Latin American theology is going through a great period of change. Much of this is due to the emergence of young Latin church leaders and theologians. Once, not very long ago, the Latin American had to adjust to the North American missionary because the missionaries ran the churches, taught in the Bible schools and seminaries, directed the evangelistic campaigns, and controlled the money that came from the north. This day has largely passed. Now the missionary must adjust to the thinking of his Latin brothers.

Despite the new forces that are at work here, the Latin evangelicals aren’t throwing out the old missionary doctrinal standards. But they are thinking and expressing themselves in ways that are at times unfamiliar and even shocking to some missionaries. Decades-old church structures are being revised. Doubts are being raised about imported methods: for example, can student work in Latin America be expected to follow the same pattern as student work in the United States? Evangelicals are wholeheartedly committed to distributing the Scriptures, but what if almost half the population cannot read? The Roman Catholic Church, once a conservative monolith, is changing drastically in Latin America, and evangelicals have to reassess their attitudes toward it. And the charismatic movement is affecting virtually all denominations.

In this changing situation, new theological expressions are emerging. One of these that has received great attention outside Latin America is the so-called theology of liberation. Some of us who work in theological circles in Latin America have been disturbed by North American accounts of Latin American theology that seem to be hurried or superficial treatments of a complex subject. There is a communications problem between North and Latin America today, a problem that is not confined to the theological sphere.

If we who call ourselves evangelicals are unable to communicate across cultural lines, what becomes of our communication with unbelievers? North American and Latin American Christians must make an effort to communicate with each other, and to avoid an unnecessarily divided witness.

To encourage this type of dialogue, we wish to point out three basic Christian doctrines that are of special interest among Latin theologians, both Catholic and Protestant.

1. Incarnation. The doctrine of the Incarnation declares that Christ, the second person of the Trinity, took on human flesh and became fully man so that he could be our saviour (John 1:14). Interest in this doctrine centers on the fact that Christ did not simply appear to be a man but fully became human in every sense except that he was without sin. He who was fully God chose to be born into a carpenter’s family and to open himself to the whole gamut of human suffering.

Many Latins are asking, What implications does this have for us as Christians? Are we not to be as fully a part of the world as Christ was? Western theologians have worked very hard at defining Christ’s divinity, but often they have given little thought to the meaning of his humanity. A number of Latin theologians say that in the midst of the misery and suffering of Latin America it is the human question that demands Christian reflection. This does not mean that belief in Christ’s divinity is in any way de-emphasized. These theologians simply call attention to the prominence in Christ’s ministry of relieving suffering, feeding the hungry, curing the sick.

Peter tells us that Christ was an example for us so “that we should walk in his steps” (1 Pet. 2:21). Paul calls us to have the same mind that was in Christ Jesus by taking upon ourselves the role of a servant (Phil. 2:5–8). If we Christians are the Body of Christ, then we must involve ourselves in the world with all its suffering and ambiguity, not view it from a comfortable distance.

There is more to Latin American theology than revolution. Before we criticize, we ought to investigate its rumblings. It expresses doctrines in unfamiliar and sometimes shocking language.

We North American evangelicals can perhaps learn something from the Latins’ struggle with living out this doctrine. We find it hard to think of being servants rather than leaders. We are often more content to discuss theological issues than to become agents of healing in the misery of our world. Yet this is what Christ was throughout his earthly ministry.

2. The Nature of Man. When we North Americans discuss this doctrine, we are often trying to affirm man’s sinful nature over against some humanistic view of man’s innate goodness, or his spiritual character over against a secular view that man is simply a higher form of animal. These discussions are important. But the Latin American theologian is likely to be interested in this doctrine for other reasons as well.

Many Latin Americans live in such devastating poverty and under such inhuman political oppression that most North Americans are hard pressed to comprehend it. What does it mean to live as a Christian in countries where the slightest criticism of the government or the least word spoken on behalf of human rights is met with modern instruments of torture that rival the Inquisition’s? For the Latin American Christians, the questions of who man is and what rights he has are of crucial importance. The Latin Christian generally wants no more to deny man’s spiritual needs than to deny Christ’s divinity. But he wants us to see how integrally related man’s human and spiritual dimensions are. We encounter this in social and psychological studies, but as missionaries and Christian workers we often betray in our theology a subtle desire to separate man’s needs and minister exclusively to his “spiritual” side.

An important point often overlooked by observers of Latin American theology is its strong criticism of certain aspects of Western theology, both Catholic and Protestant. Writers such as José Miguez Bonino, Julio de Santa Ana, and Emilio Castro claim that Western theology has shown a strong Platonic emphasis that separates man into body and soul and then concentrates primarily on his soul. They criticize this separation as not being biblical. Going back to the Hebrew word for soul, “nephesh,” these writers argue that the biblical writers saw man as a unity and did not see his physical dimension as a “lesser” reality.

Latin American theologians are by no means alone in making this criticism. They have, though, been especially concerned with the strong impact this dualistic emphasis has had on the Latin American church. Too often the goal of the church has gone no further than an orthodox confession of faith. What a person believed doctrinally was of sole interest; little thought was given to the poverty and exploitation from which he might be suffering. Many Latins would tell us that this misses the fact of Christ’s linking personal salvation with one’s response to the social and economic realities of life (Matt. 25:31–46; Mark 10:17–27; Luke 10:25–37; 19:1–10). The epistles of James and John do not allow for a faith in God that is not also a commitment to helping to improve the human physical condition (Jas. 1:27; 1 John 3:17, 18).

3. Justice and Righteousness. For many of us, the theme of justice in Scripture has been included under the idea of justification, which has often been given an exclusively individualistic interpretation. We speak of the justification of a person who has accepted Christ as his or her Saviour. And we think of righteousness in the same individual sense, i.e., a righteous person. Certainly we can never deny the central importance of the personal confession of Christ as Saviour and Lord whereby a person is justified and made righteous in God’s sight. Nonetheless, our dialogue with the Latin American Christians may call us to question whether we have fully explored the biblical meanings of justice and righteousness if we understand these terms only in a personal, individualistic sense.

José P. Miranda, a Mexican theologian, has pointed out that “justice and righteousness,” or “justice and judgment” as the word is sometimes translated, is a recurring expression found throughout the Old Testament, and it also found its way into the New. This expression first occurs in Genesis 18:19, where God speaks of Abraham as the father of a great nation that will “keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice.” The practice of—“doing”—justice and righteousness is the mark of God’s people.

When we encounter these terms in the New Testament we are likely to divorce them from their Old Testament context. It is unlikely that Jesus’ hearers or the Apostle Paul’s readers would have understood them that way. This is not to deny that both Jesus and Paul bring additional revelation to the Old Testament message. However, they both stress their continuity with the Old Testament (Matt. 5:17; Rom. 1:1–2). When Jesus says, “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” or “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” (or justice), what does he mean? Miranda and others want us to go back to the Old Testament and see that these terms deal with such matters as economic exploitation, unjust business practices, and the mistreatment of orphans and widows, as well as with idolatry, fornication, and lying (Prov. 27:2; Isa. 58:2; Jer. 22:15–16; Ezek. 18:5). This is to say that they deal as strongly with social morality as with individual ethical action.

A number of Latin theologians see the loss of the social dimension of justice and righteousness as another consequence of the previously mentioned dualism. They attribute this to Western philosophy’s traditional preoccupation with individualism, which is seen to have penetrated Western theology as well. A related concern is the tendency of some evangelicals to write off the present world as hopeless and to await passively Christ’s return to usher in a just age.

Some Latin American exegetes insist that the present impossibility of a perfectly just social order in no way mitigates the biblical mandate that the people of God work for justice in all areas of life. The danger appears when “doing righteousness and justice” is interpreted to require only personal morality, Bible reading, and faithful church attendance. The Latins remind us of the prophetic emphasis that the worship of God is useless if the poor and the oppressed are not being cared for (Isa. 1:10–17; Amos 5:21–25) and that the knowledge of God is correlated with relieving social oppression (Jer. 22:13–16; Isa. 5:8–16; Hosea 6:4–9; Micah 6:6–16).

We North American evangelicals should not respond uncritically to these theological interpretations. No one group has a corner on biblical truth. The Latin Americans do not. But neither do we. Our attitude has sometimes been that of the mother church supplying missionaries to evangelize non-Christian nations (as though the United States were a Christian one) and to guide “weaker” brothers in the Lord. But often we find in Third World churches a spiritual vitality and a biblical comprehension that are sadly lacking in Europe and North America.

Our concern should be to listen carefully to our brothers in other cultures. We should be pursuing dialogue before we offer criticism of the theology emerging from younger churches. There may be much that Jerusalem can learn from Antioch.

What will the last quarter of the twentieth century be like? How will the Church of Christ fare in it?

Many people today seem to assume that our future will be dominated by Marxism, or even by some form of Communism. They foresee a state of affairs in which, under pressure from economic forces, lives will increasingly be controlled by the state. Not a few think this kind of take-over is inevitable and have been trying to adjust their expectations accordingly. I do not say that this is always deliberate; often they are just caught up half-thinkingly in the prevailing trends.

On the whole the churches seem bent on adapting themselves to the ceaseless onrush of socio-political change, under the naïve impression that this is the progressive or enlightened thing to do, and that neither preaching nor theology can be relevant unless it is politically involved. This outlook seems to reflect a form of the Marxist fallacy that religion is the opiate of the people, namely, the idea that the less people think of the other world, the more they will love their neighbors—which is the exact opposite of the teaching of Jesus.

Furthermore, militant “theologies of liberation” have assimilated the prophetic passion of Jewish messianism, and the revolutionary nature and impetus of the Christian message, to Marxist ideology. These liberation theologians adopt a Marxist interpretation of history according to which class conflicts lead, through an inner necessity, to a future in which all human miseries will be eliminated. They believe that Karl Marx uncovered the fundamental “laws of motion” governing society, and thereby turned the understanding of our social problems the right way up. All this involves a causal interpretation of human affairs and a materialist framework for all human ideals, while the kind of utopia it holds out ultimately relies for its fulfillment on violence.

I believe that such an alliance of Christianity with Marxism is a grave mistake. Any socialization or materialization of the Church’s message along these lines can only empty it of its biblical and evangelical content, as well as undermine the freedoms to which traditional Christianity has given rise. There is no possibility along that road of transmuting human society into a community of love, for Marxism has no gospel of salvation from man’s self-centeredness and greed; it can only clamp down upon human life the enslaving structures of group egoism. But even apart from that, I believe that Marxism has no real future. Let me offer two broad reasons for this conviction.

First, the great advances we have been making in science have steadily been eroding the foundations of Marxism by destroying the obsolete ideas of a closed mechanistic universe and the hard instrumentalism that goes with it. The Marxist conception of the technological society is a product of the old positivist view of science, operating with causal mechanisms that it imposes upon every aspect of natural and human existence. But all this is now collapsing. An enormous revolution is taking place in the foundations of knowledge. What is emerging is a very different outlook upon the universe, an outlook characterized by open structures, in which mechanistic concepts have only a limited and low-level validity. The correlate of this new science is a freer and open society in which personal and social relations are emancipated from the tyranny of impersonal forces.

Even apart from the scientific destruction of Marxist premises, we find everywhere today a vast, instinctive revolt against the imperialism of socio-political institutions. One instance of this is the reaction of the young against social mechanization and establishment structures. But this kind of reaction has nothing constructive to offer, unlike what is now developing out of the new science.

I do not believe that the Christian Church has anything to fear from the advance of science. In fact, the more truly scientific inquiry discloses the structures of the created world, the more at home we Christians ought to be in it, for this creation came into being through the Word of God, and in it that Word was made flesh in Jesus Christ our Lord. The more I engage in dialogue with scientists and understand the implications of their startling discoveries, the more I find that, far from contradicting our fundamental beliefs, they open the way for a deeper grasp of the Christian doctrines of creation, incarnation, reconciliation, resurrection, and, not least, the Holy Trinity. This is an age in which we are being emancipated from the tyranny of a narrow-minded scientism, an age in which true science and theology are thrown closely together in the service of God the Father Almighty.

Fuel the pastoral ministry and you feed a society surfeited by secularism, materialism, and a Marxist interpretation of history.

The other reason why I think Marxism has no real future is that there has arisen an immense hunger for spiritual realities that will not be satisfied with merely technological or social reorganization of human affairs. Even science itself, as Michael Polanyi has shown us for many years, cannot do without transcendent grounds, for it perverts and destroys itself when it cuts itself off from spiritual reality and ultimate beliefs. Science has reached the boundary point where it realizes its own limits; hence it is dangerous to delude ourselves with the idea that through natural science we have the only avenue to a true understanding of the universe. Scientists themselves are everywhere acknowledging the need to probe into a deeper dimension of the spirit.

Human civilization is sick of its diet of materialism and secularism; there is a longing for other-worldly and divine resources. The very fact that the Soviet government has to use secret police and brute force to suppress the distribution of the Bible and the dissemination of the Gospel is a mighty tribute both to the power of Christianity and to a desire for spiritual life that will not be denied. In the Western world, this longing for spirituality sometimes takes bizarre forms, such as involvement in the occult, but behind it all there is surely a desperate hunger for God, a craving for the bread of life. The human spirit has been made for communion with God and will not be stifled by social or institutional substitutes.

The most striking sign of the quest for spiritual experience is the tide of pentecostalism that has broken through the confines of religious and ecclesiastical formalism. It refuses to have anything to do with a distant, inactive deity; it insists that God is alive and dynamically at work through his Spirit in the personal and social life of believers, moving them toward Jesus Christ.

But whether or not the charismatic movement as such breaks out among the churches, undoubtedly a steady spiritual eruption is taking place. Common people, bored and depressed by the incessant moral denunciations they hear all round them and frustrated by sermons lacking evangelical joy, clamor for the sheer, stark simplicity of Jesus, and the good news of the Gospel of salvation he proclaimed. In the last few months many people have written or spoken to me of a deep hunger in human hearts, a cry for spiritual help, a yearning for deeper faith in Christ, and a new desire for prayer. I believe a spiritual awakening is on the way, rising from the grass roots of the Church.

What this all means is that the Church is faced with an unparalleled opportunity. The deep changes going on in our way of life that (despite outward appearances at the moment) are leading to a free and open society, together with the recognition that human thought must be lifted up to a higher level of spiritual reality, even for the progress of science, give us a magnificent chance to hold up Jesus Christ in such a way that the Gospel is allowed to exert its transforming power upon human culture, and thus shape the fundamental pattern of our social order.

To do this, we must reach a deeper understanding of the essential mission of the Church. Let me indicate something of the way in which I envisage this mission by calling to mind the early Church and the Reformation.

Surely the most impressive fact about the early Church was the irrepressible, spontaneous outburst of Good News with which it exploded upon the ancient world in land after land. Its daily life throbbed with mission and expansion in such a way that every believer seemed to be a missionary. At least, every believer was a witness, for to be a Christian and to be a witness to Christ were the same thing. It was the hallmark of a Christian that he was ready to pay the cost of witness and discipleship in martyrdom. There were no missionary societies in those days, and yet the Gospel spread like a forest fire, until within three hundred years the civilized world was claimed for Christianity. There was no attempt to carry through a program of social change, and yet society was profoundly transformed. The Christian Church proved to be most effective in changing the world by being faithful to its missionary mandate.

What was the secret of it all? The early Christians had a divine message, and they really believed in it. I am thinking here not of the great doctrines of the faith to which they gave classical expression in the creeds so much as of belief in the active intervention of God himself in our human life. They could not get over the staggering significance of the Incarnation, God manifest in the flesh, or of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, which knocked a gaping hole through all mundane religion and philosophy. This is the Creator himself at work in our life and death, the Saviour of the world. And it was because they really believed in that kind of direct interaction between the living God and this world that meditation, worship, prayer, and intercession occupied such a large place in the life of the early Christians.

Such a Church with such a message was able to penetrate culture and society and reshape them from within, and thus put a Christian stamp upon the foundations of our Western civilization. Because the Church’s message was free from ideological ties, it could create new situations in society and in the world in which the transforming power of the Gospel left such an impact that all subsequent history has been affected.

