Page 6170 – Christianity Today (2024)

Four centuries ago John Knox pronounced tersely on a prominent ecclesiastic: “As he sought the world, it fled him not.” An indulgent tolerance is the fashion now. After an ordination service last year an Anglican bishop took his new priests and deacons to partake of liquid refreshment at a London pub. A battery of press photographers happened to be standing by, next morning’s newspapers carried the pictures they took, and bang went another outdated image of the Church of England.

A different Knox, Msgr. Ronald, once pointed out how shocking it was that in Muslim lands a fellow should bawl from the top of a minaret the controversial statement that Allah was great. The essay in which Knox made this protest, called “Reunion All Round,” was regarded four decades ago as satire of a high order. Not so today, when atheists in certain areas have ensured the minimum public reference to the deity, great or no, lest their faith be placed in jeopardy.

In some circles it was evidently felt that Christian charity ought to go further, for it is but a simple step from tolerance to modest self-denigration. Thus a group of Cambridge theologians produced a volume which they called Objections to Christian Belief, putting the case against Christianity with what Philip Toynbee called “robust and healthy good sense.” This was clearly a challenge to some non-Christians, and they duly obliged with Objections to Humanism, the “austerely brave spirit” of which was saluted by an Anglican weekly.

The process has now gone one stage further with the appearance of Objections to Roman Catholicism (Constable, London, 18s.). Edited and introduced by Michael de la Bedoyere, a former editor of the Catholic Herald and biographer of Baron von Httgel, the book consists of seven essays, of which six are by lay writers and the seventh by a Jesuit archbishop.

In a beautifully written first chapter, “Some Reflexions on Superstition and Credulity,” Magdalen Goflin faces her subject squarely. To the question, Why does Rome repel?, she suggests this answer: Because let your credentials be ever so persuasive, your helps to heaven ever so numerous, your liturgy ever so splendid, in practice you invite us to worship but a shrunken god. The Roman teaching about hell, Mrs. Goflin continues, might be bound up with much that is both credulous and superstitious, but it is nonetheless a sign of the annihilating effect of sin. On purgatory, she asserts that “at death the majority of souls are too self-centred to be yet capable of being filled with the life of God himself.” Credulity made Justinian think that hom*osexuality caused earthquakes; credulity made Cardinal Newman believe that the Holy Manger was preserved in Rome.

She hits out in other directions, too. Defending Roman Catholic churches and forms of worship, she contends that in rejecting “helps to heaven” some Protestant churches (and here she quotes a Presbyterian) “often have an air of desolation and gloom artificially created by Catholics on Good Friday.” But Mrs. Goflin spoils her case by declaring that “the fundamental objections to Roman Catholicism are objections to Christian orthodoxy,” which statement begs all kinds of questions and calls for a precise definition of terms.

Elsewhere this chapter makes a point of admitting “the appalling record of the German bishops during the last war” when, as Archbishop Roberts affirms in his chapter, they supported Hitler (pp. 44, 175), but this admission should be considered in conjunction with John M. Todd’s fulsome and questionable praise of the prewar pope, Pius XI (p. 69).

An excellent and informative chapter on “Censorship” by Professor H. P. R. Finsberg details the bewildering history of the Holy Office’s attitude to Alfred Noyes’s study of the life and writings of Voltaire. For some reason John M. Todd, in his chapter on “The Worldly Church,” finds it necessary to suggest that kindness is a characteristic of the Curia (“the velvet gloves are often many layers thick before the iron hand is reached”). In a most frank study called “Freedom and the Individual,” Rosemary Haughton says that while physical force is now “out” (except in Sicily and Malta), emotional and moral blackmail are still very much “in.”

The final chapter is contributed by Msgr. Thomas Roberts, formerly archbishop of Bombay, and is oddly headed “Contraception and War.” It was his controversial views on the Roman Catholic Church’s attitude to contraception that provoked the Archbishop of Westminster’s negative pronouncement in May, 1964, and subsequent Vatican statements. The archbishop puts the dilemma forcefully in a hypothetical question posed by an Indian Roman Catholic who has been told that another pregnancy would leave his children motherless and who wants temporary sterilization: “How is it wrong for the state to grant me for the good of my family what, according to many Catholic theologians, the state could impose forcibly on me as a punishment if I committed a crime?”

But here again it is Magdalen Goflin who puts the problem most graphically. In repeating the familiar charge that Roman theologians have made gods of the human reproductive organs, she illustrates this strikingly by suggesting that “if contraceptives had been dropped over Japan instead of bombs which merely killed, maimed, and shrivelled up thousands alive, there would have been a squeal of outraged protest from the Vatican to the remotest Mass centre in Alaska.” It is Mrs. Coffin’s contention that such idols are now being discredited, and that Roman Catholics of the next generation may “feel the need only of explaining what they no longer wish to defend.”

When Objections to Roman Catholicism was made the subject of a BBC TV program, one participant declared that the Roman Church in England in its present form would not survive the book, which is published without the imprimatur. One reviewer said it “must count … as something of a miracle” that it was published at all. The not-too-discerning predicted that its effect would rival that of Honest to God. All this is very misleading, as is the volume itself when it purports “to break new ground in the spirit of Pope John” (p. 12)—and so perpetuates the persistent fallacy that John XXIII was solidly behind the liberal movement in his church.

While this is undoubtedly a book to be taken seriously, its crowning fault is the writers’ concentration upon secondary and peripheral issues. They have little to say, for example, about Tradition and what Martyn Lloyd-Jones calls its “damnable plus.” We might have expected also that objections to Roman Catholicism would have included treatment of such topics as Mariolatry, papal infallibility, transubstantiation, and priestly mediation, but we look in vain for any such discussion here. The title suggests the ax laid to the root of the tree, but we find it doing no more lethal work than lopping off a few branches.

Southern Baptists have generally believed that the ultimate objective of the current ecumenical thrust is organic union. We have assumed that denominational distinctives would be dissolved and the autonomy of local churches swallowed up in the evolving monolithic hierarchical structure. And we have quite frankly declared little interest in such a movement.

Deep convictions rooted in our heritage have led us to this position. We believe that these convictions are relevant to issues facing Christianity in this decisive day.

Why have Southern Baptists not been identified with the ecumenical movement?

A major reason is our ecclesiology. The Southern Baptist Convention is a federation of independent democracies, local churches that recognize no ecclesiastical authority superior to themselves. This structure creates a mechanical problem with regard to the NCC and the WCC. These ecumenical councils are composed of denominations and do not accept affiliation by local churches. But no centralized body can deliver the 33,000 local Southern Baptist churches as a unit into any such ecumenical affiliation or corporate unity.

In my opinion, however, not many individual churches would join the NCC if this mechanical barrier were removed. For this ecclesiology is a basic tenet of our Baptist heritage. We believe that the local church is the highest tribunal of Christendom. It is its own final authority, subject only to the will of Christ, its head, as expressed by democratic action of its members.

Baptists have an innate fear of the centralization of ecclesiastical power even within our own ranks. We draw back from any entanglement that threatens to compromise the authority and autonomy of the local congregation. Baptists cannot conceive of a great “super church” or a hierarchical structure above the local church, whether it be a Baptist hierarchy or an ecumenical hierarchy. We have no such organic union among ourselves; hardly would we seek it with others of a different doctrinal persuasion!

A second reason is that Southern Baptists generally are strong denominationalists. We do not accept the ecumenical premise that denominationalism is the scandal of Christianity, wasteful, selfish, or sinful. The variety of churches produced by the Protestant Reformation has brought great vitality and strength to Christianity. Division has multiplied the Christian witness. Struggle, tension, and doctrinal debate have purified truth and have been beneficial rather than harmful. To abolish denominationalism would be to reverse the Reformation and turn the clock back to a medieval Catholicism.

Neither do we accept the ecumenical premise that the “consolidation” of all Christians into “one Church” would solve all the problems of Christendom, bringing vitality and spiritual renewal. Historically, two plus two have more often equaled three instead of five when applied to church unification.

The third barrier is theological. The present ecumenical movement tends to dismiss theological problems as “insignificant” or as readily reconciled by “honest dialogue.” Yet the basic gap remains between the evangelicals and the extreme sacerdotalists. Is the Bible or the Church the seat of authority for faith and practice? Is salvation through personal faith in Christ or through the Church? Is the divine authority on earth the voice of the Church or the Holy Spirit speaking to the individual believer? With the Anglican and Eastern churches dominating the World Council, and with the Vatican now reaching out a hand to lead back the “separated brethren,” doctrinal differences are even more pronounced.

Doctrinal indifference is not the solution to doctrinal differences! Our Baptist dilemma is that if we want unity we must scrap our doctrinal convictions, and if we uphold our convictions we cannot have unity. In every consideration of the ecumenical movement we inevitably come back to this hopeless impasse. We have remained a separate section of the Christian movement because we feel that others have departed from the truth of the New Testament. We believe that only by coming closer to the New Testament as the basis for faith and practice shall we all come closer to each other.

Methods Of The Movement

Southern Baptists are also concerned about the ecumenical methodology.

There is the comity agreement of the NCC carving up geography and restricting denominations to assigned areas. Do such “man-made” limitations thwart the leading of the Holy Spirit or frustrate the evangelistic and missionary zeal of individuals and churches?

Is evangelism the changing of the social structure by a powerful ecumenical church bringing pressure upon the state and upon legislators, or is evangelism personal as Christ redeems the individual and redeemed men redeem society?

Would a “united front” really strengthen Christianity? Does Christianity advance by a great organization filtering down power from the top or by spiritual vitality and faith at the believer level?

Then there are the “official pronouncements” of the intelligentsia of the ecumenical movement, which appear to some as sheer clericalism in modern dress. From the security of the ecumenical establishment the clergy tells the people at the grass roots what to think, what to do, and what position to take on various political and social issues. Baptists believe that men must be brought to Christian conviction by persuasion and by an appeal to the spirit-led conscience rather than by authoritative clerical pronouncements.

On the other hand, in my opinion the Southern Baptist attitude toward the ecumenical movement is not above criticism.

Our genuine doctrinal stance has sometimes degenerated into one of spiritual pride and provincialism.

We have been too negative in our aloofness.

Too often we have been more concerned about gains for ourselves than about the contributions we can make to the total Christian witness.

Unquestionably our size and success have influenced us to say, “We do not need ecumenical ties. We will go it alone.”

We have often been unduly driven by our fears.

We have allowed ecumenicity to become a “bad” word and failed to recognize that there are alternatives to organic union.

