Page 5776 – Christianity Today (2024)

A structure to embody the spirit of last summer’s Lausanne congress on world evangelization is beginning to take shape. Last month, forty-two of the forty-eight members of the Lausanne Continuation Committee for World Evangelization (LCCWE) met in Mexico City and charted preliminary directions.

There will be a general secretary, an eleven-member executive committee (its first meeting will be in Africa in August), an annual meeting of the LCCWE, and a Consultative Council of about 200 Lausanne participants who will meet every five years or so. Regional committees will seek to implement the Lausanne mandate “to pray, to plan, and to work together for the evangelization of the whole world.” At the same time, the LCCWE members intend to maintain a low profile, eschewing the building of a bureaucracy and keeping budget and staff minimal.

In a keynote address, LCCWE honorary chairman Billy Graham said he believes God has raised up evangelicalism “as a reaffirmation of historic first-century Christianity” in a time of theological defection by liberals and amid dazzling social and political changes worldwide. He noted the rise of Third World mission agencies able to send missionaries to countries where Westerners no longer can go, and he suggested the LCCWE should help the agencies as part of an over-all strategy for reaching the world. Evangelism, he maintained, should be the LCCWE’s paramount concern.

A few members, led by Anglican John R. W. Stott of London, in sometimes lively discussion lobbied for a broader approach, including greater emphasis on social concern. But in the end, the majority seemed agreed that evangelism was an effective glue that could hold everybody together while social issues could be divisive.

Among goals listed by regional caucuses were greater development of cross-cultural missions, regional and national strategies for evangelism, motivation and training of both clergy and laity for evangelism, an information network, coordination of relief agencies, and providing more evangelistic tools. Africans and Asians said biblical theological education needs to be strengthened at all levels, with more scholarships provided. Latin Americans and Europeans were concerned about increasing evangelical influence in the mass media and securing better training facilities in communication. Participants said more full-time evangelists are needed in the Arab world.

The European caucus said it is important to continue the debate begun at Lausanne in such areas as Christianity and culture, evangelism and social action, and renewal of the Church. (Of all the groups at Lausanne, the Europeans may be the least likely to make it in the ongoing cooperative relationship envisioned by the LCCWE. There are already acute differences over inspiration of Scripture, matters of separatism, and the order of priorities on the Church’s agenda.)

In proposing the establishment of regional committees, the LCCWE in a statement urged its members from each region “to be highly sensitive to all those already existing associations and fellowships which share similar aims and spirit, to seek the largest-hearted measure of cooperation, and to use whatever flexibility is necessary where these may be needed for internal reorganization, structuring and programming in ways which are appropriate to its culture and geared specifically to this task.”

Time was the only news medium that covered the LCCWE deliberations, which were closed to the press. Bernard Diederich, Time’s Mexico City reporter, flushed out the name of the man the LCCWE decided to ask to be general secretary: Gottfried B. Osei-Mensah, 40, pastor of the Nairobi (Kenya) Baptist Church. Committee members wanted to delay disclosure in order to give Osei-Mensah—traveling in Europe at the time—opportunity to respond and meet with his congregation, but Diederich was faced with a tight deadline.

Osei-Mensah, born in Ghana and educated at Birmingham University in England, was once a sales engineer with Mobil Oil in Ghana, became head of the Pan-African Fellowship of Evangelical Students of West Africa in 1966, and accepted the Nairobi pastorate in 1971. He is considered one of the most able evangelicals on the continent.

Selected as LCCWE executive committee members were Bishop Festo Kivengere (Africa), Philip Teng (East Asia), Ramez L. Atallah (West Asia), Armin Hoppler (Europe), Nilson Fanini (Latin America), Thomas Zimmerman (North America), Leighton Ford (North America), Bishop A. Jack Dain (Oceana), John Stott (United Kingdom), Kenneth Chafin (North America), and Osei-Mensah. Dain, who headed the Lausanne congress, was named LCCWE chairman, and Chafin is finance chairman. All were appointed pro tern (to serve until the 1976 meeting) except Osei-Mensah, whose term is for two years.

PRESERVING THE IMAGERY

Some people are carrying the feminism crusade too far. That is the upshot of a reply by Editor Kenneth H. Wood of Review and Herald, the Seventh-day Adventist magazine, to a suggestion in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies that Christians cease using masculine pronouns to refer to God and feminine pronouns for the Church. Jesus was born a man, points out Wood in a January editorial, and he spoke of God as his father. The impact of strong imagery and symbolism in the Scriptures would be destroyed by such a move, Wood warned.

“In our efforts to do justice to the feminist movement or any other contemporary movement, let us not do injustice to the Word of God,” he exhorts.

Canterbury Enthroned

Amid traditional pomp and colorful ceremony, Donald Coggan, 65, was enthroned last month before a congregation of 3,000 in Canterbury Cathedral as the 101st Archbishop of Canterbury. The service was described as unprecedented in its ecumenical character.

For the first time in 400 years, the Vatican was represented (Cardinal Jan Willebrands, Cardinal Leo Suenens of Malines-Brussels, Cardinal Francis Marty of Paris, and Archbishop Bruno Heim, the papal envoy to England). Twelve black-robed Orthodox patriarchs were there, along with Methodist and assorted Free Church leaders, Quakers, Salvationists, Lutheran bishops from all over Europe, and scores of other church dignitaries. Presiding Bishop John M. Allin of the Episcopal Church was present. Evangelist Billy Graham also attended.

Prime Minister Harold Wilson headed a procession of Parliament members. Scores of Anglican bishops and suffragans (assistants) filed in. A fanfare of trumpets heralded the arrival of the Prince of Wales, Princess Margaret, Prince Charles, the Duke of Kent, and other royalty. Another fanfare greeted Coggan, caped in gold.

In a sermon, Coggan called for an end to divisions among Christians and for greater sacrifice to help the world’s deprived people.

Outside, a group of Scottish Baptists demonstrated against the presence of Willebrands, and security forces kept watch against possible attacks by the terrorist Irish Republican Army.

Cueing The Charismatics

A Catholic bishops’ committee last month issued a statement endorsing the “positive and desirable directions” of the so-called Charismatic Renewal movement in the church. The statement, a slightly revised version of a paper released at the U. S. bishops’ meeting in Washington, D. C., in November, cautioned the charismatics to maintain strong ties with the church and clergy.

While acknowledging that some ecumenical “sharing” can be beneficial, the paper warned that “continued or exclusive participation in ecumenical groups runs the risk of diluting the sense of Catholic identity.” It pointed out the need for judgment and discernment on the matter of gifts of the Spirit, such as tongues, prophecies, and healing. Sacrificial Christian love is the greatest authenticating sign of the Holy Spirit, the paper pointed out.

The document, generally pastoral in tone, is intended to be a guide to clergy and laity alike in evaluating and responding to the rapidly growing neo-Pentecostal movement in the church.

Ideal Family Relationship

President Bernice McNeela of the St. Joan’s International Alliance, an international Catholic women’s organization, protested to Catholic bishops about the traditional Scripture text read at all masses on Holy Family Sunday in December. The text in Colossians 3 includes Paul’s admonition for wives to be in submission to their husbands. A liturgy booklet carries the explanatory note: “Paul outlines ideal family relationships.” The alliance says the reading is anti-feminist and unrealistic in modern times. A better selection would be the mutual-love exhortations of First John 4, said Ms. McNeela.

Breakfast With The President

Ever since 1953 the high and the mighty in Washington, D. C., have been getting together once a year for what is now known as the National Prayer Breakfast.

Some 3,000 persons—representing most members of Congress, the Supreme Court, the Administration, and other top levels of national leadership—gathered in the Washington Hilton hotel on January 30. In a symbolic gesture of identity with the world’s needy, they ate a simple breakfast of porridge instead of the usual lavish fare (paid for by anonymous donors).

In an unusual “call to fellowship,” Evangelist Billy Graham warned that the nation is in a time of “great crisis” and that survival depends on its people turning to God and away from evil ways.

Congressman Albert Quie, a Minnesota Lutheran and the main speaker, called for hope to be placed in Christ and for love to prevail in life. President Ford, introduced by former Oregon Congressman John Dellenback as “a man of faith and a brother Christian,” told how the power of prayer sustains him, and he appealed for prayers for the nation.

In the early days the event was known as the Presidential Prayer Breakfast. The first one, held at the outset of Dwight Eisenhower’s administration, was organized by Eisenhower’s campaign manager, Frank Carlson, a U. S. senator at the time, former Kansas governor, and president of the Washington-based International Christian Leadership (ICL) ministry. (ICL had been founded years earlier by Norwegian immigrant Abraham Vereide, an ordained Methodist.) A big assist came from hotel magnate Conrad Hilton, who owed Carlson a favor. Hilton had wanted to meet Billy Graham, and Carlson had gotten the two together in Denver. Hilton hosted the breakfast at the Mayflower Hotel.

Officially, the annual breakfast is sponsored by the House and Senate prayer groups (the Senate prayer group was begun the morning after Pearl Harbor was bombed, the House group began in 1943). The real work force behind the event over the years, however, has been ICL, disbanded in 1971 in favor of a loosely structured entity known today as “the Fellowship.”

Every year leaders of the Fellowship and the congressional prayer groups must hassle with several big problems. They want to keep the breakfast profile as low as possible to avoid the show of civil religion, the displeasure of strict church-state separatists, and the corruption of purpose. One way they try to achieve this goal is by banning as much of the press as possible (this year TV coverage was prohibited), irking a lot of reporters.

Those in charge also want to expose to the breakfast’s spiritual impact all the government, business, labor, and other leaders they can get, but seats are at a premium. A lot of church people manage to snag invitations, thanks to the frenzied string-pulling and cajoling that goes on at leadership level. Ministers and other church figures fly in from all over the nation to have breakfast with the President.

The breakfast programs have had increasingly clear-cut evangelical content of late. Last year, former senator Harold Hughes created a near-revival atmosphere with a moving testimony of his conversion and an appeal to turn to God, followed by unprecedented praying aloud at the tables. This year he led in similar praying.

There has been some significant turning to God in post-Watergate Washington. At last month’s meeting of the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB), Julie Nixon Eisenhower told a women’s group of her own journey of faith. Last January someone invited her to attend a Bible study for congressional wives which she began attending regularly. It was led by Campus Crusade for Christ volunteer Eleanor Page.

“In March I made a decision to accept Christ,” said Mrs. Eisenhower. “It has really changed my life.” She said Christ enabled her to handle better the bitterness and discouragement she experienced often over the past year. At times it’s hard to live the Christian life, she said, but “I know that God loves and accepts me completely.” She called on her listeners to “spread the Word.” It was her first public testimony.

President Ford himself addressed the NRB. It was his seventh consecutive visit to the annual NRB convention. In introducing him, evangelist Billy Zeoli expressed gratitude for Ford’s “Christian testimony.” Speaking about the First Amendment, Ford got enthusiastic applause when he implied that a national leader has the right to speak up publicly about his faith. He said he subscribes to the separation of church and state clause but doesn’t think it was intended “to separate public morality from public policy.”

He congratulated the broadcasters for beaming into the homes of America “the ageless axioms of divine truth.”

He concluded by quoting Proverbs 3:5, 6: “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart: and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.”

Suddenly somewhat choked, Ford asserted: “That is what I have tried to do, and will try to do, as your President.”

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Elevating The Evangelicals

Suffragan (assistant) Bishop of Woolwich David Sheppard, 45, a former British cricket star and founder of a social-welfare ministry to families in London’s East End, was named to the higher Anglican post of bishop of Liverpool. He succeeds another evangelical, Stuart Blanch, who recently became archbishop of York after fellow evangelical Donald Coggan was elevated from York to Canterbury. “We’re taking over the Church of England,” quipped a leader of Britain’s evangelicals.

Sheppard, the church’s youngest diocesan bishop, was widely noted in the 1950s for both his prowess and his Christian witness on the cricket field. Steadfastly refusing to play on Sundays, he left cricket in 1957 to work in urban ministry. He came into new prominence last year for his book about the church’s role in the inner city, Built as a City, acclaimed by many church leaders as the best Christian book of the year.

The Gospel In Creole

Gospel proclamation in Haiti is due a boost this year with the publication of a fresh translation of the new Testament and Psalms in Creole. The complete Old Testament is expected in about three years. (A Catholic version of the New Testament in Creole was recently published in Port-au-Prince.)

Approximately six million persons speak Creole, a sort of pidgin French, making it the fifth-largest language in the Western Hemisphere (after English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French). As many as 90 per cent of the five million Haitians may speak it, even though French has remained the nation’s official language since the country attained its independence in 1804 and became the second republic in the hemisphere. Comparatively few people understand much French.

Voodoo folk religion constitutes the main belief of most of the people of Haiti. Roman Catholicism, however, has been the predominant formal religion, and many Haitians practice a blend of the two. The Catholics used Latin in church services until Vatican II, and the old Protestant denominations that came into the country in the 1800s used French, thereby becoming identified with the elite classes of the towns. Evangelical missionaries entering Haiti later went into rural areas where the vast majority of the people—Creole and peasant—live. These missionaries naturally began to preach in Creole and helped to make it a respectable language for church worship. Today the West Indies Mission’s Radio Lumiere and the Oriental Missionary Society’s 4VEH cover the country with several hours a day of Creole broadcasting.

Professor Marlin Jeschke of Goshen College recently returned from Haiti, where he made a study of the survival of the African religious tradition. He says the Laubach literacy program and rising national consciousness have also helped to redeem Creole. “Even the government and older churches are joining the trend,” he says. “Parliamentary discussion in Creole is now acceptable, and court cases can proceed in Creole. One Catholic church holds a creative Creole folk mass, and the Anglican cathedral in Port-au-Prince has gone to Creole for its Sunday-evening service.”

Earlier translations of Scripture in Creole were welcomed by the people and well used, but the new translation is said to use techniques that are able to reflect much more of the Creole potential. The translating was coordinated by Anglican clergyman Roger Desir, who is also compiling a Creole dictionary, and publication is being sponsored by the United Bible Societies, the London-based umbrella organization of various national Bible societies.

“The story of Haiti’s Creole Bible sounds like some old chapters out of our history,” notes Jeschke. “Once Latin was the official language of Western Europe, and German, French, and English were just oral languages. In all these cases some man of courage took the first step to make a literary language out of an oral one. Haiti is at this linguistic juncture now.”

