Adoption was quite common in the Graeco-Roman world. Under Roman law an adopted son was fully accepted as a member of the family, regarded in all respects as a real son. Certain formalities of adoption were observed. Witnesses were necessary who could vouch for the regularity of the procedure. Anyone who became a son by adoption was required to renounce all his former ties; even his debts were canceled, it appears. He was in many ways a new creature.

The discovery of the Nuzi archives throws some light on the practice of adoption in a Semitic culture. At Nuzi it was customary for a childless couple to adopt a son who would in every sense be a son while they lived and would receive the inheritance. But a natural son born after the adoption would become the chief heir.

The New Testament points to men and women who, having put their trust in Jesus Christ, are welcomed into God’s family, and duly recognized as sons of God (John 1:12, 13; Rom. 8:14–17). Adoption is seen as one of the objectives of divine predestination (Eph. 1:5, 8). Elsewhere there is reference to the future completion of this adoption at the time of the resurrection (Rom. 8:23); adoption is completed by the redemption of the body. Pfleiderer distinguished distinct moments in adoption. Here and now, adoption means freedom from the Law and the possession of the Spirit of adoption, which enables believers to address God as Father. Adoption will be completed with the full inheritance with Christ in glory. As another commentator, Meyer, has put it: “Believers have this blessing [adoption] already, but only in an inward relation and as Divine right, with which however the objective and real state does not yet correspond” (cf. Rom. 8:23).

Adoption as a son in God’s family is a relationship of grace and is of course different from the unique sonship of Christ, who was a son by nature. Nevertheless, the adopted son is given full family rights, including the right of access to the Father (Rom. 8:15), and he also shares with Christ in the divine inheritance (Rom. 8:17).

A. A. Hodge in The Confession of Faith makes these distinctions between several theological terms:

Justification effects only a change of relations. Regeneration and sanctification effect only inherent moral and spiritual states of soul. Adoption includes both. As set forth in Scripture, it embraces in one complex view the newly-regenerated creature in the new relations into which he is introduced by justification.

Just as justification is the consequence of our Lord’s atoning work, so adoption is the sequel of justification. On the basis of our acceptability to God, we have a new relationship and standing with him (Gal. 4:4, 5). This new position is confirmed to us by “the Spirit of adoption” (Gal. 4:6; Rom. 8:15)—the inward conviction established in us by the Holy Spirit himself.

Regeneration describes the change of nature that occurs when we are brought into God’s family, while adoption describes the change of position or status that is involved in the transition. The former is an inward and spiritual transformation; the latter points to the rights and privileges of sonship resulting from that transformation. In God’s purpose in grace, he foreordains us to “the adoption of sons.” He implements this by the work of the Holy Spirit in regeneration.

The benefits of adoption are many, the greatest no doubt being that the believer becomes a “partner of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4), bearing the divine stamp upon him and being the object, in a very special sense, of the divine love (Rom. 5:5–8).

C. A. Anderson Scott points out that “the crisis of what is called the conversion of John Wesley came when, in his own words, he ‘exchanged the faith of a servant for the faith of a son.’ ” In other words, he realized he had been adopted into God’s family.

The fatherhood of God in a personal and spiritual sense is applicable only to those who have received Christ as Saviour, even though in a general and philosophical sense God may be described as “the Father of the Universe.” Prayer is on the basis of filial relationship. Christ encouraged his disciples to address God as Father. And those who address God as Father must by implication belong to the same family and are, therefore, to see themselves as brothers and sisters in Christ.

The bearing of the doctrine of adoption on interpersonal relations is of particular significance at a time when there are so many breakdowns in this area of human experience. While adoption, first and foremost, means a new relationship with God, and this must ever be given the emphasis it deserves, the fact that as a corollary men and women from varied cultural, social, and racial backgrounds find themselves within God’s family on the basis of a fraternal relationship is of great importance. The psalmist declared, “God gives the desolate a home to dwell in” (Ps. 68:6), and this is good news indeed. The Church in the New Testament is described as both the household of faith (Gal. 6:10) and the household of God (Eph. 2:19). So often the impression given of the Church is that of an institution rather than a household. No doubt in the days when believers met for worship in one another’s homes it was easier to preserve the picture of family life. In some parts of the Western world where the Church as an institution is losing ground, there is evidence of its being renewed through house groups where men and women meet together in an informal atmosphere as brothers and sisters in Christ. Could it not be that with the passing of time the more institutional aspect of the Church has tended to predominate at the expense of the sense of close fellowship implied by the doctrine of adoption?

Our new status as children of God should be an incentive to holy living, since we now share a concern for the family name. In rejoicing in this new standing before God, we should always bear in mind that it has been made possible solely by the will of God the Father and in the light of the work of God the Son. “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:1, 2).

The early Church faced a heresy known as Adoptionism. The Ebionites, one of the earliest Jewish Christian groups, held such views, which were more clearly enunciated by the later Monarchian school that went by the name of Dynamism. Paul of Samosata, bishop of Antioch, was probably the outstanding spokesman of this school. Adoptionism holds that the man Jesus was promoted to be Son of God as a reward for his perfect obedience to God.

Those who follow this line come perilously near to the error of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are prepared to speak of our Lord as “Son of God” but only in “a secondary sense.” As G. C. Berkouwer comments, “the Gospel does not present Jesus Christ as a man whose secret is that, as a reward for his faithful fulfilment of a task, he is adopted as Son of God: it rather speaks to us of the divine quality of this work which he, the man Jesus Christ, has performed.”

We, sinful men and women, have by the matchless grace of God been “adopted” into the divine family. The Divine Son, however, enjoys a unique position as God’s only Son. Yet such is the measure of God’s grace that despite this distinction, we are nevertheless referred to as “heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ” (Rom. 8:17).

THE GIRAFFE

Stiff necked, without voice:

Original sin

Was built in.

But given a choice

Of ark

Or shark

I bent my head to save my skin.

LIONEL BASNEY

George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”

Missionary activity has long been so closely associated with the United States, England, Europe, Canada, and Australia that the West was assumed to hold a virtual monopoly on foreign missions. Only a few of the most wide-awake missionary leaders knew that this really was not so. Perhaps a turning point in awareness occurred at the April 12, 1972, meeting of the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association in St. Louis, when the program was built around missions from the Third World, with papers presented by Warren Webster, Philip Hogan, and myself. Others such as L. L. King and George Peters had also been doing some preliminary work on the matter.

Curiously, the meeting of 400 IFMA/EFMA (Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association, Evangelical Foreign Missions Association) executives at Green Lake, Wisconsin, in September, 1971, on mission-church relations did not include Third World missions on the agenda. The formula for study there helpfully evolved from mission-church relationships to church-mission-church (thus including the home or sending churches), but it never quite reached the church-mission-church-mission concept. Only afterwards, as the post-GL’71 symposium developed (now published by Moody Press under the title Church/Mission Tensions Today), did it become evident that not enough time and thought had been spent on how to encourage the younger church to be truly missionary-minded.

Third World leaders have been aware of this lack for some time. Chua Wee Hian, secretary of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, once stated, “Most of my missionary friends confess that they have never preached a single sermon on missions to the young churches.” James Wong of Singapore says, “In the past, the evangelization of Asia has been retarded because of the failure of Western missions to encourage Asian Christians to organize their own missions and thereby extend the faith.”

Ralph Winter’s chapter in Church/Mission Tensions Today carries the significant title “Planting Younger Missions.” Other contributors such as Ian Hay and Grady Mangham stress the need to move from national churches to national missions, and they have presented some new facts to the Christian public.

But more facts were needed. This challenge was taken up in early 1972 by a research team at the Fuller Seminary School of World Mission composed of James Wong, Peter Larson, and Edward Pentecost. In five months they unearthed some fascinating information reflecting the activity of the Spirit of God in raising up a growing missionary movement out there in the Third World. With the cooperation of World Vision’s Edward Dayton and William Needham, they have produced a pioneer research report. It was published in Singapore recently as Missions From the Third World (available from William Carey Library, 533 Hermosa St., South Pasadena, Calif. 91030).

One of the first steps in the research process consisted of listing the names and addresses of 697 persons who might be able to provide data. The team sent letters and questionnaires to all of them, and a good 34 per cent response filled their files with new facts. They then compiled a bibliography of 164 entries, combing every available written source. They interviewed scores of missionaries and national workers and corresponded with others who had done research of one kind or another.

The definition of “Third World missions” was, of course, an essential starting point. They decided to include all the non-Western countries in their definition of Third World, using the cultural (as contrasted to political or economic) criterion. This includes affluent countries like Japan as well as Third World cultures in the United States such as the Chinese.

The team first reduced the definition of “missions” to Protestant missions, and then attempted to include basically those sending agencies that were sending missionaries cross-culturally or cross-geographically with an underlying evangelistic motive. This included missions from one culture or another within a single country, such as a South Indian to North India, and also, for example, a Japanese sent to Brazil to minister to a Japanese colony there. The team admitted that these criteria were not always easy to communicate or follow through consistently, but at least they did provide some rough guidelines.

More recently, these definitions have been further refined and labeled. The symbols M1, M2, and M3 have now come to mean:

Missions-one (M1). Missionaries sent from one culture to people of the same culture. In Acts 1:8 this would correspond to “Jerusalem and Judea,” or today to a Hong Kong Chinese sent to minister to his own people in Los Angeles.

Missions-two (M2). Missionaries sent from one culture to a slightly different culture. In Acts it would be “Samaria” and today perhaps a Portuguese-speaking Brazilian to Spanish-speaking Bolivia.

Missions-three (M3). Missionaries sent from one culture to a radically different culture. In Acts “to the uttermost parts of the earth,” and today a Nigerian to Indonesia.

A second set of symbols, G1 and G2, mean:

Geography-one (G1). Workers sent from one part of the country to another such as from Java to Kalimantan within Indonesia.

Geography-two (G2). Workers sent from one country to another.

Thus, six possible combinations of symbols emerge—e.g., M3/G1, M3/G2. Five of them, M1/G1 being excepted, are included in the concept of Third World missions.

The report, which is admittedly incomplete, locates 209 sending agencies in the Third World. They are currently sending out 3,411 missionaries. This is a conservative estimate made by counting five missionaries for each agency that did not report the exact number, conservative because the actual average of groups that did state their numbers was 26.2 missionaries. No one knows how many agencies did not report, but there may be a substantial number of them not yet discovered. Even since the report was written, new information has been coming in, and frequent updating will be necessary.

The ten top countries, according to the number of missionaries sent, are:

The ten top agencies mentioned in the report are:

Now we know much about Third World missions that we did not imagine previously. I have selected five items of particular interest arising from the report.

1. The concept of Third World missions has a long history. Although research has not yet turned up hints that such nineteenth-century missiologists as Henry Venn and John Nevius thought in these terms, some references in the writings of Rufus Anderson (1796–1880) suggest that indigenous churches should themselves engage in foreign missions. Further study will show whether this was stressed earlier within the modern missionary movement. Perhaps some historian of missions will begin to write on unknown missionary greats with names like Joseph Merrick of Jamaica, Joeli Bulu of Tonga, or Ini Kopuria of the Melanesian Brotherhood.

Few of us have been aware that the evangelization of West Cameroon in Africa was pioneered from Jamaica in the 1830s. The Karens of Burma began missionary work in 1833, moving out to the Kachins and to Thailand. In 1907 Korean Presbyterians were sending missionaries to Cheju Island. The Bataks of Indonesia used the annual fall harvest festival as a missionary conference to raise money for missions to Malaya and to other Indonesian tribes as early as 1930. Many other examples are given in the report, and undoubtedly many still are waiting to be discovered.

