While researching the Christian situation in Egypt last month, News Editor Edward E. Plowman visited two mass Bible-study sessions that attracted thousands of Coptic Orthodox members. The following is an account of what he saw and heard:

It is six o’clock on a pleasant Thursday afternoon in Heliopolis, an eastern suburb of Cairo. The service has already been in progress for one-half hour when we arrive at the Coptic Orthodox church on Cleopatra Street. We are led into the massive educational annex, past several rooms filled with people watching the service on closed-circuit television, to a large theater-like auditorium. More than 3,000 people are packed inside. The women are seated on the right, the men on the left, in accord with ancient Egyptian tradition. The balcony is full, and perhaps 150 young men are jammed into overflow seating on the platform. A rail in front of the platform is lined with dozens of tape recorders; scores of others repose on the laps of those seated near the podium.

The audience is singing a hymn as we are led to seats that have been reserved on the front row just below the podium. We are greeted by smiles and nods of welcome from those around us. Our assigned interpreter—a well-known physician, we learn later—quietly slips in beside us. The music is distinctly Arabic, unlike the familiar Western tunes often heard in Presbyterian services in Egypt. As in most Orthodox and Protestant church services, male voices dominate, their robust tones reverberating from the exposed brick and block walls. If the sometimes pained, sometimes adoring facial expressions are evidence, most of the men and boys are singing from the soul. The great hall is alive with feeling.

Father Zacharia Botros, 44, steps to the podium and opens his Bible. As all Coptic Orthodox clergy, he is bearded and is clad in a black robe and black clerical cap. Taller than average, he immediately commands attention. A hundred tape recorders are clicked on, and all around us people position their notebooks and pens.

Father Zacharia, as he is known all over Egypt, indicates that today’s Bible study will be about hunger, death, and life. Man’s hunger ranges from desire for food and sex to self-esteem, possessions, and power, he says. The priest amplifies each point with illustrations from Scripture and everyday life, pounding home applications in the dramatic oratorical manner of the great pulpit masters. At times he is a fiery evangelist, warning authoritatively about sin and death and exhorting his listeners to receive Christ, to cultivate a hunger for the Word of God. At times he is a skilled exegete, carefully explaining the rock-hard meaning of biblical truth. He leads the audience in quoting supportive Scripture throughout his presentation. At some points he also becomes a holiness preacher, pausing after every major section of his talk to identify with his people and to lead them in deeply moving prayers of appropriation of the truth expounded so far. “We can be changed right now—at once,” he affirms.

All over the auditorium people pray aloud, repeating his phrases. Some openly weep.

The session has lasted nearly two hours. There are announcements, an offering, and another hymn. A number of the people leave, but nearly 2,000 remain for a shorter meeting, designed primarily for high school and university students. A movie segment of an Old Testament story is shown, and Father Zacharia concludes with a brief Bible exposition that would cheer the hearts of evangelical stalwarts everywhere. He is one of the most powerful ministers of the Word we have ever heard.

The priest is mobbed as he seeks to leave. Some want him to pray for their bodily healing (there were no charismatic-style manifestations during the public meeting), some want his counsel, others merely want to greet him and kiss his ring, an Orthodox custom.

He cannot linger. Someone tells us that he has been summoned to the cathedral this night for a meeting with Orthodox officials who feel that the content of his preaching is out of step with church tradition.

It is now 6:30 on Friday evening, and we are at the huge Coptic Orthodox cathedral on Ramses Street. In one of those uncanny coincidences the taxi driver who brought us was playing a cassette recording of last night’s message by Father Zacharia. The driver had not been at the meeting, so a friend had provided him with a tape. As we inched through the Cairo traffic, the tape reached the prayer passages, and the driver prayed aloud (with his eyes open), following the priest’s recorded lead. Later he turned to us with a broad grin and said in the best English he could muster: “I am a Christian.”

We are met at the cathedral by our interpreter, a young press agency employee who devotes much of her free time to volunteer work at the Orthodox headquarters complex on the cathedral grounds. She is one of many such church-committed young people we have met in recent days.

We are led to front-row seats in the cavernous structure. With high vaulted ceilings and simple appointments, it is shaped like a reclining cross. In front of us is the altar and a slightly raised platform separated from the sanctuary by a decorative metal fence.

We have come to hear the Coptic Orthodox patriarch, Pope Shenouda III, expound Scripture and reply to questions from his flock. There are more than 4,000 persons here tonight, many of them young adults. The men and women are seated on opposite sides of the center aisle. Often, we are told, the crowds exceed 5,000. The fence is to protect His Holiness from being overwhelmed by swarms of admirers at the close of the service.

Shenouda sits behind a microphone at a small table near the front of the platform. Behind him and to his right is the high-backed, maroon-upholstered papal throne. To his left are several rows of chairs that face him. The first row is reserved for bishops, and there are three here tonight. Priests are permitted to trim their beards but bishops are not. We can almost tell who has been bishop longest by the length of his beard. Visiting priests and monks sit behind the bishops. They straggle in all evening, passing through a gate in the fence. At the end more than a dozen clerics are in place. As each enters the platform area he bows before the altar, kisses the patriarch’s ring, then proceeds to a seat. Father Zacharia sits on the last row. The interruptions seem to bother neither Shenouda nor the audience.

Some hymns are sung, including one written by the patriarch when he was a monk out on the desert. It is a hymn of worship addressed to the Lord: “My heart is beating, leaping for you. I have wished to keep you close in my heart. I have left the whole world to be with you. I have left all except you.”

The hymn session enables ushers to gather written questions from the audience. Shenouda quickly shuffles through them and selects the few he will answer. There are inquiries about fasting during Lent, how to concentrate when praying, how to break the ice during confession, what to do about fear of the devil.

One questioner wants to know if it is true that the world will end in twenty years. This gives Shenouda an opportunity to teach basic eschatology. He cites the embarrassing problems experienced by the Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses in date-setting. He lists some of the end-time signs—the coming of the Anti-Christ, much apostasy, the salvation of the Jews, famine, war, and solar catastrophes. No one knows when it will happen, he emphasizes. Then he exhorts us to be ready at all times. For some of us, he warns, the end may be only five minutes away.

His style is that of a learned, quiet-spirited but firm-minded orator, not given to excited, emotional pulpiteering, yet able to hold his audience. His occasional injections of humor add extra warmth.

Tonight’s Bible study is in the Song of Solomon, through which Shenouda has been proceeding verse by verse. His main point is that the believer’s love for God should be pure, that foreign objects of affection must be forsaken. This kind of love comes from following Christ, he says. Good works, prayer, fasting, and even Bible study and faith in Christ are of little or no value without such love, he affirms.

He stops rather abruptly about nine o’clock and is quickly escorted out a back exit. The people mill around in the clogged aisles, exchanging cheery greetings and looking for their mates. The priests descend from the platform and mingle with the crowd. Father Zacharia is surrounded by people seeking his blessing and prayers, and he has to struggle to reach a side door.

Sonia, our interpreter, expresses hope that we’ve gained some insight into the spiritual awakening that seems to be taking place in the Coptic Orthodox Church and that we’ve caught some of the excitement and fervor ourselves.

We have.

WCC Crisis: Hard Currency

The World Council of Churches reportedly has suffered a $2 million loss because of the decline in value of the U.S. dollar and German mark at Swiss exchange rates. The Executive Committee slashed nearly 12 per cent from the organization’s budget. Officials say that the WCC may be forced to relocate its world headquarters, now in Geneva, to a country where the currency situation is more favorable. The matter will be discussed at a top-level WCC meeting in September, according to press reports.

Center Cutback

The institution that has come to be known as the Billy Graham Center was not always planned for the Wheaton College campus in Illinois. At one time, before a premature newspaper report soured things, the evangelist’s native city, Charlotte, North Carolina, planned to get it. Then there were the hopes of some in Minneapolis, Minnesota, his headquarters city. With festive groundbreaking ceremonies last September (see October 21, 1977, issue, page 44) the college—Graham’s alma mater—appeared to lay to rest for all time any uncertainty about where the institution belonged. By that time the project had expanded from an archives to a graduate school of communications, an international institute of evangelism, a library, a museum, and a promoter of conferences.

The center, to which Graham has pledged $15.5 million, is under construction now, but developments last month raised questions again about whether all of last September’s plans will be realized. Center director Donald E. Hoke resigned amid reports that the center will not be developed to the extent announced at the groundbreaking. The college announcement of Hoke’s resignation said nothing about any change in the plans that Hoke helped to design. Wheaton President Hudson Armerding acknowledged in a telephone interview, however, that two major facets of the center program are being reviewed. He said the main floor’s public display (sometimes called the “museum”) section was being reduced. The plans for the International Institute of Evangelism, which would bring Third World Christian leaders to study at the center, have been “referred back to the program committee,” the president stated.

Armerding said the museum area is being reduced on the recommendation of Graham himself. He did not say how much it is being cut, but he indicated that the final decision will be made by the Billy Graham Center board this spring after they see revised plans. This section has probably been the most-discussed during the planning stage, and Graham was known to be very sensitive to the possibility that it might be viewed as a “monument” to him. It was one of the features that tourist industry officials wanted to exploit at the Charlotte location, and a site had been offered adjacent to an interstate highway.

Even if there are reductions, the “evangelistic thrust” of the center will be maintained, a source within the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association insisted. He acknowledged that parts of the plan are being reviewed but said that no programs would be eliminated.

A description of the planned display-exhibit area in the January issue of Graham’s Decision magazine explained: “This first-floor area for visitors will contain photographs, films, replicas of significant places, ‘shoebox theaters’ and special exhibits for children. In a small theater a specially prepared motion picture will show dramatic highlights of the Graham ministry, with a Gospel presentation by Billy Graham. Visitors to the center will receive a clear presentation of God’s plan of salvation.” Although most of the rest of the building was planned for the use of serious scholars or especially-invited leaders, this area was to be open to the general public.

In his address at the groundbreaking, Graham emphasized the training aspects of the center’s program. He added, “Our desire is not to build anything which could be interpreted as a monument.”

The center has been the major recipient of grants from the World Evangelism and Christian Education Fund (WECEF), the Dallas-based foundation whose income is generated largely by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. The $15.5 million committed to the project is for construction and a maintenance endowment. Funding of the operational budget has not been settled. Construction is expected to be completed by 1980.

Stock Answers

It was evangelism of a different kind in the Bible Belt last month when the stockholders of J. P. Stevens and Company held their annual meeting in Greenville, South Carolina. Conversion of the textile giant’s labor policy to a pro-union position was the aim of a few of those present, but management won every contested vote by more than 94 per cent. None of the resolutions proposed by a coalition of labor, civil rights, and religious groups got more than 6 per cent of the voted shares.

Stevens is the nation’s second largest textile producer and is said to be the most strongly anti-union firm among the Southern textile mills. For years union organizers have been unable to make much headway in company’s plants. The Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union has won elections to represent Stevens workers in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, but no contracts have been negotiated with management. Lack of progress in the contract talks was one reason that the National Council of Churches joined the union’s boycott of Stevens products last year (see December 9, 1977, issue, page 58). The NCC-related Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility tried to marshal all the church-owned stock it could for the Greenville meeting. The center has become well-known for its efforts to use stock to get companies operating overseas—particularly in South Africa—to change policies, but it has also worked in some domestic areas.

Timothy Smith, the center’s optimistic director, believes more was achieved at the Stevens annual meeting than the statistics indicate. He told James D. Finley, Stevens chairman, that the company’s “obstructive and illegal tactics” in fighting unionization “may have given a gift to the corporations of the country, the Labor Reform Act.” The NCC, along with various union groups, has been seeking federal legislation to get more privileges for labor organizers.

Finley declared to the assembled stockholders that the company’s record of sales and profits was “incontestible proof of the failure of the boycott.” He also said the firm stood ready to submit to a nation-wide secret ballot by all 45,000 employees “to decide once and for all” if they want to be represented by the union.

The chairman’s remarks and responses to stockholder questions were not satisfactory to all of the participants, and they kept going back to the microphones in the cavernous hall. The affair lasted four hours. The annual meeting was described as rancorous but not disorderly. There were demonstrators outside the well-guarded building, but no major incidents were reported.

Among the minority representatives was a Glenmary priest, Gerald Conroy. He reminded the chairman that the company had failed to respond to Southern Catholic bishops’ offer to mediate the dispute with the union. Later, six bishops (of Atlanta, Savannah, Charleston, Charlotte, Raleigh, and Richmond) issued a statement saying they had concluded that Stevens had engaged in “repression” of labor organizing. They stopped short, however, of endorsing the boycott.

“We had a more influential presence this year than last,” Smith said of the Greenville meeting. Instead of joining in the criticism of the company for moving the meeting from the traditional New York site to South Carolina, he commented, “The company did us a favor by moving South. None of us could have afforded to fly so many workers to New York to speak.”

The effort at Stevens was considered one of the most important of the year for the “corporate responsibility” workers. Organized labor has identified the South as its main recruiting area, and the textile industry has been one of the chief obstacles to unionization in the region. In the minds of union advocates, Stevens so typifies attitudes of southern industrialists that the labor reform measure pending before Congress has been nicknamed the “J. P. Stevens Bill.”

Smith and his supporters are not concentrating all of their energy on the stockholder meetings, however. Just before the Greenville meeting a coalition of unions and their sympathizers brought such pressure to bear on one New York bank that Stevens chairman Finley was forced to step down from a seat on the bank board. He acknowledged to reporters at Greenville that he would not stand for election to another term on the board of Manufacturer’s Hanover Trust Company because “they don’t want me.” The bank manages large union pension trust funds, and it was pressured to drop Finley or lose the accounts. The union and its supporters are also pressuring other businesses whose executives or directors sit on the Stevens board.

In a related action, New York’s Citicorp, the nation’s second largest banking corporation, announced that it will no longer grant loans to the South African government. Smith’s organization has been focusing attention on Citicorp and other lenders to South Africa for years and called the action an “important first step.” He indicated, however, that he would push for other steps, such as an end to loans to private corporations in South Africa. Other financial giants have also cut back on their lending to the white-ruled African country under pressure from American groups.

Gay Week In San Jose

Homosexual activists in San Jose, California, have been successful in obtaining city approval for a “Gay Human Rights Week” in June. Council members took the action despite sharp opposition, the presentation of petitions bearing 30,000 signatures (mostly of area church members), and threats of recall.

Council chambers were jammed last month with what was said to be the largest gathering of citizens there in city officials’ memory. More than 700 noisy protesters and a few dozen gay supporters were given a chance to air the issue at the special session that was called because of snowballing negative public opinion. There was cheering when councilman David Runyon, a member of Lincoln Glen Church (Mennonite Brethren) in San Jose, led a successful move to rescind by a 4 to 3 vote a resolution setting aside a “Gay Pride Week” in June. The cheering turned to jeers, however, when the council in effect reversed itself again, simply replacing “pride” with “human rights” in the designation.

Opening comments by Mormon Richard Harrington, chairman of the Citizens Committee Against Gay Pride Week, set the tone for the opposition. He said his group represented sixty churches with congregations having a total of 60,000 members. “We do not want San Jose recognized as a city which honors homosexuals, and we do not want San Jose to become a symbol of sexual deviation,” he exhorted.

Jerry Crosby, minister of administration for the 4,000-member First Baptist Church of San Jose, directly challenged the four who passed the initial “Gay Pride Week” resolution: Mayor Janet Gray Hayes, Vice-Mayor Susanne Wilson, Alfred Garza, and James Self. “Your action tonight will determine your political destiny,” warned Crosby, prompting thunderous approval from the audience. He accused the mayor of making “a horrendous blunder” in allowing the resolution to get on the council agenda. Leaders of the citizens group spoke of instituting recall procedures immediately.

For almost two hours a parade of thirteen Gay Week proponents and opponents stated their views. Supporters of Gay Week included an American Civil Liberties Union attorney, the pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church, and a member of the San Jose Human Rights Commission who declared that as a gay he has human rights because “God gave them to me.” Gay Week advocates cited positive contributions by homosexuals to society, and they complained that human rights of gays are denied constantly. Opponents quoted often and at length from the Bible, condemning homosexual activity as sin. The precedent of local government supporting a sexual preference was another point of contention for anti-gays.

In finally calling for the question, Runyon declared: “This council should not be involved in an issue of sexual preference.” Councilman Garza, in a surprise reversal of his first vote, joined Runyon, Lawrence Pegram, and Joseph Colla to defeat the February resolution. He immediately followed up with a motion for a new resolution specifying Gay Human Rights Week instead of Gay Pride Week, then joined Hayes, Wilson, and Self to make the unpopular decision stick.

Garza explained that in a chat with Marvin Rickard, pastor of the 5,000-member Los Gatos Christian Church, he had discovered that the real issue was the word pride. Therefore, he argued, Gay Human Rights Week should stand. Rickard, however, was outspoken against any gay recognition, and members of his congregation along with those from First Baptist comprised a significant part of the crowd in the council chambers.

