Society remembers not only its heroes but its villains, people who have distinguished themselves through monstrous cruelty or evil. It is not in a history text or work of fiction but in the Bible that we find the arch type of all such reprobates—Judas Iscariot.

We think of Judas as an unholy trinity of betrayer, traitor, and thief, as unforgettable as he is unforgiveable. That is the traditional view of him. Yet Soren Kierkegaard shrewdly reminds us that “one will get a deep insight into the state of Christianity in each age by seeing how it interprets Judas.” Perhaps we have made Judas into an Iago figure, a tragic caricature of a solitary monster. Did he act freely, or was he predestined? Such quibbling has blurred his significance.

It is true that Judas Iscariot was a man apart. A native of Kerioth, he was the only one of the twelve apostles who was not a Galilean. The Gospels mark him as a thief and as the betrayer of Christ. Yet surely he was no more endowed with the frailties of the human condition than others who followed Jesus. Thomas was the skeptic; Matthew the fraudulent tax collector; Peter the impulsive; James and John the vengeful “sons of thunder”; and then there is that great host described anonymously as “publicans and sinners.” Perhaps Judas was not like them; for no man commits suicide casually. What kind of titanic struggle led this man to end his life in despair?

It would not be far wrong to suggest that by the time the Gospel narrative brings us to the last week in Jerusalem there are only two people who have any clear grasp of what is going on. Each one knows that the Kingdom is to be established; yet they perceive it differently. Each man faces a great anxiety. Both men are concerned for this world’s grief. For one man, Jesus, the Kingdom means the bearing of sin and suffering in order to transform it; for the other man, Judas, the Kingdom means the elimination of sin and suffering. Judas sees life as a problem requiring an immediate, permanent solution. Jesus views life as a condition that contains the potential for change and transformation. So Judas betrays Jesus to make him act rather than to suffer, to eliminate what is intolerable rather than to redeem and change it. Judas seeks to build the Kingdom of God without suffering and pain. He wants to eliminate those people who make life uncomfortable for himself and others. Then, when he is alone and realizes that he also is not perfect, he eliminates himself.

There are other characters in this great drama, but they play a dumb role. The disciples, bewildered and confused, are asleep in the garden. Sadly, that seems to be the most characteristic repose of the Church throughout history. Critical events take place without the participation of God’s people. Yet perhaps that is providential. On one side we are rightly pressured by people who want immediate solutions, the manifesto of Judas, and on the other we are confronted with the seemingly impossible call of Jesus Christ to minister to the sufferings of the world. The heartaches of the world are real, but there is a distinction between the elimination-of sin and suffering and its transformation in the Kingdom of Christ. The Christian hope is not to return to Eden, but to transform the city of man into the City of God. Mother Theresa captures this distinction superbly when she says that “Welfare is for a purpose—an admirable and necessary one—whereas Christian love is for a person.” Such a stance will do little to enhance the Church as a social and political power; it will bring the accusation that we are “fooling the beggar.” But it may bring the Kingdom just one step nearer and make the vital difference between betraying the Lord and seeking to do his will.

The tragedy of Judas was that rather than giving himself for others he worked for a kind of immediate upopia. Such a pursuit destroys those who struggle for it since it is basically selfish. Judas pursued a cause rather than suffer the grief of his neighbor. Above all, he was a man without faith; he failed to allow for that transforming action of God without which all the aspirations of man must end in death. He acts in the interests of humanity without comprehending his own humanity and innate weakness.

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.

Melito was bishop of Sardis in the second half of the second century A.D. His sermon, “On the Passover,” only recently discovered, translated, and published, has been called “the most important addition to Patristic literature in the present century.” Unfortunately space requirements prohibit us from presenting it here in its entirety. (The full translation of the homily appears in Current Issues in Biblical and Patristic Interpretation, Eerdmans, 1975; the excerpt here is reprinted by permission.) Melito was the first Christian preacher known to make full use of the verbal arts of his day to impress his audience with the dramatic power of the Gospel.

As late as the second century most church leaders in Asia Minor, including Melito, still celebrated Easter at the same time as the Jews celebrated Passover. They did so in the following way: with a fast that ended on the fourteenth of Nisan (the first month of the Hebrew calendar, March–April of our calendar); with a vigil that included a sermon on the Christian meaning of the Passover; with the rite of baptism that depicted the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ; and with the eating of a love feast and the celebration of the eucharist. Melito’s sermon probably was composed especially as an Easter sermon; he delivered it during the vigil of a second-century Christian Passover celebration.

1. First of all, the Scripture about the Hebrew Exodus has been read

and the words of the mystery have been explained

as to how the sheep was sacrificed

and the people were saved.

2. Therefore, understand this, O beloved:

The mystery of the passover is

new and old,

eternal and temporal,

corruptible and incorruptible,

mortal and immortal

in this fashion:

3. It is old insofar as it concerns the law,

but new insofar as it concerns the gospel;

temporal insofar as it concerns the type,

eternal because of grace;

corruptible because of the sacrifice of the sheep,

incorruptible because of the life of the Lord;

mortal because of his burial in the earth,

immortal because of his resurrection from the dead.

4. The law is old,

but the gospel is new;

the type was for a time,

but grace is forever.

The sheep was corruptible,

but the Lord is incorruptible,

who was crushed as a lamb,

but who was resurrected as God.

For although he was led to sacrifice as a sheep,

yet he was not a sheep;

and although he was as a lamb without voice,

yet indeed he was not a lamb.

The one was the model;

the other was found to be the finished product.

5. For God replaced the lamb,

and a man the sheep;

but in the man was Christ,

who contains all things.

6. Hence, the sacrifice of the sheep,

and the sending of the lamb to slaughter,

and the writing of the law—

each led to and issued in Christ,

for whose sake everything happened in the ancient law,

and even more so in the new gospel.

7. For indeed the law issued in the gospel—

the old in the new,

both coming forth together from Zion and Jerusalem;

and the commandment issued in grace,

and the type in the finished product,

and the lamb in the Son,

and the sheep in a man,

and the man in God.

8. For the one who was born as Son,

and led to slaughter as a lamb,

and sacrificed as a sheep,

and buried as a man,

rose up from the dead as God,

since he is by nature both God and man.

9. He is everything:

in that he judges he is law,

in that he teaches he is gospel,

in that he saves he is grace,

in that he begets he is Father,

in that he is begotten he is Son,

in that he suffers he is sheep,

in that he is buried he is man,

in that he comes to life again he is God.

10. Such is Jesus Christ,

to whom be the glory forever. Amen.

11. Now comes the mystery of the passover,

even as it stands written in the law …

But I will clearly set forth the significance of the

words of this Scripture,

showing how God commanded Moses in Egypt,

when he had made his decision,

to bind Pharaoh under the lash,

but to release Israel from the lash

through the hand of Moses.

12. For see to it, he says,

that you take a flawless and perfect lamb,

and that you sacrifice it in the evening

with the sons of Israel,

and that you eat it at night, and in haste.

You are not to break any of its bones …

Melito continues with a paraphrase of Exodus 12:11–30.

16. But when the sheep was sacrificed,

and the passover consumed,

and the mystery completed,

and the people made glad,

and Israel sealed,

then the angel arrived to strike Egypt,

who was neither

initiated into the mystery,

participant of the passover,

sealed by the blood,

nor protected by the Spirit,

but who was the enemy and the unbeliever.

17. In a single night the angel struck and made Egypt childless.

For when the angel had encompassed Israel,

and had seen her sealed with the blood of the sheep,

he advanced against Egypt,

and by means of grief subdued the stubborn Pharaoh,

clothing him,

not with a cloak of mourning,

nor with a torn mantle,

but with all of Egypt, torn,

and mourning for her firstborn.

Sections 18–29 graphically detail the horrible fear and agony of Egypt at the loss of the firstborn-quite in keeping with the style of second century orators who revelled in the gruesome.

30. Such was the misfortune which en compassed Egypt.

In an instant it made her childless.

But Israel, all the while, was being protected

by the sacrifice of the sheep

and truly was being illumined

by its blood which was shed;

for the death of the sheep

was found to be a rampart for the people.

31. O inexpressible mystery!

the sacrifice of the sheep

was found to be the salvation of the people,

and the death of the sheep

became the life of the people.

For its blood warded off the angel.

32. Tell me, O angel,

At what were you turned away?

At the sacrifice of the sheep,

or the life of the Lord?

At the death of the sheep,

or the type of the Lord?

At the blood of the sheep,

or the Spirit of the Lord?

Clearly, you were turned away

33. because you saw the mystery of the Lord

taking place in the sheep,

the life of the Lord

in the sacrifice of the sheep,

the type of the Lord

in the death of the sheep.

For this reason you did not strike Israel,

but it was Egypt alone that you made childless.

In the next section (34–45), here omitted, Melito shows the importance of first making a model for the construction of any desired building-a set of blueprints for the erection of the finished product. Israel was the model, the Church is the finished product; the lamb was the model, Christ the finished product. The model has use only until the completion of that for which it was made. Then Melito continues.

46. … What is the passover?

Indeed its name is derived

from that event—

“to celebrate the passover” (to Paschein) is derived from

“to suffer” (tou pathein).

Therefore, learn who the sufferer is

and who he is who suffers along with sufferer.

47. Why indeed was the Lord present upon the earth?

In order that having clothed himself with the one who suffers,

he might lift him up to the heights of heaven.

In the beginning, when God made heaven and earth,

and everything in them through his word,

he himself formed man from the earth

and shared with that form his own breath,

and himself placed him in paradise,

which was eastward in Eden,

and there they lived most luxuriously.

Then by way of command God gave them this law:

For your food you may eat from any tree,

but you are not to eat

from the tree of the one who knows good and evil.

For on the day you eat from it,

you most certainly will die.

48. But man,

who is by nature capable of receiving good and evil

as soil of the earth is capable of receiving seeds from

both sides,

welcomed the hostile and greedy counsellor,

and by having touched that tree

transgressed the command,

and disobeyed God.

As a consequence, he was cast out into this world

as a condemned man is cast into prison.

In sections 49–65, here omitted, Melito, again in the style of his contemporaries, takes delight in describing the gross acts of sinful man and the consequent suffering he must endure, especially the ultimate suffering of death. But he introduces hope by recalling the prophets’ prediction of Christ’s suffering. Then he continues …

66. When this one [Christ] came from heaven to earth

for the sake of the one who suffers,

and had clothed himself with that very one

through the womb of a virgin,

and having come forth as man,

he accepted the sufferings of the sufferer

through his body which was capable of suffering.

And he destroyed those human sufferings

by his spirit which was incapable of dying.

He killed death which had put man to death.

67. For this one,

who was led away as a lamb,

and who was sacrificed as a sheep,

by himself delivered us from servitude to the world

as from the land of Egypt,

and released us from bondage to the devil

as from the hand of Pharaoh,

and sealed our souls by his own spirit

and the members of our bodies by his own blood.

68. This is

the one who covered death with shame

and who plunged the devil into mourning

as Moses did Pharaoh.

This is the one who smote lawlessness

and deprived injustice of its offspring,

as Moses deprived Egypt.

This is the one who delivered us

from slavery into freedom,

from darkness into light,

from death into life,

from tyranny into an eternal kingdom,

and who made us a new priesthood,

and a special people forever.

69. This one is the passover of our salvation.

This is the one who patiently endured many things in many people:

This is the one who was murdered in Abel,

and bound as a sacrifice in Isaac,

and exiled in Jacob,

and sold in Joseph,

and exposed in Moses,

and sacrificed in the lamb,

and hunted down in David,

and dishonored in the prophets.

70. This is the one who became human in a virgin,

who was hanged on the tree,

who was buried in the earth,

who was resurrected from among the dead,

and who raised mankind up

out of the grave below

to the heights of heaven.

71. This is the lamb that was slain.

This is the lamb that was silent.

This is the one who was born of Mary, that beautiful ewe-lamb.

This is the one who was taken from the flock,

and was dragged to sacrifice,

and was killed in the evening,

and was buried at night;

the one who was not broken while on the tree,

who did not see dissolution while in the earth,

who rose up from the dead,

and who raised up mankind

from the grave below.

72. This one was murdered.

And where was he murdered?

In the very center of Jerusalem!

Why?

Because he had healed their lame

and had cleansed their lepers,

and had guided their blind with light,

and had raised up their dead.

