Page 5663 – Christianity Today (2024)

You need more textbooks than the Bible.

The other day I received a letter from a Lutheran colleague informing me that his congregation was opening a Christian school for elementary grades and asking “prayers for us as we undertake this important Christian witness.” Now, my ecumenical spirit and my charitable leanings told me to pray for him in this educational venture; on the other hand, my own deep misgivings about so-called Christian schools restrained me.

A 1967 CHRISTIANITY TODAY article claimed that “the most exciting development in education today is the rise of the Protestant Christian school.” Among the reasons for organizing these schools, according to the author’s survey, were a superior academic environment, strong Christian influence, and Bible-centered curriculum. A number of pastors admitted that they hoped to promote church growth through the recruitment of parents who had become fed up with public education. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Bible reading and prayer decisions, the introduction of sex education, and the teaching of evolutionary rather than creationist views in science courses, private Christian schools grew at a rapid rate. The article claimed that “the Protestant school exists in the interest of the Christian witness in the world; the school is an instrument for subjecting the secular world to the reign of Christ.” A far-reaching court decision was not mentioned in the article—the Supreme Court’s decision on school integration and its attendant legislation on busing. The fact that the examples of fine new Christian schools came from places like Charleston, South Carolina, Selma, Alabama, and San Antonio, Texas, did not seem particularly significant to the author. There was no mention of race in the article.

A later story, “Creed and Color in the School Crisis,” appeared in a 1970 issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. This article drew an obvious parallel between the rise of Protestant church schools and school busing decisions, particularly in the North and West. It was noted that a few mainline Protestant denominations (United Methodists, for example) have forbidden their congregations to form private schools, integrated or otherwise, which would compete with public education. It was also noted that the National Association of Christian Schools (NACS) and the National Union of Christian Schools officially discouraged racial discrimination on the part of their member schools. Some of the other Christian school organizations were not so firm in their resistance to the use of Christian schools to avoid racial integration, leaving the matter to the discretion of the individual school. As one now drives across the country and sees so-called Christian schools and academies springing up in church recreation halls, abandoned restaurants, and prefabricated housing, one can’t help but wonder if more than a desire for Christian education motivates those who are part of this new education phenomenon.

Admittedly, there are Christian schools worthy of the name, and there are shoddy, racist, superpatriotic pretenses unworthy of either the designation of Christian or of school. The National Christian School Education Association (NCSEA) and its parent body, the National Association of Christian Schools (NACS), appear to set rigorous membership and accreditation requirements that not only stress an evangelical, racially inclusive Christian faith, but also a sound educational program. But any private Christian school, educationally adequate or not, raises some serious theological and ethical issues.

First, there is the unavoidable question of race. Surely there are few Christians today who would attempt to support segregation or white supremacy by Scripture. Our Christian faith compels us to witness, as individuals and as churches, to the Lord who treated all people as children of God. Despite claims to the contrary, the meteoric rise in the number of Christian schools has paralleled the desegregation of public schools.

“It’s not a question of race,” the headmaster of a local Southern Baptist school assured me; “it’s a question of quality education.” We have heard that before. As I grew up in the South, it was rarely a question of racism; it was always a question of “state’s rights” or “constitutionality” or the “Biblical belief in racial purity.” Although many private Christian schools piously proclaim an open door policy, their cost and location inevitably make them all-white institutions. De facto segregation exists in the vast majority of Christian schools even in the face of de jure inclusiveness. Would parents be as eager to send their children to these private schools if the racial proportions were the same as in their local public schools? You know the answer. A survey of literature from the NACS and the NCSEA had no statement on the race question. What kind of witness in the world do we have when we proclaim brotherhood and love, yet organize institutions that promote racial and class exclusiveness?

Further, there is the question of academic standards in these private schools. The Christian schools in my area do not have a monopoly on high academic achievement. Like many private schools before them, they often trade parental approval for rigorous education. “My child made C’s in public school and is making all A’s at the academy,” a mother told me. Her child is one of fifty students in the school where annual tuition is nearly $2,000. The school’s income is derived entirely from student fees. Is it any wonder that improved grades often come with the switch to private Christian schools? Sometimes private schools have boasted of higher standardized test scores among their students, as compared to public school students. Most educators would regard these higher scores as more a credit to the parents than to the schools. Children who come from relatively affluent, advantaged homes always tend to do better on such tests.

A Christian school in our town meets in a large prefabricated steel building. None of its teachers are accredited by any state or private agency. It has no textbooks or other educational aids (“The Bible is all we need,” its headmaster proclaims). And yet it advertises “Quality Christian Education” as its goal. Accelerated Christian Education, Incorporated, of Garland, Texas, now markets audio-visual kits for use in Christian schools. The kits contain tapes and workbooks designed for the education of individual students, led by parents or untrained personnel, rather than by qualified teachers. In a recent interview in The National Observer (Jan. 15, 1977), Dr. Billy Melvin of the National Association of Christian Schools, expressed concern about the inadequate qualifications of some teachers: “It’s not enough just to depend on the Bible for instruction, as important as that is.” But Dr. A. C. Janney of the American Association of Christian Schools said in the same article that his schools frequently “… decided to sacrifice educational background for Bible orientation. We turned to Bible school graduates without formal educational qualifications because we can always take care of the academic things but not the spiritual.”

A major problem for private education, Christian or otherwise, is cost. Education is a frighteningly expensive undertaking. At the time when many Roman Catholics are finding that their parochial schools are becoming an unbearable burden on parish budgets and of questionable value in Christian nurture, it is disheartening to see Protestants buying into the business of education. A survey of Christian schools in my state revealed tuition costs ranging from $700 to $1,200 per year. Multiply that by several children per family and you have a sizeable drain on any family’s budget. Where does the money come from? I have heard more than one minister complain that most of the money comes from funds that would otherwise be given to church missions. “My church is in an area where the public schools are 70 per cent black and where two-thirds of my church’s kids go to private schools,” a fellow minister told me. “When church budget time comes around, parents tell me, ‘Look, we’re already paying for a good Christian education. That’s our tithe.’” Is Christian education a luxury that only the rich can afford?

Our founding fathers were convinced that democracy could survive only among an educated populace. Churches got into education mainly in those areas where no one else cared enough to go; frontier missions, education for minorities, women, the poor, and the handicapped. As education became the right of all Americans, churches withdrew from primary and secondary education. It would be tragic if Christians turned their talents to educating the children of the affluent and began competing with the more universal aims of public education. And if Christian schools tried to solve their financial problems by appealing for state aid, the results could be even more tragic.

In too many communities, parents who are talented, educated, committed Christians have withdrawn their children (along with their time, talent, and prayers) from the public schools without a thought for their responsibility as their brother’s keeper. Without children in the public schools, they have little interest in the needs of public education, from passing bond issues to setting curriculum. Certainly, there is much wrong in today’s public schools—mostly the same things that are wrong with our society as a whole. Christian parents have good reason to feel alarmed over many recent developments in public education. But who will improve it? What kind of society will we have if all Christians abandon the public schools? Hats off to President Carter and his family for their stand on this issue.

My friend requested my prayer for “this new Christian witness.” To whom will his new private school witness? What will that witness be? Obviously, the only witness will be to those children whose parents already share his particular Christian theology. That is a new definition of “letting your light shine.” I am afraid that the only thing the witness will say to the rest of the world is, “It is impossible for Christians to raise their children in today’s world without withdrawing them from the world. The Christian faith cannot compete with contemporary secular ideologies. Secularity, immorality, scientism, and materialism are stronger than our Gospel and therefore we must isolate our children in a theological and intellectual hothouse to shield them from these contemporary challenges to our faith.”

That is not what I want to say. Roman Catholic schools have not been called parochial over the years for nothing. Parochialism is the enemy of evangelical witness in the world. You can’t convert the person whom you do not know. Much of the private Christian school movement is a cover-up for a haphazard approach to Christian education within our churches. True, twentieth-century America is often hostile in subtle and sophisticated ways to the Gospel. But there are more creative, more courageous, more biblical responses to the problem than by simply moving the game to our own secluded ball park where we make all the rules.

For my own children I want a good, full education. But, true to my evangelical roots, I am skeptical of the final efficacy of education in general. It is sad to see Christians accepting the same old liberal, Western, secular faith that claims that education is the god that cures all problems. If there is one thing we should have learned in the past few years, it is the severely limited capacity of education to cure our deepest problems. Christians used to be more skeptical of facts, figures, reason, externally imposed authority, and indoctrination. I’m not going to ask a teacher to do for me or for my children what I am called as a Christian to do in my home and my church. Too many American parents hire professional teachers, counselors, coaches, and babysitters to do their jobs. My church and I will teach my children to pray, to worship, to read the Bible, to counter secularity’s false claims, to keep the state in proper Christian perspective, and to witness to the light that shines in the darkness. For me intelligence is not defined as the mere acquisition of facts and figures. Intelligence is the ability to live with all sorts of people, to confidently face challenges to one’s faith, to learn from the heart as well as the head. In other words, I want more for my children’s nurture than a public or private school can give them.

How can I give my children this Christian nurture without opting for a private Christian school? First, I can work in the public schools in my community for better use of my tax money and a better education for all of God’s children, and I can claim the work I do there as Christian witness. When I see the parents of children at my local school having bake sales and rummage sales to raise money for their school, I can’t help wondering how much that time and effort would mean if applied to the needs of our public schools. We can use our time and talents in better ways than in competition with public education. We need more committed Christians who are public school board members, teachers, coaches, and volunteer workers. I know of more than one minister who has offered his services as coach, counselor, or teacher of a noncredit religion or ethics course and has been received with open arms by beleaguered school officials. One such minister doubled the size of his church’s youth group through contacts made with youth at the school. That is witness. I also know of many public school teachers who see the public school as a mission field and look upon themselves as missionaries, who heal, witness, and help. The literature of Christian school organizations implies that parents who really love their children and that teachers who are really Christians will withdraw from the public schools and make the needed sacrifices to provide true Christian education. Such self-righteousness may be needed to keep Christian schools afloat, but it insults those Christians who see their commitment to public education as a Christian witness.

Second we can support Christian teachers and students in our public schools. It is tough and demanding. Rather than withdraw during a difficult crisis in school integration, a church started a group for high school students, where school problems were shared and prayed about. The group looked upon itself as salt in a sometimes unsavory environment. That is witness. Similar Christian groups could provide valuable experiences for Christian teachers.

No, colleague, I cannot bring myself to pray for your new private Christian school. I will pray for you, but not for your school. And I pray for myself and for all of us in these difficult days that we will be a light in a dark world.

Make It As Sure As You Can

Once there was a spider who lived in a tree. The webs he wove were the strongest, the glossiest, the stickiest webs that a spider could ever construct. Many bugs and beetles, many ants and other insects found themselves caught, quick-dried and stored away in his loaded larder.

One thing alone troubled his tranquil existence. Close to his tree ran a railroad track, and each morning when the train whooshed by, his whole house shuddered and shook. Sometimes he even lost a few of the tasty tidbits he had intended for a treat.

“That’s the last straw!” he screamed one day when he found part of his house torn away. “I’ll put a stop to that train! It won’t trouble me anymore!”

That night he spun a long glossy filament that rolled out and out and out. When the wind gave a stronger puff than usual, he leaped into the air and went flying across the tracks to the tree on the other side.

Now his evil plan began. Back and forth, back and forth from tree to tree he ran, weaving the strongest, the glossiest, the stickiest web any spider could construct. None had ever been so fine, none so strong, so tough, so utterly unbreakable!

“I’ll seal it with a seal,” he muttered as he glued it doubly fast. “I’ll get some of my friends to guard it as well. They’ll make it as sure as they can.”

The next morning the “Hwooooo-hwoooo” of the train could be heard. It was the Lagos Express. And it was coming awfully fast.

“Hurrah!” laughed the spider. “What a wreck this will be!”

“Hwoo-hwooo,” called the train.

“Haw! Haw!” laughed the spider.

“Hwooo-ooo,” the train warned.

Hwoo—WHOOOOOOSH.

“As sure as you can,” said Pilate.

EILEEN LAGEER

Eileen Lageer is the administrative assistant of the overseas department, Missionary Church Headquarters, which is in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

Any reader who comes across the prose of Annie Dillard in Harper’s or Atlantic Monthly or in her books finds an eloquent blend of facts, theological ideas, and visual images. The power of her prose is undeniable. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, now selling widely in paperback, won the Pulitzer prize. Holy the Firm, her new book, more directly addresses theological ideas.

Annie Dillard deserves analysis. In her own words, she departs from such British rationalists as C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton; yet she firmly rejects agnosticism and worships in Christian churches. The following interview was conducted by Campus Life editor Philip Yancey at Dillard’s office on Puget Sound. Dillard speaks for herself. Assistant editor Cheryl Forbes and writer Patricia Ward evaluate Dillard’s books in Refiner’s Fire (page 28).

Question: Annie, when I mention you to my friends, I get one of two reactions: either a sign of appreciation from a fervent admirer or a puzzled “Who?” It seems most evangelicals are in the second category.

Answer: Well, I admit I am consciously addressing the unbeliever in my books, though I have great empathy for evangelicals. I was raised Presbyterian, in Pittsburgh, and during my development I had only one short fling of rebellion against God.

For four consecutive summers I had gone to a fundamentalist church camp in the country. We sang Baptist songs and had a great time—it gave me a taste for abstract thought. But I grew sick of people “going to church just to show off their clothes,” so I quit the church. Instead of quietly dropping away, I wanted to make a big statement, so I marched into the assistant minister’s office. I gave him my spiel about how much hypocrisy there was in the church. This kind man replied, “You’re right, honey, there is.”

Before leaving, I said, “By the way, I have to write a senior paper for the school—do you have any C. S. Lewis books?” He gave me an armful and I started a long paper on C. S. Lewis. By the time I finished I was right back in the arms of Christianity. My rebellion lasted a month.

Q: You have gained stature in the publishing world so quickly. It’s amusing to be with publishers who think they have the whole literary scene predicted and portrayed on graphs and charts. Then out of nowhere comes a young woman with her first book, which gets the Pulitzer Prize. Were you shocked?

A: Sure, but what excited me more was the acceptance of the first chapter from Pilgrim for Harper’s magazine. That day I was happy. I was out playing softball when the phone call came. I ran in, ate an apple very quickly, and called everyone I knew. Twenty-four hours later I got happy all over again. The Pulitzer came much later—over a year later.

Q: You did, however, become a public person suddenly. How did that affect you?

A: It was confusing at first. Offers came in from everywhere: offers to write texts for photography books, to write for Hollywood, write ballets and words for songs. And I received hundreds of invitations to speak and teach.

That whole business is a dreadful temptation for an artist. I thought about it, and finally made my choice by turning down an appearance on the Today show. Now I give only one reading a year, and virtually no other public appearances. I have chosen to be a writer—and I must stick to that; the craft demands my full energy.

Q: Did you get many personal letters from readers of Pilgrim?

A: Yes. One man, a professor of theology at a Catholic university, wrote that he resigned his job immediately after reading it. Another woman, a devout Catholic, was a book editor for The National Observer. She wrote a very sympathetic, intelligent review for her paper, discussing the religious angle thoroughly. On the same page with the review, the paper ran her obituary; she had died shortly after finishing the review.

Many people who responded with the most warmth were struggling with cancer or some similar burden.

Q: You seem easily moved by people. And yet, you write about them only rarely; you prefer objects and nature. Why? Don’t they fascinate you in the same way?

A: Oh yes—they do. I just don’t think I’m good enough to write about people yet. I’d love to try some day.

“There is one church here, so I go to it. On Sunday mornings I quit the house and wander down the hill to the white frame church in the firs. On a big Sunday there might be twenty of us there; often I am the only person under sixty, and feel as though I’m on an archaeological tour of Soviet Russia. The members are of mixed denominations; the minister is a Congregationalist, and wears a white shirt. The man knows God. Once in the middle of the long pastoral prayer of intercession for the whole world—for the gift of wisdom to its leaders, for hope and mercy to the grieving and pained, succor to the oppressed, and God’s grace to all—in the middle of this he stopped, and burst out, ‘Lord we bring you these same petitions every week.’ After a shocked pause, he continued reading the prayer. Because of this, I like him very much. ‘Good morning!’ he says after the first hymn and invocation, startling me witless every time, and we all shout back, ‘Good Morning!’” (Holy the Firm, pp. 57–58).

Q: I have heard that you have come in contact with rigid fundamentalists. How do they affect you?

A: I have great respect for them. When I lived in Virginia, I did readings for the blind at a nearby Bible College. Fundamentalists have intense faith. Many educated people think them naïve. But fundamentalists know they have chosen the narrow way; they know the social scorn they face.

You must remember, however, my prime audience is the skeptic, the agnostic, not the Christian. Just getting the agnostic to acknowledge the supernatural is a major task.

Q: Your latest book, Holy the Firm, differs greatly in structure from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It’s a fraction of the length, more narrative in style, more abstract, more directly theological. Many people consider it less penetrable. What did you hope to accomplish?

