How About $2.50 A Soul?

I have a friend who pastors a small church in a small town. The big-name evangelists don’t make it into town for regular crusades (and now, television fans, “Billy Graham’s Temecula Crusade”). But the no-name evangelists do. When you don’t have a name, you have to have a gimmick … or a guarantee. And the evangelist who came to my friend’s small town did.

He called all the pastors together, described his crusade, and then said in sacred tones, “I can guarantee that 250 souls will come to Christ in the seven days I’m here.” For the 250 souls and seven days, no-name wanted $1,500.

Later my friend and I figured it out on his calculator: 250 souls for $1,500 is $6 a soul. That seems high even in today’s inflationary market. If he can make guarantees, we reasoned, why can’t we dicker on the cost? So we came up with a counter-proposal.

We’ll pay top dollar—$5 a soul—for first-time conversions. (We don’t want the evangelist stacking the deck, so to speak.) We’ll spend $2.50 for second-and third-timers. (Nazarenes would call them that; Presbyterians would say “reaffirmations of faith.”) However, we’ll only pay $1.50 for people over sixty-five because they are unlikely to go into “full-time Christian service.”

We presented the plan to the evangelist. For some reason, he didn’t buy it. I can’t understand it. He could have made $2,100 in a good week.

EUTYCHUS VII

Surprisingly Healthy

Your editorials in the November 21 issue (“And How Are Things at Home?” and “Book of the Year, Topic of the Year”) stating that “if you think that raising children is chiefly the woman’s responsibility, rid yourself of that notion” and commending the books of Scanzoni-Hardesty and Jewett to your readers reminded me that I have wanted to write for several weeks to commend CHRISTIANITY TODAY for its positive and healthy approach to the “women issue” in evangelical circles. The editorials, book reviews, and articles have been more favorable to the equal status and role of women and men in society and church than, very frankly, I had expected. I encourage you to take even more forthright leadership in helping evangelical Christians to come to a proper and peaceful acceptance of the privilege and responsibility of every Christian to serve in any position in the Church to which God may call her/him.

DAVID M. SCHOLER

Associate Professor of New Testament Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary South

Hamilton, Mass.

I was puzzled and dismayed to hear that fifty-five out of 150 evangelical leaders canvassed by Eternity should honor Scanzoni and Hardesty’s All We’re Meant to Be as a “most significant” book, the one that evangelicals “need to read” for 1975. Has the view of Scripture of one-third of such leaders so changed as to accept with favor a book whose hermeneutical and exegetical presuppositions are so at variance with those one used to identify as their own?… But perhaps the fifty-five were disarmed by the preface in which a warmed-over version of the “God’s will” plea is entered, the writing of the book being portrayed as an answer to prayer, an evocation of the working of God’s love in two hearts.… That there is substance to the charge that women have not been given their proper place in the Church is clear enough. But there are only two ways to remedy this: revive the biblical structure and practice, or replace it with another one. The danger for Christians, especially Christian leaders, is to allow a proper guilt over the failure to work out the biblical structure in their own families and churches to stampede them into an innovation which is not only now the easier option but also destructive and non-biblical. As Harvard Divinity School dean Stendahl candidly notes in his essay on the topic, the ideology of feminist theology finds its roots “in the Enlightenment or in Hellas or in the cult of Baal,” not in the Bible. Here, I believe, is the real choice: not exegetical but ideological, and therefore not the outside of the cup but the inside.

JEREMY JACKSON

Syracuse, N. Y.

From Resource To ‘Rip-Out’

I would like to express appreciation for the good articles that have appeared in CHRISTIANITY TODAY this past year. More and more it is becoming the best resource for my keeping up with current thought and trends important to the parish ministry. Two other periodicals have been dropped because of the excellent coverage in this magazine.

One aspect of the magazine has been disturbing recently. It has begun to look like Sport’s Illustrated, Psychology Today, and some of the other periodicals that specialize in postcard inserts throughout the pages. One wonders if the next “pop theology” will be called “rip-out Christianity.”

CHRISTIANITY TODAY has a much more vital service than being an outlet for bulk mailing purposes. I detest the thought of having to rank this periodical as one that has to be cleaned out before it can be enjoyed and studied.

EDWARD B. NEWTON

Lakeview Covenant Church

Duluth, Minn.

Just a word to express my appreciation of your excellent magazine. I read it cover to cover. I especially like those low-key cartoons, where you often transpose a Bible character into a present-day confrontation.

MARK BUHITE

Reynoldsville, Pa.

Separate—From What

Your November 7 issue on higher education raised the question of whether Christians should “season” secular campuses, but addressed itself entirely to Christian colleges. On the basis of my six years on three secular campuses in the U.S. and nine years (six as a student) in two British universities, I would encourage every Christian student to go to a secular campus.

Parents commonly send their children to Christian colleges to protect them from anti-Christian teaching and morality, and to give them Bible teaching integrated with their studies, in a community with a Christian life-style. The monastic issue is an old one; biblical separation is from sin, not from sinners. Christians are to be salt and light in a rotting and dark world. When a professor becomes aware of a substantial Christian minority among his students and colleagues, his teaching will usually show less anti-Christian bias. And we have nothing to hide; Christianity has the answers, and will stand up in debate. Further, the major need for today’s Christian student is to integrate his faith and studies with his life, which includes witness to his non-Christian contemporaries.

GLYN O. ROBERTS

University of Colorado

Boulder, Colo.

