The Christian who wants to understand the complex problem of world hunger is confronted by a confusing barrage of data and opinions. Some maintain, for example, that “every person has a right to an adequate diet.” Others hold that this principle is applicable in short-term and emergency conditions but cannot be extended into the future indefinitely. There are voices demanding that aid be given to hungry nations with no strings attached. Others denounce current “strings” but propose the attachment of others. Some speak of the ability of the earth to support (say) 15 or 20 or 35 billion inhabitants. Others heartily disagree.

To the statement that “every person has a right to an adequate diet” there is placed the parallel “right” of every nation’s people to produce with dignity adequate food for themselves (or marketable goods that will enable them to buy adequate food). This requires a level of development adequate to stave off crisis conditions. But liberation theologians decry any attempt by affluent nations to help raise, e.g., agricultural production (by “development”); they think it only delays the revolutions that they consider to be the only way out for poor nations.

There are those who insist that in some cases generosity is actually hurtful and wrong. They maintain that in some parts of the earth, food relief will serve only to keep the starving alive long enough to beget more people to starve. This would leave development in food production as the only merciful policy, but increased production in many cases would require quick abandonment of old taboos and methods in agriculture.

When human fertility goes unrestrained and any gains in food production are thus quickly offset, the problems of both affluent and poor nations become extremely sensitive. Shall the nations of the Fourth World impose rigorous methods for the control of conception? And should aid to these lands be conditioned upon effective measures to reduce birth rates?

To this latter question, some people in religious circles reply with a ringing “No!” And some societies, because of long-standing taboos against birth control or a misguided feeling that a large population makes for greatness, will agree. But the sensitive Christian may with much justification think that the receiving of food by needy societies should be accompanied by actions directly aimed at decreasing the need for donated food.

It goes without saying that the policies of donating nations are today far from the Christian ideal. Aid has all too often been allotted to governments that now act (or may be influenced to act) in a manner favorable to the policies of the giver. For instance, sales of grain may be denied to one nation whose government is trying sincerely to effect a just distribution of vital resources and granted to another nation whose favor the selling nation seeks to curry. This may have the effect of propping up repressive regimes by bailing them out of failures in their agricultural methods.

Such are the food policies of our time, in which more attention is given to political considerations than to the needs of the hungry. Three metaphors are sometimes used as rationalizations for these actions, or for no action at all.

The Spaceship Earth metaphor suggests that our planet is a spacecraft loaded nearly to the point of saturation, struggling to survive. The element of truth here is that our planet is experiencing exponential (geometric rather than arithmatic) growth. This is occurring not only in population but also in man’s demand upon the earth’s resources and in the level of environmental pollution.

The Lifeboat metaphor suggests that mankind is loaded into lifeboats, struggling to survive in a hostile sea. Most boats are filled with hungry, impoverished people, while a few contain well-fed, satisfied people whose resources the others envy. The poor threaten to overload the boats of the well-to-do and thus threaten the survival of all.

The elements of truth here are these: first, have-not nations might conceivably rise in a sense of envious outrage and possibly attempt to blackmail the affluent; and second, demands upon the developed nations might reduce all to poverty. Yet both of these possibilities seem remote at the moment.

The principle of Triage was first employed by the medical service of the French army. Wounded persons were sorted into three categories: those who would survive without special care, those who would in no case survive, and those who would survive if given care. If medical resources were limited, only the third group would receive attention.

This principle has at best limited validity when taken from the medical scene and translated into social policy. The element of truth embodied is that should a hunger crisis of world-wide scope arise, some selective decisions might have to be made by donor nations.

But what has all this to do with the biblical mandates, “Give to him who asks from you,” “As you did it to one of the least of these my [hungry or ill-clad] brethren, you did it to me,” and “If your enemy is hungry, feed him”? Without surrendering the field to the situationists, we can agree that wherever needs are immense and resources limited, some discriminating judgments have to be made.

Further, the thrust of New Testament teaching seems clearly to be that when ambiguous situations exist, agape dictates doing more rather than less. This involves risks—of encouraging unworthy attitudes, of possibly increasing some ills, and certainly of being exploited. But the claims of the hungry world upon Christians in the favored nations are strong, the more so when viewed in the light of the clear mandates of our Lord.

Fromer Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, facing trial soon for his part in a 1968 shoot-out with Oakland, California, police, told a large throng of black evangelicals gathered in San Francisco last month that “what I learned at mama’s knee” may have been what brought him to Christ and then back home to the United States to face charges.

Unaware that the words he chose touched on an issue of the conclave, Cleaver was somewhat surprised by the many strong responses of “Amen” and “Preach it” that his statement elicited.

For the several days preceding Cleaver’s appearance at the concluding session, leaders at the fourteenth annual National Black Evangelical Association (NBEA) convention at the Sheraton Palace Hotel in San Francisco had been engaged in lively debate. At issue was whether evangelicals should emphasize black “expositional” theology or black “experiential” theology.

The discussion came to a head at a workshop on black theology conducted by Anthony C. Evans, pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas and a doctoral candidate at Dallas Seminary. Said Evans: “If the Bible message and blackness bump heads, blackness must go.”

A contrasting view was set forth by Henry Mitchell, director of the Ecumenical Center for Black Church Studies in Los Angeles. “Truth is in the book, praise God,” he declared. “But it’s true for me ’cause mama told me.… What mama told me is more important than what the paper says. Scripture came to us orally, and then through singing. The printed word is a substitute.” In short, he said, human transmittal has primacy over the printed word.

Evans countered that blacks “must end the focus on culture because eventually culture will fall.… The basis of authority for truth must shift from black culture to biblical declarations.” The black experience, he went on, is real but not revelatory, important but not inspired. “Black isn’t beautiful until it’s biblical,” he asserted.

Also participating in the workshop was Fuller Seminary graduate William H. Bentley, the pastor of Calvary Bible Church in Chicago and a former president of the NBEA. “If it is only written, then truth depends on the perspective where I was trained,” said Bentley. “There is no totally objective revelation of truth; there is a necessary degree of subjectivity in truth.” He said that black evangelicals “cannot live with [Evans’s] a priori approach.” American theology comes from Germany and Switzerland and reflects a white bias, suggested Bentley. “There’s something wrong with a white church history that ignores 25 million blacks,” he charged.

Bentley also maintained that blacks cannot be expected to live for heaven when their problems are here on earth now. “Whites have theologically justified colonization and slavery in the name of truth.” He then asked the gathering whether such theology could be dependable.

Responded Evans: “Where do we get the authority to declare that racism is wrong? How can we know racism is wrong unless the Scripture says so?” Since it is agreed that white American theology for the most part has ignored their plight, blacks must now stand up and be counted, he acknowledged. However, he cautioned, the validity of black theology depends upon its biblical integrity.

The divergent views of black theology have been developing since the black-power movements of the 1960s, although a need for black theology has been demonstrated since the days of slavery, participants at the NBEA meeting noted.

The writings of theologians James H. Cone, Albert Cleage, and Fuller’s Paul K. Jewett were the main ones quoted by proponents of black “experiential” theology.

In the past year or so articulate younger blacks, including Evans, have been exposing more evangelical blacks to “expositional” theology. Their views are succinctly stated in a booklet by Evans, “Biblical Theology and the Black Experience,” recently published by Dallas-based Black Evangelistic Enterprise (BEE).

The president of BEE is pastor Ruben S. Conner of Community Bible Church in Dallas, who is also the new president of the NBEA. “My top priority is evangelism,” said Conner in an interview. “But it is an evangelism that has social implications.” The Church’s task, he said, is to proclaim the Gospel, persuade men and women to become Christians, and—he emphasized—“to help them.”

The same night the NBEA convention opened in San Francisco, black Georgia legislator Julian Bond spoke at the University of Santa Clara, farther down the peninsula. Bond described black Americans as “people in permanent crisis [who] are climbing a hill of molasses wearing snowshoes while white Americans are taking a chair lift.” When asked to comment on Bond’s assessment, Conner agreed that it was probably accurate, but said that converted blacks are making progress and that the NBEA is offering guidance and direction where possible.

Commented George D. McKinney, an NBEA workshop leader and the founder and pastor of St. Stephen’s Church of God in Christ in San Diego: “When a black American on this molasses hill is born again, his world view changes. He’ll deal with his problems differently when he is part of an enlightened ministry.” McKinney’s NBEA-member church has grown in membership from 7 to 2,000 since 1962.

An inner-city church must minister at a personal level to involve the non-churched in church-related activities, McKinney said. He said his people conduct chapels on nearby military bases, teach noon-day Bible studies in factories, travel to men’s and women’s prisons, and participate in extensive street ministries, such as crisis centers, halfway houses, and drug-abuse centers. “The Gospel must come to you where you are, and evangelism must be full of sensitivity and compassion,” he said.

The success of ministries like this one in San Diego and others described during the week (in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Jackson, Mississippi) gave new hope to black evangelicals in San Francisco. Meanwhile, the struggle to define and refine black theology will linger.

“Black theology is still severely academic and doesn’t reach the man in the street,” lamented Bentley.

“We’re striving for a black perspective to truth, and no one’s found it yet,” mused Lem Tucker of Westminster Seminary.

Phasing Out

Reduced mailing costs for non-profit organizations will be abolished if Congress adopts a recommendation of a special commission it set up last year to study the Postal Service.

Under the proposal, the lower the rates for second- and third-class mail now being enjoyed by thousands of churches, religious magazines, and para-church and educational organizations would be phased out over the next twenty years.

“We do not think the taxpayer should be required to pay hundreds of millions of dollars forever to finance these mailing and fund-raising activities,” said the report released last month by the Commission on Postal Service.

The Postal Service has been narrowing the difference between the rates paid by commercial and non-profit users, but the commission’s proposal is the first major effort to eliminate it all together.

Dealing For Dollars

Three trips to Arab nations by Muhammad Ali failed to raise any money for the Nation of Islam (formerly Black Muslims) because of sexual and alcoholic revelry by the heavyweight champion’s entourage, it was charged in a $5.5 million suit filed in federal court in Chicago. The suit was filed by the American Arabian Investment Company (AAIC), a firm that raises money in Arab countries. Attorney Constantine Kangles, representing the AAIC, says the sum is owed as a 10 per cent commission on $55 million in loans the company raised in 1975. Wallace D. Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, reportedly refuses to pay the commission because the $55 million is “holy money.”

Kangles claims that on trips in 1972, 1973, and 1975, the boxer’s forty companions had offended their hosts with “the use of narcotics, the taking of alcoholic liquors, and consorting with women other than their wives.” They broke “every Muslim religious and criminal law that could be imagined,” he asserts, “and they didn’t raise a penny.”

As a result, says Kangles, the company had to overcome a bad image of American followers of Islam, and this was done partly by leading Arab officials to believe that Ali’s friends were not really Muslims but boxing people, when in reality all profess the Muslim faith. Also, notes the lawyer, the AAIC’s president. Garland M. Taylor of Chicago, posed as a Christian convert to Islam during his successful 1975 fundraising trip. During this time he was permitted to enter sacred sites, where “he would have been stoned to death if they had found out he wasn’t a Muslim,” says Kangles. Actually, he acknowledges, Taylor is a Seventh-day Adventist.

Taylor obtained loans of $55 million from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, and “it’s all coming to Chicago,” according to Kangles. As evidence, he pointed to the recent announcement that Muhammad’s group will build a $15 million mosque in the city’s Woodlawn neighborhood. It is projected to be the largest mosque in the Western hemisphere.

The Disbelievers: Footing the Bill?

They say it wasn’t planned that way, but atheist leader Madalyn Murray O’Hair and her backers found that Easter week was as good a time as any for their national atheists’ convention. In all, some 250 disbelievers attended the four-day Chicago meeting.

One of the highlights was the selection of someone to receive the group’s annual Religious Hypocrite of the Year award. The race was close, according to press reports, with President Carter the early favorite. Singer Anita Bryant, whose anti-gay campaign in Miami has been making headlines (see editorial, page 31), drew strong support, too, but in the end the delegates chose former Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver. The press has given much attention to the born-again experience of Cleaver, who is facing trial for a 1968 shoot-out with California police.

The main concerns of the convention centered on what the delegates feel is the unconstitutional intrusion of religion into government and on the issues of taxation and parochaid.

“Religion is costing us money,” lamented William Bennett, 35, a Chicago insurance examiner who has been an O’Hair disciple for about seven years. “Millions of dollars of property taxes aren’t collected each year because some church owns the property, so our taxes go up,” he complained. “We’re footing the bill for the believers.”

Ms. O’Hair, 57, the founder and president of the Society of Separationists, chaired the meetings. She said she is glad that atheism is “coming out of the closet,” citing public declarations by such personalities as actor Burt Lancaster, author Truman Capote, and scientist Linus Pauling. She expressed disappointment, however, that public disapproval has held others back.

The society, it was announced, has prepared the first atheist television program, a thirty-minute talk show moderated by Ms. O’Hair on cable TV in New York.

The society is also seeking membership in the United Nations as a non-governmental organization, and it has plans to appeal to the U.N. Commission on Civil Rights regarding alleged discrimination against atheists.

In an interview with Christianity Today months ago, Ms. O’Hair said she had been raised in a staunch Presbyterian home. Her parents were devout members of First Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh during her childhood years, she said, but she dropped out at age 11 after deciding she didn’t believe “all that religion stuff anymore.” Nevertheless, she acknowledged, she still slips into church services at Christmas and Easter “because I like the music.”

