An African Religious Leader

Kimbangu: An African Prophet and his Church, by Marie-Louise Martin (Eerdmans, 1976, 198 pp., $8.95), is reviewed by Irving Hexham, lecturer in religious studies, Bishop Lonsdale College, Derby, England.

This is a remarkable book, written by an evangelical Christian with a rare gift for standing outside her own culture and entering into the life of an African independent church: the Church of Jesus Christ on Earth Through the Prophet Simon Kimbangu. Martin sees this African church as just that, an African Christian church which is neither Roman Catholic nor Protestant and yet which is truly biblical in its intention and, Martin argues, its practice. Clearly this is an unusual book, especially for Westerners who are accustomed to thinking about Christianity in terms of the historical development of the church in the West. It is also a challenging book that demonstrates the way in which Christian missionaries failed to recognize the working of God’s Spirit and drove the followers of Simon Kimbangu (1889–1951), a gifted African evangelist, out of their churches and thus forced them to create their own separate church.

The story of the rise of Kimbanguism in Zaire is a salutory one that raises many difficult problems for European readers. The crassness, and at times downright cruelty, of some Europeans is vividly illustrated. Evangelicals may not be surprised to discover that the founder of this church, Simon Kimbangu, spent thirty years in jail, largely in solitary confinement, simply because he refused to cease from preaching the Gospel to his own people in the then Belgian Congo. The hymns of his followers, often derived from Baptist hymnals, and their fervent faith, were construed by the Roman Catholic authorities and Belgian government officials as acts of sedition. (Hymns like “Onward Christian Soldiers” were taken to be military marching songs!) But worse still, after initial encouragement even evangelical missionaries refused to support the Kimbangists because they sought to express the Gospel in terms of their own African culture rather than conforming to the accepted patterns of Western Christianity and European culture.

Martin convincingly argues that many of the practices which were taken by Protestant missionaries to be “syncretistic” or “pagan” were in fact nothing of the sort and that what the Kimbangists were doing was simply rooting the Gospel in African soil. She thoroughly examines the historical evidence about the life of Simon Kimbangu and the growth of the Kimbangist movement and discusses in detail some of the accusations made against them by their critics. As a result she is able to present a strong apologetic for their church and casts doubt on the wisdom of many missionaries who confused the Gospel with their own cultural traditions. But she doesn’t dwell on the negative aspect of the story. Martin shows great understanding of the problems of the missionaries. The result is a superb analysis of a great Christian work in Africa.

This book is probably unique in the growing literature about African independent churches because of its interdisciplinary approach. The author combines historical research with anthropological insights and a basic theological approach to the subject. As such it is an ideal introduction to the problems faced by young churches and to questions of cross-cultural understanding. But let the reader be warned. It is a good book, an exciting and well written book, but it is also a deeply disturbing book. The evidence it contains shows that the persecution of Christians in the twentieth century has not been confined to Communists but has been perpetrated by many who have acted in the name of Christ and who have caused great suffering to thousands of fellow believers. Martin is to be commended for her work. It deserves to be widely read and discussed.

Concern For Orphans

The Politics of Adoption, by Mary Kathleen Benet (Free Press, 1976, 235 pps., $8.95), is reviewed by Robert Case II, associate in the ministry, McLean Presbyterian Church, McLean, Virginia.

Is there a relationship between the adoption practices and the abortion epidemic in this country? In an adoption should the identity of the natural parents be revealed or should the child’s desire to know be subordinated to the parents’ wish for secrecy? Is an unmarried father justified in asserting a parental claim? Is interracial adoption a humane and workable solution to the needs of the child and both sets of parents or is it a form of “cultural imperialism?” Who should allocate children to would-be adopters, and whose needs should take precedence in the decision?

These and other questions concerning adoption practices are being asked with greater frequency these days. Mary Kathleen Benet’s book deals with many of them. Unfortunately, most of the current books dealing with adoption (e.g., Beyond the Best Interests of the Child and Children Who Wait) devalue theology in answering these questions. Benet’s book does the same.

The current sociological attention on adoption is a healthy development. However, much of what Benet says will be discounted because of the radical solutions she suggests.

She is understandably disturbed over the secrecy surrounding various aspects of the adoption procedures in our country. She is further disturbed about the way in which our country treats its orphans. She questions the American practice of adopting foreign children. And she is concerned that our way of life leads inevitably to the destruction of the natural and most beneficial way of raising children. Anyone who has tried to adopt an infant recently knows the frustration and disappointment inherent in our adoption system. Furthermore, anyone who reads the papers is painfully aware of the thriving baby black market, where healthy infants will fetch as much as $25,000 from childless couples, or where young virile couples are paid to breed children in the best tradition of a laissez faire economy.

Benet’s book would be better had she not used a meat ax on American society. For instance, the author (who lives in France) sees the American Vietnamese baby lift as just one more example of our imperialistic nature, this time shown in a racist baby stealing project. She also sees the capitalistic West as destroying the family unit. Urbanization, she reasons, is a product of capitalism and urbanization fragments the family. Only in non-capitalistic countries can the proper family unit, the extended family, function.

Benet maintains that only in the idyllic Polynesian Islands is the extended family adoption concept practiced. Children are passed around within the entire family (grandparents, siblings) so that the child will not form an attachment to the biological parents only. The idea is that the child will be reared by the best equipped people within a “kin group.” In short, biological attachment is not nearly so important as a symbiotic attachment. Indeed, Benet holds that the tight nuclear family concept is a product of the Western industrialized world and not the healthiest environment for child-raising.

The author distorts Christian teaching. She remarks that one reason for the current “success” of the evangelically founded Holt Adoption Program was that it “stopped insisting on the religious commitment that its founder saw as indispensable to parenthood.” She also ignores the biblical teaching on sociological adoption (see Deut. 27:19; Ps. 146:9; Jer. 7:6, and James 1:27).

Having said I disagree with the author’s perspective and value judgments I nevertheless believe this book can provide a necessary stimulus for Christians to re-enter the adoption arena with creative proposals to solve some of the problems Benet recognizes. This is not to suggest that there are no evangelicals presently involved in this area (for instance, Bethany Christian Services), but it is to suggest that dealing with the problems surrounding orphans is not a vital concern for many Christians. If James is correct when he writes that our Christianity can be judged by how we treat orphans (among others) and that we ought not to leave it to the world to deal with the fatherless, then we need to once again pray for the vision of a Thomas Bernardo who took the Lord’s words in Mark 10:14 as a personal call to minister to the little ones.

The Study Of Society

Christians and Sociology, by David Lyon (InterVarsity, 1976, 89 pps., $1.95 pb), is reviewed by David E. Carlson and Dawn Ward, assistant professors of sociology, Trinity College, Deerfield, Illinois.

With a dearth of books about the relationship of Christianity and sociology most Christian sociologists welcome any additions to the discussion. Originally published in Britain, Lyon’s book is now available without revision in this country. In his preface Lyon says he wants to help those students who “are quite unprepared for the subtle and persistent tendency of sociology to erode faith and raise doubts.” This sense of threat or challenge pervades each chapter. After reviewing three possible ways of relating to sociology (change to another major, dichotomize sociology and Christianity, or embrace sociology uncritically) Lyon says that sociology can illuminate the Christian faith.

He rightly focuses on the diversity and variety in sociology as a source of tension. His primary concern, however, seems to be the conflict generated by two tendencies of sociology—to relativize and to debunk. Although recognizing that knowledge is relative to our situation, Lyon says that “our Creator has revealed truth … which is not situationally determined.” “Sociological relativizing” for him is more than an arbitrary reference point; it claims ultimate significance for a theory. Lyon here feels that historical and contemporary sociology is contrary to Christianity. He addresses the issues of tensions between a sociological and a Christian view of man and the nature of religion.

In the third chapter Lyon considers the debunking motif. He explores the sociology of knowledge application of the “taken for granted” world view. Lyon emphasizes the negative effects of this questioning spirit; it breeds cynicism and distrustfulness as well as undermines authority.

Lyon in the next chapter discusses various sociological views of man and contrasts them with a “total view of man” as image of the Maker. He criticizes extreme views and ignores the contributions of other views of man because they are only theories. His discussion on the sociology of sin, although basic, is stimulating.

Lyon’s second major topic is a sociological view of religion. He glances at three approaches to religion (as behavior, as belief, as reification) and concludes that “none … is mutually exclusive or watertight,” and therefore cannot be taken as complete but should also not be ignored by the Christian.

Lyon concludes his short book with a chapter on “Christian Sociology.” He assumes that a “distinctively Christian approach to sociology” has been made clear in the preceding pages. Claiming that it is not sub-Christian for Christians to study sociology, Lyon encourages Christians to change society in accordance with Christianity’s explicit value system. His brief allusion to a historical “Christian sociology” could be expanded. He thinks that Christian sociology should consider non-Christian sociology “but … develop its distinctive sociological presuppositions and use these to criticize or modify other sociologies.”

The strengths of this book are, first, that it calls attention to the misuses of sociology by sociologists. We wish this theme had been more explicitly developed. The reader may tend to conclude that the problem is more with sociology than it is with sociologists who misuse sociology and its principles. Second, it recognizes the value commitments of sociology and calls the Christian to seriously consider them from a biblical perspective.

The weaknesses of this volume include its brevity in dealing with only two issues, nature of man and religion, its defensive tone, its underdeveloped expression of how a Christian may approach sociology, its “monolithic” view of sociology, despite his denials (Lyon tends to view sociology as a “monolithic” authority, not as a discipline of tensions and disagreements), and its traditional approach, which suggests that he is a conservative who feels threatened by sociology.

As one colleague asked after reading the book, will the reader be encouraged to continue studying sociology? A less defensive, more positive book is needed.

Charismatic Theology

Charism and Sacrament: A Theology of Christian Conversion, by Donald L. Gelpi (Paulist, 1976, 258 pp., $5.95 pb), is reviewed by Larry W. Hurtado, assistant professor of New Testament, Regent College, Vancouver, B.C., Canada.

This is the third book by Gelpi dealing with Pentecostalism (the others are Pentecostalism and Pentecostal Piety). The jacket describes it as “the attempt of a noted American Catholic theologian to synthesize the relationship between charismatic and sacramental worship.” But it does much more. The book rethinks the sacramental theology of conversion and Christian life by using insights from charismatic experience, modern philosophy, and post Vatican II Catholic biblical studies.

Gelpi is a bright, well-read, ecumenical Roman Catholic theologian, charismatically alive and well. He shows in this book a vigorous ferment that one could wish might be felt not only throughout Catholicism but also evangelicalism. If Gelpi be read, one could not say that Catholic Pentecostalism is simply classical Protestant Pentecostalism warmed over, nor could one accuse Catholic Pentecostalism of being blindly submissive to tradition or insensitive to issues other than personal piety.

Gelpi has some interesting, difficult, thought-provoking, and exciting comments on such issues as personal conversion, sanctification, church life, tonguespeaking, the eucharist, marriage and celibacy, baptism, ministry, papal infallibility, and Christian social involvement. He incorporates insights from a diversity of writers and fields, including Whitehead, Edwards, Bird, Küng, Lonergan, and Ricoeur, to name a few. Yet there is clearly a thinker at work so that the result is not a patchwork but Gelpi’s own, new production.

In discussing the sacramental nature of marriage from a charismatic perspective, Gelpi suggests that if the local church has not exercised its responsibility of ratifying only those marriages adjudged to be “rooted in a gift of the Spirit,” a given marriage may not be sacramentally indissoluble. Accompanying this suggestion is a strong plea for the churches to rescue marriage from the “romantic individualism” of secular society by a renewal of “Christian betrothal,” a period of “communal public discernment in which the spiritual maturity and personal call of the betrothed are prayerfully tested and confirmed by the community.”

