As a result of our new control over TV we can watch it less and we watch it constructively.

Our family decided it was time to stop talking about television’s potential for harm and do something about it. We considered: (1) Selling or destroying our set; but children of families who try that watch at someone else’s house, and control is thus one step farther from the parent. (2) Being selective about what we watch; but on prime-time evening hours often this only gives you a choice between various suggestive, violent, and sexually explicit shows. (3) Doing family things together; but often it’s too wintery to go on a family outing or we aren’t always in the mood to play a family game or read books together, especially when our three-year-old is active.

We looked for a workable alternative that would let our preteens feel privileged, not punished. For us the answer is a video cassette recorder (VCR). We play what we judge the very best programs. Add an occasional rented videotape, and a birthday party or slumber party becomes special. It costs less ($4.00) to rent a top movie like Superman than it does to buy the refreshments when we go to a theater.

With our children’s cooperation, we choose what moral impressions we will allow the tube to put out. If our three-year-old sleeps through “Sesame Street” or “Mr. Rogers,” we put on a tape of either and he is happy. Our family enjoys religious drama, but we aren’t awake in the wee morning hours when Emmy-Award-winning This Is the Life is broadcast in our area. The timer on our VCR turns the unit on, records the show, and we replay it at our convenience.

Saturday morning cartoons, often called TV’s most violent hours, once kept our children entranced. Now they usually give way to a replay of Sound of Music, “Little House on the Prairie,” “Star Trek,” or “Those Amazing Animals.”

Conflicts between homework and TV have ceased. If something worthwhile is on, the children gladly do their home work, because we tape the show for replay Friday night or Saturday morning.

Taping costs are not unreasonable. We record six hours of material on a $15 videotape. We paid $850 for a fully portable A.C./battery-operated, 11-pound VCR. Used standard table-top models go for $350 and up. As a result of our new control over TV, we watch it less and we watch it constructively.

Our church has also discovered a new ministry with television. We tape our services for replay in nursing homes and hospitals; we do the video recording with a camera stationed in the balcony. We experimented with various cameras until we found one that gives us good color reproduction, but does not require floodlights, and is slightly larger than a home movie camera.

Most of the recording is done by teen-agers and young adults, who enjoy having this dimension of spiritual ministry. Other volunteers take the video recorder to nursing homes, introduce the service, and visit briefly. People appreciate not only watching the service, but also the personal conversations afterwards. In hospitals, videotapes are broadcast on closed-circuit TV systems.

Of course, this TV ministry does not replace pastoral visits. We have found the TV services give an unusual midweek opportunity for worship. In addition to the worship services, we are planning to tape adult Bible study and membership classes.

DENNIS TEGTMEIER¹Mr. Tegtmeier is pastor of First Lutheran Church, Papillion, Nebraska.

An informed and impassioned argument on such a critical issue deserves the best possible chance.

The people at Franky Schaeffer V Productions continue their ministry to “change the course of history” through the prolife message of Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (CT, Aug. 17, 1979, p. 28). Most recently they have edited their nearly five-hour, five-episode film dramatization of man’s declining dignity in society into a 90-minute videotape version aimed at local television programming. For any group or individual interested in purchasing the necessary air time and covering the production costs of the materials, Franky Schaeffer and his team will provide the tape, promotional literature, and guidance for gaining inclusion in local station programming.

In the following review, Prof. Mel Lorentzen offers his evaluation of the revised format.

Since the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973 legalizing abortion, the Nazi German Holocaust toll—the systematic murder of 6 million Jews—has been duplicated in America. This is evidenced by the number of thriving human fetuses scraped out of the uterus, or broken to bits by suction methods, or shriveled by poisonous saline injection, or delivered alive only to be deliberately starved in some untended corner of a hospital lab.

Surgeon Everett Koop of Philadelphia and guru Francis Schaeffer of L’Abri are justly appalled and apprehensive over this. Their thesis in the 90-minute television adaptation of their five-hour film series, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, seems to be that legalized abortion on demand is both symptomatic and promoting of the bestializing of the human race. The agitation of environmentalists to preserve snail darters and porpoises, while human offspring are unconscionably massacred, is cited as a representative distortion of our values system.

Their joint presentation has several strengths: (1) As renowned surgeon-in-chief at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, Koop musters convincing professional evidence that the fetus is, in fact, a living being with physiological and neurological attributes and instincts that are characteristically human. (2) Numerous heartwarming testimonials by fulfilled and happy individuals with major, even monstrous, genetic or birth defects, reinforce the case for allowing and assisting handicapped persons to transcend their limitations and to become useful members of society. (3) Logical inconsistency is exposed in attitudes that advocate extraordinary measures to save the lives of premature babies, while healthy prebirth babies of the same size are destroyed by abortion; or, that plead for the rescue of imperiled infants and children in deprived cultures while sanctioning deliberate starvation of healthy newborns in our own society. (4) Schaeffer, in his customary role of “theolosopher,” thoroughly rings the changes on a biblical view of man, with the imago Dei doctrine rigorously related to the “right to life” controversy. (5) The logical extension of selective death to euthanasia—the calculated disposal of the elderly and incapacitated—is forcefully compared with Nazi atrocities.

If the film aspires to make an impact on popular opinion, however, one could wish its shortcomings were not so obvious. To invade television, an entertainment medium, with so solemn and portentous a message, poses an awesome challenge. With all due respect, Koop and Schaeffer are not Alistair Cook and Carl Sagan, to say nothing of Carson and Cronkite. As original writers and narrators of material, adapted by Schaeffer’s son Franky who produced the film, they report in lengthy segments not always easy to assimilate by listening. To complicate the problem of audience attention and absorption, endless self-conscious “optricks” clutter the cinematography. Schaeffer, Hobbit-like in goatee and knickers, delivers his monologues while perched with equal aplomb atop junked cars or on the portico of the Lincoln Memorial; Koop, in turn, broods above a surrealistic landscape of dolls at the site of ancient Sodom. From children playing dress-up to chain gangs of blacks, symbols keep getting in the way of substance.

One of the more successful sequences is an animated vaudeville interpretation of legalizing killing. Original lyrics of two songs late in the film also provide suitably acerbic social commentary.

Most seriously, the film is flawed as debate. Resorting frequently to shock and sentiment to make its own point, it slights some basic arguments of the proabortion militants—psychological, economic, and sociological factors that they interpret as humanitarian concerns. These two Christian authorities seem not to anticipate certain obvious questions featured in current discussions. They apparently count too much on the theological/anthropological case for the sacredness of life, without considering that their audience is not attuned to biblical norms and not committed to Christian mores.

Perhaps their noble purpose is better served in the original full-length, five-part series, which can be shown over a period of time in settings where viewers can interact in follow-up dialogue. As a 90-minute television special, however, it may accomplish too little by attempting too much. One wonders whether its thrust might be more supercharged in a 30-minute version. The informed and impassioned argument of these two men on such a critical issue deserves the best possible chance to get at a thinking public.

Diversity is perhaps the key word to describe the survey results.

If it is true that we are what we eat, it is equally true that we are what we read. With this in mind, CHRISTIANITY TODAY informally surveyed about 40 evangelical leaders to find out what books, other than the Bible, they considered most helpful or influential in their personal lives or ministries. Each was asked to list five such books and to give a brief statement describing why these were considered important. We thought a “top ten” would surface, but that was not the case. What did emerge was a very complex picture that shows how varied are the interests today of evangelicals at the leadership level.

