With one minor exception, Scotland has seen no church union since 1929. During those five decades the national Kirk (now with just over one million members) has been involved in talks that failed: for example, with Episcopalians (43,000) and Congregationalists (20,000). There have been friendlier relations with Roman Catholics (about 310,000 adult members) and Baptists (16,000), perhaps aided by the fact that no marriage was purposed.

What comes as a surprise to visitors, however, is the continued existence of four smaller Presbyterian bodies (aggregating 40,000 members and adherents). With three of these groups there is not even a remote possibility of union, for doctrinal reasons; the fourth protests the principle of an established church even in the modified form existing in Scotland today. Neither can any of these groups unite with each other. There was also an abortive merger scheme twenty years ago between the Church of Scotland and the Church of England (about 1.85 million communicant members).

What needs to be added to this background is that the total Scottish church membership, including sizeable other bodies such as Christian Brethren and Salvation Army, still accounts for rather less than 40 per cent of the population. More than three million souls in the land of John Knox are without even a nominal religious connection.

It seemed important to offer this flurry of statistics as something not irrelevant to the latest merger scheme—between the Church of Scotland and Scottish Methodists. The latter, who number fewer than 10,000 with forty ministers, have never been strong in Scotland, and are found chiefly in the cities and in those areas visited by John Wesley on his travels north of the border.

Talks between the Church of Scotland and the Methodists have been in progress since 1963, and have accelerated since 1972. “The principal tenets of the faith,” it is reported, “are clearly held in common.” Everything has been carried on in a low key. We are assured that the arrangements will be flexible, that no uniformity of worship will be imposed, and that any adjustments found to be necessary can be made after the union. The average church member might well echo words spoken by an army officer’s wife: “We are just simple women who sit in the pews; we really don’t know what this is all about.” She shrewdly pointed out that women constituted a majority in the church, but it makes no difference either way: The average church member is not being asked for an opinion on this scheme.

It was with some interest, therefore, that I read in the Church of Scotland magazine that in the general assembly this month the scheme “is likely to be powerfully opposed.” Evidently we are in for another season of acrimony in which protagonists will be provoked into saying more than they ought, and the thoughtful will again mourn that the ecumenical movement should engender such bitterness.

Anyway, I read the basis and plan proposed for union between the Kirk and Scottish Methodists that is being put to the general assembly this month. The new body is to be called the Church of Scotland, with Methodist ministers continuing in their present circuits as well as being received as members of a presbytery. Their representative layfolk likewise would be deemed as elders in the united church. There would still be Methodist superintendents, called circuit moderators, but in presbytery they would have the same status as other ministers.

Presbyteries over the last year had been formulating comments on the scheme, and these have been listed in an appendix to the report. None of the others quite emulated the overseas presbytery of Jerusalem in welcoming the scheme enthusiastically. The presbytery of England, which knows Methodism better than any other, gave a more typical reaction: The scheme was unacceptable in its present form. This polite brushoff was expressed in different words by other presbyteries.

There was objection to imprecision and ambiguity—the very factor that had scuppered the Anglican/Methodist scheme in England in 1969. Some saw the specter of the bishop in the ill-defined continuing role of superintendent. Disquiet was expressed that the acceptance of Methodist lay representatives as presbytery members “glosses over the question of ordination rather than tackles it.” How presbyteries and circuits could operate side by side was also unclear: The Kirk’s largest presbytery bluntly warned that it would reject what it called “two distinct and contradictory systems of church government.”

Another hazy area concerned the position of the Westminster Confession—accepted by the Kirk as a subordinate standard of faith, though few of its ministers today hold to double predestination or believe the Pope to be the Man of Sin. The proposed scheme, it is alleged, is so worded that the historic creeds are promoted, the Westminster document relegated. Since Scottish Methodists belong to the British Methodist Conference, questions of mutual eligibility of Scottish and English ministers arose. All the Kirk assembly is being asked to do at present is to send the scheme down to presbyteries for approval with instructions to report in time for the 1979 assembly.

Church merger reports are peculiarly vulnerable things, not constructed to withstand close scrutiny. Whenever striking and imaginative variations are played around a familiar theme, the strident cry of betraying our heritage is heard in the land, and dark allusions made about building new boats to founder on old rocks. On the other hand that might just be true. When a beguiling ecumenical tune is piped to us, some of us don’t dance, tiresome children that we are. So another batch of wrong conclusions is drawn and we are dismissed as incorrigible.

“Is it God’s will that his people should be one?” To this the congregation will answer yes. “Is Christ divided?” No. “Well, why don’t you join us?” Unionists spend a lot of time trying to convince evangelical dissentients that unity matters. But the evangelical appreciates that fact so much that he is out in front asking two questions: Unity on what basis? Unity to what end? Unless unity is regarded as only one aspect of the quest for all-round holiness, we shall merely emulate Edward Lear’s impetuous characters who, disregarding bad weather and good friends, went to sea in a sieve. The present Scottish merger scheme is riddled with ambiguities. If it is finally accepted it will only be because either Presbyterians or Methodists, or both, are not taking their own doctrinal standpoint seriously.

A postscript. After I wrote this column the scheme of union between the Kirk and Scottish Methodists was passed overwhelmingly by the former, but rejected by the latter.

J. D. Douglas is an author and journalist who lives in St. Andrews, Scotland.

Ten evangelical Christians traveled to Barrytown, New York, recently for a weekend of dialogue with fifteen students of the Unification Theological Seminary and a faculty member described as a nonmember of the Unification Church (U.C.), the controversial sect led by Korean evangelist Sun Myung Moon. The no-holds-barred encounter was convened by Richard Quebedeaux, a United Church of Christ member who has written several books on evangelical trends.

Mennonite scholar Rodney Sawatsky, church historian at Conrad Grebel College (University of Waterloo) in Ontario, moderated the discussions. The evangelical panel included Quebedeaux, two seminary professors (Missouri-Synod Lutheran and United Presbyterian), two college religion instructors (from Canada and Pennsylvania), two West Coast InterVarsity Christian Fellowship staffers, a religion books editor (Roy Carlisle, a Presbyterian, of Harper & Row), and Campus Crusade for Christ executive Paul Eshleman, a Presbyterian. Several of the participating “Moonies,” as Moon’s followers are known, were formerly state directors for the U.C.

Eshleman, who directed the nationwide “Here’s Life” campaign for Campus Crusade, on the eve of the conference addressed one-third of the seminary’s 106 students in a voluntary-attendance session. The lecture included an explication of Campus Crusade’s “Four Spiritual Laws,” an evangelism tool that charts the Christian plan of salvation. The next morning, when the twenty-six conferees introduced themselves by relating their religious testimonies, one Moonie told of being moved by Eshleman’s talk and meditating in the woods alone for four hours in the darkness of night until at last he “found peace.” Several Moonies told of being “born again” into the evangelical Christian faith prior to embracing Moon’s “Divine Principle.” Most cited apathy and hypocrisy in the historic churches as reasons for leaving them—and vision, zeal, love, and discipline as attractions that drew them to the U.C. (The Moonies believe that Christ failed to achieve full salvation and that a Korean-born messiah—possibly Moon—will complete the task.)

Participants were reminded of their common goal—to exchange viewpoints. Christology, Creation, the Fall, Authority, Salvation, and Eschatology were discussed in turn—as were the Unification doctrines of indemnity, the Divine Principle, Moon’s role as the Third Adam, and spiritual communication with the dead. Between sessions and sumptuous meals prepared and served by seminary students, those so inclined strolled the verdant 250-acre campus of the former Christian Brothers monastery and browsed in the 22,000-volume seminary library. First-time visitors were surprised to find, in addition to standard biblical reference works, more than 300 periodicals, ranging from the Christian Century to CHRISTIANITY TODAY, and from The Lutheran to Logos Journal. Even recent anti-Moon paperbacks—for example, Jerry Yamamoto’s The Puppet Master and James Bjornstad’s The Moon Is Not the Son—were available to students and had been read by some of the panel members.

Cross Words

They “crucified” Willie Dicks, 37, in a park in Oakland. California, last month. Attendants tied Dicks, pastor of St. John’s Missionary Baptist Church in nearby San Jose, to the twelve-foot-long cross he had carried into the park and propped against a pine tree.

He had carefully marked with a pen the fleshy parts between his toes and fingers where he wanted the three-inch nails, which had been immersed in disinfectant, to be driven. Pain flashed across his face as the nails were driven in, and blood trickled from his left hand and a foot. But an attendant supported his body around the waist to take the weight off the nails.

Said the bearded black clergyman to 100 curious onlookers: “I would like to say from this cross that I’m disgusted that our senior citizens cannot walk through the streets of the cities without being robbed and raped. I’m asking you here today to refrain from all crime.”

When he finished his exhortation against crime, an assistant using heavy wire cutters cut off the nail heads and Dicks was pulled free.

Denied accreditation by the New York Board of Regents last February, the seminary has filed suit, charging discrimination. Subsequently, in a companion suit, the U.C. entered six counts of libel against ex-Moonie Gary Scharff for testimony he presented before the board. The church is seeking $15 million in “compensatory and punitive damages” in that case.

Despite its non-accredited status, the three-year-old seminary attracts 300 applicants annually, of whom one-sixth are admitted to the two-year program in religious education. All 106 students—twenty of them women—are college graduates, all are Moonies, and all are on full scholarship. Twelve members of the 1978 graduating class of fifty-two have been accepted at recognized theological schools in the United States, Canada, and Britain.

Oddly, only three of the twelve faculty members (five of them part-time) are members of the U.C. The others represent a variety of theological backgrounds. Two are Roman Catholic, two are Presbyterian (including United Presbyterian Herbert Richardson), one is a Jewish rabbi, one is a Greek Orthodox scholar, another is a minister of the Reformed Church in America (Thomas Boslooper), and still another is a Unitec Methodist pastor (Henry O. Thompson). All are listed in U.C. literature as having earned doctorates. The formal curriculum is supplemented by guest lectures by visiting scholars—about forty of them during the 1977–78 academic year from big-name schools.

The dialogue was the latest in a series of seminary seminars. During the recently concluded academic year five dialogues involving visiting professors and three featuring visiting theological students were held at Barrytown. In addition, U.C. seminary students attended several ecumenical student conferences elsewhere. Student coordinator Anthony Guerra, former director of U.C. operations in Tennessee and Massachusetts, said that the seminars were conceived by Moon to provide stimulating doctrinal exchanges between seminarians and non-U.C. theologians, and to build bridges between the U.C. and other communions.