For this reason he suffered.

Somewhere it has been written in the law and prophets,

“They paid me back evil for good,

and my soul with barrenness,

plotting evil against me,

saying, Let us bind this just man

because he is troublesome to us.”

73. Why, O Israel, did you do this strange injustice?

You dishonored the one who had honored you.

You held in contempt the one who held you in esteem.

You denied the one who publicly acknowledged you,

You renounced the one who proclaimed you his own,

You killed the one who made you to live.

Why did you do this, O Israel?

74. Has it not been written for your benefit:

“Do not shed innocent blood

lest you die a terrible death”?

Nevertheless, Israel admits, I killed the Lord!

Why?

Because it was necessary for him to die.

You have deceived yourself, O Israel,

rationalizing thus about the death of the Lord.

75. It was necessary for him to suffer, yes,

but not by you;

it was necessary for him to be dishonored,

but not by you;

it was necessary for him to be judged,

but not by you;

it was necessary for him to be crucified,

but not by you,

nor by your right hand.

76. O Israel!

You ought to have cried aloud to God with this voice:

“O Lord,

if it was necessary for your Son to suffer,

and if this was your will,

let him suffer indeed,

but not at my hands.

Let him suffer at the hands of strangers.

Let him be judged by the uncircumcised.

Let him be crucified by the tyrannical right hand,

but not by mine.”

77. But you, O Israel,

did not cry out to God with this voice,

nor did you absolve yourself of guilt before the Lord,

nor were you persuaded by his works …

81. O lawless Israel,

why did you commit this extraordinary crime

of casting your Lord into new sufferings—

your master,

the one who formed you,

the one who made you,

the one who honored you,

the one who called you Israel?

82. But you were found not really to be Israel,

for you did not see God,

you did not recognize the Lord,

you did not know, O Israel,

that this one was the firstborn of God,

the one who was begotten before the morning star,

the one who caused the light to shine forth,

the one who made bright the day,

the one who parted the darkness,

the one who established the primordial starting point,

the one who suspended the earth,

the one who quenched the abyss,

the one who stretched out the firmament,

the one who formed the universe,

83. the one who set in motion the stars of heaven,

the one who caused those luminaries to shine,

the one who made the angels in heaven,

the one who established their thrones in that place,

the one who by himself fashioned man upon the earth.

This was the one who chose you,

the one who guided you

from Adam to Noah,

from Noah to Abraham,

from Abraham to Isaac and Jacob and the Twelve Patriarchs …

94. Pay attention, all families of the nations, and observe!

An extraordinary murder has taken place

in the center of Jerusalem,

in the city devoted to God’s law,

in the city of the Hebrews,

in the city of the prophets,

in the city thought of as just.

And who has been murdered?

And who is the murderer?

I am ashamed to give the answer,

but give it I must.

For if this murder had taken place at night,

or if he had been slain in a desert place,

it would be well to keep silent;

but it was in the middle of the main street,

even in the center of the city,

while all were looking on,

that the unjust murder of this just person took place.

95. And thus he was lifted up upon the tree,

and an inscription was affixed

identifying the one who had been murdered.

Who was he?

It is painful to tell,

but it is more dreadful not to tell.

Therefore, hear and tremble

because of him for whom the earth trembled.

96. The one who hung the earth in space, is himself hanged;

the one who fixed the heavens in place, is himself impaled;

the one who firmly fixed all things, is himself firmly

fixed to the tree.

The Lord is insulted,

God has been murdered,

the King of Israel has been destroyed

by the right hand of Israel.

97. O frightful murder!

O unheard of injustice!

The Lord is disfigured

and he is not deemed worthy of a cloak for his naked body,

so that he might not be seen exposed.

For this reason the stars turned and fled,

and the day grew quite dark,

in order to hide that naked person hanging on the tree,

darkening not the body of the Lord,

but the eyes of men.

98. Yes, even though the people did not tremble,

the earth trembled instead;

although the people were not afraid,

the heavens grew frightened;

although the people did not tear their garments,

the angels tore theirs;

although the people did not lament,

the Lord thundered from heaven,

and the most high uttered his voice.

Late March Love Poem

one red tulip

multitudes of jonquils

a tilted wisteria

tiny wild blue violets

I am delirious with her kisses

come, let us walk

along the tracks and sing small buds

the iris will bloom later

peonies’s red stalks press upward

I long for coleus

the sun is a rose too hot to sniff

I am pricked by her touches,

yea, she causes my heart to pant

Oh Solomon, your proverbs,

your Song, your weariness,

your odes, I am comforted

with the least apple-seed

of her crisp, sweet flesh,

the softest syllable of her psalm

all our branches have buds

my desire is for my beloved

and her desire is mine

what sweet billows crown the horizon

yea,Iwill feed among her blossoms,

the tender grasses of her love

Ah, my sister, my garden,

my bride, Spring is here,

multitudes of jonquils,

one red tulip

EUGENE WARREN

99. Why was it like this, O Israel?

You did not tremble for the Lord …

You dashed the Lord to the ground;

you, too, were dashed to the ground.

and lie quite dead.

If these sections (72–99) are read literally, Melito is the first (or one of the first) Christian to blame Christ’s death exclusively on the Jews; he would then be culpable himself of initiating a tragic error. But if this section is read in the context of the Passover, the rhetorical style of Melito’s day-a style given to exaggeration, and Melito’s supreme desire to show all men as sinners and Christ’s death universal in scope, then perhaps by“Israel” Melito means “Everyman,” for in reality all “lie quite dead” and all stand in need of Christ’s resurrection power.

100. But he arose from the dead

and mounted up to the heights of heaven.

When the Lord had clothed himself with humanity,

and had suffered for the sake of the sufferer,

and had been bound for the sake of the imprisoned,

and had been judged for the sake of the condemned,

and buried for the sake of the one who was buried,

101. he rose up from the dead,

and cried aloud with this voice:

Who is he who contends with me?

Let him stand in opposition to me.

I set the condemned man free;

I gave the dead man life;

I raised up the one who had been entombed.

102. Who is my opponent?

I, he says, am the Christ.

I am the one who destroyed death,

and triumphed over the enemy,

and trampled Hades under foot,

and bound the strong one,

and carried off man to the heights of heaven,

I, he says, am the Christ.

103. Therefore, come, all families of men,

you who have been befouled with sins,

and receive forgiveness for your sins.

I am your forgiveness,

I am the passover of your salvation,

I am the lamb which was sacrificed for you,

I am your ransom,

I am your light,

I am your saviour,

I am your resurrection,

I am your king,

I am leading you up to the heights of heaven,

I will show you the eternal Father,

I will raise you up by my right hand.

104. This is the one who made the heaven and the earth,

and who in the beginning created man.

who was proclaimed through the law and prophets,

who became human via the virgin,

who was hanged upon a tree,

who was buried in the earth,

who was resurrected from the dead,

and who ascended to the heights of heaven,

who sits at the right hand of the Father,

who has authority to judge and to save everything,

through whom the Father created everything.

from the beginning of the world to the end of the age.

105. This is the alpha and the omega.

This is the beginning and the end—

an indescribable beginning

and an incomprehensible end.

This is the Christ.

This is the king.

This is Jesus.

This is the general.

This is the Lord.

This is the one who rose up from the dead.

This is the one who sits at the right hand of the Father.

He bears the Father

and is borne by the Father,

to whom be the glory

and the power forever. Amen.

The Peri Pascha of Melito.

Peace to the one who wrote,

and to the one who reads,

and to those who love the Lord

in simplicity of heart.

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 parable updated.

Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” This prayer concludes the 139th Psalm. I etched it in my zipper-lined King James Version, the Bible that fortified me through my years in junior and senior high school when the ladder on my Sunday school perfect attendance pin had grown so long and heavy that I tilted to one side every time I wore it on my lapel. While growing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I repeated that prayer daily.

Before I matriculated at the University of Wisconsin in the early sixties, I had attended—as infrequently as my parents—a Greek Orthodox church in Milwaukee. The faith of our fathers, celebrated in our home most vigorously during the church’s holy feasts, failed to satisfy my raging appetite for religion. So I attended with extreme regularity a Bible-believing church located in an inner city neighborhood several blocks away from our two-story frame house. In the evenings I lounged next to my burgundy-colored short wave radio, the size of a fat midget’s coffin, and listened to the religious broadcasts emanating from the missionary headquarters of the Voice of the Andes in Quito, Equador. As a youth I rejoiced in the simple Bible-oriented broadcasts. Through them I found an edifying sense of witness in the testimonies of those who were serving the Lord in strange and far away lands, for they, more than any other group I knew, realized the dictates of the Great Commission: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”

For my all-day Saturday diet of religious broadcasting, I listened to Chicago’s WMBI, the radio voice of the Moody Bible Institute. The searching religious programs they offered, the Bible studies they conducted, the hymn singing they shared, and the splendid warm testimonies of great servants of the Lord who were students or teachers or administrators at the Institute seized and hoisted my God-centered spirit. I nurtured that spirit with systematic Bible study and prayer in the privacy of my second floor room, under my olive wood crucifix, near my antique radio.

My Bible and crucifix accompanied me on my first trip to Madison. The radio remained lodged in my room in Milwaukee. The first thing to arrest my attention in Madison was a plaque nailed to Bascom Hall, the administration building. Culled from an 1894 report of the Board of Regents, the thought on the plaque proclaimed: “Whatever may be the limitations which trammal inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great State University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”

The truth that I had known and loved and shared was found by mere acceptance of him who personified it and not by the rigorous process of sifting and winnowing. The thought of that plaque threatened my most cherished values; it reverberated in my mind as I struggled up and strolled down Bascom hill, casting glances at the law school, the school of education, the geology building, and other halls of learning. The words lingered with me as I sauntered up and down State Street, peeking into the windows of the platoon of student bars—long, dark, sprawling bars with booths and pictures of rock stars and ball players.

My first day away from home I recalled my pastor’s many attacks on the “beer culture” of the Wisconsin youth. I also recalled his parting words of advice: “I found philosophy,” he told me, “to be an excellent preparation for the ministry, and I am sure you would also.” So, I signed up for a major in philosophy and took two basic courses in that discipline during my first semester. I learned, all too soon, that the approach to philosophy used at that godless university differed from that encountered by my pastor in his undergraduate days at Wheaton College in Illinois, a theologically conservative institution that strived towards integrating the philosophic ideas of man with a Christian world view.

During those early days I felt certain that God would be with me throughout my career at Wisconsin. This much God assured me during my private prayers and Bible study sessions that I held daily and during those occasional “quiet moments” that I spent staring at the academic graffiti carved into those sturdy oak tables located at the base of a wide arch in the student union’s famed rathskeller, a dingy, drab place, always crowded with chattering students, irreparably infested with the odors of beer and coffee and smoke.

Session after session in the philosophy classes, selection after selection in the texts, my God came under attack. I had planned to defend him, but the assaults were so relentless and severe that I felt weak and timid and ill-prepared. Aristotle’s proofs for God’s existence disturbed, far more than they comforted, my thinking. The God of the ancient Greeks, my conception of him at any rate, lacked the personal quality of the God of the Christian Scriptures. I reasoned that the one true God, the Creator of the universe, the Saviour of mankind, was revealed to man. He was to be accepted, not proved. Still, Aristotle and his proofs became my ally simply because we shared a common foe in the ungodly philosophers.

Having accepted Aristotle as an ally, I began to wonder about the status of his soul. Since all those ancient Greeks—Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Thales, Homer—failed to hear Christ’s Gospel of salvation, where will their souls end: in heaven or in hell? How will they be judged? Can they be faulted for failing to follow a Saviour of whom they never heard? Were their souls considered worthy in God’s sight? Is there really salvation without Christ?

Unable to posit satisfactory answers to these questions, I left them only to confront other related questions. What is a soul anyway? Does it really exist? Isn’t the world made up of purely material elements? If one slices a man in search of a kidney or a prostate or a rib, one is likely to find any one of these. But can one slice a man and find a soul? Does a soul exist if it is not verifiable by sensory experience? Can one isolate the components of the soul? Can one define it? Can one define what is good? What is just?

