Many books and articles have been written on the question whether Christian tragedy is possible. The following writer claims that it is not, that “Cristian” and “tagedy” are inherently contradictory. For another approach see Leland Ryken’s new book The Literature of the Bible (Zondervan). In a few pages he persuasively argues that tragedy and Christianity are compatible.

A vast gulf separates the popular usage and the academic usage of the term “tragedy.” It is used in a popular sense to refer to any sad or calamitous situation. When used in a scholarly context, it refers to a literary genre in which a protagonist engages in a morally significant struggle ending in ruin or disappointment. Here the question whether a Christian tragedy is possible has teased the minds of scholars for decades. Does this profound literary genre lie outside the Christian experience? Can Job, John the Baptist, Stephen, or Christ be considered a tragic hero?

Forty-five years ago I. A. Richards proposed that “tragedy is only possible to a mind which is for the moment agnostic or Manichean. The least touch of any theology which has a compensating Heaven to offer the tragic hero is fatal” (Principles of Literary Criticism.) Reinhold Niebuhr expressed a similar idea in Beyond Tragedy: “Christianity is a religion which transcends tragedy. Tears, with death, are swallowed up in victory.”

Before discussing Christian tragedy we must define “Christian literature.” By this term I mean literature in which the hero embodies values consistent with the life of Christ recorded in the Gospels. For example, I would not call Shakespeare’s tragedies Christian, though some scholars argue that Shakespeare was a Christian and that his audience thought in Christian terms.

The term “tragedy” is slippery and ubiquitous. It is most frequently defined within a historical period: Greek tragedy, medieval tragedy, Shakespearean tragedy, modern tragedy. Rather than working from a rigid definition, I would like to borrow two statements, one from Laurence Michel and the other from Richard Sewell, to provide a framework for examining the term “tragedy.” Michel states, “Tragedy is consummated when the dream of innocence is confronted by the fact of guilt, and acquiesces therein” (“The Possibility of a Christian Tragedy,” Thought, XXXI [1956], 403–28). Sewell provides a scope for the term: “Tragedy makes certain distinguishable and characteristic affirmations, as well as denials, about (1) the cosmos and man’s relation to it; (2) the nature of the individual and his relation to himself; (3) the individual in society (“The Tragic Form,” Essays in Criticism, Vol. IV, 1954, pp. 345–58). The tragic hero is caught in a conflict that carries him inevitably from the quest to be free to collapse and failure.

What, then, are the qualities of tragedy that can be used to compare Christian man and tragic man? There are several that have been a consistent part of the genre from Sophocles to Arthur Miller.

DESTINY. Christian man is committed man. His world view is tempered by his belief that life here is temporal and life hereafter is eternal. Like Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress he seeks the Celestial City, committed to an ultimate destiny with God.

Tragic man is uncommitted to any ultimate destiny. He has no assurance of an eternity shared with God but only an uncertain hope that a cosmic justice will prevail in the end. He may acknowledge a higher order that controls the universe (as in Sophocles’ tragedies), but he sees the relation between man and cosmos as uncertain, tenuous, vague.

PESSIMISM. Christian man is buoyed by an awareness of the superiority of the supernatural over the natural. His access to an omnipotent God provides him with a sense of confidence that the universe is an orderly and regulated creation under divine control. His security is found in the promise that “he who believes in him is not condemned” and shall enjoy eternal life.

Tragic man is pessimistic in seeing the overwhelming proportion of evil to good, but optimistic in hoping that justice will ultimately prevail, though man may be destroyed. Tragic man recognizes a futility in his defiance of the anti-forces; yet his only course is to struggle, knowing he is caught in a web. King Lear’s cry of frustration, “I am a man more sinned against than sinning,” is the cry of tragic man. Job too was a tragic figure until he finally acknowledged, “I know that thou canst do all things, and that no purpose of thine can be thwarted.” Then he became Christian man.

FREEDOM. Christian man is free. But his freedom is part of a paradox: only in bondage to Christ can he be truly free. He is free of guilt for the consequences of his sins, for guilt was absolved, once and for all, at the cross.

Tragic man hangs suspended between determinism and freedom, neither slave to fate nor a free man. He can blame neither himself nor God entirely; to fix the blame on either would relieve the tension and negate the tragedy.

SUFFERING. The Christian experiences suffering, not with a sense of futility and defeat, but with the assurance that God permits it and controls the outcome. First Peter 4 advises: “Rejoice in so far as you share Christ’s suffering,” while Romans 5 suggests that suffering produces qualities that draw the Christian closer to God. Like Job, the Christian may question the reason for his suffering, but he does not doubt the ultimate purpose of God.

Tragic man, proud of his humanity, cannot “curse God, and die,” as suggested by Job’s wife. His suffering requires him, like Prometheus, to protest against the forces that prevail against him. He stands alone, pitted against the cosmos; this protest is at the heart of the tragic struggle.

DEATH. The grim conclusions of dramatic tragedies from the ancient Oedipus the King to the modern Death of a Salesman stand in contrast to the biblical accounts of Job, John the Baptist, Stephen, and Christ. Christian man finds death not defeat but victory.

Although not all tragedies conclude with physical or violent death, all lack any suggestion of a regenerated life. A. C. Bradley suggests that the events in Shakespearean tragedies may become so transmuted that they cease to be strictly tragic. Still, the violent deaths of his tragedies, the grim endings of Greek tragedies, the futility and hopelessness of modern tragedies all have in common the pathos of a collapsing world. Macbeth offers little hope when he concludes that life is “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.”

The Christian view of life, described in terms of literary genre, would seem to be most akin to comedy, most alien to tragedy. Sylvan Barnet says that “the Christian pattern moves from weakness to strength, from death to life, from innocence to bliss. Its form is therefore comic, and Dante writes a Commedia because he knows that a tragedy begins quietly but ends in horror, while a comedy begins harshly but concludes happily” (“Some Limitations of a Christian Approach to Shakespeare,” English Literary History Journal, XXII [1955], 81–92). To refer to the misfortunes of a Christian as “tragedy” is to ignore the resurrection of Christ. For the Christian, the terms “Christian” and “tragedy” remain forever irreconcilable.

Nearly twelve decades ago Walt Whitman wrote:

There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he looked upon,

that object he became,

And that object became a part of him.…

Today when the child of God goes forth, one of the first objects he looks upon is likely to be an advertisement, on a billboard or some other medium. And he need not even “go forth”; the flick of a button brings advertising images right into his living room. These objects, cleverly constructed and packaged and transmitted, do become a part of him, whether he realizes it or not—and probably more so in proportion to his not realizing it. What are you and I “becoming”?

Know it or not, admit it or not, each of us is daily “massaged” and manipulated by the subtly persuasive techniques of the adman’s multi-million-dollar industry. You and I are daily being conditioned and conned by the use of subliminal stimuli directed into our subconscious minds by the mass merchandizers. This is the thesis of Wilson Bryan Key’s recent book Subliminal Seduction: Ad Media’s Manipulation of a Not So Innocent America (Prentice-Hall, 1973). Key, a former student of Marshall McLuhan (who wrote the introduction), concludes that the apparent purpose, the blatant surface appeal, of an ad may simply be a decoy enabling the subtle, powerful motivations to work at a subconscious level: “It’s what you don’t see that sells you.” The book, with thirty ad illustrations, discusses an array of alleged subliminal techniques, from subtly embedded graffiti in ice cubes of liquor ads to sexually symbolic forms and shapes.

Most Christians will probably ignore this book and other similar ones, perhaps dismissing them as products of delusive paranoia and their authors as being “obsexed.” But even if only a mere fraction of what these authors say is true, evangelical Christians, more than anyone else, should be deeply concerned. Some pertinent questions need to be considered: (1) To what extent are we “massaged” and manipulated subliminally, and are Christians more or less vulnerable than unbelievers? (2) What specific implications does subliminal seduction have for Christians? (3) What forms does Satanic subliminal seduction take in our day? (4) Do the Scriptures provide us with defenses?

It has been estimated that the “average” U. S. adult is exposed to more than 500 advertising messages every day. Key estimates that this adult consciously perceives only 75 of the 500, blacking out from consciousness at least 85 per cent of the ad messages and daily acting upon an average of 2.5 per cent. It has been further estimated that the “average” U. S. adult views television 6.5 hours a day and spends thirty-two minutes a day reading a newspaper or magazine. Such data, whether precisely accurate or not, clearly indicate that the Christian’s senses are bombarded during many hours of each day by a pagan world-system. As a recent Saturday Review editorial expressed it, “nothing is more difficult in the modern world than to protect the privacy of the human soul.”

Experiments with the tachistoscope (a film projector with a high-speed shutter that flashes messages every five seconds at 1/3000th of a second) have seemed to confirm subliminal influence. In one six-week test, advertising messages invisible to the conscious mind but planted in the subconscious were superimposed over motion pictures. One such message—“Hungry? Eat Popcorn”—reportedly increased popcorn sales 57.7 per cent.

Studies in subliminal seduction pose a number of problems for Christians. A serious one concerns the formulation and alteration of an individual’s value system. Key writes:

One very critical and disturbing consequence of subliminal manipulation has been demonstrated in dozens of experiments by changing the position (anchor point) from which an individual evaluates the world about him. Anchor points might be described as the position between two opposed concepts from which an individual evaluates … good or bad, moral or immoral, rich or poor, strong or weak, sane or insane, and so on. A subliminal stimulus and a posthypnotic suggestion both have the ability to move the anchor point between virtually any two such concepts in any direction desired [p. 29, 30].

Are your values and those of your family formulated and altered by the pagan philosophy of this worldly system or by the Word of God?