Last Rights

Investment counselor Robert B. Graham, a Roman Catholic who lives in Holland, Pennsylvania, was “ordained” several months ago by a California mail-order ordination mill known as the Church of the Gospel Ministry. He then created the “Church of Love, Holland Church of the Gospel Ministry, Incorporated,” headquartered it in his home, and applied for a tax exemption—an advertised benefit of the ordination house. He told Bucks County tax assessors that he was “holding services, visiting the sick, and talking about God.” He said he looked on his new church as a “supplement” to his Catholic faith.

The county assessment board, however, said Graham’s church met none of the usual requirements for a church. It said the building, a split-level house, might qualify as a parsonage. But, they said, parsonages are not tax-exempt.

Graham, who claims he paid $150 for the ordination certificate, feels his First Amendment Rights have been violated, and he has threatened to sue the board for $10 million.

Graham is not the only one seeking tax relief through mail-order ordination. Thousands of people in New York state have become postal pastors, thanks to “Bishop” Kirby Hensley’s Universal Life Church in California. The ULC mails “credentials of ministry” free of charge or for a “free-will offering” to anyone on request, and it sells doctorates for $20.

Last month the state Board of Equalization and Assessment advised local New York tax assessors to deny tax-exempt status to members of the ULC. The opinion is not binding but is intended to give support and direction to assessors in turning down hundreds, possibly thousands, of applications for property-tax exemptions. (New York allows a reduction of $1,500 on the assessed valuation of homes owned by ordained clergy and a total exemption of property owned by a recognized religious group and used exclusively for religious purposes.)

Almost all the adult residents of the Catskills town of Hardenburgh have been ordained by the ULC (see October 22, 1976, issue, page 51), and their new tax status was to become effective this month—if their ordinations are recognized. Town officials said they were inclined to grant the exemptions in order to create a test case for the ULC—and to challenge property tax exemptions allowed for other religious groups in the area. The state board, however, threatened to remove Hardenburgh tax assessor Robert Kerwick from office for misconduct if he grants the exemptions.

The board said its four months of research failed to turn up any reason for granting partial or total exemptions to any property owned by a ULC member. ULC attorney Peter R. Stromer said he will challenge that position. “This is an obvious First Amendment violation,” he stated.

The Contributor As a ‘Consumer’

Religious forces are marshalling their strength to combat congressional bills that would force public disclosure of their financial affairs. Hearings have already been held on one of the bills (H.R. 41), introduced by California Representative Charles H. Wilson.

Prominent Catholic, Lutheran, and Baptist representatives turned out to testify against the proposal that Wilson classifies as “consumer legislation.” It is being considered in the House Post Office and Civil Service Committee of which Wilson is a member. It died in committee last year, but the veteran congressman reintroduced it this term.

Wilson claims backing from such major charitable organizations as the American Heart Association and the American Lung Association.

Pay Now, Pray Later

Nina and Richard Kaufman don’t think that people should have to pay to pray, but a Miami judge ruled against them, and he ordered them to pay $90 in back pledges to Temple Beth David.

The Kaufmans, both real estate agents, joined Beth David in 1974. They told temple officials they couldn’t meet their $180 pledge assessment because of hard times, so they paid $30 and said they would pay the rest later. The temple, however, sued them and about twenty other families for non-payment. Most settled out of court. Temple officials said the total sum amounted to less than $10,000 of the temple’s $600,000 annual budget.

Mrs. Kaufman argued that religion itself was on trial in the case. “I wasn’t allowed to go in the synagogue during the High Holy Days unless I made that payment,” she asserted.

Beth David’s executive director, Sheldon Mills, insisted that the suit involved a contractual obligation, not religion. “Judaism is not a business,” he said, but “where it is housed is.”

Circuit judge Edward Swanko cut the amount owed by the Kaufmans to $90, partly because the couple had donated some toys to the synagogue. “We must have religion,” commented Swanko. “The only way it can sustain itself is to depend on the membership for support.”

Mills said other synagogues were following the case with deep interest.

H.R. 41, if it becomes law, would require every “charitable organization” (including religious groups) that solicits gifts through the mail to include with the solicitation a disclosure statement (including the percentages of receipts used for the group’s primary mission and for administration and fund raising). It would also force organizations asking television viewers or radio listeners for contributions to broadcast such information as a part of the solicitation.

Several congressmen have already suggested exempting all churches and religious groups from the bill. Typical of their remarks has been that of Missouri Representative Gene Taylor, who said he was concerned about its effect on small churches.

“I want to know,” Taylor said, “if the First Baptist Zion Church of Theodocia, Missouri, will have to fill out a lot of forms because they wrote me for a contribution. I’m not a member of that church but my mother was and I went to Sunday school there as a boy.”

The bill exempts organizations that appeal exclusively to their own members for funds. This provision brought another objection at the hearings. George F. Harkins, general secretary of the Lutheran Council in the U.S.A., pointed out that this would put the federal government in the business of defining church membership and dictating the manner in which churches deal with members and non-members as defined by the government.

Also being watched closely by fund-raisers for religious groups is H.R. 478, introduced by Representative William Lehman of Florida. Referred to the Ways and Means Committee, this bill would give the Internal Revenue Service broad new powers to police the affairs of charitable organizations. It also imposes a stiff tax on such groups when they do not spend (within a stipulated time) the funds they have collected.

Lehman has titled his proposal the “Truth in Contributions Act.” It not only requires a detailed financial disclosure statement for donors and the IRS, but it would also force the organizations to send such statements “to any individual” who requests one.

The Lehman bill also authorizes the U.S. Attorney General to “take whatever action may be necessary to insure that assets consisting of, or derived from, contributions solicited from the public are preserved and expended only for substantially the same charitable purpose as those for which they were contributed” when the Secretary of the Treasury advises him that an organization may lose its tax exemption.

Creationist Text: No

Opponents of public school use of a creationist biology textbook have won their first legal test, but the court battle is probably not over. Two parents, aided by Indiana Civil Liberties Union lawyers, asked Marion County (Indianapolis) superior court judge Michael T. Dugan to remove it from the list of state-approved texts, and he did so last month. Local schools, however, are continuing to use Zondervan Publishing House’s Biology: A Search For Order in Complexity (1970) until ordered to remove it by state educational authorities. The suit was against the state textbook commission, not the local schools, and no decision has been announced yet on whether the judge’s ruling will be appealed.

The volume has been approved for use in several states and has been the subject of controversy (see March 18 issue, page 52), but the Indiana challenge is the first to reach the courts. The text was prepared by the Creation Research Society, an organization of scientists with advanced degrees. Defenders of the book, such as Superintendent Herman Miller of the West Clark school district in Indiana, insist that it presents “both theories of creation, not just the biblical account.” Critics claim it is “anti-science” and “dwells on religion” of the type they describe as “fundamentalist.” The judge agreed with the argument that it is one-sided, leaving the student “no way to support the doctrine of evolution.” Because of its biblical view, he ruled, its use in state schools violates the constitutional provisions of church-state separation.

A Look at Liberty

First steps toward establishing an international body to monitor religious liberty were taken at an unprecedented World Congress on Religious Liberty in Amsterdam this spring. Organized largely by Seventh-day Adventist leaders but supported by representatives of some other groups, the congress was attended by about 350 delegates. On the final day the delegates approved a resolution asking for a broadly based committee to serve as a permanent rights watchdog.

One of the principal speakers at the event was Philip A. Potter, general secretary of the World Council of Churches. He said religious bodies must not hesitate to “criticize ruling powers, when necessary.”

The WCC has been under increasing attack for failing to criticize socialist regimes as much as the non-socialist ones, and another challenge was thrown at Potter during the congress by Andrew Leigh Gunn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. He urged the WCC to “restore and upgrade its secretariat of religious liberty … to speak out more prophetically against violations of the right of freedom of conscience wherever found.” There was no response from Potter.

Other presentations were made by such diverse groups as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Church of Scientology, and Keston College in England.

Of Marriage And Measles

There were several developments involving the Worldwide Church of God (see last two issues) last month:

• WCG founder Herbert W. Armstrong, 84, was married in Tucson to Ramona Martin, 40, a former WCG secretary. Armstrong’s son Garner Ted performed the ceremony. The Herbert Armstrongs are expected to spend most of their time in Tucson, where they have purchased a home (as has chief aide Stanley Rader). Armstrong’s first wife died about ten years ago; Ms. Martin’s first marriage ended in a divorce fifteen years ago that the church later ruled was an annulment.

• The headquarters of Al Carrozzo’s Twentieth Century Church of God in Vacaville, California, burned to the ground. Police blame arson. Carrozzo, a former WCG executive, led a major exodus from the WCG in late 1973 and has waged a vigorous anti-Armstrong campaign since that time.

• More than 500 children of WCG members have been forbidden by their parents to receive innoculations against measles in Pasadena (California) schools despite the church’s altered stance permitting medical care. School officials say the parents’ refusal is unfair to other children, whose health is thereby jeopardized.

JOSEPH M. HOPKINS

Religion in Transit

The Pentagon says the Armed Forces Chaplains Board will remove from its Armed Forces Book of Worship a Good Friday hymn that a number of church groups and congressmen have labeled blasphemous. Another hymn will be selected to replace “It Was on a Friday Morning” in future printings of the hymnal.

Three religious broadcasting officials affiliated with the Churches of Christ were killed when their private plane exploded in mid-air in the Caribbean as they were inspecting sites for a radio transmitter for the newly established World Christian Broadcasting Corporation, based in Abilene, Texas. Killed were communications professor Lowell Perry of Abilene Christian University and broadcasters Hall Frazier of West Monroe, Louisiana, and Ken Fergusen of Sierra Vista, Arizona.

After years of hassling, the Internal Revenue Service ruled that the Church of Scientology of New York is exempt from federal taxes under the IRS regulation that applies to all churches. A Scientology spokesman said the decision was the thirteenth favorable ruling made by the IRS for Scientology churches in the past twenty-one months.

The National Federation of Priests’ Councils, which represents 113 local councils of Roman Catholic priests, voted in its recent national convention to ask the Vatican to permit women to become priests and deacons. The groups also called for the elimination of sexist language in official prayers of the Catholic Church.

A fire partially destroyed the administration building of 800-student Rust College, one of twelve colleges related to the United Methodist Church serving mainly black students. Officials blamed arson. The fire broke out during a student demonstration calling for the ouster of Rust’s president, W. A. McMillan, and for other demands to be met. Warrants were issued against several students, but no arrests were made immediately, and the school was shut down for nearly three weeks while officials assessed the situation.

Four men believed to have been members of the Rastafarians, a Jamaican religious cult that venerates the late Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, were found shot to death in a Brooklyn house. Police described the slaughter as an “execution,” but refused to comment on possible motives. Younger members have been identified with drug peddling, and the smoking of marijuana is considered a biblical mandate by the sect. There are two major factions, and they differ politically. A number of members have been arrested on various criminal charges since 1975 and twenty were killed in internal warfare in 1974.

Parents must be notified if a minor dependent child seeks an abortion, according to a new law passed by the Maryland legislature. Among those arguing strongly for the bill was Pastor Richard C. Halverson of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Bethesda, a well-known evangelical who warned that its defeat would weaken the family and thus be bad for the nation.

After a year of discussion, the board of directors of the Church Federation of Greater Indianapolis denied the membership application of the Metropolitan Community Church, a predominantly homosexual congregation. Homosexual behavior is biblically unjustifiable, they said, and they disliked the church’s advertising of adult bookstores and gay bars in its newsletter.

Homosexual behavior is sin, but homosexuals should not be denied their civil rights, says a proposed statement on homosexuality drafted for the 2.4-million-member American Lutheran Church. The 1,000-word paper also opposes homosexual marriage. It does, however, call for upholding the civil rights of homosexuals. The paper will be discussed at a September consultation.

WHCT-TV, a Christian station in Hartford, Connecticut, was off the air for three days when city officials attached the station’s transmitter for failure to pay taxes. The station’s owner, Faith Center, a church in Glendale, California, maintains that the facility should be tax exempt because it belongs to a church. To get back on the air, Faith Center wired almost $80,000 in back taxes and penalties “under protest.” The case is likely to end up in court.

Pastor Craig Dwaine Lacy of First Baptist Church in Big Sandy, Texas, resigned after being charged with the theft of more than $75,000 worth of antiques, rare books, and valuable paintings from some 100 libraries, museums, and shops across the Southwest. Many of the articles were recovered. They included books and historical documents from the libraries of Baylor University in Waco. Texas, and Southwestern Baptist Seminary in Fort Worth. Lacy, 31, was being held last month on $50,000 bail.

Self-styled evangelist Johnnie B. Robinson, 52, of Dallas, was convicted by a county court in Grand Rapids, Michigan, of fraud. Police charge he solicited funds from crowds attending his crusade meetings by promising to bring a plastic cathedral to Michigan. Several witnesses said they gave Robinson from $1,000 to $4,000 each in personal encounters. The prosecution claimed that no such cathedral exists. Robinson offered no testimony in his defense and was remanded to jail.

The downward trend in the number of Lutheran Church in America missionaries appears to have halted, according to statistics. In 1969, the LCA had 325 missionaries and in 1976 only 151, but now the total is 155.

Personalia

Britain’s Malcolm Muggeridge, internationally known journalist and social critic, received the Thomas Nelson Bible Award, an honor given annually by the Bible publishing firm to a person “whose life and work has inspired others to live by the principles of the Bible.”

