A certain young woman has been a common topic of discussion in the United States and elsewhere for months now. “Poor Patty Hearst,” or “Wicked Patty Hearst.” “Innocent Patty Hearst,” or “Guilty Patty Hearst.” “Weak Patty Hearst,” or “Rebellious Patty Hearst.” What would happen if our Patty or Betty or Carol or Jane were kidnapped, tortured, and taught a whole new set of values, given a whole new base for judgment, given totally new goals for which to work? If the base upon which our “Patty” stands is not firm, how could it do anything but shift and slide, allowing the feet to be pulled or pushed by some determined force?

As I read about Patty Hearst and hear people discuss her, a children’s chorus keeps surging through my head: “The wise man built his house upon the rock … and the rain came tumbling down.… The rain came down and the floods came up … and the house on the rock stood firm. The foolish man built his house upon the sand.… The rain came down and the floods came up … and the house on the sand fell flat!” I can see children as they sing this song, smacking their hands together to show the total collapse of the foolish person’s house.

How very many of the children who have sung this song have later been taught that what they learned in Sunday school was only religious myth, crutches to help the weakminded, a kind of escape from reality. How many children have gone on to high school, college, graduate school and have had impressed upon them the principle that there is no absolute, that everything is relative. How many children who sang heartily about the contrast of base, rock versus sand, and the difference it makes, are later told by people whose teaching they sit under, and must respond to and take exams on, that there is no firm base in the universe, nothing but shifting sand?

Shifting sand, given as a base for life by teachers of history, science, philosophy, literature, and political science, is also given as a base for the new theology. Relativism in every field is exactly what Jesus was talking about when he spoke in Matthew warning all who “hear” to “do”—to do something different because of having a different base. “Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine [Jesus is speaking], and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. And everyone that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it” (Matt. 7:24–27).

Psalm 18:2 tells us that the Lord is our rock, our firm base, and Psalm 61:2 comforts us with the specific possibility of crying out “when my heart is overwhelmed, lead me to the rock that is higher than I.” Yes, God himself is our Rock, but in Matthew, Jesus is pointing to “these sayings of mine,” or his Word, as the solid rock that does not shift. Jesus’ is making very vivid, so that no one can miss the point, what he says in another way in Matthew 24:35, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” His Word is the firm rock that can be counted on to support the lives of generations of his people in the shifting, changing circumstances. His Word is the factor that remains constant and can be trusted. His Word is that by which other things are to be judged. His Word is that by which discernment can grow. Rains of false philosophies can pour down, winds of false political ideas can blow, floods of false ideologies can break out of the river banks, hail of false values can beat mercilessly, thunder of counterfeit religious doctrines can startle, streaks of lightning can rip the skies with false miraculous force, but those who keep their feet grounded in God’s Word have been given the assurance that they will not collapse.

Come to Psalm 119 and determine with the psalmist to be more immersed in the unchangeable Word of God than ever, daily building the house of your life on the Rock in every area, spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, intellectually, in church life, in business or profession, in political life, so that the storms will not break up your house. These verses are all from Psalm 119: “I will meditate in thy precepts, and have respect unto thy ways. I will delight myself in thy statutes: I will not forget thy word.” “I will walk at liberty: for I seek thy precepts.” “I thought on my ways, and turned my feet unto thy testimonies.” “The wicked have waited for me to destroy me: but I will consider thy testimonies.” “I have more understanding than all my teachers: for thy testimonies are my meditation.” “Through thy precepts I get understanding: therefore I hate every false way.” “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.”

The Word of God will give us stability sufficient to carry us through prison camps, kidnappings, the blasts of false teachings, brainwashings by the wicked. The Word of God sheds light in the midst of gathering darkness, whether in a stuffy closet where we might be imprisoned, or in the discussion of those who would try to put walls of dogmatic denial of truth around our minds to imprison us in another way.

Turn the pages of your newspaper. Is Patty Hearst the only one who has been twisted and turned around to act upon a different base than she acted upon before? In this period of history when the prevalent teaching is that of relativism, we see example after example of individuals, groups, governments, whole chains of countries, where shifting actions show that the “base” is one of shifting sand. The base changes, and changes, and changes, as the sand shifts and slides.

The shifting sand of relativism is what many are building their lives and basing their actions on. In the churches as well as in government, in the teaching of children at home as well as in schools and universities, the solid rock of biblical teaching is spurned. If Jesus stood beside Patty Hearst and spoke of the similarity between what took place in her confusion and the shifting, sliding base of many who sit piously discussing her, how many would be left to “cast stones”? But what of the other Pattys and Bettys and Carols and Janes? What parents or teachers or churches are going to be held responsible for pouring truckloads of sand into their building areas?

We are told in Second Timothy that “evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived. But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them; and that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works” (2 Tim. 3:13–17). This is the solid rock Jesus spoke of as the basis for life: his Word, the Holy Scriptures, the Word of God.

EDITH SCHAEFFER

The Bright Young Man Theory

Jay Kesler, president of Youth for Christ, has an interesting theory about the Christian ministry. He calls it the Bright Young Man Theory of Youth Work. According to Jay, many churches follow this theory in choosing a man or woman as youth director. They find the most outgoing, razzmatazz, charismatic, attractive, under-thirty person possible and screw him into the church socket. He shines brightly for a time throughout the church and surrounding community. Soon the moths (kids) are flocking around the light. And the church’s youth program is a success until the Bright Young Man’s energy or ability dims or until another church in the area finds a Brighter Young Man to screw into its socket. When that happens, the moths flit off to the new location.

But the change isn’t very difficult, for the moths, for the church, or for the Bright Young Man. In a Christian ministry like the one Kesler describes, the moths are more interested in the person than in the Person anyhow. And travel from church to church is no problem with the mobility of today’s teen-agers.

The church is inconvenienced some, but there’s no great problem. When Bright Young Man Number One goes, the church board simply hustles up Bright Young Man Number Two and the process continues. Of course, it’s easier for a big church to build on this theory. With its money, benefits, and contacts, Big Church can usually procure a Bright Young Man more easily than the struggling community church or the decaying downtown church. But that’s life and that’s ministry.

And Bright Young Man Number One doesn’t feel bad about the change. He can always get a job. The key is to find a location where no one has seen his bag of tricks.

I don’t think we can confine the Bright Man Theory to youth work. In many churches it has been expanded to the Bright Older Man Theory of the Pastorate and the Bright Middle-age Man Theory of the Deacon Board. Having become celebrity-conscious and beautiful-people-oriented, we have forgotten that ministry may be a long-term, gut-it-out, plug-along type of thing that requires faithful people more than it does successful ones.

But until we rediscover that concept, we’ll continue to be a Christian (?) culture of competing churches that advertise their Bright Young Men or Bright Older Men according to the same principles used to sell soap, milk, and laxatives.

EUTYCHUS VII

The Christian Option

The March 26 article by Josif Ton, “The Socialist Quest For the New Man,” was excellent! Hopefully it will be made available in reprints. Personally, I wish it could be translated into Persian so as “easy reading” we could get it into circulation among the horde of Iranian students in the Houston area. Much of their time is spent in political discussions concerning the future of Iran. Ton’s article successfully presents Christianity as a viable option to consider. Thanks for the relevancy of your magazine.

NANCY PENNEY

Pasadena, Tex.

Government Or Church

As part of his review of the book Washington: Christians in the Corridors of Power (March 26) Wesley Pippert manages to homogenize Jeremiah, Malachi, and selected sayings of Christ in his earthly ministry. From this unique blend Pippert visualizes a Kingdom of God without blemish, financed by taxes extracted from individuals, most of whom have no faith in God and far less trust of bubble heads in government espousing the worn theory that vast appropriations will ameliorate our “Christian concerns.”

Should Pippert leave his sequestered Washington retreat, he will find hundreds of churches already programmed to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, and visit the prisoners—without federal aid! Such church ministries would expand their usefulness if the hand of Washington were not so deeply entrenched in the pockets of faithful tithers dedicated to Christ. When government moves into areas the church is serving there is a breach in separation of church and state. It becomes odious when Christians in office, whose primary contribution to oppressed society operates through their church, join in the move. Seattle, Wash.