Visiting Associate Professor of Astro-Geophysics

Simone Weil, Or Radical Sainthood

Simone Weil published only a few articles during her lifetime. She died in 1943 at the age of thirty-four in England of slow starvation; in a weakened physical state she had refused to eat more than the workers in occupied France. Her singular life has something of “the madness of the Holy fool” (the phrase is Leslie Fiedler’s). She wrote in 1942:

Pain and peril are indispensable to my mental make-up. It is fortunate that this is not so with everyone, otherwise all organized activity would be impossible without it; but for my part, I cannot change, I know this from long experience. The suffering that is spread over the whole surface of the earth obsesses me and overwhelms me to the point of annihilating my faculties, and I cannot recover them and free myself from this obsession, unless I take upon myself a large share of danger and suffering [quoted by Jacques Cabaud in Simone Weil: A Fellowship in Love, Channel, 1964, p. 278].

While Simone Weil’s identification with the workers of France was evident by a number of “extreme” acts, her singular and luminous spiritual odyssey did not become apparent until the posthumous publication of her writings. The most well-known books appearing in English are Waiting For God, including letters to a priest giving her spiritual autobiography and her reasons for refusing baptism and important essays such as “Forms of the Implicit Love of God” and “Concerning the Our Father,” and Gravity and Grace, a small selection of notebook entries, arranged topically.

Weil belongs to the great tradition of French notebook-writers and essayists, and her style is based on paradox and apparent contradiction. “Contradiction,” she wrote, “is the proof that we are not everything. Contradiction is our wretchedness, and the sense of our wretchedness is the sense of reality.” One cannot gain a true picture of her without reading the entire notebooks and such essays on the need for social justice as “The Iliad as a Poem of Force” and The Need for Roots.

C.S. Lewis entitled his spiritual autobiography Surprised by Joy; Simone Weil might have called hers Surprised by Love and Joy. Nothing about her early upbringing in an agnostic, upper-middle-class, Jewish family in Paris would suggest that one day she would have mystical experiences of the presence of Christ and would state that “Christ Himself came down, and He took me.” In his biography of her, Jacques Cabaud cites Sophocles’ Antigone (“I was made for fellowship in love not fellowship in hate”), calling his book Simone Weil: A Fellowship in Love.

As a child, she felt overshadowed by her brilliant older brother, and she exhibited a strong sense of self-denial, refusing, for example, at the age of five to eat sugar because the soldiers in World War I had to do without it. Suffering from severe migraine headaches, at fourteen she experienced almost suicidal despair because of her sense of worthlessness.

She was saved when she realized that the truly humble person, through a special quality of experience, can rise above the physical and discover truth. “Truth lights up the soul in proportion to its purity, not in any sense to its quantity.” Through will power setting aside physical suffering, she discovered the force of focused attention and came to view truth as available to all; in fact, attention became for her a key to study, worship, prayer, and love. Emptied of the self and propelled by a desire for truth, one focuses his complete attention in an act of patient waiting and allows the truth through grace to seize him.

She wrote:

With all things, it is always what comes to us from outside, freely and by surprise, as a gift from heaven, without our having sought it, that brings us pure joy. In the same way, real good can only come from outside ourselves, never from our own effort. We cannot under any circumstances manufacture something which is better than ourselves [Gravity and Grace, tr. Arthur Wills, Putnam, 1952, p. 94].

A desire for social justice in this world existed alongside a longing for transcendence of the material as a kind of double strand in Simone Weil’s life. After extraordinary studies in philosophy with the influential teacher Alain (at the Ecole Normale she was called “the categorical imperative in skirts”), she began a teaching career in provincial lycees (secondary schools). Her unorthodox teaching methods plus her activities among the workers during the depression alienated her from both school authorities and the middle-class parents of students, and she had several different teaching positions.

In 1935, she took a year’s leave of absence for factory work, weakening her health and coming to apprehend Christianity as the “religion of slaves.” She also participated briefly in the Spanish Civil War but withdrew in ill health after an accidental injury. The accident was typical of a certain ungainliness that marked her attempts at direct social involvement and physical labor.

As World War II broke out, her family fled in 1940 to Marseilles and later to New York. Weil followed her parents to New York but never recovered from what she came to see as the mistake of forsaking her “roots” in France. In 1942, she joined the French Provisional Government in London, but desk work was not what she wanted. Her plans to join the underground in France frustrated, her health failing, her mind exhausted, she was hospitalized in April, 1943, and died in August.

Weil’s interest in God evolved in the 1930s, a natural result of her personal inclinations, but given impetus by her year of factory work. In her spiritual autobiography she describes several key experiences during these years. For example, in Assisi in 1937, compelled “by something stronger” than herself, she knelt in a church for the first time. The year following, in Solesmes, France, at a moment of suffering from one of her headaches, an intense experience of joy came to her as she listened to Gregorian chant. In Solesmes, she also met a young English Catholic who introduced her to the metaphysical poets, and in particular to George Herbert’s “Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back.…” She memorized the poem, and it became a prayer for her.

Other experiences of divine love followed, until they took the form of mystical visitations from Christ. By 1941, she was discussing baptism and reciting in Greek the “Our Father” as she worked for a time in the fields of southern France. The theme of the bread of the mass and the eating of transcendent bread (an image in the Herbert poem, also) counterbalances in Weil’s writings her own asceticism. But the theme also becomes linked to Christ as a model for love lived out. In discussing love of one’s neighbor, she says:

It is the benefactor himself, as a bearer of Christ, who causes Christ to enter the famished sufferer with the bread he gives him. The other can consent to receive this presence or not, exactly like the person who goes to communion. If the gift is rightly given and rightly received, the passing of a morsel of bread from one man to another is something like a real communion [Waiting For God, tr. Emma Craufurd, Harper & Row, reprint 1973, p. 139].

Simone Weil was never baptized and she never adopted an orthodox theology. Spuming the legalism she saw in her Jewish heritage, she was silent about the persecution of World War II; her intellectual affinity was with Greek, rather than Hebrew, thought. She also studied Sanskrit and Hinduism, finding truth in religions outside Christianity and refusing to compromise her intellectual honesty where she felt it conflicted with church dogma. She came perilously close to Gnosticism, but she was, above all, a follower of Christ as a model for radical sainthood. “Today it is not nearly enough merely to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness, it also without precedent.”

