Rober Herrick: Welcoming Christ’s Advent

The Christmas poems of Robert Herrick, the seventeenth-century poet and Anglican vicar, show doctrinal understanding, emotional intensity, and artistic strength. All of Herrick’s poetry reveals a depth and breadth of perception not only of classical writers but also of the Bible and the later church fathers, especially Augustine, Ambrose, Bernard, and Aquinas. The images, phrases, and cadences of Scripture often leave their mark on his poems.

The subjects of the 272 poems in his collection called His Noble Numbers include God, the Incarnation, Christ’s suffering and death and resurrection, prayer, temptation, sin, pardon, judgment. But the advent of Christ is particularly in evidence. Beneath the title on the title page of the 1647 edition are these words: “Wherein (amongst other things) he sings the Birth of his Christ: and sighs for his Savior’s suffering on the Cross.”

Herrick’s poetry on the Incarnation unmistakably reveals that God’s becoming man was a miraculous, unprecedented act. In his epigram “Christ’s Birth,” for example, the poet writes these words:

One Birth our Savior had, the like none yet

Was, or will be a second like to it.

He captures the reason for this miraculous coming in the quatrain “Christ’s Incarnation”:

Christ took our nature on Him, not that he

‘Bove all things lov’d it, for the puritie

No, but he drest Him with our human Trim,

Because our flesh stood most in need of Him.

When we read Herrick’s Christmas poems carefully, we recognize a simplicity or a childlike tone (not to be confused with childishness or naivete), but we also discover an intricacy that can easily be missed. I will concentrate on his beautiful, intricately wrought poem of praise called “A Christmas Caroll, song to the King in the Presence at White-Hall.”

The chorus begins the carol, setting the joyful mood and announcing the purpose of the celebration:

What sweeter music can we bring,

Than a Caroll, for to sing

The Birth of this our heavenly King,

Awake the voice! Awake the string!

Heart, ears, and eye, and every thing

Awake! the while the active finger

Runs division with the singer.

Through a carefully controlled prosody, which lends an appropriate formality to the choral song, Herrick urges that the birth of the Heavenly King be celebrated with every human faculty and with the stringed instrument.

After the opening chorus there are four stanzas and a closing movement. The numbers before the stanzas designate different solo parts; sections without numbers are for the chorus. The first soloist demands the immediate banishment of night in order that honor may be given to an extraordinary new day:

1Dark and dull night, flie hence away,

And give the honour to this Day

That sees December turn’d to May.

This new day is a transforming one: darkness and dullness are to be replaced by renewal and vibrancy, for December, the end of the year and of life, is turned into May, the springtime and rebirth of nature and of life. But the second soloist has difficulty in understanding this unusual transformation and asks:

2If we may ask the reason, say;

The Why, and wherefore all things here

Seems like the Spring-time of the yeere.

If the second soloist lacks comprehension, so also does the third. Using a beautiful pastoral image, the third soloist inquires:

3Why do’s the chilling Winters morne

Smile, like a field beset with corne?

Or smell, like to a Meade new-shorne,

Thus, on a sudden?

The response is immediate and direct in the fourth solo:

4Come and see

The cause, why things thus frequent be:

’Tis He is borne, whose quickening Birth

Gives life and luster, public Mirth,

To Heaven, and the under-Earth.

The reason why there is a miraculous renewal is the “quickening”—the life-giving—birth of the Christ child. “Life,” “luster,” and “mirth” supplant darkness, night, and death. And this birth illuminates “Heaven” and “the under-Earth”; indeed, it illuminates the whole world.

The closing movement of the carol shows the reaction of people to this miraculous birth:

We see Him come, and know him ours,

Who, with His Sun-Shine, and His showers,

Turnes all the patient ground to flowers.

1The Darling of the World is come,

And fit it is, we find a roome

To welcome Him. 2The nobler part

Of all the house here, is the heart.

Which we will give Him; and bequeath

This Hollie, and this Ivie wreath,

To do Him honour; who’s our King,

And Lord of all this Revelling.

In the choral song, mankind sees the newborn Christ turning earth into an Edenic world. But Herrick carefully shows that Christ came primarily to renew and revitalize not nature but man. In view of this, Roger Rollins accurately perceives “deliberate irony” in the first soloist’s desire to find a room to welcome the Christ child. He is also right in suggesting that the irony is resolved in terms of the biblical metaphor: “The body is the temple of the Holy Spirit and the heart is the sancta sanctorum of that temple.” The heart, as the second chorus suggests, is the “nobler part of all the house here.” In the heart of man Christ should find a welcome. Because this is true, the chorus presents itself to the new King, “bequeaths” the traditional plants of Christmas (holly) and of royalty or nobility (ivy), and declares him its King as well as Lord of the celebration.

The poem, then, shows exultant celebration of the Saviour’s birth, queries about its miraculous results, firm assertion of the transforming and quickening power of the Incarnation, and willing surrender of hearts to the new King. If through it Herrick helps us to recognize this Advent season as an occasion for deep gratitude and joyful praise, he has helped us to commemorate it appropriately. E.

Beatrice Batson is professor of English at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

Catching up with ‘The Evangelicals’

Mark A. Noll

For some time now, developments within American conservative Protestantism have been racing ahead of attempts by scholars to define, describe, and analyze them. The rapid growth of theologically conservative denominations and seminaries, the vigorous evangelism of student groups and many local churches, the growing willingness of evangelical thinkers to depart from cultural traditions—these point to a ferment of no little consequence in American Christianity.

The diffuse nature of the evangelical resurgence, however, poses serious difficulties. Just what is meant by the “bloomin’, buzzin’ confusion” characterizing the modern world of evangelicals, fundamentalists, and theological conservatives? What actually do we mean when we talk about “evangelicals,” “fundamentalists,” or religious “conservatives”? Can one find a succinct, comprehensive theological definition of evangelicalism? Is conservative Protestantism an exclusively white, middle-class, and suburban phenomenon? Does the “typical” evangelical still approach scientific questions in the same way that William Jennings Byran did at the Scopes trial? Where do contemporary “Bible-believing Christians” come down politically—on the right with Billy James Hargis and Carl McIntire or on the left with the Wittenburg Door and the Post American? Are increasing signs of intellectual activity among evangelicals mere window dressing or indications of a deeper internal maturation?

Certain aspects of these questions have been treated in recent years by books of relatively limited focus. Four of these efforts have attracted particular attention. Dean Kelley tried to analyze reasons for the rapid advance of culturally and theologically conservative denominations in Why Conservative Churches Are Growing (Harper & Row, 1972). Bernard Ramm in The Evangelical Heritage (Word, 1973) set forth the theology of the sixteenth-century Reformation as the taproot from which contemporary evangelicalism has grown. Donald Bloesch’s Evangelical Renaissance (Eerdmans, 1973) examined briefly, but provocatively, indications of a new self-confidence in conservative theology. And Richard Quebedeaux defined and described a group of Young Evangelicals (Harper & Row, 1974) who have managed, in Carl Henry’s words, both to “cheer and challenge liberal ecumenists” and to “delight and distress traditional evangelicals” (CHRISTIANITY TODAY, April 26, 1974, p. 4).

Until Abingdon’s publication in September of The Evangelicals, however, no single volume has provided a satisfactory account of the theological, social, intellectual, cultural, ethnic, and historical life of modern evangelicalism. While The Evangelicals does not fully answer all the questions one could raise, its publication is a landmark in the serious study of conservative Protestantism in twentieth-century America. Its editors, David F. Wells and John D. Woodbridge, both professors of church history at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, have brought together a distinguished cast of evangelical scholars to analyze and evaluate evangelicalism in white America. The volume also includes two noteworthy essays by black evangelicals on conservative Protestantism in the black community.

The significance of The Evangelicals is considerably heightened by the fact that well-known scholars standing outside evangelicalism have also contributed to the volume. That highly respected theologians and church historians from the Protestant “mainstream” have taken serious and detailed account of the evangelicals is almost as newsworthy as what they have to say about them. Sydney E. Ahlstrom and Paul L. Holmer of Yale University, Martin E. Marty of the University of Chicago, and George H. Williams of Harvard Divinity School are names of the highest distinction in the study of American religion. While their contributions to the volume sound a condemnatory note as often as an appreciative one, their willingness to participate in this colloquy suggests that evangelicalism is intruding itself back into the consciousness of American culture. American evangelicalism may not yet have come of age, but the serious attention it receives in this volume from Ahlstrom, Holmer, Marty, and Williams show that it can no longer be passed by as a stale, flat, and unprofitable backwater of the American religious experience.

The book is divided into three sections. The first, “What Evangelicals Believe,” attacks the problem of definition. John H. Gerstner, professor of church history at Pittsburgh Seminary, sets out “The Theological Boundaries of Evangelical Faith,” while Kenneth S. Kantzer, professor of systematic theology and dean of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, discusses some of the theological subgroups within contemporary evangelicalism. Professor Holmer concludes this section by asking several penetrating questions about the nature and purposes of evangelical theology.

The second section, “Who Evangelicals Are,” includes the two path-breaking essays by respected black evangelicals. William Pannell, assistant professor of evangelism at Fuller Seminary, and William H. Bentley, president of the National Black Evangelical Association, discuss, respectively, the history of black evangelicalism and the shape of its current existence. George Marsden, associate professor of history at Calvin College, follows with a historical analysis of the process by which early twentieth-century fundamentalism and modern evangelicalism emerged from the dominant Protestant consensus of the mid-nineteenth century. “Fundamentalists and Evangelicals in Society” is the subject treated by David O. Moberg, professor of sociology at Marquette. Martin Marty closes this section with a look at “Tensions Within Contemporary Evangelicalism.”

Section three tells about “Where Evangelicals Are Changing,” with particular attention to trends of the last half-century. Robert D. Linder, professor of history at Kansas State, examines changing patterns of evangelical social concern. Professor Williams and Rodney L. Petersen, a staff member of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, study evangelical attitudes toward the nation. And V. Elving Anderson, professor of genetics at the University of Minnesota, discusses evangelical participation in, and stances toward, science. This section is brought to a close with Sydney Ahlstrom’s essay entitled “From Puritanism to Evangelicalism: A Critical Perspective.”

The editors introduce the volume with a brief historical summary of recent evangelicalism and a rationale for drawing both evangelicals and non-evangelicals into the colloquy. A “Guide to Further Reading” by Donald Tinder, associate editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, draws the book to a close. It is, of course, impossible to discuss each contribution with the attention it deserves. The following comments are an attempt to show the book’s scope and significance.

Pride of place belongs to George Marsden, who has provided the best interpretive essay in print on the history of fundamentalism and evangelicalism. Marsden outlines four distinct periods in the history of American evangelicalism: (1) From the 1870s to 1919, a time during which the thrust of secularism divided American Protestantism into modernist and orthodox segments and also played a role in the development of a new form of conservative Protestant theology, dispensational millennialism. (2) From 1919 to 1926, a period of fierce public controversies, climaxing in the debate between William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow over evolution at the Scopes trial in 1925, which witnessed a decisive change in evangelical attitudes toward themselves and American culture. (3) From 1926 until the end of World War II, a period of reassessment and consolidation during which fundamentalism adopted to a sectarian style of life within American society. (4) The period since the 1940s, which has been marked by the public appearance of a more intellectually sensitive and culturally involved evangelicalism as well as by a clearer division between fundamentalist and evangelical groupings.

By likening the lot of religious conservatives in the early twentieth century to that of “uprooted” immigrants deposited in an alien culture, Marsden has provided a very fruitful metaphor for comprehending the reactions of evangelical Protestants to an increasingly secular society. This essay alone is worth the price of the book.

When the very substantial historical and sociological studies by Moberg, Linder, Williams, Petersen, and Pannell are considered with Marsden’s article, this volume becomes the most informative resource available for studying the history of contemporary evangelicalism. Virtually all important matters relating to the subjects considered by these authors are touched upon directly, or are referred to in the extensive notes appended to each essay.

The other toilers in this rich vineyard have also risen splendidly to their tasks. Kantzer insists upon the inerrancy of Scripture as the “formal principle” of evangelicalism and describes the varieties of apologetical systems used by evangelicals to defend scriptura sola. Anderson shows how different evangelical views on evolution and other controversial scientific matters have developed. The notes to his essay contain a treasure-trove of references to efforts by evangelicals to formulate a distinctly Christian philosophy of science. Tinder pulls the major secondary works on fundamentalism and evangelicalism into a convenient summary. If his bibliography is not as extensive as, for example, that provided by George M. Dollar’s History of Fundamentalism in America, the notes to the other essays more than fill in the interstices of Tinder’s superstructure.

Bentley’s article is not on first reading as impressive as the others. In his defense, however, it must be said that Bentley is very much a pioneer in seeking to answer a question that has received regrettably little attention: how can black evangelicals affirm a proper expression of ethnic consciousness while at the same time maintaining ties with white evangelicals who hold common doctrines but who also participate wittingly or unwittingly in the racist aspects of American society?

