Advancing the stories and ideas of the kingdom of God.
May 4, 1923: Sir W. Robertson Nicoll, editor of the British journal The Expositor (which included articles by many leading scholars) and of a 50-volume Expositor’s Bible (published 1888-1905), dies.
May 4, 1493: In the bull “Inter caetera,” Pope Alexander VI sets the boundary between Spanish and Portuguese lands in the New World.
May 3, 1512: The Fifth Lateran Council, the last attempt at papal reform before the Lutheran revolt, opens in Rome.
May 3, 1675: A Massachusetts law goes into effect requiring church doors to be locked during services. Officials enacted the law because too many people were leaving before sermons were over.
May 3, 1738: English preacher George Whitefield, the most famous religious figure of the 1700s, arrives in America for his first of seven visits. In his lifetime, Whitefield preached at least 18,000 times to perhaps 10 million hearers (see issue 38: George Whitefield).
May 3, 1814: Thomas Coke, the first English bishop of the Methodist Church, dies. John Wesley sent him to oversee the American branch of Methodism in 1784; he later handed that responsibility to Francis Asbury (see issue 45: Camp Meetings and Circuit Riders, issue 2: John Wesley, and issue 69: Charles and John Wesley).
May 3, 1861: The Southern Congress approves a bill installing chaplains in Confederate armies. The American military did not normally employ chaplains, but they became a permanent fixture during and after the Civil War. Between 100,000 and 200,000 Union soldiers and approximately 150,000 Confederate troops converted to christianity during wartime revivals (see issue 33: Christianity & the Civil War).
Has a recent book again raised prospects of bringing the heavenly kingdom to earth?
Thornton wilder, in his novel The Eighth Day, depicts a celebration in a midwestern town in which the populace saw a rebirth of optimism and hope for turning back the negative results of modern industrialization. Wilder causes the speaker to hail the advent of the new century with the dawn of the year 1900.
Hope springs eternal within the human breast, and the last two decades have witnessed new prophecies of an “eighth day.” These forecasts have, each in a different way, presented scenarios including a widespread decentralization of authority, and a restored ecological balance, usually accompanied by a return to a more pastoral form of lifestyle.
The question of precisely which forces shall precipitate and inform such change is one of deep concern to the evangelical. Sensitive Christians have long had deep concern for the manner and degree to which evangelical faith should be creative in the shaping of a decent and just human society. Today’s evangelicals are no exception to this, and thus we do well to note some of the forms of current pseudoprophecy, to see what meaning they may have for the sensitive Christian.
A futuristic ethos has been predicted in such terms as “postindustrial society,” “the technopolitan man,” or “the Global Village.” From within the framework of these and similar projections, it is predicted that a new sense of community will come out of the wings and onto the stage. But most such forecasts have been made in humanistic and secular terms.
In general, it has been the fashion to place the blame for modern man’s malaise not upon technology, but upon a wrong application of it. This has in turn been blamed upon a wrong-headed way of public and mass thinking. For instance, it has been alleged that the public mind has been mesmerized by the analytical and linear shapes to which technological knowledge has given currency. Some have felt that this mentality has come at the expense of the needs of the mental and related sentiments that make us human.
There comes to mind the theories of Marshall McLuhan, who saw in the electronic revolution the dawning of a new age. This he based upon the ability of the new media for communication to appeal to the total human sensorium. This would in turn, he believed, alter the mental framework of the inhabitants of the Global Village in the direction of new concepts of space and time, which would lead modern man away from the present “mythos” of current technology.
Within this mode of thought, electronic discoveries possesses an almost charismatic power to lead mankind to “universal understanding of unity.” It has been felt that McLuhan dresses his views in a quasi-religious garb, but when one analyzes them, he cannot fail to see the same humanistic presuppositions as have marked similar forms of prediction.
With the appearance in 1970 of Charles A. Reich’s The Greening of America, there emerged a newer form of eschatological projection for the future. In its best-seller days, the book attracted attention because of its emphasis upon the role of consciousness in the shaping of a culture.
The distinguished Yale professor offered a masterly analysis of the corporate state, but failed to carry through his utopian vision. His third state of consciousness, expressed by loose-hanging youth smoking marijuana and dancing in the streets in bell-bottom trousers, seems to have been lost in the morass of fried brains with memories in shambles.
It is significant that the attempt by Reich and others to relate cultural transformation to stress of mind or states of consciousness has been given renewed emphasis. Perhaps it has been the Orwellian development of technology, symbolized by the fantastic honing of the computer as a pervasive element in our culture, that has given impetus to this.
It is significant also that a forum sponsored by the Institute for the Art and Science of Living, Inc., was planned for Feb. 29-March 2 of this year. The theme, “New Dimensions of the Mind: Explorations Through Science and the Spirit,” was aimed at taking participants “beyond the comfortable definitions of mind” and toward a new synthesis of “both head and heart, both mind and matter.”
There was no eschatological fanfare in the announced program; it remained to be seen to what degree Christian assumptions would give shape to the discussions.
More heartening is the appearance of the volume The Emerging Order, by Jeremy Rifkin and Ted Howard, both of the People’s Business Commission, based in our nation’s capital. Following a long analysis of the present crisis precipitated by the prevailing emphasis upon consumerism and GNP, the authors undertake to sketch a coming Age of Scarcity, and to trace the type of mind-set that will be needed to enable our citizens to make peace with the inevitable exhaustion of vital resources and a consequent reduction of our standard of living.
Against the backdrop of the alleged dominant role of Reformed theology, with its emphasis upon “calling” in the development of capitalism, these authors emphasize the impact of two movements in today’s religious scene. These are said to provide hope for “liberating energy” for a transformation of the “age of growth” into a new form of economy.
These two movements are: the Charismatic (capital “C”) and evangelical (small “e”). These two movements, impelled by God’s Spirit, are credited with the ability to generate frames of mind that will reverse the self-ism of the consumer economy, with its entropy-bound and energy-intensive accompaniments. Each is credited with the ability to contribute elements needed for replacing “our secular-materialistic culture” (p. 231).
This is said to rest upon a new interpretation of scriptural motifs, notably of Creation and the Fall of man, and rediscovery of the concept of stewardship. This movement will, it is hoped, reverse the fallacious applications of Reformed theology, and lead to a new and glad acceptance of an economy of scarcity.
Special stress is laid by Rifkin and Howard upon the charismatics’ emphasis on supernatural gifts as heralding a radical break with expansionism and consumerism. This projection recognizes the need for a spiritual rootage for any substantial alteration of the public mentality, and combines sober appraisal of the present economic order with a word of eschatological hope.
Evangelicals will tend to be cautious at the point of this (or any) prediction made on the basis of today’s society as a whole. Thus, the implementation of the central thesis of The Emerging Order will require an all-round strengthening of combined charismatic and evangelical forces if it should be translated into reality.
Harold B. Kuhn is professor of philosophy of religion, Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky.
The seventh general assembly of the World Evangelical Fellowship resolved, at a meeting near London last month, to approach the Lausanne Committee on World Evangelization about ending the “confusion and the duplication of effort arising from the separate existence of the two international evangelical organizations.” It is proposing that the Lausanne Committee be invited to become the evangelistic task force of the WEF “so that in joint harness the two bodies can accelerate, and not impede, world evangelization.”
Asked about this proposed merger between WEF and the Lausanne Committee, Wheaton College president Hudson Armerding, WEF president, pointed out that it was not the intention of the Lausanne Congress in 1974 to form a new ecclesiastical body, “but rather simply a structure that would get on with the job of world evangelization.… The WEF, representing churches around the world, ought to be able to tie into this function which … is a necessary and proper area of concern for churches. So we think that the relationship is a natural thing that ought to take place.”
Nelson Bunker Hunt is responsible for raising—but not providing by himself—the $1 billion needed for Campus Crusade for Christ’s world evangelism thrust, Here’s Life. And perhaps that is fortunate, considering the portly, Presbyterian layman, regarded as one of the world’s richest men, lost that much during the much-publicized, near collapse of the silver markets March 27.
Hunt and his brother Herbert had bought a corner on the silver markets—owning an estimated 200 million ounces—then suffered huge losses when the price per ounce dipped drastically. However, Hunt figured to weather the losses, and Christian organizations hoped for a continuation of his generosity.
The son of the late oil billionaire H.L. Hunt, Nelson reportedly provided without strings $6 million needed by the New York-based Genesis Project for production of its current feature-length movie, Jesus. The movie is being translated into 21 different Asian languages for use as an evangelism tool overseas in Here’s Life, said a Campus Crusade official. And as chairman of the international executive committee for Here’s Life, Hunt has organized efforts to raise by 1982 the $1 billion needed to cover the various project costs, such as translation. (About $150 million has been raised so far.)
Here’s Life goals are bringing one billion persons to Christ and helping present the Gospel message to everyone in the world by 1981. Crusade officials may be hoping now their ambitious speculation for souls meets a better fate than that of Texas tycoon Hunt in silver.
Some Lausanne Committee-aligned individuals are apparently working to derail any such merger plans. Last month Religious News Service quoted Sigurd Aske, head of the Lausanne Committee’s Norwegian branch, as describing the WEF as “a strongly U.S.-dominated organization” that is “rather biased, theologically and ecclesiastically.” He contended that “an organized evangelical association dominated by WEF would automatically be regarded, and probably would regard itself, as a movement against the World Council of Churches.”
The Lausanne Committee response to the WEF overture will be determined at its consultation on World Evangelization to be held in Thailand in June. Aske expressed the hope that the consultation “will not waste too much time and energy on debating this question.”
Eighty delegates representing national evangelical fellowships of 30 countries attended the London sessions. (The WEF works to develop cooperation among evangelicals, to stimulate and support national evangelical fellowships, and to encourage able evangelical leaders to work together in such fields as theology, missions, and communications.)
One observer, Paul G. Schrotenboer of the Reformed Evangelical Synod, noted that doctrinal issues remained in the background this session; the struggle for a holistic application of the gospel to the physical and spiritual problems that confront the church today was in the foreground. The conference topics of development, lifestyle, poverty, social responsibility, and even the changing of social structures, were not that different from the topics under discussion at a World Council of Churches gathering, he noted. But the what-does-the-Bible-say starting point was entirely different. Under WEF general secretary Waldron Scott, he concluded, the new emphasis does not signal a decrease in evangelism, but a switch from evangelism alone to a holistic mission of gospel proclamation and social concern.
WEF actions included establishment of:
• A task force to consider the prospect of an international satellite broadcasting system for use by evangelicals worldwide within the next five years.
• An evangelical world watch to monitor persecution and infringements of liberty both in worship and in Christian discipleship.
• An international accrediting agency for theological institutions.
Social action issues filled the agenda, and liberally oriented speakers included former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and presidential assistant Sarah Weddington, a feminist and abortion rights leader. The three-day seminar in New York City was hardly traditional Southern Baptist fare.
These factors, plus a tight economy, helped explain the smaller-than-expected turnout of 400 for “Ethical Issues for the Eighties,” sponsored by the social action arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, its Christian Life Commission. Nevertheless, an array of qualified speakers addressed future trends, which they believe churchmen must face and which cannot be ignored by skipping a conference.
United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim praised U.S. religious organizations for helping the cause of world peace. Selfishness among nations has kept the pot boiling, he indicated, but said he does not believe the world is headed for nuclear war. He urged individual nations to consider the long-term interests of all humanity in their policies.