The appeal of Simone Weil to our time is suggested by the production in 1970 of an award-winning play, Approaching Simone, by Megan Terry, a representative of experimental, non-establishment theater in the United States. When asked about her interest in Simone Weil, Megan Terry said that “all the heroes are dead or killed or compromised, and women need heroes. That’s why I wrote Approaching Simone.”

PATRICIA WARD

Patricia Ward teaches French and comparative literature at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park.

Healey Willan: A Rich Musical Mixture

Healey Willan is one of an admirable breed of twentieth-century church musicians. He and others like him stand in a special relationship to the recurrent concerns in church music, quality and appropriateness. They are also distinctive in the way they relate to the known and the new, the simple and the complex. As the debate ranges among proponents of the extremes, musicians such as Willan succeed in a mediating approach that brings function and integrity together. They achieve this through a rich mixture of conservatism, liturgical sensitivity, a certain technical fluency, and a flair for brevity and economy of means. Their work is guided by a knowledge of the historical realities of the church modes, classical harmony and counterpoint, hymn and chant tunes, the vocal and instrumental traditions, and the chief forms these traditions have engendered: the anthem, the motet, and the choral prelude.

The result is a musical style that is eminently performable, satisfying to a surprising cross section of laity, clergy, and musicians. It is a kind of music that is good without being epochal, tasteful without suggesting snobbery. At its best, it is organically one with all the activities of corporate workship; yet if it must, it can stand alone.

Music of this kind is not easy to compose. Although many attempt it—David McK. Williams, Harold Friedell, Gordon Jacobs, Joseph Clokey, Eric Thiman, Martin Shaw, George Oldroyd, Everett Titcomb, David H. Williams, Austin Lovelace, Gordon Young—few consistently succeed. Willan himself, more often in his later years, seemed at times to lose the edge, going from fluency to formula. But even his weaker efforts are above embarrassment.

For organists and choir directors, the list of Willan’s useful music is impressive. Attention is focused upon a few of his choral compositions, although his organ works (especially the two Preludes and Fugues, the Epilogue, the Introduction, Passacaglia and Fugue, the many hymn and choral preludes) should make up a good portion of the church organist’s library.

Willan’s major choral composition, An Apostrophe to the Heavenly Host, for a cappella double chorus, is a fine piece though out of reach of many choirs. It is difficult to suggest a list—others’ choices would differ—but here are some starters.

First, hymn anthems (the publishers are listed in parenthesis): Now Thank we All Our God (C.F Peters), We Sing the Praise of Him Who Died (Peters), Christ, Whose Glory Fills the Skies (Concordia), Sing to the Lord of Harvest (Concordia), and Father of Heaven, Whose Love Profound (Concordia).

Then, some anthems and motets: The Three Kings (Oxford), Lord, Thou Hast Searched Me Out (Flammer), I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes (Concordia), Seven Liturgical Motets (Oxford), Behold the Lamb of God (Concordia), Isaiah, Mighty Seer (Concordia), Grant Us Thy Light (Concordia), The Spirit of the Lord (Concordia) and Sing We Triumphant Songs (H. W. Gray).

HAROLD M. BEST

Harold M. Best is director of the Wheaton Conservatory, Wheaton, Illinois.

Twenty years ago, on January 8, 1956, five young missionaries met their deaths on an obscure river beach in Ecuador. Camping on “Palm Beach,” a sand bar on the Curaray where they had landed in a light plane, the five Americans were attempting contact with the savage Aucas. Their endeavor ended in blood and heartbreak. But soon the door to the Aucas began to open. Already a sister of one of the five, Rachel Saint, had met an Auca girl named Dayuma, who had fled from her tribe years before. Slowly Dayuma taught Rachel her language, but she was unwilling to take Rachel to her people in the jungle. Only when she saw some of her relatives in a strip of movie film retrieved from the Palm Beach slaying scene did she realize it might be safe for her to return. By then, Dayuma believed in the Christ she learned about in “God’s Carving” (her term for the Bible). In 1958 she and Rachel entered the Auca territory. The Auca village of Tiwaeno has been Rachel’s home ever since.

Question. You were already a missionary in Ecuador when the five missionaries to the Auca Indians were killed, weren’t you?

Answer. Yes. As a matter of fact, I was visiting with Elisabeth Elliot at her home in Shandia, in the eastern jungle among the Quechua Indians. I did not know it, but the other women did not want her to be alone at the time of the contact with the Aucas, so they arranged my visit to coincide with the men’s trip.

Question. How involved were the wives with this operation?

Answer. They were tremendously involved. They knew the risks and actually were the back-up team through the radio contacts. The men had only been gone a comparatively short time when the attack took place, perhaps about five days.

Question. Was there any kind of bitterness and anger or loss of spiritual vitality among the families of the men?

Answer. I remember that my sister-in-law, Marge Saint (now Vander Puy), said she didn’t know why the world was making so much of five men doing what every missionary was supposed to do. The norm of Christian living is to die for your faith. I think that the way the wives received this tragedy was what made the biggest impact on the outside world.

Question. What part did Dayuma play in this?

Answer. Dayuma had been separated from her family and the tribe for ten or twelve years. We had become friends, and she was beginning to open up to the Gospel. She felt that her family might have been involved in the killing of the five men. It would have been very risky for her to go back. If she met an enemy group, she would be killed. When the film was brought back from the destroyed camp, she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that several members of her family were alive and were responsible in part for the killings. She deduced that it might have been some of her relatives who had received some of the gifts from our men. This was proven after we moved into the tribe. One day her younger brother brought out the very rope that my brother had used to let the gifts down from the plane.

But it was the sense of responsibility for the actions of her brothers and the desire to go back to her family that was the final motivation in bringing her to the Lord. She never deviated from her desire to go back in to the Aucas.

