A Separate Reality

Some bookstores classify them as “Anthropology,” others as “Religion.” In still others, you may find them shelved as “Science Fiction” or “The Occult.” The objects of this classificatory confusion are four books by Carlos Castaneda, sales of which to date total more than three million copies.

Graduate student turned sorcerer’s apprentice, Castaneda published his first book, The Teachings of Don Juan, in 1968. He watched it climb to the top of university best-seller charts, as did the three subsequent works, A Separate Reality, Journey to Ixtlan, and Tales of Power. His books record experiences in his apprenticeship to an old Indian sorcerer named Don Juan (a pseudonym), who patiently guides Carlos to “warrior-hood.” In order to divest Carlos of traditional Western ways of thinking, seeing, and doing, Don Juan gives him drugs and leads him into the desert for lonely hikes interspersed with Socratic dialogue. The four books are ostensibly the result of meticulous notes taken by Carlos, to the initial annoyance and later amusement of his mentor.

There is still some question as to whether Castaneda’s books are fact or fiction, although as one critic puts it: “Either Carlos is telling the documentary truth about himself and Don Juan, in which case he is a great anthropologist. Or else it is an imaginative truth, and he is a great novelist. Heads or tails, Carlos wins.”

The following example of Castaneda’s dialogue illustrates why there is a fact/fiction controversy and shows the “Western logic” that Don Juan is attempting to dispel. The incident occurs quite early in the apprenticeship, after Carlos has been on a drug-induced “trip” in which he flies like a bird. Describing his hallucinogenic experience to his mentor, Castaneda asks:

“Did I really fly, Don Juan?”

“That is what you told me. Didn’t you?”

“I know, Don Juan. I mean did my body fly? Did I take off like a bird?” “You always ask me questions I cannot answer. You flew”.… [Then follows a dialogue in which Castaneda states that he thinks he flew only in his imagination, not literally.]

“Let’s put it another way, Don Juan. What I meant to say is that if I had tied myself to a rock with a heavy chain I would have flown just the same because my body had nothing to do with my flying.” Don Juan looked at me incredulously. “If you tie yourself to a rock,” he said, “I’m afraid you will have to fly holding the rock with its heavy chain” [Teachings of Don Juan, Ballantine, 1968, p. 132].

Castaneda would doubtless have understood Paul’s uncertainty in Second Corinthians 12:2, “I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven.”

Further on in the apprenticeship, after outgrowing his need for drugs to experience “non-ordinary reality,” Carlos wanders out to the mountains by himself and encounters a coyote:

I had never seen a wild coyote that close, and the only thing that occurred to me at that moment was to talk to it. I began as one would talk to a friendly dog. And then I thought that the coyote “talked” back to me. I had the absolute certainty that it had said something. I felt confused but I did not have time to ponder upon my feelings, because the coyote “talked” again … I had said, “How are you little coyote?” and then I thought I had heard the animal respond, “I’m all right, and you?” Then the coyote repeated the sentence and I jumped to my feet. The animal did not make a single movement. It was not even startled by my sudden jump. Its eyes were still friendly and clear. It lay down on its stomach and tilted its head and asked, “Why are you afraid?” I sat down facing it and I carried on the weirdest conversation I had ever had [Journey to Ixtlan, Simon and Schuster, 1972, p. 296.]

Carlos expresses more surprise at encountering a talking animal than did Balaam, the prophet in Numbers 22. Balaam was riding his ass on his way to visit Balak, king of the Moabites. Twice the angel of the Lord stood in Balaam’s way, visible only to the ass. When the animal stopped, Balaam beat her. And then it happened a third time:

And when the ass saw the angel of the LORD, she fell down under Balaam: and Balaam’s anger was kindled, and he smote the ass with a staff. And the LORD opened the mouth of the ass, and she said unto Balaam, What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these, three times? And Balaam said unto the ass, Because thou hast mocked me: I would there were a sword in mine hand, for now would I kill thee. And the ass said unto Balaam, Am I not thine ass, upon which thou hast ridden ever since I was thine unto this day? Was I ever wont to do so unto thee? And he said, Nay. Then the LORD opened the eyes of Balaam, and he saw the angel of the LORD standing in the way, and his sword drawn in his hand: and he bowed down his head, and fell flat on his face.

In this case, it was the ass who saw the “non-ordinary reality” of the angel with a drawn sword. Balaam could not see the angel until the Lord opened his eyes.

Does Castaneda have anything to say to Christians? We have traditionally claimed belief in “a separate reality,” the classic statement of which is found in Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” The writer of Hebrews continues: “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.” In these two statements, the writer is testifying to the independent and objective validity of non-empirical reality. He goes further to claim that it is the revelations of the supernatural and eternal realities that give meaning to our pilgrimage in this temporal reality.

Few Christians will dispute the existence of these supernatural realities, but where are the Christians who believe in “a separate reality” outside the covers of the Bible? If I walked up to the typical Christian and mentioned that I had just had a conversation with my pet dog, I would probably be kept under close observation for other examples of abnormal behavior. Yet we claim to believe the story of Balaam and the ass. What would happen if your minister stepped into the pulpit next Sunday and stated that while you were driving to church that morning, he had been witnessing to a Hindu priest in a remote village in India? You would probably think he needed a long vacation. But notice what Acts 8:39 and 40 says. Philip had just baptized the Ethiopian eunuch, and when they came out of the water “the Spirit of the Lord caught away Philip that the eunuch saw him no more … but Philip was found at Azotus.”

We have no reason to believe that Castaneda worships the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Paul. Yet if his writings are true, he has experienced a reality foreign to most Christians; and if it is not God who has opened his eyes, it is likely Satan. As Christians, we have access to the source of all power. We may not be anxious to talk with a coyote, but perhaps God wants to communicate with us in a dream as he did with Daniel or in a vision as he did with Peter. Or perhaps he just wants to shake us loose from some of our “Western logic,” the categories we prescribe for everything, including God. If the Holy Spirit wanted to speak to you through a donkey, would you let him?

