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The distressing decline in the moral behavior of youth has constrained legislative bodies, law enforcement agencies, educational organizations, sociologists and social workers to study intensively an appalling social problem. Parallel impassioned study has not been provoked on the part of the Christian Church. There have been voices, here and there, sounding an alarm for action, but because of ecclesiastical indifference few people have responded. Race discrimination, disarmament, the United Nations, recognition of Red China, labor relationships, economics, and ecumenicity have absorbed the interest of churchmen. Almost no attention has been given to a problem that may destroy the moral life of our nation. This shocking negligence, unless it is immediately corrected, will earn for the Church the name of delinquent.
Not only is a transgressor of the law delinquent, but also one who fails in the performance of duty. The Church has been woefully delinquent in grappling with this social blight. Yet Christ placed the responsibility for societal deterioration upon the Church. He said, “Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?” (Matt. 5:13). The figure our Lord used indicates the power that the Church has in counteracting corruption and preserving the health of society. The message, the life, and the prayers of the Church constitute the salt of the earth. Where the message has been rendered impure by the addition of human traditions and wisdom, the Church has lost her savour; where life has deviated from the standards of Christ, or prayer has been neglected, the Church again has lost her savour. A decadent society bears strong witness that the Church has lost her saltiness.
Several articles in this issue call attention to the fact that the nation’s entire cultural and social life has become corrupt, and that this is having a disastrous effect on the life of juveniles. Wherein has the Church failed? Precisely in her message, life, and prayer. To overcome prevalent immorality the Church has acknowledged the need of a program of evangelization, but terrible confusion exists as to the content of the evangel. A genuine return to biblical theology will certainly provide the kerygma that produces repentance, faith, and reformation. The Church is just beginning to realize that biblical doctrine forms the basis for spiritual and moral life, although that dawning realization has not yet activated the Church to indoctrinate young people with biblical truth. If future generations are to be saved from the blight of delinquency, the Church must redeem the time, for the careful nurture and diligent instruction of youth are her responsibilities.
The evangelical branch of the Christian Church ought to feel heavily responsible for today’s dark picture of juvenile immorality. Evangelicals have given priority to the preaching of Christ and him crucified as well as the necessity of faith in him for salvation. This has been entirely proper, but they have been guilty at times of not applying Christian revelation to culture and social life. Christ’s admonition that the Church is to function as salt upon community life has not been fully comprehended nor taken to heart by evangelicals. Furthermore, the antinomianism manifested by some groups has deprived the Church of the effective witness of holy living. The antinomian believes that Christ has fulfilled all the claims of the moral law in behalf of the true believer, and that the latter is therefore released from all obligation in living out its precepts. Our conformity to Kingdom laws of the Sermon on the Mount has usually come far short of the mark. Evangelicals have hardly matched the zeal of the apostles in applying doctrine to all of life as evidenced in the Epistles. Society would be cleansed and culture uplifted were there a greater demonstration of Christian personal and social ethics. A manifestation of strong obedience to moral law is bound to have a purifying effect on the socio-cultural atmosphere; and its absence will only accelerate society’s decadence. The prevalence and rapid increase of teenage immorality are vivid indications that Christian influence is on the wane. Evangelicals must take a measure of the responsibility.
Not only has the church been delinquent in providing a healthy moral climate for youth, but it has been appallingly negligent in reclaiming and rehabilitating erring juveniles. One branch of the church has spent its time recommending slum clearance, better recreational facilities, and social activities, while another has confined its efforts to youth rallies, singspirations, and religious entertainment. These activities may possess some merit; however, they come far from solving the problem or actually reaching delinquent youth. The church does not seem to understand how desperate a situation this is, nor how tremendous is the labor involved in the work of reclamation. Both in research and establishment of helpful projects, the church has lagged far behind secular institutions. And yet this is an area, of all areas, where the Church ought to be providing leadership and demonstrating her divine mission of saving the lost.
The main problem in handling juvenile anti-social behavior is a lack of skilled workers in the field of delinquency. The recruiting and retaining of competent, professionally-trained people constitute a continuous problem to social agencies. It is an alarming fact that all the trained social workers in the United States could be used in New York City alone. People who are concerned about the problem express a longing for the dedicated worker who will be willing to labor around the clock to salvage the life of one wayward child. The highest qualification for such work is not technical training, valuable as that is, but a genuine love for children and a passion for their redemption. What better source is there for dedicated personnel than the institution whose Head commands the love of neighbor and urges the nurture of children? Indeed the love of Christ should constrain the Church in inspiring her membership to enter this needy field of service. Since the blight of delinquency has touched every community, rural and urban, each congregation ought to make it an objective to recruit workers for youth who need help.
A Christian personnel would possess peculiar qualifications needed in the area of delinquency. Vocational education, recreational programs, and slum clearance have not accomplished maximum results because the ultimate therapeutic need of the delinquent is a sense of moral responsibility for his own actions. The public, in its concern over solving this social problem, has wasted millions of dollars and the lives of many children because this moral element has been neglected. A Christian social worker, however, with a solid moral understanding, can both instill in a child his responsibility towards God and, more than that, bring to him a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ whose love and power can save him. The success of Alcoholics Anonymous has been largely due to its convincing the alcoholic that he must obtain his strength from God. No work of redemption and reformation can be truly successful if the sinner is not pointed to Christ. In spite of optimistic statistics as to the good that has been done on the part of public and private agencies, it is rather well known that these glowing reports are not backed by actual results. Perhaps the fruitlessness and frustration has been due to a lack of definite therapeutic treatment that only vital Christianity can provide.
Christian colleges and Bible schools should provide technical and professional training for those who desire to enter into child welfare work. Many young people enter these schools with a vision for a Christian service, but have neither the qualifications nor a definite call from God for a ministry of preaching or teaching. Yet their talents may lie in the service of reclaiming and rehabilitating erring youth. Were they to be trained by competent faculties, inspired by love for children, and armed with a knowledge of the Gospel, social agencies throughout the country would more than welcome them. Workers are few enough, and the need is desperate. Courses in the social sciences that will equip students for the professional fields of juvenile delinquency or family relations ought to be encouraged in every college where the name of Christ is revered.
In addition to social workers, the Church should concern herself with detention and shelter care of children who have come in conflict with the law. One hundred thousand children from ages 7 to 17 are held in county lockups, most of which are substandard for adults. It is in these places that so many hardened youth physically and sexually abuse younger children who have been picked up for relatively minor offenses. Detention is a crucial period for a child. His hostility toward society is either deepened during this time, or he learns that crime works against his best interests. Actually the detention experience should begin the process of rehabilitation and change in behavior. It is commonly agreed by all professional people in the field of child welfare that individualized treatment and homelike surroundings is the most effective setting in which to help juvenile delinquents. How eminently effective would be a Christian surrounding. Here Christian love could be demonstrated, Christian discipline applied, and Christian precepts taught. Certainly there is a need also of residential centers for boys and girls that have been released from state reform institutions. Because these are not available, many children are forced to return to evil homes and community environments.
The adoption of a program of detention homes and shelters would be costly to the Church. Many congregations, unwilling to sacrifice either money or effort, would undoubtedly pass the responsibility, as they have before to county, state, and federal supervision. But how long is the Church going to shrug off the judgment of her Lord? “For I was an hungered, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.” A Church that cannot afford to establish places of refuge for the wayward and the needy, and yet can rear million dollar edifices “to the glory of God” and for the sole satisfaction of comfortable worshipers, is unable to come clear of the Lord’s judgment on delinquency: “Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.”
Delinquent children, irresponsible parents, and a decadent society point ultimately to a delinquent Church. Wherewith shall society be preserved from corruption if the Church has lost the savour of her revealed Gospel, moral example, and divine zeal? If the dark and dread reality of one million juvenile delinquents cannot rouse the Church from her apathy, lethargy, and indifference, then the Church has become a part of the callousness and decadence of her own generation. If she does not change, future generations will judge her delinquent. If she awakens and comes alive under the power of God with a strong proclamation of the Gospel, she can cleanse society and save the young people of our nation. Then will future generations call her blessed.
END
Red China Remains A Missionary Objective
Headlines in the daily press are still recording critical reactions of churches and churchmen to the Red China pronouncement of last November’s Cleveland World Order Study Conference. One of the most recent registered the vote of the American Baptist Convention supporting U. S. policy which denies diplomatic recognition and opposes admission to the United Nations.
The basic fault with the Cleveland thrust was its commitment of corporate Protestantism to a specific course of political action. The New Testament Church has no divine mandate for official political programs—whether leftist or rightist. Political action is not the divine mission of the Church.
We are as deeply interested as the Cleveland conferees that Christian principles of justice be honored in the case of China and that she soon recover the mutual respect and recognition of the world family of nations. We have an abiding affection for the Chinese people. The Christian people of America displayed a desire for their salvation through missionary endeavors long before the Communists came as their “liberators.” Possibly when Red promises run out we can again minister both to the spiritual and material needs of this great Oriental people. We cannot believe that political recognition of a godless regime that is the avowed enemy of true Christianity and the suppressor of individual freedoms is the best means of showing Christian affection and goodwill.
We believe that a valid concept of the mission of the Church and a true Christian concern underlay the recent critical actions of the American Baptist Convention, the Presbyterian Church in the U. S., the Baltimore Conference of the Methodist Church, and many other church bodies in and out of the orbit of the National Council.
It is unfortunate that the Cleveland pronouncements, so widely disseminated by the press and other media, left an impression that Protestants favor the recognition of Red China. Smeared with this implication, churchmen and churches had no other recourse than to publicly air their views. This might have been avoided had the NCC sought a more representative constituency for the Cleveland meeting, set that conference in the perspective of the Church’s true mission, and given the press a clear understanding of its nature and aims. Furthermore, there is no necessity for following Cleveland with propaganda for acceptance of its findings in the churches. When any Protestant group irresponsibly assumes quasi-official status as the spokesmen of American Protestantism and seeks to propagandize its views in the churches for political ends, it is altogether proper and right that protests be made. Indeed, if there were no reaction we would despair for the free spirit of Protestantism.
Sooner or later in a free America and a free Protestantism the will of God’s people must find expression. For a time it may be ignored or suppressed but, as with truth, “the eternal years of God” are ours.
END
The Moral Irresponsibility Of Snubbing A Speedometer
The most common evil peculiar to automobile travel is also the most condoned.
Were a preventable holocaust suddenly to wipe out an entire congregation, the Christian community would rise up in unanimous indignation. Yet we continually disregard 300 traffic deaths in holiday-weekend slaughter—the equivalent of a fair-sized church audience.
The sin that invariably figures in this toll is speeding.
Particularly disturbing in the speed craze is the fact that “professional” drivers seem to be among the worst offenders. Not uncommonly tractor-trailers roar down hills at obviously unlawful speeds presumably to make up time lost on the upgrades. Speeding buses are familiar sights as well. (Fatality rates in commercial U.S. transit rose sharply last year, says the National Safety Council.) When the Sunday School teacher hurtles by traffic on the hilltop, or the parson rushes the pedestrian lane, indignity is added to impropriety.
Speeding is one of the most shameful wrongs of our time. Christians ought to realize its moral evil—be it in violation of posted limits or in disregard of adverse road conditions. Little can be said in defense of irresponsibility with an accelerator. It is selfish and contradicts the Bible’s “Love thy neighbor” commandment.
END
L. Nelson Bell
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A reader of this page chides the writer for worshipping the Bible. Frequently we have heard individuals disparagingly spoken of as “bibliolaters.”
In the many years that I have lived and worked with Christians, I have yet to see such an individual. That such may exist is certainly possible. That they constitute any appreciable number of persons, however, I am certain is untrue.
There are, on the other hand, millions in our own generation, as well as those of the past, who respect the Bible for good reason. These men and women trust the written Word because it has been pragmatically justified. Wherever it can be tested it has proved itself in experience to be what Christ and the apostles represent it to be, namely, the Word of God. Neither respect nor trust can in any sense be confused with worship.
To trust the Bible is not to worship it. In respecting the Scriptures we do not ascribe homage to its pages.
How can it be said then that those who have this regard for the written Word worship it? In part the reason is it is not held with corresponding trust or respect by others.
Part of the difficulty of those who may appear to follow the Bible blindly is due to a lack of objectivity on their part. This in turn can lead to an inflexibility which is no credit to anyone. That this may also hold for many who question parts of the Bible is equally true.
There are portions in the Scriptures which were vigorously questioned in past generations because of seeming contradictions, but which are now accepted because archaeological discoveries have proven them true.
On the other hand a rigid literalism has often led to unwarranted dogmatic assumptions which fall as the rug is pulled from under them in the face of more accurate scholarship. Often a preacher has had to revise a sermon on some favored text when more careful research proved that its meaning was different from what he had thought.
By some strange legerdemain of reasoning, those who inveigh most against bibliolatry are the very ones that exhibit in their churches an open Bible flanked by burning candles!
What then is the attitude of those who turn to the Holy Scriptures with confidence and honestly believe them to be the “only infallible rule of faith and practice?” What about those who have tested the Word and found it true?
There are two questions involved here: one of inspiration and the other revelation. We believe that all Scripture is inspired of God, but not everything contained therein is equally important or relevant for daily living. We believe that in God’s Word we have revelations of truth that come through the Holy Spirit, truths which man could never have discovered for himself unless the Holy Spirit had imparted them to those willing to receive. Furthermore, we believe these revelations of truth to be God-breathed and accurate regardless of whether men believe and accept them or not.