Student-led worship services are held in the seminary chapel each weekday morning at 6:30. Following a slightly later chapel session on Sundays, an estimated 75 per cent of the students and faculty fan out to area churches for Sunday school and worship. Seminary president David S. C. Kim and his family attend a Presbyterian Church. (Kim and Moon are the only survivors of the quintet who formed the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity in Seoul in 1954.) Dean Therese Stewart, a former nun whose husband Ernest is the building superintendent at the seminary, worships with a United Methodist congregation. Asked about the reception accorded the Moon disciples, President Kim replied that at first pastors and parishioners are guarded, but when they realize their fears of infiltration are groundless, they become more friendly and accepting. One male student assists the pastor at a black Baptist church. Students, Kim said, are enjoined against proselytizing, and they are instructed to attend the churches singly or in twos—never in groups. He asserted that the U.C. is not really a church but a movement seeking to unite all churches. Hence, said he, the

Moonies do not administer sacraments, but find fulfillment of their ecclesiastical needs through involvement in local congregations of various church bodies.

Moonie Pam Fanchier told seminar participants of her seizure by her parents in an unsuccessful deprogramming attempt four months after she joined the U.C. following her graduation from the University of Kansas in 1975. As a consequence of the incident, relations with her parents have suffered, she said. Although they occasionally communicate by telephone, she hasn’t seen them for three years. Moonie panel members stated that with the church’s “increased stability and maturity” the number of such episodes has diminished. Virtually no parental abductions have occurred in 1978, they said. Citing Stillson Judah’s calculation that a third of all converts to new religious groups drop out voluntarily, they acknowledged that between 3,000 and 4,000 disciples have left on their own over the past five years. Susan Reinbold, the church’s director of public affairs (until replaced in June by Kathy Lowery) estimated in a telephone interview that some 300 Moonies have been forcibly removed by their parents since the deprogramming crusade began in earnest in late 1974. About half of these, she said, have returned to the Unification fold. A notable example is former Fort Worth socialite Cynthia Slaughter, 27, who rejoined the church in June in Boston following an absence of three years. Deprogrammed by cult foe Ted Patrick after she had spent only six weeks as a Moonie, she reportedly went on to assist in twenty-five deprogrammings herself, and she was a frequent speaker at anti-cult meetings.

Several lawsuits arising from parent recovery efforts are in process. Wendy Helander, 21, twice “rescued” by her parents only to return to the Moon group, is seeking an injunction against further attempts. Verdicts in the case, involving deprogrammers Patrick and Joe Alexander, Jr., are pending. But this spring an out-of-court settlement was reached with Baptist minister-educator George Swope, who directed the now-defunct rehabilitation center in New Hampshire where Miss Helander allegedly was confined. Details were not released. Following the earlier rescue attempt in 1975, Miss Helander won a $5,000 judgment against Patrick. Her parents, who live in Guilford, Connecticut, say efforts to recover their daughter have cost them more than $40,000. They lost a counter suit in which they sought a conviction against the U.C. for “kidnapping back” their daughter.

Church officials have announced that they will appeal a court decision denying the suit of Leslie Weiss against Patrick and Albert Turner for alleged conspiracy, assault and battery, and false imprisonment. If the appeal fails, this will be the first such case lost by the U.C., say church spokesmen. Miss Weiss joined the Moon movement in June, 1974, at age twenty-three. Her parents, who enlisted the services of Patrick, have since died. Turner, whose daughter Shelly has filed suit against the U.C. for alleged violations of her civil rights during her tenure as a Moonie, made his Warwick, Rhode Island, home available to the Weiss family for the deprogramming sessions. In a twenty-two page opinion dated June 1, 1978, U.S. District Judge Francis J. Boyle explained his decision: “What occurred here was simply an effort, in private, to persuade a willing listener to disavow the tenets of the Unification Church. To hold otherwise would be to deny defendants their First Amendment right to freedom of speech, one of the very rights which plaintiff herself asserts as the basis of her civil rights claim.” Miss Weiss, however, contends that she was manipulated into the deprogramming situation through deceit and trickery.

Are the Moonies overcoming the public relations problems that continue to plague them? Salonen believes that they are. When he assumed the presidency five years ago, he says, there were fewer than 1,000 U.S. members—and most of them resided in U.C. centers. Now, as members are growing older and marrying, many are moving into homes in their respective communities and finding jobs to support their families. Others are furthering their education in colleges and universities.

No Toll Calls Allowed

When police in Porter, Indiana, picked up Naam Hankins, 56, for public intoxication, he was feeling pretty low. He’d had a fight with his wife, he told Officer Daniel O’Kelly, and he said he wanted to use his one phone call to talk to the only friend he had—God. O’Kelly denied the request, explaining that policy prohibits the placing of long distance calls.

There is a trend, Salonen added, away from street and house-to-house solicitation in favor of financing by means of church-sponsored industries. Locally incorporated Unification groups have recently established a boat-building business in Alabama and fishing operations in Norfolk, Virginia, and Gloucester, Massachusetts. In response to the criticism that Moon-related businesses, manned by church volunteers, threatened local workers, Salonen said that workers are being recruited from the local communities as well as from U.C. ranks. All employees must be paid the minimum wage required by law, Salonen added, and the firms pay local, state, and federal taxes. (Moon’s people sell their fish at cut-rate prices, thus many once-hostile local residents now welcome the newcomers.)

When the twenty-six participants in the evangelical-U.C. dialogue at Barrytown met for their final session, convener Quebedeaux, in an emotionally charged speech, admitted that he had not been enthusiastic about his first encounter with the U.C. seminary students last March. But, said he, two visits to the seminary had changed his mind. “I’ve never seen a place where agape has worked out so well,” he said. “Theologically, doctrinally, I think you’re wrong. Emotionally, I think you’re right.… You may be heretics—I’ll let God decide that. But I love you, and I believe the world is a better place because of you.”

A Moonie responded similarly, expressing respect and love for the evangelical participants. The gathering concluded with a period of spontaneous prayer led by Moonies and evangelicals alike.

One evangelical seemed to sum up the sentiments of a number of his colleagues as he offered a farewell comment: “I’m going back and telling everyone I found real Christian fellowship in Barrytown. Of course, I must tell them, too, that many Moonies seem to be following Reverend Moon more than Jesus Christ. But I want you to know that I love you and that I will be praying for you—that the Holy Spirit will convict you of error and lead you to truth. God bless you all.”

The corridors of the seminary were buzzing with talk about plans to fly more than 300 Moonies, including the entire seminary student body, next fall’s incoming class, the Korean folk ballet, and the New Hope singers, to England this summer for an intensive evangelistic campaign. Moon flew to London in May, prompting speculation that he had skipped the country to evade a subpoena to appear before the House Committee on International Relations in Washington. There were rumors that he planned to transfer the church’s international headquarters to England.

Both allegations were denied by Neil A. Salonen, president of the Unification Church of America, in a telephone interview. The European tour, he said, had been in the works since 1976. According to an official church statement. Moon has planned for some time to “shift his focus to an international level,” and the subpoena was allegedly received at U.C. headquarters on May 17, four days after Moon’s departure from the U.S. (See also following story.)

Shortly after his arrival in England Moon married 118 European couples in a mass ceremony. Salonen acknowledged that Moon’s application for renewal of his visa was rejected by British officials. The decision has been appealed, he said, and Moon is permitted to remain in England pending the final verdict—which gives him a four-month grace period. Moon reportedly intends to leave for the Orient at the end of the summer, anyway, said Salonen.

The church has repeatedly denied ties with the Korean Central Intelligence Agency and with the autocratic government of South Korea president Chung Hee Park. Salonen insists that Moon has never met Park. He also says that factories owned by Moon—contrary to publicized reports—have never manufactured any kind of weapons for the South Korean government.

According to Salonen, American membership in the U.C. stands at 35,000, of whom 7,000 are “full-time volunteers”—the vast majority “live-in” disciples. A 1976 survey by the church indicated that 75 per cent of its members were in their twenties; fewer than 10 per cent were thirty or older. Blacks accounted for only 6 per cent of the Moonie population though the proportion was rising, the report stated. The survey disclosed that 27 per cent of American Moonies had completed four years of college; only 22 per cent had no training beyond high school. U.C. members were scattered throughout all fifty states, with more than 70 per cent of them concentrated on the East and West Coasts. New York City had the largest Moonie population. Since the church has no international administration, Salonen explained, inclusive statistics are difficult to ascertain. He estimates world membership at three million in 122 countries.

Occult Supermart

Some 20,000 people visited a supermarket of occultic and psychic means to self-realization in San Francisco’s recent four-day “New Age Awareness Fair.” Two hundred booths in the Show Place featured a potpourri of “consciousness raising” schemes through the teachings of Eastern gurus, astrologers, psychic readers, pyramid-power advocates, and a variety of meditative methods. (Satanists were excluded, say organizers.) With the stark exception of the evangelical witness of the Berkeley Christian Coalition, most of the metaphysical merchants seemed agreed on one concept: holistic health and mind-stretching power are available for all who will tap the mysterious forces within man through proper parapsychology methods, diet, psychic release, and occultic symbols.

Fifty psychic readers using astrology, tarot cards, numerology, handwriting analysis, quartz crystals, bio-feedback, palmistry, Druid rune stones, and Kirlian auras offered to predict for a fee (usually $6) a person’s future or to inform him of his past life in previous incarnations.

Physical problems were dealt with by groups pushing psychic surgery, acupressure, yoga exercises, wheat grass juice, and spine-rolling massagers.

“We want to win people to the awareness and consciousness movement, said Rousan Coronado, manager of the fair.

The Berkeley Christians viewed the event as a sample of what may be ahead for America “on a much larger scale.”

ROBERT L. CLEATH

God and the Law In Dallas

It’s been a long hot summer for the Board of Education of the Dallas school district, the nation’s eighth-largest urban school district (136,547 pupils).

It all began when Superintendent Nolan Estes, a lay leader at the city’s First Baptist Church (see March 18, 1977, issue, page 52), resigned from the $47,500-a-year post, effective next January. He had served for ten years.

A search committee was appointed to recommend a replacement for Estes. It concluded that a large number of Dallas residents want their superintendent to be “visibly and devotedly religious.” With that in mind, at least three of the board members included questions about religious beliefs, church affiliation, and church attendance in their interviews with six leading candidates. Some of the candidates expressed resentment, saying their religious activities were none of the board’s business. (Only one of the top contenders is described as “actively religious”—Houston educator Linus Wright, who is a leader in a Church of Christ congregation.)

The issue spilled into the press, prompting public controversy. The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith charged that the emphasis on religion was possibly unconstitutional and clearly a violation of federal civil rights legislation. Other watchdog groups expressed their concern also.