He predicts that the new Creole Bible will make a cultural impact in standardizing a written Creole, much as Luther’s Bible did for German and Tyndale’s for English. “Best of all,” he adds, “this Creole Bible will bring the Christian faith into the everyday life of many Haitians.”

SAVING THE CENSORS

The film The Exorcist was not submitted to South African censors because they “would have died on the spot,” a Johannesburg court was told in an unrelated case.

Too Much Too Soon?

Nearly 100 delegates representing sixteen denominations with a total membership of 7.5 million were on hand for last month’s annual meeting of the North American Area Council of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, held at Montreal. The body is a loosely structured association of Presbyterian, Reformed, and Congregational churches in Canada, the United States, and the Caribbean.

As last year, the delegates agreed to make as a matter of continuing concern “the possibility of forming a transnational Reformed Church in North America.” Yet they turned down as “premature” a motion to ask member churches to explore the union possibility. The vote was taken after a lengthy debate on the proposal to form a new church that would be “more ethnically, economically, and racially inclusive than any of the member churches.”

In other action, the delegates called for an investigation of alleged involvement in Chile by the Central Intelligence Agency, for amnesty for Korean clergymen and laypersons imprisoned on political charges, and for democratic reforms in Korea.

The council’s theological committee presented papers on the theological basis of human rights and on the theology of liberation. Major points in these pages will be discussed at the 1977 world meeting of the alliance.

Pastor Arthur R. McKay of the Knox United Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati was elected chairman of the Council. President James I. McCord of Princeton Seminary continues as general secretary.

Celluloid Champs

The Exorcist, the controversial movie about demon possession, holds fifth place among the “all-time box office champion films,” according to an annual tabulation by Variety, the show-business paper. Released in late 1973, it had produced $66.3 million in rentals by the end of 1974, the paper said.

The Godfather leads the list with rental income of $85.7 million, followed by The Sound of Music, Gone With the Wind, and The Sting, which won the Academy award as best picture of 1974 and drew 68.4 million.

Profits For Propagation

Arab oil money is being used for a lot of purposes—including the propagation of Islam. Some black Africans are concerned. They say their Arab neighbors in the north live in Africa but don’t really have African interests at heart. Arab government policies are determined in light of what is good for the league of Arab nations, not what is good for the rest of Africa, say the black leaders.

These leaders point to the obvious export of Islam by Libya into black countries. One leader asserted to Catholic reporter Floyd Anderson that Libya “bought” Uganda’s president Idi Amin, a Muslim who is turning his nation into an Islamic state. (Nearly half of Uganda’s people are Protestants and Catholics; less than 10 per cent are Muslims.) Also, Saudi Arabia donated $2 million to Uganda for the spread of Islam.

Islam is being pushed vigorously in the five former French colonies of West Africa: Niger, the Ivory Coast, Senegal, Togo, and Dahomey, notes Anderson. Arabs have established a powerful radio station in Niger and are funding the teaching of the Koran in schools, pilgrimages to Mecca, the building of mosques, cultural programs with Islamic trappings, and the like. The French are partially to blame, observes Anderson; they promoted Islam because they found it was easier to govern Muslims.

Arabs have been known to buttonhole black political leaders with the suggestion that Muslims unwaveringly follow their leaders and therefore are easy to rule, while Christians tend to be independent thinkers, hence are too democratic and difficult to govern. The point is clear: if Islam is promoted and made the state religion, political leaders reap the rewards of greater power. It is a suggestion not lightly dismissed in black Africa.

Saved By The Book

Drug-store security guard Louie D. Hairston of Washington, D. C., believes the New Testament is good for body and soul. A masked bandit recently lunged at him with a foot-long butcher’s knife. The New Testament Hairston carries in his breast pocket for sparetime reading absorbed what otherwise could have been a fatal thrust, and in the ensuing struggle the assailant was slain.

“He would have killed me except for the Bible,” remarked Hairston, noting that the knife had severed the hardback cover of the volume. He said the life of a police officer in the town where he grew up had been saved from a bullet the same way. “I’ve never forgotten that,” he stated.

Pressing On

Black clergyman James E. Newman, pastor of St. Peter’s Baptist Church in Kansas City, Kansas, for the past forty years or so, recently celebrated his 101st birthday. “I’ll stay as long as I am able,” he told well-wishers at a reception, adding he felt “just the same as I did when I was 25.” He voiced thanks to God “for the privilege of being here this long.”

Religion In Transit

The U. S. Supreme Court let stand a Missouri court ruling that denied the loan of textbooks to children attending church-related schools.

A recent Gallup Poll shows 56 per cent of the American people believe religion is losing its influence on society, down from 75 per cent in 1970. Conversely, 31 per cent think religion is gaining ground; only 14 per cent thought so in 1970. The poll also shows Bible reading up: 63 per cent read the Scriptures weekly, compared to 61 per cent in 1970. Gallup says 1957 was the peak year for faith in the power of religion: 81 per cent that year felt religion could provide the answer to the problems facing society.

An NBC television special on Jonathan Edwards, the prominent early American preacher and theologian, was scheduled for Sunday afternoon, February 16. It was produced in cooperation with the National Council of Churches’ Broadcasting and Film Commission.

Mary Ely Lyman, the first woman to hold a full professorship at New York’s Union Seminary, died in Claremont, California, at the age of 87.

Among resolutions approved last month by some 300 ordained United Methodist women were ones asking for the election of three female bishops in 1976 and the appointment of ten women as district superintendents, for half the seminary presidents eventually to be women, for paid maternity and paternity leaves, and for a denominational study of hom*osexuality, with a gay woman as a member of the study group.

Approximately $1 million was contributed last year to denominational programs and agencies of the fledgling Presbyterian Church in America. More than half was for its world mission program.

Because of escalating costs and other uncertainties, a Lutheran Church in America management committee has asked the nine LCA seminaries not to construct any new facilities this year and to avoid deficit financing of budgets.

President Ford has nominated CBS radio commentator Mark Evans Austad, an executive of Metromedia and an active Mormon who served a three-year stint as a missionary to Finland, to be ambassador to Finland.

The first U. S. soldier permitted to wear a Hindu headdress, Private Hari Nam Singh Elliott, 23, received honors as “best recruit” in his basic-training unit. He was allowed to keep his long red beard as well as his turban and to wear religious jewelry.

Muhammad Kenyatta, head of the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Economic Development Conference (guiding force behind the Black Manifesto), says he will run for mayor.

The University of Minnesota student daily notes a “definite renewal of student interest in religion” on campus. Attendance is up at services at Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish student centers, says the paper.

The Mennonite Central Committee asked Manitoba’s provincial government to guarantee the rights of persons opposed to membership in labor unions for reasons of conscience. The law allows such exclusion from membership, says the MCC, but the provincial Labor Board has been turning down all applications for exemption, including those of several Mennonites.

In a rare joint session in California, regional groups of Conservative and Reform rabbis appealed to Israeli officials for recognition of their counterparts in Israel, where only the Orthodox have legal status. Israeli Orthodox leaders generally “have been destroyers of Judaism, not builders,” confining the nation’s three million Jews to a “stultified” Judaism, complained Rabbi Joseph Glazer, executive vice-president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (Reform).

The 500,000-member B’nai B’rith Jewish service agency will have a 1975 budget of $20.3 million, representing the first reduction since the Depression. The agency sponsors centers for Jewish faculty and students on 326 college campuses, a teen-age youth movement of 40,000 in 1,400 chapters, professional counseling services, and the Anti-Defamation League.

The Christian Reformed World Relief Committee of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Holt International Children’s Services of Eugene, Oregon, will merge their child-welfare services in Korea. Holt has placed nearly 16,000 children in adoptive homes outside Korea; the Reformed group has placed 2,000 within Korea. Both have provided other care and counseling services.

“Maude” and “All in the Family” led the list of “permissive” programs noted by 7,000 persons responding to a National Association of Evangelicals questionnaire on the moral tone of television. “The Waltons” and “Apple’s Way” were cited as most “commendable.” All four are CBS programs.

With a budget allocation of $38,500, the Boston-headquartered Unitarian Universalist Association opened an Office of Gay Concerns. It is the first U. S. denomination to set up a national office to deal with hom*osexual matters. Ms. Arlie Scott, a leader in the National Organization for Women, was named director.

Government studies show that private elementary and secondary schools (most of them church-related) educate 4.87 million of the nation’s 50.5 million school children.

Centennial celebration:Canadian Churchman, award-winning monthly of the Anglican Church of Canada.

Food for the Hungry in Los Angeles, the World Concern division of King’s Garden in Seattle, and the Mercy Airlift division of World Gospel Crusades in Upland, California, have formed an immediate-response disaster relief service known as International HELP.

The 297,000-member Church of God denomination based in Cleveland, Tennessee, will open a seminary this fall with educator R. Hollis Gause as director.

A University of Maryland poll shows that freshman students make significantly more use of all illegal drugs except mescaline and heroin than their counterparts two years ago, but continued-use rates have remained constant over several years. Some 93 per cent reported using alcohol, most of them regularly.

A record $8.8 billion in taxes was collected from the sale of alcoholic beverages in 1973, nearly $550 million more than in the preceding year.

The U. S. government, under an Agency for International Development (AID) grant, awarded $425,000 to CODEL (Coordination in Development), a consortium of fifty Catholic and Protestant mission societies and other church-related organizations. Most CODEL agencies are Catholic.

World Relief Commission, the overseas aid agency of the National Association of Evangelicals, has released Honduras … Aftermath of Hurricane Fifi, a documentary motion picture produced by the same team that did the award-winning Africa: Dry Edge of Disaster.

Officials of the French Baptist Federation have invited evangelist W. H. “Dub” Jackson and his Dallas-based World Evangelism Foundation to return to France with more teams this fall. In November, some 350 Americans—twenty WEF teams of lay evangelists, two choirs, and several name personalities—ministered at their own expense for a week in twenty French Baptist churches. Four hundred decisions, many of them recommitments, were recorded.

The international headquarters of the 74,000-member Pentecostal Holiness Church has been moved from Georgia to a $3 million facility in Oklahoma City.

Personalia

Martin Luther King, Sr., 75, will retire in August as pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. He will be succeeded by Joseph L. Roberts, Jr., 39, who grew up in the African Methodist Episcopal Church but was ordained in the United Presbyterian Church. Roberts, a social-action administrator for the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern), was rebaptized by immersion in early January in order to meet a Baptist requirement.

David G. Henritzy, an administrator of a Methodist retirement home, was named director of the 96-year-old Bowery Mission on New York’s East Side, succeeding J. Wilson Lockwood, who died in November.

John Stapert, a field executive of the Reformed Church in America, was named to succeed Louis H. Benes as editor of the Church Herald, the RCA’s fortnightly. Benes retired after twenty-nine years on the job.

Missionary Ronald Wiebe was appointed general director of the Andes Evangelical Mission, succeeding Joseph S. McCullough, who served eighteen years in the post.

George Morrison, 61, chief administrative officer of the United Church of Canada, will leave that post to become senior minister next September of the 3,500-member Timothy Eaton Memorial United Church in Toronto, the UCC’s largest and wealthiest congregation. He will succeed C. Andrew Lawson, who is retiring in June.

Pastor Lewis Palmer Young of the Gardenside Christian Church in Lexington, Kentucky, a past president of the North American Christian Convention, was named to succeed the retiring J. L. Lusby as president of the fifty-five-year-old Kentucky Christian College.

World Scene

More than 1,000 decisions for Christ were registered in the north India state of Uttar Pradesh during Operation Mobilization’s Reach Up ’74 campaign, an impressive figure for this predominantly Hindu area.

Without disclosing figures, the Vatican revealed that Pope Paul rejected the 1975 budget as too costly and appointed experts to guide cutbacks in expenses. The Vatican has been hit hard by inflation and by a multi-million-dollar loss in the collapse of an Italian banking empire.

Jews number 14.1 million world-wide, according to the latest American Jewish Year Book. The United States leads with 5.7 million (nearly half of them in New York City), Israel is next with 2.8 million, and the Soviet Union is third with 2.6 million.

The recent Vatican document on Jewish-CathoIic relations continues to attract mixed reaction. Both chief rabbis in Israel gave it bad marks, but it drew qualified praise from some Protestant leaders and from some Jews abroad.

Hungarian children under age 12 are now permitted to receive religious instruction twice a week, according to a Catholic announcement.

A principal of a Catholic school in Santiago, Chile, reports a resurgence of faith among Catholics now that the controls placed upon religion and the schools by Allende’s regime have been lifted. Bible-study groups, Communion services, and spiritual-life retreats are experiencing record attendance, she says.

Some 140 delegates representing nine member churches with more than sixty congregations attended the twenty-sixth general assembly of the Cuban Council of Evangelical Churches. Presbyterian Raul Fernandez was reelected chairman. Discussions centered on theological issues, liberation, the Gospel and the struggle for justice, violence and nonviolence, and the upcoming World Council of Churches meeting in Nairobi. Protestants—some 160,000 of them—make up about 2 per cent of Cuba’s population.

Evangelist Luis Palau reports that the Catholic archbishop of Lima, Peru, recently sponsored the distribution of more than 500,000 copies of the New Testament to school children and military personnel in the area. In Bolivia,The Living Bible is planned for use as a textbook in all government schools for the next three years, says Palau.

Catholic authorities have ordered an investigation into the death of Bishop Robert Tort, 56, of Montauban, France, who apparently died of a heart attack in a Paris brothel. The officials are still smarting from accusations of cover-up in connection with the coronary death last year of Jesuit cardinal Jean Daniélou, 69, in the apartment of a young dancer.

Abortion became legal in France last month under a controversial law permitting abortion on demand during the first ten weeks of pregnancy.

Prominent layman Yap Thiam Hien, chairman of the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Fund for Reconstruction and Reconciliation in Indonesia, was released from prison after serving nearly a year under an anti-subversion law. He had been arrested during a demonstration against Prime Minister Tanaka of Japan.

After a ten-year struggle, the Anglican Cathedral of All Saints in Cairo has been closed and is being razed to make room for a new bridge to span the Nile.

Robert Mackey, British secretary of the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade, will succeed Leonard Moules as the WEC’s international secretary.

Like the old constitution, Red China’s new one speaks of the freedom to “believe in religion” but says nothing of the rights associated with religious practice. Atheists are given the right to propagate their beliefs; Christians are not.

Some 10,000 Nigerian Christians are expected to attend a national congress on evangelism in August. Of Nigeria’s 59.4 million people, 43 per cent are listed an animists, 38 per cent as Muslims, and 19 per cent as Christians.

