EDITORIALS
Nothing in Ireland lasts long except the miles, said the novelist George Moore. This fit of poetic license took no account of the Twelfth of July festivities in that seventeen per cent of the Emerald Isle still British and Protestant. As though the news had just hit the headlines, Dutch William’s victory over the Catholic James at the Boyne in 1690 was again celebrated last month with astonishing enthusiasm. All over the province and in British cities such as Liverpool and Glasgow, sash-wearing, drum-beating processions served as a forceful reminder to any uppity papists that the Protestant boys are in the ascendancy and mean to keep it that way.
Sponsoring the occasion was the Orange Order, founded in 1795 “to maintain the laws and peace of the country and the Protestant constitution.” The implementation of this policy is, however, both broad and baffling. One of the early Orange clubs, for example, had a toast to King Billy (a kindly sideglance was directed also at Oliver Cromwell) with impressive maledictions on him who would not drink to it: “May he have a dark night, a lee shore, a rank storm, and a leaky vessel to carry him over the river Styx!… May the devil jump down his throat with a red hot harrow, with every pin tear out a gut, and blow him with a clean carcase to hell! Amen.” That splendid opportunistic Amen, far from being a quaint relic of yesteryear, still sonorously echoes the pseudo-religious motif so often used to justify sinister activity in Ulster.
After the riots in 1857 a government commission of inquiry declared that the Orange system seemed to have “no other practical result than as a means of keeping up the Orange festivals … leading as they do to violence, outrage, religious animosities, hatred between classes, and too often, bloodshed and loss of life.” The commissioners expressed the hope that “kind and generous” minds in the movement would take note and see “no controlling necessity to keep it alive.”
Alas, 114 Twelfth of Julys later, the disease is precisely the same, the remedy disregarded. The Orange Order’s maintenance of the Protestant ascendancy has involved discriminatory practices in jobs, housing, and local government. Its political influence is such that no Ulster Unionist member of parliament can be elected without the Order’s sanction. Prime Minister Brian Faulkner himself dutifully marched last month with his local lodge on the Twelfth.
The result has been that the Orange Order and its more evangelical fellow traveler Ian Paisley have conjured up an association of “true religion and undefiled” with a waving of the Union Jack, and the harassment and general discomfiture of the Man of Sin’s local emissaries. The Gospel itself is brought into disrepute—and this is the ultimate tragedy of Northern Ireland. If Islam pioneered it and crusading medieval popes exploited it, Ulster has perfected the device of the holy war with its swirling banners and its appeal to fear and intolerance. There is the spectacle of a majority brainwashed into thinking they are fighting for their religious beliefs (which many of them would have difficulty in enunciating) when their more clearly grasped thrust is against the religion of others. Even Ian Paisley is not without justification identified in a recent book as “the most prominent and the most formidable anti-Catholic in Northern Ireland.” That such shameful subjugation of a minority is done ostensibly on religious grounds is a piece of sickening hypocrisy paralleled only by Paisley’s strictures on Communist oppression or Vorster’s bizarre biblical basis for apartheid in South Africa.
Mention of such things elicits from Ulster’s extremists charges of apostasy and distortion of the facts. One evangelical writer on the subject has been attacked variously as a hired lackey of the Vatican, a tool of Communism, and a sympathizer with the so-called Irish Republican Army, which fanatically opposes the fifty-year-old partition of Ireland. This too is part of the tragedy: that any attempt at moderation or objectivity brings allegations of weakness or partiality. Lights must always be heightened, shadows darkened.
No one can deny that the IRA dream of a united Ireland has led to atrocities that are continually taking the lives of British soldiers; that Dublin has never developed highly the art of bridge-building over troubled waters; that Catholic insistence on separate schools is an exacerbating feature; that disingenuous elements have exploited the civil-rights movement. But too many Protestants give the impression that their whole religious duty can be discharged through vehement opposition to those whose churchmanship differs from theirs.