Diversity is perhaps the key word to describe the survey results. Few books received more than one or two votes, so a list of the most influential books could not be compiled. It was possible to sort out the choices into four basic areas, from which large numbers of books were chosen: doctrinal theology, practical theology, general spirituality, and social issues.

Doctrinal theology. This was by far the largest category, with some 40 percent of the books chosen from it, including such topics as apologetics, Christology, systematics, God, language, holiness, kingdom of God. Scripture, and general surveys of doctrine. James M. Boice, pastor of Philadelphia’s Tenth Presbyterian Church, made this comment about The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, by B. B. Warfield: “This classic exposition of the Bible’s witness to its inspiration, authority, and inerrancy has been foundational to the way I have approached Scripture in my own daily work.” The Proper Distinction Between Law and Gospel, by C. F. W. Walther, elicited this statement from J. A. O. Preus, president of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod: “This book taught me more about preaching and respect for the Word of God and the proper distinction of law and gospel in preaching than any book I have ever read. It still affects every sermon I preach.”

Practical theology. About 27 percent of the books selected were from this category, and included such topics as: preaching, worship, prayer, and discipleship.

John Huffman, minister of Saint Andrew’s Presbyterian church, Newport Beach, California, found Building the Word—The Dynamics of Communication in Preaching, by J. Randall Nichols, to be especially helpful: “He made me reexamine every one of my homiletical presuppositions. Most of them are still in place, but I will never view them in quite the same way again.”

General spirituality. This covered approximately 20 percent of the selections and included a wide range of topics dealing with the Christian life. An example is Ruth Paxon’s Life on the Highest Plain. Pastor Jess Moody of First Baptist Church, Van Nuys, California, said of it: “This book introduced me to enthroning Jesus Christ at the center of my life and taught me the sources of spiritual and evangelical magnetism.”

Social issues. Fourth on the list were the 13 percent chosen from this category. James Earl Massey of the Mass Communications Board of the Church of God selected Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited, dealing with social issues. He said, “This book, published in 1949, helped me to see the experiences of Jesus in connection with the teachings he gave about handling life as a member of a minority race in the midst of a sometimes hostile majority culture.”

It is significant that books on theology played such an important role in shaping these leaders’ views. It indicates that far from being passé, theology is alive and actively influencing thinking evangelicals today. It is also significant that on the whole, academic rather than popular books were selected by about 8 to 1—for example, Systematic Theology, by Louis Berkhof. Of it, Clayton Bell, pastor of Highland Park Presbyterian Church in Dallas, says, “This comprehensive but concise systematic theology has been a continued and helpful reference book.”

Very few respondents said they were influenced to any degree by such nontechnical books as In His Steps or The Screwtape Letters. It is also interesting to observe that more than half the books chosen were written before 1945 and that relatively few (about 10 percent) were written within the last 10 years. Whether this means our leaders stopped reading as they grew older and could only remember the influence of earlier books upon them, or that more recent books have had less of an impact upon them because they are more mature now and less open to influence, or that fewer significant books are being written now, is hard to say. I have an idea it is the second alternative.

It is not surprising, but still noteworthy, that almost no one chose any books that are mass marketed or on the so-called best-seller lists, Christian or otherwise. This shows a rather wide gulf between what the average evangelical reads and what evangelical leaders think is important. The same is true for topics. Subjects that seem to have vital interest for the mass market, such as charismatic gifts or the Second Coming, did not receive a single selection. This would seem to indicate that these are settled issues in the minds of the leaders, but unsettled issues elsewhere.

The diversity of authors chosen was as striking as the diversity of topics. The largest percentage of authors chosen were evangelicals (about 70 percent), but others were selected as well. Writers such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, G. Delling, P. T. Forsyth, John Baillie, and even Harry Emerson Fosdick and S. I. Hayakawa appear. The standard evangelical writers appear in abundance, of course, and Carl F. H. Henry, Wilbur M. Smith. F. F. Bruce, B. B. Warfield, John Stott, C. H. Spurgeon, G. Campbell Morgan, and A. T. Robertson are among these.

There was a surprising absence of any mention of theological classics from such writers as Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Luther, or Wesley. Calvin’s Institutes was mentioned once, but that was the exception to the rule.

There seemed to be no denominational preferences displayed. Books were apparently chosen on merit rather than the label worn by reader or writer.

The areas that produced no significant books are as interesting as those that did. There was no book selected as “most significant” from psychology, sociology, statistical studies, missions, or church growth. Very few books were chosen from the categories of science, counseling, commentaries, classics, or church history. There seems to be no pattern here, except that the social sciences and allied disciplines did not fare too well.

One book does stand out above the rest, having received five votes: C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. Ray Stedman’s comment is typical, “It gave me great confidence in the truth of Scripture and its relevancy to life.”

It would be difficult to summarize all that came from this survey, but here are a few generalizations that would appear to be warranted:

• Evangelical leaders spend a good deal of time with books.

• A wide range of subjects is deemed important.

• Evangelicals find other evangelicals to be most important—but not exclusively.

• Doctrinal theology, practical theology, and spirituality are the most significant areas in which books were chosen.

• The social sciences were the least significant areas.

• Academic books outpolled popular books by a large margin.

• Older books were considered more significant than very recent books, also by a large margin.

• Best sellers don’t sell very well to leaders.

What is causing our world’s descent into moral chaos? In his article in the last issue Dr. Outler looked beneath symptoms to the root cause: radical secularism has rejected the sacred and deified the human. Paradoxically, by losing the sacred it has lost the truly human as well. The solution is found not in a return to the sacral tyrannies of Tutankhamen or Innocent III, but in the justifying faith that grounds God’s sacred order in the texture of Christian freedom.

In this article, Dr. Outler presents more precise proofs of secularism’s failure, including its devastation of the realms of law and of marriage. He sees its answers—the cults of “success,” psychological nostrums, and secular supernaturalism—as merely the self-centered reciprocal of the loss of the sacred. But in Romans 8 we find the gospel answer: a return to the sacred through Jesus Christ.

Since time immemorial, the sense of the sacred has connoted a specific human sensibility of the transcendent (this was Rudolf Otto’s main point). Homo sapiens is, by his Creator’s design, homo religiosus. Of all God’s creations, the human uniquely bears the image of God. Even in its defacement by sin, this has not been totally eradicated; and insofar as it continues to exist, it defines “the human.” This means that human life and society have always been sacralized in some sense and in some measure—and still are, even if now only latently. There is no truly human self-awareness apart from an accompanying awareness of being grasped by, immersed in, suffused with, the sacred order.

There is a consensus to this effect among most historians of religion—men as diverse as Émile Durkheim, Julian Haynes, Gerardus Van Der Leeuw, Mircea Eliade, Geoffrey Parrinder, even Claude Lévi-Strauss (to name 6 of 60). The greatest of these, Professor Eliade, has spoken of the contrasts between the sacral values in archaic cultures and “the ultimate stages of desacralization” in the modern Western world.

And they also all agree that the loss of the sacred is never complete, even in a radically desacralized society. To be human at all is to have some sense of transcendence, if only as a function of the paradox that lies between the infinitude of human aspiration and those two grim brackets of our finitude: birth and death.