Paul admonished: “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould, but let God re-make your minds from within …” (Rom. 12:1, Phillips). The world squeezes us into its mold when advertisements influence us to indulge ourselves without guilt. To quote Key again:

One of the most penetrating jobs advertising does on the human psyche is to manage the individual’s conflicts between pleasure and pain. Products such as cigarettes must first be made to appear fun, exciting, sophisticated, or glamorous. Then the smoker must be given moral permission to have fun without guilt. This is not at all easy, considering North America’s Puritan-Calvinist heritage [p. 180].

But judging from increased tobacco sales despite health warnings, the adman is amazingly successful.

If the ad media are even half as successful in marketing through subliminal manipulation as Key, N. F. Dixon (Subliminal Perception: The Nature of a Controversy) and Vance Packard (The Hidden Persuaders) have maintained, the prospects for more pervasive mass manipulation are truly Orwellian. 1984 is less than a decade away. The political conditioning, brainwashing, and exploiting possibilities of the media will be ready for the Antichrist’s use.

Quite disturbing, particularly from the Christian point of view, is Key’s assertion that “no significant belief or attitude held by any individual is apparently made on the basis of consciously perceived data.” This idea reflects the widespread impulse to bypass the rational faculties, evidenced by the current popularity of such things as occultism, mysticism, and Transcendental Meditation. If Satan cannot overtly corrupt our minds (2 Cor. 11:3) or defile them (Titus 1:15) or blind them (2 Cor. 4:4) or confuse them (2 Thess. 2:2) or unsettle them (Luke 12:29) or divert them (James 1:8, 4:8) or discourage them (Heb. 12:3), he seeks to bypass our conscious minds, subtly appealing instead to the intuitive, the irrational, the merely emotional. Adept at all of these stratagems, Satan now seems to be making extensive use of the merely emotional as his special ploy. Satan, the author of imbalance and disharmony, is responsible for the current pendulum-swing away from God-ordained reason toward a mindless emotionalism, from thought to touchy-feely sensation, from the reasonableness of sound doctrine to the intuition of visionary experience.

In such an atmosphere, subliminal seduction flourishes. Our ancient foe, by subjecting the Christian to a constant barrage of unwholesome and unholy stimuli directed at the subconscious mind, is able to influence and eventually even to control the whole being. The conscious mind of a committed Christian evaluates, criticizes, and discerns, but subliminal stimuli implant themselves within the subconscious, where they remain unevaluated, uncriticized, and undiscerned until stimulated to rise to the surface as powerful predispositions.

Many Christians have a simplistic concept of temptation that goes something like this: Satan, at a particular moment, flits to our side and whispers “Do it,” and we either do or do not, depending upon our spiritual strength at that moment. We might be more consistently victorious in not “doing it” if we realized that there is much more to temptation than the overt, momentary solicitation to evil and that our strength or weakness at that moment is based upon attitudes that have been forming for weeks, months, even years prior.

We do not fall in a moment; the predisposition to yield to sin has been forming, building, germinating—but not necessarily consciously so. Sin has both a cumulative and a domino effect. Satan plants subtle stimuli, often subliminal ones; he influences an attitude; he wins a “minor” victory—always in preparation for the “big” fall, the iron-bound habit. The words of James support such a view: “Every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin …” (James 1:14, 15). It is this time between “conceiving” and “bringing forth,” that shadowy interim between stimulus and response, that may be largely subliminal.

Several Old Testament writers make use of the word conceive, denoting, as the contexts suggest, not rational thought alone but sub-rational predispositioning, analogous to biological conception. For example, Job wrote: “They conceive mischief, and bring forth vanity, and their belly [not the mind, but the very center of their being] prepareth deceit” (Job 15:35). Similarly, Isaiah wrote: “They conceive mischief, and bring forth iniquity. They hatch adder’s eggs, weave the spider’s web” (Isa. 59:4, 5). David uses similar language: “He travaileth with iniquity, and hath conceived mischief, and brought forth falsehood” (Ps. 7:14).

David knew whereof he spoke, for, as a study of the account (in Second Samuel 11) of his great sin suggests, he had fallen long before that evening when he arose from his bed, walked upon the roof of the king’s house, and saw Bathsheba bathing. His fall was seeded when he “tarried still at Jerusalem” “at the time when kings go forth to battle,” and quite likely prior to that. Why did he tarry and why did he walk restively upon the roof? Certainly this “man after God’s own heart” did not consciously plan beforehand to commit adultery and murder. But when the stimulus presented itself, powerful predispositions surfaced, and the great man fell.

Similarly, the fall of Samson perhaps began even prior to the time when he “went down to Timnah, and saw a woman in Timnah, of the daughters of the Philistines” (Judg. 14:1). Before he “went down,” and in the process of “going down,” there apparently “went down” into him very powerful predispositions that led ultimately to his “going down” in defeat. In like manner, the tragedy of Lot and his family began even before he “pitched his tent toward Sodom,” even before he “lifted up his eyes, and beheld all the plain of Jordan” (Gen. 13:12, 10). You and I, by what we see and hear and read and do today, are unwittingly establishing predispositions that will influence our decisions and behavior far in the future.

Do the Scriptures offer any promise of divine provision for victory over subliminal seduction? God has assured us that we shall not want for anything (Ps. 23:2), that he has made ample provision for our every need (Phil. 4:19), that “our sufficiency is of God” (2 Cor. 3:5). If subliminal seduction is a threat—and there is convincing evidence that it is—we may be assured that God has made ample provision for victory.

We should realize, first, that it is impossible for the Christian to escape the assault of subliminal seduction and, further, that it is not the Father’s will that we should escape it. Christ asked the Father not that we be taken out of this evil world but that we be kept from its evil. No cloistered recluses, committed Christians are in this present evil world—and that includes being subjected daily to a vast array of unholy stimuli—but the evil of this world need not be in the Christian, for God has made provision for triumphant victory.

Early in his dealing with the Israelites, the Lord God commanded that his words should be in their hearts, should be diligently taught to their children, should be spoken of when they sat in their houses, when they walked by the way, when they lay down, when they arose. Then the Almighty gave an interesting and significant command: “Thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes” (Deut. 6:8; cf. Prov. 6:20–22). The Jewish phylacteries (phylax, “watchman”; phylokterion, “a safeguard”), two small leather cases holding slips inscribed with Scripture, were fastened on the left arm, signifying the safeguarding of actions, deeds, creative activity, and on the forehead between the eyes, signifying the safeguarding of thoughts and subconscious impressions. This gesture of placing God’s Word between the eyes (a position very significant to ancient mystics and modern occultists alike) effectively symbolizes God’s Word as a safeguard for the subconscious mind.

God’s further command that his words should be written “upon the posts of the house, and on thy gates” signifies the safeguarding of one’s dwelling and place of business, and parallels the divine protection of our very being. Just as the blood sprinkled on the two sideposts and over the lintel signified divine provision for sin and protection from its consequent death, God’s Word so placed signifies his divine provision and protection. The word subliminal is derived from the Latin sub, “below,” plus limen, “threshold” or “lintel”—below the threshold of consciousness or apprehension. The Christian must daily sprinkle his “lintel” and “doorposts” with the powerful Word of God to guard against unholy stimuli that would enter unnoticed below the threshold.

Neither the sprinkling of blood nor the placing of the words was a magic talisman; the acts were rather significant signs of God’s protection. The words were first of all to be in their hearts (Deut. 6:6). “Thy word have I hid in mine heart [suggesting both the conscious and the subconscious?], that I might not sin against thee,” David said (Ps. 119:11). Immersing ourselves in the Word of God, hiding it in the very depths of our beings, letting Christ the Word (Col. 1:27) and the Word of Christ dwell in us richly (Col. 3:16), is God’s safeguard against subliminal seduction.

God’s very peace and presence, Paul tells us, “shall garrison our hearts and minds through Christ Jesus” (Phil. 4:7). Without this provision, the Christian is vulnerable: “Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain” (Ps. 127:1).

The Scripture also speaks of the role of the third Person of the Trinity in making provision for us subliminally, especially below or beyond the level of language. “The Spirit too helps us in our weakness. For when we cannot choose words to pray properly, the Spirit himself expresses our plea in a way that could never be put into words [‘pleads for us in sighs that can find no utterance,’ TCNT; ‘his Spirit within us is actually praying for us in those agonizing longings which never find words,’ Phillips], and God who knows everything in our hearts knows perfectly well what he means [‘he who searches our inmost being knows what the Spirit means,’ NEB]” (Rom. 8:26, Jerusalem Bible). Such a relationship with God, at levels transcending but not bypassing the strictly rational and linguistic, is communication become communion.

The Christian’s victory over subliminal seduction lies, therefore, in the indwelling Word and the indwelling Spirit. The powerful, living Word of God hidden daily in our innermost being will offset the unholy stimuli and will reinforce our “anchor points.” The Holy Spirit, using the Word, intercedes subliminally for our needs. The Spirit and the Word defeat subliminal stimuli at any of several points: safeguarding against their entrance, preventing their surfacing to the conscious mind as predispositions, effacing the stimuli entirely, or giving grace for victory if they do reach the surface. At any of these points, the Christian is invulnerable to the extent that he continuously, by faith, reckons himself dead to the unholy stimuli (Rom. 8:11–13; Gal. 2:20).

At times it seems almost as if the Adamic nature is headquartered in the subconscious mind, with many of the predispositions simply being part of our natural proclivity toward evil. But when we are continuously, daily filled with the Spirit (Eph. 5:18), there will be little opportunity for subliminal stimuli to cause us to fall. When we yield our subconscious minds to God, they become instruments of righteousness unto God (Rom. 6:13). When we allow the Spirit to implant holy stimuli from the Word, what could be a seething caldron of evil impressions can be instead a sanctified depository of grace-full predispositions.

