CRITICIZES TORCH AND TRUMPET FOR PLACING A. DE JONGE’S LETTER
The Editorial Committee of Torch and Trumpet,
Dear Brethren:
As you know I have expressed serious criticism to one of your members for placing the letter of Mr. William A. De Jonge in the department “Letters to the Editor.”
I am happy, indeed, that I have received expressions of regret from this member for placing this letter without having submitted it to me in advance for a possible reply, and without checking the facts with mc. The facts are that I as editor of De Wachter did not commend the Prayer for The World Council of Churches but made it very plain that I was placing it simply to inform. Further, the letter contains unwarranted insinuations to the effect that “in all likelihood I sat at the communion table with communists” etc. It should also be stated that, while the letter of Mr. William A. De Jonge gives the impression that he is a member of the Christian Reformed Church, I have learned from him that he is a member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
Fraternally yours, WM. HAVERKAMP
REPLY TO REV. HAVERKAMP
We have willingly placed the above letter of Rev. Wm. Haverkamp, and we do not wish to deny any part of it. However, we wish to point out to Rev. Haverkamp and our readers that this letter in no way speaks to this issue which Mr. De Jonge raised. This disappoints us. Therefore we invite Rev. Haverkamp, having addressed himself to the matter of method, to speak now to the heart of the issue, namely, the relationship of the Christian Reformed Church to the World Council of Churches.
THE EDITORS
Dear Editor:
We thank you from the bottom of ow hearts for all the information the past issues have given us about Dr. Kuitert and other leaders from our sister church in Holland. We are glad that we will get more information in the future issues. We need an informed laity in our days; and this is an understatement when leaders like Kuitert write and teach in our university that Adam and Eve never lived. That spirit from Holland also landed among some of our leaders here.
We are thankful that Rev. Schalkwyk informed us regarding the great Dr. Abraham Kuyper. He was taught the same lies in the liberal university where he studied and he believed it all and applauded when the professor taught this. But that was before his conversion. Cod opened his eyes and all his Ufe he fought this ungodliness and defended with all his might the infallibility of Holy Writ.
Nothing new under the sun, Rev. Schalkwyk wrote. We all should pray for these leaders: also pray that after disciplining these men, if they do not repent. that we may put them out. If we are not faithful to His word, the Holy Spirit will move away from us. And we will be destroyed with many other denominations in our land and in Holland.
The fact that we all should weep about is that when these leaders in these denominations were not put out, God’s people stayed in and were lost with their following generations forever. They went down with the ship. We must remember God’s cause and the eternal welfare of our children and children’s children. Humanly speaking, a secession at the right time would have saved millions.
Brethren, let us pray and work.
D. KORT
DR. KING A CHRISTIAN?
A charge directed against Martin Luther King in the May-June issue of Torch and Trumpet is…regrettable. In that issue Mr. Edwin Palmer assumes the responsibility for judging him to be a non-Christian. “Nor was Martin Luther King a Christian. He called himself Christian, but he was not—if he believed what he wrote. For he repudiated the historic Christian faith.”
Our Reformed Catechism, Question and Answer 32, defines a Christian as follows: “Because I am a member of Christ by faith, and thus a partaker of His anointing, that I may confess His Name, present myself a living sacrifice of thankfulness to Him, and with a free and good conscience fight against sin and the devil in this life, and hereafter reign with Him eternally over all creatures.”
That Rev. King fought freely and in good conscience against specific and general sins, and was so moved by the Spirit, is indicated by his public life and written sermons. This requirement for being a Christian needs no further comment.