The non-evangelical commentators all present extremely stimulating essays. Of the evangelical authors, only Marsden writes as well as these non-evangelicals. This is a shameful admission for evangelicals, who number in their heritage such masters of prose as Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Thomas Crammer. Until evangelicals write as clearly, forcefully, and movingly as non-evangelicals, their message will not get the hearing its content deserves.

Marty, as always, is lively, lucid, and learned. His suggestion that evangelical life-styles and intellectual methodologies are closer to those of liberals and the neo-orthodox than to those of the fundamentalists, with whom evangelicals share basic doctrinal affirmations, is a matter worthy of much further thought. Marty does not, however, criticize the evangelicals as sharply as do Holmer and Ahlstrom.

Holmer’s bite has more to it, but not as much as his bark. He asks, first, whether evangelicals do not harp so incessantly upon a doctrine of biblical inerrancy that they lose sight of the God who inspired Holy Writ. Holmer has noted something that does indeed occur, but when it does, it is deviant evangelicalism. As Kantzer notes in this volume, scriptura sola is but the “formal principle” of evangelicalism. Even the glorious truth of biblical inerrancy fades in the brilliance of evangelicalism’s proper “material principle,” justification by grace through faith.

Holmer’s second and fourth criticisms score the evangelical propensity to treat Scripture as a mere gateway to more orderly theological schemes that are often structured along lines determined by secular philosophies. Holmer asks whether evangelicals have not looked so hard for a systematic theology in the Bible that they have slighted a personal relationship with the creating and redeeming God. He also wonders if evangelicals do not expend too much energy in trying to make Christianity fit into the categories of secular philosophy.

Once more these criticisms do note some things that take place in evangelicalism, but again these are only deviations from the evangelical norm. In contrast to Holmer’s contention, proper evangelicalism sees the Bible as a means of both understanding and experiencing God, his character, and his acts. J. I. Packer’s Knowing God is just one example to counter Holmer’s contention that evangelical theology never rises to its proper subject. In addition, as Kantzer’s description of presuppositional apologetics (Carl Henry, Bernard Ramm, Frances Schaeffer, the late Edward Carnell, Cornelius Van Til) makes clear, it is not so much that evangelical theology is systems-dependent in its reliance upon the concepts of particular secular philosophies. Rather, the strongest philosophical attachment of evangelicalism is to the affirmation that the very ability to conceptualize itself would be impossible apart from the existence of the God who reveals himself in Christ and the Bible.

Holmer’s third criticism asks whether evangelical theology does not reduce the full-orbed biblical concept of faith to mere assent to orthodox doctrines. As such, this is a criticism not of evangelicalism-properly-so-called but of “easy believism” masquerading as the real thing. Truly representative evangelical thinkers, such as Jonathan Edwards, have often stressed the importance of day-to-day Christian living as the ultimate expression of belief in God. In sum, Holmer has fought hard and fair, but evangelicals will still be able to answer the bell after going a round with him.

Ahlstrom’s polemic cuts most deeply. He argues that innovations in science, scholarship, and philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century “struck American Protestants with special force because the Evangelical tradition for over a century had been paying very little attention to these troublesome intellectual developments.” The balance of evidence rests with Ahlstrom: evangelicals did opt out of the mind game at a very crucial juncture. Giving up the intellectual battle in the period 1870 to 1900 and retreating behind self-defensive barricades meant more than a temporary setback to evangelicals, for it bequeathed as a legacy a kiss of intellectual and cultural death. Recovering intellectual self-respect is awesomely more difficult than sustaining a dearly won position. In the face of Ahlstrom’s criticism, evangelicals must confess: we have failed to love the Lord with all our minds, and hence have perverted love of heart, soul, and strength as well.

Evangelicals cannot easily evade the thrust of what Ahlstrom says. They can, however, take some satisfaction in the fact that the resiliency of evangelicalism puts Ahlstrom, and the dominant strand of American church history that he represents, into something of a bind. Ahlstrom’s magisterial Religious History of the American People (Yale, 1972) asserted that the 1960s had marked a watershed in American religious history during which the heritage of Reformation Puritanism was finally cast off. His essay in The Evangelicals admits the continuity between Puritanism and modern evangelicalism, but pictures the latter as “a subculture that, in effect, maintains itself after the end of the Puritan epoch.” To Ahlstrom, modern evangelicalism is characterized at worst by “intellectual nihilism” and at best by a ghettoized mentality artificially cut off from give-and-take with modern forms of thought. In either case, Ahlstrom does not see in evangelicalism the intellectual integrity that a religious position must maintain if it is to have an effect for truth and goodness in a modern world of moral dilemma and physical suffering.

Yet the seriousness with which Ahlstrom treats conservative Protestantism in this essay suggests that he may be reevaluating the importance of the evangelical phenomenon. His interpretation of recent American church history must, for example, find it difficult to account for the many evangelicals who are breaking out of the cultural, social, and intellectual molds of cultic fundamentalism while at the same time retaining the essential theological commitments of the Puritan tradition. Several of the essays in The Evangelicals document the growing willingness of evangelicals to think not only critically but also creatively about modern problems.

Gerstner contends that the theology of the nineteenth-century revivals aped the values of nineteenth-century American culture and that, in turn, the nineteenth-century theology of revival has come to dominate evangelical theology into the twentieth century. His contention rests on convincing historical ground. The twentieth-century heirs of nineteenth-century revivalism need very much to put evangelism back under the control of a full-orbed biblical theology rather than letting evangelistic practice dictate the shape of Christian doctrine. Gerstner’s essay, in sum, raises the basic issues of biblical and theological understanding upon which all else in American evangelicalism depends.

High praise for this book should not be construed to mean that it has no defects or limitations. Concern for Baptist and Presbyterian history sometimes causes the essayists to overlook contributions to American evangelicalism made by Dutch Reformed, Lutheran, Episcopal, Anabaptist, and Holiness groups. Apart from the articles by Moberg, Pannell, and Bentley, disproportionate attention is given to a vocal minority of evangelical polemicists as if these persons spoke for all orthodox Protestants; much more attention could have been devoted to the inarticulate concerns of the masses of evangelical pew-sitters. It is odd, for example, that a serious study of modern evangelicalism makes no mention of such a widespread and influential phenomenon as the popularity of Kenneth Taylor’s Living Bible. Many of the writers tend to take it for granted that there is a basic theological consensus among fundamentalists and evangelicals; Gerstner’s article, which those readers who lean to Arminianism may find contentious and wrongheaded, is proof enough that serious questions need to be asked about the depth of evangelical theological unity. And for a book with the high aspirations of this one, The Evangelicals has an embarrassing number of distracting typographical errors.

Neither is this book the absolute last word on evangelicals at the Bicentennial. More needs to be known about the theological effects that attended the marriage of Protestantism and American nationalism in the early nineteenth century. More needs to be known about the emergence of self-confessed secularism in the period between the Civil War and the turn of the twentieth century. In particular, we need to understand how it was that the intellectual and cultural forces unleashed in this period were able so easily to “liberate” the popular mind from the evangelical verities that had dominated it for almost a century. Martin Marty’s question also needs much hard thinking: protestations of basic doctrinal unanimity notwithstanding, have distinct and mutually exclusive fundamentalist and evangelical groups emerged out of the broad fundamentalist movement of the early twentieth century? And until someone with the insights and scholarship of a George Marsden writes a book-length account of conservative Protestantism in the last century, we will still be without a fully satisfying general history of fundamentalism/evangelicalism.

Despite these shortcomings and limitations, this book should take its place as the single most important resource for both evangelicals and non-evangelicals who want to come to grips with conservative Protestantism in twentieth-century America. The editors deserve our warmest thanks for bringing such a useful and thought-provoking book into the world.

Beauty in the Bible

Loud lamentations are heard today over the diminishing audience for good books. Even college literature majors are apt to become impatient with older literary forms, such as the epic and the medieval romance, that demand a certain aesthetic preparedness. Some classical writings that have been standard fare for years are dismissed as being too tedious to read when a synopsis or abridgment is available. A feeling for the beautiful seems to be waning in our computerized, practical-minded world. And new ways of spending our leisure time—especially television-watching—seem to be taking us further and further away from the riches of good literature.

This aesthetic impoverishment deprives us of a wonderfully rewarding dimension of the Bible. What the biblical writer says is admittedly of supreme importance, but the style, the way the words are put together, is an integral part of the truth, too. The literary artist is concerned with form as well as substance, with manner as well as matter, with style as well as content. Most of those who overlook the formal excellence of the Bible do so because they have not trained themselves to look for it.

Aesthetics has to do with form, design, color, harmony—in other words, with beauty. God is interested in these qualities. In Genesis we are told that when “the earth was without form,” God shaped it into form. The same Maker had the Tabernacle built using beautiful materials—gold, silver, and brass, with lavish curtains of blue and purple and scarlet. The high priest performed his work in garments of beauty. God, who weaves the delicate tapestry of a rainbow and causes the dewdrops to gleam on the whiteness of the lily, has put his truth in artistic form. Both in nature and in biblical revelation, God concerns himself with beauty.

How can the reader of the Bible increase his appreciation of its beauty? First, he can study the specialized language and literary forms that are used in Scripture. For instance, such passages as Psalm 30 or 61; Proverbs 4 and 10; Second Samuel 1; Judges 5, and Deuteronomy 32 and 33 may be—indeed, ought to be—read as poetry. The person whose ear is deaf to the beauties of poetry will fall short in understanding and appreciating sections of the Bible designed to be read that way. Familiarity with literary forms prepares one for intelligent, rewarding Bible reading. (For more on this, see such books as Richard Moulton’s The Literary Study of the Bible and Leland Ryken’s The Literature of the Bible, and also Ryken’s article in the January 17, 1975, issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, “Good Reading in the Good Book.”)

The Hebrew language, like Anglo-Saxon, is full of figures; for instance, “Till the day declined” for “until afternoon” (Judges 19:8). In Genesis 37:36 the literal meaning of what is rendered “captain of the guard” is “the chief of slaughter men.” Other picturesque terms are “treaders down” for “oppressors,” “fields of desire” for “pleasant fields,” “with one shoulder” for “one consent.” Still others are “the fat of the land,” “the valley of the shadow of death,” “the end of all flesh,” “a soft answer,” “son of perdition.”

A poet commonly describes through images. To convey to us the feeling of a calm, beautiful evening, Wordsworth says, “The holy time is quiet as a nun/ Breathless with adoration.…” Robert Bridges in “The Storm Is Over” says, “The broad cloud-driving moon in the clear sky/Lifts o’er the firs her shining shield.” W.B. Yeats speaks of an old man as “a paltry thing/ A tattered coat upon a stick.” We find a lot of this in Scripture. For instance, in the context of joy, the floods and the trees are said to “clap their hands,” and the hills to “break forth … into singing” (Ps. 98:8; Isa. 55:12). “The desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose” (Isa. 35:1). Jesus invokes us to “take my yoke … and ye shall find rest” (Matt. 11:29).

One of the most beautiful sections among the Minor Prophets is the third chapter of Habakuk. Chapters one and two were written at a time of national crisis when the land was threatened by barbaric hordes from the north. The prophet, though perplexed by God’s dealings, kept alive his trust and hope. At last he looks at God from the vantage point of the high place and declares his unbounded confidence in lines like these:

Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labor of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no heard in the stalls; yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation. The LORD God is my strength, and he will make my feet like hinds’ feet and he will make me walk upon mine high places. To the chief singer on my stringed instruments [Hab. 3:17–19].

The artist calls our attention to beauty and truth in the world that might otherwise elude us. This leads us to consider a second corrective for artistic deficiency: we ought to open our eyes and ears to what God has to say through those who have special insight. John Ruskin once remarked that he never really saw the blue of the sky until he looked at one of Turner’s paintings. When we stand with Wordsworth at Westminster Bridge and see with him the city that “now doth like a garment wear/ The beauty of the morning … /All bright and glittering in the smokeless air,” or when we behold Henry Vaughan’s celestial world as he says, “I saw eternity the other night/Like a great ring of pure and endless light,” we are enabled to perceive through sensitive eyes, imaginative eyes, beauty-loving eyes, a moment’s monument to truth and beauty.

The Psalmist must have felt the need for this awareness when he prayed, “Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law” (Ps. 119:18). Sometimes our eyes do not see, our ears do not hear, both aesthetically and spiritually. John the Apostle realized this when he said, and repeated six times, “He that hath an ear, let him hear …” (Rev. 2 and 3). Jesus asked the disciples, “Having eyes, see ye not? And having ears, hear ye not?” (Mark 8:18). Often the disciples failed to get the point. One moment of revelation came as the Scriptures record, “Then opened he their minds” (Luke 24:45).

