Covenanter Witness Vol. 54 - Rparchives.org

. .
parents"
centuries,"
performance"
. .
Is
. . We
preaching."
church,"
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Not for years have Britons boiled and bubbled in a
religious
controversy as they did last week over the affair
of Mrs. Knight.
Margaret Knight, fortyish, wife of a psychology pro
fessor at Aberdeen University and herself a part-time lec
turer on the subject, had asked the BBC if she might broad
cast her views on what she called "scientific humanism."
The BBC duly scheduled her for three talks on its Home
Religion."
Service. Her subject: "Morals Without
Mrs.
Knight's first broadcast drew some criticism. Her second
lifted the roof of Broadcasting House.
Margaret Knight, who has no children of her own,
undertook to advise "humanist what to tell their
offspring about God. "We can tell them, that everyone be
lieved at one time, and some people believe now, that there
are two great powers in the world: a good power called
God, who made the world and who loves human beings .
and a bad power called the Devil, who is opposed to God and
who wants people to be unhappy and bad. We can tell them
that some people still believe this, but that most people now
think there's not really a Devil .
"And we can tell them that some people now don't
think there's really a God any more than there's really a
Santa Claus, though we often like to talk as though there
was.
"What about Christ I don't think that it would be de
sirable for children to grow up in ignorance of the New
Testament. We don't want a generation who don't know
what Christmas and Easter mean, who have never heard
of the star of Bethlehem or the angel at the door of the
tomb ... All I urge is that [the child] should hear them
treated frankly as legends . . . There
was a real Trojan War
and Hector and Achilles may well have been real people,
but we don't now believe Achilles was the son of sea nymphs.
Similarly, there was a real Jesus Christ who . . . was cruci
fied. But we don't now believe that he was the son of God
and a virgin or that he rose from the dead."
Although some of Britain's most eminent newspaper
editorialists started swinging at Mrs. Knight, philosophers,
including Bertrand Russell, have been saying the same
things for years. Clergymen and letter-to-the-editor writers
soon joined in. The issue: Should the government-owned
BBC have given Humanist Knight the air
The conservative Daily Telegraph snorted at the idea
that a question of free speech was involved. Atheistic views,
it held, are no more entitled to broadcast time than a de
fense of polygamy, homosexuality, or Communism. The con
servative Daily Mail did not agree. "Christianity is not so
weak a faith that its adherents should run screaming from
those who attack it," proclaimed the Mail on its front page.
"Mrs. Knight has perhaps shocked a number of people into
thinking for themselves." The liberal Star came out against
the BBC; the conservative Standard and News both defended
public airing of Mrs. Knight's views. The "panic" over Mrs.
Knight, said the Laborite Daily Herald, is "an insult to
public intelligence."
The Church of England's Archbishop of York dismissed
Mrs. Knight's views as "the stock in trade of atheists and
agnostics for at least two
and the Bishop of
Coventry rounded on both BBC ("irresponsible") and Mrs.
Knight (a "pernicious
by a "brusque, socompetent,
bossy female"). The Rev. Dr. Donald Soper, fireeating
Methodist leader, went to her defense. "The alterna
tive to such discussion is to mollycoddle religion ... As
Christians we should welcome the opportunity for examina
tion of the fundamentals of our faith .
When the Trumpet Gives an Uncertain Sound
A very casual reading
February 9, 1955
.
of the above shows how
weak is the call to the battle of the Lord's official
trumpeter, the Church, blowing hot and cold, driven
and tossed by every wind of doctrine (if you will
pardon mixed metaphors). In confirmation of this,
permit another quotation from TIME.
Is Adultery Forgivable
Should one infidelity disrupt a marriage No, says the
Archbishop of Canterbury, and last week British newspapers
were making shocker headlines out of it.
The papers first picked up the Archbishop's answer in
an Anglican pamphlet called The Church and Marriage.
"It is the law which has made a single act of adultery a
ground for divorce, not the
he said. "The church
would wholly approve if the law was no longer content to
accept a single act of adultery as a sufficient
ground."
Other
British prelates have gone on record in the same vein
lately. Unfaithfulness, said the Archbishop of York, "should
never be treated as the one unforgivable
sin,"
and Bishop
J.W.C. Wand of London said in a sermon : "It is a pernicious
idea that if one partner has been unfaithful, then the home
must be destroyed."
Methodist leaders chimed in agreement, but the British
press seemed to think otherwise. The idea was "startling"
to the Daily Mail, which editorialized on its front page: "As
Dr. Wand reminds us, forgiveness is a Christian virtue.
But so is chastity
.
are told, in the Seventh Com
mandment, 'Thou shalt not commit adultery.'
It does not
say, 'Thou shalt not commit adultery more than Or
more than twice ... a single act of infidelity to be ap
plied only to one sudden fall from grace, or also to an in
fatuation that may
ever . .
go on for weeks and then end for
The sensational Daily Mirror polled some of its 4,432,700
readers and found that three out of four husbands and
three out of five wives thought a husband's single act of
adultery was ground for divorce. When the adultery was
committed by a wife, three-fourths of the husbands again
voted thumbs down on the marriage, though only a little
more than half the wives agreed.
Certainly every sin is forgivable where there is
repentance unto life. But the Church must hold to
the standard, "Be ye holy, for I am holy." "Thou hast
given a banner to them that fear thee that it may be
displayed (unsmirched and at full mast) because
of the truth." Ps. 60 :4 paranthesis mine.
I write these things because so many people are
saying, "We are leaving the Covenanter Church for
a larger group. It doesn't make much difference
where you belong. All churches are good, and they
have good
I have a letter on my desk
from a family that moved out to the suburbs of one
of our large cities, and the distance and the traffic
were so inconvenient, that they selected one of the
most conservative Presbyterian churches for their
church home. But it wasn't home, and now they are
back home in a Covenanter church and they say it's
worth going twice the distance to be back.
Yes it does make a difference to you and to your
children, and your children's children when you sell
the heritage of your fathers. We are printing on a
later page an article "A Wonderful and Horrible
Thing,"
for though nothing is more distasteful to
us than throwing stones at other churches, there are
times when most unpleasant duties must be done.
Would you entrust a blind child of yours to be led
by a blind guide 85