A more appropriate question with respect to Dr. King’s Christianity may be the following: Was he a member of the body of Christ by faith and thus saved by Christ’s redemptive work on the cross? Or more Calvinistically, is he one of God’s elect? In his writings, Dr. King frequently mentioned God’s redemptive work. In one of his sermons, Loving Your Enemies, he states: “…then we love our enemies by realizing that they are not totally bad and that they are not beyond the reach of God’s redemptive love.” Again, from one of his essays, The Answer To A Perplexing Problem, “In His magnanimous love, God freely offers to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves . .. so by faith we are saved.” Just what he means when he speaks of redemption and salvation is not always clear. He speaks of social and personal redemption and of reconciliation with God. In his sermon, What is Man, he says “man is a sinner in need of God’s forgiving grace.” Again, “Man by his own power can never cast evil from this world.” This was a major reason why Dr. King could not accept and find full comfort in liberal humanism which teaches, among other things, that mankind, through reason and goodness, can solve all its problems without God. He also rejected Rauschenbush’s implication that the Kingdom of God is identified with a particular social and economic system. To this, “the Church must never surrender.” That Dr. King believed in the redemptive work of God is very obvious. That he does not believe in redemption the same way the Calvinist believes it is equally obvious. Believing in the sovereignty of God vigorously, he does reject it in the sense that this sovereignty is the cause of election and faith. However, to call this type of thinking a “hodge-podge of unbiblical untruths” Torch and Trumpet, May-June, 1968, seems a bit improper at best. Un-Calvinistic, yes!! But also unbiblical and unChristian???
1n his printed sermons he appears to speak more often of God than of Christ. We may rightly ask at this point, did Dr. King believe in Christ as his personal saviour? Again, the answer to this question does not come easy. In his book of published sermons, Strength to Love, there is no message of personal salvation through the shed blood of Christ on Calvary. The Salvation and redemption of which he speaks is more general and available to all who seek it through Christ. The relationship between God and Christ, as Dr. King conceived of it is perhaps best summed up in a quote taken from his sermon, The Three Dimensions Of A Complete Life, “Where do we find this God?….where else except in Jesus Christ the Lord of our lives. By knowing him we know God. Christ is not only Godlike, but God is Christlike. By committing ourselves absolutely to Christ and his way we will participate in that marvelous act of faith that will bring us to the true knowledge of God.” Salvation through Christ, by faith, yes, that he believed. Limited atonement determined by eternal election he rejected as a falsehood. However, do we dare to call a man or a movement un-Christian because it rejects the redemptive process as we understand it?
That Dr. King did not speak clearly of personal redemption is, also in my view, to be regretted. We should remember, however, that even in our own church the nature and extent of redemption remains an area of intensive study and controversy. We should also be reminded that the sermons and essays quoted above were all written after Dr. King entered the civil rights movement and as such he spoke, perhaps, more as a Bible oriented leader of civil rights than as a minister of the Gospel.
In view of the comments made above it would appear that one can be reasonably certain that our Catechism definition of a Christian fits Dr. King. He confessed His Name, he believed in Salvation through Christ by faith, he presented himself a sacrifice working freely and in good conscience against sin and the devil, and he spoke, before his death, publicly about his eternal future with God.
Stating that Dr. King was not a Christian is in reality passing final judgment. The implication I receive from Mr. Palmer’s article is that not being a Christian he is not washed by the blood of Christ and therefore, condemned unto eternal damnation. If this is not the implication then salvation is possible outside the “historic Christian faith,” and if so, the charge that he is not a Christian becomes obviously and totally meaningless.
Another note of considerable interest found in the same article by Mr. Palmer relates to a reference made at Dr. King’s funeral and taken ‘from Isaiah 53. “He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities. ” with, “the plain implication that it fitted King'” To whom is this implication so plain? And even if the Rabbi, who read this passage, so intended it, does that also mean that Dr. King considered himself in such a way?
Summary Remarks
Communism thrives on distrust, hate and disorder in our society. Our civil rights movements, including the movement started and led by Dr. King, created some of these conditions, and as such they unwittingly contributed to the cause of Communism in America. The ultimate aims of the civil rights movement, founded and inspired by Dr. King, are good, desirable, noble and Christian and have been so judged by thousands of scholars, ministers and political leaders. Pointing to Dr. King as a Communist, or Communist sympathizer, or implicating him as a non-Christian because he does not fit the “historic Christian faith” also creates distrust and hate, and as such these accusations also cause social conditions that promote the Communist cause. Not of course, through intent but through the coincidental nature of events.
If Dr. King was indeed a Communist, this fact should be revealed. This revelation should not be made through misleading signs, slanderous implications and guilt by association, but rather, by documented evidence. The person involved is too important and the movement he represented far too significant to be called un-American without good cause and un-Christian through biased opinion. None of the above methods are consistent with total Christian behavior.
