Those who ask, “Why is it so?”, are tempted to think they have in their grasp the key to all answers.

The question appears on the cover of a university publication, accompanying a picture of a scientist. The man is obviously pondering some profound mystery. He stares into the distance, his bench with its complicated apparatus before him unseen. Some anomaly in the phenomena on which he has been working has struck him: he asks his question. And the university sees the man and his problem as a good symbol of what being a university is all about.

And it is a good symbol. A university in its restless quest for knowledge must constantly ask. “Why is it so?” When it thinks it has all the answers and ceases to ask such questions it ceases to be a university. It may be a place where learned men gather. It may have impressive buildings and equipment. Its library may be extensive. But if it has lost the spirit of earnest inquiry it has ceased to be a university, whatever it may call itself.

The question is a good one to ask in many areas of life, some far from a university. An uncritical acceptance of things as they are breeds slothfulness and stands in the way of progress. The forward looking must always be asking why things are as they are and whether they might be improved. There can be no advance as long as we remain in a stolid, unquestioning acceptance of the status quo. The question must be asked.

But there are dangers in asking it. The obvious one is that it can lead those who ask it to think they have in their grasp the key to all answers—in principle, at any rate. This is the constant temptation of the academic. He is aware he has answered many questions that ordinary people cannot answer. He is aware he is asking important questions of which ordinary people do not even think. He can set himself apart from others. Academic excellence and humility do not always go together. They are not always separated, either, and it is a wonderful thing to meet the academic who is humbled before his discipline.

But he is not the only academic: there are others whose pride is real. And for them there can be unbounded confidence in the reliability of their method. Einstein is reported to have said that every really deep scientist must necessarily be religious. His contact with the universe will lead him to see that there is more there than nontheistic assumptions can account for. But not all scientists agree. For some of them the posing of the question and their attempts to answer it are all that matter.

This easy assumption that because I can ask the question I can answer it runs through much of modern life. It is behind a good deal of the current rebellion against authority, for example. We ask why parents should have authority—or police or legislators or whoever takes our fancy at a given time. If we find that we can give no answer we take it for granted that there is no answer and no reason why such people should have authority.

I am not arguing for an uncritical acceptance of all authority figures. It is clear that many have claimed authority unjustly and also that many who are rightly in positions of authority have exercised their authority improperly. There has been room for change and for the recognition that in the past we have all too often given too much authority to too many. It is well that the situation should change.

But there are bad reasons as well as good ones for challenging authority. True, it is necessary to ask, “Why?” But if we find ourselves unable to give a reason, that does not mean there is no reason. There is room for a decent humility here.

It is worth reflecting that in any case, few of us in fact do without an authority of some kind. It has often been pointed out that in some of the modern cults young men and women are invited to throw off their submission to traditional authorities like parents, but then are required to submit totally to their messianic guru. They have not ceased to be subject to authority: they have merely exchanged one authority for another.

The same can be said of many who are outside the cults. The authority of one’s peers can be compelling. So can it be with the authority of “the party” or of one’s class or others.

I am not arguing that we should not ask the question. It is a good and necessary question and in many areas of life it should have been asked long ago. I am saying that we must be very careful about what we do with the answer. Rightly used it can be of incalculable benefit. Wrongly used it can destroy us. It can be made the justification for a strongly materialistic way of life.

There are many in the communities with which I am familiar who see a traditional respect for ideals and principles. They ask, “Why is it so?” and find themselves unable to give an answer. Perhaps they find the wicked flourishing like a bay tree (as the psalmist did), which deepens their conviction that there is no answer. So they accept the triumph of selfishness and wrongdoing as just the way life is. They give themselves over to a self-defeating life that concentrates on its own success. This “success” generally turns out to be concerned with the multiplication of goods and pleasures.

And, of course, our question can lead to the ultimate blasphemy. Because they see no reason for the existence of things as they are, many of our contemporaries go on to assume that there is no reason. They cannot work out why God should make things so, so they assume that there is no God and no making of things. Man is made the measure of everything. What man cannot explain (they hold) cannot exist. This is an obvious fallacy.

I do not mean that Christians should argue for a “God of the gaps,” a God who is progressively nudged out of the universe as our horizon of knowledge extends. I am not saying that we should believe in God because our scientists cannot explain everything. I am saying that our ability to ask the question, “Why is it so?” does not give us unlimited rights. It never gives us the right to say, “Because I find no reason there is no reason.” It does not justify us in denying God.

Indeed, the question is worth asking in the religious sphere. It cannot be denied that through the centuries there have been many who have reported that they have experienced the love and the power of God. It cannot be denied that in our own day there are many who report the same thing. While there are places where the church shows little vitality, there are others where there is abundant life.

In both areas the question should be asked. In the one the easy, atheistic or agnostic solution is challenged. The phenomena are real and are not to be denied. Why are lives changed when people put their trust in Christ? Why is “the peace of God” a reality in so many lives? Why should we not accept the testimony of those who report that they have come to know God?

In the other, believers are called to search their hearts. There is no lack of love or power in God, even though God’s people do not always respond to them. The church should never lack love or life or vigor. If it does, the question must always be put, “Why is it so?”

Leon Morris is principal of Ridley College, Victoria, Australia.

During the last two decades, evangelical seminaries experienced phenomenal growth. A slowdown was inevitable—if for no other reason, than because schools were outgrowing their limited facilities.

However, officials at a number of evangelical seminaries now fear an actual decline in student enrollments. In fact, many of these seminaries reported drops in the number of applications for fall 1980 enrollment. (At press time, it was not possible to determine if the actual number of enrollees had dropped.)

In interviews, various seminary officials indicated an awareness of the present threats to seminary growth: a smaller pool of college graduates from which to draw, inflation and rising costs, and an increased emphasis at Christian colleges on secular—not religion-related—full-time work. Only now, they indicated, are seminaries feeling the repercussions of dipping enrollments, which have caused more than 120 colleges to close since the late 1960s.

Ralph Covell, academic dean of Conservative Baptist Seminary in Denver, indicated: “With universities and colleges undergoing retrenchment and reallocation in order to survive the 1980s, it is impossible for seminaries not to be affected.”

Cary Rickman, admissions director at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, said, “We have been preparing for a drop, knowing the downward trend which has penetrated undergraduate enrollments.… Beyond 1985 we hope we will see the trend move upward, but for now we are all in for a definite drop.”

Asbury, Westminister Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, and Gordon-Conwell Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, all anticipated declines this fall. Gordon’s number of applications for 1980 sagged 10 percent from the previous year. Asbury, which had a 58 percent increase in student applications over the past five years, reported a 17 percent drop in 1980.

Not all seminaries are losing students and applicants. Some, which ballooned in the 1970s, continue growing, though at a slower rate. Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, the nation’s largest seminary with 4,336 students (about 3,800 on the main campus) enrolled in spring 1980, has reported annual student increases for the past 13 years—sometimes as high as 20 percent per year in the 1970s. It anticipates a smaller 3 percent annual increase for a few years before enrollment stabilizes.

Dallas (Texas) Theological Seminary shot from 463 students in 1970, to 956 in 1975, to its anticipated figure for 1980–1981 of 1,450 students (an increase of about 75 over the previous year). Public information officer Peggy Wehmeyer said school officials don’t expect a drop, and believe the school’s strong stand for inerrancy is attractive to many potential students.

Enrollments at other seminaries have leveled off. Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, jumped in enrollment each year from 1974 to 1977, but has not grown since. Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, peaked in enrollment in 1978 and has since stabilized.

However, almost all major evangelical seminaries reported shrinking application pools, even if their enrollments are currently stable. Fewer students are graduating from college, compared to when the World War II baby boom population reached college age. Even more relevant to the traditionally male-dominated seminaries is the fact that the number of male college students has declined steadily since a peak number in 1975.

Students faced with paying four years’ undergraduate debts aren’t likely to desire to take on the additional cost of three to four years of seminary. A mid-range cost at an evangelical seminary is $75 to $90 per hour of semester credit. The financial return on the investment is small compared to advanced degrees from law, business, and medical schools.

Censorship On The Shelf: The Bookenders

The followers of Witness Lee, who heads an Anaheim, California-based church organization, have asked a number of Christian booksellers in California to remove from their shelves copies of six books that are critical of the group.

The books include The Mindbenders, by Jack Sparks, which is the subject of a lawsuit filed by the group in June. The organization declines any name for itself other than simply “the local church” in each city in which it has members.

The books unfairly portray the church as a cult, said Eugene Gruhler, a group spokesman in Anaheim. (It claims to be orthodox Christian.) Gruhler said the letters were sent to the bookstores because “so many people are getting a distorted view of our teaching, and they choose not to sell our books.” He emphasized that no pressure was being brought on any store.

Mike Castle, of the Christian Discount Book Center in Whittier, is one of the booksellers who received a letter asking for removal of the offending books. “In times past we’ve found they present quite a few problems,” he said, such as followers entering his store and turning literature upside-down. He said he doesn’t plan to remove the books and knows of no booksellers in the area who do.

Other books the Lee followers want booksellers to remove are: The God-Men, by Spiritual Counterfeits; The Lure of the Cults, by Ronald Enroth; The Teachings of Witness Lee and the Local Church, by Cal Beisner; and two books by the Christian Apologetics Research Institute Service, Witness Lee and the Local Church and Evolution Into God.

In response to the actual and potential declines, most seminaries are currently mounting organized campaigns to attract students. Terms such as market positioning, recruitment, retention, and prospect awareness have gained respectability in hallowed theological halls, where the mere use of the word “advertising” was considered in bad taste 10 years ago.

Gordon-Conwell director of admissions and career services Kenneth Swetland said, “We haven’t had to do recruitment lately because we are riding the crest of a wave in enrollment. Now we are putting more into campus visits, more into advertising, and asking our alumni for aid in recruiting.”

Most institutions now have a traveling representative who visits colleges and churches in an effort to get his or her seminary’s share of the student market. Dave Buschart, who visited 80 colleges over the past two years as Trinity Seminary’s assistant director of admissions, said, “Ten years ago guys like me didn’t exist.”

Seminaries also are seeking students in non-traditional quarters, and are making adjustments in programs. More efforts are being directed at older and “second profession” prospects. Women and minorities are being recruited in record numbers: such enrollments have prevented some schools from suffering declines.

New programs are catering to the special needs and interests of a new breed of students. (A recent survey of five seminaries showed a 25 percent decline over the past 15 years in the number of students enrolling in basic degree programs.)

After it introduced a myriad of special programs, Fuller Seminary’s enrollment jumped by 440 students one year in the late 1970s. “Our special vocationally oriented courses are glutted, and we are turning people away,” said Mel Robeck, director of student services at Fuller.

Other schools are pushing through their own innovations, with some degree of risk. Conservative Baptist’s Covell said, “The Association of Theological Schools is advising everyone to be careful not to get overextended in terms of faculty or resources.”

In a classic “chicken or egg” debate, seminaries must decide whether to spend additional funds to attract students, when it is the declining number of students that is reducing the funds on hand to attract them. At least one school, Asbury, has settled the question to its own satisfaction: it is steaming ahead with a new $6 million School of World Missions and Evangelism, which will offer a combination of M.A., M.Div., and continuing degrees.

No one is quite sure how best to offset the effects of a tightening economy. As the average age of the seminary student increases, he or she is more likely to have family responsibilities and increased financial obligations. At the same time, seminary costs will continue to rise.

“Today students are scared to move across the country without guarantees,” said Robeck of Fuller. As a result, seminaries are investing as never before in night courses, part-time curriculums, extension seminaries, and seminary-owned housing to reduce students’ financial pressures.

If there is any benefit to the current crunch, it is that the pressures probably will produce a more committed student, seminary officials say. And commitment may be a vital requirement for future graduates, who are increasingly being encouraged to pursue church planting, foreign service, or “tentmaker” ministries because of a glut of ministers among established U.S. pulpits.

Striking Activity at Dubuque Seminary

The Faculty Union Isn’t a Social Hall

Most theologians are better exegetes of Scripture than employment contracts. But Dubuque (Iowa) Theological Seminary faculty and staff went on strike last month, and as a result got a modern paraphrased contract, which gave them a healthy wage hike and affirmed their say in school personnel matters.

A local reporter’s research indicated this was the first walkout by a theological school faculty since one in the thirteenth century in Paris, France. The strike also was unique in that these theologians have their own union.

There were no cigar-chomping labor bosses walking the picket lines in Dubuque, however. The strikers got smiles with their proof-text picket signs: “A Laborer Is Worthy of His Hire,” and “Come, Let Us Reason Together.” There were signs in Greek and Hebrew. Another read “Take this job and sanctify it”—a takeoff on the movie, Take this Job and Shove It, which was being filmed in Dubuque.

While relationships were cordial between the strikers and school officials, all parties involved had serious concerns. The strike lasted only three days—ending September 3, the day before the scheduled start of classes—although the striking faculty and staff had indicated they were prepared to stay out indefinitely.

The United Presbyterian seminary had offered an 8 percent wage hike, while its faculty wanted 12 percent. When neither side could agree, the school’s 11 faculty and 3 staff members voted unanimously to strike.

In a letter to the theologians, seminary president Walter Peterson (also president of the related 1,000-student, four-year liberal arts University of Dubuque) had said the university lacked cash to meet the request. He explained that the Aquinas Institute of Theology, which shares facilities and building rental costs with the Dubuque seminary, would be leaving next year. He reportedly said the budget already was in the red.

In interviews, faculty members placed the average salary at the seminary at $19,000—low, they said, compared to the other six United Presbyterian seminaries, and in light of the rising rate of inflation.

As it turned out, the faculty and staff agreed upon the administration’s proposed 8 percent annual wage hike. However, with an additional $400 each for continuing education, the group figured their actual annual increase was about 10 percent.

Just as important to the faculty and staff was maintaining their voice in school personnel matters. They had formed their own union, the Association of Faculty and Theological Education Professionals, as a protection after the 1973 firings for economic reasons of about half the faculty (six total, five of whom had tenure), according to Donald G. Bloesch, a respected evangelical theologian and author, and Dubuque professor for 23 years. Since then, Bloesch asserted, the administration has fired a number of faculty, even for personal reasons. The union successfully blocked one such firing last year, he said.

