Editor’s Note from November 08, 1974

Harold Lindsell

As this issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY reaches its readers I will, I expect, be somewhere in the Middle East. I hope to have a look at the situation in Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, and Greece. The Middle East shows few signs of being dethroned as the world’s number-one trouble spot. And there seems to be no reason to suppose that the oil-producing nations will not use their newfound economic power to promote vast political and economic changes around the world.

Another well received CT article is now available as a reprint: from our July 26, 1974, issue, “There Is More to Redemption Than Meets the Ear,” by Harold Best of the Wheaton College music department. Order Reprint No. 10 at 15ȼ per copy for fewer than 100, 10ȼ per copy for 100 or more; please send payment with your order.

Barrie Doyle, formerly our assistant news editor, is a young man who has gone west. He has become the director of field investigation and news reporting for a new magazine on the West Coast. We wish him well in his new post—and the transplanted Californians among us think a little enviously of those sunny skies.…

Theology

Everything but Humility

J. D. Douglas

The address by Malcolm Muggeridge at the International Congress on World Evangelization, carried in the August 16 issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, attracted wide attention and earned a standing ovation at the congress itself.

The latter fact astonished me. The address was not vintage but latter-day Muggeridge, reflecting a septuagenarian’s young faith. It was hailed as a personal testimony, which it might have been. It had no obvious base in the congress theme. Its theological content had a certain wispish quality, calling for substantial amplification in the minds of his listeners. “A con job,” said one participant, but not without admiration.

Was it? Or was it a pilgrim coming at essential things from the only way he knows? Here undoubtedly is a professional purveyor of words; that insolent drawl, one suspects, could bring life to the reading of a Greyhound bus schedule. All his life he has been an entertainer; c’est son metier. Spiritual awakening for Muggeridge has not demanded the conversion of raciness into the sort of limp prose that is tolerated, even acclaimed, because it has the gift of orthodoxy. On one view we should be thankful that the craftsman’s workshop is still cluttered; old tools, after all, like old slippers and old friends, are often the best.

This leads me to mention of Muggeridge’s recently published volume, The Infernal Grove (Morrow, $7.95), which is the second installment of his autobiographical Chronicles of Wasted Time. The title comes from William Blake, a poet maverick enough to take the Muggeridgean fancy:

Till I turn from Female Love

And root up the Infernal Grove,

I shall never worthy be

To step into Eternity.

Muggeridge resumes the story where he left off in The Green Stick (see Current Religious Thought, December 8, 1972), and now devotes 280 pages to the 1933–47 period. It begins with the writer at thirty-two, taking up a temporary appointment with the League of Nations in Switzerland (“where the Inland Revenue men cease from troubling and the wealthy are at rest”). It ends with a bizarre scene in Westminster Abbey where two caskets containing the ashes of his parents-in-law, the redoubtable Webbs, were interred (“Which is Sidney and which is Beatrice?” asked a troubled relative.)

Muggeridge never stayed long in, or gave his heart to, any one job. He had a poor opinion of the League of Nations: “What was it but another Tower of Babel, climbing inanely into the sky?” When Hitler was actually invading Poland, he points out, the league was in session, discussing—the codification of level-crossing signs.

When Muggeridge went on to India to be editor of the Calcutta Statesman there was the same satirical approach to his work, the same gift of prophecy that foresaw the downfall of the British Raj, the same wicked wit and brilliant commentary on people and events. He longed, he says, to be a part of the bustling life of that great Indian city, yet he clung to the trappings of establishment. He made friends, as he did in other parts of the world, but never close ones, and all seem soon to have been discarded almost as sometime things, so that frequently throughout his account comes the matter-of-fact but poignant reference: “I heard later that he had died.”

His enemies fare nearly as badly at his hands as do his friends. Coming in for a thumping too are “sentimentally virtuous people.” Here Muggeridge brings in Eleanor Roosevelt, who, on a conducted tour of Solzhenitsyn’s labor camp, “spawned the moral platitudes of the contemporary liberal wisdom as effortlessly and plenteously as the most prolific salmon … easily persuaded that the camp in question was a humanely conducted institution for curing the criminally inclined.” Concludes Muggeridge: “A truly wicked woman would have been ashamed to be so callous and so gullible.”

Muggeridge returned to London to work on the Evening Standard before turning to freelancing while “waiting for the war.” When it came in 1939 he joined the Ministry of Information, there to manufacture “counterfeit words with which I was required to juggle—like ‘freedom,’ ‘democracy’ … Here, then, was no raging jingoist, but rather the antithesis—and no more tolerable for that. This was seen when, after he had joined the army and been billetted in a country house, his colleagues complained about his generally offensive attitude and had him turned out of the house. Muggeridge coolly comments three decades later: “I have never found any difficulty in understanding how irritating I can be to other people; perhaps because I so often irritate myself.

A fair chunk of the book is given to his time in Army Intelligence—in Lourenço Marques (some interesting sidelights on Portuguese Mozambique here), Algiers, and Paris. He records a half-hearted attempt at suicide, worked with the spy Kim Philby, met André Gide, defended P G. Wodehouse against charges of collaboration in his misguided broadcasts from Berlin. Muggeridge seems to have taken neither the army nor the war seriously, nor did he find himself in combat conditions where diving into a dugout might have jolted him into thinking differently.

Religion evidently had little part in those fourteen years. One may, however, find it curious that the writings of the latter-day Muggeridge should still evince such acerbity, vituperation, and lack of compassion.

Why is he still so critical of others? Last night I watched him in a television interview, and he was asked that question. His answer in effect: because man is sick and lives in a sick world, and he (Muggeridge) wrote about men as he saw them, with all their faults. After all—and he seemed to think this clinched it—he didn’t mind it when others criticized him.

“He has every Christian virtue except humility,” Cardinal Heenan of Westminster says about Muggeridge. But humility surely is what one would look for in a man who claims he never has felt at home in this world. And one might have expected that world renunciation would have called for more than one innocuous reference to God in that forty-minute TV interview.

But Muggeridge has two great assets. One is a happy marriage. Whatever lies behind those oblique references in his autobiography to wartime entanglements, no one can doubt that Kitty has brought him security and the only real love of his life The other great asset I have mentioned earlier: the ability to make words come alive. Witold Gombrowicz said once: “If there is a writer who writes in terror of boring the reader, I am he!” No one who reads Muggeridge can doubt it.

The NCC: Going Deeper

David Kucharsky

Although temporal concerns have been the mainstay of the National Council of Churches throughout its twenty-four-year history, there have also been brief spurts of interest in the spiritual side of life. The NCC’s Governing Board witnessed the latest such attempt at a semi-annual meeting in New York last month. For the first time, the NCC staff is attempting to draw up a definitive policy statement on evangelism. A pair of new papers have already been prepared as resource materials for the evangelism statement.

NCC general secretary Claire Randall indicated she was thinking of the move as part of what she called a “search for transcendence.” The board had authorized establishment of a working group on evangelism, complete with paid staff if funds are forthcoming, at a meeting earlier this year.

Ms. Randall said the NCC would not abandon its advocacy role for the poor and needy. But she added that “we have to move to struggling more specifically with deeper areas of concern.” She cited growing demands for consideration of “another kind of life style” and the need for exploring “the peculiar responsibility of the church having to do with the meaning of life.”

Underlining the latter point was Dr. Curtis Roosevelt, head of the United Nations liaison with non-government organizations (appropriately enough on the ninetieth anniversary of the birth of his late great grandmother Eleanor). “In my arena,” said Roosevelt, “I do not observe any religious organizations acting as if they understood their unique role.” He said that the present style of Christian religious organizations was either aping or competing with foreign offices or a style indistinguishable from social organizations.

“Someone has to begin speaking to the major issues of our day … in terms of who are we, where we came from and where we are going,” Roosevelt declared. Role clarification might be aided, he suggested, by asking about “the balance between expressing the opinion of your membership and expressing the opinion of the ‘enlightened elite’ of the institutional leadership, its bureaucracy and governing body.”

Ms. Randall said a special meeting is planned which will bring together leaders to discuss the issue.

At a news conference at the close of the three-day board meeting Ms. Randall also referred to a panel on the future of ecumenism, saying she expected the NCC to be “moving in the directions suggested there.” Specifically cited were comments made by the Reverend Arie Brouwer, executive secretary of the Reformed Church in America. Brouwer headed a task force which sought unsuccessfully for a radical restructure of the NCC several years ago. He is now voicing an urgent appeal for the cultivation of “a national ecumenical ethos.”

This, he says, means the articulation of such ecumenical aspirations of peace, love, faith, human dignity, hope, and joy “in the symbols, myths and realities of the Christian faith.… I want something that is experiential, confessional, and testimonial. I am talking about an ethos that comes out of a community—an extension of the liturgy.” Brouwer added that he thought that there were many in and out of the NCC who were ready for implementing such a concept. He did not elaborate, however, any more explicitly as to what he had in mind, except to say that he opposed the idea of ecumenical life being dominated by structure.

In one of the papers on evangelism, David James Randolph, a United Methodist executive, argues for an “alternate evangelism” that would be neither crusade evangelism nor social action. “Social transformation” is nonetheless one of the terms used to describe it, along with “celebration” and “interpretation.”

In the other evangelism paper, Robert C. Campbell, general secretary of the American Baptist Churches, contends that the term “evangelism” describes two things: “the total activity of God in Jesus Christ and His collaboration with His people reshaping personal, group, and institutional life toward the New Creation” and “the life style of those who respond to the total activity of God in Jesus Christ.”

Evangelical leaders are not believed likely to hail such theologizing as a stride toward transcendence. However, staff writer Elliott Wright of Religious News Service unearthed a penitently-worded confidential statement which he says “strongly suggests” that ecumenical and evangelical leaders are drawing closer together. The statement, adopted by the NCC’s Division of Church and Society, expressed “a deep feeling of kinship” with the Declaration of Evangelical Social Concerns drawn up in Chicago by participants at last year’s ad hoc “Thanksgiving Workshop.” Wright quotes the statement as confessing a lack of love for “those who have disagreed with us on the need to transform the structures of society. We have been too often inclined to criticize or ignore those who have tended to emphasize the personal rather than the structural.”