The following morning Mayor Hayes was unavailable for comment, but her spokesperson Barbara Krause indicated that the mayor was quite disturbed by “the hostile reaction” to the council vote. Krause said that Mrs. Hayes “sincerely believed it was a human rights issue” and had to vote accordingly. Phone calls were running three to one against the decision.

Vice-Mayor Wilson said she was “grieved” at the response and expressed surprise at many of the volatile letters she received from “Christians.” “This resolution was typical of those we pass for groups all the time,” she said, “and we did not put a value judgment on it.” Last year the council passed more than 100 such special-week proclamations for various groups within the city.

Crosby in an interview commented that he believes Christians were correct in expressing hostility on a moral issue. “I’m for human rights unless it is a question of morality,” he said.

ROGER KOSKELA

Atheist Schism

It sounds like a church squabble, but this time it’s the atheists who are fighting among themselves. The battle broke into the open at a recent national meeting of atheists in Newark, New Jersey. Some of Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s followers in her American Atheists organization felt that it should be restructured along more democratic and responsible lines. A position paper calling for such changes was to be read by Jane Conrad, director of Quest for Truth, the Colorado chapter of American Atheists. Mrs. O’Hair, however, barred Mrs. Conrad from reading the paper. Next, Mrs. O’Hair expelled Mrs. Conrad and several other persons from membership, charging them with “conspiracy, poor leadership qualities, and false and malicious representation against the national office.”

Chapters from at least five states withdrew from the national organization in protest against Mrs. O’Hair’s actions.

Many members believe that some of Mrs. O’Hair’s suits “have been disruptive and without real significance,” said Mrs. Conrad in an interview with religion writer Virginia Culver of the Denver Post. These members tried to help Mrs. O’Hair to recognize that “her abrasive manner generated hatred and violence which was then projected on all atheists,” explained Mrs. Conrad.

Mrs. Conrad said she had always believed the O’Hair organization had 60,000 or more names on its mailing list. But, said she, a letter from William Murray—Mrs. O’Hair’s son who had split with her in a schism last year—alleged that the mailing list numbers only 2,517 names and that the membership is 1,207.

Reporters were unable to reach Mrs. O’Hair for comment.

Last month Mrs. O’Hair’s estranged husband, Richard Franklin O’Hair, who was president of the O’Hair atheist enterprise from 1965 to 1975, died of cancer at age 64.

Religion in Transit

Portions of the Bible are now available in 1,631 languages, the number spoken by 98 per cent of the world’s population, according to the American Bible Society. The complete Bible is available in 266 languages and the New Testament in 420, the ABS says.

A Gutenberg Bible was sold by New York book dealer Hans P. Kraus for $1.8 million to the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, West Germany. It reputedly is one of only forty-seven that survive out of a printing of 200 more than 500 years ago. The United States has thirteen copies; another was to be sold this month by General Seminary (Episcopal) in New York City. The Gutenberg Bibles are considered the world’s most expensive books.

Church officials are warning pastors around the nation to investigate before inviting a church-directory company onto the premises to take pictures of church members. Such companies usually offer to produce church pictorial yearbooks at no charge, ostensibly because their profits come from portrait orders placed by the members. A number of companies have filed for bankruptcy after collecting the portrait charges and delivering poor-quality photos or none at all. Rarely in these instances are the promised church directories produced. Arkansas authorities recently arrested three executives of Pictorial Enterprises, a yearbook company that has attracted many complaints, on felony theft-by-deception charges. To aid pastors, the United Church of Christ has produced a directory of the directory companies, complete with evaluations.

A recent Gallup poll found that 64 per cent of U.S. Catholics desire the return of “the old-style Latin mass.”

The Seventh-day Adventist Church in an out-of-court settlement agreed to pay $500,000 to the family of a teen-ager who was paralyzed three years ago in a tumbling exercise at an SDA school in Takoma Park, Maryland. The family had sued for $6.5 million; the amount agreed upon was the total amount of the school’s insurance coverage.

Church leaders in the Youngstown, Ohio region have formed the Ecumenical Coalition of Mahoning Valley to spearhead efforts to reopen under community-worker ownership a steel plant that was closed last September, throwing 5,000 people out of work and creating an economic crisis throughout the area. Churches as well as business firms and individuals are depositing funds in “Save Our Valley” accounts to provide seed money and attract federal aid for the project.

Southern Baptist Convention church membership last year topped 13 million, its largest ever. (Resident membership was listed as 9.4 million.) Losses, however, were recored in the number of baptisms (345,690, the lowest since 1949), and in enrollment for Sunday school, and other programs among the 35,255 SBC congregations.

Personalia

James Schoenfeld, 26, and his brother, Richard, 23, two of the three convicted kidnappers of twenty-six children in a school bus at Chowchilla, California, have made professions of faith in Christ, according to prison chaplain Cliff Harbaugh.

A Paris criminal court has convicted Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard of fraud and sentenced him to four years in prison and a $7,000 fine. He was absent, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. The president of the French branch of Scientology, Georges Andrews, was given a suspended prison term of one year and fined $600. The two were charged with promising to heal mental and other illnesses and inducing prospective members to pay more for courses than they were worth.

Roman Catholic auxiliary bishop Joseph McKinney of Grand Rapids, Michigan, was named chairman of the National Service Committee, the main coordinating body of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement in the United States. He succeeds priest Michael Scanlon, president of Steubenville (Ohio) College. McKinney has been identified with the charismatic movement since the early 1970s. In 1973 he led a delegation of Catholic charismatic leaders to a private audience with Pope Paul VI.

Jeb Stuart Magruder, 43, former Nixon aide who became an executive with Young Life International after serving part of a prison sentence for his role in the Watergate affair, plans to enter Princeton Seminary this fall.

Robert McAfee Brown, 57, a United Presbyterian, announced his resignation from his teaching post at Union Seminary in New York, effective next year. A leading advocate of “liberation theology,” he cited as his reason a lack of administrative skills demanded by his Union post.

Shortstop Chris Speier of the Montreal Expos and left-fielder Joe Rudi of the California Angels have formed Athletes for Life to fight legalized abortion. Both have been active in the Christian movement among professional ball players.

Willard M. Aldrich has resigned as president of Multnomah School of the Bible in Portland, Oregon. He has held the post since 1943. His son Joseph, 38, pastor of the 1,500-member Mariner’s Church in Newport Beach, California, was named as his successor.

World Scene

The Roman Catholic bishops of Poland have once again called on the nation’s Communist authorities to respect the rights of Polish citizens. The appeal was part of a statement drawn up during the bishops’ annual plenary assembly. It deplored “the fact that scientific, artistic, and religious activities are subjected to state censorship.”

When the body of Emanuel Swedenborg, eighteenth-century philosopher and founder of a religious sect, was removed from a grave in London in 1908 for reburial outside the Uppsala Cathedral in Sweden, authorities discovered that the head was missing. Last month the skull turned up at an auction in England, and the Swedish Royal Academy of Science paid $3,000 to obtain it.

Even a first-year missiology student might be inclined to write off predominantly Buddhist Thailand as a basket case. After 150 years of Protestant work and more than 450 years of Roman Catholic effort less than one-half of 1 per cent of the 44 million population in the kingdom is Christian. The total Protestant constituency is well below 100,000, according to mission researchers. One published source lists an estimate of just over 600 congregations with about 550 fulltime pastors.

In a rare display of candor, a recent news release by the Overseas Missionary Fellowship (OMF) lamented that twenty-five years of “constant work and witness” by more than 100 OMF missionaries in central Thailand had resulted in only 820 converts. Worse, it noted, fifty-nine people had “turned back from the Christian way” during the past year. (An estimated 700 missionaries from thirty-five agencies are assigned to Thailand.)

Except for some action in northern churches in the early 1970s, most Protestant bodies have shown little growth over the past few decades. Seldom have denominational and mission lines been crossed for fellowship gatherings and cooperative projects. Several church groups, including the 32,000-member Church of Christ in Thailand (CCT)—the largest of the Protestant bodies—have undergone periods of bitter internal dissension recently, adding further to the gloom and isolationism.

“After 150 years of work, our converts are too few,” acknowledged Tongkham Pantupong, 69, moderator and acting general secretary of the CCT (composed largely of churches having Presbyterian, Disciples of Christ, Karen Baptist, and Chinese Baptist background). “We have freedom to preach the Gospel in this country,” he said in an interview, “but we have not been taking advantage of the opportunities to evangelize.”

There are signs at last, however, that times—and people—may be changing. Thai believers are celebrating their 150th anniversary this year, and they have designated it as a year of evangelism.

To get things started, five-day evangelistic campaigns were held in February in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, the nation’s second-largest city (area-wide population: 450,000), and in Bangkok (five million population). Attendance ranged from 2,500 to nearly 4,000 at Chiang Mai and from just under 4,000 to more than 5,000 at Bangkok. In both cases, they were the largest crowds in Protestant history in Thailand, say mission observers. And, they point out, never before have so many pastors and churches joined together in such cooperative outreach efforts.

President Stan Mooneyham of World Vision International was the guest evangelist at both series of meetings, which were billed as “Toward New Life” rallies. Thai musicians and drama teams also performed at the outdoor Chiang Mai meetings. Popular American singers Evie Tournquist and Andrae Crouch helped out in the Bangkok crusade, held in a large auditorium in Lumpini Park. The pair sang solos and spirited duets that met with waves of warm applause. In both cities, local government officials delivered official greetings from the platform.

In all, more than 1,100 persons registered spiritual decisions in the two anniversary campaigns. About one-fourth indicated they were making first-time professions of faith in Christ.

Why an American evangelist? “We needed a neutral outsider for our first meetings in order to get everyone to cooperate,” explained a leader candidly. “The World Vision name is well-known in Thailand,” he added. (World Vision has extensive relief and child-care ministries in Thailand.)

Coordinating the year of evangelistic activity is the Thailand Church Growth Committee (TCGC). Its roots go back to 1969 when seventeen church leaders from Thailand attended the South Pacific Congress on Evangelism in Singapore. Those leaders returned and the following year organized a congress on evangelism that attracted 400 participants. It was held at a seaside resort southeast of Bangkok. The congress planning committee disbanded in 1971; in its place emerged the TCGC, with representatives from the major denominations and missions. World Vision provided much of the committee’s initial funding and underwrote a large share of the crusade expenses. It has three full-time executive staffers.

Also during February, Japanese educator-evangelist Paul Ariga preached to large crowds in northern Thailand—including 2,000 at Nakorn Sawan—in connection with the anniversary observances. Missionary educator James Taylor of Taiwan preached in meetings aimed at reaching the Chinese community in Bangkok. Last month Thai preachers conducted crusades with large crowds in other Thailand cities.

The most significant aspect so far, say leaders, is a new sense of Christian unity. Revival tides may be flowing, suggests Wirachai Kowae, 37, pastor of a 100-constituent Assemblies of God church in Bangkok.

Protestant missionaries began arriving in Thailand in the late 1820s. It was hard work. American Baptists established in 1837 the first indigenous Protestant church in the Far East, a Chinese one that still exists in Bangkok today. But twenty-two Congregational (American Board) missionaries labored from 1831 to 1849 without converting a single Thai, and the Presbyterians worked from 1840 until 1859 before they were able to baptize the first Thai convert. A number of missionaries contracted tropical diseases and died. Two of the earliest Thai converts were clubbed to death in the Chiang Mai area. (An Edict of Religious Toleration was pronounced in 1878, and every constitution of Thailand since then has provided for religious freedom.)

Many early mission efforts, especially those by Presbyterians, centered on the establishment of hospitals, clinics, and schools. The leprosy hospital and rehabilitation center built by Presbyterian medical missionary James W. McKean near Chiang Mai in 1908 is a world-renowned institution.

The Church of Christ in Thailand (CCT) was formed in 1932, largely the result of Presbyterian missionary labors. In 1957 the United Presbyterian Church integrated its mission work and workers into the CCT. Institutions and properties were handed over to the church. Several other missions acted similarly.

Although many older leaders of the CCT are theologically conservative, a number of the younger leaders are liberal. There is heavy liberal bias at the CCT seminary at Chiang Mai, and some young Thais get their training at liberal seminaries in America. The liberalism is a source of tension in the church. (The president of the CCT school is Mrs. Prakai Nontawasee, reputedly the world’s only woman president of a major seminary.)

There are other sources of tension, too. In 1974 seminary teacher Koson Srisang was elected general secretary of the CCT. A liberal socially and politically as well as theologically, he irritated many people with his outspokenness on controversial issues and with his seeming sympathy for radical groups. At one point he became embroiled in a controversy over his handling of relief money from the Bread for the World organization.

Last summer Srisang—a member of the World Council of Churches Central Committee—wrote a letter to the Thai government on CCT stationery. In it he asked the government to transfer from military to civil court the case of student demonstrators arrested in 1976. He released copies of the letter to the press.

A storm of protest arose within the church, not over the substance of the letter but over the fact that Srisang wrote it without church approval, involved the church in politics, and invited censure by the public and the government. At a special session of the policy-making CCT General Council in September, more than half of the church’s fourteen districts sent resolutions expressing disapproval and calling for Srisang’s resignation. A special meeting of the CCT’s General Assembly was scheduled for January of this year to deal with the matter. Srisang, however, submitted his resignation, saying he did not want to see the church torn apart. Moderator Pantupong has taken over until a replacement is named. Pantupong is a former pastor and director of the CCT department of evangelism, and he was a delegate at the 1974 Lausanne evangelization congress.

Srisang has left Thailand temporarily to seek cooler climates elsewhere. Back home it is still hot. In January, the Chiang Rai district—the denomination’s largest group of churches—ousted moderator Sompong Athorntip a year before his term was to end. Non-confidence, said the delegates. Athorntip had been a staunch supporter of Srisang. Because of such drastic actions, says a Baptist missionary, many university students have become disillusioned and left the church.

Pantupong, who doubts that many have left, hopes that new leadership can bring the CCT back to its historic position of witness. He believes that the vast majority of the members—including the young people—want the church to be more involved in evangelistic outreach than it has been in the recent past.

Much of the CCT’s present ministry is solidly evangelical. The seventeen-year-old Lamp of Thailand, a correspondence Bible institute, is servicing 8,200 enrollees this year. McCormick Hospital employs a full-time evangelist to visit patients. There are twenty-eight prayer groups among the 478 employees, and these groups have spawned two churches-in the past five years. There is as much emphasis on spiritual ministry as on rehabilitation at the McKean leprosarium, whose current director is a committed evangelical. The president of the 950-student Payap College, Amnuay Tapingkae, indicates that he wants Christ to have a greater place in higher education and in his own life.

Meanwhile, the ranks of evangelicals outside the CCT are astir with activity. The relatively young Evangelical Fellowship of Thailand (EFT) has a membership of twenty-seven foreign missions, eleven Thai organizations, and nearly 100 individual congregations.

The EFT is chaired by Charan Ratanabutra, 55, pastor of the 700-constituent independent Bangkok Church. Ratanabutra is also chairman of Campus Crusade’s upcoming “Here’s Life” crusade in Thailand (Crusade has six Thai staff members), and he is chairman of World Vision’s Thailand board. He is a good friend of Pantupong and others in the CCT leadership. Some observers see him as a bridge by which evangelical concerns in the CCT can be strengthened and by which the voices of moderation and cooperation in the EFT can be amplified.

Bangkok Bible College, organized in 1971, has forty students. It is a cooperative project of Overseas Missionary Fellowship and the Christian and Missionary Alliance. There are twelve other Bible schools scattered throughout the country, and the Southern Baptists have a seminary in Bangkok.

Voice of Peace in Chiang Mai produces Christian broadcasts beamed at the various tribal people in the hills. Its cassette and audio-visual ministries are expanding substantially.

And so it goes: Thai leaders and tribal workers reaching out hand in hand with missionaries to all of Thailand.

Chulin Toktaeng has been around for a long time. The World Vision public relations man is 74. He was a pastor and evangelist for more than twenty-five years and then an administrator. “The time hasn’t come yet for missionaries to go home,” says he. Moratorium is not a popular concept in Thailand, he says. There is much to do, he suggests, adding that if anything significant is to be accomplished, “We must work together.”

Good and Bad

What’s ahead in television programming?

More of the same, according to an advertising agency’s report on some 150 pilot programs and other shows being developed for next fall. Sex and comedy dominate, according to the report, and the plots will feature a wide variety of themes, including coed dorms and unwed couples living together.

Meanwhile, the National Parent Teacher Association (PTA) has released its ratings of the best and worst current TV shows. Topping the “excellent” list is “Little House on the Prairie” (NBC), “Eight is Enough” (ABC), “The Fitzpatricks” (CBS), and “Rafferty” (CBS). (Both CBS shows have been canceled.) “Soap” (ABC) has the poorest PTA rating, followed by “Redd Foxx Show” (ABC), “Maude” (CBS), and “NBC Movies” (NBC). (ABC has canceled the Foxx show.)