Perceptions of the tentative, one-year contract varied. Virgil Cruz, who says that he and Bloesch are among the three (out of eight full-time) faculty members “normally described as evangelicals,” believed the contract “reestablished the principle of collegiality.” By this, he referred to language in the contract describing the faculty’s consulting role with administration in the hiring of faculty.

Prof. C. Howard Wallace, a spokesman for the union throughout the strike, believed the contract at least “preserved” this collegiality. He said the dean of the school still had veto power over the faculty’s appointments and promotions committee, but that the contract called for the dean’s being “in consulation” with the committee—something the administration had wanted out of the contract. At the same time, president Walter Peterson believed “there was no movement toward a greater role for the faculty.” If anything, he said, the contract tended to give more power to the dean [Herbert Manning].

Wallace said he would have preferred that there had been no strike, but that the administration had ignored the union’s requests for negotiation: “They did find time to negotiate with us very soon after the strike began,” he said.

The contract still allows for the dismissal of faculty and staff in cases of cancellation of a school program, moral lassitude, and financial exigency, he said. However, the union does give its members “added protection” and the “power of the unit,” he explained.

The union is a member of the National Education Association (NEA), which represents 1.8 million people in public and private schools, from kindergarten through graduate school. The Dubuque group is the only theological seminary represented among the 12,000 local NEA affiliates, said an NEA representative. Through its staff in the field, the NEA consulted with the Dubuque strikers.

Notwithstanding the union, without the students’ support “we might not have swung this,” Bloesch said. He thought about 80 percent of the 140-student body had supported its faculty; some participated in a prayer vigil, and some who were not United Presbyterians contacted seminaries of their own denominations and asked for prayer support, said Bloesch.

JOHN MAUST

North American Scene

The nation’s largest black denomination noted its one-hundredth birthday this year. The 6-million-member National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., has been characterized—particularly under the ongoing 26-year leadership of president Joseph H. Jackson of Chicago—by staying out of civil rights issues. During the group’s recent annual convention, Jackson reaffirmed this stand (often criticized elsewhere in the black church community). He said blacks should start helping themselves, rather than blaming others for their present conditions. Of the so-called black theology, he was quoted as saying: “I fear religion that is so motivated by anti-white sentiment that it would make a god out of blackness. We do not need a second-rate religion and a theology without a living God.”

The place of sex education in the public schools has become a hot debate between various church and secular groups. Both would agree, however, on the need for some kind of education: nearly 50 percent of the nation’s 10.3 million women, ages 15 to 19, have had premarital sex, according to a new study by Johns Hopkins University professors Melvin Zelnik and John F. Kantner. As described in Newsweek, the study showed that most of the social pressures for remaining a virgin “have disappeared.” The researchers’ 50 percent figure on sexual activity is double that in their 1971 study.

The United Church of Canada recently elected its first female moderator, Lois Wilson, but a controversial report on sexuality received more attention. The report, which approved premarital sex in certain situations and is too tolerant of adultery and homosexuality for many commissioners, finally was accepted by the General Council as a study document. It will be used in congregations across Canada, and then debated by the 1982 council. The report’s approval would split the 2-million-member denomination (Canada’s largest), delegates threatened.

Some Canadian churchmen still are pushing for inclusion of a bill of rights in a new Canadian constitution. Particularly, they want “a defined statement of Christian liberty,” guaranteeing separation of church and state and freedom of conscience and religion, said president Wesley Wakefield of the Bible Holiness Movement. Holiness, Adventist, and Salvation Army groups are among those supporting the measure, which ran into a major obstacle last month. Premiers of the 10 provinces came out against a national bill of rights, wanting instead to set rights on a provincial basis. That approach is insufficient, Wakefield argued, giving this example: “You can’t decide whether Mennonites can be conscientious objectors on a provincial basis—that’s national.”

A layman compiled a list of United Methodist funding of pro-Marxist and political causes, then sent his 38-page report to 100 selected General Conference delegates prior to their April quadrennial meeting. David Jessup, a former peace corps volunteer who is presently employed by the AFL-CIO’s political education committee, cited such figures as $31.000 given over a two-year period to five pro-Cuban organizations by the UMC Women’s Division and its Board of Global Ministries. His statistics came from the church agencies themselves, and he used them to support his General Conference petition for financial accountability. Now, the UMC evangelical caucus group, Good News, has published the meat of Jessup’s findings in its magazine. Jessup says he first questioned UMC spending when his children brought home Sunday school appeals for wheat shipments to Communist Vietnam.

There is no substance to the rumor that Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church bought out the Proctor and Gamble company, said company spokesperson Sydney McHugh. She added that the group has never bought a single share of the company’s stock. The company has been getting a number of inquiries—especially from the North and South Dakota area—McHugh said. She attributes the flap at least partly to the company’s emblem, with its “man-in-the-moon” profile. She says the P&G emblem has nothing to do with Moon, and points out that it was patented in 1882—long before the existence of Moon’s Unification Church (which does have extensive commercial fishing, restaurant, publishing, and other business interests).

Over the last three decades, the Seventh-day Adventist Church has been shaken to the core by a few of its theologians, who believe the church has erred in the basic beliefs that separate it from historic Protestantism. A showdown on whether to adapt to the new scholarship or stand fast on the teachings of founder-prophetess Ellen White has been building for some time.

Finally the volcano blew. Last month church administrators moved to strip the ministerial credentials from Australian theologian Desmond Ford, one of Adventism’s most widely known thinkers.

“This probably won’t blow over,” said Adventist professor Raymond Cottrell of Loma Linda University, near Los Angeles, in what may be a sublime understatement. Already, at least one minister has resigned and led his congregation out the door, and he predicts dozens more will follow. A dissident Adventist group has been planning a meeting in San Diego for Adventist churches contemplating independence from the general conference. The meeting was to be held next summer, but because of the Ford affair, it was moved up to October 13–16. Organizers had been expecting about 500. Now, they’re planning for more.

Ford challenges the heart of what traditional Adventists cherish, namely, the events of 1844 and their significance. William Miller, a Baptist preacher and Bible scholar, rode the waves of Second Coming fervor that swept many American churches in the 1830s. Basing his stand on the cleansing of the temple mentioned in Daniel 8:14, which Miller took to mean Christ’s return to earth, he predicted that the Second Coming would occur in 1844. Miller and his 200,000 followers were crushed when the time came and Christ didn’t.

Two followers, Hiram Edson and Ellen Harmon, the future Mrs. White, then reported visions of Christ entering “the most holy place of the heavenly sanctuary,” just as the priest entered the Holy of Holies once a year in the Jewish Tabernacle to make blood atonement for sins. This is what Christ actually did in 1844, the visionaries said, and thus the movement was saved.

Through her writings, Ellen White expanded her vision into the doctrine of the investigative judgment of Christ. This says that although man’s sins are forgiven at the Cross, they must be blotted out by Christ before man can enter heaven. This blotting out of sin is what Christ has been doing in the heavenly sanctuary since 1844. But he blots out the sin record only after evaluating the life of each professing believer, to see how well he has kept God’s commandments. Some will pass the judgment, some will fail. According to this teaching, salvation is never secure. Ellen White wrote prolifically on these matters, and on all aspects of Christian life. Although Adventists officially claim the Bible as their first standard, many, in practice, regard Mrs. White’s books as at least equal.

Now comes Desmond Ford, a man of great learning and gracious personality, who argues forcefully against most of this cherished tradition, all the while claiming to be an Adventist from head to toe. “Ellen White never claimed to be a basis of doctrine,” Ford said in a telephone interview. “She never claimed to be inerrant. Adventists have used her in a way she would be horrified at … Our administrators [who took his credentials] unfortunately, are not well read. There’s a great gulf … not in sympathies, but in understanding, between administrators and scholars in the church.” Ford hastens to add that he cannot blame them for their actions since they cannot have both time to run the church and to delve into theology, as can the church’s scholars.

Regarding the investigative judgment, which is the fundamental belief of Adventists, Ford said, “You can’t find the investigative judgment in the Bible. You can get it out of Ellen White. The fact is, she got it out of Uriah Smith [an early Adventist writer and editor].”

Traditionally, Adventists are taught they can’t be sure of heaven until they have lived lives good enough to have their sins blotted out during the investigative judgment. That, in many cases, has spawned an attitude of “perfectionism,” always striving to be good enough, but never sure just how good that is. The reason Ford has grown so popular among some Adventists is that he is throwing all that out the window, telling Adventists they can indeed be happy and sure of salvation because Christ finished his work on the Cross, where their sins were forgiven and the eternal punishment due them erased.

“I always thought I was a Christian until I heard Dr. Ford speak, and then I found the real peace of Jesus,” said an Adventist medical doctor on the West Coast. He continued: “There is a vast youth movement in the church identifying with the evangelistic gospel [as a result of Ford]. There’s a renewed excitement about the Cross.”

Ford headed the theology department of the Adventists’ Avondale College in New South Wales, Australia, for 16 years. He holds doctoral degrees from Michigan State University and Manchester University in England. He earned the latter in New Testament studies under noted scholar F.F. Bruce. Ford has written nine books—seven of them published or in process—and has about 250,000 cassette tapes in circulation in the United States alone.

Ford contends that the Hebrew word for “cleanse,” in the key verse, Daniel 8:14 (as in Daniel cleansing the heavenly temple by blotting out sins), carries the notion of “restoring,” or “putting right,” and doesn’t really mean cleanse at all, even though the King James Version uses it. As evidence, he offers the fact that most modern translations interpret it as he does. (Ford’s opponents in the church acknowledge this but still contend the word can have the meaning of cleanse.)

The year 1844 has no biblical significance, Ford says, but he adds that God did raise up the Adventists in that year as a movement that would emphasize his creation, a doctrine Adventists stoutly defend. Ford notes that 1844 is the year Charles Darwin wrote the first sketch of his Origin of Species. Ford is also in complete accord with Saturday worship, another cardinal Adventist doctrine. Seventh-day worship signifies God’s completed creation, for it’s the day on which he rested. Ford said. Adventist have traditionally held that in the end times of the church, Saturday worship will separate those who are true believers from apostate Christians who worship on Sunday. Ford himself does not criticize those who do so.

Aage Rendalen, a Norwegian Adventist editor, said of the Ford situation that, “Among denominational theologians, it is openly conceded that Ford’s basic criticism of the sanctuary theology is valid.” But he says most of the others keep a low profile about it because the laity and the church administrators don’t like to hear it.

The flap began building a head of steam a year ago, when Ford was asked to present his views before a layman’s forum at Pacific Union College, an Adventist school in northern California where he has been a visiting professor (Feb. 8 issue, p. 64). When tapes of his talk began circulating, the phones started ringing off the hook at church headquarters in Takoma Park, Maryland. “Some old Miss Muffet out in Nebraska somewhere probably got hold of it,” said a disgruntled Adventist professor who is in sympathy with Ford.

Ford was given a paid, six-month leave to defend his views, which he did by producing a document running 990 pages in length. In August, about 100 Adventist churchmen from around the world gathered at a church camp at Glacier View Ranch, Colorado, near Boulder. They spent a week poring over the manuscript in detail. At week’s end, they found themselves differing with Ford on 10 major points, which cover most of the controversy. Because Ford wouldn’t compromise, the President’s Advisory Committee decided to ask the church’s Australasian Division to revoke Ford’s credentials as a minister, which it did.

Church administrators point to the friendly spirit at Glacier View, and the strong consensus against Ford, as evidence that the church is united in its traditional views. The Norwegian Rendalen, however, contends the theologians sided with the administration not out of contempt for his theology, but because he was not willing to compromise, as most other theologians have been doing.

Many followers of Ford can’t figure out why the administration acted so severely against such a popular figure. They must have been able to predict the commotion that has ensued. One high official explained it, but only on condition his name not be used:

“We met with Ford for 50 hours, and with all that talk he never changed a pinpoint. You just can’t be right on everything.” The official said it was further frustrating because although Ford refused to budge an inch, he was so nice about everything. “I guess his tremendous amount of research has made him infallible,” the official said.

The younger minister syndrome

Cottrell, who said he knows many of the men who made the decision against Ford, said he believes they reacted harshly because Ford’s teachings have greatly polarized the Adventist church in Australia, and it is turning older traditional ministers against younger ones in this country as well as in Australia. “He has become a world figure in Seventh-day Adventist churches,” Cottrell said, “and his students react very positively toward him, almost without exception.” Ford has trained hundreds of ministers during his teaching years.

Cottrell may be on target when he says the situation is turning younger ministers against the church. John Toews, 30, is the California pastor who resigned his Adventist credentials because of the Ford decision. He and his 150-member congregation changed its name from the South Bay Seventh-day Adventist Church to the South Bay Gospel Fellowship. “We feel we want to move into the mainstream of Christianity now because we feel that Adventism is very definitely way off to the side.” Toews, who graduated from the Adventist seminary at Andrews University, Berrien Springs, Michigan, predicts that there will be “many, many pastors who will be leaving.”

Another young minister, who asked not to be identified, says he’s known Adventists who for years have never had assurance about whether they’ll get to heaven. “That breaks my heart,” he said, adding that he is also contemplating leaving the church.

J.R. Spangler, secretary of the church’s ministerial association and editor of one of its magazines, said he believes the controversy will spark a renewed interest in the doctrine of the investigative judgment of Christ, which all who were interviewed say has not been a topical subject in the church’s pulpits for some time. Spangler said, “We realize there have been some exegetical problems with the heavenly sanctuary, but we feel we’ve handled some of them quite well.” Spangler was speaking for Neal Wilson, president of the church’s general conference.

Ford has taken a job as chaplain in an Adventist medical ministry in California, and plans to keep writing and preaching, even if, as he suspects, he will never be able to teach again in an Adventist school. He plans to remain in the United States if he can get a permanent visa. He is convinced his views are right, and he is equally convinced the church will head in his direction as more and more of its bright young people take seminary training, and learn the issues for themselves.