On the presence of Christ at the eucharist Gelpi speaks of the communion elements being “changed” as to purpose or meaning, rejecting Aristotelian concepts connected with the “transubstantiation” formula, and preferring terms like “transfinalization” and “transignification.”

His treatment of the “word of knowledge” and “word of wisdom” links them with the gift of teaching, against much popular Catholic and Protestant Pentecostals (but with the late British Pentecostal, Donald Gee, whom Gelpi does not seem to know of). There is throughout a firm call to openness to the charismatic gifts, and there are descriptions of the “pathologies” of churches that remain insensitive to these spiritual manifestations.

The book is not for as broad a group as the jacket blurb claims—“any Christian growing in a prayerful insight into the mind of Jesus.” It is clearly a theologian’s and well-read clergyman’s book. Not only are there technical terms used without definition, such as “hylomorphic,” but at times the prose is just jargon: “For the experienced openendedness of one’s personal conscious thrust toward selftranscendence combines with the highly abstractive character of evaluative, propositional feelings in order to prevent any single conceptual feeling from exhausting the possibilities for decision” (p. 52).

On one key point Gelpi seems to have missed the force of his own logic. He insists that baptism is truly efficacious only when the candidate and community are “properly disposed” in faith dependence, and that infant baptism is proper and efficacious only when the Christian parents and the church they belong to “show evidence of sufficient religious conversion” to provide “a faith environment informed by the gift of the Spirit to a degree that is sufficient to nurture the child’s growth in Christ.” And Gelpi is aware that the condition of “religious inauthenticity” characterizes many parishes. Yet, he insists that the re-administration of baptism is never proper, “for it seems to call into question the ritual efficacy of one’s initial sacramental covenant.” It seems to me that Gelpi’s own premises would dictate that baptisms performed under conditions of “religious inauthenticity” have no “ritual efficacy” to call into question.

On the whole, however, the book is a praiseworthy attempt by a theologian to address his church on important issues and displays commendable qualities of vigor, submissiveness, creativity, and reverence. This reviewer agrees with Gelpi that “neither Catholic nor Protestant piety in many of their present popular forms is completely acceptable” and hopes that this book may stimulate the mutual development and sharing for which Gelpi calls.

A Bridge For Yankees And Latins

History and the Theology of Liberation: A Latin American Perspective, by Enrique Dussel (Orbis, 1976, 189 pp., $8.95), is reviewed by J. Robert Ross, Christian Campus House, Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, Illinois.

With reference to A Theology of Liberation (Orbis, 1973), I noted that “in order for a North American Christian to read Gutierrez with any great appreciation he must be willing to … build a hermeneutical bridge that takes into account the radically different historical situations characterizing North and South America.” A competent Latin American theologian and historian has already begun the construction of such a bridge. It is a breathtaking task of theological engineering. But I wonder whether the structure erected by Dussel will bear the weight of all the theological traffic that must use it—particularly in promoting understanding of the identification of Christ with the poor and oppressed. Nevertheless, Yankees and Latins should be greatly indebted to him for undertaking this necessary historical and theological venture.

The first part of the book attempts to put Latin American history within the scope of world history. Then he considers the church history of Latin America within the history of Christianity as a whole. Dussel does not use standard historical categories to accomplish these two ambitious goals. Rather he analyzes world and church history using his own categories.

The ambition of this book is its greatest weakness. It attempts to do more than is possible in a slim volume. For example, the entire eighteenth century of church history in Latin America is covered in a page and the period from 1850 to 1929 in just over two pages. The book provides a few helpful insights into the economic, political, and religious background of Latin American theology. For example, Dussel focuses on some of the more socially sensitive priests and bishops who participated in the Spanish conquest of the Indians. Nevertheless, there are many omissions that are apparent even to the nonspecialist in Latin American affairs. For example, he ignores Protestant missions and their impact on the modern situation. And he glosses over the notoriously corrupt character of traditional Latin Catholicism and its lack of the positive influence on the morality of the population. (See, for example, the Maryknoll report of 1958, Latin American Catholicism-A Self Evaluation by William Coleman.)

From a theological perspective the book adds little to the radical Latin American theology of Gutierrez, Miranda, and Alves. Some of Dussel’s ideas demand explication, justification, and critical analysis—a case in point, his view of revelation, the main presupposition of his book: God reveals himself to us by revealing the “meaning” or “sense” of history. To understand the significance of history is to know God. This view has roots in Scripture, but Dussel has not adequately related it to the uniqueness and finality of the revelation of God in Christ in order to guard it from becoming an autonomous principle of revelation with potentially catastrophic theological consequences.

Finally, Dussel’s account of liberation theology, like that of Gutierrez and others, presupposes a continuity between inner historical liberation and the liberation of the kingdom of God. That view is not only liberal but distinctively Catholic. Liberation theology presupposes a Catholic continuity between nature and grace, and the Protestant evangelical is bound to find himself uneasy with it. In addition, the Protestant fundamentalist would reject the book because it does not accept the dominance of Western capitalism over the entire world economy. But there are theological grounds for a critique of liberation theology that have nothing to do with a conservative identification with the economic and political status quo.

Tearing Down The Walls

On Common Ground: Protestant and Catholic Evangelicals, by Paul W. Witte (Word, 1975, 135 pp. $4.95), is reviewed by William W. Wells, assistant professor of religious studies, University of Hawaii, Hilo, Hawaii.

Witte’s book proved to be as fascinating as the title suggests. The author was reared as a Roman Catholic; he studied for the priesthood for eight years. Subsequently, however, he chose to study at a Protestant center, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, the instructional part of Wycliffe Bible Translators. Today he and his wife are missionaries in South America with Logos Translators, the Catholic equivalent of Wycliffe. Witte insists that he is thoroughly evangelical, in spite of the fact that he has chosen to maintain his denominational ties with the Roman Catholic Church. Hence his self-assumed title, Catholic evangelical.

Although Witte never states it exactly this way, it appears to me that his primary intent is to persuade Catholic readers of three things: that Catholic renewal needs an even deeper commitment to the Gospel and to the Scriptures, that Catholic evangelicals need to recognize that evangelical Protestants are distinct from either liberal or extremely fundamental Protestants, and that evangelical Protestants and evangelical Catholics have much in common. But while that is his primary intent, there is an obvious secondary intent. Witte assumes throughout his work that evangelical Protestants will overhear his exhortation. In two chapters he seems to shift his attention to his evangelical Protestant audience. He clearly hopes that Protestant evangelicals will begin to recognize and acknowledge Catholic evangelicals as brothers.

The book has fifteen short chapters on a variety of subjects, so there is no way to sum the book up adequately. Instead I will highlight some interesting aspects of the book. First, his statement that he is an evangelical. Early in the book he reminds his readers of the diversity within evangelical Protestantism. For example, most evangelical Protestants would not see baptism as necessary for salvation, although some do. Evangelical Protestants do not, however, deny the label “evangelical” to that minority who hold that baptism is necessary. Again, some evangelical Protestants believe that the more extraordinary gifts of the Spirit are no longer bestowed, while others claim to have received them. Now we all know that Catholics too have their “distinctives.” So why is it, he asks, that Catholic distinctives are just too distinctive? Why do Catholic distinctives place them “beyond the pale” of evangelicalism? Witte obviously believes that they need not.

Early in the book Witte looks at several of the most sensitive differences between Catholics and Protestants: authority, the place of tradition, and the doctrine of papal infallibility. It becomes evident that Witte is a translator first and a theologian second. At places he is not as precise as he should have been. In reading Witte’s call for Christian unity one senses that the author is deeply committed to finding a mediating position. He recognizes the excesses of the Catholic past, yet he is convinced that the Catholic perspective contains elements of truth that must not be lost within the process of renewal. And that cautious, critical approach governs his discussion of the topics just mentioned. The same is true when he gets to Mary. He insists that Catholics who are involved in the renewal of their church must recognize and acknowledge that excessive devotion to Mary has at times and in places overshadowed the worship of Mary’s Son. On the other hand, he also insists that evangelical Protestants recognize that the words “from this day forth, all generations will count me blessed” are biblical (Luke 1). Mary, he points out, deserves respect for her part in God’s gift of the Christ.

Witte’s book is not, then, an essay in technical theology written for scholars; it does not even grapple thoroughly with the issues separating Christians. But it is a book of the heart, a call for unity and Christian love, written to laymen—both Catholic and Protestant. It brings a needed message. Having lived, associated, and worshiped with evangelical Protestants, having sensed the work of the Spirit both there and within his own Catholic community, Witte feels a close bond between Protestant evangelicals and the participants in the renewal movement within his own Catholic communion. Precisely because the book is directed primarily toward Catholics, it is unlikely to offend Protestant readers. And for exactly that reason it may be useful within the evangelical Protestant community in helping to break down walls of prejudice, suspicion, and ignorance.

Psychoanalyzing Luther and Others

Psychohistory and Religion: The Case of Young Man Luther, edited by Roger A. Johnson (Fortress 1977, 198 pp., $12.95), is reviewed by Lewis Rambo, assistant professor of psychology, Trinity College, Deerfield, Illinois.

This book contains six essays written by Roland H. Bainton, Clifford J. Green, Roger Johnson, William Meissner, Paul W. Pruyser, and Lewis W. Spitz. Each author focuses on different aspects of Erik H. Erikson’s Young Man Luther (Norton, 1958) in order to examine the value of psychohistory as a methodology for studying religion. Erikson’s work is important because it is one of the earliest and most influential studies that probes the complex relationship between an individual’s psychological development, influential external circumstances, and the individual’s effect upon the environment. As a psychoanalyst, Erikson is interested in the vicissitudes in the relationship between young Martin Luther and his father Hans, but he also deftly portrays the ambience of Luther’s time and the matrix of his theology.

The editor notes that since the publication of Young Man Luther in 1958 many scholars have utilized the methods of psychohistory and there have been critiques of Erikson by historians. However, there has been little effort on the part of religion scholars to evaluate Erikson’s contribution. Encounter with Erikson edited by Donald Capps et al. (1977, Scholar’s) is one attempt to fill that gap. Psychohistory and Religion is another. Bainton and Spitz, as church historians, point to the inadequacies of Erikson’s historical research, but both are impressed with the fact that Erikson’s interpretation of Luther is built upon explicit and self-conscious psychological theory. They note that historians tend to draw conclusions about people with less than sophisticated psychological insight.

Pruyser, a clinical psychologist, and Meissner, a psychiatrist, applaud the way in which Erikson has contributed to an expansion of the psychology of religion. Pruyser points to the fact that in studying Luther Erikson gives attention to the psychological dimensions of Luther’s religious quest without being reductionistic. Meissner explores the role of grace in Luther’s search for identity.

Green uses Erikson’s psychohistorical method to examine the life and theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and he then compares Luther and Bonhoeffer. Johnson’s essay examines Erikson’s work as a method of scholarship and as a form of religious ideology—a suggestion that will generate controversy among Erikson scholars. Johnson believes that psychohistory can and should be used as a method in religious studies, but any evaluation of Erikson would be amiss if it were not cognizant of the impact of Erikson’s implicit critique of modern society and its destructive childrearing practices and the resulting proclivity for violence. Johnson buttresses his argument with an analysis of Erikson’s portrait of Hans Luther—supposedly a brutal, ambitious, and superstitious man. Johnson shows that Erikson’s characterization is not only historically inaccurate but not in accord with Erikson’s general psychological stance that seeks to stress the strengths of even the most frail people. Erikson’s Hans is an ideological creation—the villain—to show the evil of parents who victimize their children as Hans victimized Martin.

