Page 6102 – Christianity Today (2024)

Ideas

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As the Christian feels about him the strong currents of contemporary change, he finds himself asking whether our world is heading into the final stages of its long day’s journey into night or facing the dawn of a new day of spiritual resurgence. Are the diabolical forces of man’s rebellion against God that now often masquerade as a quest for authentic human life ushering us into the “post-Christian” era? Or do the uncertainties precipitated by the increasing secularization of life presage a period when men, driven to the sure Word of God, will experience a God-breathed revival of faith in Jesus Christ?

We cannot calculate the course of future events of life in the secular city. Nor can we predict the sovereign action of the Holy Spirit as he moves in the affairs of men. But whether the prospects for penetrating deeply into our world with the Gospel of Jesus Christ are bright or dim, every Christian must seriously assume the supreme task Christ has given his Church: to participate actively in the evangelization of all mankind.

Transition and competing claims have constantly challenged the Church in its witness for Christ. Men have always lived in flux. Historian Kenneth Scott Latourette tells the story that Adam, upon being thrust out of the Garden of Eden with his wife, said, “Eve, I believe we are living in an age of transition.” Yet today’s changing patterns, in which the lengthening shadows of secularization and revolutionary unrest are prominent, make our generation qualitatively different from others in modern history.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from a prison cell in 1944, “We are proceeding toward a time of no religion at all.” While the German martyr’s claim does not wholly describe our present situation, it is undeniably true for a growing part. More and more people consider a conception of God to be unnecessary to their understanding of life. Such a secularistic view, writes Harvey Cox, “is the loosing of the world from religious and quasi-religious understandings of itself, the dispelling of all closed world views, the breaking of all supernatural myths and sacred symbols.” Men are doubting God more and enjoying life less.

Secularization in the Western World has been fostered by urbanization, overconfidence in man’s scientific prowess, selfish pursuit of materialistic satisfaction, and pragmatic, non-metaphysical habits of thought. But at the bottom of it all is man’s craving to worship and serve “the creature rather than the creator.” The outworking of this impulse is the limiting of human aspirations to this-worldly objectives. And the end result is the enthronement of man in the place of God.

To this secularistic world, Christians must boldly assert that the God-man, Jesus Christ, and not finite, sinful man, is the Lord of history, and that Christ alone provides meaning and salvation for this life and the life to come.

Closely associated with the secularistic trend is an intensified spirit of rebellion against all types of authority throughout the world. Men are on the march to have things their own way. International Communism continues its ruthless, imperialistic drive as it seeks to conquer Viet Nam and extend its power throughout Southeast Asia. Militant nationalistic uprisings occur with great frequency in the underdeveloped nations of the world. Racial strife mounts as people of all colors use violence to try to secure their rights or protect their interests. In the West, lawlessness is seen in soaring crime rates and the use of force rather than courts to settle grievances. The sexual revolution and high divorce rates show the refusal of great numbers of people to abide by principles that would restrict their unbridled freedom.

An indictment in the Book of Job (34:37) applies to contemporary man: “He adds rebellion to his sin; he claps his hands among us, and multiplies his words against God.” Men hell-bent on rebellion present no static target on which the Church can calmly set its sights. Yet believers must carefully aim the Christian message at the revolutionaries as well as the ever-present self-satisfied people. The Christ they proclaim is the conqueror of the sin that gives rise to rebellion.

The growing decadence of our day is further reflected in the sham theology dispensed by influential secularist theologians. Purporting to rescue the Church from irrelevance, these ecclesiastical turncoats tailor their teachings to the empirical standards of natural man. Hailing the secularistic surge and fanning the flames of social unrest, they divest the Gospel of its supernatural elements. They replace the objective revelation of sacred Scripture with subjective human insights as the basis of religious authority.

In the formulas of these theologians, the Trinity is considered outmoded as an expression of the nature of God. They no longer speak of Jesus Christ as the eternal Son of God who became the Son of Man; he is rather “the man for others” chosen by God for a messianic mission. Man’s basic problem, they say, rests not in his willful rebellion against God but in the finitude of his existence, which is estranged from its true essence. In their eyes, the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ is a psychic experience of faith experienced by the disciples and other believers. And so it goes, ad nauseum.

Such heretical notions, now garbed in up-to-date terminology, surely are not unique to the mid-twentieth century. What is astounding is that such views are being promoted by prestigious leaders in various Christian denominations. And not only are they being paid to advance these non-biblical doctrines; they are also being heralded as courageous, creative thinkers. Tolerance is the watchword of the day in much denominational theology—unless one wishes to be read out of the “in” group.

The threat that secularistic theology poses for our generation is not that its formulations are superior to historic biblical theology. The more conventional “new theology,” like its most extreme form, the “death of God” fad, will eventually fail because it contradicts the teaching of Scripture. But in the meantime, unless it is repudiated by Christian laity and ministers, this theology will rob the institutional church of its life-transforming message and power. If the “new theologians” have their way, the Church will shift its emphasis from calling men to repentance and faith in Christ to using political and social action to change the institutions of society. Contending against a Christ-rejecting world, the Church can ill afford to have a man-made gospel sound forth from its pulpits.

The demonic triumvirate of secularization, rebellion, and false theology could well plunge the world into its darkest hour. But not all prospects are black. The hand of God can be seen in many recent developments.

The crisis in theology is drawing evangelicals together across denominational lines, creating a new unity stronger than that previously seen in this century. Thousands of small trans-denominational Bible study groups are springing up in homes and churches across America. Among Roman Catholic scholars there is a renaissance of significant biblical research. Widespread cooperation of evangelicals is seen in organizations like the National Association of Evangelicals and gatherings like the recent Congress on the Church’s Worldwide Mission. The Billy Graham crusades, far from receding—as was predicted—after the religious upswing in the 1950s, continue even more strongly to galvanize Bible-believing Christians in cities across the world. The upcoming World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin in October promises further evangelical resurgence. The life-transforming power of the Gospel seen in such activities as the Graham meetings, various campus Christian witness programs, evangelical church outreach activities, and personal evangelism is proof that this Gospel is as relevant now as it has always been.

Although the evangelical witness now faces greater opposition and competition than it has for decades, our day is not a time for discouragement. The Christian Church has an illustrious record of performing best under pressure and persecution. The living God is active in the lives of those who move out in response to his command to evangelize the earth.

Whether the world is heading into the final stages of its long day’s journey into night or stands before the dawn of a new day of spiritual awakening, the task of the Christian remains the same: to reach his generation for Christ. The Christian Church must arise and devote its energies to carrying out its evangelistic mission, which was so neatly defined at the meetings of the International Missionary Council at Madras, India, in 1938: “to present Jesus Christ to the world in the power of the Holy Spirit, that men shall come to put their trust in God through him, accept him as their Saviour, and serve him as the Lord in the fellowship of his Church.”

What happens at home can complement the World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin

There is one chance in two thousand that you have been invited to the World Congress on Evangelism. Sorry about that, but the Berlin Kongresshalle can seat only 1,300, and when the seats are divided among participants from more than 100 nations, well …

But this is no reason to feel left out. There is an important role for you in this world focus on evangelistic thrust.

The congress will bring to Berlin leaders from all races and nations who have been bearing much of the burden of world evangelism. These ten days—October 26 to November 4, 1966—should be red-letter days for every Christian concerned with fulfilling Christ’s Great Commission. This is where you come in, if you are one of the 1,999 out of every 2,000 CHRISTIANITY TODAY readers who weren’t invited.

There is no reason to wait for word from Berlin before you take action. Your prayers for the Congress are needed and requested, but there is no reason for you to be content with prayer support alone.

