Eutychus and His Kin: July 22, 1966

A layman with a fetish

Unripe Instincts

It is about time that more people know that Red Oak, Iowa, is a pretty important stop on the Burlington. All the big Zephyrs stop and go either east or west—the California Zephyr, the Denver Zephyr (one of the best trains in the world), and the Ak-Sar-Ben (which is Nebraska spelled backwards). So Red Oak is a good place to be if you want to go east or west.

Waiting for the California Zephyr a couple of months ago, I had a chance to watch the other customers. I never saw a happier group than some people, somewhere around forty-five to fifty years of age, who were seeing one of their gang off to the west. The only sour note was a high school girl belonging to one of the couples, who stood around with a bored and haughty mien.

So why was she bored? Well, there wasn’t much to people taking a trip on a grand train to the west, though the old folks were putting on a pretty giddy display. There she stood, with the last word in shoes and slacks, and on top an athletic jacket too big for her. This I presume was her status symbol, the jacket of some high school hero. In addition to a chenille letter, chenille stripes on the sleeve, a chenille name on the back (I want to look into this chenille business—it looks like a good one), and all kinds of awards pinned on and around the varsity letter, she wore a gold football on a chain around her neck. But with all this she was bored. One wonders why.

About two weeks ago I gave the baccalaureate address at a state university, and I had a chance to talk for a while with the president before we were put through our paces. We were commenting on how high school students are all “used up” before they get to college. There isn’t much left to do in college any more. It has all been done—bands, big-name orchestras at the proms, pep clubs, caps and gowns—the whole bit. And I have seen pictures of kindergarten groups graduated in caps and gowns.

Socially ambitious parents and selfish children demand everything, and right now. “The trouble with American youth,” said a very wise man, “is the overindulgence of unripe instincts.”

EUTYCHUS II

Fetishes And Quirks

Re “Clergymen I Have Known,” by Lance Zavitz (June 24 issue): Then there are laymen who have the fetish which assails fetishes of the cloth, but who do not, on the other hand, offer one sentence (in a page and three-quarters, for example) that explains the goal behind national discussion of these quirks.

CLEMENT WM. K. LEE

Detroit, Mich.

In my mailbox today were the June 24 issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, and the June 20 issue of the National Observer. I found articles in both to be relevant.…

In Lance Zavitz’s article I read: “One of the more recent fetish words is ‘relevance,’ which means ‘bearing upon or applying to the case in hand.’ It is something of a shock to hear a preacher question whether Christ’s teaching is relevant to world conditions today and then reply in the negative, while declaring in the same sermon that Christianity should permeate every area of Christian experience.”

The National Observer article on “What’s Buggin’ the Campus” says: “One criterion of a good education, strongly urged by a vocal and committed group of students is relevance … relevance to the world of modern politics and social ferment, relevance to the human condition in mass society, relevance to the doubts, fears and hopes of thoughtful youth.”

Three episodes are then quoted for relevance in this context. The first tells of a “tall quiet undergraduate at a big Midwestern university”—“his voice was tight, but his words were clear.” “Why do you guys keep badgering us about what we do in the South or on the picket lines? It’s a little more exciting, but it’s not very different from what we’re doing when we work in mental hospitals or tutor Negro kids. That’s where we really learn what kind of world we’re really living in, and how to get along in it. We don’t in your blank blank classrooms.”

I respectfully suggest that we might well consider the relevance of the campus article by simply substituting “churches” for “classrooms.” Personally, I fear that in many churches, including the one I serve, the worshipers don’t get what is relevant to the kind of world they are really living in. For example, what goes on in their minds, if anything, when they hear God addressed as “our Heavenly Father”?

W. FRED WILLS

Simi Valley Presbyterian Church

Santa Susana, Calif.

Spiritual Values In Psychology

No one could intelligently take issue with the premise of Richard Cox (“Pseudo-Psychology in the Church,” June 24 issue) that evangelicals should seek to determine the highest academic and professional qualifications of psychologists with whom they associate and invite into their church meetings. On the other hand, taking offerings at counseling seminars, writing letters to persons with problems, conducting one-day seminars in counseling, and recommending one’s own books to individuals with emotional needs seems far less incriminating than Dr. Cox’s significant silence regarding the spiritual qualifications of the professional psychologist. Perhaps he places this consideration below academic training and affiliation in the professional organizations.…

Of course we should always seek professionally competent psychologists. But Dr. Cox’s impressive neglect of the importance of spiritual values in the profession of psychology, and his further suggestion that Christians who are psychologists should place themselves under the regulatory jurisdiction of professional associations which obviously know nothing about the very heart and essence of that spiritual dimension which alone forms the basis of the Christian counselor’s ministry, is unthinkable.…

MARK ALLEN

Wilmington, Del.

