“Tell our critics we didn’t go under.” On this triumphant note announced to viewers on more than 430 television stations worldwide on the final weekend of December, TV evangelist Rex Humbard burned the last of the $12.3 million in unregistered securities that got him in trouble with Ohio and federal officials in 1973. He also announced a new $1 million-per-year campaign to buy additional global TV time.

“We have accomplished something in the spiritual world that has never been accomplished since the day of Pentecost,” asserted the 56-year-old evangelist who came to Akron from Arkansas in 1952. “It has been the biggest challenge any ministry and any church has ever faced.”

The telecast was videotaped December 7 at his Cathedral of Tomorrow in suburban Akron, Ohio, a 5,000-seat semi-circular church packed with cheering, sobbing well-wishers. After the taping Humbard held a press conference, the first in Akron since his financial troubles began, in which he amplified an earlier report of the financial breakthrough (see December 5, 1975, issue, page 44).

The Ohio Securities Division and the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed suit more than two years ago in a Cleveland court, charging that the $12.3 worth of million Cathedral securities and the salesmen peddling them across the nation were unregistered (see February 2, 1973, issue, page 39). Humbard agreed to set up a trust fund for repayment of the notes and submitted voluntarily to a stiff, court-mandated budget of $825,000 a year for his TV ministry.

“We had to cut fifty overseas TV stations from our schedule,” Humbard said. The move saved $1 million a year, he added, the amount he now proposes to raise from donations, not notes, “for the spreading of the gospel worldwide.” The 1973 strictures came right after Humbard had announced a global expansion of his TV evangelism, supported by the securities income.

All the donated income above $825,000 a year during the intervening period was put into the trust fund. Humbard bombarded supporters with letters urging those who couldn’t afford donations to get loans and send him the proceeds. At the same time, he sold the Cathedral’s girdle and wire factories in New York, its twenty-two-story office building and other holdings in Akron’s prestigious downtown Cascade Plaza, its two airplanes, and other property. Humbard said Mackinac College on an island in Lake Huron, Michigan, will be sold this month for $3 million. It was bought for about $7 million in 1971 from the Moral Re-Armament movement with the promise it would always be used for educational purposes. The buyers say they plan to convert it to a resort. Not relinquished was the $225,000 house purchased during this period for use as the church parsonage.

In the divestiture process, the Cathedral holdings were pared from $45 million to $13 million, Humbard told the press. He said the church’s debt stands at $10 million, including $5.5 million in mortgages on the Cathedral owed to the Teamsters union pension fund. The annual budget, including college maintenance and local congregation expenses, was $1.2 million. That will increase with the worldwide expansion, Humbard said. He also asserted that the church will invest in no more commercial ventures. An adjoining 1,250-seat buffet restaurant, which he said makes no profit, will be kept for the convenience of travellers who visit the church, he stated. (A 1969 IRS ruling makes all profits from businesses run by non-profit organizations taxable after 1976.)

In addition, Humbard pledged to finish construction of a 750-foot tower that roughly resembles an industrial smokestack in appearance. Originally intended as a TV transmission site with a revolving restaurant on top, it will be the tallest building in Ohio. Begun in 1972 despite the outrage and legal maneuvering of neighbors in the residential area near where the Cathedral is located, the tower’s construction was halted by the budget pinch. Now, the evangelist pledged, it will become a religion museum and a site for round-the-clock prayer teams—“the prayer capital of the world.”

He added that the tower’s completion will be financed by proceeds from the college sale and donations raised solely for that purpose, not with funds donated for the television ministry. One fund-raising effort launched earlier involved an invitation to donors to send written testimonies which would be microfilmed and stored in the tower, along with viewing machines, “for the unsaved to see after the rapture, as an explanation for what has happened.”

During the televised church service, Humbard announced that his brother-in-law, Wayne Jones, the Cathedral’s associate pastor, will become “associate evangelist” in charge of advance preparation for Humbard family “rallies” worldwide (the Humbards will be in Manila this month). Replacing him as associate pastor to tend the local flock in Humbard’s absence is Charles Ronald Hembree, the editor of Humbard’s Answer magazine. Hembree ghost-writes much of the evangelist’s published material.

Outlining repayments since the court order, including the return of notes from supporters who simply gave them as donations to the Cathedral, Humbard said $4,149,000 was paid by January, 1974, another $4,246,000 by March, 1975, and $2,750,000 by last November. Notes totaling $517,000 have either not been returned or were improperly endorsed, he said. A trust fund holds money sufficient to cover them, he added.

Apparently drawing on the success of the repayment plan, Humbard told his television audience, “I want gifts, not notes, that will allow this church to be the first one ever to reach the whole world.”

The evangelist said his broadcast, with voice translation, would be welcome in Iron Curtain countries, including Russia, “because we stay out of politics.” Communist nations will get only a radio version, not television, beamed from short-wave transmitters in Monaco and Hong Kong. The services now are translated into French and Japanese for television audiences in Europe and Asia, he pointed out, but “many” other languages are to be added.

PETER GEIGER

Mission Completed

Christian and Missionary Alliance churches donated $600,000 in the last six months of 1975 to complete the denomination’s Operation Heartbeat program to aid refugees from Indochina. More than 7,000 were assisted, according to project director Louis T. Dechert, a CMA layman. Of these, some 1,800 were placed with CMA sponsors in North America. Nearly all of those sponsored were affiliated with the CMA’s churches in Cambodia and South Viet Nam.

As a result of witnessing by fellow refugees and the ministry carried out by CMA workers in the refugee camps, about 2,500 professions of faith in Christ were recorded. Twenty congregations under the leadership of trained ethnic clergy have been formed around the country by the Vietnamese Christians.

Hard Pressed

The six-week strike by Canadian postal workers which ended last month played havoc with the church press. The Canadian Baptist put out the November issue early but 80 per cent of them were undelivered. The United Church Observer and The Presbyterian Record were unable to get their November issues out. Both combined their December and January numbers. The Canadian Churchman (Anglican), which is a tabloid monthly newspaper, combined the November and December issues.

Reaching London’S Pin-Striped Set

Follow the parade of London gentlemen in pin-striped suits, and on Tuesday noons it leads to St. Helen’s Church. The dingy stone facade of the medieval, twelfth-century structure is deceptive. Inside there throbs the life which emanates from a thriving city ministry.

For half an hour, more than 600 men and women from London’s financial nerve center meet at St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate. The quick step of arriving worshippers hints at the difficulty in finding a seat. Latecomers are ushered into the chancel behind the pulpit or even the “Nun’s Choir,” a leftover from the church’s pre-Reformation history.

Promptly at 1:05 P.M. Dick Lucas, the handsome and articulate vicar of St. Helen’s, announces the hymn. In a mighty male chorus the conservative city gentlemen sing out with the unmistakable resonance of conviction. A brief Scripture reading by a lay reader follows. Then Lucas leads in prayer for the city of London and the world. His predominent evangelistic drive often seeps through. “Turn back the city to the ways of Christ,” he pleads.

The remaining twenty minutes are packed with scriptural teaching. The exposition of an evangelistic passage is amply illustrated by references to life in London. Allusions to contemporary writers, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, show the breadth of Lucas’s reading. The thrust of his message is clear: “For England the choice is revival or revolution.”

After the benediction, a sandwich and coffee lunch is served in the church. Throughout the pews clusters of men munch away as they chat. Christians mingle with their guests, and many make professions of faith. Among those who recently have found Christ are a merchant banker, a property consultant, and several from the famous insurance firm of Lloyds.

Attendance surged upward when Britain’s economic woes worsened in the face of the oil crunch more than a year ago, and it has continued at a high level. The implication is that when the money market is down, the men begin looking up, observes Lucas.

Lucas first came to St. Helen’s in 1961 after service with the Church Pastoral-Aid Society. His primary task with the old Victorian association was the care and encouragement of evangelical candidates for the Anglican clergy. When he came to the high-church parish of St. Helen’s he transformed the services into a platform for powerful Bible exposition.

This commitment to teach God’s Word is the dominant theme in Lucas’s ministry. When asked about the greatest need in modern Anglicanism, he responded: “We must maintain the historical faith. If there is no historical Christ, there is no gospel.” He deplores the current decline in pulpit ministry and urges a rejuvenation of relevant expository preaching.

A source of encouragement for Lucas is the emergence of evangelicals into prominence in the Church of England: Donald Coggan as the 101st Archbishop of Canterbury; his successor at York, Stuart Blanch; and others. His optimism, however, is tempered by concern about this new success. “Let’s not become respectable and feeble,” he warns. It is a blunting of the cutting edge of evangelism which he fears.

Evangelistic training is offered at St. Helen’s, and follow-up fellowship groups are being established throughout the city. Also emphasized are ministries to students and professional people who reside in the city. Whatever changes occur in the expression of evangelistic concern, the central theme will remain the same, vows Lucas: the introduction of modern London to the historic Christ.

WAYNE DETZLER

Religion In Transit

The Executive Committee of the National Council of Churches urged the NCC’s thirty-one member denominations to issue statements repudiating any intentional contact between their personnel abroad and U.S. intelligence agencies. It also directed all NCC staffers to refrain from such contacts.

The biblical oath to tell the truth in the nation’s courts should be abolished, the Law Reform Commission of Canada recommended to the Canadian Parliament. A simple promise to tell the truth should suffice, it stated, and it would remove the danger of discrimination against witnesses who object to religious oaths.

The American Lutheran Church has received more than $15 million of the $36.8 million pledged so far in its special three-year capital funds appeal for missionary work.

Some fifty Christians from a variety of backgrounds left San Diego January 3 in an assortment of covered wagons. They aim to arrive in Philadelphia by July 4. Their 3,000-mile trek through the southern states is part of Youth With a Mission’s Bicentennial witness project known as “The Spirit in ‘76.”

Ellen Marie Barrett, 29, an acknowledged lesbian, was ordained into the Episcopal diaconate at St. Peter’s Church in New York City. It was described as a “first” for the U. S. Episcopal Church. Bishop Paul Moore, Jr., participated. Ms. Barrett is a co-president of Integrity, an organization of Episcopal gay people formed a year ago.

The four-year-old Post American, founded as a “radical evangelical” tabloid, has changed its name to Sojourners and will broaden its content. Earlier it switched to a magazine format and moved from Chicago to Washington.

The National Courier, the four-month-old biweekly Christian tabloid published by Logos in Plainfield, New Jersey, now has a man (complete with desk and phone) at the White House. Howard Norton, for years the White House reporter for U.S. News and World Report, switched recently to the Courier. He attends Fourth Presbyterian Church in Washington.

The U. S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare announced it will resume performing abortions in the sixty hospitals it runs across the country, even in states with anti-abortion laws—if those laws are deemed “inconsistent with principles enunciated by the courts.”

The Mormons plan to commence construction of a temple in Seattle this year. It will be the group’s seventh U. S. temple and its nineteenth worldwide.

Personalia

Bishop Terril D. Littrell of the Church of God, Cleveland, Tennessee, was reelected to a third term as president of the Bible Sabbath Association International.

