Amid reports that more and more of Southeast Asia was falling into Communist hands and missionaries were being evacuated, delegates to the thirty-third annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Los Angeles last month pondered the imperative, “Let the Earth Hear His Voice.”

The theme of the three-day meeting, attended by 1,050, was a continuation of the theme of the International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne last summer. It was reflected not only by the strong position paper on the nature of evangelism adopted by the body and ten resolutions approved on a variety of social issues but also by the delegates’ expressed concern for the fate of Third World Christians.

One resolution urged Christians to pray regularly for “suffering humanity and evangelical believers in Southeast Asia” and noted that “the agony of Southeast Asia stirs the heart of compassion of a watching world. Christians everywhere are deeply concerned for fellow believers caught in the webs of the sweeping movement of anti-God and anti-Christ forces. The rolls of the martyrs continue to grow at a frightening rate.” Indeed, the delegates were told in a situation report on Southeast Asia that several Vietnamese pastors had been martyred (see following story). Louis L. King, field director for the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) in Southeast Asia, gave a moving account of “dismantling” CMA mission forces there.

The resolutions were non-controversial and passed unanimously, virtually without discussion. Some observers saw them as echoing the action-consciousness of Lausanne.

Included was a call to pray for and assist “the persecuted church” in Communist-dominated countries and elsewhere. Without Christian protest, the resolution said, “oppressive treatment may increase.” A series of resolutions protested “lowered moral standards relating to sex, vulgarity, blasphemy, and violence” in the motion picture, broadcasting, and television industries. Another objected to “widespread … advertising which portrays social drinking as attractive, healthy, and normal behavior …” Still another urged public officials to “put the welfare of those they serve above personal and partisan interests.”

NAE executive director Billy Melvin, in a keynote speech, stressed “growing recognition of the importance of united evangelical witness and cooperative action across denominational lines” and pointed to the convention’s thirty-three workshop sessions as “practical help” in bringing this about.

A workshop for evaluating short-term missionary service was led by Dr. Vernon Wiebe, general secretary of the Mennonite Brethren Board of Missions Services. It collated experiences of different missions groups. One point made was that lack of continuity, especially in countries like Japan, where mission efforts take much time, is a weakness of the short-term approach. In Zaire, some nationals complained that short-term medical doctors were “learning” or “practicing” on them; hence the need to involve nationals more thoroughly from the beginning in short-term efforts.

Although a few students came back from the field “disillusioned” with the “humanness” of career missionaries, most groups reported that a significant number of short-termers signed up for further service. Language difficulties and the need for trained nationals rather than outsiders were also discussed, but the conclusion was that short-term service was “more good news than bad.” Still, Wiebe cautioned, “the short-termer will always be ancilliary; the bones and muscle will always be the career missionary.”

A workshop on China concerns emphasized opportunities and problems of Chinese evangelicals in America rather than in Asia. Pastor Eddie Lo of First Evangelical Church in Los Angeles cited statistics showing that the number and size of Chinese churches in this country had grown “phenomenally” during the past ten years. American-born Chinese are largely unreached, however, Lo added, and though 90 percent of Chinese congregations are evangelical, the prevailing attitude toward theology “is apathetic.”

Lo pointed to two North American congresses of Chinese evangelicals, one in 1972 and the other last August, as signs of unity. A “Love China” conference will be held in the Philippines this September, and the International Congress of Chinese Evangelicals is scheduled next year in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, thirty applicants are already awaiting the opening of the China Graduate School of Theology in Hong Kong this fall. Most encouraging of all, Lo said, is the commitment of 100 American Chinese evangelicals who are preparing to enter careers in mainland China “witnessing for Christ.”

Philosopher-author Elton Trueblood drew a standing ovation for his profound but lucid commentary on the future of Christian higher education during a luncheon sponsored by the NAE’s Higher Education Commission. Church-related colleges that have blunted their evangelical witness generally are in financial straits today, the Earlham College educator declared. On the other hand, “Christian colleges that resist pressure toward pagan conformity on the whole are doing better financially.” Praising NAE educators “refusing to be conformed to the new paganism,” Trueblood said he saw little hope for Western civilization “unless we can build up a great community of Christian intellectuals.” And he observed that evangelical schools, “little institutions without prestige, may be the very means by which [spiritual] renewal is achieved.”

A somber note was sounded by Pastor W. A. Criswell of the 18,000-member First Baptist Church of Dallas. “Unless there is intervention from heaven,” he said, “by the year 2000 only 2 percent of the world’s population will be evangelical.”

Over all, the NAE this year appears robust, though hardly the avant-garde of evangelicalism. Good administration and financing, under the leadership of Melvin and NAE president Paul Toms of Boston’s Park Street Church, plus the infusion of some younger persons and a thrust toward taking social action more seriously, were generally credited by observers as the reasons for NAE health.

There are various membership levels in the NAE; individuals, churches, religious agencies, and denominations can all join. Some 30,000 churches are represented by NAE members, according to official estimates. Twenty-three denominations belong to the NAE’s military chaplaincy-endorsement commission. The NAE estimates it serves a constituency of 3.5 million persons.

For some, the big disappointment of the convention was a poorly attended fasting and prayer “non-dinner” intended to dramatize world hunger. Sponsored by the World Relief Commission, the event attracted only 138 persons, who were handed five-ounce packets of millet (used as bird feed in the U.S.) instead of usual dinner fare. The packets represent the average daily food allotment of millions in starvation areas. An hour later, however, more than 1,000 persons jammed the International Hotel Ballroom for a musical program and a message by Leighton Ford.

Toms and his first and second vice-presidents—CMA president Nathan Bailey and President Carl Lundquist of Bethel College and Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota—were reelected for a second two-year term. Lester C. Gerig, president of a Fort Wayne life insurance company and member of the Evangelical Mennonite Church of North America, was named NAE Layman of the Year.

New officers are D. Howard Elliot of Topeka, secretary, to replace Cordas C. Burnett, who for health reasons did not seek to retain the post he had for nineteen years; and the Reverend Arthur Gay, Jr., pastor of South Park Church, Park Ridge, Illinois, treasurer. Although there are only two women on the NAE Board of Administration this year, that’s twice as many as a year ago, “and there are plans to systematically increase this,” said the Reverend Robert P. Dugan of Lakewood, Colorado, an Executive Committee member.

Dugan, representing younger blood and leaning toward politics instead of an ecclesiastical career, was elected program chairman for the 1976 Convention. That convention will be held February 23–26 in Washington, D. C., jointly with the annual meeting of the NAE affiliate, National Religious Broadcasters.

NO MORE MOURNING MAÑANA

Thousands of mourners, most of them Cubans who fled their homeland after Fidel Castro came to power, crowded into and around the Church of the Soldiers of the Cross of Christ in Union City, New Jersey, one day last month. At the front of the church were the twin white coffins of 11-year-old Esli Hall and her brother Robert, age 6. They had been kidnapped and murdered by a man yet unknown.

A family friend sang a song the children’s father, once a teacher in Cuba but now a maintenance worker in Newark, had composed. It was a song of Jonathan and David and love. Then the diminutive, black-shawled mother, Elsa Hall, stepped to the pulpit. Reporter Peter Kihss summarized part of what she said:

“Leave the things of life,” she implored. “This is not life. Life is Christ. Life is salvation, where there is no more grief, no more tears. May all of you here make a promise from today on. Look for God. Prepare your life. Accept Christ.”

As for herself, she added, “I have faith and hope. Soon I will see my children.”

Out of the church and through the streets walked the mourners, escorting the slow-moving hearse and funeral cars. They stopped at a stadium for a community-wide memorial service. Again Mrs. Hall pointed to Christ and urged her hearers to turn to him and away from corruption and sin.

The procession moved on to the cemetery, more than a mile away. Amid the tears and sobbing Pastor Roland Stone, who was Orlando Pena in Cuba, pledged:

“Esli and little Robert, en la mañana veremos [we shall see you in the morning].”

Left Behind In South Viet Nam

The following update on South Viet Nam, written by News Editor Edward E. Plowman, is based in part on his interviews with government officials, mission leaders, and missionaries recently returned from Southeast Asia. It is also based on news-service reports and on accounts filed by correspondents Tom Steers in the Philippines and G. Edward Roffe in Laos.

Reliable sources confirmed last month that the seven American missionaries¹The seven are Mr. and Mrs. Norman Johnson of Hamilton, Ontario (Christian and Missionary Alliance); Mr. and Mrs. Richard Phillips of Bloomington, Minnesota (CMA); Mrs. Archie Mitchell of Ely, Oregon (CMA); and Mr. and Mrs. John Miller of Allentown, Pennsylvania (Wycliffe Bible Translators). With the Millers is their pre-school daughter. missing after the fall of Ban Me Thuot in South Viet Nam (see April 11 issue, page 31) are alive. They and the five-year-old daughter of one of the couples were seen in a group of seventeen Caucasians in a stockade in Pleiku province. They were being detained with hundreds of South Vietnamese.

Other reports, unconfirmed, were less cheerful. Sources say Communists executed a South Vietnamese army chaplain along with other military officers in Da Nang. He was a minister in the Christian and Missionary Alliance-related Evangelical Church, the predominant Protestant body in South Viet Nam. The sources also tell of the slaying of a Protestant pastor, of several Catholic priests, and of scores of believers involved in education, business, and government leadership. Rumors were circulating at mid-month of the deaths of two Catholic bishops in the central highlands.

Observers say, however, that it may be a long time before the reports are verified or proven wrong. These observers point out that the Communists executed between 2,000 and 3,000 leaders who stayed behind in North Viet Nam after the mass exodus south in 1954. The observers predict the bloodbath in the south will be many times worse.

By April 24 all missionary personnel had been evacuated from South Viet Nam except for a handful of doctors, nurses, relief workers, and administrators. Christian and Missionary Alliance administrator Jack Revelle was having little success in arranging for the evacuation of key CMA nationals and those associated with several other missions.

Many nationals face an uncertain economic future. As they curtailed or shut down operations, some mission agencies gave generous severance allowances to their national employees (six months’ pay for them in at least one case). What value, if any, the currency might have under a Communist regime is not clear yet.

In an apparent first among the main denominations, a Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) unit sent a telegram urging North Viet Nam not to inflict terror and violence against South Vietnamese refugees.

Relief efforts aimed at helping the hundreds of thousands of refugees were continued last month by ecumenical, denominational, and independent agencies. Millions of dollars in cash, goods, and medicines poured into both government-and Viet Cong-held areas. How much actually reaches the refugees may be something else. A former medical missionary who served at Da Nang said the aid is often intercepted by the military, the rich, and others with connections. It is then hoarded or resold at inflationary rates—out of the reach of the refugees.

Church leaders in both South Viet Nam and the West debated the airlifting of thousands of orphans. The Vatican expressed displeasure, but leading Catholic Relief Services officials—who arranged some of the airlifts—endorsed the concept. The executive committee of the World Council of Churches took a dim view, condemning any use of the orphan issue for political or propaganda purposes. The committee also noted that a Geneva Convention guideline calls for orphans and lost children to be entrusted to persons of the same cultural tradition. A leading Buddhist in South Viet Nam demanded that all the children be returned.

