Page 6079 – Christianity Today (2024)

What lies ahead for Canadian Christians?

The Christian Pavilion that will be a part of Montreal’s Expo ’67 is perhaps the best indication of Canadian reaction to the ecumenical drive within the Christian churches today. Supported by most of the large denominations, including the Roman Catholic Church, and a number of the smaller bodies, the pavilion will be an attempt to give an “ecumenical witness” to the common Christian faith. To many Canadian ecumenists this is the greatest breakthrough so far toward Christian unity.

Canada, however, is no stranger to ecumenism in its most thoroughgoing church-unionist form. After Confederation, many of the denominational groups that had been divided into numerous sub-denominational varieties came together to form large, single, national communions: Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans, and the like. The first interdenominational union took place on June 10, 1925, when the Methodists, Congregationalists, and over 60 per cent of the Presbyterians joined to form The United Church of Canada. The new church immediately became the largest and wealthiest Protestant denomination and has from that day wielded a very powerful influence, particularly in the direction of church union. With little professed interest in doctrine, it has laid its stress upon social action and further amalgamations.

The 35–40 per cent of the Presbyterians who refused to enter the 1925 union did so for a variety of reasons. Tradition, personal preference, doctrine, and even just plain Presbyterian stubbornness kept them from accepting the new church. In the forty years that have followed the “disruption,” however, a new generation has arisen, and a considerable number of Presbyterians now favor union. Some even feel that the 1925 refusal was a mistake. Influenced by such thinking, which is particularly strong in official circles, the Presbyterian Church is cooperating with others in all kinds of ecumenical ventures; one presbytery, for example, raised $30,000 for the Christian Pavilion. At the same time, a considerable number are very suspicious of the ecumenical movement, for they feel that its aim is to bring about union on a minimal doctrinal basis. The church is divided on the issue of union, and it is difficult to estimate the relative strength of the two groups.

Standing apart from the United and Presbyterian churches, the Anglican Church (episcopal) for many years adopted a somewhat lofty attitude towards all others, largely because it seemed to feel it should be the national established church. Over the past two or three decades, however, its attitude has changed, and since 1945 it has carried on union talks with the United Church. During the past two years, the two bodies produced a working paper which they plan to use as a starting point for arrangements leading eventually to organic union. Not all the Anglicans, however, are happy about the idea. Both high-church Anglo-Catholics and low-church evangelicals have grave doubts about the move, though for different reasons.

The other Protestant denominations hold varying views of the ecumenical movement. The convention Baptists seem to support the ecumenical approach, while the smaller, more evangelical Baptist churches ignore or oppose it. This dislike of ecumenism also pervades many other bodies, such as the Pentecostals, while the Evangelical United Brethren have recently become part of the United Church. For this reason, one cannot place the smaller groups in any particular classification.

The principal organ of the ecumenical movement in Canada is the Canadian Council of Churches, brought into existence in 1944 by the main Protestant denominations. It has all the characteristics of the World Council of Churches, and its influence is widespread and all-pervasive in the denominations that are members of it. Although the council would disclaim any desire to pose as a “super church,” nevertheless it has all the machinery set up and ready for the time when the major Protestant denominations come together.

In the light of these developments and of the decisions of Vatican II, what is the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church, which claims the allegiance of over 45 per cent of the population? Formerly it was one of suspicion and hostility to the Protestant bodies. Indeed, the French Roman Catholics often translated this into an anti-English attitude, which is partly responsible for contemporary “separatism” in Quebec. In recent years, however, particularly since Paul-Emile Cardinal Leger has been in charge of the Archdiocese of Montreal, the situation has changed considerably. A new “ecumenical attitude” has appeared with the cardinal’s establishment of a Commission on Ecumenism and, even more important, an Ecumenical Center where Protestants and Roman Catholics may carry on dialogue.

The new Roman Catholic frame of mind becomes clear almost immediately to anyone who visits the Ecumenical Center and talks to the director, Father Irenée Beaubien, S. J. The center seeks to do everything it can to bring together various groups for discussion and common worship. Indeed, some attempts have been made to go beyond the Christian boundaries to interest Jews and others. Father Beaubien, at the invitation of the United Church, attended its last General Council. One cannot help feeling, however, that Cardinal Leger, Father Beaubien, and other Roman Catholics are interested not so much in a general union as in the return of their ecumenically minded “separated brethren” to Rome.

In examining the ecumenical scene in Canada, however, one must probe deeper than the denominational epidermis. Few denominations, if any, are completely agreed on the subject of ecumenism, and the differences of opinion seem to arise out of conflicting theological views.

In general, those who hold to the so-called liberal theology, along with a considerable number who are inclined to neo-orthodoxy, support ecumenism and church unionism. For the Anglican Church of Canada, however, there is a significant qualification to be made. Most of the pro-union clergy insist that any new united church must be episcopal in organization, according to the Lambeth Quadrilateral. Usually they also reject the idea of the ordination of women.

On the other side of the fence stand those who hold that agreement on matters of belief is primary. This group is made up of those who are Reformed or generally evangelical in doctrine and who believe that doctrinal agreement is more important than organizational unity. While this element includes a number of whole denominations, ranging from the Christian Reformed Church to the Associated Gospel Assemblies, there are also many persons of the same mind within the churches committed to an ecumenical program. This complicates any attempt to analyze the Canadian situation.

The outcome of the intra-denominational divisions is hard to foretell. Undoubtedly the bodies constituting the Canadian Council of Churches are—at least as far as their administrators are concerned—drawing closer together. Already some of the ecumenists have spoken of one great Church of Canada that would include even the Roman Catholics. True, it is always specified that such a coming together would not be at the expense of true faith. When one looks at the unions that have taken place or are now being contemplated, however, one cannot but feel that doctrine really occupies a rather minor place in the ecumenical hierarchy of values.

While this trend towards togetherness manifests itself in the larger denominations, the doubters and opponents of ecumenism within the denominations find life a little difficult. Because of their views, they have little say on denominational boards or committees, and few ever become denominational secretaries. Consequently they tend to seek fellowship and support outside their own churches, with those who are “evangelical” though perhaps not in agreement with them on every point. Because of this situation, two organizations have recently come into existence: the Evangelical Theological Fellowship and the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. Regrettably, evangelicals in the larger denominations often use their participation in these organizations as a substitute for fulfilling duties in their own church courts.

What lies ahead in the Canadian Christian community? It is hard to say. But it looks as though the ecumenical juggernaut will roll on, gradually bringing more and more of the larger denominations into one big super-church. From this movement may well come, also, small splinter groups denuded of land, buildings, and endowments that will have to start from the very ground up, if they wish to rebuild an evangelical church. This could cause the evangelicals as a whole to reassess their ecclesiastical relations, and no one can now foretell what the result would be if this should happen. Here the historian must stop, lest he seek to become a prophet.

New voices and new tendencies

One does not have to be a skeptic to question the thesis that the dominant element in the founding of the American Republic was the Puritan tradition. By the time of the Declaration of Independence and the Continental Congress, under the impact of latitudinarianism, deism, and the Enlightenment, let alone the laws of spiritual atrophy, the witness of biblical Protestantism was on a pretty shaky footing among the articulate class of the new nation. The picture changed very greatly in the early decades of the nineteenth century, but this did not alter the spirit of ’76. And it is here, at the point of origin, that the contrast with Canada is great.

In 1867, when the four British North American provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia came together in a federal union, evangelical Protestantism was everywhere very much in evidence. The Methodists, since the turn of the century the dominant form of evangelicalism in British America, still retained this position. The impact of idealism, scientism, and biblical criticism had scarcely been felt, although the emergence of a fashionable and popular evangelicalism, which testified to the Church’s attempt to accommodate to growing urbanization, already disturbed the discerning. In Canadian Presbyterianism, as in Scotland and Ireland, the long reign of Moderatism was a thing of the past, and the churches associated with the dynamic evangelicalism of Chalmers and the Free Church were forging ahead. A similar situation prevailed among the Baptists. And, although evangelicalism had been fairly slow in gaining an effective Anglican foothold in the new world, by the 1860s the evangelicals were a force to be reckoned with in many key Anglican dioceses.

The geographic problems facing Canadians were great. For a great many citizens, all energy was absorbed in making a living and attempting to maintain a state that defied so many of the basic geographic laws of nationhood. As a result, ideas were largely imported, and theology suffered along with the other fields of thought. So Canadian Christians, clerical and lay, have never been distinguished as a theologically minded lot. The tradition of self-conscious loyalty to Britain has undoubtedly encouraged our well-known qualities of moderation and unimaginativeness, while the “French fact”—one-third of the population, centered in Quebec, maintaining French law, language, religion, and culture—has exerted its own pressure on Canadian Protestantism.

Another distinctive of the Canadian religious situation was the tendency to treat the fourth of the population that came from Central and Eastern Europe as pieces of a mosaic rather than ingredients for the melting pot. As a result, Canadian Protestantism has largely been deprived of the great benefits conferred upon its southern neighbor by the active participation of those of European background in the mainstream of evangelical life.

Theologically, the changes, though predictable, have been amazingly pervasive. There were able champions of biblical Christianity, such as Principal Caven of the Presbyterians’ Knox College and that remarkable group of men at the Anglicans’ Wycliffe: Sheraton, O’Meara, Dyson Hague, and Griffith Thomas. But they were bypassed. Late nineteenth-century Canadian clerical biography shows that many men looked to F. W. Robertson of Brighton, Channing, and Bucher as their popular theological mentors, and one does not need much imagination to know where this would end.

Methodism moved most quickly in this direction, and after the church union in 1925 the United Church appeared to many to be entirely dominated by this approach. Accordingly, it has had difficulty in keeping its evangelical people from running off to the smaller denominations. And it has the reputation, at least, of a liberal theological intolerance. Responsible leaders in the church have often said, for example, that you can’t have both its New Curriculum and Billy Graham.