Finally, economic, political, and social factors have influenced our considerations far more than we would like to admit.

Is our posture changing? With regard to organic union, or joining the NCC? No, as far as I can discern. In our attitude toward Christians in other denominations? Yes!

In the past, I believe that Southern Baptists, because of our organic isolation from the NCC, have been grossly and unfairly judged as “non-cooperative isolationists.” It should be remembered that Southern Baptists have been on the forefront in cooperative Christian enterprises that did not compromise our convictions. We have long walked and worked in fellowship with other Christians in such national organizations and projects as POAU, the International Lesson Committee, the Foreign Missions Conference, the American Bible Society, World Relief, and Bible revisions, as well as in such local things as evangelistic crusades and campaigns against liquor and vice.

I look for this same spirit of cooperation to continue. I believe that denominational isolationism is fast disappearing, not only among Southern Baptists but everywhere. There is an ever-growing desire for more communication and understanding among all Christians, for more creative cooperation rather than hostile competition. There is scarcely a denominational theology any more. Seminary students are reading the same books and struggling with the same theological problems. Young ministers are more oriented toward world problems and less concerned about divisive doctrines.

The Fast-Running Tide

I feel that Southern Baptists cannot ignore a fast-running ecumenical tide. The glamorous appeal of “one Church” is making an impact upon the world, and this movement must be reckoned with. On the other hand, neither can the ecumenists ignore as provincial or irrelevant the position of Southern Baptists. As the nation’s largest evangelical denomination with 10.3 million members and 33,000 churches, Southern Baptists stand as a formidable obstacle to any successful expression of ecumenicity.

In my opinion, the ecumenical movement should abandon its drive for organic union, forsake its policy of erasing denominational differences, and develop more areas of cooperation at the local level. Otherwise, I predict that Southern Baptists will remain on the sideline in a tragic isolationism. But the alternative of a shallow and impotent ecumenical inclusiveness would be an even greater tragedy, perpetrating a colossal deceit upon the world in the name of “The Christian Church.”

In my opinion, we must seek alternatives to organic union—a new brand and a new expression of ecumenicity—in which there is denominational cooperation without the loss of autonomy and distinctiveness and without the surrender of convictions.

Southern Baptists have much to contribute to world Christianity from our distinctive doctrines, our leadership, our numbers, our wealth. Southern Baptists face a moral and spiritual responsibility continually to rethink our attitude toward and re-examine our relations with other Christians so as to find acceptable channels through which to work on national and international levels. In this our goal must be to emphasize the basic spiritual unity of all believers and to give a united expression to the mind of Christ in a world where Christian ideals are being challenged as never before.

T. Leo Brannon is pastor of the First Methodist Church of Samson, Alabama. He received the B.S. degree from Troy State College and the B.D. from Emory University.

Ecumenicity is not a dirty word. Jesus Christ said, “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love.…” Love is wonderful to have; but when it is narrowed down to the love of one Christian for another Christian, then we have reality. John said, “We know that we have passed from life unto death, because we love.…” Whom? “The brethren”! I have lived long enough to know that the hardest people to love are the brethren. “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another.” Ecumenicity! Where does it start? In my humble opinion it starts within this fellowship that you and I have espoused, namely, the American Baptist family. The Southern Baptists can’t get along with anyone except themselves. The American Baptists can get along with everyone except themselves. Is this true?

I am in active contact with the presidents of the Conservative Baptist Association of America, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the North American Baptist General Conference. I am more interested in Baptist ecumenicity than I am in another form. I don’t care how ecumenical we say we are as American Baptists, or how much we point to our affiliation and activity in the conciliar movements, if we fail to see that we have far more in common with our Baptist family than with any other Christian body. What is the meaning, validity, relevance, and dynamic of fellowship with non-Baptists?

I not only believe in Baptist ecumenicity, that is, in cooperating, understanding, and communicating as Baptists, but I believe in Baptist unity.

We must go on. If you are going to project your imperfection and join an imperfect church called the local Baptist church, and if you are going to project the imperfection of your local church into what is known as a denomination, such as the American Baptist Convention, then there is no reason why you shouldn’t continue to project this imperfection and cooperate with others who are not Baptists. That accounts for the National Council of Churches. Sure, it is imperfect. You can pick it to pieces so that there is nothing left. A blood-washed hand reaches out in the increasing darkness and impersonality of the space-age, and a voice calls, “Is there another hand in all of God’s world that is also washed in the blood of Christ? If so, will you join with me and let us try somehow to do together—to the glory of God and for the redemption of lost men and women and boys and girls—what we cannot do alone?” That is all that interdenominational ecumenicity is. It involves a lot of honesty and trust. The relationship is imperfect. The net result is imperfect. But all is based upon the perfection of Jesus Christ, our only hope.

Will you go with me one step more in Christian understanding? In Israel on a Sunday morning eight other American Baptist pastors and I were walking on the beach outside Haifa trying to find some place where we could worship. As we moved south, we came to a monastery that proved to be the traditional site of Peter’s siesta on the roof of Simon the tanner’s house. It was here that Peter was straightened out about who was to get the Gospel and who wasn’t. A little Italian priest who murdered the King’s English received us warmly. As we spent an hour there, our hearts were warmed. We sensed that here was a brother in Christ. When we were ready to leave, someone suggested we have a word of prayer together. When we finished, the monk grabbed the arm of the one nearest to him and said, “I will see you at Jesus’ feet.” What do you think that did for a fellow who was brought up in Boston, where every cop on the corner was a red-faced Irishman, a Roman Catholic, and where everything wrong in City Hall, in the State House, was because of those Roman Catholics?

My heart was melted, so much so that when Monsignor Tobin of Portland asked me to come over and explain to them what Baptists were all about, I accepted the invitation. He sits on the Vatican Council. When I got to All Saints Church I talked for forty-five minutes, at the end of which the audience plied me with questions for another forty-five minutes. During the latter period I referred to myself in Pope John’s terminology as being a separated brother. Monsignor Tobin said, “No, no, you are not a separated brother. You are not even a Protestant. You are my brother in Christ.” I remember that when he wrote to invite me he signed the letter, “Yours in Christ”—just as a Bible-thumping Baptist would. What are you going to do with a guy like that?

In U. S. Nexus and World Report came word from Boston that Cardinal Cushing urged Catholics of Boston to attend the Graham evangelistic campaign there, saying, “They have everything to gain. The hand of God must be upon him. I have never known of a religious crusade that was more effective than Dr. Graham’s. I have never heard any criticism of anything he has ever said from any Catholic source. I only wish we had half a dozen men of his sort to go forth to preach the Gospel of Christ Crucified.”

Now, we can say it is about time they are reforming their church and straightening up and flying right because they have been wrong all along. But wait a minute! Can we Baptists, can we American Baptists, equal in renewal, in updating, in shaking off some shackles of the past, what the Roman Catholics are doing? Just think of the dramatic change in putting the Mass in the vernacular so that it can be understood, or including in one of their hymnbooks Martin Luther’s Reformation hymn!

Let’s keep open those windows that were thrown open by little Pope John, the peasant. He kept his feet right in the earth; and when that earth began to tremble because of the marching of Communist hordes and the exploding of A-bombs and H-bombs, he knew it was time to issue a call to all the people of God. What will it take for us as Bible-believing Baptists to have that same sensitivity, to feel we should get together as Baptists and as Protestants, and to believe in the sincerity of anyone who claims the name of Christ?—DR. J. LESTER HARNISH, president, American Baptist Convention.

Each fall thousands of young people leave the warm Christian life of their home to enter a collegiate world in which Christianity is either ignored or ridiculed. For a few, the consequence of a four-year assault upon their beliefs is permanent alienation from the Church; others turn away but recover their faith later; still others stand firm and emerge with even stronger religious beliefs than they had before.

The degree to which the college environment is hostile to the student’s Christian faith varies greatly. In general, denominational schools are more likely to provide an experience that supports Christian beliefs than non-sectarian ones. But denominational affiliation may mean anything from a program permeated by religious concern to one in which the involvement of the supporting church is almost indiscernible. Indeed, in some church colleges the dedication to academic freedom is so strong that toleration is granted to anti-religious teachings that would be banned at some state-supported institutions.

The student in an institution in which secularism prevails will discover that in many courses, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, religion in any form is held in low regard. The general anti-religious tenor is set by the instructor, and few students dare challenge it. Since Christianity looms largest among the religions of Western civilization, it is likely to receive the most anti-religious barbs.

Some instructors show their disdain for religion by attacking it, others by pointedly ignoring it. When, in ostensibly cataloguing the significant forces of our era, a professor fails to mention religion, he clearly communicates his idea that religion is an ancient and inconsequential concern. The student who raises a question about the role of religion can expect a disbelieving shake of the head from an instructor who just can’t figure out how to cope with such naïveté.

Moreover, the social science and humanities courses often have a strong “debunking” flavor. Much material is presented as though the first twelve years of formal schooling were designed to protect the student from the ugly realities of life, and now at college the truth can be told. Thus a history professor may devote much time to downgrading heroes of the past, attempting to show that they had more than their share of weaknesses and that their noble deeds had base motivations.

The shock many students experience upon encountering this treatment of much they previously held sacred is magnified by the fact that any objective consideration of religion in their public school studies was impossible. The cautious public school teacher, in fact, is likely to avoid religion altogether. The devastating treatment given the idols of history by many college instructors is, likewise, an over-response to the glorification of such figures that too frequently is found in high school history courses.

Some young and callow instructors are still suffering from the trauma of their own collegiate debunking experience. They may derive emotional satisfaction from communicating to their students, in an exaggerated and often distorted way, the revelations they have recently experienced. The student should be warned that such instructors, who often suffer from feelings of insecurity, are unlikely to treat tolerantly those who dare challenge their iconoclastic message.

In sociology and anthropology, religion is likely to be viewed instrumentally. One set of beliefs is regarded as no better than another; the “correctness” of the beliefs is usually considered to be outside the purview of social science. What matters is how usefully a set of religious beliefs functions within a particular social context. Such a cold, detached view of a sacred realm can be very disturbing to a Christian student.

Missionaries are given rather savage treatment whenever notice is taken of them in anthropology courses. The image of the missionary presented seems to be a caricature of a mid-nineteenth-century type who may or may not have existed. He is portrayed as a possibly well-meaning bumbler who is ignorant of cultural differences, hopelessly naïve, and determined to wreck an idyllic native way of life by rudely imposing upon the people his own set of values. To anyone who really knows about the work of modern missionaries, this picture is nothing less than absurdly fraudulent.

