Land Of The Vanished Church
Whenever we sing that hymn that mentions the burning of the noontide heat and the burden of the day, the years fall away and I am back once again in North Africa.
In that region, one of the most resistant to Christian missions, I recall a meeting of believers in Tunis. One of the young Arabs who had made a profession of faith was leaving to return to work in a remote area. There was poignancy and tenderness and concern as that small assembly prayed over him, and I found new meaning in their closing “God be with you till we meet again.”
Another memory is of Dar Naama (or “House of Grace”), missionary headquarters in suburban Algiers, which provided for us servicemen a place of serenity and spiritual refreshment. Its thoughtful hostess was Miss Perkin, who had grown old in the service of the Algiers Mission Band and what has been called “The Land of the Vanished Church.”
The vanishing process began two centuries after Augustine, its most renowned leader, when the Arab invaders brought the new Islamic religion. The last Christian bishopric was suppressed in medieval times; the sixteenth-century Turkish conquests swept away the few remaining traces of Christianity. Missionary outreach did not resume until the nineteenth century was more than two-thirds gone, when the Roman Catholic Archbishop Lavigerie (later a cardinal) founded the White Fathers (1868), whose work extended also south of the Sahara.
Protestant missionaries finally came to Algeria in 1880, Morocco in 1884, Tunisia in 1885. There was a lot of catching up to do and progress was slow. There were strategic blunders. Frequently encountered was that ferocious hostility directed by Muslims at the infidel. In 1900, David Cooper of the North Africa Mission was in the market of a Moroccan town when a man rushed out of a nearby mosque and shot him fatally in the back. The assailant, allegedly a holy man who had taken a vow to kill the first Nazrani (Christian) he met, took refuge in another mosque where criminals traditionally sought asylum.
The local sultan was having none of it. He had the man forcibly removed from the mosque, flogged and humiliated as a warning to others, and subsequently executed when news came of Cooper’s death. He also gave a thousand pounds to Mrs. Cooper, and offered her a military escort should she wish to return home.
After World War I, with control passing to colonial powers, great hopes were expressed of an accelerated missionary advance. It was not to be. The economic instincts by which European powers exploited North Africa served also to inhibit the spread of the gospel as something that would make the Muslim peoples restive.
Moreover, the European nations concerned (France, Spain, Italy) were nominally Roman Catholic, so that what religious tendencies they officially displayed did nothing to encourage Protestant witness. European political tensions also put a brake on missionary work. The French particularly showed an almost pathological suspicion of people they chose to regard as “English spies”—those who were trying to reach the rural Berbers with the gospel.
Difficulties were further exacerbated when after World War II independence came successively to Libya (1951), Tunisia and Morocco (1956), and Algeria (1962). With the growth of nationalistic fervor the new leaders promoted Arabic Islam at the expense of the native Berber culture, seeking to stress their political and cultural relations with the Arab world as a whole—and that at a time when Islam was starting to experience a renascence worldwide.
This somber, fascinating story is well told by Francis R. Steele in his paperback Not in Vain (William Carey Library, 1981, 167 pp., $2.95). Steele agrees with an earlier writer, the Methodist W. H. Heggoy, that missionary strategy was initially mistaken in assuming that “an atmosphere conducive to the development of a national church of converted Muslims” would be created by means of working through European citizens of North Africa. So in 1951 the NAM decided to phase out the European work (in which about one-third of its missionaries were engaged), and to concentrate on Arabic with French as an auxiliary language.
By 1978, however, “there still was no such thing as a truly independent church of converted Muslims anywhere in North Africa.” In saying this, Steele has not overlooked a plan sponsored by the World Council of Churches, when “a heterogeneous group including three Algerians … lent their names to an organization called the Algerian Christian Church [which] existed solely on paper and soon vanished into thin air.” Whatever the facts of the case, this cursory and airy dismissal is ungracious: the reader (and the WCC) might legitimately claim that the half has not been told.
Nor does Steele approve of substituting the “evangelism of foreign guests in our homeland” for the old practice of sending out missionaries. He may be on firm ground here, but we would have liked him to expand a little on this, especially in view of the possibility of students from mainland China coming to educational institutions in the West.