A: I chose an artistic structure. I decided to write about whatever happened in the next three days. The literary possibilities of that structure intrigued me. On the second day an airplane crashed nearby, and I was back where I had been in Pilgrim—grappling with the problem of pain and dying. I had no intention of dealing with that issue at first, but it became unavoidable.

I kept getting stuck. Those forty-three manuscript pages took me fifteen months to write. In Pilgrim I would get stuck for three days at a time and I would just plow through. But in Holy the Firm the problems were enormous. The question I constantly faced was, “Can it be done?” After the second day’s plane crash … how could I resolve anything on the third day?

I would have to crank myself up to approach the stack of manuscript pages. Then I’d read what I had written on the last pages and even I couldn’t understand it. I don’t live on that kind of level.

Q: People who know you through your writings probably assume you do live on that level, don’t they?

A: Yes, that’s an unfortunate error. As a writer, I am less a creator than an audience to the artistic vision. In Holy the Firm I even inserted a disclaimer. I said, “No one has ever lived well.” I do not live well. I merely point to the vision.

People, holy people, ask me to speak at their monasteries and I write back and say no, keep your vision. In The Wizard of Oz there’s a giant machine that announces “Dorothy!”; behind the curtain a little man is cranking it and pushing buttons. When the dog pulls back the curtain to expose the little man, the machine says, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! Look at the light show.”

So I ask the monks to keep their vision of power, holiness, and purity. We all have glimpses of the vision, but the truth is that no man has ever lived the vision.

Q: With the exception of Jesus.

A: Of course!

Q: How does your own vision penetrate your life? You don’t write much about ethics.

A: No, I don’t write at all about ethics. I try to do right and rarely do. The kind of art I write is shockingly uncommitted—appallingly isolated from political, social, and economic affairs.

There are lots of us here. Everybody is writing about politics and social concerns; I don’t. I’m not doing any harm.

“About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.

“The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of this free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there” (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, pp. 7–8).

Q: You write as an observer, perched on the edge, but also immersed in the world. You ask us to see it with new, enlightened eyes. But how are your powers of observation affected by what has happened to you in the last few years? Can you maintain an innocent gaze when you know you could make a pile of money on your walk through the woods or on your trip to the Galapagos Islands, or even on your visit to the hospital to visit the plane crash victims?

A: That’s not been a problem. I’d certainly not walk in the woods thinking I’d write a book about it. That would drive you nuts in no time.

Q: In Holy the Firm, you lived those three days knowing you’d write a book about them.

A: True. I started it as a poem. I merely waited to see what was going to happen and I wasn’t looking at my reactions. I simply needed a certain amount of events—whatever might happen—to make a minor point: that days are lived in the mind and in the spirit.

Q: In other words, what we perceive happening in a day is really just the surface layer; something much greater and more profound is occurring behind the curtain.

A: Yes. How does the world look from within? And that brought in the concept of Holy the Firm.

Every day has its own particular brand of holiness to discover and worship appropriately. The only way to deal with that was to discover the relationship between time and eternity. That single question interests me artistically more than any other.

If you examine each day, with the events and objects it contains, as a god, you instantly have to conclude there are pagan gods. And if you believe in a holy God—how does he relate to these pagan gods that fill the world? That is exactly the same question as the relationship between time and eternity. Does the holy God bring forth these pagan gods out of his love?

Here I depart from the British rationalists like C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, and George MacDonald. I am grounded strongly in art and weakly in theology. There is a profound difference between the two fields. If I wanted to make a theological statement I would have hired a skywriter. Instead, I knock myself out trying to do art, and it’s not so airtight. It isn’t reducible to a sealed system. It doesn’t translate so well.

Q: Then that’s why in your books you give us both hope and despair, anger and love.

A: I guess. I must stay faithful to art. I get in my little canoe and paddle out to the edge of mystery; it is unfortunately true that words fail, reason fails; and all I can do is to create a world which by its internal coherence makes a degree of sense. I can either do that or hush. And then I learn to make statements about that world, to furrow deeper into the mystery.

Every single thing I follow takes me there, to the edge of a cliff. As soon as I start writing, I’m hanging over the cliff again. You can make a perfectly coherent world at the snap of a finger—but only if you don’t bother being honest about it.

Q: You seem driven to that mystery. You describe the beauty of nature with such eloquence in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek—but just as I’m exulting, you strike me with its terror and injustice.

A: As I wrote Pilgrim, I kept before me the image of people who are suffering. They were right there in the room as I wrote the book. I could not write a cheerful nature book or a new version of the argument from design—not with a leukemia patient next to me. I had to write for people who are dying or grieving—and that’s everybody. I can’t write just from any fat position.

When I worked on Holy the Firm and the plane went down, I thought, Oh no, God is making me write about this damn problem of pain again. I felt I was too young, I didn’t know the answer and didn’t want to—but again, I had too.

“In the Koran, Allah asks, ‘The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?’ It’s a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction? If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest? Pascal uses a nice term to describe the notion of the creator’s, once having called forth the universe, turning his back to it: Deus Absconditus. Is this what we think happened? Was the sense of it there, and God absconded with it, ate it, like a wolf who disappears round the edge of the house with the Thanksgiving turkey? ‘God is subtle,’ Einstein said, ‘but not malicious.’ Again, Einstein said that ‘nature conceals her mystery by means of her essential grandeur, not by her cunning.’ It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem. In making the thick darkness, a swaddling band for the sea, God ‘set bars and doors’ and said, ‘Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.’ But have we come even that far? Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat?” (Pilgrim, p. 7).

Q: C. S. Lewis said something like this about nature; you don’t go to her to derive your theology. You go to her with your theology and let her fill those words (glory, redemption, love) with meaning.

A: I like that.

Q: Yet I get the idea, in Pilgrim especially, that you did go to nature to derive your theology.

A: In a way, that’s true. I approached the whole chaos of nature as if it were God’s book. From it I derived symbols and themes that gave me some structures for truth.

Q: But only God can tell you about God. Nature merely tells you about nature. What if something you learned from nature contradicted Scripture?

A: If I thought I had to make the choice between God and nature, I would choose God. But I don’t think I have to make that choice.

Q: When you studied nature, you came away with a simultaneous sense of awe and horror?

A: It can’t be reduced to those terms. In Pilgrim I wrote about the vita positiva and the vita negativa. The rich, full expression of God’s love bursts out in all the particulars of nature. Everything burgeons and blossoms—and then comes a devastating flood. There is spring, but also winter. There is intricacy in detail, but also oppressive fecundity as nature runs wild. It all starts collapsing; I see sacrifice and then prayer and everything empties and empties until I’m at the shores of the unknown where I started—except much more informed now.

Q: Chesterton said about nature that it’s wrong to refer to her as mother nature. She’s really sister nature, a separate, parallel creation to man with all his flaws and inconsistencies. She’s half good and half bad.

A: Well, I sure as heck deal with that. I don’t have a summary sentence for my view. It’s all in the books somewhere.

“That something is everywhere and always amiss is part of the very stuff of creation. It is as though each clay form had baked into it, fired into it, a blue streak of nonbeing, a shaded emptiness like a bubble that not only shapes its very structure but that also causes it to list and ultimately explode. We could have planned things more mercifully, perhaps, but our plan would never get off the drawing board until we agree to the very compromising terms that are the only ones that being offers.

“The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. It is a covenant to which every thing, even every hydrogen atom, is bound. The terms are clear; if you want to live, you have to die; you cannot have mountains and creeks without space, and space is a beauty married to a blind man. The blind man is Freedom, or Time, and he does not go anywhere without his great dog Death. The world came into being with the signing of the contract. A scientist calls it the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A poet says, ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/Drives my green age.’ This is what we know. The rest is gravy” (Pilgrim, pp. 180–181).

Q: The group you referred to as the British rationalists, notably Lewis, would explain this planet as the condemned planet, an outpost of the universe where evil runs rampant. Perhaps that’s why he makes the statement that you can’t get your theology from nature. You are on the canker sore planet and you may come up with a canker sore theology. Do you view the universe as filled with God’s love and the earth as a marred exception?

A: That’s nuts. We live in the age when we have the photographs of earth from space. Here is one absolutely beautiful sphere floating among the others. There’s more beauty in the variety and richness of life here than on the other planets. As an artist, that picture from space has to affect my view.

Q: I’m sure their reference is to worlds in other dimensions, that the holy world is more real than this world.

A: Perhaps. But this world merited the Incarnation. If everything is a symbol of spiritual reality, then earth’s beauty means something. The classical orthodox definition of beauty is that beauty is the splendor of truth. Beauty and goodness and truth are a triad.

The beauty of this world can’t be brushed away. It is true there is sin and pain and suffering, but to call the earth a blot in the universe is evasive. If you carry that through to its conclusion, then God should never have created the world; it was all some horrible mistake.

Q: Lewis uses the analogy of Christ’s incarnation as a diver plunging into the depths to rescue a pearl without a glimmer of light and pulling it back into the light.

A: Yes—I love that image of God emptying himself.

Q: So we’re really back to your one key question of time and eternity. Just how involved is God in this world?

A: I believe, often, that nature participates in the essence of God himself and if he removed his loving attention from it for a fraction of a second life would cease.

Q: You referred in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to the Law of Indeterminancy in physics. If randomness is the rule, what part does God play? Isn’t it true that his law strengthens the concept of God the sustainer? If he weren’t here, it could literally fall apart at any moment. There must be wisdom behind it.

A: And yet you have to be very careful how you state that, because it borders on superstition. I believe that ultimately the people praying in the monasteries are keeping the whole thing going—metaphorically, at least—but there’s a huge danger within any religion that it will lapse into superstition.

Q: Do you believe in miracles of the supernatural, nature-interrupting sense?

A: Of course, I have no problem with them at all. I’m a long way from agnosticism. I can’t imagine now how I could have had a problem with them at one time.

To me the real question is, How in the world can we remember God? I like that part of the Bible that ticks off kings as good and bad. Suddenly there comes this one, King Josiah, who orders the temple to be cleaned up and inadvertently discovers the law.

This happens after generations of rulers and following God through the Exodus. Somehow they had forgotten the whole thing, every piece of it. Recognizing that, the king tears his clothes and cries.

A whole nation simply forgot God. We think, how can we forget—we who have seen God? Is it right of God to insist that we wear strings around our fingers to remember him?

This notion of recollection is a pressing spiritual problem—not only how can we remember God, but why does he let us forget? I’m always forgetting God—always, always. That famous prayer, “I will in the course of this day forget thee; for forget thou not me” is sometimes thought of as a warm Christian joke. I don’t think it is so warm. I think that is a lot to ask.

“The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise. I return from one walk knowing where the killdeer nests in the field by the creek and the hour the laurel blooms. I return from the same walk a day later scarcely knowing my own name. Litanies hum in my ears; my tongue flaps in my mouth Ailinon, alleluia! I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force; you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff’ (Pilgrim, p. 33).

Q: There is another side of God. One of the strange sights in Scripture is Jesus weeping over unreceptive Jerusalem. “Oh that I could gather you under my wings,” he says. A very strange statement for an omnipotent God. He has limited his actions on earth; he refuses to coerce.

A: I often wonder why God didn’t make things clearer, why he spoke in a still, small voice. And I get angry at God when I see so many good people who appear to lack an organ by which they can perceive God. I blame God for that; but that’s just the way he chooses to go about doing things. I often think of God as a fireball—friendly—who just rolls by. If you’re lucky you get a slight glimpse of him.

Q: But if you actively look for the fireball he can be found. Nature can be one vehicle, as Pilgrim shows.

A: The sixteenth-century British mystic named Juliana of Norwich wrote Revelations of Divine Love, which I’ve only had the courage to read once. Its main idea, God’s love, is the most threatening of all, because it demands such faith. Q: You have described yourself as hanging onto the edge of a cliff, grappling. Yet I just read a review of Holy the Firm in New Times that paints you as the predetermined Christian with pat answers. To the reviewer, you were not hanging on the cliff: you were still very much on solid ground and he was over the cliff, unbelieving.

A: That’s the trouble. Agnostics don’t know what in the world is going on. They think religion is safety when in fact they have the safety. To an agnostic you have to say over and over again that the fear of death doesn’t lead you to love of God. Love of God leads you to fear of death.

Agnostics often think that people run to God because they are afraid of dying. On the contrary, the biblical religion is not a safe thing. People in the Bible understood the transitory nature—the risk—of life better than most people. They weren’t using religion as an escape hatch. Faith forces you to a constant awareness of final things. Agnostics don’t remember all the time that they’re going to die. But Christians do remember. All our actions in this life must be affected by God’s point of view.

“What can any artist set on fire but his world? What can any people bring to the altar but all it has ever owned in the thin towns or over the desolate plains? What can an artist use but materials, such as they are? What can he light but the short string of his gut, and when that’s burnt out, any muck ready to hand?

“His face is flame like a seraph’s, lighting the kingdom of God for the people to see; his life goes up in the works; his feet are waxen and salt. He is holy and he is firm, spanning all the long gap with the length of his love, in flawed imitation of Christ on the cross stretched both ways unbroken and thorned. So must the work be also, in touch with, in touch with, in touch with; spanning the gap, from here to eternity, home” Holy the Firm, p. 72).

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

Publicity surrounding the recent Haldeman version of Watergate and the forthcoming Nixon version makes one wonder if Americans are not only fated to have lived through that sordid period but are now doomed to continually relive it. For evangelicals, one especially interesting aspect is the entry into their ranks of two prominent figures from Watergate, Chuck Colson and somewhat lesser known Jeb Magruder, who has been serving as a vice-president of Young Life, an evangelistic organization primarily oriented to high schoolers. Word Books is this month issuing Magruder’s story, “From Power to Peace”, which tells what he learned through his role in the tragedy of Watergate. Prominent evangelical politician Mark Hatfield, United States Senator from Oregon, has written the foreword to Magruder’s book and we are pleased to share excerpts from it with our readers.

Jeb Magruder was close to the vortex of political power in Washington; he ran the day by day details of President Nixon’s reelection campaign, headed Nixon’s Inaugural, and was regarded as a rising young star among Washington’s politically influencial personalities. But within the course of a few months, he found himself in federal prison. From reading newspaper stories during those years, that is probably what you know and remember about him.…

Watergate was rooted in deception, dishonesty, and face-saving ambition, a process in which Jeb Magruder, by his own admission, played a large role. The power of this book, by contrast, is its openness, its forthrightness, its humility, and its honesty. It is refreshing and salutary to read such words by one like Jeb Magruder. More important, they stand out as a testimony to the spiritual transformation which has occurred in his own life.

You will not find a sentence of self-justification in this book about Jeb Magruder’s participation in Watergate; that is because he acknowledges the wrong in what he did, and is free to say so in ways that are not calculated to evoke pity. He writes neither to be recognized as a martyr nor to gain some public reprieve for his actions. This in itself is a refreshing departure from many of the post-Watergate chronicles written by its various participants. The heart of Jeb Magruder’s story, however, is his personal discovery of faith in Jesus Christ, and his decision to orient his life as one of Christ’s followers.…

The discovery of evangelical Christianity by the secular media in the past couple of years has tended to make celebrities out of new converts who previously were well-known to the public from politics, entertainment, or sports. There is a danger in this trend; being born-again can be reduced to the level of looking like a popular fad, and the full meaning of following Christ in all of one’s life can be overlooked and ignored. There is also a danger to the particular “celebrities” who are chosen by the Christian community for its admiration; a new form of pride, ambition, and face-saving can be nurtured in them as an unintended result. Jeb Magruder has become aware of these dangers, and this sensitivity is reflected on these pages.…

When history is written, the sweep of dramatic public events becomes the focus of attention. During the Watergate years of 1973 and 1974, the newspaper exposures, the congressional hearings, the grand jury indictments, the impeachment proceedings, and the resignation of Richard Nixon were set forth as the most historic happenings of those days.

But there is another history of that time which revolves around the inner lives of those caught up in this sweep of events. In the case of Jeb Magruder, this history is every bit as important and revealing. It tells us of the possibilities for those attitudes, values, and ambitions which were at the core of Watergate to be overcome in the lives of individuals through the experience of a personal and vital faith. This is a history which urgently needs to be known.

Watergate was not merely the result of the sins of individuals. It revealed to us the dimensions of political corruption within our political system, as Jeb Magruder’s account makes clear. But the foremost truth communicated by this book is the potential for a life subtly dominated by the ways of Watergate to be drastically altered, and even revolutionized, through allegiance to Jesus Christ.…

Copyright 1978 by Jeb Stuart Magruder.

Baseball In Chicago

There were many advantages to the Washington, D. C., area—museums, concert halls, and restaurants. But if you are a baseball fan, as I am, you were left with an empty mitt. People in Washington are football crazy and many of them are openly hostile to baseball. A local news commentator even went so far as to repeatedly ridicule the great American past-time.

But in Chicago I have found a baseball home. I come from a long line of Cubs fans, and though the team may be jeered in Cincinnati or Los Angeles or New York, it provides some exciting moments and proves that cynicism is not a way of life in Chicago anyway.

