A dispute over evangelism is leaving theological scars on the Protestant and Orthodox Center now under construction at the New York World’s Fair grounds. Two key officials have already resigned. At least one exhibitor may seek a contract cancellation. And a protesting church in the Bronx threatened to withdraw from the sponsoring agency, the Protestant Council of the City of New York.
They are objecting to a film now being produced for showing at the center when the fair opens next April 22. The film, a pantomime, depicts Christ in the role of a donkey-riding circus clown who dies suspended from a tent pole.
First to resign was Emilio B. Knechtle, Swiss-born layman who served for two years as board chairman of the Protestant Council and more recently was chief fund-raiser for the fair project. Next to leave was program director J. Marshall Miller, for many years a professor at Columbia University’s School of Architecture. Both charge that the film smacks of sacrilege.
Ironically enough, a film featuring similarly sophisticated imagery caused a row at the Protestant Pavilion of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair. The film was edited to accommodate those who objected. At that time, Miller, a Baptist layman, was taking up his duties for the New York fair and vowed to work for a more positive evangelical witness.
“While we did not succeed in achieving the goal we had visualized,” he says, “it was perhaps better to have tried and failed than not to have tried at all.”
Miller and Knechtle declare that the attempt to present an evangelical posture failed because the Protestant Council’s steering committee is predominantly liberal in its theological outlook.
The Rev. Dan M. Potter, executive director of the Protestant Council, denied that the dispute was along conservative-liberal lines. He said it was a case of traditional preaching methods, which purportedly fail to attract the unchurched, versus the use of modern art forms. He declared that in the council’s democratic voting process the modern art approach won out.
Potter recalled that the council lost some liberal support when it chose to support Billy Graham’s 1957 evangelistic crusade in New York.
The controversial film, with a projected running time of only fifteen minutes, is one of a number to be shown at the center. The others, according to Potter, will be traditional types produced by the denominational exhibitors.
Another sore spot in the theater program is the steering committee’s reported decision not to use Todd-AO despite Miller’s contention that the center “will have the finest theater in the world for the use of Todd-AO films.”
Visitors to the center will find, in addition to the theater and displays, a chapel, a bookstore, a children’s center, and a “music garden.”
Evangelical representation elsewhere at the fair will include pavilions sponsored by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the Moody Institute of Science, and Wycliffe Bible Translators.
Some evangelical observers are discouraged over the adamant attitude of would-be liberals in insisting upon approaches which lack consent of those who contributed support on the basis of a wider appeal. The film disputes in Seattle and New York will dampen prospects for evangelical participation in future Protestant fair efforts. Most likely upshot will be the creation of an Evangelical Center at the next world exhibition—slated for Southern California.
Potter, a Presbyterian minister, said that the film now being produced is designed to appeal to a broad spectrum of the unchurched. The circus setting, for instance, is supposed to capture a child’s fancy while the subtle symbolism is intended to communicate the Gospel to the intellectual.
The film writer, Chicago artist Rolf Forsberg, borrows his motif from the French artist Georges Rouault (1871–1958), a Roman Catholic known for his paintings of clowns as well as his paintings of Christ. Forsberg says the connection is aesthetic, not literal. He describes the film as expressionistic rather than theological: “It doesn’t define, but it expresses.”
To Knechtle, the allegorical image is wrong. Moreover, the evangelistic message is missing. Knechtle, young and aggressive, would like to have seen a direct appeal for conversion, one not unlike the message he heard from a Methodist missionary in the Dominican Republic ten years ago which led to his own spiritual commitment (he is now with a country day school in New Canaan, Connecticut). He also objects to the film’s implication that Christ was hated and killed because of good deeds rather than because he claimed to be God.
Miller dislikes the approach despite his own artist’s eye. A long-time member of Calvary Baptist Church in Manhattan, he is now a real estate developer. His pet project is a vastly complex plan for “Lake Europa” as a cultural and commercial capital for the Common Market countries.