Evangelism had first priority for Jesus. It has first priority on the calendar of evangelical Christianity. Why not make it a first-priority item for yourself? Block off October 26—November 4 on your calendar. Draw a firm red line from Wednesday the twenty-sixth through Friday the fourth. Cancel everything. Set these days aside for a personal, definite, specific evangelistic emphasis. Test your soul-winning potential during those days. Have no other aim that week, and prepare to be amazed at the result.

What specifically can you do? Here is one idea.

First, challenge some group (a committee, class, board, the whole church) to list as many ways of winning the lost as they can. These should not be discussed or evaluated—simply list them. Avoid long discussion of objections, the justification for evangelism, or mass evangelism vs. personal work. Leave the why’s for a while and concentrate on the how and what. Spend twenty minutes listing old and new ways of communicating the Gospel to people. You will end with far more suggestions than can be implemented in a year. The list will be valuable for future use, but the making of the list is valuable in itself. It will dramatize the reason why more souls are not being won. The reason is not lack of knowledge. Nor is it lack of method. It is lack of effort!

To know what to do is not enough. As Shakespeare had Portia say: “If to do were as easy as to know …, chapels would be churches and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces.” The test of any enterprise is not in the recipe but in the result. Evangelism does not lack discussion; it is in a doldrums for lack of action.

Second, begin immediately to evangelize. Anticipate the days from October 26 to November 4 with positive, specific, and efficient action. These are not times for a wavering sound. Go to where the people are and speak to their need. Love them. Help them. Answer their questions. Share yourself and your personal faith in a saving Lord. This was the apostolic method, this was the method of last year, this will be the method of tomorrow. No matter what vehicle is used, people are saved by grace, through faith, and almost invariably because someone cared enough to share his own experience.

There are many frameworks on which to build a program of evangelism, and their value is not to be minimized. But the lack of an ideal one is no justification for inaction. Depending on your situation, you may choose one plan over many alternatives. A Sunday school class visiting an up-to-date prospect list is a proved framework. Neighborhood captains, block captains, apartment-house captains—these are good systems. Dinners for inquirers, cell groups, luncheon fellowships, coffeehouses, literacy-evangelism among the educationally deprived, direct mail, campus crusades, businessmen’s groups, industrial prayer meetings, home Bible-study groups—these are all good vehicles for person-to-person encounter. Any communication medium that has ever been used for any form of persuasion can conceivably be used to communicate the unsearchable riches of the Gospel. Even revival meetings have been known to reach the lost.

The key is in the doing. Jesus spoke of doing, going—action. There is always something easier to do. You can talk about what you would do if conditions were changed or how you could do it better than someone else if you wanted to. Yet anyone who truly wants to win others can win them. Failure results from lack of effort, not from lack of ability or opportunity.

Suppose you respond to this proposal. Suppose you concentrate your personality, your prayer, your intelligence, knowledge, energy, and ability on evangelism for ten days. It could change your life and the lives of a score of people.

What if only 10 per cent of the 40,000,000 evangelicals in the United States were to block off ten days of their lives for the propagation of the faith? Can you imagine what four million evangelicals could do in ten days of intensive witnessing? Would not 20,000,000 new Christians—one convert per worker every two days—be a conservative estimate? Putting aside all petty distractions, they could take the Great Commission as their own command—“Advance. Conquer. I am with you.”

Evangelism is our cutting edge. It is essential, not only for extension but also for survival. Everyone is “pushing” his product. If evangelicals do not push their faith, they will not make history—they will be history.

Overcome evangelistic indifference. Spiritually and actively identify yourself with the World Congress on Evangelism.

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The distance between good and bad [art] is not perhaps so large as is the distance between good and great.” The words are those of Kenneth Hayes Miller, one of the foremost of recent teachers of painting, whose pupils at the Art Students League in New York include such painters as Reginald Marsh, Isabel Bishop, and Edward Hopper.

A vast number of artistic works may be called good because they are loving gestures toward the divine. But there are also works of art that are sadly superficial and others that are altogether perverse. Superficial appeal to the eye can be fascinating to both artistic innovators and their extensive audiences, and works containing nothing more than such an appeal may be harmless. Quite different, however, are works so full of aesthetic disorders that a parallel can be drawn between their effects upon the aesthetic sensibilities and the effect of narcotics. Addiction to this kind of art seems to atrophy the capacity to enjoy orderly and beautiful works.

Christian artists and Christian users of art are responsible for what they permit to dwell within their aesthetic sensibility. The Holy Spirit insistently teaches us to be discerning. But discernment affronts the casualness of an age without standards that confuses novelty, faddism, and popularity with aesthetic worth. The strenuous requirement of discernment cannot bow to mere popularity.

For the Christian artist to fulfill his high calling in Christ calls for discipline, discernment, and order. This requires that aesthetics be subjected to the mind of Christ, who is himself the truth; such subjection both ennobles man and glorifies God, for as John’s Gospel says, the truth will make us free.

Out of this context, then, we turn to the high mysteries, both religious and aesthetic, that have to do with the center of beauty and being. Here we enter a realm of paradox where lofty demands are made on mind, heart, and spirit.

In God’s insistently loving pursuit of sinful man, his terrible yet lovely game of holy hide-and-seek, there is a stumbling block for those who will not lose their lives in order to find them. As the Father pursues his children, he veils his face first behind the curtain of the tabernacle and then behind the curtain that is Christ’s flesh. Yet we must remember that the children of disobedience choose to make up their own games, and that their works, though seemingly sheep-like, can be like ravening wolves in their effect upon both the religious and aesthetic perceptions.

Christians are free. Therefore, according to Paul, all things are lawful for them, although all things are not therefore convenient. Likewise, all art forms are lawful, but not all art forms are convenient.

Admittedly God bestows talent upon both the just and the unjust. Yet the important thing is not so much the talent but how it is used. Unquestionably a talent used in unity with Christ, and thus in unity with the Father, is more fittingly employed than one used only for self-expression leading to the worship of the creature. For, as Paul says in the first chapter of Romans, the worship of the creature brings darkness to man’s mind and his abandonment to disorder. The result is man’s pathological preoccupation with himself, ending in meaninglessness and despair. The bizarre chaos of some modern art is neurotic evidence of this.

When an artist in this condition turns to religious subjects, he projects his own neurosis. For he does not understand that Christ came into the world to suffer and die. Nor does he know that Christ had power to lay down his life and take it up again, and that no power could be exercised against him were it not given from above.

But a problem arises when one criticizes these fellow artists. Christ accepts their neurotic aberrations as related to his Atonement, thereby rendering all human judgment suspect. Thus these observations about certain aspects of modern art can be offered only as an exercise of discernment, not as a human indictment of fellow artists. This is why Christian artistic discernment must be exercised within the context of Paul’s “lawfulness” and “convenience,” in the hope that love will cover the multitude of sins of all who participate in artistic creation. For we must always be aware that Christ’s agony was suffered within the cup of love whose form is deeper and more wonderful than our mortal understanding can grasp.

Paradox And Aesthetics

Consider now the analogy between holy paradox and high aesthetics. This helps us understand the similarity between the inner dynamics of human living and the mysterious sensation we call aesthetic experience.

Anyone who has studied the Scriptures must realize that God not only reveals himself to spiritual babes but also withholds himself from the wise and the prudent who hold the truth in unrighteousness. Take for example the discourse in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel, where Christ describes himself as the bread come down from heaven. Here we are confronted with paradox, for in this discourse Christ on the one hand makes the insistent demand that we eat his flesh and drink his blood and on the other hand turns around and says that “the flesh profiteth nothing” and that the words he speaks are “spirit and they are life.” No wonder “many of his disciples … walked no more with him.”

The highest paradoxes, which are related to all other paradoxes, are contained in such words as these: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” In its aesthetic application this saying means that the artist who is committed to express the highest aesthetic experience must hate the parts of a picture for the sake of its unity. Unity is the highest principle of art, just as love is the highest principle in Christian life. The great virtues, if they fail to produce love, profit nothing. Likewise, if the skill of the artist fails to produce unity, it profits him nothing, aesthetically.