Lutheran radio preacher Oswald C. J. Hoffmann is the new president of United Bible Societies, succeeding Archbishop of Canterbury F. Donald Coggan. The UBS is an international fellowship of fifty-nine Bible societies engaged in Bible translation, publication, and distribution in 150 countries.

Former Georgia Tech quarterback Denny Duron, who led the Bulldogs to a national championship in NCAA competition and later played pro ball with the Birmingham Americans, is head football coach at Evangel College, an Assemblies of God school in Springfield, Missouri. Duron is a licensed AOG minister and one of the nation’s youngest college football coaches.

Clergyman Paul Nichols is the new dean of the School of Theology of Virginia Union University in Richmond, one of only two black Baptist seminaries fully accredited by the Association of Theological Schools in the U.S. and Canada.

More than 2,500 decisions for Christ were recorded in a campaign conducted by evangelist Cecil Todd and a team of workers. A crowd estimated at 10,000 attended the closing service in Port-Au-Prince. Because of the extended drought and severe water crisis, in Haiti, the electrical power was shut off most of the time and the city was almost completely blacked out and paralyzed. A mobile generator provided lights for the meetings.

Methodist mission executive Alan Walker of Sydney, Australia, founder of the Life Line international telephone counseling movement, was appointed evangelism director of the World Methodist Council, which plans a global evangelistic thrust in 1980.

World Scene

Well-known Baptist pastor Josif Ton of Ploesti, Romania, and five or more other evangelicals were detained overnight by security police in early April. The men were beaten during subsequent days of interrogation, according to their friends. Ton recently issued a paper calling for an end to persecution of Christian students, of believers who meet in small groups for religious purposes, and of employees identified as believers. The other churchmen signed the paper. (A full report on the Romanian church situation, based on News Editor Edward E. Plowman’s recent eleven-day visit there, will appear in the May 20 issue.)

The Roman Catholic bishops of South Korea last month demanded the repeal of President Chung Hee Park’s 1972 constitution and the 1975 emergency decree that give him authoritarian power and ban political dissent. In a declaration read to 700 people at a memorial mass in a downtown Seoul cathedral, the bishops demanded freedom of the press, religion, and academic activities, and they called for other reforms, including the release of political and conscience prisoners. The paper was released in the midst of another wave of arrests.

A Swiss missionary of the Overseas Missionary Fellowship, Peter Wyss, 42, and a Swiss friend were murdered in northern Thailand. Robbery or a tribal dispute may be the reason, but officials aren’t sure. Wyss worked among the Akha tribe.

Death: Cardinal William Conway, 64, archbishop of Armagh, Northern Ireland, and the Catholic Primate of All Ireland. He was a noted theological scholar and an outspoken enemy of the violence on both sides in the ongoing political-religious dispute in Ireland.

Aleksandr Voloschchuk, a Soviet Baptist who was protesting religious persecution in the Soviet Union, was committed to a psychiatric hospital, according to reports from Moscow. A human-rights activist was reportedly arrested as he appealed to a Baptist prayer meeting for assistance on Voloschchuk’s behalf.

The following account is based on reports filed by correspondents Peter Geiger (Akron, Ohio) and Nell Kennedy (Tokyo):

Evangelist Rex Humbard has a vision. He says it came to him in the wee hours upon his return from preaching in the Orient in March. In the vision, he said, God told him he had completed twenty-five years of preaching the Gospel on television and could finish the job of reaching the whole word with the message of salvation “this year.”

An impossible task?

“All you need is another translator and another transmitter and God’s people to help, and all nations will hear God’s message of salvation, because the door is open now,” Humbard quotes God as saying.

This month, which marks the silver anniversary of his ministry on television, the 57-year-old evangelist plans to share his vision with his congregation at the Cathedral of Tomorrow in Akron—and with his TV audience. He intends to ask each listener for a gift of $25 ($1 for each year he’s been on television) to enable him to broadcast the Gospel “over every country in the world before the end of the year.”

Humbard’s services, videotaped from auditoriums and stadiums around North America and in foreign lands, are telecast over 543 TV stations to an estimated audience of 20 million or more. The programs are seen in fourteen foreign countries and protectorates, and they are aired by shortwave radio to many other parts of the world. Contributors send in $1.2 million a month to keep him going.

Despite increasing nationalism worldwide and the uneasiness overseas about American influence on TV, Humbard seems to have won acceptance in many circles abroad.

At the beginning of a rally the evangelist conducted in Ottawa on the night before Palm Sunday, two Canadian maple-leaf flags were lowered into view above the platform, and the Humbard family with the help of teleprompters led the crowd of 3,500 in the singing of the Canadian national anthem. Later in the service the TV minister injected the reminder that all funds donated in Canada stay in Canada to buy TV time there and to run the Humbard offices in Toronto and Montreal. Next day, in a news story headlined “Opus Rex,” the Ottawa Journal pronounced approvingly that the service was “Canadian throughout.”

In Manila, Roman Catholic cardinal Jamie L. Sin reportedly told an international prayer-breakfast gathering, “I am praying for Rex. If the apostle Paul were alive today, he’d be using TV and radio as Rex does.”

Humbard says he’s won the recent blessing of the government of Brazil, which controls that nation’s broadcasting outlets. He has been invited to put his programs on the country’s six main stations and scores of repeaters, and he has already dispatched his TV time-buyer, Judson Ott Jackson, to line up the broadcast schedule.

The evangelist believes his is a pioneering effort. “There are plenty of religious shows on American TV,” he says. “Too many, in fact. But ours is the only one on in Tokyo. People over there are hungry for the Gospel, and we’re the only ones allowed to broadcast it.” (Evangelist Billy Graham has a weekly telecast throughout Japan three months of the year, but Humbard’s is the only ongoing one.)

He attributes his show’s acceptance partly to its technical and artistic excellence. His standards are maintained by means of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of TV recording equipment, 252 full-time employees doing technical and clerical work, and the use of interpreters whose words are carefully synchronized with Humbard’s lips on the screen.

When the Humbard show airs in Tokyo, for example, only a careful viewer can tell that the evangelist isn’t speaking Japanese. The same is true for French shows broadcast in Quebec, Portuguese in Brazil, and Spanish in Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

TV director Bob Anderson says the tapes of the shows are tailored to the countries in which they are aired. Announcements about where to send prayer requests and donations must be inserted accordingly. Written transcripts of Humbard’s sermons are sent to translators and interpreters who record the foreign-language sound tracks while watching Humbard preach on tape. Each sound track is returned to the studios in Akron to be matched to the master tape of the show and then sent back to the foreign country for airing. In this way, says Anderson, the people in Akron can maintain quality control—and remain in the good graces of the governments involved.

On trips, the Humbards usually take their entire family along: their daughter and two sons, the sons’ spouses, and the five grandchildren. “When those people and little kids, fourteen strong, come out on the platform,” explains Humbard, “it says to the people throughout the world that there’s hope for the family.”

The Humbard task is carried out with the use of a $1 million four-engine Lockheed Electra prop-jet, complete with two bedrooms, leased from a Washington, D.C., dealer, four tractor-trailer rigs stuffed with TV equipment, a portable stage and set, and wardrobes for the Humbard troupe.

The trailers are sent in advance, whether overland or abroad. “In most cities of the world they don’t have the facilities to do the production we require,” Anderson explains.

At Christmas the Humbards were in Israel where the evangelist rented three Comsat satellites for $800,000 to broadcast a religious program for simultaneous, worldwide reception, said to be a first in religious television programming.

The family spent February in Florida, where the Humbards own a $100,000 condominium. Maude Aimee, the evangelist’s wife who is one of the show’s main singers, spent part of the time in a Ft. Lauderdale hospital’s cardiac-care unit for an unspecified ailment. Humbard blamed their exhausting schedule.

In March the Humbards flew to Tokyo where their rally in a sports arena was described as the largest Christian gathering since the Billy Graham crusade ten years earlier (when 14,000 attended). Of the 11,000 at the Humbard rally, 4,000 responded to the evangelist’s invitation to come forward for prayer. The Tokyo rally will be aired this month in the U.S.

Humbard first landed on TV in Tokyo in 1974 on an English-language cable station servicing hotels. The following year he began airing programs in Japanese. Since late 1975 Humbard’s show has been on Channel 12, a major Tokyo station, on Saturday mornings. Last December he expanded to Osaka. The current ratings indicate his show is watched by more than four million persons, and an average of 1,500 letters arrive weekly at the Humbard office in Tokyo.

Local pastors and others offer plenty of criticism of Humbard and his methods. They object to his description of himself as the people’s TV “pastor.” “This terminology suggests that it is all right to stay home from church, using the program as a substitute,” remarked a Japanese pastor. “He can’t baptize them or conduct their weddings and preach their funerals, and he can’t answer the phone call of a would-be suicide who needs help.”

Others feel he features his family too much, and they wonder why the choir of the Akron church, for example, is not seen and heard more. (Maude Aimee and the children are paid for their TV work.)

But those who criticize his methods often are the first to applaud his message and his devotion to the Bible as the infallible Word of God.

Humbard’s Tokyo office is manned by clergyman John Sakurai, 37, and an eight-member staff. They send out more than 14,000 copies a month of the Humbard magazine The Answer. The budget for the Japanese operation is $28,000 a month. Viewer response to appeals is never consistent. The Japanese are unaccustomed to writing checks, and most banks in Japan have no check-writing system. To send money through the mail requires a special Post Office coupon or a special registered envelope for sending cash. Even so, viewers last December sent in $18,000, the record so far. The Humbard organization has twice contributed to homes for handicapped children in Tokyo, says Sakurai.

In Toyohashi, 200 miles from Tokyo where the program is out of receiving range, Kiyoko Suzuki bought a videotape player, and through a special arrangement with the Tokyo office she plays the telecast each week at her home. Her daughter-in-law started a shuttle service in her car, picking up twenty to thirty people a week. The Suzuki family put up a large billboard advertising the video services in front of the dress shop they manage. They schedule viewings on Mondays and Fridays, and they frequently squeeze in others on request. The group chartered a bus to attend the Tokyo rally.

Although the singing comes through in English on TV, the Japanese words appear superimposed on the screen. Sakurai’s wife Rieko translates the message with a special concern for lip synchronization. The reading is done by Yasuo Hisamatsu, a professional actor and former chairman of Japan Actor’s Association. Hisamatsu was raised in a Salvation

Army home but turned away from the faith for a time. He now believes God directed him into a theatrical career in order to prepare him for the Humbard translation task. His wife made a decision at the Tokyo rally to become a Christian.

The electronic marvels that make it possible to put Hisamatsu’s words into Humbard’s mouth are beyond the comprehension of some. At the Tokyo rally a pastor’s second-grade son, upon hearing Humbard in person, said: “Hey, what is this? That guy speaks Japanese every week on TV—why is he talking in English today?”

After Tokyo, the Humbards and their team (about fifteen besides the family members, including two tutors for the younger children) traveled to Manila and Hawaii for rallies. Next month they are scheduled to go to Australia.

Because he now preaches less than half the time at the Akron cathedral, the evangelist has appointed associate pastor Ron Hembree to handle the home-church chores. (Hembree has also been one of Humbard’s main writers). Loyal members nevertheless say the spirit is stronger than ever at the cathedral.

The Humbard family has set up a for-profit corporation, known as New Day Press, separate from the church, to handle book and record sales and distributions and to arrange Holy Land tours for Humbard’s followers. Humbard says he’s been recording for Columbia and RCA for thirty-seven years, and that the royalties from his records and books have always come to him personally. But, he adds, he always gives a tenth or more of this income to the cathedral. “Last year we gave $13,000,” he said.

The evangelist declines to discuss his salary from the cathedral and television ministry, but he told a Toronto reporter: “I’m the most underpaid man that you’ll ever look at. I’m in the television industry and feeding 543 television stations and over 1,000 satellite stations throughout the world. And yet men that are producing an hour’s program in North America are paid more in one hour than I am paid in years.”

Four years ago it didn’t look as though the Humbard organization would survive. State and federal securities officials had halted sales of the cathedral’s unregistered bonds (more than $12 million worth), the church was stuck with a lot of commercial property and a multi-million-dollar college campus it could not pay for, and bankruptcy seemed certain. It was a difficult struggle but Humbard managed to raise the millions needed to repay the holders of the notes and bonds. In the end he apologized to his people for getting involved in commercial ventures and “not following the call of God, which was for me to preach the Gospel.”

Now, says the evangelist, “God has blessed our faithfulness to his calling. He gave me a vision twenty-five years ago that the world could be won by television—back before there was even the technology to do it. This year, with the faithfulness of God’s people behind us, I believe we’re going to do it.”

A Plane Is Down

Interim pastor Paul Jackson and three others were praying at New Hope Baptist Church near Dallas, Georgia, on the stormy afternoon of April 4 when a loud roar overhead and crashing noises sent them scurrying for the basement. They thought it was a tornado. Instead, it was a crippled Southern Airways DC-9 that had clipped a telephone pole some fifty paces from the church and had crashed farther up the road. Jackson and the others ran through the rain to aid the victims.

All through the night and around the clock for the next three days, pastors and members of churches in the Dallas area pitched in to help. They comforted survivors at local hospitals, ministered to the families of victims (most of the plane’s eighty-two passengers were killed, along with four adults and four children on the ground) fed and looked after rescue workers, newspeople, police, and crash investigators.