What are the present prospects for an indigenous church in North Africa? Steele records that in December 1979 “the group in the city of Algiers elected elders and became the first truly national church in North Africa for centuries”—a step which (he says) may be followed by at least six other Christian groups (an inquiry made to NAM in spring 1982 brought a response that suggests none other has as yet emulated the Algiers group).
It is a pity that Steele’s book offers no account of the missionaries’ ministry to servicemen which meant so much to many of us. I recall vividly a French military hospital in Tunis where a young airman who had undergone surgery was being cared for by staff who had not a word of English among them. Into this depressing situation there came a visitor: Frank Ewing, of Belfast and the NAM, who had somehow heard of my plight and was to prove a real friend and spiritual comforter in my convalescent days.
Many of the issues raised in this little book raise far-reaching points for Christian missions as a whole. But the chief value of Steele’s work (he graciously implies that we still need a more comprehensive history) is that it tells us in a readable way about a mission field that has never had the attention it deserves.
Reviewed by J. D. Douglas, a writer living in Saint Andrews, Scotland, and CHRISTIANITY TODAY editor at large.
Fairer Than Day
Heaven: A Future Finer than Dreams, by U. Milo Kaufmann (Light and Life Press, 1981, 220 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Mark Herring, librarian, King College, Bristol, Tennessee.
Is Heaven a place where pearly streams
Glide over silver sand?
Like childhood’s rosy dazzling dreams
Of some far faery land?
Is Heaven a clime where diamond dews
Glitter on fadeless flowers
And mirth and music ring aloud
From amaranthine bowers?
Although p. j. bailey answered the above questions with an emphatic No, his descriptions of heaven seem attractive, whatever one’s theology. Milo Kaufmann, associate professor of English at the University of Illinois, has attempted a similar task in prose. In this short book, arranged in 20 chapters whose headings are questions, the author has put forth his answers to the difficult subject of the hereafter.
Many evangelicals will find this book rewarding. Though “earth is crammed with Heaven / And every common bush afire with God,” as Mrs. Browning observed, all of us have, to a greater or lesser degree, pondered paradise. Kaufmann deals with issues about heaven he feels have bothered a great many of us with bewildering consistency and nagging curiosity. Creativity, love, meaningful work, feelings, and pain are but a few of the subjects he undertakes to explore.
Speculation is bound to occur in such a work, but Kaufmann does an admirable job of keeping the text within the bounds of the credible and away from the outer limits of science fiction. He also does an excellent job of weaving around his questions the authority of a heavenly host of figures, from Augustine to C. S. Lewis. The book does not offer any new relevation from or about heaven, but it fills the reader with a glorious sense of mystery.
Owen Barfield, one of the more obscure members of the Lewis and Tolkien circle of friends, wrote that the East went with the heart of Plato while the West journeyed with the mind of Aristotle. The end result was a mystical approach to religion on the one hand, and a rational approach to it on the other. Unfortunately, Christianity has suffered from this overdose of reason and rationalism. The mystery of God becoming man as well as the supernatural element of heaven needs to be reemphasized so that we will not lose sight of the fabulous world in which we walk. Probably more than any other merit of the book is its sense of the supernatural, and the mystery of the Gospels the reader receives. Kaufmann provides ample ammunition to defend the belief that this mystery of the kingdom was not only purposely “written in,” but maintained by divines throughout the ages.
The book is not without its weaknesses. On three occasions, Kaufmann is stricken with a palsy to compare small things with great. Football, basketball, and baseball all enter as analogies to some part of the faith. Nine out of the 20 chapters bear some reference to the work of C. S. Lewis, especially in connection with heaven. It is true that Lewis wrote many things about heaven, but it is equally true that he was rather pleased that the idea of a hereafter came to him after nearly a year of enjoying the communion with God without any extra benefit—as if any of us needed one!
Finally, in his chapter on feelings, Kaufmann indicates a heartfelt desire to have some form of them (in heaven) and attempts to prove this biblically. Augustine is cited a number of times in the book, but here Kaufmann apparently forgets the passage in the De Civitate Dei in which Augustine excoriates feelings as a damnable lot and something we must endure until we shuffle off this mortal coil.
Though Heaven will never make it to the top, the book should enjoy a wide readership in spite of its faults and overstatements. It offers some fine insights into one of the many lovely aspects of Christianity. By mixing literary figures and personal anecdotes throughout his narrative, Kaufmann presents a most readable book and gives us an enjoyable view of that “choir invisible” in which we all hope to sing.