“Can anyone define God?” one philosophy professor asked during a lecture. I raised my hand and said, “Yes, I could. I certainly could. The Bible has an excellent definition of God. ‘God is love.’ ”

“But how,” the professor fired back, “is God manifesting his love when an earthquake erupts and kills twenty thousand Christians? How is God manifesting his love when Christians on the battlefields of Europe and Asia slaughter themselves to the tune of eight million per war? How is God manifesting his love when he permits six million of his chosen people to be murdered by an insane dictator?” Needless to say, I failed to answer his questions, but I went on considering, if not confronting, the tough challenges that philosophy offered to my religious faith.

As I took other courses at the University of Wisconsin during my first year there, more questions arose. In a series of lectures, my skeptical professor of ancient history made a strong case that undermined the reality of the historical Jesus. All along, I had cherished my rich and deep relationship with Jesus Christ. Suddenly I found myself asking not what does it mean to have a personal relationship with Christ, but also whether that Christ ever existed as a historical figure who walked the dusty roads of Palestine and died on the cross at Calvary.

Anthropology presented me with all sorts of agonizing theories, among them the theory of ethical relativism. My cherished beliefs in the time-tested absolutes of the Ten Commandments came into question. Geology threatened my biblical beliefs in the creation of the world. Biology with its emphasis on the evolution of man from a lower species stripped God of his creative forces. A course in comparative religion showed me that the world had other religions claiming a monotheistic and powerful God, owning a refined and poetic scripture, preaching a gospel of love and salvation. Why should I believe the divine teachings of one prophet and reject those of another? Why should I consider Christianity better than other religions? After all, I reasoned with my professor of religion, I am a Christian simply because my parents were Christians. If I was born in Saudi Arabia or India, the chances were high that I would be a Moslem or a Hindu.

The barrage of questions was constant and unending that first year. None of the Christian fellowship groups that I visited appeared to be interested in grappling with such vast and threatening philosophic questions. So I retreated to my private world of Christian values only to find it in utter disarray. It wasn’t enough for me to label Aquinas’s attempts at christianizing Aristotle as brilliant. It wasn’t enough for me to call Hume’s attacks on religion as ridiculous. The writings of both, and the achievements of innumerable other thinkers, needed to be studied and understood in their complexities and in their context. This realization signaled the fact that for me education had at last begun. Either I had to “unlearn” much of what I had cherished in Christianity or simply to break from it.

What made the break more convenient were all the social pressures that I had felt. My first few days at Wisconsin, I walked into the classroom early, opened my lecture notebook to a blank page, dated it, and waited for the other ninety or two hundred or three hundred students to file in and hear the same lecture. To while away the time, I pulled from my shirt pocket a tiny New Testament and read from it until the professor strolled in to pontificate. As the year evolved, my Bible reading in the classroom lessened. Occasionally before class started I found myself visiting with students sitting to my left or my right. It wasn’t long before those students began to invite me to their apartments or fraternity houses for beer parties that frequently degenerated into sex orgies. I went to those parties even though the activities there violated my religious beliefs, the beliefs that were fragmented and confused by the onslaught of new and perplexing ideas and by new and exciting social mores.

During that first summer when I returned home to work as a playground coach for the city of Milwaukee, I found myself unable to return to the Bible-believing church of my high school years. Similarly, I could not pray or listen to the radio or read the Bible. I read a great deal that summer, mostly in Greek philosophy; I read all of Plato’s works and found them as absorbing as Aristotle’s were boring. On the few occasions when my parents attended the Greek Orthodox church, I accompanied them. Religion became a perfunctory feature of my life. Its passions gave way to my intoxication with ideas and drinks and women. New gods dawned upon me, enticed me, and remained with me throughout my college career and into my graduate school days at Indiana University.

Although I did well in my philosophical training (I wrote a Senior Honors Thesis on “Idealism in the Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards,” the most brilliant of the Puritan divines), I entered graduate school with a stronger interest in literature, an interest that was nurtured by my extracurricular reading and my desire to write fiction and poetry. There comes a time in a person’s life, I reasoned, when philosophy’s persisting questions (such as: What did Plato mean?) cease to be meaningful. I did not anticipate literature to offer me richer or profounder questions, but I had hoped literature’s perennial questions would be more engaging and varied. I knew full well the difficulties involved in deserting the rocky shores of Agnosticism on which philosophy had mercilessly deposited me, yet I secretly hoped that literature would help me recover the spirit, if not the substance, of my old religious values. I felt that men like Augustine and Dante, Milton and Bunyan, Tolstoy and Eliot might stimulate that recovery.

At Indiana University in the late sixties demonstrations were as common as ice in a freezer. To act, beard and all, as a member of Dow Chemical’s greeting parade was a status symbol. It was the cool thing to do. In those days we demonstrated for many causes: to end the war in Viet Nam, to cut the tuition increase, to stop CIA recruiting on campus, to celebrate May Day, to demand that Israel withdraw from occupied Arab territories, to memorialize the death of four students gunned down at Kent State University.

Beyond marching in the demonstrations, I read voraciously for my Ph.D. degree. Although the great men of letters that I had read failed to wave their magic wand and help me recover my complete piety and return me to the Christianity of my youth, some of them—Dostoevski and Tolstoy in particular—brought me to a richer appreciation of the Orthodox Church in history. I began to rejoice in the Greek Orthodoxy of my heritage. I was born into that faith, baptized into it as a child, and I was not about to renounce my roots, though, to be sure, my baptism meant little to me. In some religious circles, however, I knew that baptism symbolized rebirth. So, when Oklahoma Baptist University called me for my first job interview, I claimed that I was a born-again Greek Orthodox. It was a claim of convenience and not conviction. Coupled with my Ph.D. work and publications, the claim clinched my first teaching position.

In Shawnee, Oklahoma, land of the Baptized Indians where the bumper stickers read, “honk if you love Jesus” and “America love it or give it back,” I taught Aquinas, Dante, and Goethe to fundamentalist Baptist preachers, missionary volunteers, immersed Indians, rodeo queens, born-again jocks, drug culture leftovers, and other minds strapped in America’s Bible Belt. Throughout my stay there, I ridiculed the religious fundamentalists, argued with them in and out of the classroom, and satirized them in print; I deflowered the university’s finest youth and searched for an identity among the drug culture crew. Some of my students nicknamed me “The Prodigal Professor.” Before the Baptists could dismiss me, I resigned and accepted a post-doctoral fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to do research at Amherst, Massachusetts.

At Amherst I lived in the residence of a French lady, a teacher of French who had planned to spend the summer in Paris. Her husband, a professor of philosophy, had recently died. His huge library remained in his study at the house, a spacious house decorated by many large oil paintings some of which I liked, others I would have preferred the paint to have remained in the tubes, and by several life-size sculptures that must have been done by a close friend. I stashed a couple of those sculptures in the closet in order to avoid daily contact with them.

After three days in Amherst I decided to spend my first weekend away from that small, tidy town. So on Friday I drove to Boston, saw the Red Sox clobber the Milwaukee Brewers and then spent the late afternoon at Harvard Square, strolling the streets, admiring the shops, browsing in the bookstores, eating in a Greek restaurant. In the evening I listened to those sidewalk musical groups, one, two, or three to a group, as they played different instruments and attracted small crowds as sure as piles of dates attract flies in Morocco. I spent all day Saturday in the Widener Library at Harvard scanning many literary and scholarly periodicals that I could not afford to subscribe to and that the library back at Oklahoma Baptist University refused to purchase. Saturday evening I sauntered into a bookshop, bought a volume of poetry then headed to a restaurant to read and eat. Written by the late Anne Sexton, the book was entitled, The Awful Rowing Toward God.

Exploding with passion and raw anguish, Sexton’s journey toward God reminded me of my own brutal journey begun during my senior year at the University of Wisconsin when I wrote a senior honors thesis on Jonathan Edwards, the glintiest of the Puritan intellects whose brilliant philosophic treatises, I felt, might lead me back to God. My journey then, much like Sexton’s, drifted to the quagmire of too many questions, too many cruelties, too keen an awareness of cynicism, too mindful of pressure from peers, too sensitive to doubt, too little humility, too much pride. The more questions I asked about God and existence, the busier I became in rearranging, as the old metaphor had it, the chairs on the Titanic of my life.

On the way home Sunday morning I stopped in Northampton, Massachusetts, and worshiped in the Congregational Church that Edwards led for twenty-three years in eighteenth-century America. Much to my surprise and disappointment, the mystique of Edwards and the formal service failed to move me. And I was certain that all the philosophy books back at the house—works by Russell, Plato, Hume, Wittgenstein, Dewey, Moore, Leibnitz, Kant, Bergson, Santayana, Whitehead, and others—would also fail. If anything, I reasoned pessimistically, these books would deflect, if not destroy, my journey back to God. So I refused to touch them, though two titles arrested my attention whenever I entered that study. They were Williams James’s Varieties of Religious Experience and The Will to Believe. I had read both works during my undergraduate days, but I failed to recall their substance. I deduced the realization, however, that to a religiously inclined spirit, The Will to Believe, at least its title, appears warm and affable.

I was at a stage in my life when belief was, once again, being elevated into an act of will, though, to be sure, the act now was harder to perform. During my schooling and teaching career, my religious beliefs grew out of an intense preoccupation with all sorts of issues from the scientific, philosophic, and literary domains. The sum total of those beliefs was that nothing was to be believed, that certainty did not exist, that all was in flux, that cynicism must prevail in an anguished age. In such context too many questions remained unanswered in my mind; I felt a profound feeling of emptiness; my life appeared purposeless; my behavior with my students reprehensible, to say the least. Like a rat chews an old newspaper, guilt chewed my conscience that traced its vibrations back to the days when I hunched next to my short wave radio and listened to the Voice of the Andes, the voice of someone crying in the wilderness.

At amherst I spent many hours with my Bible once again. Each evening I read several chapters from the good book, then I took long strolls in the quiet streets of that historic town, meandering now into the graveyards, now into the softball fields. As I walked I often cried to God: “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief” (Mark 9:24). Slowly the wisdom of an old Catholic philosopher, filed in the back of my mind, came to the forefront and I began to realize that I needed to “believe in order to understand and not understand in order to believe.” All along my faith had been a struggle, an “awful rowing,” unfulfilling but demanding. Suddenly I began to see my faith or belief as a struggle with a purpose; it was a struggle to reach a canal, to enter and navigate the turbulent waters of the great beyond. To make that journey meaningful I returned, not to philosophy or science or literature, not to the pressure of peers or that of my family traditions, but to the Christ of my youth, to the Saviour who once gave my life a sense of mission.

On a sweltering Sunday in August, in a Baptist church at Amherst, I responded to the “invitation” of a preacher, and with Augustine’s soliloquoy—“My heart is restless until it rests in thee, Oh Lord”—heavy on my mind, I confessed my sins to God and invited Christ into my heart. The words of Christ that I had heard and read so often as a young man growing up in Milwaukee lit up my mind with joy and comfort. “Let not your heart be troubled,” I repeated, “believe in God believe also in me” (John 14:1). As the congregation sang “Just As I Am” I knew that my rebirth was at last real. My youthful passion for religion, my years in philosophy at Wisconsin, my work in literature at Indiana, my teaching days at Oklahoma, my study of the Bible at Amherst, my will to believe in Jesus—all conspired to act as the midwife of my rebirth. This is what the psychological, indeed secular, explanation would claim. As an explanation it is not inadequate but incomplete. Above all—and this is what makes the explanation complete—it was the grace of God the Father and the life, death, and resurrection of Christ his Son that have brought me into the world as a new child of God, a born-again Christian at thirty-three, the very age, ironically enough, when Christ exhorted from the cross, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”

Ode: Entropy & Easter

that all things wear out, break down,

erode, crack, shatter,

sag, splinter, break;

due to neglect

the rooftree gives way–

and there is no way

to avoid neglect

something is always left undone

something always overlooked

if we knew when

the thief would come,

cancer grow,

the bombs fall,

we could take reasonable precautions

but we work against night and decay

with little light,

and in ignorance of the next moment

the seed must die to grow

and yet our life–

scripture says it–

is as brief and tenuous

as the wild flower trembling

in every breeze, scorched

by the sun, clipped

by the frost

all things run down to dust at last,

they crumble and scatter, are lost

the wind chimes clatter

against Rose’s sung alleluia,

the guitar’s throbbing chords,

asIreach with ink

for an affirmation, seeking

a light seeded and rooted

beyond-beneath-above

the light that is only sun

how easy to say

“he is risen, it is Easter at last

and darkness has lost”—

yes but harder to say lightly

against the weight

of a body riddled with cancer,

of a child tortured and murdered

of the twist in the spine

that makes walking a cacophony

Easter can be true only

if the Cross was truly

the death of God

and Man in one body-

sung alleluias flower

only from that dark root

of final disaster

when all seeming hope is lost–

then can the dead rise–

and praise be alive at last

EUGENE WARREN

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

Let Us All Laugh Together

Every Easter I wish I were Greek Orthodox.