Wright describes the statement as recognizing the shortcomings and defects in the ways the more ecumenical Christians have gone about seeking a just society. He quotes it as saying, “While we do not in any way recede from our continuing determination to seek justice for all of God’s children, we acknowledge that we have not sufficiently shown this determination to be rooted in Christ’s Gospel.”

It was understood that the statement would be sent to the Thanksgiving Workshop coordinator, Dr. Ronald J. Sider. A second meeting of the workshop group is scheduled this month.

Actually, the Governing Board never did take any action on evangelism as such. Neither did it surface any concern over the dismissal of six key executives of the NCC (see July 26 issue, p. 37). Newly-hired staff members were introduced to the board as part of a personnel committee report but no mention was made of how the positions came to be vacant. Finally, as the last act before adjournment, a board member asked for the floor and read off the names of those who are leaving and they were applauded for past services.

In other action, the board adopted resolutions expressing what it terms the “inadequacies” of President Ford’s amnesty program, demanding suspension of U. S. aid to Brazil, Chile, Philippines, the Republic of Korea and any other recipient governments “as long as each persists in the jailing of political prisoners and other flagrant violations of human rights”; and calling for negotiations aimed at enabling “the people of Cyprus … to decide their own future without any foreign intervention.” In still another resolution, Ford was criticized for expressing opposition to the court order which started busing in Boston.

Also approved was a continuing dialogue with representatives of so-called gay (homosexual) churchmen. Spokesmen said that the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, an association of 71 predominantly gay congregations, is known to desire membership in the NCC.

No-Hosting The Wcc

Soon after the World Council of Churches announced its general assembly would be held in Nairobi, Kenya, next November, strife shattered the peaceful unity of many of Kenya’s churches. At a recent press conference General Secretary John Kamau of the National Christian Council of Kenya stated that the NCCK will host the WCC meeting at Nairobi’s Kenyatta Conference Center, the first WCC assembly on African soil in the WCC’s twenty-six year history. But some evangelical members of the NCCK, claiming they were not consulted, said they will protest the decision.

The NCCK is not a member body of the WCC, but some of the main-line denominations, such as Anglicans and Presbyterians, are members of both the WCC and the NCCK. Conversely, many groups such as the Africa Inland Church, the Africa Gospel Church, the Southern Baptists, and their mission sponsors are NCCK members but not WCC members.

“We are apprehensive that the public will think that all members of the NCCK endorse the World Council, and this is definitely not the case,” asserted a member of the Africa Inland Church. Some state they are reconsidering their membership in the NCCK. They say the Kenya body must decide whether the hosting of the two-week assembly is worth the loss of member churches. It may be that the WCC denominations that are also in the NCCK will have to sponsor the assembly by themselves, say observers, rather than as members of the NCCK, which has many evangelical constituents.

The WCC has 271 member bodies in more than seventy countries. NCCK chairman Lawi Imathiu, presiding bishop of the Methodist Church in Kenya, said the Catholic Church will send a delegation to the Nairobi gathering—another WCC first. He added that participants will also include people who are in no way connected with the church. The assembly agenda includes social, political, and technological problems as well as strictly church concerns, he noted.

Earlier, Bible Presbyterian leader Carl McIntire announced his separatist International Council of Christian Churches will hold its general assembly in Nairobi next July.

HAL OLSEN

Religion In Transit

Dr. Clate A. Risley, former executive secretary of the National Sunday School Association and head of Worldwide Christian Education Ministries, was shot to death, apparently by a would-be robber, outside the WCEM office in Chicago last month.

Wheaton College in Illinois was selected as the site for the Billy Graham library and archives on world evangelism. Former mission educator Donald Hoke, who headed up the recent Lausanne congress on evangelization, will oversee the library. Also, officials of both the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association and Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association say they want Wheaton to be a repository for collections of EFMA and IFMA mission documents.

Dr. Orville S. Walters, a University of Illinois medical school professor of clinical psychiatry, is the new president of the Institute for Advanced Christian Studies, succeeding theologian Carl F. H. Henry. IACS directors approved a $10,000 research and writing grant to United Presbyterian mission educator Samuel H. Moffett of Seoul to complete a history of Christianity in Asia.

A bill aimed at putting prayer back in public schools was introduced into Congress by several senators, including evangelicals Strom Thurmond and Carl Curtis. The bill would limit the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and district courts to issue any ruling that restricts voluntary prayer in the schools.

The Lilly Foundation has given a grant of $1.6 million, its biggest ever, to fund centers to train clergymen for ministries on campuses. Heading the project is Catholic priest Leo Piguet of Purdue University.

Personalia

Resigned: Charles E. Hummel, as president of Barrington College, Rhode Island, effective January 31; Lars I. Granberg, as president of Northwestern College (Reformed Church in America), Orange City, Iowa, effective next August; H. Leo Eddleman, as president of the Criswell Bible Institute in Dallas, effective when a successor is named.

United Church of Christ clergyman Frederick W. Whittaker, president of Bangor (Maine) Seminary, will serve a two-year term as president of the 200-member, forty-year-old Association of Theological Schools (formerly American Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada), an accrediting agency for theological schools and the conduit for millions of dollars in research, program, and personal assistance grants.

World Scene

Roving bands of high school students in the Arunachal Pradesh district in northeast India have assaulted scores of Christians, burning down or damaging more than 100 homes, 37 churches, and 180 granaries, and stealing food and farm animals. Scores of Christians sought refuge in a Baptist mission compound, others—destitute and hungry—are hiding in the hills. The Baptist World Alliance reports “rapid growth of Christian churches in the last ten years has alarmed anti-Christian forces in the area.”

After five years of operation, Britain’s evangelical relief agency, The Evangelical Alliance Relief (TEAR) Fund, reports a record year for money spent on aid projects: $1.01 million to 132 evangelical-sponsored projects in forty-one countries. These range from support of short-term medical personnel to the building of a hydroelectric plant by the Ruanda Mission in Burundi (Africa) and a series of wells in India.

Pastor Jose Goncalves of Porto, Portugal, was elected president of the European Baptist Federation, representing work in sixteen nations. Alexei Bichkov of Moscow, general secretary of the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists, was named vice-president.

More than 100 delegates, representing fifty-six churches with about 6,500 members, attended the twenty-second annual assembly of the Spanish Baptist Union near Barcelona. Professor Jose Borras of the Baptist Seminary in Madrid was reelected president. Two Baptist leaders from Cuba reported on Baptist work in that land (250 churches, 15,000 members, 800 baptisms a year).

DEATHS

HENRY J. CADBURY, 90, New Testament scholar, former Harvard divinity professor, a translator of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, and a founder and chairman of the American Friends Service Committee; in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, of injuries suffered in a fall.

D. C. WASHINGTON, 69, executive director of the Sunday-school publishing unit of the National Baptist Convention, U. S. A.; in Nashville, Tennessee.

Dugout Disciples

Edward E. Plowman

Manager Alvin Dark of the World Series-winning Oakland A’s went home and prayed with his family, then told A’s owner Charles O. Finley he’d take the job another year. Finley and the A’s team are a tough challenge to any manager (Dick Williams walked out on Finley after the A’s won the 1973 Series). But, Dark told reporters later, “we felt this is where the Lord wants to have us.” Finley described him as the best manager he’d ever had.

For Dark, 52, the year has represented a comeback not only in baseball but spiritually. Raised a Bible-Belt Baptist, he was known for his aggressiveness in the fourteen years he played as third baseman and shortstop for six teams. He became manager of the San Francisco Giants in 1961, but many temper tantrums, alleged racism, and marital difficulties later he was fired. Divorced and remarried, he went to work in 1966 for Finley, then in Kansas City, but Finley fired him a year and a half later when Dark sided with players in a dispute. Dark moved on to Cleveland but was sent packing in 1971.

He returned to Florida to take up golf. Somehow he and his wife got involved in home Bible-study groups, and soon they experienced the deeper reality of what they had only professed before. Thus, reported Time, when Dark took over at Oakland this year he announced he had a model for the job: Jesus Christ. The manager said he had given a lot of thought to the way Christ “would handle ballplayers.”

By season’s end it was clear Dark was indeed a new man: no temper explosions, no tongue-lashing of players, no insubordination of Finley (“the Bible teaches you to listen to your boss”)—curiously, a style that causes some to question his managerial prowess.

Dark is one reason why sports commentator Rich Ashburn, a former Phillies star, says “there’s a Jesus movement under way in baseball.”

The main reason, says Ashburn, is “a groundswell of fellowship that so far has embraced twenty-two of the twenty-four major-league baseball clubs.” He credits much of the groundswell to former Detroit News sports writer Watson “Waddy” Spoelstra, who recently founded Baseball Chapel, Incorporated.

The bald, bespectacled Spoelstra, 64, says he became a follower of Christ in 1957 when God answered prayer in healing his critically ill daughter. Before that he had been a hard-drinking sports reporter who “seemed dedicated to keeping the distilleries of America on overtime,” commented a writer in the Sporting News. (Spoelstra says he and Gerald Ford used to “get stiff together in the same joints” back when Ford was playing football for the University of Michigan.)

The following year he met Bill Glass, who went on to become a star for the Detroit Lions football team and later a full-time evangelist. Glass led Spoelstra along in the Christian life, and Spoelstra helped Glass with PR in his evangelistic crusades, devoting big chunks of time to it when he retired from sports-writing last year.

Spoelstra, who attends an Episcopal church, had long been concerned about creating opportunities for members of pro teams to attend religious services when on the road (schedules and unfamiliarity often ruled out attending churches). Football teams had been holding pre-game chapel services for several years; why not baseball teams? Spoelstra got Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn’s approval of an offer to coordinate weekly chapel services for the twelve major-league teams that would be on the road each Sunday.

There were two chapel teams at the beginning of the 1973 season: the Minnesota Twins and the Chicago Cubs. The idea caught on, and by the end of this year’s season twenty-two of the twenty-four teams were holding services regularly (the Kansas City Royals and the Detroit Tigers are expected to join the fold next year). Spoelstra meanwhile had to give up his work with Glass and give full-time attention to the baseball ministry, for which his board provides a part-time salary.