The government of South Africa last month expropriated the property of the 150-student Federal Seminary in Alice, an ecumenical school for training non-white clergy. Reason given: to expand a nearby university. Church leaders in Europe and South Africa are protesting. Other land is available for the university, they say. “Once again black people are being pushed around by white people who have power,” complained Anglican archbishop B. B. Burnett of Capetown.

President K. Narayan Nambudripad of the Evangelical Union of Students of India, a board member of the Emmanuel Hospital Association of India, is the first Indian director of the Christian Medical College and Hospital in Ludhiana in North India. The hospital is a cooperative missionary endeavor.

Evangelical churches in Spain will now be able to own their own properties and will not have to pay the large fees and taxes usually required in title transfers, according to a new government policy.

Well-known British churchman Kenneth Slack, a Presbyterian cleric and former executive head of the British Council of Churches, will become director of Christian Aid, the BCC relief arm, which handles about $10 million a year in overseas aid.

The fifteen theological training schools operated in Nigeria by Sudan Interior Mission and the SIM-related Evangelical Churches of West Africa graduated 256 men and women last year. The schools employ fifty-two Nigerian teachers and twenty-six missionaries.

The Methodist hospital in Ilesha, Nigeria, with a staff of 350 and serving 700 patients a day, is bankrupt and in danger of closing, according to an emergency appeal. Meanwhile, a medical-workers union called on the government to take over all mission hospitals, in part to ensure job security.

DEATH

HENRY SMITH LEIPER, 83, Congregational (United Church of Christ) clergyman and former executive of the World Council of Churches, which he helped to found; in New York.

The following report about a significant theological conference is based largely on a comprehensive news story written by Elliott Wright of Religious News Service.

On the last weekend in January, eighteen prominent Protestant, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox figures met at Hartford Seminary Foundation in Connecticut and hammered out a 1,000-word milestone “Appeal for Theological Affirmation.” The appeal, containing some strong back-to-basics overtones, amounts to a slap in the face at some of what has been going on lately in the name of theology. In effect, it says there is a limit to liberal theology, and this is it.

The audiences to which it is addressed include college professors of religion, church policy-makers, editors, and others who “market the metaphors,” according to Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor Richard John Neuhaus of Brooklyn. Neuhaus and Peter Berger, the noted sociologist of religion (A Noise of Solemn Assemblies), were the catalysts behind the Hartford meeting.

The ecumenical statement identifies and rejects thirteen “superficially attractive” themes that are “false and debilitating” and pervade modern Christianity, endangering the witness and mission of the Church. At the same time, it affirms the resurrection of Christ, the seriousness of sin, the transcendence of God over all of life, and his centrality in salvation. In an interview, however, a participant acknowledged to CHRISTIANITY TODAY that interpretations of such doctrinal affirmations might vary from “very literalistic” to very liberal among the group.

The document is all the more remarkable in light of the diverse backgrounds of the sixteen men and two women who not only framed it but signed it. In addition to Neuhaus and Berger, the group was composed of:

Christian Reformed minister Lewis Smedes of Fuller Seminary; philosophy professor Richard Mouw of Calvin College (Christian Reformed);

Jesuit theologian Avery Dulles and Carl Peter, both of Catholic University of America; Presbyterian William Sloane Coffin, Jr., chaplain of Yale University; Alexander Schememann of St. Vadimir’s Orthodox Seminary; Neal Fisher of the United Methodist global-ministries board; Elizabeth A. Bettenhausen of the Lutheran Church in America’s Department for Church and Society; Lutheran Church in America theologian George Forell of the University of Iowa; Notre Dame philosopher Ralph Mclnerny; Hartford Seminary president James N. Gettemy, a United Church of Christ clergyman; Illeana Marculescu, an Orthodox member who teaches philosophy at Union Seminary; Catholic George H. Tavard, who teaches at the Methodist Theological School (Delaware, Ohio); Catholic Gerald Sloyan of Temple University; Robert Wilken, a Lutheran who teaches at Notre Dame; and Yale theologian George Lindbeck.

The panelists worked on assigned themes in subgroups of six persons before approving the final text in plenary sessions.

The paper’s first and pivotal section rejects the idea that “modern thought is superior to all past forms of understanding reality, and is therefore normative for Christian faith and life.” Christian theology, said the group, must not become captive to the “prevailing thought structures” of any historical period.

Under various themes, the statement denies that Christianity is a “religion of pure subjectivity” or that it can give itself over to “scientific rationality.” It refutes claims that “religious language refers to human experience and nothing else, [with] God being humanity’s noblest creation” or that “Jesus can only be understood in terms of contemporary models of humanity.” Also repudiated is the assumption that religion is only a set of symbols or human projections. “What is here at stake is nothing less than the reality of God,” the paper declares. “We did not invest God; God invested us.”

The captivity of the image of Jesus to “cultural and counter-cultural notions of human excellence” is also denounced. “Jesus, together with the Scriptures and the whole of the Christian tradition, cannot be arbitrarily interpreted without reference to the history of which they are part,” the document says. Discussion in the sub-group section indicated the protest was against those who turn Jesus into a Che Guevara figure or those who limit Jesus to culturally defined images of the past.

Several themes deal critically with the human-potential movement, “liberation” ideologies, and humanist presuppositions. Dr. Bettenhausen agreed that the paper is an attack on “creeping or crawling humanism in the church.”

The group denied that “to realize one’s potential and to be true to oneself is the whole meaning of salvation.” Affirming that “salvation cannot be found apart from God,” the document goes on to repudiate the assertion that “since what is human is good, evil can adequately be understood as failure to realize human potential.” This theme “invites false understanding of the ambivalence of human existence and underestimates the pervasiveness of sin,” asserts the document. “Paradoxically, by minimizing the enormity of evil, it undermines serious and sustained attacks on particular social or individual evils.”

Rejected is the notion that “the sole purpose of worship is to promote individual self-realization and human community.” Worship, it says, is “a response to the reality of God” arising out of the “need to know, love, and adore God.”

Also rejected is the belief that “an emphasis on God’s transcendence is at least a hindrance to, and perhaps incompatible with, Christian social concern and action.” This supposition, says the paper, “leads some to denigrate God’s transcendence. Others, holding to a false transcendence, withdraw into religious privatism or individualism” and neglect “personal and communal responsibilities.” Because of God’s reign over all of life, Christians “must participate fully in the struggle against oppressive and dehumanizing structures and their manifestations in racism, war, and economic exploitation,” the statement reasons. “But the norms for the Church’s activity derive from its own perception of God’s will for the world.”

The paper rejects the proposal that the world sets the “agenda” for the Church, and it challenges the belief that “the struggle for a better humanity will bring about the Kingdom of God,” a kingdom that “surpasses any conceivable utopia.”

To say that hope beyond death is irrelevant or at best marginal to the Christian understanding of human fulfillment “is the final capitulation to modern thought.” If death is the last word, then Christianity “has nothing to say to the final questions of life,” insist the signers. “We believe that God raised Jesus from the dead …”

Forell described the Hartford event as a “second level of ecumenism,” going beyond church-sponsored dialogues and formal ecumenical organizations. He said he could recall no previous occurrence in American history when such a group cooperated in drafting what the signers hope will offer a major corrective to the drift of theology. Dulles said the statement indicates a “developing ecumenical theology, which has its own problems, and that is something relatively new.”

Deploring what Berger described as “a consumer mentality that assumes all faiths are equal,” the appeal says “truth matters; therefore differences among religions are deeply significant” and are not simply matters of personal preference.

The affirmation was mailed to twelve other theological luminaries (all identified with the liberal camp) who contributed input prior to the meeting. They were invited to add their names as signers. Among them: Walter Burg-hardt of Catholic University, editor of a Catholic theological journal and member of the Vatican’s theology commission; Langdon Gilkey of the University of Chicago divinity school; Old Testament scholar John MacKenzie, a Catholic; and Cyril Richardson, academic dean at Union Seminary.

One of the conference’s light moments came during a discussion of the theme “the world must set the agenda for the Church.” Yale’s Coffin remarked, “I’ve used that text myself.” Quipped Temple’s Sloyan: “Go and sin no more.”

SAVING SCOTLAND’S SABBATH

Furniture-store owner Iain MacKenzie, an elder of the 4,000-constituent Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, has been summoned to appear before the May synod meeting at Inverness. The charge brought against him by a fellow elder: profaning the Sabbath. The evidence is not in dispute—the defendant addressed an evangelical youth gathering at which musical instruments were played during worship (FPCS members sing only Psalms, unaccompanied).

Probably the staunchest Calvinistic church in the world, with strong outposts in the Highlands and islands, the FPCS has previously criticized the Queen for visiting the Pope, the Church of Scotland for advocacy of “the Lord’s half-day,” the Common Market as a Vatican plot, and a dairy company as “deliverers of Sabbath milk.” A gospel hymn solo sung by a disabled veteran in a Church of Scotland service in one village provoked an F. P. comment: “They’re turning their evening service into a concert.”

J. D. DOUGLAS

Silent Prayer

For years the Washington, D. C., City Council meetings have opened with prayer, but internal squabbling over the practice has led to a compromise: a moment of silence instead. Meanwhile, reelected mayor Walter Washington launched his new term with an inaugural prayer breakfast attended by 400. Rabbi Joshua O. Haberman urged officials not to make any decisions without consulting ethical counsel, the Scriptures, and religious leaders.

Zaire: End Of An Era

Zaire’s ruling political party, under the chairmanship of President Mobutu Sese Seko, has banned religious instruction in the nation’s school system and disbanded the education offices operated by the Catholics, Protestants, and Kimbanguists.

Since religious courses were compulsory in the official curriculum, the decision virtually affects every primary and secondary school in Zaire. The ban hurts most the Catholic-and Protestant-directed institutions, which still account for over 90 per cent of the nation’s educational system. Current figures are not available, but the total Protestant school population five years ago was already well over half a million.

The ruling wipes out the Catholic, Protestant, and Kimbanguist theological faculties that were part of the state-run National University of Zaire. The schools will cease to exist when the current academic year ends in June, bringing to an end an era of parochial education dating back to the late 1800s. In pre-independence days the Belgian colonial regime paid millions of dollars in school subsidies to the missions, mostly Catholic, and let them run the educational system. Nationalizing these schools was a top-priority goal of the Zairian government. That goal now seems to have been attained.

Banning religion from the schools is only the latest step of the government’s determined policy of eliminating any rival for the hearts and minds of Zaire’s 23 million citizens. Religion has already been eliminated from radio and television, all religious publications suspended, all church youth groups outlawed, all Christian (non-African) names declared illegal. Even Christmas has not escaped: the date is now June 24. Sunday is rumored as the next target for a change in status.

The hours previously given to religious instruction in the official curriculum will now be reserved for “civic education and political studies,” i.e., indoctrination in Mobutuism, the new national way of life. To make sure the children get the message of Mobutuism straight, those who teach the courses must attend special classes.

Some of the instructors will have passed through the party-financed Makanda Kabobi Institute near Kinshasa. The institute was set up specifically to help key people in every sector of national life appreciate the full meaning of Mobutuism as the revolutionary lifestyle of Zaire. Attendance is compulsory for all who receive an invitation.

Some observers are wondering if the Mobutu regime is not out to replace the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the schools and elsewhere with a gospel of its own. Newspapers in Kinshasa, the capital, have already published Protestant hymns in which the name of Jesus Christ has been replaced by the name of Mobutu Sese Seko.

ROBERT L. NIKLAUS

Creating An Atmosphere

Eight church leaders were among those bitterly disappointed when the outlawed Irish Republican Army ended its twenty-five-day ceasefire last month. They are the seven clergymen and one layman who set up the meeting with the Provisional IRA that brought an eleven-day Christmas truce and a fourteen-day extension.

One of the churchmen, General Secretary Ralph Baxter of the Irish Council of Churches, in an interview during a Canadian visit last month described the contact with the IRA as “melodramatic” and a “James Bond type of operation.” He declined to disclose how the meeting was arranged. “The result was more important than the method,” he stated.

The group of eight was composed of two leaders from the Irish Council of Churches (representing eight Protestant denominations from all Ireland, north and south), one from the Church of Ireland (Episcopal), one Presbyterian, two Methodists, and two from the British Council of Churches. Roman Catholics were not invited because the mission was to put forward the Protestant view. The eight leaders expected only representatives of the political wing of the IRA to attend the secret meeting, but they found the top four members of the military council there as well.

“We put to them our feelings as Christians about the present campaign of violence,” said Baxter, pastor of an interdenominational church before he took the council job three years ago. “We pointed out how it was dividing the country, even to the risk of danger of civil war. We pleaded with the IRA to bring violence to an end, to carry out their policy by political and peaceful means rather than force of arms.”

During the eleven-day ceasefire that resulted, the church group conveyed a message to the British government containing the IRA’s terms for a permanent ceasefire. The fourteen-day extension was to allow the government time to respond.

“We felt that the longer we were without violence the more possible it was that the ceasefire might become permanent,” Baxter pointed out. “Of course, the cessation of violence is not peace, but it does create an atmosphere in which to build peace.”

He paid tribute to the leaders of the four major churches—the Roman Catholic cardinal, the Church of Ireland archbishop, the Methodist president, and the Presbyterian moderator—who launched a campaign for peace prior to Christmas. United church services were held in support of the peace campaign.

Why did the ceasefire end at midnight on January 16? Baxter thinks that the government is unwilling to make any concessions to the IRA until a permanent ceasefire is guaranteed because it wants to avoid the position of being coerced by the threat of violence.

DECOURCY H. RAYNER

Detective Story

British detective Grant Smith was sentenced to a three-year prison term after confessing to Scotland Yard he had planted drugs and other evidence on four men in 1969 in an effort to brighten his promotion chances. All four had been convicted. As a result of Smith’s confession they recently were given pardons to clear their names.

Smith turned himself in shortly after becoming an elder of an evangelical congregation. “I want to be totally committed to Christ,” he told authorities. “I feel I cannot do that until I have come to terms with my fellow men.”

ROGER DAY

Biblical Renewal

Sharpening the Focus of the Church, by Gene Getz (Moody, 1974, 320 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Kenneth Gangel, president, Miami Christian College, Miami, Florida

It is disturbingly axiomatic in evangelical Christianity that some who talk most loudly about the primacy of the local church are most unaware of the biblical information concerning its life and ministry. And though my idealism stops short of confidence that they will take this volume seriously, it is for them.

