Political Insurgents Murder Philippine Church Leaders

Sharon E. Mumper

The 7,000 islands of the Philippine Archipelago stretch for more than 1,000 miles near Asia’s southeastern rim. The islands regularly endure the deadly blows of tropical storms, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions.

In addition to natural disasters, the country is torn by man-made violence. In recent months, strikes, violent demonstrations, and rebel-related murders, kidnapings, and extortion have rocked the country. Much of the rebel activity takes place in the remote, jungle-covered mountains of Mindanao, the Philippines’ second-largest island. It is primarily on Mindanao that congregations have been harassed and church leaders have been murdered in recent months. Hard data is difficult to obtain, but some facts are known.

Manuel Impit, a student pastor from the Alliance School of Church Growth, was killed last year in the mountain community of Tamugan after he was dragged from his church on Sunday afternoon. At least one other person was killed in the same incident.

In a separate attack, 20 armed men dragged Conservative Baptist deacon Luis Pademal from his home. In the ensuing struggle, he and three other church members were killed. Four members of another Conservative Baptist church were killed in a similar attack in a remote town. At the end of November, four leaders of a Christian and Missionary Alliance church were reported to have been shot and killed.

The reasons for those attacks and the recent murders of other church leaders are difficult to verify. In some cases, church members had refused to allow the Maoist New People’s Army (NPA) to use their building for meetings to indoctrinate members of the community. In at least one other case, church members had refused to give money or food to the NPA, despite threats from the rebel group.

At other times, the killers were thought to be members of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), a radical Islamic group said to be financed by Libya and other Muslim nations. Others attribute the violence to separatist Muslim rebel groups, renegade paramilitary forces, or criminal opportunists taking advantage of the isolation of the villages and the general unrest and confusion in the area.

Much of the unrest can be traced to political and economic considerations. The 1983 assassination of political opposition leader Benigno Aquino, Jr., sparked the largest and most broadly representative antigovernment rallies ever staged in the Philippines. Since then, many groups have demanded the resignation of President Ferdinand E. Marcos, who has ruled the country since 1965. Other groups, including many churches, have called for major political and human rights reforms.

The country’s worsening economic situation aggravates the situation and contributes to the growth of the NPA and other outlawed groups. In 1983, the Philippines experienced negative economic growth. Inflation ran at about 50 percent during the last six months of 1984. The country’s external debt totals more than $26 billion, far beyond its capacity to repay without long-term rescheduling. Perhaps most devastating, 20 percent of the country’s work force is either unemployed or underemployed.

Some 85 percent of the country’s population of 53 million are Roman Catholics. Another 3.5 percent are Protestants, 5 percent are Muslims, and most of the remainder are members of cults and other religions. The church is growing at a phenomenal rate despite economic problems, harassment, and the murder of church leaders and members.

“After [terrorist victim Manuel] Impit’s death, the reaction of the people was an even greater dedication to God and a revival movement,” said Peter Nanfelt, regional director for the Christian and Missionary Alliance.

“It is at a time like this that people are interested in the gospel,” said Raymond Benson, president and international director of Medical Ambassadors International, which maintains a staff of 100 in the Philippines. “People are coming to a saving knowledge of Christ not by ones or twos or even tens or twelves, but by twenties and thirties. This is a much greater rate than ever before.”

Agustin B. Vencer, Jr., general secretary of the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches, said 14 denominations reported combined growth of 23 percent from 1972 to 1981—a period of martial law. “Although no statistics are available at this time,” he added, “I believe the church is growing even more rapidly in the decade of the 1980s.”

Terrorist Death Threat Fails to Force Palau out of Peru

John Maust

Argentine-born evangelist Luis Palau recently completed one of the most trying crusades of his 20-year career. After four days of meetings in southern Peru, a division of the Maoist terrorist group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) threatened to kill the evangelist if he did not leave the South American country within 24 hours.

Palau had to decide whether to go to the capital, Lima, where another crusade was scheduled, or return to the United States. The 50-year-old preacher decided to remain in Peru. During his first day in Lima, Shining Path blasted seven high-tension towers, plunging the city into darkness for an evening. “[The synchronized attack] hammered home to us the fact that we weren’t dealing with amateurs,” said William Conard, Palau’s director of international ministries.

A skilled communicator, Palau looked relaxed during his Lima engagements. Only his team members knew about the death threat, and the crusade ended without tragedy. Said Palau afterward, “I personally came to understand several of the psalms [where David requests God’s protection] better than I ever have before.”

Long beforehand, organizers had requested a police battalion to patrol outside Alianza soccer stadium, where the Lima meetings were held. They also enlisted the aid of some 50 Christian police officers and soldiers who volunteered to help with security inside the stadium.

Any of the thousands of inquirers streaming onto the field during the altar calls could have been a terrorist moving within point-blank range of the evangelist. Supervisors found it difficult to control who entered the field. The throngs included enterprising Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons who went down front to counsel people who wanted to follow Christ.

The crusade faced problems beyond the terrorist threat. Organizers were unable to reserve Lima’s National Stadium. They had to settle for Alianza Stadium in La Victoria, a seedy barrio frequented by drug addicts, winos, and muggers. In addition, the local bus fare jumped 30 percent during the week of the meetings.

Despite the obstacles, larger-than-expected crowds attended—some 250,000 during the eight-day crusade. About 40,000 people filled the stadium on the closing day, and the 3,000 inquirers represented the most ever at a Palau meeting. Roughly half of the week’s 15,000 new converts live in La Victoria, a relatively unchurched area.

The influx of new Christians was significant as well in the southern town of Arequipa where Palau had preached earlier. According to Anselmo Rios, an Assemblies of God leader there, the Protestant community numbered 1,000 before the crusade. Yet some 6,000 people—six times the number in the city’s evangelical churches—decided to follow Christ at the close of Palau’s meetings.

Leader’s Death Gives Rise to Speculation about the Future of His Faith-Healing Sect

Chris Lutes

The death of Faith Assembly leader Hobart Freeman has spawned growing speculation about the future of his 2,000-member sect. Freeman, who taught against medical treatment, died last month of severe cardio-vascular disease and mild broncho-pneumonia. His teachings are believed to be responsible for the deaths of some 90 Faith Assembly members and their children in the past few years.

The 64-year-old Freeman, founder of the 20-year-old sect based in Wilmot, Indiana, earned a doctorate in Old Testament and Hebrew from Grace Theological Seminary. He taught there from 1961 to 1963, when he was dismissed because of growing doctrinal differences with the school.

Just prior to his death, Freeman was indicted for contributing to the death of 15-year-old Pamela Menne. The girl died in September of chronic kidney failure, a condition a local coroner said was medically treatable. The girl’s parents still await trial. If they are found guilty, they could face jail terms of up to 20 years (CT, Nov. 23, 1984, p. 38). Two Faith Assembly couples already have been convicted on charges related to the deaths of their children.

Freeman’s death could lead to changes in the controversial religious movement. But the extent of those changes is unknown.

“In the community’s mind, the death of Hobart Freeman constitutes the end of an era, because he was the genius behind Faith Assembly for 20 years,” said John Davis, a Grace Theological Seminary theology professor and a former student of Freeman’s at Grace. “And there is a sense that Freeman will never be replaced. Yet with Freeman gone, his people will continue, because the doctrines [of Faith Assembly] are so entrenched.”

Davis said Freeman’s death, while a cause of emotional strain and possibly some attrition in the sect’s membership, will most likely not be seen as defeat by most members. Even though Faith Assembly members have been taught to view death as a judgment for sin or the result of unbelief, he said Freeman’s death probably will be seen as a way to glorify God in a time of testing and persecution.

Davis and other observers said Freeman’s logical successor is his son-in-law, Steve Hill. While Hill is a close follower of Freeman’s teachings, Davis told the Warsaw (Ind.) Times Union that a transfer of leadership will most likely “change the character and quality of teaching. I see no one within the group who has the same stature as Freeman in terms of education and communicative skills.” Hill could not be reached for comment.

In addition, legal questions remain unanswered. Upon his death, Freeman had not only been indicted in the death of Pamela Menne, but he also faced a civil suit filed by David and Nigal Oleson of Genoa, Illinois. The couple sued Freeman and some of his aides, claiming the Faith Assembly ministers had nearly destroyed their marriage and caused the death of a relative. The trial for the remaining Faith Assembly ministers is set for August.

Evangelicals In Greece Fight Laws That Restrict Minority Religions

Greek evangelicals are being dragged into court under laws that restrict the rights of minority religious groups. In two trials last month and in two others not yet scheduled, the Pan-Hellenic Evangelical Alliance is seeking to overturn those laws.

The restrictive legislation was enacted in the late 1930s during the Metaxas regime. The evangelical alliance is seeking the repeal of the laws. It argues that the legislation is unconstitutional because it was enacted during an undemocratic period in Greece’s history. Among other restrictions, the laws require that official permission be obtained for the formation of any new congregation.