They don’t sit on chilly hillsides or in dark cemeteries waiting for the sunrise, soaking up the dampness, listening to a sermon.

No, they run through streets shouting, “The Lord is risen!” And people raise their windows, fling open their doors to shout back, “He is risen indeed!”

But more. Some Orthodox Easter worship services include the Rite of Laughter.

I can hear it: “Now let us laugh. Let us worship God by laughing together.”

How appropriate for the world’s great day, the universe’s great day—great day of all universes, visible and invisible, and heaven, too. Run, shout, laugh. Especially laugh.

I wonder what kind of laughter is represented by the worshipers’ response?

Certainly joyful laughter, sometimes mixed with tears.

Like the woman who wrote a few months ago, just before she died, “The cancer has spread to my liver and there is not much hope. I shall hate to leave my family.” But laugh on Easter morning, laugh because Jesus lives and so does she. More than she ever lived before.

The laughter of beginning spring, melting snow and icy streams, after a hard, cold winter.

Then there’s the soft laughter of hope, of parents whose children cause them pain, because they are living outside God’s will; of wife or husband, deeply hurt by the other’s conduct. The laughter of every Christian who is in a Catch-22 situation—like Uganda or China or Eastern Europe. Laugh, because Jesus is Lord of history, Lord of hope, and he will have the last laugh.

Maybe there’s even Sarah’s laugh at the news she’d bear a son: Can God? Will God? Was Isaac (“laughter”) named for that tentative, questioning laugh, or that later one when Sarah held the newborn in her arms? Regardless, the writer of Hebrews calls her a woman of faith who trusted God to fulfill his promise. Laugh because God sees the grain of faith hidden in our doubt.

But the biggest laugh on Easter morning is because Satan is defeated. This is the Martin Luther belly laugh. Christ died, Christ rose, Christ lives, so I am no longer condemned. He crushed the serpent’s head.

Laugh on Easter morning, whether you’re Greek Orthodox or not. Laugh, and heaven laughs with you.

EUTYCHUS VIII

What More?

I want to express my sincere thanks for the superb editing, cover work, and Steve Hawley’s stimulating illustration for my article appearing in the February 10 issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. No author could ask for more.

ROGER C. SIDER

Rochester, N.Y.

I Needed That

I was greatly disturbed by David Singer’s recent article “Seminarians: Out of the Classroom, Into the Pulpit” (Feb. 10). In fact, none of CHRISTIANITY TODAY’s articles that I have ever read has been more jarring to my young mind. With plans to commence my seminary training this fall and hopes for local church work some day, I must honestly thank CHRISTIANITY TODAY, David Singer, and the participating seminary presidents by saying (slap!) “Thanks, I needed that.”

MARK D. BENDELL

Minneapolis, Minn.

David Singer’s article on seminary training awakens the old incongruity of my own seminary days. What makes a good pastor, human effort or spiritual power? In other words, is being a Christian pastor a human function, one of human abilities, skills, and training, or is it a divine function of God’s call and anointing.… In Paul’s testimony (defending his function in the body of Christ), he didn’t wave his Jerusalem diploma but rather his personal relationship to Christ. All the rest he called rubbish or confidence in the flesh. As an apostle he knew his own human limitation, but he also knew the spiritual power of God as a minister. So he came “in demonstration of the Spirit and power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God” (1 Cor. 2:4–5). Ouch!… The emphasis in Singer’s article is rather clear. The seminary is “the intellectual center of the church.” So today a pastor or a theologian earns his place of leadership in the church by developing human abilities through human efforts not necessarily by divine call and anointing of God’s Spirit. It fits well in with the strong humanistic trend of our time.

THE REV. PETER TEERLIN

Logos Community Farm

Alto, Mich.

The excellent article which David Singer has constructed from interaction with a number of significant seminary presidents admirably furthers CHRISTIANITY TODAY’s practice of keeping in touch with Christian higher education. At the same time, this article points up a neglect of one aspect of higher education, specifically the role of the Bible college in preparing Christian leaders.

On the one hand, the Bible college has come a long way from the days when it was simply a training school engaged in teaching book and theme studies to laymen. At its best, the Bible college today provides a well-balanced, high quality education for undergraduates, preparing them for a wide variety of professional ministries.… Increasing numbers of Bible college graduates are electing to continue their study in seminary or graduate school. Students who arrive at seminary from a Bible college education have the background in biblical studies which the seminary presidents say their students lack. Moreover, Bible college graduates bring to seminary a Christian perspective on the liberal arts and a conception of Christian education and ministry.

DANA L. HUNTLEY

Assistant Professor of English

Northeastern Bible College

Essex Fells, N.J.

May I commend David Singer on his article on the preparation of seminarians for the pulpit ministry. The statement attributed to me, “students also need to work with men who are good shepherds,” unfortunately was not quite correct. It should have read “persons” instead of “men.” Our 242 women enrolled at Fuller attest to our commitment to the role women can have in providing leadership in the church.

DAVID ALLAN HUBBARD

President

Fuller Theological Seminary

Pasadena, Calif.

Where to Head

Roger Palms’s “Preaching for Results” (Minister’s Workshop, Dec. 30) was, in a word, excellent. To know where one wants his hearers to be even one minute after the message begins just makes sense; and chances are he will too. Thank you for reminding us preachers that we should speak God’s word to our hearers, and do so with a specific goal in mind. It is quite true that if you head nowhere, you will probably get there.

DAVID L. BAHN

Trinity Lutheran Church

Cheyenne, Wyo.

Another Wedge?

I was highly disappointed that you allowed Norman L. Geisler’s review of Biblical Authority to be published as a responsible and objective representation of that collection (Feb. 24). Geisler seems usually to be a fair and balanced scholar.… However, this particular review appears to be an exception. I must assume his own affective reactions with reference to the debate on scriptural inspiration have crippled his ability to understand and convey the intent of his West-coast colleagues’ declarations.

The emphasis of the collection itself is overwhelmingly positive: it comes across as a strong statement of and argument for biblical authority, which I assume is a very important theological position for Geisler as well as Rogers, et al. The collection does not bear any resemblance, however, to the polemic for scriptural “errancy,” which Geisler represents. In contrast, Geisler’s own review comes across as reactionary, accusatory, and contentious. The review is antagonistic and skeptical from the outset (Can anything good come out of Fuller?), as evidenced by such journalistic disclaimer-expressions and sarcasms as “It may come as a surprise to many Calvin scholars …,” “Clark Pinnock, an alleged believer in inerrancy,” “Mickelson claims that ‘the authority to which we go is still God and His Word’,” “Hubbard makes the errancy view even clearer.…” Geisler seems to have read the articles solely to find statements which he can use to categorize his brothers as members of the “errancy” camp (a term which drastically misrepresents the focus and intent of the “Biblical Authority vs. Biblical Inerrancy” adherents who contributed to the volume). He quotes only those statements which are helpful in pointing up their “errancy” tendencies. In doing so, he misses the entire positive thrust of the volume. In overlooking the fact that 90 per cent of Biblical Authority sets forth the same positive view of God’s Word as Geisler himself defends, the Trinity professor has ironically documented the very “fortress mentality” and “intellectual obscurantism” which his other, more substantial writings (and certainly his gracious and admirable life) seek to obliterate from evangelicalism.

In printing his review of Biblical Authority, you have driven another wedge in the split between the evangelical supporters of that position, on the one hand, and Dr. Geisler, Dr. Lindsell, and the evangelicals who insist on making their doctrine of Scripture the watershed of their emphasis, on the other hand. [Can] a magazine which consistently has spoken so comprehensively for the whole of evangelicalism afford to contribute to the identification of CHRISTIANITY TODAY with this latter camp?

PHILIP W. BUTIN

Director of Christian Education

Saint Andrew

United Presbyterian Church

Iowa City, Iowa

Good Word For Verbicide

“Have You Committed Verbicide Today?” by D.G. Kehl (Jan. 27) is one of the most provocative articles to hit your magazine. I am grateful to Dr. Kehl for being able to put into words what I so often feel. Thanks for printing the article. I like the “update” appearance of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

DAVE WARD

First Baptist Church

Knoxville, Tenn.

Concerning D.G. Kehl’s article, my comment is this, “Amen.” I almost said “right on” and then I would be guilty.

MARVIN L. JOHNSON

The Wesleyan Church

Belleville, Kans.

Thanks for The Coverage

Thank you for the coverage given to Wesleyan Theological Society (News, “Wesleyan Issues,” Dec. 9). I especially call attention to references of CHA softening its statement on Scripture and the Church of the Nazarene “declining to join the CHA until such a softer position was adopted.”

From a background of being present at all the official meetings in which consideration was given to the Church of the Nazarene becoming a member of CHA, I can safely affirm that neither the statement on Scripture or any other of the “statements of belief” were issues in not joining or joining CHA. Further, as a member of the CHA Executive Committee and also serving on the Committee on Constitution and Bylaw revision during the recent years when changes were being made in these organizational articles I was not aware of any issue pertaining to the Association’s position on the sacred Scripture.

The Association did want to shorten the rather lengthy doctrinal articles and make a statement of simple affirmation on a whole group of historic doctrines which are properly expanded and explained in detail in the disciplines or constitutions of member churches and organizations.

B. EDGAR JOHNSON

General Secretary

Kansas City, Mo.

Some of you are aware that we have been experiencing severe problems with our subscription services in Greenwich, Connecticut. Please note the letter to subscribers on page 56. We will be switching computer services effective April 1. We apologize to those of you who have borne the brunt of the poor service, and thank you for your patience and continued support of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

My oldest daughter Judy has been chosen to be Boston’s Young Mother of the Year. My wife and I are delighted at the honor.

To say that institutional religion is not wildly popular these days would be an understatement. We are all for freedom and protest and we take it as axiomatic that everyone should be able to do his own thing. Not only the church, but any institution is regarded with the gravest suspicion. We link institutions with dreary bureaucracies and find it hard to discover a vestige of life in any of them.

It is not surprising that the church comes in for its share of the general criticism. Take worship. The Bible does not contain a specific command to believers to worship on Sunday, though there are references in the New Testament to worship on that day as the practice of the early church. But all through the ages Christians have seen Sunday as the day of worship. Whether on that day or some other, there can be no doubt that a gathering for worship is important. Anyway, there is a specific direction not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together (Heb. 10:25).

But when we do this it is easy to concentrate on the wrong things. We can get caught up in the rituals of approach to God. Whether we feel that the right way is that of set forms or whether we feel we must renounce all set forms, we can so concentrate on the act of worship that we see little beyond that. The right performance of worship becomes an end in itself.

Other things follow. If worship is so important, then we must have an appropriate sanctuary. We take steps to erect a worthy building and that lands us in expenditure for maintenance. We provide for choirs, service sheets, hymn books, and a multitude of aids to worship. We give thought to the needs of specific groups, such as young people. We find the need for choirs, Sunday schools, organizations for men and for women, for young marrieds, and others.

We give thought to the community in which we live. We think of ways we can help the sick or the aged. We set up service groups of a variety of kinds and do our best to meet the needs of those in various kinds of want.

There can be no objection in principle to such activities. They are either acts of Christian compassion or acts of Christian devotion. Both are important.

But unfortunately in doing all this we can build up quite an organization. It is so easy to be caught up in the multiplicity of tasks involved that we lose sight of the main thing. We punctiliously perform the outward acts but lose the freedom of the Spirit. We get caught up in routine. We overlook the fact that Christianity is concerned not with the right performance of this or that act but with faith and love and hope. In our care to see that the right things are done we can neglect the weightier matters of our attitude to God and to man. We spend so much of our time simply causing the wheels to turn that we begin to wonder whether we are doing anything more than perpetuate the institution.