Bishop J. Floyd Williams, general superintendent of the Pentecostal Holiness Church, was elected chairman of the Pentecostal Fellowship of North America, an organization of twenty-five denominations.

Jerrold F. Hames, 35, a staffer of Canadian Churchman since 1969, was appointed editor of that prize-winning newspaper of 280,000-circulation published for the Anglican Church of Canada constituency.

Thomas P. Bailey was promoted to the presidency of Nyack College, a Christian and Missionary Alliance school in New York. Previously he was a professor and chief executive officer of the college.

World Scene

The Association of Independent Baptist Churches in the African nation of Chad has invited Baptist Mid-Missions to return to its work there. The group’s missionaries were ousted by the previous government during a wave of religious persecution. The present government says the welcome mat is out again.

Thousands of Chinese immigrants are pouring into Tanzania and adjacent African lands. Mozambique’s Chinese population is believed to be nearing 250,000. Some missionaries are attempting to reach the newcomers through literature distribution, and the Light and Life Hour (Free Methodist Church) plans to place its Mandarin Chinese broadcast on Trans World Radio’s Swaziland station this year.

Pope Paul named Cardinal Jan Willebrands, the Vatican’s top expert on ecumenism, to succeed the retired Cardinal Bernard Alfrink as Archbishop of Utrecht, Holland, and primate of the Dutch Catholic Church. The main task of Willebrands will be to unite the feuding conservative and liberal factions in the Dutch church. Under Alfrink, a number of liberal trends had developed in church life, provoking much controversy. Willebrands, however, is also identified with the so-called progressive wing of the church.

Physician-philosopher Albert Schweitzer died a little over ten years ago. This month the hospital the Nobel prizewinner founded in 1913 in Lambarene, Gabon, will close. Insufficient funds.

Death: Heinrich Grueber, 84, the leader of German Lutheranism who organized an agency of the anti-Nazi Confessional Church that helped thousands of Jews and church members in World War II.

Georgi Vins, the Ukrainian Baptist leader imprisoned in Siberia for his faith, is suffering from severe physical disorders, according to informed sources. Nearly all of his family’s furniture was confiscated and sold, in keeping with his court sentence. His earlier prison writings were published last month by the David C. Cook publishing firm.

Some 300 Christians from twelve mission organizations are scheduled to participate in evangelistic activities at the 1976 Winter Olympics to be held February 4–15 at Innsbruck, Austria. The outreach is being coordinated by the International Christian Olympics Ministry.

There are an estimated 300 Christians among the 40 million Muslims of the North African countries of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, according to the North Africa Mission. More than 400 persons are taking Bible correspondence courses offered on the mission’s broadcasts from Marseille, France.

Black pastor Kornelius Ndjoba, the new prime minister of Ovambo, South West Africa, criticized leading churchmen for distorting the Gospel to attack the “perfectly legal” government of Ovambo. His complaint was directed mainly against liberation movements in southern Africa where Christian freedom or liberation is seen primarily as a political matter.

Overseas Missionary Fellowship, the former China Inland Mission, has more missionaries joining now than at any time since it was forced to leave China twenty-five years ago, say officials. In 1975 more than seventy new missionaries were accepted for work in Southeast Asia. The total OMF missionary force numbers 901, of whom 190 are Americans.

The French Evangelical Alliance and the Evangelical Federation of France have called for a nationwide evangelistic campaign this spring. The project, an outgrowth of the 1974 Lausanne congress on world evangelization, will involve both individual action by local groups and cooperative efforts in publicity and mass meetings. Presently, Operation Mobilization is engaged in a campaign to reach all French cities of more than 50,000 population through literature and phonograph-record distribution, and through public gatherings.

Despite increasing acts of terrorism in Great Britain, the House of Commons again defeated a proposal to restore the death penalty. The vote, 361–232, showed a decrease of twenty-three in the majority’s strength over a year ago. The debate centered on capital punishment as a deterrent. Support for the death penalty for acts of terrorism causing loss of life came from, among others, the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland and more than 3,000 publicans in northwestern England.

Yugoslav church sources say harassment of the Christian community is at its worst in twenty years. The government journal Borba recently urged the Yugoslav Communist Party and its youth organization “to carry out even more persistent, systematic, and deep ideological activity among young people,” and to strongly oppose all church and religious influences among the nation’s youth.

Bishop Kurt Scharf, 74, of West Berlin resigned as head of the western half of the Evangelical Church of Berlin-Brandenburg. He was one of the much-jailed leaders of the Confessional Church, the body of Christians who opposed the Nazi regime in Germany. In 1961 he was elected to succeed Bishop Otto Dibelius as chairman of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany.

Twenty church people were injured in the explosion of two gas-and-acid bombs at an assembly marking the merger of four black Lutheran bodies in South Africa. General Secretary Carl H. Mau, Jr., of the Lutheran World Federation had just concluded a talk to 100 delegates when the blasts occurred. Three clergymen were hospitalized.

Arab poet Tawfig Zayad, a life-long Communist, was formally installed last month as mayor of Nazareth, Israel, a city of 40,000 Arabs—and the boyhood home of Jesus.

The first Bible-portion edition of the new Afrikaans translation of the Bible, containing the first five New Testament books and fifty of the Psalms, is a runaway best seller. All 50,000 copies were sold in the first ten days of publication, more than half in advance orders that are still being published.

Printing and distribution of 50,000 copies of a new Polish translation of the Bible is under way in Poland. It will provide a modern alternative to the widely used Gdanska Bible, issued in 1632. Nine Polish denominations and the Bible Society in Poland are also sponsoring a modern-language translation of the New Testament to be published next year.

DEATH

BYANG KATO, 39, Nigerian-born general secretary of the Association of Evangelicals of Africa and Madagascar, prominent African theologian, author of Theological Pitfalls in Africa; of accidental drowning, in Kenya.

Perhaps no current religious thinker worth his salt ought to look back. At the start of a new year he should fix eager eyes on the distant horizon and think long thoughts about the opportunities that lie ahead.

Not me. It is for me a season of stocktaking. The end of a year prompts the memory of things undone: the time I did not give to a middle-aged relative crippled by multiple sclerosis; my impatience with an old minister who liked to talk, and who died during the year; the college students I did not invite for a meal because students can be so demanding. Thomas Hood had words for it:

The wounds I might have healed!

The human sorrow and smart!

And yet it never was in my soul

To play so ill a part;

But evil is wrought by want of thought,

An well as want of heart.

But it’s not just my attitude toward others. Some time back I came across a 1915 number of the Boston Congregationalist in which an anonymous pastor made a couple of resolutions. I may have quoted them before, but they are worth repeating at this New Year season:

I am going to clean up my inner life. There are three distinct demons that have troubled me much in the past that I am going to lay for good this winter. I have been drifting; this is going to be a winter of mastery. I am going to cut out all that has become unreal in my life and conversation, stock public prayers that mean nothing any longer, pulpit phrases that have lost their savor, and all social cowardices and hypocrisies.

I know, I know, there’s a missing dimension in all that, but I like the sound of that man, and have often wondered if those three D.D.’s he referred to got what was coming to them by way of exorcise. Nineteen seventy-five was a year in which more than usually I reflected ruefully on the child’s prayer: “Make all the bad people good, and all the good people nice.” For the existence of original sin one need look no further than the correspondence columns of religious publications. Some writers are under the delusion that the King’s business requireth hate. The doctrine of total depravity was defended by men who saw nothing wrong in the slave trade, and the same inconsistency is with us to this day—as though majoring in one Christian virtue exempts us from another one.

In 1976 I would like to see thumpers of the pornographic and the heretical prove that championing the faith does not give one license to indulge in graceless and intemperate speech. Righteous indignation is heady stuff that comes better in company with facts. The luxury of outspokenness is justified only if truth is out-spoken. A little courtesy helps, too. Many a sound case I have seen vitiated because a bad book has been misquoted or dealt with abrasively. A welcome diversion is thus provided, and valid objections disappear in a smokescreen.

The trouble is, I glimpse the same wrong attitudes in myself on occasion. Controversy can be a spiritually arid experience; sometimes I envy those of my friends who, identifying the earth’s heirs, go on to assume that keeping out of controversy shall be accounted to them for righteousness. Not for them the rousing strains of that Salvationist song (now unjustly neglected) that shouts robustly, “The old Devil’s crown has got to come down, And that with a hullabaloo!”

Still on 1975, the cartoon I thought most discerning was in Punch. It showed a director of the British Travel Association saying to his colleagues: “Have we ruled out the tourist appeal of a decadent and dissolute society?”

I remember too a remark made last year by Malcolm Muggeridge, himself a former editor of Punch. During his term of office, he said, the magazine depended for material on two groups of people: peers and clergymen. That these should provide a reservoir of eccentricity puzzled him until he thought he had found the explanation: those two classes had nothing else to do. Muggeridge did add, however, that they were now beginning to take their jobs seriously.

The most misguided utterance I heard in 1975 came from an unexpected source; a young school principal who was just about to go to Nairobi as leader of the Church of Scotland’s delegation at the World Council of Churches assembly. Speaking at a public meeting in our district, he astonishingly sneered at the archbishop of Canterbury, who had just issued a national call for moral renewal. Referring to “Old Coggan,” my fellow Presbyterian announced that the primate was out of touch with the times, unaware that things had changed “since he was a boy in York a hundred and fifty years ago.” Though not normally a supporter of archbishops, I suggested to the speaker later that his ex cathedra criticism was ill conceived, and that I hoped he wouldn’t repeat it in the fifty-two other meetings he said he would be addressing on his ecumenical occasions. The burden of his response was that I did not recognize a humorous aside when I heard it. Oh, but I can!

The year closed in Britain with profound misgivings still expressed about the WCC’s Program to Combat Racism, which some will always find a bit bogus until its terms of reference are interpreted as covering non-white racism also. It has always seemed odd to me that the things that really animate the WCC and allied industries have little connection with the preaching of the Gospel or the things that belong unto our peace. Few spectacles are more nauseating than some of that body’s sporadic assumptions of the role of the Church Militant. With the century three-quarters gone, Jean Danielou may yet be proved right in his L’Osservatore Romano forecast that “the great heresy of the twentieth century will be that of ‘religionless Christianity.’ ”

But all is not gloom; let us to more wholesome things, for 1975 had bright moments too. There was the enthronement at Canterbury of the first evangelical since J. B. Sumner (1848), and a sermon on a theme not often heard in that ancient cathedral. The Church, said Dr. Coggan, is heading for tribulation, and Christians will have to face it—“no whining when that comes, no complaining when the winds are contrary.”

The past year saw also the other English archbishopric filled by an evangelical when Stuart Blanch went to York. The lessening of acrimony between the Church of England’s evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics is reflected in the welcome fact that the latter have generally accepted Dr. Coggan’s appointment in good spirit, as befits those who share an emphasis on the devotional life.

Finally, the year found me engaged more than usually in historical work. One tends to be dragged inexorably into the morass of minutiae, but there are serendipitous moments when anecdotes are found such as one told of the sixth-century missionary Brendan. He appeared at the court of the Pictish king Brude and preached the Gospel. When he had finished the king inquired: “Supposing I accept your Gospel, what shall I find?” To which the answer came: “You will stumble on wonder upon wonder, and every wonder true.”