Whether or not Dr. King was a Christian is difficult to discover with absolute certainty. Much of what he said and wrote would indicate he loved our Lard. That Rev. King was not a Calvinist, or true to the historic Reformed faith, is very apparent. However, we can be reasonably sure that God’s eject arc not limited to that body of believers. Judging him to be a Christian may not be easy, but dare we judge him otherwise? Besides, judging is God’s business, not ours. Furthermore, such judging by a writer in a respected Reformed magazine could help to draw our hearts and minds away from this noble movement of civil rights whose ultimate aims we can hardly consider as being in error. It may help to undermine our confidence in that movement at a time when it so desperately needs our confidence, prayer and general support.
Dr. King, and the movement he represented had their faults. He was a sinner and therefore the movement and the men were imperfect. Few will deny the rightness of the goals he and the movement sought. We should all, honestly, and from a Christian perspective, evaluate the total aspects of the civil rights movement, and in doing so we may remember that neither the movement nor the methods used would ever have been needed if all of us had always loved our neighbor as God commands.
JOHN RIEMERSMA
REPLY TO RIEMERSMA
In reply to Mr. Riemersma the following observations should be made:
1. It is the duty of every Christian “to test the spirits to see if they come from God” (I John 4:1 ). Too many Christians lack the Biblical mind that commands us to evaluate the thinking of men (II Cor. 6:14–15), not to accept those who come disguised as angels of light (II Cor. 11:14) and not to be tossed about by every wind of doctrine (Eph. 4:14).
2. Our criticism of Dr. King was not that he did not accept the sovereignty of God nor the Calvinistic view of redemption; but, as we quoted him, that he explicitly repudiated the orthodoxy in which he was reared, and hovered between modernism and neo-orthodoxy. It is not we, but Dr. King, who makes these judgments.
3. As to the one or two statements that Mr. Riemersma quotes to support his belief that Dr. King was a Bible-believing, orthodox Christian, it is important to realize that modernists commonly use historic, orthodox terminology with new meanings. We still have to see a clear-cut, ununambiguous statement from Dr. King, a minister whose duty is to preach on this subject all the time, that he believes that Jesus was God who went to hell as a substitute for sinners. On the contrary, in Strength to Love, he repudiates his orthodox upbringing.
EDWIN PALMER
The Editorial Committee of Torch and Trumpet,
Dear Brethren:
As you know I have expressed serious criticism to one of your members for placing the letter of Mr. William A. De Jonge in the department “Letters to the Editor.”
I am happy, indeed, that I have received expressions of regret from this member for placing this letter without having submitted it to me in advance for a possible reply, and without checking the facts with mc. The facts are that I as editor of De Wachter did not commend the Prayer for The World Council of Churches but made it very plain that I was placing it simply to inform. Further, the letter contains unwarranted insinuations to the effect that “in all likelihood I sat at the communion table with communists” etc. It should also be stated that, while the letter of Mr. William A. De Jonge gives the impression that he is a member of the Christian Reformed Church, I have learned from him that he is a member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
Fraternally yours, WM. HAVERKAMP
REPLY TO REV. HAVERKAMP
We have willingly placed the above letter of Rev. Wm. Haverkamp, and we do not wish to deny any part of it. However, we wish to point out to Rev. Haverkamp and our readers that this letter in no way speaks to this issue which Mr. De Jonge raised. This disappoints us. Therefore we invite Rev. Haverkamp, having addressed himself to the matter of method, to speak now to the heart of the issue, namely, the relationship of the Christian Reformed Church to the World Council of Churches.
THE EDITORS
Dear Editor:
We thank you from the bottom of ow hearts for all the information the past issues have given us about Dr. Kuitert and other leaders from our sister church in Holland. We are glad that we will get more information in the future issues. We need an informed laity in our days; and this is an understatement when leaders like Kuitert write and teach in our university that Adam and Eve never lived. That spirit from Holland also landed among some of our leaders here.
We are thankful that Rev. Schalkwyk informed us regarding the great Dr. Abraham Kuyper. He was taught the same lies in the liberal university where he studied and he believed it all and applauded when the professor taught this. But that was before his conversion. Cod opened his eyes and all his Ufe he fought this ungodliness and defended with all his might the infallibility of Holy Writ.