So there has been a turning away, particularly but not only among younger people. There has arisen a conviction that all is not well with the church and that we would be better off to abandon the institution. If we had none of the organization to run we could concentrate on simply living out the Christian faith. We would be free from many of the burdens with which we now weigh ourselves down and we would be able to give ourselves over to a simpler lifestyle that more closely resembles the kind of thing we see in the New Testament.

There is something undeniably attractive about this. Nobody who has been active in the church can be oblivious of the fact that there is far too much routine for comfort. Nor can it be denied that much of what happens in so many of our churches and ecclesiastical institutions generally is a matter of simply keeping the institution going. It would be good to be rid of all that serves no Christian purpose.

But to be rid of the institution altogether is quite another matter. The big reason for this, of course, is that the church clearly has its place in God’s plan. “The Bible knows nothing of solitary religion,” a serious man said to John Wesley, “Therefore a man must find companions or make them.” And that is true. There is much in the Christian way that is concerned with the individual. But when all this is said it is still the case that believers belong together in the body of Christ. They are commanded to assemble from time to time as we have already noticed. But more than this, the New Testament sees believers as a unity.

Christ prayed that his followers might be one (John 17:20f.) and there are many indications in the New Testament that we who are in the body of Christ belong together. The very use of the expression “body of Christ” implies this. The members of a body may be widely different but they cannot make up a body apart from being together. Illustrations of the church (such as the bride of Christ or a building) often stress the theme of belonging.

There can be no doubt but that the New Testament envisages Christians as functioning as a unity. There is an essential corporateness about the Christian way. If we are to be biblical this cannot be dispensed with. It is not easy to see how formal expression can be given to this concept without an institution. This is not to endorse everything about the present institution. It is simply to affirm that somehow the “togetherness” of the Christian way must be expressed.

And, of course, there are values that the institution protects. For example, when a way of worshiping or a pattern of thinking or a manner of living has been shown to be valuable the institution is a useful way of retaining it and of spreading it to other members. All this may become too fixed and too traditional. But there are values in it nevertheless.

There are functions that can be exercised in an institution far more easily than outside, for example that of theological education. It is true that many of our best seminaries and colleges are private institutions. But apart from an institutional church with accepted patterns and functions there would be little agreement on what to study and little incentive to engage in research.

The institution gives stability. It will be there when the individual passes on and it will stand for ideals and teachings. We cannot do without this continuing testimony.

There are dangers in the institution. We must always be on our guard. There can be vested ecclesiastical interests that blind us to realities. The institution must be continually subjected to scrutiny and it must always be the object of reformation. But when all this is said it is perilous for Christians to try to do without an institutional church of some sort. Community is integral to the Christian way and this demands some form of institution.

To do away with the institution would be to reduce Christianity to a simplistic individualism. Not that way lies authentic Christianity.

Documents are appearing fast in the controversy over whether the consecration of the first four bishops of the Anglican Church in North America (see February 24 issue, page 44) was valid. The flurry of papers is coming from overseas as well as from within the ACNA and from the headquarters of the Episcopal Church, from which the ACNA broke away.

The documents raise questions not only about which bishops had the authority to consecrate the ACNA leaders but also about which bishops are telling the truth about the matter.

Time magazine’s report last month brought a sharp retort from Bishop Albert A. Chambers, retired bishop of Springfield, Illinois, who was the only American Episcopalian serving as a consecrator. Chambers issued a statement and a notarized copy of the handwritten letter that he said he received from Korean bishop Mark Pae. The letter, dated January 24 (four days before the Denver consecration rites), conveys Pae’s regrets “that I cannot come to the U.S. of America at this time” and gives “my consent to the consecration” of Dale Doren, who formerly served in Korea.

Chambers, in the statement issued last month, wrote: “The Time magazine article leaves the impression that Dr. Doren was not telling the truth when he said he had brought from Korea a letter from Bishop Mark Pae, giving his consent to the consecration of his own archdeacon, who has been his good friend for many years. Is one to conclude from the Time report that the letter read to the congregation at the consecration service was a forged document, written to fool somebody?… It is an insult to Bishop Doren to imply that he would manufacture such a letter. I have the original in my possession.… It is quite understandable to me that [Pae] now chooses to deny he wrote the letter because it is clear he has been under great pressure from the Archbishop of Canterbury. But his denial has no effect on the validity of the consecration.”

Time religion writer Dick Ostling said that in his interviews with Pae both before and after the Denver ceremony Pae denied that he had given his consent. However, Ostling told Religious News Service that by reporting that the letter had been read in Denver and that Pae had denied giving his consent, “we did not mean to imply where the truth lay.”

Pae’s role is important because Doren was the first of the four ACNA bishops to be consecrated. Pae was considered (in absentia) to be one of the three bishops—the minimum acceptable number—consecrating Doren. Doren was then one of three bishops who participated in the other three consecrations. The Chambers statement said, “The canons found in the Apostolic Constitutions clearly state that, should a bishop be unable to be present to consecrate, he may send his written consent, and I am convinced that Bishop Pae did just that.”

Assisting Chambers in the consecration of Doren was Francisco J. Pagtakhan, a bishop of the Philippine Independent Catholic Church, a body that is in communion with the Episcopal Church (U.S.A.). Macario V. Ga, supreme bishop of the Philippine body, has now assured Episcopal presiding bishop John M. Allin that Pagtakhan’s participation was unauthorized. Ga sent Allin a communique from an extraordinary session of his church’s bishops in which they declare they are “severely distressed and shocked beyond belief” that one of their brother bishops took part in the Denver ceremony.

Pagtakhan, a non-diocesan bishop, issued a statement of his own last month. He told of contacts between supporters of the ACNA and his church that led to Ga’s explicitly authorizing him to participate in the consecration. Pagtakhan stated that after he was asked to take part in the Denver ceremony, the supreme bishop appointed him “secretary for local and foreign missions and internal and external ecumenical affairs” and directed him to handle several items of church business while in the United States. Although Pagtakhan said Ga did not give him a requested letter to take to the January ceremony, he quoted the supreme bishop as saying, “You can participate at the consecration.” According to Pagtakhan, the supreme bishop told him that appointment to the secretary’s post “will serve the purpose just the same” as a letter of authorization.

Pagtakhan said that before he left for the United States he asked his superior, “Suppose Bishop Chambers and his group want to have intercommunion with our church?” The reply, he said, was, “No problem, for in reality and in truth, theirs is the original church which was the [Episcopal Church] then with whom we were in intercommunion.”

Ga, the supreme bishop, sent Allin a cable about the extraordinary session of his bishops while the Episcopal Church Executive Council was meeting in New Orleans last month. Pagtakhan was visiting in California at the time and was reported to be “flabbergasted” by the news. He then fired off a cable to Bishop Manuel Lagasca, president of the Supreme Council of Bishops in the Philippine church, to ask about the action. One pro-ACNA source said Lagasca (not Ga) answered that there had been no such action by the council. Pagtakhan immediately began making plans to return to Manila to ask the council to set the record straight.

Sources in the United States are unclear about what authority Ga (the supreme bishop) and Lagasca (the president of the supreme council of bishops) have. Some contend that Ga is only a figurehead and can attend meetings of the council only upon invitation. The pro-ACNA group maintain that Lagasca has the authority to speak for the council. To back this claim, they sent out a January 20 document in which Lagasca conferred the “Bishop Aglipay Cross” on Chambers “and his sympathizers” for “putting up a continuing Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.” In addition to being president of the council, Lagasca is also identified as the metropolitan bishop of Greater Manila. In the citation to Chambers he specified that he was honoring the American “in behalf of the supreme council.”

In his statement, Pagtakhan gave an involved account of how Ga, the supreme bishop, first put him in touch with a supporter of the ACNA, layman Edward Heatherman of Los Angeles. He recalled that one day the telephone rang in Ga’s office and Ga answered. “I overheard him saying that the supreme bishop was out and that he, the one answering the phone, was Mr. Fermin, the clerk,” Pagtakhan said in the statement. “I got serious and asked him why he was disguising himself as someone else. He covered the mouthpiece of the telephone and told me that on the other end of the line was a certain Mr. Heatherman sent by Bishop Chambers and his group, that Bishop Chambers had called him long distance several times, asking him to participate in the consecration of the new bishops, but he had not wanted to commit himself so that [the Episcopal Church] could not say anything against him.” At that point, Pagtakhan reported, he suggested that Ga send him to talk to the American, and Ga agreed. The conference with Heatherman resulted in the invitation to Pagtakhan to come to Denver, with all expenses paid, and Ga reportedly approved the plan.

Before Allin went to New Orleans for the meeting of the executive council, he sent a letter to all American bishops to report a telephone conversation with the Archbishop of Canterbury. Allin said the archbishop agreed with him in the trans-Atlantic talk that the ACNA is not in communion with the worldwide Anglican communion.

No doubt more documents will appear on both sides of the consecration controversy in the months that remain before this summer’s meeting of the Lambeth Conference, Anglicanism’s global parliament.

South Africa From the Inside

Worldwide attention continues to focus on the racial and political situation in South Africa. Early this year Amnesty International issued a major report on what it called political imprisonment in that country. The World Council of Churches sent a “discussion document” to member denominations alerting them to three pieces of proposed legislation that it said would curtail church social work in South Africa. In the United States, the National Council of Churches-related Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility launched a new round of stockholder activity aimed at twenty-three companies doing business in South Africa. The exiled South African editor Donald Woods spoke at the Interchurch Center in New York. A commission from the Reformed Ecumenical Synod planned to meet with South African member churches to discuss racial matters. Meanwhile, more and more religious leaders within the country are speaking up. The following is condensed from a report on some evangelical activity by Johannesburg correspondent Gordon Jackson.

South Africa’s evangelical whites, traditionally either staunch upholders of the country’s status quo or else devoutly apolitical in their faith, are marching to a slightly different beat in 1978. More than ever they are looking at their faith in the context of their country’s socio-political crisis, and for the first time some are coming up with responses that have overt political overtones.

Like some of their counterparts in the United States, South Africa’s white evangelicals have long feared theological contamination by association with the “dreaded liberals” and have mostly avoided personal involvement in social issues. Bill Houston, general secretary of the Students’ Christian Association, pointed out the dichotomous reasoning that has prevailed: “It’s okay for the missions to be involved in social concern but not for the churches at home.” He cited especially the lack of concern about matters of vital importance to blacks.

Houston, 35, and others believe that this stance is now changing, however. The attention paid to Christian social responsibility at the Lausanne Congress in 1974 and at the Pan African Christian Leadership Assembly in Nairobi in 1976 has influenced South African evangelical leaders. The escalating racial tensions at home have also contributed to their awareness.

One manifestation of the new concern is the plan to hold a South African Christian Leadership Assembly (SACLA) with wide representation late this year. Another is the “momentous week”—to use evangelist Michael Cassidy’s phrase—of a renewal conference last year. During the conference, whose influence was felt far beyond the charismatic circles in which it had its primary thrust, racial, linguistic, and denominational barriers broke down. Many of the nearly 2,500 delegates literally lept and wept with joy in Christian unity. One delegate said of the experience: “What we saw here was God creating a family.”

That comment applies also to the changing picture of Christians in the country as a whole. A speaker at a SACLA planning meeting late last year noted, “Black and White [Christians] have started talking to one another.” An example of this was last fall’s conference of the Interdenominational Association of African Ministers in South Africa, a black group. The conference, unlike previous ones, was pointedly multi-racial. The members took the extraordinary step of inviting David Bosch, a theology professor at the University of South Africa, to address them on the conference theme of reconciliation.

As for politics, white Christians are less hesitant than before about extending their witness to what in South Africa is a particularly sensitive area. The most dramatic example of this in recent months was the Koinonia Declaration, which shone a light on several of the government’s most morally sensitive policies (see January 27 issue, page 24). Drawn up by two groups of young Calvinists near Johannesburg, the document was published shortly before the country’s general election last November 30. It was intended as a call to the white voters to bring biblical perspectives to bear on their choices at the poll. Among its recommendations were: ease the country’s system of detention without trial; scrap the law that prohibits marriage between whites and other race groups from participating in one another’s political affairs; introduce judicial means to prevent another possible “Biko case,” a reference to the death in detention of black leader Steven Biko; and give the public fuller information on security matters, “so that we might be able properly to judge the actions of the executive powers and consequently be better able to exercise responsibly our democratic right of voting.”

Predictably, the declaration won prompt and glowering denunciations from government supporters. The Afrikaans language daily, Die Transvaler, condemned it as a move intended solely to lend support to the integrationist Progressive Federal Party.

