Those of us who live in affluent circumstances accept our duty to develop a simple lifestyle in order to contribute more generously to both relief and evangelism.” This concluding sentence of article nine of the Lausanne Covenant has often been quoted since 1974. The time has come to think about its implementation.

North America is affluent. In a world of hunger, we live with an abundance of food. Restaurants everywhere boast of the “generous portions” they offer and indeed deliver. We eat too much. And we throw away too much food. The opulence of our meals is matched by the extravagance of other expenditures.

The theme of a simple lifestyle leads to the more basic question of how we use our possessions. For centuries we have been subject to much false teaching concerning wealth. Since the Reformation there has been a distinct move, seldom observed, to the morality of the Book of Proverbs with its praise of possessions, rather than that of the New Testament. In addition, some mechanism of thought in the Calvinist tradition seemed to say that material riches were the indicator of God’s blessings.

Worse still, the last three hundred years in the West witnessed the victory of the Roman Law concept of property, which is highly individualistic and adjudges the owner the right to dispose of his possessions to the exclusion of any outside consideration and to the extent of the destruction of the property. This philosophy of property paved the way for the horrors of early capitalism, and it still determined the alternative given by Karl Marx: the replacement of the obviously inhuman individualistic concept by a more human collectivist one.

The fathers of the early church, however, understood and proclaimed that the Roman Law concept of “dominion” could not be reconciled with the Christian idea of stewardship. St. Basil told the church that, beyond an appropriate satisfaction of personal needs, all material means were to serve the poor. Even the famous slogan, “Private property is theft” has not been thought up by some radical socialist of the nineteenth century, but belongs to St. Chrysostom, the greatest preacher of Christian antiquity. Perhaps he thought of Christ’s parable of the talents when he addressed the well-to-do, saying: “God has invested capital with you. It is not your property, but a loan by him, made to give you opportunity to exercise mercy on those who are in need.” Any surplus means, any idle capital that is not used to relieve the burden of the needy, is similar to stolen goods. For Christians, then, there can only be functional property, possessions serving the purposes of sustainment and other purposes as set by God.

The question of possessions is the question of how we spend or retain them. Affluent Christians need to go back to the biblical tradition of stewardship and bid farewell to the Roman Law concept of property.

Today the other aspect of the question seems to be even more important: the question of how we earn our possessions. The Old Testament prophets made very clear that not any kind of “increase” is a gift of God. Among those who make large fortunes in a short time there are always some who display personal asceticism or even become public benefactors. But beneficence does not cover up the inordinate ways with which some people may have extracted the money from the public in the first place, using situations of virtual monopoly and taking advantage of the so-called law of supply and demand instead of giving a just wage and asking the just price.

But this is not only a moral problem for business tycoons. On all levels of our society, a zest for acquisition reigns, a determined quest for self-enrichment that goes far beyond what the fathers of the ancient church dealt with. Our society is governed not just by a love of possessions but by a single-mindedness to increase them, which would befit the pursuit of the kingdom. The manner with which we accumulate possessions will certainly come under the scrutiny of the eternal, just as much as the manner with which we dispose of them. The New Testament speaks of honest work by which we are to earn our keep and the means with which to support the needy.

One of the strangest sights in North America is the peaceful coexistence of wealth and religion, or rather the enthusiastic efforts of many to marry the two. Spending and making money is furnished with religious camouflage. Some Christians will wear expensive suits to demonstrate how they have been blessed. Others think their pastor should drive a costly car—presumably as witnessing to the might of God, whereas it should rather be seen as worship of the gods of success.

Worse is the way some Christian agencies lure our sense of avarice as in the newspaper ad I saw last week of a church-sponsored card game drive, inviting people to “come as you are after church” and “win cash” up to a thousand dollars.

In an affluent society like ours the temptations and the attempts to compromise will naturally lie in the field of pursuit of possessions. But we should be reminded that Jesus declared this field to be the most dangerous altogether, irrespective of one’s situation. Where we are busy to wed religion and money, he stated the sharpest antithesis: You cannot serve God and Mammon together.

Poverty may be painful, but wealth and its pursuit is deadly dangerous. Where greed rules, gratefulness for forgiveness received and love of God no longer take first place. Property tends to be a consuming matter, excluding the interests of God’s kingdom. Our relationship to our possessions, then, is the expression of what we are truly living for.

“The African Christians stood like the Church at Pentecost. They are blood-and-guts Christians who did not run from death.”

That is the way Kenneth D. Enright, a veteran United Methodist missionary, described believers in Zaire’s beleaguered Shaba province after the rebel invasion last month. It was the second time in fourteen months that invaders from Angola had come into the mineral-rich area formerly known as Katanga.

Enright was in Lubumbashi (formerly Elisabethville) on church business when the rebel forces hit the city of Kolwezi May 13. His wife, daughter, missionary son, and daughter-in-law were under siege in their Kolwezi house for nearly a week before he saw them again. African Methodists protected them until he returned to evacuate them the day after French paratroopers began to sweep the invaders from the city. While the senior Enright was separated from his family he sat by the radio in Lubumbashi awaiting news. At his side for much of that time was the area bishop, Ngoy K. Wakadilo, anxious about the wellbeing of all of the missionaries.

“If you want to know what is misery for an old man, it is to know your family is in danger and you can’t do a thing,” Enright told Methodist officials when he reached New York. On the day Kolwezi was invaded, his son John, 28, transmitted a message on a mission radio set: “They’ve bombed our house. The war has broken out. Mortars have hit the roof.… The windows are all shot out. What do we do?” The father picked up the transmission just as he was about to return home from Lubumbashi in his light plane.

Rebels had reportedly attacked the Enright home in the belief that Moroccan or other foreign troops were being sheltered there. A driver for the mission screamed at the invaders, begging them not to kill the Americans. John Enright was nevertheless taken off to a makeshift jail for questioning. On the way the party encountered a Methodist district superintendent who interceded with the rebel forces to release the American. He was freed a few hours later.

At one point during the siege a young African who had stayed in the Enright home to protect them offered to kill two rebel guards who were posted there. The senior Enright said his son told the volunteer, “God doesn’t want us to do that.”

Another Methodist missionary, Harold Amstutz, said after he arrived in the United States that the elder Enright escaped death because of his absence from Kolwezi. Amstutz reported that the rebels went to the Enright home to kill the senior missionary. A Methodist missionary surgeon, Glen Eschtruth, was killed in the 1977 invasion, and after that the rebels passed the word that “they were going to kill Bwana Kenneth next time,” said Amstutz. The explanation was that during the 1977 incursion Enright had helped to maintain radio contact with Zaire Army forces and some of the expatriates who were behind rebel lines for over two months.

During last month’s action, Amstutz picked up a transmission from Kenneth Enright in Lubumbashi. No one was addressed by name, but all were assured that everything possible was being done for them. The message ended with Enright saying that he would stand by to hear if anyone would acknowledge receipt of the message by a “click” of their microphones. As soon as that exchange was over the rebel troops drove up to Amstutz’s home and began shooting into houses in the neighborhood. He said they were “shouting ‘missionaire’ in a way I’ll never forget.” They were making a house-to-house search but stopped and turned in the opposite direction when they reached the residence next to Amstutz’s. “Most of the time we spent on the floor praying,” the former Marine said in Kanshasa after he and his wife were evacuated from Kolwezi in a Belgian military jet. Using the mission plane, the senior Enright flew his family to Lubumbashi. Five other United Methodist workers in the area also were evacuated, as well as a Danish Methodist nurse who worked with them.

While no missionaries are known to have been killed or injured in last month’s invasion, an estimated 600 Africans and 130 whites did lose their lives. A rebel outpost only fifty yards from the Amstutz home was the site of fierce fighting. On the morning after the paratroopers arrived the missionary crawled out on his porch and saw bodies lying all over the street. “Not just Europeans,” he said, “but the African population was slaughtered also.”

Before leaving Zaire for a year’s furlough, the older Enright made arrangements with government officials to allow Africans to carry on some of his work. After arriving in New York he persuaded denominational leaders to send funds for relief work in Shaba. He shares with Amstutz a concern for African church members. Amstutz doubts that Americans can return any time soon. The work of the church continues, however. Declared Enright: “The only thing working in Kolwezi today is the Methodist Church.”

Commenting on the report that he is on the rebels’ death list, the missionary since 1950 said, “I’ve been on their list, but I don’t worry about that because I am on another list—God’s. I say to God: ‘You lead; you take over; I’m yours.’ That is the kind of God I walk with and fly with.”

To The Rescue

Citing horror stories of oppression, tens of thousands of persons of Chinese descent have fled Viet Nam in recent weeks, a development that has attracted international press attention. Not so nearly publicized has been the steadily increasing stream of Vietnamese who have been leaving by the thousands every month. Most set out to sea by night aboard small fishing boats for a voyage of 300 miles or more. In many cases, the vessels are overcrowded, unseaworthy, and poorly provisioned. The “boat people,” as they are known, must face not only the elements but also Vietnamese navy patrols and pirates who rob, rape, and sometimes murder them. As many as 40 per cent or so perish at sea, say some observers.

Boats in trouble are often ignored by larger ships, such as freighters, partly because of the uncertainty over whether the refugees can be discharged at the next port of call. Some nations in the past have refused to allow the refugee boats to land and have even waved them off with shots.

Two California-based relief organizations announced last month that they will come to the rescue with ships of their own. Food for the Hungry purchased a large yacht and World Vision International leased a 345-ton LST-type vessel. Both will ply the Gulf of Siam and the South China Sea, providing small craft in trouble with food packages, medicine, and clothing. There will even be some replacement boats aboard in case a refugee vessel is in danger of sinking. The refugees, however, will not be taken aboard because of the political uncertainties, say relief officials.

The mercy-ship projects have the apparent approval of United Nations officials and government leaders of nations that reluctantly host the boat refugees. (An estimated 15,000 boat people reside in camps in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong. Another 12,500 have been resettled in the United States and other countries within the past year.)

Church Aid For Viet Nam

On May 20 the Greek freighter Antiochia dropped anchor in the harbor of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), having sailed from Houston seven weeks earlier. It was loaded with 10,000 metric tons of wheat grown in the United States, billed as a gift from North American church groups to the people of food-short Viet Nam. It was the first American-grown food to enter the country since April, 1975, when the North Vietnamese Communists overran South Viet Nam.

On hand to welcome the ship’s arrival were government officials, representatives of the government-sanctioned Committee for Friendship and Solidarity with American People (known as VIETMY), and a seven-member delegation representing Church World Service (CWS), the relief arm of the New York-based National Council of Churches. Accompanying the CWS party was a four-member TV documentary film crew, which provided film clips of the event for American networks.

CWS executive director Paul F. McCleary, a former United Methodist missionary in Bolivia, explained that the wheat was to be made into bread and noodles for distribution in schools, orphanages, and hospitals. CWS will not oversee distribution, he said, but he expressed confidence that the food will be channeled properly.

CWS undertook the $2 million wheat shipment to help offset a severe food shortage and “as a gesture of friendship with the Vietnamese people,” said McCleary, who was part of the delegation. Much of the wheat was donated by organizations and individuals (one of them, Kansas farmer Harvey Schmidt, was part of the CWS delegation). About $750,000 was raised by CWS from church groups to help underwrite costs (including some $700,000 worth of shipping costs alone). Only funds specifically designated for the project would be used, CWS announced in its appeals earlier (see March 24 issue, page 53) in an apparent attempt to mollify church people opposed to aiding the Hanoi government.

CWS has provided Viet Nam with humanitarian aid for sixteen years, McCleary pointed out, and even after the Communist takeover it shipped in food purchased in nearby Asian countries.

While the delegation was in Viet Nam another shipload of CWS-purchased goods arrived: $500,000 worth of equipment from Japan to be used to repair farm equipment and to make replacement parts for agricultural machinery. CWS will provide technical experts from Japan and North America to train Vietnamese technicians in use of the equipment, McCleary announced at a New York press conference this month.

Present at the press conference were three other members of the delegation: Alfred Bartholomew, a United Church of Christ executive who is chairman of the CWS policy-making committee; Robert S. Browne, president of the Black Economic Research Center in New York and a former U.S. government aid officer in Viet Nam; and Cora Weiss, a former antiwar activist hired by CWS as a consultant for the wheat project.

They told reporters that they were permitted to move about freely during their three-week tour of the land and to talk to anyone they wished in both the northern and southern parts of the country. They said they attended a Catholic mass and visited with both Roman Catholic and Protestant leaders. They also visited a village near the Cambodian border, and they interviewed refugees who told them of atrocities and severe food shortages in Cambodia. Ms. Weiss, of Reform Jewish background, was the chief information recorder of the group.

Archbishop Nguyen Van Bingh of Ho Chi Minh City, whose see has 180 parishes and 400,000 Catholics, gave the CWS representatives a message for the American Catholic bishops. He told the bishops “not to fear giving aid to a Communist nation” because the people there “are all human beings.” Ms. Weiss quoted him as saying that the 3.5-million-member Catholic Church is participating in “the common work of the nation,” and that Americans should not be “misled by any misunderstanding that we have given up our religion.” He pointed to a state farm near Ho Chi Minh City operated by priests and nuns and financed partly by $80,000 raised by church agencies, including some related to the World Council of Churches.

(Executives of Catholic Relief Services, the U.S. Catholic relief agency, said that CRS has donated more than $200,000 toward rehabilitation in Viet Nam, part of a $1 million aid project by the Vatican. CRS has been refused direct entry by Hanoi, a spokesman said, because of a CRS policy insisting on contracts that permit CRS personnel to supervise the distribution of donated goods in other countries.)

The CWS delegation members voiced no criticism of Hanoi, although they acknowledged that many persons are leaving Viet Nam because they cannot adjust to the new economic system. Meanwhile, said McCleary, much social progress is noticeable in Viet Nam’s urban areas.

Ruth Stapleton: Bowing to Pressure

Ruth Carter Stapleton, the President’s sister and advocate of “inner healing,” did not know until last month of the strong resistance by Jewish organizations to the work of the Hebrew-Christian groups that proclaim Jesus as the Messiah. That is how her agent, Mack McQuiston of the Wayne Coombs Agency in Los Angeles, explained her involvement in a nationally publicized controversy.

When Mrs. Stapleton appeared at the recent Jesus ’78 rally in New Jersey (see June 2 issue, page 46) she accepted an invitation to address this month’s annual conference of B’nai Yeshua (Sons of Jesus) on Long Island. The organization, best known for its evangelistic efforts among Jewish students on Long Island, subsequently publicized her forthcoming appearance at Shechinah ’78, and then the trouble began.

Mrs. Stapleton’s famous brother apparently heard about the controversy before she did, but she said he did not tell her what decision she should make. At a press conference in New York six days before her scheduled appearance at Shechinah, she announced her withdrawal from the event. She said the President had informed her of the objections of the Jews when they were together at a family wedding.

She waited as long as she did to get out of the engagement because she didn’t want to make a decision based on political considerations, she explained to reporters. Acknowledging that she got many communications on the proposed appearance, she denied that any of them “gave any political implications.” However, she added, there were some threats. After much prayer and “many sleepless nights,” she said, she “tried to get into the mind of Jesus Christ and ask what he would do.” That, she declared, is what led her to cancel. She indicated that her appearance would not be in the interest of reconciliation, a theme associated with her ministry.

Among the communications she received were letters from the Long Island unit of the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, and the director of the office of Jewish-Christian relations of the National Council of Churches. The NCC’s William Weiler told her that he objected to B’nai Yeshua because of what he called its “deceptive, dishonest, and unChristian methods” to win Jews to Christ. The Long Island Jewish group asked her “to reconsider your acceptance of this paid speaking engagement and, in the spirit of respect among peoples, refuse to participate in B’nai Yeshua’s June 8 crusade in Stony Brook or in any other activity aimed at the conversion of Jews from their faith.”

Founder-president Mike Evans of B’nai Yeshua was aware of the controversy and of efforts to get her to cancel, but he learned of her decision only the day before her press conference. The tip came from a friendly journalist who got an advance news release from an official of the American Jewish Committee. Agent McQuiston said he notified the B’nai Yeshua office of the cancellation the day of the news conference. He also told CHRISTIANITY TODAY in a telphone interview that the organization’s $750 advance toward Mrs. Stapleton’s $2,500 fee had been sent back. Evans said it had not been received four days after the news conference.

Rambling Willie

The white frame Church of Christ in West Mansfield, Ohio, has a new foundation, roof, baptistry, kitchen, carpet, sidewalk, bulletin board, and church bus, plus an assistant pastor, all made possible by a race horse named Rambling Willie.

Willie is half-owned by Vivian Farrington, daughter of the church’s pastor, C. Lloyd Harris, 85. Harris brought his daughter up to believe in tithing, and she gives 10 percent of Willie’s winnings to the church. The eight-year-old horse virtually came out of nowhere to win more than $1 million so far. Tithes on his winnings last year exceeded $50,000.