Why not today? I believe we now have an opportunity such as we have not had for many centuries to carry out the same kind of mission. But to do it, we must learn from the fact that the early Church had a crystal-clear message and really believed in its divine power. We have tried so hard to fit in with the current patterns of society, obsessed with the idea that the message of the Church must be made relevant, that what we actually do is to belittle the Christian message and imprison it in what is merely transient. I believe that whole procedure is now utterly bankrupt. What we need, and need desperately, is a renewal in the very springs of our faith in the living God: not an inert, inactive god, not some vague deity behind the back of Jesus Christ, but the God who has come himself among us in his own mighty eternal Being, and personally has to do with us in Christ, crucified and risen as the Redeemer of the world. God has been using the chaotic forces of the modern world to plow up our culture and civilization, so that they are now ready to receive the seed of the Gospel.

The Reformation was another great period in which there was an irrepressible, spontaneous outburst of the Gospel that proved to be evangelical and social dynamite in country after country. Out of research into the original sources of the Church, its apostolic foundation in Christ, came a great rediscovery of the centrality of Christ. This evoked a movement to bring the Church back into conformity to him, and thus to restore the face of the ancient catholic Church. Somehow the institutional church through its alliance with worldly power had come to usurp the place of Christ, and the voice of the Church seemed louder than the voice of God. In contrast, the great emphasis of the Reformers was upon the mighty, living Word of God, which is no mere word but the Word-Act of God, still operating through his Spirit in saving, transforming power.

I had a vivid experience of what this meant when I was a young student in Greece. I had set out to climb Mount Olympus, and at the end of the first stage I lodged at a small monastery on the lower slopes. That evening as I sat by the stream outside the monastery reading my Greek New Testament, an aged monk, bent with the years, came to sit beside me. When he saw what I was reading he became very excited. Apparently he had never held a New Testament in his hands before; all they had in the chapel was a lectionary. And so I gave him my copy, and he tucked it away in the folds of his cassock like a treasure. On my return from the top I stayed at the monastery again, and down by the stream I found my friend the monk absorbed in the Gospels. Out of his eyes shone a light that I shall never forget. He was so changed that he seemed even physically transfigured.

It was a spiritual renewal of that kind on a vast scale that happened in the sixteenth century when the living Word and Spirit of God transformed the face of Europe. And it is a recovery of that Reformation experience of God’s Word that we need if we are to meet the challenge presented by the opening of the structures of our way of life, and direct the tide of spiritual regeneration now going on.

But such an experience does require a recovery of Bible reading throughout the Church and a renewal of the ministry as a proper instrument of the Gospel. And by that I mean two things: we must recover both genuine preaching of the Word and genuine pastoral visitation.

Far too much of our preaching today seems to do little more than reflect prevailing trends in society. Often we preachers seem no more than servants of public opinion. Because we do not spend sufficient time in the study wrestling with the Word of God, our sermons tend to be boring and trivial, made up of scrappy ideas often suggested by the newspapers or television, and the human heart remains hungry for the bread of life. I do not believe there is any way other than through faithful ministry of God’s Holy Word to inject the creative truth and dynamism of the Gospel into the fabric of our life. If we fail here, we will not match up to the challenge that beckons us so excitingly.

But it is no less important to minister that Word, as Calvin used to say, privati et domatim, privately and from house to house. It is there that we really minister the Gospel to people as persons, and not as just functions of industry, or cogs in the machinery of trade-union power, or pawns of the politicians. Humanity is made up of real people interlocked in personal connections, and it is there, in the midst of birth and death, marriage and family, that the Gospel must be planted. How can we do that except by complementing our proclamation of the Word from the pulpit by personal, pastoral ministry of the same Word in the home?

Genuine pastoral visitation has undergone a disastrous decline, and we seem to be allowing a secular psychology to replace spiritual counseling. I do not want to detract from the valuable help the ministry can derive from good psychologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists; but I do object when all this is allowed to relegate into secondary importance, and even to replace, a distinctively Christian understanding of man, and when some doctrine of self-fulfillment, or what a friend of mine calls “auto-salvation,” replaces justification by the grace of God. I do not believe anything can be a substitute for the evangelical insight into human nature that a minister gains as he prays with people in their homes and directs them to Jesus Christ. Nor do I believe a minister can preach the Gospel from the pulpit in ways relevant to his congregation unless he converses with them about spiritual realities in their homes.

This is not a ministry that can be adequately fulfilled by one person on his own. Pastoral care of this sort must be shared, with the eldership revitalized as a spiritual office. Even so, I believe, it is very difficult for a minister to be a shepherd to more than six hundred souls if he is to engage in pastoral care as he is commissioned to do by the great Shepherd of the Sheep.

Former students of mine in the ministry tell me there is a host of young people in our midst who are largely outside the Church, or often only half within it. They believe in God and are desperate for spiritual guidance and clear convictions, but they recoil from the institutional church because somehow its formalism and legalism get in the way of Christ. Direct personal and pastoral contact of the kind I have been speaking of can contribute much in a situation like this. These are the young people in whose hands the future of Christianity in the last quarter of the twentieth century may lie—and it would be fearful if we lost them.

I believe that from generation to generation the Church relies more on the parish ministry than on anything else. No doubt the concept of the parish needs modification through assimilation to that of the community, while the ministry also needs restructuring to give place to a shared or corporate ministry, and no doubt other forms of ministry have their proper role today. But even so, nothing can replace the parish ministry as the staple ministry of the Church.

I am full of hope for the future. If we can once again develop the parish ministry as a vigorous ministry of the Word, matching a revitalized proclamation of the Gospel, I believe the Church will be able to turn the life of our people in a radically Christian direction.

A Missionary Dying On the Molopo

What shall I do to fill the sense of void?

The night is heavy like a coverlet

Upon this fevered man who cannot move

His feet, his legs, his hands, his giddy head.

The smell of citronella, insects’ whirr,

The slender assagai against the fence,

The aardvark pawing at the rotting stump,

The eerie sheen of moonlight on the veld

Press in upon the vanguard of my life.

In the kraal the intermittent cry

Of Lumba’s baby measures out the hours;

Its swift incision cuts the straining ropes

That hold the bastion of my sanity.

Out of my panicked depths the swell brings up

Two lines I learned from Auden on Yeats’ death:

‘The provinces of his body revolted

The squares of his mind were empty.’

Never shall I return to Oregon

Nor see the gulls by Neah-Kah-Nie Light,

The moist, clean forms of holly, razor-edged,

The fruit trees on the foothills of Mount Hood.

Even when I was only eight my wish

Was to be buried in a country plot

Near Bethany, Damascus or Monroe,

One not well-tended but knee-deep in leaves

Of alder and madroña before the rains.

Not dying, God, but dying in this place,

Dying where there was never from the first

A sense of home, a sense of knowing love,

A sense of unity with smells, with soil,

With flowers, landscapes, birds, familiar sounds,

A sense of sharing one’s most transient life

With those whose eyes understood at once.

Here there was always mystery in their eyes,

Never the light for me but vacant stares

Looking through me as if diaphanous

And what transfixed them were outside of me,

As if I were an interference poised

Between them and their nameless numina.

Until the precipice of this last hour

I believed that You would order life for me

To end the way that You had ordered five

To follow four or be the half of ten.

I would go home. I moved by that sole hope.

Whether to live or die I would go home.

I will not go. The end is destined here.

Thoughts of all man-made consolations, God,

Increase my pain. There now is no pretense.

I go out to this death with no defense.

Lumba’s baby cries my requiem,

My final terror in an ochre land.

George E. McDonough

Little of the overt spirituality that crept into Baptist Sunday-school teacher Jimmy Carter’s campaign found its way into Kemper Arena at the Republican National Convention in Kansas City. Ody Fish, convention manager and Republican National Committee vice-chairman, even sought to control invocations and benedictions by requiring advance texts of the prayers. To keep spontaneous sermons from cropping up, Fish ordered that “all invocations and benedictions will be limited to two minutes with a three-minute absolute maximum.”

To keep any apparent irreverence from television viewers, the rule-makers also decreed that the convention’s delegates bow their heads during all prayers. After the first day, however, a few non-Christian delegates declined to make such a gesture, citing privately the explicit invocation of the name of Jesus Christ or the Trinity in several of the prayers. Among the nine persons who offered opening and closing prayers were Episcopal bishop Arthur A. Vogel of Missouri, Catholic auxiliary bishop George K. Fitzsimmons of Missouri, Pastor Ted Nissen of Colonial Presbyterian Church in Kansas City, and John Erickson of the Kansas City-based Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Several other program participants referred to their personal faith in Christ.

The face of Christianity, however, was consistently visible on the streets. Christians from Kansas City and elsewhere preached, sang, and passed out tracts to the delegates, reporters, protesters, and convention guests who clogged the streets of downtown Kansas City and the stockyards, where Kemper Arena is located.

The most prominent group of young Christians, with several hundred in its ranks, called itself “Christians Care for America.” Originally the group had intended to carry a Christian witness to Yippie demonstrators, but that plan quickly failed. Explained founder Charles B. Childers, 26, of Madison, Wisconsin: “We didn’t reach them very well, because they were so drugged up.” The group then began to concentrate on the delegates and the press. A lot of literature was handed out, but rallies were sparsely attended.

One Christian who persisted in a head-on confrontation with the protesters was Fred Bishop, 36, a Baptist evangelist from DuQuoin, Illinois. Each evening Bishop stationed himself adjacent to the Yippie protest site outside Kemper Arena and preached and sang, imploring the demonstrators to turn to Christ. There were “a few” conversions, reported a colleague of Bishop’s without specifying details.

The threat of disruptive demonstrations by Yippies and other protesters evaporated almost before the convention had begun. “I guess we sort of miss ‘Nam and Nixon,” lamented Yippie Billy Bright. Most attempts at confrontation ended feebly as police used consistent restraint in their handling of demonstrators. Through the entire week, convention-related arrests numbered fewer than two dozen, mainly on misdemeanor trespassing, and disorderly-conduct charges. One youth was arrested for indecent exposure when he took off his clothes in front of a delegate hotel and proclaimed himself the nude candidate for president with the slogan, “What have I got to hide?”

One major contributor to keeping the peace was a group called WATCH. Organized by James O. Leffingwell, executive director of Kansas City’s Metropolitan Inter-Church Agency, WATCH helped keep the city calm by spreading its 460 volunteer observers throughout the convention area to note any extraordinary activities on the part of protesters, police, or others. WATCH issued a daily newsletter summarizing its findings. In one typical case, a rumor spread among the Yippies that police were gathering nearby for an invasion of their campsite; a WATCH observer went to the nearest police station, where he learned that the officers were simply gathering for a reassignment of location. The observer reported the information to the demonstrators and they relaxed over beer, marijuana, and rock music.

The most conspicuous religious event during the convention was a prayer breakfast on Wednesday, attended by well over 1,000 persons, including hundreds of delegates. It was hosted by Governor Christopher Bond of Missouri, emceed by Congressman Bill Armstrong of Colorado, and sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ. The star of the program was Pat Boone, who, between his two songs, affirmed his belief that “God is working in the political process here.” Boone was a Reagan delegate from California. Congressman Albert H. Quie, a Minnesota Lutheran and leader in the Washington prayer movement (he and President Ford have often prayed together), led in prayer, as he did at one session of the convention. In the main address, Crusade’s founder-president Bill Bright surprisingly skirted politics as he made a straight plea for Christian conversion. (In many recent addresses, Bright has emphasized the need for involvement by Christians in the political process, and he has taken a conservative stand publicly on some issues.)

Missing from the dais were two of the most prominent Republican evangelicals, Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon and Representative John Anderson of Illinois. Anderson disagreed with most of the breakfast’s promoters on making abortion a political issue. “I don’t think it belongs in a platform,” he said. “You can’t make a political football out of a very personal human issue.”

In the platform adopted by the GOP, a plank on “Morality in Foreign Policy” set forth as the Republican goal “a just and lasting peace in the world … based upon our deep belief in the rights of man, the rule of law, and guidance by the hand of God.” The section came down hard on the human-rights issue in the Soviet Union, especially in regard to rights of Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

On other issues, the platform reaffirmed support for the Equal Rights Amendment, endorsed the adoption of a constitutional amendment “to restore protection of the right to life for unborn children,” asked that non-sectarian prayers be allowed in public schools, favored tax credits for parents of children in non-public schools, and opposed forced busing.

In accepting the nomination, President Ford said he will campaign on his record of having demanded “honesty, decency, and personal integrity” from government officials. “Private morality and public trust must go together” at all levels of government, he asserted. He reminded his audience that he had asked the American people to “confirm me with your prayers,” and he said he has tried to live by the prayer of John Adams that is carved into a marble fireplace in a room in the White House: “May none but the honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.”

His running mate, Robert Joseph Dole, 53, was raised a Methodist. He still holds membership in Trinity United Methodist Church in Russell, Kansas. In Washington, however, he and his wife attend services regularly at St. John’s Episcopal Church, where the Fords also frequently attend. The Doles were wed in 1975 at the Washington Cathedral (Episcopal) in a service conducted by Senate chaplain Edward L. R. Elson, a United Presbyterian clergyman. (Dole’s first marriage of twenty-four years was dissolved in 1972 on grounds of incompatibility.)

In an interview, Michigan Ford delegate Paul Henry, 34, political-science professor at Calvin College (and son of theologian Carl F. H. Henry), spoke at length on the crucial issue of the impact of evangelicals on politics in 1976. Henry, a member of the convention rules committee, denigrated the idea of an evangelical voting bloc, maintaining that there are at least four very different groups of evangelicals (free-church, confessional, hardshell fundamentalist, and Catholic) who have little in common beyond a conservative approach to biblical and theological issues. “It is naïve to believe that just because there are fifty million of us we have much of an effect in politics,” he asserted. Moreover, there are forbidding logistical problems involved: “How do you take moral principle and implement it politically?”

Henry, author of Politics For Evangelicals, also sees the strong individualistic bent of evangelicals as an obstacle to political influence. “The most enthusiastic evangelicals are the ones who have the least sensitivity to the organizational and bureaucratic aspects of political reality. In politics, you’ve got to be organized.”

Henry characterized many of his fellow evangelicals at the convention as representing “fundamentalism in a polyester suit,” he said. “They have little sense of the real moral issues of this election—economic issues and the like. They have zeal without humility; they don’t recognize how difficult the issues are.” According to Henry, there was a lot of outright “fundamentalist involvement in both the Wallace and Reagan candidacies.” As for abortion as a major moral issue this year: “There’s no doubt in my mind that in some cases abortion is justifiable. Killing is wrong, but in some cases war is justifiable. There is no difference. Our choices are all fallen.”

It is clear that evangelicals are going to be involved on both sides of the political campaign this year. Henry offers counsel: “The interests of God are in both camps. The Providence of God reaches down into all the affairs of men, and not just into one political group.”

TIM MILLER and TONDA RUSH

Jesus Festivals

More than 40,000 registrants showed up on Ralph Watson’s dairy farm outside Mercer in western Pennsylvania last month for the final three-day Jesus ’76 rally in a series of four that were held this year. Earlier, Jesus ’76 in Orlando, Florida, attracted about 15,000, and the ones in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Brantford, Ontario, each drew about 6,000.

Many of the nationally known speakers and musicians involved were at all four events. For the most part, organizers attempted to strike a happy medium in programming that both charismatics and non-charismatics could live with. Thus it was that Campus Crusade’s Bill Bright, for example, could appear on the same program with charismatic broadcaster Pat Robertson.

There were some raised eyebrows at the Mercer rally, though. In several emotion-charged sessions, Robertson encouraged the audience to speak in tongues, and he announced instant healings. A stream of young people flowed to the platform to confirm they had been suddenly healed (of epilepsy, cancer of the uterus, a fracture). Several said their eyesight had been corrected, and they smashed their glasses. One youth said that he had been plagued by lust from age 13 but was now delivered “forever.”