Funeral services for seven of those killed on the ground were held at New Hope. Among them were New Hope member Faye Griffin and her six-month-old son. They were in a car with two of Mrs. Griffin’s sisters-in-law and their three children, two of them infants. Their car, outside a service station and grocery store, was crushed by the plane and then consumed by exploding gas tanks of the service station. Nearby, a 71-year-old woman was killed in her front yard.

All the adults were members of Baptist churches in the area.

The End of Life

During his Easter morning sermon, Pastor Frank Gunn of First Baptist Church in Biloxi, Mississippi, commented to his congregation that no one knows how much time he has left, and he asked each one to think what he would do if he had only three minutes to live.

Suddenly there was a scuffle at a side door and a shot rang out. Many worshipers reportedly thought at first that it was dramatization of the pastor’s sermon. But the gun and the intruder were for real (usher Quentin Hengen was uninjured in the scuffle).

The gunman, Ford Dawson, 52, a retired Air Force major from nearby Gulfport, stepped up to the pulpit, leading his nine-year-old son’s dog by a leash. He told the congregation and choir not to be afraid. Witnesses say he talked about having to pay a price for wrongdoing. He shot the dog and then put the gun to his own head and pulled the trigger. He died later in a hospital. (The dog was expected to recover.)

The service was being televised live over WLOX-TV, and a technician called police, who arrived about the time that Dawson shot himself. Just before the fatal shot, the telecast went off the air, but no one seems to know how it happened.

Dawson had a history of emotional problems, said police.

Earlier, in a lawyer’s office in Spokane, Washington, minister Donald Wineinger of the Worldwide Church of God shot his wife to death and then turned the gun on himself. Mrs. Wineinger was seeking a divorce, according to a letter circulated by the national church body. The couple had four children.

Last month cult leader Oric Bovar, 59, leaped to his death from his tenth-floor apartment in New York City. He and five of his followers were awaiting trial for failing to report a death. Police discovered them in an apartment last December trying to resurrect a young member who had died of cancer. They had been praying over his body for two months. Bovar emphasized psychic experiences, and his disciples (hundreds in the New York and Los Angeles entertainment communities) had to adhere to a strict code of self-discipline.

The Hartford Affirmations

Against the World For the World: The Hartford Appeal and the Future of American Religion, edited by Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus (Seabury, 1976, 164 pp., $8.95), is reviewed by Bruce Demarest, associate professor of systematic theology, Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary, Denver, Colorado.

In January, 1975, eighteen spokesmen from Protestant, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic communions issued the now famous Hartford Appeal for Theological Affirmation, in which thirteen “false and debilitating” theses characteristic of the radical religious establishment were forthrightly challenged (see Christianity Today, February 14, 1975, pp. 53–55). Hartford focused attention on the demise of transcendence, with obvious reference to the popular theologies of secularism, existentialism, process thought, and liberation. The initial Hartford consultation, which was regarded as an experiment in ecumenical theology, registered a significant protest against the captivity of the Christian faith to what it called “the primacy of modern thought,” which seriously undermines the Church’s ability to carry out its God-given task in the world.

In this volume eight signers of the Hartford Appeal explore in greater detail the concerns unfolded in it. The central theme of the contemporary loss of transcendence is given considerable attention. Although evangelicals tend to view the Hartford Appeal as a protest against the theological left, more than one essayist points out that not only the radical community in Berkeley but also the typical conservative church on Main Street, U.S.A., holds a theology in which transcendence is seriously compromised. Neuhaus typically argues in his essay that insofar as conservative Christianity uncritically assimilates the values of the surrounding culture (e.g., American civil religion), it permits a secular ideology to dictate the terms of its conviction, thus diminishing its awareness of the transcendent reality. Quite boldly and unfairly Neuhaus comments: “Culture religion of the right is uninhibited in its use of metaphors of transcendence, of God, of judgment, of life everlasting. But they are captive metaphors, neatly dovetailed with an agenda set by the world.… It is insidious. It is demonic.”

Peter Berger receptively outlines the usual process by which the Church’s concept of transcendence is compromised. First, a secular definition of reality (e.g., evolutionism) gains increasing acceptance in society. Unconsciously the Church redefines its faith in terms of the current ideological fashion. Finally, the Church reorients its mission to achieve the newly adopted set of goals. The result is an increasing tendency to explain the world “in terms devoid of transcendent referents.” Belief has capitulated to unbelief. In view of such widespread trends Hartford prophetically summons the Church to return to the authentic transcendent core of the faith, which alone makes the theological enterprise possible.

Hartford’s heavy weapons are trained primarily on the theological left. The fatal error of the secularist theologies, according to Neuhaus, is their belief that salvation can be effected by a course of political action independent of an authentically Christian world view. This perspective is radically opposed by Hartford’s affirmation that “salvation cannot be found apart from God” (Theme 6). All too often on the radical left Christian identity has been abandoned and secular ideologies so accommodated that the way back to the fold has been lost. Whereas young evangelicals are engaged in a serious reappraisal of their social responsibility, the secular Christian, for his part, shows no inclination to rethink the meaning of evangelism.

Several essayists voice concern over the capitulation of the World Council of Churches to foreign agendas. Avery Dulles observes that theological ecumenism has largely abandoned the task of confronting the new paganism. The conciliar movement shows no indication of “addressing itself to the massive problem posed for all the churches by the rampant immanentism, humanism, secularism, psychologism, sociologism of our age,” which concertedly compromise belief in the transcendence of God. The mission of Hartford, simply stated, is “to unmask the secret infidelity at work in both our popular and academic culture.”

Any comfort the conservative Christian might draw from barrages directed against the radical left is vitiated by crossfire against his own position. Judgments expressed about the theological right, such as that it is blindly captive to culture, or that it insists on the “fundamentals” of the faith while being obsessed with “legalistic and literalistic controversies,” doubtless are true of the fundamentalist wing of evangelicalism. However, one is concerned about Hartford’s skepticism of conservative Christianity as a whole.

In this regard, George Lindbeck concludes that theology is in the midst of a shift away from historic, conservative models to new forms as yet undetermined. The time-honored traditional formulations Lindbeck boldly characterizes as “old paradigms … faltering under an accumulating weight of anomalies.” Apparently the theological models propounded by Paul, Augustine, or Luther—conditioned as they were by historical and cultural circumstances—are regarded as non-normative for modern, scientific man. Lindbeck’s latitudinarianism is unmasked by his exhortation that a responsible theological stance—i.e., one radically opposed to both left and right—must “resist the inclination to suppose that there is anything intrinsically good or bad” in one expression of the faith versus another. While granting the misjudgments and anomalies on the part of the far right, the Christian concerned for “the faith … once delivered to the saints” must manifest concern at any reduction of historic Christianity.

Richard Mouw’s essay, “New Alignments,” is the sole evangelical contribution to the volume. Mouw argues that the Hartford project is a significant step toward the creation of an environment in which more responsible theological discussions can take place. Mouw’s optimism centers on Hartford’s clear affirmation of what Machen called “the aweful transcendence of God,” which puts Hartford far nearer to evangelical belief than to the secularist left. In terms of evangelicalism’s response to Hartford, Mouw divides the evangelical community into five groups: fundamentalists, conservative and progressive evangelicals, and conservative and progressive confessionalists. Of these, only the progressive evangelicals and progressive confessionalists (where Mouw places himself) can be expected to respond favorably to the Hartford Appeal.

The Hartford Appeal for Theological Affirmation, as amplified in the present volume, is more a negation than a constructive affirmation. With courage and conviction it pronounces the reductio ad absurdum of modern theological movements that exchange the roles of God and man. In the words of Lindbeck, “the Hartford Appeal … battles for the possibility of theology rather than itself proposing a theology.” In this respect both the Appeal and this collection of essays are to be heartily applauded.

Nevertheless, from its broadly based confessional stance, rid of what it regards as the extremes of right and left, Hartford clearly proceeds no further than the stage of prolegomena. Hartford has demolished the old structures but is uncertain how to proceed with a program of reconstruction. From its own perspective an alternative theology has not been proposed, for “in the present circumstances, that would be divisive.”

The crucial point clearly is whether the present theological latitude of Hartford, which embraces Tillichians, Rahnerians, Barthians, Whiteheadians, et al., will in due course give birth to a theological affirmation with specific content that is both relevant to the world and true to the Word. While evangelicalism awaits the outcome of the Hartford experiment, it would do well to re-examine its own commitment and priorities in the light of the searching criticisms articulated in the Appeal and in these valuable essays.

An Evangelical Social Reformer

Shaftesbury: The Great Reformer 1801–1885, by Georgina Battiscombe (Houghton Mifflin, 1975, 365 pp., $15), and The Seventh Earl: A Dramatized Biography, by Grace Irwin (Eerdmans, 1976, 295 pp., $7.95), are reviewed by Richard V. Pierard, professor of history, Indiana State University, Terre Haute.

Charles Spurgeon, David Livingstone, Charles Finney, and D. L. Moody are nineteenth-century giants of the faith whose names are household words in evangelical Christian circles. However, the subject of these two books, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (1801–1885), though lesser known, particularly on this side of the Atlantic, probably has had just as much impact as any of these contemporaries.

Lord Ashley’s indefatigable labors on behalf of the poor and oppressed in Britain constitute one of the great epics of Christian history. Of aristocratic background, he entered Parliament in 1826 and served six decades except for a short break in 1846–47. He succeeded his father as Earl of Shaftesbury in 1851 and is generally known by that name. Though he was a Tory, his concern with social issues moved him increasingly closer to an independent stance. Among his accomplishments were reforming the treatment of the mentally ill, restricting female and child labor and working hours in the factories and coal mines, outlawing the use of “climbing boys” as chimney sweeps, initiating rudimentary education for slum children (“Ragged Schools”), creating better housing for urban workers, and fostering public health in London. He backed Florence Nightingale’s program to revamp military hospitals during the Crimean War and supported the abolition of slavery in the United States.

At the same time, he was a man of deep Christian convictions. He identified with the evangelical wing of the Anglican church and had an unshakable faith in Scripture, prayer, and the second coming of Christ. He firmly opposed the inroads of ritualism and rationalism in the church and used his political influence to secure the appointment of evangelicals to church posts. He never made any qualitative distinctions among political, philanthropic, and religious endeavors—they were all part of the totality of his life. Because he wanted to see Britain forged by an evangelical faith into an instrument for God’s use, all his concerns were religious. He rose from prayer or Bible study ready to serve the Lord, whether by local charity or by imperial politics.

Until the recent surge of interest in social and urban history, his work as a humanitarian reformer attracted only passing attention. The three-volume official biography by Edwin Hodder, The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (1886), which consisted of lengthy extracts from his diaries interwoven with copious praise for his great deeds, had long been out of print. The same was true with the major early-twentieth-century studies. John L. and Barbara Hammond, socialists who viewed religion as a means used by the patriarchal governing classes to help preserve the status quo, portrayed him in their book Lord Shaftesbury (1923) as a narrow, egotistical evangelical who abandoned the struggle for political reform and public education. To refute their contentions, J. Wesley Bready in Lord Shaftesbury and Social and Industrial Progress (1926) painted an effusive portrait of the earl as a practical saint and colaborer with God.

Since the 1960s he has once again drawn the attention of historians, as indicated by the reprinting of the Hodder and Hammond volumes in 1971 and the publication in 1964 of a new biography by G. F. A. Best, a scholar of British social and economic history. This brief but well-balanced work concentrated on his political and personal efforts on behalf of the needy and vividly depicted Shaftesbury at war with the evils of the city. Best pointed out that in his later years the earl shifted his attention from the conditions of employment to the human problems of the “poorest” poor. Unmoved by the contemporary obsession with the religious and moral aspects of poverty, he clearly understood that environmental factors were the prime culprit.

The two books under review here are the latest additions to this growing body of Shaftesbury literature. Both are by women who have written other books about nineteenth-century personages, both draw extensively upon unpublished diaries and letters, and both show a deep appreciation for their subject. Here the similarity stops, since the Battiscombe volume is a serious historical study while Irwin’s is a biographical novel, or to use her term, a “dramatized biography.”

Battiscombe’s work is a well-written, full-scale chronological treatment of Shaftesbury, but some will find the social and political background somewhat thin and others may disagree with her acceptance of the traditional view that the masses in early Victorian England lived in appalling poverty. Although she deals extensively with his political activities, there are spots where the narrative is fuzzy. An important contribution is her discussion of the millennial (always misspelled) element in Shaftesbury’s thought and how it impelled him repeatedly into reform activities.

The Irwin biography is more difficult to assess. The author says she doubts that she has “put a dozen sentences into my hero’s mouth which he did not say or write,” but the manner in which this is done makes the work unacceptable as historical scholarship. She focuses primarily on the earl’s personal and family life and provides numerous insights into his joys and heartaches, even to the point of becoming melodramatic. Much less attention is paid to his achievements as such or the ideas underlying his actions. In fact, unless one is already familiar with the details of Shaftesbury’s life and nineteenth-century politics and culture, the story is difficult to follow. She jumps from one incident to another without adequate transitions and repeatedly drops in references to contemporary happenings that will confuse the uninitiated reader.

As a device to comprehend the past, the historical novel has considerable merit, since the author can recreate moods and thought patterns not readily apparent in the available documents. But, other than portraying the experiences of one aristocratic family, Irwin does not really capture the essence of life in Victorian England, except perhaps in her description of the occasion in 1848 when Lord Ashley met with the London thieves. This is undoubtedly the most moving passage in the book, and readers who see Christianity as a purely spiritual religion that has no ministry to the physical needs of people will be challenged to rethink their conception of the faith.

