Adventures in Evangelicaland
“First Anita Bryant, now. Chuck Colson.”
“What’s the connection between those two?”
“Cream pies, that’s what. They have both suffered for their faith by having cream pies thrown into their faces.”
“You talk as if that entitles them to a place in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.”
“Can you think of anything faced by American Christians that could better qualify someone?”
“Yeah, it’s good for the rest of the world to realize that we also suffer.”
“You know, it’s a shame how the world is so anxious to take advantage of someone who’s recently been born again.”
“Like Eldridge Cleaver?”
“Yes, like Eldridge Cleaver. I find it inexcusable that some ad agency should take advantage of his innocence about Christian things by trying to get him to endorse a line of pants, especially that kind.”
“I agree. They have no business exploiting him, making a profit from him, when he is such a new, untaught Christian.”
“Right on. They ought to leave him to the church, to para-church organizations, and the Christian media.”
EUTYCHUS VIII
Nice Design
Your edition of the January 13 issue just arrived today (late as usual). The tardiness is more than compensated for by the improved art work, or really the layout and design. The wide margins and their use for quotes and biographical information—very nice.… Because a topic is serious doesn’t mean it has to look heavy and/or boring.… The review of Bruce Cockburn’s music (Refiner’s Fire) was well done. I bought a tape of Phil Keaggy after your column on him, and was very pleased.
JOHN H. BRAY
Barrie, Ontario
The Good Things
“Expedition” by Elva McAllaster (Dec. 30) … challenges mind and spirit alike, is biblical in sensibility, and well crafted. The only flaw I see is the repetition of line one at the end, which seems unnecessary and “cute.” But that is a minor point. The poem is excellent.… Not enough people, including myself, point out the good things.
MATTHEW R. BROWN
Midland, Mich.
Wesleyans And Scripture
The report of the meeting of the Wesleyan Theological Society under the title “Wesleyan Issues” in your December 9 issue suggests, somewhat awkwardly, the troubles which Wesleyans and other evangelicals whose roots lie deep in eighteenth and nineteenth century piety have had in fending off the narrow view of the doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture which B. B. Warfield and, recently. Harold Lindsell have tried to make definitive of evangelical orthodoxy. The Christian Holiness Association has not “softened” its statements on Scripture in recent years, but simply clarified the fact that we Wesleyans stand in an older and much broader evangelical tradition than that represented by modern neo-Calvinist scholasticism.
That position is, simply, that the Scriptures are inerrant in matters of faith and doctrine: and that those matters are not accurately understood by reference to the verbal inspiration of every word of Scripture, whether in the original autographs or modern translations, but in the meanings of the messages about faith and righteousness, history and hope, which whole passages of Scripture set forth. Understanding these meanings and messages requires both critical and reverent reflection by men and women of deepest faith, whose commitment to fellowship with all disciples, in the power of the Holy Spirit, is thoroughgoing. And it requires them to consider those passages in the larger context of the “book” of the Bible in which each appears. For this reason, the followers of Christ, beginning with the apostles, have been theologians, not echo boxes. They have trusted the Holy Spirit to illuminate the Scriptures, and so to guide them into all truth, just as Jesus promised.
TIMOTHY L. SMITH
Professor of History
The Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Md.
A Small Post-Script
Thielicke’s article on “Why the Holocaust” (Jan. 27) is thought-provoking. Naturally, the author cannot deal with all the aspects of the problem, yet it is a little surprising that he hardly refers to the ominous presence of antisemitism in German society prior to Hitler.
May I add a little post-script dealing with this aspect of things? In the final year of the war a lady belonging to the higher ranks of German society was allowed to go to Switzerland for health reasons. Buying a book in a Christian bookshop in Basel she complained about the Allied air attacks on defenseless women and children in Germany. The saleslady serving her—she is the source of my information—remarked about all the women and children killed in Auschwitz, to which the German lady replied: “Yes, but they were Jewish women and children!”
LUDWIG R. DEWITZ
Columbia Theological Seminary
Decatur, Ga.
I do not believe Helmut Thielicke. He protests that he didn’t even remotely suspect the full extent of what was happening in Nazi Germany. Who did know the full extent except the Nazi masters? Now some are even protesting that Hitler didn’t know of the orders to exterminate the Jews, that they were given without his knowledge and consent.
With 1,000 concentration camps in Germany and occupied countries, with millions of men, women, and children used as slave labor in factories, marched in the streets, moved across country in cattle cars, gassed and incinerated, Germans who could see, hear, and smell knew something horrible and of great magnitude was going on (“beating wings of darkness circling about us”).
No, they didn’t know the full extent but they knew enough to have said as Bodelschwingh is quoted as saying, “over my dead body” or now say they lacked the courage to do so. Christ’s new commandment was “to love one another even as I have loved you”—to be willing to die for one another which obviously they weren’t.
RUFUS H. CRAIG
Alexandria, La.
Your gala Nazi issue would have been laughable and unworthy of serious attention had it not been for the presence of the article by Robert Clouse. Clouse spent most of his time traducing and defaming the brave women (such as those of the Missouri delegation), who stood up to the degeneracy of the I.W.Y. Convention. I wonder if Professor Clouse was in Houston? If so, what are his views about the grotesque immorality there, the likes of which resembled that of Berlin at the height of “Weimar Culture”? Was he offended by the repression of the minority by the leader Bella Abzug? Maybe this is only offensive to Clouse when done by Herman Goering at a Reichstag session.…
Clouse anguishes over the “press for conformity.” Well said, for this was Hitler’s concern. The same Adolf Hitler who loathed the bourgeois Christians of Germany, and promised the destruction of their culture regardless of the outcome of World War II. Indeed, it was not the despised middle class who furnished the criminals of the Third Reich, but it was the failed academics such as Joseph Goebbels, Ernst Hanfstaengl, and Dietrich Eckart. Academics anxious to curry favor with those in positions to further their careers. These men worshiped the state, considered themselves socialists, and ridiculed the “paranoia” of the bourgeoisie. They re-wrote history, in the same manner as Clouse, to toe an ideological line and to create justification for their own fashionable views. The intellectual dishonesty of Germany’s academic community of the 1930s and the same intellectual charlatanism of Clouse’s article of 1978, is the genuine danger to our culture.
DWIGHT PRADE
St. Louis, Mo.
“Why the Holocaust” is truly enlightening and provocative. I found myself underlining so many principles which would deceive many of us. Not only has Herr Thielicke given us insight into what was taking place in Germany during the Third Reich, but he has also served a forewarning to those of us who live in a Christian milieu where God and country go hand in hand.
I was especially touched as I read his one sentence, “The soil of men’s hearts had been plowed and there was great readiness to repent.” How sad to think there were so few true shepherds to guide those ready to enter into the Kingdom by faith and repentance. The commentaries by the three American historians were also excellent, making the whole an informative, thought-provoking package. Thank you for such a timely article.
HELEN LOUISE HERNDON
St. Louis, Mo.
Good Word For Verbicide
I want to thank you and D. G. Kehl for the excellent article (“Have You Committed Verbicide Today”, Jan. 27). We are often so frantically busy using the medium of language to try to capture some notice for our ideas that we rarely have time to pay attention to the medium itself, apart from anything we wish to do with it. And as Christians we have perhaps more of a stake in language than anyone; for if God is to communicate his message through us to the world, then his word and our expression of it must remain intelligible to that world, or we shall end up “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Dr. Kehl’s article was a timely reminder of the “awful” (in the old sense) responsibility we have in our speech, that “every word shall be accounted for.”
PETER GORHAM
University of Californi
Irvine, Calif.