CAROL PRESTER MCFADDEN

Carol Prester McFadden is a free-lance writer living in Arlington, Virginia.

Affirming The Arts

Last month in Philadelphia two meetings occurred simultaneously, each suggesting half of Charles Williams’s two-part sentence, “This also is thou; neither is this thou.” The second part, the way of negation, was represented by the planning committee for the fourth meeting of evangelicals for social action (the first, at Chicago’s YMCA, developed A Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern). The major concerns of that group, part of the so-called young evangelical movement, are racism, sexism, world hunger, and living a simpler life-style.

In another part of the city a different group of “young evangelicals,” symbolizing the first part of Williams’s phrase, the way of affirmation, gathered to discuss the relation between Christianity and the arts. The movement among many young evangelicals to the arts is as significant as the move among others toward social issues, though it is less publicized. The arts now are taken seriously. The idea that the theater or fiction is sinful seems to be fading. Many of those attending the three-day conference were pursuing careers in the arts.

Regrettably, the two groups seem mutually exclusive. I served for two years on the social-action committee; only once did someone (not I) ask why artists were never included in our meetings. Artists, after all, have moved many people to work for better social conditions. Dickens is an obvious example. And Solzhenitsyn is both artist and social commentator.

At the Westminster Seminary-sponsored Christian Arts Festival, poverty and world hunger were ignored. While listening to Calvin Seerveld’s excellent lecture on “An Obedient Aesthetic Life” (Seerveld is from the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto), I kept thinking that for much of the world the problem of how to live aesthetically doesn’t exist; people are too busy trying to sustain any life at all. But contemporary philosophy and popular culture were analyzed, and sexism was both discussed and seen in action. Of the major participants—lecturers and workshop leaders—only one was a woman, and she volunteered.

Although there have been other arts conferences sponsored by Christians, such as the annual fine-arts conference held at Calvin College, this too-packed program included performing artists as well as theoreticians, critics, poets, and those involved in the visual fine arts. And a small gallery gave artists a chance to display their work.

A myriad of workshops ranged from pottery and painting to twentieth-century music, architecture, and drama. Lectures on such topics as Wagner, Negro spirituals, and inspiration and the artist showed a fine breadth of planning.

H. R. Rookmaaker (Modern Art and the Death of a Culture) lectured on “The New Ultra-naturalism.” His fits of pique at mismounted slides lessened the impact of his point. Once, claimed Rookmaaker, artists painted what they knew; now they paint what they see: thus the depersonalization of painting. Unfortunately he loaded his case by ignoring contemporary artists who do not fall into the ultra-naturalism category.

Seerveld’s convoluted lecture on the theory of aesthetics needed editing. Clarity above all should be the goal when dealing with such a topic, and his main point, that great art should be judged not by its beauty but by its allusiveness, was succinctly and lucidly articulated. However, “ubiquitous obliquity,” to use one of his phrases, characterized the lecture.

This under-publicized conference drew 650 people from as far away as Kansas and Canada. Most of the lectures had overflow crowds. Those who couldn’t get into the auditorium saw the program over closed-circuit television.

The enthusiasm of the participants, and the broad scope of topics programmed suggest to me that next year Westminster ought to plan a week-long conference on the arts. And an important area not to overlook is the relation between the arts and the pressing social needs of our time.

CHERYL FORBES

An amazing transformation happened in Taiwan during the nineteen years between the two Billy Graham crusades there (January, 1956, and October, 1975). Where narrow, squatter-hut-lined streets once ran, wide, now tree-lined avenues with high-rise office and apartment buildings fan out from the modern international airport. The pedicab and bicycle have long since been replaced by a staggering—some might say “suicidal”—fleet of taxis and motorcycles. The burgeoning population of the city of Taipei is over two million, while the total population of the island grew from just over ten million in 1956 to more than sixteen million in 1975. This population is two-thirds that of Canada and four times that of Norway. But Taiwan has only 14,300 square miles to Norway’s 125,000 and Canada’s 3,852,000.

In accord with the Cairo Declaration signed by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek in 1943, Taiwan was restored to Chinese sovereignty on October 25, 1945. Thus ended fifty years of colonial rule by Japan. It was after 1949, when the mainland of China fell to the Communists and the Nationalist government retreated to Taiwan, that the groundwork was laid for Taiwan’s miraculous transformation. Then, under the enlightened leadership of the provincial governor, Chen Cheng, a very successful land-to-tiller program was inaugurated. This program has since become a model for other Third World countries. Today, 88 per cent of Taiwan’s arable land belongs to the farmers, who till their own fields. Production for the rice farmer is now 65 per cent above what his father got per hectare thirty years ago. Other agricultural products that Taiwan has successfully developed include sugar cane, bananas, pineapples, asparagus, and mushrooms. In 1974 Taiwan exported nearly $50 million worth of mushrooms alone. It has become the world’s leading exporting nation.

With a firm agricultural base and a stable economy, Taiwan moved in the 1960s to develop trade and manufacturing. Today, TV sets, transistors, and textiles made in Taiwan are found in homes around the world. As a result, in twenty years the gross national product has risen from 2.5 billion Taiwanese dollars to 53.7 billion in 1974, and current projections are that it will increase 7 per cent in 1976. During the same period, Taiwan’s total trade volume has risen from 3.3 billion Taiwanese dollars to 260 billion, with foreign reserves now at a record high of 88 billion. Economic growth of the Republic of China during the 1960s actually averaged close to 10 per cent per year. There is no unemployment problem; in fact, there is actually a labor shortage. Wages rose another 10 per cent in 1975 after an astounding 50 per cent increase in 1973 and 1974.

