A New Religion Handbook

Understanding the New Religions, edited by Jacob Needleman and George Baker (Seabury, 1978, 314 pp., $17.50 hb, $8.95 pb), is reviewed by Erling Jorstand, professor of history and American studies, Saint Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota.

In all the discussion today about cults, sects, Asian religions, and new consciousness, many questions arise. Are these really a cohesive movement? Are they merely a fad, or are they a trend, signaling some profound transformation of religion in America? The answer to these questions from the editors and 26 contributors to this work is a resounding yes, they are a cohesive movement; no, they are not a fad; yes, they may well be a harbinger of things to come, although that is not certain.

This book grew out of a national conference on the study of the new religions held in Berkeley, California in 1977. The topics covered, often by some of the best-known American scholars, discuss the history, nature and significance, and phenomenology of these new religions. At no one point do the contributors attempt a straight-out definition of “new religion”; the reader must piece that together from a many-sided examination. However, Barbara Hargrove comes very close to a working definition, asserting that, first, these are “new,” that is, unusual and exotic, at least on the American scene. They are usually eclectic, “borrowing from a wide variety of traditions into a common theme.” Second, they are unexpected, signifying a change of direction, reversing the present trends, and moving toward something new. To Hargrove this is all the more surprising in the 1970s when so many pundits had surrendered to secularization. Third, all new religions contain familiar elements, but “the total package” is unique, addressing different issues than the traditional communities of faith.

The need for such a study, says Jacob Needleman, is because in the 1960s the public definition of “religious” expanded so greatly as to cause considerable confusion to critics and friends alike. Religious studies scholars found themselves besieged for information about the new religions from concerned individuals “from all around the world.” As the trend expanded in the seventies, close observers agreed that it signified “one crucial aspect of the profound cultural change” now sweeping America. Hence, we have this book, a very carefully planned and thoughtfully executed work, to provide as much scholarly insight and analysis (but not prescription) as possible.

What the work suggests is that instead of galloping secularization, growing numbers of Americans were alienated from their work, bored with traditional communities of faith, yet honestly asking: What is the meaning of life? Old answers no longer sufficed and the lure of these new religions was proving irresistible to them.

This book is submitted to meet the demands for scholarly understanding. It begins with a discussion of the history of Asian religions in America, by Sydney E. Ahlstrom, with comments and criticisms by three respondents. Several interpretive essays follow, including case studies of the Unification Church, and speculative essays by Walter Capps, Harvey Cox, and Langdon Gilkey on what this phenomenon means. To this reviewer, the most helpful, if disturbing, essay is that by the unquenchable leader for new religious thought, Theodore Roszak. Not rehashing older material, he announces the death of “stern, secular humanism” and opts in our posttechnological, postsecular city pilgrimage for the pursuit of ecstasy. What has obstructed this quest is confusing the ecclesiastical with the sacred, divorcing ethics from ecstasy, and gullibility for the latest fad in gurus, shamans, and other imported swamis. Deep within our natures, Roszak argues, reside gods of liberation, joy, and communal care; these alone can save us.

The third part of the book, phenomenology, is a heavily academic analysis of the language, psychology, and research methodology involved in studying the new religions. This section is more a guide for scholars than a description of the movement. It includes essays on a variety of minority groups. One monograph on a fundamentalist commune (anonymous), by James Richardson and associates, is a model of scholarship.

A very helpful feature is an extensive bibliography at the end of each essay. Those, such as this reviewer, who feel uneasy with the rapid pace and sweeping generalizations of the book, have in these bibliographies the sources by which to pursue topics of special interest.

The book is intended, without apology, for the academic community and is something of a pioneering landmark. It stakes out the territory where its contributors believe ongoing research must move. As a guide to where we are now, the reader will have to do his or her own sorting out for in-depth investigation. It is, in responsible and scholarly terms, a constructive reply to those who have argued (criticially or supportively) that the new religions are so experiential they are ineffable, beyond words and cognitive understanding. Thus it leads us directly to those areas where hard, careful analysis needs to be done.

Significant New Reprints

The reprinting of books, especially older ones, occasions some discussion because it can mean many things, not all of them good. If it meant laziness on the part of this generation to do the work necessary to produce a classic or if it were an escape to the good old days, then it would be bad. But properly understood, these reissues could display our willingness to overcome a chronological snobbery and to learn from the past by listening to those who have gone before us; then it is all to the good.

In any event, an increasing number of publishing houses are turning in this direction. The Granary, 150 Ottley Drive, NE, Atlanta, Georgia, is offering a fine selection of sought-after classics. Philip Doddridge’s An Exposition of the Gospels (2 vols.) begins the list. It is his much used The Family Expositor of 1739–56 taken from the renamed 1840 edition, to which a life of Doddridge by Andrew Kippis is added. The 1833 Better Covenant, practically considered from Hebrews 8:6, 10–12; with a supplement on Philippians 2:12–13, by Francis Goode is also now available. Exposition of Psalm 119 (1827) by Charles Bridges, a book that went through 19 editions in less than 20 years, and Arthur Pridham’s Notes and Reflections on the Epistle to the Romans (1864), are also in print again, as are Samuel Cox’s Commentary on the Book of Job (1880) and J. Denham Smith’s Christ Unveiled; or Thoughts on the Tabernacle (1889). This is all choice material.

The Primitive Baptist Library, 107 Elm Lane, Streamwood, Illinois, is ferreting out extremely rare theological classics and republishing or otherwise making them available. Two such are The Autobiography of Elder Wilson Thompson: His Life, Travels, and Ministerial Labors (1867), and Memoirs of the Principal Hymn-Writers and Compilers of the 17–19th Centuries (5th ed., 1882) by John Gadsby. The former is the thrilling story of a Midwest frontier Baptist preacher, filled with drama and history. The latter contains extremely interesting and virtually unknown facts about hymnwriters the likes of Thomas Ken (“Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow”), A. M. Top-lady (“Christ, Whose Glory Fills the Skies”), and dozens more. I could hardly put this one down.

Logos International, Plainfield, New Jersey, has made available John Wesley’s messages on the Sermon on the Mount in Happiness Unlimited: John Wesley’s Comments on the Sermon on the Mount, adapted by C. G. Weakley. These 13 sermons, all written before 1750, are introduced by Weakley and slightly revised in modern English style. Purists might object to this, but none of Wesley’s gold has become dimmed in the process.

Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, continues its excellent work in the “Twin Brooks Series” with R. C. Trench’s Studies in the Gospels (3rd rev. ed., 1874); J. B. Mayor’s The Epistles of Jude and II Peter (1907); and Robert Dick Wilson’s Studies in the Book of Daniel (2 vols. in one, 1917). Trench’s work is characteristically lucid; Mayor’s is a must, being in my judgment the best commentary on the Greek text available in English on Jude and II Peter; and Wilson’s, although dated, is still of great value. One should start a study of Daniel with Wilson; but don’t stop there. In Baker’s “Great Summit Books” series, we have Abraham Kuyper’s To Be Near to God (1925). This is a series of 110 devotional meditations stressing that “creedal confessions without drinking from the Living Fountain run dry in barren orthodoxy, and spiritual emotion without clear confessional standards can sink one in a bog of sickly mysticism.”

The Banner of Truth Trust, Box 621, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, continues to add significant books with Charles Hodge’s The Way of Life: A Guide to Christian Belief and Experience (1841), a book that has long been unavailable. It is Hodge at a level anyone can understand.

Fleming H. Revell, Old Tappan, New Jersey, in its “Evangelical Masterworks” series offers F. B. Meyer’s The Directory of the Devout Life: Meditations on the Sermon on the Mount (1904), and G. Campbell Morgan’s Great Chapters of the Bible (1935), both devotional Bible exposition at its best. These books steer clear of controversy and concentrate on being helpful.

Harper and Row, 1700 Montgomery Street, San Francisco, California, has made available again John A. Broadus’s On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons (1870). This work is, of course, the standard and ably revised, now for the fourth time by Vernon L. Stanfield, will probably remain such.