CBS landed the greatest number of programs in the PTA’s list of the twenty best; NBC was rated poorest.

Such ratings apparently don’t bother ABC programming executive Edwin T. Vane. Opposition to “Soap” by the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops, and other religious groups led some advertisers and ABC affiliates to shun the program last fall. Said Vane: “A basic industry principle was at stake, namely, who is going to control what goes on the air—special interest groups who lobby, or the American public?” He said that ABC thought it was a big enough principle to fight for. “In retrospect, it was worth doing,” he added. “Some people,” he said, “feared that kids would become instantly corrupted by ‘Soap,’ but they found out it wasn’t so.”

Meanwhile, radio-TV director Carl Richardson of the one-million-member Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) reports “surprisingly positive” written responses from most of the nearly 300 sponsors of TV programs found offensive in a church-wide survey. As a result, he says, the denomination will examine the sponsors’ actions further before publishing a proposed “Shopper’s Avoidance List.” The list will be a directory of advertisers with bad TV records—as seen through church officials’ eyes—and members will be encouraged to boycott the advertisers’ products.

Executives of many corporations that advertise on TV concurred with Richardson’s concern about the moral state of TV programming. Some said company policy prohibits sponsorship of programs involving excessive violence or explicit sexual material. Others said that they are sympathetic and that they’ve complained to the networks, but that they are at the mercy of broadcasters and program producers.

Not all responses were sympathetic. Volkswagen executive Marvin Gruber said: “Volkswagen will not be put in a position of censoring programs. If you choose not to purchase our products, it should be because of your disregard for the quality of our cars.…”

In the Image …

Is it fiction or non-fiction? That was the question last month as the J. B. Lippincott Company pushed forward the publication date of its controversial new book, In His Image: The Cloning of a Man. Author David Rorvik claimed that he helped arrange the scientific procedure that produced a child asexually. He also claimed that he has seen the boy, now fourteen months old. He named no names. Lippincott could produce no proof, but the publisher labeled the book non-fiction “on the strength of Mr. Rorvik’s credentials.”

Publication of the volume several months ahead of schedule drew wide media attention. Columnists had a field day, with some taking the story seriously and others considering the whole affair a promotional hoax. Humorist Art Buchwald asked, “Is there a limit on the number of Billy Carters the country will put up with?” Authors Ted Howard and Jeremy Rifkin of Who Should Play God? wrote, “One thing is certain—either it is the hoax of the century, or one of the most important events of recorded history.”

There was little support in the scientific community for Rorvik’s claim that a human had been “engineered” by cloning. Frogs have been cloned, but there have been no documented reports of success with mammals. The process involves the transplanting of the nucleus of a cell from a male donor into a fertile egg cell. The nucleus of the egg cell is then removed or inactivated so that the progeny develops as a genetically identical copy of the individual that supplied the donor cell. In the book, a millionaire gets a science writer to assemble a team to produce a new person identical to him. An Asian woman is found to carry the embryo, and she delivers a baby who looks like the American donor. Although some scientists said that the feat might be possible, others refused even to comment lest they help publicize the book. All were awaiting proof. The author, a free-lance writer, did not promise it.

Minnesota Poll

A vast majority of Minnesota residents (87 per cent) believe in heaven, and most think that they are headed there, according to a poll conducted by the Minneapolis Tribune. More than 70 per cent of the state’s people believe in hell, and 20 per cent say they know someone who is a sure bet to be an occupant, but only one in twenty-five believe he or she deserves to go there, the survey showed.

Another Tribune survey disclosed that when it comes to love and marriage, most students at the University of Minnesota endorse premarital sex (64 per cent) but disapprove of extramarital sex (83 per cent). The study was based on interviews with 300 students.

Repose

Christ commanded it (in Matthew 10:8), so he has been trying to be obedient. That’s what tent evangelist Daniel Aaron Rogers, 41, has been telling those who ask why he has tried to bring his mother back to life. Eighty-year-old Gladys Rogers died in Harrison, Arkansas, on February 2. The evangelist had her body frozen, and he became involved in widely publicized “resurrection” attempts for more than a month. When nothing happened, he tried to get an Indonesian faith-healer to resurrect her. None, however, showed up.

Rogers, who identifies himself as a minister of the “Church of Christ with the Elijah Message,” packed the corpse in dry ice instead of embalming it and kept it in a house trailer until moving it to a church in Deer, Arkansas, for a memorial service. That move brought authorities into the case: taking an unembalmed body across county lines is prohibited in the state. Boone County officials, with the help of an undertaker and a hospital, enabled Rogers to bring the body back to Harrison, but they would not allow him to put it on display or otherwise use it in a public meeting. It was transferred to an upright freezer. Rogers found an undertaker in Missouri who would cooperate, but then he had to get permission from Arkansas authorities to move the corpse to the state line. It was transferred to a chest-type freezer, and the convoy was accompanied to the Missouri border by a deputy sheriff.

Rogers called in other evangelists to pray at a service in the funeral home in Reeds Spring, Missouri. One of them said he saw movement in the dead woman’s eyes, but her son said he could not confirm the claim. About 100 persons sang and prayed in an adjoining room. Some had come seeking healing. Rogers maintained that his mother would return to life to give a sign that “the end of the age” is near.

Authorities were expected to order the corpse’s burial late last month.

Rogers has preached in some main-line churches in the Ozarks as an interdenominational evangelist. He told reporters that his Church of Christ with the Elijah Message is the “original remnant of the church that [Mormon forefather] Joseph Smith founded.” It was “established anew” in a 1929 break from the Latter Day Saints and the Reorganized LDS, he said.

The Disputed Lutheran Hour(s)

Fifty radio station managers had to make a hard choice this month about one of their most popular religious programs. The affiliates of the NBC network who receive the Lutheran Hour “on the wire” from the network were faced with the decision to use the broadcast prepared for April 9 by Oswald Hoffman or to use a substitute offered by NBC. (The replacement was a re-broadcast of a 1972 Lutheran Hour Easter show, with an announcement to explain why it was being run again.)

NBC refused to carry the April 9 program on the grounds that it presents “one side of a controversial issue” and that NBC policy forbids sale of time “for the presentation of views on controversial public issues.” In this case, the issue is abortion. The sermon, entitled “The Sanctity of Life,” calls abortion one of the “basic issues of life now before people all over the world.” Hoffman’s message says, “When people make a decision regarding abortion, regardless of what the law permits, they are making a moral and spiritual decision.… That’s where God comes in, and the Word of God speaks to us about that.”

The network’s decision is a “clear violation of our rights under the first amendment of the U.S. constitution,” declared Tommy Thompson, manager of domestic radio for the Lutheran Layman’s League. “They’re saying, in effect, that it’s fine to have religion on the air as long as it doesn’t say anything controversial.”

Ben Armstrong of National Religious Broadcasters said that it is hard to understand why NBC had decided to censor this one program out of all that the Lutheran Hour had broadcast. “There is hardly any aspect of religion or ethics or morality that is not controversial to someone,” he asserted.

Thompson said the Lutheran Hour’s primary purpose is to “preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to treat controversial issues only in order to apply the Gospel to those issues.” The program has been on the air since 1930 and on NBC since 1956. It is carried on about 1,000 stations in the United States alone, with only about fifty of that number picking it up through NBC. Other stations that are affiliated with NBC receive it directly from the program’s production facilities instead of by a network feed. The Mutual radio network also carries it.

Within about ten days after the dispute became public, three NBC affiliates notified Thompson that they would run discs of the original April 9 program instead of taking the show offered through the network. Among them was WBAL in Baltimore, one of the major radio markets. The program is broadcast in some of the other major markets (such as Chicago) by stations owned and operated by the network, and Thompson was watching to see if any of their managers would make decisions to use the edition refused by NBC. The nation’s communications law makes station licensees (not networks) responsible for programming. Thompson and his colleagues publicized their dispute with NBC in the hope that it would focus attention on this responsibility of the stations. Every station that normally receives the program through NBC was reminded of that provision of the law and offered a disc to play on April 9.

The public notice has brought a variety of expressions of concern and offers of help, Thompson noted. Several law firms have offered their services free to fight the case through the Federal Communications Commission and the courts. Such an appeal could take as much as $250,000 and ten years, but the Lutheran organization does not plan to go that route even with free legal services. “That just isn’t the ministry that we have seen as ours,” Thompson explained.

One of the first to come to the defense of Hoffman was the Roman Catholic archbishop of St. Louis, Cardinal John J. Carberry. His archdiocesan newspaper editorialized against the NBC decision, and in a personal statement the archbishop said Hoffman continually “proclaims a controversial doctrine: ‘Jesus Christ is Lord.’ ”

ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS

Differences On The Millennium

Understanding Bible Prophecy, by Morris A. Inch (Harper & Row, 1977, 151 pp., $3.95 pb), Contemporary Options in Eschatology, by Millard J. Erickson (Baker, 1977, 192 pp., $7.95), and The Meaning of the Millennium: Four Views, edited by Robert G. Clouse (InterVarsity, 1977, 223 pp., $4.25 pb), are reviewed by Earl D. Radmacher, president and professor of systematic theology, Western Conservative Baptist Seminary, Portland, Oregon.

The continuing publication of books on eschatology seems to indicate that the interest is more than just a passing fad. Perhaps it is a confirmation of the prediction by the late James Orr in the nineteenth century that eschatology, the one remaining undeveloped area of theology, would receive its major treatment in the twentieth century.

This spate of books on prophecy is not always met with enthusiasm, however, because the authors too often seem consumed with prediction. There is more concern with setting dates and establishing eschatological time charts than in promoting the changed life, which is the major purpose of prophecy. It is this practical value of prophecy to which Inch draws our attention in Understanding Bible Prophecy. He begins by stripping away the idea of prophecy as simple prediction and begins to develop its character as the revelation of God. “The heart of the prophet’s concern,” Inch stresses, “was not primarily emphasizing what might come to pass but who cradles life in his hands. God is the subject of the prophetic message … man is its target, and the message is an invitation to a creative relationship between the two.”

This would be an excellent volume for the beginning student of prophecy to gain a proper perspective before he digs into the heavier details of the predictive element. Each of the thirteen brief and easy-to-read chapters concludes with a stimulating set of questions for study and discussion.

For the thoroughly initiated student of prophecy Erickson fulfills a quite different purpose in Contemporary Options in Eschatology. Although theological conservatives have long had a consensus on many major points of eschatology, there has been considerable variation of interpretation respecting the rapture, “the great tribulation,” and the millennium. As crises multiply and as the glorious coming of Christ draws nearer, there seems to be a growing desire to examine the options more closely. Thus, Erickson’s students at Bethel Theological Seminary pressed him for “a course that would examine thoroughly and objectively the eschatological options extant in the circles in which they would one day minister.”

In order to place the “conservative options” in a broader context, however, Erickson in his first two chapters gives a succinct, yet helpful, summary of alternatives that generally fall outside the range of what is usually considered evangelical thought: consistent eschatology, realized eschatology, and existential eschatology, for example.

Moving to the primary area of concern—the millennial and tribulational positions—he follows a regular pattern: a brief overview of the position, its history, a more thorough examination of its major concepts and the arguments offered in support of them, and finally an evaluation of both positive and negative aspects of the position. Erickson is to be commended for the fair, balanced, and careful treatment he has given to each position. He avoids that all-too-common tactic of quoting the extreme representation of a position in order to discredit it. Rather, he seeks to put each view in the best light possible. For example, although Erickson is not a dispensationalist, any dispensationalist will be gratified to note his positive evaluation: “The first strength and benefit of the dispensational system is that it is a system. Second, the dispensationalist has attempted to take seriously the idea of progressive revelation and has developed a theology based upon it. Third, dispensationalism has attempted to be genuinely and thoroughly Biblical.”

The inherent weakness in this kind of comprehensive work is two-fold. First, you cannot be brief and thorough. Perhaps the book will whet the appetite for further study. I hope that it will not cause the reader to think he completely knows the position. Second, it seems virtually impossible to present another’s viewpoint as convincingly as one’s own.

This latter problem is nicely solved, however, in The Meaning of the Millennium: Four Views. “Historic Premillennialism,” “Dispensational Premillennialism,” “Postmillennialism,” and “Amillennialism” are presented by George Ladd, Herman Hoyt, Loraine Boettner, and Anthony Hoekema, respectively, along with an important integrating Introduction and Postscript by editor Robert Clouse, professor of history at Indiana State University. After each major essay the other three writers respond to it. On the lighter side, Ladd gets upset with Hoyt for labeling his view “the biblical view.” Likewise, Hoyt feels that it is untrue for Ladd’s position to be labeled “historic.” Again, Ladd almost refuses to respond to Boettner on the ground that “there is so little appeal to Scripture that I have little to criticize.” Hoekema responds to Hoyt that “… he nowhere gives us a specific exegesis of any Scripture passage … he simply gives scriptural references in parentheses.…” Hoekema concludes, with Ladd, that Boettner’s view “is not solidly based on Scripture.”

It is evident that historic premillennialism has much less in common with dispensational premillennialism than it does with amillennialism. Ladd states that “I am in agreement with practically all that Hoekema has written with the exception of his exegesis of Revelation 20.” Hoekema says that “There is indeed a great deal in Ladd’s essay with which I agree.… Our basic disagreement concerns the interpretation of Revelation 20:1–6.” Furthermore, Boettner concludes that “there is comparatively little difference between postmillennialism and amillennialism.”

What is it about Revelation 20:1–6 that makes it such a point of controversy? Ladd states it simply: “The passage makes perfectly good sense when interpreted literally.” Inasmuch as amillennialists and postmillennialists both prefer to spiritualize the passage and reject this literal interpretation, while dispensational premillennialists accept it, it would seem that this would be a uniting factor between historic and dispensational premillennialists. Yet, it is precisely this principle that divides them when applied to other prophetic passages. Ladd states: “Dispensational theory insists that many of the Old Testament prophecies predict the millennium and must be drawn in to construct the picture of Messiah’s millennial reign. This view is based upon the hermeneutic that the Old Testament prophecies must be interpreted literally.” In other words, the major criticism that Hoekema and Boettner use on Ladd’s interpretation of Revelation 20 is the criticism that Ladd uses on Hoyt and dispensational premillennialists. Furthermore, Boettner confirms that “It is generally agreed that if the prophecies are taken literally, they do foretell a restoration of the nation of Israel in the land of Palestine with the Jews having a prominent place in the kingdom.”

The crux of the problem then is literal interpretation (given the proper understanding of figurative language as a legitimate literary genre) as an exclusive or single hermeneutic as over against using literal interpretation normally but spiritualizing at times. It is this latter approach that brings Ladd into conflict with Hoekema and Boettner in Revelation 20 and with Hoyt in the Old Testament. One wonders on what basis the tested and tried control of literal interpretation is set aside. Ladd responds that “a millennial doctrine cannot be based on Old Testament prophecies but should be based on the New Testament alone” (italics mine).

Undoubtedly, many people will agree with Ladd, but Hoyt’s quotation of John Bright may cause others to reevaluate the legitimacy of building one’s doctrine of the millennium on the New Testament alone. Bright writes: “For the concept of the Kingdom of God involves, in a real sense, the total message of the Bible. Not only does it loom large in the teachings of Jesus; it is to be found in one form or another, through the length and breadth of the Bible.… Old Testament and New Testament thus stand together as the two acts of a single drama. Act I points to its conclusion in Act II, and without it the play is an incomplete, unsatisfying thing. But Act II must be read in the light of Act I, else its meaning will be missed. For the play is organically one. The Bible is one book. Had we to give that book a title, we might with justice call it ‘the Book of the Coming Kingdom of God’.”

I personally profited from reading these four authors. After reading all three books, I wanted to pick up a book that would consistently weave together the prophetic story from Genesis to Revelation. For me Stanley Ellisen’s Biography of a Great Planet (Tyndale, 1975) is such a book.

The Offense Of The Cross

Crucifixion, by Martin Hengel (Fortress, 1977, 99 pp., $4.50 pb), is reviewed by Streeter S. Stuart, professor of Greek and New Testament, United Wesleyan College, Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Martin Hengel, professor of New Testament theology and early Judaism at the University of Tübingen, has already shown that he is a master of historiography and descriptive biblical study; see especially his Judaism and Hellenism. This short volume on crucifixion is a translation and enlargement of an article published previously in a Festschrift for Ernst Käsemann. In twelve brief chapters Hengel takes the reader on a captivating journey through familiar and obscure Latin and Greek sources to show that crucifixion was nothing but contemptible in the ancient world and that the preaching of the cross of Christ was in effect the preaching of a most vile and despicable act, one that hardly befit a divine being. “A crucified messiah, son of God or God, must have seemed a contradiction in terms to anyone, Jew, Greek, Roman, or barbarian, asked to believe such a claim,” he says.