Mrs. Farrington’s husband bought a half-interest in the horse in 1973 for $15,000 and gave it to her for a birthday present. Until then Willie had won no races.

“The Lord said to give 10 per cent and he would bless you,” Mrs. Farrington told a reporter. “So when my husband gave the horse to me, I said I would tithe, and the Lord sure provided like it says.”

Appearing with the President’s sister at the New York meeting with reporters was Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Congress. Both insisted that it was her conference and not his committee’s, according to Religious News Service. Committee officials, however, arranged the coverage, prepared a press kit, and sent out releases before and after the conference.

Tanenbaum and other members of the committee staff have been active for years in criticizing efforts to evangelize Jews, especially those of the Hebrew-Christian organizations. He charged that the purpose of B’nai Yeshua is “to evangelize the Jewish people out of their continued historic existence,” and he praised Mrs. Stapleton’s decision as “an expression of moral courage, civility, and decency.” He apologized to her “for any offense which may have been caused to her by anyone in the Jewish community.”

Mrs. Stapleton dismissed the threats as not coming “from anyone I would feel to be a responsible source.” Her name, though, was on a poster tacked up “all over Long Island” by the militant Jewish Defense League, said Evans. The JDL called for demonstrators to show up at the site of Shechinah ’78 to protest the event.

As for B’nai Yeshua, she said, her action should not be construed as passing judgment on it. In accepting the invitation initially, she commented, “I was simply responding to an opportunity to share with another religious group some of the psychological and spiritual insights that have come to me over the years concerning how individuals can be made more nearly whole and healthy in their totality as human beings.” She expressed unwillingness to become embroiled in “the controversy surrounding the conflict between various Jewish organizations and B’nai Yeshua,” and she emphasized that when she accepted Evans’s invitation she “never thought I would be going to anything where I would try to convert Jews.”

Evans invited charismatic author-pastor Jamie Buckingham to fill the program vacancy. He also sent Mrs. Stapleton a message promising prayers for her and inviting her for a visit after the dust settles over the cancellation. He expressed regret for “the great pain you have suffered.” In a separate statement to the press Evans responded to the critics by saying, “We haven’t abused, manipulated, or distorted anything. On the contrary, those accusing us often distort our position and seem intent on undercutting our constitutional right to spread our faith freely.”

ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS

No Commencement

In a telephone directory’s classified advertisements, Clinton (Maryland) Christian School promises not only daily Bible reading and high academic standards, but also “traditional education.” However, last month’s traditional graduation exercise at the 900-student school in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., was cancelled to avoid litigation. Instead, a worship service honoring the twenty-one graduating seniors was held.

John C. Macon, the school’s founder and pastor of the Bible Baptist Church of Upper Marlboro, Maryland, which sponsors the school, called off the commencement services in order to prevent the valedictorian and senior class president from speaking. Michael A. Bongiorni, 18, had been expelled for violating a school rule against dancing and drinking. It was his second offense. His parents went to court to seek $100,000 in damages, claiming that the rule did not apply off campus and after school hours. They also said that he had submitted to a “paddling” by the administration as due punishment, and that there should be no further penalty. Macon insisted that the rules applied anywhere, any time.

Lawyers for both sides got together and worked out an agreement. The student’s parents, who are members of the church, agreed to withdraw the suit if the pastor agreed to treat their son the same as all other seniors. Macon decided that none would march across the platform, none would speak, and none would receive diplomas in the service. All would get the certificates either in the mail or by picking them up from the school office.

The incident stirred a series of front-page stories in both Washington dailies as well as letters to the editor. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen concluded that the whole matter was one of serious conviction, “of religious belief.” He wrote: “This is what the school is about. It would be like a rabbinical student eating pork. This is not just about rules. It is about sin, about education, and education not taking hold.”

Cohen quoted Macon as saying the Bongiorni family had “been here five years. They sat under my preaching every Sunday. My heart’s broken.”

Brazil: Slowing the Flow

More than 500 missionaries or persons otherwise classified by Brazil as “religious” have been entering that South American nation each year—until last year. That flow has now dwindled to a trickle, and missions executives are trying to discover what’s holding up the visa applications of the overseas personnel. The situation has become so serious that “representations have been made at the highest levels,” said one veteran executive.

The Associated Press reported from Rio de Janeiro last month that in the previous twelve months only sixty-five visas were issued to foreign Roman Catholic workers and six to foreign Protestants. An official of the Brazilian Bishops Conference was quoted as saying that the slowdown began last May and that no new applications were approved until this March. Alicia de Oliveira, identified by the wire service as an attorney for the Southern Baptist Mission in Brazil, said Protestants began to experience the slowdown last June or July. An unnamed “Protestant missionary official” was quoted as saying he had been informed last month that the military government’s intelligence service had just ordered a halt to the granting of all visas to “religious” workers.

A spokesman for Ernesto Geisel, the nation’s first Protestant president, denied that there is any special restriction on missionaries. There is, however, a general tightening up of immigration, he acknowledged. Carlos Atila Alvares da Silva cited a “general concern” for security. “With all the terrorism in the world, you never know when a terrorist might disguise himself as a priest,” he said. “It is tougher for anyone to get into Brazil now, not just missionaries.”

Missionary leaders were speculating, however, that the government was clamping down to prevent the importation of any more of the kind of foreign personnel who have drawn unfavorable international publicity. When U.S. First Lady Rosalynn visited Brazil last May she made a point of seeing two missionaries who had been jailed as suspected Communists in Recife (see July 8, 1977 issue, page 39). They gave her a message to bring back to President Carter. The two, a Catholic and a Mennonite, complained of torture and denial of rights in prison. General Joao Baptista de Figueiredo, the man picked to succeed General Geisel as president, currently heads the national intelligence service. His brother, also a general, recently charged that Catholic missionaries in the Amazon River area were spreading Communist doctrine and propaganda.

An estimated 75 per cent of Brazil’s Catholic priests and other workers are expatriates. There are about 3,000 Protestant foreign missionaries in the nation.

Spreading the Word

Nine million Bibles, 11 million New Testaments, and 390 million smaller portions of Scripture were distributed last year by the various member units of the United Bible Societies, according to a UBS report. The UBS noted that Bible distribution increased dramatically in Angola (the Bible Society of Angola reopened its office last year despite the civil turmoil), in war-torn Ethiopia, and in Idi Amin’s Uganda, where Scripture distribution exceeded more than a million books and portions for the first time in history.

Death

BILL RICE, 67, well-known independent Baptist evangelist and operator of a religious camp primarily for the deaf, brother of evangelist John R. Rice; in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, of a stroke.

Religion in Transit

The Synagogue Council of America this month condemned the recent Israel-related resolution approved by the governing board of the National Council of Churches. The resolution criticized Israel’s use of the “cluster bomb” in Lebanon (see June 2 issue, page 36). The council, which is the coordinating body for the main branches of American Judaism, noted that the measure omits mention of Palestinian aggression. The NCC, said the council, is “incapable of fair judgment” regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict, a bias that may “prove harmful” to the cause of interreligious dialogue. An NCC spokesperson explained that the resolution addressed the specific issue of cluster bombs and not the entire Middle East situation.

A nine-year-old girl was killed and sixty people were injured when the roof of Walnut Village Church of Christ in Garland, Texas, collapsed just after the opening hymn at a Sunday morning service last month. About 150 persons were attending the service. Many dove under pews when the roof caved in under the pressure of accumulated rain water. City investigators said the roof lacked a drainage system.

A crisis center for teen-age prostitutes is being established in the vice-ridden Times Square area of New York City by Lamb’s Ministries, the outreach unit of the Manhattan Church of the Nazarene. More than $80,000 was raised for the project at a rally last month. Pastor Paul Moore said $250,000 will be needed to run the program the first year. Sam Mayhugh, a clinical psychologist who is a member of the First Church of the Nazarene in Pasadena, California, will serve as executive director of the project. His church contributed $24,000 of the amount raised.

Resigned priests who have married should be allowed to resume their priestly ministries in the Roman Catholic Church, according to 53 per cent of 6,414 priests who responded to a survey sponsored by an 800-member organization of resigned priests. Some 55 per cent of the respondents said they favor optional celibacy for priests, 53 per cent registered approval of the ordination of married men, and 31 per cent advocated the ordination of women as priests.

Statistics compiled by the Episcopal Women’s Caucus show that 73 of 113 women Episcopal priests are serving in church-related positions, most of them in parish ministry. Ten of them, along with three women deacons, have charge of congregations.

Martin Luther King, Sr., canceled a speech that he had been scheduled to deliver at the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in Atlanta this month. Instead, he went to Hungary at the invitation of church officials there (several Hungarian churches are named after his late son) to receive an honorary degree of theology. He was also scheduled to visit Czechoslovakia and address the Prague-based Christian Peace Conference. Meanwhile, President Carter’s pastor, Charles A. Trentham of First Baptist Church in Washington, was invited by the Soviet government to visit the Soviet Union this month, and plans called for him to preach in several Baptist churches. Five black Baptist ministers from Washington, D.C., were invited to make a preaching tour of the Soviet Union in July.

Two veteran missionaries from Ebenezer Lutheran Brethren Church in Minneapolis were slain last month in the Republic of Cameroon in Africa. Government sources indicated that Ernest Erickson, 59, and his wife Miriam, 58, may have been victims of a ritual killing by spirit worshipers. The pair served in Cameroon for thirty-four years as missionaries of the 9,000-member Church of the Lutheran Brethren of America. This month, guerrillas in Rhodesia shot and killed two European missionaries at a Roman Catholic mission station near the Botswana border.

Bishop Antonio Teutonico, reputedly the world’s oldest Roman Catholic priest, died on May 31 in a central Italian village. He was 104. The longevity title is now held by priest Edward D. Howard, former acting bishop of Portland, Oregon. He is 100.

Bumper-sticker religion is getting serious. One of the latest messages seen on scattered bumpers proclaims: “Tithe if you love Jesus. Anyone can honk.”

A question to the 1976 United Presbyterian Church (UPC) General Assembly set off a burst of evangelical energy that peaked last month when the denomination’s top governing body said a loud “no” to the ordination of practicing homosexuals. The 1978 assembly, meeting in San Diego, California, voted overwhelmingly for a twelve-page committee report that included “definitive guidance” for New York City Presbytery, the UPC regional unit that had asked for direction concerning William Silver, a self-affirmed homosexual candidate for the ministry under its care. Out of the ensuing denominational discussion and uproar came communication and cooperation among evangelicals unprecedented in this generation.

“On the basis of our understanding that the practice of homosexuality is sin,” said the assembly’s pronouncement, “we are concerned that homosexual believers and the observing world should not be left in doubt about the church’s mind on this issue [any longer].” The majority of the 650 commissioners (delegates) said in the document that dialogue and study of the issue should continue but that ordination of unrepentant homosexuals as church leaders should not be allowed.

About five hours of floor debate preceded the decisive vote, but it represented only a tiny fraction of the discussion and controversy that has spread throughout the 2.57 million-member denomination. At the national level the debate was led by a nineteen-member study task force authorized by the 1976 assembly. The release of its report and recommendations in January (see February 10 issue, page 48) sparked intensive talk about homosexuality in regional and local Presbyterian bodies, as well as in national church agencies. The task force majority recommended that otherwise qualified homosexuals be accepted for ordination. A minority report advised against it.

Nearly one-third of the denomination’s 152 presbyteries (regional governing bodies) took the trouble to send formal communications to the assembly on the ordination question. None of the overtures (petitions) or resolutions asked for the opening of church office for unrepentant gays, and most registered opposition. A few sought more study, postponement of a decision, or simply preservation of the regional and local prerogatives in officer selection. Another indicator of the grassroots interest in the controversy was the flood of documents produced by individual Presbyterians, by local church governing bodies (sessions), and by a variety of unofficial organizations. William P. Thompson, the denomination’s stated clerk (chief executive officer) since 1966, admitted that the outpouring of mail on this issue had been exceeded only by the 6,000 messages he got after a 1970 grant to the Angela Davis defense fund.

Another sign of the intense interest in the issue across the church was the formation of an “evangelical coalition” to defeat the proposals from the task force majority. Included were the Presbyterian Lay Committee, the Presbyterians United for Biblical Concerns, and the Presbyterian Charismatic Communion. The activity of some of the denomination’s “big steeple” pastors in opposition to homosexual ordination (see March 10 issue, page 62) was another indicator of sharp local concern about the proposal.

Opponents of the task force majority’s recommendations capitalized on the unrest throughout the church as the presbyteries elected their commissioners to the assembly. The regional bodies often send representatives simply because their names come up on a rotation roster, but this year many presbyteries chose individuals on the basis of their announced positions on the homosexual question. Pittsburgh Presbytery’s questioning of candidates on this issue was challenged in the denomination’s courts, but it was sustained. Complainants in the case (including Gail Buchwalter, a member of the task force majority) had alleged that the procedure violated this provision of the assembly manual: “Commissioners must not be elected to the General Assembly with either a direct or a tacit understanding as to how they will speak or vote on any pending subject.”

Prior to the Pittsburgh elections the nominees had been asked, “What is your opinion at this moment as to whether or not avowed homosexuals should be ordained?” One nominee, James E. Ray, did not declare himself opposed to ordination, and he lost the election to John Huffman, pastor of the Pittsburgh First Presbyterian Church. In ruling on the case (in which Ray was also a complainant), the Permanent Judicial Commission drew a distinction between “an election process which extracts a pledge or commitment … and a procedure which merely allows members of a presbytery to be informed as to the present attitudes, beliefs, and philosophies of nominees.…” The commission decision added: “To prohibit members of a presbytery from making inquiry of nominees … would result in depriving presbytery members of a right to make a meaningful and intelligent choice in their election of commissioners. If such is to be disallowed, a purely mechanical system might more intelligently be substituted.”

Prayer For ‘William Smith’

There’s a new twist in the Church of England’s ongoing controversy over the ordination of women: the vicar of a Yorkshire parish underwent a sex change operation last month.

The middle-aged and unmarried clergyman, whose name was not disclosed by church officials, had intended to continue his work despite the operation, according to informed sources. He was reportedly a dedicated pastor whose ministry was highly esteemed by his parishioners. After lengthy talks involving Archbishop of Canterbury Donald Coggan, however, he was urged to resign. He did so on the grounds of ill health and moved to another part of England.

Prayer for him was recently requested by his bishop, who earlier had refused to discuss the matter. In a message to Christians, Bishop Robert Martineau said: “If you pray for ‘William Smith,’ Almighty God will know for whom the prayer is made.”

J. D. DOUGLAS

Election of commissioners opposed to ordination of homosexuals was the chief accomplishment of the loose coalition. Votes on other assembly issues illustrated that the coalition could not deliver a majority of the votes for the “conservative” side despite a groundswell of evangelical interest on many fronts. This was demonstrated early in the meeting when three ballots were required to elect a moderator. Though the moderator has the responsibility for naming chairmen of committees and for making other decisions that affect the assembly’s handling of controversial material, the anti-ordination forces did not agree on a candidate to back. Of the total of six candidates, the winner, pastor William P. Lytle of San Antonio, was not considered the most “conservative.” His presbytery, Alamo, was one of the few that asked the denomination’s national governing body to continue studying the homosexual question.

In a question-and-answer session just prior to the vote, Lytle impressed the commissioners as an easy-going but frank pastor who backs the denominational program. His nominator, pastor Wesley G. Baker, formerly a national church executive, portrayed his candidate as a missionary. Lytle served as pastor of small churches in rural New Mexico and as a home missions executive in the Arkansas Ozarks before moving to his urban pastorate in 1973. He served on the denomination’s foreign missions board, with special assignments in Latin America. Among them were helping to negotiate the turnover of property from missions to national churches in Chile, Cuba, and Mexico.

At a news conference following his election Lytle, 54, identified himself as a “conservative evangelical” with a broad view of the mission of the church that includes espousal of social action “consistent” with that theology. In statements circulated in advance to all commissioners, he indicated his approval of proposed assembly statements on the family farm and disarmament. Both the disarmament pronouncement and the farm document (criticized by some speakers as pro-union and anti-business) passed. On the homosexual controversy Lytle said in advance of the assembly debate that he hoped the body would not espouse the position of those at either extreme.

The new moderator’s “middle course” route was tested in a dramatic moment just after midnight on the assembly’s last full day of deliberations. The assembly cast a tie vote (267 to 267) on a proposal to initiate a constitutional amendment requiring local churches to put women on their sessions (boards of elders). Under the rules Lytle could have broken the deadlock. Instead, he called for a recount which resulted in a 277 to 271 decision to send the matter to the presbyteries for their vote. If a majority approves, the amendment will be added to the constitution. The action was taken despite stated clerk Thompson’s opinion that the provision, as written, is unenforceable and despite warnings that such a mandate would further alienate those who conscientiously oppose women’s ordination.

