Wanted: Christians

The world is sick and the disease is skepticism. But now, unlike the Victorian era, it is not so much man's skepticism of God as man's skepticism of man. So declares David Elton Trueblood, 43, chaplain and professor of the philosophy of religion at Stanford University, in The Predicament of Modern Man (Harper; $1).

Refining his diagnosis, Professor Trueblood, a Quaker, declares of most current church practice: "What mankind desperately needs is Justice, Mercy and Truth, but what we are offered is some ugly stained-glass windows and a holy tone and a collection plate full of dimes."

More specifically he prescribes: ". . . Our central need is for a contemporary redemptive society which will do for us what the redemptive society envisaged by Augustine did for his generation. . . . Christianity won in the Roman Empire, not chiefly as a belief, though it was a belief, but more as a self-conscious fellowship. ... A group of 50 really devoted Christians who are not in the least apologetic and who are willing to make the spread of the gospel their first interest would affect mightily any campus in the country, no matter how great the initial opposition might be. The same can be said of an average town. The prospects for the gospel might be better if the average town had only a few dozen Christians in place of the few thousand church members now listed."

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