FRANCIS W. ANDERSON

The Rent-Free Myth

In your editorial “Where Do Retired Pastors Live?” (March 12) you made an excellent point, but at the expense of disseminating some false information. You referred to the “pastor’s rent-free housing,” and this just isn’t so. Instead of a minister earning X number of dollars he earns X minus $3,000 (give or take $500) and he lives in the parsonage. He is, in effect, renting from the church. His situation differs from other renters because most churches do not adequately maintain their parsonages. The minister keeps it up; he improves their property while its value appreciates with the rising cost of real estate. Having renovated three parsonages with my own time and money, and having spent the first nineteen years of my ministry without a nickel of equity built up, I appreciate the sentiment of your article, but wish to demythologize the ancient superstition that the minister lives rent-free.

W. NORMAN MACFARLANE

Philippus United Church of Christ

Cincinnati, Ohio

Book List Best-Seller

The March 12 issue was superb! Do you plan to compile your many “book lists” into one definitive bibliography? I wish you would. It would make a great subscription give-away—and might very well become a best-seller!

WARREN W. WIERSBE

Senior Minister

The Moody Church

Chicago, Ill.

Second Death

The article on euthanasia in the February 27 issue (“Mercy Killing—Is It Biblical?” by Douglas K. Stuart) is well done and biblically sound, I believe. On one point, however, I venture to raise a question. In his comment on the eight cases of restoration to life recorded in the Bible the author says, “… they would actually have to go through death again. It may well be that their second earthly death was as bad as the first, or even worse.” Perhaps not necessarily—not in every case, at any rate.… I am convinced that Lazarus had no dread at all of “dying a second time.” He now knew firsthand that “our Savior Christ Jesus … abolished death” (2 Tim. 1:10).

CHRISTIAN BASHORE

Gettysburg, Ohio

What About Fantasy?

From time to time writers in The Refiner’s Fire have dealt with twentieth-century Christian fantasy writers. In the following comments Lionel Basney, associate professor of English at Houghton College, persuasively argues that our interest in fantasy may be in need of balance. In the second part of this section, Cheryl Forbes reviews a new book about fantasy and explains why she thinks the genre is so popular.

Can you overvalue fantasy? I think you can. Here is my real hesitation about the zeal and abundance of recent religious commentary on fantasy. I have read, enjoyed, thought and written about the works of Lewis, Tolkien, Chesterton, and so on. I plan to go on doing so. But aren’t we allowing them to dominate our horizons? And if we are, is it good?

Of course, with “mere Christianity” on the defensive, it’s heartening to find writers as brilliant as Lewis and Tolkien, for instance, on our side. As evangelicals become more receptive to literature and the arts, it is natural they should turn to congenial authors. And theology has interesting affiliations with fantasy as a literary mode, though not more interesting than its affiliations with allegory, perhaps, or with Johnson’s satires. On the other hand, a preoccupation with modern Christian fantasy encourages at least two errors.

First, we can forget that it is a coterie-taste. (This is not altered by the coterie’s being large, as in this case it appears to be.) Lewis preferred George Macdonald and Charles Williams to the “standard” masters of modern literature. That was his right. Our personal preference may be the same. But if we come to think that Macdonald and Williams were, in fact, greater writers than Eliot or Joyce, or that they are more important as agents and interpreters of modern culture, we are wrong.

For the fact is that modern literary culture looks to Pound, Joyce, and Beckett as its masters, and not to Tolkien. If we wish to understand modern letters, it is with Pound, Joyce, and Beckett that we must start. We may not like what we find. In effect, Beckett asserts the bankruptcy of Christian civilization. Whether or not this is comfortable, it is what most modern thinkers find accurate; and the brilliance of Beckett’s technique has changed the modern theater.

Second, I’m afraid we can exaggerate the inherent value of fantasy as a companion to theology, or as an avenue into it. Lewis’s fantasies are undeniably useful as Christian witness. Lewis intended this. Tolkien’s “joy beyond the walls of the world” is vaguer. But it too has invited some readers to identify a mythical vision of things with a Christian vision. If you like Frodo you must love Jesus.

But thousands of devoted secularists like Frodo without theological results. And “myth,” having become a password with Jungians, structuralists, various schools of literary critics, and so on, is as many-sided a term as you can find in modern English. To identify Christianity with “mythical thinking” is to generalize irresponsibly; at the same time, it dissolves Christianity’s claim to essential uniqueness.

J. W. Montgomery dedicated some lectures on history to Lewis, with the comment that “the fulfillment of history takes place in the land of Narnia.” As an affirmation of history’s mythical dimension, this is fine; as a compliment, it is graceful. But Montgomery knows, as Lewis knew, that history will not end in Narnia It will end in history, as Christ was born, suffered, and rose in history. The date and the event are in the Father’s hand. Reason cannot figure them out; nor can fantasy describe them. Fantasy is a product of human intelligence and culture, like logic, and like logic is subject to their limitations.

But God, his love, and his final intentions are quite beyond human intelligence and culture. They are beyond our best syllogism, our best myth, and our best guess. Tolkien offers a glimpse, “poignant as grief.” Aquinas, in his precise way, offers no more, but no less.

As I tried to indicate earlier, I do not oppose the interest in fantasy. I’m interested myself. What I argue for is moderation. It seems to me that evangelicals are liable to narrow their literary sights too far. We’re in danger of shutting ourselves in a wardrobe called “modern (Christian) myth,” and forgetting that most contemporary humans live in the house outside the closet door. Second, we’re in danger of identifying a Lothlorien vision of experience with Christ’s. They’re not the same, though they touch. Christianity is potentially as large as God’s understanding of himself. To that our symbols fail to reach, however clearly they give us a glimpse of our meanwhile moral condition.

LIONEL BASNEY

In Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (Cambridge, 308 pp., $18.95) C. N. Manlove deals with Charles Kingsley, George Macdonald, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Mervyn Peake. Manlove, English lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, carefully explains the purpose of his book and painstakingly defines fantasy. He says he intends to show the diversity among fantasy writers and the “varying successes of a range of its better-known writers in realizing a fully imaginative vision.” So far, so good. But when he begins to analyze the writers he loses sight of his initial goal and instead launches into a critical discussion of their underlying philosophies. And he doesn’t like what he finds.

The chapter on Charles Kingsley’s Water-Babies doesn’t belong with this discussion. That story is no more a fantasy than is Jonathan Swift’s Tale of a Tub. And I suspect that in his reasons for writing the book Kingsley would be closer to Swift than to Lewis or Tolkien. Much of Manlove’s commentary confirms this. The Water-Babies doesn’t seem to fit his definition of fantasy.

Of the four remaining writers, only three try to develop fully “another world.” Macdonald’s fantasy is of another sort. The world to which his characters go is not clearly defined or described, the changes in the characters themselves being more important than where the changes happen.

But in Peake, Tolkien, and Lewis we have writers who try to create worlds embodying new realities. Here questions to ask are: How well does the author sustain his imaginative vision? Does he give us a unified, consistent universe? Can we clearly apprehend this world through our imaginations? Does the author violate in the story the reality he has created for that story? Manlove does not answer these questions.

Lewis is so obviously a gifted and imaginative writer that Manlove cannot fault him there. But he does criticize Lewis’s metaphysical idea of innocence in Perelandra. At times Manlove’s argument sounds like the reverse of that made about Milton’s portrayal of Eve. Manlove thinks Lewis presents us with such strong innocence that he has trouble convincing us that “the Lady” could fall.

Manlove criticizes Tolkien’s writing skills. His descriptions, writes the critic, are too vague and “stock” to seem real to the reader. And he faults Tolkien’s handling of certain themes.

Manlove recognizes that free will and predestination lie at the heart of The Lord of the Rings (see the December 19, 1975, issue, page 10). But he couples that recognition with a statement that there are few references to providence. Where he sees Tolkien manipulating the characters like puppets, I see providence strongly at work in the story. Manlove wants some obvious reference to God or the presence of a deus ex machina to convince him that providence is the strongest force of the tale. Tolkien could not be that literal. Manlove dismisses The Lord of the Rings as the greatest failure among the fantasies he considers.