“As the issue sharpened concerning the type of witness,” Miller says, “we realized that the liberal majority of the steering committee for the center were not greatly interested in what we felt was the threefold objective for the center—to glorify God, to spread the Gospel, and to try to win souls to Christ. It appears that these leaders prefer sophisticated confusion to an evangelical witness.”
Miller has been especially careful to avoid bitterness. While espousing his own convictions without compromise, he nonetheless retained a gentlemanly spirit, expressing continued sympathy with the overall fair project. He emphasized that a number of evangelically oriented groups are exhibitors in the center and that their presence may help to offset the adverse effect he expects from the film. Several days after the Protestant Council rejected his plea for a revised approach and accepted his resignation, the council reported receiving a personal gift of $300 from Miller.
An Octogenarian’S Lament
“The last of the old-time evangelists” turned eighty on October 30, still going strong and having few kind words for the leader of a new generation.
Though the university he founded gave the younger evangelist an honorary degree once, Dr. Bob Jones now calls Billy Graham “the worst thing that ever happened to United States religion.”
Jones is currently preaching in various churches whose pastors are graduates of Bob Jones University. He elaborated on his views of Graham at a meeting in the First Independent Church of Wilmington, Delaware:
“He is destroying evangelism in this country.… His Los Angeles meetings were the greatest curse in the history of the city.”
Jones said he thinks Christ will return before the metropolis is able to recover.
Mennonite Foibles
For a year now, the talk of the Mennonite community has been a 239-page first novel by Rudy Henry Wiebe, Peace Shall Destroy Many. The book fell like a bomb among Mennonites, and many promptly decided the author had been too frank. Wiebe probably understates the impact of his novel when he says it was “a contributing factor” in his resignation four months ago as editor of the weekly Mennonite Brethren Herald in Winnipeg.
One thing seems certain: the book deserves a place on the sparse shelf of true Christian literature.
Illicit sex, hypocrisy, and prejudice apparently play a greater role in the lives of Mennonites than many of them like to think, and these are themes around which the talented Wiebe weaves his highly readable tale. As is any young writer, he was doubtless tempted to exploit the themes. Most literary critics will agree that he resisted the temptation.
Wiebe, now twenty-nine, was born on a farm in northern Saskatchewan shortly after his Mennonite parents had resettled there from Russia. The family moved to Alberta when he was twelve, and young Wiebe came under the influence of a high school teacher who encouraged him to try creative writing. Later, at the University of Alberta, he was taken in tow by an English professor, Dr. Frederick M. Falter, who guided him through the manuscript preparation of Peace Shall Destroy Many. Meanwhile, Wiebe was reading Faulkner, Graham Greene, and Frederick Grove, a Canadian writer. He found Faulkner overpowering, but he counts Greene and Grove as two writers who most influenced his own style. His education includes a graduate dip into theology at the University of TĂĽbingen.
Wiebe’s novel takes place in a Canadian Mennonite community during World War II while the young people are wrestling with traditional views on pacifism. No American publisher has yet chosen to reprint the book, but it is hardly more than a question of time. Once it wins attention, the story will probably end up on movie and television screens as well.
Some who protest the writer’s approach will find it difficult to believe, but Wiebe is still a dyed-in-the-wool Mennonite who embraces pacifism as strongly as ever. He now teaches English at Goshen (Indiana) College and is trying to get started on a second novel—with Mennonites.
England, Home, And Duty
Having spied in its midst the fourteenth incumbent of a historic Scottish earldom, the General Assembly invited him to address the fathers and brethren of the Church of Scotland. “Let us all take part in the great search to discover God and know God,” said the distinguished stranger, “and we may yet claim to be a God-fearing and a Christian country.”
Foreign secretary then, Lord Home last month became Britain’s prime minister. He is relinquishing his title (so that he can win election to the House of Commons) to assume leadership at a time when recent misfortunes make his party’s future very precarious.