In a circuit court trial last month, lay pastor Eleftherios Salonikas appealed an earlier ruling against his congregation’s application for permission to meet as a church. Under the statutes being contested, all such applications must be approved by both the police and the area Greek Orthodox bishop. After a two-and-a-half year wait, Salonikas’s congregation despaired of obtaining authorization by that route. Instead, they obtained a license to establish an association from the Ministry of the Interior. The congregation held meetings, and Salonikas was arrested and sentenced to four months in jail.

On December 11, a three-judge circuit court panel upheld the earlier ruling, including the jail sentence. In addition, Salonikas’s congregation was fined 200,000 drachmas, plus court costs of about 70,000 drachmas, a total penalty of about $1,728 U.S. Salonikas and his church plan to appeal the circuit court ruling to the Greek supreme court.

Costas Macris, president and director of the Hellenic Missionary Union (HMU), said the ruling did not deal with the validity of a church registering as an association. Instead, he said, the judges found the church guilty of proselytizing. Macris himself was the defendant in another trial scheduled for late last month. He was charged with proselytizing because he talked with a youth about personal faith in Jesus Christ.

Two other lawsuits stem from an evangelistic campaign conducted last summer in 29 towns in the Greek state of Macedonia. For the campaign, Campus Crusade for Christ obtained permission from town mayors to show a Greek-language version of the film Jesus in public squares. The film was shown on the first evening of the campaign. On the second evening, 60 young people from HMU presented “cultural events” featuring gospel music and Christian testimonies.

In the town of Kavala, where similar events had been staged for the last three summers, HMU and Macris received legal notice for failing to obtain permission from the Greek Ministry of Cultural Affairs. That notice followed an article in the local newspaper by the town’s Greek Orthodox bishop accusing HMU of wrongly taking control of the town square.

Authorities also notified Apostalos D. Bliates, general secretary of the Pan-Hellenic Evangelical Alliance and director of Campus Crusade in Greece, of a suit against him. The village of Alexandropoulis sued him for showing the film Jesus without special permission of the Ministry of Cultural Affairs.

Pan-Hellenic Evangelical Alliance officials say the rash of court cases is being orchestrated by the Greek Orthodox Church through its antiheresy department. Action by the Greek Parliament would be required to rescind the laws used to stifle minority religious groups.

Greek evangelicals say they hope international news coverage will stir world opinion and convince the Greek government to change the laws. American Christians can assist that effort by writing to the Pan-Hellenic Evangelical Alliance. Letters, written on formal letterheads, should indicate the writer’s concern that a lack of religious freedom exists in Greece. Letters will be translated and submitted to the courts as evidence of international interest in these cases. The address of the Athens branch of the Pan-Hellenic Evangelical Alliance is 12 Lydias Street, GR-11527, Athens, Greece.

PERSONALIA

The board of trustees of Northwestern College in Roseville, Minnesota, has named Donald O. Ericksen as the college’s sixth president. The school’s former executive vice-president, Ericksen replaces William B. Berntsen. Berntsen has been named chancellor of the college.

Falwell Wins $200,000 for Emotional Distress in a Suit against Hustler Magazine

Beth Spring

In a case that challenged traditional understandings of libel, Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell won $200,000 from Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt even though Falwell failed to convince a jury that he had been defamed. The money was awarded for “emotional distress,” brought on, Falwell said, by a satirical liquor advertisement in Hustler that portrayed him as a promiscuous drunkard.

The ad claimed that Falwell’s first sexual encounter occurred with his mother, an accusation that provoked the television preacher far more than the magazine’s previous insulting parodies. The $45 million libel trial was held in Roanoake, Virginia, near Falwell’s Lynchburg home. Falwell was dissatisfied that the jury dismissed his libel charge, but he was gratified at the emotional distress settlement—believed to be a first in libel law. In a prepared statement, Falwell said the compensation he received was “overshadowed by the finding that the First Amendment is not absolute. If the ruling is upheld, no longer can a pornographer or sleaze merchant falsely and maliciously inflict emotional anguish upon a public figure.”

The trial’s outcome extends press responsibility to include hurt feelings, rather than limiting it to actual damage to a reputation, the usual reason for filing a libel suit.

Libel is false information, published intentionally, that causes real suffering to a person’s standing among his peers. Legal safeguards against libel are tightly circumscribed in the interest of maintaining a free press. According to Corpus Juris, a legal encyclopedia, language that is unpleasant, annoying, irksome, and “subjects [the plaintiff] to jests or banter” may nonetheless be perfectly legal.

It is libelous only if a publication deliberately prints lies or displays “reckless disregard for the truth,” according Corpus Juris. Whether Falwell was a victim of libel hinged on a single sentence appearing in small type at the bottom of the phony advertisement. It said the ad was a parody, not to be taken seriously.

Experts say the disclaimer and the ad’s outrageous claims made it legally impossible to classify as libel. They question the emotional distress finding as well. Dale Spencer, professor of law and journalism at the University of Missouri and a member of an American Bar Association committee on communications law, said claiming emotional distress because of an alleged libel is “unique.… Emotional distress happens when a woman comes out of her house and someone says her kid was just run over by a car,” when that did not happen. The law would make no distinction between public figures and private individuals when considering an emotional distress claim, he said.

Public figures, however, have little immunity against even the severest barbs in print. “No one would believe the content of that [Hustler] ad,” Spencer said. The ability of the press to criticize and question people who seek a place in the public eye would be impaired by a finding of libel in a case like this, he said.

Flynt’s attorneys have asked the judge to overturn the jury’s decision to award money to Falwell. If that request is not granted, Flynt vows to appeal the case. Falwell is considering an appeal of the jury’s dismissal of the libel charge.

Colorado Voters Amend the State’s Constitution to Outlaw Public Funding of Abortions

Colorado’s prolife movement is still buzzing over the upset it scored in last November’s election. In a statewide referendum, voters made Colorado the thirty-fifth state to ban public funding of abortions.

Christian Research Associates (CRA), an evangelical organization specializing in personal and social reformation, mobilized support among Christians for the constitutional amendment. Opposition was strong, with virtually all of Colorado’s political leaders actively working against the measure, called Amendment 3.

CRA executive director Tom Trento participated in five debates, including one with Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm and two with Lamm’s wife, Dottie. “This is an example that though the battle is difficult, we can win,” Trento said. “David can beat Goliath.”

Richard Lamm, who last year made headlines for his statements on the duty of the elderly to die, was among the amendment’s most ardent opponents. He and his wife, along with Denver Mayor Federico Peña, played active roles in Colorado Taxpayers for Choice, an organization formed to oppose the amendment.

Dottie Lamm argued in her regular column in the Denver Post that it “costs 15 times as much for a medicaid patient to deliver a full-term infant and raise it on public funds for 17 months … as it does for her to abort.”

Colorado’s Right to Life Committee chairman, William Woodley, challenged the Denver Post’s decision to allow Dottie Lamm, a cochairperson of Colorado Taxpayers for Choice, to use her column to publicize her opposition to Amendment 3. In a letter to the Post, Woodley pointed out that the newspaper had suspended Lamm’s column in 1978 and again in 1982 when her husband announced he was running for reelection.

Post editor Chuck Green noted that Dottie Lamm addressed Amendment 3 in her column only once, and that those who opposed her view had equal opportunity to respond. Green said Lamm “would not have been allowed to go on a crusade on this issue.”

Prolife leaders contended that news coverage in general was biased against the amendment. Trento said the media covered a news conference given by 16 ministers who opposed the amendment. However, a press conference given by more than 200 pastors who favored the amendment was virtually ignored. The 200 pastors held the news conference to announce their commitment to provide shelter and other forms of support for women who decide not to abort their babies.

Chuck Buxton, the Denver Post’s deputy metropolitan editor, said the proamendment press conference was held less than a week before election day, when other major political happenings competed for press attention. Joe Wheelan, of the Associated Press’s Denver bureau, said the proabortion press conference was more newsworthy. Since most ministers oppose abortion, he said, “it’s a better news story if you have someone saying, ‘I’m a minister, and I’m for abortion.’ ”

With public funding for abortion cut off in Colorado, CRA has produced a resource manual designed to establish lines of communication between churches and crisis pregnancy organizations. Church members will be called on to open their homes and pocketbooks to women who have nowhere to go. Pastors who favored Amendment 3 will soon have to prove they were serious about providing support for women who choose not to have abortions.

The battle over abortion in the Rocky Mountain State is expected to continue, however. Colorado Taxpayers for Choice continues to operate, with its leaders hinting that they may challenge the amendment in court.

DEATHS

Theodore A. Hegre, 76, founder of Bethany Fellowship, Bethany Missionary Training Center, Bethany Missionary Church, and Bethany Fellowship Missions (a worldwide missions organization); October 27, in Singapore, of a heart attack.