Having a very personal interest in the Covenant Counseling Center, may I say “thank you” for “Pseudo-Psychology in the Church.”

MARY LYONS

West New York, N. J.

Permission Granted

The article “One Race, One Gospel, One Task” which appears in the April 29 issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, is such a stimulating message that we would like to have permission to reprint this article for a tract to be distributed free, for our church work in evangelism.

G. H. J. THIBODEAUX

Dept. of Evangelism General Secretary

A. M. E. Church

Shreveport, La.

Campus, Church, And Gospel

May I wholeheartedly congratulate you for printing “The Campus and the Church,” by Bob Auler (June 10 issue).…

College students are searching for the Truth. God’s Word has this Truth, and it is up to God’s messengers to see that the seekers find this Truth.…

BILL PHILLIPS

Assoc. Pastor

Chestnut Street Baptist

Ellensburg, Wash.

Southern Perspective

Many of us in the South are appalled by your attempted exoneration of James Meredith and his march on Jackson. How can you be possibly taken in by this cheap publicity stunt (as was also 1965’s notorious march on Montgomery)?…

Mississippi Negroes, who love the South as their homeland, will have nothing to do with this low-down riff-raff (white and colored) who invade the Southland with their cries of revolution.… Only an ostrich would deny that this philosophy is not Communistic.…

And all Southerners deeply resent your scurrilous reference to “the displaying of the Confederate flag in the South.” You owe an apology to those thousands of heroes who sincerely and honestly died for the lost cause of the Confederacy a hundred years ago!

JOHN H. KNIGHT

First Presbyterian

Opelika, Ala.

No Justification?

The review of my latest book, A New Approach to Sex (June 10 issue), contains a statement the reviewer had no justification for making: that my “theology is essentially non-Christian.”

I utterly deny that allegation. No one could be more firmly convinced than I that the life of Jesus is the most important event since the creation of the universe.…

WILLIAM FAY LUDER

Dept. of Chemistry

Northeastern University

Boston, Mass.

• The protest seems strange in the light of the following quotations from A New Approach to Sex:

Christians must admit that we cannot know any more of God than we can learn from Jesus. If they do this they can throw away irrelevant theology and pious phraseology (including some of Paul’s ideas) and return to the teaching of Jesus.…

God does not want to be worshiped. If we cannot understand what we see of the universe, can human beings—in this life at least—expect to know God? Why should we waste time on a theology of the unknowable?

We cannot know God. To claim that we can is the self-righteousness of the Pharisees.

The time has come for followers of Jesus to present him to the world as the scientist he was.—ED.

Reaching The Urban Millions

Let me congratulate CHRISTIANITY TODAY on an excellent issue (June 10) dealing effectively with a lot of practical problems of applying the Gospel to the life of the inner city.

Churches might do well to call a moratorium on a lot of things currently on the agenda and concentrate on the reaching of the urban millions in America. In the wisdom of God there must be some way.

ADIEL J. MONCRIEF

Church Editor

The Tampa Tribune

Tampa, Fla.

The Prophet Made His Point

Thank you for printing the article “Is There a Prophet in the Land?” (June 24 issue). In pointing out that the Church is failing in its prophetic mission, John Thompson has touched a sensitive spot, and his accusing finger is pointed so directly that all clergymen who read the article will surely feel uncomfortable. We need more writing like this to shake us loose from our complacency and lethargy, and to help point us back in the direction of our true mission as clergymen.

RICHARD GOINS

First Christian Church

Oskaloosa, Iowa

May I suggest humbly to the author that if his article is to take on the relevance that he asks for in the pulpit, his “applied Christianity” be taken to a local pastorate.

As a boy, I used to attend a small Baptist church in Maine. Every Sunday night they would sing this chorus, “Lord, Send a Revival, and Let It Begin in Me.” This is my word to the John Thompsons, the Peter Bergers, and the Gibson Winters: “The fields (the local pastorates) are white unto harvest” for the type of preaching that these men advocate.…

To all who would be reformers, and heaven knows we need them, I would say, “Lord, send a revival, and let it begin in me.” The fields are white unto harvest.

RICHARD D. ELDRIDGE

Pompey United Church

Pompey, N.Y.