Some leaders privately expressed reservations about Robertson’s conduct, but one said it was calculated. At previous Jesus rallies, he explained, the middle-ground approach pleased neither the charismatics nor the non-charismatics. Hence Robertson’s style was one with which the charismatics could identify fully and feel liberated.

Whatever, the heavy Pentecostal emphasis did not fracture the spirit of fellowship that was so plainly evident. In interviews, many persons said that the sense of love that pervaded the encampment was what impressed them most.

The Mercer organizers, a small band of laymen and ministers who had also sponsored Jesus ’74 in Mercer, announced they were disbanding this year. Money in excess of the $250,000-plus budget will be distributed to several area ministries.

The Jesus camp-meeting festivals began with Jesus ’73 in Morgantown in eastern Pennsylvania. Its leaders have since incorporated as Jesus Ministries, and they helped get the other Jesus rallies going. A permanent camp site for future rallies has been purchased in central Pennsylvania. (Last year’s Jesus ’75 at Morgantown attracted more than 25,000.)

The Jesus festivals emphasize Bible teaching (there were four huge “teaching” tents at Mercer), music “that ministers to the spirit,” and oneness in Christ. The book-store tent is always crowded, and display booths provide opportunities to meet representatives of mission agencies, Christian colleges, and other groups.

Businessman Alex Clattenberg, who directs the Rock House youth ministry at Calvary Assembly of God Church in Winter Park, Florida (sponsor of the Orlando event), thinks the Jesus-festival idea will spread to many other states in coming years.

Choosing A Church

Presidential hopeful Jimmy Carter once said that if elected he would join the Baptist church nearest to the White House. Some Baptists around Washington, D. C., took him seriously and got out their maps and rulers. They quickly discovered a problem. First Baptist Church and Calvary Baptist Church are both six blocks from the White House. Pastor emeritus Edward Hughes Pruden of First Baptist happened to be at the Kiwanis luncheon where Carter made his remark, and Pruden proceeded to give directions, pointing out that Harry Truman frequently walked to worship services at First. Pastor Charles A. Trentham of First followed up Pruden’s contact with several letters.

Pastor George Hill of Calvary Baptist also dropped Carter a friendly letter. He insists his church is a couple of hundred yards closer than First—if the measurement is made from the east gate instead of the front porch.

Both churches are downtown; First is close to the posh neighborhoods of “Embassy Row,” while Calvary sits amid commuter parking lots and deteriorating houses near the red-light district. Both count heavily on older suburbanites as core members. Both are integrated (relatively few blacks attend; black churches abound in the same neighborhoods). And both are dually aligned with the Southern Baptist Convention and the American Baptist Churches. First’s ties are stronger to the SBC; Calvary has firm relationships with the ABC, and its pulpit tends to be somewhat more liberal than First’s. Calvary engages in week-day neighborhood ministries, some of them headed by a black minister on its staff.

Legislator’s Legacy

Congressmen do much more than make speeches and vote on legislation. “Sonlight,” a group of fifteen young people who came to Washington August 3 to proclaim the Gospel, became keenly aware of that just before their first public appearance the next day.

Gary Holder of Tower Grove Baptist Church in St. Louis, Missouri, leader of the group, had met Congressman Jerry Litton a few months earlier and told him of the proposed tour. Litton then arranged permits for Sonlight to sing in capital area parks and at the monuments.

Litton, a Presbyterian, won the Democratic nomination for a U. S. Senate seat August 3. His plane crashed when he was taking off from his hometown of Chillicothe for a victory celebration in Kansas City that night. He and his wife and two children, along with the pilot and his son, died in the crash.

In recognition of the congressman’s death, flags were flying at half staff on the day Sonlight started singing in Washington. At a park concert, Holder concluded the program by telling of Litton’s assistance and asking for prayers for the survivors.

Pulpit Politics

Black clergyman J. L. Richard, president of the Baptist Ministers Union of Oakland, California, told reporters last month he has returned $2,000 to the Jimmy Carter campaign fund. His action came after the Los Angeles Times disclosed that he and three other black ministers in the Oakland area were paid a total of $5,000 to woo support for Carter among black voters in the June presidential primary (which Carter lost to Governor Jerry Brown). Richard said no receipts were available to document how the money was spent but, he added, he turned over a number of $25 and $50 “donations” to fellow ministers who had publicly endorsed Carter.

Richard said he considered the money as payment for services rendered. He told the Times: “When a preacher stands up in his church and talks about Jimmy Carter, he’s working for Jimmy Carter as far as I’m concerned, and he should be paid for it.… I don’t work for no damn politician for nothing.” He returned the money, he said, because of the “questionable implications” raised in press coverage.

There was no indication late last month as to whether the other three ministers will return the $1,000 each they received.

Carter spokesman Jody Powell said there was no need for Richard to return the money “because he’s done nothing wrong.” Giving “walk-around money” to community leaders to drum up votes has long been a political practice in both black and white neighborhoods. The practice is not illegal, Carter reminded reporters. He said he has ordered an investigation, however, to determine if some money was spent improperly, in which case recipients would be liable to income tax. He pledged to report anything illegal and to “take aggressive steps to prevent any reoccurrence.” Irregularities in financial reporting could force the Carter campaign to return part of the federal matching funds it has received.

Graham: Undecided

Evangelist Billy Graham warned last month that Christians should not vote for “born-again” Christian political candidates simply because they agree with the office seekers’ religious views. “I would rather have a man in office who is highly qualified to be President who didn’t make much of a religious profession than to have a man who had no qualifications but who made a religious profession,” he told reporter Russell Chandler of the Los Angeles Times. He indicated that President Ford and challenger Jimmy Carter have similar religious views. He added that he had not yet decided for whom he would vote.

The interview was part of a series of press conferences in connection with the evangelist’s eight-day crusade in San Diego. An average of more than 31,000 persons attended each of the stadium rallies, and some 10,200 decisions for Christ were recorded, about 44 per cent of them first-time professions of faith, according to crusade officials.

The crusade had the backing of 399 churches. Several hundred pastors and other church leaders attended a week-long school of evangelism held in conjunction with the crusade. Also, 1,400 young people, many of them college students, registered for CODE ’76, a three-day training conference held at San Diego State University.

Convicted

Pastor Charles B. Blair of the 6,000-member Calvary Temple church in Denver was convicted last month of seventeen counts of securities fraud. The jury deliberated seven hours. Appeals and sentencing are set for September 24. Each offense carries a prison sentence of from one to three years plus a $5,000 fine, but prosecutors say they will ask for probation for Blair because he is attempting to repay the investors.

Fund-raiser Wendell Nance was convicted last November of eleven counts of fraud in the case. He received a suspended prison sentence and had to pay a $5,000 fine.

The case involves sales of more than $11 million in unregistered time-payment certificates to 3,400 persons from late 1971 to early 1973. When authorities halted sales because the securities were unregistered and failed to contain adequate financial information, a crunch ensued, forcing Calvary, the Charles E. Blair Foundation, and Life Center, a nursing-home project, into bankruptcy (see July 26, 1974, issue, page 36, and January 3, 1975, issue, page 34). Many in the nursing home reportedly lost all or most of their savings in the collapse.

During the trial, Blair contended that Nance was to blame and that he was kept in the dark about the financial operation until it was too late to straighten it out. The prosecution established, however, that Blair had been warned by his own lawyer in 1971 that the church would lose in any civil suit against it because of inadequate information given to prospective investors. Also, he was told in 1972 and 1973 it would be illegal to “continue” in a “Ponzi” scheme (where interest is paid out of principal rather than earnings). Blair acknowledged knowing of the desperate plight in early 1972.

Blair told his congregation on the Sunday after his conviction that he still feels he is innocent. He said he has decided not to resign from the church, which he started in 1947, and will stay on the job until every investor who lost money is repaid. Four payments totaling $1 million have been made under a quarterly repayment plan; a fifth is due September 19.

“The Lord will take this bad situation and bring out of it that which will bring glory to his name,” said Blair. He apologized to those who had lost money in investments and to members who have had to defend him to their friends. Reporter Virginia Culver of the Denver Post said Blair spoke quietly, his voice choked with emotion at times. “The crowd gave him a standing ovation,” she reported, “and many of the worshipers wiped tears from their eyes during his talk.”

The Dead Speak

During a memorial service the day after seven Campus Crusade for Christ women staffers died in the recent Colorado flood (see August 27 issue, page 34), some of their fellow staff members decided to do more than just remember. The some 2,000 attending Crusade’s staff training conference in Colorado at the time of the tragedy chipped in $9,000 outright and got on the phones to ask for more from relatives and friends.

On Sunday, August 15, their idea became reality: a full-page ad containing photos of the women and an evangelistic message appeared in 150 major newspapers throughout the land. Some of the newspapers donated the space, others offered reduced rates.

“These women lost their lives in the Colorado flood,” said the ad. “But they are still alive. They have a message for you.” Accompanying the evangelistic appeal was a reproduction of Crusade’s “Four Spiritual Laws.”

Furor Over Form 990

Opposition is growing among church leaders to a proposal that would disqualify religious schools, hospitals, orphanages, and old-age homes from being classified as “integrated church auxiliaries” by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.

The change in classification would mean that these institutions would have to submit a completed Form 990 to the IRS each year. No taxes would be imposed, but the form asks non-profit organizations with more than $10,000 a year in gross receipts to list the names and addresses of all people who have contributed $5,000 or more in a year. The form also requires a detailed listing of other income, grants and gifts, certain salaries, and the nature of the activities engaged in.

The proposed change was announced in the Federal Register February 11, and a hearing on the issue was held June 7. Catholics, Baptists, Lutherans, and Mormons have expressed strong opposition. The Eastern Association of Christian Schools had a lawyer draw up a twenty-two-page brief that was sent to IRS commissioner Donald C. Alexander last month. It charges that the change runs counter to the intent of Congress when it enacted current tax-exemption legislation.

Sunday schools, men’s and women’s clubs, mission societies, and churches themselves would continue to be exempt from filing the information form.

For Sale

Deeply in debt, the Black Muslims have decided to dismantle their commercial holdings, estimated to be worth up to $70 million, according to a New York Times report. The business empire was built up in accord with the self-help philosophy of Elijah Muhammad, who led the Muslims for some forty years. But a lot of the business enterprise was just show, says Wallace Muhammad, who took over after his father died in 1974. The businesses were run poorly, and there was evidence of widespread corruption, he asserts. He acknowledges that the group owes millions of dollars in back taxes.

Latin Ferment

Some forty Catholic churchmen from fifteen nations, including seventeen bishops (four of them Americans), were detained by the Ecuadorian government last month and “invited to leave the country.” Plainclothes military police carrying automatic weapons burst into the conference room at the mountain retreat house in Riobamba where the group was meeting. The churchmen were taken by bus to a military barracks in Quito, 120 miles away, where they were detained for twenty-seven hours. Some were interrogated all night. The thirty-seven foreigners were then expelled.

Minister of the Interior Javier Manrique accused the group of interfering openly in the internal affairs of Ecuador. “The themes being discussed were of subversive character,” said Manrique, claiming that the police had found documents dealing with the unity of Catholics and Marxists, the role of the Catholic leftists, the military coup in Argentina, and the role of the Trotskyist party in Argentina. “There were even criticisms of the present Ecuadorian government by foreigners, which we cannot permit,” said Manrique. He said the participants had entered the country secretly.

The action was criticized sharply by church officials and the press. Political, labor, and student groups in Ecuador also protested the move.

Auxiliary bishop Alfonso López Trujillo, general secretary of the Colombia-based Latin American Episcopal Conference (CELAM), called the incident a “lamentable error” and “a violation of pastoral liberty,” and denounced “the burying of democracy in Latin America.” He said the church will “continue to exercise the right of criticism, in favor of the poor.”

Auxiliary bishop Patricio Flores of San Antonio, Texas, one of those attending the pastoral conference, said the detained churchmen had been treated well (they were allowed to celebrate a midnight mass), but he criticized “the unjustified suspicions of the Ecuadorian government,” and said the only purpose of the meeting was to discuss the propagation of the Catholic faith.

Other Americans involved included Archbishop Roberto Sanchez of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Auxiliary Bishops Juan Arzube of Los Angeles and Gilbert Chavez of San Diego, and Paul Sedillo, the director of U.S. Catholic Spanish-speaking work. They denied that there was anything subversive or even secretive about the meeting.

Three Chilean bishops were the objects of a violent rock-throwing demonstration on their return to Santiago. Catholic officials blamed press hostility, and they charged that secret police participated, an accusation denied by the government. The demonstrators who took part in the violence were declared excommunicated by Cardinal Raoul Silva Henriquez of Santiago.

Another American Catholic priest, James Weeks, 42, was expelled by the military government of Argentina on August 17. He had been arrested August 4 while teaching at a seminary in the Province of Cordoba, accused of subversive activities, and held incommunicado until shortly before his expulsion. The government alleged that the cleric had in his possession “abundant Marxist-Leninist literature and a record with subversive songs.”

Elsewhere in Latin America, Colombian minister of government Cornelio Reyes charged that priests were promoting subversion in areas of the country threatened by guerrillas. Reyes told the Colombian senate that he had a list of 100 priests who are operating with extreme leftist groups in the Uraba region in the northeast of the county.

STEPHEN R. SYWULKA

Blessed are the meek,” said Jesus, “for they shall inherit the earth” (Matt. 5:5). Perhaps Christians these days believe this, but they certainly don’t act as if they do. Much church life is anything but meek. We seem often to have lost sight of the essential meaning of Christ’s teaching as we go about our way of setting forward the best interests of Christ’s Church as we see them.

This was impressed on me when I came to southern California in time for Easter and saw something of the way the central festival of the Christian year was celebrated. It sometimes seems as though we who name the name of Christ are determined to outdo everyone else who names that name, even if in the process we accomplish something that has little or nothing to do with the Christian way.

For example, one service in these parts was billed as “the highest service in the southland” (it was on top of the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway at an elevation of 8,516 feet; reduced fares on the tram were another inducement). The lowest service was announced as being on a pier, just a few feet above the Pacific Ocean.

Combined choirs were often presented as an added attraction, and I was interested in the combination of the U.S. Naval Academy Glee Club and the Southern California Mormon Choir. Trumpets were blown everywhere, and sometimes “massed trumpets.” One service was billed to start at 5:14 A.M. because that was “the exact moment of sunrise.” Another was to reach its climax with the release of helium-filled balloons bearing “messages of hope and joy.” Yet another featured a twelve-foot red, white, and blue neon cross.

Perhaps the prize should go to the enterprising souls who organized a sunrise service on horseback, with prizes for the best Easter bonnet—worn by a horse!

I am not insensitive to the good intentions behind these services, and I realize that sometimes it is the unusual that brings people to church, where they may hear the Gospel and be brought into real spiritual blessing. I do, moreover, relish the joy of Easter, and I think a joyful service is appropriate. The service I attended on Easter Day (which was in my parish church, not some exotic setting) had trumpets, an enthusiastic congregation, and a note of high triumph. Indeed I cannot recall a more triumphant Easter service. Easter is a triumphant time, and it is well that the Church observe it with joy.

But when we start seeking out the highest and the lowest geographical points and adding things like helium balloons and horse bonnets, it is time to ask whether we have gone astray. Are we really looking to the meek Christ? Or are we letting the world and the worldly-minded dictate the manner of our observation of the high point of the Christian year?

There is a natural tendency to think that the solution to all our ills, including those that the Church as a whole suffers, is in our own hands. We like to think that if we put forth a determined effort everything will come out all right. And if a normal, conventional effort is unlikely to attain the goal, perhaps something unconventional will do it. So we leap from stunt to stunt, hoping that something we do will draw the crowds.

It might be worth our while to pause and ask whether, in fact, we should be trying to draw crowds. I am not suggesting that we Christians should resign ourselves to perpetual failure and comfort ourselves with the thought that we are not necessarily meant to have success as this world understands it. It is easy to take that attitude and let a cloak of piety cover a basic laziness. If our churches are to do the job to which Christ calls them, a lot of hard work must be done. Let us not close our eyes to that.

God calls us to be his servants, not his stunt artists-despite the crowds we might draw.