In other words, the authority of Scripture is in no way jeopardized by man’s acceptance or rejection of its contents; it is man who stands in judgment before the Book, not the Book which stands in judgment before man.
At the same time, the message of the Bible becomes operative in the hearts and lives of men as the Holy Spirit takes the written Word and applies it to the individual. It is perfectly accurate to say that the Bible becomes relevant to a person only as he accepts and acts on it; however, it is true that this relevance is there at all times, and man rejects it only at infinite loss to himself.
One of our greatest hindrances to an accurate and fruitful attitude to the Bible is reading books about the Bible rather than the Bible itself. There are thousands of men in the pulpits and in pews today who are thoroughly conversant on the opinions of other men about the Bible but dangerously ignorant of the Bible itself. Many of these show an almost pathological fear of letting the Bible speak for itself. To follow the example of the Laodicean Christians in examining the Scriptures is to these opponents of the Word anathema. To Paul it was an “honorable” procedure.
Again, to say that only those parts of Scripture which speak to the individual heart are, for that person, inspired is to transfer the basis of authority from the Bible to subjective intellectual or emotional reactions.
On what ground, therefore, do we Christians exhibit such confidence toward the Word of God?
This can be answered in one sentence: We have tested it and found that it is in fact what it claims to be, a Book inspired by God. In it we have found an unfailing source of comfort, hope, assurance, wisdom, warning, admonition, guidance, and truth.
Even on a cold scientific basis the Bible stands the test. Let it speak for itself and we find it true. Let it speak to our hearts and we hear God speaking.
We have found that the God of the Bible is our own God and loving heavenly Father. We have found the Christ of the Scriptures to be God’s Son and our own Saviour and Lord. We have found the Holy Spirit, whose loving ministrations are revealed in both Old and New Testaments, to be the comforter of our hearts and the illuminator of our own spirits.
In answer to the smug assertion of some that “we worship God, not the Bible,” or “we trust Christ, not a book,” we reply with hearty “amen.” Of course it is God whom we worship. Of course it is Christ in whom we put our trust for salvation. And the God we worship, the Christ we believe, and the Holy Spirit who makes our faith possible is the triune God revealed to us in the Scriptures and known experimentally by faith.
In expressing faith in the written Word, we know by experience that it is true. In matters of faith, doctrine, and practice it speaks of and for God. In the realm of daily living it shows us the way to make our Christian faith effective and relevant. Its promises have reached across the centuries and apply to our own needs. Its warnings to men of old are found to apply to these days as well.
When the Bible becomes a daily source of spiritual food and drink, when its story is woven into the warp and woof of our minds and hearts, we find that God gives us those answers without which no man can live aright.
With the Bible as our guide, we get the proper perspective between this life and the next, a right evaluation of the things which are temporary and those that are eternal, and an unshakable philosophy for living and a confidence which satisfies the question of this life and the life beyond the grave.
No, we do not worship the Bible. But we honor and trust it as a precious revelation of God’s eternal truth; and in our doing this, we have found it never to fail.
- More fromL. Nelson Bell
Theodore J. Jansma
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It is a common impression that Pastoral Counseling is something new—a new dimension in the work of the ministry. In some ways it is new, but essentially it is as old as the Church. Pastors have always been concerned about the problems of their individual congregants. The minister occupies a unique position in the lives of his people. He is a significant person at many important stages of their lives, from birth and baptism, through confirmation and marriage, to their last sickness and death. His office and function are conducive to the establishment of an intimate bond with his people on the deeper level, and it is quite natural that they should turn to him when troubles arise, when sickness brings anxiety, when guilt burdens the heart, when a marriage becomes shaky, when children cause parental concern, and so many more “natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”
Fast Tempo And Isolation
Several reasons may be given for a growing emphasis on pastoral counseling. Most commonly suggested is the tempo of modern life. We are living at too fast a pace, life is anything but leisurely, and we are caught in a mad whirl. The individual is moving so fast and is distracted in so many ways that the bond with his fellow man, which makes for greater stability, is weakened. His fast pace isolates him, gives him less opportunity for interpersonal living, less opportunity for the discipline and growth inherent in community with others. The individual is less a concern of society because society itself has lost so much of its cohesion, being composed of fast-moving individuals.
A person may feel less social restraint, may feel more of what he calls “freedom to live his own life,” but the result is also more isolation. An unwed mother or a divorcee may be less censured in modern society not because society has learned to be more compassionate, but rather because society cares less, has less compassion, has not learned the unstrained quality of mercy, and has no genuine concern for the individual. More hospitals, clinics, social agencies do not necessarily mean that society has a greater concern for its members as human beings. Its motivation may be economic. It is cheaper to help people before or in the early stages of their breakdown than to have them as permanent unproductive burdens. It is a characteristic of modern Western culture that greater individual freedom has also brought greater individual isolation. Interpersonal relations have broken down, and the result is loneliness. Our materialistic hopes, too, are shaky as we think of increasing inflation and greater longevity, if a catastrophe does not destroy us. A person still has to live with himself, and it is there in his inner conflicts that the need for counseling exists. Our divorce rate, alcoholism, juvenile problems, anxieties of every sort, the census of our prisons and mental hospitals all tell the story of the individual’s struggle in the complex society of this generation.
Influence Of Freud
Another reason for the growth of Pastoral Counseling are the new insights and techniques of psychology and psychiatry. Careful study and research are directed toward a better understanding of man and his society, the way a human personality develops, the interaction with his culture, the tension inherent in growing up, the meaning of behavior, and the influence of unconscious forces. Much of the impetus for this study of the human psyche is undoubtedly due to the influence of Sigmund Freud. While his views were unacceptable to his scientific colleagues as well as to the Christian community of his day, they have stimulated a great deal of thought and research in the study of man. His avowed irreligion and his “discoveries” of infant sexuality met insurmountable barriers in the moral tone and thought patterns of his time. But it is now generally recognized by religious leaders as well as those in the psychiatric professions that Freud made important contributions to the understanding of man and his problems in life.
Psycho-analysis does not have all the right answers, nor can it solve all problems (many cannot afford this type of service anyway), but it does have some answers and has taught some techniques for helping man in trouble with himself. Freud modified both his own theories and techniques, and this modifying process is continuing after Freud. Orthodox analysis with its sexualized unconscious, Oedipus complex, analyst’s couch, and so forth, is gradually giving way to new theories and techniques. The minister can learn some things from the analyst, especially the importance of listening, of trying to understand a fellow man, to feel with him, to make available to him an accepting heart, a warmth to which he can relate and with which he can feel community, a bond to decrease his isolation and loneliness, and a “healthy” human ally who enters the struggle with him.
Era Of Social Gospel
Another reason for the new emphasis on Pastoral Counseling is the continuing shift away from preaching. In former times preaching was the minister’s first duty. His primary calling was the preaching and teaching of the Bible, the infallible Word of God. While he was always the pastor, the shepherd of souls, this function was subordinate to his authoritative declaration of the truth of God in the tradition of the prophets and apostles. At the turn of the century, under the influence of a new vogue in philosophy and theology, the church and the minister began to develop a greater interest in man’s present life situation. It was the era of the social gospel, and it is still very much with us. The shift in emphasis was away from theology toward sociology. The slogan was, “Christianity is a life, not a doctrine.” The church became less concerned with the cleansing power of the Gospel, and more concerned with the cleansing power of a good broom. The slums, saloons, and other areas of social filth had to be cleaned up so that man would have a chance to develop his “natural potential as a child of God.” The “kingdom of God” was defined in terms of the earthly good life, and it was to be built here and now. This interest in community betterment is good in itself but, from an evangelical viewpoint, it is evil insofar as it becomes a substitute for the preaching of the Gospel.
It is only a small step from this interest in the community as a whole and its problems to an interest in the individual of the community and his problems. In fact, this step is inevitable as a further implimentation of the social gospel; and with the new developments in psychology, this dealing with the individual has become a big new field for pastoral activity. Of this, too, it must be said that it is good insofar as it is not a substitute for the preaching of the Gospel.
Mental Illness
It is well known that many patients who come to a physician do not have a physical disorder as the primary cause of their symptoms. While the physical symptoms, such as peptic ulcer, colitis, asthma, and migraine need medical treatment, the real cause of trouble is inner conflict, emotional upheaval, and immaturity. These patients need more than medicine or surgery. Then there are those who are sure they have cancer, tuberculosis, or some other dread disease, who go from one doctor to another, and cannot be convinced by clinical evidence that they have no disease. Add to such people the multitude who are “maladjusted,” “nervous,” and “neurotic,” who are in constant conflict with their social group, family, school, or job, the neurotic parents, delinquent children, alcoholics, and so forth—and we see that mental illness is an immense field, no longer the exclusive domain of doctors and psychiatrists. A team approach, interdisciplinary therapy, is more and more being recommended in which several professionally trained people contribute the insights of their own field—psychiatry, psychology, medicine, anthropology, sociology, and religion. This has led to a greater use of ministers as chaplain-counselors in both general and mental hospitals, counselor training for military chaplains, and a closer cooperation generally between doctor and pastor.
Proper Boundaries
The whole situation raises the problem of professional boundary lines. The minister is not a psychiatrist and will do damage if he attempts to be an amateur one. On the other hand, the psychiatrist may not assume that guilt feelings are neurotic per se, and that Christian moral standards are too rigid for healthy living. People turn to their minister because he is their religious leader and represents spiritual forces which they believe can help them with their troubles. Their “image” of the doctor or psychiatrist is a different one; he represents the knowledge and skills of medical science. These two are not mutually exclusive, but complementary and must cooperate in the closest possible way. From an evangelical point of view this cooperation is very difficult, if not impossible, with many psychiatrists and psycho-analysts because of their non-Christian preconceptions, and this is the primary reason for the existence of Christian mental hospitals. The pastor-counselor should know enough about mental health to distinguish between normal and neurotic manifestations of anxiety, guilt, grief, and so forth, between symptoms which indicate the need for psychiatric treatment, and those which can yield to a counseling program. He must also guard against the assumption that the religious or moral problem presented by his counselee is necessarily the real one. The unique contribution of the minister toward personality wholeness, integration, and purposeful living is to relate his counselee to God who has made man to live at full capacity in total commitment to Him.
Objectives In Treatment
The problem is also raised with regard to goals in treatment and counseling. The minister must maintain his pastoral function and direct his efforts toward the goals associated with his office, training, and personal commitment. The psychiatrist and psychoanalyst are concerned with helping a patient to achieve such equilibrium and stability that he can function reasonably well in his own setting, family, job, social, and cultural milieu. The social worker is similarly interested in the client’s human relationships, his ability to adjust to his own situation, and to affect changes in his situation to ease tension. Ostensibly these professions are not concerned with religio-philosophical matters. They claim to be neutral and permissive not only in the counseling interview but also with respect to the counselee’s Weltanschauung (at least insofar as it does not interfere with acceptable behavior).
The scope of this paper does not allow for a discussion of such alleged “neutrality,” but it should be borne in mind that no one is neutral, least of all in a counseling situation where one person tries to relate to another. This is not to say that a pastor-counselor must force his own ideals, moral standards, tenets of faith, and ultimate goals on the person who comes to him with emotional problems. He must still use good counseling techniques. But this means that the pastor may not, indeed cannot, abandon his religion’s concepts of mental health and personality wholeness, as these are bound up with God-relatedness. In the last analysis this is what the office of the minister exists for—to help man achieve and maintain his most fundamental and significant relationship, his bond with his Maker; to help man to be what God made him and wants him to be in this life upon earth.
Lack Of Literature
Precisely at this point the evangelical pastor finds a lack in much writing on modern psychology and counseling. To many the goal of pastoral counseling seems no higher than that of the psychotherapist who helps the patient to understand himself enough that he can function in his own setting, and so that he can relate acceptably to his fellow man and to his own conception of Deity. In this scheme the related human beings and cultural milieu are real enough, but God is an abstraction, a symbol, or projection. An example of the modern concept of “wholeness” or “mental health” without reference to man’s relation to God is a recent study, Current Concepts of Positive Mental Health, by Marie Jahoda. Its potential influence may be surmised from its Foreword: “This is the first of a series of monographs to be published by the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health as part of a national mental health survey that will culminate in a final report containing findings and recommendations for a national health program.” Various criteria for mental health are discussed at some length, but there is only a passing reference to religion, “A Unifying Outlook on Life,” as a “sign of maturity.”
Modern psychology studies the “existential” man who is assumed to know truth only in his own experience and action. But existentialism and phenomenology, while they claim to be ontological and genuinely interested in “being, have no interest in real Being, the Absolute, the Triune God, the Urwelt, and therefore have no ultimate reference or relationship for man. They cannot understand Augustine’s statement that “the heart of man is restless until it rests in God.” But this is precisely the “rest” that is the pastor’s concern. If he can help a man be a better husband, if he can help a husband and wife lift their marriage to a higher and more stable level, if he can help an alcoholic to stay sober, he has done a worthwhile job in terms of the present socio-cultural situation. The psychoanalyst attacks these problems on a deeper level of instinctual drives, infantile experience, interpersonal relations, and self-awareness. But the pastor goes still deeper, or higher, in his attempt to relate a person to his source and reason for being as a creature and child of the Triune God. The evangelical pastor’s efforts are directed to this life and beyond, to man’s eternal “health,” to his salvation, and “peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Depth psychology assumes that the resources for healthy life are inherent in man. The evangelical pastor believes in scientific technique and therapy, but he also believes in “miracle,” in direct divine intervention for the redemption of man, for new motivation and direction. He holds with the biblical imperative, “ye must be born again,” and that in the radical biblical sense men may become “new creatures in Christ.” A new principle of “being and becoming” must be implanted from outside of man by the Holy Spirit in order for man to have “rest” and “wholeness.” The “becoming,” growth, maturing, sanctification still involves many problems and normal anxiety, and the need for deep soul searching, for the exposure of personal hypocricies and neurotic defenses. But the frame of reference must be established in which a man can find health in the fullest sense.