Question. Do you think now that the men were mistaken in their attempt?

Answer. There has been a lot of criticism. But I feel that they took all the precautions they were able to. I had been living on a nearby plantation studying the Auca language with Dayuma. I was hoping to get into the closed territory of the tribe myself and was not aware of the men’s plans. They came over and asked many very careful questions: Was it as dangerous as people thought? What might the Indians do? Their research was as thorough as it could have been. I think that the only further precaution they could have taken was not to be willing to risk their lives. Some have called the project a waste of manpower, but it opened the way for Betty Elliot and her daughter and Dayuma and me to go into the tribe.

You see, for us to be willing to live with them cut straight across the pattern for revenge. They killed our men. Dayuma’s brother had killed my brother. Yet we were asking to live with them instead of taking our revenge. Then one day they found that our men had had guns with them when they were attacked and that they could have defended their lives. But they chose to die rather than shoot the Indians. Nothing less than this kind of commitment would have broken the Aucas’ cultural mindset.

Question. How long have you worked with the Aucas?

Answer. I have actually lived with them for eighteen years. There were five years of language learning and preparation prior to my living in with the tribe.

Question. What are some of the major changes among the Aucas?

Answer. The Aucas have been thoroughly acquainted with demons and devil worship for many generations. The result of this is a religion of terror. The witch doctor is the central authority, and he controls the tribe. Any death is supposed to be caused by the witch doctor. Then that death has to be avenged and the feuding starts. They are afraid that they might be speared at night in their own houses. Everyone is a potential enemy. If a father loses a son, he feels he must kill his daughter. If the group loses a marriageable girl, a grandmother is killed. Why should a worthless old woman live if a marriageable girl has died? This kind of thinking permeates their culture.

Now at the time the five men were killed, there were no witch doctors left in that group, so the killing was done in a vacuum, in a sense. There was no obvious source for the killing or for vengeance. With the prayers of the people around the world for the Aucas, and for us, the Gospel took root very quickly. It doesn’t happen quite so fast in other groups.

Question. Where does the Gospel start making changes?

Answer. It is the teaching of the resurrection of the body and forgiveness of sins that gives the Indian a peace of heart that is absolutely amazing to see. I really never had a good night’s sleep until we were able to teach enough of the Gospel to make them understand that God would take care of them even in the face of their enemies. Their tremendous fearfulness has been transformed.

Question. You have been translating the Bible into the Auca language. How much has been done?

Answer. Mark has been printed and about fourteen chapters of Acts. They are reading it just as fast as we can get it to them.

Question. Did you have to teach the Aucas how to read?

Answer. Well, first of all we had to make an alphabet in order to give them words. Wycliffe Bible Translators has a system adaptable to primitive jungle tribes where a missionary has to begin with the development of an alphabet. Then I started a literacy program which was taken up by a young Auca Indian.

Question. It sounds as if the Aucas took the initiative quickly once they accepted you.

Answer. They are tremendously eager for school and want to learn. There are sometimes eighty people in four different classes in one day now.

Question. What about a church?

Answer. The Aucas have built their own churches. Of course, Dayuma and I gave them every backing and help. The first pupils that we taught now are the leaders of the fellowship.

Question. Are there missionaries among the Aucas now?

Answer. There are six altogether, not counting the pilots, medical workers, and technicians who stand in back of us. Dr. Catherine Peeke worked out and published a systematic linguistic approach to the Auca language. Pat Kelley is carrying on the literacy program. Jim and Kathie Yost are doing an anthropological study of social change among the Aucas.

Question. Why are there so few men working there?

Answer. They are still very much afraid of men from the outside. Jim Yost is one of the first to live there. They believe that men are killers. Women are not such a threat, and so it has been a natural thing to start with women. There are still people who are not satisfied that men should be living there even now.

Question. Some anthropologists and even some missionaries say that we should leave people like this alone, that we destroy their cultural patterns. What is your response to this?

Answer. I have thought about it a great deal and I have come to the conclusion that we are actually giving the Indians back that which they lost, maybe hundreds of years ago. In the stories of the Indians, they recognize one God. They do not know his Son, nor his name. But they have many of the stories that seem to be universal among primitive peoples, stories of the flood, of the personal dealing of God with man. So we are simply taking them back to their old, old stories and filling in the facts of the Gospel. We really are giving them the conclusion of their own culture, not robbing them of something pure and innocent.

Question. Primitive revelation is a fascinating study. We don’t usually hear of it from missionaries, though.

Answer. The more I study their legends, the more I find of their longing to know God. They believed that if they kept certain conditions and got past tremendous obstacles, they might finally get to heaven. But God was always angry, and might throw them out once they got to heaven.

Question. The tribe was very small, wasn’t it, when the outside world first heard of the Aucas?

Answer. When Dayuma’s family joined us, the number of Aucas was fifty-six. During twelve years of peace and stable marriages the number doubled. Then there has been a reaching out and searching the forest for long-lost relatives who had not been taught the Gospel. At the last census I wrote out the names of something like 550 Indians. That is probably all of the tribe.

Question. The evangelical missionary is often accused of not being adequately conscious of the social conditions of primitive peoples. You have strengthened the Aucas’ homes. What else have you done?

Answer. From the very first we have tried to help the Aucas catch up with the world. The day will come when the forest animals are no longer plentiful enough to support the tribe. We have brought in cattle so that they will be able to use them for food. We have also brought in chickens, ducks, and geese. They have a good agricultural program of their own and have taught us how to grow crops. So we were able to introduce papaya, citrus fruits, and pineapple.

Question. What about health education?

Answer. The immediate problem among primitive Indians is that their isolation from civilization makes them terribly susceptible to disease as soon as any outside contact occurs. We immediately started a program of vaccines and made as broad an invitation as possible. Inoculations were given to all who came.

