Truth And Consequences
In her devastatingly truthful book Advice from a Failure, Jo Coudert quotes a psychologist’s remark that anyone who distorts no more than 90 per cent of the time is doing very well indeed. Naturally I greeted this with the right mixture of incredulity and detachment.
Then I rediscovered an old news clipping in which a foreign journalist recorded some impressions of the 1968 Republican convention. (The same scribe now declares obscurely that it prepared him for the present administration.) One sentence stands out in his description of the quick-changing alignments inseparable from such jamborees. Here it is: “Solemn oaths of deathless allegiance can be refuted swiftly, and the alien who jibes at it is found deficient in (I jotted down this remarkable phrase at the time) ‘a reasonable tolerance of honest lying.’ ” So, who wants his son to enter politics anyway?
More was to follow. Twice this week reports have come of yet another Middle East border raid in which each side claims to have inflicted heavy losses on the other, contrasted with its own negligible casualties. Since neither of the protagonists this time was sneaky enough to bring back a ton of concrete evidence in confirmation of a successful sortie, it seems reasonable to conclude that some reasonable lying is going on.
Well, everybody knows that in the war stakes, truth is a non-starter. It is a patriotic duty to mislead the enemy, and not to tell all to your own people either. So the honest youngster seeking a career, even if he doesn’t mind killing, must turn sorrowfully away from the armed services. The diplomatic corps likewise is out; no one has ever seriously challenged Sir Henry Wotton’s 366-year-old statement that “an ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” When you think that for similar reasons the CIA too is ruled out, the youthful job-seeker can be seen to be up against it.
The field narrows still more when you consider the number of professions in which a reasonable tolerance of honest lying would be a distinct advantage. The following list is not exhaustive: salesmen, personal secretaries, entertainers of all sorts, morticians, photographers, society hostesses, accountants, college presidents, fishermen, captains of cruise ships, professional gamblers, press agents, and pastors of large congregations with the customary quota of the quixotic and neurotic.
Pilate might have been on to a more meaningful question than we thought. Maybe Mrs. Coudert’s psychologist friend was right after all. And maybe a fallen world like this couldn’t take more than 10 per cent truth anyway.
EUTYCHUS IV
Truth, Beauty, And ‘Bravo!’
I cannot thank you enough for Dr. Wirt’s excellent article, “Moving Upon the Mass Media” (May 22). I began college as a journalism major, but I became discouraged as I took note of the direction the media were taking. I was also naïvely taken in by some Christians’ suggestions that I ought to forsake a career in journalism in order to do God’s work! I have since wandered aimlessly through three years of college, but I believe Dr. Wirt has once again shown me God’s calling.
GARY HILBERG
Whittier, Calif.
Well-written words are music to the ear. Congratulations to Sherwood Wirt, whose article stands with the best writing I have seen. It moves, it challenges, it comes to grips with 1970. And with his formula of blending the Renaissance Man with the Reformation Man, he creates a man for all times.
My students use the word beautiful when something really scores. “Moving Upon the Mass Media” was beautiful.
ROBERT L. WENDT
Chairman
Dept. of Economics-Sociology
Salem College
Winston-Salem, N. C.
To Dr. Wirt, bravo! Continue to scorch the typewriter ribbons with insight and wisdom.
OSCAR DAVIDSON
Somerset, Ky.
The Abortion Debate
Dr. R. F. R. Gardner’s article (May 22) detailing Britain’s mistake in legalizing abortion was a timely one. His position that the “Christian doctor must take refuge in the knowledge that he is seeking to do God’s will” in practicing abortions is difficult to understand, however. “The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,” sometimes called the “Didache,” expressly forbids abortions. This short manual of moral instruction and church order, which was in use by the early Church in the first century, states this commandment as follows: “… Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion nor kill them when born.”
CHARLES F. DELOACH
York, S. C.
It is my conclusion that the Bible says nothing about the problems of contraception and abortion. Yet the cultures around Israel were fully aware of effective abortive means. Full treatises were written on the topic. Since the biblical writers could not have been unaware of the practice of abortion among the surrounding nations, their silence would seem to suggest that they did not consider abortion wrong. If this be the case, our concern for biblical fidelity should lead us to support liberalized abortion laws. It took the evangelical church many years before contraception was accepted, even though Scripture says nothing about contraception; is abortion going to come in the back door through our silent acquiescence as contraception did, or are we going to develop a positive approach that will meet the issue head on?
C. E. CERLING, JR.
Iowa City, Iowa
As a new father I say … nuts to the negative-sounding pro-abortionists!
(The Rev.) GRAHAM A. D. SCOTT
Strasbourg-Neudorf, France
Our British medical qualifications are, I realize, strange to American readers, but in order to keep the record straight, I wonder if you could note that my medical qualifications were obtained from the appropriate Royal Colleges, not the universities as stated in your identification.