Psychohistory and Religion is unusual in that the authors do not fail to level incisive criticisms of Erikson’s work, but at the same time they express enthusiastic appreciation for Young Man Luther. The contributors advocate the use of psychohistory as a method to examine the interface between personality and history, identity and ideology, consciousness and society. However, it is clear that psychohistory can be viable only when rigorous standards of historical research are maintained and when psychological theories are used heuristically and empathically.

In one of Latin America’s larger cities a group of Christian students, disenchanted with the local churches, has dropped out. Now they meet on their own and call themselves cristianos descolgados, literally “unhooked” (like a picture taken down from the wall) or “unattached Christians.” Talking some time ago to a pastor who knew them well, I asked the causes of their disillusion. He said that they lack serious biblical and expository teaching and social concern, that they’ve seen a blatant gap between what was taught and what was lived, and that the laity, especially young people, have not been allowed to participate in or even contribute to church programming.

The young quickly detect any dichotomy between the Church and its founder. It seems to them to have lost the ‘smell’ of Christ.

In another Latin American city a crowd of students had just returned from a camp. The Lord had met with them and they glowed with enthusiasm. Several of their friends had been converted. They were so excited that they had even (mistakenly, as I believe) baptized these converts in a river. Now the anticlimax had set in. “Why can’t we form our own university church?” they asked. I had a hard time persuading them to stay in their local churches and to seek to be instruments of reform in God’s hands.

This kind of disaffection is doubtless part of the worldwide revolt against institutional authority. But it is serious among Christians precisely because the Church ought not be the kind of oppressive structure or privileged establishment against which modern youth feel bound to revolt. In the secular world leaders “exercise authority,” Jesus said, but added, “it shall not be so among you.” He came to create a different kind of community, and he initiated a new style—leadership by service.

So the young, with their strong loathing for the inauthentic, quickly detect any dichotomy between the Church and its founder. Jesus has never ceased to attract them. They see him as the radical he was, impatient with the traditions of the elders and the conventions of society, a merciless critic of the religious establishment. They like that. But the Church? Somehow it seems to them to have lost the “smell” of Christ. So many vote—with their feet. They get out.

Is it possible, then, to spell out what the Church’s priorities should be? Here is my own list. First, we need a preaching and teaching ministry that faithfully expounds the text of Scripture at the same time it relates to the burning issues of the day. Evangelical preaching tends to be biblical but not contemporary, liberal preaching contemporary but not biblical. Why must we polarize? It is the combination of the two that is so powerful. It is a rare phenomenon.

Secondly, we need a warm, caring, supportive fellowship. Young people hunger for the authentic relationships of love. Hobart Mowrer, emeritus professor of psychiatry in the University of Illinois and well known critic of Freud, though by his own profession neither a Christian nor a theist, once described himself as having “a lover’s quarrel with the Church.” Asked what he meant by this, he replied that the Church had failed him when he was a teenager and continued to fail his patients today. How? “Because the Church has never learned the secret of community,” he said. Unfair perhaps, because some churches are genuine communities. But it was his opinion, which was born no doubt of bitter experience. I think it is the most damaging criticism of the Church I have ever heard.

Thirdly, we need worship services that express the reality of the living God and joyfully celebrate Jesus Christ’s victory over sin and death. Too often routine supplants reality, and the liturgy (if any) becomes lugubrious. I think public worship should always be dignified, but it is unforgivable to make it dull. “The longer I live,” said the late Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher, “the more convinced I am that Christianity is one long shout of joy.” He was right. And the joy of worship needs to be more uninhibited than is customary, at least in some of our more stolid historic denominations.

The signs of spiritual renewal are exactly the characteristics of the newborn Church on the day of Pentecost.

Fourthly, we need an outreach into the secular community that is imaginative, sensitive, and compassionate. The true eccentricity of the Church is seen when it turns toward the world. Such an outgoing concern would combine evangelism and social action and would overcome the sterile polarity that has developed between the two. It would insist that if faith without works is dead, then good news without good works lack credibility. It would also involve a renunciation of “clericalism,” that is, the clerical suppression of the laity. Instead, all the members of the body of Christ would be active, their different ministries determined by their different gifts.

As I have thought about these four major signs of spiritual renewal in the Church, I have been struck that they were exactly the characteristics of the newborn Church on the day of Pentecost. Those first spirit-filled Christians “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers … And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved” (Acts 2:42, 47, RSV). Wherever the Holy Spirit is present in power, the Church is always characterized by an apostolic doctrine, a loving fellowship, a joyful worship, and a continuous evangelism.

Recently Fran and I stepped off a lake boat and were surrounded by people in wigs and brilliant costumes from various periods of history. The most prominent of the performers were those people who were carrying huge baskets of grapes. This was the “Fête des Vignerons,” the festival of the vineyards that occurs only once every twenty-two to twenty-five years. The festival shows the seasons of work in the vineyards through song, dance, and pageant—catapulting the vines, harvesting the grapes, making the wine. It shows weeds, bugs, and frosts that spoil the vines, and it shows the success of combating elements to bring forth a harvest.

The festivals in this area of Switzerland probably go back to the fourteenth century and were started by monasteries, though the records of the fêtes were burned in a fire in Vevey in 1643. The early fêtes were no more than parades with singing and dancing. The first organized fête des Vignerons took place in 1791, and the next one in 1797. Because of the French Revolution the third festival didn’t occur until 1819. This was hailed with such enthusiasm that people thought that there should always be a long period between fêtes. So from that time until now there have been just eight, and the next projected time for a fête is the year 2001.

Preparations for this year’s fête started in 1973. It took four years to compose the music, write the script, and design the costumes. Planners chose the dance troupe, professional orchestra, and the actors. And thousands of volunteer participants signed up. There were 3,800 “extras,” 350 singers, fourteen bands totaling 400 musicians, a symphony orchestra of eighty-three professional musicians, and 200 electricians, sound men, and safety personnel. They had a budget of 18,000,000 Swiss francs. There were thousands of costumes, but the people, according to tradition, bought their own. Organizers sold about 208,000 tickets at an average price of ninety francs a ticket, and 32,000 people saw the dress rehearsal. Thousands more saw the four-kilometer parade.

Here is a tradition of fun and celebration. It helps people appreciate a year’s work in the vineyards. It stirs up thoughts of dead vines coming alive in spring and bearing a heavy crop of beautifiil grapes in the fall. However, a Bacchus festival is intertwined with it. Bacchus, the fat god of wine, arrives on the lake. He has a prominent place in the cycle of the vine.

As I heard of all the preparations, and as I looked at the prancing people it struck me that Christians have every reason to celebrate vineyards. It is a central metaphor of our Christian lives. Yet we have not seen the possibilities of an imaginative festival, where we could highlight God’s use of the vineyard motif. Jesus talked about this in one of his last discourses.

“I am the true vine and my father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away; and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit. Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned. If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you. Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be my disciples. As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love” (John 15:1–9).

Jesus has given us the metaphor of the vine. We need to bear fruit, grapes. Or sometimes we should watch as the husbandman or keeper of the vines prunes and fertilizes the vines for a good harvest. He cares for the soil, he removes weeds, and sprays bugs. Fertilizing, spraying, hoeing, watering—all have parallels with our spiritual lives. It is a good thing to visit the vineyards or work in your own garden to learn the power of the metaphor. We can see the fresh leaves and the growing bunches of grapes as sap flows from vine to branch. And we see weak, withered branches where the sap has stopped. These are vivid images of life with Christ and without him.

Jesus is speaking to his disciples before he dies about things of central importance. He wants us to choose to abide in him. We can ask for his strength to stay in him. We need his Word abiding in us, and we can choose to read and meditate on it. We can put other thoughts aside and ask forgiveness for letting ourselves become wild, unfruitful branches. If you imagine yourself as having become an unpruned branch on the vine, you can ask God to cut you back and graft you again into the lifegiving sap of his words. One of the conditions for prayer is that we abide in Christ. Our prayer should always be, “Lord teach me how to live as you would have me live.”

We can never reach the end of what the vine metaphor means. Until Jesus comes again we will not be perfect as fruitful branches. To remind us of the truth of John 15 Christians should hold a fête des Vignerons. Sitting under a vine you have grown is one way to have the illustration penetrate your whole being. Another would be to celebrate in music, pageant, and dance the cultivation of a vine. The vine is so important that Jesus tells us as at the last supper that he will not taste of the fruit of the vine “until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God.” And in Revelation we are told we shall be served by Jesus at the marriage supper of the lamb. The vine metaphor goes beyond the present life. Let’s take the celebration of the vines away from Bacchus. Its importance belongs to Christians.

The questions can finally be answered. Who rules Middle-earth? How was it created? Where did evil come from? What is its theology—or does it have any? Is it pagan or Christian?

Christopher Tolkien has completed his editing of The Silmarillion (Houghton Mifflin, 368 pp., $10.95), which was to tell the tale of the three powerful rings made by the elf Fëanor. Rumors of its imminent publication began shortly after the Ring trilogy became popular more than ten years ago.

Tolkien fans who expect a gripping tale like The Lord of the Rings will be disappointed. The book reads more like Bulfinch’s Mythology; it merely summarizes events. In his introduction Christopher Tolkien explains that at the end of his life his father came to regard The Silmarillion as a compendium rather than a unified, structured story. And that’s as good a description as any.

Despite that major weakness, the book is interesting. We learn who and how Middle-earth was created. There is one being who rules its universe. Eru, the One, or Ilúvatar, created other holy beings, the Ainur. With them he created Middle-earth through a “Great Music.” But the mightiest of the Ainur, Melkor, had music of his own to compose—and it was evil. The account of creation is brief, and the reader may be tempted to draw close parallels with the creation of earth and the fall of Satan. Resist it. Tolkien disliked allegory and tried to stamp it out wherever he found it. He didn’t succeed in his own case, though.

The account of creation shows that Tolkien had a thoroughly developed theology upon which The Lord of the Rings rests. And it sounds rather Christian. Ilúvatar rules; he periodically sends messengers, such as the wizards, to Middle-earth to help his creatures; he has an intermediary, Manwë, to whom elves and men can plead for aid. Tolkien says that he is the “dearest to Ilúvatar and understands most clearly his purposes.”

We learn how elves and men, the children of Ilúvatar, were made. Dwarves were created by Aulë, one of the Ainur, who was impatient for the appearance of the children and thought he’d try out his own ideas. Tolkien gives no information about the coming of hobbits, though. Melkor perverts the elves and they rebel against the Ainur. The result: the first bloodshed, elf on elf. Sounds like Cain and Abel, right? Resist those allegorical urges. Melkor then perverts men. He succeeds both times by convincing the creatures that the Ainur and ultimately Ilúvatar want to keep them from freedom and knowledge. Again, a familiar biblical theme. The elves are immortal, but to men Ilúvatar gives the gift of death. At first they have very long lives. But their lives get shorter the farther away from the elder days and righteousness they go. Again reminiscent of the days of men after expulsion from Eden. Once Tolkien gets past the first days of Middle-earth the Genesis-like sound of the story weakens.