All of this has greatly altered the life-style in Taiwan. With per capita income over $700 (Communist China is still under $200), it has the second-highest standard of living in Asia; only Japan is higher. Nearly all homes have electricity. Electric rice cookers, fans, and refrigerators are found in the cities, rural hamlets, and even aboriginal mountain villages. In 1956 there was no television. Today three channels cover the entire island, and more than 80 per cent of the homes have a TV set. Half of the homes have a refrigerator, and one-fourth have an electric washing machine. In 1975 the millionth telephone was installed.

Despite staggering political setbacks in the United Nations and the loss of formal diplomatic relations with many countries, and despite severe economic blows sustained in the energy crisis and through worldwide inflation, Taiwan is moving forward on schedule with its ten major economic development projects for the seventies. These include the North-South Expressway, railroad electrification, a new international airport for Taipei, nuclear power plants, and a steel mill. The total cost of the ten projects is estimated at 222 billion Taiwanese dollars. Premier Chiang Ching-kuo predicts that when they are finished Taiwan will be counted a developed rather than a developing nation.

Between 1956 and 1975, significant changes took place in the Church also. Presbyterians had long been in Taiwan, but most other missionaries entered in the 1950s. Since a sizable percentage of these missionaries had previously served on the mainland, it was natural for them to direct their energies toward evangelizing the more responsive Mandarin-speaking segment of the population, which was predominantly refugee. Millions of dollars were pouring into the island annually as missions bought land, built churches, and supported pastors. Many churches became centers for distributing the U. S. government relief supplies of flour, milk powder, and butter that were being channeled through Church World Service. Motives were mixed, and the churches often seemed to lack a clear sense of direction. Sometimes one wondered whether the Church had in fact learned anything from its 140-year experience in China.

Two decades later, the Church in Taiwan is something very different. Some groups, such as those associated with Watchman Nee, had always had Chinese leadership. Now in all the major denominational groups leadership is firmly in indigenous hands. In some cases missions have withdrawn their foreign workers, but in many others missionaries are welcomed as partners in ministries ranging from pioneer evangelism, pastoral responsibilities, and youth work to administrative positions in synods and annual conferences. The institutional ministries of most mission-related bodies such as hospitals, radio, and TV, as well as theological education, are still generally under missionary leadership and are underwritten by money from abroad. However, most local congregations have long since become self-supporting.

The response to the Christian message in 1956 came largely from soldiers and civil servants, particularly that segment of the population that had been uprooted; in contrast, in 1975 young people, and especially students, seemed the most responsive. Campus Evangelical Fellowship (a local equivalent of Inter-Varsity) has had great success in establishing chapters on the campuses of nearly all the island’s eighty-one colleges and universities, as well as at a number of leading high schools. More than a thousand students attend CEF’s evangelistic camps each summer. The work of the Spirit among students in Taiwan (Hong Kong should be included also) has had far-reaching effects in North America as thousands have gone abroad for graduate study during the last twenty years. More than 250 Chinese Bible-study groups have sprung up on university campuses from UCLA to Harvard.

Christian witness on college and university campuses in Taiwan has been further strengthened by two other developments. During the past five years, more and more Christian scholars have been returning to teach after completing graduate study abroad. The influence of their witness on campus has been extensive. Coupled with this is the selection of evangelical Christians as presidents of four government-accredited colleges and universities: Dr. M. S. Hsieh at Tunghai University, Dr. Paul W. Han at the newly established Yang Ming Medical College, Dr. Daniel T. N. Yuan at Chung Yuan College of Science and Engineering, and Dr. M. C. Chang at Tsinghua University.

Campus Crusade has broadened the focus of its ministry and now helps local congregations train laymen in intensive programs of community evangelism. Another group of young Christian leaders has developed a plan for rural evangelism; they recruit students from colleges and universities to work with a local church during the summer in a program of calling, preaching, and teaching.

Here a pastor involves his church in a slum clean-up project to bring in water and resolve serious sanitation problems, while there a group encourages Christian teachers to request assignment to schools in remote areas where the local church is struggling or where there is no Christian witness at all. A number of pastors are involved in prison evangelism. A young evangelist visits a Christian coffee shop each week to witness to drop-outs who gather there.

In 1956 the Church in Taiwan focused its attention almost entirely on itself. Christians had yet to learn the spiritual lesson that it is more blessed to give than to receive. But change has come. Many churches now take special offerings each year to assist in a wide range of ministries around the world. The Taiwan Presbyterian Church has sent its own missionaries to Malaysia and Mauritius. In 1968, Elder Wu Yung, a leading pastor-evangelist, organized Chinese Missions Overseas with strong support from Christians all over the island. Some of the initial enthusiasm has been dampened by difficulties in recruiting qualified candidates and the added complication of getting a visa for a missionary holding a Republic of China passport.

Striking changes have also taken place in theological education. During the fifties and sixties, as the initial phase of indigenization began in Taiwan’s leading theological colleges, new leaders arose who did not share the faith of Barkley and Dickson, distinguished pioneer missionaries who had contributed greatly to the development of theological education. Perceptive church leaders soon became alarmed as they saw the personal faith of students neglected and a declining number of graduates entering the pastoral ministry. The vitality of the Church was further impaired as many mainland veterans sought security in seminary or as students who had failed to pass the annual college entrance examination were admitted to seminaries despite obviously mixed motivation.

Then in the sixties representatives of evangelical missions and Chinese bodies began to plan a cooperative program designed for the college and university graduate. Their vision was to establish a seminary “distinguished by its purpose to nurture vital spirituality, genuine scholarship, and effective service for God … an expression of the Chinese church, providing training in the context of its indigenous culture and fitted to the needs of its own society.” In 1970 China Evangelical Seminary was born.

The year 1975 will undoubtedly go down in Chinese church history as one in which the Church of Taiwan had an unprecedented opportunity for evangelistic outreach. This came about primarily through two very different and unrelated events.