2. Some U. S. missions are setting the pace. Although a good many of the sending agencies in the Third World have sprung up as a movement of the Holy Spirit apart from Western influence, some U. S. missions have been conscientious about encouraging the churches they have planted to start missionary programs. Outstanding among these are the Christian and Missionary Alliance (38 missionaries from Asia alone), the Overseas Missionary Fellowship (15 Third World missionaries), the Southern Baptists (250 Brazilian missionaries), and the Sudan Interior Mission (now 115 missionary couples from Nigeria). Unfortunately, these are exceptions. By and large, our Western missionary agencies have not yet caught the vision.

3. Definite patterns for missionary work in Africa can be discerned. Edward Pentecost has divided the patterns of African missionary activity into four categories:

a. The traditional denominational church affiliated with the ecumenical movement. With one possible exception there was no missionary work reported among these churches.

b. The IFMA-EFMA related churches. Missionary work is patterned after the mother organization and is often carried on with substantial financial subsidy from the United States. The SIM-ECWA (Sudan Interior Mission-Evangelical Churches of West Africa) work in West Africa would be an exception to this. Ian Hay, in Church/Mission Tensions Today, states that in 1970 they were sending out ninety-seven couples on an annual budget, raised from the African churches, of only $20,682.79. Many mission administrators would like to learn this secret!

c. The separated African churches. These churches, separated from Western missions, continue many of the Western patterns and seemingly have little missionary outreach.

d. The African independent movements. Several but not all of these movements have dynamic missionary programs all their own. Patterns have been formed that do not look at all like our traditional way of doing missionary work. One of them is based on migration, for example. Pentecost says, “These migration units are often the entire family, who go to another region, set up house and farm within the new area, and simply continue their life style in another location.”

4. Japanese missions have joined together. Japan leads the list of countries of reported mission agencies with thirty-two. The Japan Overseas Missionary Association, a group similar to the IFMA, was set up in July, 1971, bringing together eleven Japanese sending agencies.

5. The West is now receiving missionaries. When missionaries come from the Third World back to the original sending countries, missions has gone the full cycle. The report has located Third World missionaries ministering in Australia, Canada, England, France, Greece, Portugal, and the United States. In November, 1971, the head of the Church of the Lord (Aladura), which started in Nigeria, attended the inauguration of their first church in New York City! Other congregations of the Church of the Lord had previously been established in England.

Perhaps the key event of recent times in the development of Third World missions will take place in Seoul, Korea, in August, 1973. Inspired and organized by three top Asia leaders—Bishop Chandu Ray of Singapore, Akira Hatori of Japan, and David Cho of Korea—this All-Asia Missionary Conference will gather missionaries and missionary leaders from many Asian countries. The first four days will be closed-door sessions—for Asians only. During the final two days a select group of Western missiologists will be present as observers. It is clearly a sign of the times.

The phenomenon of Third World missions is now a fact of life, and a development we can thank God for. However, this thrilling fact should in no way diminish the missionary zeal of the Western world. Almost three billion people in our generation have yet to hear of Christ.

Rather than cut back, we should concentrate on increasing our Western missionary effort and at the same time pray that our brethren in the Third World will increase theirs. The task of fulfilling the Great Commission is larger, humanly speaking, than we could possibly accomplish with our combined present resources.

George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”

In the past, a proliferation of translations of Scripture, especially of the New Testament, has usually resulted in issuance of an “authorized” translation. Bishop Damascus of Rome (ca. 382) asked Jerome to settle the problem of differing Latin translations by a single “authorized” version, which became the Latin Vulgate. The Syriac Peshitta perhaps originated as an authorized attempt to supplant differing translations. And, of course, this is also the history of our English Authorized Version (AV), more commonly known as the King James Version (KJV).

We are once again in a period of “competing” translations. To some people this seems desirable: a comparison of translations may give the lay reader a broader perspective on the possible meaning of the Hebrew or Greek text. But for others it results in hopeless confusion. Compare, for example, three strikingly different alternatives given by the Revised Standard Version (RSV), the New American Standard Bible (NASB), and the New English Bible (NEB) to the literal but ambiguous text of the KJV in First Corinthians 7:36, “But if any man think that he behaveth himself uncomely toward his virgin.…” (1) “If any one thinks that he is not behaving properly toward his betrothed …” (RSV). (2) “But if a man thinks that he is acting unbecomingly toward his virgin daughter …” (NASB). (3) “But if a man has a partner in celibacy and feels that he is not behaving properly towards her …” (NEB).

Those who see value in having a variety of translations either buy several, or use a compilation in parallel columns (such as CHRISTIANITY TODAY’s The New Testament in Four Versions), or resort to something like The New Testament From 26 Translations (Zondervan).

For the rest there remains the strong desire for an “authorized” version. However, the possibilities of this in our day seem very slender. To be sure, the National Council of Churches placed its imprimatur on the RSV, but that very fact made it suspect to thousands of Christians who oppose the NCC. The best of British scholarship offered us the NEB, but for many an imprimatur from “liberal” scholarship was as bad as one from the NCC.

The final alternatives are either to cling to the old (the KJV) as a kind of nostalgic refuge in the midst of uncertainty or to ask some “authority” his opinion. But alas, if one asks more than one “authority,” he is likely to end up in the same confusion that prompted the question.

My purpose in this essay is not to set myself up as another “authority,” though I do have some strong preferences, but rather to suggest some bases for choice that even the “authorities” must use, and to give reasons for confidence in any one of several contemporary translations as generally adequate English representations of the original Greek text.

I

The most common criterion for choosing a translation is, for want of a better term, taste. By “taste” I mean all those factors involved in an adequate communication of words and ideas from one language to another. It will include questions of (1) the propriety of the English idiom (people raised on the classical idiom of the KJV may think the Cottonpatch paraphrase borders on blasphemy), (2) the ability of that idiom to communicate to the reader (one of the reasons why such paraphrases as those by J. B. Phillips and Kenneth Taylor are so popular), and (3) the suitability of the new idiom for expressing the intent of the original author (in this area the science of linguistics plays a vital role).

In this regard, such contemporary translations as the Jerusalem Bible (JB), Today’s English Version (TEV), the RSV, and the NEB succeeded with varying degrees of excellence. (Many, including myself, feel that the NASB fails on point three: it tends to be a bit too wooden, too literal a rendering of the Greek idiom.)

Ii

However, the basic criterion is not taste but text. That is, the basic question is whether the Greek text used by the translator adequately represents what the biblical author originally wrote. At this point, the contemporary translations as a group have one thing in common: they tend to agree against the KJV and its eccentric offspring, King James II, in omitting hundreds of words, phrases, and verses. The reason is that, although these translations have usually been based on various Greek texts, those differing texts have a common base. This means that although the problems of finding the “original” New Testament text is not fully solved, there is a consensus among scholars—and that consensus is in favor of a text differing noticeably from the Greek text from which the KJV was translated.

But who is to say what the “original” text looked like? What is the layman to think when he hears conflicting “authorities” speak with confidence about the “original Greek”? Although these questions will not be answered to everyone’s satisfaction, at least it may be helpful to know what textual scholars have been, and are, up to.

Iii

The problem faced by the textual critic is a combination of three factors: (1) The originals, probably written on papyrus scrolls, have perished. (2) For more than 1,400 years everything was copied by hand, and the scribes made every conceivable kind of copying error as well as deliberate changes to the text. (3) There are now, in whole or in part, 5,338 known Greek handwritten copies (manuscripts), plus hundreds of copies of early translations, plus the evidence from the biblical quotations in the writings of the early Church Fathers.

The vast quantity of biblical material far surpasses that of all other documents of equal antiquity combined, and is for the New Testament textual critic both his fortune and his problem. It is his fortune in that with such abundance, he can be reasonably sure that the original text is to be found somewhere in the available material. Unlike those searching for other original texts (including the Old Testament), he scarcely ever needs to resort to emendation, or correcting the text because he cannot make sense of what is found in all the manuscripts.

However, no two copies anywhere are exactly alike, and the greater the number of copies, the greater the number of differences (variants, readings) among them.

His problem, then, is to sift through all the material, detect the errors, and try to determine what the inspired biblical author himself actually wrote.

Although this seems to be a formidable task and one on which 100 per cent certainty is never obtainable, careful study has led scholars to approximately a 95 per cent certainty about the original text. Where uncertainty remains, it is due partly to the emphasis on different principles among scholars and partly to the very difficulty of choice in some cases. It is in this small percentage of uncertainty that one will find most of the differences among contemporary translations. A closer look at each of factors two and three—scribal errors and changes, and the vast number of copies available—should serve to reveal the textual scholar at his craft as well as to indicate where we are in the quest for the original text.

Iv

To begin with factor three: the problem of sifting through the manuscripts is not as formidable as it might at first appear. Although no two copies are exactly alike, many are enough alike that the copies tend to group themselves into three (some scholars think four) major families of texts (text-types).

There is a group that derives basically from Alexandria in Egypt, headed by the recently discovered Bodmer papyri (P75 and P66) in the Gospels (ca. A.D. 200), the Chester Beatty papyrus (P46) in Paul (ca. 225), the Bodmer papyrus (P72) in Peter and Jude (ca. 275?), the great Codex Vaticanus (B, ca. 325), and the quotations in Origen (225–250). It is also supported to a lesser degree by several other manscripts (e.g., Aleph, C, L, W, 33) and by the later Alexandrian Fathers (Didymus, Athanasius, Cyril).

A second group is equally as early but shows nothing of the homogeneity of the first. It is often called the “western” text because it is headed by the earlier of the Old Latin versions, the great bilingual Codex Bezae (D, ca. 600), and by the Latin Fathers (e.g. Tertullian, Cyprian, Ambrose). The heterogeneity of this group has led some of us to refer to it as the western “textual tradition,” which describes a group of manuscripts obviously related by some peculiar readings but apparently reflecting an uncontrolled, sometimes “wild” tradition of copying and translating.

The final group, the “Byzantine” or “majority” text, is made up of over 80 per cent of all the manuscripts. The earliest full witnesses to this text are manuscripts from the eighth century (E and Omega), though it is also represented for the most part in the Gospels text of Codex Alexandrinus (A, ca. 475) and in the biblical quotations by several Church Fathers from Antioch and Constantinople in the latter half of the fourth century.

It has been argued recently that the peculiar variants of this text-type may be found earlier in such a manuscript as P66. However, this is a half-truth. Such readings are occasionally supported by an early witness; but P66, rather than supporting specific variants of the Byzantine text-type, tends to vary from its Alexandrian cousins with a rash of patently non-original readings of the same kind as appear solidly and specifically entrenched in the Byzantine text-type. (See my Papyrus Bodmer II (P66): Its Textual Relationships and Scribal Characteristics, University of Utah Press, 1968.)

It is from manuscripts of this third text-type that the Greek text lying behind the KJV has come. The printed edition of this Greek text goes back to Erasmus, who in 1516 published the first Greek text of the New Testament chiefly on the basis of two inferior twelfth-century manuscripts. As more manuscripts came to light in the following years, the vast majority supported this kind of text; those that did not were generally considered “eccentric.” This became known as the “received text” (textus receptus=TR) and was universally accepted on the basis of “majority rule.”

The problem with “majority rule,” of course, is that the majority may be wrong. Indeed, it eventually came to be recognized that quality is far more important than quantity in making textual choices.

In the case of the New Testament text, the problem with the majority was twofold: (1) As more and more older manuscripts came to light, it became readily apparent that the older the manuscript, the less it looked like the majority text. (2) An analysis of scribal errors showed that the later manuscripts had tended to accumulate all the kinds of errors scribes are known to have made, as well as to accumulate thousands of deliberate additions and alterations to the text from earlier centuries.