His Baseball Chapel board coordinator is evangelist-film-maker Billy Zeoli, and the sixteen board members include Glass, Kuhn, Dark, General Manager Pat Williams of the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team, President John McHale of the Montreal Expos baseball team, and evangelist-teacher Bill Pannell of Fuller Seminary. Kuhn’s office helps with miscellaneous expenses.

Spoelstra’s main job is to recruit team members to be chapel leaders and to help line up speakers (businessmen and athletes, usually). Pitcher Don Sutton, who won games in the play-offs and World Series, is the Los Angeles Dodgers leader. Slugger Reggie Jackson is the unlikely but enthusiastic leader for the A’s. One day evangelist Tom Skinner addressed the A’s in New York. Jackson was so impressed he bought Skinner a plane ticket to speak again when the A’s were in Cleveland.

Sometimes managers are the ones leading their teams to the services: Yogi Berra of the New York Mets, Sparky Anderson of the Cincinnati Reds, and Bill Virdon of the Yankees.

On Sunday of the World Series both the Dodgers and the A’s held pre-game chapels. It was the first time a home team held a service. Pannell spoke to both clubs; about twenty A’s attended and thirty Dodgers. As the season closed, attendance for the twelve visiting teams’ chapels were averaging more than 150, with Cincinnati, Oakland, the Cubs, Minnesota, and San Francisco on top. Some of those most enthusiastic about the chapel program are turned-on Catholics who openly witness to their team-mates about their faith in Christ.

One such Catholic is veteran catcher John Boccabella of the San Francisco Giants, who transferred from the Expos in May. The first Sunday he attended chapel he and the speaker were the only ones there. Boccabella went to work. The next Sunday there were six. Attendance swelled steadily. On the last Sunday of the season nearly all the players were present. “I hope for all of you this will carry over in the winter to the particular church you belong to,” Boccabella exhorted.

But church isn’t everything, he cautions. “Faith in Jesus Christ just doesn’t happen by going to church on Sunday. The Bible is like a warranty book. Reading the Bible every day is the key to life.”

Some observers claim the chapels have improved relations both among players themselves and between players and management. They have also apparently improved spiritual relationships. For example, Oakland’s Jesus Alou disclosed: “I was baptized at church the day before the play-offs started. I’ve been reading the Bible for a long time, but I realized I wasn’t growing anymore. Now I know I’m saved.” And Dodgers coach Tom Lasorda says: “I want to be a part of anything that gets guys closer to God. The more rewarding life is close to God. I’d say the program has brought many of us much, much closer.”

ON THE TRAIL FOR GOD

Southern Baptist evangelist Arthur Blessitt, 33, known in the past for his ministry on Sunset Strip in Hollywood and more recently for a round-the-world witness trek carrying a cross, became the first ministerial candidate for the U. S. presidency in 1976. He says he’ll take time off from his global walk (he’s gotten as far as South Africa) to enter the Florida and New Hampshire primaries. His aim is to make morality and spirituality campaign issues, in effect using a political platform to exhort the nation—from its national leaders on down—to turn to God.

Collision In Chad

Christians in Chad are still being persecuted for refusing to participate in old tribal initiation rites they say are pagan. Reliable sources report the torture deaths of a number of pastors, evangelists, and other church leaders who declined to commit acts counter to their faith: drinking chicken blood offered to idols, handling fetishes, and the like. The accounts tell of persons buried alive with just part of a leg left above ground or—for slower death—with only the head exposed, a terrifying warning to others who resist.

The persecution originated fifteen months ago when President François N’garta Tombalbaye launched a cultural revolution assertedly to rid the nation and its four million inhabitants of unwanted foreign influences and to establish an identity with the country’s past (see June 21 issue, page 34). Male students, government administrators, businessmen, professionals, and other educated community leaders were the first ones selected to undergo the rites. Last summer thousands were sent to remote camps for two months of cultural “education.” The university was forced to postpone its opening, and Chad’s business and public services were disrupted.

According to New York Times correspondent Henry Kamm, the ordeals in the camps exact a brutal physical and psychic toll. They are known to include floggings, burning with coals, scarring, sexual indignities, mock burials, drugging, and acts of humiliation.

In the dispute surrounding the rites, some missionaries have been expelled and dozens of churches have been closed. Some believers have been killed, others maimed.

According to Tombalbaye’s announced plans, the nation’s masses are to begin undergoing the rites this month. But church leaders reportedly met in August and agreed to oppose the rites, and some church groups say they will not readmit members who take part. Clearly, Tombalbaye and the evangelical churches in Chad—more than 1,500 congregations with tens of thousands of members—are on a collision course, and more blood is likely to flow.

MAN’S INCREASED WORTH

Like just about everthing else these days, the elements that make up the human body are rising in price. Northwestern University biochemist Donald T. Forman estimates that the inorganic components of a person weighing 150 pounds are now worth about $5.60. He figures the cost in 1969 was $3.50 and in the thirties $.98.

More than 60 per cent of body weight is water, he calculates, a third is fat and protein, and nearly 6 per cent is ash and minerals in the skeleton and body fluids.

No Constitutional Duty

In a milestone decision the U. S. Supreme Court last month ruled that states have no constitutional duty to provide free bus transportation for parochial students. The decision upheld a lower federal court ruling in a case filed by a Missouri family seeking the busing service. It was the first time the justices have ever ruled on a claim that the states must provide the same services to parochial as to public school students. Twenty-seven states provide such busing; the decision means the twenty-three that do not may not be forced to provide it.

The court also voided a California tax-credit plan that helped parents of parochial school children defray tuition costs.

Pending is a case challenging the constitutionality of a Pennsylvania law providing state funds for textbooks and auxiliary services for non-public schools, a case affecting other states.

Lausanne Follow-Up

A survey of the participants at last summer’s International Congress on World Evangelization (ICOWE) at Lausanne, Switzerland, disclosed that most wanted some kind of follow-up “fellowship” to keep the spirit and purpose of the congress alive. Congress organizers then announced that a Continuation Committee would be appointed to implement those wishes (see August 16 issue, page 35). Last month the ICOWE planning body met in Honolulu and selected forty-five persons, most of them from lists of nominees submitted by national and regional caucuses at Lausanne. They are:

THE MIDDLE EAST: Ramez Attalah, seminary student, Egypt; Antonine Deeb, Christian and Missionary Alliance evangelist, Lebanon.

OCEANIA: Jack Dain, Anglican bishop, Australia.

CANADA: Mariano di Gangi, Presbyterian, mission executive.

EAST ASIA: Lawrence Chia, Presbyterian, university professor, Singapore; Chongnahm Cho, president, Seoul (Korea) Seminary; Akira Hatori, evangelist and teacher, Japan Bible Seminary; Mrs., M. Mapalie, Reformed Church, Indonesia; Petrus Octavianus, evangelist, educator, mission executive, Indonesia; Philip Teng, Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor, editor, educator, Hong Kong.

WEST ASIA: Saphir P. Athyal, Mar Thoma Church, principal of Union Biblical Seminary, India; B. U. Khokhar, general secretary, Pakistan Fellowship of Evangelical Students; N. D. A. Samuel, bishop, Church of South India; S. Sangma, Baptist, church council executive, Bangladesh; I. Ben Wati, Baptist, executive secretary, Evangelical Fellowship of India.

LATIN AMERICA: Pedro Arana-Quiroz, Presbyterian, executive, International Community of Evangelical Students, Peru; Nilson do Arnaral Fanini, Baptist minister, Brazil; Juan M. Isais, director, Latin America Mission of Mexico; Samuel 0. Libert, Baptist evangelist, Argentina.

AFRICA: Michael Cassidy, Anglican, evangelist, South Africa; Byang H. Kato, Evangelical Church of West Africa, general secretary, Association of Evangelicals of Africa and Madagascar; Festo Kivengere, Anglican bishop, Church of Uganda; Gottfried Osei-Mensah, Baptist pastor, Kenya; Florence Yeboah, Presbyterian, Ghana; Isaac Zokoue, Central Africa.

EUROPE: Peter Beyerhaus, Lutheran, theologian, university professor, Germany; Henri Blocher, Reformed Church, seminary professor, France; Armin Hoppler, Reformed Church and Free Evangelical Church, international secretary, Scripture Union, Switzerland; Josip Horak, Baptist lay pastor, university professor, Yugoslavia; Gordon Landreth, executive, the Evangelical Alliance of Great Britain; Peter Schneider, Lutheran, general secretary, German Evangelical Alliance; John Stott, Anglican pastor, England; Erling Utnem, Lutheran bishop, Church of Norway.

UNITED STATES: Vonette Bright, Presbyterian, prayer movement leader; Kenneth Chafin, Southern Baptist, evangelism teacher; Robert E. Coleman, United Methodist, clergyman and teacher; Leighton Ford, United Presbyterian, evangelist; James Kennedy, Southern Presbyterian pastor, Florida; Harold Lindsell, Southern Baptist, editor, “Christianity Today”; W. Stanley Mooneyham, Free Will Baptist, president, World Vision International; Ted Raedeke, Missouri Synod Lutheran, executive director, Key 73; Manuel L. Scott, Sr., National Baptist (USA) pastor, Los Angeles; C. Peter Wagner, Congregational Church, mission professor; Thomas F. Zimmerman, superintendent, Assemblies of God.

A youth and another Latin American will be added to the committee shortly says a spokesman. The first meeting of the committee will be held in Mexico City in January with evangelist Billy Graham as the convening chairman.

Paul Little of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship is executive secretary.

Affirming Life

Churches need to be “life-affirming” and at the same time place confidence in the “maturity and judgment of people to make freely their own decisions,” a World Council of Churches-sponsored consultation on abortion stated last month. Thirty-five representatives from churches in a dozen European countries met at the Lay Academy at Monbachtal, Germany, to discuss problems of pastoral care connected with abortion. Present as observers were bishops from both the Vatican and the Orthodox Church. The churches had been instructed to send persons involved in the issues on the practical level rather than theologians and to ensure that at least half were women (eighteen were).

