THE RECKONING, by David Halberstam. Published by Wm. Morrow and Co., New York, NY, 1986, 750 pp., paperback edition by Avon Books, 1987,$5.50. Review by editor.

This is the epic story oft he automobile industry (possibly the best yet written) from the beginning to the present. To me, intrigued with cars since childhood, and from the age of 12 beginning a half-dozen years of working on them after school, Saturdays and summers, it had extra fascination. But for the general reader, the story, exceptionally well-told, full of personal interest and drama, sheds a unique light on the problems, plight and threatened future of one of the leaders in U.S. industry and trade in today’s competitive world.

In 1973 Charley Maxwell tried to forewarn the U.S. auto companies of a coming oil crunch, but none of the big three would listen. The Detroit executives had become fat and lazy and more concerned with profits than with the quality of their products.

The author singled out Ford for special attention in two chapters, one devoted to Henry Ford “The Founder,” and his pioneer achievement, the other to him as “The Destroyer.” There is a grim account of how, after he had destroyed his son, only the resolute intervention of his wife and daughter-in-law prevented him from subjecting his grandson to the same arbitrary and fatal interference of an erratic father, spoiled by wealth and power.

We are taken to Japan, devastated by a lost war, under MacArthur’s government, beginning to rebuild its ruined industries, to follow its timid efforts to produce automobiles and then its feelers toward a possible export of them. That development was by no means free from internal personal conflicts, but it did eventuate in a union and management cooperation that was opposite to our pattern which cast them as antagonists.

The U.S. story describes various personalities and their roles. It would be hard to find a greater contrast than that between Henry Ford I who once fi red the whole bookkeeping department as unproductive and Robert McNamara, one of the new “Whiz Kids,” who was almost totally preoccupied with figures. In the growing international competition, the Japanese product came to obviously outstrip that of the U.S. Executive Hal Sperlick, visiting a Japanese factory in the early 70s, saw no repair bays beside the assemblyline, and asked, “Where do you repair your cars?” “We don’t have to repair our cars,” was the answer. “Where are your inspectors?” he asked. “The workers are the inspectors,” was his answer, and he thought of U.S. repair bins the size of football fields! Doing the job right the first time was calculated to reduce the cost about 25%—which was close to the price advantage of the Japanese (pp. 734, 735).

The most impressive of the author’s observations may be those with which he concludes his long story. After detailing some U.S. comparative advantages in world competition, he lists “two real weaknesses.” “One was the public school system and the low level of literacy. (A recent study said in its conclusion that if a foreign power had wanted to undermine the United States of America, it would have given it the public school system it currently had.)” Where formerly in one of the best schools children ofJewish immigrants had been the top graduates, now these were Asian immigrants. This spoke of U.S. opportunity, but also showed that “too many native sons and daughters had taken their standard of living for granted.” “The other respect in which America was ill prepared for the new world economy was in terms of expectations. No country, including America, was likely ever to be as rich as America had been from 1945 to 1975, and other nations were following the Japanese into middle-class existence, which meant that life for most Americans was bound to become leaner. But in the middle of 1986 there seemed little awareness of this, let alone concern about it. Few were discussing how best to adjust the nation to an age of somewhat diminished expectations, or how to marshal its abundant resources for survival in a harsh, unforgiving new world, or how to spread the inevitable sacrifices equitably.”

Although this book is not written from a Christian perspective, it is a dramatic demonstration of Herben Schlossberg’s thesis in his monumental 1983 IDOLS FOR DESTRUCTION (cf. Hosea 8:4) that, in the Lord’s management and judgment of human affairs, the idols that people make become their appropriate destroyers. Whether or not this is Mr. Halberstam’s perspective, his well-researched story bristles with examples of individuals, industries and whole nations faced with that kind of “reckoning.”

THE SUICIDE OFTHE WEST

By James Burnham. Published by Regnery Press, Chicago Illinois. Reviewed by John H. Sietsema.

With a scalpel-like logic James Burnham probes and dissects the philosophy and mind set of the liberal. He does so because he sees  the flaws and weaknesses inherent in the liberal’s system of thought are leading western civilization to commit virtual suicide.

You and I are part of the western civilization, and as Christians we know that it is our civilization that has been influenced most by Christianity and that has been instrumental in the spread of the Gospel to other areas beyond our own civilization. Burnham validates his claim that western civilization is on the path of suicide by simply studying the global map. Since 1918 the Western World has been shrinking in actual land mass. Too, its cultural and political influence in realms beyond its own boundaries has declined. And wherever the West has vacated, be it in land mass or in cultural and political influence, communism has replaced it: in Eastern Europe, Southeastern Asia, China, Cuba, Nicaragua, and great parts of Africa.