TOM MINNERY

Evangelism

Jews Turn Protective of Their Atheists from Russia

America is experiencing a new wave of Soviet Jewish immigrants. But religious ideas aren’t necessarily kosher to the newcomers. They are more interested in finding the good life than spiritual things, say many Jewish and Christian leaders.

Up to 90 percent of the Jewish emigrants from the Soviet Union are atheists, according to Jim Melnick, director of the Slavic Gospel Association’s Russian Center on Chicago’s north side. He and others explain this as the result of Russians living for the past 60 years under a government that teaches there is no God (and that Jesus is a myth invented by the early church).

This nonbelief has disappointed America’s religious Jews, who expected the newcomers would be as devoutly religious as their Eastern European ancestors. Various Jewish groups are encouraging the immigrants (reportedly with little success) to attend synagogue and observe religious traditions. These groups have occasionally clashed with Christians and cult groups who also are aware that the Soviet Jewish immigrants constitute a mission field.

(In their new book, Prison or Paradise? The New Religious Cults, James and Marcia Rudin estimate that Jews compose 20 to 50 percent of cult members, while Jews compose less than 3 percent of the American population. Most likely to join cults are persons searching for “a caring community,” said Rudin, an interreligious affairs executive with the American Jewish Committee.)

On June 26, the Jewish Sentinel newspaper in Chicago alerted Soviet Jews to the danger of being proselytized by Christian groups. Sol Goldstein of the Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago told the weekly newspaper (read mostly by conservative religious Jews), “We will not leave our Soviet Jewish Brethren alone to defend themselves against this new attack on their Jewishness. They spent a generation fighting Soviet anti-Semitism and the attempt to woo their children from Judaism to Communism. They uprooted and came here to get away from that.”

Several days after the article was published, vandals smashed windows at SGA’s Russian Center. Religious Jews also distributed anti-Christian tracts outside the building—perhaps indicating what Goldstein meant when he said in the article, “We will see to it that there is a Jewish presence around the premises where conversion attempts are being made.”

In recent months, the center has experienced several window breakings, and staff members are accustomed to a degree of harassment, said Melnick. But he is more concerned that recently some Jews have complained of being threatened if they come to the center. Also, immigrants are warned on arrival not to go to the center, Melnick said.

Ironically, Melnick says, these warnings have “backfired” somewhat; many of the immigrants come anyway out of curiosity, and just because they were told they shouldn’t.

Staff members at SGA’s Russian Center, which has been in operation for about 18 months, have helped the new immigrants learn English, how to drive, where to locate government service agencies, and have provided them with clothes and furniture.

The staff holds an evangelistic service on Sunday night, and is starting Bible studies for the immigrants. Melnick has said that many Soviet Jews think only the uneducated believe in God, but that they are curious about spiritual things, such as Bible prophecy—especially as it relates to Israel. The center has tried a variety of evangelistic approaches, including showing Moody Institute of Science films.

Most Soviet Jews have settled in major metropolitan centers. For instance, roughly 5,000 to 7,000 live in Chicago, and most of those have arrived in the last two years, Melnick said. An estimated 200,000 Jews have emigrated from the Soviet Union during the past decade: their legal departure resulted only after massive international pressure. They leave only after an official invitation from the state of Israel, and are expected to go there.

However, many of these emigrants “drop out” to other nations in the West; an estimated 81,000 of the 200,000 given visas have come to the United States, the Washington Post reported, noting that unlike previous waves of immigration following World War I and World War II, the third group is better educated, not interested in Jewish religious life, and concerned most about personal and intellectual freedoms and in having economic security. Mostly it is the religious Jews who do go to Israel, say observers.

Crete

Kidnapping in Love

The alleged kidnapping and forcible enthronement of the wrong bishop of the Mediterranean island of Crete has brought a rare challenge to the authority of the hierarchy of the Greek Orthodox Church, and to the patriarch in Turkey—the spiritual leader of 200 million Orthodox Christians around the world.

It all began with a vacancy in the post of bishop of Kisamos on the Greek island. Deliberations began last December. The people of the diocese overwhelmingly favored the return of 69-year-old Bishop Eirinaios, a native of Crete who had served there until 1971. He is popular in this underdeveloped west end of the island for the projects he launched and raised funds for, including orphanages, schools, and a safe ferry line to Athens. But the bishop fell out of official favor for refusal to collaborate with the military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974. He was banished to Germany and the Central Europe jurisdiction of the church—which reports directly to Patriarch Demetrius II in Istanbul—where he set up cultural centers for the 350,000 Greek migrant workers there.

The New York Times reported that matters came to a head in August when the Church of Crete, which is autonomous and responsible only spiritually to the ecumenical patriarch, elected a bishop other than Eirinaios. The incensed local populace seized and locked the episcopal residence. Then, while Bishop Eirinaios was vacationing on the island, they are said to have abducted him against his will and enthroned him at the cathedral.

Some 5,000 supporters then consolidated their position by keeping a vigil outside the cathedral and residence and building wooden barricades and brick walls to forestall any forcible attempt to evict him.

The patriarch accused Eirinaios of abandoning his post and ordered that he return to his German station or face stiff penalties. (This order was still in effect as of mid-September, according to a New York spokesman for the Greek Orthodox Diocese of North and South America, but no deadline had been specified.)

As for the white-bearded Eirinaios, he has decided to comply with the public’s desire. “I regret the forceful way I was brought here and wish that the patriarchate’s approval was forthcoming,” he said, “but I cannot betray the people’s love.”

The government in Athens appears to have acquiesced in the revolt since it has declined to fulfill its normally routine formal function of ratifying the appointment of the elected bishop. Speaking privately, Greece’s foreign minister, Constantine Mistotakis, who is from Crete, said that the patriarchate must quickly compromise to save face. He calls Eirinaios one of the foremost Orthodox figures worldwide. “Is it too much to allow him to serve the final years of his life as bishop of the small diocese from which he began his almost apostolic work?” he asks.

Snapshots and Bible Burnings

Jewish Believers Are Badgered in Israel

A new wave of anti-Christian vandalism in Israel has raised protests from church leaders. A spokesman for the United Christian Council of Israel, the largest interchurch organization there, has asked the Israeli Foreign Ministry for help in stopping the attacks. The July and August incidents—unlike a spate of occurrences last January, which were confined to Jerusalem—occurred in several smaller towns, attracting less publicity.

A skull and slogans were daubed on church walls, tires on the cars of a Protestant clergyman were slashed, and an evangelical minister, Barach Maoz, who also serves as a CHRISTIANITY TODAY correspondent, was attacked.

Maoz reports that Jewish hostility to Christians meeting in Rehovot (the group’s earlier worship place in Roshton LeTsion was burned down) escalated throughout the summer. First the neighborhood rabbi was reported to have called for “extreme violence” against the believers. Then Orthodox Jews began the practice of gathering around the Congregational Hall at meeting times to discourage attendance. By August, police presence was required to assure access.

In late July an agent of Yad Le’achim, Joseph Birenbaum, burst into a meeting in the hall. He began snapping photos of those present, and refused to leave when asked to do so; he was arrested and held by police. But upon the intervention of Knesset member Porush and two local rabbis, Birenbaum was freed, after being taken to a doctor who advised his release on medical grounds. (Yad Le’achim is a government-subsidized organization whose basic purpose is educational work among immigrants; however, it also has a strong antimissionary thrust, making a practice of photographing Christian gatherings in order to identify the attenders and subject them to harassment and intimidation.)

The Maoz home was broken into in August. The intruder demanded that the Maoz family leave town and stop their “illicit activity,” then proceeded to dump books on the floor, tear down pictures, and break furniture. Maos and the intruder grappled, but the incident was cut short by arrival of the police.

Last spring, Yad Le’achim asked that the Israeli public send it any missionary materials that had come into their possession, including tracts, Christian books, and New Testaments. These, group leaders said, would be burned in a public ceremony. Soon afterward the Sephardic chief rabbi pronounced that whole Bibles, as distinct from Torahs (or Old Testaments) need not be considered holy books and might therefore also be burned.

Deaths

John Beekman, 61, international translation coordinator for Wycliffe Bible Translators, coauthor of a book on translating the Bible, and the subject of two books; August 10 in Dallas, of internal hemorrhaging, after 25 years with an artificial heart valve.

Edwin Palmer, 58, executive secretary for the Committee on Bible Translation of the New York Bible Society, who supervised the 12-year project that produced the New International Version Bible, which has sold close to 3 million copies since 1978; September 16, in Passaic, New Jersey, of a heart attack.

El Salvador

Restore Christian Values, Junta Members Urge

El Salvador’s ruling Revolutionary Junta has called for a prayer campaign for peace in the strife-torn republic. Colonel Jaime Abdul Gutiérrez, a member of the junta, said he hoped everyone would join in, and that “all churches can do much for peace in our country.” Gutiérrez made his remarks during an August 17 meeting between several junta members and a group of evangelical leaders led by Juan Bueno, an Assembly of God missionary and pastor of a large church in San Salvador.

Another junta member, José Napoleón Duarte, commented that “man has lost Christian values, and it is urgent that they be restored through the Word of God, something to which all religions can contribute.”

An estimated 5,000 people have been killed so far this year in violence that continues to wrack the small Central American country despite reforms instituted by the moderate-leftist junta. Nine Catholic priests have died since 1977, including Archbishop Oscar Romero, a vocal advocate of human rights, assassinated in March of this year. Right-wing extremists have claimed credit for most of the killings (although responsibility for Romero’s murder remains unclear), and have warned of “subversive Communists” within the church.

Romero’s successor, Acting Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas, called recently for an end to the “bloody struggle” between the government and leftist guerrillas, and condemned both sides. “As a pastor, as a Christian, and as a Salvadoran, I have to say, ‘Enough!’ ” he declared.

Despite the violence, evangelical churches report overflow crowds and high spiritual interest. A number of churches in San Salvador are opening their doors for early-morning prayer meetings. While some pastors have left the country under threats, evangelism continues and numbers are aligning themselves with the evangelicals. A campaign in June by the Assemblies of God, one of the largest evangelical groups in the country, attracted crowds of up to 30,000 to the soccer stadium.

STEPHEN R. SYWULKA

Guerrillas and Saints

Political Turmoil Hampers Missions in Guatemala

Continuing political violence in Guatemala has prompted one mission to withdraw all its personnel, at least temporarily. After three families associated with the Primitive Methodists received threats in recent months, the board decided to pull out the rest of its missionaries as well—four couples and one single woman.

The latest case, in July, involved Don Lawrence, 42, who had worked in the town of Nebaj, in northern Quiché Departement (province) for 15 years. A letter, which claimed to come from the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP), a Communist group, accused the Lawrences of working for the CIA and gave them—on pain of death—24 hours to get out of town and 48 to leave the country.

The Primitive Methodist Church, which entered Guatemala in 1921, has some 135 congregations with a combined membership of 8,000. A hospital and a Christian school operated by the mission will continue to function under the national church.

Guatemala is the PMC International Mission Board’s only field. Most of its work has been in Quiché, the area of the country where the guerrilla sway is strongest.

“I’m positive about the situation because God is in control,” said field director Bill Vasey. “And a lot of the [national] brethren told us we did the right thing to pull out.” Vasey plans to return in January to continue work on the Joyabaj Quiché New Testament from a base in Guatemala City.

Complicating the situation have been reported problems between the mission and Guatemalan pastors. One departing missionary commented, “We will return when the national church invites us back.”

Other agencies working in Quiché have pulled expatriates out of the area and are maintaining a low profile. Wycliffe translators—including the Stan McMillens, burned out by the EGP a year ago (issue of Sept. 21, 1979, p. 44)—have moved to Guatemala City or other large towns, with their national translation helpers traveling back and forth.

Last November, two missionary families with CAM International, returning home to a remote town in Huehuetenango Departement, were caught at an EGP roadblock during one of these incidents, threatened, and told not to return to the area. One family had already planned to relocate in another part of the country; the other decided to go on furlough, but plans to return to Guatemala soon.

Roman Catholics have also come under attack in Quiché. Two priests, both Spanish, have been killed by right-wing terrorists since June, and 25 others, mostly European, have withdrawn from the area, leaving only two Guatemalan clergy to serve the entire province. Elsewhere in the country, a Belgian priest was murdered last May in the Pacific coastal region; another, of Filipino origin, was kidnapped May 1 and has not been heard from; other clergy and nuns have received threats.

Despite the climate of uncertainty, missionary work outside Quiché continues with no restriction in presenting the Christian message. More than 60 mission agencies work in the country; most have no plans to withdraw personnel or drastically change their operations. One international mission agency plans to move its regional office for Latin America from Guatemala to Costa Rica, while retaining its Guatemalan unit intact. Its executive said that recently imposed martial law could restrict regional coordination activities.

Meanwhile, Guatemala’s first candidate for sainthood, seventeenth-century monk Pedro de San José de Betancur, may have performed his first miracle since being beatified last summer. Dissident priest José María Ruiz Furlán—better known as Padre Chemita—an ardent supporter of canonization for Betancur (popularly known as Brother Pedro), returned to the fold two years after he was excommunicated and reacted by founding his own “Guatemalan National Catholic Church” (issue of Sept. 22, 1978, p. 48).

The controversial Chemita twice ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Guatemala City and had been a constant critic of the local church hierarchy. He apparently requested forgiveness and restoration when in Rome for the June beatification ceremony, and Pope John Paul II lifted the excommunication.

Archbishop Cardinal Mario Casariego of Guatemala, with whom Chemita had long been at odds, communicated the decision to him and the two concelebrated a mass in August at the priest’s self-styled “Cathedral of the Third World,” near a Guatemala city slum.

While the reconciliation between the cardinal and the rebel priest may have seemed miraculous to some, more likely the real reason was the almost total lack of support the pragmatic Chemita received for his breakaway movement.

STEPHEN R. SYWULKA

Poland

In the Crisis: Was the Church a Paper Tiger?