The four-day consultation was convened by the WCC at the request of the Conference of European Churches, regional arm of the WCC. It grew out of a survey conducted by the WCC on the churches’ position on abortion. The majority of the churches covered by the survey had urged the WCC to refrain from making a general statement on abortion but instead to direct attention to the burgeoning personal and pastoral problems growing out of it. There are two to three million abortions, legal and illegal, in Europe every year; abortion ends about one in every three pregnancies.

Because of the wide range of opinions represented, the adoption of any theological stand on abortion was deliberately avoided. Tension and disagreement marked some of the discussion, but conferees agreed that abortion is the least satisfactory way to deal with pregnancy. Emphasis was placed on the churches’ role to provide alternatives to abortion either before or after conception, whether by offering advice for family planning, working for change in the socio-economic field (where possible taking a responsible part in legal decision-making and in civil affairs), providing adoption agencies, or offering pastoral care.

The results of the conference were summed up in a letter sent to the European churches reminding them of their pastoral responsibility. The basic tenor of the letter is that the churches should promote “positive prevention” of abortion. “Hard theological thinking to undergird our pastoral work” is called for. The letter ends with the observation that abortion is a symptom of a much deeper malaise in society and that “we as the church are caught up in the common sin—we surely bear some responsibility for the situation we now face.”

HELMUT EGELKRAUT

Sorrow And Guilt

The some 1,000 delegates to last month’s seventh biennial convention of the American Lutheran Church (ALC) in Detroit elected Dr. David W. Preus to his first six-year term as president (he assumed the office after the death of Dr. Kent S. Knutson last year), relaxed the church’s policy on abortion (approving it in cases of “difficult human situations”), and expressed sorrow over the doctrinal discord in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS).

The statement on the LCMS could be interpreted as a mild rebuke of LCMS president Jacob A. O. Preus (cousin of David) and recent LCMS decisions elevating a Preus-authored statement of faith to the level of official church doctrine. Adherence to the ecumenical creeds and the Lutheran Confessions is requirement enough for faith and unity, said the ALC statement.

Meanwhile, the LCMS turmoil went on. The Concordia (St. Louis) Seminary board ousted the suspended John H. Tietjen as president, finding him guilty of ten charges, including one of holding and fostering false doctrine. Tietjen says he will not appeal. According to church law, the conviction requires that he be removed from the LCMS pastoral ministry.

The Bishops And The Battle

In a scenic semi-tropical resort seventy-five miles south of Mexico City—far from the sounds of the battle over women’s place in the ministry—the bishops of the Episcopal Church last month voted 97 to 35 to support the principle of ordination of women to the priesthood. There were six abstentions. The bishops, however, voted against calling for a special convention to deal with the issue before the regularly scheduled triennial convention in Minneapolis in 1976. They asked that no further attempts to ordain women be made until the laws of the church are changed.

In 1972 the bishops adopted a similar resolution, though by a tighter vote, but the 1973 general convention failed to implement it (see October 26, 1973, issue, page 55). The convention is made up of the 150-member House of Bishops and the House of Deputies, composed of more than 900 priests and laymen representing dioceses. The majority of the delegates at the 1973 convention voiced their approval of women’s ordination, but a unit-voting rule required that split delegations be recorded as negative votes, and the measure lost.

On July 29 three retired bishops, aided by an active one, took part in the ordination of eleven women deacons to the priesthood in Philadelphia (see August 16 issue, page 39), a rebel action that was ruled invalid by an emergency meeting of the House of Bishops in August (see September 13 issue, page 68). Last month a Board of Inquiry was appointed to investigate charges filed by several bishops against the four who participated in the ordination service. The board must determine whether there is sufficient ground to put the accused on trial.

At least two of the women who were ordained in Philadelphia vowed to assume their priesthood by taking part in an interdenominational communion service at Riverside Church in New York City late last month (under Episcopal law, deacons can take part in virtually all ministerial functions except the administering of the Eucharist). Several other women told their bishops they too will start practicing their priesthood.

Some observers believe the issue of ordination could end up in a civil court, which would then be required to rule on the constitutionality of Episcopal canon law.

Meanwhile, the conservative American Church Union (a 7,300-member Episcopal “high church” group with an 11,000-circulation monthly newspaper) urged the 3.1-million-member denomination to resist pressures to ordain women priests. The ACU also criticized the church’s theological education board for making a $35,000 grant to the Episcopal women’s caucus, and it dropped from membership retired Missouri bishop Edward Randolph Welles—one of the Philadelphia Four.

RECOVERED

Some things turn out all right after all. In Tucson, Arizona, a man deposited some used clothing in a drop box, then remembered he’d left $3,600 in cash in the pockets of a pair of trousers.

“He was wringing his hands when I showed up,” said Major David Riley, the Salvation Army center director, who had dispatched a worker to search the box after the frantic donor called. “The man nearly fainted when we told him we found the money. He told us he would have lost his business if the money had not been recovered.”

Books

Book Briefs: November 8, 1974

An Alternative View

Pro-existence, by Udo Middelmann (InterVarsity, 1974, 126 pp., $1.95 pb), is reviewed by Michael H. Macdonald, associate professor of German and philosophy, Seattle Pacific College, Seattle, Washington.

Udo Middelmann here applies biblical precepts to a discussion of the value of work and creativity, pointing to their ultimate significance as part of God’s original purpose for man. His plea is that a job be made to conform to our God-given uniqueness, for each is called to do a unique task well. The book will be of particular interest for those having or dealing with identity-related problems.

Addressing himself to the accumulation of wealth and property, Middelmann stresses that the Bible does not teach pride in poverty. He gives several clear implicit warnings concerning the dangers of rampant socialism; for example, that “community requires that there be something to share.” The aim is for a balanced biblical justice, allowing for equal worth among individuals, yet also “inegality of property and creativity.”

One might trace the origin of modern thinking back to several periods. In Escape From Reason Francis Schaeffer begins with Thomas Aquinas and his division of reality into the higher level of “grace” and the lower of “nature.” In The God Who Is There Schaeffer traces the “present chasm between the generations” to a change in the perception of truth, i.e., Hegel’s emphasis on synthesis instead of the previously accentuated antithesis. Middelmann traces modern philosophical folly to the emphasis on man’s autonomy and freedom from all restriction; man has thus lost the concept of objective truth. Since man is not the measure of all things, immediate experience alone (including reason) cannot be made the final reference point to knowledge. Descartes is portrayed as that philosopher who clearly wished to reconstruct from the beginning a system of knowledge beyond reasonable doubt. Yet his emphasis is on the subject, i.e., human reason, and Middelmann traces various dilemmas of thought in modern society to Descartes’s appeal to “reasonableness” separate from a reference point. He points to this generation’s life-style as a demonstration of that thought patern.

The thrust of the book is to show that God is indeed pro-existence. This world was created “very good,” and God has made us his agents (Middelmann’s term is “vice-regent”); we are the responsible creatures, so let’s carry out our responsibility wisely.

This is a typical piece of L’Abri scholarship in the sense of offering an alternative view to the present-day subjectivity and current emphasis on autonomous man. It is somewhat uneven in style and lacks crisp clarity in places, but it’s well worth reading. The chapters on work and property are particularly useful.

Mind Your Business

Help Wanted: Faith Required, by William Proctor (Revell, 1974, 158 pp., $2.95 pb), is reviewed by John Marshall, editorial assistant, Canon Press, Washington, D. C.

Ever since the fall of man, work has been both a curse and a blessing, and for many workers the former is perhaps the more accurate term. Unfortunately, even Christians are not immune to boredom, overwork, and temptations to dishonesty and goldbricking in their jobs. But they at least can tap the source of meaning and satisfaction in work, according to William Proctor. In a revealing survey of Christians in various occupations, Proctor shows how they have successfully dealt with such challenges as how to define success, how to overcome boredom, and how to assess the limits of personal loyalty to an organization or employer.

In each case the job itself is not seen as the source of ultimate fulfillment: satisfaction first and foremost comes from the worker’s focusing his attention on God. This is not to say, of course, that it is wrong to want enjoyment and satisfaction from one’s work; it is simply a matter of priorities.

Most people spend more time working than in any other one activity. To exclude God from this area is to bar him from a major part of life. God is intimately interested in the totality of every believer’s life, including his occupation, whether he has received a “calling” to the ministerial vocation or some other special career, or whether he has an “ordinary” job. Proctor notes that some Christians are clearly led into a particular occupation, while for others there is no specific career plan but simply the responsibility to live a Christian life both at and away from work.

Proctor, a professional writer whose style is extremely smooth and readable, is objective throughout most of the book. He doesn’t allow any type of work to appear inherently better than or preferable to another. Except for telling of one personal conflict and its resolution from his own journalistic background, and offering his own broad views regarding the traditional husband-wife roles and women’s working outside the home, he lets the techniques used by Christian men and women in hurdling occupational difficulties speak for themselves.

A built-in weakness of this approach is that some advice is bound to be too general, or not applicable to a similar situation faced by the reader. In spite of this, however, Proctor succeeds in giving interesting, practical principles for discovering meaning in work and for planning a career. All in all, his book emphasizes what is apparent both from the New Testament and from the example set by conscientious Christians in all walks of life: “full-time” Christian service is for everyone.

Fullest Impact Ahead?

Footnotes to a Theology: The Karl Barth Colloquium of 1972, edited by H. Martin Rumscheidt (CSR Office, Wilfrid Laurier University [Waterloo, Ontario, Canada], 1974, 149 pp., $3.50 pb), is reviewed by Donald W. Dayton, director, Mellander Library, North Park Theological Seminary, Chicago, Illinois.

Over a decade ago Robert McAfee Brown analyzed “American resistance to Barth” as reaction to a stereotype that focused on his alleged pessimism, his emphasis on transcendence, his supposed anti-cultural stance, and his affinities with orthodoxy. Whatever the reason, Brown is correct in asserting that America has seen very little serious interaction with Barth. Some observers of the contemporary theological scene (William Hordern, James Smart, and more recently Ronald Goetz in the May 15 Christian Century) have argued, however, that “Barth’s fullest impact on the modern American church is yet to be felt.” Such predictions insist that only recently have American liberalism and optimism been sufficiently shaken that Barth’s thought can find response on more sublimal psychological levels.