Take last year. The Cubs led their division from the end of May (when I moved to this area) until the beginning of August, when they rapidly fell toward the cellar. At one point the team had won eight straight games and Rick Reuschel was the National League’s pitcher of the month. Fans had more than pennant fever; they had World Series visions. They still had them when Philadelphia won the eastern division. They just transferred them to this year—“The Cubs will be great in ’78.”

Or take opening day at Wrigley Field this year, the first time I had ever attended an opening day game. The Cubs have the habit of losing their opener, but the team is unpredictable and 45,000 standing-room-only fans watched Larry Biitner win it for the Cubs in the bottom half of the ninth with a home run on the first pitch. When he came up to bat most of the crowd expected extra innings. As we watched the ball soar in a beautiful arc over the center field wall we were almost too stunned to cheer. You just never know with that team. Or with baseball.

As George Will pointed out in his recent column on baseball, it’s a game with no limits of either time or space. What other game cheers a player for getting the ball out of the playing field? Or that refuses to end in a tie? Baseball satisfies the desire in man for an uncertainty that will reach a tidy conclusion. You know when you take your seat and the umpire yells “Play Ball” that you will leave the stadium with a winner and a loser. Somehow that’s a comforting thought. (Even the umpires are comforting if maddening at times. There’s no doubt who’s in charge when you’re at a baseball game.)

The people who attend major league games are as interesting as the game itself. Last year I saw formally coiffured women, one of whom sat knitting throughout the game and never dropped a stitch. This year I noticed three women in fur coats (the weather was nippy), some austere business men who never opened their mouths, grandmothers, and lots of teenagers. And men did not outnumber women. It’s our society in microcosm.

Just as baseball is an American tradition, so is the annual spring baseball editorial for CHRISTIANITY TODAY. David E. Kucharsky, now editor of the Christian Herald, established that. I respectfully follow his lead.

On long, hot summer days when you’d rather be outside than in, listening to a baseball game (which you can do while you work) is the next best thing. It’s a companionable, easy-going game, like old shoes or baggy blue jeans—not brand new, but too much a part of you to throw away.—C.F.

Recently I was asked to speak at our neighbor seminary, the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Shatin, in the New Territories of Hong Kong. Walking from the train station you pass numerous small shops and a series of cluttered garages, cross a series of bridges, and then head out through some rice fields. The path winds up into a deep ravine. Finally the gleaming white walls of the seminary emerge in a clump of golden bamboos. Back in these mountains it would be easy to feel you were in the interior of China, so different is the scene from bustling Hong Kong.

This school has always taken the Chinese heritage seriously. The Norwegian missionary, Karl Reichelt, one of the finest authorities on Chinese Buddhism, once taught here. The library contains one of the best collections of the Taoist scriptures to be found. The lecture that afternoon dealt with the Chinese apprehension of the Gospel and what might be the contribution of the Chinese Christians to the body of Christ. Late in the discussion an older student, who was a secretary for a large Hong Kong firm, spoke of his emerging understanding of both Christ and the Chinese heritage. He said that it was only recently that he had really come to see how it was through Christ, and really because of Christ, that he could fully appreciate, appropriate, and criticize his Chinese heritage. I was intrigued by the quality of his thoughtful testimony. So I asked him where he had gained the most help in this new integration which was taking place.

Somewhat to my surprise he answered very quickly and said that, by far, the most helpful source had been the writings of C. S. Lewis. Immediately many other Chinese young people began to nod and smile and say that this was also their experience. C. S. Lewis seems to be in a class by himself in terms of helpfulness to these Chinese youth at the very point of Christ and Chinese culture.

This is amazing. C. S. Lewis was no specialist in Asian studies; he never traveled the overseas ecumenical circuit; he was constitutionally against jumping on the latest bandwagon; he showed little interest in the organization, committees, or even the theology of the World Council of Churches. Of course, he wrote logically, understandably, and with good illustrations; and these qualities are appreciated by the Chinese. He was often described as a “rational romantic” and these adjectives are also frequently used of the Chinese. He had great appreciation for the mythic and the poetic, and this would be immediately sensed by the people who have produced more poetry than any other of the world’s peoples.

There is, to be sure, his lengthy discussion of The Tao, or The Way, in his The Abolition of Man. Most of all, there is his firm and sensitive grasp of the great myths of humanity being the God-given “good dreams” sent to prepare and point to the Myth-Fact of Jesus Christ; this completes, without destroying, the deepest insights and aspirations of various nations. He writes from the fully Catholic and fully evangelical center that knows that grace completes without destroying nature.

As I plodded back through the bamboos and the rice fields, and past the greasy garages I gave thanks for the disciplined imagination and dedicated labors of this Oxford and Cambridge professor of renaissance literature. For Westerners he has helped to unfreeze the imagination; for Asians he has shown how Christ challenges but completes their God-given cultural heritage.—PAUL CLASPER, faculty of theology, Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Jesus And Junk

“A dollar bill with Jesus’ picture on it? You must be kidding.”

“No, honest. It’s called the ‘Jesus dollar,’ and it’s to remind people that ‘In God We Trust.’”

“What does it look like?”

“A regular bill. Except that instead of Lincoln, it has Sallman’s head of Christ.” “Weird. Is it worth a dollar?”

“You pay 29 cents for it.”

“Can you spend it?”

“Of course not.”

“Not even in a Christian bookstore? Or the offering at church?”

“It’s a witnessing tool.”

“Like, leave it instead of a tip?”

“Maybe leave it with a tip.”

“I bet that waitresses jump up and down for joy when they find a dollar they can’t spend on top of a dime they can.”

“It also says ‘U R Loved’ and ‘U R 4 Given’ on it.”

“Wild. And what’s the signature, in place of—let’s see—Azie Taylor Morton, whoever she is.”

“B. A. Freeman.”

“You know, a friend of mine says that what goes over with Christians is Jesus and junk. But this thing makes Jesus look like junk. I can see an Elvis dollar, even a Jimmy dollar—”

“Half-size.”

“Right. But not a Jesus dollar.”

“In place of the great seal of the United States, it has the one-way finger.”

“Did you ever think that’s only one finger removed from an obscenity?” “Today lots of things are.”

EUTYCHUS VIII

Exquisite Pain

I would be remiss if I didn’t write to thank CHRISTIANITY TODAY for bringing to its readers Philip Yancey’s exquisite article, “Pain: The Tool of the Wounded Surgeon” (March 24). I smiled and wept as I experienced its truth, insight, pain, beauty, understanding, joy, reality, promise, and hope. It made the wisdom, plan, and love of God for us in this realm and in the one to come a little less past finding out.

CATHARINE SCOTT

Old Saybrook, Conn.

When I read Philip Yancey’s well-written article I felt a tinge of regret that I have elected to let my subscription expire this year. But then I read Dr. Daniel Hinthorn’s editorial “When Does Life Begin?” and began to feel that my decision was justified. I certainly hope that Dr. Hinthorn’s understanding of medicine is better than his understanding of theology and biblical interpretation. Finally, after reading John Warwick Montgomery’s attack on Helmut Thielicke (Current Religious Thought), I knew I had made the right decision. Montgomery will wear out a lot of his toyland axes trying to chop down that giant Sequoia!

KEN FRERKING

Campus Lutheran Church

Columbia, Mo.

Congratulations and appreciation to Philip Yancey and to CHRISTIANITY TODAY. I have read, marked, and shared with my congregation some of the insights drawn from [his article]. Part of my ministry is in the area of hospital chaplaincy. There we are continually exposed to the “why” of pain, its relation to God’s will for a life, and so forth. This contribution is a real help to me in this complex issue.

BILL STOLBERG

Bethel Evangelical Methodist Church

Ridgefield, Wash.

How to Win Subscribers

I wish to comment briefly on three particularly fine articles, which have appeared in recent issues of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

“Sex and hom*osexuality” by Bennett Sims (February 24) is a splendid tract on the issue. Although I think that the bishop falls short in his practical applications of the church’s response to hom*osexuality, he nevertheless exhibits a keen, closely-reasoned biblical analysis of the problem.

“God’s Chosen People,” a book review by Richard Pierard (March 24) is another illuminating piece. Although Pierard comes down (perhaps unnecessarily) hard on the book The Light and the Glory, he nevertheless dissects errors in the book’s theology in the finest tradition of a master carver. One can only stand in awe of his ability to cut up what at first appears to be a fine fowl of a book.

“Were the Puritans Right About Sex?” by Leland Ryken (April 7) delivers a tremendous barrage of body blows to a commonly accepted viewpoint. He has marshalled such impressive evidence that detractors will have a hard time answering him.

This is the kind of writing that will command respect, if not agreement, by everyone to both the right and left of CHRISTIANITY TODAY’s position—and which should serve to pick up a few new subscribers as well.

RON BOYDSTON

Glen Ellyn, Ill.

What Did Jesus Look Like?

On my desk is a copy of your March 24 issue. As I gaze at the cover, I no longer find the desire to look inside. The cover picture of my Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, may be a classic in today’s art, but to me it stops short of blasphemy. I doubt that William Blake knew the revolutionary Jesus. It is hard to believe that people could put their total faith and trust in someone who is here portrayed as a pale, anemic, nambypamby, with golden hair flowing girlishly over his shoulders.… To me, this picture does not exemplify my Jesus.

RICK BAKER

Park Hills Baptist Church

Austin, Tex.

Radio and The NCC

In your March 10 editorial “Broadcasting: Room to Grow” you commend the proposed change in purchase time policy which the Communications Commission is bringing to the National Council of Churches Governing Board this May. The editorial characterizing our position was accurate as far as it went. However, it left out the most important element. We support “the right of any religious organization to purchase time from stations and networks,” but this time should be “beyond participation in the representative programming of the religious community.”

Our basic emphasis remains the same: that all radio and television stations have an obligation to serve the total community to which they are licensed, and that this means stations are obligated to provide sustaining (free) time for programs representing the religious diversity of the community. We even believe that “stations and networks have a responsibility to provide free as a public service station personnel, production time, and promotion, as well as adequate air time for these programs.” We most certainly are supporting the right of any religious organization to purchase time above and beyond, but we feel this should not free stations from their primary responsibility to operate in the public interest with respect to the religious life of the community in which they are licensed to serve.

WILLIAM F. FORE

Assistant General Secretary for Communication

National Council of Churches

New York, N.Y.

No Bolt

I was astounded to read the suggestion that those persons who signed the original Chicago document of November 1977, concerning the ordination of self-affirming hom*osexuals will, and I quote, “bolt the denomination if the 650-plus delegates at this year’s General Assembly adopt the Task Force recommendations” (News, “United Presbyterians Bracing for Battle,” Feb. 10).

May I set this matter straight by stating unequivocally that as a Moderatorial Candidate, nothing could be further from my mind. Nor was there anything said at the November meeting to indicate that any of those present would “bolt the denomination,” or even entertain the thought of generating a split within the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. for whatever reason. To the contrary, we will use our best endeavors to be a force for reconciliation in the spirit of the language of both the majority and minority reports that “those who in conscience have difficulty accepting the decisions of this General Assembly because of hom*osexuality should express that conscience by continued dialogue within the church.” This, I feel you must agree, hardly suggests “bolting the denomination.”

VAHE H. SIMONIAN

Pasadena Presbyterian Church

Pasadena, Calif.

More From Young People

Thank you so much for printing “Song of the Lyre” and “John Bunyan’s Christian at 300” (Feb. 24). It is heartwarming to know there are such talented Christian young people in our colleges.… Please print more from such young people, so we can pray for them and look forward to their becoming Christian apologists.

ELIZABETH C. PAYNE

Lexington, Va.

Calvinism On Trial

When I turned to your Book Review section in the February 10 edition, I was pleased to see a review of Edward Hinson’s Introduction to Puritan Theology. What I found, however, was not a review, but a philippic against Calvinistic theology. While I am unashamedly a Calvinist, I would have been equally disappointed to read such a “review” from a Calvinist of such a work as Grace Unlimited. Surely, this is a poor excuse for journalism. The reviewer gives a total of four paragraphs to the contents of the book, while he takes aim in the remaining material (the overwhelming bulk of material) at the Calvinistic doctrine of the Atonement, and Dr. John Owen in particular. It is evident that Grider has not taken time to read Owen himself, and one wonders what Dr. Owen’s response might have been. “A living dog is better than a dead lion.” Finally, as respects Grider’s sentiments expressed in the final paragraph, I would only say that such negativism is unfortunate. He who cuts himself off so curtly from the Puritans cuts himself off from one of the richest quarters of theological and devotional literature available from the Anglo-American perspective.

THOMAS N. SMITH

First Baptist Church, Tanglewood Community

Sand Springs, Okla.

Doomsday, Good and Bad

I am as dissatisfied with Gary Wilburn’s criticism of Hal Lindsey’s book and movie “The Late Great Planet Earth” (Refiner’s Fire, “The Doomsday Chic,” Jan. 27), as I am of the movie itself. It seems to me that all the hub-bub about biblical prophecy in our day has the intended effect of moving the listener either to futurism (dispensationalism), or its opposite pole, the historical (reformed) view. As if no other positions are tenable. I for one believe the reemergence of Israel as a nation, after more than two millenia of time, is positive evidence that we live in the days of the fulfillment of all the Bible prophecies. It matters not that this is doomsday thinking. If it is right, it must be said.

Lindsey is to be supported in his overall view of a possible catastrophic end to world civilization culminating in Armaggedon, in our time. Where Hal Lindsey goes astray is his treatment of the specifics of Bible prophecies. I refer to his habitual statement of theory as proven biblical fact. A case example would be his view that a Jewish temple must be built on the site of the Dome of the Rock, even if it takes an earthquake to clear the way. Theory yes; biblical fact, no. Worse yet is his explanations of Revelation 9:16. That this passage presents a picture of 200,000,000 red Chinese invading the Mideast is not biblical fact. It is not even good theory. It is in my estimation finely ground, exquisitely textured baloney.

GENE GANO

Greenwich, Conn.

Who Leads The Arts?

I appreciated your Refiner’s Fire column on “The Rolling Stones: The Darker Side of Rock” (Feb. 24). It spoke clearly of the Stones’s contribution to adolescent rebellion in the sixties. Aside from a few errors, like the widely circulated one about a man being killed at one of their concerts while they sang “Sympathy for the Devil” (Meredith Hunter was stabbed by Hell’s Angels at the Stones’s December 6, 1969, concert at Altamont during the song “Under My Thumb”), the article was factual and informative.

Perhaps, though, this article should have been written a few years ago. The Stones haven’t been a force in music since 1970, just around the time that Altamont destroyed the Woodstock myth and brought the Haight-Ashbury dream to a grinding halt. And in the eight years since then, much has happened. Besides the pseudo-Christian songs like “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Let It Be” there has been a new rash of darker music. Perhaps an examination of more recent musical assaults is in order, especially now that the term “born again” has become ubiquitous in celebrity magazines and the media has pronounced this “the year of the evangelical.” Black Oak Arkansas is a popular band whose leader claims to be a “Christian” but he prances around bare-chested on stage singing sex-laced anthems. The group, Kiss, features members in Halloween makeup with names like Vampire who breathes fire and spits blood in front of sell-out crowds of prepubescent followers. And what about all the new nihilistic “punk rock” groups like The Dead Boys, The Damned, and Johnny Rotten and The Sex Pistols. These groups claim to believe in absolutely nothing. The buttons and t-shirts which sell at their concerts say, “I’m vacant … and I don’t care.” These groups are much more influential than the arthritic Rolling Stones.

I’m as concerned about music and its effect on young people as any parent or pastor. Perhaps what is really wrong with most media art forms today is not that Satan “owns” them, but that we Christians long ago lost hold of our leadership in the arts, and they have not yet been reclaimed for use in glorifying their rightful creator, God.

LARRY NORMAN

Street Level Artists Agency

Hollywood, Calif.

How to Handle The Word

Thank you for your editorial on the importance of reading the Scriptures in public services (“Public Reading of the Word,” March 10).

Visiting a liturgical church as exchange preacher last year, I was impressed with the practice that church had of reading three Scriptural passages in every worship service: an Old Testament Scripture, a psalm, and a New Testament Scripture.

I returned to my church to begin a practice of reading at least an Old Testament Scripture and a New Testament Scripture in every worship service. The practice has been well received.

We who hold high views with regards to the Scriptures need to demonstrate our beliefs by our practice as well as our professions. Some of us who claim the highest regard for the Word are guilty of handling it most carelessly and indifferently.

ROSS R. CRIBBIS

Columbus Avenue Church of the Nazarene

Anderson, Ind.

Having trouble getting your subscription straightened out? Please accept our sincere apologies. After years of good service, our computer organization ran into disastrous problems. We finally were compelled to hire a new company. If you still have difficulties, please write to CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Subscription Services, Box 355, Dover, New Jersey, 07801. Then if you don’t get satisfaction, write to me here in Carol Stream. We’re eager for you to get all the good articles and news coverage ahead.

Thank you for your patience.

There are two related questions that Christians face in Asia with regard to their belief in the authority of the Bible. One is the claim made by the people of other religions for the divine inspiration and the authority of their respective scriptures. The other, which is a more specific issue, is whether one can claim for the Old Testament any more authority than the scriptures of other religions, if they all represent the unfulfilled aspirations of man, and to all of which Christ and the New Testament became the fulfillment.