Fourteen hundred New Years have passed, but the wonder and the truth remain to cheer us into 1976.

J. D. DOUGLAS

I hope every subscriber will read “What I Saw at the Abortion.” Friend wife and I were shaken by it. It is a graphic presentation of what it means to kill a twenty-four-week-old fetus. I hope it will shake all of us to do something about this evil. If human beings have a right to food, surely a fetus, except in extraordinary cases, has a right to life.

We mourn what for us was the untimely death of Byang Kato, a rising young evangelical African who served with me on the Lausanne Continuation Committee. His heart beat fervently for the evangelization of Africa and the world. That fervency was apparent in our interview with him, published last fall in our September 26 and October 10 issues.

As religion editors and writers last month paused to review the significant religion stories of 1975, they seemed to be agreed about the two top choices: the moral and theological aspects of the Karen Quinlan case, and the issue of the ordination of women to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church. (The Quinlan case concerns a brain-damaged young woman in New Jersey whose parents unsuccessfully sought court permission to have mechanical life-support systems removed.)

A poll of the Religion Newswriters Association (RNA), an organization of newspeople who report religion in the nation’s secular dailies, placed the women’s ordination issue first and the Quinlan case second. The editors of Religious News Service (RNS) in New York City listed them in the opposite order, as did the editors of Christian Century.

Other top stories listed by the RNA, in order: the continuing controversy in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod as it moved from doctrinal to legal and administrative phases; the expensive effort by the churches to resettle the Southeast Asian refugees; the reaction of the churches to homosexuality; the canonization of Mother Elizabeth Seton as the Catholic Church’s first American-born saint; and world hunger.

The RNS choices: refugee settlement program; the United Nations resolution equating Zionism with racism, and the condemnation of the move by Christian groups as being anti-Semitic; the Seton canonization; church-state tensions in a number of countries, including Chile, where the CIA was alleged to have used U.S. missionaries for intelligence purposes; the World Council of Churches’ Fifth Assembly in Nairobi and its emphasis on human rights; the Hartford Appeal that was drawn up by several theologians to protest what they saw as contemporary Christian “heresies”; and the increased recognition of the charismastic movement, along with internal conflicts and disavowal of it by some church groups.

The Century’s selections: the U. N. anti-Zionism resolution; persecution of church leaders and members in Chile, South Korea, the Philippines, and South Africa; the resettlement of the refugees; conflict over the charismatic movement; the “political and theological civil war” raging in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod; the World Council of Churches’ assembly; the trend toward conservatism in theology and practice; and Christian involvement in liberation and civil rights struggles.

Other significant developments cited by a number of reporters include: the controversy over the Unification Church and its messianic leader, Sun Myung Moon; financial problems plaguing churches and ecumenical organizations; the enthronement of Donald Coggan, an evangelical, as Archbishop of Canterbury; and the continuing interest in the abortion issue.

Many of 1975’s top stories will command major attention this year as well. The Episcopal Church will again vote on women’s ordination. If approval is rejected, as it was three years ago, a number of bishops may join the ranks of rebels and proceed with ordination of women in their own dioceses. On the other hand, if approval is granted, there is bound to be stiff reaction from some conservative quarters.

The squabbles in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod will go on, with the possible exodus of a number of churches. Structures to accomodate them are already shaping up.

The drive for church acceptance of homosexuality as a valid life style may intensify, in light of the recent publicity and certain gains by gay activists. Increasingly, there will be pressure to open the ranks of church leadership, including the ministry, to persons regardless of their sexual preferences.

Abroad, church-state tensions may be less intense in some countries, more intense in others. Civil strife, poverty conditions, and ever-rising tides of nationalism will continue to plague missionaries. Despite the hardships, however, the phenomenal rates of church growth overseas show no signs of letup.

Important issues remain to be thrashed out, both within the charismatic movement and among non-Pentecostal denominations for whom it represents a problem.

Many churches and parachurch organizations are tooling up to engage in creative witness during the Bicentennial. Thousands of young people will travel to Montreal to proclaim Christ at the Olympics. And important moral and ethical issues may emerge as topics for national consideration during the upcoming presidential election campaigns. Some of the candidates are professing Christians.

All in all, 1976 promises to be a fascinating year.

RECOVERY

The Bible has recovered its position as the world’s most translated work, well ahead of the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, according to United Nations data published last month. There were 109 new translations of the Bible, sixty-two of Karl Marx, fifty-nine of Friedrich Engels, and fifty-seven of Nikolai Lenin in 1972, the latest year for which figures are available.

Exiled Soviet author Alexander Solzhenitsyn was the most widely translated living writer, the study shows. Like William Shakespeare, his works have appeared in thirty-five languages.

Christian Radio: Culturally Tuned

Twenty-five years after its founding, Guatemala’s Christian radio station TGNA has moved into a new phase with the appointment of a Guatemalan manager, the first national to hold the top position. Oscar Lopez, 38, a graduate of Dallas Seminary, succeeds missionary Donald Rutledge in the post.

TGNA first went on the air from Guatemala City on August 6, 1950, with 1,000 watts. Today, classified as a “cultural” station, it operates on five frequencies—local AM and FM stereo and three short-wave bands—with 10,000 watts, the maximum allowed in the country. It is owned by the Central American Mission (CAM). While primary target area is Guatamala and Southern Mexico, letters come from listeners in Europe.

Central America has proved to be one of the most fertile areas of the world for missionary radio. All six countries, including Panama, have at least one evangelical station. In Guatemala, besides TGNA there are a Pentecostal station and a low-power tropical-band station also operated by CAM, Radio Maya, which broadcasts in seven of the country’s twenty-five Indian dialects from a remote town in the western highlands.

Additionally, the area is covered by such giants as HCJB, KGEI (Far East Broadcasting Company’s station in San Francisco), and Trans-World’s superpower facility on Bonaire in the Caribbean. A listener with a short-wave set in Central America can tune in to the Gospel on as many as seven Christian stations. Also, there are several hundred evangelical programs on commercial stations in the area.

A distinctive feature of Central American evangelical radio is the “Collaborators for Christ,” a sort of women’s auxiliary which helps raise funds and otherwise support the stations. There is an area-wide association of the support groups in the various countries even though the stations themselves have no official international tie.

Like most of its twenty-odd sister evangelical stations in Latin America, TGNA tries to fulfill two different purposes—ministering to the Christian community and evangelizing the unbelievers. Says Lopez, “We face a constant tension in designing programming which appeals to the unbelievers and at the same time is acceptable to the believers who support the station.” The dilemma is illustrated by two extremes found in a recent survey conducted by TGNA: one group of listeners objected to the “pagan” music in the evangelistic blocks, and another said, “You’d have a great station if you’d only take off that religious stuff.”

One of the most effective means of evangelism for TGNA is its late-night soft-music programming, say observers. Listeners with problems are periodically invited to call the station for counsel and are offered literature. Calls are running around 300 per month, an impressive statistic in light of the limited number of phones in the city. More than 200 decisions for Christ have been made over the phone since the program began. “We are known as a place where spiritual help is available,” says Lopez.

Lopez sees radio as a springboard for supplementary ministries. “We are able to capitalize on the good will built up over twenty-five years of cultural programming to open doors,” he says. TGNA staff regularly go into high schools with gospel films. They have also used visiting athletic teams and drama and musical groups, including a choir founded by Lopez that won second place in a national choral competition. TGNA sponsored a Guatemala City-wide crusade with evangelist Luis Palau in 1971. Another part of the extension ministry of the radio is the Bible correspondence-course department, with 6,000 students enrolled.

TGNA has ventured into television with production of several short programs that have been aired in all the Central American countries. “There’s unprecedented opportunity for television evangelism,” says Dave Keeler, director of the project. “While the number of receivers is constantly growing, costs are still relatively low. We can blanket a country with a half-hour special for only a few hundred dollars.”

STEPHEN R. SYWULKA

TUNED OUT

A leading rabbi in Israel ruled last month that religious Jews may listen to a woman sing on the radio—but only if the listener does not know the woman and the song is not a love song. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, leader of Israel’s Sephardic community, made the ruling after about 600 religious Jews complained to the national radio network that women’s voices in song should not be broadcast, according to a United Press dispatch.

Where Kids Are

Religion is playing an increasingly important role in the lives of “outstanding” teen-agers, according to the latest poll of high school leaders in the United States. The survey, based on responses from 22,000 “high achievers,” was conducted by Who’s Who Among American High School Students of Northbrook, Illinois.

The students who believe religion plays a significant role in their own moral standards and actions increased from 63 per cent in 1972 to 86 per cent in the current poll. Fifty per cent said the role of religion is “very significant.” An increasing number identify with organized faiths—80 per cent, compared with 70 per cent in 1972. And 78 per cent said they believe in a personal God or Supreme Being. Expressing such belief were 84 per cent of those identifying themselves as Protestants, 85 per of the Catholics, and 39 per cent of the Jewish youths.

The results showed that the high school leaders tend to be less tolerant of drug use (90 per cent never tried hard drugs, 73 per cent never tried marijuana, and only 27 per cent support the legalization of marijuana, compared with 42 per cent in 1973). They are also more “puritanical” on sexual issues and more “old-fashioned” in their attitudes toward marriage and the women’s movement than the group surveyed the previous year.

Campus Innovation: Christian Studies

Some new ventures in cooperative Christian education are in evidence, thanks to the successful on-campus efforts of such groups as the Navigators, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, and Campus Crusade for Christ. These and the multiplication of house fellowships have fostered a demand for follow-up nurture and articulated Bible study which the average church may be ill-prepared to handle by itself.

One pilot program stressing evangelical cooperation is the College of Christian Studies in Champaign-Urbana, home of the University of Illinois. Neither college nor Bible school in the strict sense, CCS offers a basic curriculum in Bible and Bible-related subjects. It is directed by a community board, with Allyn K. Sloat serving as executive secretary. Sloat took the pioneering job after serving for fifteen years as Christian-education director of the large Wheaton Bible Church in Wheaton, Illinois. He is a former president of the National Association of Directors of Christian Education.

The board, primarily lay, represents the spectrum of evangelical belief in the area. It has Catholic, Bible Church, Mennonite, Church of Christ, and Presbyterian members, among others. Pointing to a new cooperative spirit among evangelical ministries is the board membership held by representatives of Inter-Varsity, Navigators, and Campus Crusade, groups which have traditionally carried on their work in near-isolation from one another.

In its two semesters of last year the program enrolled 520 students from some forty church backgrounds in fifteen courses. For several of the courses, credit arrangements were made with Trinity Evangelical Divinity School or Lincoln Christian College. The faculty has been drawn from local churches, from the university, and from institutions in the Chicago area.

Flexibility and improvisation are the keynotes. Last semester’s curriculum included four eight-week courses (“Mark,” “Ephesians,” “Communicating in Marriage,” and “Body-life and Community”), two fifteen-week courses (“1st Corinthians” and “Genesis”) and two six week seminars, one on “Christ Speaks to an X-rated Culture,” taught by Professor Alan Johnson of Wheaton College.