The adoptive process had already started months earlier for many of the children; the airlift simply hurried things along. There were questions about some of the others.

“As we were leaving Da Nang,” said Judith Long, wife of an American medical missionary, “a number of parents wanted to give their children to us. This was an act of deepest love on their part. They knew there would be no future for their children under Communism.” Also, she pointed out, government officials said they could not care for all the orphans without the help of the volunteer relief agencies, and Christian orphanages would not be permitted to function under Communist rule. (World Vision alone was sponsoring about 15,000 children.)

Stories of the exodus from threatened areas are still filtering in. Southern Baptist missionaries Robert C. Davis, Jr., and Gene V. Tunell managed to escape Da Nang along with 6,500 refugees aboard an American freighter just hours before Communist troops entered the city.

A leader of the Hope Baptist Church in Da Nang saw his family off to Saigon but stayed behind to help evacuate the remaining believers. He and most of the congregation were unable to leave when hysteria and confusion gripped the city. The associate pastor of Hope pled for immediate assistance. Mission leaders chartered a small Vietnamese freighter to evacuate the Christians from Da Nang, but it arrived too late. Instructed to proceed to Cam Ranh to pick up Baptist refugees, the ship was diverted instead to Nha Trang where local authorities commandeered it. The Baptists at Cam Ranh, like those at Da Nang, were left stranded.

One youth from Hope Baptist made it to Saigon after five days of jungle and sea travel. He fled Da Nang, he said, because he was on the Communist death list. He had committed several “crimes” that landed him on the list: he had worked for the American Government, he was an officer in the Vietnamese air force, he had studied in America, and he was a student preparing for the Baptist ministry.

One pastor shepherded twenty-five orphans from Kontum in the central highlands. They were among thousands of soldiers and other refugees who were fleeing. Halfway to the coast they were forced into the jungle. On Palm Sunday the pastor and his orphans and other Christians paused for a worship service. After ten days they could go no further. Then a helicopter arrived. Aboard was a general, an old friend of the pastor. He shuttled the group to their destination.

The missionaries, many minus their personal belongings, have left behind houses, schools, hospitals, offices, and a lot of equipment, virtually all of it deeded to the nationals. They have also left behind a strong, though now disorganized, church. Its roots are deep, and it has been growing rapidly. For instance, says veteran CMA missionary evangelist Tom Stebbins, 3,000 tribes-people around Ban Me Thuot turned to Christ during outdoor meetings held by a Vietnamese pastor one month before the city fell.

Wycliffe Bible Translators has left behind eighteen years of translation and literacy work among tribespeople. On the day Ban Me Thuot was attacked, missionaries and nationals were making a final check of a translation of the New Testament in the Bru language.

CMA missionaries Charles E. Long and Truong-van-Sang (a national assigned to tribal work) recently completed translating the New Testament into the Jarai tongue. Believers among the Jarai hill people have grown from a struggling handful fifteen years ago to more than 5,000 today.

The missionaries are being reassigned elsewhere in Asia. Some will still work among Vietnamese. Cambodia, now closed to missionary work, has 200,000 Vietnamese. But, says national worker Doan-trung-Tin, there are 80,000 Vietnamese in Thailand (they have strong pro-North Viet Nam feelings), 42,000 in Laos, 100,000 in France, and 10,000 in the United States (before the current influx).

Open And Shut Cases

In rulings by two federal courts last month, racial discrimination was outlawed in admission policies of private schools, including church-related ones, and the biblical account of creation was shut out as required content in Tennessee textbooks.

A court in Richmond, Virginia, in ruling that blacks cannot be barred from private schools because of race, upheld a lower-court ruling based on the 1866 Civil Rights Act. The act prohibits refusing to enter into a contract with blacks because of their race. If upheld by the Supreme Court, the decision will affect the hundreds of segregated schools that were organized to skirt the high court’s 1954 public-schools desegregation ruling. Many of the schools are run by churches.

Relatedly, private schools would be required to submit annual proof of racial non-discrimination in order to qualify for income-tax exemption under an Internal Revenue Service proposal.

Meanwhile, an appeals court in Cincinnati declared unconstitutional a 1973 Tennessee law requiring public-school texts to give equal time to creationist views. The law stated that evolutionary content had to be labeled theory and could not be “represented to be scientific fact.” It also required that biology texts include the Genesis account. The court, agreeing with the National Association of Biology Teachers, said the law established illegally a preference for the biblical viewpoint—just as did the law that led to the famous Scopes Monkey Trial fifty years ago in Tennessee.

Psychological Studies: From Gothard To Gay

At last month’s twenty-second annual convention of the Christian Association for Psychological Studies in Oklahoma City, some 200 participants—mostly of Dutch Reformed background—delved into a diverse array of topics catching the interest of church members today.

Bill Gothard’s theory of spiritual gifts, taught in his well-attended “seminars on basic youth conflicts,” came under psychometric scrutiny by Dr. John E. Carter and Dr. J. Roland Fleck of the Rosemead Graduate School of Psychology in California. Gothard teaches that persons endowed with certain gifts of the Spirit as set forth in Romans 12 exhibit discernible character traits. These traits differ according to the gift as shown on lists Gothard has drawn up. Assuming that all of this is psychometrically verifiable, Carter and Fleck tested a large number of Christian-college freshmen, subjecting their findings to the sophisticated statistical analysis now prevalent in such research. Their results, though inconclusive, generally showed that gifts and traits do not line up the way Gothard says they do. The only gift in Gothard’s schema that correlated significantly with their testing procedures was “mercy.”

Many, including the researchers, agreed that the sample was deficient in its omission of believers in older age groups. Moreover, a non-Christian control sample would have added to the validity of their study, according to reactors in the audience. Nevertheless, the research into Gothard’s categories exemplified the possibility of empirical verification of the behavioral realities in Christian experience.

Three of the panelists in a symposium on the demonic expressed belief in the present reality of the biblical dimension of demonic activity. A strong dissent was voiced, however, by Dr. J. Harold Ellens, an articulate clinician and pastor of a Christian Reformed congregation in Farmington, Michigan, who averred that Scripture must be taken as conditioned by its historical and cultural context. Ellens expressed his doubts about the uncritical acceptance of a literal and unseen demonic realm, suggesting that the psychological scientists must bind themselves to empirical investigation and findings rather than to the assumptions concerning demons that were current in Bible times.

A symposium on homosexuality, Christianity, and the mental-health professions resulted in a second look at the standard evangelical view that homosexual behavior (as distinguished from homosexual orientation) is sinful. Taking their cue from a new study conducted by a Methodist, Dr. Thomas R. Clark, a practitioner in clinical psychology in Detroit, the majority of panel members agreed that homosexuals are no more predisposed toward neuroses or psychoses than are heterosexuals, that homosexuality is not a mental illness, and that the only real distinction is that of a non-voluntary sexual orientation toward the same sex resulting from a complex set of learning factors.

The possibility of a lasting cure was largely discounted.

Clark’s study of a rather sizable group of non-patient homosexual males in various occupations and professions, including professional sports, showed that these persons were functioning as normally and healthily as heterosexual males. Previous theories as to the psychogenesis of homosexual orientation were said to be inaccurate and no longer acceptable. Clark’s findings have attracted wide attention among American psychiatrists and clinical psychologists since they indicate that the vast majority of males, at least in their feelings, fall somewhere on a graded scale between homosexual and heterosexual, and are therefore ambisexual in varying degrees of intensity. In a majority of males, however, the heterosexual orientation predominates, and whatever homosexual feelings they may have are resolved in favor of a heterosexual lifestyle. However, when the homosexual orientation is strongly predominant, the ambivalence is resolved the other way, and the probability of any lasting reversal or permanent change is very unlikely, perhaps impossible, according to Clark and his colleagues.

In addressing themselves to the biblical-exegetical question of the sinfulness of homosexual behavior, the majority of panelists rejected the standard evangelical view that all homosexual behavior is sinful. They offered an alternative exegesis of the biblical passages relating to the subject: that God condemns promiscuity, fornication, adultery, and sexual permissiveness, whether heterosexual or homosexual, but that Scripture does not condemn homosexual behavior between committed Christians in a covenant relationship of love and loyalty. God’s “perfect” will is for the monogamous heterosexual family. However, according to the majority view, Christians burdened with an involuntary homosexual orientation could choose a committed homosexual relationship as within God’s “permissive” will rather than an unwanted celibacy.

Dr. Phyllis Peters Hart, a clinical psychologist from Chicago, declared that she had long held to the standard exegesis on the subject, but that the realities of her clinical practice led her to take a second look at the exegetical question. The upshot was that a strong case was made for thinking through again the meaning of the scriptural texts without compromise and without the imposition of exegetical or emotional preconceptions.

The symposium included a candid “testimony” by a minister of the Metropolitan Community Churches, a gay-church movement. He said he was both homosexual and a follower of Christ.

With the homosexual issue growing in intensity in the denominations, there seemed to be a deep sense of a need for further exegetical study to evaluate what the majority of the panelists, themselves professedly Bible-believing Christians, have come to think is the healing answer within the churches. No strenuous objections to the apparent pro-gay view were issued from the floor; audience reaction tended to be of the scholarly mull-it-over sort.

JOHN E. WAGNER

DIAL AN ATHEIST

Los Angeles Times religion reporter John Dart reports that when the American Atheists organization held its first convention in Austin, Texas, five years ago, only a dozen persons attended—and two of them dove under a table when the press was admitted and stayed there until the reporters left.

More atheists are coming out of hiding these days, observes Madalyn Murray O’Hair. About 160 registered for last month’s annual convention in Los Angeles, which was organized and conducted by Mrs. O’Hair. She says her organization, the Society of Separationists, has a mailing list of 60,000. Her ailing husband is president.

Helping to man the book table was her son Bill, 29, the central figure in the 1963 Supreme Court decision banning prayers in schools, a case initiated by the then Mrs. Murray.

The convention’s “atheist of the year” award went to Lloyd Thoren of Petersburg, Indiana, the owner of a small telephone company who ran a dial-an-atheist line in 1973 and 1974.

Convicted Watergate conspirator Charles W. Colson was voted “Religious Hypocrite of the Year” for “seeing the light” when faced with a prison term. (In reality, Colson’s conversion occurred months before Watergate began unraveling. He served a light jail term recently and is now teamed in Christian ministry with former Iowa senator Harold Hughes. They are based in Washington, D. C.)

On another front, Pastor Robert Bruce Pierce of the Chicago Temple-First United Methodist Church refuted Mrs. O’Hair’s claim on a Chicago radio station that the church pays no taxes on the twenty-two story building in which it is housed. The building, he said, is owned by a Methodist agency which paid $254,000 in real estate taxes last year. However, he pointed out, the one-fourth of the facility used for church purposes is exempt.