The early Greeks stood in awe before nature. In their mythology they credited the gods with driving the clouds across the sky and causing the trees to grow and the sun to rise. Need our sense of wonder be less simply because we have a higher concept of the gods? As G. K. Chesterton says in Orthodoxy, we need to admit miracle in the world about us. Why should we think that a tree grows fruit or water runs downhill because of a natural law? The world is “a wild and startling place.” God filled his earth with flowers for his delight and ours. Literature celebrates the glorious power of God at work in creation.

Of course, truth and beauty find their ultimate fulfillment in Jesus Christ. Whatever may be said for literature as an aid to understanding God’s truth and beauty, one must not make Matthew Arnold’s mistake of substituting it for the grace and truth found only in our Lord. Art is not religion. As Chad Walsh put it, “there is wisdom and illumination but not salvation in a sonnet.” Over and beyond the horizons of literature, all of us must humbly recognize that holiness is derived from God, who alone can redeem, cleanse, and renew man’s spirit.

However, knowledge in this world is at best incomplete. The inquiring Christian who desires to pursue the many-sidedness of truth, who wants a graphic, concrete, full-orbed conception of what the Bible is saying, should pay attention to its imaginatively conceived language, and appreciate both its truth and its beauty.

The Christian Source of Truth

All men build their world and life views on basic presuppositions. Some hold these views consciously; others hold them subconsciously. Some articulate their presuppositions clearly and then fail to carry through on them consistently in the details of life. Others who never state their presuppositions nevertheless tell us what they are by what they do.

When it comes to religion, the most important question lurks behind an obvious fact. Men tell us what they believe. Or what they don’t believe. That is important. But even more important is where they got their beliefs. We ask them: What is the source of your religious knowledge?

The Marxist begins with materialism. He denies that spiritual reality is the ultimate that precedes the material. He is an atheist. From whence does he get this knowledge? Certainly it is not innate, for millions of other people don’t agree with it. If it comes from intuition, the Marxist must ask himself why anyone should trust his intuition against that of others who arrive at opposite poles using their own intuition. If he gets his knowledge from reason and observation, he is hard put to explain why his reason is superior to someone else’s and how his observations of the external would provide a compelling thesis for his presuppositions.

The agnostic is in a worse predicament than even the atheist. He does not believe there is any possibility of the knowledge of God or of ultimate things. All knowledge is relative and therefore uncertain. At least the atheist makes the claim to certainty. Marxism indeed is a religion that has its absolutes. It claims to foresee and it promises a utopia to come, and this gives it status, so that it appeals to empty bellies, hungry hearts, and minds that search for finalities.

The mariner with his sextant has for his basic presupposition or absolute his belief that the sun and the stars are fixed in their courses and that his sextant is accurate. If he had nothing constant against which to take his sighting, the mariner’s ship headed for New York might end up in Singapore.

Marxism is indeed far superior to agnosticism, which leaves man in a state of flux. The only certainty of agnosticism is its arbitrary absolute that there is no certainty. The agnostic leaves man slowly turning in the wind, blown in whatever direction chance takes him. The Marxist like the mariner does claim to have a polestar that guides him; the agnostic is left stripped and naked.

The Marxist Absolutes

In today’s world, Marxism with its absolutes is the chief opponent of the only system of religious thinking that provides a better alternative and one which from an evidential standpoint has a world and life view that is infinitely superior. But first we must understand the nature of Marxism. It begins with materialism as the ultimate basis of reality. It then embraces the dialectic, by which the Marxist means that all of life is inexorably ordered so that the end envisioned—pure communism without the class system, a state in which all men are equal and the perfect utopia men dream of has come—becomes a reality. Society is developmental, going through certain stages until at last the highest stage is reached. The present world is divided into two camps, the capitalists or the Marxist or socialist. The next state will be marked by the demise of capitalism and the victory of socialism, and socialism will then yield to communism, which is the ultimate goal of history. The Marxist believes that no one can stop the operations of these historical forces. He is indeed a predestinarian of the predestinarians, except that he has no god or spiritual base and yet believes this mindless force at work will bring about the desired result.

Christianity and Marxism share one belief in common—the belief in absolutes. And Christianity is at last the only acceptable alternative to Marxism. But once this assertion is introduced it raises what in effect is a prior question: From whence do Christianity and Marxism get their knowledge? From what sources do these antithetical systems spring and which is to be trusted? These questions are significant, for if Christianity is true, then Marxism is false, and vice versa. And, of course, there is a third alternative: perhaps neither Christianity nor Marxism is true.

Marxism is indebted to Hegel for its dialectic, but its “sacred scriptures” were penned by Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Stalin and Mao expanded and perhaps refined the basic tenets of their peers. The Marxist, if he is serious about his convictions, starts with the assumption that all he needs to know about life can be discovered from his sacred writings. In those writings he finds the answers to all his questions. Stalin and Mao got their guidelines from Marx, Engels, and Lenin. However much Mao and the Chinese differ with the Soviet Union in their understanding of Marxism, the differences lie not in a repudiation of their sacred writings but in the claim each makes that the other has misunderstood what Marx, Engels, and Lenin taught.

The Christian’S Source Of Truth

Even as Marxism has its sacred scriptures, so does Christianity have its own sacred writings, the Bible. This book, composed by many different authors over almost two millennia, lies at the heart of the Christian faith. There are really two sides to the question of the source of our religious knowledge. The first question is answered for the Christian by his assertion that the Bible is the sourcebook for him. On a larger scale, wholly apart from Marxism, the same two questions, of which I have adduced the first, must be applied to the writings and the writers who have left their imprint on other religions and cults.

The ethnic religions like Buddhism, Shintoism, Hinduism, Mohammedanism, and Jainism all have their sacred writings. So do the Christian Scientists, the Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. In the case of these cults they profess to accept the Bible and add other writings to it as the source of their religious knowledge. There is the second question that must be asked: Is the source from which I get my religious knowledge trustworthy? In other words, why do I believe the Bible and not Marx, Lenin, and Engels? Why the Bible and not the Upanishads? Why the Bible and not the Buddhist Sutras?

It should be clear that if the source from which I get my religious knowledge does not tell me the truth, then I’m in great difficulty. This is true with respect to Marxism and, as we shall see in a moment, with varieties of Christianity as well. Nobody in his right mind who is willing to examine the evidences can say that Marxism’s truth claims stand up evidentially. They don’t. And neither do the truth claims of the ethnic religions or the cults of our day. Anyone who is interested in pursuing this further will find plenty of material available to demonstrate the truth of my statement.

When we come to Christianity, which has the Bible and only the Bible for the source of (that is, the final authority for) its religious knowledge, one quickly finds that a curious paradox enters into the picture. There are those who claim to be Christians who, in one fashion or another, modify or deny the authority on which the Christian faith is supposed to rest. The source of their faith which they theoretically accept is for them a most unreliable instrument. In other words, its truth claims stand up evidentially no better than those of Marxism, the ethnic religions, or the cults. If what Marx wrote cannot be trusted, then Marxism doesn’t have a leg to stand on. If what the Bible teaches cannot be trusted, then Christianity doesn’t have a leg to stand on either. It is as simple as that.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century Auguste Sabatier pointed out that “if part of an absolute authority, for example an important statement of scripture, is shown to be false, then the scripture in and of itself ceases to be an authority; for even if we still accept others aspects of its message, it is on other grounds than simply their presence in scripture.” Indeed Sabatier argued that “to question even one proposition in scripture is to divest scripture of its own absolute authority, and to remove that authority into the critical, questioning, and judging mind of the reader” (quoted by Langdon Gilkey “Naming the Whirlwind: The Renewal of God-Language,” Bobbs-Merrill, 1969, p. 74).

Theological Liberalism And Scripture

Historically the Christian faith has accepted the Bible as its authority. At the heart of theological liberalism lies its denial of the Bible as the true source of faith even as liberalism continued to identify itself as Christian. In the place of the Bible other ultimates were substituted. Schleiermacher substituted religious experience. But whose religious experience was to become the true basis for all religious experience was never answered satisfactorily. Nor was there any way to determine whether Schleiermacher’s religious experience came from God or the Devil.

Ritschl “rejected both metaphysics and experience as bases for religion and established religion on the basis of man’s moral nature and its fulfillment in the historical growth of the kingdom of God.” Scripture, for him, was no longer the ultimate source from which he got his religious knowledge. All liberalism used either one or the other of these alternatives or a combination of them. Once this road was followed, it soon resulted in the refusal to believe anything in the Bible that ran counter to scientific inquiry, moral experience, or religious experience. Out went the supernatural, the transcendent, miracles, hell, a substitutionary atonement, and the like.

Liberalism gave up the notion of infallible propositional truth. It also surrendered absolutes for the relative. It replaced the concern for the heavenly with concern for this present life, with emphasis on justice, freedom, and the temporal welfare of men. A vague and amorphous kind of love characterized the liberal, who was inclined toward syncretism and universalism, wherein the defense of Christian doctrine against competing options was lost sight of.

Whatever good may be said of liberalism and its humanistic impulses, and however genuine its concern for improving the general conditions of men, it was not a faith that was grounded in the Bible. For the liberal, the Bible was really superfluous. It was not the ultimate source of the liberal’s theological convictions. Those convictions rested on authorities extraneous to Scripture that sat in judgment on Scripture and were superior to it.

Neo-Orthodoxy And Scripture

In time liberalism was shown to be defective. Neo-orthodoxy came into being and sought to do what was really impossible—join a serious concern for the Bible with an acceptance of critical biblical scholarship and a naturalistically interpreted world. This combination made it quite difficult for the neo-orthodox theologians to take the Bible seriously as history. It was easy to slide into a framework of faith that was existentially based. Thus Scripture was not objectively and propositionally the living Word of God. It became the Word in experience.

In line with biblical criticism, the neo-orthodox scrapped the notion of a historic Adam and Eve. They professed to believe that God acts in history, but they did not believe that the waters of the Red Sea parted and the Israelites went through dryshod. Out went the plagues in Egypt, the divinely inscribed tablets of ten commandments and the literal pillar of fire. The so-called acts of God lost their historicity and became symbolic. So also with the bodily resurrection of Jesus from the grave. For most of the neo-orthodox, the identification of the Word of God with Scripture was an impossibility. Jesus as the Word of God for faith, yes; but the Bible as the Word of God in any truly historical sense conveying factual material, no.

It can be said that however much neo-orthodoxy represented a serious return to biblical theology, it was not a return to the belief in the Bible as having absolute authority, nor did it hold that whatever could be found in the Bible could be considered normative and accepted as true simply because of its presence in Scripture.

Biblical Orthodoxy

Theological orthodoxy, like Marxism, has an invariable absolute. Its absolute is the Bible. This is its benchmark, and from it Christianity takes all of its bearings. But if the Bible is not accurate, the bearings taken from the Bible as the benchmark will not be accurate. This leads logically to the second question we have asked. If the Bible is the source of our religious knowledge, how do we know that the Bible can be trusted, that it is infallible? The answer to that question is found in Christian evidences. They demonstrate the reasonableness of orthodoxy’s basic presupposition.

Orthodoxy believes that God is, that God has spoken, and that God has revealed himself. How? And how does that revelation assure us of the trustworthiness of what we claim to have been revealed? God has spoken first through natural revelation, and then through supernatural revelation. And to this we turn our attention.

“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork” (Ps. 19:1). Paul says that “the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse” (Rom. 1:20).

Natural or general revelation is rooted in creation and in the ordinary relationship of God to man. But natural or general revelation is deficient in itself. Nature has ceased to be an obvious or perspicuous (i.e., clear or plain) revelation of God, although it may have been so before sin entered the human race. Even if it were now, man, because of sin, has been so blinded that he cannot read the divine script in nature. General revelation does not afford man the same kind of reliable knowledge of God and spiritual things that the Bible does. It is therefore inadequate as a foundation for the Christian faith. However, there is enough light in general revelation so that man is left without excuse. The Christian, because he is a Christian and has a converted mind, not a reprobate mind, understands general revelation better through the Word of God, and thus he is able to see God’s finger in nature and in history.

God has also disclosed himself in special revelation. God has done so in at least three different ways: through theophanies, direct communications, and miracles. Theophanies are appearances of God himself. God disclosed himself a second way through direct communications. In doing so he made his thoughts and will known to men. God disclosed himself a third way through miracles. These showed the special power of God and his presence. They were often used to symbolize spiritual truth. They confirm the words of prophecy and point to the new order God is establishing. The greatest of the miracles in Scripture is the incarnation (see here Acts 3:20, 21).

Special revelation as I have spoken of it so far is redemptive. It is a revelation of word and fact; and it is historical. It is intended to redeem lost men and to reveal the plan of salvation. It is the revelation of God in the law, the prophets, the gospels, the epistles, the history of Israel. All of this happened in history over many centuries. It was progressive and unfolding in character, dim at first and gradually increasing the light until the fullness of the revelation had come.