Both books may be read with profit, although Battiscombe’s is the better one. They show that the incessant labor of this godly man on behalf of others was truly astounding, not only in the political realm but in the personal as well. He served on innumerable boards and commissions of charitable organizations, regularly visited factories and slums areas to observe conditions first-hand, and repeatedly gave money to needy persons and charities.

For evangelicals who are active in public life, his career takes on special significance. In a day when some socially concerned Christians urge us to reject voting as a “liberal cop-out” and condemn participation in political affairs as “selling out to the system,” it is well for us to consider how much this one person, whose conscience was sensitized by the Word of God and the Holy Spirit, was able to accomplish in the struggle with the entrenched forces of evil and injustice. We may not agree (I certainly do not) with all of Shaftesbury’s methods or political views, but we must not forget that God does work through dedicated persons to achieve his purposes in the world. We should, therefore, encourage and support those faithful Christians in governmental positions who have committed themselves to combat oppression and secure justice for all people, recognizing, as Shaftesbury so clearly did, that the final alleviation of the world’s collective misery will take place in the restoration of the creation at Christ’s return.

Christian Humanism

On Being a Christian, by Hans Küng (Doubleday, 1976, 720 pp., $12.95), is reviewed by Donald G. Bloesch, professor of theology. Dubuque Theological School, Dubuque, Iowa.

This is a book of ecumenical significance, for it shows how far a Catholic theologian is willing to go to bring the faith into dialogue with the modern world. Küng abandons his earlier kerygmatic stance, where Karl Barth’s influence was more noticeable, and attempts to make the Christian message credible and intelligible to those who no longer believe or who have doubts concerning the faith. He is quite emphatic that one must be rationally convinced before one will consider the venture of faith. Yet he recognizes that true and lasting certainty is provided not by rational arguments but only by God himself in the commitment of faith. Küng sees his position as a middle way between the authoritative proclamation of dialectical theology and the purely rational proofs for God’s existence of natural theology.

Küng propounds a “social-critical theology” that engages man at the deepest levels of his existence but that also calls into question the values of the religio-cultural establishment. He sees Christianity as a “radical humanism” and salvation primarily as humanization. The reason for the Incarnation is that man may learn to accept and bear his humanity. Küng is highly critical of the satisfaction theory of the Atonement as enunciated by Anselm and instead sees the cross of Christ in terms of the vicarious identification of God with fallen humanity. He advocates “a Christology from below” in which Jesus becomes the model of true humanity rather than a divine being in human garb. He contends for a functional as over against an “essence” Christology. In his reconstruction of theology he jettisons belief in the Virgin Birth as a biological-historical fact, the preexistence of Jesus Christ, which he regards as mythology, and the empty tomb, whose historicity he considers dubious. He also rejects the miracles of the Bible understood as the evidence of supernatural intervention. Not surprisingly, he likewise calls into question such traditional Roman Catholic dogmas as the immaculate conception and the assumption of Mary and Mary as the mother of God.

In setting forth his social-critical theology, he is insistent that liberation from economic and political oppression, which is man’s self-liberation, must never be confused with redemption from inward sin, which is given only by God. On the other hand, those who claim personal redemption in Christ are not heeding the call of their Lord unless they go on to seek the social emanicipation of their brothers in need. He takes issue with some modern-day prophets who practically equate Christianity and socialism. In his view, an informed Christian should be free to criticize socialism as well as support it. But any program of social reform must be sharply distinguished from the kingdom of God, which only God can establish.

Küng’s section on world religions is especially enlightening, though it will not be satisfactory to those of an evangelical persuasion. He is adamant that Christianity must not be amalgamated with the insights and values of other religions, since this denies the real differences between faiths. He calls for dialogue but not syncretism. At the same time he is willing to see other world religions as ways to salvation, though he insists that the biblical witness to truth is unique. Evangelical Christians especially will take issue with him when he contends that a faithful Muslim who lives up to the precepts of the Koran can thereby be saved.

Küng’s work should be seen as anthropology more than theology, since he takes for his point of departure contemporary human experience. Belief in God, he says, is based on the experience of being accepted by man. He contends that we can speak meaningfully of God only in terms of our concrete experience of reality. In this view, the only absolute that we can know is the absolute in the relative, the infinite in the finite. God is the most enduring reality “in man and in man’s history.” Yet Küng is careful not to equate God with the natural ground of the world or with an impersonal world force. True love, he insists, is genuinely human love, and it is through such love that we can understand God’s love for us in Christ. He regards the biblical texts as fundamentally an expression of man’s faith, not as God’s self-witness in biblical history.

One can discern in Küng’s work the imprint of historical positivism, the pseudo-scientific view that history is a closed continuum of cause and effect and that therefore explanation must take place in terms of modern ideas of causation. On this basis he rules out any supernatural intervention into nature and history, for this “would contradict all scientific thinking.” With Bultmann and Käsemann he calls for demythologizing the Bible, which means reinterpreting the “myths” as existential truths.

This book is provocative and challenging, but it is also disconcerting, for it indicates that through an apologetic concern Küng is moving toward the left and away from biblical moorings. Some of us who seek and pray for church unity had hoped that Catholic renewal would mean something more profound than accommodation to modern humanism. Küng does not fully accommodate, since he always points to the abiding truth in the biblical witness, which he sets off from the truths of modern philosophy and the other world religions. I can identify with him in his opposition to a syncretistic indifferentism and the idea of the “anonymous Christian,” which he thinks virtually equates the Church with the world. Yet I believe that in starting from what can be rationally verified in human experience rather than from an authoritative divine revelation in history, Küng has been led to propose a Christianity separated from its biblical metaphysic. And he has thereby reduced the Gospel to moral and spiritual values in a manner similar to that of the culture-Protestantism against which Barth protested.

Briefly Noted

Friends need to spend time together. Sharing life with someone in an unstifled relationship is more than the sum total of two individuals—this is The Heart of Friendship by Muriel James and Louis M. Savary (Harper & Row, 205 pp., $6.95). A combination of timeless quotes and psychological insights portrays the process of friendship with its stresses and joys.

An autobiographical account that may be a source of encouragement and inspiration is Defeating Despair and Depression by Matilda Nordtvedt (Moody, 128 pp., $1.25 pb). The biggest hurdle is in answering the question, “Do I want to be the most I can be?” If so, “Am I willing to take the necessary steps to become that person?,” an essential question because “there are many comforts and advantages to being an ‘unwell’ person.” In Courage to Live (Judson, 127 pp., $3.95 pb) John Bishop combines his forty-two years of experience as a minister with related Bible stories to present ways of helping with life’s problems.

“The agony of church restructure” is the apt subtitle for a critical study by two Duke Divinity School professors, Paul Mickey and Robert Wilson, of the recent bureaucratic realignments within the American Baptists, Episcopalians, United Presbyterians, Southern Presbyterians, and United Methodists. What New Creation? (Abingdon, 192 pp., $5.95 pb) is highly recommended not only for active members of the five studied denominations but for those in other groups undergoing or considering restructure.

Thank God I’m O.K.: The Gospel According to T.A. by Richard Batey (Abingdon, 112 pp., $2.95 pb) is a serious attempt to express biblical principles in a contemporary form, specifically the concepts of “transactional analysis.” The author sees Jesus Christ as the “central historical example of I’m O.K.—you’re O.K.” and original sin as “universal not O.K.ness.” But to keep from taking yourself or any psychological system too seriously, read I’m O.K., You’re a Pain in the Neck by Albert Vorspan (Doubleday, 131 pp., $2.95 pb). After studying endless self-help systems from T.A. to T.M., the author has constructed a tongue-in-cheek guide to help you “really” understand yourself. Caution: the sarcastic language is not for those who dislike cynical humor.

“God chose the Israelites so that they might make known to the rest of the nations his truth and his justice.” A balanced perspective on the “election” of the Jewish people is contained in Israel, A Biblical View by William Sanford LaSor (Eerdmans, 108 pp., $2.45 pb). The strength of the book lies in its summary of biblical events concerning Israel and their spiritual ramifications. God’s purpose in history is in uniting his people. Especially interesting is the final chapter on the Church as Israel and Israel’s role in prophecy as found in the Book of Revelation.

A call away from isolation and toward interaction with others forms the basis of both Open Heart, Open Home by Karen Burton Mains (David C. Cook, 199 pp., $5.95) and Deliver Us From Fear by Eileen Guder (Word, 117 pp., $5.95). Mains deals very practically with involvement in the world through a ministry of hospitality. Guder wants us to be less fearful so that we can be more involved. Personal illustrations abound in both books.

Did you think post-millennialism was all but dead? That symposium compilers were having difficulty finding someone to uphold the “post” view among “pre” and “a” advocates? Well, see The Journal of Christian Reconstruction, Volume 3, Number 2 (Winter, 1976–77) for a 128-page collection of articles by five living post-mils. There are also more than sixty pages of other articles and reviews in this issue of the semi-annual publication (P.O. Box 158, Vallecito, California 95251; $7/year; $4/issue).

ROMAN CATHOLICISM, it should be clear to everyone by now, is so internally divided that one wonders how it could ever have been otherwise. Actually it never was the monolith that outsiders thought, though the range and pace of diversity has increased of late. Paul Witte stresses the similarities he perceives between Protestant and Catholic evangelicals in On Common Ground (Word, 135 pp., $4.95), a simply written book. Journalist Marcelle Bernstein gives a worldwide overview of The Nuns (Lippincott, 326 pp., $9.95), most of whom are Catholic. Prolific writer Andrew Greeley celebrates The Communal Catholic (Seabury, 198 pp., $8.95) as over against “ecclesial” Catholics, both clerical and lay. By contrast, George A. Kelly asks Who Should Run the Catholic Church? Social Scientists, Theologians or Bishops? (Our Sunday Visitor, 224 pp., $8.95). He clearly opts for the latter. Greeley joins two fellow sociologists, William McCready and Kathleen McCourt, to present the results of a major study in Catholic Schools in a Declining Church (Sheed, Andrews, and McMeel, 484 pp., $15). They put the blame squarely on the Pope’s reaffirmation of opposition to contraception in 1968. The same publisher has presented an equally controversial book, The Church and the Homosexual (212 pp., $10) by John J. McNeill, which calls for endorsement of homosexual practice. The book was delayed two years while the Jesuit order was deciding to permit its publication. John Courtney Murray: Theologian in Conflict is a sympathetic ideological and biographical study of a liberal (for his time—1904–67) Catholic by Donald Pelotte (Paulist, 210 pp., $9.95). The impact of personal experience on religious thought is set forth more briefly by ten generally left-wing Catholics in Journeys, edited by Gregory Baum (Paulist, 271 pp., $6.95 pb). Finally, The Eucharist in Ecumenical Dialogue edited by Leonard Swidler (Paulist, 154 pp., $2.95 pb) has essays constrasting Catholic views with those of seven other groups, including Anglicans, Baptists, and even Jews.

New Periodical

A well-known writer in a number of practical-theology fields, Jay Adams, is the editor-in-chief of The Journal of Pastoral Practice. The first issue (Winter, 1977) has numerous articles on such topics as “counseling the decision-makers,” “how to handle a financial request,” and “preaching with a purpose.” Eventually it is to be issued regularly, but for now each issue is sold separately by the publisher ($3.50 for the first issue; Presbyterian and Reformed, Box 185, Nutley, N.J. 07110).

The revolution now under way in linguistic studies could easily overthrow long-held assumptions that bear on many related fields. Noam Chomsky’s insistence in the 1960s that the universal structures of language reflect innate human factors rather than an empirical evolutionary derivation has brought swift theory reconstruction and a great deal of controversy. Analysis of cognitive and conceptual aspects of language has increasingly disputed claims long made by many anthropologists that language is a human invention in an evolutionary context.

Dr. Kenneth Pike of the University of Michigan and Dr. Robert E. Longacre of the University of Texas/Arlington are two significant contributors among a solid core of linguistic experts long engaged in the study of language communication. Longacre’s An Anatomy of Speech Notions, an extensive attempt to catalogue the notional categories underlying language, has recently been issued by The Peter de Ridder Press (Box 168, Lisse, Netherlands). Completed under a grant from the Institute for Advanced Christian Studies, Longacre’s 358-page work (references and index extend it to just under 400) rejects not only the notion that language is a human creation but also the insistence of Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman (An Introduction to Language, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974) that it is merely an evolutionary emergent and no “gift of God.”

Longacre discusses in great detail the cognitive-conceptual apparatus that characterizes the human species. Much of his argument is too technical for nonspecialists, but certainly clear enough is his emphasis that human beings are uniquely endowed for talk about everything on earth or sea, and even on planets and universes not yet visited. Human language is, moreover, inescapably involved in logical activity. It organizes data according to implicational relationships and causal explanation; that is, it functions in rational-verbal activities that daily make possible human communication and behavior as we know them.

Longacre sees in this panorama of language and its categories an incentive to ask whether meaning and purpose characterize the objectively real world, or whether the human psyche is only “a raft of rationality adrift on a sea of meaninglessness.” In effect he challenges the good faith of those who champion the latter view, depicting them as smugglers of “elements of purpose and meaning” that pure chance does not allow.