The Moslems in general hold an extremely exalted view of the inspiration and the authority of the Koran. Some of them even believed that every word of it was dictated by Allah to Mohammed. Some scholars say that the Koran was not created, but was eternally coexistent with God. To question the authority of the Koran is to question the authority of God himself.

Orthodox Hindus consider the vedas as having absolute authority in all matters of faith and religious practices, and also in their world view. But reason plays a significant role in the interpretation of the Hindu scriptures. Within the limits of scriptural authority, reason enjoys great freedom. But reason cannot comprehend the nature of Brahma as it is subject to and conditioned by experiences in life that are illusory.

The Hindus attribute different degrees of authority to different scriptures. The vedas belonging to the category of sruti (that which is heard) is of primary authority, while writings belonging to smriti (that which is remembered) have only derived authority and are of lesser significance. Any teaching of the latter that contradicts the former is to be rejected. Most Christians would not consider different parts of the Bible as having different degrees of authority, though it might be admitted that all parts do not have the same significance and relevance.

Hinduism has the concept of general and special revelation similar to that in Christian theologies. According to it, the Supreme Reality has manifested itself in the world in a multitude of forms. Everything that exists in the world shows some aspect of Brahma. But the revelation in the veda has a uniqueness and finality about it. An exclusive claim for the uniqueness of the vedic faith is often made by the Hindu leaders similar to the claim for special revelation that Christians make for Christ and the Bible. Therefore, the view that according to Hinduism all religions are in essence the same or similar is not true.

Again, revelation in the vedas is greater than any other revelation, including the Incarnation. Writers like Shankara speak of “the eternity of the vedas.” The vedas become the source of all other creations. In Christianity, though the exact relationship between the Bible and Christ as far as authority is concerned cannot be well defined, the Bible is never considered more authoritative than the incarnate Christ.

The concept of the “word,” vac or vak, in Hinduism is intriguing. The word is eternal and God uses the word at the beginning of each aeon or world-cycle. The world is created from the word. The importance of this concept in the communication of the Christian doctrine of the Word of God and the idea of Christ, the logos, is obvious.

A significant difference between the Christian concept and that of the eastern religions on scripture is the place of history in divine revelation. To the Christian faith, the central factor in the revelation of God is his work of salvation, which culminates in the Incarnation. In the eastern religions history or events play no part in revelation, and any discussion of “historicity of revelation” makes no sense.

How shall we view the divine authority that is claimed for non-Christian scriptures? Those who have not come to a knowledge of God through Christ are not altogether ignorant of God. The one eternal God has revealed something of himself in many and various ways to all people. Paul’s speeches in Acts 14 and 17 describe God as one who guides man and is not far away from anyone “not leaving himself without a witness,” with an ultimate purpose that all men leaving their times of ignorance might come to a knowledge of God. The general revelation of God is the basis of the values found in other scriptures. Although their concept of God is limited and often distorted, these writings carry certain authority over their adherents as God continues to deal with them.

Many Christian thinkers in Asia seriously question the authority of the Old Testament for the Christian Church. The problem is nothing new. They stand in the tradition of people such as Marcion, Hermann, Harnack, and more recently Bultmann; in Asia the reasons for the rejection or the devaluation of the Old Testament are different. The richness of the scriptures of the eastern religions is contrasted with that of the Old Testament. It is often maintained that it is difficult to attribute any superior value to the Old Testament over against the nonbiblical sacred writings. It is said that if the Old Testament is considered as a preparation of ancient Israel for Christ’s coming and for the New Testament, then in the Asian setting the sacred scriptures of the East should be considered as having an equally important function in preparing Asians for the Gospel and Christ. This view has also led to a practice, though rare, of reading selections from non-Christian scriptures before the New Testament reading in the service of Holy Communion.

To equate the Old Testament with other scriptures in this way is to deny the unity of the Bible. Also, the New Testament represents not the fulfillment of any hopes of mankind as found in all scriptures, but rather the specific expectations of the Old Testament and the specific promises made to Israel in the context of history. This kind of relationship that exists between the Old Testament and the New Testament in terms of salvation history, which plays an all-important role in God’s revelation, is not seen with respect to other religious scriptures.

Both Testaments have one central theme and one cannot understand the New without the Old; the two are historically and theologically linked together. Christ’s stamp upon the Old Testament, the significance the apostles give to it, and the early church’s unreserved acceptance of its authority, are the bases of our attitude to the Old Testament. No other scripture can stand at par with it. Biblical authority is to be seen in the framework of the following closely related concepts.

First, divine inspiration of the Bible. God in his providence so overruled the formation of different books of the Bible by causing certain men to write messages that were God’s words for men. If what the Bible says is what God says to us, then it becomes the supreme authoritative standard for us.

Second, the principle of canon. Many questions regarding the biblical canon remain unanswered. But we should see in the development of the canon and its acceptance by God’s people the providence and guidance of God. The implication in the concept of biblical authority is our acceptance of the present canon.

Third, its sufficiency. The Bible does not produce answers for many questions that we ask today. It does not tell us everything we would like to know even about spiritual things, about God and his dealings with men. But it provides an adequate framework, which is clear and certain for our lives.

Fourth, the present work of the Triune God. Except for the work of the Spirit of God in the church and in the lives of the believers, biblical authority is an empty notion. It is he who witnesses to the authority of the Bible, speaks God’s words to us as we read it, and enables us to obey the word of God as it is addressed to us in the authority of our Lord.

Upon visiting Egypt tor the first time last month, an evangelist from elsewhere in Africa observed: “Where the Nile is, there is life.”

He intended a twofold meaning. First, nearly all of Egypt’s 40 million population lives in the fertile Nile valley that stretches from Sudan to the Mediterranean. Ninety-six per cent of the country is desert (Egypt is as big as Texas and New Mexico combined).

Second, many of the churches scattered along that verdant strip show signs of vigorous spiritual vitality. Despite its minority position (up to 90 per cent of Egypt’s population is Muslim), the Christian community is very much alive—yet largely overlooked by church people in the West.

Some observers believe the churches of Egypt may be in the early stages of a great spiritual awakening. Indeed, revival-like conditions exist in some sectors of the Coptic Orthodox Church, where thousands flock to Bible-teaching sessions (see April 17 issue, page 58). Protestant leaders agree that there are stirrings in many of their churches also.

The Protestant revival cause got a boost last month with the two-week visit of Anglican bishop Festo Kivengere, a refugee from Uganda, and Michael Cassidy, an Anglican lay evangelist from South Africa. The pair, who head a Kenya-based evangelistic organization known as African Enterprise, brought with them a racially mixed team of six colleagues from three continents. They conducted evangelism conferences for pastors and church leaders in Assuit in central Egypt and in Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast. They preached in well-attended public meetings in those cities and in a number of churches in Cairo, and they conducted a youth rally on the campus of Ramses College in Cairo.

In Assuit nearly 500 clergy and a similar number of lay leaders attended the conference sessions, held at an orphanage operated by the Assemblies of God. More than 250 pastors and lay leaders attended the Alexandria conference. Large numbers of young people attended the church services and other public meetings.

In all, weli over 1,000 persons requested follow-up counseling and literature, according to organizers.

It was the first time in Egyptian Protestant history that so many pastors and church leaders from so many denominational backgrounds came together in a cooperative endeavor. A number of leaders commented that the most significant aspect of the African Enterprise mission was the strong sense of unity that emerged. It brought encouragement and new resolve to reach Egypt for Christ, they said.

The largest Protestant body in Egypt is the Evangelical Church (also known as the Presbyterian Synod of the Nile), with about 60,000 members in 200 organized congregations and 200 small-group fellowships. It dates from missionary work in the 1860s. Other relatively large groups include Pentecostals (including 160 Assemblies of God congregations), Free Methodists (100 congregations), several Holiness bodies (125 congregations), and Plymouth Brethren (of the moderately exclusive variety).

The inspiration for the African Enterprise outreach and training conferences came in 1976 when several dozen Egyptian church leaders traveled to Nairobi to take part in the Pan African Christian

Leadership Assembly (PACLA). While there, they met members of the African Enterprise team and asked them to come to Egypt. The Egyptian presence at PACLA marked the first significant interchange between Arab and black Christians in Africa, according to the Egyptian leaders.

General Secretary Abd-el-Masih Istafanous of the Bible Society of Egypt handled coordination of the African Enterprise project.

Cassidy, 41, was educated at Cambridge University in Britain and Fuller Seminary in California. While at Cambridge, he was led to Christ by a friend who had been converted at a Billy Graham meeting in London’s Haringey stadium. In 1957 Cassidy on a holiday visited a Graham crusade in New York, where he received “the Lord’s call” to enter evangelism. He launched African Enterprise in 1961. During that year he made a circular “survey trip” around Africa, beginning in Libya, preceeding through the central and southern parts of the continent, and ending back in the north in Cairo.

Cassidy says he was impressed by the need to reach the cities—“where the destiny of Africa will be settled.” He began to pray for thirty-one key cities, one for each day of the month. On his prayer list, Cairo comes on the thirtieth day of the month, Alexandria on the thirty-first. Last month’s mission was his first preaching visits to those two cities.

Rhodesia: Unsettled Settlement

Coincidence or not, the latest kidnapping of students from a Rhodesian mission school took place at a Methodist institution. Guerrillas last month herded some 400 youngsters into Botswana to get them into the rebel forces of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU). The United Methodist bishop of Rhodesia is Abel Muzorewa, one of three black leaders serving in the country’s new executive council with Ian Smith, long the symbol of white minority rule. One of the chief critics of Rhodesia’s “internal settlement” for transition to black rule is ZAPU leader Joshua Nkomo. He and Robert Mugabe are co-leaders of the “Patriotic Front” that is said to be Soviet armed. They have refused to be involved with Smith, Muzorewa, Congregationalist minister Ndabaningi Sithole, and senator Jeremiah Chirau in the transition government.

The students were free to stay in the neighboring country, to leave it for guerrilla training in Zambia or Mozambique, or to return to Rhodesia. Some observers have read great significance into the decision of all but forty-eight to go home. The result was the opposite of a similar school abduction a year ago, when 380 teenagers were forced into Botswana from a Lutheran school. Only fifty of them came home, and the rest went to Zambia for training in Nkomo’s army. The turnabout was explained by supporters of the internal settlement as a demonstration of black Rhodesians’ desire for peace and support of the new government.

Patriotic Front spokesmen outside the country have been trying to make the point that their popular support within Rhodesia is greater than that enjoyed by the Methodist bishop and others involved in the internal settlement. When more than 100,000 people (some estimates ran as high as 150,000) turned out to greet Muzorewa last month on his return from a trip to the United States, a Patriotic Front leader told The New York Times, “It is not at all significant.” The spokesman did not challenge the estimated size of the welcoming party, but he indicated that it was natural for the bishop to get that kind of a turnout in the Salisbury area, the “center of his constituency.” Supporters of the bishop note that last July he was welcomed by 20,000 when he returned to the country. The much larger crowd in March only underlines his popularity and that of the internal settlement, they claim.

Muzorewa was welcomed last month even though he had failed to get a hearing at the United Nations for the internal settlement. Although the British and American governments had helped to start the talks that led to the transitional government, their support softened as Chirau, Muzorewa, Sithole, and Smith took an oath of office before Anglican bishop Patrick Murindagomo. Andrew Young, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (and a United Church of Christ minister), was not a party to the final settlement and expressed surprise when it was announced. He then proceeded to warn that the internal accord opened the way to a “black-on-black civil war” since the Patriotic Front was not included. Later, he called the new arrangement “illegal.”

Charles E. Cobb, a United Church of Christ (UCC) executive and president of the U.S. National Conference of Black Churchmen, had even stronger language for the internal settlement. He said it was “sinister” and “does not represent an authentic transfer of power.” The strong condemnations by UCC ministers Young and Cobb were particularly noteworthy in view of the UCC’s past support of Sithole. The Rhodesian Congregationalist, often identified as a UCC minister, was educated in the United States with UCC help. He has often spoken in America on platforms arranged by the UCC. Sithole said in response to some of the international uproar that he was preparing a booklet to demonstrate the differences between the internal accord and the outside proposals for majority rule.

After condemning the settlement at the United Nations, Young went to Africa to meet with leaders of the “front-line” states bordering Rhodesia and with the guerrilla leaders. He reportedly reached an agreement with Tanzanian president Julius Nyere that new talks should be started including the Patriotic Front chiefs. Young then met with President Carter in Nigeria, and Carter announced that the United States was working with the British to convene another meeting.

Following Young’s meeting in Tanzania, Muzorewa noted that the American U.N. representative was in effect ignoring all the progress that had been made within the country. Young, declared the bishop, has been “terribly brainwashed.” He added: “This is a genuine agreement to transfer power from the minority to the majority, let them say what they want.” The plan calls for a 100-member parliament, and whites would be entitled to twenty-eight seats for the first ten years. Blacks make up about 95 per cent of the country’s population of nearly seven million.

How much of that population has left to join guerrilla forces or to seek peace elsewhere is hard to determine. Another unknown factor is tribal loyalties. Chirau of the new executive council is a tribal chief, and all of the nation’s tribal chiefs are supporters of his organization. The guerrilla supporters have said that more people are in the areas they have “liberated” or in the areas which Rhodesian authorities have effectively abandoned than are under the protection of the central government. New York Times correspondent Michael T. Kaufman reported from Maputo, Mozambique, that “missionary sources” in Zambia and Mozambique corroborated reports that “large areas” are no longer controlled by Rhodesian authorities. In some of those areas the Patriotic Front has taken over schools and other institutions formerly run by either the government or church agencies. Many other facilities formerly operated by missions and religious organizations have been virtually abandoned in the midst of the strife.

Troubled Germans

When Baldwin Sjollema, an executive in the World Council of Churches (WCC), asked for response to a controversial paper that he distributed to church leaders last December, he got it. Enough people in the Evangelical Church of Germany (EKID, in German) were upset by the document—entitled “South Africa’s Hope: What Price Now?”—that the federation’s council was moved to declare last month that its distribution was “irresponsible.” In a letter to WCC headquarters the EKID also disassociated itself officially from the paper. Since the EKID is one of the largest Protestant church bodies in Europe, and since it is also one of the largest financial supporters of the fiscally troubled WCC, the sharp action is seen as a serious development.

Sjollema is the top staff member of the WCC’s Program to Combat Racism (PCR). The sixteen-page typewritten paper that he circulated deals with the situation in South Africa along the lines of the “just war” theory. Even though it reaches no definite conclusion it indicates that liberation movements should be supported even in the use of violence to overthrow the system of apartheid (racial separation). In the last sentence of the covering letter Sjollema asks for comments and suggestions “for concrete action in supporting the oppressed as they struggle for liberation.” The paper itself declares: “… whatever hope was left of the development of the African tradition of nonviolent change has now been officially snuffed out.”

The paper likened the situation to World War II times: “We do not define the resistance fighters of Occupied Europe, who used violence against their Nazi oppressors, as terrorists, because we accept that their cause was just and their methods disciplined.” In a later reference to the Nazi era the document cites the name of a current hero of the German church, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was executed for his involvement in a plot to kill Hitler.

After citing the resistance fighters of World War II, the paper declares: “It is on the grounds of exactly such arguments that South Africa’s black people today claim our recognition of their struggle as a just rebellion.” Later the WCC paper suggests that Christians who fail to help apartheid opponents “will be obstructing the just struggle of the oppressed.”

WCC officials said that the document has no “official status.” Sjollema’s covering letter also pointed this out but it went on to say that the paper’s purpose was to “stimulate discussion, and, through this, to offer lines for action, both corporate and individual.” Sjollema added that he was sending copies to the WCC Central Committee, to national councils of churches, to all WCC member-denominations, and to “interested groups and individuals.” He asked recipients to “distribute the paper as widely as possible and to ensure that the issue will be placed on the agenda of every relevant committee and working group, of every congregation and gathering of Christians.”

The EKID letter asked the WCC to define the status of the paper and to state whether the views in it reflect those of the church body. The EKID also asked whether the document was discussed with the churches in South Africa “who must bear the possible consequences of the front lines.” It questioned whether the anti-racism commission had overstepped its authority since the WCC Central Committee had refused to adopt a proposal that it define a just war or just revolution. EKID leaders were known to be disturbed by the content of the paper as well as by questions regarding the procedure by which it was written and distributed.

WCC spokesmen had no immediate comment on the German letter. They would say only that responses had been received from a number of member churches.

The headline-grabbing PCR has received much of its support from European churches, but much of its sharpest criticism has also originated there. The current Marxist regime ruling Mozambique and Angola got financial support from PCR’s special fund while they were operating as guerilla groups. At the last WCC assembly, in 1975, an effort to restrict PCR grants to non-violent groups was unsuccessful.

Bulgaria Update

The first Baptist World Alliance representatives to visit Bulgaria since World War II reported some pleasant surprises last month. Executive Gerhard Claas of the European Baptist Federation and Denton Lotz, an American who teaches at a Baptist seminary in Switzerland, said that they found crowded churches, many active young people, and a refreshing intensity of spiritual commitment among members.