The CCS structure has proved to be the instrument for several kinds of evangelical innovation in the Champaign-Urbana area. A Logos-franchised (Inter-Varsity) Christian bookstore has opened in the campus area. Cooperative vacation Bible schools are being developed, and the prospects for a Christian radio station and day school are under study.

Sloat observes that the CCS idea, which he expects to see reproduced elsewhere, is not a real competitor for the Christian college’s students, since CCS confers no degrees. With the average cost for a year of private college education last year totaling nearly $4,000, and with middle-income families increasingly feeling the college-money crunch, there is a demand for meeting Christian education needs in the environment of the increasingly populous secular campus, Sloat points out.

Sloat points also to the statements of the late Louis Cassels, United Press religion writer, who repeatedly called attention to “America’s long, steady slide into religious illiteracy,” a slide which he believed could be halted only by giving top priority to adult education programs.

With adult education exploding throughout the secular world, says Sloat, it may well be that the typical local church needs the support of this kind of program for adult nurture, equipping its members for ministry. The cost is not prohibitive, figuring out as it does to less than $15 per course hour per student, of which the student pays only $5, with the balance underwritten by pledges. CCS is efficient with resources, observes Sloat; the program does not require putting up new buildings, for area churches have been willing to provide facilities.

U. MILO KAUFMANN

Bumped From Lumpa

What is a “normal” life for the founder of an exotic African cult? After eleven years in detention, “prophetess” Alice Mulenga Lenshina has been released by Zambia’s president Kenneth D. Kaunda.

Aaron Milner, the nation’s home-affairs minister, told reporters that the fifty-six-year-old woman had signed a statement expressing gratitude to the president for granting her freedom “to live a normal life and to join forces with the people of this nation in developing Zambia.”

The government, against which she had led a brief but bloody “holy war” in 1964, let her out of prison on condition that she would not try to revive her Lumpa independent church. She was also restricted to the Lusaka area and told that her sect had been banned forever.

At the time of her imprisonment, she was thought to have about 75,000 followers. Some 20,000 of them fled over the border into what is now Zaire at the time of the Lumpa uprising against the Zambian government. The uprising was reportedly started when a member of Kaunda’s party clapped a young Lumpa boy on the ear for playing hooky from school. In the fighting that followed, at least 700 of her disciples were killed. She issued “passports to heaven” to her warriors, instructing them that if they shouted “Jericho” their enemies’ bullets would all turn to water.

In releasing the founder of the movement from jail, the government announced that her followers were free to return to join any “legally authorized church.”

Lenshina began the independent church in the early 1950s when she absented herself from her usual surroundings for three days and then returned with the announcement that she had died and had risen from the dead. Her mission from on high, she disclosed then, was to be prophet of a black god in a new black religion.

The former member of the Church of Scotland attracted followers rapidly after she preached that sinners would be struck down by lighting. A bolt killed two members under a tree seconds after she made the declaration, accounts say. Her church included many persons in Southern Rhodesia as well as many in the northern area, now the nation of Zambia.

The movement she started is only one of thousands of “African independent churches” on the continent. Many of them have gained respectability in recent years. Some are members of national councils of churches, and a few have been admitted to the World Council of Churches.

Angola: Practicing Christians

Some American church leaders are calling for cessation of American involvement in the civil war in Angola. At the same time they are reluctant to come out publicly in favor of any of the three warring liberation groups there. All three have received funds from the World Council of Churches (see November 7, 1975, issue, page 57). Ideologically, the three groups are not far apart. All espouse some basic tenets of socialism. And the leaders of the three groups are products of Protestant missions who, according to reports, have retained affiliation with their churches.

The National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), backed by Zaire, South Africa, China, and the United States, is led by Holden Roberto, a Baptist. The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), backed by the Soviet Union, is led by Agostinho Neto, a Methodist. The National Union for Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), backed by South Africa, China, and the United States, is led by Jonas M. Savimbi, a member of the United Church of Christ.

All three men are “practicing Christians,” says Larry Henderson, a mission executive of the United Church of Christ who spent twenty years in Angola. Concurring in that assessment is black American journalist Richard Gibson, who spent ten years in several African countries (including Angola).

Holden Roberto, the Baptist leader of the NFLA, is said to find enough time between military engagements to attend church “quite regularly” both in Angola and in neighboring Zaire. The 53-year-old Roberto was baptized at an early age by British Baptist missionaries (after whom he was also named), and attended schools sponsored by the British Missionary Society in both Kinshasa, Zaire, and Sao Salvador, Angola. (British Baptists first came to Angola in 1788.) Later he served as an instructor at a Baptist school in Sao Salvador. From 1951 to 1958, he was linked to the independent Messianic churches movement, joining it in anti-Catholic skirmishes in northern Angola and in what is now Zaire.

Roberto received “much encouragement and assistance from American Protestant groups and missionary societies who had long been aware of the Catholic-Protestant conflict,” said Gibson. The American Committee on Africa, partially sponsored by the National Council of Churches, was one of his key supporters. In 1958, influenced by the pan-Africanism of Ghana’s Nkrumah, Roberto transformed his anti-Catholic organization into the present NFLA, and redirected his efforts toward a free and united Angola. The northern area which Roberto represents has the largest Protestant following, an estimated 40 per cent of the area’s population. Most NFLA members are said to be Baptists.

The MPLA’s Agostinho Neto, 52, a Methodist, is recognized as an intensely spiritual leader, says Henderson, because of his close identity with the churches. (Protestants are a persecuted minority representing less than 10 per cent of the population in that area, although American Methodist missionaries came as early as 1885.)

Neto is the son of a Methodist minister. After attending mission schools through the secondary level, Neto was given a Methodist scholarship to attend medical school in Portugal. For a short period, he served as secretary to a Methodist bishop in Angola.

Present Angolan Methodist bishop Emilio de Carvalho is a strong supporter of both Neto and the FNLA. The Methodist church from which Neto comes has a larger urbane and intellectual membership than other Protestant groups in Angola; the same traits characterize his MPLA leaders, say observers.

Jonas M. Savimbi, 41, of UNITA, a member of the United Church of Christ, holds a Ph.D. in political science, the result of UCC sponsorship to both the universities of Lisbon and Lausanne. From his childhood, he attended mission schools operated by the Congregationalists. (American and Canadian Congregationalists began work in central Angola in 1880.) Savimbi’s father was a railway worker fired by a zealous desire to spread the Christian faith throughout Angola. Scores of churches and schools can trace their origins in part to his father’s evangelistic labors as he was transferred about by the railway.

Savimbi, however, has recommended a less pietistic religion. At one time he stressed at party meetings the need for less Bible reading and more political ideology, states Gibson. Nevertheless, Henderson says, since 1965 Savimbi “has been brought much closer to the church,” aware of the political advantage of such an association.

Most of Angola’s more than six million people are followers of traditional African religions. Catholics number 2.8 million, according to the 1975 edition of Africa South of the Sahara. Protestant strength is estimated at between 450,000 and 800,000; most are Baptists or Methodists, with the Plymouth Brethren also numerous.

WHITE ELEPHANTS

Black congregations should stop buying inner-city church buildings that white congregations have deserted, says clergyman Glenn S. Gothard, a United Methodist building consultant. Such structures, he asserts, are usually “white elephants” unsuited to needs of blacks for flexible facilities that can serve their immediate neighborhoods in a variety of ways. On top of that, most “hand-me-down” buildings often don’t have the choir and congregation facing each other with the preacher “front and center” he says. This arrangement is needed, he explains, because of the emphasis on fellowship and preaching in black worship.

Shared Tragedy

An American missionary who recently fled Angola says she wants to return as soon as the fighting ends. Joyce Lee Myers, a United Church of Christ missionary for twelve years in Angola, described the situation there as chaotic.

Traveling from the Emanuel Seminary near Bela Vista, Angola, Ms. Myers said she and five other fleeing American and Canadian missionaries encountered roadblocks everywhere, sometimes three in a row, each one manned by rival liberation groups.

After arriving in Nova Lisboa, Angola, the missionaries hid in an African home for a week. They were finally whisked to South Africa in a private plane.

The suffering in Angola is due in part to a scarcity of food and medicine, she points out. “Our mission doctor bought the last remaining insulin in central Angola a week before we left, and when that goes, all his diabetic patients will die,” she warns.

In a strange twist, the Angola war has drawn the races together, observes Ms. Myers. “We stood in line, black and white, for three hours, waiting for bread,” she recalls. “Everybody was sharing their tragedy, and a sense of comradeship existed in the common suffering.”

Is Capitalism Anti-Christian?

Escape From the Money Trap, by Henry Clark (Judson, 1973, 124 pp., $2.35 pb), Illusions of Success, by John Raines (Judson, 1975, 128 pp., $5.95), The Gospel According to the Wall Street Journal, by Carnegie Calian (John Knox, 1975, 114 pp., $3.95 pb), and Notes Towards a Christian Critique of Secular Economic Theory, by A. B. Cramps (Institute for Christian Studies [229 College St., Toronto MST 1R4 Canada], 1975, 80 pp., $1 pb), are reviewed by John E. Wagner, attorney, OklahomaCity, Oklahoma.

Here are four books dealing with the economic system, God, man, and mammon. Three of them cover essentially identical territory, pointing out apparent failures of the free-enterprise economy, the plight of the low-income disadvantaged, and the privileges of the wealthy, and purporting to set forth some Christian solutions to these inequities in our increasingly complex, technological age.

Without question, some of the criticisms are all too true, and Christians are under scriptural injunction to do some hard and serious thinking about them, and to assess themselves and society in general in the light of the gospel message. Nevertheless I suspect that the facts have been, wittingly or not, distorted to make a case for radical economics, redistribution of the wealth, and a headlong slide toward a more tightly controlled economy, resulting in further socialization of the economic system in America.

Henry Clark’s book, Escape From the Money Trap, starts out with a discussion of “consumerism, the yoke of mammon.” In it he lays out very powerfully the grip of materialism on American life, and validly warns us in the words of the prophets, and the Gospels, of the sinfulness of serving mammon instead of God.

But from that launching pad, Clark immediately reveals his thesis that the system itself is bad and needs radical change. In support of all this, he cites various authorities in socio-economic matters. The trouble is that the authorities are essentially one-sided; they do not represent a spectrum of thought; and they are, in fact, the exponents of a socialistic America.

Quoting freely from Michael Harrington’s Other America, a book read widely in liberal circles in the tumultous years of the 1960s, and citing John Kenneth Galbraith, Clark made obvious where his preconceptions lie, and the kind of economic system he envisages for his ideal America. Harrington, it should be said for the record, is a longtime member of the Socialist party in America, having served as its national chairman and as a member of its executive committee. Galbraith’s views for a planned economy, and further socialization, are widely known.

It would be unfair to discredit all of Clark’s criticisms of the established order simply because of his socialist presuppositions. Some of what he has to say is strictly Christian. Not doubt we do have some of our priorities scrambled, and no one would deny that the economic order can be improved.

