Cults

Is Forum Integrity Eclipsed by Moon?

“SCIENTISTS: DON’T HELP MOON—GO HOME!” So read a poster carried by one of fourteen demonstrators in a near-freezing drizzle outside the Sheraton-Boston Hotel. The scene was the day after Thanksgiving and start of the seventh International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences (ICUS), sponsored by Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church.

Undeterred, some 480 top-drawer scientists from more than fifty nations—plus about 180 spouses, 100 observers, and 100 staff members (most of them students from the church’s seminary in Barrytown, New York)—gathered in the grand ballroom for the opening plenary session and Moon’s “Founder’s Address.” Based on the conference theme “The Reevaluation of Existing Values and the Search for Absolute Values,” Moon’s speech was read in English, but copies were distributed beforehand because of Moon’s heavy Korean accent.

The International Cultural Foundation (ICF), a part of the Moon empire that stages scientific functions, planned this conference, for which it spent $500,000—much of that being earmarked for travel and hospitality costs for the participants. Those people involved in leadership roles, including scholars who delivered some eighty formal papers, received “several hundred dollars” each (said to be the going rate at comparable gatherings, according to ICUS secretary-general Michael Young Warder). ICUS board chairman Eugene P. Wigner, professor of physics emeritus at Princeton University, was one of several Nobel laureates who attended.

In a program statement, planners described the purpose of the ICUS as providing an “opportunity for scholars and scientists to reflect upon the nature of knowledge and to discuss the relationship of science to the standard of value.” The format was standard for gatherings of professional academicians, with opening and closing plenary sessions and discussion of scholarly papers. Meetings of the Religion and Philosophy Committee, which were headed by Richard L. Rubenstein, professor of religion and philosophy at Florida State University, attracted large audiences. Panelists included Gabriel Vahanian (Syracuse University), Herbert Richardson (University of Toronto), and Walter Kaufmann (Princeton University). Not serving in leadership capacities, but listed as participants, were Frederick Ferre (Dickinson College), Jack Finegan (Pacific School of Religion), C. Eric Lincoln (Duke University), and author Richard Quebedeaux (The Young Evangelicals, The New Charismatics, and The Worldly Evangelicals).

Conspicuously absent from conference discussion was any reference to Unification Church theology. A climate of academic freedom prevailed, as demonstrated by the variety of theological positions expressed by conference speakers—ranging from the warm evangelicalism of President Etienne Trocmé of the Universite des Sciences Humaines, Strasbourg, France, to the dour cynicism of a self-styled “atheist Jew” who proclaimed, “I must say that the idea of immortality fills me with the deepest horror.”

At a press conference, several ICUS leaders defended their involvement. Rubenstein, who was attending his third conference, said he had received a large amount of “hostile mail” critical of his participation. He asserted, however, that participation at the conference does not imply endorsement of Moon’s ideology. Daniel Lerner, of M.I.T., chairman of the ICUS committee on the social sciences, made available a form letter addressed to critics, in which he said in part “I have done the work (without fee) because this is the most important world conference of scholars that I know about.”

Moon’s appearance at the conference was his first in the United States since the release last November of a report by the House Subcommittee on International Organizations, which had finished an eighteen-month investigation of the Unification Church. In that report, the “Moon Organization” was charged with violation of certain U.S. immigration, banking, and tax laws, among others. The subcommittee, which was led by congressman Donald Fraser, also charged Moon with attempting to establish his own world government while working under the guise of a religious movement.

K.H. Barney, leader of the anti-ICUS demonstration, concurred with a conclusion of the Fraser subcommittee: Moon uses science conferences as part of his goal of “controlling major institutions in the United States and other key nations and of influencing political decisions and policies.” Barney, whose daughter was a Moonie for two years, worked closely with the Fraser committee. His Ad Hoc Committee of Concerned Parents blitzed members of Congress with 10,000 letters in support of a House resolution requesting that Moon appear before the Fraser subcommittee to answer questions, but the bill died in committee (Moon was traveling overseas in Britain, Japan, and South Korea while the subcommittee was convened).

In an interview, Neil A. Salonen, 33, a former Lutheran who now is president of both the Unification Church and the ICF, denied charges that conference participants were being exploited by Moon in an effort to gain acceptance for his movement. Salonen said that he finds “very offensive” the charges in the Fraser report that the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) had founded the Unification Church, that Moon had been arrested on morals charges, that the Unification Church engages in “brainwashing,” and that Moon has “operational ties” with the KCIA.

Salonen acknowledges, however, that Moon “would, as any religious leader, like to influence the whole world and everybody in it.” But Salonen says there is nothing “insidious” in this and denies there is any attempt to manipulate people.

Barney and his corps of young protestors made available to ICUS participants copies of that portion of the Fraser report dealing with the Unification Church. At the same time, church officials issued a ten-page rebuttal, in which they charged Fraser and his staff with “intentionally discrediting the Unification Church and its founder, and contributing to an atmosphere of religious bigotry and persecution.” The statement said there was no conspiracy or subversive elements in the church, but that it exists “primarily to share the Divine Principle Revelation with the public.…” They concluded by saying, “The Unification Church is a peaceable religious movement of loyal Americans who love God.…”

A sumptuous banquet on Sunday ended the conference. The Moon-sponsored New Hope Singers International (direct from an engagement at the Kennedy Center in Washington), provided a portion of the evening entertainment. Moon, himself, sang a Korean ballad, and his wife and three of the couple’s eleven children were introduced to the assemblies.