Backed by adequate credentials of academic preparation and experience in the trenches, Getz develops a provocative and penetrating analysis of the Church’s ectoplasmic crust formed over almost twenty centuries. The book is a welcome addition to the literature on the resurrection of the Church from the tomb of the late sixties. And it may well be the most biblical “renewal” book yet published in this decade.

The author argues for balance in the Church between evangelism and edification. And although his definition of the Church will be considered marginal by some, the first section, “The Lens of Scripture,” which occupies more than half of the pages, is logical, progressive, and well presented. Helpful charts and illustrations support an already strong organizational pattern. Concise summaries appear at the end of each of the twenty-one chapters.

Although I am firmly positive about the book, I did find a few weaknesses, such as the failure to establish thoroughly the plurality of eldership (two pages); a less than adequate treatment of the issue of spiritual gifts (six pages); and a “slow” conclusion, the practicality of which does not complement the strength of the theological sections. To be sure, one cannot say everything in one book, but these areas seem highly germane to the subject.

I also found the bibliography disappointing. In listing a dozen titles, Getz avoids the chaff but also allows some wheat to slip through his fingers. Mac-Arthur’s The Church—The Body of Christ, Hoffmann’s God’s Joyful People, and Saucy’s The Church in God’s Program certainly speak to the matter under discussion.

A few minor slips of expression such as “all of these New Testament pioneers were frequently multi-gifted men” and “they could care less about ever going to church (pp. 97, 255; italics mine) can be forgiven.

These criticisms are minor in view of the sterling quality of this volume. It deserves careful reading by pastors, church educators, and theological students everywhere and will stimulate classroom and seminar discussions for the next several years.

One thing more. Although Getz is not at heart disputatious, the book is bound to polarize further the “large church—busing—evangelism” team and the “family center—body life—edification crew.” Lines like. “Unfortunately some ministers—particularly of large churches, run them like a business operation” and “Perhaps the most tragic thing that can happen is when highly gifted men attempt to train ordinary men to be like themselves” will call forth excoriation in some quarters.

But it need not be so. Getz has painstakingly avoided the franchising syndrome (“This is the way we did it”) and clings courageously to biblical and historical principles. That pattern alone is a refreshing new look in an evangelical culture seemingly captivated by the golden-arches approach to success.

Faith Is Reasonable

The Justification of Religious Belief, by Basil Mitchell (Seabury, 1973, 180 pp., $8.95), is reviewed by Walter R. Hearn, editor, “American Scientific Affiliation News,” Berkeley, California.

Does religious belief require or admit of rational support? If so, of what sort and to what extent? Mitchell, who is a professor at Oxford, gives an answer that tries to do justice to the way religious questions are actually debated, and to the role of reason in the believer’s life. He takes “traditional Christian theism” as his example of religion throughout, because “it has been subjected to closer analysis and been more carefully elucidated than any other system of religious belief and it is still what the ordinary educated man understands by Christianity, what he accepts if he calls himself a Christian or rejects if he calls himself an atheist.”

Two introductory chapters outline the classical logical arguments for and against the existence of God. Convinced that such arguments can never be satisfying to either the serious believer or the serious unbeliever, Mitchell presents them sketchily. He expects most readers to be ready to go beyond the classical arguments.

If attempts to establish belief or unbelief on ordinary logical grounds are doomed to failure, is the only choice left the famous “leap of faith”? Mitchell says no. It is indeed possible to make a rational case for and against Christian theism, but the arguments are more complex than the usual patterns of deductive or inductive reasoning. The case to be made is what Mitchell calls a “cumulative case,” in which the net effect of a number of inconclusive arguments becomes, if not compelling, at least powerfully supportive.

Mitchell’s central theme is that this pattern of argument is characteristic of many fields of rational thought, not merely of religion. He cites examples from literary criticism, the study of history, and political theory. He shows that a Marxist and a liberal democrat are not being irrational when each clings to his view despite the other’s negative critical assessment. Neither politics nor religion is merely a matter of opinion. Commitment to a particular position does not preclude rationality.

Even in the natural sciences, at least since T. S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it has been recognized that at certain “revolutionary” periods, the best informed and most rational thinkers are swayed not by specific logical arguments but by bit-by-bit cumulation of evidence. In these periods of uncertainty over basic “paradigms” to which groups of scientists are committed, the criteria for evidence that would necessitate a shift in perspective cannot be specified in advance. The weighting of evidence is itself paradigm-dependent. A physicist may be completely open-minded about a particular hypothesis, but in general he cannot have a “take it or leave it” attitude toward a highly ramified area of his study, e.g., toward physics itself.

The logical situation characteristic of highly ramified elds in the humanities, religion, and so on is analogous to the situation in the natural sciences when paradigms are being questioned. “The review section of any learned journal provides ample evidence of the difficulty scholars often have in understanding one another and their impatience with what they are inclined to regard as the perversity of their opponents.” A Marxist’s commitment, for example, forces him to see the law courts in capitalistic countries as devices for maintaining the power of the bourgeoisie. His view of the courts might change through his witnessing a dramatic trial or through the cumulative effect of reading works on jurisprudence in a new light. “Conversion” to a democratic commitment would eventually involve a large-scale restructuring of his system of beliefs.

Working through Mitchell’s arguments is worth the effort, but many complex sentences require repeated reading to be sure that reader and author are still on the same course. One passage that is beautifully clear is a parable about a ship navigating in stormy weather. The officer of the watch is convinced by the navigating officer that he cannot have seen a lighthouse. The navigator’s reckoning puts them a hundred miles from land. But then the lookout sees land—or is it a cloud that looks like land? When the navigator finally “shifts his paradigm” (perhaps he did, after all, underestimate the current), it becomes clear that the lighthouse was not merely an inferred entity but an experienced reality.

Basil Mitchell seems to be gifted at parables. It was he who in a famous 1955 debate offered the parable of the partisan (who meets a stranger and trusts him in spite of questionable appearances) in answer to John Wisdom’s parable of the invisible gardener. Antony Flew had used Wisdom’s parable to batter theists with an insistence on falsifiability as a necessary criterion for meaningful statements about God. In The Justification of Religious Belief, Mitchell takes Wisdom’s parable a step further. What if the believer claims to be vividly aware of the invisible gardener’s presence, and to hear an inner voice explaining what he is trying to do with the garden? If he cannot find a better explanation for his “religious experience” or “revelation,” he is entitled to believe that the gardener really exists. The unbeliever may discount the believer’s testimony in his own frame of reference (by considering it due to a psychological derangement, perhaps). At issue then are rival frames of reference (paradigms), each attempting to account for the totality of experience. The believer’s frame of reference is defensible on rational grounds, and so is the unbeliever’s.

Mitchell concludes with a look at the logical status of divine revelation. From experience with communication on the human level it is clear that both faith (trust) and reason (critical judgment) are appropriate responses to putative revelation. It makes sense to settle any doubts about the trustworthiness of a person purporting to communicate something important to us. Yet, however careful our scrutiny, we cannot thereby discover something that he alone is able to tell us. Mitchell outlines logical steps opening the way “to a fully dogmatic theology in which the Bible is treated as authoritative.” Nevertheless, understanding divine revelation can be expected to be even more demanding of our critical faculties and even more “impossible of final completion” than the task of interpreting a human author.

What God Is Like

The Goodness of God, by John Wenham (InterVarsity, 1974, 223 pp., $2.95 pb), is reviewed by Streeter Stuart, pastor, First Church of God, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

The author has previously given us Part I (Christ and the Bible) of a multivolume approach to apologetics. His two volumes now before us represent an innovative and refreshing defense of the Christian revelation. By Wenham’s own admission, this volume is “concerned mainly with phenomena in the Bible and only incidentally with modern currents of thought.” I wish he hadn’t said it quite that way since the principal shortcoming of the book, in contrast with Christ and the Bible, is the failure to really come to grips with biblical texts, which are frequently indicated in footnotes or subsumed under more general discussions involving those “modern currents of thought.”

In his attempt to salvage a good God from some obviously difficult material, Wenham includes chapters on “Hell,” “Sub-standard Saints and Imperfect Laws?,” “The Abominations of the Heathen,” and “Cursings.” He begins where he finished in Christ and the Bible by reasserting a consistent Old Testament—New Testament picture of a God who is both good and severe. The chapter on “Hell” reveals the author’s failure to be consistent with his stated goal. The first section (“Biblical Imagery”) of this chapter contains three short paragraphs with no specific biblical references, and this conclusion:

Unfortunately the subject is so vast that it will not be possible even to summarize the discussion in such a way that the reader can come to a considered judgment on it. The most that can be done is to outline the alternatives and to give references to books where the matter is more fully discussed [p. 28].

Those alternatives are: traditional orthodoxy, Augustine and Aquinas, modern writers, universalism, and conditional immortality. So Wenham acknowledges the need for fresh study of the subject and concludes: “Our summary of the debate in this brief compass (with none of the detail argued out) provides no basis for decision on so grave and complex an issue.” We are left then to read on to chapter six (“Apparent Evils, Real Blessings”) to see Wenham’s own position on hell:

For those who have rejected the love of God there will be after the last judgment just retribution varying in severity according to individual desert, but (in my view) the suffering will end speedily and mercifully in the second death [p. 77].

But Wenham is not done with hell. In chapter 8, discussing the severity of God’s judgment in the Old Testament, he says:

But as far as the Jesus of the Gospels is concerned, there is an inescapable and indeed a fearful consistency between them [between the pronouncements of judgment by Jesus and God’s acts of judgment in the O.T.], for (as we have seen) the judgments of hell as portrayed by Jesus are more terrible even than the judgments of Deuteronomy [p. 140].

And in the first of two well done additional studies entitled “The Doctrine of the Good God” and “Evil in the World of Nature,” he adds: “Therefore Christians have been tempted to soft-pedal the theme of judgment. The theme of hell has been quietly omitted, and the wrath of God has been de-personalized.” All of this leaves us with a somewhat confused understanding of hell as either Wenham or the biblical writers view it. Is our only recourse now to go to those other “books where the matter is more fully discussed,” or could it be that we can still come to a satisfactory personal answer from Scripture itself?

Chapter five, focusing on “Beneficent Retribution,” is really a series of quotations from R. C. Mortimer and C. S. Lewis, combined with the comments of Wenham. In chapters six and seven we are introduced to problems of Old Testament law as they impinge on the notion of the goodness of God. Here again, the lack of attention to specific texts is somewhat frustrating, and we get the feeling that it is really the Old Testament that is Wenham’s springboard for understanding the goodness of God. But what is the law in regard to “hom*osexual practices” (p. 111 ff.)? Certainly some discussion of a specific text would have helped this statement:

Judged by the amount of suffering endured by many hom*osexuals, it could be argued that the occasional execution of a compulsive hom*osexual in Old Testament times, however tragic it might be, would have been merciful even to the man concerned.

Or in his discussion of the “death penalty for juvenile delinquency,” based on Deuteronomy 21:18–21, does either the text of a New Testament ethic lead to this:

In such desperate cases as are here envisaged it was not likely to make for the poor lad’s happiness (or for the happiness of those about him) that he should continue to live and perhaps propagate his kind. The wisdom of the ages is inclined to say, “Whom the gods love die young.” Certainly in such a case as this, if death were to come “naturally” we should all regard it as a merciful release. It is strange, and surely hardly I logical, to regard it as inhumane when merciful release comes through the workings of a social code [p. 113].

Also, note the rather strange combination of subjects in the heading “Marriage, divorce, and prisoners of war.”

Chapters eight and nine are the strongest of the book as Wenham deals more systematically with heathen abominations and cursings.

What we have here, then, is some very provocative material, and Wenham is to be congratulated for even raising (with a scholar’s pen) some problems that are very real to many Christians and non-Christians alike. A well known female atheist recently belittled the concept of a God who would destroy the world by a flood or whose Son would curse a fig tree. Although we may have difficulty finding in the Scriptures a God who is good according to our own definitions of goodness, Wenham does much to get us on the track of accepting the God who is really there as he really is.

A Lucid Overview

The Gospel of Moses, by Samuel J. Schultz (Harper & Row, 1974, 165 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Clark H. Pinnock, associate professor of theology, Regent College, Vancouver, Canada.

Professor Schultz is an experienced teacher of the Old Testament and the author of a widely read book, The Old Testament Speaks. In the earlier book he traced the history and religion of Israel from the very beginning until the latest pre-Christian times. In this present book he surveys the message of the Old Testament in a shorter space and according to a different plan. The material is familiar—he tells the story skillfully as it unfolds in the Old Testament—but the format is not. Rather than beginning at the first with the creation of the world, the call of Abraham, and so forth, Schultz chose to start with the book of Deuteronomy, which he considers the most important book in the Old Testament. In this book, cited so generously by our Lord himself, we discover the two fundamental principles that ought to condition the relation between man and God: love for God and love for man. This twofold truth lies at the heart of the entire biblical message, Old Testament and New.

Because Schultz begins his survey of the Old Testament with Deuteronomy rather than Genesis, the shape of the book is distinctive. The three chapters that follow his summary of the message of Deuteronomy reach back in the chronology of the Old Testament narrative until all the earlier material is discussed. At this point we are given a scholarly interlude in which the writer defends the Mosaic origin of the Pentateuch against the prevailing documentary view of it. The only bibliography in the book accompanies this chapter. Following on from the five books of Moses, Schultz presses forward into the period of the judges, of the kings, and of the prophets, summarizing with great clarity the significance of these events and the burden of each of the prophetic Scriptures. In the final chapter we are taken into the New Testament itself, where Jesus is presented as the anointed of God in whom the message and promises of the Old Testament are perfectly fulfilled.

Schultz is perhaps bold in speaking of the “gospel of Moses,” when the Fourth Gospel differentiates the message of Moses and that of Jesus by a contrast, “law” and “grace” (1:17). What he means by this expression, “gospel of Moses,” is the bipolar truth already referred to, love for God that issues in wholehearted obedience and love for fellow men. It would be more correct theologically to refer to this human activity as the appropriate response to the Gospel rather than as the Gospel itself. “Gospel” describes the decree and action of God in which he extends his grace to us; love for God and man constitutes the proper human response to his Gospel. Nevertheless, the book, which is a survey of the Old Testament message, is lucid and otherwise accurate, and can be recommended.