A chief law in liberal thinking is its view of men. liberals deny original sin and thus never regard man as indeed a sinful being. Borrowing from the thinkers of the Enlightment Age, liberals believe man is perfectible and wholly capable of attaining the golden age for man.

If there is evil in man, it is simply extrinsic to his being much like a golf ball lodged in a man’s stomach. The golf ball is not an integral part of the man‘s physical being. The evil is there only because of bad institutions, hostile environment, and sheer ignorance. Correct, or if it need s be, eliminate these institutions, so that many may become good. Thus, the liberal, unlike the conservative, places no abiding value on either the family, the state, the church, or traditions. If anyone of these stand in the way of the perfecting of man, let it be cast aside like a tattered garment that has out-served its usefulness.

Ignorance, a cardinal evil in the liberal’s eye, is to be overcome by universal education an education pursued solely along the lines of scientific, empirical inquiry. This means religious education must be eventually thrust aside, since it is too much founded on tradition, custom, and religious principles.

Also, for the liberal universal education must remove all differences, inequalities, and discriminations whether they arise from racial, social, economic, or ethnic causes. Equality of men in all their relationships is the goal of the liberal mind.

Peace is the ultimate priority of the liberal, superceding those of freedom, justice, and liberty (national sovereignty). This mind set thus explains why the liberal mind has been so willing to negotiate and collaborate with communistic powers like Russia. He naively believes that communists can be trusted to negotiate and compromise in good faith, even though the record plainly shows that the communists have repeatedly broken agreements when it serves their goal of achieving world domination.

Within our own land the liberal philosophy has wrought great harm to our educational system and jurisprudence. Progressive education with its advocacy of permissiveness has turned out undisciplined graduates who are caught up in drugs, sexual license, and utter disregard for property. Our jurisprudence system with its errant view of crime and criminals has resulted in repeat offenders and in an increase of crime.

The author feels the basic flaw in liberalism is that it has jelled into an ideology. An ideology is a systematic and self-contained set of ideas which takes over–riding precedence over practical experience and reality, and so all conceivable evidence that may run counter to it is explained away. Because the liberal refuses to let his doctrine be tempered and modified by actual empirical conditions, his programs and policies, when enacted, often flounder and fail miserably. Perhaps the Great Society envisioned by the late President Johnson is an example of a failed idea.

However, the greatest tragedy of liberalism is that communism, which is to its left, simply carries the liberal’s principles to their logical and practical extremes: acceptance of secularism, abandonment of traditions, and customs, even those nurtured and developed by the Christian faith, and boundless faith in science. Too often communism has allowed liberalism to run ahead of it in the political realm so as to facilitate its own eventual takeover.

Burnhams’ book is the trumpet’s alarm to alert us who cherish our Christian faith and appreciate our nation. For both our Christian faith and our nation are gravely imperiled if the liberal policies and decision-making in places of authority (government, education, and churches) are not checked.

A WORD FOR TODAY AND TOMORROW

LEST WE FORGET: A PERSONAL REFLECTION ONTHE FORMATION OF THE ORTHODOX PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, by Robert K. Churchill. Published by the OPC Historian’s Committee, P.O. Box 48, Coraopolis, PA 15108. Paper, 135pp. Price $3.00 (includes postage and handling). Review by the Editor.

Have you ever known a minister who organized a creative writing class in his church? This was Robert King Churchill, a unique and extraordinarily interesting personality in the history of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, which has been celebrating its 50th anniversary. He occasionally dropped in, in Seattle, where his visit might take us to the nearby U. of Washington, his alma mater, and the conversation might run in a variety of unexpected directions, from some recent Christian novel to the state of the church and nation. He was a rare combination of formidable ability in philosophical argument with the temperament of an artist and poet. When he died Sept. 20, 1980 he left 2 unfinished manuscripts, one, a history of his denomination, the other, an autobiography. Putting them together became the responsibility of Rev. George E. Haney. The result is a gripping little book that combines the vitality of a life story with unique insights on events that concerned the fundamentals of the Christian faith, expressed by an artist of the English language.