The courage to challenge the sweeping allegations of the anti-religionists is greatly needed. Often a query about evidence would reveal the lack of convincing support for a charge directed at a religion or at religion in general. But too frequently the instructor’s dogmatic manner, combined with a general air of uncritical acceptance in the classroom, causes anti-religious calumnies to go unchallenged.

Partly as a consequence of the professorial assault on religion, the student subculture at many institutions offers the Christian young person little support for the retention of his faith. On many American campuses a student expressing a forthright commitment to his religion can expect to be looked upon as distinctly “square.” To speculate in a myopic way about man’s origins and destiny is “in”; but to indicate that one has found satisfying answers is definitely “out.” The Christian freshman who is concerned about social acceptance may well consider it expedient to put his religion aside for four years.

Many factors determine the response that the Christian student makes to this world he has not known before. Probably much of the rejection of religion that occurs in college stems not from logical thought but from personality needs. The undermining elements of the college situation may support the rebellious inclinations of one who has been seething under an autocratic parental regime, a regime in which religion, like everything else, is firmly imposed from above. To embrace agnosticism may thus signify a rejection of parents more than a rejection of religion.

The ostentatious collegiate anti-religionist is often simply a disturbed personality. Persons who feel a deep emotional discomfort may, like the experimental rat in the maze, keep striking out in different directions in an effort to gain relief. Some try successive conversions to different religions; others try to eliminate religion from their lives. The fervor with which anti-religionism is often adopted indicates a great void to be filled.

Another home situation conducive to the collegiate flight from faith is that of hot-house nurture of religion. The young person who has been shielded from all challenges and doubts of skeptics is unprepared for the critical world of the college. This shielding may be responsible for the exaggerated disillusionment some young people feel when first exposed to agnosticism. The student who has earlier encountered some of the critics of his religion and has been helped to weigh their arguments is much less likely to find the skepticism of professors a traumatic experience.

In an era and in a society in which free inquiry and freedom of conviction are highly regarded, it is inevitable that for some the experience of going to college will result in a major alteration of religious outlook. Christianity will undoubtedly lose from the defection of some of the disenchanted. Many young people, however, will respond to the challenges to their faith by developing a far greater depth and maturity of Christian commitment.

T. Leo Brannon is pastor of the First Methodist Church of Samson, Alabama. He received the B.S. degree from Troy State College and the B.D. from Emory University.

DEAR SON,

I have no easy answers to your hard questions. But your letter taking me into your confidence again, now that you are inside such illustrious ivy walls, set me up as I haven’t been since you left home. I’ll toss out some comments that I hope will help you when you’re being thrown a curve.

As to how far you should go with girls, God help you, and may God help me not to answer for you, nor to unload my own code on you. But here are some things that may not occur to you in the heat of battle.

Your bride is alive and waiting for you right now with high ideals for you. You might want to sit down sometime, when one of the disrupting candidates is not sitting so close beside you, and describe the kind of girl you want to marry. How would you recommend that she behave in the blistering interim instances you gave? Perhaps you could do worse than follow yourself the recommendations you have in mind for her. The fellow has a way of finding and falling for the kind of girl he deserves. Put your dates in this perspective. How far should you go? How far do you want her to go with someone else? How would you feel about your father and mother going that far with someone aside from each other? How far do you want your little sister to go? Is your contemplated behavior something you’d not mind confessing to her and to your own son someday? As a practical matter, remember that the girl the college freshman is currently raving about is probably not the one he’ll end up with.

Undoubtedly, the happiness of your future home will be created or cheated by your current conduct. Whatever habits you make will be hard to break. Your roommate should consider that sowing wild oats starts something hard to stop. It will take more than a big wedding to break up established pre-marital patterns of misbehavior. There are showers of statistics to prove that promiscuity prior to marriage tends to perpetuate itself after the ceremony.

The marriage vows are just as sacred before the partners meet and pronounce them. And obviously only the partner who comes chaste to the wedding can be trusted to be true. I notice that the Institute of Family Relations offers convincing statistics to sustain my own impression that pre-marital sexual experience is a severe handicap to a satisfactory physical adjustment rather than a help, as the scuttlebutt has it. The best insurance for a successfully thrilling marriage solely from the biological point of view is virginity.

Home is hell without mutual trust and security, and everything one does when single carries confidence or suspicion over into the union or disunion. The guilty party will worry over whether he’ll be found out; the other will be afraid the infidelity will recur. Secondly, any sign of dissension between mother and father, any festering grievances for which each blames the other, such as a child conceived before wedlock or the shock of an earlier or suspected unfaithfulness, no matter how carefully concealed sows uneasiness and may even bring panic among the children. Paul Tournier and other distinguished psychiatrists condemn parental dissension as chiefly responsible for children’s problems.

I think I would call Brad’s atheism more of an emotional block than an intellectual summit he assumes he has reached. I don’t mean to oversimplify every rejection of God as a boy’s projected rebellion against his parents, but I would bet Brad’s rapport with his folks and his friends has not been what it might have been. His antagonistic attitude toward life seems, as you describe it, almost a classical teen-ager’s “neurosis of defiance.” In any case, I am sure you agree that someone in such a negative emotional state cannot be very objective about ultimate authority. Often the dormitory bull session that’s “out to get” religion is dominated by boys who are fanatic unbelievers, who do not want to believe, and who have probably never even read the New Testament. The campus cynic does not normally come to his conclusions conscientiously. Often driven by destructive urges, he chronically questions everything except his own cute little pet questions.

Perhaps the same thing that’s eating Brad accounts, in part at least, for the anti-attitude of your biology professor and even the whole contemporary stance of scientism. To return to Tournier, in his last volume, he exposes the whole secular reaction of our time against religion as “adolescent” (A Whole Person in a Broken World, Harper & Row, 1964). Medieval man’s approach may have been childlike, but our descendants will not consider this age’s attitude as adult. It is more like a big brother’s scorn.

Tournier recognizes in the prevalent condescension toward the Church the same old teen-ager’s “neurosis of defiance.” He believes the objections to the Bible are more emotional than intellectual, that modern man has been led to his present-day position of non-religion more by a contradictory spirit toward his forefathers than by honest doubt or fair trial. Our day has not outgrown God; it has just repressed him. “To say no, consistently, where we said yes before is not to be free.” And while Western man suffers from this compulsion to offend and avert God, he unconsciously yearns for reunion with him like a lost son.

Science, as you know, John, has succumbed to a far more naïve god of its own. It is that strange god, chance, in whom modern scientists believe. “Chance,” writes Franck Abauzit, “explains nothing; it is merely the negation of the spirit, the opposite of reason, the destruction of all intelligibility.” “And yet it is,” as Tournier tells us, “the last word of every scientific explanation of the world. ‘The classical theory of science,’ writes Lecomte de Nouy, ‘simply replaces God with chance. It is nothing more than playing with words.’ Here again, the psychoanalysts will say, is the return of the repressed disguised as in a dream” (Tournier, p. 33).

I don’t know what you can do with this, John; but I do know that the feud between faith and scientific fact is folly “exactly like the quarrel between an adolescent and his parents, in which he scoffs at them by making assertions which are too categorical and they regard every contradiction on his part as an offense” (Tournier, p. 87). It’s high time to challenge science’s sacred trinity of “accident, struggle, and progress.” The doubts so dear to humanism need doubting now.

As for your religion course, an English professor, of all people, gave me a little paperback by Sören Kierkegaard the other day, entitled On Self Examination. I wouldn’t like you to take Kierkegaard’s word on everything, but he puts higher criticism in its place as man’s last and most insidious means of escaping God. The Bible is a mirror, he says, but instead of assisting us to see ourselves in it more clearly than ever, criticism tends to distract us. We exhaust our energy and interest, dating the mirror, measuring it, counting bubbles and cracks. We note the word’s distortion here, its duplication there. We interpret, relate, outline, and evaluate. We do everything to the Bible but look in it and shout, “Hallelujah, it is He!” We miss the crowd about the Cross and forget to cry in bitter shame, “It is I.”

I am sure you will gain much from your course. At least it will test your faith and teach you what problems others will raise that must be answered. But be comforted that John Bunyan, St. Francis, and St. Peter had no Dead Sea Scrolls to prove to them how long this faith could be preserved intact. St. Peter couldn’t even have read them; he wouldn’t have had time, because he was too busy having a religious experience and being true till death. It is not obscurantism to say that the time comes when the examination should stop and the experiment begin.

Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Perhaps the best way to appreciate the Christian position is to go back to Abraham and see how our first citizen got started. He was obviously a man of great wealth; perhaps he owned a huge plantation at the suburban edge of pagan Ur. No doubt his hearth was heavy with specialized figurine gods for every conceivable purpose. But something stirred him to restlessness. Not a nervous breakdown, I think. He could have felt like the little girl I saw in the cartoon the other day. She had just stopped jumping rope. “Why?” someone asked. “Suddenly,” she said, “it all seemed so futile.” Whatever the reason, Abraham wanted more from religion and from life, or someone wanted him to have more, than he’d been getting.

Gradually it dawned on him (or instantly light struck him—who knows?) that some new and vastly superior God seemed to be telling him to get out of Ur and go somewhere else. It was all so new, so difficult to translate, I suppose. His wife Sarah must have feared for his wits. But Abraham, anxious to do better and having nothing better to do, promised this voice that he would give it a try with everything he had. He went all out. And the answer came back, promising unbelievable blessing in return. What happened there was that God got through to a man and a bargain was reached that has made all the difference in the world ever since. Call it a contract if you wish; officially that little arrangement is what we mean when we say the old covenant or Old Testament.

The moral of this story is that Abraham made no mistake. The result surpassed his wildest dreams. And he was not the only one who knew it. History bears witness that Abraham was not talking to himself. The Promised Land appeared out of nowhere; a child came out of a barren womb that set off a chain reaction of descendants distinguished for this same belief. This agreement was carried on through this lineage down to David and ultimately up to Christ. It is hard to believe that all this good news was originally born from a mistaken impression or a madman’s mind.

Now it is your turn and mine to try it, if we wish. We Christians have never been able to talk anyone into belief. We are asked only to gamble on it, as Abraham did. It would not be faith if we had all the facts or if life manipulated us like puppets by letting us peek at all the answers at the back of the book. Grooms risk “I do” in marriage with much less reason for believing it will work. Right now, no doubt, you face some problem too big and painful for you to want—or even be able—to unburden it on me. Instead of handling it on your own, ask the God of Abraham for help. Keep asking until your prayer is so important that you’ll remember next week what you asked for tonight. Help will come, and you will know the solution later, if not now. The religious bull session is usually stale, sometimes stagnating. The real thing is a trial-and-error method—God speaking to you, saying yes or no, in the language of your daily activities and in the deeper knowledge your heart knows.