Canadian Anglicanism, sometimes described as possessing glacial mobility, may not have moved very fast but has generally moved along the lines laid down by Gore in Lux Mundi, which might be described as a synthesis of high-churchmanship and liberalism. The 40 per cent or so of the Presbyterians who remained out of the church union in 1925 have often been accorded evangelical accolades from around the world, which are not altogether in order. Remaining Presbyterian did not necessarily make one a true-blue Reformed theologian, although often it did most certainly imply this. Many lay people remained Presbyterian through inertia or a dislike of the enthusiastic Methodists. Among the ministers, there was at least one—and he the principal of one of the theological colleges after 1925—who stayed Presbyterian because he feared the doctrine of the United Church might not be modern enough. A kind of liberal evangelicalism prevailed in the Baptist colleges; but this, of course, was not necessarily reflected widely in the pulpits, and certainly not in the pews.

Barthianism had considerable influence in Canadian theological circles after World War II, but it is questionable how far these views have penetrated even that often mentioned intangible “the intelligent layman,” let alone the average church member. And, of course, under the modem movements, academic theology is marching leftward once again.

As for worship, it is probably enough to say that almost every Canadian congregation has been influenced to some degree by the liturgical revival. Prayer meetings or midweek services have largely disappeared, except among the staunchly evangelical. Cell groups are supposed to have taken their place, and one can only hope this is so. But in the absence of evidence in Canada for the mushrooming of home Bible studies that is reported in parts of the States, one is uncertain. A statement once heard in a church in Cambridge may hold true for Canada as well as England: “The only people who really know how to pray are the Roman Catholics and the conservative evangelicals.” Evening services are absent in most suburban congregations, but many city churches hold on to them. Increasingly, however, the Board of Managers is debating whether it pays to heat up the church for just a handful.

If evangelicalism was present in Canada’s early days, then surely evangelism was there as well. In the 1770s and ’80s Henry Alline engaged in a peripatetic ministry among the expatriate New Englanders of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and his ministry did much to establish what is still the pattern of Baptist witness in that area. The early Methodists, many of them sent northward by Asbury, used all the revivalistic methods, such as camp meetings, protracted services, and the mourner’s bench. Presbyterian moderates were naturally skeptical of special evangelistic efforts, but so were the evangelicals when they looked across the border and saw what evangelism had apparently done to Finney’s theology. Among them, however, Calvinistic, parochial evangelism flourished. Many of the Scottish immigrants of the 1830s and ’40s had come under the influence of such great evangelists in the old land as “The Apostle of the North,” Dr. Macdonald of Ferintosh, and their new communities in the backwoods of Canada often throbbed with evangelistic activity.

One of the most famous seasons of evangelism took place in the congregation at Kirkhill in Glengarry in eastern Ontario in 1862; it was recorded in The Man from Glengarry by one of Canada’s premier story-tellers, Ralph Connor, a son of the Kirkhill manse. The minister used by God at this time was Daniel McVicar, and in 1867 he became the principal of Montreal’s newly founded Presbyterian College, which was a direct outgrowth of the evangelistic effectiveness of those days. The outstanding evangelistic venture among the Anglicans occurred in 1877 when the Rev. W. H. Rainsford of England conducted a preaching mission in St. James’ Cathedral, Toronto. Thousands were won to Christ, and Wycliffe College was founded to train converts offering themselves for the ministry.

To meet the challenge of the cities, the professional evangelists appeared on the scene. D. L. Moody came to Toronto in 1884. Soon after, the various Methodist conferences were appointing full-time evangelists, the best known of whom were the team of Crossley and Hunter. This movement continued until about the First World War but then lost its impetus among the major denominations. Evangelism was by no means dead, however; it was pressed forward in strategic independent congregations in the major cities. The story has yet to be written of The Metropolitan Tabernacle of Ottawa, The People’s Church of Toronto, The Philpott Tabernacle of Hamilton, Elim Chapel of Winnipeg, and the Metropolitan Tabernacle of Vancouver. When it is, their evangelistic ministry during the 1920s and ’30s will be seen to have had a significant effect upon Canadian Christianity. The surge of evangelism that covered much of Alberta and western Saskatchewan in the mid-thirties, at the height of drought and depression, and that threw up the remarkable phenomena of the prairie Bible schools, best exemplified by those at Three Hills and Briarcrest, sent hundreds and even thousands of young people to the mission field. These missionaries naturally carried the torch of evangelism with them. This prairie movement may yet be seen to be one of the most significant Canadian contributions to the world church.

In the post World War era, Youth for Christ again made evangelism a live option. Many who were repelled by this organization nonetheless began to rethink the question of evangelism. And soon preaching evangelism, visitation evangelism, friendship evangelism, and so on were fully in vogue. Often this was a pragmatic movement in which any form of evangelism was used as long as it could get people related to the church.

But popular evangelism seems to have had its day in non-evangelical circles, and now men with theologically non-evangelical convictions and sociological expertise are charting the course. Interestingly, however, it is the Pentecostals, with their kerygmatic evangelism, who are increasing fastest in Canada, even though they have had almost no help from the thing that has contributed greatly to the growth of other communions: immigration. A sign that the older evangelism still has a wide appeal is the entrance into the ranks of the evangelists of three greatly gifted young ministers: Leighton Ford, a Presbyterian; Meryle Dolan, a Baptist; and Marwood Patterson, an Anglican.

A word should be said about social and political issues. Canadians generally do not share the pietistic fear of their evangelical brethren in the United States about a positive relation between the churches and the government. Separation of church and state has never been a widely held Canadian dogma, at least within the churches; rather, cooperation has been the motto. With the increasing complexities of bureaucratic society, this essential Canadian tradition naturally turns to the problem of the social and economic structures themselves. Where biblical moorings are well-nigh lost, this, of course, is considered to be evangelism, or at least a satisfactory substitute. But where the faith is strong, evangelism and social responsibility go hand in hand.

Finally, a word about the picture of Protestant church life in Canada today. Among the smaller denominations, which are usually strongly evangelical, there seems to be some moderation in the spirit of separatistic exclusiveness. Among the ethnic churches, which again often have a strong evangelical testimony, there is a movement to have increased contact with his fellow Christians of other backgrounds. This is particularly true of sections of the Lutheran Church, the Mennonites, and the Baptist groups of European origin.

And what of the non-evangelical sections of the churches? The continual comment that one seems to here is: “Where are their young people?” This inability of a culturally accommodating Christian to challenge the young is borne out by the theological college statistics, which have shown a drastic slump in recent years. In contrast is the crowded conditions of Toronto Bible College and other similar institutions. It is easy to dismiss the drawing power of such schools by speaking of their simplex approach to complex issues, but this by no means deals with the whole matter. And the inadequacy of this answer is substantiated by the number of well-trained university graduates who are heading to the United States for an academically respectable and consistently evangelical theological training, which they do not feel they can get at home.

Then there are the evangelicals in the major denominations. In the Maritime provinces, Baptists—the great bulk of whom are evangelical—are seeking to exert pressure to bring their educational institutions into more sympathetic alignment with the church as a whole. In the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec, the same spirit was at work when a proposal to endorse the United Church’s New Curriculum was thrown out by an overwhelming majority. Among the Presbyterians, it is interesting to see that the evangelicals have their strength among the younger men, a situation that can in considerable measure be attributed to the work of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. A national branch of the Evangelical Fellowship in the Anglican Communion has been gaining encouraging support. And in the United Church there are younger evangelicals who are making their voices heard.

Evangelicals in the larger denominations are subject to pressures that are often intense and will in all probability increase. Yet they hold fast to their desire to walk the razor’s edge of faithfulness to the Lord and obedience to his word, while avoiding the pitfalls of a sub-biblical gospel and an introverted sectarianism.

What strength and weaknesses has Christianity in the provinces?

Canada is a land of churches. They are spread through cities big and small. They cluster in her towns and adorn her countryside. Anglican and Roman Catholic churches are located chiefly in cities and larger towns; the evangelical and free churches are far more widely dispersed.

Although it is the centennial of Canada’s confederation (July 1, 1867) that is being celebrated this year, something also should be said in this survey of Canadian churches of the two centuries that preceded this birthday.

John Cabot and son Sebastian, sailing from England just five years after Columbus’s discovery of America, probably made at least two landings: Newfoundland and Cape Breton Island. Jacques Cartier, explorer and bearer of the Christian Cross, entered the St. Lawrence as early as 1534. Champlain, heavily supported from his home base in France by that prince of the Roman Catholic Church Cardinal Richelieu, founded Quebec in 1608. Later he moved into the Great Lakes areas. His work was early paralleled in Quebec by the Ursuline Order and in what is now Ontario by intrepid Jesuits, many of whom, like Brébeuf, were martyrs for the Christian faith.

Today’s Quebec, home of most of the approximately 5.5 million French Canadians, is Canada’s Roman Catholic bastion. Here also is the challenge of bilingualism and biculturalism—indeed, the challenge to the very unity of Canada. The Roman Catholic Church favors unity, but her Jean Baptiste Society, partly religious and partly secular, throws monkey wrenches into both ecclesiastical and political machinery.

Canada’s first religious service probably was conducted by a Lutheran church pastor, Rasmus Jansen, a member of a ship’s crew in search of the Northwest Passage. The service was held at Fort Churchill in 1619, only a dozen years after the “First Families of Virginia” landed at Jamestown and a year before the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers of Plymouth fame.

Canada has long been divided into five regions: the Atlantic provinces, Quebec, Ontario, the Prairies, and British Columbia. Let us look briefly at the beginning and growth of the churches in these areas.

St. John’s, Newfoundland, was visited in 1583 by Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who claimed what is now Canada’s tenth province for Queen Elizabeth I. Roman Catholic Archbishop Howley believed there was a settlement at St. John’s, whose Water Street is one of the oldest in North America. If so, this city and probably the Roman Catholic Church may fairly claim a priority. In addition, Newfoundland welcomed the Methodists. These islanders have always been warmly evangelical. Scottish Calvinism found its natural Canadian home in Nova Scotia. Although rivalry existed between Roman Catholics and Protestants, there was always a deep friendship.