NEWLY PUBLISHED

Psychic Healers, by David St. Clair (Doubleday, 328 pp., $8.95), The Mystic Healers, by Paris Flammonde (Stein and Day, 252 pp., $8.95), Healing and Religious Faith, edited by Claude Frazier (Pilgrim, 190 pp., $7.50), Healing: A Spiritual Adventure, by Mary Peterman (Fortress, 94 pp., $2.95 pb), and Other Healers, Other Cures, by Helen Kruger (Bobbs Merill, 403 pp., $8.95). Non-medical healing can be one way to beat inflation! The first two books examine the claims and deeds of specific faith healers, only some of whom credit Christ with their power. The third has nineteen essays on the relation between healing and faith by nurses, physicians, and chaplains. The fourth is a personal account of a healing ministry associated with a New Jersey Lutheran church. The last also surveys such other alternatives to medicine as acupuncture and manipulation.

Where on Earth Is Heaven?, by Arthur Travis (Broadman, 158 pp., $4.95). Helpful comments, based on the Bible, suggesting what we can know and infer about the life to come.

Understanding Christian Missions, by J. Herbert Kane (Baker, 452 pp., $9.95), Who Cares About the Missionary?, by Marjorie Collins (Moody, 140 pp., $2.50 pb), The Church and Its Mission: A Shattering Critique From the Third World, by Orlando Costas (Tyndale, 313 pp., $3.95 pb), The Clash Between Christianity and Cultures, by Donald McGavran (Canon, 84 pp., $1.75 pb), World Evangelism and the Word of God, by Arthur Johnston (Bethany Fellowship, 301 pp., $3.95 pb), Bangkok ’73: The Beginning or End of World Mission?, by Peter Beyerhaus (Zondervan, 192 pp., $3.95 pb), and Reaching the World, by Edward Pentecost (William Carey, 149 pp., $5.95, $3.95 pb). Varying appraisals by evangelicals of the global outreach of the Church. The first is a comprehensive survey and can function admirably as an introductory text. The second is a needed how-to-treat-a-missionary manual. Costas and McGavran provide constructive comments on cultural involvement of missionaries. Johnston presents a critical, well-documented history of World Council missions concerns. Beyerhaus evaluates the latest major World Council missions meeting. Pentecost gives a brief, practical manual on developing strategy for approaching the unevangelized.

Competent to Lead, by Kenneth Gangel (Moody, 144 pp., $4.95), and Tools for Time Management, by Edward Dayton (Zondervan, 192 pp., $4.95). Two varied approaches to personal management that provide significant aids. The first lays the theoretical framework for a Christian perspective on leadership and management. The second alphabetically sets forth the mechanics of time management that contribute to good leadership such as “alertness,” “mail,” and “trips.” The first is a “why,” the second a “how-to.”

The Christian Calendar, by L. W. Cowie and John Gummer (Marrion-Webster, 256 pp., $15). The first half depicts Jesus’ life as traditionally observed in the “Christian year.” The second half lists “saints” assigned to each day of the year, giving brief biographies of some of them and of other historic events and persons. Illustrated by famous works of art.

The Anchor Atlas of World History, by Hermann Kinder and Werner Hilgemann (Anchor, 299 pp., $4.95 pb). Small-size pages with more than 270 color maps and charts, packed with clearly presented facts from all areas of human endeavor. The scope is global from earliest times to 1800. Very useful adjunct to study of the histories of Israel and the Church.

God in Public, by William Coats (Eerdmans, 215 pp., $7.95), The Alternative Future: A Vision of Christian Marxism, by Roger Garandy (Simon and Schuster, 192 pp., $6.95), A New Moral Order: Development Ethics and Liberation Theology, by Dennis Goulet (Orbis, 142 pp., $3.95 pb), Sinful Social Structures, by Patrick Kearns (Paulist, 113 pp., $1.45 pb), The Promise and Pitfalls of Revolution, by Sidney Lens (Pilgrim, 287 pp., $7.95), Marx and the Bible: A Critique of the Philosophy of Oppression, by Jose Miranda (Orbis, 338 pp., $8.95, $4.95 pb), and From Hope to Liberation: Towards a New Marxist-Christian Dialogue, edited by Nicholas Piediscalzi and Robert Thobaben (Fortress, 114 pp., $3.25 pb). Various attempts to show that biblical and theological reflection in the light of modern economic conditions requires or at least points toward, some kind of non-totalitarian Marxist or socialist orientation in order to be consistently Christian. Needless to say, such conclusions can and ought to be challenged with an equal or superior level of competence and concern.

SPECIAL NOTE

Most of the newer translations of the New Testament or the whole Bible are available principally from one or two publishers. For example, Living comes from Tyndale and Doubleday; New International, Modern Language, and Amplified from Zondervan; Today’s English from American Bible Society and Nelson; New English from Cambridge and Oxford; Phillips from Macmillan; and Jerusalem from Doubleday. The three exceptions—versions available in numerous editions from several publishers—are the Roman Catholic sponsored New American, the Revised Standard, and the New American Standard. The Lockman Foundation sponsored the NASV and allowed Creation House to launch it but subsequently has granted publishing privileges at least to Moody, Regal, Collins-World, Harvest House, and Holman. The would-be Bible buyer should know of this opportunity to shop around and compare. Most NAVSs, for example, are somewhat large, but Holman has an edition (minus the cross-references and with two columns) in three differently priced bindings, starting at $4.50.

Probably because of an influx of women, seminary enrollments are rising. Totals for the current year, based on fall enrollment, show 36,830 students in the 192 institutions accredited by the American Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada. That is an 8.1 per cent increase over last year. It is more than double the 3.5 per cent rise in undergraduate college enrollment reported in the annual statistics compiled by the University of Cincinnati.

The preliminary AATS reports for 1974–75 speaks of the latest enrollment as a “substantial increase.” It notes that for the past several years enrollment has tended to rise only 1 or 2 per cent and goes on to say:

All of the increase and more is in professional programs, since graduate students (except for D.Min., which is classified “professional”) declined 126 persons. The precise data on program increases will not be available until the computer work for the Fact Book is finished, but the growth is apparently spread across several degree programs.

The Fact Book is an analysis published by the AATS on the basis of reports submitted by its member institutions. The AATS is the recognized accrediting agency for seminaries in the United States and Canada. Among its members are a number of Catholic and some Jewish schools.

A key factor is the growth of the Doctor of Ministry program, which enables working pastors to take courses part-time, do a thesis, and add a D.Min. to their basic M.Div. (Alternatively, new students can go straight through in a four-year program for the D.Min.) In 1972 twenty-nine schools reported D.Min. programs with 1,519 enrolled. In 1974 the totals had about doubled to fifty-seven schools with 3,176 enrolled.

Perhaps the most interesting statistic to look for in the new Fact Book is how many women are now enrolled in seminaries. Until recent years, there were few, and the AATS has been collecting data on the sex of theological-school students for only three years. Its analysis last year noted that for this reason “no trends may be reported” but went on to say:

The most obvious change is the sharp increase in numbers of women enrolled, up from 3,358 last year to 4,550. Even when a special non-degree program offered by one school and enrolling more than five hundred women is discounted, the increase is still quite evident. An additional 240 women are registered in the one and two year professional programs, as well as an even larger rise in the special and unclassified category.

The report last year said the largest change was in three-and four-year programs leading to ordination:

Here women increased from 1,077 to 1,484 candidates (plus 37.8 per cent). Even with the influx of D. Min. students (who are included in this category) there was an actual reduction of almost two hundred men preparing for ordination. The slight over-all increase is explained totally by the 407 additional women registrants.

Given the impetus of the recent controversy over ordination of women and the intensive women’s movement in general, new statistics are expected to reflect an increasingly greater percentage of female enrollment, particularly in theologically liberal seminaries. Evangelical seminaries, a small but growing minority in the AATS, have not been as responsive—or have not had as many female applicants. Some will not even admit women. Among these is Dallas Seminary, which is not accredited by the AATS but has regional accreditation and is highly respected for its academic standards within its avowedly dispensational orientation. Dallas recently opened summer sessions to women but reaffirmed its policy of not admitting them in fall or spring semesters or to programs leading to the Th.M., S.T.M., and Th.D. degrees. Its enrollment is nonetheless growing steadily.

Not many generalizations can be made about seminary enrollment over the last two decades—that is, after the post-war surge. About a third of the seminaries accredited by the AATS have had steadily declining enrollments. But some seminaries, especially among those known for their evangelical doctrinal stand, have experienced a long-term growth. Among these are Asbury, Fuller, and Gordon-Conwell. Yale and Harvard are also holding up well, the latter with more students now than it has ever had. Princeton and San Francisco, both leading Presbyterian seminaries, have also been growing. Union in New York, once a great citadel of liberal theological thought, has fallen upon lean days, one casualty of which was a forty-five-year-old school of sacred music. Its successor is an Institute of Sacred Music at Yale, an interdisciplinary venture based jointly in the university’s School of Music and in the Divinity School and aided by an Irwin Foundation endowment.

Subsidies For Students

Most evangelical theological seminaries in Europe and North America have some scholarship aid to offer nationals from overseas, but not nearly enough to meet the need. Many overseas evangelicals who want theological training must get financial help from other sources and are directed to seminaries where their evangelical beliefs are likely to be undermined if not destroyed. When graduates of non-evangelical seminaries return home, they often take with them views that help to push national churches to the left of the theological spectrum. With this there usually goes a loss of evangelistic zeal and the substitution of political and social action for gospel proclamation.

No one can blame students for accepting scholarships to non-evangelical schools when no alternative is available. They are not likely to realize the subtle ways in which they can be educated away from their orthodox beliefs. There is a need for evangelicals of wealth to make enough money available to theologically orthodox seminaries that they can accept competent students who cannot pay their own way. Now, with the effects of inflation, the need is greater than ever.

A Threatening Citation

One of America’s independent Christian colleges was cited recently by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for allegedly refusing to hire an applicant because he was not a Christian. Basically the charge springs from the language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, although an executive order signed by Richard Nixon when he was president may well become an integral part of the problem too.

Sections 702 and 703 (e) of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act specifically exclude educational institutions that are “in whole or in substantial part, owned, supported, controlled, or managed by a particular religion or by a particular religious corporation, association or society.…” But now the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is arguing that the language of the act is too general and too vague and that it contravenes the Fourteenth Amendment. It apparently wishes to choose this argument over against the clear language of the First Amendment, which says that “Congress shall make no law … prohibiting the free exercise” of religion.

The college is fighting the case vigorously, since the commission’s stand involves the separation of church and state and threatens the theological integrity of every Christian institution. If the decision prevails, no Christian school could refuse an atheist, an agnostic, a Buddhist, or a Hindu a place on its faculty on the grounds of incompatible beliefs.

President Lyndon Johnson issued an executive order that guarded the hiring rights of religious institutions against governmental interference even if the institutions were contractors or sub-contractors with the government. Nixon countermanded this order with his own providing that if an institution has any kind of contractor or subcontractor relation with the government it cannot discriminate in its employment practices by refusing to hire a person to its faculty or staff because of his religious beliefs. This executive order and the decision of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission go far beyond the Civil Rights Act or its intention and become legislative action by fiat.

President Gerald Ford should immediately return to the Johnson view by issuing his own executive order, and the Congress of the United States should amend the Civil Rights Act to guarantee that no agency will be permitted to defeat the intention of the Civil Rights Act, which frees religious institutions to hire only people of their own persuasion. This is their intrinsic right under the First Amendment to the Constitution.

For The Love Of Life

An unexpectedly large turnout for the second annual “March for Life” in Washington last month gave lawmakers first-hand evidence of the growing public resentment of the U. S. Supreme Court’s 1973 decision against anti-abortion statutes. More than 25,000 persons risked winter weather hazards to come to the capital and let the government know how strongly they feel the need for corrective legislation.

The growth of the pro-life movement has been striking; if you doubt that, just ask the opposition. But what is perhaps even more encouraging than the numerical increase of the active pro-life ranks is the way their approach to the abortion problem has been maturing. No longer can they be dismissed as a group of cold-hearted Catholics simply taking orders from the Pope. Events connected with this year’s march reflected a scope of concern far beyond the fetus. The focus is still upon the rights of the unborn child, but Protestants and Jews are joining with Catholics in taking important new initiatives to deal with the moral pressures that are influencing many to condone abortion.

Pro-life people are now taking a much more active interest in the problem of hunger, for example. A spokesman for American Citizens Concerned for Life announced that enough money had been raised in the first three weeks of 1975 to purchase five tons of rice for starving people in the sub-Sahara. At an interdenominational prayer breakfast that ACCL helped to sponsor, Senator Mark Hatfield announced that he and Senator James Buckley were reintroducing a resolution extending the “right of life … to all human beings including their unborn offspring at every stage of their biological development irrespective of age, health, function or condition of dependency.”

The point is that those who argue that the fetus must be allowed to live also need to involve themselves with the problems that the individual may face after birth. That’s when “pro-life” really comes to mean what it says.

Scientific Fakers

“Until recently,” says the noted microbiologist Ernest Borek, “cheating was a rare blemish on the generally high code of ethics among scientists.” But with the advent of the nuclear age and space travel vast sums have become available for research, and with these great new temptations for doctoring data. In a recent New York Times column Borek cited two incidents of unethical conduct in medical research laboratories—one at the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research and one at Harvard. He commented, “Unfortunately, those of us in the biological sciences know that these two cases are but the tip of the iceberg.” More and more scientific chicanery is finding its way even into first-rate journals.

Here from what some would consider an unexpected quarter comes fresh corroboration of the biblical truth that the love of money is a root of evil. According to Borek, competition for grants and rewards has fostered not only cheating but “ambulance chasing” in science. “Some scientists who lack the originality or self-confidence to make discoveries on their own scan a field like so many predators and pounce on someone else’s discovery and with rapid publication try to make it their own.”

Situation ethics is a likely culprit in this evil trend. A scientist can logically argue that by breaking the “rules” against deceit he is showing his profound love for humanity: greater research funding will alleviate human suffering, and so why not waive the code to open the purse?

True biblical ethics challenges such reasoning. New Testament teaches equality before the law. No one is free to engage in wrong-doing.

Measuring Change

One of the evils that forever lurk in the hearts of men is the longing for progress, progress usually being synonymous with change.

Quite apart from the possible merits of the metric system, it seems likely that its present promotion in North America gains strength from this longing for change. A public school that is in the process of moving to the metric system has chalked on a blackboard:

Foot by foot and yard by yard

We find old systems in discard.

Giving way to metric meters

Kilograms and milliliters.