In a brief parting speech, he expressed personal shock over the tragedy in Guyana. At one point he stated, “… one reason that the Guyana tragedy frightens so many people is that it reminds us that we, ourselves, could be destroyed by a madman in a position of power.”

JOSEPH HOPKINS

The Ncc

Skipping Out Over Walker

If the National Council of Churches (NCC) doesn’t want Lucius Walker, then the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO) doesn’t want the NCC.

That’s the upshot of the IFCO decision last month to dissociate the organization from the NCC Division of Church and Society. Its board of directors was angered by the firing of Walker last November as the head of the NCC division. The NCC executive committee had voted to dismiss Walker on grounds of fiscal mismanagement within the division, citing budget deficits there of $228,000 (see the Dec. 1, 1978, issue, page 48).

Walker, a black social activist, was the first director of IFCO when it formed in 1967, and he was instrumental in bringing IFCO into the Division of Church and Society two years ago. (IFCO, a coalition of religious and community groups involved in funding a variety of minority and social action programs, has retained its corporate form and tax status, however.)

Walker told the Religious News Service that the IFCO decision to support him expressed disapproval toward “the disengagement of the Council from the social issues which confront us.”

IFCO benefited by its association with the NCC, since it makes financial appeals to many of the same denominations that support the NCC, said Dean Kelley, the acting administrator of the Division of Church and Society. Likewise, the NCC gained by its IFCO link, said Kelley, since IFCO had ties with community groups, minority caucuses, and Third World interests that the NCC otherwise alone did not.

Although the NCC executive committee must give final approval for the IFCO pull-out, Kelley said that most ties would be severed this month. IFCO officials planned to move from NCC headquarters in Manhattan to a Harlem brownstone that has a much lower rent.

Walker’s severance pay from the NCC runs out in March, and the IFCO board has asked him to become its paid executive director after that time. He was considering that offer, and in the interim was serving as a volunteer consultant to the group.

Financial Dealings

Short Cut: Convincing Preacher to Con Man

James Roy Whitby, Sr., a former Southern Baptist pastor and evangelist, is finding himself in deeper trouble with the law these days. He was indicted with four other men last month by a Muskogee, Oklahoma, grand jury on twenty-seven counts of mail fraud and aiding and abetting in mail fraud, eight counts of security fraud violations, and one count of conspiracy with thirteen overt acts.

The indictment further weakens Whitby’s once-firm reputation. While he was director of the Tulsa, Oklahoma, Youth for Christ (YFC) organization, he reportedly helped lead singer Anita Bryant—then a Tulsa high school student—to Christ. At one time, the 50-year-old Whitby did a “fantastic job as an evangelist,” said a former associate.

But when the indictment was served, Whitby already was in federal custody in Tulsa. He was convicted last September of defrauding an 83-year-old Tulsa area woman of $25,000 and of the interstate transportation of that money, according to FBI officials in Oklahoma City. Whitby began serving a two-and-one-half-year jail term last November on that charge.

Federal authorities have been investigating Whitby since 1974. He was arrested nearly two years ago on a complaint that he defrauded a Swiss bank through a bond issue in the name of Gospel Outreach, a short-lived mission agency that Whitby founded in Tulsa. However, that charge was dismissed at the request of federal authorities who were still investigating the case (see the April 15, 1977, issue, page 60).

The recent indictment against Whitby marks the culmination of that earlier investigation; it alleges that Whitby and the codefendants sold more than $4 million in worthless Gospel Outreach bonds to persons in the United States and Europe. The indictment also alleges that prospective buyers were told the bonds were backed by property in New Cuyama, California, which was valued at $6.7 million. However, the indictment continues, the land was worth only $1.5 million and the men didn’t own it. The complaint also alleges that the men offered 9 per cent interest payments on the bonds once every six months. When the first payments fell due, it is alleged, only five dollars were in the Gospel Outreach account in the Case State Bank of Stonewall, Oklahoma. The investors were not paid, and Whitby allegedly began denying that the bonds ever existed.

Whitby has often been a man to take “short cuts,” according to a former associate. He left the Tulsa YFC organization after twenty years in 1968—about the time that YFC headquarters began instituting tighter controls on local chapters, according to international president Jay Kesler (although Kesler said the controls may not have been the reason that Whitby finally left the organization).

According to Kesler, YFC established a chartering process that included the signing of the doctrinal statement used by the National Association of Evangelicals, formation of an interdenominational board of directors, and an annual outside audit. Kesler said that Whitby disagreed with the chartering procedures and felt that YFC was “becoming too centrally controlled.”

After leaving YFC, Whitby became a traveling evangelist. He used the respected Go Ye Mission and its Christian boarding school, Markoma School of the Bible, for a home base. Homer Mouttet, president of the Tahlequah, Oklahoma, mission, said that Whitby worked from there in 1968 and 1969 and was a member of its board of directors.

However, Whitby was “released” from the Go Ye Mission board in 1972, said Mouttet. “He was dabbling in things that we just couldn’t back,” Mouttet explained. He believed that Whitby’s original motives were “genuine,” but that he got involved in “questionable acts.”

In 1972 Whitby became fully involved with his Gospel Outreach organization; it reportedly was established to help needy people around the world, and, according to Mouttet, was involved in fundraising for religious groups and projects.

Whitby made headlines in early summer, 1972, when he organized a small band of young people for a 1,000-mile, fundraising march from Tulsa to San Miguel, Mexico. The young people collected donations as they went, and enough money was raised for construction in San Miguel of an orphanage, a school classroom, and a dormitory for underprivileged Mexicans.