Deciding to amend the constitution to require female elders was in marked contrast to the assembly’s treatment of the homosexual ordination issue. The task force that studied the issue for nearly two years decided unanimously not to ask for a constitutional amendment, even though some presbyteries asked the assembly to amend the basic law to explicitly preclude ordination of avowed, practicing homosexuals. The principal argument against such a change was that it would tamper with the historic rights of local and regional bodies in choosing their officers (including deacons and elders in the congregations). There is no explicit mention of homosexuality in the current constitution, but officers are supposed to be “blameless in life and sound in faith” and “examples to the flock.” Presbyterians ordain lay elders and deacons as well as ministers, and the ordination vows are similar. The guidance statement applies to laity as well as clergy.

The task force majority also ruled out the possibility of proposing an “authoritative interpretation” of the constitution. The minority report asked for such an interpretation that would specify “self-affirming, practicing homosexual persons may not be ordained,” but the committee considering the report in San Diego did not go along with this approach. Even though the clear majority of the assembly committee went along with the task force minority’s view that homosexuals should not be ordained, they followed the task force majority’s suggestion that only “guidance” should be given to the presbyteries. The task force minority had warned that simple advice would be “uncertain and ineffectual.” Speaking for the majority on the assembly committee, pastor Thomas W. Gillespie of Burlingame, California, explained that the advice could be expected to have more “staying power” than a constitutional amendment or interpretation.

Huffman, who had won a seat in the assembly in the contested Pittsburgh vote, also won a seat on the assembly committee considering the homosexuality issue. When an attempt was made from the floor to substitute the task force minority’s report (including the recommendation of a constitutional interpretation) for the assembly committee’s compromise document, he spoke in favor of the assembly committee’s recommendations. He added that the five members of the task force minority had participated in the redrafting at San Diego and that they concurred with the new language. Only a few votes were cast for the proposal to substitute.

A key figure in the assembly’s handling of the explosive issue was Josiah Beeman, a veteran political operative who once headed the denomination’s Washington office. He was appointed by Lytle to chair the committee considering the homosexual question. Formerly associated with various liberal politicians, Beeman now directs the Washington lobbying efforts of the State of California. He told the assembly that his committee tried to operate by “consensus and straw votes” until the final hours of its deliberations. One open hearing featured a parade of homosexuals and ex-homosexuals, testifying to their understanding of faith and its relation to their practice. Hundreds of commissioners and interested outsiders attended the session. Later, when Beeman called for straw votes on substantive issues, an overwhelming majority of his panel agreed with the initial proposition that homosexual activity is sinful.

Beeman’s pivotal position was pointed up after the assembly had decisively voted against accepting minority reports from his committee. With the majority’s proposal under consideration, attempts were then made to weaken the report with amendments from the floor. John T. Conner, the Oregon campus pastor who is immediate past moderator, introduced what some observers described as a “grandfather clause” to protect the ordination rights of any United Presbyterian “deacons, elders, and ministers who have been ordained prior to this date.”

From the platform, Beeman accepted the proposal on behalf of his committee, thus incorporating it into his report. His move required opponents of the Conner amendment to take the initiative to test the proposal on the floor. Despite their arguments that the addition would “destroy” the overall effect of the report by exempting some officers from church discipline, commissioners voted about 3 to 2 to keep the Conner addition.

The whole idea of discipline over the issue of homosexual practice found little sympathy in the assembly, lest the church be accused of participating in “witch hunts.” The document as finally approved urges committees considering candidates for office “to conduct their examination of candidates … with discretion and sensitivity, recognizing that it would be a hindrance to God’s grace to make a specific inquiry into the sexual orientation or practice of candidates for ordained officers where the person involved has not taken the initiative in declaring his or her sexual orientation.” The statement calls on United Presbyterians to “reject in their own lives, and challenge in others, the sin of homophobia, which drives homosexual persons away from Christ and his church.”

The assembly also reaffirmed a 1970 action calling for the decriminalization of private homosexual acts between consenting adults,” and it asked members of the denomination to “work for the passage of laws that prohibit discrimination in the areas of employment, housing, and public accommodations based on the sexual orientation of a person.”

After the final vote of approval for the whole report, a protest was registered from the floor by Laura Jervis. She identified herself as chairperson of the committee on candidates in the New York City Presbytery, the body that originally asked for “guidance.” She expressed a determination to return home “committed to work for liberation, continuing to struggle together with our gay sisters and brothers, ordained or not, who are already ministers of Christ with us.” She said that the assembly, in standing for civil rights for homosexuals, had “absurdly” asked “the culture to be more gracious and free than we are willing to be ourselves.”

William Silver, 30, the New York City Presbytery’s candidate whose homosexuality initiated the request for guidance, told reporters that he would continue to seek ordination. The New York Times quoted him as saying, “If anything, this action will probably make the New York Presbytery more anxious to support me’ Beeman indicated to journalists that the decision clearly puts the issue back into the hands of the presbyteries. If a presbytery goes against the assembly’s guidance and ordains a homosexual, he speculated, the question would then come back to the assembly through an appeal in the church’s judicial system.

After all motions pertaining to the issue had been handled, moderator Lytle called leaders on two sides of the question to the lectern to lead in prayer. One was Chris Glaser of Los Angeles, a member of the task force majority and leader of the unofficial gay caucus of Presbyterians. The other was Richard Lovelace, professor at Gordon-Conwell Seminary and a member of the task force minority. Both Lovelace, principal writer of the minority report, and Old Testament professor Byron E. Shafer of Fordham, the principal majority writer, were thanked for their assistance in drafting the final report of the assembly committee’s majority.

At issue in the homosexuality study and debate was the method of Bible interpretation being used by the various sides. Members of the task force majority had questioned whether the Bible clearly forbids all homosexual activity. The background paper, written by Shafer, noted that the denomination “is by no means of one mind on the subject of biblical authority and interpretation.” There are so many views that the “discussion is not so much dialogue as decalogue!”

Another committee, a panel on pluralism, reported to the assembly a similar view: “Of all the factors that contribute to divisiveness in our denomination, the committee found that none is more pervasive or fundamental than the question of how the Scriptures are to be interpreted.” This committee recommended that a task force be assembled to study the various ways of understanding biblical authority, a measure that was finally approved after it was specified that the study group was to be “theologically balanced.” Its final report is due in 1981.

From the same committee on pluralism the assembly got a report that 45 per cent of the denomination’s ministerial candidates are in non-Presbyterian seminaries. Presbyteries were advised to urge candidates to be received under their care before beginning seminary education. A floor amendment adopted by the assembly also urged formation of United Presbyterian faculty-student organizations in the non-Presbyterian seminaries.

The pluralism panel’s report sketched the road ahead for the denomination when it declared: “We perceive in the denomination today a wish to preserve our peace and unity at almost any cost, by smothering our differences or pretending they do not matter. There is evidence, too, of widespread misunderstanding of our polity and of failure to use it in good faith. Of all the committee’s findings, perhaps the most profound is that our differences will never disappear. The very nature of our church is pluralistic and gives certainty to those differences.”

The Kirk: Breaking Tradition

The Church of Scotland, affectionately referred to as the Kirk, is the tradition-encrusted mother church of English-language Presbyterianism around the world. Its moderators, clergy chosen to chair the annual general assembly sessions, wear garb reminiscent of founder John Knox’s day as they rule over assembly proceedings, and a degree of pomp has accrued to the office over the years. Correspondent J. D. Douglas, who lives in St. Andrews, Scotland, annually files a colorful report of the Kirk assembly. The following is his edited account of last month’s assembly.

The establishment had an unusually rough ride at this year’s Church of Scotland general assembly in Edinburgh. The main surprise came when against the arguments of a number of former moderators the 1,400-strong house voted to replace the existing forty-seven church committees with a small number of boards. The proposal is to form a sixteen-member assembly council whose fulltime executive would become effectively general secretary of the Kirk.

Another oblique dig was aimed at exmoderators (unkindly referred to by some as “geriatric grenadiers”) when the assembly also set up a special committee to examine the election and the role of the moderator. For some years it had been felt that the procedure for filling the one-year tenure was “undemocratic”—one school of thought advocated the drawing of lots, adducing good biblical warrant. The moderatorial role, moreover, had produced criticism when one or two recent incumbents had taken it upon themselves to make controversial statements while holding an office that basically calls only for chairmanship of the assembly, and which in no sense authorizes the moderator to make off-the-cuff policy declarations on behalf of the church.

The unexpected figured also in the scheme (plan) of union with Scottish Methodists. This would have been the first union since the Reformation between different denominations in a land regarded by some as an ecumenical backwater. Strong opposition from within the Kirk had been forecast by the Kirk’s own magazine. Many felt that the plan would flounder on the same rocks that had sunk earlier schemes with Anglicans and Congregationalists. Somehow the expected opposition failed to materialize in the assembly in any substantial degree, and the plan was approved by a large majority.

History was not to be made, however, for word came that the two Scottish Methodist synods, meeting at the same time, had by a 114 to 55 vote thrown out the invitation of their Presbyterian suitor. Methodist chairman Harry Tennant told a subsequent press conference that it was not doctrine that had proved the stumbling-block but fear that the 10,000 Methodists would be swallowed up by the million-plus Presbyterians. Shortly afterwards, the convener of the Kirk’s Inter-Church Relations Committee, Professor James Whyte, said his committee members believed that “organic unity” was no longer a helpful concept, and that this kind of language should now be dispensed with.

The assembly, with its sessions reduced for the first time to one week, also:

• sought “urgent” talks with Roman Catholics over the perennial problem of mixed marriages.

• called for a study of the Unification Church (“the One World Crusade which expounds the teaching of Mr. Sun Moon”), two of whose supporters were refused permission to address the assembly from the public gallery.

• heard that there were only fifty-nine new ministers last year to replace 195 lost through death and retirement, and heard that Kirk membership had declined by more than 17,000 in the past year.

• gave more support than usual to the pacifist lobby, with special reference to the neutron bomb, after impassioned pleas by two ex-moderators, both holders of the Military Cross. The Church and Nation committee’s reluctant support for retention of the nuclear deterrent was nevertheless upheld, but the assembly did condemn the activities of British arms salesmen.

• supported a boycott on South African goods.

• sent a protest to the Soviet Ambassador over the severe sentence imposed on dissident Yuri Orlov.

• appointed as moderator Peter Brodie of Alloa.

Even though from the public gallery a female voice was heard to point out loudly that “Jesus was a layman,” the assembly voted against a motion that would have allowed presbyteries to consider the appointment of elders as moderators of church courts, posts now limited to clergy.

Meanwhile, across the road in the assembly of the much smaller Free Church of Scotland, moderator Hugh Ferrier lashed out at “our drink-sodden and sex-ridden society,” and he denounced Britain’s abortion law. Professor Clement Graham was appointed principal of the church’s theological college, and the assembly agreed to appoint an evangelist whose task would be to take the Gospel to people living in areas of Scotland where the work and witness of the Free Church are little known. The assembly was reminded that “the principle of returning to the Lord one-tenth still holds good” and that “the state takes at least three-tenths.” The Church of Scotland, having also discussed the matter of tithing, had settled for one-twentieth as a starting point.

Going and Growing: The Policy Works

Overseas missions executive Louis L. King of the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) was elected president of the 113,000-member denomination at its general council meeting in Birmingham last month. Chosen on the first ballot by the record 2,100 delegates, he will assume office on August 1, succeeding Nathan Bailey, who has held the CMA’s top executive position for eighteen years. Bailey had announced earlier that he would not seek reelection.

King is the seventh president in the history of the CMA, which was founded ninety years ago by Presbyterian minister A. B. Simpson as a missions-promoting interdenominational fellowship. The new president’s vocational background includes several pastorates in North America and missionary service in India. He has headed CMA overseas work since 1956.

In his final report as president, Bailey noted that during his administration the CMA had a 35 per cent increase in the number of churches at home (to 1,561) and 150 per cent abroad (to 6,827 plus nearly 1,000 other preaching and meeting points). Membership at home increased” 65 per cent, and overseas it shot up 155 per cent (to about 333,000 baptized members plus nearly that many more adherents). Giving for denominational causes climbed 285 per cent (to $12.6 million last year).

With a total constituency approaching 200,000, the CMA is one of the fastest growing denominations in North America, and its per capita missions giving is among the highest. Nearly 1,000 CMA missionaries have assignments in forty-six countries, where some 5,500 national workers are also serving full-time.

King, a leader in evangelical mission circles, is a firm believer in the CMA’s “three-self” policy for overseas churches: self-government, self-support, and selfpropagation. He advocates liberation of overseas churches from dependence on American dollars. The policy has enabled the CMA to devote more money to new ministry projects, especially in urban areas, and to radio and other specialized work. It has also helped in shoring up missionary salaries and services against the onslaught of double-digit inflation and the sharp dollar devaluation in many countries.

The policy seems to be working. For example, lay leader Philip Lee, who heads the Foreign Missionary Society of the CMA s Hong Kong churches, told a council audience that the Hong Kong churches have sent out and are supporting thirty-five missionaries in a number of countries. Said he: “The best way we can hope to repay the work of American missionaries who have come to us with the Gospel of Jesus Christ is to reach out on our own to those yet unreached.”

A Hoax

Will it ever end? Letters protesting a nonexistent threat to religious broadcasting are still pouring into the mailroom of the Federal Communications Commission in Washington at the rate of about 12,000 a day, according to FCC officials. The letters—nearly eight million so far—are sent in the mistaken belief that atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair has petitioned the FCC to ban religious broadcasting. Pamphlets and mimeographed petitions containing the O’Hair rumor have been widely circulated among church groups. These materials urge concerned individuals to register their protest with the FCC.

Many religious publications and broadcasters have warned their readers of the hoax, and embarrassed church leaders are trying to spread the word, but still the letters come.

Christian Husbands And Fathers

The Effective Father, by Gordon MacDonald (Tyndale, 1977, 256 pp., $3.95 pb), The Husband Book, by Dean Merrill (Zondervan, 1977, 194 pp., $6.95), and Fathering: Fact or Fable?, edited by Edward V. Stein (Abingdon, 1977, 190 pp., $6.95), are reviewed by C. E. Cerling, pastor of education, Hopevale Memorial Baptist Church, Saginaw, Michigan.

Is there a definite masculine role in the family? This question forces itself on us as we consider the effect of women’s liberation.

Betty Freiden launched the modern women’s liberation movement with Feminine Mystique. The evangelical response said, “I find fulfillment in the traditional housewife role.” Not until Letha Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty wrote All We’re Meant to Be did evangelicals really take up many of the themes of women’s liberation. Since then a number of well-written books such as the Boldreys’ Chauvinist or Feminist? and Jewett’s Man as Male and Female have presented an evangelical case for women’s liberation. Books on the woman’s role in the home have multiplied like so many gerbils. Alongside the books are the conferences such as “Total Woman,” “Philosophy of Christian Womanhood,” and the “Seminar in Basic Youth Conflicts.”

But what of the male role in the family? It was inevitable that this question should be asked, but the answers have been slow in coming. In 1974 a few books came out. Now we have more books on the male role. With the feminine role in the process of redefinition, it was inevitable that the masculine role should be redefined.

See pages 10 and 15 for articles on the same subject as the first two reviews.

At the heart of this redefinition is one basic question, “If men and women are truly equal, is there really a male role?” It is obvious that men will never bear and nurse children, but is there anything distinctive about the male role that is not biologically based?

Only Fathering: Fact or Fable? actually faces this issue, but even there only the Clinebells touch on it, and that only in passing. Fathering is a book written for the professional counselor or educator. It is a compilation of highly disparate articles loosely related to being a father (editor’s note: despite the title, “fathering” is not a verb). Although the book is not worth purchasing, the Clinebells’ articles on their struggle with the changing male-female roles in their own marriage is worth reading. It gives a graphic description of the struggles some couples face as the woman begins to develop her own talents and interests.

The Husband Book is easily the most interesting and profitable of the three. Dean Merrill develops the theme that Christian leadership, whether it be as husband or father, is servanthood. He in no way abandons the biblical command that the husband is the head of the wife (even as parents should lead their children), but he sees this in terms of servanthood. The husband is the leader of the family in the sense that he has the responsibility to enable each member of the family to develop his or her potential as a child of God.

Part of this responsibility lies in developing a spirit of oneness with his wife. In a pointed statement to both liberationists and traditionalists he writes, “If in our marriages the goals of union, oneness, concurrence, and consensus were more central, perhaps we wouldn’t need to talk so much about submission … if we and our wives are of one mind on a question, no one has to submit. We move ahead in agreement.”

The idea of leadership as servanthood is not new. Merrill applies it with varying success to the husband’s relation to time, money, work, and other areas such as sex. He continually provokes the reader to think in new ways about old problems. His chapter on sex is exceptional. But his applications to some of these areas stretch the point. He might have done better to study in more depth the theme of servanthood in other authors (such as K. Gangers Competent to Lead), but he has set a high standard that others should follow in examining the male role in marriage.