The Northern Ireland situation is a complex one (see also news story, page 36), with wrongs done on both sides; our concern in this editorial has been not to analyze the overall position (we have tried to do this before and will do so again) but to point to the Orange Order as an oddly neglected factor. The latter’s ideals are astonishingly lofty: “… detesting as we do any intolerant spirit, we solemnly pledge … that we will not persecute or upbraid any person on account of his religion opinion.…” An Orangeman is, moreover, required to love God and be “of humane and compassionate disposition, and a courteous and affable behaviour. He should be an enemy to savage brutality and unchristian cruelty … wisdom and prudence should guide his actions.…”
Wisdom and prudence, gentleness and tolerance, compassion and love of God—if Orangemen practiced these attributes to which they give lip service, they might be led to give their weighty support to the current program of political reform in Northern Ireland, which is calculated, albeit belatedly, to remove the injustice of centuries. As it is, they tend to see in it a new popish takeover plot, and this at a time when the traditional grip of the Roman Catholic Church has been substantially loosened.
Nowhere is there a greater work for Jesus Christ to be done today than in this unquiet province among the bitter, the bereaved, the incorrigible, the mutilated, the vicious, the arrogant, the terrified, the lonely, the misguided. A British newspaper reports the poignant question found inscribed on a battle-scarred wall in a particularly derelict area of Belfast: “Is there life before death?” It is both indictment of and challenge to the most church-going section of the British Isles.
On Taking It With You
’Tis the season to be moving. “For Sale” signs form ranks on lawns as vans parade down superhighways marking the tempo of American mobility. Job transfers, growing families and finances, and shrinking families and finances join to form a steady beat for a national march that reaches its peak when good weather is in and school is out. In the fall, perhaps the movers, marching in place then, will like a band at half-time spell out FLUX.
Not everything changes, of course. Into the new home go the bubblegum sculpture on the head of junior’s bed, the vase that cracked when a wobbly toddler knocked it over, the table with its cat-claw scratches, and the migrants themselves. Like household goods, the furnishings of human souls do not shed nicks and scratches by moving. Though polish may improve appearances briefly, the substance remains—and the new residence turns out to be remarkably like the old. “Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell,” said Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, and “Tis heaven to me where’er I may be,” a gospel song notes. Between the two is a Word of difference.
Highway Havoc
How often do Americans kill each other in traffic accidents? An average of once every ten minutes! The grim body count exceeded 55,000 last year. The only encouraging aspect was that it was a thousand less than the previous year. Finally enough people are beginning to use seat belts and enough cars have other recently required safety equipment to begin slackening the slaughter. Besides deaths, more than five million Americans were injured in traffic accidents.
Christians, whose bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, should take reasonable precautions to keep them in good shape by the practice of safe driving habits, including fastening seat belts and not driving extended periods without rest. Christians should also do what they can to make the highways safe for all men through support of legislation requiring stricter safety features and through realistic and enforced laws against driving while intoxicated (from either alcohol or some other drug).
Debugging The Mind
Seattle’s police chief George Tielsch was leafing through the city ordinance book one day searching for ways to cut police duties so he could put more men on patrol. Suddenly the chief went bug-eyed when he lit upon a creepy law: the chief of police is responsible for enforcing a law requiring residents to keep caterpillars off the trees.
The caterpillar law reminds us of a quotation, once used by Martin Luther, about birds. A young monk came to an old one, according to the sayings of the Desert Fathers, and confessed that he was vexed by many unsavory desires. The wise old father replied: “You cannot stop the birds from flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair.”
The old monk’s wisdom is still best for those pesky foul thoughts: don’t let them get into your hair. They’re sure to leave nothing good behind—not even butterflies.
Louis Armstrong
The extraordinary musical talent of the late Louis Armstrong was best expressed in a context evangelicals by and large have been unable to appreciate. We owe him a tribute, however, and perhaps even an apology.
Jazz, considered by many experts as the only art form ever wholly originated in America, came out of one of the seamiest sides of this country’s culture. Why has musical creativity of this depth not surfaced in the Church, where it could be coupled with verbal meaning?
Because of the kind of life associated with jazz and because of its jarring quality that contrasts so sharply with traditional church music, jazz is still widely regarded as inappropriate for worship—or even sacrilegious. But the Same objections can be stated against rock music, which is currently making substantial inroads into evangelical usage.
In tribute to Armstrong, who died last month, we recall his performance genius. The Church could have asked him to play an anthem or triple-tongue a gospel song. Unfortunately, neither would have done justice to his ability.