One need not take this scenario of Paradise Lost too seriously to acknowledge Milton’s central thesis: the essential human tragedy comes from the corruption of the human beset by a superstitious belief in the autonomy of the creature. For this was also the burden of the biblical polemic against idolatry—including the prophetic condemnations of the idolatrous corruptions of religion itself. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam quickly discovered how subtly religious awe, reverence, and submission may be corrupted when married to the pomp and exaltation and arrogance of secular power. The glistening splendors of the Byzantine court blinded many a pious eye to the sodden mudsills of humanity on which that splendor rested. The heights of a Gothic cathedral blurred one’s sight of the huddled misery around its base. This insensitivity of the sacred hierarchy to the stifled cries of God’s poor thus triggered the reckless desacralizations that have issued in the shambles of secularism in which we now stand.

We cannot, of course, go back. But then, neither need we any longer defend the abuses that desacralization has brought with it. The Communist Manifesto was passionately humanitarian: but what has happened to the human cause in Marxist countries? The Secular City, The Greening of America, Where the Wasteland Ends were all cheerful projections of new human harmonies. But who can walk the streets of any “secular city” without a leaden heart or physical fear? Who doubts that America, instead of “greening,” is in “the sere and yellow leaf”? Where does the human wasteland end—and when?

Protestant liberalism spawned a whole series of what now seem wildly unrealistic enchantments. As Symonds wrote: “These things shall be: a nobler race / Than e’er the world hath known shall rise / … / They shall be gentle, brave and strong.” Try singing this after your weekly round with Time, Newsweek, U.S. News, and National Catholic Reporter!

The truth is that the reduction of theology to anthropology has served neither the cause of God nor of man very well. There is a new sense of autonomy abroad, but with it have come new enslavements and new impotencies. The triumphs of technology have loosed upon us demonic forces (inflation, domestic disorders, impending new holocausts) that threaten human survival on this fragile, lonesome planet.

True, there has been gain in many of the emancipations from the older oppressions, supported as they were by legalism, sacerdotalism, moralism, and even by those guilt trips that drive neurotics to the psychiatrists. But who foresaw how devastating a plague upon the human spirit these new antinomianisms would be? What has all this led us to? And what more, and worse, still lies ahead? What else besides a haunted feeling of being at the end of an era ushered in by Hume and Gibbon and Kant and Voltaire (or in still another possible scenario, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx)?

We have moved from the mindset in which, even for a deist, it seemed fit enough to speak of men and women being created (“endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights …”); to the settled conviction that humanity is on its own in an impersonal, natural matrix; to the paradox of believing that we are, after all, masters of our fate, captains of our souls—and yet not inrictus in any sense that matters in the end.

We have moved from a mindset in which the sacred order was defined as “The Kingdom of God” to a brazen narcissism in which the human potential has been translated into utopian subjunctives: you can be happy—or rich, or whatever—if only … We have “progressed” from a milieu that found its sonorities in Bach’s B Minor Mass to the flamboyant exaltation of the Verdi Requiem to Mahler’s agonizing triumph in his Second (Resurrection) Symphony to Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, and finally to Monty Python’s Life of Brian (about which we are told that it’s only good, clean fun, and that Christians ought to be broad-minded enough to laugh at a clever, sacrilegious joke).

Law

We are witnesses to a massive shift from the original notion of a free church in a free state to the increasingly hostile interventions of judicial opinions and civil regulations. These control what may be studied of religion in the schools. They determine when human life begins and ends, and how defenseless lives (if labeled “unwanted”) may be disposed of. All of this supports ethical relativism, and relegates religion to the margins of public policy.

For good or ill, divine law and civil law here have been linked from the beginning of time. The majesty of the law came, at least in large part, from its acknowledged analogies to the sacred order itself. We need not wonder at the fact that even civil law has lost its majesty since it has come to be regarded as manmade, as whatever the legislators vote and the judges opine. In the realm of social control, we must conclude, the results of the loss of the sacred are devastating to human law.

Marriage

It is at least as bad in the domain of marriage and the family. Surely our most crucial analog to the sacred order is the family, that unique human matrix where persons may live out their very different lives, each to its full potential. In the family as evolved in the Judeo-Christian tradition we can rightly acknowledge the sacredness of the human self in all its mystery (inception, emergence, maturation, exit).

In the human species, the family is an exceptionally stressful syndrome, involving unavoidable interpersonal relationships, with irreducible inequalities of various sorts, and yet also with the possibilities of equal belonging and full mutuality.

So matrimony has to be “holy” or it is tragically unholy; only a sacred covenant can hold its career on a relatively steady course. Only selves who hold each other sacred can sanctify sex. Only selves who hold human selfhood sacred can be motivated to safeguard the rights of the unborn, the newborn. Only when we live life in a sacred order are we compensated for the drudgeries of child rearing, the fearful hazards of growing up, the cruel traps of middle age, the appalling loneliness of old age.

Stultify the sacred character of this most difficult and most rewarding of all human commitments, as we have, and things are bound to fall apart. Marriages may then be regarded as provisional and sex becomes less sacred, more sensual. A correlation between the loss of the sacred and the loss of the fully human becomes empirically verifiable.

Self-Centered Substitutes

Any such “loss of the sacred” naturally generates a plethora of substitutes, all sharing the common character of self-centeredness. The sense of the sacred implies a sense of Another—and this becomes the ground, not only for one’s self-relating to the sacred Other, but to other selves as also sacred (which is to say, to an ethic that is neither hedonistic nor depersonalized, but religious, in the literal sense of demanding a response of obedience. The loss of the sacred, therefore, calls out and “justifies” the whole adventure of self-salvation. There are three current aspects of this increasingly desperate adventure.

In the beginning, there was the cult of positive thinking. From Coué to Carnegie to Erhard and Wayne Dyer, one can trace a progression of banalities, all devoted to “success”—subjectively defined and self-achieved.

But the pursuit of success suffers the same final frustrations as the pursuit of moral perfection described in Romans 7—partial success is no more finally fulfilling than partial obedience to the Law. And yet all the worldly “success” we ever know is partial; in the nature of the case, there is never enough for the secular man or woman. The over-reacher always ends up stultified by his shortfalls. Every program of self-salvation comes finally to the despair of Romans 7:18—“the will to do good may be there, but the power to get it done is not.” This is bound to be disconcerting to those who had been promised self-salvation.

Closely akin to these worshipers of “success” are the evangelists of redemption by one psychological nostrum or another. This is the hugely successful renaissance of an old tradition: Gnosticism. By secret wisdom one may tap his innate potential by some formula or cultic program. Martin Gross has provided us with a sort of annotated catalogue of currently fashionable gnostic sects in The Psychological Society. The range is fascinating: from the high-minded gurus of freedom and inner directedness (Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow) to the hard-eyed egocentrism of Werner Erhard to the soft-headed cheerfulness of Tom Harris to the laid-back spontaneities of Esalen.

At least two things are obvious in every case. First, all are escapist routes from specifically bourgeois miseries. Second, the ethics of these sectarians are uncompromisingly secularistic in their premises. Philip Rieff can finally come up with nothing more realistic than an appeal for an ethics of decency and decorum—as if he had never heard of Romans 7:18.

But the nearest thing to a secular substitute for the recovery of a false sense of the sacred in these days may be found in secular supernaturalism. Here we see a boom in astrology, new “turnings to the East,” new claims for transcendental meditation, new forms of sorcery, new explorations in parapsychology, and the old pretensions of “Scientology,” and so on. The shared promise of all these is a revision of that promise made long ago to our first parents: “You will not really die [if you disregard the sacred order]; actually you will be godlike yourselves” (a slightly loose but not inaccurate translation of Gen. 3:4). That such a lie should last so long and take so many shapes in human history points us toward the very heart of “the mystery of iniquity” (2 Thess. 2:7).