Paul reminded the Corinthian Christians that Satan can get an advantage over us when we are “ignorant of his devices” (2 Cor. 2:11). Ignorance or unawareness is Satan’s tool in subliminal seduction. “Once the subliminal information becomes apparent to the conscious mind,” Key states, “the persuasive or manipulative potential in the data [is] destroyed. Insidiously …, the more subliminal or deeply buried a stimulus, the greater the probable affect” (p. 27, 28).

We dare not remain oblivious to that shadowy interim between stimulus and response; we dare not abandon the subliminal to the enemy. In another context T. S. Eliot wrote:

Between the emotion

And the response

Falls the Shadow …

Between the essence

And the descent

Falls the Shadow.

When that shadow falls, let the Light shine upon and below the lintel.

While the violence and heartbreak of the recent Boston public-school desegregation conflict is fresh in the minds of Americans, perhaps it would be appropriate for evangelical Christians to ask themselves some hard questions. The foremost must certainly be, Have Christians, either deliberately or unthinkingly, contributed to the climate of racial hostility so evident in today’s controversy over busing students to achieve racial balance in the public schools?

Within the Church sphere this question can be rephrased in a way that gives it even greater immediacy: Do the predominantly white evangelical churches of America welcome black Christians to their meetings on a basis of equality, or have illiberal attitudes held by both past and present generations of churchmen created a situation that all but precludes the possibility of an Afro-American’s joining a fellowship of white believers?

If we are to prove the 1968 Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders wrong, if we hope to refute the contention that our nation is “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal,” we must be certain that prejudice and proscription have been eradicated from our religious institutions. Although it has been much maligned in recent years, the Church is still the face to which millions of Americans look for guidance in formulating personal responses to the tension-filled events of modern society.

Certainly, one cannot hope to find a quick, all-encompassing, universally satisfying solution to the complex problems that have developed during the past twenty years as a result of white America’s increased awareness of black demands for equality in all realms of social, economic, and political life. Yet by looking into the past it is possible to move, however awkwardly, toward a greater understanding of the stakes involved in solving these problems. History tends not to repeat itself exactly, event for event, of course. Still, it would be instructive if twentieth-century Christians could tear themselves away from the present long enough to consider some past mistakes.

A major mistake was made during the ante-bellum years of American history. The nation’s citizens refused to heed the insistent cries of abolitionists, both black and white, pleading for an end to the evils of the southern slave labor system. In the end, it was civil war and not moral reform that led the nation to repent of its sins toward the Afro-American.

Another mistake—one that immediately affected only one person but had wider and more lasting implications—was also made during the pre-Civil War period. When black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, one of the era’s most dynamic spokesmen for human rights, sought Christian fellowship among both northern and southern evangelicals, he was rejected because of his color and because of his “political” activities as an abolitionist. Modern-day Christians can learn much from studying the harmful effects that this proscription had on Douglass’s religious profession.

As a slave in ante-bellum Maryland, Douglass, or Frederick Bailey as he was then known, had found the burdens of servitude lightened when he experienced “that change of heart which comes by ‘casting all one’s care’ upon God, and by having faith in Jesus Christ.” As he later noted in his autobiography, the salvation experience brought the thirteen-year-old bondsman into “a new world, surrounded by new objects.” He acquired a new love for all mankind and was determined that the whole world should be converted.

Encouraged in his faith by Charles Lawson, a devout, elderly black drayman who lived near the Baltimore home of Douglass’s master, the young slave took advantage of the generally looser rein of urban slavery and joined a local congregation of black Methodists during the winter of 1831.

Unfortunately, Douglass had only a short time to experience the fellowship of the Baltimore Methodists. In March, 1833, he was sent to a new owner in St. Michaels, Maryland. To the young bondsman, his new master, Captain Thomas Auld, appeared to be an intensely selfish man who was wholly caught up in the pride of mastery and the love of domination. Understandably, after Auld made a formal profession of religion at an August, 1833, Methodist camp meeting, Douglass hoped his master would reform his “cruel” and “cowardly” ways.

But Douglass was confronted with the apparent reality that a Christian profession was no guarantee of a Christ-like treatment of the slave. Thomas Auld’s home exuded piety. Both in the morning and in the evening, he and his wife sang hymns and prayed. Soon the new convert was hosting visiting clerics, leading classes, and participating in revivals. Yet, to Douglass’s mind, Auld’s conversion made him even “more cruel and hateful in all his ways.” Conversion neither led him to free his slaves nor caused him to treat them with greater humanity.

Before escaping to the North in September, 1838, Douglass saw his covertly operated Sabbath school broken up by a mob that included Auld and other “professedly holy men”; he witnessed the perversion of the Scriptures under which slave-owners brutally whipped their chattels while quoting Luke 12:47 (“That servant who knew his master’s will, but did not make ready or act according to his will, shall receive a severe beating”); he felt the lash of a slave-breaker who, despite his cruelty, was said to “enjoy religion.”

These contradictions between the ideal of Christian virtue and the reality of Christian behavior caused Douglass much mental and spiritual anguish, but he did not renounce his Christian creed. He was now a free man, and as he later wrote, “The contest was now ended; the chain was severed; God and right stood vindicated.” The churchmen of the North, unlike those of the South, would treat him as a brother in Christ, he thought.

Encouraged by the prospects before him, Douglass sought to join a local church body in his new home of New Bedford, Massachusetts. He went to the Elm Street Methodist Church for a Sunday morning worship service. As he made his way up the aisle to take a seat, an usher touched him on the shoulder and said, pointing, “The colored people sit up there.” After listening to the white preacher’s sermon from the “nigger gallery” and then discovering that he would be allowed to participate in the Lord’s Supper only after all the white Christians had received the elements, Douglass left the Elm Street church, never to visit it again. Disillusioned by this experience, the former slave found it impossible to respect the religious profession of those Christians who were held captive by the chains of anti-Negro prejudice.

In subsequent weeks, Douglass attended other churches in New Bedford with the same result. When one of them was holding a revival, he attempted to attend a meeting, only to be stopped by one of the deacons and told “We don’t allow niggers in here.” Eventually he sought spiritual aid and refreshment in a small African Methodist Episcopal Zion congregation, but he separated from that body when he discovered that its black minister had been persuaded to join the white clergymen of New Bedford in refusing to give out notices of anti-slavery meetings.

Douglass had joined the anti-slavery forces shortly after he arrived in the North. Before long the combination of the warm welcome given him by the anti-slavery reformers and the cold shoulder offered him by the churchmen moved Douglass to renounce most of his ties to the institutional church, and the abolitionist platform soon eclipsed the pulpit in Douglass’s esteem. In later years this pattern not only led to his alienation from the earthly church but also figured significantly in his rejection of the power of the Christians’ God.

Separated from his early denominational roots and influenced by liberal religionists within the reform movement such as Theodore Parker, William Lloyd Garrison, and Henry C. Wright, Douglass came to believe in a personalized social gospel that venerated the works of man while discrediting the idea that God’s power could be relied upon to destroy the abject wickedness of the nation’s slave system. According to Douglass, only enlightened man, aided and supported by the strength of his own intellect, could solve the multitudinous and diverse problems of mankind. The true philosophy of reform that would set man on the path toward solving the world’s ills was to be found not in the heavens but in humanity itself.

In July, 1886, the ex-slave summed up his views of a Christianity whose central character was no longer a viable part of his theology. “It is something to give the Negro religion,” he wrote. “It is more to give him the ballot. It is something to tell him that there is a place for him in the Christian’s heaven; it is more to let him have a place in this Christian country to live upon in peace.”

Douglass had become vastly more liberal in his religious beliefs because he was discouraged over the contradiction between Christian theory and practice. As the black abolitionist had charged during the ante-bellum crusade against slavery, “humanity” seemed to be “received more cordially in the street than in the church.” Anti-Negro prejudice alienated Douglass first from the institutional evangelical church and then from the theology of that church. Perhaps some twentieth-century blacks, finding that they are welcomed into the Christian fold only through the doors of predominantly black church bodies, will follow in his footsteps.

Can we learn from past mistakes?

“The chief glory of any people arises from its authors,” Samuel Johnson wrote in the preface to his Dictionary (1755). Johnson could well have been thinking of, among others, his contemporary William Law, who had been instrumental in Johnson’s and in John Wesley’s conversion. In fact, Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728) with the earlier work A Treatise of Christian Perfection (1726) profoundly influenced all the main characters of the great Evangelical Revival from the Wesleys onward. Called by Johnson “the finest piece of hortatory theology in any language,” the Call appeared the year before Wesley set up his famous Holy Club at Oxford; and the gifted organizer of Methodism throughout the English-speaking world said early in his career that Law’s writings had opened the eyes of his soul to the exceeding height and breadth and depth of Christian truth so that everything appeared new in that Light which poured in so mightily upon him. Wesley was, he said, convinced afresh of the impossibility of being half a Christian. For William Law was as vehement as Kierkegaard about total commitment to Christ.

Dr. Johnson, whose primary literary-criticism rule was “Clear your mind of cant!,” had been drawn to Law by the clarity and accuracy of his critiques of the naturalism and rationalism that seemed bent on denying Christ in the eighteenth century. Centuries earlier St. Augustine, who had gone to Milan to hear St. Ambrose speak because of the perfection of his style, had found himself listening to what he was saying (beyond how he was expressing his Christian message); and so too did Johnson’s admiration for Law’s clear terms about God’s love of man through Christ bring him to full acceptance of the profound truth behind the words. Certainly the period’s severest literary critic owed much to William Law, and more than once he admitted his debt to him.