Peake, who is probably the least gifted writer among the lot, comes in for Manlove’s highest praise. Peake afflicts the reader with sentence after sentence stuffed full of adjectives. Manlove calls his style vivid; I call it wooden. The first volume of Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy is static—a long, expository prologue to the interesting tale in book two. Such stasis succeeds in captivating this critic.

Manlove concludes with an astute observation, not about the writers but about certain readers, and ultimately about himself. In the medieval and Renaissance periods, certainly the height of fantastical romance, there was a “shared belief” between writer and reader, he says. “The universe was instinct with meaning, each phenomenon at once concrete and conceptual. Nor did anything stand alone: it was related to every other by a web of influence, meaning or analogy; reality was inexhaustibly metaphoric—even, in a sense, incarnational” (p. 259). Since we have lost that sense of reality, says Manlove, the fantasy writer today will never fully achieve that imaginative, numinous vision possible in an earlier era. Such writers will always have a problem of “distance.”

But they don’t. Perhaps Manlove has lost his sense of the universe as “inexhaustibly metaphoric” and has no desire to regain it. But I think that most of the millions of people who have read The Lord of the Rings appreciate the metaphorical and incarnational nature of fantasy. People need what might be called an “epic vision” in their literature. Poetry no longer provides it; fantasy does.

Despite the weaknesses of these writers, I think they succeed where Manlove finds they fail. They lower a drawbridge into worlds “instinct with meaning.” When the tale ends and the drawbridge closes behind the reader, the real world may appear more conceptual and simultaneously more concrete than it did before.

CHERYL FORBES

King Charles II of England, so we are told, once turned to one of the most learned men he knew and asked why any intelligent man should waste his time listening to the sermons of the uneducated tinker John Bunyan. “Could I possess the tinker’s abilities for preaching, please your majesty,” replied the scholar, “I would gladly relinquish all my learning.” The scholar’s name was John Owen, and this small story—apocryphal or not—reveals a good deal of the man’s Christian character.

Unfortunately, historians have obliged Owen’s humility by almost completely neglecting to mention him in their annals. This makes it something of a surprise to find his Puritan colleagues hailing Owen as “the Calvin of England” and “the Atlas and Patriarch” of Puritanism. And before the skeptics among us move to write off such praise to the Puritan penchant for overstatement, we should note that in our own time—some three hundred years after Owen’s death—Roger Nicole has called Owen “the greatest divine who ever wrote in English.” Historian Geoffrey Nuttall at the University of London flatly declared that no study of seventeenth-century England could be complete without Owen, while J. I. Packer observed that Owen “lived in an age of giants, and I think he overtops them all.”

The “age of giants” was the golden age of Puritan theology, from 1600 to 1688, and the high summer of Puritan political triumph under the rule of the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell. Owen lived his life in the forefront of these times, not because he especially desired fame, but because a broad expanse of mind like Owen’s is always in demand in times of turmoil. At various stages, Owen was Cromwell’s personal chaplain, the vice-chancellor of Oxford University, and the acknowledged leader of the Puritan clergy. But above all, the face that stares out at us from the Hulton Library’s portrait was a study in itself of the Puritan ideal described in a sixteenth-century work: “the Ambassador of the most high king unto his people, and a skilful Shepherd to feed God’s flock with the wholesome food of his word.”

Regrettably, today we remember little of Owen as the scholar—whose library contained 1,418 Latin treatises, 32 volumes of classical manuscripts, and 1,454 other books in English from every major theological and classical author—or as the preacher whose sermons seized and convicted equally his country congregations and the House of Commons. Indeed, for all his stature Owen remains the most curiously elusive of all the Puritan leaders.

Owen himself did not help matters at all, especially when he burned his diaries. But he was too much the public man to have escaped notice entirely. Born in 1616, the year of William Shakespeare’s death, John Owen grew up listening to the seams of English life being slowly ripped apart by the furious pulling of Puritan against royalist. Owen’s father, an outspoken Puritan minister, arranged to have his son entered at Queen’s College, Oxford, at the tender age of twelve. A life of study seems to have suited the boy well; he worked hard, governed by an ambition that permitted him only four hours of sleep in a night. Under normal circumstances he ought to have expected a tranquil academic career.

The circumstances, however, were anything but normal. Archbishop William Laud, appointed by King Charles I to suppress the Puritans, had begun a bitter purge of the churches and universities. Eventually, in 1637, the twenty-one-year-old Owen had no choice but to leave Oxford and to become, along with many other nonconformist (i.e., not conforming to the established church) Puritans, a private chaplain in the home of a sympathetic nobleman.

The outbreak of civil war between King Charles and the Puritan parliament in 1642 found Owen in London. The establishment of a Puritan government gave him the opportunity to accept a pastorate at Fordham, in Essex, and then to become minister to an influential congregation at Coggeshall. It also brought him invitations to preach before the assembled parliament on the monthly “fast-days” in St. Margaret’s Chapel, Westminster, and it was after one of these sermons that Owen met Oliver Cromwell, then lord general of the parliamentary armies. Cromwell had as keen an insight into a man’s abilities as he did into cavalry tactics, and the young preacher seems to have made an immediate impression. The general stepped up and told Owen, “Sir, you are the man I must be acquainted with,” and insisted on trooping Owen off to the wars with him as a personal chaplain. In time, Owen became one of Cromwell’s chief advisors, especially in national church affairs, and later, as lord protector of England, Cromwell appointed Owen to the oversight of Oxford as vice-chancellor of the university.

Owen’s appointment was more than a mere reward for political faithfulness. Oxford had been the royalist capital, and the university had impoverished itself in support of the king; the civil wars had dispersed the faculty, and the students had been recruited into the king’s army, so that the only thing which Oxford was likely to be rich in was an intense dislike of Puritans in general and the new Puritan vice-chancellor in particular. Nonetheless, in seven years Owen had reassembled the faculty, put the university back on its financial feet, and restored its academic prestige. Owen’s students were his best testimony: Sir Christopher Wren, John Locke, William Penn, Philip Henry, and Joseph Alleine, among others.

As long as Cromwell lived, the Puritan Protectorate lived also; but when Cromwell died in 1658, the Protectorate collapsed, and the Puritan summer faded quickly into bleak autumn. Charles II was returned from exile to his father’s throne, and the restored royalist government promptly began settling old scores by wrenching the Puritan ministers out of their pulpits. Owen was forced to leave Oxford and was threatened with arrest, although, unlike others, he was shielded from actual imprisonment by powerful friends.

At best, it was a precarious existence, and Owen was more than once tempted by the promise of a haven in America when the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay offered him the presidency of Harvard and, later, the pulpit of a Boston church. Some accounts claim that Charles II, who developed an unusual friendship with Owen and often gave him money to distribute to ejected Puritan ministers, offered Owen a bishop’s miter if Owen would conform to the Church of England. But Owen knew where he was needed. He remained in England and remained a nonconformist, holding together his persecuted colleagues as the acknowledged spokesman of nonconformity until his death.

It was also acknowledged, even by Owen’s enemies, that the Massachusetts offers were not idly made, for Owen’s ministry and preaching were of a stature that demanded notice. Scholar though he was, Owen was thoroughly convinced of the primacy of biblical preaching over theological logic-chopping. His first orders for Oxford were to prod idle chaplains and students into filling vacant pulpits in neighboring churches and to require regular reports on their sermons.

The printed versions of Owen’s own sermons make hard reading. Such was the force of Owen’s intellect that the ideas quick-marched out of his head without the intervals necessary to form them into neat companies and platoons. Even at a distance of three hundred years, Owen’s intellect remains dazzling. He was only twenty-six when his first major book had brought him renown in London, and within five years Parliament was commissioning him to write theological pamphlets for national use. Owen was that rare thing, the preacher who could be scholarly without being pedantic.

Owen was a Calvinist, if we mean by this that he conceived of the world in much the same terms as did John Calvin. Therefore, his writings were often forthrightly Reformed, something that is probably nowhere more evident than in the most prized of his works, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1647). It is a formidable—and I should say the classic—Reformed statement of the doctrine of the Atonement, and Owen characteristically alternates between fearsome citadels of logic and bright sallies of wit. I have heard any number of Reformed preachers on the subject still using, in some form or other, the same headings and arguments that Owen set forth three hundred years ago.