John W. V. Smith, 69, former professor of church history at the Anderson College school of theology, official historian of the Church of God (Anderson, Ind.), member of the National Council of Churches’ Commission on Faith and Order; November 19, in Liberal, Kansas, of a heart attack.

Federal Income Tax Reform Could Harm Charitable Contributions

By eliminating or restricting the tax deductibility of charitable contributions, proposals for a simplified tax code could dampen the cheerfulness with which Americans give away their money.

Three plans may be considered by Congress and hammered into a compromise early this year. One of them, originating in the Reagan administration, contains four points that would affect donations:

• People who do not itemize deductions on their federal income tax return would no longer be able to take a single deduction for charitable gifts. Since 1982, that has been the one exception allowed for taxpayers who do not itemize. Because of other provisions in the tax simplification plan, it is likely that many more people would not itemize deductions if the plan became law.

• No deductions would be permitted until contributions pass a threshold of 2 percent of adjusted gross income. A person earning $25,000 and making $1,200 in donations could deduct only the last $700 from his taxable income. According to Independent Sector, a coalition of voluntary organizations, the median amount donated by American taxpayers is 1.97 percent. The 2 percent threshold would prevent more than half of them from taking a deduction.

• The top tax bracket would drop from 50 percent to 35 percent. As a result, wealthy donors would receive a tax benefit from only 35 cents out of every dollar donated, compared to 50 cents under current law.

• No deductions would be allowed for capital gains on property or investments, so major gifts of land and assets could dwindle.

The administration proposal, prepared by Treasury Secretary Donald Regan, almost certainly will not pass Congress intact. Some new leaders in the Senate question whether tax simplification is necessary at all if it does not help reduce the federal budget deficit.

Shortly after Regan’s plan was released, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Robert Packwood (R-Oreg.) said he prefers the existing tax code. His committee will have the first crack at developing a compromise.

Nonetheless, some Christians in Washington are alarmed because deductions for charitable giving have never before been challenged. Art Borden, executive director of the Evangelical Council on Financial Accountability (EFCA), sees it as a foot in the door. “Like the Equal Rights Amendment, these proposals won’t die but will be renewed year after year as tax reform comes before Congress,” he said. “Frankly, we’re concerned about what this will do to our [EFCA] members and their contributors.”

Donors give money because they are motivated by a particular cause or appeal, Borden said, not because of an anticipated tax break. But the tax break helps determine the amount that is contributed.

Bob Smucker, vice-president for government relations at Independent Sector, estimated that the Treasury Department proposal, if left intact, could cost charitable organizations $13 billion, or 25 percent of their total income from donations. Some 40 percent of all charitable giving goes to churches and religious organizations.

The Treasury Department proposal takes a pragmatic stance. Because most donors are not motivated by a tax break, the Treasury Department is proposing the 2 percent threshold. A deduction on giving from the first dollar “only reduces revenues and causes all tax rates to be higher, without stimulating giving,” the report says. In addition, the plan would eliminate the tax break for those who do not itemize deductions because it “creates unnecessary complexity, while probably stimulating little additional giving and presenting the IRS [Internal Revenue Service] with a difficult enforcement problem.”

Brian Waidmann, legislative aide for tax matters to U.S. Sen. William Armstrong (R-Colo.), said the Treasury Department idea as a whole is “conceptually brilliant, but it was created in a greenhouse.” Its chances of survival in Congress depend on President Reagan’s level of enthusiasm—as yet an unknown—as well as lobbying efforts by private sector groups.

Waidmann said Independent Sector and its members constitute one of Capitol Hill’s most powerful, effective lobbies. That reputation could be tested as Congress explores all options for tax simplification and deficit reduction.

Election ’84: Some Surprising Winners and Losers

Robert P. Dugan, Jr.

With the start of a new year, a slightly more liberal Congress convened on Capitol Hill. Later this month, after his inauguration, Ronald Reagan will embark on a second term as President.

Observers will be watching closely to see whether November’s election proved that Republicans have a lock on the White House, or merely that a popular Republican temporarily holds the key. There is evidence to support both views.

Republicans have won four of the last five presidential elections, with a cumulative lead of 44 million votes. They carried 169 states to the Democrats’ 21 in those elections, receiving 82.4 percent of the electoral votes. The Republican party’s vision of America appealed to more women, young voters, immigrants, and working-class people last year than anyone dreamed possible.

Reagan won more popular votes than any other President—more than 53 million—and a record 525 electoral votes. (The President who came closest to this achievement was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who won 523 electoral votes in 1936, when there were 48 states.) However, Republican victories in Congress fell short of the party’s hopes, failing to place Reagan firmly in the driver’s seat. Meanwhile, a throng of contenders for the 1988 presidential nomination already is taking shape, casting the Republican party’s future onto the unsettling variables of ideology, personality, and political maneuvering.

The make-up of the Ninety-ninth Congress notwithstanding, the President is entitled to assume a personal mandate from the 1984 election results. And in light of transcendent values in American society, his landslide victory represents more than the personal triumph of a popular President. In several congressional races, prolife candidates defeated prochoice opponents. Only one antiabortionist senator was defeated, and radical feminist candidates were overwhelmingly rejected.

The Coattail Factor

While it is true that the Reagan landslide did not produce the congressional gains Republicans anticipated, it would be wrong to conclude that his reelection was merely the victory of a “great communicator.” The history of second-term Republican Presidents, as well as developments in last year’s campaign, help explain the absence of a major coattail factor.

The victories of previous Republican incumbents show remarkable similarities to last year’s election. In 1956, Dwight D. Eisenhower won 57.5 percent of the vote and 457 electoral votes. But the Republican party that year lost two seats in the House and stayed even in the Senate. In 1972, Richard Nixon swept 60.5 percent of the popular vote and 520 electoral votes, but Republicans gained only 12 House seats and lost two in the Senate. Reagan’s victory was strikingly similar: Republicans gained 14 seats in the House and lost two in the Senate.

The President’s poor showing in his first debate with Walter Mondale contributed to his failure to swing Congress his way. Had he won, his strategists would likely have sent him across the country stumping for Republican House and Senate candidates. Instead, he spent the two weeks between debates focusing on his own campaign. Some candidates, anxious for a presidential endorsement in person, charged that the Reagan-Bush ’84 campaign leaders were indifferent about congressional races.

Ultimately, Reagan’s campaign themes were most responsible for the divergence between the presidential and congressional election results. Feeling good about America, characterizing the nation as standing tall again or voters seeing themselves as better off than four years ago all added up to keeping the President in power for another term. At the same time, that message did not lend itself to “throwing the rascals out,” and thus shaking up the congressional lineup. Significant shifts are most likely to come when the public sees a candidate or party as “the enemy.” That was the case in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson portrayed Republicans as apt to propel the nation into nuclear war.

In the recent election, the Democrats’ gain of two seats in the Senate left Reagan’s party with a 53-to-47 seat margin, identical to that of 1981 when he began his first term. But apart from party identification, the Senate is ideologically more liberal than it was in 1981. Its newly elected leaders, including majority leader Robert Dole, share a streak of independence that may place Senate Republicans at odds with the administration on certain issues.

Senate Races

Several evangelicals retained their Senate seats. Mark O. Hatfield (R-Oreg.) overcame allegations last summer of impropriety and swamped his opponent by carrying every county in Oregon for a career-high 66 percent victory. His lifelong reputation for integrity served as a reservoir of good will among voters.

William Armstrong (R-Colo.) won a second term against Lt. Gov. Nancy Dick. Well-known for his Christian commitment, Armstrong was the primary Senate sponsor of the Year of the Bible in 1983. His opponent accused Armstrong of trying to shove his values down peoples’ throats. Armstrong achieved a 64 percent win, with Dick compiling a lower percentage of the vote than any Democratic Senate candidate in Colorado history.

In North Carolina, Republican incumbent Jesse Helms scored a 52-to-48 percent victory over Gov. James Hunt. Massive registration and voter turnout efforts among evangelical and fundamentalist churches aided Helms’s victory.

Though the North Carolina race was the most expensive, the nation’s political action committees donated much more money to the U.S. Senate contest in Illinois. The challenger, Democratic U.S. Rep. Paul Simon, unseated incumbent Sen. Charles Percy by 50 to 49 percent. Simon is a lay leader in a Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod congregation and the brother of Bread for the World President Arthur Simon.

Iowa voters continued an 18-year tradition of not rewarding a senator with a second term. Republican incumbent Roger Jepsen lost to former U.S. Rep. Thomas Harkin by 56 to 44 percent. It was revealed during the campaign that in 1977 Jepsen applied for membership in a health spa that offered nude modeling and rap sessions with nude women. He faced the issue squarely, acknowledging that he had applied for membership before his conversion to Christianity. The liberal Des Moines Register editorialized that no one should question the validity of Jepsen’s conversion, and that the health spa incident should not be an issue.