Effective Fatherhood is a paradoxical book. Gordon MacDonald states that he wrote it because a father came to him and asked for a book on being a father. “I couldn’t think of a single such book,” he says. The paradox of the book is that MacDonald writes as if effective fatherhood is the achievement of very few fathers.

He states, “I cannot think of a man who would not like to be … [an] effective father. But my sad observation is that while many covet the title, few ever possess it.” I am saddened by his comment. Why? Because in my own experience as a minister and family life specialist I am constantly amazed at what I see. Men and women enter marriage with little or no training to be a parent. They rear children in a very difficult age. And most succeed! Most children of committed Christians follow their parents’ Lord. Even among non-Christians most children do not get into trouble; they often become good citizens of our country. In 1970 E.E. LeMasters wrote Parents in Modern America for family life professionals. He told them that parents in modern America do a fine job. Why can’t we give them credit for it? Their only serious failure is in not living up to the standards of family professionals who have set standards so unrealistically high that they cannot reach them themselves. MacDonald, sad to say, does not realize this.

This book is a disappointment for another reason. MacDonald has a tendency to illustrate his principles by their violation more often than by their successful application. It seems as if three out of four illustrations show how people failed to abide by his principles. Such negativism is not needed.

Each of these books makes us consider the question, “What is the male role in the family?” This question has not received nearly the attention the issues of women’s liberation have, but it is equally vital. Even as women ask what it means to be a woman of God and a wife and mother, men must ask this question: “What does it mean to be a man of God and a husband and father?” The issues of women’s liberation have been set by long-term discussion. With regard to the male role we are still asking, “What are the issues?” These books help, but we are a long way yet from the answers.

The Ways Of Males

The Total Man, by Dan Benson (Tyndale, 1977, 272 pp., $3.95 pb), Dare to Lead, by Timothy Foster (Regal, 1977, 128 pp., $2.95 pb), Understanding the Male Temperament, by Tim La Have (Revell, 1977, 188 pp., $3.95 pb), and The Christian Husband, by Fred Renich (Living Life [Drawer B, Montrose, Pa. 18801], 1976, 249 pp., $6.95), are reviewed by John Lowing, Jr., Bernardsville, New Jersey.

If the world is waiting for a great book on the Christian husband, it will have to wait a little longer. None of these will fill that bill.

If such a book is ever written it will have to sing with the joys of being a husband and father. It will have to be written by one who entered those roles with enthusiasm and anticipation and found them good. The author will need a keen insight into human nature (including his own) and the ability to see the high humor of God in calling the Christian husband—a mere male human who drags along through life his own baggage of temptations, frustrations, and maladjustments—to be his viceregent in the home. It will have to be an honest book. The author will have to be prepared to say: “All right, folks, here are some of the stupid things I did, which I never realized until the damage was already done to my family.” And the writer will need an engaging literary style capable of communicating all of that to the reader.

In the meantime we have these four volumes. All of them are written too much out of counseling experience and theory. Most of us know more theory now than we’re able to practice.

While none of them is great, none of them is really bad. Their theology appears to be within the tolerance limits of orthodox Christianity and their psychological insights appear to be noncontroversial. Each is probably useful to some with their intended constituency.

Tim LaHaye’s book has to be considered separately from the others because of its somewhat different focus. It is apparently written for the Christian wife to give her insights into her male half. The heart of the book lies in LaHaye’s analysis of the various male temperaments: “Sparky Sanguine,” “Rocky Choleric,” “Martin Melancholy,” and “Philip Phlegmatic.” And if that isn’t enough he finds twelve (count ’em, twelve) blends of temperament: San-Phleg, PhlegSan, SanMel, MelSan, San-Chlor, ChlorSan, ChlorPhleg, Phleg-Chlor, ChlorMel, MelChlor, MelPhleg, and PhlegMel. After all that he breezily informs us that human nature is sufficiently varied that a given person may not precisely fit any of them. This section sounds more like a Christian astrology chart than any biblical insight into human nature.

I found this book least helpful among the four. His cutesy style, sweeping generalizations, quirky analysis of human nature, and imprecise exegesis mar the book. A brief example of faulty exegesis is his assertion that “When Jesus Christ walked his earth, He addressed Himself repeatedly to problems of the emotional center, which he called ‘the heart.’ ” Although the use of the word “heart” is not univocal in the New Testament, the burden of its use is as the center of will and decision.

The book 1 found to be most helpful was Fred Renich’s The Christian Husband. It is somewhat plodding but there is a balance and a completeness to his approach that make it the best of the lot. His treatment of the touchy area of “submission” seems to me to be the most balanced and biblical. The title of that chapter suggests his approach: “The One Who Leads Is the Leader.” And the author’s comments on the Christian father touch on my experience more than the others.

Renich even has a chapter titled “Wow! That Other Woman.” The frequency of this problem among Christians merits more discussion than it gets from most evangelical authors. The Christian Husband is the one of these I would pick as a gift for a new husband or as the basis for a study group’s discussions.

The book I liked second best was The Total Man by Dan Benson. One section deals with sex technique. That may make the book more useful to some readers but it will certainly make it less useful as a study book with most evangelical groups. Benson has a helpful chapter on “How to Fight Like a Christian,” which suggests a Geneva Convention for family fights. The sixteen rules he gives are sound and practical. For example: Rule 3. “We will always put people before things. No broken dish, dented fender, damaged clothing or scratched record album is just cause for lashing out at the other person.” True to its title The Total Man also deals with areas outside the family situation. There are general and occupation-related chapters dealing with subjects such as the use of time, personal fitness, and fear.

Dare to Lead by Timothy Foster is the shortest of the books and was apparently written for use with study groups who don’t like to read. Foster skims the surface without coming to grips with the subtleties of being a Christian husband and father.

Highlights Of Jesus’ Life

Rabboni, by W. Phillip Keller (Revell, 1977, 319 pp., $8.95), is reviewed by Carlton L. Myers, minister of education and music, First Baptist Church, Ashland, Virginia.

Do we need another book on the life of Christ? Some people would say no. But this book is not just another biography of the Master. It is a personal view of Jesus written by a layman with at least ten other books to his credit; it is not a complete life of Christ. It highlights Jesus’ life and some of his outstanding teachings. The book could be read as an aid to daily devotions.

The author says that the title means, “My teacher, my master, the one for whom I hold the very highest esteem.” It is the word used by Mary, the mother of Jesus, as the risen Christ revealed himself to her.

Although dealing in profound truths and discussing doctrines upon which theologians differ, the author’s style is easy to read. Noticeable but not so obvious that it distracts is the author’s use of alliteration.

The author makes no claim to have studied theology formally. But his doctrine, evangelical and conservative, is revealed in most every chapter. He touches on such theological subjects as the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, the deity of Christ, and demonology.

The first two chapters on the preexistent Christ are somewhat unusual, but well done. Most biographies of Christ start with either his birth or with Mary and Joseph. He defines history as the story of how goodness ultimately triumphs over evil. It is the struggle between Christ and Satan, a battle that we are engaged in. The author says that the Bible records that struggle. Keller’s description of Jesus’ life is vivid. His description of the conditions of the temple during Jesus’ time is excellent. Death for the Christian, he says, is a “doorway into a magnificent new dimension of life.” His treatment of the prodigal sons (both younger and older boys) is outstanding. The book closes with a clear invitation to accept Christ as “Rabboni” and Saviour.

There is too much good material in the book for a cursory reading. Any person would benefit by using the book devotionally. Sunday school teachers could use it as a resource book. It will be some time before anyone else will write a more inspirational life of Christ.

Uncovering Golden Nuggets

Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, volume two, edited by G. Johannes Botterweck and Helmer Ringgren (Eerdmans, 1977, 499 pp., $18.50), is reviewed by Herbert Wolf, associate professor of Old Testament, Wheaton Graduate School, Wheaton, Illinois.

The long-awaited Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament edited by Botterweck and Ringgren marks an important milestone in biblical scholarship. The student of the Scripture now has at his disposal an in-depth study of key Hebrew words to complement the authoritative volumes of Kittel’s New Testament dictionary. Like its predecessor, the Old Testament volumes explore in detail the meaning and usage of biblical terms and seek to lay bare their theological implications. A given concept is also scrutinized in the cognate languages and in the literature of the Ancient Near East. The result is a gold mine of information that uncovers many of the nuggets contained in the Word. Each article includes up-to-date bibliographic references that bring together the most important studies made prior to this theological dictionary.

Most of the contributors are European scholars, though several Americans are involved, including Harry Hoffner, Jr., an evangelical and Hittite specialist at the prestigious Oriental Institute in Chicago. Those who originally wrote their articles in English were the first to notice problems when the material was later retranslated from the German back into English. These errors have been corrected in this new revised edition.

Much of the material is stimulating and fascinating. It contains new insights and information not readily available even to many Hebrew specialists. The article on “covenant” (berith) does an excellent job of digesting the vast literature on this popular subject, and it deftly describes the bearing of ancient treaties on the biblical term. This article is lengthier than most (twenty-six pages), and one could wish that other important words were discussed as thoroughly. Only five pages are given to “redeem” (ga’al), for example.

Other terms covered in volume two (the letters beth and gimel) include the words for “flesh” (baśar) and “tell the good news” (bśr). For the first time, the New Testament student can fully examine the roots of concepts so crucial to Pauline thought and to the Gospel itself. Ploughing through these articles can be taxing, but the rewards are worth the effort. Although the writers have in mind the scholar rather than the pastor, the material is clear and well-organized.

Unfortunately the majority of the contributors subscribe to the higher-critical views made popular by Wellhausen and this colors many of the conclusions reached. Hence the evangelical must screen out the liberal bias that shows through in the matter of the dating and authorship of many Old Testament books. Such terms as “Deuteronomistic,” the “Priestly Code,” and “Deutero-Isaiah” are sprinkled throughout the discussion. Exodus 14:31 is assigned to “the Yahwist” (document “J”) and “authentic passages” are arbitrarily separated from “unauthentic passages” (pp. 412, 57). In a work that makes such brilliant use of the linguistic and cultural resources of the Ancient Near East, it is incredible that these findings are not allowed to affect Old Testament criticism. Even the masterly article on “covenant” that compares the second millennium treaties with Deuteronomy concludes that the book must nevertheless stem from the seventh century and the reform of King Josiah. For the most part, these comments can easily be separated from the meat of the articles, so this stance in itself does not damage the overall value of the work.

A particular disappointment is the article on bethulah, “virgin,” which makes the astonishing claim (p. 341) that the virgin that Job would not gaze at refers to the Canaanite goddess Anat (Job 31:1). This is buttressed by the argument that the popularity of this pagan deity among the Jews during the fifth century B.C. may be alluded to in Job. A questionable date for the book is used to support an even more questionable interpretation. The writer also mishandles Joel 1:8 to make bethulah mean something other than virgin.

In spite of disagreements over specific conclusions and the presuppositions that spawn them, there is no doubt about the value of this dictionary for exegesis and theology. It is a tool that no Bible student can afford to ignore; it takes its place alongside Kittel as a classic reference work.

Volume two has remarkably few typographical or transcriptional errors. Eerdmans is to be commended for making the work available in English so that it might shed its substantial light on the meaning of the scriptures. I eagerly anticipate the completion of the set.

Briefly Noted

Many people face tragedy and overcome it, but few can communicate their stories as well as Robert Kemper and Robert Weller. The Elephant’s Ballet (Seabury, 152 pp., $6.95) is Kemper’s account of failing eyesight (starting soon after he became editor of a magazine for ministers) and eventual near-blindness. He has adjusted well and tells us how he is able to serve as senior minister of a large congregation. Weller was a Lutheran pastor when his eyesight began to fail. Blind—and I See! (Concordia, 145 pp., $3.95 pb) describes his journey to blindness and how his congregation rallied around him. In spite of his handicap, Weller is still a pastor and his congregation has established a second church under his leadership.

My three-week vacation was nearly over when it began to nag at me. The vacation had been great: a three-mile run along California’s Highway 395 in a thunderstorm, with my wife who laughed and photographed me from the car; the man in the campground who gave us twenty already cleaned trout; the discovery of a secret hot spring at the edge of a lake; the lava flows in Bend, Oregon; the camping trip with dear friends when we sang “Praise to the Lord the Almighty”; our laughter, love, and well-spread table.

Yessir, at the end of the week I’d be bringing home to southern California a veritable smorgasbord of great experiences, warm memories, and super stories (several of which were of sermon illustration caliber). But was I spiritually ready to resume my ministry? More than that, was I ready to get on a plane, return to Catalina Island, and spend a week speaking and living the Gospel among ninety high school kids at synod camp? The answer to both questions—no, not even close to ready.

Then on impulse I decided to follow through with an idea I had toyed with since reading Mark 1:35. Jesus prepared for ministry with a forty-day “solo” in the wilderness. Maybe a less ambitious trip would help prepare me, I thought. I pulled out a topographical map of the Cascade range and picked a tiny lake several hours in from the trailhead. I packed my backpack, and included a lantern and a Bible. I was on my way.

I had no one to complain to about the steep treacherous trail leading to Melakwa Lake, so I prayed all the way up over several hours. During that time I was both inside and outside of myself. One minute I would ask for God’s help and the next I’d praise him for the fresh blackberries along the trail and the waterfall and the clean air. With no one around, I lost self-consciousness and burst into song.

By that night, after eight hours of solitude, I’d begun looking down with a sort of eagle’s eye perspective on the important relationships of my life. I scrutinized my marriage, my ministry, my personal and professional goals. I prayed about each of them, recommitting each to Christ’s care and Lordship.

Late that night, I awoke thirsty and went to the lake for water. The night sky was as I’ve seen it only three or four times in my life. There was no moon and the Milky Way dominated the heavens. The newspapers had predicted a meteor shower and here, far from city lights, the shower of falling stars made me feel as if I had a box seat at the creation of the world.

The next morning, I swam, ate, read, reflected, prayed, and broke camp. As I loped down the trail I thought of the picture of Rocky leaping at the top of the stairs, fists in the air, caught in the estactic moment when he knew he was ready for the fight. That’s how I felt.

Since late August I have reflected on this mountain top experience. Looking back I am left with a question: Why was this simple experience of prayer and solitude—apparently common to Jesus—so overwhelming for me? That trip had been my first solid spiritual food in months. What was a regular and meaningful part of Jesus’ life—conversation with his heavenly father—was only a catch-as-catch-can for me. I was a starving man who had received a square meal after forgetting what food tasted like. Since then I’ve redoubled my efforts at finding a half-hour a day to feed myself. My problem was what Charles Hummel has called “the tyranny of the urgent.” Such urgent “administrivia” as double-checking Sunday’s communion cups used to keep me sprinting through my prayer time.

Jesus avoided this tyranny. How? The accounts of our Lord’s wilderness journey in Mark 1:35 and Luke 4:42 give us three keys to his devotional life.

First, Jesus knew his human limitations. He knew he needed time alone. In order to have an effective ministry he isolates himself to pray to his father. Dare I say it? Jesus could be selfish. I wouldn’t be surprised if on some of those mornings when he rose early he didn’t take a quick dip in the Sea of Galilee or watch the sun break across the water. And yet my own struggles tell me such moments grow more from humility than selfishness. Pride keeps many busy pastors from mustering faith in a God who can bring in his own kingdom.

Luther once made a statement that I keep on my refrigerator door: “While I drink my little glass of Wittenburg beer the Gospel runs its course.” (Luther reportedly drank a lot of Wittenburg beer while the Reformation ran its course!) Although you may disagree with his views on drinking, Luther’s theology is sound. He, like Jesus, knew his manhood included the need for renewal and refreshment.

Second, Jesus was willing to say no to his congregation. No minister will be a stranger to Luke 4:42: “And the people sought him (put your name there) and came to him, and would have kept him from leaving them.” Jesus’ phone kept ringing. But he knew how to say a loving no. He had priorities and he knew how to stick to them. Yes, at times our Lord took the phone off the hook. (My wife and I have a system where we can take the phone off the wall.) Jesus told the people no—and the text never indicates that he felt guilty about it.

Third, Jesus didn’t try to prove his worth through a busy schedule. Somehow, his relationship with his father translated into the security of not having to display ajammed calendar. A game many clergymen play is “time macho.” Our spouses lose. As a master gamesman I find myself reverting to time macho when I’m frustrated. Often it’s when I’m searching for an answer to the question, What have I accomplished today? I measure my hours.

Jesus was free from this. He took time to pray. And at the end of his earthly ministry Jesus was able to say he had finished his task. Think of that. Jesus Christ, having no more hours in a day than any of us, accomplished all that his father had given him to do.

Not a day goes by in a pastor’s life that he doesn’t feel pressure from the swaying mob. In our case the mob is looking to us for direction. I find that I can lead my congregation most effectively when, like Jesus, I take my eyes off the mob.—VICTOR PENTZ, pastor, LaVerne Heights Presbyterian Church, LaVerne, California.