Measles, polio, and pneumonia will wipe out a tribe in an amazingly short time if this is not done. We also have a heavy medical program with nurses and doctors from hospital facilities which are available to us. Isolation is impossible any more for the Indians, so through the work of the Gospel, they have protection that they would never get from oil companies and mining operations.

Question. Are you an agent of the United States government?

Answer. We are agents of the Lord. But I would like to think that we also operate as citizens of the United States. We have been able to help our sister country Ecuador. When I first went out, murder and spearing were terrible. There was no commerce. Now there is peace. People can live along the borders of the Auca territory. I would like to think that as an American citizen and a Christian, I have been of some help to the Ecuadorian government in a problem that they had no solution for.

Question. Why did you and the five families of the martyrs make such a heroic effort to reach such a tiny tribe when there are much larger groups still unreached even in Ecuador?

Answer. This is a good question that is still under debate. For me personally, it was the specific response to a direction that I felt was of the Lord. God needs people to work with all size groups, and this is the area where God has placed me. It is not really as much a matter of statistics as it is of personal guidance.

Question. Have there been responses to the death of those men that you can see today?

Answer. Our newest pilot on the field was a high school boy when this happened and came because of it. There is a Wycliffe mechanic there now as a result of the Auca story. At the time of their death, it was people in business who reacted. Men who were successful left their work and went to the mission field. Many people who did not go to a foreign field were won to Christ because of the men.

I found myself telling someone that if Dayuma, or Kimo, the pastor from one of the lost groups of Aucas who went to the Berlin Congress on Evangelism, or any one of those men who killed the missionaries had been the only one saved, my service would still have been worthwhile. Yet God has multiplied the fruitfulness so greatly. The Christian Aucas now pray that they will reach others. I am greatly moved at their faith as they want to be missionaries.

One day one of the Auca men felt he was called to go to a big group of Indians. He was the first one to contact them from the outside. He and his group taught them for two months, and yet they were murdered. Knowing the probability that he would be killed, the Auca fellowship stood behind him. One man said, “If you go and they kill you, I will follow you.” These Christians are willing to risk their own lives many times over as they go on the trail to reach murderers. So the Gospel has gone full circle.

Question. It would seem that your brother and the others did not die in vain.

Answer. That’s true. Apparently that was the one thing that could have reached these Indians, in whom fear and vengeance and demonism were so inbred. We need the prayers of the Christian world that the Aucas whom these Indian Christians have died for will be reached as the first group was.

Question. Do you expect to devote the remaining years of your life to the Aucas?

Answer. I’d be ready to do it. I hope that someday the Bible translation into Auca will be finished. Of course it is the native translator who is doing it, but I can help.

Question. If you were starting fresh again today to reach the Aucas, would you do anything substantially different?

Answer. I have learned a great deal through living with the Aucas for almost twenty years. I found that what I practiced at the beginning was right and I would do it again. I felt that the Aucas knew ever so much more about their own people than I could imagine. By following their leading, I was protected from many mistakes. There was nothing in my background that could ever let me imagine some of the things they know. I would advise anyone starting now in this type of work to assume that the natives are the ones who know their own culture best. Let them know that you want them to help you.

Sunny skies punctuated by slowly drifting fleecy clouds covered Nairobi and the Kenyatta Center as the Fifth Assembly of the World Council of Churches ended its deliberations with an act of worship. It left behind the usual assortment of assembly papers as attendees began the laborious job of evaluating what happened over a period of eighteen days.

From my perspective, Nairobi was a substantial improvement over Uppsala. The radical cast of the 1968 assembly had yielded to a more centrist approach, a better balance, and the rediscovery of evangelism as an important part of the mission of the Church. Undoubtedly the International Congress on World Evangelization in 1974 with its Lausanne Covenant had something to do with the mood that prevailed.

One of the finest of the speeches was given by Professor Charles Birch of the University of Sydney, Australia. Under the title “Creation, Technology, and Human Survival,” Birch painted a realistic picture of the human predicament, which he thinks now threatens the survival of man. He specified five areas that led him to his pessimistic conclusion: the population explosion, food scarcity, scarcity of non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels, environmental deterioration, and war. He adduced specific evidence to show that time is short, the threat to survival is real, and the need for the churches to get involved in changing matters is urgent. His theologizing left much to be desired, but apart from that, his portrait was accurate. He intimated that there was not much hope for a solution that was not imposed by some form of authoritarianism.

At this point evangelicals have something to learn from the WCC. While it has been overweighted on the side of socio-political involvement in the past, yet it can be praised for attempting to do something about the problems it sees in the world. The Nairobi assembly approved a number of concrete proposals calling for justice and observance of human rights.

In its resolution pertaining to the Middle East the assembly ran into a snag, although the statement in general was evenhanded. The snag had to do with the Palestinian Liberation Organization: whether the Israelis should sit down at the negotiating table with them and whether the PLO people should have the right to return to Palestine. There are no easy solutions to these thorny problems, especially since the PLO has called for the total elimination of Israel from Palestine. How Israel can then negotiate from this announced intention and how it could repatriate the PLO without endangering its own existence remains unanswered.

A resolution was adopted asking for what can only be construed as some kind of internationalizing of Jerusalem to preserve the religious aspirations of Jews, Christians, and Muslims to the holy places. The resolution was weakened by being extended to other holy sites beyond the borders of the holy city. The cause of women was endorsed as well and sexism castigated. The request to say something about the use of grains for the production of alcoholic beverages got some attention and approval. But nothing was done about the pollution problem related to tobacco consumption. Indeed, the Kenyatta Center was in a state of continuous pollution from the noxious fumes of cigarettes.