However, on the weekend before the election, Harkin supporters delivered copies of Jepsen’s health-spa application to Protestant churches. In addition, flyers were sent to Catholic churches, stating, “Roger Jepsen believes that if your daughter … is raped and has an abortion, she should be put to death for the crime of murder.”

Throughout his campaign, Jepsen rejected some important offers of help from the religious New Right. He declined voter registration efforts and other campaign assistance, although he had been closely associated with religious conservatives throughout his Senate career. Late in the campaign he telephoned Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell, asking him not to come to Iowa. In short, he carried whatever liabilities may be attached to the religious New Right without gaining substantially from its benefits.

In contrast, Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell welcomed fundamentalist Christian support, with Falwell taping radio commercials for him. McConnell defeated U.S. Sen. Walter Huddleston by the narrowest of margins, engineering the only victory over an incumbent Democratic senator. However, at least three evangelical challengers failed to unseat Senate incumbents, including former U.S. Reps. Albert Lee Smith (R-Ala.) and Ed Bethune (R-Ark.), and astronaut Jack Lousma, a Michigan Republican.

House Contests

Many Americans mistakenly believe the presidential race was a popularity contest while the congressional races were ideological. The reverse is usually true, and proved especially so in 1984. The televised debates let voters know where Reagan and Mondale parted company on issues. Moreover, the party platforms have seldom been so polarized. When it comes to Congress, however, most voters are abysmally ignorant of the voting record of their representative. In House races, name recognition and the specific ways incumbents have helped their constituents count most. These factors added up to victory for 95 percent of House incumbents who sought reelection.

Among evangelical Democrats winning reelection were Don Bonker (Wash.), Tony Hall (Ohio), Marvin Leath (Texas), and Bill Nelson (Fla.). Among Republicans, evangelicals who are returning for another term include Dan Coats (Ind.), Mickey Edwards (Okla.), Jack Kemp (N.Y.), Bob McEwen (Ohio), and Carlos Moorhead (Calif.).

One noteworthy newcomer to the House of Representatives is Paul Henry (R-Mich.), a former state senator and political science professor at Calvin College. Henry won handily in Gerald Ford’s old district. The son of former CHRISTIANITY TODAY editor Carl F. H. Henry, he gained national notice when political commentator David Broder lauded him in a column last September.

Former U.S. Rep. Robert Dornan, a California Republican, lost his House seat by running for the U.S. Senate in 1982. Seizing an opportunity last year, he moved into California’s thirty-eighth district and ousted Democrat Jerry Patterson. John Paul Stark, a former Campus Crusade for Christ staff administrator, failed in his third attempt to unseat Democrat George Brown in the thirty-sixth district. The Religious Right supported both Stark and Dornan.

Stark faced a specialized attack because of his formal identification with a Christian organization. In a direct mail piece, George McGovern alleged that Stark would be “Jerry Falwell’s favorite Congressman.” Stark speculates that his upbeat campaign might have succeeded if it had taken a more negative turn at times, with an aggressive attack against his opponent’s positions. Stark received strong support from evangelicals, and noted that their involvement has increased significantly since the outset of his first campaign. Yet he said evangelicals in general are less politically dedicated than, for example, antinuclear activists or environmentalists.

Religion And Politics

In state contests as well as national races, candidates parried with the notion that religion and politics do not mix. In 1980 and 1982, prolife activists and evangelicals were rebuffed by Minnesota’s Independent Republican party. They were brushed off as overzealous amateurs and scorned as single-issue activists. In a reversal of the proverbial phrase, these committed people apparently decided, “If you can’t join ’em, lick ’em.” Flooding last year’s party caucuses, they virtually took over the state’s Republican party (CT, Sept. 21, 1984, p. 68). As a result, 14 out of 17 new Republicans in the Minnesota House of Representatives, many of them evangelicals, are opposed to abortion. U.S. Sen. Rudy Boschwitz (R-Minn.), who is Jewish, applauded the entry of so many Christians into the party. With his prolife commitment, Boschwitz handily won a second term in the senate.

Nationally, religious issues appeared to play directly into Reagan’s reelection. Polls indicated that the President was in trouble after the Democratic convention in July. Mondale and his party initially did a good job of co-opting family, flag, and values themes stressed by Reagan. But for more than a month following the Republican convention in August, religion and politics continued to dominate the presidential race.

It appeared that the bottom dropped out of Mondale’s campaign when he began arguing that religious values do not belong in the political arena. The Mondale-Ferraro attacks on certain religious leaders backfired because millions of Americans felt their own beliefs were under attack. Christians were offended at the implication that they should separate their biblically based values from their pursuits as citizens.

Television network exit polls generally showed that “born-again Christians” supported the President’s reelection by at least 10 percent more than his 59-to-41 percent national margin. The New York Times/CBS News poll showed that 81 percent of “white born-again Protestants” voted for the Reagan-Bush ticket.

The same poll indicated that the abortion issue was far more influential among evangelicals than among other groups. “Every radical proabortion feminist woman who ran for the Senate was defeated,” said National Right to Life Committee president Jack Willke. “Prolife Senate incumbents, who only a few months ago were judged as threatened, all came back with the sole exception of Senator Jepsen in Iowa.” Pro-life activists provided the critical margin in Democrat Marilyn Lloyd’s fight to retain her House seat against a pro-choice Republican challenger in Tennessee.

Nothing kept abortion on the front pages more effectively than the running feud between vice-presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro and Catholic church officials. For whatever reason, Ferraro could not produce what the National Organization for Women promised: a gender-gap vote for the Democratic ticket. As it turned out, 54 percent of women voters supported Reagan. The real gender gap ambushed Mondale, with 62 percent of male voters supporting the President. Nonetheless, Ferraro was a pioneer, and all women can be gratified that a door heretofore closed has been opened to them.

A Word Of Caution

A few days after the election, pollster Lance Tarrance observed that, in the political realm, evangelicals are “here to stay.” In his opinion, they have moved “beyond emerging and are now mobilizing.” As that process occurs, evangelicals begin bumping up against obstacles. The Republican party has welcomed evangelical involvement. But when Christians begin to move into the power structure, they sometimes are seen as a threat. Such a response isn’t always an anti-Christian reaction, but the natural dynamic that can operate when people holding power begin to find it diluted.

Evangelicals occasionally attract controversy by approaching politics with an arrogant attitude, believing they have all the answers and the right to “take over” their political party apparatus. That happened in Oregon in 1978 when a fundamentalist pastor became Republican party chairman. No candidate could run for office with party endorsement unless he or she passed the chairman’s personal muster.

Anything Christians do should be done according to bibilcal principles. In politics, that means the primary motivation must be to serve. When that is the case, and evangelicals prove faithful and effective, they rise to leadership very quickly.

Ultimately, Christians must concern themselves with efforts to transform society through the spiritual processes of evangelism and equipping believers for ministry. Political engagement is a secondary, but equally valid, process of trying to reform society through education and election. The church’s task, as Carl Henry puts it, is to announce the criteria by which a holy God is going to judge nations as well as individuals and to try to help change the thinking of the country. Christians need to share those criteria with their fellow citizens—eventually prompting change to come from the bottom up, from shifting public sentiment. Meanwhile, direct political involvement is at an all-time high.

Evangelicals have helped elect a President they overwhelmingly favored. Yet presidential leadership alone would not have provided the Equal Access Act, a law that enables high school students to use public school facilities for religious purposes. In addition, presidential leadership alone has not provided any means of curtailing abortion.

This much is certain: The Reagan administration provides a favorable climate that should motivate evangelicals, both Democrats and Republicans, to increase their involvement in local party structures. Further, they should continue influencing decision makers on Capitol Hill. With increased involvement, Christians can help assure that people of competence, character, and godly values will continue to rise into positions of national leadership.

1 An ordained Conservative Baptist minister, Dugan is director of the National Association of Evangelicals’ office of public affairs in Washington, D.C. In 1976, he ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. He writes a monthly newsletter, NAE Washington Insight.

Theology

Knowing God in Justice, Love, and Holiness

A. W. Tozer

Mushy ideas about his righteousness spread wrong questions and bad theology.

Mushy ideas about his righteousness spread wrong questions and bad theology.

For the past two decades, our writers and poets have asked questions with an angst that spreads feelings of despair throughout the culture. Only recently, with the Olympics and re-election of President Reagan and various psycho-sociological factors, has there been talk of a “mood swing” to more optimistic spirits. But it is far short of a fundamental change. Suicides continue. Confusion remains. The questions have been shoved aside or papered over.

How can a God of love possibly allow so much starvation, torture, and murder? Where is justice? For decades, books, movies, and plays—from Sand Pebbles to A Long Day’s Journey into Night—flung such questions at us.

