“An Absolutely Damning Indictment”

The Watchtower, May 15, 1958

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Dr. John Knox, professor of sacred literature at Union Theological Seminary, commented not long ago about Christendom’s religion: “A woman writing in one of our national magazines a few years ago remarked that early in her career she turned from the church because it seemed to her to have too little contact with either the first century or the twentieth to be significant. . . . I have not forgotten the sting of that opening remark, the sharp decisiveness of her dismissal of the church. Can anyone deny that there is truth in her indictment? And who will dispute that, in so far as it is true, it is an absolutely damning indictment? Certainly, critics may argue, we have the right to expect that the church shall be in touch with reality somewhere: if not with our own century, then at least with the first; if not with the first, then by all means with the twentieth. Or to state the issue from the Christian’s point of view, what could we say in justification of a Christianity that was both unauthentic and irrelevant?”—Union Seminary Quarterly Review, November, 1953.

Also in this issue

• Announcements
• Anticlericism Dead or Dormant
• Balfour’s Speech on Uniting Mankind
• Check Your Memory
• Coincidence
• Does Superstition or Knowledge Govern You
• Increased Knowledge Brings Lasting Benefits
• Questions From Readers
• Right Conduct Also a Witness
• Shipwreck Explained
• The South Pacific Calls
• What Should Sermons Say
• Why Youth Is Uncommitted
• Why the Jewish Count of Time Differs
• “Love One Another”
• “The Universal Legends of a Flood”