United Methodist officials frequently describe their church as “united in its diversity.” A one-day slice of life at the denomination’s quadrennial meetings last month would attest, at least, to the diversity:

• Following breakfast in a nearby church, supporters of the evangelical caucus Good News pray for their denomination and—as challenged by their devotional leader—that God would allow them to bear witness to their faith to at least one person that day.

• About 200 gay men and women participate later the same day in a noon worship service sponsored by the United Methodist homosexual caucus, Affirmation. The group sings, “We are a gay and lesbian people.” Some tears are evidenced by those protesting “homophobia” in the church.

• Beside their 30-foot-high tepee outside the convention center, members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) protest mistreatment of and the church’s insensitivity toward native Americans.

• A confused African delegate interrupts debate on the conference floor, asking respectfully, “Would someone tell me please, just what is this Equal Rights Amendment?”

Considering the smorgasbord of racial, theological, and special interest groups present at the 1980 General Conference in Indianapolis, and, considering the many controversial issues facing the 1,000 delegates (half laity and half clergy), the outcome might have been like the misspelling on a local hotel marquee: “Welcome Untied Methodists.” Instead, the nation’s second largest Protestant body emerged more united than expected.

Early in the 11-day meeting the delegates settled the crucial issue of homosexuality. They overwhelmingly voted to reaffirm an eight-year-old Social Principles statement that “we do not condone the practice of homosexuality and consider this practice incompatible with Christian teaching.” The church’s policy-making body also retained the ban on denominational funding of gay organizations and use of church funds to otherwise “promote the acceptance of homosexuality.”

Long-time Methodist observers called this a “centrist” or “status quo” General Conference. By their voting, the delegates seemed intent on “balancing out” the issues, to prevent any faction from gaining an advantage.

Feminist groups, for instance, were pleased by legislation encouraging church boards and agencies to meet in states that have ratified the Equal Rights Amendment, but they lost their bid to change “sexist” language in the Social Principles from “God the Father” to “God the creator.” Conservatives at the grassroots level heralded passage of a financial disclosure policy: all church agencies, boards, commissions, and committees will be required to account for their receipts and expenditures in a quadrennial report, and each must make available upon request an annual audit. Yet, the advocates of bureaucratic accountability and increased local church autonomy lost in their bid for a so-called designated giving policy, which would have given churches greater choice over where their apportioned funds are spent.

Even the ever-present caucus groups, with their literature and in-the-hall lobbying, failed to upset delegates. These groups included the gay caucus Affirmation, the Coalition for the Whole Gospel, and the Methodist Federation for Social Action on the left wing: Good News and the fledgling Esther Action Council, representing the conservative evangelical viewpoint; and the many ethnic caucuses: Black Methodists for Church Renewal, the Hispanics’ MARCHA, the Native American International Caucus, and Asian American United Methodists.

The delegates plowed through a five-pound, 1,000-page workbook of agenda items—as well as 60,000 coffee break cookies baked by central Indiana Methodist women’s groups—without the divisive rhetoric and tangles that have characterized other quadrennial sessions. They even voted to allow speaking privileges to AIM founder Clyde Bellecourt, a non-United Methodist and follower of “traditional Indian religion,” who took full advantage of his 20 minutes in an emotional, podium-pounding speech, in which he said, “The extermination of Indian people is taking place right here in America in the land of the free where you came to seek religious freedom.” (Later in the conference, when delegates voted against establishing a separate Native American Commission, an angry Bellecourt called for the removal of United Methodist churches from Indian lands.)

While observers commend United Methodists for their efforts to be inclusive, some question to what extent the church can be truly united in mission and identity. The profusion of doctrinal viewpoints—or lack of them—within the church led at least one group, the Good News theology task force, to draft in 1975 a doctrinal restatement of the Wesleyan, Reformed theological tradition: its “Affirmation of Scriptural Christianity for United Methodists.”

Alan Waltz, research expert in the General Council on Ministries, told a reporter that United Methodists “don’t have a clear sense of our own identity. We don’t know who we are; therefore, we can’t move with significant purpose or resolve.” Waltz has said that United Methodism has a “lack of will and leadership to overcome a state of ‘malaise’ ” within it and lacks a clear sense of direction.

At least in terms of membership, the UMC direction is down. Before their merger in 1968, the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren had a combined membership of 11.1 million (1964 figures). Since then, the Methodists have experienced annual declines resulting in the loss of 1.5 million.

Fewer professions of faith partly explain the drop: the 196,000 faith professions in 1978 were the lowest reported “in a number of decades,” said Board of Discipleship executive Warren J. Hartman in a comprehensive study of UMC membership trends. Coupling that figure with a 44 percent drop in church school membership since 1965, Hartman concluded: “Since the majority of the professions of faith come from the children’s division of the church school, the [decline] cannot help but produce continued reduction in the number of professions of faith.

Hartman does see signs of a turnaround in the church school, and predicts the church membership decline will bottom out within the next several years. In the meantime, the church bureaucracy’s worries about depleted church rolls may push it toward continuing the renewed emphasis on evangelism for which conservatives have asked. In Indianapolis, the General Conference delegates approved two multi-million-dollar programs that are expected to bring in new members.

They adopted as the church’s single mission priority for the 1981–84 quadrennium, “Developing and Strengthening the Ethnic Minority Local Church.” The General Conference allotted $5 million annually for purposes including recruitment of ethnic ministers, new forms of ethnic evangelism, and education and training in ethnic church needs.

Some conservatives would have preferred a four-year emphasis on the Christian family. They believed this need is more crucial, and one affecting a larger number of UMC members. (Ethnic minorities comprise about 5 percent of United Methodist membership. With 375,000 blacks, 38,000 Hispanics, 18,000 native Americans, and 12,000 Asian Americans, the denomination reportedly has more ethnic minority members than any predominantly white U.S. Protestant body.) However, a conference report cited ethnic minorities as the “area of highest potential for church and membership growth.”

Researcher Hartman has documented that the two UMC conferences with the strongest growth are Hispanic—Puerto Rico and Rio Grande—with nearly twice as many annual professions of faith per 1,000 members (49.2) as other conferences. Church executive Melvin G. Talbert, in introducing the ethnic outreach program, said it would allow the church to address “the root causes of racism,” show its inclusiveness, and test its commitment to evangelism—and predicted the nation’s population will be 35 percent ethnic minority by the year 2000.

In what some observers called a reaction against the electronic church, the delegates also took steps toward a “national television presence and ministry.” They voted to establish a three-year fund-raising campaign, beginning in 1981, to raise at least $21 million to purchase a “high-quality, commercial” television station. The profit-making station is intended to generate enough income eventually to build a group of stations, said key organizer Charles Cappleman, general manager of Television City, the CBS-TV network’s broadcast and videotape production facility in Los Angeles.

Cappleman used as a model the Mormons, who own radio and TV stations in eight major U.S. cities. He cites the Mormons’ phenomenal membership growth as an indirect result; and even though, in essence, the television station will not be religious, he believes it can be a primary vehicle for outreach.

Homosexuality: Studied Ambiguity?

Questions on homosexuality remained following the 1980 General Conference. Despite their censure of homosexuality, the delegates defeated a proposed amendment that would have specifically forbidden the ordination of self-avowed, practicing homosexuals. Wesley Seminary professor Bruce Birch expressed the view of others: “I urge us to resist the listing of such prohibitions as a response more at home with the Pharisees and the Law than with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

The delegates did approve the addition of a footnote to the Book of Discipline, adding to a list of ministerial offenses “practices incompatible with Christian teaching.” Asked for a specific yes or no as to whether the footnote would allow ordination of practicing homosexuals by annual conferences (two have done so), the presiding officer, Bishop Roy C. Nichols of Pittsburgh, said only that the guidelines would be used by annual conference boards of ministry and other groups that examine candidates. Observers believe the answer may come when well-known, self-avowed homosexual pastor Paul Abels of New York City comes up for reappointment in early summer.

Charles Keysor of Good News opposed this position of denominational “ambiguity.” He asserted that 3,000 of the 20,000 petitions (resolutions) submitted by churches, agencies, and individuals prior to the General Conference had asked for a specific ban on ordination of practicing homosexuals: “The church has spoken in thunder, and the delegates heard only a whisper.”

Still, sympathizers with the 14-year-old, Wilmore, Kentucky-based Good News movement generally came away from the conference “feeling very good,” said Keysor. (He had predicted an exodus of conservative pastors and laypersons if the General Conference loosened its stance on homosexuality.) Good News ran its most extensive conference caucus operation yet—mailing in advance 18,000 packets with sample petitions suggested by Good News, and manning a national telephone prayer chain and strategy office throughout the 11-day meeting.

The General Conference didn’t detour from UMC social and ecumenical causes, reaffirming UMC support of the National and World Councils of Churches, adopting a policy against racism in all of its forms, and continuing nonrestrictive language on abortion. It also listened to complaints that the church has become unresponsive to local church needs.

Providing the most dramatic interlude of the conference was an eight-person delegation headed by Bishop C. Dale White, which met with President Jimmy Carter and the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations. The delegation had urged restraint in the hostage crisis, and praised Carter’s patience in a press conference on their return.

When they learned a few hours later of the aborted helicopter rescue operation in Iran, the delegation termed the President’s action regrettable. But they declined to condemn him for it, and counseled continued restraint.

Many member United Methodists hope their disenchanted elements also practice restraint, and that all 39,000 churches will hearken to the “united” of their denominational banner.

JOHN MAUST

Liberia

An Abrupt End to the Rule of Africa’s ‘Mr. Baptist’

There was no evidence of religious motivation for the coup in Liberia last month in which President William R. Tolbert, Jr., 66, was slain. But Liberia being what it is, the secular shakeup had noticeable religious ramifications.

President Tolbert had been president of the Liberia Baptist Missionary and Educational Convention for 22 years. The military forces led by Army Master Sergeant Samuel Doe ransacked the converted former Tolbert residence that served as the convention headquarters, removing records from files in Tolbert’s office.

During 20 years in the largely ceremonial post of vice-president prior to his presidential inauguration in 1971, Tolbert had risen to prominence on the Baptist world scene. He served as Baptist World Alliance vice-president from 1960 to 1965, and as its president from 1965 to 1970—the first black and the first native African to hold the post.

BWA officials therefore admitted to being “quite shocked” by the revelation in a January CBS-TV “Sixty Minutes” report that Tolbert had sired children by women other than his wife, and by commentator Morley Safer’s assertion that Tolbert had felt no moral or ethical conflict.

Tolbert’s Liberian Baptist Convention had been scheduled to break ground for a new headquarters building the day after Tolbert’s death as part of a three-week centennial celebration of Baptist work in the country. R. Keith Parks, president of the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board, was flying to Monrovia to participate in the event when the coup took place. His plane was diverted to Abidjan, Ivory Coast, instead. It is now thought unlikely that construction will begin.

Liberian Vice-president Bennie D. Warner also had an ecclesiastical connection as a United Methodist bishop. Soldiers broke into his house as well during the coup, apparently unaware that he and his family had left the country. Warner at the time was attending the UMC Council of Bishops in Nashville, Indiana. He remained to attend the UMC General Conference in Indianapolis, with security guards assigned to him. But four days before the conclusion of the sessions, the guards reported that Warner and his family had checked out of his hotel room and departed. (His whereabouts was unknown at press time.)

Not so fortunate was the head of the Presbyterian Church in Liberia, who was among the 13 executed. He, too, held a government post, in the senate.

John Mills, Southern Baptist board secretary for West Africa, who has visited Liberia since the coup, attributes the noticeable presence of clergy in the ousted regime not to a religious thrust in the government but to a phenomenon in the churches. Almost universally, he says, they do not provide salaries for their ministers. It is therefore normal for pastors to hold a full-time job in another capacity.