Quebec has been almost solidly French Canadian Roman Catholic. This strong majority group has been fair to the Protestant communions that have been there a long time but resentful of evangelical Baptists and definitely hostile to Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Ontario is the main home of Canada’s Protestant churches. The newer communions, such as the Pentecostal Assemblies, and the older alike have their Canadian headquarters in Ontario’s capital city, Toronto.

In the three Prairie provinces, the free, Reformed, and evangelical churches early established and later strongly supported the Christian faith. Roman Catholicism has roots in sections explored by French Canadians, such as St. Boniface, Manitoba. On the whole, however, the early thrusts were made by Methodists and Presbyterians, who vied with each other to be the first in scores of Prairie villages and towns. One story tells of a Presbyterian riding the baggage car to be ahead of his Methodist competitor only to find to his dismay that the Methodist was perched on the locomotive’s cow-catcher.

From the beginning, British Columbia was a secular area. First came the fur-traders, under such leaders as the Astors of New York. These men did not have the same feeling of the mysteries of God as did the fishermen on Canada’s Eastern shores. Then there followed the gold-seekers, swept in on the rush to the Klondike and the Fraser. Even today, British Columbia suffers from this earlier secular spirit.

The Churches’ Achievements

The Christian faith was proclaimed and nourished right from the start of Canadian life. A strongly biblical, traditional message was preached from the pulpits and taught in prayer meetings, Sunday school classes, and camp revivals. Though a stolid folk and generally not demonstrative, the Canadian Christians proved to be true followers of Jesus Christ. They often volunteered to go to foreign mission fields, served on Indian reservations, and gave their time and talents to downtown rescue missions.

The Christian churches early enjoyed the support of government, business, and industry. Part of this assistance came through the Anglican communion, with its attachment to the Royal Throne. Part was the result of a pioneer quality, as in the case of the Hudson’s Bay Company, whose factors, like a captain of a ship, would conduct religious services with the use of the Anglican Common Book of Prayer. As organized labor grew in power and influence, it gave support to the Christian churches. Some of the denominations, in turn, helped labor obtain legal authority to organize and bargain collectively.

The preaching in Protestant churches provided the main thrust in church life and community influence. Sermons were generally simple and direct, but often interlaced with the doctrines of Calvinism or Arminianism. Sometimes, Jonathan Edwards’s New England “sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-God” theme was too heavily proclaimed. Always there was a clear-cut word about sin, often about original sin. And always there came the warm evangelical call to be reconciled to God by accepting Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord.

The laity had a large share in building Canada’s churches, particularly in the first half of the 1867–1967 century. The Presbyterian catechist, the itinerant Methodist saddle-backer, the Anglican lay-reader, the Baptist preacher-farmer, and, more recently, the Pentecostal lay evangelist rendered good service. They were aided by the Bible Society colporteurs.

The major contribution of both laymen and laywomen was made in the Sunday schools. These were often too large for the church buildings and met in a larger house—sometimes a hall, not infrequently a theater or pool-room.

The intangibles in this record are significant. Directly and indirectly, the Christian faith was lived out and loved in to the benefit both of believers and of the rest of society. “In sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer”—the Gospel of Jesus Christ was spelled out in good deeds to those inside and outside the Christian fellowship.

For three-quarters of the 1867–1967 century, Canadian church life was fairly clear of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy that raged in many sections of the United States. But Canadian church life had other areas of conflict. The Protestant–Roman Catholic differences were often magnified. Fear of papal power was stressed.

The most serious difference—and a continuing one in Canadian church life—was between the free, evangelical believers and Anglicans and Roman Catholics who supported authoritarianism and establishment. This century-old conflict of freedom and authority has had its effects in Canada, and the end is not in sight.

On the whole, the Canadian churches have tried, with a fair measure of success, to have the best of both worlds. The Anglicans and Roman Catholics have a decentralized strength in their dioceses. The United and Presbyterian churches parallel this system in part in their conferences and synods but are more highly centralized. The Baptists, Church of Christ (Disciples), and Pentecostal Assemblies stress local autonomy. Alfred J. Sloan, Jr., in his book My Years with General Motors, describes in much detail the intricate task of trying to combine a high degree of coordination and central control with the equally needed incentive that only a large measure of decentralization can produce.

The story of the churches in Canadian life may well be capped by a brief statistical summary. Canada, unlike the United States, includes religious questions in its census-taking. The decennial census returns are quite complete in regard to the growth or decline of church membership and adherence, by denominations. In addition, some five-year studies are made.

From 1921 to 1961—almost half of the century under review and far more than half in terms of achievement—the Roman Catholic Church and United Church of Canada, among the larger communions, showed growth equal to the population increase. The Anglican proportion of all Canadians in 1921 was 16.2 per cent; by 1961 it had dropped to 13.2 per cent, despite the immigration of a million people from the United Kingdom after World War II. The Baptist proportion was 4.8 per cent in 1921 and fell to 3.3 per cent in 1961. The Jewish percentage of 1.4 was steady as was the Lutherans’ 3.5. The Pentecostals, with a smaller initial base, have recorded a phenomenal growth.

Challenges—Today And Tomorrow

The box score of attacks and threats that face the Canadian churches includes: The co*cky predictions that the old is finished; the glamour of rapid technological change and scientific achievement, which outshines the Christian beacons of faith and hope; the increasing secularization of life fostered by the community-deprived urban sprawls; the revolt of modern youth with its new “protestant” sit-in and other techniques; and the frustrations of all who want peace when there is no peace.

Will the Canadian churches see, meet, and overcome these threats? Have they wisdom to understand and courage to tackle these new problems?

The Church in Canada is determined to be the Church. She will experiment with jazz worship but knows that Christian worship as shaped by the centuries will hardly be simulated. This does not mean unwillingness or inability to use the most effective means of communication, including press, radio, and TV. But adjustments will not be made through any faddism or smart Madison Avenue or Hollywood gimmicks.

The Church in Canada knows she has many duties. She believes, and will continue to believe, that the chief ones are to proclaim the Word of God, make disciples for Jesus Christ, and order her life by the power of the Holy Spirit dwelling in her. She will major on the four gospel verbs: repent, believe, go, and give.

Among current and future Canadian church trends are these:

First: There will be less stress on the Church as institution, as an organization within four walls, and more outreach. The Church will listen more to the world. Such problems as hom*osexuality, abortion, pre-marital sex, and divorce will be tackled along with drives for such goals as peace, better housing, and free higher education. One area of church organization, however, has and will continue to have high priority: church union.

Second: Canadian churches will move further away from all forms of hierarchy. Efforts to give the male members a superior status over the female will fail. The ordination of women will increase. The historic episcopate will become largely a thing of the past. Prelacy will be heavily discounted.

Third: More heed will be paid to sociologist, social worker, and psychiatrist. More place will be found for politics as a vehicle of evangelism. The teaching of Jesus that the strong should bear the burdens of the weak will be heavily supported through a more integrated and extended social security program. There will be more counselors and researchers in full-time church service.

Fourth: The Christian churches with new curricula heavily oriented to liberal theology will enlist youth. Although they will battle current permissiveness, the churches’ message will be more positive than negative. The move from the “thou-shalt-nots” of the primitive society to the “thou shalts” of the pluralistic society will be made, but with difficulty.

Fifth: Awareness of the challenge of the space age will continue to increase. The population explosion will put an ever-greater pressure upon Canada to open its empty spaces for settlement. The churches must teach the full meaning of God’s fatherhood and love and demand entrance to Canada of far more of the world’s poor and hungry.

And, of course, the space age is also a thermonuclear one. Canada knows this. With a heavily armed United States to the south and an equally armed Russia just over the hill to the north, Canada could become the meat in a very badly assembled sandwich!

The churches know that Jonathan Edwards’s sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-God teaching is archaic. But there could be power-hungry atomic-equipped angry men.

The way ahead could be a via dolorosa. The Cross of Christ remains. It will continue to triumph over the wrecks even of today and tomorrow. Love, not hate, will continue to be the chief word of the Canadian churches in their service in and beyond our nation.

Religious aspects of Canada’s lavish centennial celebration will leap over ecclesiastical and theological lines. Top clergy of virtually all denominations share the patriotic spirit, and even some United States clergymen plan to lend their presence to the observance. The list of special events ranges from evangelistic campaigns to new interfaith programs. Note:

♦ Billy Graham and his Canadian associate, Leighton Ford, will crusade in several centennial evangelistic campaigns during 1967. Dr. Carl F. H. Henry, editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, has been invited to conduct an extensive lecture tour across the nation.

♦ A centennial hymn or anthem is being created by poet-diplomat Robert Choquette and Dr. Healey Willan, dean of Canadian composers.

♦ An Interfaith Anthology of Prayers will be edited by Dr. Ramsay Armitage, former principal of Wycliffe College, Toronto. It is to draw on Christian, Hebrew, Muslim, and Buddhist doxologies and present “both traditional and modern viewpoints,” according to the Centennial Commission.

♦ A number of other centennial ecumenical experiments are being conducted. As an example, the commission reported that Mennonites in Edmonton plan to spend a day touring a mosque and meeting Muslims.

As its gift to Canadian Christians on the nation’s 100th birthday, CHRISTIANITY TODAY attempts an evangelical assessment of the religious situation. This is the first time that an entire issue of the magazine has been centered on one country.

Whatever one thinks of Canada’s tradition against the printing and sale of Sunday newspapers, it indicates the tenacity with which she can cling to a principle with its roots in Christian precepts. The ongoing role of Canadian churches is examined by the dean of the nation’s Protestant clergymen, Dr. James R. Mutchmor (see page 5).

Canada has also held on to the principle of promoting population growth—when most countries are trying to curb it. Underpopulated Canada welcomed 200,000 immigrants last year. The federal government bestows a monthly subsidy upon every child in the land. Contraceptives are still illegal, partly because of religious influence, partly because of a general resistance to change. Within the churches themselves, however, a vast array of changes can be documented, as Ian Rennie does (page 8).