In a nation that largely believes in God, questions about what is seen as his general malfeasance in running his world hang heavily beneath the veneer of the new optimism. “Why doesn’t God …? How can God …?”

The only answers come in understanding the true nature of God and his dealings with man. Mushy ideas about God’s love and righteousness create the wrong questions and spread bad theology throughout the culture—a bad theology that generates specific and damaging results.

A. W. Tozer has dealt with this subject magnificently in his classic work, The Knowledge of the Holy. We have excerpted three chapters crucial to our understanding of God in today’s context: The Justice of God, The Love of God, and The Holiness of God. The reader is cautioned to read and study slowly and thoughtfully these pivotal truths that, in the words of Carl F. H. Henry’s review of the book, are “a reason for the hope within us.”

The Justice Of God

In the inspired Scriptures justice and righteousness are scarcely to be distinguished from each other. The same word in the original becomes in English justice or righteousness, almost, one would suspect, at the whim of the translator.

The Old Testament asserts God’s justice in language as beautiful as may be found anywhere in the literature of mankind. When the destruction of Sodom was announced, Abraham interceded for the righteous in the city, reminding God that he knew He would act like Himself in the human emergency (see Gen. 18:25).

The concept of God held by the psalmists and prophets of Israel was that of an all-powerful ruler, high and lifted up, reigning in equity. “Clouds and darkness are round about him: righteousness and judgment are the habitation of his throne.” Of the long-awaited Messiah it was prophesied that when he came he should judge the people with righteousness and the poor with judgment. Holy men of tender compassion, outraged by the inequity of the world’s rulers, prayed, “O Lord God, to whom vengeance belongeth; O God, to whom vengeance belongeth, shew thyself. Lift up thyself, thou judge of the earth: render a reward to the proud. Lord, how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked triumph?” And this is to be understood not as a plea for personal vengeance but as a longing to see moral equity prevail in human society.

Such men as David and Daniel acknowledged their own unrighteousness in contrast to the righteousness of God, and as a result their penitential prayers gained great power and effectiveness. “O Lord, righteousness belongeth unto thee, but unto us confusion of faces.” And when the long-withheld judgment of God begins to fall upon the world, John sees the victorious saints standing upon a sea of glass mingled with fire. In their hands they hold the harps of God; the song they sing is the song of Moses and the Lamb, and the theme of their song is the divine justice. “Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are thy ways, thou King of saints. Who shall not fear thee, O Lord, and glorify thy name? for thou alone art holy: for all nations shall come and worship before thee; for thy judgments are made manifest.”

Justice embodies the idea of moral equity, and iniquity is the exact opposite; it is in-equity, and absence of equality from human thoughts and acts. Judgment is the application of equity to moral situations and may be favorable or unfavorable according to whether the one under examination has been equitable or inequitable in heart and conduct.

It is sometimes said, “Justice requires God to do this,” referring to some act we know he will perform. This is an error of thinking as well as of speaking, for it postulates a principle of justice outside of God that compels him to act in a certain way. Of course there is no such principle. If there were it would be superior to God, for only a superior power can compel obedience. The truth is that there is not and can never be anything outside of the nature of God that can move him in the least degree. All God’s reasons come from within his uncreated being. Nothing has entered the being of God from eternity, nothing has been removed, and nothing has been changed.

Justice, when used of God, is a name we give to the way God is, nothing more; and when God acts justly he is not doing so to conform to an independent criterion, but simply acting like himself in a given situation. As gold can never change nor compromise but is gold wherever it is found, so God is God, always, only, fully God, and can never be other than he is. Everything in the universe is good to the degree it conforms to the nature of God and evil as it fails to do so. God is his own self-existent principle of moral equity, and when he sentences evil men or rewards the righteous, he simply acts like himself from within, uninfluenced by anything that is not himself.

All this seems to destroy the hope of justification for the returning sinner. Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury, sought a solution to the apparent contradiction between the justice and the mercy of God. “How dost Thou spare the wicked,” he inquired of God, “if Thou art all just and supremely just?” Then he looked straight at God for the answer, for he knew that it lies in what God is. Anselm’s findings may be paraphrased this way: God’s being is unitary; it is not composed of a number of parts working harmoniously, but simply one. There is nothing in his justice that forbids the exercise of his mercy. To think of God as we sometimes think of a court where a kindly judge, compelled by law, sentences a man to death with tears and apologies, is to think in a manner wholly unworthy of the true God. God is never at cross-purposes with himself. No attribute of God is in conflict with another.

God’s compassion flows out of his goodness, and goodness without justice is not goodness. God spares us because he is good, but he could not be good if he were not just. When God punishes the wicked, Anselm concludes, it is just because it is consistent with their deserts; and when he spares the wicked it is just because it is compatible with his goodness; so God does what becomes him as the supremely good God. This is reason seeking to understand, not that it may believe but because it already believes.

A simpler and more familiar solution for the problem of how God can be just and still justify the unjust is found in the doctrine of redemption. It is that, through the work of Christ in atonement, justice is not violated but satisfied when God spares a sinner. Redemptive theology teaches that mercy does not become effective toward a man until justice has done its work. The just penalty for sin was exacted when Christ our Substitute died for us on the cross. However unpleasant this may sound to the natural man, it has ever been sweet to the ear of faith. Millions have been transformed by this message, have lived lives of great moral power, and died peacefully trusting in it.

This message of justice discharged and mercy operative is more than a pleasant theological theory; it announces a fact made necessary by our deep human need. Because of our sin we are all under sentence of death, a judgment that resulted when justice confronted our moral situation. When infinite equity encountered our chronic and willful in-equity, there was violent war between the two, which God won and must always win. But when the penitent sinner casts himself upon Christ for salvation, the moral situation is reversed. Justice confronts the changed situation and pronounces the believing man just, and actually goes over to the side of God’s trusting children. This is the meaning of John’s daring words: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

But God’s justice stands forever against the sinner in utter severity. The vague and tenuous hope that God is too kind to punish the ungodly has become a deadly opiate for the consciences of millions. It hushes their fears and allows them to practice all pleasant forms of iniquity while death draws every day nearer and the command to repent goes unregarded. As responsible moral beings we dare not so trifle with our eternal future.

The Love Of God

The apostle John, by the Spirit, wrote, “God is love,” and some have taken his words to be a definitive statement concerning the essential nature of God. This is a great error. John was stating a fact, not offering a definition. Equating love with God is a major mistake that has produced much unsound religious philosophy and brought forth a spate of vaporous poetry completely out of accord with the Holy Scriptures.

Had the apostle declared that love is what God is, we would be forced to infer that God is what love is. If literally God is love, then literally love is God, and we are in all duty bound to worship love as the only God there is. If love is equal to God then God is only equal to love, and God and love are identical. Thus we destroy the concept of personality in God and deny outright all his attributes save one, and that one we substitute for God. The God we have left is not the God of Israel, nor the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, nor the God of the prophets and the apostles, nor the God of the saints and reformers and martyrs, nor yet the God of our theologians and hymnists.

For our souls’ sake we must learn to understand the Scriptures. We must escape the slavery of words and give loyal adherence to meanings instead. Words should express ideas, not originate them. We say that God is love; that he is light; that Christ is truth; and we mean the words to be understood in much the same way words are understood when we say of a man, “He is kindness itself.” We are not stating that kindness and the man are identical, and no one understands this in that sense.

“God is love” means that love is an essential attribute of God. It is something true of God but not God. It expresses the way God is in his unitary being, as do the words holiness, justice, faithfulness, and truth. Because God is immutable he always acts like himself, and because he is a unity he never suspends one attribute to exercise another.

From God’s other known attributes we may learn much about his love. We can know, for instance, that because God is self-existent, his love had no beginning; because he is eternal, his love can have no end; because he is infinite, it has no limit; because he is holy, it is the quintessence of all spotless purity; because he is immense, his love is an incomprehensibly vast, bottomless, shoreless sea before which we kneel in joyful silence and from which the loftiest eloquence retreats abashed.

Yet if we would know God and for others’ sake tell what we know, we must try to speak of his love. No Christian has ever done that very well. I can no more do justice to that awesome theme than a child can grasp a star. Still, by reaching toward the star the child may call attention to it and even indicate where one must look to see it. So, as I stretch my heart toward the high, shining love of God, someone who has not before known about it may be encouraged to look up and hope.

We do not know, we may never know, what love is, but we can know how it manifests itself, and that is enough here. First we see it showing itself as good will. Love wills the good of all and never wills harm or evil to any. This explains John’s words: “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear.” Fear is the painful emotion that arises at the thought that we may be harmed or made to suffer. This fear persists while we are subject to the will of someone who does not desire our well-being. The moment we come under the protection of one of good will, fear is cast out. A child lost in a crowded store is full of fear because it sees the strangers around it as enemies. In its mother’s arms a moment later all the terror subsides. The known good will of the mother casts out fear.