Hengel does not attempt to write a theology of the cross, nor does he need to His sources reveal crucifixion as an act of punishment reserved for slaves, social outcasts, political enemies, anarchists, foreigners, criminals, and robbers. The reason why we don’t know more about crucifixion in the ancient world, why we must piece the picture together as Hengel has done, is that it was so extreme a punishment and so repugnant that even the historians did not treat it in detail. Put that picture together with Paul’s preaching of the cross and you have all the cross theology you need.

Hengel corrects a number of misconceptions about crucifixion and takes several previous writers (particularly H. W. Kuhn) to task for either misrepresenting the sources or drawing conclusions from insufficient evidence. He is adamant in his claim that crucifixion was practiced widely but nonetheless abhorred in both the Roman and the Greek world. In his comments upon the docetic attempt to remove the “folly” of the cross, Hengel adds this note:

“It is time to stop talking about ‘gnosticism in Corinth.’ What happened in the community does not need to be explained in terms of the utterly misleading presupposition of a competing gnostic mission. This never existed, except in the mind of some interpreters. What happened in Corinth can easily be explained in terms of the Hellenistic (and Jewish) milieu of this Greek port and metropolis” (p. 18).

Moreover, Hengel accuses modern theologians of attempting to water down or blunt the offense caused by the preaching of the cross. He says, for instance:

“Separated from the particular death of Jesus on the cross the Pauline ‘word of the cross’ would become vague and incomprehensible speculation.… We must challenge the assertion made in the most recent investigation of the subject that ‘there is no direct route from the historical cross to theological talk of the “cross” ’ [so H. W. Kuhn], The one thing which made Paul’s preaching the offensive ‘word of the cross’ was the fact that in it the apostle interpreted the death of Jesus of Nazareth, i.e. of a specific man, on the cross, as the death of the incarnate Son of God and Kyrios.… For Paul, therefore, the word has certainly not faded to the point of becoming a mere ‘theological cipher.’ Any assertion to this effect merely demonstrates the tenuous link of contemporary exegesis with reality and its insipid and unhistorical character. In other words, the utter offensiveness of the ‘instrument for the execution of Jesus’ is still to be found in the preaching of Paul” (pp. 20f.).

One can probably find more about crucifixion in this book than anywhere else. It should be of special value to evangelicals, who particularly value the historical background of the Gospel records. I plan to make it required reading in my course on the life and ministry of Jesus. Teachers and ministers will not want to deal with the crucifixion of Christ again without first reading Hengel.

What Is Moon Up To?

Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church, by Frederick Sontag (Abingdon, 1977, 224 pp., $8.95), The Puppet Master, by J. Isamu Yamamoto (InterVarsity, 136 pp., $3.95 pb), The Moon Is Not the Son, by James Bjornstad (Bethany Fellowship, 1976, 125 pp., $1.25 pb), and The Spirit of Sun Myung Moon, by Zola Levitt (Harvest House, 1976, 127 pp., $1.75 pb), are reviewed by J. Gordon Melton, director, Institute for the Study of American Religion, Evanston, Illinois.

What is it about a religious group with a mere 30,000 members that can inspire so much loyalty and so much hatred? What is it about a leader that keeps him on the front page of newspapers across the country week after week? Other would-be messiahs are having trouble getting a feature article in their local weekly. Does he “brainwash” or “hypnotize” his followers? Is the Unification Church a plot to subvert the American government, a genuine burst of new spirituality, a con game, or just another new religious group that is having its day in the sun and will soon settle down on the fringe of the religious establishment?

Philosopher Frederick Sontag set out to answer those questions. As with any book tossed out in the midst of controversy, Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church will not make everyone happy. In Sontag’s case, he will make very few happy, because he doesn’t condemn the group and its leader as obvious agents of Satan, nor does he endorse claims that Moon is God’s latest messenger.

Sontag assembles the most complete picture of the Unification Church, its history, its belief structure, its life in both America and abroad, and the controversy that surrounds it. He also treats the anti-Moonies, the committed opponents of the Unification Church. One by one he explores the numerous accusations against the Unification Church. In the process he produces a book that is essential reading for anyone interested in the group.

Frankly, I began reading his book with a negative attitude, for rumors had preceded it. “It’s a whitewash,” people said. But the rumors were false. Sontag thoroughly investigated his subject and he discusses every major issue with a considerable degree of objectivity. He went to Korea and Japan, and though he talked to both early members and non-members who were there in the beginning, he failed to uncover any evidence of immorality or of Moon running a sex cult. He investigated the recruitment process and found no evidence of hypnotism or brainwashing; it’s merely competent.

In investigating the opponents of the Unification Church, Sontag discovered the perpetuation of numerous fabrications, unfounded rumors, and baseless charges. He cleared up a number of questions that I had about the group. For example, why would those Korean “church” leaders whose names had appeared on documents denouncing Moon never answer letters? Or why, with all of the charges of a seedy background, had no single person ever come forth to say, “I was there and Moon did those things that he has been accused of?” Also, why, if the Moonies are brainwashed, do they seem so normal when I have met them? And why are they doing such a competent job of fundraising and recruitment?

The basic answer: Moon is not plotting against America, motherhood, apple pie, family life, morality, or freedom. Instead, he represents a new religious movement that offers a distinctly new theology complete with the claim of a new revelatory contact with God. Moon seems to be a “sincere” leader and his followers are attracted for the kinds of reasons that members are attracted to thousands of other religious groups.

However, there is one point at which I am in sharp disagreement with Sontag. He treats Moon’s thought as basically “heresy.” But Moon’s thought is not heresy. It is much too deviant for that. I understand heresies to be the distortion of a theological truth. Nevertheless, with heretics one has a common realm of discourse, usually because there is a commonly acknowledged authority.

Moon’s theology is, on the other hand, not heresy, but a new form of religion. Like such other new forms as Theosophy or Spiritualism, it uses Christian symbols, but in a manner quite foreign to the Christian faith. We can not argue with the Moonies as we do with liberals, conservatives, Methodists, Baptists, or radicals. Rather, we must confront them as we do Hindus or Buddhists, or, more pertinently, the Bahai’s.

Well, then, how does a Christian respond? One of the most mature answers to that question is given by J. Isamu Yamamoto, a research worker for the Berkeley Christian Coalition’s Spiritual Counterfeits Project. In The Puppet Master he suggests two ways to respond to the Moonies—be aware of the facts, and offer to individual Moonies a loving witness. But first, get the facts straight (and Yamamoto valiantly strives to separate fact from accusation). He also perceptively draws the line between Christian theology and Unification theology.

On the tough question of deprogramming, Yamamoto takes a position that deprogramming does not constitute a Christian attack upon cults. It is not even basically anti-Moon; it is anti-religion. Deprogrammers will and have deprogrammed Episcopalians, Pentecostals, Jesus People, Baptists, Roman Catholics, and Greek Orthodox, just as it has done members of the new religions.

People join Moon because they are empty. The basic religious problem of the individual can’t be dealt with by the deprogramming process but by the inflowing of God into one’s life. James Bjornstad in The Moon Is Not the Son picks up Yamamoto’s position and, though approving deprogramming, points out that “Deprogramming is not Christian conversion.” Unfortunately, Bjornstad is naïve in his attempt to place at polar opposites conversion to Moon (i.e., brainwashing by a system of indoctrination and manipulation) versus Christian conversion (which relies on personal choices and decision). Doesn’t Bjornstad realize that church architecture, the order of worship, and even spirited hymns and the methods of evangelists can be seen as manipulative? A Christian “loving witness” promotes if not causes Christian conversion. Is there any substantial difference between a person who becomes a Moonie because of the logic of their teachings, the spiritual atmosphere, the warm friendliness, and their sincerity, and someone who becomes a Christian because of the forcefulness of biblical ideals, the life of prayer, the love of a congregation, and the commitment of individual believers?

The attempts to polarize the techniques of Christian and Unification Church recruitment aside, Bjornstad does a good job in lucidly presenting the crucial ideas of Moon’s theology. He clearly demonstrates that Moon offers a thorough-going alternative to what he designates the broad doctrinal agreement that has continued throughout history.

The final book on Moon, Zola Levitt’s The Spirit of Sun Myung Moon, lightly recounts the author’s adventures in researching the Unification Church. The volume is anecdotal and written in the tongue-in-cheek style so popular today in feature journalism. In the end you learn more about how Levitt feels about the Unification Church and about the often humorous experiences he had with them than about Moon himself.

Only three topics are really discussed, Moon’s beliefs about America, Jesus, and eschatology. But even these are treated with a shallowness that is far removed from the perceptive critiques of either Bjornstad or Yamamoto.

Moon raises for Christians two clear and separate issues, which become confused in the heat of emotion. One issue is theology. Moon presents a clear alternative to Christianity, not just a new theology. As such, we are consistent in approaching them not as Christian brothers and sisters but as religious people of a different faith.

The second issue has to do with whether the Unification Church should freely function as a religious body. On this issue, our perspective and course of action should be clear. We must not confuse theological differences with any right to bring cultural and governmental pressure to negatively bear on the Unification Church. As long as they operate within the law, however much we might oppose what they think and do, we should defend their right to exist.

Briefly Noted

CHURCH MINISTRY TO SINGLES: A Pew for One, Please: The Church and the Single Person (Seabury, 120 pp., $6.95), by William Lyons, describes three approaches to singles programs: the church-related, church-dominated, and church-integrated. Single Adults Want to Be the Church, Too (Broadman, 177 pp., $5.95) by Britton Woods is basically a how-to book on beginning a singles ministry. It includes an excellent bibliography. Robert Arthur Dow’s Ministry With Single Adults (Judson, 175 pp., $5.95 pb) reads like a psychology text complete with case studies and diagrams. This is definitely not for the average reader.

The Fraudulent Gospel by Bernard Smith, reviewed from Scotland by J. D. Douglas in the January 13 issue (p. 56), is published in the United States by the Church League of America (422 N. Prospect St., Wheaton, Ill. 60187). The cost is $2.50.

Catherine and Loren Broadus, Jr., write about the golf widows, in From Loneliness to Intimacy (John Knox, 94 pp., $5.95). Actually this is for all who are married and feel emotionally deserted by their spouses. It’s an excellent book including skills to improve the relationship and cope with emotions.

The Quinlan court battle is a landmark in medical and legal history—a family fighting for a daughter’s right to die. Karen Ann (Doubleday, 343 pp., $10) is the chronicle of that case. But more than that, it is the powerful, poignant story of parents coping with a tragic situation.

Persecuted But Not Forsaken by Pastor Nicoli (Judson, 172 pp., $3.95 pb) is the true story of the ministry of a national worker and his flock in an unnamed town behind the Iron Curtain. It gives a good picture of life on the local level for believers in Eastern Europe.

The role of women is hotly debated among Christians. A better understanding of merely cultural as distinguished from presumably divinely created distinctions requires comparative studies. Women: Roles and Status in Eight Countries, edited by Janet Z. Giele and Audrey C. Smock (John Wiley, 443 pp., n.p.), is a social-scientific study of the contemporary and historical roles of women in Egypt, Bangladesh, Mexico, Ghana, Japan, France, the United States, and Poland.

The Song (InterVarsity, 168 pp., $3.95 pb) is a welcome sequel to Calvin Miller’s The Singer. Characterized by the same delightful style, the poetic narrative roughly parallels the book of Acts as it continues the saga of Madman as he leaves the Great Walled City to travel to Urbis, the city of the Poet King.

A recent survey of 100.000 American women concludes that the stronger a woman’s religious convictions, the more likely she is to be satisfied with her sex life and marriage. This information is reported in about nine pages of The Redbook Report on Female Sexuality (Delacorte, 186 pp., $8.95) by Carol Travis and Susan Sadd. So much for the myth of religion being a killjoy.

Do Americans discriminate against Catholics? Andrew Greeley shouts yes. In An Ugly Little Secret (Sheed, 120 pp., $6.95) the Catholic journalist and sociologist attempts to prove his charge, though one wonders if he hasn’t oversimplified the whole matter.

James E. McReynolds, who works at an alcoholism treatment center, reminds us in America’s No. 1 Drug Problem (Broadman. 154 pp., $2.50 pb) that many more people have problems with drinking than with other drugs. The book serves as a worthwhile introduction for the Christian reader.

The Enemy Is Inhumanity

Between Doctor and Patient, by Donald M. Hayes (Judson, 1977, 176 pp., $4.95 pb), is reviewed by Patricia Gundry, Wheaton, Illinois.

This book is subtitled “A Christian Physician Talks About Hard Choices in Medical Care.” And that’s what it’s about. It includes case histories and the doctor’s difficult choices. Hayes had to decide whether to let patients make their own choices or to keep the truth from them “for their own good.”

This is a difficult book to read, not because of its style but because of its painful content. Casual readers, beware, only those people who are interested in knowing what to do in serious medical situations should open the book.

Hayes approaches his subject without glossing over either the seriousness of his patient’s situation or his own dilemma as a physician. His main concern is with the dehumanization of modern medicine. He says that “The enemy is not death. The enemy is inhumanity.” Obviously his desire to be a humane, caring, responsible person has produced pain and trauma for him at times. It made me see that being a good doctor means more than just good medical care.

The doctor discusses suicide, care for the terminally ill at home, unnecessary surgery and testing, prolongation of life, and resistance of the medical profession to patient-centered care. He also examines the subjects of medical and social ethics and discusses psychosurgery.

The decisions and concerns of the author are dealt with in the context of his Christian faith and responsibility. Because there is so little available in this area, the book will be welcomed by pastors, medical personnel, and all those who work with seriously and terminally ill patients.

A Very Unsecular City

Turning East: The Promise and Peril of New Orientalism, by Harvey Cox (Simon and Schuster, 1977, 192 pp., $8.95), is reviewed by Robert Brow, associate rector, Little Trinity Anglican Church, Toronto, Canada.

Who would have guessed that the author of The Secular City would twelve years later take us on a pilgrimage of very unsecular meditation with Zen masters, peyote-taking Huichole Indians, Tibetan Lamas, and Benedictine monks? Turning East is a fascinating story of open-minded entry into the disciplines of some exotic religions by a Harvard divinity professor who burst on the scene as an advocate of secularity.

Harvey Cox, though he is certainly not a good guide for every trail, is as effective and credible as any writer I know in picturing the total difference between Eastern religious detachment and the biblical view of religion as personal relationships, radical love, and sacrifice. He also pointed out for me the marriage of the modern psychological cult of self-realization with a perverted and totally consumerized adoption of what Eastern detachment seeks to attain. When “Oriental detachment is simply added to Western ego, then we have the worst of all possible worlds: people using each other but avoiding entangling alliances.”

One obviously does not look for rigorous exegesis in Cox. Nevertheless, his chapter on “Meditation and Sabbath” is stimulating. The proposition that “meditation is in essence a kind of miniature Sabbath” leads to the thought that the command of Exodus 20:8–11 requires us to create and rest the way God does. This is different from the idea of Sabbath observance as a bore.

Any return to orthodoxy for Cox is still very much in the future, even though he notes that in some ways he is more Christian than when he began. I read his book immediately after John Robinson’s Can We Trust the New Testament? There I found the author of Honest to God, who really sparked the whole God is Dead movement, now giving what I think is a mortal blow to liberal theories of dating the New Testament writings. Harvey Cox has also moved from extreme modernism to see that, after all, religions are different from one another and that Christianity in particular is the only option that offers the challenge and possibility of radical love and a genuine humanity in the image of God. From both Robinson and Cox I take courage to believe that in the long run we have nothing to fear from the pursuit of truth. An honest modernist is a better ally than a muddled thinker from our own camp.

Priodicals

A major new journal, which should be in all Bible college and seminary libraries and to which many individuals should subscribe, is Gospel in Context. Leaders in non-Western societies and missionary educators should appreciate the “focus on the critical problem of how the Church can avoid the kind of captivity to particular cultures or class interest … while allowing the Gospel to speak meaningfully within particular contexts.” Articles normally will have extended responses from a variety of locations and stances. The first issue (January, 1978) has an article by the editor, Charles Taber, who teaches at Milligan College and the Emmanuel School of Religion in Tennessee. He asks, “Is There More Than One Way to Do Theology?” and there is a report from a Lausanne Committee-sponsored consultation. Send $11 for a one-year subscription (four issues) to 1564 Edge Hill Rd., Abington, PA 19001.

Although the experts had been discussing for decades the place of culture in the communication of the Gospel, I suspect that it was the Lausanne Congress that brought this matter to the attention of many evangelicals for the first time. Culture was at the forefront of the discussion, and there are several important references to it in the Lausanne Covenant.