Dallas County district attorney Henry Wade last month declared that the board’s actions constituted a criminal violation of Texas statutes. He said that he would have little choice but to take the matter to a grand jury if he received a complaint, since the Texas Education Code clearly prohibits religious tests in job placement. The code makes violators subject to fines and jail terms. No formal complaints had been filed as of early this month, and prosecution seemed unlikely.

But that was only a fraction of the board’s troubles. Early in June, an appeals court decided that the school system has not complied with desegregation requirements despite a decade of litigation and various plans. As a result, the federal government has threatened to withhold $4.5 million in aid. The board is taking its case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Next, Estes and the board members refused to release embarrassing test scores showing that half its new teachers failed a mental ability exam. The scores also indicated that teachers and administrators together averaged lower than a sample of high school students at a private school in affluent North Dallas. Efforts of the board to contravene an attorney general’s ruling on public access to those records became pointless when the Dallas Times Herald obtained a copy of the scores.

Finally, refusal to obey a judge’s order to release information about student discipline landed the board in court for a contempt hearing.

Dallas Times Herald columnist Jim Henderson, noting the board’s search for a new superintendent, commented acidly: “One must sympathize with the anguish of this difficult … search for a soul who can reconcile devotion to the Scriptures with disdain for the law.”

It’s the Law In Kentucky

Kentucky’s new law requiring display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms took effect in mid-June. But its sponsor, State Representative Claudia Riner (D-Louisville), wife of a Baptist clergyman, says she fears it may be “choked to death in red tape.”

Implementation of the legislation is contingent on sufficient funds in voluntary public contributions being received. At last count, the state reported that only eleven dollars had come in for the project.

Representative Riner says state officials rejected her offer to help raise donations and oversee production of 31,000 copies required (at an estimated cost of $ 17,000). Instead, State School Superintendent James B. Graham told Mrs. Riner that his department would assume responsibility for the project.

Another Kentucky law requires daily Bible readings in public school classrooms, another involves recitation of the Lord’s prayer, and still another permits teachers to teach the biblical account of creation. Children whose parents object are exempted from participation in the Bible reading and prayer practices. A legislative study commission, however, announced last month that the laws probably are unconstitutional because they support religion. The commission also gave a failing grade to a law that bans distribution of immoral and irreligious books in schools because it “gets fully into the realm of freedom of expression.”

They Love Mark In London

London’s West End theater district has been lit up by a most unexpected hit that has been drawing capacity audiences: a single actor reciting verbatim the King James version of the Gospel of Mark. Performing on a bare stage with three chairs and a table, Alex McGowen presents with dramatic flair the action-packed narrative of the shortest Gospel and portrays Jesus, Peter, and numerous other biblical people.

McGowen, a well known British actor who played the title role in the acclaimed Hadrian VII, explains in a brief on-stage opening statement that his motivation to do a one-man show based on the Bible came from a godly grandfather. McGowen says that when he decided at age 16 to become an actor, the old man prayed that he would not be drawn into a life of sin.

There are plans to bring McGowen’s St. Mark to America this fall.

ROBERT L. CLEATH

Muzzled in Mexico

Mexico’s Office of the Interior last month ordered the suspension of Spanish-language religious radio programs on fifty stations throughout the country.

The action was reported in the July 12 edition of a major national newspaper, Excelsior. The government, said the story, considers that religious broadcasts “lend themselves to swindle the public, since some of the programs in question indicate to the radio listener that through prayers he may be healed of such and such an illness, and some broadcasters on stations on the northern border have even asked for financial help, which is not permitted.”

In the government’s view, the story went on, “the broadcasts lend themselves to quackery, since the leaders even offer healing of the sick by means of ‘miracles.’ ”

The great majority of Christian programs do not discuss healing, according to mission sources. Among the non-healing broadcasts canceled immediately in Mexico City were “Words of Hope,” “Luis Palau Answers,” and “Good News.” Daniel Ost’s “Living Water,” which does include prayers for the sick, was also eliminated.

Official hostility toward evangelical broadcasts surfaced more than a year ago when a number were canceled by government order. The pressure eased, and some were later reinstated by stations that said the broadcasts had cultural and spiritual value. Other programs, such as the Spanish version of “Back to the Bible” and the Mennonite “Light and Truth,” were allowed to go on broadcasting.

Radio producer Juan M. Isais, a member of the Community of Latin American Evangelical Ministries spawned by the Latin America Mission, charged that the action violates human rights proclamations of the United Nations.

Most of the Mexican religious broadcasters, insisted Isais, have been cautious to stay within the letter and spirit of the law, especially since Christian programs were totally illegal only a few decades ago. Considerable progress has been achieved in recent years, he pointed out. Isais noted, however, that a few broadcasters with wide impact feel that such caution does not reflect the urgent need to preach the gospel to the masses.

There are no Protestant radio stations in Mexico. All evangelical programs beamed to the nation’s more than sixty-two million people are aired on commercial outlets.

Ruled Out In New York

Within a month of his return from the United Presbyterian general assembly, Pastor Charles Mangione of First Presbyterian Church in Flushing, Long Island, was summoned to appear before the ministerial relations committee of the Presbytery of New York City. He was told to bring along his unordained assistant, James J. Spitzel, a candidate for the ministry under the spiritual supervision of the Presbytery of Pittsburgh.

Although he was not a commissioner (delegate), Mangione had gone to the San Diego assembly in May to work with the evangelical coalition that lobbied for a “no” vote on the homosexual ordination issue. The issue had been raised by the New York City presbytery, where a self-affirmed homosexual was seeking ordination (see June 23 issue, page 38). At the assembly, Mangione found himself in opposition to some of the prominent New York City commissioners.

(Despite spirited arguments from the New York City delegation, the assembly voted to advise presbyteries not to ordain practicing homosexuals. The denomination’s top administrator, William P. Thompson, later issued an opinion that presbyteries must accept the assembly’s “guidance.” In a key follow-up development, the Presbytery of Pacific turned down a recommendation that it ordain Chris Glaser, a leader of the United Presbyterian gay caucus and a member of the task force that urged the assembly to give presbyteries the option of ordaining self-affirmed homosexuals.)

Unable to chastise Mangione for his private attendance at the assembly and his work with the evangelical caucus, the New York City presbytery’s committee on ministerial relations apparently took aim at his assistant, Spitzel. He and another candidate for the ministry from the Pittsburgh presbytery, John Palafoutas, had stated publicly their conscientious objection to the ordination of women. In the famed 1974 Kenyon case, which arose from the Pittsburgh presbytery, the denomination’s top court ruled that ordination should be withheld from a candidate who says he will not ordain women. Thus blocked, a number of candidates with such scruples have accepted employment that does not require ordination. Spitzel became assistant to the minister at Flushing, and Palafoutas became “supply” pastor at nearby St. James Presbyterian in the Ridgewood section of Queens. As unordained workers they are not permitted to admister the sacraments, officiate at weddings, or vote in church governing bodies.

Until the presbytery’s ministerial relations committee moved in, the two men said, they were unaware of any objections to their job performance.

The committee recommended that the presbytery deny the men permission to continue working in their respective churches. After a long debate the governing body agreed. An attempt was then made to get the action reversed, but it failed by a vote of 71 to 58.

Mangione filed a protest against the presbytery’s action and is seeking a “stay of execution” pending disposition of the complaint in the church courts. In a letter to his congregation last month, the Flushing pastor explained: “I am convinced that the Presbytery of New York City has overstepped its boundaries in seeking to exclude two candidates from working … for no other reason than their personal convictions that they in good conscience cannot now ordain women as elders.” Mangione himself has participated in the ordination of women.

The presbytery acted under provisions of the denominational constitution that apply only to pastors, some authorities argue. Others, however, insist that the rules apply to all professional workers in churches that are within a presbytery’s jurisdiction.

Court Case

Alabama’s Supreme Court last month got a church property case that will be watched with more interest than such cases usually attract. Under appeal is a circuit court ruling that awards the property of Trinity Presbyterian Church of Montgomery to a “loyal minority” that wanted to stay in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (PCUS) when the majority of Trinity’s members voted to join the new Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) in 1973. The congregation, widely considered the most influential in the state, has over 1,700 members, many of whom are leaders in Alabama affairs.

The circuit judge who heard the case, G. H. Wright, Jr., had to be called in from another county when all the local judges disqualified themselves because of their affiliation with the PCA through Trinity or another congregation. He ruled that the PCUS should get the name and property since its general assembly had declared invalid the procedure by which Trinity left the denomination. The congregation had voted 814 to 112 to apply to its presbytery (district governing body) for dismissal. The presbytery had authorized a commission to dismiss congregations that met certain criteria, but the 1976 assembly ruled that such a transfer of power to a commission was not permissible.

Wright based his ruling partly on an 1872 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. Trinity’s lawyers contended that later Supreme Court rulings modified the 1872 precedent as it might apply to churches with presbyterian polity. The congregation’s majority has been permitted to retain use of the property while the case is under appeal. No decision is expected before next May.

The state’s high court will be at less than full strength when it takes up the Trinity case. Some justices are members of either PCA or PCUS, and they will have to disqualify themselves.

Religion in Transit

New York City’s historic St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery Episcopal church was gutted by fire last month. The church was built in 1799 over a vault containing the remains of Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor-general of New Amsterdam, as New York was then called. The shell and steeple of the building were declared sound. Restoration costs were estimated at between $500,000 and $1 million. Ironically, the fire was touched off accidentally by a worker’s acetylene torch near the completion of a nine-year renovation project.

All parents, including those who call themselves atheists or agnostics, should provide religious education for their children. So says famed pediatrician and author Benjamin Spock in an article on “What to tell your child about God.” Sunday schools, he writes in the August issue of Redbook magazine, “have much to offer … as long as the teachers have a positive attitude.” Faith ought to be communicated at home, too, he emphasizes.

Evangelist Morris Cerullo recently purchased San Diego’s historic El Cortez Hotel for use as his international headquarters and as a short-term ministerial training center. The price was not disclosed, but the property—including a convention center and other facilities—is said to be valued at $4.3 million.

The Hare Krishna movement is going straight: shaved heads, sandals, and orange robes are out, suits and ties are in. The International Society for Krishna Consciousness decided that the distinctive appearance of many of its male members often turned off the public. With the new conservative-businessman look, followers report that literature acceptance has risen dramatically.

The Freedom from Religion Foundation has taken the state of Wisconsin to court in an attempt to halt its legislature’s “unconstitutional” practice of opening each session with prayer. Assembly leader Edward Jacamoms pointed out that the first U.S. congress appointed chaplains to open its daily sessions with prayer. It was this same congress, he declared, that wrote the First Amendment to the U.S. constitution, “so I don’t think that the founders intended to bar legislative bodies from opening their sessions with prayer.”