Polish workers may have bolstered the Roman Catholic church more than the church helped the striking workers. That is the consensus after the crisis that won the workers the right to independent trade unions. Midway through the strike Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, the 79-year-old Polish primate, gave a homily that was interpreted as an appeal to return to work. That impression was strengthened when the state television network—which never before had allowed the church use of its broadcast facilities—broadcast his remarks.

Among the concessions won by the strikers were government permission to televise a Roman Catholic Mass every Sunday, and the church’s access to state-controlled papers, radio, and TV (the latter, church officials said, would become reality only after lengthy negotiations).

Last month the church found itself in the awkward position of being praised—by Prime Minister Jozef Pinkowsky at a session of parliament—for its reasonableness and good sense during the strikes. To help rectify its tarnished image, Wyszynski met with strike leader Lech Walesa in an effort to maintain the church’s considerable moral authority over the people by moving more in step with some of the aspirations for freedom expressed by the strikers.

World Scene

Christian leaders have been having a tough time in Bolivia since a July 17 military coup. Methodist leader Mortimer Arias was abducted on August 26 from his home in Cochabamba by armed men. However, the ruling junta reportedly planned last month to exile Arias to Brazil, after Christian leaders worldwide sent messages supporting Arias, who is general secretary of the Confederation of Evangelical Methodist Churches in Latin America and an officer in the still-forming Latin America Council of Churches. Last month the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops condemned the junta’s alleged human rights violations, and documented cases of murder and torture of innocent persons.

The World Evangelical Fellowship general secretary is in Europe this month to attempt a reconciliation with the Italian Evangelical Alliance. Waldron Scott is meeting with the leader of various evangelical alliances in Europe and with leaders in the Italian alliance. The Italians withdrew from WEF membership in protest over the presence of a Roman Catholic observer at the WEF General Assembly in London last March. They were especially upset that the observer was permitted to bring greetings to the assembly.

Church pronouncements figured in the West German electoral campaign just concluded. The country’s Roman Catholic bishops circulated a pastoral letter criticizing Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s Social Democrat-led government for so simplifying divorce and abortion laws, without giving specific support to marriage and the family, “that love is destroyed.” The Protestant Church in Germany (EKD) declared itself politically neutral but acknowledged its concern about pastors living with common-law wives in church-owned houses. An EKD press spokesman said pastors “are not exempt from the general uncertainty in the area of ethics,” but added that they must apply to their own lives what they preach about “the unequivocal witness of the Bible.”

Norway’s government has appointed an “unorthodox” clergyman to a pastorate over the unanimous objection of all 10 of the (Lutheran) Church of Norway bishops. The bishops rejected Helge Hognestad because his public statements conflicted with Lutheran confessions on the character of God, the historicity of Jesus, the Atonement, and justification. Rather than accept these evaluations, the government’s minister of church and education solicited opinions from two theological faculties in Oslo. One seminary declared Hognestad unsuited while the University of Oslo gave a divided opinion. The government minister went ahead with the appointment, saying there should be diversity of theological opinion. The bishops have lodged a protest.

The Christian Peace Conference, mainly a forum for churches in Soviet-bloc nations, nearly always follows the political line of the Soviet Union. But in late August Karoly Toth, president of the Prague-based organization of churchmen, called an unusual special session to cope with objections from its committees in the United States and Europe over its defense of Soviet armed intervention in Afghanistan. The Reformed Church of Hungary clergyman said the session was characterized by a “frank discussion and exchange of views.”

Nearly 5,000 East German Christians participated in the annual Evangelical Alliance conference at Bad Blankenburg in late August. The 2,500 spaces for campers were all reserved more than two weeks in advance. Publicity about the annual event in this center of early German pietism was limited to word of mouth. Some 70 percent of the attenders at the weekend Bible study conference were youths in their late teens and early twenties.

Liberia’s new regime remains an enigma half a year after the April coup that brought Sgt. Samuel Doe to power. Victoria A. Tolbert, wife of assassinated Liberian President William R. Tolbert, Jr., was released from custody in midsummer, but many political prisoners remain. Last month the commanding officer of the stockade warned anyone attempting to visit these prisoners that “you will be severely punished, or maybe not live to tell the story.” Liberian Baptists gained permission to meet in late August; they elected an interim general secretary to replace Tolbert, who was president of both church and nation.

The Dimitri Dudko case is still not closed, according to sources cited by Keston College: when a Moscow home was searched on August 15, its Christian owner was told by the investigators that the search was connected “with the Dudko case.” Last June the Russian Orthodox priest publicly recanted of his leading role in support of religious freedom (August 8 issue, p. 55) after five months of solitary confinement. He was then promptly released. But he refused to comply with a summons to attend as a witness the August trial of Gleb Yakunin, another activist. He also is reported to have made statements regretting his recantation. Soviet officials reportedly tried to coerce him to sign a document—the contents of which are unknown—but Dudko refused.

Another Russian Orthodox religious activist has been tried and sentenced by Soviet authorities. Alexander Ogorodnikov, 29, who founded the Christian Seminar on Problems of Religious Renaissance, which attracted young Orthodox intellectuals concerned with religious revival, was given a maximum 11-year sentence for “anti-Soviet” activities—7 years at hard labor and 5 years banishment to a remote Soviet Union location.

A fourth secret printing press operated by the unregistered Baptists in the Soviet Union was tracked down and impounded by Soviet authorities in June. A Russian-German mission source said seven printers and four local contacts were arrested at the press, located in Glivenki, a village in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains east of the Black Sea. This was the second press confiscated this year.

A French radio station claims that a missing Muslim religious leader is a prisoner in a Libyan military camp near the Algerian border. Imam Moussa Sadr, a Lebanese Shiite leader who was born in Iran, disappeared August 31, 1978, while attending celebrations marking the anniversary of the Libyan revolution. The Paris-based Radio Luxembourg, which aired the allegation, cited no sources and gave no possible motives. Libya has repeatedly denied any involvement in his disappearance.

The September military coup in Turkey sought to stem the tide of terrorism in that country. Attacks on Syrian Orthodox Christians in the southeast sector of the nation is a little-publicized aspect of that lawlessness. IDEA, the information service of the German Evangelical Alliance, reports that Muslim fanatics destroyed vineyards belonging to the Christian villagers of Deir es Salib (“Monastery of the Cross”) at the beginning of the harvest, eliminating their only source of income. They have also repeatedly attacked nearby villages of Kerburan and Arbey over the last several years, murdering a mayor, ransacking a church, and driving out all Christians. Turkish officials have done nothing to prevent the attacks, claiming no persecution of religious minorities exists. Christians in Turkey number about 100,000 out of a population of 45.5 million, or about one in 450.

Until now, Pakistan has been an Islamic republic in name only. That is the opinion of President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, the country’s military ruler, and he is doing something about it. Last month his administration ordered all female college students and teachers to wear the chador, the outer garment that covers the body from head to toe. He has also moved to introduce Islamic law, to punish those caught breaking the Muslim dawn-to-dusk month of fasting, to excise interest rates from financial transactions, and to levy taxes on the rich as sanctioned in the Koran. The latter measure, especially, has raised stiff resistance from religious minorities. While the majority Sunnis endorse compulsory collection of the tax, the Shiites, composing between 20 and 25 percent of the population, believe the tax should be voluntary. A protest against the tax by 20,000 angry Shias in the streets of Islamabad this summer led Zia to promise a compromise ordinance.

A 1980 survey of churches in Japan shows gradual growth over the last decade and better distribution of churches. Conducted by the Church Information Service in Tokyo, the survey revealed that while the number of churches in Japan increased by nearly 40 percent over the decade, there is still only one church for each 19,600 persons in the country. But whereas 10 years ago there were 11 prefectures (states) with less than 40 churches, today there are only 3. Some missionaries moved into the underchurched prefectures in response to the earlier survey.

Australia’s Uniting Church recently leased one of its Sydney buildings to a homosexually oriented Metropolitan Community Church. The “gay” church was exported from the Los Angeles, California, church of the same name to Australia in 1975. The Anglican dean of Sydney, Lance Shilton, commented that a special church for homosexuals was as logical as a church for “people who beat their wives or have bad tempers.”

A group of evangelical Presbyterians built the framework for a new denomination last month. Their provisional “Association of Evangelical Presbyterian Churches” is the first uniting of conservative congregations that have left the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. in recent months.

“Possibly a year ago none of us would have dreamed we would be here for an occasion like this,” pastor Bartlett Hess said at the start of the brief, two-day meeting in a Saint Louis hotel. But then, Hess added, a year ago he wouldn’t have dreamed of the subsequent withdrawal (in June) of his growing. 3,400-member Ward Presbyterian Church in Livonia, Michigan.

He indicates that many conservatives awoke to the conviction that troubling conditions won’t change in the 2.6-million-member denomination. At least 43 congregations had voted to withdraw as of last month, perhaps causing the denomination’s hierarchy to wish it was all a dream. Most of the churches left in opposition to church legislation requiring congregations to elect women elders and deacons. They also have resisted the denomination’s claim to ownership of local church property. These churches reject what they see as liberal theological trends—best typified, they say, by a presbytery appointment of a Rockville, Maryland, pastor who, upon questioning, declined to affirm Christ’s full deity.

Twenty-five churches that have withdrawn sent representatives to the so-called Consultation of Presbyterian Evangelicals in Saint Louis. Representatives of at least 15 other interested churches also attended. Pastor Edward Auchard of Bryan, Ohio, for example, said his church board (session) had asked him to “check out the meeting.” He believed the denomination has left its historic and theological roots, and that like-minded conservatives “need some form of theological identity.”

The meeting was called expressly for the purpose of forming an association of like-minded churches. Hess, his executive pastor, L. Edward Davis, and conference convener Calvin Gray, pastor of the 750-member First Presbyterian Church in Trenton, Michigan, wanted a national fellowship similar to one they already were enjoying regionally with several other churches that have withdrawn from the Detroit presbytery.

The conference was their idea initially, and they shared it in a planning meeting with four other pastors a month earlier: J. Kent Bull of the 450-member Dundalk Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, Maryland; Bruce Dunn of the 2,000-member Grace Presbyterian Church in Peoria, Illinois; George Scotchmer of the 400-member Memorial Presbyterian Church in Saint Louis; and Dean H. Wolf of the 3,300-member Faith Presbyterian Church in Aurora, Colorado.

The estimated 100 attenders met in small groups to discuss the beliefs and organizational structures of their proposed group. The next morning they voted on them.

The group first approved six affirmations that “define the basic principles of faith and life for ourselves.” They affirmed the primacy of Christ as Savior and Lord and “fully God and fully man,” the infallibility of Scripture, the Westminister Confession, the Presbyterian model of church government, the “evangelical vitality within the Reformed faith,” and spiritual unity in the basic tenets of the Christian faith, but spiritual and constitutional freedom in the area of “nonessential and secondary distinctives” (women elders and deacons, for instance).

The group next voted:

• Creation of a provisional fellowship, the Association of Evangelical Presbyterian Churches (AEPC), its purpose being to “establish a network of communication, fellowship, and shared resources.”

• Creation of a steering committee of up to 14 persons, both laity and clergy, which will form needed committees and oversee the group in its provisional period.

• That member churches meet regularly for fellowship on a regional basis.

• That the group reconvene at a national level sometime before March 1981 (so as to take place before the next UPCUSA General Assembly).

Only those representatives of churches that have withdrawn were allowed to vote. Each pastor noted he could only endorse the association, and that his church’s membership in the group depended upon congregational vote.

The steering committee then elected Gray as moderator of the new association, and Davis as its clerk. In an interview, Gray shied away from describing the group as a “denomination.” However, he did say steps are being taken in that direction. The AEPC is incorporating in Michigan, giving it legal status to receive funds and issue ministerial credentials, among other things. Gray expects in the beginning that at least 20 churches will join. These have a cumulative membership of around 18,000.

Denominational leaders are fully aware of the problems, and want to stop further defections. In August, UPCUSA moderator Charles Hammond, who is a former presbytery executive from Indiana, called a “Conference on Unity” at Princeton Theological Seminary. It was, in his words, a response to “divisions and tensions abroad in the church.” Hammond invited persons from three groups: pastors and elders on the verge of leaving the denomination, evangelicals wanting to stay, and those who support the present church directions.

The 180 persons who attended aired their concerns mostly in small group discussions, although there was time for a question-and-answer session with long-time stated clerk William Thompson, Hammond, and G. Daniel Little, executive director of the General Assembly Mission Council.

The new AEPC is not trying to lure congregations from the UPCUSA, Gray said, but will only offer an alternative to dissatisfied congregations—perhaps even to some conservative congregations in other church bodies, such as the Presbyterian Church, U.S.

Well-known pastor James Boice, whose Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia withdrew from the UPCUSA last spring, said he sympathized with those who attended the Saint Louis meeting. However, he said, “I think it’s wrong to start another denomination.”

He is working for the proposed merger of four smaller Presbyterian bodies: the Presbyterian Church in America, the Reformed Presbyterian Church/Evangelical Synod, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America. (At its recent annual Synod meeting, the RPCNA declined joining any merger.) His own congregation is considering affiliation with either the PCA or the RPCES.

One problem, however, is that these conservative, evangelical denominations do not allow women elders and deacons: Hess’s Ward Church, for example, would not qualify because it has women serving in both capacities. Boice’s church has women deacons (not women elders), but he suggests his church might get around this barrier by creating a separate board of deaconesses. He suggested that Hess and others also look for alternatives that would allow them to join an existing Presbyterian body.

(The one-year-old group of pastors who oppose having women officers, Concerned United Presbyterians, for the most part has stopped functioning. The group lost most of its leaders [Boice and Dunn, for instance], after their churches withdrew from the UPCUSA.)

Some UPCUSA evangelical groups, such as Presbyterians United for Biblical Concerns, remain in support of bringing renewal from within the denomination. The PUBC and evangelical groups within the PCUS believe a long-anticipated merger of these two largest Presbyterian denominations would result in a single, more conservative and evangelical body. They point out that UPCUSA stated clerk Thompson expects an end to the legislation requiring women elders and deacons in a merged group, and that he has predicted accomplishment of the merger by 1985.