Styled “an elegant anachronism” by the vitriolic tongue of Labor’s Harold Wilson. Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home was educated at Eton and Oxford, and married the daughter of noted Anglican dean C. A. Alington. “A most charming person and extremely kind,” reports Canon A. E. Swinton of the little Scottish Episcopal church (fifty-seven communicants) at Coldstream near the English border, where Lord Home is churchwarden and a regular attendant when residing at his ancestral seat.
Lady Home was in charge of the Mothers’ Union at the church until her husband’s appointment to the Foreign Office involved long stays in London. A few hours after he had been named prime minister-designate and was feverishly trying to form a cabinet against opposition from some of his colleagues, he took an hour out to attend morning worship at fashionable St. James’, Piccadilly.
“The politician,” he had told the General Assembly last May, “must resist the temptation to claim that every political act is approved by the angels. But in politics there must be leadership, and in the leadership of a Christian nation there should be an element of witness.”
J. D. DOUGLAS
Reprieve For Chaplains
The U. S. Air Force says it will no longer require its Protestant chaplains to use the controversial “Unified Curriculum” for Sunday schools (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY News, April 13, 1962, p. 31).
A revised regulation permits chaplains to choose their own Sunday school literature, thus removing the objection of many that the prescribed curriculum imposed an undesirable theological orientation. The curriculum is still “recommended,” but a standard thematic development is distinguished from course materials. The “official” designation of the old regulation has been dropped.
The Army and Navy had never made the use of the curriculum mandatory by regulation, as did the Air Force. Some chaplains, however, reported other types of pressure in behalf of the curriculum.
The new policy spells a victory for the National Association of Evangelicals, which has waged a campaign against the mandatory clause for more than two years. Floyd Robertson, executive secretary of NAE’s Commission on Chaplains, termed the changes “consistent with our American heritage of religious freedom.”
Sunday schools at military bases have long been plagued with a problem of continuity in study matter. The Unified Curriculum was introduced to meet difficulties created by frequent transfer of military personnel. Materials are selected in cooperation with the Protestant Church-Owned Publishers Association.
Sex And Sharks
“I imagine that historians will say of us that, since people did not believe in much, they made a pitiful attempt to exalt sex into a religion,” said the Church of England’s Bishop of Guildford, the Rt. Rev. George Reindorp. Among other British episcopal utterances on a similar theme was a declaration in a Sunday newspaper by Dr. F. D. Coggan, Archbishop of York, suggesting that a young man on marrying had a right to look for one who had not indulged in sexual intercourse. He quoted one young person who asked: “What decent boy or girl wants second-hand goods?” This was not regarded as a model of timely utterance by the editor of Prism, Anglican monthly, who wondered if British clergy should not keep quiet on sex for at least a year. Regarding the primate’s “second-hand goods” reference the editor commented: “There is a contempt implied in it, which surely no Christian must ever feel for a fellow human being.”
The subject cropped up again at the fall meeting of York Convocation when Dr. Coggan said in his presidential address: “The attitude of too many that it is bad for young John to be told that he must wait to satisfy his cravings, that if he is denied satisfaction he will be a psychological wreck—does this need to be offset by a reconsideration of such ancient words as self-control, chastity … and purity?”
Meanwhile, at the Convocation of Canterbury, Archbishop Michael Ramsey said the Anglican communion needed to have cohesion in its approaches to other churches. Was it right that in Canada and in the United States there should be entirely separate approaches to the Presbyterians without knowledge or cooperation across the frontier? Should Methodists in Britain be approached without cooperation with the church in Wales? On Anglican-Methodist union proposals the archbishop said: “The months which lie ahead are full of opportunity in the quest of Christian unity.… There will be the urgent study of the Report on Anglican-Methodist relations.… We must realize that if the decisions to be made by ourselves are hard, the decisions to be made by the Methodists are perhaps harder still.”
Both convocations agreed to revision of a canon so that women may become lay readers, despite a stirring rearguard action at Westminster by the Rt. Rev. Basil Guy, Bishop of Gloucester. The bishop pointed out that woman despised the assumption of headship so much that “to be known as one who wears the trousers is both painful and humiliating for her.”
