For the past two or three weeks, references have been made briefly to the debt that Christianity has to Judaism. Yet, it is a safe guess that few of us know, or take the trouble to find out, what Judaism itself is like. Christians have at times crusaded to convert Jews as if they were engaging in a rescue. On the other hand, Jews themselves show no missionary zeal. In the main, Judaism has been the religion of one people, trying to keep their covenant with God. The Jewish tradition holds that some day this covenant will include all humanity.
In recent years the question [has arisen] of whether modern Judaism should abandon its somewhat neutral position and assume a missionary role. Again, it is … a safe guess that it is unlikely to do so in the near future.
Unlike some other religions, Judaism has never held to the idea that there is no salvation outside that particular faith. Instead, it recognizes all righteous men as sharing in the world to come. Non-Jews need only obey the Seven Laws of Noah – the covenant God made with all mankind, instead of the 365 negative and 248 positive injunctions of the Jewish law.
Those among the Jews who seem most sympathetic to the establishment of Jewish missions are the liberal group, officially known as Reform Jews; and yet it is those who have the least to offer, for it is they who live least like the Orthodox Jews of the Old Testament days and most like the non-Jewish Christians around them. The liberal, indeed any other, Jew would hardly lay claim to personal salvation of the individual. But the Jews do believe that the plans for God’s kingdom on earth have been delivered into their keeping: that Judaism, as the religion with the most positive approach to all aspects of human life, holds the best promise for enrichment of the earthly life of mankind as a whole. As a good friend of mine, ex-Rabbi Franzblau once remarked, “We’d rather work to make good Catholics better, good Protestants better, than to work to make either one of them a poor member of the Jewish faith.” And that about sums up the traditional attitude of Judaism toward missions, and that tradition is likely to continue for some time to come.
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Five witnesses were announced this week in the first interdenominational competition in social welfare conducted by the National Council of Churches. Dr. Robert Thomas of Sevierville, Tennessee, was recognized for “Outstanding Achievement in Church-related Social Work.” He has been called the “Albert Schweitzer of the Smokies.” The Church of All Nations in Los Angeles will be cited also for outstanding social welfare in its community. Dr. Leonard Mayo of New York, executive director of the Association for the Aid of Crippled Children will be cited for contributions to the social welfare of the nation. Similar honors will go to Chaplain Russell Dicks of Duke University and professor John C. Bennett of Union Theological Seminary in New York City. All five will receive their citations in Cleveland during the first national Conference on Churches and Social Welfare, November 1 – 4.
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A Minneapolis man who describes himself as an atheist has started action to prevent the government from paying chaplains in the Armed Forces. He says his right to religious freedom is being violated. The action was taken by 73-year-old Frank Hughes.
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Francis Cardinal Spellman, the archbishop of New York, says he hopes this year’s national Catholic Youth Week “will help strengthen America’s family ties.” The observance will be held October 30 – November 6.
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Protestant groups in Highland, Indiana, are preparing to go to court to demand that a 20-foot crucifix be removed from a public park. The cross was dedicated this week in ceremonies attended by 4500 persons. It was built by the Knights of Columbus, a Roman Catholic organization, as a monument to veterans of all wars. Protestants say the crucifix is a “symbol of the Roman Catholic Church.”
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Washington: The American Federation of Labor President George Meany has been given the highest award that can be presented to a Catholic layman in the U.S., the Laetare (lay-tah’-ray) Medal. In making the presentation the Most Rev. Patrick O’Boyle, Archbishop of Washington, called the 61-year-old former plumber “the number one labor leader in the free world.”
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Milwaukee: The Rev. Victor Wrigley, pastor of a Lutheran church in Brookfield, has been formally charged with six acts of heresy, including a denial of the virgin birth and the resurrection. He is the third Lutheran minister in the Milwaukee area to be charged with heresy in recent months.
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Understanding ears seem not only to have heard the prayers of a young Korean orphan who wants to be the Billy Graham of his country, but the possessor of those ears did something about it. President William F. Foster of the Merit Clothing Company in Mayfield, Kentucky, says he has wired authorities that he is willing to sponsor the 19-year-old youth’s studies in the U.S. The lad’s desire to be a minister is traced by a U.S. army chaplain to the time he heard Billy Graham preach in Korea. The chaplain taught the boy to read and write English from hymnbooks and the Bible. Another friend says he preached the finest sermon of his life when the youth was his interpreter in Korea. The boy, Park Bon Il, has won a sponsorship that may enable him to accept a scholarship at Campbellsville, Kentucky, at a Baptist junior college. Park, or “Mike,” as he was known after he “joined” the U.S. Army, lived with Dr. and Mrs. John A. Abernathy of the Southern Baptist mission in Korea awhile. They are leaving soon and Mike has written his old chaplain friend that he wants to go to college in America, and then return to Korea as a preacher.
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British historian Arnold Toynbee says man’s work must be vitally related to religion if the work is to be healthy and beneficent. He has also told the Church and Work Congress of the Protestant Episcopal Diocese of Albany, New York that the price of salvation is the same as the price of liberty: eternal vigilance. Toynbee adds the exercise of this vigilance cannot be delegated to the public authorities. The historian says each of us must keep watch over himself, in the hope and with the help of God’s grace.