The New York State Assembly passed a bill designed to deny religious property tax exemptions for “churches” and other organizations that appear to exist mostly to provide tax exemptions for its members. The measure, which is vaguely worded and subject to challenge, was prompted by the mass mail-order ordinations of most of the citizens of Hardenburgh as ministers of the Universal Life Church. They turned their homes into meeting places, and a sympathetic assessor removed them from the tax rolls (see July 21 issue, page 45).

The New Jersey Supreme Court upheld by a vote of 5 to 2 the constitutionality of renting public school buildings to churches and synagogues during weekends and after school hours—as long as the rental fee is adequate and the arrangement is temporary, such as when a church is seeking to purchase or construct permanent quarters. Prolonged use is out.

The United Church of Christ’s racial justice commission sent to President Carter a list of alleged “political prisoners” in the United States. They include the so-called Wilmington Ten, whose imprisoned leader Ben Chavis helped to draw up the list. Chavis, who was convicted of firebombing along with others in a 1971 incident in North Carolina, was granted study-release status to study at Duke University Divinity School.

Deaths

ROBERT G. LEE, 91, long-time pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, eloquent preacher best known for his “Pay Day Someday” sermon, author of fifty-three books, and three-time president of the Southern Baptist Convention; in Memphis, of a heart ailment.

CARLYLE MARNEY, 61, Southern Baptist clergyman, author, lecturer and founder of Interpreter’s House, an ecumenical study center; in Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, of an apparent heart attack.

JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER III, 72, former chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation, philanthropist and benefactor of liberal Protestant causes, population control activist, and member of New York City’s Riverside Church; near Scarborough, New York, in an auto collision.

An endangered species? Records show that the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) has 21 per cent fewer members (1.2 million) than ten years ago and 9.7 per cent fewer clergy. Of the 6,710 ministers on the roster, the number of those who serve non-Disciples congregations rose 84.1 per cent during the decade.

World Scene

More than 700 persons from forty-two countries participated in Youth With a Mission’s witness campaign during the World Cup soccer championship games in Argentina this summer (it was winter there). Teams fanned out in major cities. They went door to door, handed out literature, spoke in schools and on street corners, staged witness marches, sponsored coffee-house minitries, and even held open-air meetings. Rarely allowed because of political unrest, these meetings featured music, drama, and preaching.

Missionaries in Zaire recently sent out a call for 18,000 French-and Kikongo-language Bibles for school children in Zaire. Funds from Bible Literature International of Columbus, Ohio, have provided 13,300 so far.

Help may be on the way for Ireland. The predominantly Roman Catholic nation has a soaring birth rate, but it is illegal to sell, advertise, or distribute contraceptives. Legislation will go before parliament this fall to legalize the sale and distribution of birth-control aids. Church officials state their opposition but hint they might go along if sales are restricted to married couples and if tight controls are placed on advertising.

Thousands of despairing Christian believers in the Soviet Union see no future for themselves in their beloved homeland, and now they want out. The ranks of Christians seeking emigration visas are swelling weekly. At least 20,000 Pentecostals want to leave, according to the highly respected Keston College Center for the Study of Religion and Communism in suburban London, and the movement is spreading among congregations, both registered and unregistered. Also, an increasing number of Baptists want to emigrate. For the first time, reports Keston, the Council of Baptist Prisoners’ Relatives has come out in support of those who wish to emigrate on religious grounds. In one of its recent secretly published bulletins, the council published an open letter to Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev demanding freedom to emigrate for all those wishing to do so because of religious persecution.

Few are granted exit visas, however.

On June 27, seven members of two Pentecostal families from Chernogorsk in Siberia rushed past a police guard in Moscow and barricaded themselves inside the consular lobby of the U.S. embassy. An eighth person, the teen-age son of demonstrators Pyotr and Augusta Vashchenko, was seized by police. The Vashchenkos learned later that he had been permitted to return home.

The Pentecostals announced that they would not leave the embassy until the Soviet Union granted them emigration visas. Early this month they were still there. It was the longest sit-in in the Soviet capital in memory.

In addition to Pyotr Vashchenko. 57, and his wife were three of their thirteen children, Lidiya, 27, Lubov. 25, and Liliya, 21, along with a neighbor, Maria Chmykalova, 56, and her son Timofey, 16.

By day, reported Seth Mydans of the Associated Press, the seven sit on yellow leather armchairs in the consular lobby, quietly reading their Bibles. When the office has closed and everyone has left, they kneel and pray for exit visas so they can go to America to practice their faith. Then they stretch out for the night on sofas in the office. Someone has donated blankets for their use. Embassy staffers take up collections to feed them.

Embassy sources said the seven would not be ejected, despite the protests of Soviet authorities. Every day, though, the embassy asks them to leave, the Pentecostals told Mydans. An American official told them that it is not in their best interest to remain and that chances of gaining a Soviet guarantee of visas are slim. But that is as far as the embassy will go, he assured. “If it is necessary to keep them here forever, then we will,” he said.

The Vashchenkos, a mining family, were among thirty-two persons from their congregation who staged a similar demonstration at the American embassy in 1968. On that occasion, after Soviet officials gave assurances that there would be no retaliation, the embassy staff forced the Pentecostals to leave. The group had been there only four hours. Keston College says that documents from the group show that no reprisals were taken against participants. The Vashchenkos, however, informed reporter Mydans that they spent a term in a labor camp as a result of the action.

Mrs. Vashchenko charged that three of the couple’s children were taken away from them for six years because the government disapproved of the religious atmosphere of their home. (Under Soviet law, children may be taken from parents who are judged unfit to raise good citizens. A number of Pentecostal families throughout Siberia reportedly have suffered under the statute.)

If the Vashchenkos are permitted to leave the country, they may find American sponsors already prepared to take them in. Several years ago the Tolstoy Foundation of New York City lined up sponsors and began sending invitations to some 200 Pentecostals in the Soviet Union who wished to emigrate. The organization also petitioned the Soviet government. So far, only two families have arrived. Tolstoy executive Alla Ivask acknowledged that things “are moving very, very slowly.”

Among the Soviet believers who wish to emigrate is well-known religious dissident Georgi Vins, the leader of unregistered Baptists who is serving a sentence in Yakutia, a labor camp in Siberia. Earlier this year, according to information received by Keston College, he was visited by his son Peter, who brought word that the family had received invitations from relatives in Canada to emigrate to that country. The elder Vins reportedly informed his son in a written statement “certified” by the labor camp administration that he is ready to leave the Soviet Union and live with the Canadian relatives. Until recently, the Vinses and other Baptist leaders believed that the best policy was to stay as witnesses, despite the persecution. Peter Vins’s first arrest for his faith came less than a year ago. His father has spent most of his adult life in confinement or exile. Broken in health, the elder Vins may feel that a new beginning elsewhere is at last in order, say some observers.

One week after Peter Vins returned from the visit, says Keston. he was arrested a second time and sentenced to one year in a Ukranian labor camp for “parasitism,” a charge used often against church workers who have no secular job. Although he was allegedly beaten by a prison guard upon his arrival, the younger Vins is “in good spirits,” a family member reported.

Pastor Charles A. Trentham of First Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., recently traveled to the Soviet Union. While there he visited with dissident Baptists. He declined to comment, however, on what they talked about or on negotiations aimed at the release of Georgi Vins. Trentham, President Carter’s pastor, said the only message he carried from Carter was a greeting to his fellow believers throughout the Soviet Union.

While Pentecostals sat in at the American embassy in Moscow, a different kind of demonstration took place at the Soviet embassy in Washington. High-level representatives of the U.S. Catholic Conference, the Synagogue Council of America, and the National Council of Churches sent ajoint letter of protest to Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. The letter protested the recent widely publicized trials of four prominent Soviet dissidents, along with the heavy sentences that were meted out.

The delegation that carried the letter was unable to see Dobrynin, and a press attache refused to accept the letter. The group decided to mail it instead.

Graham: The News Can Be Misleading

Is evangelist Billy Graham a victim of irresponsible journalism, or is it all a case of faulty communication?

The question was raised afresh following the publication last month of a story by reporter Robert Hodierne in the Charlotte Observer. The story, which was widely reported elsewhere, recounts details of financial transactions connected with the 1973 acquisition of a choice 1,050-acre site east of Asheville, North Carolina, for a laymen’s Bible training center. Its cost was $2.75 million. (Additional acquisitions have increased the area involved to 1,374 acres at a total cost of more than $3 million.)

Funds for the purchase came from the World Evangelism and Christian Education Fund (WECEF), the Dallas-based Graham foundation that is also funding the Billy Graham graduate school and archives facility at Wheaton College. Construction of the North Carolina training center, which Graham describes as “the last goal I have before the Lord takes me to heaven,” is expected to begin next year.

Hodierne’s story suggests that it may have been improper for WECEF to purchase the mountain land next to Interstate 40 without an appraisal—a point disputed by some real estate people, including investor Melvin Graham, the evangelist’s brother. He said: “You pay what the man’s asking.… If he sets the price, you’re going to pay his price, or you don’t get the property.” Considering the property’s location and its adaptability to the intended use, the price was a fair one and maybe even a bargain, say some experts. Whatever, it is worth much more today, says an Asheville real estate broker who was involved in the transaction.

Apparently what aroused Hodierne’s curiosity most was the discovery that the $2.75 million price included $650,000 for an option held by two investors. The pair, William Pharr of Pharr Yarns and McLain Hall, a South Carolina real estate broker, had paid only $25,000 for the option just three months earlier, said the reporter. (The option gave its owners the right to buy the land for $2.1 million by mid-1974; no one else could buy it before then without also purchasing the option.)

Further, said Hodierne, some of Graham’s relatives and associates had business dealings in 1973 with the two men, especially with Hall. And it was Hall, he said, who had showed Melvin Graham—a WECEF board member with whom he was linked in several joint real estate ventures—the land that WECEF eventually bought.

Casual readers of the story could have mistakenly inferred that Graham’s relatives and associates somehow profited from the WECEF purchase. Indeed, using a hypothetical case of such self dealing, Hodierne explored the possibility of action by the Internal Revenue Service—thus increasing the likelihood of confusion among readers.

For the second time in a year, Graham took the unusual (for him) step of responding directly to a critical newspaper article. He had said last year that stories on WECEF by Hodierne were “grossly misleading” (see July 29, 1977, issue, page 36, and August 26, 1977, issue, page 18). The latest account, he declared, was “filled with unsupported and untrue innuendos and insinuations.” He added: “To my knowledge, no member of my family or organization has made a cent on the purchase.” An IRS audit of WECEF “took no exception” to the transaction, he said. (Graham declined to be interviewed until after the story was published. Hodierne spoke with several of Graham’s associates instead.)

In a follow-up report, the Observer insisted that its story “did not say Graham family members profited from the sale,” but it kept the pot boiling by implying that Graham was not telling everything he knew.