The clue to this trochaic doggerel lies in the word old. We’ll have only the latest … nothing old-fashioned for us … everything must be new, efficient, easy … clear away the rubbish of the past.

It was this spirit in part that gave us some of the theological wonders of this century: a God too great to help anyone, too good to interfere with evil, and too remote to matter.

Unfortunately, truth has a way of being old, cumbersome, and hard. Justification by faith is as old as Abraham, and monotheism is older. Trinitarian theology is hard by any accounting. And it would be difficult to conceive of anything more cumbersome than the Church—yet it is the body of Christ, the very creation of our Lord for doing his work on earth.

Sift carefully the rubbish of the past. It may have treasures unmatched even by the promises of the future.

Rice Is For Eating

Roman Catholic archbishop Jaime L. Sin of Manila has issued a simple reminder: rice is a basic food, and there is not enough of it to go around, so why waste rice by showering it on newlyweds? Forgoing the custom would not save much rice but it would help a little in consciousness-raising. Unless the well-fed get under the burden of the fact that millions are starving, little improvement in the food problem can be expected.

Hatfield On Hunger

United States Senator Mark Hatfield is calling upon fellow Christians to undertake extra measures of compassion during the current Lenten season. In a twenty-four-point action program, he specifically suggests periods of fasting and acts of service. “Skip at least one meal a week,” Hatfield urges, “and give instead at least one dollar for that meal to a relief agency involved in feeding the hungry.… Feed pets more table scraps instead of commercial pet foods.”

In view of the worldwide food shortage and the fact that approximately 60 per cent of Americans are overweight, we commend the senator’s proposals. They represent, as he puts it, “another way of teaching ourselves how to identify with the poor.”

American Christians should be careful not to presume, however, that they will have fulfilled their obligations with a bit of Lenten sacrifice. The long-term solutions are very complex, and sometimes short-term measures simply make problems worse. An example is the wave of unemployment that resulted when people started buying fewer cars. Indeed, the situation can get so confused that we are tempted to do nothing, and that is the worst of the alternatives. Senator Hatfield has shown some leadership in the hunger problem, and his suggestions merit support and action.

The Cia In The Spotlight

First it was Watergate; then it was the FBI; now it is the CIA. The New York Times broke the story, charging the Central Intelligence Agency with spying on American citizens and collecting dossiers on thousands of them illegally and beyond the limits laid down for the agency by Congress.

It is by no means clear how far the CIA may have gone in simply collecting material on American citizens nor whether the thousands of people the Times refers to were actually spied on. The President has appointed a committee to investigate the matter; human nature being what it is, after the report is issued people will probably continue to believe what they want to believe as they did at the time of the Warren Report on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The friends of the CIA won’t believe a bad report, and its foes will reject a good one.

Every great nation maintains a spy network, and all of them interfere, one way or another, in the internal affairs of other nations. The reason for this is, of course, that each nation has its own national interests, and these sometimes conflict with the national interests of other nations. It is the business of a nation to preserve its sovereignty and maintain its position and role in the world, but with as little aggressiveness as possible.

In a world ruled by force and governed by unregenerate men, men and nations do not act the way the Sermon on the Mount says they should. There are Americans who have trafficked with the enemies of the nation and in their operations have worked outside the United States. Why the CIA should not involve itself with people of this sort is not clear. But if it spied on Americans who have had no such connections, then it overstepped its boundaries.

However, an agency needed by the nation in a wicked world should not be eliminated because it has made mistakes. We are especially concerned with the attitude of some churchmen who would like to see the CIA killed off. They suggest that interference in the affairs of other nations to support governments or to bring them down is wrong. These same people, however, openly interfere in the internal affairs of other nations for precisely the same reason, although they may be on opposite sides from the CIA. It is regrettable that the nation needs an agency like the CIA, but it does, and the CIA has a congressional mandate. Churches, on the other hand, have no mandate from God to do the same kind of thing some churchmen blast the CIA for doing.

Giving Do’S Their Due

Christians are often accused of being “legalists.” This accusation is not normally intended to fault them for trying to be law-abiding citizens; presumably, most Americans are fed up with illegal behavior, whether on the streets or in high levels of business and government. “Legalist” as applied to the Christian has to do with behavior as it relates not to the law of the state but to the law of God. Those who disapprove of most or all of such practices as gambling, profanity, smoking, drinking, extra-marital sexual relations, abortion, divorce, and theater attendance are common targets for the charge of legalism.

It is noteworthy that much of the Apostle Paul’s writing is concerned with keeping—or reclaiming—Christians from legalism. Yet these same writings are appealed to as a divinely inspired basis for refraining from the kind of activities mentioned above! We need to recognize, and learn to live with, the paradox in Paul’s appeal.

Consider, for example, Galatians 5:1–23. Paul begins by warning the Christians against giving up their freedom by becoming legalists: “Do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (v. 1). But before long we find Paul exhorting, “Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love be slaves of one another” (v. 13). Paul condemns one kind of slavery but commands another kind. Similarly, legalism—in the sense of strong concern for obedience to God—is not wrong: the error comes in our understanding of what laws are really God’s laws, and in the attitudes with which we attempt to keep his laws. Paul, following his and our Lord, declares emphatically that “the whole law is fulfilled in one word, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (v. 14).

In the well-known passage that follows, Paul does not shrink from providing an incomplete list of “don’ts” or taboos: “immorality, impurity, licentiousness … jealousy, anger, selfishness … envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like” (vv. 19–21). The Apostle himself would doubtless be a “legalist” in the eyes of most of those who hurl the charge at Christians today. Yet at least three aspects of Paul’s teaching distinguish it from the “legalism” that he warns against. First, obedience to God’s law, though important, is in no way the basis of our acceptance as righteous by God. We are saved by grace through faith, not by law-keeping (vv. 4, 5). Second, the Pauline taboos include not only specific practices, such as fornication or drunkenness, but attitudes, such as jealousy, anger, and selfishness. Often Christians show far more concern about the former than the latter. And some make matters worse by claiming biblical sanction for questionable taboos (such as a prohibition against card-playing). Third, Paul is more concerned with the positive side, what a Christian does in the course of displaying love of neighbor, than in the negative side of what a Christian does not do. Consider the well-known list of the fruits of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (vv. 22, 23).

Christians probably cannot avoid the epithet of “legalist” altogether if they want to be obedient to God’s revealed standards. But they can certainly blunt the charge if, with the Apostle Paul, they are as eager to avoid wrong attitudes as wrong deeds, and are even more eager to display the positive fruits of the Spirit in both attitude and action.

Worth reading is Orlando Costas’s The Church and Its Mission (Tyndale House Publishers, 1974). A native Puerto Rican who long lived and studied in the United States, Costas emerged to champion a modified “theology of liberation” while professor of missiology in Latin America Seminary. His plea for the Church’s “total” task, as against evangelical preoccupation with the “primary” task of verbal gospel proclamation, espouses a diaconate concept of salvation that meshes into the struggle for justice and peace on earth.

Now secretary of studies and publications for the Institute of In-depth Evangelism, Costas rejects the Wheaton and Frankfurt declarations as too conditioned historically to provide a normative global concept of evangelical mission. He opposes any imposition of such North Atlantic approaches either on ecumenical Christianity or on evangelical churches in the Third World (p. 214). While he hails the theology of liberation as “first and foremost a Latin American theology,” he nonetheless considers it significant for “the rest of the Third World” and even for “the church universal” (pp. 221, 223).

Liberation-theology rejects a missiology that, despite 400 years of Christian presence, perpetuates in Latin America “the largest Christian area of the world of poverty” (p. 231). Costas views North American missions abroad as beholden to international business interests; despite a profession of political neutrality, their indifference to the status quo reinforces an economic domination that perpetuates impoverishment of the masses (p. 246). Instead of going along with the exploitation of the disadvantaged, Christian mission should espouse the cause of the oppressed.

Although one usually hears from foes, not friends, of Christianity such undocumented generalizations as Costas’s charge that the Church has often transmitted “a gospel of repression, subjugation, and alienation” (p. 250), we ought not on account of his overstatement to turn a deaf ear to his plea that evangelicals “start sounding off on the imperative of orthopraxis, instead of spending all our time defending right doctrine” (p. 247).

What alternative does Costas propose? He commends liberation-theology as sponsoring a biblically congenial missiology, and criticizes as ahistorical and docetic in tendency such traditional expositions as Harold Lindsell’s An Evangelical Theology of Missions (1970) and George Peters’s A Biblical Theology of Missions (1972) which skirt concrete historical structures while promoting evangelism. Only naïve mission thinking, he says, ignores prevailing social structures and assumes that theology can be done without political commitment. “Perhaps the greatest merit of the theology of liberation” lies in its “insistence on the concrete historical situation as a necessary starting point” (p. 241). “When the theologians of liberation insist on … the necessity of theologizing out of commitment to the concrete historical situation of the downtrodden, they are in fact calling us, at this one point, back to the heart of biblical theology” (p. 245).

Costas nonetheless considers dangerous the liberation-theology emphasis that the concrete historical situation is the text or the normative element in hermeneutics on which theology is grounded so that Scripture has only a secondary comparative and descriptive function (p. 251). He proposes to modify its radical historical orientation and situational hermeneutic by a balancing correlative starting point: Scripture must be considered “a primary frame of reference together with the situation” (p. 252).

While Costas thus avoids an explicit deflection of Scripture into an instrument promotive of a Marxist alteration of the status quo, he is nonetheless vulnerable to the same tendential exegesis when he elevates to co-primacy with Scripture the present historical situation viewed in the context of socialist analysis. For Scripture alone is not the norm for Costas, but rather Scripture in correlation with the critically viewed contemporary politico-economic context. Costas commends as the ideal method “one with an ideology that favors the oppressed in their struggle for liberation” (p. 252), thus connecting the Bible comprehensively with an ideology that promotes a tendential hermeneutic.

Moreover, he locates the truth of Scripture not in the propositional teaching of the biblical text but in a mystical authority mediated by the Risen Christ and the Holy Spirit’s witnessing presence in one’s “encounter with the text” (p. 252). Dilution of the primacy of Scripture, mislocation of the truth of special revelation, and connection of the Bible with a particular ideology inevitably blunt his appeal to the norm of the canon and the normativity of Scripture.

Costas does not indicate what specific forms of social action—engaging Soviet sphere as courageously as free world?—are to be ventured in evangelizing men universally ruled by pride and passion and harried by regional injustice and oppression. If the term “salvation” is comprehensively defined, surely some “salvation-works” would nevertheless involve an objectionable redefinition of the doctrine in its biblical understanding. The Church, we are told, should be involved in all struggles for a better world, yet Costas concedes that these struggles are also under God’s judgment. But God must be identified with them “because in their imperfection and/or moral limitations, they represent the cause of justice and well-being, and God is the giver of all good gifts” (p. 205, n.84). We need clarification of how and why God must be identified with what is under his judgment.

Yet we must stand courageously with Costas in championing the Gospel’s irreducible relevance for oppressed multitudes, and actively identify evangelical Christianity with the justice God demands in all arenas of human exploitation and oppression. Costas rightly complains that many evangelicals polarize the individual and social aspects of salvation, whereas structural interrelations are critically important for the problem of social justice. It does not help his cause that he readily quotes ecumenists whose preoccupation with social structures dwarfs their concern for the necessity of individual regeneration. But if evangelical Christians are not to forfeit to secular ideologies or to radical theologies the perception of dire needs that plague masses of humans on every continent, we must aggressively cope with such needs in a principled and practical way.

The new order of life implicit in the Gospel concerns not only the individual but also man in society, not excluding government and business, and it carries a special care for the despoiled and destitute. No facet of this comprehensive mandate falls outside the Church’s missionary witness and work, for personal conversion and social transformation alike belong to evangelical mission.

“Love” is a much misused word, misunderstood even by Christians, whose “mark” is supposed to be love. At present many valentine cards are flying about the country speaking of one or another sort of affection, and the day of many grandmothers and grandfathers, mothers and fathers, and others is cheered by the reminder that someone was thinking of them. However much we may scream “commercial,” something is better than nothing as a sort of a squeeze of the hand across the miles. Yes, even an “artificial” day can be a helpful jog to get us to stop in our “too-busy” hour-by-hour day-by-day life and say, “I love you, you are significant to me, you matter, it is important to me that you are alive.”

In First Corinthians 13, we are admonished in strong words to speak with love. No matter how beautiful and eloquent our speech, if it is without love, it sounds like the clank of brass or the tinkling of a cymbal. Our speaking is to be in love, with love, prompted by love.

Chapter 14 goes on to say that we are to “follow after love” so that we can speak in a way that will build up people in their understanding and give them comfort. True comfort can come only from knowing the truth and the hope and the promises of the living God. Our compassion and love are to prompt us to comforting conversation, and also to conversation in which we learn something that will help us take a step forward in the Christian life.

When we talk on and on with no consideration for anyone else, no thought of what someone else might need to hear or say, our conversation can do great harm, spraying the plants around us with a poison that stunts growth instead of with fresh water and a little proper fertilizer to help growth. What harm can take place in an evening’s careless conversation as doubts and bitterness, gossip and criticism poison the tender growth of understanding, ideas, creativity, or fresh love for the Lord and desire for his will in others. People can go home from such an evening and lie awake full of doubts as to whether their ideas and plans—for a book or article or painting, a gardening project, an open house on Wednesday evenings, a festive meal at an old-people’s home, a weekly visit to a blind person to read aloud, sketches to illustrate a Bible story, a fresh way of communicating God’s truth to prisoners—are worth bucking the criticism. They may even begin to doubt whether any fresh, new, loving, compassionate attempt to glorify God and help people to find him, or to show kindness, is worth the effort. The careless remarks, the raised eyebrows that say “That’s impossible,” can bring such discouragement that the result is the death of some precious seed the Lord had planted.

A Christian’s careless conversation can be used in the Devil’s plan to hinder or delay the plan God is unfolding to his children, even in the very basic areas of obedience. In Galatians Paul says, “Ye did run well; who did hinder you that ye should not obey the truth? This persuasion cometh not of him that calleth you.… He that troubleth you shall bear his judgment, whosoever he be” (Gal. 5:7–10). It happened in Paul’s time, and it happens now: someone in his conversation hinders another Christian from obeying God.

When we read the warning in Galatians 5:15 against “biting and devouring one another,” we must realize that it is in the area of conversation that we “bite.” We are being warned with a flashing light that there is danger when we depart from talking with love, kindness, longsuffering, concern, compassion, and a desire to help rather than to hinder others.