This case against the majority text was set forth in its classic form by the British scholars B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort, in their (Hort was chiefly responsible for it) famous introduction to the Greek text that served as the basis for the Revised Version of 1881. Besides the factors noted above, the cornerstone to their case was the fact that no Church Father earlier than 350 had New Testament quotations supporting the peculiar readings of the Byzantine text-type.

But if the majority of manuscripts are late and do not reflect the original text, what then? Hort was faced with the fact that the other two earlier text-types had equal antiquity (they could be traced back into the second century). So on the basis of internal evidence (the tendencies of scribal changes and judgments as to what the author probably wrote), he chose in favor of the Alexandrian text-type, which he dubbed “neutral,” and which he believed really was.

Westcott and Hort did their work so thoroughly and with such exceptional skill that textual work since then has been either in reaction to or in implementation of theirs. Some indeed were uneasy with their term “neutral”—after all, no manuscripts have totally escaped scribal errors. What is significant is that even those who tended to disagree with Westcott and Hort’s obvious preference for Codex B published Greek texts that differed very little from theirs—but different in many places from the “received text.”

It should be noted, however, that in recent years some attempts have been made to give the majority text a new hearing. One such case is by the British scholar G. D. Kilpatrick and his students. They have developed a method of choosing among variants strictly on the basis of internal evidence, with total disregard for the age, quantity, or quality of the witnesses to a given variant. Although this falls short of wholesale acceptance of the majority text—in fact, their results are far from it—their work does have the effect of giving the majority text equal hearing with the earlier witnesses. To a degree this seems to be a welcome corrective, for age alone should not determine originality. The biggest fault Kilpatrick’s critics find with his method concerns his choice of “internal” criteria on which to make decisions (it is felt that he places too much emphasis on an author’s style). Although he has not intended it to be so, his method appears to be the ultimate in subjectivity.

Less significant attempts to give the text of the KJV a new hearing have also been made by men such as Jay Green of the Religious Book Discount House (King James II) and David Otis Fuller (editor of Which Bible?). Their basic arguments, however, are theological (and sometimes emotional) and have little to do with the actual data. Fuller, for example, argues: “If we believe the original writings of the Scriptures were verbally inspired of God, then of necessity, they must have been providentially preserved through the ages.” One might superficially answer that they have been preserved, but in the earlier, not the later, manuscripts. But the point is that desiring to have exact providential preservation of the original New Testament by the medieval church does not make it so. (It seems strange that one in the Baptist tradition, who rejects so much from medieval Christianity, should argue so strongly for this point.) In any case, no amount of wanting can make the account of the angel at the pool (John 5:3, 4), for example, a part of John’s Gospel if John indeed did not write it—and its absence from all early manuscripts as well as its non-Johannine language does not seem to allow the remotest possibility that he did.

A more significant attempt to give the majority text a new hearing has come from Zane C. Hodges of Dallas Seminary, whose article is reprinted in Fuller’s Which Bible? Hodges has revived the argument from quantity: so many manuscripts cannot be wrong. His basic argument is that “the manuscript tradition of an ancient book will, under any but the most exceptional conditions, multiply in a reasonably regular fashion with the result that the copies nearest the autograph will normally have the largest number of descendants.” Although this may be hypothetically true, the question for the New Testament is whether it is really true. All the actual “hard” evidence speaks to the contrary.

During the second to the fourth centuries, the readings peculiar to this text are generally unknown (I say “generally” because an occasional variant of this type may be found here and there) in Syria (the Old Syriac), Egypt, Africa (the Old Latin, Tertullian, Cyprian), Italy (the Old Latin, Novatian), and southern France (Irenaeus). The first witness to this text (as an entity) is St. John Chrysostom, who apparently carried such a text from Antioch to Constantinople. Its wide medieval acceptance was probably the result of the immense influence of Chrysostom, the drying-up of copies of the Alexandrian text owing to the demise of Christianity in Africa, and the exclusive use of Latin in the West, where few Greek manuscripts were transcribed.

In any case, the argument is irrelevant. Even if the parent of the majority text could be shown to be early, the ultimate question is not which parent (Alexandrian, Byzantine, Western) produced the most offspring (the Latin Vulgate wins this one) but rather which parent is more likely the original.

Hodges has also raised the cry of subjectivity—that choices based on internal criteria are inevitably subjective. In fact, textual work may be made to appear circular: one chooses the reading supported by the best manscripts, which are determined to be the best because they have the best readings.

As a theoretical argument this criticism looks convincing, but when one examines the data, in this instance by comparing the readings of specific manuscripts, the accusation of circularity seems to be only theoretical. All this leads us to look at the second factor: scribal errors and alterations.

V

Scribal changes in any text fall into two large categories: intentional and unintentional. The latter are the more numerous and the less significant. They are generally easy to discern (usually added or dropped letters or words because of slips of the eye, ear, or mind), and they have affected the New Testament text much less than the intentional changes.

Most of the problems, then, lie with those intentional changes. However, lest one think of these early scribes as vicious fellows, let it quickly be pointed out that one may overdo the concept of deliberate. The majority of these changes were attempts to help out the text. The early scribes appear to have been far more concerned with the inspired message of the text than with the very words, for they frequently made that message clearer by smoothing out grammar, adding nouns or pronouns where there might be ambiguity, substituting common synonyms for uncommon words, clarifying difficult phrases, and confirming one passage to another (especially in the Gospels). There are some instances, of course—and these are usually very important ones—where whole sentences or narratives have been added (or subtracted) in the interest of either doctrine or completeness (such as the catechetical addition before the baptism in Acts 8:37, which is supported by only a handful of witnesses, yet found its way into the KJV).

Examples of this process may help. Let us begin with some from John’s Gospel, which are untranslatable, and yet which clearly show scribal tendencies.

1. A common feature of Greek prose is the abundant use of conjunctions and particles to add nuances between sentences and phrases. John’s Gospel, however, has many sentences that lack these conjunctions (the technical term for this lack is asyndeton). Over hundreds of years, scribes in various ways tended to correct asyndeton, i.e., they tended to conform John to the more standard style. (There are often as many as four independent attempts to do this in the same sentence!) Elimination of conjunctions for reasons of style is uncommon, so that a text marked by asyndeton is not likely to have become so by editing. What is significant here is that this clearly secondary scribal correction, the addition of conjunctions, is found predominantly in the majority text, not the earlier, especially Alexandrian, manuscripts.

2. Something similar is true with the use of the definite article with personal names. The usual practice in Greek was to include the article with names (=“the aforementioned …”). John is the great exception to this usage in the New Testament; and again, the tendency of later scribes was to add the definite article in conformity to ordinary usage. Again, the TR has picked up the great majority of these additions, so that it has the article eighty-four times with the name Jesus where Codex B does not, and B never has it where TR does not.

As a further example (now of translatable variants), take the tendency of scribes to conform one biblical passage to another. In the earliest manuscripts and Church Fathers, both east and west, the Lord’s Prayer in Luke’s Gospel lacks the phrases “who art in heaven,” “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” and “but deliver us from evil.” On the other hand, these phrases are not lacking from any known copy of Matthew’s Gospel. It seems evident, therefore, that the later scribes of Luke’s Gospel eventually conformed his version of the prayer to the longer and more often quoted version of Matthew’s Gospel. (For further information see J. Jeremias, The Lord’s Prayer, Fortress, 1964.)

This harmonizing tendency appears early in the western texts and has become thoroughgoing in the majority text. Such harmonizations appear on nearly every page of the Synoptic Gospels (especially Mark), as well as in parallel accounts in Acts (see how Acts 9:4 was conformed to 26:14) and parallel passages in Paul (compare Ephesians 1:7 with Colossians 1:14). It can always be argued, of course, that some scribe later deliberately omitted or changed texts for the sake of variety, and thus that the harmonized texts were earlier, but there is no evidence that happened and it seems to be contrary to all reason for him to have done so.

The point is that such examples may be multiplied hundreds of times over. Therefore, the more significant readings peculiar to the later manuscripts are already suspect by the company they keep. Moreover, when one applies such basic criteria as “the more difficult reading is probably original” (on the grounds that scribes tend to clear up difficulties, not create them) or “the variant which best explains how the others came to be is probably original,” the majority text comes out second (or third) best in most cases.

For example, the well loved story of the adulterous woman in John 8, which almost certainly actually happened to Jesus, seems just as certainly not authentic to John’s Gospel. The evidence? It is entirely unknown in Greek and Syriac manuscripts before A.D. 600. It is likewise unknown to Church Fathers before the end of the fourth century. The story first appears in John 8 in some, but not all, of the Old Latin translations, and when it finally is found in Greek manuscripts, there are two significantly different accounts, and the story is found in three other places (following John 7:36, John 21:24, and Luke 21:38). Furthermore, there are several examples of non-Johannine words and grammar in the story.

If this story were original to John’s Gospel, the only way one could explain all the data is to assume it was omitted (for what reason?) in a very early copy after the original, that other copies of the original were misplaced for three or four centuries, that in the meantime the only copies of John circulating throughout the Christian world were from the manuscript with the omission, and that eventually the misplaced “original” reappeared and won the day. However, this appears to be an exercise in mental gymnastics. The point is that the one reading that explains all the others happens also to be the best attested reading.

Since one hates to lose an account that has such a “ring of truth” to it, the alternative is to do what most translations have done: acknowledge that it is not original to John, but recognize that it is probably genuinely historical, and therefore include it in brackets, italics, or footnotes. It was simply one of those “many other things Jesus did” (John 21:25); it did not make its way into one of the four Gospels but continued to live in the Church, and was eventually placed in the Gospels (at various points) because it was too good to lose.

But not all textual choices are so easy. And this is why, finally, that although almost all contemporary translations are a vast improvement on the KJV, the Greek texts they use do not always look alike. For example, the JB and NEB translate a Greek text of John 1:34 “Chosen One of God” where the others read “Son of God.” Although the latter has the better of it in quality and quantity of witnesses, the former is found early, and with broad geographical distribution.

The choice here is not easy; however, “Chosen One” seems to be preferable as John’s original. Both titles are messianic, one from Psalm 2:7 and the other from Isaiah 42:1, and both are associated with Jesus’ baptism (Mark 1:11). Since John also calls Jesus the Lamb of God, probably in light of Isaiah’s “suffering servant,” “Chosen One” would be contextually well placed. But if it was original and has such meaningful messianic acclaim, why would a scribe change it? Probably for orthodox theological reasons: “Chosen One of God” would have been well suited to adoptionist Christology, which believed the human Jesus was “adopted” (=“chosen”) to be God’s Son. Of course, on the other hand, it could have been a deliberate adoptionist change to the text. But if so, why only here in the Gospel?

Such are the questions raised and the way textual choices are made. Since there are some obvious variables, what is the layman to do? The following concluding suggestions may be helpful:

1. Textual choices are first of all matters of history, not of faith. Our “manuscripts” were some believers’ Bibles. Our question is, when their “Bibles” differ, which variant is most likely the original? Here we must be historians—and good ones—if we are to know what God’s Word actually said. It should be noted of historical choices that any number of hypothetical possibilities might be raised, but that not all possibilities have equal probability. Ultimately textual critics must choose what seems to them the most probable solution.

2. Textual criticism is not the stronghold of “unbelieving” scholars. What is most probable in textual choices transcends confessional boundaries. Hence, confessional evangelicals are generally at one with other scholars on the principles, if not always on the actual choices, of textual criticism. (See, for example, the excellent Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism by J. Harold Greenlee [Eerdmans, 1964], which elaborates and generally says far better what is said in this article.) Two newer translations, the NASB and the forthcoming New International Bible, were both done by committees of committed evangelical scholars.

3. For a generally thorough commentary on most of the translatable textual variants in the New Testament, see Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (American Bible Society, 1971). Here one can see how textual choices were made by a committee of five well-known experts.