On the day that the disputed story was published in the Observer, an article on the proposed training center also appeared in the Asheville Citizen-Times, presenting an altogether different perspective. It was written by columnist Bob Terrell, who has often broken Graham announcements in exclusive stories. In it, Graham told of his plans for the center, where lay people “of all ages” can come for two weeks or for longer periods to study the Bible, speech, church history, and the like. A curriculum has been planned tentatively by Charles Riggs, veteran trainer of crusade counselors, who “will probably run the school.” It will “not be an academic institution,” and no credits will be offered, said Graham. Probably only one or two permanent faculty members will be named, he surmised, with others coming from around the world to teach for short periods. Initially, the center will be limited to a maximum of 500 students at a time.

Poetic Justice

Thomas E. F. McNamara, 42, a former educator in the field of fine arts, is considered an expert on the work of American poet Robert Frost. He is apparently less skilled in matters of handwriting, though. Last month he pleaded guilty in a federal court in New Hampshire to charges involving forgeries purported to be manuscripts of Frost and other major poets.

Among the poems McNamara was accused of forging is a two-liner by Frost:

“Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee,

“And I’ll forgive thy great big one on me.”

Graham, who lives a few miles away in Montreat, said that he intends to keep on preaching. The school “will have to be run by other people,” he acknowledged, “but I will keep my hand in it.” Meanwhile, he added, he will help raise money to build it.

Graham indicated to Terrell that he is not a stranger to criticism over land acquisition. He recalled that his organization in 1953 bought a Colorado property called Glen Eyrie for $300,000 from a Texas oilman who was chairman of the University of Notre Dame board. The idea was to build a Bible school there, said the evangelist, but the board chairman “was a Catholic, and Southern Baptists, who thought I was going to start a new denomination, raised so much fuss that we finally gave the property to the Navigators.”

Test-Tube Results

The birth of the first so-called test-tube baby in England was accompanied by an outpouring of published opinion. Much of the attention, it seemed, was prompted more by intense fascination than by philosophical anguish.

“Used responsibly,” said physician John Dawson, secretary of the British Medical Association’s ethics committee, the technique of laboratory fertilization of a human ovum and reimplantation in the uterus “offers no ethical difficulties for doctors.” He called it “a valuable addition to the treatment for infertile women.”

United States health officials are much more cautious, calling for more research in the laboratory and in animals. They said they will continue a three-year-old moratorium on funding of any studies involving even the first step of combining human ova and sperm until a new National Ethics Advisory Board gives its approval. Although suggested in 1975, the board was not formed until last fall when Secretary Joseph A. Califano, Jr., of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare began appointing its fourteen members (twelve have been named so far).

“This is the first project we’re going to undertake,” said one of the appointees, cleric Richard McCormick, professor of biological ethics at Georgetown University, a Catholic school. “I have real serious questions and problems that lead me to take a negative position” on the issue “at this time.” There may be doubts, he said, about whether that mere speck-sized clump of cells is or is not “fully a human being. And when there is a doubt, I want to go very slowly and cautiously.”

In any case, as Doctor Luigi Mastroianni, head of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, points out, the procedure pioneered in England relies on hormones to prepare the womb and help maintain the pregnancies. “Our Food and Drug Administration would never allow” use of these hormones, Mastroianni said, “because of the risk of producing congenital abnormalities” or problems in the test-tube children’s future offspring.

Responses of religious spokesmen to the event covered a wide spectrum.

Jewish rabbis were among the least bothered. Rabbi Wolfe Kelman, executive vice-president of the Rabbinical Council of America, the major Orthodox group, pointed out that the first of 613 commandments in the Torah is “be fruitful and multiply.” Therefore, he said, Judaism “is quite lenient in that area.”

Protestant spokesmen tended to take a more guarded stance.

Theologian William Lazareth of the Lutheran Church in America’s Department of Church and Society, commented: “Christian ethics cannot be determined by medical technology. Fallopian tubes, as the Sabbath, are here for the benefit of moral human beings created in God’s image. The basic issue is the validity of conception control, whether in aiding or in preventing such conception.”

According to Lazareth, “the ethical significance of the use of any medically sound method within a covenant of marital fidelity depends chiefly on the motivation of the users.” He pointed out that “human beings do not actually create life, whether inside or outside of test tubes. Ultimately, God remains the sole creator of the egg or the sperm, and the sovereign author of the miracle of life.”

Chairman Haddon W. Robinson of the Department of Pastoral Missions at Dallas Seminary saw “no theological problem” with the English baby, but he said that he was afraid laboratory-fertilized eggs could be placed in “surrogate mothers.” This would raise questions about “what it actually means to mother a child.”

Doctor C. Everett Koop, surgeon-inchief at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, who is a Presbyterian elder and an author on bioethics, praised the “remarkable scientific achievement.” But he added, “Since I believe that life begins at conception, I must ask what happens if somebody wants to cancel the experiment and he dumps it down the sink?”

Koop said that he was concerned about “the next step, when Mrs. Jones decides she wants a child from that tall blond gene pool down the block.” He also expressed concern that “some women’s liberation groups” might see it as an advance toward single parenthood, while he is inclined to view it as “just another threat to the family.” He also said that he fears genetic manipulation to produce a “super race.”

Catholics take the dimmest view of developments.

“The episode points to a readiness to implement new technology before its moral implications have been thoroughly considered,” said Bishop Thomas C. Kelly, general secretary of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. “The consequences of this mentality—from the atomic bomb to uncontrolled use of carcinogenic pesticides—have become clear in recent years. We should proceed cautiously when the same mentality manifests itself in regard to so sensitive and sacred a matter as the transmission of human life.”

Theologian Charles Curran of Catholic University in Washington goes farther: “You have no right to use the process until you have the assurance that it is as safe as normal reproduction.”

“That argument,” counters cleric John Fletcher, a clinical assistant of bioethics at the National Institute of Health, “is an argument against doing anything for the first time.”

Director James McHugh of the Catholic bishops’ Pro-Life Committee maintained that priests should advise against anything that “would tend to mechanize the marriage act.” He added: “It is not necessary to have a child. People can have a certain confidence and reliance on God’s will. If God’s creative act doesn’t take place, it is not to be.”

The Pope had not yet spoken on the topic as of early this month but was expected to voice opposition to any artificial methods that do not aid the natural act. “In the case of the Brown couple,” wrote veteran Vatican journalist Benny Lai in the Florence daily La Nazione, “… sexual relations were missing, and thus the birth of Louise must be taken to be morally illicit.”

Some secular commentators ranged further afield. “Aren’t the more crucial problems of the world those of fertility, not infertility?” wondered Ellen Goodman in the Washington Post.

And syndicated columnist George Will reflected on what he described as a melancholy situation. Said he: “Dangerous and ethically dubious baby-making technologies” are being developed largely for the “compassionate purpose” of helping couples with problems to enjoy parenthood. Adoption, he suggested, would be a better option, but there are few children available for adoption. He concluded: “If there were fewer abortions there would be more adoptions and less pressure [to push] baby-making technologies beyond the range of ethical understanding.”

A Quiet Time For Lutherans

Lutheran church gatherings aren’t always noted for tranquility. But delegates to the Lutheran Church in America (LCA) convention last month in Chicago managed to remain unruffled in electing a new president and passing a variety of potentially controversial resolutions and social statements.

Outgoing president Robert J. Marshall described the ninth biennial meeting as the “easiest” of his ten-year tenure, mainly because of “an evident good feeling among the delegates” gathered at the Conrad Hilton Hotel. Marshall had announced in March that he would step down to become missions and development director of Lutheran World Ministries, a New York-based cooperative agency serving the LCA, the American Lutheran Church, and the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches.

Elected to a four-year term as LCA president—the 3.1-million-member denomination’s top executive post—was clergyman James R. Crumley, Jr., 53, who served as LCA secretary for the past four years. He is expected to follow Marshall’s path in emphasizing Lutheran unity and budgetary growth.

Crumley’s twenty years experience as a parish pastor was credited by many for tipping the election in his favor. He narrowly defeated William H. Lazareth, regarded as the LCA’s top theologian, on the sixth ballot. Despite the close vote, though, the election was peaceful.

Formed, in 1962 as a merger of four Lutheran bodies, the LCA is generally regarded as the most liberal of Lutheran groups—though the theological conservatism displayed at the convention might temper that assumption for some. The LCA is slightly larger than other members of Lutheranism’s Big Three: the more conservative 2.9-million-member Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS) and the 2.4-million-member American Lutheran Church (ALC), often described as the “moderate” group between the LCA on its left and the LCMS on its right.

Smaller Lutheran bodies include: the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches (AELC), a 112,000-member group that broke from the LCMS in 1976 following years of doctrinal controversy; the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), with about 400,000 members; and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Canada (ELCC), with 82,000 members.

Reaffirming their commitment to Lutheran ecumenism, the LCA delegates set the gears in motion for a joint consultation of ALC, AELC, and LCA representatives in the fall of 1979. Possible merger will be the main topic of discussion.

In brief fraternal greetings, presidents David W. Preus of the ALC and William Kohn of the AELC praised the signs of increasing cooperation. Following the remarks of Kohn, formerly a missions executive with the LCMS, Marshall told the assembly that overtures between the LCA and AELC are not designed to encourage schism or divisions. However, in an obvious slap at the LCMS, he said that a time may come “when the true confession becomes so obstructed that faithful people in good conscience feel that they must separate themselves from others.”

The LCMS participated in a Lutheran unity consultation from 1970 until 1975, at which time the presidents of the three big churches decided no further progress could be made, mostly because of doctrinal issues raised by the LCMS. It is unlikely that the LCMS will enter any new talks in the forseeable future.

LCMS president J. A. O. Preus did deliver fraternal remarks at the convention. He lauded the LCA for its consideration of “timely concerns,” and he commended Marshall’s work as a “church administrator … who does his homework.” In return, he was greeted with warm applause. Only two years earlier, Preus had jolted the LCA convention with a sharply worded defense against a 1974 LCA resolution that chided the LCMS for “fencing God’s word and fracturing God’s people.”

President S. T. Jacobsen of the ELCC said that the ELCC will pursue efforts to merge Canada’s 300,000 Lutherans within a single Lutheran denomination. About 70 per cent of Canada’s Lutherans belong to U.S.-based denominations, including the LCA and LCMS. An ELCC resolution calls for merger with the LCA-Canada section by 1980.