On the other hand, Owen had sworn no inviolable allegiance to Calvin, and he refused to be limited to rehashing the Institutes. In the preface to his work on the Holy Spirit, Owen confessed, “I know not of any who ever went before me in this design of representing the whole economy of the Holy Spirit,” and thus having bid farewell to tradition, he proceeded to turn out what Charles Ryrie of Dallas Seminary has described as a work that has never been superseded.

The scope of Owen’s subject was not the only departure from tradition that he felt constrained to apologize for: “Probably some will think that our discourses are carried to an unnecessary and inconvenient length by that intermixture of practical applications which runs along in them all.” None of this, of course, disturbs our century in the least; in fact, it is exactly his recognition that the regenerating work of the Spirit ought to bear tangible, practical fruit that keeps Owen from losing us to the seventeenth century’s love of metaphysical labyrinths.

In many ways, Owen’s stress on “practical applications” tells us as much about Owen as it does about the Holy Spirit; Owen’s chief interest was not in turning out tight little works of specialized scholarship but in pursuing personal holiness. Charles Bridges wrote that Owen excelled in “skilful anatomy of the self-deceitfulness of the heart, and a detailed and wise treatment of the Christian’s heart.” In short, Owen might be called a typical English Puritan, bored with too intricate theological theories and unrivaled in awakening conviction. At Oxford, he and Thomas Goodwin set up what might be regarded as the forerunner of the modern campus counseling center, which the undergraduates promptly labeled “the scruple shop.” Owen began mortifying exalted academic spirits, not with rationalism but with “first, a due consideration of God, and then of themselves.” And all this, though excellent theology, never strikes us as being merely academic:

They know nothing of the life and power of the gospel, nothing of the reality of the grace of God, nor do they believe aright one article of the Christian faith, whose hearts are not sensible of the love of Christ.… I had rather choose my eternal lot and portion with the meanest believer who, being effectually sensible of the love of Christ, spends his days in mourning that he can love him no more than he finds himself [able] to do [“A Declaration of the Glorious Mystery of the Person of Christ,” in The Works of John Owen, ed. by W. H. Goold, Banner of Truth Trust, 1972, I, 166].

Although Owen derided the “horrible self-macerations” of the monastics as falling “upon the natural man instead of the corrupt old man,” he insisted that relentless self-examination was the only possible way to be aware of the attacks of sin. “Let not that man think he makes any progress in holiness who walks not over the bellies of his lusts,” he wrote in “On the Mortification of Sin in Believers.” “He who doth not kill sin in his way takes no steps towards his journey’s end.”

Convinced as he was of the imperfection of any work that human depravity laid a hand to making, Owen was more prepared to tolerate dissent and disagreement than history books have generally made the Puritans out to be. At Oxford, he personally intervened to save a royalist professor from dismissal; in 1669, he censured his Puritan brethren in Boston for suppressing a Baptist congregation, stiffly reminding them that the Baptists were also fellow Christians, and that Puritans who complained of persecution in England had no right to become persecutors themselves in Massachusetts Bay.

Owen died on August 24, 1683, and was buried in Bunhill Fields, the celebrated graveyard of English non-conformists that would in a few years receive the remains of John Milton and John Bunyan as well. Andrew Thomson recorded that Owen’s funeral procession included “sixty noblemen and many others in mourning coaches and on horseback.” There is at his grave today a long, pompous epitaph in flowery Latin that exhaustively lists Owen’s virtues and accomplishments. It probably would have embarrassed him beyond words had he seen it. The words I think Owen would have been truly pleased with were, instead, uttered by his assistant, David Clarkson:

We have had a light in this candlestick which did not only enlighten the room, but gave light to others far and near. Holiness gave a divine lustre to his other accomplishments; it stirred in his whole course and diffused throughout his whole being [quoted in Andrew Thomson’s “Life of Dr. Owen,” The Works of John Owen, I, civ].

An Interview With Festo Kivengere¹Festo Kivengere is probably the best-known product of the East African revival movement. Since 1962 he has worked as an evangelist around the world. He is the leader of the African Enterprise evangelistic team in East Africa, and since 1972 he has also been the Anglican bishop of Kigezi, with headquarters at Kabale, Uganda. He holds the M.Div. from Pittsburgh Seminary. The following is a condensation of an interview by the editors ofChristianity Today:

Question. What is the East African revival, and why has it lasted over forty years?

Answer. Can I explain? This is a question I have been asked repeatedly for over twenty-five years, and all I have ever been able to do is to share what I have seen. The only explanation I can give is that it is God’s work. It is not a technique. It is a movement that cannot be contained. It is renewal within renewal. It is an attitude toward the Lord, toward the Bible, toward the fellowship, and toward the Spirit. It has always been open to a fresh touch.

Q. What does this revival mean to the people involved in it?

A. It is when Christ becomes a living, risen Lord in the life of a believer. For the non-believer, it is when he is brought into a confrontation with Christ and accepts him as Saviour, thus completely changing his life morally and socially. In other words, revival is when Christ becomes alive in a life, changing that life. The person is born again, and if he has previously had that experience, then his life is changed in such a way that it affects all his relationships.

Q. Is it visible to an outsider?

A. Absolutely! Go back to a village a week after a man comes to the Lord in a meeting in the market. The whole village knows something about it. He has paid the debts he owes. He has gone to people he hated and said, “I’m sorry. I’m a changed man.” He has apologized or asked for forgiveness. He’s now telling them what Christ means to him. He has carried his new belief into his business practices. In other words, it isn’t something he sits on as a comfortable experience. If anything, it is terribly uncomfortable.

Q. How has this differed from other revivals in history?

A. It may be the continued willingness of those who have been revived to be renewed by the Spirit of God. At the Kabale convention last year, celebrating the fortieth year of the revival in that area, we heard up-to-date testimonies from people who were brought to Christ as early as 1930. They had tremendous freshness; yet they had been winning souls for thirty-five or forty years. They have remained open to what the Spirit may want to say to them in the present situation. They learned that when they got into a rut God had to turn them out of it so they could breathe again. The tendency to get into certain patterns can stifle the work of the Spirit and create pockets of hardness. Continued breaking and bringing new streams of life have been the means God has used.

Q. Amid this openness are there some agreed points of emphasis?

A. Yes, three. The basis was the Bible. Christ was at the center. And the Word was not just read; it was obeyed.

Q. How has the Bible been used?

A. It has been preached from Genesis to Revelation. Men who have never been to seminary have taught it as the living book. I know people who were converted at the age of forty-five, born again when they were illiterate. They taught themselves how to read immediately. Even before they could read they quoted what had been quoted to them. They would get the verses in their heads and then go stand up and preach them without having a Bible. They preached it without hesitation, and they allowed it to work on them. They have won hundreds and thousands of people, and I believe their power lay in their attitude of feeding on the Word. Of course, they have no commentaries, so as you can imagine they are limited. But the amazing thing is that they can see the whole spectrum of the Bible in such a way that one must agree they are in fellowship with the Author, the Holy Spirit. To them it is God’s Word. It speaks to them, and they do something about it. It convicts them, and they repent. It fills their hearts with joy.

Q. Explain, please, the centrality of Christ in the revival.

A. All sorts of things have happened: dreams, visions in the night, conviction of sin; but no one ever put these above Christ and him crucified and moving alive among us. We had our excesses, but they were corrected as we kept our eyes on the Word incarnate and preached the written Word.

Q. What about the third point you mentioned, obedience to the Word?

A. The living Christ in the Bible spoke living words to living persons in living situations. This meant that those who listened had to do something about it. It made men move. It made them pay debts of love and money. It made people go and speak to neighbors out of compelling love and concern for their souls. The Word compelled men and women to evangelize.

Q. Has this evangelization spilled across tribal and national boundaries?

A. Oh, yes. It has gone into all parts of Uganda, Ruanda, Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania, and Malawi, and into parts of Ethiopia. And it has had an impact in such faraway places as Indonesia.

Q. Is it interdenominational?

A. Initially, the thrust was in the Church of England, but the fire began to move, and people shared with those in other denominations. It went from church to church, denomination to denomination. Some churches, like the Lutherans, found it hard to move fast at first. They were looking at it from a doctrinal point of view. The very staunch evangelical groups found it terribly hard to accept at first look. Doctrinal loopholes could be found. It didn’t have a neat theological approach. They felt that things might go wild. Imagine 300 people lying on the ground weeping and crying and shouting and shrieking in church. Invite that sort of thing into your church?