There are countless affinities between aesthetic and religious perception. For this very reason, the aesthetic faculty when not surrendered to Christ competes with rather than conforms to the redemptive task. This explains why art and idolatry are often found serving each other. And it also explains, in part at least, why those who in former times have condemned aesthetic forms, both artistic and liturgical, are not without some justification, especially when these forms have been used unrighteously to “serve the creature rather than the Creator.” Nevertheless, wrong use of a gift does not invalidate its right use.

What Is Perception?

As we go on to look more closely at the mystery of aesthetics, we need to clarify the meaning of perception, because perception is crucial to aesthetic experience. We often say of a mysterious event that it apparently happened “without rhyme or reason.” The familiar phrase points to understanding of the mystery of aesthetic perception by suggesting a clue to the two great ways reality comes to have meaning for us.

Following this clue, we may think of “rhyme” as symbolizing that reality resulting from the recurrent events whereby the physical universe and all the complexities of organic life are actively held together in time. Rhythmic patterns created by the times and the seasons, by our heartbeat, breathing, and the other silent processes of life take meaning from their regular occurrence in dependable cycles.

But there are other realities. After God created, he brooded and set up interdependent relationships that require cognitive participation on the part of his creatures. These relationships are essentially connected to meaning. And since meaning is inherent in creation from beginning to end, we are bound to reflect on the past, to relate meaningfully to the present, and to look forward to the ends of life. Thus this cognitive participation in creation is the reason-reality suggested by the words “rhyme or reason.”

Now as we follow this clue, we see that in great art the rhyme-reality, symbolizing the pulsating activity of life, shares the same pattern with the reason-reality, whose elements are composed of the descriptive, philosophical, and spiritual aspects of life. Just as emotional meanings arise from action and thought, so overtones arise from the abstract pattern underlying the outward reality and the story elements in great art. Properly speaking, basic motor activity undergirding and supporting cognition is unconscious. It operates at the level of unconscious habit, freeing the cognitive process.

Now, to elevate the abstract in art to the place where it must be dealt with by the cognitive faculties is to frustrate both the rhyme-reality and the reason-reality. Abstract relationships in painting should be so skillfully and unobtrusively developed as not to call into conscious attention forces other than those out of which uninterrupted reason-reality would flow.

In certain physical or nervous states, we may be suddenly and unhealthily aware, for example, of a fast pulse, or shortness of breath, or other motor disturbances. Likewise, it may be that distortions and conscious abstractions in art could serve a purpose in metaphorizing neurosis. But in religious works of art we must never confuse Christ’s high paradoxical struggles between his flesh and his spirit in the Garden of Gethsemane with neurosis; to do so would show failure to grasp the awesome meaning of his becoming the sin of the whole world and bearing it outside the gate—an event of such dimensions as to stagger the mind.

Let us look again at some paradoxes. Christ says that a man must be born again of water and of the Spirit, if he is to enter the kingdom of heaven. Paul gives us the allegory of the bondmaid and the free woman, Hagar and Sarah, using these two women as prototypes of the two covenants, one given from “Mt. Sinai in Arabia” and the other, relating to the New Israel, given to Abraham by promise. And the essence of the allegory is found within Paul himself, in the conflict he describes of flesh lusting against spirit and spirit against flesh (Rom. 7:15–25).

Here birth in the flesh, which inherits corruption through Adam’s fall, is egocentric and has as its dynamic product lust. But the second birth through the Spirit operates redemptively by the obedience of the second Adam, Christ, who has broken the bondage of the Fall by his perfect obedience, even unto the death of the cross.

When a man is baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection, he is made a new creature with a new dynamic, the indwelling Holy Spirit. This dynamic encounters the law in our members, and the tension creates an internal warfare. It is this warfare that Paul felt when he exclaimed, “Who can deliver me from this body of death?” What saves from “this body of death” is God’s love (agape) in Jesus Christ, which transcends this conflict while at the same time paradoxically fulfilling it. This agape is released in a covenant. Christ says, “This is the new covenant in my blood.” A covenant requires discipline, but in this case a peculiar kind of discipline, a discipline that cannot offend for the sake of love. Christ says, “If you love me, keep my commandments.”

The Higher Gift Of Unity

Turn now to the field of art. On another level, great art forms also have a power, analogous to love, that can deliver them from their own kinds of artistic death. This power is called unity. Unity transcends and fulfills its “rhyme and reason” covenant in a manner similar to the way in which agape fulfills spiritual gifts. Unity, as it transcends the tension between the abstract and the illustrative elements in painting, bestows a higher gift. And when this higher gift becomes operative, the beautiful sensation we call aesthetic occurs.

But we need to look further into the analogy between religion and aesthetics. When religious thinkers fail to take into account transcendent agape, they usually resolve their problems in one of two ways. They either abandon the hope of casting out Hagar and Ishmael and create instead liberal theologies that console the libertine, or else they go around the mountain of paradox and manifest a kind of flint-faced piety. This piety is embarrassed by much in the life of Christ, as when he eats and drinks with sinners or shows his gentle and forgiving concern for women who love much because they have been forgiven much. While God hears the cry of Ishmael and takes pity, many religionists ignore that cry and console themselves with righteous feelings coming out of their legalism. For them it is safe and egotistically fulfilling to come down on either the rationalistic or legalistic side of the paradox. On the other hand, to remain within the tensions of God’s holy paradox requires a giving of one’s life over to the Spirit. This offends our feelings of self-sufficiency, and we recoil from so humiliating a necessity.

What is true in the descent to one or the other side of holy paradox is also true in aesthetics. The artist, unable to bear the tensions required for unity, may be content to practice an art that is abstract or libertine in form. Or he may skirt the mountain of aesthetic paradox by doing no more than meticulously illustrating nature. But it is only out of this tension between rhyme and reason in the bond of unity that the aesthetic child is born. In this bond of unity, rhyme and reason become as it were one flesh. And from this come the sensations of aesthetics. Aesthetic sensation, then, is not so much the perception of beauty as it is the beauty of this unity of tension-mingled perception.

Unity is to aesthetics what agape is to the Christian life. And unity, when exercised in the service of religious works of art, is an aesthetic metaphor for the Holy Spirit. Aesthetically it brings man a feeling of reconciliation and peace such as the world cannot give. In a significant religious picture this is what is at work. And it is this spiritual process that is important rather than whether the picture is specifically religious in subject matter.

There are two ways to arrive at this essential aesthetic unity. One is to use an art form of three dimensions on two, with the picture plane acting as the unifying agent. The work of Raphael and Michelangelo best exemplifies this, which may be called the on-plane formula.

The second, which may be called the in-plane formula, places a tonal veil over the modeling which gives the effect of gathering up three dimensions in a way best exemplified by Rembrandt. This tonal veil is excellent for introspective works, because the forms seem to emerge half-hidden from a rich, mysterious matrix. Moreover, it also seems to convey the deepest unity. How marvelous for a veil to reveal aesthetically a religious presence! Just as the temple veil pointed to the Presence in the holy of holies, so Christ opened the way to the Presence of God through “the veil, that is to say, his flesh,” when he died on Calvary (Heb. 10:20).

It is in this sense that the Christian artist, along with all his fellow believers, cannot but stand amazed at the way in which God can hide and yet reveal himself in his creation.

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DIEMEN, THE NETHERLANDS August 23, 1966

DEAR MISS STEPHENSON:

Your letter reached me yesterday after its trans-Atlantic voyage, and I propose to answer you directly. Your request touches on a problem I have been thinking about for a long time. Maybe what follows can be of help to you. I’d like to approach the matter in a schematic way, pointing out some principles.