On April 5 President Chiang Kai-shek died. A week earlier, with Madame Chiang and six of his most trusted senior ministers at his side, the eighty-eight-year-old Nationalist leader had publicly and unequivocally reaffirmed in a final will and testament his lifelong commitment to Jesus Christ. The state funeral, which was carried by television to every corner of the island, was thoroughly Christian, with a funeral sermon from Hebrews 11 by the Reverend Chow Lien-hwa. As the hearse made its way through the streets of Taipei, which were lined with hundreds of mourners, then out on the new North-South Expressway to Tze Hu, a large white cross was displayed prominently, declaring to all President Chiang’s faith in Jesus Christ. Young people immediately responded to a new openness they sensed to the Gospel. They organized choirs, wrote and distributed tracts, and held mass rallies. Clearly the Spirit of the Lord was moving in Taiwan.

At this time preparations for the Billy Graham crusade in Taipei were nearing the halfway point. Ably led by Henry Holley, representatives of all major Protestant groups were laying the foundation for the greatest gathering in the history of the Chinese church. Every committee was headed by a Chinese pastor or layman. For many, this was the first experience in interdenominational cooperation. It was an experience few would forget. The churches were to learn many invaluable lessons, perhaps the most significant of which was the strength they had in unity.

Other important lessons were to follow: the need to emphasize prayer and planning and the importance of training and publicity. More than 2,000 Christians enrolled in an intensive course on Christian nurture and witnessing. Newspapers, radio, and TV advertising was so effective that even a non-Christian specialist in the field openly expressed his admiration for the fact that nobody could escape knowing that the crusade was on.

Then there was also the lesson on faith through finances. Few really believed that the original budget of five million Taiwanese dollars was realistic. A month before the crusade there was even talk of cutting it back to three million. But faith was stimulated as Jonathan Chu, leader of the youth committee, rose to declare that there could be no retreat, only advance. Then, as if in response, a Chinese refugee who had managed to escape from Viet Nam just before the fall of Saigon, having no money, came in person to the crusade office to donate a gold ring. By the second night of the crusade, the five million figure was passed, and three days later, with gifts coming in from all over the island, the offerings had surpassed seven million Taiwanese dollars. What a lesson in faith!

Twelve hundred persons had preregistered for the School of Evangelism held during the crusade. More than 3,000 showed up—pastors, seminarians, and laymen from every part of the island. Some were from mountain tribal churches. Churches and chapels were transformed into dormitories; pews were pushed together to make “crusade bunks.”

A final significant feature of the Taipei crusade was the prominent role played by young people from start to finish. They were involved in committee planning. They organized highly effective mobilization teams to visit the churches and promote prayer and financial support. All 4,000 persons in the crusade choir were young, as were a majority of the counselors and ushers. When during one of the meetings Graham asked all those who had not yet been born when his last crusade was held in Taipei nineteen years ago to wave their umbrellas (it rained during four of the five crusade services), it seemed as though the whole vast audience began to sway. Night after night it was young people who were responding to the invitation to decide for Jesus Christ. More than eighty per cent of the 11,580 who came forward were under thirty. What potential and promise this holds for the Church in China!

From the beginning, discerning Christian leaders in Taiwan realized that the crusade was not an end in itself but an important step in a continuing sequence. It provided training for more effective witness and service through local churches and in missionary outreach. In 1976 there will be the Chinese Congress on World Evangelization in Hong Kong. Then the next year, Explo 77 in Taipei. These conferences will bring together Chinese Christian leaders from around the world. They will pray together, study together, plan together, and presumably initiate bold new steps in evangelism—for Taiwan, for mainland China, for the world!

The development of Theological Education by Extension (TEE) in the Third World may well be one of the most important religious innovations in the twentieth century. The program enables students to get a good academic preparation for the ministry without disrupting their productive relationship to society. They are not required to leave family, church, or daily work to pursue their studies. Instead, they work at home, using programmed texts. Teachers periodically come to centers near their homes.

TEE now is furnishing hundreds of trained leaders for churches and missionary organizations that might not otherwise be able to get educated persons. The graduates are at work in a variety of denominations and in many countries. The method has been used successfully in the developed nations and in urban areas as well as in developing nations and rural areas.

TEE enrollment has been rising steadily to reach a current level of over 25,000 students in more than 250 institutions in sixty countries. In the last two or three years the fastest enrollment increases have been in Africa and Asia, but Latin America still accounts for about half of the world total.

Nowhere else in the Third World has the TEE concept caught on so well and developed so steadily as in Brazil. The lack of trained pastors and the vast distances between church and educational institutions in Brazil are factors in the success of TEE there, but they alone do not explain its acceptance. The important factor is that Brazil had the resources, human and technological, that enabled TEE to spread; well prepared leadership—both missionary and Brazilian—that was willing to launch out to meet the needs; facilities for getting books printed; and a network of established theological schools.

The TEE idea was planted in Brazil in August, 1968, during a visit by Ralph Winter of the Fuller Seminary School of World Mission. He and others had pioneered TEE work in Guatemala, and he spoke about the concept at a two-day meeting of missionaries. The Association of Evangelicals for Theological Training by Extension—AETTE—was formed, and by January, 1969, a few texts had been prepared and some Bible institutes and seminaries had begun extension programs. Before the end of that year 200 students were enrolled. The number had climbed past 3,000 by 1972.

Today in Brazil, more students are enrolled in TEE programs than in all the seminaries and Bible institutes together. Participating institutions now have some 3,500 students studying by the extension method.

TEE was originally known as “seminary extension,” since when it originated in Guatemala it was used primarily for training ministers. In Brazil, however, there has been a dual thrust from the beginning. Both pastors and lay leaders have been trained. In 1970, half of Brazil’s 65,000 evangelical pastors had no formal training. Therefore, training lay leaders is as important as ministerial education.

The number of theological graduates is still small when compared to the rapid growth in the number of churches in Brazil. For instance, in 1966 the Presbyterian Church in Brazil adopted the slogan “1,000 in 10,” meaning 1,000 new churches in ten years. Considering the size of the country and the phenomenal growth of evangelicals generally, it was a modest goal. There is every reason to believe that the thousand new congregations will have been organized before the end of the decade. But the graduates of the Presbyterian seminaries during that period will add up to less than half the number needed to pastor these new churches.