The coup itself probably resulted from Tolbert’s wavering on recently instituted reforms. In January he had authorized registration of an opposition party—the People’s Progressive Party—for the first time. But after the ppp called for a general strike and for his resignation, he reversed himself—banning the party, arresting some of its leaders, and offering rewards for capture “dead or alive” of those still at large. The new army-imposed People’s Redemption Council said it had taken power to deal with “rampant corruption.”

Two weeks after seizing power, the new regime was holding Tolbert’s wife Victoria under house arrest, and was searching for other family members. But it also asked the churches to observe a week of prayer on behalf of the nation. That was one directive being followed with fervor.

Latter Day Saints

The Un-Mormons Also Celebrate

Most new religious movements do not long outlast the lifetimes of their founders, but the Latter Day Saints are more vigorous than ever 150 years after their founding in upstate New York. On Easter Sunday the Mormons and the various smaller LDS groups celebrated the anniversary with pageantry and prayer.

The 220,000-member Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is the largest of the less-known groups of followers of the revelations of Joseph Smith, Jr. The Independence, Missouri-based denomination held its anniversary celebration in conjunction with its biennial world convention, an event that brought nearly 3,000 delegates (together with an entourage of another 15,000 or so) from 34 countries to the site where, Joseph Smith once said, the Second Coming of Christ will take place.

Although there was little overt discord during meeting sessions, some controversy was in the air. Gregory Donovan of Detroit, one of several conservative critics of leadership they see as drifting in a liberal direction, identified RLDS membership in councils of churches and ordination of women as the two major specific issues this year, within a larger context of “extensive and continual” drift away from RLDS traditions. “The current leadership tends to play down the early teachings of the church in favor of ecumenism. They seem to be less proud of their origins,” he said.

By the end of the week the church had not changed either policy. Ordination of women was deferred indefinitely, and the delegates decided not to try to join the National or World Councils of Churches, but to allow local churches and ministers to join local ecumenical agencies (the situation now prevailing).

The RLDS church was “reorganized” in 1860 when Joseph Smith II, the founder’s son, gathered a remnant of the faithful who had not followed Brigham Young to Utah. The group settled in Independence because of the location’s special importance to all Latter Day Saints and finally built the 5,800-seat auditorium where the world conventions are held. It was there that president/prophet Wallace B. Smith, the great-grandson of Joseph, Jr., presided over the week’s transactions.

The Reorganized Saints see themselves as very different from the Mormons. In an interview just before the opening of the convention, Smith said, “People often look for our links with the Mormon church, but we think of ourselves as separate. There are more differences than similarities. The Mormons have developed a new theology involving a plurality of Gods, sealing for eternity, and many other things. We do not accept any of that. Today our theology and doctrines are quite divergent.” The differences have grown steadily greater since Brigham Young took over the leadership of the main faction, Smith said.

Richard Howard, the official historian of the Reorganized church, supported Smith’s analysis. Speaking of the Mormons, he said, “They live in a different universe. We have different doctrines of God, the world, you name it. The only thing we have in common is our historical origin, and we even interpret that differently.”

However, the relatively greater success of the Salt Lake City group has not escaped the notice of RLDS members or officials. The leadership of the church has adopted “Faith to Grow” as its theme for the 1980s; it is understood that the slogan refers both to growth in faith for current members and growth in overall numbers for the church. Missionary activities are being stepped up at home and abroad, particularly in East Asia and Oceania.

Despite the resolution—at least for the time being—of the major controversial issues, other issues face the denomination over the longer run. One will be the problem of the succession. To date the leadership has passed down through direct male descendants of Joseph Smith, but Wallace Smith at age 51 has no sons (he has three daughters). Technically, Smith noted, a current leader can designate any successor, who need not be in the Smith family. However, he conceded, the “Smith leadership has been helpful in preventing rivalries and in assuring continuity in the church.” No one knows how the problem will eventually be handled.

Another relatively long-term situation is the construction of the temple. In 1831 Joseph Smith announced that God had revealed the proper site for the eschatologically important Independence Temple; all LDS believers agree that the site—now principally owned by the RLDS church, to Salt Lake’s chagrin—remains unchanged. In 1968 the RLDS church announced a revelation to W. Wallace Smith, then president, that it was time to begin planning the long-awaited edifice. A building fund now contains slightly over $2 million.

A plot of land—now mainly a parking lot—within the original 61-acre “Temple Lot” designated by Joseph Smith has tentatively been designated as the site. Some work on a temple site master plan was undertaken in 1974; plans for the complex show several buildings, including worship space, a facility recognizing and encouraging world brotherhood, a school, and research facilities. One official, when pressed, said that he “hoped” that ground could be broken in the 1980s, but there is no timetable, partly because, as Wallace B. Smith stated, “We’re not entirely sure what the role of the Temple should be. We have not defined all its functions. We need to consult with and inform our people about it.” However, Smith did vow that the project would not be much like a Mormon temple, noting that “We don’t believe in secret rites,” the hallmark of the Mormon temples.

Despite the heady plans, the future is unclear for the RLDS church. Even during the convention more dissidents were pulling away from the leadership. One, Eugene Walton, 52, a former middle-level RLDS official who was excommunicated in 1974 for opposing the leadership, announced that he had received a revelation on Easter Sunday telling him to proceed with the development of a new splinter group; he and his congregation of 25 have already withdrawn and formed the “Restorationists United.”

Clearly the vast majority, however, will stay with the church as it enters its 151st year. Like the Mormons, the RLDS delegates are proud of their church with its unorthodox teachings and will continue to work to make it prosper.

TIM MILLER

Recent Studies In John

John: the Gospel of Life, by D. George Vanderlip (Judson Press, 1979, 144 pp., $5.95); John, by Samuel Young (Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 1979, 196 pp., $5.95); Deeper into John’s Gospel, by Arthur Fay Sueltz (Harper & Row, 1979, 156 pp., $4.95); and The Theology of John, by W. Robert Cook (Moody Press, 1979, 284 pp., $8.95), are reviewed by Allison A. Trites, associate professor of biblical studies, Acadia Divinity College, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada.

These four books present a wide range of material, though generally they all stand in the conservative tradition of biblical scholarship. Vanderlip handles John helpfully but nontechnically; Sueltz develops arresting sermons on selected texts; Young adopts a devotional approach; and Cook offers the most detailed and technical discussion of Johannine theology.

George Vanderlip, professor of English Bible at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, offers a clear, concise study of the fourth Gospel, enriched by useful references to Palestinian geography, archaeology, and a unique perspective of John. Dr. Vanderlip offers illuminating comments on the “I am” sayings, the role of the Holy Spirit, the use of key terms (such as “believe,” “hour,” “born again,” “Paraclete”), and the place of symbolism in John (e.g., the meaning of footwashing and the theological significance of Jesus’ turning water into wine). The book is aimed at a simple level calculated to put the deep spiritual truths of the “Gospel of Life” within easy reach of the attentive reader. This paperback is a welcome addition to the layman’s library on the fourth Gospel; many pastors will enjoy it, too.

Less rewarding is Samuel Young’s John, volume 4 in the Beacon Bible Expositions. This series seeks to provide “a systematic, devotional Bible study program for laymen and a fresh, homiletical resource for preachers.” The writers in this series are “Wesleyan in theological perspective” and “seek to interpret the gospel, pointing to the Living Word, Christ, who is the primary Subject of all Scripture, the Mediator of redemption, and the Norm of Christian living.” Young served as general superintendent of the Church of the Nazarene from 1948 until his retirement in 1972, and writes with these aims in view.

The devotional purpose seems to predominate, for the author dismisses questions of introduction in four pages, consistently ignores critical problems (e.g., the woman taken in adultery, the problematic gloss in John 5:4), quotes copiously from well-known hymns, and includes an appendix with outlines on John. His exposition frequently consists in simply citing one of the modern versions or in quoting another commentator on the text of John. This commentary, unfortunately, does not live up to the stated purpose of the editors of the series, who claim that “all the benefits of the best biblical scholarship are found.” There is no recognition of the Johannine community, no concern for the use of archaeology, and no study of Johannine symbolism. It is hard to justify such books when so many fruitful studies of John are already available.

Arthur Sueltz, the senior pastor of Lake-wood First Presbyterian Church in Long Beach, California, does not try to provide a commentary on John’s Gospel in Deeper into John’s Gospel, but seeks rather to explore some of the key passages. These 22 studies are really modern sermons that challenge the average reader “to experience more fully the impact of John’s words.” The fourth Gospel packs a powerful punch, and Sueltz’s goal is to make us feel its impact. His messages are serious, thoughtful reflections on some of the central truths of our faith. A refreshing attempt is made to plumb the meaning of familiar incidents often taken for granted, and the book is punctuated with good illustrations and telling anecdotes (e.g., pp. 5, 14, 25, 66f, 103f). Occasionally Sueltz splits his infinitives (p. 83) and uses “like” when he means “as” (p. 82), but these are matters of purely academic interest. Sueltz stresses relational learning (p. 30), and writes more for the ordinary reader than the scholar. He communicates well, and some of his sentences burn their way into the memory (e.g., p. 2: we “seem to live somewhere between Eden and Gethsemane—between hiding and praying”).

W. Robert Cook, professor of biblical theology at Western Conservative Baptist Seminary, Portland, Oregon, attempts to present a scholarly study of all theological truths taught in the Johannine corpus (Gospel, Epistles, and Revelation).

After an introduction to the study of Johannine thought and a discussion of his “biblioiogical assumptions,” Dr. Cook unfolds John’s doctrines of God, of Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit. The rest of the book undertakes to study three major theological themes: John’s doctrine of salvation (developed principally in the Gospel), his teaching on the Christian life (focused primarily in the Epistles), and his view of last things (seen primarily in the Apocalypse). The book contains an extensive bibliography: four indexes of Greek words, authors, subjects, and Scripture references.

The material is well organized, and proceeds logically from section to section. There are many interesting discussions of Greek grammar, points of exegesis, and theological issues (e.g., eternal security, perfectionism, the death of Christ, the doctrine of sin). Parts 2 and 3 on “Soteriology” and “The Christian Life” were especially helpful to this reviewer. Probably the most controversial section of the book is part 4—dispensational, pretribulational eschatology without any detailed attempt to consider other hermeneutical options open to evangelicals.

A serious weakness is that Professor Cook shows no detailed acquaintance with much recent work on the fourth Gospel, the Johannine Epistles, and the Book of the Revelation. He ignores recent studies by Oscar Cullmann, Louis Martyn, and Raymond Brown, C. H. Dodd, Howard Marshall, G. R. Beasley-Murray, G. B. Caird, and R. H. Mounce. However, Dean Cook does isolate many Johannine themes in a profitable way, offers useful comments on translation problems, and presents his views with straightforward candor.

This reviewer would have appreciated a more extensive treatment of John’s use of witness concepts. This is touched on in the Gospel, but is largely overlooked in the discussion of the First Epistle and the Apocalypse. The hermeneutical questions involved in the use of biblical numerology and a futuristic approach to the Apocalypse were other important issues that were not discussed very adequately. Moreover, the fact that the Apocalypse is an example of apocalyptic literature was minimized. Nevertheless, when due allowance has been made for all these caveats, it must be said that this is a challenging, thought-provoking book.

Opening Some New Vistas

Encounter with the Text: Form and History in the Hebrew Bible, edited by Martin J. Buss (Fortress Press, Philadelphia, and Scholars Press, Semeia Supplements, No. 8, 1979, 224 pp., $5.95 pb), reviewed by Peter C. Craigie, dean, faculty of humanities and professor of religious studies, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

A task group was formed within the Society of Biblical Literature in 1971 to address the topic “Methodology and Its History.” This volume, edited by Martin Buss and containing essays from 11 contributors, is the principal outcome of the work of the task group.