Like Pavlov’s dog, I predictably salivate when certain stimuli come along. Having been much involved in the death-of-God controversy of the sixties and having written a book called The Suicide of Christian Theology, I am the sheer victim of conditioned reflex when an article appears with the title “God Is Not Dead, But Theology Is Dying”: my mouth begins immediately to water. Therefore I cannot resist analyzing the thesis embodied in the article of that title that appeared in the December issue of Intellect—particularly since its author is Charles W. Kegley, co-editor with Robert Bretall of the six-volume Library of Living Theology series, which has given significant scholarly treatment to the thought of Tillich, Niebuhr, Bruner, Wieman, Bultmann, and Nygren.

For Kegley, “theology, at least in the Western world, like all Gaul, is divided into three parts,” and all are in deep trouble. There is biblical theology, which has classically endeavored to set forth a systematic understanding of the teachings of the Bible; dogmatic theology, interpreting the doctrines of a particular church; and “natural or empirical” theology, illustrated by liberal D. C. Mackintosh’s Theology As an Empirical Science, which tries to arrive at religious truth without dependence on scriptural revelation.

The first half of the twentieth century, according to Kegley, “appears to have produced the most remarkable collection of brilliant theologians and the most exhaustive systems of theology in the history of Western thought” (he cites the theologians included in his Library of Living Theology series, plus Barth, Berdyaev, and Buddhist Suzuki), but “there not only are no equally creative theologians at work today, there are none on the horizon.” Now the biblical theologians are myopically dealing with specialized issues, rather than attempting to understand the sweep of Scripture; the dogmatician, likewise, has given up the great task of comprehending the whole of the faith by way of a “new theological blick or stance”; and “as for natural-empirical theology, religious liberalism, like political liberalism, just does not excite and sell enough to warrant the writing.”

To illustrate this collapse, Kegley zeros in on the “theology of hope” and the more recent “theology of play.” The former illustrates the tendency of the contemporary theologian to “dwarf” his subject matter—to take one (perhaps entirely valid) aspect of the whole and make it everything. “Hope is not any more—and probably is less—likely a candidate than love, faith, or other central concerns of theology” for prime position, and in any case the theologian should be offering a synoptic and comprehensive view, not a partial and limited perspective. As for “play theologies,” they so distort the broad sweep of biblical religion that they become a “burlesque”—a “crude joke.” Like today’s artist who gives us urinals as works of art, the play theologian (in the double sense) offers “the reserection of the flesh” (Sam Keen, in The Theology of Play, by Moltmann et al.).

Why this appalling situation? Kegley cites the American development of the independent theological seminary (“angel factory”) separated from the university, and the Supreme Court’s Schempp decision in 1963, allowing only “literary” and “historical” study of religion—only talk about religion—in secular educational institutions. This decision served to drive the wedge even deeper between so-called objective study of religion and the dedicated work of the theølogian, and to move the theologian even farther from the mainstream of intellectual life. And so the understandable tendency today is for the theologian to run away into Transcendence (example: the most recent theologizing of former death-of-god-er Paul Van Buren). Yet “to expound a theology which is incoherent, empirically meaningless, and irrelevant is to misconstrue the task of theology, and to seal its doom a priori.” What we need is a “theology of God, not of some secular fantasies and games of men”—but at the same time a theology which can “so construe its god-talk as to bypass … all the criticisms which attach to de-mythologized, literal discussions of God.”

Aspects of Kegley’s argument can readily be discounted as special pleading: his inclinations toward the “subjective religious empiricism” of early twentieth-century theological modernism cause him to redefine philosophical theology and apologetics as “natural or empirical” theology à la Mackintosh and Wieman; and his fascination with his own Library of Living Theology makes him forget Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and others and assert incredibly that theology has now plummeted from the greatest height it ever attained—in the first half of the twentieth century! But apart from Kegley’s frustration in not finding a suitable candidate for the seventh volume of his series, he should be listened to carefully.

Theology today is superficial and faddish. The important question is, Why?, and the answer lies much deeper than the separation of theology from religion or the theological seminary from the university (indeed, modern theology’s abrogation of its proper task occurred first in the German university faculties of theology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). The central source of the problem—as Kegley himself indirectly suggests in his call for a true “theology of God” and yet a theology that “bypasses” secular criticisms of literal revelation—is that theology is no longer sure of its data. The biblical theologian is unsure to what extent the words and acts of Jesus are the product of primitive belief communities rather than a reflection of Jesus himself; the systematic theologian, unable to build on such shaky foundations, cannot produce a consistent or comprehensive picture of revelational truth—for no one is sure what is revelation and what is not; and the modern philosophical theologian, having given up special revelation as the source of his operations, has fallen into thinly disguised humanisms devoid of theological substance or appeal (the old modernism, the new “secular theology”).

Theology is in the position that medicine would be in if it lost confidence in the germ theory or the use of pharmaceuticals, or law if it found the idea of precedent (stare decisis) no longer compelling. Either Scripture speaks univocally of God, or the death of theology is a dead certainty. When will the modern theologian learn that a reliable Bible is his only survival kit?

In the aftermath of Wounded Knee and other recent Indian confrontations, a widespread new consciousness is developing toward Christian work among the original Americans.

Most Indians seem to repudiate the violent tactics of the American Indian Movement, as well as such criticisms of Christians as those in the book God Is Red by the scholarly Vine Deloria, Jr. If nothing else, however, the resultant publicity has helped many more white Americans learn of the red man’s legitimate grievances against both church and state.

In the religious realm, a few radicals are asking whether white Christians have any right to tamper with traditional Indian beliefs. Christian Indians generally scoff at such suggestions, contending that there is no common religion among Indians anyway. What Christian Indians would like is to see their leadership roles in the church win greater respect and encouragement from white Christians.

“The secret of effective Indian work is Indians working among Indians,” says minister Thomas Francis, a Cree from Saskatchewan who is secretary of the Native Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. Missionaries are usually reluctant to turn over the reins to those whom they have evangelized. Now in North American Indian work they are being pushed to do this as never before.

Christian Indian leaders also are saying that a new evangelistic approach is long overdue. The native Americans have been preached to by white Christians for more than 350 years, and some experts feel that evangelistic methodology needs to be updated. A Christian missionary anthropologist asks, “Why … have the Indians been so resistant to Christianity when something like the peyote cult [peyote is a cactus that yields a hallucinatory drug] has grown so rapidly?”

A report prepared for the Missions Advanced Research and Communication Center last November concluded that mission work among Indians has been directed at the lowest social level and at the leadership but has often neglected the “innovative middle.” The report also cited other observers’ comments on the competition among the many Christian agencies engaged in Indian work. One researcher quoted by the report called the Navahos the “most missionaried people in the world.” Difficulties in relating to young people and in conducting evangelism within the framework of Indian culture, partly because of the dearth of Indian-language translations of Christian literature, were cited also.

The most memorable work among Indians is said to have been that of John Eliot, who dedicated his life to the cause in 1646 and saw some 4,000 conversions in thirty years. The converts were gathered into twenty-four congregations, some with ordained Indian ministers. The first Bible printed in America in any language was the one Eliot produced in a translation for the Massachusetts Algonkian Indians.

The most extensive of the ministries among Indians in recent years has been that of the United Methodists. They have an all-Indian annual conference with 110 churches. Latest membership figures (for the end of 1973) showed a membership of 11,443, a 10 per cent increase over the previous year. There are other Indian Methodist churches that do not belong to that conference, as well as individual Indians who are members of Methodist churches not predominantly Indian. Best known of the Methodists with Indian blood is Oral Roberts.

Presbyterians and Baptists too have substantial Indian ministries, as do the Assemblies of God and the Nazarenes. The largest independent work seems to be that of the North Canada Evangelical Mission, but hard figures that would enable accurate comparisons have not yet been compiled. A prominent Indian mission director suggests that efficiency might be greatly increased if a relatively simple directory were compiled. There may now be considerable duplication of efforts, he says, because of lack of awareness of what others are doing.

Currently about 800,000 Indians are enrolled in reservations in the United States, and more than 350,000 in Canada.¹In the United States, an Indian is enrolled on a reservation on the basis of his mother’s tribe; in Canada, on the basis of his father’s. They are spread among about 250 tribes. Several hundred reservations are scattered throughout the United States. The largest occupied by the largest tribe, the 137,000 Navahos. Their sixteen-million acres of arid land (an area about the size of West Virginia) is spread across parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. The Indian population is increasing steadily. It is said to be America’s fastest growing ethnic group, with a birth rate as high as India’s.

General Director H. Thomas Claus of the American Indian Crusade estimates that between 3 and 5 per cent of American Indians could be called evangelical Christians. Others think that about half regard themselves as at least nominally Christian, and this assumption is often part of the problem in evangelistic work. Says Ted Standing Elk, a Mennonite Brethren evangelist from Porcupine, South Dakota: “We are not dealing with heathen. They claim they are Christian.”

Claus says resistance to the Gospel is also attributable to the fact that Indian Christians are often outcasts in their pueblos. Many do not want to give up their old ways, says Jerry Yellow Hawk, a Sioux minister from Eagle Butte, South Dakota. “They just find it very hard to change over.”

Influential evangelical Indians have recently recognized the great need for pooling their ideas on such problems. As a result, a three-day leadership and evangelism conference was held in Albuquerque in March, and a continuing organization is to be constituted in California in June. Claus was named chairman of the organizing committee. Educational development is a key objective.

There are six Indian Bible schools operating in the United States, but the recognition from authorities that would bring more subsidies and scholarships has been hard to get. Lack of adequate preparation in secondary schools is probably the major hindrance to the Bible schools’ achieving higher academic levels. The secondary-school problem, in turn, is traceable at least in part to language deficiences. There are about 250 surviving languages among the Indians, according to Dr. Thomas, and only about 100 of these are in writing. Wycliffe Bible Translators are at work at several levels in trying to break down language barriers.

Despite the obstacles, some 30,000 American Indian young people are currently enrolled in U. S. colleges. Bacone College, a junior college in Muskogee, Oklahoma, operating under the auspices of American Baptists, has been pioneering in Indian higher education. It has 575 students this year, 78 per cent of them American Indian.

Robert Hardgrave, principal of the Southwestern School of Missions in Flagstaff, Arizona, warns against making too many generalizations about Indian attitudes toward education and religion. He points out that there are marked differences between tribes. He also reports that the multiplicity of Christian denominations confuses Indians, and that some cults are working feverishly to reach Indians. Hardgrave is a former chemical engineer who for seventeen years served as pastor of the First American Indian Church of Los Angeles. He is not an Indian.

Social problems on Indian reservations, much publicized but little corrected, are also a basic concern for Indian evangelical leaders. Nazarene Erwin Patricio, a Papago Indian who is chaplain of the Southwest Indian School in Peoria, Arizona, contends that alcohol is still the number-one problem on reservations. Other major problems concern educational opportunity and ample health care. About half a million Indians are eligible for free federal medical help, but they usually have to go a long way for treatment, and the hospitals and clinics operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs do not get enough funding from Congress to update facilities and attract the needed number of doctors and nurses. The suicide rate among Indians, especially young people, is alarmingly high, say observers.