Q. They were afraid of enthusiasm?

A. Exactly! Those who saw this considered it too risky. They did not know how to control it.

Q. Were the top leaders of the Anglican church involved from the beginning?

A. No. That would be great for Anglicans if God blessed the men with commanding positions and influence. But he came and blessed girls and elderly women and boys and nobodies, and the ministers remained very dry. Of course, the ministers were embarrassed by what these lively Christians said, and they opposed the revival. Until the pastor was blessed, he had to oppose it. Why did God choose to work “through the back door”? Why not deal with the big man so things could move easily?

Q. How did the “big men” get involved?

A. One example was in Tanzania where some of us went to witness. The doors were shut against us repeatedly. The African pastor got up in the cathedral pulpit one Sunday when the church was packed and said, “Now, look: I want to warn you against some strangers who have recently moved in. They talk big words about salvation, but they are wolves in sheep’s skin. Be careful of them.” And you could see the congregation turn and look at us. Sunday after Sunday this man did not preach anything. Finally, he got up one morning and said, “This is my last warning. If any of you is caught up in this talk and business of salvation I will excommunicate you for six months to show you how wrong you are.” There was silence. We walked outside. We were becoming bitter.

Then the Lord spoke to me and said, “You owe deep love to that man. You need to be helpful. Go to his church, and do what you can, and love him.” We protested that it would be difficult, but we went on for a few weeks, for a month, for three months, for five months. Finally he stood before his congregation one day with tears streaming down his cheeks. He said to them, “Months ago I told you that if any of you experienced this salvation they were talking about I would excommunicate you. I have been saved. Now you can excommunicate me if you like.” We could hardly believe our ears. Public testimony! This man was born again because revival started. But it didn’t start easily.

Q. Why has this been accepted by leaders of the mainline denominations in East Africa, such as the Anglican, when it might not have been accepted elsewhere?

A. It was not accepted at first. That is a part of the picture that has not been reported widely. In Uganda, for instance, twenty students who had only two months or less to go before ordination were expelled from our theological college. They were expelled simply because the warden was not agreeable to their experience, and the bishop agreed with him. I got a lovely letter about a year ago from that bishop, who is now retired in England. He has been deeply blessed in the years since that. We went to see him when we conducted a mission in England. It was interesting that before revival broke out in the country he had asked for missions of evangelistic teams to spread throughout Uganda. He was the only bishop there then, and he had a vision, but many of his ministers were not born again. Then God began to move, and people were repenting of their sins. People were in tears. A respectable part of the church was embarrassed. Ministers did not like it. This poor man, the bishop, was afraid, and he shied away from what he had actually initiated. He turned around and said, “This can’t be of God; it must be of the Devil.” So for twenty-five years he opposed it, but the position of the hierarchy didn’t stop the movement.

I was brought into it when things in the church were really thick and hard, when licenses were being withdrawn from ministers and the revival groups were not permitted to meet in churches. But God did something unique. After the bishop himself suggested that we leave and form another denomination, we went and had prayer. The Spirit of God said, “Don’t you move.” So, our answer was, “This is our church here, and we stay whether we speak or not.” We witnessed, people suffered every week, and one minister after another came into the blessing of God. Now more than 85 per cent of the clergymen know Jesus Christ as their Saviour, as do all our bishops.

Q. To what extent has the charismatic emphasis been a part of the East African revival?

A. None. There are now some charismatic groups in Africa, but they seem to have come through European and American missionaries. In one country I visited, a man told me, “We had a revival.” When I asked him when, he replied that it had been three years earlier. Then I asked him exactly what he meant by “had a revival.” His response was that it was the extraordinary experiences, the unusual manifestations, and now that they were over, so was the “revival.” But real revival is Jesus Christ himself. Now, I do not despise the manifestations God has sent to shake people up. Praise God for them! I have told people who have been involved: “Don’t think the manifestations are going to feed you. They shook you up so that you may go to the bread of life.” Perhaps the only contribution I have made to some of these groups is that I have reminded them not to overlook the fundamental issues.

Q. You have spoken of persecution from within the church; has there also been persecution from outside it?

A. Yes, in Kenya, for instance. Revival broke out there in 1937, but the Mau Mau revolution started in 1952. There is a strong church in Kenya today because many Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans, and others had been blessed in the revival and then gave such marvelous testimonies during the emergency. So many Christians were exposed to these terrible experiences and massacres, but they stood the test of time. The church went through the fire. It was not originally a persecution directed at people because they were Christians. But the believers who knew Jesus and who were witnessing had a hard choice. The Mau Mau got many members from the churches. Those who were in the Kikuyu tribe had a very hard time keeping out of the revolutionary group. The Mau Mau were fighting to liberate the land from white domination. Then the British would come and say, “We want people to fight against these terrible murderers, so join our forces. We’ll give you guns, and your local militia can protect your people from these killers.” Many of those who had been affected by the revival could not join either side. They often agreed with the Mau Mau that their land had been taken from the Kikuyu unjustly, but they also held that Jesus died for men, never for the land. Those who refused to take sides suffered. The British arrested them as supporters of the Mau Mau, or the Mau Mau killed them.

Q. What should Christians say in such situations, where neo-colonialism can be as bad as the old colonialism?

A. We have only one message: the disease is not domination by white men. It is the disease of sin in the human heart, which makes any man the exploiter of another. This is a clear message, and we should not hesitate to make it clear to people wherever we are. I wish there were more gospel preaching in those terms, not in political terms.

Q. Do you mean in Africa, or elsewhere?

A. Everywhere! God’s power knows no boundaries, of course, and we have heard amazing testimonies from many countries of the world. A man from the eastern part of the Soviet Union was a guest at our Kabale convention last year. He had been in prison in Siberia for eight and a half years and then was kicked out of the nation. He gave a lovely word of testimony in which he told us that Khrushchev had said on television in 1970, “I will show you the last Christian in Russia.” He said that since then there has been a wonderful time of revival in the midst of pressure, the church has doubled, and Khrushchev is no more.

Q. Have you seen a similar response in the places where you have preached?

A. Yes. There is a real movement of God now among the young people of Kenya, for instance. There is evidence of a new openness to the Bible in some of the African independent churches. I have never seen such a response to Christ-centered messages as I saw at a university mission organized by students in Ghana. Some pastors from Zaire told me about thrilling things in their churches. In Japan, where Christians are such a tiny minority and often very formal, I sensed a hunger for more vitality and simple, direct presentation of the Gospel. In Germany last year I spoke to a crowd of evangelicals estimated to total 35,000, and we had a wonderful time. Since then I have heard that there is a drawing together of the Christians for the single purpose of presenting Christ.

Q. Do you see any of this as a result of the 1974 Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization?

A. Some of it is. The congress has shaken the established church. In Germany I met a number of Lutheran bishops who want more evangelistic outreaches, and they quote the vision of Lausanne.

Q. You were invited back to the city of Lausanne in 1975 to preach at the 700th anniversary of their cathedral. What did you find?

A. You can imagine a team of two Africans who are conducting an evangelistic mission in Lausanne, of all places! You know what the Swiss people are like. We told them we appreciated their reserve, and then we had tremendous times together with them. The line God has given us is to present to any community the message that has the power to break down the barriers. Christ has entered my culture in Africa, and Swiss culture, and German culture, and all the rest. And out of it he brings brothers and sisters without destroying their cultures. Rather, he releases them from their cultural barriers. In Europe, they need fresh air, and they seemed to appreciate my approach.

Q. What did you discover in your mission in England?

A. We had quite a remarkable response. Our ministry was to the churches, and there were no big crusades. In some places, such as Manchester and Bristol, it was beautiful. Ministers were on fire; there were many young people; churches were packed; testimonies were given. There are wonderful signs of hope in parts of the Church of England, and there is tremendous spiritual impact.