There are only about 500 Baptists scattered in sixteen congregations throughout the land. Despite the vibrancy of their faith and church life, potentially serious problems exist. The leadership tends to be elderly (both the general secretary and the president of the Baptist Union, though active, are in their seventies), and there is no seminary where young potential leaders can be trained for the ministry. A number of the meeting places are dilapidated or too small. And there are legal restrictions on evangelism, Christian education, and other aspects of church work.

Claas and Lotz spoke with officials at the government office for religious affairs in Sofia about the possibility of training some young people at seminaries elsewhere in Europe. The pair also expressed hope that Bulgarian church leaders could attend European and world meetings of Baptists. (Government travel permission is needed in both cases.)

The door was left open for future contacts and discussions, an encouraging development for the country’s Protestant minority, about whom little is known in the West.

The largest number of Protestants are Pentecostals, who number more than 10,000 in 120 churches. Membership ranges from 100 to 600 among the congregations in the major cities, according to Keston College, a research center in Britain. Keston reports that revival-like conditions exist among the Pentecostals. With the increase in numbers, however, has come an apparent increase in pressure from the government, according to sources. Since 1975, several pastors and church workers have been “exiled” from their home communities and forbidden to preach, reportedly for violating limitations imposed by the state on religious activities.

About 70 per cent of Bulgaria’s 8.7 million people are said to be baptized members of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, but many are inactive. There are more than 3,700 churches and chapels, served by some 1,500 priests, ten bishops, and twelve metropolitans, according to an Orthodox leader. The Orthodox Church also has two institutions for theological training, with more than 300 students enrolled.

Roman Catholics number about 50,000, with several dozen priests.

The needs most cited by leaders in virtually all the denominations are: an updated version of the Bible with widespread distribution, the training of clergy, improvement of relationships between the various church groups, and more adequate facilities.

This month a dissident group emerged in Bulgaria for the first time with publication of a six-point statement of alleged human-rights violations, according to Austrian press reports. Although it was unsigned, the paper was considered authentic by sources in Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, who said it apparently was the work of intellectual dissidents. The paper called for freedom of press, religion, and travel, respect for human rights, higher pensions, and better living standards.

Black Religion And Black Politics

Black ministers and theologians shared time with political scientists and politicians last month in Philadelphia at a symposium on “The Function of Black Religion in Public Policy.” The three-day conference was sponsored by the Afro-American Studies Department of the University of Pennsylvania. Theologian Joseph R. Washington, author of four books on black religion, is chairman of the department.

“Although religion is essential in the black community, it really hasn’t been looked at seriously or understood for its real political potential,” commented Washington at the onset. With that, the some 300 participants plunged into a discussion of the topic at hand. They emerged with a less than unanimous assessment, however. The newly-elected black mayor of New Orleans, Ernest N. Morial, a Roman Catholic, acknowledged that “without black religion there would have been no civil-rights revolution.” But he made a sharp distinction between black religion and the black church, suggesting that progress often has been in spite of the church and not because of it.

Another critical note was sounded by C. Eric Lincoln, professor of religion at Duke University and one of the most prolific black writers on religion. In discussing the “function” of black “sects and cults” in public policy, he concluded that they had none. His designation of Muslims and black Pentecostals as examples brought emotional denials from representatives of both groups present. No Muslims or Pentecostals were featured as program speakers; James A. Forbes, Pentecostal associate professor at Union Seminary in New York, had been scheduled to speak but was canceled in a program-budget cutback. Most of the principal speakers were Baptists. Among the notable exceptions was Democratic Congresswoman Shirley A. Chisholm of New York, a United Methodist.

Samuel D. Proctor, Adam Clayton Powell’s successor as pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, cited the low numbers of university youths attending black churches. Pastor Leon H. Sullivan of Zion Baptist Church in Philadelphia, founder of a nation-wide network of urban job-training centers, criticized blacks for “putting all our eggs in the basket of the Democratic party.” (Sullivan is a Republican.) And Edward D. Irons, professor of banking at Atlanta University, expressed worry about the “dictatorial” style of many pastors, whom he described as “prima donnas.”

On the whole, however, most speakers agreed that the black church is the underlying force, the mobilization front, and the definer of values for nearly all black political action, both electoral and non-electoral. “Poverty is at its base a religious problem,” asserted one participant. Proctor insisted that desegregation, social security, minimum wage standards, and affirmative action “are on the side of the angels. People who don’t understand that just don’t know what the kingdom of God ought to look like.” Democratic congressional delegate Walter E. Fauntroy of the District of Columbia, pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church in the capital, spoke of experiences as an aide to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “The Gospel was declared in our day,” he proclaimed, “when the body politic translated our beliefs into public policy.”

A ringing definition of the “ethical imperatives of black religion” came from James A. Joseph, under secretary for the U.S. Department of the Interior. More than all the rest, his address portrayed the theological, ethical, and social interrelationships of black religion. “All of life is sacred,” Joseph affirmed. “Black religion is not a doctrine but an ethic of mutual obligation. Power is political, and it cannot be redeemed or used creatively until we become political.”

Relatively unknown to most of the symposium conferees beforehand, Joseph became the star of the meeting. “Why didn’t somebody tell us we had someone like him in Washington,” one woman asked.

A white Jewish panelist, educator Harold H. Frank of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, took exception to the conferees’ unanimous opposition to the controversial Bakke decision by the California Supreme Court. (The case, involving in effect the successful challenge of a medical school’s compensatory admissions program by a white applicant, is before the U.S. Supreme Court.) Harmony otherwise prevailed throughout the conference. Most participants saw no disjunction between “evangelistic services” and political activity—a distinct contrast with views of many white evangelicals.

“Some wonder if there is any hope,” commented Sullivan. “There is more than hope, there is movement. The black community’s basic economic and political and social organization is the church. It will still turn cities around. It may even turn the world around.”

JAMES S. TINNEY

A Matter of Policy

The Mormon-related 24,000-student Brigham Young University (BYU) and dozens of landlords in the Provo, Utah, area face a possible federal lawsuit because the school insists that men and women be separated in off-campus housing.

The U.S. Department of Justice says it has “reasonable cause” to believe that equal housing opportunity has been denied by BYU and the landlords on the basis of sex.

BYU president Dallin H. Oaks in effect told the Justice Department to get lost. “BYU is not supported by taxes, and it uses no government funds to build or administer its housing or to enforce its policies,” he asserted. “BYU simply insists on our constitutional right to teach and to require our students to live high moral standards, and to foster housing patterns supportive of that effort.”

Oaks also said that BYU has monitored landlords to assure that ample and acceptable housing exists for both men and women.

Religion in Transit

Under relentless pressure, mostly from church groups, the San Jose, California, city council voted to rescind its designation of a week in June as “Gay Human Rights Week.” The council members earlier had tagged it “Gay Pride Week,” then settled for the human rights angle as a compromise when opposition arose (see April 7 issue, page 63).

The 11,000 congregations of the United Church of Christ and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) have been asked by their executive leaders to take part in church-wide local conversations that will help determine whether formal union talks will be started in 1979.

The Mississippi-based National Federation For Decency has called for a boycott of the Sears, Roebuck company until the firm agrees to stop sponsoring TV programs featuring profanity, excessive violence, and sex. The National Citizens Committee for Broadcasting in Washington, D.C., ranks Sears as the third highest sponsor of violence and sex during prime time.

Publishers’ notes: The Zondervan Corporation, a Christian publishing firm, reports a net income for 1977 of $1.4 million on sales of $32.6 million. Scott Foresman, a Chicago textbook firm, purchased the Fleming H. Revell publishing house, a producer of Christian books. Harper and Row bought the Lippincott-Holman combine. (Holman publishes Bibles and religious books.) Doubleday says it has added an evangelical publishing line: “Galilee.” Logos International, in an economy drive, has trimmed fifteen employees from its roster and reportedly asked executives to take a salary cut.

Planned Parenthood will “become more aggressive” and take a national leadership role in lobbying for abortion rights, government funding for welfare abortions, federal backing of contraceptive development, and a national strategy to reduce teen-age pregnancies, according to a spokesperson.

Personalia

Robert J. Marshall, for ten years president of the 2.9 million-member Lutheran Church in America, announced that he will not seek reelection at the LCA’s annual convention in July. He has accepted an executive post with the U.S. office of the Lutheran World Federation. The LCA presidency is a full-time administrative position. Marshall has been known for his emphasis on Christian unity.

Charles Colson, the convicted Watergate figure who has become a leader of an evangelical prison ministry, is depicted as a nasty villain in H. R. Haldeman’s new book on Watergate, The Ends of Power. Some allegations in it concerning what Colson did or did not know, say, and do in Watergate conflict with Colson’s public statements. During a talk last month at First Baptist Church in San Antonio, Colson criticized the book as a disservice to society and said he had found at least twenty-five major factual errors in it. Said he: “I have admitted the mistakes I made. I think we should start forgiving one another. Then maybe the public can start forgiving us.”

Prince Philip of Britain presented the 1978 $100,000 Templeton Foundation Prize for Progress in Religion to Edinburgh theologian Thomas Torrance, last year’s moderator of the Church of Scotland. At the awards ceremony, President James McCord of Princeton Seminary noted that Torrance “has sought to rid theology from the blinders that have left it oblivious to what is going on in modern science and from its captivity to bad science.”

United Methodist bishop L. Scott Allen of Charlotte, North Carolina, resigned as president of the denomination’s Commission on Religion and Race. The agency in February voted not to hold meetings in states that have failed to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. That meant cancellation of a commitment to a hotel in Charlotte, where a meeting was scheduled next spring. “I felt I could not go on heading an agency that would not honor a valid commitment it had made,” explained Allen. (The National Organization of Women has asked churches, businesses, and other organizations not to hold conventions in states that have not ratified the ERA. The boycott has cost states $100 million so far, according to various estimates.)

Keith R. Bridston, 53, professor of systematic theology at Pacific Lutheran Seminary, Berkeley, and an American Lutheran Church clergyman, became the executive secretary of the U.S. Conference for the World Council of Churches in New York April 1. He is a former director of the WCC Faith and Order Commission. He succeeds Charles H. Long. 54, who will become director and editor of Forward Movement Publications, an Episcopal agency in Cincinnati.

World Scene

Some 200 pastors representing all of Brazil’s major denominations gathered in São Paulo last month to plan “Generation 79,” a congress for 16,000 Brazilian young people. To be held early next year, the week-long event will feature as speakers Billy Graham, Luis Palau, Brazilian Nilson Fanini, and other evangelists. Two public rallies will be held at an 85,000-seat stadium in São Paulo, where Graham will preach. (Two-thirds of Brazil’s 116 million population is under age 26.)

The government of Finland has introduced legislation to ban the smuggling of unauthorized goods—including Bibles and other religious materials—across its border into the Soviet Union. Presently only p*rnography is prohibited. The Soviets, however, ban much more, and there have been some awkward border incidents as a result.

The South African government in a reversal of policy announced that white churches may now admit blacks without official permission.

More than one-tenth of couples living together in Sweden are unmarried, and one-third of all Swedish children are born out of wedlock, according to a government report.

Little publicized in either legal or church circles is a national society of Christian attorneys who are doing things that may gain for their organization—the seventeen-year-old Christian Legal Society (CLS)—more visibility in both realms in the near future.

Nearly 100 of the 1,800 CLS members met in Arlington, Virginia, this month to study and pray together about the professional and spiritual challenges they face in their practice of law. They discussed and acted on plans for expanding CLS ministries in the coming decade, laying the groundwork for more intensive research and action on a variety of issues. During open-forum sessions, old pros among the private practitioners, government attorneys, corporation lawyers, and religious institutional lawyers interacted with law students about ethics and the troubled state of the profession. (The CLS sponsors several retreats each year for law students in various parts of North America.)

The conferees reviewed test cases involving alleged violations of religious liberty and government interference in religious realms. CLS members have been involved in such cases in the past, and the CLS itself occasionally provides guidelines to religious groups needing assistance in defending their right of expression. Sometimes the CLS sends a representative to appear in a case as a “friend of the court.”

The CLS board gave a green light to a group of its members to undertake a pilot program of Christian mediation services aimed at settling court-size disputes between Christians out of court. The experiment will involve both legal and spiritual counsel in accord with principles outlined in First Corinthians 6:1–8 and elsewhere in Scripture. (Members of the CLS are divided on the issue of a believer taking another believer to court: some believe that no such instance can be sanctioned biblically, others contend that Scripture does not place a universal prohibition on legal actions between Christians.)

Plenary sessions of the three-day CLS conference included messages on spiritual nurture by Lynn Robert Buzzard, a Northern Baptist Seminary faculty member who has served for more than five years as CLS’s part-time executive director at CLS headquarters in suburban Chicago. President M. G. “Pat” Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network, who holds a law degree from Yale, gave a banquet talk on biblical jurisprudence. Former Arizona congressman John B. Conlan discussed current legislative concerns.

Chairing the conference sessions was CLS president Julius B. “Jay” Poppinga of Newark, New Jersey, who in 1977 won the widely publicized U.S. District Court case against the teaching of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation (TM) in the curriculum of New Jersey public high schools. (That case is now on appeal before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.)

Among projects designated to receive priority attention by CLS planners are clarification of the “Christian lawyer” concept, enunciation of a biblical view of jurisprudence, and prepaid legal services to and through church organizations.

Constitutional lawyer William Bentley Ball confronted what is often the most slippery problem regarding “freedom of religion” suits: “What is religion?” Ball, who has handled more than fifty personal-liberty suits and a variety of Supreme Court cases, is perhaps best known for his successful representation of the Amish in the landmark Wisconsin v. Yoder case. That case secured the rights of the Amish to raise their children in accord with their religious convictions and apart from traditional state educational requirements. He is also known for his involvement in important parochial-school cases.

In his talk, Ball pointed up the ambiguity that plagues both plaintiffs and defendants in many religion-related legal battles and in alleged instances of suppression of the rights of Christian students on secular campuses. “In many situations the content given to the word ‘religious’ is what determines whether, in fact, one shall enjoy ‘religious liberty’ in that situation,” explained the attorney.

Contrasting the amount of current litigation on the subject with that of the previous century, the veteran lawyer said that in the nineteenth century the U.S. Supreme Court processed less than a handful of decisions dealing with religion. In a case tried in 1890, however, the high court defined religion as “man’s relationship to his Creator.” That theistic definition persists, said Ball, but in 1944 Justice Douglas in a significant case stated: “Men may believe what they cannot prove; they may not be put to the proof of their religious doctrines or beliefs.”

Then in 1961, said Ball, the court clearly indicated that non-theistic religions are also covered by First Amendment protection. In that year Roy Torcaso, a candidate for public office in Maryland, challenged the state’s requirement of a religious-oriented oath. The outcome of the showdown was that the Supreme Court disallowed Maryland’s religious requirement, saying that it violated Torcaso’s freedom of belief and religion. And since the court did not disclose that Torcaso had any beliefs or any religion, non-belief and non-religion therefore came under the same “free exercise” clause that protects adherents of any religion.

The court complicated the question even more by a now-famous footnote to that opinion, which said in part: “Among religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism, and others.” The definition of “secular humanism” as a religion has produced considerable debate over public school programs whose content, critics allege, is essentially “secular humanist.” Some Christians—including legislators (especially Conlan)—argued with little success that such programs may not be imposed in schools because that would amount to the establishment of a religion.

Ball also referred to court cases in which religion has been more narrowly defined. They include a current one, Caulfield v. Hirsch, involving the effort of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to assert jurisdiction over Roman Catholic schools in Philadelphia (see June 17, 1977, issue, page 38). That case is now in the appeals stage and may be headed for the Supreme Court. The NLRB has taken the position that no “free exercise” claim can be asserted by pastors of the schools, since the legislation at issue does not contradict any “tenet” of the Catholic religion or prevent the expression of any. With such a view, the government can control a church school’s “terms and conditions of employment” so long as it does not contradict a doctrine or bar expression of it, as Ball sees it.

“Lawyers in religious liberty cases must pause to listen to believers,” Ball counseled. “Such cases should be defended on the single ground of liberty of religion,” he emphasized. He warned against misdefining religion by seeing it in terms of only a single facet of its many meanings. He also urged his listeners to recognize the truth of C. S. Lewis’s remark: “There are not ‘non-religious’ activities; only ‘religious’ and ‘irreligious.’ ”

Ball concluded with an appeal to the CLS participants to defend religious and other human liberties, to be a faithful witness within the profession (“which is indeed in a troubled state and was never in worse public repute”), and to help others become truly Christian lawyers.

Private Education: A Tax Break?

Intense pressure was building up early this month on President Jimmy Carter and Congress over proposals to grant tax relief to parents of students in private schools, most of which are church-related.

The congressional bills would give limited credit toward the income tax of tuition-paying parents, many of them hard pressed to keep abreast of spiraling educational costs. The legislation is backed not only by the Roman Catholic hierarchy but also by many evangelicals who support private schools. Much to the surprise of opponents, the tax-relief concept has already gained considerable congressional endorsem*nt. The best-known of the bills, introduced by Senators Daniel Moynihan and Bob Packwood, sailed through the Senate Finance Committee and was ready this month for action on the Senate floor. Half the membership of the Senate joined in sponsoring the measure, so there is little doubt that it will be passed.

Sermon Suggestions

Applause after a good sermon?

That’s what a Roman Catholic priest, Henry Fehren, suggests in an article in U.S. Catholic magazine. After all, he says, even clergy need audience approval and support “lest their work seem useless or a mere chore.” He thinks preachers would benefit if members of the congregation participated in the sermon preparation process—by contributing suggestions for content, providing reviews and clippings, engaging in dialogue, and the like. He also believes that churches could provide cards on which churchgoers would rate the sermon, comment on what was good or bad, and make suggestions for future talks.

“If the preacher senses from the active involvement of the people that he is communicating with them,” writes Fehren, “he will surely make greater efforts to make the sermon better in content, form, and effectiveness.”

A survey of the magazine’s subscribers showed that 69 per cent agree that applause can have a place in church. More than 70 per cent think the rating-cards idea is a good one.

The poll also found that no one prefers sermons of more than thirty minutes and that only 4 per cent like sermons longer than twenty minutes. Forty-five per cent said they believe sermons should last from five to ten minutes, and 35 per cent favor a length of from ten to twenty minutes.

In the House of Representatives, which historically has been slower to act on bills giving special tax breaks, hearings were held in the Ways and Means Committee, and chairman Al Ullman announced that he was ready to bring the matter to a vote.

President Carter and cabinet member Joseph Califano, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, have opposed the Packwood-Moynihan bill. They were backed by an opinion from Attorney General Griffin Bell that questioned the constitutionality of the legislation on church-and-state separation grounds. The Administration wants Congress instead to appropriate more funds for direct aid to students at the college level. (The Packwood-Moynihan proposal includes parents of elementary, secondary, and college students in the tax-credit plan.)

The President’s rejection of the tax-credits proposal has prompted critics to charge that he is not keeping pledges made during his campaign for the White House. “Are your promises mere rhetoric? Have you no intention of making them reality?” asked John Meyers, president of the National Catholic Educational Association, in a letter to Carter.

Meyers, a priest, quoted a telegram that Carter sent to the 1976 annual meeting of the Catholic educators shortly before the presidential election. In it, Carter promised to find “constitutionally acceptable methods of providing aid to parents whose children attend parochial schools.” During testimony on the legislation, Califano—a Catholic—defended his Baptist boss. He argued that Carter is limited by the Constitution in what he can do.

The defense of the President by his cabinet members brought a challenge from Bishop Thomas C. Kelly, general secretary of the U.S. Catholic Conference. He dismissed Bell’s opinion on the constitutionality of tax credits as only one man’s opinion. Numerous constitutional authorities have testified that the plan is constitutional, he pointed out.

Catholic support for the proposed legislation seems to be solid, as it has been in most past attempts to get financial relief for parents of church-school students. A new element is the backing that is coming from other religious groups. Jewish groups, for example, have generally opposed such legislation in the past. The Synagogue Council of America is bound by a rule of unanimity, so it is taking no position on Packwood-Moynihan. Its Orthodox Jewish constituency, however, favors such tax relief. Members of evangelical groups that operate schools—including the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and the Christian Reformed Church—have testified on behalf of the legislation. Support has also come from officials of some non-sectarian organizations, among them the Congress on Racial Equality.

Alarmed by the progress of the Packwood-Moynihan bill, a variety of national organizations put together a coalition to stop tax-credit legislation. About forty groups, including religious, labor, civil rights, and educational organizations have joined the National Coalition to Save Public Education. Among them are Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs.

Letter Writing In a Limousine

A whirlwind tour of four nations in the week after Easter focused world attention on the American president who has made human rights a popular issue. Jimmy Carter’s visit to Venezuela and Brazil was the first of a U.S. president to South America since John Kennedy, and his trip to Nigeria and Liberia was the first official visit by any U.S. president to black Africa.

Although Carter talked about oil, atomic energy, Communist influence, and other international concerns, his agenda also had its moments of religious interest. His host in Brazil, Ernesto Geisel, is the nation’s first Protestant president. Whether they discussed religion was not announced, but the President insisted on seeing two Brazilian cardinals who are critics of the Geisel government. He met for about an hour in Rio de Janeiro with Paulo E. Arns, archbishop of São Paulo, and Eugenio Sales, archbishop of Rio. Religious News Service reported that Arns rode with the President to the airport and received handwritten letters from Carter for delivery to two persons. One was addressed to Pentecostal pastor Manoel de Mello of São Paulo, a World Council of Churches leader who was once arrested by security police. The other addressee was not named, and the content of the letters was not divulged.

There was some speculation that the other letter Carter wrote in his limousine to the airport was intended for embattled Archbishop Dom Helder Camara of Recife, Brazil. While Arns has been called Brazil’s leading human rights advocate, Camara is perhaps the best known cleric outside the country. He has traveled and spoken around the world, particularly in Europe and North America.

As Carter’s trip began, the American lay-edited National Catholic Reporter went to press with an interview article on Camara. The weekly reported that the archbishop had been ordered by the Vatican to suspend his travels. The paper’s Washington correspondent, Mark Winiarski, said Pope Paul had imposed the ban last November. The Reporter said that Italians in the curia, unhappy with the “red bishop’s” outspoken advocacy of socialist programs, had moved Pope Paul to limit Camara’s wide influence.

As Winiarski was piecing together the story in Recife, Camara got a phone call from a high Vatican official. Cardinal Jan Willebrands, telling him that the ban had been lifted. Other Vatican figures denied that any ban had ever existed. Despite the phone call, Camara told the Reporter that the matter was still unsettled. He also gave the paper a statement in which he criticized the United States as an exporter of torture.

In Africa, Carter went to a service at First Baptist Church in Lagos, Nigeria. That country’s chief of state, General Olusegun Obasanjo, is also a Baptist. The general read Scripture during the service, and Carter led the responsive reading and prayed. In Liberia Carter was welcomed by President William Tolbert, a Baptist pastor and former president of the Baptist World Alliance.

Schism In the Order

More grief than bitterness lingers in the aftermath of a recent schism within the New Covenant Apostolic Order (NCAO), a group founded four years ago by seven former key staff members of Campus Crusade for Christ. There was no uproar attracting public attention to the NCAO split when it occurred, and many of the leaders are unwilling to talk about it to outsiders. Simply put, it was in the end a matter of theological incompatibility among old friends who had worked together in the front ranks of evangelism and church planting.

The seven central figures left Campus Crusade between 1968 and 1970 to develop other ministries. Sharing a common belief that evangelism had to be linked more closely to spiritually renewed churches, they later banded together as the NCAO to establish congregations founded on the principles of theological orthodoxy, historic continuity, and catholicity. They chose churches of the first six centuries as models for government, liturgy, doctrine, and discipline. The goal was to create an ideal New Testament-type church fellowship where new converts could come and be nurtured properly.

Several of the seven managed to bring their varied ministries into the newly formed group. The movement began with five churches and expanded within three years to nearly 100, most of them small house fellowships scattered in fifteen states.

Explained Gordon Walker, one of the founders: “We don’t see ourselves as a new denomination or a separatist organization, but rather an order in the church catholic (or universal). There have been many honorable orders in the history of the church that have brought her great blessings. We hope we will be another such [order bringing] blessing to the church.…”

Walker, former director of Campus Crusade’s African ministries, is pastor of an NCAO congregation in Nashville and oversees NCAO work in the Southeast. He also was associated at one time with Grace Haven Farm near Mansfield, Ohio, an NCAO collegiate work-study center patterned after the famed L’Abri center in Switzerland. The present director of Grace Haven is Ray Nethery, who formerly headed Campus Crusade’s Asia department. Nethery is the only one of the seven NCAO founders who departed in the schism.

Other NCAO founders:

• Jon Braun, predecessor of Josh McDowell on Campus Crusade’s university lecture circuit; overseer of NCAO’s West Coast congregations.

• Dick Ballew, formerly Campus Crusade’s East Coast director; shepherd of the NCAO churches in the Santa Barbara-Goleta area on the California coast.

• Ken Berven, former Canadian director of Campus Crusade and personal assistant to Crusade president Bill Bright; supervisor of NCAO’s work in the Pacific Northwest.

• Pete Gilquist, formerly Campus Crusade’s Midwest director and editor of Crusade’s Challenge magazine; now an editor for Thomas Nelson publishers, overseer of NCAO’s Midwest work, and the NCAO’s president.

• Jack Sparks, former research director and computer specialist for Campus Crusade, and founder of the Christian World Liberation Front at Berkeley (an outreach group that split up in 1975); dean of NCAO’s Academy of Orthodox Theology in Goleta, a school founded in 1976 “to help equip Christian workers in the theological battles that are presently being fought as well as those yet to come.” (Both Braun and Ballew are members of the academy’s faculty, and both spent a year or more in a sect patterned after Witness Lee’s Local Church movement. About two dozen persons are enrolled in the school.)

Ballew is 51, Gilquist is 39, and the others are in their forties.

Women In Ministry

Seventy-six of 211 Christian church bodies polled in North America ordain women, according to a survey by editor Constant H. Jacquet, Jr., of the Yearbook of American and Canadian churches. The study also showed:

• Nearly 10,500 women are ordained in the full ministry.

• Women comprise 4.1 per cent of the total clergy force of the groups surveyed.

• More than one-fourth of all women clergy counted in the survey were ordained by the Salvation Army.

• The United Church of Christ has the largest number of women clergy—400—of the major denominations. (The Disciples of Christ have 388, and both the United Methodist Church and the United Presbyterian Church have about 300 each.)

Women account for 40 per cent or so of seminary enrollments across the nation, an increase of 118 per cent since 1972, according to another study cited by Jacquet.

The seven founders and thirteen other “apostles” (as they were known among the western churches) or “apostolic workers” (the designation used in the eastern churches) comprised the NCAO proper. Within the NCAO was a governing General Council composed of the seven founders. The NCAO-spawned churches were divided into a dozen geographical presbyteries. From each were selected elders, about 150 in all, to sit on the Church Council, a sort of governing body over the churches but subject to the NCAO leadership.

(At the time of the split there were about 2,000 adherents. An estimated 500 left with Nethery and two other apostolic workers: Kevin Springer of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Michael Seiler of Columbus, Ohio.)

The NCAO’s strategy was to establish community churches and develop within them indigenous leadership. There are no pastors as traditionally understood. Local boards of elders administer services and programs. Larger congregations are served by ordained apostolic workers. (The NCAO does not ordain women.)

The constituents include a “goodly number of mild charismatics,” according to a member. Most of the people involved in the churches are in their twenties and thirties, a high proportion of them college graduates. Most come from Protestant backgrounds that are not heavily liturgical. There are no blacks, and NCAO leaders express regret about this.

Much good is being accomplished in the local congregations, according to NCAO president Gilquist. He points to marriages and lives that are being healed in the nurture process. (Gilquist declined to comment at length about the NCAO, however, in the context of an article about the recent schism. It is unfair, he suggested, for the press to all but ignore a movement until controversy arises.)

Theological concerns have occupied much of the attention of the NCAO’s leaders. One of their major concerns is the theme of union: the union of the Godhead, the union of Christ’s two natures, the union of the believers with Christ. The church is seen as the place where union with Christ is expressed. It is effected in baptism and carried on in the Eucharist.

For some time Nethery and his associates were fearful that the other NCAO leaders were moving too far in the direction of Eastern Orthodoxy in their increasing emphasis on sacramental theology and authoritarian government. (Indeed, there were informal contacts with an Orthodox body.) Theology was not a settled matter, it was being developed as the months went by.

The Nethery group meanwhile was moving toward reformational views of doctrine and ecclesiology.

Things came to a head in January when the NCAO ruling-council members met in Goleta and discussed their differences. The meeting took place two days before a theological forum was to be held in Paso Robles, California. Representative scholars of the NCAO had submitted position papers for consideration by the leadership in advance of the meeting. Some of the papers—all from Nethery’s area—took issue with certain positions of the Goleta faculty and with what Nethery’s group felt were “dangerous” directions:

• A position that borders on baptismal regeneration.

• The “binding” of individual conscience to the church leadership.

• The teaching that divine energies are transmitted through the sacraments and the church.

• Emphasis on the incarnation at the potential expense of the atonement.

• Elevating the patristic tradition to the point of threatening the authority of Scripture.

(Gilquist insists that NCAO leaders believe the blood of Christ, not the water of baptism, saves. However, he describes baptism as being ideally “that point at which the Lord comes to live in your life.” On another point, he rejects the conscience-binding charge but does insist that a believer’s actions must be “subject to [the authority of] the church.”)

When discussion of the issues reached an impasse the majority of the council members suggested that Nethery set up a new order that would have ties to the NCAO but would accommodate the dissenting leaders. This he agreed to do.

Since the council felt that presentation of the divergent viewpoints would prove disruptive, the forum was canceled, and Nethery returned to Ohio. Some thirty individuals, however, did show up at Paso Robles. They reviewed the controversial papers and pronounced them “polemical.” A “prophecy” repudiating the eastern dissenters and challenging their Christian integrity was drawn up and sent to all NCAO-related congregations. Denied the opportunity to defend their views, the Nethery group of twenty congregations and some 500 members withdrew from the NCAO altogether.

In a telephone interview Nethery said he deplored the split, but he added: “We’ve got to be very careful that the tradition of the church doesn’t overpower the voice of Scripture.” Theological differences, not personality conflicts, produced the separation, he emphasized. (In talking with reporters, both Gilquist and Nethery expressed high regard and affection for each other despite the parting of ways; it was Nethery who led Gilquist to Christ.)

Observers say it is too early to predict what will be the ultimate outcome of the schism. The eastern separationists plan a meeting in July to chart the road ahead.

JOSEPH M. HOPKINS

Wilmington Ten: Conscience or Crime?

North Carolina’s natural beauty attracts thousands of out-of-state admirers every spring and summer, but some of the visitors this season will be going to North Carolina to say how terrible they think the state is. In the forefront of those paying their calls this spring will be United Church of Christ executives who are trying to get the nine remaining “Wilmington Ten” prisoners out of jail (see June 17, 1977, issue, page 38). The continuing controversy over the sentences of the men convicted of fire bombing a store in 1971 has been one of the issues bringing the Tar Heel state some attention it does not want. At the center of it all is Governor James B. Hunt, Jr., who does not easily wear the “racist” tag that some critics have given him.

Churches of North Carolina are also wrapped up in the issue. The spring issue of the NCCC Chronicles (of the National Council of Churches) announced that the North Carolina Council of Churches had just been awarded a “national ecumenical service recognition award” by the NCC’s Commission on Regional and Local Ecumenism. Among the cited accomplishments of the winner in the state council category was spearheading “a campaign to mobilize support for the Wilmington Ten.”

Not all religious leaders in the state are in favor of the campaign, however. Even the United Church of Christ (UCC), whose Commission on Racial Justice has led the national protest, has furnished some opposition within the state. Early this year fifty-eight UCC ministers got together and issued a statement asking the denomination to back off. They said that the denomination had already spent enough money (estimated at more than $500,000) on the cause and that “the divisive and derogatory rhetoric expressed by some denominational officials” was “accusatory and disrespectful of the motives, character, and personhood of others.” They urged that regional, rather than national, officials speak for the UCC in the matter. The UCC national communications office responded with a statement saying that the North Carolina complaint would be taken “very seriously” but that because of the UCC’s polity all churches are independent with “a right to do as they please.” This month the UCC rejected the request of the North Carolina dissidents.

The leader of the jailed men is Ben Chavis, a field worker for the UCC commission at the time of racial strife in Wilmington in 1971. Governor Hunt reduced the sentences of Chavis and the others, but he did not grant the pardons which had been demanded. Because Hunt is eligible for reelection and considered a contender for national office, there has been speculation that his action was politically motivated. One state-wide poll showed 52 per cent of North Carolinians in favor of his decision, 21 per cent who did not want him to make any change at all in the sentences, and only 12 per cent who wanted pardons or further reductions of the sentences. Hunt, generally considered moderate to liberal within the state, has put more blacks in middle-to top-level state jobs than his predecessors.

Chavis, though, argued that he and the other eight still in jail had been “nailed to the cross of racism and political repression” by Hunt’s decision. (A tenth member of the group, a white woman who formerly worked for the federal VISTA program as an anti-poverty worker, was released earlier.)

Three of the key prosecution witnesses at the original trial have since recanted their testimony (and recanted the recantation in some cases). This has led to renewed cries that there was a miscarriage of justice and that the Chavis ten were imprisoned simply because of their political positions and not because of the crimes for which they were convicted. The court found them guilty of conspiring to shoot policemen and firemen as well as setting the store building on fire. Chavis got the longest sentence since he was considered the mentor of the young men (teen-agers at the time). Under the reduction granted by the governor, he will be eligible for parole in 1980. Such organizations as Amnesty International have helped make the case a world-wide issue, claiming that the men are prisoners of conscience.

The courts have consistently held that there was nothing improper about the trial, and all appeal efforts have failed so far. President Carter, who has been petitioned by a variety of groups to intervene, has said only that it is a state issue. Protests and appeals have been carried to Washington (including one by the National Council of Churches), and the supporters of the Wilmington Ten plan to keep the cause in the headlines.

Among those urging President Carter to take a hand in the matter last month was Philip Potter, general secretary of the World Council of Churches. In a letter to Carter, the WCC leader recalled an appeal made on behalf of the Wilmington Ten to the White House last August by the WCC Central Committee. Potter told Carter that granting a “pardon of innocence” and release of the prisoners “would greatly enhance your moral stance and credibility both at home and abroad.”

An estimated 8,000 rallied across the street from the White House last month, cheered on by such veterans of the protest movement as singer Pete Seeger and Marxist professor Angela Davis. Leon White, director of the North Carolina-Virginia field office of the UCC’s commission, suggested that a rally planned early this month might be the last orderly one. He said it would be one of solidarity and not civil disobedience, but “after April 1, the tactics are open.” Golden Frinks, a Southern Christian Leadership Conference worker who is a veteran North Carolina activist, said he was “prepared to violate some laws” in the continuing protest.

More than the cases of the individual prisoners or the cause of political action in the United Church of Christ is at stake in the case. One of the underlying issues arousing people on both sides is the use of confrontation techniques, including violent ones, to effect community change. The issue is getting fresh national attention because of President Carter’s appointment of Sam Brown as director of Action, the umbrella organization for domestic volunteer agencies as well as the Peace Corps. Brown is a veteran of the protests of the Sixties. Some members of Congress and other political leaders have taken issue with the plans he has for the agency. The fact that one of the Wilmington Ten defendants (the woman who was freed) was a VISTA volunteer in Wilmington has focused attention on use of “outsiders”—whether church-paid or government-paid—to organize community protests.

Black Muslim Rift: Recalling the Past

Abdul Haleem (formerly Louis) Farrakhan, 44, the man chosen to fill the role of Malcolm X and avert widespread defections in the Black Muslims in 1965 upon Malcolm’s death, has left the movement himself. He announced at a number of recent public appearances his intent to rebuild a black nationalist Muslim faith in accord with the separatist doctrines of the Late Elijah Muhammad, the founder of the Black Muslims.

The break between Muhammad’s son Wallace, who now leads the World Community of Al-Islam in the West (formerly Nation of Islam), and Farrakhan is expected to precipitate hundreds of other defections from the movement. “To this day I have not asked, contacted, or called one follower of Wallace D. Muhammad to leave with me. Nor will I,” Farrakhan asserted at Howard University. “Therefore I can never be accused of being involved in an internal power struggle.”

Nevertheless, a minority of “purists” in the WCIW is known to favor the older, former beliefs proclaimed by Elijah before his death in 1975. They are expected to follow Farrakhan, who also seeks to reinstate all the symbols of the older version, including dress codes, black separatism, the paramilitary disciplining unit known as the Fruit of Islam, and Muslim business enterprises. In addition, Farrakhan’s popularity (he has been called the “most influential” minister in the movement by several Muslim writers) may influence some moderates to leave.

Farrakhan contends that integrationist policies are depriving blacks of the social and economic gains of the 1960s. In an address to about 400 persons last month at Baruch College in New York, he indicated that the remedy lies in a return to the separatist, self-help philosophy of the past.

The loss of Farrakhan to the older body is viewed as a parallel development to the loss of Malcolm X in 1964 (he was killed a year later). Farrakhan, who was chosen to succeed Malcolm as the national spokesman for Elijah and as leader of the large Harlem mosque, became a regular speaker on the official radio broadcasts of the Black Muslims, heard weekly over nearly 100 stations.

Before Malcolm’s breakaway to embrace a more orthodox Islam (ostensibly the same faith Wallace Muhammad now champions), he and Farrakhan were close friends. Later, however, Farrakhan branded him a “hypocrite and enemy of the black man.”

Relations between Wallace Muhammad and Farrakhan were always strained at best. According to some observers, Muhammad in 1975 assigned Farrakhan to Chicago and later to the West Coast in order to neutralize his influence. A self-imposed moratorium of Farrakhan’s national speaking tours lasted for nearly a year prior to his announced decision to “be silent no longer.”

Questioned about his risking fate similar to that of Malcolm, who was shot to death (allegedly by fellow Muslims, although questions surrounding the event have never been resolved), Farrakhan replied, “He who seeks to save his life will lose it. No risk is too great for the salvation and freedom of black people.”

Wallace Muhammad told a reporter that he is not worried about losing members. He said the sect now has 70,000 members—more than when his father was alive (law-enforcement authorities say membership has never exceeded 25,000). He acknowledged, however, that attendance at services is lower now, mostly because of relaxed discipline. He also insisted that he will not reverse the changes instituted since his father’s death. Farrakhan, he said, is pursuing an “outdated” political, not religious, policy of black nationalism with ties to Africa. Said Muhammad: “I believe in the oneness of God [and] the oneness of man.”

The Uniqueness Of Paul

Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion, by E. P. Sanders (Fortress, 1977, 645 pp., $25.00), is reviewed by David E. Aune, professor of religion, Saint Xavier College, Chicago, Illinois.

Of those Christian scholars foolhardy enough to have written about rabbinic religion or Paul’s theology, some receive a thorough scolding and others a sound thrashing in this most significant reconsideration of both subjects by E. P. Sanders, professor of religious studies at McMaster University. Sanders’s book will doubtless prove to be a watershed in Pauline studies, comparable to the achievement of W. D. Davies whose Paul and Rabbinic Judaism was published thirty years ago.

The “comparison” mentioned in the subtitle is done in a very refined and sophisticated method. Rejecting the atomistic approach of comparing or contrasting one element of Pauline thought with a supposedly corresponding element in early Judaism, Sanders insists that the whole religious system of Paul be compared with the whole religious system of Judaism. His notion of a “pattern of religion” makes such a comparison possible. For Sanders, the pattern of religion is the way in which a religion is thought to function by its adherents, that is, “how getting in and staying in are understood.”

Sanders devotes more than two hundred pages to the most difficult subject he discusses, “Tannaitic literature,” which is rabbinic literature stemming from the period A.D. 70–200. He attacks the widely held view that rabbinic religion is characterized by a legalistic works-righteousness, the view that salvation is never assured but is attainable only if the final balance of one’s deeds shows a preponderance of good over bad. This assessment of rabbinic religion, which Sanders clearly shows to be a figment of nineteenth-century scholarly imagination, has achieved near-canonical status through the influential work of such scholars as Emil Schürer, Wilhelm Bousset, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Billerbeck. Sanders takes great pains to refute it step by step, point by point. His view is absolutely correct. His delineation of the pattern of rabbinic religion is by no means new; however, he follows in the footsteps of such illustrious predecessors as George Foote Moore and R. Travis Herford.

Sanders characterizes rabbinic religion as “covenantal nomism.” An individual’s place in the plan of God is established on the basis of the covenant, which requires obedience to its commands while providing a means of atonement for transgressions. Obedience to the covenant is nowhere regarded as a burden in Tannaitic literature, nor does the notion of perfect obedience concern the rabbis. The rabbinic emphasis on obedience finds a necessary correlative in the twin notions of repentance and forgiveness. “The rabbinic religion,” according to Sanders, “was framed by election at one end and a share in the world to come at the other. All those who remained within the covenant partook of the covenant promises.” The central concern of the rabbis was not how man could earn salvation but rather how man could best be faithful. Sanders also emphasizes that for the rabbis, God’s grace was not contradictory to human endeavor; grace and works were never considered alternate roads to salvation.

Besides dealing with Tannaitic literature, Sanders provides fascinating analyses of the religious pattern in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in five apocryphal and pseudoepigraphical writings: Wisdom, First Enoch, Jubilees, Psalms of Solomon, and Fourth Ezra. A pattern of religion similar to that of the Tannaitic literature emerges in all except Fourth Ezra, where the notion of covenantal nomism has collapsed in favor of a legalistic perfectionism.

One of the major problems facing Pauline scholars who take the Apostle’s pharisaic background seriously is to account for Paul’s apparent misunderstanding of the “covenantal nomism,” characteristic of first-century Palestinian Judaism. Why does Paul portray Judaism as a religion of salvation based on works and nowhere so much as allude to Jewish notions of repentance and forgiveness? The answer that Sanders proposes is exceedingly attractive: Paul did not begin with the problem of man’s plight and work to the solution of salvation in Christ; rather, he began with the solution (salvation may be obtained only “in Christ”), from which he deduced man’s plight (all other ways to salvation are ineffective and wrong). Paul did not misunderstand the law, nor was he disillusioned by it prior to his conversion (Romans 7 cannot be interpreted autobiographically!); rather, he gained a wholly new perspective through his conversion that led him to regard the law as abolished. The real problem of Pauline exegesis, claims Sanders, is determining the relation among various soteriological terms in Paul, the two major categories of which are the “juristic” and the “participatory.” Those categories are complementary in that they are different ways of asserting that apart from Christ man stands condemned.

Sanders concludes that the religious pattern in Paul’s religion is markedly different from anything found in Palestinian Jewish literature. What then is the source of the distinctive Pauline pattern? The fact that Paul’s thought was not taken over from any one scheme of religious thought. Sanders cautiously ascribes a degree of uniqueness to Paul, whose pattern of religious thought was determined by the fundamental conviction that Jesus is Lord and that in him God has provided salvation for all who believe.

This book is essential fare for any serious student of Paul. Its size is formidable, but the reader will be more than recompensed for his labor by Sanders’s penetrating analyses of early Jewish and Pauline religious thought. There is an excellent appendix on “Perspectives on ‘God’s righteousness’ in Recent German Discussion” by Manfred T. Brauch, a New Testament professor at Northern Baptist seminary.

Specific Helps For Premarital Counseling

Premarital Counseling, by H. Norman Wright (Moody, 1977, 215 pp., $6.95 pb), is reviewed by C. E. Ceding, pastor of education, Hopevale Memorial Baptist Church, Saginaw, Michigan.

Premarital counseling is what every minister knows that he should be doing. But few ministers do it well because they lack the time. Norm Wright eliminates many of the excuses by giving us a volume that contains almost everything needed for a good premarital counseling program.

Premarital counseling provides one of the greatest opportunities for teaching that the average minister or church encounters. The people who come, because of their deep concern for success in marriage, are teachable to a degree rarely experienced in Christian work. Premarital counseling can do more toward helping a couple establish a Christian marriage than almost anything else we can do for them in the future. It also develops rapport between the counselor and counselees that moves them in the direction of a deep commitment to the life of the church.

However, the greatest opportunity is the chance to help reduce the rising divorce rate. Statistics show that since the late sixties the divorce rate has risen at a dizzy rate. From approximately 3.5 divorces per 1000 stable marriages in 1960 the divorce rate now approaches 4.8 per 1000. One of the most effective means of lowering it is premarital counseling.

During the past year our church began a premarital counseling program. As the one in charge of this program I have drawn extensively on material Norm Wright produced as background for this book. In a series of tapes (“Upon This Foundation”) and a book of curriculum resources for marriage and family living, he set forth many of the ideas used in this book. However, these materials were available exclusively through his organization, Christian Marriage Enrichment. Now the material on premarital counseling (some of the best he published) has been published by a major evangelical publisher. I’m thrilled at the opportunity of seeing this book receive the wide distribution it deserves.

Premarital Counseling contains a three-chapter introduction to the main course. This introduction lightly but thoroughly covers major issues confronting each of us in marriage and family living. However, the heart of the book is the four chapters that deal with premarital counseling resources and that outline six sessions of premarital counseling. I have used these sessions (with minor modifications) myself over the past year; I can attest to their great value and thoroughness. For the average premarital counseling experience they cover almost everything necessary. In fact, our church is so pleased with them that in time this whole program will be placed in the hands of lay couples who will do the counseling in their homes, thus freeing a major portion of ministerial time for other duties.

Sessions one and two explore the following subjects: What is marriage?, the couples’ family backgrounds, their dating background, the extent of their present sexual involvement, their preparation for marriage, their attitudes toward marriage, their definitions of love, and what they anticipate from marriage. The other sessions are equally thorough.

Each session includes homework to be done before the beginning of the next session. There is even homework for the couple before the counseling actually begins. In all, between twenty-five and thirty hours of homework are required.

How do people react to such extensive preparation? Let me give you a few reactions. A young man asked shortly before he and his fiancé dropped out, “Do all the churches in town require this much preparation to get married?” But others have said, “This is one of the greatest things I have ever experienced.” It has been my experience that couples who complete the course have nothing but praise for its contents. I have both a premarital counseling class and an individual counseling program, but those involved always share their appreciation for what they learn.

If there is one weakness in this book it is the chapter dealing with special problems in premarital counseling. It is too short (ten pages). The issue of mixed marriages, Christian/non-Christian marriages, could have been explored in far more depth. Another problem I face regularly is the divorced person who wants to marry again. These are sticky issues that cannot be lightly handled. I was surprised that no mention was made in the bibliography on divorce of Dwight Small’s The Right to Remarry.

Another question needs to be handled in more detail: how should a minister respond to the couple who is sleeping together? Wright suggests to tell them to stop. If they do not, counseling will not continue. He says that he has not encountered couples who refuse to follow his advice. I sure have. To insist that they stop sleeping together or I will stop counseling them, places a couple in a position of lying about what they are doing if they don’t want to stop. Further, it would be difficult to check up on them to determine the facts.

This criticism, however, should not detract from the value of this book. For too long the church has been involved in conducting weddings when it should have been creating Christian homes. For years we have needed a thorough plan of action for premarital counseling. Wright gives us a good one. We might want to modify it for our own use, but at least we should begin by making use of it.

A Police Chaplain In Hawaii

Calling Angel One, by Bob Turnbull (Bible Voice, 1976, 175 pp., $2.95 pb), is reviewed by John de Vries, Protestant chaplain, Centre Federal de Formation, Laval, Quebec.

The down-to-earth police chaplain of Waikiki Beach, Bob Turnbull, writes an adventurous account of his experiences as a “Jesus Cop.” What is an ordained minister doing as a police chaplain on this exotic, Pacific, “Hawaii Five ‘O’ ” playground? As the reader travels with him he sees how Jesus enters into the lives of prostitutes, pimps, and pushers.

This is not simply a book about “spirtual highs.” The reader is called to thoughtful reflection and Christian discipleship. The author successfully promotes lay and clergy interest in the new and specialized ministry of the police chaplain. “Needs are visible everywhere,” writes the author. The police, the law breakers, the victims, and the community need to be ministered to through the “Christ presence” of the chaplain. Numerous police chaplaincies are now being established. Any church can show interest in the local police force, which could lead to creation of a police chaplain in the community. The author’s many anecdotal accounts illustrate both the difficulties and the rewards of this ministry.

Young people will enjoy this fast-moving book. Church groups might develop projects to work with the local police. Ministers and deacons who want to broaden the ministry of the local congregation will be stimulated and challenged. For immediate assistance the author has included in the appendix the “Police Chaplain’s Handbook” and a description of “The Role of the Volunteer Police Chaplain.”

Tensions In The Church

The Church in the Power of the Spirit, by Jürgen Moltmann (Harper & Row, 1977, 407pp., $15.00), is reviewed by Donald G. Bloesch, professor of theology, University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, Dubuque, Iowa.

In his latest book Moltmann seeks to reinterpret the doctrine of the church. He rejects the older conservatism of Abraham Kuyper and August Vilmar, which in his mind sought to identify the church with the ruling order against chaos and revolution. The true church will see its goal as the liberation of the oppressed and downtrodden of the world, and such liberation entails both personal freedom and social emancipation. He disdains the traditional emphasis that the church’s mission is to convert people to the Christian religion; instead it is to implant the seeds of liberation in the hearts and minds of the oppressed.

While he reaffirms the historical understanding of the marks of the church as holiness, apostolicity, catholicity, and unity, Moltmann adds the sign of the liberating witness of the church in conflict with the powers of the world. He sees the holiness of the church in terms of its poverty, its willingness to confess its guilt. Apostolicity is manifested in continuity with apostolic doctrine and faithfulness in carrying out the apostolic charge. The church is catholic and related to the whole insofar as it seeks to restore to favor the lost, the rejected, and the oppressed. The evidence of the sanctification of the church is its suffering and persecution in resisting the principalities and powers of every age.

Moltmann sees the New Testament church as charismatic, not hierarchical. The development of the monarchial episcopate led, in his opinion, to the quenching of the Spirit and was an impediment to the charismatic church. He calls for the discovery and practice of “the free abundance of the Spirit’s gifts.” These gifts and ministries have for their purpose “the messianic liberation of the world.” Deadness, not enthusiasm, is the bane of the modern church. The fullness of the Spirit should not be “smothered by established and regimented forms of worship.”

Recognizing the salutary role of monastic orders in the church of the past, he calls for the formation of “regulated discipleship groups” that will demonstrate the liberty of Christ more unhesitatingly than church leaders and more radically than the ordinary laity. Yet he warns that such groups will isolate themselves in a social ghetto if they do not seek to have a reforming effect on both church and society.