Another Nazarene, Kogee Thomas, a Creek Indian who teaches at UCLA and is associate director of its American Indian Culture and Research Center, gave the Albuquerque meeting a thorough briefing on the obstacles to economic development among Indians. She noted that the individual Indian “is often torn between a desire to remain with his diminishing land in an effort to recover the essence of his culture and a temptation to adapt to the non-reservation world in an effort to increase his material well-being.” The average Indian income is said to be $1,500 a year, and unemployment hovers around 40 per cent.

Christian laymen in some tribes are taking the initiative in tackling the big social problems. Among these is Peter MacDonald, who is beginning his second four-year term as chairman of the Navaho tribe.

Appreciation for Indian ways is growing among American whites, thanks primarily to the recent popularity of sand paintings and silver-and-turquoise jewelry crafted by Indians. Indian evangelicals hope that this kind of respect for the Indian ethos will bring whites and reds closer together and contribute to mutual understanding. If that happens, the cause of the Gospel is bound to be enhanced.

DAVID KUCHARSKY

WORKING WITHOUT WATCHING

Many of the Bloomington (Indiana) Gospel Tabernacle’s members are employed at the big RCA television plant in town. Yet a lot of them refuse to watch TV themselves, and a number don’t have a set anywhere in the house, according to an Evangelical Press story.

“I am certain God would condemn me if I had a television in my home,” said Tabernacle member Fern Ropp. She and others believe TV is a tool of the devil.

Pastor Charles Benninghoff, 40, says there is “a complete moral breakdown in America today. Television programmining is in a large part responsible.”

Missouri Synod: Cooling Off

Schism may not occur in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod after all, say some of the leaders among the 300 participants in last month’s high-level LCMS theological convocation. The five-day convocation did not result in doctrinal consensus, but members of the opposing factions in the denomination’s doctrinal controversy said they did gain a better understanding of each others views, and they called for further talks.

LCMS president Jacob A. O. Preus seemed pleased with the outcome and said he might say something special at the denomination’s convention in July as a result of the convocation.

The convocation dealt with the authority of Scripture. Position papers were presented by theologians of both sides. These were discussed by reactors and in small-group meetings.

Inerrancy emerged as the key topic. Preus and his colleagues argued for it; the other side allowed for errors in the Bible (“its humanity”) but contended that errancy does not rob Scripture of its authority and power, a concept rejected by the conservatives.

Neither side seemed to be able to arrive at a mutually understood definition of the historical critical method of biblical interpretation, an important issue in the controversy. Advocates of errancy and non-literal interpretation of certain Bible passages rest their case on historical criticism.

The conservatives, who hold the positions of power in the LCMS, indicated they will not compromise “God’s truth” in order to achieve unity. Nevertheless, the convocation concluded on a hopeful note of reconciliation as most of the participants—including Preus and opposition leader John Tietjen—joined together in a communion service.

Earlier, the LCMS board of directors was told that relations with the LCMS-related churches in Brazil and Asia are much improved. Presidents of the Asian churches reported that Chairman Waldo Werning of the LCMS missions board and Hong Kong church leaders “have made peace with each other.” A disputed policy statement of the missions board has been set aside in favor of a joint policy study, said the presidents.

Thus for now, things seem to be cooling off a bit in the Missouri Synod.

Garbled press coverage of several recent developments contributed to unrest among LCMS members. Action at a January meeting of the faculty senate at 1,200-student Concordia Teachers College in River Forest, Illinois, was interpreted by a Chicago newspaper as a no-confidence vote for the administration. The faculty immediately issued a statement denying that the action was an attack against the administration or a no-confidence vote. It was instead an airing of the issues on the troubled campus, according to a source.

When Seminex, the seminary founded by anti-Preus dissidents, was voted as an associate member of the Association of Theological Schools, a United Press story indicated wrongly that Seminex was now accredited and could grant degrees.

Another news story said an Illinois court had upheld the legality of an arrangement by which Seminex degrees were granted through another Lutheran school. In reality, the matter has not yet reached the courts; the state’s Superintendent of Public Instruction said he saw no fraud in the arrangement.

Also, officials at Concordia Seminary in Springfield, Illinois, deny that any troubles on campus there stem from the denomination’s doctrinal controversy, as some news accounts implied.

Lost Cause

Apparently under pressure, the United Methodist Council on Youth Ministries no longer plans to ask the denomination’s legislating body next year to endorse the ordination of homosexuals, according to a Religious News Service story.

Instead, the youth agency will try to get the body to drop one sentence and a clause from a church statement adopted in 1972. The phrase puts the church on record as not condoning homosexual practice because of its incompatibility with Christian teaching. The sentence says the church does not recommend marriage between persons of the same sex.

Leaders of the youth agency, noting the vocal anti-gay reaction throughout the denomination, say privately they don’t expect their deletion proposal to survive pre-convention committee action.

The Saga Of St. Sava

A twelve-year-long church battle neared an end with a recent Illinois Supreme Court decision that is bound to disturb some church authorities in Yugoslavia. It all started in the early 1960s when the bishops of the Serbian Eastern Orthodox Church in Yugoslavia decided to split its American-Canadian Diocese into three new dioceses. This move was opposed by Bishop Dionisije Milivojevich of the American-Canadian diocese. He was already a storm center of controversy because of personal charges lodged against him by a number of American church members. In 1963 the Yugoslav bishops suspended him. The following year, without investigating the charges, they defrocked him.

Dionisije and his followers rejected both the restructuring and the defrocking, and they declared their diocese no longer was bound to the mother church in Yugoslavia. Near-riot conditions ensued in some of the churches as both sides contended bitterly for control of property and pulpits. Families were divided. Police had to quell disturbances. (Records show the denomination had 65,000 North American members and fifty-two churches in the late 1960s.)

The Illinois high court ruled that the Yugoslavia bishops had violated their church’s constitution in partitioning the American-Canadian Diocese and in the way they defrocked Dionisije. But, said the court, the diocese also erred in seceding from the mother church and is still bound to it.

Lower courts will use the opinion as a guideline in arriving at settlements. In effect, neither side has won, and in a number of cases the warring factions now may settle out of court. In the Cleveland suburb of Parma, where the St. Sava Serbian Orthodox church exchanged hands several times amid slugfests and shouting, the opposing groups agreed to split the $1 million worth of church property between them. The group loyal to the mother church—about 400 members—has first option on the church building and will be known as the St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Cathedral. The other group—about 800 in number—will call itself the St. Sava Serbian Eastern Orthodox Church.

St. Sava was dedicated twice in 1963: once by Dionisije and once by the three new bishops appointed by the Yugoslav hierarchy. A long, unpleasant chapter in its history is concluded at last.

Anglicans: Will Women Win?

Parishioners of the Anglican Church of the Ascension in London formally petitioned Bishop Mervyn Stockwood of Woolwich, known as a controversial “progressive,” to ordain to the priesthood Elsie Baker, a deaconess who has served the parish for thirty-three years. It is the first request for ordination of a woman to the priesthood in Church of England history. Stockwood was not available for immediate comment; it was believed he will not act on the petition until the denomination agrees to the ordination of women. Assistant bishop David Sheppard, an evangelical, voiced approval of women’s ordination.

The topic has been a subject of study throughout the Church of England, and each diocese has voted on it in a straw poll. The results of the voting are to be reported to the July session of the church’s General Synod. That meeting may determine in which direction the church will move on the issue.

News sources quote an unnamed Anglican authority as saying that forty-one of forty-three diocesan synods see no important barriers to women’s ordination.

Religion In Transit

More suicide attempts were preceded by a serious quarrel with a spouse than by any other stress situation, according to a recent medical study. Also high on the list: serious personal or family illnesses. The majority of suicide attempts were by white females under age 30, mostly through drug overdoses.

A 24-year-old Camden, New Jersey, man was indicted for murder in the deaths of twin fetuses. He wounded a young woman seven months pregnant in a hold-up attempt. The fetuses were removed but died within fifteen hours. “We will have to prove in court that they were living persons,” says the county prosecutor. Some observers believe the case could force the Supreme Court to define more precisely the rights of the unborn and when life begins.

The National Religious Broadcasters organization will move its headquarters from Morristown, New Jersey, to Washington, D. C.

A Southern Baptist Convention committee, instructed to study the possibility of a name change for the 12.5-million-member SBC, will recommend against a change at next month’s annual meeting. Reasons: other groups might grab the SBC name; no consensus on a new name; the difficulties in communicating the change and in changing all the records and published materials.

Melodyland School of Theology, a 500-student charismatic-oriented school in Anaheim, California, has formed an Ecumenical Research Academy and an Advanced Center for Theological Studies. The latter will offer short terms of graduate study. Both ERA and ACTS are to be housed in a proposed $9 million facility.

The chief planning and coordinating body of the United Presbyterian Church rejected a proposal to establish a separate overseas mission agency. It also rejected a list of evangelical theological affirmations as standards for mission work but called for a denomination-wide study of the meaning of mission. The affirmations and the request for a UPC mission agency for “world evangelization” were made last year by Presbyterians United for Biblical Concerns, an evangelical lobby. Evangelicals are now talking about starting their own mission unit.

For “various” but unspecified reasons, the Joint Washington Office for Social Concern, representing the Unitarian Universalist Association, American Humanist Association, and American Ethical Union, will close June 30 after more than five years of lobbying in the nation’s capital.

A Harris opinion poll shows that religion is “very important” for 71 per cent of Americans 65 and older. The figure is only 34 per cent for persons 18–24 but increases for each age group. Attendance at church and synagogue services is highest among those 55 and older.

The American Board of Missions to the Jews will launch an “evangelistic blitz” of one-minute spots six times daily on the 675-station Mutual Broadcasting System from May 19 through May 30, according to ABMJ sources.

Western Maryland College in Westminster, Maryland, severed its affiliation with the United Methodist Church. College officials blame a parochaid lawsuit by Americans United that has tied up more than $1 million of state aid. Of 1,288 undergraduates, 276 are Methodists. An earlier suit by A.U. resulted in the loss of $500,000 of state funding for a new building. Elsewhere, North Carolina Wesleyan College’s request to be taken into the state’s university system was denied. The United Methodist school, $3.5 million in debt, may be forced to close.

Unless the twelve-year-old Journal of Ecumenical Studies, a Temple University publication in Philadelphia, can come up with nearly $10,000 in additional funding for next year, it will cease publication, according to a spokesman for the 2,500-subscriber quarterly journal.

First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana, hosted 3,194 pastors and lay workers at its twelfth annual Pastors’ School, according to Pastor Jack Hyles. On March 16, a total of 30,570 attended Sunday school in shifts at the church. A world record, says Hyles.

The Canadian Supreme Court ruled that the nation’s five-year-old abortion law permits abortions at licensed hospitals by doctors only when the mother’s life or health is endangered.

DEATH

CHARLES BRANDON BOOTH, 87, former commander-in-chief of the Volunteers of America relief and rehabilitation organization and grandson of William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army; in La Mesa, California.

Personalia

Author-journalist Russell T. Hitt, 69, retired this month as editor of Eternity magazine and as executive director of the Evangelical Foundation, which sponsors the magazine and the “Bible Study Hour” radio broadcast.

