The Duke Divinity School Bulletin, Vol. 22

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Excerpt from The Duke Divinity School Bulletin, Vol. 22: February, 1957 "In Opelika [Alabama], a five-foot cross was burned in front of the home of a white Baptist minister, the Rev. W. F. Wagner, whose church had admitted a Negro delegation from the local high school to observe the church's presentation of "The Messiah." "In Montgomery... some 30 robed and hooded Klansmen were seen December 14, bringing food and money to the home of a sick person." - The Southern School News, Jan. 1957. These two adjoining bits of news can be taken as a fairly accurate symbol of the strangely mixed moral elements of the racial crisis in which we are involved in the life of the Southern church. Klansmen bring food to a sick person and burn a cross, no doubt with equal Christian fervor and concern. The same symbol which is burned outside the parsonage stands on the altar inside the church where the Messiah is honored. It is not strange that any Protestant pastor should be bewildered and frustrated in knowing how to be obedient to the cross, when he lives in and is party to a culture which gives such contrary and twisted meanings to its demands. This article is an attempt to suggest something of the task of the Protestant minister in the South today, knowing he must make hard choices on racial matters, but puzzled as to how. The first main task is for the pastor to read the racial problem aright. This means not only that he must be informed with accurate data, but that he must make the right moral diagnosis, from the standpoint of his Christian faith. It means that all the outer conflicts and oppositions are seen as expressions and symptoms on an internal conflict within the soul of man. As Myrdal's still-classic study diagnosed the issue, it is a problem "within people and not only between" people, a dilemma created by the tension between the American creed and racial prejudice. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.