Longacre rejects the notion that linguists deal only with diverse languages and not with Language per se. “The evidence is coming in,” he writes, “that there are language universals which underlie the surface structure categories of particular languages and that languages differ more in their surface structure than in these underlying categories” (p. 317). In short, some features of a “common architectural plan” underlie all the world’s languages.

Since we view reality only through these innate language structures, do we therefore (recalling Kant) distort the world beyond? Not at all, Longacre contends; rather than veiling reality, language and its categories are windows into it. To live in the world as viable human beings, he argues, necessitates a belief that “there is a rationality at the heart of things.” Contrary to the pantheistic option in which man projects his own rationality upon the greater Whole, Longacre commends the theistic view that “man and his rationality are creatures of God and his rationality.” He affirms that “the Judeo-Christian God revealed in the Scriptures of those two religions must be central to a satisfactory world-view” because this alone adequately preserves “valid connections between mind and fact and between fact and fact” (p. 321).

In positing a Rationality at the heart of things, a Creator who bestows an ultimate structure upon man and the world, Longacre at times leaves it unclear whether the infinite-personal God for whom he contends is known as the achievement of an essentially anthropological argument or is known on the basis of intelligible divine self-revelation. He does insist, however, that “if there be a God of the sort revealed in the Scriptures, then we have good reason to believe that language is fit to talk about Him” (p. 325). In that event, the infinite personal Creator and encoder of man described in the Bible qualifies man for communication with himself and others. Yet, on broadly Thomistic lines, Longacre holds that God-talk and other language is basically analogical.

It would seem that the forfeiture of the univocal truth borne by language weakens the role of language unnecessarily. To be sure, while describing language as “practical poetry” Longacre insists at the same time on its “truth-revelatory nature” and defends the validity of propositional scriptural statements about God and the universe. But the larger significance of his work on the rational categories of language lies in the fact that it places the biblical doctrine of the imago dei once again on center stage in the discussion of human speech.

No less significant is the fact that new literary techniques are calling into question almost a century of biblical studies, particularly the JEPD documentary hypothesis, which has brought Bible scholarship to a virtual impasse. The contemporary study of discourse structure, some scholars think, will revolutionize the widely prevalent assumption that the Old Testament gains its unity from editorial redaction of once detached and atomistic units.

Applying recent analytic tools to an analysis of the Noahic flood narrative, Longacre asserts that the stylistic variations serve the pace and mood of the story much more than they identify supposed sources. In a paper presented in 1976 to the Society of Biblical Literature on “The Discourse Structure of the Flood Narrative,” he concluded that “the flood story as it stands has a consistent and plausible discourse structure, that the variations in style found in certain parts of it are appropriate to the distinctions in the subject matter. Even small details of structure such as the presence or absence of resumptive pronouns and variations in the form of quotation formula will probably be eventually explicable here and elsewhere in the Hebrew Old Testament in terms of discourse structure.… Repetitive allusions to the same event—far from being evidence of more than one documentary source—are either (1) cohesive features which contribute to the unity of the discourse, or (2) features of parallelism and paraphrase which mark the prominence of the peak” (Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers 1976, edited by George MacRae, Scholars Press, p. 258). Longacre affirms that even variations of the divine names Elohim and Jahweh and references to dates and chronology are more readily explicable not as “the hallmark of a special writer (P)” but rather as an integral part of the discourse flow of the narrative. He expressly concludes that in the Noahic flood narrative “the assumption of divergent documentary sources” not only is unnecessary but also “obscures much of the truly elegant structure of the story.”

My husband answered the telephone in Grand Rapids when the sudden message came: “They have been trying to reach you from Switzerland to let you know that Dr. Hans Rookmaaker had a heart attack and died tonight.” Impossible to digest such news, the announcement of the unexpected passage from full activity to death of someone close to us.

Hans Rookmaaker had been a close friend and associate of my husband since 1948. He was professor of art history at the Free University of Amsterdam and a widely known lecturer and author, as well as a member of L’Abri fellowship, working with his wife in the Dutch L’Abri. He was only fifty-four, and we all expected many more years of his ministry of lecturing and writing about the arts from a Christian point of view. On Sunday he had attended the service in the L’Abri chapel. That afternoon he had been lying down because he did not feel well, his wife told me. Then at eight o’clock he felt worse, he told her, and had a slight pain in his chest. Suddenly, within five minutes, he was absent from the body and present with the Lord.

Sudden death creates a sharp line of before and after, and we recognize anew that we are living through a period of history with clear limits. Time and space take on a sharper definition, as the value of being where the Lord wants us to be, doing what he would have us do, is suddenly spotlighted by the lightning streak of death.

“And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men. And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said …” (Luke 2:13–15). The appearance of the first angel with the glory of the Lord shining about him was sudden, and the shepherds were afraid. The message they were given was a sudden one, cutting all history into a before and after, to be known by succeeding centuries as B.C. and A.D. Then there were many angels, and all praising God—a glorious sight and sound for the shepherds to experience. But just as suddenly it was gone. The contrast of light and darkness must have been staggering. The shepherds would never have forgotten that glorious sight, but they told others also whose memories could then contain that most important announcement of a sudden happening: “Unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:10, 11).

Sudden happenings. Death, earthquake, fire, tornado, hurricane, automobile accident, disabling illness, all bringing a recognition of two central realities: the before and after of history, and the continuity of history in which memory is such a central bridge. The promises of a coming Messiah had been given for centuries in increasingly clear terms; yet his birth was also “sudden” and the announcement was sudden. Jesus made it known that his being on earth with his disciples was temporary, and told of his coming death; yet to those who were with him, that death was a sudden happening. And his resurrection and his closeness to them once again in his new, changed body were so sudden as to be incredible to them at first.

“Who will take Dr. Rookmaaker’s place?” I was asked when I spoke of his important contribution to the understanding of the place of art and culture in the Christian view of the whole man. “Nobody,” was my quick reply. God has made us as individual, diverse people with significance in history, each with something both to be and to do that is unique. We are not machine-like parts in a larger machine that can be replaced by new parts ground out in a factory. Each of us is a person who cannot be replaced by another person, and the exact thing that we have to do cannot be done by another.

We mourn over the death of a loved one, and we mourn rightly. Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus, and also was angry at death. Satan brought about the first death, the separation, and all of them that take place are of the same origin. We agonize over all the wisdom, understanding and ideas that are no longer reachable as our human friend dies and communication is cut off. Our deep regret and very real sorrow are right. Nobody will take that person’s place.

But the before and after of history as one line after another is drawn must be recognized and met head on. There is something we are meant to do about it. With due place given for the emotions of sorrow, there is also a quick “now because of this, not in spite of it, get on with what you have to do in the time that is left.”

When Jesus was suddenly taken up in a cloud out of the sight of the disciples, two angels came to speak firmly to them: “Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven.” They were meant to get on with their most important task of making known the message Jesus had given them to make known.

We are meant to be aware of being in a flow of history. Jesus chided the men who walked with him on the Emmaus road: “O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken: ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory? And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself’ (Luke 24:25–27). We are to remember past history as well as prophecy, and to live with a seriousness about what we are meant to do, as we seek to do his will moment by moment, day by day.

I don’t believe it,” said the older-looking boy. “I don’t believe there is any glory to be found on this mountain. The tales are wrong. Here there is nothing but the song of the birds just as we have it at home, and the sun shines no brighter here than there.” The other boy, younger perhaps by two years, looked too discouraged to argue.

“Yes, Philip,” he said.

“And,” Philip went on, “the darkness is deepening. We’d better seek shelter for the night.”

“But the Glory …”

“No, Andrew, there is no Glory to be found.”

The two boys—brothers they were—trudged on in silence, saving their energy for the steep ascent that lay ahead. They had left home—without telling their parents—early that morning, determined to find the Castle of the Great King on Singing Mountain. For did not all the tales speak of the dancing and singing, the feasting and reveling, that went on without end in that castle? How often they had heard their mother tell the stories! A mountain alive with music. Sunlight so bright that darkness could never really conquer it. Her eyes would sparkle as she said, “There, my sons, there is the Glory seen as nowhere else—the Glory surpassed by none other—the Glory …”

“Look,” cried Andrew, “a light! Over there to the right!” Tired as they were, the boys, changing their course, hurried toward the light. It was only a short way, but hard, for they had turned aside from the path.

Suddenly they were there! In a small clearing in the dense forests of the mountain there stood a tiny cottage. “I wonder that such a small cottage should have a fire large enough to cast so great a light,” murmured Philip, more to himself than to Andrew.

But Andrew was tired and—to tell the truth—a little afraid of the dark. In no mood to wait, he hurried forward saying, “Come, brother, perhaps there is room for guests even in so tiny a cottage.” But just as he was about to knock, the door swung open. There stood an old man with gray hair, wearing a striped flannel shirt and a rather baggy pair of pants with patches on the knees.

He stared intently at the two boys, who stood there looking rather sheepish and embarrassed. Then he swung the door wide open and said, “Welcome, my sons. We have been rather expecting you.” The boys went in, happy to be near a warm fire. Andrew was about to sit down on a stool near the fire when a well-aimed poke in the ribs and one of those knowing looks that older brothers like to give warned him that it might not be very good manners to sit down until he was invited to.

“Alice,” said the old man—and for the first time the boys noticed a little old woman sitting quietly in a rocker, her eyes closed and a blanket draped around her legs—“Alice, thy prayer hath been answered. Our guests have come.”

Good manners dictated that the boys cross the room and introduce themselves, but before Philip could stop him Andrew blurted out: “Please, sir, excuse me, sir, but you talk the way people talk in the old tales our mother told us. It is said that such a manner of speech is a sign of reverence for the Great King. Please, sir, is it true? We have looked for the Castle of the Great King and have tried to find the Glory. We …”

He stopped. Philip was glaring at him, but that was not the reason he stopped. The old man, kindly but firmly, was shaking his head and putting a finger across his lips. “Not tonight,” he said. “Tonight thou art welcome as our guest—thou and thy brother. See, here are cots. Now introduce thyself to my good wife Alice and then rest. Tomorrow will be a busy day.”

The boys did as they were told. And, having made their introductions and having been warmly greeted by the woman, they lay down and were asleep almost at once. Both boys slept restlessly, dreaming. In their dreams the fire beside them blazed brightly—so much that the whole mountain seemed bathed in its light. And the singing—in the dreams the boys heard beautiful music but saw only the old man and his wife on their knees singing together their evening prayers. Time after time the refrain came back in clear, melodic tones: “May the Great King be praised forever! Glory in the highest! Glory … Glory.…”

The sun was rising and the birds singing as the boys awoke to discover that it had been no dream. For there—again on their knees—were the man and his wife singing their morning prayers. And again the refrain went up: “Glory in the highest!” Whenever the boys told the story in future years they could not explain how, but it seemed as if the whole mountain were alive with song—as if the sun and birds, the trees, the flowers and the streams all joined in chanting the hymn of praise.

For breakfast the woman offered them only dry cereal and cold water from the well. “Eat and be filled,” she said, “for so the Great King giveth us his gifts. Today will ye work hard, but tonight when the work is done—then will we feast.”

Several times now the man and his wife had implied that there was work for the boys to do. But while the old woman was clearing the table, Philip leaned over and whispered to Andrew: “Why don’t we just thank them and leave now? There’s a lot more of the mountain to be explored if we’re going to find the Glory”—for now that he had a good night’s rest and some food in his stomach Philip was much more optimistic about their quest.

He motioned Andrew to leave, but his younger brother sat there, stubbornly refusing to move. Philip glared at him and nodded in the direction of the door. But Andrew, though he could not bring himself to look directly at Philip, shook his head sideways and mouthed the word “no.”

“Well, boys,” said the old man coming up behind them, “now that ye have eaten, shall we go outside and begin our day’s labors?” Philip gave Andrew a look as if to say, “Now see what you’ve done,” but without a word the boys rose from the table and went out.

“My sons,” the old man began, “my wife and I have been charged by the Great King with one task: we are to keep this fire going throughout the night. When the sun sleeps and darkness descends on the mountain, this fire is to be a reflection, though a pale one, of the Glory that shines both day and night in the Castle of the Great King. Here darkness must never conquer light.”

It was on the tip of Andrew’s tongue to inquire whether the old man had ever been to the Castle. But he got only as far as “Please, sir,” when Philip broke into a fit of coughing that drowned out the rest of his question. The old man continued: “My wife and I are old and the winter is near at hand. We need help from you if we are to have wood for our fire. The Great King hath called you, my sons, to spend one day in labor here. Thou, Andrew, are not old enough for the ax—thou must gather as much wood as thou canst find lying on the ground. Thou, Philip, shalt set to work with the ax.”

“But it doesn’t make any sense,” Philip blurted out. We can’t possibly get enough wood in one day to keep this fire going all winter.”

“Dost thou think, my son, that the Great King cannot call more servants when he needs them?—and now, to work. But thou, Andrew, be careful to gather no wood from that ancient oak tree beside the cottage. For it was there that the Kind Stranger one time saved my life, and it is sacred to this day.”

The boys worked—harder than they had ever worked before—until at noon the old man brought them more dry cereal and a drink of clear, cold water. And it seemed to them to be a feast. While they lay resting they heard again the song of the man and his wife at their noonday prayers. Again it seemed as if the mountain itself were alive with singing—as though chorus after chorus rolled down the hills around them in harmonious song.