Harold Shaw Publishers, 388 Gundersen Drive, Wheaton, Illinois, offers three highly praised Tom Howard gems in reprint paperback: Christ the Tiger (1967); Chance or the Dance: A Critique of Modern Secularism (1969, previously An Antique Drum); and Hallowed Be This House (1976, previously Splendor in the Ordinary). Howard’s flowing prose ought not to be lost and Shaw is to be thanked for keeping it alive.

Fortress Press, Philadelphia, has reissued Samuel Sandmel’s The Genius of Paul (1958). It is a major work of New Testament scholarship that argues Paul can only be understood in a Hellenistic-Jewish context.

Again, reprinting books is not necessarily good. However, if only such books as these are reprinted, not even the most vocal objector could complain. Here is material that ought never to be forgotten, and these publishers are to be thanked for making these fine books a part of our own time, just as they were a part of past generations.

“Be Wid Us, Jesus”

Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South, by Albert J. Raboteau (Oxford, 382 pp., $14.95), is reviewed by Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., associate professor of Afro-American studies, San Diego State University, San Diego, California.

For years historians and sociologists have sought to explain how black slaves in America kept themselves physically and emotionally intact while in bondage. The role of Christianity has been occasionally noted, but a full appreciation of evangelical Protestantism’s impact on the Slave Religion, written by a black Catholic historian, is a fascinating catalog of the slaves’ religious experiences. While concentrating on Christianity, it also includes well balanced generalizations on African religious traditions and the degree to which they were melded into black Christian worship patterns (as distinct from doctrine or theology), as well as the way the practice of conjuring stood alongside Christian belief in the slave communities.

Raboteau chronicles the experience of “a people whose lives were marked by their trust in the Lord.” This trust was not simply in a heavenly life free of bondage; many slave Christians were confident that their cruel enslavement was contrary to God’s will and that he would accomplish their emancipation on earth. The unscriptural treatment often suffered at the hands of supposedly Christian masters also led bondsmen to conclude that heaven would not be overly populated by slaveholders. Numerous southern slaves were subordinate members of interracial Baptist and Methodist congregations. The experience of one who was administered the sacraments by the same white deacon who two hours later flogged him for not having proper permission to attend services only dramatized the perversion of a Christlike life that slaves so often saw. White preaching to slaves so commonly emphasized the “slaves, obey your masters” theme and promised only a segregated heaven, that many bondsmen were convinced that masters used a “white man’s Bible,” while somewhere else God’s true written Word lay hidden.

Had the only source of the gospel been slave owners or proslavery plantation missionaries, Christianization of the slave population would never have attained the dimensions it did. The numerical growth of black believers resulted from two Spirit-empowered sources: the wave of revivalistic Awakenings from the 1740s through the 1820s, and the calling of black exhorters and preachers. Baptist and Methodist preachers emphasized the primacy of a born-again conversion experience, and one slave spoke for thousands when he testified, “This is my religion … ‘Repent, believe, and be baptized, and you shall be saved.’ ” White and black together were saved in camp and church meetings. Spirit-filled black exhorters, often illiterate, preached to and converted members of both races, just as did white exhorters. But genuine interracial Christian fellowship proved elusive. From the beginning, separate black congregations formed; some were ministered to by white preachers, but mostly they were ministered to by members of their own race. The history of the black church thus has its roots in the Great Awakening. These first all-black Baptist congregations were founded in the 1770s in South Carolina and Georgia, 40 years before the African Methodist Church became the first organized denomination. They suffered periodic suppression, especially as whites perceived that Christianity could inspire slave revolt as well as encourage slave submission. But with or without church buildings, a licensed clergy, or white permission, evangelical Protestantism spread through the slave cabins, where the slave preacher rose to become one of the most important members of the plantation community, and spirituals became the most meaningful expression of that community’s faith.

To find fault with a book as interesting and informative as this is almost to quibble. One might mention only that Raboteau should have noted the scriptural basis of the slaves’ faith, for in seeking to be reborn through Christ they had captured the fundamental center of the New Testament redemption message. The slaves were indeed “Bible Christians,” and this faith, along with a sense of community and kinship that transcended biological ties, kept them whole during the long nightmare of slavery. What Corrie ten Boom discovered in the concentration camps, black slaves knew in the nineteenth-century South, as they sang in one of their spirituals, “He have been wid us, Jesus, He still wid us, Jesus, He will be wid us, Jesus, Be wid us to the end.”

SAMUEL SANDMEL, 68, noted Reform Jewish theologian and author, the first Jewish scholar to publish a study of the New Testament; November 4 in Cincinnati, Ohio, after a long illness.

WELLINGTON MULWA, 61, bishop since 1970 of Kenya’s Africa Inland Church; begun in 1895 by the Africa Inland Mission, the 2,000-congregation, 500,000-member body is Kenya’s largest Protestant church; November 11, in Nairobi, from complications resulting from pneumonia.

The Southern Baptist Convention is speeding after a goal of presenting the gospel to everyone on earth by the year 2000. But moving faster up the denominational agenda has been the issue of biblical inerrancy. In recent months, the nation’s largest Protestant body has been almost hamstrung by it.

The issue has been building since the denomination’s national convention last June in Houston, where a group of Baptists vigorously campaigned to elect a proinerrancy SBC president, Adrian Rogers of Memphis, Tennessee. Of the 34 Baptist state conventions held during the past two months, at least 10 were affected directly or indirectly by the conservatives versus liberals debate over Scripture.

In Georgia, conservatives (meaning in this context those who advocate full biblical inerrancy and most often the verbal plenary inspiration method) failed, at least for the time being, in their attempt to remove Jack Harwell as editor of the Christian Index, the official publication of the Georgia Baptist Convention. At issue was a letter written by Harwell five years ago in answer to an inquirer, in which he said Adam and Eve represented mankind and womankind, not one historic man and one woman.

The Dodge County Baptist Association, representing 38 churches, had voted at its annual meeting for Harwell’s dismissal because of his “lack of faith in the entire Bible as the infallible word of God.” Conservatives then had organized three meetings across the state, prior to the state convention, in which they encouraged churches to vote to dismiss Harwell.

Publicizing and promoting this effort was William Powell, editor of the Southern Baptist Journal of the Baptist Faith and Message Fellowship (an organization formed in 1973 to promote inerrancy and expose liberalism in Southern Baptist schools).

Prior to the state meeting, the convention’s executive committee had voted to request a meeting between its own administration committee and the Christian Index board of directors. These groups would consider the charges against Harwell, and then report back to the executive committee sometime this month.

This action was presented to delegates “as a matter of information.” They then approved a resolution reaffirming the Baptist Faith and Message Statement. Drafted in 1925 and revised by the SBC in 1968, the statement says Scripture has “truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter.”

Then W. Henry Fields, Christian Index board chairman, told the delegates that Harwell repeatedly had affirmed loyalty to the Faith statement. He asked the convention for a vote of confidence for Harwell so that the executive committee would “know the sentiments of the messengers.”

By a 4-to-1 margin, the 3,000 state convention delegates voted to express their confidence in Harwell’s “personal and professional integrity.”

Twice during later sessions Powell and other proinerrancy conservatives tried to raise their request for Harwell’s removal, but each time they were defeated. In addition, the delegates voted to ask Powell to change the name of his publication from the Southern Baptist Journal, saying it misleadingly appeared to be an official publication of the church. He said he would not do so.

In Texas, the inerrancy controversy focused upon Baylor University and the use by its religion department of the textbook, People of the Covenant. Faculty member H. J. Flanders found his position as chairman-elect of the department in jeopardy after Baylor trustee Jimmy Draper charged that the book presents Adam and Eve as symbolic figures and the Jonah story as a parable. Flanders had coauthored the book 17 years ago, along with two Furman University religion professors; it is used as a primary text for the Baptist school’s freshmen religious courses.

Draper, pastor of the Euless First Baptist Church, told the Baptist Press he had received numerous complaints that the book is “liberal, built on the premise that the Bible is man’s attempt to explain God, and does not even suggest that it is God’s revelation of Himself.” His problem with the book, now being used in 24 Baptist schools and more than 70 overall, is that it “presents no alternative to the literary study of Scripture.” Draper admitted that his written critique of the book, which he presented to the trustees, set off a series of meetings between the Baylor trustees, administration, and religion department faculty (both Draper and Flanders were included).