Colonel Orris E. Kelly, 48, a United Methodist clergyman and Garrett Seminary graduate, was named to succeed retiring Gerhardt W. Hyatt as U. S. Army chief of chaplains. With the new job comes promotion to major general. Two thoroughgoing evangelicals were among the three final candidates for the post, according to chaplaincy sources.

William O. Rieke, 43, an executive of the University of Kansas Medical Center, will become president of Pacific Lutheran University, an American Lutheran Church school in Tacoma, Washington.

Now that you’ve had a chance to get used to our new format, we have a new feature to introduce. “Others Say …” will follow the editorials and will, as the title suggests, present the opinions of people other than the editors on various issues of the day. The number of contributors will vary, as will the frequency and length of the feature. For the first appearance of “Others Say …” (page 28) we asked some well-informed evangelicals about their views on developments taking place in Southeast Asia.

Next on our agenda of controversial topics: women. The May 23 issue will offer “Women as Preachers: Evangelical Precedents,” and after that we’ll have pro and con articles on the ordination of women. Also forthcoming are articles on marriage, divorce, and remarriage.

The Wisdom Of This World

Encyclopedia of Philosophy, four volumes, edited by Paul Edwards (Macmillan, 1973, 4,206 pp., $99.50), is reviewed by David E. Kucharsky, managing editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

No reference work can ever claim to offer all the answers, but here is one that at least poses most of the questions. Except for Encyclopedia Britannica, no other work in English can compare, in the scope and intensity with which the great human ideas are presented, with the Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

It would be hard to overrate the value of EP for thoughtful Christians. Those who acquire a set will find themselves consulting it regularly. Philosophy as a discipline is closely related to theology, and there is hardly a page among the 4,200 in EP without some religious relevance. Everyone who researches sermons or Sunday-school lessons should have access to it if he wishes to grapple effectively with the wisdom of this world.

The publishers originally issued EP in eight volumes, priced at $299.50. Now, eight years later, they have rebound it into four volumes with no abridgement and are offering it for two-thirds less. (In fact, by joining the Book-of-the-Month Club one can obtain the set for the cost of a couple of regular books.)

Editor-in-Chief Paul Edwards claims in the introduction that “there is no philosophical concept or theory of any importance that is not identified and discussed.” In most cases, he says, articles were assigned to authors (there are 500) “who were to some considerable extent sympathetic to the theory or the figure they were to discuss.” However, Edwards and his 153-member editorial board chose to have long and integrated articles rather than a greater multitude of shorter entries. As a result, many theories and figures end up being handled in broader contexts by contributors who are ideologically hostile to them. For example, “propositional revelation” appears in the same article as “nonpropositional revelation.” The contradictory views are presented by the same author, John Hick, once a Princeton Seminary professor. Hick flatly asserts that the propositional conception of revelation “was largely abandoned by the first Reformers in the sixteenth century, particularly Martin Luther.”

One also wonders how, under the guidelines stated by the editor, a Catholic medievalist was selected to write the article on the American Puritan Jonathan Edwards. Fortunately, the writer, Armand A. Maurer, is accurate, lucid, and interesting and considers his subject “the most gifted and articulate theologian-philosopher in the New England colonies and perhaps in American history.”

The editor comments that “reference works have a reputation, not altogether undeserved, for being deadly dull.” To avoid this in EP he says, controversy was welcomed and “high-flown phraseology” discouraged. Also, “our contributors were not required to be serious and solemn at all costs, and some of our articles are certain to offend those who believe that philosophy and laughter are incompatible.” There are indeed occasional attempts at humor in EP, though not in its three-page article on the subject.

Edwards states that writers were free to show their own bias as long as they did not deliberately distort opponents’ views. Thinking people will recognize this as a commendable approach: it is productive of a lot less misunderstanding if one concedes that one operates within a certain perspective and then tries to be fair. The difficulties begin when readers are led to expect absolute objectivity, which is in fact impossible.

The bias of EP is admittedly toward the empirical and analytic tradition of Anglo-Saxon philosophy, which is numerically overpowering in academia today. Vienna-born Edwards readily admits that the encyclopedia would have been vastly different had a Hegelian or phenomenologist been the editor. If the reader is not sympathetic to a concentration on language, semantics, and nomenclature, he may occasionally despair. (He may also be disappointed, however, to find among all the discussion of human expression virtually nothing on the discipline of rhetoric as such, long associated with philosophy and undergoing in recent years something of a revival. The material was originally written about a decade ago—before this revival was very apparent, and also before Vatican II released a flood of existential and phenomenological speculation among Roman Catholic philosophers.)

Edwards shows his own bias in his ten-page essay on “Meaning and Value of Life.” The article does not, as one might expect, survey the various theories of worth but focuses upon whether pessimistic conclusions are justified if belief in God and immortality is rejected. The implied presupposition is that religious claims are outside what is now considered the domain of philosophy, and that the subject must be handled within contemporary confines, namely, those of empirical verifiability. Needless to say, the tenets of biblical Christianity are not regarded as sufficiently linked to sense data to qualify for rational philosophical discourse.

In most of the rest of EP, Christian premises are not such outcasts. The work is replete with ideas set forth by Christians. Among article writers are a number of neo-Thomists and neo-Protestants, and several Calvin College graduates who are evangelicals. But contemporary evangelicals will not be found as subject matter, except for C. S. Lewis, who in the article on “Concepts of God” is credited with providing “the best modern defense of the miraculous element in Christianity.”

True, one might be hard pressed to name many twentieth-century evangelicals whose creativity would warrant notice in EP. There is no evangelical apologetic in philosophy that has any appreciable respect among worldly thinkers. But one can hope that if there is a second edition it will at least make significant references to such figures as Machen, Dooyeweerd, Clark, and Van Til. Also, a promising group of younger evangelicals are winning respect among their philosophical peers and will be deserving of attention.

Hick, whose limitations in discussing revelation were noted earlier, does much better in his treatment of faith. He manages to write a four-page article without quoting the definition in Hebrews 11:1, but otherwise provides a succinct survey of how faith has been described by great intellects down through the ages. Hick also wrote key articles on Christianity (in which the fall is referred to as a myth) and on the ontological argument for the existence of God.

There is an eight-page article on common-consent arguments for the existence of God, and nearly two pages are given to the Golden Rule. Among the many theologians covered in separate articles are Barth, Brunner, Bonhoeffer, and Bultmann. T. S. Eliot also gets an article, as do such subjects as “If,” “Nothing,” “Why,” “Can,” “Common Sense,” and “My Death.”

The text, set in film type, is quite readable even though each two-column page packs in about 1,200 words. One might hope that reference works of this sort would include pronunciations of names, but EP does not. It does have bibliographies with each of its 1,450 articles. A 157-page index has some 38.000 entries.

The obvious use of this tool for non-philosophical types is to get a quick rundown on some concept, thinker, or intellectual phenomenon. There is a vast amount of description of how Christians have wrestled with great ideas, as well as a compilation of the most profound resistance against God. Christians should not have to be persuaded to be as aware as possible of these things, but, regrettably, many avoid philosophy, feeling that it is too abstract to bother with. The truth is that philosophers perhaps more than politicians determine the patterns of how people live. One cannot get away from philosophies. One can only choose between them.

The Need For Challenge

The Urban Mission, edited by Craig Ellison (Eerdmans, 230 pp., $3.95 pb), is reviewed by Cheryl Forbes, editorial associate, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Throughout the twenty-two chapters plus the introduction we are told that people, evangelicals particularly, hate and mistrust the city. The contributors try to convince readers that the city ought to be important to them. I am not sure that they succeed.

I read the book from a city perspective. I work in the city and have lived and worked in both the South End of Boston and the ghetto of Washington, D.C. I love the city for itself, and I believe that urban missions are as vital as foreign missions. I know from first-hand experience what poverty in the city is like. But those who don’t will probably think, even after reading the book (if they will read it, that is), that “those people” deserve little help.

John F. Alexander’s essay, “Making People Aware,” deals with this problem, and is in some ways one of the best in the book. (All the chapters but one are original; the exception, by Joseph Daniels, appeared as two articles in CHRISTIANITY TODAY.) Alexander points out that those trying to activate evangelicals have used rational methods of communicating the problems. Of course, the best way to convince people is to show them. But if we can’t get them into the city, we should get the city into them. Alexander explains how:

Consider how evangelicals have tried to communicate about poverty, racism, and the city. On such topics we have written hundreds of learned treatises, but no novels, very little poetry, few short stories, even fewer allegories, little humor, practically no songs, and only a few photo essays or movies. Do we really believe that two-hundred-page essays are the way to produce change? If we want to make people sensitive to human suffering, let us show human suffering.

Most literary historians know that through his fiction Charles Dickens did much to alleviate the suffering of the poor in nineteenth-century England. And in this century many secular poets have written of war and poverty. But evangelicals have failed to understand that art, while entertaining, can also help us see and feel the problem. Regrettably, the publishers of this volume did not heed Alexander’s perceptive point, and we have another two-hundred-page collection of essays.

The essays are good, well written (for the most part), and instructive. Ronald Sider tells us about rural Messiah College’s Satellite Campus in Philadelphia. Roger Dewey explains the development of the Evangelical Committee for Urban Ministries in Boston, and Eunice and Donald Schatz and Lucille Sider Dayton tell us of Chicago’s Urban Life Center. But because the chapters lack imagination, they do not convey the conviction of their authors. The emotional aspect is missing, except in the chapter by Graham Barnes, “Black-White Understanding: Communication and Participation,” which effectively uses a case-study narrative technique.

As a resource or text book The Urban Mission succeeds admirably. But as—to use the editor’s words—a “challenge to the general evangelical community” to get involved in the city, it is, I fear, less convincing.

Topical Approach

Biblical Archaeology, edited by Shalom M. Paul and William G. Dever (Quadrangle, 1974, 290 pp., $12.50), is reviewed by Richard Neissen, Ph.D. candidate, Aquinas Institute of Theology, Dubuque, Iowa.

This volume is part of the New York Times Library of Jewish Knowledge series and covers Old Testament archaeology up to the Persian period. Both editors reside in Israel, and they have been able to use unpublished material and original works in Hebrew that would normally be inaccessible to Western readers.

One interesting feature of the volume is the authors’ topical approach to the subject. Instead of leading the reader on a tedious site-by-site tour of the Holy Land or on a century-by-century trudge through the dim ages of Israel’s past, they present him with a topical arrangement of the subject matter. Overall, the arrangement makes for both interesting and reference usefulness.

Part one, a full half of the book, deals with architectural matters pertaining to the construction and layout of cities as a whole and of the various buildings contained therein. Photographs of sites are supplemented by models and drawings. Also included are chapters on temples and various cultic structures, fortifications, tombs, and water works.

Part two treats the various aspects of economic life, including agricultural techniques, trade and commerce, taxation, and, in a chapter each, monetary systems and the system of weights and measures.

The third part deals with the hardware of everyday life. One chapter covers the raw materials used, from iron and glass to leather and textiles. The other is on tools and utensils, clothing, weaponry, musical instruments, and religious artifacts.