But this does not mean that we are to turn ourselves into stunt artists. Being Christ’s servants is much more difficult.

We are to live out the implications of Christ’s cross. He said that if anyone wished to follow him, that one must take up his own cross daily. To be Christ’s means to see life in the light of the cross.

Now the central thing about the cross is that it was God’s way of putting away man’s sin. Because Christ died we live. We no longer live for ourselves; we live for him who died for us and rose again (2 Cor. 5:15). And we no longer rely on ourselves. No one can look at the cross and decide that his own right arm is adequate. The cross means the end of all self-seeking and all self-reliance.

It is true that the cross summons us to an all-out effort. In view of what Christ has done for us, less will not do. But it is also true that the cross leaves no place for complacency. Since my sins put Christ there, I cannot be satisfied with my achievement. And I cannot be satisfied to approach my problems or those I share with the other members of the body of Christ in the spirit of one of the world’s super-salesmen. I must do it in the spirit of Christ.

And that brings us back to the importance of meekness. We do not greatly like that virtue these days, partly, at least, because we confuse it with lack of spirit. We see the meek as those too passive and weak to put up a battle, and we are not surprised if they are downtrodden.

But real meekness is strong. There is nothing of the weakling about the man who could assert himself but chooses not to do so. That is real strength. We should not confuse strength with selfishness. The one who consistently puts forth all his strength in the pursuit of his own selfish aims is not showing himself to be strong in the best sense of that term. He may be able to prevail over many and to secure the things he wants. But he is not really strong.

That is rather the prerogative of the meek. They are those who have looked at life and seen that there are better ways than selfishness. They may or may not live in poverty. But if they do it is not because they cannot earn more. It is because they see better things in life than choosing to be affluent at all costs. In some respects the hippies have come to such a position. But they are not usually meek; many of them are self-assertive about the rightness of their own way and quick to reject other people’s values.

Meekness means a readiness to accept God’s way. The really meek man looks to find God’s will and is humbly obedient to it when he finds it. This means that he constantly looks to God for his way and his means, for his direction and for the strength to take that direction rather than another. There is a need for meekness in today’s world and especially in today’s Church.

LEON MORRIS

“When the Devil wanted nothing to happen,” according to an old Norwegian saying, “he set up the first committee.”

Under a mandate from the Nairobi assembly of the World Council of Churches to do something about religious liberty in Eastern Europe (see January 2, 1976, issue, page 31), the policy-making Central Committee of the WCC decided last month in Geneva to set up an advisory committee. It was the first full meeting of the 130-member group since the late-1975 WCC assembly (the WCC has 286 member denominations). Human rights in Eastern Europe was one of the major issues in Nairobi, and more journalists than Central Committee members turned out for the meeting in the expectation that some action would be taken. Some 100 advisors, guests, and staff were also on hand.

When the WCC’s general secretary, Philip Potter, met with reporters after adjournment, he suggested that the new panel might get to work on the human-rights issue by next March. The Central Committee’s next annual meeting is scheduled next July.

Per Lønning, the resigned bishop of the Church of Norway who suggested the origin of committees, stopped short of calling the WCC demonic and of suggesting that it will never do anything on the Eastern European situation. He did, however, point out the council’s inconsistency in dealing with issues.

“I am happy that in many important questions such as the racism issue, or in issues of peace and war, this council has not spoken so contextually that the challenge to the consciences has been allowed to disappear,” Lønning declared. “I hope the issue of religious freedom will not be allowed to disappear either.”

Potter was disposed to speak in general terms about the issue rather than being specific. So was William P. Thompson, stated clerk of the United Presbyterian Church U.S.A., who was the chairman of a panel that reviewed the general secretary’s recommendations on the subject. When someone objected to the vague language that was under consideration, Thompson, a lawyer, responded with an old saying from the American legal fraternity: “One is never unintentionally ambiguous.” The words in his enabling motion, he said, “were chosen with great care.”

Even though there was vigorous discussion of the issue, the Central Committee followed the lead of Potter and Thompson when the showdown came on the key motion. No hands were lifted in opposition.

In keeping with their recent practice, the council’s policy-makers were very specific on human rights in other parts of the world. South Africa was condemned for its “deceptive maneuver” to “perpetuate and consolidate apartheid” by creating black homelands such as the Transkei. The council’s member churches “and particularly the churches in South Africa” were urged to “do everything in their power to counteract the repressive violence of the regime” and to demonstrate “solidarity with the oppressed” in the white-ruled nation. The Smith government of Rhodesia was described as “illegal,” and the WCC committee’s resolution expressed grave concern over its “criminal measures of collective punishment and the continued denial of human rights.” The Turkish government was called to task for its expulsion of some Greek Cypriots from Cyprus and its organized immigration of Turks to Cyprus.

One of the council’s most highly publicized agencies, the Program to Combat Racism (PCR), also got down to specifics during the nine-day meeting. It announced its sixth allocation of funds since creation of a “special fund to combat racism” in 1970. A record sum of $560,000 was distributed to thirty-seven groups in nineteen countries. Six of the grants were given in North America, among them an initial $10,000 for the fight to abolish the death penalty in the United States by the Legal Defense and Educational Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The American Indian Movement, which has received previous grants from the PCR, got $15,000 in the 1976 allocation. Another $15,000 was given to the United Farm Workers, also a previous recipient. The newest donations bring to $2.11 million the total amount distributed through the PCR’s special fund.

Members of the Central Committee with backgrounds in various WCC programs spent most of their meeting time fighting for specific language in documents that would assure the continuation of those programs. Taking the most time of the committee as a whole was the Ecumenical Institute at Bossey, near Geneva. This international study center’s future has been hotly debated since officers of the council decided last year that no more of the WCC’s undesignated income should go to keep Bossey in operation. That decision was reversed by the Central Committee, but the study center was put on notice that it will need to tighten its operation in order to get more funding after next year.

Much of the meeting was involved with housekeeping, with all units being directed to practice stricter financial controls. The committee launched a plan to develop more undesignated income from member denominations. Even though some member churches have increased giving since special appeals were made at the Nairobi assembly, the international monetary situation has meant that when those gifts were converted into Swiss francs, the WCC’s income was still not increasing. The 1977 budget adopted at the meeting is slightly below the spending authorized for 1976.

In one attempt to save funds, some of the commissions that direct various programs will not have their first meetings until 1978. Others will begin work by 1977. Meantime, the programs will be run by the staff, with oversight by small “core groups” appointed by the Central Committee.

The Nairobi assembly’s much discussed emphasis on “confessing Christ” got little attention at the Geneva meeting, but a decision was made to plan the 1977 sessions around a theme of missions and evangelism. Also approved was a proposal from the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism to sponsor a major conference on missions in 1980. It will be preceded by conferences in 1977 on ecumenical dialogue, in 1978 on faith and order, and in 1979 on church and society. Major studies on militarism and disarmament were authorized also.

Military governments in Ethiopia and Uganda were the topics of short resolutions. No condemnation was expressed, but the general secretary was authorized to work with the All Africa Conference of Churches to take “appropriate action.”

Potter, the general secretary, was voted an additional five-year term during a closed session of the committee. He completes his first five-year term in 1977.

Provisional admission to membership was voted for five denominations: the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem and the Middle East, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Southern Africa, the Baptist Church of Bangladesh, the Methodist Church in Fiji, and the Protestant Christian Church in Bali, Indonesia. Their membership will be considered permanent if current member denominations do not file objections after being notified of the Central Committee’s action.

Translations Tussle

As reported earlier, all but four members of Wycliffe Bible Translators’ forty-person team left Nigeria by the end of June, in compliance with a government order issued in April (see June 4 issue, page 51). In the order, Wycliffe was asked to turn over its impressive linguistics center, located in Jos, to the University of Jos. Why the ouster? ACHRISTIANITY TODAYcorrespondent looked into the matter and filed this report:

Since starting work in Nigeria in 1961, Wycliffe has been registered as the Institute of Linguistics, affiliated with Nigerian universities. The government’s official rationale for ordering an end to IL’s work is that the universities have now developed their own linguistics departments and therefore IL is no longer needed. As to other aspects of IL’s work, the government states that Nigerian church bodies can look after Bible translation, and there are government literacy agencies.

A government official has intimated, however, that the policy is a linguistic one, because of the need to unify the nation’s multitude of tribes with a common language. In the eyes of some government officials, development of small linguistic groups would not be in the national interest. A report by the University of Ibadan’s Savannah journal lists 396 distinct Nigerian languages, apart from dialects.

February’s attempted coup has increased the military government’s concern about minority groups. Most of the ringleaders were from small tribes in the Plateau area—ironically, IL’s operating base. The national paranoia following the assassination of Nigeria’s popular general Murtala Muhammad aroused suspicion of foreigners. In its northern edition, Nigeria’s largest newspaper, the Daily Times, came out with a scare headline story on the IL: “Another CIA Base Closed.” IL director Ronald Stanford and Nigerian Bible Translation Council members refuted the allegation of CIA involvement.

In Africa’s increasing nationalist awareness, there is a continent-wide suspicion of foreigners seeking information among remote tribal groups. An East African newspaper recently alleged that anthropologists doing research were really foreign spies. Tourists may be suspect.

Observers point out that the government’s decision regarding IL does not reflect opposition to Christian or missionary work, which still enjoys complete liberty in Nigeria. The institute was not registered as a mission, they say.

The Council for the Promotion of Bible Translation in Nigeria strongly appealed the government’s ouster decision, explaining that qualified consultants from overseas are still needed. The Nigerian trustees of the institute also put up a strong case for retaining IL’s linguistic center.

Negotiations resulted in the government’s agreement that the Nigerian trustees could register as a Nigerian organization with an immigration quota of ten foreign consultants, and could retain all IL property. However, only four persons from the 40-member IL team could remain in the country. None of the others, including the director, may return, and the remaining six quota places must be filled with linguists from outside Wycliffe’s membership. Nigerian organizations are appealing the latter decision.

Wycliffe, facing similar difficulties in several other countries, is emphasizing the development of national linguists to carry on the work. Of the twenty Bible translation projects currently active in Nigeria, twelve should be completed by the end of this year.

While government leaders wonder about the effects of developing minority languages, tribal Christian response varies. Representatives of one small ethnic group said they would not use the forthcoming Scripture translation in their tribal language because they were literate in a trade language. But in the Higi language, a New Testament illustrated with culturally relevant photographs sold more than 2,500 copies in three months.

‘We see this work as a real challenge to us Nigerians,” said one member of IL’s Nigerian board. “It is our responsibility before God to make it possible for every Nigerian to read the Scriptures in his mother tongue.”

Lutheran Love

Money and mission were priority items on the agenda of the biennial meeting of the 3.1-million-member Lutheran Church in America (LCA), held recently in Boston. Approved was a special mission campaign to raise $25 million over three years, to be split about evenly between domestic and overseas projects. A freewill, open-ended hunger appeal, with anticipated receipts of about $7 million during the next two years, will be continued (hunger appeal gifts for the past two years totaled $6.75 million). A third money motion was the adoption of record budgets for the next two years: $37.4 million for 1977 and $38.5 million for 1978.

President David W. Preus of the American Lutheran Church (ALC) and ecumenical officer Thomas C. Spitz, Jr., of the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches (AELC), the recently formed “moderate” breakaway group from the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, received standing-ovation welcomes and adieus during their appearances to deliver brief fraternal greetings. “We in the ALC,” reported Preus, “pledge you our partnership. Lutherans have a heritage worth claiming, a message worth proclaiming, a church worth sharing. The ALC applauds all of this evidence of LCA and ALC unity.” In a show of further evidence, the delegates recommended unanimously that LCA leaders “pursue with haste negotiations toward organic union with the American Lutheran Church” and report back in 1978.

Spitz, also pledging cooperation, said, “We believe that our common subscription to the Scriptures and the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church is both basis enough and reason enough for a total effort toward Lutheran consolidation.”

President Jacob A. O. Preus of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod was given a polite but cooler reception. Surprisingly, he responded frankly to a knuckles-rapping resolution adopted by the 1974 convention of the LCA that accused the LCMS of “fencing God’s Word and fracturing God’s people.” Preus retorted that his church’s doctrinal resolutions “reflect the scriptural and confessional position which the synod has maintained throughout her history.” Many delegates were incredulous when he announced that the LCMS controversy “is drawing to a close.” Fewer than ten of the 6,200 congregations, he said, have decided to leave the synod. “Missouri has overwhelmingly, at the synodical, the district, and the congregational level, decided that she is going to remain Missouri.”

He declared that the LCMS “is a haven for those who desire to be a part of a confessional church body which has been tested in the fires of affliction and has emerged triumphant over the forces that had the effect of muffling her voice in Christendom and throughout the world.” Then he invited “all who share the great seriousness of God’s Word and our Lutheran Confessions to join with us in witnessing to the biblical faith as we carry out our mission and ministry.” There was no rush to accept.

The most hotly debated item on the agenda was the proposed new service book and hymnal, to be published in cooperation with the ALC, the LCMS, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Canada. The joint hymnal project was begun in 1965. The often revised list of hymns, now totaling 510, was officially sanctioned. The convention, however, withheld its approval of the sections on worship services and occasional services in the hymnal, voting only “to approve in principle the liturgical portions and to authorize the Executive Council of the LCA to take final action following a review of its theology and whatever testing is deemed necessary.”

Of concern were several unclear sections about who could administer the Lord’s Supper, who should receive it, and who would be allowed to distribute it to shut-ins. The theology of the real presence of Christ, the use of “covenant” or “testament” terminology, the omission of the confessional from the communion service, and the avoidance of the implications of the reserved host were disturbing features to many delegates. A task force is making revisions.

Of the numerous social-action concerns that were debated, school busing was the first to be considered. Significantly, the adopted resolution originated with the New England Synod, where Boston-based busing has caused considerable strife. Delegates overwhelmingly—there were fewer than a dozen negative votes out of a possible 685—agreed to urge that “all citizens and officials of government … support busing as a means to equal access to quality education when that cannot be achieved otherwise.”

The delegates called on President Ford to grant “unconditional amnesty to all persons who by action in the exercise of their conscience are in legal jeopardy because of their non-violent resistance to the Southeast Asia War,” and they urged Congress to halt development of the B-l bomber.

LESLIE CONRAD, JR.

All Wet

The great flood present in all major religious “mythology” really did take place, says André Capart, director of the Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. It occurred, he asserts, in 6500 B.C. but did not cover the entire surface of the earth. A sudden melting of the polar ice caps lifted ocean levels 166 feet, covering the coastal areas of the world and leaving traces still visible, he explains. Undoubtedly there were some “clever peasants” who were able to gather their families and belongings in boats around the world, he acknowledges, but that story about Noah and the ark is “a mistranslation of ancient texts.”

Coggan To Church: ‘Dither No Longer’

Despite rumblings about disestablishment and a series of amendments, the recent Church of England general synod accepted Prime Minister Callaghan’s proposals regarding the appointment of bishops. Disestablishment from the church’s favored position was never really a practicable proposition, and even the amendments that advocated further negotiation with the state were swept aside. By 390–29 the synod agreed to revised arrangements that will give the church a greater say in episcopal appointments. Ultimately, however, the decision remains in the hands of the state; technically, appointments to dioceses are made by the Queen on the advice of the prime minister. It makes no difference that the latter could be Muslim or Mormon, Jew or atheist (Callaghan is a Welsh Baptist).

Synod chairman Sir Norman Anderson, a well-known evangelical, warned the synod in a powerful speech that to reject the prime minister’s proposal would be to precipitate a head-on collision with the state. He felt that in practice the new proposals involving extensive consultations would give the church a decisive voice. If things did not work out that way, the church would “be free to approach the government again in terms of some further reform—but from a position of vastly greater strength than we have at present.”

Archbishop of Canterbury F. Donald Coggan also urged acceptance of the proposals. “For decades,” he said, “this matter has been before the church; report has succeeded report.… We must dither no longer, but have the courage to make up our minds.” The church could then “use the privileges of its legal establishment for the service of God [and] devote its energies to the evangelization of the nation.”