On the other side, there is much to make you sad. There are some churches without much of what you would call the Gospel. They knew all about liturgy and ceremony but were scared of preaching. In one place my colleague on the team, a layman, was assigned to preach in a Roman Catholic church, and the congregation there was more open than in the Anglican church next door. I went to the Anglican church, and since I was a bishop they respected me. The priest said to me very gently, “Bishop, my people are not used to more than eight-minute sermons, so please keep that in mind.”

Q. Is there anything distinctively African in the East African revival that cannot be found in other cultures or that cannot be used in other countries?

A. That is difficult to say. Maybe our music or other forms of expression have made a certain contribution. But when we have gone to share it in the South Pacific or in Central America and elsewhere, we have shared Christ and not Africa. In Indonesia and other places God has done some wonderful things. No, I don’t think there is anything purely African about the revival.

The Zurich authorities had handed down their ultimatum: all unbaptized infants must be baptized within eight days, or those responsible for withholding them would face imprisonment or banishment. After much prayer and soul-searching, on the night of January 21, 1525, a small group of believers decided “to obey God rather than men.” They inaugurated believer’s baptism, baptizing those who confessed their faith in Christ and requested baptism. In less than two years their three leaders, Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz, and George Blaurock, were dead or banished. Manz, after many imprisonments, was executed by drowning in the Limmat River on January 5, 1527, becoming the first Protestant to die at the hands of Protestants. Regrettably, he was not the last.

These believers preferred to be known as Brethren in Christ, but they soon came to be called Anabaptists (ana– in Greek means “again”). Subsequently not only they and their spiritual descendants but many other groups, only superficially related to them if at all, were called Anabaptists. The careless and polemical use of the term has long muddied the waters of historical investigation. We need to make finer distinctions and to strive to understand what the real Anabaptists were saying.

Anabaptism was born when the Reformation itself was still in its swaddling clothes. The meeting at Worms, from which Luther emerged as an outlaw, was less than four years in the past, Luther had not yet married, and Zwingli was still saying Mass in Latin. However, in many respects the reform movement led by Zwingli in Zurich had outrun its German counterpart. The actions of the radical social reformer Thomas Müntzer and his peasant supporters had driven Luther to turn against the peasants and to retreat further from the innovative implications of his own teachings. A seething ferment marked the social, intellectual, and religious climate. Doubtless the pre-Reformation movements of Waldenses, Lollards, and Hussites had contributed to a strong undercurrent of discontent that the Magisterial Reformers—that is, the reformers who had the support of the local political rulers, such as Luther and Zwingli—began to tap. But the socially conservative Magisterial Reformers were no more able to contain the new wine in their patched-up wineskins than had the cautious humanist Erasmus. Nevertheless, they enunciated the initial principles that virtually all Reformation elements were to follow.

The continental divide between the Reformers and the Roman Catholics was the concept of authority. The Bible became for the Protestants the final court of appeal in all matters of faith and practice. Sola scriptura was far more than a slogan; it became a way of life. The publication of a critical edition of the Greek text by Erasmus sparked not only Luther’s translation of the New Testament (1522) but also the Zurich Bible (1529). The Zurich translators incorporated into their Old Testament the work of two Anabaptists, Ludwig Hetzer and Hans Denck, who had combined their linguistic expertise to make the first translation of the Old Testament prophets from Hebrew into German.

For the Anabaptists, as for the other Reformers, the Bible was the supreme source of authority. However, a major difference appears in the way the Anabaptists handled Scripture. They took their interpretative key from Matthew 5 and Galatians 3 and 4. For the Anabaptists, the Old Testament could never stand alone as the last word of God to men. Since the Incarnation, it was clear that the Law was fulfilled in the new covenant of grace that Christ had inaugurated. Therefore, the old Testament could never stand alone, nor could it be interpreted as if Christ had never come. While the Anabaptists frequently quoted the Old Testament and some occasionally quoted the Apocrypha, they found in the New Testament the guidelines for the Christian life and for the Church. The Magisterial Reformers, on the other hand, “sought to construe the New Testament Church after the lineaments of the Old Testament, thus reversing the forward movement of God’s affairs in history …,” as Leonard Verduin aptly put it in The Reformers and their Stepchildren.

The practice that called forth the label “Anabaptist” can also provide a key to understanding the major thrust of the movement. Believer’s baptism became for the Anabaptists both an affirmation and rejection. By this act the Anabaptists said yes to Christ and no to the world. It was for them an act of confession and discipleship as well as a repudiation, not only of infant baptism but also of that which they felt infant baptism implied, i.e., coercion, the sacral society, the authority of tradition as opposed to the Bible, and a church composed of the mixed multitude.

Much of what the Anabaptists taught came from their concept of faith. For them Christian faith was not subject to coercion. Balthasar Hubmaier, an early Anabaptist martyr wrote, after having been tortured in the water tower in Zurich, “But faith is a work of God and not of the heretic’s tower in which one sees neither sun nor moon, and lives on nothing but water and bread.” Claus Felbinger, a Hutterite missionary, shortly before he was beheaded on July 10, 1560, declared, “God wants no compulsory service. On the contrary, he loves a free, willing heart that serves him with a joyful soul and does what is right joyfully.”

The concept of complete religious liberty and the corresponding limitation of the state’s authority to temporal affairs was clearly expressed as early as 1524. For the state to deny a person the right of choice in matters of faith was, according to Hubmaier, a denial of the Incarnation. For him, freedom of religion was rooted in the revelation of God in Christ. Indeed, it was inherent in the Gospel itself. For the state to insert itself into this realm was tantamount to blasphemy. In attempting to transcend its God-given limitations, the state violated the integrity of the Church.

Moreover, for the Church to baptize an unbeliever or an infant incapable of a voluntary faith-commitment to Christ was also a clear violation of the teachings of Christ and the apostles. The New Testament called for a personal and voluntary commitment that was seen as solely the work of God through the Holy Spirit in response to the proclamation of the Gospel. Faith was the scriptural prerequisite to baptism.

The Anabaptists also went beyond the Magisterial Reformers in their concept of faith. To them, a claim of faith that did not eventuate in a new life of Christian discipleship was nonsense. Hubmaier expresses it in this way: “Such faith cannot remain passive but must break out to God in Thanksgiving and to mankind in all kinds of works of brotherly love.” Some Anabaptists referred to the new life as “walking on the resurrection side of the cross.” All Anabaptists stressed that the essence of the Christian life was discipleship.

While the Anabaptist concept of discipleship is one of the clues for understanding the genius of the movement, Anabaptist ecclesiology is even more significant. It is here that Anabaptism made its most telling point. For sixteenth-century Anabaptists, the guidelines for the Church were found in the New Testament. In baptism an Anabaptist congregation found a visible means of expressing its corporate discipleship. In this act, confession, voluntarism, obedience, and the fellowship of disciples bound together in Christian love for witness became a reality.

For the opponents of the Anabaptists, the sting of believer’s baptism was in part its implied repudiation not only of the Roman Catholic Church but of the other Reformers as well. Infant baptism was seen as the unfailing symbol of continuity between the churches of the Magisterial Reformers and the Roman Catholic Church. Regardless of the harshness with which Magisterial Reformers castigated Rome, their continued recognition of Rome’s baptism as valid baptism implied a recognition of Rome as the true church of which their churches were reformed branches. In the Magisterial Reformers’ eyes, then, the fall of the church was never complete in the sense that the pre-Reformation Roman Catholic Church had ceased to be The Church. This is one of the reasons why the Anabaptists viewed the Magisterial Reformers as half-way reformers.

Of course, infant baptism doubtless appeared an indispensable rite for the territorial churches that the Magisterial Reformers set up. It is at this point that Anabaptists moved from heresy to sedition, in the eyes of their opponents. Their ecclesiology demanded the separation of the church from the state. For them, the state was God-given, to be sure—they were far too biblical to deny this—but its sphere of legitimate activity was severely reduced. It could never interfere with a person’s right to believe or disbelieve. Hubmaier makes this point quite clear: “Therefore, it is well and good that the secular authority puts to death the criminals who do physical harm to the defenseless, Romans 13. But no one may injure the atheist who wishes nothing other than to forsake the gospel.” This is at once the most logical and the most radical statement of the Anabaptist consensus. This meant that neither the prince in Saxony nor the city council in Zurich, much less the King in England, could command the conscience of those to whom Christ only was “the Lord and lawgiver of the church and conscience.”