Draper denied having a vendetta against Flanders. He acknowledged that Flanders disagreed with his critique of the book, but says Flanders has a “great respect of the word of God” and a “positive commitment” to Christ.

Aware of the Baylor debate, delegates preparing for the annual session of the Baptist General Convention of Texas expected an inerrancy fight as heated as the one that occurred during the national convention in Houston. Primarily because of the religion department’s own initiatives, however, the volatile issue was defused before the state meeting.

Through the Baylor administration, the religion department asked the trustees’ academic affairs committee for counsel in the textbook controversy. The department also opened itself to a complete study by the trustees committee of its entire teaching program. It asked for suggestions that “would help it to more nearly meet guidelines of the board of trustees as representatives of Texas Baptists.”

Finally, the department submitted what seemed to be a conservative statement of faith, with the signatures of all department members except one who was out of town. The statement affirmed Flanders as a “true spokesman for the Baptist faith,” while declaring “full sympathy with the Baptist Faith and Message Statement.”

Critics noted that the statement was submitted just three days before the state convention, and called it a case of the faculty telling Baptists exactly what they wanted to hear, while not necessarily changing their own positions. Flanders’s view that Adam and Eve are symbolic figures would be regarded as liberal by most Baptists, they said.

Apparently, the same Baptist Faith and Message statement can be affirmed by persons having very different interpretations of inerrancy and inspiration of Scripture. At least one Baylor religion professor, said a Baptist theologian, adopts the existential view of inspiration. In this view, Scripture becomes the Word of God only when it speaks to its reader. For the agnostic who reads Scripture and is unmoved, Scripture is not the Word of God. Most Baptists would find this view unacceptable and liberal, he said.

The Houston convention had reaffirmed the Faith statement after first agreeing that it meant that the original manuscripts are scientifically, doctrinally, historically, and philosophically without error. Interestingly, the Texas state convention also reaffirmed the Faith statement. But it rejected an amendment to have this fuller definition included. (The Northwest Convention, composed of Oregon and Washington, reaffirmed the Faith statement as approved by the national convention.)

Within this atmosphere, SBC president Rogers has stood firm against a “witch hunt.” Rather than create a special committee to investigate liberalism, he said, Baptists should work through present systems, such as trustee boards.

So far, Baptist observers point out, the inerrancy controversy has circulated mostly at the seminary and church hierarchy level. No one denies that disagreements exist among Baptists on the matter of biblical interpretation. Few persons dispute the authority of Scripture. But whether so many views of scriptural interpretation can fall under the single umbrella of “historic Baptist beliefs” remains the question.

Roman Catholicism

Catholic Bishops: No Generics Yet

At one point in the liturgy of the mass, Roman Catholic priests say that Christ died “for all men.” To some Catholics, however, that is a sexist remark, and they have been trying to get it changed to something more inclusive. Under such prodding, the nation’s Catholic bishops instructed their liturgical specialists to study the matter and offer advice. The specialists responded with a two-part proposal: delete “men,” making the sentence say simply that Christ died “for all,” and permit priests at their discretion to substitute inclusivist language elsewhere in liturgical prayers where “the generic term ‘man’ or its equivalent” is found.

Both parts of the proposal, though, failed to get the necessary two-thirds approval at the semiannual meeting of the bishops last month in Washington, D.C.

Representatives of women’s groups in the church said they were “dismayed” by the bishops’ “lack of concern,” and some women picketed the hotel where the prelates were meeting.

Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee, chairman of the bishops’ committee on liturgy, explained that many bishops favored the change but wanted to wait and include it with other changes that may be recommended when all the language of the mass is overhauled. He acknowledged that some priests might defy church authority and use inclusivist language in their services anyway.

In other actions, the bishops in a resolution lavished praise on the Pope for his recent visit, but 27 prelates proposed an amendment urging that “opportunities for dialogue” be scheduled during future papal visits. An author of the amendment acknowledged later that it was aimed at papal consideration of the problems many Catholics have in following the strict teachings of the church on such issues as contraception and divorce. Cardinal John Cody of Chicago bitterly attacked the measure, saying the church’s leaders need to be forceful in upholding the teachings of the church. “We ought to be very careful in talking about dialogue,” he said. The amendment was referred to a committee for study (and almost certain death).

The bishops also approved a major position paper that contends racism still abounds in American society. It commits the church and its institutions to strong affirmative action policies and equal opportunity programs.

A survey released at the meeting shows that there has been a serious decline in candidates for the priesthood and that many men entering seminary in their mid-20s and early 30s have inadequate previous religious training. Surprisingly, 13 percent (634) of the students in U.S. graduate-level Catholic seminaries are women. Barred from the priesthood, they and 327 male students not seeking ordination plan to pursue other church vocations. Altogether, there are 3,914 candidates for the priesthood in the seminaries. Thirty-six women work as seminary administrators and 74 as seminary professors, according to the survey.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Cuba

The Church Finds Its Role in a Socialist State

Participants at the Second Latin American Congress on Evangelization (Dec. 7 issue, p. 44) listened with special interest to the five representatives from Cuba. They acknowledged that a special information sharing session conducted by the five laid to rest a number of rumors that had been circulating. The Cubans represented Baptists (three), the church launched by the West Indies Mission (now Worldteam), and the Salvation Army.

The Cubans’ spokesman, Obed Gorrín, a professor at the Los Pinos Nuevos Evangelical Seminary (formerly WIM), described the church on the eve of the 1959 revolution as a young one—less than 70 years old. Although begun by Cubans who had returned after emigrating to the United States, the church had become dependent on mission agencies economically, administratively, and ideologically, said Gorrín. It was growing numerically, especially the Pentecostal wing, but it was largely divorced from Spanish culture.

The church enjoyed a honeymoon relationship with the new regime ushered in by the revolution—that is, until Fidel Castro in 1961 declared his government Marxist. This sent the church into shock, said Gorrín, and rapid exodus of most of the church leadership followed; many members either emigrated or deserted the church. Those who remained were disoriented and afraid. They turned to the church primarily as a shelter, conserving the familiar, and shutting out the pervasive change being engineered in every other sector of life, such as the system of universal work, participatory education, and socialized medicine.

Church members who had emigrated considered those who remained to be collaborators. Those who remained considered the exiles traitors. They saw themselves as heroes, or perhaps martyrs, since some of them, too, had previously laid plans for escape.

During the 1960s, perceptions changed. Christians began seeing themselves simply as witnesses—and acknowledged that the exiles, too, were bearing a valid witness. (Recently, 16 exiled pastors met in Cuba with church leaders there, facilitating a process of mutual reconciliation.) The church mentally began to unpack its bags and adjust to the new society.

By 1969 the transition had substantially been made. The church had restructured itself and established complete economic independence. A younger generation that took the revolution matter-of-factly was developing its witness with enthusiasm, moving out into society and confronting secularism. As the government saw the church move from a negative to a constructive interaction, it looked on the church with more favor, attempting to improve relationships, Gorrín said.

The Cubans say they enjoy freedom to conduct every kind of service on their church premises—including evangelistic meetings. Pastors also may conduct funerals elsewhere. Six seminaries operate in the churches (an annual women’s society offering fully supports the two Baptist seminaries). There are five campsites operated year around. There are no curbs on personal witness.

Mass evangelistic campaigns and Christian radio programs are banned in Castro’s Cuba. But the believers say they believe that evangelism that works within, rather than invades, the new society is more effective anyway. They stress such themes as “man shall not live by bread alone,” pointing out those human problems experienced under all social systems, insisting that the gospel provides solutions, and that Jesus Christ imparts abundant life.

They note a pinch on the economic side, however. No money may be sent out of Cuba, eliminating the possibility of financing foreign missionary efforts.

Partly because of the U.S. embargo of Cuba, building materials and paper are scarce, making it difficult to build new churches, repair existing ones, or publish church materials. But this squeeze is gradually lessening.