The story begins with a visit to and memories of the old First Presbyterian Church of Tacoma, Washington, where he as a n 18 year old, first heard the gospel and was converted, where he met his wife, Dorothy, and heard the call to the gospel ministry. (The wedding date already set was postponed seven years while he, a grade-school dropout, reluctantly went back to school.) He wrote the moving story of the Holy Spirit’s work through Dr. C.W. Weyer in that great church and then through the Seattle pastor, Dr. Mark A. Matthews who was said to have “made Seattle presbyterian” in his 8,000-member congregation with 27 branch Sunday Schools. Despite the thrilling labors of those great defenders of the faith against attacking liberalism, Churchill saw the high promise of those congregations undercut and weakened by an incoming dispensationalism . That misguided movement brought division and confusion to these big evangelical congregations that were not being adequately taught the Biblical doctrines of the creeds. Through personal struggle, Bob came to exchange the dispensational shrinking of the gospel for the vast Biblical vision of the “whole counsel of God” with its teaching of one great covenant of grace fulfilled in one Old and New Testament church.

Already registered to attend the dispensational Dallas Theological Seminary, he, at the advice of a new pastor, and becoming uneasy about dispensationalism, turned to Westminister instead. There he learned from Machen and Van Til to appreciate the wholeness of the gospel. This too was a corrective to his university training where he had “walked this dry philosophical riverbed” in which “training in science and philosophy was always attempting to elbow God out of his universe” (p. 57). At Westminster, in what “some would call a second conversion” to Calvinism (p. 47); he “came to realize the greatness of the God of the Bible, and that the Bible is indeed God’s self-revelation. Gradually, and in diverse ways, the doctrine of God dawned upon my soul like a cloudless morning. A reluctant assent gave way to the world-and-life view of the Reformed faith. My horizons were expanded . . . . I love those infinitudes that beckon the soul in the so-caned Calvinistic theology” (which he explained really meant “biblical Christianity”).

At this school he became immersed in the church battle around the “Westminster Movement.” Led by Dr. Machen, this group held that the big presbyterian church “could not exist only half-loyal to the word of God . . . . Christendom could not endure on a foundation consisting of the true gospel mixed with ‘another gospel.’” Because of this uncompromising stance, the liberals were determined to destroy it. The liberals’ method of trying to change the church doctrines “was dishonest, perhaps even diabolical” (p. 63). They appealed first for “tolerance,” but on gaining the upper hand, they compelled “those who stood for the old faith . . . to pay tribute or leave.” In their “Auburn Affirmation,” they held that “while facts of the gospel are given by God in Scripture, the interpretation of those facts is determined by man.”

Thus, a professor can encourage “his class to doubt many things in the Bible and the Christian faith,” and reassure objecting students by saying, “It all depends on your interpretation. Your pastor interprets it one way. I interpret it another way” (p. 67). The Auburn Affirmation dismissed fundamental Christian doctrines as mere “theories” Machen pointed out that this liberalism was really “a different religion” from Christianity.

The account graphically describes the way in which Machen and his followers had to oppose this liberal perversion of the gospel in the church missions. Rather than support missionaries that contradicted the gospel, they were driven to establish an independent board of mission, with Machen as president. For this, Machen was brought to trial. In that process any questioning of the acts of the Assembly and any appeal to the Bible were ruled out of order, as he was even denied the opportunity to make a defense and was suspended from office (pp. 96, 97). Thus Churchill’s vivid first-hand account introduces the beginnings and the early struggles of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. It is a story not on.ly full of interest, but one that, most importantly, describes (and sometimes perhaps anticipates) many of the same kind of developments that increasingly trouble us in our own churches and denomination. This is an excellent (and bargain) book to help us get ready to understand and prepare to meet them. It ought to be in our libraries and homes.

Two other O.P. Church Anniversary volumes have been published by and arc available from the committee mentioned at the head of this review. The ORTHODOX PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH: 1936-1986, edited by Charles G . Dennison, is a 358-page hardbound collection of materials about the churches, the denomination and the ministers, priced at $10.00 (including postage). PRESSING TOWARD THE MARK, edited by Charles G. Dennison and Richard C. Gamble, is a 490-page hardbound collection of 30 essays on various issues and events in the church’s history, priced at $15.00 (postpaid). Referred to in an article by Steven M. Schlissel in our April1987 OUTLOOK, it contains valuable materials on a wide variety of subjects which invite study and a 24-page bibliography of Machen’s writings.

For the general reader, Churchill’s lively little book should have the broadest appeal and can be highly recommended. May it find a place in many homes and churches.