What Clark fails to tell his readers is that we live in a very socialized form of capitalism as it is, with ever-increasing government meddling in the lives of Americans. Whether they are willing to exchange their personal freedoms for the security and purported equities of a further redistributed system of wealth is highly doubtful. That such a redistribution, going far beyond the heavy tax burdens now imposed on almost everyone for governmental services, would achieve a more just order has yet to be proven. That such a system in any case would be more inherently Christian is open to serious challenge. To point out the un-Christian areas of the prevailing system is one thing, but to equate the Christian solution with socialism is quite another. I simply do not think that Clark is a realistic thinker. Nevertheless, if you want to see how a liberal theorist, who also wears the hat of a Christian social ethicist, sees the problems and solutions, then this is a book to be read with a dialectical approach.

A similar line of thought is followed in John Curtis Raines’s Illusions of Success. But whereas Clark’s book is aimed at liberal-chic readers, Raines aims at the middle-class audience. Raines is a kind of theological Fred Harris, seeking to arouse the middle class from its frustrated lethargy to strike down the dragon of privileged wealth and monopoly.

Here again, as a lawyer and businessman who has been involved in political life as well as social-reform efforts in a metropolitan community, I see some of his criticism as valid. There are indeed tax loopholes, and some of the rich are insulated from heavy taxation. Moreover, the middle class does very likely bear more than its fair share of the actual out-of-pocket taxes.

But Raines, like Clark, seems alert only to the negatives of the system. He blindly refuses to see its positives; the productivity, generally high standard of living, jobs, income, creativity and technological advances inherent in a free-enterprise economy, and, what is supremely important, the freedom to choose even when that choice is limited by economic inability. He also fails to see that many of the so-called tax loopholes are well-thought-out attempts to encourage research and industrial growth, all as conceived by the Congress in open debate in the legislative process.

America has plunged ever-leftward economically under both Democratic and Republican administrations since the 1930s. The plight of the poor has not gone unattended. Wealth has been redistributed through taxation and social-welfare programs. That these efforts have not been successful should at least give pause to the advocates of radical social change, including Raines. Perhaps the guaranteed-income idea, espoused by some conservatives as well as by liberals, would serve as acceptable compromise in this realm, without the loss of freedom that the leveling of wealth and tight government controls would inevitably bring to the body politic.

Next, Carnegie Calian’s The Gospel According to the Wall Street Journal is a rather stilted effort to draw some comparisons between what the author believes to be the good life as envisaged by the Journal and the good life of Christian commitment. Calling for a radical faith and a pilgrim theology, Calian says that God “in himself is unknowable.” “At most,” he tells us, “we can have only an attitude of reverent agnosticism regarding his inner nature.” If he means that the infinitude of God cannot be fully comprehended by finite man, he is right; but if he is trying to tell us that God has not fully revealed himself in Jesus Christ and through the special revelatory instrument of Holy Scripture, then he has blown the game. You will have to read this part of the book for yourself and draw your own conclusions. However, his side tour into this question is symptomatic of the faults of the whole volume. It rambles and it preaches. Money can’t buy happiness. The country club set isn’t that important after all. The poor need to be dealt with more compassionately. The realism of the Wall Street Journal in the final analysis stands under the cross of Christ.

All these platitudes, and more, are take-off points for his discussion. This is not to deny that many of his points are valid. But much of what he says I have heard in evangelical testimony meetings from housewives, socialites, wage-earners, and businessmen. Happily, Calian ends his analysis on a moderate note: “The Wall Street Journal contributes much to our understanding of human existence; however, it is the Gospel of Christ which enables us to fulfill our humanity.”

Cramp’s monograph, Notes Towards a Christian Critique of Secular Economic Theory, is technical and well written, and it comes to some serious Christian conclusions as to the flat spots in both capitalist and Marxist theory. It needs to be developed further and expanded into a full-fledged book. Its readers need to be capable of handling abstractions. Readers used to dealing with abstract categories will be able to understand it even though they are not schooled in economic theory. Moreover it is dealing with the philosophical trunk of the economic tree, and does not sort out the socio-economic apples, good or bad, that have fallen off the branches.

In Cramp, we have the philosopher-economist at his best. The book consists of lectures given first at Cambridge and later at Toronto. Cramp tells us that economics has thought of itself as a positivist science of description, but that in so doing it has been atomistic in the Hobbesian sense; that is, it has not dealt with the whole of man. Consequently, it has substituted the purely descriptive task of what “is” for the prescriptive task of what “ought to be.” The economist cannot be ethically neutral, says Cramp. He must deal with the whole man, and this goes beyond the classical Western conception of economic man’s manifesting himself in the sole dimension of acquisitiveness. This kind of reductionism is particularly subject to Christian criticism, for man is not to be measured by the hedonistic canon alone. It is in this that classical Western liberal economic orthodoxy has erred.

But on the other hand, the collectivist argues that Marx’s teaching makes possible a synthesis of all human knowledge and above all a synthesis of economic history and economic theory. But this too is subject to criticism. While Marxist philosophy is more holistic—not individualistic—nevertheless it sacrifices the “person of the present” for the “expected person of the future.” And to make such a sacrifice, it runs counter to the biblical understanding of man. The man of the now should stand as a person of worth and dignity and not be made a collectivist sacrifice in forfeiting his freedom in the interest of some utopian communist future.

Finally, I would recommend that in conjunction with any of these books one also read the cover story in the July 14, 1975, issue of Time, “Can Capitalism Survive?” For here we have a survey of nearly all the questions dealt with by Raines, Calian, Clark, and Crump that balances their conclusions with other equally, if not more, informed facts and conclusions. The ten-page Time article is almost a layman’s handbook to economic philosophy, problems, and proposals. But since Time does not purport to deal with these matters theologically, and since I have serious misgivings about the theological perspectives of Raines, Calian, and Clark (but not Crump), I would urge the evangelical principle that we are not to idolize any economic system, nor its fruit; we must let both stand under the judgment of God, the saving word of the cross, and the ethical demands of the Gospel.

These are matters about which individual believers and the whole Body of Christ must think and pray, and which no economist theorist can answer.

BRIFFLY NOTED

Bibliography of Bioethics, Volume 1, edited by LeRoy Walters (Gale Research Co., 249 pp., $24), Contemporary Medical Ethics, by John Dedek (Sheed and Ward, 236 pp., $7.95), Bioethical Decision Making, by Barbara Ann Swyhart (Fortress, 130 pp., $6.50), Abortion and the Sanctity of Human Life, by Baruch Brody (MIT Press, 162 pp., $8.95), Death Inside Out, edited by Peter Steinfels and Robert Veatch (Harper & Row, 149 pp., $7.95, $3.50 pb), and The Dilemmas of Euthanasia, edited by John Behnke and Sissela Bok (Doubleday, 187 pp., $2.95 pb). Bioethical issues include abortion, genetic manipulation, psychosurgery, human experimentation, medical confidentiality, the definition of death, and euthanasia. Obviously the Christian community should continue to have considerable concern with such matters and should not leave them to the legal, medical, scientific, and political arenas. The bibliography is the first in a proposed annual series and covers both print (articles and books) and non-print items that were first released in 1973. Dedek is a Catholic ethicist who has written a survey text aimed at medical students but usable elsewhere. Swyhart uses the insights of modern academic theologians, especially process thinkers, to propose guidelines for the usually difficult bioethical decisions with special reference to abortion. Brody gives a philosophical and scientific defense, rather than a religious one, for the humanity of the fetus beginning about six weeks after conception, and the consequent immorality of aborting it after that time (with certain exceptions). Brody heads the philosophy department at Rice; his book merits widespread attention. The last two books are collections of mostly previously published scholarly articles that take on special significance in light of the New Jersey court case involving comatose Karen Ann Quinlan.

A Book of Comfort For Those in Sickness, by P. B. Power (Banner of Truth, 100 pp., $1.65 pb), The Hospital Prayer Book, by J. Massyngberde Ford (Paulist, 106 pp., $1.65 pb), Color Me Legitimate, by Lu Nell Isett (Bible Voice, 88 pp., $1.50 pb), and Never Too Late, by Kathryn Kuhlman (Bethany Fellowship, 79 pp., $.95 pb). The first title also gives the purpose of the other three books. Power writes from a Reformed perspective and gives valuable insights into God’s purposes in sickness. Ford, a Catholic charismatic and scholar, has herself been gravely ill. The suggested prayers and Scripture portions cover almost every situation (e.g., “on taking sedation at night”). Isett, from a Protestant charismatic viewpoint, reflects on the important question, Why isn’t everyone healed? Kuhlman writes a “first-person” narrative of Marion Burgio, who after seventeen years of multiple sclerosis was reputedly healed instantly at a Kuhlman meeting. Lest every victim be given false hope, Kuhlman adds a valuable chapter “For those who are not healed.”

Culture and Human Values, by Jacob Loewen (William Carey, 443 pp., $5.95 pb). Collection of twenty-nine papers originally published in Practical Anthropology from 1961 to 1970 by one of the leading evangelical missiologists.

The Social Psychology of Religion, by Michael Argyle and Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 246 pp., $18.50), A Sociology of Belief, by James T. Borhek and Richard F. Curtis, (Wiley, 201 pp., $8.95), The Sociology of Religion, by Harold Fallding (McGraw-Hill, 240 pp., n.p.), A Sociology of Religion, by Michael Hill (Basic Books, 285 pp., $10), Religion and Society in Interaction, by Ronald L. Johnstone (Prentice-Hall, 345 pp., $9.95), Psychology of Religion, by Goeffrey E. W. Scobie, (Halsted, 189 pp., $8.95), and Homo Religiosus: Sociological Problems in the Study of Religion, by Robert Towler (St. Martin’s, 206 pp., $10.95). Many Christians think of religious behavior as something that can be described only with at least implicit reference to the Holy Spirit or evil spirits. But even as church buildings can be described architecturally, so religious beliefs and practices can be studied with profit from social scientific perspectives, provided that one recognizes the self-imposed limitations. Theological and major college libraries will want to acquire these texts, and instructors might consider them for classroom us.

What Must God Be Like? by Pope Paul VI, (Dimension, 84 pp., $4.95), Searching For Sense: The Logic of Catholic Belief, by Frank De Siano (Paulist, 189 pp., $1.95 pb), The Faith of Catholics, by Richard Chilson (Paulist, 303 pp., $2.45 pb), Religious Life, edited by Sister M. Rose Eileen Masterman (Alba, 289 pp., $4.95 pb), Letters to a Young Priest, by Anton Grabner-Haider (Abbey, 63 pp., $1.50 pb), Crises Facing the Church, by Raymond E. Brown (Paulist, 118 pp., $2.45 pb), and The Shape of the Church to Come by Karl Rahner (Seabury, 136 pp., $6.95). Increasing Protestant-Catholic contacts require each side to know not only what the other says when trying to be congenial to its opposite but also something of the other’s internal discussions. The Pope himself shares his thoughts in an informal style. Similar doctrinal overviews, addressed both to non-catholics and long-time Catholics confused by the present turmoil, are offered by Di Siano and Chilson. Ministry by celibate priests and nuns—one of the most obvious Catholic distinctives, and also one of the most tumultuous—is the focus of Masterman and Grabner-Haider. Brown and Rahner, two of the most important theologians, examine not only the role of ministry and of women but other problem areas.