The need for trained leadership can be met only by educating the laity. Any person who is spiritually and intellectually qualified can get a complete theological education without having to quit his job or uproot his family. Those who finish the extension curriculum do extensive outside reading and research as well as the required courses in a variety of subjects. Offerings are often more varied than in the campus programs.

Training of lay leaders takes into consideration the wide educational range represented in most Brazilian congregations. Often there are university-trained professionals as well as those who cannot read. TEE curricula are being prepared on three levels to meet this diversity. It is thrilling in Brazil to see local church members prepared for and performing the work of the church, rather than relying on the “professionals.” This includes all aspects of the work, and especially the preaching.

This emphasis on educating the laity is not intended to underrate the ordained ministers. Rather, it is meant to face the reality of the situation. This need for trained people was especially impressed upon me when, as a new missionary, I was assigned fifteen congregations and thirty preaching points for which I would be the sole pastor.

One of the most impressive things that has happened in the TEE movement in Brazil is the cooperation of various denominations. The formation of AETTE included forty-three evangelical theological institutions from Presbyterian, Baptist, Mennonite, Assemblies of God, Nazarene, Methodist, Lutheran, and other denominations. These various denominational institutions were able to agree on a declaration of faith, one that is truly evangelical. There was even agreement about what courses should be included in the curriculum. Most of the self-instructional texts produced under AETTE supervision meet the needs of all the groups participating. AETTE has also opened the door to many contacts between denominations, and a warm personal fellowship has grown up among those who participate.

The TEE movement in Brazil was largely composed of missionaries at first, but soon the number of Brazilians participating increased. Often a Brazilian was sent to AETTE meetings as the official delegate of an institution heavily staffed by missionaries. AETTE itself has made a conscious effort to “nationalize” the membership. Among its four current officers, two, the president and secretary, are Brazilians.

Most of the first generation of texts were written by missionaries. Now more than thirty Brazilians are doing post-graduate work (using extension methods) to prepare themselves to write programmed texts for theological education in Brazil.

One of the early predictions of the effect of TEE in Brazil was that the number of students enrolled in theological institutions would be reduced, since practically the same education would be available at the local church level. The opposite has happened. The number of students in institutions has increased, in part because the extension program has made the local churches aware of church vocations.

Sixty self-instructional texts are now available in Portuguese, and at least forty more are being prepared. In the future the number of titles is sure to increase markedly, as is the demand. An ever-expanding program of TEE can insure a trained ministry and theologically trained lay leaders in Brazil.

Help wanted: committed, capable people to staff evangelical churches, mission boards, and other church agencies. They are not always available. Persons with the needed combination of professional training and evangelical conviction are sometimes in short supply.

The evangelical church ought to be doing everything in its power to fill this leadership gap. Men and women are urged to enter church-related vocations, and they are applauded when they announce their decisions to do so. Too often, however, the encouragement ends there. It is just at this point that the support should be intensified.

The cost of the average evangelical seminary education, like the cost of living in general, has skyrocketed in the past five years. According to figures published by the Association of Theological Schools, as recently as 1970–71 the average cost of a year’s tuition in seminaries across the nation was about $600. Today, at eight leading evangelical seminaries tuition costs average over $1,400. The typical seminary student used to be able to pay tuition and fees, as well as bare-bones living expenses, from a part-time job. Now he or she must work nearly full time, have a spouse working, or both, simply to make ends meet; and if the student has children, the financial plight is likely to be serious. The prospects for the future look even darker. According to the best estimates, the cost of a seminary education will continue its rise in the next decade, squeezing many students out. They will simply be unable to afford it.

The average seminarian has few places to turn for financial help. The beleaguered seminaries themselves cannot offer much aid; many of them are struggling to remain solvent. Generally, the older and more liberal seminaries have large endowments to draw upon in difficult times, and these tend to lighten the burden upon the student. For example, over one-fifth of the revenues of the accredited Protestant A.T.S. schools comes from endowment funds, and only a quarter has to come from tuition. Contrast this with seven of the leading evangelical seminaries, most of which do not have sizable endowments: they must pass on to the student an average of one-half of the cost of his education; and recent advice from educational experts was that they must increase the amount the student pays to approximately 65–75 per cent if they are to survive in the decade ahead. These seem to be the financial facts of life for private educational institutions in the seventies and eighties. But how will the average seminarian, already staggering under his financial burden, manage this additional load?

The more traditional ways of financing an advanced, professional education are insufficient for the seminarian. For example, though grants, fellowships, and assistantships are fairly abundant for secular M.A. and Ph.D. students, relatively few are available to seminary students at evangelical schools.

Nor is borrowing the answer. Medical, dental, and law students can incur large educational debts fairly easily, since their future income holds the promise of easy repayment. But seminary students can look forward to no such income. They are viewed as poor risks by lending institutions. Even though certain kinds of governmental (or at least governmentally insured) loans from the state and federal governments, from banks, or from seminaries that meet federal Affirmative Action requirements continue to be available, these are seldom the total answer to a student’s financial needs. If he is able to borrow enough to finance his three or four years of training (which is not likely), he is then saddled with $4,000–$6,000 of indebtedness that he must begin paying off when he graduates. Given the pay scale of the typical young minister, a financial burden this large is staggering. The fact is that, while the student should be willing to borrow to help finance his education if loans are available to him, he ought not be expected to mortgage the next twenty years of his ministry just to get through seminary.

Most seminarians do some form of outside work, but such jobs are seldom high-paying. Thus the student is forced to work more hours. This is inevitably detrimental to his studies, and sometimes to his health, physical, mental, and spiritual. What many Christians may not understand is that the curriculum at most evangelical seminaries requires a rigorous commitment of time and energy. Extensive outside work for the student often impedes the effectiveness of the training. Some seminaries have toyed with the idea of stipulating, as do certain medical schools, that the student can have no outside job, but have dismissed this option as unrealistic.