One sign of the validity of these predictions is the recent founding of the Karl Barth Society of North America under the auspices of the Toronto School of Theology. (I am membership secretary, and readers can get more information by writing to me at North Park Seminary, 5125 N. Spaulding Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60625.) This volume makes available the papers of the 1972 inaugural colloquium, edited by Martin Rumscheidt, vice-president of the society and professor at the University of Windsor.

These seven papers provide something for everyone. Although Arthur Cochrane of Pittsburgh Seminary provides more personal reminiscences of Barth, the emphasis is on sophisticated, even technical, treatments of Barth’s thought. The most critical paper, by Joseph McLelland of McGill University, uses the relation between Karl and his philosopher brother Heinrich to illuminate tensions between theology and philosophy in Barth’s thought. Paul Lehmann, now of Union Seminary in Virginia, focuses on the relation between Barth and BonhoefEer to examine “the concreteness of theology.”

The two most exciting and controversial papers are by Yale biblical theologian Paul Minear and Barth’s own son Markus, recently appointed to Basel in New Testament. Minear examines the reaction to Barth’s explosive Commentary on Romans to attack dominant schools of exegesis so captured by secular historiography that they can understand neither Paul nor Barth. Especial criticism is brought against Bultmann, who, “followed by most exegetes, so defined history as to deny to the resurrection of Jesus the status of historical fact.” Markus Barth’s paper is the only introduction in English to a recent controversy in Europe over the writings of Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt, who has argued that Barth’s theology is essentially a revolutionary ideology developed in response to the questions of “religious socialism.” While no doubt overstated, this thesis has given new impetus to the study of Barth in Europe and may well be picked up by activists in this country struggling for self-understanding the wake of the turbulent sixties.

The two remaining essays trace the ecumenical impact of Barth’s thought. Emilien Lamirande of Ottawa surveys fifty years of his influence on the Roman Catholic Church, where Barth has been taken more seriously than in many Protestant circles. Somewhat startling is an essay by Michael Wyschogrod of CUNY’s Baruch College on why Barth is of interest to Jewish theologians. Wyschogrod claims that “Barth is the Christian theologian of our time who is oriented toward Scripture, who does not substitute the Word of Man for that of God, and who does not find himself helpless before the mighty technology of ‘scientific biblical scholarship.’ ”

There is little attention to the significant, and occasionally profound, dialogue of evangelicals with Barth. We need a study like Lamirande’s devoted to this subject. Evangelical reaction has varied from the early attacks of Cornelius Van Til, for whom Barth’s thought was The New Modernism (1946) and perhaps the most dangerous heresy in the history of the Church, to more appreciative but not uncritical evaluations by men such as Donald Bloesch, who devotes a chapter to “A Reassessment of Karl Barth” in The Evangelical Renaissance (1973). Surely the truth lies more with Bloesch, and evangelicals ought to welcome a reawakening of interest in Barth’s theology as a most potent force for biblical and evangelical renewal of theology in America.

NEWLY PUBLISHED

A Guide For Old Testament Study, by William Stevens (Broadman, 320 pp., $3.95 pb). A useful, conservative, introductory overview of the Old Testament.

The Perfect Life: The Shakers in America, by Doris Faber (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 215 pp., $6.95), and Work and Worship: The Economic Order of the Shakers, by Edward Deming Andrews and Faith Andrews (New York Graphic Society, 224 pp., $10.95). To commemorate the Shaker bicentennial both of these offer a history of the movement. Faber, a journalist, gives a basic overview. The Andrewses, the leading historians of the movement, delve into the economic structure and ideology besides presenting a thorough history with numerous photographs.

Clergyman’s Psychological Handbook, by Clinton McLemore (Eerdmans, 146 pp., $2.95 pb). Summary of the major functional and organic disorders pastors encounter. General but helpful.

Western Attitudes Toward Death From the Middle Ages to the Present, by Philippe Aries (Johns Hopkins, 111 pp., $6.50). Scholarly, illustrated presentation of predominant attitudes and their ramifications as shown in art, philosophy, and social customs.

The Christian School: Why It Is Right For Your Child, by Paul Kienel (Victor, 131 pp., $1.50 pb), and Have the Public Schools “Had It”?, by Elmer Towns (Nelson, 192 pp., $2.95 pb). Two contenders for private schooling. Towns also suggests ways for improving public schools.

Justice and Mercy, by Reinhold Niebuhr (Harper & Row, 137 pp., $5.95). Posthumous collection of prayers and sermons.

The Measure of a Man, by Gene A. Getz (Regal, 219 pp., $1.25 pb). Examines the qualifications for Christian maturity as listed in First Timothy and Titus with suggestions on attaining them. Highly recommended.

Is There Really Only One Way?, by Dick Hillis (Vision House [1415 E. McFadden Ave., Santa Ana, Ca. 92705], 117 pp., $1.25 pb). The necessity of faith in Christ is well presented, especially for young people, by a missionary leader.

The Jesus Party, by Hugh Schonfield (Macmillan, 320 pp., $7.95). The author of The Passover Plot takes off from there in his highly speculative rewriting of early Christian history. Don’t be deceived by the scholarly apparatus.

Jesus’s Audience, by J. Duncan M. Derrett (Seabury, 240 pp., $6.95). Scholarly, well documented report on the social, economic, political, and intellectual spectrum of first-century Palestine.

The Vatican in the Ages of the Dictators (1922–1945), by Anthony Rhodes (Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 383 pp., $12.50). An apologetic study of the political positions and reasoning under Pope Pius XI and XII and the effect they had on European politics.

The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, by William J. Walls (AMEZ Publishing House [Charlotte, N.C. 28201], 669 pp., $10). A comprehensive history and chronicle of the second largest black Methodist denomination, with references to the black churches generally.

You Can’t Begin Too Soon, by Wesley Haystead (Regal, 130 pp., $2.25 pb). Biblical and educational paths to take with children to direct them toward a true understanding of God appropriate to their capabilities.

The Church in the New Testament, by Rudolph Schnackenburg (Seabury, 222 pp., $4.95). A leading Roman Catholic scholar offers a helpful exegetical study.

Ian Ramsey: Bishop of Durham—A Memoir, by David Edwards (Oxford, 101 pp., $6.50). Biographical sketch of the late intellectual and activist Anglican bishop.

Theology

Commanded Love

Edith Schaeffer

Love is sometimes pictured as a meeting of personalities in some mystical assurance of baseless emotion. The intellect is put on the other side of a high stone wall, and a chill, grey atmosphere is contrasted to the riot of colored flowers and warm sun-filled grass on the “emotion” side of the wall.

The impression is given that one needs to make a choice between “mind” and “heart,” and that to choose one is to deny the other. “Come away from the harsh use of logic, you over there on the cold side,” shout some. “Love, feel, experience—don’t question. Just let yourself go. Is love there? Is it not there? Don’t ask. The very asking may drive it away. Jump into experience and feel.”

Is this true? Human love, though limited and imperfect, can grow and deepen through the years. How does this take place?

Love grows through deepening understanding, a better knowledge of the other person. It grows through expression. If one discovers a new reason to admire, enjoy, and be stimulated by the other person, he should verbalize this discovery. “I love the way your mind works.… I love the compassion you have for minority people.… I love your sensitivity to my need of music right now.… Thank you for getting those concert tickets for tonight.… How nice of you to think of making those tapes for Johnny in the hospital. I love you for that.” Concrete reasons for loving another human being need to be expressed to that person, and the expressing will help the person who is doing the verbalizing also.

Dwelling in one’s mind on reasons for love does not diminish the feelings of love; it increases them. Making new discoveries of qualities in the other person’s character through recent things he or she has done adds to the content of love. And verbalizing these discoveries fixes in the memory things that increase love. Love will grow as reasons for love are discovered, thought about, expressed verbally, and remembered.

The question is asked, “How can I experience love for God? I want a flood of warm love for him, but he seems so far away, and I feel nothing.” Is the answer to be one of urging each other to wait for a mystical spiritual experience during which we will be plunged into a riot of color and sunlight on the emotion side of the wall? Are we to put away intellect and logic?

Listen as Jesus speaks in Matthew 22:37. Jesus is being asked what the great commandment is. What is the basic and first commandment? “Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul and with all thy mind.”

The whole man is to be involved in loving God. This is a command. The command is not only to love God but to love him with heart and soul and mind. The whole person is to be blended together in this love, not divided into compartments.

The mind is to have an important part in this. How can we experience a growing love for God? By discovering logical, reasonable, understandable reasons for loving him. And then we can verbalize our discoveries and express our love to impress upon our memories the reasons we have for loving God. “God, I love you for your compassion to Ninevah in sending Jonah to make truth known, to warn the people in time.… How I love you for letting people come to know Jesus day by day personally so that they can also know you, the Father.… Thank you, Father, for keeping a record of the many prayers you answered in detail centuries ago, and just a hundred years ago as Hudson Taylor went to China.… Thank you for your gentleness in supplying our need for food, and for adding the roses yesterday.” Love for God increases as the reasons for love are considered, spoken aloud, written on paper.

Love for God sometimes burns low, like a dying fire of pale pink and grey coals. Reading his Word, looking for fresh understanding of what he is like, acts as a breeze to fan the dying fire into a warm glow. “Love the Lord thy God with all thy mind.”

How foolish we are in human relationships when we dwell upon each other’s weaknesses and mistakes. How easily the fire dimmed with a dash of cold water when the sensitive deed, the proffered rose, the cup of tea, the concert tickets are ignored and instead a stream of criticism blasts the air—“Why did you forget to mail the letter?… Why did you drop that dish?… Why have you brought mud in on your feet?… Why didn’t you tell me first?”

Searching for reasons to express love, thinking about them, formulating appreciation into words, takes time. Dwelling on each other’s mistakes can absorb the time together so that there isn’t time to increase love. Emotion needs a base if it is to be a solid continuing experience. We can help ourselves to have a continuity in our relationships when we come to recognize that there is no wall between intellect and love.