This revelation of God has become inscripturated. It has come down to us in written form. Thus there are two words: the Word of God incarnate, Jesus Christ, and the Word of God written, the Bible. It is the Word of God written that reveals the Word of God incarnate to men. The Bible then is The Word of God, and it is of this Word we now speak. When we say the Bible is the Word of God, it makes no difference whether the writers of Scriptures gained their information by direct revelation from God as in the case of the Book of the Revelation, or whether they researched matters as Luke did, or whether they got their knowledge from extant sources, court records, or even by word of mouth. The question we must ask is whether what they wrote, wherever they may have secured their knowledge, can be trusted. This brings us to the doctrine of inspiration, which is clearly taught in the Bible itself.

Inspiration may be defined as the inward work of the Holy Spirit in the hearts and minds of chosen men who then wrote Scripture so that God got written what he wanted. The Bible in all of its parts constitutes the written Word of God to man. This word is free from all error in its original autographs. It is wholly trustworthy in matters of history and doctrine. However limited may have been their knowledge, and however much they may have erred when they were not writing sacred Scripture, the authors of Scripture, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, were preserved from making factual, historical, scientific, or other errors. The Bible does not purport to be a textbook of history, science, or mathematics. Yet when the writers of Scripture spoke of matters embraced in these disciplines, they did not indite error; they wrote what was true.

The very nature of inspiration renders the Bible infallible, which means that it cannot deceive us. It is inerrant in that it is not to be found false, mistaken, or defective. Inspiration extends to all parts of the written Word of God, and it includes the guiding hand of the Holy Spirit even in the selection of the words of Scripture. Moreover, the Bible was written by human and divine agencies, that is, it was the product of God and chosen men. The authors of Scripture retained their own styles of writing, and the Holy Spirit, operating within this human context, so superintended the writing of the Word of God that the end product was God’s. Just as Jesus had two natures, one of which was truly human and the other truly divine, so the written Word of God is a product that bears the marks of what is truly human and truly divine.

Inspiration involved infallibility from start to finish. God the Holy Spirit by nature cannot lie or be the author of untruth. If the Scripture is inspired at all, it must be infallible. If any part of it is not infallible, then that part cannot be inspired. If inspiration allows for the possibility of error, then inspiration ceases to be inspiration. Now no one will assert that the human authors of Scripture were infallible men. But believers in infallibility do say that fallible men were made infallible with respect to Scripture they indited. They were kept from error by the Holy Spirit. But there are those who argue that this refers only to Salvatory matters. John Murray has pinpointed the basic problem connected with this viewpoint. He argued the case this way:

If human fallibility precludes an infallible Scripture, then by resistless logic it must be maintained that we cannot have any Scripture that is infallible and inerrant. All of Scripture comes to us through human instrumentality. If such instrumentality involves fallibility, then such fallibility must attach to the “spiritual truth” enunciated by the Biblical writers, then it is obvious that some extraordinary divine influence must have intervened and become so operative so as to present human fallibility from leaving its mark upon the truth expressed. If divine influence could thus intrude itself at certain points, why should not the same preserving power exercise itself at every point in the writing of Scripture? [The Infallible Word, edited by N.B. Stonehouse and P Wooley, Eerdman, 1946, pp. 4, 5]

Need we add the very obvious? If Scripture itself professes to be inerrant only with respect to revelational or salvatory truth, where is the evidence for this to be found? Not in Scripture. For when the Word of God speaks of its trustworthiness, at no point does it include any limitation. Nor does it indicate that some parts of Scripture are thus to be trusted and other parts are not. If there is any doctrine of infallibility based upon the biblical date, it must include all of Scripture or none of it.

Those who stumble over inerrancy do so because of the supposed errors they find in the phenomena of Scripture, by which they mean those parts that can be verified. The late Edward John Carnell wrote:

B. B. Warfield clearly perceived that a Christian has no more right to construct a doctrine of biblical authority out of deference to the (presumed) inductive difficulties in the Bible, than he has to construct a doctrine of salvation out of deference to the (actual) difficulties which arise whenever one tries to discover the hidden logic in such events as (a) the Son of God’s assumption of human nature of (b) the Son of God’s offering up of his human nature as a vicarious atonement for sin. This means that whether we happen to like it or not, we are closed up to the teaching of the Bible for our information about all doctrines in the Christian faith, and this includes the doctrine of the Bible’s view of itself. We are free to reject the doctrine of the Bible’s view of itself, of course, but if we do so we are demolishing the procedure by which we determine the substance of any Christian doctrine. If we pick and choose what we prefer to believe, rather than what is biblically taught, we merely exhibit once again the logical (and existential) fallacy of trying to have our cake and our penny, too [Letter, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Oct. 14, 1966, p. 23].

Christianity’S Uniqueness

We have advanced the truth claims of Christianity. Is there reason to believe that the Bible, which is the ultimate source of our faith, is to be trusted? Here we look to Christian evidences that support the Bible’s truth claims and at the same time show us that all other systems of religious knowledge, although they may contain elements of truth, are essentially false.

Fulfilled prophecy supports the Bible’s claim to truth. The fulfillment of the Deuteronomy 28 prophecy of the Jewish diaspora, the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies relating to Jesus, and the predicted downfall of Tyre, Babylon, and Jerusalem make this clear.

The miracles recorded in the Bible also substantiate its claims. These miracles were open and sensible, witnessed to by many people, and supremely attested to in the life of Jesus Christ. The greatest of miracles and the one that marks off Christianity as unique is the bodily resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Mohammed, Gautama, Zoroaster, Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, and all the other founders of competing religions or cults are dead. Jesus Christ is alive!

Archaeology supports the truth claims of Christianity in the accuracy of facts that can be checked. The existence and witness of the Christian Church through the ages lends further support to this. The pragmatic test by which Scripture challenges men to “taste and see that the Lord is good” adds to the evidences. And surely the Holy Spirit who convicts of sin, converts from unbelief to faith, and seals every believer and indwells all the saints of God bears his own special testimony that the Bible is the source of true religious knowledge and is dependable and to be trusted in a way no other book ever can be.

God indeed has spoken, and he has not stuttered in his speech. And the vehicle he has chosen for the witness to himself and to his salvation is the written word of God. Without it there could be no Christian faith. With it, reinforced by the work and power of the Holy Spirit, we know that as long as time lasts there will always be the Church that comprises the people of God borne along by the assurance of the divine promise that the gates of hell will not prevail against it.

How to Choose a Bible

I used to hate to go to restaurants that served smorgasbord style. My appetite is good, and I enjoy eating out. But I was overwhelmed by the jumble of dishes spread out before me. Then someone kindly took me in tow at a buffet table and showed me how to approach it. I learned I didn’t have to try everything. My plate didn’t have to hold a chicken leg lying atop a slab of ham floating in some shrimp Newburg, paved over with dabs of seven vegetables and four salads, then finished off with carrot sticks, black olives, and a dash of piccalilli. I could choose what suited me best.

My purpose here is to try to perform a similar service for the Bible reader who boggles at the array of Bible translations spread before him today. So far in this century alone more than seventy English versions of all or part of the Bible have appeared in print. Should we try to use them all?

First I should state some convictions I have about translations in general: (1) there is no one perfect, inspired, best, or final translation; (2) few translations deliberately distort the message of the Bible by setting forth a particular theological viewpoint, orthodox or otherwise; (3) every translation is, nevertheless, to some extent an interpretation of the original writing; (4) the extremely hard work that has gone into producing translations has been done to aid the reader, not to enrich the translater; and finally (5) all translations worthy of use must meet three crucial criteria: (a) they must be based upon the best Hebrew and Greek texts presently available, (b) they must include the abundance of new information about Hebrew and Greek vocabulary and structure now at hand, (c) they must be accurate—at least, their lodestar must have been a determined effort to be true to the meaning of the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts.

Having said this, I move on to a general and simple guideline: let the purpose for which you are reading the Bible determine which translation you use.

For careful study I recommend that you use several translations, but that you begin with the American Standard Version (ASV) or the New American Standard Bible (NASB). These Bibles are exceptionally faithful to the Hebrew and Greek texts. So if you do not know the original languages but want to know what the original says, use either of these two translations.

To know what the Hebrew or Greek text says is not enough, however. It is equally important to know what it means. Literal translations such as the ASV and the NASB can sometimes be misleading. Supplement them with other translations, such as the Revised Standard Version (RSV), the New English Bible (NEB), the Modern Language Bible (MLB), or the Jerusalem Bible (JB), a Roman Catholic version. These are less literal. Their translators were prepared, if need be, to emend the text (but only after careful consideration) or to rely on ancient translations wherever the original documents were obscure or incomprehensible. The goal is not word-for-word but meaning-for-meaning translation. All are invaluable complements to the literal ASV and NASB.

Here too I recommend Today’s English Version (TEV) as a supplement. In my judgment it is a superb example of a meaning-for-meaning translation. Its limited vocabulary and general unpretentiousness should not cause you to omit it as a tool for serious Bible study. Some have called it the most accurate of all translations. The New Testament and several Old Testament books are now available in the TEV, and the entire Bible is due in 1976.

Many of the translations mentioned above are available in study editions that offer clear type, marginal notes, cross-references, full-color maps, concordances, introductions, background information, and other helps. Three of these editions, all using the RSV, deserve special mention: the Holman Study Bible with articles by competent conservative scholars, Zondervan’s evangelically oriented Harper Study Bible prepared by Harold Lindsell, and the Oxford Annotated Bible edited by H. G. May and B. M. Metzger.

Serious Bible study often requires you to read a particular verse or passage in more than one translation, and some single volumes have made this easy. Prices range from $10 to $23. One such volume is The New Testament Octapla edited by Luther Weigle (Nelson). It brings together on each double page the RSV, Tyndale, Coverdale, Geneva Bible, Bishop’s Bible, Rheims, KJV, and ASV. A more recent octapla is The Eight Translation New Testament (Tyndale). On facing pages it shows the KJV plus the Living Bible, Phillips, RSV, TEV, the New International Version, JB, and NEB. Moody Press’s Four Translation New Testament parallels the KJV with the NASB, Williams’s New Testament in the Language of the People, and Beck’s New Testament in the Language of Today. Zondervan publishes The Layman’s Parallel Bible (KJV, MLB, LB, and RSV). Zondervan also publishes The New Testament From Twenty Six Translations. This volume prints the KJV and, right below each KJV line, only the significant differences from the KJV found in the other twenty-five translations. It is a handy tool, but weakened by the fact that the editor gives no criteria for what he considers a significant difference.

In their daily devotional reading, many people go through long sections of the Bible, perhaps in order to read through the entire Bible in a set period of time or to try to grasp its overall message and meaning. What’s needed for this kind of use is a readable, modern English translation. The NEB is one. Its thought flows smoothly. Its literary style on the whole is excellent, with some exceptionally fine phrases. It makes for good reading. Although the NEB may be criticized as an obviously British free translation with a resultant loss of meaning in the finer areas important for exegesis, yet this very freedom helps it impress the reader with the overarching message of the Bible. Cambridge and Oxford University Presses offer the NEB in a wide selection of styles and prices.

Recently I have enjoyed and profited from reading the Scriptures in the Jerusalem Bible. I highly recommend this fine rendering too for devotional reading. Its excellent format and boldface headings are aids to reading with understanding. As a Roman Catholic translation it naturally includes the Apocrypha—interesting, informative, and valuable religious material for Protestants and Catholics alike. Doubleday publishes this Bible in editions that start at $10.

Despite the criticism leveled against the Living Bible (LB), I recommend it here. With its contemporary, vibrant, sometimes racy style, the LB is awakening interest in the Bible everywhere it goes. Although it may not be acceptable for careful, detailed Bible study, it is refreshing and delightful for devotional reading. The most popular edition is Tyndale’s $10 one. Less expensive editions are also available; among them is “The Way,” profusely illustrated to appeal to youth.

For a non-Christian who has shown interest in the Bible, I have three suggestions. First, the Living Bible. Although the translator’s bias does show through at times, it is not enough to dull the clearness of the message of God’s Word.

Second, the TEV, which transfers the dynamic message of the Greek New Testament over into equally dynamic English, losing little of the original meaning. And it has a word list at the back explaining many terms that might be unfamiliar to the non-church-goer. The American Bible Society offers the TEV for well under one dollar. Nelson has other editions ranging from $2.50 to $9.50.

J. B. Phillips’s New Testament in Modern English is also excellent. It is a translation that does not read like a translation. I have friends who knew little or nothing about the Christian faith and who could hardly have cared less. Then someone gave them Phillips, and for the first time the Bible came alive for them. They became Christians and are now ardent disciples of Jesus Christ. Phillips is without doubt one of the best idiomatic translations of the English Bible. Macmillan publishes it in both paperback and hardback.

Ever since the Protestant Reformation, the reading of the Bible has had a prominent place in the worship service. People used to carry their own Bibles to church to follow the reading for the day, to read aloud responsively, or to check up on the minister. But today this doesn’t work very well; there are too many translations. To try to follow a passage in, say, your NEB while the minister is reading from the RSV is likely to confuse rather than clarify.

The obvious solution is for a church to choose a version that will be used by both preacher and parishioner in church services. But which one?