Noted author and environmental scientist Barry Commoner, presidential candidate of the Citizens Party, predicted that placement of corporate profit interests ahead of national interests will be a dominant ethical issue for the next decade. The nation, he said, will have to choose regarding other ethical issues, too: How much injury and damage are we willing to sustain for energy output? Are we willing to go to war to preserve our foreign energy sources?
Solutions to ethical problems will require people to be “brave enough and naïve enough to love and to trust” each other, mused 85-year-old Buckminster Fuller, celebrated author, inventor, educator, and architect. The coming decade will determine whether man will survive, he said.
Church historian Martin Marty reaffirmed the ability of the church to cope successfully with the increasingly complex ethical issues of the decade. But, he warned, there are “hazards” to be avoided. These include a “new apocalypticism” that keeps people preoccupied with the end of the world.
Marty knocked the “electronic church” and its “celebrities who attract and often exploit clienteles” as the “biggest internal problem for conservative Christianity today.” Many religious broadcasters, he alleged, reduce ethical issues to “simplisms” and “bumper-sticker warfare that does not address itself to the actual conditions of freedom and pluralism.”
Marty expressed partial sympathy with those who have joined politically oriented conservative Christian groups like Christian Voice and Moral Majority. They are sincerely looking for answers to a lot of problems, he said. He voiced approval of their stand against abortion, but he complained about their alleged failure to deal with biblical teachings regarding other issues, such as prayer in the schools.
Methodist seminary professor John M. Swomley, an authority on church-and-state matters, forecast controversy over a number of church-and-state issues during the coming decade. Much will center on the Roman Catholic Church’s persistent attempts to obtain government funding for its educational programs. He noted that the rapid growth of Protestant Christian schools has eroded much of the opposition to parochiaid.
Swomley voiced fears over the current proposals in Congress that would remove questions about prayer in public schools from federal court jurisdiction.
He also predicted further expansion of government regulations that affect the free exercise of religion. But if churches and religious organizations insist on tax exemptions and other government benefits, he chided, they must expect government entanglement. The best course, he advised, is to be totally free from government benefits that are granted for religious reasons.
The cleric acknowledged, however, that he enjoys his tax-exempt ministerial housing allowance.
Therein, observed one conference participant privately, lies the kind of ethical dilemma that is at the heart of the world’s woes: Can we change the world without sacrificing our self-interest?
EDWARD E. PLOWMAN
The Roman Catholic Church in Brazil has decided to model an agrarian reform program affecting its own properties. The National Conference of Bishops of Brazil in February overwhelmingly endorsed a document signaling its intention to break up a number of its largest landholdings. Brazil, colonized in the sixteenth century, is the only major Latin American nation not to have had agrarian reform. The majority of its land is in large ancestral estates and, in the Amazon basin, in holdings of transnational corporations.
Tulsa-based evangelist Billy James Hargis has resigned from the British branch of the missionary organization he founded, according to a report in the Glasgow (Scotland) Herald. The Herald called the David Livingstone Missionary Society a “charity in turmoil,” and charged that sometimes as much as 80 percent of funds raised were spent on administration. The newspaper also reported the society’s treasurer resigned after refusing to sign checks for which he could find “no substantiation in the records of the society,” that a public relations specialist called in to bring order was released after he called for radical changes, and that American leaders rode roughshod over the British staff.
Scientology has been recognized as a religion in France. Two years ago, the former president of the sect in France, George Andreu, was fined and received a suspended prison sentence for enticing proselytes by making fraudulent promises. Andreu appealed, and the Paris appeals court acquitted him in March, ruling that “Scientology seemed to correspond to a definition of religion in that it embraces both a faith and a community.” Reuters wire service reports that there are some 10,000 Scientology adherents in France.
Pope John Paul II used a March synod of Ukrainian Catholic bishops to bring this Eastern Rite church firmly under Roman (or Western Rite) control. The Ukrainian Catholic Church, declared illegal by Stalin in 1946, has perhaps 5 million secret members in the Soviet Union and another 1 million elsewhere. Under the strongly independent 88-year-old Cardinal Joseph Slipyj, it has held eight previous synods disowned by the Roman curia. As the price for official recognition for this synod, the Pope appointed a weak successor Slipyj, Metropolitan Myroslav Ivan Lubachivsky of Philadelphia, 66, and made clear that the Ukrainians would not be permitted to follow their tradition of ordaining married men as priests.
Dialogue of the joint Roman Catholic-Eastern Orthodox Theological Commission gets under way late this month on the island of Patmos. Meeting in a Greek Orthodox monastery on the island where John wrote the Book of the Revelation, the commission will work toward eventual reunification of the two churches.
The “Siberian Seven” sang the offertory music for the Easter service at the American embassy in Moscow. The members of the Vaschenko and Chmykhalov families—Pentecostals who have lived in the embassy for almost two years after dashing past Soviet guards—sang a Russian hymn entitled “He Lives.” After the service, several American families brought food to an embassy room and sat down to an Easter dinner with the group. Embassy officials permitted the dinner, but stipulated that no pictures be taken. Some observers expect the Soviets will expel the group before the Olympic games begin in July to prevent their becoming a magnet for foreign visitors.
The Bible House of the Bible Society of Ethiopia has been taken over by the Ethiopian government for official use. The headquarters was located in the center of Addis Ababa where there is an acute shortage of commercial building space. The society has had to relocate its operation in three separate locations.
Samuel Habib was elected chairman in March of the Supreme Protestant Council of Egypt, which represents all Protestant denominations before the Egyptian government. He succeeds Elias Makar, who died of a heart attack in January. Habib will continue as director of the Coptic Evangelical Organization for Social Services. The Coptic Evangelical Church, in which Makar also was a clergyman, was founded by Presbyterian missionaries and dominates the Protestant Council.
The Coptic Church of Egypt canceled its traditional Easter celebrations this year to protest the alleged mistreatment of Coptic Christians by Muslim extremists. Easter services took place, but without the usual festooning of electric lights on church buildings, and without the customary exchange of greetings between the Coptic Pope Shenouda III and the Egyptian government. President Anwar Sadat has attempted to increase minority Coptic representation in the government, but Muslim fundamentalists have used developments in Iran and the offer of asylum to the ex-shah as rallying points for a crusade against both the Coptics and Sadat.
Religion is still taboo for China’s party cadres. In the March issue of China Youth News, organ of the Communist Youth League, the editors told a letter writer that “a citizen may have his religious beliefs,” but prospective members of the Communist Party “should not.” The young man had written from Kiangsi (Jiangxi) Province, complaining of Buddhist “religious fervor in my locality.”
Leith Samuel, a Southampton, England, Baptist pastor who has periodically visited Czechoslovakia, filed this report after a November 1979 visit.
Beside the road stands a large, stone monument of an open Bible. It marks the entrance to the Bible Museum in Kraslice, opened in 1969 with the approval of the Communist authorities. It was in this mountain town near the border with East Germany that the Czech Reformers began printing their Bible in 1579 as Roman Catholic leaders attempted to suppress the circulation of the Scriptures. Here some of the leading Czech Reformers were buried under the flagstones of the local parish church, which they had turned into a center for Bible teaching and fellowship. Here the Protestants’ printing presses were dismantled and scattered hurriedly in the thick snow when the 1620 Act of Uniformity was passed, forbidding all religious worship and practice except that of Roman Catholicism.
In another town is an open Bible in a display case where any passerby can read it. In a large city I saw a large, open Bible in a store window just off the main street, in a passageway leading to a church. Alongside it was a poster recommending a helps system for daily Bible reading.
The Czechoslovakia I have observed differs markedly from the popularly held view of religious oppression in Eastern Europe.
Czechoslovakia has a number of denominations: Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist, Plymouth-style Brethren, Pentecostal, and two distinctively Czech bodies, the Evangelical Church of the Czech Brethren and the Church of the Brethren (Cirkev Bratska).
Both these groups trace their roots to Jan Hus. Hus came under the influence of the Scriptures, reinforced by John Wycliffe’s teaching. When rector of Prague University, he was banned from the city because of his beliefs and eventually, in 1415, burned at the stake as a heretic. In spite of fierce persecution, Bible teaching was sustained by men such as Jan Comenius (Komenský) and Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf until the 1781 Edict of Toleration permitted Protestants to be identified openly without fear of arrest and execution as heretics.
The Church of the Brethren is comparable to the British Free Evangelical churches. Within the Evangelical Church of the Czech Brethren are some liberal theologians who have been involved in the outlawed Charter 77 movement and have suffered for it. But the Church of the Brethren avoids overtly political issues and concentrates on Scripture. (The term “evangelical” does not carry the same connotation in Europe as in North America and Great Britain, but simply indicates “non-Roman Catholic.”)
I have observed members of large congregations, with their Bibles open and following the exposition of Scripture, children sitting with their parents in Sunday services, groups chatting on the sidewalk after services. Christians are a small minority, but they are not “underground.”
A Czech pastor, visiting England, was asked at a student gathering in Keswick, “Do you have an underground church?” “Yes,” he replied, “we have just one: the Jehovah’s Witnesses.” He was perhaps unaware of the Mormons who also meet illegally.” (The Jehovah’s Witnesses are growing rapidly, perhaps because they teach people to be unafraid of secular authority and provide an outlet for expression of opposition to the regime.)
Many day-to-day problems of church life in the Brethren churches are similar to those encountered in Western evangelical churches. The Brethren face conflicting teachings about the Holy Spirit, mostly introduced from outside the country. Parachurch groups based in the West sometimes offer help that tends to weaken the links of youth with their churches (all movements are illegal; the government only allows churches to exist). Representatives of other denominations, apparently motivated by jealousy, have occasionally lodged accusations against them with the authorities.
There are other problems peculiar to churches under Communist regimes. Church of the Brethren young people encounter obstacles in education and employment. They may, at first, be refused entrance to universities; but with prayer, polite persistence, and hard work, many eventually get in. [Roman Catholic and Evangelical Church of the Czech Brethren youth, by contrast, face an absolute barrier.] Within the churches are a number of medical doctors and scientists. Most Christians are excluded from teaching, however, and a qualified person may lose his job because of his church involvement.
Believers are free to assemble for worship and prayer meetings in their own buildings. They are allowed to include their children in church activities and teaching, and to possess Bible commentaries in English and German. They print and circulate through the churches church newspapers and, at intervals, a certain number of Bibles and hymnbooks.
They are not free, generally speaking, to print and circulate Christian books in their own language. They are not allowed to hold open-air meetings, to hand out invitations to services on the street, or to distribute tracts.
While this freedom is by no means total, it compares quite favorably with that accorded in the past by Catholic regimes. The Jesuits, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, hunted down and persecuted non-Catholics.
Local authorities in three different towns recently decided they must have properties on which the Free Evangelical group’s churches stand. In Levice (where John Stott was scheduled to speak last month), the property is required for an apartment complex to house workers expected for a new industrial project. (This should not be perceived as discrimination against Christians: a primary school next door and a Communist Youth headquarters on the same street are also slated for demolition.) The congregation there has obtained permission to expand the rear of the pastor’s home to form a meeting place.
In Presov and Stara Tura, the church properties are needed for planned improvement of cultural facilities, and these congregations have been searching urgently for alternate sites. The possibility of being forced into unsuitable meeting places, far from their present convenient downtown locations, has been lessened by the presence of sympathetic officials on local planning committees. The Presov congregation has just been allowed to purchase two houses for conversion into church facilities in an adjacent suburban neighborhood.