Nothing new under the sun, Rev. Schalkwyk wrote. We all should pray for these leaders: also pray that after disciplining these men, if they do not repent. that we may put them out. If we are not faithful to His word, the Holy Spirit will move away from us. And we will be destroyed with many other denominations in our land and in Holland.
The fact that we all should weep about is that when these leaders in these denominations were not put out, God’s people stayed in and were lost with their following generations forever. They went down with the ship. We must remember God’s cause and the eternal welfare of our children and children’s children. Humanly speaking, a secession at the right time would have saved millions.
Brethren, let us pray and work.
D. KORT
DR. KING A CHRISTIAN?
A charge directed against Martin Luther King in the May-June issue of Torch and Trumpet is…regrettable. In that issue Mr. Edwin Palmer assumes the responsibility for judging him to be a non-Christian. “Nor was Martin Luther King a Christian. He called himself Christian, but he was not—if he believed what he wrote. For he repudiated the historic Christian faith.”
Our Reformed Catechism, Question and Answer 32, defines a Christian as follows: “Because I am a member of Christ by faith, and thus a partaker of His anointing, that I may confess His Name, present myself a living sacrifice of thankfulness to Him, and with a free and good conscience fight against sin and the devil in this life, and hereafter reign with Him eternally over all creatures.”
That Rev. King fought freely and in good conscience against specific and general sins, and was so moved by the Spirit, is indicated by his public life and written sermons. This requirement for being a Christian needs no further comment.
A more appropriate question with respect to Dr. King’s Christianity may be the following: Was he a member of the body of Christ by faith and thus saved by Christ’s redemptive work on the cross? Or more Calvinistically, is he one of God’s elect? In his writings, Dr. King frequently mentioned God’s redemptive work. In one of his sermons, Loving Your Enemies, he states: “…then we love our enemies by realizing that they are not totally bad and that they are not beyond the reach of God’s redemptive love.” Again, from one of his essays, The Answer To A Perplexing Problem, “In His magnanimous love, God freely offers to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves . .. so by faith we are saved.” Just what he means when he speaks of redemption and salvation is not always clear. He speaks of social and personal redemption and of reconciliation with God. In his sermon, What is Man, he says “man is a sinner in need of God’s forgiving grace.” Again, “Man by his own power can never cast evil from this world.” This was a major reason why Dr. King could not accept and find full comfort in liberal humanism which teaches, among other things, that mankind, through reason and goodness, can solve all its problems without God. He also rejected Rauschenbush’s implication that the Kingdom of God is identified with a particular social and economic system. To this, “the Church must never surrender.” That Dr. King believed in the redemptive work of God is very obvious. That he does not believe in redemption the same way the Calvinist believes it is equally obvious. Believing in the sovereignty of God vigorously, he does reject it in the sense that this sovereignty is the cause of election and faith. However, to call this type of thinking a “hodge-podge of unbiblical untruths” Torch and Trumpet, May-June, 1968, seems a bit improper at best. Un-Calvinistic, yes!! But also unbiblical and unChristian???
1n his printed sermons he appears to speak more often of God than of Christ. We may rightly ask at this point, did Dr. King believe in Christ as his personal saviour? Again, the answer to this question does not come easy. In his book of published sermons, Strength to Love, there is no message of personal salvation through the shed blood of Christ on Calvary. The Salvation and redemption of which he speaks is more general and available to all who seek it through Christ. The relationship between God and Christ, as Dr. King conceived of it is perhaps best summed up in a quote taken from his sermon, The Three Dimensions Of A Complete Life, “Where do we find this God?….where else except in Jesus Christ the Lord of our lives. By knowing him we know God. Christ is not only Godlike, but God is Christlike. By committing ourselves absolutely to Christ and his way we will participate in that marvelous act of faith that will bring us to the true knowledge of God.” Salvation through Christ, by faith, yes, that he believed. Limited atonement determined by eternal election he rejected as a falsehood. However, do we dare to call a man or a movement un-Christian because it rejects the redemptive process as we understand it?
That Dr. King did not speak clearly of personal redemption is, also in my view, to be regretted. We should remember, however, that even in our own church the nature and extent of redemption remains an area of intensive study and controversy. We should also be reminded that the sermons and essays quoted above were all written after Dr. King entered the civil rights movement and as such he spoke, perhaps, more as a Bible oriented leader of civil rights than as a minister of the Gospel.