Jesus and Paul: Paul as Interpreter of Jesus From Harnack to Kummel, by J. W. Fraser (Marcham Books [Appleford, Abingdon OX14 4PB, England], 244 pp. £ 8). Major scholarly demonstration that Paul did not alter the teaching of Jesus, as many prominent scholars have asserted, but made explicit what was implicit all along.

Leaders of Sunday-morning children’s services can find help in Children’s Church: The Leader’s Guide. The first issue is dated Fall, 1975, and has programs for thirteen sessions that are readily adaptable for use at other times and beyond the sponsoring Assemblies of God denomination. For information write the editor at 1445 Boonville Ave., Springfield, Missouri 65802.

Antireligious Propaganda in the Soviet Union, by David E. Powell (MIT Press, 206 pp., $25), Miracle in Moscow, by David Benson (Regal, 303 pp., $3.95 pb), Christians in the Shadow of the Kremlin, By Anita and Peter Deyneka, Jr. (David C. Cook, 96 pp., $1.50 pb), and Testament From Prison, by Georgi Vins (David C. Cook, 282 pp., $2.50 pb). Four approaches to the problems faced by Soviet Christians. Political scientist Powell concentrates on what he finds to be largely unsuccessful attempts to “convert” people to atheism. His maps and bibliographical references are extremely valuable. Benson is an American who has been engaged in outreach to the U.S.S.R. for several years, especially through radio. This book is largely about his various visits to the country. The Deynekas, who are with the Slavic Gospel Association, one of the oldest and most reputable ministries of its kind, tell of their visits. Vins cannot simply visit. He is the prominent Soviet evangelical leader who is once again imprisoned and probably being tortured solely because of his faithfulness to God. Meanwhile American leaders toast his persecutors. Characteristically, the book is not so much about Vins as about his fellow Christians who are suffering.

Preparing to Teach God’s Word, by G. Raymond Carlson (Gospel Publishing House, 128 pp., $1.25 pb), Successful Teaching Ideas, by Marie Chapman (Standard, 95 pp., $3.95 pb), Creative Sunday Schools, by Elizabeth Crisci (Baker, 107 pp., $1.95 pb,) Exploring the Bible With Children, by Dorothy Jean Furnish (Abingdon, 174 pp., $3.95 pb), The Effective Sunday School Superintendent, by Kenneth Gangel (Victor 48 pp, $.95 pb), The Care and Counseling of Youth in the Church, by Paul Irwin (Fortress, 80 pp., $2.95 pb), Teaching Primaries Today, by Elizabeth Jones (Baker, 128 pp., $1.95 pb), Making Learning a Joy: For Leaders and Teachers of Children, by Jim Larson (Regal, 75 pp., $1.45 pb), Guiding a Growing Sunday School, by Albert Morton (Beacon Hill, 96 pp., $1.95 pb), Puppets Go to Church, by Wilma Powers Perry and Earl Perry (Beacon Hill, 87 pp., $1.50 pb), Jesus, the Master Teacher, by Clifford Wilson (Baker, 160 pp., $2.95 pb), Multimedia Handbook For the Church, by Ron Wilson (David C. Cook, 142 pp., $1.95 pb), and Sunday School Teacher’s Planbook: Early Childhood, … Children, … Youth, … Adult (Regal, 48 pp. each, $1.95 pb each). Sunday-school teachers and others who minister to children and youth should examine these titles in their local Christian bookstores. Church libraries might wish to acquire several.

To keep abreast of scholarly writing by evangelical seminarians, see Studia Biblica et Theologica and Trinity Journal. SBT, which appears twice yearly for $5, included major articles on Luke 9–19 and on Edward John Carnell in its October issue (516 Winthrop Ave., New Haven, Conn. 06511). TJ costs $2 a copy, and the Spring, 1975, issue included major studies of Bible colleges as pre-seminary institutions and miracles in John’s gospel, plus forty-eight pages of recommended books for ministers (2045 Half Day Road, Deerfield, Ill. 60015).

He Never Was Or Still Is

Jesus: The Man Who Lives, by Malcolm Muggeridge (Harper & Row, 1975, 191 pp., $17.95) is reviewed by Cheryl Forbes, assistant editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Here is a “coffeetable book” that makes the description not only respectable but complimentary. Muggeridge, the acerbic onetime editor of Punch and a Christian convert, retells the gospel story with punch and verve. Black-and-white and color reproductions of great religious art dramatize the text and are effectively and intelligently spaced throughout the book. Muggeridge divides his tale into three parts: “Jesus Comes Into the World,” “What Jesus Came to Tell the World,” and “The Man Who Lives.”

Muggeridge seems unconcerned with doctrine, and readers might be confused about his theology by the way he states modern secular notions about Jesus’ birth, life, and death. For example, with a journalist’s training, he records that “to a twentieth-century mind the notion of a virgin birth is intrinsically and preposterously inconceivable.” Is he denying the Virgin Birth? No, he merely reports what people think today, and then tells of those who for centuries believed the doctrine. It is clear which side Muggeridge aligns himself with.

Along the way, Muggeridge gives some interesting commentary on miracles and some brilliant insights into why twentieth-century persons find them difficult to accept. He also criticizes the World Council of Churches, and deplores recent attempts to deprive God of his majesty:

In our own time the balance has swung heavily the other way, and the tendency has been all in the direction of loving our neighbor and forgetting or overlooking God. St. Simeon has come down from his pillar to become Comrade Simeon, or the Right Honorable Simeon, or Senator Simeon, or just Sim, with God as no more than a constitutionally elected President to perform ceremonial duties and deliver an annual Speech from the Throne.… Worship becomes a seminar, God’s House a coffee-bar, and the Word that came to dwell among us programmed into people’s Logos [p. 131].

He also weaves into his narrative a fine essay on God’s gift of imagination to his people and on the importance of creativity, both in God’s redemption of the world and in our accepting and living that redemption here on earth. God in the Incarnation achieved what every artist attempts: “the Word whose flesh he became is every true word ever written or spoken; every true note ever sounded; every true stone laid on another, every true shape molded or true colour mixed” (p. 29).

As the subtitle indicates, Muggeridge resoundingly proclaims that the Resurrection happened. “Either Jesus never was or he still is,” he says. This book lovingly and creatively points to the person at the center of our faith, without whom Christianity could not exist.

The Holy Spirit According To Whom?

The Person and Ministry of the Holy Spirit: A Wesleyan Perspective, by Charles W. Carter (Baker, 1974, 355 pp., $7.95), and The Person and Ministry of the Holy Spirit: The Traditional Calvinistic Perspective, by Edwin W. Palmer (Baker, 1974, 196 pp., $5.95), are reviewed by Donald W. Dayton, director of Mellander Library and assistant professor of theology, North Park Theological Seminary, Chicago, Illinois.

With these two books Baker inaugurates a series on the Holy Spirit from various theological positions that are competing for acceptance. Carter is a member of the Wesleyan Church and a leader of the interdenominational holiness movement. Palmer speaks from the Christian Reformed Church and the circles of Westminster Seminary. The publisher promises a third volume by an Assemblies of God professor.

Palmer’s book is virtually a reprint of his The Holy Spirit (1958), enthusiastically reviewed in these pages on January 19, 1959. The only changes other than minor alterations in the text are the addition of chapters on glossolalia and the “unpardonable sin” and the use of the New International Version (of whose editorial board Palmer is chairman). Palmer attempts to popularize the work of Abraham Kuyper and John Owen by developing the doctrine in short essays on such topics as the role of the Spirit in creation, common grace, revelation, illumination, regeneration, sanctification, guidance, and prayer. The new chapter on “tongue-speaking” takes a moderate position, granting that the case for the cessation of special gifts since the apostolic era is not conclusive and allowing the possibility of tongues while insisting that the New Testament views it as a minor gift.

Carter’s book, nearly twice the length of Palmer’s, is directed more to scholars and students and so contains more extensive scholarly apparatus. The dust jacket displays “full endorsement” of the book by the Christian Holiness Association as “a scholarly and exhaustive exposition within the Wesleyan interpretation.” In contrast to Palmer’s book, Carter’s consists of an “exposition” of various natural groupings of biblical material (prophetic, synoptic, Pauline, Johannine, and—in five chapters, one-third of the book—Acts and the Pentecost account). This approach keeps Carter close to the biblical text and allows him to take account of the development within the Scriptures and the differing nuances of its various voices. Intermingled are treatments of theological issues and debated points within the tradition.

Carter reflects the classical holiness movement’s extreme suspicion of Pentecostalism and glossolalia, a suspicion that dates from the turn-of-the-century struggles when Pentecostalism emerged as a sort of “holiness heresy.” He contrasts, for example, the “sane and constructive” work of Methodism with the “aberrant fanaticism” of the Azusa Street revival. He argues that the gift of tongues at Pentecost was the supernaturally given ability to speak unlearned languages, and then chooses to interpret the Corinthian passages along this line.

Carter strongly criticizes Vinson Synan’s argument (in The Holiness-Pentecostal Movement) that the holiness movement was the immediate antecedent of Pentecostalism. But some would say that Carter’s book represents precisely those developments within Wesleyanism that permitted the emergence of Pentecostalism. If Pentecostalism is that branch of Christianity which elevates Acts 2 to the hermeneutical key for the interpretation of Scripture (as the Anabaptists use the Sermon on the Mount and the Reformed traditions perhaps Galatians and Romans), then except for the question of glossolalia, Carter’s book is in its basic thought patterns essentially “Pentecostal.” It is noteworthy that Wesley repudiated the approach of early Methodist theologian John Fletcher when Fletcher began to speak of a personal “Pentecostal baptism of the Holy Spirit.”

Carter’s book does, however, well represent twentieth-century holiness thought, in both its strengths and weaknesses, and can, if so understood, well serve as a dialogue partner in this series. Baker is to be commended for this much needed project. We are clearly a long way from the fresh (both of these books are still rather traditional readings of their own traditions) and the “clear, Biblical view of the Holy Spirit” that the publisher hopes will emerge from this dialogue.

One also wishes that the publisher had exercised greater editorial control. The two volumes are not parallel in approach and level of treatment. Carter’s book is marred by numerous misspellings, inconsistencies in bibliographical form, and other errors of fact and detail that careful proof-reading could have eliminated.

Under the general title “Evangelicals in Search of Identity,” Dr. Henry begins in this issue a monthly series of “Footnotes” devoted to the strengths and weaknesses of evangelical Christianity on the present American scene. His observations are written in the mood of his book “The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism,” which appeared shortly before mid-century.—ED.

Twenty-five years ago there were signs that a long-caged lion would break its bars and roar upon the American scene with unsuspected power. The mounting vitality of the evangelical movement baffled the secular press, a press beguiled by ecumenical spokesmen for liberal pluralism to regard conservative Christianity as a fossel-cult destined to early extinction.