Only two years ago the Church of the Brethren rebuilt its largest church in Bratislava, the Slovak capital. Help came from believers throughout the country and beyond, who gave unstintingly of their money, time, and energy, doing practically all the work with their own hands. Each evening after their regular employment was finished, they were at the site—skilled craftsmen doing carpentry, ceramics, electrical work; girls lugging heavy buckets of cement and cooking meals for all the helpers.
The prospect of rebuilding three other churches so soon is formidable, and the task beyond their resources. Yet the property condemnations present a rare opportunity for Western Christians to contribute directly to Eastern European churches. The three churches have been granted permission to appeal outside Czechoslovakia for financial assistance.
(Malcolm McLaren, a retired customs official and treasurer of our church, is serving as treasurer of a temporary fund established to help in this rebuilding project: East European Fund, Above Bar Church, Southampton S02 3FR, England, U.K.)
It is, of course, impossible to generalize about all Eastern Europe from one nation in the Soviet orbit. But the experience of the Church of the Brethren in Czechoslovakia demonstrates that it is possible for a church to enjoy a positive relationship with the authorities without succumbing to a “collaboration” status, and that it can maintain a vigorous witness without going “underground.”
Holy Week celebrations in El Salvador were muted this year, as Roman Catholics mourned the death of their archbishop and deplored the violence that accompanied his funeral. Many traditional Good Friday processions were cancelled.
Well-known Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, 62, was felled by a single bullet March 24 as he lifted his chalice during mass in the chapel of the Divine Providence Cancer Hospital near his home in suburban San Salvador. (No group claimed responsibility for the murder: Romero had received threats from both right- and left-wing terrorists.)
Then, on Sunday, March 30, at least 40 people died and hundreds were injured as bombs and gunfire shattered funeral services. More than 30,000 people had jammed into the Metropolitan Cathedral and central plaza in downtown San Salvador. Many were killed after shots erupted midway through the mass.
Visiting international church leaders remained trapped inside the cathedral for more than two hours as pandemonium reigned in the plaza and streets outside. An old woman, also trapped inside, commented, “In Salvador, God is on vacation.”
Well known for his defense of the poor, the outspoken Romero was a thorn in the side of the military governments that have ruled the small Central American nation for the past 47 years. Although he supported the agrarian reform program of the left-leaning, military-civilian junta that ousted the government of General Carlos Humberto Romero last October, the archbishop had been critical of what he called repression by the army and right-wing paramilitary groups. In a sermon the Sunday before his death, he urged the military not to obey orders “which are opposed to the law of God.” He also had called for a cutoff of U.S. military aid to El Salvador. His sermons characteristically contained denunciations of kidnappings and assassinations throughout the country. He had aroused the ire of the extreme left by condemning violence from any quarter.
The junta strongly condemned Romero’s murderers, blaming leftist extremists looking for a martyr; it also declared official mourning and closed schools. Colonel Adolfo Majano, a member of the junta, said that Romero’s example “impels us to continue the struggle to improve the conditions of poverty in our country.” (Two percent of the tiny republic’s 4.8 million people control 60 percent of the wealth.)
Romero reportedly had refused police protection, despite threats on his life, saying that “the shepherd seeks protection, not for himself, but for his flock.” He once told a reporter that his death would not change the course of events in El Salvador. “Persecution is a symptom [indicating] that we are moving in the right direction,” he said.
A previous attempt on Romero’s life failed when 72 sticks of dynamite were discovered in the vestry of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart where Romero customarily gave his Sunday sermons. Catholic radio station YSAX, which broadcast the homilies, was dynamited in February by right-wing terrorists. In the past three years, six Catholic priests have been killed in El Salvador.
The key question now for Salvador’s Catholics is who will replace Romero. The rightist element in the church was strongly opposed to his actions.
Evangelicals in El Salvador have remained on the sidelines of the political struggle, which has cost an estimated 700 lives so far this year. Despite their growing numbers—an estimated 10 percent of the population in El Salvador—evangelicals in Central America have been traditionally apolitical and much more concerned about evangelism than social change. But some pastors, who had ties with the previous regime, recently have received threats. In a last-ditch effort to shore up his government, ousted president Carlos Humberto Romero had called for a “national dialogue” involving various sectors of society, including evangelical churches. Now church leaders who participated in that dialogue face possible reprisals from the leftists. Archbishop Romero and his wing of the Catholic church had refused to participate.
Despite a drastic cutback in U.S. embassy personnel and warnings to all Americans in nonessential positions to leave the country, most missionaries have remained. There are no restrictions on movement or on religious liberty apart from the imposition of martial law.
Open to question, however, is how long the churches will be allowed to remain neutral. The son of a deacon at the First Baptist Church of San Salvador, apparently involved in a leftist group, recently attempted to burn down the church. Evangelist Paul Finkenbinder, known throughout Latin America as “Hermano Pablo,” intended to speak at a united Easter sunrise service, but withdrew after learning of threats against him (perhaps because he is a North American), and against evangelical radio station YSHQ, which was to broadcast the service. The service took place uneventfully, with a local pastor preaching.
STEPHEN SYWULKA
Does it include unmarried and homosexual couples? Will a governmental big brother help or hinder?
The White House Conference on Families (WHCF) sounded good as a campaign promise: Why not hold a national discussion on ways to strengthen the troubled American family?
But President Jimmy Carter may wish now that he had never followed through on this particular pledge. The upcoming conference has struggled through leadership shuffles and several postponements. Lately it has become a platform for debate between traditional and liberal moralists. Special interest groups have used the WHCF to argue their positions for and against the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion, and homosexuality.
Some have divorced themselves entirely from the White House family of conferees. Alabama Governor Forrest (Fob) James, on advice from his wife Bobbie—a professing born-again Episcopalian—announced his state would not participate in “such conferences which do not establish traditional Judeo-Christian values concerning the family, the foundation of our nation under God.” (Indiana also pulled out of the WHCF.)
Several Christian and New Right lobbies have organized family conferences of their own. Well-known family life speaker Tim LaHaye of El Cajon, California, and his wife Beverly each head conservative caucuses that, along with television preacher Jerry Falwell’s political arm, Moral Majority, are sponsoring a July 12 “profamily conference” in Long Beach. The Washington, D.C.-based Free Congress Research and Education Foundation has invited 30 speakers—ranging from constitutional lawyer William Ball to evangelical theologian and antiabortion spokesman Harold O.J. Brown—to its “American Family Forum 1980” in June.
At the same time, some religious groups have supported the White House conference. These include the United States Catholic Conference (USCC), several Jewish agencies (although the Orthodox Jewish movement, Agudath Israel of America, pulled out, citing the WHCF’s domination by those opposing traditional religious and family values), and the National Council of Churches. G. William Sheek, director of the NCC office of family ministries and human sexuality, has cast his support behind the so-called Coalition for a Fair White House Conference on Families, an umbrella group formed to counteract the feared takeover of the WHCF by conservatives.
Concerned by the uproar, WHCF chairman Jim Guy Tucker, a former Arkansas congressman and Southern Presbyterian layman, blames some of the problems on “unfounded fears” within the Christian community and has asked for churchmen’s support.
The White House conference actually consists of three meetings, not one: in Baltimore (June 5–7), Minneapolis (June 19–21), and Los Angeles (July 10–12). (The WHCF originally was to peak with a meeting at the White House.) The battle lines between conservatives and liberals formed during the recently completed local and state hearings. The hearings were held in order to bring to the surface issues that were submitted to a 40-member WHCF national advisory committee for compilation into a single issues agenda for use at each of the three regional meetings, and in order to locate delegates from each state. Seven national WHCF hearings attracted 2,000 people.
Participants discussed everything from tax exemptions to child abuse. But, ironically, a central issue has been disagreement over the definition of “family.” Conservatives, who say their position is representative of at least 90 percent of the American population, have defined the family as consisting of persons who are related by blood, marriage, or adoption. They criticize liberal factions, which have endorsed a broad definition of families that would include unmarried and homosexual couples: the New York delegation, for instance, approved a statement calling for full freedom of choice in lifestyle (which would include a woman’s right to have an abortion) and for equal rights to persons in any kind of family arrangement—“including but not limited to nuclear families, extended families, blended families, same sex couples.…”
According to WHCF spokesman Rhoda Glickman, organizers deliberately chose not to define the family in order to prevent “advocating” one particular form of the family over another.
“Families are changing and adapting, and there’s nothing that’s going to change that process,” she said. “That’s why we changed the name from the White House Conference on the Family to the White House Conference on Families—to show the diversity.”
However, the definition of family at least would have a significant bearing on eligibility for federal tax assistance programs, observers note. (A Carter-appointed national task force will pull together recommendations from the regional conferences. In a final report to be submitted to the President and Congress, the task force will make suggestions regarding federal policies affecting the family.)
The problem for conservatives is that they don’t want government involvement in family life. “Our experience has been that government involvement is more destructive than helpful … we believe that families can solve their own problems in many cases if the government stays out of it,” said Connaught (Connie) Marshner, editor of the Free Congress Foundation’s Family Protection Report.
Marshner is spokesman for—and LaHaye supports—the National Pro-Family Coalition on the White House Conference on Families. It has been the strongest of the so-called profamily lobbies in terms of successful lobbying for the election of profamily state delegates to the WHCF. The coalition has an “informal network” of contacts in every state, who were asked to discover, publicize, and campaign for profamily candidates to state delegations, said Marshner.
The coalition mobilized early, and was credited with engineering a near sweep by profamily delegates (22 of 24 elected positions) in Virginia—the first state to elect delegates. The profamily group, which takes a firm stance against the ERA, abortion, and homosexual rights, had similar, but not such spectacular successes in several following state elections.
Various WHCF state committees responded by taking steps to prevent their own delegations from becoming top-heavy with conservatives. (Each state is allowed three times as many delegates as it has U.S. congressmen. At least 30 percent of each state delegation is elected by peers, 30 percent are appointed by the governor, and the remaining 40 percent are chosen in any way the state prefers. In Virginia, 70 percent of the delegates were elected.)
In Washington State, for instance, the committee decided to have 18 delegates appointed by the governor and 9 elected by the people—just the opposite of its original plans. When a profamily, antiabortion organization, The Umbrella Group, filed suit in protest, a judge ruled that since there were no state or federal laws guiding the conference, the state could not be held in violation of any laws.
Marshner, involved in various Capitol Hill capacities for the past 10 years, was particularly upset that such states as Idaho, Texas, and California subsequently revised election guidelines so that the 30 percent who were to be elected could be chosen instead by a random selection process.
LaHaye said he was tipped off in advance by President Carter’s liaison to religious groups, Robert Maddox, that California’s “elected” delegates would be chosen at random from among all those who had volunteered to be delegates. LaHaye responded by organizing a campaign for profamily “volunteers.”
He sent letters to the 700 local church pastors, who are members of his year-old Californians for Biblical Morality. His wife Beverly contacted 20,000 California women who are members of her Concerned Women for America. The result, claimed LaHaye, was 30,000 letters from profamily, volunteer delegates, from which 40 delegates would be randomly chosen. “They had to delay the drawing three times in order to process all the mail,” LaHaye said. (The LaHayes founded a Christian family lobby, Family America, recently made a division in the New Right lobby, Moral Majority.)