The Cuban constitution, promulgated in 1976, guarantees citizens the right to practice their religious faith. This, the congress participants acknowledged, is sometimes violated at the petty official level. But when infringements are appealed, redress is obtained. Gorrín related how his wife, a university instructor, had been removed from her post because of her religious beliefs. On appeal she not only was reinstated, but received compensatory, retroactive pay.

Although committed to remain in Cuba, the Cuban participants were as eager to learn about the outside Latin American church as were other participants curious about them. One observer watching the Cubans at the Christian literature exhibits said they reminded him of children in a toy store.

HARRY GENET

The Soviet Union

Yakunin among Victims of Pre-Olympic Crackdown

The following report was compiled primarily from data gathered by the Society for the Study of Religion under Communism, the United States (Wheaton, Ill.) associate of Keston College in England.

Exiled Soviet pastor Georgi Vins said recently that Soviet authorities are preparing “in their own way” for the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. Apparently they aren’t doing pushups and running wind sprints.

Instead, Soviet authorities are using their muscle against religious dissidents and human rights activists. In a continuing campaign, which began in earnest last spring, human rights documents and documents showing religious repression have been swept up in a series of searches of the homes of leading activists and their associates. Leaders of Orthodox, independent Baptist, and Adventist groups, and other religious leaders, have been arrested and subjected to house searches.

The most repressive measures have been aimed at two Orthodox activist groups, in what may be the harshest crackdown on dissidents since 1978, and an attempt at “cleaning up” potential trouble spots before the summer Olympic games.

On November 1, Soviet police arrested Father Gleb Yakunin, the leading Orthodox religious rights activist. The same day, police arrested Tatyana Velikanova, a member of the Moscow Helsinki Monitoring Group. Police also conducted house searches of five workers in the Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights.

Yakunin has been active in the religious freedom movement since 1965, and re-recently he was charged with “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” under Article No. 70 of the Russia Criminal code. Soviet KGB agents had seized CCDBR documents and archives from Yakunin’s apartment during a September 28 search.

The CCDBR has sent out of the Soviet Union documents from or about Orthodox, Baptists, Pentecostals, Catholics, Adventists, and Jews, and over 1,000 pages of documentation have been published in the West. Yakunin and another Russian Orthodox activist, Lev Regelson, whose house was also searched, had been threatened with arrest since a press campaign began against them last year.

The search of Yakunin’s apartment was thought to be connected with the case of Vladimer Poresh. The Leningrad representative of Christian Seminar, a five-year-old, Moscow-based study group of young intellectuals, Poresh was arrested August 1. CCDBR members frequently have appealed in support of Christian Seminar members and other groups that have been targets of repression.

The Seminar’s founder, Alexander Ogorodnikov, 29, now serving a one-year sentence for alleged “parasitism,” was in danger of having his sentence prolonged for his refusal to testify against Poresh. Another Seminar associate, Tatyana Shchipkova, from Smolensk, was arrested in September on charges of “hooliganism.” (At least 29 Seminar members have been subject to state pressure since 1976.) A case had been opened against Shchipkova six months prior, following the February 10 breakup of a routine Seminar meeting in which militia confiscated religious books.

The policing measures represent growing Soviet concerns regarding the exposure of religious repression as documented by CCDBR, and the renewed interest in religion among young intellectuals as typified by Christian Seminar.

Dimitro Dudko, an Orthodox priest who has been influential in the religious renewal among young intellectuals, also has been pressured by authorities in the recent crackdown.

Dudko’s long harassment by Soviet police has been regularly documented by the Christian Defense Committee. CCDBR volumes 7–10, published in San Francisco, California, document the Dudko harrassment by “people dressed in militia uniforms,” who checked documents of visitors to his parish, watched worshipers during church services, made baptisms difficult, and threatened Dudko.

In October, Dudko’s apartment was searched by 20 Soviet officials, and a report dated October 15 states that Dudko recently was summoned to the bishop heading the Moscow diocese, Metropolitan Yuvenali, who warned Dudko about his sermons at Grebnevo, near Moscow, which have been gathering crowds.

Independent Baptists, Adventists, and Pentecostals also have been the targets of recent repressive measures. There have been concerted attempts to curb the unofficial publication and dissemination of religious literature, independent Baptist work among Soviet young people, and the emigration movement among Pentecostals.

The present campaign against Orthodox and evangelicals may be part of a Soviet pre-Olympics plan for stilling the voices of those who might blacken the picture of religious and human rights there.

Vins, who spent eight years in Soviet labor camps, has warned that all unregistered Christians would be transported out of Moscow during the Olympics “so that Westerners cannot make contact.” (Soviet contacts indicate that such action already has been taken on a limited basis against Reform and independent Baptists.)

The head of the Russian Orthodox Church in America voiced a concern similar to Vins’s in a recent letter to U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. Reacting to the arrests of Father Yakunin and other dissidents, Metropolitan Theodosius said the Soviet actions may be “pre-figuring attempts at suppressing the voices of freedom in the USSR, during the Olympic games, since many foreigners will visit Moscow then.

“It is essential that repressed Christians receive the support of world public opinion,” he said.

World Scene

Argentinians and Chileans were shaken by the appeal of Pope John Paul II for the disclosure of the fate of thousands of missing political prisoners. This may have been because the Roman Catholic military commanders who rule the two countries did not censor press reporting of the Pope’s late October remarks, as has been their practice with other charges of human rights violations. An Argentinian industrialist, who has been promilitary and skeptical about reports of killings and torture of prisoners, told journalist Juan de Onis that the pontiff’s words “really brought the problem home to me.”

The Orinoco River Mission is merging with TEAM (The Evangelical Alliance Mission) effective January 1. ORM, which has operated in eastern Venezuela for 60 years, currently has 28 missionaries. ORM-related churches number 116, with about 4,000 baptized believers. TEAM has 84 missionaries working in western Venezuela. The TEAM-related churches number 55, with some 2,400 members.

The Latin American Council of Churches (in formation) has named its first staff personnel. Meeting in Bogota, Colombia, last August, the board of directors of CLAI appointed Gerson Meyer of Brazil as general secretary. Also named were Ann Beatriz Ferrari of Argentina as associate secretary, Mortimer Arias of Bolivia as director of evangelization, Juan Marcos Rivera of Puerto Rico as director of pastoral services, plus three regional officers. CLAI has World Council of Churches ties.

The Churches’ Council for Covenanting in England has drawn up a draft covenant for unity among five major British denominations, and expects to have a final draft ready in time for their individual summer sessions. Reportedly still at issue is the inclusion or exclusion of bishops in church structure, and recognition of women ministers. The denominations involved are the Church of England, the Methodist Church, the Churches of Christ, the United Reform Church, and the Moravian Church. Baptists, Congregationalists, and Roman Catholics withdrew from the formal unity process two years after it was begun in 1974.

The government of Transkei last month declared as illegal within its borders the World Council of Churches and the South Africa Council of Churches. These were just 2 of 34 socially activist organizations, many of them church-related, banned by this black tribal “homeland” under its Public Security Act. Transkei was proclaimed an independent nation by South Africa in 1975, but has failed to receive recognition by any country outside southern Africa.

The vice-chairman of the Namibian Council of Churches has resigned over the hiring of a SWAPO partisan onto the NCC staff. Paul G. Kauffenstein, provost of the German Evangelical Lutheran Church in South-West Africa, said he fears that employing Daniel Tjongarero will create the impression that the NCC is losing its political impartiality, adding that council officers did not approve the appointment.

About 200 missionaries have been forced to leave Indonesia in the last few months, according to the Press Service of the Swiss Church and Mission; in most cases authorities declined to renew work permits. Evangelical missions and the Roman Catholic Church are said to be most affected. The evangelicals are accused of aggressive missionary methods, while the Catholics are faulted because most key positions are held by foreigners.

The government of Taiwan has shelved its draft law on religious organizations that would have required all services to be conducted in the Mandarin Chinese language (Oct. 5 issue, p. 74). The proposed legislation was withdrawn after sharp criticism by Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian groups.