Missouri Synod: Evangelical Persuasion
There was noise and confusion on the floor as people moved in and out of the aisles at a crowded hearing during the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod convention in Milwaukee last month. Several times a man, frustrated because he couldn’t hear, shouted out, “Order in the house!”
The subject of the hearing was whether Missouri Synod president Jacob A. O. Preus acted within his authority when he conducted an investigation into the beliefs and teaching practices of forty-five professors at Concordia (St. Louis) Seminary, one of the denomination’s two theological schools (see News, page 31). Nearly everyone who spoke to the issue during the two-hour hearing said Preus did indeed have that prerogative. But there was sharp divergence of opinion over how unity of doctrine should be maintained.
The pressing need for the sadly divided LCMS is “order in the house.” But how?
There is the way of “law and order,” epitomized in the Roman Catholic concept of the immutable and infallible magisterium of the church that must be obeyed. This approach sometimes leads to oppression and repression.
There is also the way expressed in John Milton’s Areopagitica. Speaking to a religious controversy of the day, Milton wrote as a resolute believer in the power of truth to win its way in the free marketplace of ideas. The Milwaukee convention adopted this approach of “evangelical persuasion,” a pastoral method of dealing with doctrinal deviation.
We commend Dr. Preus for his forthright and uncompromising stand for biblical inerrancy and his insistence that his church hew to the line of the Synod’s confessional commitment. An evangelical and confessional church body has the right and duty to adopt doctrinal statements that are in conformity with Scripture and its confessions—and then expects its pastors, teachers, and professors to believe, teach, and confess according to them.
Unfortunately, Dr. Preus is between the rock and the whirlpool. Who decides what is a binding statement of doctrine that goes beyond the explicit understanding of doctrine expressed in Scripture and the Lutheran confessions? And how are such statements interpreted and enforced? That’s where the rubber hits the road.
If a restrictive resolution introduced at the Milwaukee convention had been adopted, conceivably teachers and pastors in the Missouri church might have had to change their beliefs every two years or so in order to conform to the doctrinal resolutions passed by the latest biennial convention. In 1959, the Synod convention adopted a statement asserting that “every doctrinal statement of a confessional nature adopted by Synod as a true exposition of the Holy Scriptures is to be regarded as a public doctrine in Synod.” The 1962 convention declared that resolution unconstitutional.
Regrettably, Preus appears to have been stymied—at least for now—in his bid to steer the three-million-member church back into a snug harbor of theological conservatism (a feat, incidentally, so far not accomplished by any major denomination).
We pray that, in the tradition of Milton, free inquiry and discussion will provide a middle way for evangelical persuasion and the leading of the Holy Spirit.
The Peking Gambit
President Nixon astonished the world by his announcement that he would step through the bamboo curtain in a personal visit to Communist China by early 1972. No doubt the Kremlin lights are burning late as the Soviet Union plans its next play in the global game of power politics. But if someone could seize the “Kremlin Papers,” we would undoubtedly learn that the Soviets had contingency plans ready for just such a move by Nixon.
However greatly we may dislike the Communism of the People’s Republic of China, this much should be clear: it is a well-entrenched government controlling more than 700 million people; and it has as much right to recognition by the world as the Soviet Union, which murdered multiplied millions of people in its early years. It may even be possible for the United States to use Red China as a counter-point against the Soviet Union in the worldwide struggle for hegemony. Perhaps our stake in Europe would be advanced were we to recognize Red China’s legitimate stake in the Far East mainland, where she could provide a balance of power to the Soviets, who share with China a very tense border.
It is well to remember that of all the powers the United States never took over any part of China’s land and extraterritorial possessions, nor did the United States demand spheres of influence. Traditionally, the United States has been friendly toward the Chinese. Yet the journey to Peking will not be easy. Diplomatic recognition may be long in coming, for the Chinese are a resourceful, tough-minded, pragmatic lot who will bite in the clinches and drive hard, shrewd bargains.
It is not unlikely that Nixon’s step will speed our exodus from Southeast Asia, for it is in the interests of Red China for us to go even as the Soviets might like us to stay. Whatever the outcome, evangelicals can hope that the Peking gambit will in due time lead to a wide-open door for the Gospel, and they should lay careful plans to penetrate this spiritual darkness whenever the opportunity arises.
