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Advancing the stories and ideas of the kingdom of God.
Daniel Silliman
In 1962, CT engaged friends and enemies in the Cold War and the Second Vatican Council.
The United States sent its own man into space in 1962. CT published a 5,000-word article, “John H. Glenn: An Astronaut and His Faith.”
When the Friendship 7 space capsule landed with a splash and a sizzle and Lieutenant Colonel John H. Glenn, Jr., clambered out, American Christians had special reason to take heart. Not only had their prayers for Glenn been answered, but the nation had a new space hero. And for once at least the hero was not a smart-alecky ham with a long record of marital strife.
Throughout the world the word had gone out that Glenn and his family are devout Presbyterians and faithful churchgoers. They represent an American Christian home in the best tradition. Theirs is clearly not a head-in-the-sand Christianity, but a very practical faith.
“But are they born again Christians?” some evangelicals were asking. “Have they actually experienced regeneration?” …
The most publicized church in the world in 1962 has been the Little Falls United Presbyterian Church of Arlington, Virginia. Its minister, the Rev. Frank A. Erwin, has played a key supporting role in the Glenn space drama by virtue of the fact that the astronaut and his family have worshipped at Little Falls since 1958. …
The Glenns exercise their faith in their home as well. During evenings when the father is home, they have family Bible reading together. One of their favorite traditions at Christmas is to bake a birthday cake for Jesus.
Evangelical Press Service quoted a minister friend of the Glenns as saying, “There’s no doubt about it. John is a born-again Christian.”
The minister’s father was said to have been used of the Lord to lead John Glenn’s father to Christ many years ago, “and the conversion of the entire family soon followed.”
Astronaut Glenn, however, is not known to refer to a specific conversion experience, but Erwin warns that this is not to be construed as reason to question his genuine Christian commitment.
While attention was turned skyward, CT also asked about the possible discovery of life on other planets and what that would mean, if anything, for Christian theology.
Do intelligent beings exist on Venus with her dense clouds and relatively moderate temperatures? Do the “canals” of Mars witness to human engineering as Percival Lowell maintained? And what of the other planetary systems throughout the universe, and of the other island universes, the spiral nebulae, which are scattered across the inconceivable vastness of space? Has man any right to assume that intelligent life exists solely on his “small and insignificant planet”?
… Should other worlds possess other sinful beings—which seems improbable—the fact is hardly disruptive of evangelical theology. To suppose that there are other inhabited worlds, even thousands of them, does not detract in the slightest from the value of the soul in this one. “Man is not less great,” said Scotland’s James Orr, “because he is not alone great. If he is a spiritual being,—if he has a soul of infinite worth, which is the Christian assumption,—that fact is not affected though there were a whole universe of other spiritual beings.” In such circumstances the atonement of our Lord is not less significant because it occurred in this world for the redemption of mankind. The “good news” would be as welcome on Venus or Mars as upon the farthest reaches of the earth.
Back on Earth, humans were grappling with the reality of sin in the US capital. Violent criminals preyed on tourists, and Washington, DC, seemed incapable of stopping them.
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The crime rate in Washington is as ugly as the Nation’s Capital is beautiful. Week-end robberies and other attacks on both visitors and local citizens have become almost commonplace. Major crimes abated somewhat during the first five weeks of 1962, but the number of gunpoint robberies alone more than doubled, totalling 46; and 222 other robberies also stepped up the 1961 tally. Widows, young wives, the aged, business men, diplomatic personnel—none seems exempt or safe from these hoodlums who yoke and attack their victims in private and public buildings or in parking lots. Recently, as its special project of the year, a women’s service group imported nine specially trained dogs to augment the city’s canine police corps. Some area public schools offer judo classes for girls.
Representative Martha W. Griffiths (D.-Mich.), who lost her contact lenses in a purse-snatching in front of her home, rightly pronounced it “disgraceful that a woman cannot walk unmolested in the shadow of the Capitol.” She is a former criminal court judge in Detroit. A Washington attorney told us that for several years he has been reluctant to walk five blocks from his home to Sunday night church service.
Many evangelicals were appalled when the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment prohibited school-mandated prayer in public schools, but CT was not:
Evangelical opinions were mixed. … Some were gratified that a blow had been struck at a least-common-denominator type of religion. As the days passed, however, support grew for the view that the position on church-state separation implicit in the Supreme Court action was—as Christianity Today had editorialized (July 20, 1962)—both defensible and commendable. …
The National Association of Evangelicals issued a 1,295-word statement by its executive committee. The statement noted that Justice Black’s majority opinion “carefully avoided striking down the prayer on the simple grounds that it is a religious activity within a governmental institution. Instead the prayer in question was called unconstitutional because it was written and sanctioned by an official government body … We do not take issue with the point of law on which the majority of the Justices ruled. Indeed if this has served to uphold the constitutional stipulation that church and state must be kept separate we commend the Court for its sensitivities to the dangers involved in even the most minute intrusion upon religious freedom by any agency of the government.” …
The president of the Southern Baptist Convention, Dr. Herschel H. Hobbs, said that “what appeared to me to be a tragedy is now clear to me to be one of the greatest blessings that could come to those of us who believe in the absolute separation of church and state.” … National Association of Free Will Baptists called for a constitutional amendment that would permit voluntary, non-sectarian religious exercises in public schools. … The Baptist General Conference in America deferred action on similar proposals at its annual convention in Muskegon, Michigan.
CT considered another religious division when theologian Karl Barth visited America. The magazine published four separate pieces on the “almost oracular” Barth.
