Can biblical authority be maintained if biblical inerrancy is denied? No! was the resounding answer from a conference of nearly 300 evangelicals who assembled in Chicago’s Hyatt Regency O’Hare Hotel October 26–28. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy was prepared and then signed by four-fifths of those attending.

Its release is but the first of a series of proposed activities aimed at Christians who are uninformed, unconcerned, uncertain, or unconvinced about inerrancy. The goal is to win adherents to the belief that the doctrine is both true and important. The statement denies that belief in inerrancy is necessary for salvation, but rejectors are warned of “grave consequences both to the individual and to the Church.”

Advocates of inerrancy feel that many of those who do not affirm the doctrine misunderstand and caricature it. The Chicago Statement denies “that it is proper to evaluate Scripture according to standards of truth and error that are alien to its usage or purpose.” Contrary to what detractors suggest, inerrancy as a valid theological concept is not affected by “lack of modern technical precision, irregularities of grammar or spelling, observational descriptions of nature, the reporting of falsehoods, the use of hyperbole and round numbers, the topical arrangement of material, variant selections of material in parallel accounts, or the use of free citations.” But lest it be wondered if that leaves more than terminological disagreement with those who limit inerrancy to matters of faith and practice, the statement also includes “assertion in the fields of history and science” within the purview of biblical inerrancy.

The Short Statement

1. God, who is Himself Truth and speaks truth only, has inspired Holy Scripture in order thereby to reveal Himself to lost mankind through Jesus Christ as Creator and Lord, Redeemer and Judge. Holy Scripture is God’s witness to Himself.

2. Holy Scripture, being God’s own Word, written by men prepared and superintended by His Spirit, is of infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches: it is to be believed, as God’s instruction, in all that it affirms; obeyed, as God’s command, in all that it requires; embraced, as God’s pledge, in all that it promises.

3. The Holy Spirit, its divine Author, both authenticates it to us by His inward witness and opens our minds to understand its meaning.

4. Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation and the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives.

5. The authority of Scripture is inescapably impaired if this total divine inerrancy is in any way limited or disregarded, or made relative to a view of truth contrary to the Bible’s own; and such lapses bring serious loss to both the individual and the Church.

The conference, called a “summit,” was sponsored by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy (ICBI), which was conceived in February, 1977, and launched eight months later. (See Nov. 4, 1977, issue, p. 51.) The council is a small group comprising forty or so advisory members and a sixteen-member decision making body. The latter has, in turn, a six-member executive committee chaired by James Boice, pastor of a United Presbyterian church in Philadelphia, and consisting of Norman Geisler (Trinity seminary), Harold Hoehner (Dallas seminary), Earl Radmacher (Western Conservative Baptist Seminary), R. C. Sproul (Ligonier Valley Study Center), and the full-time executive director, Jay Grimstead. CHRISTIANITY TODAY editor Kenneth Kantzer is one of the sixteen council members. Editor-emeritus Harold Lindsell and board chairman Harold Ockenga are among the advisors.

The ICBI received a $35,000 grant to fund the summit from an anonymous Christian organization, but expenses ran to $45,000, almost half of which was to help transport and house some of the conferees who came from all over the states and from as far away as Africa and India. The ICBI is also $10,000 in arrears for salaries and other expenses relating to its three-employee operation.

Production of the statement on inerrancy was the chief purpose of the summit. Invitations were issued by the ICBI only to individuals thought to be in hearty sympathy with its aims. The time for the meeting with others is later. Council members began assembling two days before the 48-hour conference and by the time the larger summit convened on a Thursday afternoon they had greatly expanded the preliminary statement that one of them had previously prepared. The crowded agenda included six sermons on what the Scripture says about itself. Among the preachers were Edmund Clowney (Westminster seminary), Robert Preus (Concordia seminary, Fort Wayne), and W. A. Criswell, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention. (The sermons on cassettes are for sale from the ICBI office, Box 13261, Oakland, CA 94661 and the complete text of the statement can also be obtained there.)

Fourteen position papers had been distributed in advance to the conferees. Two at a time were summarized and the author interrogated in hour-long sessions. Sample topics: “Christ’s View of Scripture” by John Wenham (formerly Latimer House, Oxford), “Legitimate Hermeneutics” by Walter Kaiser, Jr. (Trinity seminary), and “Human Authorship” by Gordon Lewis (Conservative Baptist seminary). (The extensively footnoted papers are to be published next year. Meanwhile Zondervan released at the summit the first ICBI-sponsored book, The Foundation of Biblical Authority, edited by James Boice.)

Individual conferees could submit proposals for changes in the statement, and there was one hour for small discussion groups and one for the whole assembly to ask questions of the summit leaders. At that time the only vote was taken, which indicated a clear preference of the majority to have the whole document immediately prepared for signing rather than waiting months for a longer, meticulously-prepared statement.

The nearly 5000-word statement has a preface and three parts. The preface explicitly acknowledges “the limitations of a document prepared in a brief, intensive conference,” invites “response from any who see reason to amend its affirmations about Scripture,” and proposes to maintain “a spirit, not of contention, but of humility and love.” Part one is the “short statement.” (See box.) Part two consists of nineteen articles, each with a one- or two-sentence affirmation and a corresponding denial. Part three, the longest, is an exposition largely written just before the summit by James Packer, a Church of England theologian.

The nineteen articles were basically drafted by R. C. Sproul, but amended more than the other parts throughout the summit. They treat, respectively, authority, revelation, inspiration, infallibility, inerrancy, the witness of the Spirit, and interpretation. The last article affirms “that a confession of the full authority, infallibility, and inerrancy of Scripture is vital to a sound understanding of the whole of the Christian faith.”

Assuming funds can be raised, the ICBI plans to produce both scholarly monographs and popular materials, including those suitable for training courses. The organization also wants to foster discussions and dialogues on seminary and college campuses, especially with evangelical scholars who do not affirm inerrancy. In the next few years ICBI hopes to host large conferences for lay leaders, for scholarly discussion of hermeneutics, and for exploring the practical implications of the inerrancy issue.

The first executive director of ICBI is Jay Grimstead, 43, who until about seven years ago believed that inerrancy could be limited to matters of faith and practice. He was for twenty years a worker with Young Life, a low-pressure youth evangelistic organization, along the way earning degrees as a master of divinity (1961) and doctor of ministry (1976) from Fuller seminary, the best known evangelical seminary with scholars who contend that full biblical authority does not require total inerrancy. In 1976 Grimstead began a small lay training center in the San Francisco Bay area and it was at a conference sponsored by that center a few months later that the idea for ICBI was spawned.