The traditional chuch is rather conservative in its form of worship. It cultivates, and properly so, a sense of mystery, awe, and reverence. Hence, I recommend that the translation selected as the “standard” version be one that conforms to what the traditional church is, one that retains dignity, beauty, and a certain loftiness of expression without being unclear.

The New International Version (NIV) would be my first choice if it were complete. When the Old Testament is finished, churches will do well to consider using this version. In the meantime, I recommend the NEB, RSV, or MLB. (The last, the Modern Language Bible, deserves more attention than it has had. It is an excellent monument to evangelical scholarship, combining dignity with readability.) Roman Catholics will do well to choose either the RSV Common Bible or the Jerusalem Bible, both of which include the Apocrypha.

When I was a boy, everyone who could read was expected to read aloud his verse when his turn came at family devotions. We read a chapter a day without fail, round and round the family circle verse by verse. Each of us had his own copy of the KJV. This experience helped me with my oral reading, my appreciation for good English, and of course my overall knowledge of Bible content. But the exalted King James language made it hard for me to understand what I was reading. I suggest that families today use the TEV.

For families with very young children who can only look and listen, the Holman illustrated edition of the Living Bible is a good choice. This Bible, in the vivid language of everyday life with excellent art work to brighten every page, could make family Bible reading a delight even for its youngest member. It costs around $15.

If you plan to start a neighborhood Bible class among persons who are unfamiliar with the teaching of the Bible, I strongly recommend the use of only one translation, not a variety—either the TEV or the LB.

For a study group composed of mature Christians, I urge the use of many different translations, to open the way for a lot of exegetical insights.

The beautiful cadences of the KJV and its position as a masterpiece of English literature tempt me to recommend that it alone be used for memory work. Yet I recall hearing our young son recite First Corinthians 13 after learning it from the TEV: I really understood what that chapter was saying, and best of all, so did he. For memorizing, use a translation that makes the meaning clear. The KJV can no longer be the standard for this important part of the Christian’s development. I have not recommended it for other uses, either, because comparatively speaking it simply does not measure up as an accurate-enough translation (for this reason I have not cited the popular Scofield Bible).

There is no substitute for knowing the Bible from the languages in which it was originally written. Hence my ultimate recommendation is that the Bible reader learn Hebrew and Greek! But this is not a likely possibility for most readers. Alternatively, pause a moment to give thanks for the many English translations at your fingertips. Then suit the translation to the need.

Mary Reconsidered

Protestants are, on the whole, extremely reluctant to talk about Mary. If a Protestant theologian should dare to suggest that Mary’s role in the history of salvation is an important theological issue, he would be informed that the matter is of concern to Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox but scarcely to Protestants—as if, a concern to two-thirds of Christendom could be of no significance to the remaining one-third! Even the early fundamentalists who insisted on the Virgin Birth as one of the key fundamentals of the faith were less interested in Mary than in her virginity.

One can argue, of course, that the Protestant reluctance to talk about Mary reflects the New Testament’s reluctance to offer much information about her. The Bible has really very little to say about Mary, and much of what it does say is not highly complimentary to her. She cannot seem to comprehend what her son is about and tries to interfere. Indeed, the blood relationship between Jesus and Mary appears to stand in the way of her faith relationship. When a woman says to Jesus (Luke 11:27), “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that you sucked,” he responds, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!” And when Jesus is notified (Mark 3:32) that “your mother and your brothers are outside asking for you,” he replies, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother.” According to the witness of the New Testament, there is a distance between Jesus and his mother, that can be bridged only by faith.

Luke’s portrayal of Mary as humbly obedient when she learns she is to be the mother of the Messiah and John’s picture of her role at the cross are the high points of the New Testament witness to Mary. She is not at the center of the New Testament but at its periphery. At the time of the birth of Jesus and at the cross, Mary is not the initiator; she is the humble recipient and observer of the mysterious action of God. When Mary tries to intervene in the course of events, she is very much like Peter. She misunderstands what is happening and by her actions stands in the way of the fulfillment God’s will.

But while the New Testament does not focus on Mary, it does have a number of impressive things to say about her. In the Gospel of Luke, Mary represents the remnant of Israel. When she breaks into song in the presence of her cousin Elizabeth, she sings the New Testament reformulation of the song of Hannah (1 Sam. 2:4–7): “The feeble gird on strength.… Those who were hungry have ceased to hunger. The barren has borne seven.… The LORD brings low, he also exalts.”

The virginity of Mary is the sign of the divine initiative. As God brought forth a son from Sarah, who was too old to bear a child, so he brings forth a son from Mary, who as yet has no husband. In establishing the covenant with Abraham, God acted by creating a possibility where no human possibility existed. In fulfilling the covenant with Abraham, God once again created a new possibility for man where there was an absence of possibility. Sarah was the recipient of a covenantal blessing: “And God said to Abraham, ‘As for Sarah your wife … I will bless her, and … she shall be a mother of nations; kings of peoples shall come from her” (Gen. 17:15, 16). This covenantal blessing is echoed in the words of Luke 1:28, 42: “Hail, O favored one, the LORD is with you!… Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!1The addition of the phrase “Mother of God” to the Ave Maria grows out of the Nestorian controversy of the fifth century. The Orthodox Fathers ascribed to Mary, the mother of Jesus, the title of Theotokos or God-bearer, which better preserved the Word-flesh Christology of Alexandria against the Word-man Christology of Antioch. Curiously, the West did not use the exact Latin equivalent, Deipara, but rather the phrase Dei Genetrix or Mother of God. The intention, however, was the same: to preserve the high Christology of Chalcedon rather than to ascribe special honor to Mary herself. The later medieval theologians saw in Mary’s role as Theotokos the basis of her work as intercessor. Mary is a sign of the continuity of the people of God, of Israel and the Church.

Of course, Protestants do not wholly neglect Mary. The Apostles’ Creed confesses that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, and thus, by the back door, Mary enters into Protestant worship. There is very little in the New Testament about the Virgin Birth itself. Matthew and Luke speak of it; possibly John also, though that is open to question. Paul makes no mention of it.

Contemporary men and women, who have difficulty believing in any kind of miraculous birth, stumble in the creed over the word “virgin.” The ancient Church, though it knew as well as we how babies ordinarily come into existence, stumble not over “virgin” but over “born.” The early Church proclaimed the good news that God had intervened in human history, that he had taken humanity upon himself and become a man, though without surrendering his deity. The early Greeks to whom the Gospel was declared found that improper. It was improper that an uncreated God should link himself with something created in this way. What could a transcendent God have to do with human clay? The word “born” as applied to God was a terrible stumbling block to the pagan mind of the early Christian world. Therefore the Virgin Mary was viewed as a sign that God had decisively intervened in human history for the redemption of mankind, that he had taken flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. The early Church was interested in Mary not for her own sake but only as a sign, a guarantee of the reality of the Incarnation. Although Mary is seen as the last of a covenantal line that begins with Sarah and is continued through Hannah and Elizabeth, affirmations about Mary are not about her but about her son. Mary is a signpost pointing to Jesus Christ and to the reality of the historical intervention of God in human history.

The unbiblical reluctance of Protestants to deal with the figure of Mary can be understood only as a reaction to certain later developments in the life of the Church. In the Middle Ages, as well as earlier in the age of the Fathers, Mary increasingly became an object of interest in herself. I will not attempt to summarize all the ways in which Mary claimed the attention of churchmen, but here are a few.

1. Immaculate conception. It is not really made clear in the New Testament why Mary should be the mother of Jesus Christ without the aid of a human father—unless, as John intimates in his description of regeneration as a kind of virgin birth, this marvelous act was intended to show that the advent of Jesus was not a human possibility but solely a divine one. Jesus was born, if one can apply the text of John 1:13 to Jesus rather than the Church, not by the will of man and not through man’s cooperation but by the will of God alone.2The suggestion that John 1:13 is an indirect allusion to the Virgin Birth was first made by Hans von Campenhausen in his book Die Jungfrauengeburt in der Theologie der alten Kirche, Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil. hist, Klasse, Abh. 3, 1962, p. 12. And the sign for this is the virginity of Mary at the time of the birth of Jesus. Or perhaps, as Luke suggests, the Virgin Birth shows the extreme humility of Mary, who, precisely because she had no husband, occupied the bottom rung of Jewish society.

But this is speculation. The fact is, no theory is put forward to explain why Mary should be a virgin. Matthew stresses the idea that virgin birth fulfills the ancient prophecy of Isaiah 7:14, which only pushes the unanswered question further back in time: why was such a prophetic utterance made in the first place and why was it applied to Jesus? Luke feels that the Virgin Birth is further vindication of the principle that “with God nothing will be impossible,” though the primary vindication of that principle is the conception of John the Baptist in the barren womb of his mother Elizabeth (Luke 1:37).

In the absence of any clear explanation for the necessity of the Virgin Birth, the Church began to devise theories. It connected procreation with lust and sin, and exalted virginity as a higher state of moral purity—as if a virgin could not be impure and as if procreation within marriage were not the will of God! Furthermore, the transmission of original sin was believed to take place in procreation, though the sexual act itself was not looked upon as evil. Lust is sinful, and fallen man conceives in lust. At the moment of conception, sin is mysteriously transmitted to the child by means of the perverted self-regard that accompanies the biological act. By doing away with birth through procreation, so the theory ran, Jesus is preserved from the human predicament in which we all find ourselves. He is not involved in original sin. Therefore he is Emmanuel and can save his people from their sins.

But what about Mary? Is it not fitting for the mother of Jesus also to be preserved from original sin? Would that not contribute to the guarantee that her son could not be involved in hereditary sinfulness? If there is no sinful procreation and if the mother herself is preserved from original sin, then surely the Saviour is free from all taint or sin.

The Catholic Church did not, of course, affirm that Mary was also born of a virgin, but rather that she was sanctified and preserved from sin through an immaculate conception. When some theologians (like Thomas Aquinas) argued that to exempt Mary from sin would undercut the centrality of Jesus Christ as Redeemer, they were told (by Duns Scotus among others) that one gives greater honor to Jesus Christ by saying that he preserved the Virgin Mary from sin than by holding that he waited to save her only after she had fallen.

2. The maternity of Mary. Mary is not simply a virgin; she is also a mother. And the medieval Church rang the changes on that theme. God chose Mary to be the mother of Jesus Christ, as he once chose Abraham to be the father of his people, Israel. According to the Genesis account, when God made man he took the dust of the earth. But redemption begins, not with dust, but with the body of Mary. It is from her flesh that the Messiah comes. Mary is the second Eve, the fulfillment of Genesis 3:15.

God chose Mary. But Mary, according to medieval Catholic thought, merited that choice. She cooperates with God in becoming the mother of Jesus Christ. God does not use her as a potter uses clay or as he once used the dust of the earth from which he formed man. Mary has freedom of choice. She chooses to cooperate with God; she accepts the message of the angel in Luke’s narrative; she gives her assent. That choice, that assent, that cooperation, is meritorious.

Mary is thus a type of the Church. Like Mary, the Church has freedom of choice, the ability to decide. God respects the human reality of the Church. He does not deal with it as if it were inert clay. And the Church’s choice to cooperate with God is meritorious. God respects the creation he has made. He deals with it as a responsible covenant partner. And he graciously rewards the good works of that partner. God does not destroy human freedom but works with that freedom.

Mary is also an example for the Church. She obediently and humbly accepted the role God offered her, even though it brought her suffering. There is no obedience to God that does not involve some personal cost to oneself. The Church is called to imitate Mary, her obedience and selfless love.

3. Cooperation in redemption. Now we come to a crucial point, that of Mary’s cooperation in redemption. Mary is more than mother and virgin; she is also a covenant partner. At the Cross, Mary does not stand above or below her son; she stands beside him, sharing in his sorrows and suffering as only a mother can suffer. But for the good of the Church and its redemption, Mary takes the suffering of her son upon herself. She offers him to God the Father for the sake of the Church, even at the cost of her own spiritual torment. At the cross she is the bride of Christ. Through the sufferings of Mary and her son, the Church is born. Jesus came from Mary’s womb, but the Church comes from her broken heart. All forsake Jesus and flee, all except Mary. She belongs to the faithful remnant of God’s covenant people. It is not the case that all humanity has been faithless to God and that God finds a faithful covenant partner only in Jesus Christ. Mary, too, is faithful. She is the elect remnant. And from her faithfulness and the faithfulness of Jesus Christ, the redemption of the world is effected. As Mary consents to the Incarnation, so she consents to the Cross, and by her consent and self-sacrifice she cooperates in the work of redemption.

At this juncture one must not forget the analogy between Mary and the Church. The Church, like Mary, is also the mother of the faithful. A Christian is born in the womb of the Church, nourished by its sacraments and teaching. Like Mary the Church also stands by the cross, not the cross on Calvary but the cross over the altar. Like Mary the Church makes a re-presentation of the body and blood of Christ for the sins of the people in the unbloody sacrifice of the mass.