Faith Healing
Pastoral counselors must take divine intervention much more seriously than they have done. The charismata, the special healing gifts of the early Church, may no longer be in our possession, but that does not limit the power of God to heal today as he did then. It is a lesson of church history that when a particular doctrine or practice is neglected by the Church, that doctrine or practice becomes the occasion for a new sect which takes it out of context and raises it to a position of central importance. That has happened with “faith healing.” There is a biblical faith healing which some have perverted to a sensationalism and quackery. Prayer for the sick is not a sentimentality or futile ritual; it is thoroughly biblical and we must do it with the same confidence of faith with which we pray for bread. The bond between body and soul is so intimate that the distinction is actually formal. Man is a whole, and healing influences are never limited to a part. Health is wholeness, and in a real sense prayer ministers to the whole man more directly than medicine.
A word of caution is needed at this point. A sick person, somatic or psychic, saved or unsaved, is not necessarily a greater sinner than a healthy person. Illness is not necessarily due to personal wickedness, not necessarily and basically a personal moral problem. Job’s friends thought so but God said they were wrong. It is true that sinlessness is health, wholeness, heaven. But earthly “health” exists in spite of sin, even gross sin. One person becomes “sick” because of dishonesty involving 10 dollars, while another stays “healthy” in spite of dishonesty involving thousands. One breaks down under emotional tension occasioned by masturbation, while another is a “healthy” fornicator. Sin and sickness are connected in the life of mankind and often in the individual. But individual health is no proof of virtue, and individual sickness is no proof of sin. It may be that the sick one is more sensitive, more easily affected by his sin; that the healthy one is more hardened, indifferent, better able to cover his sin, a more clever hypocrite.
Analysis Of Self
Psychoanalysis has taught us, among other things, the health-inducing power of honesty, realism, and the importance of searching below man’s confessions and professions for the springs of personality. It has taught us to think dynamically when dealing with human problems, to probe into the reasons for behavior, to uncover the deep motivations of which a person is mostly unconscious. To prepare himself for such analysis of another human being, the analyst is required to undergo personal therapy. He must be made aware of his own deep motivations and neurotic defenses, and to achieve the maximum “health” for himself. He has to know his own “blind spots” which could limit the effectiveness of his therapeutic practice. “Physician heal thyself” is a proverb taken seriously by the analyst, and the pastor-counselor can do no less. He should be rid of any illusions of his own omnipotence and perfection. He must be thoroughly and honestly human, while at the same time knowing “rebirth” and conversion as a genuine personal experience. He must be honest and realistic with himself before he can help others.
END
Theodore J. Jansma is Chaplain-Counselor of the Christian Sanatorium of Wyckoff, New Jersey. He holds the A.B. degree from Calvin College in Grand Rapids and the Th.B. degree from Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He is also a minister of the Reformed Church in America.
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J. Marcellus Kik
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A great challenge before the Christian Church is the awful and terrifying blight of juvenile delinquency. In the last several years over 1,250,000 children between the ages of 10 and 17, on an average per year, have come to the attention of the police, and approximately half of these appear before juvenile courts. The pace of juvenile crime is increasing at a tremendously rapid rate and J. Edgar Hoover estimates that by 1962 one million of our teenagers will be arrested each year if the present rate continues. In the eight-year period from 1948 through 1956, juvenile court cases more than doubled, while the child population of that age group increased only 19 per cent. Out of this amazing harvest of youthful offenders against the law, society will continue to reap for years to come a bigger and tougher crop of adult criminals. The cost to society in money, moral degeneracy, and violence defies the imagination. Yet the Christian Church pays little more attention to morally sick youth than the priest and Levite did to the wounded man in the story Jesus used to define the concept of neighbor.
The popular concept that delinquent conduct is limited to slum areas or places on the “wrong side of the tracks” is not true. Juvenile delinquency has had its greatest rate of increase in rural areas. This perhaps is due to the penetration of mass media. But economically well-to-do communities are also producing many delinquents, and the reason is often that parents have wealth. These children do not appear before juvenile courts, but are sent quietly to private psychiatrists or boarding schools. Even children from Christian families have not escaped wrongdoing.
A distressed and perplexed society is seeking a scapegoat on which to place the blame for all this. Sin in the human heart and a decadent culture are certainly the basic causes of lawless conduct on the part of the young. Nevertheless many other factors enter into the dark picture. Progressive education, lack of discipline, horror and obscene comics, pornographic literature, TV programs, movies of violence and sex, excessive drinking, broken homes, delinquent parents, stringent labor laws, materialism—these are all further factors that contribute to the moral downfall of children. Society has had a tendency of alternately blaming one or several of these for influencing behavior for evil. Each, however, has been in some measure responsible for the terrible situation of our day. Whatever evil lies within these factors must be fought if our youth is to be saved.
The public, of course, is anxious to find some panacea that would eradicate the problem. Society has already indicated that it is willing to spend huge sums of money to find and apply the cure. Slum elimination, recreation facilities, bigger and better schools, teenage clubs, stricter police action and more drastic punishment, summer camps, and work projects are some of the things that have been suggested and tried. Why is it then that juvenile delinquency is on the increase? A materialistic society has sought material means to eliminate the problem. While these things are good and necessary in some instances, they are not the answer to the grave problem confronting the nation.
Sin within the human heart is the basic cause. Man’s sinful nature is susceptible to many influences from within and without. Sin can either be restrained or awakened to greater activity. If society is to be saved, means must be sought to control juvenile crime; and whatever is feeding the sin of youth must, if at all possible, be eliminated.
Community Climate
The potential delinquent child is especially vulnerable to the materialistic, violent, and immoral climate around him. The rapid increase of youthful offenders reflects a lowering of standards in adult society. This is actually the distressing index of a deteriorating community. Progressive decadence in adult society is paralleled by a progressive delinquency among teenagers. Impressionable youth becomes victim to the “fashion” of dissolute living manifested in excessive drinking, gambling, racketeering, bribery, violence, dishonesty in business and public life, prurient entertainment and other evils daily publicized. These are communicable diseases that are more apt to corrupt impressionable youth.
A more subtle corrupting influence is the constant pressure upon youth to give themselves at the altar of materialism. Almost from infancy, children are threatened by mass manipulators of the mind and imagination who steer young people to believe that material luxury is the summum bonum of life. Advertisers are not above using children as instruments in commanding parents to buy what may be beyond their means. They have created a materialistic Eden of false values wherein the child feels he must enter to really live, and in order to gain entrance he may have to commit crime. A powerful impression is stamped upon the soul of youth that this materialistic “American way of life” is his rightful inheritance, and if his family cannot provide the luxuries to which he feels entitled, then frustration, dissatisfaction, and covetousness possess his soul. He is tempted to obtain what he wants by unlawful means, and this brings him in conflict with the law.
Sin, evil environment, and materialism must be combated by the Church—the only institution, above all others, which the Lord has established as the preserving salt of the community. One cannot expect an unregenerate and pleasure-mad adult society to be moved to change its evil ways for the sake of the oncoming generation. Rather, the Church must gird herself for a major assault on the evils prevalent in society. The first area to be assailed in public conscience which has lost feeling and sensibility is the sphere of morality. Our nation’s conscience is in need of lashing and scourging by the preaching of God’s law. Men must be made sensitive to the fact that prevalent immorality not only contributes to the degenerate state of many juveniles but also is an affront to a righteous and holy God. Only after the conscience has been thoroughly aroused and quickened will the public be ready for the message of forgiveness and healing that is found only in Christ. The pulpit must forget its moral lectures and political pronouncements and get down to its main task of smiting the conscience through the law and saving the soul through the Gospel.
The Church herself has yielded to materialism and secularism and must reform before she can hope to change the damaging climate that engulfs our young people. The Church should have bowed her head in shame at the rebuking Easter editorial in Life magazine. In raising the question why God was not real to Americans, the editorial answered, “partly because of the blight of secularism in the churches, which have become just another valued branch of American democratic culture instead of its center. What used to be the minister’s study is now his office, and as a busy agent of the social gospel he is less a spokesman of God than a useful citizen, making East Overshoe ‘a better place to live.’” The terrible tragedy of the social gospel is that in its major concern for better environment, it has forgotten the soul of man. And what shall it profit the Church before God if she gain the riches of the world for man but lets him lose his soul?
Better wages, better working and living conditions, better housing, better recreational facilities—these are the cardinal doctrines of the social gospelers. They have exchanged an “other worldly” religion for a “this worldly” one, little realizing that secularism is the belief that this world is all there is, or all there need be, and forgetting that “the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost” (Rom. 14:17). They have not heeded the Lord’s admonition that “a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth” (Luke 12:15). We cannot imagine these advocates using for a text John the Baptist’s admonition to greedy soldiers, “be content with your wages.” They emphasize the peripheral or by-product of the Gospel, and in so doing have helped to create a secular climate that blights the souls of children who place not the Kingdom first but “what shall we eat? or drink? or, where withal shall we be clothed?” Without the restraint of the Gospel this secularism has devolved on the part of some children into theft, vandalism, violence, sadism, murder, drug addiction, adultery, rape, and sodomy.
The Church, then, must rid herself of secularism and the one-sided social gospel that has produced it. Returning again to the preaching of the Gospel as defined by Christ and the Apostles, she must create a spiritual climate in which the young may move and have their being. J. Edgar Hoover lists as a major step in the prevention of juvenile delinquency a restoration of the firm moral precepts of our forefathers. These moral precepts were not snatched out of the air but were obtained from the written revelation of God and activated in regenerate lives.
The Family
The disorganized family is another major contributing factor to the increase of juvenile lawlessness. It is the incubator of emotional insecurity and stress that incline a child to delinquent behavior. The working mother, the irresponsible father, the home broken by internal strife, divorce or desertion, drunkenness, promiscuity and marital discord—all these have their part in inciting youth to rebel against the decent laws of society. Flaunted rules of conduct by parents are emulated by children. Only in sound and happy family living does one find the genuine preventive of juvenile misconduct. This truth has been stated frequently but very little has been done to correct unhealthy homes.
Scripture places the responsibility for moral training of the child upon the parent, but this responsibility must be further inculcated by the Church. Those that have oversight in the Church should see that parents fulfill their God-given duties in respect to the training of the young, even admonishing parents as did Paul in the Ephesian church. Further, the Church should instruct children to have proper respect for parental authority. Upon the Fifth Commandment is based all proper and healthy social relationships, and the teaching of it needs to be impressed on the mind and heart of the child. Where there is no respect for parental control, there will be no respect for any duly constituted authority.
Progressive Education
Next to the influence of Church and family is that of the school. The tragic breakdown in family discipline is little counteracted in school life. The late Reverend Canon Bernard Iddings Bell wrote this once to Senator Estes Kefauver: “Let it suffice for me to say that our educational system breeds moral irresponsibility—the result of intellectual responsibility. Our schools create in many of their students, perhaps most of them, a sense that the world belongs to them without necessary preliminary labor. Those brought up in such a system learn to regard themselves as entitled to everything that they can lay their hands upon without doing any real work in order to get it. You can scarcely wonder that people brought up to think in this fashion … seldom develop into responsible citizens.
One of the first symptoms of delinquency is truancy among school children. This has often gone on without punishment; and as the student feels that he can flaunt school regulations with impunity, he is the more likely to violate laws of society. The full weight of the school’s authority should be invoked upon truant youngsters that they may learn that breaking laws brings punishment. Rather than depending, as some do, on psychiatrists and social workers to remedy the moral breakdown of children, each schoolteacher should claim the job of moral strengthening as her own.
Pornographic Literature
The increase of illegitimate births, rape, and sexual deviancy among teenagers may be attributed to much of the mass communication media that exploits sex. Law enforcement agencies contend that juvenile delinquency stems in measurable part from obscenity conveyed through books, comics, magazines, newspaper stories, advertising, movies, and television shows. It is an almost insurmountable problem to control pornographic literature, for it pervades practically all mass media. Even the New York Times, which boasts that it prints all the news decent to print, allows its advertising department to arouse prurient interest with lurid statements like these: “Undertones of emotional masochism as well as a curious intertwining of paternal with sexual love”; “Easily the peep-showiest of all Bardot pictures”; “the heat and humanity are oppressive and sex is rampant and raw”; “Steaming with tropical heat, sizzling sex, violence and passion”; “The super-heated carnal scenes are sufficiently passionate to deserve an exclamation point!; astonishing frankness! As though the camera were aimed through a key hole!” (New York Times, May 15, 1959).