The Gospel simply cannot be shared with others in a cultural vacuum. There is no such thing as the pure Gospel isolated from a cultural setting. On the contrary, three distinct cultures are involved in any presentation of God’s good news. First, there are the cultural situations within which God chose to reveal himself to mankind in the Bible. Secondly, there is the cultural background of the evangelist or missionary. Thirdly, there is the culture of the people to whom the missionary or the evangelist bears witness. How, then, can Christian witnesses who live in one culture take the Gospel out of the Bible, which was written in another culture, and share it with people who belong to a third, without either distorting the good news or rendering it unintelligible?

This problem of cross-cultural communication, involving an interplay between three cultures, brought thirty-three Christian thinkers together to Willowbank in Bermuda last January, under the joint sponsorship of the Lausanne Committee’s Theology and Education and Strategy working groups. The twenty-eight participants were all committed to the Lausanne Covenant, while the four consultants expressed themselves in general sympathy with it, and there was also one visitor. We came from all six continents, approximately one half belonging to the North Atlantic and the other half to the Third World. Such theologians as James I. Packer, Howard Marshall, and Saphir Athyal, missiologists Peter Beyerhaus and Harvie Conn, Third World Christian leaders Wayan Mastra (Indonesia), James Wong (Singapore), Chongnalm Cho (Korea), René Padilla (Argentina), and Tite Tienou (Upper Volta), and anthropologists, ethno-historians, and linguists Charles H. Kraft, Alan R. Tippett, Jacob A. Loewen, and Donald R. Jacobs discussed freely with one another in this unusual international and interdisciplinary consultation.

Christians have made two blunders: failed to respect other cultures, and then clumsily tried to impose our culture on them.

Reasserting the Lausanne Covenant’s statement that the Word of God is “without error in all that it affirms,” we went on to say that the biblical writers’ critical use of whatever cultural material was available to them for the expression of their message in no way diminished their unique inspiration. Whatever literary genre they used, the writings are still “God’s Word through human words.” Sometimes, it is true, we have to discover the essential or inner meaning of a biblical text and then translate it into our own culture. The purpose of such cultural transposition, however, is not to avoid obedience, but on the contrary to make our obedience contemporary and authentic. And always the original biblical text remains as the criterion by which to test the faithfulness of every attempted translation.

When we moved on from our own understanding of the message to our presentation of it to others, we tried to grapple with the two principle “cultural barriers” to the effective communication of the Gospel. The first is a failure to appreciate or respect the culture of those to whom we witness, and the second is a clumsy attempt to impose our own culture on them. Sometimes both blunders have been committed together. Indispensable to the cultivation of cultural sensitivity is the humility of Jesus Christ. Meeting as we did within a few days of Christmas, we recalled that his incarnation was “the most spectacular instance of cultural identification in the history of mankind,” since by it God’s Son became “a first-century Galilean Jew.” As he emptied himself, so we are called to a similar costly renunciation of status and independence, and a similar identification of ourselves with others, though without losing our own identity or authenticity as the persons and the Christians we are.

Other areas to which we gave our minds at Willowbank were the relations of culture to conversion, to churches, and to ethical behavior. In particular, we asked ourselves how individual Christians can discover their own identity in Christ, without renouncing their cultural origins, and how each church can develop as the body of Christ within its own culture. We stressed that if each church is to “develop creatively in such a way as to find and express itself,” then it must be given freedom to do so. This led us to speak some straight words about those “power structures” that deny churches their freedom and so impede their growth into maturity. We also warned of the dangers of “provincialism” and “syncretism.” The first takes place when churches cut themselves off from fellowship with the rest of Christ’s body, and the second when they try to mix their faith with elements of the local culture that are incompatible with the Gospel.

The gifted and dedicated coordinator of the “Gospel and Culture” Consultation was Pedro Savage from Argentina. He was backed by Partnership in Mission, who are also generously investing in a learning package that they will produce, finance, and distribute on behalf of the Lausanne Committee, which will spread the Consultation’s message. It is hoped that a book will be published later.

Meanwhile, The Willowbank Report gives a full summary of what took place during the Consultation; we commend it to our fellow Christians throughout the world for study and action. It is particularly addressed to missionaries, mission executives, and pastors, but would also be suitable as a basis for local church study groups. Each section includes discussion questions. The Report is available as “Lausanne Occasional Paper No. 2” at $2.00 each from the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization, Box 1100, Wheaton, Illinois 60187.

Thank you so much Nony, for my pocket calculator; I was the only girl in my school class without one, so I had to do my sums in my head, and the answer wasn’t always as right as theirs.” An unfair competition, as far as speed and accuracy goes, between the lightning speed of the calculator, and doing sums in the “old way”! I awakened with that sentence running through my head followed by a series of thoughts. What kind of reality does adding and dividing, multiplying and subtracting have, when it is removed from one’s experience of having more or less, sharing a portion of one’s goods, or loosing them? If “sums” are first just numbers on pieces of paper and not a portion of daily compassion or greed, what do the numbers come to mean? When numbers are removed another step into simply results coming when the right buttons are pushed, the distance from reality is even farther.

My mind went on to consider the history of exchange. Think of the feel and touch, satisfaction or frustration involved with having too many potatoes and searching for someone with apple trees who would swap some apples for some potatoes, or of having many sheep, and the know-how to turn wool into thread, then searching for someone with a loom to weave cloth in exchange for a certain amount of thread. Jump on into the using of shells for exchange, then silver and gold, and then step away into the use of paper money to represent gold and silver, and checks to represent paper money, and on into the modern confusion of the world’s complicated economic system recorded on computers.

Where have the short cuts taken us as to any of the basic realities of life becoming more real? What price computer life? One price is the loss of the sense of reality in some of the important basic areas. The distance between the “real world” and the rapid mathematical calculations it is reduced to in so many areas, becomes a distance that measures unreality.

Language is so wonderful in giving us communication, and written language increases the possibility of communication. However, God has warned us that the very use of words may push us farther and farther away from any reality of communication if the words are used without thought or understanding, as only some kind of a short cut for a desired result. Remember when the Pharisees were complaining to Jesus that his disciples were breaking the law of the elder’s tradition by eating bread without washing their hands?

Matthew 15:3, 7–9 says “But he (Jesus) answered and said unto them, ‘why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition?… Ye hypocrites, well did Esaias prophesy of you, saying, This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoreth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me.’ ” There can be a dangerous temptation to take short cuts spiritually by “mouthing” or “saying” words that sound outwardly as if we were drawing close to the Lord, while inwardly our motive has been twisted into something with no honest desire in it for the Lord’s will, nor for honoring him.

The twentieth-century atmosphere in the area of short cuts, which take people farther away from the basic realities of human exchange in creativity or farming or buying or selling, and take them into a kind of punch button existence removed from the need of thinking in many areas, affects us all in a manner that can too easily be transferred into our human relationships and more seriously into our relationship with the living God. People are too apt to be expecting as a matter of course, short cuts to spiritual growth, push buttons that can lead to the sought for “reality” in Christian life. Easy formulas or phrases can too easily become the kind of words that Isaiah warned the people were only honoring God with lips, not with the heart.

The true “measuring stick for reality” in our Christian lives, is the stick that would measure the distance between what our lips and mouths are saying, and where our “hearts” really are. To make that distance short enough to be a measure of reality is to be willing to take the long slogging way that may seem a long way around and even an unexciting way around.

However, the humanly tempting short cut makes the distance the Lord measures a very long one. The reality of knowing God, loving him and wanting his will, loving to spend time with him in his Word and in communication with him, takes time, but the longer time spent this way, then the shorter the distance between “heart” and “lips.” The shorter that distance is, the greater the reality of the presence of the Lord, and of his love and comfort in the midst of the changing, constantly shifting, intensity of the afflictions in life.

Satan’s temptations have always been to “short cuts,” a painless way to get something for nothing. Not only was his temptation to Eve and Adam this kind of thing, but to the Lord Jesus Christ himself as Satan promised him the worship of the people of the earth, without his going to the cross. Satan promises the things he has no power to give, but he makes it sound convincing, and as he tempts us as Christians, we need to be aware of the same kind of “short cut,” “push button” promise for spirituality, or “reality” without living through months and years of history, keeping the distance short between our hearts and our words.

The temptation is to just use formulas, phrases, types of music or poetry, positions of bodies or some specialized order of the use of time … with an expected result promised. The temptation is to put some kind of result, or some kind of attainment in the place of motive, and to fail to recognize the fact that the basic motive has long since departed from being a desire for the glory of God, or for a way to express love and appreciation to him. The motive shifts so often, when the “short cut” enters in, so often the motive becomes selfish.

“Then said Jesus unto his disciples, ‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?’ ” (Matt. 16:24–26).

The way of reality is not pictured as short and easy, as John Bunyan knew so well, and made clear in The Pilgrim’s Progress. What is meant to be short is the distance between our hearts, our whole person, the existence of what is true in our longings, and the expression of this in our prayer and action based on God’s Word. Then comes growing reality, in words acceptable unto God.

Whittier’s middle name is the English version of Feuillevert, his Huguenot ancestor. The poem, “A Name: To Greenleaf Whittier Pickard,” begins:

The name the Gallic exile bore,

St. Malo! from thy ancient mart,

Became upon our Western shore

Greenleaf for Feuillevert.

He asks his namesake “like the stout Huguenot of old” to keep the faith “unswerved by cross or crown.”

Whittier’s own zeal for social and civic reform has been traced by some writers to his Huguenot blood. Certainly he worked for oppressed classes in our nation from Indians to African slaves, and the day laborers to whom he is drawn closely, both by his own experiences and his innate sympathy and sense of justice.

Bom in a Merrimac valley in a farmhouse near Haverhill, Massachusetts, on December 17, 1807, Whittier was brought up in the best tradition of the Friends; and to their beliefs as well as to their dress and speech he always adhered. He began writing verses in his teens, stimulated by the poems of Robert Burns whose themes of the commonplace and the innate dignity of man were to be Whittier’s also.

Early high points in his career include the publication of one of his poems in 1826 in William Lloyd Garrison’s Newburyport Free Press, which started the friendship between the two reformers; enrollment in Haverhill Academy for two terms (1827–28) where he worked his way by shoemaking and schoolteaching; editing of a number of papers—The American Manufacturer, Haverhill Gazette, the influential New England Review—from 1829 to 1832; publication of his first book, Legends of New England. After resigning his editorship, he worked steadily for the Anti-Slavery party which he joined in 1833 on Garrison’s urging. Before 1836 when he moved to Amesbury, his home-place until his death on September 7, 1892, Whittier had been chosen as a delegate to the National Republican Convention, served as a member of the Massachusetts legislature and had written the prose work Justice and Expediency; he had composed the first of his many Abolitionist verses and acted as a delegate to the American Anti-Slavery Convention. In 1844–45 he was the editor of the Middlesex Standard in Lowell, and in 1846 he published Voices of Freedom. In the decade beginning in 1847 he published most of his poetry and prose in the National Era for which he was corresponding editor. His Songs of Labor in 1850 made him “the poet of the commonplace,” and with the founding of the Atlantic in 1857 he was assured of a wide readership; by 1866 he not only gained financial security with the enormous success of Snow-Bound but was to be given best-seller status for his later works. In 1886 Harvard gave him the honorary title, LL.D., which Whittier called his “nickname.” Years earlier, he had become what a modern biographer termed an object of veneration and awe in a class with Mount Vernon and the American flag. His birthday became a national holiday; and he was highly acclaimed by his contemporary poets, Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, and others, including the younger writers Howells and Mark Twain. Oliver Wendell Holmes was expressing the views of many readers when he wrote Whittier that “I never rise from any of your poems without feeling the refreshment of their free and sweet atmosphere.…” His last book At Sundown appeared in 1890.

Self-educated for the most part as he was, and slow in gaining recognition, the unsought success of the last four decades of his life found him the same honest and humble man he had always been. Neither the poverty of his younger years nor the ill-health he endured so long with such heroic patience left him bitter in any way or stood in the path of high achievement. Both his life and writings in the words of a contemporary were of a man who was “thoroughly and terribly in earnest” in his Christian faith and works. On the ABC Evening News, February 14, 1977, Harry Reasoner read a long passage from Whittier’s timeless Snow-Bound, illustrating the reading with pictures of current snow scenes in that worst of winters.

Whittier, whose watchword like Thoreau’s was “simplicity, simplicity, simplicity,” had, in his own words, composed many of his poems with no expectations that they would survive the occasions that called them forth: “They were protests, alarm signals, trumpet calls to action, words wrung from the writer’s heart, forged at white heat, and of course lacking the finish which reflection and patient brooding over them might have given.”

Whittier’s lifelong insistence that he was a man not a mere verse-maker is reiterated in a timely study of this poet-patriot by John B. Pickard, professor of English, Rice University. The writer (a grandson of Whittier’s official biographer, Samuel Pickard, and his wife Elizabeth Whittier Pickard, the poet’s niece and companion of his last years) set out to show in his volume in the American Authors and Critics Series, John Greenleaf Whittier (Barnes and Noble, 1961) that the poet was not only a man of his age—a militant humanitarian and reformer—but in the light of modern critical techniques a poet whose finest works are well worth preserving beyond their author’s marked historical and cultural interests. Most of this era’s biographies have dealt with Whittier as a patriot rather than a poet; but Pickard has shown us how successfully he was both; and though many commentators have held it unjust to consider his enormous output of verse from an academic standpoint, the analyses of his ballads show a number in the best tradition of this difficult art-form: original, realistic, direct in their portrayal of native folklore and New England legends. The poet’s Quaker background, his humanitarianism, and sense of the beauty of the commonplaces of everyday rural life combine with a genuine psychological insight into the lives of his countrymen to make his name one to conjure with; indeed no other American poet covered so much purely legendary lore as did Whittier.

His inspiration from first to last had been consciously that of the Holy Spirit. Because of this, the author of the Britannica (fourteenth edition) account states that of all American poets Whittier’s song was most like a prayer. The admiring Encyclopedia writer goes on to say that his stainless life and his ardor caused him to be termed a Yankee Galahad, whose pure and simple heart was bared to all who loved him in “My Psalm,” “My Triumph,” and “An Autograph.”

“It was one of the secrets of his great religious influence” wrote Elizabeth Stuart Phelps in a memorial to Whittier in 1893 “that he sang only of the simple essentials of faith—God, Christ, and immortality.” She said truly that “this poet, being dedicated, has done more to hold the faith of the American people to the God of their fathers than any other one man in our nation.” Phelps opened her essay this way.

“In a remarkably literal sense of the word, Whittier exemplified the ‘given name’ of the religious sect to which he was born. He was essentially, enthusiastically, and conscientiously a Friend. Friendship was his ideal, his comfort, and, in a measure, his occupation.… He spent himself on the great needs of humanity and the great heart of humanity answered him.… The people loved him because he loved the people. It was his honor that he loved them nobly” (The Century Magazine).

Speaking of the masterpieces of his later years as “artless art,” the essayist said of the development of Whittier’s genius that it came only after “the freed slave and the saved country gave an interval of rest to that uncompromising New England conscience.” Referring to the exquisite realistic sketching of the snow-covered landscape, the family group about the fire, the New England interiors, the “Flemish pictures of old days” in Snow-Bound, Phelps asks whether it is any of these features of the poem that gives “its eternal hold upon our admiration and affections.” She answers: “Ah, no, no … It is the comfort offered to the broken heart”: “The truth, to flesh and sense unknown,/That Life is ever Lord of death,/And Love can never lose its own.”

That comfort to the broken heart sings with deep effect in his religious lyrics, which stand as testimonies to his sure simple belief. In “Worship,” for example, we find the great message of the poet-patriot: “O brother man! fold to thy heart thy brother;/Where pity dwells, the peace of God is there;/To worship rightly is to love each other,/Each smile a hymn, each kindly deed a prayer.” Though few of his songs were written expressly for that purpose, he has been called America’s greatest hymn-writer. The well-known “Eternal Goodness” expressing God’s personal interest in each human being shows throughout its twenty-two stanzas the contrast of that Goodness with worldly evil. Pickard, analyzing this poem as typical of Whittier’s religious lyrics, and one that perfectly fulfills the requirements for hymnal use, pointed out that the emphasis on the word “know” in the middle section reveals Whittier’s complete mental and emotional acceptance, “a knowing that transcends mere logic”: “To one fixed trust my spirit clings;/I know that God is good!” The lyric beauty of the conclusion appearing in the twin quatrains preceding the closing two stanzas is echoed in the hushed vowel sounds and assonances of the actual words as they carry the poet’s quiet conviction:

And so beside the silent sea

I wait the muffled oar;

No harm from Him can come to me

On ocean or on shore.

I know not where His islands lift

Their fronded palms in air;

I only know I cannot drift

Beyond His love and care.

