Page 6091 – Christianity Today (2025)

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Dear Saints And Sinners:

Time was when you could count on our leading theologians to thunder forth against the seven deadly sins—pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust—in no uncertain terms. And formerly you could expect Esquire magazine to devote itself to making immorality tantalizing to all red-blooded Americans. But alas, the mop has flopped. Now many young princes of the church advise us that these deadly acts, if carried out with the right motive in the proper context, may be living demonstrations of love. And a recent issue of Esquire, using a bit of satire and feminine pulchritude, delivers a lesson in morality by calling attention to our preoccupation with a new septette of sins. Will somebody please stop the world? I want to get off!

Esquire scrutinizes “our age of realism, of psychological insight, of truth” and jocularly states, “the quaint belief that lust, pride, avarice, and all the rest of them were really ‘sinful’ passed quietly in the Sixties.” Now the seven deadly sins that sear our souls are chastity, poverty, anonymity, age, failure, ugliness, and constancy.

Esquire’s sagacity is undeniable. For surely every member of the Pepsi generation cringes at the possibility of being (1) inexperienced, (2) non-affluent, (3) uncelebrated, (4) over thirty-five, (5) unsuccessful, (6) unattractive, and (7) rooted.

But what about our theological promoters of contextual ethics? Can they afford to remain deaf to the prophetic word of this worldly journal? Dare they continue to bury their heads in the passé pages of Playboy and neglect the satirical proclamation of the “Magazine for Men”?

A voice greater than Hefner is being heard in the land. And the boys at Esquire are having a great time chuckling at all of us. Especially at those for whom none of the seven old sins is necessarily deadly or even always sinful.

Venially, EUTYCHUS III, EsQ.

Excellent Beginning

Your editorial, “Viet Nam: A Moral Dilemma” (Jan. 20), is an excellent beginning in raising for evangelicals the question of the justice of American action in Southeast Asia. You are to be commended for your clear call for biblical thinking and for your insistance that Christians cannot sit by, passively approving of the actions of their government, lest they suddenly find themselves guilty of serious violation of God’s law.

PAUL D. STEEVES

Lawrence, Kan.

For a pacifist to argue that the war in Viet Nam is illegal and unjust is ridiculous, since there can be no legal and no just wars for the pacifist. For the man whose conscience is troubled by “the undeclared war,” let him remember that the United States is fulfilling a treaty agreement approved by the Senate, and the Congress continues to vote funds to prosecute the war effort. Nobody likes the war and everybody wants it ended. If the critics of the war would spend less time criticizing U. S. involvement and spend more time working for an equitable solution—plus a little praying—it might end sooner than they think.

G. BLACKMORE

Silver Spring, Md.

It is good to see the historic Christian positions toward war raised in reference to the present war in Viet Nam. Too often we derive our ethics of whether to follow the government in a war on secular sources such as Machiavelli rather than on the basis of the Christian faith we profess.…

Would it be unpatriotic for the churches or even individuals to question the actions of the government in war? For me, the patriotic slogan, “My country right or wrong,” means that whether my country is right or wrong it is still my country and I have responsibility for seeing that it is right. When my country is wrong, even when I oppose its wrongness, then I share in its guilt. I feel that an interpretation that says I must follow my country even when it is wrong without trying to see that it be right sets my country above my allegiance to God, is idolatry, and must be rejected.

GEORGE BLAU

Decatur, Ga.

Many thanks for your thoughtful exploration of a problem which should concern every Christian American. A continuing dialogue on this issue would be appreciated.

GORDON WHITNEY

Trenton, N. J.

Christianity On Campus

Elton Trueblood’s response (Jan. 6) to the question of how he would exhort college and university students “in regard to their commitment to Christ and the opportunities for Christian penetration in the oncoming generation” is most significant.

For Christian students to pray together, to share the relevance of biblical faith to various disciplines, and to discuss and plan ways of penetrating the diverse segments of the academic community is essential if they are to mature spiritually as well as mentally. Unfortunately, many frustrated evangelical students are afraid to expose themselves to Scripture and ideas around them and choose rather to spend their college years blindly following charismatic leaders who offer a predigested program, complete with ready-made answers to all questions.…

The unstructured honesty of Christian students grappling with truth in small groups has been, and continues to be, of extreme value to both the Christian students themselves and those around them. Harvey Cox recalls in The Secular City that when he was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship “sponsored scores of student-led Bible studies, where the discussions were often hotter and more valuable than those carefully supervised by clergymen” (p. 224). During my own undergraduate years at UCLA, I “found myself” and learned practical lessons in discipleship and mission in similar groups.

DONALD G. DAVIS, JR.

Department of Special Collections

Fresno State College Library

Fresno, Calif.

Alive And Working

Please correct the erroneous statement in the Lippincott advertisement of Mal Forsberg’s newest book, Last Days on the Nile (Jan. 20, p. 18).

The Sudan Interior Mission is very much alive! In fact, we have perhaps more vital force than ever before. Dr. Forsberg’s book describes last-day missionary efforts in the southern Sudan, which does not affect the on-going work of 1,318 missionaries, actually working across the broad expanse of Africa, south of the Sahara (formerly all called “Sudan”).… It says nothing of any “tragic end to the Sudan Interior Mission.”

IAN M. HAY

North America Director

Sudan Interior Mission

Plainfield, N. J.

Injustice In Jail

I noted with great interest your small news article (Jan. 6) entitled “Turks Jail Preaching Trio.” My interest stems largely from the fact that I know two of the jailed “trio” personally; in fact one of them is my former roommate.… Since I am in direct contact with him and have received two letters from him since the inception of his recent incarceration, I feel I must correct some of the information which you have received from your government sources.

First of all, his name is not Geoffery W. Cobb but Jeffry W. Cobbe. Second, Jacquith, Magney, and he were not engaged in proselytizing activities in violation of Turkish law. Not only had the mayor of Midyat (the town where they were arrested) granted them permission to distribute their literature there, but more important, the constitution of the Turkish government guarantees such freedom of religious expression.

According to Cobbe’s correspondence with me, the local officials holding them in prison have realized they cannot legally sentence the three men. Since, however, they have noted “how little pressure the American consul is putting on them,” they intend to keep them in jail “until higher officials make them release us or we give them a bribe ($600.00 or so).” Cobbe continues, “We are beginning to see that justice here is a matter of money and not laws. Since we aren’t about to bribe any official, no matter how long we stay here, our only recourse is through you to exert force on the Turkish officials to release us. All I can say is that any resemblance to justice in their legal system is purely coincidental”.…

Third, it is not exactly true that the three imprisoned men “serve under a small American mission board.” All three are associated with the Operation Mobilization crusades of Send the Light, Inc. (with headquarters in Wyckoff, New Jersey), but each is technically on his own in his evangelistic ventures in Turkey. Moreover, Send the Light is not actually a mission board as such.

Finally, not only Magney but Jacquith and Cobbe as well have been arrested before on similar charges, Cobbe once or twice before in other parts of Turkey!

JOHN S. OLDFIELD

Senior Student

Conservative Baptist Theological

Seminary

Denver, Colo.

Read My Sermon

Your editorial, “Why Hurry a New Confession?” (Jan. 20), prompts me to send a copy of the sermon, “The Case of the Sad Advertisement,” which deals with what one of my colleagues has characterized as “This Sad Ad.”

CHRISTIANITY TODAY does no service or honor to the cause of truth in quoting, as did the advertisement, the sections of the confession on “political, social, and economic controversies” out of context. This is a particularly blatant matter when quoting out of context creates misleading and false impressions; when choice is obviously made to omit the theological basis of concern in each of these matters; and when the only phrases used in quotation are those which taken by themselves may be bound to raise questions but provide no answers.

CHARLES R. EHRHARDT

First Presbyterian

Phoenix, Ariz.

Since your editorial referred to the large advertisement of the Presbyterian Lay Committee, something can be said about its deception. Its appearance in major newspapers raises some questions about motives but also was a grief to many of us who have questioned the position of the Confession of 1967. We would have hoped for integrity from men who know Presbyterian polity and the Westminster documents. The ad raised two issues.

It states:

How far the authors would go in humanizing the Bible can be realized in this excerpt from the new Confession:

“The Scriptures, given under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, are nevertheless the words of men, conditioned by the language, thought forms, and literary fashions of the places and times in which they were written. They reflect views of life, history and the cosmos which were then current. The church, therefore, has an obligation to approach the Scriptures with literary and historical understanding.”

It seems almost deliberate to cite this to an uninformed public without giving the accompanying paragraph, which reads, “The one sufficient revelation of God is Jesus Christ, the Word of God incarnate, to whom the Holy Spirit bears unique and authoritative witness through the Holy Scriptures, which are received and obeyed as the word of God written. The Scriptures are not a witness among others, but the witness without parallel” (italics mine). We may have wished for the word “infallible” to appear somewhere in the statement, but to omit the paragraph is deceptive.…

Later in the ad, when it speaks to what the new confession has to say about the involvement of the Church in social, political, and economic issues, it tells of the “radical changes,” and then, to offer authority that the Church should not take a position, it says: “The Westminster Confession states it clearly: ‘Synods and councils are to handle or conclude nothing but that which is ecclesiastical, and are not to intermeddle with civil affairs which concern the commonwealth’” (Chap. XXXI, No. 4.) Again it seems deliberate that the sentence was not completed. This is the way it reads in the true text: “Synods and councils are to handle or conclude nothing but that which is ecclesiastical, and are not to intermeddle with civil affairs which concern the commonwealth, unless by way of humble petition in cases extraordinary; or by way of advice for satisfaction of conscience, if they be thereunto required by the civil magistrate” (italics mine).

DONALD C. IRWIN

First Presbyterian

San Diego, Calif.

• Our editorial quoted C ’67 passages cited by Presbyterian Lay Committee to support its claim that C ’67 departs from biblical infallibility and involves the institutional church in political matters. Further C ’67 quotations do not refute the Lay Committee’s contentions.—ED.

If you read Monday Morning … you may have been as amazed as I to find in the January 16 issue (p. 31) the following statement of impartiality from the “national offices” of the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A.:

Adoption or rejection of the proposal “now is in the hands of the presbyteries,” and the church’s national offices are being careful to avoid “even appearing to be attempting to influence these presbytery decisions,” he [William P. Thompson] said.

To clarify points attacked by the lay committee, a Public Relations Memorandum has been sent by the Presbyterian Office of Information to executives and stated clerks of all synods and presbyteries. Along with a statement by the Rev. Theophilus M. Taylor, secretary of the General Council, the Memorandum suggests that judicatory officials share Dr. Taylor’s analysis with pastors, continue to encourage careful consideration of the Confession of 1967 on its merits, help pastors and elders resist efforts to turn them from their studied convictions, and avoid being dragged into battle with the lay group in public news media.

My own reflection is: It is amazing how impartial you can be, when you have an Office of Information to push the official line and argue the case for you in “all synods and presbyteries.”

DONALD C. SMITH

First Presbyterian

Levittown, Pa.

Which Evangelicals?

You seem to make some statements for evangelicals which tend to represent only the (many) evangelicals who are in agreement with you.

Your discussions of the NCC usually find the NCC or “those committed to ecumenism” on the one side and the “evangelical Christians” on the opposite side in a strict they-we dichotomy. We evangelicals who belong to denominations which are a part of the NCC and who are heartily appreciative of the opportunities which this ecumenical setting provides are confused as to where we are supposed to fit.

We feel even less represented when you speak of the evangelical position on social action. For example, despite your denials, we advocate church support and recommendation of specific legislative programs; and we feel that socialism can be a Christian philosophy.