A Toronto theologian, Dr. C. E. Feilding, recently completed a three-year study of ministerial training in Canada for the accrediting agency of North America. He charged that major Canadian denominations are lowering educational standards to retain students, and that some candidates who fail are ordained. Meanwhile, churches go from one theological controversy to another. Dr. Thomas Harpur examines the theological climate, beginning on page 14. Discussions of other important aspects of Canada’s present religious situation will be found on pages 11, 12, 16, and 19.

Overall, perhaps the most thought-provoking thing to be said about Canada concerns her staggering potential. This potential is very obvious on the physical level as one scans the vastness of her border. But Canada’s greatest opportunities may well be ideological or even spiritual. Her future can well be the envy of many a nation.

Canada’S Religions

Chart compiled from government census figures. The population of most Canadian churches is usually given on the basis of what people say they are, rather than in terms of actually counting members in full communion. Census enumerators in 1961 were instructed to “record the specific religious body, denomination, sect or community reported in answer to the question ‘What is your religion?’”

This special issue is dedicated to the evangelical witness in our great neighbor-land to the north. CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S news editor is securely married to a Canadian (Pat Kucharsky comes from Hamilton, Ontario); hence this is an appropriate time to salute this colleague’s fine journalistic contribution. David Eugene Kucharsky (“Gene,” as he is called) joined us on January 1, 1958, coming from the Pittsburgh bureau of United Press International. In the years since then he has shaped the most effective and widely read religious news section in Christian journalism. Mrs. Kucharsky—along with the three young Kucharsky daughters—will be glad to read here of our tenth-year recognition of her husband’s conscientious labors: with the next issue he will hold, along with Dr. Harold Lindsell, the rank of associate editor. Gene Kucharsky’s new role will include supervisory direction of the news operation but will also give him the chance to project and prepare periodic interpretative news features for the main essay section.

At the same time, Richard Ostling becomes news editor, a post in which he will maintain close liaison with CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S religious journalism fellows under the Washington Journalism Center.

Much that has been said in the recent past about man’s “coming of age” has been inspired by the prison statements of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, popularized by Bishop Robinson in Honest to God. The most frequently quoted passages from Bonhoeffer’s writings are excerpts from the series of Briefen an einen Freund (Letters to a Friend), especially those written between June 8 and July 16, 1944.

It is not surprising that Bonhoeffer’s theological statements are woolly and contradictory, since he wrote from prison, with the Gestapo waiting to close in upon him; he realistically expected at any moment to hear the knock at his cell door from the seedy characters who would bid him accompany them—to the gallows. Yet these writings need to be studied for what they are and what they say, so that their truth or non-truth is judged from their intrinsic meaning, and not by the aura of the heroic that surrounds their author.

Like a refrain comes Bonhoeffer’s reiteration of the theme of the Mündigkeit der Welt und des Menschen (the of-age-ness of the world and of man). He sees this as the end-result of a process that had its roots in the scientific movements of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and has continued steadily to the point at which man no longer needs God as a constitutive factor for his thinking, whether moral, political, or scientific (see letter for July 16, 1944, in Richard Grunow, ed., Bonhoeffer Auswahl, p. 589).

Bonhoeffer notes that man has, step by step, conquered his environment, until there is allegedly no room for God, as historically understood, in the framing or articulation of the culture modern man has created. Bonhoeffer assures us (ibid., p. 577) that man has learned to manage or at least to cope with all the important factors and elements that confront him without recourse to God as a working hypothesis. Man simply must learn to get along without God.

Perhaps this will suffice for the present as a statement of Bonhoeffer’s thesis, if we add that at the end of his letter of July 16, 1944, he speaks of God as powerlessly permitting himself to be crowded out of the world and onto the cross. This view has quite evident affinity with the “radical theology” of Thomas Altizer.

The theme of man’s coming of age is a tempting one that derives a degree of plausibility from the immense strides science has made in conquering nature. Man stands at the threshold of the conquest of space: lunar exploration today, interplanetary travel tomorrow, and perhaps interstellar travel later. The question remains, however: Does this capability imply as much as modern man thinks it does?

As one considers man’s coming of age, one troublesome facet of experience presents itself. Perhaps never again does a person feel so grown-up and so capable of managing his own affairs as he felt at the onset of adolescence. This period in life, so easily forgotten by adults, has as one of its signs a false and foolish sense of autonomy and self-sufficiency. Thus, to understand the present status of the race, as it imagines itself to be “of age,” he may well recall some of the traits of mind that accompany the puberty crisis.

The adolescent has a ludicrous inability to distinguish between major and minor issues. Usually his major considerations include rejection of the guideposts of the elders and acceptance of a servile bondage to the ways and taboos of his peer group. Or the achievement of independence looms large, while a realistic assessment of his capacity for self-direction seems unimportant. The immediate nearly always takes precedence over the higher and the lasting. The adolescent is impatient: he wants what he wants when he wants it.

Again, the adolescent tends to misunderstand the nature and role of freedom. He maximizes the absence of restraint and minimizes the significance of the creative boundaries that are essential to the creative life. To him, freedom is something to be gained by quiet rebellion or by noisy revolt—and he is almost compulsive at the point of demonstrating his grown-upness by behaving in a juvenile way.

He tends to take the basic necessities of his life for granted. Any “good” for him must be something beyond these. And any appeal concerning the duty of gratitude to parents is likely to be met with a surly, “Well, I didn’t ask to be born!”

The adolescent often has a distorted sense of danger. While he feels anxious and in personal jeopardy if he is unable to gain the approval of his peers, he tends (in the absence of strong training otherwise) to feel very little the perils involved in excessive speed, the intake of alcohol, or the use of drugs or chemical substances that “turn him on.” He feels strongest at the points at which he is really weakest, and estimates as weakness the cultivation of the areas in which true strength is found.

Much more could be said. The clear implication of it all is that an emphatic and flamboyant proclamation of autonomy and self-sufficiency may well be an eloquent testimony to adolescence and immaturity of outlook. The question repeatedly arises: What are the real criteria for maturity?

One need not seem unappreciative of the greatness of scientific endeavor, particularly in the West, if he acknowledges that there are major areas in which man has not yet begun to master some of the essentials for living. That man’s achievements in power and energy are now too tightly harnessed to destructive purposes does not cheer the thoughtful person. That man has not succeeded in bringing his reproductive energy into some rational relationship with his ability to produce and/or transport basic nutritive elements hangs like a pall over the human enterprise. That the spread of technology now serves mainly to widen the gulf between the affluent nations and the poor ones is hardly a univocal witness to man’s maturity. Nor does the boldness with which some assert man’s independence of a Creator tend to signify maturity, particularly when one reflects that the greatest nations are those that have inherited the greatest natural resources. Whence came these resources? Are they really “natural” and to be taken for granted?

Two conclusions compel our attention. First, the compulsive and shrill proclamation of man’s attainment of his majority may, like similar protestations during the human puberty crisis, be a testimony to great immaturity.

Second, maturity is a relative thing, so that a person (or a society) may be relatively mature in one aspect and pitiably adolescent in many others. The wide time-gap between the teen-ager’s relative physical maturity and his emotional, social, and economic maturity may be profoundly revealing for the predicament of mankind. Can the one who walks be expected to assess his steps and his progress correctly, or to serve as his own locator?

The stained-glass Bible glowing in a pink-and-blue sunburst window at College Church of Christ in Abilene, Texas, emphasizes the basic unifying factor among all Churches of Christ—reliance on the authority of the Scripture. Beyond that, the 10,000 members of the rapidly growing movement who crowded into Abilene last month for the annual Abilene Christian College Lectureship exhibited a spectrum of religious viewpoints.

“When you talk about the Churches of Christ, what you describe depends on where you are,” said Dr. Abraham Malherbe, an ACC Bible professor educated at Harvard Divinity School. “It is a pluralistic group, really.” Emphasis on the normative character of the New Testament, on “the once for allness” of the New Testament, is what ties the churches together, he said.

The 2.5-million-member group traces its roots to the Restoration Movement led by the dynamic Irishman Thomas Campbell and his son Alexander in the early nineteenth century. Unity of all believers in Christ was their plea, and they believed that acceptance of the Bible as the absolute authority in religion was the only possible basis for unity. Although the movement has not unified Christendom, it spawned two of the largest religious bodies indigenous to America—the Churches of Christ and the Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ).

The Churches of Christ represent more than 20,000 independent congregations located in all fifty states but concentrated in the South and West. They are the only major religious community in America that has no organization beyond the elders of the local church. Each congregation selects its own minister and missionaries.

Boundaries of fellowship are not clear cut, and divergent interpretation of Scripture is tolerated, though churches commonly believe immersion is essential for salvation. Neither instrumental music nor the title “Reverend” is regarded as biblical.

Partly because there is no hierarchy whatever and no denominational conventions, the annual lectureships at the churches’ twenty colleges have gained considerable significance. The Abilene lectureship, the most famous, draws together members as diverse as conservative Reuel Lemmons and arch-conservative-turned-liberal Carl Ketcherside. Lemmons is editor of Firm Foundation in Austin, Texas, and Ketcherside is editor of Mission Messenger in St. Louis. They wield great power, since the churches’ journals, though themselves independent, are the only tangible factors holding the movement together.

Lemmons, who states his convictions in nineteenth-century language and distributes them throughout the “brotherhood” in his monthly journal, fears that “a small number of well-educated men have imbibed the liberal ideas of Protestantism” and that “they are in some positions of influence among us.… Especially are they attracting the young mind of the church.”

Ketcherside dropped a campaign against “located preachers” about six years ago in favor of a new mission to tear down “walls between churches … man built of hate.” Now an advocate of reuniting the Restoration Movement, which split into the Churches of Christ and the Christian Churches around the turn of the century, he concluded that the movement divided “when we ceased to love one another … not over the issues.”