Another popular hymn is drawn from “Our Master,” a poem of thirty-eight, stanzas, exalting Christ as the incarnation of Immortal Love. (“Immortal Love, forever full,/Forever flowing free, Forever shared, forever whole,/A never ebbing sea!”) “The Brewing of Soma” with its warning against man’s inveterate temptation to forms of pagan worship ends with that most famous hymn beginning “Dear Lord and Father of mankind,/Forgive our foolish ways!” In “At Last” (1882) God the Father is asked for “Some humble door among Thy many mansions …,” a sheltering home by “the river of Thy peace.” As a patriot, the poet went beyond his own America to people everywhere; and as a poet he sang of the patria of the human spirit where all might rest in God’s “Immortal love and Fatherhood,/And trust Him as His children should.”

M. Whitcomb Hess is a free-lance writer living in Athens, Ohio.

An Interview With Kenneth Kantzer

With this issue we welcome Kenneth Kantzer as our new editor. To prepare the following interview, we went to a cross-section of religious leaders and asked them to direct questions to Dr. Kantzer. Naturally, we could not use all of them. We chose questions that dealt with areas of general concern. The questioners in order of appearance are: Harvey G. Cox, associate professor of church and society, Harvard Divinity School; Frank E. Gaebelein, headmaster emeritus of the Stony Brook School and general editor of The Expositor’s Bible Commentary; Ronald J. Sider, associate professor of history and religion, Messiah College; James Montgomery Boice, minister, Tenth Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia; Joseph Bayly, vice-president, product and marketing, David C. Cook; Harold Lindsell, editor emeritus, CHRISTIANITY TODAY; Martin E. Marty, associate dean, University of Chicago Divinity School; Russell Chandler, religion editor, The Los Angeles Times; Elisabeth Eliot, author; W. Stanley Mooneyham, president, World Vision; Denny Rydberg, editor, The Wittenburg Door; Tom Skinner, president, Tom Skinner Associates; David A. Hubbard, president, Fuller Theological Seminary; G. Aiken Taylor, editor, Presbyterian Journal; George Sweeting, president, Moody Bible Institute; James Daane, professor of theology and ministry, Fuller Theological Seminary. Here is a condensation of the results.

Cox: Do you believe, as many young evangelicals claim, that CHRISTIANITY TODAY represents the establishment and has severely compromised the genuine American evangelical tradition to a cautious blessing of conservative economics and civil religion?

Kantzer: That CHRISTIANITY TODAY has at times spoken in ways inconsistent with its own prophetic and biblical commitment no one would deny. But this journal is rigorously opposed to civil religion. The evangelical church stands under the authority of God and owes ultimate allegiance to him. It secures its divine imperatives through the written Scripture. The Christian must never indiscriminately and uncritically accept the values of his culture; he must oppose idolatry of a civil religion.

Conservative economics is a more difficult matter. Most evangelicals decidedly prefer a competitive economy over monopolistic socialism; most of them consider fiscal policies that balloon the national debt and inflation to be irresponsible. I didn’t get my Ph.D. in economics; as editor I don’t intend to pass judgment on explicit economic measures. The church is not the appropriate body to determine economic policy. Yet the church must be concerned about the implications of such policy for long-term human good. Certainly CHRISTIANITY TODAY should not endorse conservative economics just because it is conservative. Nor should it altogether withhold its criticism just because the field is economics and not theology. The magazine has the same concern as the church—the religious, moral, and spiritual values of society, and the justice and goodness of any economic practice, liberal or conservative.

Gaebelein: Do you consider it an obligation of CHRISTIANITY TODAY to speak out about national and international policies according to biblical principles?

Kantzer: Yes, but not on every issue. CHRISTIANITY TODAY must be selective in its involvement. It is neither a journal of politics nor of economics. It is a religious thought journal with an obligation to the entire church. Therefore, it should focus upon the role of the church and upon moral and spiritual values. But economics and politics cannot be divorced from moral and spiritual values. Where there is overlap, the church—and therefore CHRISTIANITY TODAY—must speak. Its voice may sound strident or weak at times, but unless it speaks the indignation of a just God will fall upon it.

Sider: Will CHRISTIANITY TODAY take as strong a stand against the ethical liberalism involved in ignoring what the Bible says about the poor and about justice as it takes against the theological liberalism involved in denying the deity and resurrection of Jesus?

Kantzer: You are quite right when you imply that there is an ethical as well as a theological liberalism. The essence of liberalism is rejection of biblical authority. It is also possible to reject biblical authority in Christian ethics and in social issues as well as in doctrine. The Bible is our infallible and divinely authoritative guide for both faith and practice.

Unfortunately, it is easier to attain a beautiful system of theology than to become a beautiful saint. But ethical instruction regarding a Christian’s obligation to the poor and disenfranchised is unequivocal. The broad bifurcation that condemns bad doctrine but condones bad practice is thoroughly unbiblical.

Boice: Is the evangelical church continuing to abandon the cities? If so how can it ever hope to influence, let alone win, our nation for Christ?

Kantzer: I believe the tide has begun to turn. Evangelicals are beginning to see that the command to go into all the world cannot possibly be interpreted to exclude the great masses of mankind now dwelling in our cities.

Bayly: Who has influenced you the most? And in what ways?

Kantzer: My wife. She was instrumental in leading me to Christ. She nourished my infant faith, curbed with understanding my rebellious and willful growth, and over the years became my wise and willing counselor.

Lindsell: Do you have any hobbies?

Kantzer: Yes. To clear my mind I propagate and cultivate African violets, which I then enjoy giving to my friends. My more passionate hobbies, however, are reading and music, especially the Baroque music of Vivaldi, Corelli, Bocherini, Scarlatti, Buxtehude, Purcell, Telemann, and, of course, Bach—with a pinch of Schubert and Mozart thrown in for spice.

Lindsell: Do you find time to read?

Kantzer: Not as much as I should like, but since childhood I have been an insatiable and omnivorous reader. From fifth grade on I developed the habit of never letting studies interfere with my reading. I regularly, if not systematically, read at least three books per week.

Lindsell: What are your favorites?

Kantzer: Naturally my favorites have changed across the years. First it was Victor Appleton’s Tom Swift and … series. Then I discovered Altsheler: Guns of Shiloh, Star of Gettysburg, and the frontier tales. A teacher introduced me to Jack London and to Cooper’s Leather Stocking Tales. For several years I reveled in Dumas, then Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, and a host of other friends who have built themselves into the structure of my soul.

Every summer I pack up a few page-worn and greatly treasured friends and go into isolation for one week at least. In them I return home to renew and deepen friendships that become more precious with each passing year. Then I come back to the dance of life with my values regrouped and my goals clarified.

Oh, yes, my all-time favorite is Anna Karenina. I suppose it meant more to me than War and Peace because I read it first.

Lindsell: How long have you been in the field of education?

Kantzer: All my life. I was in school until I was twenty-nine. My father-in-law was convinced that his daughter had married a professional student. I have been a college or seminary teacher and administrator ever since.

Marty: If your doctor told you to take one year off and do nothing connected with your work, what would you do?

Kantzer: Probably treat myself to a magnificent reading feast.

Marty: If you were to become another person, who would you like to be from the past and from among the living?

Kantzer: From the past, Augustine, because he was both good and wise. In his goodness and wisdom he faced a world at its pivotal point of transition from ancient culture to medieval and thereby gave crucial direction to humankind for more than a thousand years.

Among the living, my children; they, too, are good and wise beyond my hopes. I pray that they may become better and wiser. And they, too, face a world in transition with infinite and surprising possibilities. Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin was right. Western civilization is in radical transformation. But the scenario of the future is not yet determined, and in the plastic culture of our day the power of the Gospel to affect human lives has never been greater.

Marty: If you could do one thing to improve the Christian church today, what would you do, other than evangelize and promote pure and thorough teaching?

Kantzer: That is terribly difficult for me to answer, because there are so many good things I should love to do. If I had a thousand lives, they would all be filled to the brim. I could readily give myself to the discipling of a few young people, nurturing them toward Christlikeness and in a sacrificial love for others. Or I could study law and joyfully serve in the inner city as a trusted legal resource for the deprived who are now rarely able to get equal justice in our lower law courts. I could also enthusiastically work in the Christian movements in Africa or in Indonesia, where cultural transition and shock are developing at a terrifying pace.

Chandler: Do you feel that your background of not having extensive experience or training in writing or editing will be a handicap to you in your new post?

Kantzer: It is a handicap not to have been an editor or professional writer. But I have been reading magazines for a long time; I know a good one when I see it. I am tackling my new writing and editing responsibilities eagerly. My years of teaching the history of Christian thought and systematic theology provide me with a background that I consider immensely valuable for the editing of a thought journal like CHRISTIANITY TODAY. It will better enable me to select writers who can produce the kinds of articles and information that the church needs. I believe that my lifelong role as an educator will help me direct the theological and ecclesiological impact of the publication. Perhaps it will mean that the magazine will be more instructive than evangelistic in its approach to troublesome issues facing the church today.

Eliot: May we hope for a standard of English in CHRISTIANITY TODAY that would be approved by Frank Gaebelein and Edwin Newman, for example?

Kantzer: Of all religious periodicals I think that CHRISTIANITY TODAY has the highest calibre of writing. Our editors work hard to avoid the infelicities of language that so offend people like Edwin Newman or Thomas H. Middleton of Saturday Review. However, there is always room to improve. I am committed to the principle that tough-minded and stout-hearted theology need not be dull or unintelligible. If you will write more articles, we shall come closer to that goal!

Gaebelein: Will the emphasis on the relation of Christianity to literature and the arts be maintained and strengthened?

Kantzer: Throughout its pages the Bible reveals to us that God loves beauty, and he created man and woman in his own image so that they also have a capacity to create and enjoy beauty. The psalmist revels in the beauty of nature and gives God thanks. The sweet song of the harp, the exquisite form of the human body, and the delights of married love are all extolled in Scripture. The skills of the artist are honored. The Bible itself is a divine revelation imbedded in a literary work of awesome beauty.

God, moreover, is concerned about me as a whole person. My aesthetic nature is an important part of me. If CHRISTIANITY TODAY is to preserve a biblical pattern in its ministry to the whole person, it cannot escape serious involvement in literature and the arts. Its role will not be to guide the artist or literator. Rather it will be to encourage all intelligent Christians not to permit their aesthetic nature to atrophy, but to develop it according to their individuality.

Mooneyham: What are some of the major issues that evangelicals will have to deal with in the next five years?

Kantzer: 1. The imbalance within conservative evangelicalism that developed out of its reaction against liberalism. Evangelicals professed to base their convictions upon biblical teaching. But all too often the heat of battle determined their stance, rather than the clear teaching of holy writ. To be true to itself, evangelicalism must stand on its biblical faith.

An example is the reaction against the social gospel of the later Walter Rauschenbusch early in this century. Many evangelicals came to view the task of the church as solely a concern for the spiritual good of man, forgetting what James says about the connection between concern for man’s social needs and a right relationship to the Creator. Evangelicals must be balanced in this and other areas to preserve the integrity of the full teachings of Christ.

2. Lack of evangelical concern for culture. Too many contemporary evangelicals have followed Tertullian in his repudiation of a well-rounded Christian life. This can only be rectified as evangelicals cease to see themselves merely as a corrective for the church.

3. The swing of the pendulum from legalism to antinomianism. Evangelicalism lives in tension between legalism and antinomianism. Developing out of English and American Puritanism, the most authentically American evangelicalism has always teetered on the edge of legalism. Now the pendulum is swinging in the opposite direction: “This feels good so it’s got to be right.” Walking the chalk line between these unbiblical extremes demands alert and constant attention.

4. Evangelical unity. The combative instinct is deeply ingrained, and, when thoroughly aroused in a battle for fundamental truth, is slow to subside. In spiritual warfare as well as in physical, he who takes up the sword is often destroyed by the sword, because he does not know when to stop fighting. At best, therefore, evangelical unity is a fragile vessel, but it carries a precious cargo and is worth defending.

5. The Americanization of the church. This is a continuing problem not only for main-line denominations, as Will Herberg warned so clearly in his book Protestant, Catholic, Jew but also for the small sectarians, whom he charitably exempted. Today the small sects are especially endangered. Evangelicals jeopardize their biblical and traditional values by the infiltration of the ideals of society. It is ironic that now when it’s in to be evangelical (undefined), evangelicalism itself has allowed its sharp biblical edges to be eroded by the culture that buffets it.

Other issues are surfacing. For instance, I detect a hesitant but ugly spirit of triumphalism emerging in evangelicalism. Not only is this decidedly premature; it is deadly sinful. Evangelicals must be reminded that the only kind of messianism tolerated in the Bible is that which leads to crucifixion. Evangelicalism must be reminded continuously and sternly that it too stands under the judgment of the Lord of the church and of his Scripture.

Rydberg: What do you see as the role of CHRISTIANITY TODAY in the next five years?

Kantzer: As I see it, the purpose of CHRISTIANITY TODAY is: (1) to set forth in prophetic fashion the biblical and evangelical faith for our day; (2) to publish useful, readable information to help evangelical leaders make intelligent decisions as to faith and work; (3) to provide a forum in which evangelicals can work out solutions for current problems; (4) to serve as an instrument of change for society in general, for the church at large, and especially for the evangelical wing of the church so that it may move to better and more effective service for God; and (5) to reflect or share with nonevangelicals the true meaning of the Gospel and its implications for our contemporary thought and life.

Skinner: The record of CHRISTIANITY TODAY in reporting news of what God is doing among evangelicals is dismal, to say the least, as is the record for reporting on prominent black evangelicals. What do you plan to do as the new editor to change this?

Kantzer: I do not share this opinion. I believe that the news section is one of the strongest areas of the magazine. You may well be right that it has not adequately covered black evangelicals. If so, that must be corrected.

We are vigorously reviewing all our editorial procedures and personnel. Our aim in this as in all other areas of the magazine is to minister fully and adequately to the needs of the evangelical community.

Skinner: More than 2,000 verses of Scripture speak of God’s concern to the poor and oppressed; yet most of the major articles featured in CHRISTIANITY TODAY over the past ten years have not reflected this biblical concern. Will there by any change in this area under your administration?

Kantzer: Yes, there will be an increased emphasis in the area of concern for the poor and oppressed and for all social issues. The entire evangelical community has become more and more interested in social injustice and our responsibility as evangelicals to do something about it. Such works as Henry’s Uneasy Conscience, Moberg’s Inasmuch, your Black and Free, Sider’s Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, Mooneyham’s Hungry World, Harper’s New Way of Living, and Stott’s Christ the Liberator, have had a profound effect not only on the radical fringe of evangelicalism but also on the so-called solid establishment.

Skinner:CHRISTIANITY TODAY is a powerful medium for influencing the minds and shaping the priorities of evangelicals in general. How do you see the magazine using this influence to heal and reconcile some of the differences that have recently developed among evangelicals—such as those certain brethren who have been rejected in The Battle for the Bible; or our charismatic brethren; or those who are more politically or radically inclined, such as the Sojourners group, than the traditional evangelical?

Kantzer: As newly appointed editor, one of my primary responsibilities is to guide the editorial policy of the magazine so as to minister to the entire evangelical community. It is important to heal rather than to alienate.

The magazine was founded to serve as a voice for evangelicals and orthodox Christians. It will not compromise that commitment or condone any departure from biblical authority, including a properly understood doctrine of biblical inerrancy.

On the other hand, no personal vendetta will be carried out against those who may disagree with us. We recognize that there are differences of opinion with respect to how biblical inspiration and authority are to be understood. We do not in any way wish to rule such persons out of the church. But CHRISTIANITY TODAY stands and will continue to stand in a positive and constructive way for the complete authority of Scripture.

The charismatic movement is an integral and significant part of the evangelical community. The vast majority of those who identify with the Pentecostal bodies of the past or with the present charismatic movement are working within the framework of an orthodox and biblical Christianity. We shall continue to support charismatics in their witness for Christ. We welcome their contributions. We will plan to work together with them for the Gospel. Where there are departures from biblical orthodoxy, CHRISTIANITY TODAY will oppose error here as well as elsewhere.

Those within the conservative evangelical framework who seek to encourage the church to be more socially or politically active will not be rejected by the magazine. Quite the contrary. Their contributions, too, will be welcomed. I believe that they have something to say to the evangelical church and that it will be enriched by hearing them.

Not all evangelicals who are radically committed to a positive social thrust speak with one voice. As with all movements and emphases, CHRISTIANITY TODAY reserves the right to provide critical evaluation of their thought and action. No evangelical can say, however, that “I am uninterested in what the Bible says about a Christian lifestyle or about concern for the poor and needy.” So long as “radical” evangelicals are radically biblical, we very much wish to hear what they have to say.

Hubbard: What can CHRISTIANITY TODAY do to encourage evangelical unity in the midst of the numerous tensions that threaten to divide us?

Kantzer: First, unity is not necessarily the greatest good. The deepest commitment of the Christian is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, as the Westminster Catechism says. At the same time, our Lord anticipated our divisive pride; in his hour of trial and great suffering he took time to pray that we might be one. Unity must have a high priority in the mind of Christ.