Born at King’s Cliffe, Northhamptonshire, in 1686, William Law entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1705; six years later he was elected fellow of his college and was ordained. After living as a curate in London for several years he became tutor to Edward Gibbon, father of the historian, who recorded that the man who was to become an eminent English divine was “the much honored friend and spiritual director of the whole family”; accompanying his pupil to Cambridge, Law returned to his college in 1727, remaining there for four years. Later, Law lived in the Gibbons’ house at Putney for more than a decade, acting as religious guide for the family and for many other serious-minded persons. The best known of the latter were John and Charles Wesley. After 1740 Law returned to his birthplace, King’s Cliffe, where he was house chaplain of Hester Gibbon, whose brother he had educated. He spent the rest of his life there, never marrying, and died in 1761.

In the Gibbon household Law was known as one who believed all he professed and practiced it as well. He is said to have refused some of the best preferments in the Bishop of London’s see as rewards for some of his writings; and with little means of his own he was remarkably charitable to his poorer neighbors. He set so small a value on money that he gave away the copyrights of all his publications—seventeen in all. In one instance, however, his publisher insisted on his accepting a hundred guineas for his work. A Serious Call, his acknowledged masterpiece, was read as a popular and powerful book of devotion for many years, going through numerous editions in both England and America. “His precepts are rigid,” wrote Edward Gibbon, the noted historian-son of Law’s pupil,

but they are formed and derived from the Gospel; his satire is sharp, but his wisdom is from the knowledge of human life.… If there yet exists a spark of piety in his reader’s mind, he will soon kindle it into a flame; and a philosopher must allow that he is more consistent in his principles than any of the tribe of mystic writers. He handles with equal sincerity and truth the strange contradiction between faith and practice in the Christian world.

His controversial, devotional, and mystical writings over the years covered a variety of topics. First brought to public attention in 1717 by his three letters to the Bishop of Bangor (whose impugning of the existence of a visible Church produced a war of pamphlets known as the Bangor Controversy), William Law derided that prelate’s empty “sincerity” and proved himself the ablest contributor on the side of the Church. Six years later (1723) his Remarks on Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, rejecting the satiric Mandeville thesis (that men’s actions cannot be divided into higher and lower; that the higher life is a fiction invented by rulers to simplify government and social relations), revealed Law’s own ability as a satirist in his championing of Christian virtue. He wrote Mandeville:

If you would prove yourself to be no more than a brute or an animal, how much of your life you need alter I cannot tell; but at least you must forbear writing against virtue for no mere animal ever hated it.

Here we find Law vindicating morality on the highest ground and insisting on the spiritual quality of reason, which had turned him from the empiricism of Locke and others. With sure insight he knew the tendency of such empiricism to sensualize both the mind and the soul. Thus he told Mandeville that moral virtue began with the first man. He added:

It is the will of God that makes moral virtue our law. Away then with your idle and profane fancies about the origin of moral virtue! For once turn your eyes to heaven, dare but own a just and true God, and then you have owned the true origin of religion and moral virtue.

Law’s Case of Reason (1732) is a critique of Tindal’s deism, which, rampant in the eighteenth century, was bent on usurping the rightful place of revealed Christianity. In this treatise Law anticipated the great Analogy of Bishop Butler as he urged the vital importance of revelation in connection with reason. Law’s Either/Or, in the spirit of Kierkegaard’s more than a century later, reads:

There are only two possible states in life; the one is nature, the other is God manifested in nature. We must choose one or the other. We cannot stand still without deciding, for life goes on and it is always bringing forth its realities which way soever it goes.

Again like Kierkegaard (whose teaching resembles closely that of Law on the side of personal holiness), Law was wholly absorbed with man’s real nature and the fact that he cannot have true existence outside a radical encounter with Christ. As sharply anti-secular as his successor, Law indicts lukewarmness in religion where any attempt is made to live by both pagan and Christian morality. The question asked by each is Kierkegaard’s: “Are you living the Christian life or not? Do you hold God a fool, calling the Christianity of the New Testament that which is not the Christianity of the New Testament?” The choice between God and self is an all-or-nothing one: Either faith that the God-Man who died for us can alone save us, or trust in ourselves. Law’s last words, written shortly before his death, dealt with the only way to be reborn:

All that Christ was, did, suffered, dying in the flesh and ascending into heaven, was for this sole end: to purchase for all His followers a new birth, new life and new light, in and by the Spirit of God restored to them and living in them as their support, comforter and guide into all truth. And this was His “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”

For, in Law’s phrasing, the whole nature of the Christian religion stands upon these two great pillars: the greatness of our fall and the greatness of our redemption.

The worst offense to truth is pretense to it. But, all unaware of hypocrisy, the various pilloried “Christians” in the Call who fool themselves in what the author termed the “indevotion of ignorance” lead lives in direct opposition to what their Gospel teaches as necessary to salvation. Among them are the worldly clergyman Cognatus, the rich buried-in-business Calidus, the pagan scholar Classicus, the fashionable Flavia, and the punctilious church-goer, yet playboy, Julius; but to offset these and other persons we are shown such true Christians as Miranda (Flavia’s sister), the good father Paternus, and the pious widow Eusebia, whose counsel to her five daughters forms part of Law’s chapter on the education of women. For if some of Law’s examples show men and women who are wise about everything except what is most important—love in deed and in truth—others truly live by the faith they profess.

Ouranius, the country pastor, is presented by Law as having undergone a real transformation (from the ennui he had felt in being sent to a little village) to a life of love for God and neighbor. “Now,” the author says of the changed minister, “his days are so far from being tedious, or his parish too great a retirement, that he wants only more time to do that variety of good which his soul thirsts after.”

He now thinks the poorest creature in the parish good enough and great enough to deserve the humblest attendances, the kindest friendships, the tenderest offices he can possibly show him.… He presents everyone so often before God in his prayers that he never thinks he can … serve these enough for whom he implores so many mercies from God.

The whole nature of virtue, Law wrote in the Call (which Johnson found an “overmatch” for him), consists in conforming to the will of God, and the whole nature of vice in declining from it. Over and over Law appeals to man’s reason as a gift from God to be used in his service. All God’s creatures are created, we are told, to fulfill his will; the sun and moon obey it by the necessity of their nature. When William Blake wrote in his “Auguries of Innocence,” later in the century, “If the sun and moon should doubt/They’d immediately go out,” he was only transcribing Law’s earlier statement in the Call; for, beyond question, Blake too had been impressed with Law’s fervent protests against naturalism, and the rationalism that, far from being reasonable, freezes over the springs of creative imagination and brings havoc to the moral order.

“We are as sure,” said the author of the Call, “that nothing happens to us by chance, as that the world itself was not made by chance.” In a letter written a decade before his death, Law said that the spirit of prayer is for all times and all occasions, a lamp that is always burning, a light that is ever shining. Everything calls for it; everything is to be done in it and governed by it.

There is nothing wise or great or noble in a human spirit but rightly to know, and heartily to worship and adore the great God, Who is the support and life of all spirits whether in heaven or on earth.

He is only one, of course, of the legions of honest defenders of Christianity through the ages; but William Law remains among the most lucid and definitive of those who have presented a reasoned case for it in the English language. His vigorous and simple presentation of traditional Christian spirituality was motivated by a need to share his own experience of Christ and the resulting daily practice of prayer and the moral virtues. In a letter in 1749 Law outlined what he called “a short way to certain success”:

Do not seek it in books and methods of devotion, but offer all you are to God. All that is to help you find Him is best expressed by the distressed state of your heart. “Come to Me,” says the Holy Jesus, “all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will refresh you.” Here, my dear friend, is more for you to live on, more light for your mind, more of unction for your heart than in volumes of human instruction.

Kierkegaard was to write in Training in Christianity of the full acceptance of our forgiveness on the authority of the God-Man:

When we are tempted to doubt whether our sins are really forgiven, we must find comfort in Christ saying to us in His eternal contemporaneity: “Believe it, nevertheless, for I have laid down my life to procure the forgiveness of your sins; so believe it then: a stronger assurance is impossible.

Some years ago I wrote a poem (published in the verse-magazine Spirit, March, 1938) that suggests something of what both Law and Kierkegaard meant by the subordination of human wisdom to divine faith. Entitled “Beyond Knowledge” (referring to the Christian’s realization of the actual Presence superior to any knowing) it reads:

Acquainted long with love I saw

The oneness of the world, the law

The stars keep, shining by its breath.

I felt it at the couch of death.

Nor wrong below nor cloud above

But veiled a universe of love.

Vague premonition! Till You drew

The diffused radiance to You,

As when the coming of the sun,

Draws all the dawnlights into one,

How could I know Love had a place

(O Light eternal!) in one Face?

That one Face is recognized by the Christian as (in the words of Browning) his “universe that feels and knows,” the eternally contemporaneous Christ to whom William Law appealed with such notable effect in his writings and in his life.

The Soviet Union is now fighting what it used to call the disease of capitalist countries-ever-increasing alcoholism. The Soviet “New Man” and new social and economic structures were supposed to eliminate this scourge, but the New Man looks remarkably like the old Adam after he was expelled from the garden. Although the bourgeoisie is gone, the proletariat has taken on the marks of bourgeois decadence. History will continue to illustrate inexorably that man is not intrinsically good and that environment is not the decisive element in character and lifestyle.

Somehow we must convince people of the need for a changed heart. A pig bathed in perfume and dressed in a ruffled bonnet is still a pig until his nature is changed. Well fed, well housed, and well clothed people will never make it to heaven without being born again through faith in Christ. In this new year let’s bait every hook with the good news of the Gospel.

When India became independent in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru adopted an official policy allowing tribal areas to develop their own cultural and religious traditions unhindered. But natives of an animist background resented the growing numbers of Christians who put away old tribal customs. And after Nehru died, Hindus in the 1960s began to persecute Christians in obscure Arunachal Pradesh, a province of 25,000 square miles in the extreme northeast corner of India, along the Tibetan-Chinese border (see map).