“Unbelievers trust scientific things,” a young Russian immigrant told the Slavic Gospel Association staff. “As Christian radio missionaries, you should apply this fact to your programming.” Elis challenge “clicked,” resulting in a radio series in Russian, called the Radio Academy of Science, that will be released beginning January 1. Aimed at students, teachers, scientists, and other professional people—some 25 percent of the Soviet population—the goal of the weekly half-hour program, according to SGA general director Peter Deyneka, Jr., is to “open the minds of Soviet listeners to the gospel—to make room for it in their thinking.” Each program will feature a Christian scientist, who will be interviewed or speak about his specialty, adding a testimony of his faith in Christ. Trans World Radio and Far Eastern Broadcasting Company will air the programs from short-wave transmitters located in the Caribbean, Monaco, the Philippines, and Guam.

Personalia

National Religious Broadcasters has appointed as its legal counsel Richard E. Wiley, Washington, D.C., lawyer who brings to the post three years’ experience (1974–77) as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. A long-time supporter of religious broadcasting, in 1977 he was awarded the NRB Distinguished Service Award for his contributions to religious broadcasting. He succeeds John H. Midlen, Jr., who has served on an interim basis since the death of his father, John, Sr.

Franklin Graham has been elected president of Samaritan’s Purse U.S.A. and Canada relief agency that has been without a president since the death of its founder, Bob Pierce, more than a year ago. Graham, son of the famous evangelist, promised to continue the agency’s policy of responding to immediate “people needs,” rather than funding building and long-term projects. He presently is head of World Medical Mission, which will merge next month with Samaritan’s Purse.

Princeton Theological Seminary has named a faculty member for ministry and evangelism effective September 1980: Richard Stoll Armstrong, at present an Indianapolis pastor, who has held evangelism seminars for the United Presbyterian Church and occasionally at the Princeton campus. The faculty chair in evangelism reportedly was created after numerous requests from evangelical students at the seminary, which is the largest and the oldest connected with the United Presbyterian Church.

Yugoslavia

Evangelicals Fare Better than in the Bad Old Days

In a Communist state and under difficult circumstances, an evangelical Protestant seminary is experiencing significant growth. With 50 students enrolled for classes this fall, the Matthias Flaccius Illyricus Theological School of the University of Zagreb has doubled in size since its inception in 1976. Although theological faculties in Yugoslavia have been officially separated from their respective universities since 1952, they still maintain university standards and receive appropriate recognition. The positive reputation of the three-year-old Protestant theological faculty at Zagreb has spread rapidly throughout Eastern Europe.

The school was established to train students for leadership positions in the evangelical churches of the nation. It has also tried to provide continuing theological education for active pastors and interested lay leaders. Moreover, in its statement of purpose, the school has expressed its desire to “try to reawaken the legacy of the Reformation among the Protestant communities” of the country. Fittingly, the new school was opened on Reformation Day, October 31, 1976.

As Trevor Beeson noted in Discretion and Valor, his excellent survey of religion in Eastern Europe, “Yugoslavia is the despair of tidy minds.”

Originally created as a federation of South Slavs under a king following World War I in 1918, present-day Yugoslavia emerged in 1945 when Communist partisans led by Josip Broz Tito grasped political power. Thirty-four years later, Tito still presides over a population of 22 million in an area approximately the size of Colorado, composed of six republics and two autonomous provinces, with four principal languages and two alphabets.

Moreover, religious allegiances in Yugoslavia historically are not simply matters of personal faith but also serve as badges of national identity. Thus, to be a good Slovene or Croat is to be a Roman Catholic, while most Serbs, Macedonians, and Montenegrins are members of the Serbian Orthodox Church. There are two man Islamic groups, one in Bosnia and one in Kosovo and western Macedonia.

Overall, about 40 percent of the Yugoslav population is Serbian Orthodox, about 32 percent Roman Catholic, and about 12 percent Muslim. Most of the remaining 16 percent are nonbelievers; only about 2 percent is affiliated with evangelical churches.

The fortunes of evangelical Christians in the country have improved in the last 34 years despite the handicap of national-religious allegiances and despite the advent of a Communist government in 1945. For one thing, their numbers have slowly but steadily increased; and for another, they are no longer persecuted by the various state churches. For example, the Baptists had been subjected to rather severe persecution in pre-World War II Yugoslavia, but since 1945 have enjoyed the same freedom as all other religious bodies. There are still restrictions, harassment, and occasional persecution of the evangelicals under the Tito regime, but nothing as extensive as before the war.

The Communist order has taken an ambivalent stand toward religion. All of the post-World War II constitutions (1946, 1963, 1974) have guaranteed freedom of worship and legislated separation of church and state. But, as in most Communist nations, the official party line is atheistic. It regards religion as springing from the material conditions of society and as a result of the individual’s alienation from the product of his labor. Religion will wither away when the individual’s alienation has disappeared. Meanwhile, it must be separated from the socialist state that will remove its very reason for existence. This has been the Yugoslav government’s public position since 1945.

One major problem is that although the constitution guarantees certain basic religious freedoms it also defines the church’s sole province as “religious affairs,” a field that now tends to be interpreted more and more narrowly. Thus, on the one hand, Bibles freely circulate throughout the country and new translations are being prepared in all the principal languages of the land. Church services are not monitored nearly as closely by the authorities as they are in East Germany or the Soviet Union. On the other hand, in order to be allowed to own real property and enjoy government recognition in the form of various kinds of subsidy, a religious group must be officially registered and meet only on premises officially licensed for the purpose. There is antireligious propaganda in the schools, youth organizations, and the army. It is difficult to obtain permission to build new churches, and school teachers are pressured not to attend church. Religious publications are suppressed from time to time for alleged “interference in politics,” and individual Christians are often discriminated against in the professions.

It was in this context that evangelical leaders in 1976 decided to establish a university-related theological faculty at Zagreb. The school of theology is organized with a traditional curriculum for a Western graduate theological seminary.

The school has eight faculty members (six men and two women) representing three denominations: Lutheran, Reformed, and Baptist. Two distinguished senior members are Josip Horak, who holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Zagreb and currently serves as president of the Baptist Union of Yugoslavia, and Vlado Deutsch, who recently earned a Ph.D. in systematic theology at the University of Bratislava in Czechoslovakia and is the presiding minister of the Evangelical Church (Lutheran) in Croatia. Horak is dean and Deutsch is prorector of the faculty.

Students come from all over Yugoslavia plus two from Finland. Students are expected to “give themselves over to Jesus Christ, His Word, and His Church; to lead a consistently Christian life; and to participate in the life and work of the Church.”

The new theological school has enjoyed a steady stream of noted guest lecturers from around the world. These have included Carl F. H. Henry, C. Stacey Woods, W. Stanley Mooneyham, and Gilbert W. Kirby. G. Noel Vose, principal of the Baptist Seminary in Perth, Australia, was a visiting professor last month.

What are the prospects for the future? Most Yugoslavs look Westward and yearn for the day when they can buy their own car and perhaps their own apartment or small house. Many Yugoslavs with whom I have talked in the past three years have expressed deep concern over what will happen when 87-year-old President Tito dies. In anticipation of that event, the 200,000-man Yugoslav army appears to be massed along the eastern frontier facing the Soviet Union.

Despite this uncertain political situation, the prospects for evangelicals appear fairly bright. The evangelical churches are attracting and holding young people, especially in the university towns. Baptists, Adventists, and Pentecostals especially have experienced gradual growth in recent years. Each of these groups is unhampered by nationalist loyalties that have often hindered evangelization in the past. The future is uncertain, but then uncertainty is part of the air breathed by the Yugoslav people.

ROBERT D. LINDER

“The one thing a lot of black pastors can’t understand is why white pastors don’t speak out on issues,” commented one of the nearly 500 clergymen attending the First Annual National Black Pastors Conference.

His inference was that black pastors do speak to issues—and they did little else but that during their five-day meeting last month in Detroit. The pastors adopted resolutions ranging from opposition to construction of nuclear plants to support for the American Indian.

The assembly especially plotted strategy for the 1980 presidential election; one resolution challenged black pastors to establish sophisticated voter registration and voter education programs through their churches.