Many archaeologists subject their readers to a seemingly endless parade of pictures of vases, rock-carvings, and what have you. This one, however, seems a little under-illustrated in places. For example, the chapter on money shows none of the coinage, and the last ninety pages, on technology and crafts, contain twelve illustrations.

The text is written at a popular level, and there are no footnotes; this complicates going to the primary sources for reference and further study, though a section of “Suggestions for Further Reading” lists the more important contributions to the field. The book’s usefulness as a reference tool would be enhanced by an index of Scripture references, but this lack is partially compensated for by an eight-page, double-column index of the subject matter. This volume would be just the thing for church libraries and is recommended supplementary reading on the life and times of the Old Testament world.

What Do We Know About Jesus?

Jesus and Christian Origins Outside the New Testament, by F. F. Bruce (Eerdmans, 1974, 216 pp., $3.45 pb), is reviewed by Stanley K. Riegel, graduate student, Wycliffe College, Toronto, Ontario.

The Bible student is indebted to F. F. Bruce for many books that offer a thoroughly researched but non-technical introduction to various areas of biblical scholarship. This recent one surveys and evaluates the information about Jesus and Christian origins provided by non-biblical sources. Bruce is careful to point out, though, that while the secondary sources are of great interest, the primary source for information on this subject is the New Testament.

The evidence he considers in this book comes from many sources: pagan writers, Josephus, rabbinical tradition, Qumran, apocryphal gospels, Gnostic writings, Islam and the Qur’an, and archaeology.

In synopsis form these are some of Bruce’s conclusions. The pagan writers give what he calls reports of their investigations into police records concerning the origins of Christianity after its rise and growth began to attract attention. The writings of Josephus and the rabbis contain reports of Jesus that, though they may not be accepted as wholly authentic, do witness to the writers’ knowledge of Jesus and his followers. Of the sources that purport to record what Jesus said and did, Bruce acknowledges that authentic traditions may be recorded but that the majority of these materials are either imaginative expansions of the Gospels or collections of sayings interpreted by those with heretical theological viewpoints. Islam and the Qur’an are seen not as independent sources but simply as further attestation that Christianity had made an important impact. Archaeology has contributed to a better understanding of the New Testament through what has been learned from papyrus documents, coins, and stone inscriptions.

Bruce concludes by stating that his purpose has been not to prove something but to provide readers with an account of the references to Jesus and Christian origins in all types of documents outside the New Testament. The legends found there in no way detract from the historical validity of the New Testament but witness to the growing impact that Jesus and the Church were having.

The value of this book is that it puts a readable account of all this material together under one cover, thereby saving the reader from consulting many other books to find the same information.

The service to the reader is further increased because it does not simply provide a source but also gives a reliable evaluation of the worth of every piece of non-canonical material included. It is a welcome addition for the library of laymen and also for students, who will find it a good introduction to the varied sources it treats.

Christian And/Or Civil Religion

American Civil Religion, edited by Russell E. Richey and Donald G. Jones (Harper & Row, 1974, 278 pp., $3.95 pb), is reviewed by Dean M. Kelley, director for civil and religious liberties, National Council of Churches, New York City.

It is either too hard or too easy to write about “the American civil religion” because so few agree on what it is. Like the blind men and the elephant, the authors of these essays come up with at least as many definitions as there are authors. The editors sort out five categories of definitions used in the book: (1) folk religion, (2) the transcendent universal religion of the nation, (3) religious nationalism, (4) the democratic faith, and (5) Protestant civic piety.

Martin Marty, in his essay “Two Kinds of Civil Religion,” suggests that there are as many civil religions as as there are citizens. And John F. Wilson, with gentle and scholarly courtliness, follows this logic to its inevitable conclusion: while there are many ceremonia or quasi-theological elements in American life, they do not constitute an ongoing, independent identifiable “thing” out there worthy of being called religion like other religions.

The book begins and ends with articles by Robert N. Bellah, who gave the term its current usage in his classic article “Civil Religion in America,” reprinted from the Winter, 1967, Daedalus, as the prologue of this book. In his epilogue of six years later, Bellah insists that, despite the disputations of the intervening years and pages, there is too such a thing (or at least the concept of such a thing) because he set it forth in 1967, and that its “reality” consists in its usefulness in talking about things that “indubitably are out there.” When another concept comes along that is more useful in talking about those things, then the “civil religion” will cease to exist.

The same could be said for “phlogiston” or the “ether”: they were “useful” concepts for talking about “things out there.” The only trouble was, they were erroneous concepts that led many generations of observers astray. Likewise, “civil religion” is a concept (or rather a disorderly bundle of concepts) that creates more confusions and illusions than it resolves. The same “things out there” could be described more adequately—and more accurately—by less pretentious terms, such as “civic ceremonials,” “shared political presuppositions,” “messianic nationalism,” and “vestiges of Protestant proprietary culture-pieties.”

Some of the papers in this book were presented at a conference on civil religion at Drew University organized by the editors; others are reprinted classics, such as Sidney E. Mead’s “The Nation With the Soul of a Church” (1967) and W. Lloyd Warner’s “An American Sacred Ceremony” (1953!). Will Herberg’s article is a kind of a brief reprise of his insightful book Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1960).

I have read this book three times, the first time in galleys, and have come to appreciate several of the essays—even Bellah’s—more each time. David Little analyzes Thomas Jefferson’s failure to recognize, let alone resolve, the tensions among moral beliefs, religious beliefs, and civic responsibility, thus encouraging the American propensity to confuse moral commitments and religious convictions with civic allegiance. Leo Marx points out the vernacular use of obscenity to deflate the propensities of “civil religion,” which he defines as “the effort to invest the highest political authority with religious legitimacy.”

Charles H. Long offers the important insight that the American civil religion is devoted mainly to exalting and sanctifying the deeds of male European conquerors in this land, thus not only rendering invisible the native American, black, and Oriental people here but helping the dominant group to forget what it did, and is doing, to them. This omission cannot be rectified merely by adding on the histories of these non-Europeans to the American hagiography, he says; it calls for a far more radical remedy (hold your breath now!): a new episteme! With this (undefined) prescription, the force and specificity of the article degenerate into two pages of obscure incantations about “hermeneutics,” “heuristics,” and “historiographies”—a disappointing anticlimax.

My favorite essay, perhaps because most congenial to my own views, is Herbert Richardson’s theological castigation of civil religion. He rejects Bellah’s and Mead’s notion that it can be an exalting influence and becomes demonic only when “misused.” Such misuse is inevitable because of the very nature of civil religion. The linkage of the nation to God runs both ways: politics takes on ultimacy, and justification is afforded for whatever course politics takes. “In attempting to be pious, we can also become proud.”

It is not that we can exorcise civil religion, he contends, for it is inevitable in any society, but “the national form of civil religion in America is not inevitable—and it is certainly wrong.” Every cultural grouping has its mythologies and rituals and ideals, and a state is usually composed of several such groupings, which serve as a check upon one another and the state. It is only when the state identifies itself with one such entity and suppresses the others that “civil religion” becomes monopolistic and demonic. We must reinstate multiple peoplehoods, multiple loyalties.

It is a belief peculiar to our Puritan heritage, Richardson adds, that “the political order is where the drama of human salvation is being worked out.” On this point, Calvin and Jefferson, Nixon and McGovern agree. To suggest to Americans “that Christianity is radically opposed to civil religion is to be met with incredulity.” He argues that the political models of salvation of the Old Testament, Calvin and the Puritans be replaced by noncivic categories, such as the New Testament’s insistence that ultimate reality is not like a state but like an ecclesia; that “God is known not in glory but in suffering.”

To show the sovereignty of the nation-state to be limited, there must be a countervailing entity able to contend with it for the right to determine the nature and mode of human fulfillment, and that competitor is the Church. It knows that it is not the creature of the state nor dependent upon it for authority, and that it, not the state, is the repository of God’s Kingdom. Not just religious creeds or attitudes are the alternative to a demonic civil religion, but ecclesiastical Christianity, an institution of broader compass and vastly longer provenance than any nationstate, having its own “turf,” as it were, independent of the state, claiming the (voluntary) allegiance of people in regard to ultimate things not by force or violence but by suffering and the Word.

This essay alone is worth the price of the book, and the other excellent articles are bonuses.

Watchman Nee is well known among evangelicals in many parts of the world. Identified with the plight of underground Christianity in China, he became, especially among many Jesus people, a model for victorious Christian living under adverse social pressures.

Any leader who directly or indirectly founds 700 churches inevitably invites attention, and many persons were understandably curious about this remote Chinese personality and his “little flock” principles. The worsening political climate—Nee spent the last decade and a half before his death in June, 1972, in Communist work camps—spurred interest in his writings. His many small works, particularly those in applied soteriology, or salvation in practice, quickly gained for him an international following.

Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, and other revolutionaries deplored Christian missionaries as foreign-controlled agents reflective of Western culture and interests, as imperialist spies and political propagandists. Actually, according to World Vision staffer Robert Larson, a long-time Hong Kong China-watcher, serious research will some day do proper justice to the Western missionary experience in China. “On balance,” he says, “most Western missionaries to China were every bit as dedicated to their mission as the committed Chinese Marxist is to his ideology today” (Wan-sui, Insights on China Today, p. 103).

As a Chinese national, Watchman Nee also raised questions about Western missionaries, but for very different reasons. Born on November 4, 1903, in Fuchow, Fukien Province, mainland China, Shu Tau Nee espoused an unsettling concept of the Church: more than one congregation in any given area, he said, is unbiblical. He soon ran into conflict with established mission agencies like the China Inland Mission, which, by the 1930s, sponsored about 1,300 missionaries and mission associates in establishing churches. Nee insisted that none but his “little flock” churches were authentic. After forming the first “little flock” in Foochow in 1923 he spearheaded a movement that in sixteen years embraced some 70,000 members in 700 congregations.

Nee expounded his doctrine of the Church in The Normal Christian Church Life, one of more than a dozen books now translated. The larger availability of Nee’s writings has precipitated insistent questions about his full doctrinal orthodoxy, not least his view of Scripture. According to James Cheung, Nee espoused an authoritative and inerrant Bible (Ecclesiology of Nee, p. 36). But Terry Jenkins, graduate research student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, insists that Nee blends evangelical and liberal views of revelation and Scripture.

Nee’s dynamic view of revelation is clear. Scripture he considers an inspired Book; revelation he depicts as ongoing. “Inspiration is given only once; revelation is given repeatedly.… Revelation means God again breathes on his word when I read it” (Ministry of the Word, p. 87). In other words, Nee does not carefully distinguish illumination from revelation. Revelation occurs anew when God enlivens Scripture and “the Holy Spirit imparts light to me” so that it becomes “as full of life as at the time when it was first written.” This notion, says Jenkins, leads Nee “to his particular concept of ‘enlightenment’ of which the key principle is ‘one inspiration but many revelations.’ ”

Nee thus subordinates the objectivity of revelation by elevating personal experience to dynamic centrality. Unlike Barth and neo-orthodox theologians, however, Nee does not sponsor a dialectical view of revelation. He insists on the uniqueness of scriptural revelation and on the Bible’s authority.