Then, in a particularly symbolic example of Christian political action, forty-four men and women were arrested while singing Christmas carols outside the Johannesburg police headquarters last December 20. The police felt that the carol singers had contravened the Riotous Assemblies Act. They were obliged, under the letter of the law, to stop what was ostensibly a bona fide Christian gathering because the group had not received prior permission to assemble as they did.

One member of the largely Christian and student-affiliated group, which included a priest and four nuns, said: “We knew it would put them in the position of not knowing what to do.” Some Christians, sympathetic to the group’s objectives, nonetheless disapproved of the ill-disguised confrontation.

Although Afrikaans-speaking whites have traditionally been reluctant to criticize their government on any grounds, this has been changing in recent years. Still, the government continues to expect a high degree of solidarity from them. The fact that a small number of students and faculty at Potchefstroom University, a long-standing bastion of Afrikaaner conservatism, were involved in the Koinonia Declaration was a source of particular embarrassment to the government.

Speaking about the church’s social responsibilities, Bosch says: “Race relations are the priority for Christians. Issues like pornography and alcohol, important though they are, are non-issues by comparison.”

Mounting evidence suggests that a small but growing number of white evangelicals from all parts of the political spectrum agree with him, to the extent that they are no longer willing to leave politics just to the politicians.

Chief and Church

Transkei is the first of the tribal black “homelands” to attain self-government under South African law. Since its creation in 1976 it has not been recognized by other nations, and the World Council of Churches is one of the groups leading opposition to its recognition. Opponents of the South African policy of establishing the Bantu homelands describe it as a way of disenfranchising South African blacks and further segregating them.

Some churchmen within the Transkei have been less than enthusiastic about the country’s “independence,” and the prime minister of the Transkei reacted early this year. Kaiser Matanzima, himself a Methodist lay preacher, said he will ban the Methodist Church of South Africa from his country. He alleged that the denomination was taking its orders from the WCC. His cabinet will support an act of parliament to establish a Methodist Church of Transkei.

Criticism of Matanzima’s announcement came from all sides. Colin Morris, general secretary of the British Methodist Church’s overseas division, called it a “comic opera development” and added. “It is highly appropriate that a phoney state like Transkei should try to establish a phoney church.” The acting secretary of the South Africa Council of Churches, Methodist John Rees, rejected Matanzima’s reasons for banning the church.

There was general support for the move, however, from a commentator on the state-owned South African Broadcasting Corporation. The commentator said that even though “banning of a Christian church in any country is deplorable,” there is a question in this case whether the church “has not brought the action upon itself.”

After the initial flap over the Transkei announcement, Matanzima agreed to meet a group of Methodist leaders to talk it over.

Bophuthatswana, the second of the homelands to be granted self-government, came into being last December. As another of the Bantu states with strong dependence on the South African government it is also under a cloud internationally. The Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board announced in the United States, however, that it was opening work in Bophuthatswana. A couple forced to leave Ethiopia by the civil strife there has begun missionary activity in the new tribal state.

Rhodesian Church: Opening to All

As leaders of factions vying for power in Rhodesia continue to try to reach terms for a transition to majority government, churches continue to be in the spotlight. All the principals in the top-level negotiations have strong church identifications. Meanwhile; amidst the tense situation, more and more reports of revival are coming from the African nation. A pastor from one of Rhodesia’s charismatic congregations was recently interviewed by correspondent Ruthanne Garlock in Dallas, Texas. Her report follows.

Who holds the answer to the riddle of Rhodesia? The problem is so complex it seems to defy solution. But at least one citizen of that troubled land feels he has a handle on it.

“The answer to Rhodesia is not a political answer; the answer is Christ,” says 47-year-old Don Normand, pastor of Mabelreign Chapel in the largest suburb of Salisbury, Rhodesia’s capital.

And how has the church been affected by the guerrilla warfare raging there over the past five years? “The evangelical church is suffering through tribulation, but it is growing spiritually,” Normand says. “More people than ever before are turning from conventional Christianity to being born again, amongst both black and white. Even some terrorists are coming to know Christ as Saviour.”

At Mabelreign Chapel, begun ten years ago as a breakaway Assemblies of God church for whites, blacks are welcome at all meetings. “We have open worship,” Normand reports. “If an African wants to pray in his mother tongue, he is welcome to do so, but the meeting is conducted in English. We get a lot of African university students.”

Normand, a South African of German descent, had an engineering background when he entered the ministry, and he directed construction of the chapel. One day during morning tea break he tried to witness to a black man working on the construction crew. Normand felt the man was totally unresponsive. That same afternoon a huge beam toppled, striking the black worker across the chest.

“I had him in my arms to carry him out to the Land Rover,” Normand recalled. “Every bone in his chest was crushed. He looked at me and said, ‘Bwana, I’m going to be with Jesus.’ Tears came to his eyes, and he died in my arms. When the church was finished I put a plaque under the cross in remembrance of Patrick Matika.”

During its first two years, only about thirty white people attended Mabelreign Chapel. Various black congregations asked to use the chapel on Sunday afternoons, but two white board members refused. Finally Normand overruled the board and welcomed Pastor Elijah Guti to conduct meetings on Sunday afternoons. The dissenting board members left.

“From that moment on, the church began to grow,” Normand says. “The blood of a black man is in the foundation of that church, and blacks will always be welcome there.” Currently the building is in use almost every night of the week and three times on Sunday. Half the meetings are conducted in English and half in the Shona language. All are open to both blacks and whites.

Mabelreign’s white congregation fluctuates drastically because whites are fleeing Rhodesia at the rate of a thousand a month. Since last November, when attendance was running five hundred or more, a hundred parishioners have left. But the ranks are swelled with new converts and with transfers from mainline congregations, particularly Methodist. Normand reports that many people are leaving these churches out of protest over the World Council of Churches’ political involvement in the war and its funding of guerrilla groups. Two other charismatic churches in Salisbury are seeing the same type of growth.

The people of Rhodesia live with the tragedies of war every day, but according to Normand the strife has brought a greater awareness of eternal things and greater opportunities to witness. Prime Minister Ian Smith’s son, Alec, was converted after being involved in drugs, and now attends Mabelreign Chapel regularly, Normand said. Many soldiers are being converted while on duty.

In the evangelical churches, believers gather for prayer every morning at five o’clock. Most of them are women praying for their husbands and sons in military service out in the bush.

From the time he finishes school until he is 35, a Rhodesian man must serve intermittently in the army, spending seven weeks in the bush, then five weeks at home. From 35 to 50 he must serve ten days a month. Many families are leaving the country to protect their sons from military service.

Normand and his wife, Cynthia, who have three daughters and a son about to graduate from university, have considered leaving but now feel they should remain as long as possible. In Normand’s opinion, 85 per cent of both the white and the black population is content to follow Smith’s leadership of a pluralistic society in Rhodesia. He says it is the 15 per cent minority, supported by Communist agitators, that keeps the warfare alive.

“I’m not just for the preservation of white skin in Africa; we’re all going to lose our skin one day,” he observes. “I’m concerned that the black man is maintained in the gospel of Jesus Christ and has the fair opportunity to be raised in a civilized culture.”

News Goliaths, Watch Out?

“Watch out, CBS, NBC, and ABC. You’re in for some stiff competition in the television news field.”

That is the tone of an announcement issued by the Christian Broadcasting Network’s M. G. “Pat” Robertson, but the big three can wait a few months before relinquishing their ratings. Although September is the target date for the start of the CBN newscasts, a spokesman said that October may be more likely. As of late last month, only one journalist had been named to staff CBN’s new “national news division,” and his background is in newspapers, not television.

CBN is negotiating with stations across the nation for placement of the earth stations that will enable them to receive CBN programs via satellite. Programs produced at CBN headquarters in Virginia Beach, Virginia, will be beamed to a satellite on which CBN will lease space from the Continental Satellite Corporation. The network has ordered thirty earth stations and plans to get thirty more so that its programs will be available in the top sixty U.S. television markets.

Besides news programs and its popular “700 Club,” CBN plans also to feed entertainment and public-affairs shows to local outlets. Among the planned offerings are soap operas and comedies.

CBN owns television stations in Boston, Atlanta, Dallas, and Virginia Beach. (It also owns six radio stations, but a spokesman said there are no plans to provide a radio news service.) Some 130 other television stations carry the “700 Club,” and the program is also relayed to more than 4,000 cable-television communities. It is available in many countries in Central and South America also.

Joining the CBN staff this month as head of its news division was Bob G. Slosser, a former assistant national editor of the New York Times who became the editor of the now defunct National Courier. Slosser will begin recruiting a staff immediately, with a network of 200 correspondents in view. Most are expected to be “stringers” who either are freelancers or work for other organizations.

Initial plans call for a daily thirty-minute newscast, a weekly hour-long “magazine type” feature, and a separate religious news program. Robertson, founder and president of CBN, said that the news shows “will cover all the major stories shown on CBS, NBC, and ABC.” What will make the CBN coverage different, according to Slosser, is that “we are a Christian organization and therefore under keener scrutiny. We have to be better than the others. Our emphasis will be on fairness, accuracy, and thoroughness, rather than flamboyance or being ‘first at all costs.’ ”

Robertson hit what he called a “bias centered in the Washington/New York axis” in the existing television news coverage. “We do not intend to follow the lead of two or three national newspapers in deciding what are the key stories,” he declared. “We are particularly interested in hard-hitting investigative reporting, and will not be bound by any ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ to cover up the failings or escapades of public figures or gross errors in public policy. We would also like to show some of the good news, the very wonderful and wholesome activities from the heartland of America that deserve to be brought to the attention of our people. It’s a big job. It’s like David taking on Goliath. But I think the time is now, and that the project is economically viable.”

Economics will doubtless be the hardest test. So far, CBN has arranged long-term financing of $12 million to order the earth stations. The programs will be provided free to affiliate stations. Revenue is expected to come from regional and national advertising. How CBN fares in the ratings race with CBS, NBC, and ABC will be a major factor in whether it gets enough advertising dollars to stay in the news business.

The Open Congress: ‘Beyond Evangelism’

With a little help ($350,000) from his family foundation, Texas supermarket executive and Laity Lodge leader Howard E. Butt, Jr., threw a party in Los Angeles last month. More than 800 influential men and women who were “open to the leadership of Jesus Christ” turned out for the five-day North American Congress of the Laity.

That Butt, 50, a Southern Baptist former lay preacher, could assemble a crowd that size was in itself no surprising feat; for some twenty years he has been emphasizing lay renewal groups. But the makeup of the crowd was surprising. The conferees represented a broad cross section of society, and while some of the speakers were “safe” evangelicals, others were of liberal and ecumenical persuasion, or were Roman Catholic, or even had no apparent Christian faith at all.

Among the speakers were Catholic writers Abigail McCarthy and Michael Novak, management consultant Peter Drucker (who said during a news conference after his speech that he’d rather not discuss theology). Lutheran historian Martin Marty, Lutheran sociologist Peter Berger, Catholic psychologist Eugene Kennedy, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist James Reston, who described himself as “backsliding Scottish Presbyterian.”

There were others, of course, who delighted the hearts of evangelicals in particular, such as exiled Ugandan bishop Festo Kivengere, bludgeoning social critic Malcolm Muggeridge, and black gospel musician Andrae Crouch.

And rubbing shoulders with top evangelical personalities were such mainline church figures as William P. Thompson, stated clerk of the United Presbyterian Church; Claire Randall, general secretary of the National Council of Churches; and Cynthia Wedel, a president of the World Council of Churches.

Deaths

CRAWFORD WILLIAM BROWN, 82, an Episcopal clergyman and first director of the chaplaincy service of the Veterans Administration; in San Gabriel, California, of pneumonia.

JOHN ANTHONY BROWN, 59, president of United Presbyterian-related Muskingum College in Ohio; in St. Louis, of a heart ailment.

LEONARD FEENEY, 80, a former Jesuit priest who was excommunicated in 1953 for teaching that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church; at Ayer, Massachusetts, after suffering for years from heart ailments and Parkinson’s disease. Even though he is not known to have recanted his position on salvation, his excommunication was removed in 1972.