Anabaptist ecclesiology held serious implications for medieval concepts of the state. The pattern of persecuting in which the Magisterial Reformers engaged was due, to a considerable extent, to their inability to extricate themselves from the Constantinian synthesis of church and state. In such a configuration a sin against the church (heresy) became an act of treason against the state. It is precisely at this point that the Magisterial Reformers appeared powerless to change the medieval structure of society. Almost from the very beginning of the movement the Anabaptists saw the serious deficiencies of this social structure. In fact, it is precisely this issue that gave rise to the movement. A church that was subject only to the Lordship of Christ could never become captive to the state or to the powers of this world.

While the Anabaptist attitude toward the state appears almost wholly negative, the Anabaptists were not anarchists. One may glean from their writings and actions certain concepts that reveal a more balanced view than has at times been apparent. While the state in Anabaptist thought is temporary, it is nevertheless ordained of God and must be obeyed.

One’s ultimate loyalty, however, belongs to Christ. When allegiance to Christ and allegiance to the state conflict, there can be no question of which demands priority. And the Christian must be prepared to suffer the consequences. Hubmaier went beyond most Anabaptists in attempting to work out a more positive orientation toward the state. He even advocated the use of the sword in defending the state from attack by its enemies. However, the majority of Anabaptists followed the teachings of the Schleitheim Articles, which prohibited a Christian to use the sword for any reason.

After four and a half centuries, numerous documents written by Anabaptists are coming to light. The twentieth-century student can now read many of these in English. No longer does he have to depend upon the accounts of persons who had little interest in understanding the Anabaptists or in representing them fairly. From these documents as well as other sources it now appears that the Anabaptists were the first to enunciate clearly, and to attempt to implement, the truths that gave rise to the free-church movement. For this reason modern evangelicals will always be indebted to these much maligned Christians, whether they recognize this debt or not. Their gratitude can best be expressed, not in an attempt to reproduce sixteenth-century Anabaptism, but rather in an attempt to recover New Testament Christianity in a twentieth-century context.

A new edition of the sermons of Johann Arndt that appeared in March, 1675, included a preface entitled Pia desideria (“pious longings”). The author of the preface was Philip Jakob Spener, a prominent pastor in Frankfurt. Soon the book was being bought not for the sermons but for the preface. Pia desideria became so popular that it was revised and published separately the following September.

Spener had initiated a renewal, called “German Pietism,” that has influenced evangelicalism almost as much as the Reformation has. The Pietist movement was, as A. Skevington Wood has said, the spiritual bridge between the Reformation and the Evangelical Awakening of the eighteenth century. Much that characterizes evangelicalism—evangelism, missions, lay-witness—was nourished by Spener’s work.

When Spener was born in Alsace on January 13, 1635, northern Europe was in political and theological turmoil. It was the midpoint of the numerous religious wars known collectively as the Thirty Years War. And it was the “scholastic” period of Lutheran orthodoxy. Luther’s works had long since been practically canonized, and theologians and pastors were involved in academic disputes that had little relevance for the layman. These conditions fostered spiritual ignorance and moral lethargy in the churches.

But young Philip was directed along a more positive path. Throughout Alsace a moderate Lutheranism prevailed. The movement derived its principles of devotion and simple piety from the influence of Zwingli and the writings of Johann Arndt (True Christianity), Immanuel Sonstrom (Golden Treasure), Lewis Baylys (Practice of Piety), and other devotional writers. Furthermore, Philip was permanently influenced by the spiritual counsel of his godmother, Agatha von Rappolstein, and of the court chaplain, Joachim Stoll. As a result, Spener developed a sensitive religious nature early in life.

Spener studied Greek and Latin at Colmar and matriculated at the University of Strassburg in May, 1651. He specialized in biblical languages and history, and he earned the master’s degree in 1653 for a refutation of Thomas Hobbes. In 1654, while a lecturer at the university, he began serious theological study. His professors introduced him to a remodeled Lutheranism that understood justification as rebirth, replaced eschatological speculation with interest in the present, and promoted a severe asceticism.

Professor Konrad Dannhauer stimulated young Spener’s interest in Luther. Spener revered Dannhauer, who often functioned as a pastor-counselor to his students, and may have used him as the model for the ideal professor described in Pia desideria. Spener was impressed by Luther, Melanchthon, and other German theologians, as well as by the Dutch theologian Hugo Grotius. At this time Spener’s lifelong interest in heraldry emerged, and he wrote a two-volume work on the subject that was republished after his death. In 1659 he finished his studies at Strassburg.

While traveling to broaden his education, Spener was forced by illness to stop for a while in Geneva. There he developed such a great admiration for Calvinism that he later refused to join his fellow Lutheran pastors in their bitter condemnation of Reformed theology.

At Geneva he met Jean de Labadie, a former Roman Catholic priest who had brought opposition upon himself in France because he emphasized the need for personal Bible study and for regeneration. In 1650 Labadie had joined the Reformed Church in Montauban. He was ordained and in 1655 became the rector of the Reformed academy there. However, he had been forced to flee from France and eventually settled in Geneva. While there he devoted himself to preaching on repentance and establishing a church that followed the apostolic model. Spener may have participated in his home Bible-study classes. Although the degree of Labadie’s influence is debatable, Spener almost certainly drew upon his Reformation of the Church Through the Clergy in writing Pia desideria.

After much prayer and consideration Spener accepted a pastorate at Strassburg in 1663. He received his doctorate there, and he married Susanna Erhard. They had eleven children. Because his pastoral duties were light, Spener had time for his studies and time to give lectures on theology. After three years he was called to become chief pastor at Frankfurt.

Shocked by conditions in Frankfurt, Spener abandoned the prescribed texts and began to preach from the whole Bible. His fearless preaching called for repentance and discipleship but had little impact. Then, in 1669, he preached a sermon on Matthew 5:20–26 (“Whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment …” etc.). The response was immediate and surprising. Spener’s prayer and study group (modeled after Labadie’s) grew, and others were formed. Family life changed. Many persons were converted. Interest in devotional literature increased, and this accounts for the republication of Johann Arndt’s sermons early in 1675. Spener’s introduction to this volume, Pia desideria, was a call for revival. His influence spread through this statement and through another book he wrote, The Spiritual Priesthood (1677). At Leipzig and elsewhere, similar renewals were motivated by Spener’s writing.

In 1686 Spener accepted an invitation to become court preacher at Dresden. But because of his uncompromising preaching he was often in trouble with the authorities, and in 1692 he welcomed an invitation from the elector of Brandenburg to come to Berlin. That same year he persuaded Frederick, the future king of Prussia, to invite August Hermann Francke to become a professor at the new University of Halle. In this Spener showed great wisdom and humility. Francke later became the leader of the Pietist movement, and his influence came to be greater than Spener’s. Spener continued writing and preaching until his death in February, 1705.

Pia desideria is divided into three parts. The first describes society in Spener’s day, the second surveys the biblical basis for hope that God would revive the Church, and the third lists the ways by which Spener believed renewal would come.

In the first part Spener analyzes the spiritual ills of the three levels of society: rulers, clergy, and laity. Most rulers are either so secular that they have no interest in religion, or so blindly dogmatic that they become guilty of “an irresponsible caesaropapism.” Spener concludes that “in some places congregations are better off where they are under a ruler of a different religious persuasion than are those who live under a ruler of their own religion” (Pia desideria, edited and translated by T. G. Tappert, Westminster, 1964, p. 44; subsequent page references are to this edition).

The clergy’s insatiable appetite for theological speculation produced tragic results for the spiritual life of both the clergy and their congregations. Even sincere Christians who are involved in such exercises find, wrote Spener, that “it becomes exceedingly difficult to grasp and find pleasure in the real simplicity of Christ and his teaching. Men’s taste becomes accustomed to the more charming things of reason” (p. 56).

Concerning the laity Spener lamented, “It is evident that on every hand none of the precepts of Christ is openly observed.” Lovelessness, drunkenness, the many lawsuits involving Christians, and unethical business practices were among the sins that distressed Spener.