The strength of the Ring trilogy is its originality. Tolkien makes new creatures and myths. Yet in The Silmarillion he falls back on Genesis in an obvious fashion. Even his sentence structure and writing style have too much in common with the King James Version. The first few pages of the book are difficult to read because Tolkien constantly reverses the normal English sentence pattern and uses an irritating sing-song rhythm. For example, “Then Ilúvatar spoke, and he said: ‘Mighty are the Ainur, the mightiest among them is Melkor; but that he may know, and all the Ainur, that I am Ilúvatar, those things that ye have sung, I will show them forth, that ye may see what ye have done.’ ” His vocabulary, too, weakens the tale: thee, thou, ye, hearken, and it came to pass recur. These archaisms unnecessarily disrupt the flow of the tale, without providing a “high” style for the high matter it describes.

As the book progresses Tolkien leaves these infelicitous phrases behind—or maybe one gets used to them. And in certain chapters Tolkien stops summarizing and tells a good tale: “Of Beren and Luthien” and “Of the Voyage of Eärendil and the War of Wrath” are two examples.

Where does Sauron fit in? He was Melkor’s most important servant. After Manwë shut Melkor “beyond the World in the Void that is without,” Sauron began an evil work where his master had stopped his.

Because of the large number of characters involved in the tales and the variety of names for each one, the stories often are difficult to follow. But Tolkien provides some genealogical charts to help straighten out who is related to whom (for instance, Elrond is related to Aragom). The different groups of elves and their feuds with each other and with the various tribes of men show the breadth of Tolkien’s imagination and the detail in which he worked. But in the mass of material the reader searches anxiously for a familiar character like Galadriel or Gandalf. Christopher Tolkien indexes every name and gives short descriptions for each. The ingredients for an exciting creation are here, but without the chef to mix them we get nothing of what the flavor could be.

Fortunately The Silmarillion is not the only posthumously published volume of Tolkien’s. His fine translations of Gawain, Pearl, and Orfeo show his skill as both writer and scholar. For readers unconvinced that those medieval works still have power, Tolkien’s introduction should change their minds. His imagination was steeped in such tales as these and they are central in understanding his style and his myths.

Last December Houghton Mifflin published The Father Christmas Letters, edited by Christopher’s wife Baillie. Each year for over twenty years Tolkien sent his children a letter, supposedly from the North Pole. As Father Christmas he described the amusing and alarming antics of Polar Bear, snow-elves, and Red Gnomes. The book includes the large full-color drawings that Tolkien always sent with his letters. And in true Tolkien fashion we have another invented alphabet, the Goblin alphabet, developed by Polar Bear. The book is a delight.

These latest books, along with the biography by Humphrey Carpenter (see September 9 issue, page 35), provide a more complete picture of the art and imagination of J. R. R. Tolkien. As Carpenter explains, Tolkien left thousands of unpublished manuscript pages. Perhaps there will be more books to come. Christopher and Baillie Tolkien are to be commended for the work that they’ve already accomplished.

Although still relatively young (forty), Bruce Bell already has several fruitful Christian ministries behind him. He is now confronting what he feels is the neediest area in the world today. Bell became a Christian at the age of nineteen while a student at Phillips University, Enid, Oklahoma. He was baptized at a Baptist church in Atlanta and worked for a time with Youth for Christ before becoming a missionary. He was interviewed by the editors of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

QUESTION. How did you become a missionary?

ANSWER. I was working with Youth for Christ, and after marrying I was called to pastor a Baptist church in Marietta, Georgia. I was ordained there. I organized a missionary conference, and we prayed earnestly that God would call some young couple out of our church. The first night of the conference my wife and I surrendered to go to the mission field, and six weeks later we went. We were greatly influenced by Hudson Taylor’s life and believed—perhaps foolishly, although that’s debatable—that all we needed to do was explain our needs to God, who would provide them. He has now for sixteen years.

Q. You went first to Mexico. Why there?

A. We had been burdened for Mexico for some time. We had made an exploratory trip down there, and we felt that this was the place.

Q. Did you speak Spanish?

A. No. The first thing we did in Mexico was to enroll in a language school.

Q. How did your ministry get started?

A. We worked for a time in the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico and had thought about working with primitive Indians. We made some exploratory trips into the mountains. Meanwhile, we were invited to preach an evangelistic campaign in a very small Baptist church in southern Mexico. After the campaign they asked if I would consider pastoring for a while. I accepted for a period of six months, as I recall, to help them in a sort of extended crusade. That turned into six years. It became one of the largest Baptist Sunday schools in the country, about 450 attendance by the time we left. A great number of young people went out from the church into full-time Christian service. One of them returned, after training to be a minister, and worked with me for a while. Then we turned the work over to him entirely.

Q. Did the church continue to prosper?

A. Not long after, they held a vacation Bible school which attracted two to three thousand youngsters—a total attendance of 10,000 in three weeks. The next year it was 17,000 in a town of 70,000.

Q. Where did you go from there?

A. I had three burdens at the time—planting churches, training local preachers, accepting invitations to conduct evangelistic crusades. So I tried to combine the three by organizing a traveling Bible school. I taught the young people in the morning. They went out evangelizing in the afternoon, and we had crusades at night. We started several churches in Mexico in that way and turned them over to national workers. During this time our family lived in a twenty-three-foot travel trailer. There were six of us, and that was quite an experience. We did it for two years. We were invited to Guatemala and started a church there that continues to function. We were also invited to San Salvador, the capital city of El Salvador, and we went there in July, 1970. We went into a middle-class area.

Q. What’s the point?

A. Most missionaries in South America realize that they are not reaching the professional class. Our work went quite slowly at first. In four months we were ready to organize with thirty-eight charter members. We felt we had to “discriminate” because the Gospel has such a reputation for being for the low-class people. In seeking members we visited only middle-class people; however, we did not discriminate in the church itself. After about two years we became known as the middle-class church in El Salvador.

Q. Were you able to do that and still preserve the universality of the Gospel?

A. Certainly.

Q. What has been the attitude of the Latin governments toward the churches you were involved in?

A. Very good. This is true even in what are termed dictatorships. I know of no official persecutions at the present time in Latin America.

Q. How about “unofficial”?

A. Well, I can tell you about a personal problem. When I returned to El Salvador last June, I was told I no longer had permission to reside there. It was a tremendous surprise. I can’t go into detail, but it was not a government decision. The long and short of it was that we had to leave, and it has been very hard for me to get back in, even to visit.

Q. Whatever became of the traveling Bible school in Mexico?

A. We turned it into a permanent institution. It is a Bible school on a high academic level.

Q. What kind of missionary vision is there among Latin American believers?

A. This has been a problem. The Latin American churches are not accustomed to supporting missionaries. One of the things I have been trying to do is to establish a Latin America-based mission board. It’s tough. The denominational lines are very clearly drawn there, much more so than here in the States.

Q. You have mentioned that some of your students have been inclined toward missionary service in the Arab world. Why there?

A. My burden. I have shared my burden with the church. The Muslims in the Arab world are not being reached. We traveled in eleven countries from Spain through North Africa to Turkey, surveying outreach. We interviewed many people. My companion had served as a missionary in the Middle East for eleven years, so he had many contacts. Among 40 million people, the most liberal estimate we could come up with was 160 visible Christians in North Africa at the time, excluding the Spanish-speaking area. We were not able to find anyone who knows a single Christian in Libya! We learned of only one evangelical congregation in all of Turkey. It’s the neediest area in the world today, and I personally feel burdened to do something about it.

Q. How many missionaries are there in those countries?

A. There are more than you might believe. They have been run out of Morocco time and time again. They get back in. They are great people; they bless my heart. But they are people with their hands tied. It’s against the law to witness. It’s against the law to pass out literature. Something new has to be done.

Q. What do you have in mind?

A. My crazy idea, if I had the finances and everything else that was necessary, would be to recruit young Christians who would be willing to go to the universities of the Arab world to get their degrees. These would be committed, Bible-trained young people who would live Spirit-filled lives, identifying with the Arabs in every possible way and making friends. A student after two years ought to have 400 friends. The people are amazingly hospitable. The idea is that the Christian’s life is so different that the people are going to begin to ask questions. There is nothing in the law against sharing your faith in that way.

Q. Would there be any difference in acceptability between North and Latin Americans?

A. The Latin would be more readily received.

Q. Are you convincing mission-minded people that this idea of yours is worth trying?

A. Well, I have been told, “Bruce, you’re all mixed up. The harvest today is in Latin America.” One “expert” told me we should pull out what missionaries we have in the Arab world and put them where the harvest is. The people of Latin America are ready to be saved, he said, and there are not enough laborers. I say, however, that this harvest is taking place only because some daring souls sowed the seed in days gone by when things were a lot tougher and when it took a lot of courage and when results were not being seen. Those early pioneers were persistent and daring in the face of adversity. That’s the way we have to be now in the Arab world. We’ve got to start sowing the seed if there is ever going to be any harvest, and you can’t do that with just twenty missionaries among 110 million Arabs. We need to have hundreds of people who are ready to go over there. It means literally being willing to give your life. That’s why you can’t get the Arab Christians to return. There are all kinds who have been converted in the States and in France. Try to get them to go back. Many will laugh in your face, no matter how consecrated they are. They know it means giving their lives.

Q. What evidence is there that what you propose would work?

A. In the interviews we had in the Arab world we learned that virtually every Muslim won to Christianity was won because he was able to observe the life of a Christian over a prolonged period of time. This is verified in an excellent little book by Charles Marsh on how to share your faith with a Muslim. It’s essential reading, incidentally, for anyone interested in the Muslim world.

Q. Would it lay the groundwork for what you envision if some Arabic were taught here in the States among people who had an inclination toward ministry among Muslims?

A. Undoubtedly. It would also help a great deal to be very sound emotionally and to be very patient, realizing you’re working maybe a thirty-year plan.

Q. What are you staking your hopes on? That new Arab Christians can be supported economically from the outside, or that there will be changes in Arab society that will make them more acceptable in the future?

A. I say that a professional trained in what his country needs will not have the problem that an impoverished Muslim who is won to Christ has.

Q. But the first generation of Christians will be persecuted to some extent, right?

A. No doubt about it. We may have to support them.

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 beauty of the beach at one of Thailand’s most popular sea resorts did not seem to soothe his frustration. He was suffering from “culture shock”—sudden immersion in a culture where values and psychological cues were quite different from those in Hometown, U.S.A.

He told me that he had been serving as an advisor to the Thai Air Force Training School, a few dozen kilometers to the south. He had been invited to a government official’s home for a lawn party attended by the socially elite of the town. Amid the din and hilarity (which usually rises in proportion to the Mekong whiskey consumed), a single-engine training plane could be heard. It was Saturday afternoon, and a cadet was putting in extra time flying out to sea for target practice. But he released the bomb prematurely, and it fell in the midst of the revelers, killing several and injuring others.

The American’s first reaction was to save life, and he frantically called for assistance. He spotted a doctor and pleaded with him to help load the injured people into a jeep. The response was, “It’s Saturday afternoon. The hospital is closed.” As he implored others to help him, the refrain always was, “It’s no use. They are going to die anyway.”

I have made several visits to a school for the blind in Bangkok that had a rather hesitant beginning. An American Catholic woman, blind herself, heard of the plight of the many blind people in Thailand who had no opportunity to get an education. She approached the minister of education with the request to establish a school for the blind. His first answer was, “Miss Caulfield, these people are blind because of their evil actions in their previous existence. As Buddhists we do not believe that we should interfere with a person’s fate or Karma.” But then his mind flashed back to his exposure to another value system during graduate studies in the West, and he added, “However, we will grant your request.”