4. The layman finally should learn to use all the available helps. Consult several of the better translations, use them carefully and comparatively, and in places where they differ consult Metzger and the better commentaries for the data and kinds of options that are available.

Such a procedure is surely better than having an “authorized” version, for the possibilities for understanding the Word of God are greatly enhanced.

George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”

We have been living through days that try the soul of the nation and test the resiliency of our republic. All of us who hold positions of leadership, whether in the political, the economic, or the religious sphere of life, must think through the meaning of the tragic affairs that have afflicted the highest leadership of our nation.

However, we would always rather hide our wounds than heal them. It is always more comfortable to believe in the symbols of righteousness than to acknowledge the reality of evil. This is especially true in our national political life. And we have become adroit at manipulating religious impulses in our land to sanctify this political life. That is the temptation of our “civil religion.” We run the risk of misplaced allegiance, if not idolatry, by failing to distinguish between the god of an American civil religion and the God who reveals himself in the Scriptures and in Jesus Christ.

We want to believe that our nation and its leaders are right, just, and pure. We want to put our country beyond the reach of God’s judgment. Why? Because everything is so much simpler then. We want to believe, in the words printed on the back of our Great Seal, that “God hath ordained our undertakings,” and not believe that God also judges them.

This impulse is born out of our own lives. We want to believe we merit God’s blessing. How hard it is to admit that we stand in need of God’s forgiveness. We would rather celebrate Easter than Good Friday. But without Good Friday, there can be no Easter.

We must look to biblical religion—not civil religion—for the wisdom to guide our lives, and the life of the nation. Then we discover that our prayers must begin with prayers of repentance. We must start talking about sin again—sin in our personal lives, and sin in the corporate life of our country.

Sin is an old-fashioned word that many people think is irrelevant to this modern age. But if we really reflect upon the crisis that afflicts us at the national level, and the dilemmas in our own personal lives, then we come face to face with the unavoidable reality of sin. In the words of St. John: “If we refuse to admit that we are sinners, then we live in a world of illusion and truth becomes a stranger to us” (1 John 1:8).

Any of us in positions of leadership find it terribly difficult to deal with the concept of sin. We may be able to handle this in our personal lives well enough. We have some idea about what is right and wrong in our personal treatment of others. But when we enter our public or professional lives, we tend to leave our thoughts about sin behind.

For a leader, this is all the more true. When we are given a position of leadership, it becomes almost second nature to avoid admitting that we may be wrong. Confession becomes equated with weakness. The urge toward self-vindication becomes enormous, almost overpowering. A politician faces this temptation in a very special way, for somehow it has become a political maxim never to admit that one is wrong. Now, that may be wise politics. But it’s terrible Christianity. In fact, it’s the very opposite of biblical faith.

Herein lies the vulnerability of leadership. For the more one gains power, whether in business, economics, government, or religion, the greater the temptation to believe that he stands beyond the scope of transcendent judgment. We see this especially clearly in the office of the Presidency. Every man who has held that office has known the unbelievable temptation of identifying the power of that office with self-righteousness.

When power becomes the end, in and of itself, power will always corrupt. Any means that sustains power becomes justifiable. So in the end we feel we can transgress upon the law, whether man’s or God’s, because we are accountable only to ourselves, and our ability to wield power.

The roots of this temptation, however, lie not only within the hearts of those who aspire to power but also within the attitudes in each of us, in our worship of political power. There is an idolatry of the Presidency; we, as Americans, bow to the powers and prestige associated with that office in a way that can be ungodly. This makes temptations and burdens that fall on the shoulders of any mortal who occupies that office to be almost unbearable, and corrupting.

That is why any President deserves our compassion, and needs our fervent prayers. For in certain ways he is victimized by our idolatrous expectations. We impose demands of righteousness, wisdom, and virtue that no mere man can meet.

Often a cultism springs up around personalities of power. Perspective becomes lost and reality distorted, as the ego is constantly massaged. The plaudits, the honor, and the unswerving allegiance can create a moral vacuum. So bribes become referred to as inappropriate gifts. Crime is reduced to misguided zeal. Lies become misspoken words.

But the fault lies with us all. Why do we want so desperately to believe in man-centered power? Why do we want to place such a total and uncritical faith in our institutions? Why does each one of us want to believe that God blesses America more than he blesses any other land?

I believe it is because we have let the wellsprings of deep spiritual faith in our lives run dry. Man will always have a god. In Communist countries, where the death of God is made a tenet of government belief, the leaders and their dogma are deified so they can be worshiped. Man has an inherent instinct to worship; if God is not the source of his ultimate allegiance, he will then create his own gods. He will worship other people, or his country, or institutions, or money, or power, or fame—and all of these are different ways of worshiping himself.

As a people, we lack the firm foundations of a deep biblical faith in God; we have allowed our spiritual resources to be mocked, explained away, ignored, and forgotten. So we have transferred our allegiance to other gods—to materialism, to nationalism, to hedonism, to all the modern forms of idolatry that make claims on our fundamental allegiance.

If we forsake these gods, and also reject the platitudes of civil religion, and turn to biblical faith, what do we find? We discover that our actions, indeed all our lives, stand under God’s judgment and mercy. We are accountable to him—accountable for the motives in our hearts, and accountable for the conditions in our land. So our prayers must begin with repentance, individual repentance and corporate repentance: “If my people … shall humble themselves and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways … then I will forgive their sins, and will heal their land” (2 Chron. 7:14).

The promise is that with this repentance and allegiance to God come healing, reconciliation, and new life. We are made whole as persons, and we see that the wounds of the world can also be healed. We can see this wholeness of life demonstrated in the person of Christ. As we receive for ourselves the love that molded his life, then our entire self can be transformed and made new.

Our whole understanding of leadership and power and the purpose of life is then re-created. A source of ultimate allegiance beyond the ego is established in our hearts. Then leadership is seen as service to others. We discover from the Scriptures that if we are to save our lives, we must lose them; we must give ourselves away for the sake of others.

We then have a standard of values that gives a basic framework of integrity for our lives, whether it be in a business or profession or in political life in Washington. We can no longer seek power at any cost; we can no longer isolate ourselves from reality and vindicate our actions.

I am convinced that this is the only way we can guard against the vulnerability of leadership. I know of no other formula for overcoming the corrupting influences of the world’s power than to give our lives over to a higher power, the power of God’s love. This can seem foolish in the eyes of the world. But there are times when each of us must choose where we give our final allegiance.

The one who follows Christ is a citizen of a different kingdom; he has another Master; his allegiance is to a new order from which he derives his ways of thinking, feeling, and judging. He therefore cannot give ultimate allegiance to the world and its way of operating. His first duty is to be faithful to the Lord. The central life commitment for a Christian must be to the lordship of Jesus Christ.

In following this life, we are gripped by a vision of the world and a love for all mankind. We sense the mandate for every man to be made whole, for his physical and spiritual needs to be fulfilled and his gifts to be expressed. We see our swords being turned into ploughshares, and our spears into pruning hooks. “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain” (Isa. 40:4). We want justice “to roll down like a river,” in the words of Amos, “and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

To the eyes of conventional politics, this vision seems almost irrational, irrelevant, totally unrealistic. But the world normally regards God’s word and his truth as nonsense. The world believes in the power of power; the one who follows the life of Christ believes in the power of love.

Because of that love, we are compelled to give ourselves for the needs of others, to involve ourselves in the task of healing others and healing the world. So we find ourselves in the midst of the world, many times under conflicting demands and pressures.

Personally, I continually find it hard to know how, at any given point, to live out this calling. Frequently the way may not be clear at all. But when a difficult choice or decision is made, we must be open to wherever we may be led. And then we must rely simply on our faith rather than expect human certainty about every choice we make.

But while we may not always know all the precise answers and actions, we do know that leadership is expressed through service. We cannot separate our allegiance to God from our love for our fellow man.

In our nation, this must especially include a love for the poor and the dispossessed. Here again it is so easy for us to neglect the reality of God’s judgment on us as a people. We are tempted to think that the millions of impoverished citizens in our land are merely an unfortunate fact of life. But God takes the suffering of the poor far more seriously.

What, for instance, was the greatest sin of the city of Sodom, which caused its destruction by God? Sexual immorality? Listen to the words of Ezekiel, in the Old Testament: “This was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride of wealth and food in plenty, comfort and ease, and yet she never helped the poor and wretched.” Wherever wealth abounds and the poor continue to suffer, we must confront God’s judgment.

Christ opened his public ministry by rising in the synagogue and reading these words from Isaiah: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me; he has sent to announce good news to the poor, to proclaim release for prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind; to let the broken victims go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” And then Christ began to speak. “Today,” he said, “in your very hearing this text has come true.” If we are gripped by Christ’s love, then we will have an unquenchable compassion for the poor and the needy.

The thought of turning our national attention, at appropriate times, to the need for repentance should not be foreign to us. President Abraham Lincoln had a profound sense of the sovereignty of God. He knew how the nation stood accountable to God’s judgment. In the midst of the Civil War, the U. S. Senate asked the President to set aside a day for national prayer and humiliation. That might be a very appropriate action for the U. S. Senate to take today. On April 30, 1863, three months after the Emancipation Proclamation and three months before the battle of Gettysburg, President Lincoln composed a Proclamation for a Day of Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer:

Whereas, it is the duty of nations, as well as of men, to owe their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon, and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.… We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.

It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.

Rebuilding the inner strength of our nation today requires the same of us, in each of our hearts.

George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”

I inadvertently misled readers when I wrote last issue about having surgery. It was recommended in Virginia, but experts at the Massachusetts General Hospital decided against it. I have a bronchiectasis (dilation of one or more of the bronchial tubes) in the right lung. Careful living, avoidance of colds, and less stress and tension will help. Meanwhile my wife and I are looking to God for his healing touch.

On the last day of Billy Graham’s recent evangelistic crusade in Korea (see News, page 33), 1.1 million people attended the service. This was the largest religious gathering in the history of the Church. Such a meeting would have been impossible, of course, before the advent of amplifiers. Yet George Whitefield spoke to crowds as large as 20,000 in the eighteenth century, and all could hear his voice. Graham had a congregation fifty-five times as large, and all could hear his voice.

I would have supposed that the TV networks and the newspapers and magazines in America would have covered this memorable event in detail, but they paid little attention to it. Can it be that for those who have a nose for news the “good news” of the Gospel isn’t particularly newsworthy even when more than a million people gather to hear it?

Normally church conventions elicit yawns from editors and journalists barely exceeding their reactions to national parakeet week, but one next month will be different. For in New Orleans in July, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, a bastion of biblical orthodoxy whose name has been synonymous with doctrinal strictness for one hundred and twenty-five years, will choose either to continue that stance or join the ranks of America’s permissive denominations.

Why do columnists find this struggle fascinating? Why did the religion writers for the secular news media consider the Missouri conflict the most important story of the year? In part, no doubt, because the journalist’s favorite archetype when dealing with religion is that forever incarnated by H. L. Mencken: the liberal skeptic bursting the balloons of fundamentalist pomposity. In his heart of hearts, the religion writer longs to find himself as the voice of rational sanity in the Neanderthal atmosphere of a Scopes evolution trial.

And so the press has pretty well arrived at its own verdict before the jury comes in: President Preus and his supporters are the “literalists”; they want to force their own hopelessly archaic brand of biblical interpretation down everyone’s throat; they are unloving, intolerant, and representative of an orthodoxy that other American churches mercifully discarded generations ago. The opponents of Preus, by the same token, are enlightened, well educated (Preus’s own Ph.D. is carefully ignored), theologically perceptive, ecumenically open to new truth, and courageously trying to bring a stodgy, midwestern church body into the twentieth century.