STEPHEN MOTT

Somerville, Mass.

Not Guilty

I should not have replied to Rabbi Solomon S. Bernards’s letter (Jan. 20) in which he accuses me of “distortions” and “misrepresentations” of facts; but since he represents the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith, which is considered by Jews and non-Jews the most powerful and influential organization of American Jewry, I feel obliged to reply.…

Contrary to his … interpretation of my article, I merely stated in it how Christians could proclaim the Gospel to Jews without offending them. I emphasized that a Jew should not be required to leave his people or any of his customs when he accepts Christ as his Messiah. He may remain within the Jewish fold (if he is not expelled) just as various other dissenters (Reformists, atheists, and so on) remain “Jewish.”

Contrary to the A.D.L. rabbi’s accusation, I have always firmly believed in the indestructibility of the Jewish people. I am the editor of a paper called The Everlasting Nation. Like all true followers of Christ, I believe that the Jews are an Am Olam (an everlasting people), who, as stated in God’s Word, are to be a holy people, a kingdom of priests, a light unto all nations, and a blessing to the whole world.

JACOB GARTENHAUS

Atlanta, Ga.

Many Jews have looked for long years for the coming of their Messiah as foretold in Old Testament Scriptures. Will they be less than Jews when he comes and they receive him?

MARIE STRACHAN

Santa Barbara, Calif.

In Praise Of The Principles

I have read “Evangelical Principles and Practices,” by Gordon Harman (Jan. 6), several times, and each time I rejoiced in my heart at the straightforward manner in which the writer set forth such wonderful truths. I agree 100 per cent with all he has written and shall look forward with keen interest to the second part.

CHARLES R. BEITTEL

Pastor Emeritus

Otterbein Evangelical United

Brethren Church

Harrisburg, Pa.

I think one point needs clarification. He said, “Evangelicals in all the main Protestant denominations have been celebrating Holy Communion with one another at interdenominational activities ever since the Reformation.” Well, if Scripture would authorize such a practice, it would authorize the performance of baptisms in the same context.

The truth is, the ascended Christ left a legacy, not of loose interdenominational activities, no matter how useful we may consider them today, not a youth organization, not men’s, not women’s, not even Bible societies—but a church. But the problem is, Christian people when they get together, instinctively wish to observe the Lord’s Supper. This instinct is right. The vehicle chosen may be incorrect.

EDWARDS E. ELLIOTT

Garden Grove Orthodox Presbyterian

Garden Grove, Calif.

The Most Important

CHRISTIANITY TODAY is certainly the most important magazine we receive, and has been a great help.…

MRS. R. S. SEDZIOL

Cincinnati, Ohio

L. Nelson Bell

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It is not easy to be honest with God. Rarely do any of us face up to actualities when we pray. But whom do we think we are fooling? Either we think God is very obtuse or else we presume upon his grace and mercy and salve our consciences with the feeling that he does not know or does not care.

We may try to sweep our sins under the rug, assume a hypocritical air of innocence, and go our own willful way. But God sees no rug, only the unconfessed and unrepented sins that form a barrier between us and him. These sins may be sins of the spirit (such as unbelief, pride, jealousy, envy, censoriousness) or of the flesh (such as lust, intemperance, love of money, dishonesty).

Failure to be honest with God is a continuing source of unhappiness, frustration, and ineffectiveness as Christians. On the other hand, complete honesty in confessing all sins, whether they be of thought, word, or deed, brings peace of mind and spirit and is the first step to a life of usefulness as a Christian.

Psalm 139 tells us that God knows our every thought and motive. “Even before a word is on my tongue, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether” (v. 4, RSV). There is no place to which we can flee and escape God. The darkness cannot cover us: “even darkness is not dark to thee, the night is as bright as the day; for darkness is as light with thee” (v. 12).

Little wonder that David ends this psalm, “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!” (vv. 23, 24).

Our unwillingness to be honest with God may stem from our failure to realize his all-seeing eye. “Before him no creature is hidden, but all are open and laid bare to the eyes of him with whom we have to do” (Heb. 4:13). Is this a frightening thought? Far from it. It is comforting to know that God, who knows and sees into the depths of our hearts, sees our feeble aspirations for righteousness and meets them with his own loving concern and help.

David knew well the difference between being honest with God and trying to hide his sins. When he prayed, “Clear thou me from hidden faults” (Ps. 19:12b), he was admitting the tendency to think that things done in secret are unknown to God. In Psalm 32 he tells of the anguish of soul he suffered when he did not confess his sins and the joy and peace that came with honest confession.

Christian Neutralism

The first and main document in the World Council of Churches’ Conference on Church and Society is entitled “Economic Development in a World Perspective.”

The introduction brands as “a scandal and an offense to God and men” the existing imbalance between rich and poor countries.

In a section dealing with the changing economic and social pattern of the advanced countries, the Conference summarizes “three types” of economic policy:

… There are those who argue for the moral virtues of the market economy (because of its impartiality, its treatment of everyone as equal in status), and the importance of freedom of individual choice and of economic incentives in the making of decisions which will lead to development. They are suspicious of government intervention, doubt the usefulness of detailed forecastings, and rely on short-term controls to ensure a steady rate of growth. They emphasize the use of the price system to allocate resources for growth, and are suspicious of efforts to adjust income levels by manipulating prices.…

Others hold that, in the 20th century, the welfare state and a mixed economy are the essential means for furthering desired social objectives and the most rapid growth. While recognizing that free enterprise has its proper place, and that the price system is the best mechanism in many situations, they stress that in other situations the price system does not work, and government action is more effective than free enterprise. They see a role for nationalized planning. They stress the need for overall control of investment by whatever means are most suitable. They see a place for framework plans outlining a future path for private industry. They tend to decide between government and private enterprise planning on pragmatic grounds, though some would have a bias in favor of government action.

Still others hold that economic life is best organized in a single centrally planned economy, with no private ownership of the means of production, though with some freedom of consumer choice and occupation. Even though economic incentives are used, resources are allocated according to a central plan and there is a state monopoly of international trade. In recent years, there has been more interest among those who advocate this view in the use of prices and profit incentives within the framework of a centrally planned economy. Some who advocate this type of organization believe it will not come about without revolutionary overthrow of the existing order, whether violent or non-violent. They believe that only a society of this kind can achieve a maximum rate of growth, can distribute widely the benefits of growth, and can assist the successful development of poor societies.

Having more or less described capitalism, socialism and communism without courage to name names or call spades, the World Council of Churches then goes on to bless all three with the statement that they “have shown themselves capable of rapid economic growth and wide distribution of income.”

Not a single word in the Conference document reflects the fact that the Soviet Union and other nations with centrally planned economies have been unable to produce a self-sustaining agriculture, have been forced to adopt some profit and price incentives to rescue their bankrupt economies, and have been unable to develop wide enough distribution of income to permit consumers any but the narrowest choice of goods and services. Not a single line in the document contrasts the low productivity of welfare state economies to the high productivity of the private enterprise ones. Moreover, not a single line refers to the present stagnation of the centrally planned economies which are falling further and further behind the advancing economies of West European nations, to say nothing of Japan and the United States.

The World Council of Churches’ report on economic development in a world perspective states flatly that all three economic systems—free enterprise, welfare state and centrally planned—can be supported by Christians “not as ends in themselves” but to achieve “ends for which men were made. The role of Christians is to be critical participants in the societies in which they find themselves.”

How can Christians be critical participants in anti-Christian Communist societies that forbid criticism? Russian Orthodox Archbishop Alexei, who resides in Moscow, would not have been able to help govern the Conference in Geneva as one of its presidents had he dared to be critical of the Red regime in the USSR. The price of his Christian participation in that society is his absolute obedience to and acquiescence in its tyranny.

Though the World Council of Churches’ report on economic development is replete with lofty humanitarian concepts and most idealistic exhortations, it also is full of ill-founded slogans and clichés, many without the slightest foundation in fact. Thus the report contains such sweeping assertions as, “Mechanization has meant lighter work, but it has also brought with it monotony, boredom and frequently a form of organization in which employees can have little sense of responsibility for or real interest in their work.”

With all due respect, this is pure bunk. Is a laborer picking cotton by hand less bored than one operating a cotton-picking machine? Is a woman sewing a fine seam by hand less bored than one operating a sewing machine?

It is a modern Liberal myth, indeed a Leftwing anti-business intellectual superstition, that a man or woman who operates a machine to earn his or her living turns into a machine.

In a free society—and how can a Christian conscientiously support any other?—no machine can turn a human being into a soulless, heartless, conscienceless robot. The biological law of the differentiation of the species guarantees individual reaction to similar circumstances, and certainly this law must be counted among the greatest of God’s gifts to mankind, though it is consistently disregarded by the disciples of Karl Marx. Happily, the fact that no two blades of grass, no two petals of flowers and no two thumbprints of human beings are alike is what spells doom to Marx’ concept of an egalitarian scientific society.

Christian Taxation

The transfer of capital from rich nations to poor ones is the World Council of Churches’ main concern in the report on economic development. The Council’s aim is set forth as follows:

One hopeful sign of our times is the growing sense of international responsibility for assisting in the development of the economically less advanced nations. External aid is most helpful when it serves as a catalyst for internal efforts, is related to the mainstream of a nation’s development strategy, and is directed toward its longterm rather than its short-term growth needs.

Unfortunately the level of government contributions has only rarely been determined in consultation with the receiver. These contributions, even to international agencies, are voluntary, short-term commitments. However, the transfer of capital and skill through governmental channels must be considered as a longterm process, and more formal, medium or longterm arrangements and commitments are becoming increasingly necessary for the efficient operation of these agencies and the carrying out of development programs.

What is the World Council of Churches aiming at?

The answer lies in the conclusion to the foregoing argument for longterm transfer of capital. “Eventually,” declares the Council’s Conference report, “these may lead to an ‘international budget’ and ‘international taxation.’”

Such a budget and such a system of taxation could be accomplished only under a system of World Socialism in which the Marxian doctrine “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” would be supreme.

Inevitably, then, the World Council of Churches’ report on economic development stresses “the key role of the state and the public sector” in the process. The Council calls for “gradual imposition of supranational approaches upon national efforts.” It also adopts the anti-capitalist doctrine, “The fundamental problem [in the transfer of capital from rich to poor nations] is that the goal of the businessmen—to make profits—sometimes conflicts with the goal of governments—to increase the social product and to distribute it equitably.”

Purporting to be a Christian document, it fails to point out many of the principal reasons for poverty in many lands—for example, polygamy, the worship of sacred cows and monkeys, the ban on eating pork and the husbandry of plant-destroying, desert-creating goats, the practice of tribal blood rites—and places basic blame on the modern businessman’s legitimate, constructive and truly useful search for profits essential to capital savings and investment.

Through three dozen pages, the Conference report on economic development moves slowly but surely toward a radical goal, taking utmost care to avoid those words and phrases which might shock an American reader believing in the free system that has made our nation into a fountainhead of benefactions to needy humanity, and might cause such a reader to reject the report as thoroughly alien. Finally, after lengthy persuasive pontification, the report lists a series of recommendations closely resembling the old Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist plan for One Socialist World, the plan that was eventually proposed to the United Nations in the Havana Charter of 1947, but was wholly rejected by Congress and President Truman, the plan that still later was presented at the United Nations in 1951 under the name “SUNFED” (Special United Nations Fund for Economic Development) and was again rejected by Congress.

Anyone familiar with the Havana Charter, the SUNFED scheme, and Gunnar Myrdal’s “An International Economy” will recognize the almost complete similarity between these documents and the World Council of Churches’ report on economic development.