So it was decided to take a substantial half-loaf and ignore the plaintive question raised by T. L. Dye of York: “Are we a colony of heaven on earth here, or are we a colony of 10 Downing Street [the prime ministerial residence]?”

At another session, General Secretary Philip Potter of the World Council of Churches also took pains to underline the Church of England’s subordinate role. Friction between it and the WCC, he suggested, could be reduced if the church could come to terms with the fact that it was no longer a dominant force.

Potter returned to the “racist Britain” charge that, made at Nairobi, had roused ill feeling in some quarters. Britain in the past three centuries, he said to the synod, had been one of the leading colonial and imperialist nations. The most responsible persons in community and nation had been associated with the Established Church of England. It was “a historical fact of life” that “colonialism and imperialism were accompanied by racism and the violation of human rights at home and abroad.”

In a newspaper interview the previous week, Potter had suggested that his critics would not “have carried on in the same way” at his WCC predecessors, both of whom (the paper pointed out) were white men. “I speak as Philip Potter,” he reportedly said, “and am not terribly conscious as a rule of being general secretary of the WCC.”

J. D. DOUGLAS

Mission From Japan

A July graduate of Japan Bible Seminary, Takashi Fukuda, 30, and his wife Aiko have completed Wycliffe Bible Translators training and have been assigned to translate one of the 150 minority languages of the Philippines. The couple organized Wycliffe Bible Translators in Tokyo after Fukuda read a Reader’s Digest article, “Two Thousand Tongues to Go,” and began translating English excerpts from the Wycliffe magazine into Japanese as a challenge to other young Christians. Eight other Japanese missionaries are working with Wycliffe.

The Protestant churches in Japan have almost 100 Japanese missionaries serving in twenty-two countries. The heaviest coverage is in Taiwan, Indonesia, and Brazil, but some are scattered as far as Zaire, Kenya, Nepal, Jamaica, India, and Ethiopia.

The post-war missionary move of the church in Japan had to contend with bitter war memories in Southeast Asia at first. Most of those now on the field have gone out within the past ten years. At the same time, Japanese churches are assuming more financial responsibility for missionary work, and Japanese Christians are learning concepts of stewardship, an aspect of personal involvement relatively unknown until recently.

In 1971 the Japan Overseas Missions Association (JOMA) was formed, and presently it is composed of eleven evangelical groups (including Wycliffe). Non-JOMA affiliated agencies such as the Southern Baptists, Assemblies of God, and the Evangelical Alliance Mission are also sending missionaries from Japan.

According to JOMA executive secretary Andrew Furuyama, pre-World War II missionaries went from Japan to China, Mongolia, Southeast Asia, and South America.

NELL L. KENNEDY

MONEY FROM THE DEVIL

Canadian headquarters of the Salvation Army ordered a Windsor, Ontario, corps to return an $8,283 grant it had received from Wintario, the provincial lottery. “Our opposition to gambling makes it impossible to accept lottery profits,” explained a spokesman. The leader of the Army’s Windsor youth band, who had requested the grant, said he recognized the problem, but pointed out that the Salvation Army opposed drinking, yet accepted money from breweries. He quoted Army founder William Booth as saying, “I would accept money from the devil to further the Lord’s work.”

LESLIE K. TARR

Near Miss

Late one night last month communications staffer Bill Nyman of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (Wycliffe Bible Translators) returned to the SIL’s guest house in Bogota from the airport where he had picked up a colleague. With him were his daughters and one of their friends. A brown paper parcel lay on the doorstep. One of the girls joked that it might be a bomb. When she picked it up, it began to sputter and smoke.

Nyman shouted for everyone to take cover. The girls ran across the street and threw themselves down; the men ducked behind Nyman’s car.

A moment later the bomb exploded, blowing the steel front door through another door and upstairs where twenty people were sleeping. No one was hurt.

Elsewhere in the city that night three other bombs exploded outside buildings linked to Americans.

Vatican Turmoil

Under attack from different sides, the Vatican has struck back.

Dissident leftist priest Giovanni Franzoni, an open backer of the Communist party, was defrocked. Franzoni, a former Benedictine abbot, has been living in a Rome slum where he is active in social work and political affairs. Just before the June elections he came out publicly for the Communist party. Already under a two-year suspension from priestly duties, he was in effect challenging the Vatican’s repeated assertion that Marxism and Christianity are incompatible. The action to reduce him to lay status is seen as a warning to the growing number of other restless, politically active priests in Italy.

On another front, the Vatican spoke out strongly against the growing public sentiment and pressure to permit dozens of women of an area near Milan to have abortions. The women were exposed to a toxic substance following an explosion at a chemical plant.

One of the Vatican’s most volatile problems involves conservative French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, 70, a traditionalist who has opposed many of the reforms of Vatican II and who has directed personal attacks against Pope Paul and his predecessor, Pope John XXIII. Lefebvre, who has run a small unauthorized seminary in Switzerland to train priests in traditionalist ways, was suspended from his episcopal functions in late June—when he was to have ordained a dozen new priests. The archbishop proceeded with the ordinations anyway, and he announced he would celebrate a Tridentine Latin mass on August 29 in Lille, France, where he was born—even though his priestly rights were revoked, and even though the local bishop refused to grant permission for the mass, as required by church law.

The Vatican’s indefinite suspension of Lefebvre is the most severe sanction against a prelate in recent memory. He is thought to have about 25,000 followers in France. Some observers believe schism will occur—a virtual certainty if the archbishop is excommunicated.

Living Chinese

The New Testament volume of the New Chinese Bible was released recently, the third major Chinese translation in less than two years. Sponsored by the Lock-man Foundation of California and produced by a committee of Chinese scholars, the new Bible is intended for a wide Chinese readership in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and Manila.

In January of this year another Bible committee came out with the New Testament in Today’s Chinese, a close rendering of Today’s English Version, popularly known as Good News For Modern Man.

Prior to the release of these two, the Bible Society in Hong Kong published The Contemporary Gospel (Living Chinese New Testament) in December, 1974, the first Asian edition of the Living Bible. Expected to top 500,000 sales by the end of the summer, it is available in various formats and language styles. It is intended for use in mainland China as well as elsewhere, and some copies are in the new simplified script introduced by Communist leader Mao Tse-tung, while others are in the standard Mandarin and Cantonese script.

NELL L. KENNEDY

Religion In Transit

In a roll-call vote, churches of the 5,200-member Seventh Day Baptist General Conference at the group’s annual meeting voted 355 to 227 to withdraw from the World Council of Churches. The Seventh Day Baptists have been a member of the WCC from its outset.

Officials of World Vision Internationl denied a report in a Washington Post story from Bangkok that claimed WVI used street boys in South Viet Nam to collect intelligence for U.S. officials. The story attributed the report to former Boston teacher Dick Hughes, who headed the “Vietnamese Shoe-Shine Boys Foundation.” A WVI spokesman sternly rebuked the Post for failing to check out the unsubstantiated report (which he attributed to unhappy Vietnamese left behind during WVI evacuation efforts).

Newsweek reported that evangelist Billy Graham was discussing with ABC-TV management a proposed series of TV network appearances, including both a regular program and specials.

Sociology of Homosexuality, an appreciative and sympathetic study of homosexuality as a way of life, is being taught this year at Humber College in Toronto. The teacher is anthropologist Earl Reidy, an admitted homosexual. He says the course is designed to help gays accept themselves and adapt to their life-style and to help “straights” overcome “common misconceptions.” Humber has 6,000 full-time students and thousands of part-timers.

Navy officials canceled a week-long revival planned at Whidby Island Naval Air Station near Seattle last month. The cancellation came after the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups asked a federal court to stop the event. A letter signed by Commander Bernard Minetti, recently converted base operations officer, had been sent to area churches inviting people to an “old-fasioned tent revival.” It was billed as a back-to-Christ renewal campaign featuring a variety of preachers. The letter was marked “Official Business” and “Postage and fees paid: Department of the Navy.” It offered free parking for campers and trailers and at least one meal in the Navy galley. Base commander Richard S. Hopper voiced regret that his personnel could not “share a religious experience with their civilian friends.”

Monroe County, Indiana, school trustees banned distribution of the Bible inside school buildings by the Gideons, a practice instituted in 1972 under pressure from local churches.

Catholic archbishop John F. Whealon of Hartford, Connecticut, granted preacher status to nun Kathleen Cannon, chaplain of Albertus Magnus College in New Haven. The designation gives her the right to deliver sermons from the church pulpit during mass. The archbishop says she is the first woman preacher in the history of the Catholic Church.

The Christian Broadcasting Network announced it will broadcast an hour-long pre-election television special over 120 TV stations on September 17 calling the nation to prayer during the seven weeks preceding the election. A number of well-known Christian leaders, evangelists, and other personalities will be featured.

Missouri voters defeated by a vote of 57 to 43 a proposed amendment to the state constitution authorizing limited aid to non-public schools.

Sunday sales “are humming like a church organ” in shopping centers throughout the nation, Business Week has reported. Thirty states still have blue laws banning certain types of store openings, but enforcement has been lax, said the magazine. The nationwide trend is toward seven-day shopping, according to the article.

A national conference of 275 Lutheran and Catholic college students and campus ministers in a meeting at Collegeville, Minnesota, last month issued a plea to their parent church bodies to permit intercommunion.

After protests by fellow Catholics and on the advice of Archbishop Thomas J. McDonough, black priest Edward Davis called off a speech in his Louisville, Kentucky, church by Communist-party activist Angela Davis. Pastor Gilbert Schroerlucke of West Broadway United Methodist Church then agreed to have the speech at his church, a decision denounced by Methodist bishop Frank L. Robertson “as totally incompatible with the teaching of the United Methodist Church.” There were more protests. After Ms. Davis’s appearance, Schroerlucke spent eight days in a hospital after suffering what was described as chest pains.

Canada’s churches are suffering from a shortage of clergy, according to a published survey, and the hardest hit apparently is the Presbyterian Church in Canada, in which 12 per cent of the pastoral charges lack ministers.

Divorce, rather rare until recent years in Orthodox Judaism, has become increasingly commonplace, involving 10 per cent of its adherents, according to reports released at the annual convention of the Rabbinical Council of America.

The 215-church, 62,000-member American Baptist Churches of New Jersey will join other religious and civil-liberties groups in a federal lawsuit opposing the teaching of Transcendental Meditation in four New Jersey school systems.

Teachers in Catholic schools began organizing unions in the early 1960s to gain better pay, benefits, and working conditions—but not without opposition from church officials. In 1971 the National Labor Relations Board began asserting jurisdiction over large non-profit organizations. Within the past year the NLRB ordered union elections for schools in Los Angeles and Chicago. The unions won, but the school officials are fighting the decisions, saying the NLRB’s involvement in church affairs is unconstitutional. Irate teachers accuse the church of hypocrisy: the church is an advocate of the rights of workers to organize—except when its own interests are at stake.

Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn is chairman of the interfaith National Bible Week November 21–28 and founder-chairman Ray A. Kroc of the McDonald’s hamburger empire is associate chairman. Kroc, in his seventies, still supports the church he attended as a child. Harvard Church of Oak Brook, Illinois.

DEATH

BENJAMIN P. BROWNE, 83, noted religious journalist and American Baptist educator; in Alhambra, California, of leukemia.

Personalia

Paul M. Stevens, 61, radio and television executive of the Southern Baptist Convention, was selected by President Ford to be a director of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. SBC programming is aired in twelve languages on 3,700 U. S. radio and TV stations and on the military network.

Thomas P. Bailey is the new president of the 94-year-old Nyack College, a growing school of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. His brother Nathan is president of the CMA.

Educator Craven Edward Williams of Davidson College in North Carolina was named president of Gardner-Webb College, a Southern Baptist school in the same state.

Gerhardt W. Hyatt, 60. who retired last year as chief of chaplains of the U. S. Army, was named president of Concordia College, a Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod school in St. Paul, Minnesota.

World Scene

Australia’s highest court has given the green light to a planned merger of the Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregational churches into the Uniting Church of Australia. The court rejected challenges by a Presbyterian clergyman and layman. The wedding date is June 22, 1977, barring appeals and legislative snags. The new denomination is expected to have some 2.5 million members.

Britain’s Evangelical Alliance, embracing more than 700 churches and other groups, has sharply denounced a “Manual of Technique for Deprogramming Technicians” that claims the alliance actively counters the “menace of the cults” and is a good recruiting ground from which to get deprogrammers (persons who use force and psychological techniques to extricate others from offbeat religious groups). Alliance executive Gordon Landreth says his organization “utterly condemns the practices recommended in the manual” (kidnapping, torture, fees of $4,000). The manual is published by a virtually unknown group and may be a spoof.

Hundreds of persons watched in horror as Protestant pastor Oskar Brusewitz doused himself with gasoline, then lit a match on the square in Zeitz in East Germany. He died of burns. One of two signs he carried said, “The churches accuse the Communists of oppressing young Christians.” Embarrassed government leaders alleged that the clergyman was a sick man who suffered from delusions. Several hundred Protestant pastors have asked for permission to leave the country, but church leaders want them to stay put: their congregations need them.

Nearly 2,000 Polish Catholic men and women missionaries are serving in Africa, Latin America, Oceania, and Asia, according to Catholic sources.

Religious liberty in Communist-ruled Laos is being curtailed, claim Vatican sources. Catholic schools, orphanages, residences, and churches have been taken over by the government and religious education has been eliminated. Two of the six Catholic churches in Vientiane, the capital, may still be used for weekly services, the sources say. About 34,000 of Laos’s 3.3 million people are Catholics. Most of the population is Buddhist. Only two of Vientiane’s eighty-seven Buddhist pagodas remain open.

Israeli officials say their government “in no way” extended any help to the producers of the controversial film The Passover Plot, based on a 1965 book by British scholar Hugh Schonfield. And there was no legal way they could prevent its filming on Israeli soil, they say. Their statement was in response to storms of protest by Christian communities in the Holy Land. The film shows Jesus being killed unexpectedly while trying to stage a fake death.

General Secretary Philip A. Potter of the World Council of Churches has appealed to President H. Kamazu Banda of Malawi to release Jehovah’s Witnesses who have been arrested for practicing their faith and to allow them to return home to lead a normal life. Potter described reports of persecution and torture of JWs as “most disturbing.”

Women ordained abroad as priests in the Anglican Communion cannot be allowed to officiate in the Church of England, according to an official report. Any change in the recognition of women’s status must be made by the church, not by bishops or archbishops.

Elders of Evangelical Church in Abeche, Chad, decided to move the distribution of relief food from a residence to the church, intending to tie the relief effort more closely to the church’s witness. Wheat was handed out to Abeche’s poor following a sermon. But angry Muslim activists protested, claiming the Christians were using food to proselyte poor Muslims, and rock throwing ensued. The government ordered that food distribution at the church be suspended. Mennonites who supply the relief food say it should be given with no strings attached.

Large cracks have appeared in the great dome of the cathedral in Florence, Italy, an architectural and engineering masterpiece that dates from the fifteenth century.

A Turkish court has jailed or fined forty-two Jehovah’s Witnesses on charges that they are members of a foreign-based organization without permission.

A cooperative Protestant theological school has been founded in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, as a result of the unifying influences and “stimulus” of the 1974 evangelism congress in Lausanne, according to European Baptist Press Service.

The government of Czechoslovakia was described as “one of the most repressive in eastern Europe in regard to the exercise of human rights” by a spokesman for America’s Catholic bishops. Latest evidence: a ban against joining religious orders of women that “will mean the liquidation of the twenty-two religious orders.”

The October 22 issue will mark the celebration of our twentieth anniversary. In it we will print several articles from earlier days that are of enduring interest, including one by Billy Graham on evangelism. I am in my twelfth year of service at C.T. with a few more to go.

I urge readers to pray about some of the urgent needs around the world. Europe and especially Britain desperately need rain. God’s people everywhere can do something about it. Pray for the resolution of the political problem in Rhodesia and South Africa. The days of control by white minorities are numbered. Prayer can make the difference between a peaceful and a violent solution.