Many factors influence people to feel, think, and act as they do, but chief among these is their religious orientation. Anthropologists have never yet found an ethnic group without a religion. Robert Bellah in an article entitled “The Sacred and the Political in American Life” writes, “Religion is as central to a culture’s self definition as speech or tool-making. It is the key to culture. Every nation finds its legitimacy in being a part of a larger context. The cosmos, the movement of history, or the purpose of God provides a nation with its reason for being. Society is never merely a social contract, an association of individuals who band together out of mutual self-interest. It … transcends the social and finds its meaning in the sacred” (Psychology Today, January, 1976).

In an age of secularism it is not popular to speak of values derived from religion. Modern man feels awkward and nervous about using moral language because he is uncertain of his values. But it is possible for a person to renounce all religion and yet follow an ethical code that is derived from a religious tradition.

Buddhism is the state religion of Thailand. Its influence pervades education, government, business, and other spheres. A Thai person’s view of the world and himself, his value system, and his thought patterns are influenced by Buddhist philosophy.

Buddhists believe in reincarnation, “samsara.” They hope through many existences to evolve into non-existence, or Nirvana. The law that determines the quality of a particular existence is “Karma.” The root idea of the word is “action,” and Karma is the force that causes reincarnation to take place. In the doctrine of “samsara,” Buddha taught that all existence is illusion or continual change with no reality beneath the change. As Paul Eakin explains it, “there is no being, but only an eternal becoming.”

The cardinal sorrow and sin of man are due to the demon “desire,” which makes human beings cling blindly to this fleeting experience called life, or individual consciousness. The root of evil is the will to live.

Karma produces a new existence. It is not “I” that am reborn, for there is no “I”; but the sum of all my doings is carried over to a new account. We evolve from the wheel of existence into a state of extinction (Nirvana) when all desire has ceased.

Buddha taught the Four Noble Truths, which lead into The Eightfold Path, as the means of attaining Nirvana. The Four Noble Truths are:

1. Life is painful.

2. Desire brings pain.

3. Pain vanishes when desire ceases.

4. Desire ceases when the eightfold path is followed.

To understand the law of Karma in Buddhist thought, one must examine three principles (I am paraphrasing these from Paul Eakin’s book, Buddhism and the Christian Approach to Buddhists in Thailand, printed in Bangkok in 1956):

1. The individual is like an airtight compartment and completely independent of external forces. Any seeming external influence is an illusion. The person is a captive of fate.

2. A person’s sufferings are the result of his own actions. He is free from suffering in proportion to his credit balance from his past existence.

3. Justice rules supreme in the world. It is relentless and complete: the last cent must be paid. There is no room for mercy or forgiveness.

This system received support as an explanation for the suffering and inequalities that are the common experience of mankind. It seemed logical to postulate a previous life in which evil deeds were sown that were reaped in succeeding existences. This has given consolation to some who want to work out their salvation at their own speed without guilt complexes and fear of impending doom.

However, when a new religion is introduced, social practices can change not only for the converts but even for those who still maintain nominal allegiance to the traditional religion. I have seen numerous examples of this in my many years of representing Christianity in Thailand.

1. Women. When Christians from the West opened the first elementary school for girls in Thailand, they were met with almost complete indifference from the general public. The sponsors of the school had to offer money to some of the parents to help persuade them to send their daughters to the school. The parents had the ingrained feeling that you “may as well teach a buffalo as to try to teach a woman.”

Now schools for girls are universally accepted in Thailand. The status of women has been greatly upgraded with the advent of Christian missions, which teach that men and women are equals in the sight of God but differ in function.

2. Manual labor. One of the first pieces of advice I received when I arrived at my up-country home in Thailand was, “Do not do any manual labor in public such as working in the yard or lifting boxes. If you do manual labor, the Thai people will say that you are stingy and too cheap to hire a coolie.” When we first arrived in Thailand it was difficult to find a Thai who could build a house or overhaul a car. The prevailing idea was that “Thai are born to be kings. Other nationalities can do manual labor.”

At the Bible institute, I heard stories of Christian students who had come from rural areas and who upon visiting their homes refused to work with their hands. One student visited his village wearing gloves (in the tropics) and insisted that his aged mother build the fire for meals.

When I had the opportunity, I spoke of the example of Christ in learning the carpentry trade and of the Apostle Paul in supporting himself and sometimes his co-workers by making tents. A work program was established at the Bible institute. Students were required to work (usually manual labor) for four hours a day in addition to spending four hours in classrooms. This helped them develop an appreciation for their education and also an empathy for the working class.

In recent years vocational schools have become popular in Thailand, and the blue-collar worker is coming to have almost as much status as the white-collar worker.

3. Wealth. Most Thai Buddhists until recently have been indifferent to the acquisition of wealth. A favorite saying of rural people is, “Hunt for your food in the morning and eat it at night.” They have been content with a hand-to-mouth existence.

Western experts showed some farmers how they could get two crops instead of one in a season from the same plot of land. The first year two crops were successfully reaped. The second year the experts returned to find the people whiling away their time during the planting season. “Why aren’t you working the fields?” they asked. The answer was, “You taught us to get two crops last year, so we had a surplus and don’t need to plant this year.”

Buddhist priests are not supposed to handle money, and many lay people shy away from occupations that handle money.

The Bible teaches not that wealth is wrong in itself, but that wealth is not an end in itself to be accumulated for selfish indulgence; it is entrusted to us to use for the furtherance of God’s kingdom. Christians will be held accountable for the manner in which they have used the wealth that has been entrusted to them.

4. Ambition. I was teaching English to a high school class in Korat. The textbook told of a school teacher who taught in a poor section of Cleveland, Ohio. One day she gave a very poor girl a pretty new blue dress. This dress sparked a chain reaction. The parents noticed how the new dress showed up the shabbiness of their kitchen and table, so they bought a tablecloth. They began to develop a feeling of self-esteem, and their drab surroundings began to take on a new look. Neighbors noticed and began to clean up their own properties.

The article mentioned that before the gift of the dress the people of the area had lacked ambition and the desire to improve their lot. I asked the students, “Is ambition evil?” Their reaction was “Yes, of course. Ambition is sin.” I tried to show that certain kinds of ambition, where we work for the betterment not just of ourselves but of others, might be very beneficial.

5. Government officials. An English-language newspaper in Bangkok has introduced the term “prependalism” to describe a practice that is common in much of Asia. In this system the average government official is paid only a subsistence allowance. He is expected to make up the difference between that and an appropriate income by accepting “gifts” from citizens who come to his desk for the processing of various applications.

The people are victimized because they must present the “gift” before the service is rendered. Since there is not a generally agreed upon amount, such as the 15 per cent tip of the West, people wait and wait for action. Thinking that their request is being delayed because their gift was too small, they are likely to give more.

Some cabinet ministers have been known to stipulate gifts of $2,500 before they sign such things as export-import permits. This of course has made government officials very unpopular with the people.

Although one of the best-known Buddhist precepts is, “Do good and you will receive good, do evil and you will receive evil,” many of the people doubt the truth of the statement as they see corrupt people flourish materially.

6. Taxes. Many people feel they do not owe loyalty, respect, or taxes to the government because of the ill treatment they have received at the hands of some officials. They try by every conceivable way to avoid paying taxes. One method is to rent out a house for a very minimal amount because they pay taxes on the basis of the rental, and then charge a much larger amount for the furniture in the house, even if it is only one piece, because they do not pay tax on rental of furniture.

7. Job satisfaction. A Thai achieves satisfaction not in accomplishing a job so much as in the “sanuk” (fun) he can have in doing it. For the average Asian, time is not a factor—there is always tomorrow. An American sergeant came to me after he had watched a Thai sweep a huge hangar with a soft, short-handled grass broom. “Why can’t they get a wide, heavy-duty broom and finish the work in a third of the time?”

An American well-digging team felt its efforts in giving villages pure drinking water from underground reservoirs were not really appreciated. The villagers complained that the Americans were destroying their fun by placing a pump in reach of their houses. This deprived them of a quarter-of-a-mile hike to the village pond, which was always a social event. Neighbors exchanged gossip there, and boys met girls. And after all, the water from the pump was not quite so tasty as that of the village pond, where people and buffalos bathed.

The foreign advisor wants to get the job done and send a good report to the head office. His local host wants him to relish the local food, learn the local idiom, execute the tribal dances gracefully, and enjoy himself.

8. The handicapped. At the age of six, a few weeks after he had started school, Brayut was involved in an accident that made him permanently blind. His mother and relatives felt that the evil actions of his former existence were catching up to him, and they assigned him the fate of the average blind person in rural Thailand—alienation and loneliness.

Deprived of the opportunity to attend school, he played in the dust as close to the school yard and to the sounds of the children’s voices as he could. When he was about nine, a missionary came by and noticed the blind boy crying. He told Brayut about the blind man who came to Jesus. The disciples had pressed their question heartlessly: “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus replied, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.” This story gave hope to the lonely boy, and in simple faith he reached out to Christ. The missionary gave him some literature for his friends to read to him, told him of a school for the blind in Bangkok, and went on his way.

The blind boy persuaded a neighbor to teach him how to weave baskets. After many painful injuries to his hands, he mastered the art, and after a year he had earned the equivalent of twenty-one dollars. He pleaded with his parents to let him go to school in Bangkok, but they felt it was worthless and foolish.

Finally when Brayut was sixteen he locked himself in a room and said he would not come out until his parents agreed to let him go to the school. Reluctantly they gave him permission, and an uncle helped him make the daylong journey to the big capital city.

Imagine their disappointment when the headmistress at the school for the blind told him he was over age and could not be accepted. She encouraged him, however, to enter the adult-education classes. He entered classes with people who had normal sight and in a brief time was able to complete a twelve-year curriculum, supporting himself by teaching manual arts to blind boys at the vocational school.

It was during this time that we became acquainted with Brayut. He came the farthest of anyone to the Sunday worship service, having to change buses and find his way through busy traffic and down our lane. My wife gladly taught him English for an hour each Sunday.

After he finished the high school curriculum he insisted on taking the entrance exam for the teacher-training college. He has now completed two years of college and hopes to establish his own school for the blind someday.

A Thai living in the United States would doubtless be able to call attention to American cultural patterns that seem to contradict our ethical precepts. Wherever one lives, it is necessary to understand the prevailing value system if one hopes to influence people to change for the better.

Love of Darkness

In a heart of night

blacked in by solitude

and wrapped around by grief,

hearing in its darkness

pity as a token

of its choice to die,

against the wall at once

a shadow moves, then fades

into obscurity

of memory that so quickly

would deny the fact

that Light has shined.

CAROLE SANDERSON STREETER

The Spirit of God

Always I hear the soft, invading sound

Of Your inimitable voice, and fear.

Your slow and even steps upon the ground

Are the annunciation You are near.

When in the pool You touch my naked side,

Confound me as a shadow on my face,

Reveal Yourself where lonely gentians hide,

Or in the pale green willow’s sorrowful grace.

You are past understanding to conceive,

To be arrested in intrinsic might;

I have no sight, and I cannot perceive

How beautiful, how awful is the light.

I only feel that You are deep and true

And that I would know all if I knew You.

GEORGE E. MCDONOUGH

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.

Evangelicalism is currently experiencing serious tensions over the questions of revelation and Scripture. More and more one hears declared evangelicals disputing the relation between the Bible and revelation. Recently much attention has been given to the issue of inerrancy. The eye of the storm, however, is propositional revelation—that is, the doctrine that God has revealed information about his nature and his will. The question of inerrancy cannot even arise unless God reveals propositional truth.