It calls for grants instead of loans by rich nations to poor ones and for “rationalization of distribution … under the auspices of the United Nations.” (Italics in original.) The report calls for “elimination of the adverse effects of price fluctation and terms of trade” and also “the establishment of world commodity marketing boards.”

Christian Deportation

The 1966 Conference report then calls for measures that beggar the imagination in trying to conceive of the resulting injustice, suffering and horror, all amounting to a hell paved with good intentions that would exceed in tortures even the grimmest fantasies in Dante’s “Inferno.”

Obviously believing that a desired end justifies any means, the Conference report proposes:

the deliberate transfer of non-capital and non-technical intensive industries to countries with insufficient capital but abundant man power, and the acceptance of the problems involved in the fundamental restructuring of economies in the developed countries which that entails.

At this point, it must be remembered that a few years ago some Latin American socialists at the United Nations Economic and Social Council actually proposed that the United States get out of the textile manufacturing business so that Central and Latin American countries could have a Western Hemisphere monopoly of it! What would be the fate of thousands upon thousands of U. S. textile workers was of no concern to the socialist planners eager to help the economic development of backward Latin nations.

The Latins’ plan was relatively innocuous, however, when compared with that of the World Council of Churches. Its 1966 Conference report declares:

The fundamental restructuring of the world economy necessarily implies temporary dislocation and possible suffering for a large number of people. The first task of the churches in this situation is to speak to the government or power structure responsible and to insist that prior measures be taken to prevent or at least to minimize and alleviate the difficulties which individuals and groups may have to face. Only after every preventive measure has been taken should the Church prepare people to accept and overcome these problems and impart the vision of a wider world order for which restructuring is a necessary preliminary.

Whew! It is necessary to pause and take a deep breath before launching into horrified analysis of what the foregoing really means.

It is not an exaggeration to say that nuclear war could not inflict greater suffering on people than the mass restructuring of the world economy, with mass transport of populations and mass transfer of non-capital and non-technical industries from the developed nations to the backward nations with insufficient capital and over-population.

Evidently the World Council of Churches—professing to be Christian—has adopted the cold-blooded, blood-curdling cynicism of “humanitarian” Swedish socialist Gunnar Myrdal who called for redistribution of land (land reform) in India and other underdeveloped nations even though “It will almost always reduce temporarily the marketable surplus of agriculture, and it is easy to imagine cases where sheer starvation in the towns may be the result.” (“An International Economy,” page 183.)

How many millions of people would be dislocated, ruined, enslaved, tortured and murdered under a World Council of Churches’ plan to restructure the world economy, and to redistribute wealth among nations by arbitrarily allocating the right to engage in this or that kind of industrial manufacture? Will it be as many millions as those who perished in the Bolshevik collectivization of agriculture in Russia or in the establishment of the Red Chinese communes? Was any past crime committed in the name of Christianity during the darkest ages of history of greater magnitude than that contemplated in the World Council of Churches’ “Christian” document? Does the organization really believe that millions of employed workers in developed countries will supinely accept abandonment of their industries in favor of poverty-stricken peoples in backward lands, while wage earners in advanced nations furnish the backward ones with the capital and know-how to establish these industries on faraway continents?

How could the Church “prepare” people in advanced nations for such suffering?

The World Council of Churches’ document envisages preparation for such enslavement as establishment of “an ethic of altruism and justice which will make these measures intelligible.” The document goes on to state, “In the developed countries this would involve active support by the churches of such specific measures as severance pay, industrial retraining, higher unemployment benefits and mobility subsidies.”

Could any advanced economy endure such stress?

Can one really believe that a Swiss worker in an embroidery factory, a Belgian worker in a lace factory, a New England worker in a cotton textile factory, or French or Italian worker in a vineyard could be persuaded by the Church to forfeit his means of livelihood so that it could be taken over by an African worker in Somalia, a Latin worker in Guatemala, an Arab worker in Algeria, a Bantu worker in South Africa, a Buddhist worker in Laos?

Christian Dictatorship

To effect such redistribution and restructuring of the advanced nations’ economies in favor of the backward ones, there would be only one possible way—total enslavement of populations in advanced and backward nations. For this there would be required a World Dictatorship and the reality was recognized by the World Council of Churches which called for a “World Economic Plan” for “the ultimate aim: an international division of labor …”

To help bring about such totalitarianism, the 1966 Conference report on economic development calls for replacing the present forms of aid by the rich nations to the poor ones “by a system of international taxation.”

Since by far the greatest part of such aid is now rendered by the United States, the heaviest burden of international taxation would fall on Americans.

To obtain this, the World Council of Churches calls for “church participation in political education” in order “to produce the political will for a world economic and social order compatible with Christian conscience.” The Council’s 1966 Conference also calls for “social education designed to help society understand and accept the costs of world economic development.”

In total disregard of the United States Constitution, the American participants in the Council’s Conference in Geneva supported without evident dissent or formal protest the participants’ recommendation that “the Church” urge governments “to introduce economic, political and social education into national school systems” for support of the Council-proposed measures, including “a diminution of national sovereignty.”

If all this is not a call for world socialism, then what is it? The fact that it is made by a handful of “Christians” in the name of “God” is characteristic of the moral decline of the West, of its fall into the bottomless pit of revolutionary nihilism of the kind that gave rise to Stalinism and Hitlerism, and made the Fifth Column a satanic force more potent and injurious than a nuclear bomb.

The Whited Sepulchre

It seems that what the World Council of Churches proposes in its World Economic Plan is a world-whited sepulchre full of dead men’s bones. Not surprisingly, therefore, the Council sanctions violence and civil disobedience in its second Conference document on “The Nature and Function of the State in a Revolutionary Age.”

The sanctioning of violence and civil disobedience is preceded by a lengthy philosophical discussion of the nature of power and its exercise by the state. The basic fault in the discussion—from the truly Christian point of view—is that it fails to differentiate between Caesar and God and thus renders unto Caesar that which belongs to God, and renders unto God that which belongs to Caesar.

In discussing the nature of power and the State, especially in developed countries, the document states:

Power, as the capacity to get things done, is essential to any person or society. As Christians we believe that it originates in God, that human power is part of the dominion God has granted man. Like all God’s gifts, it is subject to misuse. The Christian concern is that all human power be used to benefit man rather than to abuse or betray him.…

Technology increases concentrations of power in large, intricate organizations. The state has a moral responsibility for initiating and directing the uses of power, for supervising the sharing of power, for keeping the use of power responsible, for relating the power of any given society to that of other societies.

As we examine the operations of power within the state, we discover that the actual functioning of power may be far different from the formal allocation of power, e.g., constitutions and laws are not always accurate guides to the centers of power in a society. Legal rights may be effectively denied to those who lack the economic means for their exercise. In seeking a responsible society, we need to discover the operations of power, unveil the hidden centers of power, and hold all power accountable to men and God.…

In the foregoing, it must be noted that nothing is said about the effective denial of legal rights to those who lack political means for their exercise in Communist-dominated nations where The State is judge, jury and prosecutor.

It is a logical consequence of this omission, therefore, that the very next paragraphs in the World Council of Churches’ document set forth an entirely neutral position in discussing “The exercise of power by the state.” These paragraphs are characteristic of a moral relativism now confusing all the basic issues confronting congregations of Christians delegating responsibility to a small group of representatives at international conferences. The paragraphs state:

We have asked ourselves the question, “Should the state be the only repository of power?” and we have found that the answer is no.… Christians and their fellow men may honor and respect the state, but they cannot give it the ultimate allegiance that is due to God alone.

But beyond this agreement, we find major differences among ourselves. Some of us regard the state as only one instrument of society—a unique instrument having some jurisdiction over all people and all other organizations, but still one institution among others. Those holding this conviction emphasize the importance of diversity of sources of power within society, and of a system of checks and balances.

Others among us give the state a more encompassing role. They see the state as the effective organ of community as against the dangers of excessive individualism, and they regard the nationalizing of the means of production in the framework of central planning as a basis for responsible participation of citizens in political life.

Are the imprisoned poets in the Soviet Union guilty of excessive individualism? Is Cardinal Mindszenty guilty of it? Ah—let us weep for Dr. Zhivago! Was the musical genius Serge Prokofiev guilty of excessive individualism and deservedly forced to make public apology for his deviation from the Communist Party line by writing his great symphony on the tragedy and spirit of man?

Come The Revolution

It is natural, then, that the World Council of Churches regards the changing relationship between “state and law” as a “dialectical process moving from improvement to improvement and simultaneously from error to error” and that “Revolutionary action needs law to keep open the path to further change.”

It is entirely natural, too, that the participants in the World Council of Churches’ 1966 Conference on Church and Society in Geneva, Switzerland, raised the question, “What is the Christian attitude towards the ‘law of revolution’ which is conceived by revolution itself?” The Conference also asks, “What are the criteria for an acceptable ‘law of revolution’?” and then says that Christians may exercise their influence on the “law of revolution” that it may not be misused against the principles of human rights. But though there is frequent reference to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there is nowhere reference to individual property rights or any condemnation of “revolutionary law” as it has been applied by Fidel Castro and other dictators to justify firing squad executions and expropriations of private property and investments without adequate compensation.

Categorically, the World Council of Churches’ Conference on Church and Society rejected the concept that it is enough for Christians “to seek to save souls and improve individual characters on the assumption that good people will produce good government.” Declaring that Christians must be concerned “for the structures of society” as well as for the moral qualities of individuals, the Conference declared it is “imperative” that Christian involvement in politics “become conscious” and active. There is no reason, states the Conference, “why ministers of the Gospel should not play an active political role, although certain church and civil laws limit them.”

Evidently the participants in the Conference do not regard these church and civil laws as insurmountable barriers to ministers’ political action. The Conference document recognizes there are “special issues of Christian participation” and goes on to state:

Political involvement at times confronts Christians with especially difficult issues such as the use of constitutional or extra-constitutional methods of political action, the use of violent or non-violent action, and the rights of minorities or other oppressed groups within the life of a nation.

From this, inevitably, proceeds the following Conference statement:

… In many cases where legislation violates an acceptable constitution, and no speedy means of legal relief are available, the Christian may be called to civic disobedience (sit-down strikes, passive disobedience or deliberate violation of laws). In cases in which the constitution itself is inadequate, the Christian is called to work for its amendment in the interest of firmer guarantees of human rights. Where such changes are impossible, the Christian may come to the conclusion that he has no alternative but to violate the constitution in order to make possible a better one.… We understand that laws may be defied in the defense of the constitution, and that the constitution may be defied in defense of human rights.

Is it any wonder that law and order are breaking down in Western society in general and in the United States in particular? How can laws be defied in defense of a constitution?

Proceeding from relativism to confusion, then to anarchism and nihilism, the Conference document argues that the question often emerges today “whether the violence which sheds blood in planned revolutions may not be a lesser evil than the violence which, though bloodless, condemns whole populations to perennial despair.”

The Conference next declares that the state “has the function of serving all its citizens. This includes the obligation to make provision for free discussion and criticism. We recognize the desirability of different political structures and institutions in varied situations and stages of development, all subject to the same will and purpose of God.”

There is no mention in all the foregoing argument of free elections though lack of them in socialist nations dooms whole populations to despair.

The second World Council of Churches’ Document in the 1966 Geneva Conference on Church and Society ends with a prayer “for the daring faith that obeys God as he leads us out of our old securities into new ventures.”

There is no explanation of what are the old securities. With a World Economic System as the point of destination, Christians are urged to set sail in a Sea of Change with a non-directional compass and revolutionary law for a rudder.