There is a danger in constantly dwelling on things we find in God’s Word, or in the abnormal universe, that distress us. God is perfect. His love and compassion, his wisdom and holiness, his creativity and diversity, his gentleness and kindness, are perfect. When we come up against anything that causes us to feel like screaming with annoyance at another hman being, we can know we have not understood the thing that bothers us.

Of course, we must be honest in our thinking. But if we allow the things that bother us to absorb a large part of our time, if we read and reread lines we do not understand that bring feelings of fear, criticism, coldness, and uncertainty, the effect will be one of throwing cold water on the embers of our love for God. Our minds can be occupied with thoughts that distort the reality of the character of God.

We are commanded to love. We are commanded secondly to love our neighbors, but first to love God. That command has within it the key to increasing that love. That command shows how to pull down the false wall between intellect and faith, reason and trust, understanding and feeling, mind and love. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” Search for ways to fill your mind with thoughts that will give continuity to love—before you are in his presence.

Ideas

Many Shall Come in My Name

The Editors

In his Olivet Discourse Jesus warned, “Many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ, and shall deceive many” (Mark 13:6). Seldom has this warning been so explicitly fulfilled as in our day. On every side individuals and groups are making sweeping messianic claims. Some of these plainly set themselves up in opposition to the historic Christian faith, but others—and these are probably more dangerous to Christians—claim to be legitimate developments or fulfillments of Christ’s work and teaching.

The young “guru” Maharaj Ji, acclaimed by his devotees as the “perfect spiritual master,” has always addressed himself to Westerners in the syncretistic terms characteristic of Hinduism, but recently he has begun to make so pronounced an effort to appropriate the Christian heritage for his purposes that it may be difficult, in the initial stages, for people to distinguish his message from that of Christianity. His principal collaborators, originally called “Mahatmas” (great souls), he now designates “Apostles.” Specifically addressing himself to “real Christians,” he claims to be fulfilling the work of Jesus by giving them, instead of a dead Teacher and religious theory, a living Master and direct religious experiences.

According to Michael Mildenberger, a German Protestant pastor and analyst of religious movements, “evidently even ‘post-Christian’ youth, largely estranged from the Church, from which the ‘Divine Light Mission’ recruits most of its devotees, still bears such a strong Christian imprint that it is necessary to present oneself in familiar [Christian] images and ideas in order to win them” (Materialdienst, Sept. 15, 1974, p. 282). This attempted takeover of the Christian heritage, combined with much valid criticism of the perversion of Christianity found in so many churches today, evidently persuades many people to become thoroughly involved with the guru’s Hinduism before they ever realize that they are thereby turning their backs on biblical Christianity and on Jesus Christ as the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Even more troublesome is the Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon, who has been making a widely publicized tour of major American cities. Mr. Moon was originally a Christian and claims to be one still, and he presents his own distinctive teaching as “based on Christian beliefs and ideology” (from the editor’s note to Moon’s magnum opus, Divine Principle, p. vi).

Sociologically, Moon’s movement resembles Moral Re-Armament, enrolling a bevy of clean-cut, enthusiastic young people. Like MRA, the Unification Church movement is very hostile to Marxism and strongly promotes many of the traditional Christian virtues. Moon himself waxes eloquent on America’s providential role in God’s ordering of history, and encourages reverence for the United States, and its institutions and leaders at a time when contempt for them is widespread. Unlike many of the other important cults that are historically related to Christianity, such as Mormonism, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christian Science, Moon emphasizes major Christian doctrines such as the Trinity (but not the full divinity of Jesus), the historic, space-time fall into sin, and the second coming of Christ. Because of this marked similarity at certain points, as well as the attractiveness of his emphasis on traditional values, it is vital to recognize the major points at which he grossly perverts Christian teaching and makes himself into the leader of a non-Christian cult.

Moon teaches three stages of revelation and salvation history: the age of Judaism, that of Christianity, and that of his own movement, called the Unification Church (in full, The Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity). While Judaism still looks for the Messiah and Christianity awaits the return of Christ in glory, Moon’s Unification Church movement believes that his “second coming” in the form of another birth took place shortly after the First World War in an Eastern nation, specifically, Korea (Divine Principle, pp. 498–532). Although Moon (born in 1920) apparently does not expressly claim to be the reborn Jesus Christ, his presentation lends itself to that interpretation. His preaching includes a considerable polemic against John the Baptist, the Elijah whose coming preceded the beginning of Jesus’ ministry and who, Moon claims, misunderstood and rejected Jesus. In a Washington lecture he alluded to the possibility that Billy Graham might be the new Elijah of the second birth of Christ; of course Graham “misunderstands” and rejects Moon today.

Teaching that the fall of both angels and man consisted of illicit sexual relations between angels and humans, Moon believes that God’s work of restoration will proceed by the creation of a Holy Family. Adam’s family would have been holy had he not sinned. Jesus, the Second Adam, was to have become a second spiritual parent to the human race by his union with the Holy Spirit, the Second Eve (Divine Principle, pp. 214–18), but this work was frustrated by the unbelief of the Jews and the crucifixion of Jesus. The reborn Christ, or the Third Adam, will also have his Third Eve and will become the “True Parent both spiritually and physically, by forming the substantial Trinity centered on God” (ibid.).

Like the adherents of many of the other cults, Moon’s followers often make a favorable impression because of their sincerity, commitment, and generally exemplary personal conduct. Unfortunately, what they promote is a radical perversion of the biblical doctrine of salvation, and the fact that Moon claims to base his teaching on Christian revelation and tradition certainly places him in the category of those against whom Jesus warns us in Mark 13.

A Un Seat For Christians?

Suppose the Christian community had a seat in the United Nations: what distinctive input could it provide? That’s the question raised by Dr. Curtis Roosevelt last month in an address to the Governing Board of the National Council of Churches. Dr. Roosevelt did not speak of a “seat” as such, but he did ask the board to think about the special way in which the churches should involve themselves in international politics. As chief of the non-governmental section of the U. N. Secretariat, he said he has yet to see any religious organization acting as if it understood its unique role. Dr. Roosevelt did not attempt to offer elaborate answers. He did say he felt that the churches should not parrot other lobbies but should concentrate on ultimate concerns such as the meaning of life. That much sounds like good advice. From our perspective, the best thing churches can do is to proclaim the Gospel.

Turning Points

For many Brazilians, the night of October 2 represented the end of an era. Pele, soccer’s living legend, played his last professional game of a seventeen-year career that made him the most famous Brazilian in the world.

For other Brazilians, that same evening meant a great beginning. They too were gathered in a stadium, but not to watch a soccer match. They had come to hear the Gospel proclaimed, and they had responded to the invitation to receive Christ as Saviour. The Gospel was sounded forth by Billy Graham and his associates for five successive days at the Maracana stadium in Rio de Janeiro (see October 25 issue, p. 30). Final tabulations showed that more than 25,000 persons recorded decisions for Christ.

Exporting Democracy

Evangelicals seem to be growing more sensitive to the need to distinguish the Gospel from the political and economic practices of their homelands. However, this necessary distinction should not make us indifferent to politics, especially in countries like the United States where God has ordained that political sovereignty resides in the people, not in some ruling class.

Because Communism has both a theoretical and a practical opposition to Christianity, many evangelicals have felt comfortable with American foreign policy to the extent that it opposes Communist states and supports anti-Communist ones. A problem with this policy is that often the staunchly anti-Communist states also seem to oppose constitutional democracy. Dictatorships, whether of the right or of the left, are still dictatorships. Moreover, America puts itself in the position of trying to fight an idea—the Communist ideology—not by exporting our own political ideology, but by supporting repressive regimes that the American people would not tolerate at home.

As citizens, Christians should be concerned that not enough is being done to convince other peoples that constitutional democracy is a form of government which, for all its faults, allows more freedom—including freedom to propagate the Gospel at home and abroad—than any other we know about. The American government may have to maintain some sort of relationship with totalitarian states of the right even as it does with Communist states. But does it have to show so much favor? Is it really in the long-term interest of the United States to seem to endorse the principle of dictatorship and minority rule? Some argue that repression is necessary at times to keep Communists from taking over. In fact, repression can lead people to feel they have nothing to lose by heeding the (admittedly phony) promises of Communist “liberators.”

As Christians, we likewise need to keep the long-term view in mind. Some right-wing governments (by no means all) do allow the Gospel to be preached, with restrictions, so long as it serves their purposes. But we should distinguish more carefully than is often done between taking advantage of such opportunities and enthusiastically endorsing a dictatorial regime.

A democratic civil government is not essential to the life of the church, but is certainly preferable to dictatorship. As Christians and as citizens let us be known for our support of truly democratic government everywhere, rather than by our opposition to only certain kinds of dictatorship.

Time For Something Different

Even when their lives and deeds were not in striking harmony with their public sentiments, political leaders in America have long honored the tradition of making an occasional ritual nod to God or religion, especially before and immediately after elections. Many observers have the feeling that with America’s new president, Gerald R. Ford, something is different. His profession certainly appears to come from the heart rather than from any calculation of political utility.

In other matters, too, President Ford seems unusually straightforward and frank: he is even willing to acknowledge mistakes. Many media representatives immediately recognized this and commented on it. It certainly seems far more in keeping with the idea of a representative democracy than the common political penchant for secrecy and dissimulation of acts and motives. Because President Ford seems determined to give the nation something different from what it had in previous administrations, he deserves a somewhat different response.

Unfortunately, in one respect at least things have not changed. During much of Johnson’s second term, and throughout Nixon’s whole presidency, it was rare that the president made a public appearance without being harassed and insulted. This type of “protest” was often excused on the grounds that Johnson and Nixon had supposedly cut off the opportunities for rational discourse and reasoned protest, and hence those seriously disturbed by their policies were forced to resort to more direct if also more boorish confrontations. And of course this type of harassment is also extended to lesser political figures: recently Senator Edward Kennedy, for instance, was met with jeers and food-throwing in Boston.