A presidential candidate needs the black vote to win, one speaker said. “Our question to him should not be just ‘What have you done for us [blacks] in the past?’ but ‘What have you done for us since supper, and what will you do for us before breakfast?’ ”

For several reasons, black pastors historically have asserted political and community—not just spiritual—parish leadership. Joseph Lowery, Southern Christian Leadership Conference president, explained, “It’s because of our holistic concept of faith, which speaks to the whole man. We see no distinction between the social and personal Gospel.”

In addition, black pastors have had more education than fellow blacks and, not being obligated to a white employer, more freedom to speak for their people. They have provided more verbal guidance for their parishioners than, say, the average white Protestant pastor. One pastor at the Detroit conference said, “I believe it’s part of my duty to endorse a politician [in his church]. The fact is, politics affects everyone in the church.”

Still, the level of political and civil rights strategy planning at the Detroit conference seemed especially high.

However, the political activity in Detroit may have been more a reflection of the planning of William A. Jones, president of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, than of the present state of the black church overall. Jones had conceived the idea for the conference and presented it to his denomination, which approved and gave him staff personnel and a $20,000 conference budget.

Jones has a concern for organizing blacks on political and economic issues, and he believes black pastors as “the only truly free people” are best qualified to lead any effort at unity.

Jones said that prior to the conference, “It occurred to me that blacks in this country have never moved in concert against any economic Pharaoh.” He announced he had almost had the opportunity to use this clout that very week when a dispute with the hotel management, reportedly over use of the presidential suite, threatened continued use of the hotel. But his call to the hotel’s national headquarters and a threat of a black boycott of its hotels nationwide resolved the problem, Jones claimed.

His brother, Manhattan lawyer Clayton Jones, made what may have been the most controversial speech of the conference. Introduced as “one of the last true revolutionaries,” this Fulbright scholar and founder of the National Conference of Black Lawyers lived up to his billing.

He criticized blacks in white-controlled organizations and government-appointed positions as being compromised in their ability to speak freely for blacks and against an economic system that he says has placed blacks in a poorer economic position than they occupied during the 1930s.

He called for an end to the American capitalist economic system and asked the pastors to effect a “revolution [nonviolent] that would change the fundamental economic system of this nation.” (Afterward, Jones said that he had no economic model to replace the present system, but that it would be “something along socialistic lines.”)

Asked whether he supported his brother’s speech, William Jones stated he did, “absolutely and totally.”

On the previous night, the leader of the 1.5-million-member PNBC had preached a sermon entitled, “God the Revolutionary,” based on Isaiah 40:4–5. In that sermon he said. “The Cross spells creative conflict,” and “Our task is not to comfort the system, but to confront the system.”

While Jones had his personal views, he and PNBC staff persons invited conference speakers whose views ran the full political and spiritual gamut; an “everybody who’s anybody” of black leadership: former United Nations ambassador Andrew Young; globetrotting activist Jesse Jackson; Washington, D.C., congressman Walter Fauntroy; NAACP executive director Benjamin Hooks; National Urban League director Vernon Jordan; and Lowery. All but Jordan have served as local church pastors.

Observers question whether any one group or leader can speak inclusively for the black church. Black denominations rarely have cooperated in joint programs or conferences; in that respect, said conference spokesman George Lawrence, the Detroit gathering was significant.

Listed as cooperating denominations with the sponsoring Progressive Baptists were the African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal Zion, Church of God in Christ, Christian Methodist Episcopal, and the National Baptist Convention of America. These denominations represent from 10 to 12 million of the nation’s 25 million blacks, Lawrence claimed, noting that accurate membership statistics from black denominations are difficult to obtain.

Conference administrator H. Beecher Hicks of Metropolitan Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., had compiled a computerized listing of 12,000 pastors from those six black denominations, and all of them received letters of invitation to the conference. The listing—called the first of its kind for black pastors—will be used to contact black pastors regarding future political and economic action, said conference organizers.

Conspicuous by its absence from the list of cooperating churches was the largest of the seven major black denominations: the 6.5-million-member National Baptist Convention, U.S.A. The denomination was represented at the conference, as were 12 overall, including Seventh-day Adventists, a few Roman Catholics (there are 1 million black Catholics), Pentecostals, and mainline denominations. However, the NBCUSA leadership withheld its official blessing.

Long-time NBCUSA president Joseph Jackson, pastor of the 2,000-member Olivet Baptist Church in Chicago, could not be reached for comment. But Jackson, whose within-the-system approach to equal rights causes has angered black activists, may have felt uncomfortable with the attitude of the conference.

For the most part, Jones ran the show and nobody seemed to mind. He appointed the resolutions committee, which reworked a list of suggested resolutions that had been prepared even before the conference began (markedly similar to those passed by Jones’s denomination last summer).

A second black pastors conference was scheduled for June 1980, when the group could have an impact on, and speak to, the various presidential and other candidates for office.

In addition to the civil rights and political preachments, the pastors attended daily worship services and morning meditations. Conference organizers had invited preachers from all seven black denominations, who gave rousing sermons in vintage black preaching tradition.

Church of God in Christ pastor F. D. Washington of Brooklyn soaked two handkerchiefs with perspiration during a 45-minute exhortation. As the pastors registered approval with “Say so,” “Preach it,” and “Lift it up,” Washington told them: “Preach the Word, preach the Word …”

African Methodist Episcopal Zion bishop Alfred Danston cautioned blacks not to blame all their problems on whites and the white church: “We don’t need to blame white folks because black folks rape and kill each other.” He said, “We’ve got to teach our own people to deal with their problems within.”

In interviews, some pastors rejected an approach to solving blacks’ problems as radical as Clayton Jones’s. However, many shared his concern that something needs to be done to improve the plight of blacks in America. Several said they appreciated the information gained from conference speakers; there appeared to be as many cassette recorders as Bibles. They hadn’t traveled to Detroit on a whim: Pastor Oscar Lomax of Chicago, noting the $5 breakfast, $10 luncheon, and hotel lodging costs, said “Many of us came here at great sacrifice.”

With so many voices in the black church, the bottom line in Detroit was blackness. One pastor reminded his audience: “Even if you live to be 90, when you go to bed at night, you will be black, and when you get up in the morning, you’re still going to be black.” Another said, “The blood that unites us is stronger than the waters that divide us.”

In a roller coaster, emotional oration that had the entire audience on its feet, Jesse Jackson said, “No one will save us for us, but us.”

The National Council Of Churches

Mulling Over Criminal Justice and Church Union

Some critics of the National Council of Churches say the council is too quick to issue social statements, while giving only lip service to its theological underpinnings.

But at its semiannual meeting in New York in November, when the 266-member Governing Board of the 32-denomination agency finally approved the policy statement on the “injustice of the criminal justice system,” it was only after much debate, especially about theology.

The document says there is “ample evidence” that the U.S. criminal justice system is “unfair, inequitable, unjust … in some instances itself illegal” and “one of the most punitive in the world.” It has been misused to “suppress nonviolent political dissent … cope with social problems, and … provide cheap labor.”

The statement would preclude the death penalty and require “formal, legally prescribed demonstration that no acceptable alternative exists” to incarceration.

The motif of the theological section, about a fifth of the statement, is that “in the covenant of love that creates community, God establishes justice/righteousness as the structural norm.”

The document and its theology were warmly supported by several denominational executives on the NCC board, among them president Avery Post of the United Church of Christ, and general secretary Arie Brouwer of the Reformed Church in America.

But some board members, especially Lutherans and Orthodox, were unhappy with the theology. President James Crumley of the Lutheran Church in America said LCA representatives “have objected … all the way through the development of the paper and were really never listened to.”

William Rusch, LCA ecumenical concerns director, complained that the theological section “expresses theology in the terminology of one particular Christian tradition” rather than an ecumenical theology that “transcends these traditions.…”

“Justice is something you can expect from society; righteousness is a religious term, which has to do with redemption. It’s like mixing apples and oranges.” He said it “confuses sociology and theology.”

The effort to delete lost by roughly a 2-to-1 margin.

Later in the course of the nearly five-hour debate, UCC representative W. Sterling Cary suggested that if faithfulness to theological tradition “silences the voice of God, that is blasphemy.” He added his suspicion, to which some other board members took exception, that “some of our hesitancy is not theologically inspired.”

