To Have and to Hold: The Feminine Mystique at Work in a Happy Marriage, by Jill Renich (Zondervan, 1972, 145 pp., $3.95), Risk and Chance in Marriage, by Bernard Harnik (Word, 1972, 179 pp., $4.95), How to Make Your Marriage Exciting, by Charles and Frances Hunter (Regal, 1972, 162 pp., $1.45 pb), Everything You Need to Know to Stay Married and Like It, by Bennard Wiese and Urban Steinmetz (Zondervan, 1972, 222 pp., $4.95), and Liberated Love, by Chester Pennington (Pilgrim, 1972, 127 pp., $4.95), are reviewed by Robert K. Bower, professor of practical theology and pastoral counseling, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

Of these books dealing with marriage, one is written for Christian wives (husbands may read it with profit also), two for young and middle-aged married couples, and two for young persons who are contemplating marriage or are newly married.

In To Have and to Hold, Jill Renich (the daughter of Dr. and Mrs. R. A. Torrey, Jr.) writes to other women out of her twenty-seven years’ experience as a wife and mother. In a day when women are reassessing their roles, this volume presents a view of the Christian wife who knows how to accept herself as a woman and how to be a truly helpful helpmate without losing her individuality. Her understanding of sexual responsibility in marriage is biblical and balanced. Perhaps her best chapters are the last two, in which she deals with problems usually avoided or overlooked by other writers: absentee husbands, job-hopping husbands, uncommunicative husbands, Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde husbands, and husbands who have failed. As a brief but realistic handbook for Christian wives on how to cope with the problems of normal marriage, this volume is a pleasure to recommend.

The author of Risk and Chance in Marriage is a physician who gradually moved into full-time marital and family counseling as he saw the need. Dr. Harnik is also chairman of the Swiss Board of Christian Doctors and is associated with Dr. Paul Tournier in Geneva.

The general outline of the book is developmental, following the individual through the stages of marriage crisis. Some of the subjects Harnik deals with are emotional and sexual adjustment in marriage, keeping romance in a marriage, married life after the children have left home, handling infidelity, and the twilight years of life. It is obvious that he has developed his ideas through counseling hundreds of cases, and he suggests realistic solutions to the kinds of marital problems that commonly arise. He refers to several basic concepts of Freud and Jung but only insofar as these are compatible with Christian values. He finds premarital sex, probation marriage, group marriage, and group sex all seriously deficient on Christian and psychological grounds.

In How to Make Your Marriage Exciting, the Hunters discuss the Christian qualities a husband and wife need to make a marriage satisfying, such as honesty, love, patience, courtesy, and forgiveness. This is a story of a widow and widower who married in middle-age when both were fairly well established in their professional roles (she a writer, he a businessman). It should appeal to Christians who find themselves in somewhat similar circumstances. Younger couples in process of personality formation, career stabilization, sexual adjustment, and possible financial crisis would probably find the material relevant but in a limited way. The Hunters write from a light-hearted perspective, and many overly serious Christian couples could profit from reading the book.

In the first of two books designed for those forming their views of marriage, Everything You Need to Know to Stay Married and Like It, Wiese and Steinmetz deal quite adequately with money, maturity, communication, and child-rearing as well as with more psychological subjects such as conditioning influences, defense mechanisms, and the need for self-disclosure. There are several inaccuracies in what they say about sexual functioning and anatomy; the inferences a reader might make from this misinformation could hinder rather than enhance sexual adjustment. On the whole this volume is quite helpful and conservative.

The major theme of Liberated Love is that the traditional views of love, sex, marriage, and the family are still the most logical and meaningful. Insights and interpretations from Eric Fromm, Rollo May, and other psychologists are presented along with those that Pennington (professor of preaching and worship at Iliff School of Theology) gained from his own experience. Authority for the views presented tends to be derived primarily from human experience but with significant reference to the story of creation and its sexual meanings. The book might appeal most to young people who prefer not to accept the Scriptures as their only source for discovering the meaning of sexuality. It is creative and interesting.