Still, a few leaders who had been asked to lead “theoventures” (discussion groups) rejected Butt’s invitation on the grounds that the affair, held at a Hyatt Regency Hotel, was too lavish and tilted too far toward the affluent and the prestigious. A few others stayed away because they feared their own conservative constituencies would withhold money if they learned they had given apparent approval to an evangelically sponsored conference that went well beyond the conservative Protestant perspectives.

Butt’s purpose in convening the congress was, he said, to break down “artificial barriers between liberals and conservatives; Protestants and Catholics; secularity and religion; art, science, business, and theology; men and women; nations and races.” “I am trying to be a bridge builder or reconciler,” he explained. “It is maturing for evangelicals to hear other points of view.… In classic Christian orthodoxy we don’t have to be afraid of an open forum and the free exchange of ideas. This doesn’t denote insecurity or deny the faith we profess.”

The idea for the congress was born at the last Butt-sponsored laity conference, held in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1976. Martin Marty, who attended that conference with his wife Else (she heard “born-againism” there for the first time, Marty said), told CHRISTIANITY TODAY in an interview that he and Butt had talked about going beyond “mere evangelism.” “I sensed in him an honest desire to move into a new stage,” remarked Marty. “There wasn’t a trace of evangelical imperialism.” Marty added that the Los Angeles congress, which passed no resolutions and issued no statements, was “a symbol of carrying the evangelical movement to a point beyond which it cannot go back again.”

The church historian and author noted that while the 1960s was the decade of Catholic-Protestant dialogue, “this decade’s exciting ecumenical grouping is the mainliners and evangelicals getting together.”

If that is true, this congress, for which former President and Mrs. Gerald Ford were honorary chairpersons, served as a model. The conferees represented a broad spectrum: 12 per cent corporate chief executive officers, 32 per cent entrepreneurs and senior managers, 25 per cent professionals in medicine, law, and science, 19 per cent a potpourri of educators, government officials, media leaders, entertainers, artists, and sports figures. Only 12 per cent were clergy. Nobody seemed to care, but there were twice as many Presbyterians as Methodists, and these top two affiliations were followed by Baptists, Catholics, and Episcopalians.

Despite the obvious erudition and sophistication of most of the delegates, a minor but widespread criticism voiced during the busy five days was that most of the presentations were overly intellectual. The more down-to-earth, easy-to-follow talks, like those by Kennedy and Kivengere, received standing ovations. And the crowd obviously enjoyed Crouch and his no-bones-about-it Christian testimony.

Music and art displays as well as the talented puppetry, mime, and street theater of the San Diego-based Lamb’s Players added a much-needed dimension.

Will there be another congress like this one?, Butt was asked. His answer was that it was too soon to tell. Clearly, Howard Butt would like to see the evangelicals continue to woo the main-liners. Yet he declared, “I want to be a Christian first and an evangelical second. In every religious community there is a peril of party spirit.”

RUSSELL CHANDLER

If the leaders of the Presbyterian Church in the United States (Southern) have any deep concern about a possible second round of desertions by conservative congregations in the months ahead, that concern was little in evidence last month when 214 delegates met in Montreat, North Carolina to chart the denomination’s course in missions for the coming decade.

The PCUS General Assembly of 1976 had asked for the consultation and had set up a task force headed by Herbert Meza, a minister from Washington, D.C. The assignment for the consultation was to examine priorities and make proposals for the church’s mission task. Faced with a 15 per cent decline in the last ten years in the dollar value of giving for its programs, the General Assembly had specified that the consultation be “broadly representative of viewpoints and constituencies within the church.”

With that in mind, the PCUS hierarchy could hardly ignore the fact that some strongly evangelical congregations—including the large Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church of Fort Lauderdale, Florida—had voted to withdraw from the denomination in the weeks just before the consultation, and that other conservatives would be looking to Montreat for signs of conciliation.

There were a few. A theological preamble was hastily added to the informal outline distributed at the start of the consultation. Also added was a statement on “Proclamation” that helped balance an original list of priorities devoted almost exclusively to social action.

Evangelicals were heartened too by the consultation’s suggestion that the denomination capitalize on its “Sun Belt” location by devising strategies for planting new congregations in this rapidly growing area of the country. Urban areas are to get special attention. Also encouraging to conservatives was a ten-point proposal on evangelism.

But conservatives were frustrated in their efforts to clarify statements implying that all human beings—professing Christians or not—have already been reconciled to God. Nowhere were they able to get the consultation to include any reference to the “2.4 billion people still without Christ.”

The give-and-take came as delegates worked on two major documents: “God’s Claims,” a seventeen-page summary of Christian principles and priorities in a world plagued by injustice and inequality, and “Mission Proposals,” suggestions for action at all levels of church life. The documents will be considered at the Church’s General Assembly to be held in June in Shreveport, Louisiana.

These two statements were shaped at least as much by the fifty-five non-PCUS delegates as by the church’s own representatives. There were thirty-three invited representatives from overseas churches and twenty-two others from various U.S. organizations, and they had full voting privileges.

The part played by outsiders showed that the PCUS was taking seriously the advice of its last consultation on mission, held at Montreat in 1962 (see November 9, 1962, issue, page 31). The subject then was the partnership in mission of other churches, especially those overseas, on an equal basis. This time that partnership seemed to be an accepted operating principle.

The consultation management succeeded in its efforts to assure a hearing for all parts of the church. “I expected a railroad job,” said missionary surgeon David J. Seel of Korea. “But this has been an open affair.”

However, conservatives discovered that the opportunity to be heard was not enough. In at least three significant tests they were decidedly outvoted. Sometimes they were able to muster only a dozen votes.

The first test came when guest delegate Jonathan Chao, dean of studies at the Hong Kong Graduate School of Theology, proposed an addition to the church’s description of its mission as “discerning what God is doing in the world and joining Him in that work.” Chao suggested that the phrase “in the light of Scripture” be added after the word “discerning.” The proposal was overwhelmingly defeated.

Halfway through the consultation, some delegates argued strenuously for at least a token reference to the Westminster Confession of Faith in the final document. Instead, each section of the “Claims” paper focuses on an excerpt from the PCUS “Declaration of Faith,” which last year failed to replace Westminster as the denomination’s primary doctrinal statement.

Observing the refusal to refer to the historic confession, Ryuzo Hashimoto of the Reformed Church in Japan commented, “PCUS throw away jewel, keep stone.”

Most distressing to many conservatives, however, was the consultation’s willingness to accommodate a universalist view when it turned down a suggestion by Arthur F. Glasser of Fuller Seminary’s School of World Mission. The subject was a new outreach to the Islamic world, and Glasser argued that the concepts of “discipling” and “baptism symbolizing a transfer of allegiance” should be included. But the consultation settled on calling for “an authentic Christian witness to Muslims” after hearing Lawrence H. Richards. PCUS missionary to Lebanon, say: “Jesus is present in Islam, and we should embrace Muslims as brothers.”

Conservatives at Montreat spent more time challenging the consultation on economic issues than on theological ones. In doing so, they took issue with an impressive and eloquent cadre of Third World spokesmen. William Watty of Kingston, Jamaica, set the tone for that group when he said, “Until North Americans are willing to follow Christ’s example of impoverishing Himself to reach the world, they will neither get nor deserve a hearing for the Gospel.”

The consultation heard similar sentiments from E. A. A. Adegbola of Ibadan, Nigeria, representing the Institute of Church and Society; from C. Rene Padilla of Buenos Aires, Argentina, of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, currently teaching at New York’s Union Seminary; and from Sergio Arce, moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Cuba and probably the first Cuban churchman to address a U.S. audience since Fidel Castro assumed power.

Capitalistic exploitation of Third World countries was the main theme, and the consultation stopped just short of explicit condemnation of the free-market economy. Some Third World delegates were dismayed when the final papers attributed that somewhat harsh evaluation only to them, while the consultation itself called meekly for “sensitization regarding how present economic systems affect people.”

One African delegate said the consultation was equivocating in taking such an approach, and many North American delegates agreed. But the body was also encouraged toward caution by Richard-Louis Grosse, an economist from Savannah, Georgia, who said that both the Soviet Union and the OPEC oil-producing countries are more exploitative than the United States. Grosse called the accusations against capitalism simplistic and said that to adopt them would “alienate the people of our churches—and would be incorrect.”

The consultation did affirm, however, that “Christ calls us to dissent from our present lifestyles” and to “help in creating the political will for a new international order.”

The longest sections in both the “Claims” and the “Proposal” papers deal with justice and equality. A parallel emphasis on stewardship appeared to please all factions of the consultation.

Also popular—for varying reasons—was a section of the “Claims” paper indicating the PCUS’s desire to mend its century-old schism from the United Presbyterian Church and even to turn a friendly face toward the Presbyterian Church in America, which was the result of a 1973 PCUS split.

Conference organizers would not speculate publicly on the reception their work might get from the General Assembly.

“It’s really not so important that what we said proves to be a reflection of the church,” said one spokesman for the task force, “as it is that we have passed on to the assembly what we think God has been saying to us. I think the product of this consultation has been faithful in that way.”

In Advance Of the Storm

Some 400 determined United Presbyterians beat a snowstorm to Chicago one Monday last month and got down to business before O’Hare Airport’s runways were closed. They came from all across the country to work for defeat of a task-force recommendation (see February 10 issue, page 48) that would allow homosexuals to be ordained.

The group, mostly ministers, came from 130 of the denomination’s 153 presbyteries. Their diversity was not only geographical but also theological. Said one participant: “We must let it be known that those present in Chicago were not just a bunch of evangelicals doing their thing; we represent a broad cross section of the church.” What united them was the hope that in May the denomination’s General Assembly will agree with the task-force minority that the church constitution precludes the ordination of homosexuals.

The focus of attention was “The Chicago Plan,” the name given to a document drafted last November by sixteen prominent Presbyterians. At that time the sixteen hoped to influence the majority in the task force. After that attempt failed, they invited more than 400 others to join them in Chicago to plan for the defeat of the task-force recommendations at the General Assembly in San Diego.

The organizers describe “The Chicago Plan” as a “thorough, comprehensive strategy to consolidate the voice of the majority of Presbyterians.” One speaker, Donald M. Williams, suggested that the task force, which voted 14 to 5 in favor of the ordination of homosexuals, and the Advisory Council on Church and Society, which voted 12 to 3 to recommend the task force’s report to the assembly, were not representative of the church. Williams, a lecturer at Claremont Men’s College in California and an adjunct professor at Fuller Seminary, urged the participants to get their local sessions (church governing boards) and presbyteries to adopt resolutions backing the position of “The Chicago Plan.”

Some participants had another strategy. They planned to try to influence the choice of commissioners (delegates to the assembly) in the presbyteries that have not yet elected them. It was reported that in many presbyteries where commissioners have already been elected, candidates were questioned about their views on the homosexual issue before the vote. When Pittsburgh Presbytery was choosing its twenty-two representatives in January, all but one of the nominees declared themselves opposed to the ordination of homosexual. The exception was James E. Ray, colleague of a member of the task-force majority. He was then defeated by John Huffman, the pastor of Pittsburgh’s First Presbyterian Church, who was nominated from the floor.

While Pittsburg, Presbytery has been recognized by many Presbyterians for years as a bastion of conservatism and not a typical presbytery, some observers think that the make-up of its San Diego delegation suggests the outcome of the vote. Most participants in the Chicago gathering seemed to doubt that the General Assembly would endorse the task-force majority’s report. What they are working for is the adoption of the minority’s recommendations. Also under consideration is the possibility of proposing a constitutional amendment that would explicitly forbid ordination of a homosexual.

The keynote speaker at the meeting was Ernest Lewis, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Evanston, Illinois, who cautioned against “overreacting, overkill.” He warned that such a response could do more damage than the task-force report itself. The majority report must be defeated, he suggested, “because of love—for God’s Word, for the homosexual, for the community of faith.”

Down the Ladder

Stanley R. Rader, 48, long considered to be number three in the Worldwide Church of God hierarchy, has announced he will “no longer serve as a director and officer of the church and Ambassador College.” Officially, Rader was vice-president for financial affairs, but he was generally thought to be the top aide to WCG founder Herbert W. Armstrong and to outrank all church officials except the eighty-five-year-old founder and his son, Garner Ted Armstrong.