LaHaye complains of an alleged lack of Christian influence among WHCF organizers. In an interview, he said, “Whoever is doing the inside planning has done everything they could to keep traditional, Judeo-Christian morality and values from being considered.” Of the 40-person national committee, appointed by Carter and the WHCF staff, only one has come forward as a “born-again Christian”—Southern Baptist official Harry Hollis, asserted LaHaye. (The committee has an equal number of men and women, who come from a variety of ages and occupational backgrounds. Its religious representation includes Mary Detrick of the Church of the Brethren national staff, several Lutheran leaders, and Operation PUSH leader Jesse Jackson.)
LaHaye, who pastors Scott Memorial Baptist Church and heads the board of its Christian Heritage College, said he has been assured by religious liaison Maddox that the various “profamily, pro-traditional family” resolutions coming out of his July conference will be presented to Carter.
The Free Congress Foundation’s conference in Washington, D.C., is aimed at action, rather than resolutions. Conference coordinator Larry Taylor hoped participants would “translate their moral concerns for the family into some kind of activity that will have impact on public policymaking.” (The Free Congress Foundation is headed by Eastern Rite Catholic Paul Weyrich, who also directs a campaign training school for conservative candidates for political office.)
While conservatives are opposing government intrusion into family life, many are supporting comprehensive legislation introduced last fall by Senator Paul Laxalt (R.-Nev.), a divorced and remarried Catholic. Laxalt’s so-called Family Protection Act (S-1808) has 35 major provisions, covering education, First Amendment, taxation, and domestic relations issues. Many provisions would remove churches from oversight of government regulatory bodies, would benefit private schools, and would have the effect of strengthening the family by reducing federal controls, said a Laxalt aide.
Observers agree the “superbill” might require years for completion, because of its scope and subjectivity. One provision, for instance, would withhold federal funds from states and school systems that forbid voluntary prayer in public buildings.
Cosponsors of the bill include Senators Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Jake Garn (R-Utah), and Roger Jepsen (R-Iowa). Helms and Laxalt were among four U.S. senators given a perfect 100 percent rating for their votes on profamily issues by the Christian Voters’ Victory Fund. The fund, a political action committee of the National Christian Action Coalition, compiled its “Family Issues Voting Index” of all U.S. congressmen as an election-year boost for profamily political candidates. The Victory Fund also provides them with financial aid.
WHCF chairman Tucker has told church leaders that the family needs government attention, but not government intrusion. At a Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission seminar, he said government leaders ought to give more thought to the impact their proposals will have on the family. He cited as an example discriminatory tax legislation—such as when a married couple pays more taxes than two single persons living together.
Despite their disagreements, conservatives and liberals would agree the nuclear family is an endangered species. During the last decade, the ratio of divorced persons per 1,000 husbands and wives in intact marriages rose from 47 per 1,000 to 92 per 1,000 (a 96 percent gain), according to a just-released Census Bureau report. The bureau also said the number of unmarried couple households doubled to a total of 1.3 million since 1970. One-spouse families jumped 50 percent.
Can the WHCF change the situation? A WHCF delegate from New York, Norman Wetterau, told CHRISTIANITY TODAY that federal programs can help the family. But Wetterau, a medical doctor, who describes himself as evangelical, said the WHCF format has allowed only for seeking government solutions. There is no opportunity for “discussion or recommendations for what I feel are the real causes of our family breakdown,” he said. “During the New York conference, there was no mention of marriage, love, discipline, or personal responsibility of one family member to another.”
More than 100 national organizations had submitted priority issue papers to the WHCF as of last month, said WHCF spokesman Glickman. She acknowledged many differences in opinion and complaints by special interest groups. Her explanation of the debate: “You’re dealing with families—you can’t get any more personal than that.”
Many ministers and Christian workers have personal, emotional, and family problems, but don’t like to admit it. And many of their parishioners feel ministers are supposed to have all the answers. Yet, without psychiatric help, some workers’ effectiveness may be hindered or destroyed.
These were the thoughts of a Southern Baptist psychiatrist, who began doing something about the problem. At his modern retreat center in Marble, Colorado—a rugged and remote resort area of the Rocky Mountains 60 miles from Aspen—Louis McBurney offers the only in-residence psychotherapy in the U.S. that is exclusively for religious professionals, their spouses, and children.
McBurney, 41, opened Marble Retreat three years ago out of a growing conviction that clergy, more than any other professional group, feel the pressures of job demands and the resulting anxiety and frustration.
“To make matters worse,” he observed during an interview at the pine-studded, five-acre retreat, “most congregations seem unwilling to accept the humanity of their minister and allow him to seek professional help in his own community.”
A few denominations have programs to help ministers in psychological or emotional trouble. The United Presbyterian Church holds “debriefings” every five years for ministers in transit through their careers. But McBurney offers concentrated help for professionals “on the verge of disaster.” Many of the couples’ marriages are on the rocks.
McBurney observed that pride and fear that admission of need might place their jobs in jeopardy make most religious professionals reluctant to seek outside help. Many drop out of the ministry for other occupations. In the Southern Baptist Convention, for example, about 1,000 ministers drop out each year.
McBumey, a graduate of Baylor and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, learned the short-term form of psychotherapy he uses at Marble Retreat during his residency at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. His wife Melissa, who majored in religion at Baylor University, sits in on group therapy sessions and sometimes counsels ministers’ wives separately. Lodging, food, and 40 hours of intense group counseling and four or five hours of individual assessment and therapy during the two-week sessions cost clients a modest $35 a day.
Asked about the greatest pressures clergy face today, McBurney said “number one” is “the feeling of inadequacy or failure.… The parishioners have such high expectations [of the pastor] that he is almost sure to fail.” Loneliness and isolation are other frequent causes of ministerial despair. “Ministers and their families have a loss of privacy. They live in a kind of fishbowl existence,” McBurney said.
Most ministers also complain of financial poverty. “Those in small churches are struggling along, not getting much help.… And retirement brings a crisis for many ministers; financially they have problems then.” He said other crisis periods occur after a minister has been out of seminary one year, and after he or she has been out five years.
Buried bitterness and resentment usually percolate to the surface by the end of the first week of counseling. Early in the second week, McBurney begins to explore “where people are spiritually.” Even ministers can easily develop spiritual problems and get “out of touch with God,” observed McBurney, the author of Every Pastor Needs a Pastor (Word).
“It’s a hard, scary week,” McBurney said of the final six days of therapy. “Counselees realize they’ve either got to get it together now or go back to face the same crisis situations.”
Marble Retreat itself has weathered some crises. The McBurneys built the 5,000-square-foot lodge, which is equipped with large counseling and recreation rooms as well as a small meditation chapel, only after securing a building loan using stock in a family business as collateral. There were problems with environmentalists and legal tangles over zoning, well drilling, and power connections. But McBurney feels the rewards have outweighed the difficulties.
“We feel that the availability of a retreat offering psychiatric counseling remote from the work situation and essentially unadvertised to the general public offers the clergyman and his wife an alternative to suffering in silence or perhaps resigning the ministry in despair.”
RUSSELL CHANDLER
Dallas Baptist College students again are receiving state and federal tuition grants that were frozen after school president W. Marvin Watson began requiring school employees to sign a proinerrancy “Articles of Faith” as a condition of further employment (Feb. 22 issue, p. 46). The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and school officials reached an agreement: employees will no longer be required, as such, to sign the faith statement; they will, however, sign an employment contract that, among other things, indicates agreement with all policies in the personnel manual. Watson denied the school was “backing down,” particularly since the articles of faith will be written into the personnel manual.
Pioneer Girls is developing a parallel program for boys, which will provide churches with the options of having either a separate or a combined boy-girl program. This marked shift in ministry focus for the most part ends its informal paired relationship with the male-oriented Christian Service Brigade. The agencies, each based near Wheaton, Illinois, explored merger for a number of years. Brigade officials remain committed to a ministry of discipling men, who in turn, disciple boys, while Pioneer Girls leaders believe their new approach will meet the needs of the greatest number of churches. Some denominations, for instance, take the position that boys and girls programs should not be separated.
Some liberal and moderate Roman Catholics recently organized against what they call “repressive” actions of Rome, such as the censure of theologian Hans Küng. Temple University professor Leonard Swidler said the Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church will draft a charter of Catholic rights in an attempt to curb excessive power of the bishops and papacy.
Evangelist James Robison will appeal a March 6 decision by a Federal Communications Commission official, who said Dallas television station WFAA-TV had the right to drop the evangelist’s program (since reinstated) after a controversial sermon attacking homosexuality. WFAA-TV had called Robison’s programs a “continuing problem,” saying his controversial remarks often required the station to give equal time, under the Fairness Doctrine, for groups to respond. In his ruling, FCC official Arthur Ginsburg did not speak to the doctrine. Robison wants a full FCC hearing on the matter, believing the Fairness Doctrine inhibits his preaching style and violates his First Amendment right to freedom of speech.
Fallout continued last month over Baylor University’s (Southern Baptist) decision to take disciplinary action against any female student who posed nude for an upcoming Playboy “Girls of the Southwest Conference” issue. Three student newspaper editors, who editorialized against president Abner McCall’s stand, were fired and their scholarships for next year were revoked. One sympathetic journalism professor was fired, and another resigned in protest. McCall said he approved balanced student news coverage of the situation, but not editorials contrary to the Baptist doctrine against pornography as stated in university policy. A Playboy photographer announced that 80 students had taken part clothed, in a preliminary screening.
Thinking About Religion, by Richard L. Purtill (Prentice-Hall, 1978, 175pp., $5.95 pb), is reviewed by Michael H. MacDonald, professor of German and philosophy, Seattle Pacific University, Seattle, Washington.
According to the author, Thinking About Religion is intended to serve introductory classes in religion and philosophy of religion. Yet Purtill’s book neither treats numerous facts concerning the various religions, nor is his major emphasis the usual range of topics dealt with in such books. Rather, Purtill is most interested in why people hold any religious belief at all and whether there is rational justification for claiming one set of beliefs instead of another.
Purtill’s background is an interesting one. He has written several books on logic, ethics, and religion, some of which are standard texts in philosophy and religion classes across the country. More recently, he completed his first novel. This rather unique combination of logician and poet is put to good use in Thinking About Religion, for Purtill introduces each chapter with a short story or parable, which he uses as a springboard to discuss the chapter topics. His imagination baptized, one of Purtill’s most successful chapters is his last one. Here he speculates about life after death, telling through concrete experiences what might be some characteristics of the afterlife. Purtill suggests how the “eternal life view” can provide answers to several theological and philosophical problems.
Much of Purtill’s attention in the book is given to a defense of the kind of religious belief that has been most influential in the Western world: the Judeo-Christian view, including Islam. He is not content, as some religious believers are, to call the debates a draw. After examining the pros and cons of religious belief and unbelief, Purtill shows that the believer has a more reasonable interpretation of our total experience than does anyone else. He is well aware, however, that rational arguments do not necessarily bring us to the God of Christian faith and experience.
Those who maintain that clear thinking brings one to the threshold of belief will welcome this book. Purtill argues his case well and helps counter the new irrationalism today, which substitutes subjective feelings for sound thinking. In this sense Richard Purtill writes within the tradition of Elton Trueblood and John Stott. Thinking About Religion is thus an excellent book for any serious reader who wants a better reason for the faith that is within him.
Real Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Works of C. S. Lewis, by Leanne Payne (Cornerstone Books, 1979, 198 pp., $4.95), and C. S. Lewis on Scripture, by Michael J. Christensen (Word Books, 1979, 120 pp., $6.95), are reviewed by Donald T. Williams, instructor of English grammar and composition at the University of Georgia, Athens.