Since all of us are influenced more than we realize by the climate of news reporting in which we live, it is very important to cut through the extraneous issues (such as an alleged church power struggle, “academic freedom” at Concordia Seminary, or the beauties of “tolerance”) to the real nature of the July battle at New Orleans. The journalists are right: the struggle is historic—but not for the reason most of them suppose. New Orleans will not be another Scopes trial. The only issue for New Orleans is whether the Bible will continue to serve as “the only true standard whereby to judge all teachers and doctrines” (as the Lutheran Formula of Concord so succinctly puts it).

The faculty of the Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, is the core of the opposition to President Preus. These teachers have striven mightily to convince the church and the general public that they want only to make the Gospel of Christ more real and powerful by removing the impediment of biblical infallibility.

In the faculty’s recent manifesto, Faithful to Our Calling, variation upon variation is played on the theme that it is “a misunderstanding of the nature of the Gospel” to “insist on a public acceptance of the historicity of every detail of the life of Jesus as recorded by the evangelists, as if that were a test of our faith.” “Our faith,” the faculty declares, “rests in the promises of a faithful God, not in the accuracy of ancient historians.” Therefore the evangelists—and the other human authors of the Bible—are placed on the same level as “ancient historians” in general, with no better claim to precision or accuracy than they. The irony of this attempt to make Christian belief rest on “the promise of a faithful God” and not on a reliable scriptural revelation is, obviously, that apart from the Bible we do not know what God’s promises are.

The thrust of the faculty’s document, and the thrust of the entire “moderate” movement against President Preus, is to eliminate the Bible as a basis for faith in the supposed interests of “the Gospel.” To “begin with the assumption that the doctrine of scriptural infallibility guarantees the validity of our theology,” the faculty tells us, “would not be Lutheran. We, as Lutherans, start with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” But since the only proper source of the Gospel is Scripture, a fallible Bible means a Gospel subject to the very same fallibility.

When the Missouri moderates ask the church to hold an infallible Gospel not guaranteed by an inerrant Scripture, they ask the church to remove the Gospel from Scripture and elevate it to the status of an eternal principle without historical guarantees. This is gnosticism, not Christianity. More specifically, the operation can be termed Gospelism: the creation of a total religion out of a minimalistic statement of the Gospel, whose certainty is assured by inner faith only, not by biblical documents. The Gospel itself is put at the mercy of faith-experience, and why should it be expected to survive any better than the Scriptures, which the Concordia faculty’s criticism has already found wanting in reliability?

The latitudinarian cry of those who would change Missouri’s course is: Believe in an inerrant Bible if you want, but give us the right not to believe in it; after all, the Gospel is the important thing. A fascinating parallel exists in the debates between Lincoln and Douglas on the question of repealing the Missouri Compromise. Should slavery be allowed to spread into Kansas and Nebraska? Douglas thought it ought not to be made a divisive issue; Lincoln held otherwise. At Alton, Illinois, on October 15, 1858, Lincoln declared:

Judge Douglas … says he “don’t care whether it is voted up or voted down”.… Any man can say that who does not see anything wrong in slavery, but no man can logically say it who does see a wrong in it; because no man can logically say he don’t care whether a wrong is voted up or voted down.… That is the real issue.… It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong.

Precisely. The question for the Missouri Synod is simply: Is it wrong to hold that Scripture errs? If it is wrong to regard the Bible that way, the question cannot be avoided by political compromise. The entire reliability of Holy Scripture is as bedrock an issue for the survival of a Christian church as was the equality of all men for the survival of the American commonwealth.

A few months earlier, on June 17, 1858, Lincoln himself quoted Scripture, “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” and added the immortal commentary: “I believe this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free.” Neither can the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod—or any other church—endure permanently divided on the question of biblical authority, for the Gospel is inevitably compromised where Scripture is compromised.

I think the delegates at New Orleans must give the President a firm mandate to clean out the divided house; and if this is not done, the only alternative remaining is the immediate formation of a new church that will not be partially enslaved to an unworthy view of Scripture but will be free to proclaim the whole counsel of God and the unsearchable riches of Christ as declared throughout the plenarily inspired Word.

JOHN WARWICK MONTGOMERY

The Church Press: Something Lacking?

“The Holy Spirit is alive and moving in the religious press,” declared Walter Brovald, awards chairman for the Associated Church Press (ACP) annual convention. But the University of Minnesota professor chastised member periodicals for a distinct lack of specifically Christian content and called on editors not to forget their call as Christians to further God’s kingdom.

In Minneapolis last month, the ACP in conjunction with the Catholic Press Association held its fifty-seventh annual convention. The largely Protestant ACP includes 168 periodicals with a total circulation of well over 19 million. (Only about eighty editors and publishers attended the meeting.) For the first time in its history the ACP elected as its president a woman, LaVonne Althouse, editor of the Lutheran Church in America’s Lutheran Women. Among those elected to the board of directors were James M. Wall, editor of the Christian Century, and CHRISTIANITY TODAY’s managing editor, David E. Kucharsky.

Awards for outstanding achievement were given in six categories. For the second year in a row the Canadian Churchman, an Anglican newspaper, won all four awards in the national news category. CHRISTIANITY TODAY received awards for best editorial and best article in the opinion category (see May 25 issue, page 33). Judges selected the independent Lutheran Forum as a co-winner in the best-article award. Among periodicals cited for general excellence were A.D. 72, a United Church of Christ-United Presbyterian publication, and Liberty, published by the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

The convention’s emphasis on the work of the Holy Spirit was evident in the well-attended editorial session on the charismatic movement in both Protestant and Catholic churches. Two Catholic laymen, a Catholic theologian, and a Lutheran minister discussed the impact and future of the charismatic movement. They praised its “de facto ecumenism” but sidestepped the issue of tongues-speaking. After tracing the history of the movement the panel concluded that the renewed interest in the work of the Spirit is not a “peripheral manifestation” but “is here to stay” in the life of the Church.

CHERYL FORBES

EPA: THE WINNERS

The Reformed Journal, a 2,100-circulation magazine published by the Eerdmans publishing company, won top honors as Periodical of the Year at the Evangelical Press Association’s twenty-fifth annual convention last month. The Journal also won first place in the news-story category with a newsy, first-person critical review of Explo ’72 and Campus Crusade for Christ.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY took first place for a humorous article with “Ducking the Mailed Fist” by Editor-at-Large J. D. Douglas (see September 15, 1972 issue, page 63). The magazine won second place for news (“Olympic Outreach”) and third place for a cartoon. It also placed third in the general category for Periodical of the Year.

Honored as Most Improved Publication was the Free Methodist Church’s Youth In Action, last year’s Periodical of the Year. Other award winners and categories: general article, Athletes in Action; editorial, The Wittenburg Door; best full color cover, Youth Alive; special section or supplement, Eternity.

Canadian Anglicans: Women And Children First

The twenty-sixth General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada (1.1 million members, 1,700 churches) last month broke with Anglican tradition in approving two innovations for the Canadian church. Meeting in Regina, Saskatchewan, the ACC voted overwhelmingly to accept the principle of ordaining women as priests and to embark on a two-year trial of a new “Christian initiation” rite that affects mostly children.

The much discussed action on women—approved by each of the three voting groups: laity, clergy, and bishops—aligned the Canadian church with three other jurisdictions of the world Anglican communion (Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Burma). Bishop T. David Somerville of New Westminster, one of the sponsors of the resolution, predicted that women priests will be serving in his diocese as early as next year.

While the approval of ordination for women attracted more publicity, the new rite was an equally sharp break with tradition—or, according to some apologists, a return to earlier church tradition. It will include baptism, laying on of hands, and first communion all in one service, eliminating the long delay between baptism (of infants) and first communion at confirmation (usually in mid-teens).

On another front, the ACC condemned abortion on demand and called on the federal government for strict enforcement of existing laws. Canon Eugene Fairweather of Trinity College, Toronto, described present abortion practice as a “grim solution widely pressed on people by an increasingly brutalized society.”

Having extensive missionary interests in Canada’s north, the ACC took new notice of the country’s native peoples and established a consultative council to advise the Anglican primate and to oversee the church’s northern ministry. Primate Edward Scott assured the assembly that the majority of the council’s members would be Indian and Eskimo. Further, the delegates approved a strong resolution of support for 6,000 Indians whose way of life is allegedly being threatened by a $5 billion hydroelectric development project on James Bay in northern Quebec.

Delegates formally “received” but did not act on the Plan of Union that proposes merger with the United Church and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Although the ACC has contributed more than a quarter of a million dollars to the General Commission on Church Union since negotiations got under way in the sixties, there is apparently widespread Anglican apathy toward merger. One cynical observer described the vote to receive the union plan as “a quiet way of killing it.”

In a social-action move, the 300 delegates created an agency to press for corporate policy changes through stockholder resolutions. (The ACC has about $28 million in investments, mostly in clergy pension-fund contributions. Dioceses and parishes also have sizable investments.)

Statistical reports showed increased income and expenditures but a decline in total membership for 1971 (the last year for which complete statistics were available) of 17,000. Sunday-school membership dropped from 133,150 to 123,527, and the total number of parishes also declined.

Commenting on the declines, Canon Philip Jefferson, director of parish and diocesan services, assured fellow Anglicans that members were more committed than fifteen years ago and that although there were now fewer clergy, morale was higher.

LESLIE K. TARR

In Black And White

More than 300 ministers, most of them black campus chaplains to the half-million blacks now enrolled in higher education, gathered at Xavier University in New Orleans for the fourth annual convocation of Ministries to Blacks in Higher Education.

The audience, including dashiki-clad clergymen, heard gospel choirs, viewed black-art productions, and listened with apparent agreement to author-historian Lerone Bennett, senior editor of Ebony. Bennett asserted that the first black colleges were built by white missionaries and then later deserted by them. Although America’s Catholic and Protestant churches have total assets of $160 billion and an annual cash flow of $22 billion, “second only to the federal government,” they spend almost nothing for black education or any other black need, Bennett alleged. He implied that blacks will have to push ahead themselves in providing spiritual ministries to black students and not count on getting much white help.

New members of the Roll of Honor of outstanding black campus chaplains are: Howard Cornish of Morgan State College, Clee McCoy of A and T State University, Rogers Fair of Bethune-Cookman College, and William Eichelberger of Louisville Seminary.

JAMES S. TINNEY

Continuing Presbyterians

Conservative Southern Presbyterian churchmen met in Atlanta last month to lay the groundwork for a rival denomination. The call for a two-day meeting May 18 and 19 was issued by thirty churches with a combined membership of nearly 20,000.

Several hundred persons turned out for the special “Convocation of Sessions.” Ruling and teaching elders among them voted 349–16 in favor of the schism. They also approved the calling of an advisory convention, tentatively set for August 7–9 in Asheville, North Carolina. The purpose of the convention would be to prepare for a constituting general assembly, to be held possibly in December.

The call for the Atlanta meeting had taken note of a February action by The Steering Committee for a Continuing Presbyterian Church “calling for a formal ecclesiastical entity to be formed in 1973.”

Dozens of congregations of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (PCUS) have taken steps to dissolve ties with the denomination and have been forming new presbyteries. It is the first major schism in the church since its formation in Augusta, Georgia, December, 1861, after a split with northern Presbyterians.

A number of theological conservatives, however, have vowed to stay in the denomination, at least for the time being. Dr. Robert Strong, a noted evangelical churchman who is pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Montgomery, Alabama, said there is no clear-cut theological issue current before the church to warrant division.