4. Intercessor. Mary is not only mother, virgin, and bride. She is also intercessor. In the Middle Ages it became increasingly difficult for ordinary Christians to believe that Jesus Christ was really a man. People tended to think of him solely as divine. Consequently he receded farther and farther into heaven, and became more and more remote and inaccessible. Increasingly it was Mary to whom people looked for compassion. Jesus Christ was a judge who spent his time scrutinizing Christians to make sure that they were using to best advantage the means of grace he had provided for them in the Church and the sacraments.

A second development was closely related to this. Jesus Christ was the God-man. He was perfectly obedient to the will of God. But in this obedience he had an advantage over ordinary men and women. He could be obedient in the power of his divine nature. We do not have this advantage. When we are tempted, we have no divine nature to give us the power to obey. How can Jesus, therefore, really understand the temptations that befall ordinary men and women? How can he have compassion on them? Mary on the other hand is wholly human. Originally, to call Mary pure was simply to call attention to her freedom from the taint of sin. But this began to take on a new meaning. To call Mary pure human being was to call her real human being. She obeyed and pleased God without a divine nature. She is just like you and me. Therefore she can have pity on us in our sins and temptations. One should pray to the compassionate Mary. She will pray to her son. And her son cannot really deny his mother’s requests.

The medieval vision of the role of Mary is a vision that Protestants cannot affirm. Mary as one who cooperates with God or who participates in the redemption of the world is a theological point of view that Protestants reject. Men do not cooperate with God in the sense of earning merits. Good works are given not to God, who does not need them, but to the neighbor, who clearly does. Any view in which Mary or the Church offers something to God reverses the direction of both the original sacrifice of Jesus and the eucharistic sacrifice. We do not offer a sacrifice to God to procure his benefits; the movement is all the other way. God offers himself to us in the suffering love of the cross. God nourishes the Church through the benefits of Word and sacrament. We do not offer anything to God, except, perhaps, gratitude and praise. God offers everything to us, and we then gladly share with our neighbor. Mary as co-worker and Mary as co-offerer are images that Protestants cannot accept.

Moreover, Protestants agree with Thomas Aquinas in opposing any thoughts about Mary that undercuts the centrality of Jesus Christ. God found a faithful covenant partner only in his Son. Since Mary is a mythical personification of the Church, the judgment of Gerhart Ebeling that for the Church to glorify the fidelity of Mary and her role in the redemption of the world is for the Church to glorify itself, though it may be too harsh, it is certainly not without some theological justification.

1. On the other hand, Mary is a sign that God has really intervened in human history, really involved himself in our human clay, our suffering, our temptations. If there is reason to reject a theology that is interested in Mary in herself, there is no reason to reject one that makes affirmations about Mary as a signpost pointing away from her to God’s mysterious activity in Jesus Christ. Mary is humble. She stands at the periphery of the New Testament. And there is where she should be. She is a sign pointing to Jesus Christ. Truly biblical Mariology is only another term for Christology.

2. Mary is also a sign that God’s new act in Christ stands in historic continuity with his saving acts in the Old Testament. To be sure, Christian theologians are correct when they say that the Messiah undercuts many of the expectations of the Old Testament. In a very real sense the Messiah who comes is not the Messiah who is expected. But Mary is a sign that the promise is fulfilled as well as transformed. With Simeon, Anna, Zachariah, Elizabeth, and John the Baptist, Mary belongs to the Old Testament people of God, who stand on the threshold of fulfillment. A church that takes Mary seriously may say no not only to denials of Christ’s humanity but also to denials of the authority of the Old Testament.

3. Furthermore, the image of Mary as a type or analogue of the Church is not a bad one, so long as the whole biblical witness is taken. Mary is not only the obedient maiden; she is not only the sorrowing mother. She is also one who does not understand what God’s purposes are, who intervenes when she ought to keep silent, who interferes and tries to thwart the purpose of God, who pleads the ties of filial affection when she should learn faith. And that is what the Church is like. It is not only faithful; it is faithless. It is not only a custodian of God’s truth; it falsifies the Word of God as well. The Church like Mary is iustus et peccator simul: obedient and interfering, perceptive and opaque, faithful and faithless. It is false theology to say that Mary, because she is feminine, adds an element of compassion that is somehow missing in God. On the contrary, there are no bounds to the compassion of God, of which the compassion of Mary is a finite and limited reflection.

Mary confesses that she is not worthy to be chosen by God. That is not false humility. It is the truth of every human being’s situation before God. The words of Luther on his deathbed are applicable to Mary as well as to the Church of which she is the type: “Wir sein pettier; hoc est verum.” We are beggars; this is true. To recognize this fact is to give Mary her true honor, to recognize her rightful place in the history of salvation. Mary is the sign of the continuity and reality of God’s saving activity. To understand this is to hear in the salutation the echo of the blessing of Sarah; to find in her song the strains of Hannah’s; to say with Luke: “Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you!… Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!”

Editor’s Note from November 21, 1975

One month after the latest book by our board member Billy Graham—Angels—had appeared, 560,000 copies were in print or on order. By this time the figure probably exceeds 750,000. Although it was not written primarily as an evangelistic resource, the book is being used that way by God.

After the International Congress on World Evangelization, a follow-up committee was created. Its first meeting was in Mexico City last January. The second is to convene in Atlanta, Georgia, this coming January. Anyone interested in helping to finance the ongoing work of the congress should send a check to the Lausanne Continuation Committee, c/o Dr. Kenneth Chafin, South Main Baptist Church, 4100 South Main Street, Houston, Texas 77002. All gifts are tax-deductible.

The Public Mind Against Itself

Some years ago in an article entitled “Japan: Three Obstacles to the Gospel” (Christian Century, March 7, 1962), William P Woodard developed the thesis that this Far Eastern land had built-in social and psychological factors that made it essentially non-responsive to the Christian Evangel. This idea—that elements in the psyche of a people either make that people susceptible to the Christian message or cause it to present an indifferent or perhaps hostile face—may be timely for us to consider in relation to the climate of our own nation.

Our Lord commended the builder (mentioned in Luke 14:28) who, if he planned to build a tower, first took note of the cost. The same kind of prudence would suggest to the evangelical that he appraise realistically the climate into which he is to project his message. Such an assessment would not limit the efforts at making Christ known; it does provide guidelines for faith and limits upon expectations.

During the times of protest in our colleges and universities, we heard a great deal about commitment. Youth leaders called upon the rank and file to renounce objectivity and detachment, and to become active in causes—to “get a piece of the action” even if it proved to be costly.

The trend was short-lived. In its place has emerged, in almost cultic fashion, an anti-commitment mood that is creeping over old and young. The rejection of commitment seems to be pervasive enough to be considered a dominant social and intellectual motif. This has to be a source of deep concern to the Christian who takes seriously the central demand of the Lord Christ for total allegiance.

This frame of mind has a certain complexity in that it has roots in both the public psychology and in prevailing philosophical trends. In turn it tends to be reinforced by patterns of societal behavior. When and if such a mood beomes institutionalized, it becomes increasingly visible, and the mood becomes increasingly crucial for the strategy of the Christian Church.

A condition of emotional aridness has crept over our populace, affecting youth most directly but leaving no level of society untouched. The so-called sexual revolution, with its over-emphasis upon emotional experience, has contributed to this. The downgrading of work and of ambition and the resulting mood of “doing one’s own thing” served also to fragment experience, with a consequent sterilization of the inner life.

Contemporary literature, art, and music celebrate random and fragmented episodes and events. Personhood seems no longer to consist in continuity and wholeness. The quest for openness (which is really a flight from commitment) is frequently held to be the only alternative to being exploited. What is not so easily seen is that non-commitment may provide an easy rationalization for the emotional exploitation of others.

We have the media to thank, in good part, for a climate that fosters non-involvement. Having long abandoned our Lord’s dictum, “a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of the things which he possesses,” the organs of public communication on all hands create artificial appetites and inordinate expectations. When persons without spiritual roots expect more than they can possibly achieve, or when the achievement does not bring satisfaction, they may become frustrated.

As a result, multitudes in our society live in a state of mild anger, toward unidentified threats. Commitment now appears to be a threat to what is considered valid personhood. Part of the reaction against permanence in marriage stems from this fear. Alternatives that offer sensory experience severed from involvement appear attractive.

While staying detached and uncommitted may decrease one’s vulnerability, it also exacts a great price. Significantly, in an era in which commitment is a dirty word, there is among psychotherapists a renewed concern with narcissism. This involves not only an inordinate preoccupation with the ego but also a demand for random sensory satisfaction.

Perhaps enough has been said to suggest that the cult of non-involvement has deep roots in today’s culture and in the response of the human psyche to dominant motifs in that culture. There are also moods and movements in philosophy that tend to undermine the kind of responsibility that supports vital commitment. Philosophies that engage the classrooms do filter down into the public mind. And often it is their less desirable tenets that have the sharpest impact upon public thinking.

This seems clearly true of existential forms of thought, with their downgrading of reason, their built-in introversion, and their preoccupation with subjectivity. The net result of this philosophical mood—for it is more a mood than a system—is the fragmentation of experience, the celebration of the off-beat, and above all the atomization of truth.

The latter enables the candidate for ordination or for a position on the faculty of a confessional college or seminary to pledge loyalty to a statement of faith one day and a week later to espouse views that undercut that statement. Commitment on this basis, such as it is, seems to the existentially trained to be limited to the period of time in which the one so pledging “feels that way about it.” To this way of thinking, long-term allegiances seem like bands that constrict intellectual breathing and close promising options.

Similarly, the philosophical movement that has surfaced in some quarters as process theology has had an impact at the popular level. It reaches the public in the form of a downgrading of biblical authority, an insistence upon relativizing the personality and sovereignty of God, and a demand for total openness to new options. As the process theologians suggest, “God” is maturing with his world and is exhilarated by the complete open-endedness of the cosmic process.

The popular outcome of this form of thinking is a frame of mind that rejects all forms of finality. It has no tolerance for system or systems. It demands a form of non-involvement that works against meaningful commitment.

Far from being a cause for pessimistic inaction, the prevalance of the “cult of non-commitment” should afford a two pronged challenge to the evangelical. It should stimulate the messenger to “preach for a verdict,” pressing the gospel summons to the sinner to repent and to commit himself to Christ. It should also deepen the Christian’s reliance upon the ministry of the Holy Spirit as he seeks to bring men and women to yieldedness and committed discipleship.

HAROLD B. KUHN

War and Peace in Lebanon: The Religious Roots

During a lull early this month in the fighting between Christians and Muslims in Lebanon, mission officials counted heads and tried to assess the damage to date. Only a handful of the several hundred Protestant foreign missionaries serving in Lebanon remained. None had been hurt, and most mission property had escaped major damage. There were reports of casualties among national workers, however, including the death of a Seventh-day Adventist communications employee. Important church-related schools either delayed the start of their fall terms indefinitely or were limping along at a fraction of normal enrollment. For now, the future of Christian work in Lebanon remains clouded, say mission officials.

Many factors figure in Lebanon’s turmoil: political, economic, and class differences, the presence of several hundred thousand Palestinian refugees, involvement of outside powers, even subversion. But the roots of the nation’s troubles go back many centuries, deep into its religious past.

Christianity was present in the area as early as the first century. In the fifth century St. Maron founded what is known today as the Maronite Catholic Church, an Eastern-rite church in submission to Rome. It is the largest of Lebanon’s Christian bodies, claiming perhaps 60 per cent of the Christian community and 30 per cent of the country’s estimated 3.3 million population.1Population estimates throughout this report are based on conditions earlier in the year, before hundreds of thousands of persons fled from the country to escape the fighting.

The Greek Orthodox Church is the next largest Christian group, with about 13 per cent of the total population. Protestants account for only 1 per cent.

The majority of Lebanese—descendents of the ancient Phoenicians—are Muslims, divided about equally between the Sunni Muslims and the Shi’i Muslims, with a smattering of other Muslim sects. The two main branches of Islam are the result of a split in 657 over the successor to Muhammad. Within each of the major Muslim communities are factions that disagree with one another on fine points of interpretation of the faith. Disputes between them have often erupted into violence.

Islam and the Arabic language date from the ninth century in Lebanon. About 1840, the country came under the domination of the Ottoman Turks. A mandate after World War I placed it under the administration of the French, who had intervened during disorders in the 1860s.

Lebanon, a mountainous country about the size of Connecticut, was given its independence in the early 1940s. To provide for a system of checks and balances between the Muslims and the Christians, a national pact was agreed upon. The Christians outnumbered the Muslims at the time, a calculation based on a census taken in the 1930s—the last time a census has ever been taken. Thus the pact reflected the dominant Christian position. It specified that the president would be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, the speaker of the legislature a Shi’i Muslim, and the commander of the army a Christian. Religious quotas governed the selection of virtually every major governmental, judicial, and military official.