I think I shall not at this point try to tell you any more than I already have about who Christ is, lest I be guilty of understatement or presumption. For when the time comes, he will come and address you in person. The essential question is, Are you ready to follow him? That is all you have to agree to now. The day Jesus walked up the beach to where Peter and Andrew and James and John were fishing, I notice he asked for nothing more than that. He didn’t ask just then who they thought he was. That question would have been premature; it came later.

Remember, John, how we used to play that game together, “If I had one wish.” You always said you’d wish for as many wishes as you wanted, you rascal. If I had one wish tonight, it would be for you to follow Christ wherever he leads you. That’s my prayer. If you’ll dare to do that much, one step at a time, sometime, as an illustrious pilgrim once promised, you’ll come to know as an inexpressible secret who He really is.

Blessings on you, my son, always,

DAR:bn

YOUR DAD

David A. Redding is pastor of the First Church (United Presbyterian), East Cleveland, Ohio. He holds the degrees of A.B. (Wooster) and B.D. (Oberlin). His writing has appeared in “Life” magazine and “Reader’s Digest” and in the “Christian Herald” and “Presbyterian Life.”

T. Leo Brannon is pastor of the First Methodist Church of Samson, Alabama. He received the B.S. degree from Troy State College and the B.D. from Emory University.

DEAR DAUGHTER,

Thanks for your long letter. It was good to get a “stream-of-consciousness” type of report—all the things that you would talk about if you were right here curled up on the foot of the bed. Your other letters were delightful and interesting, but I was wondering what was going on beneath the surface.

Please don’t feel that we are upset by all those questions about the basis of your faith. I am sending you several books on apologetics recommended by a professor who would know just what you need.

Daddy says he’s not dealing with apologetics right now and that he’s not in the student atmosphere. In his ministry he’s dealing with people who are facing matters of life and death, heartbreak and tragedy, practical problems of family living, and it’s quite different. They aren’t, for the most part, worrying about philosophies and theologies. They want something of practical use to them today, something to help them face and solve their problems, something that works. And that is what a practical, experiential Christianity does, as I know you have proved to your satisfaction.

Of course, in the environment in which you find yourself you are challenged to dig out the answers for the sake of those whom you meet and also to strengthen your own faith. It seems to me—am I not right?—that this is the first time all these questions about your faith have bothered you.

Do you remember how disgusted you used to get with your older brother when he would want to bat around such questions at the dinner table ad infinitum? He was always taking the opposite side of the question from us just to get our answers. Then he was fortified to meet discussions on the outside.

As you know, his faith tended to be strengthened in an antagonistic environment and to waver in the environment of a Christian college. You, however, have always been the opposite in temperament; in a truly feminine way, you tend to yield to the atmosphere you are in. This yielding to an atmosphere can be both good and bad. It’s good in that you are always able to gather the full value out of whatever situation you are in. You are able to concentrate on the good points and not worry about the bad. It is the quality of sensitivity that enables you to pick up the language, feelings, and ways of people of another culture and background. This quality will help you benefit to the full from your year in France.

But it’s bad in that you will need to guard against having your spiritual life weakened by the unbelief around you. However well it is dressed up in scholarly and attractive form, it is still unbelief—a basic disinclination to yield the will to Christ. Becoming a Christian is primarily a matter of the will. There is either an honest desire to find out how to get into a vital, personal relation with God or else just an idle desire to argue and toss around scholarly terms, thereby further consolidating one’s own refusal of Christ.

So by all means study all these questions to your own satisfaction. But don’t let anybody who just wants to show how smart he can sound throw you off balance spiritually. If a person is truly seeking, help him. Give him all the answers to the limit that you have them. But don’t ever for a moment think that, because you don’t have an answer at your fingertips, there is no answer!

Plenty of thinking Christians have agonized through all these questions before you ever were here and have come through with their faith intact. During the first years of my Bible teaching, I was in about the same frame of mind you seem to be in now. I felt I had to know, that I had to work out in my own mind all the “whys.” I felt I had no right to teach, that I could not stand before a class with any ring of conviction in my voice, if I hadn’t beaten my way through every last question that occurred to me—and plenty of them did!

Finally, though, I became thoroughly satisfied, and my interest in apologetics shifted to the practical aspects of Christianity—the way it works in everyday life, the way prayers are answered, the beautiful, the poetic, the soul-satisfying aspects.

In my teaching I try to speak the language of those not committed to Christ and to bring in apologetics when necessary. Yet it really isn’t argument that wins people to the Lord. It’s just presenting the Scriptures and trying to make them come alive in as many different ways as possible, and then trusting the Holy Spirit to do the real work, not yourself.

But I know what you are after; you want to work through all these questions for yourself. And you should honestly face them. Then you will be ready to be a fine Bible teacher someday. I have wondered occasionally why you hadn’t had to go through all this questioning before now. Just about everyone who is brought up in the Christian faith has to go through this shaking-down process sooner or later before his faith is absolutely his own and not just what he has gotten from his parents or from his environment.

So we’ll see that you get the books as soon as we can get them for you. And in the meantime, be sure that you do everything you can be doing to keep your spiritual life strong and bright in a spiritually chilling environment. You haven’t mentioned having any Christian fellowship at all in the few weeks you have been gone, or even attending any church services except one on ship and one in Tours.

You will have many Christian groups open to you when you get to Paris; with your knowledge of French you can no doubt have some spiritually thrilling experiences as you seek out these minority groups. It will give you the taste and flavor of what it is to be a Christian or a Protestant in an overwhelmingly pagan or Catholic society. Be sure to look up those Christians whose names we gave you.

I’m glad to hear you are keeping up your Bible reading. It’s fine to read the Bible in French, but it might be that you would get more of a blessing out of reading it in English. Anyway, be sure you are getting spiritual nourishment for the day, not just more practice in French.

Another thing about trying to argue with these bright students. Don’t forget that you’re not the kind who finds it easy to win an argument of any kind, any more than I am. Smart as you are, you don’t have that sharp, clipped, overwhelming manner of marshaling facts and arguments in a way that talks other people down.

Your brother Bob has more of that quality. He exults in argument and in his group in Heidelberg was able to take on all comers. Whether it was as intellectually dazzling a group as the one you find yourself in is a question, but still they had been exposed to the same ideas as your group. You are more likely to convince them by what you are and by what Christ means to you than by what you say in argument.

Well, send us another “stream-of-consciousness” letter when you feel like it. Of course, you’re not homesick. You’re a big girl now, all grown-up, or almost. Nothing can take away the wonderful years we have had with you. They are forever written into your conscious and sub-conscious mind. But I would feel that I had done a poor and selfish job if you couldn’t stand to be away from your parents at the age of twenty. I wouldn’t like to think of you over there in the midst of that fine opportunity, all torn up with homesickness.

Of course you know we pray for you constantly.

With love,

MOTHER

Margaret Johnston Hess is the wife of Dr. Bartlett L. Hess, pastor of the Ward Memorial Presbyterian Church, Detroit, Michigan. She is a graduate of Coe College. This letter was written to her daughter, a student at Sweetbriar College, who at that time was taking her junior year abroad by attending the Sorbonne in Paris.

T. Leo Brannon is pastor of the First Methodist Church of Samson, Alabama. He received the B.S. degree from Troy State College and the B.D. from Emory University.

DEAR PASTOR:

I am writing this letter as a Christian faculty member at a state university—a man who needs your help. My request involves the university where I teach. It contains thousands of students, faculty people, and employees, some of whom are interested in finding a purpose in life. They admit to an inner yearning, a wistful search for meaning; they are concerned about the strife and injustice in society; they are looking for a solution to the individual problem of meaninglessness and the social problems of selfishness and hate.

As disciples of Jesus Christ, you and I have something to offer them. To us, Jesus Christ is the Bread of Life who satisfies that inner hunger; he is the Giver of Life who enables people to dwell together in love. Moreover, he needs them in his Church today.

The problem is how to reach the university campus with the message of Jesus Christ. Out of eighteen years’ experience as a senior faculty member at one of the nation’s largest state universities, I suggest some preliminary considerations that relate to the solution of that problem.

The Local Church. The campus world in general will not go to church to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The majority will not go to any church (except infrequently); if they do, there is no assurance that they will hear Christ presented clearly. If the majority of students and faculty are to be reached, they must be reached in some additional way.

The Campus Foundation. Perhaps your denomination could establish a “foundation” or student center on the fringe of the campus. If a house could be purchased or constructed for this purpose and if one or more full-time pastors could concentrate on serving campus people, perhaps more would respond. Possibly so. But the success of such ventures varies. Some foundations are well attended; others attract very few. More than one campus pastor wrings his hands at the lack of response by students and faculty. Although foundations and some campus churches are near at hand and some are packed for one service a week, most of the campus world still passes them by.

The Mission Field Concept. Another alternative is to consider the campus a “mission field,” not in the sense of “skid row” or “an economically underdeveloped area” but rather in the sense of any group of people outside the Body of Christ. Take Japan as an illustration. The Japanese will never come to your church to hear the message of Christ. Your church does not try to get them to “come and hear” the Gospel. Instead, you adopt the attitude of “go and tell” and so send missionaries to Japan. Your denomination trains them and lets them go. Perhaps your own congregation has sent such a man (let’s call him “Johnson”); you released him from teaching Sunday school classes or singing in the choir so that he could go to Japan.

Have you pastors of churches in college towns ever thought that precisely the same strategy might be successful in reaching the campus in your city? For example, suppose that you have a college professor (let’s call him “Perkins”) in your congregation. You might begin to pray that the Holy Spirit will open his eyes to the campus as his mission field. This is an important notion, because some non-Christian faculty members who are so biased against clergymen that they will never listen to you, might listen to Professor Perkins. Now for this to happen, Professor Perkins will have to cultivate friendships with his non-Christian colleagues; he will have to become familiar with their thought patterns and carry a prayer concern for them. Furthermore, he will have to know the Bible and be able to introduce these friends to the Christ of the Bible. Beneath all this he will need you to pray for him just as you pray for the Johnsons in Japan.

Do you have any college students in your congregation? If so, they could be the missionary arm of your church to the campus. The student body contains hundreds (perhaps thousands) of young people who refuse to listen seriously to clergymen but who might give heed to a Christian roommate or classmate. For this to happen, the Christian students in your flock will have to cultivate their friendships, gain their confidence, learn to communicate with them, and be skilled in the Word. These students need your prayers just as does Mr. Johnson.