While modernist disbelief and neo-orthodox universalism scotched the indispensability of conversion, the Graham evangelistic crusades demonstrated anew the Gospel’s regenerating power. Fuller Theological Seminary in 1947 brought a higher dimension to most evangelical divinity learning. The Evangelical Theological Society at mid-century canopied hundreds of scholars committed to scriptural inerrancy and hoped to shape a theological renaissance. Evangelical books of philosophical and theological power were on the increase—G. C. Berkouwer, J. Oliver Buswell, Gordon Clark, Cornelius Van Til, E. J. Carnell, Bernard Ramm, and others paced the way as J. Gresham Machen had done a half-century earlier—and vigorous symposium and commentary series appeared. The National Association of Evangelicals, founded in 1942, rallied a service constituency of ten million American evangelicals. CHRISTIANITY TODAY united scattered evangelical contributors from all denominations in a common theological, evangelistic, and social witness. Garnering an impressive paid circulation of 175,000, the magazine enlisted the loyalties of many who were disenchanted with both the fundamentalist far-right and the liberal left; scholars like D. Elton Trueblood now aggressively championed evangelical rational theism.

Aiming to penetrate the secular intellectual arena with young educators holding an informed Christian life and world view, leaders met and talked of a Christian university. Their vision, attenuated through many delays, issued finally in a mobile fellowship of scholars, the Institute for Advanced Christian Studies. Meanwhile the Consortium of Christian Colleges emerged to link evangelical campuses in new cooperative effort.

In a time when ecumenical missionary enthusiasm was beginning to wane, the five missionaries martyred by Auca Indians underscored evangelical Christianity’s frontier evangelistic concern. Evangelistically committed churches were expanding; some “third force” churches registered post-war growth rates exceeding 500 per cent. The World Congress on Evangelism, sponsored in 1966 by CHRISTIANITY TODAY, gathered evangelists from all continents for an accelerated world thrust.

Church historian Sydney Ahlstrom writes of this “rapidly growing force in American Christianity” in terms of a “vast, inchoate multitude of earnest Christians and a much more dynamic and exclusivistic ‘third force’ ” (A Religious History of the American People).

While still on the loose, and still sounding his roar, the evangelical lion is nonetheless slowly succumbing to an identity-crisis. The noteworthy cohesion that American evangelicals gained in the sixties has been fading in the seventies through multiplied internal disagreements and emerging counter-forces.

The world fundamentalist conference scheduled to be held this June in Edinburgh indicates that despite the weakened influence of Carl McIntire, the evangelical far-right is regathering for a massive initiative all its own.

In its post-Lausanne-Congress (1974) para-ecumenical thrust, the World Evangelical Fellowship waivers between those who want the emphasis solely on cooperative evangelism and those who insist that the Gospel’s social implications are not optional. The so-called American evangelical establishment—represented prominently by the National Association of Evangelicals (its impact curtailed by strategy and money limitations), the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, many evangelical college and seminary administrators, and more recently also by Campus Crusade for Christ—so elevates personal evangelism above other concerns that the Christian faith’s sociocultural interests hold seemingly marginal focus.

That courageous minority of evangelical clergy in the National Council of Churches orbit who mine the intellectual and social as well as evangelistic facets of the heritage have witnessed the withering of conciliar ecumenism because of its ill-advised pluralistic and political priorities; they find no wholly congenial home in the National Association of Evangelicals, however, and probe other evangelical fellowships (Reformed, sub-denominational, regional, and the like). Restive participants within all these groups are calling for vigorous alternatives and voice increasingly strident criticism of the evangelical status quo.

The latest in a rather long succession of volumes about the conservative religious scene is The Evangelicals, edited by David F. Wells and John D. Woodbridge (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY, December 19, 1975, pp. 18–21). Its diversity of contributors—some evangelical and some nonevangelical—leaves unclear just what authentic evangelical Christianity is. Does Paul Holmer or Martin Marty or John Gerstner or Kenneth Kantzer speak definitively?

A great deal has evidently happened since The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (Eerdmans, 1947), when, despite a growing conviction that the evangelicals needed to mend some of their ways, there was little doubt as to who they are.

The evangelical high noon of a half-generation ago was not in fact without significant historical antecedents, however much liberal church historians tend to minimize them. To assess the crumbling of evangelical unit we shall need to consider emphases by certain evangelicals earlier in this century and those by some in the present. Having burst his cage in a time of theological default, the lion of evangelicalism now seems unsure which road to take.

CARL F. H. HENRY

A strange stream of circumstances put me in a front seat of an ambulance, parked at the corner by “Aux Deux Magots.” This is the well-known cafe on the left bank of Paris where Sartre sat and discussed the existential philosophy that changed the thinking of so many of today’s people. I sat in this ambulance seat for six hours, watching people walk by, stand on the street corner, go in and sit at the tables on the glassed-in sidewalk section of the cafe or disappear into its main portion. Six hours of watching people … people … people.

As I watched thousands of people walk, run, stand, stop, sit, frown, laugh, gesture, talk, be silent, I was struck by the amazing conformity in this spot of the world where non-conformists speak in loudest tones! There were the Vogue-look people—the new straight-cut boots wrinkled properly under the whirl of flared midlength skirts, capes swirling above them, hats of the twenties back again. One could see a parade of the haute couture; models appeared to be meeting the right people at the right place at the right hour, conforming to a pattern in every detail.

There were blue jeans in another stream of conformists walking by, blue jeans with fur jackets, blue jeans with cashmere sweaters, blue jeans with blue-jean jackets and old shirts, blue jeans with expensive silk shirts and tweed jackets, blue jeans with the newest of capes, blue jeans with soft suede jackets—all conforming to the “must” of blue jeans.

Then scattered in between were the obvious non-conformists conforming to a pattern of non-conforming! There were the longer-than-long-haired men with strange clothing that matched others looking just as strange, and the girls whose combination of found-in-the-attic or second-hand-store clothing looked the same as that of others.

Sitting on this particular street corner in Paris, beside the cafe where ideas flowed forth that have affected even the churches in your town as some of your pastors preached existential theology, or sitting on a corner in mid-western America, Hong Kong, Vancouver, or Miami, observing human beings for a time, just from the outside—everywhere one sees people conforming to other people, striving for their good opinion, interest, or approval. And when God speaks to us in Romans 12:1 and 2, he is speaking in an area we all can recognize as a part of our own experience since childhood. We all know by experience what it means to want to conform to this world in some way.

But the admonition comes to us to experience something very different now as children of the living God. We are given a dash of cold water in our faces as we read these verses in Romans, and realize we cannot “copy” someone else and be all right in God’s eyes. We cannot “copy” the person we think to be the “best Christian” and in that way “fit in” to the Christian family the way we have copied or conformed to other things, other patterns, other groupings of people in this world.

The dash of ice water is this: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be ye not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God.” After these first two verses, Romans twelve goes on to tell us that we are not to think more highly of ourselves than we ought to, and on the background of all that, we come to the fact that we have not all the same office but that we are a “body.” Some are to be feet, some hands, some eyes, some ears, some knees, some elbows. We have diverse things to do and be, as diverse as the parts of the body. Something is to happen that is just the opposite of a sheep-like conforming. We are to become willing to be different, and to accept the part God gives us to do.

This is a call to come directly before God and to be ready to do and be what he plans for us. To do this we must be transformed. Our minds are involved in this transformation, not just our feelings and emotions. We are to have different attitudes and also a set of evaluative “sieves” different from the world’s.

These renewed, transformed minds do not come by hard work, Titus 3:5 tells us: “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and the renewing of the Holy Ghost.” Titus 3 starts out by speaking of how we were sometimes foolish, disobedient, serving a variety of lusts in malice and envy—in other words, conforming to the world’s emotions and motives. Now, as Christians, we have been transformed. The transformation takes place at the time of salvation: our sins are washed away, and the renewing or transformation through the entrance of the Holy Spirit starts. The Holy Spirit dwells in us, and he alone can transform us, moment by moment.

Romans 12 goes on to tell of some of the things that will show forth the reality of our transformation:

Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love; in honour preferring one another; not slothful in business; fervent in spirit; serving the Lord; rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation; continuing instant in prayer; distributing to the necessity of saints; given to hospitality. Bless them which persecute you; bless, and curse not. Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep. Be of the same mind one toward another. Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceits. Recompense no man evil for evil.… Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head. Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.

It takes “living sacrifice” to act this way, day by day. It takes a changed, renewed mind, transformed attitudes that do not conform to the world’s attitudes, to live according to Romans 12:10–20. It also takes a willingness to stand directly before God in day-by-day, moment-by-moment practice, not simply a conforming to many Christians’ ideas of non-conformity.

Are you, am I, conformed non-conformists or transformed conformists in our practical lives? Let us ask the Spirit’s help for 1976.

EDITH SCHAEFFER

Evidence For The Baptism

I’m tired of being told that if I would only speak in tongues, I would be a much stronger and more effective Christian. Why is it that tongues are taken to be the only sign of spiritual power and effectiveness? Why have the tongues-pushers picked that spiritual gift as the one above all others when they’ve read Paul’s thoughts on the subject?

Why haven’t they, for instance, emphasized the gift of teaching? “If you only start teaching, you’ll be a more effective Christian.” Or better yet, the gift of administration.

I can imagine it now. The Holy Spirit indwells a person and that person becomes a time-management freak. Previously a disorganized, spontaneous person, he or she now becomes Mr. or Ms. Schedule. Instead of talking about glossalia, the newly filled being speaks of time flow and organizational charts. Instead of praise, he or she talks about priorities. Instead of Merle Carothers, Bob Mumford, and Larry Christenson, his or her idols are Ted Engstrom, Ed Dayton, and Peter Drucker.

Evidence for the baptism of the Spirit would not be how high you could hold your hands in praise or how ecstatically you could mouth monosyllables, but how quickly you could get the church office to function efficiently, how many things you could do at once, and how well you used commuting time to tackle “A” priorities.

Ah, if the Holy Spirit had only made all of us organized, wouldn’t the world be a better place? Wouldn’t the Church be stronger and more alive? Wouldn’t the Gospel be preached to more people in less time? I think I’ll tell some of my friends about it.

EUTYCHUS VII

How Different

It is encouraging for the Evangelicalism of the seventies to read your friendly report of the first national meeting of the Evangelical Women’s Caucus (News, “Christian Feminists: ‘We’re on Our Way’ Lord!’ ”, Dec. 5). How different the evangelicalism of the sixties might have been had your assistant editors then included a black American and a Vietnamese nationalist.

JOHN OLIVER

Canton, Ohio

What Is Evangelical?

Because of the high esteem in which CHRISTIANITY TODAY is held by so many of us evangelicals on the Board of Trustees at Whitworth College, it was inevitably of great disappointment and surprise to us that it was omitted from your list of evangelical colleges (Nov. 7).… It probably boils down to what is meant by “evangelical.” If, to be considered evangelical, a college must follow the format of insisting upon Christian faith and commitment by students prior to admission, Whitworth does not qualify.… And for this I am thankful. The percentage of students at Whitworth who have NOT made a decision for Christ runs as high as 40 percent. Praise God! What an opportunity!