Nee’s concern is to emphasize Christian experience and life rather than mere doctrine. But in some passages he disparages truth over against life, and in others he so overstates the priority of spiritual commitment that the historical and factual aspects of the Christian faith are devalued. The “spirit and life” side of Christian concern is contrasted with physical interests that include “the letters and words … doctrine, knowledge, teaching, types and various truths of the Bible (Ministry of the Word, p. 85). This explains the maxim prevalent among Nee’s followers: “We need Christ rather than doctrine.”

Nee stresses the “spiritual” content of Scripture rather than its historical-grammatical interpretation. Jenkins points out Nee’s use of allegory and typology and his fanciful explanation of parables and names. Adam and Eve become types of Christ and the Church. The Bible is replete with hidden spiritual meanings. The result is a kind of “subjective hermeneutics,” which, says Jenkins, has the effect of frustrating the authority of Scripture.

Today many young people are in revolt against the religious establishment’s reduction of Christian commitment to mere institutional affiliation or to the espousal only of doctrinal commitments as the badge of Christian discipleship. For them, Christ’s lordship means that soul and body are to be put on the line for the risen Redeemer in all life’s decisions and deeds. But in this noble quest for a living faith they are easily tempted to disparage or to submerge what is equally integral to authentic Christianity, namely, its revealed truths and the historical factuality of the central redemptive events. Particularly in the American academic milieu, which by and large concurs with a secular naturalistic view of reality, contemporary Christianity needs to become deeply rooted in the biblical view of nature, history, and man. Watchman Nee, however bold was his testimony to Christ Jesus in a hostile environment, does not in his writings help much at this point.

Nee’s prolific writings need not on that account be avoided, nor should one lose sight of a brave witness for Christ in desperately difficult circumstances. He edited not only a church publication called Revival, later named The Present Testimony, but also The Little Flock Hymnal (these are untranslated). A cursory biography of the man lists among his writings dozens of small books and pamphlets already translated and published. If these are viewed not as definitive texts but as a stimulus to doing what Scripture teaches and demands, they perhaps can refine not only some of Nee’s positions but ours as well. A generation that is fascinated by Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison letters must not forget the Christian martyrs in Communist work camps. While they may flub in the fine points of technical theology, they may also teach us a great deal about practical discipleship.

Have you ever had a garden? Do you know what it’s like to watch little shoots come up, grow, get buds and flowers, and then develop pods, beans, ears of corn, or tomatoes? Have you watched for the right moment to harvest a crop, your own crop? Do you know the sort of nervousness a gardener can have over the possibility that the wrong sort of person will tramp through the neat rows, crushing little plants with rough boots, tearing off peas that don’t yet fill out the pods, knocking off delicate blossoms that would otherwise mature into tender butter beans? Do you understand the trust extended when one says to another person, “Here, take this basket and you can pick the tomatoes—be sure they’re ripe and ready. And pick two heads of Bibb lettuce, please, but don’t be harsh with it or you’ll crush the leaves. Then pick a cucumber, the one nearest the path, but don’t knock against the three others near it that need a little longer to ripen.” A harvest can be spoiled by people who won’t listen to instructions, or who won’t admit their lack of know-how and ask.

We’re given two striking pictures in the brief space of Matthew 9:36, 37. One is of God as the Lord of the harvest, trusting human beings to be his laborers in this business of harvesting. Another is the picture of Christ, who gave his life for the sheep, being moved with compassion as he looked at the multitudes of human beings filling the synagogues, the fields, and the streets of the cities and villages. He was moved with compassion, we are told, because they were distressed, scattered as sheep without a shepherd. They were distressed and scattered because they were very mixed up concerning the truth: they needed to be cared for by spiritual shepherds. In Mark 6:34 Jesus began to teach many things to these people who were as sheep not having a shepherd, and toward whom he was moved with compassion. But he was not going to stay on the earth to keep teaching the frightened, “baaing” people.

John 4:35–38 speaks again of a harvest that is ready to be gathered in:

I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest. And he that reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto life eternal: that both he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together. And herein is that saying true, One soweth, and another reapeth. I sent you to reap that hereon ye bestowed no labor: other men labored, and ye are entered into their labors.

In Matthew 9:36 and 37 these two amazing pictures are brought together in two verses. How often have I heard these verses since early childhood in China? How often have you heard them? Yet suddenly at times it is as if lightning has streaked across a dark sky, or the sun has suddenly come out, splitting the fog to make a snow-covered scene dazzlingly clear, and we see something new. Fran was reading Matthew 9 to us this morning while we were still in bed, and it was one of those dazzling times of suddenly “seeing” as if I had been blind before. He is the Lord of the harvest!

It is his harvest!” I exclaimed. “We’re being trusted to gather in his harvest. What a precious commission we have been given! What trust has been placed in us!” It is as if we had the basket and were on our way down to the most precious of vegetable gardens, trusted by the owner to carry out his directions. We, you and I, are to be harvesters, trusted to not crash in like oafs and spoil things with our ignorance.

How can he trust us? He is compassionate. He has wept over people. They matter to him. Yet he trusts us to gather in the harvest. How dare we undertake such a delicately important task—and yet, how dare we not? He has appointed no angels to take over. Human beings are the ones to do it. But how?

He can trust us to do what he gives us to do because he knows his promises are true. He knows that he will be faithful to the end, and that we need only to come to him for the help we need, over and over again. He knows that his patience will not give out. He has promised to guide us and lead us to do that which will fit into the whole plan of bringing in the harvest. And as we fit in, we don’t even need to count on our own strength and wisdom to do whatever he tells us to do.

But how do we find out what our part is?

If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed [James 1:5, 6].

Yes, we have to ask what he wants us to do, along with asking for the wisdom to do it, but with the kind of faith that is willing to do what he unfolds, sight unseen. Faith in him and in his plan for his harvest: that is what this is all about. It is the willingness to let him be the Lord of the harvest, and not to tell him we have a better method we learned in another farmer’s land.

Suppose that his job for me is sharpening sythes. “But I wanted to go out and drive a tractor!” He knows, and we need to acknowledge that he knows. Or suppose that his job for me is operating the newest kind of harvesting machine. Then I am not to say, “But I love the old way of doing things, and this is an antique scythe I have had handed down to me for generations. I want to do it in the good old way.” This is his farm, his harvest, and he is the one who is giving the equipment, the directions, and the strength to carry them out. I am to trust him because of who he is, and because of the truth of what he says, and what he has promised:

I am the LORD thy God, that divided the sea, whose waves roared; THE LORD of hosts is his name. And I have put my words in thy mouth, and I have covered thee in the shadow of mine hand, that I may plant the heavens, and lay the foundations of the earth, and say unto Zion, Thou art my people [Isa. 51:15, 16].

Whether he wants you to be setting type for printing presses, selling groceries across the counter, driving a laundry truck, painting a house, making furniture, working in a little underground office of a city building, digging potatoes on a farm, doing secretarial work, nursing sick people in a hospital or at home, whatever unlikely looking harvesting work it seems to be, he really does have a place for each of his harvesters. The problem is that “the laborers are few.” Somehow or other some of us are not doing what he wants us to do. Some of us are not picking the crop by hand because we think we need a big machine, or we are not running the machine because we want to handpick the crop.

It seems to me correct to think of Jesus, moved with compassion in Matthew 9:36, speaking with the same deep compassion in his voice in verses 37 and 38: “Then saith he unto his disciples, The harvest truly is plenteous, but the laborers are few: pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth laborers into his harvest.” The laborers are few, the harvest plenteous. It is his harvest! Doesn’t anybody care? Do we really care? What about the old chorus, “Lord, send me; here I am, send me; across the street, or across the sea”? Do we put limits on what we really mean? Are we too proud? Or too proud of our humbleness? Why are the laborers few?

If we have had a flash of understanding, may the clouds not gather back over the sun, and dullness settle down on what we have seen. Pray ye therefore that the Lord of the harvest will send forth more trusted harvesters.

Waldron Scott, General Secretary, World Evangelical Fellowship

I do not comment as a representative of the World Evangelical Fellowship, but rather on the basis of seven years of residence in Southeast Asia, during which time I traveled widely throughout most of the countries of the region. I do not think that any Christian should dogmatically state that the tragic events that have been happening there are necessarily of long-range detriment to the people in South Viet Nam and Cambodia. It is possible that the churches might emerge stronger than ever. While there I perceived that many of the people felt that Communism would provide more honesty and stability in government and a better standard of living than the people as a whole have been accustomed to. Even as the United States wants friendly governments in our hemisphere, many Southeast Asians recognize the legitimacy of China’s desiring the same for her periphery.

Billy Graham.evangelist

Our hearts are heavy with grief as we hear the reports of the agony and suffering in Indochina. This suffering transcends political differences, and our sympathetic response should do the same. With compassionate hearts for every needy individual and family we Americans have a responsibility to make available the medical assistance and food required to heal and sustain life for all Indochina’s afflicted people.

We also have a responsibility to pray for those who suffer, that God’s grace, strength, and love will sustain them. We should also give of our resources through private reliable voluntary organizations of mercy. In addition to what the various government agencies do to alleviate the wounds of war, my own organization is accepting gifts for this purpose, and we guarantee that 100 per cent of it will be used directly to help the needy and the refugees.

We should also seek through urgent negotiations to assure the safety of those in South Viet Nam whose lives are in jeopardy because of their religious faith or their relationship to America over so many years. If negotiations fail, we should undertake an evacuation program that would not involve us in the fighting. We are heartsick of war, but we cannot close our eyes to this tragedy we were involved in so long.

Evelyn Mangham,wife of the Director for Southeast Asia, Christian and Missionary Alliance

It is hard to find an orphan in Viet Nam, that is, an orphan as Americans understand the term, meaning without any family. There is often at least one parent alive, and if not, grandparents care for the children. Americans are trying to salve their consciences by this baby airlift. The media has overplayed the situation greatly. Perhaps parents want to see their children safe, or those who run the orphanages want the children out of South Viet Nam, for fear they will not be properly cared for under Communism.

Yet there is triumph in the midst of tragedy in many ways. There are an increasing number of new Christians. Older Christians thank missionaries for coming to Viet Nam. Several, such as the president of the Evangelical Church of Viet Nam, say they’re ready to die. Those people will stay, regardless of the price. Yet, we know that the Lord is still sovereign.

Mark Hatfield,United States Senate

The resignation of President Thieu should give us an opportunity to negotiate an end to the war and avert a bloody battle for Saigon. There is now no need whatsoever to appropriate money for military aid to any Saigon government. The priority for the Administration now must be to assist in enabling a political settlement to end the war and allow safe exit of all Americans from Saigon.

Ronald Sider,Dean, Messiah College campus at Philadelphia

The ghastly evil, agony, and suffering inflicted by both sides is another painful illustration of the fact that violence provokes more violence. If one loves and cares for all persons, both oppressed and oppressors, war is a dreadfully ineffectual way to establish justice.