Your questions concern your wish to paint—that is, to work as an artist—as a Christian. It really is remarkable that you decided to do this when you were just converted. Many times new Christians just drop their artistic careers because they think painting and art today are incompatible with being a real Christian. I’m glad you made this decision and hope to help you by suggesting the following principles for Christian artists:

1. If God has given us talents we may use them creatively—or rather, we must use them creatively. A Christian artist is not different from, say, a Christian teacher, minister, scholar, merchant, housewife, or anybody else who has been called by the Lord to specific work in line with his or her talents. There are no specific rules for artists, nor do they have specific exemptions to the norms of good conduct God laid down for man. An artist is simply a person whose God-given talents ask him to follow the specific vocation of art. There may be circ*mstances when love toward God would forbid certain artistic activities or make them impossible, but the present moment in history does not ask for such a sacrifice. Quite the contrary. We—the Christian world and the world at large—desperately need artists.

2. To be God’s child means to be offered freedom—the Christian freedom Christ himself and Paul in his letters say much about. This freedom is most important for anybody who wants to do artistic work. Without freedom there is no creativity, without freedom no originality, without freedom no art, without freedom even no Christianity. This freedom can exist only if it is based on love toward God and our neighbors, and if we become new men through the finished work of Christ and the Holy Spirit is given to us. Without this base, freedom may easily mean being free from God and consequently free to indulge all the cravings of the sinful heart of unredeemed man. (For more on this matter of freedom, see Paul’s letter to the Galatians).

Christian freedom is different from humanistic freedom, the freedom man gives himself to build a world after his own devising (as was tried by the Enlightenment and the humanist development after that time in the Western world). Humanistic freedom leads to all kinds of problems, as our Western world is now learning from experience. Freedom in the biblical sense is in no way negative—shun this, don’t do that, you must leave that alone, keep away from this. Christian freedom has nothing to do with a set of rules by which you must bind yourself; indeed, such rules may easily be pseudo-Christian. Freedom is the necessary basis for creativity, for creativity is impossible when there is timidity, when you allow yourself to be bound by narrow rules. Do not think the modern art world is free—but we will turn to that later.

Freedom is positive. It means being free from tradition, from the feeling that everything you do has to be original, from certain fixed rules said to be necessary in art—but also from the thought that to be creative you must break all kinds of rules and standards.

Freedom means also that there are no prescriptions for subject-matter. There is no need for a Christian to illustrate biblical stories or biblical truth, though he may of course choose to do that. An artist has the right to choose a subject that he thinks worthwhile. But non-representational art provides no more freedom than the most involved allegorical or storytelling art.

Freedom includes the right to choose your own style, to be free from tradition but also from modernity, from fashion, from today and tomorrow as well as from yesterday. Yet there is no need to slap the contemporary in the face, as some streams of art nowadays deem necessary. Christian freedom also is freedom from the sinful lust for money, from seeking man’s praise, from the search for celebrity. It is the freedom to help a neighbor out and give him something to delight in.

3. There are norms for art that are a part of God’s creation. Without them art would be an empty name without sense. To say a person has been given a feeling for art and beauty (everybody has, to a certain extent), that he has been granted a strong subjective sense of artistic rightness, is but another way to say that he has been given an understanding of certain norms God laid down in his creation, the world in which we live. We call this taste, a feeling for design and color, the ability to grasp the inner harmony of a complex of forms and colors, the understanding of the inner relationship among elements of the subject-matter, the ability to recognize the indefinable dividing lines between poor and good art, between worn-out symbols and fresh ways of saying things that are important to man.

These norms do not stand in the way when we want to live in Christian freedom; they are a part of our world and our nature. Only when man revolts and does not want to be a creature, when he wants to be God and not man, does he feel bound by these norms. For those who love the Lord and rejoice in his good and beautiful creation, these norms provide the opportunity to live in freedom and to create. As one cannot act and live free as a woman if one is not a woman and has not the possibilities of a woman, so the norms for beauty and art are at the same time the opportunities to see beauty and create art.

4. When God created—and in that way made the perception of beauty and the human creation of art possible—he gave art (or any artistic endeavor) a place in this world in which we live; and that world he called good. (I added artistic endeavor because we have to think not only of the rarefied museum type of art called Art with a capital A today but also of all other types, including ceramics, dance-music, pictures used in Sunday schools, and so on. We shall come back to this.) Art is here because God meant it to be here.

So art has its own task and meaning. There is no need to try to justify one’s artistic activity by making works with a moralistic message, even if one is free to emphasize moral values. Nor is there any need to think one has to serve as a critic of culture, or always provide eye-openers to the non-artists, or teach, or evangelize, or do whatever other lofty things one can think of. Art has done its task when it provides the neighbor with things of beauty, a joy forever. Art has direct ties with life, living, joy, the depth of our being human, just by being art, and therefore it needs no external justification. That is so because God, who created the possibility of art and who laid beauty in his creation, is the God of the living and wants man to live. God is the God of life, the life-giver. The Bible is full of this.

Art is not autonomous. “Art for art’s sake” was an invention of the last century to loosen the ties between art and morality, that is, to give art the freedom to depict all kinds of sins as if they were not sinful but simply human. The human understanding of depravity, of morality, of good and bad was thereby undermined or erased. The results we are seeing today, in our century. The meaning of art is its being art; but it is not autonomous, and it has thousands of ties with human life and thought. When artists cease to consider the world in its manifold forms outside the artistic domain, their art withers into nothingness, because it no longer has anything to say.

Much abstract art today is art, yes; but it has little meaning because it is only art. All its ties with reality have been cut. This applies as much to a ceramic product as to a painting. Art has its own meaning and needs no excuse. But it loses its meaning if it does not want to be anything but art and therefore cuts its ties with life and reality, just as scholarly work loses its importance and interest if learning is sought for its own sake. Art and science become aestheticism and scholasticism if made autonomous. They become meaningless idols.

The artist’s work can have meaning for the society God put him in if he does not go to live in the ivory tower, or try to play the prophet or priest, or—turning in the other direction—in false modesty consider himself only a craftsman. He has to make art while thinking of his neighbors in love, helping them, and using his talents in their behalf.

5. Most art today expresses a spirit, the spirit of our age, which is not Christian. In some ways it is post-Christian, in others anti-Christian, in still others humanistic. Here and there there are Christian artists who try to do their work in a godly spirit. But often their brethren leave them alone, distrusting their creativeness or doubting that they are Christians. False art theories that have pervaded the Christian world—the artist as an asocial being, a non-conformist in the wrong sense, a dangerous prophet, an abnormal being who lives in an alien world—are often responsible for this attitude. But some Christian artists themselves hold these false views and look down with contempt at their fellow Christians. Anyway, there is a lot of confusion.

Who’S On Second?

Last week I saw some very interesting baseball. The ages of the members ranged up to fourteen, and I must report that I was very much impressed by their play. Some other things that impressed me were the markings around home plate, the exact position of the bases, the raised pitcher’s mound, the complete uniforms of all the players and all the substitutes, the array of bats, the dugout, and so on. But to any of you who are what is politely called middle-aged I address the question: What do you think of a ball team, age fourteen and under, that has all the baseballs it needs?

Go back a few years. We really had nothing of what has become an expectation for these leagues today. There was always that business of whether you had a good ball. But there was also the question of where you would play, and whether you could scrape up enough for two teams. Are you old enough to remember how when you didn’t have enough for two teams you played “rounders”?

That game of rounders was a phenomenon of its own. Ligon, the psychologist, says that in undirected boys’ play 64 percent of the time is spent in argument. Beside the endless arguments about how double plays really work and whether the man was out or safe, there was always the basic, original, fundamental argument in the game of rounders of what was the batting order and who played what position. Usually we had three men at bat and everybody else in the field, so there used to be a screaming argument about who was first up, and who got to pitch.