Navigating A Middle Course

Religious Liberty in the United States: The Development of Church-State Thought Since the Revolutionary Era, by Elwyn A. Smith (Fortress, 1972, 386 pp., $10.95), is reviewed by Erling Jorstad, professor of history, St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota.

This is a timely and helpful contribution to our understanding of the theological and political ideas that created the tradition of religious liberty in American church-state relations. Rather than attempt to revise the standard work by Anson Phelps Stokes (later edited by Leo Pfeffer), Professor Smith of Temple University presents a sharply focused, superbly researched study into the history of those ideas that he finds behind the three traditions concerning religious liberty: the separatist tradition, the Catholic tradition, and the constitutional tradition. Using the skills of an intellectual historian, he traces the development of religious liberty among the leading spokesmen of these schools.

Each tradition is examined chronologically from the time of the Revolution to the present. Smith asks each of the men whom he studies his views on religious liberty and how he can justify these on the bases of his theological and philosophical convictions. In this way we get a fresh reading of such familiar thinkers as Isaac Backus, James Madison, Timothy Dwight, Horace Bushnell, John Carroll, John Ireland, and John Courtney Murray, to name only a few.

Smith also asks the same questions, in part III, of those Supreme Court justices who wrote opinions on the landmark religious-liberty cases. By this method he adds considerably to our understanding of the theology and philosophy that contributed to such decisive cases as Zorach v. Clauson and Engle v. Vitale.

In the final chapter, Smith sheds his role as impartial historian and presents his own conclusions on what the title calls “The Meaning of Separation of Church and State.” Here he comes to terms with the toughest question of all: How can the state remain neutral on theology but still concern itself with “socially significant conduct that is religiously grounded”? Smith makes it clear that he does not want the state to remain indifferent to the effect of socially significant ethical doctrines. He suggests that expert church and constitutional authorities, drawing on the traditions of the past, establish guidelines to keep any solutions strictly within the realm of constitutional law.

Smith says that when church bodies speak and act in areas of public significance they should be treated by the state solely in their civil or secular character. That is, they should have no special protection or immunities once they enter into the arena of public debate on social issues. But Smith states that this should not cause the state to withdraw the churches’ tax exemption. As a solution to this thorny problem he suggests that ecclesiastical property-holders “cut their taxable property to a level at which they could afford to pay their taxes.”

Smith concludes with what strikes me as a sound middle-of-the-road course for the future. Noting that extremists who want even more separation of church and state (no chaplains, no prayers in the legislatures, and so on) and those who favor increasing state aid to religious institutions (to parochial schools, for instance) are attracting the most attention at the moment, he finds that only a middle ground between “favor and hostility” is possible. He wisely cautions all concerned to avoid setting up too rigid standards and definitions. The future of religious liberty is bright, he concludes, so long as its practitioners continue to navigate from those charts of tradition that have long served this nation well.

Dubious Psychiatry

Religion May Be Hazardous to Your Health, by Eli S. Chesen (Peter H. Wyden, 1972, 145 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Orville S. Walters, clinical professor of psychiatry, University of Illinois, Peoria.

The author of this book is identified on the dust jacket as a psychiatric resident in an unnamed medical center who has completed “an internship in psychiatry”—perhaps halfway through psychiatric training. He was raised in the Jewish faith, and the best chapter in his book is one describing the tensions of achieving identity in a Jewish family. In a brief autobiographical note at the end of the book, he acknowledges difficulty in imagining “a God who listens to me or an afterlife that waits for me,” though he tends to envy those who do have “such genuine beliefs.”

Dr. Chesen is not troubled by the ambiguities that abound in psychiatry, nor by some of the booby traps of logic that may beset the essayist. In a chapter titled “Some Ground Rules,” he explains that he has studied religion “as an etiology.” Such an “etiological” approach assumes in advance of any proof that religion is a cause of disease. Likewise undaunted by the post hoc fallacy, the author charges religion with precipitating or laying the groundwork for psychosis when he finds religious background and symptoms in the psychotic patient.