Gordon-Conwell Seminary professor Richard Lovelace, a well-known advocate of evangelicals staying in the UPCUSA, sent a memo to Gray and Hess before the Saint Louis meeting asking that they consider formation of a “relief presbytery,” similar to that organized in the 1840s by Scottish churchman Thomas Gillespie. Such a group would maintain a relationship with the parent church, and return when certain conditions of reunion are met.

In an interview, Hess said the newly formed AEPC can be explained no other way than as “the work of the Holy Spirit.” He said the Holy Spirit is “building his church through separations, as well as through those who feel compelled to stay within the church.”

Hess said he still hopes to see renewal within the UPCUSA, and rejects criticisms of being “schismatic”: all Presbyterians have roots in some form of separation—the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation being the example common to all, he said, if anything, he noted, recent church withdrawals have “done more to shake up the church [UPCUSA] than all of our talk had done … there have been more sermons preached on the deity of Christ in the last couple of months than there have ever been.”

JOHN MAUST

Is The Sanctuary Safe?

Certain United Presbyterian congregations are leaving their denomination on principle, but they would prefer that it be with their church property as well.

Many of these congregations have gone to court over the matter, because the presbyteries are holding to the denomination’s claim to ownership of all local church property. These cases were in various stages of litigation around the country last month, but no decisions had been made.

In fact, there have been no major church property rulings since two recent U.S. Supreme Court actions that favored the property claims of the local congregation. In Jones v. Wolf, the court indicated that property should go to the withdrawing majority of the congregation when the denomination does not have specific claim to it in its constitution.

To close this loophole, the UPCUSA General Assembly adopted a constitutional amendment in June making explicit its “implied trust” concept, which says local church property is held in trust for the denomination as a whole. Final ratification of the amendment by the next assembly probably would take away the legal claims to property by most withdrawing congregations. Some churches have thus decided to get out while they still have a chance of keeping the pews they’re sitting on.

One of the few experts on church property issues is editor G. Aiken Taylor of the independent Presbyterian Journal. The ordained Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) minister attended the Saint Louis meeting of Presbyterian evangelicals as the invited PCA representative and chairman of its interchurch relations committee (see related story). He spoke on church property issues when a number of those in attendance at Saint Louis sought his advice during an informal supper meeting.

“Right now, the denomination is probing for soft spots; they are looking for the weaker cases that would establish the first precedent,” he said. He noted that each case is different.

Taylor advised the group to find lawyers knowledgeable in this fledgling field, or at least to find ones “willing to listen” and learn. At least three lawyers, who are representing churches that have withdrawn, attended the Saint Louis meeting in order to get an update on recent property disputes (and, no doubt, some new clients).

UPCUSA associate stated clerk Robert Stevenson has been given the responsibility for monitoring the church withdrawal situation for the denomination. He asserted that the U.S. Supreme Court had interfered with the church’s interpretation of its own constitution.

Presbyteries are responsible for their own legal proceedings in property disputes, he said, while adding that most “are generally following the book” in upholding the denomination’s claim to property. “We’re [the denomination] hoping to get some clear-cut decisions this fall,” he said.

There has been maneuvering by the withdrawing churches and the presbyteries. Some presbyteries have requested the membership rolls of withdrawing congregations; Taylor said these have contacted members who might not have voted for the church’s withdrawal, and who would be willing to file suit for the property as a continuing congregation.

Some congregations have placed their funds in separate corporations that can’t be touched. Some have offered to buy their property. But in most instances, any solutions will require a court’s consideration.

“Whoever wins the next one or two cases is going to make a great, big splash,” Taylor said.

Personalities: The Bob Green and

Anita Bryant Breakup: Picking Up the Pieces

With the dust from her divorce beginning to settle, people wondering whether Anita Bryant plans to resume her public life will have to keep wondering. She hasn’t decided yet, says her agent, Jackie Lee.

Several weeks ago Bryant moved from Florida back to her home town of Tulsa, Oklahoma. She is renting a house in Tulsa, and three of her four children are with her. Her oldest son, Bob, 17, remained in Florida with her former husband, Bob Green.

Bryant is filling a number of singing engagements made before the divorce, such as one for a trucking company convention in Staunton, Virginia, early in September, at which she sang secular and patriotic songs, and at sacred music concerts in Nashville and Clewiston, Florida.

“It’s just too soon,” said Lee. “She just put the kids in school, and she still has crates to unpack.” Lee said singing dates have been falling off ever since Bryant stepped into the middle of the fight to repeal a Dade County (Miami), Florida, ordinance prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals.

A crusader against family breakup, as well as against homosexuality, the singer shocked many when she filed for divorce last May. She revealed then that the two had been separated “in heart, mind, and body” for much of their 20-year marriage.

A friend of Bryant in Miami said the singer is “waiting for God to heal the hurt and waiting for him to show her what to do. She holds herself responsible for the disappointment many people feel.”

Green, who managed Bryant’s career as head of Anita Bryant Ministries, has renamed the organization “Successful Life Ministries”; it still deals primarily in seminars and counseling. He said, “The top priority in my life is to win Anita back.” The two haven’t spoken lately, he said.

Green said his own experience qualifies him more than ever to teach people how to avoid divorce, although he himself doesn’t lead the seminars.

Green also has formed a new organization called Crusade for Morality. It is designed to help out Christian groups who get involved in local morality disputes—with homosexual organizations, for instance—and need experienced, outside advice, such as on strategy, and dealing with the public media. He’s already been advising a Baptist pastor in Virginia Beach who organized a referendum vote in November over whether the city libraries should remove copies of a local homosexual newspaper. Green also hopes to do battle against the liberal American Civil Liberties Union and the lawsuits it frequently files that bear on morality issues.

TOM MINNERY

Museum, school, research center …

Graham Center Provides Evangelism Focal Point

The new Billy Graham Center reaches up five floors, each one about the size of a football field. The 193,000-square-foot, Colonial-style structure—from its eight molded, fiber glass pillars to its rooftop cupola—appears almost awkwardly huge compared to other buildings on the Wheaton (Ill.) College campus.

But then, college officials believe the center’s contribution to Christendom will be just as conspicuous. They say its museum, library, and archives offer the largest collection of materials on missions and evangelism anywhere in the world, and that it will become a training center and a think tank for world evangelization.

The center opened officially last month with a dedication ceremony and a series of programs designed to display the facilities to a curious local public, college alumni, and area news reporters.

In his dedicatory address, Graham described the history of the center. Looking north toward the college’s Blanchard Hall, where he attended many classes prior to his 1943 Wheaton College graduation, Graham said the original intent six years ago had been to find a home for his personal records and those of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA). Plans expanded beyond a library, however. The 61-year-old evangelist felt “God wanted it [the center] to be more than a place to house these things,” but also a center for research and planning in missions and evangelism.

Several other schools had wanted the center, including Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and the University of North Carolina (Graham’s home state). Graham said. However he chose Wheaton for several reasons: his ties to the school (he and his wife are trustees); the city is a hub of evangelicalism; and because of the undergraduate and graduate schools’ emphases on world missions and social concern.

Graham got applause after saying the $13.5 million structure was all paid for. It is a gift from the BGEA to Wheaton College with “no strings attached,” he said, and will become a department of the college under the management of the school’s trustees board. Former president of Holiday Inns, Bill Walton, took an early retirement in order to raise (within 18 months, it is hoped) a $15 million endowment, which will earn the $1 million necessary for annual operations costs. No student fees or tuition will go to support the center.

Critics had seen the center as a multimillion-dollar monument to a single man. And some Wheaton College faculty have feared the center will detract from, and place a drain on, the 120-year-old school’s respected four-year, liberal arts programs.

Mindful of those concerns in his dedicatory address, Graham said the building would be used for God’s glory, not his own. He told reporters that his own preference had been that the center not even carry his name. The center’s director, William A. Shoemaker, said original plans for the center were revamped midway after Graham felt certain exhibits were too gawdy and overemphasized himself.

The center’s research facilities will be available to anyone. The library has 60,000 bound volumes, and another 80,000 in micro form.

Materials in the archives record interdenominational Protestant evangelism and missions in America. Beginning five years ago with the records of Graham and the BGEA, the archives have grown to include 197 collections (any materials except books, serials, and artifacts). Its files include personal letters of John Wesley, D.L. Moody, and Ira Sankey, taped interviews with missionaries, records of the Africa Inland Mission from 1902 to 1978, three boxes of material on evangelist Billy Sunday, and all manner of slides, videotapes and cassettes, diaries, scrapbooks, and other collectable paraphernalia.

The general public learns the history of Christianity, and particularly that of evangelism in America, in the first floor museum. Displays and headphone recordings describe various evangelists and movements, and ministries of the BGEA. There is a “walk through the gospel,” with salvation messages etched on the walls, and special effects to represent Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection.

The second floor of the center is home for the 425-student Wheaton Graduate School, with its four emphases in psychological studies, communications, theology, and Christian ministries. The fifth floor is vacant, pending decisions on its use.

School officials intend to bring key international Christian leaders to the center for short-term training, and to offer schools of evangelism for pastors and laity. They say they will address major issues facing evangelicals in forums with prominent evangelical spokesmen, similar to the three-day “Forum on the Church’s Future,” held prior to the Saturday, September 13, dedication. The center also will finance various missions projects: already earmarked is a manual for first-term missionaries, and a leadership program for worldwide ministry for Chinese Christian students in the U.S.

About 6,000 persons attended the outdoor dedication ceremony. Most of these were local residents, although prominent guests included President Jimmy Carter’s religious liaison, Robert Maddox, and Barbara Bush (described by Graham as a long-time personal friend), wife of Republican vice-presidential candidate George Bush. While most of the addresses were as sunny as the September 13 skies, keynote speaker Charles Malik, the former president (from Lebanon) of the United Nations General Assembly, warned of a crippling, spiritual darkness at universities in Europe and America. Christians and Christian schools must work harder if they are to match the academic and intellectual prowess of their secular counterparts; they must train the moral, responsible leaders that the universities are not training, he said. Next in importance to saving souls is saving minds, he said.

Appropriately, Graham ended his Wheaton visit with a Sunday evening evangelistic rally, participated in by 248 west suburban Chicago churches. Despite his “churched” audience—many of whom work for the more than 30 Christian organizations located in the area—Graham preached his usual salvation message. However, he noted that just living in Wheaton or a nearby suburb doesn’t ensure one’s personal salvation. Of the 10,000 attenders, about 330 responded to Graham’s call for Christian commitment; about 100 made first-time decisions.

Among the attenders was Richard Brandel, vice-president of the J. Emil Anderson Company in Des Plaines, Illinois, the contractor for the center. As the building superintendent of the center in 1978, Brandel became a Christian under the influence of a Wheaton College employee, Warren Schilling. Prior to his work at the site, Brandel said he had been “seeking after God,” and that he had encountered Schilling at just the right time. Graham Center officials hope the center’s impact will be just as decisive and timely.

JOHN MAUST

Personalia

Two years after becoming a Christian, British actor James Fox gave up his career in 1971 to work with other Christians. For the last six years he has been associated with the Navigators, and leading a student group at Leeds University in England. Now, he says, he plans to return to acting, in a British television series planned for next year, believing the Lord wants him to use his acting talents again. Fox played in Thoroughly Modern Millie, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, and King Rat.

At its international convocation in Birmingham, England, Youth for Christ International elected Jim Groen in August to succeed Sam Wolgemuth as president and chairman of the board. Jim Wilson, a Canadian, was elected general director, succeeding Groen in that post. The internationalized administration was frustrated in efforts to name a Third World leader as chairman, but is committed to seeing that happen four years from now.

The Meaning Of Violence Today

Terror or Love? by Bommi Baumann (Grove Press, 1979, 127 pp., $6.95); Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt, by Barrington Moore, Jr. (Pantheon, 1978, 540 pp., $7.95); The Moral Meaning of Revolution, by Jon P. Gunnemann (Yale University Press, 1979, 277 pp., $15.00); are reviewed by Douglas J. Miller, associate professor of Christian social ethics, Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Acts of political terror and revolutionary violence continue to stain the globe with an almost machine-gun-like regularity. The social and ethical issues engendered by such desperate human action have fractured the church community. In one camp are Christians for whom revolutionary violence is nearly incomprehensible and fully reprehensible. On the other side stand Christians who sympathize with and even participate in various liberation movements around the world. Both groups will discover material to refine their convictions in each of these three books. Yet all the authors raise nagging moral questions both for one who would cavalierly dismiss revolutionary activity, and for one who would promiscuously embrace it.

Terror or Love? is an autobiographical sketch of Bommi Baumann, Germany’s best-known urban guerrilla. His callously blunt ramblings, documenting his journey through the drug scene into admittedly mindless terrorism, is frightening. He describes growing up in a subculture of violence, with beatings by his drunken father, school fist fights, and finally bomb building. He chillingly remarks, “Making a decision for terrorism is something already programmed.” Yet, woven throughout the narrative is Baumann’s desperate, but elusive search for love. On occasion, he does savor affection, only to have it turn bitter and contribute to his accumulated hatred. The book might profitably be read by ministers, teachers, and especially parents, all of whom need to understand the inner temptations and struggles of urban children today. Furthermore, it undercuts the stereotype that all revolutionaries are moral idealists—a sobering reality for Christians who are uncritically sympathetic toward revolutionary activity.

Barrington Moore, Jr., in his book, Injustice, approaches the dynamics of revolution from a behavioral science perspective. Utilizing contemporary theoretical tools, then analyzing pre-Nazi Germany in excruciating detail, Moore tries to discover the social and psychological factors which either contribute to a sense of moral outrage and the consequent tendency of people to revolt, or inhibit a sense of moral outrage and foster obedience to a “predatory authority” such as Hitler. Moore intends his readers to be disturbingly confronted by the analogies between pre-Nazi Germany and contemporary social systems, whether rightist or leftist. An unanticipated benefit of the book is its vigorous critique of moral relativism and its effort to ground moral concepts, such as the sense of justice, in “Pan-human” or universal categories. The volume suffers because of its failure to interact with significant theories of political violence like those of Ted Robert Gurr and James C. Davies.