Here are some suggestions for putting this mission concept into action:

First, recognize that the Holy Spirit calls some members of a local church to serve primarily as “pillars” in that church; he calls other members to serve primarily as missionaries to those who will not attend that church.

The “local pillar” type are those whom God calls to serve mainly as elders, deacons, trustees, Sunday school teachers, choir members, or officers in various groups, shouldering the duties and spending the time required to keep a local church functioning. On the other hand are the “missionary” type whom God wants detached (the Greek word for “set apart” in Acts 13:2 is a strong verb, aphorizo, which means “to sever”) from local church duties but not from local church fellowship in order to go to those who will not come to church. (See Isaiah 6:9 and Mark 16:15—scriptural portions that surely apply to the college-campus components of our social order.)

Second, ask the Lord what his design is for Professor Perkins and the college students in your congregation. If he wants them to be “local pillars,” then they must shoulder their duties in your church; if he wants them to be campus missionaries, you must “let them go” from church duties but not from church fellowship. Similarly, you can expect Professor Perkins and your missionary students to return home “on furlough” every Lord’s Day for worship. But the rest of the time you will have to “set apart” such people for witnessing duties on campus. This will take a great deal of their time as they cultivate friendships with colleagues, earn their respect, answer their questions about Christ and the Bible. But if you will release your campus missionaries from church duties, eventually your church attendance will begin to grow as the missionaries begin to bring their interested friends to church.

Third, pray for your campus representatives. In your private prayer life, you doubtless pray by name for Mr. Johnson (and other missionaries to Japan). Do likewise for Professor Perkins and the college students in your congregation. Does your church have a prayer meeting or “cottage” prayer groups? If so, urge the members to pray for Professor Perkins and your student missionaries.

Fourth, encourage these student missionaries to participate at least once a week in a prayer cell on the campus. Similarly Professor Perkins ought to participate in a faculty prayer cell on campus. You may have to plant this idea in his mind and pray that the Lord will plant the concern in his heart, but you can hardly expect the Holy Spirit to use Professor Perkins in reaching his colleagues unless he is carrying a prayer burden for them. This burden should manifest itself not only in his private prayers but also in a faculty prayer group. Urge him to interest a Christian colleague in starting such a cell.

Fifth, encourage each of your missionaries to find one non-Christian to participate in an Outreach Bible Study (ORBS for short)—a session designed for the non-Christian, introducing him to the answers to five basic questions:

1.What did Jesus say?

2.Why did he say it?

3.What did Jesus do?

4.Why did he do it?

5.Of what significance in our lives are the foregoing answers?

On every secular campus there should be at least one ORBS that is for faculty only. Likewise, there ought to be an ORBS in every dormitory and fraternity or sorority house. Suppose one of your collegians reports that there is a non-Christian in his dormitory interested in a weekly Bible study and the only time he will attend is Sunday evening. Will you excuse your collegian from evening service to lead this ORBS?

Sixth, urge your campus missionaries to join the campus chapter of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship or Campus Crusade for Christ. These organizations have effective systems for training campus missionaries in the science and art of leading their non-Christian friends to the Saviour. It is not easy to refute the attacks of an atheist, to answer complex questions of an agnostic, to awaken interest in the minds of an unconcerned person, to explain to a thinking inquirer precisely how he can come to know Christ personally. IVCF and Campus Crusade have devised methods for each of these situations and can train your students.

It is encouraging to realize that many students quickly catch the vision and spontaneously enter into a prayer group, an ORBS, and the IVCF or Campus Crusade chapter. But there is another group who come to church Sunday morning (sometimes early enough for Sunday school) and sit attentively in the pews, but who are not interested when they are invited to a prayer meeting somewhere on campus; when somebody suggests a Bible study on campus, they do not attend; as for IVCF or Campus Crusade meetings, they prefer to do something else; and as for carrying a prayer concern for dormmates, classmates, or teachers—they have no concern. The pastor and Sunday school teacher can play an important role by opening the eyes of such students (and faculty) to their mission field.

Seventh, tell your high school seniors about Inter-Varsity or Campus Crusade. Urge them to look up the chapter as soon as they arrive at college. Even before they go to the campus they can benefit from a week of the “College Prep Camp” that IVCF holds just before school begins. The task of a new freshman adjusting to the strange environment of a college is difficult; it is doubly so if he is a Christian arriving on a secular campus.

Eighth, Acts 14:27 indicates that when Barnabas and Paul returned on furlough to their home church, they “declared all that God had done with them and how he had opened a door of faith to the Gentiles.” No doubt Mr. Johnson does likewise when he returns from Japan and visits your church. Such reports inspire your prayer warriors, giving them information with which to construct prayers of both praise and intercession. Why not do likewise with your campus missionaries? Ask Professor Perkins to report at prayer meeting on the faculty prayer group and the faculty ORBS. Ask some of your students to do likewise at your college Sunday school class or at a church service.

To sum up, Christians on campus desperately need the help of pastors and Sunday school teachers. We need you to pray and to urge students and faculty members to join the other missionaries on campus.

Very sincerely yours,

JOHN W. ALEXANDER

John W. Alexander is professor and chairman of the department of geography at the University of Wisconsin. He holds the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Illinois and the Ph.D. from Wisconsin, where he served as assistant dean of the College of Letters and Science before his appointment as department chairman.

T. Leo Brannon is pastor of the First Methodist Church of Samson, Alabama. He received the B.S. degree from Troy State College and the B.D. from Emory University.

The morning mail at 3, blvd Gambetta, Strasbourg, brought the latest issue of the new Lutheran theological journal Dialog. In an editorial entitled, “A Theology of Rediscovery,” Roy A. Harrisville of Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minnesota, informed readers that the “boredom” of Lutheran orthodoxy was being replaced by a “new posture”—characterized by such views as that “there is a demonstrable parallel between Bultmann’s method and Luther’s concentration of the gospel in the single theme of justification” (Dialog, Summer, 1963, pp. 188–90).

This kind of reasoning was no surprise, for I had encountered similar utterances in earlier issues of this journal which consistently tries to lift American Lutheranism out of its “boring” biblical orthodoxy into the mainstream of “contemporary” theological thought (i.e., that contemporary theology which, with Harrisville, “admits to the discrepancies and the broken connections in Scripture”). What did surprise and amuse me was the assertion that “this concern for the contemporary manifested itself in a streaming to the universities of Europe … One by one, the so-called ‘Young Turks’ went to Basel, to Heidelberg, to Marburg, to Tubingen, to the universities of England and France.” The obvious implication was that merely to drink the heady wine of European theology was to be forever cured of reactionary views of plenary inspiration and Reformation orthodoxy. I found this implication especially bizarre because I was then engaged in writing a dissertation for the degree of Docteur de l’Université, mention Théologie Protestante, at Schweitzer’s alma mater, the historic University of Strasbourg. To suggest that European theological study and historic Protestant conservatism were incompatible seemed a serious misunderstanding of the nature of the European academic atmosphere. This “Young Turk” thus felt a strong desire to dethrone a stereotype by offering a closer look at the European doctoral experience.

Why Europe?

Doubtless theological “boredom” in the States has driven students to Europe. None except the intellectually lazy care for the seminary or graduate school where students must conform to their professors’ views. But where today on the American scene is such orthodoxy enforced? Not, I should say from personal experience, in the doctrinally orthodox seminaries, but rather in the very institutions claiming to offer “theologies of rediscovery.” While serving as a faculty member in a theological school of a large American university, I discovered to my dismay that able doctoral students in that school often spent long years attempting to complete their work, only to be eliminated from the program because their theological “attitudes” did not fit the prevalent modes of thinking or methodologies. Encouragement was ostensibly given to engage freely in “constructive theology,” but such “construction” was not really a “free” activity, because it implied that the great confessional documents of the historic Church, and even the Scriptures on which they are founded, stand always in need of reconstruction. I also noted that at this same university the theological school was often viewed with less than respect by the non-theological faculties, because it was evident that a doctorate in theology meant not so much a superior level of academic attainment as an achievement in learning how to manipulate currently accepted conceptual patterns and “in-group” terminology.

Faced with such an atmosphere, I took my Ph.D. in a non-theological field and looked to one of my own denominational seminaries as a more satisfactory possibility for the Th.D. However, the latter situation manifested the same kind of “inverse orthodoxy”: to display a non-conservative doctrinal position was to exemplify “academic freedom,” whereas to affirm biblical evangelicalism was to betray “poor scholarship.” After a summer program in which I received professorial criticism for a subsequently published paper asserting the historical as well as theological soundness of John’s Gospel, I determined that a Th.D. from such an institution would represent conformity to a viewpoint rather than scholarly achievement.

At this point, I recalled two or three European theological professors under whom I had studied during their visits to American seminaries; these men differed from their average American counterparts not so much in doctrine as in their attitude toward the nature of theological study. Whatever their personal religious position, they respected the views of the individual student. They demanded of him not conformity to their beliefs but sound scholarship in clarifying and defending his beliefs. This was in refreshing contrast to the approach taken by a professor of church history under whom 1 studied, who began the year by saying, “We are going to remold you here in seminary.…”My thoughts thus turned to Europe. “Boredom” with theological conformity did enter the picture; but it was the exact reverse of the straw-man boredom referred to by Harrisville. I was bored with a conformity imposed by so-called “theologies of rediscovery,” which say in essence: “Be as free in your theological thought as you wish—as long as you don’t try to embrace orthodoxy.” For me a theological doctorate had to represent scholarship and not sycophancy. This was my “Young Turkism.”

Professorial Tone At Strasbourg

My first insight into the character of a European doctoral program came when I applied for the program. There were no “fill-in-the-blanks” forms, no psychological aptitude tests. Application was by personal letter, accompanied by proof of degrees held and examples of already published works. The Faculté de Théologie Protestante wished to be satisfied on two counts only: first, that the candidate had an original and significant doctoral topic he wished to pursue; and second, that he was capable of pursuing it. Administrative safeguards of course exist: the foreign student must, by French law, evidence academic achievement equivalent to the old licence en Théologie Protestante—that is, he must have the theological competence of the French doctoral student who has completed all course work, written examinations, and the minor thesis for the so-called “state doctorate.” But the entire admissions procedure has the ring of scholarship, not the smell of administrative minutiae. Even the physical arrangements at the university uphold this impression: the secretariat of the faculty, where official inscription is made, is a dingy office in a building separate from the Palais Universitaire, where the attractive faculty offices are situated. How unlike the average American institution, in which the “administration” possesses the visible signs of power while faculty offices display clear evidence of subordinate status!

What were faculty members like? Were they cold, dogmatic rationalists—radical negative critics of Scripture and creeds—promoters of “theological rediscovery”? Doubtless, examples of these stereotypes can be found in European theological schools. However, I had no professor of this kind at Strasbourg. It was impossible to compartmentalize the faculty; no one was a “Bultmannian,” a “Barthian,” or a “Bonhoefferian.” In general, the tone was more Barthian than anything else; but the overriding impression conveyed by faculty members was that the search for theological truth can never be limited to the categories of a single modern school of thought.

The perspective was thoroughly academic and thoroughly historical. Flanking the entrance to the Library of the Faculty was a glass bookcase containing the publications of its members, which represented a wide gamut of approaches and judgments and testified to the principle that scholarship, not ideological conformity, should characterize the true graduate faculty in theology as in any other subject. The historical emphasis—natural in a faculty out of which the university itself arose during the Protestant Reformation—prevented the substitution of facile novelties for serious analyses of theological problems. The creeds of the Reformation and the work of the Orthodox fathers were listened to—not passed over in haste in an effort to reach the twentieth century as quickly as possible. Dean François Wendel, in a course on the Christology of the Reformation, spent more time in the seventeenth century (the “Age of Protestant Orthodoxy”) than in the sixteenth, even though Wendel is one of the greatest living Calvin scholars. Roger Mehl’s course in the Augsburg Confession frequently pointed out how Barth has to his detriment moved away from Reformation doctrine. I was often reminded of Paul Tillich’s famous remark that the European theologian, unlike the American, when faced with a theological problem asks first, “What has been thought on the question through church history?” Such an approach is a valuable corrective to the popular notion today that nineteen and a half centuries of Christian history have been but an inadequate prelude to the theological innovations of our generation.

The faculty members assuredly did not hold the verbal inspiration view of Scripture, and often it became evident that they confused this position with the Roman Catholic, Tridentine dictation-theory. But never was there the slightest attempt to ridicule plenary inspiration or to force conformity to another view. Indeed, I am firmly convinced that because scholarship and not presuppositionalism is the determinative factor in the theological atmosphere at Strasbourg, its faculty members would be hospitable to the orthodox view if it were consistently represented today by scholarship on the level of that of Theodor Zahn or B. B. Warfield. This is saying a great deal, for few American theological faculties would be psychologically capable of embracing biblical orthodoxy regardless of the force of its presentation, simply because conformity to the prevalent view, not scholarly objectivity, so often seems the overriding consideration.

A theological faculty usually sets the tone for its students. Have not many of us suffered from the indefinable student tensions in a seminary where the faculty, unsure of itself because of the unacademic nature of much of its work, overcompensates for inferiority feelings through heavy assignments and through preoccupation with the minutiae of course requirements and “hours” for graduation? At Strasbourg, the Protestant Theological Faculty, as the founding faculty of the university and as a faculty comparable to the others in scholarly productivity and academic standards, found no need to question its raison d’être. Therefore the students also could relax and study theology for its own sake—not for the sake of “proving” something by accumulating course hours. Indeed, since there the attainment of degrees is based upon written examinations, the production of a thesis, and oral defense of the thesis, one must think of actual mastery of the subject, not of mechanical acquisition of “grade points.” The program for the present licence (much like our S.T.M., but required of all candidates for ordination in the state Lutheran Church in the Alsace) is thus rigorous, but the students find themselves in such a “permissive” environment that they show few signs of student neurosis. Quite the contrary; I have seldom met a more irrepressible group in or out of theological circles. I remember well the evening we sang Negro spirituals in the single students’ subsidized residence, and the cartoon on the front cover of one issue of the student paper, showing a dancing figure with the caption: “Vive le Yé Yé théologique—David twistait devant l’Arche!”

Granted that many students, especially on the licence level, find it difficult to secure a firm theological orientation in such a non-regimented environment, nevertheless the truly open-minded faculty attitude, coupled with insistence upon a solidly grounded historical program of studies—including mastery of the original languages of Scripture—helps the students arrive at confessional solidity. Certainly no faculty prejudice creates the barrier to orthodoxy that is the most unfortunate aspect of American seminary life. It was evident how much a plenary inspirationist could accomplish on a faculty such as that at Strasbourg; and it is noteworthy that the Groupes Bibliques Universitaires (the French equivalent of IVCF) have a potentially open field among seminary students.

Because I was encouraged to work in complete independence, I became so engrossed in the subject of my thesis that a three-volume, 950-page work resulted. The necessity of consulting primary documents of the Reformation era led me to manuscript collections in five countries and to conversations with theological specialists such as Heinrich Bornkamm of Heidelberg. On completion, the thesis was presented and defended in a public examination before a traditional jury of three members of the Faculté: Dean Wendel as Président, accompanied by Pierre Burgelin, the Rousseau authority and urbane philosophy professor from Paris, and René Voeltzel, the author of works on seventeenth-century theology and on twentieth-century religious pedagogy. During this three hour French-language defense, two things became evident: though on many theological issues the jury and I disagreed, their concern was simply that I be able to defend the scholarship of my position: and though the four of us did not always see eye to eye, we thoroughly enjoyed the dialogue.

Thus from my European experience I carried home this ideal of true “dialogue,” which by no means necessitates the “theological rediscoveries” of Harrisville’s “Young Turks.” Mention of Strasbourg will always conjure before me the image of its medieval cathedral, rose-pink at dusk, where in the late sixteenth century Jakob Andreae preached acceptance of the Formula of Concord. That orthodox confession, it will be remembered, opens with the words: “We believe, teach, and confess that the prophetic and apostolic writings of the Old and New Testaments are the only rule and norm according to which all doctrines and teachers alike must be appraised and judged.”

Traditionally the relation between philosophy and religion has been one either of identity, as in the early Middle Ages, or of hostility, as in the Age of Reason. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this hostility focused on the question whether the claims of religion were true, and the task of the Christian philosopher was to show that the assertions of religious language were indeed true.

Within the last thirty years the situation has been transformed by the rise of the philosophical movement known as “logical empiricism.” In light of the vast and profound influence of this movement, the philosophical world can now be said to hurl a completely different challenge at those who make religious assertions. Religious language is no longer given the privilege of being classified as false; it is now classified as meaningless. The relation between philosophy and religion is no longer one of positive hostility; the former simply ignores the latter as “non-sense.”

At first religious thinkers were at a loss as to how to respond to such a challenge, except to deny it. Within the last ten years, however, a large number of scholars, particularly in Britain, have attempted to meet the challenge head-on. Much of the impetus for this response has come from the writings and influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, which is known today as “ordinary language philosophy,” or “linguistic analysis.” The meeting of the challenge hurled by logical empiricism is fast becoming the focal point of much of contemporary philosophy and theology, as is shown by the many articles and books on the subject. For example, a large part of the religion section of the July 10, 1964, issue of Time magazine was devoted to this.

The challenge that logical empiricism presents to those who use religious language can be stated in a variety of ways. The following syllogistic statement of this challenge serves to distinguish the various responses quite clearly, and so it is especially appropriate for the purposes of this study.

1. All cognitively meaningful language is either definitional or empirical in nature;

2. no religious language is either definitional or empirical in nature;

3. no religious language is cognitively meaningful language.

Three things about this syllogism should be noted at the outset. First, this is the core of the challenge as it is presented by A. J. Ayer in Language, Truth and Logic (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1946). Although many logical empiricists, including Ayer himself, have offered helpful modifications of their original, somewhat dogmatic position, there has been no attempt to retract the essence of this argument as it applies to religious language.

Second, the term “cognitively meaningful language” is used to refer to those statements that admit to true and false judgments. Cognitive meaning is thus to be sharply distinguished from emotional or existential meaning, which is better termed “significance.” This is not to say that cognitively meaningful statements are void of emotional significance, but it is to say that the nature of each is quite distinct. The statement, “It is raining,” can have both cognitive meaning and emotional significance; but the fact that the former is susceptible to true and false judgments while the latter is not makes it clear that the two can and need to be differentiated.

Third, this syllogism is obviously valid. This eliminates the possibility of maintaining that the premises are true but that the conclusion is false.

Three main approaches have arisen in response to this challenge, aside from those that accept its conclusion and thereby dismiss religious language as nonsense. This latter view will not be discussed, since according to it nothing remains to be said.

Some thinkers, by training and vocation usually more philosophical than theological, respond to the foregoing argument by accepting the truth of both of the premises and of the conclusion as well. These thinkers differ, however, from those who go on to say that religious language is nonsensical. They maintain that even though religious language is not cognitively meaningful, it is very significant from an emotional, ethical, or existential point of view. That is to say, once we get straight about the true nature of religious language, the challenge of logical empiricism is no longer devastating to the use of such language.

Belief: A Matter Of Perspective

Two very prominent British philosophers have expressed this point of view, namely R. M. Hare and R. B. Braithwaite. Hare develops his view of religious belief as an unverifiable and unfalsifiable interpretation of one’s experience in his contribution to New Essays in Philosophical Theology (ed. by Antony Flew and Alasdair McIntyre, London: SCM Press, 1955, pp. 99–103). He suggests that religious beliefs are really principles of interpretation, or frames of reference, by means of which one interprets his experience. As such, religious beliefs are not subject to true and false judgments because they simply do not assert any’ state of affairs. Hare calls such beliefs “bliks” and likens them to the perspective of a paranoid who is convinced that all Oxford dons are out to do him in. Thus there is no factual disagreement between the two statements “God exists” and “God does not exist.” The real difference is one of perspective—like the difference between optimism and pessimism.

Suppose we believe that everything that happened, happened by pure chance. This would not of course be an assertion; for it is compatible with anything happening or not happening, and so, incidentally, is its contradictory. But if we had this belief, we would not be able to explain or predict or plan anything. Thus, although we should not be asserting anything different from those of a more normal belief, there would be a great difference between us; and this is the sort of difference that there is between those who really believe in God and those who really disbelieve in him [New Essays in Philosophical Theology, pp. 101, 102].

It is clear that if religious beliefs are viewed as bliks, then the language in which these beliefs are expressed is neither empirical nor definitional in nature. Thus Hare accepts the argument of logical empiricism but endeavors to redefine the nature and function of religious beliefs and language.