The unity for which Christ prayed in John 17 presupposes a basic doctrinal unity. This in turn makes possible the construction of common spiritual goals. But even impeccable doctrine and clearly defined goals do not guarantee Christian unity. The Scripture teaches us that we can find true unity at the foot of the cross as we kneel there together in repentant humility. As the infinite magnitude of divine love penetrates our being and we kneel in awe before the amazing, forgiving grace of our Redeemer, it is impossible to hate or even to fight against our brother or sister kneeling beside us, for whom Christ also died. In the fellowship of forgiven love we can only adore God, seek earnestly his revealed will, and love and serve him and each other forever. As we grow more like him, we will have unity.

Taylor: How important do you think it is to develop a more contemporary theology of the Holy Spirit than classic Protestantism has held?

Kantzer: If by classic Protestantism you mean the doctrines held in common by representative Lutherans, Reformed, Anglican, and Anabaptists—the theology stemming from the Reformation and postreformation periods—then I do not think we need a revolution in theology, but rather a careful building on these solid foundations, the stones of which were hewed directly out of the Bible.

Sweeting: Along with the weakening confidence in the Bible, there is a growing syncretism that blurs the distinction between Christianity and the seeming good points in other religions. Any comments?

Kantzer: The impact of oriental religion and the tendency toward syncretism are a direct result of our pluralistic religious society and of closer relations between east and west. The Christian has nothing to fear from the similarities that are frequently pointed out between Christianity and other religions. Some of these are the result of common responses to general revelation and others arise as a result of direct borrowing from the biblical revelation. Hinduism, for example, tells of an incarnation of the god Krishna sometime in the distant and murky past. Redemptive Buddhism preaches a gospel of salvation by faith alone.

The distinctive thing about the Christian faith is not that the Bible says certain things that can be duplicated in the sacred writings and in the leading thinkers of other religions. The uniqueness of the Christian faith lies in Jesus Christ, who is our loving God come down into this world to become man at a particular time and in a particular place to redeem us from our sin. This doctrine is basic to all of Christian faith. No other religion can or will duplicate this.

Bayly: Do you consider the present favorable evangelical climate springtime or Indian summer?

Kantzer: If forced to choose one, I’d say Indian summer. I see no signs that either Western Europe or America is turning to evangelical Christianity. But my faith rests not in signs but in God. He is magnificently at work in the world and he will bring to pass his great designs.

Daane: Do you favor direct church involvement in social and political matters?

Kantzer: Evangelical involvement in social and political matters is an important aspect of a Christian’s obedience to God. He is not only a citizen of the kingdom of heaven but also a citizen of an earthly kingdom and is responsible to God for his actions in both. This responsibility increases immensely when a Christian lives in a democratic society and must take responsibility for the actions of his government. It is his Christian duty to function effectively as a citizen for the good of his fellow men.

The involvement of the church in social and political matters presents a different problem. The church is the visible embodiment of the kingdom of God. As the kingdom of God in this world, however, it is in direct and constant relationship to the state. For this reason, social and political matters cannot always be separated from the church’s role as proclaimer of the biblical message. No doctrine of separation of church and state is valid that precludes the church addressing itself to problems of state that are also directly related to the functions of the church as the visible kingdom of God. No one would contest the right of the church to speak out when a government makes the public proclamation of the Gospel illegal or seeks in any way to curb the practice of Christianity. But the church also has the God-given duty to stand for public righteousness and to oppose the flagrant inhumanities of man to man.

Occasionally evangelicals have decried liberal church pronouncements on current political and social issues. Their objection is not that the church has addressed itself to basic issues of right and wrong. Rather, they object when liberal churchmen participate in matters outside their knowledge or when certain church leaders purport to speak for the entire church, but in reality represent only a minority opinion. Evangelicals also object when a church exceeds its rightful jurisdiction as a church to meddle in politics or fiscal matters that are not clearly moral and spiritual.

Rydberg: Do you think CHRISTIANITY TODAY can perform a prophetic function with so many special interest groups—BGEA, advertisers, old-time subscribers, a former editor—looking over its shoulders?

Kantzer: Yes, but it won’t be easy. We dare not, however, insist upon any stereotype of what constitutes a genuine prophet of God. Not all prophets wore long hair and flowing robes. Moses, the greatest of the prophets, was a superb military and political leader. Jeremiah became so obnoxious to the political establishment that he was accused of being a fifth columnist and was thrown into prison. Isaiah, by contrast, was a patriot and a friend of the king who spent his days in the royal court. A weather vane is turned by every breath of wind, but a sign faithfully directing travelers to the next town does not always and necessarily buffet every wind broadside.

I am committed to a radically biblical Christianity, but that does not mean that I must oppose everyone or everything in the establishment. I recognize some godly and righteous leaders in places of power. I thank God for President Carter, Senators Hughes and Hatfield, and Representative John Anderson. Their Christianity, of course, is no magic alchemy to transform them automatically into great statesmen. I pray for them and seek to strengthen their hands. All human beings and human institutions must stand under the judgment of Scripture. CHRISTIANITY TODAY in faithfulness to God needs to critically evaluate the establishment, including what is sometimes called the evangelical establishment. At times, no doubt, it must rebuke and condemn. But whether it is the evangelical, liberal, or secular establishment, let us seek to understand before we rebuke, so that we shall rebuke in love, seeking one another’s mutual good.

Wiechert had faith like the Centurion.

One of modern Germany’s best stylists, Ernst Wiechert, left a rare legacy to Christian letters. His Der Hauptmann von Kapernaum (The Centurion From Capernaum), published in 1944 in Switzerland near the close of Hitler’s time, is a moving German war story dealing with Wiechert’s main concern—Christian faith. Major von Soden, of the title role, was so called by his men because of the deep lasting effect on him when he heard the preacher of the garrison church read about the great faith of the Centurion (Matt. 8:5–13). The Major had himself come to a trust in Christ so all-embracing that he gave his life for a prisoner whom he helped escape because the latter also knew that der Glaube (faith) is vital to “the truth of man as by God first spoken,” the truth Hitler had defiled.

Before World War II, Wiechert had achieved top rank in the novella, that exacting genre in which German writers excell. Born in Kleinort, East Prussia, 1887, his schooling was in the Gymnasium and the University of Königsberg. For two decades he taught in secondary schools in Königsberg and in Berlin. In 1933, the year of Hitler’s seizure of power, he resigned as teacher to devote his life to literature; as a short story writer, novelist, playwright, and poet, he became known throughout Germany and beyond. (In all he wrote sixty books.) But his profoundly religious spirit, and his sincere love of humanity brought him into conflict with the Nazis.

His defense of Pastor Niemoeller in 1938 had put him in a concentration camp. However, he was released after being nearly a year at Buchenwald—the year that had furnished him with the facts for his powerful Der Totenwald (The Forest of the Dead), which was buried with other like manuscripts in his garden to be unearthed and published after the war. In 1947, having outstayed Hitler in Germany by two years, he retired to Switzerland; he was one of the few noted writers who had not fled the Führer. His prominent role in the Inner Emigration is itself a miracle of faith. He and his band of devoted followers denounced all that Hitler stood for; and the man himself, a godly, cultured person, appealed to others to see beyond the cataclysm.

In 1948 the late George N. Shuster edited three lectures by Wiechert (Regnery), emphasizing his luminous insights and the need to let the whole world know of this German that Hitler could neither intimidate nor destroy. Even as the Führer reached the zenith of his frightful power, Wiechert had declared against his pretensions and had foretold their ephemeral quality.

The German writer’s fervency for justice and for the freedom and dignity of each and every human being should hold a high place in twentieth century literature. Shuster wrote of the addresses above that “They are the work of a great man. Mankind needs every jot and tittle of its greatness.” His Christian-based idealism (couched as it is in the very tongue of the people whose rulers denied in turn, justice, freedom, and dignity for the individual) shows, in the words of the editor, “resolution, bravery and the faith we all must find.” In his late twenties, Wiechert had experienced a second birth or what he himself called a breakthrough into grace. His native love of nature was itself transformed in that breakthrough. A contemporary critic wrote of Wiechert: “ ‘Natural man’ has yielded to the Christian ethic. Man remains true to nature but also to himself as man, as a being different from other forms of nature.” He had always reveled in the beauty of God’s world. However in his Christian rebirth he saw the power of love, self-sacrifice, and compassion, as well as humility and the patient endurance of intolerable conditions as being so far removed from mere natural beauty that there can be no comparison. All that really matters in any life, as Michael, the hero of Wiechert’s masterful Hirtennovelle (A Shepherd’s Tale), came to realize, is whether or not one is filled with the spirit of God.

Wiechert died in 1950. His last work had been Missa Sine Nomine, published in England in 1953 and re-issued as Tidings in 1959 (Macmillan). In this story the Freiherr Amadeus, dragging himself back to his castle after the subhuman horrors of World War II, is joined by his two brothers in works of charity for the Nazi victims. The leitmotif in Tidings as elsewhere in Wiechert is the overcoming of evil by goodness, the triumphing of Christian love over hate. His last novel, held by many critics to be his finest work, expresses the author’s fervent wish to bring hope again to his countrymen by stirring their innermost hearts in the way Wiechert’s own heart had been stirred by his breakthrough into grace. The epigraph to one of his earlier works (1946) is taken from Goethe: “Come, we want to promise you/Rescue from the deepest pain … /Columns, pillars can be broken/But the free heart will remain.” When he spoke to the German youth in Munich in 1945 he referred to Hitler’s twelve years as Führer.

“One day into the house of this nation, filled with the treasures of a thousand-year-old culture, a stranger had come, without knowledge, without culture, without tact or taste, possessed only by the dark hatred of the slave for the master, of the upstart for the aristocracy of tradition …; gifted only with the talents of the demagogue, oratorical, unprincipled, merciless; practiced in all the gestures with which fools and children are deceived; an amateur in all the sciences and arts except the art of evil, a market crier without shame or moderation, secretly planning for the future and openly protesting his innocence; a liar and a breaker of promises, and hourly growing into a madman and a criminal” (The Poet and His Time, Henry Regnery, 1948, p. 48; translated by Irene Täuber in the Shuster volume, in the first of Wiechert’s three addresses).

This madman and criminal, the speaker continued, went through the splendid rooms of the mansion of traditional culture, tearing from its walls the things that had filled him with such savage bitterness and hatred—“the pictures of God, as well as the pictures of unknown ancestors; the tablets of law, of tolerance, of love, and of the free human personality. He tore them down and trod upon them with his boots, and in their place he hung what he had brought up out of his dark caves: the tablets of violence, of revolt, of hatred, of vengefulness. And above all the picture of the Antichrist who lays the earth waste in order to overthrow God’s work” (p. 34).

In an epochal essay in Time (January 9, 1978) titled “On Challenging the Inevitable,” Lance Morrow speaks in passing of what he calls Hitler’s “satanic leap.” Morrow asks, “What inspiration instructed Hitler that he might conquer Europe and destroy six million Jews?” Wiechert’s powerful, prayerful challenge to that satanic leap is not mentioned. After all, his work had last attracted American attention in 1960. In that year, the Nazism Wiechert boldly arraigned from the first had been shown for what it was in the well-documented study by William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. “Not a single writer of any importance,” Shirer reported, “with the exception of Ernst Juenger and Ernst Wiechert in the earlier years, was published in Germany during the Nazi time. Almost all of them led by Thomas Mann emigrated; the few who remained were silent or were silenced” (Simon and Schuster, 1960, p. 242).

Wiechert’s warning to the German youth over and over in these words and others, “Remember that no one is lost to the world who has not first been lost to God,” was indeed timely. And Shirer shows incontrovertibly that Germany had been preparing for the madman, the great genius of evil that the modern historian so fully presented in his painstakingly objective survey of Hitler. What made Hitler’s Weltanschauung (his own word for his terrorist “philosophy”) important, Shirer writes, is that “it was embraced so frantically by so many millions of Germans and that if it led, as it did, to their ultimate ruin, it also led to the ruin of so many millions of innocent, decent human beings inside and especially outside Germany” (p. 82).

Aided by a military caste, dating prior to Bismarck’s new Reich (1871), and by many a strange intellectual, the Germans had been inculcated with a contempt for democracy and individual freedom and a longing for authoritarianism. Among the strange intellectuals cited and indicted by Shirer are Hegel with his absolute-state teaching and Nietzsche with his cult of the superman. Thus it was that Germany (“not a state with an army, but an army with a state”), opened wide the door to Shirer’s “vagabond from Vienna” who entered to destroy it utterly.

No modern writer was more convinced than Wiechert that “Love is the absolute sole Lord of life and death.” His genuine literary merit is itself matched with his Christlike zeal to break down the bonds of hate Germany had forged for herself. That hope (shared by the few who remained with him in the Reich “unbowed and undeluded” and could be counted, he said, almost with “the fingers of one hand”) was constant even through the darkest climate of evil engulfing their land. Their hardest task had been to transform the bitter grain of their lives into fruit, never forgetting meanwhile the angel “whose scythe was raised above a condemned generation.”

Wiechert’s message is in general what the publisher of Tidings called it: “A Christian message for an un-Christian and totalitarian age.” For he kept what was being most ruthlessly mowed down in Nazi Germany. He kept God’s Word. His faith like the Centurion’s cited in Der Hauptmann von Kapernaum was great indeed; for he was wholly assured of God’s love and power: “Dir geschehe, wie du geglaubt hast!”: “It shall be done because you trusted.”

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.

The image is wrong.

The sixteenth century Catholic Thomas More claimed that they “eat fast and drink fast and lust fast in their lechery.” C. S. Lewis has called them “young, fierce, progressive intellectuals, very fashionable and up-to-date.” Most modems assert confidently that they were uptight, sexually repressed, and ascetic. Is it any wonder that the Puritans have suffered from an identity crisis?

The taunt “don’t be Puritan” has come to be regarded as a conclusive way of silencing anyone whose viewpoint is more conservative than one’s own. The writer of a well known Christian critique of contemporary literature accompanies his attack on pornography with the assurance that he is not basing his criticism on “puritanism,” which he equates with “repressiveness” and “prudery.”

In a debate before 2,000 college students in Lubbock, Texas, the official spokesman for “the Playboy philosophy” stated, “Our rebellion, really, is against Puritanism. We are not rebelling against Christianity.” And the Christian respondent blithely accepted his opponent’s charges against “Puritan hang-ups,” apparently not realizing that his own very able defense of the Christian sex ethic was in the Puritan tradition at its best.

Why have the Puritans received such bad press in Christian circles? Where is the evidence that supports the charges? Why, above all, have the early Puritans received the reputation of being sexually repressive when it was precisely their attitudes on sex that were regarded by their own contemporaries as one of their most revolutionary traits?

People who charge the Puritans with sexual hang-ups do not bother to tell us that one of the most quoted statements from Martin Luther is that “if the wife refuse, let the maid come.” Nor do they cite the case of the New England wife who complained, first to her pastor and then to the whole congregation, that her husband was neglecting their sex life. The husband was excommunicated from the church, a verdict that hardly reflects a bias against sex. And then there is the curious fact that the commonplace book of the New England Puritan named Sea born Cotton contains not only notes of church meetings but also passages of love poetry from Elizabethan and Cavalier poets.

What did the Puritans have to say about sex? Obviously we cannot allow the answer to come from modern debunkers of the Puritans. Fortunately the Puritans themselves wrote a good deal about sex, and it is easy to piece together their attitudes toward the topic on which they have been so unjustly slandered. Even a cursory glance at the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will show that Puritan attitudes toward sexual love were not repressive but expressive, not negative but positive. And the Christian community today can find in their Reformation counterparts a clear path through the contemporary sexual jungle of obsession and perversion.

If we wish to understand the early Puritans, we must see them in their historical setting. This means, right off, that we must redeem the very word “Puritan” from the meaning that it has today. The word initially had little to do with morality in general or sexual behavior in particular. The Puritans wanted to purify the theology, liturgy, and ecclesiastical structure of the church, whether Catholic or Anglican in approach. At the root of all their reformation efforts was their acceptance of the Bible alone as the final authority for belief and conduct.

In their own day the Puritans were, as C. S. Lewis aptly puts it, “the very opposite of those who bear that name today.” They were the latest rave, definitely not old-fashioned or passé. They were the angry young generation demanding a clean sweep of the medieval past and a radical return to biblical Christianity.

This revolutionary attitude toward the Catholic past is the key to understanding the Puritan attitudes toward sex. The dominant attitude of the Catholic church throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance was that sexual love itself was an evil and did not cease to be so if its object were one’s husband or wife. For Athanasius (fourth century) the supreme message of Christ was the need for virginity. In the same century Jovinian found himself excommunicated when he asserted that the married state was not inferior to virginity.