All things considered, the arrangement worked fairly well until after the Six-Day War of 1967, and Lebanon prospered. Beirut became the Wall Street of the Arab world. Business and tourism flourished. The biggest chunk of the prosperity went to the Christians, who tended to have better educations, better jobs, and better connections than the Muslims. Enough of the Sunni Muslims acquired wealth and position to keep the lid on, though. Only occasionally did it threaten to come loose.

One such occasion was in 1958 when Camille Chamoun sought a second term as president, a post he had won six years earlier. Many Muslims opposed his move as a violation of the national pact. In the ensuing disorder Egypt backed the Muslims, and President Eisenhower ordered in thousands of U. S. Marines with the explanation that American citizens needed their protection. Peace was restored, constitutional reforms were enacted, and Chamoun eventually stepped aside in favor of another Maronite acceptable to the Muslims. (Chamoun more recently has been head of the ministry of the interior, another key government post.)

Lebanon’s own small army (fewer than 18,000 troops) has been ineffective. Many officers are Christians, and the majority of enlisted men are Muslims. Therefore there is hesitance on both sides to commit the troops in any internal fracas. Many Muslims are bitter over the army’s failure to repel Israeli reprisals against Palestinian commandos operating out of the refugee camps and villages in southern Lebanon. And they will never forgive the army for dealing more harshly in the past with the Palestinians than with Israel.

A number of political parties have emerged in Lebanon over the years, and these too reflect religious alignment. The largest ones have their own security and militia forces. In the Christian camp, the conservative Phalange Party is the largest.

With the gradual shift in population the Muslims began pressing for more constitutional revisions and reform of the ruling pact. Key provisions of it were never put in writing; they have been observed all these years in a sort of gentlemen’s agreement. The Muslims wanted more of a say in government, more control of the army, more leverage in the marketplace, land reform, and more government support of the Palestinians, among other things. Militants and leftists poured on the fuel. They were supported to come extent by elements in the Beirut-based Palestinian Liberation Organization.

The Christian rightists feared that a shift in power would result in the establishment of a Muslim state and might lead to a destructive war with Israel.

In such an explosive atmosphere relatively minor incidents like a fenderbending auto accident near Tripoli and a street-corner argument in Beirut quickly escalated into bloody national crises. More people were killed in three months of civil strife than in ten years of feuding between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Many business firms relocated elsewhere around the Mediterranean, and tens of thousands of people fled to Syria and Jordan.

The economy is in shambles, bitter feelings run deeper than ever, and some Mideast observers are saying that Lebanon cannot recover with democracy intact. If so, then the future of Christianity in the country may also be at stake.

The largest Protestant body in the country is the Presbyterian-oriented National Evangelical Synod, with more than 10,000 members. The Armenian Evangelical Union has about 7,000 members, and there are substantial communities of Baptists, Anglicans, and independent evangelicals with ties to Britain.

Dozens of Protestant foreign missionary groups have work in Lebanon. The largest missionary force at the beginning of the year belonged to the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Most of the four dozen SDA missionaries were engaged in educational work. The United Presbyterian Church had about twelve missionary families there. Operation Mobilization had thirty assigned to work in publications and in direct evangelism. The Southern Baptists, Assemblies of God, and the Lebanon Evangelical Mission (British) also had sizable contingents.

Much Protestant mission work centers on education. The Catholics likewise emphasize education, enrolling about one-fifth of Lebanon’s school children, and operating a number of seminaries and several universities.

DEATH ON PRIME TIME (RATED PG)

Pastor Paul Tinlin of the 250-member Evangel Assembly of God Church in Schaumburg, Illinois, is getting a lot of press attention in the Midwest. It all started when Tinlin, 41, wrote a letter to a local newspaper disagreeing with an editorial that praised the Supreme Court for in effect striking down the death penalty. His letter stirred up sharp reaction, prompting a stiffer stance by Tinlan.

“There should be swift and sure justice for those who kill—and that should be public execution, and the execution should be on prime-time TV,” declared the minister. “We’ve got to start letting society see life for real,” he explained to a Chicago reporter. “Society should know that killing isn’t like on TV shows where the victim gets up and walks away when the show is over, that when real people get killed they are dead, that they are not just non-persons whose names appear in the newspaper and whose lives had no real meaning for the general public.”

Tinlan told his questioning 12-year-old daughter that seeing executions on TV “would probably make me sick, that it would be gruesome.” But, said he, “murder is also gruesome, and society has to start taking it seriously.”

He cited a verse in Genesis: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed.” Maybe, he said, it’s time for God’s harshest law to be followed.

RISKY BUSINESS

For potential victims of tricks on Halloween, 326-member First Church of the Nazarene in Pekin, Illinois, offered some treats—for a price. Teen-agers went door to door, selling Pranksters Assurance policies for $1. Policy-holders were guaranteed against debris and litter on their property. A clean-up detail of fifty teen-agers and two dozen adults stood by on alert, ready to wash windows and haul away trash. They received only fifteen calls for help.

About 2,000 policies were sold, and the money was donated to the church bus fund, according to pastor John Davis.

Portugal: Christian Climate?

The following account is based on a report filed by London correspondent Roger Day:

For weeks, up to 5,000 refugees, mostly of Portuguese ancestry, poured daily into Lisbon. They were fleeing the fighting in Angola, and most wanted to escape subjugation by the black-dominated government that would assume control upon Angola’s independence from Portugal (see November 7 issue, page 57). They now number several hundred thousand, and they pose special problems—both economic and political—for Portugal.

Relief efforts are under way to help care for the refugees. One operation is being administered by a team of Portuguese evangelicals. Team members include Baptists, Brethren, Pentecostals, and Salvation Army workers. Food, medicine, supplies, and cash are flowing in from national alliances of evangelicals throughout Europe in response to a call from President Jaime Vieira of the Portuguese Evangelical Alliance.

In commenting on the political situation, Vieira says the refugees could endanger “the revolution.” Strongly antileftist and having lost everything, they could be used by high rightist officials to thwart the nation’s liberalization campaign, and they could provoke attacks by extreme leftists that might lead to all-out civil war.

Despite the unrest and threats, Portugal’s people in general are happier now than they were in the repressive past, states Vieira. As for religious affairs, he says there is growing optimism that the new spirit of freedom afforded to Protestants (see March 14 issue, page 59) is likely to continue. A constitutional provision was passed in July stating that Catholicism is no longer the official religion and that all churches would not be treated in the same way.

Vieira says the new freedom means much to the estimated 45,000 believers in the 600 churches associated with the Portuguese Evangelical Alliance. There is complete freedom to worship as one pleases, churches can be organized without the official opposition that was formerly encountered, and Christians are free to evangelize, even in public street meetings. Evangelistic rallies have been held in theaters and sports pavilions, something impossible a year ago. Conscientious objectors on religious grounds no longer need fear imprisonment or flee to another country; they can apply for alternate service.

Most of the country’s evangelicals “did not believe in the dictatorship we had in the past,” affirms Vieira. “We believe in freedom and democracy, and we have practiced democracy in our churches.” He adds: “We now have more freedom than ever, and we believe we should use it to spread the Gospel.”

Christians aren’t the only ones taking advantage of the new climate. Marxists of various persuasions, from mild-eyed socialists to acid-tongued Maoists, are in the streets daily, trying to attract followers. Pornography is flourishing.

To Vieira and other Portuguese evangelicals, it all simply means that the times are ripe for a spiritual harvest.

In some cases there have been nearconfrontations. Baptists in Portugal have been engaged in a nationwide evangelistic campaign. Church members put up posters advertising the theme, “Reconciliation through Jesus Christ.” But the posters disappeared one recent Monday in Cacem. They were torn down by people, reportedly Communist-inspired, who even came into the churchyard to remove the posters on the church building. A group claiming Communist affiliation had also been at the entrance of the church on the preceding Sunday night, trying to persuade people not to attend the special campaign services, according to European Baptist Press Service. The church hall was filled for both the Sunday and Monday night meetings, reported an observer.

The Cacem church had been without a pastor for several years. The new pastor is Sergio Felizardo, one of five pastors among Baptist refugees from Angola.

Wycliffe Opposed

Evangelical groups are under government pressure in Colombia. The Summer Institute of Linguistics, also known as Wycliffe Bible Translators,2Wycliffe is in Colombia officially as a cultural rather than a religious mission, under the Summer Institute of Linguistics name. is now the focus of a public debate in the Colombian legislature. The organization is in a delicate position. It is opposed by the conservative right, which wishes to maintain a Roman Catholic monopoly on missions to the Indians; opposed by liberals and anthropologists who frown upon the “cultural imperialism” of any kind of missions to the Indians; and opposed by the far left because it originated in North America and because it has given linguistic information to the Colombian government.

In a recent meeting with a large group of Indians of various tribes, President Lopez—a liberal—proposed gradually replacing Wycliffe linguists with Colombian linguists. It remains to be seen whether Lopez’s proposal was merely rhetoric. It does imply a recognition of the value of Wycliffe’s linguistic work.

More extreme opponents have spread a strident rumor that a secret American missile base is located on a remote plateau, presumably with Wycliffe collusion. Official sources emphatically deny the rumor. The defense minister, speaking in the House of Representatives, attributed it to “fantasies originating in the suspicions of the Catholic missions.”

Other evangelical groups apparently are being scrutinized by the government too. The Confederation of Evangelical Churches of Colombia recently alerted its members that it “obtained information that the national government is studying and reviewing the incorporation (that is, the legal standing) of some evangelical churches, missions, and institutions.” The committee expressed concern and called a meeting to deal with the question.

LEROY BIRNEY

Religion In Transit

After a ninety-minute debate over whether to remove President Ford’s name as a recipient of one of its annual “Family of Man” awards, the board of directors of the New York City Council of Churches voted overwhelmingly to give it to him as originally planned. But the board also voted to advise Ford of the criticism from clergy and laity opposed to giving him the award because of his stance against federal aid for the financially ailing city.

Trinity (Episcopal) parish in New York City, the United Methodist board of global ministries, and Church World Service (CWS), the relief arm of the National Council of Churches, each gave $5,000 to help air on nationwide television a controversial film about South Africa. A United Church of Christ agency donated $2,000, and an NCC unit chipped in $500. In addition, the Methodist board also helped with production costs. The film, Last Grave in Dimbaza, conveys a strong indictment of apartheid, but knowledgeable persons who saw the film say it contains distortions and inaccuracies.

The five-hour “I Care” television special aired by the fledgling Manhattan Church of the Nazarene over Channel 11 in New York last month brought in almost $300,000 in pledges from some 3,800 viewers.

END-ZONE ENDING

Footballer Mike Rohrbach of the University of Washington made three trips into the end zone against Stanford—two for touchdowns and one to pray. At the close of the game Rohrbach and about a dozen other players from both teams knelt in the end zone and, according to Rohrbach, “thanked the Lord that we got a chance to compete and see each other as friends.”

Thousands of fans who watched the game in Palo Alto, California, probably still are wondering what that post-game huddle was all about. Rohrbach, a member of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, suggests that fans there and elsewhere might be seeing more of that kind of activity this season.

World Scene

The 25-year-old Word of Life Press, a publishing house in Tokyo, staffed by 130 Japanese workers and related to The Evangelical Alliance Mission (TEAM), last month released the New Testament of the Living Bible in Japanese. Although it is not a translation of the popular English paraphrase, it employs similar techniques. TEAM missionary Roger McVety, founder and director of the Press, is working with Living Bibles International to produce modern translations in thirty-seven Asian languages.

MIK, the only evangelical publishing house in Pakistan, sold 45,000 Christian books and 200,000 tracts last year.

Return of the Captives

Edward E. Plowman

On the afternoon of October 30, exactly seven months after the fall of Saigon, a Royal Air Lao twin-engine DC-3 landed at Bangkok, Thailand. Aboard were fourteen persons, including seven missionaries and one of their children, who had been held captive by the Vietnamese Communists since the second week of March. They were accompanied on the flight from Hanoi by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Prince Sadruddin Khan of Pakistan. Khan and his aides had spent months negotiating their release.

Standing in a light drizzle to greet them were a dozen friends, mission officials, and 17-year old Geraldine Mitchell, daughter of Mrs. Betty Mitchell, one of the returning missionaries. Mrs. Mitchell’s husband Archie, a Christian and Missionary Alliance hospital administrator, had been taken captive with two other missionary workers in 1962, and he has not been heard from since then.

Also on hand were a number of embassy officials, including the ambassadors of the United States, Canada, the Philippines, and Australia, plus a bevy of newsmen.

There were shouts of greeting, hugs, and kisses when the released captives, looking a bit undernourished, deplaned. Mrs. Mitchell broke into tears on being reunited with her daughter (see photo, this page). She told reporters she had been unable to learn anything about, the fate of her husband.

The other missionaries in the group were Richard Phillips and his wife Lillian, John and Carolyn Miller and their six-year-old daughter LuAnne (see photo, page 50), and Norman and Joanne Johnson (see April 11 issue, page 31). The Millers served with Wycliffe Bible Translators; the others were members of the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA).