Convinced that the promise of Christ’s protection for the Church implied a promise for revival, Spener outlined a program for renewal. First there must be “a more extensive use of the Word of God.” Preaching was not enough; Spener encouraged daily family Bible reading, the systematic public reading of the Bible for those unable to read, and group discussions led by laymen.

Second, Spener encouraged the “establishment and diligent exercise of the spiritual priesthood.” Every Christian is charged with responsibility of studying the Word of God and ministering to others. The pastor cannot do all that is necessary for the spiritual growth of those entrusted to his care; all Christians have been called “to exercise spiritual functions.”

Third, Spener insisted that doctrinal knowledge must be accompanied by the faithful practice of Christian love. He took special pains to extend this principle to the arena of theological debate. In an age of bitter feuds, Spener argued that “a proper hatred of false religion should neither suspend nor weaken the love that is done the other person.”

Fourth, he called for reforms in ministerial training. Theological schools should be “nurseries of the church,” that is, they should promote the spiritual development of the students, for “study without piety is worthless.” Spener was particularly irked by the frivolous use of Bible texts and hymns as puns. He also recommended changes in the curriculum. Certain students should specialize in polemics in order to create a body of specialists to help resolve important issues.

Spener called for better sermons, but not simply for homiletical excellence:

Many preachers are more concerned to have the introduction shape up well and the transitions be effective, to have an outline that is artful and yet sufficiently concealed, and to have all the parts handled precisely according to the rules of oratory and suitably embellished, than they are concerned that the materials be chosen and by God’s grace developed in such a way that the hearers may profit from the sermon in life and death [p. 115].

The best sermon is one that allows the Holy Spirit to use the Word of God to produce new life.

Spener’s thought and the revival it helped produce had worldwide influence. Spener and Francke modeled the University of Halle upon the pattern set down in Pia desideria. In 1705 Bartholomew Ziegenbalg and Henry Plutchau left Halle to become the first Protestant missionaries in India, where they sought to develop an indigenous church. Count von Zinzendorf, another graduate of Halle, became the leader of the Moravians, whose influence on the Evangelical Awakening is suggested in the classic statement of William Warburton about that revival: “William Law was its father, and Count Zinzendorf rocked the cradle.” In the American colonies Theodore Frelinghuysen, a young German Pietist, preached against the shallowness of his Dutch Reformed parishes in New Jersey’s Raritan Valley; from his preaching the middle colonies experienced the first wave of the Great Awakening.

Later doctrinal aberrations, such as the Moravian fascination with the wounds of Christ, and a sentimentalistic tendency to eschew theological precision demanded the counterbalance of a strong orthodoxy, but the spirit of Pietism lives on. Spener’s influence continues in the evangelical tradition of devotion, missions, and evangelism, though his name is often forgotten and the Pietist movement is often ridiculed.

Happy Mother’s Day to all our reading moms! I’m married to a mother and a grandmother as well. In praising mothers, let’s not forget the wives who are not mothers and the single women. I’ve had two single secretaries who helped me for at least eighteen years, and they deserve kudos for their service to God and to the work of the kingdom.

Dr. Blaiklock’s article on permissiveness, which not infrequently has been the sign of a decadent culture, should alert us to the fact that Western man has lost his bearings; without an accurate compass to guide him, he’s headed for disaster.

Gasoline prices are on the rise again. In my article I suggest that we close all businesses and stay home one day a week. It would help!

For decades now there has been a shaking and winnowing of the symbols by which “the something beyond man” has traditionally been expressed. Some seemingly having misread the process of change within meaning-systems, have decided that only a “death of God” or some totally new theological beginning can help Western man toward a new understanding of our Ultimate Source of existence—toward a doctrine of God.

Under the spell of secularist ways of thinking, some theologians profess actually to believe that God has undergone a real death. This they infer from the assumption that the forms by which his reality has been expressed have permanently lost their hold upon the minds of thinking men and women in our time. Others have contented themselves with a declaration of God’s absence from our scene.

One interesting phenomenon of recent times has been the gradual shift by some radical theologians toward belief in the reality of a Divine Being. Perhaps the stages by which these theologians have moved toward a doctrine of God indicate the outlines of a path along which others can be expected to move. That remains to be seen. At any rate, the process merits our observation.

If some theologians move by easy stages from radical secularism to some form of “Christian” theism, multitudes of plain people are skipping the preliminaries and moving abruptly into faith in a self-disclosing and personal God. Surprisingly, many are coming to see him as revealed uniquely and supremely in Jesus Christ.

Young people who move into Christian faith through the ministry of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, Campus Crusade, and similar agencies do not fulfill the prophecies of the secular theologians. They seem to develop not only the conviction of God’s reality but an understanding of him in terms of many of the traditional symbols and expressions. Evangelically oriented seminaries find this to be suprisingly true among those who come into ministerial training from the secular campuses.

John Wild reminded us a dozen years ago that the God who was declared absent by the secularists in the sixties would in time again be declared present. Writing in a book entitled Christian Existentialism, Wild held that “man is open to the lure of transcendence,” a fact evidenced by “the restlessness that lies at the core of our human history.”

Will this return be described in totally new and perhaps alien terms, or will many of the historic definitions and symbols be used? If the latter proves to be the case, will formulations maintain the essential content of biblical revelation, and at the same time be perhaps more meaningful than former modes of expression? The current state of indecision seems exciting to many.

One of the most spectacular turnabouts in theological approach in our decade has been that of Professor Paul van Buren of Temple University. In the middle sixties he was considered to be in the right wing of the God-is-dead movement, and one of the radical theologians. The religious world was astonished when in 1974 Professor van Buren declared himself, in the columns of the Christian Century (issue of May 29), in favor of a return to a belief in the transcendent.

At that time, van Buren expressed the feeling that such a return would amount to a rediscovery, but seemed uncertain about the direction in which theologians should look for their cues. With part of his mind, “it seems, he would seek for transcendence in the secular structures all about us. With the other part, he seemed encouraged to believe in the possibility of “an intense systemic consciousness-raising effort” by which men and women will again turn in faith to the Word-made-flesh.

In an address given in November, 1975, van Buren issued a call to theological renewal through a refined and chastened approach to four elements: the nature of God, Easter, the motif of “the Messiah,” and the relationship between the New Testament and the Old Testament. According to van Buren, then, the impetus for the return to theism is to come not from an analysis of the secular but from within a religious context. This call for renewal represents a 180-degree turn in emphasis. So far, so good.

The address in which van Buren issued this call was entitled “The Status and Prospects for Theology” and was delivered before the theological section of the American Academy of Religion. Starting with the current historical, geographical, cultural, and political renewal of Judaism in our time, van Buren suggests that the Holocaust, so tragically symbolized by Auschwitz, Belsen, Treblinka, and Dachau, has pressed a new and inescapable call upon the Christian world. Van Buren’s initial demand is that we reassess our understanding of God’s nature, in terms of what van Buren believes to be God’s compromise of his own freedom—an abiding and limiting compromise—in establishing the Covenant with Abraham.

Human history is thus held to have operated outside the divine sovereignty, particularly with the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A. D. and with the horrendous expressions of the disease of anti-Semitism in Central Europe from 1033 to 1945—masterminded, as van Buren insists, by “baptized Christians.”

Van Buren lays much of the onus for the perversion of Christian history upon three factors. The first is the Church’s misunderstanding of Easter, by which a triumphalist view of the Church led to an insistence upon the radical bypassing of Israel. The second wrongheaded view is Christian Messianism, which van Buren sees as having led to a deep and fateful misunderstanding of Romans 9–11, in which a controversy within Judaism was translated into a doctrine of “a Gentile interim.” The third Christian error was the acceptance of the priority of the New Testament: this error, van Buren contends, charted a course from Matthew’s Gospel, through the Church Fathers, in a direct line to the gas ovens.

Historic Christian theology is thus to be set aside. In its place is to be a radical reconstruction, based upon the assumption that mainline Christianity has been perversely wrong all along. In this restructuring, there would certainly be a rejection of the saving Deed on the Cross, the continuing lordship of Jesus Christ, and the proclamation of “no other name.”

The question that will not go away here is, Would such a restructured form of theology merit the title “Christian” at all? To this the vast majority of those who owe vital allegiance to the Lord Christ would reply with a ringing No!

HAROLD B. KUHN