During the last three decades, the doctrine of propositional revelation has been one of the major differences between Protestant orthodoxy and neo-orthodoxy. According to neo-orthodoxy, God reveals himself not through propositions or information but through personal presence or encounter. Man does not require knowledge about God (that is, propositional truth) as a precondition for a personal relationship with God. Revelation is God’s personal disclosure of himself.

It was in conscious reaction to the neo-orthodox repudiation of revelation as a vehicle of truth or information that orthodox theologians like Gordon Clark, Cornelius Van Til, Carl Henry, E. J. Carnell, and Kenneth Kantzer began to emphasize the cognitive dimensions of God’s revelation. By this they meant that revelation must be viewed as including God’s communication of information to man. This was something that earlier Christian theologians like Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin had presupposed. The modern evangelicals agreed with J. I. Packer that “the essence of revelation is conceptual communication, whereby God makes known His own nature, thoughts and knowledge” (The Bible—The Living Word of Revelation, edited by M. Tenney).

But contemporary evangelicalism is full of surprises. Some younger evangelicals seem to be saying that the fight their elders led against neo-orthodoxy was misguided. While neo-orthodoxy has been losing respect in the non-evangelical world, these young evangelicals act as if they have discovered a fountain of truth in the Barthian attack on the concept of revealed truths. One might expect that such an important doctrine would be abandoned only for the most weighty reasons. It is distressing to see, however, that their arguments against propositional revelation are shallow and irrelevant thrusts against a straw man.

A fresh examination of propositional revelation is in order. We need to clear up the misunderstandings that have arisen about its character and to show the irrelevance of the host of feeble objections voiced by its critics. In an effort to promote dialogue about the real issues, I shall not object to abandoning the label “propositional revelation.” There is some evidence that this name by which the doctrine has been known during the past thirty years has caused confusion. In fact, it is clear that the label must be dropped unless all parties to the dispute agree to its proper use.

We can clarify what evangelicals have meant by the doctrine of propositional revelation by referring to a central tenet in neo-orthodoxy, the view that no revelation can communicate information. Revelation, according to neo-orthodoxy, is always an event in which God reveals himself; it is never information about God or anything else. Concerning the question at issue here, then, the central claim of neo-orthodoxy was: No revelation expresses cognitive information.

The doctrine of propositional revelation is best understood as the denial of this thesis. The contradictory of the neo-orthodox thesis is: Some revelation expresses cognitive information. And this statement is the core of the doctrine of propositional revelation. Man can have cognitive information about God. Since a proposition is the minimal vehicle of truth, the information about God is contained in divinely revealed propositions.

Note that this view does not state that all revelation must be cognitive or capable of being reduced to human language. It asserts only that some revelation is cognitive and has been expressed in human language. It is compatible with the evangelical position that some revelation is personal and non-cognitive and that some revelation is expressed in forms other than language. God’s revelation through his mighty acts in history would be an example of non-cognitive revelation.

Evangelicals must make it clear that they believe revelation can be both personal and cognitive. Orthodoxy contends that the ultimate object of revelation is God, not some truth about God. Whatever God reveals and whatever means he uses, his purpose is to bring man into a personal, saving, loving, serving relationship with Himself. Those evangelicals whose appreciation of the cognitive character of revelation is waning sometimes speak as if the doctrine of propositional revelation involved a rejection of personal encounter. They respond as if they thought Karl Barth discovered the idea of personal salvation.

Orthodoxy insists that personal knowledge of God is not in competition with propositional knowledge about God. The more person A knows about person B, the better A can know B in a personal way. Bernard Ramm once asked what kind of encounter could take place between two blind, deaf, and dumb people who had no information about each other. God does not treat mankind in this impersonal way. Scripture declares that man requires information about God that He has taken the initiative to supply (Heb. 11:6; John 20:30; 1 John 1:1–3). Personal encounter cannot take place in a cognitive vacuum. Saving faith presupposes some genuine knowledge about God (1 Cor. 15:1–4; Rom. 10:9).

But, neo-orthodoxy counters, there is at least one catch to all this. The disjunction between personal and propositional revelation is exclusive because cognitive knowledge about God is unattainable. Because God is totally transcendent, because he is unlike anything else in our experience, human language is an unfit instrument to capture ideas or express truths about God. Nor are man’s rational faculties adequate to allow him to have knowledge about the transcendent. Cognitive knowledge about God is unattainable. Students of the history of philosophy will recognize this as a revival of Immanuel Kant’s skepticism regarding knowledge about God or the even earlier view I have called “Hume’s Heresy” (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY, August 6, 1976). The implication is that God could not communicate genuine information about himself to man even if he wanted to do so. (A significant response to this theological skepticism is presented in such books as Gordon Clark’s Religion, Reason and Revelation and Carl Henry’s recently released God, Revelation and Authority. The early roots of this historic Christian view are discussed in my book The Light of the Mind: St. Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge.)

On this issue, neo-orthodoxy takes a radical all-or-nothing, either-or position. Since revealed knowledge about the transcendent God is impossible, revelation must be personal encounter; there is no alternative. Orthodoxy affirms the less extreme position that some revelation is encounter and some revelation is communication. The two modes of revelation complement each other. In order to experience genuine encounter, man requires information about God and about his need for God. In order to distinguish genuine encounter from the ever-present threat of spurious religious experience, man needs information about God so he can determine whether his encounter is with the God who discloses himself to man. Man requires information about how he should manifest his love for God. And he needs divinely given interpretations of God’s mighty acts in history if he is to penetrate beyond a historical enigma to the truth that God has acted in history.

Scripture recognizes a distinction between true and false doctrine. Those who preach false doctrine are worthy of God’s severest judgment (Gal. 1:6–9; 1 John 4:1; 5:10–12). The Christian is obliged to recognize this distinction. But just how does he come to know true doctrine? The Barthian asserts that the cognitive assertions that constitute church doctrine arise from reflection about a non-cognitive encounter, one that discloses no information. But if this is true, if God never reveals truth to man, what is the source of the truth that the New Testament deems such an important part of genuine Christian commitment? If revelation has no informational content, how can it yield doctrine?

When we interpret the doctrine of propositional revelation as I have done here, what becomes of the major criticisms that have been leveled against it?

First of all, we should note that propositional revelation should not be confused with the quite separate doctrine of verbal inspiration. A person could accept propositional revelation but reject verbal inspiration. The converse would not be true. The doctrine of verbal inspiration has to do with the extent to which God’s revelation is conveyed in words, notably the written words of the Bible. It has to do with the role of the Holy Spirit in guiding the human authors of Scripture in their selection of words to convey the inspired ideas. (None of this, of course, entails the mechanical view of dictation frequently and erroneously attributed to all evangelicals.) The doctrine of propositional revelation expresses a conviction on a quite different question: Is God’s revelation a disclosure of truth? Does it have cognitive content?

The advocate of propositional revelation does not hold that God’s written revelation must assume a particular literary form. Countless critics have assumed that if one accepts propositional revelation, one must also believe that all written revelation assumes the form of assertions. In reality, comparatively little of the Bible is written in this form. Scripture contains more than historical assertions or doctrinal statements. God uses human language as a medium of revelation, and language has many different functions. Language can be used assertively to teach (consider the book of Romans) or to record history (consider the book of Acts). Language may be used to command (Matt. 28:19, 20), to exhort (Rom. 12:1, 2), or to proclaim (Matt. 5:1–10). God uses poetry and allegory as well.

While all Scripture is inspired, not all Scripture is concerned to declare truth in sentences that are to be interpreted literally. The evangelical believes that all Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness (2 Tim. 3:16). But there is no need to assume that this list is exhaustive. It may be only illustrative of the multiple functions of language in Scripture.

The orthodox view does not lead to “bibliolatry,” the veneration of the Bible with a reverence appropriate to God alone. It is difficult to see how even the most crude, unimaginative theory of mechanical dictation would justify the charge of bibliolatry. Perhaps the critic means to suggest that because the evangelical regards the Bible in a very real sense as the Word of God, he is in danger of diverting from God the reverence and honor due him. But is any person of normal intelligence likely to do this? If a king issued a proclamation, those of his subjects who honored and reverenced him would hardly show their respect for the king’s person by ignoring his words or by denying that he had even spoken. But what kind of sensible person would confuse honor for the king’s person with honor for his word? It is precisely the fact that genuine knowledge is available about the nature and the will of God that makes bibliolatry sin. The presence of some true revelation of God’s nature, character, and will permits man to know the difference between worshiping Almighty God and worshiping a book.

Belief in propositional revelation does not mean that one denies the human element in Scripture. God used human authors whose writings reflect their personal backgrounds, their personalities, their distinctive vocabulary, their cultural milieu. Nor does propositional revelation cause one to subvert the notion of faith as personal commitment to God by confusing it with the notion of faith as an acceptance of true propositions.

It is also wrong to suppose that the doctrine of propositional revelation minimizes revelation in the sense of event. God does reveal himself in his mighty acts in history. But even though God’s acts in history may be a type of non-propositional revelation, these acts require a divinely given interpretation. The Romans crucified thousands of Jews. From the perspective of event, the crucifixion of Jesus was simply one more instance of Roman legal practice, and many eyewitnesses of the death of Jesus interpreted his crucifixion from this perspective. Similarly, many theologians accept the historicity of Jesus’ death but fail to see that death as God’s atonement for man’s sin. Only through the perspective of God’s revelation is Jesus’ death seen as what it is, the decisive point in the history of redemption. Biblical revelation is a conjunction of event and the interpretation of that event.

Belief in propositional revelation need not involve a reduction of God’s revelation to something static. Plato realized there was a problem whenever ideas were put into writing: matters reduced to writing die in some sense while the spoken words of men live on. This observation should not be taken lightly. God’s revelation is not static or dead; it is a gracious act of God. Evangelicals must beware lest their emphasis on a revelation inscripturated in human language degenerate into a de-emphasis of the living and active nature of God’s speaking. The God whose voice can raise the dead is not one who can be limited by “dead” words. The activity of the Spirit of God insures the vitality of God’s revelation. He speaks and his word is recorded. He continues to speak through that record, and these words live, energized by the Spirit of God.

This last point raises the issue of the relation between the objective and subjective poles of revelation. It is one thing for revelation to be objectively given through divinely aided spokesmen. It is quite another for that revelation to be received and understood. Neo-orthodoxy over-emphasized the subjective side of revelation at the expense of its objective side. Evangelicals must reject the claim that Scripture is not revelation but becomes revelation when illuminated by the Spirit. They must remember that “revelation” can refer both to the act of revealing (the subjective side) and to that which is revealed (the objective side).

Perhaps the following example will help clarify the relation between these two senses of revelation. Imagine a situation, perhaps a time of war, in which a mother and her child are separated. By chance, years later, the mother and her now adult son live, unrecognized by each other, in the same village. The one person who knew their real relationship kept it to himself until he decided to reveal the truth in a letter. But that person died before the letter was delivered, and the letter remained hidden for years. Suppose finally that the letter was discovered and the actual relationship of the mother and son was revealed. Certainly there is an important sense in which the revelation was objectively contained in the letter. But it is also true that the relationship between the mother and son was revealed to them when certain conditions were realized. The Barthian may insist that the only revelation that counts is the subjective one. No one should deny, perhaps, that it is the important revelation. But the subjective revelation could not have taken place unless the truth of their relationship had been objectively revealed in the letter. When speaking about Scripture, it is important to affirm the objective character of God’s revelation. The basic error of religious subjectivists is that they confuse the proclamation or delivery of truth with the reception of truth.