The white-haired preacher, whose mother was Lutheran and whose agnostic father later espoused the Churches of Christ, predicts, “We stand on the threshold of one of the greatest breakthroughs of love in the history of the movements.”

Another editor, Leroy Garrett, professor of philosophy at Texas Womans’ University, holds similar views. His journal, Restoration Review, has become an organ of expression for “a brighter-minded younger set, with Ph.D.’s more often than not,” he claims.

One speaker at Abilene last month contended that “as long as we have dedicated men who can give book, chapter, and verse, instead of paraphrase, who will use the language of the Scriptures rather than that of psychology and philosophy, and who will quote Paul and Peter instead of Barth and Bultmann, the church will be safe.”

Dr. John C. Stevens, assistant president of Abilene Christian College, said, however, that more and more preachers have “discovered that the job is not only to quote Scripture but also to get their neighbors to listen to it.”

The complexion of the church is changing, he declared. “So many people in the congregation are well educated and efficient in business, they are requiring the same of the church.” He sees the church becoming more concerned with problems of community welfare—breaking down racial barriers; establishing community centers, homes for unwed mothers, and orphan-care centers; and placing greater emphasis on mission methods.

One of the churches’ most successful community-welfare projects is a community center called “The House of the Carpenter” in Boston’s South End. Supported by the Brookline Church of Christ, the workers are primarily graduate students at Harvard, MIT, Boston University, and Boston College. This inner-city project has drawn several hundred poverty-stricken children into annual summer camps, craft classes, remedial school classes, Bible studies, and a generally expanded world.

Currently, the most popular method of sending new people to an area lightly populated with Church of Christ members is what is known as an Exodus movement. An entire community of believers moves to an area rather than relying on an individual missionary.

The first modern-day Exodus began in 1963 when a young minister, Dwain Evans, led eighty-five families to West Islip, Long Island. The West Islip congregation has won 100 converts and built its own $300,000 building. Other Exodus movements are being planned for Newark, Delaware; Finland; Toronto, Canada; Rochester, New York; Burlington, Massachusetts; and Sao Paulo, Brazil.

The next area of innovation, predicts a young missionary from Perth, Australia, will be in learning how to apply the old doctrines to a rapidly changing world. “Our fathers learned how to apply these Scriptures, and it worked,” said Ron Durham. “We’ve grown fast. But the world is changing, and old methods and approaches to applying those Scriptures don’t work.”

“The nature of the restoration plea—divorce from tradition, makes it essential for every generation to examine the Bible and see if it is the authority, then learn how to apply it,” declared Durham. “The world is changing so fast, trying to apply old doctrines to each new situation—that’s the rub.”

Protestant Panorama

Methodists reported a loss in membership last month, the first such decline since the present Methodist Church came into being in 1939—except for a 1953 drop attributed to a wholesale dropping of inactive members. At the end of the 1965–66 fiscal year, U. S. Methodists numbered 10,318,910, a decrease of 12,664 from the previous year. Church-school enrollment fell off by 196,711 to 6,705,727.

Total membership in Southern Baptist churches reached a record high of 10,952,463 during 1966, according to official statistics. The figure is an increase of 179,751 over the 1965 total.

A revised 1967 budget for the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod is $26.2 million, some $600,000 below last year’s figure. Receipts are so sluggish that the denomination will spend at 5 per cent below the budget.

Death

LESLIE E. COOKE, 58, associate general secretary of the World Council of Churches in charge of refugee and interchurch aid; in New York.

Miscellany

Our Sunday Visitor, national Roman Catholic weekly, reported last month that Pope Paul has been invited to visit the World Council of Churches’ assembly in Sweden next year. But Eugene Carson Blake, top WCC executive, later denied such an invitation had been sent.

Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie spoke to members from the U. S. Senate and House prayer-breakfast groups during his state visit to Washington last month.

The National Council of Churches General Board urged last month that the principle of conscientious objection to military service to extended to provide for those who merely object to particular wars or to the use of certain weapons or forms of warfare. A board policy statement also recommended elimination of a statutory requirement that conscientious objection be based on “religious training and belief.”

Two clergymen of the International Council of Christian Churches were reported expelled from the Cameroun, where they had come to confer with local Presbyterian pastors. Some days earlier a group of the pastors had walked out of their General Assembly, vowing to continue their denomination in defiance of a merger vote. The Christian Beacon blamed a pro-union Presbyterian police chief for the expulsion.

In 1960, John F. Kennedy proved you don’t have to be Protestant to be President. Many said religious creed was irrelevant and mention of it was bigotry.

By 1964, Barry Goldwater had become a religious issue for many churchmen, particularly because of his laissezfaire stand on civil rights. Hardly anybody noticed that his running mate, William E. Miller, was Roman Catholic. Michigan’s Governor George Romney was so opposed to Goldwater’s racial policy that he never endorsed his party’s presidential candidate.

In one of the great ironies of recent political history, a powerful religion-and-race issue now lurks in the background as Romney considers running for president himself. George Romney said he is the first serious presidential contender to belong to a cult, and his Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) practices racial discrimination.

Last month Romney went west on his first test of grass-roots support. Much of the 7,000 miles was in Mormon country, and the high point was a confrontation with Protestant and Catholic clergymen in the Mormon citadel, Salt Lake City, Utah. It was reminiscent of Kennedy’s urbane deflation of the religious issue at a 1960 meeting with Houston’s Protestant clergy.

The Utah questioners knew that in the Mormon church Negroes cannot enter the “Aaronic priesthood,” first step to full church activity, which is routinely entered by white youths at age 12. Nor can Negroes enter Mormon temples, major ritual centers such as the famous one two miles from the Catholic mission hall where Romney met the ministers.

Questioned by the Rev. Louis Williams, a Baptist, Romney met the issue side-on: “I don’t think I’m required as a public official to discuss the doctrine of my church. It would be wrong for me to do so.” Taking a leaf from Kennedy, Romney asked to be judged on his politics, not his religion. He said that his liberal civil-rights views have their impetus in Mormonism, and that if the church had prevented him from working to end discrimination in society he would have left it. (In November, 1965, the National Conference of Christians and Jews honored Romney for his efforts toward racial equality.)

“I believe I’m entitled to be judged on the basis of my actions, not someone’s ideas of what may be the precepts of my church,” the governor said. But he is helped by the fact that few people know much about these racial precepts. His wife, Lenore, a Mormon Sunday school teacher for eighteen years, told Look magazine last month that “it makes me very cross when some commentators say we think Negroes inferior.” This prompted the liberal Protestant weekly Christian Century to comment, “As a loyal member of a church with an indefensible tenet, Mrs. Romney has a burden to carry. Don’t we all?”

After the Utah confrontation, the Rev. Palmer S. Ross of the African Methodist Episcopal Church said that “the right thing to do is to disown” Mormon theology on race. Presumably Romney could do just that but has no plans to. When Mormon leaders passed him to be president of the denomination’s Detroit “stake” (equivalent of diocese), Romney vowed to obey the “accepted rules and doctrines of the church.”

Current doctrine could be changed by a divine revelation to 93-year-old David O. McKay, church president. The next man in line for the LDS presidency, aging Joseph Fielding Smith, was quoted by Look in 1963: “Darkies are wonderful people, and they have their place in the church.” Smith leads the Council of the Twelve Apostles, which includes Romney’s cousin Marion.

Church leaders have said some pretty salty things about Negroes for better than a century. The latest definitive word came from the First Presidency (McKay and two advisers) in August, 1951. Their statement tied the Negroes’ plight directly to performance in the “pre-mortal existence” the church believes in. Negroes were on God’s side in the great heavenly battle with Satan but somehow didn’t measure up. Since Mormons reject original sin, the statement said, the individual Negro “is punished or alloted to a certain position on this earth, not because of Cain’s transgression, but came to earth through the loins of Cain because of his failure to achieve other stature in the spirit world.”

This section refers to another element in Mormon racism—identification of black skin with the biblical “mark” given Cain and his descendants after he murdered Abel. Although the idea is still held by a few extreme fundamentalists, it has never gained the stature of doctrine within mainline Christianity. The “mark” is tied to the priesthood ban in the Pearl of Great Price, the last holy book translated by the LDS prophet Joseph Smith. The Pearl and the racial beliefs that go with it are rejected by the Reorganized LDS Church.

George Romney has stated, “I am completely the product of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” His grandfather fled the Nauvoo, Illinois, settlement after a mob murdered Smith. Governor Romney was born in Chijuajua, Mexico, at a Mormon exile community formed when the U. S. government ordered an end to Mormon polygamy. (Granddad had four wives, but Romney’s own parents were monogamous.)

After the family returned to the United States, Romney attended a church high school in Salt Lake City and then attended the University of Utah briefly. Like most Mormons, he spent two years as a missionary, and he considers this experience in Britain as a start toward the salesmanship that led him to the presidency of American Motors, followed by a meteoric political rise. Son Mitt is currently evangelizing in France.

Romney’s belief in hard work, individual responsibility, religious faith, and the divine inspiration of the American republic is tied up with his Mormonism. His political speeches are laced with calls for a return to God and old-fashioned morality—a factor that turns off some Grand Old Party pros. The Romneys do not smoke or drink, although they serve alcohol to guests. At a visit to Nelson Rockefeller in Puerto Rico after last fall’s elections, Romney told reporters, “I never talk politics on Sunday.”

Wags call Romney’s staff the “Dutch Mafia” because it includes several men from the conservative Dutch Protestant group. His key advisor—recently shifted to duties with the embryonic national campaign effort—is Walter B. De Vries, 37, a Ph.D. who taught political science at Calvin College, the Christian Reformed school in Grand Rapids.