Many Christians feel uneasy about the reading and writing of satire, especially religious satire, because it does not seem a serious enough vehicle for religious topics. These Christians are often not against controversial writing per se. For example, if I should write a treatise against dispensationalism or against fraudulent religious advertising, or against shoddy country music, they would not consider such writing inappropriate. Of course, they might disagree with me and defend their silent, trumpetless raptures or their walk-where-Jesus-walked-stay-at-the-Capernaum-Hilton commercialism, or their “Jesus, Drop-Kick Me Over the Goal Post of Life” song, but they would not think it inappropriate for me to defend my point of view and write my argumentative essay. But to treat dispensationalism or Calvinism or prayer or any other religious topic satirically seems to violate religious propriety.

I defend satire; it attempts to expose that which is false and, at least implicitly, to set forth an alternative. Religious satire is in the company of argumentative literature that points out what is amiss in Christian walk or belief. It may suggest a more biblical view. And certainly, polemical Christian writing has a long (if not always venerable) tradition. From Paul to John Warwick Montgomery, from Augustine to Gordon Clark, Christians have disagreed with each other, and have said so—sometimes with Arnoldian sweetness and light, sometimes with more than a touch of vinegar.

The pigeon-holing of satire as controversial literature can perhaps be illustrated best with a few examples. “Holy Willie’s Prayer” by Burns and “Cracker Prayer” by Hughes castigate those Christians who plead special rights with the Lord and use their prayers to settle scores with their enemies. If there are such Christians and such prayers, then they ought to be exposed—and tins can be done by a sermon, by a magazine article, or by satire. Or take Dutch immigrant Calvinists. They were often extremely narrow and intolerant in their views of other Christians. Such an attitude often betrayed an unbiblical exclusivism and DeVries exposed it in his novel, The Blood of the Lamb.

I could cite other examples where an error could be exposed either straightforwardly or satirically. Since the intent is similar, at one level at least satire can be seen as a species of polemical writing.

One other point of similarity between satire and general polemical writing is worth pointing out. The charges are often made, and rightly so, that satire exaggerates, that it presents only one point of view, does not give a fair hearing to the opponent, and intimates the superiority of the author. But here again, I suggest that satire may have such traits in common with other controversial writers. Luther or Calvin sometimes used hyperbole and superiority. I’m not arguing here for the propriety of such strong polemic, but I am stressing that satire shares certain characteristics with other argumentative modes. Moreover, I often prefer the sharpness of satire to that of the polemicist, because the former at least has the grace of wit. Also, the satirist may ultimately be more aware of his exaggeration and superiority—it’s part of his technique, a pose he may not take too seriously, the polemicist’s dead earnestness does not allow for such a distance.

A book that warns us not to sit in the seat of the scornful and scoffers will perhaps not be the most promising source for satire. Remembering what happened to Goliath and Rabshakeh, one ought to be careful to emulate some of the satirists of Scripture. But there are other examples.

Probably the best known example is Elijah’s sarcastic encouragement of the Baal prophets: “Yes, you have a god, but he’s probably taking a snooze.” The spirit of these remarks is reminiscent of our Lord’s laughing at those who exalt themselves against his rule (Ps. 2). But often the barbs are aimed at God’s own people. In Jeremiah 8:7 God ridicules his people by comparing their knowledge to that of the stork, turtle, and swallow who can discern their appointed time, which the people cannot. Isaiah similarly mocks the people who try to divine the truth from the wizards who can only produce a silly peeping and muttering (8:19). Earlier he has a scathing portrayal of the women of Jerusalem. Although there’s very little wit here, the balance of ornamental spices, belts, and coiffure with stink, rope, and baldness does have sardonic intent. Elsewhere God turns his sarcasm on erring servants. Jonah’s pique, first at seeing his enemies spared and then at seeing his parasol destroyed, is greeted with the Lord’s incredulous “Do you well to be angry?” (4:4, 9). And Job’s challenging “Let the Almighty answer me” (31:35) is greeted by the Almighty’s “Where were you when I put my tape measure around the universe?” followed by the refrains of “Can you …” and “Have you been there?” and “Deck yourself with majesty” (chapters 38–41). Of course, Job had previously withered his comfortless friends with “No doubt, you are the people, and wisdom shall die with you” (12:1), and he later called them, in effect, “windbags” (16:3). Of a somewhat different nature are some of the Proverbs, which thus nicely characterize our taste for juicy gossip: “Gossip is so tasty! How we love to swallow it” (26:22, GNB). Or the delightful satire of the lazy man who shuts the alarm clock off and says “I better not go to work today; there may be a hungry lion out on [the] street” (26:13). And, although much of the advice and reprimand of Proverbs seems to be addressed to males, women are not totally neglected, as in the unflattering comparison of a nagging woman to a leaky roof (27:15). Christ’s lampooning of the Pharisees is, of course, well known, but familiarity may have dulled us to the vignette of a church elder passing the collection plate to the accompaniment of a trumpet fanfare, or another with a camel traveling down his esophagus while he’s busy straining a fly out of his drink.

But enough of examples. Is there any pattern here? Any similarities? Yes. They all answer part of my definition of satire: an attempt at reproof and correction through humor and ridicule. Certainly Elijah wants to expose the Baal prophets, and the Lord reproves his stubborn people as well as his balking prophet. So in the proverb the preacher inveighs against nagging and laziness and Christ against nit-and-fly-picking hypocrisy. And the ridicule runs the gamut from the Lord’s gentle mocking of Jonah: “Do you well?” through Job’s sarcasm against his friends, to Elijah’s taunting of the Baalites. In all of these examples the ridicule is carried by different kinds of humor or wit—sometimes through exaggeration, or a far-fetched comparison, or simply by demonstrating an incongruity, such as Jonah’s being more concerned about his sunburn than he would be with God’s fire raining down upon the children and animals of Nineveh.

Even though I approve of religious satire, I think that there are limits. It’s difficult to prescribe what the boundaries are, and I don’t find this boxing in of a writer a very congenial task. But let me suggest a few guidelines.

Satire can (and often is) an attack upon the person. Pope’s Dunciad and Philip Roth’s Our Gang are explicit attacks on the personalities and actions of individuals. And it may well be that such personal attacks are not appropriate in the Christian community.

You must distinguish between beliefs, views, writings, and practices, and the person’s character. Perhaps the old distinction between sin and sinner is applicable here. Interestingly, in The Humor of Christ, Elton Trueblood suggests that Christ’s attacks on the Pharisees, which were often satiric, were directed against the Pharisaic spirit, rather than individual Pharisees.

Of course, you cannot completely separate a person from his opinions. But it remains true that the satire (as, I suppose, most other argumentative writing) ought to be very careful in its aim and not attempt to assassinate character. This distinction is perhaps essential for the defense of religious satire.

I reach an impasse with subjects for satire. You should not ridicule God’s ordained vessels, but don’t the shenanigans of some ministers invite healthy laughter? God’s house may be holy, but don’t some of the more ostentatious churches seem a bit inappropriate to followers of one who didn’t have a place to sleep and had to get by on a lot of free meals? You see my point. In some way all religious subjects are sacred and demand reverence. But once these subjects have been appropriated by us, they have a way of going awry, and then the satirist’s job is to show the incongruities of our ways. Perhaps biblical subjects and incidents should not be satirized (certainly not the way Twain does), but even then there are incidents that can be highlighted with a humorous twist. Thus, though reverence would forbid us to satirize the Lord and his name, no other facets of our religious and moral life can be considered taboo in themselves. Rather, the tone determines the limit.

Some definitions of satire are framed in such a way that no Christian could use that form. Such definitions focus nearly exclusively on the destructive, vicious potential of satire, in which the writer vents his spleen (however one does that). Satire can be jovial as well as vicious, mild as well as bitter, zany as well as malicious, and provoke a chuckle rather than a sneer.

Satire is not essential—but it can be useful and promote health in the body ecclesiastic. Just think of some rather typical situations. The traditional role of the pastor who is revered and hallowed and sometimes feared has built-in potential for pomposity and pretensions. A preacher writes seriously that the mark of a good Christian family is the wearing of bibs by the children, which say “I love my preacher,” and another seems so devoid of mortal blood that even his wife seems to have forgotten his Christian name and calls him “the reverend.” The satirist can perform a useful function in such cases.

Again, we are a people who take our faith and our Bible seriously. We should. But then we begin to take our particular interpretation of it equally seriously. And then we get theologians who seriously speculate how many angels can waltz on the point of a needle or modern-day biblical mathematicians who can manipulate Kissinger’s name to make it read 666 (I suppose those who were busy doing so a few years ago are now wondering why Kissinger isn’t enthroned in Rome and wonder what they can do with Vance). Or to hit closer to my home, there once were Dutch Reformed folk who became concerned when their new minister smoked neither pipe nor cigar, since that made him suspiciously similar to the Baptist minister who was not only infralapsarian, but an Arminian.

And then there are the profiteers who find that the gospel of self-denial is a rich source of treasures that are susceptible to moth and rust. And here too we have an unvenerable tradition of selling indulgences and plastic dashboard saints, of promoting Christian charm for the right price and sponsoring Holy Land tours that partake more of Mammon than Yahweh. Foibles, silliness, blind spots, incongruities. And what does satire do? It exposes fraud, deflates sanctified pomposity, slays holy cows, pricks inflated pious balloons, puts a banana peel in front of the unctuous posture.

Thus the kind of satire I’ve been describing does not mock the serious things of life, but man taking himself too seriously—not God, but man’s ecclesiastical idols, not God’s Word, but man’s interpretations of that word, not the faith once delivered to the saints, but the sometimes silly caperings of those saints.

And we will not bestow on our satirists honorary doctor of divinity degrees, nor name our libraries after them or even give them imitation-leather-gold-trimmed King James Bibles. But they do deserve our applause when they expose what we think to be the moral blemishes of the church and our uneasy smile when they hit targets dear to us.

Harry Boonstra is director of libraries, Hope College, Holland, Michigan.

Second of three parts.

For all Professor James Barr’s adverse comment on fundamentalism in his recent book, he does quite objectively state its central beliefs. One would think most members of the university world would be adequately preinformed about these, but perhaps they are not.

Fundamentalism, says Barr, calls for “a simple and clear theology, based on a single well-known source, the Bible” in contrast to “the shilly-shallyings of more sophisticated theology” (p. 35). Fundamentalism emphasizes Christ’s substitutionary atonement for sinners rather than works-salvation, and personal faith in the crucified and risen Lord rather than sacraments; it enjoins daily experience of the Holy Spirit and “a good knowledge of the Bible coupled with acceptance of its authority” (pp. 31, 81). It proffers salvation through “a particular kind of message … not necessarily or universally preached in the churches” (p. 11). Personal conversion is indispensable, and its supposed coincidence with a change of opinion is “structurally essential” (p. 18).

Lay evangelistic witness, Barr continues, holds an important place, as does the sacrificial support of worldwide missions (pp. 33 ff.). While fundamentalists are not ascetics, they readily deny themselves certain enjoyments to further the task of evangelism (p. 99). Their group dedication encourages many others to adopt a personal faith (p. 318).

Much that Barr says about fundamentalism—even if in a censorious context—may, in the absence of any persuasive alternative, serve to commend the evangelical outlook to many of his readers. Barr acknowledges the “positive pressure towards conservative positions” that fundamentalism exercises on theology and biblical study (p. 9) and the “seeming attractiveness of the position” for those whose minds are still open (p. 10). “Fundamentalism has roots that … go back into the Bible itself” (p. 183), Barr concedes. In an age in which nearly everything seems threatened by obsolescence, fundamentalism “works reasonably well for large numbers of people and is also reasonably stable” (p. 314).

Intrinsic to fundamentalist faith, Barr notes, is the distinction between true and nominal Christianity in the matter of pure doctrine (p. 17). “The fundamentalist view of the Bible as a whole is very much grounded upon the teaching of Jesus” (p. 170); it is considered wrong, observes Barr, to say that Jesus “didn’t know” (p. 171). Conservative evangelicals avoid cooperation “with ‘liberalism’ and ‘modernism’ and other false gospels” (p. 22); their “special calling is to present their own distinctive witness” (p. 25). Evangelical organizations make a deep evangelistic impact through “the solidity of their witness” (p. 25). Those who “share a conservative evangelical faith” have a deeper bond across denominational lines than do nonevangelicals inside their various denominations (p. 20). Fundamentalists do not consider the large denominational bodies “coterminous with the community of true believers” (p. 30). They hold church leaders and clergy answerable to the authority of the Bible, tend to view skeptically any excessive concentration of ecclesiastical power, and minimize the distinction between clergy and laity (pp. 100 f.). Fundamentalists distrust the ecumenical movement because it accepts the essential Christianity of those who hold radically divergent doctrinal views (p. 328).

Fundamentalism, moreover, has some sturdy intellectual allies. It is “certainly not a preserve of the uneducated,” says Barr, but is “quite evenly spread through the different social and professional classes” and has “strong representation” among university students. “There is certainly no reason to suppose that advanced education forms a barrier” to it (p. 90). “Fundamentalism is increasingly seeking to make its voice known through scholarship rather than through purely dogmatic assertion,” Barr tells us. “In modern conservative scholarship questions are often not simply foreclosed through the use of dogmatic argument. Contact is often made with nonconservative scholarship …” (p. 88). “The sort of scholarship conservative evangelicals respect has improved in erudition and in ability to present itself on the historical level on which world scholarship exists” (p. 125). A “very large proportion” of conservative scholars “interest themselves academically” and “become scholars in … textual criticism, the grammar of New Testament Greek, archaeology and the Bible, Coptic, Semitic linguistics, … Egyptology, Assyriology, Ugaritic studies” (p. 128).

On the national scene, conservative Christians strive for “a Christian country dominated by Christian values” (p. 110). They discount utopian views of history and expect, rather, a cataclysmic divine climax (p. 115). Their eschatological hope centers in Christ’s imminent return (p. 35). Many evangelicals emphasize eschatological prophecy, says Barr; he himself downgrades futuristic prophecy and does not consider the Jewish return to Palestine “a matter of cosmic religious importance” (p. 118).

Despite sporadic portrayals of fundamentalism as a bizarre modern cult, Barr concedes its “remarkable similarities” to “the official Roman Catholic position.” Roman Catholicism until recently held a “quite strictly fundamentalist position … as regards biblical literature and biblical criticism,” he says (p. 105). Rome at first resisted biblical criticism much as Protestant evangelicals do now, and the Roman Catholic Church (historically) and evangelical Christianity emphasize the importance of correct doctrine and the historical accuracy of the events reported in the Bible (p. 106).

Given Barr’s contrast of fundamentalist Christianity with the churning religiosity of our age, why did this Oxford scholar find it necessary to write a major work that goes into detail about a view he considers repulsive to the modern mind, for all its deep biblical roots?

The answer is not hard to find. The spectacular growth of evangelical conservatism, Barr tells us, has become “an extremely irritating phenomenon” within mainstream Christianity (p. 336). One reason why fundamentalism has shown “so much vitality in the last decade or two,” he says, is that scholars of the critical school have not challenged it (p. 140).

The evangelical appeal to the Bible, Barr assures readers, should “intimidate” nobody. “The non-conservative should not let himself be intimidated by fundamentalist arguments with their endless citation of texts and passages; the ability to produce these does not necessarily betoken any real or profound knowledge of the Bible at all” (p. 38). Barr emphasizes that not one of the major denominations of British Christianity can be considered fundamentalist or evangelical, and that in only a few places in the world is fundamentalism the majority faith (p. 18).

Why, then, are what Barr summarizes as “the simple and superficial arguments” of fundamentalists “bound to remain frustration”?

Barr is clearly concerned over the striking decline of pluralistic ecumenical fortunes and the cresting of the evangelical tide. Religious publishers find a diminishing market for works by nonconservative scholars except as they turn sensationalistc; evangelical readers, on the other hand, maintain a brisk demand for conservative, well-tempered literature. Not the critical views of scholars like D. E. Nineham, John A. T. Robinson, and Barr but rather the more biblically grounded views are what capture the commitment of many young ordinands in the Church of England. On university campuses, ecumenical student effort languishes while hundreds of students flock to Christian Union meetings in places like Oxford and Cambridge. In the ailing churches, bewildered laymen wonder why they should attend services oriented toward the so-called myth of the incarnation; interest quickens wherever the Crucified Jesus is powerfully proclaimed. Even in London an Oxford alumnus who preaches an authoritative Bible now draws the largest Sunday-night congregation.

Barr acknowledges that fundamentalism flourishes even in times of theological liberalism. Its influence has steadily gained since 1960 despite the rise of radical theologies. Biblical critics and modern theologians more and more appear to be but a glamorous vanguard of generals with a diminishing army of followers. Despite every conceivable assault on historic evangelical theism, including a polemical depiction of it as a putrid corpse, biblically based Christianity continues to show itself alive and well.