Here then is my thesis: The loss of the sacred in our time and the upsurge of self-sufficiency are reciprocals—and this is a massive new chapter in a long, tragic history.

Despite all the cheerful promises of “progress,” it is finally clear that none of the great human issues has yet been resolved to our lasting benefit. For all the consciousness raisings we have had on this aspect of human indignity, or that, for all our fine frenzies of moral indignation, our actual gains toward peace and plenty and happiness seem disproportionately low.

Thus far the loss of the sacred in our time; thus far the human wasteland of godlessness; thus far the loss of faith in God’s self-disclosure in Jesus Christ, the lack of assurance that the Paraclete is our sufficient reliance; thus far the gathering dusk of another dark age, a setting for another Boethius; thus far the delusions of human self-sufficiency; thus far our reenactment of Romans 1 and 2.

The Future

We could speak of the human prospect only in tears were it not for our faith in the lordship of Jesus Christ, together with our memories and expectations of various “surprises of the Spirit” and the solid, sure serenity that breathes through Romans 8.

In looking to the future, we must make careful distinctions between any idea of recovering the sense of sacred order within scattered enclaves of the Spirit and a renewed commitment of the whole Christian community to God’s kingdom and his righteousness (which always includes our love of our neighbor in God).

We must not settle for anything less than our best wisdom, our best-tested faith, our truest love. We must ask ourselves and each other what we have to say about the possibility of a really radical shift in the basic sensibilities in our society—away from the miasmas of narcissism to yet another awakening in the Spirit with its fresh and controlling sense of the sacred. What would it take to renew faith in God’s immanent rule of righteousness in human life and society, to reenlist Christians for new patterns of disciplined life in witness, service, and dauntless hope?

The whole of Romans 8 is the great alternative clue to the recovery of the full richness of the sacred order in which we, and humanity, may come to live again, and truly. Notice how Saint Paul’s argument has moved from the flat-voiced doomsaying in 1:18–2:29, through a terse exposition of the evangelical mystery of God’s free pardon for Christ’s sake appropriated by faith alone, to a restatement of the human condition in the pitiless realism of chapter 7.

Then in chapter 8 Paul shouts out that people liberated by the Spirit live “in the Spirit” because that Spirit dwells within them (v. 9). This is his description of life in the sacred order, in the kingdom of God. It is a life in which the Spirit attests our sonship with our heavenly Father, since, far from the primal dread in the presence of God, the Spirit-filled person may speak to the Almighty as “Abba.” This is the commanded life that still has its ordeals in tragic plenty, its modicums of heroism, its repeated frustration in good causes that may not triumph. But it is a life with no final despair, since we now live in an unshakable certitude that nothing in all creation “shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Maybe the time has come again to take Saint Luke seriously about his subjunctive in 18:17: “Should anyone not accept the kingdom of God [the sacred order] as a child he will simply never enter it at all.”

After a bitter prodigal’s journey into the same far country of godlessness we have been exploring, one derelict-tumed-Christian-poet was redeemed to write “The Hound of Heaven.” He also left a poem so nearly private that it went unpublished till found in his papers after his death. But Francis Thompson’s “In No Strange Country” is yet another way of evoking our sense of the sacred which, however lost, may yet be recovered to humanity’s great gain!

But when so sad thou canst not sadder,

Cry;—and upon thy so sore loss

Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder

Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

Yea, in the night, my soul, my daughter

Cry—clinging Heaven by the hems;

And lo, Christ walking on the water

Not of Gennesareth, but Thames.

Is man’s behavior to be understood and accepted in terms of the selfish genes?

At the 1978 meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a group of protesters from the International Committee Against Racism marched into the final session of the seminar “Beyond Nature—Nurture.” They were shouting slogans against racism, sexism, fascism, and other social inequities. Believing Edward O. Wilson of Harvard was using science to maintain the social status quo, they doused him with a bucket of water, crying, “Wilson, you’re all wet!”

What had angered these people was the relatively new science, sociobiology, of which Wilson is a principle proponent through his monumental book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, published in 1975. According to the New York Times, Wilson has claimed that sociobiology is a well-established discipline of biology and has been for 25 years. The general public, however, and even most scientists, have not been aware of its growing influence until the last few years. Consistently applied, its principles can promote different moral standards for different situations. They view hypocrisy and deception (if undetected) as beneficial. And they can encourage abortions, euthanasia, and killing of malformed infant children. Apparently, according to Wilson, they might even lead to “worship” of the human brain.

Wilson defines sociobiology as “the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior.” By “biological basis” he refers specifically to genetics and ultimately to evolutionary theory. Sociobiology is the application of evolutionary theory not only to animals, but also to human social behavior.

Many view sociobiology as a return to nineteenth-century social Darwinism. It maintained the superiority of certain races and classes of people by utilizing the Darwinian principles of “struggle for survival” and “survival of the fittest.”

Until recently, social Darwinism has enjoyed little more than historical interest. It was the belief that Wilson was promoting a new type of social Darwinism, aimed at preserving the status quo and making social institutions like racism legitimate, that led to the demonstration against him.

Much of the current debate over sociobiology concerns the roles played by heredity and environment in shaping man’s behavior. According to evolutionary theory, these are the only two forces that have any effect upon determining who man is and how he behaves. More often than not, these two factors are seen as interacting in some combination.

Those who stress the biological factor (heredity) are often referred to as biological determinists. In 1851 Herbert Spencer said that starvation and poverty were nature’s way of cleansing society of the unfit. In 1940 the German writer Konrad Lorenz used his theories to call for eliminating certain parts of society deemed “undesirable.” The environmentalists, on the other hand, of whom an extremist would be B. F. Skinner, see human beings as extremely malleable. We need only determine the kind of society we desire and then create an environment that will foster it. This view contrasts sharply with sociobiology.

Each side in the debate is apparently reacting to what it sees as the possible loss of personal freedoms under the other’s system. Each seems to have discerned some of the other’s weaknesses. Environmentalists fear a conscience-numbing stamp of approval on the status quo and a deteriorating motive for social change. However, Wilson (though claiming not to be a strict biological determinist), is apparently wary of the concept of the infinitely malleable human being since it might be used to justify any social or economic system in vogue.

We can grasp the workings of sociobiology by understanding three concepts. First, human social patterns are said to be shaped by evolutionary processes acting on genes. Put another way, our genetic make-up influences our behavior, and that behavior is subject to natural selection just as physical characteristics may be.

Second, we must grasp what sociobiologist Robert Wallace, in his 1979 book, The Genesis Factor, calls the “Reproductive Imperative.” This “imperative” states that the ultimate goal of any organism, including the human organism, is to reproduce as many offspring as possible. Within the evolutionary system, the species simply strives to avoid extinction. It accomplishes this only through survival and reproduction.

The third concept is that, within evolutionary time, the individual is meaningless. This is because species, not individuals, evolve. The individual reproduces and dies, but its genes persist into the next generation. Therefore the genes, or DNA, become the unknowing driving force of the reproductive imperative. Biologists once said that a chicken is simply an egg’s way of making another egg. Wilson has modernized this, saying, “The organism is simply DNA’s way of making more DNA.” The organism exists for the sole purpose of making more DNA.