These are some of the common misunderstandings of propositional revelation. It may be that if we could clear up these misunderstandings we could rehabilitate the label “propositional revelation.” But there is some evidence that the term itself has contributed to the misunderstanding and has outlived its usefulness. For example, it is easy for the uninformed to equate revealed propositions with sentences.

It is sobering to remember that the phrase “propositional revelation” has been in use for only thirty years, and that it probably was not coined by evangelicals. One of the earliest references to the distinction between personal and propositional revelation occurs in a review of Emil Brunner’s The Divine-Human Encounter by E. G. Homrighausen published in Theology Today (1944). “Propositional revelation” appears to have been used by non-evangelicals as a term of derision for the position they wished to repudiate. Evangelicals gradually picked up the phrase in the late 1940s, and it has stuck.

Given the phrase’s parentage, then, there should be no sentimental reason to continue using it. Rejecting the label may help evangelicals resist the temptation to set up some new formula that will continue the error of an exclusive disjunction between encounter and knowledge. Instead of an alliterative formula, evangelicals should simply insist that some revelatory acts have a cognitive or informational character, and that this revealed truth is inscripturated in the several different literary forms found in the Bible.

“Let Not Man Put Asunder”

St. Mark 10:1–12

Committed by command and habit to fidelity

I’m snug in the double bed and board of marriage:

spontaneity’s built-in

to the covenantal dance,

everyday routines arranged

by the floor plan of the manse.

This unlikely fissiparous alliance

embraces and releases daily surprises.

The ego strength we’d carefully hoarded

in certain safe-deposit boxes

we’ve now dispersed, unlamented,

in dozens of delicate paradoxes.

A thousand domestic intimacies are straw

for making bricks resistant to erosion:

with such uncomely stuff we’ve built

our lives on ordinary sod

and grow, finally, old. My love is

not a goddess nor I a god.

“Asunder” is the one unpronounceable word in the

world of the wed, “one flesh” the mortal miracle.

What started out quite tentatively

with clumsy scrawls in a billet-doux

has now become the intricacy

of bold marriage’s pas de deux.

Blind Bartimaeus

St. Mark 10:46–52

Good at getting what he wanted

Blind Bart was holding forth

as usual on the best corner in

Jericho, collecting his usual

handouts, heard the name Jesus,

a word whose meaning he understood,

made a quick decision to get,

if he could, not what he wanted

but what he had always and everywhere needed,

and, under the Mercy, got it.

EUGENE H. PETERSON

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.

Sometime in the early 1880’s, a plain-faced, middle-aged woman sat in her father’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts, musing on the dying. She knew well, from close observation at many deathbeds, the difference between those who died in confidence of an eternity with God and those who entered fearfully upon the unknown. Reflecting upon the experience of her father and mother, other members of her family, and at least two men with whom she had been in love, Emily Dickinson wrote a poem:

Those-dying then,

Knew where they went-

They went to God’s Right Hand-

That Hand is amputated now

And God cannot be found-

The abdication of Belief

Makes the Behavior small

Better an ignis fatuus

Than no illume at all-

T. S. Eliot divided modern literature into three periods in its attitude toward Christianity. The first period, he said, “took the Faith … for granted, and omitted it from its picture of life.” This era may be said to have lasted until the middle of the nineteenth century; perhaps, to pin it down, until the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. “In the second,” Eliot goes on, the age “doubted, worried about, or contested the Faith.” Here he was thinking of such writers as Matthew Arnold, Herman Melville, Thomas Hardy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Emily Dickinson.

The third period is the one in which we are living: “It is the phase of those who have never heard the Christian Faith spoken of as anything but an anachronism.” Eliot notes that as a result “the whole of modern literature is corrupted by what I call Secularism.” To Eliot, secularism is “simply unaware of, simply cannot understand the meaning of, the primacy of the supernatural over the natural life.”

In Dickinson’s poem, “those dying then” represent the age of complacent faith. The amputation of “God’s Right Hand” is a fitting metaphor by which to describe subsequent assaults upon belief in God in an age of skepticism and doubt. And then we come to the age of secularism and “the abdication of Belief.” Here we pass into a rejection of transcendence exceeding even the dismembering of God. Secularism is marked by its stubborn refusal to grant even the most grudging acknowledgment that any dimension exists outside the boundaries of this natural world. Any talk of God—metaphorical or metaphysical—is an insult to the Secular Mind. To the secularist, as Karl Heim has written, God has become “an impossible thought, not framable by the mind.”

In other words, secularism is far more than the absence of belief, which may be mere unbelief or skepticism. And secularism is also more than the opposite of belief, which is disbelief. For while disbelief is an active adversary, inimical to faith, disbelief suffers this logical handicap: to disbelieve one must grant the possibility of a reasonable alternative, to believe. But “the abdication of belief’ means that the Secular Mind no longer contests the phantoms and fantasies of faith. The secularist’s only prayer is the litany in Hemingway’s story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”: “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name.… Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”

Yet, very few writers are capable of sustaining so dire a philosophy of nothingness. To many, a more reasonable course left for mankind is laughter, an inane guffaw at the outrageous condition of human existence. With La Bruyère they would say, “We must laugh before we are happy for fear of dying without laughing at all.” One such novelist is Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., of whom the critic Alfred Kazin has said, “Vonnegut’s horselaugh of self-deprecation finally becomes his picture of the damned human race.” In his novels, from the early and prophetic Player Piano, with its vision of a cybernetic dystopia, to Slapstick, Vonnegut systematically belittles human beings by clinically exposing our least desirable traits. As we read a novel like Slaughterhouse-Five, we too laugh and wonder why.

Certain aspects of our civilization provide an environment in which self-mockery may flourish. We are living at a time when, to quote from Joan Didion’s remarkable collection of American vignettes, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the clearest evidence of the presence of evil is “the absence of seriousness.” We have endured pop art and the soup can, op art and its illusions, “happenings,” camp, hula hoops, piano smashing, conceptual art, Chubby Checker and the Twist at the Peppermint Lounge, and streaking, to mention what would be only the start of a ludicrous list.

In this burlesque of modern living, death is disguised with euphemisms and mortal terror dismissed with a joke. But all this is juvenile in the face of legitimate fears that, at any moment, mankind may choose to destroy itself. Facing the possibility of finality, the writers who most clearly cast the shape of this secular age belong to that generation whose common heritage is the Jewish Holocaust: Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Arthur Miller, Karl Shapiro, and others.

None of us who lived through the plague of National Socialism as Christians, Gentiles, Aryans, non-Jews, or whatever other catchword of Nordic supremacy you choose, can begin to grasp the meaning of the Nazi outrage upon humanity in general, European Jews in particular. Identity cards, the sacrilege of a swastika on a synagogue wall, the yellow star, a ban on certain artists and their work, the knock in the night, the vanishing of whole families without a trace, the cattle cars, the work camps, a tatooed number, more travel by sardine cans on rails; at last, the death camp and its invitation to a fatal shower. This madness, I remind you, was “the final solution to the Jewish question.” To us—especially to some who were not born yet—the names of Dachau, Belsen, Auschwitz, and the rest of those charnel houses seem foreign, the events distant in time. But to every Jew, the names are as familiar as his own, the events as real as if they were happening now.

Some Christians find it relatively easy to rid their minds of the Jewish slaughter by blaming it on Hitler’s demonic hatred. But this is a gross oversimplification. It ignores the shameful collaboration in genocide by representatives of the church in Germany who, by their silence if nothing else, acquiesced to the extermination plot. There were exceptions, of course, and their names are saintly: Martin Niemoller, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Father Maximilian Kolbe, and the ambiguous Kurt Gerstein. (If you are not familiar with Gerstein’s story, I urge you to read A Spy for God by Pierre Joffroy, the most transfixing account to come out of World War II.) But apart from these and some others who are less well known, like Corrie ten Boom, the record of professing Christians is marred. Surviving Jews know very well that neither the German state church nor the Roman Catholic hierarchy took a stand on behalf of the Jews against their murderers. If you are at all uncertain about what Friedrich Heer calls “the living lie of German Christendom,” then you must read Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy and its documentation.

Except in degree, however, the “final solution” was not so different from persecution and pogroms throughout history. Ever since Sethos and Raamses of Egypt, there had been tyrants who oppressed, villains like Haman and Alfred Rosenberg who schemed, and mobs of unreasoning men to carry out their foul business. But before there had also been a Moses, an Esther, to deliver. Where was Esther in 1933? More important, where was Israel’s God?

The question of God is the key to Jewish identity. Without God, the Jew is a cynosure among the nations, a foundling, the only kid on the block without a Father, without a name. Judaism has nothing to offer if God did not call Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees and set him in the Land of Canaan. Every Jew must believe this, or else he repudiates his patrimony, sells his birthright, and becomes the son of Esau.

Yet what is there left to believe? At best, God is a Jewish uncle who forgot to show up for the Bar-Mitzvah; at worst, a faithless lover who fled for his own safety when the bullies and rapists approached. After generations of apostasy, any traditional belief in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob expired forever in the gas ovens of Europe.

The failure of God to deliver six million of his Chosen People out of the hands of Hitler, Rosenberg, Goebbels, Eichmann, and the rest disqualified him and his claims to a covenant relationship with the Jews. Thereafter, all that remained of a historic union between God and the Jews was memory.

This is the rupture the Jewish writer now feels between his father’s faith and his own secularism. The question is this: “If God is dead, then why am I a Jew?” A poem by Karl Shapiro called simply “Jew” manifests the quandary.

The name is immortal but only the name, for the rest

Is a nose that can change in the weathers of time or persist

Or die out in confusion or model itself on the best.

But the name is a language itself that is whispered and hissed

Through the houses of ages, and ever a language the same

And ever and ever a blow on our heart like a fist.

And this last of our dream in the desert, O curse of our name,

Is immortal as Abraham’s voice in our fragment of prayer

Adonai, Adonai, for our bondage of murder and shame!

And the word for the murder of God will cry out on the air

Though the race is no more and the temples are closed of our will

And the peace is made fast on the earth and the earth is made fair;

Our name is impaled in the heart of the world on a hill

Where we suffer to die by the hands of ourselves, and to kill (Published in Today’s Poet, ed. by

Chad Walsh, Scribner’s, 1964, pp. 153 and 154).

To the secular Jew, cut off from the Torah and Holy Days, history is no longer a link with God but a reminder of the oath taken in rashness and rage, “His blood be upon us and upon our children.” The Jew as Christ-killer—this is his curse, like the mark of Cain. History becomes hell to be lived through again and again—in the shtetls of the Russian Pale, in the Warsaw ghetto, on the Golan Heights, at Munich’s Olympic Village, at Entebbe airport. As Yakov Bok, in Bernard Malamud’s novel The Fixer, comes to realize, “being born a Jew meant being vulnerable to history, including its worst errors.” But Malamud has also said, “All men are Jews,” meaning perhaps that no man knows the significance of his own existence apart from the existence of God.

“Tragedy arises when you are in the presence of a man who has missed accomplishing his joy,” wrote Arthur Miller in an essay concerning Death of a Salesman. “But the joy must be there, the promise of the right way of life must be there. Otherwise pathos reigns, and an endless, meaningless, and essentially untrue picture of man is created—man helpless under the falling piano, man wholly lost in a universe which by its very nature is too hostile to be mastered.”

In the end, therefore, the purpose of all art is religious; it is either a statement about or a search for the “right way of life.” There is no way to write, to sing, to paint, to dance, to love or be loved without calling into account the God in whom we believe or disbelieve. Secularism’s greatest hoax is its claim to have made God obsolete to human consciousness. That simply can never be.