If the student cannot look to the seminary, the government, or the banks for the solution, where can he look? The most obvious answer, it seems, is that the local church must step into the gap. Even though most congregations are feeling deeply the economic crunch, the training of future leaders ought to be high on their list of priorities. Regrettably, many congregations are willing to support a person only after he or she has been trained and is ready to come as a pastor or begin service as a missionary. What about all that has gone into making that person what he or she is? Should not the churches be willing to help support a seminarian’s training as well as his consequent ministry?

Certain denominations have taken steps to aid their candidates for the ministry. The United Methodists, for example, collect money from each church for their Ministerial Education Fund, from which seminary students can receive substantial scholarship aid. Other denominations help their candidates by subsidizing the seminaries so that educational costs to the student remain low. Tuition and fees at Southern Baptist schools, for instance, remain significantly below those at other seminaries because of institutional support by the churches. But a large percentage of evangelical students choose to attend the independent or smaller denominational schools where such help is not available, and they must bear most of the cost of their education. For them, the local church can be an immense help and encouragement.

I speak from my own experience. My home church gave me a scholarship that paid all four years of seminary tuition expense and supplied $100 per semester for books. What an encouragement and help this was! It allowed me to get more out of my seminary training than I could have otherwise, and knowing that the folks back home cared enough about me and my prospective ministry to give me this support was an emotional and spiritual boost. It was precisely what I needed, and I coveted this sort of support for my classmates. Regrettably, I could find only two other students of an incoming class of approximately 145 who had any similar help.

The toll the evangelical churches pay for this oversight may be a large one. How many men and women have wanted a seminary training but have dismissed it as beyond their financial reach? How many students already in seminary have dropped out because they could not pay their bills? How many seminary graduates have gotten far less out of their seminary years than they might have because they had to work many hours just to feed and clothe their families? How many have turned aside from their studies because they could not bear the emotional strain of the financial pressure?

A few churches do have scholarship programs. My home church—a large, independent work in Michigan—is one. A sizable denominational church in Atlanta not only supports its own seminaries but also provides tuition scholarships to students who want to study in acceptable independent schools. A church in Oregon sees the preparation of potential ministers as so strategic a ministry that it has given its scholarship program priority over its mission commitments. But such farsighted programs are rare. Far more churches need to recognize the pressing need and to consider what they can do to meet it.

What should church scholarship programs be like? Each church would have to design its own of course, but it should probably be only for those who are planning for a full-time Christian ministry and who have enrolled in an acceptable seminary or Bible college. Some churches might decide to limit their support to students from their own congregation. In those rare churches that regularly produce a large number of Christian workers, perhaps the students could compete for the scholarships in some way. Still better are standing scholarships for any student who is enrolled in a chosen seminary and who meets a given set of requirements. It may be that the church cannot afford to pay full tuition plus a book allowance, but some program should be initiated as a starter, however small. Anything is better than nothing.

What if thousands of churches across the nation set up a program of support for candidates for the ministry? It could revolutionize the seminary experience for numberless students, as well as encourage others to enter full-time Christian service. The student must not, of course, be induced to enroll in seminary by a promise of financial aid; but this would hardly happen. There are too many other prices the student must pay spiritually, emotionally, and mentally for such a program to become in itself an inducement to enter the ministry. Rather, this support would help to free the committed, qualified student to get the most out of his or her seminary education and become a well-trained, effective minister.

Evangelical seminaries and colleges generally require their teachers to subscribe to a rather fulsome doctrinal statement. When these institutions are seeking or being reexamined for accreditation, such statements have almost routinely been challenged as possibly restrictive of academic freedom. I have served as professor or visiting professor on half a dozen evangelical campuses and have noted that accreditation inspection teams seldom fail to ask how, in view of such commitments, academic liberty can be preserved.

I well recall the founding of Fuller Theological Seminary. First we were told that no application from the school could be considered until after it had graduated its first class of seniors. Then, in the year following the first commencement ceremonies, Dr. Daniel Williams of Union Theological Seminary, New York, paid a preliminary visit. In a meeting with faculty he asked how Fuller’s official doctrinal commitments could be maintained alongside a regard for professorial freedom. Dr. Edward Carnell asked in turn whether Union Seminary would add to its faculty a professor who did not subscribe at least to some beliefs, say belief that there is a God. Williams conceded that belief in God would probably be an indispensable minimum. Carnell then remarked that the difference lay not in whether any beliefs were required but in which beliefs were required.

I should explain that this conversation occurred at mid-century. More recently, some nonevangelical seminaries seemed to consider the presence of a death-of-God spokesman in their faculty a doctrinal imperative. Others seemed to feel it was imperative not to have any full-time evangelical professor. It is tempting to consider others broadminded only if they are broadminded in the way in which I am broadminded.

Yet we cannot escape the imperative of ongoing intellectual appraisal of our own heritage as well as of rival views and recent innovations. To be sure, gazing at one’s own navel is not an advisable classroom preoccupation. But simply taking for granted that one’s vital positions are properly covered may lead to embarrassing public exposure and charges of nudity. Academic integrity is served neither by censorship of foreign views nor by an authoritarian inculcation of one’s own ideology.

The temptation merely to indoctrinate is not confined to any one school of thought. The fiercest ideology in our times, Communism, does not dispute revelational theism on its own merits. Rather, it has made atheism the advance ideological commitment of national governments and university campuses alike.

Let me speak for a few moments as an evangelical journalist rather than as a professional theologian. In my experience, evangelical campuses—though they reflect the theological commitment of a majority of American churchgoers—on the whole do a fairer job than non-evangelical campuses in examining and presenting the views of opposing scholars, and in giving them personal representation. At Union Seminary’s commemorative convocation for Karl Barth, Geoffrey Bromiley, who translated Barth’s Church Dogmatics, was not even invited, let alone given a place on the program. Only last year a Nashville seminary that professes to represent all points of view in the classroom rejected a request by some of its ablest students that one course be offered based on the writings of twentieth-century evangelicals like Machen, Carnell, Clark, Ladd, Ramm, Schaeffer, and Van Til.

Some years ago, Gerald Beavan was working for a master’s degree in religion on a Texas campus where the only significant classroom reference to evangelical Christianity he can recall was a professor’s passing remark that “the only scholar the fundamentalists have ever had was Machen.” Beavan therefore thought it strange that not even Machen was on any of his reading lists, and from the library he signed out The Origin of Paul’s Religion. Reading it he had a conversion experience. Later he became the ablest promotion specialist that evangelist Billy Graham has ever had (after the Harringay crusade, the Advertising Council of Great Britain gave him—the first time ever to an American—its award of the year). Unofficial censorship of competing views breeds in the present student generation a reaction that outwits a narrowly protective mental custody.

The special protection of theological perspectives is not confined to any one tradition. I took a master’s degree in 1940 in Illinois where Karl Barth then got about the same silent treatment as Gresham Machen in Texas.

Let me pay special tribute to the most genuinely liberal scholar under whom I have studied, Edgar Sheffield Brightman. Brightman championed a finite god and repudiated miraculous theism. After I completed doctoral work in philosophy, we were walking together to the commencement exercises when he said in effect: “It always pleases a professor when his ablest students hold his own views. You don’t share my philosophy, but you have done good work. I know how easy it is simply to parrot a professor’s views, especially on the way to a degree, and you haven’t done that. It’s been a pleasure to have had you as one of my students.” My dissertation, The Influence of Personal Idealism on the Theology of A. H. Strong, was a criticism of the baneful effect on evangelical theology of a philosophy like Brightman’s (that of his predecessor, Bordon P. Bowne). Brightman went the added mile; when the dissertation was published, he wrote a commendatory foreword.

An academic institution that offers publicly recognized degrees should not penalize students for not subscribing to views of the faculty. The student should be expected only to master the course requirements, faithfully reproduce this content, give reasons for accepting or rejecting debatable positions, and demonstrate the ability to use his scholarly tools creatively.

I well recall the days at Northern Baptist Seminary when nonevangelical students began to attend my classes in theology. When some of them finished graduate degree work, we as an evangelically conservative faculty decided that we were not ordaining candidates to the ministry nor putting an imprimatur on the views of graduates but were certifying only that they had fulfilled certain academic requirements.

A great deal of attention is now being given to the subject of manipulation. While the discussion focuses upon the use of drugs, electrodes, and hypnosis for mind control, it has widened to include the education of children.

Advocates of self-sovereignty think it is deplorable for parents to impose a value-system and religious beliefs on their children. The charge of manipulation in the home is readily extended to manipulation in the schools. Educational instruction is increasingly scrutinized as an arena of compulsion in which teachers exercise subtle forms of mind and behavior control.

The issue at stake is not presuppositional versus non-presuppositional learning. No learning takes place in a presuppositional vacuum; the speaker who disavows a doctrinal stance merely masks his assumptions. But if students are given a censored or heavily biased view, or if certain positions are reduced to inarticulate manikins, a form of classroom manipulation occurs because the student is not involved at the level of dialogue that his or her intellectual maturity deserves. An academic setting becomes in these circumstances a theater for skillful mind-control. The question that an instructor needs continually to ask is, Would I want my convictions treated as I treat those of others?

The Bible exhorts us: “Train up a child in the way that he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it” (Prov. 22:6). Need such training be considered manipulation? If training involves no apppeal to self-responsibility and self-formation, it is dehumanizing in that it arbitrarily imposes beliefs and conduct, refuses discussion of the why, and regards the teacher as beyond all answerability to the learner.

If faculty colleagues are to remain colleagues, the bond that holds them together must be more than mutually held salary contracts and a mutually felt burden to impart individual beliefs. Ideally a theological faculty has a spiritual bond. But it would be futile to argue that such a bond is most secure where no doctrinal consensus exists. I know scholars of high excellence serving on ecumenically pluralistic campuses who have confided that they are among the loneliest of men. I also know evangelical campuses where personality differences and rivalries place faculty members at a distance despite common doctrinal loyalties.

A theological institute owes its faculty, students, supportive constituency, and the larger Christian Church an articulate statement of the principles on which it stands. No school can be a distinctive institution without some shared beliefs. Its principles should be in clear view, and should be renewed periodically. An institution committed to nothing articulate is not only intellectually unstable but also vulnerable to forfeiting whatever it considers valuable at any given time.

To many secular scholars today, any and every claim to final truth seems specious. Since the secular campus knows only opinion and not final knowledge, any community that salutes fixed beliefs appears to be restricting liberal learning. To such scholars it makes little sense if we emphasize that great philosophers and early scientists were devout Christians; to be a Christian, as they see it, is not to take seriously either science or philosophy. A faculty generation and a student generation filled with doubts about everything in the name of academic earnestness tend to be knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:7). Neither the classic Greek philosophers nor the great Christian theologians, however, saw in relativism a commitment that poses a threat to enduring truth. What relativism threatens most of all is true freedom and any claim whatever that the relativist himself would care to make about truth or anything else.

Yet doctrinal commitment can be less than intellectually honest if it is blind commitment. The assumption regarding a seminary faculty is, of course, that invited scholars have wrestled the issues for themselves before uniting with that faculty. One lamentable feature of theological education today is that some prospective faculty members assert their intellectual concurrence when seeking a position but, after receiving tenure, disavow those commitments. The practice extends the readiness of some ministerial candidates to be ordained in accord with historic church standards and then to defect from those standards in the pulpit. I know of at least two instances in which scholars gave unqualified assurance to the president and then to faculty colleagues only to reverse those assurances after they became securely entrenched. Academic tenure than is invoked to protect theological vacillation, and administrative protest is deplored as a compromise of academic freedom. Similarly, the Church is frequently accused before the world and through the secular press of intellectual sterility if it insists that its ordained clergy be faithful to their vows.