Revolution For Peace

The third document issued by the World Council of Churches’ 1966 conference in Geneva is entitled “Structures of International Cooperation—Living Together in Peace in a Pluralistic World Society.” It is a modern gospel for revolution and declares:

… the function of the state in God’s purpose is to provide, if necessary by lawful coercion, that order which enables men to live in peace and justice with one another. Human experience as well as Holy Scripture shows us that the power of laws is required to compel man to respect the rights of others. While this remains true in our day, many circumstances in the modern world force men to revolution against an unjust established order.

There is no satisfactory explanation of what are the present day circumstances that “force men to revolution.” There is only the sweeping assertion that this is so, and there is no censure of professional anarchists and agitators seeking to foment revolution in even the most prosperous and advanced societies.

In the Conference documents, one generalization follows another in almost unending sequence. Thus there is the unequivocal statement, “war between states results from the present disorganized and unjust political and economic conditions of international society.…”

To ensure peace, social justice, prosperity for all, the equality of men, to decrease tensions and increase cooperation, the Conference proposes “a supranational authority” over “the two major nuclear powers” and calls for the elimination of international trade conducted according to market rules in order to free all people from hunger, misery and poverty. Just how international trade conducted without market rules will accomplish Utopia is not explained, but the over-all implication is that socialism will solve all human problems.

The World Bank is severely criticized, for example, for being “more concerned with monetary stability than with growth” in the relationship of developed to underdeveloped nations. Yet monetary instability is one of the greatest deterrents to growth in any nation.

The World Council of Churches’ Conference not only recognized the “revolutionary mood” of the most active and influential groups in the “Third World” (meaning Asia, Africa and Latin America) but also endorsed these groups’ impatience with any kind of development that is not “rapid.” Such rapid change must be achieved—so the Conference says—“if necessary, by violence.”

What should Christians do?

Let heads roll. Then help mop up the blood.

Here is the “Christian” proposal:

No generally valid over-all prescription can be given for the ways in which changes in the organization of political and economic power in developing nations should occur and how Christians should respond to such changes.…

There are, however, at least two generalizations which can be made about the approach of Christians to the reorganization of the structures of power in the “Third World.” One is that wherever small elites rule at the expense of the Welfare of the majority, political change toward achieving a more just order as quickly as possible should be actively promoted and supported by Christians. The second is that, in cases where such changes are needed, the use by Christians of revolutionary methods—by which is meant violent overthrow of an existing political order—cannot be excluded a priori. For in such cases, it may very well be that the use of violent methods is the only recourse of those who wish to avoid prolongation of the vast covert violence which the existing order involves. But Christians should think of the day after the revolution, when justice must be established by clear minds and in good conscience. There is no virtue in violence itself, but only in what will come after it. In some instances significant changes have been made by non-violent means, and Christians must develop greater skill and wisdom in using these.

The remainder of the third Conference document is a plea for world disarmament under supranational control and for the settlement of international conflicts. There is a plea for peace in Vietnam and the statement, “the massive and growing American military presence in Vietnam and the long continued bombing of villages in the South and of targets a few miles from cities in the North cannot be justified.”

The Conference also calls for the admission of Red China to the United Nations and declares, “The United Nations is the best structure now available through which to pursue the goals of international peace and justice.”

Radicalism For Youth

The World Council of Churches’ Conference on Church and Society entitled its fourth and final major document, “Man and Community in Changing Societies.”

The emphasis in this document is on social change created by modern technology that is “radically new in history.” In accordance with the currently fashionable way of regarding technology as changing the relation between man and nature, the forms of human relationships and of social structure, the Conference document calls for accommodation to change in secular society, and for a Christian faith promoting a unity of mankind “which transcends political and economic factors.” All the contemporary fashionable theories about men, women, children, families and sexual relations are taken into account with avant garde sociological interpretation. Everything is put into question, viz., “In affluent societies the transferal to other institutions of many functions of the family, and the increasing interest in (as well as experience of) emotional and sexual attachment outside marriage raise the question of whether the family does or does not have an important role in society and in social change.”

Perish the thought that the Church should hold any but the most advanced views on contraceptives, sterilization, unmarried mothers, divorce, and all existing “value systems.”

Perhaps the entire document can best be characterized by the following two quotations:

• “The danger of integrating young people in existing structures is that the need for radical change will thus be covered up.”

• “The concept of authority has to be rethought.… Honest sharing of doubts and uncertainties by both adults and youth is a first requirement here. All this we shall have to learn together. It calls for renewal and continuity of education of those who traditionally held [sic!] positions of unquestioned authority—parents, teachers, ministers. It also calls for a careful scrutiny of what theology and, primarily, the Bible has to teach us. In a courageous and imaginative approach to authority, the Church could experiment for the whole of society.”

Why should the Church become transformed into an experimental institution?

“The problem of the contemporary structure of the Church,” declares the Conference document, “is that it was devised for a past form of society, which was static, generally agrarian, and religiously conformist.”

Was society ever static?

The whole history of mankind refutes such a concept. Has the Church been static? Of course not. But the Christian ethic, let us pray, was permanent.

How can the contemporary structure of the Church become suitable for present and future forms of society?

The answer given by the World Council of Churches’ 1966 Conference on Church and Society is that the churches, “in all forms of mission and ministry,” must make full and effective use “of the insights and data of the social and behavioural sciences.”

Are these insights and data truly scientific or are they merely empirical deductions and interpretations?

St. Paul gave the answer:

O, Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and opposition of science falsely so called.

Which some professing have erred concerning the faith. Grace be with thee. Amen.

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Every Christian faculty member on a state university campus is well aware of the number of students who, coming from backgrounds in which the fundamentals of the Christian faith have been stressed, yet find themselves quite at sea in the swirling currents of intellectual give-and-take on the campus. They cannot distinguish between fact and opinion, between problems peculiar to the Christian and problems for which nobody has a ready answer. I have on my desk at the moment the papers of such a young student. He has come from an obviously Christian home and has now discovered the wider world of the mind. Caught between conflicting currents, he is drawn toward psychology, sociology, and philosophy. But he is improperly equipped and is even foundering in his academic progress by neglecting his mathematics, English, and history for these other new enticements. No doubt there is stormy concern back home about this young man’s faith while all this is going on.

The coin has another side. When I was a young seminary student, I was appalled to hear an area secretary of the Sudan Interior Mission say that the mission would no longer accept as candidates those graduates of Bible schools and other Christian institutions who had not taken some of their work on a secular campus. I have since learned firsthand that there is such a thing as intellectual give-and-take on the mission field and that Europeans, Americans, and Russians are exporting psychology, sociology, philosophy, political theory, and above all a tough-minded practical atheism, right along with their dollars, direction, and detergent.

Many pastors at home know this situation well also. They find their congregations very much caught up in a world whose convoluted stresses and strains produce many complex concerns that must be cleared away before the pastor can get to the underlying issues of sin, righteousness, and judgment. And although academicians are supposed to reside in ivory towers, we all are aware of the stress of intellectual confrontation with systems of thought that are no closer to evangelical Christianity today than they were when Christ stood below Pilate at the steps of the Praetorium.

Why not devise a plan in which evangelical students could receive their training right in the midst of that distillation of the world—its drives, its problems, and its proposed solutions—that is the modern university? Certainly higher education has recently undergone some changes that lend support to the suggestion. One Christian university is imaginable; indeed, it is more than that, in view of the need for dedicated and able Christians in positions of leadership. But how can we think of providing the plants, facilities, libraries, teachers, salaries, and retirement plans necessary to meet the competition when we must think of a large number of Christian institutions?

One of the new breezes in Academia is decentralization, which is picking up speed on many state university campuses. Michigan State has residential units that include classrooms and faculty offices. The Santa Cruz campus of the University of California is designed wholly along this line. The University of Michigan seems ready to bet some $14 million on the idea. And there are many others. Perhaps the eagerness of university administrators to have a separately financed, adequately designed and administered college on or near the campus may outrun that of many evangelicals to provide it. What could the university lose with an adjunct that provided housing, scholarship support, special counseling, and good students?

I propose, therefore, that a separately administered college be established on or near a major university. It should have a residence hall housing some 500 to 700 students. (This number is suggested in view of building and maintenance costs.) The college should offer facilities for instruction and counseling, recreation, and dining.

The essence of the program should be special counseling for academic performance and for the special interests and problems of Christian young people. There would also be certain courses for these students, who would be regularly enrolled in the university and pursue their major studies there. These two might be combined as follows:

1. First year. First semester: one hour per week of counseling. This weekly meeting of the student and a staff member could deal with adequate performance in university courses, with direct help for problems; with the student’s theological outlook and related questions that arise in connection with his studies; and with the student’s long-run purposes in acquiring a college education. Information about possible majors and their relation to Christian service, and the challenge of Christian service in relation to pastoral work, missions, secular careers, personal testimony—all this should be thoroughly aired in individual sessions with a person of faculty status and mature insight. The second semester could be given over to tutorial sessions, an hour per week, for which the student would prepare papers on topics related to his major interests and their involvement with his obligations as a Christian. After written criticism of the papers, each should be redone and then form the basis for a formal meeting with the tutor. These sessions should be academically impeccable as well as theologically sound. They should be a great help with the student’s other work on campus, since they would demand integration of specific areas of study with each other and with the student’s developing world-view. They would also provide explicit help with what is usually a great problem for university students: getting sufficient instruction and practice in written and oral communication.

2. Second year. A three-credit course, both semesters, on the history of evangelical Christianity. Presumably, university credit could be secured for this course, if there were adequate staffing and sufficiently cordial relations with whatever is present on campus in the way of a religion department.

3. Third year. A three-credit course, again for both semesters, that in my view ought to be the most significant single offering of the program. It would concern the relation between evangelical theology and the modern world. It ought to take up in turn the issues of the modern world and the evangelical view on those issues. Although it would be directed by one man, the course should include a wide range of visiting lecturers who could present their own special interests within this framework. The course might well use lectures plus structured discussion, individual research, and writing.

4. Fourth year. A three-credit proseminar for two semesters on the general subject of Christianity and the student’s own field of major interest. The course could begin with the student’s survey of his field, its major problems, and its recent developments. This could be followed by a paper on the relation of Christianity to that field and then another on the student’s ideas on how to present a Christian testimony within that field.

At the same time students would also be fulfilling the university’s requirements for a major field of study. They should be encouraged, and indeed helped, to participate in the regular honors program of the university. Every effort should be made to secure exemplary academic performance from the students and also to take advantage of any competitive situation that might develop with other living units and student-interest units on campus. This is an area in which much imagination could be exercised.

Along with this essentially academic program, for most of which regular university credit should be sought, there ought to be a careful consideration of the other sides of college life. This should begin with the counseling program, formally established during the student’s first year and continued during the rest of his stay. Efforts to bridge the gap between classroom instruction and personal counseling should be a matter of primary concern to the college staff. As much as possible, the distinction between the actual classroom situation and informal discussion of the issues raised in all courses should be erased. Staff members who have worked with students in the initial counseling and tutorial program should remain active in their contact with the advanced work of those students and in considering the issues that arise from this work.

Categories Of Admission

In the selection of students for the college, the admision standards of the university to which the college is attached would clearly have to prevail. This is so, not only because the college students must be accepted by the rest of the campus, but also because the added interests of the college could then demonstrate to all the strength of the college idea. Moreover, at any university the registrar has the discretionary power to admit marginal students; therefore the college would have enough leeway to provide itself with the student population that would best fit its aims.