The author makes free use of some sharp instruments that can cut both ways. He asserts that the psychiatrist guided by religious beliefs is unfair to the patient, but he seemingly hasn’t thought about the influence of the psychiatrist who has angry feelings toward religion. He suggests that priests who take a hard line on contraception and abortion may harbor resentment because they are shut off from something in which they would like to have a part; this recalls his own wistful closing note acknowledging the constructive value of religion for giving meaning to life, and his envy of those who have such faith. He belabors the Catholic Church for replacing logic with dogmatism, while his book abounds in such gratuitous assertions as: “there is absolutely no question in my mind” that many ultrafundamentalist preachers are schizophrenic; psychotic breaks are common in fundamentalist Protestantism; the more fundamental or evangelical faiths are the most hazardous to mental health; the Jesus craze is a dissociative experience and a threat to mental well-being; the “mental scar” of abortion is a myth; religious dogma and reality are at opposite poles. A great deal more needs to be written on relationships between psychiatry and religion, but one of the first qualifications is to “read the minutes of the last meeting.”

Two articles of faith underlie most criticism of religion offered by psychiatrists: (1) that healthy religion may be understood by studying religion as it is seen in disturbed and mentally sick patients; (2) that since the alleged realities of religion cannot be grasped by science, there is no such reality. Both presuppositions are defective. The first is fallacious because no unbiased inquiry can neglect the first-hand examination of healthy religion; the second produces an argument from ignorance rather than from knowledge. The logical weakness of these assumptions has long been recognized. (See my articles, “Religion and Psychopathology,” Comprehensive Psychiatry, February, 1964, and “Have Psychiatry and Religion Reached a Truce?,” CHRISTIANITY TODAY, October 8, 1965).

For a balanced view of the subject, I recommend Modern Psychiatry: A Handbook For Believers (Doubleday, 1966, paperback), written by a highly respected psychiatrist, Dr. Frances Braceland, in collaboration with a professor of psychology. Although the subject is treated from the Catholic viewpoint, the book is authoritative and valuable for all Christians.

NEWLY PUBLISHED

Western Religion, edited by Hans Mol (Mouton [Box 1132, The Hague, Netherlands], 642 pp., 72 guilders). Authoritative country-by-country surveys in English, each by a sociologist of religion, for all of Europe (except Romania), plus Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States (the latter written by perhaps the leading evangelical in the field, David Moberg). Summarizes statistical data; excellent bibliographies. Belongs in every theological library.

The Christian Poet in Paradise Lost, by William C. Riggs (University of California, 194 pp., $7.50). In a lucid, graceful prose style Riggs tries to answer a long-discussed critical question: Do we find Milton expressing his attitudes through Satan or through God? Riggs’s conclusion evinces a mature understanding of Milton’s theology. He says, “Rather, as we have seen, by offering himself as an example of the Christian in conflict, Milton was concerned to turn the meaning of his own encounter with God’s ways toward all mankind, to become himself an heroic pattern.”

Bless This House, by Anita Bryant (Revell, 156 pp., $4.95). A homey, anecdotal look at family living, written by Miss Bryant and her husband. Might be too soupy for some.

Saints Alive!, by Huber Drumwright (Broadman, 128 pp., $1.50). On twenty-six of the lesser-known believers in the New Testament.

How I Changed My Thinking About the Church, by Richard C. Halverson (Zondervan, 120 pp., $3.75). Using the example of the early Church, a well-known pastor stresses the importance of truly personal ministry by the congregation to its own members and to the surrounding community. Fellowship and commitment are effective means of meeting the social and human needs of today’s society.

Independent Bible Study, by Irving Jensen (Moody, 188 pp., $2.95 pb). Paperback edition of a ten-year-old introduction of proven value.