For a time, Whitby was involved in a mission operation known as the Ethiopian Call, which was organized by Oklahoma physicians. Religious News Service reported at the time that Whitby proposed to raise money for the operation by striking silver medallions of the late Emperor Haile Selassie to be sold for $50 each. Whitby was doing some type of mission work in the Philippines until last April. A friend of Whitby said that Whitby asked him to donate 1,900 Holstein heifers to the Philippines project.

Whitby is scheduled for jury trial later this month in a Muskogee federal courtroom. FBI officials said he faces a maximum sentence of 180 years on the thirty-six counts.

The other men named in the indictment with Whitby were Ray Evan Mason, 46, the former president of the Case State Bank in Stonewall, two Chicago area securities dealers, and Tillman Jackson, a former Baptist pastor from Los Angeles.

With the exception of Case, all of the men have been previously tried and convicted of federal fraud violations, FBI officials say. Jackson was once imprisoned on conspiracy charges in connection with fraudulent transactions of the now defunct Baptist Foundation of America. Whitby’s intercession on his friend’s behalf before a California parole board was instrumental in getting Jackson a suspended sentence.

Friends and former associates of Whitby have trouble explaining how the once-respected evangelist got in so much trouble. “This has been a hurtful thing to some of us,” Go Ye Mission president Mouttet said. “He was an excellent speaker and evangelist. At one time, there were few in the country like him.”

North American Scene

Black evangelist Tom Skinner has agreed to host “The PTL Club” television talk show once a month, officials of the PTL Network announced. Skinner, team chaplain of the Washington Redskins and director of a wide-ranging ministry to blacks, also will have a one-hour weekly show aimed at inner-city blacks. It will be beamed on PTL’s leased satellite.

Wake Forest University trustees last month voted to remove their school from church control. They deleted clauses from the school charter and bylaws that give the Baptist (Southern) State Convention of North Carolina the right to elect or fire trustees, and removed a phrase stating that they will operate “as an agency” of the convention. The trustees still promised to operate the liberal arts school as a “Christian university” and to maintain communication with the convention.

More than one-half million fewer households watched the ABC network in November than during the previous nine weeks, according to figures released by the A.C. Nielsen Company in its recently completed “sweeps.” Donald E. Wildmon, executive director of the National Federation for Decency, was elated by the figures. He attributed the drop—which he says will cost the network millions of dollars in advertising revenues—to a November boycott of the network that was planned by his group to protest sex, violence, and profanity in programming.

Work began recently on a new hymnal and service book for the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. The LCMS had created a stir when it withdrew its support of the new Lutheran Book of Worship, which had been a joint project of the LCMS, the Lutheran Church in America, the American Lutheran Church, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Canada. LCMS Commission on Worship members say they still will use some materials from the Lutheran Book of Worship for inclusion in their own book.

A woman who was arrested with two others for disrupting services last August at First Baptist Church in Washington was convicted of unlawful entry and of remaining on the premises without authority (see September 8 issue, p. 58). Alice McCormack had spoken her opposition to the neutron bomb during a worship service attended by President Carter. Although he regretted that the matter had to be settled in court, pastor Charles Trentham made no apologies, saying that First Baptist should not be an instrument for protest to the President.

Personalia

Ernest Holz will succeed the retiring Paul S. Kaiser in February as the national commander (in the United States) of the Salvation Army. Holz has been an officer in the Army since 1940.

Louise Camp, a California businesswoman and singer, was named national chairperson of a committee to raise $2 million for construction of a Gospel Music Hall of Fame, research library and museum in Nashville. The Hall of Fame will house the international headquarters of the sponsoring Gospel Music Association. Members of Camp’s executive committee include George Beverly Shea and Ralph Carmichael.

Officials of the Evangelical Churches of West Africa Theological Seminary in Igbaje, Nigeria, appointed Nathaniel Olutimayin as principal—the first Nigerian to hold the post. Olutimayin recently finished studies at Dallas seminary.

An old church denomination has a new approach to church-planting. The result has been the formation of three new congregations in Dallas, Texas. The 350-year-old Reformed Church in America broke from traditional methods of church mission with its “Dallas Project.” The 155 persons who attended the first services last month were the fruit of a complex program of statistical research, telephone surveys, and media promotions.

Other denominations have used single elements of the program, said Peter M. Paulsen, executive pastor of the project. But Paulsen said that the Dallas offensive is unique because all those elements—research, testing, and the media—have been combined in one package. Arie Brouwer, the chief executive of the New York-based denomination, said in a newspaper interview that Presbyterians and the United Church of Christ are watching closely the results of the project.

The Dallas Project came from a $6 million, five-year church growth drive within the 215,000-member body. Concerned about decreasing membership figures, church leaders set a minimum goal of twenty-five new churches a year. They were particularly interested in areas that had no Reformed Church influence.

Dallas was selected for the initial thrust of the church growth drive only after extensive demographic research had been made of several U.S. cities.

Historically, the Reformed Church has appealed to persons with above average income and education, said Paulsen. And he said that the surveys were assessed with those criteria in mind. Dallas was finally selected because “it tends to be an area dominated by well-educated, well-paid nuclear families.”

The Reformed Church is not being exclusive or class-conscious by using this approach, Paulsen said. He notes that many first-time attenders in Dallas do not fit the typical Reformed Church image: “But if this is the ministry that we know how to do, then that’s the ministry we felt we ought to be doing.”

Paulsen, himself, was selected for a purpose, according to Lois Joice, director of promotion and communication for the Reformed Church. Since there were no Reformed Church congregations in the Dallas area—or Texas, for that matter—the church needed a program to build name recognition, Joice said. Paulsen was chosen because of his past experience as media coordinator of the denomination.

With a Dallas advertising agency that “helped sharpen the process,” Paulsen designed a media strategy for the Dallas Project. He used the newspapers and radio to promote a telephone survey of 4,500 persons in the northern suburbs of Dallas.

Volunteers from Reformed churches staffed the telephone lines, introducing themselves as members of the denomination of Norman Vincent Peale and television pastor Robert Schuller—an attempt to get name recognition. Then the respondents were queried about church attendance. If they had no affiliation with a local church, they were invited to join a new Reformed Church congregation.

With information gained from the telephone surveys, the Dallas Chamber of Commerce, marketing studies, and commuter patterns, the project staff members determined where to plant the first churches. Facilities were rented in the Dallas suburbs of Plano, Carrolton, and North Dallas. These were areas “that were growing more rapidly than existing churches could respond to,” said Paulsen.

Initially, the objective of the project was to establish three congregations of 1,000 members each. But their goals have changed. “The people that we’ve talked to say they want to attend smaller churches where they’re known by name and where their contributions are counted as worthwhile,” Paulsen said.

From the three-year, $800,000 budget, the project will purchase media spots to promote the Reformed Church drive. A series of ads ran in Dallas newspapers and on radio to promote a Christmas Eve service in a North Dallas Holiday Inn—the central meeting place for the new congregations.

Pastors of the three new churches were selected by a task force of Reformed Church laymen and pastors from a long list of applicants. Paulsen only regrets that the pastors had too little time to get settled in Dallas before the media campaign and telephone surveys began.

Paulsen, 36, denies that the Dallas Project ignores the human element by way of a calculated, Madison Avenue approach. “Having done the research carefully, using the available resources, we now are freed to be as completely human in Christ as we can be,” he said.

Love God With All Your Mind

Developing a Christian Mind by Nancy Barcus (InterVarsity, 1977, 103 pp., $2.95 pb), All Truth Is God’s Truth by Arthur Holmes(Eerdmans, 1977, 145 pp., $3.95 pb), and Preserving the Person by C. Stephen Evans (InterVarsity, 1977, 177 pp., $4.95 pb), are reviewed by Ronald Nash, head, department of philosophy and religion, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Most Christians preach and practice a truncated gospel. Although the first and great commandment obliges us to love God with all our minds, the church continues to be afflicted with an unbiblical disparagement of the intellect accompanied by an unhealthy emphasis on emotionalism. I regret that Christian publishers more often than not pander to this deplorable state with light-weight testimonies of famous sinners or assorted prescriptions for curing sexual maladjustment. Three recent books stand out as exceptions to the prevailing antiintellectualism among evangelicals.

Nancy Barcus pleads with Christians to develop a Christian mind. What is needed, she urges, is a “renewal of the Christian mind.” Knowledge, she states, “is not an isolated or an unchristian part of the world. It is part of the very fabric of what it means to be a Christian.” Arthur Holmes believes that the recognition that God is the ground of all truth should undercut the wide-spread depreciation of so-called secular learning among evangelicals. The common Christian practice of compartmentalizing knowledge into sacred and secular branches is unbiblical and leads to the mischievous notion that secular knowledge is in some way less important and worldly, unfit for the “spiritual” Christian. Although the truth revealed in Scripture is sufficient for faith and conduct, it is not exhaustive. The truth to be mastered outside of Scripture is every bit as much the truth of God. Even revealed truth requires study and interpretation, tasks that can be aided by an education in such “secular” subjects as philosophy and history. Holmes warns against the erroneous belief that faith provides the Christian with a short-cut to the truth that eliminates any need for a grounding in secular areas of learning. Especially dangerous is the practice of many charismatics of elevating their own religious experiences above revealed truth. In such hands, the experiences of some individual or group become a pattern into which the truth of the Word of God must be squeezed. Holmes counters that experience should be tested by truth; Scripture should not be subordinated to our experiences.

Stephen Evans focuses on the arena of the social sciences, where an intellectual battle over the nature of man is raging. Christian theology has an obvious stake in the view of man as a self-conscious, responsible agent who makes choices and who has purposes and reasons for his actions. But the very view of man as a person is the subject of attacks emanating from the social and behavioral sciences. These disciplines have been captured by a positivistic mind-set that emphasizes causal explanations that are mechanical, impersonal, and nonteleological. A key question for our time then is: Are the scientific and personalistic views of man compatible? If not, must the presuppositions of a scientific method that depersonalizes man be modified, or must major alterations be made in the view of man as a person? Evans carefully notes that the real source of the trouble is not the social sciences per se. Rather, the problem results from social scientists opting for a particular philosophy of social science (positivism), by which Evans means “the tendency to make scientific procedures and theories the ultimate source of truth and the ultimate account of the nature of reality.”

Evans questions whether the advocate of a mechanistic view of man can avoid a self-stultifying view of knowledge. That is, does the behaviorist view of man hold consequences that make knowledge, including the “knowledge” of the behaviorist, impossible? Doesn’t the very possibility of knowledge require that the knower be a person (as opposed to a machine)? Does the mechanist’s view of man undercut his own claims to knowledge? Advocates of a mechanistic view of man also make value judgments. Does their mechanism also undermine this process? The implications of the behavioral view of man are especially disconcerting in the political arena. The position not only suggests the possibility of unlimited control over and manipulation of human beings; it leaves a liberal society without any objective ideals that would effectively limit such manipulation. Evans’s major contribution is a lengthy discussion of a number of possible routes to resolving the conflict between the personalistic and mechanistic views of man. Some people prefer to resolve the tension by limiting science either by arguing that there are areas of knowledge off-limits to the scientific method or by rejecting the ultimacy of truth provided by the scientific method. Other approaches surrender to positivism and attempt to reinterpret the notion of man so as to make it more compatible with present trends in the behavioral sciences. Others seek resolution of the conflict by attempting to humanize science, by replacing the antipersonalistic philosophy of science that grounds so much contemporary social science. As Evans sets out ways in which a Christian might relate each of these options to a biblical view of man, he makes some points that will surprise readers uninformed about recent discussions. For example, he concedes that a dualistic view of man may not be essential to Christian theology. I think Evans is wise in not restricting the Christian scientist’s options too drastically. His taxonomy of available options is helpful and should generate some worthwhile discussion among Christian philosophers, theologians, and social scientists.

More Christians need to read books like these; more Christians need to be writing books like these. Will Christian publishers help make such books available? Let’s hope so.

A Classic Study Of Pain

Where Is God When It Hurts?, by Philip Yancey (Zondervan, 1977, 187 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by James A. Zitzman, Jr., promotion manager, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Where is God when it hurts? Why does he feel so close in our time of joy, yet so distant in time of sorrow? Why does he allow us to suffer at all?

American Christians avoid such questions, fearing the mysteries of the problem of pain. When the specter of pain forces us to react, we respond weakly, defensively. Maybe we don’t have “enough faith.” Or we have some hidden sin. Or we attempt to deaden the suffering with injections of goodwill and cheer.

In the first chapter of his book, Yancey tells of a young bride battling Hodgkin’s disease. The girl and her husband, when told she has only a 50 per cent chance to live, react with anger against the God who seems to have turned on them. Christian visitors, seeking to console the couple, only confuse them with different interpretations and approaches to their questions.

The suffering of his friends started Yancey searching for “a message Christians can give to those who suffer.” His quest lasted five years and resulted in this book.

When I first heard that Yancey was working on a book about pain, I assumed that essentially he would paraphrase C.S. Lewis’s Problem of Pain. I have always thought that Lewis’s classic apologetic could not speak to the average Christian. I welcomed a paraphrase. Yancey, however, chose to write his own book—with powerful results.

Yancey guides the reader through the book, mapping every section in advance. He uses a conversational style that questions, informs, perhaps concludes, then illustrates. His approach allows him to treat complex questions without losing either the layman or the theologian.

The book has three sections. The first probes the biological and theological purposes of pain. The second reports on how some Christians have dealt with extreme pain, notably Joni Eareckson and Brian Sternberg. In the final section, Yancey searches for ways to deal with pain when it does come. The logical pattern followed within each section (raising a question, reporting on theological and scientific evidence, presenting examples of people dealing with the question, discussing Christian responses) also forms the introduction and three sections into the book.

After presenting in his introduction the intellectual and emotional questions aroused by pain, Yancey surveys the intellectual, emotional, and biological purposes of pain. He rounds out his reasoning with examples and explains the remarkable functioning of the nervous system. He reports on the horror of lepers, people without pain. He notes that the ability to feel pain is not only necessary for survival, but is often required for pleasure and fulfillment.

Yancey then says that “though pain may have been intended as a smooth, efficient warning system, suffering is raging out of control.” Like Lewis, Yancey points to man’s misuse of freedom as the source of his agony. “Suffering,” he says, “is consistent with the Christian view of the universe that reveals our home as a stained planet.”

All of us would agree that pain has value in protecting our bodies. Most Christians would agree that pain has value as a reminder of this “bent” world. But Yancey observes that all this reasoning only deals with pain in the abstract. People don’t experience pain that way, he says, but in “piercing, specific jolts.”

These specific jolts transform the intellectual answers into “sounding brass and clanging cymbals.” Throughout the remaining two sections of the book, Yancey searches for a more adequate response.

He begins by recording and comparing the responses of several of God’s children inflicted with pain: the sufferings of Job, the struggles of Joni Eareckson, the frustrations of Brian Sternberg, and the tortures of a minister in Dachau. He analyzes the attitudes of each person and then attempts to distill them into basic, universal principles. After all that, Yancey approaches in the third section the fundamental question: How can we cope with pain?

We can cope, the author says, if we remember our suffering Lord. Here is a Christian’s unique contribution to the discussion of pain: We believe that God himself has borne all the sorrows and pains of the world he created. God designed the complex system of nerves that provides the mechanism for suffering. God allowed man’s misused freedom to twist and distort his creation. And he emptied himself to experience poverty, starvation, loneliness, fatigue, scourging, humiliation, crucifixion, and death. Finally, he promised to set aright what man despoiled.

Despite all of the interviews, reading, hours at hospital bedsides, and prayerful study of God’s Word, Yancey admits that he cannot provide adequate answers for all the questions he has raised. The problem of pain remains an enigma. However, his study melted his anger toward pain and left him “with a solid faith in a Person which no amount of pain can erode.” Because of the personal style of the book, he shares this maturing process with the reader. He partially illumines the mystery and—more importantly—teaches the reader to approach that mystery correctly. His sensitive questioning and honest approach result in a helpful book that could become a classic.

Variety In Earliest Christianity

Unity and Diversity in the New Testament, by James D. G. Dunn (Westminster, 1977, 480 pp., $19.50), is reviewed by Charles Wanamaker, graduate student, University of Durham, Durham, England.

Every serious reader of the New Testament will have noticed that certain theological features are characteristic of particular writers. John, for example, is unique in his “Word” Christology, and only Hebrews portrays Christ as the heavenly High Priest. Such differences form the starting point for this book. According to Dunn, the research into the history of religions in general and the study of early Christian traditions in particular have made it impossible “to conceive of first-century Christianity as a clearly defined entity, easily extractable from its historical context.” Earliest Christianity was characterized by immense diversity of thought and practice; despite this, it developed as an identifiable movement. Dunn explores both aspects.

Dunn looks for the unifying strand of earliest Christianity. In New Testament preaching, he finds great diversity, but he also perceives a central core, the proclamation of the resurrected and exalted Jesus. He explores other features of earliest Christianity, including primitive confessions, the role of tradition, the use of the Old Testament, the concept of ministry, patterns of worship, the sacraments, and the role of the Holy Spirit (the subject of Dunn’s two previous books).

Dunn raises a crucial christological question: Was the continuity justified between the historical Jesus and the exalted Christ that Christians preached? Dunn attempts to connect this question to the unity and diversity of belief found in the New Testament. The problem, however, is a modern one. The early disciples’ experience of the resurrected Jesus provided all the continuity they needed for proclaiming him as the resurrected and exalted Christ. Nevertheless, Dunn presents several historical reasons for connecting the historical Jesus with the Christ of faith. The only one not found in his earlier book, Jesus and the Spirit, is his argument that Jesus foresaw his death as vicarious suffering and expected divine vindication.

The second section of the book concentrates on the supposed diversity of earliest Christianity. In successive chapters, Dunn examines Jewish Christianity, Hellenistic Christianity, apocalyptic Christianity, and early Catholicism. Unfortunately, he glosses over the problems created by such categories. Apocalyptic Christianity, for example, did not exist as a separate movement, and the boundaries between Jewish and Hellenistic Christianity are notoriously difficult to delimit. Because of the categories he uses and the way in which he points forward to later developments such as the Ebionite, Gnostic, and Montanist heresies, he produces a misleading and one-sided emphasis on diversity. He does, however, find two unifying elements common to both Jewish and Hellenistic Christianity. They both sought to maintain the unity between the earthly Jesus and the exalted Christ, and they both insisted on the importance of love. Dunn argues that because Jewish Ebionites and Hellenistic Gnostics violated these principles they fell outside the acceptable limits of Christianity.

The conclusion of the book struggles with the nature and function of the New Testament canon. This question is becoming increasingly important among biblical scholars who maintain a personal Christian commitment. Dunn’s answer is certainly not the final one, though it is an important statement. He sees the abiding value of the canon in the very unity and diversity it preserves. The canon illustrates the acceptable variety that is permissible within Christianity and provides a “norm” for its development. The canon is of further value because it reports the events that determined the Christian religion and because it has an irenic function when divergent forms of Christianity encounter one another.

Dunn has written an important book, one of the first to deal exclusively with the complex problems of unity and diversity in the New Testament. It also raises the question of what orthodoxy was and is. Students should find it valuable. Nevertheless, I have several reservations. Does Hebrews, for example, really preserve an adoptionist Christology? Does the prologue of John in fact give evidence of an earlier stage of theological reflection than is found in the rest of the Gospel? How much is really known about the Lucan or Johannine communities, or earliest Palestinian Christianity? Has Dunn sufficiently recognized the limited nature of the evidence?

I think that the fundamental weakness of the book is its overemphasis on diversity. That the New Testament reveals differences in earliest Christianity is indisputable. But the variety exists primarily in the particulars, not in the universals. Dunn limits the unity of the New Testament to the belief that the earthly Jesus became the exalted Lord. In reality, the overarching unity extends to such features as a common Scripture (the Old Testament), a common Gospel, a common faith, common sacraments, and common ethical concerns. This book deserves to be read and discussed not so much for the answers Dunn offers, but for the questions he raises. As the author states in the introduction, he wishes to provoke rather than define. In this he succeeds.

One might, upon searching fruitlessly for the word “depression” in a Bible concordance, conclude that no such emotional state existed in antiquity. There is neither a Greek nor a Hebrew word that corresponds exactly to our English term. The New Testament speaks of being sorrowful, distressed, troubled, perplexed, in agony, and very heavy, all of which seem to be more industrious states of suffering than what we mean by the modern affliction of depression.

The Old Testament, when describing states of inner agony, is more graphic: “Out of the depths I cry to thee, O Lord,” begins Psalm 130. Using the same spatial metaphor, Psalm 69 recreates a powerful image of one “sunk” in despair: “Save me, O God! For the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold; I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me. I am weary with my crying; my throat is parched. My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God.” Isaiah, who prefers the image of “desolate places” to objectify this inner state, describes the experience this way: “Among those in full vigor we are like dead men. We all growl like bears, we moan and moan like doves.”

Still, both the psalmist and the prophet are documenting a response to a clearly identifiable situation. In the Psalms, it is the ever present enemy who makes the poet’s life miserable. In Isaiah he is protesting lack of justice. The very recognition of such a solid source of one’s unhappy state makes it slightly, but significantly, different from what we call depression today. Indeed, the absence of a cause to which we can pin our sudden drop in spirit is what frightens us about depression.

Where we do find an example of this supposedly modern emotional phenomenon is in the book of Ecclesiastes. Like Luther, I had long dismissed this book as a most unfortunate inclusion in the canon. The author, obviously well off, seemed nevertheless constantly bogged down in ennui and incapable of joy. This ancient philosopher is always brought up short at the dead end of merely human wisdom. “I might as well be chasing the wind,” he admits. As with the psalmist and the prophet, there is no precise word in his lexicon for depression. Yet his constant refrain of “vanity” comes closer to what we mean by that state of physical and spiritual inertia than any other ancient term. In fact, in some ways it surpasses our contemporary term, specifying as it does the content of depression, the feeling that nothing is quite worth the effort.