Robert Riehweh Cunville, a Khasi tribesman presently studying at the Fuller School of World Mission in Pasadena, California, said that the first wave of persecution occurred in 1968 and 1969. Another major series of attacks and harassments in the mountainous territory, where Western missionaries are banned, took place last spring and summer, he said.

The Baptist World Alliance and other sources corroborated reports of widespread looting, burning of homes and churches, and physical assault and torture of Christians. “Highly destructive vigilante attacks” were perpetrated by bands of high school students, the BWA reported. Its information came from workers of the Baptist General Conference, a 111,000-member denomination based in Evanston, Illinois, with mission work in Arunachal Pradesh.

Cunville, ordained a minister by the 400,000-member Presbyterian Church in North East India, produced documents alleging that three Christian churches in Arunachal Pradesh were burned in 1969, six in 1970, and seven in 1971. In addition, his records show, a Christian mission school was forced to move out of the state in 1970, and another was closed a year later.

Rochunga Pudaite, an Indian who formerly lived in northeast India and is now president of Bibles for the World in Wheaton, Illinois, showed a reporter lists compiled by the North East India Christian Council (NEICC) giving the dates and places of losses and damages allegedly occurring between March and June of 1974 in the Subansiri District of Arunachal Pradesh. Included on the list: thirty-seven churches burned down; twenty-five dwellings burned and seventy-four other dwellings damaged, affecting 343 families; fifty-three persons physically assaulted; sixteen granaries burned down and 162 destroyed or looted; 463 head of livestock and 1,275 fowl stolen.

The NEICC petitioned Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the chief commissioner of Arunachal Pradesh in 1971 and again last May and June to stop “mob violence against Christians,” according to documents in Cunville’s possession. Concerned delegations also brought the issue to Mrs. Gandhi’s personal attention, Cunville added.

An NEICC memo dated June 7, 1974, told the Prime Minister that previous appeals for intervention “have borne no fruit.”

Rather, harassment of Christians has been on the increase with no interference from the government authorities whatsoever. In fact, resolutions were passed in public meetings presided [over] by high government officials in which direct threats were held out to Christians unless they renounced their faith. These threats are now being carried out.… Worst of all, the local government officials have refused to interfere … and the higher officials of the administration have feigned ignorance and are deliberately making themselves inaccessible.

Near year’s end, “the situation up in the hills” hadn’t improved. “Our brethren are very disappointed with the authorities,” an Indian Christian told Baptist General Conference officials.

Cunville, a former seminary teacher and past executive secretary of the NEICC, said the council also had petitioned the Indian Supreme Court for enforcement of the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom in Arunachal Pradesh, and for the protection of lives and properties of Christians there. The NEICC’s petition to Mrs. Gandhi asked that full compensation be made to those affected and that an impartial commission be set up to investigate “anti-Christian incidents.”

The NEICC also asked that its representatives be allowed to tour affected areas freely in order to restore “normal relationships” between Christians and non-Christians. The government rejected the requests on grounds that the people would be hostile toward “an outside agency.”

The chief commissioner, in 1972, had written Cunville that the “incidents” were not persecution but “rather an expression of reprisal in the tribal way on those responsible for causing division and disruption in the tribal society and sometimes disgrace to tribal morality.”

Neighboring states have large Christian communities, but only 6 per cent of Arunachal Pradesh’s 467,000 inhabitants are Christian. During the past ten years, one tribe in Arunachal Pradesh has added 4,000 baptized believers and more than fifty churches. Leaders say another thousand new believers are waiting to be baptized.

NEICC President L. N. Ralte said last June that the alleged attacks on Christians were fomented by high school students, roaming from village to village, who had been paid several hundred dollars by a councilor from Subansiri District “ostensibly for social work but with secret instruction to harass Christians.…” Ralte said the NEICC was prepared to prove its case before an impartial tribunal.

The province’s chief administrative secretary denied the charge, saying that some boys at the John Firth Mission School in North Lakhimpur could not tolerate the divergent views of a man who was “an ardent advocate of preserving tribal faith and culture.” They manhandled and “brutally beat” the man, triggering retaliation by youths and students who “burned a few thatched houses,” he said.

The BWA reported in October that about fifty Christian leaders and their families took refuge in the John Firth School, which was founded by the Baptist General Conference. BWA relief coordinator Carl W. Tiller said other families have remained in hiding in the hills, not daring to return to their destroyed homes. “They have been eking out a subsistence in the jungles on edible roots and leaves,” Tiller said.

Officials of the American Baptist Convention at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board in Richmond, Virginia, said persecution had not spread to the neighboring provinces of Assam and Nagaland, where they have mission work. Neither of the two bodies has specific projects in Arunachal Pradesh.

Meanwhile, Pudaite, the Bible distributor (see May 24, 1974, issue, page 54), has sent Bibles to 500 government officials in Arunachal Pradesh (all those who have telephones). He hopes the liberating Good News will change their hearts—and their attitudes toward Christians.

GREAT GIVEAWAY

Dutch businessman Evert Dekker attracted a large crowd as he gave away ten-guilder bills (about $3.80) outside the train station in Groningen in northern Holland. Police questioned him briefly. Satisfied that the money was real, they left, and Dekker went on with his giveaway.

Each bill, enclosed in a small plastic box, was attached to a mini-tapestry suggesting that the bill could be given away or spent on food or gasoline. Or, it added, “you can also buy yourself a Bible. Then this bill will get everlasting value.”

Dekker’s private campaign cost him nearly $4,000. Why did he do it? “In our day it is useless to hand out tracts,” he replied. “But I haven’t yet seen anybody throwing away a piece of tapestry with a ten-guilder bill attached.”

A recent survey shows that some 3.8 million people over age 15 in the Netherlands (about 43 per cent of the population) do not possess a Bible or Scripture portion. Further, it was found that 54 per cent of those who do have a Bible do not read it.

Fighting Another Famine

After more than twenty years of discussion and negotiation, fifteen evangelical church groups with some 500 congregations and 80,000 members recently organized the Federation of Evangelical Churches of India (FECI). About 150 delegates, many of them pastors, participated in the three-day inaugural meeting, held at the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) headquarters in Akola, near Bombay. Seventeen other evangelical bodies involved in the negotiations did not participate; some are awaiting final approval by church councils or mission boards, some have taken a wait-and-see position.

The federation was created to link churches “for the evangelization of India and defense of the historic biblical faith.” Among the FECI’s architects were leaders of the twenty-four-year-old Evangelical Fellowship of India, a loosely knit alliance of individuals, churches, and organizations. The federation and the fellowship will be complementary, not competitive, say sources.

New Zealand theologian Bruce Nicholls, a seminary teacher in India for twenty years and coordinator of the Theological Assistance Program of the World Evangelical Fellowship, says the federation has the potential of equaling in size the United Church of North India formed three years ago and thus becoming a major force in Indian church life. There are 500,000 members of evangelical groups outside the ecumenical church unions, he points out.

FECI members include the St. Thomas Evangelical Church of Kerala, South India, which claims its roots go back to the apostle Thomas’s visit to India in 52 A.D., the Regions Beyond Missionary Union-sponsored churches in Bihar, North India, the Delhi Bible Fellowship (churches recently founded in the capital city by workers with TEAM, The Evangelical Alliance Mission), and independent churches such as Carey Baptist Church in Calcutta.

One of the first official actions of the FECI executive committee was to appeal to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to appoint a commission to investigate persecution of Christians in Arunachal Pradesh (see preceding story). Another was to join with other church bodies in extending an invitation to evangelist Billy Graham to come to India.

CMA leader Y. T. Aghamkar is FECI president, Pastor T. C. George of the St. Thomas Evangelical Church of South India is vice-president, and Disciples of Christ cleric P. Pannalall is general secretary. The federation will meet triennially in a general assembly, with regional assemblies for the local churches taking place in the interim.

Missiologist Donald McGavran of Fuller Seminary, who was on hand for the celebration, says India is ripe for the FECI’s emphasis on evangelism. Spiritual hunger and famine among India’s half-billion population is no less a disaster than the food shortage, he implies, yet many churches in the ecumenical camps seem more concerned about internal politics and social action than about outreach.

Among the developments attracting McGavran’s interest:

• Christians in the thousands of large new housing complexes are organizing Bible study groups, cell groups, even new congregations;

• The five million Mahars, one-time Hindus who turned to Buddhism in 1956 but found no saviour there, are “more responsive to the Gospel than they have ever been”;

• Christian radio is reaching hundreds of thousands, and many non-Christians are taking Bible correspondence courses, resulting in large numbers of requests for baptism.

As the government of India increasingly turns a cold shoulder to missionaries from the West, India’s financially hard-pressed churches and believers are doing more to reach India’s masses on their own. The FECI is one evidence. Another is a new missionary society organized in South India. It already has sent sixty-five South Indian couples as missionaries to North India and plans to send more—all on Indian money alone.

Bench Beliefs

Several court actions involving religious considerations were taken recently.

The U. S. Supreme Court, by refusing to hear an appeal, in effect let stand a ruling that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) can require religious broadcasting companies to maintain non-discriminatory employment policies. The case concerned the King’s Garden organization, which operates two radio stations in Edmonds, Washington. In 1971 King’s Garden turned down a job applicant for religious reasons, and he complained to the FCC. The FCC did note in a brief that religious broadcasters are permitted to discriminate in the employment of “key personnel,” including those on the air or TV screen.

The high court also let stand a lower-court ruling requiring members of the Bethesda Baptist Church of Port Chester, New York, to exercise due process in seeking to dismiss their pastor, James H. Howell. A majority of the members, accusing Howell of alien theological views, voted to fire him, but the church’s constitution required a three-fourths vote, and Howell refused to bow out. His opponents then took the case to court.