New York’s Governor Averell Harriman was also a speaker to the Episcopal gathering. He declared that unless the Free World sets as its goal the elimination of misery and hunger from the earth, out great production and productive capacity may crush us.
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Roman Catholic Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle of Washington says the Catholic Church believes that labor unions are desirable. He has termed them necessary to protect workers’ interests and develop a sound social order.
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Two Argentine Roman Catholic Church officials have left New York City for their homes and the posts they were deported from last June. Former dictator Juan Peron had exiled the Rev. Manuel Tato, auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires, and Monsignor Ramon Novoa, his vicar, during the revolt against Peron. Now the prelates have been invited to return by Argentina’s provisional president Eduardo Lonardi. The provisional government has annulled the law that Peron’s regime used to gag or jail critics for expressing disrespect for the president and his top aides. Under that law, scores of Catholic priests were arrested and jailed, many on charges of voicing disrespect form the pulpit.
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One of the ironies in the news recently is the refusal of the city of Providence, Rhode Island, to accept a statue of Thomas Paine because the hero of the American Revolution “was and remains a controversial figure.” In reply it should be emphasized that the struggle for American freedom, to which Paine’s writings contributed greatly, was a struggle to establish the rights of all men to speak their minds freely, without fear of penalty or repression by government. Exchange of opinions, however controversial they may be, is a hallmark of the kind of democracy that we have built into our history as a nation, and it represents the free exercise of the liberties epitomized in our own Bill of Rights. If such an outstanding historic figure as Thomas Paine can now be denied a place in Rhode Island, a state noted during its colonial days for liberal thought in speech, religion, and about all the other freedoms, one cannot help but wonder what this world of ours here in the United States is coming to. Are such people as Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and others of our great men, one by one, to be pilloried, figuratively speaking, years after their great contribution to the American way of life has become much a part of that way that we ofttimes fail to remember who contributed what?
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In the fight to put into practice the decree of the Supreme Court regarding segregation in the public schools, Time magazine a short time ago ran a story, featuring Thurgood Marshall, but also containing something of a report card on the states as to how well or how unwell they were moving toward what the Court declared unanimously and unequivocally to be the law of the land. This report card runs something like this:
Those states receiving a grade of “F” were the following: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. The states receiving a grade of “D” were Florida and Virginia. Arkansas got a “C+” while North Carolina racked up a “C-“. The “C” states were Delaware, Tennessee, and Texas, while those states receiving an “A” were Missouri and West Virginia. It is doubtful if the rating of Tennessee would be changed much by the recent Memphis court decree approving the admission of Negroes to graduate schools this year, senior college next year, and presumably eligibility for enrollment in first grade by 1972.
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During the coming week there will be observed United Nations Day, a day set aside to pay tribute to our only organized hope for one world, slim and despairing as that hope seems to be at times. Some of the voices opposing the United Nations today are indeed strange ones, and the arguments they give sound unappealing. Some of us can remember, either from personal experience or from our reading of history, the great vision of Woodrow Wilson who envisioned a league devoted to keeping peace among nations. Our experience with that League [of Nations] throughout the 1920s and 1930s showed how very unrealistic were some of the things we expected of it in the light of the lack of willingness on our part to clothe it with real powers to act. This unwillingness to grant more than a semblance rather than a substance of power caused the gradual collapse of this effort at collective security. And when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 there was nothing for the league to do but go into eclipse.
Many of use were sadly disappointed that in the formation of the United Nations the powers that be showed a willingness to concede little more than they had done in 1919 in connection with the league. Yet, despite the weaknesses in the United Nations, it is the only continuing agency we have in which to promote world public opinion through the forum process.
So it is that this week, Christians and Jews will be among those marking the 10th United Nations anniversary this weekend. At New York’s Protestant Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine, President Eisenhower’s special assistant Harold E. Stassen will speak this afternoon. Yesterday, Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Rabbis in Jewish congregations all over the country offered a prayer that read, in part, “We pray earnestly for the United Nations and for the nations united, that they may find the way to goodness transformed into life, to justice revealed in the processes of living, and to peace discovered through the abandonment of bloodshed and wars.”
At 4:00 tomorrow afternoon, a U.N. anniversary program on WJHL-TV will be given with Mrs. Betsy Harrel acting as coordinator. A representative from Korea and another from Lebanon will discuss “what the United Nations means to our country, and why we came to America to study.” This discussion will be largely of the interview type with the coordinator. After this, Dr. James E. Sutton, assistant professor of history at East Tennessee State College will be on hand to answer questions regarding the United Nations. And knowing Dr. Sutton pretty well, I can assure you that his answers will be reliable and well worth knowing. Watch your radio and TV page and newspapers for more materials regarding observation of this important day.
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This last item is something of an innovation, but one of the three people who are the most important persons in my scheme of things is observing her birthday anniversary today, and I wish to take this occasion to wish her sincerely a happy and successful one.