The method they employ is based on a theory. It is a theory that the Bible contains “abiding messages” placed in a “transient setting.” The Bible, for example, is full of stories about devils and angels. Now, modern men do not believe in devils and angels. These are “categories” which they have outgrown. But what the devils and angels stood for are evils and blessings which modern men still encounter. We have, therefore, only to “decode” the Bible, and where it speaks of devils to see temptations, sin, disease, pain, and suffering, which have a psychic origin; where it speaks of angels to remember that sense of unseen friendliness which may help us at a crisis in our lives. The old wine is still good, but it needs to be put in new bottles. “The modern preacher’s responsibility is thus to decode the abiding meanings of Scripture from outgrown phraseology.” This is not so difficult a thing to do for the devils and the angels. But a little reflection will show, I think, that in dealing with the major themes of religion, the solution is not so easy. The real difficulty appears when Dr. Fosdick attempts to decode the biblical promise of immortal life. He begins by rejecting completely the resurrection of the flesh and any kind of immortality which is imagined as the survival of the physical person. Yet he believes [p042] in “the persistence of personality through death.” For he maintains that without this belief the final victory of death would signify “the triumphant irrationality of existence”; not to believe in immortality is to submit to “mental confusion.” Speaking quite frankly, however, he cannot easily imagine “a completely disembodied existence.” Yet it is obviously not easy to imagine the persistence of personality through death once you have made up your mind not to imagine a concrete heaven inhabited by well-defined persons.