The world is full of enemies, and as long as we are subject to the possibilbity of harm from these enemies, fear is inevitable. The effort to conquer fear without removing the causes is futile. The heart is wiser than the apostles of tranquility. As long as we are in the hands of chance, as long as we must look for hope to the law of averages, as long as we must trust for survival to our ability to outthink or outmaneuver the enemy, we have every reason to be afraid. And fear has torment.

To know that love is of God and to enter into the secret place leaning upon the arm of the Beloved—this and only this can cast out fear. Let a man become convinced that nothing can harm him and instantly for him all fear goes out of the universe. The nervous reflex, the natural revulsion to physical pain may be felt sometimes, but the deep torment of fear is gone forever. God is love and God is sovereign. His love disposes him to desire our everlasting welfare and his sovereignty enables him to secure it. Nothing can hurt a good man.

God’s love tells us he is friendly and his Word assures us he is our friend and wants us to be his friends. No man with a trace of humility would first think that he is a friend of God; but the idea did not originate with men. Abraham would never have said, “I am God’s friend,” but God said that Abraham was his friend. The disciples might well have hesitated to claim friendship with Christ, but Christ said to them, “Ye are my friends.” Modesty may demur at so rash a thought, but audacious faith dares to believe the Word and claim friendship with God. We do God more honor by believing what he has said about himself and having the courage to come boldly to the throne of grace than by hiding in self-conscious humility among the trees of the garden.

Love is also an emotional identification. It considers nothing its own but gives all freely to the object of its affection. We see this constantly in our world of men and women. A young mother, thin and tired, nurses at her breast a plump and healthy baby, and far from complaining, the mother gazes down at her child with eyes shining with happiness and pride. Acts of self-sacrifice are common to love. Christ said of himself, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

It is a strange and beautiful eccentricity of the free God that he has allowed his heart to be emotionally identified with men. Self-sufficient as he is, he wants our love and will not be satisfied till he gets it. Free as he is, he has let his heart be bound to us forever. “For our soul is so specially loved of him that is highest,” says Julian of Norwich, “that it overpasseth the knowing of all creatures: that is to say, there is no creature that is made that may know how much and how sweetly and how tenderly our Maker loveth us. And therefore we may with grace and his help stand in spiritual beholding, with everlasting marvel of this high, overpassing, inestimable Love that Almighty God hath to us of His Goodness.”

Love also takes pleasure in its object. God enjoys his creation. The apostle John says frankly that God’s purpose in creation was his own pleasure. God is happy in his love for all that he has made. We cannot miss the feeling of pleasure in God’s delighted references to his handiwork. Psalm 104 is a divinely inspired nature poem almost rhapsodic in its happiness, and the delight of God is felt throughout it.

The Lord takes peculiar pleasure in his saints. Many think of God as far removed, gloomy, and mightily displeased with everthing, gazing down in fixed apathy upon a world in which he has long ago lost interest; but this is to think erroneously. True, God hates sin and can never look with pleasure upon iniquity, but where men seek to do God’s will he responds in genuine affection. Christ in his atonement has removed the bar to the divine fellowship. Now in Christ all believing souls are objects of God’s delight.

According to the Book of Job, God’s work of creation was done to musical accompaniment. “Where wast thou,” God asks, “when I laid the foundations of the earth … when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

Music is both an expression and a source of pleasure, and the pleasure that is purest and nearest to God is the pleasure of love. Hell has no pleasure because there is no love there. Heaven is full of music because it is where the pleasures of holy love abound. Earth is where the pleasures of love are mixed with pain, for sin is here, and hate and ill will. In such a world as ours love must sometimes suffer, as Christ suffered in giving himself for his own. But we have the certain promise that the causes of sorrow will finally be abolished and the new race enjoy forever a world of selfless, perfect love.

It is the nature of love that it cannot lie quiescent. It is active, creative, and benign. “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son.” So it must be where love is; love must ever give to its own, whatever the cost. The apostles rebuked the young churches because a few of their members had forgotten this and allowed their love to spend itself in personal enjoyment while their brethren were in need. “But whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?” So wrote John, who is known as “the Beloved.”

The love of God is one of the great realities of the universe, a pillar upon which the hope of the world rests. But it is a personal, intimate thing, too. God does not love populations, he loves people. He loves not masses, but men. He loves us all with a mighty love that has no beginning and can have no end.

In Christian experience there is a highly satisfying love content that distinguishes it from all other religions and elevates it to heights far beyond even the purest and noblest philosophy. This love content is more than a thing; it is God himself in the midst of his church singing over his people. True Christian joy is the heart’s harmonious response to the Lord’s song of love.

The Holiness Of God

The moral shock suffered by us through our mighty break with the high will of heaven has left us all with a permanent trauma affecting every part of our nature. There is disease both in ourselves and in our environment.

The sudden realization of his personal depravity came like a stroke from heaven upon the trembling heart of Isaiah at the moment when he had his revolutionary vision of the holiness of God. His pain-filled cry, “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts,” expresses the feeling of every man who has discovered himself under his disguises and has been confronted with an inward sight of the holy whiteness that is God. Such an experience cannot but be emotionally violent.

Until we have seen ourselves as God sees us, we are not likely to be much disturbed over conditions around us as long as they do not threaten our comfortable way of life. We have learned to live with unholiness and have come to look upon it as the natural and expected thing. We are not disappointed that we do not find all truth in our teachers or faithfulness in our politicians or complete honesty in our merchants or full trustworthiness in our friends. That we may continue to exist we make such laws as are necessary to protect us from our fellow men and let it go at that.

Neither the writer nor the reader of these words is qualified to appreciate the holiness of God. Quite literally a new channel must be cut through the desert of our minds to allow the sweet waters of truth that will heal our great sickness to flow in. We cannot grasp the true meaning of the divine holiness by thinking of someone or something very pure and then raising the concept to the highest degree we are capable of. God’s holiness is not simply the best we know infinitely bettered. We know nothing like the divine holiness. It stands apart, unique, unapproachable, incomprehensible, and unattainable. The natural man is blind to it. He may fear God’s power and admire his wisdom, but his holiness he cannot even imagine.

Only the Spirit of the Holy One can impart to the human spirit the knowledge of the holy. Yet as electric power flows only through a conductor, so the Spirit flows through truth and must find some measure of truth in the mind before he can illuminate the heart. Faith wakes at the voice of truth but responds to no other sound. “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” Theological knowledge is the medium through which the Spirit flows in to the human heart, yet there must be humble penitence in the heart before truth can produce faith. The Spirit of God is the Spirit of truth. It is possible to have some truth in the mind without having the Spirit in the heart, but it is never possible to have the Spirit apart from truth.

In his penetrating study of the holy, Rudolph Otto makes a strong case for the presence in the human mind of something he names the “numinous,” by which, apparently, he means a sense that there is in the world a vague, incomprehensible Something, the awesome Mystery, surrounding and enfolding the universe. This is an It, an awful Thing, and can never be intellectually conceived, only sensed and felt in the depths of the human spirit. It remains as a permanent religious instinct, a feeling for that unnamed, undiscoverable Presence that “runs quicksilver-like through creation’s veins” and sometimes stuns the mind by confronting it with a supernatural, suprarational manifestation of itself. The man thus confronted is overwhelmed and can only tremble and be silent.

This nonrational dread, this feeling for the uncreated Mystery in the world, is back of all religion. The pure religion of the Bible, no less than the basest animism of the naked tribesman, exists only because this basic instinct is present in human nature. Of course, the difference between the religion of an Isaiah or a Paul and that of the animist is that one has truth and the other has not; he has only the “numinous” instinct. He “feels after” an unknown God, but Isaiah and Paul have found the true God through his own self-disclosure in the inspired Scriptures.

The feeling for mystery, even for the Great Mystery, is basic in human nature and indispensable to religious faith, but it is not enough. Because of it men may whisper, “That awful Thing,” but they do not cry, “Mine Holy One!” In the Scriptures God carries forward his self-revelation and gives it personality and moral content. This awful Presence is shown to be not a Thing but a moral Being with all the warm qualities of genuine personality. More than this, he is the absolute quintessence of moral excellence, infinitely perfect in righteousness, purity, rectitude, and incomprehensible holiness. And in all this he is uncreated, self-sufficient, and beyond the power of human thought to conceive or human speech to utter.

Through the self-revelation of God in the Scriptures and the illumination of the Holy Spirit, the Christian gains everything and loses nothing. To his idea of God there are added the twin concepts of personality and moral character, but there remains the original sense of wonder and fear in the presence of the world-filling Mystery. Today his heart may leap up with the happy cry, “Abba Father, my Lord and my God!” Tomorrow he may kneel with delighted trembling to admire and adore the High and Lofty One who inhabits eternity.