I suggest three categories of admissions: Scholarship I, Scholarship II, and Regular Admission.

Scholarship I should be a group of students, building up to thirty or so, who receive full-support scholarships. They should be selected from a group having combined SAT scores above 1300 and ranking in the top 5 per cent of their high school graduating classes. A 3.8 gradepoint average should be required for maintaining this scholarship. Scholarship II should be a living-expense scholarship group, numbering some fifty students, for whom the requirement would be combined SAT scores of 1200 and a high school graduating rank in the top 15 per cent. For both groups, other factors, such as precise high school program, outside activities, and evidence of creativity should be considered also. The rest of the students, those in Regular Admission, should have a Verbal SAT score above 450 and be from the top 50 per cent of their graduating classes.

All entering students should be able to subscribe to a doctrinal statement stressing a personal relationship to Jesus Christ, his Lordship, the inspiration of the Scriptures, and the student’s intention to devote his life to Christian service, whatever his vocation might be. A question of strategy arises at this point. Arguments for having a limited number of uncommitted students not only are very persuasive but also have been proven valid in many places, most notably in Roman Catholic schools. But all students should agree to participate fully in the program of the college and to abide by its rules.

Choosing The Staff

The problem of staffing the college is most crucial. The director should have the rank of full professor at the university to which the college is attached. The college would pay half his salary for the time he devoted to administering and teaching at the college. In my opinion it would be best to choose a person already established at the university, to forestall possible suspicion about the college’s programs and facilitate acceptance of the courses it offers.

In many ways the choice of a director will determine the success or failure of the college. He should be a thoroughly grounded Christian, able and producing in his own field of study and fully convinced of the value of the college. He should also be capable and imaginative as an administrator and have personal access to all divisions of the university. The director must function at the discretion of a college board of trustees and answer to them. As trustees I suggest two faculty members of the university, at least two nationally known persons with expertise in Christian education, and several other persons from various fields of Christian service and business.

The director should be assisted by seven persons with full faculty qualifications. Hopefully, at least some of them would have part-time appointments in various departments of the university. There should be a historian to give the course on the history of evangelical Christianity, and a person with theological training and reputation to give the course on modern theology. The other assistants should represent science, social science, and the humanities. Ideally one of them would have special language competence.

Each of these persons must be fully acceptable to the university as a regular faculty member even though he may not hold an appointment there. Every effort should be made to open the full resources of the university to these persons’ particular interests in teaching and research. As they acquire partial obligations to the university, their time should be replaced in the college so that there would still be the equivalent of at least 7½ full-time faculty members. Those who are particularly concerned with counseling and tutoring should have access to the university offices of counseling and guidance, for consultation and for integration of the college’s guidance procedures into the overall guidance system.

How Much Will It Cost?

Cost estimates have proven difficult, and the figures I mention should be taken with a grain of salt. A building that would house 700 students and provide recreational facilities, some classroom space, dining rooms, and administrative and faculty offices would probably cost about $4.5 million. I am told that this could be self-amortized and maintained over a forty-year period at an annual cost of $1,100 per student, including summer occupancy. Academic staff costs would come to approximately $75,000 per year, and supporting staff would add another $20,000. Thirty full-support scholarships would cost $60,000 per year, and fifty at half that would come to $50,000. Library acquisition could be managed for about $8,000 per year. Therefore, exclusive of building and development costs (which, it is hoped, could be met by the money students pay), the annual budget of the college would come close to $215,000 per year. I think that this is somewhat less than the average cost of maintaining a small college of 500–700 students. Keep in mind that these figures are only approximations.

However, the actual design of the college, its staff, and programs is not our problem at present. I have offered these suggestions only to give some concreteness to the basic proposal. Many variations suggest themselves. One proposal has come to me urging full academic dress for lectures and for a weekly dinner and other attempts to provide the general atmosphere of an Oxford college.

This proposal that I have outlined includes a number of ideas in current academic ferment. Those that are not original can be found in Axelrod, “New Patterns of Internal Organization,” in Emerging Patterns in American Higher Education. Tutorial instruction, counseling that is integrated with subject matter as well as performance problems, the structured integration of all the student’s course program, special attention to communication skills, proseminars for advanced students, the maintenance of close faculty-student identification—these are a good share of the problems and proposals with which educators are now grappling. By working these and other new ideas into its program, and by making it possible for teachers to give close attention to the plans and needs of individual students, the college might well find itself providing leadership in these areas to the university as a whole. In doing this it could take advantage of the fact that its students originally came together out of a common interest and, using the student support this could engender, could show the way to a combined faculty and student approach to mutual problems.

Moreover, the college (unlike most Christian schools—though there are some interesting exceptions to this) would have a way to use its own program as part of a concerted attempt at evangelical outreach. The students of the college could participate directly in the many dialogues of the whole campus and perhaps gain the opportunity to present Christ and the views of Christianity. And they would have ready-made programs to which to invite interested students.

AN UNREASONABLE FAT SIMILE

The cherubic thinker reclined in ease,

Double-chinned doctrine, quite obese—

No longer could, nor really would

Kneel on his dimpled, liturgical knees.

He summoned God to his corpulent side,

Said God was asleep or preoccupied—

Thus the catechism of jumboism

With its ultimatum: God has died!

The chubby green giant’s great offense

Was concept divorced from experience;

No exercise caused his demise—

A theology wanting viable sense.

WILLIAM J. SCHMIDT

At the same time, the college would be able to nourish and challenge its students and the security of their beliefs during the crucial period when they awaken to the life of the mind. By promoting gradual freedom from a carefully controlled and apologetically oriented counseling program, it would be set up to meet this need, which so often goes unmet.

Finally, and most important, the student in the college would meet his challenges during his undergraduate years instead of later, when he would have to face them without guidance and perhaps without fuel for reply. He would, as he is interested and able, participate in the raging, never-ending dialogue between faith and intellectualism. And he would come to see that for many people these questions are not entirely answerable but also that they do not need to be answered for everyone. Those students who could not maintain their association with the college on grounds of faith and intellect are likely the ones who could not maintain their Christian zeal when buffeted by the world, whenever that buffeting came.

The college, however, would provide a working situation in which to hammer out the practical, less philosophical aspects of Christianity’s answers to today’s problems in education. It could lead the student to more basic thought along these lines in his graduate career at an Institute of Advanced Christian Studies or elsewhere, or it could provide a good beginning for those who might decide to transfer and continue their work in a Christian university.

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Students are asking: What invests me with value as an individual? What absolutes limit my freedom?

Prince Hamlet, returning to the Danish court at Elsinore Castle with his student life fresh in mind, found a situation so ugly, so darkly threatening to his selfhood, that he was plunged into a protracted melancholy. The discussion that follows suggests how Hamlet’s protest against what he found at the court is paralleled by the present student generation’s protest against what it increasingly finds on the campus and in society at large.

Shortly after he has discovered the mess at court, Prince Hamlet makes a grim lament:

I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercises, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that the goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory. This most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire—why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The Paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust [II. ii. 304 ff.]?

This gloomy tirade brings to mind the dour Preacher of Ecclesiastes; but that witness’s fatalism and ennui seem the end products of a self-indulgent life rather than the pessimism of a disgruntled student. More to the point, Hamlet’s words might be those of a precocious undergraduate in the mid-twentieth century who has left home for the university only to find there such widespread denial of the value judgments he has taken for granted, such violations of the trusts he has held most sacred, and an image of man so contrary to his own estimates of his inner self, that he is desolated. He finds that his spontaneity and mirth have left him, never to be reclaimed in anything like the old fullness.

Last year a conference sponsored by the Danforth Foundation brought together college teachers from all over the country. They were addressed by such informed educators as Wayne C. Booth, dean of the college at the University of Chicago, and Robert Rankin, associate director of the sponsoring foundation. The lecturers seemed to agree upon a basic point: The present student revolt is at root a spirited and intransigent reaction against dehumanization, against the “phoniness” of an educational system in which students are methodically treated as something less than what they know themselves to be.

This dehumanization can be traced to sources other than administrative regimentation, of course. No less blameworthy is the image of man projected in various academic disciplines. From my own experience and from the experience of students I have counseled at the university, I have learned that the first confidence to be questioned on the university campus is the idea that the world is the sort of a place a man can feel at home in.

There is something tragic in this. Reinhold Niebuhr has said that faith is a disposition of the heart akin to the child’s trust in his universe. Central to man’s well-being is the preservation of his sense of belonging. He is no moon-child, no accident or abortion of the world-process. In his fullness as a human being, he is confirmed by his world.

In the university setting, however, this conviction of significance is often systematically undercut. The student is asked to unlearn what he is in a position to know better than any of his teachers—that he matters, infinitely so. The undercutting occurs as a many-sided attack upon the student’s conception of what it is to be human, and a portrayal of the universe as at best indifferent to man’s concerns with life, intelligence, and value. Young men and women are led to think that their elemental trusts have been unfounded. Not surprisingly, they feel betrayed.

We need no Freudian exposé of Hamlet’s Oedipal feelings to alert us to what was perhaps most disheartening to him. The prince loved his mother deeply and apparently had never had reason to doubt her regard for him. There was unquestioned trust. That she should, so suspiciously, and in violation of the canons of simple decency, lay aside proper mourning for Hamlet’s father and hurry into a marriage with the prince’s uncle, was a gaping breach in the very groundwork of the universe. Hamlet’s world had betrayed him. His speech quoted previously shows the profound shock he has suffered. Although he has not relinquished his native ideas about man as angelic, even divine in faculties, his capacity to feel these as truth, and so to act upon them, has been all but destroyed. The empowering union of head and heart has been ruptured. And what the mind holds as unfelt notion cannot long survive. The plain implication of his mother’s and uncle’s behavior is that man cannot be what he has thought him to be.

Not surprisingly, Prince Hamlet’s discovery of violated trust resulted in a diseased view of the whole cosmos. Yet, in all his melancholy, there was a conviction of destiny. “The time is out of joint. Oh, cursed spite/That ever I was born to set it right!” (I. v. 189, 190). Hamlet knows that he can do something to set right the specific evil that has made the whole time seem disjointed.

Such a sense of obligation to repudiate identifiable wrongs seems to lie at the bottom of student unrest. There is—understandably, since students are long on energy and short on experience—much flailing about, much generalizing to the outermost perimeters of responsibility, much sound and fury, as with Hamlet; but if one looks, he can always locate the special wrong somewhere in the foreground of concern.

At the University of Illinois an attempt was made recently to learn what issues are most pressing for students, what ones they would like to hear renowned speakers discuss in the forthcoming Centennial Symposium sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The students consulted raised two questions with startling vehemence: (1) What invests me with value as an individual? (2) What absolutes, what givens, impose the limits upon my freedom? In their desire to answer these questions, today’s students are no different from those of other days. They assume an unalienable right to inquire after meaningfulness and to cultivate freedom within the evident limits upon knowledge and action.

Now if it is true that the student revolt is, at root, a protest against dehumanization inspired by moral indignation, we have reason to expect that wrongs of long standing will be righted, or at least that one age with its peculiar moral compromises and inconsistencies will close and a new age with its new versions of the old problems begin. Although the cleaning up at court, in which Hamlet lost his life, did not usher in a millennium, it did inaugurate the auspicious rule of Fortinbras. This new king, who took the throne after a successful expedition against a foreign enemy, presumably had learned something from his predecessor about sin and its consequences for the stability of the throne.

It may not be presumptuous to suggest that an age is ending now. The age of anxiety, alias the age of analysis, alias the age of self-consciousness, is long past its meridian. Its end seems latent in a central incoherence, an instability that pairs a diseased self-consciousness with a methodological denial of the self. The incoherence is not beyond the notice of the student generation.

