Too Much Central Heating?

Murdo Ewen Macdonald remembers his first West of Scotland congregation--on the Isle of Skye--as "very churched people. The acids of the modern temper haven't corroded them much."

Last week Presbyterian Macdonald, 36, now pastor of Edinburgh's St. George's West Church, told Americans how to clean up the kind of corrosion he has found outside the Isle of Skye. To a big midsummer congregation in Manhattan's Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church and to students at Union Theological Seminary, he gave the same message: "The thing wrong with religion today the world over, and especially in America, is that it is too centrally heated, too cozy and comfortable." His remedy: less social psychology and good fellowship, more emphasis on an austere gospel of sacrifice. Said Macdonald:

"Christian evangelism will never make an impact until it regains the genius of the Cross, the capacity for sacrifice. Look what the Communists have required of just ordinary people . . . Religion today doesn't call it out because it doesn't demand it."

Macdonald learned the worth of sacrifice in a hard school. In 1942, after two years as a British army chaplain, he switched to combat duty with the paratroopers. A bit later, while commanding a platoon in North Africa, he was taken prisoner. Until the end of the war, he ministered to fellow prisoners, mostly U.S. airmen, in a Luftwaffe camp. "The war," he said, "taught us the indescribable latent courage of the ordinary person."

This spiritual courage can only be evoked by a strong spiritual message. Although Macdonald greatly admires the informal relations which often exist between U.S. ministers and their congregations ("Perhaps we in Britain are more formal"), he doubts that good fellowship and social consciousness can be substituted for active Christianity.

"We must preach a social gospel, but we must first of all preach the Word . . . To call the wrath of God a metaphor, to smoothly rationalize Hell, to smother the Cross in sentimentality is to play havoc with Christianity; you may have a religion left, but it is not the religion of the New Testament."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.