One measure of control is that of censorship which undoubtedly will invoke anguished cries from those who see a danger to the freedom of the press. However, the Supreme Court ruled in 1956 that obscenity is not protected under the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution. In a recent address Arthur E. Summerfield, Postmaster General of the United States, said, concerning purveyers of filth: “They are also experts at raising a hue and cry about ‘censorship,’ ‘freedom of the press,’ and ‘civil liberties.’ And all too often they are able to find willing pawns to take up their cry and carry on their slimy battle for them. This, of course, is utter nonsense. I would only ask any such misguided person these questions: Is it a violation of civil liberties to deny the sale of liquor to a ten-year-old boy? Is it censorship to prosecute those who sell narcotics to junior high schoolgirls? Are we abridging civil liberties when we do not permit children to drive a car?” We have laws prohibiting the sale of products that harm the body, and the public gives no cry of protest. Cannot the nation prohibit the sale of pornographic material that poisons the souls of our youth?
Alcohol And Switchblades
The subcommittee on juvenile delinquency of the United States Senate has found a definite connection between juvenile drinking and acts of delinquency. There was also discovered a direct relationship between the vigor with which liquor laws were enforced and the amount of drinking among juveniles. For instance, beer parties have led to sex orgies and acts of vandalism and theft. In spite of this recognized relationship, liquor interests continue to bombard our youth with their vivid propaganda. Neither the public nor our legislators seem to be sufficiently aroused to combat this corrupting influence. A bill to limit alcohol advertising over radio and television has never been able to come out of the committee stage in either the House or the Senate. Yet a law was passed with great speed against the manufacture of switchblade knives. No one would seriously argue that switchblades constitute a greater incentive to acts of violence than alcohol. One wonders at the rapidity that the manufacture of switchblades was eliminated by law and the inactivity in regard to the influence of liquor advertising.
Conflict With Labor
Society is beginning to recognize that young people who are jobless, idle, and without funds are vulnerable to delinquency. Because of stringent labor laws teenagers are being prevented from gainful employment. Young people, who are no longer in school, are unable to obtain jobs in the present labor market. One cannot doubt that there have been far-reaching benefits from child labor legislation; however, conditions have changed so radically in past decades that much of that legislation could be liberalized in the greater benefit of youth. One Washington, D. C., leader in the field of youth employment asserted that the proponents of child labor legislation, anxious to correct the abuses of the past, have sometimes taken an overprotective, even emotional attitude about changes in legislation. Nonetheless, the time is certainly at hand for legislators to review and amend labor laws that affect our youth. Work is one of the most stabilizing influences in people’s lives, and there are children, physically strong and mentally alert, who are being deprived of an outlet for their energies. An anomaly of the present situation is that the mother who is needed in the home is working to provide for teenagers whose energies are being absorbed in antisocial deeds.
Attack On All Fronts
The most pressing problem in our fight against juvenile delinquency is purifying the environment in which our youth live. The material emphasis of the social gospel has accomplished little in restraining the tide of teenage crime. What is needed are the spiritual weapons found in the dynamic Gospel of historic Christianity. Youth cannot live by the bread of materialism alone, “but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” A proper spiritual and moral climate can only be brought about by a Church that feels a keen responsibility in creating happy families in which children are brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Delinquency will never be curbed and eliminated until parental responsibility and filial obedience are firmly inculcated in the minds of our people.
The Church must also sensitize the public conscience to the evil factors that demoralize youth. An apathetic public is a major obstacle to the removing of pornographic business that corrupts the minds of children with filth and smut. An indifferent public allows the liquor industry liberty to use mass media to entice teenagers in drinking. An aroused public, on the other hand, sees to it that bills curbing interstate advertising of alcohol would come before Congress and not be allowed to die in committees. This would be a tremendous help in the battle against delinquency.
The factors that contribute to the moral downfall of youth are many and varied. Their elimination demands all the effort, skill, and leadership that the Church can provide. To save our youth is a tremendous task. It is a work to which the Church has been called by her Lord. May she be found in the vanguard of combat!
END
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Talbot Ellis
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“Lord, fill my mouth with worthwhile stuff and ‘nudge’ me when I’ve said enough.” That was a quotation the writer recently saw on a wall at the Pennsylvania Junior Republic at Grove City, Pennsylvania. With it in mind I trust that I may write from my heart those innermost convictions concerning juvenile delinquency that have come to me from my 12 years’ experience as judge of the juvenile and domestic relations court at Birmingham, Alabama.
My only qualifications for holding such a position are that I have a law degree from the University of Alabama, am happily married and the father of three children and, as the law requires, am a person of “high moral standards with some understanding of children and family problems.” It became apparent to me after I first began my work that legal training was not sufficient for me to carry out my responsibility. I therefore went to night school for over three years and studied psychology, sociology, criminology, and philosophy, and received a B.S. from Howard College in the social sciences 20 years after I had received my law degree. Thus equipped, I thought I knew all the answers—that I was now thoroughly qualified to be judge of a court such as this. I joined all of the professional organizations of social workers and took an active part in them; but as the months and years passed by, I realized more and more that neither the law nor the social sciences held ultimate answers to the problems with which I dealt.
Of course I knew all of the usual pat answers for the cause of delinquency: “broken homes,” “inadequate housing,” “low economic conditions,” “poor recreational facilities,” “racial prejudices,” “alcoholism,” “world-wide unrest,” “rapid increase in population,” so-called “mollycoddling of young criminals,” and many others. Please do not misunderstand me. I know that all of these reasons are good and valid, and there are many cases of delinquency that do arise from them. There is also no question in my mind that legal training and social work training are important to people in the professional field of juvenile delinquency and family relations. I can say without fear of contradiction that more than 70 per cent of the 5,000 cases (adult and juvenile) which this court handles each year stems directly or indirectly from alcoholism. Sometimes I lose patience when I see the effort and money being spent in trying to rehabilitate alcoholics, and then look at some of our “best magazines” extolling “men of distinction” who drink such and such a particular brand of liquor. If we knew what caused cancer we would eliminate it regardless of the cost or labor. We know the deadliness of alcoholism, and yet we in the great United States of America continue to advertise it.
Moral Sensitivity
In any age of “easy expediency,” we have lost somewhere our ability to distinguish right from wrong. Often the dividing line is so thinly drawn that the Executive Assistant to the President on down to the garbage collector compromise their convictions. In another century Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst, pastor of a Presbyterian church in Philadelphia, said, “I believe in progress but I think some progress is backwards. The family is one of the few institutions that has an unchanging ideal in the mind and the Word of God and no hand of man can improve it and God will never alter it.” Dr. Parkhurst believed and wrote that “some things are so inherently true, whether we like them or not … that they will continue to be true until destiny ends and God dies.” My own pastor said about the same thing one time: “You can no more repeal the Ten Commandments than you can repeal the law of gravity.” A hard-boiled newspaperman of the Cleveland Press once asked the question in an editorial: “What has taken away the capacity for indignation that used to rise like a mighty wave and engulf the corrupters—the corrupters of public office, the corrupters of business, of youth, of sports, of almost every mentionable phase of American life?” Certainly I believe in tolerance, but I often think that we as a people have become so composed that we have lost the capacity to tell right from wrong. Several years ago the seniors of a large high school were asked to write down the questions in their lives that caused them the most concern. From the statements made, most of them wanted to know, “how can we tell what is right and what is wrong?” This is an indictment of the moral fiber of our churches and our family life.
I know that we live in a changing world. Some call it the atomic age, some the space age. Distance may in the meantime have shrunk into insignificance, but certain fundamentals like truth, honesty, integrity, and decency, right, and wrong have never changed and never will change.
Source Of Morality
Juvenile delinquency is on the increase. It is going to continue increasing until somehow each of us as individuals finds, believes, and obeys the blueprint of a successful, happy, law-abiding life as found only in God’s Word. These are some of the truths that we discover there: “Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it”; “Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the earth”; “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right”; “Parents, provoke not your children to wrath but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord”; and then that great commandment, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.… And the second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” These are the definite and positive instructions that must take the place of any magic words or legal Mumbo Jumbo that we professionals try to use to cleanse human hearts.
To me there is no complete or final answer to the problems of the family except a change of hearts. This can only be done through careful study and deep belief in the requirements of our Creator.
We are very happy with the spiritual emphasis that is being given to children while detained in our Shelter Home. It bears fruit. Proof of this is the following excerpt from a letter written by a runaway boy to his father in Atlanta:
… I am sorry I run away and worried you so. Sunday School and church at this place sure has changed me. I got saved in church last Sunday. I am coming straight home in a few days, and I am never going to worry you again. Satan led me a bad life but I broke loose from him and took Jesus Christ as my Saviour. Daddy when you get well [sober] will you go to church with me? I am never going to get into no more trouble.… All my love, BOBBY.
I used to say that juvenile delinquency was about like Ivory soap—99 44/100 per cent pure parental delinquency. As years have gone by, I realize that parental and juvenile delinquency can best be expressed in the three-lettered word—sin. Now I do not mean to oversimplify problems, but I do believe that when you cut through all of the drunkenness, looseness, and easy expediency, our family and juvenile problems go back to man’s violation of God’s commandments. Of course it is trite to say that “The family that prays together stays together,” but this is true.
Back To The Bible
What can concerned Christians do to help reduce these problems? Surely we can uphold the fundamental truths of the Bible, live our professed Christian convictions every day of the week, and guide our own children in the admonition of the Lord. It may sound old-fashioned, but I believe if our parents would have in their homes family prayer and Bible reading, they would by precept and example instill in their offspring at an early age an abiding respect for God’s laws and man’s laws. A famous child psychologist is old-fashioned enough to write: “A child who has not been taught the meaning of the word ‘No’ by the time he is four years old has spent four years in the academic school of crime.” Ministers in our churches ought to go beyond “God is love” and teach their flock that God is also a God of law and order and that always “the wages of sin is death.” I find that some young people are crying for knowledge and are sick and tired of the “milk-toast” that is regularly parceled out to them in sermonette style through some of the literature from our religious presses.
What I am trying to say is best expressed in an old poem:
The Anvil and the Hammers
I paused in passing the blacksmith door,
and heard the anvil ring, the vesper chime,
And looking in I saw upon the floor
Old hammers, worn with beating, years of time.
“How many anvils have you had?” said I,
“To wear and batter all these hammers so?”
“Just one,” he answered, then with twinkling eye,
“The anvil wears the hammers out you know.”
And so I thought, the Anvil is the sacred Word of God.
For ages skeptics’ blows have beat upon it,
But though the rain of falling blows were heard
The anvil is unchanged,
The hammers gone!
(Author unknown).
Yes, there needs to be sounded a clarion call to parents, in this age of change and shifting standards, to realize that truth and righteousness and basic moral values do not change. Let each of us search our own hearts and know that as the home stands or falls, so will the nation and the world. Let each of us go back to God’s Word and live according to his will in our daily life. We have the noblest task that God gave to men.
END
Judge Talbot Ellis is an Elder of the South Highlands Presbyterian Church, Birmingham, Alabama, and has acted as Judge for 12 years at the Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court of Birmingham. He is a member of American Bar Assoc.
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Russell J. Fornwalt
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For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.… (Hosea 8:7)
The most appalling thing about the crime news today is that so many offenses are being committed by people who ought to be on the front line of delinquency prevention! Here are some stories that appeared in a recent edition of a New York newspaper. A city policeman was sent to Sing Sing for selling police uniforms to two former convicts who were planning a holdup. Seventeen parents, including a mother of 12 children, were arrested in relief frauds. The controller of a city hospital was ousted for failure to “carry out properly” the responsibility of his office. A commissioner of jurors in Ulster County was accused of lying to a grand jury investigating alleged kickback practices in purchases of road equipment. A 26 year-old Brooklyn school teacher was guilty on vice charges.
There was other crime news in that edition. The state’s attorney general told housewives to be on guard against fraudulent business firms. A front page story told of a juke box industry leader whose life was threatened by hoodlums using union fronts. The governor was preparing a special message to the legislature on “the method for the handling of organized crime in New York State.”
Day after day newspapers all over the country are carrying this kind of news. We have indeed a serious situation, and we cannot minimize it by saying that these cases of policeman, parents, and public officials are isolated incidents. They are the leaven that leaveneth the whole lump.
The pathetic aspect, of course, about this crime picture is not the hoodlums, racketeers, and gangsters that figure into the scene, but the wanton disregard for law by men and women in high places who have daily and intimate contact with children, and whose jobs in one way or another involve law enforcement.
Climate For Delinquency
We read of further instances. A New York City youth board counselor was recently fired for supplying a teenager with narcotics. A social worker for a private agency was dismissed for giving a boy liquor. The mayor of a small town was picked up in a subway restroom on a morals charge. By giving a “bottle” to the right person, a lawyer got a client off jury duty. A well-known hotel executive and trustee for a social agency was indicted for evasion of $80,000 in income taxes.
These are the people whose graft, greed, and gross offenses are making a favorable climate for juvenile delinquency. These are the men and women whose sin, cynicism, and insincerity are creating an atmosphere in which our children must live and breathe and have their being. These are the individuals whose chiseling, cheating, and chicanery cause today’s boys and girls to become confused, incorrigible, or criminally inclined.
Adult Example
What then is juvenile delinquency? It is but the reflection of adult modes, morals, and methods. Actually, there is no form of juvenile vice, violence, or viciousness that does not have its counterpart on the adult level.
High school boys, even girls, extort money from younger and weaker children. But does not this same practice flourish, often with the tacit blessing of public officials, among racketeers and unscrupulous union leaders?