Discussion of the “end of the world” is natural in times when long-held assumptions are brought into question. Such talk was widespread in the seventeenth century in Europe, when authoritarianism, long an unquestioned modus vivendi, was being doubted and replaced by democratic parliamentarianism, empiricism, and egalitarianism in taste. The seventeenth century saw the questioning and abandoning of the basic hypotheses of authoritarian culture; the twentieth sees a questioning of the confused image of the private self that is at the center of the modern synthesis. It was, to be sure, our “age” that in a sense began in the seventeenth century, with the institutionalizing of the sundry rights of the private man, whether political, scientific, religious, or aesthetic. Thus dawned the age of self-consciousness.

The case of Prince Hamlet is very relevant here. He was the reflective man par excellence. Indeed, Coleridge saw Hamlet’s reflectiveness as his tragic flaw, for his diseased self-consciousness made it impossible for him to act. Shocked by the violation of trusts into an anguished immobility, he temporized and complained. Perhaps we should see him as the archetypal man of the age then beginning, and now closing.

Yet, as we shall see, Hamlet could be self-conscious without the inconsistency that plagues modern man. The moribund self-consciousness of today concerns a self that, by those various strategists of reduction and neglect mentioned earlier, has been depreciated to a cipher. There is no conundrum here, merely a stark inconsistency. At one moment, the self is the be-all and end-all of existence, which art bares and science serves. At the next, it is no more than a vacancy at the center of the private world, the emptiness left when the soul-wraith has been exorcised by the teacher-priests of the day.

L. L. Whyte has pointed out that “conscious” in the sense of “inwardly aware” was first used in 1620; the noun “consciousness” first appeared in 1678, and the noun “self-consciousness” in 1690. Language is the dress of thought, and the history of coinages is a useful index to the history of thought. We would expect the seventeenth-century ferment with its earnest advocacy of individualism to produce such terms. But now, three centuries later, we are witnessing the decay of that emphasis.

In the brilliant anthology, The Modern Tradition, Richard Ellman and Charles Feidelson, Jr., devote one of their nine sections to self-consciousness. They have good reason: no term is more basic to an understanding of the peculiar genius of the modern artist. It covers a wide range of experimentation in choice of subject and in technique. But it also serves to remind us of a thousand separate ills of the twentieth-century artist. He advertises his solitariness, his estrangement, his incommunicable despair.

If, as T. S. Eliot suggested in The Hollow Men (1925), the world will end not with a bang but with a whimper, we must now be hearing that end. The typical note of contemporary literature is roundly melancholy. This became fully evident to me during three semesters of reading the critical essays students submitted after doing independent research on living poets and storywriters. Batch after batch of papers testified to a bleak consensus. Although the research ranged widely—from Katherine Anne Porter to Saul Bellow, from Robert Lowell to Lawrence Ferlinghetti—and although the students were encouraged to present nothing but the artist’s own vision, the essays converged on a single note: discomposure. The harmonies were provided by the notes of ennui, nostalgia, frustration, and violent indignation. And the students found man portrayed as helpless, hapless, and addled—a grisly, dejected cast-off of the universe. All but paralyzed, he sits on the ash-heap, unable to pray, but feverishly, agonizingly self-conscious.

So self-consciousness decays into an uninterrupted awareness of hurt and homelessness. What about this homelessness? Might it be related to an empiricism that has assimilated man to nature as object but will not, or cannot, assimilate him to nature as subject? Who needs to be reminded that the last three centuries, identifiable as the era of self-consciousness, have also and not irrelevantly been the career of science and technology? Man has become ever more self-conscious as he has become ever more the manipulator of a mechanical caricature of nature, anything but the environment of sacraments and presences that man in another day felt it to be.

The inconsistency here is apparent enough to anyone who will look. In a little-known essay that served as an introduction to D. E. Harding’s The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth, C. S. Lewis calls attention to the absurd quandary of a science that by its methodological underpinnings excludes the role of the observer and then, well along in its explorations, discovers there is no way at all to get the observer back into the universe. This quandary is compounded by the fact that the whole process has actually been made to serve a self ever more pridefully and insistently honored by man the technologist. It should be plain that ends and means cannot forever endure such an estrangement.

I think students are well able to glimpse the lie at the heart of our self-conscious age. We denude and desecrate nature, we manipulate other men, all in the interest of a self we idolize. But it is a self that our system of hypotheses will not even let us admit exists. Our culture has at the same time deified and denied the self.

Clearly the time is out of joint. The Christian Gospel has always borne witness to the fact that the self is neither a cipher nor a proper center for the life. Of infinite worth, it is nothing apart from the God who treasures and loves it. That these assurances, which must ring so brightly in the hearts of men, could be so totally perverted in the process of the years is disturbing evidence that student revolt, or any species of human reaction and repair, is inadequate. Prince Hamlet cleansed the court, but the cleansing was enormously, tragically expensive of life. We must ask that Providence shape the rough-hewn ends of the present revolt to His own perfect design.

This is not to slight the importance of human effort. Edmund Burke observed that for evil to triumph, it is necessary only that good men do nothing. Student unrest is a condition that, if left unregarded by spirit-filled men of high resolve, will certainly be exploited by those radical elements that form a narrow fringe on the university campus.

This should not be allowed to happen. The situation is nothing less than a call to the planting of a new image of the whole man at the heart of the university community. To such a task the everlasting Gospel is uniquely relevant.

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THE EDITOR

Ever since the post-apostolic age, the Christian revelation of God and of the world has won the attention of secular thinkers. Even scholars not captivated by its unique power to explain life and reality have recognized in biblical supernaturalism an option that must be openly met and debated. This confrontation has been made all the more necessary because exponents of Christianity have advanced the case for revelational theism within the framework of Western philosophy, and not simply in the tradition of sacred theology.

Moreover, the Christian movement has confidently sponsored schools at all levels of human interest and learning. The religion of the Bible became, in fact, the mother of general education; it boldly established universities and then also kindergartens and Sunday schools. Wherever men have delved into the nature of existence, there Christian thinkers have upheld the scriptural revelation of God as the one coherent explanation of the whole of experience.

But the Christian stake in higher learning has now come upon hard times. The disrepute of Christian perspectives in American public education is shown by the widespread disregard of the Christian world-life view in the classroom. True, people remain sympathetic to the churches, and school administrators and teachers still count church affiliation an asset. But in most public elementary and high schools, teachers seldom expound the governing ideas of the Judeo-Christian revelation and rarely offer the biblical view as a serious option for understanding either God or man. Assembly exercises and devotional programs once served to draw attention to the biblical view; now Supreme Court rulings have stifled even these remnants of revealed religion. So little continuity remains between school instruction and religious instruction that churches and synagogues have become filling stations for doing weekend emergency repair jobs on students whose shaky outlook depends increasingly on naturalistic supports.

At the university level, the assault on the scriptural understanding of life becomes more energetic and explicit. Religion departments are almost invariably slanted against the orthodox biblical heritage. Only a minority of philosophy departments include any competent champion of supernatural perspectives, and many are dominated by exponents of logical positivism or naturalism. Many of the professors who do claim to hold the Christian view misrepresent it in the anti-intellectual mood of liberalism, Barthianism, existentialism, and linguistic theology. Some united campus ministries now provide a platform for death-of-God theologians in order to attract attention to the claims of religion.

There are some significant exceptions. On many campuses one can find in various departments articulate professors who expound the Christian option alongside rival views and who objectively state the merits of the biblical position. In a few situations, they even provide the nucleus of a Christian college within the university.

However, it is virtually impossible for students to base their study programs on these offerings and, within the pluralistic framework of the campus, coordinate the various disciplines of liberal learning with an exposure to Christian views. On most campuses, moreover, the perceptive Christian faculty members are seldom found teaching subjects that especially shape the student mind. Often they are lonely men whose biblical convictions are assailed in university pulpits and by faculty colleagues who regard unitarianism and humanism as pristine expressions of Christianity and disparage evangelical theism as offbeat. What one Christian professor achieves through the objective presentation of scriptural views his colleagues often destroy through distortion and ridicule.

Larger opportunities for Christian influence come outside the classroom when professors identify themselves with evangelical student groups or give their witness within the inclusive context of ecumenical campus agencies. But the effectiveness of this evangelical leaven, even on campuses where a few outstanding professors lend their presence and influence to student causes, need not be a matter of speculation; statistics show that only a very few students are actually confronted by a Christian witness. Still more significant intellectually is the fact that evangelical students are denied the privilege of a comprehensive exposure to the Christian world-life view as it bears upon the disciplines of learning.

Never has a great Christian university been more needed. Our premise here is simply that such a university is necessary; we are not primarily concerned with its feasibility or possibility. It must be noted, however, that some educators who grant that it is feasible still doubt that it is desirable. Why? Their contention, briefly, is that the Christian task force should be completely engaged in penetrating the secular world of learning; to isolate evangelical scholars in a Christian university, they say, would virtually preclude an evangelical influence on secular higher education.

SEMANTIC

The Alpha and Omega spoke—

The Word we’ve heard, the flesh we’ve seen

Which filled our void, a Cross-ward stroke,

Beginning, end, and in between.

WILLIAM J. SCHMIDT

If this were the probable outcome, proposals for a Christian university should indeed be abandoned. But before conceding the point, we would do well to consider some facts.

Does Penetration Work?

Among my own academic acquaintances, a Christian university has been talked about for at least thirty years; almost ten years ago it was considered and debated in earnest. Now, for almost a decade the advocates of “penetration” have had the field to themselves. In a few places (the universities of Michigan and Iowa, for example) a small nucleus of able Christian scholars has emerged—and that is all to the good. But most campuses, even those that have added new courses in religion, still neglect the evangelical option.

Is this situation an effective alternative to a Christian university? Would it be so even if these gains of the past ten years were doubled in the next ten? Does the pluralistic state of higher education today really offer unlimited opportunities for Christian penetration—even if much more can be (and ought to be) achieved? And, if these opportunities do exist, would not a Christian university, whose graduates took doctoral degrees at prestigious state universities as well as at their alma mater, equip an admirable task force to have a greater effect upon secular learning? Is the ideal that motivated the founders of schools like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton outmoded today? Or has the miscarriage of their ideal created a new need for a university committed to goals these founders cherished?

We ought not to expect non-Christian scholars to show any great enthusiasm over proposals for a Christian university. Whatever significance these scholars assign to Christianity they find in the emotional or volitional aspects of man’s experience, or in considerations of cultural heritage, rather than in its contemporary intellectual relevance. For them, biblical religion as a system of revealed thought has no durable or decisive bearing on academic learning.

To explain secular disinterest in the Christian view as a matter of hostility of biblical supernaturalism is too simply. Admittedly, a naturalistic bias pervades modern philosophy and permeates much of the campus; the humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences widely reflect this mood. Yet the academic community welcomes pious Christian scholars as faculty colleagues. Moreover, the university seldom attacks the church as a community agency but instead often commends it as a center for promoting humanitarian ideals, or as an emerging instrument of social revolution.

The secular university mind and the Christian mind no longer divide mainly over the problem of miracle, or even over the larger question of the reality of the supernatural. In part this is because of the readiness of influential members of the Christian community to compromise many cardinal tenets of the historic faith. Many university churches have shown a prolonged tolerance of humanism; teachers in church-related colleges have ranged themselves on various sides of most doctrinal issues; and some seminary administrators have brought naturalists into their faculties under the misleading label of “empirical theists.”