The Theology of Post-Reformation Lutheranism, Volume 2: God and His Creation, by Robert Preus (Concordia, 280 pp., $12.50), and Lutheran Confessional Theology in America: 1840–1880, edited by Theodore Tappert (Oxford, 364 pp., $10.75). Tappert collects seventeen writings by several American counterparts of the two-centuries-earlier Germans who are ably summarized by Preus.

A Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship, edited by J. G. Davies (Macmillan, 385 pp., $9.95). A major reference work, with 361 articles, from “ablutions” to “watch-night.” Liturgy is defined to take in much more than the traditional “liturgical” churches. Many smaller bodies also have articles on them, and such articles are by members of the group. “Baptism,” a long entry, has fifteen subdivisions, each by a different author. International in scope, but with a British flavor. Should be in all school and many congregational libraries.

The Gospel of Matthew, by David Hill (Attic [Box 1156, Greenwood, S. C. 29646], 367 pp., $11.95) and The Gospel of John, by Barnabas Lindars (Attic, 648 pp., $16.95). The “New Century Bible,” a British commentary intended to have more than thirty volumes, is now half complete and has acquired an American distributor. These two volumes are worthy additions to the series, which theological libraries should acquire.

Electric Evangelism, by Dennis Benson (Abingdon, 144 pp., $3.95). Good introduction to the possibilities of radio and TV evangelism. Benson presents creative, innovative ideas to capture the imagination and hearts of young people for Jesus.

From Tradition to Gospel, by Martin Dibelius (Attic [Box 1156, Greenwood, S.C. 29646], 311 pp., $11). Reprint of the 1933 revision of a 1919 work that has been very influential in the academic study of the New Testament.

Thomas Merton on Prayer, by John J. Higgins (Doubleday, 192 pp., $5.95). A helpful study, though reading Merton himself would be more revealing.

Patterns For Prayer From the Gospels, by V. Gilbert Beers (Revell, 95 pp., $2.95). A devotional study of six prayers from the Bible. Some good insights but lacks real meat.

Textile Art in the Church, by Marion P. Ireland (Abingdon, 282 pp., $27.50). A definitive study, with sections on symbolism, color, and the history of Christian art, plus chapters on weaving, design, and needlework. See also the editorial in the February 2 issue, page 25.

Dictionary of American Philosophy, by St. Elmo Nauman, Jr. (Philosophical Library, 273 pp., $10). A biographical dictionary of about 150 philosophers influential in American thought. Entries range from a few lines to a few pages in length. Style is chatty.

Understanding the Bible, by John Stott (Regal, 254 pp., $1.95 pb). Excellent introduction to the purpose, land, story, message, authority, interpretation, and use of the Bible by the renowned English preacher-author.

A Translator’s Handbook on the Acts of the Apostles, by Barclay Newman and Eugene Nida (American Bible Society, 542 pp., $2.50 pb). Those not engaged in translation work will still find many helpful insights.

The Spirituality of Friedrich von Hiigel, by Joseph Whelan (Newman, 320 pp., $8.95), and Baron Friedrich von Hiigel and the Modernist Crisis in England, by Lawrence Borman (Cambridge, 278 pp., $18.50). Two perspectives on a central figure in the turn-of-the-century Catholic conflict that ended rather differently (complete repression) from the way it seems the similar one now raging will end. Well done works of scholarship.

The Threshing Floor, by John Sheehan (Paulist, 208 pp., $3.95 pb). A Catholic educator gives a personal and readable interpretation of the Old Testament that treats the material topically, emphasizing the supposed evolution of the religious forms.

Market Unlimited, by Neville Cryer (Hodder & Stoughton [Warwick Lane, London EC4P 4AH, England], 125 pp., $1.50 pb). A report by a leader of the British and Foreign Bible Society on ways and means of Bible distribution. Some good information on the many and varied media available, and how they can be used to overcome the problems involved in distributing the Bible to the world.

Truth in Advertising (Harper & Row, 44 pp., $2.25 pb). Report of a symposium of the Toronto School of Theology. The pervasive phenomenon of advertising, commercial and non-commercial, has not received nearly enough attention by ethicists. This is only a start.