To clarify this, Wallace takes great pains to explain why parents love their children. They are simply the “genetic repositories” of the parents into the next generation. Love for children insures proper development of these genetic repositories so that they can later reproduce. In short, parents love their children because love produces effective reproducers. Through natural selection, “love your children” has become universal in humans because it works. It is an effective means for making more DNA.

Sociobiological concepts regarding man are startling and fascinating. Some sociobiologists have been extremely bold, predicting that eventually political science, law, economics, psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology will all be branches of sociobiology.

When its theory is applied to man, we discern a thin line between truth and error. In the last chapter of his book, Sociobiology, Wilson lays before us his view of man: who he is, why he is, and where he is going—or more precisely, where man will need to go in the future. Wilson begins by recognizing that man is anatomically unique in respect to the rest of the animal kingdom, yet he has no doubts that man’s behavior is to be understood in terms of the selfish genes. (The sociobiologist views all behavior as ultimately selfish.)

Much of the debate over sociobiology reviews the nature versus nurture controversy, nature referring to biology (heredity) and nurture to environment (culture). Acknowledging the seemingly endless variety of human social organizations, Wilson insists that the underlying basis for culture is genetic. Different cultures arise simply as different genetic strategies to achieve the same basic survival goals, which are already genetically determined.

In Sociobiology Wilson makes special note of two practices, which he sees as deep-rooted in every culture, and therefore assumes may have a genetic base: “Deception and hypocrisy are neither absolute evils that virtuous men suppress to a minimum level nor residual animal traits waiting to be erased by further social evolution. They are very human devices for conducting the complex daily business of social life.… Complete honesty on all sides is not the answer.”

Because a person is out to promote his own genetic survival, it is to his advantage to get ahead by whatever means. The one who cheats “gets ahead.” The final standard of success then rests on whether he gets caught. If he does, those who were deceived will likely seek retribution and suddenly the cost may be greater than the benefit. However, if he remains undetected, the benefit is unaffected and that person has “done well.” It follows, then, that sociobiology views not our acts themselves, but their consequences, as what really matters. Consequences become only the focus of ethical value judgment; the act means virtually nothing.

In discussing the evolution of ethics, Wilson boldly suggests that the time has come to remove the field of ethics temporarily from the hands of philosophers and “biologicize” it. He refuses to use any absolute to guide moral decisions and blames such thinking for what he calls complex, intractable moral dilemmas.

To determine behavior and assess value, we will need moral standards for various sex and age groups as well as for whole populations, Wilson claims. He reasons that we should not subject people of different ages, sexes, and environments to the same code of ethics, because they are experiencing different situations (actually, “different selective pressures”).

The effect of a system of differing moral standards becomes evident when we consider certain medical practices such as abortion and euthanasia. For example, in Wilson’s futuristic scenario, humans will undoubtedly overpopulate the earth. When levels were low and environmental conditions good, sociobiology says the most profitable strategy was to reproduce in large numbers so that as many of one’s genes as possible were placed into the next generation. However, when population levels are high and food as well as other resources are scarce, a person had best not multiply himself too much and risk the loss of all his offspring. He is judged better off producing only the few offspring that he can adequately care for. So in an age of scarcity, those parents are sociobiologically preferred who have fewer but healthier children for whom they can provide. If parents do not need or want a pregnancy for economic, social, or genetic reasons, abortion becomes justified on the simple basis of cost-benefit analysis. A sociobiological analysis aims to keep the human population free of those who do not contribute, and the gene pool as free of genetic frailties as possible.

In the future the principles of sociobiology may well promote euthanasia. Those elderly adults past reproductive age and no longer able to contribute to the survival of family or society will have little biological value. Therefore, why spend valuable time and energy keeping them alive? That such a prospect can be legitimately drawn from sociobiological theory calls to mind the biological remedies to human problems in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. To sociobiology, perhaps Hitler’s ideas were only 40 years ahead of their time, although some of his methods may seem a bit crude.

It should come as no surprise that Wilson sees religions as human institutions that exist merely to further the fitness of its practitioners. For example, a member of a religious group benefits from his strong bond with other members of the group. He and all the other members perceive that the developing bond promotes cooperation, and such cooperation helps each to benefit personally (a mutual back-scratching arrangement). Indeed, strong human bonds almost guarantee a certain amount of cooperation and mutual advancement.

Since Wilson believes that the tendency toward religion is genetically based, he admits in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, On Human Nature (1978), that belief in a personal, moral God will not disappear. Instead, we should offer a new “mythology” in its place—scientific materialism, with the “evolutionary epic” at its core. Since every epic needs a hero, Wilson suggests the most complex evolutionary achievement he knows: the human brain. He also says the evolutionary epic can be adjusted until it comes as close to truth as the human mind is constructed to know truth.

If we inspect this closely, however, we are faced with a conundrum. According to Wilson’s view of evolution, the mind is simply a product of brain activity, the result of interaction between neurons and chemicals. How then can the brain, which he says is a construct of evolutionary processes functioning only to promote survival, be expected to recognize truth? C. S. Lewis, in Miracles, a Preliminary Study, has cited J. B. S. Haldane’s view on this very issue: “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true … and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.” The brain should be expected only to perceive the world around it in such a way as to further the survival of the species. Whether or not this perception is true is totally irrelevant from an evolutionary vantage point.

Sociobiology is the latest example of a periodic revival of the evolutionary religious vision. It views the whole of reality through an evolutionary lens. It degrades man; it degrades all things. Nonhuman things are anthropomorphized. Wilson does a disservice to biology by imparting to it human characteristics it does not have and cannot achieve. He would also have us believe our attributes should be “biologicized.” With all the arrogance of humanism concerning the prospect of a planned future society, Wilson essentially joins the vision of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Skinner’s Walden Two.

In On Human Nature Wilson sees mankind mapping out its own evolutionary course through eugenics (selective mating), genetic engineering (altering the molecular structure of the genes), and cloning (producing exact replicas of certain people). Man’s destiny is simply to gain knowledge, knowledge that will enable him to control his further evolution by producing a complete understanding of the human organism right down to the level of the neuron and gene. No doubt those who will assume supervision of this evolutionary process are the sociobiologists or others who supposedly have a fuller understanding of the biological issues involved.

Critics are legion. Some rightly accuse sociobiologists of resting their case on hypothetical genes—ones whose existence has not yet been verified. Others have hit hard at the methodologies and political motivations of sociobiologists. However, there are deeper, more serious issues. To approach the effect of heredity and environment on human nature from either angle exclusively, or from some combination of the two, is to reduce people to mere material that can be manipulated. Can we explain the whole person simply by reducing him to an interaction of heredity and environment? Or are we overlooking something?

Men and women can be conditioned by both their genetic constitution and the environment they inhabit. But this is not the sum total of what makes us human. Heredity and environment do not determine all that we are since man is man because God created male and female in his image. Our Creator has endowed us with a uniqueness that sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. To reduce our kind to mere molecules is to strip away our humanness; reductionism in any form removes the proper sense of identity. When we are viewed as having a purely mechanistic origin, we become dwarfed by the vastness of a meaningless universe; the basis for our significance is undermined. Faced with this dilemma, we find our initiative sapped, and lose all sense of responsibility and guilt.

Within a sociobiological system, the person possesses little value in evolutionary time. He is only a vehicle transmitting genetic information, and his only real value is in continuing the species. Wilson himself elaborates on this in On Human Nature: “If human kind evolved by Darwinian natural selection,” he says, “genetic chance and environmental necessity, not God, made the species.” Wilson interestingly calls this an unappealing proposition. He reasons that if this form of naturalism is true, it leaves the human species devoid of purpose. The human species, then, or any species for that matter, lacks guidance or goal beyond its own biological nature. There is no place to go.