Those who would deny political leaders and others the opportunity to express their views without ruffianly interference demonstrate that they do not deserve representative government. If their tactics spread, they could make such government an impossibility. The frustration of many with the “hierarchy of oligarchies” (the expression is Dr. Helge Pross’s) that makes up modern government is understandable. Feeling that they have no way to get the ear of the powerful for their genuine and deep concerns, some try to obtain by shouting and shock the hearing that they feel they have been denied. And of course there is always a small but influential minority dedicated to the abolition of democratic institutions; their cause is clearly served by agitation that makes it impossible for those institutions to function normally.

The majority may be simply oafish, and only the minority cunning and malign, but the net effect is dangerous. At a recent appearance in Vermont, President Ford was met by a small but loud group of protesters who sought to disrupt his presentation, as earlier groups had so often disrupted those of his predecessors. Under such circumstances, Mr. Ford may lose some of his frankness and good humor.

Mr. Ford is trying to break out of the straitjacket of pretense and self-importance that so often characterizes the politically powerful. He deserves something better than the same harassment, hostility, and insult that embittered his predecessors. Christians who appreciate his frankness about his faith should join in restraining the obnoxious tendency, already in evidence, to use demonstration and disruption to prevent him from speaking freely with the citizenry, with those over whose temporal fortunes he presides.

Soldier, Athlete, Farmer, Criminal

In his exhortations to Timothy, Paul refers to four occupations with which Christian discipleship should or may be compared (2 Timothy 2:1–9). A Christian is to be like a soldier whose commander is Christ Jesus (vv. 3 and 4). When we sing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” do we solemnly recognize what this implies in the way of obedience to our Lord’s will? A soldier cannot pick and choose which injunctions he will obey.

The concept of the Christian as soldier can be misused. In saying that a soldier is not to get involved in civilian pursuits (v. 4), Paul does not mean that certain areas are off limits to the Christian, such as politics or the arts. (Curiously, those who speak against Christian endeavor in these areas rarely would prohibit Christians from being in business, which is just as much a “civilian” pursuit.) What Paul does mean is that any activities in which we participate are to be done under the Lordship of Christ. It is the person of the supervisor, not the nature of the service, to which Paul refers.

A Christian is also to be like an athlete (v. 5), not only in the sense of diligence, which Paul mentions in other writings, but also as one who “competes according to the rules.” Note, however, that it is the Lord who has established these rules, not our fellow athletes. Furthermore, these “rules” are, with few exceptions, not nearly so precise and detailed as those in the typical sports rule book. We are normally dealing with principles to which a variety of behavior can be conformed.

A Christian is to be like a farmer (v. 6), and the emphasis is placed on working hard, not to earn salvation but to express our gratitude for that which has been freely granted by “the grace that is in Christ Jesus” (v. 1).

Doing what the leader says, like a soldier, in the way that he wants, like an athlete, with the effort that is appropriate, like a farmer—this is the path of the disciple. However, conformity to these exhortations does not guarantee success as the world understands it. Consider the fourth occupation: “I am suffering and wearing fetters like a criminal” (v. 9). Being a good disciple of Christ does not mean, as some exhorters imply, that everything will always be pleasant for us.

Paul was in prison, and we should not be surprised if that or other kinds of suffering and hardship is our lot. Paul was able to endure mistreatment for Christ’s sake gladly because he kept in mind “eternal glory” (v. 10). We must do the same.

Culture

The Refiner’s Fire: Mixed Media

Back To Basics

A modern-day Everyman? Perhaps not intentionally. But Lonesome Stone, a British multi-media rock musical, leaves the viewer with that impression. For regardless of the character’s name, each is “Lonesome Stone,” with a “mind as quick as grease./All he lacks is faith and love/And a little peace.” Lonesome Stone stands on every street corner in every city in every color, “lost within.”

Each character is little more than a stereotype—vegetarian, speed freak, revolutionary, drug dealer, gay libber, and foxy female. Some viewers have objected to the use of stock characters, but for the purpose of the play stereotyped characters were essential. Lonesome Stone does not pretend to be a character study; it is a story, based on actual experiences, of a drug dealer and user turned Christian. And it’s a story that hundreds of young Christians today can call their own.

The cast is a good example of this. Most members come from the drug scene, either the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco, the setting for Lonesome Stone, or its counterparts in England and Germany.

Jim Palosaari, who conceived, directed, and produced this musical (see October 11 issue, page 47), chose a cast with no previous theater experience. But one wouldn’t learn that from the show itself; both singing and acting seem quite professional.

The musical uses some intriguing slow-motion sequences. Easy to do on screen, such scenes require a great deal of precision and skill to be effective on stage. The Lonesome Stone cast succeeds. With special lighting effects, the cast has a prolonged slow-motion fight scene, where police raid the group’s den, beat up the leader, called “The Bear” (performed ably by Fred Gartner), and drag him off to jail. Facial expressions and bodily movements silently portray the sound and terror of the event. The scene is so well done that it creates the impression of a slow-motion film rather than live action.

Sounds of bombers and explosions and projected war slides form the backdrop for the song “War Babies.” Clear Light Productions, the young Boston-based multi-media organization that produced CRY 3 and If Your God Is So Great, also did the media work for Lonesome Stone. (Clear Light has a fine future in this new art form; it deserves more support and publicity than it has yet received.)

Not all the songs used were written for the show. The group opens with a song popular a year or so ago, “Jesus Is Just Alright,” uses a Larry Norman song, “Great American Novel,” and closes with Andrae Crouch’s “Take a Little Time.” The songs are unfamiliar to many in the audience, however, particularly the adults. And the older songs appear in effective new contexts.

Palosaari has taken the song “Great American Novel,” which is another symbol of Everyman in the play, and made it the biography of the one character in the musical specifically identified as “Lonesome Stone.” Stone, played by Rich Haas, leaves Minneapolis disgusted with middle-American middle-class meaninglessness and goes to California looking for life’s answers. But before he has been in the Bear’s “den” an hour his guitar is stolen. Despairing because of his empty life, Stone decides to go back “to the Lord I knew so well in my youth” (in the words of Slim, another convert). Slim and Stone, along with The Bear, who is converted while in jail, try to convince the rest of the group to get back to basics—Jesus.

The Bear’s mate, Queenie (Linda Madsen), is bitter and resentful about his new interest in Jesus. While The Bear and his fellow Christians pray for her, Queenie desperately tries to believe in Jesus. During the song “Come Jesus, Come,” written by Grey Noncarrow, who also played Slim, her attitude changes. In an angry voice she reluctantly sings “I’m ready./Come Jesus, come, and show me/Your way, your truth and life.” By the time she reaches the third stanza Queenie’s voice softens to admit her shattered dreams and longing need of a new architect for her life.

Although parts of the show seem derivative, as Palosaari himself admitted—one surrealistic scene with plastic-covered cast is reminiscent of Jesus Christ Superstar—and the plot has become so familiar as to be trite, the production as a whole is fresh and energetic. The lighting is superb, the costuming imaginative. Unfortunately, it will be timely for only a short while. And only a few will be able to see it. Before the American tour it played for weeks in London and then went on the road to other cities in the United Kingdom and on the Continent. But in the United States it played in only a few cities, all in the Midwest.

To gain wider exposure Lonesome Stone should be made into an album. It would make a good addition to the growing body of contemporary Christian recordings.

CHERYL FORBES

NEWLY PRESSED

In its first few appearances this new section, which will be published irregularly, will cover some of the best religious music released within the last two years.

Lamb and Lamb II, Joel Chernoff soloist (Messianic, P.O. Box 37100, Cincinnati, Ohio 45222). Produced by Rick “Levi” Coghill, these two fine albums, include an interesting mix of Jewish, rock, and blues sounds. Songs in the album are credited to Chernoff, John Martz, Daniel Ben Yosef, and Dana Langford. Chernoff, backed up by Coghill, sings with sensitivity and verve, creating a quiet, gentle effect. “Clap Your Hands” is one of the most exciting cuts on the second album. Coghill uses steel guitar and what sounds like a dunbeck (Jewish drum) to lead and build into the song. The rhythm is intricately Jewish and the melody moves joyously to match the lyrics, which are adapted from Psalm 47. On their first recording “The Sacrifice Lamb” stands out. “The sacrifice lamb has been slain/His blood on the altar a strain/To wipe away guilt and pain/To bring hope eternal” is the witness in beautiful song of these completed Jews.

The Way I Feel, Honeytree soloist (Myrrh, a division of Word, Waco, Texas 16703). Side two contains the best on the album, all but one written by Honeytree. Her approach to each song, arrangement, and instrumentalization conveys the atmosphere of the later Roberta Flack or Carole King. On side two she gives us a mix of secular and religious songs—a country hymn to heaven, some soft love songs, and an offbeat buff called “Hummer, Bummer, Bashmobile” about her broken-down car. Honeytree shows through song her ability to appreciate all of life; her attitude is incarnational. Side one is too traditional, too typically soft Christian music. Side two gives more of the singer’s personality, light-hearted and loving, and shows her talent and potential. Let’s hear more of this side of Honeytree.

Because I Am, rock musical (Clear Light Productions, Box 391, Newton, Mass. 02158). This two-record album, released a little over a year ago, examines the situations that shape our attitudes and the help Jesus can give in changing them: “I come to you with life in hand/You’re what you are Because I Am.” The instrumental numbers are as evocative as those with lyrics. A good first effort.

The Judgment of America

Carl F. H. Henry

More than twenty years ago, after viewing the remains of forgotten civilizations of the distant past, I noted that a similar dark fate had in our own century overtaken world powers like Great Britain, and I warned that America might be next.

Trampling the ruins of former world empires with a horde of irreverent tourists, I told, in a series of reports to the Los Angeles Mirror, of the faded glory of those great nations of the past, and its troubling lesson for the present. In my book Glimpses of a Sacred Land (Wilde, 1953) I flashed a clear caution for the United States:

Everywhere one travels in the Near East today he can find the rubbled remnants of great empires of the past.… One by one they have fallen, either to extinction or second rate powers: Babylonia, Assyria, Persia, Egypt, Syria, Greece and Rome. In some of these lands, the wonder of their past can be recovered only from the dust heaps disclosed to the archaeologist’s shovel.… The whole course of history pays its testimony to the nature and activity of God: He sends disobedient nations down to their doom [pp. 223 f.].