HONORED

The interfaith Religious Heritage of America society handed out its annual awards this month. Among those honored: Lutheran radio preacher Oswald C. J. Hoffmann, named Clergyman of the Year; hotel mogul Conrad N. Hilton, a southern California Catholic, Churchman of the Year; and Vonette Bright, wife of Campus Crusade for Christ founder-president Bill Bright, Churchwoman of the Year. Bright was given a special award for Explo ’72 and his work with youth, and Taylor University’s Robert Davenport was similarly awarded for his “Wandering Wheels” bicycling program. Dorothy James Newell, religion editor of the Quincy, Massachusetts, Patriot Ledger, and wife of a Nazarene minister, won the Faith and Freedom Award in Journalism. Southern Baptist communications executive Claude C. Cox won it in Radio. Other recipients of awards include President Emeritus Benjamin E. Mays of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Chicago Unitarian minister Preston Bradley, and Southern California Council of Churches communications executive Clifton E. Moore.

“My vows of ordination, as I understand them, require me to continue to work in the denomination to which I have professed loyalty,” he said in a prepared statement. Strong is a member of the board of directors of the Presbyterian Journal, one of four organizations calling for a division.

Religious News Service and Associated Press reported that the voting delegates at the Atlanta convocation represented 260 or more PCUS congregations, with a total membership of some 70,700 in fourteen of the denomination’s fifteen states. But the elders voted as individuals, without power to bind their churches. Sources close to the scene said the split was not as extensive as had been feared earlier.

The convocation called for the establishments of the new denomination “loyal to Scripture, the Reformed faith and committed to the spiritual mission of the Church as Christ commanded in the Great Commission.”

Cold Shoulder

The courtship of the Catholic Church and the National Council of Churches may be nearing an end. Catholics are backing away because of the NCC’s sociologically bad breath. The issues are abortion and parochaid.

In its long efforts to woo the Catholics to join, the NCC has resisted internal pressures to speak out as a body for liberalized abortion laws. But it is no secret that a number of NCC leaders and denominations look kindly on abortion; some have been exceedingly vocal about it—even opposing Catholics in hearings and lobbying sessions.

But nothing so far has been as official—and embarrassing—as last month’s disclosure that the NCC filed with a congressional committee a statement opposing tax credits for parents of non-public school students. Its final text prepared by NCC director for civil and religious liberty Dean Kelley, the statement asserted that certain Catholic parochaid arguments are “fallacious” and that Catholics are “unwilling” rather than “unable” to support their schools.

Bishop James Rausch, general secretary of the U. S. Catholic Conference (USCC), and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, was “dismayed” that he was not informed of it until he read it in the newspapers. (The document was filed in April but did not surface until mid-May when Americans United called attention to it.) Rausch then withdrew—at least “temporarily”—from the Interreligious Committee of General Secretaries, which is composed of the executive heads of the USCC, NCC, and the Synagogue Council of America.

NCC general secretary Edwin Espy and NCC president W. Sterling Cary responded with a telegram of apology to Rausch, disavowing it as an NCC document and repudiating the “unwilling” section. Espy blamed the mixup on “honest mistakes” within the NCC staff and promised to revise the statement but nevertheless stressed that the NCC wasn’t changing its long-standing opposition to express hopes for a restoration of “full relations and understanding.”

Rausch thanked the NCC for the explanation but declined to rejoin the interreligious committee until “vital” questions were resolved. Clearly, the NCC mouthwash was not strong enough.

Religion In Transit

The pastor of that forty-member Holiness Church of God in Jesus’ Name in Newport, Tennessee, where two men died after drinking strychnine during a service was cleared of manslaughter charges by a grand jury.

The People’s Church in Toronto, with a constituency of about 3,000, pledged a record $547,000 in “faith promises” for overseas missionary work. The church supports partially or in full more than 400 missionaries and a number of national workers and projects. Park Street Church in Boston pledged $360,000 in a similar campaign.

United Methodist clergyman William Alberts of Boston’s Old West Church performed a “marriage” of two homosexual males in April over the protest of Bishop Edward G. Carroll. Now Carroll wants Alberts to take a leave of absence and confer with psychiatrists, but Alberts is balking.

Students at the University of California at Los Angeles can now major in “The Study of Religion.” The new program involves thirty-five faculty members in seven departments, including languages, and requires a minimum of sixteen courses for a B. A. degree.

United Church of Christ communications executive Everett C. Parker is leading the battle against a series of spot announcements in which the National Association of Broadcasters opposes regulations of broadcast advertising. Everett contends the spots themselves present only one side of a controversial issue and are thus subject to the Federal Communication Commission’s Fairness Doctrine—and to equal-time response.

Six young transients described as hardcore Satan worshipers were charged with the torture murder of a teen-age youth in Daytona Beach, Florida. The victim, apparently suspected of being a police informer in the drug scene, was allegedly tied to a black table and tortured in the Satan cult’s “altar room” as a sacrifice.

Self-styled evangelist John Thomas, convicted of first-degree burglary with intent to kidnap a Knoxville, Tennessee, woman, was sentenced to five years imprisonment. Thomas, in his thirties, bound and gagged the woman, in her fifties, and carried her to a rural cabin where he was going to fast, read the Bible, and get the woman “ready to marry me” under state law. Considering her already his wife in the eyes of God, Thomas explained: “God told me to do it.”

Fifty-five persons, describing themselves as the vanguard of thousands from California and Oregon in a “Christ is the Answer Crusade,” were arrested in Las Vegas after preaching and marching with a cross through the city’s casino district. Police say they lacked a permit and tied up traffic.

City Sanitation Workers treasurer Samuel Fulton, pastor of Philadelphia’s Faith Temple Church of God in Christ, was suspended by the union for alleged theft of $12,000 in union funds to help pay for the remodeling of his church and other repairs. No legal charges are planned, but the union wants the money back—with $4,000 interest.

The North Carolina legislature passed a law authorizing use of “I do so affirm” in place of “so help me God” for persons objecting to use of the latter phrase in oaths.

Eastern Mennonites plan to erect a full-sized replica of the Tabernacle of Moses as a tourist attraction in the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, area.

Tuition-aid grants and aid to “needy and disadvantaged” students attending non-public schools and colleges were ruled unconstitutional by the Washington state supreme court.

Officials of the Unitarian Universalist Association in Boston do not now, since the dismissal of charges against Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo, expect the federal government to reopen an investigation of the UUA’s Beacon Press in the Pentagon Papers case. The UUA says it has heard nothing about the investigation since last summer.

Scores of collegians from Christian campuses leave this month for Managua, Nicaragua, to help rebuild churches destroyed by the recent earthquake. A Scripture distribution campaign is part of the summer project, sponsored by World Gospel Crusades of Florida.

Construction has started on a $1.2 million sanctuary to replace the 2,500-member Pasadena Presbyterian Church building that was severely damaged by the February, 1971, earthquake in Southern California.

County health official Helen H. Foster cited the Clinton, Maryland, Christian School for allegedly violating state daycare regulations by its Bible reading and memorization programs. Her superiors apologized to the school—and demoted her. Now there’s a big fuss.

Now it’s official. A new law requiring biology books in Tennessee schools to give creationism equal billing with evolution went into effect—without the signature of Governor Winfield Dunn.

Suicide is the Number Two cause of deaths among young people (first: accidents). Of the estimated 75,000 persons between 15 and 24 who will attempt suicide this year, about 4,000 are likely to succeed, according to a published study. Researchers cite inability to communicate, loneliness, and pressures at home as chief factors. Fewer than 30 per cent leave notes.

Family Radio Network station WKDN in Camden, New Jersey, was the top winner in the radio category of the annual Freedom Foundation awards for its July 4 “Tribute to America” special.

The number of priests, nuns, and others in Catholic religious orders in Canada dipped to 56,349 last year, down about 4,000 from 1971, in line with declining trends world-wide.

Little Mt. Angel College in Salem, Oregon, an independent Catholic school, is behind in payments to the Benedictine Sisters of Mt. Angel, who founded and ran the college until 1965. There are other financial problems, so the sisters have instituted bankruptcy proceedings.

More than $1.3 million was raised in cash and pledges during a stewardship week at First Baptist Church, Augusta, Georgia, in connection with a building campaign.

When a group of lay witnesses from a Baptist church were asked to leave a mobile home park in Crowley, Texas, because they lacked solicitation permits, they balked, and their leader, collegian Willie G. Rutledge, was arrested on a disorderly-conduct charge. The jury’s verdict later: “Not guilty.”

Personalia

Evangelist Lane Adams of the Billy Graham organization has switched jobs. He’s now minister of evangelism at the Hollywood, California, First Presbyterian Church.

Conservative Ralph H. Didier, 45, former pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Anaheim, California, and now pastor of the new Covenant Presbyterian Church, was defrocked by his fellow United Presbyterians in Southern California. He had attacked the “hierarchy and denomination” for “selling its soul” to leftist enemies of Christ. Didier’s former associate pastor, Lowell W. Linden, was also “divested” of ministerial status. He has applied for reordination with another group.

Dr. Eugene L. Smith resigned as head of World Council of Churches operations in the United States (a post he’s held since 1964) to become pastor of the United Methodist Church in Denville, New Jersey.

Cardinal Josef Slipyi, 82, the spiritual leader of about seven million Ukrainian Catholics around the world, last month celebrated mass before 10,000 in Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. The occasion: the tenth anniversary of his release from eighteen years of imprisonment in a Siberian labor camp.

President Larry Poland, 34, of Miami Christian University will leave his Florida post to head Campus Crusade’s Agape Movement, which proposes to send 100,000 short-term Christian workers to more than two million villages and university centers around the world.

Dutch Reformed theologian G. C. Berkouwer, 79, plans to retire from his chair of dogmatics at the Free University of Amsterdam next year. His successor: Jan Veenhof, 39, a pastor in Basel and former teacher at the evangelical Saint Crischona seminary there.

Attorney Robert G. Mayfield of Lexington, Kentucky, a leader of United Methodist lay work, is the first layman to become chairman of Good News, the seven-year-old unofficial organization of evangelical United Methodists.

United Methodist editor Curtis A. Chambers, 48, will head the denomination’s newly restructured communications operations.

Trinidad-born Albert B. Crichlow, an architect and former British pilot, has become the first black lecturer for the Christian Science Board of Lectureship. He joins thirty other lecturers, who give more than 4,000 talks annually.

World Scene

A dozen Church of Scotland ministers have teamed up with Irish Presbyterian pastors for short-term service in troubled areas of Belfast and Londonderry. Civil disorders and evacuation have decimated a number of Presbyterian, Methodist, and Church of Ireland congregations. Some have closed. Other Scottish Presbyterians have also volunteered for the short-term work.

The 184-congregation Church of God in Europe will open a Bible college near Stuttgart, Germany, this fall.

Australia’s House of Representatives overwhelmingly defeated a hotly contested federal bill to legalize abortion on demand. Catholics and Anglicans led the opposition.

More bad news from Zaire (formerly Congo): religious broadcasts and non-government periodicals have been banned and church youth meetings prohibited, according to a report in the Mennonite.

London Baptist lay preacher Ron Allison, 41, former newscaster and religious broadcast producer, is the new press secretary for Queen Elizabeth, whose functions include the titular leadership of the Church of England.

To cover its rear flank, the South Korean Army Chaplains Council will shift its emphasis from conversion to deepening the quality of spirituality among soldiers. As a result of the chaplains’ evangelistic efforts many mass baptism services have been held, and half the troops are said to be Christians now.

The Church of Scotland’s communicant membership declined by 23,300 last year, bringing membership to 1.11 million, down nearly 200,000 since 1959.

Much attention was given a “pastoral crisis” at the sixty-sixth Synod of the French Reformed Church. In the last five years at least forty pastors have renounced the traditional ministry, and last year the church had only a dozen theological students, delegates were told.

An explosion, apparently from a bomb, destroyed the $900,000 printing plant of the 215,000-member predominantly black Ovambokavango Evangelical Lutheran Church in Namibia, South-West Africa. The facility printed school texts, church publications, and a widely read newspaper.

Relations between the Reformed Church in South Africa (GKSA) and the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands (GKN), once cordial, are now strained. The GKSA people cite the liberal theology of certain GKN teachers, the differing views of church order adopted by the GKN in 1970, and the GKN’s joining the World Council of Churches against the advice of the Reformed Ecumenical Synod, a world body of Reformed groups. Some South Africans want to end the free transfer of pastors and members between the two groups.

Irish and British Baptists are baptizing more than ever. The 3,234-church Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland reported 5,804 baptisms last year.

Brazil has over half of Latin America’s population but no monthly Protestant magazine, according to a study by the Congress of Evangelical Literature in Brazil. It has one bimonthly and three limited-edition quarterly publications.

The Central American Mission is phasing out its Bible institute in Guatemala City after forty years to concentrate on its eight-year-old seminary (about fifty students from nine countries) at the same location.

The long-delayed and sometimes in doubt union of the Methodist Church in Southern Asia (600,000 members) and the Church of North India (700,000 Methodists) will be formalized in November, say officials.

The Dearth Of Reapers

People are being converted to Christ in record numbers around the world, making the current shortage of ministerial and missionary recruits perhaps more critical than ever. Delegates to the annual convention of the Christian and Missionary Alliance were told last month that national church leaders are making repeated appeals for more trained workers from North America. In a number of areas, it was reported, the appeals are based on the desire to capitalize on surges of revival. “Both the overseas and homeland reports show the highest number of converts in any one year in our history,” said CMA president Nathan Bailey.

CMA-related churches overseas now have more than 264,000 members, a 125,000 increase in ten years. The number of congregations increased from 3,397 to 4,651 in the same period, not counting the 1,406 CMA churches in North America. A total of 16,264 baptisms were recorded by CMA missionaries in 1971, the last year for which figures are available, and this represented an all-time high. The gains took place even though the CMA missionary task force has stayed at approximately 900 for the past decade.

Bailey says that in his travels around the world he has sensed quite the opposite of the “missionary go home” spirit alleged in some quarters to characterize overseas Christians. “On my recent trip to Africa,” he declared, “the national church committee and the district committee in one area asked for an interview with me. Their burden in each case was a plea for more missionaries.” Similar calls were voiced in a meeting of CMA-related church leaders in Southeast Asia earlier this year.

CMA foreign secretary L. L. King echoed: “Although a renewed student interest in world missions and evangelization was evidenced, the critical need is for a great increase in the number of qualified youth responding to God’s call to overseas ministry.”

Bailey contends the primary responsibility for motivating missionary volunteers lies with Christian parents.¹In an ad lib during his presentation of the report, Bailey remarked wryly that evangelicals used to tell liberals they would not have recruitment problems if their theology were biblical. But the CMA is also making some efforts to spur recruitment of trained talent, including inauguration this fall of an innovative graduate program in the new Alliance School of Theology and Missions at Nyack, New York. Meanwhile, the CMA is starting to recruit lay persons on a contract basis for specialized service in such fields as medicine and administration in order to free ordained missionaries for evangelism and church-planting.

For their part, delegates to the six-day meeting in St. Paul, Minnesota, tended to housekeeping matters, the main one a denominational reorganization plan.

DAVID KUCHARSKY

Bury My Tithe At Wounded Knee

The armed occupation of the Indian village of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, may be over, but its shock waves are reverberating through several denominations and Indian mission boards.

Some church members learned for the first time during the dispute that their churches were funding the American Indian Movement (AIM), which spearheaded the takeover assertedly to dramatize Indian problems. They learned, too, that their leaders supplied money for AIM’s “Trail of Broken Treaties” caravan, which ended in the $2 million occupation and devastation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, D. C., last fall.

At the same time, church leaders and missionaries were warned that one of AIM’s avowed goals is removal of Christian churches and missionaries from Indian reservations.

Syndicated columnist Lester Kinsolving stirred hot reaction early in the Wounded Knee takeover when he reported that Episcopal bishop Ivol Ira Curtis of Seattle had approved a $10,000 grant to AIM for its Washington trek. Other newspaper reports indicated that AIM received more than $37,000 from the American Lutheran Church, $40,000 from the U. S. Catholic Bishops’ “Campaign for Human Development” fund, and an additional $30,000 from the Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis. The Mormon church earlier provided $1,000 cash and $150 worth of gasoline for the Washington march. Church leaders have since defended the grants despite the damage and the Wounded Knee takeover (and, says writer Kinsolving, despite the accumulation of nineteen felony convictions for burglary and assault by three of AIM’s leaders). Huffed one indignant church official after Kinsolving questioned him about the convictions: “We fund projects—not people.”

At Wounded Knee, National Council of Churches officials kept the insurgents supplied with food and took a hand in the sometimes thorny negotiations.

For many, however, AIM symbolized devastation and destruction—and a call to young Indians to overthrow Christianity, the “White Man’s religion.”

Church of God minister Orville Lansberry and his wife returned to their church and parsonage at Wounded Knee after the militants left to find the home and garage burned to the ground. It was destroyed the night before the siege ended. The teepee-style church was severely damaged by fire, and the exterior was pockmarked with bullet holes from the many exchanges of gunfire between Indians and government agents.

R. L. Gowan, director of the American Indian Mission, based in Rapid City, South Dakota, said the militants had seized more than $1,500 in supplies and equipment. Two missionaries connected with Gowan’s group fled under gunfire the night of the takeover.

Sacred Heart Church, the Roman Catholic church in the village, was also severely damaged. It had served as the militants’ headquarters during the eighty-day seizure.

While deploring AIM’s rampage at Wounded Knee, however, some Indian missionaries are listening to the Indians’ cry for justice and self-determination—and agreeing.

Donald G. Fredericks, director of the United Indian Mission (UIM) in Flagstaff, Arizona, said “some of the spirit of the Indian-ness” of the radicals is shared by Indian Christians “and it’s a healthy thing.” The Indians want pride in themselves and want the right to decide their own courses of action, said Fredericks. As a result, UIM is now “100 per cent indigenously minded.” (The mission has sixty-nine missionaries working in the southwest United States, Mexico, and British Columbia.) Fredericks added that UIM prefers extension courses rather than centralized schools for Indian workers. At present it helps nearly ten churches with Indian leaders among the 130,000 Navajo Indians. (The Navajos are the largest of 250 tribes in the United States.)

Gordon H. Fraser, a leading Indian mission authority and former president of Southwestern School of Mission in Flagstaff, warned that increasing Indian self-awareness will cause corresponding drops in white missionaries. Already missionary numbers have dropped in the last fifty years while the Indian population has “doubled and redoubled.” Fraser said Indian students at his school are encouraged to return to their reservations and work with their families first, then reach out to other tribe members, slowly building an indigenous church. Twenty-five graduates are now working on the Navajo reservation.

Both Fraser and Fredericks see Wounded Knee as a possible turning point for white-operated missions. The AIM has already blamed the church for many of the Indians’ troubles, and young Indians are returning to the peyote-using Native American Church in increasing numbers, they said. (Peyote is a hallucinatory drug derived from a cactus.) In the end, said Fredericks, all non-Indian missionaries may be forced off the reservations. “And if that happens the church will blossom. We’ll have a tremendous revival. We’ve sowed the seed and must let the Indian take it from here.”

BARRIE DOYLE

It’S In The Air

There’s a new sound in the nation’s capital these days. It’s the 1,000-watt daytime AM radio station WCTN, which went on the air last month interspersing soft-sell plugs for the gospel with routine secular-type programming. The idea behind the format is to reach more than just the church-oriented listener. Purchased for about $250,000 by the nondenominational, charismatic 300-member Christ Church, the station is broadcasting popular music, news, and weather reports—and both traditional and contemporary religious programming.

“Don’t hold me to playing a hymn every time I put on a record,” said Keith Jollay, 25, Christ Church’s disc jockey-assistant pastor, who is heading up the radio ministry. “What we want is a station that’s much more live than are most religious stations around the country today,” Jollay said. “We’re going to try to stay away from the usual pre-recorded sermonette-type programs, because you can’t keep an audience interested in a long evangelistic program. We don’t want prerecorded preachers coming on back to back.”

Jollay told correspondent Herb Perone that commercial advertisements (open to anything not contradictory to WCTN’s message) are expected to underwrite the station’s costs, but that in the meantime the church and individual donors will pick up the tab.

“The best writers are often shy and timid and need encouragement.… The editor … needs to carry a Geiger counter to discover the hidden uranium of writing ability.”

So said Dr. Benjamin P. Browne, known as the “grand old man” of Christian writing schools, in his book Christian Journalism for Today published back in 1952 by Judson Press. Practicing what he preached, Browne, an American Baptist minister gifted in writing and administration, was instrumental in building the International House for writers at the conference ground at Green Lake, Wisconsin. He founded Christian writing conferences there and at Judson College, Elgin, Illinois, and established the International Christian Writers organization.

Although Christian writers’ schools at Judson and Green Lake have since faded away and Browne has retired in southern California, the legacy lives on. Editors are taking Browne’s advice of searching out neophyte writers and helping them hone dull talents to a cutting edge for Christ.

Schools of Christian writing have been proliferating in the past several years, and this summer may see a record number in the United States and Canada and also abroad.

Decision magazine’s eleventh annual School of Christian Writing, to be held next month in Minneapolis, has attracted 1,900 inquiries and nearly 400 applications, registrar Charlene Anderson said several weeks ago. “Interest in the school has greatly exceeded that of other years.… The quality of writing is going up. And it’s harder to get in now,” she said. Applicants will be narrowed to 200–250. The school will be held in Minneapolis July 13–22.

Decision editor Sherwood E. Wirt said in an interview that he got the idea for the Minneapolis school after attending Robert Walker’s Christian Writers Institute in Wheaton in 1961. “I realized we weren’t getting unsolicited manuscripts of quality in the mail. We didn’t let people know what we wanted,” Wirt recalled.

Wirt told Billy Graham of his vision for a school in early 1962, and the first conference was launched with about ninety students in the summer of 1963. God has used graduates of the Minneapolis schools in remarkable ways, says Wirt, and a few have zoomed into prominence swiftly. But the peripatetic editor and author sees the Minneapolis school as more than an end in itself. “It’s priming the pump for others,” he says.

Wirt and his wife, Winola—also an author well known in evangelical circles—trekked all over the South Pacific and the Orient in 1971, holding eight writing schools for Christians. Schools struck root and are growing in Tokoyo and Manila, reports Wirt. And he’s returning this summer to boost ongoing annual schools in London, Paris, and Frankfurt.

Another spin-off is a school at Olivet Nazarene College in Kankakee, Illinois. And a school will be held in Toronto for the first time July 2 to 4.

California is the site for two annual Christian writing schools, and a third is to be christened next month. A strong school with a let’s-get-down-to-business attitude convened during Easter week at Mount Hermon conference ground in the Santa Cruz mountains with 130 students. Practical sessions in conceiving, writing, polishing, and selling stories were led by pros like free-lance king James Hefley, and Norman Rohrer, who conducts a writers’ correspondence course and is executive secretary of the Evangelical Press Association.

Decision also launched a California School of Christian Writing last July with seventy-three aspiring students (see August 25, 1972, issue, page 44). Bigger and better things are on tap this June 24–27 at Forest Home in the San Bernardino Mountains. The goal, according to Wirt, is to enable satellite schools to become autonomous. There, as elsewhere, the trend is to seek out the younger writers.

Meanwhile, writer Rohrer is spearheading the first writers’ conference at Hume Lake in the Sierra Nevada July 6 to 8. Mini weekend conferences at the Rohrers’ Hume cottage, Quill o’ the Wisp, will follow.