The error within sociobiology lies in neither the data it presents nor the biological influences on social behavior it assumes. Rather, it errs in the evolutionary and philosophical grid through which it interprets its data. We agree, for instance, that deception and hypocrisy are a part of our present nature. In a fallen state our first concern is for ourselves. However, to herald this portion of human nature as something we should accept and almost encourage is a travesty. Should we rear our children to believe that cheating or lying is acceptable as long as they can get away with it? Scripture rejects such behavior. Further, Scripture requires that in all we do we should seek to do justly, love kindness, and walk humbly before God (Micah 6:8).

Wilson considers religion a paradox since “so much of its substance is demonstrably false, yet it remains a driving force in all societies.” Here again, he misses the point. It remains true that much of the substance of most religions is false. But religion’s persistence is not an evolutionary paradox. Rather, it points to our most basic need. Within us is a void only God can fill; we constantly search to fill that void. This answers the paradox. Our efforts to find God have gone awry in the past as they still do today, but our need for a relationship to our Creator has always been there and will remain until fulfilled by Jesus Christ.

Sociobiology follows logically from the naturalism of an evolutionary world view. This view presupposes either that God does not exist, or at least that he has no concern for the material world. The universe and all life found within it have evolved from random interaction of matter and energy over vast reaches of time. Consequently, in the human realm, no absolutes exist to guide moral decisions. Such a view denies our spiritual nature, and therefore reduces each of us to a meaningless blob in evolutionary time. Our only purpose, then, is to be an effective vehicle for the reproduction of a master molecule, DNA, by which we are enslaved. With such a world view, our search for meaning and hope can only end in despair, or we must opt for one of the many brands of irrational “hope” offered today.

The despair inherent in the sociobiological world view should lead us as Christians to examine our own hope. Scripture presents a universe created by God, peopled by men and women made in his image, and offered hope in the person of Jesus Christ. In contrast to sociobiology’s view that we are enslaved by a master molecule and our environment, the biblical world view assures us that in spite of our limitations we are free to love God and our neighbor, and free to be with Him forever. Sociobiology says that we are meaningless vehicles for carrying genetic material; Scripture declares that we are persons of enormous value to our Creator, and temples of the Holy Spirit. Although we live as finite earthen vessels in this life, we carry a precious treasure within as we wait for the return of our Savior. Then we will live in glorious new bodies forever with him.

Along with this hope, we also have a responsibility to tear down strongholds raised against the knowledge of God. Surely the naturalistic philosophy of secular sociobiology is such a stronghold, so we must take strong exception to it.

At the same time, however, we have a great deal to learn about genetic factors affecting animal and human social behavior. To know what to support and what to oppose, Christians involved in the social and biological sciences must be effective students of sociobiology. The popularity of sociobiology has gone unnoticed for too long already. We need precise and careful study as well as a watchful eye if we are to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.

After a false start and a three-year period of national reassessment of resources and industrial performance, China commences a new ten-year plan in 1981. Leaders and people alike genuinely look forward to China’s rapid modernization—hitherto delayed by the follies of the past regime and the resulting shortage of scientists, technologists, and foreign exchange.

Everyone, including Christians, is required to serve under the banner of the United Front. Christians, therefore, are enjoying a tolerance and even respect quite unthinkable a few years ago. Religion has become a respectable topic in academic circles.

Moreover, the mushrooming of household churches all over China, and the very large numbers of conversions among young people, make it clear that the church today is much larger than in 1951 when the missionaries withdrew. But the critical question is how Christians from the West should react to this changing situation.

“Facing the Future or Restoring the Past” is the title of an article by a leading Chinese Christian. For nearly 30 years the church has boasted of its independence of foreign financial support and foreign control. The “three autonomies” principle has been enforced and accepted. After a century of foreign imperialist exploitation the Chinese nation and the Chinese church are equally proud of having attained their own selfhood. Chinese Christians now fear any attempt, however well meaning, to turn the clock back to the prerevolutionary age of “missionary imperialism.” They demand to be treated as equals. They have forcefully expressed their fears and suspicions; they will carefully monitor the plans and activities of all Western agencies. They claim that they have outlived the era of Western denominationalism and they want no more of it.

All Christian organizations concerned with China should call an international conference as soon as possible to define clearly, and reach agreement on, the limits of possible action with regard to China. Such an agreement might include the following resolutions:

1. No action must be taken that is contrary to the laws of China.

2. No action must be contemplated that might endanger or embarrass Chinese Christians or risk punitive consequences.

3. No action must be taken that does not have the prior approval of a representative body of Christians in China.

4. No action must be taken on a denominational basis.

5. No action should be planned on the sole initiative of any one organization in order to avoid the scandal of rivalry, competition, adventurism, and one-upmanship.

6. No public statements or appeals for funds should be published without the approval of the coordinating agency.

7. No action should be taken involving the expenditure of Western money in China without the full consent of both coordinating bodies, in China and abroad.

One of the Three-Self principles was that of refusing U.S. money. The relaxation of strict Marxist principles and practices has led to a growing spirit of materialism in China, and this has already infected some Chinese Christians with a spirit of covetousness. Jealousy and division have arisen over the distribution of foreign money already sent. The unwise use of foreign money could be disastrous for a church experiencing spiritual revival.

The proper and wise course is to seek the closest possible consultation and cooperation among all groups burdened to help the Chinese church. A single international body should be formed. This body should make a united and official approach to an equally representative church body or body of Christians in China. The international body would seek the fullest possible discussion and advice from its Chinese counterpart about how to aid the Chinese church. If foreign agencies act prematurely, without full consultation, and by-pass the existing church and its leaders, it will be disastrous.

Among the possible forms of aid are:

1. The supply of Bibles, literature, teaching aids, and the replacement of theological libraries.

2. The exchange of news items of the world church for Christian papers in China and in the West.

3. The exchange of visiting delegations of Christians to and from the West.

4. The more effective use of Christian radio transmissions.

5. Short visits by accepted Bible teachers (Chinese or Western) to certain main centers in China for a teaching ministry among Chinese pastors and leaders.

6. Scholarships for selected persons to study abroad at Bible and theological colleges, preferably within Asia.

7. The offer of the services of foreign scholars to teach in a proposed theological college and to help in Bible translation.

8. The best use of Christian educators, scientists, and so on, to work in China for the Chinese government.

If all this seems to be a counsel of perfection in the notoriously divided evangelical world, we should not therefore lower our aims. What may seem impossible today may be possible in days to come if we keep our sights high. The opportunity lies before us but the hour is critical. So let us be warned! That opportunity could be thrown away and lost forever by well-meaning but impulsive and blundering activism of any one of many agencies sincerely concerned for China’s spiritual welfare. So let China speak, and let us listen. Then, and then only, let us determine what should be our corporate action.

LESLIE LYALL¹Mr. Lyall, ex-China missionary and author of New Spring in China (Zondervan), lives in Tunbridge Wells, England.

A Child’S Garden Of Musings

Now that we have baptized Mother Goose and transformed her silly rhymes into bedtime sermons for children, we must strive to conquer new literary worlds and share truth with more people. After all, not everybody reads Mother Goose.