On the other hand, if to be “evangelical” a college has for its theme: “Jesus Christ” (and that … or better HE … is the theme of Whitworth College); if to be “evangelical” a college reaches out through all of its faculty and through a warmly committed, solidly biblical Chaplain’s Office and Religion Department to establish bridgeheads with the uncommitted with the Gospel of God’s grace and to nurture the spiritual growth of those who are already Christians; if to be “evangelical” means to take the love of God in practical ways out into the community, helping the poor and disadvantaged, teaching in Sunday Schools and leading youth groups, and in countless other ways incarnating the love of Jesus, then Whitworth is “evangelical.” I am proud to be associated with it.

WILLIAM S. STODDARD

Walnut Creek Presbyterian Church

Walnut Creek, Calif.

Through Chaff To Grain

For the past six to eight months as I have read your periodical I have sifted through a lot of chaff to find a little grain. Therefore, I felt like the merchant who found the pearl of great price or the man who discovered the treasure in the field when I happened upon the article “Mary Reconsidered,” by Dr. David Steinmetz in the December 5 issue. I must say that this article is without doubt the finest piece of work I have found in your publication.

Even more striking is the position it occupies in the issue—first, not tucked away in some corner on page 92. You must have considered it important enough to merit such a high place. I think your judgment is correct. Publish any more articles like this one and I will have to reconsider may decision not to renew my subscription when it comes due this Spring.

DAVID STOHLMANN

Mt. Olive Lutheran Church

Sebastopol, Calif.

A Parish Pastor Replies

May a Grand Rapids parish pastor reply to a letter by Edd Doerr, Educational Relations Director for Americans United For Separation of Church and State (12-5-75).

Doerr writes, “… the Grand Rapids Chapter of Americans United For Separation of Church and State (has) filed suit in Michigan to enjoin two school districts from purchasing and distributing Bibles to graduating seniors (Religion in Transit, Oct. 24).… It should be noted that the plaintiff in the case is a clergyman, Jay Wabeke.”

As a pastor of seventeen years standing in one of Grand Rapids’ larger congregations, I was unaware that we have a chapter of Americans United.… Some years ago the city had a chapter of AU which was comprized largely of Reformed and Christian Reformed clergy and laymen. When they found that the official position of AU was quite contrary to their own views, they withdrew almost enmass. This withdrawal included two of the officers, both of whom were clergymen of the Reformed Church In America.…

Doerr’s letter also contains a number of errors. Jay Wabeke is not known to me as a clergyman, nor as a resident of Grand Rapids. I recognize the name because of his compulsive, inflamatory letter writing to the “Public Pulse” of the local daily paper. In these letters his residence is indicated as Coopersville, a small town situated between Grand Rapids and Muskegon. His listing in the Coopersville section of the telephone directory does not identify him as a clergyman. The two school districts against which he has filed suit are Hudsonville and Zeeland, two small towns situated between Grand Rapids and Holland.

GORDON H. GIROD

Seventh Reformed Church

Grand Rapids, Mich.

Fine Defense

I want to thank you for the fine article in the December 5 issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, “The Christian Source of Truth.” Dr. Lindsell’s defense of the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture in this article and others is heart-warming to me and to many in my church.

JOHN C. ZIMMERMANN

President

The Iowa District East

The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod

Cedar Rapids

Jock Syndrome

In the fifteen plus years that I have been a CHRISTIANITY TODAY subscriber, it has become apparent that CT has been caught up in what I call the “Jock Syndrome.” Such a syndrome is expressed in subtle ways, such as the inclusion of the brief account of a University of Washington footballer making three trips into the end zone, two for touchdowns and one for prayer (News, Nov. 21).

There is no one who more loves to hear and see a dynamic Christian testimony than myself, but why is it that we tend to leave the impression that a Christian testimony is somewhat lacking in validity if the testifier cannot be introduced as “a former All-Pro running back”?

I have attended many crusades and rallies, but I can never recall anyone ever being introduced as “the first trombonist of the award-winning Podunk U marching band,” to give a rousing testimony as to what Jesus Christ has done in his life. Why not? Because somehow we have assumed that “stud-faith” will impress more impressionable people than will some person who only plays a trombone. And we, in evangelical circles, have, consciously or unconsciously, become manipulators of the Grace of God.

WILLIAM H. SIMPSON

Chaplain

Northeast Baptist Hospital

San Antonio, Tex.

Where The Warning Was

In your interview entitled “The China Watch” (Nov. 21), David Adeney recollects an article on Watchman Nee that warns the Hong Kong government about his “growing religious empire.” This article is found in three issues of the monthly news magazine Nan Pei Chi (vols. 32–34, 1973), and actually warns against the growing “empire” of Nee’s successor, Witness Lee.

DANA R. ROBERTS

S. Hamilton, Mass.

Georgia O’Keeffe: Visionary In God’S Wilderness

I have picked flowers where I found them—

Have picked up sea shells and rocks and pieces of wood where there were sea shells and rocks and pieces of wood that I liked

When I found the beautiful white bones on the desert I picked them up and took them home too

I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it.

At eighty-eight the unquestioned matriarch of modern art in America, Georgia O’Keeffe presents a unique vision in her painting and drawing—at once intensely personal and radically expressive of the strange and lively otherness of the natural world. Her works emerge like icons from a sacred pilgrimage through an inner landscape of great emotional range, or as one critic commented, hers is “an art of psychic confession, an inner recital of symbolic language, like the murmur of acolytes.” She stands before nature filled with awe and wonder, yet “paints the mountains of New Mexico as though they answered when she spoke.” (4, p. 20; the 4 and the numbers in references to follow designate the five works listed at the end of the article). The painting A Black Bird With Snow-Covered Red Hills reflects this marvelous dual quality. As Daniel Catton Rich has observed, there is about it not only “the silence of winter” but also a “suggestion of a personal winter, a personal silence” (2, p. 23).

Mediated through her powerful vision, the simple objects of her environment—large rocks or common flowers, bleached bones, a starkly colored gully or the shadows and shapes of an old adobe wall—come alive from within. In her works the very bones live and the stones cry out. She is a kinswoman to the Hebrew poets whose art and wisdom fill the pages of the Old Testament, a twentieth-century anchorite who has been to the wilderness and returned with a treasure. Especially for evangelical Christians, who emphasize the primacy of the Word and of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, O’Keeffe’s work may serve as a significant reminder of how God reveals himself in the natural order and the sensual world. The towering architectural forms rising dramatically out of a mysterious sea in Lightening at Sea, or the great yellow bolts of energy that hang, both beautiful and terrible, in an enormous, bold orange and yellow sky in From the Plains, are reminiscent of the Old Testament theophanies when Yahweh addressed his people from the midst of the burning bush or out of a whirlwind.

Georgia O’Keeffe was born in the farming community of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, in 1887. Although she showed early promise as a painter, she was largely dissatisfied with her conventional work until she came under the tutelage of Arthur Dow in 1914. His emphasis on the elements of color and line and form as the essential language of painting, and his promotion of the styles of clarity and abstraction often found in Oriental art, liberated and transformed her sense of herself as an artist. “I decided … to at least paint as I wanted to and say what I wanted to when I painted,” she wrote in explanation. “I found I could say things with color and shape that I couldn’t say in any other way—things that I had no words for.” (3, p. 22).

In the years during which she developed her craft with Dow, O’Keeffe spent four winters on the high plains of the West Texas Panhandle, discovering in that barren landscape with its fierce heat and winds and storms a deep source of inspiration. “It was the only place I have ever felt that I really belonged,” she wrote a friend in 1919. “That was my country—terrible winds and a wonderful emptiness.” (1, p. 9).

In 1916, a friend showed some of O’Keeffe’s drawings to Alfred Stieglitz in New York. The pioneer American photographer and modern-art exhibitor was quite impressed, exclaiming when he saw her work: “Finally a woman on paper!” A friendship grew between them that blossomed into marriage a few years later, lasting until his death in 1946.

Her reputation was already established when a series of stunning paintings of enormous flowers she did in the 1920’s had a sensational public reception. In a characteristic comment, she wrote that she was “attempting to express what I saw in a flower which apparently others failed to see” (3, p. 26). These works probe deeply and do seem to express far more than the finest closeup photography does in examining the inner architecture of the flower. “O’Keeffe,” wrote one critic, “has penetrated into the very essence of nature and brought back reports of its mysterious existence” (3, p. 26). Lewis Mumford heralded her as one of the “most original talents America has possessed in painting,” and suggested she was assured a place in American painting similar to that of Emily Dickinson in American poetry (4, pp. 17, 18).

After she made a trip to Taos, New Mexico, in 1929, the northern New Mexico desert, with its vast panoramas, bold, numinous light, and unparalleled clay hills in a rainbow of subtle color, began to appear frequently as the locus of her work. To the often asked question of why she does not include the human face or figure in her paintings, she once replied that she believed she could get “all the life that has been lived in a place … into a picture by suggestion” (3, p. 29). Nowhere is she more successful in achieving this than in the work that comes from this fierce and sensual land with its long tradition of Spanish American Catholic culture around Abiqui and Ghost Ranch, where she had settled permanently by 1940.

In both Black Cross, New Mexico and Black Cross With Red Sky, a massive black wooden cross looms in the foreground as a powerful silhouette against a red-soaked sky over the muted colors of rolling clay hills in a remarkable portrait of “the somber tragic spirit of Spanish Catholicism in this land of the Pentitentes” (1, p. 23).

Cow’s Skull-Red White and Blue has the quality of a death mask and overtones of the crucifixion as it shows the haunting image of a blanched skull flat against a brilliant field of color.

Summer Days presents a bleached white antlered skull hanging as a brooding presence of death above a gorgeous New Mexico sky and arid brown hills. Beneath the skull a shockingly lovely spray of bright red and yellow wild flowers springs out in vivid juxtaposition—the whole image one of death and resurrection.

The artist has said of these paintings: “I brought home the bleached bones as my symbols of the desert. To me they are as beautiful as anything I know … strangely more living than the animals walking around.… The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive in the desert even though it is vast and empty and untouchable—and knows no kindness with all its beauty” (4, p. 18).

Abbe Michel Quoist wrote in his Prayers that “if only we knew how to look at life through God’s eyes, we would see it as innumerable tokens of the love of the Creator seeking the love of his creatures. The Father has put us into the world … to search for him through things, events, people. Everything must reveal God to us” (5, p. 17). In expressing her vision Georgia O’Keeffe has kept faith with her own extraordinary gifts and understanding, and she offers us much instruction in how we may look at life and see the natural world “through God’s eyes.”

1. Lloyd Goodrich and Doris Bry: Georgia O’Keeffe. Exhibition and Catalogue by the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), 1970.

2. Daniel Catton Rich: An Exhibition by Georgia O’Keeffe at the Worcester (Mass.) Art Museum. October 4-December 4, 1960.

3. Daniel Catton Rich: Georgia O’Keeffe. The Art Institute of Chicago, 1943.

4. Mitchell A. Wilder, editor: Georgia O’Keeffe: An Exhibition of the Work of the Artist From 1915 to 1966. Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Fort Worth, Texas, March 17–May 8, 1966.

5. Michel Quoist: Prayers, translated by Agnes M. Forsyth and Anne Marie de Commaille. Sheed and Ward, 1963.

JAMES R. LAURIE

James R. Laurie is resident counselor at the Pastoral Counseling and Education Center of the Greater Dallas Council of Churches, Dallas, Texas.