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SESQUICENTENNIAL YEAR 1812-1962

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PRINCETON

SEMINARY

BULLETIN

Paradoxes of the Ministry Today
All Things to All Men
Kerygma and Discipleship
Sermons:

The Light of Men
Prophet and Priest, But Not a

Freedom and Tradition in Pastoral

Renewal Through Witness

Tillich’s Science of Being

King

Theology

Franklin C. Fry
Jas. I. McCord
Otto A. Piper

H. Ganse Little
Eugene C. Blake

Seward Hiltner

George W. Webber

Wm. Hallock Johnson

VOLUME LVI, NUMBER 1
OCTOBER 1962

PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

Jas. I. .McCord
President

BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Peter K. Emmons, President John M. Templeton, Vice-President

Frederick E. Christian, Secretary George W. Loos, Jr., Treasurer

Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company, New York, N.Y., Assistant Treasurer

Arthur M. Adams

J. Keith Louden

Roland W. Anderson

Thomas M. MacMillan

Clem E. Bininger

Joseph E. McCabe

Eugene Carson Blake

John W. Meister

John G. Buchanan

W. Beverly Murphy

Ernest T. Campbell

Mrs. John J. Newberry

Allan M. Frew

Elmer L. Reynolds

John T. Galloway

William H. Scheide

E. Harris Harbison

H. D. Moore Sherrerd

Ralph Cooper Hutchison

Laird H. Simons, Jr.

Weir C. Ketler

W. Sherman Skinner

Bryant M. Kirkland

George E. Sweazey

Harry G. Kuch

Mrs. Paul Switz

Raymond I. Lindquist

Samuel G. Warr

John S. Linen
Edmund P. Lorenz

TRUSTEES EMERITI

David B. Watermulder

Richard J. Dearborn

Wm. Hallock Johnson

Benjamin F. Farber

Albert J. McCartney

Henry Hird

Mrs. Charles 0. Miller

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

Donald Macleod, Editor

Edward J. Jurji, Book Review Editor

The Bulletin is published quarterly by the Trustees of the Theological Seminary
of the United Presbyterian Church at Princeton, New Jersey. Numbers I, 2, and 3 of
each volume are mailed free of charge to all alumni and on an exchange basis with
various institutions. Number 4 in the series is the annual academic catalogue of the
Seminary and may be obtained by request to the Office of the Registrar.

Second class postage paid at Princeton, N.J.

The Princeton Seminary Bulletin

| VOL. LVI OCTOBER, 1962 Number 1

I Donald Macleod, Editor Edward J. Jurji, Book Review Editor

Paradoxes of the Ministry Today Franklin Clark Fry 4

All Things to All Men Jas. I. McCord 12

Kerygma and Discipleship Otto A. Piper

Sermons :

The Light of Men H. Ganse Little

Prophet and Priest, But Not a King Eugene C. Blake

Freedom and Tradition in Pastoral Theology Seward Hiltner

Renewal through Witness George W . Webber

Tillich’s Science of Being W . Hallock Johnson

Book Reviews :

Theology

The Church’s Confession under Hitler, by A. C. Cochrane Jas. /. McCord

The Second Vatican Council, by Henri Daniel-Rops
The Council, Reform and Reunion, by Hans Kung

Communism and the Christian Faith, by L. de Koster Charles C. West

Biblical

The Thanksgiving Hymns, by Menahem Mansoor Charles T. Fritscli

The Royal Psalms, by Keith R. Crim

The Scrolls and Christian Origins, by Matthew Black

When Israel Came Out of Egypt, by Gabriel Hebert Philip C. Hammond

The Patriarchal Age, by G. F. Pfeiffer

The Phoenicians, by Donald Harden William R. Lane

The Birth of the Christian Religion and The Origin of the

New Testament, by A. F. Loisy Otto A. Piper

Lists of Words Occurring Frequently in the Coptic New Testament,

by B. M. Metzger Wm. F. Albright

Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries, by G. E. Mylonas Bruce M. Metzger
Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries, Vol. 8 (Romans and

Thessalonians), by R. Mackenzie Georges A. Barrois

Concordance to the Distinctive Greek Text of Codex Bezae,

by J. D. Yoder jan A_ Moir

66
66

68
68

71
7i

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

History

On the Road to Christian Unity, by Samuel McC. Cavert
The Ecumenical Movement, by Norman Goodall
One Great Ground of Hope, by Henry P. Van Dusen
Freedom and Catholic Power in Spain and Portugal,
by Paul Blanshard

The Protestant Search for Political Realism, 1919-1941,
by Donald B. Meyer

The Christians of Korea, by Samuel H. Moffett

Norman V. Hope 72
72

James H. Smylie 74
/. Christy Wilson 76

Practical Theology

The Search for Meaning, by A. J. Ungersma
Doctor Sangster, by Paul Sangster
From Out of the West, ed. by Paul Jesse Baird
The Christian Answer, by George E. Sweazey
Proclaiming Christ Today, by W. Norman Pittenger

E. G. Homrighausen 76
Donald Macleod 77

General

Through the Valley of the Kwai, by Ernest Gordon John Killingcr 80

Hear the Word : A Novel about Elijah and Elisha, by H. Zador 81

IN THIS ISSUE

The Sesquicentennial Program of Princeton Theological Seminary began
with a Service of Worship in the First Presbyterian Church on April
23, 1962, with Dr. H. Ganse Little, Minister of the Presbyterian Church,
Pasadena, California, as preacher. Dr. Little, an alumnus of the Seminary,
delivered the sermon, “The Light of Men,” which is published in this number
of The Bulletin.

The 150th Commencement brought distinguished churchmen to the cam-
pus: Dr. Eugene C. Blake, Stated Clerk of the General Assembly of the
United Presbyterian Church and an alumnus of the Seminary, gave the Bac-
calaureate Sermon, “Prophet and Priest, But Not a King.” The commence-
ment address, “Paradoxes of the Ministry Today” was delivered by Dr.
Franklin C. Fry, President, The United Lutheran Church in America and
Chairman of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches. A
farewell message to the Graduating Class, “All Things to All Men,” was
given by Dr. Jas. I. McCord, the President of the Seminary.

Two papers by distinguished members of the Seminary Faculty are in-
cluded : “Kerygma and Discipleship,” by Dr. Otto A. Piper, who retired this
year after twenty-five years as Helen P. Manson Professor of New Testa-
ment Literature and Exegesis. “Freedom and Tradition in Pastoral Theol-
ogy” is by Dr. Seward Hiltner, Professor of Theology and Personality. Al-
though this article was written some years ago and its thesis given fuller
treatment in his Preface to Pastoral Theology (Abingdon, 1958), Dr. Hilt-
ner has seen no reason to alter the basic point of view advocated and explored.

During the Institute of Theology in July, 1962, the general theme was
“The Holy Spirit in the Renewal of the Church.” An address, “Renewal
through Witness,” delivered by Reverend George W. Webber, Minister of
the East Harlem Protestant Parish, New York, as part of a series, is pub-
lished in response to many requests.

Of unusual interest to Princeton alumni will be the article, “Tillich’s Sci-
ence of Being,” by William Hallock Johnson. Dr. Johnson is one of the oldest
living alumni of the Seminary, Class of 1896. After a distinguished career as
scholar and teacher, he served as President of Lincoln University until his
retirement in 1936. Although he is now in his ninety-seventh year, he main-
tains a lively interest in theological and philosophical studies and from within
the context of a former generation he evaluates the fresh concepts of the new.

D.M.

PARADOXES OF THE MINISTRY TODAY

Franklin Clark Fry

As a far more distinguished voice
. than mine has already reminded
this Sesquicentennial celebration, in the
kind of world in which we live, the para-
dox is becoming an increasingly apt fig-
ure of speech and more and more fits real-
ity around us, to which, after all, a living
language is designed to correspond.
Right in every-day affairs, who of us is
not acquainted with the way, in fact the
inevitability with which we find our-
selves reduced to contradictions every
time we set out to speak of the pro-
founder things of character ; of love and
hate, of commitment and self-centered-
ness, even of generosity and thrift? No
sooner do we turn the first corner than
we find our feet snared in riddles and
our tongues beginning to speak in para-
doxes.

“Absence makes the heart grow fond-
er,” is emphatically, often painfully true,
as a chronic itinerant like me who is
doomed to wander the face of the earth
almost as much as a certain character
mentioned in the first chapter of Job —
although, I hope, to a better purpose —
can testify. Yet, simultaneously, who
can deny that the opposite adage is no
less so? In the absorption of any mo-
ment, in concentration on the task at
hand ; as for example right where we
are now : “out of sight” does mean “out
of mind.”

“A penny saved” — no doubt about it
— is still “a penny earned” but in the
next flash it too is cancelled out by an
equally sensible warning how perilously

easy it is to be “penny wise and pound
foolish.” And so it goes on.

It is hardly surprising that when we
move over into the realm of sacred
things, the incidence instantly becomes
much, much higher. That is predictable
when life is looked at in depth and at the
same time in its totality; life which by
its very nature defies being captured in a
simple statement or comprehended in
what after all can only be a single re-
flection from one of the facets of what
God himself has made a sparkling prism
with many sides. It is dramatic how the
New Testament bristles, or if you pre-
fer, glistens with paradoxes.

“He who is not with me is against
me,” the Master flatly declared, but lis-
ten to his very same voice in the morn-
ing when the disciples reported to him
that a man casting out devils in his
name would not follow them : “Forbid
him not . . . for he that is not against
us is on our side.” Both on the same su-
preme authority are so completely con-
tradictory but incontestably true. “Bear
ye one another’s burdens” precedes by
only three verses, “Every man shall bear
his own burden.” We are to love the
Lord our God with all our hearts, and
precisely at the instant when a man does
not have even a tiny corner of his heart
left with which to do it, he is to love his
neighbor as himself. The Kingdom of
God itself, we are told, is simultaneously
within us, in the intimate, private realm
of personal piety ; and among us, in the
complicated and compromising world of
our relations with other people ; without

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

even a shade of difference in the Greek
preposition to give us a hint of the tran-
sition.

The Christian man, looking inward, is
justified by faith and yet at the very mo-
ment of his ecstasy at realizing it, with
a chill he finds himself still in the bonds
- of sin and in need of constant repentance.

It is no wonder that II Corinthians 6
is such a classic : sorrowful, yet always
rejoicing; chastened and not killed; dy-
ing and behold we live ! It could be mul-
tiplied many times. It has in it the juice
and the essence of truth.

In this spirit and against all this mon-
tage of memory, I am venturing to speak
to you at these Commencement exercises
on “Paradoxes of the Ministry Today.”
I do so because I believe that the subject
itself is worthy of being dignified by be-
ing cast in this form and because aside
from everything else, I hope the very
shape of this address, with the hooks at-
tached to it, may snag the fabric of your
minds and attract you to listen to what
I have to say. Four such paradoxes in
all will define the bony structure of all
that follows.

The first, inevitably, is : we live in an
age in which the Gospel that we preach
must be relevant but, woe be to us and
to our children, if it is not also timeless.
“Relevant,” without doubt, is the catch-
word of our day ; more deeply than that,
we have recognized in it no less than a
divine imperative — and so we should.
As every observer and above all every
participant must realize, it has become
the touchstone of church life everywhere
in 1962. There is no question, to begin
with, of that being true of the pyramid-
ing councils of churches that we have

organized in our time and that are so
expressive of the mood of our genera-
tion. It is not too much to say that it
has become so much a predilection in
them that it has almost turned into a
fixation.

The world is hungry, although it has
to be admitted, very possibly it is no
more so than it has always been ; and we
unlike our fathers, feel an overwhelming
new compulsion, we have a sharpened
conscience to feed it. As an organic re-
sult, what may be the most distinctive
and revealing new dimension of twenti-
eth century Christianity — as distinctive
and revealing in its way as the mission-
ary movement was for the nineteenth —
has come into being, first in the form of
inter-church aid, now flowering into
community development, with relief
supplies indiscriminately for all.

Racial tensions erupt and at once we
rush off to a Cottesloe Conference in
South Africa and are at any rate begin-
ning, if only barely beginning, to show
fruits meet for repentance at home.

Because peace is so maddeningly,
frustratingly elusive, we marshal our
wits with that much greater determina-
tion to see how we can make our Chris-
tian insights impinge directly at the
places where the life-and-death deci-
sions are being forged.

The more life as a whole appears like
a runaway juggernaut, the more firmly
we have the conviction and the resolve
that our Christ must be at the controls.

The same sentiment, I do not need to
labor it, is spreading conspicuously and
healthily also in congregational life,
with the accent increasingly on laymen
precisely in their secular vocations as
the salt which needs to permeate the
structures of society and the light which

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

ought to shine, if need be in the midst
of darkness — and that is admirable too.
Indeed, nothing less will do. We have
come to have a right instinct that the
divine drama of salvation is not to be
regarded only as a spectacle to be
gawked at by us as spectators. It needs
to be made operative, pervasive, effec-
tive in the swirling and seething world
around us in these days, which is not
only too much with us but which would
otherwise speedily be too much for us.

The Gospel — on this much we twen-
tieth century Christians are agreed —
must have the smell of reality about it.
But, never forget, before it can get that
odor it must overridingly be real. To fit
in time, above all before it can trans-
form time — don’t let anyone ever over-
look it — it has to be timeless.

Granted, its preachers are to be the
servants of men whom God so loved —
that is indispensable — but exactly for
that reason they must first utterly be
the servants of God, who have Jesus
only in the focus of their eyes. We must
never allow the music of our religion to
be set so to the metronome of this world
that anyone can ever fail to hear in it
the strains of eternity.

Right there is our besetting tempta-
tion. It is possible, in fact it has re-
peatedly happened, that we can con-
centrate so much on applying our Chris-
tianity that we all but forget to teach
our people and even to remind ourselves
what it is.

A hush fell over a recent meeting of
the World Council of Churches’ execu-
tive committee when one of our col-
leagues, a scholarly woman, read from a
galley sheet of a forthcoming study book
for a conference on Christian education
this searching paragraph which states

the case in what may be an extreme
form :

“To many people in the west such is
the emphasis upon progress and the
production of more goods and services
that it seems beside the point to worry
about one’s self with questions that are
too big for definite answers anyway.
What is life for? Is death the end of
everything? Does a God exist and is he
good? Common sense — and the scien-
tific spirit too — suggest that it is wiser
to concentrate on facts and to apply our
knowledge to finite situations. Why
bother to ask unanswerable questions?
Facts are safe enough ; but vague specu-
lation and chasing the heart’s desires are
not, and so in a technological world
many questions are left not merely un-
answered but unasked.”

All this means that no matter how
great our zeal for relevance is ; honor-
able, even indispensable rightly seen as
an extension of our Lord’s own coming
into this world, as it may be ; it must
always be balanced by — a better word
is bathed in — an overwhelming, all-
pervasive, transfiguring consciousness
of the incarnate Son Himself, who has
revealed to us the Father. No amount
of external activity must ever be al-
lowed to mask, especially from our-
selves, impoverishment in the inner cita-
del of the soul.

No river can stream out to fructify
life outside except as a fountain of liv-
ing water has first sprung up within me
and you, within our minds, our hearts
and all our being which flows to e-
ternal life.

All of this brings sharply back to me
an indelible scene from my own past to
which I hope you will pardon my refer-
ring. At a meeting of the Central Com-

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

mittee of the World Council of Churches
at Lucknow more than a decade ago, to
our shocked surprise a high official of
the Indian government who had come
as our guest that took it upon himself
to read us a brusque lecture on the role
that he insisted that missionaries should
assume from then on. His country, he
admitted in what sounded almost like a
tone of condescension, had benefited
from the schools and had appreciated
the hospitals that had been established,
and indeed the principal reason why he
was present was to give a proper ac-
knowledgment. But having said that,
in the very same breath, he went on in
a suddenly harsh tone, Never again
would there be room for proselytization.
It was an offensive kind of cultural im-
perialism ; it had to stop. Missionaries
from that time on ought to confine
themselves to human betterment — in the
jargon of today he might as well have
said to things relevant to the actualities
of life— in order to be accepted.

When the time came for me as pre-
siding officer to reply, it was clear what
I had to say. The gist of it simply was
that we Christians had come to India as
friends and a mark of a friend is that he
feels no less than a compulsion in his
heart to share his best. Clinics and col-
leges are good and we have been glad
to give them, but, good as they are, the
minds they train will be empty; the
lives they preserve can even be a mock-
ery if it all ends there. The best is the
joy that can be bright only as it flames
from peace of soul, a peace which in
turn can be steady and serene only when
it issues from hope, that hope which is
fruit that grows only on the vine of a
living faith. This, our finest, if we are
true friends, we can not withhold.

The second of the four paradoxes can
be dealt with somewhat more summa-
rily; but who can say that we do not
equally feel its pinch right where we
are? It is this. The Church, with no
apologies at all, is an institution, but you
and I must ever be on the alert to guard
it against the diseases to which institu-
tions are prone. I confess to having no
sympathy with those who throw the
word around these days as if it were an
insulting epithet, a kind of popular
sneer. I do not understand them at all,
especially where they turn out to be the
same people, as they surprisingly often
do, who in the next minute are the loud-
est in lamenting the sinfulness of our di-
visions. One is tempted to ask, divisions
of what? Not of the corpus Christi
mysticum, of course, but precisely of the
institution that they started out to de-
plore. When will they learn that they
simply cannot have it both ways? If
there is to be a manifested unity, it
must be in an earthly frame.

What bald inconsistency they show !
Nowhere else in life is there the slight-
est disposition to prevent any other
emotion or sentiment from taking a
bodily form to give it effect. We look on
it as the most natural and laudable
thing in the world. Where is the logic
to make Christian faith the one and only
exception? Nobody objects when family
affection issues in the home, its cor-
responding institution. More emphati-
cally than that, every time you and I
have met a man who professed a devo-
tion to the one but refused to support
the other, we have known he was in-
sincere. It would be grotesque to pro-
test admiration for justice but cry down

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

the law courts, and ridiculous to pretend
to compassion for the sick but reject
hospitals. Culture self-evidently requires
universities and everyone knows that
the benevolent impulses of a city would
be reduced to ineffectiveness without
the equivalent of a community chest. At
the very peak of it all, just try to imag-
ine a man being patriotic apart from a
state !

“All public spirit,” Elihu Root was
right, “all the noblest emotions that
move the best of mankind are futile ex-
cept through the creation of institutions
to give them effect.” That is no less so
also, without any cavil about it, of
Christianity and the institutional
church.

At the same time, we who love the
church, I in a church bureaucracy and
you who are just entering its ministry
— agreed ! — must be argus-eyed by
night and day to guard it against the
temptations, the infirmities that come
exactly from the fact that it has a body.

As a descendant of the Reformation,
I would be among the last to be blind
to that, knowing that the Reformation
was not only 450 years ago but must
be perpetual. The weight of the flesh
can subtly stifle the spirit ! Thanks to
the busy organizational beavers in the
church, what was meant to be a channel
of grace can so easily be dammed up
and turned into a self-contained arti-
ficial lake. The body of Christ can grow
to be so fascinated at its own physical
processes that it can forget to live for
the One in whom and for whom it ex-
ists. Good in itself, it is in constant peril
of deflecting our loyalty from the Best.
Our sonship toward the church, our
mother, must never cast a shadow on
our sonship toward God, our Father.

Ill

The institution and the needed vigi-
lance are the opposite poles in the sec-
ond paradox ; the third, which you will
see at a glance constitutes just as tight
a fit in our time, is between the twin
calls to today’s minister to be penitent
and yet affirmative. We Christians have
a built-in disadvantage in our struggle
against any adversaries by being hob-
bled by the sense of our guilt; and
seldom has it been more apparent than
now. Speaking humanly, it can be car-
ried so far that we can be lamed by our
introspection. We can even come close
to being palsied by the depressing
knowledge of our imperfections as we
see them in the light of God. In a life-
and-death contest like the one in which
we are engaged today with ruthless an-
tagonists who are completely extro-
verted and never deterred by the slight-
est scruple or self-doubts, there are
moments when this can almost seem too
heavy a handicap. Of course, it never is
actually as bad as that. At any rate,
come what may, we must not give up
penitence at any cost. We cannot and
remain Christian.

A man does not have to reduce him-
self to an animal in order to grapple
with an animal; in fact he forfeits his
advantage if he does so. Similarly in the
warfare of the spirit the Christian can
never afford to be less than himself.

But there are two other things that
he cannot afford either. One, quickly,
is to have any doubts about the sword
in his hand. I am told that it is the
fashion nowadays in some quarters to
speculate what would have happened if
the Reformation doctrine of the corrup-
tion of our characters by sin so that we

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

can no longer trust our motives had ex-
tended to the mind so that we could no
more trust our beliefs. Thank God it
didn’t! The Gospel, the power of God
delivered by him into our grip, would
otherwise fall loosely from our hands.
Relying solely on our own tentative, un-
certain, hypothetical, speculative, grop-
ing thoughts can lead only to paralysis.

Certainly this is not what we have
learned from our eponymous confes-
sional ancestors Calvin and Luther, or
from Paul and John. By the grace of
Christ and his Spirit, we have tem-
pered steel in our grasp that insures
victory ; we must never allow it to be
wrenched from us by anyone alive.

A still more sinister danger, which
has the added disadvantage of being
even more prevalent in these days, is
that unless we watch out, what starts in
a right way as healthy penitence can so
quickly degenerate into a negative de-
featism. It is one of the endemic dis-
eases of the 1960’s that that so often
happens. One way to account for it is as
perhaps an unconscious outcropping of
the deep-going pessimism of these years.
Since it is regarded as the next thing
to subversive to let discouragement
show through in other areas of life,
many people compensate by doing so in
religion where it has the extra virtue of
sounding pious and high-principled. Or,
at other times, it may be only an in-
stinctive reflection of the national mood
that has made almost an idol of broad-
mindedness. There is a common feel-
ing nowadays that it is necessary as a
kind of lubrication in a pluralistic so-
ciety for everybody to be so aware of
his shortcomings that nobody will feel
justified in acting very sure of himself,

especially in matters of faith. Positive-
ness, where any is allowed to exist, is
to be reserved for political and social
opinions ; and no doubt about it, it has
been. Honestly it makes me feel almost
sick to see how weakly too many Chris-
tians have gotten into the habit of yield-
ing to this trend.

Whatever the causes, it is high time
that there is an end to it; to all the
dreary business of rehearsing lists of
obvious failures which has almost mas-
ochisticly become a kind of Protestant
specialty in recent years ; an end to the
field day for, if not false, then misguided
friends to slur at everything the church
does as mediocre, offering what nobody
wants, prosaic, dull. If we do not take
care, we shall come dangerously near
to talking ourselves into despondency,
a strange aberration indeed for those
with an invincible Lord.

Be of good cheer, my friend, the
church of the living God is not becom-
ing unstuck or falling to pieces. Peni-
tence is well enough but affirmativeness
is equally needed to strike the balance
of truth. Built on a rock, by His grace
she still stands and I can rejoice in her,
the foreshadowing of my Father’s
house, the fountain from which I can
drink and be refreshed, the table of
forgiveness, the tower of refuge, the
divinely prepared training-ground for
my soul. If the Holy Spirit dwells in
us, one test is that He will not speak
with a cracked voice !

And now, in only a few bold strokes,
for the final paradox, which is in many
ways the most personal, addressed di-
rectly to those who stand at the brink
of going out into today’s ministry, Put

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

the Gospel of obedience ahead of the
Gospel of success. Sometimes there is
an antithesis, a dramatic oppositeness,
between these two also. More than once
you will find yourselves confronted with
a straight-out choice.

There are few people alive with
whom I have less patience than those
— and some prominent and formidable
figures are numbered among them —
who would like, often unconsciously, to
twist the Kingdom of God to serve sec-
ondary ends. Granted that when Chris-
tianity is planted in men’s hearts and
flourishes in a land, law and order be-
come more secure and juvenile delin-
quency is on the wane. We thank God
for it and should count them as appreci-
ated by-products, but one would have a
distorted focus if he imagines that they
are what our faith in God through
Christ is primarily for, the one thing
that it is designed to do. Nor — dare I
say it? — is the free enterprise system,
not even the defense of democracy, high-
ly as I esteem one and devoted from
the depths of my being as I am to the
other. The best that can be said is that
democratic institutions have more often
than not come like a natural flowering
wherever the Christian faith has first
been firmly rooted in men’s lives. The
main aim, towering above all the rest,
single and unique, is none of these. It
is so much higher than all the others
that it soars above them. It is simply
to raise frail men to the stature of sons
of God. It is to feed hungry hearts ; to
give a footing to those who would fall
on which they can rise. It is for that
that so God loved the world. For that
we are called and must render our obe-
dience.

Even if the pitfall of secondary aims

is avoided, once we are wholly given to
the primary work of the church, even
then we are not yet safe. One more net
lies seductively in the path of every min-
ister today to which I call on you to be
alert. It is the most insinuating tempta-
tion of all : to j udge what ought to be
our ministry in spiritual things by the
entirely foreign yardsticks of this world.

It is frightening to see the subtle kind
of osmosis that brings secular standards
right into the house of God.

In matters of church union — I know
because I am right now engaged in one
— you can guess what is the most fre-
quently asked question. It is : How
much heightened prestige will it bring?
Or what will be the increase in effi-
ciency? Or how will it build a stronger
front against a named rival ? All of that
is oddly off the point. For shame on
those who ask and on anyone who even
calculates an answer. When will our
proud hearts learn that His motives are
not prudential as ours too often are,
that God refuses to be cramped into our
mean ambitions, that the only test is
that His will shall be done ?

The same thing will be true where-
ever you serve, bitter as it is for the
old Adam to learn it. If it is in a foreign
field, the decisive factor is not where
we are tempted to look for it, in the
fertility of the soil. Our missionary ef-
fort cannot one day longer indulge in
the illusion that it is cultivating spiritu-
al provinces for the glory of the church
back home. If anyone does that, he is
disqualified at once. Those days, for the
health of our souls, are dead and gone
forever. The one, the only thing that
will matter — Oh, when will we learn it ?
— is abandon in his obedience.

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And in America, America which is
no longer out of this world but embar-
rassingly a part of it, it will be no dif-
ferent. Here at home just as truly, one
after another, the old marks of success,
which used to be such a tempting coun-
terfeit of a spiritual service of God, are
i being exposed as shoddy too. What we
used to call progress, the tangible things
that could be dehydrated into impres-
sive statistics, have frighteningly but
salutarily begun to be shaken — and it is
good that they have. The most settled
parish that you can enter into has be-
come a testing frontier where a man
needs to venture in faith. My prayer is
that God will grant that true values will

shine in your eyes as in his ! The Lord
take the charm for you from the copper
of success and sublimate it in your lives
into the gold of obedience.

The Gospel relevant and timeless.
The Church rightly an institution but
needing to be protected against the ill-
nesses to which, as an institution, it is
altogether too prone. Our witness peni-
tent but unflinchingly affirmative. Your
lives not obeying in order to succeed
but winning through to the only true
success in Christ’s ministry, that which
comes from a quiet obedience to our
Lord.

God speed you as you go and this
noble school as it lives on !

SESQUICENTENNIAL

LECTURESHIPS

November 12-16 , 1962

THE L. P. STONE LECTURESHIP
The Reverend Paul L. Lehmann, Th.D., D.D.

THE STUDENTS’ LECTURESHIP ON MISSIONS
The Reverend John A. Mackay, D.D., LL.D., Litt.D.

THE ANNIE KINKEAD WARFIELD LECTURESHIP
The Reverend Kenneth J. Foreman, Ph.D., D.D.

ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN

Jas. I. McCord

It is not possible for me to address
the Sesquicentennial Class of Prince-
ton Theological Seminary without be-
ginning on a personal note. You and I
came to Princeton in the fall of 1959,
all of us juniors, and many of you were
in my first class here. From that Sep-
tember when we began with the theol-
ogy of the pre-Socratics, I have had a
feeling of genuine solidarity with you,
and to you I owe a great debt of grati-
tude. I salute you as you enter the min-
istry of the Church of Jesus Christ, and
I am confident that the life of the
Church will be enriched by your gifts
and by your commitment.

Let my words of farewell be very
brief. They begin with verses from St.
Paul’s first Corinthian letter :

For though I be free from all men,
yet have I made myself servant
unto all, that I might gain the
more.

And unto the Jews I became as a
Jew, that I might gain the Jews;
to them that are under the law, as
under the law, that I might gain
them that are under the law ;

To them that are without law, as
without law, (being not without
law to God, but under the law to
Christ), that I might gain them
that are without law.

To the weak became I as weak, that
I might gain the weak : I am made
all things to all men, that I might
by all means save some.

And this I do for the gospel’s sake,
that I might be partaker thereof
with you.

(I Corinthians 9:19-23)

Canon Warren has called this “the
most dangerous program ever adum-
brated,’’ and I am suggesting that no
less dangerous program will be worthy
of your ministry. The most urgent ques-
tion you will meet the moment your
ministry moves out of the shelter of the
Church into the world is how is Chris-
tian witness possible today in a world
that is rapidly being reshaped into an
order that is closed and one-dimen-
sional. And, further, what is the nature
of this witness which in Christ’s name
we bear ?

These bold words of St. Paul de-
scribe the nature of his witness. It be-
gan with his entering into the experi-
ences of those around him, with his
becoming “all things to all men,” and
with his making their experiences his
own. He was not afraid of the world.
He understood that his own witness to
the power of the Gospel was possible at
the price of his becoming one with all
conditions of men, for only then could
he make their questions his questions
and avoid the risk of supplying solutions
to problems no longer being raised.

Wasn’t it Gertrude Stein, when on
her death bed, who turned to her friend
Alice Toklas and asked, “Alice, what is
the answer?” Alice looked at her sadly
and said, “Gertrude, I am afraid we
don’t know.” After a long pause, Miss

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

Stein said, “Well, then, Alice, what is
the question?”

The question, after all, is the im-
portant thing. It is cheap and easy to
give glib answers to old questions, to
inquiries no longer made, and to prob-
lems our fathers solved, and to refuse
to pay the price of learning the agoniz-
ingly real questions that are being asked
by your contemporaries. You will want
to deal with more than surface symp-
toms which may be met with half
truths and partial answers. You will

want to probe the depths of man’s be-
ing, where he becomes aware of the
problems of life and death. And you
will not know all the answers, but you
may have every assurance that by giv-
ing prior attention to the questions, you
will be in a position to trust the Holy
Spirit to supply the answers in your
own ministry.

May the peace of God, which passeth
all understanding, keep your hearts and
minds through Christ Jesus.

The Gospels see everything against the background of that final consummation which will
bring the labored story of human life to its close, and which waits from day to day only
the hidden counsels of God. Indeed, from Genesis to Revelation the end is always there. It
is the context of every book, the undertone of every hallelujah. But it is not there as
catastrophe ; certainly not as meaningless catastrophe, canceling every item of the past and
present, reducing it all to dust and nothingness. It is there as victory — that victory which
the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ celebrate and, to say the whole truth, inaugurate,
in the very face of life’s dismal word finished. It is there to solemnize every beginning, to
read every chapter as if there were no other, to see in all days the last days, to turn history
itself into one great now of judgment, to make of each moment a moment of high decision
in the loving-kindness of God.

— Paul Scherer, in Love Is a Spendthrift, Harper & Brothers, 1961, p. 6.

KERYGMA AND DISCIPLESHIP

THE BASIS OF NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS
Otto A. Piper

The Uniqueness of
New Testament Ethics

Not until the eighteenth century
did Protestant theology treat
Christian Ethics as an independent
subject. It was taken for granted that
the Christian life fell under the pur-
view of theology, and had to be dis-
cussed under the headings of Law and
Holy Spirit. While, for practical pur-
poses, philosophical ethics nurtured by
Aristotle’s writings was taught in the
curriculum of the Arts faculties of the
universities, the fact was clearly recog-
nized that it had its foundation in Nat-
ural Law, and thus had no direct rela-
tionship with the life of faith. But the
Enlightenment of the eighteenth cen-
tury, which regarded Jesus onesidedly
as the great teacher of mankind, identi-
fied his teaching with morals. The the-
ology of the nineteenth century, particu-
larly under the influence of Schleier-
macher, was anxious to regain some
of the lost ground. But the theologians
were overawed by the authority of Kant,
and thus, though recognizing that the
New Testament had its own set of ethi-
cal standards, Protestant theology tried
in various ways to show that they had
a rational root in human nature. This
meant that Christian Ethics had to de-
velop its own method independent of
dogmatics. Christian conduct was no
longer understood as being rooted in
man’s faith but rather faith had to be
justified in ethical terms.

Recent Biblical scholarship begins to
realize, however, that such an approach
is not fit to do justice to the New Tes-
tament. By treating ethics as an auton-
omous science the scholar lost sight of
the true meaning of conduct as it was
described in the Gospels and Epistles
of the New Testament. For in the eyes
of the Primitive Church, Jesus was not
only a teacher or an example of good
life but also a leader who bade people
to follow him, and by the way he lived
his life, he determined the circumstances
in which his disciples were to follow
him. But where do we find the com-
mon denominator of the ethical teach-
ing and the actual conduct of Jesus?
We can hardly start from a supreme
idea such as love, justice, purity or faith.
For it should be obvious that the mean-
ing of the ethical commandments dif-
fers according to the kind of community
within which they are to be realized,
and according to the abilities and re-
sources which people are supposed to
possess for the realization of the true
life. The principal question which we
have to ask, is therefore that of the
actual setting in which the believer has
to live and to realize the supreme good.

The New Testament has a very sim-
ple answer: true life is life with Jesus.
This holds good not only for his earthly
life and his intercourse with his dis-
ciples, but also for his participation in
the life of the Church in his risen state,
as can be learned from an unbiased
study of the Acts of the Apostles, the

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

Epistles, and the Revelation of John.

In Acts, for example, Luke is anx-
ious to show that not a single one of
the decisive and epoch-making events
in the life of the Primitive Church hap-
pened in a purely incidental way. They
came to pass as a result of the determi-
nation of the people concerned never
to follow their own imaginations, but
rather to be guided by their risen Lord
and his Spirit. In a similar manner, the
Revelation of John describes the life
of the Church under persecution as be-
ing fashioned by obedience to the risen
Lord or lack thereof. Among the au-
thors of the New Testament letters,
Paul brings out most decisively the fact
that his whole activity as an Apostle
was conditioned by his faith, that is to
say by the personal relationship in
which he stood with his Master. For
practical purposes, however, it will be
advisable to start the study of New Tes-
tament ethics from the Gospels, because
in them the disciples’ intercourse with
Jesus is described most graphically.

Although Jesus is called the friend
of his disciples, their mutual relation-
ship was not a purely sentimental one.
The kind of fellowship that Jesus of-
fered to those who were willing to fol-
low him, was that of a teacher with his
pupils. To his contemporaries, and in
particular to his disciples, Jesus ap-
peared as a teacher, who in his methods
had much in common with the Jewish
scribes (e.g., Mk. 4:38; 9:38; 10:35;
13 :i ; Lk. 21 :y), and Jesus himself used
the title “teacher” as self-designation
(e.g., Mt. 10:24; Lk. 6:40; Mt. 23:8;
26:18; Mk. 14:14). But equally re-
markable is the fact that outside of the
Synoptic Gospels Jesus is nowhere in
the New Testament referred to as

teacher. The appellation is reserved to
the teachers of the Church. The reason
is obvious. The disciples were aware
of the uniqueness of Jesus’ teaching.
Unlike that of the rabbis, it carried
spiritual authority with it (e.g., Mk.
1:22; Mt. 7:29; Mk. 1:27; 11:18),
that is to say, it had a compelling and
convincing effect. Furthermore, people
realized the “newness” of his teaching
(Mk. 1 :27). In its surprising original-
ity it struck them as indicating the dawn
of the final age. They sensed that his
message was rooted in the very ground
of reality and thus it made manifest
the true meaning of life.

The disciples were consistently made
aware of the unique character of the re-
lationship in which they stood with Je-
sus. By forbidding them to be called
“teacher” (Mt. 23:8; cp. Mt. 10:24;
Lk. 6:40) Jesus claims for himself an
exclusive role vis-a-vis of them, because
he was himself the very source of his
teaching. All those who followed him
would therefore remain dependent on
the message he conveyed to them. The
true character of Jesus’ teaching can
best be seen in his denunciation of the
scribes, that is to say, the official teach-
ers of Israel (Mk. 12:38-40). The
“teacher” Jesus was then proclaiming the
divine Judgment upon them. It is this
kind of teaching that Jesus will con-
tinue beyond his death. To his disciples,
he promised that in times of persecution
they would be taught by the Holy Spirit
(Mk. 13:11; Mt. 10:19; Lk. 12:12).
As his own teaching was conditioned by
the Spirit of God who in his Baptism
had descended upon him (Mk. 1:10;
Mt. 3:16; Lk. 3:22), so would that
Spirit, who had become one with him,
continue to teach them.

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

Law and Kerygma

What was the supreme value by
which Jesus was guided both in his
teaching and in his conduct ? According
to the Synoptists, the teaching of Jesus
was not primarily ethical but rather it
concerned itself with the coming of
God’s Kingdom or kingly rule here on
earth. To this eschatological message,
the ethical teaching of Jesus might be
related in two different ways. The an-
nouncement of the Kingdom can be re-
garded as furnishing the setting for the
activities of the believers (cf. Schlat-
ter, Amos Wilder), or the Kingdom
may be interpreted as the goal and re-
sult of the Christian efforts (cf. Kant,
Ritschl, the Social Gospel). Those
scholars who consider Jesus’ eschato-
logical teaching as a mere adaptation to
popular language overlook the fact that
his whole teaching is tinged with escha-
tological language. This leads one to
the conclusion that Jesus’ ethical in-
struction was rooted in his eschato-
logical proclamation. Understood apart
from the fact that God is now establish-
ing his realm here on earth, the Sermon
on the Mount would be excessive ideal-
ism or pathological, self-destructive fa-
naticism. But when Albert Schweitzer
interprets Matt. 5-7 as “interimistic eth-
ics” to be practiced during the short in-
terval between the day of its proclama-
tion and the breaking in of the Day of
Yahve only, he misunderstands com-
pletely the message of Jesus. For with
the ministry of Jesus, the power of
God’s Kingdom is already at work in
this world, and those in whom it oper-
ates will be able to act as described in
the Sermon on the Mount.

Similarly, the authority, which Jesus
claims for his ethical teaching, is rooted

in the fact that he participates in the
eschatological process as an insider ; he
is part of that process himself. Hence,
even when he refers to the Old Testa-
ment it is not as a given authority which
has to be interpreted in a casuistic way
— so did the scribes — but rather Jesus
can point out what the original inten-
tion of the divine lawgiver has been,
e.g., in the matter of divorce (Mk. 10:
2-9). In other words, it is as the Son
of God that Jesus offers his ethical
teaching. He is capable of instructing
people in such unique manner because
he ‘sees’ God. He comprehends the di-
vine will from within God’s operation,
whereas the rabbis are dealing with an
infallible commandment, whose inter-
pretation, however, is the victim of
man’s limited knowledge and compre-
hension. The Synoptists and John agree
on this characterization of Jesus’ teach-
ing (e.g., Mt. 11 125-30; Lk. 10:21-24;
John 6:40; 8:38). Thus Law and Ke-
rygma are seen by him as emanating
from a common source, namely God’s
redemptive purpose. Consequently the
commandments given by Jesus are de-
scriptions of the life he lives, and which
his followers are promised to receive.
Hence, the imperative form of the state-
ments gives expression to the absolute
necessity under which man stands, when
confronted with God. Thus Jesus in-
dicates that he has no choice concerning
the way and the goal of his ministry.
The strange kind of life he lives he is
compelled to live, if he is to be faithful
to his mission and nature.

His mission Jesus defines as his com-
ing to fulfil the Law and the Prophets
(Mt. 5:17). As the context and the
Old Testament meaning of the verb
pleroo show, this characterization does
not mean that by making such a pre-

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

1 7

tentious statement, Jesus wanted to un-
derline his perfect compliance with the
Law. Rather “to fulfill” has an eschato-
logical connotation. The purpose for
which God had given the Law and sent
the Prophets was eventually being real-
i ized in the ministry of Jesus. By em-
phasizing that the decisive event in the
history of mankind issues from God,
Jesus enjoins men to consider their lives
as given to them for God’s sake. Such
perspective is absent both from the vari-
ous schools of philosophical ethics as
also from the rabbinical interpretation
of the Torah, all of which are based
upon a man-centered attitude. Quite
apart from its concomitant exhorta-
tions, Jesus’ message of the advent of
the Kingdom subjects the whole life
of man to the service of God’s purpose.
Conversely, the divine proclamation of
the Mosaic Law was in the eyes of Je-
sus intended to remind people of the
fact that by nature they were inclined
to disregard God’s will. Accordingly,
the obstacles which people encounter on
the way to what in their egotism they
regard their supreme good, be it self-
perfection or happiness, existential self-
realization or a perfect world order, are
explained in the light of the divine com-
mandments as being placed there by
God in order to remind man of the
falsehood of his evaluations. No matter
how passionately he may crave for free-
dom, man is doomed as a sinner to live
in a world of limitations by which his
activities are hemmed in from all sides.

The Law itself is interpreted by Je-
sus as such a limitation. Whereas not
only secular ethics but also many of the
theological ethics start from the as-
sumption that the moral law is an in-
dication of the moral goodness of man,
and that only incidentally it is to warn

him also against transgressions, Jesus
teaches his disciples that it is to sinful
people that God has given his Law, and
that divine permissions, as, e.g., that
of divorce, are reminders of their sin-
fulness (Mk. 10:5). Even God’s chosen
people, far from being good, have turned
away from him so completely that with-
out the provisions of the Law it would
disintegrate. Thus shows, that when
adopted apart from Jesus’ ministry, the
Law lacks the strength to bring about
goodness. While this condition does not
prevent man from doing things which
are beneficial to others (e.g., Mt. 7:11 ;
Lk. 11:13), they, nevertheless, do not
serve the end for which man was made
by God. For God created him that
through his life he should manifest the
glory of his maker. Yet in our ‘natural’
goodness, we contrive actions the bene-
ficial effects of which are confined to
the group with which the individual
associates, and they serve practical ends
only.

It is not surprising, therefore, that
the kerygma of the advent of God’s
kingly rule should be coupled by Jesus
with the call to repentance, that is to
say, return to God. The significance of
this demand has frequently been mis-
understood, because hereby the keryg-
ma, too, is made to approach man under
the form of an imperative. Thus the
difference of the two Testaments seems
to be at the best one of degree only.
Actually, however, the divine behest
has never changed (I John 2 :6-8). The
change which Jesus proclaims is one of
the situation only, in which God’s word
reaches man. Formerly the divine de-
mand had been received in ‘darkness,’
namely within the narrow perspective of
a life, in which people tried to make the
best of their own shortcomings and the

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

evils of this world. While the knowl-
edge of what is right and the ability to
act accordingly are found in all men
(e.g., the story of the Good Samaritan,
Lk. 10:29-37) ^ is the “hardness” of
man’s heart which renders him disin-
clined most of the time actually to do
God’s will.

Following Jesus

That even in the age of faith the dis-
closure of the purpose of God should
be addressed to man in the form of a
commandment is an indication of man’s
inability instinctively or of himself to
make the transition from darkness to
light. No wonder, therefore, that a great
deal of Jesus’ teaching should assume
the grammatical form of an imperative.
But as the evangelists emphasized the
complete newness of that teaching, they
illustrated its paradoxical demands by
recording numerous instances of Jesus’
dealing with other people. Quite apart
from the personal charm deployed in
many of them, they exhibit the new
vision of life that Jesus had and that he
conveyed not so much by means of the-
oretical discussions but rather by his
conduct.

Having in himself that new life, that
is to say, life as God intended it to be,
was the cause of the irresistible power
by which people were attracted to Jesus.
Yet the Gospels show also that the dis-
ciples were not immediately aware of
what this inseparable combination of
teaching and personality meant. Not un-
til Pentecost did they realize for the
first time the full splendor of the new
vision which the Saviour had imparted
to them. In their eyes, he was not the
sinless one only, i.e. a man who had
never transgressed the Law, but rather
the Righteous One (e.g., Acts 3:14; I

John 2:1, cp. Mt. 5:20), that is to say
a man who beyond the letter of the Law
had complied with God’s demand, and
who therefore was the faithful witness
(Rev. 1:5; 3:14), i.e. the one who
evidenced man’s ability to realize the
purpose for which God had created
him. The modern Protestant antipathy
against the Law, supported allegedly by
the primacy of the Gospel, or of Love,
completely misunderstands Jesus. There
is no contrast between Law and Gos-
pel, rather the good news of the coming
of God’s Kingdom has become reality
in Jesus’ re-establishing the cosmic or-
der, in which everybody and everything
receives the place for which it is des-
tined.

By the sovereignty, with which Jesus
brushes away all the obstacles that sepa-
rate people from each other and from
God, and prevent them from reaching
their destination, Jesus proves his lord-
ship. The disciples realized soon after
he had called them that their relation-
ship to him was not built upon the
basis of personal allegiance or pedagogic
eros. Jesus’ call required from the out-
set belief in his sovereignty and his di-
vine mission. In turn, it was this belief
of the disciples, fragmentary and weak
as it was, that survived the death of
their master and made the apostles bold
to contend that the risen one was pres-
ent in the midst of their fellowship. The
spiritual growth which the disciples ex-
perienced as they followed Jesus can
be learned from the way in which they
spoke and acted as leaders of the Primi-
tive Church, and from the profound yet
realistic manner in which the new life
is described in their letters.

The vision of the new life, as the
New Testament understands it, com-
prises not only the destination which

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

God has assigned to man, but also the
central significance which Jesus has in
the actualization of that life. Hence,
when he called people to follow him,
our Lord was not just a teacher anxious
to have students. He wanted his Dis-
ciples “to be with him” (Mk. 3:14),
that is to say to share his life and mes-
sianic ministry. This did not mean, as
later generations so frequently under-
stood it, that the Disciples were to imi-
tate Jesus’ life. The New Testament
records leave no doubt concerning the
difference between the Master and his
disciples (e.g., Mk. 6:13; 9:18 par.).
What they had in common with him
was first of all the common pursuit of
that new vision of a God-given life, and,
as a result, their willingness to accept
the way, on which Jesus led them, as
an expression of his genuine under-
standing of God’s redemptive will.
Hence the apostles were ready to pre-
pare God’s chosen people for the even-
tual manifestation of the Messiah’s glo-
ry, no less than to endure with the Mas-
ter all the hardships and hostile acts
that were implied in such an endeavor.

Modern Protestant theology seems to
be eager to correct the work of Jesus by
contending that social and international
activities are absolutely necessary as
primary evidences of a Christian life.
But while Jesus did not disparage good
works, he pointed out, nevertheless,
that there was an order of spiritual
growth, and unless first things were
given priority no spiritual fruits could
be expected. Basic requirements of a
true life are humility, purity of heart,
trust in God’s power and faithfulness
even in the most insignificant matters.
Man’s principal goal is the building up
of God’s people here on earth. Most
urgent therefore is the willingness to

serve others rather than to pursue one’s
own interests, and the restoration of
brotherly relationships, wherever they
have been spurned or disregarded or
disturbed. This obligation takes prece-
dence even of the prescribed acts of
worship (Mt. 5:23-24). Since the fel-
lowman lives in this world, those who
follow Jesus cannot withdraw from it
into a dream world or a self-chosen
solitude. Yet their attitude will be one
of compassionate love anxious to trans-
form this world rather than an accept-
ance hereof as it is. By living with Je-
sus, the disciples learnt no longer to
be afraid of the seemingly uncontrolla-
ble forces of the universe and their en-
mity, for they saw how by the power
of faith their Master triumphed over
them. A further important lesson the
disciples appropriated was the experi-
ence of guidance and strength that
comes to people who consort in a fel-
lowship whose common goal transcends
the interests of each and all of them.
By their willingness to dedicate their
lives to God’s cause, that is to say to
foster the advancement of his Kingdom,
they felt the Holy Spirit working in
their hearts as a power which not only
enlightened them but also moved them
to overcome their own reluctance and
fear.

The records of the New Testament
indicate clearly that this life of dis-
cipleship was an unconspicuous life.
There were not many outstanding deeds
in the Primitive Church, otherwise ref-
erence would be made of them. Rather
the early Christians shared their daily
life, its needs and its chores. Yet it was
not, what through a misunderstanding
of Bonhoefifer, is considered a flight in-
to secularly. While not everyone per-
formed the work of an Apostle or an

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

evangelist, all felt responsible for the
propagation of the Gospel, and they
considered common worship and com-
mon religious instruction essential fea-
tures of their fellowship (Acts 2 142, 46).

The Lord of the Church

What is described in the New Testa-
ment as the life of the disciples, is to
serve as an example for all the Chris-
tians. But what does discipleship mean
for us who are no longer privileged to
walk with Jesus? Well, above all, we
should remember that as in the days of
Jesus, the Kingdom is something to be
sought. For what matters, is Christ’s
work rather than his mere presence
among us. The progress of God’s re-
demptive work, although it has never
ceased, is nevertheless not something
that is immediately obvious. What in
our seeking we discover is, negatively,
the fact that despite the American en-
thusiasm for international action, civil
rights and social justice, there is no
hope of doing God’s will in those areas,
unless we apply the Christian attitude
of faith to them, that is to say, trust in
God, willingness to serve, humility and
purity of heart. Apart from faith, the
change accomplished may alter the
structure of social life, but it leaves the
basic problems unsolved, pace the con-
dition of the negroes in the northern
states of the USA, notwithstanding
their emancipation.

Positively, two facts should be taken
into consideration. Firstly, the Church
still enjoys the presence and the fellow-
ship of the risen Lord, and thus it has

not only powers at its disposal by which
the pattern of this world can be radi-
cally transformed, but its history itself
is the result of the constant guidance
given to it by Jesus. Events such as,
for example, the ecumenical movement,
the feeling of spiritual dissatisfaction in
today’s churches, or the groping for a
theology of facts instead of a theology
of words, must be understood as symp-
toms of the work that the risen Lord
carries on in its midst, and hence they
demand appropriate action. Secondly,
the vision of the new life which Jesus
implanted into the Twelve, is still with
us. It is not a rigid set of command-
ments or a system of established vir-
tues, but rather it constantly remodels
itself in the course of Church history, as
the Spirit moves Christians to apply
their faith to changing historical situa-
tions. Thus the Church occupies a two-
fold position in the believer’s life. It is
the Body of the risen Lord, through
which the individual is conditioned and
guided, and it is at the same time a so-
cial institution in this world, to whose
quickening the believer’s effort is de-
voted. This explains the paradox of the
Christian life. The believer is not anx-
ious to bring about a new and better
world, but either he wants to do what
Jesus through the Spirit urges him to
perform. Yet when doing so, he is used
by his Lord as his agent through whose
activity a new world comes into being
which is not different only but also bet-
ter than all the improvements which
purely human activity is able to bring
about.

THE LIGHT OF MEN

H. Ganse Little

In him was life and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the
darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. — John I ‘.4, 5

In the beginning was the Word, and
the Word was with God, and the
Word was God. He was in the begin-
ning with God ; all things were made
through him, and without him was not
anything made that was made. In him
was life. And the life was the light of
men. The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness has not overcome it.”
That is to say, God comes first ! The
Bible never presents God as static,
fixed, aloof, far away, immured in an
unknowable and unconcerned isolation
booth. The Bible always talks about
God as having given abundant proof
to man that he is at the integral core
of his Being what John calls “the
Word” — i.e., that which to God is what
a man’s word and thought are to that
man or that which in a man impels
him to initiate action.

Indeed, the word and thought which
make a man “a man under God,” en-
abling him to think, to communicate, and
to act, constitute in themselves man’s
response to God’s initiating word and
thought and act. Such is the Biblical
meaning of man “made in the image of
God” — capable of creative response to
God’s creative Word.

In the metaphor of our text, there is
light in man — the light of reason, the
light of faith, the light of creative
thought and action, the light of love
because there is first, last, and all the
time, God taking the initiative, God on
the move, God creating and then visit-

ing man through his challenging, de-
manding, insistent Word.

In this sense, “God comes first.” God
is not just “first,” that is only part of
the truth for the Bible and for Chris-
tian faith. God comes first, God always
makes the first move. God always “beats
man to it,” so to speak.

My mind goes back to a group of
boys madly undressing beside a creek
in the Ozarks, the urge to jump into the
“old swimming hole” accelerated by the
challenging cry. “Last one in’s a pole
cat!” God is more circumspect and less
given to the vernacular in his chal-
lenge, but he challenges man neverthe-
less ! And man in immersing himself in
any aspect of life, or truth, or freedom,
or love is always responding. God, the
Spirit of God, God through his Word,
has already and always created and of-
fered the life, the truth, the freedom
and the love which man finally enters
into, “discovers,” shares.

Another way of stating this is to say,
God through his eternal, initiating
Word is the first and continually-at-
work Creator, Inventor, Teacher, and
Saviour of mankind.

It is because of the impact, influx,
infiltration of his life through his Word
that man possesses “Light” — the light
of reason, of truth, of freedom, of love.

The Psalmist heralds the same con-
viction as the gospel writer : “With Thee
is the fountain of life ; in thy light shall
we see light!” “In him was life and the

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

life was the light of men. And the light
shines in the darkness and the darkness
has not overcome it.”

It is important to bear in mind just
here that there are two kinds of “dark-
ness” in this world — figuratively speak-
ing— and John so speaks: There is the
darkness God creates — and there is the
darkness man creates.

There is the darkness into which God
“calls” or introduces man, the darkness
in which God then bids the light to
shine, the darkness in which God bids
man look upon the light. And there is
the darkness man embraces by shutting
out the light, by shutting his eyes to the
light, by turning his back upon the light.

The Bible and our own experience
and faith do not equate all darkness with
sin and evil. Only that darkness in
which man still wants to hide himself
after he has seen the light is evil and
is sin.

There is a startling implication in
this regard in the opening verses of
Genesis which describe — again in figur-
ative language — God’s initial act in
Creation : “In the beginning of God’s
creation of the heavens and the earth,
the earth was without form and void,
and darkness covered the deep, and the
Spirit of God brooded upon the face of
the waters. And God said, ‘Let there
be Light.’ And there was light. And
God saw that the light was good. And
God separated the light from the dark-
ness, and God called the light, day, and
the darkness, night.”

That is to say, God created both light
and darkness — and he created darkness
first. Then he created the light, estab-
lishing a clear distinction and alterna-
tion between the two. First darkness —
and then light — “And there was eve-
ning and there was morning, one day” !

Moreover, God declared the light to
be “good.” But he did not state the
darkness to be evil. The darkness is too
primitive, too static, either to create
or sustain life in any of its higher forms !

Light must shine in the darkness if
the passive, primordial, pulsating in-
nocence and ignorance which is life in
the dark is ever to be stimulated, chal-
lenged, to grow, to learn, to change, to
reach out and up, to explore, to achieve
at last that God-destined level of life
where Word and Thought and Action
combine in love to create the life more
abundant !

Every man is born under God into a
kind of darkness into which God’s light
shines. This soft, lovely, primitive, in-
adequate yet inviting darkness is the
innocency of the tiny baby. This in-
nocency (which means utter lack of
knowledge) tugs at our heartstrings.
We ourselves as adults long often to
return to its comfortable darkness and
unawareness. Oh, not to have to grow
any more, to learn, to change, to act
responsibly upon the basis of that which
we have learned, and grown into, and
become ! This is the desire to “regress,”
to become a little child again, to slip
back into the soft, safe, cozy passivity
of darkness.

Man is created in this state of “in-
nocence” in this pristine, primitive, dark
ignorance of life and love and freedom
and truth. As of the hour of his birth,
man knows nothing about life, until
“light goes up in his darkness,” until
he is approached in love with an offer
of life and truth and freedom to which
he responds. This response is growth
into responsible maturity as a man.

Once the light is seen for what it is
— a stimulus, a pressure, an induce-
ment, indeed, often a painful goad — to

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

\ change and growth, a challenge calling
the child into manhood, calling for re-
sponse and obedience; once the light is
i seen and man fails to respond, to obey,
shuts his eyes, turns his head, turns his
back to the light, embraces his darkness
i as the security he knows and loves the
best, then that resultant darkness is dif-
ferent from what it was before ; it is evil
and Sin for him.

Jesus said, “Men love darkness (not
because the darkness is evil) rather
than light, because their deeds are evil,”
most particularly the deed of rejecting
light and embracing darkness and so
turning away from growth into the life
more abundant.

Now John asserts in his gospel that
all this energizing Word of God — this
life-inducing light — blazed forth in our
flesh, in our world, in our human his-
tory in the person of the man Christ
Jesus. And he goes on in his Prologue,
“And the Word was made flesh and
dwelt among us. And we beheld his
glory like as of the only son of the
Father, full of grace and truth.”

This is the meaning of the word in
Isaiah : “The people that walked in
darkness have seen a great light ; and
they who sat in the land of deep dark-
ness, upon them hath the light shined.”
This is the meaning of Zachariah’s
hymn of praise upon the birth of his son
John, who was to be known as the Bap-
tist, the forerunner of the Christ : “. . .
whereby the dayspring from on high
hath visited us ; to give light unto them
that sit in darkness, and in the shadow
of death, to guide our feet into the way
of peace.”

These are passages we usually asso-
ciate only with Christmas. We properly
do so at that festal time. But this is the
story of Jesus Christ, the light of men,

the light of the world. This is the tale
of the Mass of Christ, of Christ’s Mass.
“Mass” derives from the Latin verb
“sent.” The gospel is the good news
of Christ’s “sent-ness,” of “the Word
made flesh,” of God coming first into
man’s darkness, of the continual avail-
ability of the power of God unto salva-
tion. “The true light which lighteneth
every man was coming into the world.”

Only in the light of the life of Christ
do we see light, i.e., do men come to
know themselves, to understand life, to
grow in the responsible utilization of
life and truth and freedom in love.

Take three deliberately chosen and
quite disparate areas of man’s life and
see how helpless and despairing and
fearful is man’s situation in his vain
attempt to understand and use good
things for good ends in his life — apart
from God in Christ — only to discover
that good things become in his fum-
bling darkness instruments of death and
hell.

Take the use of alcohol, first. Only
the man who sees life in the light of the
life and love of Jesus Christ can con-
ceivably know how to handle what many
sincere Christians believe to be a poten-
tially good thing in life — alcohol used
in moderation.

If Christ has saved a man from bore-
dom, from despair, from frustration,
from hatred of himself and life, from
resentment of others, from hostility to-
wards his family, from the childishness
of always having to prove his freedom
by showing he doesn’t know how to
handle it ; if Christ has saved man from
these things, then he is set free to enjoy
another thing in life in moderation upon
occasion — and he is set free not so to

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

drink even in moderation upon other oc-
casions where the welfare and safety of
others are involved — both decisions be-
ing freely his to make in his continual
awareness of the meaning of life in
Christ.

If a man drinks to escape life, to avoid
the challenge of responsible maturity,
to drown the inevitable sorrows which
accompany change and growth, to hide
himself from himself, to regress from
adult living in a give and take world
back into the darkness of the irrespon-
sible unconsciousness of childhood, he
is literally “lost.” He isn’t lost because
he drinks, he drinks because he’s lost.

The issue is not “to drink or not to
drink,” the issue is, a man’s freedom to
drink and not to drink each in accord
with a penetrating understanding of his
own life and the lives of others as seen
in the light of the life of Christ.

Take next the awesome power for
good which is atomic energy. Only as
man sees the life of mankind under
God in Christ dare man make use of the
tremendous energy he has unlocked
from God’s storehouse with the help
of God’s freely given light of reason for
the life of mankind rather than for the
death of mankind.

The issue again is not : is man usurp-
ing the power of God like Prometheus
of ancient Greek myth ; the issue is :
has man’s life been sufficiently condi-
tioned by the light of the glory of God
in the face of Jesus Christ so that man
is free to use his awesome possession in
terms of the values taught and exempli-
fied in Christ? The stark realism of the
Old Testament fits our dilemma today:
“Behold, saith the Lord, I have set
before you life and death. Choose

life !” The New Testament would say,
“Choose Christ — who is the way, the
truth, and the life !” Man is so tempted
to choose himself — and death.

In our beloved land our thought gives
evidence of substantial regression from
that day at the outset of World War II
when we were filled with horror at the
saturation bombing of Rotterdam. Nor
does the testimony of many experts in
the field that we might have secured the
same end result near the close of that
same conflict by dropping a demonstra-
tion atomic bomb harmlessly in the
Pacific rather than decimating Hiro-
shima and Nagasaki lull our consciences
to sleep.

Once more, the issue is not : “I
would rather be dead than Red.” It is
not even, “I would rather be dead than
alive under any given set of circum-
stances.” The first is a falsely stated set
of alternatives. The second is not a live
option for a committed Christian. The
issue is : “In the light of the life and
death and resurrection of Jesus Christ,
do we commit ourselves to the thesis :
We are willing to destroy the world
of men, if in our judgment that is neces-
sary, for the sake of the life more
abundant !” ?

Ill

Finally, and surprisingly perhaps,
take “religion.” Apart from the light
of the whole life and love of God as re-
vealed in Jesus Christ, religion is the
most destructive, vicious, evil power
man can bend to his own selfish de-
vices.

How Jesus Christ castigated “reli-
gion” and religious people! Religion is
man cutting God down to his size — to
the kind, color, and creed of his nation,
his race, his economic philosophy, his

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

cultural heritage, and the pattern of his
morality. Religion is God made in man’s
image. Religion is man shutting his eyes
to God as seen in Jesus Christ, turning
his back to the light of Christ, and
peering into a mirror darkly, sees his
own shadowy image with the help of the
very light he denies, and cries out,
“Thou art my God.”

The greatest enemy of the light of
God in Christ is “religion” — including
much that passes for Christianity !
Apart from Jesus Christ, religion in-
cluding Christianity inevitably becomes
degraded by superstition, bigotry, prej-
udice, provincialism, hostility, igno-
rance, selfishness and sin. “In him was
life and the life was the light of men.
And the light shines in the darkness
and the darkness has not overcome it.”
Over and over again, man turns his
back upon God as seen in Jesus Christ
and in the darkness of that perverse
turning away, seeks to fashion out of his
own moralism, scientism, religion, a
scheme of salvation more congenial to
his fear and pride. And man seems to
get away with it, doesn’t he? “How
futile,” we cry, “is the name and claim
of Christ in the lives of men. How
pitifully ineffective is the light of his
life in this dark world where men love
the darkness rather than the light !”

But God declares this judgment to be
too hasty, to be itself a product of man’s
turning away from Christ, the too fear-
ful, too wishful thinking of a closed
mind rationalizing behind closed eyes.

God in Christ still comes first, last
and all the time ! The cry of the
Psalmist reflects this painful pressure:
“Whither shall I go from thy Spirit,
and whither shall I flee from thy pres-
ence? If I ascend up into heaven, Thou
art there : if I make my bed in hell, be-

hold, Thou art there. If I take the wings
of the morning and dwell in the utter-
most parts of the sea ; even there shall
thy hand lead me, and thy right hand
shall hold me. If I say, surely the dark-
ness shall cover me : even the night
shall be light without me. Yea, the dark-
ness hideth me not from Thee !”

The Word of God is more powerful
than any two-edged sword (than mega-
ton hydrogen bomb) — more powerful
even than the most intransigent and
savage enemy of all — the heart of man.
Thus the voice of Isaiah speaks for
God, “My Word shall not return unto
me void, but shall accomplish the pur-
pose whereto I sent it.”

The sign, symbol, and seal of this
promise is the fact of the resurrection !
On this first day after another celebra-
tion of Easter — and in this post-Easter
world — we glory in the vacated sepul-
chre. At its open door, “See the Christ
stand !” Once and for all time, the hand
of God has violated the hiding place of
death. Light streams forth out of the
darkness of the tomb of man’s faithless-
ness and fear. In the resurrection of
Jesus Christ, God rejects man’s rejec-
tion of the light. God thunders an Ever-
lasting “Yea and Amen” to man’s pro-
testing “Nay and Never.” The seven
words of the cross are followed by the
last word of all — the first Word from
the grave! “Lo, I am with you always
even unto the end of this present age.”
In such a day surely the word of an
honored school of the prophets to the
world of men remains one and the
same: “For it is the God who said, ‘Let
light shine out of darkness,’ who has
shone in our hearts to give the light of
the glory of God in the face of Christ.

. . . We have this treasure in earthen

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

vessels, to show that the transcendent
power belongs to God and not to us.
. . . We too believe, and so we speak
knowing that he who raised the Lord
Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and
bring us with you into his presence. For
it is all for your sake, so that as grace
extends to more and more people it may
increase thanksgiving, to the glory of
God.”

God in Christ, the Word made flesh,

has great staying power, a limitless
power of penetration : kingdoms will
come and go ; nations wax and wane ;
economies rise and fall; philosophies
and religions flourish and decline, but
“Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, to-
day and forever.”

“In him was life and the life was
the light of men. And the light shines
in the darkness and the darkness has
not overcome it.”

There is a theological dimension in institutional as well as individual appraisal. The theo-
logical dimension, even though it complicates evaluation and provides great theoretical diffi-
culties for the scientific investigator, gives a depth and meaning to Christian education
evaluation that would otherwise be lacking. In fact, without thorough attention to the theo-
logical dimension, Christian education evaluation would be so meaningless as to be im-
possible.

What is this theological dimension? Simply put, it is the assertion that in Christian edu-
cation there is much more than meets the eye, and that this “more than meets the eye” con-
sists of the dynamic work of God in man’s midst : his purposes, his mighty acts, and the
work of his Holy Spirit.

— D. Campbell Wyckoff, in How to Evaluate Your Christian Education Program,
Westminster, 1962, p. 21.

PROPHET AND PRIEST, BUT NOT A KING

Eugene Carson Blake

And he said to them, ‘The Kings of the Gentiles exercise Lordship over them;
and those in authority over them are called Benefactors. But not so with you;
rather let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one
who serves.’ — Luke 22 125, 26

I want to speak to you today about
your ministry. As you are gradu-
ated from Theological Seminary this
week, you go out from this place to your
new places in the life of the Church.
How you conceive of your ministry of
word and sacrament will be important
not only as you begin it, but also all
through your years of service to God
and his people.

Much is said these days about the
image of the Protestant minister. It is
alleged that you young men are general-
ly either confused about the ministry
you are entering, or else that you resist
the image of it that is most current. You
are all familiar with the studies of
Richard Niebuhr, which realistically
describe the pastorate in the American
Church. The new emphasis of this study
is upon the administrative task that is
laid upon the American pastor. Due
to the multiplication of program activi-
ties even in the smaller churches, the
“image” of the pastor has now come to
be that of an executive of a social agen-
cy. He is expected to make the church
“go” and his “success” seems to be
measured by various statistics such as
new members received, money raised,
buildings built, and the number of bus-
tling programs conceived and promoted.

It is no wonder to me that many of
you are hesitant and unsure of your
calling, if that is the way you conceive

of it. But let us rather examine your
ministry in theological terms in order
that your image of the ministry may be
enriched and the task you undertake in
the Church seen in a fuller perspective.

It has become commonplace to say
that the only ministry in the Church is
Christ’s ministry and that all other min-
istries are derivative from his. I have
never quite fully understood the impli-
cations of this remark, which is usually
uttered with a profundity that is sup-
posed to end all argument. But let us
begin our argument with it today.

Christ’s ministry is the ministry in
the Church. The ministry of the laity,
that is of the whole people of God, in-
cluding you and me, is the ministry of
witnessing to Jesus Christ to which we
were ordained by our baptism. So far
so good. The specialized ministry of
Word and Sacrament to which you and
I have been called in the Church is de-
rived from and supportive of both the
ministry of Christ and of that of all of
the people of God. When we are ordained
in and by the Church, our ministry is
not new and different. The terms of the
call of a minister in our Church (an es-
sential part of his ordination) include
these significant words : “that you may
be free from worldly care and avoca-
tions.” The reason a congregation un-
dertakes to pay you a salary as pastor is
neither to hire you to be something dif-

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

ferent from what you were before ordi-
nation, nor does it signify any radical
change in your ministry from that of the
whole people of God. Rather you are
freed by the Church for study and serv-
ice and from the necessity of earning
your livelihood in some “worldly” way.

To understand fully, then, what you
are thus called to do and to be, it is
necessary to look at Christ’s own min-
istry as a model and pattern. In our
tradition the ministry of Christ has been
usually described as that of prophet,
priest and King. Calvin writes in Book
II, Chapter XV of The Institutes :
“The office enjoined upon Christ by
the Father consists of three parts. For
he was given to be prophet, King and
priest.” And in The Confession of Faith
of our Church (VIII, i), one reads,
“It pleased God, in his eternal purpose,
to choose and ordain the Lord Jesus,
his only begotten Son, to be the Media-
tor between God and man ; the prophet,
priest, and King. . . .”

If then the office of the minister of
Jesus Christ is to be derived from
Christ’s own office in and to the Church,
let us look at our ministry together to-
day in terms of prophet, priest, and
King. For as Calvin goes on to say in
The Institutes, “It would be of little
value to know these names without un-
derstanding their purpose and use.”

In what sense then are you and I
called by the Church to be prophets?
Essentially according to Calvin a proph-
et is one who sets forth “useful doctrine
sufficient for salvation” (cf. Inst. Book
II, Ch. XV). This broad definition will
prevent us from too restricted an under-
standing of the prophetic role of the
pastor and preacher. Some think of the

prophet solely in terms of an Amos or
a Jeremiah, thundering, “Thus saith
the Lord,” to a people unwilling to lis-
ten or to heed.

But it is much wiser to think of
prophecy more broadly, as Calvin sug-
gests, as setting forth the gospel, the
good news of God in Christ, “sufficient
for salvation.” This will, of course, in-
clude “the social gospel,” viz. : the set-
ting forth of the word as it applies to
the life of the Church and the world in
terms that encourage the witness in
the world of the people of God. But
this is not easy to do, especially for a
young man. Each of you by now has
achieved some political, economic and
social orientation. Some of you are “lib-
erals” in all of these. I doubt not that
some of you are conservative, not to
say reactionary. May I humbly suggest
that the congregation to which you are
called will be profoundly uninterested
in your private views, liberal or con-
servative, on disarmament, integration,
the profit system, or the United Na-
tions. What your congregation has a
right to hear from you is the gospel of
Jesus Christ set forth in such clear
fashion that as you preach, you and
they together see the light of salvation
in the pilgrim way you walk.

If you think of prophecy in these
terms, you will find that you will not
be speaking only as a counsellor to fear-
ful people, though you need to do that,
nor only as a teacher of Christian doc-
trine, though you need to do that, nor
only as a lone voice warning of God’s
judgment upon a faithless people, al-
though every faithful preacher will be
required from time to time to do that
as well.

But salvation is no small thing. To
speak God’s word of salvation to any

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

1 people will require all of your knowl-
: edge and study, your humility and pray-
' er, your continued learning and repeat-
ed moments of high courage.

The heart of what I am saying is
| that to be a true prophet of Jesus Christ
' and his gospel, the necessity is to un-
: dertake to speak on behalf of God to his
j people. This is no easy task. Brash
1 young preachers more often get in trou-
1 ble with their brashness than they do
with the gospel. The broader and deeper
j your study of the gospel, the more hum-
| ble you are about your own opinions
I and the surer you are about what God
has done and is doing for man’s salva-
i tion, the surer you are, week by week,
! to have something persuasive and im-
portant to say to the people to whom
you are called to preach.

The danger of the preacher-prophet
is when he begins for any reason to try
to please man more than God, or when
his righteous conviction is asserted as
his own word to the people rather than
God’s. To be a prophet is an impossible
task. Any minister of Christ who does
not echo again and again in his own
heart Jeremiah’s protest at God’s choos-
ing him to be a prophet has not really
begun his ministry. Jeremiah said, you
remember, “Oh, Lord God ! behold I
do not know how to speak for I am
only a youth.” And thirty years from
now, if you remain sensitive to your
high calling, you will protest in your
prayers, “Behold, I do not know how
to speak for I am only a youth.”

And as to Jeremiah, God’s answer
will be, “Do not say T am only a youth’

. . . and whatever I command you, you
will speak. . . . Behold I have put my
words in your mouth.”

God’s words of reconciliation, cour-
age, love, patience, judgment, and sal-

vation : this is your high prophetic call-
ing. No work is harder and no work
more thrilling. If you so look at your
ministry, you will not be confused,
though you will know from the begin-
ning that it is more than you, of your
own ability and talent, can ever accom-
plish. And each Sunday you will pray
that your words are God’s words and
that the salvation you proclaim is also
his.

In what sense is a Presbyterian min-
ister to be a priest? I am profoundly
weary of the 400 year old disputes that
continue to divide the Church of Jesus
Christ on this matter. Of course, you
are not a priest who controls the peo-
ple’s access to God. But no Catholic
who knows his best tradition believes
that either. Let us have done with an-
cient controversy and examine this min-
istry of ours in terms of Christ’s min-
istry from which ours must be derived.
Let us be very clear that Christ died
upon a cross for our sins and for
those of the whole world. This is his
once and for all accomplishment. He
alone, after the order of Melchizedek,
is prophet, priest and King, the sole
mediator between God and man. This
we accept as having been accomplished.
But positively why each week do the
people of God gather in the sanctuary?
Why are you called upon to lead this
people to the throne of grace? In what
sense is yours a priestly ministry ? What
is the relationship of cult to ethics or
of worship?

If one were to put his finger on the
chief source of the confusion of the
American Protestant minister, it is just
here. Most Presbyterian ministers are
at a loss really to relate the regular wor-

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

ship of Almighty God, its hymns, pray-
ers and sacraments, to the scheme of
salvation he sets forth in his preaching.
This is the central sickness of the
American Church today.

The cure to this sickness will not be
found in our aping the outward acts of
Catholic priests. Liturgical gadgets will
not transform a Presbyterian Service
into anything more useful. Reverence
and worship cannot be produced by
anything less than the consciousness of
the presence of God himself. But we as
Presbyterian ministers do not believe
we in any sense control or contrive that
presence. As our new Directory for W or-
ship puts it, “In worship the initiative
lies with God” (II, i). “In public wor-
ship God makes known among his peo-
ple his love in Jesus Christ, his claim
upon their lives, his abiding presence
with them, and his concern for all crea-
tion. . . .” (Ibid). And our Directory
also says, “Those ordained to the min-
istry of Word and Sacraments have
entrusted to them the direction and
leading of public worship” (I, 4).

This “Christian worship is . . . above
all ... a corporate response by the
Church to God’s mighty act of redemp-
tion in Jesus Christ” (II, 2).

If you and I will begin to think of
our priestly office in these terms, there
can be a resurgence of life and joy in
the public worship of our Church. This
task of leadership to which you are
called is not the preliminary to your ser-
mon. The worship of God in which the
minister, with reverence, awe and due
preparation of mind and spirit, leads a
congregation into the very presence of
God is in our tradition the only setting
for the effectual preaching of the Word.

I am told that many young men, sure
of their call to Christ’s ministry, are yet

unsure of their call to serve as pastor
of any particular Church. “So much of
what the churches do, budgets and Boy
Scouts, building programs and dull so-
cial gatherings, women’s associations
and Sunday School picnics — what has
this to do with my ministry?”

Let it be understood that every job
in this world has its routine and unin-
teresting aspects. If any of you think
my task in the Church is all glamor,
think again. Hours of committee meet-
ings and days and nights of travel, even
abroad, soon lose their glamor. But
what is more wonderful than week by
week to enter a sanctuary, to lead a
people who have come there voluntarily
to worship God, to pray and sing, to
voice praise and thanksgiving, to sit in
Christ’s place at his table, to preach the
word, and bless the people? If this is
your work, cannot many small burdens
be carried lightly with it?

The ministry of word and sacrament
in the Presbyterian Church is, in our
increasingly organized and organiza-
tional life, one of the few callings which
is centered in creative human and hu-
mane service. How can any young man
resist a call to such a ministry ? To com-
pare it to being a cog in a great busi-
ness, or even to prefer academic teach-
ing to it, is profoundly to misconceive
what the ministry may be in personal
challenge and satisfaction, in deep joy
and ultimate meaning.

Ill

But what about the minister being a
King? You will have noticed that I
named my sermon “Prophet and Priest,
but not a King.” By this topic I did not
intend to imply that I would reject the
third part of the traditional understand-
ing of Christ’s threefold ministry.

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

But I do want to make it clear that
the idea that a Presbyterian minister is
in any sense a “King” is false and mis-
leading. In other days, when the parson
was “the person” in a community, when
discipline in the Church carried with it
civil penalties, when, as in Geneva, Cal-
vin sought order in a revolutionary age,
there may have been excuse for making
the pastorate appear to be at least a pale
reflection of our Lord’s rule in his
Kingdom.

It is equally true that it is a profound
misunderstanding of the present day
pastor’s role, if he is understood to be
a boss or dictator of any kind, or an
executive officer with authority over the
people of his congregation.

Jesus said to his disciples, “The
Kings of the nations exercise Lordship
over them ; and those in authority over
them are called Benefactors. But not so
with you ; rather let the greatest among
you become as the youngest, and the
leader as one who serves.”

Surely the ministry of word and sac-
rament is a kingly ministry too, if we
will in our understanding of it accept
Jesus’ radical revolutionary view of
Lordship and rule.

I choose this text from Luke rather
than the more familiar one in Mat-
thew, particularly because I am speak-
ing about our ministry to you young
men. It is true that your youth, as you
begin your ministry, is a handicap in
your role of prophet, or of priest. The
years add wisdom to the prophet, and
make his words more easily accepted ;
age and experience, sickness, sorrow,
death — all these make a man a better
priest. But here our Lord suggests that

contrary to all the world’s conception,
a Christian King should be a youth, that
is one who, because of junior status,
finds it natural to be a servant — a min-
ister.

So understood, the Kingly ministry
is the willingness to obedience to our
Lord to serve a whole congregation of
people one by one. That is why, when
you are tired you will make that hos-
pital call on a lonely invalid. That is
why you will give yourself to the poor,
the unlovable, the lonely, and the rich.
That is why you will ring doorbells and
call upon strangers, so that they may
be no longer strangers.

We are told that the driving force in
American life is status-seeking. I am
sure all of us are human and ambitious
enough to seek some status. But the
status of a Christian minister is always
a junior status, “Let the greatest among
you become as the youngest, and the
leader as one who serves.”

If throughout your ministry you will
remember this, in this sense only try-
ing to retain your youth, you will find
that this is an ambition which can be
achieved — there will not be too many
seeking your place — you will find that
most of the heartache and most of the
bitterness that has blighted men’s min-
istries will not blight yours and that the
end will be as thrilling as the beginning.

May such a ministry be yours. And
if it is, it will be crowned by successive
generations of young men in increasing
numbers and quality who, having seen
the reflection of our Lord in you, will
also hear his call to serve him in the
Church.

CONVENTRY— JUNE 8, 1962

Pain is in everything —
in joy, in love, in life,

(and even granite is alive).

Only death is painless
though the approach to it
sums up all pain.

The tree is lacerated by the woodman’s axe and saw,
the wood winces under the driven nail,
the asphalt cracks at the dandelion’s upward thrust
to light and air, to being-trodden-upon,

its flower mangled by the boot, which, bruising, wears away.
Pain everywhere.

To inflict pain, our and Nature’s original sin,
to be expiated in appropriate suffering.

Appropriate !

Was not the Carpenter nailed to the Tree?

Pain takes its place

in Coventry

where new proportion

fits old discords into unity,

foretaste and sign of man at one with God

in painless harmony.

Pain takes its place,
is reconciled with life
where Christ is seen in Glory.

— T. M. Heron, in Frontier (used with permission).

FREEDOM AND TRADITION
IN PASTORAL THEOLOGY

Seward Hiltner

The purpose of this discussion is
to examine the meaning of free-
dom and of tradition in pastoral theol-
ogy, to see the relationship that has ex-
isted between them, and to ask, in the
light of reflective meditation, what that
relationship should be. Some prelimi-
nary explanation is needed about the
nature of pastoral theology.

The Meaning of Pastoral Theology

As the term “pastoral theology” has
been used in Protestant circles since the
latter part of the eighteenth century, it
has had at least three kinds of mean-
ings. First, it has referred to the study
of the theory and practice of the care
of souls, thus being almost a synonym
for the term “poimenics.” In this mean-
ing, its focus is the theory and practice
of the shepherding function of the
church, and of the minister as represen-
tative of the church.

Second, “pastoral theology” has re-
ferred to the whole theory of the work
of the minister, including homiletics,
poimenics, catechetics, apostolics, and
so on. That is, instead of interpreting
the shepherding function of the church
and the minister as applying to some
kinds of activities rather than to others,
this second conception of pastoral theol-
ogy has assumed that shepherding, as
a metaphor, is the central conception
around which all the activities of church
and pastor are organized, and is the
basis of the theory of those functions.
During the nineteenth century there
was much discussion of these two con-

ceptions of “pastoral theology.” The
term “practical theology” came into
wider use among those who thought
“pastoral theology” should be confined
to the theory of only some types of func-
tion.

The third conception of “pastoral
theology” was not in fact a logical alter-
native to either of the first two notions
already indicated. But it is mentioned
because of its historical significance. Ac-
cording to this conception, “pastoral
theology” was an omnibus kind of study
of the work of the church and the min-
ister, which received its content from
the biblical, historical and doctrinal
studies and then applied this content
to the actual work of the pastor. By the
turn of our century, this had become the
dominant conception. In seminaries of
the more liturgical churches, the term
“pastoral theology” was retained. In
the so-called free churches, it tended to
be replaced by “practical theology.”
What was lost from the nineteenth cen-
tury conceptions was the conviction
that there was a theory of the ministry,
a theory of the minister’s operations,
and a theory of the church’s activity,
and that this theory was in some vital
sense related to practice. What was
gained in the movement from either of
the first two ideas to the third was of
course some release from particular and
restricted forms in which the theory had
become embedded.

Until recently, in the “free-church”
tradition (especially Baptists), the idea

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

of a pastoral theology was, for all prac-
tical purposes, a dead issue. Free-church
ministers who had their theological edu-
cation before 1930 may recall a course
on “pastoral theology” as an omnibus
and usually dry consideration of how to
conduct a wedding, a funeral, a finance
campaign, or a tea. They will recall it
as “practical” in the sense that no vi-
talizing theory was involved in it, but
as impractical as far as any specific situ-
ations, cases, or down to earth consid-
erations were concerned. The vital prac-
tical courses that they may recall from
those days were about religious educa-
tion, which seemed to have cut the um-
bilical cord and made a fresh start, or
of practical Christian ethics, in which
Christian principles were used so as to
influence the world.

In my discussion, I want to renounce
entirely the third notion of “pastoral
theology” as an omnibus consideration
of variegated skills unconnected by a
fundamental theory on the one side or
by concrete study of individual situa-
tions on the other side. This tradition,
it should be noted, is not dead ; and it
lives on precisely in those churches that
call themselves “free.” Every year sees
many books and articles on such topics
as “the work of the minister,” which
float in some anecdotal no-man’s-land
between concrete instance and basic
principle and which manage to avoid
entangling alliances with either. Most
of the new critical literature on the na-
ture of the ministry has appeared since
1953-

But I want very definitely to bring
back something of the first two mean-
ings of “pastoral theology.” It will be
recalled that the first of these is differ-
entiated from the second in its limiting
of the shepherding focus of the min-

istry to some types of activities rather
than extending it to all, as did the sec-
ond conception. But what these two no-
tions had in common, against the third, |
was the conviction that a basic theory
was required for the functions and
operations. It is this fundamental idea
that will be advocated in this paper,
whether we define pastoral theology in
the narrower sense of shepherding pas-
toral care or in the broader sense of
the total shepherding focus of all the
pastor’s functions.

As between conceptions one and two,

I am strongly inclined to take the first,
which sees in pastoral theology the the-
ory of pastoral operations in which the
shepherding aspect is dominant over
other aspects, and which therefore be-
comes a comprehensive theory of Chris-
tian pastoral care. But one must retain
from the second theory the notion that
every function of the church or minis-
ter has shepherding implications, even
though rejecting the imperialistic idea
that the shepherding focus is always the
most important one. With such a posi-
tion, it becomes possible for me to
speak of pastoral theology as the theory
of shepherding pastoral operations or
functions, and thus to be relatively con-
crete in what I am focusing on ; while
at the same time I am forced to see that
the shepherding dimensions of the pas-
tor’s functions go beyond his activities
in pastoral care. So long as these actu-
alities are kept in mind, it becomes a
mere terminological problem as to what
“pastoral theology” denotes.

Thesis of the Article

All this, to be sure, sounds very ab-
stract ; and it would not be put in this
way unless I considered it an essential
preliminary to my main points about

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

freedom and tradition in pastoral the-
ology. Let me now give my thesis, stated
first in negative, and then in positive,
terms. Here is the negative statement
of the thesis. The omnibus conception
of pastoral theology, which is neither
theoretical nor concrete, must be re-
nounced in all its forms in relation to
pastoral care in particular and to the
operations of the pastor and church in
general. And here is the positive state-
ment. The conception of pastoral theol-
ogy as involving a basic theory of the
minister’s or church’s operations, but
transcending in content all previous pas-
toral theologies, must be developed both
in the particular shepherding functions
and in the general operations of the pas-
tor and the church. I shall try to explain
and defend these theses, and to suggest
that the greatest threat to their realiza-
tion lies within the so-called “free”
churches.

In their desire to find release from
dead aspects of tradition, the so-called
“free” churches have buried some
corpses that were only apparently dead.
What happens then is not merely com-
plaint about the small size of the living
population, but is also the emergence of
a new and uncriticized tradition whose
traditional character goes unrecognized
because, in content, it is unlike that from
which release was sought. Let me be
more specific, and cite some parallels.

Preaching

In the field of homiletics, for exam-
ple, one of the achievements of the past
half century is the Beecher Lectures on
preaching at the Yale Divinity School.
The most renowned preachers, and
teachers of preaching, in each decade
are faithfully recorded in their Beecher
Lectures. And what does one find? He

finds some who emphasize the basic
content of the Christian gospel that the
preacher is trying to communicate to his
people ; and others who stress the skills,
the art, or the techniques of preaching.
What he will not find throughout the
Beecher series is a basic treatment on
homiletics, the basic theory of the oral
communication of the Word, dynami-
cally linked and related to concrete con-
texts in which the function of preach-
ing takes place. The hearer or reader of
these lecturers and books may well be
inspired about new insights into the
meaning of the gospel, and may get
some excellent technique suggestions
on constructing sermons ; but what he
will not get is a basic theory about the
meaning and function of preaching in
relation to concrete contexts in which
the activity takes place. He may get in-
formation about the gospel, inspiration
on its human relevance, and useful tech-
niques ; that is, his knowledge, his feel-
ing, and his gimmicks may be touched.
But his intellect, in the sense of culti-
vating a basic theory of homiletics that
informs actual situations, and learning
from concrete situations what will cor-
rect and deepen the basic theory, will
not be touched. Since he has never had
any homiletics in this sense anyhow,
the free-church minister will not know
there is anything missing. And if he
is taken to task by the more conserva-
tive brother, he is likely to be as much
repelled by the aridity and formalism
of the latter’s homiletical theory as he
is by the conception of the message to
be preached.

Religious Education

Or consider what, in the large, has
happened to the free-churches in the
field of religious education. It was in-

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

dividuals in these churches, and later
the churches themselves, that had the
courage to look at John Dewey’s basic
idea that learning occurs only as inter-
ests are touched, and to begin the con-
struction of a theory of religious educa-
tion that rejected a pattern of imposition
and tried to become what we should
now call “existential.” But three things
happened within this movement, even
though these remarks should not be
construed as a denial of genuine prog-
ress that we have made in religious edu-
cation. First, the Bible and the Chris-
tian heritage tended to become source
books for illustrations, rather than, in
some basic sense, normative for bring-
ing us the relevation of God in Christ.
Second, the religious educators devoted
so much time to expounding those as-
pects of their theory that rejected the
old patterns of imposition that they
failed to become concrete ; and the
practical people who had to do the con-
crete job, as a result, often made serious
distortions of the new movement. Third,
a religious education orthodoxy arose
which, because it regarded itself as pro-
gressive, was unusually dogmatic in its
resistance either to old truth that had
been overlooked or new truth that was
emerging.

Within these past few years, in Chris-
tian education as in homiletics, I firmly
believe something new is appearing :
firm theory related to concrete practice,
solid reliance upon revelation along
with a critical but appreciative use of
social science.

Church Administration

If I appear critical of our betrayal of
homiletics and catechetics, my com-
ments on church administration will
seem devastating. So far has this sub-

ject moved in the direction of gimmicks
that it may even be a surprise that it
could be thought of as anything else.
But consider : The administrative or
executive functions of the church or
pastor are the cohering functions, what
holds things together, what, in a con-
crete sense, makes an operating and, we
hope, transforming fellowship out of the
whole business. Is there anything Chris-
tian about the bases upon which the
church ought to be held together? Are
there ways of achieving fellowship that
Christianity must renounce, and other
ways that it must cultivate despite risks
and obstacles? This is not of course to
imply, here or anywhere else, that there
are not valuable things to be learned
from secular experience of many kinds.
But what order of such experience is
likely to be relevant ? Do we learn about
the financial coherence of the Christian
fellowship from the analogy of high-
pressure community fund campaigns?
Or do we look to the best secular
thought and experience on how to make
an enterprise cohere, which moves far
beyond the gimmick stage? The fact is
that our theory of church administra-
tion, if such a thing exists at all, is out
of touch with the most basic secular
experience and thought along these
lines.

At the same time there is this notable
absence of any Christian or basic the-
ory of administration within the church,
the institutional complexities of church
life have increased many fold ; and the
pastor, as executive coherer of this en-
terprise, is pushed to the utmost in a
degree that even a Richard Baxter
could not conceive. If we have no open
and basic theory of all this, it does not
mean that no theory is in operation.
What it means, instead, is that there is

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

a sub rosa theory, uncriticized, accept-
ing the gimmick aspects of secular ad-
ministrative experience without the
growing body of principles, and totally
unconscious of the fact that Christian
administration requires a Christian the-
ory if it is to be Christian. I sometimes
think that administration within the
churches is becoming the last frontier
of obscurantism.

Pastoral Care

Or consider my own field of pastoral
care, and the narrower definition of
pastoral theology as the shepherding
function of the ministry that is more
in evidence in some types of activity
than in others. Here too we are far
from blameless, although our recent
record seems to be, in some respects,
better than that of some others that have
been mentioned. At the turn of the cen-
tury, the chief element in the theory of
pastoral care could be called “assidu-
ity.” The exhortations to wear out shoe
leather, and later automobile tires, were
certainly not irrelevant. But they con-
tained the hidden assumption that pas-
toral care is not genuinely interesting,
that it is principally a duty to be per-
formed to earn the right to the inter-
esting aspects of the church’s work and
ministry. Nor are we free of this yet.

During the 1920’s and since, how-
ever, has come a collection of move-
ments proclaiming from the bedside and
study that there is no more interesting
aspect of the ministry than pastoral
care. Psychology has come to our aid.
By being able to understand something
of what our relationship with them can
mean, we make contact with the vitali-
ties of actual helping relationships as
never before. This is new and very posi-
tive.

But is pastoral care, then, simply the
way the minister applies psychology,
strictly coordinate with the way the so-
cial worker or psychiatrist might apply
psychology? Are the new findings so
completely adequate that we can simply
continue to borrow a few leaves from
the books of the psychoanalyst and his
relatives, being careful of course, to say
frequently and loudly that we are not
psychoanalysts or psychiatrists? Or is
our pastoral care function, with all the
valuable new insights we now have in
connection with it, still to be understood
in some basic sense on which psychiatry
and its brethren have little light to
shed? Do we need to develop a new
basic theory of pastoral care that in-
cludes the modern insights but that
belongs explicitly within the tradition
of Christian ministry? Ever since I
have been peddling this particular pill,
during the past twenty years or so, I
have been getting a positive response
from the pastors of the more liturgical
churches. I am still uncertain as to the
response from the ministers of the free
churches. In so far as they want to
avoid going back to any authoritarian
tradition in pastoral care, plainly I am
with them. But in so far as they seem
fearful of looking back anywhere at
anything, then the fact is that their
theory of pastoral care is still one of
disorganized assiduity covered by drib-
lets of unrelated psychological insight.
As such, it is not deep or relevant
enough for the needs of our day.

Toward a Theory of Functions

Let us try to state what, generally
speaking, has happened to these func-
tions or operations, and to the study of
them. Within the group of churches
that are more liturgical, or more con-
servative, or more structured in form

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

and polity, there was greater initial re-
sistance to the inclusion of any insights
from modern knowledge into the basic
theory of the work of church and min-
ister. Experimentation was undertaken
more slowly and reluctantly, and in its
early phases tended to discount any re-
lationship between the experiments and
basic theory or structure. But as time
has gone on, it is precisely these
churches that have become most active
in their experimentation, and are in-
creasingly convinced that, while this
may change some basic theory, it will
not alter it in an unchristian direction.

The free churches, on the other hand,
went for the new insights much earlier.
Feeling confined by the old structures
of a formalized but undynamic pastoral
theology (or homiletics, or social teach-
ing, etc.), they moved toward release
from those patterns. Convinced that
they were progressive, they proclaimed
their own freedom as the tradition en-
abling them to slough off the outworn
irrelevancies and to seek the new. So
long as the new was something never
heard of before, they had no conflict in
accepting it. But when the new turned
out, at times, to be a rediscovery of
something previously shuffled off, the
situation was different. Most especially
does this seem to be true in our redis-
covery of the conviction that there must
be a basic theory and structure of opera-
tions, and not merely an unrelated col-
lection of truths or insights or tech-
niques. So they pay lip service to a the-
ory of the functions of church and min-
ister, but do not wrestle with the ma-
terial out of which any significant the-
ory must emerge. So much impressed
with the pit from which they have been
digged, they hesitate to enter any mine
lest it too prove to be a pit.

To some extent what is said exag-
gerates, for there are outstanding ex-
ceptions to these trends. And the point
is certainly not to drive free churchmen
into unfreedom. But if there is fear of
any depth because what one has been
freed from was an unpleasant depth,
then the result is likely to be a dogmatic
superficialism.

So far as the functions and operations
of the pastor and church are concerned,
what the previous generation had to
free itself from was an arid and un-
dynamic theory and structure that im-
peded the discovery of new and vital
content. But having freed itself from the
old theory, the new and vital content
was absorbed only in chunks, as if the
digestive process leading to a more basic
theory and structure were now un-
necessary. So even the originally vital
content began to lose its dynamic mean-
ing; and discussions could be had on
whether, for example, there was too
much or too little stress on pastoral
counseling or religious education or
evangelism. Efforts to rediscover vital-
ity in preaching were made either in an
inspirational manner, or in purely doc-
trinal terms, with no sense that even
the vitality of preaching was an im-
possibility without a basic homiletic the-
ory and structure. And so there arose
two tendencies that appear to be far
apart, but which are actually two as-
pects of the same misunderstanding : on
the one side, those who frankly go for
the gimmicks, and on the other side,
those who believe vitality comes only
through content and doctrine and Bible
and in no way through the functions
themselves. Both views fail to under- f i
stand that a theory of operations, firm
but not rigid, open but not jelly-like, is
essential to vitality of function. If it

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

does not cohere, it is likely to be inco-
herent ; and if it is not stated, it is likely
to have all the unpredictable devilish-
ness of a repression.

You will recall that my negative
statement of thesis was this : that the
omnibus conception of pastoral theology
(in whatever sense that be defined) be
done away with for good. And the posi-
tive statement : that a basic theory of I
the operations of the minister and the
church, both in particular and in gen-
eral, must be created, and must relate
to concrete experience. Perhaps at least
the meaning of the thesis is now clearer.

How do I learn about pastoral theol-
ogy, either in the narrower shepherding
sense, or as the general theory of opera-
tions of pastor and church? According
to my thesis, it is never enough to learn
this through gimmicks of any kind or
degree, even though the ability to con-
struct relevant gimmicks is of great
importance. But neither is this to be
learned merely by studying Bible, doc-
trine, history, or what not, and then ap-
plying it to specific situations. In both
instances, the energetic and dynamic
connection between concrete experience
and basic theory is denied ; and the es-
sential two-way movement is not culti-
vated. Actually, we learn to construct
a theory of operations out of disciplined
reflection on concrete experience, which
reflection in turn is brought to bear on
the critical understanding of the con-
crete experience, and so on back and
forth. The richer the concrete experi-
ence, the more basic the theory that is
suggested by it. The more basic the
theory, the deeper or broader are the
capacities to penetrate concrete experi-
ence.

Let me see if I can make the issue
“existential” for you. Suppose that some

member of your congregation is a gen-
uine industrial statesman, and that he
comes to you with some such statement
as this. “George, in my industry I have
found that what I have to pursue to
make it work — to work for the work-
ers, for the executives, and for the con-
sumer of the products — is a basic theory
of industrial operations today. What
equivalent to this do you have in the
church, that is uniquely appropriate to
the operations of a church as we think
our theory is getting to be for a respon-
sible industry?” What would your an-
swer be?

Of course I know you would say, and
properly, that the church is in some
sense a community of those who would
be faithful, or those to whom Christ has
spoken, and so on. That is, the first an-
swer would properly be doctrinal, or
biblical, or historical. But suppose our
friend pressed you, saying, “Of course
I understand that. That’s why you exist
at all. That’s your foundation, source,
and end. And it’s important. But what
does this mean for a daily theory of
operations ? What does it say about the
meaning of preaching in the whole en-
terprise, and how it is conducted ? Have
you any theory of that kind? In our
enterprise we are developing one, strict-
ly because we can’t operate properly
without a critical theory of operations.”
I wager there would be none of us who
would feel adequately prepared to reply
to this question. About this ignorance
I do not care ; it is understandable. What
I would hit hard is any obscurantism
that denied any importance to attempts
to become unignorant.

The Theology in Pastoral Theology

A final point. Even if you have fol-
lowed me up to this point, and agree

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that we need a basic theory of the op-
erations of pastor and church emerging
out of creative interaction between con-
crete experience and reflective symboli-
zation of it, you may still wonder why
I have resurrected the notion of “pas-
toral theology’’ to denote at least one
aspect of this. Where is the theology,
you may be asking?

My final contention is that, in so far
as we follow this kind of concern and
procedure, we are moving toward the
constructing or discovery of theology as
knowledge of God in as basic a sense as
is done by the systematic theologian.
We are doing, for some aspects of ex-
perience, what he attempts to do for
all aspects of our experience. If this
dimension is not explicitly recognized
in our operations, then we are mere-
ly speakers, counselors, salesmen, or
group leaders who happen to operate in
a certain kind of sociological or ideo-
logical setting.

I have nothing against good speak-
ing, salesmanship, counseling or group
leadership. But if there is not a reflec-
tive theory of these things explicitly
theological in character, what tends to
happen? There may be little or no ac-
quaintance with the depths inherent, for
example, in many pastoral relationships ;
only the surface may be seen. This is,
with any good man, not likely to last
long; for the depths force themselves
upon him. But what then? Suppose him
to be involved in some deeply meaning-
ful experience, such as with a person
who fights off death or bitter despair.
The pastor is deeply moved. But he may
then generalize from this in a way that
enables him to be related to the next
person only sentimentally, as if every
crisis of every person were to be evalu-
ated by the terms learned in dealing

with the first. If he has no general the-
ory of operations, theologically oriented
at both ends, he is unlikely to have ade-
quate standards, and may fall at times
into sentimentalism, superficiality or
hard-boiledness.

None of these dire results is neces-
sary. But if they are to become unneces-
sary, then there must be a wrestling
with operations at the level of theologi-
cal theory. Let me, in closing, illustrate
with a brief reference to funerals. One
of our advanced students who studied
funerals reached the conclusion, among
others, that most of the reforms recent-
ly agitated among ministers in relation
to funerals were based on the aesthetic
sensitivities of the ministers, which
might or might not be related to the
needs of the people or the understand-
ing of the gospel. We may indeed be
critical of those undertakers who inter-
pret meeting the needs of the people in
pandering terms, or who at times make
a travesty of the gospel. But are not our
own aesthetic sensibilities inadequate
criteria for examining the whole busi-
ness? What, specifically, is our basic
theory of a Christian funeral as an op-
eration or function of the Christian
church ? How clear are we about it ?

Elsewhere in the world, Christians
are likely to refer to us as too practical
or activistic in America. Yet what my
thesis implies is that we have failed to
push genuine practicality to the point
where it makes a contribution to basic
theory, even theological theory. So the
practicality we actually possess must be
a deficient kind, a sort of pseudo-prac-
ticality, a practicality of the gimmick.
This is not alone to be cured, as I see
it, by a more profound penetration of
doctrine, of the Bible, or of Christian
history, important as those things are.

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' We need also to reach for a basically
theological theory within our operations
themselves, so that the operations il-
luminate our theological understanding
and our theological understanding actu-

ally shapes our operations. To move in
this direction will be to state a Christian
pastoral theology for our day that is
worthy to stand beside the Christian
constructive theology that is emerging.

Modern biblical theology has rightly made it its concern that biblical terminology should
be seen ‘within the context of’ biblical thought as a whole. But it is a misuse of this prin-
ciple to apply it to words, in such a way that the relating of the word to features of the
general context of biblical thought replaces the examination of its actual syntactical con-
text. The general theological context can never in the slightest degree be a substitute for the
syntactical environment. Only within their syntactical environment do words function. Where
this is neglected, we may produce studies which quote Greek and Hebrew words in every
sentence and which clamorously insist on the pursuit of biblical terminology, but which in
fact are not dealing with biblical language at all.

— ’James Barr, in Biblical Words for Time, Allenson, 1962, p. 154.

RENEWAL THROUGH WITNESS

George W. Webber

Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “For
I decided to know nothing among
you except Jesus Christ and him cruci-
fied.” Our concern is with the content
of this affirmation, for it also defines
the meaning of witness for the congre-
gation today. When Paul seems to limit
the arena of his concern to “nothing
except Jesus Christ and him crucified,”
he is in fact setting up a kind of um-
brella under which he had the right to
talk about all of life for the meaning
of every part of it is to Christ. Paul in-
tended to witness to Christ; that was
his business and nothing more; but it
was not a narrow or confining task.

The task of the congregation is wit-
ness also in this sense. All that it does
and says must point to Christ, to his
life and death and resurrection. As D.
T. Niles has suggested somewhere, the
Christian is not an objective witness
who stands apart from the event to
which he testifies, like a man watching
a traffic accident. He is himself involved
as an active participant in the event. He
becomes part of the gospel, for Christ
has taken hold of him to make him a
witness. He must himself share in the
life and death and resurrection of his
lord.

The Dimensions of Witness

Instead of using the familiar three
dimensions of evangelism ( diakonia ,
koinonia, kerygma ) as a way of describ-
ing the various aspects of witness, let us
examine the task of the congregation in
the light of the Christ’s life. Thus our

section headings become incarnation,
crucifixion, and resurrection.

i. Witness to the Incarnation: The
Incarnation was a life lived not in the
circumscribed confines of a religious or-
ganization, but in the midst of the world.
Christ came into the world, not the
Church, and for the sake of the world.
The Church in our time has lost the
truth of the Incarnation and has re-
treated into the privatized circle of lei-
sure time and family, making religion
into one of the twenty-two sections of
Time Magazine and generally unrelated
to most vital areas of human life. The
tension between Christ and culture is
not a problem, sure sign that the church
is not alive in the midst of the world.

To live by the Incarnation is to par-
ticipate fully as a human being in the
midst of the world. The phrase “Holy
Worldliness” points to the proper em-
phasis for our time, cutting across the
distinction between sacred and secular,
and bringing faith again into the mar-
ket place.

There are many concrete aspects of
such genuine participation. The first is
described by the work presence, truly
present in the world seen as one lives in
obedience to the king of heaven. For
clergy, it is hard to be present in the
world as open, responsive human be-
ings. We almost certainly hide behind
our ecclesiastical role. When the East
Harlem Protestant Parish was begin-
ning, we were terribly concerned about
how to communicate the Gospel to the
people in East Harlem. With all the
barriers of class and culture and lan-

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guage, how could we somehow figure
out a way to get through to these peo-
ple? So we hired a very sensitive per-
son to come and live in the community
and study this problem — how could we,
white, middle-class Seminary-trained
clergy, communicate to the people of
East Harlem ? How could we, in effect,
learn enough about them so we could
get the message across? After a couple
months she came and said, “Forget it,
you got the problem all wrong. There’s
no hope as long as you’re going to be
ministers, all seeing, all knowing, om-
niscient, standing on the bank of East
Harlem watching this floodtide of hu-
manity sweeping by, determined to do
good at any cost. Until you get in and
are part of that world, if it’s possible
for you to become part of that world
(she wasn’t convinced it was), and live
by the Incarnation, then you won’t have
a problem of communication.” And I
think she was right. The starting point
was not some kind of determination to
help people, but the willingness to live
in the middle of their world and share
in as many of its dimensions as possible.
The Christian does not stand safely in
the shelter of the Church and throw
life rings out to drowning men, but is
one who jumps into the torrents of life
and with his arm around the drowning
man points to the place where they both
find their salvation. There is no other
way but participation, to live by the In-
carnation which means to be truly pres-
ent in the world where God is at work
in Jesus Christ.

Integral with presence is the ability
to listen to the world. The Church has
got to stop approaching the world as
though it had pre-packaged answers
for all the world’s problems, and in-
stead, learn with humility to listen to its

travail, and in the light of what it hears,
seek with new urgency to discover
God’s word and will for that specific
context. But this experience of listening
is so uncommon, not least of all for
clergy, that it is hard to describe. For
me, the best glimpse into the meaning
of genuine listening came through John
Genzel, a Lutheran pastor in New York
City, who has been assigned half time
as a minister to jazz musicians. Al-
though his work sounded a little off-
beat and esoteric, I was curious to find
out more about it. His witness is an
illuminating experience for those who
seek to take the Incarnation seriously,
for Pastor Genzel has learned to be
present in the world, to listen, and feel
and respond. Based in a parish, he
spends most nights in the jazz centers
of the city, not preaching or talking
religion necessarily, but entering into
the lives of jazz musicians and learning
to know them as fellow human beings,
often sensitive and alive. From them he
has come to understand freshly and
more deeply the meaning of depersonali-
zation in modern life, about the struggle
of racial minorities, about alienation and
estrangement and the other big words
clergy too easily bandy about. They
showed him what is really happening
in the hearts and minds and lives of
people in a big city in the middle of the
twentieth century. In listening and
learning from the world, he was driven
back to the Bible with new urgency.

To live by the Incarnation, then, is
not to begin with a ready made answer
for the world’s problems, but so to live
in the world that a genuine dialogue
takes place between the realities of the
world and the truth of the gospel. God’s
word comes afresh to men as they stand
in concrete situations in the world,

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placed there for obedience, and not in
the isolation of a religious ghetto. Chris-
tian ethics is not a system to be applied
like a band-aid to the world’s problems,
but is the involvement of Christians in
the world’s problems, in the midst of
which they express Christ’s love and
witness to the hope that comes from the
resurrection. To live by the Incarnation
is to believe that God is now at work
in the world and we are called to dis-
cern what he is about, to see the world
through eyes of faith, and bring into its
life the perspective of the gospel.

Illustrations of dialogue with the
world are difficult to find, for as Peter
Berger has suggested, there is no con-
frontation between a secularized church
and a pseudo-Christian culture. Dia-
logue demands that Christian laymen
be present self-consciously in the world
where they work, engage in politics,
and struggle for community. Some of
the critics have about come to the con-
clusion that present forms of congrega-
tional life are impossible for the task of
Incarnation and radical new forms must
be sought. Clearly, every kind of ex-
periment that offers hope must be at-
tempted, but in the process, the local
congregation must also face this issue
of participation in the world and not
go down without a fight. The congrega-
tion of Christ Church, Presbyterian, in
Burlington, Vermont, has made serious
attempts to be present in the world and
enter into dialogue through The Loft,
a coffee-house book store, located in the
heart of the business district. Where-
ever the congregation breaks out of the
narrow sphere of “religious” concerns
and enters into the full arena of human
experience, then dialogue may begin,
with all the concomitant results that oc-
cur when men come face to face with

the gospel at the heart of life, and not
on its periphery.

2. Witness to the Crucifixion: In the
second place, the path of witness is to
enter into the way of the Cross. We
must not only be present in the world,
but we are also called to enter into
God’s work. Let me mention here the
aspects of this task which seem most
urgent for our witness today.

(a) We join Christ at work in the
world. Most missionary and evangelis-
tic literature assumes that the Christian
is called to take Christ to the world,
to introduce him as some kind of
stranger. In fact, Christ is at work in
the world and we simply enter into his
task as obedient servants. This is to
take up our cross and follow him. We
are sent to men in whom Christ’s spirit
is already at work, and in whom we
literally meet Christ. Surely, if we wish
to encounter Christ we will find him
where he promised to be, with the sick,
the prisoners, the hungry, the naked,
. . . and with the dehumanized men and
women of urban America (Matthew
25:31-46).

It is hard to have such eyes of faith.
Many are able to talk about the fight
for justice and to work hard for im-
portant causes. Few are blessed with
the gift of love that enables them to
stand with the unlovely victims of in-
justice and individually care for them.
It is easier to fight for better care of
addicts than to love an addict, for when
he is not using drugs, he is likely to be
unpleasant and unlovable a human be-
ing as one can imagine. But Christ, in
calling us into his ministry, expects us
to see in every man one for whom he
also died, and grants to his servants the
gift of love.

(b) We are called to meet human

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need, but not promiscuously. Jesus, in
the temple, read the passage which de-
fined his ministry :

‘‘He has sent me to preach good news
to the poor,

proclaim release to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are op-
pressed,

to proclaim the acceptable year of
the Lord.”

As a congregation, we must ask our-
selves what it is we are called to do to
fulfill this ministry of healing and serv-
ice. Set down in the midst of East Har-
lem, with its manifold forms of human
need, what was a small parish called to
do? So easily its energy might be dis-
sipated and its function destroyed in the
genuine effort to meet more problems
than it had the strength or resources to
deal with. What is the business of God’s
people as a corporate body? Out of the
experience of East Harlem I would sug-
gest that at least the following elements
are part of the answer :

(i) The congregation would under-
take those tasks which enable it to point
to the reconciliation and the love which
it knows in Jesus Christ, in other words
to those tasks which point to Jesus
Christ. In specific terms this means that
a congregation seeks out the problems
of human life that are presently no-
body’s concern : the unvisited in prisons,
the sick no one is caring for, the drug
addict, ignored by society or at best
treated as a criminal. In East Harlem,
the need of the drug addict pointed to a
clear place for the congregation to work,
for in seeking to offer Christ’s love and
healing, in whatever partial and broken
ways, it was pointed to the restoring,
saving power of God.

As a corollary of this position, when
the world discovers addiction as a prob-
lem and begins to face the problem, it is
not for the church to insist that it de-
velop further its programs of medical,
legal, psychiatric and casework help, but
gladly relinquish much of its work to
society. Now, by its work with addicts,
it no longer points in a unique way to
Christ, for the victims of injustice have
been discovered and are no longer help-
less.

(ii) The congregation must meet
real needs, not simply those that are
most obvious. In East Harlem, the im-
mediate human needs are so great and
overwhelming, the temptation is always
to concentrate on food, shelter, employ-
ment and the like, without remembering
the ultimate needs of men go beyond
these. The story of the beggar, asking
Peter for alms, is a good reminder of
our need to give what we have. Peter
recognized the man’s deepest need, and
that he could meet only in the name of
Jesus Christ. Again, in the story from
the gospels of the paralytic man, Jesus
met not only the immediate need for
healing but also forgave the man his
sins. These aspects of human life are
not in conflict, but the congregation
must never forget that the ultimate need
of men is for forgiveness, reconciliation,
and community. The congregation, in
facing human needs, is thus called not
only to bring compassion that encom-
passes the life of those in need, but also
comprehends the full dimensions of
their need.

(iii) The congregation points to
Christ, not to itself. “For what we
preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ
as Lord, with ourselves as your serv-
ants for Jesus’ sake” (2 Cor. 4:5). So
easily the Christian points to his own

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experience rather than to his lord. Or
the clergyman becomes the center for
people of their loyalty. But in the re-
markable phrase of D. T. Niles, “The
Christian is one beggar telling another
beggar where to find food.” Lose for a
moment that stance of a beggar and
stand over the other in some other re-
lationship, then we shall fail to follow
the way of the Cross and live by Christ
alone. The moment we stop being beg-
gars in attitude and feeling we begin to
live by works and not by faith.

(c) The individual Christian is always
involved in witness. The congregation
must make decisions as to its areas of
work and concern in witness of Christ.
For the individual, called to the way of
the Cross, everything he does, every-
where he goes must be part of his wit-
ness. This is pretty idealistic talk, as we
all know, for the laity of the Church de-
fines Christian service by what they do
in and for the gathered life of the
Church. But what sounds idealistic is
in fact normative. If Christians do not
live in their dispersed life in the world
as witnesses, the Church is simply not
a church. “The church exists by mis-
sion as a fire exists by burning,” to use
Dr. Brunner’s words. Without laymen
engaged in full time obedience, there is
no mission.

The new interest in small groups of
various kinds in the congregation are
in large part a reflection of the need
to prepare men in the gathered life of
the church for their work in the world.
While the locus of much of their witness
will be in their daily work, there must
also be conscious involvement in com-
munity organizations and politics. In
East Harlem, as a symbol of church
work as obedience in the world, we
have long required all staff and mem-

bers to join at least one community or-
ganization, working for brotherhood or
justice. God is at work in such places,
and we must join him there.

(d) The congregation in its service
has no ulterior motive. Christ healed
men because they were sick. He did not
suggest that they should then become
his followers. For the Church, this
poses a very subtle issue. So much of
what we do as one eye on getting new
members or building up our institution.
This is always wrong as any part of
the motivation of our service. But at
the same time, we pray that men will
come to know the truth and that truth
is fully known through life in the body
of Christ. Somehow we must both pray
that Christ will give the harvest, that
men will be lead into his Church, and
yet in no way ourselves seek to force
the growth or reap the harvest prema-
turely.

(e) Finally, in entering into the way
of the Cross, the Christian expects suf-
fering. The reality of the Crucifixion
stands as the power of man’s rejection
of love. The congregation today must
grasp the truth that when men confront
the gospel, they may reject it or try vi-
ciously to destroy it. Or, in our day, they
may simply disbelieve that it is true,
since signs of the first fruits of the king-
dom are so rare in the Church. When
the Christian expects suffering, antago-
nism, dislike, frustration, suspicion, then
he is prepared for the warfare against
the principalities and powers to which
he is called, and surprised by the joy
which God often gives in the midst of
trouble.

Perhaps unbelief in the claims of
Christianity is the sharpest rejection in
the inner city. As a white, middle class
clergyman in East Harlem, I affirm that

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I am a brother in Christ to the men and
women of the community. One is a
Puerto Rican orderly in a large hospi-
tal, his life dominated by white doctors
and nurses who in most cases hardly are
aware of him as a person. He is not
likely to accept my statement of our
brotherhood at face value, but uncon-
sciously, perhaps, will subject me to
every kind of testing, figuring that
sooner or later he will call the white
man’s blufif. The testing is a very dis-
concerting business, for I, at least, am
aware of the feebleness of my love and
concern and conscious of my own sin-
fulness. So it is hard to know whether
I am being “persecuted” for righteous-
ness’ sake or for my sins ! In either case,
I must learn to expect that the way of
the Cross will involve testing and seek
in it whatever meaning God will grant.

Thus the way of the Cross is fool-
ishness to the world, but for the Chris-
tians, the power of God.

3. Witness to the Resurrection : The
Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the
Resurrection are part of the one reality
of Jesus Christ to which the Christian
is called to witness. As we enter into
Christ’s work now in the world, we live
by hope. Our hope is defined first by
the reality of the victory that has been
won and second by our confidence that
Christ will come again. Service that is
not sustained by hope, that does not
point to Christ’s victory, is not Chris-
tian service at all. Christians share in
the first fruits of the kingdom. Eschatol-
ogy, then, does not cut across social
concern, but is essential to it, if it is to
be part of Christian witness.

The unreality of this affirmation for
! most American Christians is obvious.

! In the midst of East Harlem, I am only
dimly beginning to glimpse what it must

mean for the congregation. But clearly,
there is no other way to continue in the
face of failure, discouragement, and
frustration save in the confidence that
the victory, in spite of our feeble efforts
is secure, and that Christ is Lord in-
deed.

The reality of the Resurrection must
begin to find expression in simply pat-
terns in the lives of Christians. To live
with joy and confidence in the midst
of struggle and seeming defeat— that
would point to the Resurrection. To
keep on ministering as best one can to
drug addicts, even when no names are
added to the Church rolls and only a
handful are in any sense healed — that is
possible only in the confidence that
Christ has called you to that task, and
whether you succeed or fail, the issue
is in his hands.

In East Harlem we have found that
positive content can come through “gos-
siping the gospel.” If the Resurrection
as the central event of faith is at all
real to men and women, then natural-
ly, spontaneously, they will talk about
Christ. This will not be a fundamen-
talists intrusion into the lives of oth-
ers, but the reality of Christ will be
such a part of their own lives that they
will, whenever an occasion offers, easi-
ly and unselfconsciously “gossip” about
what has happened to which they have
now become witnesses. A faith that
does not gossip the Gospel must be
pretty second-hand and unimportant to
the one who affirms it. This is not only
a matter of talking, of course, but of
the orientation of the Christian’s whole
life. He is one who understands that
all he does is in obedience to his lord,
and thus part of witness and service.

Thus in this first section of the dis-
cussion of witness we have sought to

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affirm the essential unity between the
dimensions of witness : participation in
the Incarnation, in the Crucifixion and
in the Resurrection. Whenever the
Church takes one of these as its basic
focus and ignores or curtails the oth-
ers, its witness is partial and perhaps
becomes even false. For then the con-
gregation does not point fully to Jesus
Christ, the Lord of its life. Witness is
not some form of religious propaganda,
nor is it the propagation or establish-
ment of churches. It is devoid of any
kind of striving for demonstrable suc-
cess. Witness is so to live and work and
speak among men that you know noth-
ing among men except Jesus Christ and
him crucified.

The Possibility of Renewal

The topic is renewal through witness.
Renewal is a possibility when the
Church has been opened to the renew-
ing power of the Holy Spirit. It is my
thesis that whenever a congregation
takes seriously the dimensions of wit-
ness we have described in the first part
of this talk, it will be driven to repent-
ance and may again become the kind
of open vessel into which the Holy Spir-
it may pour its power. The chastening
experience of the East Harlem Protes-
tant Parish is illustrative. When the
Parish got started, its dynamic founder,
Don Benedict, was certain that the Gos-
pel was relevant to human needs and
that the Christian had to fight for jus-
tice. He went into East Harlem, all
fists flying, to solve all problems and to
witness in every way possible. The
speeches made by parish clergy in the
early years were all about social con-
cern and action. But gradually the par-
ish, as it sought to serve its Lord in the
world, was driven back to ask what it

means to be witnesses. Then, at last,
the congregation as the basis of mission
became apparent. Then the great Refor-
mation concern with the Church became
urgent and renewal a necessity.

1. Renewal through the Word: As
the congregations in East Harlem
sought to live in their world, to take
seriously the Incarnation, they quickly
discovered how little they knew about
what God had done, was doing, and
had promised to do in a short time, they
were sent back to Bible study as a basic
task of Christians. The Bible, as far
as the clergy were concerned, could no
longer be a source from which to dredge
sermons or a devotional book, but now
was the place one turned to understand
East Harlem in the confidence that God
“has made known to us in all wisdom
and insight the mystery of his will”
(Ephesians 1:9). The congregation be-
comes the locus of a dialogue between
the world in which it is seeking to live
by the Incarnation and the Word of
God in which God speaks with fresh
power to his people. In our parish,
Wednesday night Bible study has be-
come almost as much a part of the pat-
tern of congregational participation as
Sunday morning worship, though this
has come only after a long struggle. One
of the clergy of the parish, after six
years in East Harlem, used a sabbatical
leave of five months to study Greek as
a vital preparation for his continuing
ministry in the inner city. A congrega-
tion engaged in witness will be led to
drench itself in scripture so that God’s
Word may become a living sword in its
hand. Whenever men turn with eager-
ness and expectancy to scripture, there
is hope of renewal.

2. Renewal through the Sacraments :
When a congregation seeks to take the

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

way of the Cross as its pattern of obedi-
ence, it finds itself driven to a new
seriousness in Baptism and especially in
Holy Communion. In East Harlem, the
parish early discovered that its ministry
of service was getting nowhere, for the
Christian community is an essential
foundation. Only as the parish became
truly a family of God, in its own life
demonstrating reconciliation, accept-
ance, and love, would its service be
faithful and point to its Lord. Above all,
when men seek to serve Christ, they
are led back regularly to the place
where he promises to meet them, at his
table. There they are fed, sustained and
renewed for the sake of their witness.
In East Harlem, as we have struggled
to hear the Word again, so also we have
sought to discover what it means to be
a family of God’s people who gather
regularly at his table to re-enact the
meaning of our faith and to meet our
Lord. In our situation we have tried in
the actions of communion itself to make
clear that we are a family : we gather
around the table in large circles, use
the ordinary bread of the community,
pass the elements from hand to hand,
eat and drink together. Whenever men
turn with eagerness and expectancy to
the table, there is hope of renewal.

3. Renewal through Discipline :
When men and women seek to witness
to the Resurrection, they discover their
urgent need for a new style of life, for
the disciplines and habits that reflect
their participation in the Kingdom of
their Lord that already has begun. Word
and Sacrament are essential, but so also
is discipline in the new life which we
enter at our Baptism. Geddes MacGre-
gor in his excellent book on the Church
makes the point that for the Scottish
church, these three were always kept

together in your tradition. In East Har-
lem, the clergy have struggled with a
common discipline of life. The parish
as a whole is seeking to discover a style
that reflects its obedience to a new Lord
and its involvement in a new task. Dur-
ing Lent each year this is the focus of
Bible study, but it is a continual con-
cern. As men and women are taught
patterns of life that are necessary for the
Christian — prayer, Bible study, wor-
ship, service and the rest — they become
open to the channels of grace. Disci-
pline can easily become legalistic and
rigid, but these dangers must be run,
not because discipline guarantees re-
newal, but because the habits of the
Christian life help keep men open to
the possibility of renewal.

In no way am I seeking in this sec-
tion to affirm that renewal has taken
place in East Harlem, but only to affirm
that as a Parish we set out to witness
in every possible way, through Incarna-
tion, Crucifixion and Resurrection, and
in the process have been driven back
to the Bible, to the table, and to a new
concern for the habits of the Christian
life. Only in this direction does the hope
of renewal lie.

Implications for Present Patterns
of Witness

The content of this talk has certain
implications for the present meaning of
witness in the life of the congregations
in this country. I have purposely left
this negative section until last, for I
hope that you will be willing yourselves
to draw the necessary conclusions. Let
me simply point the way as I see it. My
criticism is directed to the practices
that we have come to take for granted,
continue to carry on year after year,
when they have no basis in our theol-

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

ogy and may in fact contradict it. Re-
cently I have been reading evangelism
materials from various denominations.
Some of the best of them have devel-
oped excellent theological statements on
the meaning of evangelism, but usually
the methods section that follows has no
relationship to the theology at all.

1. The congregation must demon-
strate the Gospel : Here men must ex-
perience a foretaste of the Kingdom of
God, discover the unity that can in fact
unite all sorts of conditions of men,
albeit in partial and broken ways, and
know the joy of life together. At this
point, we are all vulnerable. The de-
scription of a normative Christian com-
munity sounds idealistic and impossible,
far removed from the homogeneous,
secularized congregations we know.
When I heard D. T. Niles suggest
that when a stranger enters a church
on Sunday, he should encounter a
reality of faith that he will recognize.
The Church must be the Church, a
foretaste of the Kingdom, a living cell
in the Body of Christ. Without a per-
vasive awareness of its dependence upon
its Lord and continual relationship to
him, the witness of the congregation is
dead.

2. The importance of conversion :
We witness that men might believe.
In Acts, the process of conversion is
defined in what may be a normative se-
quence. Upon hearing Peter preach, the
listeners were cut to the heart, repented,
were baptized for the forgiveness of
their sins, and were given the gift of
the Holy Spirit. When I joined the
Church, twenty junior high children
were lined up, all agreed to “live a
Christ-like life” and joined the Church.
A long time ago, H. Richard Niebuhr
wrote :

“As the kingdom of Christ is institu-
tionalized in church and state the ways
of entering it are also defined, mapped,
motorized and equipped with guard
rails. Regeneration, the dying to the
self and the rising to new life — now ap-
parently sudden, now so slow and pain-
ful, so confused, so real, so mixed—
becomes conversion which takes place
on Sunday morning during the singing
of the last hymn or twice a year when
the revival preacher comes to town.”

In whatever way you would define
genuine conversion and commitment to
Christ, you must take the matter with
utter seriousness and not permit church
membership in our day to be superficial
and innocuous. Perhaps the story of the
encounter between Jesus and the rich
young ruler needs to be deeply pon-
dered.

3. Christ Converts: In our task
of witnessing, it is almost impossible
not to be falsely concerned with the
results. In a variety of subtle ways we
short-circuit the initiative of God and
lead men to respond to human agencies
and not to Christ. The danger is all the
great in an age of institutions where the
Church seeks in its own life to copy the
patterns of a successful human institu-
tion. Congregations want to succeed and
in the process lose sight of the function
of the Church and betray the task of
evangelism. Every time you hear a
phrase like “Win souls for Christ,” I
hope you will stop and examine the
process that is being used. Does Christ
do the winning, or the cleverness and
wisdom of men? Indeed 95 per cent of
the time we hear the phrase, it does re-
veal upon examination some form of
human manipulation that compromises
in the end, true conversion. As a mat-

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

ter of fact, I don’t believe the phrase
“winning souls” appears in the Bible.

In the inner city we tend to talk
about “winning the city for Christ.”
Again, the danger is the same. Men pre-
sume to achieve what Christ has done
and is doing. The moment we feel that
the result depends upon us, we have
slipped into an unbiblical mode of think-
ing. We enter into Christ’s task. He has
the initiative. We must witness, what-
ever the results, whatever the soil where
he places us. But we dare not force
the growth, nor harvest before Christ
brings it to maturity. Deeply praying
that men may respond to Christ, that
through our witness they may become
part of his body, we yet dare not this
concern the motive for our obedience,
nor let it absorb our attention.

4. The congregation exists to wit-
ness : As we hold before ourselves the
essential function of the Church, we
have a standard by which to judge the
program and activities in which we en-
gage. As Barth has said, “As an apos-
tolic church the Church can never in
any respect be an end in itself ; but, fol-
lowing the existence of the apostles, it
exists only as it exercises the ministry
of a witness.” The danger arises when
we invite men to join an organization
that exists to serve them, to meet

their spiritual needs, to teach their chil-
dren religious values and all the other
reasons listed in visitation evangelism
manuals. When we get men into Church
under false pretenses (new church de-
velopment books are full of such), we
are not likely to succeed in enlisting
them in the true work of Christ.

Enough has been said by Winter,
Berger, Marty and the other “ok” crit-
ics about the introversion and institu-
tional egocentrism of American congre-
gations. To break out of our present
predicament will be impossible save by
the miracle of God’s renewing power.
But we may begin by holding firmly be-
fore ourselves the truth about our pur-
pose. As Jesus instructed the first apos-
tles, so we are to go forth and make dis-
ciples of all nations. These are not
“church members,” but fellow disciples,
men and women who enter the life of
the congregation not because it is good
for them, or will help them, or is right,
or is important to their spiritual life,
but that they might serve their lord as
witnesses to his life and death and re-
surrection. In this sense, witness, the
kind of witness we have been talking
about does not lead to renewal of the
Church. It is the Church, truly alive as
God’s people in the world.

TILLICH’S SCIENCE OF BEING

William Hallock Johnson

Two generations ago, William E.

Gladstone, British statesman and
Prime Minister, in the Nineteenth Cen-
tury (1888), reviewed a famous novel
by Mrs. Humphrey Ward entitled Rob-
ert Elsmer. Mrs. Ward for conscien-
tious reasons had abandoned her tradi-
tional faith in the Trinity and in the
Divinity of Christ and had traced a
similar change of belief in the hero of
her novel. She and her spokesman
seemed happier in a fervent belief in
a bare monotheism expressed in lives
of devotion to the Christian virtues and
in notable service among the people.

Gladstone’s review was reprinted in
Later Gleanings ( Scribner’s, New York,
1897), and its closing sentence read : “If
the ancient and continuous creed of
Christendom has slipped away from its
place in Mrs. Ward’s brilliant and sub-
tle understanding, it has nevertheless
by no means lost a true, if unacknowl-
edged, hold upon the inner sanctuary
of her heart.”

For some time past theological in-
terest has centered in the work of two
“offbeat” theologians who have wan-
dered from the path of traditional or-
thodoxy. They are Rudolf Bultmann of
Germany and Paul Tillich of America.
Both have a divided allegiance to the
new philosophy of existentialism on
the one hand and to the teaching of the
Old and New Testaments on the other.
Our topic is the ontology of Tillich,
with only a brief glance at Bultmann.
Our main sources are his two volumes
on Systematic Theology, Vol. I, 1951,
and Vol. II, 1957; also Biblical Re-

ligion and the Search for Ultimate
Reality, 1955 (University of Chicago
Press) . Two volumes of sermons should
also be consulted : The Shaking of the
Foundations, 1948, and The New Be-
ing, 1955 (both by Scribner’s, New
York). It will be convenient to con-
fine ourselves to a few leading topics
without going into the details of Til-
lich’s wide ranging discussion.

Tillich and Creation

Tillich fully recognizes the value of
the Biblical and traditional doctrine of
Creation. In what he says about crea-
tion we hear the voice of traditional or-
thodoxy strongly expressed. He says
that according to every word of the
Bible, “God reveals himself as personal”
{Biblical Religion, etc., p. 22. All quota-
tions in this section are taken from this
book). The doctrines of Christ, of salva-
tion and fulfilment depend on this doc-
trine. It emphasizes the dependence of
all creation on God and the essential
goodness of creation. It protects against
the two gods, good and evil of dualism,
and the idealistic merging of God and
man into monism. “It emphasizes the
infinite distance between the creator and
the creature” (p. 36). It was correct
and proper “for Jews and Christians to
speak of creation out of nothing. Crea-
tion through the word means the per-
sonality of God” (pp. 35, 36). Biblical
religion in the Old and New Testaments
is a religion of personalities. The climax
of the argument for the personality of
God as the ultimate reality is in the doc-
trine of Incarnation. The full and final

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

revelation of God : “God is so personal
that we can see what he is only in a per-
sonal life” (p. 38). It leaves God in his
majesty, his power, in his sharp and
clear-cut difference from all his crea-
tures. This sharp difference protects
monotheism from polytheism and pan-
theism. It emphasizes the dependence
on God of everything created and, con-
sequently, the essential goodness of crea-
tion (p. 35). Of this doctrine he says,
“Without it, Christianity would have
ceased to exist as an independent move-
ment” (p. 35).

Tillich’s praise of the Biblical ontol-
ogy of Genesis could not be stronger
or more admirably expressed, and it
seems, to quote Dr. Patton, [to be]
“shot from the tense bow-string of con-
viction.” We are astonished, then, to
hear a new and authoritative voice from
the stage, the voice of Philosophy. It is
so directly opposed to the eloquent plea
for the Biblical ontology that wonder :
Can it be by the same man? The new
voice of an impersonal ontology breaks
in without ceremony and says of ontol-
ogy: “It speaks of being — itself as the
ground of everything that is, personal
and impersonal. It speaks of the identity
of the infinite with the finite. It speaks
of the finite mind through which the
Absolute Mind wills and recognizes
himself” (p. 36). The two ontologies,
Biblical and philosophical, run parallel
but never meet. But it will be Tillich’s
declared task to show their “profound
interdependence” (p. 42).

It is unfortunate, the critic could re-
mark, that the “Absolute Mind” when
it planned and carried out the stupen-
dous enterprise of Creation, was de-
prived of the advice and consent of a
senate of finite spirits because no finite
spirits yet existed.

Under this new system, Tillich ac-
knowledges, the way is open for the du-
alism and monism from which the Bib-
lical ontology gave protection. Two
morals may now be safely drawn : first,
that with his bitter hostility to the su-
pernatural he can admit no real doc-
trine of Creation ; and second, that there
are two Tillichs, two souls within a sin-
gle breast, or one and the same great
scholar suffering from a type of schizo-
phrenia in the broadest sense, attached
with almost equal fervor and equal con-
scientiousness to two incompatible and
mutually exclusive ontologies, one lead-
ing to an abstract and impersonal and
speechless and loveless Being, and the
other who created the world by his
word and out of nothing in the effort-
lessness of his omnipotence.

The early Greek thinkers and the
philosophers from Plato and Aristotle
down have been seeking for Ultimate
Reality. As philosophers they cannot
and will not appeal to revelation, al-
though Plato in the Phaedo reports that
Socrates advises Simmias and Cebes
to take the best of human opinions and
thus sail, not without risk, over the sea
of life, unless we have some divine word.
People in university circles have all
known devout philosophers and scien-
tists but have never heard them sing,
in passionate praise to Being itself. Why
should they? First, because Being is an
abstraction from the innumerable be-
ings in the world and is itself on the
side of the finite and cannot reach the
ultimate, and the philosophers who do
their best work in moments of detach-
ment and reflection regard passions
and emotion as obstacles to clarity of
thought. What can Tillich do in the
circumstances? Fortunately he has dis-
covered a short cut to Ultimate Reality,

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

and uses it constantly and skillfully in
his argument. An ultimate concern in
the key to Ultimate Reality. There is
no doubt of its utility as pointing to the
truth but much as to its infallibility. The
concern must be passionate and uncon-
ditional, a matter of life and death. It
must grasp us or be grasped by us with
our whole being, not by reason alone.
Tillich thinks that there may be such
concern for being-itself as the psalmist
had when he exclaimed, “My soul is
athirst for God, for the living God”
(Ps. 42:2). I believe it is plain that if
God is the Creator of all things, visible
and invisible, that being-itself, abstract-
ed by the human mind from finite things,
must fall on the finite side and further
is so uncertain in meaning and closely
allied, as we shall see, with Nothingness
that it cannot be a matter of life and
death. Ultimate Concern is too enig-
matic, too subjective, too changeable
from group to group and from one pe-
riod in an individual life to another to
reach as high as heaven or as deep as
the Everlasting Arms.

Examples easily suggest themselves.
Thus C. S. Lewis, in his book, Mir-
acles, 1947, says that he was at first
an atheist with a “passionate convic-
tion” that miracles never happened, but
then he became a Christian with an
equally passionate conviction that the
Gospel miracles are historical. Similar-
ly Reinhold Niebuhr in his Beyond
Tragedy, 1937 (pp. 289, 290), speaks
of his radical change of view on the
Resurrection since twenty years ago.
Muslims have as much concern for their
creed as Christians, and many observers
say that the Communists have more.
Tillich’s radical change in the matter of
the Fall (see next section) may be a

case in point. It is possible that Tillich’s
short cut to Ultimate Reality may be
like the by-way into which the Pil-
grim was led and which ended up with
Doubting Castle and Giant Despair.

Tillich and the Fall

In the philosophical situation today
what stands out with most startling em-
phasis is the fact that the new school
of Existentialism has given powerful
support to the Biblical doctrine of the
Fall. Existentialism, as Tillich has right-
ly said, is a description of the human
predicament. The result is that the writ-
ings of the living existentialists with-
out exception are dotted with such terms
as estrangement, anguish, anxiety, care,
dread of death or nothingness and guilt.
Meaninglessness is bad enough, but it
is the least of our troubles. What are all
of these dreadful terms but a modern
translation of the old-fashioned “estate
of sin and misery” into which men have
fallen ?

Tillich has felt the trend, and with
admirable candor, insight, and common
sense, has confessed in a later publica-
tion, Love, Power, and Justice (Ox-
ford University Press, New York, i960,
p. 25), that “estrangement presupposes
oneness.” More explicitly a year earlier
in his Theology of Culture, he says:
“In the Christian tradition, there are
three fundamental concepts. First, Esse
que esse bonum est. This Latin phrase
is a basic dogma of Christianity. It
means ‘Being as being is good.’ Or in
the biblical mythological form : God
saw everything that he had created, and
behold, it was good. The second state-
ment is the universal fall — fall meaning
the transition from this essential good-
ness into existential estrangement from

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

oneself, which happens in every living
being and in every time. The third state-
ment refers to the possibility of salva-
tion. . . . These three considerations of
human nature are present in all genuine
theological thinking : essential goodness,
existential estrangement, and the pos-
sibility of something, a ‘third,’ beyond
essence and existence, through which
the cleavage is overcome and healed”
(pp. 1 1 8, 1 19). These three stages in
an authentic theology are evidently suc-
cessive. Tillich’s present testimony is
more effective because in his two volume
Systematic Theology he held firmly the
view that Creation and the Fall were si-
multaneous. He formerly thought that
we were compelled to believe that crea-
tion and the fall are coincident. “Crea-
turely freedom is the point at which
Creation and the Fall coincide” ( S.T .
I., p. 256). “There is no point in time
and space in which created goodness
was actualized and had existence.”
There is no utopia in the past and will
be none in the future. “Creation and
estrangement are identical” (S.T. II,
p. 44). There is no need to discuss the
point for in later publications Tillich
gives it up and shows that he cannot
continue to believe that a loving God
would create man in estrangement, if
not in hostility to himself. It is plain
that Tillich cannot continue to believe
it.

In Tillich’s present view of the Fall
it is an historic event and there was a
time in the history of humanity, before
sin by man had entered into the world
(Rom. 5:12) when the way is opened
to believe that in history at its end
“Christ will appear a second time, not
to deal with sin but to save those who
are eagerly waiting for him” (Heb.
9:28).

Tillich’s Being and Nothingness

The topic of the relation of Being to
non-being or Nothingness has assumed
major importance in recent years. The
shadow has become of greater impor-
tance than the sun which casts the shad-
ow, as in the story of the man who
made, he thought, a shrewd bargain
with the devil on the promise of great
wealth and the gift in return of his
worthless shadow — and his soul. When
the boys jeered after him on the sunny
street, and people avoided him as a
sinister figure and his fiancee broke her
engagement, he discovered that with his
shadow he had thrown away all hope
of happiness in life.

The story would have no point were
it not for the paradox that what has no
value or even existence has usurped
the leading role in philosophical drama
which might well be called with Shake-
speare “much ado about nothing,” but
has been named in euphemism “existen-
tialism.” When the critic wants to be
sure of a laugh he will parody the fa-
miliar hymn and sing: “How sweet the
name of Being sounds in a believer’s
ear.”

Tillich’s name is often associated with
that of Bultmann. Both are called exis-
tentialists, and they do not, to my knowl-
edge, disown the soft impeachment. To
be an existentialist is no reproach or
advantage to a theologian, since this
school of thought is completely neutral
in religious faith. A glance at Pascal
and Nietzsche, both called precursors
and morning stars of existentialism,
will show the extremes which may be
found in religious attitudes. Thus Pas-
cal says: “Jesus Christ is the Center
of everything and the object of every-
thing; and he who does not know him

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

knows nothing of the order of the world,
and nothing of himself.”

Nietzsche says repeatedly that “God
is dead.” Karl Jaspers, in his definitive
biography of Nietzsche, (translated into
French, but not into English) declares
that in this saying the philosopher did
not make himself an atheist but aimed
to clear the road for a “higher region”
beyond good and evil. Jaspers believed
that Nietzsche with this power could
elevate the race by “severity, violence,
slavery, tempter’s art and deviltry of
every kind — by everything wicked, ter-
rible, tyrannical, predatory, and serpen-
tine in man” ( Beyond Good and Evil,
Aph. 44). The title of the work from
which this quotation is drawn is sig-
nificant.

Kierkegaard, the founder of existen-
tialism, was a Lutheran and Marcel is
a Roman Catholic. Both would vote for
the Ten Commandments, of which the
sixth protects my life, the seventh my
wife and family, the eighth my proper-
ty, and the ninth my good name. Tillich
is strong on the ethical emphasis in
both testaments. “Biblical ethics means
standing in ultimate decision for or
against God” ( Biblical Religion, p. 46).

The being of God is the central prob-
lem of Tillich’s Systematic Theology,
I & II. Kierkegaard, deadly enemy of
Hegel, had an implicit ontology when
he spoke of the infinite qualitative dis-
tinction of God from all other beings.
Tillich in his ontological argument uses
constantly the term “being-itself,” and
very often “the power of being.” Being
is a broader term than God. It does not
distinguish but includes two kinds of be-
ings, finite being — an abstraction from
the multiplicity of beings — and an eter-
nal, self-existent living God and Crea-
tor. The “power of being” thus is am-

biguous. It can mean the power of God
or a powerless abstraction from finite be-
ings— impersonal, speechless and love-
less. “God is love” is not derived from
psychoanalysis or from dissection of
Dasein, but from revelation of God in
Jesus Christ.

Tillich sees a tree in his back yard
and says that it “exists only because it
participates in that power of being
which is treehood” (S.T. II, p. 11).
But can the putting on of the ‘hood,’
treehood, ever make a tree? I see from
my window an enormous spruce tree
towering over its neighbors and carry-
ing up with it a tremendous weight of
trunk and branches against the down-
ward pull of gravitation. As I gaze on
my tree I can only say with the poet
in profound and reverent conviction,
“Only God can make a tree.” We must
be careful and not go back to the pre-
Baconian age of science and change the
nature of a thing into its efficient cause.

Tillich is still hopeful of the effort
to assimilate the apostolic tradition and
the modern mind. Others — Schleierma-
cher, Hegel and modern liberals — have
failed. But, he says, “There is no choice
for us. We must try again” ( Biblical
Religion, etc., p. 57). In every period
that we know, and worse times are pre-
dicted for the future, the modern mind
is too frivolous, too self-centered, too
much a lover of self, lover of pleasure
and of money, and too little a lover of
God to make this possible. “If any one
loves the world, love for the Father is
not in him” (I John 2:15). His view
of the polarity of faith and doubt makes
him bring together things that are poles
apart, makes him mix oil and water.
He is following here the dictum of a
great revolutionist, Lenin, whose col-
lected works show that he is no mean

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

controversalist. The principle is that
dialectics is the unity of opposites.

We are reminded of Shelling’s Sys-
tem of Identity : Object and subject,
real and ideal, nature and spirit are all
identical in the absolute.

Tillich’s view of faith and doubt as
correlates — that faith holds or hides
doubt in its heart — obscures the distinc-
tion between truth and falsehood. Til-
lich says: “Faith and doubt do not es-
sentially contradict each other. Faith is
the continuous tension between itself
and the doubt within itself” (p. 60).
What kind of faith is he speaking of?
It is not the kind of faith which Abra-
ham had when he believed that God
could raise the dead. It is not the faith
which Moses had when he endured as
seeing him who is invisible when God
made a slave race his chosen people
and delivered them from a mighty em-
pire by a mighty hand and a stretched
out arm.

It is not the faith which found ex-
pression in the inspired eloquence of
Romans, Chapter 8. God is on our side,
and his love is assured to us by facts
of history which have never been suc-
cessfully denied. Christ died and he rose
again the third day. Our hope is a living
hope based upon these facts and upon
the revelation that he is now upon the
throne, ever living to make intercession
for us. Then the organ with all the stops
open peals forth in a glorious crescendo,
and the chorus bursts forth in a tri-
umphant challenge to all the forces of
the universe and all the powers of evil
to separate us from the love of God
which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

It was not the faith of the early Chris-
tians which placed the Cross above the
Roman eagle, proud emblem of imperial
power, Bishop Wescott, studying em-

peror worship, says of the early Chris-
tians that their witness to an unseen
world was “a pledge of a nobler free-
dom than had ever been realized among
men: that the belief in God, as made
known to them in Christ, was the one
safeguard against utter slavery.”

Harnack, in his great work The Ex-
pansion of Christianity in the First
Three Centuries, declares: “Now, for
the first time, that testimony rose among
men, which cannot ever be surpassed,
the testimony that God is Love.”

The vacillating faith with which
Browning’s Bishop Blougram, over his
wine cups, pictures

A life of doubt diversified by faith,
so easily interchangeable with

A life of faith diversified by doubt,

is as different as possible from the faith
which is a matter of life and death to
him who possesses it. The Master told
his disciples not of a faith which could
be discussed lightly in detachment over
the wine cups, but of a powerful faith
which could move mountains and move
the arm that moves the world (Matt.
21:21, 22). The Apostle Paul, a pris-
oner at Rome and in the imminent pros-
pect of death, had the faith to declare
to Timothy, “I know whom I have be-
lieved, and am persuaded, that he is
able . . .” (II Tim. 1 :i2). Shall I say
also that it is the faith of Tillich when
he quotes with profound admiration and
appreciation both in his systematic work
and in his printed sermons the passage
in Romans 8 alluded to above ?

During the middle years of this cen-
tury our philosophical schools have been
haunted by the specter of non-being,
nothingness, nihil, or whatever we may
call it and the ghost has never been laid.
What are we to do about it? Tillich

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

himself admits that “the correlation of
ontology and Biblical religion is an in-
finite task,” which means that he has
not solved it. For he says on the same
page : “Against Pascal I say : The God
of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the
God of the philosophers is the same
God. He is a person and the negation of
himself as a person” (From Biblical Re-
ligion, etc., p. 85). The tasks he assigns
himself is not only “infinite,” it is im-
possible so long as he keeps turning
contradictions into correlates, and so
long as he, with his contemporaries,
Heidegger and Sartre, finds a place for
nothingness in the conception of God
or rejects God altogether.

Tillich believes that there are a few
“converted” philosophers who have a
“regenerated reason” and that some of
them have an ultimate concern for Be-
ing or being-itself, thus pointing to ulti-
mate reality. But Being is the last ab-
straction from a host of finite beings and
belongs therefore, we have argued, in
the finite sphere and cannot be ultimate.
This abstraction then, whether assumed
by Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre, or Til-
lich, cannot reach the ultimate which
can only be the ground of all existence
and can only be found in God. Biblical
religion, whether expressed in scrip-
tural passages (John 1 13, Col. 1 :i6, 17 ;
Heb. 1 :2, 3 ; I Pet. 3 :22) or interpreted
in the creeds, confessions, rituals, hymns
and prayers of all the leading branches
of the Church, shows that God created
all things by and through the eternal
Word, and is the Lord of all Being and
all history, Lord of everything with
which science deals, Lord of nature, and
Lord of the destiny of men and of na-
tions and empires and civilizations. No
non-theistic existentialist can unite upon
a credible and consistent ontology which

must reach to the ultimate ground of
all existence, which is God. No ontol-
ogy of this type can offer us a God that
we can pray to and worship, or a God
that can hear and answer prayer. Noth-
ingness is usually regarded as something
evil, something that ought not to be. It
is associated with the last enemy, death,
and the fear of death. What more fright-
ening and frightful nightmare could
there be than when one dreams that he
is falling headlong into the bottomless
pit of extinction? Barth shows clear in-
sight in seeking to remove Nothingness
as far from God as possible. The only
concession he makes is to say that this
nameless Nothing is what Jesus Christ
destroyed by his work on the Cross.
Whether this is the last word that can
be said on the subject I cannot say. At
any rate Biblical religion asserts that
“God is light and in him is no darkness
at all” (I John 1:5).

Tillich and the Gospels

The last unkindest cut of all is when
Tillich assails the integrity and truth
of the Gospels and invalidates the char-
ter of the faith of the Church. Listen
carefully when he says :

“Miracles cannot be interpreted in
terms of a supernatural interference in
natural processes. If such an interpreta-
tion were true, the manifestation of the
ground of being would destroy the
structure of being, God would be split
within himself, as religious dualism has
asserted. It would be more adequate to
call such a miracle ‘demonic,’ not be-
cause it is produced by ‘demons,’ but
because it discloses a ‘structure of de-
struction’ (See Part IV, Sec. I.). It
corresponds with the state of “being
possessed’ in the mind and could be
called ‘sorcery.’ The Supra-naturalistic

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

theory of miracles makes God a sor-
cerer and cause of ‘possession’ ; it con-
fuses God with demonic structure in the
mind and in reality” ( S.T . I., p. 116).

If I use an ad hominem argument and
insist that the “split” is in Tillich him-
self my only excuse will be that he
asked for it. In order to save space my
comments on the above passage, to
adopt a musical figure, will be in an
abrupt staccato style rather than in the
more smooth and leisurely legato.

1. It is dangerous for a theologian to
set limits on what can happen in na-
ture, or what could happen in Galilee
during the ministry of Christ, especially
when this restriction has already been
removed and outmoded by the advance
of science. We refer to the postulated
and inviolable “structure of being.”

2. In recent years two powerful ham-
mers have been beating against the an-
vil of the trustworthiness of the Gos-
pels, Bultmann’s hammer of demythol-
ogizing in Germany and Tillich’s ham-
mer of deliteralizing in this country. To
one who has studied the course of Criti-
cism from Reimarus to Wrede and be-
yond it is difficult to believe that the
anvil will be destroyed. “The anvil
wears the hammers out, you know.” If
one law of nature can because of inter-
ference repeal all the other laws, then
the tree which bore Newton’s apple
could not have risen one inch from the
ground.

3. When a man is at the end of his
rope and finds that he cannot save him-
self and knows that no man can by any
means redeem his brother, then he will
look to the supernatural and the mighty
works of God as his only hope for this
life and the next, and will look to the
Resurrection of Christ which gives
death its death blow and kindles the

sure and certain hope of everlasting life
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

4. Enormous industry and energy
have been expended in the past cen-
tury and a half in the search for the “hu-
man-historical” Jesus underneath the
text of the Gospels. In Latin there have
been three stages in the course of that
great effort. Ant Deus, aut non bonus
(God or not good) ; aut Deus, aut non
sanus (God or not of sound mind) ; aut
Deus, aut ignotus (God or unknown
and unknowable). Remove the miracu-
lous from the narratives and no outlines
of any definite figure remain. Turn to
the teaching and only a faint whisper is
echoed from the Galilean hills. The
failure to draw from the Gospels a
credible picture of a non-miraculous
Jesus has built up a cumulative argu-
ment of great power for the truth of the
Gospel miracles.

5. The cure for science when it seems
to invalidate religion is more and better
science. Tillich when he makes his orac-
ular diatribe against miracles quoted
above, is, if I understand him, living in
the Newtonian, not the Einstein age.
His untouchable “structure of being” (I
must qualify again by saying if I un-
derstand him) seems to imply a block
world, making our universe a block
universe of matter and motion, a rigidly
deterministic mechanical universe of
matter and motion, and making man
into an automaton. In plain English
this is not an up-to-date science.

Newton’s laws of motion and of mat-
ter afterward hardened into the strictly
mechanical view of the universe. My
fellow townsman, Albert Einstein in
Princeton, is my authority for saying
that this theory is no longer a postulate
of science.

Einstein practically preached its fu-

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

neral sermon when he said that the ad-
vance of electrical science has “caused
a complete breakdown of the belief that
all phenomena can be explained me-
chanically.” And again that “the new
quantum physics removes us still fur-
ther from the old mechanical view, and
a retreat to the former position seems,
more than ever, unlikely” (Einstein and
Infeld, The Evolution of Physics, 1938,
pp. 125, 309).

Science, to make way for its own ad-
vance, removed the strait jacket from
the spirit of man, and opened a wide
avenue for the freedom of God in the
exercise of his grace.

6. Some would discard all the deeds
of Jesus but save his words out of the
wreck. Let us see how what he began
to do and to teach are separable. Bult-
mann in his Jesus, 1929, saved the
words of Jesus from the wreck, but
said that if Jesus of Nazareth never
existed it would make no difference to
his religious life. Tillich in his printed
sermons says that Jesus is not the truth
because his teachings are true, but the
other way about. His teachings are true
because he is the truth ( The New Be-
ing, p. 70). Look for a moment at the
eleventh chapter of Matthew, contain-
ing the most intimate disclosure of his
relations to God in the Synoptic Gos-
pels and the great invitation to bur-
dened man. When the Baptist sends to
ask, “Are you he that is to come?” the
answer of Jesus was his works. “The
blind receive their sight and the lame
walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf
hear, and the dead are raised up, and
the poor have the good news preached
to them” (Matt. 11 :5). The guilt of the
cities where his mighty works were
done was that they were blind to the
meaning of his redeeming works (Matt.

11 :2i-24). If the works were false, so
were the words (See also John 15:22-
24.).

7. I must say a word about the Res-
urrection where a volume would be
more adequate. Tillich rejects the physi-
cal theory, although he says it is the
most beautiful, and the psychological
theory of visions, and proposes a “Res-
titution Theory.” This is that some dis-
ciples who had fled to Galilee became
convinced the New Being into whom
the “man Jesus” had been transformed,
could not have been defeated by his
death as a criminal. This subjective ex-
perience, followed by others, was the
origin, overlaid by legendary matter, of
the faith in the Resurrection. Til-
lich’s Resurrection theory means a
man-made resurrection instead of a rais-
ing from the dead by the power of God.
(References are too numerous and need
not be given.) The restitution theory
is weak, made by disciples in Galilee
who had never investigated the empty
tomb. In a couple of places Tillich sup-
ports the judgment that his theory is
weak. “It (the theory, while he thinks
adequate) must also be considered a
theory. . . .” It remains (he says can-
didly) “in the realm of probability, and
does not have the certainty of faith”
(S.T. I., p. 58). He adds that “the at-
titude of the New Testament and espe-
cially of the non-literalistic Apostle
Paul justifies the theory of restitution”
(ibid). Was Paul non-literalistic when
he said that Christ died, was buried,
arose on the third day, and appeared to
Cephas, then to the twelve? (I Cor.
15:3, 4). Was he non-literalistic and
could be accused of “literalistic distor-
tion of symbols and myths” (ibid., p.
152) when on the way to Damascus the
Risen Lord spoke to him in his child-

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

hood’s language, in words twice re-
peated before Agrippa and before the
mob in Jerusalem, and reported again by
his most intimate friend, Luke (Chap-
ters 9, 22, and 26) ? Who in the world
could have invented those words of
identity with the church, “Why do you
; persecute me?” words which burnt
themselves into Paul’s memory and
changed the course of his life and the
history of Europe? A noted French
New Testament scholar, Maurice Go-
guel, has found the source of the four
Gospels in a narrative written during
the eighteen months before the conver-
sion of Paul which closed with the pas-
sion and left out both the Resurrection
and the Great Commission in Matt. 28.
I am ready now to rest my assurance
of Jesus’ resurrection upon a single ar-
gument, until it is refuted. Who at this
period would have written such a “gos-
pel” of bad news as is contemplated?
Would the Jews who hated Jesus and
wanted to forget him? Would the Jews
who were bitterly disappointed by the
hoped for political Messiah? Would the
Christians and Apostles who, before
they saw the empty tomb and the marks
in the hands of the risen Savior, were
in deep despondency and despair ? Who
would think of writing the life of one
who died seemingly in defeat and disil-
lusion and ended his life in desertion,
darkness and blood? I am glad that
there are “many proofs” (Acts 1:3),
the most convincing and irrefutable
among which are the empty grave never
accounted for, the appearances to a
number of well-known people who
lived long after the event, and then our
fellowship with the Father and with his
Son, Jesus Christ, who has promised
to be with us all the days. It is good for
us to see how broadly based is our cer-

tainty of the resurrection. It is well for
us to walk about Zion, to tell the tow-
ers thereof, to mark well her bulwarks
and consider her palaces that we may
tell the generation following. This God
is our God forever and ever. He will be
our guide even unto death.

It would strengthen my hypothesis of
the two Tillichs if time and space per-
mitted us to place in parallel columns
what he says in his Systematic Theology
and in his printed sermons. It is my
misfortune that I have never heard
him preach. In his ecstatic mood and his
moments of illumination he has in-
sights, as when he is in the pulpit or
preparing for it, insights that can il-
lume and inspire his hearers and read-
ers. Comparison between his two moods
show that contradictions have no terror
for him. Is the relation between the two
teachings correlation or polarity? He is
certainly equally sincere and conscien-
tious in both roles. His divided loyalty
is a challenge to the psychologist. He
has two sermons on healing, one of
them with the text (Matt. 10:1) that
Jesus gave his disciples authority “to
overcome unclean spirits, to cast them
out, and to heal every disease and every
infirmity.” There can be no doubt, as
I see it, that Jesus was conscious of
having miraculous power which he
never used for his own advantage. In
the second sermon he says that “the
woman who encountered him,” a chron-
ic invalid for many years, “was made
whole, the demoniac who met him,”
who broke bonds and fetters was the
terror of the neighborhood, “was liber-
ated from his mental cleavage” ( The
New Being, p. 43). These cases were
surely miracles ; they are wonderful,
they were signs of his redeeming pow-

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

er and part of it, and of destroying the
work of the devil and restoring lost in-
tegrity of personality.

Miracles are not excess baggage, they
are not the cargo which may be thrown
over to lighten the ship, they are the
ballast which keeps the ship steady amid
the shriek of the tempest and the surg-
ing of the waves. They are the break-
ing through of the spiritual into the
natural order for a redemptive purpose.
They answer the questions of our deep-
est and most passionate and most per-
sonal concerns : Does God exist ? Can
he save me ?

We are reminded often that no final
appraisal of Tillich’s work should be

made until his third volume appears.
Then we may hope that the differences
between the two Tillichs may be made
less glaring. When we remember Au-
gustine’s Retractations, the changes in
Barth’s views since he wrote his com-
mentary on the Epistle to the Romans,
changes which all thinkers are expected
and permitted to make, and the radical
and profound change which he himself
made in his interpretation of the Fall,
we hope that further study, reflection
and experience will cause him to make
changes, even radical changes, in those
aspects of his teachings which, while
interesting in their novelty, cut deeply
into “Biblical religion.”

BOOK REVIEWS

THEOLOGY

The Church’s Confession Under
Hitler, by Arthur C. Cochrane. The
Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1962.
Pp. 317. $6.50.

The Barmen Declaration is undoubtedly the
most influential theological statement of the
twentieth century. It grew out of the Nazi
period of German history and was directed
against the errors of the so-called “German
Christians,” churchmen who succumbed to the
Hitler propaganda and who confused the
ideology of the Third Reich with the historic
Christian faith. This Declaration, adopted
by the First Confessional Synod of the Ger-
man Evangelical Church, meeting in Barmen,
on May 29-31, 1934, was the basis of the
“Confessing Church,” that heroic group of
Reformed, Lutheran, and United church
members who furnished the most consistent
opposition to Hitler of any German group.

It is the author’s contention that Barmen
represents something more than resistance to
a totalitarian state. “From is inception,” he
writes, “it was essentially a struggle of the
Church against itself for itself. It was a strug-
gle to recover the confession of faith and a
struggle to remain faithful to it in the preach-
ing and actions of the Church.” Barmen, by
pointing the Church back to Holy Scripture
and to her historic confessions, enabled the
Church to rediscover itself, its primary al-
legiance, and thus its proper mission in the
German Reich.

The first chapter details the background
of the Nazi movement, the second contains
a description of the theological movement
between 1917 and 1933, and subsequent chap-
ters trace the history of the emerging strug-
gle between the “German Christians” and the
“Confessing Church,” culminating in the
Synod of Barmen. Many familiar figures
appear in these pages : Karl Barth, the spirit
behind Barmen and the hero of the book,
Martin Niemoller and his brother, Otto Pi-
per, Wilhelm Niesel, Hans Asmussen, and
a host of others that should not be forgotten.
In an age of expediency they demonstrated
to us how to stand.

In the final chapter, “The Nature of a
Confession of Faith,” the author uses the
Church struggle to illustrate the characteris-
tics of a genuine Confession and raises the
question of the significance of Barmen for
the Church today. It is to be regretted that
this question was not answered and that the
author did not go further by pointing out the
implications of Barmen for present situa-
tions in which the Church must struggle
“against itself for itself” in order to be a
viable instrument of its Lord.

Dr. Cochrane is the distinguished profes-
sor of systematic theology in Dubuque Theo-
logical Seminary and an authority in the
theology of Karl Barth. In this book he has
rendered a much-needed service, not only
in detailing the history of the German church
struggle, but also in supplying in a series
of appendices the not readily available texts
of many of the most important documents it
produced.

Jas. I. McCord

The Second Vatican Council, by
Henri Daniel-Rops. Hawthorn Books
Inc., New York, 1962. Pp. 160. $3.50.

The Council, Reform and Reunion,
by Hans Kiing. Sheed and Ward, New
York, 1961. Pp. 208. $3.95.

The decision to summon an ecumenical
council came as a sudden inspiration to Pope
John XXIII (“Suddenly and unexpectedly
we were struck”), and since its announcement
speculation has been rife about its every as-
pect. For one thing, will it be called a con-
tinuation of the First Vatican Council, which
was never adjourned but was ended by the
approach of Piedmontese artillery without
getting far into its agenda but after promul-
gating the dogma of papal infallibility, or the
Second Vatican Council? (Correspondence
from the Vatican now refers to the Second
Council). Other questions concern agenda,
the role of Protestant observers, and how
long the council will run. The October open-
ing date has been announced, with the first
session recessing before Christmas, but pre-
sumably second and third sessions will be held,

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

one after Easter and the other in the fall of
1963, and there may be more.

There is reason, of course, for both specu-
lation and anticipation. Vatican Councils are
not scheduled regularly, as are Assemblies
of the World Council of Churches. Through-
out the Church’s history there have been
only twenty ecumenical councils, the first con-
vened by the Emperor Constantine in Nicea
in 325 and the twentieth held in the Vatican
in 1869-1870. Moreover, ecumenical councils
have extraordinary powers ; they are above
canon law. As Dr. Kiing comments, a Vatican
Council “in union with the Pope . . . has
universal legislative authority in every field
of ecclesiastical law, and can thus carry out
full-scale reform throughout the entire
Church.” This power, and the possibility it
holds, will explain why many inside the
Roman Catholic Church as well as outside it
look forward in anxious anticipation to the
Council’s decisions.

Henri Daniel-Rops and Hans Kiing are
Catholics, the former a member of the French
Academy and the latter a member of the
Catholic Theological faculty of Tubingen
and author of a widely praised study of Karl
Barth’s theology.

Daniel-Rops’ volume bears the subtitle,
“The Story behind the Ecumenical Council of
Pope John XXIII,” and is written for those
who want a short, popular sketch of the ear-
lier councils and of the organizational prepa-
rations for the upcoming one.

Hans Kiing’s volume is another matter. It
is a work of major significance and deserves
a wide reading, as much by American Catho-
lics as by Protestants. Here, too, there is
historical material, but the author’s real con-
cern is with what the Vatican Council might
accomplish. He begins by citing the change
of atmosphere the Council’s announcement
has brought about on both sides, the grow-
ing dialogue between Catholics and Protes-
tants and the relaxed attitudes within both
traditions. Professor Kiing’s great hope is
that the Council will be an instrument of
renewal within Catholicism. He points out
that reformation is not a Protestant monop-
oly but is necessary also for Rome, since it
too is a “communio peccatorum,” and illus-
trates how the Church has been renewed in
the past. Catholic renewal must steer a course
between “opportunist modernism” and “op-

portunist traditionalism” in “fidelity to the
Gospel of Jesus Christ,” the author argues,
and then sets down certain reforming ideals
for the Church today. They include a fresh
appreciation of the genuinely religious mo-
tives in the Protestant Reformation, increased
concern for Holy Scripture, development of
the liturgy into a people’s liturgy, a fresh
understanding of universal priesthood, and a
greater emphasis on the devotional life of the
ordinary church member. Throughout Pro-
fessor Kiing writes with great candor and
with eager expectation of the Council’s re-
sults. In any tug of war that may be going
on within the papal curia it is to be hoped
that those of Kiing’s persuasion will be vic-
torious.

Both authors write as loyal members of the
Catholic Church and as defenders of the
Petrine office. They agree that the Council
will not proceed with any new definition of
Marian dogmas or develop further definitions
of controversial theological doctrines. Rather,
the Council will be, as Cardinal Tardini has
remarked, “an internal event in the Church.”
To this, Pope John added, in his Encyclical,
“Ad Petri Cathedram”:

The chief end of the council is to advance
the development of the Catholic Faith, the
renewal of Christian life among the peo-
ple, the adaption of ecclesiastical discipline
to contemporary conditions. Assuredly, this
will afford a wonderful spectacle of truth,
of unity, of charity, and we are confident
that in seeing it those who are separated
from this Apostolic See will see in it a
warm invitation to seek and find unity.

It is clear, then, that the Council will not
meet to discuss union. There is a prior ques-
tion with which to deal. It is intended to be
a reforming or renewing Council, within
Catholicism. Observers from the World Coun-
cil of Churches and the various confessional
bodies have accepted invitations to attend.
They are, in the main, theologians and his-
torians, scholars who will serve as eyes of
the Protestant Churches and who cannot by
any stretch of the imagination be thought of
as officials able to negotiate union. It would
be foolish to expect anything more to come
out of the Council than certain reforms with-
in the Roman Church, but this in itself is of

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

the greatest significance and should engage
the interest and prayers of every Christian.

Jas. I. McCord

Communism and Christian Faith, by
Lester de Koster, Wm. B. Eerdmans,
Grand Rapids, Mich., 1962. Pp. 158.
$3-50.

This vigorous book is an expansion of an
earlier volume, All Ye That Labor, now out
of print. It is a well-balanced treatment of
the subject by a writer who is passionately
interested in truth without favor. His anti-
communism is unimpeachable, at times over-
emphasized. But he places it within the so-
cial recognition that Communism has its ap-
peal in large parts of the world because of the
illusions and injustices of economic liberal-
ism ; and he places it within the theological
understanding that the battleground between
God and the Devil is within ourselves first
of all, and that the crisis of Communism pre-
sents us with a judgment. It is on the whole
the Calvinist sense of God’s judgment and
a rigorous loyalty to a truth which cannot be
made in our social image which tames and
directs the author’s abhorrence of the whole
Communist system into constructive chan-
nels. It is therefore a useful book placed
against Fred Schwarz’ “Christian Anti-Com-
munism” and alongside of John Bennett’s
Christianity and Communism Today (As-
sociation Press), the National Council of
Churches’ Christian’s Handbook on Com-
munism, and similar volumes as study ma-
terial for intelligent church groups.

The book has one weakness. It is not writ-
ten out of experience with Communists where
they are active or powerful. It therefore lacks
the subtlety of human insight to be a pro-
found book. This shows up in the bibliography
as well as in the writing, where some of the
finest treatments of Christian-Communist en-
counter by those engaged in it, are missing.
To name three of them: Helmut Gollwitzer,
Unwilling Journey (Muhlenberg Press) ;
Nicholas Berdyaev, The Origin of Russian
Communism (U. of Michigan Press) ; and
Johannes Hamel, A Christian in East Ger-
many (Association Press).

Charles C. West

BIBLICAL

The Thanksgiving Hymns. Trans-
lated and Annotated with an Introduc-
tion. (Studies on the texts of the Desert
of Judah. Edited by J. van der Ploeg,
Volume III), by Menahem Mansoor.
Wm. B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids 3,
Michigan, 1961. Pp. xi -f- 227. $7.00.

The life of the Essene was devoted en-
tirely to the praise of God and the study
of his word. We not only have many “pesh-
ers” or commentaries on various books of the
Old Testament from the library at Qumran,
but we also have a collection of hymns which
were used in the worship of the community.
Several translations of these noble hymns are
now available in various handbooks on the
Dead Sea Scrolls, but the definitive work in
English is the book under review, written by
Prof. Menahem Mansoor, of the University
of Wisconsin. These deeply spiritual psalms,
or Hodayoth, as they are known in Hebrew,
resemble and often echo the language of the
Biblical psalms. They constitute an impor-
tant source for the theological doctrines of
the Qumran Sect. In the introduction to this
volume, the author devotes a long chapter to
the study of the most important of these doc-
trines.

The main purpose of the book, however, is
to give the reader a study of the Essene
hymns based on the texts themselves. The
description and dating of the scroll, the lin-
guistic aspects of the Hebrew text and its
relation to Biblical Hebrew are expertly dis-
cussed by Prof. Mansoor in the introduction.
He, like Dupont-Sommer and Licht, divides
the contents of the scroll into thirty-two in-
dividual hymns, most of which begin with
the stereotyped formula, “I praise thee, 0
Lord, because. . . .” The author also sup-
plies us with a summary of each hymn.

One of the puzzling problems of these re-
ligious poems is their authorship. In most
cases they seem to reflect the personal ex-
periences and feelings of a single individual.
Although the Teacher of Righteousness, the
reputed founder of the Qumran Community,
is never mentioned in the Hymn Scroll, many
scholars believe that he is the author of the
work, especially when one compares what is

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

said about the Teacher of Righteousness in
the Habakkuk Commentary and the Damas-
cus Document with the obviously autobio-
graphical passages in the Essene hymns. If
this theory of authorship proves to be correct,
we must recognize from these mystical con-
fessions one of the loftiest figures in the his-
tory of religion.

After the lengthy introduction there fol-
lows the excellent translation of the hymns
themselves. “The purpose here is to present
an authentic translation, as faithful as pos-
sible to the source. It is humbly hoped that
competent scholars and theologians with no
access to Hebrew will be able to use the text
as a basis for further studies and research”
(p. 96). This method contrasts sharply with
that of T. H. Gaster in his translation of
the scrolls {The Dead Sea Scriptures in
English Translation, N.Y., 1956), which is
more often a paraphrase with little docu-
mentation to support his free renditions.

Prof. Mansoor’s translation is annotated
with copious textual, lexicographical and
theological notes. One is impressed not only
with the author’s erudition in textual and
philological matters, but also with his sound
judgment and open-mindedness in matters of
interpretation. Twelve pages of bibliography
and numerous indices add to the value of this
outstanding volume on the Thanksgiving
Hymns from Qumran.

Charles T. Fritsch

The Royal Psalms, by Keith R.
Crim. John Knox Press, Richmond,
Va., 1962. Pp. 127. $2.75.

One of the most significant phases of Old
Testament study in the past few decades has
been the investigation of the nature of king-
ship in Israel — its origins, its influence on
Israel’s religion, and its relation to the Mes-
sianic hope. In this book Dr. Crim, Associ-
ate Professor of Bible at Taejon Presbyterian
College in Korea, introduces to American
readers the research of German and Scandi-
navian scholars on the so-called “Messianic”
Psalms, which were used in connection with
the annual celebration of the Davidic king-
ship, the Royal Zion Festival. The author
gives an exposition of Pss. 2, 72, no and

seven others, plus a study of 2 Samuel 23 :
1-7, in the second part of the book.

The first part sets the stage for the ex-
position by discussing in detail the begin-
nings of the Israelite monarchy and its
unique charismatic character, the Biblical
evidence for a yearly festival commemorating
the choice of Jerusalem and the Davidic
dynasty for the rule of God’s people, and the
importance of these concepts for the Mes-
sianic ideal in Israel’s thought and life.

This book serves as an excellent introduc-
tion to a significant yet complex area of re-
search in Old Testament studies today. It
should be of particular value for the preach-
ing ministry, as well as for the Seminary
classroom.

Charles T. Fritsch

The Scrolls and Christian Origins,
by Matthew Black. Charles Scribner’s
Sons, New York, 1961. Pp. 206. $3.95.

The basis of this important book was a
course of lectures delivered in May, 1956, in
Union Theological Seminary, New York.
Even though publication is five years later,
the value of the book is not seriously harmed,
since its focus is not so much on the scrolls
themselves as on the light which they shed
upon the beginnings of Christianity. Profes-
sor Black, Principal of St. Mary’s College,
University of St. Andrews in Scotland and a
distinguished New Testament scholar, takes
us backstage of New Testament times and
shows us, from Jewish and patristic sources,
how widespread the “movement of Jewish
or para-Jewish ‘non-conformity’” was in the
early days of Christianity. Numerous Jewish
sects, of which the Qumran Essenes were
just one group, presented a “solid and un-
broken front to the established religion of the
day,” and, according to the author, it was
from this “unorthodox” side of Judaism that
Christianity sprang. “It seems probable that
this vast movement of ‘Jewish’ or ‘Hebrew’
sectarianism represents the survival into New
Testament times of the old pre-Ezra type of
Hebrew religion ; and its puritanism would
then stem from the ancient asceticism of the
religion of Israel” (p. 167).

Professor Black believes that the link be-
tween this side of Judaism and the New

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

Testament is to be found in the ‘Hebraists’
or Hebrew Christians of the Book of Acts,
and more particularly in the “Sect of the
Nazarenes” (Acts 24:5), which continued
the ancient Israelite institution of the life-
long Nazirite. This same Nazirite strain can
be detected in John the Baptist, whose rela-
tion to Qumran and its teachings is recog-
nized by most scholars.

The last part of the book deals with the
religious institutions and theological concep-
tions of the scrolls, especially with those
which bear some resemblance or relationship
to Christian ideas or institutions. The Qum-
ran baptismal rites, which were practised in
relation to a movement of repentance and
entry into a New Covenant, “prepared the
way, at some considerable remove, for the
full Christian doctrine of baptism” (p. 98).
The sacred meal of the Qumran priestly type,
with its Messianic overtones, may well lie
behind the earliest forms of the Eucharist
in the primitive Church.

The author has a good deal to say about
the eschatological beliefs of the Qumran
community. He points out that many of these
ideas are derived from the closing chapters
of Ezekiel. He might well have noted in this
connection that the very site of Qumran
was probably chosen by the Essenes for
eschatological reasons based on Ezekiel 47.

This is a scholarly work which shows great
erudition on the part of the author. One may
disagree with some of his ideas regarding
the historical origins of the sect, or the
identity of the Teacher of Righteousness, but
no one who is interested in the importance
of the Dead Sea Scrolls for New Testa-
ment studies can afford to ignore this book.

Charles T. Fritsch

When Israel Came Out of Egypt,
by Gabriel Hebert. John Knox Press,
Richmond, Virginia, 1961. Pp. 128.
$i-75-

This slim volume devotes its five chapters
to a consideration of the Exodus as an event
in the faith of Israel, and in the history of
the world, considering the use of that event
in the narratives of the Bible, the relation
of that event to Moses, and its meaning for
Christianity.

The approach of the author is avowedly
devotional, not critical. As a consequence,
the role of the God of Israel, in and through
the historical event of the Exodus, is given
primary consideration. A sane view of the
miraculous elements involved helps to make
that consideration valid and coercive. The
Covenant is thus seen, and rightly so, as the
complement to the Exodus as an event, and
as the means whereby the relation of Israel
to her independent Deity is resolved. The
necessary point is also made that one cannot
take the faith of Israel seriously without pri-
or commitment to that faith ! For Hebert,
the uniqueness of that faith rests on the Ex-
odus event, and the subsequent covenantal re-
lationship.

From the historical and scholarly side, the
author makes clear that the Exodus tradition
can be given firm historical ground, in spite
of the unanswerability of a string of specifics
connected with it. He presents a good sum-
mary of what has been learned in the near
present in regard to Biblical backgrounds,
and makes plain the realization that the Bible
cannot either be completely documented, or
simply dismissed as myth. A fine description
is given of the transition of Israel from a
political unit to a “faith,” based on the Lord
of history and the hope of future deliverance.
A brief, but good, summary is also given of
the present schools of Biblical criticism, from
literalism to Uppsala, and the rise of Biblical
theology. The chronology of the book is up
to date and the discussion of the archaeo-
logical and historical setting of the Exodus
problem is informed. The plague narrative
is seen as a conflate account of JEP, set in
stylized form. No conclusions are offered
for the location of Sinai, other than the gen-
eral area. The biblical account of the cross-
ing of the sea is presented simply as a “mys-
tery,” in accord with the devotional view-
point of the book.

The author follows Albright on the Exo-
dus dates, and on certain features of (early)
Israelite religious development. Wright, et
al., are followed in regard to the amphicty-
onic site, but Noth’s view of tribal disperse-
ment during the Exodus period seems favored.
An Uppsalian flavor is also introduced by
reference to oral traditions as an explana-
tion of textual vagaries. The acceptance of
Rowley’s view of the role of Joseph (as the

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

vizier of Ikhnaton) is not coercive, nor is
the author’s interpretation of the numbers of
the Exodus account strictly necessary. The
desire to establish the Mosaic relation to
the Exodus event has led the author to hold
both sides of the argument equally well! Un-
fortunately he misses the difference between
later attribution as a sign of both veneration
and as a means of authentication, and the
actualities of history. The use of JHVH con-
fuses the reader unnecessarily, including the
preference of the author for that form over
the Hebrew (sic) YHWH. The “parallels”
to Christianity are, of course, untenable, ex-
cept as devotional comparisons — a fact the
author’s style and purpose make evident. In
that light, as well, the little book is warmly
recommended.

Philip C. Hammond

The Patriarchal Age, by Charles F.
Pfeiffer. Baker Book House, Grand
Rapids, Michigan, 1961. Pp. 128. $2.95.

In seventeen extremely brief chapters, the
author sketches the organization, family re-
lationships, social context, culture and daily
life of the Patriarchs, as well as discussing
the matter of the historicity of the patriarchal
narratives, the patriarchal religion and the
literature involved.

Professor Pfeiffer gives the reader a bet-
ter-than-average general coverage of the Pa-
triarchal Age as depicted in the Old Testa-
ment. His presentation of the currently known
data of history relating to the period is also
very well done, and his summary of extant
legal codes is excellent. In his opening chap-
ter he furnishes a very brief over-view of
various views held in Biblical circles today
and honestly chooses sides in the ring of mod-
ern critical approaches to Biblical scholarship.

It is in the author’s use of archaeological
material and in his interpretations of history
that this reviewer finds his basic criticisms,
however. Pfeiffer presupposes the “essential
historicity” of the Biblical records, and then
feels it necessary to prove that historicity
by proof-texting, as it were, from archaeol-
ogy and from known historical records. The
assumptions seems to be that the historical
validity of the latter will uphold the former.
It is not to be denied that the Patriarchal
Period, as presented in the Old Testament,

clearly reflects the Middle Bronze Age in
Palestine. Nor is it to be doubted that many
newly discovered records and practices of
ancient Near Eastern life mirror situations
to be found in the Bible. Yet, correspondence
and proof are not identical, and parallels do
not make patriarchs 1

Still in the realm of historical interpreta-
tion, the author has a strong tendency to
moralize the events recorded in biblical his-
tory, and to evaluate in terms of contem-
porary standards. Any such reading back into
the Old Testament of Christian ethical de-
mands, or even contemporary mores, is to-
tally invalid. Pious reconstruction and ro-
mantic supposition becloud the essential spir-
ituality of the biblical materials, rather en-
hance it.

From the objective point of view, the
dichotomy between the religion of the patri-
archs and the baalism of their neighbors is
much too strongly drawn. That the pre-
Israelite religion of the Hebrews can be re-
constructed for the patriarchal period, on the
basis of the Biblical text, is doubtful. A naive
universalism is also introduced, along with
theological “distinctions” (e.g. those of Vos
and Bromiley) which are not always neces-
sary or really relevant.

In short, although some sections of this
small volume are extremely well done, other
parts must be read with the presuppositions
and assumptions of the author carefully kept
in mind.

Philip C. Hammond

The Phoenicians, by Donald Har-
den. Thames and Hudson, London,
1962. Pp. 336. 30s.

In this volume Dr. Harden, Director of
the London Museum, has presented the re-
sults of modern scholarship concerning the
Phoenicians in a very readable form. He
discusses the origins of the Phoenicians, the
geography and history of their homeland and
colonies, their government and social struc-
ture, their religion, their language and script,
their warfare, and their industry and com-
merce.

Because of the scope of the subject the
author has not always been able to give a
detailed treatment, but has limited himself
to the most interesting and important ma-

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

terial. As the author admits, it has also been
impossible to give all the points of view in
areas where the interpretation of the evi-
dence is controversial. He has given his own
interpretation, which is in most instances that
of the majority of scholars and that most
easily defended. These two necessary limita-
tions may at times be disconcerting to the
specialist but will in fact enhance the in-
terest and value of the book for the reader
who seeks a basic introduction to the subject.

However, Dr. Harden’s treatment of Phoe-
nician inscriptions is less valuable. His trans-
lation of the inscription of Abibaal is in-
correct. He introduces a problem concerning
the sarcophagus inscription of Eshmunazar
which is answered by the inscription itself.

Incidentally, Dr. Harden is also inconsistent
in the date which he assigns to the above
mentioned sarcophagus. After having pointed
out the difficulty in determining the date of
the reign of Eshmunazar, King of Sidon, and
having suggested some date in the 6th cen-
tury B.C. as most likely, a position with
which the reviewer takes issue, Dr. Harden
oscillates between dating his sarcophagus to
the 6th century and to the 5th century.

Nonetheless Dr. Harden has made a real
contribution in this study of the history and
culture of the Phoenicians, who as the close
neighbors of the Israelites strongly influenced
the culture of Israel and who left as a legacy
to the world one of its most important pos-
sessions, its alphabet.

William R. Lane

The Birth of the Christian Religion
(La Naissance du Christianisme) and
The Origin of the New Testament (Les
Origines du Nouveau Testament), by
Alfred Firmin Loisy. Authorized trans-
lation from the French by L. P. Jacks.
University Books, New Hyde Park,
N.Y., 1962. Pp. xix -f- 414 and 332.
$10.00.

These two principal works of the most
outstanding Catholic modernist were pub-
lished in 1933 and 1936 and appeared in Eng-
lish translations in London in 1948 and 1950
respectively. Covering the whole ground of
New Testament History and Introduction,

they exhibit both the brilliance of the French
author’s mind and also its conspicuous weak-
nesses. Father Loisy had a complete com-
mand of the vast amount of information
available in those two areas, and he interprets
and arranges it in a most imposing way. But
the principle of strict rationality which he
applies to his subject, and which makes his
picture of the Primitive Church so impres-
sive, is also his undoing. If this picture of
early Christianity presents a coherent and
consistent picture, it is because he fills in the
many gaps of information with daring hy-
potheses. Moreover, with his positivistic-so-
ciological outlook he completely fails to ac-
count for the greatness of Jesus and his apos-
tles, as well as for the strangeness of the
events that took place in the early decades
of our era.

Loisy was a rebel by nature. He rose up
not only against his own church. Deeply
influenced as he was by liberal Protestant
scholarship, he, nevertheless, rebelled against
it, too. In his view, it was full of contradic-
tions and lacked the courage of imagination.
In his desire to overcome its failures he acted
as heir of a tradition, which considered his-
tory primarily as the outcome of man’s in-
tellectual efforts, and thus the whole history
of the Primitive Church was interpreted as
proceeding in logical sequence. Modern Bib-
lical scholarship has in the meantime become
aware of the vexing element of irrationalism
in history and of its apparent whims. The
modern scholar is far less inclined to contend
that he knows everything and he is capable
of explaining all the riddles of history. In
view of this radical change of scholarly cli-
mate, Loisy’s great work, suggestive and
stimulating as it is, is definitely dated.

Otto A. Piper

Lists of Words Occurring Frequent-
ly in the Coptic New Testament ( Sahid -
ic Dialect), compiled by Bruce M.
Metzger. E. J. Brill, Leiden, 1061. Pp.
24. Old. 3- ($.85).

Good word lists are not only very useful
for persons who wish to learn a new lan-
guage as rapidly as possible, but they are also
of great value to teachers and especially to

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

scholars. This list has been very carefully
prepared by a first-rate specialist, and the
reviewer has not noted a single printer’s
error in the list proper (there is one in the
title of the brochure).

The importance of the Coptic language has
increased greatly in recent years. Not only
did the 1961 census of Egypt establish that
the number of Copts is close to 6,400,000 —
more than three times the more cautious ear-
lier estimates — but there is now a definite
renaissance of religious and intellectual cul-
ture among the Copts, in spite of very ad-
verse conditions. Even more important to
historians is the fact that such discoveries
as the Manichaean library of Faiyum and
the early Gnostic library of Chenoboskion
(Nag Hammadi) are revolutionizing our
knowledge of the history of religions. The
historian of Christianity, as well as the stu-
dent of Hellenistic-Roman and Iranian civili-
zation must now learn Coptic, if he is to
control his field properly. Second and third-
hand information is never good enough for
a scientific historian.

As a curiosity, it may be added that the
reviewer began to study Coptic because of
his interest in the vocalization of ancient
Egyptian. His first studies go back to 1918,
and after many years during which he was
practically the only worker, the subject has
recently been taken up by half a dozen
scholars (including T. O. Lambdin in this
country), with very remarkable results. The
subject is not purely linguistic; it has very
important historical repercussions, as will
appear in still unpublished studies of the re-
viewer. In order to work successfully in all
these fields a knowledge of Coptic is indis-
pensable.

W. F. Albright

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
BALTIMORE, MD.

Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries,
by George E. Mylonas. Princeton
University Press, Princeton, N.T., 1961.
Pp. 346. $8.50.

For over thirty years Professor Mylonas
of Washington University, St. Louis, has
been associated with the work of excavation
at Eleusis, a small town about fourteen miles

west of Athens. In antiquity from Mycenaean
to Roman times there stood at Eleusis the
world-famous temple of Demeter. During
almost two millennia pilgrims from all over
the civilized world would travel to this cen-
ter of the Demeter cult and participate in
the ritual of initiation, the details of which
were jealously kept secret from outsiders.

Now the archaeologist’s spade has un-
earthed foundations of six successive temples,
or halls of initiation, each larger than the
former. In the process of expansion, no an-
cient architect dared to move the location of
the inner repository (the Anaktoron ) away
from the ground on which the original My-
cenaean shrine had once stood.

The cult of Demeter at Eleusis was general-
ly regarded as the most elevating and noble
of the several competing mystery religions
of antiquity. Even Plato, who generally spoke
depreciatingly of such cults, had only praise
when referring to the Eleusinian mysteries.
So carefully guarded were the secret rites
of initiation into the cult that only tantaliz-
ingly brief comments have been preserved by
ancient writers. The only literary source of
any considerable extent is the Hymn to De-
meter, and its language is designedly obscure
and indirect. The comments in the Church
Fathers are, without exception, adverse, for
they regarded the competing rituals as in-
spired by demons in order to confuse weak
Christians.

In the book under review, Professor My-
lonas describes the early history and archaeo-
logical remains at Eleusis. He takes the
reader on a guided tour of the Museum which
houses many of the artifacts discovered at
the site of the temple. The plates depicting
the more important statues and other ob-
jects are remarkably clear. A large part of
the book surveys the scanty and scattered
literary references to the Eleusinian mys-
teries. Here Mylonas shows a salutary rigor
in questioning many opinions which have
been held by previous scholars on the basis
of insufficient evidence. For example, he is
unwilling to agree with the widely held view
that the drama of a sacred marriage ( liieros
gatnos ) was enacted as part of the initiatory
rites. Furthermore, Mylonas questions the
legitimacy of the conjectural emendation of
a statement made by Clement of Alexandria
which forms the basis of the view that a

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

7 1

sacramental meal was part of the rites of
initiation. (It will be recalled that Professor
Percy Gardner had thrown out the suggestion
that the Apostle Paul, having stopped off at
Eleusis, was so much intrigued by the pos-
sibilities of a sacred meal of communion with
one another and with the Deity, that he
henceforth introduced such a ceremony into
the primitive church.) The net result of My-
lonas’s book is not only to strengthen and
enlarge what can be deduced from the archae-
ological remains, but to question and, in part,
to reduce the area of “assured results” based
on the literary analysis of ambiguous and
fragmentary testimonies.

All in all, this is a significant contribution
to a subject which has fascinated hundreds of
modern scholars.

Bruce M. Metzger

The Epistles to the Romans and
Thessalonians. (Calvin’s New Testa-
ment Commentaries, Vol. 8). Trans, by
R. Mackenzie. Wm. Eerdmans, Grand
Rapids, Mich., 1962. Pp. 433. $6.00.

This new translation is undoubtedly more
fluent than that of the older Edinburgh se-
ries and, all in all, the translator has made a
creditable job. Yet a greater accuracy in the
detail still is desirable, in order that the
readers may be led, as it were, by the hand,
into the intimate knowledge of what Calvin
used to call his “procedure.” Here are a few
examples : “The definition of his analogy,”
analogiae definitio, is vague; definitio is a
technical term, which could be rendered best
by “resolution” (p. 127). “A distinction be-
tween depraved lusts which secure our con-
sent, and concupiscence which tempts and
affects our hearts in such a way that it stops
in the midst of urging us to sin” is verbose
and weak; Calvin speaks of those evil de-
sires which “go as far as consent,” quae ad
consensum usque perveniunt, and of such con-
cupiscence as “tickles and affects our hearts,
yet stops in the midst of urging us,” quae sic
corda titillat et afficit, ut in medio impulsu
subsistat (p. 143). “Free will” is used either
as a translation of the technical liberum arbi-
trium — I really cannot think of a suitable
English equivalent ; but then a footnote would
be in order — or for rendering the adverb

sponte, as for instance on page 163, “there
are good motions within us by which we are
prepared of our own free will” ; in this last
instance, the reader will not realize that these
“preparations” are an important item in the
vocabulary of the Roman Catholic theologians
and polemists, which was officially adopted
by the Council of Trent in its decree on Jus-
tification. Here, again, why not a footnote?
Pp. 416, 417: “and not after the tradition,”
is the lesson of the King James version, cor-
responding to Vulg. : iuxta traditionem, and
to the Greek : Kara ryv irapabotriv. Calvin
writes : iuxta institutionem, a word of which
he is particularly fond, in the sense of “teach-
ing,” “instruction,” the equivalent of the
Greek SiSaxv. This leads me to a general
remark: it might have been a good idea to
translate the Biblical text as Calvin has it,
rather than to give the King James instead,
for the latter is misleading, and sometime
causes the commentary to appear irrelevant
or even unintelligible. The editors of the
Corpus Reformatorum had been careful to use
different types to show those passages which
had been added to the 1539 text in subse-
quent editions. But the general format of the
new series excludes such typographical de-
vices as well as footnotes, and this is most
regrettable, since what is planned as a “popu-
lar” edition would have become useful also
for scholarly purposes, at a very small addi-
tional cost.

Georges A. Barrois

Concordance to the Distinctive Greek
Text of Codex Bezae, compiled by
James D. Yoder. (=Vol. II of New
Testament Tools and Studies, edited
by Bruce M. Metzger.) E. J. Brill,
Leiden, and Wm. B. Eerdmans, Grand
Rapids, Mich., 1961. Pp. vi -f- 74 ■ $5.00.

The codex Bezae (known officially as D
or 05), named after its former owner, the
French Calvinist, Theodore Beza, is a Greek-
Latin manuscript of the Four Gospels and
Acts dating from the fifth (sixth) century
and is of great importance for the study of
the textual history of the New Testament.
According to one rumor it spent the period
of the World War II (1939-1945) at the
bottom of a college well, but it is now again

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

on view in the Cambridge (England) Uni-
versity Library, which has been its home
since 1581. It may be described as a “prob-
lem-child” which demands an answer to these
questions and many more besides. What is
the relationship of its Greek and Latin sides?
Neither is a direct translation of the other.
Why does it make additions to and para-
phrases of the text? Why does it indulge in
fancy spellings and word formations? What
is its relationship to the Syriac tradition?
What connection has it with heresy and su-
perstitious divination? (see the studies of
Rendel Harris). What significance have the
activities of the twenty odd correctors who,
according to Scrivener, worked on the manu-
script at various periods?

By reason of its vagaries D has produced
a collection of language forms of its own
not listed in the standard concordances of
Moulton and Geden or of Bruder and so are
in danger of being overlooked in study. Some
of these are referred to in Arndt and Ging-
rich’s Greek-English Lexicon, but it is use-
ful to have this record of all of them which
Professor Yoder has produced and has used
as the basis of his unpublished Th.D. dis-
sertation, “The Language of the Greek Vari-
ants of Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis,” 1958.

The term “ ‘distinctive Greek text’ covers
those words in Bezae that are not present in
the corresponding text of Westcott and Hort’s
edition of the Greek New Testament” (1881).
The definite article is excluded and, follow-
ing Moulton and Geden, the evidence for 54
and Kal is given in summary. Such a detailed
volume has to be used over a period before
it can be properly judged, but a spot-check
at various points suggests a high degree of
accuracy in the compilation and proof-read-
ing.

A book like this is not without value to the
Biblical student with Greek or to the pastor
in quest of a text. Perhaps instead of re-
churning the commentators he would find it
useful to look at some of the words here and
think of the story behind their appearance.
For example, the drjSt'a which describes the
relationship of Pilate and Herod (Lk 23:12)
is not unknown in our midst today. The rare
d\\o«5w of Lk 9:29 used of our Lord’s face
at the Transfiguration has a link with the
Greek text of Daniel. D’s form of Iscariot
(dn-A Kapvurov) has given rise to several

theories as to the meaning of this name.
k \4ppa at Mk 7 :2i we meet otherwise only
at Rev. 9:21. The wape/cros of Mt 19:9 shows
another of the many cases where a scribe has
been influenced by the parallel passage in
5 132. In the rather unusual irenn-Taios of
Ac 20:6 (after 5 days) the scribe manages
to make one word do the work of three of
the ordinary Greek text or the English. At
Ac 22 :26 D makes a third reference to em-
phasise the importance of Paul’s Roman
citizenship. Unusual proper name forms are
listed on the final page and perhaps a closer
study of these might tell us more of where
D was written.

All in all this book is no mere dry list,
but, if treated imaginatively with a New
Testament at hand, it could readily be a
working introduction for anyone who wants
to study Codex Bezae’s special phenomena.
Why not begin now in a field where facts
count for more than fancy?

Ian A. Moir

NEW COLLEGE

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

HISTORY

On the Road to Christian Unity, by
Samuel McCrea Cavert, Harper and
Brothers, New York, 1961. Pp. 192.
$3-75-

The Ecumenical Movement: What
It Is and What It Does, by Norman
Goodall, Oxford University Press, New
York, 1961. Pp. 240. $4.50.

One Great Ground of Hope: Chris-
tian Missions and Christian Unity, by
Henry P. Van Dusen, The Westminster
Press, Phila., 1961. Pp. 205. $3.95.

It may be simply a coincidence, but if so
it is surely a happy one, that three books
on the Ecumenical Movement should have
appeared in 1961, the year in which that
movement at the General Assembly of the
World Council at New Delhi, achieved a
signal degree of unification at the world level
through the merger of the International Mis-
sionary Council with the World Council of
Churches.

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

The three authors have for years been
closely identified with the Movement. Dr.
Cavert, after long service as Secretary of the
Federal Council of Churches, and then of
its successor, the National Council of Church-
es, from 1954 to 1957 was Executive Secre-
tary in the United States for the World
Council of Churches. Dr. Goodall has been
Secretary of the International Missionary
1 Council since 1944, and Secretary of the
Joint Committee of the World Council of
Churches and the International Missionary
Council, since 1946. Dr. Van Dusen, though
not a full-time official of the Movement, has
attended every major ecumenical conference
during the past crucial quarter century ; and
since 1954 he has served as Chairman of the
Joint Committee of the World Council of
Churches and the International Missionary
Council, in this capacity playing a key role
in the recently-consummated merger of these
two world Christian organizations. So all
three authors write both out of inside knowl-
1 edge of the Movement and with a deep con-
cern for its increasing usefulness in the cause
of Jesus Christ throughout the world.

As was only to be expected, each author
has his own individual approach and em-
phasis. Dr. Van Dusen emphasizes the mis-
sionary origins of the Movement, presents a
careful analysis of the various forms which
Christian reunion has taken and lays stress
on the problems concerning the Movement as
it faces the future. Dr. Cavert pays particu-
lar attention to those Christian groups, Prot-
estant, Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catho-
lic, which do not cooperate in the work of
the Movement, and seeks to explain the rea-
sons for this non-cooperation. Dr. Goodall,
while of course not ignoring the questions
with which these other authors deal, devotes
much space to the history of the Movement
and to its various organizational structures
— i.e., to what it does as well as what it is.
Despite such differences of viewpoint and
emphasis, however, all three authors deal
with the Ecumenical Movement in the same
general way. They all give an outline of its
history during the past half century, emphasiz-
ing the World Missionary Council at Edin-
burgh in 1910 as an important milestone,
and pointing to the three-fold strand — the
organization of the International Missionary
Council, the Faith and Order Movement, and

the Life and Work Movement — which finally
merged in the World Council of Churches as
it exists today.

Secondly, they all deal in some detail with
the question of the Movement’s goal — i.e.,
the kind of Christian unity which it seeks to
bring into existence. On this matter there is
no officially announced policy; but Dr. Van
Dusen makes some valuable concrete sug-
gestions concerning it.

Thirdly, all three authors concern them-
selves with the major problems which con-
front the Ecumenical Movement at present,
and which seem likely to continue to plague
it in the immediate future. There is, for ex-
ample, the question of the relation of non-
cooperating church groups to the main move-
ment. Secondly, there is the question of the
Movement’s leadership — what Dr. Van Dusen
describes as “problems implicit in the trans-
fer of leadership from the persons who so
largely guided the destinies of the Movement
in the days of its projection and early de-
velopment, to those officially designated by
the member churches for its direction” (p.
102). Again, there is the question of the role
of councils of churches — local, national, in-
ternational— within ecumenical Christianity.
Once more, there is the question of the re-
lation of world confessionalism, which has
experienced such a resurgence in the past
half century, to the interdenominational world
Movement, represented by the World Coun-
cil of Churches. And finally, but by no means
least important, there is the grave and con-
tinuing problem of establishing adequate grass
roots for this world Movement of Christian
unity at the local congregational level, where
to many church members the word ecumeni-
cal, with all that it implies, means little or
nothing.

These three books are clearly and inter-
estingly written, and therefore are eminently
readable. Among them they present a well-
rounded account of the origins, nature, pres-
ent status and future prospects of that Move-
ment of Christian unity which is one of the
most striking developments in the recent his-
tory of non-Roman Catholic Christianity.

Norman V. Hope

Freedom and Catholic Power in
Spain and Portugal, by Paul Blanshard.

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

Beacon Press, Boston, Mass., 1962. Pp.
300. $3.95.

This is an analysis by Paul Blanshard —
the well-known author of American Freedom
and Catholic Power — of the systems of gov-
ernment prevailing in the Iberian Peninsular
countries of Spain and Portugal. It is per-
fectly true, as the author is careful to note,
that these two governments differ some-
what from each other. For example, in Por-
tugal but not in Spain, there is a legal sepa-
ration between Church and State, which
means that in Portugal “the homeland con-
gregations must raise most of the money for
their own priests” (p. 221). The Roman
Catholic Church, which claims a nominal
membership of 90 per cent of the Portuguese
people, enjoys special privileges; but minority
religious groups, such as Jews and Protes-
tants, have greater freedom under Salazar
in Portugal than under Franco in Spain. In
spite of such differences, however, both
governments represent what Mr. Blanshard
rightly calls “clerical fascism.” That is to
say, in both Spain and Portugal a dictatorial
government, in alliance with the Roman
Catholic Church, has silenced and outlawed
all political opposition by main force. It has
imposed a strict censorship over all mass
media of communication, such as the press,
the radio, and even books. In the economic
realm, a paternalistic capitalism has outlawed
strikes, and denied the workers the right of
free organization, even though it has also con-
ferred on them some social benefits, such as
health services, family allowances and old
age pensions. In short, both Spain and Por-
tugal have many of the earmarks of police
states.

Mr. Blanshard does not fail to note that
both Iberian dictatorships, though accepted
resignedly by the citizenry, have run into
trouble during recent years. For example,
Portugal has had Goa forcibly annexed by
the Indian government; and riots and other
disturbances have broken out in Angola, one
of Portugal’s chief African colonies. Spain
has recently experienced a wave of strikes,
some of which have enjoyed the backing even
of certain members of the Roman Catholic
hierarchy. So it may be that time is running
out for the two aging dictators of Spain and
Portugal.

Mr. Blanshard is interested in exposing the
facts about these Iberian governments, not
merely as a reporter, but also as an Ameri-
can. For, as he rightly points out, freedom,
like peace, is indivisible ; and therefore, “in
this troubled and interdependent world no
suppression of human freedom is irrelevant
to our own future” (p. 1). But more than
that, American money, with the full approval
of the American Roman Catholic press, has
gone to shore up Franco’s dictatorship, in
payment for the right to build air bases in
Spain. Whatever value these bases may have
from a military point of view, there is little
doubt that this alliance of America with Fran-
co has gravely blurred its image as a friend
of democracy, and a foe of dictatorship. And
it may well be that, because of present Ameri-
can support for Franco, the Spanish govern-
ment which succeeds him will not be as friend-
ly to the western democracies as the United
States would like.

Some reviewers have disagreed with Mr.
Blanshard’s suggestion that the United States
should end its ties with Franco at the ear-
liest possible moment. Others have claimed
that he has not done adequate justice to cer-
tain improvements in Spain, such as higher
living standards and some relaxation of po-
lice rule. But it can be confidently asserted
that he has presented such a well documented
and objective account of the two dictatorships
that his book will be banned by their censors.
This is an additional reason why it should
be widely read in the United States of
America.

Norman V. Hope

The Protestant Search for Political
Realism, 1919-1941, by Donald B. Mey-
er. University of California Press, Ber-
keley and Los Angeles, i960. Pp. 482.
$6.75.

The Protestant quest for social justice in
the United States has been perennial. At-
tempts to understand this quest in the twen-
tieth century are comparatively new and
fresh. Recently, Paul Carter in The Decline
and Revival of the Social Gospel, 1920-1940,
and Robert M. Miller in American Protes-
tantism and Social Issues, 1919-1939, have
attempted to write histories of the period

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

dated by the passing of Walter Rauschen-
busch and the rise to influence of Reinhold
Niebuhr. Both of these social historians were
interested in the organized aspects of the
quest and stressed analysis of the denomi-
national and ecumenical pronouncements of
Protestant groups.

Donald B. Meyer, Associate Professor of
History at the University of California, Los
Angeles, supplements, indeed, makes up for
certain deficiencies, in the work of Carter
and Miller. Meyer attempts an analysis in
depth. His study is polarized around Walter
Rauschenbusch and Reinhold Niebuhr. All
other individuals and organizations are
drawn, and sometimes quartered, in relation
to these figures.

The so-called “social gospel” movement
was the climax of the Protestant “religion
of will,” according to Meyer. While it was
colored by the liberal theological ferment
of the post-civil war period it was essen-
tially the last effort of evangelical Protestant-
ism to embrace within its concern society as
a whole. In criticizing Rauschenbusch, Mey-
er maintains that he “failed to defend a cen-
ter of religious meaning prior to, in some
sense independent of, social salvation, from
invasion by society and the political.” He
failed largely because he did not define per-
sonal salvation in such a way as to include
the proper relation between man and other
men. Rauschenbusch believed that the “flow
of force” would all be in one direction, “from
the centers of prior salvation outward.” Con-
sequently, in claiming that the Christianizing
of the social order was as possible as the
Christianizing of the individual, he tended
to equate the Christianization of the social
order, the coming of the Kingdom of God,
with the Christianizing of the soul. But he
still left the individual, “with his inner unity
and composure, his sense of meaning and
integrity,” exposed to the power structures
and struggles of society. After dealing with
the tendency to the absolutize reason and
love in Harry Ward and Kirby Page, Meyer
concludes his summary of the social gospel.
It must be criticized, not because of its social
vision or its political naivete, but because of
its view of “the sanctified man, the good
man, the moral man who would moralize
immoral society.”

Then came Reinhold Niebuhr, fresh from

his exposure to the Ford revolution in De-
troit, to expose Americans to neo-orthodoxy.
Niebuhr saw man’s problem as older than
that of industrialization. The problem is as
old as man himself ; man is a sinner. The
Renaissance was right in asserting man’s
transcendence and freedom, but wrong in as-
serting confidently and optimistically the way
in which man manifests these attributes. The
Reformation was right in insisting upon
humility as the check upon pretension, re-
pentance as the center of humility, to recog-
nize the evil within oneself before the evil
outside. The fruit of humility is the capacity
to forgive ; its support is a true knowledge
of God possessed by grace, not by right. And
grace cannot be accumulated in history. In
relating all this to his discussion of social
problems Niebuhr maintained that justice did
not have to wait upon the prior salvation of
all men or righteousness within man. While
love may be the impossible possibility, it can
be approximated only between individuals.
Love gives the direction to justice, however,
which remains the potential possibility in
any given situation arising among men. In
the service of justice, power, whether rep-
resented by capital, labor, or the church, has
to be balanced by power. Thus man will be
saved from the depersonalization of an “au-
tomatic process” compounded by an “auto-
cratic management” often supported by “ab-
stractions of society.” Meyer suggests Nie-
buhr’s crisis came before and during the
Second World War when he waited for re-
pentance. Lost to perfection, open to prag-
matic dealings, he had little concrete and
familiar to offer to his fellow Americans to
fight for or to work toward after the war.
According to Meyer, the neo-liberals in-
fluenced by neo-orthodoxy — Walter Horton,
Henry Pitt Van Dusen, Robert Calhoun,
John Bennett — tried to moderate between
Niebuhr and his fellow Americans. Paul Til-
lich added a cultural dimension to relieve the
preoccupation with the political.

Meyer observes quite perceptively — but all
too briefly — that neither Rauschenbusch nor
Niebuhr, until recently, developed any help-
ful ecclesiology. However, the Church is not
the brotherhood transcending and softening
all human divisions, as among chastened lib-
erals. The Church is sacramental, according
to Niebuhr, pointing to a center and ground

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

of meaning that is not in itself, in which it
shares but which it does not possess. Founded
on need and shaped in repentance, it is the
human society which understands that no
society can realize brotherhood, even the
church. “Every society,” according to Mey-
er’s interpretation, “lives under, not toward,
the kingdom of God.” It is in the Church
that a man may wait upon God. Meyer cred-
its Niebuhr with reviving a new self-con-
sciousness within Protestantism and with its
increasing willingness to carry “great respon-
sibilities without great expectations.”

This is the book about the “social passion”
to buy and to read. To be sure, it directs
the student to a more careful consideration
of the books by Miller and Carter which
have to do with the Church. But it raises its
questions in a far more suggestive manner
than do other writers. Meyer’s style is some-
what involved; but it is helpfully allusive.
Meyer’s conceptions are not always clear,
such as, his analysis of the who’s who and
what’s what of neo-orthodoxy, the Christian’s
relation to the Church and the kingdom of
God, and the way by which Niebuhr protects
the individual who seeks after justice in con-
stant struggle any better than did early “so-
cial gospellers.” Meyer’s analysis never fails
to stimulate. He is very much concerned with
the upsurge of what he calls “economic fun-
damentalism,” e.g., Christian Economics,
which equates Christianity with laissez-faire.
And well he might be ! But he might have
expressed more interest in those men who
represent a Niebuhrian harvest, who have
accepted his political insights and who are
now in power in Washington, e.g., Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr., for whom this book was
written as a doctoral dissertation. How do
these men understand “grace” which is “be-
yond security, beyond morality, beyond trag-
edy,” and which is basis for the patient bear-
ing of sustained political responsibility?
Where and how do these men wait upon
God?

James H. Smylie

The Christians of Korea, by Samuel
H. Moffett. Friendship Press, New
York, 1962. Pp. 174. $2.95.

From the very beginning the establish-
ment and growth of the Christian church in

Korea has been one of the wonders of the
modern missionary movement. The seventy-
fifth anniversary of the founding of the church
in Korea has recently passed, and there are
more Christians in that little country than
there were in the world at the end of the first
century of the Christian era!

Of late years divisions within the church
have been a cause of great sorrow, but one
finishes the present small volume with a sense
of gratitude to God for the accomplishments
of the Gospel in Korea, which are nothing
short of being marvelous. We feel that even
more might have been made, in this review,
of the conversion of thousands of prisoners
behind barbed wire, who accepted Christ even
though they had been indoctrinated with all
that Communism had to give.

This book is written in a most attractive
style and is filled with statistics which rep-
resent up-to-date research by an expert.
Samuel Moffett was born in Korea and his
father was one of the great founders of mis-
sion work in that “Hermit Kingdom.” Many
people know the author from his former book,
Where’re the Sun, which has been one of the
most popular volumes published by Friend-
ship Press. The book under review has a
number of excellent illustrations and a book
bibliography. It is one of the textbooks to be
used by the churches in the general mission
study for this year on East Asia.

The author is remarkable in his selection
of the salient facts of the Christian movement
and combines them with information about
the country and the results of the tragic war
years, to give us a vivid picture with high
lights and deep shadows. This is certainly
a splendid book for group study and should
be read carefully by every pastor and mis-
sion leader.

J. Christy Wilson

PRACTICAL

The Search for Meaning, by A. J.
Ungersma. Westminster Press, Phila.,
1961. Pp. 188. $4.75.

The Professor of Pastoral Theology of San
Francisco Theological Seminary has given
us a sympathetic and informing summary of
the existential analysis and logotherapy of
Dr. Victor E. Frankl of Vienna. Not only

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

is Ungersma well-trained for the task, but
he went to Vienna to gain an insight into
the theory and practice of one of the most
interesting and controversial psychiatrists of
our time. The result of Ungersma’s study is
warmly favorable ; it is also a welcome intro-
duction to logotherapy based upon Frankl’s
position that the main drive in human life is
the “will to meaning.”

Frankl does not repudiate the Freudian
method, but he does believe that the “will
to pleasure” is secondary to the “will to
meaning.” Frankl bases his theory upon sci-
entific study, clinical practice and his own
bitter experience in a concentration camp.
Over against the naturalistic interpretation
of much psychotherapy, Ungersma describes
Frankl’s concern for the growth of meaning
in life as well as the person’s realization of
values and the will to act responsibly. Un-
gersma seeks to relate all this to Reinhold
Niebuhr’s, Nature and Destiny of Man, and
Pitrim Sorokin’s studies in sensate culture.

This book is significant for the Christian
since it uses the term “logos” to describe
the existential core of human life. It seeks
to bridge the chasm between religion and
psychiatry. It claims that the deepest need
of man is for a meaning which will create
initiative and responsible action.

Logotherapy may also be welcomed by some
psychoanalysts because it goes beyond the
pragmatic approach to human problems. It
seems to fill a human need. The removal of
problems is one thing; the engendering of
some will to meaning to fill the vacuum is an-
other.

On the other hand, there are psycho-
analysts who will regard logotherapy as
unscientific, and as the introduction into analy-
sis of a theological factor which is quite ex-
traneous, and even dangerous. And there are
theologians who will regard Frankl as the
champion of a rather hazy theology which
is lacking in a definitive of the meaning of
Frankl’s “meaning” !

However, it must be admitted that Frankl
is having success in his therapy. And above
all, he is causing some serious thought among
psychiatrists and religionists as to the “chief
end of man” and hence the crucial task of
those who deal with man.

E. G. Homrighausen

Doctor Songster, by Paul Sangster.
Epworth Press, London, 1962. Pp. 372.
25s.

Biographies of great preachers are rare
these days and none of us can determine
whether this is due to a scarcity of great
pulpit men or of skilful biographers. In an
age when secretarial help, press releases,
and carefully noted itineraries are the com-
mon blessing and advantage of outstanding
churchmen, it is unfortunate that so few
stirring biographies are written and that we
lack great contemporary portraits such as
those once given to us by Adamson, Barbour,
Porritt, and Allen.

Before Will Sangster died he entrusted his
son, Paul, with the responsibility of telling
his story for posterity. He left chapter head-
ings and copious notes, but the major job still
remained and what we get is happily not a
sentimental paean of filial devotion, but a
sober and objective assessment that does
honor to one of the greatest figures in Brit-
ish Methodism in this generation.

When the story of Methodism in Britain
from 1930 to i960 is written down, three
figures will stand out for reasons peculiarly
each own : Leslie D. Weatherhead, William
E. Sangster, and Donald Soper. Sangster’s
career was cut off prematurely — he was only
sixty when he died — but into those years was
crammed a career of growth, development, and
service to his denomination that make him
easily primus inter pares. Coming out of a
family of splendid spiritual devotion with an
early acquaintance with the Christian faith
in the Radnor Mission, blessed with a keen
mind and an abundance of natural gifts as
a preacher, executive, and prophetic leader,
the record of his life as set down by his son
is an inspiration to younger men, a joyful
memory to his family, and a contribution
without equal to the life of Protestantism in
post-war Britain. He was a rare combina-
tion of discipline and devotion which made
him an attractive preacher for consistent con-
gregations of 3,000 in Westminster Hall,
London, and a churchman who served in many
responsible capacities, including President of
the Methodist Conference, 1951.

Yet he continued to be also an author,
writing fifteen books in all, and publishing

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

a stream of pamphlets and tracts along with
a regular column in The Methodist Recorder.
He never let his scholarship lapse. In spite
of the constant harassments of the executive
responsibilities he carried, he never lost sight
of the glory of preaching and of the indis-
pensability of the preacher. His social con-
sciousness was sharpened and deepened dur-
ing the five long years he ministered to the
victims of the air raids in the basements and
tubes of London and some of the little vi-
gnettes and snapshots recorded by his son are
pictures of greatness. Indeed after the mess
of World War II he was one of the few
prophetic voices in Britain who tried through
a vast “machinery” of prayer cells to give
spiritual fibre to the nation and to fashion
among the irregular pieces some blueprint
for the future.

This is a lively portrait, for Will Sangster
would neither fit nor desire any other. For
those who have read his books and heard him
preach at his best, it is a memento of worthy
dimensions. If any weakness appears it is in
the lack of a more definitive review of the
age — a fateful era — during which Britain ex-
perienced a great industrial depression, a
terrible war, the rise of Labor to political
power, and a whole plethora of social and
economic revolutions, but as a tribute to a
man of great and varied capacities it is ade-
quate.

Donald Macleod

From Out of the West : Messages
from Western Pulpits, ed. by Paul Jesse
Baird. The Lantern Press, Stockton,
California, 1962. Pp. 156. $3.95.

This book is a response to a felt need. “For
many years it has been felt that the men who
fill America’s pulpits in the West were not
adequately known by the rest of the Chris-
tian Church,” so states the promotional de-
scription of this book. The result has been
the establishment of The Lantern Press to
be “a channel for publishing the message of
the Church of the West.” This initial volume
consists of a collection of sixteen sermons by
leading Presbyterian ministers in the general
geographic area of the Pacific Coast. They
are a representative group, mostly from large

churches, with a very fair distribution among
seminary backgrounds (Princeton, 6; San
Francisco, 4; McCormick, 3; Omaha, 1;
Union, N.Y., 1; Union, Richmond, 1). An
interesting feature is the inclusion of a photo-
graph of each preacher’s church, accom-
panied by data about its size and develop-
ment, and a modest biography of the preacher
himself. The contributors range from such
widely known names as Jesse Hays Baird
and Theodore A. Gill to others who although
not generally familiar yet show quality and
real capacity in sermonic art.

This is an ambitious project and we hope
that the idealism and optimism of the found-
ers will not succumb to a box office chill.
The market for volumes of discrete sermons
is not brisk, but if either the members of the
churches whose ministers are represented
here purchase copies or if the enterprise is
endowed, then the continued usefulness of
such publications will be sustained and as-
sured. Those of us who deal with sermons
in the classroom welcome it as another
worthwhile source of commendable material.

It is difficult to appraise a volume, written
by sixteen different men who have no ob-
vious subject pattern or theme structure in
mind. All one can do is to single out a few
trends. The encouraging feature is that the
sermons are generally Biblical although a
few are so in no more than a sense of accom-
modation. However, the return to Biblical
studies is just now getting to the pulpit and
therefore this criticism may be more unfair
than it is a good omen. Probably the best
and most hopeful characteristic of these ser-
mons is that the Western pulpit is critical of
itself and here appears its growing edge.
These are, all in all, good average sermons
— interesting, personal, and filled with hu-
man concern — but are more apt to tell us
more about what these preachers are doing
than what they are thinking. Are they read-
ing theology? With some exceptions their
frames of reference are more frequently nat-
ural life rather than the supernatural. Re-
garding form, their homiletical thinking needs
to be more cogent and embodied in a more
unified thrust. Harry Emerson Fosdick — as
yet without peer in the area of sermon con-
struction— was able to state the essence of
his sermon in one sentence. None of these

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

critical observations, however, are intended
to deter the Western group from going on to
equally useful projects in the general area of
the preaching and pastoral ministry.

Donald Macleod

The Christian Answer (to Life’s
Urgent Questions), by George E. Swea-
zey. Bethany Press, St. Louis, Mo.,
1962. Pp. 192. $3.50.

An earlier volume, Effective Evangelism
(Harper’s, 1953), established George Swea-
zey’s reputation as a writer and thinker of
substantial quality at a time when an arm
of the Church’s program of witness was fall-
ing victim to the operations of the hucksters.

1 Today, on the threshold of the space age,
the same author comes to us as preacher with
fifteen sermonic essays of unusual perception
and relevance. The immediate context which
prompted these pages is not indicated, but
good readers will gather that here we have
an able and sensitive minister of the Gospel
giving well thought out answers to the awk-
ward and embarrassing questions posed by
a secular age to the Christian believer. And
the messages come with attractiveness and
force because the literary style is marked
with fresh imagery, contemporary allusions,
personal situations ; and because facts are used
instead of generalities, we see constantly the
evidences of a well-informed and courageous
mind.

The contents are gathered under a series of
questions that are like the expansion of the
main divisions of a creed: How do you get
hold of religion? Where am I? Who is God?
Who is Jesus Christ? Where does the Church
fit in? How is the Bible the Word of God?
Each of these questions is examined astutely
by Dr. Sweazey who has an uncanny art of
turning them over and around in order to
see the pros and cons of every facet. His dis-
cussions sparkle with axioms (“The pure in
heart shall see God; the impure in heart do
not want to see him,” p. 30) ; his definitions
are revealing (“Sin is like an offense against
someone who deserves something better of
us,” p. 50) ; indeed some of his marginal re-
marks reveal the depth of his insights and
comprehension, e.g., his concise treatment of

the Roman Catholic Church (pp. 131, 132),
or his reflections upon theories of the Atone-
ment (p. 94). In short, here is page after
page of high and thorough thinking upon
the great tenets of our common faith.

Some may find Dr. Sweazey to be lacking
in an over-all smoothness that comes from
well-bridged transitions in literary form, but
more will be abundantly satisfied to have in-
vested in a book of addresses teeming with
ideas that have matured through careful
processes of the mind.

Donald Macleod

Proclaiming Christ Today, by W.
Norman Pittenger. Seabury Press,
Greenwich, Conn., 1962. Pp. 148. $3.50.

Here is a book on preaching, written by
an Anglican as a series of lectures for An-
glicans and from an Anglican point of view,
yet sufficiently broad in its message to have
a measure of timeliness for the Reformed
traditions. Professor Pittenger, a member of
the faculty of General Theological Seminary,
New York, has an established reputation as
a writer and scholar in his own field, Chris-
tian apologetics, and for this reason his
thoughts on preaching will be read with more
than passing interest. He writes in a clear,
sober style, and his content indicates wide
reading, not only in his own ecclesiastical
tradition but also among sources Catholic
and ecumenical.

In the course of six solid chapters, the
author covers the nature of the Gospel we
preach, the context of its proclamation, its
hearers and the obstacles to contemporary
communication, and the need for an authentic
spiritual accent in our encounter with the pat-
terns of secular thought. For an Anglican his
appreciation of the office of preaching is high,
for he sees its indispensability for the act
of worship as much as the necessity of the
latter as a context for the former. He has
something to say of real consequence regard-
ing issues that confuse and scare, many
preachers today : the cult of scientism, the
communication of neo-orthodoxy, Bultmann’s
demythologizing, miracles, the finality of the
Christian faith, and the right focus of evan-
gelistic preaching.

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

This is not a profound book, but it can be
read with profit a second time. Professors of
preaching should list it as required reading.
Parish ministers will find in it a fresh orien-
tation of their primary task — the ministry of
preaching.

Donald Macleod

GENERAL

Through the Valley of the Kwai, by
Ernest Gordon. Harper & Brothers,
New York, 1962. Pp. 257. $3.95.

One valid test for a good book is to ask
whether or not it sharpens the vision and
enlarges the sympathies of the reader. By
this standard, Ernest Gordon’s narrative of
his prison experiences along the River Kwai
during World War II is an unusually good
book. It whets one’s sensitivities to the prob-
lems and meaning of life as no book that I
have read recently.

In good epic fashion, it begins in medias
res, with Gordon lying in the morgue end
of the Death House of the Japanese prison
camp at Chungkai, Thailand. Like many a
soldier in the C.B.I. Theater, he had had his
share of diseases — malaria, beriberi, diph-
theria, amoebic dysentery. Now he had diph-
theria. A long flashback brings us up to date.
Gordon was a company commander in the
93rd Highlanders, one of the battalions that
were decimated in the bloody haul through
Malaya and over the causeway to Singapore.
From Singapore he had made his way to
Padang in Sumatra, where he and nine other
men began an escape odyssey on a fifty-foot
prahu named the Setia Berganti. The ill-
starred flight had ended several hundred
miles out in the Indian Ocean, where the
Setia Berganti was stopped by a Japanese
warship. The men had then been sent to a
succession of prison compounds, Gordon ar-
riving finally at Chungkai, near which were
being built, mostly by the labor of coolies and
P.O.W.’s, the jungle railroad and famous
bridge over the River Kwai.

The atrocities of the concentration camp
are brought freshly to mind. None of these,
however, is made to seem so terrible as the
moral and spiritual degradation of men un-
der the pressures of servitude, deprivation and

disease. All hope seems to have gone out of
life. Stealing and cheating became the norms
of behavior toward one’s own fellow sol-
diers. Whole sentences were composed in
which every word was a curse word.

But then, when the long night was at its
darkest, the prisoners at Chungkai began
to witness what Gordon calls “the miracle
by the River Kwai.” Compassion began to
return. Men who were still able to get about
and to work began to take an interest in the
sick and the dying. Gordon was carried to a
little bamboo shack of his own, where he
was daily visited by a young man who bathed
him, cleaned his sores and massaged his
paralyzed legs. Before long, he was walking
again — and ministering to others. The steal-
ing and the cheating stopped. Circulating li-
braries were started, and a jungle university
was initiated — with no records, no adminis-
tration and no salaried professors. The men
began to talk about God, and about the mean-
ing of redemption. Eventually a little chapel
was built — a church without walls, but with
a crudely fashioned altar, a bamboo cross,
and a vessel made from a tin can with a shoe
lace for a wick.

Gordon’s book is essentially about this mir-
acle. It is about the recovery of heroism
and self-respect and laughter. It is about the
rediscovery of God. The title phrase, Through
the Valley of the Kwai, is not, as I suspected
before reading the book, a play for popular
identification with Pierre Boulle’s already
famous Bridge over the River Kwai. In-
stead, it is a fitting allusion to the Twenty-
third Psalm’s “through the valley of the
shadow of death.” Many of the P.O.W.’s in
the Japanese death-camps sank even beyond
the desire to live. The miracle was that they
were brought back — first to the desire and
then to life.

Though he tries, as humbly as a Scotsman
knows how, to stay in the background through
most of the narrative, it is evident that the
miracle had a great effect upon Gordon him-
self. When the war was over, he, along with
hundreds of other Jocks and G.I.’s, entered
theological school to study for the ministry.
He is now Dean of the Chapel at Princeton
University, where he says that he witnesses
the miracle he first saw in the jungle “being
repeated daily on the campus — the miracle of

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

God at work in His world.” The final chap-
ter, in which Gordon traces the postwar his-
tories of some of the P.O.W.’s and comments
upon postwar conditions generally, is, in my
opinion, one of the best.

There are a number of minor scenes in the
book that are played out unduly. If they were
condensed and the prose were tighter, the
action would be more gripping. The reader
is almost always conscious that the author is
not a professional writer. (This is bad, but
it is also good — one comes to detest “slick-
ness” in a book of this sort.) There are
numerous inept phrasings, such as this sen-
tence: “We were slipping rapidly down the
scale of degradation.” But there is also some
good and subtle prose, as in this example :
“Flies clustered on his nose and mouth. Then
I knew that he was dead.”

There is naturally some question about the
accuracy of the reporting of certain events
and conversations after nearly two decades —
especially since Gordon has testified that his
diary was confiscated by the Japanese. Is
this really what happened and what was said,
or is it what twenty years have done to what
happened and what was said? Still, some
latitude must be permitted, as it is to any
chronicler. (One cannot help wondering
whether the misquotation of Tennyson on p.
22 was “Limey’s” or the author’s.)

But I have said that this is a good book
because it engages the sensitivities and widens
the sympathies, and it is. No reader can fail
to be impressed by the indomitable spirit of
these thousands of prisoners of war, who,
having made their descensus ad inferos, came
back to sanity and health and love, or by the
graciousness of the God whom they praised
for their return. Archibald MacLeish may
have been right when he said that “A poem
should not mean, but be.” This reviewer,
however, is always happy to come across a
book that means. Ernest Gordon’s book does.

John Killinger

Hear the Word; A Novel about Eli-
jah and Elisha, by Heinrich Zador.
McGraw-Hill, New York, 1962. Pp.
286. $4.95.

For several years now we have been com-

plaining mightily about the two-dimensional-
ism of contemporary literature. Where, we
have asked again and again, may the nu-
minous any longer be found?

Here is a book to answer that complaint.
G. Ernest Wright himself never wrote more
dynamically about the Word of the Lord
than has Heinrich Zador, the Budapest-born
music critic, author and Zionist who emi-
grated to Palestine in 1939. Here, in an
imaginative account of the prophetic minis-
tries of Elijah and Elisha, is a real attempt
to deal sensitively with the concept of “word”
as “event” — because God speaks, things hap-
pen. The German title, Die Erfiillung, ex-
presses it more graphically than the Eng-
lish.

Nor does the novel fail, because it is so
concerned with the divine, to be human. In
fact, it illustrates again the insight of the
first words of Calvin’s Institutes, that man
is known most truly when viewed in relation
to God. The portrait of Elisha as a penitent
because the Word has used him despite his
unworthiness — the climactic moment of the
novel — is especially compelling. The “infi-
nite qualitative distance” was never expressed
in better terms.

It must be admitted that there is an ap-
parent unevenness in Zador’s performance.
Some readers will doubtless feel that in try-
ing to rest his plot on both Elijah and Eli-
sha he has fallen between the stools. The
Elisha section is more fully and imagina-
tively developed than the Elijah part. Con-
sequently the last half or three-quarters of
the novel is much more absorbing than the
first.

Few writers would have the courage to
split a novel between two major characters.
But Zador is driving at something by doing
it. It is not Elijah and Elisha who get top
billing, but God! The Word, the dabar Jah-
weh, abides behind every scene as the ultimate
reality. Therefore what matter if the story
be divided among the lesser dramatis per-
sonae, who are but shadows in comparison?

Perhaps this points up the real problem
of any biblical-type narrative in our day. It
must bridge an almost unspannable gulf from
the biblical Zeitgeist to the modern. The
same was true of Thomas Mann’s Joseph
and His Brothers, the reviewers of which,

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN

as Amos Wilder has observed, were hard put
to appear oriented, because the Old Testa-
ment material is so basically counter to the
cut of the contemporary mind. Few people
are genuinely sympathetic to the idiom of
biblical thought — including the idea of “word”
as “event.”

These few, however, will appreciate Za-
dor’s novel, and the world of wonder it un-
folds. The rest — well, Kierkegaard had the
word for them when he said that there ought
to be asylums for people who are always
sane and logical.

John Killinger

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