of us a life of honesty, kindness, peace, and love; and he promises us a destiny that will fulfill all the highest aspirations of our race. That destiny lies beyond this physical universe which we share. It is in another dimension altogether.
The most powerful religious impulse in our civilization is one that springs from a revelation of this God that we have now bound up in a book called the Bible. It tells us not only that God is the Creator of all that is, and that he made the human race to live in communion with him and to share a life of love and peace and joy, but frankly shows that something went wrong. At the heart of this revelation is the story of God’s rescuing action, what we call his “grace” offered to forgive what we have done wrong, and keep us on the right path. Roughly a billion of us recognize one called Jesus Christ as the Savior of the world, one who by living and dying for us has reconciled us to the living God. We believe that he is the true Lord of all of us and that as the perfect reflection of God he will reign over the whole universe. We believe that he is the one in whom all things will find their ultimate meaning and coherence. These beliefs have, in one way or another, been the driving-power behind the story of our civilization.
Dear Martian, you may know this already. You may have a far deeper knowledge of this God than we have. You may not have fallen into what we know as sin and therefore didn’t need to be redeemed. You may have a far closer communion with the Eternal than we have ever known. I just wanted you to know that billions of us would not express our hopes and aspirations entirely with the words: “We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations.” In the light of our faith we are less optimistic about “solving the problems” on our own, and, while it would be delightful to “join a community of galactic civilizations” most of us have a more immediate hope of reaching the eternal world, and a final hope of a glorious community called the Kingdom of God.”
If you don’t like that letter how about trying to write your own?
“This World, with Devils Filled”: Luther’s Answer and Ours
Editor’s Introduction
On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther nailed his ‘95 Theses Against Indulgences’ to the door of the University Church in Wittenberg. The Augustinian monk wasn’t trying to incite a revolution so much as he was calling for a theological debate on the controversial practice of the selling of Indulgences. Luther’s arguments, however, were run off on the newly invented printing press. Suddenly people all over Europe were talking about the brash young priest in Germany who had dared to challenge the authority of the Pope himself.
David Read’s Reformation sermon largely bypasses the 500 year-old debate that Luther’s protest sparked. Instead it seizes the occasion to champion what Luther himself was essentially championing: God’s free, undeserved grace. Read sees grace escaping from the pages of the Bible and lighting up the beauty of the whole natural world. He sees grace in a child’s anger-diffusing remark, in the courage of a stricken family at a memorial service, in the splendour of his city on a fresh fall morning. Above all, he sees God’s grace breaking upon us in Jesus’ revolutionary life and teachings, and especially in that awe-filled moment when “the embodiment of grace let himself be crushed by the very forces of which we are so afraid today.”
“This World, With Devils Filled”: Luther’s Answer And Ours
A Sermon preached by David H. C. Read at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church on Reformation Sunday, October 27, 1974
Text: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God . . . ” Ephesians 2:8
Readings: Joshua 1:1–9; Ephesians 2:1–10; John 16:26–33
Seen from forty thousand feet this is a fair and beautiful world. The other day I flew in from the west coast over a pure and sparkling desert, then the folding, blue ranges of the Rockies with their misty turrets, then the quilted plains soaking up the riches of the autumn sun, till leveling down slowly over the flaming tints of New England. Even at five thousand feet New York itself is a dream city on such a day, and rises to meet you as a tapestry of streets and parks and bridges, as a glittering jewel in its silver setting of rivers and ocean. This is when you really want to shout: “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork.” “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.”
Halfway across the continent the air traveler who can’t spend all his time looking out of the window consumes the last unnecessary calories on his tray (I never knew what calories tasted like until I met airline food) folds up his table, and picks up the morning paper. In a few minutes it’s a very different world he is seeing. Somewhere up in the Maritimes a storm has struck and pictures show families hopelessly digging out their belongings from the wreckage. In the Bronx a young woman has been found murdered in her apartment. School children in Boston and Brooklyn are scratching and stoning each other because some have black skins and others white. A picture of a mother and daughter from West Africa in the last stages of starvation cries out against the food that has already been wasted on this plane and calls out to the great breadbasket that stretches endlessly below us. He turns the pages. Human beings have been torn to pieces in Ireland in the name of religion. The Holy Land is the target of warring powers. Somewhere diplomats are conferring so that there may be some pause in the race for weapons that can destroy every living creature on this planet. Then page after page reports the suspicion and the cynicism with which we have come to regard the political scene. It’s a different world the traveller sees when he looks again through that little window.
“And though this world, with devils filled,
Should threaten to undo us”
wrote Martin Luther, and we now know what he means. Fifty years ago these words would have had a curiously antique flavor. “With devils filled?” That’s the way they used to talk, poor dears; we know better now: devils went out with Santa Claus: there’s nothing wrong with the world that better education and a little Christian optimism won’t be able to cure. Now we feel closer to Luther than to the blinkered idealists of the recent past. And to be closer to Luther is to be closer to the Bible. For the Bible tells us that this world, created to declare the glory of God, is a fallen world, and that humankind, made in the image of the Creator, has been enslaved by demonic powers. This doesn’t mean that the world is bound for hell and that every human being is some kind of monster in disguise. But it does mean that there is a mystery of iniquity abroad that defies the simple solutions of human ingenuity. There is such a thing as sin which, as Karl Menninger has recently pointed out, has been strangely neglected by the modern Church.
Has there ever been a time since perhaps when Luther lived when ordinary men and women have been more baffled and dismayed by the virulence of human passions, the sheer irrationality of the evil things human beings can do to one another? Particularly in this country where ideals have glowed so brightly and hopes have been highest we are going through a period of shock, anxiety, and near-despair. We know exactly what Luther meant when we sang of “this world with devils filled” that “threaten to undo us.” The trouble in the Church has been that we have wanted to hear the Good News without first taking a hard look at the bad. We have sometimes spoken as if our redemption was little more than a helping hand to humanity in its rise to perfection, and that the Son of God didn’t really need to die to save us from our sins. It’s time to see again in all its grim, demonic depths, the predicament of the human race, the fearful question to which the Gospel gives its answer. Luther, Calvin, Augustine, Paul, and Jesus himself would echo in this spiritual struggle the old military maxim: “Never underestimate the power of the enemy.”
We need to be saved. Let’s hear that word again with its full Biblical weight, without any undertones of sticky pietism. We need to be saved from evil in all its forms—individual, social, and cosmic. That’s why Jesus taught