Part 1 contains two major essays. The first, by Martin Buss, is entitled “Understanding Communication”; it is on the one hand the most scientific article in the collection, and on the other hand the most obscure essay in the entire volume. The second, by Hugh White, conveys a clear account of the possibilities of structural analysis for biblical studies. Part 2 contains three clearly written essays pertaining to relatively new methods in contemporary biblical criticism: sociology (Norman Gottwald), redaction criticism (John Willis), and rhetorical criticism (Roy Melguin). In part 3, there are two linguistic and literary studies: Wolfgang Roth, following the path of Paul Ricoeur, develops a linguistic approach, while John Gammie employs a literary approach involving theological reflection. The fourth and final part of the book contains four essays by younger scholars, developing what are described as “human issues” in interpretation.

It is difficult to review a book with 11 different contributors, and inevitably an element of subjectivity creeps into the reviewing process. My subjective response to the first half of the book was probably one of boredom; the essays were generally clear and consistent, but did not grasp my attention, nor did they open up new vistas for interpretation. (Such an observation no doubt reflects more negatively upon the reviewer than the reviewed!) But I mention this initial reaction by way of background to my response to part 4; at last my interest was aroused, and the possibility of new vistas and new understanding emerged. Dale Patrick writes on “Political Exegesis,” with an admirable concern for the contemporary relevance of the Old Testament and a fine sensitivity to the problems inherent in any approach toward political exegesis. And implicitly he raises questions about the whole nature and role of criticism.

Patrick’s essay is followed by Stephen Reid’s “Violence and Vengeance,” in which (from a more philosophical perspective) the possibility of a black hermeneutic is considered. And Christine Allen (“On me be the curse, my son”) takes into account feminist considerations in an examination of the Rebekah story in Genesis 23–29. These three essays I found particularly stimulating and interesting, opening up the possibilities inherent in the book’s title—Encounter with the Text.

Much of this book will not be easy going for the general reader, but parts of it will be important for the student, scholar, and pastor who desire to keep up with some of the trends in Old Testament scholarship.

Focusing On The Death Of Jesus

What Really Happened When Christ Died? by Moret H. Dinsmore (Accent Books, 1979, 159 pp., $3.95); The Man Who Died for Me, by Herbert Lockyer (Word Books, 1979, 160pp., $6.95); The Cross: Tradition and Interpretation, translated by Elke Jessett (Eerdmans, 1979, 162 pp., $6.95); are reviewed by Robert W. Lyon, professor of New Testament interpretation, Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky.

Here are three very diverse books on the Cross of Christ. Dinsmore, a Baptist pastor, has written a book that is marked by excessive literalism and a curious imagination on historical matters, but also by undoubted passion to proclaim the story of the Cross. His reconstruction of “history’s most lifeshaking week” will hardly convince any except those who will feel comfortable with his use of Scripture.

According to Dinsmore, Jesus was crucified on Wednesday afternoon, rather than on Friday, and was buried before sundown that evening; he was raised on Saturday evening at 6 P. M. and was thus dead for three days and three nights. His basis for this is found in Matthew 12:40 when Jesus said that the Son of Man would be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth and in John 11:9: “Are there not twelve hours in the day?” The book is occasionally harsh, as when he refers to the “sign seekers” meaning, apparently, the charismatic movement.

Lockyer’s book strikes a different note entirely. It is simply a series of devotional meditations on the death and resurrection of our Lord. One will not go to the book for exegetical help, yet there are moments of profound insight into the mystery of Christ. Lockyer is an avid advocate of alliteration (example: his magnetic person; his magnetic passion; his magnetic power), and at times his efforts are strained, hence distracting. This type of literature is a constant reminder of the inscrutable depths of the mystery of the Cross and of our need always to read with the heart as well as the head.

The third book is by the long-time director for biblical studies of the World Council of Churches, and while it is intended to be a technical and academic study of how the Cross was understood in the early church, the book also reveals the author’s own authentic commitment to the message of the Cross. After an opening chapter on what is known historically about the crucifixion of Jesus, the three following chapters discuss the various ways by which the early church discovered and expressed its significance. There is first an inquiry into the earliest, precanonical traditions, then an examination of two Pauline texts (“case studies”), and finally the redactional activity of the four evangelists.

The entire book reveals an intimate, firsthand knowledge of the biblical texts as well as the critical literature related to their investigation. One finds brief summaries of such diverse problems as the work of form critics, the (to us, surprisingly) limited use of Isaiah 53, the north and south Galatian theories, and much more. Throughout the book, reverence and an inquiring mind walk hand in hand.

At the end of his study, Weber offers a quite useful bibliography of 22 pages, listed topically. Only one thing mars the book: there are no footnotes and no indexes, in spite of the fact that numerous authors and studies are referred to and even quoted. The book can be so useful to students that if a second edition is ever offered, this omission should be cared for.

Understanding Our Evangelical Past

The Gospel in America: Themes in the Story of America’s Evangelicals, by John D. Woodbridge, Mark A. Noll, and Nathan O. Hatch (Zondervan Publishing House, 1979, 286 pp., $9.95), is reviewed by Richard L. Troutman, head, Department of History, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green.

Evangelicals take pride in the fact that Christianity is a religion deeply rooted in history. For the most part, however, that pride has not been translated into the time and effort necessary to understand the historic context out of which their faith has emerged. Furthermore, American evangelicals have little or no understanding of the evangelical experience in America. If one holds to the enlightened position (as historians do) that only by studying the past can one understand the present, then this book, written primarily for the layman, is a must for every informed evangelical.

The three authors identify themselves as belonging to the Reformed-Presbyterian-Baptist traditions. All three are evangelicals as well as historians, and their faith shines through.

As the subtitle implies, the authors have not written a definitive history of American evangelicals, but rather have presented certain broad themes that are crucial to an understanding of the movement. These include theology, attitudes toward the Bible and the church, and the evangelical interaction with American culture.

In the chapters devoted to evangelical theology, the authors have attempted not only to present clearly and simply what major evangelical theologians have thought about God, but to show how these theologians were influenced by the intellectual currents of their day. In similar fashion they have traced evangelical attitudes toward the Bible. In response to those who argue that the idea of inerrancy dates only from the 1880s, the authors observe that although the idea may be expressed by a number of terms, it has been “well grounded in Protestantism since the Reformation.”

In dealing with evangelicals and the church, the authors have focused upon three main themes: revivalism, Americanization, and separation. Although revivalism is treated sympathetically as a means of bringing large numbers of people to commit their lives to Christ, the authors note that it has suffered from the “demagoguery and showmanship” of some revivalists.

The authors offer some thoughtful observations on the Americanization of the church and separation. They point out that in contrast to the Puritans who correctly saw the church as the “primary agent of God’s meaningful activity in history,” American Christians since the early nineteenth century have had difficulty in understanding the church as a significant institution. Revivalism, individualism, and denominationalism have been largely responsible for this relatively low view of the church. On the matter of separation, the authors state that the splitting of denominations has been due primarily to conflicts over the essence of the faith as well as over specific doctrines and practices, and to the influence of powerful leaders.

Two concluding chapters deal with evangelical attitudes toward the nation and society.

The Gospel in America is a good book. In general it is well conceived and well written. The authors have handled controversial issues with eminent fairness and obviously have a deep appreciation for our evangelical heritage. On occasion, a statement is overdrawn as, for example, the observation that in 1776 the blacks in America “already knew by experience the kind of slavery that patriotic Americans went to war to avoid for themselves.” Also, as historians the authors should know better than to take direct quotations from secondary sources (in one case an American history text) when, with a little effort, the quotations could have been found in printed primary materials in any good research library. Nevertheless, the authors are to be commended for making such an important contribution to our understanding of the evangelical past.

A Balanced Presentation

The Trauma of Transparency, by J. Grant Howard (Multnomah, 1979, 235 pp., $7.95), is reviewed by Em Griffin, associate professor of communications, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

There seems to be very little middle ground when evangelicals write on interpersonal communication. The author is either an unabashed apostle of openness and honesty (Bruce Larson, The Relational Revolution) or an avowed skeptic toward anything that smacks of a humanistic emphasis on self-actualization (Paul Vitz, Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship). Dr. Howard does a good job in presenting a balanced position as he deals with the thorny issues of face-to-face relationships.

He presents a well-thought-out rationale for a positive self-concept that avoids the extremes of the “I am a worm” school on the one hand and self-idolatry on the other. He has an equally healthy emphasis on the lost practice of Christians confessing their sins one to another after the scriptural pattern set forth in James 5:16. Unfortunately, there are some significant problems with the book that mar this good effort.

First, Howard assumes that it’s possible to synthesize a communication theology from the biblical witness, but this is a shaky assumption. He ends up drawing a number of horizontal man-man communication principles based upon the vertical God-man model. But is there sufficient scriptural data to warrant this method? Jesus’ teachings went in the opposite direction. He illustrated mysterious God-man relations in terms of the familiar human bridegroom, father-son, master-servant bonds.

Second, if a theology of communication is possible, it should be based on the sound hermeneutical principle of drawing on portions of Scripture that deal systematically with interpersonal communication rather than patching together proof texts. That might prevent us from making the kind of questionable pronouncement that Howard makes: “A bold authoritative confidence is the picture of the biblical communicator.” In other words, it’s a sin to be shy.

Third, the book is written in a style that is lively—sometimes catchy, sometimes cute. The reader will wish the author would illustrate his many didactic statements. For instance, “Christians have resources to draw on that non-Christians don’t.” The statement obviously is true. But what are they?

On the other hand, I did particularly appreciate two things. At the end of each chapter, Howard puts the reader in touch with a number of excellent Christian writers, such as John Powell, Paul Tournier, Ray Stedman, Reuel Howe, and David Augsburger, who speak to the questions of transparency. He also capsulizes the trauma the conservative church has experienced concerning relationships. We have often been more orthodox in handling God’s Word than we have been in dealing with God’s people.

Daniel For Today

The Lord Is King: The Message of Daniel, by Ronald S. Wallace (InterVarsity Press, 1979, 200 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Raymond B. Dillard, associate professor of Old Testament, language and literature, Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder. Prophecy buffs would find this volume on Daniel devoid of much serious, detailed exegesis, while those who are a bit weary of prophecy buffs would find the volume a positive delight. Prophetic schemes complete with charts of eschatological events, the latest reckoning on the chronology of the 70 weeks, the answer to what is represented by the toes of the image or the 10 horns of the beast, the role of the United Nations and the European Common Market in the end times—if this is what you are looking for in a book about Daniel, you had best look elsewhere. But if you are looking for a study of those things that are central and clear in Daniel for both his own day and ours, this volume is a good place for some help.

As with other volumes in “The Bible Speaks Today” series, Wallace treads the middle ground between commentary and sermon; and the author’s position on matters of date, authorship, and unity are traditionally evangelical (pp. 16–22, 165, 187–190). Short summaries relate Daniel to other genres of prophetic, apocalyptic, and wisdom literature (22–29).

One temptation in showing how “the Bible speaks today” is for an author or preacher to make his points on the basis of his assessment of the psychological state or motivation of the characters in the narrative. The obvious danger is that this subjective assessment of psychological state easily becomes the basis for moralizing that is not clearly anchored to the intent of the text; it makes for vivid writing and immediate application, though often at a tangent to the central concern of a passage. Wallace succumbs at this point on occasion (pp. 50–51, 62–64, 70–71, 146).

Too often writers on the book of Daniel are carried away either by preoccupation with details of eschatological expectation or the necessity of answering the pronouncements of higher criticism. Wallace provides a well-written and happy alternative that concentrates on Daniel’s central thrust toward the concerns of his audience and those concerns as they translate to our own day.

Book Briefs

Church History: American Colonial Period

Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts Essex County, 1629–1692 (University of North Carolina Press), by D. T. Konig, is an incisive new study of Puritan life. A somewhat Freudian look is The Language of Puritan Feeling: An Exploration in Literature, Psychology, and Social History (Rutgers University Press), by David Leverenz.