It was right about then that I had my first and only coaching as one of the boy wonders of the sand lot. Some man said to me during that screaming business, “While everybody else is yelling ‘first up’ you start for second base and go out and throw your glove on the base.” So I did, and it was wonderful. When everything else settled down, there I was at second base, not too far from the outfield and not too far from being a batter.

This almost sounds un-American. It lacks the note of leadership. It seems a coward’s way. But you would be surprised how it works. Jesus suggested that you even start with the lowest seat.

EUTYCHUS II

Movies And Morals

J. Melville White’s essay, “The Motion Picture: Friend or Foe?” (July 22 issue) is excellent. He unmasks the stupidity or hypocrisy of arguing that because many movies are bad, a Christian should see none, when even the pietists dare not argue that because many magazines are obscene, the Christian should read none.

Note also the falsity of two quoted assertions, to the effect that evangelicals do not attend the movies. The Evangelical Lutherans, the world’s largest evangelical group, have never supported these pietistic restrictions.

Adding to God’s commandments has been a frequent American arrogance. Finney, if I remember correctly, made it a sin to drink tea or coffee; certainly the Mormons inflict this prohibition and also insist that people should eat “very little meat.”

To refuse to go to the movies is to deprive oneself of seeing War and Peace, Hamlet, and, less ponderously, Treasure Island. But what is worse, to refuse on religious grounds to go to the movies is to bring the cause of Christ into ill repute. After reasonable people are told that we should never see a movie, and never read a magazine, they lose all interest in hearing the rest of the gospel.

No Graven Novel

Re your recent review of Elisabeth Elliot’s No Graven Image (July 8 issue): Mr. Lindsell’s comments were, for the most part, well taken. But his concluding remarks, about the author’s having put the right answers into her heroine’s mouth, but our own uncertainty as to whether the author in fact shares these sentiments, are a departure from the role of reviewer to that of judge.

The novel has begun to arouse a certain amount of confusion in the weeks since it appeared, and the flurry is turning into what amounts to an inquisition against Mrs. Elliot. The idea seems to be that (1) she has attacked the missionary community in this book, and (2) she has betrayed the Christian cause by not having a happy ending, and by failing to have her heroine enunciate some comforting maxims about Romans 8:28 at the end.

This represents a serious confusion, first, as to the nature of fiction, and second, as to the nature of Christian faith.

Concerning the art of fiction, the heavy responsibility of the artist is to record simply and with integrity what he sees of life. He cannot do anything else. He must try to articulate his experience. This, of course, is not to say that novels are not slanted. They are. Every writer writes from his own viewpoint. But we do wrong to read into fiction our own reactions. For instance, Mrs. Elliot has a rather vivid section concerning a missionary conference. Anyone who has ever been to a field conference knows that every word in that description is absolutely true. It is not a flattering picture. But neither is it an untrue picture. And there is not a word of commentary on the author’s part. She does not cluck and tut-tut from the sidelines.

Readers who are put off by this picture must remind themselves that the picture of the missionary effort is not at all a damning one. At least three of the pivotal characters in the missionary community (aside from the heroine herself) are entirely admirable people. Mrs. Elliot has not presented the missionary scene as some non-religious writers and film-makers have done—depicting a sad collection of starry-eyed, misguided, draggled zealots. Her people are human. And if the picture of the conference is not one that glorifies the scene, the thing is not to cry out in offense, but to ask simply, “Is it true?” …

But infinitely more serious than this failure to understand the nature of fiction is the misreading of Mrs. Elliot’s whole idea. It seems clear to me that she has achieved here, not attack on faith, but an agonized vindication of it, and a desperately needed relocation of faith. The novel represents a massive protest against the misplacement of faith in circ*mstances, and the redirection of it toward God. This is what the heroine learns. Insofar as our religion insists that things have a happy issue, and that we see fortunate results from every calamity, it is a false religion. And insofar as the God we preach is a God whose integrity depends on his either working things out for us or at least bestowing us with the sensible tokens of his comfort, then he is a false God.

What about Gethsemane? There was no happy issue there. The ministering angel did not, as far as we know, bring instant euphoria to the suffering Christ. There was nothing but agony and bloody sweat. If the book is about Margaret Sparhawk’s Gethsemane, we cannot ask that it record more. For, clear and loud, the thing that Margaret learns is that God is God, far above anything that he may seem to be doing or failing to do.…

THOMAS T. HOWARD

New York, N.Y.

I was profoundly disappointed and a bit incensed over the final clause in the review. In this case, is the reviewer judging the craftsmanship and the content of the book or the personal, spiritual life of the author? Is this the true function of a reviewer? And is the reviewer qualified to express this “haunting doubt”? Please don’t misunderstand, my questions are not posed as defense of any particular author. And in this case, I have not met the author. Rather, I find it regrettable that the author of the review deserted his role as literary critic and assumed a less noble role.

FLOYD W. THATCHER

Vice President, Publications

Zondervan

Publishing House

Grand Rapids, Mich.

Cross-Examine Leaders?

CHRISTIANITY TODAY is to be commended for its integrity in reporting the recent Wenham conference on biblical inspiration (“Ten Days at Wenham,” News, July 22 issue), though the contents of this report should constitute a matter of grave concern for all evangelicals. In saying, “Some held this [inerrancy] to be an essential biblical doctrine, while others preferred to speak of the Scripture as infallible,” and in quoting the conference report (communiqué) in full, it has made public what some have known for a considerable time, that certain leaders within conservative theological seminaries are no longer willing to affirm the inerrancy of Scripture. Their very reticence testifies to the wisdom of the founders of the Evangelical Theological Society (North America’s fellowship of Bible-believing theologians) in restricting its membership to scholars who support the inerrancy of Scripture’s autographs. But it also warns evangelicalism that it must now gird up its loins to face within its own institutions an apostasy from full biblical authority, such as occurred within Protestantism as a whole half a century ago.

It is strange that the official communiqué of the conference, while representing that “the Scriptures are wholly truthful,” goes on to say that among the areas left for further study was “the concept of inerrancy, whether and in what sense it is a biblical doctrine.” Must evangelicalism now therefore face the unhappy task of having to cross-examine the profession of some of its leaders? The Evangelical Theological Society, as most particularly involved, pledges itself to remove from its membership any whose employment of the English language permits acceptance of the Bible as “wholly truthful” but not “inerrant.”

J. BARTON PAYNE

President

Evangelical Theological Society

Wheaton Graduate School of Theology

Wheaton, Ill.

Dollars And The Institute

I am thrilled with the idea of the proposed Institute of Advanced Christian Studies.… I’m going to try and send a dollar when each issue arrives.…

MRS. E. A. KAMMERLING

Melrose Park, Ill.

The issue just arrived here in Saigon. Enclosed is my dollar.…

ARTHUR J. ESTES

Brigade Chaplain

Saigon, Viet Nam

One dollar for me, one dollar on behalf of my pastor.

LUELLA GOODRIDGE

St. Petersburg, Fla.

Surely the Lord is in it; may his people be behind it!

DAVID P. HANEY

President

Ohio Baptist Pastors Conference

New Lebanon, Ohio

May you hear from a goodly portion of the ten million evangelical magazine readers.

W. EVANS MOORE

Baltimore, Md.

A grass-roots contribution from my wife and myself.

PETER RICHARDSON

Toronto, Canada

A splendid idea … prayerfully hope all 40 million respond.

ROSS RHOADS

Valley Forge, Pa.

Enclosing $3—two for ourselves and one for our five children … praying that this may be as effective in its field as is CHRISTIANITY TODAY.…

MRS. PAUL T. EDWARDS

First United Presbyterian Church

Springfield, Ohio

Here’s my $4 for the four evangelicals (Southern Baptist) in my family.

