Insight on the News

Baptists “Addicted to War”?

● “We in the Baptist tradition are addicted to war,” charged a Baptist leader speaking to the Ethics Commission of the Baptist World Congress held in Toronto, Canada, this past July. Delmar Smyth, professor of administration at Toronto’s York University, called on Baptists around the world to launch a peace crusade. “The choices before us are non-violence or nonexistence,” he said, as he urged Baptists to “take the pledge” for peace.

According to the Toronto “Star,” Smyth pointed out that “the idea of ‘a just war’ was not accepted by Christianity until it became an established religion in the fourth century A.D.” Additionally, the Baptist leader noted that Jesus’ early disciples “believed he taught and practised non-violence . . . Early Christian writers condemned war. They branded killing in war as murder.” Modern historians also have observed this early Christian stand. Now, one wonders, Will Baptists respond to the call for peace? What will they do in the event of another war?

Ill-fated Futurists

● In 1955, the editors of “Fortune” magazine asked prominent Americans to make their predictions about life in 1980. Recently the Boston “Sunday Globe” republished some of these speculations, noting that “they bristle with faith in the wonders of science and technology, productivity and the American dollar.

In 1955, George M. Humphrey, a former U.S. secretary of the treasury, declared: “We must work to ensure that the dollar of 1980 will buy at least as much food and clothing as the dollar will buy today, preferably and properly more.” David Sarnoff, former chairman of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) rhapsodized: “The ever more plentiful supplies of food and goods, higher standards of living and education and health​—these should make the containment of violence easier during the coming 25 years . . . We cannot know when or what form the coming ‘one world’ will take, but world law enforced by world police seems inherent in the age of science and technology.” And Henry R. Luce, former editor-in-chief of “Time,” “Life,” and “Fortune,” added: “Secure in his person, his larder, and his opportunities, the individual of 1980 can start his private quest from a higher plateau of earthly human achievement.”

Now we have seen what those 25 years actually brought. Does it inspire confidence in the optimistic promises of world leaders that men can cure the human condition? Or, rather, should it make realistic persons acknowledge that these truly are the “last days” during which the Bible says “critical times hard to deal with will be here”?​—2 Tim. 3:1; compare Matthew 24:3-22.

Loving to Be King

● According to an Associated Press dispatch, when Pope John Paul II visited Brazil last summer “he obviously continued to draw strength from the huge crowds that mob him, chanting ‘King, king, king, John Paul is our king.’” But when Jesus Christ, whose vicar John Paul claims to be, faced a similar situation he reacted quite differently. On seeing the miracles Jesus was performing, the crowds began to admire him, saying, “This is indeed the Prophet who is to come into the world,” and Jesus could see that the mood of the crowd was to “make him king.” But rather than ‘drawing strength’ as politicians do from such adulation, the Bible says “he fled again to the mountain, himself alone.”​—John 6:14, 15, “Catholic Confraternity” Version.

Showing that no man can play a kinglike role in the true Christian church, the apostle Paul drew a strong contrast between those who would try to do so and true apostles: “I wish you were really kings, and we could be kings with you! But instead, it seems to me, God has put us apostles (including Peter) at the end of his parade, with the men sentenced to death . . . you are celebrities, we are nobodies. . . . we work for our living with our own hands. . . . We are treated as the offal of the world, still to this day, the scum of the earth.” Do you think this Scriptural description of the apostles of Christ is reflected by the attitude of those who claim to be their successors?​—1 Cor. 4:8-13, Catholic “Jerusalem Bible.”