The growing flood of secondary literature on C. S. Lewis seems to be turning into new channels, moving from general treatments of Lewis as apologist or man of letters to more narrowly focused expositions of Lewis’s views on particular questions of theology. As the two books before us illustrate, the stream does not always flow in these channels with the same depth or force.
Payne’s thesis is that the key to Lewis is his view of reality as incarnational, and that his effectiveness is “rooted in a living and comprehensive understanding of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling of the very being of the Christian.” Payne admits that the Holy Spirit is present only implicitly in Lewis’s work, but too often her only way of making the Spirit explicit is simply to assert that it is so. It is often hard to tell whether we are reading an exposition of Lewis’s theology of the Spirit or a development of Payne’s concept of the role of the Spirit in a sacramental world, highly informed by Lewis’s metaphysic, and liberally illustrated from his writings. The book seems to me to be predominantly the latter, and as such it is not without value, though it is certainly mistitled.
More competently written is Christensen’s account of Lewis’s views on Scripture. He presents Lewis as a model for a mediating position in the midst of current controversies within evangelicalism over the doctrine of inspiration. Christensen’s treatment of Lewis’s position is mostly accurate, and it is specially valuable in that it relates Lewis’s particular statements about Scripture to his more general views on literary criticism, myth, and so on. More problematic are his attempts to relate Lewis’s views to the present inerrancy debate. Christensen rightly points out positive lessons that conservative evangelicals could learn from Lewis: the importance of genre for interpretation, the need for an imaginative as well as an intellectual response to biblical images, the danger of making either response independent of the other. But, unfortunately, Christensen shares both Lewis’s own naiveté concerning what is at stake in the doctrine of inerrancy and his confusion over what the doctrine actually affirms. His survey of the question of inerrancy in church history is too sketchy to warrant the conclusions he draws from it; he unfairly implies that inerrancy is a characteristically fundamentalist and not an evangelical doctrine; he repeats the absurd non sequitur that inerrancy denies the humanness of Scripture; and he, like Lewis, totally ignores our Lord’s own attitude toward the total trustworthiness of the Bible. But with all these crucial weaknesses Christensen’s book is one that deserves to be read. Lewis has much of positive good to teach us about Scripture and how to read it, and Christensen, despite his uncritical approach, can help us appropriate some of those lessons.
Essentials of Evangelical Theology, Volume Two: Life, Ministry, and Hope, by Donald G. Bloesch (Harper and Row, 1979, 297 pp., $14.95), is reviewed by David Foxgrover, chaplain and assistant professor of religion, Rockford College, Rockford, Illinois.
In his preface Donald Bloesch states with modesty: “My purpose is simply to spell out the core of the historic Christian faith from an evangelical and Reformed perspective.” However, it quickly becomes clear that Dr. Bloesch’s purposes are far more daring: he wants to “reconceive evangelicalism” by establishing a “catholic evangelicalism” that is faithful to its “historical roots” and to the “biblical and evangelical witness.”
Dr. Bloesch’s intention is “to open new ground” in four areas: the new birth, the gifts and ministries of the church, the millennial hope, and universal salvation. The book concludes with a review of evangelical distinctives and a delineation of a “catholic evangelicalism.”
What is the “new ground” Dr. Bloesch opens? In “The New Birth” the writer both affirms the necessity of the new birth (the old man “cannot evolve into the new”) and cautions against identifying the event of the new birth with stereotyped feelings or experiences. On baptism, Dr. Bloesch avoids the “traditional Catholic view” of an “automatic development from baptism to conversion,” but he affirms that baptism is a “means of grace by which the Holy Spirit … works within us.” Dr. Bloesch believes that one can recognize “stages” in regeneration, one of which is a “preparatory stage” wherein one is “already under grace, though grace has not yet fully possessed him.”
Regarding the “gifts and ministries of the church,” Dr. Bloesch states that preaching is not “dialogue” but a “means of grace,” and is careful to uphold the proper role of the sacraments; nonetheless, his description of “Reformed worship” does not jibe with an earlier statement that it is “not only the preached Word, but also the celebration of the sacraments that creates and sustains the fellowship of Christ.”
In “The Priesthood of Believers” Dr. Bloesch does an admirable job of doing justice to “both cultic and charismatic dimensions” and the corporate nature of the church.
In “The Personal Return of Christ,” Dr. Bloesch acknowledges the place of realized eschatology, while stating without compromise: “… the consummation of history is an event still to take place in the future.” Christ’s coming will be bodily and visible, and will inaugurate a new heaven and new earth. After critique of traditional views, Dr. Bloesch advocates a “postmillennialism within the framework of a modified amillennialism” that conveys the “note of victory.”
For many, the most controversial chapter will be that on “Heaven and Hell.” For Bloesch, the Bible teaches both a “moral dualism” and a “universalism that envisions God’s grace as everywhere triumphant.” “Moral dualism” means that heaven and hell are not simply “states of mind” and that there is a “history of salvation and perdition.” “Universalism” means that “God’s grace ultimately will encompass the whole of creation, though this does not imply the actual salvation of every individual.…”
Bloesch wishes to avoid any conception that suggests that God’s justice and love are opposed to each other. Instead, God is “sovereign in his love.…” But, because God’s love cannot tolerate sin, hell is necessary: “It is not because God’s love is limited but because it is unlimited that hell as well as heaven is made necessary.” Bloesch then takes the argument to its conclusion: “Hell … is essentially the creation of a loving God for those who refuse the help offered to them in Christ.”
Dr. Bloesch hopes to bridge the barriers between evangelical groups and between Catholicism and evangelicalism, but at the same time he is clear that “catholic evangelicalism” is a “theology of confrontation as opposed to one of accommodation or … of correlation.” He has not only opened new ground, but has also offered a commendable example of the theological enterprise to which he calls us.
Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism, 1875–1925, by Timothy P. Weber (Oxford University Press, 1979, 323 pp., $14.95), is reviewed by Joel A. Carpenter, professor of history, Trinity College, Deerfield, Illinois.
“How do modern, educated people behave in a growingly complex industrial society, when they are firmly convinced that this age might suddenly be turned into the age to come by the personal return of Jesus Christ?” Prof. Timothy P. Weber, church historian at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary, asks this behavioral question of people who hold a premillennialist world view. By focusing on those who hold to the dispensationalist version of that doctrine, which became widely accepted in American fundamentalism, he has made a valuable contribution to the cultural history of that movement.
To the uninitiated, dispensationalism is an arcane, unattractive theory of redemption history, but Weber outlines the system in a clear, straightforward fashion and explains its appeal to many conservative evangelicals. He then examines its effects on the personal lives of those who were caught in its tension, expecting the Second Coming at any moment while knowing that it might not happen in their lifetime. This tension produced an earnestness that reinforced waning evangelical mores and produced an urgency useful in promoting evangelism and foreign missions. It is no coincidence, the author contends, that many leaders in urban revivalism and the foreign missions movement of the era were premillennialists.
The second half the book examines the premillennialists’ confusingly ambivalent response to selected issues. Even though their eschatology predicted an inevitable cultural decline, and hence the ultimate futility of social reform efforts, many premillennialists engaged in social welfare activity.
In a particularly enlightening chapter, Weber shows that intrinsic tensions in dispensationalism led its devotees to the sad irony of showing more respect and concern for Jews and more interest in Zionism than other Christians, while expecting many Jews to join the Antichrist. Finally, the author surveys the role of premillennialists in the fundamentalist-modernist controversies. While covering no new ground here, he shows that premillennialist fundamentalists did not agree on their duty to their denominations in that “day of apostasy.” Some separated themselves, others fought for control, and many others quietly stayed put.
Weber’s major point throughout this fascinating excursion is that premillennialism did positively affect its adherents’ behavior, and that the apparent contradiction between their beliefs and some of their actions resulted more from the doctrine’s own flexibility and the pull of competing forces than from any inner dishonesty on the part of premillennialists. This helps explain some of their discrete actions and attitudes, but the author does not adequately pull these strands together. If Weber had kept this larger question in mind, the book would seem less a casual, if enlightening excursion, and more a systematic exploration.
Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness, by Marshall Frady (Little, Brown, 1979, 546 pp., $12.95); Billy Graham: Evangelist to the World, by John Pollock (Harper & Row, 1979, 352 pp., $10.00); Billy Graham: Saint or Sinner, by Curtis Mitchell (Fleming Revell, 1979, 320 pp., $9.95), are reviewed by John Woodbridge, professor and chairman of the Department of History, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.
In 1979, as if to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Billy Graham’s entrance upon the national scene, three books (among a bevy of recent ones about the evangelist) appeared. The first, Marshall Frady’s Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness, is probably in the tradition of William McLoughlin’s earlier critical interpretation, Billy Graham: Revivalist in a Secular Age, 1960. (See the CHRISTIANITY TODAY review, Nov. 16, 1979). John Pollock’s authorized study, Billy Graham: Evangelist to the World, and Curtis Mitchell’s Billy Graham: Saint or Sinner, clearly fall within the sympathetic or friendly camp. Author Frady finds much to regret in Graham’s multiphased ministry while authors Pollock and Mitchell defend and celebrate it. Working presuppositions apparently account for the author’s contrasting sentiments of appreciation.
Author John Pollock has envisioned writing the definitive biography of Billy Graham. With the full cooperation of the evangelist and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Pollock published Billy Graham (1966, reedited 1969), which treats the evangelist’s life and ministry until 1969. Pollock offers the present volume, Billy Graham: Evangelist to the World, as both an “inside story” and a history of Billy Graham’s ministry during the 1970s.
Rather than giving a detailed chronological analysis of the decade, Pollock fixes upon episodes he believes to be representative of Graham’s emergence from a national to a global religious leader. He discusses Mr. Graham’s evangelistic campaigns from Europe 70, held in Dortmund, Germany, to the evangelist’s visit to Roman Catholic Poland in 1978. That Graham’s ministry has become worldwide in scope becomes abundantly clear in Pollock’s presentation. That the evangelist himself remains a personable and humble servant of God is also amply documented.
Very different is the approach of Marshall Frady. He charges that Billy Graham has preached a smooth and simple message, programmed to stir crowds but largely incapable of meeting the complex needs of lonely, anguished people. Whereas Frady portrays Billy Graham as living in a depersonalized and sanitized world of mass media evangelism, Pollock presents Graham as being sensitive to the various spiritual and material needs of hurting individuals, whether they be his own family members or perfect strangers. For Frady, the political demise of Richard Nixon, whose vision of America Graham allegedly shared, coincided with the denouement of the evangelist’s own golden age as a national figure. Pollock offers evidence that Graham’s ministry, far from cresting after Watergate, moves along at a steady if not quickening pace and with undiminished appeal.
Frady proposes that Graham became an eloquent defender of the establishment rather than a genuine prophet lashing out against the social sins of America. Pollock attempts to fend off criticism that the evangelist has been a doughty defender of the status quo. In reference to Graham’s attitude toward integration, for example, Pollock notes Daniel Moynihan’s remark to Billy Graham in 1973: “You and Rev. King, more than any two men—and, surely with God’s help—brought your own South out of that long night of racial fear and hate” (p. 127). On point after point, Pollock’s portrait of Billy Graham’s person and ministry clashes sharply with the one found in Frady’s biography. Although neither writer wrote specifically to address the other, their two volumes create a curious interchange in which Frady’s criticisms of Graham’s ministry are consistently parried and rebutted by Pollock’s praise and defense of that same ministry.