I have long felt that the Sherlock Holmes saga is tailor-made for spiritual messages. Surely “A Study in Scarlet” immediately brings Isaiah 1:18 to mind, and ‘The Valley of Fear” suggests Psalm 23:4. (Oh, why has it taken us so long to see this?) Beyond question, Paul’s “Beware of dogs” (Phil. 3:2) can be related to “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” I could name several more, but I will leave to you, the reader, the thrill of discovering them for yourself.

So much for detective stories. How about applying some sanctification to A Child’s Garden of Verses? I submit an edifying sample:

How would you like to go up in a plane,

Over the bus routes wide?

If you bring twenty to Sunday School,

You shall receive a free ride.

How would you like to enjoy a long trip,

And visit the Holy Land fair?

Bring two hundred people to Sunday School

And we will escort you there!

Vast vistas of evangelical opportunity open to us! Time would fail me to suggest what could be done with children’s games. I ask you: Why should the little ones only enjoy themselves at games, when they could also be edifying themselves? Would it not be wise and profitable to read them Luke 15 before they go out to play “hide and seek”? Would not this add more seriousness of purpose to their play? I’m sure it would.

I tell you, the possibilities are limitless! Why have a ducky or a doggie on a child’s bib when a dispensational chart would accomplish much more? Bars of soap shaped like Noah’s ark, or the tables of the Law, would rescue a child’s bathtime from being merely an exercise in outward cleanliness.

Children of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your childhood joys.

EUTYCHUS X

Finding A Balance

Let me commend the convincing arguments in your December 12 editorial “Just Because Reagan Has Won …” This salutary word is most important for all of us who call ourselves evangelical in today’s American society. With others, I have been looking for a sense of balance in this whole matter of my political interest and stance as a Christian and as a responsible voting citizen of our nation. You have helped us all.

TED W. ENGSTROM

Executive director, World Vision

Monrovia, Calif.

You’ve done it again, droning on about “key issues” for evangelicals while omitting the “rights” of the purest “minority group,” the unborn. Reagan was elected by a margin equivalent to the prolife vote he garnered.

MIKE ALLEN

Tipp City, Ohio

In the wake of Ronald Reagan’s election, news of the so-called Moral Majority has reached expatriate Americans here in England. Has not the “moral majority” learned anything from history? When early Christians captured Constantine for the “moral majority,” the church rapidly sank in the peat bog of spiritual mediocrity. To exchange political power for spiritual strength seems a pretty pathetic substitution.

REV. WAYNE A. DETZLER

Kensington Baptist Church

Bristol, England

The church should be extremely careful lest it transform itself into a pressure group, whether in boycotts on the economic level, or bloc voting on the political scene. Otherwise the church ceases to be the church of Jesus Christ, and becomes another human organization. Efforts to Christianize the social order, divorced from the heart of the gospel, result in the secularizing of the religious mind.

REV. ARNOLD H. JAHR

Trinity Lutheran Church

Waterloo, Iowa

Too Generous

John Stott is far too generous in analyzing the weaknesses of the statement of the Nationwide Initiative in Evangelism in his “Reviving Evangelism in Britain” [Dec. 12]. The statement leaves out the substitutionary atonement, presents a defective view of sin, fuzzifies biblical authority, and completely ignores the Second Coming of Christ. In general, the statement reads as if it had been drafted by a group of scholars committed to watering down the Christian faith.

REV. RAY PRITCHARD

Redeemer Covenant Church

Downey, Calif.

Three Cheers, But …

Three cheers for Larry Richards’s digging and divulging regarding the CT-Gallup Poll, “The Great American Congregation: An Illusive Ideal?” [Nov. 21]. However, his admitted idealism and bias toward picturing the church “as a family of brothers and sisters.” tends to blunt his spade. He seems to be hurt that people overwhelmingly turn to their immediate family for help rather than to church members. Why should that be disconcerting? Family is family! One’s immediate family is the historical biblical and cultural center for the meeting of virtually every need. The current evangelical vogue for “deep interpersonal relationships” (spoken with hushed, intense tones!) goes too far when the implication seems to be that it is something less than “spiritual” for my literal brother to know and care for me rather than a brother in my church.

It appears Richards can’t comprehend why people do not seek help from friends and neighbors. One reason concerns the right to deem some areas of our lives as “personal.” Many of us in the counseling field are not happy with popularists who encourage everybody to “let it all hang out” all the time. There is natural embarrassment connected with many of our intimate needs.

WILLIAM L. O’BYRNE

Director, Family Development Institute

Speculator, N.Y.

All-Time Low?

Your December 12 issue hit an all-time low in the cartoon (?) on the nativity scene. I consider it in very poor taste bordering on the sacrilegious. Perhaps you should do some serious thinking about the holiness of the birth of our Lord, his death and resurrection. Or are you watching too much TV?

W. F. JANKE

Blaine, Wash.

“A Cute Catchword”

Tom Bisset’s December 12 “Religious Broadcasting …” thoughtfully addresses many of its very complex problems. However, I cringe at the continued use of the phrase “electronic church” or “electric church.” It’s a cute catchword but it is totally inadequate, inaccurate, and unbiblical. We don’t refer to the Christian publishing industry as the “printed church,” yet it serves the same functions of edification, information, and entertainment. Why then label Christian broadcasting as the “electric church?” We don’t baptize, bury, or serve Communion to our “congregation.” Broadcast ministries ought not try to be a substitute for the local church nor should they be considered as such.

TOM SOMMERVILLE

Moody Bible Institute Broadcasting

Chicago, III.

Visitation—With Limits

Regarding Neal Kuyper’s “Minister’s Workshop” on pastoral visitation [Dec. 12], I feel that a pastor must look to the Word of God to determine his responsibilities in the local church. One of the frustrations that many a pastor feels is that he is expected to do so many things and most of them are worthwhile in and of themselves. However, he finds that his time spent in productive Bible study and sermon preparation can be greatly eroded if that time is not protected. In larger churches, a pastor can soon be spiritually emaciated because of the many demands upon his time, and visitation can be one of the leading culprits.

Kuyper mentions the involvement of many pastors in sermon preparation, counseling, reading, weddings, and deaths. But no mention is made of the pastor who comes home at the end of a day, having visited in homes, having done everything else that needs to be done only to be met at the door by a family that says, “who are you?”

REV. THOMAS W. MCDERMOTT

Grandview Baptist Church

Davenport, Iowa

News Commentary

After reading the December 12 news article “Faith Formula …” my pen can no longer be silent concerning my views on what has been transpiring at Oral Roberts University. I am a 1978 ORU graduate, and thoroughly enjoyed my studies and relationships there. But I had some difficulties when it came to some of President Roberts’s teachings—that is, faith vs. presumption, seed-faith, and “claiming it.”

My greatest contention is the student’s inability to think for himself and challenge (on the basis of Scripture) some of Roberts’s teachings. Healthy dialogue should be viewed not as threatening, but as a time for learning for both parties. For instance, I have come to realize there is nothing “un-scriptural” about having a physical handicap or being poor. Joni Eareckson and Mother Theresa can attest to that.

DENISE BELTZNER

South Hamilton, Mass.

Clarifications are needed on your December 12 news item concerning the November meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion. The Consultation on Evangelical Theology is not primarily a “beachhead,” which implies a battle with clearly defined warring factions. Evangelicals have often avoided dialogue, thereby cheating ourselves and others. Those of us who initiated the consultation believe (1) we have scholarly work that needs to be done; and (2) we can benefit from the availability of other scholars at the AAR.

MARK LAU BRANSON

Chairperson, Consultation on Evangelical Theology

Madison, Wis.

