Rna
Eutychus Associates had just finished setting up a task force on teaching machines and programmed learning when the whole thing was undercut by worms. Our research consultant who reads the newsmagazines now informs us that teaching machines have been up-staged by RNA. That’s where the worms come in.
RNA is ribonucleic acid, a chemical alleged to be in short supply among elder folks who forget where they put their glasses, but said to be abundant in educated flatworms. According to the article, injections of artificial RNA improved the memory of the oldsters. The worms enjoyed their RNA raw. Unconditioned flatworms were given a diet of other flatworms who had been trained to react to a flashing light. Eating this educated meat enabled them to learn the same trick twice as fast as worms who ate only the usual underprivileged fish bait.
If faulty memory makes you lose job opportunities, if you forget the boss’s name when you’re asking for a raise, if nobody loves you—then go out to the lab and eat worms. You may then thrill to a new skill, and cringe like a worm whenever a light is turned on.
Wait till the breakfast food people get this. We can expect brands like TOTAL RECALL and DOUBLECHECKS, perhaps even SHREDDED WORMS.
But suppose you want to be smarter than the average worm. Can digestible data be stored on tapeworms? Or must our diet include something a bit brighter? One scientist is credited with a flight of fancy. If memory is edible, he reasons, why waste all the knowledge a distinguished professor has accumulated at retirement age?
Should we assume that he is describing 1984, or joking? At any rate, absent-minded professors are safe. The Ph. D. may remain, but the RNA is exhausted.
Before you invest in RNA chemicals, stop to consider the market. For every researcher who wants to remember something, there must be ten who would rather forget something. For a happy birthday our culture chooses tranquilizers over memorizers ten to one.
Soon the magic pills of science will make us as adjustable as Alice in Wonderland: big or little, bright or dull—chemically conditioned. Yet somehow no one promises a chemical to give meaning to this flexible existence. For that a man must eat of the Bread from Heaven.
EUTYCHUS
Arrivederci, Barbarians
I imagine Charles Lowry, “Perspective on the Power Struggle” (May 11 issue), translated to Roman Christendom of the fifth century. As the barbarians over-run Europe, I hear him counsel …:
“There is an unprecedented struggle in our world between pagan barbarians and Christian Romans. The barbarians, in violation of religion and civilization, threaten to remake the world in an image of terror. We Romans are potentially much the stronger. Unfortunately, at the moment our leaders are not as pious as the commoners, religion is excluded from public life, and materialism and modernistic notions are corrupting the fabric of our common life.
“Only if we take our Christianity seriously can the tide be turned.… If we capture any barbarians we should be kind to them. If we meet any … on the street or in business, we should be civil and courteous. If we must kill them, we must do so with love.… Above all, we must match power with power. If necessary, we will fight with every weapon we have, and not only kill all of their warriors, but destroy their women and children and level their villages and camps. We should not even pause at having our own populace annihilated and our own civilization destroyed. As long as we think of our force as dedicated to God and truly controlled by love and justice, we have to use all possible force. Of course we do this as Christian citizens and not as Christian individuals.
“As Christian believers we are still idealistic—but again not so publicly that the barbarians might notice it. We are to go on praying and hoping … that we won’t have to use force or, that if we must, God and anybody left to judge will see … that we really only meant it with the very best of intentions. If the worst should befall us, we shall have destroyed barbarians and Romans in the service of law and order and to the glory of the Christian God.
“If we are intelligent, better Christians, and willing to sacrifice, these seeming contradictions may work out. In fact, the best thing might be to train Christian missionaries who will be able to show barbarian leaders that Christian Rome is really not so divided, impious, and materialistic as we know it to be. If they simply will not be convinced that way, then we are always ready to wipe out the whole lot of them just to prove our superior religion and way of life once and for all.”
NORMAN K. GOTTWALD
Professor of Old Testament
Andover Newton Theological School
Newton Centre, Mass.
Does Dr. Lowry actually dare to say that “authentic Christianity” has this glorious (!) witness—namely (p. 5), “far from declaring, in accordance with some theologians in their most recent pronouncements, that we will never initiate nuclear war in any form, that is just what under present circumstances we must be willing to do” (my italics)? Is this, Sir, the witness of Christianity? How does it differ from the sinister expediency of Khrushchev himself? How strangely it sounds on the lips of Jesus—whose followers I thought somehow we are. Even firebrand Reinhold Niebuhr is less militaristic than you on this!
BEN W. FUSON
Kansas Wesleyan University
Salina, Kan.
Dr. Lowry has only words of condemnation for communism chiefly because it does not believe in God or any hereafter. He criticizes communists because they wish to “build Heaven on earth.” That would not seem to be anything very heinous. Jesus had the same idea and “went about doing good” to accomplish just that, and spending much of his time healing people of their sicknesses. If Marx and Lenin had the deep desire to improve the condition of the mass of the people—as they did—and free them from their slavery under the rule of the capitalist, that surely should not be to their discredit, though we rightly abhor the many cruelties by which the Kremlin pursued its course in trying to seize all economic and political power and extirpate religion.…
GEORGE L. PAINE
Cambridge, Mass.
A Mailman’S Medley
I have received a goodly number of very interesting letters in connection with my recent article (“Ecumenical Merger and Missions,” Mar. 30 issue). Most of the mail was favorable and even those letters which raised questions were irenic in spirit and tone. Some arguments advanced in these letters are interesting indeed.
Several people argued that it was not fair to judge the missionary effort simply on the basis of the number of foreign missionaries and the increase or decrease of the field staff. It was in connection with this argument that one eminent Presbyterian indicated that the United Presbyterian Church is sending fewer missionaries but placing more emphasis upon financial support of national churches. It is interesting to observe that over a period of many years from 4 to 8 per cent of the total amount of money received by all of the churches in the Presbyterian Church was spent for foreign missions. Today slightly more than 3½ per cent of the total income is spent for foreign missions. This means that there has been a proportionate decline financially as well as in the number of missionaries.
Another Presbyterian suggested that in Latin America the idea “Yankee, go home” might be useful and that perhaps the national church would be served better if the missionaries in Latin America were to go home. I have no objection whatever to the redistribution of missionary forces. Some places where missionary strategy dictates that the missionaries should be removed, this could be done, but with a thousand tongues in which no portion of the Word of God has ever been translated there should be plenty of room for “displaced” missionaries to go and for hundreds of others who have not gone yet!
A key missionary expert from the United Church of Canada felt that since approximately one-half of the missionary work of the United Church was concentrated in China that it was unfair, in view of the cataclysm in China and the exodus of the missionaries, to assume that what I said was representative of the United Church. However, there were other churches who were equally committed in China, but who have not only recovered from the China debacle but have doubled, tripled and quadrupled their missionary forces. This is likewise true of some faith mission groups that are not denominationally oriented.
One of the most interesting comments came in a letter which expressed the writer’s unhappiness with the substantial rise of the faith missionaries and stated that this posed a threat to the ecumenical movement. Of this there can be no doubt. What the outcome will be, so far as the faith missionary impulse is related to the ecumenical movement, I do not know. And I suspect that no one else knows either. But that it will have a tremendous effect upon the ecumenical movement overseas admits of no doubt.
HAROLD LINDSELL
Vice-President
Fuller Seminary
Pasadena, Calif.
Air Power
Dr. Goppelt succeeds well in bursting Bultmann’s bubble (Apr. 27 issue). He also lets a quantity of air out of Barth’s balloon. But he doesn’t succeed too well in getting his own theological craft off the ground.…
E. ARNOLD SITZ
Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church
Tucson, Ariz.
Evaluation Of Evaluation
Walter R. Martin’s review of Herbert Bird’s Theology of Seventh-day Adventism (Mar. 2 issue) is, in my judgment, grossly unfair. Martin charges Bird with using “outdated quotations, particularly on the nature of Christ.” To be sure, Bird does use the “infamous Wilcox statement.” He mentions, however, in a footnote, that some Adventist leaders with whom he has worked “have not heard of its having been disqualified as denominational material, and have sought to defend it …” (p. 65). Bird further observes that he has not found this statement referred to in Questions on Doctrine, where one would expect the denomination officially to repudiate it. Other statements on the nature of Christ are drawn by Mr. Bird from Wm. Branson’s Drama of the Ages (written in 1950, and therefore hardly an “outdated source”) and from Questions on Doctrine, the most recent authoritative statement of SDA beliefs (1957). From the latter volume Bird even quotes a statement by Mrs. White, the inspired prophetess of the movement, to the effect that Christ “took upon His sinless nature our sinful nature” (p. 69); he clearly indicates the difficulties he has with the way the nature of Christ is described in this latest official volume of SDA teachings. It is therefore most unfair to assert that Mr. Bird, in discussing the nature of Christ, relies chiefly upon outdated quotations.
Mr. Martin’s objection to Bird’s statement that there can be regenerate people among the SDA’s as inconsistent with the charge of Galatianism overlooks the fact that even the Apostle Paul, who rebuked the Galatians for having begun to follow the errors of Galatianism, still addresses them as brethren (Gal. 1:11, 3:15, 5:13, etc.). It is one thing to attack the teachings of a group as unscriptural; it is quite another thing, however, to say that because of this fact there cannot be regenerate persons among them!
Mr. Martin accuses Bird of having ignored research work which tends to disprove his main thesis: viz., that SDA is a revival of the Galatian heresy. It is, to be sure, unfortunate that Mr. Bird makes no reference anywhere to Martin’s own recent work on the subject, The Truth About Seventh-day Adventism. However, Mr. Bird bases his charges on research of his own, done with primary sources. In the chapter dealing with SDA and salvation, Mr. Bird quotes from Froom, White, Branson (all SDA authors) and Questions on Doctrine. He fully recognizes that in Questions on Doctrine SDA’s affirm that they believe in salvation by grace alone, but his contention is that their teachings on the investigative judgment (with respect to which Martin admits that Bird has done a good job) are not consistent with that claim! For the main burden of the investigative judgment doctrine is that what really determines whether a man is saved is his obedience to the law and his unfailing confession of every single sin! Furthermore, Bird finds evidence for “Galatianism” in SDA teaching on the Sabbath Day (p. 113) and in their rules about the avoidance of certain types of food (p. 125). He culls their teachings about these last-named matters largely from Questions on Doctrine and from Arthur Lickey’s God Speaks to Modern Man, written in 1952, and therefore hardly to be considered an “outdated source.” (Incidentally, both Lickey’s book and Branson’s Drama of the Ages are found among the “Representative Adventist Literature” listed in the back pages of Questions on Doctrine.)
I conclude that Mr. Martin has not given us a fair evaluation of what I consider to be a competent treatment of SDA theology.
ANTHONY A. HOEKEMA
Dept. of Systematic Theology
Calvin Theological Seminary
Grand Rapids, Michigan