R. B. Braithwaite also redefines the nature of religious language by likening it to the language of morals and commendations. When a person expresses a religious statement, he is not asserting a fact but indicating a commitment to, and commendation of, a certain attitude or source of action. In his own words:

A religious assertion, for me, is the assertion of an intention to carry out a certain behavior policy, subsumable under a sufficiently general principle to be a moral one, together with the implicit or explicit statement, but not the assertion of certain stories [An Empiricist View of the Nature of Religious Belief, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955, p. 32].

In other words, Braithwaite, like Hare, concurs with the argument of logical empiricism that religious language is not cognitively meaningful, but he does not think that this renders religious language ethically meaningless.

By way of criticism, at least three things can be said about this approach. First, it is simply not in harmony with the way religious language is used. Most religious people would object if you told them that their religious beliefs are neither true nor false. Second, it leaves unanswered the question as to how one chooses between right and wrong bliks, and/or ethical commitments. Third, there is a strong possibility that the teachings of Christ were meant as assertions about human experience that could be confirmed or disconfirmed. But more about this later.

Other thinkers are not prepared to accept the argument offered by logical empiricism. These, by training and vocation usually more theological than philosophical, respond to the challenge by accepting the truth of the minor premise (2), while rejecting the truth of the major premise (1). The main contention of those taking this approach is that cognitive meaning cannot be confined to the logical and empirical realms. Here it is maintained that religious truth, along with other forms of metaphysical truth, is a form of cognition that has a unique nature. Since such truth is embodied in religious language, religious language may be cognitively meaningful even though it is neither logical nor empirical in nature.

Revelation And Mystery

One of the best-known exponents of the point of view that rejects the first premise is Michael Foster (Mystery and Philosophy, London: SCM Press, 1957). Foster identifies revelation, and thus the religious language that expresses revelation, with mystery. He objects to the logical empiricists’ demand for clarity in our talk about experience. Thus he would conclude that revelation can be cognitively meaningful, that is, subject to the judgment “true,” without being reducible to either logical or empirical language. Foster says:

Revelation is of mystery, but mystery revealed is not eliminated, but remains mysterious. It remains an object of wonder, which is dispelled when mystery is eliminated. There is no method by which revelation can be commanded: “it is” (in the Bible) “not a thing to be procured from God by any technique.” That is to say, it is not subject to human mastery [“Contemporary British Philosophy and Christian Belief,” The Christian Scholar, Fall, 1960, p. 194].

Although the first sentence raises many other questions, there can be no question that Foster rejects the major premise of the logical empiricist argument.

Willem Zuurdeeg also refuses to accept the statement that all cognitively meaningful statements are either logical or empirical in nature (An Analytical Philosophy of Religion, Nashville: Abingdon, 1961). He maintains that religious truth, and thus religious language, is unique in that it is not limited to propositional assertions. Moreover, it cannot be analyzed or justified. Nevertheless, Zuurdeeg wants to maintain that such statements are still meaningful and true.

I must protest vehemently against the notion that language of Christian faith consists of propositions which can be analyzed by means of logic. If it does not make sense to a philosopher to attempt a logical analysis of persons, how much sense will it make to a theologian to try to do so with the Lord God? Exactly in the way that man is man-who-speaks, so God is God-who-speaks. Can we offer a logical analysis of the Creator of Heaven and Earth? Shall we discard the doctrine of the Trinity simply because the language in which it is expressed is logically inconsistent [“Implications of Analytical Philosophy for Theology,” The Journal of Bible and Religion, July, 1961, p. 209].

Despite the fact that the approach represented here by Foster and Zuurdeeg argues on the side of angels, there are several reasons for rejecting it as inadequate. First, it runs the risk of rendering religious language so distinct from all other language that it becomes irrelevant. Second, no extra-logical criteria are offered by means of which one can even decipher the content of religious statements, let alone distinguish between those that are meaningful and those that are not. Third, there is no contesting the fact that reality and experience cannot be completely re-presented in language, but this obvious fact should not be used to license sloppy talk. Fourth, as John Locke clearly saw, whether or not revelation is true is not the real problem; rather, the problem is which statements are to be taken as revelation. The best way to honor revelation and mystery is to apply rigid standards so as to be able to distinguish non-sense and falsehood from meaning and truth.

Relevance And Truth-Value

Another way of responding to the argument of logical empiricism is to accept the major premise (1), while rejecting the minor premise (2), and there are those thinkers who have taken up the responsibility of constructing such an approach. The main drive of this approach is to be found in the attempt to relate religious language to experience and thereby to establish it as cognitively meaningful. Thus, it might be called a form of Christian empiricism. The thesis of this approach is that religious language very often fulfills empirical functions and is, therefore, at those times cognitively meaningful. The main burden of such an approach is to specify the exact situations in which religious language can be said to be empirical.

One of the most interesting presentations of the cognitive status of religious language is to be found in the writings of John Hick of Princeton Theological Seminary (Faith and Knowledge, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957; “Theology and Verification,” Theology Today, April, 1960; and Philosophy of Religion, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963). Hick maintains that statements that make predictions about experiences taking place after death are open to verification (or at least confirmation). Such verification is termed “eschatological” by Hick, and firmly establishes the cognitive meaningfulness of this type of statement. Space will not permit a full analysis of Hick’s views at this juncture. It is sufficient to note that they are explained and presented by one who is fully aware of the challenge of logical empiricism and who endeavors to learn from its insights. Concerning the claim that there will be experiences after death, Hick says:

The logical peculiarity of the claim is that it is open to confirmation but not to refutation. There can be conclusive evidence for it if it be true, but there cannot be conclusive evidence against it if it be untrue. For if we survive bodily death we shall (presumably) know that we have survived it, but if we do not survive death we shall not know that we have not survived it. The verification situation is thus asymmetrical. However, the religious doctrine at least is open to verification and is accordingly meaningful. Its eschatological prediction assures its status as an assertion [Faith and Knowledge, p. 150].

Another recent explication of the empirical nature of religious language is found in John Hutchison’s Language and Faith (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963). Hutchison maintains that since religion is to be understood primarily as a means of comprehensive life orientation, the language of religion is to be understood as the expression and description of various orientations to life. He contends that, like poetry, religious language is very often intended to communicate certain feelings, values, facts, and interpretations of human experience.

It should be clear that such theories or interpretations of life are subject to true and false judgments in the same sense that broad theories about the physical universe are—namely, in terms of confirmation and fruitlessness. In chapter five of his book, Hutchison uses the term “adequacy” to designate the standard by means of which life-orientational theories are to be evaluated. This adequacy implies, in addition to rational consistency and coherence, the standards of sufficient reason, simplicity, empiricism, and critical rigor (Language and Faith, pp. 129 ff.).

Other writers suggest that much of religious language functions as an empirical-theoretic model. A helpful development of religious language in terms of models can be found in the writings of Frederick Ferré (Language, Logic and God, New York: Harper & Row, 1961; and “Mapping the Logic of Models in Science and Theology,” The Christian Scholar, Spring, 1963). He outlines the functions of theological models in the following way:

Theological speech projects a model of immense responsive significance, drawn from “the facts,” as the key to its conceptual synthesis. This model, for theism, is made up of the “spiritual” characteristics of personality: will, purpose, wisdom, love, and the like. For Christianity, more specifically, the conceptual model consists in the creative, self-giving, personal love of Jesus Christ. In this model is found the only literal meaning which these terms, like “creative,” “personal,” and “love,” can have in the Christian vocabulary. All the concepts of the Christian are organized and synthesized in relation to this model. The efforts of systematic theology are bent to explicating the consistency and coherence of the synthesis built on this model of “God” as key concept. Christian preaching is devoted to pointing out the applicability of this conceptual synthesis to common experiences of life. And Christian apologetics struggles to show that the synthesis organized around this model is adequate to the unforced interpretation of all experience, including suffering and evil [Language, Logic and God, p. 164].

Ferré goes on to point out that since the language, thoughts, and actions that are based on a given conceptual model can be evaluated in terms of their coherence and adequacy in dealing with experience, it is possible to speak of one model as being more appropriate, or more fruitful, than others (ibid., p. 165). This sort of evaluation implies cognitive meaning, since although the criteria and results of such evaluation are difficult to determine, the models are, in theory, confirmable or disconfirmable.

The Disclosure-Commitment Concept

The one writer who perhaps has done more than any other to develop an explication of the complex elements involved in this experiential use of religious language is Ian T. Ramsey of Oriel College, Oxford (Religious Language, New York: Macmillan, 1957; and “Contemporary Empiricism,” The Christian Scholar, Fall, 1960). Ramsey develops the concept of “discernment” or “disclosure” to describe the nature of the situations that provide the experimental basis for religious language. He maintains that a religious disclosure gives rise to a “commitment” to what is disclosed, and that this disclosure-commitment situation in turn gives rise to what we have termed experiential-religious language. It is maintained that such disclosure-commitment situations are anchored in experience and in this sense can be said to be empirical.

One group of examples Ramsey uses to illustrate what he terms “discernment” or “disclosure” is composed of situations in which, because of a unique set of personal experiences, the significance is always greater than what can be expressed in terms of physical description alone. In a way he is saying that because of the facts of highly personal experience, seemingly ordinary, public situations are “seen,” or discerned, in a new light. In other words, one’s personal, mental experience often acts as a catalyst, or a category, which fills a situation with more significance than just a description of the objective facts would provide. Thus such situations are more than empirical in the narrow or sensory sense of that word, but are still empirical (experiential) in the broad sense.

Ramsey maintains that the experiential-religious language that arises out of religious experiences is both similar to and different from ordinary language. It is different in that it is not about objects, and thus follows a logic that is a bit “odd” at key points, e.g., in the use of the term “God.” Such talk is similar, however, to that type of ordinary language which pertains to personal experience. Thus Ramsey maintains that the term “God” is no more odd than the term “I” as employed in such personal talk as, for instance, the discussion of one’s motives.

So our conclusion is that for the religious man “God” is a key word, an irreducible posit, an ultimate of explanation expressive of the kind of commitment he professes. It is to be talked about in terms of the object-language over which it presides, but only when this object-language is qualified; in which case this qualified object-language becomes also currency for that odd discernment with which religious commitment, when it is not bigotry or fanaticism, will necessarily be associated.

Meanwhile, as a corollary, we can note that to understand religious language or theology we must first evoke the odd kind of situation to which I have given various parallels above. This is plainly a sine qua non for any religious apologetic.

At the same time we must train ourselves to have a nose for odd language, for “logical impropriety,” and it is possible to do this by concerning ourselves with other examples of odd language which may not in the first instance be religious [Religious Language, p. 47].