During the 1962 campaign for governor, De Vries recruited one of his former students, Charles Orlebeke, 32, also a Ph.D. in political sience. Orlebeke and Robert Danhof—a graduate of Hope College of the Reformed Church of America—are two of Romney’s four top executive assistants. Herbert De Young, another Calvin grad, recently left Romney to join the U. S. Department of Commerce. The Dutch duchy even includes Romney’s bodyguard, state trooper Cornelius Bykerk, who went to Grand Rapids Christian High School with Orlebeke.

Orlebeke (who is actually Flemish, not Dutch) says that “we are close-knit socially, religiously, and in our political positions” but that the accumulation on Romney’s staff is the result of “a chain of coincidence.”

Strategist De Vries would have expected a significant anti-Mormon vote a decade ago, but “Kennedy broke that barrier.” Asked how the Negro question would affect voting, he pointed out that Romney drew more than one-third of Michigan’s Negro vote in winning re-election in November. Early this year, the Harris Poll showed that 84 per cent of Negroes and 88 per cent of the national sample don’t care about Romney’s religion.

De Vries, who has written for the Christian Reformed Banner, is not exactly a Mormon enthusiast, but he says, “any organized religion has certain irrational aspects, including Calvin’s Geneva, and Roman Catholicism.”

But a well-known Protestant writer who usually votes Republican made the following comment after being assured his name wouldn’t be printed: He has grave doubts about handing the vast presidential powers to someone who so fully embraces Mormonism, “knowing what we do about the crudeness of its theology, its historically nonsensical account of U. S. prehistory in the Book of Mormon, and the like.” On a different level, free-lance evangelist Harry McGimsey of Hemet, California, is mailing out cards which read: “Dear Friend: Mormonism is headed for the White House. If you can use more of our tracts to warn people, please write me.”

Although Romney is the current Republican front-runner for 1968, there is much mention of Senator Charles Percy of Illinois, who is a Christian Scientist. His candidacy would raise similar objections from those who distrust his religion’s denial of the material. If he becomes a serious candidate, Percy will someday have to vow full support of public-health programs despite church teachings.

Another interesting religious issue would develop if Senator Jacob Javits were nominated for vice-president and became the first Jew on a national ticket. Time magazine speculated last month that Senator Edward Brooke, as a Negro running mate, could neutralize Romney’s Mormon problem. Another possibility is Senator Mark O. Hatfield, whose strong evangelical beliefs could create opposition.

Next to Romney, the most-mentioned nominee is hardy perennial Richard M. Nixon. As a Quaker, he is also outside the religious mainstream, but he has never let the customary pacifism of this faith affect his foreign-policy views.

The Powell Controversy

Here and there around the country religious groups rallied to support the preacher from Harlem. It was not enough. On March 1 the House of Representatives voted to bar Adam Clayton Powell from its membership for the remainder of the Ninetieth Congress.

The stunningly severe action against Powell may well produce an adverse effect on American race relations. Many considered him the most powerful Negro ever to come on the national scene. His arrogance and misconduct notwithstanding, they argue that he fell victim to a racial backlash. Historians for years to come will argue the extent of racial prejudice against Powell.

In Chicago last month, Powell got considerable support from members of the National Council of Churches General Board. The lone outspoken critic of Powell was Mrs. Jesse Jai McNeil of Dallas, an NCC vice president. Mrs. McNeil, widow of a well-known Negro Baptist minister and author, said Powell “should have known better.… Why whitewash this man’s actions?”

Charisma In The Capital

Faith-healing evangelist Oral Roberts urged an audience of twenty diplomats, twelve U. S. congressmen, and more than 1,000 Full Gospel Business Men to find a “heavenly vision.” And to Pentecostalist Roberts, this involves “the baptism of the Holy Spirit.” He said that no one can present Christ with the success achieved by the Full Gospel Fellowship without this charismatic experience.

Roberts told of his own recovery from tuberculosis through faith and recounted other instances of spiritual healing. Another advocate of healing was Bonhomme Arthur, who has been Haiti’s ambassador to the United States since December. Arthur is a Methodist lay preacher who had a vision of God and was convicted of his sins while in prison sentenced to death. He finally won his freedom and went on to become president of the Haitian Bible Society, a worker for Laubach Literacy, and a senator and public works minister.

Missal Mix-Up

A Roman Catholic missal—not a Bible—was inadvertently used by Lyndon Johnson when he was sworn in as President after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

So said the Washington Post last month, corroborating a report in a forthcoming book, The Truth About the Assassination, by Newsweek correspondent Charles Roberts, who was aboard Air Force One at the time.

This new version contradicts the account of William Manchester in The Death of a President. Manchester said Kennedy’s personal Bible was used.

The Heresy Of Ernest Harrison

The Rev. Ernest Harrison, 49, who headed the board that produced the Anglican Church of Canada’s new curriculum last year, was removed from the staff of Toronto’s Holy Trinity Church last month in the outcry over his new book, A Church Without God.

Outdoing Altizer, Harrison disbelieves not only in a present and future God but even in a past one. “I claim to be a Christian and an Anglican; yet I can say in all seriousness, that there is no God,” wrote the Oxford-educated priest. Harrison now teaches English at the Ryerson Institute of Technology. When he was with the denomination’s religious education department, he persuaded Pierre Berton to write his controversial outsider’s view of the Church, called The Comfortable Pew.

Toronto’s Bishop George Snell has barred Harrison from priestly work, but he still holds a license to preach in Quebec. There will be no heresy action in Toronto.

Harrison says the Bible “is not the last word on anything.… There are contexts in which Lord of the Flies is a more useful, perhaps a deeper witness than that of Genesis; in which Death of a Salesman shows more insight than Jonah; in which Martin Luther King presents a more dramatic plea for the triumph of grace over law than the neurotic Paul.”

He speculates that Jesus probably got drunk, and experienced acute sexual excitement when the woman wiped his feet with her hair (Luke 7:37–39). On sex: “Conduct which is right between two married people does not necessarily become wrong because they are unmarried.” As for life after death, “for myself it is a doctrine that has no meaning.”

J. BERKLEY REYNOLDS

American Protestant leaders, yielding a historic principle, apparently intend to cash in heavily on Great Society programs. At a meeting of the National Council of Churches’ 268-member General Board in Chicago last month, they joined Orthodox leaders to sanction wide use of public funds by church-related service agencies.

A policy statement adopted by the board encourages an estimated 3,000 American Protestant and Orthodox social and health agencies to reach for a big share of the more than $50 billion of public money now reportedly being spent annually on social welfare at federal, state, and local levels. The statement specifically names “church-related service agencies offering social, psychiatric, health, rehabilitation, housing, and neighborhood development services” as appropriate channels of government spending. As these agencies draw on tax dollars, their church sponsors will be free to divert the millions of dollars now earmarked for social work into new sectarian—and even political—programs.

A companion document rationalizing the National Council’s own use of tax dollars never came to a vote. It was one of several proposed reports and statements that had to be laid aside on the last day of the board meeting when it was discovered that a quorum of 89 was lacking.

Two days before, on Washington’s Birthday (which went unrecognized by the board), the policy statement “Church-State Issues for Social and Health Services” was adopted by a vote of 96 to 6, with 2 abstentions. From the American Protestant perspective, the major surrender of principle came on a closely contested floor amendment after key board members were bombarded with telegrams from denominational social-action leaders. As originally proposed by an NCC committee, the statement said, “Church-related service agencies offering social, psychiatric, health, rehabilitation, housing and neighborhood development services may in temporary, emergency, or exceptional circ*mstances accept public funds.…”

Social-action leaders argued that limiting acceptance of public funds to these special situations would run counter to current welfare practices by churches. After a hot debate they won deletion of the phrase, though they did not offer to estimate to what extent churches are now involved in state subsidies. Those favoring the deletion mustered the necessary votes in return for another amendment that calls for discontinuance of the use of public funds if “freedom of the churches” is jeopardized. It was added to a list of five other “safeguards” drawn up by the drafting committees.

The policy statement differs in principle from a pronouncement adopted six years ago in which the council opposed use of public funds for parochial schools. The 1961 pronouncement said “the practical effect would be that the American people would lose their actual control of the use of the taxes paid by all the people for purposes common to the whole society.”

In contrast, NCC President Arthur S. Flemming, former U.S. Health, Education, and Welfare Secretary, told newsmen last month that he favors a “meaningful partnership” between government and religious institutions. The new posture could likely unleash another flood of criticism against the NCC.

The church-state question is as old as Christianity, and money has probably been the dominant aspect. Jesus himself cited a coin in response to a question about religious versus political loyalties. The shifting position of the American religious leadership toward government subsidy comes at a time when the churches’ financial future is less than bright. Few denominations are making up for shrinking dollar values. The NCC had to dip into reserves last year, despite its $4,000,000 investments (its biggest stock holding is AT&T).

As if to reflect dollar anxiety afresh, the February NCC meeting was dominated by economic concerns. Board members were told that in three instances NCC programs had received minor financial assistance from foundations suspected of having links with the Central Intelligence Agency. Meeting in the oak-paneled Florentine Room of the Pick-Congress Hotel, the board asked the government for a “full funding” of the federal anti-poverty program for 1967–68 at no less than $2.1 billion. The board also recorded its support in principle of legislation “which will require all lenders to inform all borrowers in clear” terms of the dollar cost and the annual interest rate on each loan. Just before the opening of the meeting, the New York Times reported a flurry of protest from liberals over what an NCC spokesman called an attempt to “streamline” the council’s Commission on the Church and Economic Life.

Temporal concerns within the NCC are being underscored as social-action radicals seek to gain an upper hand. These radicals want to commandeer the NCC into throwing its whole weight against what they regard as evil social structures. They regard their mission as the crucial need of the day, and they propose to shelve the idea of reforming society through individual action. Their problem is that they are obliged to finance their programs with money from constituencies that largely oppose their approach.

The man in the middle of the muddle is efficient, even-tempered R. H. Edwin Espy, general secretary of the NCC. Upon the 58-year-old Espy, a native of Portland, Oregon, falls the responsibility of balancing the pressures. He brings to the job the combined assets of a Yale doctorate and years of top administrative experience with the YMCA and Student Volunteer Movement. He was named to the top NCC administrative post in 1963.