An excellent collection of essays is Puritan Influences in American Literature (University of Illinois Press), edited by Emory Elliot. From Wilderness to Wasteland: The Trial of the Puritan God in the American Imagination (Kennikat), by Charles Berryman, traces the transformation of religious dogmatism to skeptical humanism. An extremely valuable guidebook to this period (and later) is American Prose to 1820: A Guide to Information Sources (Gale Research). There are 3,000 annotated entries here, covering 83 major authors of the period and others.

We become personally culpable when we acquiesce to the status quo.

In my article in the last issue I argued that equality is not a synonym for identity; that by creation, equality of human worth and inequality of human ability are combined; and that what we should be seeking is equal opportunity for all human beings (through education, medical care, housing, nutrition, and trade) to develop their full, God-given potential. This is the minimum that love and justice should demand.

Such an acceptance of responsibility is not the same as an admission of guilt. To apportion blame for the present situation of worldwide economic inequality seems to me neither possible nor profitable. It is certainly not God’s fault, since he has provided ample resources for everybody. Nor is it the fault of the poor, for almost invariably they were born in it. But neither is the situation necessarily our fault, although our colonial forefathers doubtless had a share in creating it and our governments in perpetuating it by not tackling the problem more energetically. We ourselves become personally culpable, however, only if we acquiesce in it by doing nothing. Yet what, in practice, can we do?

To begin with, God may well be calling more Christian people than hear and respond to his call to give their lives in the service of the poor and powerless, in practical philanthropy or Third World development, in politics, or in economics. I would love to see in every country a team of well-qualified Christian economists band together both to work out new international economic policies and to labor for political solutions. Yet this is bound to be the calling of only a minority. What can the rest of us do?

First and foremost, there is the challenge to our heart. When Jesus saw the multitudes, hungry and leaderless, he was moved with compassion, and then fed them or taught them or both. It was compassion that aroused and directed his action, and it is compassion that we need most. We have to feel what Jesus felt—the pangs of the hungry, the alienation of the powerless, and the indignities of the wretched of the earth. For ultimately, the unacceptable inequalities between North and South are neither political nor economic, but rather moral. Until we feel moral indignation about worldwide social injustice and strong compassion for worldwide human suffering, I seriously doubt if we shall be moved to take action.

The challenge to our head comes next. We need to inform ourselves of the facts. The Third World lies at our gate today much as Lazarus lay at the rich man’s. Dives may not have known he was there, but a plea of ignorance would not have exonerated him. Nor can we plead ignorance. Nearly all of us drink tea and coffee, probably sweeten it with sugar, eat bananas, and wear textile clothing. We cannot enjoy these things responsibly if we remain indifferent to the wages and living conditions of those who produce them, and to the trade agreements by which they become available to us. So we should take steps to find out. Does the daily paper we read have adequate Third World coverage? Do we subscribe to a magazine devoted to Third World needs? Is there a “Work Development Movement” in our country for us to join (as there is in Britain), which exists to supply the public with factual information? More personally still, could we make friends with a Third World citizen or travel to some region of the Third World in order to educate ourselves at first hand? Or could we offer ourselves for short-term service in a developing country? And does our church have a “world development group” in addition to a “world mission group,” whose responsibility is to inform itself and to keep the congregation informed?

Our mouth also needs to be involved. We have a duty to spread the information we have obtained in order to arouse the concern of our relatives, friends, and colleagues as well. It is only when we are sure of our facts (for we all have a tendency to pontificate from a position of ignorance) that we shall be equipped to join in any form of political agitation. Most communities have pressure groups, which are seeking to influence public opinion and increase public concern about development issues. They could benefit from a Christian contribution to their thought and action; it is anomalous that sometimes humanists show more compassion for the deprived than Christians. Again, most congressmen have times when they are available to the public (British members of Parliament borrow an expression from the medical profession and call them “surgery hours”), Christians should take advantage of such opportunities to ask informed questions about trade tariffs and quotas, to press for the government to increase its ODA (Official Development Assistance), and to inquire why, in Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere’s words, so many developing countries are forced to “sell cheap and buy dear.”

Finally, there is our pocket. Emotional arousal, self-education, and political agitation are all necessary. But there is an element of hypocrisy about all of them if they are not accompanied by personal commitment. In comparison to the 800 million destitute people of the world, we who subscribe to CHRISTIANITY TODAY are rich. We could not afford it otherwise! Now, we should be thankful to God our Creator and Father for the good things he has given us to enjoy; a negative asceticism—self-denial as an end in itself—is a contradiction of the biblical doctrine of creation, for it overlooks the generosity of God “who richly furnishes us with everything to enjoy” (1 Tim. 6:17). At the same time, we have to remember the numerous biblical warnings against the dangers of wealth (that it easily engenders pride, materialism, and a false sense of security), against the evils of covetousness, and against the injustice of condoning the inequalities of privilege. So, recalling the principles of unity and equality which I elaborated in my previous article, most of us (for I include myself) ought to give more generously to aid and development, as well as to world evangelization. In order to do so, we ought further to develop a simple lifestyle. The two most discussed sentences in the Lausanne Covenant (1974) read: “All of us are shocked by the poverty of millions and disturbed by the injustices which cause it. Those of us who live in affluent circumstances accept our duty to develop a simple lifestyle in order to contribute generously to both relief and evangelism.”

I am writing this a few days before the International Consultation on Simple Lifestyle to be held in London, and naturally I am in no position to anticipate its findings. But I am confident that it will remind us of the biblical call to renounce covetousness and to cultivate contentment. I hope it will summon us deliberately to develop a standard of living lower than we could afford, out of solidarity with the world’s poor. It is true that such a purposeful renunciation of luxurious living would not solve the world’s economic problems or transform the poverty of the destitute into plenty. But it would be a sign and symbol of our Christian obedience, of our love for the needy, and of our resolve to imitate that grace of our Lord Jesus Christ who, though rich, became poor in order that through his poverty we might become rich.

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

CT-Gallup Poll findings on American clergy show them to be more conservative than their public image.

Heretics make headlines. When a minister publicly denies the cardinal beliefs of his church it’s news. If she openly supports a lesbian lifestyle, reporters know that sells newspapers. But what about the clergy whose names appear only in the Saturday church announcements? What do they believe? What kinds of lifestyles do they approve? What do they feel about the ministry or the social-ethical issues of our day?

A modern business axiom proclaims, “In God we trust—all others must have data.” To gather data to answer these questions, CHRISTIANITY TODAY employed the Gallup organization and its affiliate, the Princeton Religious Research Center, to survey American clergy. A group of 1,060 Protestant ministers, selected at random, took time to answer 45 questions sent to them in the mail. In a separate sample, 998 Roman Catholic clergy also filled out the questionnaire. The denominational proportion of Protestant clergy participating in the survey corresponds to the actual number of clergy in the various denominations. Baptists made up 17 percent of the respondents; Methodists 14 percent; Lutherans 12 percent; Presbyterians 9 percent; United Church of Christ 4 percent; Episcopalians 3 percent; and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) 2 percent. Other religious bodies represented in the sample—Mormons, Eastern Orthodox, Bible churches, to name a few—each made up 1 percent or less of the total.

According to the study, most Protestant clergy serve relatively small congregations. Only 12 percent reported an active membership of 1,000 or more, while over half said they pastored churches with less than 300. Congregations that call their minister “the preacher” have support from the clergy: when asked what they considered the most important activities of pastoral ministry. 56 percent of the ministers singled out preaching. The closest second, checked by 15 percent of the respondents, was administration of the sacraments. That does not necessarily mean that clergy feel their preaching is effective. When asked. “What programs in your church are especially successful?” less than 10 percent mentioned preaching. About a third selected “liturgy—worship services.” Among evangelicals, youth ministries topped the list.

American clergy tend to classify themselves as theologically conservative rather than liberal. Over half—53 percent—declare they are evangelical. Over 20 percent say they are fundamentalists. One-third answer to “traditional confessional.” Ten percent accept the label “charismatic.” Only 15 percent of the clergy characterize themselves as “liberal” and 8 percent as “neoorthodox.” Within the evangelicals, 55 percent regard themselves as philosophically conservative compared to 37 percent who see themselves as “middle of the road” or a small 6 percent who think of themselves as “liberal.” What is more, members of the clergy believe their congregations view them as they view themselves.

Conservative doctrinal positions emerge again and again throughout the survey. Seven in ten ministers believe “the Bible is the Word of God and is not mistaken in its statements and teachings.” Among evangelicals, over 95 percent accept that position. Clergy under 30 are more likely to hold this view of Scripture than their elders. In fact, throughout the study, young persons in the clergy appear more traditional and theologically conservative than their older colleagues. As many Catholics hold this high view of the Bible as Protestants. Catholics and Protestants differ significantly, however, when it comes to testing religious beliefs. While 76 percent of Protestants cite the Bible as their chief authority, 77 percent of Catholics say they test their beliefs “by what the church says.” On questions about the person of Christ, respondents were even more orthodox. The great majority of clergy (87 percent) believe that “Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man.” Catholics are virtually unanimous in this doctrinal affirmation. Approached negatively, only 1 percent of all the clergy accept the proposition, “Jesus Christ is not God or the Son of God, but was a great religious teacher.” The only significant deviation from the strong affirmation of Christ’s deity and humanity came from Methodists: 30 percent felt that “Jesus Christ was a man, but was divine in the sense that God worked through him. He was the Son of God.”

Ninety-nine percent of both Protestant and Catholic ministers believe in life after death and eight out of ten go on to affirm that “the only hope for heaven is through personal faith in Jesus Christ.” A basic issue of the Reformation still separates Protestants and Catholics, however: 61 percent of Roman Catholic clergy believe that “heaven is a divine reward for those who earn it by their good life.”

Continuing the conservative trend, a strong majority of clergy believe that the devil is a personal being. Catholics, Southern Baptists, and those over 50 are more likely to affirm this than others in the sample. Once again Methodists as a group file a minority report. About one in five maintain that the devil does not exist either as a person or a force for evil in people’s lives.

In the face of pervasive teaching about evolution in our school systems, it is significant that 57 percent of the clergy and half of the general public still believe “God created Adam and Eve, which was the start of human life.” Younger clergy are more likely to accept this than their elders. Catholics, however, differ with Protestants on this question. Two-thirds of Catholic clergy agreed with the statement, “God began an evolutionary cycle for all living things, including man, but personally intervened in a point in time and transformed man into a human being in his own image.” Creation and evolution divide evangelicals. “Liberal” evangelicals appear much more likely to adopt an evolutionary position than those who characterize themselves as “conservative” or “middle of the road.”

Eight out of ten clergy testify to having had a “religious experience,” but the experience relates to some degree to their religious affiliation. For instance, Protestants are more likely than Catholics to have had such an experience, and Baptists are twice as likely as Lutherans. Within the group reporting a religious experience, better than nine out of ten said it involved Jesus Christ, and three out of four saw it as a turning point that included asking Jesus Christ to be their personal Savior. While most of those who report a religious experience feel it continues to hold significance for them, among Catholics and Lutherans the experience is not usually associated with conversion.

What about the personal lives of the clergy? Press reports of pastors and priests leaving the ministry make it appear that large numbers pick up their cross only to drop it along the way. According to the survey, however, only about three in ten indicated they “often” or “occasionally” considered leaving the ministry. Just as many replied that they have “never” considered dropping out. Catholics are less likely than others to have flirted with this possibility. In their personal lives, about half of the clergy feel they live up to their own moral and ethical standards most of the time. About one in three admit that while they try to live up to their standards, they find it difficult. However, few felt their standards were impossible to maintain. When temptation does assault the clergy, it is not blamed on the society around them. Only 2 percent checked the response “there is so much in today’s culture that works against my standards that I often find it impossible to live up to what I think is right.” Alcohol poses less of a threat to ministers than it does to the general public. While two out of three lay persons drink, less than half of the clergy indulge. Among evangelicals, three out of four are total abstainers.