A. D. PRICKETT

Chaplain

U. S. Naval Station

FPO New York 09555

• Dollars for the Institute of Advanced Christian Studies, promptly acknowledged by us, are banked in American Security and Trust Co., Washington, D. C., where the total now stands at $385. Evangelical Protestants giving a dollar each could bring the Institute into being almost overnight.—ED.

- More fromEutychus

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Crosscurrents of exchange with the non-Christian world will help Christian colleges more effectively perform their tasks

Christian colleges have generally kept their students roped away from the dangers—real and imaginary—of the outside world. Yet Christ, speaking to his Father about believers, says that although they are not of the world (John 17:16) they are in the world (17:11), that they have been sent into the world (17:18), and that they are not to remove themselves from the world (17:15).

Almost by definition, Christian colleges tend to create barriers between those on the inside and those not. Despite a few channels to the outside, such as Christian service programs, intercollegiate competitions, and incidental daily contacts, there is too little real integration of Christian students with the world beyond the campus. The only world they know is the “Christian” world within campus boundaries.

As a result, many Christian colleges that aim to turn out leaders who will win the world to Christ tend to produce Christian isolationists. These men and women live out their days as much as possible in Christian surroundings—the evangelical church, Christian business associates, and Bible-conference vacations, and in time the Christian retirement community. Many of these graduates make comparatively little impact on the outside world because they are not really involved in it.

How can this be changed? How can Christian colleges begin to produce articulate and outgoing Christians able to live dynamically in a non-Christian environment?

The answer is that involvement with the outside world must become one of the goals of the Christian school. This requires a joint effort by administration and students; neither can do the job by itself. But working together they can transform the evangelical college from a mere “religious” school into a driving force for Christ, for a new community, and for a new world.

Positive steps must be taken to ventilate Christian campuses with winds from the non-Christian world. But at this point a word of caution must be said. Stepping outside traditional isolationism must in no way lead to watering clown the theological convictions of a school established in the name of Christ and determined to maintain a pure witness. On the contrary, the goal is to maintain the doctrinally pure witness of the college and put it out where the world can see it.

Yet there must be no confusion between purity of witness and certain rules of conduct. Opening wide the Christian campus will make the Good News travel farther and hit harder, but it may also bring archaic and arbitrary rules of personal conduct under increasing fire. Such mental gymnastics as distinguishing between plot and non-plot Cinerama to decide whether students may attend will perhaps be re-evaluated.

One obvious step toward leading the Christian college out of its isolationism is to expand existing contacts with non-Christian schools. Here the athletic program can be of great help. Many Christian colleges have already made a beginning in arranging social gatherings with visiting students after games. Concerts, art exhibits, colloquiums, and lectures—especially on non-religious themes—provide other opportunities to attract outside college students. Perhaps invitations to worthy efforts in these “secular” areas of liberal arts education would gain a greater response than invitations limited to evangelistic services at the college chapel, important though the latter are. The invitations should be sent to neighboring academic communities, using personal contacts wherever possible.

It may well be that nearby secular colleges and universities offer many more opportunities to hear notable speakers and performing artists than the Christian college. This opens the door wider for Christian students to visit and to get to know students there.

Both the administration of the Christian college and its student government can do much to encourage these efforts. Transportation can be arranged; perhaps student ticket prices or admission preferences might be offered by the neighboring school. This could lead to other openings for friendly involvement, among faculty members, for example, or student council officers. Interschool discussions might often be a natural follow-up.

Once the goal is determined of promoting contacts between the secular and the Christian campuses, there are many means to consider. Student activities at the Christian college usually range from pre-med clubs to intramural ping-pong tournaments. Practically all of them (with the possible exception of distinctively Christian organizations like missions fellowships and pre-seminary groups) can become stepping stones to associations with nearby secular schools. For athletic groups, an inter-school field day might be followed by a picnic; a foreign-language club might invite the corresponding club on the secular campus to a special meeting or dinner.

The Christian colleges and Christian student bodies must take the initiative. And they must be prepared for skeptical observation and comment. Chances are, however, that friendship will be met by friendship and openness by openness, and that explanations of school policy and personal belief will be respectfully received.

There is also a longer-range aspect of cultural integration of Christian schools. This would include such projects as making the campus available to groups that are not specifically Christian, such as the Peace Corps, National Student Association, and responsible civil rights organizations.

Another possibility is an educational plan that has become widely popular—the year of undergraduate study overseas. Many universities have established branch campuses in other countries, while others encourage their students to participate in such programs as the Junior Year Abroad.

Perhaps this plan might find a modification in this country. How about the Junior Year in the State University? Most Christian colleges are relatively small and many secular schools large; both have their recognized advantages and drawbacks.

Take a typical sophom*ore in a Christian college. He may have floundered in his freshman year, but by now he has declared a major and has completed perhaps a third of his required courses. In many academic fields he would find it very valuable to spend the next year in a large university. There he could get courses not offered on his own campus. He would probably have access to elaborate equipment no small school can afford. And he might even find the contrast in atmosphere to be an added stimulus to study.

Most of all, he might come back to his senior year in the Christian school knowing what life is like in a non-Christian student world. He should have gained—unless he hibernated all year—an acquaintance with fraternities and sororities; some encounter with practicing agnostics and atheists, cynical professors, and an impersonal administration; and an impression of hard drinking and easy sex, wholesale cheating, and left-or right-wing agitating.

Dangerous? Of course! Like tentmaking in Corinth, or public speaking in Athens. But consider the benefits: One would be the new life coursing through struggling Christian student groups at the university. And then, the following year, the memory of that experience might well serve to fire the vision and concern of the complacent back on the Christian campus.

But sending students from Christian schools into the universities is only half the picture. Might it not be possible to attract some secular students to a Christian college for a year? Perhaps some imaginative Christian educator could approach university officials about publicizing a year, or a semester, in a small Christian college.

True, the appeal would be different. But surely the “Christian atmosphere” is not the only advantage over secular universities. There are also the warmth and friendliness of the small college campus, where students are names rather than numbers; classes that are generally small and an open door to every professor’s office; the small college community’s friendly meals and homey traditions in which all students participate.

The administration of the Christian college needs to offer encouragement and help in the short-range steps to involvement with the outside world. And for longer-range plans, it must take the lead. In a semester or annual student-exchange program, careful planning would be needed to facilitate transfer procedures, to prearrange housing, perhaps even to find part-time jobs (on campus, if possible). An orientation program would be helpful, preferably matching outstanding Christian students with exchange partners of similar interests.

A strategic part of the work of Jesus Christ in the world today is carried on by college-educated Christians. A great number of them graduated from Christian colleges. But besides the Christian-college alumni on the firing line, there are many others who hardly know there is a war on. Or if they do know it, their participation is limited to designating a tax-deductible fraction of their surplus on a check and sending it off in a self-addressed, postage-paid envelope.

This must be changed. We cannot afford to have a large part of the Lord’s army only mildly interested in what is going on at the front.

Yet what can we expect when much of their basic training was so unrealistic? The first thing we did to these young recruits was isolate them—and this lasted all the way through until D-Day! No wonder many of them stumbled under fire, then gradually slipped off to the sidelines. We gave them spiritual weapons during basic training and lots of theory about the enemy, but seldom any training exercises, seldom any simulated battle conditions, seldom any personal contact with those back from the fighting. During four years they became well adjusted to an artificially warless world and learned the difficult skill of assimilating heart-stirring battle reports without getting personally involved. They could not get involved; the system did not permit it. No wonder we are losing the war.

Involvement in the outside world will not solve all the problems of Christian colleges. But it will increase their effectiveness for Jesus Christ. These colleges need to remain thoroughly Christian; but they need to be involved with the world, too. The cross currents of exchange with the non-Christian world will help Christian colleges more effectively perform their task of training Christian leaders to go out and move a non-Christian world towards its Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

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While differing in function, ideally they are complementary and share a common inner nature

To restore meaning to the phrase “church-related college,” we must explore what church and college have in common and how they differ. For church and college to be wholly subject to the Christian revelation has implications for the nature and the function of both.