The drafters of the Chicago Statement “gladly acknowledge that many who deny the inerrancy of Scripture do not display the consequences of this denial in the rest of their belief and behavior.” But because of their conviction that biblical authority will not be long maintained if full inerrancy is denied, they have launched this essentially educational endeavor.

Associate Editor Donald Tinder is in charge of the Books section.

Proof Of The Resurrection?

The Shroud of Turin: The Burial Cloth of Jesus Christ?, by Ian Wilson (Doubleday, 1978, 272 pp., $10), and Shroud, by Robert K. Wilcox (Macmillan and Bantam, 1977, 182 pp., $8.95 and $2.25 pb), are reviewed by Gary Habermas, professor of apologetics and philosophy of religion, Montana Institute of the Bible, Lewistown, Montana.

Is the shroud kept at Turin, Italy (on rare public display this fall) the actual burial garment of Jesus? Interest in this subject has grown, as evidenced by the publication of an increasing number of articles, a revised book on the shroud, and two new books on the subject.

Known to exist since at least 1354, the shroud measures 14′ 3″ x 3′ 7″. On the linen itself is imprinted the “double image” of a man, revealing the entire length of both the front and back of the body. The double image, head-to-head, is apparently because the cloth was wrapped lengthwise around a dead man.

An interesting feature of the shroud is that the man was obviously beaten, whipped, cut in the scalp, stabbed in the side, and pierced through both wrists and feet. To investigators, the wounds are similar to those that would have been inflicted by crucifixion.

An equally interesting point is that photographs of the shroud’s image do not reveal the normal positive print; rather they appear in the negative. This has intrigued observers, since photographic negatives were unknown until the last century.

The major issue concerns the authenticity of the shroud. Was it faked and made to appear like Jesus’ burial clothes? If actual, do we know whether Jesus was wrapped in it after death? And what caused the mysterious imprint?

Both Ian Wilson and Robert Wilcox address themselves to such questions in their new books on the shroud. For instance, both authors deal with the problem of the existence of the shroud before 1354. Wilson, an Oxford graduate in history, does a more exhaustive job, with more than 100 pages devoted to this question.

The evidence indicates that the shroud may have been kept in ancient Edessa, a small kingdom in what is now Turkey, during the early Christian centuries. It was most likely moved to Constantinople in the tenth century and then to France, where it was brought to light in 1354.

This theory is supported by an ancient legend, which teaches that a veil or shroud-like cloth with Jesus’ image on it was held by Christians in Edessa. In addition, there are various historical references before 1354 to its existence. Even several works of art before this date bear likenesses of Christ’s face, which resemble the image on the shroud, seemingly indicating its acceptance in years past.

Further corroboration came from Max Frei, a Swiss botanist and well-known criminologist, who recently found traces of pollens on the shroud that come from Palestine and Turkey (both Istanbul and the area around Edessa). Thus, while questions still remain concerning the history of the shroud, it appears that bits and pieces can be traced.

Both Wilson and Wilcox deal with the authenticity of the shroud, which is certainly the key issue. They point out that, in light of modern scientific research, it is quite unlikely that the object was faked. An examination of some of the threads of the fabric under an electron microscope revealed that there was no paint or dye present. In fact, not only had the image not soaked through the fibers, but even the initial threads that contain the image were only affected on the surface. Experts concluded that the image had not been painted or otherwise caused by the addition of substances to the shroud. Such substances would have soaked through at least the first layer of threads.

Some people theorized that the image was caused by body vapors, such as those found in human sweat. But such vapors do not rise in straight lines, but diffuse in the air. Experiments in body vapors achieved blurred images.

Those who have studied the shroud, including a number of scientists, generally are convinced that the object is not a fraud. Because of the obvious marks on the image people have concluded that Jesus actually was buried in this cloth.

As to the source of the image, both authors explain that an increasing number of scientists, such as some at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico, have preferred the view that a burst of energy and light caused the imprint. This conclusion was based on studies of the image with modern technological equipment and data.

An example of such scientific research is the recently published proceedings of the Conference of Research on the Shroud of Turin, which met March 1977, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. (The 243-page volume is edited by Kenneth Stevenson, Jr., and is available for $10 from the Holy Shroud Guild, 294 East 150th St., Bronx, NY 10451.) Many of the essays are technical and describe various experimental data concerning the shroud. These vary from medical views on the death of Christ and related topics to the information provided for shroud studies by X-rays, infrared theomography, computer technology, and chemistry. For instance, an essay presents the views of John A. T. Robinson, author of Honest to God. Another presents the conclusions of scientist Eric Jumper on possible causes for the image on the shroud. He rejects the “vaporagraph” thesis for a variety of reasons and presents the possibility of radiation from Jesus’ body. The various authors, most of whom are scientists, present a variety of material from their own studies, most of which supports the shroud at least as an authentic archaeological relic.

A popular recent conclusion, even supported by several scientists, is that Jesus’ resurrection caused the images by the burst of energy that accompanied it. Both Wilson and Wilcox share this conclusion, even referring to the shroud as a sort of photograph of Jesus’ resurrection. They painstakingly analyze the available data. Of the two, Wilson’s work is by far the more technical, including a number of valuable appendices that contain the results of several scientific studies. This work is further enhanced by the long section on the history of the shroud noted above. Wilcox’s book reads more like a diary, giving the results of his trips to Western Europe and across the U.S. in search of information. Because of this format, the presentation of Wilcox’s research is less systematic.

It is possible that the shroud will yet be proven fraudulent. Even if it is shown to be a genuine burial shroud of a man crucified in first-century Palestine, the victim was not necessarily Jesus.

The evidence so far does appear to indicate that the shroud is ancient, that the image on it is not a fake, that it may well be the one in which Jesus was buried, and that the image on it resulted from his resurrection. Further studies on the shroud that began in October, after the public display ended, will certainly yield additional evidence.

Recent Books On Meditation

This evaluation of five books is by Cecil Murphey, pastor, Riverdale Presbyterian Church, Riverdale, Georgia.

I had two immediate negative reactions to Avery Brooke’s Hidden in Plain Sight (Seabury, 1978, 143 pp., $5.95 pb). The awkward size and large print make it difficult to read and the amateur artwork distracts the reader.

Ignoring those things, you’ll discover a simple, helpful book subtitled, “The Practice of Christian Meditation.” Brooke believes that God speaks in “whispers flashing through our minds as we meditate.”