Pending before the Supreme Court is a petition filed in behalf of parents and their children who attend sectarian schools in Missouri. The petition asks the court to review a Missouri Supreme Court decision that denied the loss of textbooks to children attending church-related and synagogue schools. In that decision, children attending non-sectarian private schools were not denied textbook loans.

An appeal is also expected to be brought regarding a Minnesota Supreme Court decision that overturned as unconstitutional a 1971 law providing income-tax credits or refunds to parents of children attending private and parochial schools. The action continues a nationwide trend of court bans on parochaid in virtually all its forms.

In New York, a federal court upheld the constitutionality of state welfare regulations that permit “religious-matching” of children to foster-care institutions operated by religious groups but publicly funded.

Religion In Transit

Evangelist Billy Graham again placed second in the annual Gallup-poll list of men the American people most admire, behind Henry Kissinger and ahead of President Ford, Edward Kennedy, and George Wallace.

A court ruling in 1973 forbade government sponsorship of the traditional nativity scene near the national Christmas tree in the nation’s capital. A private group, the American Christian Heritage Association, led by a Baptist layman, was permitted to sponsor the scene that year. Last month there were three displays: the ACHA’s, an American Legion post’s (plastic figurines), and one by the Christian Service Corps mission agency (live drama with elaborate staging).

Evangelist Leighton Ford’s one-minute inspirational feature is now shown on thirty-two television stations in seventeen states. Viewer surveys indicate the comment-on-a-topic spot, scheduled right after news shows, is seen by a daily audience of about five million.

The 179,000-member Presbyterian Church in Canada, the country’s third-largest denomination, is observing its centennial year. The church was born of a merger of eight Presbyterian groups in Montreal in 1875. When three Canadian denominations—Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregational—agreed in 1925 to form the United Church of Canada, more than a third of the Presbyterians remained aloof, choosing to continue the denomination.

Next month’s Convocation on Church Growth, headed by Pastor Robert H. Schuller of the 7,000-member Garden Grove Community Church in California, will meet at the church instead ofin Jerusalem. Travel costs and Mideast uncertainties were blamed for the shift.

No funds will be available to send any new Lutheran Church in America missionaries overseas this year, according to an LCA administrative report. Increased costs and declining support were blamed. There are 183 LCA overseas missionaries, down from 325 in 1969.

Seventh-day Adventists and Mormons rank lower in cancer mortality rates than any other groups of Americans, according to studies by UCLA medical researcher James Enstrom. He suggests diet and life-styles may be the reason.

The Bible-Science Association of Caldwell, Idaho, is publishing three weekly science readers for use in elementary and junior-high schools.

Named as chaplain to the California Senate: Shoko Masunaga, 58, Japanese-American pastor of the Buddhist Church of Sacramento, an affiliate of the 25,000-family Buddhist Churches of America (Jodo Shinshu Buddhism), headquartered in San Francisco. Masunaga was nominated to the one-year term by Senator Albert Rodda, a United Methodist who has made the chaplaincy nominations for the past sixteen years.

A questionnaire distributed to delegates to the three major Lutheran church conventions in Canada shows 81.6 per cent favor union of the three bodies (the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Canada and the Canadian sections of the Lutheran Church in America and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod).

Personalia

Campus minister David A. Shank of Goshen (Indiana) College was named speaker for “The Mennonite Hour” radio broadcast, replacing David Augsburger, who has accepted a teaching position at Northern Baptist Seminary in suburban Chicago.

William L. Phillips, bilingual pastor of Eglise Baptiste d’Ahuntsic in Montreal, is the recently elected president of the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada.

Joy Hansell was promoted to the position of editor of Pentecostal Testimony, official organ of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. Miss Hansell is the only woman to hold the senior editorial post on a major Canadian religious publication.

Richard M. Winchell, administrator andformer missionary to South Africa with The Evangelical Alliance Mission of Wheaton, Illinois, is TEAM’S new general director. He succeeds Vernon Mortenson, who was named chairman of TEAM’S board. TEAM has 1,008 missionaries on 23 fields with a national-church membership of 60,000 served by 334 pastors and 1,200 other workers.

World Scene

Four persons were killed and two others seriously injured last month in the worst highway accident in Operation Mobilization’s seventeen-year history. An OM van and a large truck crashed head-on in fog near Slavenski Brod on Yugoslavia’s treacherous two-lane auto-put. Killed were New Zealander Chris Begg, head of OM’s intensive evangelistic campaign in India’s Uttar Pradesh state, his wife, and two Americans, Earl Jay Sunanday, 24, a member of Allen-wood (Pennsylvania) Presbyterian Church, and Sharon Brown, 24, of Christ Bible Church in Hamilton, Montana.

The government of Uruguay last month shut down a publication of the fifteen-congregation Waldensian Church in that country. Officials, citing in part a July editorial that mentioned World

Council of Churches economic aid to groups in Uruguay, Chile, Viet Nam, and Africa, alleged that the WCC promotes subversive activity throughout the world. The WCC then threatened legal action against Uruguay if it does not retract “false and defamatory” statements.

Many Christians were imprisoned and killed in the war that began in the Portuguese colony of Angola in Africa because they were Christians and different from the rest of the population,” alleges missionary Donald Jeffrey in a recent article in Christian Missions in Many Lands. But sweeping changes were made under the new government installed in Lisbon last year. Christians have come out of hiding, and “among the thousands of untried, unsentenced, suffering prisoners released were hundreds of Christians.”

More than 20,000 Scripture portions in several languages were distributed by 200 young people of the Church of Christ in Zaire to the thousands who flocked to see the recent George Foreman-Muhammed Ali “fight of the century.”

Dejean Replogle, 16, and seventeen fellow Holy Land tourists from Main Street Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida, were the targets of a grenade attack at the ruins of Bethany outside Jerusalem. The teen-ager, hit by shrapnel, underwent amputation of her right leg. Pastor E. C. McDaniel and the others escaped injury.

Founder-president K. E. Abraham of the 500,000-member Indian Pentecostal Church of God died in Kottayam, India, at age 76.

Assemblies of God minister Joseph Gyanfosu, 55, leader of the Ghana delegation to the Lausanne congress on evangelization, resigned his post as acting secretary of the Bible Society of Ghana to engage in full-time evangelism. He attributes his decision to the challenges of Lausanne.

An International Congress of Chinese Evangelicals will be held in Hong Kong in 1976, an outgrowth of last summer’s evangelism congress in Lausanne.

DEATH

DON R. FALKENBERG, 80, founder and president emeritus of the Ohio-based Bible Literature International, which supplies literature in 175 languages to workers in 151 countries; in Kissimmee, Florida, after a long illness.

History And Polemic

A History of Fundamentalism in America by George W. Dollar (Bob Jones University Press, 1973, 411 pp., $6.95, $3.95 pb), is reviewed by H. Crosby Englizian, professor of church history, Western Conservative Baptist Seminary, Portland, Oregon.

George Dollar has done the evangelical church in America a great service with this volume on the history of fundamentalism. He narrates the goodness and glory of historic fundamentalism while also revealing its pettiness and misery. Because of the radically separatist stance, symbolized by the clenched fist on the jacket cover, Dollar has produced something more than a history. For the history, we are in his debt. For the rest, some of us who are evangelical historians are embarrassed.

Dollar’s account of fundamentalism prior to 1900 is welcome. Only a few scholars have endeavored to tell in some detail the values and significance of the prophetic conferences held near the close of the nineteenth century (in this connection, the researchers that brought to light the contributions of A. J. Gordon of Boston are noteworthy). The biographical data scattered throughout the book, and especially the seventy-six-page biographical index, are invaluable. One may wonder, however, why such early church figures as Clement, Constantine, and Augustine are included in such an index. Dollar is a student of preachers and Spirit-blessed preaching—a personal enthusiasm that enhances this effort.

The reader might begin his reading on page 279, where Dollar discusses “secondary separation,” and then ponder a while his definition of historic fundamentalism: “… the literal exposition of all the affirmations and attitudes of the Bible and the militant exposure of all non-Biblical affirmations and attitudes.” The reader may soon wonder whether he is reading a history or a pugnacious polemic for an insular Christianity. This definition, which demands our attention by appearing in large, bold type that fills a whole page, has only a confused correspondence with the rest of the book. Does “prima donna” W. B. Riley meet the definition even though he remained in the Northern Baptist Convention almost to his dying day? And what of the amillennial “prima donna” T. T. Shields? And the “schizophrenic [?]” “prima donna” J. Frank Norris?

Dollar finds three categories of professing fundamentalists: the militant (the genuine and historic), who most nearly meet the requirements of the above definition; the moderates, who are faithful in “literal exposition” but disloyal in “militant exposure”; and the modified, who are equated with new evangelicals and who “dismiss the doctrine of the imminent coming of the Lord as unimportant” and “are party to compromise, erosion, and capitulation to Satanic forces.…” Then follows a representative list of institutions in each category: of the fifteen militant examplars, eleven are associated with hard-core Baptist groups; also included is Bob Jones University (where Dollar teaches), founded by an evangelist who, incidentally, remained within the Methodist Church as late as 1957. Among moderate schools are Biola, Cedarville, Moody Bible Institute, Tennessee Temple, and Dallas, Grace, Talbot, and Westminster seminaries. The new evangelicals are purportedly represented by Gordon, Houghton, King’s, and Wheaton colleges and by Fuller, Trinity, and Conservative Baptist seminaries. Beyond this, Dollar believes Southern Baptist pastor W. A. Criswell to be “supporting the apostasy,” and seminary presidents Vernon Grounds, Herman Hoyt, and Earl Radmacher to be contributing to a National Council-like “tolerance toward all religious groups.” Fundamentalists should not support Dallas Seminary or J. Vernon McGee or Harold Ockenga or Charles L. Feinberg or Moody Bible Institute, says Dollar. These are the “SSS” men and schools—they personify Silence, Sympathy, or Support in the face of “all forms of compromise.” Wilbur Smith and John Walvoord are referred to as “men in retreat”; Jack Wyrtzen, John R. Rice, and many others are mentioned with but ever-so-faint praise.