There is a “crisis in America” today, I forewarned:

a basic moral and spiritual collapse.… Europe and the United States are closer to moral chaos than men realize.… We are rapidly losing clear-cut lines of faith: sacred and cherished terms, like justice, law, order, democracy, human dignity, are given glib meanings not alone by men who speak against Christianity, but by some who presume to speak for it.… A seeming fatal sickness of spirit is descending on our era [pp. 219 f.].

I cautioned that America’s “real glory” was departing, and cited political rottenness, sectional interests, and the instability of the home as aspects of national deterioration.

Even before Watergate, I was convinced that America as a nation has already passed its spiritual and moral peak. That is still my view. In a report on “The American Religious Scene Today” in the April 26 and May 10 Evangelical Newsletter published by Eternity magazine I enumerate some highly disconcerting trends in American life.

In fewer decades than we think—in the twenty-first century if not before—the tide of world tourism could do an about-face: souvenir-snatchers from developing Third World countries may be swarming across America to collect a worthless share of Wall Street and a chip of what was once our photogenic Capitol. Carrying paperbacks on the decline and fall of the American republic, they may ask why New York suddenly became a ghost town, and why Washington so little sensed that the nation’s final judgment was at hand.

It is not history that will have “caught up with us,” for the Communist dogma about historical inevitability is a myth; given a generation or two or three, Russia will face a similar fate. Our neglect of God and his commandments is our undoing; disinterest in the forgiveness of our sins and in moral renewal will carry us past redemption’s point. America is currently in the place of judgment—not merely global judgment, but divine judgment—and the time seems fast running out when a suspended sentence remains an option.

If America has had any special mission among the nations of the earth, it has badly blundered that mission in the latter half of the twentieth century, whether in reflecting the virtues of democracy, the merits of the free enterprise system, or evangelical impact on national conscience. The sad spectacles of the Washington riots and of Watergate and related crimes, televised globally at a time when the principles of democracy were almost everywhere under harassing fire, convinced even those friendly to democracy—as in South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Singapore—that the American variety of democracy is less than desirable. Not only rulers but the people as well in such lands were the more disposed to restrict certain human rights to preserve national stability. The outcome could only be serviceable totalitarianism rather than to the future of democracy, at home or abroad.

Small wonder that Samuel Escobar muses about America:

Maybe it is not enough to correct the system, to add some spiritual flavor to it, to dig a hole for an evangelical presence in it. Maybe it is necessary to question it and disengage ourselves from it. Maybe developments are calling us evangelicals also to attempt an escape from the Constantinian captivity of the Church—not into Marxism dressed with the rhetoric of liberation theology, but into a New Testament Christianity that takes seriously again what it means to call Jesus, and only Jesus—not Mammon—Lord [“Reflections,” in The Chicago Declaration, edited by Ronald J. Sider, Creation House, 1974, pp. 121 f.].

Socially sensitive evangelicals need to make such musings their own in these dark times. It will be no mark of patriotism to shoot off spectacular bicentennial fireworks and sing “The Star Spangled Banner” with double unction while glossing over the concerns of national righteousness.

Imagine, then, my surprise at finding myself characterized by Post-American editor Jim Wallis, writing in the June 21, 1974, issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, as biased “toward the general acceptability of the present American economic and political system” and as holding “a rather paranoid and unbalanced view of socialism.” For reasons of logic and space, let me fix the main issue in debate: Is the Post-American right in its judgment that the structure and exercise of American power must be viewed negatively, that American institutions are past redemption’s point, and that an authentically biblical attitude no longer permits a supra-American but rather demands a post-American perspective? If one takes the Post-American route, it seems to me, he can “observe” the bicentennial only by implementing a new revolution. If American politico-economic structures are inherently corrupt, then the only conscientious course will be to strive not to improve those structures but to overthrow them.

The “Chicago Declaration” adopted by the Thanksgiving/73 Workshop included the phrase “an unjust American society” without elaboration. Is this injustice inherent or contingent? Ronald Sider, editor of the workshop paperback, seems gratuitously to imply that American economic structures are perse “racist and unjust.” If that be the case, would not the only moral course be to renounce one’s citizenship?

It takes an omniscience that the Post-American lacks to suggest that America is the incarnation of politico-economic evil, that God has written off the nation and condemned it to march off the map.

The truth seems to me to lie somewhere between a super-Americanism that adulates our national institutions and Jim Wallis’s post-American requiem.

Eutychus and His Kin: November 8, 1974

Eutychus Vi

And Now, Orthocalypsy

According to Francis Schaeffer, one of the most important things to recognize in spiritual warfare is where the important battle lines are drawn. We have to fight the right battles, not march out with full equipment to a quiet spot where no enemy is in sight.

One of the greatest errors we can make is allowing others to plan our battles. It was the liberals who decreed that the first post-war decade would be the age of the church and ecumenism, the second that of secularization, and now the theology of revolution. As Sr Don Cabeza de Madera so trenchantly illustrates (see the October 25 issue, page 21), it is a mistake to allow ourselves to be drawn into the pitfall of the theology of revolution, no matter how many liberals we may hope to crush in our fall.

While the liberals were trumpeting about various peripheral issues and keeping evangelicals running frantically from one corner of the ecclesiastical playing field to the other, die-hard conservatives were sticking grimly, and on the whole effectively, to the defense of the truth: in a word, to orthodoxy. Orthodoxy, as seen by biblical Christians, is intimately related to the authority of Scripture. But defending orthodoxy, even successfully, may grow monotonous. More and more evidence is accumulating to show that the more creative evangelicals are turning from their old preoccupation with the doctrine of revelation to a newer one with the Book of Revelation.

Lest it be thought by any that this might represent a turning away from the central to the peripheral, consider the fact that the very Greek word for revelation is Apokalypsis, the name of the last book in the Bible. Where only a few years ago books in defense of propositional revelation abounded, today new publications are mostly devoted to the interpretation of Revelation, however fancifully.

We may well be able to say that the Age of Orthodoxy is behind us, even within the “orthodox” Protestant churches. We are entering the Age of Orthocalypsy. There can be no doubt that a touchstone of Orthocalypsy in our age must be the doctrine of Dispensation, just as Inspiration was so important for old Orthodoxy. The catholicity implicit in full-orbed orthocalypsy can be seen from the fact that the dominant school within it is not named for a single place (as “Genevan”) but embraces the whole earth. We speak, of course, of the late great planetary school of orthocalypsy. It is indeed as Schaeffer says: for the evangelical the important thing is knowing where to draw the line.

Thanksgiving Testimony

Recent news articles and editorials in CHRISTIANITY TODAY have spoken to the question of the severe hunger in the world. For this awareness, your periodical must be praised; for the hungry and the poor have not been forgotten. I would like to suggest that this Thanksgiving the Christian community out of its abundance give the world’s hungry its prayers and financial support. What an appropriate moment for God’s people to lift up the hungry and poor. Christian missions would gladly appreciate this additional support and the world would receive the testimony of a caring Christian community.

Batavia, Ill.

For Excommunication

As an evangelical who is young, I have followed the disagreement between the proponents of Carl Henry’s “establishment evangelicalism” and Jim Wallis’s “young evangelicalism” with interest. Whatever are the intellectual shortcomings of Mr. Wallis and his Post-American cohorts in the area of economics and politics (there are many), I believe that almost as significant as this is their attitude towards their theological and political enemies. I engaged one of the staff members of Wallis’s journal in conversation, and was surprised to learn that the call of the Holy Spirit had driven the People’s Christian Coalition to abandon the dictates of basic politeness in order that they might interrupt the proceedings at Explo with their ill-received demonstration. This prophet of social justice then noted that Jesus was rude to the Pharisees, in which class he placed Campus Crusade for Christ. He then informed me that every soldier who fought in World War II was a “sinner.” When I pressed him on the theological wars in the Old Testament, he brushed me aside with “the Holy Spirit has led us into this.”

A casual reading of the Post-American will confirm to anyone the existence of this abrasive and uncharitable attitude towards their enemies that easily rivals the Coalition’s concern for the oppressed. It seems to me that evangelicalism should do to the kooks on the left what it did to the kooks on the right: excommunicate them.

Deerfield, Ill.

Wide Eyes

After reading Ms. Mollenkott’s review of A Literary Survey of the Bible in the September 13th issue I wondered how well your editorial staff knows the people selected as reviewers?… I must admit to a wide-eyed degree of serious distress when I read in her review, “… there is no mention of the possibility of universal redemption, although there are many biblical Christians who strongly believe that glorious promise is definitely ‘in the Bible.’ ”

Really, now, in the light of CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S theological stance in general, and Lindsell’s article in this same issue in particular, I object to the fact that you must have invited Ms. Mollenkott to write her review. Lindsell reports that the seminar on universalism (at Lausanne) rejected the thesis that all people will ultimately be saved. I feel that this correct interpretation of Scripture is crucial and thus I express my disapproval of your choice of book reviewers.

Chairman, Missions Department

St. Paul Bible College

Bible College, Minn.

Bad Shape

I resent very much the article, The Pastor and The Other Woman (Aug. 30). I think the article is timely and needed, but I know of no intelligent scholar who would consider Dr. Leary an authority on anything worthwhile. If this is the only source to find material on this subject, then we are in bad shape. I find it difficult to conceive of your fine magazine having an article like this.… I think a close examination of even this article will reveal the unscriptural approach. I refer particularly to the item about the reason men enter the ministry. At the risk of being called “old hat,” I believe in a God-called ministry. Now not all men who enter the ministry are God-called, but Dr. Leary would not know the difference. You see some things are spiritually discerned, and he would not know about this.

El Bethel Baptist Church

Tampa, Fla.

Capitalistic Vitiations

The efforts of a capitalistic typesetter to vitiate my message by substituting the verb viciar (vitiate, corrupt) for vivir (live) in my concluding sentence, “Viva la revolución! (Eutychus and His Kin, Oct. 25), was frustrated by his poor knowledge of Spanish, for “vica,” as he has it, is meaningless.

Habana

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