In other actions, the delegates:

• adopted a social statement on “Aging and the Older Adult” and one on human rights as foundations for action, along with a series of resolutions to implement them (a study of LCA retirement policies, an appeal for help for refugees, and the like);

• approved change of “president” to “bishop” in LCA titles, a switch that must also be endorsed at the 1980 convention in order for it to take effect;

• approved a revised communion practices statement drawn up jointly with the ALC (it precludes infants from receiving communion);

• elected Edgar R. Trexler, Jr., to succeed Albert P. Stauderman as editor of The Lutheran;

• Adopted budgets of $47.2 million and $50.3 million for 1979 and 1980;

• Referred resolutions on homosexuality to LCA units for further study;

• Reaffirmed the 1970 LCA position on abortion, specifying that abortion-on-demand is not endorsed;

• went on record opposing pending legislation in congress that would require certain disclosures by church and other lobby groups.

At the convention’s opening session, two delegates protested the church’s choice of Illinois as a convention site. The state, they pointed out, had not voted to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. One-fourth of the delegates submitted their signatures to indicate that they were seated under protest.

From then on, though, the mood was as placid as the warm Lake Michigan waters a short stroll away.

JOHN MAUST

Anglicans: Marriage Issues

Following nearly five hours of debate, the General Synod of the Church of England last month voted 367 to 92 to endorse a controversial ecumenical document known as the Ten Propositions. The paper, published in 1976 by a commission representing most of the nation’s denominations, asks those denominations to join in a covenant to seek visible unity and to press for action on intercommunion, agreement on baptism, and mutual recognition of ministries (see February 13, 1976, issue, page 74).

Archbishop of Canterbury Donald Coggan intervened during the debate to calm the strong Anglo-Catholic (or “high church”) faction, which feared a setback in relationships with the Roman Catholic Church. This faction hopes for eventual Anglican reunion with Rome. With Coggan’s assurances plus certain stipulated conditions, many of the Anglo-Catholics voted their approval. The conditions include the acceptance by the other churches of the historic episcopate at the inauguration of the covenant, and a narrowly passed amendment made clear that this must involve the consecration of bishops. Further, according to the conditions, the mutual recognition of ministers among the covenant groups must be effected “by the action of the whole episcopate of all the covenanting churches.” Other elements of Anglican tradition and practice were included in the clergy section of the conditions.

The action by the synod affected Britain’s Methodist Conference, which voted in June to endorse the propositions—on the condition that the Anglicans would do likewise. Earlier, the Moravian Church and the United Reformed Church approved, and endorsement by the Churches of Christ was expected this month. So far, the Catholic Church, the Congregational Federation, and the Baptists have decided against joining the covenant.

The next major step in the unity timetable will be the composition of a draft covenant by the unity commission. It is scheduled to be released for discussion among the approving denominations in 1980. The conditions that will be laid down in advance by the Anglican negotiators, however, may be a higher price for unity than the other churches are willing to pay. Marriage is still a long way off, say observers.

In addition to its action on unity, the synod voted 213 to 206 not to change long-standing rules that bar the remarriage in church of a divorced person while the other partner is still alive. Coggan made it clear that he was against relaxing the rules but said that he wished he could find some way out of the dilemma. (A study last year indicated that a large majority of Britain’s Anglican priests favor relaxation of the rule, a marriage-study commission of the church expressed a similar view, and an increasing number of remarriages are being conducted by parish priests in defiance of policy.)

“It’s a matter of some agony to me to have to register my own decision against this,” commented Coggan. “But I ask myself whether this is the moment for the church to take off the brake, perhaps the last brake, and rush down the divorce slope.”

Peaceful Prague

“… Christians for peace, justice, and liberation,” proclaimed the theme of the fifth assembly of the Christian Peace Conference (CPC), which met in Prague in June. In a sense, the CPC itself was enjoying a measure of liberation.

The CPC was founded twenty years ago by the late Czech Brethren leader Joseph L. Hromadka, mainly as a forum for churches in Soviet-bloc nations. It also attracted some participants from the West. But after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, a Soviet-dominated faction took over the Prague-based conference, and Hromadka resigned in protest. Consequently, at the last assembly—held in 1971—no Americans and few from the West attended.

This year was different. Twenty-four Americans attended, most of them from a National Council of Churches unit, and three were elected to important CPC offices.

Bishop Karoly Toth of the Reformed Church of Hungary was elected CPC president, succeeding Metropolitan Nikodim of the Russian Orthodox Church. Toth was elevated to the presidency from the general secretary slot.

Ludomir Mirejovsky was elected general secretary by the conference’s continuation committee from a field of six candidates—all of them Czech. The conference’s international secretariat excluded consideration of other nationalities. Mirejovsky, a clergyman of the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren who attended Union Seminary (Presbyterian) in Richmond, Virginia, had been ousted from the CPC’s international commissions following Hromadka’s resignation and was not permitted to participate in them until this assembly.

Hromadka was also rehabilitated in a sense. His widow was an honored guest and gave an address to the women of the assembly. A booklet about her husband was given to the delegates.

Soviet interest in the assembly was still very much in evidence, however. An estimated 300 delegates and their spouses (out of a total of more than 600 participants from eighty-four countries) came from the Third World, with the Russian Orthodox Church reportedly paying their airfare. They were flown to Moscow, and four chartered Aeroflot planes ferried them to Prague and back. (In the past, CPC statements consistently have reflected Soviet policy and often have been outwardly critical of the West.)

In a message to churches, the assembly declared that “solidarity in the work for peace means joining the fight for liberation.” It singled out racist oppression in southern Africa, military dictatorships in Latin America, and other “pockets of colonialism” in the non-Communist world. It appealed for support of detente and for achievement of general and complete disarmament by the year 2000.

Why Is There Evil?

God and Evil, by Michael Galligan (Paulist, 1976, 80 pp., $1.65 pb), God, Power, and Evil, by David R. Griffin (Westminster, 1976, 336 pp., $17.50), Evil, Suffering and Religion, by Brian Hebblethwaite (Hawthorn, 1976, 115 pp., $3.50 pb), and How God Deals With Evil, by W. Sibley Towner (Westminster, 1976, 185 pp., $4.95 pb), are reviewed by Steve Siebert, graduate student, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

One often hears these days that modern man is faced, as never before, with a series of objections to Christian belief known as the “problem of evil.” Although it is acknowledged that Augustine and others in the Christian tradition struggled with the presence of massive evil in a world alleged to have been created by a good God, it is claimed that the wars, concentration camps, and gas chambers of modern times have focused the contrast between God and evil even more sharply. Indeed, for many people it has become the apologetic problem of our time. With such considerations, in mind, these four books have been written.

The shortest and in many ways the wisest is Michael Galligan’s God and Evil. In the space of forty-five pages he examines two traditional and two contemporary justifications of God (“theodicies”) in the face of an evil world. Traditionally the most popular, the theodicy of free will (associated with Augustine, but it was the consensus of the Western church until after the reformation, and is still espoused in conservative circles) locates the source of moral evil in man’s free rejection of a perfect created state, and explains natural evils with reference to testing by God or punishment for sin, or else traces it to the malicious intent of a fallen devil in control of the world. In contrast, the theodicy of development (associated with the Eastern Orthodox tradition and with much of modern theology from Schleiermacher to the present) puts created perfection, not in the past, but in the future as the goal toward which human history will evolve. Evil, both moral and natural, serves as a necessary stage along the way in the development of such higher moral virtues as compassion. A more modern alternative is the process theodicy (based on the work of Whitehead), which argues that the only way to relieve God of responsibility for evil is to rethink the nature of his power. Finally, the last view discussed by Galligan is the type of theodicy that attempts to solve the problem by redefining the goodness of God (compare C. G. Jung and American personal idealism).

None of these four solutions is acceptable to Galligan. He claims that the free will defense is based on an inadequate characterization of the nature of human freedom, and founders, furthermore, on the theory of evolution. The developmental theodicy, on the other hand, is overly optimistic about the future and overlooks the ability of evil to produce bitter, broken people, as well as saints. Less confident, but therefore incapable of doing justice to the Christian hope, is the process theodicy, which is unable to guarantee that even in the end good will prevail over evil, and which (in its more consistent forms, Galligan argues) even denies personal immortality. Finally, theodicies that redefine the goodness of God so as to include a dark evil side in him can hardly be considered acceptable by Christians.

Galligan’s book is lively, though not popular, and full of insight. Many readers, however, will find that his brief summaries of various positions, particularly process metaphysics, cannot be understood without having read some of the primary sources. Those people concerned with a more in-depth treatment of the two classical theodicies will need to turn to John Hick’s Evil and the God of Love, which develops the contrast between the two in its 400 pages. For the process theodicy, however, one need only turn to David Griffin’s God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy, the fullest treatment of the problem from that perspective. Griffin’s work is a moderately difficult attempt to engage the scholarly proponents of classical theism in a discussion of a whole range of problems (evil, providence, the nature of God) and cannot be ignored by anyone seriously interested in these issues. Indeed, I know of no better introduction to the contrast between traditional and process theism.

After spending fifty pages reviewing the biblical and Greek sources (the Bible, Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus), Griffin proceeds to discuss eleven different traditional theodicies, devoting fifteen to twenty-five pages each to Augustine, Aquinas, Spinoza, Luther, Calvin, Leibniz, Barth, John Hick, James Ross (a contemporary analytic philosopher), Emils Fackenheim (a contemporary Jewish theologian), Brunner, and personal idealism. All these theodicies (except personal idealism, which has other weaknesses), Griffin argues, ultimately compromise the goodness of God by presupposing that God either is, or could be if he so desired, the cause of everything that happens, good as well as evil. Traditional theism, of course, escapes the conclusion that God is therefore responsible for evil by distinguishing between God’s primary and human secondary causation, or between God’s willing and his permitting. All such attempts, however, Griffin charges, are inadequate, and, indeed, contradictory. Only a radically new conception—yet one suggested by many biblical passages—of the power of God, one which breaks with the classical Greek categories alleged to be used by traditional theism, will help us develop an adequate, noncontradictory, theodicy. Such a conception will recognize that everything that exists has some power, and therefore God cannot have it all, though he still has enough power (in fact, the greatest amount of power it is possible for a God to have) to make him worthy of worship. Thus construed, however, God is no longer responsible for evil, for much of what happens is outside his control, though this is not to say that God is unconcerned with luring as much good out of the world as possible.