Holy is the way God is. To be holy he does not conform to a standard. He is that standard. He is absolutely an infinite, incomprehensible fullness of purity that is incapable of being other than it is. Because he is holy, all his attributes are holy; that is, whatever we think of as belonging to God must be thought of as holy.

God is holy and he has made holiness the moral condition necessary to the health of his universe. Sin’s temporary presence in the world only accents this. Whatever is holy is healthy; evil is a moral sickness that must end ultimately in death. The formation of the language itself suggests this, the English word holy deriving from the Anglo-Saxon halig, hal, meaning, “well, whole.”

Since God’s first concern for his universe is its moral health, that is, its holiness, whatever is contrary to this is necessarily under his eternal displeasure. To preserve his creation God must destroy whatever would destroy it. When he arises to put down iniquity and save the world from irreparable moral collapse, he is said to be angry. Every wrathful judgment in the history of the world has been a holy act of preservation. The holiness of God, the wrath of God, and the health of the creation are inseparably united. God’s wrath is his utter intolerance of whatever degrades and destroys. He hates iniquity as a mother hates the disease that would take the life of her child.

God is holy with an absolute holiness that knows no degrees, and this he cannot impart to his creatures. But there is a relative and contingent holiness that he shares with angels and seraphim in heaven and with redeemed men on earth as their preparation for heaven. This holiness God can and does impart to his children. He shares it by imputation and by impartation, and because he has made it available to them through the blood of the Lamb, he requires it of them. To Israel first and later to his church God said, “Be ye holy; for I am holy.” He did not say “Be ye as holy as I am holy,” for that would be to demand of us absolute holiness, which belongs to God alone. Before the uncreated fire of God’s holiness angels veil their faces. The heavens are not clean, and the stars are not pure in his sight. No honest man can say “I am holy,” but neither is any honest man willing to ignore these solemn words: “Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.”

Caught in this dilemma, what are we to do? We must like Moses cover ourselves with faith and humility while we steal a quick look at the God whom no man can see and live. The broken and the contrite heart he will not despise. We must hide our unholiness in the wounds of Christ as Moses hid himself while the glory of God passed by. We must take refuge from God in God. Above all we must believe that God sees us perfect in his Son while he disciplines and chastens and purges us that we may be partakers of his holiness.

By faith and obedience, by constant meditation on the holiness of God, by loving righteousness and hating iniquity, by a growing acquaintance with the Spirit of holiness, we can acclimate ourselves to the fellowship of the saints on earth and prepare ourselves for the eternal companionship of God and the saints above. Thus, as they say when humble believers meet, we will have a heaven to go to heaven in.

Books

Confessions of a Librophliac

Calvin Miller

My dependency is bigger than booksit is print of any kind.

For years (just as I promised at my Baptist ordination) never a near-petrol hiccup has passed my lips. Books, not booze, are my addiction. I am hopelessly hooked—I cannot live without books.

How serious is my affliction?

Actually, my dependency is much bigger than books—it is print of any kind. Magazines interrupt me wherever they intersect my line of vision. As a professional minister, I have tried to keep abreast of the theological journals relating to the ministry. Naturally, therefore, I read things like Bibliotheca Sacra, but I cannot stop with things that relate. While waiting in a dentist’s office, I read things like Orthodontia Today or The Molar and Cavity Journal. Waiting for an oil change, I read Pipeline Perspectives. In a hobby shop, I read three pages of Plastercraft, Vol. III, No. 32, while waiting for a gum-chewing clerk who doesn’t even suspect Bibliotheca Sacra.

But books tempt me most. They call to me like mating seals while I, in zombie advance, pick them up and read. I cry weakly against them, yet I read until my eyes bleed.

Here is my real problem: How can I get anything done while there is one unread book in the house crying, “Read me! Read me!”? I cannot make peace with any unread book. A new book in my home is a psychotic guest that rises against my addiction. Knowing I am weak, it sneers at my lack of self-control. When I try to get away from it, it woos me, flirtatiously flipping its pages if I try the New York Times acrostic or television’s “MacNeil-Lehrer Report.”

No book ever worries that it might contain a subject that doesn’t interest me—all subjects interest me. For instance, I once read a book on Ferris wheels. Of course, I have no real interest in these nauseating vertical spinners. But a friend said, “How would you like to read this small book on Ferris wheels?”

“Please,” I said, “no thanks, I don’t read.” I turned to walk away from the pusher.

“It’s free,” he said with a curl of temptation in his voice.

“No!” I cried. “Please!”

“Did you know that Ferris wheels were once called ‘pleasure wheels’?”

I took the book. Now I know more about Ferris wheels than I care to. But what could I do?

I have doubtless cost the bookstores of our city thousands of dollars. Most of the children’s books I read without leaving the store. For years I have read every Dr. Seuss title on the spot. I didn’t do it to save money. I did it because in sampling a page to know whether I wanted to buy it, I sampled so many pages I didn’t need to buy it. The Butter Battle Book would not have looked good anyway beside my copies of The Review and Expositor.

It is hard to muffle a Dr. Seuss giggle that ricochets off the hard, glossy enamel faces of his books. Of course, people turn their heads in my direction. I never see them. But my wife says that people who giggle in bookstores do have a problem. She must be right: I am a librophiliac. Librophilia is a reader’s disease. Its symptoms are red, itching eyes and the catatonic clutching of open books.

The intercourse between writer and reader is an immense intimacy. No wonder Eric Hoffer said, “No minds are chaste, all minds copulate wherever they meet.” Hoffer’s metaphor makes me feel even worse. Drunkenness is a more wholesome way for me to think about my problem. And worse yet, librophilia’s effects are not only psychological: there is physical destruction as well.

James Michener always gives me a hernia carrying home his latest thousand-page title. Most of my back trouble, I’m sure, has come from trying to hold The Source with one hand and a coffee cup in the other.

Writers are the producers of my addiction. I wonder if they know the misery they create. Writers can be happy: after all, they only work on one or two books at a time. Readers, on the other hand, have at least 7.5 books going all the time. Actually, the number of books a reader takes on is usually directly related to the number of bathrooms he has in his home and office. I am working on a survey that will prove that, over a lifetime, readers are in bathrooms seven years and three months longer than nonreaders.

What’s to become of librophiliacs like me? Who can say? Miserere. For the moment, I’m in control. The only book in my study not read is my $120 dictionary. It is the only book I’ve been able to read one word at a time. But then, the plot is sluggish, the pictures are small, and it jumps around so badly the mind wanders, especially in the k’s and q’s.

The Student’s Calling

Leland Ryken

College should be more than tomorrow’s meal ticket.

College should be more than tomorrow’s meal ticket.

“Education is not a preparation for life—it is life.” So claims a headline in one college’s promotional brochure.

Several recent books have explored how our culture robs children of a childhood exempt from adult experiences. Today’s college students suffer from a similar trend.

College was once a time of preparation in which young adults could search for truth, broaden their intellectual and cultural horizons in multiple directions, and decide what vocation best suited their talents. Today they are pressured to regulate their college years around the job they think they have the best chance of landing upon graduation. In the process, students are increasingly turning their backs on the subjects that interest them most, which may be the areas where their greatest potential contribution to society lies.

Advertisements for colleges increasingly picture students in front of computer terminals. “One of our fastest-growing majors,” these colleges proclaim, hoping to send out the message that they can produce technicians with a marketable skill.

Today’s college students are caught in an identity crisis. Their instincts as learners pull them in one direction, while voices of activism and a preoccupation with landing a job pull them in another. It was once an axiom that education was a preparation for something in the future. Today young people are made to feel guilty about being in a preparation phase.

The time has come to revive an idea that once seemed natural: the student’s life as a Christian calling. By calling I mean vocation—the occupation of being a student. It is not an idea that students alone need to hear. My remarks are intended for anyone who rubs shoulders with young people: pastor, parents, or friends.

When we begin to describe the ingredients of the student’s life as a calling, we quickly start to formulate a theory of education as well. Some methods of education measure up to the description of that calling, while others do not.

This should not surprise us, for as T. S. Eliot once noted, “We must derive our theory of education from our philosophy of life. The problem turns out to be a religious problem” (“Modern Education and the Classics”).

What Is Education For?

In one important way, a Christian student’s calling is the same as it is for a Christian in any situation of life. Its central focus is the individual’s relationship to God. Loving and serving God should be the foundation for everything else that a student does at college. It is a requirement, not an elective.

When the Puritans founded Harvard College just six years after arriving in Massachusetts, one of the rules at the new college was this: “Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well [that] the main end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ …, and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning.”

When Thomas Shepard’s son entered the college, he wrote to his son, “Remember the end of your life, which is coming back again to God, and fellowship with him.”