Correction

We regret errors in two recently published poems by Luci Shaw. In “Theory” (Sept. 19) the word “us” was omitted from line 17, which should read: “to orchestrate us all.” In “The Stars, The Bells” (Dec. 12) in line seven the word “like” should be “light.” Lines seven and eight thus should read: “light runs / like music in the bones …”

In this issue, CHRISTIANITY TODAY book editor Walter Elwell analyzes a survey of 40 evangelical leaders to discover the books that have proved most influential for their lives and ministries. Among the illuminating facts brought out by the survey is the wide disparity between the continuous stream of “best sellers” flooding our Christian bookstores and the books that have proved most formative in shaping the life and thought of Christian leaders. This may tell all of us something about our own reading habits and the quality of our reading diet.

A relatively new feature in CHRISTIANITY TODAY is the attempt to come to grips with the explosion in the production of audio-visual materials for church and home. An update on video equipment and materials is offered along with versatile suggestions for their use, and Mark Senter evaluates some outstanding films especially suited for church groups.

In a disturbing article, “Sociobiology: Cloned from the Gene Cult” (page 16), Ray Bohlin explains the undergirding philosophy of the new so-called science of sociobiology. While noting its significant insights, he also points out fundamental inconsistencies inherent in any recognizable form of sociobiology. He warns, finally, against some malignant, but frequently unnoticed, aspects of this new face to what is really a very old world-and-life view—the modern heir of ancient materialism.

This month assistant news editor John Maust begins a three-month leave from his duties at CHRISTIANITY TODAY to attend the Spanish Language Institute in Costa Rica, Central America. With his new linguistic skills and greater first-hand knowledge of Spanish-speaking nations south of the border, John will be able to provide us with better understanding and in-depth interpretation of the church in these turbulent areas of the world where so much, both good and bad, is happening with such rapidity.

A faltering and impatient liberalism is tempted to catapult itself into violent new remedies.

Two years go a former colleague at a midwest college acquainted me with a work group of prominent American liberal theologians who had come together to do “constructive” theology. My friend invited two member acquaintances to lead a colloquy concerning the goals of the group on the campus where I was then serving. Names of some in the work group are familiar to many in the American setting: Edward Farley (Vanderbilt), Gordon Kaufman (Harvard), David Kelsey (Yale), Langdon Gilkey (Chicago), Schubert Ogden (Perkins).

This was my first introduction to the workshop goals, and I was a bit surprised at the vitality and stridency with which the agenda was presented. An informative overview of the group’s goals and membership was published by Julian Hartt in the March 1979 Occasional Papers of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research (Collegeville, Minn. 56321). It is fascinating reading for those who want to keep up with what American liberal theologians are about these days.

I recently learned that the group is still meeting and is planning to publish a textbook they hope will break new ground for theological study and church life in the U.S. Briefly, this is what the group has agreed on as its assumptions in hammering out a reconstructionist theology for our day. Since the workshop first assumes that the scriptural doctrine of the supernatural is wholly discredited in the modern world, a new theology for our time will have to get along without it. In fact, Hartt writes, much of the traditional package of the Christian faith has been discredited and needs to be rethought completely.

Accordingly, the group has assigned specific traditional doctrines to various group members who are responsible for studying them in their historical contexts, assessing them in light of modern secular criticism, and reconstructing them for a new day, following a kind of Hegelian pattern of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The principal aim of the 22 members is to address the challenge of “whether the Christian message can be freed from bondage to arcane models of vertical transcendence. So bound, the church’s message fails to reckon with the shape and movement of the actual world.”

Translated, that means all the traditional doctrines of Christian faith that evangelicals consider essential will be reconstructed and restated in language suitable to the non-supenaturalist assumptions of the present day. The inspiration and authority of Scripture is radically revised, as one might assume. Hartt remarks: “The faith of our fathers may be living still, but we are not under a divine mandate to accept our theological fathers’ views and uses of Scripture. Indeed, hardly anything better illustrates the power of historical relativism in our time than the need to produce constructive—rather than past-regarding—views on the authority and function of Scripture in theological work.” American theologians, he observes, are not as tied to biblical theology as are their European counterparts, and therefore are “not likely to claim direct Scriptural warrant for every serious theological proposal about God, man, nature, and history.”

What, then, is the higher purpose of the group’s agenda, other than meeting the challenging attacks of secularism? Liberation theology is the stated goal, to discover the prophetic vision of the church in wrestling with the world’s political and economic inequities, and so deal with the enormity of evil in our time. This, according to the work group, is not sufficiently addressed by historic Christianity.

Several observations might be made in reply to the project. It seems that liberal theologians who insist that the major obstacle in historic Christianity is its belief in God’s supernatural sovereignty won’t let go of the old liberal-fundamentalist controversy. I had thought that liberal theology was gaining in that it might be at least respectful toward those of us who hold such views—just as we evangelicals are acknowledging more broadly our social responsibilities in political and economic areas. But the issue is clear-cut and the tone strident: historic Christian doctrines must be demolished and reconstructed according to the norms of secularist society.

In a forthcoming study on “New Approaches to Jesus and the Gospels” by this writer, the creative insights of Michael Polanyi, I. T. Ramsey, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Wittgenstein to New Testament study are applied. It is an effort to encourage scholars once again to be relaxed and faithfully imaginative as they interpret the Gospels and not to be intimidated by the “flatness” of ordinary biblical criticism. Ramsey invites those who are logically bound by secular expectations to appreciate the logically “odd” in Scripture—including the miraculous and the supernatural. Lewis claims that only the good reader who is attentive and obedient to the text will hear it and not simply use it for other purposes. And Tolkien begs the reader to let the gospel cast its “spell.”

Polanyi maintains that great discoveries have never been made by the doubting mind but only by the receptive spirit with a searching and heuristic vision. “Unless you first believe, you will not understand.” An apparent concern for the poor and oppressed can often compel a faltering and impatient liberalism to catapult itself into violent new remedies and totalitarianisms. Only the preservation of conservative elements in the tradition, he writes, can check the destructive tendencies in our culture.

The political lessons of the twentieth century, with its horrendous powers bent on radical reforms ostensibly in pursuit of justice and brotherhood, impressed Polanyi that the right of moral self-determination and religious freedom can be preserved only within the conviviality of the conservative free society. The truth is unpalatable to our conscience, he writes, but there is no other way to preserve the free society than to correct unjust privileges by carefully graded stages, realizing that our duty lies in the service of ideals that we cannot possibly achieve on our own.

As for the group’s serious charge that historic biblical faith does not really address human evil in our day, I had thought Christ came to do just that, and at its deepest originative level in the human heart. It is a sickness of the modern mind, C. S. Lewis observes, to focus on the amelioration of the sins and poverty of another, oblivious of one’s own illness and sinfulness. Both must be addressed. But the central question is whether salvation is first something God does for us because it cannot be accomplished any other way, or something we insist on doing our own way in spite of what God says about the human condition. Is redemption centered in Christ’s supernatural work on the Cross, or is it essentially political freedom and freedom from material want? In biblical ethics, the latter arises from the first, but not always and at any price. And never is it a substitute for the Cross.

Once again an old question comes “round for new debate.” One hopes that the proposals of the group on “constructive” theology will challenge evangelicals to respond reflectively, imaginatively, and above all with integrity of commitment to Christ and those for whom he died.

ROYCE GORDON GRUENLER¹Dr. Gruenler is professor of New Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts.