Christ and Psychiatry

M. N. Beck

Second of Two Parts

From the cursory review in Part I of the background of psychiatry as a social science I would draw two points: the rich but diverse profusion of philosophical assumptions of those who have molded the psychological-science side of psychiatry underlies much of the identity confusion that we experience today; secondly, as we attempt to help our patients with their personal problems, this same variety of orientations gives us a philosophical legacy from which we can draw, extending far beyond the narrow confines of mechanistic determinism.

Even granting the full force of this second point, the side of our profession rooted in the social sciences lacks the firm philosophical base that would allow us to integrate it fully with the side rooted in medicine, with its strong presupposition that the patient really does matter. These two thought-worlds of the psychiatrist do not always easily come together. I would propose that in Christ and in the Judaeo-Christian view of man, these seemingly dual allegiances of our profession can become one, and that here we will also find a full-bodied sense of meaning for our vocation.Both psychiatry and Christianity are relentlessly empirical at their pith. Psychiatry at its best would proceed, in its dealings with man, from the observation of man as he is and from the collection of information and interpretation of data rather than from philosophical ideas about the nature of man. In the like manner, the Old Testament does not start from philosophical speculation about the nature of God; its revelation of God to man is unfolded in the actions and deeds of God in history. Similarly the New Testament focuses upon the actual historical facts of the life, the death, and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. The issue it presents is whether or not these events really happened and whether or not they fulfilled predictive prophecy. The Christian man of science can afford to have a hard-nosed look at facts without sacrificing the deep religious yearnings that are such a fundamental part of his being.

In the Judaeo-Christian view of man the physician finds a sure base for the enduring dedication of medicine to the health of his fellow man. Only this seems to provide good reason for his allowing himself both to spend and to be spent, for making of himself the therapeutic tool in psychotherapy, to be used as a whole person in his patients’ search for health. His patient is a being of inestimable worth, as he is himself. The sick patient, who comes to him in trust, is a being created by God in his own image; the type of being that God would incarnate himself in, in Jesus; a being of such ultimate worth that God in Christ would voluntarily offer himself on the Cross for the remissions of sins of the believer. In this high view of man the stern ethic of the psychiatric physician finds a well-grounded raison d’être. Man as an individual abundantly deserves our very best. The frequent evidence to the contrary in both high and low places notwithstanding, man is a being of great dignity and worth, treasured by the living God. I can find no other fully sufficient reason for the traditional reverence in which the physician holds the lives of others.

It is also well to remember that science flourished in the Western world, a world suffused by the underlying assumption that the universe was created and providentially upheld by a God of order, of purpose, and of design, a God whose work could be comprehended and understood. The importance of this Judaeo-Christian world view (along with the important contribution of the antithetical orientation of the Greek philosophers) to the development of science and our capacity to conceptualize man as a rational, responsible being is brilliantly treated by Francis Schaeffer. In Escape From Reason Schaeffer strikes the keynote:

When the Bible says that man is created in the image of God it gives us a starting point. No humanistic system has provided a justification for man to begin with himself. The Bible’s answer is totally unique. At one and the same time it provides the reason why a man may do what he must do, start with himself; and it tells him the adequate reference point, the infinite-personal God. This is in complete contrast to other systems in which man begins with himself, neither knowing why he has a right to begin from himself, nor in what direction to begin inching along [Inter-Varsity, 1968, p. 87].

I would in no way minimize the success and the rich benefits derived from the scientific study of the nature of man. We have learned much that is important for our understanding of man and the treatment of his mental disorders, and if we remain steadfast in our goals we shall learn much more from this study. But let us not think that we have explained all. The question “What then is man?” remains. In Sherrington’s words, “the human mind stubbornly resists all efforts to take its measure, and shrinks forever from the probe of the mechanistic analyst.” Or as Sir Martin Roth stated, “For man is always more than he knows about himself and will perhaps always be.” Nothing in the dictates of reason, of logic, or of science properly applied requires that because man’s behavior is in part determined it must be totally so, or that because man is free his behavior cannot be in part determined by the biological and psychological forces within him, or by the social and cultural forces outside him. Nature’s causes and man’s purposes may complement rather than contradict each other.

This sense of complementarity is in full accord with the position to which science has now been taken by the findings of modern physics. The work of Maxwell, Planck, Bohr, and Einstein has changed the philosophy of science. In the study of sub-atomic particles the act of observation becomes one of participation, the certain eventual predictability of yesteryear has become probability, the laws of the machine have become the laws of chance. Heisenberg’s “principle of uncertainty” and Bohr’s “principle of complementarity” have become more meaningful in the light of these findings than the assumptions of objective predeterminism. The basic datum of science is no longer matter but energy. Sir James Jeans overstated the case only somewhat in saying that “the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.” Pascal long since suggested that “the spirit of geometry” could not encompass all of man. With this revolution in science it is no longer scientifically impertinent to think in terms of incalculability, of purpose, of “open systems,” or even of the freedom of living organisms. “Vitalism” lives again!

In the very evocative analogy of Bohr’s “principle of complementarity,” science comes close to terrain long familiar to Christians. Science now wrestles productively with paradoxes not unlike the dual nature of Christ, as both perfect man and perfect God, or the trinitarian concept of God as the three in one. C. S. Lewis put this situation nicely some years ago when he said:

Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe in Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have. So, let us leave behind all these boys’ philosophies, these over-simple answers. The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simple either [Mere Christianity, Fontana, 1952],

In all of this, then—from the tradition of medicine, from the historical teaching of the Church, and from the matrix of modern science—we find good and sufficient reason to relate ourselves to our fellow man as beings both wonderful and worthwhile. In this context, we can live comfortably as psychiatrists with the paradoxes that man is pulled by his own purposes as well as pushed by his experiences, bowed in reasonable reverence to his Creator as well as bent by his biology, blessed by his aspirations as well as bewildered by his mechanisms of defense, and that man’s reasons count as well as nature’s causes. Can we, in fact, fully relate to man as he is without accepting that man is as much a product of his personal value system as of his libidinal forces, or vice versa, that he is free as well as bound, determining as well as determined, possessing free choice as well as conditioned, that he is responsible as well as responsive, a maker of history as well as being molded by history, and that he is a being whose moral and religious strivings are as real as his sexual and his aggressive drives?

Jurgen Reusch states the matter this way:

Inner experience must be restored to the position it has held for thousands of years. The outer and inner observer stand in a relationship of complementarity. What one sees the other does not see and vice versa. This acceptance of the limitations of the human observer brings psychiatrists into agreement with the views of modern physicists [in Modern Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Citadel, 1962],

“There is no such thing,” said Kenilworth, “as an unprejudiced man.” In the maturity of a life fully, enjoyably, and satisfactorily lived I see no reason to disagree with him, and I see no good reason to think that psychiatrists are any exception to this maxim. I also agree with Samuel Miller when he says:

Believing is as much an integral factor in man as are eating and sleeping. He neither gains nor loses faith; he merely changes the object of it.… There is little or nothing that man, even modern man in all his supposed sophistication, will not believe. Man is simply an inveterate, incurable, inevitable believer” [Are You Nobody?, John Knox, 1971, p. 74].

As Jung said, “If we do not acknowledge the idea of God consciously, something else is made God.” Man is a being who will persist in distinguishing between good and evil—he has an inherent sense of oughtness in him. He is also a being who demands a solution for the fundamental human problems of individual meaning and worth, of suffering and defeat, of death and destiny.

As such a being, I would share with you some other aspects of the profound areas of agreement I have found between that part of my life dictated to by Jesus Christ and that part of my life spent in the study and practice of psychiatry. I would first acknowledge that I have found much in my Christian faith to sustain me in the many perplexing situations which have arisen in the practice of my profession, and much in psychiatry that has enriched my Christian experience.

Both psychiatry and Christianity soundly affirm the centrality of personhood and of relationship to meaningful human existence. Our profession is insistently aware of the importance of relationship to the growth of personality and to health. The majestic God of the Old Testament, replete with the awesome powers of divinity, always presents himself as personal, a Being who seeks, finds, and communicates with man. This personal God of the Hebrews was fully affirmed by Jesus and made even more personal through his life here on earth.

The judicious use of authority with its positive contribution to the health of patients is familiar to all psychiatrists; the finding of the self in the other and the fundamental importance of the loving authority of the parent to the successful adjustment of the child has become second nature to those of us in child psychiatry. All this resonates very nicely with Christ’s statement that “whosoever loseth his life for my sake shall find it,” and with the wonderful Christian notion that true freedom is found only in total subjection to Christ—“bound yet free,” said Saint Peter. One’s inner being senses a pleasant balm when Saint Paul’s dictum, “Provoke not your child to wrath,” and the more familiar “Bring up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he shall not depart therefrom,” are placed side by side with a statement like this from Adelaide Johnson:

These parents have been seen to unconsciously encourage the amoral or antisocial behavior of the child [whereas] … the mature mother expects the thing to be done, and later if she finds the child has sidestepped her wishes, she insists without guilt on her part that it be done. The mother must have this undoubting, firm, unconscious assurance that her child will soon make her intention his own in accordance with her own image of him [in Searchlights on Delinquency, ed. by K. R. Eissler, International Universities Press, 1949].

Both my profession and my faith deal with man realistically. Both see and accept man as he is, a far from perfect being of unending contrariness, yet capable of enormous good. If there is any surer prophylaxis to moral shock than the daily practice of psychiatry, it is a sound appreciation of the Christian doctrine of sin and its companion doctrine of the fall of man. Within this realistic approach to man, both my profession and my Lord affirm that man can and does change. My profession reaches out with all its resources—drugs, the physical therapies, and our persons in psychotherapy—toward this end. Jesus reaches down to bring regeneration to man. Both approach man as a rational being possessing freedom of choice; both reach out to man in persuasion and in love; and both refuse to coerce or to manipulate man.

Both psychiatry and Christianity seek to release man from the bonds of guilt. Psychiatry attempts, not always successfully, to distinguish between objective and irrational guilt and to resolve the latter. In his death, Christ freely offers release from the ultimate sting of both.

My faith and my profession are again in accord in regard to genital sexuality. Both the Old and the New Testaments (yes, even that so-called male chauvinist Saint Paul) place the full enjoyment of sex at the core of the marital relationship. They portray the expression of sexuality, on the basis of full equality between the partners, with a warm-hearted openness, and in the Bible anticipated by at least 2,000 years the findings of Masters and Johnson.

But the great historic doctrines of the Church and the scientific findings of psychiatry come together with resounding accord in their mutual emphasis on the overwhelming importance of love in the life of man. This lies at the center of the advances made by the fathers of our profession; it is of the essence in our relationship to our patients in psychotherapy and has been deeply etched into our professional consciences by the careful scientific work of Ribble, Spitz, Bowlby, Mahler, and others. And this is in complete agreement with the out-reaching love of God for man revealed to us in both Testaments. Jesus again and again made it clear that the love of the God of justice for man transcends man’s merit. His death was because of his love for us. The prodigal was loved as much as the deserving older brother. God’s grace is free. In him, the reconciliation of the baptized believer to God is non-conditional. Saint John said, “We love, because he first loved us.” In this response to God’s all-embracing love, and motivated by it, one finds the root of that other cardinal doctrine of the New Testament—the outreach by the Christian in love and in service toward his fellow man.

Theology

Milton the Awakener

Virginia Ramey Mollenkott

Three hundred years ago, one month before his sixty-sixth birthday, probably on Sunday, November 8, John Milton was gathered into the eternal realm he had often written of:

Where the bright Seraphim in burning row

Their loud uplifted Angel-trumpets blow.

The year of his death, 1674, was one of great loss to English poetry, since not only Milton but also Thomas Traherne and Robert Herrick died then. Of the three, only Milton was much mourned beyond the circle of immediate friends. Although Herrick was an Anglican priest, he has long been considered a semi-“pagan” poet; we are only now beginning to appreciate the religious significance of his joyous verse, which affirmed that God is a God of many delights, so that worshiping him turns the mundane into miracle. Thomas Traherne had to wait for his recognition until the first years of the twentieth century, and is increasingly valued for his ecstatic celebrations of the Paradise within and the Heaven under our feet. But Milton has never been eclipsed, though he has undergone many fluctuations in the literary marketplace.

Milton’s work has often been a storm-center because of an imaginative power that is so basic, so probing, so profoundly disturbing that it becomes a Rorschach test for those who read Milton and write about him. In 1688 John Dryden revealed his own generosity, the rare ability to recognize and honor a prophet in his own country, by asserting that Milton surpassed Homer in loftiness of thought and Virgil in majesty, and therefore was a combination of the two of them at their best. In 1838 Ralph Waldo Emerson revealed his own lofty ideals by writing of Milton as “identified in the mind with all select and holy images, with the supreme interests of the human race.” In 1942, speaking of the tendency of some readers to admire Milton’s Satan more than Milton’s God, C. S. Lewis revealed his own crisp clarity by commenting:

To admire Satan … is to give one’s vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography.… Where Paradise Lost is not loved, it is deeply hated.… We have all skirted the Satanic island closely enough to have motives for wishing to evade the full impact of the poem.

Much earlier, in 1804, William Blake named an aspect of Milton that appealed to his own electrifying imagination, calling him Milton the Awakener; and it is on this aspect of Milton’s work that I choose to focus. Can John Milton, dead for three centuries, still retain the power to awaken mankind? In a technological world he could not possibly foresee, can he still inspire us to climb toward the highest reaches of human nature? Having spent more than a decade studying his work, and having been told by certain college students that Milton seems more relevant than much of the contemporary literature they have studied, I think the answer is yes.

In a poem called “London, 1802,” William Wordsworth described the state of England as he saw it then in terms that perfectly describe America of the Watergate era:

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee: she is a fen

Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,

Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,

Have forfeited their ancient English dower

Of inward happiness.

We no longer speak of firesides and bowers, of course, and we no longer fight with swords; but the fact can hardly be denied that many American religious organizations (“altar”), military forces (“sword”), artists (“pen”), family units (“fireside”), and government officials (“heroic wealth of hall and bower”) have through corruption forfeited the internal peace that is the reward of integrity. Wordsworth was expressing his faith that Milton’s unselfish commitment to serving God through serving human society would help to re-sensitize the England of his day. Of course he did not hope that Milton’s literal return to life would have straightened out the vices of England. Moses and all the prophets, or even the return of Christ to live as a human being among us, would not accomplish that feat. What Wordsworth meant was that if Milton’s “manners, virtue, freedom, power,” and “cheerful godliness” were alive in the hearts of enough of his countrymen, the corruption would cease.

And indeed, no one has surpassed Milton in portraying the essentially self-defeating nature of corruption. In Paradise Lost he pitted against the Son of God a Satan who embodies destruction, negation, bitterness, and selfish passion, and who in his pettiness sometimes reduces himself to the stature of a nasty brat determined to ruin his parents’ picnic:

To do aught good never will be our task,

But ever to do ill our sole delight,

As being the contrary to his high will

Whom we resist. If then his Providence

Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,

Our labor must be to pervert that end,

And out of good still to find means of evil.…

[I. 159–65].

Of course, as long as Satan remains “out there,” it is possible to thrill to this kind of evil and the violence it breeds; but as Stanley Fish has shown in his excellent book Surprised by Sin (1967), Milton has constructed Paradise Lost in such a way that the reader is confronted with evidence of his own corruption; gradually he “becomes aware of his inability to respond adequately to spiritual conceptions, and is asked to refine his perceptions so that his understanding will be once more proportionable to truth.…” Satanic corruptions “out there,” the “they” and “them” that are so easy for all of us to adopt, become in the course of an intelligent reading of Paradise Lost the corruptions “in here,” the “we” and “I” that squeeze and disquiet us and force us toward constructive change. Milton the Awakener.

For John Milton, the Bible possessed an authority so great that no other book could begin to equal it, although of course Milton was learned in Greek and Roman classics, Jewish commentators, Church Fathers, Medieval and Renaissance European literature, and the like. So imbued was he with the Bible that for the introduction to his book of theology, De Doctrina Christiana, he provided an epistle that was obviously modeled after those of the New Testament, entitled “John Milton, Englishman, To all the Churches of Christ and to All in any part of the world who profess the Christian Faith, Peace, Knowledge of the Truth, and Eternal Salvation in God the Father and in our Lord Jesus Christ.”

De Doctrina Christiana contains some theological views that have alienated people in some branches of the Christian Church, but Milton’s definition of heresy deserves careful consideration:

I devote my attention to the Holy Scriptures alone. I follow no other heresy or sect. I had not even studied any of the so-called heretical writers, when the blunders of those who are styled orthodox, and their unthinking distortions of the sense of scripture, first taught me to agree with their opponents whenever these agreed with the Bible. If this is heresy, I confess, as does Paul in Acts 24:14, that “following the way which is called heresy I worship the God of my fathers, believing all things that are written in the law and the prophets” and, I add, whatever is written in the New Testament as well.

Thus, skillfully, Milton points out that even St. Paul was sometimes considered a heretic, and establishes that the only tribunal before which he wants to be judged is that of the Bible without “unthinking distortions”—that is, the Bible carefully interpreted, with full attention to historical context and literary devices. And on this basis he asks his readers, “Do not accept or reject what I say unless you are absolutely convinced by the clear evidence of the Bible.” All of Milton’s doctrinal discussions and the basic doctrines of his poems give one no reason to question the sincerity of what he has said here.

Where the Bible was silent, however, or where the Bible was sketchy, Milton saw the opportunity to apply sanctified imagination. He was careful to emphasize that where he has filled in imaginative details, he is using the language of accommodation and does not intend to be taken literally (see especially PL V.571–76). For example, Isaiah 14:12 hints at the fall of Satan from a very important position in the angelic host: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning.… For thou hast said in thine heart, … I will be like the Most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell.…” Out of this Milton fashioned the stupendous character of Satan that dominates Books One and Two of Paradise Lost, jealous because the Son of God had been revealed to the angels as the glory of the Father, determined to reign in Hell rather than serve in Heaven, leader and destroyer of the one-third of the angelic host that defected at his urging. From the brief suggestion in Isaiah 14 combined with the passage in Revelation 12:7–9 about a war in heaven in which Michael and his angels fought against Satan and his hosts, Milton created a detailed three-day battle culminating in the defeat of Satan by the appearance of the Son in his fiery chariot:

Him the Almighty Power

Hurl’d headlong flaming from th’Ethereal Sky

With hideous ruin and combustion down

To bottomless perdition, there to dwell

In adamantine chains and penal Fire,

Who durst defy th’Omnipotent to Arms [I.44–49].

Anyone who reads aloud that magnificent sentence will notice that the predominant h and p and d and f and b and t sounds require a sudden expulsion of breath that dramatizes for the ear the sudden expulsion of Satan from his high position as Son of the Morning. And anyone who figures out the grammar will notice that the sentence begins with the object (Him), moves from there to the subject and verb, then to the modifiers of the verb, and finally back to the modifiers of the object, so that the whole sentence curls around upon itself like a vast chain—or like an angel falling headlong and flaming out of the sky. What Milton has supplied is a concrete, vivid experience that fleshes out the suggestions made by the Bible. Thus he stimulates us to interiorize the biblical narrative, causing us to experience it on our pulses instead of reading theoretically.

From the terse narrative of Christ’s temptation in Luke 4:1–13 Milton built Paradise Regained, devoting over nine hundred lines of poetry to the temptation of hunger (in Luke there are only two verses), lavishing over a thousand lines on the temptation of the kingdoms of this world (in Luke, four verses), and dealing with the third temptation, “Cast thyself down,” in a lightning-swift climax that shows a startled Satan (and the reader) that Jesus is in a very special sense the Son of God, “True Image of the Father.” Because of all the details added in the Miltonian account, the reader not only experiences the temptations more thoroughly than he does in reading a sketchy historical account, but also learns to appreciate more deeply the implications of the moral conflict, the parallels between Job and Jesus, and the contrast between the first Adam’s failure in the Garden and the last Adam’s triumph in the wilderness. By means of the dialogue between Christ and Satan, Milton stimulates the moral awareness of the reader. Milton the Awakener.

Milton lived through a civil war that included the execution of the king despite the still widespread belief in the Divine Right of Kings, according to which it was considered exceedingly sinful to raise one’s hand against the Lord’s anointed. It was inevitable, therefore, that Milton had to do some hard thinking about the basis for moral choice. The twentieth century knows something about the easy morality that absolutizes obedience to “the powers that be” and thus justifies immorality and evildoing with the excuse that “I was only obeying orders.”

Milton wrestles with this issue in Samson Agonistes, closely following Scripture to show that Samson had indeed been led of God to marry the woman of Timnah and thus to break the law that forbade the marriage of Israelites to non-Israelites (see Deuteronomy 7:1–3). Judges 14:1–4 makes it clear that Samson’s parents opposed his marriage because of the Deuteronomic law, “but his father and mother knew not that it was of the Lord.” Later, however, Samson assumed on the basis of this one transcendence of the law that he had the right to do the same thing in regard to Dalila—and in this case he was wrong, and suffered immensely for his mistake. Finally, alone and blinded but purged by his suffering, Samson is ordered to entertain the Philistines at the feast of Dagon. He refuses on the basis of the law against participation in pagan worship (Exod. 23:24). When his countrymen urge him to go ahead out of expedience, so that he and Israel will not be further punished by their captors, Samson takes a firm stand against the morality of expedience:

… the Philistian lords command,

Commands are no constraints. If I obey them,

I do it freely; venturing to displease

God for the fear of Man, and Man prefer,

Set God behind … [SA 1372–75].

Yet Samson does go to the feast, because once again he feels “rousing motions” telling him that in this individual case, he is intended to obey the voice of the inner Spirit and disobey the law that ordinarily would apply.

Thus Milton awakens us to the profound implications for the individual conscience that are embedded in the biblical narrative but may have been missed because of the sketchiness of that narrative. And thus he sensitizes us to the awareness that there are no easy answers, that it is with God that we have to do, and that mindless obedience to law cannot and must not take the place of sensitivity to the will of God for us as individuals in individual cases: twice, Samson is right to disobey God’s general law and obey an “intimate impulse.”

On the other hand, Milton has also built into his drama a stern warning about too easily assuming that we are above the law, for in the case of his liaison with Dalila, Samson erred disastrously. “I thought it lawful from my former act,” he cries (SA 231), but he must nevertheless take the responsibility and suffer the consequences. “Whatsoever is not of faith is sin.” Samson Agonistes is, among many other things, a profound study in moral responsibility. Milton the Awakener.

Although Milton’s theories concerning women and the relation between the sexes were largely conventional, his own practice was as liberal as his hierarchical interpretation of the Bible and the universe would allow him to be. (On this subject, see my article “Milton and Women’s Liberation” in the December, 1973, issue of the Milton Quarterly.) But in his metaphors of inspiration, Milton is truly electrifying. He pictures his Heavenly Muse—that is, the inspiration for his poetry—very clearly in terms of the Son of God in the invocations to Books One and Three of Paradise Lost, yet in Books Seven and Nine he pictures this same Muse in female terms (see William B. Hunter, “The Heavenly Muse,” in Bright Essence: Studies in Milton’s Theology, 1972). Thus he imaginatively embodies the implications of Scripture, in which John 1:1–2 identifies Christ with the Logos, the Wisdom of the Old Testament, which of course was personified in the Book of Proverbs as female.

Although Milton could not allow himself consciously to accept the egalitarian implications of the fact that the Bible sometimes presents God or his attributes in female terms (cf. Num. 11:12, Isa. 66:13, Luke 15:8–10) in order to make clear that God is literally neither male nor female, his poetic imagination soared far above his conscious theorizing. As much as any poet or mystic and far more than most, Milton freed himself from the tendency to anthropomorphize God. His metaphors challenge us to do the same, to abandon our traditionally sexist assumptions about the nature of God and to put into practice Paul’s liberating vision of a classless, non-sexist Christian society (Gal. 3:28). Milton the Awakener.

And Milton challenges us to a more profound definition of heroism than that prevalent in modern society, where strong-arm tactics still prevail and where money still makes the man. For the subject of his great epic Milton thought about and consciously rejected militaristic heroes, in favor of “the better fortitude/Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom” (IX.31, 32). The code of his hero is simple and Christ-like:

Henceforth I learn, that to obey is best,

And love with fear the only God, to walk

As in his presence, ever to observe

His providence, and on him sole depend.…

… that suffering for Truth’s sake

Is fortitude to highest victory,

And to the faithful Death the Gate of Life.… [XII. 561–71].

It is easy to grow dull to such values because of the aggressive self-serving constantly demonstrated in the society in which we live. Milton the Awakener.

And by his own standards, Milton was himself a hero, though he would have been too graceful to call himself one. The justly famous sonnet on his blindness records his turmoil at finding himself blind before he had written any of the major works that “intimate impulse” told him it was his destiny to write. He feels a natural rebellion, wondering whether God will expect him to do a full day’s labor after denying him light;

But patience to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need

Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best

Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best; his State

Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed

And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:

They also serve who only stand and wait.

“It is, after all, not ultimately necessary that I be the one to write Paradise Lost,” Milton concludes. “It is only necessary that the will of God be done, even if that means for me a life and death of utter obscurity.” It is harder, of course, to “stand and wait” than to “post o’er Land and Ocean.” The “posting” may be hard, but at least it gives us a sense of importance. Looking blindly into his own future, Milton could say with his great contemporary, Sir Thomas Browne, “Thy will be done though in my own undoing.”At the same time, Milton sweeps away our spurious and egocentric reasons for serving God: “God doth not need/ Either man’s work or his own gifts.” This is a recognition that God did not need John Milton to write Paradise Lost. The same One who had given the poetic fire to John Milton could just as well have given it to John Doe had Milton chosen to be careless with the gift. We need not flatter ourselves with an inflated sense of our own importance, whether we are one of the messengers or one of the sentinels; God is sovereign, and cooperation with the divine will is a privilege arising out of God’s love rather than God’s need. This may be a somewhat deflating vision, but it is a realistic and healthy one, since it asserts that individual importance stems from a love relationship with the Creator rather than from what we do or do not accomplish.

In Walden, Henry David Thoreau wrote:

Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.… The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive.

Milton the Awakener is also Milton the Enlivener. And this month, three hundred years after his death, we can continue to be grateful that there was a man sent from God, whose name was John.

Bibliographical Note

The quotations of Milton’s work are from what I consider to be the finest general text, Merritt Y. Hughes, John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (Odyssey, 1957). The best complete edition is edited by F. A. Patterson, The Works of John Milton (Columbia University Press 1931–38), though the six volumes of The Complete Prose Works of John Milton now available from Yale University Press contain very helpful introductions and explanatory notes. The indispensable biography of Milton is that by William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography (Clarendon, 1968).

Theology

On Being a Christian Radical

David Claydon

The modern language of “revolution,” which enables us to reflect on ourselves as apart from and—if we desire—in conflict with society, finds its roots in the French Revolution, nearly 200 years ago. Here we have both a model for insurrection and a legend to which subsequent anti-society movements could appeal. Here is the source of gruesome facts and of inspiring ideals for anarchists and Marxists alike. But here too is the stark reminder that political insurrection may be little more than a myth.

Among the many modern disciples of Marx, the most widely recognized in this past decade has been Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse thinks that man has been so manipulated by capitalism that he actually enjoys affluence and its consequent values. In an attempt to climb out of his pessimism, Marcuse expresses in his book One Dimensional Man the hope that youth and the intelligentsia will become radical and change society. How this could happen Marcuse doesn’t tell us, but French students made a good attempt to put his words into action in May and June, 1968. The failure of what was potentially a second French revolution may in the light of history prove to be the largest single pragmatic reason for the decline of youth insurgency. In an era of pragmatism, it didn’t work! But the language of the revolutionary continued to be used and was given new meaning on the university campuses, in hippie pads, and even among Christian youth.

Setting aside the problem of cultural syncretism by Christians, it appears that humanly speaking the language of the revolutionary has provided symbolic hardware that has halted the rapid decline of the youth membership of the Christian “Church.” I say “the language” because this symbolizes the potential dynamic and the existing doctrine of a body of people who have critically analyzed society and who are seeking to change it at the radix—the real root.

But how many of us, let alone those we lead, have solved the supposed dichotomy of personal salvation and salvation in society? In J. H. Yoder’s words, how do “we choose between the catastrophic kingdom and the inner kingdom” (The Politics of Jesus, Eerdmans, 1972)? To me it is further evidence of God’s sovereignty over history that he has used the radicalism of the sixties to radicalize a significant number of Christians.

While the events of history can trigger the process of radicalization, a radical movements will have substance only if it has a thoroughly worked-out ideological base. Yet the Christian has more than an ideal. He has the facts of God’s acting in history, speaking to a nation through prophets, and then personally intruding into history.

The Scriptures teach that God created the world as an expression of his own creativity and for his enjoyment (Neh. 9:6; Isa. 43:7; Col. 1:16), that he did so freely (Eph. 1:11), and that he is not dependent on his creation in any way (Job 22:2, 3; Acts 17:28) but is sovereign over the whole of creation and sustainer of it (Eph. 4:6). We know all this because God has chosen to reveal himself to created man, and part of that revelation has been that man is created in the image of his Creator. So both man and the Triune God have personality and the potential to relate to each other. Because of sin men were unable to relate to their Creator, but the Creator has chosen to redeem man. It is up to man to respond to this free gift. God has not discarded his creation because of sin. He continues to sustain it. He continues to allow the freedom for man to express his autonomy within history.

So we have a social reality over which God is sovereign and yet in which man has decided to be independent of God. God did not discard society for this reason but instead entered society to redeem those who would be redeemed. Those who are redeemed may see themselves either as a remnant or as one instrumentthrough which God can act out his sovereignty over the fallen world. There are traces in the Old Testament of a remnant mentality (see Isaiah and Jeremiah) that may be understood to support the view that there are times in history when God’s people are unable to speak to their society. But the very persistence of the remnant is in itself an instrument of God’s sovereignty. So there is some validity in a remnant attitude, but there is a far stronger emphasis in the Scriptures on being a person through whom God can overtly exercise his will.

A study of the Old Testament prophets reveals that they performed a variety of tasks. For example, Samuel had, at least initially, a leadership role; Elijah called the people to worship the One True God; Elisha was deeply involved in politics, affirming that God is King, that God is sovereign over world politics. The integrity of our humanness does not suffer by our making Jesus our Lord. Rather, it is only when Jesus becomes our Lord that we become completely free. It is in true holiness that we find our true humanness. And it is in our humanness that we choose to let God work through us (that is, through our experience, talents, feelings, and opportunities) so that he may be glorified here on earth. Our freedom from the oppressor—the evil one—has meaning only in that it is freedom to something, namely, freedom to be his.

The single motive throughout the record of prophetic activity is to bring honor to God. The New Testament picks up the same theme (e.g., 1 Cor. 10:31; Phil. 2:11), that our foremost motivation is to bring glory to our King. Two other significant motives were simply stated by Jesus: “You shall love the Lord your God.… You shall love your neighbor.”

The importance of these three motives should preclude any method or style of activity that does not in itself reflect the qualities of glory and love. Failure to be motivated by these three factors can lead to disaster, as the accounts of the Kings of Israel and Judah make clear.

Was Jesus’ attitude that his followers were a remnant, or did he see them as an instrument through which the Father could exercise his sovereign will over the world? Some have argued that Jesus’ teaching was concerned not with society as such but only with individuals. Matthew 5 is pointed to as evidence of a position radical only for individuals. Yet Jesus called a group of men to follow him, and the personal radical ethics of the “Sermon on the Mount” was to be exemplified in this group. Yoder has argued from this that “to deny the powerful (sometimes conservative, sometimes revolutionary) impact on society of the creation of an alternative social group” would be “to overrate both the power and the manageability of those particular social structures identified as ‘political!’ ” (p. 111). The very existence of a community of people who pursue a set of values different from the social milieu is radical in itself. It is not counterculture, which ultimately is a pessimistic humanism. It is, rather, the positive, affirming optimism of a God-given alternative culture.

Is the Christ-given alternative culture radical? We know that its ethics was radical in contrast to the ethical attitudes of the society of the day. But what impact was this to have on society? Jesus’ instruction to his disciples in respect to society was that they were to be his witnesses. This means to declare him, and this must include who he is and what he has done for us. The proclamation of personal salvation includes the proclamation of the Kingdom of God. This proclamation is both personal and social.

Yet it is not a proclamation of a utopian hope for heaven on earth now; that clearly would not be biblical. It is a proclamation that God and not man is sovereign, or, to be more practical, that no one, no matter how senior or junior, in any given system need be irresistibly oppressed by the motives, ethics, values, or goals of that system (see Col. 2:13–15; Eph. 6:10–18). This seems to me to be the root, the radix, to which we as members of the Christian community must cut. To get to this radix is to be a Christian radical. The term “radical” ought to be automatically implied in the title “Christian.” But to our great shame the Christian community as seen today as “the Church” has been so culturally syncretistic that the radical quality, if ever evident, will be found only at the side door; the frontdoor appearance is that of just another comfortable institution for those who have the inclination to enjoy it.

Non-Christians will object to this Christian radical position, maintaining that the only really radical approach to society is to proclaim the complete destruction of the present “system” (that is, of government, corporation, WASP values, and so on). But we know that any alternative to the present system will be just as sinful. The reason for the false values is fallen man. Marx, Mao, Che Guevara, Marcuse—all these persons recognized the falseness but not the reason. But since we, through our Creator’s revelation, can go one step further than Marx and Company, we do not get excited about the need for a radical change in the superstructure of society. Our lack of enthusiasm at this point reflects Christ’s lack of enthusiasm for political revolution. The real revolution is that Christ is King, although his Kingdom is not “of” this world but rather is “over and above” all creation (John 18:36).

This still leaves one question. Should we be issue-oriented, that is, speaking or doing something about particular issues?

Jesus certainly did (e.g., his attitude toward the Sabbath, outcasts, the rich), but this is reform, not revolution. Confronting issues is a change within the system, not a change at the radix. We should surely be concerned to bring about reforms, but like Jesus and the apostles we should make our revolutionary intent clear first.

It is up to us to be his witnesses, seeking not just to stop the evil in the world, not merely to change the unacceptable into the acceptable, but first and foremost to expose the one-dimensional (Marcuse’s term) foundation of our society by bringing to bear the spotlight of the second dimension, the vertical dimension of the potential God/man relationship.

Rome and the Bible

C. René Padilla

Vatican II opened a new epoch for the Bible in Latin America.

Vatican II opened a new epoch for the Bible in Latin America. In chapter VI of Dei Verbum (the Constitution on Divine Revelation) the council gave unequivocal approval to the effort to providing “easy access to Sacred Scripture … for all the Christian faithful” and promoted the production of Bible translations made from the original texts “in cooperation with the separated brethren.”

With this encouragement, in the last few years the Roman Catholic church in Latin America has developed an impressive array of programs intended to put the Scriptures in the hands of the people. And, interestingly enough, no translation has enjoyed a wider distribution in Roman Catholic circles than Dios llega al hombre, the popular version of the New Testament produced and distributed by the United Bible Societies as the Spanish counterpart to Good News for Modern Man.

A very significant event in relation to Rome’s new attitude toward the Bible, the first Conference of Bible Scholars in Latin America, took place in San Miguel (near Buenos Aires), Argentina, at the end of August. Sponsored by the Departments of Ecumenism and of Catechism of CELAM (the Latin American Episcopal Council, an official body existing for the service and coordination of the episcopal conferences throughout the continent), it attracted fifteen people directly involved in biblical scholarship, plus four Latin American bishops, including Eduardo Pironio of Argentina and López Trujillo of Colombia, president and secretary of CELAM respectively.

To underscore the importance of the gathering, several distinguished visitors from Europe were present also: the Reverend John van der Valk, general secretary of the World Catholic Federation for the Biblical Apostolate; the Reverend Albert Descamps, secretary of the Pontifical Biblical Commission; and Miss Elizabeth Pregardier, vice-chairman of Adveniat, a German organization whose financial assistance has made it possible for CELAM to develop those aspects of its program related to the Scriptures.

The conference was basically an occasion for the Bible scholars to think on the pastoral dimension of their work. The stated purpose was not only to study together but also to wrestle with questions regarding the service that the scientific study of the Scriptures should lend to the churches, whether in relation to the synod of bishops or in relation to the proclamation of the Word of God in Latin America. In accordance with Pope Paul VI’s belief that “the Bible is a privileged place for meeting with ecclesiastical communities in imperfect fellowship with the [Roman] Catholic Church,” however, there were also ecumenical overtones given by the presence of four Protestant guests—two representing the United Bible Societies and two New Testament professors.

Assuming Rudolph Bultmann’s program for “demythologizing” the New Testament, Carlos Bravo (Bible professor at the theological school of a Jesuit university in Bogota, Colombia) spoke on “The Hermeneutical Problem.” The reception accorded his paper showed the small extent to which the critical approach developed by the Marburg professor has affected Roman Catholic Bible scholars in Latin America.

Two other papers were more representative of the climate prevailing among the scholars attending the conference: “Evangelization and the Bible” by Jorge Mejia (secretary of the Department of Dialogue of CELAM and active promoter of the Scriptures on an international scale) and “Bible Translations in Latin America and Cooperation With the United Bible Societies,” by Pedro Ortiz (Bravo’s colleague in Bogota) and Armando Levoratti (seminary professor in La Plata, Argentina, and well known as a Bible translator). Both of them reflected the new evangelical outlook in Rome, an outlook that only now Protestants are beginning to accept as a work of the Spirit of God rather than as a mere mask for courting the “separated brethren.”

The only Protestant speaker was a young evangelical Anglican, Andrew Kirk, until recently professor of New Testament at the Union Seminary in Buenos Aires. A firm believer in the authority of Scripture, Kirk in his paper on “Technical Exegesis and the Proclamation of the Gospel” referred to the principle of sola Scriptura as the fundamental difference between Roman Catholic and Protestant hermeneutics and underlined the importance of recognizing the limits of all the historical-critical methods of biblical research. “The notion that the historical-critical methodology is scientific,” said he, “is one of the greatest illusions in the history of Christian theology.”

According to Kirk, the degree of objectivity that may be attained with the various exegetical methods in use today goes in a descending order from textual criticism to linguistic criticism, form criticism and theological criticism. None of these methods is strictly “scientific,” and that makes it all the more necessary for the interpreter to be attuned to the purpose of the biblical writers—the communication of the faith.

Kirk insisted that the trouble with a great amount of modern exegesis results from a wrong approach to the Bible in which ideological and cultural premises take the place of responsible participation in the Christian mission. He challenged the group to commitment to the proclamation of the Gospel as one of the indispensable keys to the correct understanding of the link between the historicity of Jesus and faith.

For four centuries Roman Catholicism in Latin America failed to give the Bible a place of priority. Vatican Council II set in motion a spectacular reversal with regard to “easy access” to the Scriptures on the part of all the faithful. The new emphasis on biblical teaching has already brought renewal to many. The CELAM Conference of Bible Scholars in Latin America recently held in Argentina is a further step in an aggiornamento that is meant to infuse new life into every aspect of the old ecclesiastical structure.

A direct result of the conference, according to the explicit desire of those attending it, will probably be the establishment of an institute for biblical studies sponsored by CELAM but on an ecumenical basis. There is a felt need to cancel the great debt to Bible scholarship that has accumulated for several centuries in this part of the world, a debt that (at least partially) explains the absence of Latin Americans (as well as of Asians and Africans) from the renewed Pontifical Biblical Commission. Quite definitely, Rome is set on a return to the Bible, and many within its ranks see in this move a sign of hope for unity with the “separated brethren.”

Editor’s Note from October 25, 1974

Harold Lindsell

Managing Editor Gene Kucharsky went to Rio de Janeiro for us to cover Billy Graham’s crusade; his report appears on page 30. The 200,000-capacity stadium was jam-packed for the final Sunday meeting, and thousands more were unable to get in.

Mr. Graham preached with a handicap: shortly after reaching Rio he learned that his wife Ruth was in a hospital in Milwaukee with a concussion, a broken rib, and one leg in a cast—she fell out of a tree while playing with their grandchildren. She is recovering. Please pray that there be no permanent after-effects.

Early this month I spoke at the seventy-fourth anniversary banquet of the Mel Trotter Mission in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The occasion reminded me once again of the great service these evangelical rescue missions perform in all the large cities in the United States. They testify to evangelical social concern for the material needs of man as well as the need for Christ as Saviour to lift up the fallen.

Reprints of our July 26 editorial entitled “A License to Live” are available at 15¢ each for fewer than one hundred, 10¢ each for one hundred or more. Please ask for Number 9 and include cash or a check to cover your order.

The Armstrongs and Changing Times

Joseph M. Hopkins

Scandal, schism, and spiraling inflation have been forcing Herbert Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God (WCG) into drastic economic retrenchment and doctrinal revision (see March 15 issue, page 49). Despite a claimed 2.1 per cent increase in income over last year, the belt-tightening has included: (1) termination of the undergraduate program at the Bricket Wood, England, campus of Ambassador College (a training school for ministers will be substituted at this facility), and other academic trimming (earlier, a 27 per cent slash was decreed for the main Pasadena campus); (2) sharply reduced use of the church’s jet airplanes; (3) closure of high schools and elementary schools operated by the church (a move Garner Ted Armstrong views as “traumatic” inasmuch as children from the Imperial Schools will “be suddenly thrown in with all the foul language, filthy habits, sloppy hair and dress, drug usage, violence, and racism that exists in the public systems”); (4) a 5 per cent across-the-board reduction “in all divisions and departments”; (5) the sale of “peripheral” properties (including faculty residences); (6) production cutbacks for the TV program “The World Tomorrow”; (7) curtailment of the church’s editorial and other departments; (8) sale of tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of imported paintings, which heretofore have adorned the walls of faculty homes.

Some time earlier, other economy measures had been taken. Free distribution of The Plain Truth decreased from a record high of 3.2 million copies in October, 1973, to 2.7 million with the June-July, 1974, issue. Size was reduced as well. Following the February exodus of some thirty-five ministers and 2,000 members, it was announced that three of the church’s festival properties—at Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin, Mt. Pocono, Pennsylvania, and Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri—would be sold.

Garner Ted Armstrong, who has virtually taken over the administration of “the Work” (Armstrongism for the church) while his 82-year-old father roams the world proclaiming the Armstrong gospel in foreign capitals, insists that “vital areas such as preaching the Gospel and ministerial needs” have not been hampered by the curtailments. In a recent letter to the church’s 60,000 members (46,000 of them in the United States, 4,200 in Canada), the Work’s executive vice-president exuded optimism, saying he expected “the great work of God” to get stronger than ever before.

As evidence Armstrong pointed to the report for 1973: receipts soared to nearly $56 million; 7,000 new members were baptized; 3.6 million letters were processed at Pasadena alone; almost 38 million pieces of free literature were mailed out; and from June (when toll-free service was instituted) through December, 50,000 telephone calls (90 per cent of them from “new” people) lighted up the Pasadena switchboard. Personal-appearance campaigns, paid advertising in mass-circulation magazines, and the broadcast have produced a backlog of “7,000 new prospective members” as of June of this year awaiting ministerial visits. Recently announced strategy calls for a switch from daily to weekly TV but the extension of both TV and daily radio broadcasts to dozens of additional cities. Thus the downward trend in media outreach (from 384 to 311 outlets between January, 1973, and spring, 1974) is to be reversed.1U. S. television coverage grew from 47 to 88 stations during this interval; Canadian, from 28 to 33. Meanwhile, U. S. radio fell from 200 to 98 stations; Canadian climbed from 39 to 59. Of greater significance is the fact that overseas outlets over this period diminished by more than half, from 70 to 33. European coverage is now limited to one lone French broadcast.

Absence of a comprehensive doctrinal statement has occasioned confusion, contradiction, and dissension in the WCG throughout its history. But now that lack is under consideration. The Theological Research Project (TRP) has been established to frame a brief statement of faith and a detailed “exegetical handbook.” Texas staffer Charles Dorothy, a Spanish specialist, is heading up the TRP.

In the meantime, the church is reexamining its doctrines in the same manner in which they were “revealed” to Herbert W. Armstrong—one by one. The reappraisal has been prompted by increasing pressure from ministers and members. Close observers say Garner Ted has privately—sometimes publicly—favored many of the changes demanded by the dissidents; but Herbert has maintained a posture of intransigence, doggedly adhering to his timeworn dogmas until forced to knuckle under by sheer necessity.

Among the changes; (1) A new policy of openness (January, 1973), admitting outsiders to worship services and advertising meetings: largely unimplemented yet. (2) Shift of Pentecost from Monday to Sunday (February, 1974), a concession to a scholarly verdict correcting Armstrong’s miscalculation of years ago. (3) Modification of the divorce and remarriage policy (May, 1974). Long a source of internal controversy in the WCG, the doctrine held that second marriages following divorce are not binding in the sight of God and the church. A number of marriages had broken up as a result. The new teaching provides that those coming into the church will be forgiven at baptism of “past marital mistakes which were made apart from the knowledge of God’s way.” Termed “monumental” by Garner Ted, the announcement, made by his father to a ministerial conference in Pasadena (the largest in the history of the church), was greeted with spontaneous applause by the 408 salaried ministers and ninety-five local-church elders attending. (4) Relaxation of the “third tithe” requirement (May, 1974). Collected every 3½ years for “widows and orphans” (many of them made so under the old remarriage doctrine), the third tithe imposed a heavy burden on the Armstrong faithful. There have been charges that third-tithe funds were siphoned off for non-welfare uses. It was further objected that the additional levy lacked New Testament foundation. Finally, at the Pasadena conference, Armstrong announced that the third tithe no longer would be mandatory. Pastors may now “release” those who are “going down the drain financially.” (5) Lifting of the bans on wearing makeup and observing birthdays (June, 1974).

Other changes are in the offing. A new booklet on healing is about to roll off the Ambassador College presses. The church eschews professional medical services except for “repair” surgery (setting broken bones, suturing open wounds, and the like). The restrictive policy has figured in several lawsuits during the past year: two custody cases in which a non-member parent has accused a divorced mate of withholding urgently needed medical treatment from the couple’s children, and a suit in which a Seattle man is seeking $100,000 from the church for loss of eyesight.

In a ninety-minute address before nearly 10,000 pilgrims at the Feast of Tabernacles at Mt. Pocono last October, Garner Ted repudiated his father’s “Petra” doctrine, declaring that “our God is a practical God” who will not take his people in non-existent ocean liners and 747s to a desert place devoid of food and water to save them from the tribulation. (Petra is an ancient rock fortress in southern Jordan.) The “place of safety” is spiritual, not physical, he said. Reportedly, Herbert rebuked his son publicly in Great Britain for saying the same thing.

In an interview, Garner Ted acknowledged that identification of the “lost ten tribes” with the Anglo-Saxon peoples “can’t be proved”—thus discounting his father’s oft-repeated dictum that British-Israel identity is “the master key” to 90 per cent of Bible prophecy relating to the end time. He further indicated disagreement with the “one true church” doctrine, and rejected out of hand the church’s teaching that Sunday worship is the mark of the beast and is punishable by the lake of fire. These divergences notwithstanding, Dr. Robert L. Kuhn, Garner Ted’s administrative assistant, averred in a recent telephone interview that father and son are in substantial doctrinal agreement.

How much farther can the WCG travel along the road of doctrinal accommodation without surrendering its claim to uniqueness and apostolic authority? Dr. Ernest Martin, who resigned as chairman of Ambassador’s theology department, believes that the church is willing to yield on almost any issue “as long as the hierarchical posture is retained. They will never change, so they say, on church government.” In a thirty-page member letter dated May 2, 1974, Herbert Armstrong blasted “defecting ministers” for seeking to “destroy the Work of the living God.” Christ’s “rod of iron” rule, he said, is by government “from the top down.” He denounced “democracy, from the bottom up—every man doing what seems right in his own eyes,” as a device whereby Satan endeavors to undermine God’s—and Armstrong’s—authority over his people. Whatever compromises and concessions may be made in other areas, it appears certain that on the question of government (the theological basis for his control over the church and its membership) Herbert W. Armstrong will stand firm.

Black Muslims: Billing The Baptists?

A little more than a year ago, Black Muslims in Kansas City, Missouri, purchased the ultra-modern Kansas City Baptist Temple, pastored by the Reverend Truman Dollar, for $250,000.

Although a substantial down payment was made, attorneys for the Baptist congregation—one of the largest in the Midwest—say that the Muslims have had difficulty raising the monthly payment of $2,436.

Nevertheless, Baptist members in their new suburban temple were caught off guard, they say, when six men (three of them are confirmed members of local Kansas City Muslim mosques) entered the church office on a Monday, ordered twelve church employees to lie face-down on the floor, and then ran off with $24,000, much of it the previous day’s offerings.

Two of the men are still at large, police report. Four others were arraigned on charges of felonious assault and first-degree robbery. Dollar contends that one of the men who allegedly robbed the church was present at negotiations for the sale of the former building to the Muslims.

In Chicago at the time of the robbery, Nathaniel Muhammad, son of Muslim head Elijah Muhammad and leader of the Kansas City mosque that made the purchase, denied that he knew anything about the event and promised that the mosque would not harbor fugitives of justice. He returned to Kansas City and held a public press conference inside the mosque, even permitting television cameramen to take pictures inside. (Muslim policy traditionally has always forbidden whites and anyone with recording equipment from entering a mosque.) All news-media personnel, however, were subjected to the usual “frisking for weapons” before entering.

Nathaniel said he believes someone had been planted within the temple to lead fellow Muslim brothers astray. He promised that even after serving sentences in jail, the members (if found guilty) would have to serve “additional time” at the mosque.

Dollar says he believes the robbery was in retaliation for remarks he had made which were printed by a daily newspaper in the city. In that article, he accused the Muslims of not following standard business procedures. “They don’t even know the rudiments of business,” he said. “And it’s a myth that they have great economic stability and sources of funds.”

Last month the Baptists ordered the Muslims off the property, with forfeiture of the down payment.

JAMES S. TINNEY

Manhattan Movers

Dozens of Jews for Jesus left New York City last month after a flamboyant street-evangelism campaign prompted hundreds of “serious” inquiries about Christianity—and the arrest of eight Jewish followers of Christ.

The Jews for Jesus movement is composed of mostly young, evangelical Jewish Christians who militantly affirm their Jewish identity. About thirty who were involved in the four-week New York project traveled from the group’s main headquarters in Corte Madera, California, and another eighteen came in from elsewhere. Concentrating on Manhattan, they staged street-theater skits, concerts, and marches in prophet robes, and distributed 800,000 tracts and 7,000 posters. Not wanting the image of button-holers, they tried to avoid long street-corner debates. “About 2,000 people responded by mail or phone, and more than 200 signed our decision cards,” said Moishe Rosen, the leader of the movement. By signing these cards persons either made definite commitments to Christ or embarked on a program of study, he pointed out.

In a campaign sidelight, a group of Orthodox Jews, calling themselves “Jews for Judaism,” handed out opposition literature. Their tracts also dealt with sin and salvation, so even that was a plus, Rosen said, because “those are not usual discussion topics in any segment of Judaism these days.”

Part of the group’s preparation for the New York campaign involved learning how to respond non-violently to physical attacks and harassment. This training, said Rosen, came in handy on several occasions as irate pedestrians—screaming “You’re not Jewish!” and “You should be ashamed of yourselves, traitors!”—punched and kicked the young evangelists. They suffered no major injuries.

On one occasion, police arrested eight of the Jews for Jesus who with faces painted white were presenting a twelve-minute vignette in front of Rockefeller Center. While they were being booked in the precinct on disorderly-conduct charges of obstructing pedestrian traffic, a policeman told them this wife was dying of cancer and asked, “Will you pray for her?” The entire group immediately offered a prayer for the woman. Later, as they were waiting in holding cells for their case to be called in court, the male actors put on a skit for the other prisoners and did some impromptu preaching.

“You might say they had a captive audience,” quipped their defense attorney, Herman Tarnow, who eventually convinced the judge to dismiss the charges.

WILLIAM PROCTOR

FREE HOT DOGS AND HAIRCUTS

Things have simmered down at Highway 70 Baptist Church outside Memphis. The 300-member independent church has a policy of short hair for men and long dresses for women, and several women stand ready with scissors, needles, thread, and spare cloth, during and after church services to implement the policy. Men can get their hair shortened and women their dresses lengthened on the spot.

A while back 8-year-old Timothy Tillman rode to the church on its bus to take advantage of the free hotdog and Coke offer. During the sermon, Pastor Gene Hobgood warned of hell-fire ahead for those with long hair. At the invitation, Tim and other boys walked forward and had their collar-length hair cut.

When Tim returned home, his parents—who do not attend Highway 70—were appalled (Mr. Tillman is a barber) and threatened to sue. Hobgood took the threat in stride but agreed not to administer any more haircuts to children without parental consent. He still insists long hair is part of the “Communist curse on this country” and is condemned in the Bible.

Evangelicals At Ewersbach

With a conference planned for Sounion, Greece, canceled at short notice because of the Cyprus conflict, the International Fellowship of Free Evangelical Churches convened instead at a seminary of the Free Evangelical Churches of Germany. Nearly 150 representatives from fifteen national associations (including that of East Germany) gathered in Dietzholztal-Ewersbach, West Germany, for the September meeting.

Reports from 3,096 local churches on four continents showed increasing membership and a growing number of churches. They also reported a total of 2,709 full-time ministers and 547 missionaries supported by the churches. Newly formed associations in Asia, Africa, and South America were invited to join the international body.

After long and thorough discussions of the Lausanne Congress (see August 16 issue, page 35), delegates pledged themselves to emphasize the authority of the Bible in their theological teaching, to intensify evangelism, and to teach members the practical consesequences of following Jesus. Elected president for a four-year term was a Spanish minister, Jose Martiny of Barcelona. Walter Persson, a minister from Stockholm, Sweden, was named general secretary. A 1975 youth conference planned for Chicago will try to relate the results of the Ewersbach conference to youth work.

WOLFGANG MULLER

Attacking The Texts

After a brief respite, that public-school textbook controversy in the Charleston, West Virginia, area (see October 11 issue, page 44) flared up again this month. Led by ministers, crowds of angry parents blockaded bus garages, picketed school buildings and kept hundreds of children out of school. Several were arrested, including Pastor Ezra Graley of the Summit Ridge Church of God. He received a $1,500 fine and sixty days in jail in addition to an earlier thirty day sentence.

Shortly after Grayley’s arrest, more mines were shut down, one school was dynamited and another set on fire. Damage to both was minimal and there were no injuries, but the incidents emphasized the growing bitterness in the dispute.

Pastor Marvin Horan of the Leewood Freewill Baptist Church got roaring approval from a rally crowd of 4,000 when he suggested schools in three counties be closed “until the books are out.”

Another clergyman, Charles Quigley, principal of the Cathedral of Prayer Christian School, made headlines by praying that God will “strike three members of the Kanawha County Board of Education dead” for endorsing the textbooks that protesters have charged are anti-Christian, anti-American, and obscene. Later, Quigley backed off a bit, explaining that he only wanted God’s will to be done in the matter, but he warned that God had struck dead some who had opposed him in the past.

A survey by the Charleston Gazette shows 41.2 per cent opposed to the books, mostly on religious and moral grounds, and 27.2 per cent in favor of them, with 31.6 per cent undecided.

Meanwhile, textbook controversies have broken out elsewhere. In Roanoke, Virginia, real estate broker Curtis Doss is leading efforts to rid the schools of junior-high and senior-high readers in the Ginn Company’s “Responding” series, one of the series disputed in West Virginia. Doss says he was glad Bible studies were dropped from public schools for constitutional reasons. But, he argues, “the Bible isn’t pushed down anybody’s throat. Why should filth be?”

Thousands of miles away in Courtenay, British Columbia, the local ministerial alliance has stirred up a fuss over a study guide on women for use by high-school teachers. Among other things, the guide blames the Christian Church for carrying forward “the bitter campaign to debase and enslave the women of Europe” during the latter days of the Roman Empire.

Religion In Transit

Evangelist Kathryn Kuhlman says she bears no ill will toward Dr. William A. Nolen, the Minnesota author and surgeon who said his research found no evidence of any healings at a service Miss Kuhlman conducted last year. He “doesn’t understand,” she says. She points to healings verified by other doctors but says she’s “the first to admit” not everyone at her services gets healed. She was scheduled to appear on NBC-TV’s “Tonight” show in response to Nolen’s appearance earlier.

The small Poolesville (Maryland) Presbyterian Church is publishing a less expensive $(19.95) edition of a 330,000-entry concordance to the Living Bible than the one it produced last year ($34.95).

United Farm Workers of America union leader Cesar Chavez, with the encouragement of World Council of Churches officials, was in Europe this month drumming up support for boycotts against California grapes and Iceberg lettuce. The WCC to date has given more than $69,000 to Chavez, whose union membership is down to 10,000 from a high of 50,000.

More than 5,000 persons attended a conference on the Holy Spirit sponsored by the evangelism and worship unit of the Iowa United Methodist Conference. Speakers included Episcopal charismatic leader Dennis Bennett and Pentecostal lecturer David J. DuPlessis, who claimed there are 10,000 charismatic pastors within member denominations of the National Council of Churches (approximately 10 per cent of the some 107,000 pastors in the thirty-one Protestant and Orthodox bodies).

Forty-one senior medical students from North America were awarded fellowships sponsored jointly by Medical Assistance Programs, an evangelical agency based in Wheaton, Illinois, and Reader’s Digest. The fellowships are designed to stake students to a well supervised clinical experience in a relatively primitive setting. More than 200 have served in thirty-eight countries since the program began four years ago.

DEATHS

VIRGIL MOSES BARKER, 94, bishop emeritus and founder of more than fifty congregations of the Church of God in Christ in the midwest; in Kansas City, Missouri.

LEWI PETHRUS, 90, noted Swedish Pentecostal pastor, author, and editor of Dagen, the daily Christian newspaper he founded in 1945; in Stockholm.

Personalia

Bishop Stuart Y. Blanch of Liverpool, England, an evangelical who has emphasized evangelism in his ministry, has been appointed the next Anglican archbishop of York. Blanch, 56, will succeed Archbishop Donald Coggan, a fellow evangelical who next month will succeed Archbishop Michael Ramsey of Canterbury as titular head of the Church of England.

This month Pastor W. A. Criswell of First Baptist Church, Dallas, observes his thirtieth anniversary as pastor there. During those thirty years the church has had 9,400 baptisms, more than 25,000 other membership additions by letter of transfer and statement of faith (membership has increased from 8,253 to nearly 17,900), and nearly $51 million in offerings.

Jesus-movement figure Duane Pederson, editor of the internationally distributed Hollywood Free Paper, is now pastor of a congregation of the Missionary Church denomination in Venice, California. Before founding the paper in 1969 he was a gospel-magic evangelist.

SHOW BIZ AND CHRIST

The National Enquirer, a secular tabloid, is featuring stories of show biz people who have turned to Christ. Among the recent ones: Jeannie C. Riley, 28, of “Harper Valley PTA” hit record fame, and actor Mickey Rooney, 53. Both say they were converted about two years ago.

Miss Riley told how the fame and fortune that came to her nearly destroyed her values and ruined her life. “I was feeling real low about my way of life and I went to church,” she said. During a hymn she was overwhelmed by the thought that if she didn’t turn to God right then she never would. “That’s when I was saved,” she said. The country and western singer says that her life is better now and that she tries to get her feelings about God into her songs. “The Lord changed my life completely,” she asserts.

Rooney said his life was “a mess” until he started going back to church. “Then,” said he, “I gave my life to Christ and suddenly—like a miracle—everything became positive and creative where before it had been negative and bleak.” Married seven times, Rooney acknowledged he’d made a lot of mistakes. As for his seventh wife, Carolyn, the actor commented: “This marriage will last until the end of my days, I’m sure—because the love of Christ and the love of a good woman are an unbeatable combination.”

World Scene

Increasingly, newspapers in India are carrying stories of famine, huge livestock losses, and “thousands of starvation deaths.” West Bengal is especially hard hit; one newspaper claims more than 15 million of its 50 million people do not get a full meal even once a week.

Some 10,450 persons were baptized in Baptist churches in Burma last year. The Burma Baptist Convention has 2,579 churches with 277,000 members. Leaders say they are confronted by pressures to make the faith more culturally indigenous and by the emergence of the charismatic movement in some churches. Theology teacher Thra Victor San Lone is the new general secretary.

Either way we lose. That might be the way a pessimistic World Council of Churches leader would describe one predicament facing the WCC. The Palestinian Liberation Organization has asked the WCC to represent the PLO at the United Nations and in talks on the Middle East. Mission: be a peacemaker without alienating either the Arabs or the Israelis, and keep the friends of both happy.

Greater Europe Mission’s university-level theological school in Seeheim, Germany, opened last month with eight first-term students enrolled. The new school is headed by New Testament scholar Cleon Rogers.

Some 5,000 persons attended the fourteenth general conference of the (West) German Evangelical Alliance. Official representatives of member groups debated the relation between the alliance and local churches (rumors that the alliance might establish congregations of its own were denied) and between the alliance and the World Council of Churches. The consensus seemed to be that while the general course of the WCC cannot be favored, connections should not be severed to the evangelicals trying to witness within the WCC.

The few remaining Sudan Interior Mission missionaries in Somalia have been transferred to work elsewhere. Somalia nationalized mission work and shut down ministries last year. An SIM spokesman estimates that there are only 200 known believers in the land, and any open witness brings immediate opposition.

Once a year Telugu Baptists in India stage a mass baptism. This year 1,233 were baptized in one day in the Gundlakamma River. Many of the converts are the product of a lay evangelistic movement led by P. Sadhu Samuel.

The Cross over East Germany

The increasing international acceptance of East Germany’s independence and socialist way of life does not appear to have jeopardized the spiritual vitality of the various Christian communions in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), which celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary this month.

To be sure, in response to official pressures the East German Lutherans and Baptists have severed all organizational ties with their fellow believers in West Germany. A similar situation is developing among the Roman Catholics, albeit more gradually. Polish diocesan borders now no longer encompass GDR territory, and West German episcopal jurisdiction in the East is rapidly eroding. Perhaps the GDR authorities have moved slowly on this because Roman Catholics make up a mere 8 per cent of the country’s population. More significant, from a political standpoint, is the fact that although the Cardinal of Berlin is a GDR citizen (his handsomely reconstructed cathedral is adjacent to the state opera house), he exercises authority over the West Berlin church as well. Thus his status gives the GDR a toehold in the western half of the divided German capital.

Despite pressures through the years to wean the people away from Christianity, the names of 10 million of the GDR’s 18 million citizens still remain on the rolls of parish churches. Few congregations have been forced to disband, and the religious instruction of children is permitted. Several state universities continue to support theological faculties, while Lutherans, Baptists, and Catholics maintain seminaries to train clergy. And among all denominations the dominant theological orientation today is that of the historic Christian faith based on the Bible.

One indicator of spiritual strength in the GDR is that the 1974 enrollment at the Baptist seminary in Buckow (just outside Berlin) exceeded the school’s capacity of sixteen students. Moreover, substantial numbers of young women have joined the denomination’s corps of deaconesses. The East German Baptists even have a special arrangement that allows them to send some of these deaconesses to other Eastern-bloc countries as “missionary” nurses.

Also, a Lutheran pastor in an industrial town has been holding regular youth services in his church that draw 1,500 to 1,800 young people for a time of singing and a simple evangelistic message. He reports numerous conversions as well as many requests for religious instruction and baptism. (An eyewitness told us that similar evangelistic youth meetings with equally electrifying results were being held in a number of major East German cities recently.)

He is unfortunately paying a price for his devotion to Christ. He is often subjected to police harassment, and his mail is intercepted. His wife and daughter were recently put through an intensive search while they were traveling on a train, apparently because the teen-ager was wearing a pin that read “Jesus Makes One Free.” His courage is amply reflected in a simple statement he made to us: “I always preach with one foot in jail.”

According to a study just released by the American Bible Society, more copies of the Scriptures are currently being distributed in the GDR than in any other Communist-bloc state. Since 1969 almost one million portions have been disseminated there, including 316,181 in 1973 alone. A printing of 80,000 copies of the German common-language translation of the New Testament, Die Gute Nachricht (Good News for Modern Man), was rapidly exhausted, and more copies have been ordered. A few religious publishers along with the Bible societies and church bookstores in the GDR produce and market Bibles, Testaments, and religious books.

Although East German Christians have repeatedly and wholeheartedly pledged their loyalty to the state and its social premises, tensions continue to be high. The leaders of the GDR still espouse atheism and inculcate these ideas in the schools. Christian young people are subjected to discrimination in employment and education. Church officials frequently are denied travel permits to attend meetings abroad. Religious publications of necessity have to be circumspect in their evaluations of state actions. Even the doctrine that all men are sinners was recently criticized by a Ministry of Culture spokesman as being “a negation of the optimistic basis of socialist society.”

Conscientious objection to military service is not permitted, but Christians opposed to carrying arms are reluctantly allowed to do their time in a militarized labor-service battalion. To do this, however, means one is blacklisted for life—that is, he is denied admission to university studies and relegated to the most menial and low-paying jobs in the country. Some Mennonites who object to the induction oath with its requirement of “unconditional obedience” to superiors (actually a serious problem for all Christian young men in the country) refuse even to accept the route of alternate service. This inevitably means a long prison term, and upon release from jail possible induction.

Some believers, especially those connected with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), a quasi-political party in the GDR, feel that the Christian ethic actually is quite compatible with socialism. Karl Ordnung, a CDU official, was reported by Evangelical Press as saying during a recent visit to North America: “It is easier in some ways to be a Christian in East Germany than in the United States.” Last October he contended in an article in the official CDU organ that a Christian cannot avoid being partisan in the class struggle:

[He must be] for the poor, the persecuted, the oppressed and against the wealthy and oppressors. He champions the cause of the wealthy in that he opposes them and wants to free them from their social position. The class struggle revolves exactly around this issue—not for the destruction of the opponents, but for the transformation of social relationships which such opposition constitutes.

Such efforts to reconcile Marxism with Christianity probably go too far for most East German Christians, but many concede that the regime’s official policy of complete separation of church and state has been beneficial. As Klaus Fuhrmann, director of the Baptist seminary, perceptively observed, “the old territorial churches have been made into free churches like us.” This has opened the way for cooperation among the various denominations in studying the Word and proclaiming the Gospel. Fuhrmann mentioned that in several towns vigorous interdenominational evangelistic Bible studies are taking place with the enthusiastic support of the local Baptist, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic leaders.

Another interesting trend is the new eastward orientation of the churches. Now that there has been a severing of the traditional ties with the West (and along with it a tapering off of the flow of Western funds to assist the churches), Christians in the GDR are seeking to form new relationships with other brethren in the Soviet-bloc lands. However, the ancient suspicions and animosities in eastern Europe toward Germans are making this transformation difficult, and many GDR believers feel they are isolated.

Dominating the skyline of East Berlin is a thousand-foot-high television tower built five years ago to be a showpiece of the new Communist state. But because of a design fluke, whenever the sun shines on the spherical rotating restaurant atop the modernistic structure, a glittering cross appears. East German officials even ordered the exterior painted over in a recent attempt to blot out the cross, but to no avail.

Nothing better symbolizes the current situation than this. Despite the official atheism of a quarter century of Communist rule, the cross still shines over East Germany.

ROBERT D. LINDER and RICHARD V. PIERARD

Help For Honduras

Relief and clean-up operations were underway in Honduras this month amid the devastation wrought by Hurricane Fifi.

Reports indicate the death toll among evangelical families is under twenty-five. Six persons, mostly children, who attended the Iglesia Evangelica Reformada (Evangelical and Reformed Church) in Choloma were swept to their deaths in the wall of water, mud, and debris that destroyed 60 per cent of the town. The pastor and his family escaped by clinging to the rafters of their home and then climbing onto the roof of a nearby building.

No pastors or missionaries were reported hurt, but the Mennonite pastor and his wife in the port of La Ceiba lost their two-year-old son and a grandmother who Was caring for the boy while the parents were away on an evangelistic trip.

Nazarene missionary Stanley Storey watched his newly built house near San Pedra Sula wash away while he and his family clung to the steel posts supporting the carport, which collapsed soon after they managed to make their way to a safer house nearby.

Seventy believers met in an Assembly of God church near Progreso to pray as the waters mounted. The houses on all sides were swept away, but the church withstood the storm’s fury. Not so fortunate were the residents of Ocotillo, a village five miles up the valley from Choloma, who took refuge in a Catholic church. The raging river smashed the building and carried away everyone inside. (Ninety-five per cent of the nation’s population is nominally Catholic.)

The Mennonites and Moravians reported damaged and lost buildings; many church members lost their homes.

Within hours of the disaster, CEDEN—the Evangelical Committee for National Emergency, set up originally at the time of the war with El Salvador—was reorganized and became the channel for aid from Christian groups in other countries, including Church World Service (the relief arm of the National Council of Churches), the Mennonite Central Committee, the Christian Reformed Relief Committee, the Baptist World Alliance, the Southern Baptist Convention, World Vision International, Medical Assistance Programs (Wheaton, Illinois), and the World Council of Churches.

Evangelicals were among the first to arrive with help as the waters began to recede. In some cases they were on the scene days before government teams arrived. Pastor Julio Marriaga of the Central American Mission church in San Pedra Sula drove the first vehicle to enter Progreso—cut off for four days by flooded roads—after helping to build one of the temporary bridges that replaced washed-out spans.

Aid began arriving in San Pedra from Christians in other parts of Honduras as soon as the highway was opened. Help also poured in from other parts of Central America. CAM’s radio station TGNA in Guatemala City launched a drive that brought in more than twenty-five tons of food, clothing, and medicines, and over $3,000, much of it from fellow believers also ravaged by the storm. The Evangelical Alliance of Guatemala, Good Will Caravans of Costa Rica, and CEP AD, the evangelical relief committee set up in Nicaragua after the big earthquake in 1972, all sent aid.

Missionary Aviation Fellowship pilots flew many missions, dropping supplies to isolated victims, many on roofs and treetops. One interior tribe floated a raft of relief supplies down a river to an MAF air strip, from which they airlifted to the stricken coastal area.

Governor George Wallace of Alabama donated a mobile hospital to the Salvation Army, which sent it to Honduras along with twenty-four officers and volunteers to staff it.

A DC-3 operated jointly by Food for the Hungry (FFH), World Gospel Crusades of southern California and King’s Garden of Seattle flew dozens of missions, ferrying more than 200,000 pounds of supplies. FFH said it was sending an additional 200,000 pounds by sea, and other agencies were appealing for funds to provide urgently needed long-term assistance (factories, businesses, and farms need to be restored).

Catholic Relief Services sent three helicopters to help distribute supplies to thousands of refugees in isolated villages. Food consumption by 80,000 refugees in thirty-five camps was estimated at more than fifty tons a day.

At mid-month, a relief spokesman said airports and docks were jammed with goods pending distribution.

STEPHEN SYWULKA and BARRIE DOYLE

PUMPKIN PULPIT

President Ford has received a memorable gift—a giant, 150-pound pumpkin with his name and a Scripture reference inscribed on it. It was sent by farmer-clergyman Wallace W. Jones, 70, who grew it on his farm near Philadelphia. When it was a mite smaller and still on the vine, Jones’s wife used a darning needle to scratch on it, “1974—President Ford—Congratulations—Matthew 6:33.” (The verse reads, “But seek ye first the kingdom of God: and all these things shall be added unto you.”)

“People forget pumpkins,” says Jones, pastor of the Furlong Union Chapel in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, “but they don’t forget the word of God.”

Last year he donated twenty-five of the mammoth pumpkins to Philadelphia College of Bible, where they were made into 1,000 pies. This year he’s sending forty-five.

Theology’S Effect

The effectiveness of most prison chaplains has been challenged in a study made by the Arlington, Virginia-based Good News Mission. The study measures effectiveness by the numerical involvement of prisoners in chaplaincy-sponsored programs.

A GNM chaplain, Dale K. Pace, says that responses to a mailed survey obtained from 40 per cent of all prison chaplains, both Catholic and Protestant, show: The more liberal a chaplain is theologically, the less effective he is; government-paid chaplains are less effective than privately employed ones; the average chaplain spends only eight hours per week in personal prayer and study, including message preparation; fewer than 60 per cent hold regular Bible studies or religious-education classes in prisons; and more than 20 per cent refused to define themselves theologically.

The mission says that Pace’s study—prepared for a doctoral thesis at Luther Rice Seminary in Jacksonville, Florida—is the first such one made of the chaplaincy. It balanced chaplain representation by denomination, geographical location, and type of institution (jails, juvenile facilities, state prisons, and federal prisons). To increase the prison chaplains’ effectiveness meanwhile, the independent evangelical mission is planning the fourth in its annual graduate-level chaplaincy courses for next January. More than sixty officials have taken the courses.

BARRIE DOYLE

Shedd Sheds Pounds, Gains Readers

The gray-haired minister and his wife, Martha—childhood sweethearts—were dressed in matching blue-denim outfits with a colorful apple-core design. “The secret of a great marriage?” Dr. Charlie W. Shedd asked a convention of youth workers and their wives recently. “Great prayer.”

Shedd, whose numerous books are probably as well known as those of any Christian writer, has another secret: a dialogue formula of candor and humor to give practical answers to problems in family relationships, sexuality, and personal honesty. The Shedds are widely sought as speakers, and he also has a booming syndicated newspaper column and a radio show.

Shedd’s rise to fame (his Letters to Karen has sold more than a million copies) wasn’t exactly meteoric. His first magazine article took five years to sell, and another manuscript was rejected twenty-nine times before a publisher took pity and accepted it.

Shedd, a minister under whose leadership Memorial Drive Presbyterian Church in Houston went from fifty to four thousand members in thirteen years, began his writing career with several small books on practical things like Pastoral Ministry of Church Officers and How to Develop a Tithing Church.

As the Shedds’ four girls and a boy grew up, Charlie used the family as a living laboratory for books and articles. The success of Letters to Karen created an eager audience for Letters to Philip (on how to treat a woman) and Promises to Peter (building a bridge from parent to child).

Soon Shedd had a regular column on sex and dating in Teen Magazine, and when 25,000 letters poured in, he used them as grist for his most controversial book, The Stork Is Dead, a frank look at youthful sex problems. Some conservative religious-bookstore managers kept The Stork from landing on their shelves, mostly because Shedd calls masturbation “God’s gift” to help Christian young people refrain from premarital intercourse. (The Stork soared nonetheless to sales of more than a quarter of a million copies.)

Shedd used a personal problem—obesity—as food for The Fat Is in Your Head, a slim trim-yourself guide telling how Shedd shed 120 pounds from his 320-pound frame—and kept them off.

Other books: Is Your Family Turned On? (on the drug problem), and a three-part series in progress, The Exciting Church, “Where the People Really Pray,” “… Really Study the Bible,” and “… Really Give Their Money Away.” Titles in the works include one on the Christian version of Transcendental Meditation (Shedd says he’s been doing it for twenty years) and Talk to Me: How to Get Your Husband to Communicate and Turn Your Marriage Into a Great Friendship.

Praying together, the Shedds told couples at the low-key youth workers’ conference, helps husbands and wives to “set each other free,” brings “way out sex—sex at its best is spiritual,” and enables partners “to know the will of God.”

In the latter connection, Shedd cited a decision several years ago to leave the flourishing Houston church for a tiny Presbyterian church on Jekyll Island, off the Georgia coast (another noted Christian writer, Eugenia Price, lives there also). The small flock (100) allows the Shedds ample time off; Shedd is in the pulpit three Sundays out of four in the winter, away most of the summer.

His column, “Strictly for Dads,” is carried in seventy newspapers, forty with circulations topping 100,000. And his ninety-second “Parent Talk” is aired five times a week. Shedd is also making a tape series called “Fun Family Cassettes Library,” to be out in the fall.

The Shedds are optimistic about the religious future of America, and they see a rising interest in the Christian home and a de-emphasis upon open marriage and alternative life-styles among young people turned on to the Lord.

Charlie, who says “I am 100 per cent Christocentric and that’s all I care about,” thinks the feminist movement is an indictment of the way many men treat women. “Many husbands are clods who won’t relate,” he said in an interview. “The problem with women is not women, but men.”

“My theology is very simple,” Shedd elaborated. “I very much believe the secret to the Christian life is Christ deep in the heart with a fresh commitment to him every day.” Affirming his belief that the Bible is the Word of God, he said he also believes that “the Word of the Living Christ inside is important in places where the Bible is silent.”

He and his wife Martha say their five children are “all spiritually atuned with the Lord, though they are not all actively involved with the church, as we are.”

Philip, 30, a deacon in a church in Houston, is a senior at the University of Houston. Married and the father of one daughter, Philip dropped out of high school when he was a senior for a short Navy career. This was something of a crisis at the time, Shedd recalls, but he notes that “we never had one bit of a problem with our kids” in matters of morals, drugs, or liquor during their growing-up years.

Karen, 28, and her husband also live in Houston and have two daughters. Peter, 20, and his wife graduated this June from the University of Georgia and have been asked to spend a year as Southern Presbyterian missionaries in Africa. Paul, a 24-year-old “mystic,” according to his dad—himself now 58—holds a responsible medical position in San Francisco and says he won’t marry until he’s 30. Timothy, 16, is a senior in high school and, like the others, a top student.

Shedd still emphasizes family devotions and says most Christians “dodge the tough half of the Cross”—the cost of discipleship. He also defends “social justice” as an imperative of the ministry, pointing out that his Georgia congregation is integrated.

Royalties from recent Shedd ventures pad their Abundance Foundation, set up to aid agricultural missions: a job-training farm in Virginia for the mentally retarded, a dairy herd in Zaire, Africa, and a large rabbitry that eventually will support 10,000 families in Nigeria.

RUSSELL CHANDLER

BANNED IN EPHRATA

Dan Neidermyer’s novel Jonathan, the story of a 19-year-old Amish boy who is torn between the ways of the Old Order Amish and the ways of the world, is a sell-out success. It is also out of print.

After a Canadian critic alleged the book “maligns the Amish by its tone, its emphasis, its theme,” Amish leaders in Pennsylvania raised about $4,000 to buy and destroy all available copies of the $5.95 hardcover book, and Herald Press of Scottsdale, Pennsylvania, promised not to print any more. (A second printing of 5,000 copies had been ordered after the initial 5,000 copies were sold.)

Neidermyer claims a group of church elders told him the book was “too truthful.” A Herald executive explains it is not the publishing firm’s intention to “hurt anyone in a real or imaginary way,” and so it will respect Amish wishes.

Neidermyer, 27, an honors graduate of Philadelphia College of Bible, is a senior at Reformed Episcopal Seminary in Philadelphia and directs Maranatha Productions. Not Amish himself, he is running for the state legislature as a Democrat in his home district in the heart of Amish country around Ephrata in Lancaster County, where a Democrat has never been elected.

Books

Book Briefs: October 25, 1974

Bioethics: What Is It?

Politics, Medicine and Christian Ethics, by Charles E. Curran (Fortress, 1973, 222 pp., $6.95), Is It Moral to Modify Man?, by Claude A. Frazier (Thomas, 1973, 332 pp., $10.95), Medical Ethics, by Bernard Haring (Fides, 1973, 250 pp., $8.95), Human Medicine, by James B. Nelson (Augsburg, 1973, 207 pp, $3.95 pb), and Biomedical Ethics, by Kenneth Vaux (Harper & Row, 1974, 131 pp., $5.95), are reviewed by Roy Branson, associate professor of Christian ethics, Andrews University, Berrien Springs, Michigan, and research scholar, Kennedy Center for Bioethics, Washington, D. C.

Bioethics was not even a word until 1971. For years Catholic moralists had written on ethics for physicians, with Joseph Fletcher, almost alone among Protestant academic ethicists in America, joining them in 1960 with his Morals and Medicine. By 1974 there were at least two major research institutes, many university programs, and a rapidly increasing number of publications analyzing the ethics not only of medical practice but also of biological research. This review looks at a cross-section of recently released books on the subject.

The most usable for pastors and layman wanting a readable, careful introduction to bioethics is James Nelson’s two-hundred-page paperback. His constant “on the one hand … but on the other,” approach may become maddening, but the reader is spared eccentric arguments, and Nelson’s hesitancy to advocate clear-cut positions on all issues emerges from a self-conscious and respectable theoretical commitment. Nelson adheres to the priority of the concept of responsibility articulated by H. Richard Niebuhr, the late Yale theologian and teacher of many of today’s most prominent Protestant ethicists. Nelson understands responsibility to mean the sensitive balancing of individual rights and obligations against social benefits and harms. In the contemporary ethical landscape he wants to take a path that ignores neither the deontological preoccupations of a Paul Ramsey nor the utilitarian enthusiasms of a Joseph Fletcher. The book is not a constructive one, full of original solutions, but it is a helpful survey.

On what are now the standard topics in bioethics—abortion, human experimentation, genetic engineering, organ transplantation, death and dying—Nelson gives a fair description of the various Protestant and Catholic positions. Typically, on abortion he says the right decision is inevitably made by “living beings immersed in widely varying patterns of social relationships,” reconciling the conflict between “the sanctity of the life of the fetus in one instance and the woman’s right to self-determination in the other.”

The other book in this group written by a Protestant also takes Niebuhr’s concept of responsibility as the fundamental category for bioethics, but tilts it in the direction of Fletcher’s utilitarianism. Kenneth Vaux talks of the necessity, in dealing with bioethical problems, of having a “retrospective” insight into traditional rights, as well as a “prescriptive” view of future consequences. He says these considerations of the past and the future are reconciled by “introspective” insight into the present relational situation. Benefits now and in the future are uppermost in his mind when he addresses his first concrete bioethical problem. “A human society should not only allow but facilitate abortion when a mother’s well-being, a family’s vitality, is severely threatened. It should be readily available and economically feasible.”

Vaux’s slim volume attempts too much theoretically and accomplishes too little concretely. In the few pages at his disposal at the beginning of the book the author cannot adequately explain and justify a rather ambitious and elaborate multi-part theological and philosophical scaffolding for what can be only a cursory fifty-page overview of the standard issues in bioethics. The theory is in its construction and defense, so that one remains rather uneasy about its conclusions on specific topics.

Vaux is a sprightly writer, however, and fundamentally well within the same community of discourse as the other writers in this group. The book, like Nelson’s, could serve as the basis for church or class discussion of the Christian’s response to recent biomedical discoveries.

The other two authors of complete books are Roman Catholic moral theologians. Some may be surprised at the extent to which they agree with the conclusions of their Protestant counterparts. True, Bernard Haring, no doubt the world’s best known Catholic moralist, begins his book not by adopting the Niebuhrian idea of responsibility but by explaining a concept more familiar to Catholic theology, that of nature. However, his description might well have enough flexibility to please the Protestant bioethicists. He defines nature as “the dynamic principle directing the development of that which is innate.” In its human form, nature, dynamically understood, is the basic standard for ethics. “I say that the decisive norm or criterion is the human person … the human person in the process of self-actualization through encounter with and in dedication to other persons.”

As he discusses the various problems, Haring remains in dialogue with the scientific data and the writings of his Protestant friends in ethics. For example, Haring agrees with Protestant bioethicists on the importance of physicians’ receiving free, informed consent from patients before experimenting on them, and on the value of distinguishing between ordinary and extraordinary means for prolonging life (a distinction refined by Catholic moral theology in the first place).

Even on abortion, the topic within bioethics that one might think would reveal the greatest split between Catholics and Protestants, Haring shows that there are points of convergence. Haring’s stress on dynamism and process in nature is consistent with his belief that with reference to a fetus “we cannot state a specific or accurate moment of hominization.” One can say that “as the fetus develops, there is an increasing degree of certainty that it has become a human being.” Haring does not retreat from the implications of his dynamic view of human nature:

I think it can be said that at least before the twenty-fifth to fortieth day, the embryo cannot yet (with certainty) be considered as a human person; or, to put it differently, that about that time the embryo becomes a being with all the basic rights of a human person [p. 89].

Haring’s twenty-five to forty days would still fall far short of the first three months allowed by United States Supreme Court for legal abortions virtually on demand, but it would provide Catholic bioethicists greater flexibility. As Haring himself says, “Up to the moment of complete individualization, the traditional judgment about the absolute immorality of the direct interruption of pregnancy might be modified in extreme cases of conflict of values and duties.” He is aware that his position allows greater conversation with Protestants. He mentions James Gustafson and Paul Ramsey, assuring his readers that there is “a wide area of common ground among Catholics and Protestants relative to abortion in general, even if there are different positions in difficult situations.”

In much of contemporary bioethics one figure looms in the background. Charles Curran makes explicit what emerges implicitly in the other books: Paul Ramsey may well be the dominant Christian ethicist writing on biomedicine. First of all, he is one of the two or three most respected Americans in the field of Christian ethics generally. Second, as Curran points out, he has written an impressively large and growing body of work specifically in bioethics. Third, and perhaps this is the most important reason, Ramsey attempts to draw together not only scientific data and Christian affirmations but concepts in philosophical normative ethics as well. Curran is right: “Any Christian ethicist discussing these question in the contemporary context must come to grips with the thought of Paul Ramsey.” Curran’s “coming to grips” grew to book-size proportions.

Like the three volumes discussed previously, Curran’s book could serve as an introduction to bioethics. The one hundred pages of parts three and four cover the major problem areas in the field, and readers can get a survey of the positions of two leading ethicists for the price of one. On the issue that we have followed through these various volumes, Curran substantiates Haring’s claim that at least some contemporary Catholic theologians can find basic agreement with Ramsey. Not only does Curran approve of Ramsey’s willingness to balance grave threats to the mother’s psychological health against the life of the fetus; he would go on to approve of an abortion when the continued life of the fetus endangered “values that are commensurate with life,” within which he explicitly includes “values of a socio-economic nature in extreme situations.” Curran hastens to add, “I would want to underline that these cases are comparatively rare.”

The book is clearly written, and provides an orderly outline of Ramsey’s sometimes shifting positions for those particularly interested in his work. It will be an especially useful for those who are familiar with Catholic bioethical positions and want them compared to the views of a leading Protestant scholar in the field of ethics.

Unfortunately, perhaps because of space constraints, Curran does not so much engage Ramsey in a dialogue as his subtitle, A Dialogue With Paul Ramsey, suggests. He follows an exposition of Ramsey’s position with a rather terse summary of his own views, with little argumentation or defense of them.

Anyone wanting to go beyond one of the introductory volumes might prefer to go directly to Paul Ramsey’s own books, especially Patient as Person. The reading would, frankly, be more exciting. One can not only follow Ramsey’s description of a problem in biomedicine and his exposition of how moralists have historically met analogous issues, but watch as a firstrate ethical mind moves into new territory, taking on new issues and daring to propose clear-cut answers. Somehow the adventure in Patient as Person even carries Ramsey past his well-known problem with style, about which Curran goes so far as to complain in his introduction. The Patient as Person is very readable.

Claude Frazier’s book is quite different from the others we have discussed here. It is a collection of essays covering a wide range of topics, many of them well beyond the field of bioethics, and many written by physicians themselves, reflecting on the social implications of their scientific work. Reading Frazier’s volume would not give one any coherent overall picture of the developing field of bioethics.

Perhaps the most interesting fact to emerge from a comparison of these books is that theologians responding to the problems of medicine and biology are not constructing a Protestant or Catholic position but contributing to a common Christian approach to bioethics. Protestants and Catholics may differ over the Supreme Court’s opinion concerning the legal status of abortion, but ethicists are finding areas of consensus on its moral status. In normative ethics the true unchartered frontier of ecumenism is the dialogue between religious and philosophical ethics. Even here, a theoretical consensus may well be emerging on fundamental positions. But that is another story.

Ordering The Christian Home

One Home Under God, by Jack R. Taylor (Broadman, 1974, 157 pp., $4.95), and Christ in the Home, by Robert R. Taylor, Jr., (Baker, 1973, 282 pp., $3.95 pb), are reviewed by A. J. Conyers, pastor, Ila Baptist Church, Ila, Georgia.

Recent cynicism over the family’s present and future roles in society has increased the need for Christian answers to problems that plague the home. These authors contend that there are answers, and that if the Gospel bears upon human relations at all, then its power should be especially evident in the home. They seek to clarify both the problems and their biblical solutions.

In a number of ways Robert Taylor and Jack Taylor have taken similar approaches to a study of the Christian home. Both authors are convinced that problems of marriage, child rearing, and home management stem from a failure to acknowledge the God-given design for family living. Both deal with the difficult questions of submission and authority, and both point to Ephesians 5 as a key passage for understanding the dynamics of Christian order within the home.

Beyond these points, however, the similarity ends. Jack Taylor’s One Home Under God is like a testimony. The author ties his discussion together by telling, at each point, how his own family began to discover the reality of certain biblical teachings on family life that before had been rather shadowy concepts. Their discovery of the meaning of submission and authority in the home resulted in mended relationships and a new appreciation for the various roles of family members.

This author doesn’t avoid the hard questions. When right at the beginning he launches into the subject of wifely submission, one is almost afraid either that he will add fuel to the already hot suspicions of Paul’s feminist detractors, or that he will neglect the real thrust of the Apostle’s teachings, as some writers have done in recent years. Taylor avoids both of these pitfalls. In the first place, he says that submission involves both partners, not simply the wife. The beginning of his own family’s pilgrimage involved the realization, based on Ephesians 5, that “we were to submit ourselves to each other in the fear of the Lord.” In fact, the husband’s title to authority stems from that very act of submission. The pattern is found in Christ’s relationship to the Church: Christ gave himself for the Church and is therefore the head of the Church.

Building on this point, Taylor follows with an account of the biblical patterns that apply to each member of the family. The life in submission to God, framed by love for one another, has consequences that reach into every area of family concern. Such effects become quite evident in Taylor’s discussions of family finances and the life of worship, as well as in a chapter on coping with the minutiae of family life (“the little foxes”). The same principle it not quite so clear, though still felt, in his treatment of the preacher’s family (a chapter not just for preachers) and the Spirit-filled family life.

Robert Taylor’s Christ in the Home covers much the same ground but with less emphasis upon personal experience and more drawing upon biblical illustrations of family patterns. Chapters on the roles of husband, wife, and children are followed by portraits of Old and New Testament characters as they relate to these family roles. This author gives attention to a subject often neglected in works of this type in a chapter entitled “The In-law in the Home.” He also considers the potential witness of a well ordered Christian home to a world of marred values and broken relationships.

This author’s vigorous homiletical style forfeits some of the advantages of the written word. The writer is afforded the leisure to ponder various facets of his subject, reveal to his reader some of the finer points that lead him to certain conclusions, and work on building the reader’s sympathy in advance for a conclusion that may be a shade unpopular or unorthodox. Robert Taylor, however, doesn’t spend much time in pondering the finer points of his argument. His style is more that of the thundering pulpit, and at times his treatment is somewhat heavy-handed. Long-haired boys and mini-skirted girls come in for a scathing attack, as do their fathers, who are “derelict in their duty.” On such points a more considered approach might make the same argument more telling in its effect on the reader.

There is, nonetheless, one clear advantage in Robert Taylor’s direct approach. His central message, which he pursues with single-minded consistency, is unmistakably clear: when parents and children “lift up Christ and the Bible” in the home, their roles will likewise be exalted.

Lutherans And Charismatics

The Fire Flares Anew: A Look at the New Pentecostalism, by John Stevens Kerr (Fortress, 1974, 112 pp., $2.95 pb), and Gifts of the Spirit and the Body of Christ, edited by J. Elmo Agrimson (Augsburg, 1974, 112 pp., $2.95 pb), are reviewed by Erling Jorstad, professor of history and American studies, St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota.

Among the many titles now being published on the charismatic renewal, or neo-Pentecostalism, these two merit particular attention because of the specialized information they contain. Each focuses sharply on specific aspects that are not well covered in other works.

The Fire Flares Anew is by the senior editor for youth of the Lutheran Church in America. Its particular virtue is that it gives over half of its space to a careful exegetical and theological study of the ministry and understanding of the Holy Spirit from Old Testament writings, through the New Testament, and on into the early church fathers.

Kerr contacts the traditional view of the work of the Holy Spirit, which he calls the “continuing-collective,” with the Pentecostalist, which is the “individual-spontaneous” view. The Church has said the Spirit is an ever-present reality in the believer’s life accessible through the sacramental life of the Church. Pentecostalists have held that the Spirit comes to individuals, not through churches but in a spontaneous manner, making his presence known instantly through the manifestation of one or more of the spiritual charismata. Kerr concludes that “the biblical evidence doesn’t settle the Pentecostal issue squarely either way.”

Kerr also explains clearly why the forms of charismatic renewal are appealing to so many (he estimates participants number nearly a million adults in America) today: they find a closer walk with God; they like the spontaneous freedom of worship; they cherish the small group, individualized prayer meetings; and they agree with the individualized ethics accent. Kerr lauds the first two but feels the last two could split apart church bodies, and finds dangers of obsessive self-centeredness in celebrating individual, rather than social, renewal. He concludes with a sound summary of unique Pentecostal-charismatic teaching and makes clear that he feels most mainline charismatics are really Pentecostal in their theology.

The Agrimson volume has an entirely different purpose. Written more for the parish pastor and the lay leader than for the general public, the volume explores charismatic renewal from several academic disciplines: biblical theology, church history, sociology, psychology, systematic theology, and pastoral ministry. The editor makes no attempt to synthesize these perspectives; the reader is left to make what application he needs for his own congregation.

The essays show we know a good deal about the biblical teachings about the spiritual gifts (described in an excellent essay by Duane Priebe); we have considerable experience in counseling congregations split over the charismata; and we know on what we agree and disagree in the matter of spirit baptism.

The other essayists try to show how the charismatic movement can be understood from their particular perspectives. The historian Paul G. Sonnack presents wise and carefully balanced comparisons between today’s renewal and that of Finney’s search for holiness. John P. Kildahl summarizes his long-term research into the psychology of speaking in tongues and concludes that the phenomenon is understandable by psychology and linguistic scholarship. It would be helpful to know how extensive his sampling has been.

The essay searching for sociological explanations of the renewal adds little understanding because the author has no real theoretical foundations or empirical studies on which to build.

The charismatic renewal cannot be understood purely from the historical, psychological, or sociological perspectives. Charismatics are talking about Scripture and prayer life and transformed lives. To minister to them and to their critics in those realms is a challenge to which this volume, despite its limitations, makes a significant contribution.

NEWLY PUBLISHED

Hebrew Christianity: The Thirteenth Tribe, by B. Z. Sobel (John Wiley and Sons, 413 pp., $12.50), and Hebrew Christianity: Its Theology, History, and Philosophy, by Arnold Fruchtenbaum (Canon [1014 Washington Bldg., Washington, D. C. 20005], 139 pp., $2.50 pb). Sobel is a sociologist who attended Hebrew Christian activities in order to learn first-hand about the long neglected movement. His observations, historical survey, and bibliography make this an extremely significant book. Fruchtenbaum writes as an insider; the book is useful as a brief overview. He advocates Hebrew Christian fellowships in addition to, rather than instead of, separate Jewish churches.

Where in the World Are the Jews Today?, by James and Marti Hefley (Victor, 175 pp., $1.75 pb), and My Heart’s Desire For Israel, by Richard DeRidder (Presbyterian and Reformed, 126 pp., $1.95 pb). The Hefleys give the Gentile a brief introduction to Jewish history, from Abraham to the present, including information on Jewish Christians. DeRidder offers a more theological treatise on Jewish-Christian relations, especially as they relate to evangelism.

The Gospel of Moses, by Samuel Schultz (Harper & Row, 165 pp., $5.95). The widely known teacher of Old Testament at Wheaton offers a fresh survey of the thirty-nine books stressing God’s graciousness in dealing with Israel.

The Science of Religion and the Sociology of Knowledge, by Ninian Smart (Princeton, 165 pp., $8.50). A guide for the scientific study of religion as distinct from “theologizing.” Introduces methodological questions important in such a study.

The Last and Future World, by James Montgomery Boice (Zondervan, 148 pp., $1.95 pb). A pastor holding premillennial views presents a well-balanced overview of prophecy and is fair to those with whom he differs. Originally a series of sermons.

The Nature of Human Consciousness, edited by Robert Ornstein (Viking, 512 pp., $15). Forty-one articles from a variety of psychologists and religious thinkers.

Great People of the Bible and How They Lived (Reader’s Digest, 432 pp., $14.95). A chronological narrative of the major biblical figures, interspersed with cultural, social, and geographical background. Large pages. Color photos, sketches, and maps admirably augment this readable history. Helpful for Sunday-school teachers and families.

Jesus and Christian Origins Outside the New Testament, by F. F. Bruce (Eerdmans, 216 pp., $3.45 pb). Pertinent data from pagans, Josephus, the rabbis, the apocryphal gospels, Islam, and archaeology are skillfully and readably marshalled by the dean of evangelical biblical scholars. Bruce does not set out to “prove” the reliability of the primary documents, the New Tsetament. Therefore this book is especially valuable for those falling prey to the fanciful, but widely publicized, alternative accounts of how Christianity began.

Trumpeter of God: A Biography of John Knox, by W. Stanford Reid (Scribners, 353 pp., $12.50). A major study that should be of interest far beyond Presbyterian borders. The author is a leading evangelical professor of history.

The Justification of Religious Belief, by Basil Mitchell (Seabury, 180 pp., $8.95). Demonstrates that the problems faced philosophically in defending theism are not peculiar to religious discourse. Seeks to clarify the grounds of discussion among competing world views.

The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire, by T. R. Glover (Canon [1014 Washington Bldg., Washington, D. C. 20005], 359 pp., $8.95). Reprint of a highly commended and very readable work of classical scholarship that examines early Christianity against the background of politics, literature, and religion.

The Negro Church in America, by E. Franklin Frazier and The Black Church Since Frazier, by C. Eric Lincoln (Schocken, 216 pp., $2.95 pb). A decade-old classic is augmented in this edition by an equally long account of recent events.

Georges Bernanos, by Robert Speaight (Liveright, 285 pp., $8.95). The first full-length biography of a French Catholic novelist and polemicist (1888–1948) whose abhorrence of evil is reflected in his best-known work, translated as The Diary of a Country Priest.

I and II Esdras, by Jacob Myers (Doubleday, 384 pp., $8). Latest addition to the Anchor Bible series of commentaries and the first volume to appear on the Apocrypha.

Living Animals of the Bible, by Walter W. Ferguson (Scribners, 95 pp., $9.95). Large pages, colorful illustrations, brief descriptions of all the animals (lions to leeches) mentioned in the Old Testament and still extant somewhere. Fortunately distinguishes guesses from certainties.

Sharpening the Focus of the Church, by Gene A. Getz (Moody, 320 pp., $5.95). Detailed look at the Church as depicted in Scripture, and a brief look at its character over the centuries and the influence of the culture on it. Suggests a practical contemporary strategy. Keen insights by a professor of education at Dallas Seminary.

When All Else Fails … Read the Directions, by Bob Smith (Word, 151 pp., $4.95). Challenging and helpful book on how congregations today can function in the light of God’s Word according to a specific example. Highly recommended.

The American Puritan Imagination, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge, 265 pp., $10.95, $3.95 pb). Twelve essays examining Puritans from a literary viewpoint. Sheds considerable light on theology.

Word Meanings in the New Testament: Romans, by Ralph Earle (Beacon Hill, 261 pp., $4.75). Studies of nearly 350 Greek words and phrases from Romans. This is the first of five projected volumes on the whole New Testament by a leading evangelical scholar.

The Case For Entire Sanctification, by Pascal Belew (Beacon Hill, 79 pp., $1.50 pb). The distinctive doctrine of Nazarenes, Free Methodists, Wesleyans and others in the “holiness movement” is often misrepresented by others. This basic explanation and appeal is for those who wish to consider the scriptural arguments that can be marshalled.

Scottish Theology, by John Macleod (Banner of Truth, 350 pp., $6.50). Covering the period from the Reformation, this 1943 volume by a Calvinist scholar is reprinted with the addition of a much-needed index.

Death in the Secular City, by Russell Aldwinckle (Eerdmans, 194 pp., $3.95 pb). A theology professor affirms the existence of personal, individual life after death. A scholarly treatment.

On Taking God Out of the Dictionary, by William Hamilton (McGraw-Hill, 255 pp., $8.95). A treatise on the aftermath of the “death of God” movement by one of its “theologians.”

Purity Crusade: Sexual Morality and Social Control, 1868–1900, by David Pivar (Greenwood, 308 pp., $10.95). Religious social activism after the Civil War was directed not only toward temperance but also against the legalization of prostitution. This is a scholarly study of the latter movement and its related causes.

Relativism in Contemporary Christian Ethics, by Millard J. Erickson (Baker, 170 pp., $3.95 pb). A critique of situation ethics by a professor at Bethel Seminary. It is accompanied by an alternative structure that rests on the glorification as the first principle. Views of the ramifications of situationist positions help the reader see their weaknesses. For the general reader.

Chautauqua, by Theodore Morrison (University of Chicago, 350 pp., $10.50). A scholar offers a centennial history, well illustrated, of the widely known religious institution in far western New York State. For the general reader.

A History of Christianity in the World, by Clyde L. Manschreck (Prentice-Hall, 378 pp., $7.95). Thumbnail sketch of Christianity throughout the world, from Pentecost to the present. Captures the major trends and personalities.

Cults and the Occult in the Age of Aquarius, by Edmond Gruss (Presbyterian and Reformed, 132 pp., $1.25 pb). Brief chapters, with good bibliographies on a dozen or so groups. Besides the usual older deviations from Christianity such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, many of the currently active groups are presented such as Armstrongism and Scientology. Highly recommended.

Theology: White, Black, or Christian?, by Warner Jackson (Herald Press, 48 pp., $.75 pb). A middle-of-the-road statement on the race issue that attempts to put the focus on Christ’s teachings. The author, a black pastor, points out the errors and inconsistencies of both black and white reaction. Concise and helpful.

The Interpretation of Prophecy, by Paul Lee Tan (BMH Books, 435 pp., $6.95). Comprehensive defenses of the principles underlying dispensational eschatology together with consideration of some of its specific conclusions.

God, Secularization, and History, edited by Eugene Long (University of South Carolina, 161 pp., $7.95). Nine essays in memory of the Scottish theologian Ronald Gregor Smith.

William Culbertson: A Man of God, by Warren Wiersbe (Moody, 176 pp., $4.95). Popular biography of the late Episcopal (Reformed rather than Protestant) bishop and president of Moody Bible Institute.

Isaiah 13–39, by Otto Kaiser (Westminster, 412 pp., $12.50). For advanced scholars.

Ideas

Another Autumn?

The Editors

In an address to the United States House of Representatives September 25 commemorating the two hundredth anniversary of the convening of the Continental Congress, journalist-scholar Alistair Cooke warned his hearers that the United States and the world today are faced with three immense dangers: crime and violence in the cities has become greater than at any time since the fifteenth century; the prospects of world-wide, ruinous inflation are greater than at any time since the 1920s; and overshadowing all the rest there is the prospect of man’s nuclear self-extermination.

The content of Mr. Cooke’s address, apart from a few pertinent biblical allusions, was almost entirely secular. Even so, and despite the festive nature of the occasion, he voiced a sense of foreboding strongly resembling the apocalyptic mood expressed by Malcolm Muggeridge at the Lausanne congress in July (printed in CHRISTIANITY TODAY, issue of August 16). Only a few days earlier, the American president and his secretary of state, on different occasions, had issued somber warnings of what the future may well hold in store if the nations of the world cannot change the course on which they are now headed.

It is significant that Cooke, with his acute sense of history and our relation to it, mentioned that we are in danger of reverting to conditions that have not existed since the fifteenth century, which was the last century of what we now call the Middle Ages, just before the dawn of the Protestant Reformation. Of course, many factors, secular and spiritual, coincided in bringing about the change from the medieval to what we call the modern: the voyages of discovery, colonization of the sparsely populated and immensely rich American continents, the rediscovery of classical civilization and art that we call the Renaissance, and the humanistic revival that promoted—among much else—the study of the Scriptures in their original languages. This last accomplishment Luther, Erasmus, and Calvin had in common, however great their differences otherwise may have been. Now many factors combine to threaten a dismal transition, being predicted by many, to what Roberto Vacca has called The Coming Dark Age (Doubleday, 1973). Other students of modern society, though they may share the Christian faith and hence have an assurance about eternity entirely different in quality from the hope-against-hope of the secularistic futurologists, nevertheless find it hard to be optimistic about mankind’s prospects on this earth. Thus Jacques Ellul, in several works, seems to suggest that the Christian’s only valid attitude is one of suffering witness in a dying world order, the expectation of a crown of life that will come only, in the words of St. Stephanos, “sorrow vanquished, labor ended, Jordan passed.”

There is tremendous reassurance in the confidence that, though in the world we have tribulation, Jesus Christ has overcome the world, and that we, if we suffer with him, shall also reign with him. Yet the fact that Christians have this confidence, which can be a great source of strength at a time when the world seems to lie in the valley of the shadow of death, should not mean that we are without hope or expectation for our present age. The fifteenth century, to which Cooke referred and which Johan Huizinga called “the autumn of the Middle Ages,” was a troubled century indeed, and it was followed not by the darkness of winter but rather by a springtide of the re-emergence of the Gospel.

With the rediscovery and reinterpretation of the evangelical faith initiated by Luther and the other Reformers there came something that had been sadly lacking in Huizinga’s “autumn”: assurance of personal salvation, confidence about one’s standing with God. With the confidence that one could, in the words of Luther’s hymn, with impunity “let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also” and surely be received into the Father’s house, came a rediscovery of the biblical pattern for personal life and conduct and a far-reaching transformation of society.

American society, and what is loosely called “Christian civilization” as a whole, has virtually cut itself off from its biblical base, and in consequence has forfeited not only the personal assurance that comes with evangelical faith but also the quality of social peace that comes with a general respect for the principles of biblical law. However, as long as it is still day, what has been largely forfeited may yet be regained. Perhaps our cold, dark, and anxious winters can be followed by a rediscovery and recovery of the Reformation confidence of the sureness of God’s salvation. Even as we despair of so many of our secular works, we can still have recourse to the finished work of Christ, which can be ours by grace, through faith, apart from the works of the Law.

A new Reformation, based on a renewed attentiveness and obedience to the revealed Word of God, will certainly accomplish what Hebrews says, in bringing “many children to glory” (2:10). And it may well do more than that, in bringing new justice, fresh honesty, and ultimately renewed life to institutions and nations already anxiously regarding the lengthening shadows of a coming dark age.

Newspeak Again?

Americans, on the winning side during World War II, used to mock Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’ practice of cloaking defeats in circumlocutions such as “executed a planned withdrawal to previously prepared positions.” In George Orwell’s dystopian vision of the future, Nineteen Eighty-Four, governments impose an entirely new language in order to obtain complete spiritual conformity from their faceless subjects. In his monumental study Propaganda, Christian sociologist Jacques Ellul describes how the tremendous literacy campaign of Mao Tse-tung’s China provided hundreds of millions of new readers with nothing but Mao’s thoughts to read, and hence largely determined what the world’s most populous nation would think.

In the normally more critical, even cynical West, we too have succumbed, perhaps through the force of constant repetition, to the habit of using the tendentious, Newspeak-like terminology of the Communist world in our everyday speech. We readily speak of “people’s democracies” and use the word “liberation” to mean the kind of violent revolution that imposes a totalitarian dictatorship (progressive, of course!).

Unfortunately the American government itself, supported by a large part of the media, is moving toward the practice of introducing new, often meaningless or even misleading terminology to accustom people to accepting ideas and policies that they would find obnoxious if presented in a clearly understood form. For example, Congress has specifically forbidden the impostion of racial and other quotas in educational and hiring practices. But the Department of Health, Education and Welfare has successfully circumvented this law in its Affirmative Action program by not imposing “quotas” but requiring subject institutions to set “goals” acceptable to HEW. The word quota has a bad sound to Americans, reminiscent of discriminatory immigration policies, but goal, of course, is a good word.

Another ominous Newspeak trend in America is the division of the old concept of euthanasia (mercy killing) into “active” and “passive” euthanasia. It has long been standard medical practice, acceptable or even desirable from an ethical point of view, to allow a dying person to die without further drastic measures to prolong his life when it is evident that such measures in effect only prolong the process of dying. Since this practice is hardly controversial, although it has no resemblance to “mercy killing,” to call it “passive enthanasia” accustoms the public to the term and helps to prepare the way for widespread acceptance of “active” or real euthanasia. Thus we avoid all the unpleasant moral and ethical controversy sure to be stirred up by any attempt to institute euthanasia, understood as “mercy killing,” as lawful and private policy.

Today the world is much closer to 1984 than when Orwell wrote, and the nearness is not only chronological. Christians, committed to a Word of God that has ultimate meaning and truth, above all others should struggle to prevent the language we use every day to describe and sometimes to determine our actions and our thoughts from slipping or being remolded into any kind of Newspeak.

The Oil Languisheth

“The field is wasted, the land mourneth, for the grain is wasted, the new wine is dried up, the oil languisheth” (Joel 1:10). From a period of unprecedented abundance, at least in the industrialized countries of the world, we are now moving into a situation similar to that described by Joel’s prophecy. A recent agricultural report from France indicates only that the grape harvest is outstanding, so this year at least the new wine has not dried up. But an outstanding grape harvest will scarcely help the French obtain oil, of which they must import over 90 per cent of their needs.

The situation in which the French may find themselves—trying to trade a huge surplus of unwanted wine for badly needed, extravagantly-priced oil—is all too typical of the situation facing all the highly developed countries and the oil-poor majority of underdeveloped ones. What they need is available only at tremendous cost; what they have to trade for it is unwanted or needed only in minimal quantities.

The few money-earning export items of India, for example, no longer suffice to pay that populous nation’s relatively small oil bill. With 600 million people (one-sixth of the total world population), India consumes less oil than France, but its minimum oil needs, at today’s exorbitant prices, have exhausted its foreign-exchange assets. India has less than nothing left with which to pay for other vitally needed imports. Their slow, slight progress towards minimally acceptable living conditions has now been drastically set back by an action that fattens the profits of the oil producers.

When the oil-producers quadrupled the price of oil in the wake of the Yom Kippur war, it was widely felt that this was primarily intended as a means of marshalling world-wide support against Israel, and that the prices would drop once the Arabs received some satisfaction in their conflict with that tenacious nation. It was not only the anti-Israel Arabs who quadrupled their prices, however: Indonesia, Nigeria, Venezuela, and even Canada acted in concert with the rest of the oil cartel.

The oil-producing nations have a right to a fair return on the resource of which they have something approaching a world monopoly. Oil is an exhaustible natural resource, and once it is gone, the countries that grew rich on oil profits may be impoverished if they have not prepared in advance for this turn of events. It may well be true that, even though the oil costs only a few cents a barrel to produce, a fair price for the producing nations would have to be higher than the approximately two dollars paid in the summer of 1973. But can a price be just if it impoverishes or destroys the consumer?

The whole world is rather in the situation of the Egyptians of Joseph’s day, who had to sell their land and their possessions and ultimately go into indentured service in order to pay Pharaoh for the stockpiled grain of which he had a monopoly—and which, ironically, they themselves had produced during the “fat years.” A curious modern parallel to the ancient Egyptian situation lies in the fact that it was the industrialized nations who discovered and developed for the largely undeveloped oil nations the resources they now are using to choke the economic life of the rest of the world.

Many in the traditionally Christian West have been conditioned to have a rather guilty conscience toward the Arabs, who were attacked and at times conquered by European Christians during several centuries of the so-called Crusades. (Of course, the territories for which they were fighting, including the Holy Land, had been Christian for centuries before the Muslims erupted onto the world scene in an unparalleled series of rapid conquests.) And there is no doubt that many Muslims have remained bitter toward the “Christian” West ever since the Crusades. The present policy of the oil cartel will indeed, within a few years, spell economic ruin for the rest of the world and with it a breakdown of world order.

Quite apart from the immorality of using a virtual monopoly to impoverish one’s trading partners, the oil-rich nations should recognize that the course on which they are presently embarked promises to end in disaster for everyone, not least themselves, whether they see it yet or not. If it is a Christian duty to serve the cause of peace, it is our obligation to warn the oil-rich states against driving the other nations of the world into a situation where possibly suicidal violence appears the only alternative to slower but sure strangulation.

The Breadth Of Christian Art

Robert Hughes writing in Time magazine recently called the Vatican’s newly opened collection of modern religious art “an embarrassing document of religion’s inability in recent years to provoke aesthetic responses.” Although many critics claim that we are in an “art explosion,” only a few artists are frequently cited as using biblical or liturgical themes and symbols for subject and inspiration—Salvador Dali, Paul Klee, Georges Rouault. And Dali at least was not an orthodox Christian.

Perhaps this dearth of Christian art is due to secularism or our “post-Christian” condition. Are young Christians with talent still too much influenced by their forebears who deeply distrusted art? Or is it that older Christians misunderstand the works of young Christian artists who have been influenced by Rouault, Picasso, and Klee?

Franky Schaeffer, painter son of L’Abri director Francis Schaeffer, claims that “art is usually viewed by churches as either something secondary or useless.” In an interview with Right On, the Berkeley-based paper sponsored by the Christian World Liberation Front, Franky explained that “Christian art is something much wider than Christian art as a ‘thing,’ as opposed to secular art.” He distinguishes between honest and dishonest art, rather than between secular and sacred art.

Rembrandt used both secular and sacred themes in his paintings, and today’s Christian artists want to do the same. The promise found in John 10:10 cannot be isolated into one acceptable area. Christian art must be more than a decoration for another medium. If it is not, we will continue to find, as Franky Schaeffer put it, “Christian art [that is] just the sterile message removed from life.” Evangelicals need to recapture the broad Christian understanding that made possible both “The Road to Emmaus” and “The Night Watch.” Otherwise we may see more and more young Christian artists turning to the opposite extreme—art for its own sake.

A Baleful Tax Proposal

Christian schools and institutions have traditionally had a hand-to-mouth existence. In the midst of the current raging inflation, their problems are greater than ever. And now one provision of a new tax bill proposed by the House Ways and Means Committee adds a further threat to their already precarious financial position.

For a long time tax laws have permitted people to donate items like land, houses, stocks, and works of art that have appreciated in dollar value without paying the capital-gains tax that would have been imposed had the items been sold instead. For instance, a person who had paid $100,000 for a farm now worth $500,000 could give the farm to a qualified organization and deduct from his taxable income (over a period of years if necessary) the $400,000 gain in value.

But under the new tax bill, before taking the deduction the donor would have to report the difference between the purchase price and the current value as ordinary income. Obviously the considerable tax advantage to donors that makes this sort of gift attractive would no longer exist.

There are good reasons for arguing that such a change would be unfair and counterproductive. In the first place, the gift item may not be any greater in actual purchasing power than when it was first bought. If the dollar value of a house has risen 500 per cent, the purchasing power represented by the house has not increased if the cost of what the owner would buy with the money from the sale has likewise increased 500 per cent. Even if the property owner simply sold the house without making a gift to charity, he would suffer a loss in purchasing power after he had paid his taxes. This is unfair.

Second, and more important, is the fact that charitable institutions will suffer. It is important that the government not fund religious work even if it were legal to do so, and it is important that the government not have a monopoly on educational, cultural, relief, and other forms of charitable work. Such endeavors should be encouraged, not hindered. This change in the tax laws would create problems that outweigh the financial gain to the government.

The legislators should take a hard look at the implications of this bill, and the taxpayers should let the lawmakers know where they stand.

Why Are People Starving?

While consumers in the industrialized countries grumble about rapidly climbing food prices and frequent shortages, North Africa, Honduras, and Bangladesh are reporting increasing numbers of deaths by starvation. Millions in India, too, are on the verge of death. Births are outpacing agricultural production, and the monopolistic pricing practices of the oil-rich nations are creating increasing shortages of vital fertilizers. Millions of people are sure to die of hunger. Hard decisions will have to be made about who will receive food from our limited supplies and who will be allowed to starve. Some are already beyond hope, and even if they could be kept alive, their existence is already reduced to a level that can hardly be called human.

Does God care about dying babies, small children with distended stomachs, adults reduced to skin and bones? If so, why does he do nothing about it? The answer is that God has in fact done something about it, but men refuse to accept what he has done. As a consequence, mankind is headed toward mass suicide. The multitudes—including the powerful and wealthy “elites”—refuse Jesus Christ, and turn instead to idols, whether to the literal idols of some Eastern religions or to the more sophisticated idols of the West: money, power, sexual indulgence.

The truth of God is being demonstrated in human history: as we sow, so shall we reap. Judgment always follows the repudiation of God and the offer of his free grace. And lest we think that because famine conditions are presently worse in several non-Christian nations, we who live in “Christendom” will be spared, we should reflect that much of the Christian world, while not “unevangelized,” is apostate, and that if we fail to repent, we too shall face the same and worse.

Yet there is hope. There is conditionality with God. A great word in Scripture is if. If people will turn to Christ, if they will love one another, if they will claim the promises of God—then God will respond and healing will come. Those of us who are Christians—and who, for the most part, live in wealthy and favored nations—should deprive ourselves of our luxuries and surpluses and do all that we can to alleviate the worst suffering of our fellow humans. And even as we try to remedy certain temporal ills, we must recognize and proclaim that ultimately, from the perspective of eternity, there is only one answer: not social service, revolution, or political change. The answer is Christ, who called himself the Bread of Life—and who can both help us to endure a difficult life in time and give us life eternal.

Coffin-Corner Kicks

Christians readily recognize that life is a struggle, what sportwriters used to call “a see-saw battle.” Ultimately we will win, because Christ’s atonement means the defeat of sin, death, and hell. But in the meantime we will be losing some battles. There are times when we are doing well simply to hold the line. We may even have to give up points, though we know that the final score will be in favor of God and his redeemed.

Here and there in Scripture we get instructions on how to behave while we are on the defensive, when it is not the time for aggressive initiatives. At one point Paul cites forgiveness as a defensive measure. He says he forgives “to keep Satan from gaining the advantage over us” (2 Cor. 2:11). This is inspired revelation, and we should heed it and acknowledge the connection between forgiveness and defense against Satan, even though we may not fully understand it. Evil has been done (Satan has gotten the ball), but to fail to forgive is to make matters worse (to let him gain ground on us).

Another admonition for defensive “play” is found in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians: we are to put on “the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” This much-preached-about passage tells us what to do when we are under attack, and we can draw a great deal of encouragement from the resources listed here.

The point is that it is not always possible to be carrying the ball and heading toward the goal line. Sometimes we must give up the ball, try to stand fast, and let the Holy Spirit call the plays.

One time-honored defensive maneuver has come back into its own in pro football this year because of some rule changes: the attempt to punt the ball out of bounds as close as possible to the opponents’ goal line. The idea in “kicking for the coffin corner” is to turn the ball over, but to put the other team in such a hole that it will play conservatively and nervously. Although the opponents will still be on the offense, they will be in a place where mistakes will cost them dearly.

Similarly, in the Christian’s life it’s a good principle to try to keep the enemy as deep in his own territory as possible. When he gains one advantage, we should not let discouragement cause us to let him have other advantages also.

Rebirth in Brazil

A report on Billy Graham’s mammoth crusade in Rio.

Despite long, intensive preparations and a healthy spirit, Billy Graham’s five-day crusade in Rio de Janeiro this month proved hard to get off the ground. The evangelical community in Brazil has been growing faster than that of any other country. Brazilian believers welcomed the Graham team with enthusiasm. The government went out of its way to help. All the potential seemed to be there for a series of meetings that would rival those conducted by Graham in Korea last year. Yet the crusade was no exception to the historical pattern in Brazil: evangelicals have repeatedly had to rely on miracles to overcome obstacles.

During the five days the air was warm but the overcast sky threatened rain every day. It did rain once, and the crowd was down to 30,000 that night. But Maracana stadium, largest in the world, is a beautifully designed structure with a large pillarless roof overhang that kept the people in the stands from getting wet.

The stadium is located in the heart of the city and is therefore quite accessible, except that parking is minimal and traffic maximal. Most people apparently came by public transportation.

The stadium’s sound system, thought inadequate, was set aside in favor of a special hookup using more than 150 speakers. Many in the audience still had trouble hearing, and to make matters worse vandals knocked eight of the speakers out of operation. Radio stations seized the opportunity to broadcast the proceedings live. But would the people come to the stadium if they could hear Billy Graham at home?

A crowd estimated at 85,000 attended the first service, on Wednesday night, October 2. The next evening the turnout dwindled to 50,000. On Friday, the rainy night in Rio, the total plummeted again.

Graham himself must have been feeling somewhat low by then. He had the additional problem of a family concern: after he had flown to Rio his wife Ruth fell out of a tree while putting up a swing for their grandchildren. She suffered a concussion and broken leg bones and was in the hospital with the prognosis not altogether certain.

The audio problems made preaching difficult because people were fidgety, distracting one another with conversation. The 55-year-old American evangelist repeatedly pleaded with the crowd to keep still. At one point he asked people to bow in prayer if they could not hear the message from the platform. “Silencio” signs were hastily painted and given to ushers to carry up and down the aisles.

Still another perplexity was the counseling of those responding to the invitation to receive Christ at the close of each service. Stadium officials refused to give ample access to the playing field, which is where inquirers normally stand. The field is separated from the stands by moats. Moreover, most of the stadium seating is in the second tier, which does not give access to the first.

The gloom produced by all the problems reached its peak on the night it rained. But in answer to the prayers of many around the world there was a sudden turnabout, psychologically, physically, and spiritually. The Palermo Brothers, a musical team from the United States, entertained the crowd from beneath a makeshift canopy on the platform. A local band added to the informality with some unscheduled numbers, and the crowd began to sing along.

The next morning Graham met with his team and crusade officials, and their spirits had obviously been buoyed. They seemed confident that the worst was over and were looking ahead to Saturday night and Sunday afternoon services. Surely many more people would come, if only because they would not have to rush to the stadium from their places of employment.

The miracle happened. Some 183,000 went through the turnstiles Saturday night. They were still coming an hour after the service began. Nearly 3,500 decisions for Christ were recorded, and doubtless many more vowed a spiritual turnaround privately.

The closing Sunday service drew some 250,000. The turnstiles counted 218,000, there were another 7,000 choir members and others given special admittance, and an additional 25,000 or so could not get in and listened to the service via a public-address system.

Not even the soccer matches, tremendously popular in Brazil, had ever attracted so many people to Maracana before. The throngs came despite live television coverage, reportedly by government order, throughout Brazil.

A school of evangelism held in connection with the crusade drew some 2600 registrants. The program featured several noted pastors from the United States. A school of Christian writing was also held to promote literature in Portuguese (spoken by more South Americans than Spanish).

The response was phenomenal, particularly for a country that has traditionally been considered the largest Roman Catholic country in the world. But it also represented a big dividend on a lot of investments. Brazil has more North American missionaries than any other country, and for good reason: only China, India, the Soviet Union, and the United States are bigger in population, and only those four and Canada are bigger in land area.

Actually, the Gospel has been making great headway in Brazil in recent years, and there are now believed to be more practicing evangelicals than Roman Catholics. Pentecostal groups have grown most rapidly. In a report prepared for the International Congress on World Evangelization, it was estimated that Protestants in Brazil now total almost 11 million (out of a population of 102 million). Roman Catholics claim about 85 per cent of the people, but fewer than 10 per cent attend mass as often as once a year. The one other big religious influence in Brazil is Macumba, the general term for a variety of spiritist sects that attract a great many Catholics and even some Protestants.

Perhaps the person for whom the crusade had the most meaning was the Reverend Harold Cook, who at 96 is believed to be the world’s oldest active missionary. He first went to Brazil from England in 1911, and still preaches regularly. He took part in the preparations and in the crusade itself.

“The Catholics in Brazil used to burn Bibles and churches,” he said. “Now they distribute Bibles and support evangelical work.”

Another person for whom the crusade was memorable was a 14-year-old boy whose mother gave birth to him while attending the only other rally Graham has even held in Rio. That one, too, was held at the Maracana. The parents named him after Billy Graham, and he was a guest of honor on the platform this month.

In a kind of sequel to that, the wife of the manager of Maracana gave birth to a girl during the most recent crusade (though not at the stadium), and the baby was named Ruth, after Graham’s wife.

The crusade director, who with his wife and son set up residence in Rio a full year before the crusade, was Henry Holley. He is a 47-year-old former U. S. Marine sergeant who has worked with Graham since 1967.

Translating for Graham was the Reverend Walter Kaschel, 61, a native Brazilian whose parents were Roman Catholic. He and his three brothers were converted during boyhood at a neighborhood Sunday school conducted by Southern Baptists.

Nilson Fanini, noted Brazilian Baptist pastor, served as president of the local crusade sponsoring committee.

A distinguished visitor, Dr. Michael Ramsey, archbishop of Canterbury, was on hand for the opening service of the crusade and when asked to bring a brief greeting used the occasion for a mini-sermon. Ramsey suggested that Christ’s love is best shown today through the ecumenical movement and through identification with the poor and underprivileged.

Graham’s own preaching stressed the cross. He urged Brazilians not simply to think of the cross as a great symbol but to appropriate Christ’s atoning work on the cross for forgiveness of sin. As he spoke, some in the stadium could see Rio’s famous statue of Christ the Redeemer atop a nearby hill.

African Impact

Two of Billy Graham’s associates came to help out at this crusade in Brazil after a memorable month of meetings in Rhodesia. Howard Jones and Archie Dennis, both black, reported on evangelistic services held in the four cities of Rhodesia with racially integrated audiences. Jones, the preacher for the team, said many of those who came to the meetings had never before participated in a service addressed by a black person or attended by both whites and blacks. The largest rally, attended by 12,000, took place in Salisbury, the capital. Traveling and ministering with Jones and Dennis were Gary Strong, Henry Davis, and Joseph Abston.

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