I am appalled by the evil, corruption, and inhumanity of both sides in Viet Nam. I can only identify with masses of poor persons who simply want peace, food, and justice. But American policy in Viet Nam was designed not primarily to bring justice to the masses but rather to preserve our honor, pride, and influence in the game of international politics. The masses of poor people were mere pawns.

The fundamental question posed by Viet Nam is: Is U. S. foreign policy designed to promote justice for the vast majority of poor people in the world? If not, do American Christians want it to be?

A sampling of opinions on current issues

What’S Sauce For The Gander

The Roman Catholic bishop of San Diego recently caused a furor not only in his diocese but around the country by declaring that persons who belong to organizations that militantly support abortion on demand cannot receive communion in his jurisdiction. Although various lower diocesan officials have explained that this is not exactly excommunication, it is not quite clear to this Protestant, poorly versed in Roman canon law, what the difference is (which is not to say that he disagrees with the bishop). A prudent man, the bishop left for Europe before his announcement was published, leaving local clergy to take care of (or take) the consequences.

There is, of course, some question about the propriety of blanket sanctions levied against mere membership in a particular organization, especially one such as the National Organization of Women, many of whose policies and goals are not at all inconsistent with Christian or Roman Catholic aims. But NOW’s militant advocacy of abortion on demand (“freedom of choice”) is, and it is this aspect of the organization that drew the bishop’s fire.

Before those who object to the idea that a church should have anything to say about what its members believe launch into bombastic attacks on the bishop, it might be well to observe that turning people away at the altar has a long and honorable history. The most celebrated incident was certainly one involving the Roman emperor Theodosius and the archbishop of Milan, Ambrose, the patron and advisor of Augustine. Theodosius, angered at the way a group of citizens had demonstrated against him, invited them to a stadium to “discuss matters.” Then he sent in the late Roman equivalent of the shock troops and had quite a few of them killed. When he subsequently presented himself for communion (so the story goes—there is some conflict about details), Ambrose turned him away, announcing that he could not be received unless he first repented and did public penance for his misdeed. Perhaps that seems an inadequate way of dealing with an emperor who had in effect ordered a massacre. On the other hand, if you were in Ambrose’s shoes, you might have found that it took a bit of courage to stand up to an ordinary emperor, much more one with the record of Theodosius. In any event, Ambrose’s action had the desired effect—Theodosius publicly repented of his wrongdoing. It may not be much, but if we recall how difficult it is in our own country for any theologian or spiritual leader to get any political figure to admit to anything more than a “mistake in judgment,” despite the fact that our leaders don’t have a Pretorian Guard to deal with obnoxious clergy, we should appreciate Ambrose.

Of course, the NOW women wouldn’t have been recognized at the altar had they not taken the precaution of wearing buttons—something Theodosius didn’t need to do. If they were turned away, all that we can say is that what’s sauce for the gander is none too good for the geese.

EUTYCHUS VI

Three Points And Praise

Members of the Lutheran Church are always grateful for the objective and fair coverage of our problems in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. May I correct, however, three errors of fact in the March 28 report (“Prospecting For Peace in the Missouri Synod”).

1. As president of Concordia Seminary in Springfield, Illinois, I can assure the readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY that things are not “simmering” these days at our school, if by simmering one means unrest or dissatisfaction with our school. The spirit and morale of both faculty and students here is very high, a fact immediately noted by visitors. Our faculty is united theologically, and we look forward to a faculty next fall which will be one of the finest in our history.

2. Professor Victor Bohlmann has chosen to resign from teaching at our school, as of now, because he believed he was entitled to tenure a couple of years ago. His action has nothing to do whatsoever with the other unfortunate events transpiring in our church body. The Board of Control mistakenly thought that he did not have tenure, and in all good faith offered him a year’s contract. Such a gesture is hardly the act of an institution which “lacks integrity.”

3. The opposition seminary, operating in St. Louis under their euphemistic title “Seminex,” did not receive accreditation from the Association of Theological Schools.

I also wish to thank Dr. Lindsell for his perception and accuracy in his article “Who Is Right in the Missouri Synod Dispute?” (April 11).

The issue in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod is the inerrancy and authority of Scripture and the indiscriminate use of the historical critical method.… Dr. Tietjen knows this as well as anyone. For five years some of us on the faculty at Concordia Seminary tried in every possible way to have him face the issue as president, and have the matter discussed within the faculty. He adamantly refused. The only smokescreen in the Missouri Synod today is Dr. Tietjen’s thin and transparent beclouding of the issues.

President

Concordia Theological Seminary

Springfield, Ill.

Dr. Lindsell’s analysis, I am sure, is correct; and it is so refreshing to have someone from outside the Missouri Synod come to the conclusions he did and have the courage to say so and to write it down. I’m glad this analysis appeared in the same issue with the half-truths and evasions of Dr. Tietjen, who, I see, still claims that he was never told what the false doctrines are he is holding and defending.

Chairman, Department of Exegetical Theology

Concordia Seminary

St. Louis, Mo.

Harold Lindsell’s assessment of the dispute in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod is correct.… One additional comment should be made, namely, that Dr. Tietjen and his colleagues have infused the term “inerrancy” with an entirely new meaning. They define inerrancy as the quality of being able to effect God’s purposes. The conservatives conserve the dictionary meaning of the word as the quality of being without error. The two positions are a thousand light years apart.

Our Redeemer Lutheran Church

Eureka, Ill.

Unfair! We were grateful that you at last published the other side of the Missouri Synod problem. But then you followed it with Dr. Lindsell’s own judgmental analysis. In effect he refused to accept Dr. Tietjen’s declaration: “I fully accept the authority of the Bible. I am totally committed to the Bible as the inspired and infallible Word of God.” Why is it so difficult for him to believe that the conflict is more than a dispute over [biblical] inspiration?

I became a member of ELIM because of the manifest injustice done to Dr. Tietjen and the Concordia Seminary faculty majority.… Yes, I believe in an inspired Bible and a living Lord. Therefore I cannot take lightly the injunction of Scripture, “Seek justice, correct oppression” (Isa. 1:17a).… The Missouri Synod has never believed in an official exegesis. We rejoice in our freedom to approach the Holy Scripture praying only that the Holy Spirit will there speak God’s truth to us. Because we do not agree 100 per cent with the councils and conventions of men does not make us Bible doubters. It is because we are believers, not doubters, that we insist upon our freedom under Christ.

Christ Memorial Lutheran Church

Plymouth, Minn.

Reeking Wall Street

An interesting and sickening contrast can be seen in your April 11 issue. On page fifteen is a picture of a mother and child near death from starvation. On the back cover is a picture of an apparently very well off gentleman standing beside a $10,000 automobile. In the first instance the plea is for money to feed starving people; in the second the offer is made to “build financial security within just a few years.” This second ad reeks of the Wall Street mentality responsible for exploiting the greed of Americans to capitalize on our over-consumption. The rationale used by many wealthy Christians (“I tithe 10 per cent and the rest of my money is for me”) is wholly inadequate in today’s world situation. “And from everyone who has been given much shall much be required; and to whom they entrusted much, of him they will ask all the more.”

St. Paul, Minn.

A Dutch Face

James Montgomery Boice’s article, “Is the Reformed Faith Being Rediscovered?” (March 28), unfortunately ignores those vital portions of the Reformed community which are not of Anglo-Saxon derivation. To many Dutch immigrants and their descendants, the Reformed faith means more than the theological formulas discussed in this article. Rather, they have dedicated their lives to the full-life concept of Soli Deo Gloria. In their struggle to bring all aspects of man’s living under the Lordship of Christ, a handful of people have sacrificed to initiate innumerable organizations scattered over the entire face of this continent. Some of these include: a large system of Christian grade and high schools, four Christian colleges (Calvin, as mentioned, Dordt in Iowa, Trinity Christian in Palo Heights, Ill., and King’s in Alberta), a growing graduate-level institution in Toronto, a Christian political organization in the United States, and a Christian farmer’s organization in Canada.

Carrboro, N. C.

Boice lists a number of great Christian leaders of the past who essentially subscribed to Calvinistic doctrine. He then says:

For these the doctrines of grace were not an appendage to Christian thought, something that could be temporarily set aside in the interests of a greater, so called evangelical unity; these doctrines were central to their faith, and fired and gave form to their preaching and missionary efforts.

Naturally whatever we believe will “fire and give form to” all we do in the cause of Christ.… Does Boice regard all non-Calvinists as merely “so-called evangelicals”?… Many times the Reformed confessions and catechisms are given a place of authority practically on a par with the Bible itself. These documents and the writings of the Reformers are quoted to substantiate doctrinal positions in virtually the same manner as the Bible is quoted to substantiate doctrinal positions. This is very curious when done by people whose motto is so often proclaimed as being “sola scriptura.”

Assembly of God Church

Clayton, N. Mex.

James Montgomery Boice’s article clearly represents what I believe is the finest characteristic of CHRISTIANITY TODAY: concise, accurate, stimulating journalism. The fact that my own heart has recently “rediscovered the Reformed faith” biases my attitude towards Boice’s article, but this is merely the occasion that has spurred me to congratulate your magazine.

Assistant Professor of Bible

Bryan College

Dayton, Tenn.

Second Best

The Total Woman is the second best thing that ever happened to me, the first being my conversion to Jesus Christ. If Carol Prester McFadden (“Significant Books of 1974: Ethics and Discipleship,” March 14) would interview Marabel Morgan she’d discover that the book was written to the unsaved. Does she really “regret” that 370,000 plus have read God’s plan of salvation here?

R. B. QUATTLEBAUM, JR.

Savannah, Ga.

In Warm Tones

I was cheered to read the good things that Carl F. H. Henry wrote about Orlando Costas’s new book, The Church and Its Mission (Footnotes, Feb. 14). The warm tone of the review might indicate a desire for increasing rapport between evangelical theologians of the more historical and dogmatic tradition with evangelical missiologists, like Costas, who are striving to articulate the issues involved in the contextualization of theology, particularly now as contemporary expressions emerge from the growing Third World churches.

However, I would like to argue that the point at which Henry calls Costas vulnerable is, as a matter of fact, Costas’s strongest and most valid missiological thesis. Henry says, “Scripture alone is not the norm for Costas, but rather Scripture in correlation with the critically viewed contemporary politico-economic context.” A missiologist would ask Henry to justify this notion of “Scripture alone,” apart from context. Whether the context be the Semitic culture of the Old Testament or the Greco-Roman-Hebraic culture of the New, biblical hermeneutics cannot proceed to a satisfactory understanding of revelation without considering them simultaneously with Scripture. Furthermore the biblical interpreter must face the additional problem of his own cultural conditioning which he must intentionally bracket before moving to “Scripture alone.” And in addition the missiologist, interested in seeing that revelation is adequately contextualized in yet another culture, faces the even more complex task of a phenomenological understanding of the receptor culture before he can begin to apply “Scripture alone.”

This is not to deny a supracultural element in revelation. However it is to suggest that the methodology of understanding it and transmitting it, that Costas so skillfully describes, may well turn out to be much more helpful to World Christianity than some of the more traditional methodologies of Western Christianity.

Associate Professor of Church Growth

Fuller Theological Seminary

Pasadena, Calif.