Yet the very fact of the inclusion of Ecclesiastes in the canon of Scripture shows that there is no human experience that cannot be embraced by faith. The Bible encompasses all of life, even futility and doubt. The writer of Ecclesiastes was correct about at least one thing. There is nothing new under the sun. Neither Darwin nor Freud nor all the philosophers and scientists of the Enlightenment invented depression.

Ecclesiastes may have recorded our earliest case of depression, but in the thousands of years that followed, its proliferation has been widely documented. The Stoic philosophers and the statesmen helplessly watching the disintegration of the Roman court were no strangers to it. It played a part in the chaos and confusion that accompanied the break up of the civilized world in the fifth century. Curing the Renaissance, Robert Burton’s huge Anatomy of Melancholy was a best-seller. Hamlet is, at least in one sense, a case study in depression. “What should such fellows as I do,” he asks, “crawling between earth and heaven?” The first obstacle that Bunyan’s pilgrim on his progress toward the Celestial City has to overcome is the Slough of Despond.

Of all the illustrations, however, perhaps the most instructive is Martin Luther. His markedly severe depressions were not abated by the renewal of his faith or the posting of the Ninety-five Theses. Neither his translation of the Bible into German nor his marriage to Katherine von Bora alleviated permanently these psychological seizures. In fact, the agony of these times of darkness only intensified as he grew older. Lest any twentieth-century sufferer imagine that his private throes of depression bring him unspeakably near the edge of ruin, let him listen to Luther’s own description of his emotional and spiritual extremity. “For more than a week I was close to the gates of death and hell. I trembled in all my members. Christ was wholly lost. I was shaken by desperation and blasphemy of God” (in Roland Bainton’s Here I Stand, Abingdon, 1950, p. 36). He even entertained the notion of writing a book about these Anfechtungen, “for without them no man can understand Scripture, faith, the fear or the love of God.”

Thus, despite the fear we all have of these black holes in our worlds, which seem to suck us into an incomprehensible quagmire of doubt and despair, they often turn out to be, as Luther’s biographer claims they were for him, a mode of revelation. The fear of depression, especially among Christians, has been so great, appearing to be the antithesis of faith and the opposite of what is currently called “victorious living,” that we have shied away from any close examination of the pit. When we do manage to cast a furtive eye at its murky depths, our involuntary defense mechanisms immediately try to protect us from the perilous vision by finding another name for what lurks there. We say that it is loneliness or bereavement or failure and thereby imagine that the cause has been identified and can then be either eliminated or ameliorated.

Pilgrim’s episode in the Slough of Despond, however, shows that the frantically sought for “cause” of depression is nothing less than the total experience of being human. Not any particular death in the family, not any single failure, not an isolated disappointment, but an overwhelming conviction of the helpless human condition. “The name of the slough was Despond. Here, therefore, they wallowed for a time, being grievously bedaubed with dirt; and Christian, because of the burden that was on his back, began to sink in the mire.”

After Help has rescued Christian from the slough, Bunyan enters his own dream to ask him the question we all would like to pose: “Sir, wherefore, since over this place is the way from the city of Destruction to yonder gate, is it, that this plat is not mended, that poor travellers might go thither with more security?”

Help’s answer is not to point out a causeway across the swamp built of pop-psychology or self-help instructions or the sustained mirage of inspirational writing. His answer is in fact what we all tremble to hear. “This miry slough is such a place as cannot be mended …; for still, as the sinner is awakened by his lost condition, there arise in his soul many fears and doubts, and discouraging apprehensions, which all of them get together, and settle in this place.”

When Help says that it is “such a place as cannot be mended,” he is in earnest. He has no cosmetic cheer to apply to the bleak landscape. Indeed, he goes further with his discomfiting truth-telling, explaining that though it “is not the pleasure of the King that this place should remain so bad,” nevertheless the effort of sixteen hundred years to reclaim the swamp has been fruitless: “here have been swallowed up at least twenty thousand cart-loads, yea millions of wholesome instructions, that have at all seasons been brought from all places of the King’s dominions, (and they that can tell, say, they are the best materials to make good ground of the place) if so be it might have been mended; but it is the Slough of Despond still, and so will be when they have done what they can” (The Standard Bunyan, Hitchcock and Walden, 1876, p. 114).

Once we have stopped fighting the fact that the Slough of Despond is a reality that cannot be avoided, not even by Christians, and once we have realized that we can see it more clearly for what it is once we remove the rose-colored spectacles being shoved at us like headache remedies, then we can get on with the business of slogging through it. Despair is a deadly sin. If one does remain in the slough, he eventually suffocates. But just as fatal is it to struggle out on the wrong side, as Christian’s companion Pliable did, and return to the city of Destruction because we cannot bear the experience of spiritual suffering.

Some of Luther’s advice suffices for the milder bouts of depression. He admonishes the sufferer simply to ignore his heavy heart and instead to shun solitude and seek convivial company, discussing irrelevant matters. Music, dancing, joking, and feminine company he found especially helpful. However much one feels driven to fasting, it should be avoided at such times. Manual labor too offers surcease. “A good way, counseled Luther, to exorcise the Devil was to harness the horse and spread manure on the fields” (Bainton, p. 364).