As a generalization, we can say that churches and their colleges share a common inner nature, that they differ in function, and that these differing functions are complementary. Generalizing further, we can say that the common nature of church and college is summed up in the New Testament word koinonia (fellowship) and that the specialized functions of church and college are proclamation and reflection respectively. Obviously we are concerned here with the philosophic rather than the legal relations between church and college. Thus what is said applies to any seriously Christian college.

Just as koinonia should be the main characteristic sensed by a stranger who comes into a church (“Behold how they love one another”), so koinonia in Christian college faculties can be the distinctive tone that marks these colleges as different. The central justification for insisting on Christian commitment as a qualification for faculty is to ensure not merely that proper indoctrination occurs but also that koinonia is shown.

The body of Christ—a concept that applies to Christian faculties—has an organic unity rather than the unity of a jigsaw puzzle. All the members sustain one another as if the same lifeblood flowed through them all. The freedom of each member is heightened by functioning within the discipline of the body. No college faculty can be a collection of individualists and yet be Christian. There is a difference between individuality (the fullest development of personal capacity) and individualism (the unilateral action of a person without regard to the fellowship of which he is a part).

Probably no other job in the world lends itself so superbly to selfishness as does college teaching. Part of the reason for this is that knowledge is the chief seat of human pride. But beyond this there is a professional device that abets individualism. It is the exaggerated notion of the classroom as the professor’s castle. This notion is often reinforced by an appeal to “academic freedom.”

That there is a legitimate freedom of thought required for professors is axiomatic; but too often “academic freedom” has been a smoke screen for an irresponsible, selfish, individualistic bombast. The net result is to place the professor beyond the reach of evaluation. No other profession in the world gets by with so little evaluation as teaching. This cannot be squared with Christian koinonia. Part of a Christian teacher’s worthiness is indicated by his willingness to be evaluated, even by students, and to seek help in improving his skill.

Christian koinonia, far from being a denial of academic freedom, really points to a more excellent way of handling this difficult matter. Freedom must be balanced with responsibility. In Christian koinonia, responsibility is found by submission to group discipline.

This discipline starts at the simple level of spiritual fellowship in which faculty meet together as persons, without benefit of academic regalia, to share burdens and triumphs under a common Lord. In this prayer fellowship, everyone matters to everyone else. Here the corrective word is spoken in love. Schism is avoided. Reputations are protected. Idiosyncrasies are borne. Out of such fellowship it is possible to tackle the problem of academic freedom, which must be moved from individualism to the higher freedom in community.

Within the community of mature scholars, there must be freedom to try out new ideas without fear of reprisal or recrimination, even when these ideas test the margins set by the commitment of a particular institution. This applies especially to sensitive areas such as the relation of science and the Bible, the relation of the authority of the Bible to the means by which it was inspired, and the relation of realism in literature to p*rnography.

Christian faculty who are sensitive to koinonia will approach these areas with a spirit of tentative inquiry rather than dogmatism. Some of these new ideas will survive and become advanced insights good for everybody. Others will, in the give-and-take of faculty discussion over a period of time, emerge as untrue. This freedom among scholars, however, is quite different from the flaunting of untried notions before students.

So the college faculty shares with the church the experience of Christian fellowship or koinonia. But how do college and church differ in function?

At the very center of the Christian view is God’s relation to man, and the proclamation of God’s good news of reconciliation is the main task of the church. Indeed, this doctrine of reconciliation is so crucial in the New Testament that its rediscovery by those who have reacted against liberalism has been so enthusiastic as to lead some to the extreme (and the error) of universalism.

In rejecting universalism, however, we must not minimize the enormous scope of redemption in the New Testament. The main burden of the Bible is its concern for the reconciliation of man to God through atonement and repentance. Yet in addition there are many hints of the cosmic significance of God’s reconciling acts. It is the purpose of the church to proclaim to all men God’s reconciling message, but it is the purpose of the Christian college to reflect upon the implications of the Lordship of Christ in every area of thought.

The primary purpose for having a committed Christian faculty in a Christian college is not to proclaim to students what might be called salvation facts. As a practicing Christian person, the faculty member will, to be sure, be a witness. But he will be this because he is a Christian person and not because he is a professor. In identifying with the whole range of truth, the college cannot dissociate itself from proclamation. Therefore a college that is seriously Christian will make its chapel services and its weeks of religious emphasis a very carefully planned and meaningful confrontation of the academic community with the total claims of Christ upon life as well as mind. For this no apology is needed.

But justification for the Christian college does not lie in its repeating the work of the church. Obviously, it costs a lot less to preach the Gospel through the church than by building colleges! Nor is the answer merely that the Church is concerned with kérygma (proclamation) and the college with didaché (teaching), for the didaché of the New Testament is really an extension of the kérygma. A Bible college might be justified on the basis of didaché but not a liberal arts college.

What then is the function of the Christian liberal arts college? At the risk of oversimplification, we might say that it is concerned with what the Apostle Paul called “the wisdom of this world” and its relation to the Christian revelation. Paul warned against being enamored of the world’s wisdom when it was not related to and grounded in the message of the Cross.

The earliest Church Fathers misunderstood this warning. Refusing to have anything to do with “pagan” learning or education, they gave themselves exclusively to proclaiming the kérygma and expounding the didaché. This attitude was reinforced by the fact that the Apostle Paul mentioned philosophy only rarely, and then only to belittle or condemn.

Later Church Fathers, struggling with the problem of communicating the Gospel to pagans, began to realize that pagan learning contained vast amounts of truth; that the Apostle Paul, while deriding certain pagan philosophies, was actually very philosophical indeed in his treatment of the cosmic aspects of God’s reconciling work; and that the apostle was decrying, not learning nor even philosophy as such, but a certain twist or bias in the treatment of them. To rush to the heart of the matter: Paul was decrying the humanism of the Greeks, not because most of what they set forth was false, but because the framework of their thinking made men the measure of all things. Over against this, he insisted that all knowledge must be set against a new framework taken from Christian revelation, where the Incarnation becomes the measure of all things.

This means that:

Having tried to master the philosophies and religions of the world as should be done in a secular institution, the Christian liberal arts college goes beyond and sees these against the framework of the Christian revelation;

Having tried to master the techniques and findings of the behavioral sciences and to learn about the average man, the Christian college goes beyond and compares these findings with the perfect man, Jesus Christ, understanding that man’s self-knowledge is not complete unless he goes beyond describing what man does to realizing what man ought to do;

Having tried to master the disciplines of the scientific method and the factual discoveries of the natural sciences, the Christian college goes beyond to see these in the framework of God’s creation (it is assumed that God’s revelation in nature does not contradict his revelation in history or in the Bible, and that whenever a contradiction seems apparent, we have improperly interpreted either science or the Bible or both and must suspend judgment and pursue the matter further until the apparent contradiction is resolved);

Having sharpened skills in communication through the study of the world’s masters of expression in literature, speech, drama, art, and music, the Christian college goes beyond the ephemeral judgments of the contemporary mood and views these arts against the timeless Christian values.

In the Christian college, then, the student receives not less but more than he would get at a secular institution.

If we have any valid case for inviting students to attend a Christian college, it is not that the college does what the church does, nor that the college takes a position on certain social matters, nor that it maintains a religious atmosphere. Rather, the case must be that in the classrooms, the various subject matters are integrated into a Christian world view that is presented to students as a live option. This is the implication for the Christian college of sharing with the church a commitment to the Christian revelation. This is the real genius of the Christian college.

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Liberal learning lacks logical integration and needs a unifying frame

Many educators have declared that a liberal arts education cannot be truly liberal and open-minded, truly humanizing in its effects upon students, if it is dominated by a “Christian approach.” They view Christian faith as a sectarian prejudice that hinders the free and disinterested study of our world.