Send It To The Bishop

I can’t tell you how I thank our Lord for a conservative publication such as CHRISTIANITY TODAY.… Bruce Metzger’s essay, “The Meaning of Christ’s Ascension,” (May 27 issue) was the best I’ve ever read on the subject of the Ascension. Please have a copy sent to Bishop Robinson (Honest to God) in England, whose mind is so limited by space and time that he can’t see beyond the existential.…

LONNIE KRAGEL

Hampton, Iowa

The True Teaching On Baptism

Re Dr. Daane’s Review of G. R. Beasley-Murray’s Baptism Today and Tomorrow (June 10 issue): Whatever values Beasley-Murray finds in infant baptism and regardless of Daane’s prejudices in favor of pedo-baptism, it is quite apparent that the conclusions of neither on this facet of baptism are biblical!…

Beasley-Murray’s belief that “all the chief Christian doctrines are involved in the theology of baptism” is a biblical conclusion borne out by Romans 6 among other texts. If evangelicals could get back behind “hereditary total depravity” on the one hand and “faith only” on the other and receive the Scriptures without Reformation presuppositions, then evangelicals could find a basis for oneness that has so far eluded the ecumenists.

Baptism, as taught by Paul, Peter, and Jesus himself, is neither “water salvation” nor “salvation by works” but rather the believer’s response in faith to God’s grace (1 Peter 3:21) and the point at which the believer identifies with, receives the benefits of, and unites in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ (Romans 6:1–14), following which the Holy Spirit of God is imparted (Acts 2:38) and the new life is begun (John 3:1–15, Romans 6:4).…

CHARLES A. SHELTON

The Church of Christ

Campbell, Calif.

A Soldier Speaks

Re your editorial “The Church and the Viet Nam-Bound Soldier” (May 13 issue): To say the least, I believe that this article borders on a shocking truth, that the Church is guilty of indifference to the military man.…

The article stated that the soldier wanted to “know whether the Church regards this service as worthwhile.” Unfortunately, I do not believe that the Church can honestly answer that question. That the Church cannot answer that question is largely due to its obsolete concepts of the role of the fighting man and the importance and worth of his military career. The Church has outdated concepts that the military man is essentially corrupt and that a Christian cannot exist within the realms of military life without succumbing to its evils. Thus it is my opinion that the Church, though it superficially sympathizes with the soldier, cannot honestly, as a whole, sense his needs and longing desires for love and fellowship.…

RICHARD G. GARTRELL, Lt. jg.

U.S.S. Providence

San Francisco, Calif.

More On The Institute

Your suggestion for the establishment of an Institute for Advanced Christian Studies (May 13 issue) is most timely.

The great change which I noticed in the university world after coming back from Australia was the presence of great numbers of evangelical faculty members. It is still my feeling that the greatest single untapped source of manpower for the evangelical cause lies here.…

CHARLES TROUTMAN

Wheaton, Ill.

It’s a great idea. Here is my dollar and a quarter since we’re a little deflated in Canada just now.

K. E. HALL

Ottawa, Ontario

I am prompted to add my dollar.… I am a teacher in Denver public schools.

OSSIE JANE OZBIRN

Denver, Colo.

Here’s my dollar for the institute.…

LARRY WATKINS

Hays, Kan.

You are to be commended for pointing up two things in recent articles and editorials: the carefully cultivated illusion of far too many professionals in religious circles that evangelical Christianity is merely a reactionary nostalgia for frontier Christianity and the mistaken belief that it is to be reckoned with only in terms of some kind of theological therapy or re-education of those so afflicted.…

You are also to be commended for noting that evangelicals ought to bolster their intellectual status.…

Perhaps … your proposal for an Institute of Advanced Christian Studies should be seriously considered and implemented under adequate leadership as soon as possible. Nothing could be more advantageous to evangelicalism now than a genuine strengthening of its intellectual status.

Here’s my dollar!

MILTON D. HUNNEX

Dept. of Philosophy

Willamette University

Salem, Ore.

I am … sending you a check for $5.00, this being $1.00 for each member of our family plus an extra one for good measure.…

ELBERT H. HADLEY

Carbondale, Ill.

Enclosed please find two dollars from myself and my wife.…

CHRISTIANITY TODAY continues to be my window on the evangelical world, from which I am able to gain satisfying perspectives in the midst of seeming contradictions, cross-currents, and eddies.

RAYMOND P. JOSEPH

Reformed Presbyterian

Greeley, Colo.

Want to add our bit to your institute fund!

ORVILLE S. WALTERS

Director of Health Services

University of Illinois

Urbana, Ill.

Enclosed you will find two dollars, for my wife and myself.… I trust that the Lord will bless this venture of faith.

Should your plans materialize, be sure that we will be regular contributors.

R. HOWARD MCCUEN JR.

Webster Presbyterian