Then it was back to work. Through the long hours of the afternoon the boys toiled. They had forgotten by now how strange it was that they should be doing this, and had given themselves over to the enjoyment of their labor. So it was that they were almost sorry to stop when the old man came up as the sun began to sink behind the mountain. “Ye have worked hard and well, my sons. Tonight must ye return home, but first we shall feast together.”

It was the strangest feast the boys had ever seen. Instead of the delicacies they had been imagining throughout the day, there was only wine (made, as the old man told them, from the vineyards of the Great King himself) and bread, freshly baked that day by the old woman, with large chunks of butter melting on each slice. But for years afterward the boys would recall that meal with delight. And Philip would always finish the story by saying, “You wouldn’t believe how it seemed to be just the right sort of banquet.” And Andrew would add, “I sometimes think it was the only real meal I’ve ever eaten.”

“Charles,” said the old woman to her husband, “while we eat thou must tell the boys the sacred mysteries.” So he did, telling them how it was that he himself had once been called to the Castle of the Great King; how on that journey his life had been saved by the Kind Stranger; how he and Alice had celebrated their wedding feast at the Castle.

“And now,” he concluded, “now it is our task to see that light always shines into the darkness of this mountain. For when travelers see the light, they lift up their hearts with joy and are not afraid.” When they had finished, everyone sat silently for a few minutes. Even Andrew was afraid to speak lest he should break the spell that seemed to hang over them. But at last the old man spoke: “And now, my sons, ye must return to your home at once. Your parents await you, and ye must be home before the break of day.” “Must we travel in darkness?” asked Andrew. “What if we lose our way and turn aside from the path?”

“My son, thou hast seen the fire, a reflection of the Glory of the Great King. And thou hast heard the story of the Kind Stranger. He walked that very path once and watches over those who walk it still. Think not that thou walkest in darkness. Think rather that thou walkest from light to light. And now, my sons, go in peace. My blessings rest upon you.”

Reluctantly the boys set out from the cottage, turning often to wave to the old man and woman silhouetted against the fire. Philip was first to break the silence. “The Glory, Andrew, we have come all this way and yet have not seen the Glory.”

“No, Philip, I think we have seen the Glory—and heard it—and tasted it.”

Nothing more was said for a time. And as the boys journeyed on it seemed that even the foothills of the mountain were alive with music. They looked at each other with new understanding. There was no need for either to say what both of them knew: that somewhere farther up the mountain an old man and woman were kneeling in their cottage beside a great fire, chanting their evening Gloria.

Philip spoke softly. “Who will sing the King’s song in our land?”

“Those,” answered Andrew, “who have seen the Glory.”

Gilbert Meilaender is assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical mathematics of the city of heaven.” So writes Sir Thomas Browne in The Garden of Cyrus (1658).

It is a quotation which, like Stephen Leacock’s horse, can be ridden off in all directions. Few words in the language envelope a more massy globe of meaning than “order.” For the purpose of this fragmentary comment, it is construed in its most basic sense, deriving from the Latin root ordo (row, or rank); namely, “meaningful arrangement.”

“All things began in order.…” “In the beginning God created.…” Before the beginning, from eternity, was not Matter, nor Vacancy, nor Cronus, nor Idea, nor Chaos, but God, the Ordainer of order, the Meaner of meaning. (It is odd that many people are so bemused by the pagan myth—in our culture chiefly derived from the Greeks—that “chaos” preceded all things that they read Genesis 1:2 as if the “ruined and emptied” planet Earth were a kind of primal way-station toward creation, instead of the consequence of a pre-Adamic outpouring of God’s wrath, presumably for the only reason God’s wrath is ever described as being poured out: sin.) The entire universe is a meaningful arrangement, determined from eternity by God. Its meaning and its arrangement are not susceptible to alteration, or even to advisory comment, by God’s creatures.

Those creatures either live within the universe in perfect self-fulfillment in obedience to God’s instructions for its proper use, or they rebel against it. If they rebel, there is nowhere else to go save to a self-induced disorder, a place where God is not and there can be neither meaning nor purpose. (Here again the ancient myth is influential, for some believe that “outer darkness” is a part of primordial chaos not needed by God in his creation of the heavens and the earth, and hence left in its “original” form. The Bible, on the contrary, teaches explicitly that such a place of judgment is “prepared” by God for his purposes—Matthew 25:41.)

One may imagine that the Adversary—Satan, Shaitan, Lord of the Flies, the Old Artificer—knows all this. Created as he was to great power and glory as prophet, priest, and king (Ezek. 28:13–16) sometime in the immensity of the past (as feeble human beings conceive of time), still bearing and exercising the power of at least three mighty titles (Prince of This World; God of This Age; and Prince of the Powers of the Air), it would be strange indeed if his intellect were deceived, even though his will remains obdurate. But as a rebel seeking followers, he has artfully concealed from those whom he woos the rage for chaos (the inevitable consequence of rage against God) that burns within him. Certainly the record is clear that his appeal to Eve was not, “Come, drink of my cup of disorder,” but rather, “Create your own order in defiance of God; devise your own meaningful arrangement; determine for yourself the difference between good and evil—and ye shall be as gods.”

There was, in short, no attempt to overset the divinely implanted human awareness that order is the condition of being and disorder the condition of chaos. Indeed, it would be thousands of years before the human mind had deteriorated to the point of asserting, with the Dadaist and his like, that the universe is totally without order or meaning. That assertion is a suicidal self-contradiction, for unless it is dismissed as the merest vaporings of idiocy, it must be allowed to possess order and meaning, a sort of inexplicable cell of order in the boundless inane. Not really inexplicable in the upside-down logic of rebellion, however, for it is simply an exercise of self-asserted godhood: I will create in my own image—“in my own image,” as John Davidson wrote not long before his suicide, “for that cannot be surpassed.” (“Obey your nature, not authority,” was his creed.) Among the degenerative effects of disobedience to God’s order, a degeneration that is as apparent in the course of human society as it is in the individual life, is a progressive inability to tell the difference between order and disorder. Order can comprehend disorder, but disorder can comprehend neither order nor itself.

Between the first rebellion against God’s universal order and the final breaking loose of the last fragment, the last disintegration of any meaningful arrangement, there may, for the rebel, be a good deal of heady excitement. Defiance, whether the cosmic, Satanic shout “I will not serve; not as thou wilt, but as I will,” or a simply querulous “No, I won’t” followed by a stuck-out tongue, is often a lot of fun. Rarely is the immediate exuberance tinged by the chill fear of consequent and irremediable disorder. It may give quite a nice little ego-kick to an orchestra musician to declare, “I will not play the assigned notes at the assigned times; I am a free and self-defining individual.” The chill comes when the conductor says, “Fine. Play as you wish. But not in this orchestra.” (Footfalls in the memory. “What thou doest, do quickly.” And he went out, and it was night.)

Whether sensed or not, in man’s first disobedience there lurked a rage for chaos, for a condition of meaninglessness. With what prolonged agony the disease has worked itself out, and with what an infinite variety of hideous symptoms, the blood-soaked history of this planet bears witness. One thinks of the statement a few years ago by a prominant physicist that he could name three problems facing mankind, each of them absolutely predictable, absolutely catastrophic, and absolutely unavoidable. Since the human race has no spiritual, intellectual, or aesthetic equipment save that which God installed at the factory, rebellion against the rules of operating that equipment must necessarily (to paraphrase Jonathan Swift in his essay on the abolition of Christianity) be attended by some inconvenience.

The first recorded breach in the social order was pretty violent: murder. A fissure opened to chaos. Surely, though, human society, in its self-annointed godhood, could develop a system to control this and other unexpected problems; so we read of Nimrod, who first set up an authoritarian political system, complete with cities, in which a new order would prevail. “The beginning of his kingdom was Babel …” (Gen. 10:10). But no sooner was the fine new ziggurat well under way—typifying the new liberation: “No need, O Lord, for you to reach down to us; we are perfectly capable of climbing up to you”—when something else came unstuck: language. At that time “the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.” But not for long. “Let us,” said the Lord, “go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech” (Gen. 11:7).

And so it has been to this day—when, according to Professor McLuhan and others, we are nearing the end of the “Gutenberg era” of rational, linear communication. Instead, within a single language we find impenetrable jargon confining every “learned” discipline; the literature of the absurd and of silence; the lines of verbal communication between people snapping one by one, until each retreats into his own cell of loneliness and knows that he exists only because he suffers—a piece torn from the fabric, an irrelevant syllable alienated from the cosmic poem, like people in a play by Beckett. “His people speak out of the void, striving desperately to salvage remembered scraps from their past,” observed John Barber. (The sound of serpentine mirth. “Ye shall be as gods.”)

One cannot look back over human history without being amazed at the success of the Old Artificer in maintaining his pretense. People continue to believe that the reason for rebelling against God’s order is not irrational pride but a legitimate determination to achieve self-fulfillment through “freedom” and to devise a better universal “meaningful arrangement” than God did in the first place. Equally amazing is the persistence of Satan’s fiction that disease, wars, cruelty, crime, death, and all the other inconveniences consequent upon rebellion against God’s order are all mere growing pains as human existence moves gradually from chaotic mud to ordered perfection. (Surely the dogma of human progress must be one of the “delusions” spoken of in Isaiah: “Thus saith the LORD … they have chosen their own ways, and their soul delighteth in their abominations. I also will choose their delusions.…” [Isa. 66:1, 3, 4].)

The Adversary’s most successful method of deception has always been imitation. His packaging has always been almost indistinguishable from the Real Thing, with such ethical knee-jerkers as Religion, Piety, The Golden Rule, and Virtue freely used in prominent places. Only a close reading of the small print reveals the missing ingredients—chiefly, everything having to do with sin and redemption, hell and heaven. The artificial flavors and fragrances are tantalizing. They include the synthetic essences of the Natural Goodness of Man, the Inevitability of Human Progress, the Equation of Technological and Material Wealth with Virtue, and something called “The Authentic Sovereignty of the Individual Human Personhood in All Ethical Situations.” Nothing really inflammatory. Nothing to cause dismay to those in whom God’s originally implanted conscience still operates and who can never feel really comfortable in the company of palpable evil. The “decent godless people” Eliot writes of.

Actually, history shows comparatively few who have been willing, in the open market place, to emulate their demonic master and cry, “Evil, be thou my good.” But for them, too, the truly depraved, other and adequate provision has been made (in the Enemy’s house are many hovels), and their numbers seem to be increasing rapidly. To them is given the honor of making loud and unmistakable noises in favor of chaos, without concealment or subterfuge. By them is made visible the hidden rage for chaos that dwells invisibly in all the natural children of our first parents. By them are set up the avowedly Satanic cults, where everything is turned upside down or put backward, including the Lord’s Prayer, and where they “call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter. Woe unto them …” (Isa. 5:20).

Indeed, it is one of the interesting features of our day that the Enemy seems to be permitting his true destination, chaos, to be revealed and his banner of confusion to be unfurled. One would think that such frankess would have little appeal; but rage knows no reason, and is near kin to self-deceiving rationalization. And at the heart of the deception is the old, old belief that order comes out of chaos. Remember the words of Sara Jane Moore, who tried to murder President Ford: “At the time,” she is reported to have said, “it seemed the correct expression of my anger, and, if successful, just might have triggered the kind of chaos that could have started the upheaval of change.” One hears the echo of myriad faculty voices raised in support of student rebellions a few years ago. The same philosophy permeates the arts, notably the “pop” arts. Typical are the words uttered a few years ago by Jim Morrison, rock star of “The Doors”: “I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that has no meaning. It seems to me to be the road to freedom” (Time, Nov. 24, 1967). Among other strange features of this point of view is that there seems to be no instinctive shrinking from the vast boredom that many sensitive souls (including Baudelaire’s) have realized to be inherent in total disorder. Perhaps because, as Andy Warhol said once to an interviewer, “I like boring things.”

Others, however, have viewed the delights of chaos with less equanimity. In 1969 there met in New York one hundred “prominent intellectuals” to discuss the topic “The End of the Rationalist Tradition?” Said Robert Lowell: “The world is absolutely out of control now, and it’s not going to be saved by reason or unreason.” Said Norman Mailer: “Somewhere, something incredible happened in history—the wrong guys won.” Writes E. M. Cioran, the now very popular Rumanian-born philosopher, in his first U.S. publication, The Temptation to Exist: “I cling to the world no better than a ring on a skeleton’s finger. It is from self-hatred that consciousness emerges. I hate myself: I am absolutely a man.” Aldous Huxley caught the taste of it in his novel Island: “Take one sexually inept wage slave, one dissatisfied female, two or … three small television addicts; marinate in a mixture of Freudism and dilute Christianity; then bottle up tightly in a four-room flat and stew for fifteen years in their own juice.” No wonder disorder seems more exciting.

Wherever one turns, one sees the evidence of man’s rage for chaos, an accelerating dash toward total moral, social, political, psychic, ethical, and intellectual confusion—a dash toward the beatitude of perfect “freedom” from meaning. Particularly tragic is the progressive disintegration of those relationships once blended by mutual need, service, and respect—female from male, student from teacher, patient from doctor, wife from husband, employer from employee—and the development instead of “adversarial relationships.” The change is often hailed as “progress.” One college course in “consciousness raising” advertises: “If you don’t feel that other people are putting you down, you should. Learn how to develop your own aggressiveness. Learn adversarial techniques.…”

Even the language, on the orderliness of which we depend for the existence of our intellectual life, is being torn asunder. In the classrooms, one hears much about “writing as one feels” and about the “tyranny of grammar.” Eminent theologians have declared that “language has no conceptual utility”—except, presumably, when it is used to declare the inutility of all declarations. Language is simply an eruption of one’s unique response to “encounter,” not a means by which thoughts are transmitted from one brain to another. Each eruption of one’s personal “is-ness” in sounds provides the environment for further encounters, more unique eruptions. The biblical writers, therefore, were not trying to “communicate” anything they were merely encountering and erupting all over the place. Discourse degenerates to babble—and we remember where that word comes from.