Do clergy regard the world as their parish, or the parish as their world? On the one hand, when asked which pastoral activity gave them “least satisfaction,” 28 percent said “community service” (ranking under administration, which received the lowest marks of all). Yet, most agreed that “helping win the world for Jesus Christ” should hold top priority for a Christian. While Methodists and liberals are less likely to affirm that priority, it still ranks as the dominant opinion in these two groups as well. Two out of three respondents say the church should concentrate more on personal than social renewal; the remaining third vote for equal emphasis. Only 2 percent favor making social renewal the primary concern of the church. These reactions stem from a strategy embraced by four out of five ministers—personal renewal generally leads to social renewal. Even among liberals, the response stands four to one that if we renew persons we can renew society.

This emphasis on the individual does not necessarily imply the church has no business in politics. Three out of four of those questioned believe that religious organizations should take a public position on what they feel to be the will of God in political-economic matters. Catholics hold this more often than Protestants and young adults seem somewhat less likely to opt for political expression than their elders. The clergy also respond in impressive numbers that “religious organizations should try to persuade senators and representatives to enact legislation they would like to see become law.”

If the clergy should decide to get together on political-economic issues, though, they could not agree on what legislation to push. What could be expected is that the clergy would generally be more conservative than the public at large. For example, only 3 percent of the clergy agree that abortion is “acceptable under any circumstance,” while 13 percent of the public accept that statement. After that the clergy split. While over 80 percent of the Protestants feel that abortion is “acceptable under only certain circumstances,” only a quarter of the Catholics assent to that. Most insist that abortion is unacceptable in all circumstances.

A heavy majority (84 percent) believe sexual relations before marriage are wrong—while only half of the general public see that as true. Catholic clergy hold this view more often than Protestants, but conservative and middle-of-the-road evangelicals hold it even more strongly than Catholics. Among liberals, however, one out of four accept the idea that premarital sex may be right. When it comes to extramarital sex, the clergy present a more unified front—96 percent declare that an extramarital affair is wrong.

Homosexuality, another issue of our times, does not get such widespread denunciation. While eight out of ten clergy across the nation reject homosexual relations between consenting adults as sinful (Southern Baptists and conservative evangelicals hold this unanimously), among theological liberals better than one out of four disagree.

The clergy also appear more conservative than the public on divorce. The dominant position of ministers is that “divorce should be avoided except in an extreme situation.” On the other hand, the dominant view of the public is that “divorce is painful, but preferable to maintaining an unhappy marriage.” On this issue Catholic and Protestant clergy stand together. The strictest view on divorce is held by ministers under 30. Almost one out of five feel that “divorce should be avoided under any circumstances.”

What about remarriage after divorce? In the population at large, one out of three persons feel that “remarriage after divorce is always acceptable,” but only one out of ten clergymen agree with that statement. Thirty-seven percent prefer the alternative “remarriage after divorce is acceptable if reconciliation to the former mate is not possible, regardless of the reason.” Surprisingly, 22 percent of Catholic clergy endorse that position.

When asked what should be done about poverty in their community, two out of ten members of the public felt no obligation beyond paying taxes. Another two believed they should try to persuade church and government organizations to aid the poor. Three more were willing to contribute to such organizations. Only two out of ten felt they should be involved personally and directly. Members of the clergy contrast sharply with the public. One-third believed they should personally be involved with the poor, while an additional third felt a responsibility to persuade church, religious, and government agencies to help. Almost as many believed they should contribute to religious and community groups. Less than 1 percent of the ministers in the country felt that paying taxes alone was enough. More impressive, according to their answers, clergy involve themselves with the poor far more often than do the general public. They work personally with the poor, contribute to agencies that assist the poor, and persuade others to get involved. While 27 percent of the public confess they have done nothing about poverty in their community, only 1 percent of the ministers make such an admission.

Clearly, the CHRISTIANITY TODAY-Gallup Poll and members of the press don’t pose identical pictures of the American clergy. Ministers as a group hold much more conservative positions on theological and ethical questions than a newspaper reader might suspect. Nor do ministers live in steeples high above the pavement. In impressive numbers, they get involved at a personal level with needy men and women around them.

In the weeks to come this broad survey will be broken out into its separate parts and the thinking and actions of the clergy analyzed in detail. Through these studies church leaders today and historians of the future will have an accurate understanding of where ministers positioned themselves as the decade began.

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.

Churches and schools are promoting programs to better equip their adults for growth and ministry.

Secular educators call adult continuing education “lifelong learning.” How much more appropriate “lifelong learning” is in adult continuing Christian education! One of the major tasks of the church is “to make the saints fit for the task of ministering toward the building up of the body of Christ, until we all may arrive at the unity of faith and that understanding of the Son of God that brings completeness of personality, tending toward the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.” (Eph. 4:12, Berkeley). Becoming like Jesus Christ, becoming mature in him and in relationships within his body, constitute a process of “lifelong learning.”

That adults can learn, do learn, and want to learn, is evidenced by the explosion in adult continuing education. Courses are offered by corporations, business institutions, hospitals, park districts, school districts, YMCAs, YWCAs, junior colleges, universities; long courses, short courses, in-between courses; courses by mail and by newspaper; seminars for men and “feminars” for women; high school level, popular level, special interest level, college-credit level, and graduate level; courses on every subject imaginable, and a few that are unimaginable; courses for minimal or no cost, and courses of moderate to maximum cost. More and more adults have time, or are planning to take time, for courses that will help them achieve mastery of a problem, satisfaction of curiosity, relief of frustration, knowledge of facts, development of an interest or skill, or insight into the meaning of life. Adults bring to these courses a high level of personal motivation, and they achieve various degrees of personal satisfaction. In a recent survey, the Adult Education Association found that about one of every three postcollege-age adults in America is involved in some type of adult continuing education program every year. Last year over 40 million adults were involved in adult continuing education programs.

Meanwhile, back at the “Fourth Methobapterian Church” of Central City, U.S.A., what is being done in adult continuing Christian education? Hundreds of local churches, both large and small, are now developing popular level, adult Bible institutes to better equip their adults for ministry at home, at church, and in the community. Here are a few examples:

At the Church of the Open Door in Elyria, Ohio, a series of courses is taught by members of the pastoral staff on a weekday evening using Moody Correspondence School materials and the Evangelical Teacher Training Association series, with a total enrollment of over 200 each semester. Adults come from other area churches as well. For many years, Calvary Baptist Church in New York City has conducted its evening school of the Bible to train lay men and women for effective Christian service in that vast metropolitan area.

The Church of the Redeemer in Mesa, Arizona, has an extensive and intensive program of adult discipleship, stressing a balance in gaining factual biblical knowledge in a classroom setting with training in personal godliness leading to practical Christian service. Adults make a special time and work commitment in order to be accepted into this program. At Peninsula Bible Church, in Palo Alto, California, one of the excellent adult Christian education ministries offered by the church is Scribe School. Twenty-four adults spend two years in a course combining classroom instruction with in-service work experience in all phases of the church’s ministry. Leadership is shared by the pastoral staff, which seeks to prepare Scribe students for local church vocational positions.

Trinity Church of Seattle, Washington, conducts its Schools of Christian Living for adults on Sunday afternoons. In the School of Counsellor Training, lay persons are trained by professional counselors to handle crisis work via the telephone. The church receives an average of 600 crisis calls per month. This program has gained public commendation by many Seattle area social agencies. A School of Creativity gives adults an opportunity to discover, develop, and improve specialized gifts in music and other artistic areas, in journalism, and in crafts. The School of Discipleship accepts 36 men and women each year for concentrated study of biblical discipleship, with research papers, exams, and evaluative grades as part of their responsibility.

Calvary Baptist Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, has long carried on an internship training program for young adults pointed toward vocational Christian ministry. The church also conducts Deacons’ Training Seminars, which regularly draw scores of deacons from churches all over the Midwest, along with the pastors of those churches. The staff of Calvary Baptist has developed the program and curriculum for these seminars, which feature deacons training deacons. The response has been enthusiastic.

Though some of them may have peaked, specialized seminars continue to be a vital aspect of the Christian adult continuing education scene, with hundreds of programs conducted by churches, Christian schools, and organizations, and covering a multitude of topics. Most notable of the week-long and weekend seminars are “Basic Youth Conflicts” and “Walk Through the Bible.” Tens of thousands of young people and adults come to see and hear Bill Gothard in person or on videotape. They receive large, red notebooks with scriptural answers to personal and family problems from Gothard’s perspective. Alumni keep coming back (free of charge) to receive new notes and insights. “Walk Through the Bible” seminars in Old Testament, New Testament, the Gospels, the Prophets, and Bible study methods give hundreds of participants creative “memory handles” for an overview of the whole Bible and selected parts of Scripture, as well as ways to study the Bible for themselves. These seminars also provide notebook materials.

Christian liberal arts colleges, Bible colleges, and Bible institutes are expanding their adult continuing Christian education horizons. Many of these schools have conducted evening programs for many years. Some of the courses are college credit-level courses, but in recent years more and more evening programs are offering popular-level courses. Adults need to consider the difference between college credit- and popular-level courses. Here’s one way to look at it, using a course on Romans as an example: College-level credit: two-semester-hour course meeting for two classroom hours per week over a 15-week semester, for a total of 30 classroom hours of instruction. Popular-level credit: one semester hour course meeting for one classroom hour per week over a 15-week semester, for a total of 15 classroom hours of instruction.

Popular-level instruction thus provides about half the number of classroom hours of instruction that would be required for college-level credit. However, the vast majority of postcollege-age adults interested in reentering a more formal education program desire popular-level training that can be practically applied in their lives and in service for Christ in the home, church, and community. While it is very important to offer some type of certificate recognition, or even a graduation goal, most of the adults in these programs are not interested in college-level credit.

Until the last decade, institutions of higher Christian education that offered popular-level evening programs expected adults to come to their campuses one or more evenings a week for study. Now, a few of these schools are “taking the school to the people” through evening school extension ministries. The two schools doing most with evening school satellite programs are Washington (D.C.) Bible College and Moody Bible Institute of Chicago. The two differ in basic approach. Washington Bible College concentrates on the greater Washington, D.C. area, with extension schools meeting in local churches within a 50-mile radius. Moody Bible Institute, however, places its satellite evening schools in more neutral public or private secondary schools in order to appeal to a wider cross section of adults. Moody feels that meeting in a local church might limit participation by adults from other churches.

Faculty members at Washington Bible College do most of the teaching in their evening school extensions, but Moody Bible Institute uses a team of special instructors (usually qualified pastors) in each satellite area, as well as faculty from the Chicago main campus. Moody coordinates 10 schools (including the main campus program) in five states—Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida—offering approximately 175 different courses each semester in Bible, doctrine, Christian education, evangelism, pastoral studies, and Christian communications. Classes are taught by more than 90 faculty members and special instructors. Total enrollment is from 1,700 to 2,000 per semester. Enrollment has jumped from 700 in 1970 to a high of over 2,000 since the first Moody Bible Institute satellite schools were established in 1972–73. Of Moody Bible Institute’s current evening schools, eight were started in other locations in the last four years.

People in various parts of the country are thinking about beginning satellite evening schools. Before starting such a plan for adult continuing education, here is a list of important questions to ask:

1. What is the population base in your area within a 25–30 mile radius?

2. What other similar adult evening Bible school programs are operating in your area? How many adults are involved? How successful are these programs?

3. What primary spiritual needs should be addressed by an evening school in your area?

4. Is there a broad, enthusiastic interest for such a program among pastors, churches, organizations, and leaders?

5. How many area churches and Christian organizations would endorse such a school by expressing in writing their positive interest?

6. How many adults would express in writing their interest in possible enrollment?

7. What neutral facilities are available that would be suitable for an adult evening school, providing central location, easy accessibility, affordability, and adequate, lighted parking?

8. What is the potential for developing a core of qualified instructors with proper academic training, vital Christian experience, and the gift of teaching?