In the end, the document passed 72-to-17, with seven abstentions.

Later, NCC general secretary Claire Randall (United Presbyterian) said the council is “taking theology much more seriously.” She said the NCC would “review our prophecies” so that in the future, all theological approaches are adequately represented as documents are developed. A quest for an ecumenical theology, she said, should not be “least-common-denominator” theology.

The board may have a chance to test all that at its meeting next November. Then it is to act on possible constitutional changes in light of denominational reactions to two documents that project the vision of the NCC as a “communion of churches.”

“Received and transmitted” by the board, the documents are results of a two-year study by a special panel.

Introducing the report, president Paul Crow of the Disciples of Christ Council on Christian Unity said they call for “new dimensions of commitment,” movement “beyond reluctant minimal relationships” toward “maximal ecumenism” and “visible unity.”

Related to the documents are proposed changes that would amend the preamble of the NCC constitution and completely rewrite Article Two to make the NCC’s purpose “to call the churches to visible unity in Christ as a sign of the unity of humankind and to enable the churches to act responsibly together in living out that wholeness in witness and service to the world.”

Discussion of the Middle East and the potential strain of a debate over Christian-Jewish relations, was in large measure postponed until the board meeting in May.

In the meantime there is to be a series of hearings and a trip to the Middle East this winter by a special panel of NCC officers and heads of member denominations.

Concurrently, a separate Middle East policy review committee is to draft an NCC policy statement for first reading at the May meeting. Among the issues to be dealt with is formal U.S. recognition of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

TOM DORRIS

North American Scene

Holiness churches should reconsider their traditional hard-line stance against Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement, Free Methodist author Howard Snyder told about 200 scholars at the recent annual meeting of the Wesleyan Theological Society. That position has blocked a proper emphasis on spiritual gifts and a properly “charismatic” view of the church as rooted in grace and committed to mutual ministry of all members, Snyder said. His paper received a mixed, but generally favorable reaction, which might indicate a historic shift at least in scholarly attitude. Speaking in tongues can lead to immediate excommunication in such Holiness bodies as the Wesleyan Church and the Church of the Nazarene.

Elvis Presley was recalled in song, but not in spirit, in Portland, Oregon, last month. Portland area churchmen successfully protested against a much-publicized “world’s largest seance,” to have been conducted by clairvoyant Mickie Dahne at the conclusion of the “Elvis Experiment,” a benefit concert with Elvis look-alikes, sponsored by two Portland radio stations. Concert organizers cancelled the seance after the protests, and also because of alleged death threats against Dahne and themselves. In lieu of the seance, Dahne talked to the concert audience of 5,000 about “astrology, love, and the Presley death.”

Spending of city funds for Pope John Paul II’s speaker’s platform in Philadelphia violated the First Amendment, U.S. District Court Judge Raymond J. Broderick ruled last month. He ordered the city to seek $204,000 reimbursement from the Philadelphia archdiocese, which had said it would pay costs for the platform if the courts so ruled. Mayor Frank Rizzo had defended the city’s expenditure, saying the Pope was a “head of state” and the city was responsible for such visits. The American Civil Liberties Union and the American Baptist Church had contested the city’s outlay of funds.

The United Methodist Church’s highest legal agency last month upheld the appointment of practicing homosexual Paul Abels as pastor of New York City’s Washington Square Church. The nine-member judicial council declined to rule on the larger question of ordination of practicing homosexuals. United Methodist Social Principles call the practice of homosexuality “incompatible with Christian teaching.” However, the council noted UM Book of Discipline paragraphs that allow appointment of all ministerial candidates who are members in good standing of an annual conference; it said a minister can lose his or her good standing only by action of that conference.

Carl McIntire last month paid the city of Cape May, New Jersey, almost $30,000 in back taxes owed on eight properties—avoiding foreclosure. McIntire recently lost two appeals of court rulings, and has been ordered to pay five and eight years’ back taxes on his Christian Admiral Hotel and Shelton College, respectively. City officials said the controversial preacher previously had not begun to pay any of the nearly $500,000 in back taxes owed on the two structures.

History is about to repeat itself. Once again 17,000 collegians and their missionary counselors will gather at the University of Illinois at Urbana to spend Christmas week facing the challenge of the world’s three billion who do not acknowledge Jesus as Savior and Lord. They will come from all over North America for Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship’s triennial missionary convention. If history further repeats itself, probably some 10,000 of these college-age men and women will respond to the challenge to commit themselves to the magnificent task of proclaiming the gospel worldwide.

But there is one more if. If history repeats itself, many of those 10,000 will find it difficult actually to get into full-time missionary service overseas. If history repeats itself, sophomores and juniors and seniors may never find the path that leads from the soul-stirring experience in the halls of the University of Illinois to one of the world’s thousands of unreached peoples.

Whether history repeats itself depends in a large part on you and your church. Are you ready for Urbana?

IVCF does a magnificent job of challenging men and women to Christian service. But their work on campuses is only one leg of a three-legged stool. The other two legs are the mission agencies and local churches. Very few pastors understand this. Very few young people understand this. They respond to the challenge before them and the moving of the Spirit within them and assume that since God has called them, the way has been prepared. Doors will open. Funds will be provided. Their training and culture lead them to believe that a well-defined career path is at their feet, one well understood by both their home church and their pastor. Would that it were so! Future training is more extensive than they thought. The career path is fuzzy at best.

The college senior should have somewhere between six and ten years of additional training and experience before he or she can become an effective missionary. When a person is 21, six to ten years seems like an eternity. Who is going to hang in there with students if their pastors don’t? Who is going to help them hold to their commitment? When they graduate, for the most part they will leave the care of organizations like Inter-Varsity and Campus Crusade.

First, be convinced yourself of the need. There are all too many pastors who believe the day of missions is over. However, there are more Buddhists today than there were people alive at the time of Christ! Get a copy of Unreached Peoples ‘79 (David C. Cook) and look at the evidence. Of the estimated 55,000 Protestant missionaries in the world, almost 40,000 come from North America. Only 25 percent of them are involved in evangelism and church planting.

Second, understand the kind of preparation needed. It’s all too easy to send young people off to cross-cultural missionary service right out of Bible school (and far too many missions are willing to take them with little further training). Rather, preparation should call for an investment of four years of college, summers in cross-cultural exposure and training, two to three years of additional graduate training, two years of home service, and “junior missionary” status until language is mastered on the field.

Third, understand the cost. It’s higher than that of preparing for the pastorate. And it’s more difficult for students to earn money over the summer when their summers need to be spent in service elsewhere. Many churches are willing to take young people under the care of the church and to share in the cost of their education while they are preparing for the pastorate. Many more churches need to consider supporting future missionaries in those same terms.

Fourth, welcome them back from Urbana. Whether one or one hundred went from your church, they are going to come back excited about what they saw God do. They will have been exposed to some of the greatest missionary speakers of our day. They will have a backpack full of information from hundreds of agencies, and they will have a lot to share. Let them share it, not just at a morning or evening service, but in small groups, at special home meetings, in Sunday school. Let them challenge other young people who didn’t go.

Fifth, be prepared to give counsel. An unknown road lies ahead. Few of us really understood very well what was involved in pursuing our chosen profession. And there are few professions less understandable than missionary service. There are people in your church who are equipped to help young people get a better hold on their future, to hold them up in prayer, to be there when the first flush of a new commitment has disappeared. Match up your students with mature Christians.

Give them practical help. For example, provide a copy of the Mission Handbook (MARC) that lists all of the North American agencies—where they serve, what they do. Write the Association of Church Missions Committees (ACMC, 1021 W. Walnut St., Suite 202, Pasadena, CA 91106) for free information about local church missions programs. Get your Urbana “graduates” involved in Inter-Varsity’s “Urbana Onward” program, special follow-up conferences on all the major campuses. (Write to John Kyle, IVCF, 233 Langdon St., Madison, WI 53703. For a copy of the career planning book that will be used, You Can So Get There from Here, write to MARC, 919 W. Huntington Dr., Monrovia, CA 91016.)