However, it is not just in long times of talking together with careless disregard for what we might be doing to each other that there is danger. Questions can be completely without compassion, totally unloving. Yes, honest questions deserve honest answers, but there are two things to think about before asking a question in a group of people who have come together, whether as a class, a discussion group, a gathering of friends, a Bible-study group, a casual gathering on a beach, or in some other way: (1) Is this an honest question or a trick question to try to upset the person answering? (2) Are there people present who do not know whether the God of the Bible exists or not, who may not have another opportunity to hear their own deep questions dealt with, and who will be turned aside by theological “hairsplitting”?

Consider for a moment that perhaps you have entered a group of people where a Hindu, a devil worshiper, an atheist, a confused church member, a materialistic business man with slight interest in spiritual things, and a variety of others have come because of someone’s concern in bringing them, or praying for them. With what breathless interest someone may be listening? Suddenly a Christian asks a question about some point about which Christians differ, such as predestination or mode of baptism. The whole evening can be negative in its effect, but worse than that, the time is lost, never to be retrieved.

We are responsible for our use of our time, and perhaps doubly so for our use of other people’s time. So often the Christian uses up the time during which non-Christians might have drastically needed help. The need to avoid extravagance with money is much in our minds because “depression” is near, but what about the extravagant use of time, which will never be more abundant until this life is over?

Paul says to Timothy in Second Timothy 2:14, “Of these things put them in remembrance, charging them before the Lord that they strive not about words to no profit, but to the subverting of the hearers.” I think Paul is talking about conversation and peripheral questions that use up time during which the “hearers” need some positive help. He is warning all of us who are children of the living God to show forth our love and compassion for one another and for the lost ones of the world when we sit conversing, and asking questions. He goes on to urge and command in verses 23, 24, and 26:

Foolish and unlearned questions avoid, knowing that they do gender strifes. And the servant of the Lord must not strive, but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient, in meekness instructing those that oppose themselves … that they may recover themselves out of the snare of the devil, who are taken captive by him at his will.

There is to be a positive result in conversation and in question-and-answer times, as well as in teaching and preaching times.

Love expressed is not simply a valentine, not simply the words “I love you” said at the end of a phone conversation, an evening, or in public acclaim. Love is to be expressed as we choose the content of our conversation, as we carefully decide when to ask a question and when to keep quiet, as we consider other people before ourselves in the use of precious time.

To The Uttermost Ends Of The Earth …

Recently a government official in the nation’s capital was criticized for having taken (at government expense) a costly trip to attend a traffic conference held in Hawaii. (Think about most cities’ traffic planning for a moment, and the logic of choosing Honolulu for the site of a U. S. traffic planners’ convention will immediately strike you.) As the affronted public servant indignantly replied, “There would have been no question about the necessity of attending the conference had it been held in Baltimore.” Probably not.

But it is not only public servants who travel far, wide, and sometimes handsome in their efforts to render ever new and more useful services. Where the state leads, surely the church cannot be far behind. We all know that Jesus said that he came “not to be served, but to serve.” And everyone knows that service is badly needed almost everywhere. As a result, almost every week we can read of prelates, ecclesiasts, and sometimes even just plain, ordinary religious officials who range the globe attending assemblies, conferences, colloquia, strategy meetings, executive committee meetings, and all the various other gatherings that call them away from the humdrum life at the home base. Mindful of the prophetic words of Amos (“They shall wander from sea to sea, from the north even to the east, they shall run to and fro.…,” Amos 8:12), myriad religious leaders, from the prestigious World Council of Churches itself but also from lesser international, national, ecumenical, denominational, and miscellaneous agencies of all kinds, roam the world seeking, in a manner reminiscent of Alexander of old, new fields to serve.

Even though the vast majority of the world’s Christians live in Europe and the Americas, with the Protestants even more concentrated, mostly in North America and northern Europe, ecumenical agencies show a penchant for gathering-places with more exotic names, such as Djarkta, Pago Pago, and Timbuktu. It gives religious leaders the opportunity to inspect at first hand first-class facilities in the underdeveloped countries, and we can be sure that a significant portion of the expense involved flows into the coffers of those nations. For example, if a mere two hundred ecumenical dignitaries (a paltry number, by the standards of WCC conclaves) gather in Nairobi, whither the majority must fly, either from Western Europe or North America, not to mention more distant places, we can calculate on at least $160,000 in air fares alone. (From this we can deduct the saving in air-mail postage achieved by letting the participants meet face to face.) And we should not forget food and lodging. Even if much of the travel money is soaked up by international airlines, the food and lodging payment must be expended on location. (It has come to Eutychus’ attention that one publicity-seeking group, a workshop on evangelical social concern, allegedly puts participants up in a YMCA. If that kind of thing spreads, it could ruin the whole game!)

In an earlier era, when a missionary “went to the field,” his departure was a long time in preparation. The trip might consume weeks or even months, and normally he stayed for years before returning, sometimes even for an entire lifetime. Thanks to modern transportation, modern church figures do not need to limit themselves to the sluggish displacements of olden times. All up-to-date ecclesiastical figures can go almost anywhere on earth and return within a matter of a few days. It is true that the money used to finance such trips might also be expanded more slowly on other projects. Training an Indian Christian scholar in Britain for a year, for example, costs about as much as sending a North American delegate to Delhi for a week. It’s simply a question of priorities.

Christians At Death

“Grandmother: Dying” (Dec. 6) was one of the finest pieces of poetry I’ve read in your magazine.… It expresses what many of us working around the dying have noted. As I worked in a Christian retirement home, one of the most reliable sounds in the infirmary was an elderly lady reciting the Lord’s Prayer at the top of her voice, or singsonging the words of some old hymn. It was a little nerve-wracking until I remembered the shouted obscenities, vilifications, and paranoia of those dying outside of Christ at a community hospital. Those who think Christianity morbid and repressive would do well to notice the peace of Christians and their families when facing death.

Dallas, Tex.

Women On Women

Carl F. H. Henry’s “Reflections on Women’s Lib” (Footnotes, Jan. 3) were sensitively, albeit cautiously, expressed. In fact, they could be seen to be noncommittal. He twice listed careers now open to women as needing, and suitable for, “evangelical” women, but in neither list was the professional ministry mentioned—unless one accepts “child evangelism” as the one level on which an “evangelical” can safely and biblically serve in professional ministry. I think I understand the not so subtle distinction implied in his use of “evangelical.” Not too many years ago I began an evangelical church (Emmanuel Baptist, Norfolk, Mass.) in our home. This is now a thriving church which takes a dim view of my new career. Why should women be good enough for the rigors of the mission field, but not for the pulpits and the counseling rooms of our parishes? Their devotion to God has certainly met the test.

(The Rev.) MARIE TOLANDER

Chaplain

Havenwood

Concord, N. H.

It seems to me that Henry is moving away from biblical directives for mothers. Titus 2:4 and 5 teaches that the young mother’s responsibility is to (1) her husband and (2) her children—and that she is to be “domestic” (“keeper at home”). To do it differently, Paul says, is to bring discredit to the Word of God. Or doesn’t that matter?

Pragmatic tests may support it, but I cannot find anything in Scripture which recommends that young mothers separate themselves from their children to advance their careers. God’s way is that the older women should train (not just “teach”) the younger women of their fellowship to walk in obedience in their roles as wives and mothers (Titus 2:3–5). What a pity that children, who did not ask to be born, should be viewed by their mothers as hindrances to their own personal career goals. Are there not later years, after the family is grown, to devote to outside careers?

I believe that if “motherhood diverts many evangelical women from their fullest creative possibilities” it is only because the potential in motherhood is not understood. How can we older mothers help the younger ones see the high calling, the extraordinary opportunities, the satisfactions and joys in following the scriptural pattern regarding motherhood—not to mention the blessing, as always, in obedience?

Midland Park, N. J.

Your schizophrenically ambivalent attitude toward women was again reflected graphically in the January 3 issue. Carl Henry’s “Reflections on Women’s Lib” was a very sensitive attempt to grapple with the issues which women are raising today. He offers some helpful correctives to the prevailing Protestant idea that woman’s primary function is to be wife and mother. I agree with him that we need a new theology of marriage which incorporates both parenthood and full use of both partners’ other talents as well. His suggestion that the wider community of believers take corporate responsibility for our children rather than putting all the burden on individual couples is a good one—good for children, parents, and church. This would enable more women to heed his call to responsibly use all the talents God has given them.

Perhaps you could arrange for Dr. Henry to share some of his sensitivity with Eutychus VI (“Myths of Our Mothers”). The use of language which excludes women is driving many women either from the church or at least from any meaningful participation in worship. Some women are simply refusing to sing the more blatantly sexist hymns; many others continue to mouth the words while feeling ever more alienated and angry. Why shouldn’t we remember and be inspired by the “Faith of Our Mothers” just as much as by the “Faith of Our Fathers”? And why shouldn’t we challenge our children to “Dare to Be a Deborah” or a Mary or a Phoebe? Are we sure that we want anyone to be soldiers and go forth to war or do we prefer to be peacemakers? Scripture attributes to hymns and spiritual songs a very important teaching function. Our hymns are perhaps more important than sermons in shaping our theology. I believe theology should include both women and men and our hymns should reflect that understanding.

Chicago, Ill

Toward 2000

I rejoice that the “first call for the big celebration” (“The Bimillennial—A

Great Year Coming,” Jan. 3) comes from the pen of an evangelical author. The call is a valid one. It is imperative that we begin immediately to map a strategy for the year 2000. Other futurists have written on the year 2000. Most of the literature so far has highlighted the technical problems and possibilities of the next twenty-five years. There have been scenarios of doom as well as utopias. Your call is a fresh idea—one we need to pursue in an active way.

Stone United Presbyterian Church

Wheeling, W. Va.

Here I thought I was the only one turned on by the fact that our generation will have the privilege of seeing it: one chance in thirty for the average human being since the last millennium.

Western Michigan University

Kalamazoo, Mich.

David Kucharsky makes a good point about the Christian’s responsibility to “watch and be sober”.… I found parts of the article distressing, however, such as the quotation of Philip Schaff that “… Christendom awoke with a sigh of relief on the first day of the year 1001.” Does Mr. Kucharsky think such would be the attitude of true Christians at year 2000? On the contrary, if I expected Christ to return that particular year and he did not come, my sigh would be one of deepest disappointment, not relief.… If the recent increase in anticipation of the Lord’s soon return is merely another historical period of “eschatological mania,” as Kucharsky implies, then it follows that I am an eschatological maniac.… I find it difficult to get too excited about an event I know won’t occur for another twenty-five years, but easy to be enthused about something which might happen any day. Is this madness? A practical application of Christ’s teachings and a fervent attempt to reach others for him because our time may be short will do more to help us out of our own dark age than will a subconscious anticipation of the year 2000.

Milwaukie, Oreg.

More In The World

Your November 22 issue had an error worth about two million—two million people, that is. In News, “Religion in Transit,” you state “Delegates to the Annual Council of the 449,000-member Seventh-day Adventist Church.…” That is our membership in North America. Our world membership is about 2.5 million.

Seventh-day Adventist Church

Huntington Station, N. Y.

On Celluloid Images

I do not know [who] we have to thank for the marvelous editorial on Donald Drew’s Images of Man (“Through a Glass Lightly,” Jan. 17). But thanks indeed! And the saints preserve all beings whose acumen is so acute.

Editor

InterVarsity Press

Downers Grove, Ill

Aaron’S Age

Your “What If …” cartoon in the January 17 issue seems to perpetuate a common falsehood. Moses is represented by a gray, tired, bearded figure while Aaron is youthful in appearance; but, in fact, Aaron was three years Moses’ senior (Exod. 7:7). God evidently chose Moses for leadership because of his, God’s, plan and purpose and most certainly not because of older age or birthright, for the latter qualifications were Aaron’s.

Irvington Baptist Church

Irvington, Ky.

Kurt Vonnegut: Charming Nihilist

It’s a little difficult to understand the continuing popularity of Kurt Vonnegut. It’s not that Vonnegut is not an entertaining writer. He is. Time magazine has aptly called him “the most distinctive voice in recent American fiction.”

What makes his popularity puzzling is his nihilistic world view, which runs counter to the present popularity of the search for final truth. Vonnegut doesn’t even believe in final truth.

There is, of course, his charm. He admits he can be very charming when he wants to be. Apparently when he’s writing he wants to be. His candor must be given credit for part of that charm. In the face of dozens of conflicting world views, each claiming to have the right answer, Vonnegut has the modesty and candor to say: “I don’t know.”

In his novels he continually raises the question of what people are for. His own answer is, “I don’t know.”

However, Vonnegut is holding out on us. Like most good teachers he knows more than he’s admitting. He knows it’s good (but probably impossible) for people to be happy. Just how he knows this is not clear. The Vonnegutian epistemology is as whimsical as the rest of his philosophy. He believes something (such as the miracles of Madame Blavatsky) if it pleases him.

Now the thing that will make us happiest, Vonnegut thinks, is to believe that man is the center of the universe. As his gift to mankind he offers us the opportunity to believe in “the most ridiculous superstition of all: That humanity is at the center of the universe, the fulfiller or the frustrator of the grandest dreams of God Almighty” (Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons, 1974).

“If you can believe that,” he continues, “and make others believe it there might be hope for us. Human beings might stop treating each other like garbage, might begin to treasure each other instead.”

Vonnegut likes the arts, religion, and astrology better than science precisely because they “use frauds in order to make human beings seem more wonderful than they are.”

Art makes human conversation seem more entertaining than it really is. It makes human activity seem more important than it is. Astrology gives every man a symbol, a color, a metal—a destiny!

And religion is able to make people happy by telling them all sorts of neat lies. In Vonnegut’s novels religion is faulted not for being the opiate of the people but for not being a better one. Religion’s job is to anesthetize man for his life imprisonment in the universe. A religion is not true or false but merely useful or not useful depending on how happy it makes people. People need lies to live by.

Science and technology get their lumps from Vonnegut. Science is the great dehumanizer because it does not place man at the center of things.

Vonnegut is not naïve about the nature of man. He’s no dreamy-eyed liberal extolling the essential goodness of human nature.

“All human beings are to some extent greedy and cruel—and angry without cause,” he points out. In his novel Cat’s Cradle, the Fourteenth Book of Bokonon (the bible of an invented religion) is titled “What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?” The book consists of one word: “Nothing.”