9. Are there available representatives to serve on a local evening school steering committee?

10. What financial support is available for both initial and ongoing costs?

Most extension schools offer courses just one evening per week, 8 to 10 courses taught by four to five different teachers. The number of evenings, courses, and instructors can be increased as interest and participation increase. Students can work toward various series certificates and eventually graduate. Moody grants a Certificate of Graduation in Continuing Christian Education upon satisfactory completion of 36 semester hours of study. Some adults choose to audit the courses, but about 80 percent of those enrolled in all Moody Evening Schools are credit students. They fulfill all course requirements, take exams, write papers, and receive a course grade.

The average time from start to graduation is six years, but recently a man in his 50s graduated after having attended Moody Evening School off and on for 29 years—and he’s still attending. He believes that in just a few years, when he retires early from his secular position, God wants him to be a pastor in small, rural churches that can’t really afford a pastor. He and his wife would have sufficient retirement income to be self-supporting. Another man, an art teacher in the Chicago public school system, trusted Christ as personal Savior at about the age of 50. Shortly thereafter he was encouraged to attend Moody Evening School. He graduated in three and one-half years by taking classes two nights a week. During those years his wife and adult children also became Christians, and now he and his wife are seriously considering teaching in a mission school in Africa.

Correspondence programs on the graduate-, college-, and popular-credit levels, are also having a positive impact on adult continuing Christian education development. Moody Correspondence School (118,000 course enrollments in 1979) is the largest of a growing number of Bible correspondence schools across the U.S. and Canada that are a part of the newly organized Christian Correspondence School Association.

Never in the history of the church have we had the quantity and quality of curriculum resources available for helping adults to become equipped for life and for their “work of the ministry”—resources from denominational and independent curriculum publishers, and materials produced by campus ministry organizations such as Campus Crusade for Christ, the Navigators, and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. More and more these resources are helping teachers to become facilitators in a “discovery/learning” approach in adult Christian education.

Evangelicals are just beginning to scratch the surface in producing videotaped Bible study and other resources for use in connection with related student textbooks and study magazines. Most available video resources follow a “head-talking, content-centered” approach, with minimal attention to the wide variety of educational techniques for adults. By far the best use of the videotape media this writer has seen is the “Bible Alive” study series on the Gospel of Matthew produced and taught by Dr. Larry Richards. This series provides excellent balance in biblical content and use of educational participatory techniques in both video and printed resources.

A recent U.S. Census Bureau report highlights some extremely significant trends for leaders in adult continuing Christian education:

• In the next decade (1980–1990) there will be significant growth in the 25–34, 35–44, and 65 and over age groups.

• In the decade 1990–2000 there will be continued growth in the 25–34, 35–44, and 65 and over age groups, with the most dramatic growth occurring in the 45–54 age group.

• Growth in children and youth age levels will proceed at a much slower rate, and, according to moderate projections, will actually decrease over the next two decades.

Without a doubt we are entering the “decades of adults.” One of the greatest challenges facing churches and schools in these decades is that of adult continuing Christian education. We must ask ourselves: What new goals must be sought? What changes must churches and educational institutions make? Are they willing to pay the price for excellence in lifelong adult learning?

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.

Elton Trueblood’s contributions intersect life at many different levels.

Philosopher, author, theologian, teacher: D. Elton Trueblood (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins) is all these and more. Now in his eightieth year, this eighth-generation Quaker from Iowa has perhaps had his greatest impact on local church renewal, especially in relation to training laymen. As part of this issue about adult continuing education, his experiences and observations merit the attention of all who value education’s role in reshaping the life and ministry of the churches. Dr. Trueblood also practices the discipline so well espoused in his noteworthy book, The Company of the Committed—one of 31 published works. And he encourages others to do so as well, through the ministry of Yokefellows International. Honored with doctorates from 12 institutions, Dr. Trueblood has held professorships at Guilford, Haverford, Harvard, Stanford, and, most recently, Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, from which he has retired with the title professor at large. This interview for CHRISTIANITY TODAY was conducted by Richard J. Foster, special lecturer and writer in residence at Friends University, Wichita, Kansas.

I understand C.S. Lewis had an important influence on you.

Yes, Lewis made me a conscious evangelical, and by “evangelical” I mean “Christ-centered.” I was attracted by Lewis’s careful logic. I already understood it as a friend. In his Screwtape Letters, Screwtape advises his nephew Wormwood that, above all, he dare not let his “patient” think. That was the first sentence by Lewis that struck me, and I immediately sensed a kindred spirit. He had turned the intellectual tables on the critics of Christianity.

For me, Lewis’s central impact came in his Case for Christianity, where he exposed the weakness of liberalism by demonstrating that Christ cannot be viewed simply as a great moral teacher. The only options available are to see him as either lunatic, charletan, or as God the Son; and the only reasonable option is the third. The clear logic was so compelling and shocked me out of the unexamined liberalism of my student days.

How old were you and what were you studying when you first encountered Lewis?

I was 36, teaching the Stanford course in philosophy of religion.

Did Lewis also influence your writing style?

Definitely. Lewis wrote clearly and profoundly, without jargon. If Lewis could do this in England, someone should do it in America; perhaps it was my duty to try. The result was The Predicament of Modern Man. I wrote for the general populace with academic integrity, but without academic jargon. I kept it brief—100 pages in five chapters, each chapter a logical pointer to the next.

I have always felt The Company of the Committed was one of your best accomplishments in this regard.

It is clearly the most important book I have ever written. After 18 years, it still outsells all my other books.

The title is particularly descriptive.

Titles make all the difference. Many good books have been ruined by bad titles. I put immense thought into each title. I discarded 99 titles before I came upon The Company of the Committed.

That book profoundly affected the church renewal movement. Where is the renewal movement now?

It is still going forward, but not with the impetus it once had. There are dangers; one of the worst is temporal snobbishness. Contemporaneity is a disease. Jesus said, “One who is instructed in the Kingdom is like a householder who brings forth what is new and what is old.” I put great stress on the “and,” the holy conjunction. It is a great mistake to choose one or the other. It is not necessary to choose, for example, between the warm heart and the clear head, or between the new and the old. The renewal movement runs the danger of the heresy of the contemporary.

How do you explain the current evangelical resurgence?

Conviction. The trouble with much of mainline Christianity is that people do not believe anything. Pentecostals, for example, obviously believe something. But the weakness of much evangelicalism is that conviction does not have a sufficient intellectual base. It is hard to find a modern William Temple. If the evangelical movement hopes to hold on to its gains, it will need to develop a strong intellectual base.

In 1944 you called Western society a “cut flower” civilization. We were benefiting from a rich heritage, but we had lost our roots. How do you assess Western culture today?

Unfortunately, the prediction has come true and the flowers are withering. We see this in the disintegration of the family, in the enormous increase in suicides, in sexual promiscuity. The greatest challenge facing us today is the heresy of absolute freedom; absolute freedom is absolute nonsense. The Christian, of course, believes in freedom, but he is sophisticated enough to know that freedom comes at a price. Without paying the price you will never have any great poetry, or great music, or great athletes, or anything else great. Freedom is only found in the voluntary acceptance of discipline.

What can Christians do to respond to this?

Committed Christians are a conscious minority. That is where the power lies. The moment we think we are like the world we will fail. Our hope lies in a conscious nonconformity, especially in regard to permissiveness. “Do your own thing” is the most vulgar phrase of our century. Permissiveness always destroys excellence. Deliberate mediocrity is a heresy and a sin. To make your life small when it could be large is a sin of the worst kind.

Discipline and the liberation it produces has been a hallmark not only of your teaching, but of your personal life as well.

I could never accomplish what I needed to without discipline. The early hours are exceedingly precious. At the heart of discipline is the discipline of time. I am in bed at 10 P.M., come what may, because I want to be at my peak for the creative hours of the morning. Most people ruin the next day the night before.

Your conviction about discipline found corporate expression in the Yokefellow Movement.

Right. I had become aware of two separate dangers: the futility of empty freedom, and the fruitlessness of single effort. Hence, my concern for discipline; the small fellowship emerged. For years I had been impressed with the powers of Christian orders. They were strong precisely because of their corporate discipline. Hope lay in the creation of orders, and for a quarter of a century now, much of my thought and energy have gone into the Order of the Yoke. We engage in daily prayer, daily Scripture reading, weekly worship, proportionate giving, and study.

Study is among the first disciplines in the Yokefellow Movement. You have always stressed the importance of educating and equipping the laity for the work of the ministry.

Education is too good to limit to the young. The ministry of the laity is a great idea, but there is no magic in it. Unless the layman is given solid teaching, his ministry, after an initial burst of freshness, will tend to degenerate into little more than a string of trite phrases linked to commonplace ideas and buttressed by a few sloppily quoted biblical passages. We must take the education of the laity with utter seriousness. Lay persons are not assistants to the pastor, to help him do his work. Rather, the pastor is to be their assistant; he is to help equip them for the ministry to which God has called them. The difference is as revolutionary as it is total. Half measures are worse than nothing. Our hope lies in making big plans, in undertaking to produce a radical change, in aiming high. Adult education is the big thing in the church. It is not a decoration, it is the centerpiece.

What curriculum do you envision?

A five-year course that can be taught by pastors. The first year, the Hebrew prophets. Make use of the best commentaries and the insights of modern scholarship for depth and interest. The second year, the Synoptic Gospels. Students can develop their own harmony of the Gospels, and thus wrestle with the issues. The third year, the Christian classics. The average Christian is abysmally ignorant of the wealth of devotional literature from the past: Augustine’s Confessions or Pascal’s Pensées, for example. The fourth year, the intellectual understanding of the Christian faith. This gives an opportunity to work out a reasoned belief, and to struggle with the hard problems of theology and philosophy. There is no good reason why knowledge of Christian apologetics must be confined to the seminary trained. The fifth year, the history of Christian thought. The rise and decline of various heresies, the growth of the papacy, the beginnings and completion of the Reformation, the origin of contemporary denominations, the conflict with science—all these and many more topics can fill a gap in the knowledge of many Christians.

Are curriculum materials available, or do pastors start from scratch?

The curriculum is available at The Yokefellow Academy.

Central to this emphasis is the concept of the equipping ministry. Has this concept been generally accepted?

The equipping ministry has only partly taken hold. In many seminaries they have not heard of the concept. They still equate pastor and minister, which is a horrible mistake. Some pastors reject the concept. One pastor said to me, “This is my one chance for prestige and separation from the common man, and I’m not going to give it up.” Do you see what that does to the idea of the pastor as an equipper, as a servant? It destroys it entirely. But I am glad for the many places where people have put the idea into practice and new life is blossoming.

You say equating “pastor” and “minister” is a mistake. What’s the difference?

A pastor is a professional. Every Christian is called to minister.

There is much concern about the future of the Christian college. Several are facing financial crises and others have an identity crisis. What is your assessment?

When the Christian college emerged, it appeared as a genuine novelty. Curiously, it appeared in its fullness only in the United States. What developed in America was not so much education in specifically Christian subjects as education in all subjects from a Christian perspective. The idea is a great and worthy vision, but the sad and uncontested fact is that the vision has dimmed. However great the financial problems are, they are not the major problem. The major problem is a loss of meaning and identity. If the Christian college ceases to be consciously committed to the Christian revelation, it has nothing to give. Under those circumstances I’d much rather go to Purdue—there would be far better facilities and a far better football team! When the Christian college loses its Christian commitment it becomes a poor little thing, a glorification of mediocrity. Whether we can recover the roots, I do not know, but unless we do the case is lost.

What new directions do you see in philosophy?

The great new development will be a better epistemology. The shame has been that in the recent past, so much of our philosophy has been mere word mongering that doesn’t affect life at all. It has been far from the spirit of Socrates. But that day is passing; we are seeing both a new concern for knowledge and a new humility in the epistemological task. Of all people, Christians should have a keen interest in epistemology, because an unexamined faith cannot be sustained.

In your autobiography you speak of the importance of living life in chapters. What chapter do you see yourself in now?

This chapter is one of encouragement. I want to give the rest of my life to encouraging young authors. I am not going to write anymore—that is a firm decision. I’m letting some collections be made of former publications, but I want to give my prime energies to urging others to take up the task.