In the next century Tertullian and Ambrose preferred the extinction of the human race to its propagation through sin, that is, through sexual intercourse. For Augustine the sexual act was innocent in marriage but the passion that always accompanies it was sinful. Gregory the Great agreed, adding that whenever a husband and wife engaged in sexual intercourse for pleasure, their pleasure befouled their sexual act. Albertus and Aquinas objected to the sexual act because it subordinates the reason to the passions. St. Jerome said that the only good of marrige is that it produces virgins, and he also asserted that while there have been married saints, these have always remained virgins even in marriage.

Origen took Matthew 19:12 so literally that he was castrated before being ordained. Church fathers such as Tertullian, Chrysostom, Augustine, and Aquinas declared virginity superior to marriage, and the Council of Trent climaxed this tradition by denouncing people who denied that virginity was superior to the married state.

The medieval Catholic commentaries on early Genesis are a good index to the prevailing attitudes toward sex. St. Jerome argued that God refrained from pronouncing a blessing on the second day of creation because the number two prefigured marriage, which Jerome was sure had sinful associations. Chrysostom said that Adam and Eve could not have had sexual relations before the fall. Origen agreed, and he inclined toward the theory that if sin had not entered the world, the human race would have been propagated by some mysterious angelic manner rather than by sexual union. Bishop Gregory of Nyssa claimed that Adam and Eve had originally been created without sexual desire, and that if the fall had not occurred the human race would have reproduced itself by some harmless mode of vegetation.

I do not cite these examples in order to engage in some cheap laughs at the expense of the Catholic tradition, nor to imply that most modern Catholics are guilty of these negative attitudes toward sex. I do insist, however, that these Catholic attitudes of the Middle Ages are the necessary background against which we must understand early Puritan attitudes. In general, the Puritans affirmed what the Catholics denied and denied what the Catholics had traditionally affirmed. Many of the Puritan pronouncements, in fact, occur in head-to-head debates with Catholics.

After the Reformation broke in the early sixteenth century, Thomas More and the Puritan William Tyndale conducted a bitter printed debate about whether clergymen were free to marry. Tyndale argued not simply that ministers were free to marry but that Paul had commanded them to marry, citing verses such as First Timothy 3:2 (“Now a bishop must be … the husband of one wife”). It is instructive to note that More, with his Catholic views about penance and asceticism, regarded Tyndale’s Puritan theology as indulgent to the point of license, charging Protestants with “sensual and licentious living.”

Equally revealing is More’s run-in with Luther on the subject of sex and marrige. More regarded Luther’s marriage as an act of lechery, all the more offensive because Luther had married a nun. More spoke of Luther’s “abominable bitcheries” and called Luther’s views on married priests “abominable heresy.” More termed Luther himself “an open incestuous lecher.”

Luther’s reply in his Table-Talk gives some good glimpses into the Protestant reasoning about sex. Luther asks at one point, “On what pretence have they forbidden us marriage? ‘Tis as though we were forbidden to eat, to drink, to sleep.” What strikes one about the comment is its acceptance of the sexual appetite as a normal, God-ordained part of life, to be neither slighted nor exaggerated.

The Puritans were unanimous in declaring that the sex drive was created by God and is therefore good in principle. Calvin wrote that “conjugal intercourse is a thing that is pure, honorable and holy, because it is a pure institution of God.” “It is a foolish imagination,” Calvin writes elsewhere, “that celibacy is a virtue.” Luther regarded the sex drive as so strong and universal as to make marriage a virtual necessity. Bacon’s Book of Matrimony (1562) called marriage “an high, holy and blessed order of life, ordained not of man, but of God, … wherein one man and one woman are coupled and knit together, as one flesh and body.” The Puritan divine William Gouge, in commenting on Proverbs 5:18 (“rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely hind, a graceful doe”), writes that the hind and roe were chosen because of all beasts they were most enamored of their mates “and even mad in their … desire after them.”

In viewing sex as a God-implanted drive, the Puritans did not, of course, view sex as only a physical drive. For humans, they agreed, it is an expression of love and commitment as well as an appetite, and the Puritans romanticized sexual love in a way that removes it far from a merely animal urge. It is not often enough noted that the age of the Reformation was also the greatest age of love poetry in English literary history. The poets of the Middle Ages had first established romantic love as a leading literary subject, but the love that they portrayed was adulterous courtly love and never pretended to have the sanction of Christianity. “The conversion of courtly love into romantic monogamous love,” writes C. S. Lewis, was “largely the work of English, and even of Puritan, poets.”

What is the lesson to be learned from this huge body of love poetry? Simply that sexual love is, for people, more than an appetite, being a distinctly human experience and an expression of love. Perhaps this explains why the Song of Solomon exerted such a strong and steady influence on sixteenth-century English poetry, since that biblical work likewise puts sexual intimacy into a distinctly human, romantic context.

Because the Puritans viewed sexual intimacy as an expression of deeply felt love, they believed that its proper sphere was marriage. The Puritan ideal, in other words, was wedded romantic love. Whereas the Catholic tradition had praised virginity and deprecated marriage, the Puritans exalted marriage. The Catholic Erasmus had described as ideal a marriage in which husband and wife learn to live in sexual abstinence; John Cotton mentioned such a practice in a sermon only to denounce it, calling such an attitude toward sex the attitude “of a blind mind … not of that Holy Spirit, which saith It is not good that man should be alone.” The New England Puritan Thomas Hooker gave this picture of a husband infatuated with his wife.

“The man whose heart is endeared to the woman he loves … dreams of her in the night, hath her in his eye and apprehension when he awakes, museth on her as he sits at table, walks with her when he travels.… She lies in his bosom, and his heart trusts in her, which forceth all to confess, that the stream of his affection, like a mighty current, runs with full tide and strength” (quoted by Edmund S. Morgan in The Puritan Family, Trustees of the Boston Public Library, 1944, p. 26). This came from the pen of someone who, modern writers and speakers tell us foolishly, was inhibited in his romantic passion by a narrow theology.

Far from minimizing the importance of sex in marriage, the Puritans flaunted their enthusiasm for married sex. William Gouge called physical union “one of the most proper and essential acts of marriage.” The Puritan churchman Henry Bullinger cited First Corinthians 7:3–5 to support his claim that husband and wife are obligated to satisfy the sexual desires of the other. The Elizabethan Puritan Henry Smith regarded First Corinthians 7:3 as “a commandment to yield” the duty of sexual intercourse, “and not to do it, is a breach of the commandment.” William Whately declared regarding the sexual act that neither husband nor wife can “without grievous sin deny it.”

Although the Puritans placed sex within a context of marriage, they did not regard procreation as the only good reason for sexual relations between husband and wife. In this they differed from many of the Catholic churchmen. Augustine exerted a strong influence on the Catholic tradition when he asserted that the sexual act is free from sin only when its purpose is to produce offspring. Martin Luther had a different idea.

“Propagation is not in our will and power, for no parents are able to foresee whether … they will bring forth a son or daughter. My father and mother did not consider that they wanted to bring a Dr. Martin Luther into the world. Creation is of God alone and we are not able to perceive it.” (Tischreden; quoted by Roland Bainton in What Christ Says About Sex, Love, and Marriage, Association Press, 1957, p. 79). Similarly, John Milton observed that God ordained marriage “to comfort and refresh” man, “not mentioning the purpose of generation till afterwards.”

Mocked

St. Mark 15:16–20

Mocking the new boy on the block

with blind man’s bluff and other bully

games, the soldiers chased boredom

from the stagnant Jewish backwater,

inventively turning a routine job

into a back-slapping, not-to-be forgotten

revel. Later some would say

the victim, dressed up to look

like a king (whom they would kill

on the morrow) was the life of the party.

All the while they made their jokes

Another sat in the heavens and laughed,

holding his enemies in derision.

EUGENE H. PETERSON

If sexual love in its fullest meaning is an expression of love and commitment, it follows that sex in a loveless marriage is a kind of adultery. John Donne, a Protestant if not strictly a Puritan, made exactly this point in a sermon when he said that without “harmony of dispositions, … marriage is but a continual fornication, sealed with an oath.”

But the Puritans were prudes, right? Wrong. They insisted on the privacy of sex, not because they thought it wrong but because they thought it sacred. They knew that a sexual relationship is the least casual and most delicate of all human relationships to be entered into with one other person in a situation of deep personal commitment. Hence the Puritan emphasis on not flaunting one’s sexuality in public. Thomas Gataker was not prudish but convinced of the privacy of sex when he wrote that “the holy Ghost did allow … private dalliance and behavior to married persons between themselves.” Remembering that God had clothed the nakedness of Adam and Eve after the fall, Luther objected to the low necks worn by the girls of Wittenberg. And Milton, who went out of his way in Paradise Lost to insist on sexual love as part of the perfect marriage, at the same time draws our attention to the privacy of such a relationship; he describes Adam and Eve as not lacking “youthful dalliance as beseems/Fair couple, linked in happy nuptial league,/Alone as they.” The case against Playboy magazine, if we can trust the Puritans, is not that sex is wrong nor the feminine body unattractive; it is rather that sex is private, sacred, and more than an animal appetite for which persons may be used as pieces of equipment.

It is a commonplace that if one really wants to know the heart and soul of a culture, he can do no better than read its literature. In the stories and poems and plays of a culture you will find what, deep down, people were thinking and feeling. This will help to explain why the writings of two of the towering figures of English literature, Edmund Spenser and John Milton, are such useful repositories of Puritan attitudes toward sex.

Spenser was the foe of both asceticism and adulterous courtly love. He pays his disrespect to courtly love in his portrayal of the Bower of Bliss in Book II of The Faerie Queene. The Bower of Bliss represents excess, and in it Spenser portrays the whole sexual nature in disease. There is no genuine sexual fulfillment in the Bower, only female provocation and male prurience and voyeurism, the very ingredients of Playboy and related magazines.

Spenser’s ideal was chastity, by which he meant abstinence from sexual intercourse before marriage and active, devoted love after marriage. To show that his ideal was not abstinence, Spenser contrasted the Bower of Bliss to the Garden of Adonis (Book III of The Faerie Queene), a symbol of chaste married love. And what kind of’ place is it? A place of sexual pleasure—of “goodly merriment and gay felicity.” It is also a place of passion, where “sweet love” throws “gentle fits” among the lovers. It is a place of sexual union, where “frankly each paramour his sweetheart knows, each bird his mate.” The word “frankly” packs a lot of meaning in this context. It praises married love, which is based on a public avowal of love, and criticizes the courtly love tradition, which is as old as Proverbs (see especially 9:17) and as contemporary as today’s popular music and cinema, and which has for centuries been trying to titillate people’s sexual desires with the notion that secretive adulterous love is more exciting than married love.

Spenser’s ideal of wedded romantic love finds its most moving expression in the sonnet sequence that portrays his own courtship, and in his Epithalamion (“wedding song”) celebrating his own wedding. Sonnet cycles before Spenser had been addressed by poets to other men’s wives. By basing his sonnet sequence on the courtship that eventuated in his own marriage Spenser could not have been more original. He attained such distinctiveness, believe it or not, by being “Puritan.” The woman that Spenser’s sonnets praise is neither a disembodied spirit nor a body without a soul. She attracts the poet partly by her physical, sexual beauty. Yet this attractiveness belongs to her total person, something that is untrue when a woman draws attention to herself only as a sexual object.

Spencer’s Epithalamion is a concise and eloquent source for discovering Puritan attitudes toward sexual love. The poet praises his bride for both her physical beauty and her Christian virtue (“There dwells sweet love and constant chastity,/Unspotted faith and comely womanhood”). The celebration of the events of the wedding day includes a frank acknowledgment of sexual eagerness: “For greedy pleasure … / Thinks … upon her paradise of joys.” But the Puritan outlook was so integrated within itself that the poet can include also the prayer for a family of children “to increase the count” of “blessed Saints” in heaven.

In celebrating sexual love, Spenser illustrates well the domestic context in which the Puritans believed sex could flourish. Unlike the modern tendency to treat sex only as an appetite and to isolate it from the rest of human experience, the Protestant attitude, like the biblical, treats sex as part of a much bigger picture. Chad Walsh puts it well when, in contrasting the Christian attitude to that found in modern literature, he states that “when we are thinking normally we look at love, marriage, sex, parenthood, and child-rearing as one package.”

Milton’s Paradise Lost is a literary monument to Puritan beliefs on a number of topics, including sex. Milton disparaged the Catholic view that Adam and Eve did not consummate their love in Paradise. He portrays Adam and Eve as enjoying the delights of sexual love before the fall:

Straight side by side were laid, nor turn’d I ween

Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites

Mysterious of connubial love refused:

Whatever hypocrites austerely talk

Of purity and place and innocence,

Defaming as impure what God declares

Pure, and commands to some, leaves free to all.

Our Maker bids increase, who bids abstain

But our Destroyer, for the God and man?

[The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. by Douglas Bush, Houghton Mifflin, 1965;

Paradise Lost, Book IV, 11. 741–749].

Having thus dissociated himself from the Catholic tradition, Milton goes on to give his famous apostrophe to wedded love:

Hail wedded love, mysterious law, true source

Of human offspring, sole propriety

In Paradise of all things common else.

By thee adulterous lust was driven from men

Among the bestial herds to range, by thee

Founded in reason, loyal, just and pure,

Relations dear, and all the charities

Of father, son, and brother first were known.

Far be it, that I should write thee sin or blame,

Or think thee unbefitting holiest place,

Perpetual fountain of domestic sweets,

Whose bed is undefiled and chaste pronounced [IV, ll. 750–761].

All of the usual Puritan themes are here: the biblical basis (as evidenced by several biblical allusions) for affirming sex, the differentiation between animal lust and human love, the domestic context into which sexual fulfillment is put, and the privacy of the sexual relationship between two persons.

But didn’t the Puritans have rules against various sexual practices, and doesn’t this prove that they were opposed to sex? The answers are “yes” and “no,” respectively. The Puritans had strict taboos (and, when they were in power, civil laws) against sexual perversions, including adultery, lechery, homosexuality, and sexual idolatry. In this they were merely following the Bible. It is a curiously superficial view, currently popular, that when biblical and Puritan writers denounce sexual perversion they show a negative attitude toward sex. The reverse is true.

These writers are horrified by sexual perversion because they regard sex itself as good. Every culture protects what it regards as sacred with safeguards and taboos. A rule against stealing, for example, does not reflect a low view of property but a high view of it; the prohibition of murder shows that a society regards life as sacred rather than cheap. For the contrast to the biblical horror at sexual perversions one need only look at classical culture. Classical mythology is full of stories of illicit sexual capers and orgies among the gods and goddesses, and classical culture tended to have a low view of the physical appetites and of marriage.

Any attempt to understand the Puritan ideal of wedded love will lead ultimately to the cornerstone of all Puritan belief, the conviction that the Bible is the final authority for doctrine and conduct. It is, indeed, easy to list the biblical passages that the Puritan writers cited again and again in support of their beliefs. Genesis 1:27–28 was used to prove that God had created human sexuality and commanded men and women to reproduce. The Puritans also returned incessantly to Genesis 2:18–25 to support their view that God had ordained marriage between a man and woman as the perfect way of satisfying the sexual instinct. Preachers and commentators were zealous to call attention to Genesis 26:8, which describes Isaac’s fondling of Rebekah his wife; Luther said that the Holy Spirit recorded the incident in order to show that married sex is beautiful, and “how better to be expressed than by embracing?” Proverbs 5:15–20, which commands a husband to be infatuated with his own wife and avoid adultery, was expounded as a concise summary of the Bible’s teaching about the right and wrong ways to satisfy the sexual drive. The Puritans often allegorized the Song of Solomon so heavily that it ceased to be a repository of teaching about wedded physical love, but there were, happily, some who referred to it as providing instruction in perfect married love.

There were also some classic passages for the Puritans in the New Testament. Jesus’ attendance at the wedding in Cana and his quoting of Adam’s words in Genesis 2:24 (the quotations appear in Matthew 19:4–6 and Mark 10:6–9) were interpreted as Christ’s sanction of marriage. First Corinthians 7:1–5 produced a barrage of commentary about the obligation of husbands and wives to satisfy each other’s sexual needs. First Timothy 4:1–5, which denounces as “doctrines of demons” various ascetic ideas, including the forbidding of marriage, became a favorite passage to refute the Catholic teaching that ministers could not marry. Hebrews 13:4 may have been the most quoted text of all; in the King James Version it reads, “Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge.”

The Puritan ideal of sexual love between husband and wife arose as a reaction against an excessively negative attitude toward sex. Today the Puritan ideal stands as a corrective to the opposite extreme of total permissiveness and unbridled lust. Divorced from its context of love and armed with the seductive idea that it is wrong to restrain one’s natural impulses, sex has become a cultural obsession. The obsession has not brought freedom but bondage—bondage to sexual appetite, perversion, and the tendency to look upon people as sex objects.

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.