A Major Reference Tool

The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology. Volume 1, edited by Colin Brown (Zondervan, 1976, 822 pp., $24.95), is reviewed by W. Ward Gasque, associate professor of New Testament studies, Regent College, Vancouver, Canada.

This valuable new work is the English translation, revision, and adaptation of a standard German reference tool that is much beloved by theological students and pastors. It is both easier to use and generally more theologically conservative than the famous Theological Dictionary of the New Testament edited by Gerhard Kittel, which has been recently completed in nine volumes (index volume yet to come). Considering the fact that it is in many ways an improvement of an already proven work, it would seem that it is destined for a long and useful life in its English form. When completed, the NIDNTT (or shall we abbreviate it DNTT?) will be in three volumes, due to appear at roughly one-year intervals.

The first difference from the TDNT is obviously size. The DNTT covers the same basic ground covered by the larger work in three volumes of approximately the same size as the nine in TDNT. (Volumes two and three are expected to be slightly larger than volume one.) However, it should be pointed out that there are Greek words discussed in DNTT that were missed in TDNT, and it seems improbable that any that occupy space in TDNT will be omitted from DNTT, even though the treatment will obviously be much briefer.

The second difference concerns the orientation of the two dictionaries. TDNT is intended for specialists, though it can be used with profit by anyone who has taken the trouble to learn Greek. By contrast. DNTT is designed to be easy for those with little or no Greek or Hebrew to use. Not only are all Greek and Hebrew words transliterated, but the material is arranged according to English word-groupings, so that one does not have to know even the Greek alphabet to find what he is looking for. In addition, there are extensive cross-references and very full indexes, which enable one to find just what he wants. Thus, for example, someone studying Mark 13 would look up “Abomination of Desolation” instead of bdelugma in order to find help in understanding this cryptic term; or one would look up “Church” instead of ekklesia; “Brother” instead of adelphos; “Darkness” instead of skotos; “Enemy” instead of echthros; and so forth. And under each of these headings he would find not merely a discussion of the important Greek terms used in the New Testament but also the larger conceptual context (which scholars nowadays call “semantic field”) and often penetrating exegesis of difficult passages of Scripture.

An important feature of DNTT is the presence of extensive and fully up-to-date bibliographies. This makes the dictionary indispensable for advanced theological students and scholars as well as for ordinary Bible students. Here it is miles ahead of TDNT, whose early volumes are now extremely dated (as is, it might be added, the German original of DNTT). The bibliographies are divided into two sections, the first listing books and articles in English and the second, foreign-language material. This feature alone makes the dictionary an essential reference work in any serious theological library.

A final difference between the dictionaries edited by Kittel and Brown is the theological orientation, though this should not be overemphasized. While DNTT is often more conservative than TDNT, it is not uniformly so. One detects the influences of what we in the English-speaking world would regard as fairly negative German criticism—for example, in the hesitancy to accept the witness of Acts as historically trustworthy. However, these influences have been carefully balanced by the English editor, who indicates reasons for a contrary position on many issues discussed by the original authors and also enlists the aid of British scholars to supplement the original German articles.

It is difficult to say anything negative about a work that is carefully and lovingly produced. I have already found it not only of great personal interest but also of value in my study, and I am sure that I will continue to do so for many years to come. The editor and his team have done a superb job of proof-reading: I noted only one typographical error in my (admittedly hasty) first reading. The only thing I came across to which I took strong exception was the rather desperate article on “Infant Baptism: Its Background and Theology,” intended to balance a superb discussion of “Baptism” by G. R. Beasley-Murray. Whatever the strength of the theological case for infant baptism, this article is certainly out of place in a dictionary of New Testament theology. Still, I suppose it will not do a great deal of harm and may cause some pedobaptist clergymen to buy a copy of the dictionary when they might otherwise not do so.

Another useful feature is a brief glossary of technical terms in the beginning of the volume. Although the dictionary is by no means lightweight, and will be difficult for some beginners, every effort has been made to present the material in a form usable by serious students of the Bible at all levels of experience. I am certain that it will perform a valuable ministry for many.

Seeking First The Political Kingdom

The Trivialization of the United Presbyterian Church, by John R. Fry (Harper & Row, 1975, 85 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Barry H. Downing, pastor, Northminster Presbyterian Church, Endwell, New York.

This book says the author, is not about “your average pooped-out Presbyterian” but rather about the liberal establishment that has led the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. down a theological and financial drain during the past decade. Since Fry was a part of that liberal establishment, his book gives you the same feeling you might have reading an exposé by Spiro Agnew of Richard Nixon’s administration: you believe he may have an inside view of what happened, but you may not think he is the one to take over the fallen kingdom.

Fry offers a theological analysis of what went wrong. He traces the problem back to the Confession of 1967, written by a liberal committee chaired by Princeton Seminary’s Edward Dowey. The confession was built around one key word, “reconciliation,” which Fry says was a fatal mistake. Reconciliation came to mean “peace at any price,” which makes for poor politics. Issues were never confronted head on. Instead, the church became caught up in trivia—therefore, “the trivialization of the United Presbyterian Church.”

The decline, if not the fall, of the United Presbyterian Church as Fry traces it goes something like this: The Confession of 1967 emphasized social action, especially in the areas of racial justice, war, poverty, and sex. In effect, the confession defined a true Christian as a liberal Democrat. The confession was used by leaders to justify more political involvement, leading eventually to the grant of $10,000 to the Angela Davis defense fund.

When this happened, the lay members of the church finally caught on to what was happening and said in clear terms that they didn’t like it. The message was that no more money would be given by local churches for national church work. The Presbyterian Lay Committee soon had a fairly substantial following, protesting the liberal leadership of the church. Fry thinks the Lay Committee has overestimated its influence, but he admits that the main body of Presbyterians is miles apart from its leadership.

Meanwhile, the church hierarchy began a movement of corporate restructuring at the General Assembly and synod level. Fry sees this as a “Peter Principle” gone wild, at a time when the UPC had no money to carry out these structural changes.

What is Fry’s solution? He has none. He closes with a statement of blind faith that the Presbyterian Church will rise from the dead because somehow the Presbyterian lay faithful—if there are any left—will renew the church.

Generally Fry’s book is entertaining and historically accurate. I agree with him that the Presbyterian problem is theological. But I disagree with the way he has diagnosed the illness. The problem did not begin with the writing of the Confession of 1967. The problem began with the fact that the liberals felt a need to write a new confession. Why? Because they did not believe what the church had believed in the past.

Rejecting traditional Christian eschatology with its heavenly kingdom, liberals came to believe that justice could be achieved only through social and political action. Rather than expecting God to bring about justice in a heavenly day of judgment, the church must take matters into its own hands now, and if not through traditional politics, then through radical and revolutionary politics. This led to the political emphasis of the Confession of 1967 and the logic of the Angela Davis grant.

Fry fails to see that the real problem with Presbyterian liberals is that they have abandoned the New Testament. He thinks the main business of the church is to bring about love and justice. Love, yes, but justice, no. Justice is a matter of law, not gospel. Jesus used the word “justice” only once in his recorded ministry. Corrupt men resist justice. The only way to bring about justice on earth is to use violence, and Jesus strictly forbids the church to try to overcome evil with evil.

Jesus does speak prophetically to the rich, but this is eschatology, not politics, as in the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man. Jesus warned of the coming day of judgment. But since some church leaders no longer do more than pay lip service to the idea of that judgment day, they make themselves judge, and politics is their executioner.

Fry is sorry to see the leaders of the Presbyterian Church now in fast retreat from politics to the sanctuary. I am not. The crucified Christ is a symbol not of political victory but rather the submission and humility of a heavenly king to corrupt earthly politics. The real problem in Presbyterian theology is not that the liberals picked the wrong word for the Confession of 1967. That is trivial. The real problem is that some Presbyterians have given up the ethics of the cross and the eschatology of the resurrection. That is not trivial.

Change Churches, But How?

The Problem of Wineskins: Church Structure in a Technological Age, by Howard Snyder (InterVarsity, 1975, 214 pp., $3.85 pb) is reviewed by Robert Case II, pastor, Hope Presbyterian Church, Phoenix, Arizona.

Howard Snyder has given us what he believes is an agenda for future thought on the organic relation between the Gospel of Jesus Christ (the “new wine”) and the church traditions, structures, and patterns surrounding that Gospel (the “old wineskins”). His major premise is that church structures are relative and sociologically conditioned whereas the Gospel is absolute and eternal. He quotes Luke 5:36–39 as foundational to his argument that “new wine must be poured into new (not old) wineskins.” Snyder is to be added to the ever increasing list of church “renewal” authors (e.g., Getz, Stedman, Richards, Bloesch, Girard) seeking to recast evangelically the mold of church structure.

He defines “new wine” as “preaching the gospel to the poor.” Indeed, how a church deals with the poor (not poverty) is the test of apostolicity, in Snyder’s view. He writes. “In God’s world there is no human condition which escapes moral significance, and the poor, and the treatment they receive, are strong indicators of the faithfulness of God’s people.”

He defines the “old wineskins” as that part of the Protestant church which came out of the sixteenth-century Reformation (presbyterian and congregational church government) and did not shed enough of the encrusted Roman Catholic tradition to allow the “new wine” to pour forth once more as it did in the days of the immediate post-apostolic church. He writes. “Regardless of the label, much Protestant ecclesiology is based more on tradition than on Scripture.”

Having thus defined his central terms Snyder lays before us the basic tension in the body of Christ as he sees it: “Renewal in the church has usually meant the church’s rebirth among the poor, the masses, the alienated. And with such resurgence has usually come the recovery of such essential New Testament emphases as community, purity, discipleship, the priesthood of believers and the gifts of the Spirit.” The tension is that the structure of the Reformation-rooted church is unable to respond adequately to this “renewal” or “rebirth.”

This being the case, a “new wineskin” is needed. Snyder takes the tabernacle in the wilderness as the divine model for today’s church structure: “it shows God’s people—the church—as mobile and flexible.” But the model that is used instead is the temple, a sign of immobility, inflexibility, inhospitality, and vanity. Using the tabernacle model. Snyder tries to determine the ecclesiastical remedy for these four woes of our Reformation-rooted church structural heritage.

Rather than being immobile, the church structure ought to facilitate the gathering together of God’s people. The Church is to be organized around the central idea that God’s people are a covenanting, called-out people on a pilgrimage in this hostile world. Secondly, rather than being inflexible, the church structure ought to accommodate itself to functional considerations as it seeks to harbor the beleaguered people of God in an antagonistic cultural setting. Thirdly, rather than being inhospitable, the church structure ought to emphasize community and “peoplehood.” That is, the Church is to concern itself, at least partially, with expressing and demonstrating the charismatic communion of God’s people as they are gathered together by the Holy Spirit. Lastly, rather than fostering vanity, the church structure ought to encourage the priesthood of all believers, with everyone humbly contributing his spiritual gifts for the common good and affirming the “uniqueness and value of human personality.” There are no “super-star” pastors in the reconstituted church.

Snyder’s discussion of the “new wine” as the “preaching to the poor” is a ground-breaking evangelical attempt to get the Church to consider this aspect of its kingdom responsibilities. His survey giving a cultural and historical perspective helps one understand his approach to the problem of church structure. The book is clearly laid out and highlighted to make comprehension rather easy. And the author’s extensive use of notes is welcome.

Snyder refuses to engage in what Kenneth Gangel calls the “franchising syndrome” (This is the way we did it, so copy us), and while this is laudable, it also poses a problem. The practicality of the book is thwarted by the omission of concrete suggestions on just how to implement the restructuring for which Snyder is calling. (Granted, he disclaims the role of blueprint-maker in his introduction.) While he emphasizes the small group (eight to twelve people) as the most efficient and functional component of church structuring, how-to-do-it information (such as that offered by Richards, Stedman, and Girard, to name three) is absent. This I consider a major drawback to this book.

One other major weakness is the apparent cutting of the apostolic umbilical cord to church structure. Snyder seems to deny the sufficiency and normativeness of God’s Word for structuring and organizing God’s people in our age. Does God charge us with the Great Commission and then refuse to reveal to us the structure for carrying out that commission? Snyder draws more upon the unauthoritative (and scanty) history of the immediate post-apostolic church than upon the authoritative (and not so scanty) history of the apostolic church in building his sociological/functional church structure for our age.

Howard Snyder is an erudite, trench-experienced church scholar who has an immense contribution to make to the welfare of the Church of Jesus Christ in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The Problem of Wineskins, however, is itself a pilgrimage—a statement written in the midst of Snyder’s journey to a settled ecclesiastical Canaan. It might have been more profitable had the author waited upon more study and reflection and then come forth with a definitive direction that was more soundly exegeted and tightly reasoned. Until we get this from Snyder, we must rely on ecclesiastical pioneers such as David Mains of Chicago. Ray Stedman of Palo Alto (both of whom endorse this book), and Egon Middelmann of the L’Abri-oriented Grace and Peace Fellowship in St. Louis to help the evangelical churches become the “new wineskins” for our precious vintage of gospel wine.

The Dark Side Of Human Nature

Escape From Evil, by Ernest Becker (The Free Press, 1975, 188 pp., $9.95), is reviewed by Michael H. Macdonald, associate professor of German and philosophy, Seattle Pacific College, Seattle, Washington.

Escape From Evil is a sequel to the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winner, The Denial of Death. Shortly before he died Becker requested that Escape From Evil remain unpublished, but his wife decided to release it. “believing the work to be an eloquent closure of his scientific literary career … [and] realizing that had the time remained, the author himself would have done so for what he considered to be his magnum opus.” His other books include The Birth and Death of Meaning, (second edition, 1971), The Revolution in Psychiatry (1974). Angel in Armor (1975), and The Structure of Evil (1968).

Becker claims he looked man full in the face for the first time in Escape From Evil. For years he refused to admit the dark side of human nature. Here he confronts the tragic reality of human evil. He elaborates on the central theme of The Denial of Death by arguing that it is the fear of death that drives man. The root of human evil lies in man’s urge to transcend this fear and deny mortality. Becker illustrates “how man’s impossible hopes and desires have heaped evil in the world.” Man the animal wants the impossible for an animal in a godless world: an earth that is not an earth but a heaven. Man is cursed with a burden that no other creature must bear, the consciousness of his own impending death. Yet even more than extinction, man fears “extinction with insignificance.” Man needs to know daily that his activity has cosmic meaning, that his life counts in the larger scheme of things.

Becker, writing from a starkly empirical point of view, refers to “the immense burden of guilt on the human psyche.” Here he identifies the significance of man’s need to experience expiation for guilt. In sacrifice man is drawn into the majesty of that which transcends him. Sacrifice has been one way of affirming power over life and, therefore, denying death. Becker arrives at “a logic of killing others in order to affirm our own life,” a concept that may indeed unlock much that our modern minds have been unable to explain. People within a nation join together under one banner to become “a chosen people.” Those who are different are excluded, and the attempt is made to purge the evil (the different ones) from the world (consider Stalin or Mao). Thus Becker sees the same dynamic at work in blood sacrifices, holy wars, and purges: the attempt to reach the infinite. All ideology is concerned with qualifying for eternity, and all power becomes essentially sacred, i.e., power to deny mortality. Through power one can become transformed from small and finite to big and infinite. Yet Becker discovers that not only do power and coercion enslave man, but he himself harbors an “enemy within.” Both Rousseau and Marx are wrong. Human nature is neither good nor even neutral. Societal changes will not cause man’s natural goodness to flourish.

Becker concludes that we moderns have the means for large-scale destruction, and that power is beginning to take devastating tolls. Moreover, masses of people are still being treated as means and not as ends in themselves. He bemoans the fact that neither democracy nor Marxism has led to human equality and freedom, and asserts that man must develop a social ideal that is nondestructive, yet creative and life-enhancing, one that takes into account man’s basest motives. The “hate object” could then be transformed from a race or a class of people to other, impersonal forms, like poverty, disease, and natural disasters.