Baumann and Moore’s discussions of civil violence contain implicit rebukes for those theologians who romantically link Christianity with revolutionary action. The Moral Meaning of Revolution, written by Jon P. Gunnemann, a Christian ethicist at Yale, grounds these rebukes in solid ethical bedrock. Drawing upon the insights of Berger and Kuhn, he constructs a theory of revolution that highlights the radical shifts in a society’s paradigm of arbitrary sufferings grounded in its patterns of domination and subordination.

Based upon this definition of revolution, Gunnemann critiques some classical and contemporary apostles of revolution, such as Marx, Marcuse, Fanon, and Moltmann. Their views of social change are morally inadequate because they focus upon the value of sudden and violent reaction to injustice, rather than accent the importance of “articulating just principles for ordering power and creating just human institutions.” But Gunnemann does not simply affirm the status quo. Rather he suggests that the Christian faith entails a “revolutionary potential,” However, this potential rests in the ordered moral discussion of the uses and abuses of power and authority (beginning, he argues, with these uses and abuses in the church itself). When revolutionary conditions prevail, the church’s moral debate upon new political orderings may result in less violence and destruction and greater justice before and after the smoke has settled.

Gunnemann’s definition of revolution and his assumption of its inevitability are somewhat vulnerable. Nevertheless, his critique points up the ethical weaknesses of contemporary theological trends and the various liberation theologies built upon them.

Evangelicalism In Britain

Contending for the Faith, by Douglas Johnson (Inter-Varsity Press, London, 368 pp. £2.95), is reviewed by S. W. Murray, Belfast, Northern Ireland.

In this excellent history the development of the evangelical movement in British universities and colleges over the past half-century is presented. It has certainly been one of the most significant religious influences in the British Isles. An early pioneer in the English universities was Charles Simeon of Cambridge, whose ministry at Holy Trinity Church established an evangelical tradition at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The student awakenings commencing with the visits of D. L. Moody led to the Student Volunteer Movement and then to the establishment of the wider Student Christian Movement at the end of the century.

As the SCM developed, the movement broadened and became theologically inclusive. This led in 1910 to the disaffiliation of the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (known as CICCU) and the union continued an independent course for the following years.

Following the end of the First World War an evangelical witness was started in London which ultimately led to the establishment of the Inter-Varsity Fellowship in 1928.

Visits by representatives of IVF to North America, Australia, New Zealand and other countries led to the formation of similar organizations and finally to the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. The Inter-Varsity Press has come to be one of the major evangelical publishing houses, with a widespread influence, and the emphasis on biblical research and scholarship has helped to promote a more clear-cut evangelicalism in the churches and a strong missionary outreach to the ends of the earth.

With the development of an evangelical witness in many other types of colleges—training, technical, and vocational—the IVF title was changed in 1975 to the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship.

This book is a definitive treatment of UCCF and will be read eagerly by anyone interested in the history of evangelicalism in Britain. It reads well alongside C. Stacey Woods’s The Growth of a Work of God, which is a history of IVCF in the U.S. and Canada.

Ministering To People

When People Say No: Conflict and the Call to Ministry, by James E. Dittes (Harper & Row, 1979, 150 pp., $4.95 pb), Finding Hope Again: A Pastor’s Guide to Counseling Depressed Persons, by Roy W. Fairchild (Harper & Row, 1980, 150 pp., $8.95), are reviewed by Lewis R. Rambo, assistant professor of pastoral psychology, San Francisco Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union, California.

Here are two new books that are excellent contributions to the fields of pastoral counseling and pastoral theology. Each combines deep insight into the human condition, theological sophistication, up-to-date psychological knowledge, and readability. In addition, both books are brief, which will aid the busy ministers or lay people in the task of serving the needs of suffering persons in the community of faith.

Dittes’s book is addressed to the minister and his/her struggles when a congregation says “No.” By “no,” Dittes means those situations in which individuals or the congregation refuse to go along with a minister’s proposals. Examples of such refusals are legion. “Normal” reactions are for the minister either to reprimand the congregation for its refusal to hear the call of God or to submit meekly to the wishes of the church. Dittes urges the minister to take the congregation’s “no” seriously and to understand his/her own sense of anger or failure, going on to understand the refusal as a symbolic gesture on a deeper level, which can lead to a more profound form of ministry to the person or church.

An example of such a “no” might be an individual’s simple refusal to join in a Bible study group. Deeper exploration of the “no” may reveal a person who is genuinely fearful of the imperative to abandon old but comfortable patterns of living; or it may uncover the fact that the person still has not forgiven God for the death of a child years before. Resistance, in other words, is not to be taken at face value, but to be seen through in order to accomplish a ministry that goes beyond the mere platitudes of conventional wisdom.

Throughout the book, Dittes utilizes psychology and the Bible in an unobtrusive but powerful way. The underlying theme of the book is that ministry takes place by direct confrontation with the suffering of the individual or community and that the gospel empowers minister a boost of hope and affirmation in his or her call to the ministry.

Fairchild’s Finding Hope Again is a handbook for understanding and counseling depressed persons. The book is especially valuable because Fairchild surveys the literature on depression within psychology and psychiatry and provides a holistic model for ministry that does justice to the minister’s role as a religious leader and a counselor.

An important contribution of the book is to enable the minister to understand that depression, one of the most common forms of mental illness today, is a multidimensional, complex phenomenon. The cause of depression can be both physical and psychological. Unfortunately, many current schools of thought make these two points of view mutually exclusive; Fairchild correctly asserts that the minister should be alert for both possibilities. Some ministers assume that depression is merely a problem that would disappear if the person were “right with God”; however, the problem is more complex in that depression can be due to biochemical imbalances as well as to the result of a way of life that fosters a debilitating depression. Fairchild’s book gives guidelines and resources for making the proper diagnosis and urges consultation with medical doctors when the problem is seriously disrupting the individual’s life.

In addition to understanding the phenomenon of depression, Fairchild provides suggestions for the minister’s role in bringing healing. He does not offer bland panaceas of “positive thinking” or other nostrums. Rather, ministry to the depressed person involves a willingness to share in the despair and hopelessness of the person and in a sometimes arduous reconstruction of the person’s life to find hope. Like Dittes, the fundamental thrust of Fairchild’s book is that hope and health emerge through confrontation with suffering and not avoidance of the human plight. Hope is found in the process of deep exploration of a person’s pain and in the building upon his/her faith, however rudimentary it may be, and in a God who created and loved us in Jesus Christ.

Dittes and Fairchild have written books that deserve a wide readership, books that provide solid and helpful information to expand and enrich the practice of ministry. They add to the growing literature that affirms the legitimate role of the theological dimension in pastoral psychology.

Whitefield: A Definitive Biography

George Whitefield, Volume II, by Arnold Dallimore (Cornerstone, 1980, 602 pp., $19.95); and George Whitefield: Trumpet of the Lord, by Ruth Gordon Short (Review and Herald Publishers, 1979, 126 pp., pb).

Interest in the early years of America’s (and Britain’s) religious history continues unabated and two recent books on George Whitefield add to the store of valuable material available.

The completion of Whitefield’s biography by Arnold Dallimore is an epochal event. It would be difficult to praise this second volume too highly. Covering the period 1741–70, the events of Whitefield’s turbulent life are admirably and carefully handled. Whitefield’s preaching missions, his split with the Wesleys over doctrine, his marriage, travels, controversies, triumphs, and tragedies are gone over in detail.

Several things stand out as significant in this biography. First, one is impressed with the amount of original work Dallimore has done. This is not just a rehash of someone else’s work, but a freshly researched piece of highest quality. Second, it is beautifully written, and shows that history need not be boring. This biography flows faster and better than most fiction. Third, the power that characterized Whitefield’s life is made real by the careful way Dallimore writes. His restraint in style allows the power of the subject to force itself through in a remarkable way. Fourth, the subject matter itself is of immense worth and one can hardly wait to move on from page to page. Anyone who wants to read the definitive biography on Whitefield may now do so by purchasing Dallimore’s fine work.

Ruth Gordon Short’s George Whitefield: Trumpet of the Lord is a bit thin by comparison. Based almost entirely on secondary sources, this breezy run through Whitefield’s life seems to lack a focal point, giving it a chopped-up feel. Very few dates are given, so one doesn’t always know how events relate to each other, and minor liberties are taken with the sources (e.g., it was not at one of Whitefield’s services that the “gallery” incident occurred [p. 37], but at a meeting in Exeter [see Dallimore, p. 164]). However, this book is still worth giving to a high school student or adult who wants a brief introduction to the subject. If interest is stirred by popular volumes such as these, then all the better. The full treatment can then be had by reading Dallimore.

A Christian System Of Psychology

Psychology from a Christian Perspective, by Ronald L. Koteskey (Abingdon, 1980, 175 pp., $5.95 pb), is reviewed by Willard Harley, Sr., practicing psychologist, and professor emeritus, Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California.

The author’s purpose in this book is “to place psychology in a Christian world view as a system.” Koteskey dichotomizes man into “animal-like” and “God-like” qualities. The animal-like aspects follow natural cause and effect and are therefore amenable to scientific method, including behavioristic theory. God-like qualities originate from man’s creation in the image of God. Here, with modifications, the descriptive methods of science, Gestalt, and humanistic approaches are applicable.

Koteskey believes a Christian psychology will include moral implications in the study of all human behavior. He gives examples such as: studying vision should include “the lust of the eye”; audition, “ears to hear”; pain, “not to inflict pain on others”; fatigue, “to rest every seven days.”

Koteskey identifies “God-like” qualities as those aspects of behavior that have usually been assigned to higher mental processes, such as perception, cognition, personality, and creativity. Here Koteskey seems to have problems; perhaps they are only semantic. He is describing fallen man as spiritual, God-like, and like God, without distinguishing these from the supernatural work of God in the believer. For him, Transcendental Meditation, the effects of psychedelic drugs, extrasensory perception, dreams, and occult visions illustrate man’s spirituality. Also, the more man progresses in his personality development and self-actualization the more like God he becomes, and for the same reason, the study of these qualities will help understand the nature of God better.

Koteskey’s ambitious dream of a Christian system of psychology is indeed challenging. While his book is intended for beginning students in psychology, it probably is better adapted to courses in history and systems, since much of it is not oriented to current trends in psychology. For example, his discussion of structuralism, functionalism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Watsonian behaviorism are rarely alluded to today in beginning psychology courses.

Ethics In The Early Church

History of Christian Ethics, Volume 1, by George Wolfgang Forell (Augsburg, 1979, 247 pp., $12.50), is reviewed by Reginald Stackhouse, principal, Wycliffe College, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Few scholars have a sufficiently comprehensive mastery in any dimension of theology’s many-sided corpus to attempt a survey of more than nineteen centuries of thought. But George Wolfgang Forell, Carver distinguished professor of religion at the University of Iowa, is one of them, and he is bringing his encyclopedic knowledge to a planned four-volume history of Christian ethics.

The first volume covers the period from the New Testament through Augustine of Hippo. There are chapters on the New Testament, the early Christian fathers, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, the fourth century, Basil, and Augustine. A seven-page bibliography is appended, along with four indexes of subjects, names, biblical references, and Greek and Latin terms.

Professor Forell allows each church father to speak for himself, including generous quotations from primary sources. His book is thus a valuable aid for gaining a clear, accurate insight into what leading teachers of the patristic era taught about ethics. It might have been more useful had it provided an overview of this seminal period. The book itself, however, provides a thoroughly researched exposition of its author’s conviction that the key response to the gospel has always been and must always be the question, “What shall we do?” (Acts 2:3).

Christians have answered that question in varied and complex ways, shaping in each time and place lifestyles to manifest the difference the Christ event makes to behavior. Professor Forell’s history aims at setting forth diverse answers. He is convinced that from the beginning the world has not been most impressed by Christians’ “theoretical formulations but rather the obvious and impressive new life.”

No Sinking Sand

Where Do We Stand? by Harry Blamires (Servant Books, 1980, 158 pp., $7.95), is reviewed by Dan E. Nicholas, public information officer, Mendocino County Schools and Evangelical Orthodox Church pastor, Ukiah, California.

C. S. Lewis fans will want to take note of a new book by Harry Blamires, an English author who was a student and friend of the apologist. Blamires’s Where Do We Stand? (foreword by Malcolm Muggeridge) is an appeal to thinking Christians to remain true to historic Christianity and to resist the allure of today’s growing secularism.

Blamires calls readers to think twice before embracing modern-day remakes of the orthodox faith. He believes efforts by the church to identify with the worldling’s plight can and must be accomplished without confusing the kingdoms of light and darkness. He also addresses the need for God’s people to pursue such issues as social justice—but for the cause of Christ, not for the cause of humanism.

Blamires takes an effective stab at current idolatries in Western culture that work to lure the church away from its calling and attempt to enlist its troops in polytheistic allegiance to materialism and self-gratification. He points to the public media with its power as a secular authority to which we have granted unwarranted trust.

The author’s plea is for the preservation of orthodoxy. He makes a telling point in reminding us that God did not intend his people to adapt to changing and evolving truth. Had this been God’s plan, he would have provided believers with a succession of Christs, appearing to assist us in each generation.

Traditional orthodoxy and meaningful church authority are the two major thrusts in Blamires’s work. He states that proper authority in the church is the only tool that can save us from authoritarianism. Blamires stands against the growing egalitarian spirit that would have us dissolve rightful authority in church life.

The author’s style might appear a bit “high-brow” for those who have forgotten the long paragraphs of years past. Yet his audience—well-read laity or informed clergy—will probably not be greatly offended by this approach. At the same time, Blamires is not above using casual talk or personal anecdotes to establish his point.

We live under God by virtue of our membership in the church, says the author. The walls surrounding the city in which we live are being chipped away by those who would update old truths to make Christendom fit the fads of the hour. Wherever we stand, we must stand within those walls; we must stand against those influences that would weaken the bride of Christ, making her unrecognizable to her Lord.

The Christian’s vocation is to remain a citizen of another kingdom. Blamires says it well: until Christ’s return we must expect to “live uneasily in the kingdom of this world.”