And in that noblest of all educational treatises, John Milton’s Of Education, Milton gave this definition of Christian education: “The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him.”

Contrary to trends in our own century, Milton here defines education in terms of its end or goal. There may be many ways to achieve a Christian education, but in the meantime we must not lose sight of what it is for. What it is for is to produce Christian growth.

Albert Einstein once remarked that we live in a day of perfect means and confused goals. When we obscure the goals of education, we trivialize it. It is no wonder that students today so easily reduce education to completing the required number of courses, obtaining a degree (but often not an education), and—in that most irritating of all student clichés—getting a requirement out of the way.

Our whole milieu has conditioned students to conceive of their education in measurable quantities, with grades and jobs upon graduation topping the list. But to conceive of the student’s calling in Christian terms—to view it (as Milton did) as a process of redemption and sanctification—is to substitute an entirely different agenda of concerns. Here the crucial question is not how many requirements students have met nor even how much they know, but rather what kind of person they are in the process of becoming during their college years.

The nurture of one’s soul is finally a more important part of the student’s calling than is obtaining marketable skills. I said at the outset that my description of the Christian student’s calling would be at the same time a theory of education. Education governed by a goal of Christian nurture obviously means Christian education, however it might be achieved.

All Of Life Is God’s

A second cornerstone of the Christian student’s calling is the premise that all of life is God’s. There is no division of life into sacred and secular. For a Christian, all of life is sacred.

What goes on in a college chapel is not more glorifying to God than what goes on in the classroom. What goes on in the classroom is not more important to God than what goes on in the dorm room or the dining hall. We have no basis for viewing some academic courses as sacred and others as secular. Nor are some academic majors holier than others. God calls Christians to make his will prevail in every area of life.

As a variation on that theme, we should be convinced that all truth is God’s truth. In the New Testament, Paul several times quotes with approval from pagan Greek poets whom he apparently knew by heart. In his commentary on one of these passages, John Calvin wrote, “All truth is from God; and consequently, if wicked men have said anything that is true and just, we ought not to reject it; for it has come from God.”

Thomas Shepard wrote to his son at college, “Remember that not only heavenly and spiritual and supernatural knowledge descends from God, but also all natural and human learning and abilities; and therefore pray much, not only for the one but also for the other.”

The integration of every academic discipline with the Christian faith is an essential part of the Christian student’s calling. It is the differentiating feature of Christian higher education today. That ideal should not be confused with the situation of a Christian student’s attending a public college and gaining spiritual sustenance through a Christian fellowship group. A college is not Christian by virtue of having chapel services. By the same token, a weekly meeting with a Christian student group on a university campus is not the same as an education in which the very curriculum is structured to view human knowledge from a Christian perspective.

Liberal Arts Education

It is an easy step—I would say an inevitable step—from the idea that all of life is God’s to the idea of a liberal arts education. Liberal education is comprehensive education. Martin Luther wrote to the councilmen of Germany, “If I had children and could manage it, I would have them study not only languages and history, but also singing and music together with the whole of mathematics.… The ancient Greeks trained their children in these disciplines; … they grew up to be people of wondrous ability, subsequently fit for everything.”

“Fit for everything”: that has always been the goal of liberal education, as distinct from vocational training in a specific field.

Milton’s definition is even more famous. He defined “a complete and generous education” as one that “fits a man to perform … all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.” The heart of Milton’s definition is that a complete education frees a person to perform “all the offices” of life. A liberal education prepares people to do well all that they might be called to do in life.

May I say parenthetically that such an education is possible only as students realize that all education is ultimately self-education. Education is learning, and someone else cannot learn for a person. The most perfect educational climate in the world will not make someone an educated person. An adequate education does not stop after one’s college years. To be generously educated is to have acquired the lifelong habit of self-education.

What are the “private and public” roles that Milton had in view when he defined liberal education? Education in our day is obsessed with a single public role, that of job, which is increasingly defined in terms of one’s income. But the public roles that a person fills cover much more than that. They include being a good church member, a good board member or committee member, and a positive contributor to the community. One of the tests that I apply to people’s education is whether they can teach a good Sunday school class.

And what are the private roles of life for which an education should prepare a person? They include being a good friend or colleague, and a good spouse or parent. And they include the most private world of all—the inner world of the mind and imagination. One of the best tests of whether people are liberally educated is what they do with their free time.

Let’S Be Practical

The liberal arts education I have described is not necessarily more Christian than other types of education, but it is more practical. More practical? Surely we all know that liberal arts education is impractical in today’s specialized world. But do we? In a rapidly changing world, how can anyone know what he or she will be doing 5 or 10 or 20 years from now?

Several years ago I spoke at a conference where I had dinner with a couple who had graduated from a Christian liberal arts college several years earlier. During their college years, she had gone on a summer missions program and he had been an intern in a social work program. Both had come back from those experiences painfully aware of the needs that exist right now. Their activism had led them through a time of intellectual lethargy in which they regarded their academic courses as misspent time.

Two years later both could speak with regret about the wasted time that their attitude had in the long run produced. She was a resident director in a dorm on a university campus, holding weekly meetings with Christian students who were trying to relate their studies to their Christian faith. The liberal arts courses that she had regarded as impractical were now exactly what she most needed. Her fiance was trying to make up for what he had neglected in college by taking a year of science courses at a university near home, trying to raise his MCAT scores so he could get into medical school.

The intellectual aspect of a student’s calling is a foundation that is worthy of every student’s best effort. There is still much to commend the wisdom and practicality of T. S. Eliot’s theory that “no one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest—for it is a part of education to learn to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.”

The Legitimacy Of Preparation

We live at a time when education is regarded in such a utilitarian way that its legitimacy finally depends on its being a ticket to a job. In recent years I have seen pathetic examples of parents putting so much pressure on students to know exactly what job they expect to enter upon graduation that the student could not possibly avoid feeling guilty about taking time for an education.

Parents and advisers to young people need to stop making students feel guilty about being in a period of preparation. When God calls people to a task, he also calls them to a time of preparation. This preparation time, moreover, is as important as performance of the task.

What should we say about the hours it takes to prepare for a sermon or Sunday school class or lecture or term paper or ball game or recital? Is this time and effort somehow ignoble? Does God turn his head the other way when a person prepares?

Jesus did not begin his earthly ministry until the age of 30, living until that time as an obscure carpenter in an out-of-the-way village. We might protest: Think of all the people he could have preached to and healed between the ages of 20 and 30.

Moses spent 40 years of his life being educated in the court of Pharaoh, receiving the best education his day afforded. Then he spent 40 years in Midian, from a human point of view rotting away in exile, but actually being prepared for wilderness survival, the skill he needed to lead the Iraelites from Egypt to the promised land.

According to Galatians 1:17, Paul, upon his conversion, did not at once become an evangelist. Instead, he spent three years in Arabia and Damascus being instructed in the gospel.

Learning, in whatever form, is the student’s calling. It is the arena within which students display good stewardship or lack of it.

Several years ago I entered my office to find the following letter that had been slipped under my door: “I do not know where to begin, except I am preparing for the next test. I tried reading late into three successive evenings and found myself moving in and out of consciousness. I fell behind early after the first exam. This year I am heavily involved in the community. I am trying to wean myself from college life (not studying). College is just a transition period (a period of preparation). This term I have four reading courses, 20–30 hours in a ministry, a job, and meetings almost every night, and two speaking engagements a week.”

What was this person’s problem? An inadequate view of the student’s calling. And where did he get it? From his pastor, his family, some of his fellow students, and a general atmosphere that denigrates the idea of intellectual preparation for one’s eventual vocation in life.

During one’s college years, being a student is one’s vocation. That occupation involves more than studying, but studying is by definition its major ingredient.

Education And The Mission Of The Church

The Christian student is not peripheral but central to the church’s mission. The future health of the Christian church depends on the quality of its young people’s education now. After all, tomorrow’s Christian leaders are being molded today.

A number of recent surveys have shown that the majority of today’s college students are primarily concerned to get out of school and find a lucrative job. Students will do almost anything for a good grade, but zeal for learning is currently at a low ebb. Can Christian education offer a vigorous alternative to the national trend?

It can if it protects what I have called the student’s life as a Christian calling. In a sermon entitled “Learning in War-Time,” C. S. Lewis compared the Christian student’s calling to the soldier’s life. The Christian church, he said, cannot survive without Christian students taking time for an education.

“To be ignorant and simple now,” Lewis said, “would be to throw down our weapons, and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.”

John Calvin said that God’s calling is the sense of duty that God gives us to enable us to reject what is superfluous. In Calvin’s terms, vocation is a sentry that spares us from distractions to our main task.

There is much that would divert young people today from getting a high-quality education. The strongest antidote to the forces of activism, utilitarianism, materialism, and anti-intellectualism is a renewed commitment to the dignity of the student’s life as a Christian calling.

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