Becker does a brilliant job of penetrating to the roots of issues. Escape From Evil and The Denial of Death are both likely to become important books for the history of ideas. They answer some key questions about man’s basic motives and his attitude toward the world around him. Becker has immersed himself in both the sciences and the humanities and digested much of modern psychological and anthropological thought. His theory embraces a broad spectrum of current events and issues, from the Viet Nam war to rock festivals and Transcendental Meditation.

Regrettably, his presupposition is clearly that since there is no deity to save us, man must save himself—however impossible the task. He does an excellent job of identifying the role of guilt, but he does not point to its cause—sin—for he himself feels no sense of sin. Sin is inoperative because the Divine is denied. Our modern world has avoided sin “by simply denying the existence of the invisible dimension to which it is related.” The scientist Becker rejects the Marxist point of view that man is basically good. He concludes, in basic agreement with Christianity, that much of what is wrong with the world relates to the nature of man and the age-old problem of evil. It is a pity that in cutting through to the roots he did not rediscover the whole of historic Christianity. He seems to have come so close to, and yet be very far from, the Truth.

BRIEFLY NOTED

Scholars who are interested in writing for the general reader and are capable of doing so effectively are all too rare, especially in the area of academic biblical studies. But here are books by five outstanding authorities that communicate extremely well: I Came to Set the Earth on Fire: A Portrait of Jesus, by R. T. France (InterVarsity, 190 pp., $2.50 pb); Gleanings from the New Testament, by A. M. Hunter (Westminster, 182 pp., $4.95); First Christians: Pentecost and the Spread of Christianity, by Paul L. Maier (Harper & Row, 160 pp., $6.95); Light on the Gospels: A Reader’s Guide, by John L. McKenzie (Thomas More, 216 pp., $9.95); and To Heal and to Reveal: The Prophetic Vocation according to Luke (Seabury, 179 pp., $8.95).

Most leaders of religious ministries would rather not have to raise money, but for those who can’t avoid it, and for those who do see it as a calling, here are three recent books with practical helps: A New Climate for Stewardship, by Wallace Fisher (Abingdon, 127 pp., $3.95 pb), which sets the broadest context: New Models for Creative Giving, by Raymond Knudsen (Association, 143 pp., $5.50 pb), with such chapters as charitable reminder trusts and instrumentality grantsmanship; and How to Pay Your Pastor More and Balance the Budget Too! by Manfred Holck, Jr. (Religious Publishing Co. [198 Allendale Rd., King of Prussia, Pa. 19406], 121 pp., $6.95), written by an expert. Highly recommended for church finance committees.

A very practical and tested method for learning to speak another language is presented by E. Thomas Brewster and Elizabeth Brewster in Language Acquisition Made Practical (Lingua House [915 W. Jackson, Colorado Springs, Colo. 80907], 384 pp., $10 pb). The book is full of illustrations and charts and takes the user step by step. It was designed with missionaries in mind. An accompanying cassette is available.

Two recent collections of essays seek to honor distinguished evangelical Bible teachers. New Testament Studies, edited by Huber L. Drum-wright and Curtis Vaughan and dedicated to Ray Summers of Baylor (Baylor University Press, 195 pp., $7.95), includes contributions by F. F. Bruce, M. C. Tenney, Fred L. Fisher, Frank Stagg, and others. Interpreting the Word of God, edited by Samuel J. Schultz and Morris A. Inch (Moody, 281 pp., $8.95), has essays written by various faculty members of Wheaton College in honor of their colleague, Steven Barabas. The latter volume has a broader focus and includes an exceptionally fine article on the use of the Old Testament in the New, though both will be of interest to theological students and teachers.

At last there is a manual for the ordinary Bible student who wishes to have a basic introduction to the biblical languages without becoming an expert, or who is frightened by the formidable enterprise of their formal academic study! Do it Yourself Hebrew and Greek: Everybody’s Guide to the Language Tools, by Edward W. Goodrick (Multnomah Press [10209 S.E. Division, Portland Ore. 97266], 250 pp, $9.95 pb) offers some of the basics of the two languages plus, equally important, an introduction to the many tools of biblical study which can be used by those who have learned these basics. The author also gives guidelines for proper biblical interpretation and warns the reader not to abuse his limited knowledge of Hebrew and Greek. Could form a unit in any Bible school or college introductory course or provide the basis of an elective Sunday school class in a larger church. An accompanying cassette is also available.

The name of Armerding is something of a household word in the evangelical community. Now George (brother of the elder Carl, uncle of Hudson and Carl Edwin) joins the ranks of the family authors with an interesting study of all of the references to perfumes and fragrances in the Bible, Fragrance Ascending (Western Book Company [1618 Franklin St., Oakland, CA 94612], 125 pp., n.p. pb). A Song for Lovers, by S. Craig Glickman (InterVarsity 188 pp., $3.95 pb), a guide to the Song of Solomon; Journey with Job, by Thomas John Carlisle (Eerdmans, 94 pp., $2.25 pb), a series of original poems; and Epistles Now by Leslie Brandt (Concordia. 186 pp., $5.95), a rewriting of the New Testament letters in free verse with illustrations by Corita Kent: these refreshingly restate some biblical messages.

The following books will be of interest mainly to biblical specialists and theological librarians: What is Structural Exegesis?, by Daniel Patte (Fortress, 90 pp., $2.95 pb), and Structural Analysis of Narrative, by Jean Calloud (Fortress, or Scholars Press, 108 pp., $3.95 pb), a new literary approach to the Bible arising out of modern anthropological studies. Studies in the Structure of Hebrew Narrative by Robert C. Culley (Fortress or Scholars Press, 122 pp., $3.95 pb) takes a more traditional literary approach to his subject. The fourth and final volume of the famous Grammar of New Testament Greek begun by James Hope Moulton (1863–1917) contains a careful analysis of the Style of each of the New Testament authors by Nigel Turner (Edinburgh, Scotland: T & T Clark, 174 pp.,£ 4.20).

Tribal religions plus a dozen surviving advanced religions are briefly surveyed by Lewis Hopfe in Religions of the World (Glencoe, 308 pp., n.p., pb).

You do not have to believe that the Apocrypha is inspired to appreciate the fact that its varied writings offer much insight into the life and thought of the Jewish people during the intertestamental period. The extensive commentary on I Maccabees by Jonathan Goldstein (Doubleday, 609 pp., $9.00), volume 41 in the Anchor Bible, offers a very welcome mine of historical information. The New Testament Environment by Eduard Lohse (Abingdon, 300 pp., $6.95 pb) begins with intertestamental history, but includes much more. It gives the student an excellent overview of the various cultural facets influencing the culture of Jesus. Specialists will find Aspects of Religious Propaganda in Judaism and Early Christianity, edited by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza (University of Notre Dame, 192 pp., $12.95), of value.

The Latter-day Saints (Mormons) are a fastgrowing rival of historic Christianity. Their missionary zeal, increasing national prominence, and relatively upright lives make them formidable adversaries. Some understanding of them can be gained from a publication of their leading university, Christian Churches of America, by Milton Backman, Jr. (Brigham Young, 230 pp., $9.95, $5.95 pb). A reasonably fair portrayal is given of several major bodies and movements. When describing the Mormons themselves Backman tries to be objective and makes no attempt to cover up their highly unorthodox doctrines. Authoritative statements from the highest Mormon leaders, chiefly on ethical issues, have been compiled by R. Clayton Brough in His Servants Speak (Horizon Publishers [Box 490, Bountiful, Utah 84010], 298 pp., $6.95). The fifty-five topics include birth control (no), card playing (no), Coca Cola (no), dancing (yes), military service (yes), Negro priests (no), tithing (yes). A similar compilation of doctrinal pronouncements would be desirable.

The late Arnold Toynbee’s last book, Mankind and Mother Earth (Oxford, 641 pp., $19.50), is a fitting capstone to his long and controversial career. He narrates the entire history of man, striving to avoid the Western bias that so often afflicts such attempts. His focus is not on comparisons among civilizations as it was in A Study of History. Toynbee did not hold to orthodox Christianity, but he recognizes major influences by religious movements upon historical development, and therefore his approach is worth considering.

Creation, Christ and Culture is an appropriate title for a collection of theological essays seeking to honor Professor T. F. Torrance of Edinburgh, perhaps Britain’s most distinguished and creative living theologian, edited by Richard W. A. McKinney (T & T Clark, 328 pp., £ 5.60). Twenty scholars contributed.

Beyond The Exorcist

Hostage to the Devil, by Malachi Martin (Reader’s Digest Press, 1976, 477 pp., $9.95), is reviewed by William Melden, Lookout Mountain, Tennessee.

It is quite possible that Malachi Martin’s Hostage to the Devil will become one of the essential texts in the dark and difficult field of biblical demonology. While not as scholarly as the theses of Merrill Ungar, nor as overwhelming in scope as the work of Kurt Koch, Martin’s book will be of tremendous value to anyone involved either in studying demonology or in actually grappling with demonic forces.

It is interesting that the publication of Hostage to the Devil coincides with the second re-release of the film The Exorcist. Like the tormented heroes of that grisly, tasteless story, Malachi Martin is himself a former Jesuit professor with considerable experience in the field of exorcism—or, if you prefer, the ministry of deliverance. His book is both a superb piece of theological scholarship and a terribly dramatic narrative. Martin explores the nature of demonic possession, the awful havoc created in the victim’s life, and the power of Christ over Satan and his minions. He offers five detailed case studies of possession and deliverance. His examples are far more gruesome, and potentially offensive, than anything dreamed up by the scriptwriters of Warner Brothers; his final message, however, is one of encouragement, hope, and a strange sort of scarred joy that can be felt only by those who have confronted Satan face to face and seen him defeated.

The victims described in Martin’s case studies are not less “ordinary” than the people we all encounter from day to day. They include a teen-age girl, a popular disc jockey; a Catholic priest who has adopted the “pop theology” of the post-war period, a professional psychologist, and a transsexual. As Martin points out, each of these persons adopted some attitude or ideology that has only recently emerged from the shadows and become “respectable”: the confusion of sex and gender that makes homosexuality and even transsexuality “viable options for a contemporary society”; the attempt, by Teilhard de Chardin and others, to reconcile biblical theology and Darwinian evolution; the steady assault on man’s personality that makes possible the hideous reductionism of a B. F. Skinner; the contemporary infatuation with occult phenomena, such as “parapsychology” and “astral projection,” pursuits that open the doors to demonic influence. The pathetic people Martin studied are the real-life victims of such “philosophical speculations.” When we see their sufferings through Martin’s eyes, we begin to understand Paul’s warning in First Timothy 4:1, “The Spirit explicitly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons” (NASV).

That warning, and the illustration of its truth provided by Hostage to the Devil, raises a point that the Christian Church must never forget: ideas—philosophies, theories, “vain imaginings”—do not exist in a vacuum. They have consequences. Whether the “doctrine” is evolution, “free love,” dialectical materialism, or reincarnation, it has ramifications and repercussions in the material world. This is one of the little-discussed “occupational hazards” of the professional philosopher or theologian; while he may indeed live in an “ivory tower,” he does not live there alone. The deceitful spirits are always there, ever awaiting the opportunity to swarm into their terrible habitations. This correlation between intellectual activity and demonic ambition is very real, as witness Martin’s book; it is also probably the chief raison d’être for the old Catholic Index.

Aside from the case studies, Hostage to the Devil is distinguished by two sections that are of inestimable value to the student of demonology. The first is the chapter entitled “A Brief Handbook of Exorcism,” in which Martin discusses the mechanics of possession and exorcism and describes the type of person usually chosen by God for the dreadful ministry of deliverance. He rarely chooses a person of great intellect or imagination; such a one would be too receptive to the confusing thoughts and doubts inevitably hurled at the minister during an exorcism by the demon or demons involved. As Martin points out. Satan’s two strongest weapons are deceit and confusion, and these can be deployed with utmost effectiveness against an intellectual, whose mind can easily be led down a thousand “rational” alleyways of defeat. There are obvious exceptions, of course, such as the Apostle Paul (and, presumably, Martin himself), but the rule seems clear enough. As Martin puts it, God usually seems to choose “sensitive men of solid rather than dazzling minds.”

“A Brief Handbook of Exorcism” also includes a fascinating outline of the chronological stages of exorcism, explained to Martin by another, more experienced exorcist. The stages are called Presence, Pretense, Breakpoint, Voice, Clash, and Expulsion; each corresponds to a particular tactic or event used by the demon and/or the exorciser.

The final section of the book. “A Manual of Possession,” is an adequate if not breathtaking presentation of the traditional biblical views of Christ, Satan, and man. Martin wisely avoids a strong Catholic emphasis here; as elsewhere in the book, he emphasizes that it is nothing but the power of Jesus Christ that prevails over Satan and his demons. He does make continual reference to “the Church,” but it is clear that he means the universal church, rather than the church of Rome.

This emphasis on the power and grace of Jesus Christ is the factor that most distinguishes Hostage to the Devil, and makes it far more than merely another book of horror stories. Malachi Martin has met the devil face to face in a way that few of us ever will; and, while he is obviously scarred, he can say, with Corrie ten Boom, “Jesus was Victor, Jesus is Victor, Jesus will be Victor.”

NEW PERIODICAL

Like its Protestant counterpart, the Roman Catholic charismatic movement has differing styles and emphases. Joining New Covenant as a nationally circulating magazine is Catholic Charismatic, a slick-paper bi-monthly issued by a major Catholic publisher, Paulist Press, with a widespread network of editors. The first issue was dated March-April, 1976. Protestant as well as Catholic theological libraries will want to subscribe, and, of course, charismatic Catholics will be especially interested ($7.50/year; 400 Sette Drive, Paramus, N.J. 07652). Bulk rates are available.

Have you ever carried a bucket of water up a hill? Has anyone ever explained to you that the reason your shoulder is getting twisted or your back is hurting might be that the weight you are carrying is a one-sided strain, that it wouldn’t bother you so much if it were divided in two? Two buckets filled with the same amount of water, carried in two hands, giving a balance of weight on each side, or carried on a yoke fitted across one’s shoulders, make it possible to carry a weight that would be impossible all on one side. When carrying water, carry balanced buckets.

Psalm 89:1 is a good song to sing privately to the Lord at the beginning of a day: “I will sing of the mercies of the LORD for ever: with my mouth will I make known thy faithfulness to all generations.” There are such varied mercies to sing about as we think of the kind thoughtfulness of the Lord in all he has given us. We are to make known his faithfulness to all generations—our parents’, grandparents’, children’s, and grandchildren’s generations as well as our own.

One of the central demonstrations of his faithfulness that we need to make known, and also to sing about privately, is the verbalized communication he gave us. His Word, the Bible, is preserved from generation to generation, so we don’t have to start from zero and discover truth for ourselves in some long trek to a secret cave or guru. “Thy hands have made me and fashioned me: give me understanding, that I may learn thy commandments”: this verse, Psalm 119:37; helps us to recognize that our Creator made us to have the capacity to understand what he has given us in written form. The same psalm says in verse 105, “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.” Verse 148 speaks of staying awake at night to meditate upon his Word. That Word to us is meant to be clear, understandable, a help day by day in our thinking and meditating as well as in our conduct.

“But why should I thank God for the Bible,” some may complain, “when it mixes me up so? And I can’t understand how God can be God and sovereign and yet how I can have choice and not be a computer.”

We are finite creatures, created by an infinite, personal, perfect God who knows all things. Think about how hard it is to explain something you know to a small child who is getting frustrated because he or she cannot understand the explanation. God is perfect in his knowledge, wisdom, understanding. He is infinite, eternal, unlimited, unchangeable. We are finite, had a beginning not long ago, are limited, are very changeable in our emotions, attitudes, interests, and so on. We are made in God’s image, and so we can think and act and feel and communicate and love. We can make things, be creative in a variety of ways.

Finite and spoiled by sin though we are, we still can think. We can read, listen, and come to an understanding. And God prepared a communication for us that would give us sufficient knowledge about the universe and himself, history and prophecy, how to come to him and how to receive strength day by day.