Espy, a short stocky American Baptist layman, lives with his wife in a Manhattan apartment. The couple, who have no children, attend Riverside Church.

Because he is an administrator rather than a legislator, Espy stays out of General Board debates, confining his comments to non-substantive matters. At the February meeting, however, he stood up to President Flemming in warning the board to confine its recommendations on the Viet Nam war within a mandate established by last December’s General Assembly in Miami Beach. Flemming tried to stretch the mandate, and the two engaged in a friendly but serious debate at the head table. Espy has a crisp delivery despite the trace of a lisp.

Espy gets much more severe pressures from the bureaucratic radicals who have little respect for the consensus of the NCC’s vast constituency. Some are on the NCC payroll, constantly thinking up new programs and position papers. There was evidence last month that they go so far as to write speeches for board-meeting guests to promote bureaucrat-inspired programs. Other radicals are denominational employees who have won themselves seats on the board and have ample time to attend its meetings. They often seize the added leverage provided by the absence of busier or less interested lay members and clergymen who give priority to pastoral responsibilities.

Espy said publicly last month that the charge could be refuted that the National Council “is tightly run by a small clique of bureaucrats.” He observed that “one could also elicit the opposite charge that the churches through the NCC spend too much time in talk.”

The NCC General Board meets three times a year, never with more than half its membership on hand. It is the council’s governing board between the triennial General Assemblies, which operate with three times as many voting delegates, chosen by NCC constitutent denominations (for a report on the last assembly, see Dec. 23 issue, p. 31).

U. S. Aid For Segregation?

Federal aid to church schools harms both racial integration of education and Protestant-Catholic ecumenism, W. Stanley Rycroft told last month’s annual conference of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Rycroft, longtime ecumenical researcher for the United Presbyterian Church, said “the most serious aspect has been an exodus from public schools … in an attempt on the part of the parents to flee integration.”

In the past year Roman Catholics have increasingly recognized that their schools often become white harbors. A report to Americans United showed that 90 per cent of public funds for elementary and secondary schools goes to Roman Catholics, although Protestant-related institutions hold the lead at the college level.

KEN GAYDOS

The Easter season puts the central historical claims of Christianity into the secular spotlight for a few fleeting moments each year. Opposition arguments haven’t changed much over the centuries, but this year they have an engaging new spokesman.

Hugh J. Schonfield, a Jewish historian from Britain, last month wrapped up a four-week, $10,000 tour to promote his version of the historical Jesus, found in his book The Passover Plot. His 275-page theory rated little attention from scholars in the field, but Schonfield has doubtless had an effect on people who have little technical knowledge of their own.

Aided by controversy, some bright advertisem*nts (“Don’t give this book to anyone for Christmas”), and two month-long tours, Plot sales are nearing 100,000 during Lent, and the book will go into a paperback edition this spring. Schonfield proved an articulate proponent of his views on network TV; many thought he outflanked Christian opponents in broadcast debates.

Schonfield’s dozens of appearances in major cities were not without incident. His publisher, Bernard Geis Associates, reports Boston’s WBZ canceled an interview the day after Ash Wednesday as being inappropriate. Pressure from the Roman Catholic archdiocese led to a cancellation on New York’s WCBS. But publicist Letty Pogrebin, who considers Schonfield to be “like a little modern prophet,” reports one Catholic priest found himself in “95 per cent agreement” with the Briton. The Rev. Harold Blake Walker, a Presbyterian, wrote a friendly review for the Chicago Tribune.

Historians are not so enthused. One who has expressed his opinion is Edwin M. Yamauchi, a young history professor at Rutgers who earned a Ph.D. in Mediterranean studies from Brandeis University. Some of Yamauchi’s reasons for skepticism are summarized as follows:

The wildest, most publicized aspect of Plot is the theory that Jesus manipulated people and events to fulfill Old Testament prophecies of a messiah. Schonfield contends that Jesus confided in Joseph of Arimathea, Lazarus, a Judaean priest, and an anonymous “young man.” (For some reason, he excluded his closest disciples—Peter, James, and John.)

The conspirators were to give Jesus a drug so he could feign death on the cross, then recover and reveal himself as “resurrected” after three days. The drug was in the “vinegar” (cheap wine) given Jesus on the cross, Schonfield explains, while omitting that Jesus earlier had refused another pain-killer: wine mixed with gall or myrrh.

To prove that Joseph of Arimathea was in on the plot, Schonfield points out that he asked for the body (soma) of Jesus instead of the corpse (ptoma). But soma often means “corpse” in Greek, as in John 19:31; this meaning is universal in Homer’s writings.

Schonfield explains that the plot failed because Jesus received a spear wound on the cross and couldn’t be revived. The plotters then got rid of the body somewhere—thus the empty tomb—and Christians later added the story about guards at the tomb to make things plausible.

The major reason for belief in the resurrection, however, wasn’t the empty tomb but Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances to his disciples. Of the ten appearances generally listed by biblical scholars, Schonfield makes no mention at all of three and cites a fourth without comment. He dismisses the two appearances in Jerusalem as a Judean tradition picked up by Luke and John but neglects to mention the allusion to them in Mark.

The other four are explained away as mistaken identity, although he says each involved “a real living person.” Mary Magdalene saw a gardener. The “angel” at the empty tomb was just a “young man.” The disciples on the road to Emmaus also made a mistake, possibly involving the “young man.” This ubiquitous youth was also the person the disciples saw on the mountain in Galilee.

Schonfield neglects Saint Paul’s report that more than 500 persons saw the risen Jesus at once. Schonfield’s own Authentic New Testament translation includes this passage but, without support from any existing Greek manuscript, leaves out the statement that “the greater part” of those 500 were still alive when Paul wrote.

Yet Schonfield tries to maintain that neither Jesus nor his apostles were guilty of fraud. The apostles, he says, were confused by that mysterious “young man,” were transformed by the delusion, and then turned Jerusalem upside down with their preaching.

Aside from the “Passover plot” section, Schonfield makes standard arguments against such doctrines as the resurrection and Christ’s deity. His contention that pagan ideas seeped into the writings is aided by the late dates at which he says they were written. He puts John’s Gospel at A. D. 110–115, which does not consider the revised estimate that recent scholarship has impressed even on Bishop John Robinson. In a book last year, eminent scholar W. F. Albright said he prefers a date in the late seventies or early eighties for John.

Schonfield’s date for the Book of Acts is A. D. 98–117, on the disputable grounds that Luke depended on Josephus’ Antiquities; there are cogent reasons to date Acts earlier. One argument Schonfield uses for a late date of Luke’s Gospel is a resemblance between the Emmaus Road incident and a story in Apuleius’s The Golden Ass. But Schonfield dates Luke at about A. D. 100; Apuleius was not born until 124!

Assuming late writings and pagan corruptions of the stories about Jesus, Schonfield says the belief in the resurrection was patterned after worship of a dying-and-rising fertility god, such as Adonis or Attis. After thorough study, such scholars as Pierre Lambrechts question whether these legends even existed in pre-Christian times. In any event, if the legends existed, they typified the death and rebirth of vegetation, not of a historical person.

Belief in Jesus’ deity is linked to the deification of the Roman emperors. Technically, it was Augustus’ genius or double who was deified, and he himself was named a god only after he died. It was a madman—Gaius Caligula (A. D. 37–41)—who demanded worship of himself while he was still living. Many scholars believe the ruler cult was more an expression of political loyalty than of genuine piety.

Jesus, of course, was not a conqueror or emperor with vast powers. And those who first worshiped him were not Gentiles from this polytheistic Greek-Roman culture in which heroes readily became anthropomorphic gods. They were Jews from a monotheistic tradition.

The early apostles’ Old Testament background included foreshadowings of deity in prophecies about the Messiah, even though the Jews were not looking for a divine Messiah. Schonfield does not deal with such passages as Psalms 2:7; 45:6, and 110:1. He also eliminates troublesome material when he compares a Qumran hymn with Isaiah 9:6, 7, by omitting the key phrase “Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

Schonfield similarly evades Paul’s statements on the deity of Jesus. He argues that Paul never spoke of Jesus as God and that followers “unacquainted” with Paul’s “esoteric Jewish background” made misinterpretations. Yet Philippians 2:6, for instance, is meaningless unless Paul assumed that Jesus was divine.

Then there are Jesus’ own statements. At the trial scene in Mark 14, the high priest asked Jesus whether he was the Messiah, and he replied ego eimi (“I am”). The Jewish scholar H. J. Schoeps writes that Jesus, in his use of the phrase, “implied that He predicated of Himself divine nature.” Schonfield figures that the priest then ripped his garments because Jesus had blasphemed Tiberius. But the rending of garments was a Jewish protest against a gidduf—blasphemy against God himself, an act worthy of death. If Jesus had merely claimed to be the Messiah, it is unlikely the Sanhedrin would have condemmed him to death. In the Jewish view, history would be the judge of messianic claims. In the next century, Rabbi Akiba proclaimed Bar Kokhba to be the Messiah, but rabbis who disagreed did not persecute either man.

Finally, Schonfield argues that the Jews would have stoned Jesus if he had blasphemed God by a claim to divinity. But he recognizes the historical fact that the Jews were prohibited from practicing capital punishment. On two occasions when the Jews stoned Stephen and James for blasphemy, they took advantage of the temporary absence of a Roman governor to take the law into their own hands.

The Quest For Verification

John W. Montgomery, in a debate with Thomas J. J. Altizer (see adjoining story), predicted that “the Delphic Oracle phase in modern theology is almost over.” Montgomery said that in Altizer “you may well be seeing its last, soon-to-be extinct representative.”

Altizer is the best-known spokesman for death-of-God theology.

Modern man, Montgomery said, “is sick to death of verbal panaceas—of autobiography masking as theology—of the naïve confusion of cultural trends with religious truth—of the theologian who hypnotizes himself by his own terminology and leaves no possible means of confirming what he says.”