The Liberalization of American Protestantism by Henry Pratt (Wayne State University, 304 pp., $15.95). A revealing study of the development of the Federal Council of Churches and its successor organization, the National Council of Churches, into a pressure group for political liberalism, despite the opposition of the majority of members of member churches. The author basically approves of this development.

Shakespeare’s God: The Role of Religion in the Tragedies, by Ivor Morris (St. Martin’s, 496 pp., $15.95). While rejecting the “conceptual,” theological approach to Shakespeare’s tragedies, which leads incorrectly to allegorical interpretation, Morris admits that a critic needs to be theologically aware. This critical theory is seen in his discussion of Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, and Hamlet. A solidly argued, well written, interesting case.

The Crusades, by Hans Mayer (Oxford, 339 pp., $10.25 and $2.95 pb), and The Crusaders in the Holy Land, by Meron Benvenisti (Macmillan, 408 pp., $12.95). Respectively, a good general survey and a detailed, illustrated, archaeological and historical presentation of the Crusaders at their destination.

Moral Education: Interdisciplinary Approaches, edited by C. M. Beck, B. S. Crittenden, and E. V. Sullivan (University of Toronto, 402 pp., $12.50, and Newman, $4.95 pb). Conference papers by respected secular educators on the problems of moral education. Some of the issues covered are the search for norms, moral education and action, and moral development. Valuable to those with a serious interest in education.

Hope Is the Remedy, by Bernard Häring (Doubleday, 192 pp., $5.95). The author embarks on a redefinition of hope in terms of a God-given life-style that allows us to face evil and further our “conversion.” At least he bases hope on the ability of Christ’s victory over sin.

Buganda in the Heroic Age, by Michael Wright (Oxford, 244 pp., n.p., pb). With Uganda in the headlines once more, this scholarly account of religious and political strife in a major portion of the country at the close of last century is especially timely. Many Christians were martyred in those years; will it happen again?

Understanding the Old Testament, by Jay Williams (Barron’s, 240 pp., $2.95 pb). A readable introductory guide to the Old Testament that espouses current critical views. Apparently designed for use in a “Bible as literature” class. Displays skepticism about the historicity of reported events.

Revelation and Theology: An Analysis of the Barth-Harnack Correspondence of 1923, by Martin Rumscheidt (Cambridge, 219 pp., $11.95). Documents the chivalrous but vigorous clash between the greatest of German liberals and his famous Swiss student, the founder of neo-orthodoxy. Evangelicals may sympathize with Harnack’s bafflement at Barth’s concept of revelation, which, Harnack felt, destroyed theology as a science for the sake of a faith that Barth could not really define. A valuable if somewhat esoteric contribution to recent theological history.

Luther, edited by Ian Siggins (Harper & Row, 209 pp., $10.50, $5.50 pb). Excerpts from a wide range of writings by Luther and his contemporaries, expertly introduced and arranged (basically in the order that the events occurred). Good bibliography. Unfortunately overpriced.

Inductive Study of the Book of Jeremiah, by F. Ross Kinsler (William Carey Library, 584 pp., $4.95 pb). A missionary-educator has developed a very thorough programmed text for use in extension seminaries. A useful tool for the student who wants to do advanced study of the English Bible.

The Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in Eighteenth-Century England, by David B. Morris (University Press of Kentucky, 260 pp., $8.50). A welcome addition to the various studies of sublimity in the eighteenth century. Basing his survey of the religious sublime on John Dennis’s critical theories, Morris examines Wesley, Watts, and Johnson, among others, and shows how—and postulates why—the eighteenth century’s attitudes toward religious poetry changed.

God Is Up to Something, by David A. Redding (Word, 164 pp., $4.95). A devotional book giving a basis for personal hope; shows God active in lives today as he was in Bible times. For those who despair.

A History of Christian Thought, by Paul Tillich (Simon and Schuster, 550 pp., $4.95 pb). One-volume edition of two series of lectures delivered in the sixties and previously published separately. Indexed.