The excellent chapter on “Christian Mantras” not only defines them but offers a list of words and phrases for meditation. I recommend this book for anyone who wants to learn about meditation.

In Meditation: Escape to Reality (Westminster, 1977, 120 pp., $4.95 pb), Thomas H. Troeger says that people want practical instruction, not vague generalities. That’s what he tries to offer. He says that people still yearn to glimpse some vision beyond themselves. We have a deeper hunger and a greater thirst than can be satisfied by a thick shake and a Big Mac. Troeger offers something to satisfy the hunger that remains in us.

Troeger makes a good case for Christians disciplining the body as well as the mind, using yoga to do so. If Christians really believe that the body is the Holy Spirit’s temple, we can learn from Troeger even though he overstates the compatibility between yoga and Christianity.

M. Basil Pennington in Daily We Touch Him (Doubleday, 1977, 115 pp., $5.95) urges people to approach God directly rather than through words or formulas. His book is based on exercises he teaches at the Religious Experience Workshop. It has a heavy Roman Catholic emphasis.

Pennington compares “centering prayer” (a term from Thomas Merton) with TM. He does not oppose TM, but thinks it is too rigid. Contrary to many writers, such as the author of the next book I mention, Pennington feels TM isn’t a form of religious exercise, but a “simple, natural technique.” The book is almost an apologetic for TM.

H. Wayne Pipkin’s Introduction to Christian Meditation—Its Art and Practice (Hawthorn, 1977, 176 pp., $6.95) is an introduction “to the varieties of meditation practiced by Christians.” I enjoyed the book, though it requires an alert mind to read it. He compares Christian meditation with both TM and Relaxation Response—and shows their shortcomings.

Early in the book Pipkin suggests a form of Christian meditation and gives specific steps on how to do it—both for individuals and for groups. If the contemplative life is what you’re aiming for, this is a book to read. It is thoughtful and balanced. Pipkin wrestles with questions of whether “answers and guidance” during meditation come from God. He warns people who become involved in meditation not to lose sight of the world.

Cashing in on the meditation craze, David Ray writes a popular book on how it is done in The Art of Christian Meditation (Tyndale, 1977, 132 pp., $3.95 pb). He lists “secondary, but important benefits” of meditation and it almost has the taste of a spiritual elixir that cures all, clarifies all.

Despite that, Ray provides a simple, step-by-step approach on meditation, particularly meditating on the Bible. He includes 124 verses (from The Living Bible) in card form, which can be cut out. Ray then tells you how to begin meditating with these cards. Ray delivers what his title promises.

Lutheran Distinctives

Getting Into the Story of Concord, by David P. Scaer (Concordia, 1977, 100 pp., $1.95 pb), and Getting Into the Theology of Concord, by Robert D. Preus (Concordia, 1977, 94 pp., $1.95 pb), are reviewed by Harold Lindsell, editor emeritus, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Carol Stream, Illinois.

Lutherans and non-Lutherans should read these two volumes. The first one tells the story of the origins of the Book of Concord, which is the Lutheran standard. It was published in 1580, not quite 400 years ago. David Scaer provides the thrilling story of the confessional development of Lutheranism during and following the death of its founder. The product is biblical, apostolic, catholic, reformed, confessional, catechetical, and even pastoral.

The Book of Concord contains a quite divergent assortment of creeds and formal confessions, including Luther’s Small and Large Catechisms, the Augsburg Confession, the Apology of the Augsburg Confession (by Melanchthon), the Smalcald Articles (by Luther), the Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope (by Melanchthon), and the Formula of Concord. It constitutes a formidable array of church material, which provides the foundation for Lutheran churches today.

Robert Preus, president of Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the second work, briefly summarizes the theology of the Book of Concord. He tells how the documents in it approach the Bible, the Gospel (and their relationships), and the doctrines of God, creation, the fall, and redemption. He emphasizes justification by faith and also speaks to such issues as the work of the Holy Spirit, the Church, the sacraments, and the Christian life.

Free time is available.

Do you ever wonder how you can more effectively publicize activities sponsored by your church or organization? Are you aware that many radio and television stations will announce your event at no cost to you except postage?

Many stations broadcast a listing of events as a public service to most nonprofit organizations. These announcements may be aired only once a week or as often as many times throughout the day. Check with your local stations to see if they have such a service. If they do, find out what their limitations are concerning the amount of information they will run and what specifics they need to know. Also be sure to learn the deadline: how far in advance of the event they need to receive the notice.

Don’t overlook cable television if it operates in your area. Many cable systems have a channel set aside for weather, public service announcements, or community programming. Find out how to have your events aired. Make use of this service (which is usually free).

It is important that you follow the guidelines set up by the stations to which you send information. If they want the information sent on a post card or in a letter, don’t send a poster or a flyer. If they need an announcement in their hands two weeks before the event, make sure it gets there at least two weeks in advance. When a group sends an announcement to a station two days before an event and the station has a two-week deadline, the station may not run it. The station is frustrated because another group can’t follow the rules and the group is upset because they aren’t receiving the publicity they want.

You should be able to find a listing of all radio and television stations in your locality in the yellow pages of your phone directory. For information on stations outside your immediate area, check your local library or a local station to see if they have a copy of the Broadcasting Yearbook, which you can use, in connection with a map, to find nearby stations.

Start a file of stations. Copy down the call letters, the address, and the phone number for each. As you call each station to find out its policy concerning public service announcements or community events programming, add this information to the sheet for that particular station.

Any announcement should include the event, date, time, place, location (a street address and city), and the cost of the event, if any. You should also put a name, address, and phone number with your announcement where interested parties can write or call for further information. The station may also need this information to contact you should clarification or further information be needed.

Are there any other facts that you think are important? Is this an annual event? Say so. Is there a musical group coming to your church that has made records or toured internationally? Add it to the announcement. Most stations reserve the right to reject or edit any information sent to them. It won’t hurt to put down a few interesting facts.

A problem many people encounter when writing an announcement is editorializing. For example, “You’ll receive a great blessing from the fantastic music of.…” Those are your thoughts, and though you may think that they’re true, let the people who attend decide for themselves. Stations will generally edit these phrases out, so save yourself and them some time by omitting them.

If you don’t have a publicity director for your organization, find one. Is there anyone in your congregation who has had any journalism or broadcasting experience? Is there a high school or college student who has taken any journalism courses? Do you know anyone who can write? Not everyone can.

If you find someone to be your publicity director, you have won half the battle. Let him or her do all the writing so that all your announcements will have the same basic style. This person can also become familiar with your listing of stations and serve as the official contact between you and the station.