Evangelical readers will probably feel more comfortable with Pollock’s volume than with Frady’s: Pollock’s portrait of Billy Graham, the Holy Spirit-empowered preacher, resembles closely their conception of the evangelist. Moreover, the author uses categories of spiritual analysis that are familiar to them. Frady’s portrait has some disturbing features. He does profess genuine admiration for Mr. Graham’s personal warmth and goodness, and shuns intimations that would associate the evangelist with the haunting specter of Elmer Gantry. In addition, he avoids the scabrous excesses of a muckraker. But then Frady brushes a picture in which Billy Graham’s own spiritual experience and spiritual influence upon others are treated, not in their own religious terms, but essentially in psychological and sociological ones. Certainly, there is a place for the social history of ideas, religious or otherwise. But the biographer tends to rob Graham’s life experience and ministry of real transcendent elements. Whereas Frady acknowledges the sincerity of Graham’s faith that God is involved in his life and work, the author is quick to explain in human terms what Graham attributes to divine intervention.
This aspect of Frady’s approach to Graham’s life and ministry reveals an unusual feature of the biography. In a curious way, Marshall Frady, himself, emerges as a central figure in the Graham story. He is the assured voice who repeatedly lets his readers know where Graham and others did right or how and why they went astray. He will determine when Graham is being helped by God or when human forces alone actually account for Graham’s success or failure. He repeatedly brings Billy Graham before the bar of his own personal judgment and sorts out the cosmic merits of other subjects’ activities. It is not surprising, therefore, that reviewers of the biography about Billy Graham often dedicate many paragraphs of their reviews to Marshall Frady, so powerful is the author’s stamp upon his narrative.
If Marshall Frady has not written the definitive biography of Billy Graham, is John Pollock in the process of doing so with his two studies on the evangelist, Billy Graham (1969) and Billy Graham: Evangelist to the World (1979)? An ultimate answer to that question should be postponed until Pollock has written his final work of synthesis.
Certainly, Pollock’s pleasant writing style is readable enough for such a biography. But Pollock faces several hurdles particularly hazardous for authorized biographers. First, he has privileged access to mountains of data coming from Billy Graham himself, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and other sources (p. viii). With one author’s energies and skills, will Pollock be able to sift through this vast documentation in order to paint a convincing and nonsimplistic portrait of the evangelist’s person and ministry? Second, does author Pollock possess the necessary psychological and emotional distance from Billy Graham and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association that will permit him to assess critically the evangelist’s ministry and to recognize possible deficiencies in it? Third, will Pollock broach those questions that fascinate professional historians and religious sociologists concerning the complex relationship between evangelical Christianity and American culture? How author John Pollock comes to grips with these issues will probably determine the evaluation both evangelical and nonevangelical historians make of his projected biography. His two studies to date admit to considerable promise.
In the third work, Billy Graham: Saint or Sinner, Curtis Mitchell has penned less a biography than an apologetic. He seeks to dampen “a fire storm of suspicion and derogation,” which, he says, “has threatened Billy Graham’s health, his mission, and his dreams.” Fearful that recent allegations in the press could cause serious damage to Graham’s ministry, journalist Mitchell decided to probe their sources and assess their accuracy.
Mitchell’s volume is helpful on several counts. It provides systematic refutations of many of the nagging criticisms of Graham’s ministry. Moreover, the book’s first-person narratives by the evangelist’s children are both inspiring and instructive. They reveal much about the deep spirituality of the flesh and blood Billy Graham.
Several structural weaknesses, however, sadly undermine the import of author Mitchell’s work. His central question, “Is Billy Graham a saint or a sinner?” is poorly construed. The either-or paradigm employed is simply inappropriate. Moreover, Mitchell does not afford his readers either footnotes or a bibliography. Professional historians and lay readers alike will find themselves frequently stymied if they want to evaluate the specific documentation upon which Mitchell bases his refutations.
The current quest to know the man, Billy Graham, behind the bigger-than-life image is a worthy one for Americans largely bereft of respected spiritual leaders in an anxious age.
A large audience probably awaits the biographer, who, sensitive to the subtle interplay between divine and human realities, will recount Billy Graham’s story with warm empathy, with consummate literary grace, and with sterling historical integrity. That will be a biography to read.
We are tempted to use the enormous complexity of international economics as an excuse to do nothing.
The 1980s have ushered in the Third Development Decade, but without much optimism. Although during the first two development decades some progress was made in the economic growth of Third World countries, as well as in public health, life expectancy, and literacy, the gap in average per capita income between the rich and poor nations still widened considerably.
According to the World Bank’s 1979 Report on World Poverty “about 800 million people still live in absolute poverty, with incomes too low to ensure adequate nutrition, and without adequate access to essential public services.” The Brandt Commission Report on International Development Issues, published this past February, adds that 17 million children under five die every year, and that in 34 countries more than 80 percent of the people are illiterate. These facts, comments West German ex-chancellor Willy Brandt, constitute “the greatest challenge to mankind for the remainder of the century.”
The call for a “New International Economic Order” was thus issued; it was first formulated in 1973 at the meeting of non-aligned countries in Algiers. It demands radical restructuring of world economy in the interests of developing countries, and expresses their determination to gain economic independence along with the political independence they have recently gained. The UN General Assembly endorsed this in 1974 and published a “Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States.” The NIEO is a plea for more direct aid and credit facilities, the right to regulate multinationals, the removal of trade barriers, and more adequate representation in international decision-making structures like the International Monetary Fund. Little progress has been made to implement these proposals. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in Nairobi in 1976 and in Manila in 1979 are regarded by most as disappointing and by some as failures.
How should Christians react to the growing demand from the Third World for economic justice? There are two major biblical principles that should help us to think and feel “Christianly” about it.
The first is the principle of unity. It was Adlai Stevenson in 1965 who likened the earth to a little spaceship in which we travel together, “dependent on its vulnerable supplies of air and soil.” Barbara Ward elaborated the theme in her book Spaceship Earth (1966) and developed it further in Only One Earth (1972). She bemoaned the lack of “any sense of planetary community,” and added that human survival depends on our achieving “an ultimate loyalty to our single, beautiful and vulnerable Planet Earth.”
This is clearly a biblical vision. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein” (Ps. 24:1). That is, God has created a single people (the human race) and placed us in a single habitat (the planet earth). “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it” was his original command (Gen. 1:28). The whole earth was to be developed by the whole people for the common good; all were to share in its God-given resources. This divine purpose has been frustrated by the rise of competitive nations, who have carved up the earth’s surface, and who now jealously guard their part of its fossil fuels and mineral deposits. But we cannot evade our responsibility to the poor on the ground that they belong to other nations and therefore do not concern us. The major point of the parable of the good Samaritan is that true neighbor love ignores racial and national barriers. We Christians should be pioneering the way, by repenting of all selfish nationalism and by developing instead a global perspective. For “the chief new insight of our century,” writes Barbara Ward in her latest book, Progress for a Small Planet (1979), is “the inescapable physical interdependence” of all human beings. We are one people inhabiting one planet. We are our brother’s keeper.
The second biblical truth concerns the principle of equality, which Paul develops in 2 Corinthians 8:8–15. He grounds his appeal for the poor Judaean churches on the theology of the Incarnation—that is, on the gracious renunciation of Christ who, though rich became poor so that through his poverty we might become rich (v. 9). It was a renunciation with a view to an equalization. It should be the same with the Corinthians: “your abundance at the present time should supply their want … that there may be equality” (v. 14).
An important qualification is necessary, however. The equality the Bible commends is not a total egalitarianism. It is not a situation in which all of us become identical, receiving identical incomes, living in identical homes, equipped with identical furniture, and wearing identical clothing. Equality is not identity. We know this from the doctrine of creation. For the God who has made us equal in dignity (all sharing his life and bearing his image) has made us unequal in ability (intellectually, physically, and psychologically). The new creation has even increased this disparity, bestowing on us who are “one in Christ Jesus” different spiritual gifts or capacities for service.
How, then, can we put together this biblical unity and diversity, equality and inequality? Perhaps in this way: since all have equal worth, though unequal capacity, we must secure equal opportunity for each to develop his or her particular potential for the glory of God and the good of others. Inequality of privilege must be abolished in favor of equality of opportunity. At present, millions of people made in God’s image are unable to develop their human potential because of illiteracy, hunger, poverty, or disease. It is, therefore, a fundamentally Christian quest to seek for all people equality of opportunity in education (universal education is arguably the principal means to social justice), in trade (equal access to the world’s markets), and in power sharing (representation on the influential world bodies that determine international economic relations.)
We are all tempted to use the enormous complexity of international economics as an excuse to do nothing. Yet this was the sin of Dives. There is no suggestion that Dives was responsible for the poverty of Lazarus either by robbing or by exploiting him. The reason for Dives’s guilt is that he ignored the beggar at his gate and did precisely nothing to relieve his destitution. He acquiesced in a situation of gross economic inequality, which had rendered Lazarus less than fully human and which he could have relieved. The pariah dogs that licked Lazarus’s sores showed more compassion than Dives did. Dives went to hell because of his indifference.
I hope in my next article to make some suggestions as to what we who live in comparative affluence could and should do to help the world’s 800 million destitute people.
John R. W. Stott is rector emeritus of All Souls Church, London, England.
A grammar of images and a logic of plot mimic the mysteries of life.
Quid hinieldus cum Christo? “What has Ingeld to do with Christ?” asked an eminent eighth-century educator when informed that monks in England were listening at mealtime not to saints’ lives and Scripture but to tales Many evangelical Christians, it may seem Germanic heroes as Ingeld the Heathobard.
Many evangelical Christians, it may seem, still share Alcuin’s sentiments about the reading of fiction: that it is a waste of a Christian’s time and should have no part in a life ordered by God’s Word. Fiction’s Christian apologists have always used as one of their weightiest arguments the pervasive use of narrative forms by the divinely inspired penmen of the Scriptures—indeed, by Christ himself—a characteristic of the Bible recently called again to our attention in CHRISTIANITY TODAY by Leland Ryken (Oct. 5, 1979).
A corollary, of course, to the hesitancy about reading fiction, is the hesitancy to write it. We do not have many outstanding Christian novelists among us, and most of the important writers who are confessing Christians seem to be Roman Catholics. Much of the so-called Christian fiction available in religion bookstores can still be called, in Henry Zylstra’s phrase, “Religious Pollyanna.” To have a Christian culture that promotes and accepts the writing of fiction about itself, evangelicals must first be persuaded that the writing and reading of fiction is in fact a legitimate enterprise; they must be taught how to read fiction as fiction, and how to tell the good from the bad.
But perhaps such proddings of the evangelical world are happily no longer needed. Two recent issues of CHRISTIANITY TODAY contain (1) an appreciative review of a new biography of Walker Percy, the Louisianan Catholic writer whose novels the reviewer highly recommends; (2) the fine article, already mentioned, by Leland Ryken, who calls to our attention the narrative mode of the Bible; (3) an appreciative review of a recent novel by Shirley Nelson, written, says the reviewer, Harold Fickett, “out of sympathy for the evangelical world” but without sentimentality and with striking imaginative verisimilitude.