In view of the comments made above it would appear that one can be reasonably certain that our Catechism definition of a Christian fits Dr. King. He confessed His Name, he believed in Salvation through Christ by faith, he presented himself a sacrifice working freely and in good conscience against sin and the devil, and he spoke, before his death, publicly about his eternal future with God.
Stating that Dr. King was not a Christian is in reality passing final judgment. The implication I receive from Mr. Palmer’s article is that not being a Christian he is not washed by the blood of Christ and therefore, condemned unto eternal damnation. If this is not the implication then salvation is possible outside the “historic Christian faith,” and if so, the charge that he is not a Christian becomes obviously and totally meaningless.
Another note of considerable interest found in the same article by Mr. Palmer relates to a reference made at Dr. King’s funeral and taken ‘from Isaiah 53. “He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities. ” with, “the plain implication that it fitted King'” To whom is this implication so plain? And even if the Rabbi, who read this passage, so intended it, does that also mean that Dr. King considered himself in such a way?
Summary Remarks
Communism thrives on distrust, hate and disorder in our society. Our civil rights movements, including the movement started and led by Dr. King, created some of these conditions, and as such they unwittingly contributed to the cause of Communism in America. The ultimate aims of the civil rights movement, founded and inspired by Dr. King, are good, desirable, noble and Christian and have been so judged by thousands of scholars, ministers and political leaders. Pointing to Dr. King as a Communist, or Communist sympathizer, or implicating him as a non-Christian because he does not fit the “historic Christian faith” also creates distrust and hate, and as such these accusations also cause social conditions that promote the Communist cause. Not of course, through intent but through the coincidental nature of events.
If Dr. King was indeed a Communist, this fact should be revealed. This revelation should not be made through misleading signs, slanderous implications and guilt by association, but rather, by documented evidence. The person involved is too important and the movement he represented far too significant to be called un-American without good cause and un-Christian through biased opinion. None of the above methods are consistent with total Christian behavior.
Whether or not Dr. King was a Christian is difficult to discover with absolute certainty. Much of what he said and wrote would indicate he loved our Lard. That Rev. King was not a Calvinist, or true to the historic Reformed faith, is very apparent. However, we can be reasonably sure that God’s eject arc not limited to that body of believers. Judging him to be a Christian may not be easy, but dare we judge him otherwise? Besides, judging is God’s business, not ours. Furthermore, such judging by a writer in a respected Reformed magazine could help to draw our hearts and minds away from this noble movement of civil rights whose ultimate aims we can hardly consider as being in error. It may help to undermine our confidence in that movement at a time when it so desperately needs our confidence, prayer and general support.
Dr. King, and the movement he represented had their faults. He was a sinner and therefore the movement and the men were imperfect. Few will deny the rightness of the goals he and the movement sought. We should all, honestly, and from a Christian perspective, evaluate the total aspects of the civil rights movement, and in doing so we may remember that neither the movement nor the methods used would ever have been needed if all of us had always loved our neighbor as God commands.
JOHN RIEMERSMA
REPLY TO RIEMERSMA
In reply to Mr. Riemersma the following observations should be made:
1. It is the duty of every Christian “to test the spirits to see if they come from God” (I John 4:1 ). Too many Christians lack the Biblical mind that commands us to evaluate the thinking of men (II Cor. 6:14–15), not to accept those who come disguised as angels of light (II Cor. 11:14) and not to be tossed about by every wind of doctrine (Eph. 4:14).
2. Our criticism of Dr. King was not that he did not accept the sovereignty of God nor the Calvinistic view of redemption; but, as we quoted him, that he explicitly repudiated the orthodoxy in which he was reared, and hovered between modernism and neo-orthodoxy. It is not we, but Dr. King, who makes these judgments.
3. As to the one or two statements that Mr. Riemersma quotes to support his belief that Dr. King was a Bible-believing, orthodox Christian, it is important to realize that modernists commonly use historic, orthodox terminology with new meanings. We still have to see a clear-cut, ununambiguous statement from Dr. King, a minister whose duty is to preach on this subject all the time, that he believes that Jesus was God who went to hell as a substitute for sinners. On the contrary, in Strength to Love, he repudiates his orthodox upbringing.
EDWIN PALMER