It is always possible that a scholar may develop sincere doubts about institutional commitments after uniting with a faculty. Such doubts should not be simply deplored; they should be taken seriously by colleagues who profess to be leaders in an academic community. The issues can be discussed and debated objectively in special faculty meetings without placing the scholar in jeopardy. Serious theological discussion is regrettably at a premium, even on many conservative campuses; I was associated with one seminary for five years during which the faculty on no occasion gathered to hear and discuss a theological presentation by one of its members. The extensiveness of an institution’s theological statement ought to coincide with a faculty willingness to evaluate it critically no less than to be critically governed by it.

A faculty member who has doubts about institutional commitments is either right or wrong. If he is wrong, or colleagues are convinced that he is, he should withdraw from the institution, unless his colleagues and those responsible for the institution are persuaded that the issue is no longer as important to the institution as its founders thought. In that event all faculty members should consider themselves free concerning this commitment, and the constituency should be told.

It is highly important that students not simply parrot an inherited tradition but rather win the Christian heritage for themselves. Objections to the great doctrines of the faith must be earnestly wrestled in theological college and seminary, and not merely glossed over. The very existence of God, the fact and nature of divine revelation, the precise significance of Jesus Christ, the unity and triunity of God, indeed the whole gamut of religious beliefs, is to be fully debated. A commitment based on unexamined assumptions is always weak in the next generation.

Yet not every professor has a chair whose duties center in challenging all Christian positions. The prime responsibility of the faculty is to clarify Christian claims and consistently set forth their implications. A faculty that is dominated by critical professors and that fails to communicate the content of the Christian heritage fails to fulfill the mission of theological education. Criticism has its rights, but so does the criticism of criticism; on balance, the latter has been more widely neglected in modern theology than the former. In my student days one divinity school in the Midwest was notorious for its circuitous handling of the Bible. Professors would indicate that their courses were not the ones in which the content of the Bible was taught; that would be gotten elsewhere in the curriculum. But graduates complained that they never found the course in which the content of Scripture was actually taught. Patrick Henry said: “This book [the Bible] is worth all the books which were ever printed.” It is a supreme tragedy when the Bible does not appear on a seminary’s required reading list and books about the Bible usurp its place.

In critically evaluating one’s own heritage, it is easy in our day to challenge historic commitments in the name of current deviations. One may dispute some or all ecclesiastical positions out of professed love for the Church or out of a desire to preserve respect in an academic environment gripped by secular presuppositions; but Jesus reminded theologians of an earlier generation that it is more important to honor God than to honor man and that only if God’s Word abides in us can we be preserved from deceptive loyalties to our religious communities (John 5:38, 44). Freedom to be a school respected among its peers does not require theologians to repudiate the distinctive way of knowing that is appropriate to the science of God. What it does require is the presentation of rational supports for a truth that neither empirical science nor conjectural philosophy can attain, a truth that has its basis in God’s intelligible initiative and act and Word.

A theological seminary has the high duty of justifying all its doctrinal commitments in view of divine revelation. Holding the Word of God as the central referent for all theological discussion keeps doctrinal affirmation from deteriorating into a mere salute to tradition and keeps theological commitments perpetually open not to human divergence but to the Word of God. Gamaliel’s counsel is not an adequate platform for theological education: even if Christianity won its way in the ancient world, the synagogues were steadily sealed against the Gospel of Christ, and those who delayed decision forfeited redemptive truth and grace. Pragmatism involves a kind of detente between the claims of God and of the devil more appropriate to political ecumenism than to theological lucidity.

The justification of theological commitments by the scriptural Word will also best preserve the vitality of theological education. Those who hold that academic excitement depends upon a diversity of viewpoints forfeit a transcendently valid norm. The intellectual force of divergent contemporary views can be preserved by other means than a theologically divided faculty. One is by required reading and critical evaluation of competitive viewpoints in courses on current religious thought. A scholar’s books often present his position in a more orderly and disciplined way than do his classroom lectures. Additionally, the guest-lecture circuit, which does not involve the question of faculty tenure, can provide live contact and discussion opportunity with scholars of other viewpoints. On occasion I have invited one of the scholars whose work we have studied in a course in contemporary theological perspectives to dinner and an evening’s informal dialogue with members of the seminar.

The notion that no seminary can give a fair hearing to dissenting scholars except by according them faculty status is more agreeable in principle to those committed to theological pluralism than to those adhering to revealed theology. In practice, however, nonevangelical seminaries tend to make little more room on their faculties for competent evangelical scholars than do evangelical institutions for nonevangelical scholars.

I see no prospect of transcending the divisions within Christendom by a misguided emphasis on the intellectual propriety of pluralistic and contradictory theologies and the consequent severance of divine revelation from truth. To be sure, our perceptions of divine revelation are vulnerable to the abuse of skewed perspectives. But to admit that is quite different from resigning ourselves to skewed perspectives as a victory for faith. If our traditions are answerable to no superior criterion, if they are to be viewed as fallible testimony to some inexpressible truth, to truth that depends ultimately upon individual decision, then we had better give public notice that theological truth is not openly identifiable and that truth in religion is whatever one commits himself to. We would not need to learn from each other if we already had a theology of glory, if we were sons of God wholly conformed to Christ’s image, if our theological truth-claims were unscarred by evident theological contrariety and even contradiction. The designation of the Pope as antichrist by the Lutheran confessions and the Roman Catholic confession of him as Christ’s unique vicegerent on earth cannot both be true; you may even excuse a Baptist for suggesting that both are wrong.

What could be real gain for the Christian witness in the modern world would be not simply to wrestle our differences but to emphasize also what we affirm in common in view of the scripturally revealed truth of God. The real issue is not whether theological commitment is compatible with academic freedom to believe whatever one prefers. It is whether, in the absence of commitment and more particularly of commitment to the intelligible revealed truth of God, we educators can long preserve sense for either freedom or academia.