A Debate On God

Produce God, dead or alive, said a writ of habeas corpus served on a poet and a theological lawyer. It was an audacious demand, but because both believe they know God’s whereabouts, they attempted last month to obey.

The poet was Dr. Thomas J. J. Altizer, associate professor of Bible and religion at Emory University. The lawyer was Dr. John Warwick Montgomery, professor and chairman of the division of church history and history of Christian thought at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.

The hearing was held in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel of the University of Chicago. It was one of numerous events being held to mark the Baptist-founded university’s seventy-fifth anniversary. More than 2,000 persons, a minority of them from the university’s quadrangles, heard the evidence.

As though to put things straight at last, and with a respectful tinge of melancholy, the young Southerner confessed firmly that God is dead. Moreover, he continued, the angel’s proclamation was false. Christ was crucified, but there was no resurrection.

God did incarnate himself in Christ, said Altizer more cheerfully, but when Jesus died God did not return to heaven. He remained in the world and is in it now. No longer transcendent, God has become totally immanent, totally flesh, totally world.

Replying, possibly, to those who have said that he is alone in most of his beliefs, Altizer spoke of the God-is-dead “movement” and said frequently, “We believe.…”

It is “our” belief, said Altizer, that “God died as a means of embodying himself redemptively in Christ.” Speaking in terms of a flux, he contended that Christ continually moves in the fullness of history and the present. Christ is a forward moving force, and redemption is a gradual process, Altizer declared.

Though he did not intend it to be, for he was speaking on behalf of a movement, his argument was intensely personal. And when questioned about it, Altizer admitted that among its elements were much that was “autobiographical.”

Montgomery, speaking at breakneck speed in an effort to get a fifty-minute argument into the half hour allotted to it, sharply attacked the personal aspects of Altizer’s theology as subjective factors completely beyond proof. “What modern man insists on above all is a verifiable base for his faith, so that he can bring some order out of the welter of religious claims,” he said.

In contrast to Altizer, who made virtually no references to the works of others, Montgomery nearly submerged his own words in citations from a startling variety of sources.

Yet, finally, after speaking of the awesome authority of the Bible and of its support of his contentions, after stating that the Bible was the ultimate, all-persuasive source, Montgomery said that it does not supply complete, unquestionable verification.

It was one of the rare moments of the hearing when poet and lawyer, each in his own fashion, agreed.

The program was conducted in cooperation with the university’s student government and was sponsored by the University of Chicago unit of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship.

RICHARD PHILBRICK

Cloak, Dagger, And Cross

Controversy over the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret funding of private organizations has expanded with the disclosure of possible links with at least eight religious groups, three of which are Protestant and four Roman Catholic.

The groups reported that they received funds from foundations that allegedly are CIA-connected after Ramparts, quasi-Catholic monthly published by laymen, disclosed the CIA’s indirect funding of such student groups as the National Student Association.

Foundation grants have become common income sources for non-profit organizations, and all eight groups admit the financial support. But they all deny that the money originally came from the CIA.

The National Council of Churches reported “minor” contributions from the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs toward expenses for a conference of the NCC-related National Student Christian Federation and from the Baird Foundation for “direct relief” programs. National Council officials declared emphatically that the money was not used for CIA purposes, but they immediately dispatched letters of inquiry to the contributing foundations.

The Baird Foundation was also the source for funds supplied to the American Friends Service Committee over the past twenty years. The committee characterized the total as “far exceeding” a reported $50,000.

The Synod of Russian Orthodox Church Bishops Outside Russia said it received $38,000 from the same foundation.

The Young Women’s Christian Association, emphasizing it sought out the money, said it was given $3,500 by the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs during the past ten years.

The same foundation said it supplied money to four Catholic groups, the Young Christian Movement and Pax Romana, both lay organizations, and the National Federation of Catholic College Students and the National Newman Student Federation, both Pax Romana student affiliates.

A $6 Million Mosque

Fund-raisers are touring twenty Islamic nations to raise $6 million for a mosque in New York City that will be far grander than most Christian churches in the United States. The city’s overcrowded Islamic Center currently serves an estimated 70,000 people—largest Muslim community in America.

The proposed complex of buildings will include a dome, tall minarets, a school and library, and an Oriental market to sell products from Muslim lands. Architect’s plans and a site should be ready by year’s end, and construction is to be completed in three years.

India Vote: Extremists Gain

India’s week-long election that ended February 21 brought shocking results: the rise of the Hindu Right in the North, return of the Communist Left in the South, and near-disaster for the ruling Congress Party in the middle.

In the nation’s fourth vote since independence, the Congress Party of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawharlal Nehru, and Mrs. Indira Gandhi faced strong opposition parties as never before. Not only was its two-thirds majority in the 521-seat Lok Sabha (lower house) cut to a fifteen-seat margin, but it failed to win a working majority in half the sixteen states.

The spectacular rise of Jan Sangh, especially in the North, presents a major challenge. This seventeen-year-old movement wants to make India a Hindu kingdom (Ram Raj) where people could then live in peace and prosperity. Jan Sangh does not hesitate to use violence to achieve its ends, as in the recent anti-cow slaughter riot that raked the capital city of New Delhi and surrounding areas.

This first election since the death of Nehru—idol of India’s masses—was marked by unprecedented violence, riots, even murders.

The problems of this nation of nearly half a billion persons are capsulized in the southwestern state of Kerala, where a united front led by pro-Chinese Communists won 119 seats in the 133-member assembly. Congress won just nine seats.

Ironically, Kerala is India’s most “Christian” state; tradition holds that the Apostle Thomas founded seven churches there in A. D. 48–52. Culturally, socially, educationally, even politically, this most densely populated state is well ahead of any other in India. It is widely believed that Kerala owes much of its advancement to early introduction of Christianity.

Robert G. Cochrane, British missionary who formerly directed the Christian Medical College in Vellore, said of Kerala in 1965, “If we give people only Christian ethics without Christ, the result will be Communism.”

Communism did not take root in Kerala overnight. After a 1949 landslide victory, Congress leaders were quick to better their own financial security but slow to do anything substantial to raise living standards. And corruption was too great for Kerala’s educated electorate to ignore. The religious establishment, meanwhile, lost the confidence of the people through its continued support of the unpopular Congress as it went in and out of power.

Communists, quick to capitalize on the situation, worked hard in the hot climate, buttonholing peasants in mud huts and college graduates in polished homes. Many educated voters turned to Communism to find needed solutions to Kerala’s political and economic problems.

The Reds eventually won power in 1957 with a wild promise to bring stable government. They not only failed at this but also created opposition across religious and caste lines by trying to nationalize schools—most of them run by Christians and other religious groups.

When the Communists fell, Kerala was put under “President’s rule” from New Delhi. In the 1960 campaign, Roman Catholics in particular opposed the Communists on the religious-freedom issue. A Congress coalition won, then failed and gave way to President’s rule. This continued until last month, when the Communists won again with the stability issue.

In the 1967 campaign, Roman Catholic and other religious leaders again warned against Communism. Some openly sided with the Congress, and Bishop Peter B. Pereira of Trivandrum (Kerala’s capital) even spoke at two Congress rallies. He was quoted as saying Congress is “the lesser of two evils.” The Muslim League, a Congress ally in 1960, joined the Communist coalition.

In contrast, some Christian conservatives isolated themselves from politics, even refusing to vote under the argument that “our citizenship is in heaven.”

The Kerala vote shows to what extent Christianity has lost its positive influence upon the masses. Nationally, the rise of strong opposition can be interpreted as a step toward democratic give-and-take, but there is also room for real concern.

First, fifteen political parties could produce turmoil similar to that of France before De Gaulle. And India’s survival as a unified democratic nation is threatened by the growth of such bitter regional opponents as Jan Sangh, which wants Hindi as the national language, and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in southern Madras, which opposes imposition of Hindi.

Worst of all is the rapid growth of Communism in Kerala, Bengal, and other parts of India. At any standard of measurement, the growth of Commuism is not a good sign to the peace-loving Indians, or for the general climate of religious freedom the nation has enjoyed.

T. E. KOSHY

Confession Wins Okay

The United Presbyterian Church has approved the “Confession of 1967.” Stated Clerk William Phelps Thompson reported March 1 that a necessary two-thirds (126) of the church’s presbyteries had voted in favor of the new creed with only fourteen opposed at that point. The document will be placed in a Book of Confessions to be ratified at the May General Assembly in Portland, Oregon.

Seminaries Down Under

Australians, stunned by a report showing low standards in theological education, appear ready to form a national organization to accredit seminaries and upgrade things generally.

This project dominated the first national conference of the new Australian Society for Theological Studies in Sydney last month. The official 1964 study by the Australian Universities Commission showed the nation’s average Protestant seminary had only thirty-four students, with three full-time and four part-time teachers. Among Anglicans, the largest denomination, only 10 per cent of the ministerial trainees were university graduates. Many fill in academic background through correspondence courses.

Seminaries give diplomas, while public universities monopolize the right to grant recognized degrees. Only two of the universities have courses in theology. At one of these, the University of Sydney, a meager total of thirty-three students have earned the B.D. over the past twenty-five years.

The theological conference drew 120 participants from every major denomination, including the Roman Catholic Church. Most of the thirty lectures on the program stressed broad historical-philosophical matters rather than biblical or theological fields. The surprise of the week in this broadly ecumenical setting was a paper of near-evangelical impact on First Peter 3:21, presented by W. J Alton, a Jesuit of Sydney’s Canisius College. Another Roman Catholic was elected interim chairman.

The conference had no distinct relation to the ecumenical thrust of the Australian Council of Churches, but this provided the momentum for the meeting. The ACC’s annual meeting followed, featuring the commissioning of a layman as new full-time secretary and the discussion of relations with Roman Catholicism and missionary efforts in Australia. The theology conference had a broader representation than the fourteen groups included in the ACC meeting.

CRAIG SKINNER