A decade ago Daniel Stern wrote some pertinent words: “The problem that haunts modern culture is not, as is generally assumed, alienation. It is its parent: nihilism.” A glance at the dictionary reminds us that “nihilism,” in this context, means “total and absolute destructiveness toward the world at large and oneself.” In other words, no book will ever be written on “Beyond Alienation.” There won’t be anything to write it with.

Emerson somewhere warns that one should be careful about what he sets his heart on, for he will surely have it. Millennia ago, our first parents set their hearts on chaos, though they did not realize it. The prophet phrased their action tersely much later: “We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement” (Isa. 28:15). Their legal counsel, formerly a prominent citizen in the Kingdom of Heaven though now disbarred (and, actually, awaiting the execution of a stiff sentence), took the case on a contingency basis: if he succeeded in terminating his clients’ citizenship in God’s realm and in expunging their names from its archives, they would give themselves to his service forever, in a place of his own devising, yet to be prepared. What that place will be like when every vestige of meaningful arrangement has been disintegrated, one cannot imagine—though a few faces on the Sistine Chapel ceiling suggest how it will affect its newly arrived inhabitants.

Disorder cannot cure itself; death cannot generate life; confusion cannot compose its own harmony. Their natural destination is chaos. Only the Ordainer of order, the high and lofty One who inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy, is able to retune the string, to restore the meaningful arrangement, to reintegrate the fragmented, to restore fellowship to the alienated—and to say to those who will come to him with contrite hearts and humble spirits: “Your covenant with death shall be disannulled, and your agreement with hell shall not stand” (Isa. 28:18). He who created the heavens and the earth (not out of chaos, but according to the Word of his power—the Word who dwelt among us, and who said to the raging storm: “Peace, be still”) is become our Saviour (by whom and for whom all things were created) as well as our Creator. He who in the flesh said to his followers, “I go to prepare a place for you,” is he who in the infinite majesty of Godhood declares: “Behold, I make all things new.”

I have vivid memories of my early childhood on my grandparents’ dairy farm in northern Wisconsin. My great-grandmother sat with me on the stairs and read stories to me by the hour. Uncle Trix—short for Trigve—took me on long walks, and Grandpa let me drive his tractor or watch him milk the cows. My family is Scandinavian.

When I was in grade school I read all the books I could find about the Norwegian immigrants who settled the middle west—the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. They became wheat growers and dairy farmers, like my grandfather, and those books helped me understand the struggles my forebears had had with the angry winters and parched summers. Because of them I better understood what life must have been like for my mother and her sister and parents, who had lived in a one-room house until they saved enough money to buy a farm.

When I became an adult, the novels of Willa Cather and Sigrid Undset (the Nobel prize-winning Norwegian novelist) brought me even closer to my heritage. And Ingmar Bergman’s film The Emigrants, starring the powerful Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, provided me with visual images to attach to the facts I’d read and heard.

The stories of my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother linked me with the past. I knew that part of the Kolderup family still lived in Norway. I knew that they had left Denmark for Norway centuries earlier, and that some of them had left Norway for this country. That gave me a strong sense of identity, something that every child needs. Traditions, family distinctives or peculiarities, personal history—these all help to form a child’s image of himself, of who he is and where he belongs, of why he’s a little bit special and a little bit like every other person. Without that kind of cultural—one could almost call it spiritual—foundation, it’s hard for someone to decide where he’s going and why. Before he can decide that he needs to know where he came from.

Until Alex Haley wrote Roots, black Americans had little that told their story. Slavery. Yes, they knew about that. Africa. Yes, they’d heard about it. But what did they really know? What did we? A few bare sentences in a sterile history book did little to convey the rich culture of many African tribes. Haley explores his ancestor’s culture—how Kunta learned to read and write Arabic, his strict Muslim training and deep religious faith that never left him, and the complex, years-long training for manhood (for some comments on what his culture meant, see the editorial “Knowing About a Powerful Name,” February 18 issue, page 36). The textbooks I studied perpetuated the stereotype of an African continent filled with illiterate, ignorant people living like jungle animals. White people brought education, Christianity, civilization, culture—and, oh yes, made a few Africans into slaves along the way. A terrible thing, slavery, I learned. It dehumanized people. Just how deeply I never knew until I read Haley’s description of the voyage of a slave ship. Here is one detail of the multi-faceted agony:

“The stinging bites, then the itching of the body lice, steadily grew worse. In the filth, the lice as well as the fleas had multiplied by the thousands until they swarmed all over the hold.… [Kunta’s] free hand scratched steadily wherever his shackled hand couldn’t reach. He kept having thoughts of springing up and running away; then, a moment later, his eyes would fill with tears of frustration, anger would rise in him, and he would fight it all back down until he felt again some kind of calm. The worst thing was that he couldn’t move anywhere; he felt he wanted to bite through his chains. He decided that he must keep himself focused upon something, anything to occupy his mind or his hands, or else he would go mad—as some men in the hold seemed to have done already, judging from the things they cried out” (p. 159).

Yes, slavery was terrible, we agreed in the classroom. But in the hallways of my nearly all-white high school, my friends and I ignored the few black students, and finally they went into another school system where there were more black students to be shunned by whites.—But that kind of behavior is all over, isn’t it?—Ask the next black person you see.

Or ask Haley. He was fortunate. He had a strong family who made sure that he knew where he had come from. Both his parents attended college. His father did it through hard work and the generous help of a white man he met while working as a Pullman porter during the summer; eventually he became a college professor. Haley after two years in college enlisted in the U. S. Coast Guard as a messboy, where, he says, he “stumbled onto the long road that has taken me finally to the writing of this Roots.” He spent twenty years in the Coast Guard, and partly to relieve boredom at sea began writing. After World War II the Coast Guard created a new rating for him—journalist. He retired after twenty years, and a few years later his first book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, was published.

Twelve years ago Haley saw with what seemed to him a mystical clarity how the story of his family traced back to its African roots could provide the sense of identity and pride that is lacking among many black people, despite the Afro-American movement of the late sixties. Haley wanted Roots to be more than just his story; it was to be the story of every black American, “for all of us today to know who we are.”

Roots is being called a media phenomenon. More than a million hardcover copies—priced at $12.50—are in print. Supermarkets and drug and discount stores, which usually sell only paperbacks, are selling Roots. This is an impressive sales figure for a hardcover book. But it represents only a small fraction of the total audience: 80 million watched the final episode of the eight on TV.

The real significance of Roots lies not in the fact that it could change the programming of television or in the millions of dollars Haley is making or in the almost cultishness with which people are talking and writing about the book. Roots is essentially a spiritual story, and its importance lies there. Christ said that to know the truth brings freedom, and Haley has told blacks and whites the truth about a tragic part of our culture that has not yet been excised.

Never before have we heard the tale of a slave ship told with such power or sensitivity. Nor have we understood what the word cargo meant to millions of black men and women—Negroes listed alphabetically along with spices, bananas, iron. And the families. How could black slaves know their roots when parents and children were so often cruelly separated? What mother could not feel Bell’s anguish when her daughter is sold and sent south? And what woman would not feel Kizzy’s shame and hatred at being raped and used by her white massa? As white people, we do not want to know these things. But to understand the black experience we must. A friend of mine said he hadn’t bothered to watch the series—“after all, it’s only fiction, and anyway I know all about the slave trade.” The dialogue in Roots may be fiction, but the story is truth. Haley explains it this way: “By far most of the dialogue and most of the incidents are of necessity a novelized amalgam of what I know took place together with what my researching led me to plausibly feel took place.” Twelve years of intensive research gives him the right to expect our trust in his book of “faction” (what he calls it, a combination of fact and fiction). And the fact remains, comfortable white people do not know what it was like.

Howard O. Jones, a black evangelist with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, agrees. For the first time, he said, the real identity and roots of black Americans were written about by someone from the inside. “We’ve kept the past hidden. Haley for the first time revealed the brutality and cruelty that was our past. It has caused black Americans, particularly the youth, to be proud of their roots and of the culture from whose loins they sprang.” And it has helped blacks realize how much progress has been made, even though, Jones insists, we still have a long way to go.

As Jones travels for the Graham team, he still finds evidence of racism. He’s constantly shifting gears between white and black people. “Sometimes I feel absolutely schizophrenic when I get home,” he explains. And he mourns the fact that while blacks and white have gotten together in many areas, particularly sports, the Christian Church lags far behind. The Church, he adds, needs to confront the past, and Haley has made it possible. Jones hopes that Roots, which he urges all white Christians to read, will help to build the bridges we need as Christians to cross our racial barriers.

William Pannell of Fuller Seminary, too, found Roots a profoundly moving experience for him as a black and an evangelical. Pannell wants the white Christian community to see that the Roots story is not just a hundred years old but continues today. “White evangelicals, for some hidden reason, have found it convenient to block out the black experience. Haley has proclaimed the message that we’ve been trying to get across for years,” he explains. While urging white Christians to listen to that message, Pannell warns against a blanket condemnation of all white people during that period. “Somewhere a white Christian may not have laid his neck on the block for social justice, but he did preach the Gospel.”

That Gospel pervades Roots. Although Kunta Kinte was Muslim, he married a Christian who raised their daughter in the Christian faith. What kept the family filled with hope was not only their knowledge of where Kunta came from—their physical heritage—but also their understanding of where they belonged spiritually. Haley’s ancestors firmly believed that God guided them from slavery into freedom.

“With all their houses, barns, sheds, and fences built by 1874, the family—led by Matilda—turned their attention to an enterprise they considered no less important to their welfare: building a church to replace the makeshift bush arbors that had been serving as their place of worship.” Haley tells us that the church took nearly a year to build and used most of the family’s savings. The first Sunday service was so crowded that people had to sit on the lawns. Matilda says to her husband, Chicken George, “ ‘I won’t never forget dis day, George. We done come a long way since you first come courtin’ me wid dat derby hat o’ yours. Our fam’ly done growed up an’ had chilluns of dey own, an’ de Lawd seen fit to keep us all togedder. De onliest thing I wish is you Mammy Kizzy could be here to see it wid us.’ Eyes brimming, Chicken George looked back at her. ‘She lookin’, baby. She sho is!’ ” (p. 652).

Roots is not a religious history of Alex Haley’s family. But the Christian faith of his ancestors pervades the book; it is an integral part of their lives. Church and camp meetings, weekly prayer groups, and Bible studies are seen not as something tacked on to their lives but as an outgrowth of the slaves’ deep religious fervor. These slaves knew who they were: they were children of God and of Kunta Kinte.

Haley tells us that his mother often seemed embarrassed by references to her parents’ slave past. His grandmother’s reaction was, “If you don’t care who and where you come from, well, I does.” And along with an almost liturgical reminder of the African and his arrival in America came these words, “Thanks to Jesus, or we wouldn’t be here tellin’ it.”

The providence of God pervades the book, just as it pervades the brief account of how Haley came to write Roots (the complete story will be told in his next book, Search, which he says is the more important and exciting story). His only surviving relative who remembered those slave days exclaimed when Haley told her about his search, “You go ’head boy! Yo sweet grandma an all of ’em—dey up dere watchin’ you!” Shortly after that she died. Haley thought that “it had been her job to get me to Africa, then she went to join the others up there watchin’.”

Since the success of the television series Haley has more specifically given the credit for Roots to God. He told Newsweek magazine that “God works in mysterious ways and maybe I’m a conduit for him.” To the National Press Club, in speaking of the uncanny coincidences that happened over and over as he searched for the clues of his saga, he explained that “God does these kinds of things.” About the phenomenal success of the television program he said, “I would soberly and somberly ascribe it to God himself. There is no man, no committee of men or women who could sit down with whatever media expertise and predictably create a program or an event of any kind of comparable, spontaneous national response.”

If, as he and other black Christians say, the success of Roots comes from God, we need to listen to its message. We cannot merely give the book a passing nod because of its current popularity. Nor should we be content with having seen all or part of the television series. Read the book; there’s more in it than could be put on film. Haley’s saga should move us to examine our racial attitudes and work to put our white selves into that dank hole of slavery. How strong would my self-image be if my ancestors had been thought too feeble-minded to learn anything but the most elementary of tasks? How strong would yours?

Alex Haley’s father died before the book was published. “So Dad has joined the others up there,” Haley concludes his story. “I feel that they do watch and guide, and I also feel that they join me in the hope that this story of our people can help to alleviate the legacies of the fact that preponderantly the histories have been written by the winners.” Blacks now know more about their heritage; so do whites. That knowledge should bring us closer together.

In The Rain

my rage in the rain

deliberately stomping

through puddles

to wet my childish way

muttering bitterly

in my beard, letting

frustration with circumstances

sour my love

and violate my heart

and when the current of grace

rose in my heart,

the appeal to mercy,

the shame

that I at first resisted

and shut my mouth

on the words

that call out to the one source

of ease and forgiveness,

ah, mercy

mercy

my rage in the rain

mirage in the rain

marriage in the rain

EUGENE WARREN