Evangelical Scholarship Is Alive And Well

Perspectives on Evangelical Theology; Papers from the Thirtieth Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, by Kenneth S. Kantzer and Stanley Gundry, editors (Baker Book House, 1979, $9.95 pb), is reviewed by John Woodbridge, chairman of the Department of History, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.

For Enlightenment scholars, the year 1978 marked the two-hundredth anniversary of the death of both Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. However, the nearly four hundred evangelicals who gathered at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in December of 1978 gave little thought to the passing of the Frenchman and the Genevan. They had come together to celebrate an anniversary of a different kind, the thirtieth birthday of the Evangelical Theological Society.

In the present volume, editors Kantzer and Gundry present selected papers from the conference that the Christian worker and informed lay person will find stimulating and valuable.

The essays are grouped under four rubrics: Systematic Theology, Biblical Theology, Philosophical Theology, and Pastoral Theology. Some of the essayists spar indirectly with their colleagues on such issues as liberation theology (Ronald Sider, H. O. J. Brown), election (Fred H. Klooster, Wilber Dayton, David Scaer), the ordination of women (E. Margaret Howe, Robert L. Saucy), while others focus their attention on more specialized topics (e.g., J. J. Davis’s “Kant and Religious Knowledge”).

Several essays warrant particular commendation. In “Categories in Collision,” Gordon Lewis provides helpful critiques of the categories of thought underlying the work of Bruce Larson, G. C. Berkouwer, Helmut Thielicke, and John Bright. Bruce Demarest summarizes his penetrating critique of “Process Trinitarianism” with the apt words of Kenneth Hamilton: “The disadvantage of founding a theology upon relevance is that it may suddenly become irrelevant and die” (p. 36). Gerhard F. Hasel furnishes a well-constructed programmatic essay concerning the future of biblical theology. In his essay, “An Evangelical Theology of Liberation,” Ron Sider brings evangelicals up short by charging that their attitudes toward the poor are heretical. He contends that “the biblical teaching that God is on the side of the poor ought to be an extremely important doctrine for evangelicals” (p. 132).

Some loose threads dangle from a few of the papers. Clark Pinnock calls for Christians to approach the creation of their theism by allowing “revelational norms to exercise control over any and all philosophical influences” (p. 42). He does not proffer the means, however, with which we might bracket out philosophical presuppositions in such a conclusive fashion. Klaus Bockmühl calls evangelical theologians to reverse the “Decision for Secularism” (p. 12). But he adds little to our knowledge about what secularism is and he fails to cite the vast literature devoted to that definitional problem.

What do these papers collectively signify? On the one hand, their arrangement and occasionally severe editing (e.g., John W. Montgomery’s paper), give us but an indirect reflection of the conference itself. But on the other hand, their generally high quality speaks well for evangelical scholarship as a whole. Indeed, as editors Kantzer and Gundry affirm of the Thirtieth Annual Meeting, “evangelical scholarship is alive and well, coming to grips with the tough questions of the present and facing the future” (from the preface).

Honor To Whom Honor Is Due

Pauline Studies, edited by Donald A. Hagner and Murray J. Harris (Eerdmans, 1980, 336 pp., $17.95).

Festschriften are honorary volumes put together by appreciative persons (usually former students) to commemorate some landmark in a deserving scholar’s life. Most such honorees are grateful to receive one in a lifetime. It is almost unheard of that two should be presented, but such is the affection in which F. F. Bruce is held that his devoted friends wish to give him on the occasion of his seventieth birthday a second collection of essays in his honor.

Pauline Studies is a selection of 16 essays, nicely put together and arranged under two general headings: The Life and Theology of Paul, and Literary and Exegetical Studies Within the Pauline Corpus. It would be difficult to pick out the best essay. All are well worth reading, even when different points of view are taken. Such is the case of Robert Gundry’s argument that Romans 7:7–25 describes Paul’s preconversion state in “The Moral Frustration of Paul Before His Conversion: Sexual Lust in Romans 7:7–25” and David Wenham’s contention that this probably deals with Paul’s converted state in “The Christian Life: A Life of Tension?—A Consideration of the Nature of Christian Experience in Paul.” I found Murray Harris’s “Titus 2:13 and the Deity of Christ” and Peter O’Brien’s “Thanksgiving Within the Structure of Pauline Theology” of particular value.

In addition to the essays, this Festschrift contains the usual appreciations, tabula congratulatoria, select bibliography (in this case, a nice bit of work by Ward Gasque covering 1970–79), and curriculum vitae of the honoree.

It is a distinct pleasure to recommend this book in honor of such a gentleman and scholar, not only because he richly deserves it, but also because the essays are of such high quality. Evangelical scholarship has progressed tremendously in the last 25 years, as this volume shows, due in large part to such a man as the volume honors, Prof. F. F. Bruce.

A Look At Your Marriage

Your Marriage Is God’s Affair, by Dwight Small (Revell, 1979, 342 pp., $4.95 pb); Communication: Key to Your Marriage, by H. Norman Wright (Regal Books, 1979, 189 pp., $2.95); Pillars of Marriage, by H. Norman Wright (Regal Books, 1979, 173 pp., $3.50); Marriage, Divorce and Remarriage, by Theodore Epp (Back to the Bible, 1979, 84 pp., $1.25), are reviewed by C. E. Cerling, Jr., pastor of First Baptist Church, Tawas City, Michigan.

Dwight Small’s Your Marriage Is God’s Affair further develops the theme of his previous publishing efforts. It combines the best of three earlier works—(Design for Christian Marriage, After You’ve Said I Do, Christian: Celebrate Your Sexuality)—with previously unpublished material.

Because a theology of marriage begins with a theology of sinful humanity, Small faces the problem created by selfishness in marriage when he writes, “The problem of self-devotion is accentuated in marriage, because there is where personal intimacy reaches its highest achievement. Two self-centered lives confront each other in the most self-revealing terms.”

Since George Bach’s The Intimate Enemy, writers have increasingly drawn attention to the fact that conflict is inevitable in marriage. Small takes these two steps further when he says, “Intimacy is inseparable from conflict in human relations,” and “Incompatibility is one of the purposes of marriage! God has appointed conflict and burdens for lessons in spiritual growth.”

Sexual fidelity challenges the modern world, at times creating major problems even for Christians. Recognizing the depth of the problem, Small comments, “God designed sex that it might be fused together with the highest emotion of which man is capable—love, and with the highest commitment of which he is capable—marriage.”

While everybody who writes on marriage knows the importance of communication, Small adds the insight that “the purpose of communication in marriage is not to get partners to agree, but to bring them into a relationship where the uniqueness of each stands in complementary relation to the other.”

As with most books written by Small, this is a book to be digested at your leisure. Each chapter, often each paragraph, contains such a distillation of the best literature on marriage combined with biblical insight that we have in this book a feast on Christian marriage. Anyone could profit by reading it.

If Dwight Small is the theologian of the Christian marriage and family enrichment movement, H. Norman Wright is its most effective spokesman. Over the last five years he has authored or coauthored at least a dozen books on the subject. Communication and Pillars of Marriage include a variety of subjects all married couples need to discuss. Topics such as dealing with anger and anxiety, coping with conflict, examining marital expectations and goals, meeting needs, facing crises, making decisions, praying, and a key topic, forgiving, all lead couples toward marital growth.

About two years ago we used Communication as our adult Sunday school curriculum for one quarter. Adult attendance doubled during the period and the positive response was unbelievable. Not only does Wright know his field, he also knows how to write material that touches people where they live. For those interested in using Wright’s books in the classroom or for marriage enrichment seminars, the publisher also has excellent leader’s guides. These contain a wealth of extra material independently valuable, yet excellent for use with the books. I cannot recommend these books highly enough.

Finally, a book that could easily be lost in any library is Theodore Epp’s Marriage, Divorce and Remarriage. Only 84 pages, this book is a sensitive, popular presentation of the position that divorce and remarriage are always wrong.

Although I disagree with Epp’s view of divorce and remarriage, it must be granted that he presents the most compassionate explanation of this position. His style is that of a popular preacher; he obviously draws from his sermons, for the style is not the written but the spoken word. His chapter on restoration of those who have sinned through a divorce and remarriage is the best I know of. His position is usually advocated in a manner that suggests law rules over grace and forgiveness. But Epp will have none of that: this sin also can be forgiven. That does not mean the consequences will necessarily be wiped out, but the sin can be forgiven and the sinner restored to full fellowship and service in the church (apart from the office of deacon or elder).

If we are to be fair, we must choose to read the best presentation of views we oppose. Epp presents the best popular exposition of a widely advocated conservative view of divorce.

The major weakness of Protestantism is fragmentation.

For more than a millennium, ever since Mieszko I became a Christian in the year 966, Poland and Roman Catholicism have been practically synonymous. “Probably no country in the world,” writes Trevor Beeson in his Discretion and Valour (1974), “is more tenaciously Catholic. Polonia semper fidelis was the motto of the old Polish gentry and bourgeoisie, and neither passage of time nor radical political change requires this motto to be modified.” The election of a Polish pope may require it rather to be underlined. The knowledge that a Pole reigns from the Vatican has given a great lift to Polish Catholic morale.

More than 95 percent of the population are Roman Catholics by baptism, and it is claimed that more than 75 percent attend church regularly. Communism’s failure to win the mind and soul of Poland is largely due to cultural heritage and national identity. For Communism smacks of Russia, as Protestantism smacks of Germany, and both countries are traditional enemies; to be a loyal son or daughter of Poland one must be a Roman Catholic. Moreover, the church has been able to retain considerable educational authority over its people. Young people are expected to receive religious instruction for an hour or two a week at one of 18,000 “catechetical points” throughout the country. Even many party leaders’ children conform to this pattern. Nor is there any sign that Roman Catholic influence is diminishing. New churches are being built, and 10,000 men are in training for the priesthood in the 27 diocesan seminaries or for one of the orders in the 35 special seminaries. In addition, there are four Academies of Catholic Theology and two full-blown Catholic Universities.

If we ask what kind of Catholicism prevails in Poland, an equivocal answer has to be given. On the one hand, Pope John Paul II’s June 1979 message in Warsaw centered on Christ. Without Christ, he boldly affirmed, it is not possible for man to understand or to fulfill himself. Also, a few charismatic prayer groups are meeting, and the “Oasis” movement encourages young people to read the Bible, pray, and serve. On the other hand, traditional Catholic piety continues, and an official church document refers to the “Marian character of Polish Catholicism.” The principal Marian shrine is at Czestochowa, southwest of Warsaw, and contains the world’s most famous image of the virgin. Since 1656 the Virgin Mary has been proclaimed “the Queen of Poland.” When the Pope visited the shrine in 1979, the Christ-centered Christianity he had expressed in Warsaw seemed to become Mary-centered again. Our Protestant conscience is troubled, and our evangelical theology affronted, by this unbiblical devotion to Mary.

How do Protestants fare in Poland, then? They constitute a tiny minority of about 100,000 Christians, or less than one-third of 1 percent of the population. The major weaknesses of Protestantism, according to a paper by Karol Karski, were from the beginning elitism and fragmentation. The latter continues. Even in cities in which several Protestant denominations maintain small and struggling churches, there is little fellowship or cooperation between them. And of course the Roman Catholics both notice this and take advantage of it. At least, however, Protestants have since 1945 enjoyed a certain brotherly association through the Polish Ecumenical Council, although they are outnumbered by the Orthodox and Old Catholic Churches.

Poland’s largest and most ancient non-Roman church, dating from the fourteenth century, is the autocephalous Orthodox church, with nearly a half-million members, especially Ukrainians. The two Old Catholic churches, which do not acknowledge the papal primacy, are the “Mariavites” of Russian origin and the “Polish Catholic Church”: they have nearly 60,000 members between them. The Lutherans now number about 80,000, the Evangelical Reformed church about 4,500, the Methodists 4,000, and the Baptists 3,000, while the United Evangelical Church (a federation formed in 1947 of two Pentecostal churches, the Christian Brethren, the Evangelical Christians, and the Churches of Christ) has a membership of about 9,000 baptized adults. The Polish Ecumenical Council maintains close links with the Christian Theological Academy in Warsaw, which came into being in 1954, and enjoys a direct continuity with the earlier Evangelical Theological Faculty at Warsaw University. It has Orthodox, Old Catholic, and Evangelical sections, which have independent programs but unite for some lectures and worship services, so that virtually all the non-Roman ministerial candidates (120 at the moment, from 10 churches) are trained in it.

The dominant Roman Catholic church is obliged to live with, but does not acquiesce in, the present system of inequity. For how can it be just for the Roman Catholic 95 percent of the country’s 35 million people to be controlled by the 3 million who are registered as Communist party members? To be sure, the church enjoys more liberty in Poland than in any other East European country, Roman Catholic chaplains are still appointed to army units, hospitals, and prisons. Nevertheless, the church is still inhibited in a number of ways. Its children are indoctrinated in the schools and taught a rewritten history of Poland; it has no access to the news media; its ecclesiastical appointments have to be endorsed by the state; and all its manuscripts have to be submitted to government censorship.

Yet there is a large degree of free speech. In answer to my question about religious freedom in Poland, Dr. Witold Benedyktowicz, superintendent of the Methodist Church and president of the Polish Ecumenical Council, replied: “We can do everything, except perhaps street preaching, which in any case is not a Polish tradition. We can also say anything from the pulpit. Catholic bishops, in their pastoral letters … at times criticize and even attack the government.”

Are Christians free to evangelize? Billy Graham’s visit to Poland in October 1978 seems to indicate they are. He was received by high government officials, was interviewed on national television, and seized the opportunity at the international press conference to proclaim the gospel to the many journalists present. Although his visit was sponsored by the Baptist Church and the Polish Ecumenical Council, the Roman Catholic church cooperated by placing their largest buildings at his disposal and by encouraging their people to attend. Many did so and responded positively to his message.