I think the idea of balanced buckets may help us to recognize something of what we should be doing as we read the Word day by day and ask for strength to do what it says. God has given a balance from beginning to end. We are not meant to carry the heavy bucket of “meaningful choice” or our “significance” while we tip out all the water in the other bucket. The Lord God gave us an equal teaching that he is sovereign, that he has chosen us before the foundation of the world.

“But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that you should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Pet. 2:9). “Choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD. And the people answered and said, God forbid that we should forsake the LORD, to serve other gods” (Josh. 24:15, 16).

“And one Ananias, a devout man according to the law, having a good report of all the Jews which dwelt there, came unto me, and stood, and said unto me, Brother Saul, receive thy sight.… And he said, The God of our fathers hath chosen thee, that thou shouldest know his will, and see that Just One, and shouldest hear the voice of his mouth” (Acts 22:12–14). “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).

“Then the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou earnest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations” (Jer. 1:4, 5). “I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star. And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely” (Rev. 22:16, 17).

How can it be? How can he choose us and call upon us to make a choice? How can we be known before we were born, be chosen for a task before we were born, and yet need to agonize over wanting the Lord’s will and being willing to put the Lord first?

The infinite God has given us truth in his Word. He has given us that which we can handle, can carry. He means for us to carry balanced buckets of truth. When we try to pour it all into one bucket, we are upsetting the balance. When we insist on doing this, we suffer and do not have the comfort we were meant to have.

God is sovereign, and we are not computers, not puppets, but persons with the ability to choose. Both things are true. We don’t have to be fatalists. We can be comfortable being people, and rejoice in not needing to be God. We can turn Satan away when he tries to make us insist on knowing all that God knows, and quote to him one of the last passages in the Bible: “For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: and if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book” (Rev. 22:18, 19).

Balanced buckets, with all the words intact, to be carried with comfort.

EDITH SCHAEFFER

Ninth in the Series “Evangelicals in Search of Identity”

In the August 6 Footnotes column, Carl F. H. Henry discussed two of four areas where he thinks evangelicals need to work for progress: in recovering the sense of the community of believers, and in presenting a rationale for Christian faith. He deals with the other two areas in this article.

3. We evangelicals must inspire the mass media to portray evangelical realities to the restive world. Satellite radio and television may soon overtake the field. Frontier studies are now under way to determine the possibilities of launching a Christian satellite or of leasing time on already orbiting satellites.

The popularity of television, America’s prime communications medium, far surpasses that earlier enjoyed by the theater, newspapers, and radio; 98 per cent of the people now watch it, many of them almost addictively. Vigorous media engagement is all the more necessary if, as Malcolm Muggeridge contends, television promotes cultural decline by implicitly if not explicitly commending moral permissiveness as the virtue of modernity. No less does the medium accommodate cultural chaos by routinely evading the issue of fixed truth. Like the United Nations, television is far more a forum for spirited presentation of conflicting opinions than a tribunal for promoting discernment of right and wrong.

If evangelicals had launched a major university that included a college of creative and communicative arts to train Christian young people for vocations in writing and editing, radio and television, stage and screen, the Christian message would today enjoy wider and better exposure. Evangelical TV programming still falls largely into the so-called Sunday ghetto. No evangelical group has as yet developed a regular prime-time weekday program that effectively confronts secular society with the Christian challenge. For one thing, the cost of prime-time programming is staggering; also, network competition for ratings discourages the sale of prime time for religious purposes.

The Lansman-Milam petition to thwart designating educational FM and TV channels for religious organizations has been disallowed by the Federal Communications Commission. The objection that sectarian stations do not program contrary views was a veritable Pandora’s box: it would conform every station to a complainant’s point of view. It also raises questions about the “fairness” of secular stations that deal all too sparingly with the evangelical heritage, although evangelicals are now appearing at least occasionally on television talk shows. More than 700,000 letters deluged the FCC with evangelicals’ appeals for a nondiscriminatory ruling. The FCC expects all licensed stations to observe the “fairness” doctrine and stresses the need for constructive community relations.

A number of independent Christian radio networks and television stations are already operating at the borders of large, wildly secular urban centers. Some evangelicals see cable TV programming as an alternative to station ownership and operation. Recently charismatically oriented groups have moved aggressively onto media frontiers; Oral Roberts has sporadically invaded prime-time television with a mixture of musical entertainment and spiritual ministry; Pat Robertson engages in direct evangelistic confrontation over more than fifty radio and TV stations. The National Courier, a fortnightly newspaper targeted for bookstore and shopping-center sale, is the latest of various charismatic efforts.

Most evangelical television programs, if not sermonic in nature, are largely experience-and event-oriented. World Vision has successfully sponsored famine-appeal telethons and televised other evangelical social concerns. For the most part Christian theism, if presented at all, is done so in an intellectually unpersuasive way to a generation in revolt against doctrinal and theological foundations for biblical faith. While evangelical programming does not on that account lack merit, it nonetheless fails to reflect comprehensively and cohesively the biblical view of life and the ultimately real world at a time when the great urban centers with their universities, newspapers, and other media have largely capitulated to secular pressures.

Enough evangelical churches are in financial or attendance trouble to warrant consideration of using at least one strategically located inner-city church building for high-quality FM or educational-TV religious programming. Such a center might also offer Christians various possibilities of training in writing, music, art, photography, and so on. The growing use of cassettes in extending educational preaching and evangelistic ministries is notably enlarging the perspectives of clergy, seminarians, and laymen; its fullest potential remains to be probed.

Wherever they are, evangelical college students should be counseled to pursue elective classes in journalism and creative writing. While content of writing is in the long run most important, a felicitous style does much to commend the truth in winsome ways and can gain a hearing when ideas run counter to popular prejudices. The temptation to capitulate to the devil is stronger when deception is cloaked in sparkling speech; why should not the truth be all the more regally robed? In this realm C. S. Lewis has put the devil to rout and the rest of us to shame.

4. Evangelical churchmen will do well to reevaluate existing Sunday programs as to nature, serviceability, and timing. While local worship ought not to be reshaped by a particular media mentality, it need not be drab. Sunday-morning programs that involve the family in both graded and corporate participation in worship, education, and social fellowship offer challenging possibilities. To avoid the overall proliferation of church meetings, stop the decline in youth involvement and the erosion of the Sunday school, and solve the isolation problems of lonely members are high imperatives.

A prescribed headquarters format will no longer meet the varied needs of varied congregations. With an eye on the immediate church families and the community context, local leaders can examine existing needs, and by enlisting wherever possible resources within the church they will not only meet those needs specifically but will also promote leadership training. In some places Sunday-evening church meetings might be given over to high-school and college-age groups while older adults gather in neighborhood Bible studies or engage in prayer and testimony meetings or conduct seekers’ or new converts’ classes.

Three-day weekends and four-day work weeks, and crises in safety, transportation, and so on, call for imaginative church scheduling and programming. A proper balance of worship, evangelism, Christian education (including arts, crafts, and writing as potential evangelical tools in communication), service projects, and recreation can do much to demonstrate the wholeness of the Gospel for the whole person and for the whole world.

CARL F. H. HENRY

The Touch And Texture Of Georges Rouault

In our century Christian art has fallen on hard times. It must wrestle not only with the perennial question of the relation of faith and art but also with the modern limiting of subject matter to personal experience. In a day when the artist prizes his individuality and vaunts his obscurity, can there be Christian art? What possible role can it play?

Georges Rouault (1871–1958) was one of the rare artists who combined a real faith with a modern sensitivity. Born in a poor suburb of Paris during the bombardment of the Paris Commune, Rouault was of hardy Briton stock and was raised in an artisan’s environment. His first job (in 1885) was as an apprentice in a stained-glass factory. All of this did much to help him develop his feel for the painful texture of life.

But not until 1898, after the death of his beloved teacher Gustave Moreau, did this emotional sensitivity to life touch his painting. By that time he had spent almost a decade in art school; he knew drawing and art history, but as he put it: “I had not taken the time to watch people and life. I was acquainted with religious history … but I knew nothing of suffering.”

His experience with life—with men in the workyards and the barges—touched off a profound religious transformation in the artist. As he explained it: “When I was about thirty, I felt a stroke of lightning, or of grace, depending on one’s perspective. The face of the world changed for me. I saw everything that I had seen before, but in a different form and with a different harmony.”

What was the nature of this experience? Clearly its root was religious. Rouault was a believing Catholic, and while studying with Moreau he had sought out a priest in order to prepare himself for his first communion. The influence during this time of Léon Bloy and of Jacques and Raïssa Maritain led him to an evangelical Catholicism. His life was changed, and his sensitivity as an artist was transformed.

But it would be a mistake to try to understand this change by his verbal confession. Only rarely does he refer to his faith in words. His friend Claude Roulet tells us that Rouault spoke of his faith only three or four times in twenty years. In part this may have been due to his innate taciturnity about intimate questions. But more important, as an artist he made his work his primary confession. He once said: “If I have always been reluctant to discuss these questions, it is because our language is form, color, harmony.” And: “Images and colors, for a painter, are his means of being, of living, of thinking and of feeling.”

What then do we see in his painting? Here too we find surprises. Especially in his early work, his art evinces a dark and melancholy view of life. His musings reflect “a cry in the night, a stifled sob. A suppressed laugh. In this world every day, a thousand unknown persons that are worth more than I labor on and die at the task.” One may wonder if an outlook like this reflects Christianity. Isn’t a Christian supposed to be happy?

Rouault’s contemporaries asked the same question. Some of them—perhaps they were Christians—wondered when he would start showing his “better side.” Rouault’s answer is worth pondering:

“Perhaps one day far off when a true and genuine inner peace will control the mind … of the pilgrim, far from the prostitution of the world. When force will be less visible and more intuitive, secret and discrete, then perhaps I will show my ‘better’ side. For what we see with our eyes and think we touch with our diseased hands and weigh so precisely, is not all there is in this clever and mechanized world.”

Of course, “more than the eyes can see” for Rouault included the reality of Christ’s suffering for sin. In his directly religious painting, Rouault was primarily a painter of the incarnation and passion of Christ. Heads of Christ, portrayals of Christ on the cross, all focusing on the Lord’s sufferings, predominate. Here too one might ask: Why the emphasis on the dark side? Isn’t Christianity about healing and resurrection as well as suffering and death?

Indeed it is. Rouault knew this—he believed and painted the resurrection. But he also knew what his beloved Pascal had felt, that as long as there is suffering in the world the pains of Christ are important. In Pascal’s words, “Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world and we should not sleep during that time.” For Rouault it was the logic of human experience (or should we say its illogic) that drove him to the cross. He brooded:

So little righteous

And certainly helpless, the poor wretch

With the best of intentions,

Trips and falls more than once.

Like Jesus on the road to Calvary

Under the weight of the cross

Wanting to take on our sufferings.

Perhaps such reflections are difficult for us because we have come to believe that Christian things must be “nice.” Of course, that is easily enough said by Christians who are well fed and free. But for many people life is not nice, and Rouault felt this deeply. His faith was an attempt to find in Christ a way to make some sense of life filled with misery.

But it would be a mistake to leave the impression that Rouault’s painting is only dark. If his world is often dark, there is usually a light in the sky. At times (especially in his later works) the light becomes so bright that the whole canvas has a luminous quality. But it was the misery that captured his artistic imagination and brought it to the cross.

It is easy to criticize this emphasis. Christ’s death does more than illumine misery; it atones for sin. And sin is more than suffering; it is also rebellion against God. But these criticisms, while they may be true, are somehow beside the point. Rouault was an artist, not a theologian. His world was the concrete world of flesh and tears. He dealt—as all artists must—with personal and visible reality, with shapes, not with ideas.

We must not expect more from Christian art than it can give us. Rouault’s art records one man’s experience. It is a witness of a personal faith, not a revelation of objective truth. And all human witness is limited. When the Gospel enters a life it comes through a narrow door. And since no one person’s experience is the sum of religious truth, no witness to Christ is perfect. While a witness can point to Christ, it is the Word of God—not the witness—that the Spirit uses to convert others.

But for all that, art can be the visual expression of one person’s faith. We cannot escape it with Rouault. Throughout his work a vivid sense of the reality of sin and grace is as concrete as the figures who fill his canvases. Miserere pictures for us the reality of Rouault’s faith. A blind man reaches out to touch Christ. The caption reads: “Lord, it is you. I recognize you.” That is Rouault’s faith: concrete, intuitive, as sure as the sense of touch. Calvin could have been referring to Rouault when he spoke of the Christian’s knowing the fullness of God in Christ. He wrote: “The believing soul recognizes the presence of God indubitably and, as one may say, touches him with his hand.”

WILLIAM A. DYRNESS

William A. Dyrness is the author of “Rouault: A Vision of Suffering and Salvation” (Eerdmans, 1971).

Larry Norman, And …

A new Larry Norman album generally creates a stir among Jesus music freaks and critics, and In Another Land (SRA 2001), perhaps his best LP to date, should be no exception. He now records on the Solid Rock label (distributed, as are most of the best Jesus rock records, by Word). The controversial Norman explains “Solid Rock” on the inside record slipcase. Part of his defense is worth noting:

“Music is one of the most strategic art forms we have today. It is more widely popular than literature, cinema, poetry, or any of the other art forms. It is also the most portable. Radios fit into back pockets, cassette players weigh less than a textbook, and almost every car has a radio. Most people have access to some kind of record player.”

And like it or not, rock music is what comes from most of these radios, cassettes, and record players.

To me Larry Norman is the best Jesus rock artist around. With a little help from modern technology he manages to change his voice to suit song or mood. His lyrics are always clever and effectively imagistic. No other song shows this success so well as “The Sun Began to Rain”: “A thief fell out of Heaven with some loaded dice/but the lamb rolled a seven back to Paradise/the bread was finally leavened so I had a slice/and the sun began to rain” (verse one). The superbly played loose honky-tonk piano and the vocal technique match the lyrics exactly.

That’s another of Norman’s strengths. He knows how to arrange both his music and his albums. “The Sun Began to Rain” opens side two. With no break he goes right into cut two, “Shot Down,” with an early rock beat and sound. The contrast works.

In “Six Sixty Six” a simple guitar accompaniment of arpeggios shifts between verses to a country-pickin’ flavor. Throughout the album the guitar interludes are well placed and paced, and the one in the lead cut, “The Rock That Doesn’t Roll,” briefly approaches good innovative jazz. The only weakness of this LP is that some of the songs have been previously recorded.

Norman also produced Randy Stonehill’s latest album, Welcome to Paradise (SRA 2002), also on the Solid Rock label. Stonehill doesn’t have the easy way with lyrics that Norman does. His have a studied feel, and the images seem labored. Stonehill uses one style more consistently than Norman, but it wears well. Norman should have paced the album better, mixing long cuts with short ones. That’s the main weakness of the first side. But “Keep Me Runnin’,” which runs nearly six minutes, wouldn’t be as effective if shorter.

Both albums include love songs. But for a larger dose of Christian love music try The Greatest of These Is Love (Myrrh, MSA-6565). That album has songs from nine contemporary Christian artists. Or dip into Danny Taylor’s latest record, A Time For Love (Tempo, S-102). The songs on these albums are a little too much syrup for me, but people who like The Lettermen and other love-song groups should like them.

Originally an ABC album, White Horse by David OMartian is now on the Myrrh label (MSA-6564). OMartian did a superb job producing and arranging his music. He showed selectivity sensitivity by including such love songs as “Fat City” along with religious numbers.

Do you remember “Alley Oop!,” “Along Comes Mary,” or “Cherish”? Well, Gary S. Paxton was involved in one way or another with all those million-sellers. Now a Christian, he’s just released The Astonishing, Outrageous, Amazing, Incredible, Unbelievable, Different World of Gary S. Paxton (New Pax, NP-33005, distributed by Word). Technically the record is well produced, and musically Paxton does some interesting things. I particularly like his echo-chamber imitation of Elvis. The best cuts on the album are “Layed Back” on side one and “There’s Got to Be More to Livin’ Than Just Waitin’ to Die,” both written by Paxton. He balances the album with humorous and serious songs, ballads and rock numbers. Welcome to Jesus music, Gary S. Paxton.

CHERYL FORBES