R. F. R. GARDNER
Sunderland, County Durham, England
Scholarly Evangelism
My highest compliments to you and your magazine for bringing to us the very timely and important essay by Donald G. Miller, “Toward a Theology of Evangelism” (May 22). I know of no more important issue in the Church today, and this essay was written with the high scholarship we have come to expect from Dr. Miller.
ALLEN WARD BEACH
The Seventh Presbyterian Church
Cincinnati, Ohio
I like the article—it holds much to ponder.… I am, however, a bit fearful of the comparison (or seemingly so) of Adolf Hitler with Wallace.…
Perhaps Wallace has his faults—sad to say, I have some and share with every son of Adam the old nature. But neither Wallace nor any of his followers, to my knowledge, has burned a draft card, burned or destroyed the American flag, burned a college, or destroyed an ROTC building. He and his kind have no guns or missiles pointed at our nation’s capital and are not organizing to overthrow our present form of government. Nor taking training in Cuba.
I am fearful that all men who work against Communism and revolution are being tagged a “Hitler”—and this may discourage many a good citizen to stand Barry M. Kelley would do well to reread the Gospels, this time without inserting all of his biases into them.
It seems to me that what the Church today does not need is the bland kind of Christianity Mr. Kelley promotes in his article.…
To use a term from those who “wear long hair as a symbol of non-conformity,” Mr. Kelley’s “inner happiness regardless of his environment” is a cop-out if I ever heard of one.
Let’s not throw in the towel yet.
(The Rev.) HAROLD W. RAST
Editor of Youth Materials
Board of Parish Education
The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod
St. Louis, Mo.
A Topless Church?
I note with interest two editorials in the May 8, 1970, issue: “Skirting An Issue” and “Worldliness According to James.” I agree that character is a matter of the inside, not the outside; however, the Bible does have some revealing things to say about modesty of dress as an expression of modesty of heart. If the Church continues to ignore the essential correlation between inward root and outward fruit, the shocking dilemma in which we shall find ourselves when Christian women start coming to church topless will leave little to the imagination.
J. W. JEPSON
Pleasant Valley Community Church
Grants Pass, Ore.
Of Clarity And Combinations
The report by Dan Orme on the seventh annual convention of the National Negro Evangelical Association (April 24) did cover the major facets of the convention, but the interpretation given … needs some clarification.
First of all, the establishment of black identity has from the first been a major focus of the association.… It would be more correct to say that at the 1970 convention it occupied center stage.…
So far as counter-emphasis on “militancy” is concerned, especially if it is viewed with reference to “moderate,” under the umbrella concept of the NNEA there is room for both. Black evangelicals, in common with black people all over America, must rely more and more on a survival kit that includes diverse tools. We therefore stress the idea of differing viewpoints, since reality is like that.… Our stated goal is to articulate a position to which all persons seeking truth can relate.…
A “decline in fellowship” is simply not the case.… When the NNEA originated, we as a group represented many backgrounds and felt the loneliness all blacks experience in a white world despite the rhetoric expressed to the contrary. We sought fellowship and a means of mutual refreshing.…
The NNEA recognized and articulated the fact of polarization long before many others, Christian and otherwise, and of necessity must be able to recognize it within its own ranks. We recognize it, face it, and determine to resolve it. We are not a closed fellowship.… Though black, we are not antiwhite.
As for the assessment of Mr. Salley … he related, in his own way, as must all of us, to facts that are the same whether one is conservative or liberal, moderate or militant. His use of the term brother as applied to Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, Malcolm X, or “the honorable Elijah Muhammad” merely reflects common usage of virtually all blacks who regularly refer to each other as “brother” or “sister.”
Although it is not necessary to agree with Mr. Carmichael or Malcolm X in either their soteriology or eschatology, it is necessary to relate to much of their critical assessment of much of current American social relations, especially the racial and political. For they have brought out into the open for all to see much that is rotten in American social reality. Truth is truth no matter who says it.…
Finally, regarding the resolutions adopted by the convention, we believe in the main we are right on target. What happens to a black brother in Mississippi is most relevant to the black brother in Los Angeles or Detroit, Chicago or New York, or Podunk, Iowa. John Perkins is a Christian, and is known to be so. But he is also the victim of an oppressive system that threatens all blacks.… Our response was a feeble attempt to support a brother in need.… And we acted strictly within the American system.…
In common with the overwhelming majority of blacks from all across the country (over 95 per cent of the black voting public), our attitude towards Mr. Nixon is “wait and see.” For neither Mr. Nixon nor Mr. Agnew has ever distinguished himself by going out of his way to benefit either the poor or the black.…
That an organization such as ours should be conservative in theology and “radical” in social thought and policy might be, and probably is, wondered at by Christians who are conservative in both. But there is nothing that says that it is impossible. When people are survival oriented, as American blacks are, many combinations are possible.
WILLIAM H. BENTLEY
President
National Negro Evangelical Ass’n.
New York, N. Y.