The church’s Worldwide News reported that Rader “will continue as an independent senior consultant, similar to the post he held before 1975.” (Even though he had worked for Armstrong for nearly twenty years, Rader, formerly a Jew, did not officially convert to Armstrongism until 1975, when he was baptized in Hong Kong.) Rader was quoted as saying that he had “considered this resignation for some time” since in recent years he had “minimal involvement with the day-to-day administration of the church and college.”

Close observers believe, however, that the resignation was forced—the outcome of a power struggle between Rader and the younger Armstrong. In January the senior Armstrong told a large crowd of ministers and their wives that “day-by-day administration and execution of policy decided by me has been delegated by me to my son Garner Ted Armstrong.” Three weeks later Rader’s resignation was announced.

Rader’s association with the movement began in 1956, when he was hired as tax advisor. Later, after he graduated from law school, he became legal counsel to the church and college. Since 1968 he has been “a constant traveling companion and personal aide to Mr. [Herbert] Armstrong … some years spending as many as 300 days abroad with him,” said the announcement. Robert Kuhn, assistant to Garner Ted Armstrong, explained in a telephone interview that Rader has not in fact served as financial vice-president during the past three years even though he has held the title. The title will now go to Ray Writ, who, said Kuhn, has been performing the functions of the office.

Rader is expected to keep one assignment for the present. He will continue to be a vice-president of Ambassador International Cultural Foundation. Kuhn, too, is a vice-president of the foundation.

JOSEPH M. HOPKINS

Straight Sharing With the Revelers

The crowd was off at the annual New Orleans Mardi Gras carnival this year. Thousands of would-be revelers were snowbound in northern and eastern cities. But two groups showed up in greater numbers than ever: the Christians and the homosexuals.

About 300 young Christians traveled to New Orleans to take part in a coordinated outreach to Mardi Gras visitors, estimated to number a million this year. They came from the Christ for the Nations Institute in Dallas; the International Bible College in Austin, Texas; Jesus People, U.S.A., in Chicago; Resurrection City, Berkeley, California; and Agape Force, Lindale, Texas. Gospel recording artist Danny Taylor and a Dallas music group called “Street Level” also participated.

The evangelism effort was coordinated by two New Orleans youth ministers, Eddie Brown of First Assembly of God and Mike Barbera of Trinity Christian Community. Participating groups all handed out the same tract, a folder designed for Mardi Gras. It included the testimony of a black lesbian who became a Christian and other material from national evangelistic groups.

The outreach began five days before Mardi Gras and climaxed on Tuesday night with a twenty-block parade. Although most of the young people engaged in one-to-one street conversation, some specialized in other types of witnessing. Street drama, group singing, pantomime by clowns, and street preaching were used to help draw crowds. Many revelers seemed as interested in what the Christians were doing as in any of the other Mardi Gras attractions.

According to Brown, there were noticeably more homosexuals at Mardi Gras this year. Probably the main gay event was a beauty contest for drag queens.

“I believe the Christian young people showed more compassion this time than ever before,” Brown observed. “There was less judgmental preaching and more effective witnessing.”

Next year will be even better, he says. “In May we’ll have a retreat to start laying plans. We hope to have a thousand young people here in 1979.”

RUTHANNE GARLOCK

New Missionaries For a New Century

No Westerners were allowed to enter Burma to help the Kuchin Baptist Convention celebrate the centennial of Christian work in its area last December. Among the former missionaries who received letters about the observance in northeast Burma’s hill country was Herman G. Tegenfeldt, professor of missions at Bethel Seminary, St. Paul. The following report is drawn from information sent to him.

After a biblical forty days of training, 300 young missionary volunteers fanned out across Kachin. Burma’s northernmost state, last month. Their entry into three-year commitments as unpaid evangelists climaxed the celebration of the one-hundredth anniversary of mission efforts among the Kachin hill people. Early in 1877, Josiah N. Cushing, a Baptist from the United States, and Thra (Teacher) Bogalay, a Karen Baptist from lower Burma, went into the hills near the China border to evangelize. By 1977 the Kachin Baptist Convention had 55,000 members and was the third-largest (behind the Karen and Zomi) Baptist group in the country.

The centennial had long been anticipated, and the Kachins began planning over two years ago. Other Baptists from all parts of the nation were invited, as were all American Baptists who had served among the Kachins. However, government officials said that since no Burmese are allowed to travel abroad to religious meetings, no foreigners would be allowed to come into Burma for that purpose.

The celebration, held December 21–25, brought more than 90,000 people to a temporary “city” erected ten miles from the town of Myitkyina. The vast majority walked to the site; thousands spent ten days or more on the road.

The events began with a procession of thousands of costumed marchers. Leading the procession was ninety-four-year-old Labya De, the oldest living Kachin pastor, who helped Ola Hanson translate the last books of the Old Testament into the tribal language over fifty years ago. As he cut the ceremonial ribbon to open a 15.000-seat tabernacle built by volunteers, a hundred large gongs were sounded. Then the entire assembly shouted, “Karai Kasang a hpung shingkang tut nawng e a nga nga u ga law!” (“May God’s glory endure for ever and ever!”)

In addition to the 300-by-400-foot tabernacle, volunteers had erected a warehouse for food, a dispensary, offices, and a hundred sleeping shelters (thatched roofs over straw laid on the ground). Christians living near the site gave wooden posts, bamboo, firewood, and food. They also oversubscribed by 80 per cent the cash contribution requested of their association of churches. Each Kachin family attending the celebration brought its own cooking pots and prepared its own meals.

Preaching services were held four times a day. There were also dramatic presentations of aspects of the century of Baptist history. A highlight of the celebration was a service in which 20,000 people received communion. Music included singing by a 3,000-voice centennial choir and by choirs from other parts of Burma and processional tunes performed on bamboo flutes and bagpipes. A mass baptismal service was held at a nearby river; more than 6,200 converts were baptized in what may have been the largest baptismal service in Christian history.

Although they are confined by political realities within Burma, the Kachins believe that the celebration marked the beginning of a new missionary era. One pastor predicted that the Kachins, once known as “the wild dogs of the hills,” will be taking the Gospel to many parts of southeast Asia by the year 2027.

Last November I reviewed The Myth of God Incarnate (see Nov. 4 issue, page 34). Four months later the initial excitement has died down. The book was not a work of profound scholarship. It will not stand the test of time. Yet it raised issues that remain. The one I take up this month is the question of heresy in the church. Those who deny the Incarnation were formerly regarded as “heretics”; now the very concept of heresy is thought by many to be outmoded, and those who would previously have had to bear that stigma are left alone (at least in some churches) to enjoy their positions of influence in peace and honor. Is this right? What can be done?

Let me begin positively. Our concern for God’s truth should not make us hesitant to affirm the importance of three matters. 1. Theological exploration. The fact that God has revealed himself in Christ and in Scripture does not rule out intellectual exploration. The theologian is no more inhibited from theological research because God has revealed himself in Scripture than the scientist is inhibited from scientific research because God has revealed himself in nature. Both are limited to the data (which, to oversimplify, are nature on the one hand, Scripture on the other), but within the limits that the data themselves impose, the Creator encourages us to use our minds freely and creatively.

If, therefore, by the myth of God Incarnate were meant the mystery of the Incarnation, we would have no quarrel with the concept. The church has always acknowledged that the Incarnation is a mystery beyond the full comprehension of human minds. A humble, reverent exploration of what God has revealed of himself in Christ is the essence of true Christological scholarship.

2. Contemporary questioning. The kinds of questions that are being asked in that book are perfectly valid. We should emphatically not wish to suppress or sidestep genuine intellectual inquiry. For example, is a development of conviction about Jesus discernible within the New Testament itself? What development took place subsequently? Can modern psychological understandings of human personality throw any light on the self-consciousness of Jesus? Is the Chalcedonian definition, which used Greek concepts of person and natures, satisfactory for our own day? This is only a random sample of legitimate questions.

3. Academic freedom. The contributors to the book all hold academic posts in Oxford, Cambridge, or Birmingham universities. Some of them occupy positions of leadership in the church as well. Their double role raises a further issue. In a secular university setting, in which the divinity department is regarded as equivalent to other departments, full academic freedom must be preserved. No subject can be protected from the most rigorous scrutiny, and all inquiry must be open-minded and open-ended. If, therefore, the contributors to The Myth of God Incarnate were only academics, and if their purpose in writing were only to promote academic discussion, then the publication of the book could be defended. But the book attempts to have both an academic and a popular appeal, and in consequence it falls between the two stools.

Some Necessary Distinctions

It is important to make the following distinctions. 1. The distinction between university teachers and church leaders. It would be wrong to require any lecturer in a secular university to make an a priori commitment of any kind except to intellectual integrity. But clergy give a solemn, voluntary undertaking before they are ordained to uphold and expound in their teaching the fundamental doctrinal standards of their church. Their integrity, therefore, will be expressed in loyalty to these standards.

2. The distinction between questions and denials. It is one thing to question and explore a Christian doctrine because one desires one’s understanding of it to be clearer, fuller, deeper, fresher, and more closely integrated with the rest of one’s understanding of reality; it is another for such questioning to lead to a denial of the doctrine. Again, to pass through a temporary period of agnosticism about some doctrine is one thing; to reach a settled conviction about its falsehood is another.

3. The distinction between Scripture and tradition. Anglican evangelicals, I think, have a growing respect for tradition because we have a growing confidence in the work of the Holy Spirit. We believe that he has guided the church to express its mind in the catholic creeds of the early centuries. These creeds have continued to enshrine for all churches many essentials of biblical revelation. We think it extremely improbable that they will ever be shown to be mistaken. Nevertheless, both they and the reformation confessions, because they belong to the realm of tradition, must be left open to continuing scrutiny in the light of Scripture. Only Scripture itself, being God’s Word, is not open to revision, although it calls for continuous interpretation.

Ecclesiastical Discipline

I now broach the sensitive question of church discipline. What should the church do with false teachers, and in particular with those who deny the Incarnation? 1. The fundamental issue. The real issue is neither linguistic (whether the word Incarnation is mythical, metaphorical, or literal), nor cultural (how far the biblical or Chalcedonian formulations reflect the concepts of their day). The ultimate question is absolutely plain, even to the man in the street to whom semantics, culture, and theology are all closed books. It is this: is Jesus to be worshiped or only to be admired? If he is God, then he is worthy of our worship, faith, and obedience; if he is not God, then to give him such devotion is idolatry.

2. The necessity of the Incarnation. The first chapter of The Myth of God Incarnate poses the question whether there could be a Christianity without the Incarnation. This question must be answered with an unambiguous no. There is no possibility whatever of reconstructing Christianity without having at its center Jesus the God-man who is “ever to be worshiped, trusted and adored.” A reconstruction of Christianity without this would be a destruction of it.

3. The denial of the Incarnation. If the worship of Jesus as God is central to Christianity, and thus the Incarnation is essential, then it follows logically that those who deny the Incarnation by not worshiping Jesus are not Christians in the sense in which the term has always been understood.

4. The special case of clergy. At their ordination clergy place themselves freely under the authority of their church, and promise to teach its doctrine. If a time comes when a clergyman can no longer conscientiously teach something central to his church’s doctrine (such as the personal deity of Jesus), which he has solemnly undertaken to teach, then surely the only honorable course open to him is to resign any post he occupies as an accredited teacher of his church.

5. The responsibility of the bishops. What should be done if such a clergyman refuses to resign? Bishops (and their counterparts in other churches) are in a very difficult position. They are rightly concerned for the peace of the church as well as for its truth. In order to avoid a public scandal they prefer where possible to take action privately. They have no wish to make martyrs. Nevertheless in the last resort (a) if a central Christian doctrine is at stake, (b) if the clergyman concerned is not just questioning it but denying it, (c) if he is not just passing through a temporary period of uncertainty but has reached a settled conviction, and (d) if he refuses to resign, then I myself believe that the bishop or other leader concerned should withdraw his license or permission to teach in the church. I further believe that to allow such a man to continue as a practicing clergyman would damage his own conscience in addition to harming the church and lessening its credibility in the sight of the world.

The most effective way to restrain and correct error, however, is not by a resort to repressive measures but by a convincing commendation of the truth. We should not be fearful either for the truth or for the church. The living God is well able to look after both, because both are his. Only one force can overcome error, and that is the power of truth. So we evangelicals should accept our responsibility to engage in more constructive theological work ourselves. For God calls his people now as always both to defend and to proclaim his Gospel.

JOHN R. W. STOTT