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.

Philosophies of science often provide the logic for our hermeneutics.

Americans in the early nineteenth century joined the rest of the western world in a love affair with science. And they knew exactly who to praise for the rise of that science. First was Francis Bacon (d. 1626), father of the modern scientific method. Bacon thought true knowledge came from induction, the process that reasons from particular ideas to general laws. And he thought it should be empirical, gained by observations and experiments.

The genius who best put Bacon’s principles to work was Sir Isaac Newton (d. 1727). Through careful observation and brilliant reasoning Newton explained the regular movement of matter in time and space according to mathematically precise laws of motion. His contemporary John Locke (d. 1704) showed how Newton’s kind of reasoning could illuminate the study of human nature in his heralded Essay on Human Understanding.

The science of Bacon, Newton, and Locke underwent one important modification before its full impact was felt in America. This was accomplished by the Scottish “philosophers of common sense” who appealed to the universal perceptions of humanity to rescue the Newtonian-Lockean system from the idealism of George Berkeley and the skepticism of David Hume.

Led by Thomas Reid (d. 1796), an undeservedly neglected figure, the Scottish realists answered both Berkeley and Hume to the satisfaction of many Europeans and most Americans. Against Berkeley, they contended that “common sense”—the universal perceptions of mankind as well as down-to-earth hard-headedness—testified to the real existence of the physical world. Against Hume, they argued that a careful study of our minds (an empirical examination of consciousness) led inevitably to the conclusion that cause and effect can be relied upon and that a God exists who rewards good and evil.

Early American Response

The Scottish variation of the new science provided such a satisfying explanation of reality for so many Americans that it was virtually the sole scientific perspective in America during the early nineteenth century. The Scotsman John Witherspoon had brought common sense realism with him to Princeton College in 1768, where it flourished for over a century. But other learned Americans adopted it as well, including such disparate figures as the evangelical president of Yale College, Timothy Dwight; the deist Thomas Jefferson; the innovative founder of the Restoration movement, Alexander Campbell; and the traditional Presbyterian, Samuel Miller.

American Christians had special reasons for appreciating the Scottish version of the new science. With its emphasis on observable facts, whether in nature or the mind, it rescued science from the agnostic and materialistic implications given it by leaders of the Continental Enlightenment. The Baconian and Scottish realist insisted that science must stick to perceived facts and shun “hypotheses” that could not be verified by direct observation. In so doing, this perspective provided a sturdy defense against impious “inventions” and godless metaphysics, such as the materialism of some French philosophers who explained all reality by reference to the physical side of man.

Historian T. D. Bozeman has given the convenient label “Baconianism” to the science shaped by Bacon, Newton, Locke, and the Scottish realists. For many Americans, the most important thing about this Baconianism was its ability to make science “doxological” (the word is also from Bozeman). That is, this kind of science seemed to enlist both science and orthodoxy in praise (doxology) to the Creator.

Christian apologists in Europe and America also exploited Baconianism in defending the faith against deism, atheism, and “Enlightened” immorality. They used the Newtonian world view to refurbish proofs for the existence of God. If Newton had proved that reality is a vast complex of cause and effect relationships, it gave new life to the cosmological argument. The sequences of cause and effect observable in the present could not stretch back into the past indefinitely but required an original cause not itself acted upon by anything or anyone. Saved as well was the argument from design. If the complexity of nature could be reduced to the orderly mathematics of Newton’s laws, this was prima facie evidence for an intelligent Designer of the universe.

Apologists likewise used Baconian methods to defend the statements of Scripture. Samuel Stanhope Smith, Witherspoon’s son-in-law and himself the president of Princeton from 1795 to 1812, argued in an influential work first published in 1787 that science proved the unity of mankind, a belief increasingly questioned as travelers brought back strange tales of strange peoples from around the globe.

Apologists also used the methods of the Scottish realists for a scientific defense of Christian morality. The Scottish disciple of Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart (d. 1828), argued that scientific intuition—the careful study of our own minds—led to the inductive conclusion that God exists and has standards for our lives. When we study our consciences honestly, John Witherspoon could say, we end up with the general moral principles Scripture also reveals.

Three Problems

Evangelical intellectuals in America were able to unite Christianity and Baconianism with great success. They could champion morality as both biblical and scientific. They could unify faith and learning in the growing numbers of church-sponsored colleges. They could combine the gospel of peace and the orderly science of Newton to combat antiintellectualism and social disorder on the frontier.

At least three serious problems existed, however, in the process that saw Protestant Christianity joined so securely to the science of Bacon, Newton, and the Scottish realists. (1) Baconianism became the most satisfying mode of explanation for Christians, even though little serious consideration was given to whether the Baconian idea of truth was a Christian idea of truth. (2) Few Baconians seemed to have considered the question of explanation at all. That is, almost no one reflected upon the influence that currently fashionable forms of scientific reasoning exerted upon expressions of the faith. (3) Most seriously, the ease with which intellectuals found it possible to prove scientifically the existence of God, the validity of Christian morality, and the accuracy of the Bible, led to a situation where the proofs of science seemed to become the basis for belief in God and in scriptural revelation.

The three problems can also be stated as questions: (1) Are the scientific principles of Bacon and the world view of Newton the only adequate forms for Christian explanations? (2) How self-aware should Christians be about their acceptance of scientific world views that make some explanations appear more attractive than others? (3) Are the existence of God and the truth of his revelation in Scripture dependent on our ability to verify them by the methods of science in general, or of any one type of science in particular? Since the first and third problems/questions lead into complicated philosophical discussion, we will focus on the second. In particular, we will explore how the history of American evangelicalism has been affected by the relative absence of critical self-awareness concerning forms of explanation and popular conceptions of science.

Hodge and Finney

A brief series of examples can show how influential Baconianism was in framing explanations that satisfied American evangelicals in the nineteenth century. The science of Bacon, Locke, Newton, and the Scottish realists had an impact on the way nineteenth-century evangelicals approached their Bibles. The orthodox Congregationalist Leonard Woods, Jr., wrote in 1822 that the best method of Bible study was “that which is pursued in the science of physics,” regulated “by the maxims of Bacon and Newton.” Southern Presbyterian Robert Breckinridge wrote in 1857 that theology was a science that could be expressed as “uncontrovertibly as I would write geometry.”

We can also see the Baconian approach in Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology. While that work still speaks as forcefully to many evangelicals of our era as it did to believers over one hundred years ago, the Baconian spirit of Hodge’s age exerted a noticeable influence on his introductory discussion of theological method.

“The Bible is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science. It is his store-house of facts; and his method of ascertaining what the Bible teaches, is the same as that which the natural philosopher adopts to ascertain what nature teaches.… The duty of the Christian theologian is to ascertain, collect, and combine all the facts which God has revealed concerning himself and our relation to him. These facts are all in the Bible.”

The Baconian effect was no less evident in the more practical theology of Charles G. Finney, the greatest revivalist of his day. His Lectures on Revival (1835) summarized a new approach to evangelism. Since God has established reliable laws in the natural world, we know that he has also done so in the spiritual world. To activate the proper causes for revival is to produce the proper effect. “The connection between the right use of means for a revival and a revival is as philosophically (that is, scientifically) sure as between the right use of means to raise grain and a crop of wheat.” Because the world spiritual was analogous to the world natural, observable cause and effect must work in matters of the spirit as well as in physics.

The point of these examples is not to belittle these men. Hodge’s theological works are among the most substantial ever published in America, and Finney’s revivalism left an impact on the churches that is felt to this day. The point is rather that Hodge’s introductory comments on theological method and Finney’s concept of revival relied upon Baconian-Newtonian explanations without, it appears, ever giving the question of explanation itself a second thought.

New Scientific Explanations

The great difficulty in not thinking about explanation itself is that satisfying explanations, like every other form of human endeavor, are subject to the whims of fashion. In this case, even as American evangelicals were cementing their alliance with Baconianism, a newer form of scientific explanation had begun to excite the imagination of pioneering intellectuals. The scientific world view of Bacon, Newton, Locke, and Reid was beginning to give way to a form of scientific explanation first associated with the work of Charles Darwin. It was a world view, however, which in its general outline would also inform the work of Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, and Albert Einstein.

The explanations of the eighteenth-century science no longer sufficed for the scientists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Baconianism was mechanistic: its model was the carefully constructed watch; the newer science was organic: its model was the growing plant. Baconianism was static and antithetical: scientific conclusions were fixed and could be stated dogmatically, once and for all; the newer science was developmental and synthetic: scientific conclusions were expected to change over time and often included considerable ambiguity or mystery. Baconianism was realistic—our minds took reality from the external world; the newer science was often idealistic—our minds shaped perceptions of the world. Baconianism was commonsensical: Samuel Johnson could dispose of Berkeley’s theories by kicking a stone; the newer science was esoteric, talking of straight lines curving deep in space, of matter changed into energy, and of particles with negative weight.

Taint of Darwinism

The great problem for American evangelicals in adjusting to newer scientific explanations was that they first came to American attention through the work of Charles Darwin. But Darwin, and even more a circle of “Darwinists” who carried his ideas into the study of religion, society, and human nature, had no interest in harmonizing the latest scientific discoveries with Christian truth. In fact, the Darwinists tended to be materialists, denying the Christian idea of the soul; they tended to be agnostic, questioning the existence of God; they argued for randomness and chance in nature, denying God’s design of the world.

In reaction to these clearly anti-Christian tendencies, the nineteenth-century forerunners of modern evangelicalism largely rejected the work of Darwin and the Darwinists. In so doing, however, they also tended to reject the newer modes of scientific explanation with which Darwin was associated. To be sure, not all nineteenth-century evangelicals rejected the newer science when they rejected the unchristian propositions associated with it. America’s leading botanist in the 1860s and 1870s, Harvard’s Asa Gray, was a lifelong Christian who believed in both development in nature and the argument for design. Congregationalist theologian George Frederick Wright, who later wrote for The Fundamentals, had some reservations about evolution, but had no trouble with the newer forms of scientific explanation in general.

Modern evangelicals naturally are concerned about the seeming incompatibility between the conclusions of the newer science and the cosmology of the Bible. Interestingly enough, in the nineteenth century it was not until the materialism and agnosticism of the Darwinists were perceived as the ally of the newer science that evangelicals gave up efforts to harmonize developmental science, and the Bible. A developmental, more or less organic theory of the origins of the solar system—the nebular hypothesis of Pierre Simon Laplace—had in fact won widespread acceptance among American evangelicals in the early nineteenth century.

This hypothesis described very long periods of astronomical and geological develoment, which evangelicals of virtually every description easily incorporated into their interpretations of Genesis. Two of the still popular ways of interpreting the first chapter of the Bible arose in the effort to harmonize Scripture with Laplace’s nebular hypothesis—the idea that the Hebrew yom designated a lengthy period rather than a single 24-hour day, and the idea that a period of incalculable eons might have separated the events of Genesis 1:1–2 from those of 1:3ff.

When, however, evangelicals began to perceive the newer science as the ally of a godless Darwinism, many rejected both as opposed to Christianity. The earlier marriage of Baconianism and the Christian faith made this rejection easy. To the Baconian evangelical, the newer science itself was condemned as speculative, metaphysical, and insecurely based on directly observable facts. To the Baconian evangelical, the newer science was linked too closely to the impieties of the Darwinists. The result of rejecting both the newer science and its anti-Christian applications was that twentieth-century fundamentalists and evangelicals continued to find explanations shaped by Baconian and Newtonian science the most satisfactory of all explanations.

Baconianism in Perspective

Several significant consequences have flowed from that fidelity to Baconian science. The first has to do with our approach to Scripture. Why do evangelicals read the Bible as we do? Is it not at least possible that it is Baconianism, rather than a principle of Scripture itself, that has encouraged some evangelicals to regard the Bible as a compendium of separate facts and commands rather than as a unified revelation of the character and acts of God? Discussions over the ordination of women sometimes illustrate this tendency. In addressing this issue, are we not prone to hurling individual texts at one another (Gal. 3:28; 1 Tim. 2:12), instead of examining the general character of God’s dealing with his people from Genesis through Revelation?