Facing Fragmentation

Today a deeper cleavage divides non-Christian from historic Christian thought patterns. A generation ago, important surveys of leading American universities lamented the lack of moral and religious certainties on campus, and deplored the academic non-realization of the ideal of rationally integrated learning. Studies of the state of university learning, such as the Minnesota report and the Amherst and Columbia reports, readily admitted the need for a comprehensive correlation of the fragmented elements of classroom study. But today many secular scholars question the very possibility of a rationally consistent world-and-life view. They surrender in advance any hope of embracing man’s knowledge of reality in a single explanatory whole. In fact, the very effort to present a rationale for life and being is often disparaged as an evidence of human pride.

Underlying this depreciation of the ultimate significance of reason are numerous forces that shape modern history and thought. Evolutionary naturalism, the theory that reason is a late evolutionary emergent rather than the constitutive principle of reality, has encouraged the view that life is “deeper” than logic and that experience is “profounder” than consciousness. Recent existentialist philosophy assails the effort to comprehend reality rationally. That man has no cognitive knowledge of the supernatural world, and that such knowledge is unattainable because of the nature of reality or of human experience (or both)—these are controlling tenets of the modern mind.

It is at this level that a Christian university—if it took seriously the ontological nature of reason, man as a creature uniquely lighted by the Logos, the reality of intelligible divine revelation, and the possibility of a logically consistent view of God and the world—would pose a direct threat to the orientation of modern learning. For most secular educators today believe that intellectual synthesis is an excessive goal inherited from the medieval universities, and that the price exacted by scholasticism to achieve it included an arid rationalism and an undue restriction of academic freedom. In higher education today, there is a widespread notion that academic liberty is preserved only when nothing is taken for granted and everything is subject to doubt; as a result, any affirmation of finalities—let alone the quest for intellectual synthesis—seems highly presumptuous.

Regrettably, the church-related or so-called Christian college today often tends to reinforce these objections. Roman Catholic colleges and universities are usually regarded as defender-of-the-faith institutions. (And it must be admitted that they have succeeded better than Protestant colleges in avoiding secularization.) But because of a polemic and defensive classroom spirit, Protestant institutions that have maintained their theological heritage seldom fulfill the alternative image they covet: that of faith-affirming institutions. When able professors leave some of the larger evangelical schools for secular universities, often at little salary increase, many of them are protesting against an intellectually restrictive climate. Proposals for a Christian university therefore raise the spectre of medieval scholasticism, with its rationalistic pretensions on the one hand and its restrictions on human inquiry on the other.

It is not easy to show the difference between the spirit of a nonexistent Christian university and the impressions of evangelical education that secular observers get from some church-related colleges and universities (often those least respectable academically). The failure of established evangelical colleges to penetrate the secular milieu raises the moot question whether a Christian university would not follow the same pattern of cultural isolation or withdrawal. Some of our evangelical colleges, even with a century of history behind them and faculty members now numbering in the hundreds, have produced almost no textbooks that find a place in the mainstream of secular education. For that matter, they have not produced a comprehensive apologetic statement of the Christian view of God and the world for the evangelical constituency. In the main, they have provided a sanctuary from secular ideas and ideals rather than confronting and disputing the tide of contemporary unbelief or giving modern man an explanation of his predicament based on biblical premises.

If a Christian university simply perpetuated this pattern on a grand scale, it would compound the element of tragedy in evangelical higher education. Such a university can be justified only if it will train young intellectuals to introduce Christian ideas and ideals into all areas of dialogue, reflection, and work.

In From The Periphery

Perhaps the most significant note in current discussions of advanced Christian education is the acknowledgment (implicit in the many proposals of alternatives to a Christian university) of the urgent need that something new be done to show the relevance of Judeo-Christian truth to the pressing problems of modern thought and life. The Christian colleges are filling an important role in preventing an easy surrender by evangelical youth to the reigning tenets of modernity. And some faculty members in the secular universities effectively present Christian perspectives in academic dialogue. But they are an inconspicuous minority. Evangelical effort persists mainly on the periphery of instruction and does not hold a place as a competitor in the pluralistic situation. University instruction is largely oriented to non-Christian, if not anti-Christian, theory; this fact has created interest in the possibility of a Christian college within a federated campus complex, or, at least, of a group of Christian faculty members within a larger pluralistic context. These proposals hold an advantage over the more modest suggestion of establishing evangelical houses similar to those now functioning in Oxford and Cambridge, each directed by a competent scholar in residence: the advantage is that they make Christian perspectives an integral part of serious academic discussion within a university. It is questionable whether, in a pluralistic situation, a small body of Christian professors can achieve, either for themselves or for their students, the ideal of unified liberal learning in the light of the Judeo-Christian revelation.

Yet neither the proposal for a Christian faculty group nor that for evangelical houses ought to be dismissed summarily because of apparent limitations. Evangelicals must learn not to expect all ends from any one means. They have much to gain from investigating a variety of possibilities and putting into operation the pilot projects that show promise. Even the offering of a master’s degree, and possibly of a doctorate, by every accredited evangelical liberal arts college in the one academic area in which it can best serve the Christian constituency, is overdue. It would be a great gain if one school were to specialize in advanced graduate offerings in philosophy, another in political science, another in music and the arts, another in journalism, and so on.

But these possibilities ought not to be confused with the matter of a Christian university. Such an institution would give Christian scholars at the graduate level a chance to expound all the insights of liberal arts learning in relation to the truth of revelation; this task is not adequately performed by any existing evangelical college or university on either the graduate or the undergraduate level. The proposal of a national Christian university composed of cooperating regionally accredited evangelical liberal arts colleges has the merit of endorsing the need of a Christian university in principle, and of recognizing that no comparable education is now available. But although the ideas of leased lines, coaxial cables, shared library resources, and some mobile faculty personnel should all be creatively explored in an effort to improve existing institutions, the correlation of graduate offerings on half a dozen campuses cannot produce the equivalent of a Christian university. This proposal to pool disparate resources raises some difficult questions: How effectively can a university function without a campus of its own? How can professors who have never instructed students for the doctorate suddenly become eligible to do so? How can libraries that are inadequate for doctoral studies become adequate by an expansion of undergraduate holdings or of minimal graduate holdings? Which institution will offer the degree under state charter and will thus inherit alumni loyalties?

Only with a Christian university can we now hope to fill the need. In a century that esteems education, unshaken by the fact that its terrible world wars were unleashed by two of the most literate modern nations, a Christian university can set an example of human energy in the service of the true, the good, and the beautiful—in short, of man intelligently devoted to God and his revealed will.

A Christian university would pursue scientific interests, adding to man’s curiosity and desire to control nature the further motivations of glorifying God and advancing human well-being. It would study history, not simply for a knowledge of events, but in quest of the revelation of God in history. It would revive the forsaken study of metaphysics, and it would bring theology to bear on all the disciplines of learning. It would be devoted to the whole truth—nothing less. It would offer the academic world a fresh and authentic statement of the Christian option. It would relate all the assured results of learning—both the wisdom of the ages and the discoveries of our own time—to the Christian revelation, and exhibit as a coherent whole the body of truth we possess. It would train scholars and teachers for service in Christian and secular institutions and for a role of intellectual leadership in all areas of work. It would give substance to an apologetic literature for our generation.

Never has the evangelical community had a better opportunity to present a rationally persuasive case for the religion of the Bible. The secular stream of speculation has emptied into the mudbanks of intellectual confusion; the mediating religious options have run the course of anti-intellectualism and are lacking in intellectual power to persuade. This can be a new day for evangelical theism if we merge the fullest and highest resources in the service of truth.

What The Choice Implies

In deciding for or against a Christian university, we do not decide merely whether or not modern learning will concern itself with the whole truth, including the Judeo-Christian revelation. The issue is deeper.

The alternatives are either the permanent loss or the hopeful recovery of intellectually integrated learning. The loss of a unifying frame in liberal arts studies is now acknowledged not only on secular campuses but in many church-related colleges as well. The primary issue, therefore, is whether liberal learning will be permanently abandoned to its present chaotic plight, or whether the Christian rationale will be openly and convincingly asserted in the academic arena.

It is no exaggeration to say that today the case for the ontological significance of reason—the confidence that reality is rationally intelligible—survives among Protestants almost exclusively as an evangelical option. Modernist, dialectical, and existential movements in modern theology have progressively retarded the role of reason in religious experience and have abandoned interest in a Christian view that gathers into one explanatory whole all aspects of human knowledge and experience. Loss of the biblical principle of intelligible divine revelation, based on the creation of the universe by the Logos and of man in the divine image, has immersed theological studies in subjectivism and deprived liberal learning of direct confrontation by the Christian world-life view.

Those who share the vision of a Christian university do not insist that, like Melchizedek, it must appear on the scene of history all at once without apparent parentage. An Institute for Advanced Christian Studies, justifiable on its own merits, could be an ideal intermediate venture. If such an institute were to succeed, it might well open the way for a Christian university; if it were to fail, the case for a Christian university would probably collapse with it.

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The professionals are in trouble and need outside help

All around us there is abundant evidence that religion is not doing well on the campus. We greatly need new approaches to campus work.

In the years since Sputnik, science and industry have made tremendous gains. Their increase of knowledge has been gigantic. Space exploration is moving rapidly. But what is happening in the areas of the mind and the spirit, and in the understanding of one another as persons? The humanities have suffered in our culture so much that universities now put on drives to stimulate interest in these areas.

Our religious heritage has been allowed to dwindle also. In the colleges, the Church has not kept pace in its manner of presentation. It is regarded as a second-or even third-class citizen on most campuses.

On the average, about 10 per cent of the students on an American campus have some contact with Christianity through the organized church. Ninety per cent of the students on most campuses have no such contact and look upon the church as a thing of the past. This group often contains the most exciting students on campus, the future leaders of our country.

American colleges and universities are being profoundly affected by the swift and complex changes taking place in our society. The world is in a ferment, and the campus reflects this. The university or college presents many different opportunities for Christian witness. There are the faculty, the students, and the families of faculty and students. And there are also employees of the university and their families. Obviously the Church needs different approaches to reach these various groups.

The students are probably the most complex group. They are of many nationalities, many different home backgrounds, various religious connections or none at all. They are smarter than ever before. They very much want to be individuals; yet at the same time they desire to hold fast to some group connections and conformity. They are often lonely. They are searching for something. Many are very self-centered, and some live in a state of rebellion.

None of these characteristics is new. What is new is the great number of students, many more than ever before. American campuses now contain about 5.2 million students; by 1975, there may be 8.6 million.

Regrettably, not much effort is being expended in presenting Christianity to the whole campus—at the appropriate intellectual level—as a living religion. I do not mean enticing students into religious services. Nor do I mean preaching to them. I mean alerting the campus to the fact that Christianity is a living religion and speaks to the problems of twentieth-century man.

Denominational chaplains make their effort through small group meetings and the one-to-one approach. Many build their programs around social and political interests and have become very secular in their methods. Choruses, folk music, drama, and art are used, and so are coffeehouses and teahouses. Some of these programs are good; but others are poor, and many are only fair. Organizations like the YMCA, the YWCA, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, and Campus Crusade offer varying inducements for student participation. There is always room for more groups like these. But we are still faced with that disturbing statistic that 90 per cent of the students have no contact with organized Christianity. How to reach this group—that is the burning question.

Communication is a starting point. In the United States the art of communication has been developed into a science, and almost a fetish, but the Church has not learned to use it. The story we have to tell is simple and powerful, if we only can get it across. One prominent churchman has been quoted as saying, “Don’t worry. We are chipping away at the problem.” That seems to be just the trouble. We are using aspirin to treat the patient instead of open-heart surgery.