Hebblethwaite’s Evil, Suffering, and Religion, as the title indicates, covers slightly different ground. Broadening the scope of his study beyond the Christian tradition, Hebblethwaite attempts a systematic discussion of the attitude of all major world religions towards the problem of evil. He does a surprisingly good job, given limitations of space, of presenting generally accurate and relatively detailed treatments of the different traditions, even making the necessary distinctions between various types of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. This feature alone would justify the enthusiastic endorsements on the back cover, but the reader will be just as stimulated and provoked by Hebblethwaite’s comprehensive (though, again, brief) treatments of all the relevant issues clustered around the problem of evil. He begins with a discussion of how people cope with evil, isolating five different, often related, responses: the ways of renunciation, mystical knowledge, devotion, works, and sacrifice. Theistic religions demand, in addition to ways of coping, ways of explaining the presence of evil in the world. Hebblethwaite again gives us brief surveys of the options: dualism (he isolates three types); blaming the devil; evil as due to divine punishment, testing, and discipline; and human freedom. His own solution employs a modified (non-Augustinian) free-will defense within a generally developmental theodicy. Man is created at a distance from God in an “ordered yet flexible physical environment,” which cannot preclude the possibility of natural tragedies, and into which God acts “without suspending the natural order” of events (93). This, Hebblethwaite believes, is an acceptable mean between the more traditional notions of providence (in which God acts directly) and existential versions of the doctrine (which reduce the notion of providence to subjective perceptions). At the consummation, however, God will actively intervene; the Christian “must suppose some future recreative divine act of transformation or resurrection.” Thus Hebblethwaite, like Hick (whom he seems to have followed in certain important respects), argues for a kind of eschatological verification of Christian belief about the goodness of God in the face of evil. This procedure is questioned by Galligan, who suggests that the sub specie aeternitatis viewpoint required by it is unavailable to us humans, and rejected by Griffin, who cannot guarantee either that good ultimately will prevail or that personal immortality awaits mankind—though he does not deny the possibility of either, and indeed hopes for both.

Despite their divergent outlooks, all three works share a conviction: the traditional Augustinian solution is no longer creditable. Not only is its view of God and/or providence self-contradictory, and its theory of the nature of human freedom inadequate, it also cannot maintain its idea of an original state of goodness against criticisms advanced by evolutionary theory. One can understand and even share the motivation behind this rejection of Augustine, and yet be wary of such wholescale rejection of time-honored solutions.

But the major weakness of these books is not their attitude toward tradition so much as their failure to do justice to important aspects of Scripture. Along with their repudiation of Augustine’s interpretation of Edenic existence goes the rejection, in one or more of these writers, of the idea of original sin, the personal being of the devil, the possibility of angelic existence, and the reality of hell. That these ideas are unpopular today may be granted, but that does not relieve the theologian or philosopher within the Christian tradition from making serious attempts to come to grips with some of these issues in a more positive manner than our authors do. Perhaps in the end one might feel compelled to deny certain traditional interpretations of Satan—but certainly one must find better grounds than those adduced by Hebblethwaite to the effect that modern psychology can now explain many phenomena once attributed to demon possession. Or perhaps one might quarrel with certain aspects of the notion of free rebellion in a state of paradise—but certainly on grounds stronger than Galligan’s. He himself seems to understand that, for his last pages are haunted by the symbol (at least) of some primal, cosmic rebellion.

These objections notwithstanding, Galligan’s and particularly Hebblethwaite’s books are rich in insight and understanding, and should prove of help to the Christian apologist, though perhaps not so much to the person caught up in the moment of personal grief or suffering.

Griffin’s book, on the other hand, must receive a more qualified endorsement. There is no question that he makes the most substantial scholarly contribution to the subject, but this in turn rightly exposes him to more criticism about inaccuracy in detail and interpretation. To take just one example, the careful reader will find that Aquinas does not mean, by the doctrine of divine simplicity, “that God’s knowledge, will, and causation are identical.” Not only does Aquinas not make this claim when he explicitly treats this doctrine in Summa Theologica I, 3, he also constantly distinguishes between situations in which God both knows and causes and those in which he simply knows. Such forcing of the texts is unfortunately quite frequent.

The cumulative effect of this is to render suspect Griffin’s major thesis about the self-contradictory nature of traditional theism. One cannot, of course, claim against him that to abandon this particular theological expression, with its use of Greek categories, is to give up biblical faith. Yet on the other hand it is unlikely that the weaknesses of the traditional account are as obvious as Griffin supposes. Indeed, most readers will find the process account of the nature of God’s power, goodness, and providence even more deficient.

The basic difficulty with Griffin’s argument, however, is his formula of the problem of evil as an eight-point logical problem leading from the dual premises of the orthodox definition of God and the reality of evil to the conclusion that that God cannot exist. This way of setting up the issues implies that there is “the problem of evil” and that one must find “the solution” to it. But this claim is extravagant and misleading. In the first place, it is unlikely that everybody could agree enough about the meaning of the terms involved to get the problem off the ground. Certainly this is the difficulty that plagues Griffin’s various definitions of genuine evil. More importantly, however, as Galligan’s valuable last chapter points out, people believe in God in the face of evil for a variety of highly complex and often personal reasons; the logic of belief is not the logic of deductive arguments. Thus any attempt to suggest that the problem of evil troubles everybody in the same way, if at all, is to distort the phenomena. That Griffin can claim that an elaborate, complex theology—let alone one that flies in the face of the whole tradition—alone solves the problem indicates that something serious has gone wrong.

The issue, indeed, is elsewhere for most people, and for many readers it will lie in the question, “What really does the Bible teach about God and evil?” To this question, W. Sibley Towner’s How God Deals With Evil is directed. Towner includes a critical examination of the treatment of divine retribution by some historic confessional statements along with two giant sweeps through Scripture. He wants to show, by examining representative texts, the diversity and openendedness of the biblical teaching about divine retribution, and to argue that one can justifiably subordinate these retributional passages to the kerygmatic core of Scripture, God’s universal redemptive purpose in Christ.

Towner confronts difficult texts head-on, and is to be commended for his desire to show—in a rare departure from most theodicies—that God is no mere “nice guy.” It must furthermore be conceded that many accounts, including evangelical ones, of the present and final states of rebelling creatures do not, as Towner points out, do justice to the full and rich variety of biblical teaching on the matter; that many Christians have treated apocalyptic literature inappropriately; and that some principle of selection and subordination is involved in all biblical theology. Towner’s book should set us all searching again to see what the Bible really says about God and evil.

Towner uses higher criticism to accomplish this task. Not only will the average Christian for whom the book seems to be written be overwhelmed by his approach, but on the basis of the often one-sided and incomplete evidence given, he will be unable to judge which critical theory to accept. Many of Towner’s opinions, such as his late date for the idea of covenant in Israel, will be hotly contested. That Towner chooses to follow these “assured scholarly results” is unfortunate, for a large number of his conclusions, such as his discovery of the relative unimportance of the lex talionis (an eye for an eye), could have been made without conjecture, simply by appealing to the total scriptural teaching on the subject.

Basically, however, most readers will find the book deeply disturbing, not so much because stereotyped and caricatured fundamentalists (such as an eschatologically minded anti-Communist) occasionally bear the brunt of the attack, but also because Towner, in his own way, often does violence to the text, and thus arrives at a view of the world as already and entirely redeemed, with Satan and hell as mere personifications. Towner’s conclusions to this effect are even more insidious than either Galligan’s or Hebblethwaite’s, for Towner wants to claim that this is what Scripture really teaches.

Ultimately, however, on key issues such as providence and divine action Towner comes to a position no different from that of the rest of our authors. When he says that we must “keep the secular sphere of cause-and-effect and the sphere of religious faith and perceptivity carefully separated,” he only states more openly a tendency implicit in both Hebblethwaite and Griffin. Such a view has characteristics of modernity. It is also expressed, Galligan points out, by the refusal of modern theologians to interpret the Holocaust in the light of God’s providential control of history (in contrast to their willingness to do just that as recently as the American civil war). Now orthodoxy need not shrink from this conclusion; any theodicy, after Auschwitz, and indeed after the first act of human rebellion, must take seriously the idea of a runaway world, which God has given up to its own devices. Of course, the historic Christian position has always expected a recreation at the eschaton, but neither would our authors, with the exception of Griffin, be willing to give up this hope either. The crucial questions arise, however, about the course of the world until then. Is God completely hidden and silent, as all but Galligan suggest? Does God not act into the world in this age? Can we count on nothing until the end? With these questions we move to issues far broader than theodicy.

BRIEFY NOTED

Judson Press has recently published four books on Christian education. Written primarily for church school teachers, Evangelism in Your Church School (63 pp., $2.50 pb) by Vincie Alessi discusses the basic concepts of salvation and some of the factors necessary for evangelism. She also includes advice on how to incorporate a new believer into the church as well as a discussion of the central elements of our faith. It is refreshing to see a book that goes beyond the mechanics of conversion. If growth is your concern, read A Growing Church School (64 pp., $2.50 pb) by Kenneth Blazier. Again, a refreshing broadmindedness is seen as Blazier defines growth in terms of both quantity and quality of faith. He discusses seven factors necessary for this type of growth and then provides checklists to help a church evaluate its program. Doing Christian Education in New Ways (112 pp., $3.95 pb) by Evelyn Huber discusses such innovative teaching models as contract learning and learning centers. The book provides a useful overview of many models and offers first-person success stories to illustrate them; however, a solid discussion of the methods and underlying principles are lacking. Huber does provide a bibliography to fill that gap. Family Cluster Programs (75 pp., $2.95 pb) by R. Ted Nutting deals with a way to keep the family together to learn with other families. For this book to be helpful one would have to be familiar with his idea, since little explanation of the method is provided; the bulk of the book is devoted to program material for six sessions studying Jesus’ parables.

STRESS. Everyone faces tension in some form at every stage of life. The accelerated pace of modern life often leaves Christians wondering why they don’t have their promised joy and peace. Of several recent books, Gary Collins’s You Can Profit From Stress (Vision House, 249 pp., $6.95) is the most comprehensive and realistic. Collins treats such sources of stress as one’s family, sexuality, occupation, and crises. He is practical in his prescriptions for coping with the problem. Questions for group discussion are included. A shorter, more colloquial book, The Stress Mess (Master’s Press, 48 pp., $1.50 pb) by Ron Susek is similarly designed to help one cope with stress. It is especially suited for those who take their reading in small doses. Robert Schuller’s Turning Your Stress Into Strength (Harvest House, 144 pp., $2.95 pb) is filled with illustrations from the lives of those he has interviewed during his “Hour of Power” telecast. Tom Watson, Jr., approaches stress and peace through a study guide to Philippians, How to Be Happy No Matter What (Regal, 160 pp., $1.50 pb). Wally Metts’s The Brighter Side: Practical Help for Facing Life’s Problems (Moody, 96 pp., $2.25 pb) offers fourteen meditations based on the author’s search of Scripture during a crisis. Each meditation begins with a question or insight, followed by Scripture, a reflection on the subject, and a prayer. It is a good gift for a suffering Christian friend. For those going through difficult times who might be turned off by constant Scripture references, two recent books to consider are Being Up in a Down World (Harvest House, 149 pp., $2.95 pb) by James Kilgore and To Bend Without Breaking (Abingdon, 127 pp., $3.95 pb) by Ella Stuart. The biblical insights are implicit, not explicit.