Sex crimes among teenagers are increasing. But recently the papers told about businessmen who landed lush contracts with the lure of beautiful call girls. That Brooklyn school teacher was supposed to have been one of them. Arrests in New York for prostitution and commercialized vice rose from 2,304 in 1957 to 2,374 in 1958.
Often we find juvenile gangs organized along national and ethnic lines. The newspaper that was mentioned before also carried this headline: “Virginia Area Backs All-White Classes.” Will we not face it? Our children live and breathe in the air of injustice, intolerance, and indifference. We have not solved the racial problem at the adult level. Men and women have their hate groups; and boys and girls have theirs. Children are simply the imitators of adult behavior.
Most adults in our communities belong to some kind of organization, whether it be for prestige, privilege, or profit. The majority of these groups use pressure, propaganda, and politics to gain their ends. Some even resort to violence and strong-armed methods. “Scabs” are beaten. Labor leaders are abused. Plants and machinery are damaged. But, they say, it is all for the cause. After the same manner, boys and girls band together for what at their level of thinking and understanding constitutes “legitimate” ends too. Teenagers often join gangs under duress or for self-protection. Yet, are not these the very same reasons men and women join unions and political clubs?
I do not believe that children today need the stimulus of television, tabloids, or theatres to become delinquent. Nor do they need to be goaded or prodded into violence by Hollywood, horror comics, or headlines. So long as adults live the loose, lax and lewd lives that they do, we can hardly expect boys and girls to be different. And so long as men and women chisel on tax returns and show racial discrimination, the children will cheat in school examinations and reinforce their juvenile gangs. What a lot of us are trying to do, I am afraid, is have two standards—one for adults and one for children. But boys and girls are not going to let us get away with it. According to the latest juvenile delinquency statistics, our children are more than determined that we shall reap the whirlwind.
New York Crime
Let us look at New York City’s police department report for 1958 and observe this whirlwind that is beginning to reach hurricane proportions. There were 11,570 arrests during that year for juvenile delinquency as compared to 9,886 during 1957, making an increase of 17 per cent.
Most alarming is the fact that juvenile arrests rose higher in the categories of murder, felonious assault, rape, burglary, grand larceny of autos, and dangerous weapons. In the 16 to 20 year-old age group there was a total of 18,760 arrests compared to 15,317 arrests in 1957—an increase of 22.5 per cent.
Major crime as reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation increased 6.7 per cent in New York City. In 1958 there were 116,235 crimes as compared to 108,919 for the previous year. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover said recently that crime jumped an “appalling” eight per cent in United States cities last year. Most significant is the fact that small towns and rural areas showed sharper rises in juvenile crime than metropolitan sections.
So much for the wind and the whirlwind. Where do we go from here? What is our way out? Everyone seems to have an answer. But what is the answer?
Inadequate Remedies
Early one morning a man phoned me and excitedly told me about his plan to end all delinquency. “Put every kind on a horse” was the way he put it. His idea was to develop a chain of ranches for “bad boys” all over the country in carefully chosen locations.
Another fellow urged me to promote a campaign whereby boys and girls would go from door to door selling soap. This was a variation on the “idle hands breed mischief” theme. An athletic director of a large eastern university proposed solving the problem by turning every vacant lot into a baseball field.
Certainly our children need recreation. But let us face the important fact that recreation is not solving the delinquency problem. We have today more community centers, boys’ clubs, neighborhood houses, settlements, and canteens than we ever had. And yet last year delinquency rose 17 per cent in New York City, and this has been a steady rise in the last 10 years.
More and more social agencies in New York City are giving up or curtailing summer camp programs. Strange as it may seem they are having difficulty giving away “free” camping. Authorities in delinquency are finding that maladjusted or delinquent children often shy away from supervised recreation.
Another cry in answer to the problem is “Get rid of the slums, and you’ll get rid of delinquency.” In New York City alone billions of dollars have been spent on housing projects and slum clearance programs. Yet juvenile arrests continue to rise. And because there has been so much delinquency with these areas, the housing authority has had to employ extra police.
We hear answers on every side. Pay higher salaries to teachers and social workers! Build more elaborate school buildings! Expand the system of vocational education! Put psychologists and psychiatrists in every school! Erect more comfortable prisons! Build more playgrounds! Have special courts for children! Change the labor laws so that 14 and 15 year-olds can go to work! Punish the parents! These are the solutions of the “experts” who would lick our nation’s delinquency problem. We have even called in public relations specialists for gags, gadgets, and gimmicks; and they have dreamed up all sorts of stunts, slogans, and special weeks to get people “prevention conscious.” These are the things we have done, and still are doing.
A lot of money has been spent. We have done everything possible in a material way to prevent and combat delinquency, and the problem is still with us—and to a greater degree. This is not to say that we should retain slums or become indifferent to the building of new schools and playgrounds. It is to say, however, that material considerations are not enough. We cannot buy our way out.
We have tried all kinds of approaches: aggressive casework, psychiatric treatment, institutionalization, police saturation in high delinquency areas, total mobilization of community resources and crash programs. We have held thousands of conferences, conventions, committee meetings, and even cocktail parties. Investigations and surveys are going on around the clock. All this effort has been exerted, and we have not made a dent in deterring delinquency.
In the cliché clique we have heard them say “There’s no such thing as a bad boy,” or all they need is “love and affection.” Others say it is all on account of the “cold war,” or the “sick society” in which we live.
The Preventative
There is an answer to the child crime problem, and it is not in more cash, conferences, or clichés. It lies in a complete commitment to Christ on the part of men and women everywhere.
A juvenile delinquency prevention program does not begin in Madison Avenue’s advertising agencies. It does not begin in courts, camps, or clubs. It does not start with a PTA committee or a congressional investigation-fine and useful as these may be.
Delinquency prevention begins in the hearts and minds of fathers and mothers before their children are born. It begins the day parents dedicate their lives to Christ.
Dedication to Christ involves more than church attendance, memorizing Scripture, tithing, or strict adherence to ritual. It is more than sectarian loyalty or denominational zeal. These things are fine, and they should be encouraged. But they are not enough.
Dedication to Christ goes much deeper. It involves day to day living according to his precepts. This includes a dedication to one’s job and devotion to one’s family, a recognition of the humanity in every man regardless of race, and doing it constantly “unto the least of these.”
The best delinquency preventive is the exemplary life of parents. It means the integrity of the policeman, the public official, the businessman, the labor leader, and the school teacher. A complete commitment to Christ is not easy. But it is the only answer.
Senator Jacob K. Javits of New York pointed out recently that since 1952 the nation’s juvenile population has increased about 22 per cent while juvenile arrests have shot up 55 per cent. “At this rate, a million youngsters may be arrested by the year 1961, if not sooner,” he said.
A million delinquents a year is certainly not a pleasant prospect. What is more we have no assurance that a million is the maximum. By 1970 we might have five million boys and girls in trouble. Here is the greatest challenge ever faced by the Christian Church. The need for complete commitment to Christ has never been so manifest. The need for Christian living in our daily lives has never been so evident.
Dark and desperate as it may seem the situation is not in any sense hopeless. There is hope, and that hope is in Christ.
END
Russell J. Fornwalt has been Vocational Director, Big Brothers, New York City, since 1943. He holds the B.S. degree from Lafayette College and M.Ed. from Pennsylvania State College. He has published many pamphlets on juvenile delinquency and was Editor of the Juvenile Delinquency Digest.
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Cover Story
Emma Fall Schofield
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About two years ago a 14 year-old boy—Bill we will call him—was brought before me for drunkenness. I was sitting in the juvenile session of our district court. For several years Bill had been what social workers call a latch-key child. Both of his parents worked: his father was a taxicab driver and his mother worked as a waitress in a tavern. Bill had the key to the house and could come and go as he wished. Beer was available to him in the refrigerator, and so he drank when he desired and treated his friends, the neighborhood children, with it. Bill was not the only child who became intoxicated.
Both parents came to the court with Bill. Neither seemed unduly disturbed that he had been brought into session for drunkenness, and they could not see why they should discontinue to drink themselves or keep beer in their homes.
Parental Neglect
The results of a survey on drinking among teenagers, some years ago in Nassau County, New York, showed that 90 per cent of them drank to some extent, although most of them said they drank only “moderately.” The ages that these young people began drinking were under 16. It was found that most of the parents drank also. The child of abstaining mothers and fathers tended to abstain, and the child of parents who drank moderately or excessively was inclined to follow suit. Such findings would seem to contradict the notion that children of parents who are teetotalers and who forbid drinking are most likely to drink to excess.
When we realize that today’s alcoholic was most likely yesterday’s social drinker, and that alcohol is to many people a habit-forming beverage, how can intelligent and wise parents set an example that encourages sons and daughters to drink?
J. Edgar Hoover states that at FBI headquarters crime statistics from all over the United States are collected and analyzed. They show that in small towns as well as in big cities there is a disturbing increase in juvenile delinquency and that curative measures must be devised and applied immediately. In Hoover’s opinion, parents in almost every case are to blame for the development of young criminals. Investigations show that neglect, unhappiness, insecurity, parental conflict, drunkenness or other bad influences in the home are usually the cause of children getting into trouble.
One morning two boys, one 18 and the other 19, stood up in the dock of the criminal session of our court and pleaded guilty when their names were called. They had been arrested on the Newburyport turnpike the night before for driving perilously and under the influence of liquor. Their heads were bandaged and their faces swollen. But the occupants of the car into which they had crashed were lying in the hospital in a serious condition. After having stopped to drink at a wayside tavern they had got into their car and had driven off. With super confidence and a great desire to speed, coupled with lessened ability for quick reaction, they collided with another car at an intersection. The outcome was tragedy.
Examining the probation officer’s cards at the bench, I discovered that both of these boys had piled up long juvenile records before they were 17. Their case histories showed that there was drinking in the home, and that there was no proper supervision of the boys as to companions, the movies they saw, the comics and literature they read, the hour they came home at night, or questions asked as to where they had spent their time. No wonder we must ask ourselves, “Is it a matter of delinquent children or delinquent parents?”
Prohibition A.D.
In a survey made by the American Businessmen’s Research Foundation of Chicago, which is neither “wet” or “dry” but concerned with discovering and publishing the truth, figures showed that 1. “Crimes induced by or directly related to drinking alcoholic beverages have increased 28.6 per cent in the 25 years since the repeal of the Prohibition Amendment. Arrests for drunkenness have increased from 1,490 to 1,939 per 100,000 population; arrests for drunken driving have soared 207 per cent. Crime not basically stemming from the use of alcohol rose only 9.6 per cent. 2. Insanity attributable to alcohol increased in this period three times more than that of other mental disease cases. 3. The number of dependent children cases have doubled, rising from 15 per 100,000 to 30. 4. Alcoholism has increased. The number of those who cannot drink unless they drink to drunkenness has increased 68 per cent since repeal.… In 1934 there were 2,808 alcoholics per 100,000 adult Americans: in 1956 there were 4,718.”
During the 27 years I have been judge in the criminal and juvenile sessions of our district court, I have had hundreds of cases brought before me where the husbands have deserted their wives and children. I would say that in a great majority of these cases liquor has been the chief cause of difficulty.
Broken Homes
The National Desertion Bureau gave testimony to the Senate subcommittee to the effect that there are over 4 million estranged mothers and children who are not being adequately supported by the absent fathers. Aid to Dependent Children, commonly called ADC, was being given to 936,000 mothers and children at an approximate cost of 252,000,000 dollars annually in federal, state, and local funds.
The cost to our state and nation, however, cannot be reckoned in money alone. Fatherless homes are not normal homes, and frequently they produce children who add to the juvenile delinquency rate of our communities. Although the exact percentage cannot be accurately determined, sociologists have said that 85 per cent of our delinquents come from broken homes.
One has only to visit the sessions of the divorce court in his county to learn how frequently liquor is given as the cause of abusive treatment, the ground on which the libelant is seeking to secure a divorce from her husband. Almost countless divorce actions are brought on the ground of “gross and habitual use of intoxicating liquor.”
The increase in mental conflict and divorce during the last 20 or 30 years was emphasized by Richard Glendennen, executive director of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. He said that the situation arising as the result of broken homes is one of the major causes of the delinquency of our youth. Boys who were deprived of their fathers during the war years often became delinquent. The Gluecks have found that a large percentage of boys falling into serious trouble have had no real father in their lives. Today the Big Brother Movement is doing fine work in trying to be of help in such cases. The same may be said of the Big Sister Movement. We are appalled at the figures that show the increase in liquor drinking among women. Children need the loving care and protection of both a mother and a father.
I remember the imploring and terrified face of a 10 year-old girl who had been brought into the juvenile session with her five younger brothers and sisters as neglected children. The father was in jail for drunkenness, the mother was spending time with her drinking cronies in taverns, and the little 10 year-old “mother” had been trying to hold the family together. Because conditions became so serious, neighbors finally reported the case to the police. The children were taken away from the mother temporarily which gave her a sufficient jolt that she began to mend her ways.
Liquor Propaganda
A fairly recent survey showed that traffic in alcoholic liquors was spending at the rate of 250 million dollars a year in the most deceptive and glamorous advertising of liquor, wine, and beer ever conceived by the mind of men. More and more this advertising is aimed at the home. When I look at the fascinating appearance of the young people in magazine ads as they are portrayed sipping their wine, beer, or cocktails, I remember the drunk in the dock who had to be hurried downstairs because he had the DT’s and continued making hideous outcries. I recall, too, the blowsy-looking young woman who, sitting beside the woman probation officer in front of the bench, had been picked up by the police from the floor of her apartment the night before, drunk. I would judge that once she might have looked glamorous, even a “lady of distinction” as Calvert distiller company would say.