Evangelicals can happily join the WCC in approval of many of these resolutions and commend it for its deep concern for human betterment. It was in connection with the Helsinki matter that the most dramatic confrontation developed. And it may be that the way the conflict was settled will leave the WCC with the charge of losing its credibility and forsaking its prophetic function. What happened was this: in the consideration of the Helsinki declaration an amendment was moved from the floor to name the U.S.S.R. as a specific violator of the human-rights provision, especially in the area of religious freedom. M. M. Thomas, who was presiding at the time, took a vote on the amendment. The delegates voted overwhelmingly in favor of it. Then American delegate Robert Moss rose to challenge the nature of the vote, claiming that it should have been a call for the previous question, not a vote on the amendment. Rightly or wrongly the chairman had taken a vote on the amendment and delegates had voted favorably. Thomas then reversed himself and took a new vote on whether the question was called for. That vote (requiring a 2/3 majority) was lost.

A coffee break was called, and the politicking began. Two key Soviet delegates rushed to the platform to talk to the officials. When the coffee break was over, WCC president Payne of Britain jumped into the fray. He said that the matter was too serious for a quick or frivolous decision, and that it should be referred back to committee or to the new Central Committee. After a hassle it was referred back to the committee.

The following day the committee presented a new report that effectively nullified the intention of the original amendment, calling for the matter to be referred to the Central Committee, deleting the name of the U.S.S.R., and asking for a report on the matter at the first meeting of the Central Committee next August. This amendment was finally adopted, but one speaker rose to declare that the credibility of the WCC was at stake since the original vote indicated the sense of the assembly whereas the new action was a grievous betrayal of that vote. The delegates from the U.S.S.R. abstained from voting, even against the watered-down amendment, and one of them rose to charge the assembly with a lack of love.

The delegates from the Soviet Union clearly implied that they could do without the WCC if necessary. It was a veiled threat, but it was effective. Unfortunately, the way things went the WCC was faced with the possible loss of U.S.S.R. Orthodox participation or the loss of credibility for itself. It risked the latter. But it did so against a backdrop of persistent criticism of its perennial choice of other nations it wished to arraign without ever spotlighting the U.S.S.R., which is among the most flagrant violators of human rights. Lurking in the background is the continued silence of the Geneva secretariat or any assembly to assert the claims of freedom for the oppressed peoples of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Ukraine, Poland, East Berlin, and Lithuania, to mention a few. The positive and appropriate resolution of the Nairobi assembly calling on Indonesia to withdraw its military presence from East Timor and to allow the people there to decide their own destiny was quite at odds with its failure to come to the aid of the European countries under the iron heel of the Soviet dictatorship.

Some good came from the fact that this was the first time the Soviets were openly subjected to criticism by any assembly. Now the further credibility and the good faith of the WCC will be seen when and if the Central Committee treats the U.S.S.R. the same way it has treated South Africa when it meets next August.

One of the significant plusses of the assembly was its new stance on evangelism and evangelization. The delegates showed a great interest in this subject. Approximately one-third of them asked to be assigned to Section I, “Confessing Christ Today.” In connection with evangelism, it was particularly appropriate that the assembly went on record opposing syncretism. Before this statement was approved, it encountered strong resistance from J. R. Chandran, a south Indian who is president of United Theological College in Bangalore. Moreover, M. M. Thomas in his moderator’s report for the Central Committee left behind the same impression by his use of the term “Christ-centered syncretism.” This served to highlight the obvious fact that the WCC is theologically pluralistic, as are its member churches, which have in them theological viewpoints ranging from the extreme left to the right.

The WCC program committee chose Bishop Mortimer Arias to be its spokesman on behalf of evangelism. (He was not a delegate, since his church is not a full member of the WCC.) A reply to his paper was made by John R. Stott, chosen by the WCC as a representative of the conservative evangelicals. Bishop Arias said that “staying together” (the basis of the WCC) “is secondary to the indispensable task of the Church of Christ: the evangelization of the world.” He identified evangelism as an essential priority, essential for the Church and its permanent task as well. Arias was somewhat openended in his assertion that he and others who had been proclaiming the new man had “met him among those people, who spent their day digging like moles below the mountains of Bolivia and who did not consider themselves members of the Church. All that was missing was the naming of the Name. And we had to recognize that perhaps these people had more of Christ in them than we who spoke in his name.”

Stott, in his response, said, “Would it be unfair to say that the bishop’s address is not typical of recent ecumenical utterances?” He went on to say that he wished to speak positively “of what the World Council needs to recover.” He mentioned five things: (1) A recognition of the lostness of man; (2) confidence in the Gospel of God; (3) a conviction about the uniqueness of Jesus Christ; (4) a sense of urgency about evangelism; and (5) a personal experience of Jesus Christ. He argued that “if justice means the securing of people’s rights, is not one of their most fundamental rights the right to hear the Gospel?” “If love seeks to serve men’s highest welfare, can we leave them alone in their spiritual lostness and still claim to love them?”

Section I devoted itself to this matter and brought back a report that was considerably better than anything coming out of Mexico City, Uppsala, or Bangkok. It called for the proclamation of the whole Gospel to the whole world by the whole Church. “We are called to preach Christ crucified” and risen again, it said. Proclamation includes “the announcement of God’s Kingdom and love through Jesus Christ, the offer of grace and forgiveness of sins, the invitation to repentance and faith in Him, the summons to fellowship in God’s Church.”

Regrettably, the thrust of this statement was blunted somewhat by the inclusion of the assertion that the Gospel “always includes” “the responsibility to participate in the struggle for justice and human dignity, the obligation to denounce all that hinders human wholeness.” These things are not an intrinsic part of the Gospel; they are a part of the total mission of the Christian’s witness and should neither be obscured nor overlooked. The essence of the Gospel lies in its vertical dimension, in which man is made righteous in the eyes of God, which is followed by a new horizontal perspective, in which man is made right with his fellow man. The struggle for justice and human wholeness is the logical and irresistible outgrowth of the new birth.

In seeking to fulfill the mandate from the assembly, Geneva will be caught between Scylla and Charybdis. Right now it is suffering from an ominous financial crunch. It is faced with the need to cut back considerably if it is to balance its budget. If evangelism receives adequate attention, it will do so at the expense of other programs now funded by the WCC. The only alternative is to increase the WCC’s funding so that it can support a new evangelistic thrust without cutting back on other programs. The hope of this latter possibility has been seriously compromised by another aspect of Nairobi, one that endangers not only the hope for a new evangelistic outreach but the already existing programs of the WCC. To this side of Nairobi I devote my attention in the final part of this overview.

Robert McAfee Brown of Stanford University and the Honorable Michael Manley, prime minister of Jamaica, both presented major papers. It is hardly likely that their viewpoints were unknown to the program committee. If what they said was representative of the WCC as an ecclesiastical body, that is one thing; if it wasn’t, then choosing them to speak was a grave mistake.

Professor Brown wallowed in the depths of guilt. He replayed the role of critic he had played at Uppsala, when the United States was still involved in Viet Nam. He qualified his love for the United States by professing to be ashamed of it. He introduced the bizarre notion of linguistic imperialism and made his point by giving the second half of his speech in third-rate Spanish to deliver himself from the sense of guilt attached to his speaking English. He fulminated against racism, sexism, classism, and imperialism. He begged to be freed from his security in his witness, his maleness, his class situation, and his United States citizenship.

Father Sergio Torres, a Chilean Roman Catholic priest, one of the founders of “Christians for Socialism,” was the executive secretary of the Detroit Conference on “Theology in the Americas—75” held last August. In response to a question put to him by the editors of Target, the Nairobi assembly’s daily paper, he said:

The Detroit meeting attempted to clarify for the 200 North American participants … the meaning of liberation theology in the North American context.

Despite the plurality of the oppressive experiences shared during the meeting, the use of marxist analysis [my italics] produced a working hypothesis that there are four basic kinds of oppressive reality in the U.S.A., namely: imperialism, class domination, race and sexual discrimination. You will obviously recognize these categories as the framework of Dr. Robert M. Brown’s paper [my italics].

Consistent with this viewpoint, Professor Brown went on record against capitalism, now indicted under the title of imperialism.

Brown’s paper was warmly applauded for almost a minute. The ovation was to be exceeded only by that accorded to Prime Minister Manley of Jamaica. Manley delivered a carefully thought through paper with charismatic vigor and specific partisanship. He said he was “a humanist by instinct, an egalitarian in social philosophy, a democratic socialist by political commitment … and a member and spokesman of the Third World by force of circumstance and by active involvement.”

Manley went on to assert the truth of the Marxist formulation that “modern imperialism and colonialism represent the later development of capitalism in the metropolitan countries.” He denounced capitalism and accused it of being responsible for just about all the ills of mankind.

Later Dr. William Keesecker, moderator of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., said that Manley’s speech against capitalism would make it difficult to raise support for the WCC in his country. A spokesman (unnamed) for the WCC defended the presence and the speech of Manley against those who asked why there was no presentation in favor of capitalism. The WCC is not a forum, he declared, but he left unanswered the question why the WCC chose to surface Brown and Manley, both of whom were calling for the demise of capitalism. This made the platform at Nairobi one-sided in favor or socialism. Not all the delegates favored socialism, of course. But any objections were muted, and no substantive proposals and no identifiable group rose to challenge the presentations of Brown and Manley.

More than three-quarters of the financial undergirding of the WCC comes in approximately equal amounts from two capitalist countries: West Germany and the United States. A case remains to be made why Christians in these countries should support the WCC financially unless it makes it clear that it is not anti-capitalistic. Why should church people who are able to give precisely because of capitalism fund an agency, a program, or a platform that calls for the demise of the system that makes their gifts possible?

Nairobi is over. But the questions, problems, and hopes that spring from it remain. The S. S. Oikoumene has some turbulent waters to sail through in the years ahead. And the possibility that it could founder on the rock of socialism-versus-capitalism can’t be ruled out.

It’s a pity, as the Bicentennial year dawns, that we’ve picked the wrong year to celebrate. I agree that it’s too late to call off the nation’s two-hundredth birthday party. After all, the streamers are hung, the table is set, the guests are on their way. Nevertheless, I propose that the date we should be celebrating is not the organizational birth of the nation in 1776 but its organic birth in 1740. What occurred in that year was nothing less than an inner American revolution, a spiritual declaration of independence that made the political reshuffling thirty-six years later an inevitability. The year 1740 was the crest of that wave of spiritual power called the Great Awakening. Let’s look back to this awakening to see what it was and why it deserves credit as the real birth of the American consciousness.

To understand this inner American revolution of 1740 we must take the spotlight off Boston, Lexington, and Concord and shine it on the Raritan Valley of New Jersey, the quiet hills of eastern Pennsylvania, and the trim hamlets nestled in the fertile Connecticut Valley. In 1727 in a small Dutch Reformed church in New Jersey, T. J. Frelinghuysen began stressing in his preaching the need for “heart” religion. This novel emphasis broke through the frozen crust of his congregation’s complacent Calvinism like an ice axe. The Tennent family of the greater Philadelphia area lit a similar fire beneath the chilled Presbyterianism of the middle colonies with the same exciting results—hearts of men and women were set aflame. In the late thirties the tranquil Connecticut Valley shook with the fervor of the renewed Northampton Congregationalists led by their brilliant and godly pastor, Jonathan Edwards. Edwards publicized these dramatic effects in a small book entitled A Narrative of Surprising Conversions, an eyewitness account of spiritual transformations that soon became a best-seller on both sides of the ocean.

All that remained was for these regional revivals to be channeled together to create a mighty movement of spiritual power. The one man who more than any other accomplished this task was the firebrand British evangelist George Whitefield, who was then twenty-five years old. His open-air meetings stirred thousands of colonists throughout the southern and middle colonies. After a successful campaign in Philadelphia, in the waning weeks of 1739 he was led northward to New England. Thereafter New England was flooded with new conversions and renewed commitments. The impact of Whitefield on New England as the Great Awakening reached its crest can best be described in the words of Nathan Cole, a farmer of the Middletown, Connecticut, area, who wrote this eyewitness account:

Then on a sudden, in the morning about 8 or 9 of the clock there came a messenger and said Mr. Whitefield preached at Hartford and Wethersfield yesterday and is to preach at Middletown this morning at ten of the clock. I was in my field at work. I dropped my tool that I had in my hand and ran home to get my wife, telling her to make ready quickly to go and hear Mr. Whitefield preach at Middletown.… And when we came within about half a mile or a mile … I saw before me a cloud of fog rising. I first thought it came from the great river but as I came nearer the road, I heard the noise of horses feet coming down the road, and the cloud was the cloud of dust made by the horses feet.… And as I grew nearer it seemed like a steady stream of horses and their riders … all of a lather and foam with sweat, their breath rolling out of their nostrils with every jump [The Great Awakening, edited by Heimert and Miller, Bobbs-Merrill, 1967, p. 184].

Cole continues the build-up until finally the climax is reached, Whitefield’s appearance before the crowd of thousands:

When I saw Mr. Whitefield come upon the scaffold he looked almost angelical; a young, slim, slender youth, before some thousands of people with a bold undaunted countenance. And my hearing how God was with him everywhere as he came along, it solemnized my mind and put me into a trembling fear before he began to preach; for he looked as if he was clothed with authority from the Great God … and my hearing him preach gave me a heart wound. By God’s blessing, my old foundation was broken up, and I saw that my righteousness would not save me [p. 186].

This scene was repeated scores of times in that climactic year of 1740. Dozens of itinerant evangelists took Whitefield’s message to the most remote backwaters of the colonies. An inner revolution had taken place that forged a bond among the colonies and weakened the ties with Europe. What was awakened in 1740 was the spirit of American independence.

The story of the Great Awakening is an exciting one, but is this idea of an inner American revolution necessary to explain the armed rebellion of 1776? Can’t the political issue of taxation without representation sufficiently explain the widespread disaffection of the previously loyal thirteen colonies? There are three reasons for seeing the spirit of ’40 as the essential inner power behind the political eruptions of 1776.

First, the message of personal commitment and individual decision central to the Awakening reached a wider audience than the issue of taxation without representation. The merchant class of the port cities might be inflamed by the irritating tax laws, but how much popular appeal did that issue have? Colonial America was a rural society. One authority states that only one out of twenty Americans lived in the city. While Boston was certainly a powerful radiating center, it could influence only a minority in the northern colonies, and by no means the whole seaboard. To inflame the colonists sufficiently against Great Britain there had to be embers that were rekindled by the taxation issue, not created by it. The spiritual independence fostered by the Great Awakening saturated the colonies from Massachusetts to Georgia, from the Atlantic deep into the Appalachians.

Secondly, as a cause for rebellion the Great Awakening had a deeper appeal than the taxation issue. The spiritual appetite aroused in 1740 created a search for “something more,” a dissatisfaction with the status quo that refused to fade with time. Two centuries before, the Puritans of England had followed religious impulses that led to the beheading of King Charles. Is it any less likely that in 1740 transformed hearts would seek a transformed society and would want to free themselves once again from a monarch’s rule?

An example can be found in the career of the political radical Herman Husband. In 1760 he joined a southern guerrilla force that attempted to overthrow the colony of North Carolina. After failure and expulsion he moved north, where he worked tirelessly for independence from Britain. What was the source of Husband’s radicalism? In an account of his religious conversion under Whitefield and his subsequent spiritual journey, Some Remarks on Religion, written in 1750, he provides an answer. One historian comments about this interesting document that “his longing for a more abrupt and soul-ravishing experience hints at why he, along with other Americans for whom the Great Awakening was still a vivid recollection, responded as they did to the next great ‘crisis’ in the life of their society” (The Great Awakening, p. 637).

Lastly, the Great Awakening had a deeper impact on the political revolution than did the issue of taxation because of longer exposure. By 1776, three and a half decades after the flood of revival, the message of the Great Awakening with its heavy emphasis on individual responsibility had had a chance to soak deeply into the consciousness of the common man. Even granting the activities of the Sons of Liberty, the pamphlet war, and the rabble-rousers’ constant diatribes, to assert that merely thirteen years after the end of the bloody French and Indian wars the colonists would become so deeply embittered with their constant ally, Britain, that they would take up arms against her and seek the embrace of their constant enemy, the French, over a tax problem that had only limited appeal to a limited number over a very limited time—this assertion leaves unanswered questions. There had to be a previous alienation of heart and mind throughout the length and breadth of the Thirteen Colonies. The Great Awakening was the occasion of America’s alienation of heart. For three decades its impulses saturated the colonies with the message of inner freedom.

Admittedly, some of America’s leaders during the Revolution did not come to the Great Awakening type of faith; among these were Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison. But they too were influenced and carried along by its stream. We can therefore say that the Great Awakening, not the trigger issue of taxation, transformed the colonial consciousness to create the American identity through its wider audience, deeper appeal, and longer exposure. In the opinion of the noted church historian Winthrop Hudson:

The Awakening played an important role in forming a national consciousness among people of different colonies whose primary ties were with Europe rather than with one another. As a spontaneous movement which swept across all colonial boundaries, generated a common interest and a common loyalty, bound people together in a common cause and reinforced the common conviction that God had a special destiny for America, the Awakening contributed greatly to the development of a sense of cohesiveness among American people [Religion in America, Scribners, 1965, p. 76].

So enjoy the parades this year. Visit the historic sites. Celebrate the nation’s birthday to your heart’s content. But in the midst of all the talk about the spirit of ‘76, remember too that more important spirit—the spirit of 1740.