The Archdeacon of Aston, the Ven. M. T. Dunlop, said he had sought for years to understand opposition to women as priests or lay readers. Apart from the usual prejudice, he had had to wait until Bishop Guy’s speech to hear another reason—and that speech was based on a fallacy. He said later: “We are in danger of overemphasizing this notion of the family in the current teaching of the Church. We have the Family Communion; we have Christian Family Year—I sometimes wonder if any bachelor or spinster has any more chance of salvation than an archdeacon.” The archdeacon went on to charge with blasphemy another speaker who, he suggested, had put forward the supposed “maleness” of God who was “neither male nor female, but spirit.”
Both convocations passed resolutions approving full communion with the Philippine Independent Church, the Spanish Reformed Episcopal Church, and the Lusitanian Church of Portugal. Commented the Dean of Chester: “One of the advantages will be that if you are shipwrecked off the Philippines and the sharks do not care whether or not you are members of the Synod of York you will be able to receive the ministrations of the very able local priests and receive Holy Unction from them if necessary.” No one was quite sure what all this meant, but the dean meant it kindly and everybody laughed.
J. D. DOUGLAS
Women In The Balance
Presbyterian church politicians in the South are keeping a sharp eye on otherwise routine presbytery meetings this fall as a proposal to ordain women comes to a vote. The Book of Church Order amendment now before the eighty presbyteries of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. would allow ordination of distaff deacons, elders, and ministers.
In the first month of balloting, with twenty-seven judicatories reporting, sixteen approved the change and eleven turned it down.
Veteran observers say the trend is thus far inconclusive. Many are comparing the votes on female clergy to the votes cast in 1955 on union with what was then the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Of the sixteen judicatories voting for women’s ordination, all except two voted for merger. And of the eleven voting against ordination, all except two voted against union. The merger proposal failed, with forty-two presbyteries supporting the measure and forty-three opposing it.
Another indicator was the early vote of the denomination’s largest presbytery, that of Atlanta, Georgia. It turned down the amendment for female clergy by a margin of one vote—84–83. “As Atlanta goes, so goes the assembly,” has long been a slogan of ecclesiastical vote watchers.
The issue may continue for several months. Some presbyteries do not plan a show of hands until next spring. If forty-one or more presbyteries approve the amendment it will be subject to enactment by the 1964 General Assembly. The denomination’s constitution requires that such changes be approved by one assembly, then by the presbyteries, and finally by a subsequent assembly. Rarely has an assembly failed to go along with a majority of the presbyteries.
Disapproval of the proposed change by forty or more presbyteries would defeat the issue, but not for long. The presbyteries killed a similar plan seven years ago, and proponents are expected to keep trying. Besides suggesting a scriptural basis, those in favor have also argued that women are more “progressive” and more anxious to extend ecumenical contacts. Opponents claim there is no authority in the Bible for women as “rulers” of the church.
ARTHUR MATTHEWS
Baptist Rapprochment
Baptist geographical lines came under the scrutiny of a self-appointed committee of eighty-five pastors and church members in Virginia Beach, Virginia, last month. The group, known as the Baptist Survey and Study Committee, seeks eventual merger of the American and Southern Baptist Conventions.
The committee passed a resolution urging their denominations to avoid competition in establishing and accepting churches for membership. An appeal was made to American and Southern Baptist home missions leaders to “begin between themselves a discussion of ways to work together in the missionary witness to North America.”
In their resolution, the Baptists said the two national conventions must “distinguish between necessary and unnecessary territorial expansion on the North American continent.” They defined “an acceptable form of expansion” as “the ministry to those who lack a Baptist witness,” and an unacceptable form that which “results from the beginning of competing churches in the same immediate area.”
The resolution, approved by conference participants with only one dissenting vote, will be presented to both conventions when they meet in their annual sessions in the spring of 1964.
The meeting was the committee’s second. The first was held a year ago and drew seventy-five participants. Committee chairman is the Rev. Howard R. Stewart of the First [American] Baptist Church in Dover, Delaware.