In addition to the missionaries were Paul Struharik, a U. S. Agency for International Development (AID) official; Jay Scarborough, a Cornell student; Peter Whitlock, an Australian; and a Filipino and his Vietnamese wife and son.

All fourteen had been captured in or near Ban Me Thuot (pronounced ban-may-too-et) in the central highlands at the outset of the fighting that led to the sudden collapse of South Viet Nam.

At the conclusion of an airport press conference with the returnees, the Canadian ambassador took the Johnsons, who are Canadians, to his home to spend the night. The other missionaries were whisked to a nearby CMA guest facility. Two days later, Mrs. Mitchell was hospitalized with a severe case of malaria she’d contracted while being held a prisoner in jungle camps, and there was no immediate word on how soon she would be able to leave for home.

In the few days that the missionaries spent at the guest facility before proceeding to North America, they recalled their experiences for interviewers.

The Johnsons were based in a village outside of Ban Me Thuot. On Sunday, March 9, they awoke to the sound of shelling and gunfire in the distance. The couple packed in order to be ready to evacuate in case the shooting turned out to be more than one of the intermittent Communist probes. At 3A.M. the next morning they were suddenly jolted out of bed by a tremendous explosion outside their window. Other shells landed nearby; the village was under attack. The Johnsons huddled until daybreak on the floor of a roofless concrete shower stall at the back of their house.

By dawn the shelling was less intense. The couple saw some South Vietnamese soldiers walking along the street in front of the house, and they decided to venture out themselves in the direction of the nearby missionary compound. They had taken only a few steps when they heard a lot of cheering: triumphant North Vietnamese troops were entering the Raday village.

The couple jumped off the road and made their way to a bunker near their house. For the next eight hours they hid there with a group of frightened Vietnamese, within earshot of the North Vietnamese soldiers (who were rummaging through the house) and with South Vietnamese planes bombing the area. About four o’clock in the afternoon a soldier spotted the people in the bunker, fired a warning shot, and ordered them out. The troops seemed especially excited about snagging a couple of Americans.

The prisoners were marched down the street and into the hills. For their journey the Johnsons had only the clothes they wore, along with a jacket, sweater, and blanket that Mrs. Johnson carried from the house earlier in the day.

When an officer began to tie Johnson’s hands, Johnson explained that he was a missionary and would cause no trouble if left untied. The officer complied, and he ordered the return of a watch and money that had been taken from the missionary.

Along with other prisoners, some of them injured, the missionaries were herded along a rough trail in the hill country. At 1 A. M. they finally came to a building. Here they were kept with one hundred others for the next seven days. It was in the same area where Archie Mitchell had last been seen.

When the attack on Ban Me Thuot began on March 9, the Phillipses hurried to Struharik’s home. Struharik was the senior American advisor in the province. He had a radio and would know of any evacuation flights. With the exception of the Johnsons, the other members of the “Ban Me Thuot 14” were already there. But there were no evacuation flights. The fighting roared on past Struharik’s house that same day, and for the next two days everybody inside tried to be as quiet as possible. But on March 12 the North Vietnamese discovered them and took them to a detention area. On March 18 the group linked up with the Johnsons.

The first jungle camp to which they were taken was located in the northwest corner of Dar Loc province. They stayed here thirty-three days. Then they were moved to another jungle camp in Pleiku province near the Cambodian border, where they stayed forty-three days. This was followed by a seventy-six-day period in a village away from the jungle. From here they were taken by truck to North Viet Nam, arriving on August 23 at Son Tay, the camp outside Hanoi where American helicopters landed in 1970 in a futile attempt to rescue POWs.

The missionaries say they were treated well by their captors. In the jungle camps they were given plenty of rice, although a tablespoon of meat had to be split twelve ways. They were offered whatever medicines were available (Phillips is a doctor; his wife and Mrs. Johnson are nurses), and they were allowed a certain amount of freedom of movement. They built their own shelters and latrines, and they did their own cooking, frequently experimenting with new dishes. One favorite: donuts made from rice flour, sugar, and shortening. The missionaries laugh about how hard the donuts were, “even after ten minutes of dunking.” Once in a while they got dried fish, and they learned to like manioc root. They missed greens in their diet, so they kept sampling leaves that might serve as substitutes.

Everyday they had to cut back the jungle from their doors. They bathed in streams. The only illumination at night came from campfires. For their work they were paid a small sum with which to purchase food.

From the beginning, the foreigners were kept isolated from South Vietnamese prisoners. The missionaries were allowed to hold religious services, but Vietnamese Christians who tried to join in were driven away. The Vietnamese were not permitted to have services.

Mrs. Phillips developed a hobby during her jungle sojourn. She made a butterfly net and collected forty-five different varieties of butterflies. She even persuaded guards to pursue specimens that fluttered into off-limits areas.

The bamboo structures the prisoners built had no walls, and they had to sleep on the ground. When it rained the thatched roofs leaked badly. Many became ill, and most of the foreigners came down with malaria.

Conditions were much improved in North Viet Nam. The prisoners were housed in cement shelters that had electricity and running water. In the jungles the only reading matter the missionaries had were Bibles, but in Hanoi they were provided with books, magazines, and newspapers. Recreation facilities were made available, and the menu improved considerably (for breakfast: soup, fish, bananas, and cookies).

Mrs. Johnson was hospitalized for an infection requiring minor surgery, and she says she received good treatment and the proper medication.

Shortly before their release the missionaries were taken on sightseeing tours to a zoo and a museum but their request to visit a North Vietnamese church service was denied.

Throughout their captivity they were often subjected to tough interrogation sessions. Their questioners kept asking who they really were and why they really were in Viet Nam. Contrary to some speculation, the missionaries say they saw no atrocities, mass graves, or the like that might account for the North Vietnamese reluctance to release them sooner.

“They kept telling us that they had to wait for good relationships to develop between our countries and that they had to find out who we really were,” says Phillips.

Johnson complains that the North Vietnamese would not let him communicate with Canadian officials.

The missionaries, homesick for their families, at the encouragement of prison authorities wrote a number of letters to their children and other relatives, and Phillips prepared a tape for his family. He discovered after his release that none had been received.

They were required to attend indoctrination classes, but with the right questions and reasoning techniques the missionaries were able to turn some of these into witness sessions.

They held services on Sunday mornings in North Viet Nam. These consisted of some hymns, a Scripture reading, and a Bible message. There were regularly scheduled prayer meetings, and whenever anyone was in the interrogation room or was feeling especially low the others would all pray.

The missionaries say they were conscious of the prayers of people back home. “We want to thank everyone who prayed for us,” Mrs. Johnson told a broadcast interviewer. “That’s what brought us through.”

Canada: A Win For Women

After hours of debate, bishops of the 1.5-million-member Anglican Church of Canada voted 31–3 to give individual bishops power to admit qualified women to the priesthood after November 1, 1976. Meeting in Winnipeg, they asked Archbishop Edward Scott, the Canadian primate, to seek comments on their new policy from Anglican churches in other countries. Only “overwhelmingly negative” reaction could stall the move, but Scott anticipates no such reaction. The vote ratifies a move of the General Synod of the church last year.

A Church of England spokesman said it was unlikely that his church would object to the Canadian action. The English church decided in principle some time ago that it has no fundamental objection to women priests. The issue is now being considered by the Church of England bishops.

The decision was made despite several formidable attempts to block it. Some critics wanted to forestall action until the council’s next meeting. Others urged no action until after the 1978 Lambeth conference, which brings together Anglican and Episcopal bishops worldwide, but supporters saw such action as an “intolerable strain.” Reports have suggested that the purpose of a September visit to Canada by Presiding Bishop John N. Allin and eight provincial bishops of the Episcopal Church in the United States was to urge Canadian Anglicans to delay a decision. What effect the Canadian action will prove on the American scene is still a matter of speculation.

About 350 of Canada’s 2,700 Anglican clergy have signed a manifesto that calls for a total boycott against the ministry of any woman who accepts ordination. The manifesto states that “it is an impossibility in the divine economy for a woman to be a priest.”

The 1,000-member Council for the Faith, an alliance of Anglo-Catholics and evangelicals, described ordination of women as “schismatic if not heretical.” Some members of the council have threatened to quit the church to form a new Anglican church.

Archbishop Scott hopes that women candidates for the priesthood will be ordained next year at the same time as men wherever possible.

LESLIE K. TARR

Harvest Time On Taiwan

It was harvesting time as well as watering time in Taiwan early this month when evangelist Billy Graham ended a five-day crusade, breaking all records for a religious event on the 300-mile-long “island beautiful.”

The water was both spiritual and physical in Taipei, capital of the Republic of China. Rain fell each day, turning the playing field of the city stadium into a morass. People came from all over the island, however, sometimes huddling under umbrellas and sometimes squatting on styrofoam squares.

Only on the fourth night did the rain stop briefly, and the estimated 65,000 then filling every space in the stadium broke an attendance record for the facility. It was a special kind of victory for island evangelicals since ecumenical forces had predicted about six months earlier that the government would not allow a crusade in the stadium. On the final day, Graham preached to 60,000 in the rain on Noah, “the man who dared to stand alone.” In the audience was the top man in the government, Chiang Ching-kuo, premier and son of the late president Chiang Kai-shek.

Absent, but sending cabled greetings, was Madame Chiang Kai-shek, honorary chairman of the crusade. She was in the United States for medical attention. Her personal chaplain, Chow Lien-hwa, translated Graham’s messages into Mandarin Chinese. (Translation was also provided in Japanese and Taiwanese.)

Cumulative attendance for the five meetings was estimated at 250,000. Many of the listeners came from outlying towns and villages on the mountainous island, and Taipei churches provided sleeping space for thousands of visitors.

The harvest came as Graham issued an invitation at the end of each service. More than 11,500 decisions were recorded during the five days.

Graham’s team musicians were on hand, but the wet weather had the effect of making the music more Asian than American. Area instrumentalists and vocalists stepped in to lead when rainfall made it impossible to play the piano and organ.

A 5,000-voice choir was only one of the groups of volunteers recruited by local churches to assist. The 300 supporting congregations of some forty denominations also provided more than 3,000 counselors and 2,000 ushers.

A veteran Presbyterian pastor, C. C. Chen, was crusade chairman. “This is the biggest thing I have seen happen in the church life of Taiwan,” he said of the cooperative effort. “It is with deep thanksgiving and joy that I have watched us come together to save our brothers’ souls.”

A school of evangelism conducted in connection with the crusade attracted 2,900 pastors, pastors’ wives, and college and seminary students. Among those enrolled were 160 students, virtually the entire student body, of a seminary at Tainan. They rode eleven hours on a steam-powered train to attend.

China-born Ruth Graham, the evangelist’s wife, accompanied him to the Far East, where he was to conduct a crusade in Hong Kong two weeks after the Taipei meetings. Correspondent Nell Kennedy reported that the Grahams planned to meet in Tokyo with U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger, prompting speculation that they were arranging for a visit to Mrs. Graham’s childhood home in Mainland China.

Rio In Retrospect

Evangelicals in the Rio de Janeiro area staged an anniversary commemoration a year after Billy Graham’s crusade in famous Maracana Stadium, and an estimated 10,000 came through a downpour of rain to attend. It was still pouring at the end of the sermon, but some 500 came forward for counseling when the invitation was given.

Sponsors said that live radio broadcasting of the service gave additional thousands an excuse to stay home in the bad weather. They also emphasize that the Rio meeting is just one of many indications of the impact made on all of Brazil by the 1974 Graham campaign.

Graham biographer John Pollock of Britain was in the country to assess the impact a year later, and he reported that the crusade “set in motion a great surge of evangelistic activity, not just in greater Rio but wherever School of Evangelism students returned.” The “school” was a seminar series for Christian workers.

Among the places Pollock visited were the cities of Recife and Belem in the north and Brasilia and Belo Horizonte in the south. He says he found unprecedented cooperation among evangelicals and record response to their evangelistic endeavors.

Perhaps most important of Pollock’s discoveries was what he described as a new respect for the Gospel throughout the country. He attributed this mostly to the network telecast of the final Sunday rally of the 1974 crusade. It went into all major cities and into most states. Viewers saw a record crowd at Maracana.

Organizers reported to Pollock that decisions for Christ are still being recorded, and that initial inquiries are still coming to the phone number set up in October, 1974. More than 50,000 inquiries have been noted.

The crusade, its preparatory work, and its aftermath have “demolished the inferiority complex” of Brazilian evangelicals, Pollock found. He also attributed to the campaign these results: seminary enrollments in the Rio area are up to capacity and beyond; Baptists have met their national budget early; sales of evangelical literature are up, with one Rio bookshop experiencing a 50 per cent increase this year. The biographer also found that since Graham’s meetings evangelicals have made historic penetrations into intellectual and political circles.

The sense of achievement realized by the cooperating Christians also taught them they can work together “without having to unite in formal organization,” Pollock was told.

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