Furthermore, we must allow for the possibility that some persons may possess unconsciously what they consciously reject; as John Baillie puts it in Our Knowledge of God, even those who “deny God with the top of their minds” may believe at the same time “from the bottom of their hearts.” And Leslie A. Fiedler has noted that “the belief of many atheists is closer to a true love of God and a true sense of his nature, than the kind of easy faith which, never having experienced God, hangs a label bearing his name on some childish fantasy.”

One of the most affecting books I have ever read is A Walker in the City, the personal narrative of Alfred Kazin. He tells us what it means to be a Jew in this secular age. Recalling his boyhood in Brooklyn, Kazin speaks of his early struggle to believe: “I was a Jew. Yet it puzzled me that no one around me seemed to take God very seriously. We neither believed nor disbelieved. He was our oldest habit.… Yet I never really wanted to give Him up. In some way it would have been hopeless to justify to myself—I had feared Him so long—He fascinated me, He seemed to hold the solitary place I most often went back to” (Harcourt, 1951, pp. 46 and 47).

One day, on the steps of the New York Public Library, Kazin accepted a copy of the New Testament and began reading eagerly: “… and the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me. Offended in him? I had known him instantly. Surely I had been waiting for him all my life—our own Yeshua, misunderstood by his own, like me, but the very embodiment of everything I had waited so long to hear from a Jew.… It was he I thought, who would resolve for me at last the ambiguity and the long ache of being a Jew—Yeshua, our own long-lost Jesus, speaking straight to the mind and heart at once.… He was Yeshua, my own Reb Yeshua, of whose terrible death I could never read without bursting into tears—Yeshua, our own Yeshua …” (pp. 161 and 162).

A few years ago Kazin turned to me at a dinner table and said, “Tell me what you Christians mean when you say that Jesus is Lord.” I admit that I was tongue-tied, inarticulate, disappointing as I tried to express my faith. I am reminded now of the urging of another writer: Albert Camus said, “What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear … in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man.”

This is our challenge in a world shriveled and atrophied by its “abdication of Belief.” It is a challenge we dare not ignore. Even if victimized by stammering tongues and the limits of our own illumination, we possess two certain gifts: not the rhetoric of men but the Word of Truth; not an ignis fatuus but the Light of the World. And, in the words of my favorite example in the Gospels, the father in Mark 9, we can cry out in assurance, “Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief.”

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.

Kentucky Is a Subversive State

An 85-year-old Kentucky woman is quoted in The New York Times as saying, “If I had my life to live over again, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dances. I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I would pick more daisies.”

That just proves what I’ve thought all along: Kentucky is a subversive state. It produces kooks, and they don’t improve with age.

I know a teenage boy who went down to the bluegrass state, to the part that has hills and hollers, on a church-sponsored work project a few years ago. The experience created a major hassle with his father.

“It’s fantastic down there,” he said. “The men play checkers and talk in the store at the crossroads. In the daytime, mind you. Sometimes they play fiddles. And they sit out in their yards, just sit, and rock back and forth, doing nothing. Except think. Far out.”

Going barefoot and picking daisies and dancing and playing checkers and rocking in the front yard are subversive activities to normal Americans. Kentucky is therefore a threat.

In other parts of the good old U. S. of A. you just don’t play checkers at the Safeway, A. & P., or Piggly Wiggly. And you don’t sit and rock in your yard—if you did, your grass would begin to look unkempt, and the neighbors would be ashamed, and then where would your Christian witness be?

So the father gently asked his son why the youth group went to Kentucky in the first place.

“To work, of course. You know that.”

“But why did they need to work? Why did the church have to be painted, the new septic field have to be dug, the new boiler installed?” The father’s tone was understandably triumphant. “Wasn’t it because the men rock in the yard and play checkers in the store during the daytime?”

“Sure,” the son replied. “Isn’t it great how work always gets done if you put first things first?”

The generation gap. Let’s withdraw statehood from Kentucky.

EUTYCHUS VIII

Staff Lift

The editorial, “A Pause for Appreciation” (Aug. 12) was as gratifying as it was surprising. My deepest thanks. It gave the whole Religious News Service staff a lift.

That July 14 was a memorable day. I just couldn’t believe that it was impossible to put out a service, since twelve years ago we had weathered a blackout; we mailed the service out of Washington and Newark during the New York postal strike and begged, borrowed and all but stole typewriters when our offices were burglarized. But this time we were completely stymied.

LILLIAN R. BLOCK

Editor-in-Chief

Religious News Service

New York, N.Y.

A Slant On Luke

All too often, non-Christians point to Scripture as the ultimate in degrading women. Your reference to Luke as “showing both a classist and a sexist slant in one phrase” (Editorials, “Prime Time for Evangelicals,” Aug. 12) was therefore careless, and not in keeping with your stance as a Christian publication. Carrying this to its logical conclusion, one is forced to the view that God is also classist and sexist since he inspired the writer, Luke.

The inclusion of this seemingly insignificant statement in Acts 17:4 recognizes the involvement of respected women in the reception of the Gospel. It is important and purposeful. We cannot allow subtle distortions of the biblical role of women to go unchallenged, or to gain a foothold in our theology. Nor should we give credence to anti-biblical views, as this statement might.

As a Christian wife and mother of two girls, I find special comfort in knowing God didn’t allow classist, sexist, or slants of any other kind to enter and diminish the beauty and the character of his Word, even when using human authors.

RENEE OELSCHLAEGER

Springdale, Ark.

The Problem Of Self-esteem

Regarding John Piper’s article “Is Self-Love Biblical?” (Aug. 12) we could not fault his excellent argument, based on his own strong sense of self-esteem, that there is much misinterpretation of the message, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself’ (Luke 10:27). But the modern so-called cult of self does reflect a deep weakness in self-esteem, for whatever reasons. While Mr. Piper may have few problems in this area, many of us in the modern world do have serious problems of self-esteem, and in order to truly give love to others we must first feel strong in divine love before we can give of ourselves. Otherwise we do not truly have the sense of anything to give and therefore may give for false reasons rather than in truly divine love. False motivations lead not to increased love but actually to hate. Thus it seems imperative that those souls who need encouragement in their own sense of divine worth must find this first before they may fully share their true God-given love with others.

CHARLES MCCOWN

New York, N.Y.

Piper’s article is not a “small vote against the cult of self-esteem” but yet another chapter in the annals of Christian opposition to psychology. His article reflects a common and ancient error of Christians: the difficulty to accept new insights to our world through the sciences. This is evident from his distorted ideas of self-love; biblically it is simply loving that person Jesus died for, be it neighbor or self. This love is not the self-centered, vain self-preservation the author presents, but the true love of 1 Corinthians 13, the realization and acceptance of our position and worth of Romans 8:28ff, the regal elements of our selves and domain of Psalm 8:5–8, and our holy and blameless condition before God of Ephesians 1:4. Is self-love biblical? Indeed, it is.

SARA M. MOORE

Costa Mesa, Calif.

I am troubled by the paradoxical nature of John Piper’s article. All that he says about love of neighbor—the need for it, the characterization of it, and the challenge of it—is appropriate. His definitions, however, of self-love are less than acceptable. His blunt, unchallenged statement, “All human beings love themselves,” gets to the very heart of why the self-esteem, self-appreciation emphasis is so strong today. A careful study of the First Cry described in The Five Cries of Youth by Merton Strommen (Harper & Row, 1974) makes it abundantly clear that not all persons, even who have heard of God’s love and care, cherish and appreciate themselves in a positive, healthy way. Self-hatred is the theme of that First Cry. And it is the predominant cry of at least one in five church youth.

The self-love defined by Mr. Piper … has little to do with true self-esteem. Loving oneself by trying to get the best place in the synagogue or to be seen praying on the streets is pathological.… The simple truth is that most people today do not love themselves—not in any healthy sense. Most of the love that most have for themselves is a very conditional love. And that is their understanding of God’s love for them and the kind of love that they are to have for their neighbors.

The question of the article is never quite answered. Of course self-love is biblical. Of course love of neighbor is biblical. Of course love of God is biblical. To question any one of those three important assumptions is less than helpful. To love oneself and not love one’s neighbor, to love neighbor and not love oneself, and/or to love God and to love neither self nor neighbor are all expressions of the misappropriation and misunderstanding of love.

KENNETH G. PRUNTY

Associate Secretary

Board of Christian Education

Church of God Anderson, Ind.

No Help On Homosexuality

As a theological and medical educator, as a pastor, and as a consulting psychiatrist I know of few subjects as perplexing or troublesome in counseling, church work, family life, or institutional development as homosexuality. Unfortunately, John M. Batteau (“Sexual Differences: A Cultural Convention,” July 8) has not addressed the issue in a way that would be helpful either to the homosexual or to the pastor/counselor.

The author has not handled the current controversy with regard to fact. He begins with a not-so-tacit approval of the Bryant campaign. But can a contributor to CHRISTIANITY TODAY (which is manifestly concerned about truth-as-fact in the inerrancy issue) avoid considering truth-as-fact in the Bryant campaign? By what facts are claims made that homosexuals corrupt children, that they should not teach, or that they are threatening the fabric of home, society, and civilization? Is there any evidence that the incidence of homosexuality has changed since the Kinsey report thirty years ago? While the visibility of the homosexual has increased, the incidence of this sexual variation seems to be stable, and its danger to society difficult to establish on factual grounds.

Batteau’s exegesis of relevant Scripture was disappointing—violating important exegetical and hermeneutical principles. He offered no evidence of reflecting on either the literary or social contexts of the passages cited. Why has he (and others who have published on this subject in your journal) failed to interact with Bailey’s Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition on whom all recent exegetical apologists for homosexuality rely heavily? To label an exegetical position as rationalistic is not quite the same as engaging it in debate. The psychological discussion was embarrassingly naive. Batteau quotes one authority to conclude that homosexuality is learned behavior. But so also is heterosexuality if the reports of a large number of workers are to be trusted. And as for the unlearning of homosexuality—no method of therapy (which is after all an unlearning and relearning process) that has been carefully reported and evaluated cites more than a 25 per cent success rate in changing homosexuality. Jay Adams, whom Batteau cites, has yet to produce a scientifically acceptable account of his methods and results with homosexuality.

Nor does Christian experience alter the condition. An evangelical British psychiatrist, Ernest White, writing fifteen years ago of his clinical experience with fifty homosexual males concluded, “If anyone believes that the experience of conversion will take away homosexual desires and lead to a normal attraction toward the opposite sex, then he is mistaken … I have met no single case of a man being set free from them by spiritual measures.”

It is sad that evangelical writers can show little pastoral sensitivity to the heartache of families and to the agony of those beset by homosexual fears and temptations, or understanding of the relief and integration (with apparent personal benefits) for the person who finally “comes out.”

From this article, and previous publications, it is quite clear that CHRISTIANITY TODAY regards homosexuality as a serious moral threat. If so, should not the editor demand that writers examine the current literature and interact with such leading Christian writers and thinkers as Thielicke, Smedes, Oraison, McNeill; with gay churchmen; with the biblical evidence in its full context; with the full scope of the ethical issues (including issues of justice and truth as well as issues of genital morality); and with the complex and inconclusive therapeutic literature? Then perhaps we pastors and teachers may have some help and words of wisdom for those who consult us and for those to whom we teach the art of pastoral care.

J. ERNEST RUNIONS

Principal, Carey Hall

Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry

University of British Columbia

Vancouver