His view of the sacraments combines elements from Reformation theology and the Anabaptist and Pietist traditions. While affirming believer’s baptism only, he makes a place for the blessing of children in the service of worship. He contends that the Lord’s Supper should not be conducted by a special priestly caste but should be celebrated by the whole congregation. The invitation to partake should be extended to unbelievers as well as believers.

In place of the communion of saints Moltmann substitutes the “fellowship of friends.” A friend is anyone who loves in freedom, and this means that the fellowship of love extends beyond the frontiers of organized Christianity. By friendship Moltmann does not mean selective intimacy based on common interests; he has in mind an open and total friendship that goes out to meet others in the spirit of love.

He sees positive values in the world religions and therefore believes that the church’s role should be not to try to win people to faith in Christ but instead to join with people of other faiths in the alleviation of the world’s distress. The coming of the redeeming kingdom rests partly “in the potentialities and powers of the world religions.” In inter-religious dialogue the Christian role is to encourage people of other religions to discover and activate their charismatic potentialities in the service of liberation and humanization. Thereby the world religions are given messianic direction and serve to prepare the way for the coming kingdom. Moltmann even allows for the possibility of Hindu, Muslim, and Shintoist and animist forms of Christianity.

While discouraging missions to the Jews, Moltmann regards the state of Israel as having messianic significance. It is a sign of the end of the dispersion and “the beginning of Israel’s homecoming.” Interestingly he is favorably disposed toward millennialism, since it “vanquished anti-Judaism by vanquishing ecclesiastical absolutism.” Because the church in the past so often understood itself as the messianic kingdom of Christ, it could not “acknowledge Israel’s separate existence alongside itself.”

The hope of the church is not life with God in eternity but the future of this world as changed by the kingdom of God. He sees transcendence in terms of the eschatological future into which we are raised by faith. The church is not yet the kingdom of God, but it witnesses to this kingdom, which has already been inaugurated in Jesus Christ and is destined to encompass all peoples and all history.

Moltmann maintains that the real division in the church today is not doctrinal but political. This division crosses all denominational lines, since the class conflict between the oppressed and the oppressors is not restricted to any church or nation. I would contend, against Moltmann, that behind the political tensions within the churches lies a growing doctrinal cleavage that augurs ill for the unity of the church in the future.

What makes evangelicals uneasy about Moltmann’s theology is not his call for identification with the oppressed and the poor of this world, since this indeed has a New Testament basis; instead it is his understanding of God as immanental in history rather than transcendent over history, his view that all humankind is already justified by God irrespective of faith, his monism of grace, which includes all world religions in redemptive history, and his reinterpretation of mission as political and social liberation rather than the call to a faith commitment to Jesus Christ.

Briefly Noted

Sherwood Wirt, well-known journalist and former editor of Decision magazine, shares his tips about the journalism trade in Getting Into Print (Nelson. 132 pp., $2.95 pb). Included with the basic principles are an interview with C. S. Lewis and a discussion of the Christian journalist’s role.

Work consumes 40 per cent of a person’s waking hours, and all too often it becomes either a tyrant or a source of frustration. Mary and Jerry White attack these and other problems in Your Job—Survival or Satisfaction? (Zondervan, 191 pp., $6.95). Their purpose: to provide principles and practical applications that enable a Christian to put his job into perspective.

Will D. Campbell is known as a Southerner, preacher, civil rights activist, and father-advisor to people as diverse as Andrew Young and the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. Brother to a Dragonfly (Seabury, 268 pp., $9.95) is the story of Campbell’s relationship with his older brother, a relationship that ended with the brother’s suicide. The book reveals far more than two people’s lives, however. It is a portrait of the enigmatic deep South during the Depression and its painful awakening with the civil rights movement.

An update of a previous work. Counseling the hom*osexual by John R. Cavanaugh (Our Sunday Visitor, 352 pp., $14.95) is written by a medical doctor for professionals. Most of the material is background information on hom*osexuality with only a short section on counseling techniques. Theologically, the perspective is conservative Catholic.

Bible students with a special interest in archaeology will welcome A Preliminary Near East Periodical Index compiled by John Elliott. All of the articles in five major scholarly journals are indexed not only by author but by one or more categories such as location, book of the Bible, or particular ancient language. A much larger index is in the works, but meantime this one is available for $5 from Samuel Schultz, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL 60187.

A beautiful volume of poetry and art has been published by Grossmont Press (7071 Convoy Ct., San Diego CA 92111). A Part of Me ($39.95) contains reproductions of fifty of Betty McClellan’s original oil paintings, which are detachable for framing, and each is accompanied by a poem.

hom*osexuality and the Christian Faith, edited by Harold Twiss (Judson, 110 pp., $3.95 pb), is a collection of nine previously published articles from widely varied viewpoints. It explains what Christians are thinking on the subject.

Bombarded by the sophisticated use of media and creative teaching methods in the public schools, children are no longer content to endure boring Sunday school classes. As in the public schools, interest has to be earned. Several recent books give practical advice to help Sunday school teachers of younger students enliven their teaching. Spicing up a story by combining quickly drawn scenes with a narrative is the subject of Sketching and Telling Stories to Children (Zondervan, 57 pp., $2.95 pb) by Keith Thompson. Easy-to-follow instructions are given, followed by eighteen stories complete with suggested illustrations and techniques. For the teacher who absolutely cannot draw, Augsburg has a solution. In three large page paperbacks Help, I Can’t Draw! ($2.95 each), Sheila Pigrem provides hundreds of people, buildings, backgrounds, and animals to trace. These figures can then be colored and used to create illustrations, friezes, collages, or flannelgraph figures. Puppetry also pleases children. Give Puppets a Hand (Baker, 104 pp., $4.95 pb) by Violet Whittaker contains thorough directions for creating puppets along with a wide variety of scripts. Practical Puppet Plays (Gospel Publishing House, 61 pp., $2.50 pb) by Irvy Gilbertson is limited to seventeen puppet scripts classified according to age. For an all purpose book on classroom extras, see Teaching Tools You Can Make (Victor, 110 pp., $3.95 pb) by Lee Green. This book is especially appealing because of its wide range of suggestions and its emphasis on recycling throwaway items for creative teaching aids.

Christians have long argued that education is not complete without a study of religion, because of its impact on history, literature, and language. The Supreme Court has finally agreed, and the doors for including religion in public school curricula are now opening. Teaching About Religion in Public Schools (Argus, 258 pp., $3.95 pb) edited by Nicholas Piediscalzi and William Collie is designed to help teachers take advantage of this opportunity by showing how religion can be included. Written by experts, the book deals with both elementary and secondary age levels and subjects, and it often includes example lesson plans.

This book, which in my opinion is Moltmann’s best, can be recommended on the basis that it contains challenging and creative insights that can be used by the discriminating reader in the service of church renewal. I have difficulty with Moltmann’s views on eschatology and with his depiction of the true church, particularly where charism is emphasized to the detriment of structure; yet what he says about apostolicity, holiness, and suffering as marks of the church has much biblical support and can be helpful in the Protestant-Catholic dialogue. His understanding of spirituality as signifying not just the inner life of devotion and prayer but the whole of life under the guidance of the Holy Spirit has biblical foundation and ecumenical promise. Moltmann represents the theology of liberation at its best, and those who wish to know more about this theology would do well to study this creative and searching theologian who stands, even if somewhat tenuously, in the Reformed tradition.

A Call For Imagination

Theopoetic: Theology and Religious Imagination, by Amos Niven Wilder (Fortress, 1976, 106 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Robert K. Johnston, assistant professor of religion, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Amos Wilder, now retired from Harvard Divinity School and a former president of the Society of Biblical Literature, is one of the pioneers in the field of religion and literature. He has continued his distinguished career in writing with this small, provocative book on the relationship of the human imagination and divine grace. He has sought to be faithful to the demands both of the aesthetic enterprise and of the biblical narratives. The book is more suggestive than concrete; its semiaphoristic style encourages the redder to pause and imaginatively reflect on its pages.

Wilder believes that it is only “on the level of the imagination that any full engagement with life takes place.” Thus, to the theological task in the church must be added the theopoetic. There would be “a suffocation of the human heart were it restricted to logic.” A contemporary theopoetic will be preliminary to theology, providing it its ruling metaphors and idioms. Before the message there must be a vision; theology needs the religious imagination as its resource. Rooted in the experience of man’s full creaturehood—in creation—and deepened by interaction with the biblical drama, the theopoetic vision remains prerational, providing faith room to breathe and theology a richer agenda.

A claim for theopoetics is not a denial of the theological task, nor a plea for an arbitrary mysticism, nor, again, a claim that imagery and ritual are superior to love and action. Instead, the theopoetic should function to revitalize traditional theology, deepen contemporary spiritualism, and strengthen Christian action by giving each of them a truer vision and a more meaningful celebration. A plea for the theopoetic is not, for Wilder, a call for the symbolic or imaginative in any guise; it is not a baptism of aestheticism. Rather the theopoetic is a call for a mature imagination, one which has an antecedent discipline and a resultant human value.

Unfortunately, too much of contemporary religious imagery and symbolism has become stereotypical, and thus unable to work its charm. The theopoetic is absent. The church, therefore, needs to let its wider culture teach it new spiritual sensibilities and images from the full human repertoire of experience. This is made difficult, however, for there are many competing claims for spiritual insight in modern culture. How do we judge possible momentary theophanies? Although the Christian must be open to the Spirit of creation in all contemporary experiences, he must also be cautious of modern spiritual expressions, testing them by the biblical narrative. Wilder believes that, according to this criterion, people are in error who support the new polytheism, theologies of play, and theologies of “parable.” For each would deny the religious imagination its total vision of man.

A theopoetic can renew biblical faith by revitalizing our reason and enriching our action. Here is its internal function. A theopoetic can also help deepen and/or challenge the mystical expressions of contemporary culture by providing a maturation of vision, enriched by interaction with the biblical witness. Here is its external function.

Wilder’s book shies away from the programmatic; it is itself a vision, which needs fleshing out. How one effectively correlates our new “spiritual” illuminations from society, for example, with the older biblical traditions, without silencing the one or truncating the other, is not always clear. But as a stimulus for thought, the book is an important contribution to the Christian community.

Evangelicals in particular need to hear Wilder’s challenge. We have too often undervalued the aesthetic (the “Refiner’s Fire” of this magazine being a notable exception). Wilder makes the intriguing suggestion that the theme of theology (the glory of God) needs a theopoetic even more than it needs a theology. Worship and adoration through dynamic speech and dramatic image is the first order of business for the Christian; critical reflection, though necessary, remains second.

Did Solomon Really Mean That?

Solomon on Sex, by Joseph C. Dillow (Nelson, 1977, 197pp., $6.95), is reviewed by Donald L. Norbie, Bible teacher, Greeley, Colorado.

There is a spate of Christian books on the market today dealing with sex. This is to be expected. The church is constantly reacting to its culture, and Western culture today is sensual and sex-obsessed. So, Christian writers are vigorously stating that sex is beautiful; God made it; let’s enjoy it.

Joseph Dillow has had many years of experience as a marriage counselor, and he is completing doctoral studies at Dallas seminary. He uses the Song of Solomon as a setting for instruction concerning marriage, especially the sex act. He does not accept the allegorical interpretation of the book. Many Jewish rabbis taught that the book depicted Jehovah’s love for Israel. And many Christian teachers have seen in it an allegory of Christ and the church. In their attempt to spiritualize the language interesting views have been advanced, such as that the bride’s breasts typify the Old and New Testaments.

Dillow takes the language literally: “We want to remove these metaphysical mists and take a clear look at God’s guidelines for sex, love and marriage.” He views the book as the intimate diary of the sensual love of Solomon and Shulamith, a country maid who captured Solomon’s heart.

Each chapter covers a section of the Song. First the setting is given. Then the text is discussed, with special attention paid to the various sensual terms. The chapter concludes with comments and practical application to present-day marriage difficulties.

Like Tim LaHaye in The Act of Marriage Dillow is deeply concerned for the physical fulfillment of marriage. This important part of marriage has often been neglected. Many couples will get practical help for their sexual lives from books such as LaHaye’s or Dillow’s.

In years past Christians may have been too prudish and inhibited sexually; now there may be a danger in following the world in its obsession with sex. The chief end of man is not an org*sm. Dillow seems to read into some of the expressions in the Song of Solomon more explicit sexual references than are intended. A general romantic expression becomes for him a specific sexual description. He states that “The female genitals are referred to in 5:1 as a ‘garden’ and in 4:13 as ‘shoots.’ ”

On chapter 2:3 he says, “it is possible that here we have a faint and delicate reference to an oral genital caress.” A remark like this is exegetically unwarranted. Concerning “a garden locked is my sister” (4:11) he states that “the garden refers to her vagin*.” Beautiful poetic descriptions of the person as a whole are seen as describing her sexual organs. Apparently Solomon was writing a sex manual rather than a romantic poem. As an exegesis of the Song of Solomon this book could do better. Perhaps it should be entitled “Dillow on Sex.”

Periodicals

One of the best ways to keep up with theological scholarship is to join Theological Students Fellowship, a division of Inter-Varsity. One does not have to be in college or seminary. The key benefits are a joint subscription to the thrice-yearly international journal, Themelios (the Greek word for foundation), which we have often commended for its articles and reviews, and to a new periodical, TSF News and Reviews, which is to appear three or four times a year and is edited by several North American scholars. It has some news, but contains mostly reviews and bibliographical articles together with forms for ordering selected scholarly books and articles at reduced prices. To join/subscribe for a year send $5 to TSF, 233 Langdon St., Madison, WI 53703.

The last couple I married was relaxed and actually enjoyed the wedding ceremony. Traditionally, most couples are nervous. I’ve had some grooms so nervous that they forgot when it was time to kiss the bride. And I’ll never forget the bride who was so wrought up that she sobbed all the way down the aisle. What makes the difference? Is it possible to help each bride and groom that a minister marries enjoy their ceremony and look back on it as one of the most pleasant experiences of their lives? Except for a few chronically nervous people, I believe that the wedding rehearsal is the key to a smooth wedding.

The pastor must set the example. If the rehearsal is another inconvenient night out, the couple will sense his annoyance. If it is a hassle for him, it will be the same for the couple. If it is a joke to the minister, it will be insignificant to the bride and groom. The pastor should display several characteristics: happiness, respect, organization, authority, seriousness, and above all, a deep Christian love. If the pastor is happy himself, the rehearsal will be a joyful time for everyone. A little lightness will go a long way to help the young couple relax. But what if the pastor is ill-at-ease? Perhaps he does not know the couple or thinks that they are not suited for one another. That problem can be solved if the pastor has a strict premarital counseling policy. I ask a couple to spend six one-hour sessions in premarital counseling. I will not give my final consent to marry the couple until the third or fourth session. My experience has been that when this is done, couples with problems will at least have a foundation for solving them. Many problems a couple faces can be detected by premarital surveys. Through premarital counseling, I have found that when the evening of the rehearsal comes, not only is the couple satisfied that they are ready to cope with all the changes in their lives, but also I am happy to have a part in this exciting event.

The pastor should also display respect for the couple, their parents, and all the wedding participants. When their job is well done, they deserve thanks. Harsh words should not be spoken to those having a hard time remembering what to do.

This is especially true if children are involved. Talking with them, or holding their hands while showing them what to do can show respect and love. It will help remove their fear and shyness to know they have a friend on the platform.

Respect is also shown in the preparation the pastor has done for the rehearsal. Proper preparation will make a smooth rehearsal. The pastor must be in charge of the rehearsal, even if there is a wedding hostess. The pastor will have spent considerable time discussing the ceremony with the couple; he knows their minds and desires. He should also have a schedule for the rehearsal. I have found a three-step rehearsal to be most effective.

First step: Start on time. Ask all the participants to sit down. After prayer, I give each person a name tag. I often don’t know several of the bridal party, and this helps me to know them and to get their assignments straight. I explain the procedure of the rehearsal, and then say that the wedding belongs to the bride and groom and that they have told me what they want. Then I explain that since we have already decided on what is to happen, only major suggestions should be discussed. This keeps in-laws from repeatedly interrupting the proceedings. With the participants still seated, I then go through the entire ceremony, giving each person detailed instructions.

Second step: the rehearsal. Everyone, including parents, go through the motions. I don’t repeat the prayers and vows though it is wise to go over the vows with the couple privately. I make notes of minor needed adjustments. There are few pauses in the walk-through part of the rehearsal. If the talk-through was thorough, the walk-through will be smooth.

Third step: Have everyone sit down again. I review the noted adjustments and answer any questions. Then I express my commitment to the bride and groom for their wedding day, which is the most important part of the rehearsal. It is their day, and I am to minister to them or for them in any way possible. A wedding cannot be just another service where I get my $25 and leave.

I want the bride and groom to know that God is interested in their marriage, and that I, as God’s representative, stand ready to serve them on that day. I also ask the wedding participants to make the same commitment. When we have assured the bride and groom of this, they may leave the rehearsal not ragged, but refreshed by the support they enjoy for this special day.—PETER TORRY, pastor, Faith Missionary Church, Pomona, California.