Cherie L. Nagy is acting news director of WUGN-FM, Mt. Pleasant, Michigan.

I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master,” wrote C.S. Lewis of George MacDonald, “indeed, I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him.”

Of all the masters of the written word that Lewis taught and studied at Oxford and Cambridge, why did he choose this one man to so acclaim? The scholar who gave the world Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, and The Narnia Books, among others, was not the only literate Christian so affected. G.K. Chesterton wrote, “I for one can really testify to a book that made a difference to my whole existence, which helped me to see things in a certain way from the start.… Of all the stories I have ever read … it remains the most real … the most like life. It is called The Princess and the Goblin and is by George MacDonald.”

The object of these kudos is an obscure Scotsman whose major portion of prolific writings from the age of Dickens and Thackeray until recently could most often be found on the dustiest shelf in the library—if at all. Happily, his works are being reprinted. William B. Eerdmans has issued The Gifts of the Child Christ, a number of his best stories, in a two-volume set. Rolland Hein has condensed a collection of his sermons, Life Essential, The Hope of the Gospel, unfailingly upholding the Christ-like gentleness of this simple Scottish visionary.

Both Lewis and Chesterton are now coming into their due honor in this generation with new books studying their work, their lives, their religious convictions. Believers in this country have given especially high esteem to Lewis’s works, and, according to Lewis himself, that’s just the rub: “It has always seemed to me that those who receive my books kindly take even now insufficient notice of my affiliation with George MacDonald.… Honesty drives me to emphasize [my obligation],” wrote Lewis and he gratefully completed his circle of godly inspiration with publication in 1946 of George MacDonald, An Anthology (reissued this year by Macmillan).

Just who is the man who called forth such effusive praise from two of this century’s most precise Christian thinkers?

A humble Victorian companion of John Ruskin and Lewis Carroll, MacDonald lived his life (1824–1905) ever reflecting the gift of an excellent childhood. “We have learned,” writes Lewis, “from Freud and others about those distortions in character and errors in thought which result from a man’s early conflicts with his father. Far the most important thing we can know about George MacDonald is that his whole life illustrates the opposite process. An almost perfect relationship with his father was the earthly root of all his wisdom. From his own father, he said, he first learned that Fatherhood must be at the core of the universe. He was thus prepared in an unusual way to teach that religion in which the relation of the Father and Son is of all relations the most central.”

MacDonald preached, wrote poetry, novels, literary criticism, and children’s tales (for the childlike, whatever their age), which are still acknowledged as classics. Despite—or perhaps because—he was so prolific, he remains difficult to catalogue. Lewis and Chesterton agree that MacDonald was an uneven writer, though he is unequaled in his mythopoeic works: Phantastes, the Curdie books, The Golden Key, The Wise Woman, and Lilith.

Lewis, however, points us to his mentor’s sermons, lifting up MacDonald’s three-volume Unspoken Sermons with a debt of gratitude “almost as great as one man can owe to another: nearly all serious inquirers to whom I have introduced it acknowledge that it has given them great help—sometimes indispensable help—towards the very acceptance of the Christian faith.”

Not unexpectedly for MacDonald, a rebel from the grueling cultural overtones of rigid Scottish Calvinism, his life as a cleric was ill-paid and hard, made harder still when the rich deacons of his parish church censured his preaching on the mercy of God by reducing his salary. They misjudged their man, however, and MacDonald managed to limp along on the subsistence wage for another year. Thereafter, he embarked on a life of “lecturing, tutoring, occasional preaching, writing and ‘odd jobs’ which was his lot almost to the end.” Immensely popular as a speaker (he toured America soon after Dickens’s famous circuit, encountering equally enthusiastic crowds) he nevertheless remained poor. He lived an almost unbroken life of poverty, expecting the “butcher’s bills popping in through twenty different keyholes,” not to mention those of the other creditors of his large family. “His lungs were diseased,” Lewis tells us, “and his poverty was very great. Literal starvation was sometimes averted by those last moment deliverances which agnostics attribute to chance and Christians to Providence. It is against his background of reiterated failure and incessant peril that he can most profitably be read. His resolute condemnations of anxiety come from one who has a right to speak.” This sensitive poet and uncompromising Christian thinker had eleven children, four of whom preceded their father in death.

He was thus deeply in touch with the persistent tragedy and primal goodness of the human lot, psychologically on-target in his works, militantly evangelical (in the historical sense of the term), rigorously evangelistic. He preached without strident pulpit-pounding that life is an all-of-a-piece search for God made possible solely by the willful sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Obedience to God was his theme: “We are no more to think ‘What should I like to do?’ but ‘What would the Living One have me do?’ ” “He appears to have been a sunny man,” writes Lewis, “playful, deeply appreciative of all really beautiful and delicious things that money can buy, and no less deeply content to do without them.”

It can only be a great good that he is rediscovered. He has blessed generations of the faithful in the midst of personal ill-fortune; he was christened with joy in sorrow; he is a man for all seasons. He was expansive toward his many friends, hospitable to strangers, tenderly responsible in behalf of his children. And he was deeply in love with his wife; he sorrowfully awaited with peace his heavenly reunion with her when she died three years before him. MacDonald’s son commented, “They give so realistic a picture of domestic and widely shared happiness … so simple, faithful and happy were this father and mother, so full their lives of pathos and humor.”

Gary Havens is a carpenter and writer who lives in Evanston, Illinois.

Has our heritage of the great feast day, the sacramental meal, gone stale?

Thanksgiving Day is our biblical holy day as a nation, set aside in memory of our founding as a chosen people, but its meaning is under strange and strong attack. On the one hand, the forces of secularism exemplified in the three-day weekend keep trying to turn it into the sorry situation of Independence Day, where even parades and fireworks with a quick community prayer are losing out to sleeping in or backpacking through “God’s” wilderness. Showing witness to the God “through whose mighty power our fathers won their liberties of old” is about “out.” A sign of these times may be found in the Episcopal Proposed Book of Common Prayer, which subtly changes that old collect by saying instead, “Lord God almighty, in whose Name the founders of this country won liberty for themselves.…” We are surely more than conquerors in his name, but did we establish the country or did he?

This is similar to the change of pace that has crept into our observance of Thanksgiving. In my university, urban community, at Thanksgiving there is an interfaith service with the combined choirs of all the churches and synagogues that carries with it a once-a-year togetherness that is beautiful to behold. But at the same time there is this stark tendency to depreciate the very cause of our being assembled under one temple roof. One of the best expressions of this tinkering with intention is again found in my own denomination’s Proposed Prayer Book.