Other regular schools are the Christian Writers’ Conference at Wheaton College each March, a Portland, Oregon, Christian writers’ group meeting in January, April, and the fall led by Dr. Raymond Cox of Salem, Oregon; classes at Moody Bible College, Chicago; a June conclave of secular and Christian writers (Midwest Writers Conference) at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls; and occasional invitation-only schools hosted by Earl Roe for Guideposts in Rye, New York.

“We need to motivate superior Christian writing,” sums up writers’ dean Wirt. “We need to upgrade the whole corpus of Christian literature.”

And though the styles and techniques taught at increasingly professional schools of writing are as up-to-date as tomorrow’s headlines, the standards of excellence are securely rooted to the best of Christian classics, says Wirt, adding: “John Bunyan and John Milton are still our models.”

RUSSELL CHANDLER

When Eugene Carson Blake stepped down as stated clerk of the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. in 1966 to become general secretary of the World Council of Churches, the UPUSA church was at the peak of its growth and prestige. Membership had crested the year before at over 3.3 million. Giving to General Assembly mission causes was at an all-time high. The Consultation on Church Union, proposed by Blake in a speech in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco in 1960, was moving toward an actual plan of union. And the controversial “Confession of 1967” was soon to be adopted by the denomination.

This year, at the 185th General Assembly of the UPUSA Church, held in Omaha, Nebraska, Blake returned to find the church in severe economic difficulties and even to be rejected as a candidate for moderator, the highest elective position within the denomination.

Elected moderator was Omaha clergyman Clinton M. Marsh, the second black moderator in the church’s history. Marsh, who serves on the General Assembly’s Task Force on Southern Africa and who holds several synod and presbytery positions, received 378 out of 726 votes on the crucial ballot. Blake received the lowest number of votes of the five candidates.

The size of the crisis facing the church that Marsh now heads is seen in the church’s statistics, some of which became publicly available for the first time at the assembly. Highlights:

• A membership loss of 104,000, the largest membership decline in one year in the denomination’s history. Membership now stands at fewer than three million.

• Decline of giving to General Assembly causes by nearly $2 million, even though total giving throughout the church has gone up. Giving to General Assembly causes has gone down by $9 million since 1967, necessitating a depletion of the denomination’s capital reserves by $22.8 million during the five years 1968–73.

• Cutback in staff positions at the national level from over 1,000 to 700. Actually, more than 300 will be leaving the staff, some as the result of the concurrent move to consolidate the denominational offices in New York City.

As the budget statistics were presented, many of the 750 commissioners sat in stunned silence. There was almost a gasp as they were also told that denominational restructuring, approved last year by the 184th General Assembly and involving the reorganization of the boards and agencies, reduction of personnel, and the move to New York, will in itself cost $5.6 million. The only figure heard previously was $1.5 million, which last year’s assembly approved and which many delegates apparently considered to be a top figure. The smaller amount, explained Executive Director Leon E. Fanniel of the General Assembly’s powerful Mission Council, was just to get the change-over under way.

The financial picture is not expected to improve either, as is evidenced by a proposed General Assembly General Mission program budget for 1974 of $32 million, down $8 million from the comparable 1973 figure. The number of United Presbyterian missionaries on the foreign field has been declining since 1958, when there were 1,300, but is expected to bottom out at 550. There are now approximately 580 overseas personnel. A year ago, there were 700.

For the first time in recent years there did not seem to be an emotionally charged issue for the assembly. Even the Consultation on Church Union, from which the church withdrew last year, did not generate much enthusiasm as this year the church voted itself back in. Many commissioners expressed belief that the issues had changed in that COCU had shifted its emphasis from attempting to gain agreement on a formal plan of union to encouraging cooperation among churches at the local level. The Reverend Paul Crow of Princeton, New Jersey, general secretary of COCU, admitted that there had been a “general unreadiness to accept the proposed structures”—indeed, that “nobody bought them.” The vote to return to COCU was 453 to 259.

In related action commissioners expressed renewed commitment to the task of reuniting the Northern church with the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern), though recent developments affecting the Southern church (see story, page 44) seem to put that possibility a long way off.

At last year’s assembly the denomination’s Committee on the Self-Development of People reported a grant of $75,000 to La Rosca, a small group of Colombian intellectuals dedicated to social research and action among the poor of that country. The action drew a heated protest from the Presbyterian Church of Colombia on the grounds that La Rosca was “composed at its leadership level of men with known Marxist views” and that its objectives called for “the fomenting of class struggle, subversion and agitation among the world population.” The Colombian church also regarded the action of the UPUSA church as an unwarranted intrusion into its own affairs. At this year’s assembly the commissioners approved a report affirming the propriety of the first grant and approving a second in the same amount. Except for a spirited minority report by Rafael Cruz, who had investigated La Rosca literature, the Marxist views of the Colombian group did not seem to trouble members of the denomination’s Self-Development Committee.

Apparently they trouble church members, however, for the funding drive to raise “$70 million in the 70’s” for self-help projects among minorities has generated only $4 million since 1971.

In further action the delegates:

• Resolved “to join with others of the world in a symbolic Declaration of World Citizenship and Responsibility,” aiming at world peace based on a system of enforceable world law.

• Asked the denomination’s agencies to explore the possibility of contributing massive aid to Indochina through the World Council of Churches and suggested an initial pledge by the denomination of $600,000.

• Recorded “outright opposition” to any attempt by the U. S. government to enforce the Paris Agreements by unilateral means and, in particular, deplored any renewed bombings in North or South Viet Nam as well as the continued bombing in Cambodia and Laos.

• Denounced the reported violation of religious freedom and the denial of human rights in the Soviet Union, and urged that “religious literature of all faiths be allowed to be made available to the people of the U. S. S. R.”

• Called for an immediate on-the-scene study of the Wounded Knee situation by the United States Senate’s Subcommittee on Indian Affairs and left the door open for granting denominational legal-aid funds to those arrested in the incident.

• Rejected a renewed attempt to involve the denomination officially in the Key 73 evangelistic program.

With the extensive restructuring under way, it is probably not surprising that few new programs were suggested. “We have spent millions and will be in debt for years,” said the Reverend John W. Meister, director of the Council of Theological Seminaries, at an installation service for the six top executives of the denomination, “and that is only the money expense. Hundreds of people have suffered throughout the turmoil of restructuring. We must make our new structures work.”

Perhaps that concern lay behind the theme of this year’s assembly, displayed in large gold letters behind the speaker’s platform: “Can Do All Things.” There might have been more confidence in the outcome if the assembly had also gone on to complete the quotation—“through Christ who strengthens me.”

JAMES MONTGOMERY BOICE

If key 73 achieves only a part of its objectives in the United States and Canada, World Vision president W. Stanley Mooneyham has remarked, the results will nonetheless be phenomenal. From its impact thus far, two observations are inescapable: that the venture has had gratifying and surprising momentum on a nationwide basis, and that Key 73 must be viewed not as a terminal effort but as an ongoing thrust into and beyond the mid-seventies.

By the turn of last year, the enterprise had enlisted not simply 100 (as was initially hoped) but 150 major denominations and organizations for the largest cooperative evangelistic effort in any nation since the Protestant Reformation. Since the television launch film was shown January 6 and 7 on 667 stations across the United States, mostly public service, it has been televised additionally on half as many more outlets. The total estimated viewing audience in the United States and Canada exceeds 75 million.

Although the first phase in many places began unspectacularly, there were already impressive pilot programs in 1972, and Christians in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Detroit, and Seattle, among other metropolises, found their stride in the first weeks of the new year. During March alone, executive director Dr. Ted Raedeke and other leaders held thirty-five statewide strategy seminars providing program resources and guidelines for lay witness, Bible distribution and study, fair ministries, youth outreach, and impact weeks.

Scripture distribution quickly accelerated to the point where the American Bible Society was dispatching 600,000 to 700,000 copies of Luke-Acts weekly; beyond all expectation, distribution reached the six-million-copy mark long before Easter. In some cities—including a traditionally Lutheran center, St. Louis—Roman Catholics led the way in citywide distributions of Scripture. Their interest in evangelical vitalities has been especially noteworthy in Iowa, particularly Des Moines and Dubuque, and the number of Catholics in neighborhood Bible-study groups is on the increase in many communities.

On the local level, there are impressive reports of evangelical engagement. In one New York area, twenty-one churches in the Kenmore-Tonawanda region, spurred by Kenmore Baptist Church, distributed 50,000 copies of Touched by the Fire (Luke-Acts) by personal presentation house to house on a Sunday afternoon in March. Hundreds of laymen are now wearing an ordinary door key attached by a pin clasp and bearing the figures 73, an idea developed by a member of Olean Baptist Church.

Dr. James Nettinga, director of advance programs for the American Bible Society, reports:

The Bible Society simply cannot keep in stock the Key 73 Scriptures we have designated for the Bible study program. Luke-Acts goes out as fast as it comes from the printer, and already more than three million copies have been ordered and distributed by individual churches and communities in study programs and in community distribution witnessing. They are going at the rate of 250,000 per week; our immediate problem is paper!

Yet is it also clear that the gathering momentum of Key 73, somewhat late in occurring in many parts of the nation, argues against rigid calendar restrictions. The danger that Key 73 might empty into a 1974 vacuum of effort was early sensed by Christian Reformed and other cooperating agencies that viewed the effort as initiating an ongoing evangelistic concern. Methodists of all branches are planning a worldwide evangelistic engagement in 1974. Southern Baptists, slow to get under way in 1973 despite a fervent original commitment, may not find their cooperative stride until next year. Church leaders throughout Australia are contemplating a nationwide effort in 1975.

Seen in the context of Key 73, ecumenical-evangelical cooperation and contrast reflect some interesting developments. Vocal independent conservatives who have never had a good word for Graham crusades, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, or any effort that transcends fundamentalist isolation from ecumenical-related churches, have predictably had no use for Key 73. At the same time, some ecumenical-devoted churchmen have seen Key 73 primarily as an opportunity for creating a public image of broad ecumenical acceptance at a time when ecumenism is in considerable disarray, not least of all for substituting socio-political protest for personal evangelism.

In the center, however, are the vast multitudes of evangelicals, inside and outside the ecumenical constituency, who recognize the Great Commission as the Church’s primary task. This group includes many ecumenists who regard a Christian social witness as authentically biblical, yet neither equate this with evangelism nor make it the Church’s main mission in the world.

It is at the level of ecumenical bureaucratic leadership that the purposes of Key 73 are conspicuously exposed to public understanding or misunderstanding, while its inner intentions are best exhibited and clarified at the community level. NCC leaders associated with Key 73-related denominations, some of whom cooperated when they could no longer afford to ignore the effort, are sometimes more concerned for high-level mass-media visibility on the edge of Key 73 than for local congregational cooperation in evangelistic penetration.

Most of the laity and many of the clergy, however, are aware of this propensity, and know how to assess it when it appears. The difference between authentic apostolic evangelism and ambiguous modern proposals for Christian engagement is readily evident on the local scene. Those whose prime devotion is to the broadest possible public image for ecumenism per se (“I don’t care what we do, so long as we do it together publicly”) are simply presiding over the terminal coma of neo-Protestant ecumenism.

It was part of the Key 73 commitment that existing transdenominational structures should be used wherever they have been useful for local cooperative evangelism, and that new community structures should be projected only where already existing structures are unserviceable, and that these new ones should be projected as self-destructing with the completion of Key 73. This principle should be maintained.

Already interest in learning new evangelistic techniques and methods has shaped a well-nigh irresistible demand for a new Key 73 manual incorporating information about novel, successful ways of witnessing. And communities sharing the blessings of cooperative evangelistic engagement are asking what new and larger possibilities of spiritual activity remain to be explored.

Key 73 is but a beginning; the Great Commission will retain its urgency until every last citizen has heard good tidings of great joy. There is every reason for Key 73 participants to look and labor toward a significant bicentennial climax in 1976.