Sixth, build your missions program around them. If you already have a strong and up front concern for missions, this will probably take care of itself. But if you are wondering how to get your church turned on and knowledgeable about what God is doing all around his world, what better way is there than to involve your own young people?

Seventh, become a part of the new thing that God is doing in the world. Christ’s church has been commissioned to carry his gospel to all peoples everywhere. When a local church looks out beyond itself, when it looks past the thousands of steeples that pinpoint the American landscape to the thousands of unreached peoples who fill the world, it finds new meaning, new reality. In a day when we struggle against a culture that beckons us to grab all the gusto we can get, and pays off in lives emptied of meaning or value, life that is worth living must be centered in commitment to something greater than ourselves. In their hearts young people know this is true and older people long to believe it again. Thousands of those young people will be changed at Urbana and will want to become part of Christ’s global cause.

Will history repeat itself? Pastors and churches can play a significant role in the answer.

Edward R. Dayton is director of the Missions Advanced Research & Communication Center (MARC) of World Vision International, Monrovia, California.

But the question remains, does the message fit the medium?

On the surface the idea of another film of the life of Jesus would seem to be a bit much. Besides the recent and very-much-touted Jesus of Nazareth, which Zeffirelli made for television, and The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, which attracted a good deal of interest some years ago by its rather spare, fierce, unsentimental picture of Jesus, one seems to recall a more or less steady stream of these things. (Didn’t they make one called The Greatest Story Ever Told? And wasn’t there a gigantic production of near Cecil B. deMille dimensions called The Bible that one remembers from one’s youth? And all those lesser productions in which one’s principal impression was of striped bathrobes and terry cloth towels and sandals?) How can anyone muster the sheer chutzpa to embark on yet another production? Perhaps there is an inexhaustible market for the commodity, like the market for books on jogging and losing weight and miracles.

Yet this film, Jesus (distributed by Warner Bros.), is better than its publicity, which fervently claims that it is “totally authentic.” Now that is an astonishing claim to make for a film whose setting is the ancient world. Very few historians, and fewer archaeologists, would claim surely, that we can approach “total authenticity” in recreating any epoch, the ancient world least of all. But my point is that the film is better than the publicity that would seem to leave itself open to the charge of sensationalism. The film itself steers as true a course as one might ever hope to see in a film on Jesus, in avoiding the soft sands of sensationalism and sentimentalism.

The wisest decision the producers made was to stick quite rigorously to the text of the Gospel of Luke; you cannot get a better script than that. The screenplay, by Barnet Fishbein, is to be commended for its fidelity to this text. Although one or two minor departures seem gratuitous—instead of mere scribes and Pharisees in one place, for example, we find “the hypocritical section of the scribes and Pharisees”—for the most part, a multitude of errors has been avoided.

The action of the film is quick and spare, since it must follow Luke’s narrative. This is exactly as it should be. This Gospel—indeed any of the Gospels—makes no attempt to give us a biography of Jesus, much less a drama. We are given as many of the bits of Jesus’ life as the Gospel writer chose for the particular pattern he wished, and no more. Here again, the producer, John Heyman, and the codirectors, Peter Sykes and John Kirsh, are to be commended for not being afraid of the sparse, selective nature of the Gospel materials. They move us along to the next incident, and the next, in obedience to Luke, calling the film a “docu-drama,” which, while we may deplore this hybrid word, does catch something of the angle and flavor of the film.

Apparently nine years of research went into the production. No effort was spared to get authentic costumes, and even authentic faces for the 5,000 extras. An “extras manager” ransacked the countryside of Israel for the sort of face they wanted for the crowd scenes, and came up with a throng, mostly of Moroccan and Yemenite people, none of whom were actors by profession, trying, they tell us, to avoid the picture postcard world of Renaissance painting.

A young English actor, Brian Deacon, was given the title role. The image he projects reminds one of those very rugged and handsome pictures of Jesus drawn in recent years by Richard Hook. Here again, artists and, a fortiori, film directors and actors, work with a terrible problem: how shall we show Jesus? The particular look of first-century Jews might not serve the special iconography of sanctity, purity, tenderness, and whatnot that Western piety has ordinarily sought. Suppose Jesus had a head full of coal-black ringlets, all tousled and matted with salt and wind and dust? It would not do, we suppose. But on the other hand, when we try to catch those qualities of sanctity and tenderness and so forth, we end up with Sallman and are in worse trouble. Brian Deacon’s face is probably a very good one, in that it is strong and handsome without being glamorous, and tender without being saccharine. They have fixed him up with what we have come to expect in Jesus, namely long straight brown hair parted more or less in the middle, and a short, uncurly brown beard. To depart from this imagery would be to make a laboriously conscious effort at iconoclasm, and would probably defeat its purpose by siphoning our attention off, making us whisper to each other, “Dear me—I don’t think I had thought of Jesus as looking like that.”

Mr. Deacon does well with the supernally difficult job of depicting Jesus. The problems must be insurmountable. There are no dramatic conventions available to an actor that are quite adequate to the task, surely. One would have to have achieved perfect charity himself in order to have any idea how Charity Incarnate might have spoken or acted. How do you say, “You have heard it said … but I say unto you,” or “This poor widow hath cast in more than they all”? And how do you arrange your face in the meantime, if you are the actor? When do you glower, if ever, and when do you decide to look foxy, or arch, or pained, or affectionate? Since the original script was not written by a dramatist, surmise plays a big part here. And you (the actor, and the director, and whoever else is in on it) are having to surmise about the most extraordinary character ever to appear on the stage of history. Can it be done at all? Or, more solemnly, ought it to be done? Who can say? After a hundred years of trying to get the gospel onto celluloid, we may all in the end conclude that we may as well have tried to reproduce Chartres in papier-mâché, or Mozart on an ocharina. It can be done, after its fashion, but something has ebbed away in the process.

Which is not to liken Brian Deacon’s performance to papier-mâché or an ocharina. The critic’s task is as elusive as the director’s and the actor’s: how do I know whether it was a good job or not? All of us are uneasy about even the best efforts to portray Jesus; there are simply too many imponderables entailed, not the least of which is whether it should be attempted to begin with. On the whole, Deacon has avoided the traps of sentimentality and eccentricity. He smiles, and even chuckles, and this seems not a bad note to strike. He is very good in the scene with the moneychangers, where he could have been pardoned for giving way to mere bombast and ham, but where he manages to convey the sort of ire and outrage Jesus both felt and wished to teach on that occasion. When we come to the Crucifixion, surely we are all in water altogether over our heads. To have Jesus yell in pain is certainly in the interest of dramatic verisimilitude: but does dramatic verisimilitude turn out to be grotesquely inadequate to the mystery of the Passion? It is not delicacy which objects here, it seems to me, so much as a certain paralytic hesitation in the precincts of mysteries as titanic as this. Outside of the biblical narrative, perhaps only liturgy and music are made of hard enough material to hold the burden.

The film makers are to be commended for avoiding several snares where less-disciplined imaginations might have blundered into all sorts of disconcerting banalities. The “special effects” used at the Annunciation and the Transfiguration, and at the rending of the Temple veil and the Ascension are very good—good because they come close to not existing at all. Extreme understatement has saved the day in all these cases. One blot on an otherwise clean sheet here, though, is the snake they used for the devil in the wilderness. Surely …

The film deserves a great deal of praise, and has done, we may venture to guess, as good a job as anyone has ever done with the attempt. Perhaps when film makers and actors approach the gospel story, their task is like a sculptor’s: all you have to do is take away what you don’t want. The sculptor chips away the excess marble; the director and actors must get rid of melodrama and schmaltz and ham and all the other things that try to cling to the drama. But when you have laid down strictures like this, you realize that nobody but a saint or a sage could do very much with it all. How a commercial enterprise, with the box office pistol held to its head, is to compete with Fra Angelico and Michelangelo and Saint Ignatius Loyola and Rembrandt and Milton in reworking the gospel materials, is a taxing question. We may keep it open, and at the same time give tentative laurels to this film.

Thomas Trumbull Howard is professor of English at Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts.