‘Where Are the Mainline Funnies?’

A friend of mine, a state university professor, recently suggested that the impact of our evangelical movement in recent years caught the liberal theological/ecclesiastical establishment by surprise. The reason: they had persuaded themselves that there were no bright men and women of evangelical persuasion.

Snake handlers, anti-intellectuals, King James Bible devotees, Sinclair Lewis creatures, mindless ranters, yes. Theologians, educators, top people in the arts, professions, business, government, communications, no.

Then suddenly bright evangelicals flooded the American scene.

Now a new tack seems to be developing. We may be bright, but we have an edge on the “funnies.” No less an authority than church historian Martin Marty assures us of this.

According to Marty, writing in Christian Century, there are no “mainline funnies,” only conservative (i.e., evangelical) ones.

I think he really means liberal mainliners, since he singles out a Southern Baptist and some conservative Episcopalians as laughable. (Tee-hee, chuckling, thighslapping, roaring laughable, to use Marty’s words.)

Hey, Marty—Anita Bryant is a “funny” and Malcolm Boyd isn’t? The Denver bishops are “funnies” but the House of Bishops who let James Pike destroy himself and devastate the church weren’t?

Marty quotes Arthur Koestler (in Janus, Random House): “We laugh because our emotions have a greater inertia and persistence than our reasoning processes.”

And it’s hard for bright people, even, to answer ridicule.

EUTYCHUS VIII

A Soothing Breeze

After reading the interview with Dr. Kantzer (April 7) I suspected that a fresh wind was blowing at CHRISTIANITY TODAY. After reading the article on evangelicals (“Evangelicals and the Inerrancy Question,” April 21) my suspicions have been confirmed. I, for one, want to express my appreciation to the selection committee and to Dr. Kantzer for providing us with a Christian statesman of his caliber.

I especially applaud his willingness to soothe the sores of the evangelical “radicals” (evidenced by the selection of questioners), yet unequivocally, albeit graciously, state his own convictions. I hope this spirit of reconciliation will be contagious through all the ranks of evangelicalism (in its broad sense).

Perhaps most encouraging is Kantzer’s predilection for orthopraxy along with his orthodoxy. I look forward to this emphasis in the pages of CHRISTIANITY TODAY and in the lives of its readers.

MARK PETTERSEN

Emporia, Kans.

I am thoroughly impressed. Dr. Kantzer’s inerrancy article is worth filing both for its boldness and balance. More important, it leaves us with no qualms as to his ability to edit a magazine of your caliber.

JIM CONGDON

Topeka Bible Church

Topeka, Kans.

I wish to express appreciation for CHRISTIANITY TODAY as a valuable resource in my ministry. Congratulations to Kenneth Kantzer as he assumes his editorial leadership. I look forward to the marks of his stated aims in future editions. His interview was excellent.

HERALD HASKELL

Community Christian Church

Twin Falls, Idaho

From one longtime subscriber, a sincere welcome to Kenneth Kantzer as editor. CHRISTIANITY TODAY had seemed to hit a nadir for me several years ago. Articles were becoming all too predictable, from a too-small number of contributing voices. Still I felt the subscription price was justified, if only for the unique quality of News and the annual book issue; for some time that was about the state of things.

With the coming of Harold Myra as publisher, a noticeable promise of rebirth seemed to emerge. I caught myself reading lead articles again. Some of the puffy pontificating of editorials turned towards more responsible interaction with complex issues. The Refiner’s Fire has offered quality and information more often than not. Minister’s Workshop seems to have greater variety and practicality of content. The magazine still helps more than any other in sorting out, “What’s being newly published that appears worth my investment of time to grapple with?” In short, this reader finds CHRISTIANITY TODAY presently more creative, informative, and stimulating than it was five years ago.

Dr. Kantzer’s broad experience and balanced integrity were evident in the April 7 interview. It is pleasing to see he has little romanticism concerning present evangelical problems and shortcomings. One senses that there is just enough “radical” in his notion of “radical biblical commitment” to promote increased kingdom usefulness for CHRISTIANITY TODAY in days to come.

MICHAEL A. ROGERS

Randall Memorial Baptist Church

Williamsville, N.Y.

Standing Ovation

About Leland Ryken’s article, “Were the Puritans Right About Sex?” (April 7): Bravo! Bravissimo! (ah-hemmm.… wonderfully refreshing).

FRED HYDE

Dallas, Tex.

I want to applaud the article by Leland Ryken. I consider it instructive, refreshing, and edifying.

SCOTT R. LONG

Belleville, Ill.

I must take issue with the article on Puritans. My knowledge of mainstream Puritan theology is, I admit, as small as Ryken assumes, but upon reading his account of church history in the fourth and fifth centuries, I am afraid that a grave shadow … is cast over the entire article.

I was astonished at the several blatant errors that reveal Ryken’s apparent disdain for the rich heritage we have in the early centuries of the church’s history. Indeed, Athanasius was a bishop of the fourth century, but to say that for him “the supreme message of Christ was the need for virginity” is preposterous. The man’s entire life was exhausted to preserve the very foundation of our faith, i.e., the doctrine of the Trinity. And then in the next paragraph to refer to Tertullian and Ambrose as having lived in the century after Athanasius shows nothing but shoddy research on the part of Ryken. Tertullian, in fact, was a Christian apologist in Carthage during the latter part of the second century. He died in 220 A.D., 80 years before Athanasius was even bom. Also, it would have been appreciated if Ryken had substantiated his summaries of the teachings of these church fathers. If he is going to take issue with them, they deserve at least that much respect.

As for Origen, he truly did castrate himself in the name of religion, but he is hardly a good representative of the early church’s view on virginity, for Ryken neglects to mention the fact that he was excommunicated from the church for that very act. In addition, several Egyptian synods of the third century, as well as the fifth and sixth Ecumenical Councils, branded him as a heretic and a rebel.

Finally, it was very grievous to me when he supposed that the apostate Council of Trent climaxed the teaching of the early church fathers. It did not.

It is obvious that Ryken lacks not only knowledge but also regard for the history of the early church. I would ask, Who was his teacher? Why would CHRISTIANITY TODAY print an article containing such disgraceful errors? Let me encourage Dr. Kantzer, as the new editor, to continue to safeguard the credibility of your magazine by printing articles that contain a little more respect for our church fathers and, if not respect, at least accuracy.

MARC DUNAWAY

Goleta, Calif.

• Origen was not excommunicated for that act.—ED.

Missing The Focus

In this review of my book Youth, Brainwashing and the Extremist Cults appearing in the March 24 issue, Mr. Melton comes to the inaccurate and unfortunate conclusion that I “advocate” kidnapping and all forms of deprogramming. My treatment of this controversial topic is essentially a description of the phenomenon, not a blanket endorsement.

Regardless of one’s views on the rightness or wrongness of deprogramming, to categorically conclude (as the reviewer does) that it “does not work,” is a gross distortion of the facts. Furthermore, Melton’s assertion that ex-cult members who have been deprogrammed are incapable of leading a normal life or are in need of long-term psychiatric treatment ignores the clear evidence to the contrary presented in my book and supported by the research of other behavioral scientists.

It is unfortunate that your readers were left with the impression that the focal concern of my book is deprogramming rather than the spiritual and psychological seduction of American young people by the cults.

RONALD M. ENROTH

Professor of Sociology

Westmont College

Santa Barbara, Calif.

The Purpose Of Pain

I commend Mr. Yancey on his fine article (“Pain: The Tool of the Wounded Surgeon,” March 24). However, the statement that no hymn has been dedicated to pain is not quite correct. Consider for instance, “More Love To Thee,” by Elizabeth Prentiss (1818–1878). The third stanza reads:

Let sorrow do its work,

Send grief and pain;

Sweet are Thy messengers,

Sweet their refrain,

When they can sing with me,

More love, O Christ, to Thee,

More love to Thee, More love to Thee!

Is this not the purpose of pain in essence? Too bad this is a third stanza—that’s why we missed it!

GARY L. HAMBURGER

Grace Evangelical Free Church

Sacramento, Calif.

Harold Lindsell moved out of his office last Friday. We are grateful for his leadership over the past decade. We wish him well and promise to pray for him as he turns his splendid gifts and abundant energies to new tasks. (He is not slowing down even at sixty-five.)

Don’t miss the Harvard Commencement Address of 1799 on page 30. It’s more evangelical than most you’ll hear this spring—and better and more up to date.

While the winter winds blew during January and February, I kept out of mischief by studying for (and passing, praise God!) the terrifying Virginia Bar examination. The object was not merely to be able to defend myself against libelous attacks from the Kin of Eutychus but more especially to gain additional expertise in integrating legal principle with theological truth. The interconnections between law and theology are particularly striking in the field of Wills & Estates, and we shall here offer some examples of the kind of cross-pollination that can aid the contemporary biblical interpreter.

The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews bases his entire theological argument on a foundational legal principle relating to the estates of decedents: “The blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, [shall] purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God. And for this cause he is the mediator of the New Testament, that by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first testament, they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance. For where a testament is, there must also of necessity be the death of the testator. For a testament is of force after men are dead: otherwise it is of no strength at all while the testator liveth” (Heb. 9:14–17).

From the days of Roman law to modern Anglo-American common law jurisprudence, the rule has been invariable: a testamentary expression “speaks”—becomes efficacious—not at execution but on the decease of the testator. American legal realist Joseph Walter Bingham might well have cited Hebrews when he declared: “The essential distinguishing characteristic of a will is that it has absolutely no effect as a legal instrument until the death of the testator, and is revocable until that time.” Christ’s death was not optional; his sacrifice of himself for men’s sins was the essential precondition for our receiving an eternal inheritance. Christians are first and foremost heirs—“heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ” (Rom. 8:17).

In a concrete sense the revelatory Scriptures, which offer us this eternal inheritance sealed with the blood of Christ, are the final testamentary expression of Christ himself. It is not accidental that the two grand divisions of the Bible are called the Old and New Testaments. Viewing the Bible in this light we may be able more adequately to interpret it and more readily to avoid errors so often attendant on its misinterpretation.

The fundamental perspective for the construction of wills has been well expressed by Albert Martin Kales: “In a will, which is wholly the act of the testator, the test is what did the particular individual mean by the words he used.… Within limits he may make his own standard.… In cases where the difficulty is in ascertaining the subject matter of a devise or the object which is to benefit by the devise, … outside evidence becomes extremely valuable.… [But] in endeavoring to ascertain what kind of an estate a testator intended to devise,.… the introduction of outside evidence does nothing more than furnish the ground for a cheap and easy speculation founded upon a most inadequate view of what went on in the testator’s mind.”

There is, to be sure, nothing unique about these rules: they apply to the entire range of legal documents—though with greatest force to wills, since wills are not the product of a meeting of minds, mutuality, or commonly established interpretation, but the unique expression of a person’s testamentary intent. Concerning the interpretation of legal documents in general Lord Bacon offered these telling aphorisms:

“Interpretation that departs from the letter of the text is not interpretation but divination.

“When the judge departs from the letter, he turns into a legislator.”

Sir Roland Burrows makes the point with admirable clarity: “The Court has to take care that evidence is not used to complete a document which the party has left incomplete or to contradict what he has said, or to substitute some other wording for that actually used, or to raise doubts, which otherwise would not exist, as to the intention. When evidence is admitted in connection with interpretation, it is always restricted to such as will assist the Court to arrive at the meaning of the words used, and thus to give effect to the intention so expressed.”

Why are we seemingly belaboring this point? Because of the tragic departure from such standards of literal, textual interpretation of the Bible in the church today. Modern theology has done perhaps its greatest harm to classical Christian faith through what has come to be known as the “new hermeneutic”—a radical approach (really, a potpourri of radical approaches) to the interpretation and treatment of the Bible. In general, modern interpreters refuse to be held to the fundamental rule of classical biblical hermeneutics that “Scripture must interpret itself.” Because the contemporary theologian does not regard the Bible as a qualitatively unique divine revelation, he constantly employs extrabiblical materials (such as, ancient nonbiblical Near Eastern documents, modern scientific and social theories) to structure and recast the scriptural data. Thus the Creation account in Genesis is construed—on the basis of extrinsic evolutionary considerations—not to intend to teach how the world came about (but only that God created it), in spite of its clear and repeated stress on the creation of each species “after its kind”; alleged scientific “impossibilities” transmute the account of Noah and the Flood—which could hardly teach more plainly a universal deluge—into a minor Near Eastern drizzle; ancient extra-biblical literary parallels are allowed (by fallacious post hoc, propter hoc reasoning) to contradict the veracity of Jesus’ own affirmations of the Mosaic and Davidic authorship of Old Testament books; and modern rationalistic antipathies to the supernatural provide hermeneutic justification for construing our Lord’s miraculous ministry as little more than a morality play.

Here indeed we have the “divination”—as opposed to interpretation—Lord Bacon warned against. Such an approach is the death of all meaningful understanding of Scripture—as it would be in reference to legal documents too were jurists to enter on the same suicidal hermeneutic course.

But as with wills, deeds, and statutes, the faithful interpreter of the Bible will construe the text “in manner to give it validity rather than invalidity”; will operate with a “presumption against absurdity”; and, once the clear meaning of the text has been determined, will accept its application and enforcement in his life “though the result may seem harsh or unfair or inconvenient” (C. E. Odgers, The Construction of Deeds and Statutes, fourth edition, 1956, pp. 186, 188). The believing Christian interpreter of the testamentary Scripture will assume that in reference to it also “every part of a will means something and must be given effect and harmonized, if possible, by construing it in connection with all other parts” (F. H. Childs); and he will interpret the Old Testament always in light of the New on the ground that “the last testamentary expression prevails.”

Singapore is a swamp-to-riches story. For centuries the island at the foot of the Malay peninsula was little more than a mangrove swamp. Only Malay fishermen paid it much heed. In 1819 the legendary Sir Stanford Raffles of the British East India Company, impressed by the island’s harbor possibilities, built a trading post there. The island soon became a British colony, noted for its middle-man role in international trade. Immigrants poured in, mostly from southern China, to work in rapidly developing rubber and tin industries. Self rule came in 1959. A two-year experiment as a member state of the new nation of Malaysia ended in 1965 when leaders concluded that the island could make out better on its own.

Singapore today is a booming modern metropolis and Southeast Asia’s leading port, the fourth largest in the world. It is the queen city and garden spot of the Orient. The government is fairly clean, and so is the social exterior. The well-groomed downtown streets, lined by trees and scrubbed frequently by afternoon tropical showers, are not marred by the seamy bars and massage parlors that plague many other big cities. Pockets of poverty exist within the city republic’s 226 square miles, but the per capita income of its 2.3 million residents—75 per cent of them Chinese—is the largest in Southeast Asia. The city is also a beehive of Christian activity, and what is happening among Christians there may have important significance for all of Asia.

About half of the Chinese population (English and Hokkien Chinese are the main languages) is identified with traditional Chinese religion, including Buddhism. Ten per cent or so of the Chinese profess Christianity, but the majority of the other Chinese are not associated with any faith. Malaysians comprise 15 per cent of the population, and most are Muslims. Indians, whose forbears were imported as cheap labor by the British, account for 8 per cent of the population; about three-fourths are Hindus.

Chinese Protestants and Roman Catholics are rather evenly divided numerically. Anglican and Catholic missionaries arrived shortly after Raffles set up his trading post, the Plymouth Brethren came in 1856, and the Methodists began work in 1885. The Methodists, with about 15,000 members, are the largest of the Protestant bodies. The Anglicans have about 6,000 members and there are strong minorities of Presbyterians, Plymouth Brethren, and Pentecostals. About half of the congregations are English speaking.

A number of Christian leaders acknowledged in recent interviews that a “spiritual upsurge” began in the early 1970s, and they said its impact has been felt in most of the churches. They pointed to rapidly growing congregations, the spreading house-church phenomenon, the influx of large numbers of young people (more than half of all Singaporeans are under age 25), the burgeoning charismatic movement (especially among Catholics and Anglicans), the increasing interest in full-time Christian work on the part of young people, and the emergence of evangelical emphases in circles once considered theologically liberal. There are an estimated 100 Bible-study and prayer groups that meet in downtown offices, some before work, some after, but most during lunch hour. One lawyer, Hin Hiong Khoo, hosts a Tuesday lunch-hour session in a penthouse; between 200 and 300 persons attend. Twelve Christian bookstores are located in the city and their sales are spiralling.

It is not the first time the island has experienced a spiritual awakening. Many of the current pastors and church leaders were converted before World War II during a revival led by famed Chinese evangelist John Sung, according to physician-pharmacist Benjamin Chew, 71. Still carrying on an active medical practice, Chew is an example of the seemingly indefatigable and committed Christian leadership one repeatedly encounters in Singapore. He is president of the Youth for Christ and Keswick Conference boards of directors, chairman of the Overseas Missionary Fellowship (OMF) Council of Singapore, chairman of the official board at the 600-member Bethesda Katong Church (Plymouth Brethren), and he is active in the Christian Business Men’s Committee and the Gideons. He is also general chairman of the week-long Billy Graham crusade that will be held in a 60,000-seat stadium in early December. Chew is confident that the Graham rallies will attract capacity crowds. Evangelist Grady Wilson of the Graham team held a campaign in 1965 that was attended by capacity audiences of 3,500-plus at the National Theater. “That was a big crowd in those days,” says Chew. Nowadays the annual week-long Keswick conferences on deeper spiritual life attract that many to the theater location.

Fifty years ago, says Chew, there were few Christians and no missionaries. For the most part, church growth has been slow but steady over the years since then, he adds, with big boosts during the Sung and present-day awakening. Virtually all of the Chinese-speaking churches have remained evangelical throughout the years, he says. The Methodist churches, some with the reputation for liberalism, have become more evangelical over the past five years, he affirms. As proof, he points to young pastors who studied at liberal U.S. seminaries but who “are preaching the Gospel now.” Even the church’s top leadership, says Chew, “is on fire”—an assessment confirmed by several lay Methodists. The largest Protestant church in Singapore is Wesley Methodist with more than 1,000 members. Its pastor, Tony Chi, is an evangelical.

The switch to evangelical views among liberals, Chew believes, can be attributed in part to the evangelical orientation of the charismatic movement, which many have joined. “The movement has some negative aspects,” he says, “but there is a genuine core that is truly of the Holy Spirit.” For the most part, he comments, non-charismatics and charismatics are getting along fairly well with each other. One of the most interesting results of the charismatic influence, says Chew, can be seen among Roman Catholics. Many individuals now speak of a personal relationship with Christ that they never had before. Catholic priests and school principals regularly invite Protestant evangelical evangelists to speak in their churches and schools.

Anglican bishop Ban It Chiu is a frequent speaker at charismatic gatherings, and he leads a teaching session on Friday night at Saint Andrews cathedral. He reportedly became a charismatic during a period of spiritual frustration while attending the controversial 1973 “Salvation Today” conference in Bangkok, sponsored by the World Council of Churches. He was joined a short time later by canon James Wong, who had just returned from study at Fuller Seminary in California.

Wong, like many charismatics from non-Pentecostal backgrounds, does not believe that tongues is the necessary sign of Spirit baptism. He did not speak in tongues until months later, but he insists that the initial experience he had was a valid charismatic one: “The Holy Spirit touched my life.”

The Holy Spirit moved among many other Anglicans, says Wong, and one result has been ten new Anglican congregations in the past four years. Six are house churches with strong lay leadership and an average attendance of about fifty each. “People in this city are basically responsive and open to the Gospel,” affirms Wong, “but they are hesitant about entering a traditional church.” House churches, he indicates, provide a way around the problem. Not all house churches remain that way. Saint James Church, which began in a house in 1975, now has its own building and a congregation that numbers more than 200.

Charismatic activity among Anglicans is confined largely to the four English-speaking congregations; those in the twenty-one Chinese-language congregations tend to frown on the movement. The renewal, says Wong, has led to evangelistic fervor. It has also prompted new worship styles. Communion services are more informal and believer’s baptism by immersion is practiced. Many of the charismatic house congregations in Singapore gather in one place several times a year for a joint worship and celebration service. Thousands attended a conference on renewal in March.

Wong, a key figure today in worldwide evangelical leadership ranks, believes that the masses of Singaporeans “have a greater God consciousness than ever before,” and he believes that the city spiritually may be on the verge of something big.” Meanwhile, he has taken a leave of absence from parish duties at the 300-communicant Church of the Good Shepherd to minister to the various house groups and to head up coordination of an Asian Christian leadership conference. The conference will bring hundreds of pastors, missionaries, and lay leaders to Singapore in November from throughout the Orient. Evangelistic outreach strategy will be uppermost on their agenda. Most recently Wong has been busy with other Singapore Christian leaders in last month’s Congress on Evangelism for Malaysia and Singapore.

The charismatic movement has gained a wide following among business and professional people. Among the most prominent is Ewe Kheng Goh, 53, a third generation Christian who owns a photo supply firm. He is president of the local Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International chapter and chairman of the local Gideons branch, a rehabilitation ministry for ex-criminals, and the Chinese section of the Scripture Union organization. He is also an elder of the independent Church of Singapore and treasurer of the Graham crusade committee.

Of Plymouth Brethren background, Goh became a charismatic fourteen years ago under the preaching of a Pentecostal woman evangelist. Goh opened his home for meetings and invited the evangelist to preach. The Brethren, however, “did not want our converts,” says Goh with a chuckle, “so we started a house church for them.” Some 1,000 have been baptized since then, he says, and the house congregation has become the Church of Singapore, with from 450 to 500 at two services on Sunday mornings. It is led by ordained clergy.

Another turned-on businessman is Goh’s son-in-law, Jimmy Teo, 27. Teo is a financier who heads a brokerage firm known as the M. G. (for Mission Group) Corporation. Teo says he founded the company primarily to underwrite missionary projects. There are 3,000 islands south and east of Singapore in Indonesia, he says, and “people there are really open and responding to the Gospel.” So far, Teo has supported forty short-term missionaries working among the many poor people—including one million Chinese—on several nearby islands. His missionary teams have built two churches on the islands.

Teo also wants to demonstrate that Christian principles can be applied to business management. Too many Christian businessmen compromise those principles, he believes. Among those he’s most wary about, he says, are certain itinerant American missionaries and evangelists who have allegedly bilked him and other businessmen, including Goh, out of thousands of dollars.

Another businessman touched by the charismatic movement is Oon Theam Khoo, a management consultant and former university teacher with a Methodist background. Both he and his wife, a stockbroker with Anglican roots, were educated in American colleges. Their faith did not become real until a medical crisis occurred in the family, they say. Under the ministry of bishop Chiu they experienced renewal in 1976. They launched a house meeting where from 140 to 180 gather on Saturday nights and 30 to 60 on Wednesday nights for Bible-study. Among the regulars are several Catholic priests. Everyone is expected to attend his or her own church on Sundays. An average fifteen or so persons are baptized every two weeks, say the Khoos, who attend both Christ Methodist Church and the Church of Singapore.

The openness of the population to the Gospel was demonstrated graphically in the Here’s Life Singapore effort sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ a year ago. Spearheading it was Victor Koh, 28, who has been Campus Crusade’s Singapore national director since 1975. Koh and his staff of twenty-four spent one year preparing for the campaign. They trained 7,000 volunteer workers from 110 churches and raised about $100,000 locally. Koh says 25,000 persons were contacted individually as a result of the media phase of the campaign. Of these, 9,100—more than one-third—prayed to receive Christ, reports Koh, and more than 5,000 enrolled in Bible-study classes and other follow-up programs. Many are now members of churches.

Koh, who is chairman of English-speaking work at the 600-constituent Geylang Methodist Church, believes that Here’s Life did something for the entire Christian community. The effort was, he says, the greatest show of Christian unity in the history of Protestant work in Singapore. It was the first time that Chinese-speaking and English-speaking churches came together for cooperative ministry. A national prayer movement was launched, enlisting a record 8,000 in an around-the-clock prayer campaign. It was the first time that media were used so extensively in evangelism, and telephone outreach was discovered to be extremely effective in overcoming urban barriers, says Koh. Congregations and individuals have been sensitized to evangelistic endeavor as a result of Here’s Life, he adds. The number of churches have organized witness teams, some churches have had to add services to accommodate increased attendance, and some churches have spawned other churches. There are now a greater number of trained Christians, states Koh, and all of this should make planning of the Graham crusade easier.

Koh indicates that university students are especially responsive to Christian witness. He believes that one out of every four that are approached effectively will become a follower of Christ. Some 16,000 were approached with the Gospel on campuses last year, he says, and 4,000 of them professed faith in Christ.

In addition to Campus Crusade, the Navigators and Varsity Christian Fellowship (related to Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship) are engaged in outreach on university campuses. Varsity has 300 members, with 600 in contact groups. Leaders say that the ratio of Christian students to the university population is higher than the ratio figures in the general population.

Youth for Christ, with a staff of twenty, works with public high school students in fifty YFC clubs. More than 1,000 professions of faith were registered last year, according to YFC records. Experienced journalists on YFC’s staff publish Impact, an impressive slick-paper magazine that is one of the best sources of Christian news on the island. The Scripture Union organization has a ministry to students at mission-operated schools.

Victor Koh says that he hopes Singapore will become increasingly a missionary-sending base. Missionaries have already gone from Singaporean churches to the Philippines, Thailand, New Zealand, and even Africa. Koh himself plans to become a missionary for a three-year term with Campus Crusade in the Philippines. Christian higher education will assume greater importance as more young people prepare for church-related locations. Among the Christian schools are:

• Trinity Theological College, supported by the mainline denominations. Its sixty-five or so students receive a theologically liberal education, but observers say that the influence of the charismatic movement on campus has tempered some positions.

• Singapore Bible College, a thirty-year-old independent evangelical school with 100 students. It has had to turn away applicants and a $450,000 program is underway to remedy the space problem.

• Far East Bible College, a Bible Presbyterian school with about two dozen students.

• Discipleship Training Center, an evangelical project with between one and two dozen students engaged in graduate-level study.

There are several other small schools, including a Seventh-day Adventist one. The Baptist and Pentecostal churches normally send their students to schools in neighboring Malaysia.

Several Singaporeans were among the 162 participants from fourteen countries who attended the Chinese World Missions Seminar in Baguio, the Philippines, in March. It was sponsored by the Hong Kong-based Chinese Coordination Center of World Evangelism, an offspring of the 1974 Lausanne evangelization congress. The conferees were reminded that more than 800 million Chinese reside in mainland China and that an estimated 38 million live elsewhere around the world. Of about 4,000 Chinese congregations, only 110 participate in the global missionary endeavor, a seminar leader noted. He also said that 403 active Chinese missionaries are at work in nine countries, but only twenty are engaged in cross-cultural ministry.

Deaths

C. ADRIAN HEATON, 63, former president of the American Baptist Seminary of the West; in Pacific Palisades, California, after a long illness.

THOMAS MACDONALD, 87, long-time missionary leader and emeritus general director of the Bible Christian Union mission agency; in Quarryville, Pennsylvania.

U.S. missiologist Ralph Winter almost brought the seminar participants out of their chairs when he declared: “The early church sent its best men, Paul and Barnabas, out to be missionaries. So should the Chinese church today. Do not think that only the young people should go. Chinese churches should [also] send their most seasoned leaders.”

It’s a sure thing that Singaporeans will be among those who answer the call.

The Growing Issue: Saints in Sodom?

The media spotlight will focus attention this month on the United Presbyterian homosexuality debate, but that does not mean that homosexuality is not just as live an issue in other denominations. As the Presbyterian General Assembly in San Diego decides whether to accept a task force report regarding ordination of avowed homosexuals, other religious groups are passing resolutions, publishing studies, issuing orders, and otherwise getting into the controversy.

Release of the United Presbyterian document in January (see February 10 issue, page 48) has stirred an avalanche of protests from that church’s members in official and unofficial gatherings (see March 10 issue, page 62). Sessions (local congregational boards) and presbyteries (district governing units) have turned out a variety of pronouncements which say, in effect, that regardless of what the San Diego meeting does, they will not ordain avowed, practicing homosexuals. Many of the documents will reach the denomination’s top governing body in San Diego as official communications.

The intensity of feeling on the subject was demonstrated last month when the United Presbyterian Twin Cities Area (Minneapolis-St. Paul) Presbytery spent four hours discussing it. The district body, which usually supports liberal causes, concluded the meeting by simply asking the general assembly to take more time before deciding the ordination question. A resolution opposing homosexual ordination was defeated by a vote of 98 to 111. The presbytery also tabled a motion which would have put it on record in opposition to removing some legal protection for homosexuals in a St. Paul city ordinance.

Ordination of a lesbian in the Episcopal Church two years ago started an uproar that continues despite the departure into the new Anglican Church of North America of many objectors. Homosexuals within the Episcopal Church have done their part to keep the controversy going. “I know several homosexual bishops,” author-priest Malcolm Boyd, himself an avowed homosexual, said late last year in a news conference announcing formation of the “Committee for Justice in the Episcopal Church.” The panel was established to put pressure on the bishops on the issue of women and homosexuals as priests. A New York vicar, Henry Sturtevant, said the committee had the support of a group of bishops who were unwilling at that point to be identified publicly. Boyd complained that since he announced his sexual orientation more than a year ago he has been “totally unemployable.”

One of the reasons cited for formation of the committee was the stand taken by the Episcopal House of Bishops at Port St. Lucie, Florida, late last year. The statement passed by that body declared that ordaining practicing homosexuals would “require the church’s sanction of such a life-style not only as acceptable but worthy of emulation.” The position was based on a report written by a theology committee headed by Bishop John H. Burt of Ohio. At a meeting of Burt’s diocese early this year the House of Bishops stand was reaffirmed, but the vote was less than an overwhelming reaffirmation. In the clergy section, only forty-two of the eighty priests approved the ban on homosexual ordination. The lay delegates approved it by a wider two-thirds margin.

Six hundred Southern Baptists attending a national “life style” seminar heard a University of Louisville professor call for decriminalization of homosexuality after saying that ordination of homosexuals was contrary to biblical teaching. Henlee L. Barnette drew applause from the Nashville audience when he stated, “It is incredible that the Southern Baptist Convention … would call for the denial of basic civil rights of a minority group on the basis of sexual orientation.” He was referring to a 1977 convention resolution that commended the campaign of Anita Bryant and others against a Miami ordinance that guaranteed certain rights to homosexuals. Barnette, professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Louisville medical school, said, “If churches really believe in the Christian and democratic way of life, they should work actively to decriminalize laws against homosexual behavior between consenting adults, to eliminate discriminatory laws in employment, housing, and public facilities.”

The Louisville professor called on churches to admit homosexuals as members “if they meet the criteria applied to any other prospective member and seek to follow the biblical norms for sexual expression.” Taking a harder line on ordination, he noted that a minister “is to exemplify the Christian ideal in all areas of life, including sexual behavior.” Thus, he contended, ordaining such a person violated clear biblical teaching. He said there is “no single passage in the Scripture that supports sex relations between consenting male adults,” and general condemnation of such acts is found in both the Old and New Testaments.

In the United Methodist Church the discussion has warmed up considerably since the denominational “gay” caucus and New York City’s Washington Square United Methodist Church sponsored an “educational conference” on homosexuality late last year. The highly publicized meeting called attention to the fact that the host pastor, Paul Abels, was an avowed homosexual and conducted “covenant” services to unite same-sex lovers. When his bishop, W. Ralph Ward, was asked about his conduct he responded that he would not use his appointive power to “go on witch hunts.” He noted that the congregation had asked for Abels to be returned but that an appointment elsewhere in the New York Methodist Conference for the minister was unlikely.

Bishop Edward G. Carroll of Boston was one of the conference speakers, appearing as “a deeply concerned person” but not “for the United Methodist Church,” said a United Methodist Communications report. He said some lesbians convinced him “their relational love was based on the Christian value of enhancing the other rather than the self.” On the question of ordination the bishop said, “I would want to make a decision on the basis of each individual person because of the multilithic definition of homosexuality.”

Another speaker was Charlotte Bunch, an associate at the Public Resource Center, Washington, and formerly president of both the Methodist Student Movement and the interdenominational University Christian Movement. “As an affirmed lesbian,” she said, “I want to be seen as capable of being a minister, not ministered to.” She charged the church with being one of the architects of homophobia (fear of homosexuals).

Even though the event at Washington Square church drew only 100 participants, it drew fire from across Methodism. Charles W. Keysor, founder of the “Good News” evangelical movement within the denomination, immediately demanded that four bishops be disciplined for their open “support” of homosexual activists in the church. In addition to Bishop Ward of New York and Bishop Carroll of Boston, the “Good News” leader singled out Bishop Melvin Wheat of Denver and Bishop James Armstrong of the Dakotas, who sent greetings to the Washington Square event. An editorial in the evangelical movement’s magazine warned that unless action is taken against the bishops a constitutional crisis will develop in Methodism.” The Council of Bishops was asked to “act decisively in order to protect their corporate and individual credibility before the church.”

Another issue that has stirred up some United Methodists is the discovery this year of a Gay Rights National Lobby desk in the Methodist Building on Washington’s Capitol Hill. The denomination’s Board of Church and Society is the landlord for the valuable office space, and a variety of organizations have leased quarters for lobbying activity there. The board did not lease directly to the homosexual lobby, the Texas-based United Methodist Reporter learned after a Texas pastor asked the paper about the group. The weekly, which publishes regional editions all over the nation, reported that the lobbying organization sub-leased from the homosexual Metropolitan Community Church. MCC has been in the building since 1975. Until this year, however, no one had publicly questioned the propriety of having the MCC there. When the Reporter asked the Board of Church and Society executive George Outen if MCC was not a national federation of homosexual congregations, he responded that he did not know but would confer with the agency’s officials to find out. The board is scheduled to review its spaceleasing policies at a meeting this month.

The ferment over the sexuality issue has also hit the Jewish community. There is a four-year-old synagogue in New York’s Greenwich Village that sometimes attracts more than 300 homosexuals to its services. The New York Times reported, “Now, it is part of New York life, involved in United Jewish Appeal fund-raising efforts, tree-plantings in Israel, and offering classes in Hebrew.” An article in Judaism, the scholarly quarterly of the American Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress, suggested this year that such congregations could be recognized if they do not restrict their leadership or membership to homosexuals.

Leaders of seven national Orthodox Jewish organizations were not as kind to the homosexual movement in a statement issued in February. “This moral rot has reached the point where the security and very existence of our republic is in peril,” they declared in a joint statement. “The Law of Sinai, which is the foundation of our civilization and of our legal system, must not be replaced by the law of Sodom and Gomorrah.” They condemned the homosexual rights movement as a “cancer [that] must be permanently removed from our midst.”

Roman Catholics have waded into the fray also, but most bishops in America have stood firm against the cries for official recognition and support of homosexuals as priests and teachers. In Australia, however, a prominent Jesuit educator has come up with the idea of a patron saint for homosexuals. In a booklet published late last year Desmond O’Connor suggested the adoption of St. Aelred of Rievaulx, a Twelfth Century English monk, who probably “deflowered his chastity” in “an intimate friendship” with Earl Henry, son of King David of Scotland. “Aelred,” wrote the Jesuit, “must have been one of the most loving and lovable men who ever lived.”

Love and Marriage

More than 1.5 million men and women lived together out of wedlock in 1977, according to a U.S. Census Bureau study released last month. The study shows that more than one-fourth of these persons were under age 25. The total figure represents an increase of 14 per cent over the 1976 findings and a whopping 131 per cent increase over the 1970 total.

The study also notes a “dramatic upsurge” in the divorce rate. There are now eighty-four divorced persons for every 1,000 who are married—a 79 per cent increase since 1970, says the report. (Divorce increased by 34 per cent between 1960 and 1970.) The study shows that there are 8.1 million persons who are divorced and have not remarried.

Other findings:

• Most of the recent increase in divorce has been among younger couples.

• Women stay divorced longer before remarriage, and have a lower incidence of remarriage.

• The number of women from age 20 through age 24 who have never married increased from 28 per cent in 1960 to 45 per cent last year. Among men, the proportion increased from 53 per cent to 64 per cent during the same period. “The postponement of marriage among young adults is one of the most notable trends regarding marriage and family living in recent years,” says the study.

• The median age of first marriage among men was 24 and for women 21.6, an increase for both sexes of one full year since the mid-1960s.

Forecast: Cloudy But Dry

Prohibition is still an issue in some parts of the nation. Voters in the Chicago suburban village of Winnetka turned out in record numbers last month to decide whether a ban on sale of liquor would be continued for another four years. In the forefront of those in favor of ending the ban were restaurant owners (and apparently many of their patrons), who pointed to the increased revenues for the village coffer from liquor taxes. Leading the opposition were members of Winnetka Bible Church. The church’s pastor, David S. Gotaas, had urged members to get involved. Some of the 700 members circulated among commuters at train stations and handed out pamphlets urging a “yes” vote for “quality of life.” Others quietly spread the word among neighbors and friends.

Local elections in Winnetka usually attract between 150 and 200 to the polls. This time, 2,332 turned out, and they voted to keep the village dry (but by only 186 votes).

In the past five years a number of neighboring communities have gone from dry to wet, including Evanston—home of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

KAREN MULLER

Congo Crackdown

The Marxist government of the People’s Republic of the Congo has banned more than thirty religious groups—including the Assemblies of God and the Seventh-day Adventist Church—and all religious youth organizations, according to a report published by the Ecumenical Press Service (EPS). In explaining its recent action, the Brazzaville government said that the groups were dissolved because their aims and activities did not agree with the general interests of the nation and its revolution. Buildings, furniture, and other property owned by the groups were confiscated, said the EPS report.

Seven denominations and organizations were permitted to continue their existence: the Roman Catholic Church, the Muslim Committee of the Congo, the Evangelical Church of the Congo (affiliated with the World Council of Churches), the Salvation Army, and three indigenous sects.

The remaining religious groups, however, are no longer permitted to teach religion to young people, EPS was told. The only recognized youth organization now is the Union of the Socialist Youth of the Congo—the youth wing of the nation’s sole political party.

Religion in Transit

West German police are engaged in an extensive search for members of the Children of God sect, according to European press reports. COG leaders have been accused of “inciting” young people to become involved in prostitution, robbery, blackmail, and pornography. Government investigators reportedly have identified some 120 hostel-type residences in West Germany where COG members practice procurement and prostitution.

Higher education regents of the Baptist General Conference have decided to close 172-student Vancouver Bible College over the objections of its president. Bob Anderson. A denominational official said that during the twenty-one years of Baptist General Conference ownership it produced only twenty-four graduates for the church’s Canadian ministry after an investment of $1.25 million. Currently the debt is $700,000.

The last remaining state law banning clergymen from holding public office, Tennessee’s, was declared unconstitutional last month by the Supreme Court. The test case arose from the election of Chattanooga minister Paul A. McDaniel to a state constitutional convention.

Sunday school attendance is off sharply in Canada. The Anglican Diocese of Toronto reported an enrollment drop of 68.6 percent from 1962 to 1976. In the same period the United Church of Canada Sunday school enrollment dropped 62.1 per cent.

Eden Publishing House, established in 1850 by a predecessor of the United Church of Christ, has been closed. Also going out of business was the Eden-Heidleberg Bookstore of St. Louis.

The Gutenberg Bible owned by General Theological Seminary, the first complete Gutenberg sold in more than fifty years, brought a record $2 million last month. Germany’s Stuttgart Library was the buyer.

The nation’s first woman divinity school dean, Sally Teselle of Vanderbilt, has resumed her maiden surname, McFague, after a divorce from Gene Teselle of the faculty. The first woman to be regularly ordained to the Episcopal priesthood in the United States, Jacqueline Means, has filed for divorce from her husband of twenty-five years, Dalton Means.

Uruguay, like most Latin American countries, has been in a state of turmoil in recent years, but you would never know it by walking down Montevideo’s bustling main street, the Eighteenth of July Street. Pushing, elbowing your way along the crowded sidewalk any night of the week, you encounter handsome, well-dressed couples, young and old, holding hands, stopping to window-shop, and lining up for movies, apparently as carefree as anyone anywhere.

It’s difficult to imagine that during the last decade or so, this country was torn by terrorist attacks, retaliation by the government, and then a take-over by a military regime which rules with an iron hand … shooting and arresting first and asking questions later. There has been a great amount of criticism of the military government. U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance declared in February that Uruguay was one of the three worst violators of human rights. The Organization of American States decided not to hold its next General Assembly in Montevideo because of the government’s human rights record. The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a church-related agency, charged that between mid-1972 and the end of 1977, over 60,000 Uruguayans had passed through the jails. That is one out of every forty-five residents. At least half of them, WOLA declared, were submitted to psychological and physical torture.

But you would never suspect this background by observing what seems to be a tranquil people concerned only with making a living and getting some pleasure out of life. What does seem believable is that Uruguayans are materialistic. Uruguay is said to have the third highest standard of living in all of Latin America. There is no poverty when compared with many Latin American nations. With the materialism there is atheism. A Gallup poll showed that 30 per cent claim to be atheist. Even religious holidays are known by secular titles. Holy Week is called “Tourism Week” and “Beer Week.” The day of the “Immaculate Conception” is called “Beach Day.”

The Roman Catholic Church and the mainline Protestant churches have lost influence, and there are some observers of the scene who say the reason is that the leaders got involved with the left-wing terrorists influenced by Communists from the outside. They say that when a priest or a preacher puts down his Bible and takes up a gun, he loses his right to spiritual leadership. And when religious leaders work for the overthrow of the government, they can expect the government to impose restrictions on them. During the violence, three U.S. embassy officials were kidnapped by the terrorists. One American was killed. The first ransom demand was not for money for the release of prisoners, but for a field hospital, an indication of the long-range plans. An American who was there through the turmoil says you have to understand the climate of fear that existed, in order to understand fierce government crack-down.

Emilio Castro, who was president of the Methodist organization in Uruguay and a leader of the ecumenical movement, had to leave the country because of his association with the Tupameros—the terrorists. (He is now a World Council of Churches executive in Geneva.) An evangelical missionary said the Methodists had over forty churches in Uruguay a few years ago, but that there are no more than twenty-five functioning now. He said attendance at Methodist churches is probably only 15 or 20 per cent of what it was a decade ago. Catholics have lost their leadership, too, for similar reasons.

Uruguay has lost moral leadership that would normally come from political leaders, also. Nobody wants to get involved in politics, and couldn’t anyway, because the military government will tolerate no opposition … from political parties, the press, or anyone. The government is containing terrorism, but providing little leadership beyond that.

Surveying the Latin American picture, evangelist Luis Palau and his team decided Uruguay was the place and April, 1978, was the time to test a concept of reaching and influencing an entire nation for Christ. Palau said, “We feel that there is such a vacuum of spiritual leadership in Latin America that it is the perfect time for evangelicals to move in and in the name of the Lord take nations for Christ.”

The motto for the Uruguay crusade was “Let All of Uruguay Hear the Voice of God.” To accomplish this, crusades were set up in six cities: Colonia, Paysandu, Rivera, Minas, Melo, and Montevideo. Before and during the crusades, there were 108 television programs and 661 radio programs. Almost every night, following the big rally, the evangelist had a half-hour live television program called “Palau Responds,” in which he answered telephone calls from viewers. One of the meetings in Montevideo was broadcast live to the entire nation on a network of thirty-one radio stations. Palau called it “just an overwhelming saturation, like I don’t believe any country has been saturated, ever. We’ve done a lot in other times and other countries, but never like this.”

The availability of radio and television time is one of the reasons Palau believes this is the day of opportunity for evangelicals in Latin America. A few years ago, evangelicals could not even dream of getting radio and television time, but the mass media are wide open now.

Along with the big rallies and the radio and television programs, Palau incorporated two unique features in his crusade: establishment of new churches and operation of family counseling centers. The goal was to open 250 new house churches. Through pre-crusade efforts, over 140 new house churches had been started. This was before Palau arrived for the crusade push.

The counseling centers were open during the day in each crusade city and supervised by team member Jim Williams. Many persons with problems would not go to the stadium, but they did go to the counseling centers. By the end of the Uruguay crusade, Williams estimated 600 persons had come to the centers for help.

Palau believes all of this had an impact far beyond the persons who attended meetings, or even the 8,000 who responded to invitations to accept Christ. Estimated cumulative attendance was 101,000. He believes the results will be felt for years. Existing evangelical churches have been rejuvenated and encouraged. Some churches are expected to double in size because of the new crusade converts. The churches have learned to work together, whereas they have worked separately in the past, local leaders said. And the evangelical image has been changed.

The evangelist remembers his boyhood days in Argentina when evangelicals were considered third class citizens and suffered from an inferiority complex. He says they were a “despised minority, treated as though they were nothing and didn’t amount to anything.” Part of his mission has been to show the non-Christian world that evangelicals are respectable people, intelligent people, up-to-date, and willing to question things. He believes the Uruguay crusade helped to change the image, so that middle and upper classes listened. In some cities he had luncheons with leading businessmen, and teas with the wives of community leaders. Members of the press sought him out for interview, which was a turnaround from the days when he had to try to find a reporter to try to get some news coverage. In Montevideo, a newsman told one of the crusade leaders: “You know, you people have always been in a little corner. What are you doing up front, suddenly?”

Another evidence of the changed image was the visit of the Montevideo Catholic bishop’s representative. At the beginning of the last meeting, the bishop’s secretary came to the little office used as a prayer room at the Sports Arena. He brought greetings and apologized for the fact the bishop was not able to attend crusade meetings personally. He said he was in favor of Palau’s work and hoped to attend meetings sometime in the future.

Palau and his team believe the Uruguay crusade is a good model to follow in other countries. They believe that if an entire country can be reached, so can an entire continent. While in Montevideo they took a day to plan strategy. They divided Latin America into three zones and assigned team members to each zone with a mandate to analyze the situation and to use all media to make sure every single Spanish-speaking person in all of Latin America has heard the Gospel by the end of 1980. They also tentatively planned a Congress on Latin America for 1980 in Guatemala City. It would bring together evangelical leaders from twenty-four or twenty-five countries, the United States, Canada, and Spain to coordinate plans for seizing spiritual leadership for the evangelicals.

Already, the Palau team is encouraging Latin American evangelicals to get into politics, education, business, and the media. In Montevideo, Bill Conard conducted a week-long journalism school and handed out ninety-seven diplomas. As a result, approximately fifty believers were forming a Christian Communications Fellowship, with specific goals for influencing the media. They are a start toward the new evangelical leadership Palau believes can emerge to fill the vacuum left by the government, the Catholics, and the liberal Protestants. He is convinced this is not just a dream.

Whether or not he is right depends on a number of things: whether Latin American evangelicals take up the challenge, whether the evangelical world supports the idea with prayer and finance; and whether the political situation waits. It may be a race against time. One of the sayings about those bright young people walking the streets is that they look forward to graduating and then migrating. If the government doesn’t provide some kind of future to fulfill their aspirations, the country could see another upheaval. Evangelist Luis Palau admits there is no time to waste, and he says, “It’s an exciting period, but you feel a little bit desperate that we may not be moving fast enough, or we may not have enough motivated people.”

Little to Celebrate In Czechoslovakia

This is a big anniversary year for Czechoslovakia, but Christians in that East European nation may not do much celebrating. Czechs are observing the thirtieth year since Communists took over after World War II and the tenth year since the Alexander Dubcek “Prague spring” movement was crushed by a Warsaw Pact invasion.

The sixtieth anniversary of Czech statehood is also being observed in 1978, but citizens look back on the last half of that national life as a particularly hard time for the churches. Communists have often given the religious community as much trouble as the Nazis in World War II. Since 1948 the Marxist authorities have held ecclesiastical leaders on short leashes, and few have ventured to cause any problems for the government.

President Gustav Husak’s visit to West Germany last month—his first trip to Western Europe since he took over after the Soviet-led invasion—caused some observers to wonder if Czechoslovakia might be planning to end its isolation from much of the free world. Husak went to Bonn to promote trade, but he was met by some reminders that Western church people are aware of his repression of religion. His government has, however, opened a dialogue with Roman Catholic authorities that has resulted in some changes for that church. While 70 per cent of the population of over 14 million is considered to be nominally Catholic, the Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia is more tightly controlled by the government than most churches elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

Cardinal Frantisek Tomasek, 78, was formally named archbishop of Prague early this year after serving for years as apostolic administrator. The appointment to the long-vacant post indicates that the Vatican’s diplomatic contacts with the Communist government have produced some of the points it has been seeking. At the same time that the filling of the post of archbishop was announced, the Vatican announced creation of a new diocese of Trnava. This makes the ecclesiastical map correspond more closely to the political map. The appointment of a prelate of Tomasek’s age—despite the Vatican’s current policy of seeking bishops’ retirement at age 75—pointed up the age factor in the country’s clerical leadership. Only fifty to sixty priests are being graduated from seminary each year, according to a recent report in The New York Times. Many pastors are required to serve five or six churches since there is such a severe clergy shortage. Some former pastors are unable to function in churches because the government has banned them.

Although the church does operate two small seminaries, it is not allowed to sponsor other educational institutions. Thus the traditional recruiting ground for Catholic religious workers—the parochial school—is denied to the Czech church. According to the Times report, some priests have been seized in recent crackdowns on unauthorized private Bible classes.

The salaries of priests (and other ministers) are paid by the state, and men with more than twenty-five years of experience get as little as $120 a month, less than unskilled laborers. The government also controls the Catholic press. The result of all this stranglehold on the official apparatus of the church, said the Times article, is the emergence of a “network of so-called subterranean churches—a nether world of religious worship that is increasingly becoming the target of police surveillance and suppression.”

No Stadium Rites

Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu wants a certain amount of trade between his country and the United States, but he is not particularly interested in importing any American preachers. He made that plain during a state visit to Washington last month as he fielded questions at the National Press Club.

“Would evangelist Billy Graham be welcome to preach in Romania?” he was asked. In response, the Marxist leader recited Romanian church statistics and asserted that “citizens are free to perform their rites.” He then said: “If we reach an agreement with your government for Romanian priests to preach in stadiums here in the United States, so shall we allow that in Romania.” His comments prompted some laughter and applause from the luncheon meeting of journalists.

Ceausescu’s reply was in line with his other comments on human rights. He insisted that Romanians have equality and need no “outside interference” in their internal affairs.

While the Catholics have been having their troubles, spiritual descendents of fifteenth century reformer John Hus have also had their share of difficulties. A declaration signed by thirty-one lay and clergy leaders of the Evangelical Church of the Czech Brethren has recently reached the West, outlining the restrictions on religious freedom under the Husak regime. The appeal to the Czech National Assembly was published in New York in Religion in Communist Dominated Areas, a journal edited by Czech refugee Blahoslav Hruby. The signers’ denomination is the largest Protestant one in the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia and one of the largest of the Protestant groups in Czechoslovakia. It has 272 congregations with 240,000 members. The appeal specified, however, that just 5 to 7 per cent of them are active in congregational life. The document spoke of the decline of religious freedom since 1969 and said that while the violations cited were in the denomination of the signers, they are “of general validity.”

Ten areas of concern were mentioned in the declaration, but religious education of children was the one that best demonstrated the state’s tight control. “In 1969–70 approximately 10,700 children were registered in our church for religious education,” the appeal said. “Within six years that number declined to 575 children in 1976 in the entire area of Bohemia and Moravia. Not one single child from the twenty-one Prague congregations is registered. Also, the number of children attending Sunday school has dropped sharply, although not quite as tragically as in [weekday] school.” The document charged that children who are not members of the Socialist Youth League are denied opportunity for higher education. It said parents are not registering their children for religious instruction for fear they will be barred from secondary school and college.

The paper details a variety of methods that state authorities use to try to discourage parents from enrolling their children in religious courses. Often parents are summoned to appear before local government committees and asked to explain their reasons for wanting the students to take the courses. The youngsters themselves are also targets of campaigns to cut down on the religion enrollment. In one area, said the document, eighth graders were required to fill out a questionnaire with the following questions: “Do you believe in God? Why do you believe? Do you go to church? Do you decide yourself or do your parents force you to go? Does your grandmother force you to go? What do you say about the Pope’s blessing Hitler and his arms?”

Ecumenical activity of Czech Christians is also severely limited, the thirty-one signers of the declaration alleged. “Only the activity of the highest ecumenical organization—the Ecumenical Council of Churches—is permitted, “they said, “but [it is] controlled by the officials of the [state] Ministry of Culture. Other ecumenical efforts on the congregational and parish level, such as joint meetings with other churches, joint prayers, practical cooperation, are restricted and purposefully suppressed, with the exception of annual weeks of prayer and of the joint work on the translation of the Bible.”

Drafters of the appeal noted that Evangelical Church of the Czech Brethren contacts with churches abroad were tightly controlled and that few members were allowed to participate. Czech authorities have frequently denied entry visas to foreign churchmen trying to visit the country. Even World Council of Churches general secretary Philip Potter “failed to obtain entry visa” for a planned visit, the declaration reported.

“It is encouraging,” said the appeal, “that the voices of freely elected representatives are still heard” on some occasions at denominational general assemblies. However, the paper pointed out that efforts by state authorities to manipulate assembly decisions “seriously violates the church’s autonomy.” Two denominational journals which “had published contributions which were regarded as attacks against the state system” were affected by “harsh financial sanctions,” said the declaration. Another magazine, one for youth, was discontinued by “a decision by the Ministry of Culture.”

Both the Evangelical Church of the Czech Brethren and the (congregationalist) Church of the Brethren are members of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. The WARC’s Geneva-based news service last month devoted a page in its dispatch to construction of a new congregationalist building in Bratislava. Members of the Modlitebna church, from children to the elderly, gave 200,000 hours of volunteer labor to erect the sanctuary that will seat 350. There are only 180 persons on the membership rolls, but assistance came from members of three neighboring congregations, and some financial help came from abroad, said the report. The WARC listed membership in the denomination, formerly known as the Unity of Czech Brethren, at 10,000 in thirty-one congregations.

Big Shift To Big Sandy

Television evangelist Garner Ted Armstrong announced last month that the undergraduate program of 1,100-student Ambassador College in Pasadena, California, will be shifted to Big Sandy in East Texas. The school was established in 1947 as the main educational wing of Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God (WCG). Garner Ted, 48, also announced that he was stepping down as president of the school but would remain as vice chairman of its board.

At one time the WCG had three college campuses, all sharing the Ambassador name. Then came leadership and financial crises in the WCG. A campus in England, opened in 1960, was shut down four years ago. Many of its 250 students were absorbed by the U.S. campuses at Big Sandy and Pasadena. The thirteen-year-old Big Sandy operation, which had a peak enrollment of 650 students, was closed last year and merged with the 800-student Pasadena campus.

Garner Ted said the move was based in part on a need to separate the physical plant, funding, administration, and other operations of the church and college. A major block to accreditation would thus be removed, he said.

Garner Ted told reporters that the church has suffered “an identity problem” in some quarters, with the church taking “a back seat” to the college. The move will help overcome the problem, he suggested.

WCG spokesmen said the decision was also based partly on a need to expand WCG headquarters and to develop a graduate school of theology, a marriage and family counseling center, and an expanded theological publishing endeavor.

Donald Ward, former dean at the original Big Sandy school, was named to the presidency of Ambassador.

The need for building up the church’s image has been underscored by sagging membership gains. In 1973 the WCG reported 7,000 new converts, but during the two years following a major schism in 1974, nearly 5,000 members were “disfellowshipped.” Gains achieved by the baptism of new converts were minor. The 1977 net gain was less than 1,000. No statistical statement has been published since May, 1976, when the WCG reported 65,000 members. Income for 1975 was set at $66.8 million.

Headquarters staffers are optimistic, however. Robert Kuhn, special assistant to Garner Ted, says free distribution of the WCG’s slick-paper magazine, The Plain Truth, has reached 600,000 in high foot-traffic locations (out of a total circulation of two million). Garner Ted, he points out, is rebuilding the radio and television ministry, which has slumped badly since 1975, when “The World Tomorrow” broadcast was aired from 500 radio and television stations worldwide. Armstrong is concentrating on fewer but bigger stations now. (The younger Armstrong has emerged as the chief spokesman and prime mover of the WCG since his father Herbert, 85, was stricken last year with a heart ailment.)

One WCG instant-success story involves the one-year-old Quest magazine, described as a sophisticated “human potential” journal published by the WCG’s Ambassador International Cultural Foundation, which Kuhn administers. The publication has soared to a $2-per-copy circulation of more than 400,000, including an overseas distribution of 100,000 copies, says Kuhn.

JOSEPH M. HOPKINS

Scientology: Matters of Law

Arthur Maren is out of jail—at least for now. Maren, 36, director of public relations for the Church of Scientology, was released last month from the District of Columbia jail, where he had spent seven months on contempt charges. The publicist was jailed last July 29 for refusing to answer questions before a federal grand jury that was investigating allegations of criminal activity by church members. Prosecutors contended that church members had infiltrated government agencies and illegally obtained confidential files pertaining to the church.

By law Maren could not have been held any longer than the grand jury’s term, which expired in mid-April. It was still uncertain late last month whether Maren would be hailed before a new grand jury. If he is required to appear, and if he still declines to answer questions, he may be sent to jail again.

Maren’s plight is part of a web of events going back to June 11, 1976. Late that night two Scientology members—Michael J. Meisner and Gerald Bennett Wolfe—were discovered inside the U.S. courthouse in Washington, D.C., in possession of forged Internal Revenue Service credentials. Wolfe eventually pleaded guilty to using the fake credentials and was sentenced to two years probation. Meisner, however, became a fugitive, then surrendered to federal authorities a year later. He told the FBI that his superiors at Scientology headquarters in Los Angeles had wanted him to stay in hiding. To enforce their decision when he showed signs of wavering, he said, they placed him under “house arrest.” They gagged and handcuffed him, he said, but he managed to “escape.” The authorities placed him in protective custody and grilled him (see August 12, 1977, issue, page 32).

Meisner said that he had been one of Scientology’s top five officials and that beginning in March, 1975, he supervised covert Scientology agents and activities within government agencies. He alleged that church officials had infiltrated the Internal Revenue Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the tax division of the Department of Justice in an effort to obtain documents about the church possessed by these agencies. (The controversial church and various government agencies have clashed on numerous occasions since its founding by L. Ron Hubbard in 1954, and the church has filed many Freedom of Information suits to find out what the government files say about it. Much of the material in the files is inaccurate and has resulted in violations of members’ rights, claim the Scientologists.)

A number of files were removed from government offices by Scientologists, copied, and then returned, according to Meisner. He told how Scientologists had bugged an IRS conference room in Los Angeles to eavesdrop on a discussion of strategy regarding the church. Meisner said that he had seen a transcript of that discussion.

(Scientology leaders denied that Meisner was ever a national official of the church, and they said he had been removed from membership in June, 1976, “after having blown his legally assigned” post in the church.)

Armed with the information that Meisner had provided, more than 100 federal agents raided Scientology offices in Los Angeles and Washington early last July and confiscated thousands of documents. Federal judge William B. Bryant, acting on a Scientology motion, ruled that the search warrant used in the Washington raid was illegal because it was too broad, and he ordered the confiscated documents to be sealed pending appeals. A Los Angeles judge issued a similar order, basing his decision on the Washington ruling. This meant that prosecutors were greatly limited in what they could show the grand jury.

In December, however, an appeals court reversed Bryant, saying that his opinion “ignores completely” restrictions put on the search and seizure by an affidavit that accompanied the warrant. In its thirteen-page opinion, the appeals court also said that it had made a “cursory” examination of the documents taken in the Washington raid. They included “apparently original documents from the Internal Revenue Service” and “copies of Central Intelligence Agency documents marked ‘secret,’ ” noted the court.

Meanwhile, Maren had refused to answer three questions before the grand jury and had gone to jail. He was asked whether he had discussed plans for Gerald Wolfe to develop a cover story regarding the courthouse breakin, whether he had discussed plans for bugging an IRS conference room, and whether he had read or discussed a transcript of bugged conversations by IRS officials, all within certain time boundaries. Maren refused to answer on grounds of confidentiality of the ministry and on grounds that the nature of the crime being investigated had not been proven to be serious enough to override his constitutional rights. Judge Bryant rejected his arguments.

The National Council of Churches (NCC) filed a brief with the court in Maren’s behalf. The brief argued that religious workers should not be forced to testify before a grand jury unless the government can show that they have personal knowledge about a particular “probable” crime, that the information can be obtained only from the church workers, and that the testimony would serve a “compelling and overriding societal interest.” (An NCC spokesman noted that the issues raised in the case are similar to those in the case of two Episcopal Church workers jailed for refusing to testify before a grand jury in New York in connection with some bombings, presumably by Puerto Rican terrorists.)

In a related incident, Linda Polameni, 34, a Church of Scientology member, was arrested on September 12 as she left the building in Los Angeles that houses the main southern California offices of the California attorney general. She was indicted three weeks later on charges of stealing government documents. A Scientology lawyer attempted to have the indictment dismissed on grounds that photocopying of documents does not constitute theft, according to a Los Angeles Times news story.

Miss Polameni apparently had been under suspicion as an “infiltrator” for some time. Her boss, Patti Kitching, who is a deputy attorney general, and another deputy, William Pounders, said that they had put together a package of “both accurate and false information” on the Church of Scientology as part of a plan to nab her. (Ms. Kitching was handling a matter related to the tax-exempt status of the church, and Pounders was handling a Church of Scientology suit against the attorney general’s office.)

A grand jury transcript shows that government agents placed Miss Polameni under surveillance from several vantage points. They testified that they observed her photocopying classified files from Ms. Kitching’s office and then placing the copies in her purse.

Confiscated along with the photocopies was a diary that was introduced to the grand jury as evidence. A January, 1977, entry said: “By June, 1977, be well into the cycle, creating a whole new game. By the end of 1977 be ready to move out of the AG’s office. Big money.” Then came a June entry: “Found materials needed so I can terminate project. Need to isolate and locate area so all cycles can be finished.”

Prior to joining the attorney general’s staff, Miss Polameni worked as a secretary in the major frauds section of the Los Angeles district attorney’s office, said the Times.

In March of this year, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the appeals court ruling in the matter of the documents seized by the FBI from Scientology offices. Thus the ruling stands, meaning that prosecutors can study the documents and present them as evidence to a grand jury.

Scientology leaders insist that their church is a victim of harassment by government agencies, that misinformation about the church has been scattered throughout government files, and that government authorities and newspaper reporters have infiltrated the church to damage it. The church in recent years has maintained a steady counterattack through multi-million-dollar damage suits against government officials and certain publishers.

Where Women Are

A survey of 60,000 American women “of all faiths and incomes” indicates that 47 per cent of them do not consider premarital sex sinful but 73 per cent are against extramarital sex, according to McCall’s magazine, which sponsored the poll. Nine of ten women questioned expressed belief in God, reports the magazine, and 59 per cent said that they attend religious services at least once a week. However, only 17 per cent identified their church, temple, or synagogue “as the principle influence of their morality.” Observes McCall’s: “In times of stress, priests, ministers, and rabbis are virtually the last people they turn to for guidance or comfort.” The magazine suggests that it is a case of women being turned on to God but turned off to organized religion. It quotes one woman as saying, “Religion is for the birds. Jesus Christ is for people.”

Issue Of The Year

The Bond That Breaks: Will Homosexuality Split the Church?, by Don Williams (BIM Publishing Co. [Box 259995, Los Angeles, CA 90025], 1978, 176 pp., $4.95 pb) and Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? Another Christian View, by Letha Scanzoni and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott (Harper & Row, 1978, 160 pp., $6.95), are reviewed by Tim Stafford, west coast editor, “Campus Life,” Palo Alto, California.

For the past twenty years a small homosexual minority has become visible. They have been received with a degree of tolerance, rather than repression. Because of that homosexuals have made their own communities, particularly in large cities. But tolerance has not been enough. Homosexuals want full acceptance. In Miami, they demanded and got an ordinance prohibiting any discrimination against homosexuals, even in private religious schools. That launched a national debate.

The legal issues were complex. Could civil rights be denied citizens who had committed no illegal actions? On the other hand, weren’t the civil rights of parents being threatened by an ordinance telling them they had to accept homosexuals as their children’s teachers?

But beyond the legal questions, homosexuality itself was being debated. The same question has been, and is being, thrust on the major Christian denominations. Churches have tolerated homosexuals—that is, they have left them alone, so long as they made no issue of their presence. You don’t see evangelists invading homosexual communities. But that, too, wasn’t enough. Homosexuals want the right to be ordained, which is in effect asking for the church’s blessing.

To some Christians nothing could be more blatantly political. They see Christians responding to political force, not to the voice of God. If some minority demanded it, some people say, we would form a task force to consider whether our heads should really be attached to our bodies.

But there is more to the issue than that. With the increased visibility of the gay community has come increased awareness of the utter loneliness and frustration that a person with homosexual feelings can have. By most estimates 2 to 5 per cent of the male population feel persistent, strong homosexual attraction. These men, and a smaller number of women, are sprinkled everywhere, including conservative churches. Any pastor who does much counseling must be aware of them. In writing a regular column on sex and love, I have received many letters from them. The confusion, frustration, and self-loathing in many of those letters is unmatched in anything I have ever read. It is no wonder that the gay community has won many with its promise of acceptance and openness, and with its models of homosexuals living exemplary, creative lives. And it is no wonder that evangelical Christians are asking questions about what the Bible has to offer homosexuals. Compassion and understanding are terribly needed. So is hope—for the common testimony of the letters I have received is that they did not ask to have homosexual desires, and no amount of prayer has succeeded in taking those desires away. The church seems to offer only threats of hell and a “grit-your-teeth-and-endure” morality.

So the compassion in Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? Another Christian View by Letha Scanzoni and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott is welcome. One of several books on homosexuality being published by Christians this spring, it is sure to raise a storm of controversy. The reason is simple: The authors, well-known in evangelical circles, argue that for those who have exclusively homosexual drives and cannot change the most Christian solution is often a committed, permanent homosexual relationship. They view a person with what they call the homosexual condition—someone who is primarily attracted to his or her own sex—as no more sick or immoral than someone who is left-handed.

To do so they must, of course, go against all traditional biblical interpretation. They are willing to do so because, they say, traditions can sometimes keep us from loving our neighbor, as they apparently did for the priest and the Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Scanzoni and Mollenkott know evangelicalism well enough to realize that many will treat them as Samaritans for writing this book, but they are willing to take the risk. I can’t help admiring their courage.

They write in a good Protestant tradition, reevaluating traditional interpretation while holding to the authority of the Scriptures. They don’t suggest that some biblical commands should be ignored because an ethic of love is more important. Instead they assume that a correct understanding of the biblical commands will identify the meaning of love. Most of the people who hate this book will be, I suspect, people who have not read it. One can disagree strongly with its conclusions—I do—and yet wish for more books like its well-documented, compassionate, and courageous style.

Scanzoni and Mollenkott draw extensively on the findings of social scientists. Several facts are generally accepted by such scholars. No one knows exactly what causes homosexuality. No one cause has been firmly established. Hypotheses about the quality of homosexuals’ parents, for instance, are on shaky ground. Many whose interest is exclusively homosexual have not chosen that drive; apparently they have had it from a very early age. Many men and women are attracted to either sex, and can choose either homosexuality or heterosexuality. But for those whose exclusive interest is and always has been their own sex, psychologists have found change next to impossible. You might as well try to make a healthy heterosexual start preferring homosexual intercourse.

Scanzoni and Mollenkott then pose these questions: does God condemn a person for an orientation he had no choice in and cannot change? Does the Bible demand a standard of him that is much harder than that which it demands of heterosexuals? By insisting that he give up all sexual contacts, is the church driving him away from a community where he can find love and help and toward a community where sexual contacts are promiscuous?

What does the Bible say? There are seven or eight passages in Scripture that refer to homosexuality, and Scanzoni and Mollenkott consider them all. They convincingly show that the sin of Sodom described in Genesis 19 was not the sort of homosexuality lived by most modern homosexuals. It was homosexual rape—quite probably not even committed by people with a homosexual orientation, since the account makes it very clear that the whole male population of Sodom participated. Such behavior, they point out, is common in prisons, and it has more to do with humiliating the victims than with sexual urges.

They agree, on the other hand, that the prohibitions of Leviticus 18 and 20 refer to homosexual activity. But they point out that the same passages also prohibit such “sins” as intercourse during a woman’s menstrual period. Nearly all Christian marriage counselors now consider the latter acceptable and some even encourage it. How can we be sure which commands are still in force?

One way is to look carefully at the New Testament to see which Old Testament laws were regarded as eternally normative by Jesus and the apostles. Here I found Scanzoni and Mollenkott less persuasive. They make the case that the three principle New Testament references to homosexuality—Romans 1; First Corinthians 6, and First Timothy 1—prohibit specific, perverted kinds of homosexual practice current in the Roman world.

They quite correctly insist that Romans 1:26 and 27 be read in context. The passage convicts not a small minority of homosexual perverts but every man, homosexual or heterosexual, for his rejection of the truth. More importantly, they claim that “the key thoughts seem to be lust, ‘unnaturalness,’ and, in verse 28, a desire to avoid acknowledgment of God. But although the censure fits the idolatrous people with whom Paul was concerned here, it does not seem to fit the case of a sincere homosexual Christian. Such a person loves Jesus Christ and wants above all to acknowledge God in all of life, yet for some unknown reason feels drawn to someone of the same sex, for the sake of love rather than lust. Is it fair to describe that person as lustful or desirous of forgetting God’s existence?” They also point out that the passage refers to men and women “exchanging” natural relations with the opposite sex for lustful relations with their own sex. Does this apply to the person who has no natural attraction to the opposite sex to “exchange”?

They carry this argument to First Corinthians 6 and First Timothy 1 by suggesting that the two Greek words usually translated “homosexual” are technical words that refer to particular kinds of homosexual activity—perhaps male prostitution or the perversion of young boys. They cite some lurid examples from first century accounts of Roman life to suggest the kind of perversion Paul might have referred to. They quote with approval J. Rinzema, who explains that “the Bible writers assumed that everyone was heterosexual and that in times of moral decay, some heterosexual people did some strange and unnatural things with each other.” They add, “Since the Bible is silent about the homosexual condition, those who want to understand it must rely on the findings of modern behavioral science research and on the testimony of those persons who are themselves homosexual.”

But the Bible’s silence on the homosexual condition does not really alter its general condemnation of homosexual actions. The Bible is generally disinterested in the condition we are in when temptation comes to us; it speaks to our response. Greedy people are not excused because they had wealthy upbringings; they are asked to give up greed. Adulterers then as now must often have been fleeing difficult or impossible marriages; no doubt some adulterers sincerely and deeply loved each other. But they are not excused. A compromise is not offered; they are not urged to make their relationships as permanent and loving as possible. Rather, they are to break them and stick to their marriage partners.

There is no reason to believe that Paul was unaware of lasting, loving homosexual relationships nor of what we call the homosexual condition. Paul lived in a society where homosexuality was commonly accepted. He could easily have mentioned exceptions to his blanket condemnation if he had wanted to. Instead, First Corinthians 6 makes the condemnation absolute: To ensure that no one is left out, Paul refers to both the active and passive partners in the relationship, or so most scholars understand the Greek.

In the Romans 1 passage Paul is not telling us the progressive, existential choices of a sinful individual. He is giving us a description of God’s wrath directed toward an age that has rejected him. Because mankind has rejected what is natural in relationship to God, he has given us up to impurity. Our futility without him is expressed in many ways, and most vividly in the corruption of the natural, i.e. God-made, way that men and women relate to each other. Although it is true that the main point of Romans 1 is not antihomosexuality but antiidolatry, homosexuality is seen as a powerful perversion of what is most good and most basic to man as God meant him to be.

If Paul had written, “men exchanged generosity for selfish greed” we would not be bound to read that as though all greedy men had once been selfless idealists, or that only those born generous were condemned for leaving their natural state. Paul would mean that God meant men to be generous. But the mark of sin was such that they did not pursue “natural” generosity, but greed.

This does not imply that people with either greedy or homosexual drives are guilty of sin. But they are responsible for how they respond to those drives, as all of us are responsible for how we react to all kinds of temptation. The responsibility for people driven by homosexual urges is far from easy. But is it impossible that they can live full lives without expressing their sexual drives through intercourse? Scanzoni and Mollenkott don’t spend much time on that possibility, since they consider permanent homosexual relationships an acceptable choice. But in reviewing Helmut Thielicke’s position on homosexuality in The Ethics of Sex (unlike them Thielicke sees homosexuality as a disruption of God’s plan, but thinks that in many cases the best possible solution to a bad situation involves urging permanent homosexual relationships), Scanzoni and Mollenkott quote his rejection of celibacy as a widespread option because “celibacy is based upon a special calling and, moreover, is an act of free will.”

Is celibacy truly an act of free will? That assertion could be disputed by millions of unmarried people who, though they would happily exchange that special calling, have used it for the kingdom of God. I am thinking particularly of single women missionaries who have been as responsible as any other group for the spread of the Gospel through the world. Besides, Jesus is very specific in Matthew 19, a passage I wish Scanzoni and Mollenkott had chosen to comment on. After asserting the total, unbreakable commitment of heterosexual marriage, Jesus is asked by his incredulous disciples whether it is possible for anyone to live up to such a standard. Jesus indicates that not everyone is supposed to be married. But the only alternative he cites is that of the eunuch. Perhaps he used that term, still harsh today, to stress God’s approval of a state with low status in that society (and in ours). He cites three reasons for remaining unmarried: “There are eunuchs who were born that way from their mother’s womb; and there are eunuchs who were [psychologically or physically] made eunuchs by men; and there are also eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 19:12). He does not slight the first two categories, which certainly could include those who, for various unknown reasons, have strong homosexual urges. Instead, he joins them to a category of those who have chosen that role for the sake of the kingdom. They are all in the same state and can be used (and nourished) by God equally.

Most Christians combat homosexuality by stressing how wonderful heterosexual marriage is. The trouble is that marriage doesn’t appeal to someone whose desires are overwhelmingly homosexual. It might be better if we again took up the plain biblical assertion that chaste singleness is a wonderful, useful, satisfying state. Today our culture greets such a statement with disbelief, since we think that urges cannot be indefinitely repressed and that those with unexpressed sexual urges are quite sure to be unhappy. Christians have been quite feeble in disagreeing with that belief, preferring to stress Paul’s rather oblique statement in First Corinthians 7 that it is better to marry than to burn. But in that same chapter Paul stresses that though marriage is a wonderful gift, so is singleness. Perhaps we are reaping the harvest of our inattention to that strong, clear biblical message. Without a high view of singleness, we do not have much hope to offer the person who has no erotic interest in the opposite sex.

Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? suffers because it offers no understanding of sexuality, only homosexuality. Although the Bible has relatively little to say about homosexuality, seeing it as a sign of a broken and disordered world, it has a great deal more to say about sexuality, beginning in the unbroken world of Genesis 1 and 2. Passing by Eden, passing by Matthew 19; Ephesians 5, and other passages that indicate what sexuality is meant to be, Scanzoni and Mollenkott concentrate on passages that explicitly mention homosexuality. This is a little like writing a theology of stealing without mentioning the principle of honesty.

Don Williams particularly criticizes that kind of theology in his new book, The Bond That Breaks: Will Homosexuality Split the Church? He compares it to “trying to understand a tree by starting with the branches. Forgetting that the branches come from the trunk, we can dispose of them one by one without ever understanding their origin or their interrelationship.” His book, though considerably less tidy than Scanzoni and Mollenkott’s, gives a far more thorough Christian understanding of sexuality and homosexuality. Williams, a pastor and part-time professor at Fuller seminary and the Claremont colleges in southern California, has had ample time to consider the issues in the homosexual debate. He served on the Task Force on Homosexuality for the United Presbyterian Church, and was one of the five members who supported the minority report opposing homosexual ordination.

Williams’s interpretation of the biblical data follows Karl Barth, as most evangelical Christians writing on sexuality have. He stresses the creation account in Genesis 1:27, where man is made male and female, reflecting the image of God. Although Scanzoni and Mollenkott compare homosexuality to left-handedness, Williams compares a homosexual pair to two right shoes. They lack the complementary oppositeness that is God’s will for all erotic love, that expresses God’s image, and that contains the potential for a lasting, continually intriguing relationship.

To a reader unfamiliar with this theological interpretation, Williams may seem to be making much of little. A few descriptive verses in Genesis are expanded into a complete understanding of sexuality, and an implied prohibition of any other options. This understanding of Genesis 1 is so generally accepted in the theology of sexuality that Williams probably can’t remember how it sounds to someone who hasn’t encountered it before. In any case, he doesn’t argue for it as effectively as he might. He seems to jump ahead of himself in making sweeping conclusions.

However, the logic of his position becomes clearer as he marches through all the biblical passages on homosexuality. They all fit together, along with passages on heterosexual love, sins, and marriage, and have as a common key those first two chapters in Genesis.

For instance, though agreeing that the crime of Sodom was homosexual rape, Williams’s belief that homosexuality is a disruption of the order and beauty of creation, and particularly of the image of God in man, allows him to explain that Sodom’s homosexuality is exhibit A in the case against the total corruption of that city. Thus, it is basic to the biblical assumption that Sodom is as sinful as man can be, to be mentioned by biblical writers whenever an extreme example of degradation is needed.

The prohibitions of Leviticus 18 and 20 can also be grounded in Genesis 1 and 2, since homosexuality violates the sexual norm there. Other prohibitions such as the one against intercourse while a woman is menstruating cannot be grounded in Genesis 1 and 2, and so can be understood as completed in Christ and no longer relevant.

In the New Testament Williams gives a careful, contextual discussion of all the passages Scanzoni and Mollenkott considered. He succeeds, to my satisfaction at least, in answering their questions. (Some of the objections I raised in reviewing their claims I owe to him.) He continues to stress Genesis’s man-woman sexuality as the biblical norm. The fact that some people have without choice strong homosexual urges he sees as a sign of the fallenness of our world. One interesting point he makes is that homosexuality is found most often in cultures where masculinity is a heroic, inflexible ideal. The hypothesis offered is that men who for some reason sense themselves inadequate to match that ideal try to “borrow” masculinity from other men. In cultures where men are noncompetitive and cooperative homosexuality is low. Williams seems to believe that some of our male stereotypes are a result of our fallen nature and contribute to homosexuality. Thus families that stress strong masculinity in an attempt to combat homosexuality may be encouraging it.

There are many places where Williams could be questioned. For instance, I wondered how single people fit into the image of God as male and female, a rather crucial theological question since it includes Jesus, the “image of the invisible God.” Not everyone fits the ideal pairing of Adam and Eve. But are they therefore less than the image and glory of God?

Still, Williams gives us a consistent way to understand our sexuality, a way that agrees with nearly all current evangelical thinking. If Scanzoni and Mollenkott are going to be ultimately convincing to evangelicals, they will have to offer an alternative.

Williams does not believe that there is any such thing as a constitutional homosexual—that is, one who is naturally homosexual and cannot change. He admits that most social scientists categorize homosexuals this way, but he believes there is no compelling evidence to back up their claim. (In some cultures, all men have relations with both men and women—a fact Williams cites as an indication of the flexibility of our sexuality.) Borrowing such static categories as constitutional homosexual and imposing them on the Bible is cultic, he claims; he compares it to Mormonism, which adds to the canon of Scripture and thus dictates a particular, variant interpretation. “When the social sciences have the first word, the Bible may have the second word, but the social sciences will be the final arbiter as they select what of the Bible is relevant for us.” Constitutional homosexuals are not recognized in the Bible, Williams asserts, because they do not exist. In fact, they contradict the Bible’s assertion that all men and women are meant to live in relation to the opposite sex.

Instead, Williams insists that our sexual attraction is dynamic, learned behavior. We are not heterosexual or homosexual at birth; we are merely male or female. We have as a society and as individuals great choice in what we can do with that condition. But God has made it clear what choice is right. He has commanded us to live as male or female—that is, not to pursue a unisex ideal—and as male and female—as people whose erotic focus is the opposite sex. Williams is confident that homosexuals can change to a heterosexual orientation, though perhaps painfully and slowly. He believes that many have changed but have hidden the fact because of the shame in most churches of being known even as former homosexuals. Although Freud admitted himself powerless to change homosexuals, Williams is not willing to consider Christ and his church on those same terms.

Williams concludes with an appendix that critiques the Task Force Report on Homosexuality of the United Presbyterian Church. His forceful criticisms will be of special interest to Presbyterians, but his analysis and his answers to seventeen questions posed by the majority report form an invaluable part of the book for any reader.

We ought to remember that Luther began with theses, not a theology. Scanzoni and Mollenkott have not offered an alternative to the way we have been thinking about sexuality, but they have tried to ask some important questions. Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? should not persuade many evangelicals to accept its distinctive thesis. It should lead to a more thoughtful consideration of how good news applies to homosexuals.

That is how the Presbyterian dilemma has affected Williams; he has been forced to think out his position more carefully. But I hope that for Williams and for all evangelicals a position will not be the end of the question. We need not only theological answers. We need pastoral answers.

Williams begins his book with five vignettes from his own life, describing experiences he had with homosexuals. The point he says is to show that his book is not “merely academic. The crisis now facing us in the ‘homosexual question’ is a crisis that has touched my life.”

But he never comes back to those people who so desperately needed help. Williams did not promise pastoral counsel, so I am perhaps unfair to wish for it. But I did put his book down wondering how the homosexual debate would affect those who sit in church Sunday after Sunday, and who wonder what is wrong with them and what they can possibly do about it. I hope this debate will end with a movement by Christians to thoughtfully, lovingly, personally, and biblically answer their questions.

How Long The Days?

Genesis One and the Origin of the Earth, by Robert C. Newman and Herman J. Eckelmann, Jr. (InterVarsity, 1977, 156 pp., $3.95 pb), is reviewed by Russell Mixter, professor of zoology, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

In dealing with interpretations of Genesis 1, which recur in each generation of thinkers, the authors are doubly expert. Both have degrees and have done research in the physical sciences and possess a thorough knowledge of theology. Newman is associate professor of New Testament at the Biblical School of Theology in Hatfield, Pennsylvania, and Eckelmann, formerly research associate with the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research at Cornell University, now is pastor of a church in Ithaca, New York. They write for nonscientists but include much material that scientists can evaluate. They compare the various views on the age and origin of the earth so that the reader may know why certain theories are held. Both Scripture and science are considered for “either set of data taken alone will not necessarily give the complete picture, nor even a correct picture”; also “tradition should be no more than suggestive in seeking a proper interpretation of the Bible.”

Chronological evidence from scientific data, whether astronomical, such as light travel-time, the expansion of the universe, or stellar structure, suggests the earth is billions of years old. Observations from meteorites and lunar material, radioactive calculations and nonradioactive data (amplified in an appendix by Daniel E. Wonderly) support such a conclusion. The evidence continues with a discussion of the solar system’s mass, angular momentum, orbital regularity, and chemical nature.

The model selected for the origin of the solar system is the one held by most investigators today, the star formation model (condensation from a cloud of interstellar gas), rather than the close approach theory or the interstellar capture theory.

Following such a conclusion the authors thoroughly discuss the various interpretations of chronology in the Bible, aided especially by the classic work of William Henry Green, a professor at Princeton seminary in the nineteenth century, whose complete paper is in the appendix. It is agreed that the genealogies are incomplete, that to claim that the “day” of Genesis 1 “always means a twenty-four hour day cannot be substantiated by a survey of its actual use.” Newman suggests that “each day opens a new creative period, and therefore each day is mentioned in Genesis 1 after the activities of the previous creative period have been described, but before those of the next period have been given.”

A detailed analysis of Genesis I follows. The authors remind us “that the Bible does not tell us as much as we might like to know about certain subjects.… Nevertheless it clearly teaches that everything but God is directly or remotely God-created.” Hebrew phrases are interpreted and their correlation with the author’s preferred scientific theory stated: “Genesis 1 gives a description of what the various creation events would have looked like to an earthbound observer had one been present to see God’s work.”

In an appendix, R. John Snow, who taught mathematics and is now a pastor in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, analyzes the length of the Sixth Day. By deciding how long the recorded events of day six would take and interpreting the phrase “now at length” in Genesis 2:23, Snow affirms that it is unreasonable to believe that day six was limited to only a few hours.

The book has this admirable statement: “It is not to be expected that these suggestions are the ‘last word’ for investigation even in this particular area of the relationship between science and Scripture.”

A Multitude Of Authors

The Equipping of Disciples, edited by John Hendrix and Lloyd Householder (Broadman, 1977, 264 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by C. E. Cerling, pastor of education, Hopevale Memorial Baptist Church, Saginaw, Michigan.

Right now, discipling is a popular theme. The whole process of discipling, however, is the subject of debate. What does it mean to disciple another person? Hendrix and Householder have a unique approach to this subject. They selected biblical passages dealing with discipleship and asked men from various backgrounds to write on each passage.

Each chapter of the book includes a theological interpretation of an aspect of discipling, a biblical interpretation, and a practical application. The practical interpretation is given by people in the fields of education and behavioral processes. The result is 247 pages with 95 authors.

Nevertheless, this should not be taken as a condemnation of the book. Any book with that many authors must have something good to say somewhere. The strongest portions of the book are the theological and biblical interpretations. Almost every chapter has something worthwhile in those areas, and preachers should find some helpful material there.

Here is an example of the editors’ methods. Discipling means training people to face crises. Theologically one is confronted by God, judged as to the strength of his faith, and challenged to exercise it. The biblical application was the feeding of the 5000, which showed how a crisis is both a test of faith and an occasion for faith. Part of the practical section dealt with the stages a person goes through in a crisis. For people to benefit fully from a crisis we must permit them to go through each stage. Another aspect of the practical section showed how people could be trained to meet crises through roleplaying.

The practical section of the book, however, is extremely frustrating. Many of the authors write only a single paragraph. Yet they frequently suggest directions that could profitably have been developed at length.

Christ Versus Secularism

The Cosmic Center, by D. Bruce Lockerbie (Eerdmans, 1977, 158 pp., $4.95 pb), is reviewed by Larry M. Lake, chairman, department of English, Delaware County Christian School, Newton Square, Pennsylvania.

Living as Christians in a wicked world, we need to be reminded that the world’s ways are not God’s ways. We who are ministers or teachers need clear examples and a philosophic framework with which to demonstrate this to our hearers. In this book, Bruce Lockerbie of the Stony Brook School applies his skills as a teacher and expositor to clarify the menace of secularism and to point again to Jesus Christ as the center of all things.

In five well-planned chapters, Lockerbie diagnoses the secular condition, documents its worsening infections, identifies its root problem as idolatry, presents the Christian cosmology as seen in Colossians, and shows us the weighty implications of being Christians in a post-Christian world.

His warnings against the secularizing effects of civil religion are painfully clear and will provoke many of us to clear our shelves of idols. His assessment of our so-called religious heritage in America should affect the way we teach history and help us avoid confusing patriotism with religion.

The book discusses secular humanism and the fatal blow that biblical theology can deal such philosophies. In this context, The Cosmic Center helps us focus on Christ even as we see the decay all around us. “This understanding, that Christ stands at the center of history, delivers the Christian from an otherwise cold, cosmic philosophy, a theology derived from belief in a depersonalized universal magneto. Instead, we worship a God who cares for his cosmos” (pp. 110–111). The mystery of the Incarnation is explored here from many angles, yet Lockerbie allows it to remain a mystery.

As in The Liberating Word: Art and the Mystery of the Gospel (Eerdmans, 1974), Lockerbie skillfully uses his broad knowledge of art, philosophy, theology, and poetry to clarify his thesis. We learn about the nature of the wisdom God gives, and that Christianity “announces, as Calvin Seerveld says, ‘with scandalous intolerance’ that only by confessing that Jesus of Nazareth is also the Incarnate Lord of the universe can we begin to know and understand that universe” (p. 118). We are shown the outlines of a philosophy of Christian education that encompasses the universe, but deals compassionately with individuals.

“The Christian must be biblically informed; his attitude and actions must take into account what Scripture declares to be mankind’s condition before God, and God’s reconciling grace in Jesus Christ. But the Christian isn’t called to be limited to Bible study. An integrated Christian mind is compelled to study and learn more about men and the nature of the universe—to study art, politics, physics, and every other area of human knowledge—because all these belong in the realm where Christ is Lord.… Such thinking must be free from narrow-mindedness, purged of the dross of parochialism or sectarianism totally open to the truth that sets one free” (p. 120).

Lockerbie reminds us of the enormous challenge we have in teaching, evangelizing, and in carrying out all the responsibilities God has given us. We must in turn present this challenge to those who depend on our guidance and teaching, and then joyfully work with them, confident that we serve the one who is the center of all things.

An Exciting Concordance

Modern Concordance to the New Testament, edited by Michael Darton (Doubleday, 1977, 796 pp., $27.50), is reviewed by Robert Brow, associate rector, Little Trinity Anglican Church, Toronto, Canada.

I received this exciting concordance as a Christmas present, and I use it often. It is based on a linguistic grouping system first worked out in French. The result is 341 New Testament theme groups, each headed by the different Greek words that express the theme, the number of times each word is used, and then a list of all the related texts in English for easy comparison. You don’t need Greek, but a first-year student can profit from the additional index that leads from any Greek word into the theme where it occurs. New Testament scholars will find the themes important for advanced work.

Last night reading James 2:1, I was struck by the word “partiality” in the Revised Standard Version. The English index of the concordance referred to the theme grouping under “Favouritism.” There I found seven transliterated Greek words that express such ideas as having favorites, making distinctions, and respecting persons. I then read the twelve texts that express these ideas, which was exactly what I wanted. I checked what I would have got from Young’s Concordance and found I would have missed three important connections. In larger themes the difference would be great.

The book does not quite live up to its claim that it is “a complete and accurate Concordance to the New Testament in any English translation.” It seems just about right for the Jerusalem Bible, since all references are given in that version. It misses a proportion of words from other translations. Thus in the reference to James 2:1, the New English Bible uses “snobbery,” which does not come in the English index. That is not as serious as it might seem, since almost any synonym would get you into the correct group.

Occasionally, the arrangement has failed me. I was interested in the idea of teaching, and I quickly found a rich mine of eleven Greek words, including didasko (97 times), didaskalos (59 times), and di-daskalia (21 times). Unfortunately, I missed the equally large number of references to learning gathered under the head of “Hear—Listen—Learn.” Obviously the 261 texts concerning disciples were relevant to the theme of teaching, but in the English index the connection was not made under “Teach” or “Teacher,” though it was made under “(Be) Taught.” For an exhaustive study a check of cognate ideas in a thesaurus would ensure a complete coverage. If you want to enrich your minister’s preaching, this is one of the best gifts you could give him.

Periodicals

An enormous potpourri of more or less scholarly material is itemized in the quarterly ADRIS Newsletter. Announcements of meetings and notices of books, articles, and fugitive matter go on for page after page. Theological librarians and scholars in a variety of disciplines would almost always find several pertinent items. Subscribe by sending $5 (for four issues per year, starting with the fall number) to the Department of Theology, Loyola University, 6525 N. Sheridan Rd., Chicago, IL 60626.

The Epworth Pulpit is a bimonthly tabloid launched by some Nazarenes, but since the third issue (January, 1978) it includes members of three other Wesleyan-holiness denominations among its editors. Three of the articles in the January issue convey its interests: “Phineas Bresee [a Nazarene founding father] and the Poor”, “Was John Wesley a Liberation Theologian?”, and “John Woolman, Man of Conscience.” One year subscriptions are only $1.50, a good price. Write Box 5161, Kansas City, MO 64132.

A chorus of many voices is chanting in unison today that I must at all costs love myself; that self-love needs to be added to love for God and neighbor as a much-neglected commandment; and that dire consequences will overtake me if I refuse—frustration, depression, hostility, inertia, and much else besides. A whole new literature is growing up around this theme. In 1976 we had The Art of Learning to Love Yourself by Cecil G. Osborne (Zondervan), and in 1977 Loving Yourselves by Ray Ashford (Fortress), Celebrate Yourself by Bryan Jay Cannon (Word), and Love Yourself by Walter Trobisch (InterVarsity).

I intended to write a column on this topic when John Piper got in first and cast his “one small vote against the cult of self-esteem,” in his article Is Self-Love Biblical? (See the August 12, 1977, issue, page 6.) I appreciated what he wrote. But then I also appreciated the points made in the letters section in the following issue. Now that the dust has settled a bit, maybe the time has come to stir it up again. I shall begin with a negative critique, but then I shall try to affirm positively and biblically what, it seems to me, the advocates of self-love are really after.

The way that some writers are arguing, namely that we are commanded to love ourselves just as we are commanded to love God and our neighbor, is untenable for at least three reasons.

First, and grammatically speaking, the command “love your neighbor as yourself” is not a command to love both my neighbor and myself, but a command to love my neighbor as much as, in fact, I love myself. That is, self-love is not a virtue that Scripture commends, but one of the facts of our humanity that it recognizes and tells us to use as a standard. The best commentary is the Golden Rule: “do to others what you would have them do to you” (Matt. 7:12, NIV). We know instinctively in every situation how we would like to be treated; so let this knowledge determine our treatment of others. We can be sure that this is the right interpretation partly because the Ten Commandments stipulate our duty to God and our neighbor, and partly because Jesus summarized them in terms of love for both. He said: “the first and great commandment is.…; and the second is similar …”; he did not say “the second and third are similar.”

Secondly, and linguistically speaking, the verb used is agapaō; agapē love (a term popularized by C. S. Lewis) always includes the ingredients of sacrifice and service. Indeed, agapē is the sacrifice of self in the service of another. This is extremely meaningful when we are seeking to love our God and neighbor. But how can we sacrifice ourselves to serve ourselves? The concept is nonsensical. Agapē love cannot be self-directed; if it is, it destroys itself. It ceases to be self-sacrifice, and becomes self-service. This may sometimes be quite proper (as in Eph. 5:28, 29), but it is then not true agapē. It is precisely because we should preserve a high doctrine of agape, portraying the love of God (his for us and ours for him) that we should resist the current fashion of self-love as inappropriate. Besides, our Lord’s new commandment is not to love others as we love ourselves, but to love others more than we love ourselves, namely as he has loved us (John 13:34).

Thirdly, and theologically speaking, “self-love,” that is, directing one’s concern and service toward oneself, is the biblical concept not of virtue but of sin. Indeed, a mark of “the last days,” of the interim between Christ’s comings in which we live, is that “men will be lovers of self … rather than lovers of God” (2 Tim. 3:2,4). True, the Greek word here is the weaker one, and the contrast is between philautoi (self-lovers) and philotheoi (God-lovers). Nevertheless, the evils of the day are attributed to a misdirection of our love from God to self, and so also (in the context) to money and pleasure. Paul Vitz, in his courageous and perceptive book Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-worship (Eerdmans 1977), is biblically correct that “to worship one’s self (in self-realization).… is, in Christian terms, simple idolatry operating from the usual motive of unconscious egotism” (p. 93). He is referring to what he calls “selfist humanism.”

All of this, however, does not dispose of the question. It may be no more than a game of semantics. For the advocates of self-love, however misguided they may be in their language, are concerning themselves with a topic of great theological and psychological importance, namely what a Christian’s self-image should be.

It is significant that through most of his little book Walter Trobisch uses “self-love” as a synonym for “self-acceptance,” and then writes: “Self-love used in the positive sense of selfacceptance is the exact opposite of narcissism or auto-eroticism” (p. 15). Right. But he also concedes the difficulty, namely that the term “self-love” can equally well mean “self-centeredness” rather than “self-acceptance.” He quotes Josef Piper: “there are two opposing ways in which a man can love himself: selflessly or selfishly” (p. 14). This being so, is it not extremely misleading to use the same expression (“self-love”) for diametrically opposite concepts?

We should be able to agree that selfdepreciation is a false and damaging attitude. Those who regard a human being as nothing but a programmed machine (behaviorists) or an absurdity (existentialists) or a naked ape (humanistic evolutionists) are all denigrating our creation in God’s image. True, we are also rebels against God and deserve nothing at his hand except judgment, but our fallenness has not entirely destroyed our Godlikeness. More important still, in spite of our revolt against him, God has loved, redeemed, adopted, and re-created us in Christ. Anthony Hoekema is surely right, in his excellent little work The Christian Looks at Himself (Eerdmans 1975), that “the ultimate basis for our positive self-image must be God’s acceptance of us in Christ” (p. 102). If he has accepted us, should we not accept ourselves?

We cannot, therefore, agree with Cecil Osborne’s statement that “there must be something truly wonderful about us if he (God) can love and accept us so readily,” identifying this “something” as “that portion of himself he has planted deep within” (p. 138). Thielicke is much nearer the truth when, echoing Luther’s fourth thesis, he writes: “God does not love us because we are valuable; we are valuable because God loves us.”

The problem we all have in relating properly to ourselves is that we are all such mixed-up kids. We are the product on the one hand of the fall, and on the other of our creation by God and recreation in Christ. This theological framework is indispensable to the development of a balanced self-image and self-attitude. It will lead us beyond selfacceptance to something better still, namely self-affirmation. We need to learn both to affirm all the good within us, which is due to God’s creating and recreating grace, and ruthlessly to deny (i.e., repudiate) all the evil within us, which is due to our fallenness.

Then, when we deny our false self in Adam and affirm our true self in Christ, we find that we are free not to love ourselves, but rather to love him who has redeemed us, and our neighbor for his sake. At that point we reach the ultimate paradox of Christian living that when we lose ourselves in the selfless loving of God and neighbor we find ourselves (Mk. 8:35). True self-denial leads to true self-discovery.

The International Herald Tribune is printed in Zurich rather than Paris now, but it continues to be spread throughout Europe daily with a wide variety of American and international news, so that one can sit on the top of a snow-covered Alp in the midst of a blizzard and become suddenly informed as to what has been going on in the last hours, days, or months in very distant parts of the world. Amazing how human beings take all this rather for granted! My eyes were looking out at peaks almost 11,000 feet high, my body was sitting in the warmth of a heated room with snow blowing wildly against the window panes at an altitude of about 7,000 feet, but my mind was off in the midst of a situation in an African country, which consists of a tiny grouping of islands, horrified with what that particular day’s paper had reported. Facts were listed including the statistics that 300,000 people make up this country which a few years ago became “free.” The “freedom” was demanded, suggested, by various people, and then given by the French government. The “freedom” from French rule has produced in something like five years, statistics which lumped in this report gave facts such as “There are only three doctors left to serve 300,000 people.” “Fifty per cent of all children born die before they are five years old.” “The last dentist left the country two years ago.” “The per capita annual income is the lowest in the world, $60 a year.” The article went on to tell of the age of those who are ruling the country. Voting age commences at fourteen, and some of the officials are seventeen and eighteen years old. An official from a foreign country came to offer aid, but the two teenage officials he was given to talk to could neither read nor write, and he found it impossible to communicate with them so he left with his mission not accomplished.

The snow flakes whirled in dizzying patterns as the wind blew, but my mind whirled with the twisting patterns human beings have made as they have blown about the word “free” into blizzard-like drifts, changing what it would have been without the storm power of false winds. I thought of the people who had ranted and raved, insisted and pushed, screamed and forced, and had “won.” Not for themselves, but for so many thousands of other people whom their victory had affected, they had won freedom to be miserable, freedom to suffer, freedom to be without medical help, freedom to be ruled by uneducated teenagers, freedom to be ignorant of nutrition or medicine, freedom to be without education in any area, freedom from knowledge, freedom from ever being exposed to truth, freedom to be tortured or killed by the whims of whoever had sudden power. How destructive can “freedom” be? The destructiveness of “freedom” stares at us from the newspapers daily!

What a brillant screen is the word ‘free’ to hide the misery of final destruction.

Am I trying to say that colonial rule has ever been anything close to perfect? A thousand times no, but so many hundreds of thousands of people in the world are being spilled out of the frying pan into the fire, to sizzle without the “spiller” caring a whit, and the spilling process is being piously labeled, “the giving of freedom.” No matter what results are, the use of the word “free” satisfies those who scan the verbal camouflage without examining the reality of what is really there under the screen of words. What a brilliant screen is the word “free” to hide the misery of destruction.

The destructive twist to the meaning of the word “freedom” commences in the hearts of people. Come a moment to a serious discussion I was having with a twentieth-century young man when he nodded his head and proclaimed with a strident certainty, full of unrecognized human pride and egoism, “I understand the teaching. My questions are answered—but how can I bow? I can’t bow. I want not only to go on in an interesting life in my own will, but I want to continue comparing one teaching and another. I enjoy the search. If I bow, that freedom will be over.” It was really a cry of wanting the freedom to be “master of my own soul,” or the freedom to be an observer, a critic, a reporter making judgments from a vantage point of being uninvolved, free to theorize continually, freedom to be a critic of true truth, to listen to God speak and consider it with the attitude of a columnist reporting last night’s opera. What he had was the same thing as the people of that island nation of Africa—the word was freedom, the reality was misery. Freedom from God is everlasting misery.

Jesus speaks clearly to the Jews who had believed him, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31, 32, NIV). There are discussable theories as to what path needs to be taken for freedom to be real under human governments, but true freedom is meant to be a cutting of chains and a substitution of something that will not disappoint, that will not destroy, but that will give a constructive fulfillment that is lasting.

With a Shake Of the Fist

When an author wins a Pulitzer Prize for her first book the sensible reader will vote with the majority. What other analysis is possible than that Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is in places a beautifully written and moving book? Or that Annie Dillard deals with such difficult questions as the meaning of nature, the role of death and birth in the universe, the problem of pain, and the nature and image of God; that she approaches them with a unique eyesight.

The difficulty is increased when the author explains her work, as she does in this issue (see page 14). Yet, a reviewer can fall back on the statement that writers are less dependable than an outsider, being both too close and too removed from her own work. Also, that what a writer writes is more important than what a writer says about what she writes.

Dillard’s descriptions of nature and the aspects of nature on which she concentrates reveal a particular view of God that does not necessarily match that of biblical revelation. She takes the Old Testament into account, particularly the book of Job. She asks the same questions. But Dillard leaves out the New Testament almost entirely.

Since Dillard might say that the nature of a person is revealed in his work, it is important to get an accurate picture of her picture of nature. In some sense it is pantheistic. She sees God animated in nature; yet she also sees him as quite apart from his creation; you can’t have it both ways.

Dillard’s views on God and his work are implicit in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. There is little straightforward philosophy or theology. She is much more explicit in Holy the Firm, particularly in the central chapter, “God’s Tooth.”

That the world was created by God is never denied. But when Dillard asks “whatever for” she is really asking about the nature of God. She views nature as bleak, dark, almost wicked. Just when the day looks inviting, she reads about parasites who feast on a man’s guts. Or she watches a praying mantis eat her mate as he mates her. Or she thinks of cockroaches who devour human hair and nails and rats who gnaw a child’s flesh. This is what God made, she says. But how can we rejoice and be glad in it?

All of this healthy questioning should not go unheeded. She provides a balance to the treacle that sees every slug as beautiful. Yet in forcing us to face the problem of pain in a world made by a presumably good God she stacks her case by ignoring some basic Christian doctrines. First, the fall. Second, that nature is herself a creature, just as man is. Third, the Incarnation.

God told us to care for nature; we were born to be gardeners and animal tenders. When we disobeyed God we failed at that just as much as at obedience. We brought nature down with us. And, as Paul tells us, it too waits to be redeemed. The seeming irrationality of nature is a result of the fall. We may not like it; we may not understand all that it means. But we cannot deny it, or impute to God any unrighteousness that belongs to us alone.

Of all the passages on the nature of God in Pilgrim, the most telling is in “The Waters of Separation,” the final chapter. Dillard draws a parallel between an ancient Eskimo tale and God:

“A young man in a strange land falls in love with a young woman and takes her to wife in her mother’s tent. By day the women chew skins and boil meat while the young man hunts. But the old crone is jealous; she wants the boy. Calling her daughter to her one day, she offers to braid her hair; the girl sits pleased, proud, and soon is strangled by her own hair. One thing Eskimos know is skinning. The mother takes her curved hand knife shaped like a dancing skirt, skins her daughter’s beautiful face, and presses that empty flap smooth on her own skull. When the boy returns that night he lies with her, in the tent on top of the world. But he is wet from hunting; the skin mask shrinks and slips, uncovering the shriveled face of the old mother, and the boy flees in horror, forever.

“Could it be that if I climbed the dome of heaven and scrabbled and clutched at the beautiful cloth till I loaded my fists with a wrinkle to pull, that the mask would rip away to reveal a toothless old ugly, eyes glazed with delight?” (p. 273).

Later in that chapter, where the New Testament enters her thinking, in a tone of irony Dillard comments on the peace and happiness that God gives. Read between the lines, she says, and you might find it. But her conclusion: we are “dealing with a maniac.”

Can Annie Dillard possibly think that God is like that old woman? That he sits laughing at our distresses, drunk with lust? That he is crazy? She seems to answer yes in Holy the Firm. As she looks at the universe and sees sorrow piled on pain, she asks, “The works of God made manifest? Do we really need more victims to remind us that we’re all victims?… Do we need blind men stumbling about, and little flamefaced children, to remind us what God can—and will—do?” (pp. 60, 61). Is this the fault of God?

No Christian should walk around with an unreasoning optimism. If our consciences have been seered by God’s holy light we must recognize pain and evil. And then work, where and when we can, to change it. But that is different than asking who is to blame, a question that seems to get us nowhere.

But what of the things we can’t change? What of the praying mantis and its habits? Dillard looks at these seeming aberrations of nature as evil. But an insect has no moral concept of evil, no way of thinking, no soul. Man can be evil; can nature? These are questions she needs to face.

God, Dillard says, has a stake in the universe. Agreed. But just what the stake is she never tells us. That stake and the answer to the question “Does God care?” were given in the Incarnation. What we know of pain and irrationality God knows, because Christ does. Have we suffered? What is that compared with Christ’s suffering? Does nature suffer? Look how it reacted to the crucifixion. Do we weep? Did Christ when he saw his creatures fall? All that sounds pat. It looks pat in print. But to understand it from the inside out takes a lifetime of commitment.

Dillard wants to love God, though she admits that he is “less lovable than a grasshead, who treats us less well than we treat our lawns.” We can agree that at times it may seem that way, but seeming and reality are two different things. And we return again to the Incarnation. And to biblical revelation.

Throughout Pilgrim and again in Holy the Firm Dillard insists that all we can know of God is what we see in nature. And that is the weakness of her argument. Orthodox Christianity teaches that we have a trustworthy guide to understanding God and for knowing his will, the Bible. God made us rational human beings; we can think; we have language. He reveals himself through these means. We don’t need to look at nature alone to learn of God. We can understand what we see in nature because of the Bible. And because of the Incarnation.

At times that may strike us as insufficient. We may shake our fists at God; Dillard’s books are her way. But faith demands that we accept the witness of the writers of the Bible that God is who he says he is. Ultimately, that is the question to decide.

CHERYL FORBES

Annie Dillard’s Way of Seeing

Since the 1960s American culture has been marked by the resurgence of a popular brand of neoromanticism. We have fled urban blight and searched for calm and simplicity in a country lifestyle. We have rediscovered the vanishing wilderness and become conservationalists. Annie Dillard’s romanticism, however, is of a deeper sort. She writes in the tradition of the great nineteenth-century writers: her heightened moments of consciousness within nature are akin to Wordsworth’s “spots of time.” Like Blake and Rimbaud, she is a voyant—a seer whose imaginary eye transforms prosaic details of this world into visions of another universe. Like Emerson, she ponders how a transcendental reality may participate in the nature we know. And she has followed Thoreau by living an at times ascetic life as an amateur naturalist.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm indicate that Annie Dillard’s nature experience is also religious. She calls readers to discover the intense joy of really seeing the created world. Her frequent allusions to the Bible, along with a wealth of other reading, place her personal observations within larger and larger contexts, pulling the reader along on a metaphysical quest.

Dillard claims that she is not a scientist, but an explorer of her neighborhood; the world of these two books is spatially limited. Tinker Creek and the cycle of the seasons during one year in Virginia make up the framework of a nature diary in the first book. She also deals with the process of her own consciousness as she moves between observation and poetic vision. Moments of insight into the mystery of nature lead Dillard to a new understanding of what writing is. “Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it.… My eyes alone can’t solve analogy tests using figures, the ones which show with increasing elaborations a big square, then a small square in a big square, then a big triangle and expect me to find a small triangle in a big triangle. I have to say the words, describe what I’m seeing” (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p. 30). To see is to perceive connections between everything in this world and thus is a metaphoric act.

Dillard uses religious language to describe this perception, which involves an apprehension of the divine presence in the world and a creative, artistic act. (Coleridge would have called these two aspects of seeing the work of the primary and secondary imagination.) In order to see, one must yield the self in an act of faith; one receives a gift in return. Illumination follows.

Time, particularly our consciousness of the present moment, intrigues Dillard. The present is “an invisible electron,” but when the poet-observer is able to transcend her time-bound position to experience eternity within the present moment and to capture that moment, then it is the scandal of particularity. The creative perception of the poet parallels the scandal of particularity of the Incarnation, but all of us have the potential of perceiving the eternal in our time-bound midst.

The intricacy and fecundity of nature also cause Dillard to meditate about the underlying reality of the universe. In the end she is drawn to a hymn of praise for the creator of this world she loves so much. “And like Billy Bray I go my way, and my left foot says ‘Glory,’ and my right foot says ‘Amen’: and out of Shadow Creek, upstream and down, exultant, in a daze, dancing, to the twin silver trumpets of praise” (p. 271).

Even as Annie Dillard experiences time and decay in her first book, few doubts enter her mind about the reality of her own glimpse of the sacred at work within nature. In fact, she sees herself as a co-operator with God.

“Hasidism has a tradition that one of man’s purposes is to assist God in the work of redemption by ‘hallowing’ the things of creation. By a tremendous heave of his spirit, the devout man frees the divine sparks trapped in the mute things of time; he uplifts the forms and moments of creation, bearing them aloft into that rare air and hallowing fire in which all clays must shatter and burst. Keeping the subsoil world under trees in mind, in intelligence, is the least I can do” (p. 94).

Holy the Firm depends upon this notion of a holy “subsoil world,” which is only alluded to in this passage from Pilgrim. It may refer implicitly to God as the ground of all being; in any case, “holy the firm” is a metaphor for an insight that enables Dillard to resolve doubts about the reality of her nature experience when an awful accident threatens her joy.

In form, Holy the Firm is a spiritual diary in prose poetry, though its opening is strongly reminiscent of one of Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Only three days are covered in this diary, but they are a paradigm of the romantic experience of joy: joy lost and consolation.

The nadir of the book comes as the result of a plane crash that causes the burning of Julie Norwich, a young girl who lives in the vicinity of Dillard’s Puget Sound home. The accident points up the fragility of beauty. Dillard now asks whether there is any metaphysical reality undergirding our world of time and space. In asking this question, she also asks whether her nature experience has been only an illusion. The resolution to this crisis is a mystical one. To Dillard’s question, “But how do we know—that the real is there?” comes first the realization that the love of the real is preferable to the knowledge of the illusory and that all of us must be reminded of what God chooses not to do. Then comes the moment of mystical transformation as the writer walks home after buying the bread and wine for the next communion at her country church.

“Here is a bottle of wine with a label, Christ with a cork. I bear holiness splintered into a vessel, very God of very God, the sempiternal silence personal and brooding, bright on the back of my ribs. I start up the hill.

“The world is changing. The landscape begins to respond as a current upwells” (Holy the Firm, p. 64).

The world becomes translucent. As Dillard looks at the sea, she sees Christ being baptized and the drops of water falling from him take on microcosmic symbolism. “I deepen into a drop and see all that time contains, all the faces and deeps of the worlds. […] And I am gone” (p. 67). In this statement of the classic mystical loss of self, Dillard experiences the essential spiritual unity of the world. Taking ideas from the esoteric Christian and Jewish traditions, she believes in God’s participation in the world: in a holy firm, or foundation below the salts and earths, marking God’s presence in nature, and in Christ as the link back to a transcendent God.

With its pantheistic overtones, Dillard’s intuitive view of the spiritual unity of the universe makes everything sacred and restores to the artist the exalted task of making the world blaze to the glory of God. The artist becomes a Christ figure.

The thought and experience of Annie Dillard are not unique; they are rooted in the romantic and mystic traditions. She makes, however, a personal restatement of the need to see the world as a poet sees it, and her prose poetry is that of a fine writer. Holy the Firm is unified on the metaphoric scale by a number of images. Taking from the orthodox tradition the practice of salting a child to preserve her for God, Dillard makes Julie Norwich a symbol of that child. A dead moth, immolated in the flame of a candle, becomes linked to the crucified Christ and the sacrificing artist. Dillard reformulates with feminine imagery the romantic view of the artist as God’s visionary. She will be God’s chaste bride, his nun, and she will bear Julie Norwich’s suffering. This vocation is a consuming one; the consolation is God’s love.

“Held, held fast by love in the world like the moth in wax, your life a wick, your head on fire with prayer, held utterly, outside and in, you sleep alone, if you call that alone, you cry God” (p. 76).

PATRICIA WARD

Patricia Ward teaches French and comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University, University Park.

Let’s not dispense with logic.

In the Middle Ages philosophy and theology were happily wedded and seemed destined to a long and happy life together. With the dawn of the modern era, however, the marriage appeared to be in trouble. Philosophers began to see theologians as muddle-headed and superstitious. Theologians viewed philosophers as increasingly secular and short-sighted. The strained relationship managed to hold together through the seventeenth century, but in the eighteenth, philosopher David Hume’s suggestion that most theological writing should be thrown in the fire signaled the inevitable divorce. The two disciplines have gone their own ways since then. They speak to each other only on rare official occasions when it is awkward not to do so.

My purpose here is not so ambitious as to attempt a reconciliation. As a Christian philosopher, I wish to consider one small part of the broken relationship by examining the way in which some theologians have expressed a particular doctrine, that of the transcendence of God. Philosophy has always emphasized clarity of thought, and modern analytic philosophy especially is committed to the avoidance of linguistic ambiguity and confusion. Some theologians, especially those with an “existential” outlook, cause philosophers to stumble not over the doctrine of transcendence itself but over the language in which it is conveyed.

The doctrine of the transcendence of God is at the heart of Christianity. No one can deny it and be a Christian in any traditional sense. The God whom Christians worship transcends man and his world. He is, as the Apostles’ Creed proclaims, the maker of heaven and earth. So although the world may be viewed as his handiwork, he is always distinct from the world. And although man was created in God’s image, man is not God, nor is God man. The failure to make these distinctions has been regarded by Christian orthodoxy as heresy.

Theological discussions of the ways in which God is transcendent must run into thousands of pages. But most of these explanations fit into three broad categories. One is that God is transcendent in that he is not a part of the world of space and time. God will never be found as an object occupying a particular location, as, say, the President might be found at the White House. Another explanation is that God’s transcendence is seen in the fact that his qualities and activities surpass those of all the other beings we observe. God’s love is greater than that of any man and his creative activity more pervasive than any other’s. Neither of these two explanations poses a problem for the philosopher, though the question of how we are to conceive of an agent who has no physical body is of some interest.

The third position is often put forward by theologians with an existential bias. This one involves an attack on traditional rational categories, and it therefore falls squarely within the realm of the philosopher’s interest and judgment. These theologians claim or imply that because theology deals with God, its language is exempted from the usual linguistic and logical rules. God is so radically other than man that he is beyond the natural man’s thought. Theology, they say, is sui generis, it is unlike all other systems of thought, and therefore theological explanation is a unique type of explanation.

Their explanation of God’s transcendence runs as follows. God transcends the world in that he is inconceivable; that is, he surpasses our thought. Our frail minds with their finite rational abilities cannot conceive of God. In his Church Dogmatics (Volume II, Part 1) Karl Barth asserts that the sufficiency of our thought forms collapses altogether in relation to God. He says that we are not capable of conceiving God, that God is invisible not only to the physical eye of man but also to the spiritual eye. Barth then asserts, however, that God is visible as the invisible and expressible only as the inexpressible. Faith somehow involves seeing what cannot be seen, expressing what cannot be expressed. This is an attempt to bring into focus the radical difference between a holy God and sinful men. The Scottish theologian T. F. Torrance goes even further than Barth in this. Torrance claims that if we are to have a knowledge of God, we must not impose our own patterns of thought on him but must allow our minds to fall into subjection to what Torrance calls the “divine rationality.”

These thinkers, and others like them, imply that God is transcendent in a way that the natural man cannot logically understand or express. Thinking or speaking of God is impossible. Now this may sound pious or humble to some, and therein lies at least part of its appeal. I would like to suggest, however, that the piety here is somewhat confused. The virtues of piety and humility are not enhanced by intellectual and linguistic confusion.

It is difficult to get a clear picture of exactly what Barth is saying about our knowledge of God and his transcendence. Is he attempting to say that God is visible only to the eyes of faith or only through the revelation of his son Jesus Christ? That can be said clearly and directly. Is he saying that man is sinful and that God is holy? This too can be clearly expressed and responded to. It is not inexpressible. Barth appears to insist on forcing upon us all sorts of offensive contradictions, such as “visible as the invisible” and “expressible as the inexpressible.” Then when we finish making our way through this, we are told that God is not really expressible as the inexpressible but is expressed in Jesus Christ.

Now in order to make a significant assertion one must differentiate between what is so and what is not. If God is not expressible, then he is not expressible. Not in contradictions, not in paradoxes, not in poetry. If he is expressible and has been expressed clearly in the life and words of his son Jesus Christ, then this fact can be expressed to human beings in language. Christians can put forward the claims of the Gospel and call for a response. Barth needlessly offends the intellect with his contradictions. If the Gospel is expressible, then it can be expressed. If not, then all proclamation, all attempts to express the Gospel, ought to cease.

The problem with Torrance appears to be even more serious. He appears to claim that God’s transcendence means we cannot conceive of him. And yet we have a “knowledge” of God. The point is not that we realize there are things that we do not yet know but may someday discover or have revealed to us. The claim here is stronger than that. It is the contradiction that one can now know something that one cannot now know.

This sort of claim offends the philosopher. It is tantamount to saying that it is possible to conceive of that which lies unconditionally beyond the conceptual sphere. What would we think of a geometer who claimed that the circle is really square and even insisted that this concept is central to geometry? We would not take him seriously, no matter how impressive his credentials. But Torrance appears to make an assertion that is at least roughly like this. And then we are told that the philosopher must suspend his disapproval of contradictions at this point because God is God. God is above or beyond logic, and we can therefore make significant self-contradictory assertions when speaking of him.

Philosophers reject this. Not because they are proud or impious, though doubtless some are. They reject it because they are committed to clarity of thought and language. And theologians need to realize that this kind of attack on logic can be very destructive to theology itself. If theologians wish to debate with one another (to say nothing of debating with philosophers), they must adhere to certain minimal logical rules. To allow contradictions is to allow such statements as “God both is and is not x,” “God can make an x that both is and is not y.” All debate about the Resurrection can be resolved by the now meaningful assertion, “Jesus did and did not rise from the dead” and out the window along with the debate goes the distinction of truth from heresy.

As I said earlier, it is simply a fact about human language that in order to make a significant assertion we must distinguish between what is the case and what is not. Statements that are self-contradictory are compatible with anything at all being the case; hence they cannot be assertions.

They cannot be judged true or false in that they assert nothing about which this judgment can be made. Theologians are concerned about distinguishing truth from falsehood. It follows that theology needs to avoid contradiction, even when speaking of a transcendent God.

Theologians who insist on removing the criteria of meaningful assertion demean their own enterprise. They force themselves into a position of accepting all sorts of strange and fanciful claims about God and religious experience. The contemporary scene abounds with false prophets who appeal to the irrational. I would like to suggest that only by applying basic logical principles can serious theologians close the door against the endless absurdities of free thinkers who claim to be Christians.

Reason should not be viewed as the dry and dusty tool of the secular philosophers. It is an indispensable tool for all of us who labor with our intellects. This leaves the theist with two alternatives as he tries to explain the transcendence of God. If he continues to insist that self-contradictory talk is a necessary constituent of theism, then theological distinctions are left to personal preference, temperament, or caprice. He may, on the other hand, hold that all that is really important to Christian theism can be stated clearly and without contradiction, that the claims of Christ can be proclaimed clearly and human beings can be asked to make a decision in terms of those claims. To say this is both logically and theologically sound. It makes logical sense to assert that God is more merciful and kind than any human being while at the same time insisting that his mercy and kindness are not conceptually different from human mercy and kindness. The wish to make these attributes different in kind is tantamount to doing away with these words. However great God’s mercy and kindness are, to convey any truth about them requires that they remain mercy and kindness. One may wish to go on and assert that God’s mercy and kindness amount to much more than we could ever explain, that, in the song writer’s words, “the love of God is greater far than tongue or pen can ever tell.” This is a perfectly acceptable logical and theological point. If we assert this “unexplainable remainder,” however, we must be consistent and leave it unexplained if we wish to retain the rational integrity of our theology. To attempt to explain it as a matter of a “divine logic,” or as an expressing of the inexpressible, is to suspend the basic principles of sound discourse. It is to make theology a kind of intellectual no man’s land. Kindness and mercy can be only kindness and mercy. A word cannot transcend its own conceptual content.

Theologians who wish to emphasize that Christian truth calls for a response, or that the knowledge of God is a personal knowledge, should say so. But they must remember that they are talking about truth and knowledge. Talk of an “existential” or “heart” knowledge of God is clearly understandable. When, however, the theologian demands that we suspend ordinary logical principles, he demands too much. He removes theology from the realm of meaningful philosophical, theological, or common-sense analysis. But if we cannot understand or analyze a claim we cannot act upon it; we can neither accept nor reject it. Even evangelism requires rationally coherent claims that people can act upon. “Come, let us reason together,” said the ancient prophet.

A Survivor Of Babel

He flexes his lips,

tenses his jaw,

clenches his tongue & uvula

but makes only silence–

silence & the rasp

of tissue, pop of spittle

Somewhere his voice

is filling a stranger’s throat

& mouth

words he should speak

are clearing a stranger’s lips–

& only its distant whisper

tickles his ear

EUGENE WARREN

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.