Nevertheless, there is still a need for informed and healthy debate of the subject. It remains true, by and large, as Fickett states in his review, that “the evangelical world remains uncharted territory for the novelist. Though it contains and accounts for the way of life of many Americans, writers have rarely tried to describe this form of faith or its subcultures.” Ryken asks: “If the Bible uses the imagination as one way of communicating truth, should we not show an identical confidence in the power of the imagination to convey religious truth? If so, would a good starting point be to respect the story quality of the Bible in our exposition of it?” However, while suggesting practical implications for preaching and teaching, Ryken does not suggest that the narrative mode of God’s revelation might have implications for the writing and reading of stories other than those in the Bible. But Fickett finds the Christian fiction writer’s art validated precisely by the story form of Scripture. He states in the introduction to his recent book of stories: “The fiction writer can see himself as working within the tradition of biblical narrative, although he cannot claim divine inspiration. His task is simply to rework the old and ever-true story into new stories which take into account the present circumstances. His credentials consist solely in how well he does this” (Mrs. Sunday’s Problem and Other Stories, Revell, 1979).
What reasons can be given for the Christian community’s disregard for worthy fiction? Zylstra, referring to age-old objections to fiction, speaks to the Christian parent irked to find his child with his nose in a novel: “If only you could make fiction serve practical, or moral, or religious purposes you could honor it, but that since you cannot you wish your boy would read something useful, improving, or edifying. You suspect that novels, when they are innocent, are trivial. At best, you feel, they constitute mere entertainment.” In similar terms, Fickett speaks of the “practical person” who “often does not like fiction. He finds life difficult, and when he reads, he wants help; he wants advice on his marital problems or counsel about his career. If he is a Christian, he wants to know how he can improve his spiritual life. He is looking for answers.”
I would observe that the Protestant community has had in general a notion of Christian fiction as fiction that illustrates ideas previously and systematically articulated by theologians and theorists. We often judge fiction in the same way that we judge our life: by asking whether our experience matches up with a particular framework of theory or propositional doctrine, rather than asking whether our experience (and propositions about it) does justice to a plot, namely the divine narrative about history, with its climax on Calvary, of Creation, Fall, and Redemption. We have asked that fiction provide a self-satisfying and confirmatory experience for the reader, at the expense of allowing fiction to test theoretical formulations in a fictional crucible of people’s lives, or to be a mode in which the reader is asked to relive or experience vicariously the often painful “essential issues of existence” as an exercise to sharpen the reader’s perception of the religious character of human life.
Hence, as Malcoim Ross reminds us, we must not confuse “literature with apologetics. The Christian poem or novel is not a theological tract. Nor may one come to a critical judgment of a Christian writer by abstracting and counting his sound dogmatic utterances. The Christian writer is not a preacher. Nor is his [immediate] end the salvation of souls” (Poetry and Dogma, Rutgers University Press, 1954). We must remember, says Zylstra, “that a novel is a work of art, and that reading it is an aesthetic experience”; that is, an experience which, though not immediately useful, grants a certain engaged distance from which we may observe the affairs of human life.
Though I have spoken of Protestant notions, Flannery O’Connor has written similarly of the idea, among many in her own Roman Catholic community, that fiction-writing is a process of “beginning with Christian principles and finding the life that will illustrate them.” Like Fickett’s “practical person,” “we Catholics,” says O’Connor, “are very much given to the Instant Answer. Fiction doesn’t have any. It leaves us, like Job, with a renewed sense of mystery.” Both O’Connor and Fickett gently prod a public that wants fiction to work like nonfiction—by means of unambiguous statements and abstract propositions—as they propose anew fiction’s ability and responsibility to imitate life, which, for writers who are Christians, is an enterprise fraught with mystery.
If many among both Protestant and Catholic audiences share certain notions about fiction that make them unprepared to let fiction work on its own terms, we ought still to ask why most of the significant Christian fiction written in this century has come out of the Roman and other sacramental branches of Christendom. One could mention O’Connor, Walker Percy, François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, Graham Greene, as well as those writers who have been adopted into the evangelical fold: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Dorothy Sayers. Why this is so is a question too complex to do justice to in a brief essay, but certain avenues of thought may be opened up. Literature, in some manner, is by its very nature sacramental and incarnational—always of necessity linking movements of the mind, soul, or spirit to concrete phenomena and tangible objects, always showing the action of grace in its flesh and blood manifestations.
One might expect that the attitudes and skills required to write and read fiction would be less foreign to the person versed in the sacramental tradition of the church. Likewise, the hesitancy of the Protestant tradition to attach the working of grace to anything too tangible, along with its alignment with systematic, propositionally articulated and rationally ordered theology, would cause hesitancy in placing too much trust in the efficacy of fiction to promote doctrine. But my intention is not to oversimplify the complicated web of motives and patterns of thought that constitutes the history of the several traditions in the Western church. For on the other hand, the Reformed tradition of my own upbringing called the scholastic tradition of the Roman Catholic Church legitimately to task for severing the connections between the realms of Nature and Grace, for promoting rational theology at the expense of the guidance of the eye of faith, and looked rather to the heritage of Calvinism for the more authentically sacramental union of sign and signified, of flesh and spirit, of earthly visibilia, and the Invisibilia Dei that nourishes the making of stories.
John E. Skillen is a doctoral candidate in English literature at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
How many are there? Where do they come from? How can we minister to them?
Muslims have been migrating to North America from at least the 1700s, but in appreciable numbers only since World War I. They have come from Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Orient, as well as the Middle East. No accurate statistics are available. Islamic leaders claim there are three million Muslims in North America; religion researchers estimate one million. The 1970 census showed there are about 1.75 million Arabic-speaking people in the United States alone, the majority of them at least nominally Muslim. These are in addition to the Muslims of other ethnic backgrounds and nationalities. Officials expect the 1980 census to reveal a dramatic increase. Islamic and non-Islamic authorities agree that only a minority of America’s Muslims—10 percent or so—are associated with Islamic centers of worship.
The earliest known American convert to Islam was Alexander Russell Webb, a diplomat who embraced the faith in 1888 while serving in the Philippines. Most conversions in North America have been among blacks. An Afro-American preacher in the Harlem district of New York City who adopted the name of Soufi Abdul Hamid reportedly won more than 300 Americans to Islam before his death in 1937.
A number of Islamic sects sprouted in black communities, but most—including the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims) of Fard and Elijah Muhammad—were condemned as “heretical” by Mecca purists who objected to certain beliefs and practices. Under Elijah’s son, Wallace Muhammad, the Nation of Islam recently changed its name to World Community of Islam in the West, shed its racist expressions and other “heresies,” and won approval as an orthodox Islamic body. Its adherents are known as Bilalians (in honor of Bilal, an African who was reputedly the first black follower of Islam’s revered prophet Muhammad).
Except for the Bilalians, who have an estimated 50 to 60 thousand active members plus a similar number of constituents (the Bilalians themselves claim a much greater membership), Muslims in North America show little inclination to proselytize. Islam watcher Max Kershaw of International Students discounts rumors and fears to the contrary as “the myth of the Muslim monolith.” He points out that Islam, like the whole of Christianity, has no lines of authority flowing from a central headquarters. Mecca is a spiritual, not organizational, center. Muslim minorities in North America are fragmented, and in many cases members of the same community do not seem to trust each other.
However, Kershaw and other Christian observers agree with Islamic leaders that an increasing number of American Muslims are taking their faith more seriously. Accompanying this resurgence are efforts to forge greater unity between Muslim groups. The Islamic Center in Washington, D.C., which opened in 1957, publishes a 16-page directory of mosques and Islamic organizations in the United States and Canada. The Council of Imams in North America was established in 1973 to promote spiritual growth among Muslims; its members are the Imams (worship leaders) and directors of the leading Islamic centers on the continent. (A number of nonblack Imams have been serving the Bilalian communities in recent months.)
Some major Muslim organizations publish periodicals and sponsor annual conventions. The Coordinating Council of Muslim Organizations in America was founded recently to coordinate and support the work of several national Muslim societies, including the Muslim Students’ Association, which has chapters on scores of North American university campuses. Major funding of Islamic organizations and projects has come from the Middle East and northern Africa, but details are difficult to extract.
Christian approaches to Islam currently are centered on dialogue and evangelization. The National Council of Churches sponsors a task force on Christian-Muslim dialogue; it is led by Byron Haines of the Hartford Seminary Foundation. The Southern Baptist Convention interfaith witness unit joined with the Council of Imams in sponsoring a dialogue several years ago, and there is talk of having another one.
Except for campus ministry among international students, little is being done evangelistically among North American Muslims. A few missionaries have returned from the Middle East and are quietly working among scattered individuals. Few of the 15 or so Arabic-speaking Southern Baptist congregations have any Muslim converts among their members, but several of the immigrant pastors are cultivating contacts with Muslims. Some Arabic-language Christian broadcasts on U.S. radio stations contain low-key appeals to Muslims.
Iranians are apparently the immigrant group most open to evangelism, according to several Christian workers. Fellowships of Christian Iranians have been formed recently in Los Angeles, and another is in embryo stage in California’s Orange County. Several of the members are recent converts from Islam, and one worker hopes to establish a fellowship of Iranian Muslim converts. Of the some 30,000 Iranians in the Los Angeles area, fewer than one-third are students. Many of the others have fled their native country in fear, say workers, and they are especially responsive to friendly overtures from American Christians. Unfortunately, the workers point out, many Americans display bitterness toward the Iranian refugees, heaping abuse upon abuse.
Christian literature aimed at Muslims, described by evangelical workers as “excellent,” is being produced in English, Farsi (Persian), and Arabic. The American Bible Society has distributed nearly 10,000 copies of the New Testament in a modern Arabic version. The Fellowship of Faith for Muslims in Toronto is reputed to have the most complete stock of literature available for work among Muslims. International Students has ordered a second printing of “How to Share the Good News with Your Muslim Friend.” The Samuel Zwemer Institute was organized in Pasadena a little over a year ago “to inform, educate, and direct Christians in Muslim outreach worldwide.” and specialized literature will be one of the products.
Christians are waking up to the Muslims in their midst.
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.
Many Christians limit their view of God to what he does for them and ignore his hand in human affairs.
Few questions are as crucial in today’s world as what is the meaning of history. After the trauma of two world wars within one lifetime, the nightmare of Hitler’s Germany, and the futility of Vietnam, our generation is crying out for an answer to this question. It is an answer the church of Jesus Christ ought to know, because it is given to us in the Bible. For many centuries, however, the church and its theologians barely noticed the Bible solution, found in material that could have provided it with a theology of history. It is unfortunate that many Christians today limit the power of Christ to his personal relationship to the individual believer and see virtually no connection between Christ and world events. Such an attitude denies essential aspects of our Christian faith.
We should therefore examine more closely this question of the meaning of history. Let us look first at two interpretations of history that we must reject. The first of these was found among the ancient Greeks, who had what may be called a “cyclical” view of history: things occur in endlessly repeated cycles, so that what is happening today will someday be repeated. On the basis of such a view, however, it is impossible to find any real meaning in history. One conceivably could live for certain individual goals in life, but history itself could not be thought of as moving toward a goal, for history only repeats itself.
Time and history for the Greeks represented a realm from which one longed to be delivered. Oscar Cullmann has pointed out that such an understanding of history profoundly affects one’s understanding of redemption: “For the Greeks, the idea that redemption is to take place through divine action in the course of events in time is impossible. Redemption in Hellenism can consist only in the fact that we are transferred from existence in this world, an existence bound to the circular course of time, into that Beyond which is removed from time and is already and always available” (Christ and Time, Westminster, 1950).