An article dealing with this possibility—“China: Open Door to What?”—is scheduled for the next issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.
Viet Nam—Continuing Impasse
In 1949 North Viet Nam as well as South Viet Nam and the United States signed the Geneva Convention governing the treatment and repatriation of prisoners of war. North Viet Nam has consistently violated this pact, and its claim that American prisoners are “war criminals” and “air pirates” because the war is an undeclared one is nonsense, since the treaty binds the parties “even if the state of war is not recognized by them.”
The Viet Cong have tied the prisoner-of-war issue to the political settlement in the Paris peace talks and have used it to help shape American public opinion toward withdrawal. Although North Viet Nam’s latest proposals are substantively no different from previous ones, their form is designed to generate enthusiasm for what has already been rejected.
The United States can only go through the process of trying to determine the intentions behind the “new” proposals. Despite past experience, we can pray for a fruitful outcome. More and more it appears that Mr. Nixon’s Vietnamization program, though far from ideal, is the best of the available alternatives. Perhaps this move toward establishing diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China will do more to bring an end to the war than anything done in Paris so far. Meanwhile he should be urged to end our involvement at the earliest possible date consistent with the safety of our men and a chance for South Viet Nam to remain viable.
A Four-Letter Word Upheld
Public display of vulgar language may be constitutionally defensible, says the United States Supreme Court. In a decision little noticed by the news media, the court reversed the conviction of Paul R. Cohen, who had been charged after he appeared in a Los Angeles courthouse corridor wearing a jacket that bore an obscene remark denouncing the draft. It was a five-to-four ruling in which the normally conservative justices John M. Harlan and Potter Stewart sided with three members of the court’s liberal bloc. Harlan, in fact, wrote the twelve-page majority opinion, joined also by Justices William O. Douglas, William J. Brennan, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall.
Harlan argued that the California law under which Cohen had been found guilty and given a thirty-day jail sentence was inadequate for this particular case. He went on to say, however, that “the ability of government, consonant with the Constitution, to shut off discourse solely to protect others from hearing it is dependent upon a showing that substantial privacy interests are being invaded in an essentially intolerable manner.” It was a victory for the American Civil Liberties Union, which had appealed the case on the issue of free speech.
Much as Christians may loathe the growing respectability of four-letter words once considered immoral, they should now find ways of capitalizing on this legal precedent. A court that has upheld scurrilous discourse in public places will have to allow the communication of the Christian Gospel, for example, in similar situations.
Trouble Is Chronic
The Christian life is not like a ship’s cruise on a calm ocean with shining sun and bracing temperature. Often it is more like the journeying of a well-built ship through rough seas and dense fogs, confronted by opposing currents, contrary winds, and broken propeller shafts.
Those who undergo the severest trials are not the worst saints nor those most careless about the soul-nourishing practices of Bible reading and prayer. Take, for instance, the Apostle Paul, one whose life was wholly devoted to God. He was an expert on the theory and the practice of prayer, and undoubtedly he often prayed that God would keep him from the worst trials of life. Yet his pilgrimage was one of unremitting hardship—he was beaten, stoned, shipwrecked, starved, victimized by evil men, and tormented by a thorn in the flesh. God did not choose to deliver him.
God did, however, give him the courage to endure, and so Paul can triumphantly say, in a heartening series of contrasts, that he was “troubled yet not distressed,” “perplexed but not in despair,” “persecuted but not forsaken,” “cast down but not destroyed” (2 Cor. 4:8, 9). And through his hardship he was able to write words of comfort and assurance that have helped millions of suffering believers.
We have no right to expect the Christian life to take place in some tranquil demilitarized zone, away from the conflicts of life. Believers in Communist lands right now bear the marks of suffering, and the day may not be too far off when Christians in the free world will face persecution. We may endure the loss of many material blessings we have taken for granted. We may know in a way we have not known before that trouble is a chronic part of the human condition. How will we respond to adversity? Sermons and liturgies and sententious sayings can help us little in that day.
Trouble is chronic, to be sure, but there is a sovereign remedy for this condition, one that enables us to live “not somehow but triumphantly.” That remedy is walking in the Spirit.