The Roots Of Errancy
Biblical Errancy, An Analysis of Its Philosphical Roots, edited by Norman L. Geisler (Zondervan, 1981, 270 pp., $7.95), is reviewed by John M. Frame, associate professor of apologetics and systematic theology, Westminster Theological Seminary, Escondido, California.
If I may begin with a quibble, this book is not about biblical errancy, because the writers do not concede the existence of errors in Scripture. It is rather an analysis of the view of some who believe that Scripture errs (“errantism,” perhaps?). But don’t judge this book by its awkward title. It is in fact a volume of first-rate scholarship, and frequently very helpful to the defense of inerrancy.
The book contains eight essays dealing with modern philosophers. After the initial chapter, which deals with Bacon, Hobbes, and Spinoza, subsequent essays each treat only one philospher: Hume, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger. An epilogue by the editor seeks to link these figures with contemporary “errantist” theologians. Each essay surveys the thought of the philospher(s) in question, investigates how these ideas influence (or might influence) discussions of inerrancy, and presents an evaluation. Each chapter is preceded by a summary—a helpful feature, I think, especially for readers without extensive philosophical training.
The importance of this project may be seen in the following statement by Geisler: “Hence, the rise of an errant [sic] view of Scripture did not result from a discovery of factual evidence that made belief in an inerrant Scripture untenable. Rather, it resulted from the unnecessary acceptance of philosphical premises that undermined the historic belief in an infallible and inerrant Bible” (p. 10).
The book does not actually argue this thesis; to do that would require a historical study of the rise of errantism and a careful analysis of the reasons for its acceptance. But with its analysis of the philosphers, this book is a necessary first step to such an argument and goes a long way toward making Geisler’s thesis plausible. If indeed we can show that errantism is based not on “intellectual honesty” and “openness to the facts,” but rather (to the contrary) upon arbitrary, even opportunistic, attachment to philosophical fads—bad philosophy at that—then we will not have refuted it, but we will have at least demolished its pretense of obviousness.
Critical analysis of such a book is impossible in a short review, but a few comments are in order. The essays naturally are somewhat uneven in quality. I thought W. David Beck’s essay on Kant was superb but Geisler’s concluding epilogue rather weak. John Feinberg’s essay on Wittgenstein was the most maddening: I repeatedly found myself enthusiastically agreeing on one page and sharply disagreeing on the next. One problem in several of the essays is that some of the authors seem to endorse the rather common thesis that errantism is essentially the fruit of relativism. The argument is that philosophy since Bacon lacks commitment to absolutes, to objective truth, to the idea of truth as “correspondence with reality.”
While there is some truth in this analysis, I think, we should not forget that modern philosophers are not without their own absolutes. For Bacon it was “scientific method”; for Spinoza, mathematical reason; for Kant, the categories of the understanding; for Hegel, the Absolute Spirit. The argument then is not over whether or not there is an absolute, but over what that absolute is, whether the God of Scripture or the idol of the philosopher’s imagination. And the issue is not whether truth is “objective” or “subjective,” but rather what the precise relationship is between the object and the subject of knowledge. At times I think the book takes the easy way out of these difficult questions.
Errantism, after all, has many roots and many different kinds of philosophical roots. Some may be led to such a position through subjectivism or relativism, but others (such as Dewey Beegle and Daniel Fuller, I think) are led to it by a kind of “objectivism”—a resolution to adopt a pure inductive method apart from any theological presuppositions and to follow that inductive method wherever it leads.
This fact ought to embarrass some (such as Gary Habermas in the present volume) who have tried to defend inerrancy on that sort of basis. And it ought to move Geisler (well-known for his evangelical Thomism) to reconsider his rather awkward defense of Thomas Aquinas in his introductory essay. Surely not only the roots of subjectivism but also the roots of such false objectivism should at least have been explored in a volume such as this. That study could have been done through essays on such thinkers as Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Thomas Reid.
It is W. David Beck who formulates best the issue that to my mind is most central: it is not subjectivism or relativism as such, but the dogma of the autonomy of human thought. It is the view that human reason may rightly function independently from God’s revelation. That is the philosophical (and theological) issue that must sharply separate errantists from inerrantists. This is the issue that ought to be the focus of future analyses of this kind.