A second view of history that we must reject is that of the atheistic existentialists for whom history is totally without meaning. These people can find no significant pattern in history, no movement toward a goal, only a meaningless succession of events. One is left with what would appear to be sheer individualism: each person must try to find his own meaning in life by making significant decisions. History as a whole is devoid of meaning. This view of history is also incompatible with the Christian view. Christianity does see meaning in history without denying the importance of individual decision.
Let us examine several of the main features of a Christian interpretation of history.
God discloses his purposes in history. This is true primarily of what is commonly called “sacred” history, which I prefer to call “redemptive” history: the history of God’s redemption of his people through Jesus Christ. This redemption is rooted in Old Testament promises, types, and ceremonies. It is fulfilled in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ; it will be consummated in the new heavens and new earth that are still to come. This redemption has a historical dimension, as it involves the history of mankind (at its beginning), the history of a nation (Israel), the history of a person (Jesus of Nazareth), and the history of a movement (the beginning and early years of the New Testament church). These histories unveil or disclose God’s redeeming purpose for mankind.
The events in this “redemptive history” revealed God before there was a completed Bible. One could even say that God revealed himself to man primarily through historical events—for example, the Exodus, the crossing of the Jordan, the return from captivity, the birth of Jesus Christ, the resurrection of Christ, and the outpouring of the Spirit. But these events need to be interpreted before their revelatory message can be understood. The Bible, therefore, is both the inspired record of these events and the inspired interpretation of the divinely intended meaning of the events. Thus it is that only as the event of the Exodus is interpreted by the writers of the Old Testament is it understood to be a revelation of the redemptive power and love of Israel’s God.
But we have looked so far only at the “redemptive history” found in the Bible; however, since “redemptive history” is the key to the meaning of all history (because it is at the center of God’s dealings with man), and since all of history is under God’s control and direction, we may say that all of history is a revelation of God. This is not to say that history is always crystal clear in its message. Truth is often on the scaffold, and wrong is often on the throne. Nevertheless, we believe history does reveal God and his purposes.
That god is in control of history is clearly taught in Scripture. Old Testament writers affirmed that God’s kingdom rules over all (Ps. 103:19), even over the kingdoms of the nations (2 Chron. 20:6), and he turns the heart of the king wherever he wishes (Prov. 21:1). New Testament writers tell us that God accomplishes all things according to the counsel of his will (Eph. 1:11), and that he has determined the times set for the nations of the earth and the exact places where they should live (Acts 17:26).
That God is in control of history does not mean he manipulates people like puppets or robots; man’s “freedom” to make his own decisions and his responsibility for those decisions are at all times maintained. What it does mean is that God overrules even the evil deeds of men so as to make them serve his purpose.
An outstanding Old Testament illustration of this is found in the story of Joseph, who, after his brothers had sold him into slavery, became the chief ruler of Egypt under Pharaoh, and was thus instrumental in preserving many, including his own family, from famine. The words with which Joseph addressed his brothers after his father’s death underscore God’s sovereign lordship over history: “As for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today” (Gen. 50:20).
The supreme New Testament illustration of God’s sovereign control over history is, of course, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Though unquestionably the most wicked deed in history, even this terrible crime was completely under God’s control: “For truly in this city there were gathered together against thy holy servant Jesus, whom thou didst anoint, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever thy hand and thy plan had predestined to take place” (Acts 4:27–28). Precisely because of God’s control, the most accursed deed in history became the heart of God’s redemptive plan and the supreme source of blessing to mankind.
All of history, therefore, fulfills the sovereign purposes of God. Nations rise and fall in accordance with God’s will; he uses them as he pleases and overrules their plans. He does the same thing with individuals.
Christ’s first coming was the single most important event of human history. His coming, therefore, had decisive significance for all subsequent history, even for all preceding history. The Bible teaches us to see human history as completely dominated by Jesus Christ. History is the sphere of God’s redemption; in it he triumphs over man’s sin through Christ and once again reconciles the world to himself (2 Cor. 5:19). Through Christ God has once and for all won the victory over death (1 Cor. 15:21–22), Satan (John 12:31), and all hostile power (Col. 2:15).
Christ’s centrality in history is symbolically depicted in the fifth chapter of the Book of the Revelation: only the Lamb is deemed worthy to take the scroll and to break its seven seals—which represents not only the interpretation of history, but the execution of the events of history.
Christ has brought in the age of the kingdom of God. The world is no longer the same since he came: an electrifying change has taken place, and unless we recognize this change, we do not really understand the meaning of history.
No biblical writer laid so much stress on the fact that Christ ushered us into a new age as did the Apostle Paul. In Colossians 1:13 he says God “has delivered us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son,” implying that we have been delivered from the power of the old eon of sin (Gal. 1:4). In Ephesians 2:5–6, Paul teaches that God has “made us alive together with Christ, … raised us up with him, and made us sit with him in the heavenly places,” implying that we are even now by faith living in the new age. In Romans 12:2 he specifically enjoins his readers not to be “conformed to this world [or age; the Greek word is aiōn] but to be transformed by the renewal of your mind.”
The common Pauline contrast between “flesh” and “Spirit” is not so much a psychological contrast between two aspects of our being as a contrast between lifestyles that belong to two power spheres, or to two eons: the old and the new. There is a similar contrast between “old man” and “new man” in Paul’s writings. “Old man” refers to the old age or eon in which man is a slave to sin, whereas “new man” designates the new age or eon in which man is liberated from the slavery of sin and is free to live to the praise of God. The New Testament believer has been transferred from the old age of sin into the new age of Christian freedom (cf. the author’s The Christian Looks at Himself, Eerdmans, 1977).
History’s goal is new heavens and new earth. Though Christ has ushered in the new age, its final consummation is still future. The Bible therefore sees history as directed toward a divinely ordained goal. That history has a goal is not an idea that is unique to the Hebrew prophets; it is also taught in the New Testament. What Old Testament writers depicted as one movement was seen by New Testament writers as involving two stages: a present messianic age and an age that was future, with the first coming of Christ to be followed by a second coming. The established kingdom of God has not yet come to its final consummation, and though many Old Testament prophecies have been fulfilled, many await fulfillment.
The New Testament believer, therefore, is aware that all history is moving toward this final consummation that will include the second coming of Christ, the general resurrection, the day of judgment, and new heavens and new earth.
In order to understand the meaning of history fully, therefore, we must see God’s redemption in cosmic dimensions. Since the expression “heaven and earth” is a biblical description of the entire cosmos, we may say that the goal of redemption is nothing less than the renewal of the cosmos, or our “universe.” Because man’s fall into sin affected all of creation (Gen. 3:17–18; Rom. 8:19–23), redemption from sin must also involve the totality of God’s creation.
This cosmic dimension of redemption is clearly taught in such passages as Ephesians 1:9–10 and Colossians 1:19–20. According to Romans 8:21, nothing short of the total deliverance of all creation from its “bondage to decay” will satisfy the redemptive purposes of God.
What are some of the implications of this interpretation of history for our understanding of the world in which we live?
1. The characteristic activity of the present age is missions. Since Christ has indeed inaugurated the kingdom of God and given us the Great Commission, the great task of the church today is to bring the gospel to every creature. Christ himself said, “This gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations; and then the end will come” (Matt. 24:14). According to 2 Peter 3:9, one reason why Christ has not yet returned is that the Lord is patient with men, “not wishing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” These considerations all add up to one thing: the missionary activity of the church is the characteristic activity of this age between Christ’s first and second coming.
2. We live in a continuing tension between the already and the not yet. The New Testament believer lives in the last days, but the last day has not yet arrived; he is in the new age, but the final age is not yet here. Though he enjoys the “powers of the age to come,” he is not yet free from sin, suffering, and death. Though he has the first fruits of the Spirit, he groans inwardly as he waits for his final redemption.
This tension gives the present age its unique flavor. The Christian today enjoys blessings the Old Testament believer never knew; he has a far richer understanding of God’s redemptive plan. But the Christian is not yet at the end of the road. Though he is now a child of God, it does not yet appear what he shall be (1 John 3:2). Though he knows he is in Christ and no one can ever pluck him out of Christ’s hands, he realizes that he has not yet laid hold of perfection and he must still daily confess his sins.
Since Christ has won the victory, we should see evidences of that victory in history and in the world around us. But since the final consummation of the victory has not yet taken place, there will continue to be much in history that we do not understand, that which does not seem to reflect the victory of Christ. Until the final day of judgment, history will continue to be marked by a certain ambiguity.
3. There are two lines of development in history. The tension described between the already and the not yet implies that alongside the growth and development of the kingdom of God in the history of the world since the coming of Christ we also see the growth and development of the “kingdom of evil.” In the parable of the tares (Matt. 13:24–30, 36–43) Jesus taught that the tares (weeds), which stand for the sons of the evil one, will keep on growing until the time of harvest, when they will finally be separated from the wheat. In other words, Satan’s kingdom will exist and grow as long as God’s kingdom grows, until the day of judgment.
Here again is the ambiguity of history: history does not reveal a simple triumph of good over evil, nor a total victory of evil over good. Evil and good continue to exist side by side. Conflict between the two continues during the present age; but since Christ has won the victory, the ultimate outcome of the conflict is never in doubt. The enemy is fighting a losing battle.
4. All our historical judgments must be provisional. Here again the ambiguity of history is implied, for we know that in the last judgment good and evil will be finally separated, and a final evaluation of all historical movements will be given. Until that time, as Jesus said, the wheat and the tares grow together. Thus all of our historical judgments on this side of the final judgment must be relative, tentative, and provisional. We can never be absolutely sure whether a specific historical event is good, evil, or—in case it partakes of both—predominantly good or predominantly evil.
We often tend to see historical movements and forces in simple terms of black and white: “the church is good; the world is bad.” In reality, things are more complicated than that. There is much that is bad in the church and there is much that is good in the “world.” Abraham Kuyper used to say, “The world is often better than we expect it to be, whereas the church is often worse than we expect it to be.” Historical events therefore must not be seen simply in terms of black and white, but rather in terms of varying shades of gray.
Yet the fact that all historical judgments are provisional does not mean that we need not make them. Even fallible judgments about the significance of historical events are better than no judgments at all. According to Hendrikus Berkhof in Christ the Meaning of History, “World history is not black or white, but it is not an even grey either. The eye of faith recognizes dark grey and light grey, and it knows that these gradual differences originate in differences of principle.”
5. The Christian understanding of history is basically optimistic. The Christian believes that God is in control of history and that Christ has won the victory over the powers of evil. The ultimate outcome of things, therefore, is bound to be not bad but good; God’s redemptive purpose within the universe will eventually be realized, and “though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet.”
Unfortunately, however, Christians are often unduly pessimistic about the present age. Many Christians tend to lay the emphasis on the evil they still find in the world rather than on the evidence of Christ’s rule. Their motto seems to be, Why paint the ship when it’s sinking? Such a view of history does not do justice either to the present rule of God or to the victory of Christ; it is therefore a denial of an essential aspect of the Christian faith.
Though the Christian is realistic enough to recognize the presence of evil in the world and the presence of sin in the hearts of men, he is still basically an optimist. He believes that God is on the throne and that he is working out his purposes in history. Just as the Christian must firmly believe that all things are working together for good in his life, despite appearances to the contrary, so must he also believe that history is moving toward God’s goal, even though world events often seem contrary to God’s will. History does indeed have meaning, and that meaning is ultimately good.
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.