There are, however, times when the simple remedies fail us as they failed him. No distraction can delight us, no favored face make us smile. In those days, it is “the world,” not our particular circumstances nor our singular situation or relationships, but the actual, objective, physical world itself, that turns fetid and sour, like the lilies that fester. This is the experience that Sartre writes of so horrifyingly in Nausea, when sitting on a park bench, looking at a tree, he is convinced of the voracious stupidity of the cosmos.

The figuration of this state of depression when everything in the world seems somehow hollow, off-center, and shabby varies with individuals. Some become obsessed with the dirt and disorder of human living, the fouled nest. The fact that human beings can do nothing—not eat, sleep, work, or study—without causing dirty dishes, smelly clothes, muddy feet, worn out furniture, smudged pages, becomes the central cosmological fact of life. All human living is symbolized in our own excrescences; that is the burden on Christian’s back.

Some people in a state of depression experience the world as armed and dangerous. Everything becomes a portent of its hostility—the splinter in the finger as much as the cancerous tumor. Every thing threatens to undo us with its harmful intentions. The world is demonstrably ungracious and not to be trusted. The very physical world gives way beneath the touch and we live in a world of delusion and bad dreams.

Others see the world literally turn grey before their very eyes. They become incapable of perceiving color in an antisacramental rejection of the joy of life. Some people retreat into sleep, getting up later and going to bed earlier every day to escape the pain of consciousness.

At such times it is not the devil we feel is assailing us but God himself. In all Luther’s severest depressions, he found it was God who was his adversary rather than Satan. “I dispute much with God with great impatience,” he said. His chief source of comfort during these times was the example of the Canaanite woman who had the temerity to badger Christ into healing her daughter (Bainton, p. 363).

In these times of emotional extremity, there is often a transvaluation of feelings. A disputatious anger is sanctified by its ability to keep us from suffocating in despair. The playwright Lillian Hellman wrote about a particularly cantankerous friend of hers “that sadness often looked like temper, often turned into it, as if he were rejecting despair for something healthier” (Pentimento, Signet, 1973, p. 194). Likewise, Luther’s shaking his fist in God’s face was far better than turning his back on him.

All these hard truths about depression, while neglected in our age of mandatory optimism, should nevertheless leave room for the insights of someone like George MacDonald, a seer whose simplicity and strangeness convicts us with a truth we can scarcely name. In his tale, At the Back of the North Wind, the boy Diamond is seized by North Wind, a changeable, incomprehensible creature, and blown about with her on her adventures. Sometimes this means pollinating flowers with gentle breezes and sometimes it means sinking a ship in a storm. Promising to take him to the country of marvels that lies at the back of the North Wind, she carries him to a polar region full of spires and caves of ice. There, for the first time in their acquaintance, North Wind becomes motionless, “with drooping arms and head.” Diamond is frightened and demands if she is ill.

“No. I am waiting.”

“What for?”

“Till I’m wanted.”

“You don’t care about me any more,” said Diamond, almost crying now.

“Yes I do. Only I can’t show it. All my love is down at the bottom of my heart. But I feel it bubbling there.”

North Wind then tells the boy that if he wants to go to the country at her back, he must go through her.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean just what I say. You must walk on as if I were an open door, and go right through me.”

“But that will hurt you.”

“Not in the least. It will hurt you though” (Macmillan, 1956, pp. 110–111).

Here is a new and illuminating image of the depression we feel even as redeemed humanity. It recognizes the cold inertia that sometimes settles on our hearts not as a matter of mud and filth but as a time of waiting and dormancy. As North Wind explains to Diamond, she must be still if South Wind is to blow. The periods of spiritual inertia we experience would perhaps be easier to bear if we simply recognized our need for expanses of inactivity instead of demanding a bustling busy spirituality that is mostly an attempt to fulfill a culturally conditioned expectation. Indeed, there are quite a few biblical counsels of passivity—to be still, to watch, to rest. Somehow we have mistaken our exuberance for our faithfulness, and when it begins to ebb, as it must from time to time, we become frantic with fear that we are losing our faith. We have a hard time sitting quietly and feeling it bubble at the bottom of our hearts, even when they are icy.

Beyond that, there is the realization that we must go through the frozen land where all seems lifeless in order to emerge in the pleasant pastures at the back of the North Wind and that the journey is necessarily painful. As North Wind later tells Diamond before his death, “I don’t think I am just what you fancy me to be. I have to shape myself various ways to various people. But the heart of me is true. People call me by dreadful names, and think they know all about me. But they don’t. Sometimes they call me Bad Fortune, sometimes Evil Chance, sometimes Ruin; and they have another name for me which they think the most dreadful of all” (p. 386).

Gethsemane was the place where Jesus had to face that most dreadful word. Not just death, but the desertion of God the Father. The picture of anguish we have there should be enough to banish forever the easy triumphalism of current commercial Christianity. Obedience in the face of despair was the example he set us, and the one even his most bedeviled disciples have followed. None of his companions smugly advised him to “claim the victory.”

Both the biographers of Luther and of C. S. Lewis have reminded us of their dark days before death, sometimes grim to the point of terrifying hallucinations. Does this mean that the spiritually advanced, like Job who was “blameless and upright,” are allowed to see depths of darkness the rest of us are sheltered from? Roland Bainton observed that the ones “who are disposed to fall into despondency as well as to rise into ecstasy may be able to view reality from an angle different from that of ordinary folk. Yet it is a true angle, and when the problem or the religious object has been once so viewed, others less sensitive will be able to look from a new vantage point and testify that the insight is valid” (Bainton, p. 361). It is only from that vantage point which lies at the back of the North Wind that we will be able to give the right name to our depression.