Beginning in mid-September, the PBS television network will bring to American viewers “The Long Search,” a thirteen-week series on world religions. The series was coproduced by the BBC and Time-Life Films and has already been shown in Britain. It received a number of critical plaudits. A reviewer commented that “The BBC can safely regard it as a triumph and a breakthrough, the discovery of that rare thing, a new technique for making sense of an almost impossible subject.”

It’s hard to see what the shouting is all about. A basic interview technique is used in the series. Both religious professionals and laymen from each religious tradition are interviewed. Each group is shown at worship and work.

The reason the series seems so unusual probably lies in the fact that television has generally shown itself incapable of dealing with religious faith in any meaningful or realistic way. This self-imposed theological eunuchhood makes the series seem more virile than it really is.

Technically the films are well done. The photography is sensitive and effective. Producer Peter Montagnon has used natural settings with natural light. The occasional loss of photographic sharpness is more than offset by the sense of sharing in an intimate conversation with another about his religious faith. Ronald Eyre, British stage producer, who is the host-narrator, is a sensitive, polite, companionable guide.

My first concern in viewing a selection of eight of the thirteen episodes was: How is Christianity treated? I wondered if the Christian faith would come across in a fair and recognizable manner. I think it does.

The producers cannot be faulted for the answers given by the adherents of any religious faith. If Christians give inadequate answers, we can only blame the Christians. However, it is fair to ask. Did the interviewer ask the right questions and did he ask them of the right people? Generally the choices of questions and people seem reasonable. The questions are sufficiently straightforward and broad to enable everyone to state the case for his faith. In the case of Christianity it seems reasonable to cover the subject by looking at American Protestantism, European Catholicism, Romanian Orthodoxy, and independent Black African churches.

The hour spent on American Protestantism is probably the one of the greatest concern to most of us. The producers pegged Indianapolis as the typical American Protestant city. Its 1,100 churches represent the full spread of Protestantism. Host Eyre takes us to the Baptist Temple, a gargantuan church of incredible vigor and bustle. He innocently asks, “What is this vast organization all about?” Sonny Snell, one of the six full-time ministers at the church responds, “To get people saved.”

When Eyre attempts to find out what that means he finds himself the object of an on-camera personal evangelism effort. Apparently Snell hoped that Eyre might be asking out of need rather than curiosity. It was one of the few moments in the series that I found embarrassing. Snell’s pat and patronizing manner made me extremely uncomfortable. Yet his form of evangelism is no doubt greatly to be preferred to the nonverbal evangelism practiced by most Christians.

Scenes of the Baptist Temple’s worship service featured hilarious duets on evolution and the ecumenical movement by two young women. If they ever decide to enter show business, I hereby volunteer to be their agent. From his interviews with Greg Dixon, pastor of Baptist Temple, and others from the church, Eyre understandably but wrongly concludes that there is no room for doubt in fundamentalism.

The North Methodist Church of Indianapolis was chosen as the place to examine “mainline” Protestantism. Mainline Protestantism, according to adviser Martin Marty, is composed of those churches that are comfortable with their culture rather than trying to save people out of it. Dr. Richard Hamilton, the pastor, reveals his rejection of the task of saving people out of the world. As we listen to the pastor, sit in on a social action committee meeting, and visit a worship service, it would be easy to conclude that mainline Protestantism is spiritually bankrupt. Eyre perceptively notes that it was impossible for him to see where the North Methodist Church ends and society begins. “The edge was too blurred for me to see,” he concludes.

The third focus of the Protestant segment is the Mount Vernon Baptist Church of Indianapolis. Mount Vernon is a black Baptist church occupying a rickety, unpretentious building. Inside things are different. The building is not impressive but the Christian faith of the congregation is. The church, under the direction of Mozel Sanders, has an active life of worship and social help. Members of the church are shown preparing some of hundreds of Thanksgiving dinners distributed to those in need.

The scenes of its worship were moving. As a long-time aficionado of black Gospel music and an admirer of the late Mahalia Jackson, I was more comfortable with the worship at Mount Vernon than with either Baptist Temple or North Methodist. The proclamation/response style of preaching and the spirited singing of “You Must Be Born Again” and “I’ll Fly Away” seem to me to catch the emotional spontaneity that should characterize Christian worship.

For me the most engaging of the series was the segment on the Orthodox Church of Romania. Romanian Christianity is an anachronism—but a desirable anachronism. I had the feeling that there is a sort of medieval ethos to the Christian culture there. About 80 per cent of the population embraces the Orthodox faith. And it doesn’t seem to be a superficial profession with most of the people but a matter of personal commitment. Christianity has entered into the fabric of society and into the marrow of their bones. All of Romanian life—farming, cleaning, cooking—seems to have a sacramental flavor to it. That is remarkable in view of the fact that Romania is a Communist nation. The president of the building committee of one of the churches is a member of the Communist party. Of this seeming conflict he says simply, “No one says a Communist has to be an atheist.”

Eyre had one of his most unsettling experiences in Romania. In interviewing Bishop Justinian, Eyre thinks of himself as the post-Christian man who has gone beyond Christianity. He confesses his shock when Justinian treats him as a pre-Christian pagan. Justinian points out to him that a person can know about Jesus and not know him.

Eyre finds that Easter is fun in Romania. He has enough Puritan hangover to worry about that. He observes all the preparations for Easter, including the egg painting and spring cleaning that build a sense of excitement and anticipation. Bishop Justinian wisely remarks that every day is Easter if we could just understand it.

Eyre asks his Romanian guide-translator, Remas Rus, what Orthodox Christians believe. Rus corrects him, “You should ask rather: Whom do Orthodox Christians worship?”

The segment on Roman Catholicism focuses only on European Catholicism. The livelier North and South American scenes were ignored. I question that decision, which puts only the most traditional face of the Catholic church before the viewer and eliminates the ferment that has resulted from the charismatic renewal, marriage encounter, and the push for more lay control.

Those who were chosen as spokesmen for their church are intelligent and sensitive and generally acquit themselves well. Judith Dryhurst, a Catholic from Leeds, England, points out to Eyre that the church is simply “the people who follow Christ.” Rembert Weakland, Abbot Primate of the Benedictines, observes that Christianity says God has entered history. If that’s true, he concludes, God has made something available that wasn’t there before. Eyre notes that placed against the claims for Jesus the other claims of the Catholic church pale.

A great deal of time in this segment is spent with the Little Brothers of Jesus, a Spanish monastic order. It clearly shows the desire of these young monks to know God alone, but the non-Catholic viewer has to wonder how much of what it says about the essence of Catholicism is understood and practiced by most Catholics.

The hour spent on African religions was the most puzzling to me. The movements examined are not described as African Christianity but as “African response to the stimulus of Christianity.” That distinction seems to be accurate and important.

Black South Africans are apparently attempting to rediscover their lost religious heritage and, in some cases, to incorporate it with Christianity. It was somewhat disconcerting to hear Peter Mkize, a black Lutheran bank employee, comment that he communicates with his deceased mother. “She visits me,” he says, “in my visions and dreams about things I’m supposed to do but am resisting.”

Even Reverend Makhathini of Mapumulo Theological College, a Lutheran school, tells of a vision of his dead grandmother that resulted in his physical healing. “This has touched my mind to try to find out where the dead are,” he explains. “This is no problem to the Zulus but the Christians say, Don’t ask—just look to Jesus.”

It is relatively easy to see how the presuppositions of the African culture have pulled Christianity into an African shape. It is less easy for most of us to see how our Western civilization has pulled Christianity into its own shape.

The other episodes in the series left me ambivalent. It is easy enough to examine the doctrines of non-Christian religions and to condemn their distortions of God and his world. However, it is impossible to condemn the Muslim doctor who loves God as she understands him and spends her life trying to bring healing to sick children; or the Jewish student diligently studying the Torah in order to determine what God really demands of him.

The scenes of others seeking to find and serve God should remind us that in our evangelism we are merely beggars telling other beggars where to find food.

The episode on the meeting of Western and Eastern religions in California has a number of interesting moments. Eyre comments that he went to California wondering what the gods of the twenty-first century would be like and whether they had already appeared. That’s a heavy burden to give California.

Frankly, the appeal of the Eastern religions remains a mystery to me. In the minds of many they seem to offer an antidote to the mechanistic, fragmented view of the world in our own culture. In Eastern mystical religions man is not separate from the world and God but a part of some sort of great cosmic oneness.

People young and old seem prepared to lose themselves in some larger world soul. If I have to choose, I prefer fragmentation. After all, I am something different from the rest of creation and God is someone different from me. I can understand a Muslim seeking the will of Allah, the merciful and mighty. I find it difficult to understand the pantheist who wants to blur the distinction between himself and God.

The California interviews tend to shatter the liberal myth that Christianity must be demythologized in order to appeal to modern scientific man. We see the operator of sophisticated electronic biofeedback equipment using it in connection with Tibetan meditation. And we hear a scientist confess that scientists like to think they’re dealing with absolute truth—although they know they’re not.

The concluding episode, “Loose Ends,” is probably the most unsatisfactory for Christians. Eyre compares religion to a mountaineering kit. Different kits are needed for different mountains. Not all climbs are the same, we are told.

It would have been better to let each faith present its own claims and speak for itself and let the viewer make his own conclusion. This attempt to paper over differences and create some sort of validity for each religious expression is a disservice to them all.

The best part of this segment is Eyre’s dialogue with Dr. Jacob Needleman, professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University. Eyre asks Needleman how one starts with religious experience.

Needleman responds, “Are you speaking out of curiosity or need?”

Eyre reveals himself to be the typical modern man by answering with another question: “Is there something that can speak to us in the limbo between curiosity and need?”

He is a spiritual voyeur unwilling to say that his quest comes merely from curiosity and he is not ready to acknowledge his need of faith. He wants to ask ultimate questions; he’s not prepared to worship the Ultimate Answer. He reserves the right of refusal.

The answer to his question is no. There is nothing that can speak to us in the limbo between curiosity and need. I hope Ronald Eyre will take the step out of limbo into need. Only there does God ever reveal himself to man.

With all of its limitations, the series is nevertheless a good beginning. We can only hope that the Public Broadcasting Network will not regard this as the end of its task but a worthwhile beginning in the exploration of this important area of human experience that has too often been ignored by the electronic media. (A sixteen-page discussion guide has been prepared by Cultural Information Service, P.O. Box 92, New York, N.Y. 10016.)

John V. Lawing, Jr., is assistant professor of journalism at CBN University, Virginia Beach, Virginia.