In a book entitled Christianity and History (1964), E. H. Harbison describes the attitude of these educators and scholars:

Deep at the heart of the American academic world is the belief that the word “scholar” cannot tolerate any qualifying adjective like “Christian.” … Did not the Church burn Bruno and humiliate Galileo? And in the search for historical truth, were not the real heroes those who (like Nalla) exposed the arrogant forgeries of Popes or (like Bayle) laid bare the superstitions on which Christians had been nourished for centuries? Once a man allows himself to be anything before he is “scholar” or “scientist,” so the argument runs, truth flies out the window and prejudice fills the classroom [p. 5].

Even some of the more conservative Christian educators have asserted that the liberal arts are independent disciplines which the Christian student must include in his studies but which he can never relate to a Christian perspective derived from Scripture. Rational inquiry and tentativeness in approach characterize the liberal arts, while assured faith and personal commitment characterize the Christian perspective. Therefore, say these Christian educators, the two remain incompatible, or at least irreconcilable. Such persons would perhaps assign all who are more optimistic about the integration of “revelational truth” and “liberal arts truth” to the limbo Dante reserved for those who “refused to take sides.”

These educators have not failed to find support for their contentions. They refer to the Scriptures—to Christ’s prayer, for example, as recorded in Matthew 11:25,26, or to Paul’s rejoinder to the Corinthians (“Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” [1 Cor. 1:20])—as well as to the historical fact that from time to time unpleasant tensions have marked the relations between theologians and philosophers, theologians and educators, theologians and scientists, theologians and literary scholars.

Valid Though Dangerous

Whether or not one agrees with this view, it is obvious that any serious attempt to integrate the learning of men and the revealed knowledge of God is fraught with difficulty and danger. Yet, despite the prejudice of certain unbelieving educators and the anxiety of certain Christian educators, a Christian “approach” or “perspective”—if not a thorough-going Christian philosophy—in the teaching of the liberal arts, still seems both possible and valid. Several considerations support this belief.

First, the New Testament, while it declares that the “learning of men” may under certain conditions obstruct the way to a personal faith in Christ, does not disparage this world’s learning as such. Rather, it implies (in passages like Second Corinthians 10:5 and Philippians 4:8,9) and even illustrates (in the dialogue of Christ with his opponents as well as in the ministry of Christian teachers like Paul and Apollos) that the Christian must deliberately bring the two kinds of knowledge together. He must let the one kind (Christian revelation) illuminate, interpret, and sometimes correct the other kind (learning of men).

Secondly, some Christian humanists have in past centuries shown that liberal education can be given a Christian orientation that renders it more meaningful. Harbison, in chapter 5 of the work mentioned above, refers to a number of these, among them Jerome, Augustine, Vittorino da Fettre (of Mantua), Johann Sturm (of Strasbourg), John Colet (of London), Luther, the Brethren of the Common Life, Calvin, Erasmus, and Comenius. Indeed, Harbison goes so far as to maintain that, on the basis of historical evidence, Christianity and liberal education, though they have often drifted apart, have never fully and finally split in the West; they have “always shared one central belief and concern: belief in the dignity of personality and concern for its integrity” (p. 86).

Thirdly, the learning involved in the liberal arts must, insofar as it is valid, be part of God’s truth. For the Christian, no genuine learning, whether received from Christian or non-Christian teachers or textbooks, can be alien. The reminder of Augustine is relevant: “Let every good and true Christian understand that wherever truth may be found, it belongs to his Master.”

Fourthly, the objectives of the Christian liberal arts college demand a Christian approach in the teaching of secular subjects. One of the broad objectives of such a college has been defined as follows:

Christian higher education should provide balanced programs of liberal and professional education that are Biblically centered and are designed to prepare selected young people for leadership—either as fulltime Christian workers or as consecrated members of other professions and occupations. [Christian Education in a Democracy, Frank E. Gaebelein, p. 137].

Clearly, such a goal can be achieved only if students are theistically oriented in the basic areas of human knowledge—that is, in the liberal arts.

Fifthly, in higher education today discerning educators increasingly feel a desperate need for a frame of reference that will pull together seemingly disparate fragments of knowledge and serve as an integrating center for teachers and students alike. The authors of the Harvard Report of 1945 (General Education in a Free Society) for instance, confess freely that the “search continues and must continue for some over-all logic, some strong, not easily broken frame within which both college and school may fulfill their at once diversifying and uniting tasks” (p. 40). Surely the Christian college ought to be in a position to supply that frame.

Steering Between The Extremes

The crux of the problem of a Christian approach to the liberal arts is the proper integration of two seemingly unrelated spheres of knowledge. If our understanding of both spheres were fuller and more precise, the problem of integration would doubtless be much simpler. But as things are, it is quite difficult to steer a safe course between the extremes of full and forced absorption of liberal arts knowledge by Christian revelation and superficial accommodation of liberal arts knowledge to Christian revelation. Medieval scholasticism is an example of the one extreme and the instruction offered in second-rate Bible colleges today an example of the other.

Liberal arts subjects have an integrity of their own. History, for example, provides some of its own “rules” of evidence and criteria of reliability and authenticity; music provides some of its own “laws” of harmony and dissonance; literature provides its own “canons” of literary criticism. And such rules, criteria, and canons cannot be ignored without serious loss of understanding; indeed, the subjects cannot be intelligently studied without them.

But for Christian students and teachers, the study of a liberal arts discipline includes more than an understanding of subject matter. Christians need to know how that particular subject is related to the moral nature and purpose of man in the universe, as these are revealed by God in the Scriptures. They must know how that subject illustrates, even if only faintly, the moral nature of man and how it may be made to serve God’s moral and spiritual purpose.

It will not do, therefore, for Christian teachers in a church-related college simply to point out the presence or absence of artistic integrity in a given selection. A work of literature may evidence artistic wholeness and artistic sincerity and yet embody misleading insights and induce false feelings about the nature and destiny of man. Only a distinctly Christian reading of such a work will uncover and properly correct these undesirable insights and feelings.

Few Christian scholars have achieved anything like a satisfactory integration of human and divine knowledge, even in limited areas of study. And the phenomenal increase of human knowledge in the twentieth century has only complicated the task. Yet Christian educators must constantly strive for such integration in their own teaching.

Two simple guiding principles may help. First, this integration must be attempted in crucial areas, not merely at peripheral points. It would not do to suggest to students that Shakespeare’s Othello is a basically religious play because it has numerous allusions to the Bible or because Othello dies in recompense for his murdering Desdemona. These are only superficial links and tell little about the basic tone and thrust of the play.

A Christian approach to this play would involve, rather, a critical and biblically oriented discussion of the deeper motives of Othello and of Shakespeare’s own comments—as implied in the statements of certain characters—upon these motives.

In the study of European history, the instructor claiming a Christian approach could not content himself with “prophetic denunciation” of Hitler’s wickedness; he would need to discuss the moral factors that disposed Hitler to act as he did, and to present whatever evidence of divine judgment he might justly see in the development and final disruption of the Nazi regime.

A second guiding principle is that integration must be attempted in a natural, intuitive, and suggestive manner rather than in a forced and dogmatic one. The most meaningful comments of the teacher may often come as a delightful surprise to the students. Such a way of presentation calls for humility, tact, and even a bit of reticence.

Christian teachers of liberal arts subjects need to be very much at home in both human and divine areas of knowledge. Many will need as much formal education in theology as in liberal arts. But whether by formal or informal means, they will need to acquire a thorough knowledge of the inscripturated revelation of God and a strong personal commitment to its truths. For unless a personal integration of divine and human knowledge underlies the attempt at integration in the classroom, the latter is bound to be weak and unconvincing.