Barth struck hard from the opening minutes for the autonomy of evangelical theology. Whereas all other theologies start out from man, evangelical theology is unique as a science dealing with the response of faith to the speaking of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Having its origin thus solely in the action of God, evangelical theology must recognize no other rule than that of the Word. Since it consists exclusively of study of the response of faith that is given and evoked by the Word it derives its procedures exclusively from the character of that Word and consequently has no reason for squaring itself with the many systems that start out with man. It is to stand totally aloof to them; its justification and commendation are from God and not from man.
The editors liked some of what they heard from Barth in 1962, but were nonetheless suspicious that his evangelicalism was not exactly evangelicalism as they would want to present it.
At a luncheon in Washington, Barth made no speech but invited questions. Editor Carl F. H. Henry of Christianity Today, noting that newsmen were present, asked if the saving events of the first century, particularly the bodily resurrection and virgin birth, were of such a nature that newsmen would have been responsible for reporting them as news—that is, whether they were events in the sense that the ordinary man understands the happenings of history.
Barth replied that the bodily resurrection did not convince the soldiers at the tomb, but had significance only for Christ’s disciples. “It takes the living Christ to reveal the living Christ,” he said.
Barth thus shied away from emphasis upon apologetic evidences and refused to defend the facticity of the saving events independently of the prior faith of the observers.
The biggest religious news of 1962 was the start of the Second Vatican Council, which would eventually lead to sweeping reform in the Roman Catholic Church. CT viewed the Vatican gathering of Catholic leaders with a mix of curiosity and skepticism.
What effect its debates, decrees, and declarations will have upon the unresolved tensions of our fear-ridden nuclear age is, at this stage, unpredictable. Though answers will understandably vary, we may ask which of the council’s actions seem most significant, and why. …
In his opening address at the present council … Pope John XXIII made special mention of the change of posture assumed by the church toward theological errors and those who hold them. “At the outset of Vatican Council II,” he declared, “it is evident as always that the truth of the Lord will remain forever. … The Catholic Church, raising the torch of religious truth by means of this Ecumenical Council, desires to show herself to be the loving mother of all, benign, patient, full of mercy and goodness toward the children separated from her.”
Today, then, men are urged to engage in polite dialogue with their “separated brethren,” for though there are serious doctrinal differences at the root of all ecclesiastical divisions, the theological disagreements are but the tragic result of sixteenth-century mistakes, misunderstanding, and misinformation about the Roman Catholic Church. …
… Will separated brothers seek to achieve a practical synthesis of their opposing theologies and emerge from their confrontations confessing but one faith and pledged to but one sovereign Head, the Lord Jesus Christ? And can such a practical synthesis of theological viewpoints ever produce what Pope John describes as a “visible unity in truth”?
CT did find some aspects of Catholicism admirable, including a willingness to believe the historic Christian creeds.
This council, as no other event in modern church history has done, calls us to a new understanding of dogma for the Church. This will become very evident when on October 11 more than 2,000 bishops confess the Nicene Creed, not as a beautiful liturgical formula, a venerable document of the past, but as the confession of the truth which they must defend with their lives and for which they are prepared to shed their blood, as probably a number of them will do. They confess it as the great ecumenical creed which does not belong to the Roman Church only, but which is the common possession of East and West (despite the controversy about the filioque), of Rome and the churches of the Reformation. Why is such a confession impossible at a full assembly of the World Council of Churches? It is worthwhile to ponder this question.
That fall, the Cold War escalated and came perilously close to a full-scale conflict. The Soviet Union tried to set up nuclear missiles in Cuba. The US responded with a naval blockage and waited with bated breath to see if the Communists would respond with force.
For a few precarious days last month, the world seemingly hung on the nuclear-oriented edge of war. The human race underwent one of its biggest scares.
How did the Christian clergy face the crisis? What did church leaders have to say? What kind of help did they offer?
… Dr. Eugene Carson Blake complained the church did and said very little.
Declared Blake, stated clerk of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., in a Reformation Festival of Faith at Binghamton, New York:
“We’v’ve been worried about the possibility of ending all cultures, the end of the world. … But has the church said anything?
“Not very much. Not very much.”
CT was dismayed by the apparent growth of a pacifist movement. While the magazine rejected allegations that Christian pacifists were secretly Communists, editors nonetheless felt they were playing into Soviet hands.
Sometimes the churches and the Communists seem to be saying much the same thing. The disturbing fact, however, is how Communist strategists fit the peace program of the churches into their own program of class hatred and world revolution. When peace-literature, including occasional essays in church and Sunday school publications, takes the same line as is found simultaneously in Communist organs, then our distress must surely deepen. Communist sympathizers often manipulate U.S. public opinion on disarmament and peace and war into propaganda serviceable to the Soviet leaders, men whose temporary goals coincide at points with the announced goals of American pacifists.
CT published a Connecticut Senator’s strong warning against “illusions” of peaceful coexistence with Communism and his call for the liberation of Cuba—and the world.
I believe that Cuba is not only a place where we can seize the initiative and strike an effective blow for freedom; I believe that the security of our nation and of the hemisphere make it essential that we embark upon this initiative without delay and without equivocation. I believe that freedom can be restored to the Cuban people if we are prepared to give our unstinting support to the Cuban forces for liberation, in Cuba and abroad, and if we are prepared to invoke the Monroe Doctrine to proclaim a partial blockade directed against the shipment of Soviet military equipment and personnel to Cuba.
And if we act successfully in Cuba, it will have an impact that goes far beyond the confines of our hemisphere. I think it no exaggeration to say that the restoration of freedom to the Cuban people might very well mark the beginning of the end of the slave empire that the Kremlin has built up in Europe and in Asia.
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