The main point that Ramsey makes, in good Wittgensteinian fashion, is that just the fact that talk which arises from personal, religious discernment is odd with respect to the language of physics, is no reason to conclude that it does not have an adequate logic that is similar to other forms of ordinary language. Thus this experiential-religious language can be cognitive to the extent that (1) it is anchored in experience and (2) it has an established use by means of which appropriate and inappropriate talk can be distinguished.

A ‘Qualified-Model’

In discussing the attempts to describe God, Ramsey develops the concept of a “qualified-model” to explain the logic of such phrases as “infinitely good” and “first cause.” In such phrases the terms “good” and “cause” are models in the sense that they are taken from experience, while the terms “infinite” and “first” are qualifiers that indicate the logical oddness of this particular use of the model terms. Thus to say that God is “infinitely good” is to say that he is similar to the moral quality of goodness we experience in everyday life, and that his goodness has a different quality than human goodness.

Now it would seem that this analysis suggests a way of dealing with religious language that conforms both to the way religious language is used and to the criteria of legitimate theoretic language. To talk of God as a “heavenly father” or “divine creator” is to speak analogically and hypothetically. That is, one is endeavoring to suggest a qualified similarity between a concrete aspect of past and present experience, and future experience. This qualified similarity must be taken as a tentative hypothesis, or conceptual model, which may be confirmed or disconfirmed on the basis of its fruitfulness in enabling a person (and perhaps a society) to appreciate, understand, and predict experience. (Ramsey suggests the concept of “empirical fit” as a criterion of confirmation in his new book, Models and Mystery [New York: Oxford, 1964].) Obviously, if such models tend to be disconfirmed, then they should be withdrawn, and vice versa. In any case, they have an experiental, albeit a theoretic, nature, and thus it can be said that they involve cognitive meaning.

This, then, is a sketch of the challenge and main responses concerning the meaning of religious language. Obviously, this writer is more impressed with the third, or empirical, response to the challenge because it preserves both the relevance and the truth-value of religious assertions. The other two responses are weak at these two points. All of the responses, however, are only in their beginning stages, and a great deal of work remains to be done. Further explorations may reveal more fruitful approaches.

Revealed religion once again is being summoned to fight for its life. There is no need for panic. This is not a new battle but just another round in a long-continuing contest. Every generation has had to face attacks on “the faith once delivered.” And if we are now seeing the emergence of new attacks from both without and within the Church, we need be neither surprised nor dismayed. The enemy has new tactics, perhaps even a new visage. Yet we face the same old battle between faith and unbelief.

The lengths to which the opposition will go is evidenced by the wide acceptance of Bishop A. T. Robinson’s book, Honest to God. Robinson and others less well known are prepared to abandon every major tenet of the faith, including the very existence of the biblically revealed God, in order to accommodate themselves to an age when historic Christianity is declared intellectually “indefensible.”

This apostasy is not without practical results. Moral absolutes go the way of theological dogmas. Thus one Scandinavian cleric recently announced that the Church must stop condemning premarital intercourse in order to be relevant for a generation 80 per cent of which opposes its narrow-minded morality.

This latest attack on the faith unquestionably springs from human speculation. It is “new” only in its outward guise. It may offer a new “solution,” but like its eighteenth-century forefather, rationalism, and its first cousins, deism, liberalism, and agnosticism, it presumes to find the biblical faith unacceptable on an intellectual basis.

As in a refrain, we are told that the human race is coming of age—a claim Thomas Paine made almost two centuries ago. The simple, naïve religion of our forebears will not do. God is but a projection of the human mind. To our fathers he was the explanation of the mysteries of the universe. But we have unraveled these mysteries by scientific investigation and no longer need God to account for them. God, we are told, was merely a father image. An insecure race concocted him to calm their fears. Now we have grown up and do not need any Father in the skies to watch over us. Religion is for weaklings.

The Need Of A Weak World

Yes, religion is for weaklings. That is precisely the point. And it is illogical, if not outright absurd, for a world that is falling apart to dismiss Christianity because it is for the weak. Crime increases at a rate four times greater than that of population growth because people are too weak to walk the path of integrity. Mental patients fill more hospital beds than all other sick people combined because people are too weak to face the stresses of life. The race is so immature that heads of nations wrangle like spoiled children. Humanity is weak; men need God.

Not only is it true that religion is for weaklings (as the child learns in earliest Sunday school days, “Little ones to Him belong; they are weak, but He is strong”); it is also true that religion makes weak men strong. Men of religious faith (weak men transformed) were the hardy pioneers who built this mighty nation, carving it out of a wilderness. Some of their descendants, lawless hoodlums, godless and dissolute, prowl in our asphalt jungles, a threat to everything their forefathers built.

Irreligious people who are supposedly strong are often only untested. When everything goes fairly well they are strong, but a heavy affliction may often change their views. Then they find hope and comfort only in God.

This “weakness” of those who accept religion, used as an argument against God, is actually evidence for him. It shows that man was not designed to be self-sufficient. The Creator put basic needs in man that can be met only by a meaningful relationship with God. Yes, religion is for weaklings. Therefore, who of us can afford to be without it?

As for our vaunted intellectual superiority, let us remember that this is not the first generation to profess itself wise. Such an attitude was ancient history even in the days of the Apostle Paul, and in the first chapter of Romans he pictures the results of that attitude. Creation plainly reveals a great Creator. But man fails to live according to this revelation and refuses to glorify the God he knows exists. In need of some authority, godless man exalts his own intellect. Having deposed God, he installs his own mind on the empty throne.

Professing himself to be wise, he becomes a fool. He begins to serve money, power, fame, appetites. Then he begins to defend immorality as freedom and descends to perversion and utter degradation. This is no longer mere immorality or a lapse into sin. It is rather a complete denial of the principles of morality and capitulation to libertinism. Such people feel no shame; indeed, they glory in their lusts. Like the Sodomites, they demand absolute moral abandonment as their right. This whole process of deterioration may not occur in a single generation; yet it is the ultimate end of much unbelief.

Thus it is no surprise to Bible students that men who deny God because they deify their own intellectual biases go on to defend the “new (im)morality.” Some already espouse complete libertinism. When will such men realize that unbelief is no mark of intellectual superiority? Consider the overbearing smart aleck who rejects the entire Bible because no one can explain to his satisfaction where Cain got his wife. In citing this “proof” of Bible error, he only parrots what he has heard. Many better intellects could explain this “problem” to their complete satisfaction. His unbelief is no evidence of his intellectual superiority or of biblical error, but only of his own limited understanding and unlimited pride. Likewise, a problem that bothers the wisest of us might be no problem at all to an even greater intellect. Humility admits that God may understand some things we do not comprehend.

Belief does not require intellectual mediocrity or dishonesty, but only intellectual humility. The faith of the French genius, Blaise Pascal, demonstrates this. The Encyclopaedia Britannica describes Pascal as “a man whose genius gives him a unique eminence among modern thinkers.” In even more glowing terms, the Americana calls him “one of the greatest and most comprehensive geniuses that the world has ever known.” At the age of sixteen, Pascal astounded the greatest authorities of his day by his mathematical ability. Two years later he invented a calculating machine that could add, subtract, multiply, and divide. His achievements ranged from laying the foundation of mathematical calculus to establishing the first public omnibuses.

There was a time when for Pascal the intellect was supreme, as is evident in a letter he wrote to Queen Christina of Sweden. But at the age of thirty-one he had an encounter with the living God that transformed his life. “The God of the philosophers and the scholars” gave place to “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob … the God of Jesus Christ … to be found only by the ways taught in the Gospel.”

“I have separated myself from Him,” cried Pascal. “I have fled from Him, denied Him, crucified Him.” But henceforth “let me never be separated from Him. This is the eternal life, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and the One whom Thou hast sent, Jesus Christ.” From then until the day he died, Pascal sought to persuade intellectuals to trust in Christ. He maintained that belief was as reasonable as unbelief, and that one had nothing to lose and everything to gain by trusting Christ.

The Rich Man’S Danger

Christianity does not condemn intellectual excellence any more than it condemns material affluence. But it recognizes the inherent danger in both, the danger of idolatry. The rich man (either in goods or intellect) may, instead of humbly thanking the Creator for his gift, feel he does not need God. Thus he worships the gift instead of the Giver, the creature instead of the Creator. This danger is both real and great. In fact, Jesus said that it is harder for a “rich” man to enter the Kingdom than for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye. “But,” he continued, “with God all things are possible.”

Today’s intellectuals, many of whom are inside as well as outside the Church, have need to recall the experience of our Lord Jesus at the hands of the intellectuals of his day. Why was it that not one of the apostles was from the intellectual class? Paul indeed was a notable exception. But for Saul to become Paul, the camel had indeed to pass through the needle’s eye! Jesus’ choice of his apostles was not arbitrary. If he chose no intellectuals, it was because none was spiritually fit. As Paul said, “not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called: but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise …” (1 Cor. 1:26, 27).

And so it will be with modern intellectuals who reject the God of the Bible. He will set them aside to dazzle one another with their fruitless debates, while he goes about his work in the world through common men who do not think they know more than he does.

Christ was no more acceptable to the intelligentsia of the first century than he is to the intelligentsia now. “None of the princes of this world knew [at that time, the divine wisdom], for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor. 2:8). The intellectuals were all in the dark. They could have given a dozen reasons for rejecting the “untenable claims” of Christ.

In Matthew 11:25 and 26 we read, “At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father: for so it seemed good in thy sight.” The wise and the prudent today also must be converted and become as little children that God may reveal unto them his truth.

God has deliberately arranged it thus. (“So it seemed good in thy sight.”) Why? Because not everyone has the vaunted wisdom of the intellectual. Shall God so order his truth that it may be understood only by the intelligentsia? If it were intelligible only to geniuses, they would inescapably have the advantage. But anyone, whether slow-witted or brilliant, may and must come to God only through humility and simple faith.

Much is said these days about making our message relevant. But we need to ask, Relevant to whom? Is Christianity only for the gifted student or philosopher? There can be no argument against translating the solid substance of biblical teaching into plain, contemporary language. But to twist that substance into vague, speculative wanderings is not relevance. Nor can it meet the need of the masses!

So the battle rages. Let those of us who have the necessary mental capacity rise up to debate the wise of this world. But let us “beware, lest any man spoil [us] through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ” (Col. 2:8). The battlefield of life is littered with the remains of men who “knew” too much and believed too little.

T. Leo Brannon is pastor of the First Methodist Church of Samson, Alabama. He received the B.S. degree from Troy State College and the B.D. from Emory University.