Baconianism may be responsible for other characteristics of the Bible reading of certain evangelicals, such as uneasiness with the idea of progressive revelation, or a preference for biblical systems constructed mechanically from the frequency of word use over those stressing the development of historical narration. Thus, Calvinists make much of God’s ability to “harden” hearts (Rom. 9:18; 11:7; Exod. 4:21), while Arminians stress the fact that Christ died for “all” (Rom. 5:18). Yet in both cases it is possible that intense focus on the individual words blinds interpreters to the larger historical and theological contexts of Scripture where the appropriate meanings for individual terms should be found.

Baconianism has certainly encouraged a “common-sensical” and literalistic approach to Scripture over one that gives full play to the Bible’s poetry, figures of speech, and literary devices and to the world views of Scripture’s human authors, in which the text had its origins. Evangelicals quite properly criticize modernists who explain away the force of scriptural passages by labeling them poetic or mythological. Still, the pendulum, under Baconian influence, can swing too far in the other direction. If we treat every number (e.g., one thousand, Deut. 7:9), event (e.g., the beast rising from the sea, Rev. 13:1), or statement (e.g., God has revealed hidden things to babes, Luke 10:21) as if it came from the computer of a modern research laboratory, we lose sight of the divinely inspired authors of Scripture who lived in a world that knew neither Newton nor the modern fashion of historical precision.

Another result of the continuing faithfulness to Baconianism is the failure of many evangelicals to be self-conscious about the Baconian mode of explanation itself. The Baconian conviction that reliable knowledge arises from the accumulation of perceived facts apprehended directly by objective observers is still widespread among evangelicals. This is regarded by some as so obvious that it is taken for granted.

In holding to this, however, these evangelicals cut themselves off from modern discussions about the nature of science. Historians and philosophers of science now generally agree that nonempirical factors are vital in the development of scientific knowledge (Michael Polanyi). They have made it clear how important are the personal attitudes of the scientists as well as the sociological condition of the scientific community in the growth of scientific theory (T. S. Kuhn).

The failure of many evangelicals to take part in the modern discussions about the nature of science has led to great confusion in relating biblical truth to scientific investigation. It may even be largely responsible for such imbroglios as the old earth/young earth impasse. If we take for granted the only way to read Genesis is according to the canons of common sense realism, and if we assume that modern geological findings are unscientific because they are not based on immediate observation, it is impossible to make progress in addressing the relationship between biblical truth and modern science.

Testing All Viewpoints

The point is not that evangelicals should become proponents of an ancient earth, or even that they should necessarily abandon Baconianism and common sense realism. The point is rather that without careful consideration of the way we think about Scripture, our thoughts about the Bible will be restricted in value by the limitations of that particular way of thinking. This, of course, holds true for any scientific world view that is not subjected to the scrutiny of its adherents, whether it is Baconian, post-Baconian, or something else.

Evangelicals in the nineteenth century needed, no less than their descendents today need, to be self-aware about their scientific commitments in order more accurately to assess when modern “discoveries” are subverting the Bible itself, or when they are merely interpretations of the Bible grounded in culturally limited frameworks of explanation.

Finally, it is worth noting how an analysis of “explanation” can help clarify debates within American evangelicalism today—over the nature of biblical authority, over the formulation of biblical personal ethics, over the propriety of social involvement. The sometimes acrimonious arguments concerning these and related issues may signify that Baconianism is slipping as the dominant mode of explanation for American evangelicals and that no equally accepted one has arisen to take its place. It is, thus, entirely possible that many current disagreements among American evangelicals are best understood not as black and white issues dividing faithful sheep from erring goats, but as conflicts between older and newer forms of scientific explanation.

Evangelicals do well to contend valiantly for truth. In this, however, they should always be aware of the damage done when the logic of an age is exalted over the inner logic of divine revelation. In the last analysis, the only way to avoid this damage is to bring all forms of explanation and all modes of scientific reasoning captive to the God who communicates definitively—in the ages before Newton, in the age of Newton, and in the age of Einstein—through Scripture and the witness of the Holy Spirit to his Son.

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.

Too Much Middle Earth?

To coin a phrase. I could hardly believe my ears. My friend’s statement stunned me: he told me he had just read the four Tolkien novels for the tenth time.

Maybe he does it from force of hobbit; I don’t know. But this I do know: I could never read all four books ten times.

“Each new reading gives new insights.” he told me breathlessly, wiping his perspiring hands on his Gollum sweatshirt. “I have insights into Frodo and the orcs and Gandalf that have just made my soul flutter with excitement!”

Let me hasten to say that I have read the four novels and enjoyed them. In fact, I was the first in our family to bring them home and read them. I must confess, though, that I sometimes forgot who some of the characters were, or where the action (or lack of it) was taking place (or not taking place). I will also confess that I skipped all of the poems, songs, and excursions into endless genealogies. This probably explains why I never had any fluttering insights. I lost my way somewhere in the middle of the final war, and I was relieved when they stopped fighting and started cleaning up the shire.

But read all four books ten times?

My reply is similar to that of Thoreau when a Concord citizen asked him if he wanted to read the newspaper: “No. I read one once.”

I may miss several valuable insights by neglecting Frodo and his friends, but I’ll take my chances. Meanwhile, several shelves of great books are before me, and I feel strongly inclined to heed their call.

Care to join me?

EUTYCHUS X

Homosexuality Editorial

Your editorial “Homosexuality: Biblical Guidance Through a Moral Morass” (Apr. 18) surely fell short of a biblical standard. Scripture gives us every assurance that we can “Cast your cares upon Him, for He careth for you.”

How could you conclude that God will not remove a sin from our life if we give it to him! Homosexuality is sin in its ugliest form. Surely my God is able to overcome such a thing. Your article is the poorest example of God’s mighty power that I have ever read.

REV. THOMAS D. BAUDER

Union Grove Baptist Church

Union Grove. Wis.

To say that a homosexual cannot be cured from his/her condition by a conversion experience is to leave the back door open to all kinds of improper thinking. This sounds to me like excusing the poor “Christian” homosexual from truly seeking total deliverance by the power of the Holy Spirit. The article was interwoven with modern nonbiblical thinking, even though a weak attempt was made to quote Scripture.

P. FRED FOGLE

Delavan, Wis.

Let me first commend you on the sensitivity with which you approached the subject of homosexuality. I must admit it surprised me that you were as open-minded and understanding about the problem as you were! I’m sure this column will receive many letters of hostile criticism and I congratulate your courage.

But it seemed to me that what you said was a paradox. While you were willing to accept the pragmatic realities that gays are usually no more in control of their orientation than are righthanded people in control of their dexterity, you are unable to look at Scripture a second time to attempt to reconcile a biblical view of the problem with a pragmatic understanding of it. The implicit theme of the Scriptures throughout is that God is love, justice, and mercy in balance with each other. Justice does not bring condemnation to someone for behavior that is not competely within the range of human control, as you have admitted that homosexuality is. Love and mercy certainly do not condemn it either.

I believe you are naive to assume that most persons, even with God’s help, can be strong enough to reman celibate indefinitely. I believe it is up to the church to make provision for permanent homosexual commitments for our people who are caught in this double bind, instead of challenging them to do the unrealistic, the impossible, and indeed the unnatural.

JOHN W. HOWELL

Colgate Rochester/Bexley Hall/

Crozer Theological Seminary

Rochester. N.Y.

Let’s not be guilty of patting the sinner on the back and telling him his sin doesn’t matter as he draws ever closer to the gates of hell. Sin is sin and sin is heinous wherever, and in whatever form, it is found. Sin is antithetical to the righteousness of our God and his Christ. Let’s not minimize its ugliness for the sake of pseudoesthetics in human relations. “Rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith” (Titus 1:13).

K. L. RIDGE

Charlotte, Mich.

It is clear that homosexuality is one of the major issues that faces the church in these last years of the twentieth century. Unless the church can deal with its own sin in relation to homosexuality, it will be weaker in the twenty-first century, and untold numbers of gay men and women will go to hell—and it will be our fault.

JOHN EARLE HEDRICK

Mesquite, Tex.

Sane Writing

Thank you for publishing the article “No Return to Eden,” by Peter Wilkes (Apr. 4). It is the first sane piece of writing about the nuclear industry that I have seen in a Christian magazine. Other articles I have read in Christian publications too often start off saying that the nuclear industry is at fault and that we should avoid any further growth of it. Mr. Wilkes shows that with the proper controls, the nuclear industry is needed.

REV. JOHN STEPHENSON

Northwest Saskatchewan Territorial Mission

The Presbyterian Church in Canada

Buffalo Narrows, Sask.

Wilkes left certain widely held errors unchallenged when he sought to justify centralized agribusiness in the U.S. by asserting that the harvest “will go to feed a hungry world.” While it is true that the U.S. is a net exporter of food to Western Europe, and until recently. Russia, the truly hungry segment of the world actually receives less food from us than it exports to us in the form of such crops as coffee, sugar, and bananas. (These are grown on land that could otherwise produce badly needed food for the hungry in those nations.)

Only a fraction of our centralized industrial society is needed to fulfill human needs: most of it goes to fulfill our wants. This concentration of power is not only unnecessary, but also undesirable, since centralization gives sinful people the irresistible opportunity to oppress the weak, and the economic and military power to do so on a large scale.

DARRELL J. HARTWICK

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Cambridge, Mass.

Unfortunate Artwork

I am disappointed and disturbed by the unfortunate artwork that accompanied Marvin Wilson’s perceptive article. “Christians and Jews: Competing for Converts?” (Mar. 21). Whatever it may have been intended to do, the key figure used in the artwork does not reflect the subject of the article or the author’s intent in writing it.

The Fagin-like figure in this illustration has appeared and reappeared with the most negative meaning possible in anti-Semitic literature in Germany, Russia, France, the Arab States, and the U.S. for close to a century. Its use here diminishes the value of the article. I am unable, because of this artwork, to share copies of the article with Jewish friends.

What this artwork may suggest to some belies your publication’s repeatedly expressed positive position on Jewish-evangelical relations.

BELDEN MENKUS

Middleville, N.J.

Tragic

Your proposal that conservative evangelicals should involve themselves in the Consultation on Church Union (“Selective Obedience Is Disobedience.” Editorial, Mar. 21) would result in a reversal of much of what true evangelicals stand for. It is not news that some who consider themselves evangelicals are following this sad road to unscriptural ecumenism. But that CHRISTIANITY TODAY should recommend it is tragic.

You say that this would display the “visible unity of the body of Christ.” By what definition of the body of Christ? Surely we cannot accept that one who denies his deity and other fundamentals is a true member of his body? Unity at that level does not exist, nor should it. “What fellowship hath light with darkness?” (2 Cor. 6:14). True believers should indeed recognize one another, but to meet together in a display of nonexistent unity with unbelievers would not only be inappropriate, but dishonest.

RICHARD WINCHELL

Wheaton. III.

Stands Out

I have just completed reading the March 21 issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, and I must congratulate you on a publication that stands out “above the crowd” for its clarity and informative content. I believe this is the first time I have actually read through every article in a magazine, only to find one more interesting and enlightening than the other!

Special note should be made of the article “Peddling the Power and the Promises.” by D. G. Kehl, and the information from the CT-Gallup Poll as presented by Walter Elwell. They are both powerful and dynamic articles which cut to the heart of the issues in a logical and concise manner. What a pleasure to read for information and enjoyment at the same time!

All in all, I must indeed express my gratitude to all associated with CHRISTIANITY TODAY for providing me with a realistic, religious view of the world as it is today from a Christian perspective.

SUSAN J. SHAW

Professional Business Women’s Association of Florida

Miami Beach. Fla.