Why right-thinking parents do not boycott the product of TV, radio, and magazine advertisers who put money above human welfare, I certainly do not know. Do these advertisers forget that we take with us when we die only what we have given to God and in service to our fellow man?
We all know that there are some people who are capable of drinking in moderation. With others alcohol is a habit-forming drug, and for reasons either physical or psychological they are in danger of the lost weekend. I heartily agree with Professor Roland H. Bainton of Yale Divinity School who says that for the sake of such people, those who can drink without excess should abstain and create a social environment where abstinence is not an act of courage but accepted behavior.
Temperance?
My experience as a probation officer for women and girls in western Massachusetts and later as associate justice of a district court in criminal and juvenile sessions has instilled in me a firm conviction that alcohol is very dangerous stuff to tamper with. Because it is habit-forming in a tremendous number of cases, why should sensible persons talk about being temperate? No one knows whether he or she is a potential alcoholic.
As a general rule, the desire or urge to drink liquor builds up in one over a period of time. With some people, however, a craving for alcohol starts immediately. For example, a woman member of AA who has helped me in my work had never taken a drink of alcohol until she was 45. At that time she went on a week’s trip to Bermuda with a party of friends. Refusing all drinks at first, she finally consented at their insistence. The first drink, she told me, set up an insatiable thirst for more, and in a short time she became an alcoholic. Rescued through AA, she has been of inestimable help to many unfortunates since her own reclamation.
Ann Landers, noted columnist for a nation-wide newspaper syndicate, has helped thousands of people through her “Advice” column. Recently she made this statement: “Most women who say they must take a drink to be sociable are only kidding themselves. You will have to go a long way to find one who is more sociable than I am. Yet I have never needed liquor as a crutch. When I attend cocktail parties, as I often do, I merely say, ‘ginger ale, please!’ And I am not the least bit uncomfortable. A woman, young or old, who is able to say ‘no’ so that it sounds like ‘no’ and not ‘maybe’ should have no problems.”
Prohibition may have been a failure, but not such a dismal one as was its repeal. Wayne D. Williams pointed out in his article on alcoholism in the Christian Century (Nov. 5, 1958) that “there is a job of moral instruction to be done if the Nation’s drinking habits are to be changed. There can be no surrender to alcoholism. The worsening problem of liquor can be solved if law, school, and church join in a positive approach to it.”
Dr. Gerald O. McCulloh of the General Board of Education of the Methodist Church clarifies the entire matter for the Christian: “Any indulgence of self which obstructs the Christian life is destructive of the human spirit.”
It is our duty as parents to build a Christian home and to put religion into the lives of our children. In these days of stress and strain it is glaringly obvious that all of us, young and old, need God in our lives. We need the Rock to cling to. Children brought up in today’s world without the solace and strength which religion gives them are cheated of their birthright. Members of Alcoholics Anonymous have learned that in moments of temptation they must turn to a Higher Power for help and that they must then thank that Power in recognition of the sustaining strength they have received.
END
Judge Emma Fall Schofield, 27 years an Associate Justice of the First District Court of Eastern Middlesex County, Massachusetts, was the first woman in New England to sit on the bench and the first to serve as Assistant Attorney General. She holds the degrees of A.B., LL.B. cum laude, and LL.M. from Boston University. She received the Ed.D. from Calvin Coolidge College and the J.D. from Portia Law School.
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Cover Story
Pitirim A. Sorokin
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Some fifty million pieces of obscene advertising annually mailed mainly to our teenagers, and a five hundred million dollar a year pornographic business in this country certainly contribute a tangible share to the growth of juvenile delinquency, to the too early and too erratic sexual life of the “wild” portion of our youth, and to the cult of cynicism, vandalism, and sterile rebellion of our Beatniks.
If the total production of the lewd poison were limited to this prurient stuff, and if it were the main factor of these defects of our young generation, it would be easy to eliminate this obscene poison from our nation, as well as its disastrous effects from the life of our youth. A rigorous prosecution of all manufacturers and peddlers of this smut, assisted by the aroused public opinion and by an active cooperation of the family, religious, civic, and educational agencies, would have been sufficient to cut out this cancerous growth from our culture and social life.
Unfortunately, the real situation is very different from this hypothetical picture. This situation is such that a complete elimination of the prurient stuff can, at best, only slightly decrease the mentioned defects of our youth, but it cannot either radically cure these diseases or stop an increase of the rates of juvenile delinquency, of erratic-premarital and extra-marital-sexual experiences, and of other mental, social and moral disorders in the behavior of teenagers and adults.
An Infectious Culture
The main reason for this diagnosis is that the viruses of obsessive sexuality, violence, and crime are by no means confined within the explicitly pornographic garbage. They infest and infect not only the young but the adult generation of our population. In a disguised form they are virulent in all compartments of our culture, system of values, and social life. They are in the supposedly decent literature and fine arts, in our free press, movies, radio, and television, in our alluring advertising, prosperous economy, and power policies, and even in our modern science, “rational” philosophy, and “Freudianized” religion. Hidden in the “normal”—cultural and social—milieu in which we live, these viruses reach practically everyone of us, are incessantly and unsuspectedly absorbed by us, and continuously affect us. And they do these things much more effectively than the openly prurient stuff consumed only sporadically and by a limited part of our population. For this reason these hidden viruses are more dangerous for our well-being than the visible viruses of the undisguised pornography. For the same reason, a relentless prosecution of the smut dealers and consumers, even a merciless destruction of the total obscene garbage, is not enough to eliminate the pathological processes discussed. This result can be achieved only if this operation is supplemented by a thorough disinfection of our cultural, social, and personal life from the bulk of the hidden viruses of demoralization, stultification, and falsification of the real and perennial values in favor of the evanescent sham values.
The virulence of the hidden viruses is greatly helped, first of all by the exceedingly tenuous boundary line between the obscene and the decent realities, or the demoralizing and the morally ennobling values in our culture and life. The boundary line is so uncertain that even our courts have often passed contradictory decisions in regard to the obscenity or unobscenity of the same literary or artistic work (for instance, in regard to several magazines like “Sunshine and Health” and “Sun Magazine,” or in regard to works like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Garden of Eden, Lolita, and others). Similar contradictory verdicts have been passed by the special judicial, governmental, and parliamentary committees of other countries. This uncertainty of what is obscene and what is not permits the hidden viruses to circulate freely in our national and personal life in the role of healthy cultural vitamins. Believed to be such, they are avidly swallowed by millions of unsuspecting people anxious to improve their vital, mental, and moral forces. As a result, instead of improvement, the absorbed viruses progressively poison the integrity of millions of young and adult consumers.
Virus In Literary Veneer
The attraction and effectiveness of these viruses are greatly enhanced by the fact that they are often served with all the refined trimmings of polished literary style, artistic skill, or excellent technical rendering. Whether served on a plate of skillful literary or artistic work, or in the form of a sensational scientific, philosophical, or ethical theory, or within the covers of the widely-read magazines and papers, these viruses easily pass for the real (cultural and social) values, for “fabulous,” “magic,” and “most modern” creative achievements. Absorbed as such by millions, they indefatigably “bore within” and successfully undermine the vital, moral, and mental well-being of their addicts.
In the prevalent atmosphere of our sensate culture and mores, many of such skillful and supposedly decent write-ups, pictures, music, plays often are more effective in arousing the illicit sex-impulses or in inciting a violation of legal and moral rules of conduct than the explicitly prurient smut. Nobody has proved as yet that the extensively circulating best sellers like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Garden of Eden, Lolita, Anatomy of Murder or Peyton Place are less erogenous and demoralizing than the smut published in Cabaret, Modern Man, Gent, Scamp, Adam, Gala, Follies, Paris Life, Dare, Monsieur, Frolic, After Hours, and similar publications found objectionable for sale, distribution, and display for youth by special government commissions and civic organizations of many states. Lolita or Lady Chatterley’s Lover are certainly more artistic than Peyton Place or Forever Amber; and the eroticism of Esquire is more polished than the vulgar obscenity of the pornographic garbage. However, the finer artistic merits of Lolita or Esquire do not necessarily make them less sex alluring and demoralizing than the ugly smut. If anything, the skillful rendering of the illicit sex adventures in the high grade literary and artistic works makes their eroticism more infectious than the raw sexuality of vulgar pornography.
Cathartic Or Erogenic?
This does not mean that sexual topics, even illicit love, should be excluded from the fine arts, or science, or other fields of creative activity. Since Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey to Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina, and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, this sort of topic has provided main themes for great literary and artistic works. And yet, these great classics have been able to treat them without arousing illicit sexual passions. If anything, their superbly masterful treatment of these problems regularly produces moral and mental catharsis in their readers, in the audiences of the great tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and the like, in the listeners of great music expressing love in its multifarious forms and, in the onlookers of great paintings and sculptures dealing with the same topic. Exactly the difference between the cathartic and the erogenous effects upon the readers, listeners, viewers, and generally the absorbers marks the profound contrast between the immortal masterpieces dealing with heterosexual love in all creative fields and the just skillful erogenous best sellers infected by the destructive viruses and, in their turn, infecting their numerous consumers with bodily, moral, and mental diseases.
What has been said about the “decent”, polished, high-grade erogenous literature can be said of the bulk of today’s “decent cultural food” with which the public is fed by our press, radio, television, theater, movies, music, advertising, and other channels of communication and “education.” With few exceptions, the bulk of the mental, moral, and aesthetic food they supply represents a sort of “intellectual chewing gum” heavily infested with erogenous and criminalizing germs. Sex, murder, violence, and mental disease are their main topics. And despite an excellent technical rendering of these themes by the best-selling magazines, papers, music, records, plays, movies, and radio-television programs, their fine-looking, mental and moral “food” is often about as poisonous as the ugly concoctions of the openly pornographic stuff.
Their sex-appealing advertisements of bras, cosmetics, cigarettes, and what not; their seductive and curvacious females in extra-Bikini suits or no suits at all decorating the covers of most of our national magazines; the lascivious scenes of sex-exuding females and males incessantly presented by our movies, magazines, television, and papers; the juicy descriptions of sex scandals and “romances” of various stars in almost every copy of our newspapers; sensational plays alluringly displaying “the third sex” and other sex abnormalities; sex-exuding crooners, rock-rollers, and dancers ceaselessly glamorized by all these means of communication and “education;” moronishly monotonous sexy records of yelling, bleating, mewing, and noisemaking voiceless “singers” sold by the millions; superabundant numbers of articles on how to date, kiss, copulate, or to have orgasm published in our national magazines for men, women, youth, and for everyone; popular and immense production of allegedly “scientific” publications on sexual behavior of the American or the African male and female, of the savages and the civilized, of the homosexuals and the heterosexuals, of the partisans of the genital, the anal, the cutaneous, and other forms of sexuality; sensational success of the Freudian fantasmagorias about the Oedipus, the Narcissus, the Tetanous complexes, about “the envy of penis” in females and “the fear of castration” in males—these and millions of similar “productions” are the main mental, moral, cultural, and educational food served to all of us by our powerful and supposedly “decent” means of communication, recreation, information, and education. They are as effective in stimulation of the lusty sex adventures as the openly obscene smut. For any sexually obsessed person, there is no need to look for the “censored and prohibited” pornography. The hidden viruses of these “decent,” “respectable,” “free,” “cultural,” and “educational” instrumentalities can successfully serve the prurient interests of such persons; and they do serve indeed such quests for millions of their consumers in a much more polished way than the ugly and vulgar pornographic concoctions.
Further Demoralization
The hidden viruses of these instrumentalities are tangibly responsible not only for sex obsession and sex delinquency of our population but also for the other non-sexual forms of delinquency, demoralization, and stultification. Murder, sadistic assault and battery, and other forms of crime are the second main topic of our popular literature, press, radio, television, movies, and other means of entertainment and “education.” Beginning with the westerns and detective stories where people are killed, beaten, and mutilated by the dozens, and ending with the more sophisticated stories and pictures of human bestiality, these “productions” successfully educate the public into tolerating and accepting this sort of behavior as perfectly normal, as something that may happen with anyone and that should be taken without worry, regret, and remorse. By glamorizing the best killers and creating the heroic sagas of their murderous exploits, these productions liberally contribute to the depreciation of human life and dignity, and effectively induce and habituate especially children to this sort of conduct.
Besides these instrumentalities, the young generation is coercively conditioned and officially trained in the difficult art of mass murdering of innocent people, including children, women, and the old folks, and in a merciless destruction of anything and anybody that happens to be an obstacle to the realization of goals of private persons, groups, or the military and public policies of existing governments. Two world wars and innumerable small wars of this century, in which all parties carried on indiscriminate mass-killing of combatants and the noncombatants; expansion of drafted armed forces where youth is intensely trained, brainwashed, and conscience-washed for the business of effective murdering and remorseless destroying of whole cities and villages of “the enemy”; the pitiless wars of the gangs, of business concerns, and labor unions with their opponents; all forms of violence used by antagonistic groups (racial, political, and economic) in their incessant struggle with each other; feverish preparation for a next world war in which existing rulers unblushingly boast to wipe out millions of lives and turn the planet into “an abomination of desolation”—these and thousands of similar lessons of merciless killing, mutilating, and mistreating man by man, and of the wantonest destruction of anything, including the greatest values of mankind, for the realization of perfectly temporary, parochial, often worthless, purposes relentlessly and systematically aim to demoralize the young generation, and to eradicate from its moral conscience the eternal verities of right and wrong. They indefatigably teach the young generation the cynical rules that “might is right,” and that “everything is permitted, if you can get away with it.”
