Poling Y. Pacifism

To Christians who find it difficult to reconcile their faith with participation in war, a famed Protestant clergyman last week made a Christian's answer, A Preacher Looks At War (MacMillan; $1.25). Daniel Alfred Poling tells why he sees no conflict with Christian faith in the defense of the things on which Christianity is based.

Dan Poling, pastor of Philadelphia's Baptist Temple, president of World's Christian Endeavor Union, has been deeply touched by war. His son, Army Chaplain Clark Vandersall Poling, to whose memory the book is dedicated, died last February in the sinking of an army trans port in the North African campaign. He and three other chaplains (a Methodist, a Roman Catholic, a Jew) gave their life belts to soldiers who had none, were last seen kneeling together on a canting deck in their final prayer.

"Immoral and Unchristian." Tall, broad-shouldered Dr. Poling is editor as well as pastor (his Christian Herald, potent Protestant monthly, has a circulation of 250,000). In both capacities he has consistently espoused the down-to-earth view of religion, shown little patience with unpractical applications of faith. He stood out among U.S. Protestant leaders for a steadfast refusal to espouse pacifism after World War I. He still finds pacifism "immoral and unchristian." To those who profess it, believing they thereby follow Jesus' teachings literally, Poling quotes from P. W. Wilson's Newtopia to point out that Jesus asked nothing of society, had no home, no money, spent his life in service of others. He argues that unless a pacifist can live as Jesus lived (an impossibility to day), he cannot justify his stand.

"Life," writes Dan Poling, "is no longer a debate, it is a practice; no longer a theory, but a fact; for now we live not in peace but in war.

"War is not holy. . . . War is the sum of man's inhumanity to man. But there are holy causes. Freedom is holy.. . . Human personality, declared by Jesus to be the most sacred thing, is holy. What then should we do when holy things are beneath the war machine or threatened by it? This is the issue and, in the presence of this reality, the overwhelming number of those who seek to know the mind of Christ find themselves following Him when they fling their lives against the war machine. . . ."

"Let the Church have no blessing for war, but shame upon us as churchmen if we have no blessing for our sons and no blessings for our governments who, in the presence of war, defend with their very lives our holy things."

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