Our old Thanksgiving collect echoes its biblical origins by saying simply: “O merciful Father, who hast blessed the labours of the husbandman in the returns of the fruits of the earth; we give thee humble and hearty thanks for this thy bounty; beseeching thee to continue thy loving-kindness to us, that our land may still yield her increase, to thy glory and our comfort …” (italics mine). Now in the Proposed Book instead we pray: “Almighty and gracious Father, we give you thanks for the fruits of the earth in their season and for the labors of those who harvest them. Make us, we pray, faithful stewards of your great bounty, for the provision of our necessities and the relief of all who are in need.…” Of course we Americans must be faithful stewards of our bounty and mindful of the needs of others, but historically and biblically that is not meant to be the dominant theme of Thanksgiving days. It is as if we are all determined to be the grumbling elder brother who complains about wasting family wealth on the celebration when his prodigal younger brother comes home, or worse, echo the disciple who wanted to use for the poor the money spent to anoint the feet of Jesus.

We cannot any longer celebrate the glorious fact of our founding because as Americans we are no longer comfortable with the idea of being chosen. It is vulgar to assume that God had a peculiar destiny for us and blasphemous to expect him to continue to give us what one rabbi called “great booty.”

The difficulty is that we are turning this holy day on its head, acting as if like Joel we are really called to: “Blow the trumpet in Zion, sanctify a fast, call a solemn assembly; gather the people.… Let the priests, the ministers of the LORD, weep between the porch and the altar, and let them say, Spare thy people, O LORD, and give not thine heritage to reproach … wherefore should they say among the people, Where is their God.” But that prayer, of course, is for Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent.

As I have thought about this curious national change of heart, trying to see why I felt that it instead of being ethical is impious, I realized that my own approach to Thanksgiving has been shaped by two experiences that reinforced one another and have become for me a part of all Thanksgiving days.

The earlier experience is representative of all the Thanksgivings during the 1930s when the Great Depression was going on. Most stories about the Depression focus on triumph over adversity, of making do with nothing but a full heart. But mine were not like that at all, because my father and mother, both of whom had come from small midwestern towns and large families, were “rich.” My father was a tenured professor, so instead of being down and out, we were the center of a widespread family’s hope and trust for the future and in the Lord. Innumerable cousins lived with us and babysat and were put through college, my grandmothers were sent rent money and new hats, uncles and friends one after the other were given my father’s “treatment”—helping them to regain the self-confidence to tackle yet another doubtful job offer until they finally made it. My young brother and I basked in the undeserved, but enjoyed bounty of the affection of many adopted “aunts and uncles” who, unable to afford children of their own, saved their pennies and nickles to treat us to an occasional ice cream cone.

One of my most delightful memories of what for me was a happy, joyous time was a fall afternoon just before Thanksgiving when I was around eight. I came into our kitchen to find my mother talking with a young cousin’s husband, a recent immigrant from Germany who was trying to sell eggs and butter door to door. Joachim was in tears because he could not pay the rent and he and Polly might have to accept the offer of our spare bedroom. My mother saved his face, and his faith in himself, by gently kidding him, telling him that she and dad had great confidence in his ability as a salesman and knew that one day he would be a millionaire and take us to Europe first class to meet his family. This idea pleased him and he went on peddling until he did make good in a big way. Then he spent the rest of his life trying to convince my parents they had promised to let him take them to Europe first class on the Queen Elizabeth. That year between Thanksgiving and Christmas the only thing he could do to show his appreciation was to save enough money to trim a tree with real candles for my brother and me to see and remember all our lives.

But still Thanksgiving itself was the great feast day, when everyone we knew who lived near enough to get there came to share our bounty in a sacramental meal. Now I can see that the solemn polishing of grandmother’s silver candlesticks, the washing of the old white plates with thin gold bands, and the making of an autumn harvest centerpiece of grapes and apples and oranges, all to be eaten, set the tone of such a ceremony. We were really setting up the altar of the Lord, mindful of his mercies, and sharing all we had. That turkey was no golden idol but a true fatted calf, and fed not only those nearest and dearest to us, but always someone else, like the Deuteronomic feast where we are told: “A wandering Aramean was my father, and he went down into Egypt … and became a nation, great, mighty and prosperous … and the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand … and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. And behold … bring the first of the fruit of the ground … And you shall set it down before the LORD … and you shall rejoice in all the good which the LORD … has given you and to your household … and the sojourner who is among you.”

Then I didn’t quite understand why we always had an old lady from across the alley who lived on nothing or friends of the cousins who could not afford busfare home or even the handyman who had to have dad’s help with the screens. But I knew instinctively that they all belonged, as representative Americans, at the banquet.

Then, as a young college graduate I retraced the steps of my New England ancestors, finding myself, after a summer in Quaker workcamp soon after the war, living in London lodgings, uncertain where I really belonged. A family friend sent a young GI couple to look me up, the veteran blind from war wounds, his wife a gay American-Irish girl with a green temper and egalitarian ways that did not sit well with her new British neighbors. (She was caught having coffee with a telephone repair man after he finished a job for her.) They adopted me and my problems and finally invited me and another college friend, exiled at the London School of Economics, to Thanksgiving dinner. And it was that day that I learned just what that holy day is all about.

All of us Americans had been treated to a great deal of rudeness about our nationality and our nation, its rich, insufferable, overspending ways, our naïve belief in the rights of man and our accidental prominence as a world power for which by nature, Englishmen and Frenchmen and Finns assured me, we were not meant. Whether we were ashamed of our country or not, we had seen signs on Paris streets saying “Americans, go home,” and we were weary and homesick.

Thanksgiving Day we had Sam, the turkey, named by the young couples’ two-year-old, who fortunately did not object to eating his large friend. Sam was bought at the navy PX. The rest of the feast we all found here and there, some corn meal, cranberry jelly with a funny taste, and apple pie, although we ought to have been able to find mincemeat in England. But as we gathered about the plastic tablecloth in the dusk of a London evening, where outside on the streets Londoners were hurrying home from work as if it were an ordinary day, our two candles lit and the turkey smelling like home, we all nearly cried. We knew we were singing the Lord’s song in a strange land and it was terribly sad, but joyful, because we had the chance to celebrate what we, as the chosen people, must celebrate—our national creation and preservation. The next day I got up and went and bought a ticket home. It is the remembrance of that moment of glory that I have celebrated each year since and want preserved for my children’s children.

G. Douglas Young is founder and president of the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem. He has lived there since 1963.

Ancient Egyptians worshiped the blazing sun. The pagan Greek saw Apollo riding his chariot through the sky, until philosophers like Anaxagoras studied the meteorite that fell at Aegospotami in 468 B.C. and said, “They’re not heavenly bodies, they’re just hot stone.” The demythologized hot solar rock took on new importance with Copernicus and Bruno who made it the center of the universe. Even modern man may yet get down on his knees to put an adapter on his gas and oil furnace to catch the heat from this source of energy.

But it takes the Bible to tell the truth that the sun is a servant of the Lord. The glorious, formidable sun is not a matter of fact so much as a minister of God, as faithful as the angels, whose testimony is more sure than human tradition. The sun waits, along with the trees too polluted to breathe well and with animals suffering wounds, for the redemption of our bodies so that its service be fulfilled and it may rest from its labors.

Again and again the Bible stresses that the name of Yahweh is praised from where the sun rises to where the sun sets. The name of Yahweh—Covenanting Lord of faithfulness—is held up high for all nations to see, and the people native to the earth are called to chime in with pure offerings of “Hallelu Yahweh!” “Don’t tell me,” says Paul to the Jews at Rome, “that you and your neighbors never heard the Good News. Didn’t you ever see the sun run along its God-appointed race track?” Each day of sun and rain, of dappled things and finch’s wings and pileated woodpeckers, is brimming over with news of God’s great deeds.

Scripture cuts off such sentiments as Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!” The praise of nature is not in the Bible to elicit introverted, pantheistic feelings about the fall colors or to encourage God’s people to have tremulous, Romantic experiences of the sublime “out in the country” (an eighteenth-century, citified term) while the urban world goes to cultural hell. And you miss the meaning of Psalm 19, or 104, or 148, if you agree that you should just look at the sun and moon, fire and hail, fruitful trees and cedars, young men and virgins, so that your I meets the Thou of these innumerable individual presences filling the world, and we bask in the encounters of mutual love and praise (See Nathan Scott’s “Prolegomenon to a Christian Poetic,” Modern Literature and the Religious Frontier, Harper & Brothers, 1958, pp. 50–52).

As I understand God’s Word, “the contemplative poetic look” is a gnostic version of the human vocation; the artistic stare is not enough to save anybody or anything. What counts is whether the human response to creation levels pride, builds up Christ’s body, and compounds the praise and thanksgiving of God’s myriad creatures. God tells us that the creaturehood of nonhuman creatures is good, deserves respect, is worthy of cultivation, is to be emulated and sanctified by prayerful thanksgiving on our part.

Starkly put, creation is a revelation of the true God, as Psalm 19 tells us. God speaks through the glossolalia of his creatures day and night; God witnesses through the path of the sun, through seedtime and harvest, of his providing care. The covenanting will of the Lord is not secretive, oracular, or far away, but as close as the solution of salt in water, the breathing of a newborn child, the way of a man with a maid, the fine line of an older generation’s pedagogy next to indoctrination. Children of God are asked to trade their talents in interpreting creation. That’s what Christian philosophy is all about, what Christian aesthetic theory wants to plumb for its service, the very rationale of Christian scholarship and Christian education.

When you want to find out how God ordered plants to grow, you don’t go study the synoptic Gospels. You go examine plants with a sharp knife and a keen microscope. If you need to discover what chinks in a person’s emotional makeup are apt to crack wide open in later life and how you should put an arm around such a one, you don’t go read Proverbs for details on neuroses and psychoses. You study the case histories of emotionally disturbed people and examine others who display psychic health, make notes, reflect, and bite your fingernails as psychotherapist lest you mess up the life of somebody Christ died for. If you must decide, so you can give leadership on whether Chagall’s stained glass window, honoring the late Mayor Daley in the Art Institute of Chicago, is more or less significant than the striking piece by Abraham Pattner that takes a whole wall of the downtown loop synagogue, you don’t read Paul’s letters, the Psalms, or even Isaiah 40. Instead, you study art and the artists and slowly begin to make an aesthetic judgment that will bring relative blessing or a curse to those whom it influences.

Although God’s people necessarily go first to the Bible for the Lord’s disciplining and setting our consciences straight and for a right understanding of doctrine, we must needs go search creation for drafting our fallible, Christian solutions to the problems facing us in our sin-cursed world and society.

That’s nothing new. But I’m saying (with the authority of God’s written Word, Psalm 19) that no Christian need be uneasy about whether a study of biology, psychology, or aesthetics serves the Lord. Creation is a revelation of God’s will, and if you are humbly studying plant creation or emotional or artistic creatureliness, and are busy trying to discern the will of God there, what more could one ask for as a kingdom mission and fulltime Christian service. Of course, if your biological theory is Lamarchkian or Teilhard de Chardinian, and your psychology is soft-Skinnerian or Jungian, and your aesthetics is Crocean or a mixture of Hume and Dewey, you should be very uneasy as a Christian. Otherwise, you perjure the plants, the emotions, and the arts.

Yet, we must not succumb to the temptation to use the Bible as an answer sheet to check out our biological taxonomy, our chart of personality types, or to determine “what now is art and music?” That would be a cheap misuse of the Bible and express an illegitimate, immature desire for a ready-made, instant Christian culture that shoves off on God what he entrusts us to do. What we need is a richer grasp of creation in our Christian philosophy and evangelical theology, and a new, urgent sense of doing scholarship as a community of saints.

Don’t misunderstand; I am not talking about “a natural theology.” I think that a biblical understanding of the doctrine of creation is the backbone of a Christian cultural philosophy and a theology worth its biblical salt. The glory of the Lord God is indeed being revealed everywhere—deafeningly—so nobody has an excuse; but some people are religiously deaf. Only when the Holy Spirit unstops the ears and opens up the heart can you make saving sense out of the creaturely glossolalia.

Evangelical believers are so busy thinking, talking, and acting out salvation, with nary a second thought about creation, that before you can say “Afghanistan” we are caught up in quasi-world-flight heresies and are “saving” disembodied, uncreaturely people. One cause of this abnormality, I’m afraid, is that many of us walk around with a lightweight Bible and act as though all the Good News for modern man is in the New Testament and the Old Testament is out of date. But creation is Good News, and it is found in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament. A believing knowledge of creation brings hope because creation, understood biblically, reveals the perversion and broken power of sin, as well as of salvation. Inflation and unemployment in tandem is not an inevitability. Racism is not ineradicable. Camp art and mental breakdowns among the saints are not necessary. We are not locked into evil. We can turn from sin to God, who will save us and his creation. That is enough to leave you limp.

G. Douglas Young is founder and president of the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem. He has lived there since 1963.

Before nature one must be silent and stare.

Late in the afternoon I often go out walking with my dog in the hills around my home. Such excursions have the character of escape. I climb over a sagging barbed-wire fence and am free. This twisted metal thread, gradually being engulfed by wild currant bushes that birds planted while swinging on the wire, separates one reality from another. Both my dog and I sense this.

We follow the natural divisions of the land as we walk—a rock fault, the crest of a hill, a dry creek bed. It takes only a few minutes for the authority of this other reality to make itself felt. In this sphere one must be silent and stare. There are no interposing “media.” There is no “sharing.”

I stare at a white-skinned, black-scarred aspen tree whose leaves have turned a rosy gold with the trapped anthocyanin left by the receding sap. The tree and I do not communicate. Yet as I rub my hand across its tough skin and scabs and feel my own sap, full of sugars and enzymes, circulating through the branches of my body, I once again sustain the momentary illusion that, given such a setting of steady, silent intent, of beauty, I would find it easy and natural to be forever good and virtuous. Here every organism goes about its business with unwearying devotion. Sap rising and falling. Leaves drifting and decaying. Birds eating and excreting. Seeds dying and sprouting. Surely I could slip into a niche somewhere in this open-air monastery.

I sit down under the tree and call my dog to me. He is a comical sight, sniffing his way over the hill in systematic criss-crosses of ecstasy, belonging yet not belonging to this separate reality. Watching him, I realize that his devotion to his destiny is greater than mine. With a few exceptions, mostly in the form of squirrels, he is obedient, faithful, and affectionate toward his master. In that great avalanche of creation we call the fall he has landed somewhere between me and the tree. He is that strange anomaly, a domesticated animal.

This separate reality my dog and I invade was invented in the eighteenth century, and it is called Nature. It contains the images that float before our mind’s eye when we hear the word Creation: trees and birds and flowers and fish. Ruffed grouse and black bears, gray whales and mule deer. It is the preferred setting for Boy Scout jamborees, rock concerts, vacations, and summer weddings. We reverently preserve it in national parks and game sanctuaries.

But we do not allow it in the house. It is useless to point out that gravity operates indoors as well as out, that bacteria decompose garbage in the trash can, that water evaporates from the sink. Those activities of the physical world, while acknowledged as Science, are outside our common category of Nature. The closest we come to Nature indoors is pine-scented room deodorizer.

Yet nature, or at any rate Creation, has always been a significant category in Christian understanding. Significant but not static. For example, the comparable category for the first-century Greek world was the cosmos. The Greek cosmos differs from our Nature in that it contains all things that have being, including mathematics and time. Only cursory attention is given to small furry animals and fields of daisies. Thus there arose in the first few hundred years of the church life-and-death controversies over the “nature” of Christ—how he came into being; what that being, in an almost mathematical and molecular sense, consists of; how it relates to temporal history. These concerns, imbedded in the Nicene Creed, now seem almost inaccessibly antiquarian to the contemporary Christian. “Very God of Very God; Begotten, not made; Being of one substance with the Father.” That was the closest approximation to a “nature talk” the early church in its Greek milieu ever made.

It remained for Tennyson, a millennium and a half later, to translate that cosmological obsession into our familiar Nature terms:

Flower in the crannied wall,

I pluck you out of the crannies;

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,

Little flower—but if I could understand

What you are, root and all, and all in all,

I should know what God and man is.

Well, we may say, we will leapfrog over the esoteric Greeks and get back to those earthy Hebrews. They understood about Nature. Didn’t Jacob camp out with a rock for a pillow? And Moses, out on a nature walk, discovered a new and truly wild flower, a burning bush. But that’s not exactly what we had in mind either. That’s somewhat more than we ask of Nature today. Indeed, we won’t put up with its getting so out of hand. It is the steady predictability of Nature that we love—the rotating seasons, the weather forecast, the ecological balance.

But for the Hebrews, the category we call Nature, one for which they had no word at all, was always precarious and unpredictable, capable of breaking forth into flame or dropping bread down on their heads or washing away the world in a few weeks. Jacob’s pillow became the first step on the stairway to Heaven. Anything one touched, any place one innocently laid his head, could be an unlooked for entrance into the unveiled presence of the Creator. Trees and rocks and streams were alive with the possibilities of what God might decide to do next. And although the Old Testament escapes the sentimentality of latter-day pantheism, the prospects of Yahweh’s showing up in a whirlwind or a thunderclap were enough to encourage the Hebrews to keep a wary eye on the environment.

They also insisted upon its joining the chorus of praise to its Creator. The psalmist orders the trees to clap their hands and the hills to leap for joy. We even have it on no less a Hebrew authority than Jesus that the very stones could cry out in praise of the King of Heaven in addition to performing the formidable task of raising up children to Abraham.

Yes, Nature has suffered a considerable comedown since the days of the “earthy” Hebrews. We tend to place the burden of this responsibility on the thin shoulders of Sir Isaac Newton, who in the eighteenth century formulated the binomial theorem, the laws of gravity and motion, and the elements of differential calculus. The poets who inherited this vivisection of the world were particularly distressed with Newton’s study of light. Blake, for example, scorned both the Greeks’ cosmology and Newton’s science, preferring to cast his lot with the Hebrews, when he wrote:

The Atoms of Democritus

And Newton’s Particles of light

Are sands upon the Red sea shore

Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.

But such a dividing of waters of creation into Nature and Science must have begun even earlier in the church’s history. On one side of the gulf we see the Scholastics, for whom Nature was primarily a proposition in an interminable argument that was to prove the existence of God. On the other side stands Francis of Assisi, birds perched in his hair, proclaiming his kinship with the sun and moon. Give them a few centuries and the Scholastics in their cold stone edifices of the University of Paris have become Isaac Newton at Cambridge writing his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in which Nature becomes Number. Now Newton was a pious man who also wrote treatises on Daniel and Revelation. To him the numbers added up to God. But to his followers they added up only to Science.

And what of the inheritors of Saint Francis? As the eighteenth century turned into the nineteenth, they either went mad, like Blake, stomped off in a huff to die early, like Shelley and Keats, or lived to a ripe old age writing silly things about the “natural piety” of the pagan, like Wordsworth. Yet even the mad Blake could recognize nonsense: “I see in Wordsworth the Natural Man rising up against the Spiritual Man Continually, & then he is No Poet but a Heathen Philosopher at Enmity against all true Poetry or Inspiration. There is no such Thing as Natural Piety Because The Natural Man is at Enmity with God.”

