Page:Southern Presbyterian Journal, Volume 13.djvu/942



In our disturbed period, men and women turn to God for peace and comfort. They want to hear God's word. Call it escapism, if you please, but they are not escaping to voluptuousness and drunkenness. They are escaping from the unreality of fear of the atom to the reality, for them, of the life eternal. It is a wholesome response to the challenge of the confusions of our times. For many, who have been lost in the maze of argumentation and confusion, it opens a door to a new and rich experience.

The churches of God are not public forums nor are they substitute pews for the couch of the psychoanalyst. The clergy are not important as editorial writers who read complex studies on social problems. There are others to perform such wonders. The following paragraph was issued by an important religious denomination.:

"… There is growing up over against communism a fanatical negativism. Totally devoid of a constructive program of action, this negativism is in danger of leading the American mind into a spiritual vacuum. Our national house, cleansed of one demon, would invite by its very emptiness, the entrance of seven others. In the case of a national crisis this emptiness could, in the high sounding name of security, be occupied with ease by a Fascist tyranny."

What is the constructive program? I do not see it in the document. I do not see a statement of fundamental Christian doctrine such as Billy Graham preaches and such as his immense following craves. The clergy who fail to recognize that their function is a particular one, fail to meet the issue of our times which is how to bring God back into the home, back into the school and the workshop, back into the church.

I have come across clergymen who are Humanists. Man is the center of the universe. Man is everything. They avoid mention of God, but they capitalize science. That, of course, is their privilege, but what are they doing in the churches and synagogues?

As one might expect, the Westminster Confession in explaining the Lord's Supper emphasizes the distinction between the evangelical and the Romish views. The two most important points at which Romanism has departed from Scriptural teaching are its theory of transubstantiation and the derivative doctrine that the mass is actually an expiatory sacrifice.

Transubstantiation is the theory that the bread and wine, by the magic pronouncement of the priest, become in substance the very body and blood of Christ. Inasmuch as the sensible qualities (i.e. the color, taste, consistency, etc.) of the elements remain unchanged, Rome supports the theory of transubstantiation by an appeal to the philosophy of Aristotle in which a particular relationship between substance and accident is elaborated. Aristotle's philosophy is too subtle to be discussed here, and the Bible centered thinker can hardly make Aristotle his guide for the Lord's Supper. As a Scriptural basis for transubstantiation the Romanists teach that Christ's words, "This is my body," changed the bread into his body. And even the Lutherans, though they repudiate transubstantiation, take these words literally and insist that the verb is can have only one meaning. It requires no profound scholarship to see that this is not so. The verb to be in Scripture can and does take on figurative as well as literal meanings. When Christ said "I am the door," he surely did not mean that he was an oak panel three inches thick. Again, "I am the resurrection," does not mean literally that Jesus was Lazarus walking out of the tomb. In the book of Revelation the verb to be is frequently used in the sense of to represent. For example, "The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven candlesticks… are the seven churches" (Rev. 1:20); "these are the two olive trees" (Rev. 11:4); and "the seven heads are seven mountains" (Rev. 17:9). Now, in the same sense in which the seven heads are or represent seven mountains, so the bread is or represents Christ's body. The one is the figure of the other.

What further makes transubstantiation abhorrent to those who abide by the Scriptures is the inference drawn from it. If the bread is literally Christ's body, and if the priest breaks the bread, then Christ's body is broken again and the sacrifice of the cross is repeated every time the mass is said. The Council of Trent (Twenty-second Session, chap. 2) asserted that "this sacrament is truly propitiatory…, for the Lord, appeased by the oblation thereof,… forgives even heinous crimes and sins. For the victim is one and the same." Against this view the Scriptures are particularly explicit. Hebrews 9:22-28 can hardly be misunderstood: "Nor yet that he should offer himself often PAGE 8