Dollar and his friends have seemingly established themselves as examiners within the Christian community, dispensing a “clean bill of health” to men and organizations who measure up to their ever-narrowing expectations. The fundamentalist is one who exposes “non-Biblical concepts and activities.” But what of the second class, the “moderate” fundamentalist, who, according to Dollar “refuses to expose error, wrong attitudes, questionable habits, and defections from Bible discipline”? There are thousands of “moderate” fundamentalists who do “expose error, wrong attitudes …,” but not always the same alleged errors and attitudes and habits as the militants. Are the “moderates,” therefore, not “militant”? Can a “militant” be a “moderate”?’ A “moderate,” a “militant”? A “modified,” a “moderate”? If the answer is yes, and the author so suggests, then the efforts toward definition seem to reach an impasse. Granting the “shortcomings” of these classifications and admitting that there is “not enough evidence” to know who belongs where, Dollar asserts, nevertheless, that “lists … must be made.”

All three kinds of fundamentalists come in for their share of both praise and criticism. Is this an attempt at a balanced presentation, or might it suggest the instability of the author’s position? Must Christians agree 100 per cent on everything to be acceptable to one another? Do all the GARBs think alike? Or the new evangelicals? Or all members of the New Testament Association of Independent Baptist Churches? No! Dollar is to be commended for his efforts to cite the hardline fundamentalists as they were and are—both good and not so good—but his bias is so markedly evident that the attempt loses some of its credibility. Why not castigate Chester Tulga for speaking against institutional bigness (“jumboism”), since Dollar’s favorites are noted for their immense churches? Why let the Fundamentalist Fellowship within the Northern Baptist Convention escape criticism after founding the “motley group” called the Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society! “It is a strange phenomenon,” says Dollar, that militants are “barred” from less militant schools; he is disturbed that second- and third-class fundamentalists “can afford to be friendly” with each other but not with outspoken first-class fundamentalists. But are not the militants guilty of the same exclusivism, inviting into their assemblies their own kind only, and mailing their church papers to select addresses only?

Although Dollar’s definition of a fundamentalist is fine on paper, its practice is something else. Amidst recent Conservative Baptist struggles, it was stated that “policy is the application of principles to circumstances, and men who speak of principle apart from circumstances fall victims to a legalism which easily becomes dogmatic and harsh.” The fact of the matter is that the strict separatists have a soft side, but it is reserved for their own group. Thus W. B. Riley comes out smelling like a rose despite his long stay in the “apostate” Northern Baptist Convention.

Their hard side, on the other hand, appears against those who stand outside their precincts. Examples of such ambivalence are numerous. One militant local church refused to accept a paid subscription to its church paper from the library of a “moderate” Baptist institution on the grounds that the paper was “sent to friends … on a selected basis where there is some compelling reason.” Again, can a respected historian (and I, as a former student and personal friend of George Dollar, have always respected his scholarship, his pastoral heart, and his love for the Saviour) say that San Francisco Baptist Seminary is a “bulwark” institution, in the face of recent events? Dollar mentions Pillsbury Baptist Bible College in Owatonna, Minnesota, and the leadership of Richard Clearwaters and Myron Cedarholm, men of longstanding note among Conservative Baptists until recently. But he forgot to inform his readers why Cedarholm left Pillsbury to found a competing school across the Wisconsin border. Dollar says that “because of complete capitulation to new-evangelical attitudes and methods, no serious dissension affects the Conservative Baptists now.…” This explanation of the return of peace to the annual meetings of the Conservative Baptists is debatable; some would cite instead the departure of the hard-core element.

A History of Fundamentalism in America is a history only in part. Interlaced with this history is a strange mixture of interpretation and editorialization. I find little difficulty in agreeing with Dollar as he observes certain laxities in the Bible-school movement and as he evaluates certainly worldly modes and manners. Some new evangelical ideas are indeed fraught with peril; and so is cooperation with liberals, and the employment of gimmicks in the church, and the low estate of exegetical, forceful, and tear-touched preaching. Furthermore, Dollar’s trenchant observation that new evangelicalism (whether in part or in whole) may serve to create a tolerance of “all religious groups” to the detriment of the evangelical church in America is, to my mind, not without substance. It may very well be that new evangelicalism will stimulate or give rise to ideas and practices that even present-day “moderate” and “modified” fundamentalists will reject.

This is a curiously interesting book—one that defines a true fundamentalist as a person who, among other things, gives himself to “the militant exposure of all non-Biblical affirmations and attitudes,” and at the same time praises fundamentalist giants who chose as their successors men “who operate on the basis of connections and not convictions.” Why did fundamentalist leaders who are to expose non-biblical attitudes choose opportunist successors, i.e., men with non-biblical attitudes? Dollar suggests gullibility. Could it be that these stalwarts of the past do not quite fit the above definition? Indeed, does anybody?

I highly recommend this book for its insights into the history and mind of fundamentalism—both past and present, both real and imagined.

A New Tribalism

The Restless Heart, by Robert C. Harvey (Eerdmans, 216 pp., $3.95 pb), is reviewed by Donald G. Bloesch, professor of theology, Dubuque Theological Seminary, Dubuque, Iowa.

Robert C. Harvey, an Episcopal clergyman, has given an incisive analysis of the crisis in social identity in contemporary Western society. His basic contention is that our society is becoming collectivized, and that this is reflected in the shift from inner-direction to other-direction and random-direction. In the inner-directed society, which was present from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, man takes his cues from a divinely illumined conscience and acknowledges the reality of moral absolutes. In the other-directed society man appeals to the consensus of the group or wider community; the author calls this a new tribalism. Among young people today there is a movement away from other-direction to random-direction, which makes an island of every man by giving him total autonomy. Random-direction is individual in intention but collective in fact. Indeed, it represents the most thorough form of collectivism, since it denies individual morality and substitutes an ethic of collective morality. Both other-direction and random-direction characterize modern society, though inner-direction can be detected among southern fundamentalists and later generation ethnics.

Most people today, he maintains, are person-oriented, not value-oriented, which means that they place loyalty to their fellows above fidelity to transcendent moral values. The homogenized man is supplanting the free, self-individual. A demand for uniformity crushes individual initiative and responsibility. Criminals are no longer treated as responsible but as sick and therefore not deserving punishment. Guilt is seen as collective instead of individual. Progressive education, group dynamics, and psychiatry all tend to press people into the mold of the collective personality. Even the church is acquiring the collectivist mentality, since it is more intent on reforming social structures than on converting individuals.

Harvey issues a plea for a recovery of transcendence and abiding moral values. He is suspicious of the liberal mentality that sees man as basically good and institutions as harmful. The need of mankind is to acquire a universal identity that will include both a corporate and an individual sense of personhood. He is aware of the perils of a rampant individualism, but he believes that a heightened sense of individual conscience contributes to stability in society and to the preservation of religious values. Man can be free and responsible, Harvey contends, only when he finds his identity in the personal, trinitarian God.

Much of what Harvey says rings painfully true, and this is why churchmen of every persuasion need to ponder this book. He writes as both a sociologist of religion and a theologian, since he tries to relate his sociological analysis to his theological vision. While basically concurring in his social analysis, I take exception to some of his theological affirmations. He is right that society can be ruled only by law and not by love, but he does not see that law must be measured in the light of the higher criterion—love. His ranking of the Gospels over the Epistles and his view that God accepts a man as righteous because his goodness is motivated by a love for God is not acceptable to biblical or evangelical believers.

Harvey speaks of the need for a faithful, righteous and saving remnant that will be a leaven in society. I agree, but are any of his categories, including inner-direction, appropriate for such a creative minority? In my opinion it is more proper to see such persons as upper-directed or God-directed rather than inner-directed. A case can be made that such an orientation characterized the Christian remnant in all previous ages.

NEWLY PUBLISHED

Library Research Guide to Religion and Theology, by James R. Kennedy, Jr. (Pierian Press [Box 1808, Ann Arbor, Mich. 48106], 57 pp., $7.50, $3.50 pb). An invaluable aid to writing term papers and theses. Students, teachers, librarians—take note. The large-size pages contain many illustrative reproductions from card catalogues and a variety of available indexes as the user is given step-by-step guidance. The nine-page bibliography of basic reference works is commendably fair in its inclusion of titles by evangelicals.

Parents and the Experts, by Diane Kessler (Judson, 96 pp., $2.45 pb), Evelyn Duvall’s Handbook For Parents, by Evelyn Duvall (Broadman, 192 pp., $2.25 pb), and Know Your Child, by Joe Temple (Baker, 149 pp., $2.95 pb). Noteworthy and practical helps for parenting. Kessler evaluates the best-selling guides for parents from a Christian perspective. Duvall touches briefly on most aspects, but with little explicit reference to the Scripture and focuses on positive discipline.

The Pastor and Marriage Group Counseling, by Richard Wilke (Abingdon, 173 pp., $5.75), The Minister as Crisis Counselor, by David Switzer (Abingdon, 288 pp., $6.95), and Divorce: The New Freedom, by Esther Fisher (Harper & Row, 198 pp., $7.95). Pastors who do much counseling can, with careful evaluation, find some helpful insights and methods to try.