He also repeatedly refers to the stupidity and unreasonableness of mankind. “If you would be unloved and forgotten,” writes the protagonist in one novel, “be reasonable.”

In addition, his novels are peopled with an assorted lot of crazies and halfcrazies, including a drunk schizophrenic, a pyromaniac whor*, an ugly virgin “too dumb to live,” a decadent poet, a science-fiction writer, a U. S. senator, a midget, a Pontiac dealer, a scientist, and a hom*osexual piano player. If this is a cross-section of humanity, it’s a puzzle why Vonnegut wants to put this animal at the center of the universe.

But he does. And if we could get everyone to think this way, reasons Vonnegut, we could bring into existence a sort of Vonnegut utopia. Utopia is tied up with his longing for “community.” If we can all set our minds to believe the lie that man is the center of the universe, we can begin treasuring one another and stop being lonesome. He says it’s the rich who keep us apart from our neighbors because they want us lonesome. “Lonesome no more!” is his war cry for the American people.

Vonnegut whimsically suggests that everyone throw out his middle name and substitute whatever name the computers give—names of Greek gods, colors, chemical elements, flowers, animals. Each person would then have a family of 20,000 all with the same middle name. That way no one would feel alone.

He points out that the drug thing among young people gave them a community. “If you become a user of any drug, you can pick up a set of friends you’ll see day after day, because of the urgency of getting drugs all the time.”

It’s perhaps in this humanism that Vonnegut has his greatest appeal after all. There lurks within each of us a virulent strain of humanism waiting for the proper culture in which to grow. Vonnegut provides the culture.

Let yourself go, he says. Believe a lie. And it’s a lie that humans want to believe—that we’re the center of the universe. Let’s create a great fellowship where we worship our collective being. After all, there’s only a consonant of difference between having “men” at the center of the universe and having “me” there.

But the lie that Vonnegut wants us to believe won’t really do the trick. Once God ceases to be at the center, it makes little difference whether he is replaced with hom*o sapiens or hominy grits—with ideals or an idol. The ultimate result is horror.

The very exhalting of humanity always results in the inhumanity that creates Vonnegut’s despair. The moral horrors of our modern age derive not from the haters of mankind” but from the lovers of supermankind. They have less to do with Jesus of Nazareth than Friedrich of Saxony.

There is, of course, a proper humanism. People are important. They have the importance assigned them by God—not that which they choose for themselves. The crucifixion is God’s assignment of value. We are objects of God’s redeeming love—a little lower than the angels in the created order.

Too long a look at mankind can only bring despair. The effects of looking too closely are already beginning to tell on Vonnegut. Suicide, he admits, is at the heart of his last novel Breakfast of Champions.

Another element that seems to loom large in Vonnegut’s present thinking is his need for a “culture.”

“What I say didactically in the introduction to Breakfast of Champions is that I can’t live without a culture anymore, that I realize I don’t have one. What passes for a culture in my head is really a bunch of commercials and it is intolerable.”

He’s right. Without this sort of culture, or point of integration, human life is fragmented and pointless.

Vonnegut reports that a twelve-year-old after reading Breakfast of Champions wrote him a note saying “Please don’t commit suicide.” Let us join this sensitive youngster—in imploring Mr. Vonnegut not to commit suicide, but to look away from humanity, the object of his affection and despair, to Jesus, the Lord of humanity.

There, Vonnegut, you’ll find a culture men have found worth dying for when dying became necessary. You’ll find a community that has outlasted all other communities—the people of God.

JOHN V. LAWING, JR.

Love has reached the saturation point. In the last few years there has been a desperate, and justifiable, search for a cure-all for the deteriorating plight of mankind. The Vietnam war and the civil-rights movement made the search more urgent, and the answer that has emerged is a great big warm something called “Love.” Love has now become an overworked, overused word and consequently has lost much of its true meaning. Just a few years ago people hesitated to use the word “love” unless the degree of feeling or commitment warranted it. The present loose usage is the result of the release of emotion in the sixties with the new morality and the decay of traditional moral standards. Love-ins were held, in the vague belief that for hundreds of young people to exchange daisies in the park could accomplish some good. But the feeling of warmth soon wore off because love-ins were not based on love.

Much has been written about filial love and agape love; that is, brotherly love of man for man, which is a horizontal love, and agape love, God’s self-giving love for man, which is a vertical love. Although this distinction is repeatedly pointed out in religious books and articles, the word “love” still bounces around in conversations, group discussions, sermons, and writing, meaning many different things to different people.

It is interesting to see how certain words come into popularity. They catch on as an interesting turn of phrase, such as “no way,” and “right on.” They get pressed into service as catch-all adjectives, such as “great” and “fantastic,” now used to describe anything from a new toothpaste to a sermon. When such words and phrases are overused, they eventually lose their impact, but there is no real harm done. However, the overuse of the word “love” can be detrimental, and Christians in particular should be on guard. It is not a word like “great” or “fantastic” that can come into common usage one day and then fade away the next as other words become popular. There are volumes on the subject of love, and Christians should be urged not to confuse the secular use of the word with the spiritual use.

“God is love” is one of the first biblical truths taught to a child in a Christian home or in even the most liberal Sunday school. But as this teaching is amplified, it must be pointed out that God’s love is not the same warm feeling for another person that human love is. True love is not a security blanket, a warm puppy, a blazing fire in the fireplace, or even being with the person closest to us. The love of God is not an emotional thing at all. It is the most intellectual, profound reality that we could ever attempt to comprehend. Love is the motivating force that culminated in the greatest act in all history—the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, his death to make atonement for our sins, and his resurrection.

Even in certain Christian groups there is a misunderstanding of love. The “love of Christ” is said to be felt during healing sessions and charismatic experiences. Despite the fact that these Christians are strongly enough committed to meet together regularly and to pray sincerely, unless they read and study Scripture and make it a part of their lives, they cannot understand the true love of Christ. The revelation of God is never a warm feeling of “love.” The revelation of God is in Jesus Christ as revealed in the Scriptures. Therefore we can come to a greater knowledge of the love of God only through a greater knowledge of the Scriptures. We read in Philippians 1:9, “And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment.” Our outreach in Christian love must be backed by scriptural knowledge and teaching—not a surface or emotional love, but a love deep enough to recognize sin and to introduce Jesus Christ as the only remedy for that sin.

I was disturbed recently to read in a Christian magazine for young people that “the supreme happiness of life is the certainty that we are loved.” The article pointed out Jesus’ interest and involvement in the needs of man: that he loves us and touches our lives and makes us feel worthwhile. All this is true, but it is only part of the story. It is dangerous to teach young people that Jesus loves them just to meet their needs and problems and loneliness. Such superficial teaching leads to disillusionment. They must be taught first their need for a Saviour, and then his unspeakable love for them as expressed in his atoning death for their sin. When they accept Jesus Christ as their Saviour and acknowledge him as Lord of their lives, they will understand and experience true love. Then they can indeed experience the love and peace of God that pass all understanding, and as the Lord Jesus Christ takes over their lives, a love for others begins to emanate from them as a fruit of the Holy Spirit dwelling within.

In Ephesians 2:4 it is stated clearly that “God … out of the great love with which he loved us … made us alive together with Christ.” Ephesians 3:17–19 expresses the hope that we, “being rooted and grounded in love [God’s love], may have power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breath and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge.”

To understand even partially the great transaction that took place at Calvary—when our sins were atoned for by the death of God’s only Son—we must use our minds as well as our hearts. We should stand in awesome wonder at the depth of love God showed for us. Is this love a warm, emotional feeling? Indeed not! This love commands our complete commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ and a new beginning as a child of his.

We cannot expect the person who has not experienced the new birth to understand these things. But Christians should and must understand that “love” is a word not to be used lightly or idly. Let us be fully aware that the love of God is infinite, unalterable, unchangeable—the antithesis of the type of love we hear proclaimed and see practiced all around us.

How does a prospective seminarian prepare for seminary, choose one, and get the most out of his theological education? Here are some guidelines.

Preparing for Seminary. Educational preparation for seminary is a highly individual matter. Many educators feel that a basic liberal arts education in a four-year college is the best preparation. It may or may not be. The student who does poorly in high school may not be able to take the pressure of a four-year college but may need to learn new study habits and take remedial work in a junior college or Bible college.

Some students who have come up through a Christian school system do their best in Bible colleges. Also, other students converted later in life, who have little or no understanding of a Christian world view, feel the need to surround themselves with the total Christian influence that may be found in a Bible college.

Whether the student goes to Bible college, junior college, or a four-year college, he needs to learn to think analytically, express himself in the spoken and written word, and develop an awareness of the world around him with all of its complexities.

In the realm of emotional and spiritual preparation, the student should distinguish between the call of God and his own need to exercise his talents. God does indeed use talents (which arise out of human personality) in conjunction with spiritual gifts that are sovereignly given. The prospective seminarian needs guidance in distinguishing between the two and seeing how his personality enhances or diminishes his spiritual gift.

Choosing a Seminary. The prospective seminarian should ask several questions of any seminary he considers:

1. Is it faithful to the orthodox Christian faith? Some prospective seminarians have argued that theological education in a liberal seminary challenges the conservative and prepares him better to combat the erosion of orthodoxy in the churches. I have serious reservations about this argument. One’s seminary education is basic training for a warfare against Satan. Ephesians 6 clearly points out the centrality of the Word in the believer’s arsenal. When he is on the front lines the believer will stand alone many times. He had better be sure he has the equipment to stand.

If one is going to specialize in a field that requires a thorough knowledge of unorthodox theology, a second theological degree in a liberal seminary may be in order. Having put on the complete armor of God one will be better equipped to stand, and not only that, he will be able to inquire more intelligently into teachings contrary to the faith.

2. Does the seminary provide a solid basic biblical education? No matter what field the student plans to minister in, he needs a good biblical education.

Seminarians who are interested in a ministry other than the pulpit may be tempted to avoid the rigors of Hebrew and Greek. Although I sympathize with those so tempted, I urge them to resist. Languages are not my forte, but I am grateful for tools that enable me to do sound biblical exegesis. No matter what his field of service, the Christian in a leadership position must be an expert on Scripture. This is what distinguishes him from other practitioners in his field. For instance, as a marriage counselor I am continually called on to establish a biblical rationale for what I say.

The rigors of homiletics should not be avoided, either. A theologically trained person who achieves in fields other than the pulpit ministry will be called on to preach in churches and speak before community organizations. He should have the skill to communicate his message.

3. Is the curriculum designed to help the prospective seminarian discover and perfect his spiritual gift? Having spoken of the necessity for a solid biblical education, I emphasize the need for focus on spiritual gifts. Christian vocations are not as limited as they once were—preacher, teacher, and missionary. With the revival of the doctrine of spiritual gifts Christians are pursuing alternative ministries consistent with their gifts. The seminary should offer a range of electives that permits the student to concentrate in areas of alternative ministries.

4. Is the seminary in touch with the current outlook of the churches and the Christian community? The seminarian needs to be prepared to minister to the Church as it is today and not as it was thirty years ago or may be thirty years from now. Perhaps the latter warning ought to be stressed more than the former. Seminarians who are instructed by forward-looking professors may be jolted by the resistance of the people they minister to—resistance to new ideas and new programs.

5. If the prospective seminarian is married, he should find out whether the seminary can meet his needs. He needs to have low-cost housing that is adequate for his family. The seminary may not be able to provide such housing, but it can help him find it. The same may be said for work opportunities.

The seminary should also provide opportunities for strengthening family life through instruction and counsel. In admission screening and in the training program, assessment should be made of the strengths and weaknesses of the marriage. Although a student’s wife may desire to maintain a low profile both during seminary and after graduation, she nevertheless will exert a profound influence on her husband. The Apostle Paul noted this reality in First Corinthians 7 when he said that the married man gives thought to the things of the world with a view to pleasing his wife, and indeed, he should!

At least once a year the marriage should be evaluated, and workshops should be offered to strengthen it. Such an evaluation should be a mandatory part of both admission to and training in seminary.

The seminary that lacks such a program may find it more efficient to contract this work to psychologists and counselors than to hire another staff member. In fact, this may be the only way the smaller seminary can provide the service.

6. Is the seminary suffering from power struggles internally with faculty and staff or externally with its denomination? This may be determined somewhat by the rate of turnover among the faculty and staff and by discreet inquiries of Christian leaders outside the seminary who live in the same town. What kind of a reputation does the seminary have in its own neighborhood?

7. Is the seminary well attended and in demand? The enrollment figures over the years give an idea of what other prospective seminarians have thought about the seminary. It would be well also to talk with students who are currently attending the seminary.

8. What kind of graduate is produced by the seminary? If I had only one guideline to offer on the choice of seminary it would be this. Most seminary public-relations programs recognize that their graduates are their best advertisem*nt. Graduates who have remained true to the faith and have proved their effectiveness in the ministry speak well for the seminary they attended. This guideline is advanced by Scripture itself, which teaches that good fruit comes from a good tree and good water from a good spring.

Getting the Most Out of Seminary. The student who wants to get the most out of seminary should consider at least four things:

1. He (and his wife, if he is married) must view his seminary education as the primary goal for the three or four years required. This does not mean that the family life should suffer, but a commitment to the educational process as the primary goal is called for. The seminarian (and his wife) must soberly assess the demands of a seminary education. This must be done even before enrollment. Much grief and misunderstanding can be avoided. What builder does not project the cost before building?

2. The student should avail himself of informal contacts with his fellow seminarians and faculty members. A lot can be learned through rap sessions.

3. Most seminaries make Christian service part of their graduation requirements. The seminarian should take seriously these opportunities for ministry. Christian service will point up his strengths and weaknesses and motivate him to study.

4. The seminarian must be careful not to insulate himself from the world around him. It is easy to fall into a study/work/play routine that involves only Christians.

While attending seminary I was befriended by a Dallas (Texas) policeman who made it his mission to keep my feet on the ground. He carried me all over the city of Dallas while he answered calls. After many nights of observing mayhem and murder I found that depravity was more than just a theological word. It was a living reality.

ATTENDANCE

Christ sits down by the olive

and his face mottles;

by shagbark, his face, unable to expand,

cracks into dark strips;

by the willow his face is drawn;

by autumn’s maple, flame.

Near the birch, he wraps

his face in bandages,

and when he leaves the earth,

his absence is perceptible;

then, nothing resembles any other thing,

no one inclines toward another,

trunks slant diagonally out of the ground,

creeks overflow their banks,

lightning strikes fires

that will not be smothered.

SANDRA R. DUGUID