Yet when Wordsworth wrote his famous sonnet celebrating that pious pagan, “suckled in a creed outworn,” it was the first three lines that set the tone for the twentieth-century “nature lover,” that wistful, slightly comical creature:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in Nature that is ours …

At last. There is the use of the term “Nature” we have been looking for. There are the wandering clouds and the fields of daffodils and the babbling brooks. And there too is the divorce of Nature from “the world” that is also a part of our understanding. Human beings and their society forever separated from Nature. Henceforth we can only be picnickers or backpackers, inserting ourselves as unobtrusively as possible into the landscape, scrupulously gathering up our sandwich bags and virtuously picking up the soda cans others have left behind. We refrain from picking the wildflowers and shoot wild animals only with a camera. But at last we must go home and sadly shut the door on Nature.

True, for its part Nature will not have us on any account. At a recent national campers’ convention a few miles from my former home, the very grass disintegrated within two days under the hiking boots of pious pagans. The game removed themselves to the next county. Pollen grains and mosquitoes filled the air. The campers were humble toward the mosquitoes and apologetic about the grass. Still, Nature has a way of receding upon our approach, like one who is not anxious to make friends.

Yet we persist, pagans and Christians alike. Take us back, we whimper, plucking at the sleeve of heartless Mother Nature. We may not, as a culture, have penetrated to the meaning of disobedience in the Garden, but we have certainly appropriated the fact of our expulsion from it. We stand somewhat bewildered beyond the gates, wondering why the sight of a scurrying furry animal should move us so when we don’t even remember its name.

Becoming Christians has not given us the key to that particular gate. Ours is the key to the City, not the Garden. A city, however, that is like none we have ever known, pierced by a river and with a tree at its heart. Therefore, since we might one day be called upon to return to our original occupation of naming creation, we should perhaps attend more closely to the tenderness and trepidations we feel toward Nature while we wait for the lion and the lamb to become bedfellows. Jesus expected his own generation to read at least the signs of the sky and the harvest. Few of us can do that much.

The greater the gulf between Nature and the world, the more disastrously imbedded our sense of invulnerability becomes. We may lament Nature’s elusiveness, but we also feel safe from its surprises. That is why termites in the woodwork and cancer in the bloodstream always come as a shock. Despite the “unnaturalness” of fallen humanity, Nature has been allowed to keep a grip on our bodies, our breath, our bacteria.

How far we have withdrawn into our illusory citadel can be measured by our distance from the Franciscan hymn that begins, sweetly enough, “Praised be God for our Sister, Mother Earth, which brings forth varied fruits and grass and glowing flowers,” but ends on the shocking note, “Praised be God for our Sister, the death of the body.” That is truly a nature psalm, embracing all the mysterious implications of our kinship with creation.

Indeed, it would be a great boon to all human culture if Christianity could succeed in once more uniting Nature and Number. We have heard for long yawning decades now about the war between science and religion and their imminent reconciliation at the hands of Christian apologists. These announcements would be much more credible if they came from Christian scientists. In the twentieth century, Christendom has embraced Nature more passionately than ever our forebearers did. Lilies of the field leave us positively giddy. But too close an embrace makes respectful attention impossible. Our love is more often a consumer’s orgy. We must possess Nature. We protect the lilies and feed the sparrows, hoping to make them ours.

Stand back a bit, and instead of “loving” nature, do as Jesus instructed and consider it. Observe where the constellation Scorpio rises in the summer sky. Learn how long light takes to reach the earth from our own sister sun and why it is at present impossible to calculate accurately either the distance or size of strange quasars. Follow the seedpods of field flowers and the hundred curious paths by which they find their way into the ground. Discover what cancer cells look like. Jonathan Edwards knew, much more intimately than Tennyson, the anatomy of arachnids. The one is content to stand with his uprooted flower drooping like a dismal question mark in his disappointed hand, while the other pursues spiders to his satisfaction.

This is the only significance of the science-and-religion reconciliation, not that scores of doubting scientists will be converted, but that thousands of blurry-eyed, nature-loving Christians will shake themselves, blink, and begin to take a hard, intimate, respectful look at the handiwork of their Creator. That they will sit down on a stump or a rock somewhere silent and feel the listening, watching, thrumming sense of separation and groaning desire that engulfs them—the separation that makes it painfully impossible for human beings to live like lilies and the desire that makes it equally impossible to stop trying.

Yet even in the continual tension we must suffer between these separate realities of “the world” and Nature, there is a grace extended to us, often misappropriated but nevertheless real. It is the very quality of carelessness, of what-will-it-matter-fifty-years-from-now. It is freedom from self-importance, egotism that dissipates in the open air like smoke. Misappropriated and turned inside out, it is the frequently described fear that assails the solitary figure overwhelmed by the night sky, filled as it is with vast spaces and infinite stars. But it is that sense of not mattering that comforts the heart of Sam, the hobbit, struggling with the outsized task of saving Middle-earth. Within the very realm of the Enemy, he has a moment of carelessness mediated by the sight of a star. “There, peeping among the cloud-wrack, above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.… Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s ceased to trouble him” (Lord of the Rings, Houghton Mifflin, 1965, p. 199).

Notice that Sam did not, like Dorothy in the Land of Oz, begin to sing about wishing on a star. He did not attempt to “commune” with Nature in the shape of the star. He recognized it as a separate—but substantial—reality. Far from frightening him, the thought of his own inconsequence comforted him. Field flowers being burnt in the oven, numbered sparrows falling out of the sky, seeds buried in the earth. It is by such strange paradoxes that Nature talks to us.

G. Douglas Young is founder and president of the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem. He has lived there since 1963.

John Paul Ii

We do not expect that John Paul II will greatly alter the ways of Roman Catholicism. But there is reason to hope that he will be open to change such as toleration toward other Christians and adherents of other religions and also encouragement to Catholics who are emphasizing the centrality of Christ.

Although Catholics are a huge majority within Poland, John Paul’s experience under Nazi, then Communist rule, should make him more sensitive to the plight of religious minorities. When the Polish government was hounding the Oasis movement with its evangelical overtones and other Polish bishops were vacillating, it was the future pope who helped Oasis to achieve recognition and hence, a measure of protection (see News, October 6, p. 44).

The pope is receiving advice from diverse quarters. We think he could do no better than heed the Apostle Paul’s charge: “A bishop, as God’s steward, must be blameless; … he must hold firm to the sure word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to confute those who contradict it” (Titus 1:7a, 9).