Good News, by Jim Comstock (EPM [1003 Turkey Run Rd., McLean, Va. 22101], 44 pp., $6.95 pb). Key events in the life of Christ as they might have been reported on forty-four front pages of tabloid newspapers of his day. Includes photographs.

Grow: Your Sunday School Can Grow, by Lowell Brown (Regal, 120 pp., $2.25 pb), Twenty-four Ways to Improve Your Teaching, by Kenneth Gangel (Victor, 131 pp., $1.95 pb), You and Adults, by Lawrence Richards (Moody, 111 pp., $1.95 pb), and You Make the Difference For 4’s and 5’s, by Mary LeBar (Victor, 47 pp., $.95 pb). Some new life for all aspects of Sunday school, with specific howto’s on each count.

Love, Altruism and World Crises: The Challenge of Pitirim Sorokim, by Joseph Allen Matter (Nelson-Hall, 336 pp., $9.95). Exploration of a noted sociologist’s theories on the practical power of selfless love in a crisis-ridden world.

The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church, edited by J. D. Douglas (Zondervan, 1074 pp., $24.95). Nearly 200 evangelical scholars have prepared a comprehensive reference work on the history of Christianity. Some 4,800 brief articles. Belongs in every academic and public library, and ministers and many others should have personal copies as well.

If Christ Is the Answer, What Are the Questions?, by Tom Skinner (Zondervan, 219 pp., $2.95 pb). An excellent way to get one (well-known) evangelist’s answers to a variety of questions posed to him. Since Skinner is black, many of the questions are on topics like black power, black theology, and black-white relations. Highly recommended.

The Liberation of Planet Earth, by Hal Lindsey (Zondervan, 236 pp., $4.95, $2.95 pb), Assumptions and Faith, by Wayne Roberts (Gibbs Publishing Co. [Broadview, 111. 60153], 97 pp., $1.95 pb), and Ten Teachings, by J. Rodman Williams (Creation, 121 pp., $1.95 pb). Basic presentations of evangelical doctrine by, respectively, a well-known author, a math professor (who lays an apologetical foundation), and a leading charismatic theologian.

The Black Experience in Religion, edited by C. Eric Lincoln (Anchor, 369 pp., $3.95 pb). Twenty-six essays previously published within the past few years. Good introductory overview of the literature, but more writing on the subject from more biblically shaped perspectives is needed.

Biblical Theology: New Testament by Chester Lehman (Herald Press, 566 pp., $18.95). A major, systematic overview of the ministry of Christ and the teachings of James, Peter, Paul, Hebrews, and John. The author taught at Eastern Mennonite College and Seminary for fifty years.

Trinity Journal, Volume 3, edited by Mark Asp and Leonard Goss (Trinity Evangelical Divinity School [Deerfield, 111. 60015], 117 pp., $2 pb). Eighteen essays and reviews by past and present students and teachers at Trinity. Very worthwhile.

New Testament Survey, by Robert G. Gromacki (Baker, 433 pp., $9.95). A professor at Cedarville College (General Association of Regular Baptist Churches) presents a well-illustrated freshman-level text.

Letters to an Unborn Child, by David Ireland (Harper & Row, 138 pp., $5.95). The kind of book that is hard to put down. The author is now paralyzed by a rare disease that has always led to premature death. These letters, started during his wife’s pregnancy, attempt to let his child know more about his father. They also point to the Heavenly Father, revealed through his Son, who longs to have us all know him better.

The Challenge of Black Theology in South Africa, edited by Basil Moore (John Knox, 156 pp., $4.95 pb). Seventeen stirring essays, mostly by South African blacks. If those who brought the Gospel to South Africa had also taught and tried to practice biblical ethics, such a book need not have been written.

The Armstrong Empire, by Joseph Hopkins (Eerdmans, 304 pp., $4.50 pb), Herbert W. Armstrong and His Worldwide Church of God, by Roger F. Campbell (Christian Literature Crusade, 120 pp., $1.25 pb), and Armstrongism, by Robert L. Summer (Biblical Evangelism Press [Box 157, Brownsburg, Indiana 46112], 424 pp., $5.95). Hopkins is definitely the best on the movement as a whole, including its recent troubles. The other two books especially focus on presenting biblical refutations of key Armstrong positions.

The Hungry Sheep, by John Sheridan (Arlington, 175 pp., $7.95). A straightforward logical defense of the traditional orthodox doctrines of Roman Catholicism.

Mourning Song, by Joyce Landorf (Revell, 184 pp., $5.95), To Die With Style, by Marjorie Casebier (Abingdon, 174 pp., $5.95), The Experience of Dying, edited by Norbert Greinacher and Alois Muller (Seabury, 152 pp., $3.95 pb), When Cancer Comes, by Clarence McConkey (Westminster, 140 pp., $2.95 pb), and The Cost of Dying, by Raymond Arvio (Harper & Row, 159 pp., $5.95). Death is the topic of the season, and these books cover the gamut of the experience. Landorf covers the five emotional stages of facing death that Kubler-Ross identified, but from a Christian and personal perspective. Very helpful. Casebier illustrates and supports the thesis that we face death with the same attitudes and styles that we face life. Greinacher and Muller collect thirteen theological and scholarly essays. McConkey examines the scope of cancer from definition to demise. Arvio offers some creative, debatable alternatives to our traditional costly funerals.

First of Two Parts

One part of the media explosion in our day that has found wide use in Christian circles is the cassette.

The cassette is a member of the tape-recording family. Tape recorders and players have been around for a long time, but the bulkiness of the equipment and the vulnerability of the tapes limit their creative use by most pastors. Among the advantages offered by cassettes are simple operation and relatively inexpensive, easily carried equipment.

Cassette-makers are sprouting up everywhere. Christians with gnostic tendencies who gather in “underground” cells glory in circulating cassettes. They have about them the aura of the clandestine samizdat without the risk of discovery. Cassettes can be made by anyone who has a little imagination and relatively simple and inexpensive equipment. They are a boon to every ism in the land. The Cassette Review, a bi-monthly newsletter (1031 E. Prospect Highway, Mount Prospect, Ill. 60056—$6 yearly), lists approximately sixty-five major religious producers running from Billy Graham’s Decision Tape Library to Islamic Productions. A number of Christian schools are involved in producing and distributing cassettes: Bethany Fellowship, Columbia Bible College, Luther Theological Seminary, Moody Bible Institute, and Regent College. Christian Bookseller Magazine periodically reviews the latest offerings of the major religion-market companies.

There are a growing number of cassette clubs, operating in the familiar pattern of book clubs. The Episcopalians have the Catacomb Cassette Club, and, from another part of the spectrum, Pillsbury Baptist Bible College in Minnesota, will enroll you in its fiery evangelist-of-the-month.

There appears to be no central clearing house for cassettes as yet, and in preparing this survey I have missed many good things. Some new companies do not appreciate the value of review, and some old ones are afraid of review for one reason or another. A surprisingly large number of the companies that I solicited for review chose to ignore my request without so much as an acknowledgment.

One church advertises its cassette library in national Christian magazines. A quarter brings a list of its huge holdings, and the library lends by mail on a postage-paid basis. The Christian bookstore in my community rents cassettes at fifty cents per reel until the set is paid for and a quarter thereafter. If a satisfied customer wishes to purchase a cassette album he has rented, the rental is subtracted from the price. Some denominations have established centralized lending libraries; among these is Church Leaders Cassette Library (119 Magnolia Dr., Cedar Falls, Iowa 50163), sponsored by Midwest American Baptists.

Secular societies for the blind provide free cassette machines and tapes of novels, lectures, and the like. I hope that, if it doesn’t already exist, a similar avenue can be established for the Gospel.

When evangelicals gather in seminars across the country, often cassettes are made on the spot and are available minutes after the benediction. My own participation in the Good News Movement within United Methodism has laden me down with every sermon, lecture, and harangue offered in St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Louisville. Bill Gothard’s Basic Youth Conflicts seminars forbid recording of all kinds and do not make any available. On the other hand, Step 2 (1921 N. Harlem, Chicago, Ill. 60635), geared toward imaginatively worshipful worship services, appears to live by reel spirit.

Cassette users must face an ethical matter like that of photocopying music. I know one man who records every broadcast of a radio Bible series and sends cassettes to friends and relatives across the continent. Recognizing this problem, Abbey Tape Duplicators, producers of “Living Tapes,” asks that Christians pay a fifty-cent-per-tape royalty to speakers still living.

Categories in religious cassettes include:

1. Dead Men Who Still Speak. These cassettes are really old reel-to-reel tape recordings in a new form. The Evangelical Foundation (1716 Spruce St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19103) is a distributor of everything—it seems—that the late Donald Grey Barnhouse ever said. He is worth listening to today (though it was a bit disconcerting for one message to end abruptly when the tape was exhausted before Barnhouse was!). Living Tapes (10520 Burbank Blvd., N. Hollywood, Calif. 91601) offers sermons by many now dead men such as E. Stanley Jones.

2. Living Men Worth Listening To. Discernment is needed, because many men not worth listening to have large followings. Among the better offerings are the Evangelical Foundations’ “Bible Study Hour” series with Dr. James Boice as teacher; an interesting feature is a short interview with leading evangelicals. Grace Community Church sponsors “The Word of Grace Tape Ministry” by its pastor, John MacArthur (13248 Roscoe Blvd., Sun Valley, Calif. 91352). The Lutheran Laymen’s League (2185 Hampton Ave., St. Louis, Mo. 63139) tapes messages by Oswald Hoffmann. Some men worth listening to, however, cannot be easily understood. Abingdon’s Audio-Graphics gives us William Barclay, and Abbey Tapes gives us Festo Kivengere—both speaking with British accents that make for hard listening on cassette. —DALE SANDERS, pastor, Riverside United Methodist Church, Fort Dodge, Iowa.