The Oxford critic is clearly distressed because exclusively conservative evangelical colleges survive in the Church of England (p. 19). He fears that conservatives may be “taking over a field that was once non-conservative,” that is, biblical theology, and doing so in disregard of critical scholarship (p. 233)—which, as he sees it, requires nonevangelical emphases. He also laments the fact that nonevangelical ecclesiastical forces do not currently control the selection of university teachers of theological or biblical studies so as to limit the number of those holding conservative views (pp. 102 f.).

Barr concedes that “the world of mainstream church and theology is not at all a rosy and happy world where everything is well; on the contrary, it is within that mainstream Christianity that the really serious problems and conflicts of church life and theology lie” (p. 336). A hurried reading of that comment might give the misimpression that Barr thinks ecumenical Christianity stands in need of evangelical renewal. But that is not at all his point. The main hope of the ecumenical church, Barr indicates, lies in a sapping of conservative vitalities.

In a dramatic passage, Barr scorches the liberal clergy for not boldly declaring from their pulpits the radical implications of biblical criticism and the new theology for traditional Christianity. The dilemma of mainstream Christianity, Barr states, is that even the nonevangelical clergy neglect the scholarly authority of the biblical critics. Many nonevangelical clergymen hesitate to break completely with a Bible that is considered in some respects to be intrinsically authoritative and accurate; thus they needlessly and inexcusably compromise with fundamentalism (pp. 333 ff.). Barr even imputes dishonesty to nonevangelical clergy who thus accommodate traditional views that, he insists, they do not at all believe (p. 335). Conceding that evangelicals do not shilly-shally about God and the Bible, Barr implores the nonevangelical clergy not to shilly-shally about the new theology and biblical criticism. It seems apparent from Barr’s plea to the disloyal shilly-shallyers that he seeks a full-scale renewal of the modernist-fundamentalist controversy.

That Barr would like to see the demise of fundamentalist-evangelical-conservative views is wholly evident. To be sure, he declares it is “no part of my purpose to stick the label of‘fundamentalist’ upon anyone” (p. 5); rather, he proposes “to understand fundamentalism as a religious and intellectual system and to see why it functions as it does” (p. 9). He aims to clear up misunderstandings of fundamentalism (p. 8), which in some forms is “essentially … emotionally-based,” in others is “coldly intellectualistic,” and in still others strikes a balance (pp. 17 f.). But whatever its form, Barr declares, fundamentalism is not a valid continuation of mainstream orthodoxy (p. 168); he pronounces evangelical “claims for ‘orthodoxy’ … a sham” (p. 197). His verdict is that fundamentalism is “thoroughly destructive of Christian understanding of the Bible” (p. 196).

To be sure, after delivering one harsh judgment after another, Barr now and then resorts to a more tempered opinion of fundamentalism, as when he notes its long roots in Scripture. But such qualified concessions sound much like a benediction intoned by a sheriff who has just officiated at a hanging. Barr declares it is not necessarily so that “in order to be a fundamentalist a man must have a closed mind” (p. 323). Yet fundamentalist theological arguments do come, he assures us, “from a social and religious organism which does have a closed mind” (p. 323).

Barr attributes the survival of fundamentalists to “the type of intellectual exposure” they get (p. 91), a thesis one can readily extend to include nonfundamentalists also. He explains the phenomenon of fundamentalist intellectuals by designating most of the learned in the camp as specialists in fields other than religion (p. 91). If this implies that only professional religionists can discern the truth about Christ and the Bible, their track record has not been good.

American readers can somewhat gauge Barr’s objectivity in evaluating evangelical scholarship by his verdict on J. Gresham Machen, whose academic competence was conceded by even his most articulate theological adversaries. Machen preferred, in view of his Reformed (Presbyterian) views, to be designated an evangelical rather than a fundamentalist. Yet at the height of the modernist-fundamentalist controversy no scholar championed conservative essentials more ably than Machen. But Barr does not trouble to distinguish Machen’s writings from “the simple and superficial arguments” of fundamentalists (p. 38); he brushes Machen aside by quoting only a partisan secondary source (p. 165) and fails also to note that Machen did not castigate all subscribers to biblical errancy as nonevangelicals. Amid his resentment of Machen’s pointed rejection of modernism, Barr might of course have also noted Barth’s disavowal of modernism as heresy; but perhaps it was Barth’s ecumenical associations that make his judgments more palatable to Barr. In any event, only prejudice could give this verdict: “The polemic of neo-orthodoxy against liberal theology was infinitely more effective than that of traditional conservatism, because Barth and his associates, unlike conservative apologists, had thoroughly studied liberal theology and knew what it was” (p. 214). Barr’s hostility assuredly is not based on any inability of evangelical commentators either side of the Atlantic to recognize liberal theology when they read it.

Only because Barr considers heresy a now irrelevant conception does he hesitate to apply the label to fundamentalism (p. 197), though he insists that if Scofield dispensationalism is not heretical, “then nothing is” (p. 196). While he considers dispensationalism an intolerable mythology, Barr finds Bultmannianism more bearable (pp. 235, 237). He defends modernism and even radical Bultmannianism as having not “the slightest idea of attacking Christianity … as a revealed religion” (p. 166), whereas he treats Machen and the fundamentalist as foes within the camp.

Barr’s ill-concealed hope is that internal differences will tear conservative Christianity into irreconcilable factions (pp. 304 ff.). He believes that increasingly conflicting evangelical publications are “likely to lead to tensions within conservative evangelical religion in the long run” (p. 126) and he does his best to help the cause along. 1 myself, in the “Footnotes” series that once appeared as a CHRISTIANITY TODAY feature and was reprinted as Evangelicals in Search of Identity (Word, 1976), noted mounting evangelical tensions over matters like biblical inerrancy, socio-political involvement, and the basis of transdenominational cooperation. Yet one must concede that American Christianity will suffer if it depends mainly on evangelical leaders bound by geographical nearness, evangelistic visibility, and overlapping directorates and financial underpinning; such bases for religious power and cooperation are a poor guarantee of a productive response to criticisms such as Barr’s.

To My Godson At His Baptism

Appearing

At Advent,

You became for me

Before a day had passed

A special offering.

I saw in you

Our Lord’s

Most fragile form.

And I rejoiced

In His might.

Today, you are again

The gift whom we return

To the Giver

For safekeeping

Forever.

BONNIE L. BOWMAN

It is surprising, however, to one familiar with the American religious scene and its widely shared literature, that Barr highlights differences of evangelical perspective while downplaying the range of agreement that sets evangelicals apart from other critical scholars (pp. 187 ff.). He pits Calvinist against Arminian, pietist against activist, Pentecostalist against non-Pentecostalist, dispensationalist against nondispensationalist, premillenarian against postmillenarian. He often tends to pick out positions taken by various evangelical writers in a way that he considers reprehensible when evangelicals follow the same technique of selectively quoting critical scholars (p. 132).

Barr’s thesis that “a common fundamentalist view of the Bible does not succeed in providing a clear or unitary basis for faith” (p. 189) sounds strange alongside his initial warning that the movement’s “organizational base” approximates a “conservative evangelical denomination” (p. 22). Provoked by evangelicals’ frequent dissent from ecumenically oriented positions, Barr “cannot help asking whether a strict sect solution, that is, separation as a strictly fundamentalist church, would not be a more honest and sincere position” (p. 322). This proposal leaves little doubt that Barr’s conception of ecumenical pluralism has no room for a consistent evangelicalism. When evangelicals consider “the elimination of liberals more important than the unifying of the churches,” Barr labels it pernicious (pp. 328 ff.); when Barr considers the elimination of evangelicals the key to ecclesiastical unity, the prejudice somehow becomes virtuous.

Barr complains that fundamentalist theology fixes on “a few nodal points” and fails to see “theologies as wholes” (p. 166). In defending nonconservative alternatives, however, he nowhere recognizes that the deletion of central articles on the fundamentalist check list—such as inspiration, the virgin birth, the substitutionary atonement, and the bodily resurrection of Jesus—necessarily invalidates any professedly biblical theology or consistent basis for Christian unity. Instead, he satirizes the emphasis on “pure doctrine” according to which those who do not make “the proper evangelical noises” about virgin birth and biblical inspiration are considered non-Christian (p. 14). Historic Christianity is not well served by this careless dismissal of fundamentalist expositions of the Trinity, atonement, and sin and evil as biblically simplistic and trivial (p. 177).

Since Barr has introduced the charges of simplism and triviality, one may ask whether he himself adequately universalizes the doctrine of sin when he rhetorically asks: “Does conservative evangelicalism teach that a man in and through his adherence to conservative evangelicalism may be following out his own sinful impulses, or that conservative faith may itself be a structure vitiated by the deep and all-pervading sinfulness of mankind?” (p. 178). Evangelicals at least believe that divine once-for-all revelation relativizes sin in some respects; if Barr does not, he should beware of casting boomerangs.

If evangelical Christianity is in as much disarray as Barr believes, then he surely need not be so preoccupied with it. He questions whether “relatively orthodox fundamentalism … will survive, or … be displaced by … its own more extreme offspring”—that is, Pentecostalism (p. 209). The irony of Barr’s book on Fundamentalism lies in the posing of just such second-level alternatives.

We surely have a right to expect from the Oriel Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture in Oxford a persuasive case for Christianity that rallies intellectuals to a rationally compelling faith and especially so at a time when many people and forces are competing for the mind and will of man and humanity faces the endtime of civilization. It is one thing to pronounce an acerbic verdict that the conservatives’ argument for miracles and the supernatural is “completely valueless.” What conservatives ask of Barr is no more than he demands of them: to state explicitly where the natural ends and the supernatural begins, and to indicate how far the supernatural can work naturally (p. 278). Let him tell us, unambiguously and systematically, what concept of biblical authority he considers the acceptable modern alternative to the historic Christian conviction that the New Testament is “a unified body of teaching all of which was always right, and still is” (p. 84).

Barr deplores the fact that evangelical apologists generally make “no contact with the positions held in modern theology and biblical criticism” (p. 81). But today those positions change more quickly than Paris fashions; even seminarians tend to review them as transitory oddities. If Professor Barr will state the preferred position for the 1980s in an orderly way, he will evoke more intellectual confrontation from both evangelical and nonevangelical scholars than Oxford can conveniently handle.

The next and last installment of this article will deal with the outlines of an alternative position projected by Barr.

A Response From Helmut Thielicke

Here is an [abridged] response to the rather curious article by John Warwick Montgomery, “Thielicke on Trial” (March 24). Montgomery’s obsession with assigning a heresy hat to me leads him to proclaim some fantastic things about my “dispute” with the so-called Free University of Hamburg. Permit me to make the following comments.

1. This “university,” both in my opinion and in that of other competent persons, is a macabre contraption that threatens to bring shame to the Gospel. Montgomery is listed as one of the instructors of this institution, though I have been told that he can scarcely speak German.

2. The courts, at the first level of jurisdiction, prohibited this institution from calling itself a “university” after the state agencies had already refused to give permission to do so. The president of the sponsoring association, Saake, is currently being prosecuted by the state attorney with the charge that he was using an academic title without the legal right to do so.

3. Almost all of the members of the faculty have by this time separated themselves from the undertaking and are involved in forming a new graduate school.

4. The advertising of this school cannot be taken seriously. This, among other things, led me to feel obliged to warn well meaning Christians about this undertaking.

5. The Protestant Church in Germany and many free church associations and pietistic societies have unambiguously distanced themselves from this so-called university and refused to provide it support. Examinations that it conducts and titles that it wants to grant (Lic. theol.) are accredited neither by the state nor by the church.

6. The courts contested only one sentence in my long article against this university. The court was of the opinion that my criticism of this faculty and its quality (and I certainly was not forbidden to express such criticism) could have resulted in two gentlemen feeling defamed, who themselves did not belong to the actual faculty and had only given guest lectures on occasion. (One of these two persons has distanced himself from the endeavor in the meantime; I don’t know about the other one.) I was only required to revise the one sentence, but I publicly added that my negative judgment still stood. It is therefore incredible to read what Montgomery says about my so-called punishment. The astronomical fines that allegedly were required of me are exaggerated in direct proportion to the pretenses and self-ostentation with which this structure still presents itself to the public before its exitus.

7. Like Mr. Montgomery, I, too, would like to conclude with a quotation from Luther and ask myself how the Reformer would probably have characterized this species of people. But I think I had better not: Luther used for such things a kind of earthy and crude vocabulary that could well bring upon me the wrath of the courts, if I were to repeat it. For that reason. I prefer to remain silent, even though Mr. Montgomery may say and misunderstand as much as he wants, whether it be due to lacking understanding or to aggressive resentment. 1 find it depressing to have to wash dirty laundry before the eyes of strangers, even though I am only doing it to prevent the honor of the Gospel from being dirtied by the unqualified.

HELMUT THIELICKE

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

Soviet man in search of morality.

November marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Red revolution in Russia. The parades, speeches, and the rumble of rocket launchers around Red Square all celebrate the birthday of the U.S.S.R. and the new communist age confidently established by Lenin in 1917.

How stands the Gospel of Marx in the Soviet Union today? Derek Sangster, editor of the British gospel paper “Challenge,” interviewed Anatoli Krasnov-Levitin, an influential figure in the movement for human rights in the Soviet Union who is particularly noted for his influence on young people. Mr. Krasnov-Levitin now lives in Switzerland but keeps in close touch with his homeland. Here he talks about the changing face of the Soviet Union today.

At first sight, Marxism-Leninism seems triumphant in the Soviet Union. The truths of Marxism are drummed into young people in every school, institute, and university. Generations of people have known nothing but Marxism-Leninism. And this ideology is probably going to influence millions of people for a long time yet.

However, if we look deeper, things aren’t going as well for Marxism-Leninism as they might seem.

When 1 was young, the majority of young people raved about Marx and Engels and knew their works almost by heart. It was like this up and down the country, from Moscow and Leningrad to the remotest villages. Old people treated all this with skepticism, sighed for the czarist order, and went to church.

Now the roles are reversed. The ardent Marxists and adherents of Soviet ideology are old-age pensioners. Young people laugh and tell jokes about Lenin, and some of them turn to the church.

An acquaintance of mine in Moscow—previously an important Soviet diplomat and a prominent KGB worker (quite a common combination, by the way)—complained to me about his son. “I only want to pass on to him a few names like those of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, but he doesn’t even want to hear about them.”

Another lad, also the son of a KGB worker, wandered into a church by chance and was so impressed that he was baptized. He later delivered a sermon about Christ at the district conference of the Young Communist League in the Dzerzhinsk district of Moscow. As a result, he was dismissed from the Young Communist League and expelled from school. He was also thrown out of his home—by his mother. “I don’t need religious fanatics here,” she said.

Even the Communists and KGB workers don’t take Marxism very seriously.

In 1973, when I was in a labor camp for the last time, there was a lad there who had been sent to prison for hooliganism. He dreamed of becoming a doctor and asked advice from the local doctor about this. The doctor said, “To get in, you’ve got to pass in Russian language, maths, biology, and, well, recitation.”

Bewildered, the boy asked me, “What’s this ‘recitation’? And why do you need it in medical school?”

I smiled. “Recitation” is the students’ name for Marxism-Leninism, which is taught in all institutes.

The position of Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union today is reminiscent of the position of the Russian Orthodox Church in czarist days. Then Orthodoxy was the official ideology. Every person born of Russian parents was considered an Orthodox Christian, and God’s law was taught in all secondary schools. Even Lenin had to marry in church and before that to go to confession and take communion.

As a result there came about a certain haziness: It was impossible to tell who was really Orthodox and who was Orthodox only according to his passport. And Orthodoxy lost all authority among the intellectuals, who were simply too embarrassed to go to church lest they be taken for bootlickers and the government agents.

In the same way, it is now awkward in respectable intellectual society to let it be known that you are a supporter of Marx and Lenin. If you identify yourself that way in a group of people they will exchange looks and fall silent. And the thought will flash through everyone’s mind, “He might be a KGB agent.” In the Soviet Union today, the younger, the cleverer, the more politically honest you are, the further you are from the authorities and the official ideology of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

Is this success or failure? And would Marx, Engels, and Lenin be pleased with it?

There is indeed a noticeable thirst for religion nowadays among Soviet citizens, mainly among young people. What most attracts young people to faith in God is the need they feel for moral renewal, their thirst for truth and justice. This is the main thing that Christianity can offer man now.

A student at one of the institutes, active in the Young Communist League and a member of the YCL Committee, returned home after a YCL meeting. He had a feeling of disgust. At the meeting there had been lies, intrigues, and vile bureaucratic phraseology that no one believed.

Suddenly he remembered seeing a little book, a gospel, that his parents had owned. By the time he finished reading it, he was already a Christian. Here he found what the Young Communist League could not give him: truth.

That was ten years ago. Now he has a family and is an outstanding specialist in his field. He will remain a believing Christian all his life.

Soviet man is now deeply disillusioned because Soviet ideology has deceived him. Hoping to find truth and justice, he has found instead lies, oppression, universal slavery. He is searching for truth. And in the course of this search many turn to Christ and find in him the truth they are seeking.

Furthermore, the Soviet system has poisoned human relations. One seems to see in everyone a KGB agent, an informer, a betrayer—if not actually, then potentially. There is no faith in human nature. The Russian writer Anatoly Kuznetsov now living in London tells in his book Babi Yar how even his own mother began to suspect he was a KGB agent after he had talked to her about politics.

The great Russian poet Boris Pasternak speaks about this in these words:

I have long ceased to be faithful to everyone

whom I once confided in.

I lost man right from the time when he was

lost to everyone.

In Christianity, Soviet man is seeking for this lost man. He is seeking and finding. That man is the Son of Man and the Son of God, Jesus Christ.

Soviet man is further alienated from Marxist philosophy by the utter inability to answer the eternal nagging questions: From where and how did the universe come into existence? What is the purpose of man? Marx’s well-known words, “Philosophy has explained the world; it is a question of changing it,” were, if I am not mistaken, parodied by Bernard Shaw in this way: “Being unable to explain the world, Marx decided to change it.” This lack of answers to the important questions forces Soviet young people to look for explanations in philosophy and religion.

Chronology

Krasnov Levitin

21 September 1915 Born in the town of Baku in the Azerbaidzhani Republic, on the shore of the Caspian Sea. His father, Emmanuil Ilich Levitin, was a Justice of the Peace.

1920s The family lived in Leningrad. His father was now an official of the Supreme Soviet of the People’s Economy.

24 April 1934 First imprisonment. Investigation after a denunciation led to his arrest by the secret police (GPU).

1935 Graduated from teacher-training college and worked as a teacher of Russian literature.

1935–40 While working as a teacher, graduated from the evening class of the Leningrad Pedagogical Institute.

1940s Postgraduate course at the State Scientific Institute of Theatre and Music.

1941 Took part in the defense of Leningrad, but was demobilized because of illness.

1942 Evacuated. Ordained deacon in Ulyanovsk by Metropolitan A. Vvedensky of the “Living Church.”

1944 Joined the Orthodox Church as a layman. Senior lecturer in the Central Asian University. After returning to Moscow wrote a dissertation “Belinsky and the Theatre.”

8 June 1949 Second imprisonment. Sentenced after a denunciation to ten years imprisonment.

1956 Rehabilitated. Taught Russian literature in schools. Began to write articles for the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate.

1958 Began to distribute his articles in samizdat (literally “self-publishing,” and referring to poems, essays, stories, and so on, that are passed from hand to hand to evade censorship). Dismissed from his teaching post.

1960s Wrote many samizdat articles on church and society and was active in the Democratic Movement.

12 September 1969 Third imprisonment. Eleven months pretrial investigation in prisons in Moscow and southern Russia; released for lack of evidence.

December 1970 Investigation again on the same charges. Arrested. Sentenced to three years imprisonment.

May 1973 Released. Continued writing in samizdat and activity in the Democratic Movement.

20 September 1974 Emigrated from the Soviet Union and settled in Lucerne, Switzerland.

As a religious person I believe we must insist on truth in all things, and there are at present two views of the U.S.S.R. that are in my opinion quite wrong.

The first is that Marx and Engels are absolute bearers of the truth, some sort of prophets. I can only say that this is a kind of Marxist hysteria. The other misconception is that anything remotely connected with Marx and Engels is linked with labor camps and prisons. This point of view, too, savors of hysteria.

As I see it, socialism existed long before Marxism, and the Marxist stage in the history of socialism is already coming to an end. Some countries have avoided the Marxist stage altogether. This is a credit to them.

A number of Marxist tenets are correct, but to elevate Marxism to a universal system explaining world history is simply ludicrous. And it is no mere chance that history has disproved most of Marx’s prognoses. Were he alive now he would, as an honest scholar, renounce them.

But this is not the chief flaw of Marxism. Its chief flaw is that it tries to link an epicurean, materialist philosophy with true socialism—socialism that is wholly based on selflessness, on mutual love, on altruism.

Our Russian philosopher Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovev parodies Marxist philosophy in the following way: “There is nothing in the world but matter, man is no more than an ape, we die and the weeds grow on our graves—so let everyone give up his soul for his friends.” The soul of man, according to Tertullian, is by nature Christian, and there are many noble people who reason more or less like this. Such inconsistency does them credit.

However, the majority of people reason: “If I am an ape, then I must live like an ape.” And that is why we see so horrifying a decline in morals in many countries where socialism has gained the upper hand. Atheism (and consequently Marxism) is a sickness of contemporary socialism. The true interest of world socialism requires that atheism be overcome.

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

Is Mary the model of motherhood?

This is the year my first child will leave home. Over the past eighteen years I have often had cause to lament the fact that Jesus never had any children. The area where I have needed the most guidance and the clearest pattern of behavior has been a great grey mist through which move the bewildering and sometimes contradictory figures of Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, David and Absalom. My own mother’s favorites were Hannah and Samuel, but then he left home at the relatively uncomplicated age of three, not eighteen. From the very first, however, something had gone awry in human families. Cain was a prodigal who went off to a far country but never returned.

If the Old Testament is full of the all-too-human failings of families, the New Testament supplies the opposite problem. We see few families and scarcely any children. We know Peter had a mother-in-law, so he must have been married. Several of the disciples were close kin and at least two had a pushy mother. Philip had three daughters whose spinsterhood was presumably alleviated by their gifts of prophecy. Timothy’s mother and grandmother were obviously virtuous women, but where was his father?

It is only Mary who provides any kind of fully developed pattern of parenthood in the New Testament. We see her energy, her youthful exuberance, and defiant idealism evident in the Magnificat and the subsequent cross-country hike to her cousin Elizabeth’s. We watch her being transformed and tempered as she participates in the mystery of the Incarnation, is rebuked by her twelve-year-old son in the temple, shows him off at the Cana wedding, and attempts unsuccessfully to deprogram him at the beginning of his itinerant ministry. Yet she is still there grieving at the cross (when the disciples have fled) and rejoicing at Pentecost.

But what kind of model is Mary? True, the same conflicts that were hers have also been mine. First, there is the sense of floundering in depths over one’s head, of participating in a drama one cannot possibly comprehend nor foresee the outcome of. And second, there is the vertigo produced by the constant vacillation between asserting parental authority and allowing the child autonomy. The blessed mother herself must have sometimes regretted that her son did not see fit to marry and bring forth a brood of offspring like the other boys. Yet the very fact that I can so easily identify with Mary’s pain and failure merely proves the need for a more satisfactory manual of child rearing.

The lack of a proper example for parenthood is sorely felt by our entire culture. It seems we know how to do almost everything else in this country today except how to make lasting marriages and raise children. The advances in social justice and economic equity of the past two centuries have been in almost directly inverse proportion to the steadiness and reliability of familial relationships. Slavery has all but vanished from the face of the earth. Child labor is an anachronism. Governments take human rights with a seriousness never before seen in history. But the family, the basic human experience, lives in an atmosphere of disaster.

Provided with the world’s most luxurious accommodations, our families live an interior life of poorer quality than refugees among rubble. Their existence has that impermanent, hand-to-mouth nature usually associated with poverty—only now it grows out of wealth. Convenience food, easy access to entertainment, disposable dishes and diapers, the quick call, the fast getaway. Yet half of all marriages end in divorce. We are at war with one another on the homefront. And the heart is ripped open as surely as by shrapnel and left to heal as best it can. The only balm seems to be a friendly pat on the back from the secular media: “There, there. It happens to everyone these days. Buck up. It’s only a trend.” One could, of course, say the same about cancer, which, though it affects one adult in three, still lags behind the battlefield disease of domestic gangrene.

Even so, the bombed out marital landscape is not as personally unsettling to me as the paradox of parenthood. First of all, one at least enters marriage consciously and with consent. The terms, whether one intends to keep them or not, are clear.

But children are different. Birth control notwithstanding, one is not apt to be in a rational state at their conception. No one asks you, the prospective parent, or the unborn child, if either agrees to enter into this relationship. Children happen. In fact, their appearance—or failure to appear—often foils the best calculations of man and machine. One may speak of a contractual relationship between marriage partners, but that possibility simply does not exist with a parent and child. “I didn’t ask to be born!” The phrase reverberates with all the unanswerable ambiguities of the universe.

In our small rural community, a situation thought to be the last bastion of old-fashioned family values, we have about 250 souls. Among those there are at least nine families that during the past year have been seriously damaged either by violence or desertion. Several of these have been church families. The whole gamut of child-rearing exponents, from Parent Effectiveness Training to Bill Gothard’s Basic Youth Conflicts, seems a weak joke when prescribed as an antidote to this kind of problem. Given the choice, I’d rather muddle through with Mary.

Before the birth of my first child, I dreamed of her as my own production, my signature upon the world. But from the moment she was first laid in my unready arms, I have instead been startled and spellbound by the separateness of this creature. With her folded fists and squinting eyes, she was a stranger to me. Her infant cries, as I searched frantically for the source of her discomfort, were a horrifying sign of our frustrated communication. And now, as she prepares to leave for college, packing up the chaos of her personal belongings and at least half a dozen career choices, she is still a stranger to me. Even though I am convinced I know her better than any other human being does, nevertheless she is a singular, unpredictable entity.

A friend once told me she thought the curse on Eve in Genesis was not simply to bear children in pain. That is soon over. But that is only the beginning. The real sting is being allowed to participate in creation, but always having to see one’s handiwork turn out differently than one had intended. Perhaps I’ve been an unnatural mother, but I’ve never had even the faintest hope of predicting how, where, or with whom my daughter would turn out. She’s as much an enigma as the magnetic field of the Milky Way.

To further compound my feeling of unnatural motherhood, I have to admit that I am glad to see her go. I know the hole left by her extraction will be painfully felt by the rest of us. But quite plainly, I find myself an awkward parent, abashed at the ineptitude with which I play my part. I am uncomfortable and confused by telling other obviously unwilling people what to do. As a teacher I honestly relished my authority, which I felt was properly justified by my superior knowledge of my subject. I lopped off grade points with never a quiver of conscience. College students, after all, have a choice of whether or not to subject themselves to a teacher’s authority.

But children have no choice, are indeed incapable of making one, and thus parents have their authority thrust upon them. In their heart of hearts they know their frightful incapacity to govern even themselves, much less others. The only resources they have are a few years’ headstart and a Pandora’s box of mistakes. But to abdicate that authority, ramshackle and gerrymandered though it be, is to invite appalling and certain chaos. To try to slither out of the responsibility is cowardice, no matter how we try to disguise our laxness or indulgence. It is a task we must stick to, even in the face of inevitable failure.

And failure is inevitable. Despite the manuals, the self-help guides, the democratizing or tyrannizing of the family, despite even our most sincere efforts at searching the scriptures and the mind of God in prayer, we fail. Every day, children from Christian families with the best sort of spiritual and moral instruction and example run away from home, become alcoholics, get or are gotten pregnant, become addicted to drugs, wreck cars, cheat in school, break windows, commit suicide. Like cancer, it strikes indiscriminately. Being a Christian offers no immunity from family tragedy.

It is not simple cause and effect that is at work here nor only a sociological pathology. Although our society creates a climate for domestic disaster, we all know of instances where the most creditable parents inexplicably turn out deplorable children.

In fact, isn’t that at least one of the points of the parable of the prodigal son, the story Jesus offered his followers in lieu of his own example? The eternal parental question of “Where did I go wrong?” seems totally irrelevant to Jesus’ purpose. It is simply a fact of fallen life that something will go wrong, inevitably. And the story takes up at that point. For whatever reasons, the younger son, spoiled and ungrateful, thoughtless and inconsiderate, takes off for the first century equivalent of Las Vegas.

And the father lets him go. That’s all. No recriminations, no breast-beating, no guilty introspection.

Then the father waits. Again, we are dissatisfied with the sketchiness of the details. As parents, we don’t need to be told what sonny is doing off there in the far country. But what about the father at home? Did he weep, did he worry, did he write urgent letters? Apparently not. Work seems to have gone on as usual.

And when the prodigal “comes to himself’ (months, years later?) he lets the penitent return and rejoices.

I think parents can take some sort of heart from the sociological evidence that many, though by no means all, children who have a consistently Christian upbringing return, by one road or another, to the faith of their fathers and mothers. Particularly when they begin to have children of their own.

Up to this point, the parable satisfies, even consoles us. Then comes the unexpected fly in the ointment, the older brother. It’s hard enough to raise a black sheep, God, if anyone, knows. But a wolf in sheep’s clothing is infinitely worse. We are all rather secretly fond of the prodigal. Yes, he is inconsiderate and excessive. But having sowed his wild oats and gotten hungry, he’s ready to come home again. Perhaps the father was wisely counting on that all along. But the older brother’s spite and stinginess are not in the slightest attractive. Something within us seems to know that squandering one’s inheritance on harlots is less damaging to one’s soul than the meanspirited hoarding of the older brother.

As long as our children are out carousing, we can at least feel like self-righteous victims of their thoughtlessness. But the “good child” at home with his nose to the grindstone—see how quick he is to outdo even his father in rectitude, how impermeable to joy he is behind his pointing finger. The one whose problem is prodigality at least repents. The good child with his heart frozen in resentment seems unreachable. We never witness his reconciliation with the father or with the younger brother.

Psychologically and sociologically, the parable of the prodigal is no doubt quite accurate. But as a how-to book for being a parent, it offers few foolproof techniques. What hope it holds out to parents is tempered with the promise of suffering.

I go to the hospital to visit a friend. He mentions that a neighbor is there also with her daughter who is a thirty-year-old victim of multiple sclerosis. I stop by to see them and am shaken. The child is a skinny, twisted mass of uncoordinated muscle. Her mother is feeding her, using painfully developed techniques to stimulate her involuntary nervous system to swallow. The daughter’s communication consists of a high whine of desolation and an awkward pawing at her mother’s hand for comfort.

The mother, who lives fifty miles away, arrives at the hospital every morning at eight and doesn’t leave till nine at night. I ask, inanely, if she doesn’t get tired. You don’t let yourself, she answers.

Her eyes are like craters—deep and dark though not dead. Her mouth is no longer set in suffering but quick to catch the fleetest glint of thought or feeling reflecting off another’s face. We pray together, each holding one of the daughter’s hands.

I leave the hospital reeling. I have been in my scrupulous, self-assured way, praying for holiness. Now I have seen it and I have to be honest. I hesitate at holiness, terrified at the cost.

We often speak of the cost of our salvation to the Son. What of the cost to the Father, watching, helpless?

When Jesus enjoined his followers to “call no man your father upon earth; for one is your Father, which is in heaven,” he freed earthly parents from a burden they are not capable of bearing. It is only God to whom true parenthood belongs. The rest of us are imposters, shocked and dazed by the whole experience. The first children of God were turned into parents when they usurped the enormous task of managing their own lives (and the Father, just as in the parable, let them do it). Ever since, we have found ourselves standing in God’s place in relation to our children, charged with ordering their unruly universe for their own good, a good they stubbornly resist. Understandably we find the position alarming. Much rather would I think of my child as my sister in Christ than as my daughter.

On the other hand, it is only because of the pain we experience at the hands of our children that we can acquire the smallest understanding of the suffering of God. Because we have stood in a parent’s place with our children, we can appreciate the plight of our true Father. As we, the parents, become once more the children, and as such, are able to enter the kingdom, the awesomeness of that Father himself becoming the Child overwhelms us. Both the Incarnation and the Trinity open out before us in a terrifying vista. It is true, Chesterton’s claim that “we can never reach the end even of our own ideas about the child who was a father and the mother who was a child.”

For in Christ, even the image of the elder brother of the parable is undone. Fie becomes the elder brother who intercedes, who takes the punishment for the prodigal, who sets the example of loving obedience to the dread father, who shares his inheritance with us. In him, the world’s one child who did ask to be born, the parable becomes complete.

I look at my daughter who is several inches taller than I am now. My years of sheltering her are over. I sometimes quake with gratitude that she has, beyond dreaming, turned out to be strong, intelligent, and beautiful, knowing that her being so is a matter of grace and not my doing. I am also grateful that her heart has grown large enough to shelter others, perhaps even her provoking parents, when that time comes. But most of all I look forward to that time beyond time when the both of us “will be set free from bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God,” together, as sisters.

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

On archetypes and raising children.

Suddenly, after ten thousand years of myth and history, we find ourselves floundering in a marsh. The footing upon which our forebears proceeded through life has fallen away and we are awash in the fen.

What marsh? What fen? What footing?

The footing, surely, would have been the whole set of suppositions that lay underneath the ordinary business of human life for all tribes, all cultures, and all civilizations, Oriental, African, Occidental, or Oceanic, for as many aeons as we can uncover. One of these suppositions, and one that appears to have been vastly widespread, was that humanity appears under the splendid and dual modality of male and female, and that this is good. It took no special perspicacity to see this: any savage, any peasant, any coolie, proceeded on this assumption, along with the sages, seers, and saints. All young men and women becoming aware of each other, all bridegrooms approaching their brides, all husbands and wives coupling fruitfully, all fathers and mothers united in rearing their sons and daughters so that they in their turn might enter this wonderful Dance—they all thought, if they thought about it at all, that the distinction was there, and given, and clear, and rich.

But suddenly we are told that it has all been a mistake. The distinction that has appeared to everyone as such a bright fixity, and that has nourished all song and story, and has gilded all human ordinariness with bliss, and from which has sprung all manner of valor and charity and nobility and joy—this distinction is cultural only. It is superficial. It is irrelevant. Nay, it is pernicious. We are persons, not men and women. Pray don’t chain us down to these heavy and embarrassing fleshy categories. There is an entity “me” that has nothing to do with the costume under which I am obliged to masquerade. I (a man, alas) am indistinguishable from you (a woman, alas). You and I have nothing to gather from our anatomy. Our bodies furnish no cues to anything more far-reaching than necessary biology. Some mechanism, of course, had to be devised for multiplying the race, and this seems to be how the pieces fell. But let’s leave it at that.

This is not a straw man (or straw person, shall we say) that I have conjured. I never could have thought it up. But it has been offered to us in the last half decade, and it is called the androgynous ideal; it underlies a great deal of the public debate on the topic of sexuality now. It is sometimes even urged by religious people that Jesus was a sort of crypto-androgyne, the idea being that he was mild and could weep and therefore does not fit society’s stereotypes as to what maleness means.

But surely Christian vision would see all this as gnostic? That is, there have always been efforts to disengage earthly existence from the prison of flesh, and to fly to the heavenly aether where we are liberated into real and eternal life, unhampered by these bodies. Eastern religions, mystery cults, and all forms of gnosticism and Manichaeism offer this as the desideratum. But early in the game, the Church condemned the whole effort as heterodox. She did this because she espoused the doctrine of the Incarnation. This is the worst possible scandal. God is a spirit. It is too mortifying that he should appear in human flesh, not just in a charade, but really, truly united to that flesh, taking our nature to himself and becoming man. All the gods, at one time or another, popped down in human form (usually it was to satisfy their concupiscent desire for some nymph or shepherd boy). But only the God of Israel can be called Immanuel. “When Thou tookest upon Thee to deliver man. Thou didst not abhor the Virgin’s womb,” says the Te Deum. That’s getting clinical.

Indeed, all the great acts in the drama of redemption proceed in grossly carnal terms. Creation (he made these things—these pebbles and flatworms and radishes); Covenant (you had to lug stones and build altars, and knife your best lamb in the throat); Incarnation (he did not abhor the Virgin’s womb); Passion (the drama gets down to pieces of timber gashes); Resurrection (oh-oh—just when we thought the flesh had been overthrown, out it comes again); Ascension (this is too much: that flesh taken into the midmost mysteries of the triune godhead forever); Eucharist and Baptism (things—physical things—at the center of Christian vision and practice for as long as time lasts).

Clearly, Christians are stuck with a whole scheme of things that invests matter with enormous significance. Nay, that is putting it too mildly. It is more than a question of attaching some adventitious meaning to matter, thus turning everything physical into symbols or some such. Is it not, rather, that the Christian vision would see the Creation as one, whole, seamless fabric, with everything from seraphim to jellyfish to shale participating in one good order? The distinction between the visible and the invisible, or matter and spirit, is an unhappy, post-Fail distinction, a fissure in the fabric, introduced by us when we made our grab in Eden and doomed ourselves to live thereafter in a divided world. The disjuncture is of our making, and we must live with it. No doubt our very eyeballs were affected at the Fall, so that we can no longer see things as undivided. But Christian vision would have a prior notion of a realm in which there is a lovely harmony at work entailing all things, so that the very external shapes and forms of things bespeak what they are.

But what does this have to do with fatherhood?

Would it not be that, over against the current effort to redefine sexuality entirely, and hence to reshuffle the roles that have attached to male and female, and thus to realign family life in brand-new patterns—would it not be that Christians will want to pause in front of three huge data before they join this brisk effort?

First, history. If all tribes and cultures, and all sages and poets, have seen something a certain way, and it has appeared to them, not as horrid but as blissful, then surely any reflective person will hesitate before agreeing to recast the whole picture under the pistol of one decade’s debate? (Over against this, it may be objected that this same argument can be used to perpetuate slavery. But the answer to this objection is that the human race has not celebrated slavery as the richest source of joy and virtue, whereas it has done this with the ancient sexual distinctions.)

Second, nature: the stark biology of the matter attests to what all poetry and myth have celebrated, namely that the male, bearing that particular aspect of the imago Dei disclosed in male stature and anatomy, enacts somehow a role of initiator and seeker. The sexual imagery is too vivid to need comment here. And we may also guess, in this connection, that the reason the poets and philosophers and mathematicians and composers and conquerors and chairmen have been mostly men has been not so much because of a diabolically successful plot to keep women at their brooms, as because the male of the species is bedevilled with an odd awareness of being on the perimeter of things somehow, and must seek the center. Hence he has tried, fiercely, sorrowfully, desperately, to bring some order out of chaos—in poetry, philosophy, music, conquest. Whereas the woman, bearing the image of God under the species of womb and breasts, is already there at the center of the operation. She does not need to go anywhere, as it were. Perhaps old jests about women’s intuition were not wholly misbegotten. If this is all wildly fanciful, and too embarrassingly folklorish, we may at least wonder whether, when we meet protohistoric and universal types (man as father, lord, initiator, protector, and woman as mother, lady, receiver, and nourisher), we have come upon, not stereotypes, but archetypes.

Third, Scripture. The Bible assumes given sexual structures in its language. It is fervently urged now, of course, that the revelation came to us during patriarchal centuries, and that the language is thus culturally conditioned. God as King and Father, and Jesus as Son and Bridegroom—this is all Mediterranean, and really ought to be seen for what it is. The difficulty here is the old difficulty about image and thing. When you change the imagery, you change the thing. Jesus as kind corner cop rather than shepherd, for example, since ghetto kids don’t know about sheep. It is a plausible and well-intentioned effort, but loses something. We may need to tell city kids about sheep somewhere in there. Or the image of the Cross: we don’t crucify the misfits in our society now, we hurry them to analysts’ couches. Hence, in the effort to update Christian imagery, we ought to substitute tiny silver couches on the chains around our necks, since the Cross is a wholly outmoded symbol. But surely something has got lost here? Or God as King: we don’t have kings in modern secular democracies, so perhaps we ought to begin speaking of him in more contemporary, and thus more gripping, terms—as Chairperson of the ad hoc caucus, perhaps. (There would be a squeak trying to huddle all those syllables into, say, Handel’s acclamation of God as “King of Kings,” where he set the music up for only three syllables; but we can surely manage this.)

The point here is that Christians suspect that biblical language and imagery judge us, and not vice-versa. It spreads and arches over all of history, like the Christos Pantocrator looming gigantically over Orthodox Church interiors. If the Psalms sing about dragons and great deeps praising the Lord, we are not altogether prepared to jettison the picture when the Loch Ness expedition fails to rouse the monster. If we hear of morning stars singing, we want to hold onto the picture somehow, as a clue and glimpse of dazzling realities beyond the reach of our radio antennae that don’t seem to be catching that song. If the Apocalypse is full of the imagery of crowns and scepters and horses, we hesitate before substituting fedoras, attache cases, and flying saucers. If the apostolic writings are full of pictures of husband as “head” and wife as “body” (pictures drawn by the Apostle, not from the Curse, as is frequently urged now, but from the twofold source of Creation and the eschatological mystery of Christ and his Spouse), then we will want to know what on earth that may mean before we replace it all with our sociology texts.

It is for some such reasons as the above that I find myself unprepared to espouse the new castings of family life so briskly urged upon us now. If I may transpose into a first-person key here, I may list the notions that seem essential to me in my experience of fatherhood.

First, it is not my experience in any case. Or rather, it is, but it is mine only in the sense that I have stepped into a mystery that has been here since the beginning. All fathers have stepped into it, whether they are aborigines, tsars, or bank clerks. For all of them, there has been the great mystery of entering (literally) into the knowledge of the other, and of finding that knowledge to be both ecstatic and fruitful. This other creature, this third party, issues from the mystic (and very carnal) union of the two who bear the two antiphonal modes of the divine image.

What does it all mean? What on earth is all this plumbing and obstetrics about? Is it not the enactment, under the species of male and female anatomy, of what is true, namely that we are made for each other, and that our wholeness is to be found in thus uniting, and, further, that this wholeness turns out to be, not a solitude, but fruitful? The very biology attests to the theological mystery: I, a man, am made for the other; but not just any other. I am made for the other who is also the image of God, but not me. Not a mirror image of myself. (Hence, whatever may be being said now in behalf of homosexual union, one will want to have this Edenic picture at the bottom of his imagination, in which the Adam and the Eve—me and my wife, now, ten thousand generations later—enact the human mystery in which the image of God, under the dual modality of man and woman, appears in its wholeness.)

My experience of fatherhood, then, is not mine. It depends upon my being united with a woman, my lady and wife, as all fathers have been united. (Promiscuity, and hence the fathering of “fatherless” children, is nobody’s ideal.)

Secondly, my experience of fatherhood is unfair. It is unfair because it absolutely cuts me off from ever being a mother. Here is a whole, rich, aspect of being human that I, because of my anatomy, am cut off from. I shall never, never, know the experience of bearing a child in my body. I shall never suckle an infant. I may dandle my babies, and change their diapers, and bathe them, and rock them to sleep, and kiss and fondle and love them (and I love all that): but I have not carried them in my womb, and nursed them at my breast. It is unfair. My wife has entered into mysteries that I cannot quite share. I may stand next to her at the delivery table (I did), but it is she and not I who is physically experiencing parturition.

But no. It is only some testy, crabbed, pinched, and mercenary frame of mind that will complain thus. It will be the frame of mind that is forever demanding equal time and equal shares and equal slices of the pie. Dear heaven! My wife got the whole pie of motherhood. Where’s the equality in this universe? Where’s the justice? I’m a second-class citizen! I protest! I demand …

No. No, no, no, say all lovers, and all mothers and fathers since Eden. What are you talking about? These mysteries of love, and of fruitfulness, and of birth and fatherhood and motherhood, know nothing at all of your calculating, political, committee-model language. Of course your wife got the whole pie, and she got it for one reason and one reason only, and that the worst possible reason: she is a woman. You are utterly discriminated against on the basis of your sex alone. You are cut off from the absolutely central human thing, if this is how you insist on seeing it.

So I am bidden to retreat from my headlong protestations of equality, as Peter was hushed up with his chattering on the Mount of Transfiguration, and to look again at the splendor unveiled.

I, like all men, have been united with this woman who brings as her great gift to me that aspect of the image of God which completes me. And I offer to her the only gift I can offer, my very limitation, namely, my manhood, which is that aspect of the divine image made to complete her, and which I bear. She was made to be a mother. Her womb awaits the fructifying seed. I was made to be a father. My loins offer that seed to the only matrix that will receive and vivify it. She was made to be a mother. Her breasts and arms await the infant who will find nourishment and comfort there. And I? What gift may I bring now? What role may I play in this unfolding drama? Have I only a bit part in the first scene, never to reappear until the curtain call?

It would not seem so. The image I bear, of maleness, and the role I enact, of husband and father, are deeper and more far-reaching than the single act of procreation. That forms part of my role, of course. But then?

Then I am still husband and father. It is my appointed gift, or burden, or yoke, to be husband and father, precisely because I am a man, it would seem. With respect to my wife, I am instructed by the Apostle to be “head.” Not boss: head. The Apostle gives me my cue here by referring to the headship of the divine bridegroom vis-á-vis his spouse. It is a headship brought as gift, not wielded as club, and offered—“submitted,” if you will—to her, for her, in obedience to the divine choreography, so to speak. I did not think it up.

What is this headship, if it is not boss-hood? Here again, I must take my cues from the Apostle, nay from the Lord himself: it seems to have something to do with answerability before God. Somehow I am the one who stands before the most high as the one responsible for this family. Responsible all by myself? Surely not, since I am made one with my spouse here. And yet, just as the one, single act of procreation distributed itself between the two of us for one single end, so here there is no question of exchanging roles, any more than there is of Christ, in the interest of his spouse’s health and freedom, stepping aside and saying, “Right. Now we adopt the round-table model.” What can it mean? I am not sure what it means, any more than I can unscramble and plot out the mystery of the Eucharist. But I obey, and in obeying, move perhaps slowly but nonetheless farther and farther, towards the place where I will be vouchsafed to see what it all means.

And with respect to my children? It means that I bear the yoke of fatherhood. Again, I did not make up the terms of this task. And I am unable, for reasons I have listed above, to assign it all to a dark plot, or to society’s stereotypes. I passionately believe that this ancient office is rooted in all the divine mysteries, and unfurled in Creation, and enjoined upon me and all fathers for as long as time lasts. Nothing new—but nothing outdated either.

I and my wife and our children live now, as everyone does, under the heady mythology of change. Our epoch is in the process of changing the terms of everything, not just politics, ecology, economics, and technology. Genetics, sexuality, morality—it is all to be redone. This mythology has a wide and eager hearing in the evangelical church, and very convincing voices plump for it. It frequently entails a delicate rewriting of the Bible, in the name of “biblical” radicalism. I would be one of those who are not prepared to whisk away the picture of family structures, say, as that has been understood by the prophets and fathers and the whole church, for all of history. No matter what the world is into which I usher my children, I will want them to have experienced a realm in which love and authority are synonymous, and where liberty and obedience are synonymous, and where something of what is true in the eternal realm is made present and visible in ordinary, flesh-and-blood family relationships. Unlike the Freudians, I do not believe that we have projected our human experience of fatherhood onto the cosmos and come up with the notion of God the Father. On the contrary, I believe that the Father has given us a little toe-hold into something of that eternal Fatherhood by giving to us the experience of fatherhood ourselves. I stand—frightening thought—in loco Dei for the moment towards my children.

This is dangerous language. It is dangerous on at least two counts. First, it may lead me to suppose that I am God, or can replace God, for my children, and this is false. Secondly, it may make it sound as though, if a man believes this, he has a guarantee of success in raising his children. Flere I must earnestly and hastily demur: my children, at the time of this writing, are seven and ten. The acid test is still to come. God in heaven alone knows how I’m doing in this role. I will write no books or articles on successful fatherhood—at least not until I am ninety, and both my children have turned out to be aging saints, and have raised their own crop of mature saints. Any time before that is too soon.

But how shall I understand this role of being, so to speak, in the place of God for my children? Is it not that I must understand that, just as great mysteries are both cloaked and revealed in the very imagery of maleness that I and every man bear, so in this household in which I find myself, the ancient role of father is appointed to me, as the ancient role of mother is appointed to my wife, and that we must do our best to learn our cues and lines, and to enact our roles as the playwright intended? How, for example, shall my children ever grasp the odd notion that it is love and not caprice or tyranny that demands obedience unless they discover this paradox at home? I want them to be familiar with this paradox so that they will already be familiar with the God whose love (not whose tyranny) makes high demands on us. And how shall they know that obedience and freedom are synonymous unless they are taught the steps in this strange dance at home? They will grow up in a world that thinks these ideas are outrageous and brutalizing, and that insists that the way towards freedom and authenticity lies in declaring our total independence of authority and in forging our own morality. How will anyone explain to them about the God “whose service is perfect freedom” if I have not somehow tried not only to teach them this, but to be this for them?

I may fail. But that will be, precisely, my failure. Perhaps I may step altogether aside here and point in a more sure direction. I point to my own father. He was a man oppressed with great burdens and limitations (he thought), and he suffered intensely over a sense of his own unworthiness. But to six children, all of them now aging, and all on the side of the angels, he stood, decade after decade, as an image of the Father. He loved us greatly, and he asked (and got) our obedience. The household was by no means a participatory democracy. That would have been a shabby betrayal. Obedience was nonnegotiable. Things ran on schedule. Order was of the essence. But lest this sound impossibly grim and Edwardian, it was also the most hilarious household I have ever encountered. We spent a good deal of our time laughing our heads off, mostly at each other. But the bedrock upon which the hilarious liberty was grounded was that we had a father who, in obedience to the ancient rubric, shouldered his yoke of fatherhood, with all that that has implied of primacy and headship, and carried it for the sake of his family; and a mother who understood in her innermost being what the great charge to our Mother Eve was—to be a help meet for this man. I am sure that our vision of God is to be attributed very heavily to our experience of love and authority embodied in our parents; and I would think that our vision of Christ and his Church is to be attributed very heavily to what we witnessed of this man and this woman enacting year after year before our eyes the corresponding (not interchangeable) roles of husband and wife.

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.