Being born, reared, and trained in this murderous atmosphere of our age, a considerable part of the young generation is unavoidably affected by it. It would be a miracle if in these conditions juvenile (and adult) delinquency were not increasing, and if all the teenagers were to remain sound and innocent, free from cynicism, wanton violence, senseless destructiveness, mental disorders, and other defects. The really surprising fact is a comparatively modest rate of increase of the discussed diseases.
If we really want to stop their further increase, we must fight not only their visible germs but also their invisible viruses. Otherwise, we cannot eliminate even the open pornography and its consequences: they will be incessantly generated by the hidden sources of infection.
A disinfection of our life and culture from the invisible viruses means not so much a prosecution and punishment so much as a basic revaluation of our main values and a strenuous realization of the disinfected values in our life and activities. In concrete terms this difficult process means a basic reconstruction of our culture, social institutions, and personal life.
Since the older generation is infected with these diseases as heavily as the young generation, adults must first cure themselves from their infections and stop giving bad examples to youth. Parents must do this in regard to their children. Leaders in various walks of life must perform this operation upon themselves and in regard to the led. All cultivators of the hidden viruses must cease this cultivation, and must thoroughly disinfect their “decent” productions from these viruses. If and when this basic operation is performed, the visible germs of obscenity will die by themselves. Otherwise, despite the severest crusade against these germs, they will be generated again and again by the hidden agencies of demoralization virulent now in all compartments of our “decent” culture and social life.
END
Pitirim A. Sorokin, Professor of Sociology at Harvard University since 1930, was born in Touria, Russia. He holds Soc.D. and Ph.D. degrees, and was formerly member of the faculties of the University of St. Petersburg (1910–22) and University of Minnesota (1924–30). President of the International Congress of Sociology (1937), his many books in this field include Social and Cultural Dynamics (4 volumes) and Forms and Techniques of Altruistic Spiritual Growth.
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Philip Edgcumbe Hughes
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The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland is in session in Edinburgh and the news has just come through that bishops-in-presbytery have been (to quote The Times) “utterly rejected as a proper price to pay for unity with the Anglican communion.” This adverse decision regarding the proposal contained in the Joint Report on Relations between Anglican and Presbyterian Churches (discussed on previous occasions in this column) that Presbyterianism should take episcopacy into its system was not unexpected. During the past week the discussion on this subject has been proceeding in the pages of The Times. It was sparked by a leading article, published on the day of the opening of the General Assembly, which observed that “the longer the Church of Scotland has looked at the proposal that it should take in bishops, the firmer has been its stand against it,” and we were reminded that “close on two-thirds of sixty-two Scottish presbyteries have spoken outright against the suggested change for Scotland, and the opposition of many of the rest can be inferred from their dour comments and questions.” The deep reason, “as revealed in the presbyteries’ reports,” continued the editorial, “is that the Scottish Church as a whole devoutly and sincerely believes that closer relations between two communions of the same faith should not be made dependent on changes in polity and structure. Why, it is asked, should closer unity require closer uniformity? The center of the present deadlock is to be found at precisely that point.” Scottish churchmen “had hoped that full intercommunion might be granted once the Churches pledged themselves to work towards unity.” They have been unable to escape the conclusion that “the Anglican insistence on the principle of episcopacy” has the effect of calling in question the validity of their own Presbyterian orders.
The following day there appeared a letter from the Archbishop of Canterbury who, after describing the editorial phrase “Anglican insistence on the principle of episcopacy” as “strange words,” drew attention to the declaration of the Ordinal of the Church of England “that from Apostolic times there have been the three Orders of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons in Christ’s Church and that these Orders are to be continued, reverently used and esteemed in the Church of England.” Referring to the opinion concerning episcopacy not only of the Anglican communion and of the Roman, Orthodox, and other ancient churches, but also of the Church of South India and of the planners of reunion in Ceylon and North India, and of the Faith and Order Conference of 1927, the Archbishop asserts that “the problem here is for the Church of Scotland to show on what grounds this deeply established principle of Church Order is no longer to be regarded as requisite for progress in Church unity.” He repudiates the suggestion that there is any intention to pass adverse judgment on the spiritual status of the Church of Scotland and unequivocally affirms that “though between our two Churches there are diversities of gifts, ministrations, and workings … yet we are both within the same body of Christ, under the same Spirit, the same Lord, the same God”—an affirmation, surely, which all would applaud.
The Archbishop of Canterbury’s statement in turn called forth letters from Dr. Nathanael Micklem, doyen of Congregationalist scholars, and Dr. G. W. H. Lampe who, besides being professor of theology in the University of Birmingham, is a clergyman of the Church of England. “I should be prepared to argue on historical grounds,” says Dr. Micklem, “that the structure of the Church of Scotland, of which I am not a member, is much closer to the organization of the Church in the early centuries than is the Anglican; but the historical argument is not decisive. If, as he says, the Archbishop does not question the spiritual status of the Church of Scotland, why will not or cannot he receive communion in a Scottish church?”
Professor Lampe maintains that the Archbishop’s assertion that both Church of England and Church of Scotland are within the same Body of Christ, under the same Spirit, the same Lord, “must surely imply that we share the same Sacraments,” and, further, that “if … we acknowledge that the same Lord is truly present at his Table in both Churches, we ought to give practical effect to that recognition by some official encouragement, on the Anglican side, of the intercommunion which is already widely practised by individual communicants.” It is his conviction that “such a practical demonstration of our existing unity in Christ would show that Anglicans mean what they say when they assert that they are not ‘passing adverse judgment on the spiritual status of the Church of Scotland’.”
There are many members of the Church of England, including the author of this article, who are cordially in sympathy with the viewpoint of Professor Lampe (which, after all, is entirely in harmony with the faith and practice of historic Reformed Anglicanism), and also, it may be added, with his repudiation of “the ‘pipe-line’ theory of the transmission of sacramental grace.” The Preface to the Ordinal of the Church of England does no more than define and justify the threefold Orders of Anglicanism: it does not in any way seek to legislate for other Churches whose Orders do not correspond with those it has approved. The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of the Church of England, indeed, significantly make no mention of episcopacy as an essential ministry of the Church of Christ. For example, Article XIX (Of the Church), which we would otherwise have expected to make some pronouncement on this subject, says nothing at all about Orders, but simply affirms that “the visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.” Episcopacy, though integral to the structure of the Church of England, was never demanded as a necessity either for the preaching of the pure Word of God or for the due ministration of the Sacraments for the Church of Christ in general, and it was only last century that, with the rise of the Tractarian Movement, the sacramentalist doctrine of episcopacy as the “essential” ministry came into the Church of England. Prior to that, the full validity of the Presbyterian Orders of the Reformed Churches in Scotland and on the Continent had been recognized and approved. A return by the present leaders and spokesmen of the Church of England to this historic position would do more than anything else to prepare the way for the realization and practical expression, especially at the Lord’s Table, of Christian unity with other Protestant churches.
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Talbot G. Mohan
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Shortage Of Man Power
Vocation and Ministry, by F. R. Barry (Nisbet, London, 1958, 184 pp., 12s6d), is reviewed by Talbot G. Mohan, Secretary of Church Pastoral Aid Society, London.
The established Church in England is facing a grave crisis through the steady decline in the numbers of its ministry. The author describes the ministry as “just dying on its feet” and gives some impressive statistics to prove his statement.
During the last half century the number of clergymen on the active list has dropped from 19,000 to 15,500, while the population has increased by several millions. In 1886 there were 814 ordinations; in 1956 the number was 496, and that was the highest for 15 years. Of this number 25 per cent were over 40 years of age. The average age of the clergy today is not less than 52. To maintain our present inadequate ministry requires 600 ordinations every year. In 1957 there were 478. This phenomenon is, of course, not confined to the Church of England. The free churches, the missionary societies, and the interdenominational missions are all facing the same problem.
The author is an English diocesan bishop with unique qualifications for writing on this subject; for throughout a long and distinguished ministry he has been closely concerned with the training of candidates. He reveals a transparent sincerity and earnestness. He is no sacerdotalist with a tractarian theory of apostolic succession. He longs to ‘declericalize’ the church. The laity must have their scriptural place—indeed the laity are the church and he praises the English Reformers for restoring this conception.
This book is full of wisdom, and, like everything that Bishop Barry writes, arresting, challenging, and of absorbing interest. It would seem unkind to criticize this valuable contribution to the consideration of a problem of such universal importance. But one wonders if the fundamental cause is understood, and if he concentrates on symptoms rather than on the root cause. The writer acknowledges that the majority of the population are being conditioned in an atmosphere which is less than pagan. But has the author taken into account the fact that the church itself has not escaped infection, and that its spiritual quality has been seriously debased by the substitution of conventional Christianity for an individual committal to the claim of Jesus Christ? Spiritual destitution could be the real cause of the lack of man power.
“The church in the Victorian age,” says Bishop Barry, “was rich in man power beyond dreams of avarice.” This was true because the nation could then be described as one of the most religious the world has ever seen. We were a people of one Book—the Bible which was accepted as the Word of God and was expounded in the churches Sunday by Sunday. Within living memory it could be said that in many factories and workshops the main topic of conversation on Monday was the Sunday sermon. Here surely is the answer to the problem of vocations for ministry; not how we can persuade men to offer themselves, but how we may create the conditions in which they will offer themselves without much persuading. We are told that it takes 20 parishes to produce one ordinand. But there are many parishes where an evangelical ministry (which would be frowned upon as ‘fundamentalist’) is producing a steady stream of ordinands. A diocesan Bishop said recently, “Just when we need more and more women workers, the number offering is getting less and less,” but the Evangelical College of St. Michael’s at Oxford is increasing its numbers year by year. It has already added to its accommodation and is seeking further expansion.
The author’s brilliant intellect makes it hard for him to accept the doctrine of assurance. He described it to the present reviewer as “wanting something to take home in a bag.” His conception of ‘salvation’ is that of man in the mass. “Anaemic idealism has no place in the theology of the incarnation. Drains and public health matter greatly in man’s pilgrimage to the Ideal City.” The redemption of the social order is surely an ideal which can only be reached through the redemption of individuals. Drains are important, but if the church is busying herself with drains and neglecting the eternal welfare of the souls for whom Christ died, it is failing miserably. The first task of the church is to persuade men to be reconciled to God.
The idea that contemporary society is different from any which has gone before can blind us to the fact that the human heart is the same in every age. Only the background is changed, but we must not be too obsessed with the background. Men and women in every age look for something authoritative and assured. A religion which is not sure of itself makes no appeal. When the author writes of the “myth of Christ’s ascension” it is abundantly clear that he is not denying its reality but describing the fact that it is beyond our conception. But the ‘man in the street’ associates ‘myth’ with something unreal and untrue, a fairy tale. Is it not just here that we must begin to examine the problem of the shortage of man power? Our English Reformers recovered the authority of Holy Scripture in the Church of England: we are steadily drifting back towards the pre-Reformation position. A church without an authoritative word will confirm the ‘outsider’ in his view that religion is all right for those who like that sort of thing. It will leave the churchgoer without any compelling motive to offer himself for a ministry which provides him with a brief cheery word about nothing in particular each Sunday.
The Bishop has some trenchant things to say about the use (or misuse) of the Church’s manpower and in a valuable chapter sets forth his plea for a ‘supplementary ministry,’ for example, the full ordination of men who would continue in their present occupation and be available to give help to the churches where it is most needed.
TALBOT G. MOHAN
Diagnosing The Church
The New Church in the New Age, by C. O. Rhodes (Herbert Jenkins, London, 1958, 256 pp., 21/-), is reviewed by S. W. Murray of Belfast, Ireland.
This survey of the Church in action is a diagnosis of the present predicament of religion as it affects the Church of England primarily. Written by one who combines the editorship of the Church of England Newspaper and the secretaryship of the Modern Churchmen’s Union, the volume shows how the influence of the Christian religion has declined to an alarming extent over the past half-century.
It is perhaps in diagnosis that Mr. Rhodes is best. Comparing the comparatively poor church attendance figures for England generally, he points out that there is a large listening population for religious programs. On the other hand, he confesses that in his lifetime he had only come across one person who attributed to broadcasting a decisive influence in the spiritual life.
Mr. Rhodes has some pertinent things to say about the Church of England—its organization, the theological college (he pays tribute to the evangelical colleges for their training and intellectual vigor), the Anglican communities, the power of the bishops, and marriage and divorce.
He has strong criticisms to make of the Billy Graham campaigns in London which he describes as a “spectacular failure.” He seems to have devoted his inquiries to the industrial masses primarily and quotes a newspaper survey taken some months after which revealed that the campaigns “were as good as forgotten and the permanent results statistically negligible.” He does not seem to have heard of churches which were revived and have been exercising a vital ministry since, or of the increasing evangelical influence in the universities and colleges. It is doubtful if Billy Graham claimed, as he asserts, either the Harringay or Wembley campaigns to be “the start of a great religious movement that would change the face of the country.” Redemption in the view of the author will be wrought through a “prophetic community.” The Church, he believes, “must be the home of advanced ideas.” Whether such a church will bear any relationship to the Church of the Apostles or of the Protestant Reformation is doubtful.
S. W. MURRAY
Anthropology
What, Then, Is Man?, a Symposium of Theology, Psychology, and Psychiatry (Concordia Publishing House, 1958, 303 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by Theodore J. Jansma, Chaplain, Christian Sanatorium, Wyckoff, New Jersey.
This is the third in a series of “Graduate Studies” sponsored by the School for Graduate Studies, Concordia Theological Seminary (Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod). It is the product of five authors, with a common religio-philosophical basis, who worked together as a committee under the chairmanship of Dr. Paul Meehl, head of the department of psychology at the University of Minnesota. This gives the book considerable cohesion in distinction from the loose collection and often opposing views one finds in symposia. It also differs from the general run of current books on religion and psychiatry in that it is frankly confessional (Lutheran) and specific in its theological orientation. It abounds in quotations from the Bible and doctrinal standards. At the same time it is sophisticated in modern psychology and psychiatry.
The committee set itself a fonnidable task—“to explain Christian doctrine to non-Christian psychotherapists; to explain psychology and psychiatry to pastors; to examine critically some of the relationships existing between these two systems of concepts” (p. 295). In the opinion of this reviewer they have succeeded remarkably well. They cannot be charged with obscurantism or one-sidedness which often mars the attempts at rapprochement between theology and psychiatry, and yet they have held firmly to the biblical view of man and the basic truth about man’s troubles—his alienation from God. In an area, so alive today, where evangelicals have been either indifferent, incompetent, or even hostile, this book is a valuable contribution.
THEODORE J. JANSMA
Critical Reconstructions
The Date of Ezra’s Coming to Jerusalem and The Building of the Second Temple, both by J. Stafford Wright (The Tyndale Press, London, 1958, 1s.6d), is reviewed by L. E. H. Stephens-Hodge of the London College of Divinity, North-wood, Middlesex.
Since it became fashionable to decry traditional views of the Old Testament, critical reconstructions of the history have acquired an aura of sanctity which makes them tend to resist further investigation.
Believing this to have happened in the case of the chronological sequence of Ezra and Nehemiah, Mr. Stafford Wright, principal of Tyndale Hall, Bristol, took as his thesis for the 1947 Tyndale Old Testament Lecture “The Date of Ezra’s Coming to Jerusalem.” First published in 1947, this has now been reprinted in a revised form which takes into account the comments of reviewers and others who have made reference to it, notably Professor H. H. Rowley. Mr. Wright ably maintains his position and shows that the traditional view, which makes Ezra and Nehemiah arrive at Jerusalem in the seventh and twentieth years respectively of the reign of Artaxerxes I King of Persia (464–424) agrees better with the known data than the view of C. C. Torrey that Ezra was a “creation” of the Chronicler who wanted a priestly figure to offset the civil leader Nehemiah, or the view of L. W. Batten in the International Critical Commentary by which it is stated that the Persian king in whose reign Ezra arrived was Artaxerxes II (403–359) and that therefore the two men were not contemporaneous. But the prominent position of two such men as Ezra and Nehemiah in a small, close-knit community like that of post-exilic Judaism militates against any theory of their being wrongly dated by the Chronicler 150 years later, even if our records do“show so little trace of any real contact between the two men” as demanded by the traditional theory.
Another problem raised during the period after the Exile is that of the date of the building of the Second Temple. According to Ezra 3:8 ff., the foundation stone was laid very soon after the return in 536 B.C. under Zerubbabel and Joshua. Was Zerubbabel actually in Jerusalem 16 years before? And if so, how are we to account for the mention of Sheshbazzar as the leader of the returned exiles in Ezra 1:8? Were Zerubbabel and Sheshbazzar the same person? When did the rebuilding really begin? These and kindred questions formed the subject for a further lecture by Mr. Wright under the Tyndale Foundation given at Cambridge in 1952 and now published under the title “The Building of the Second Temple.”
Both these pamphlets should be carefully studied by those who are troubled by critical reconstructions which appear to do violence to the text of Scripture, and who wish to have a clear statement of conservative lines of defense presented in a reasonable and scholarly manner.
L. E. H. STEPHENS-HODGE
Religious Psychotherapy
The Psychology of Religion, by Walter H. Clark (Macmillan, 1958, 485 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Orville S. Walters, Psychiatrist, Urbana, Illinois.
There is a basic contradiction implied if not expressed in this title—a title that has been used several times in older books. How can a discipline that claims to operate within the canons of scientific method explain an aspect of reality that is supra-empirical?
The author has the important qualification of a thorough acquaintance with both sides of the dilemma. He is dean of the Hartford School of Religious Education and, although he writes as a psychologist, the ambivalence of his position is continually apparent. Concessions to the validity of Christian experience alternate with frequent reassertions of objectivity.
Clark draws heavily upon recent literature, including studies of his own, to extend the observations and opinions of older writers in the field. Conversion, mysticism, prayer, and worship are considered in separate chapters following a broad survey of psychological methods and the successive phases of religious growth.
In his treatment of conversion, Clark continues William James ‘sick soul,” a term that has laid a heavy taint of psychopathology upon much religious experience. In a chapter on “Religion and Abnormal Psychology,” Clark has made this association more explicit by elaborating Anton Boisen’s thesis of linking schizophrenia and religion. The inner activity of schizophrenia, says Clark, is essentially religious (p. 348), and the disease may actually favor the facing and thinking through of issues (p. 344). There is little clinical evidence for this view.
The author’s alternation between religionist and psychologist leads him into some surprising positions. His effort to identify religious experience with psychotherapy produces such statements as these: “Prayer has served to some degree as an inexpensive substitute for the psychiatrist’s couch” (p. 324); “One or two of the (conversion) case studies … will illustrate religious experience serving also as psychotherapy” (p. 366). One might as soon say something like this: “If you can’t afford psychiatry, don’t overlook religion as a low cost second choice.”
Surprising, too, is his acceptance of the Freudian concept of the death instinct. It is probably no less controversial when it is renamed the “death urge.”
Clark occasionally lapses from his scientific neutrality in displaying impatience with revivalism. His adjectives and metaphors seem to carry more animus than the statistics and his own more restrained conclusions seem to warrant (pp. 204, 213, 217). His term “conversion shock” is another tautological coin of little value. Nevertheless, Clark does make a fairly impartial appraisal of conversion, and it is apparent throughout the book that he is trying to put into practice the obligation he lays upon the student of religious experience—that is, to “be as scientific as he can.”
ORVILLE S. WALTERS
Catechetical Lectures
Is It True?, by Martin E. Hollensen (Wartburg Press, 1958, 197 pp., $2.75), is reviewed by E. P. Schulze, Minister of the Lutheran Church of Our Redeemer, Peekskill, New York.
The contents of this solid, useful, and sprightly volume consist of a series of catechetical lectures delivered by a talented and experienced pastor to prospective members of Emanuel Lutheran Church, Marion, Ohio.
The lectures cover the five chief parts of Dr. Martin Luther’s original Catechism, namely, the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, Baptism, and Holy Communion. Pages at the end deal with liturgical matters.
Is It True? is, of course, written from a Lutheran point of view, and Lutheran pastors might well adapt some of its materials, methods, and illustrations to their own adult classes. But, perceiving its logical and lucid argumentation, one suspects that almost any evangelical pastor could cull pointers from it for his own instruction periods. Then, too, its lively and brilliant style makes for exceedingly pleasurable reading. Because of its elementary exposition of doctrine, its stress upon real life situations, and its popular idiom, the book should also appeal to the layman who wishes to find out what Christianity is and how it works, or even to know more about the basic teachings of Lutheranism.
Perhaps notice should be taken of a few flaws. On page 167 Hollensen cites the use of the Greek verb baptizo “in Mark 7:3” as an argument against immersion. But the word used in that verse is nipto. Apparently he means Mark 7:4, where some manuscripts do have baptizo; but others in that place have rhantizo which is the reading preferred by Nestle in his editio vicesima. The noun baptismos, to which he also alludes in this verse, and baptizo in other passages better serve the cause of those who hold immersion to be unnecessary.
E. P. SCHULZE
Expository Helps
The Great Texts of the Bible, (Matthew, Volume 8) by James Hastings (Eerdmans, 451 pp., $4), is reviewed by the Rev. Cecil V. Crabb of the Rock Island Presbyterian Church, Tennessee.
Many preachers and students of the Bible are turning today to the older commentaries and expositors. To meet the demand this publisher has brought out a new edition of an older work called The Great Texts of the Bible. In this particular volume on the Gospel of Matthew, the author selects 27 outstanding texts from 18 different chapters which are largely representative of the thoughts in each chapter. In every study he gives a good discussion of the introduction and context, a sound exposition of the given verse, and then presents copious homiletical and illustrative material of a highly cultural literary order gleaned from many sources.
A work like this, if used properly, should be of great value to the average minister and Bible student. It should not be used, however, as a mere crutch but as an example and challenge to the reader in selecting great texts and themes, exercising sound exegesis, and adorning one’s messages with fitting illustrative material of high literary and biblical caliber. It is well to keep in mind that in any such selection of great texts, the personal element inevitably plays a large part. A work like this should inspire the minister to select other outstanding texts from other chapters and verses in Matthew that are in line with his own theological, homiletical and other religious needs.
CECIL V. CRABB
Know Thyself
A Genuinely Human Existence, by Stephen Neill (Doubleday, 1959, 312 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by James D. Robertson, Professor of Preaching, Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky.
Here is a provocative study of man’s search for self-understanding, a study rich in insights from history, philosophy, and the modern psychological sciences. The author sets forth the complex emotional dynamics underlying human behavior, the frustrations and perversions that prevent man from living a “genuinely human existence.” Supporting his analysis with case histories from life and literature, he leads us to a sympathetic understanding of the human predicament. In so doing, he discusses the contributions resulting from the newer scientific approaches to the problem, yet at the same time reminds himself of the limitations of the scientific method in coming to assess human personality.
The thesis of the book asserts that Christ is the greatest revelation of man to himself. Jesus is the key to the understanding of human nature and destiny. “In him for the first time the full stature and reality of human nature was made manifest, and therefore he can serve as a criterion for the measurement of the normal and the abnormal, the sound and the unsound in human nature as we see it and as we experience it in ourselves” (p. 305).
But man in the process of thus measuring himself is never free from tension. Is not tension, counters the author, after all an inevitable part of adult life? When a living thing fails to react with its environment all tension is removed and life is no longer there. The significant thing is, the Gospels never fail to speak at these points of tension, whatever they may be. “The life and words of Jesus prove themselves effective as pointers to the accurate diagnosis of the ills from which man suffers. They serve also as indications of the way in which fulness of life may be recovered” (p. 306). The author makes a convincing case for the Gospels as the only fully satisfactory manual of mental health ever written.
On two pertinent questions Dr. Neill has little, if anything, to say; yet they are much in the reader’s mind. The book gives an excellent diagnosis of man’s struggle to know himself, it presents Christ as the key to a genuinely human existence; but it does not cast in bold relief the very natural question, What has God been actively doing about all this? It merely cites the fact that the life and death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth are not just events among other events—but the Event, “the central happening of human history.” The other question is this: If a man concludes that Jesus was in fact the act of God in history, that he came from God, how should this knowledge affect his understanding of himself and of life as he experiences it? The author, who himself raises these questions in his concluding chapter, feels that they are of such magnitude that they must form the theme of further writing. One hopes for the appearance before long of another volume from his pen.
JAMES D. ROBERTSON
Power Of The Gospel
Adventurers for God, by Clarence W. Hall (Harper, 1959, 265 pp., $3.75), is reviewed by Horace L. Fenton, Jr., Associate General Director, Latin America Mission.
There is no overabundance in our day of good missionary stories, well told. And oftentimes those that are written have a very limited circulation. It is good, therefore, to know that stories like those which comprise this book have first had wide dissemination through the pages of the Reader’s “Digest, and then have been given expanded treatment and a more permanent form in the book under review.
It is author Clarence W. Hall’s conviction that the popular conception of the missionary has changed greatly in recent years, and that the work of missions is more fully appreciated today than it was in former years. In this connection, he quotes a statement by Franklin D. Roosevelt, written shortly before his death: “Since becoming President, I have come to know that the finest type of Americans we have abroad are the missionaries of the Cross. I am humiliated that I am just finding out at this late date the work of foreign missions and the nobility of the missionary” (pp. 16, 17).
The author of this book has traveled to far places to track down these stories, and they speak the truth. The evangelical motivation is more evident in some than in others, and now and again readers may wonder at the inclusion of a particular story. But the overall impact of the book is great, and the reader continually has a feeling that he has been given a fresh understanding of the power of the Gospel, and of the great variety of ways in which it is being made known. There is human courage and endurance on display here, but above all, one sees the power and the grace of God. The book seems to reach a fitting climax in the story of the Aucas, and of the five missionaries who gladly yielded up their lives to make Christ known among them.
Well written, attractively illustrated by a great number of photographs, the book carries a real message. It may well be read by many who, like our ex-President, will confess that they have waited long before recognizing what is being done throughout the world by men and women worthily called “adventurers for God.”
HORACE L. FENTON, JR.
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