Yet evangelism is beset with peculiar difficulties. How are Roman Catholics to be reached who, though baptized and even practicing churchmen, nevertheless have no personal knowledge of Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord? This was the question that exercised the Methodist ministers whose conference I attended in May. They recommended the use of Christian homes for evangelistic Bible studies, since Vatican II encouraged Bible reading among the laity, and since Roman Catholics who might feel unable to attend a Protestant church have no comparable embarrassment about entering a Protestant home. The Methodist ministers acknowledged the need to develop programs to train their members in personal witness. They also emphasized that the reality of the living God must be visibly demonstrated both in the reverence of their public worship and in the love of their community life.

John R. W. Stott is rector emeritus of All Souls Church, London, England.

Christians who read Freddy’s Book must admit his questions of pride and pleasure are uncomfortable.

Morality is out of fashion, especially in fiction. If a writer wants to suffer the same fate—fast—all he need do is declare for the side of morality. Few writers care enough. Those who do seem to think it is the business of philosophers and theologians, not writers, to stump for that cause. But there are some notable exceptions. John Gardner is one.

Gardner, a teacher, medievalist and scholar, and a novelist, believes that “almost all modern art is tinny, commercial and immoral” (On Moral Fiction, Basic Books, 1978). Not content with that, he cited the novelists who had three flaws, and in doing so made himself vulnerable to the same judgments he used on others. His judges may not have known it, but in doing so they practiced a sound biblical principle (see Matt. 7:1). With his latest novel, Freddy’s Book (Knopf, 1980), we now have a chance to see how moral John Gardner’s fiction is. First, though, we need to look at his definition of morality.

We need to note at the outset that his morality does not begin with orthodox Christianity. Not that Gardner is unfamiliar with it; a quick reading of any of his several books will tell you this. (His first novel, is called The Resurrection, taking the heart of Christianity and turning it into the controlling metaphor for his story.) If at some point he was close to Christianity, that point has long since passed. Now, he says, “fiction is the only religion I have.” (A former student of his told me Gardner was raised in a conservative Presbyterian home.)

Yet the morality Gardner espouses is a kind of leftover Protestant ethic: no longer the roast turkey, but turkey hash or turkey roll. It has some resemblance to the original—if you search hard enough. Gardner wants to focus on reality, not shadows. He wants to help people live better lives, all vaguely reminiscent of Christianity. (For example, Jesus as the light of the world is the only relief from the shadowlands. Gardner’s idea is right—light is better than darkness—he’s just looking for it in the wrong place. Art is a creation of God’s grace, not grace itself.)

To the dismay of his peers, Gardner believes that unless a story deals with right and wrong it cannot be moral—indeed, cannot be art at all. Then he goes a step further (since who doesn’t use the good versus evil conflict; what else is there, ultimately?). You must, he says, deal with right and wrong in the proper way: declare your values; don’t equivocate. Is lust wrong? Say so (within the context of your novel, of course; Gardner doesn’t replace storytelling with preaching). Is greed wicked? Or the love of power? Or pride?

His answers almost come right. His moral instinct seems sound, but he gives no reason why he—or we—should trust it. What are the reasons behind his morality? Why bother? Does it make for a more civilized society? Probably, which may be part of the reason for his stand (though I may be oversimplifying).

In Freddy’s Book, Gardner not only looks at lust and greed and power, he looks at them in the church, which makes this book so uncomfortable for Christians. We know we have problems; we just don’t want to let anyone else know. (And, I might add, we don’t want outsiders pointing out our problems.)

The structure of the novel is a familiar one, a story within a story. Gardner has used it before (October Light; for a review, see Refiner’s Fire, Feb. 18, 1977). Freddy’s Book is literally what the title declares, a book by someone named Freddy (a character in the prologue). The title of Freddy’s book is “King Gustav & the Devil.” The story takes place in sixteenth-century Sweden, when the country is in the midst of political upheaval. Gardner treats the situation as a mere outgrowth of an inner, religious conflict. The Devil plays a big part.

Everyone except hero Lars-Goren appears to be in league with Satan. Gustav ascends the throne because of a pact he made with the Devil, but then spends much of his reign trying to drive Satan out of Sweden. The central religious figure in the story has decided that the Devil, not God, has the upper hand. If you want power—and that is one of the themes of the book—you had better align yourself with the one who has it and can give it to you.

In fact, power and the search for it faces the reader at every turn of the page. Gustav wants power—to be king of Sweden. Bishop Brask wants power—to create political powers and control the spiritual ones. Certainly, the Devil wants power. His words reveal a desire to control human behavior—for evil, naturally, and not just in Sweden. He is also making trouble in Western Europe (remember the Reformation? asks Gardner).

The Devil was so busy “he could barely keep track.” Later Gardner writes, “plots, counterplots; one would have thought even the Devil would eventually have tired of them, but he did not.” He is everywhere, whispering in the participants’ ears, egging them on. Only Lars-Goren resists, and only through his fear of the Devil and his faith in Christ. (At least he calls out to Christ in his fear.)

Gardner uses his simple plot to consider more serious questions: the nature of evil, the nature of God (or his existence; it may be the same thing to Gardner), the truths of the Reformation, the interpretations of Scripture. Imbedded in the dialogue are long stretches of theological arguments. In the latter part of the story the dialogue becomes almost completely theological. Are the Lutherans right? What does Scripture really say? Bishop Brask responds to a young, earnest priest: “Human pride! Beware of it! What a pleasure it would be to impose one’s opinions on the world through the mouth of God himself!” Is he speculating that the Reformers were doing that? Or that the Catholic church was?

Gardner is a brave novelist to write such a book. How many critics know enough about church history or theology to comment? Do they even know enough to recognize that Gardner is being theological? He is serious, at any rate, about his quest for morality. If he doesn’t know the answers, he at least knows the questions.

Christians who read Freddy’s Book must admit that his questions are uncomfortable. (And, not to dismiss his skill lightly, he does so with precision, wit, and some fine writing; here is a first-rate teller of tales.) Do any of us know how pure are our motives? Do we want to be known in our circles as humble, pious, spiritual? Why? Could all of our pious pretensions be merely a mask for less-than-pious motives? A desire for glory or fame or a good name? Do we sincerely seek Christ’s kingdom for his sake, or do we seek it because it gives us a fine reputation among our peers?

Gardner seems to say with Augustine and the Reformers generally that every person’s motives have something of evil in them; that none of us is without sin, hardly an original view of human nature. Paul stated something of this in the first century. But we read Romans—perhaps too often for it to retain its impact. Can an avowed non-Christian provide us with the punch that Scripture, through familiarity, may have lost? I think the answer is yes. God gives certain people insight and ability to prick our consciences, to bring us up short, to force us to say, “Yes. I have spiritual pride. I have greed and a lust for power.” Such a one is John Gardner. He has done his job. The rest is up to us.

Cheryl Forbes is project manager of The Genesis Project, located in the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area.

Sometimes a dreaded thing occurs in the body—a mutiny—resulting in a tumor or a runaway clogging of the system.

At the central railway station in Madras, India, lay one beggar woman more pitiful than the others I saw there. She had positioned herself alongside the stream of passengers hurrying to catch their trains. Businessmen with briefcases passed by her, as did wealthy tourists and government officials.

Like many Indian beggars, the woman was emaciated, with sunken cheeks and eyes and bony limbs. But, paradoxically, a huge mass of plump skin, round and sleek like a sausage, was growing from her side. It lay beside her like a formless baby, connected to her by a broad bridge of skin. The woman had exposed her flank with its grotesque deformity to give her an advantage in the rivalry for pity. Though I saw her only briefly, I felt sure that the growth was a lipoma, a tumor of fat cells. It was a part of her and yet not, as if some doctor had carved a hunk of fat out of a 300-pound person, wrapped it in live skin, and deftly sewed it on this woman. She was starving; she feebly held up a spidery hand for alms. But her tumor was thriving, nearly equaling the weight of the rest of her body. It gleamed in the sun, exuding health, sucking life from her.

Fat cells: the Madras beggar’s tumor was composed entirely of an orgiastic community of them. In our figure-conscious Western culture, the word “fat” connotes a lack of discipline, an unnecessary aggregation of cells that should be reduced.

From the surgeon’s vantage point, however, as he draws a knife across the skin exposing oleaginous layers of fat cells, the evil connotation is balanced by a sense of the value of fat. It insulates against cold, and for that reason billions of fat cells congregate just below the skin. (Because of this, fat people can survive cold air and water better than slim people.) Fat cells pitch their tents wherever they find space around internal organs and muscles and between layers in the body. Their presence helps cushion those vital parts against jarring shocks.

Nothing influences appearance as much as fat. Why are young women so pleasing to the eye? An abundance of fat cells fills in the irregularities of bone and muscle, giving their skin a sleek, smooth contour.

But there is more to fat’s function than insulation and contouring. Each fat cell is a storehouse containing a yellow globule of oil which crowds out the cell nucleus. Most of the time the cell lies dormant, while the body eats enough food to fuel its needs. Come famine, people with plenteous fat cells will be able to sit by while others starve. And that is the most strategic function of fat.

When all is going well, the body takes in just enough food to maintain itself, grow, and replace worn cells. But when the supply diminishes, as when a person mowing the lawn delays supper in order to utilize the summer light, a signal sounds in the body’s fat cells. To the liver short of glycogen and the blood short on glucose, the fat cells freely yield their oily treasure. By being the body’s storehouse, the fat cells free other cells to do their job more efficiently. For example, if every muscle cell had to include a pouch-like reservoir of energy, our bodies would be deformed lumps and nodules.

Some fat is readily expendable: it goes first when a person starts a diet. Other fat, such as that around the kidney and in the palm of the hand, holds out because of its important secondary functions. When the body is starving, however, even these high priority fat cells must relinquish their important contents.

I like to think of fat cells as the banker cells of the body. In times of plenty they bulge with excess, as the body deposits more than it withdraws. In times of want they channel their chemical wealth back into the bloodstream.

But sometimes a dreaded thing occurs in the body—a mutiny—resulting in a tumor lipoma such as the one attached to the Madras beggar. A lipoma is a low-grade, benign tumor. It derives from a single fat cell, skilled in its lazy role of storing fat, that rebels against the leadership of the body and refuses to give up its reserve. It accepts deposits but ignores withdrawal slips. As that cell multiplies, daughter cells follow its lead and a tumor grows like a fungus, filling its crevices, squeezing against muscle and organs. Occasionally a lipoma crowds a vital organ like the eye, pushing it out of alignment or pinching a sensitive nerve, and surgery is required.

I have removed such lipoma tumors. Under a microscope they seem composed of healthy fat cells, bulging with shiny oils. The cells function beautifully except for one flaw—they have become disloyal. In their activity they disregard the body’s needs. And so the beggar woman in Madras gradually starved while a lipoma that was part of her engorged itself.

A tumor is called benign if its effect is fairly localized and it stays within membrane boundaries. But the most traumatizing condition in the body occurs when these disloyal cells defy inhibition. They multiply without any checks on growth, spreading rapidly throughout the body, choking out normal cells. White cells, armed against foreign invaders, will not attack the body’s own mutinous cells. Physicians fear no other malfunction more deeply: it is called cancer. For still mysterious reasons, these cells—and they may be cells from the brain, liver, kidney, bone, blood, skin, or other tissues—grow wild, out of control. Each is a healthy, functioning cell, but disloyal, no longer acting in regard for the rest of the body.

Even the white cells, the dependable palace guard, can destroy the body through rebellion. Sometimes they recklessly reproduce, clogging the bloodstream, overloading the lymph system, strangling the body’s normal function—such is leukemia.

Because I am a surgeon and not a prophet, I tremble to make the analogy between cancer in the physical body and mutiny in the spiritual body of Christ. But I must. In his warnings to the church, Jesus Christ showed no concern about the shocks and bruises his body would meet from external forces. “The gates of hell shall not prevail against my church,” he said flatly (Matt. 16:18). He moved easily, unthreatened, among sinners and criminals. But he cried out against the kind of disloyalty that comes from within.

I must concentrate on how I, as an individual cell, should respond to the crying needs of the body of Christ in other parts of the world. Beyond that, I cannot and should not make sweeping judgments about what the response of other Christians should be.

But I must say, from the perspective of a missionary who spent 18 years in one of the poorest countries on earth, the contrasts in resources are astonishingly large. At Vellore we treated leprosy patients on three dollars per patient per year; yet we turned many away for lack of funds. Then we came to America where churches were heatedly discussing their million-dollar gymnasiums and the cost of landscaping and fertilizer and a new steeple … and sponsoring seminars on tax shelters for members to conserve their accumulated wealth. As I saw those churches’ budgets for foreign missions and for inner-city work, I could not force a telling image from my mind: the memory of the Madras woman slowly starving to death while her lipoma grew plump and round.

The problem is not just an American problem, or even a Western problem. I could easily point to examples of hoarding in every society I’ve seen: in the cruel Iks of Africa, in Soviet Russia, in the disparity within the Christian community in India. The warning applies to all of us. My only message is the caution of a doctor: Remember, the body will have health only if each cell regards the needs of the whole body.

I wonder if perhaps we in the West get caught up in a competitive spiral with “cells” around us, and become oblivious to the stark needs of the rest of the world. In the body of Christ ownership of property and money is no sin; it is an important function of certain members. And when I liken wealthy people to fat cells, I use the image positively, as an admiring doctor who appreciates the role of fat. Hospitality and generosity are made easier by wealth. Reserves can help the body care for itself and fuel its muscular activity in a hurting world. However, the control of fat is a difficult problem, both in biology and in religion.

I realize these issues have complex economic and cultural factors behind them. But I am impressed with how decisively that early church responded to pressing needs: the apostle Paul took months out of his schedule to collect money from Greek Christians to aid improverished Jewish Christians in Jerusalem.

We need to pause and look carefully at ourselves. God needs all types of cells in his body: fat and thin, rich and poor, simple and complex. But he only needs loyal cells. And in the area of using resources, Jesus, our Head, had many unsettling things to say. God save us from being a cancer within his body.

Carl F. H. Henry, first editor of Christianity Today, is lecturer at large for World Vision International. An author of many books, he lives in Arlington, Virginia.