The first step in developing new approaches to the campus is for the top leaders of the organized church to realize that new approaches are needed. They must admit that the chaplaincy system by itself is not the answer to the present-day campus and certainly will not be the answer to the greatly expanded campus of the future. There are just not enough chaplains to minister to the 25–30,000 students on the larger campuses. (Jones B. Shannon has covered this aspect of the situation in an article in the Church Review, May, 1965.)

Here are some suggestions for first steps in developing new approaches:

1. Hold an interdenominational conference or series of conferences of the best minds that the various denominations can recruit. Invite participants from business, advertising, the mass media, public relations, publishing, management, education (recent graduates, faculty, and students), the sciences, the ministry, and other fields. Have them meet at some out-of-the-way place, without newspaper coverage, for four or five days. Instead of addresses, have brain-storming sessions. Conferences could be set up on a regional basis. They should not be allowed to become too large and unwieldy, and they should not be dominated by the present campus-ministry leaders. As far as I know, no such free-wheeling, idea-seeking conference has ever been held by the organized church. Anything can happen if enough brains are brought together to attack a problem.

2. Stress the campus ministry as a project for every church in America, just as we stress missions. The time to do this was ten years ago or yesterday, but certainly today also. The churches have been very negligent in alerting members to the real problems on the campus. They simply report a rosy picture of “X campuses contacted, X chaplains at work.” Church members are not told what the Church does not do on the campus.

Yet the hidden resource of the Church is its laymen. The Church must stop sitting on its hands and must utilize the great talent of its creative members. Like other institutions, it is using only a small fraction of its tremendous capability. It must not be content with the small number of lay people who now contribute their services. There are many men and women capable of making real contributions to various phases of church activity who do not want to be bound by the overly organized structure of the Church.

3. If the brain-storming conference is productive, and if more creative lay people are involved, many ideas will appear that are good enough to try. Set up an interdenominational task force to experiment with them. This group should be separate from the present campus ministry, and the members would have to be chosen with great care. No one wants to change what is being done at the moment; we just want to see more done and a better approach made to the 90 per cent of students not now being reached. This task force could start with a large university to gain experience and might eventually minister to several campuses in the same area.

Some areas in which the task force could work are:

a. The use of the mass communications media.

b. Clever college-newspaper advertisements beamed to intellectuals. Having a theme for the whole campus for the academic year is important.

c. Distribution of books to freshmen as an arrival greeting—perhaps a paperback edition of The Screwtape Letters, by C. S. Lewis. This could be followed up with other books of like caliber distributed each year in October, and with repetitive contacts maintained by mail throughout the college year. The mail campaign should be planned by experts in this line.

d. The bringing of top-ranking artists and groups of actors to the campus, in connection with the year’s theme. Many students will attend a play or concert by nationally known artists when they might not support a local campus group’s performance. These artists could travel on a circuit of colleges and universities.

e. Concomitant exhibits for the whole campus on astronomy, geology, archaeology, religious art, medicine, and so on, all coordinated with the theme. Faculty could be enlisted as resource people for this phase.

f. The establishment of research centers adjacent to the campus. Research is the keynote of college and university activity, but the Church does practically no research on the campus. Visiting scholars could be brought to these research institutes for a few months, or as much as a year, to work on specific problems. They could hold seminars that would attract students. Students could also be involved in the research, and the scholars could publish the results of their work in the college publications. They also might travel from one campus to another. To attract the whole campus, this presentation has to be made on a grand scale with real excellence. (A medical-religious research institute is in the planning stage for the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore, spearheaded by J. Donald Woodruff, a gynecologist.)

4. Explore the possibility of joint campus services with other denominations. Financially, the ecumenical approach is the only feasible one. The campus is an excellent testing ground for this approach, since few students are interested in denominational differences.

5. Stop trying to get people to attend services. If the all-over influence of the campus religious work is good, students will come to the services. Often the invitation to come sounds the death knell of their interest.

6. In church-related colleges, arrange for better working relations between chaplains and the departments of religion. Students recognize that a dichotomy exists, and this has a negative effect.

7. If there is a theological seminary on the campus, use it some way, somehow. Usually the seminary is a total loss as far as the rest of the campus is concerned. It is outside the mainstream of intellectual life and might just as well be a thousand miles away.

8. Provide some sort of religious experience for those attending summer school, particularly graduate students and teachers.

9. Investigate the possibilities of junior-college programs and of day-college programs in large cities where students commute from home to college. Re-evaluating the senior high school program might be fruitful, also.

10. Search for new staff talent for the campus-planning groups of the various denominations. These groups need bright, enthusiastic people with ideas, imagination, and initiative. The recruits need not all be clergymen.

Many profound discourses have dealt with the nature of the university, the psychology of the student, and the relationship of student, church, and university. Yet one never finds any practical guidelines for initiating new methods of presenting the Gospel to the campus.

The Danforth Foundation is undertaking a comprehensive study of campus ministries, under the direction of Kenneth Underwood. Documentation of the failures, weaknesses, and strengths of various phases of the present ministry will be interesting and valuable. However, we already know that current programs are inadequate. After all the findings have been digested and evaluated by many committees and the study report has been filed away, the planners will still have to take the necessary steps to develop something new. My plea is that we start now.

I am convinced that the professionals now in this field cannot provide new methods of approach to the campus without outside help. The present leaders of campus work cannot institute new ideas without the support of the national boards of the various churches. Hopefully, the interest of the lay people will arouse national boards from their lethargy and open their eyes to the importance of college work. For they do not now realize the seriousness of the problem. They are working with too little, too late; their programs are out of step and are not making an impact on the campus.

Christianity is not something that the non-Christian has thoroughly comprehended and rejected; it is something he has never really seen or understood. The campus work is one of the most important challenges facing the organized church and our nation in the decade ahead. We must summon all our imagination, intelligence, and faith to meet it.

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In the darkened window of an Amsterdam antique shop one evening, I saw a lively bronze-colored cherub hanging in mid-air and blowing a trumpet. It struck my fancy, and next day I purchased the happy creature, hoping it could dangle somewhere in our Virginia home.

It arrived just before Christmas—when the American post offices were delivering more than one billion pieces of mail a day—and my treasured plaster cherub had a broken arm. Even my best repair work left traces of the fissure.

Yet the cherub still keeps sounding the trumpet, and its countenance beams. I like to think that it first learned to play the trumpet on Easter morning, and that the joy of Christ’s resurrection strikes so deep a hope that not even a broken arm can silence the song of triumph.

When my own limbs are brittler and my heart is heavy, I trust that—like my cherub with a broken arm—I will remember there’s a trumpet to be sounded. Maybe somebody will come along in the darkness and say: “That’s the note of joy I’ve been waiting to hear. I want it—cherub and all.”

Ideas

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Addison H. Leitch

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There are people, I hear, whose job it is to monitor television programs and who therefore have to watch everything on one station from the beginning of the week to the end. Perhaps they have to watch another station another week. I can’t imagine what that kind of life must be. As one who watches television about two hours a week, I would place watching television steadily under the same heading as proofreading a telephone book.

Another interesting assignment is to read some college newspapers. If you want to know where young people really are and what they are thinking, and if you want to try to foresee the future of this lovely land that we are constantly turning over to these young people, read college newspapers for a sense of horror.

Recently the newspaper of one Mid-western college was very happy to give front-page center to something that had happened at another college. What College A was saying was that College B had put on a play called The Chairs that was scheduled for three performances but was called off by the administration after the first. The whole affair was especially newsworthy because at least one group of college administrators reacted violently to what they thought was filth on the stage, and were not afraid to say so, and were not afraid to endure the wrath of the drama department, the student body, and all those members of the popular press who enjoy so much anything off-color that happens on a college campus.

Apparently the scene that stopped the show was a girl going through all the actions necessary to suggest that she was participating in sexual intercourse. The drama department refused to eliminate this part of the play, and the girl was quite taken aback, according to the newspaper account, that there were still “squares” around who did not appreciate (a) realism and (b) dramatics. Another college in the same area has been carrying on a tussel about whether they can or should produce Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The arguments in favor of such dramas again reduce themselves to the questions of realism and what constitutes drama.

It might be worth our time to reconsider this whole argument about realism. We must admit that almost anything that is portrayed must be somewhere, among some people, realistic. But whether we need to know or have set before us on the stage or described in novels what realism in these matters may mean to some kinds of people is a nice question.

I like to think of it this way. The rose bush in front of our house is just as real as the garbage can at the back. I think it is a sound instinct that the garbage ought to be kept at the back of the house, with a lid on it. I don’t think doing this is narrow-minded, naïve, old-hat, provincial, or square. It is a piece of progress that to my mind makes our century more pleasant and certainly more healthful than previous ones. The streets of our cities were once almost like cesspools, and that was real enough. Now we have learned to clean up the streets, and that is real, too. What I am trying to say is that to argue realism is not quite enough. Something else is at stake here.

In the movie and the play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? we have plenty of realism. The older couple in the play have made a very sad mess out of their lives, and in the course of the play they pull in the younger couple. With plenty of liquor and lots of foul language and one woman who acts like a fishwife and another who can’t keep from falling apart in tears, we get a strong dose of realism—at least what is real in some marriages and some families. Depending upon where we sit ourselves, we are more or less horrified by being allowed to look into something like this.

Perhaps the play has a moral: Don’t drink so much and do your best not to get your marriage into a mess like that. There is, of course, a touching and very dramatic problem in the case of the older couple, and there is a kind of hope at the end that they have found each other and are about to reach out and touch now as persons dealing with their problem. All I can say is three cheers for that.

Whether looking in on a couple as they wash their dirty linen is the kind of catharsis Aristotle had in mind when he talked about the power of great drama is another question. In any case, great literature is not only a reflection of life but also a creator of life. With the inundation of sex that surrounds college students today, they don’t need more of what “Virginia Woolf” gives them. It is not unrealistic to look in on this kind of marriage; but when we hope for better things for college students, wouldn’t it be wise to hold something better before them?

Another problem bothers me. What about the girl who had to act out the part in The Chairs? What about the girl who at the age of twenty plays the part of Martha in “Virginia Woolf”? To play their parts well they had to identify strongly with the characters. If I understand “method” acting (and maybe that is just good acting), you can’t really act a part unless you live it. Shall we use a college girl as a channel for the sort of thing that has to flow through her in a living way in order for her to play this part? What does such a part do to her?

This leaves the question of dramatic performance. Can we justify anything so long as it is artfully done or done for the sake of art? I pull back from this argument, too. Let your mind run to some of the physical things people have to do in the normal course of a day. We rightly do these behind closed doors. They are absolutely real, but doing them, even doing them well, on the stage would certainly be no argument for their presentation.

I was pleased to see that one of Genet’s plays was stopped in the name of decency. Apparently it was a Peeping Tom approach to homosexuality. Doing such a play well is, it seems, not quite enough. I have often wondered why a college drama department can present on the stage viewpoints and language that would get a man fired if he used them in the classroom. We are all so afraid of being thought unsophisticated that we run for cover at the least scorn of one who is so sure that we must have realism in drama. My observation is that the most sophisticated nations and races by virtue of their sophistication (take the Jews, or the Chinese, or the French, for example) have been most careful to protect their young people from freedoms in sexual matters.

It is amusing but also tragic that in the American culture we are so unsophisticated as to believe that our young people should be allowed everything in the name of freedom. Then we wake up with such naïve surprise because somehow man-woman relationships have gone very sour indeed.

- More fromAddison H. Leitch