To Love or Perish: The Technological Crisis and the Churches, edited by Edward Carothers and others (Friendship, 152 pp., $1.95). The report of an NCC/Union Seminary-sponsored task force describes the now familiar crisis and its moral implications. Calls for nations to forsake exploitive life-styles and liberate the oppressed of the world.

The Spirit World, by McCandlish Phillips (Victor [Wheaton, Ill. 60187], 192 pp., $1.45 pb). An abridgment of The Bible, the Supernatural, and the Jews, focusing on the competing expressions of supernaturalism, benign and malign.

1,000 Stories and Quotations of Famous People, by Wayne E. Warner (Baker, 362 pp., $5.95). A sourcebook of forty-four persons’ thoughts (only three are women). Handy, but simplistic. The synopses of various novels are especially poor.

A God Within, by Rene Dubos (Scribner, 325 pp., $8.95). A Pulitzer Prizewinning microbiologist probes man’s inner resources for effecting good or evil, without ever showing why or how to choose one over the other. Tantalizingly unsatisfying.

The Christological Awareness of Clement of Rome and Its Sources, by Harold Bumpus (University Press [21 East St., Winchester, Mass. 01890], 196 pp., n.p.). In this highly technical analysis of one of the earliest post-apostolic writings, Bumpus shows that Clement of Rome was strongly influenced by the Jewish Christians and the literature of the intertestamental period, and hence stressed Christ’s teaching and eschatological role more than his being. Nevertheless Clement was aware of Christ’s preexistence and his mediatorial work.

The Go-Between God, by John V. Taylor (Fortress, 246 pp., $5.50). An examination of the role of the Holy Spirit from the standpoint of personal encounter in all human experience, as specifically portrayed in the Scriptures, and in developments in other religions and the contemporary church. Weak in biblical emphasis.

In Man We Trust: The Neglected Side of Biblical Faith, by Walter Brueggemann (John Knox, 144 pp., $4.95). Having moved from neo-orthodoxy to a more secular theology, the author finds in Old Testament Wisdom literature an affirmation of man and culture. Evangelicals in “culture negating” traditions may benefit from this emphasis, but it is hardly the message needed by secular man. Included is a useful bibliographic essay on recent Wisdom research.

Enthusiasm, by Susie I. Tucker (Cambridge, 224 pp., n.p.). A fascinating discussion of the religious and cultural connotations of the word “enthusiasm” in English literature from the seventeenth century on.

Episcopalians and Roman Catholics: Can They Ever Get Together?, edited by Herbert Ryan and Robert Wright (Dimension [Box 811, Denville, N. J. 07834], 249 pp., $2.95 pb). A liturgy- and ecclesiology-centered discussion of the possibilities of union between two church structures that are in the process of disintegration.

Celibacy in the Church, edited by William Bassett and Peter Huizing (Herder and Herder, 156 pp., $5.95 and $2.95 pb). Nine essays on Roman Catholic clerical celibacy, viewed both historically and theologically, including some by non-Catholics. Also two essays on married (non-Catholic) ministers. (Volume 78 of the “Concilium” series.)

Dogma, Volume 4: The Church, Its Origin and Structure, by Michael Schmaus (Sheed and Ward, 215 pp., $3.95 pb). Translation of the fourth volume of the conservative German Roman Catholic’s major work on systematics, which attempts to uphold traditional Catholic views in dialogue with Protestants and to show their usefulness in daily Christian life and experience. Previous volumes were: God in Revelation, God in Creation, and God and His Christ. Constantine the Great, by Hermann Dörries (Harper & Row, 250 pp., $3.45 pb). An able presentation of the first Christian emperor with full consideration of the theological and religious ramifications.

Conversations on Love and Sex in Marriage, by Jim and June Cicero and Ivan and Joyce Fahs (Wood, 138 pp., $3.50). Very frank conversation between two couples on sex practices and hangups and their relationship to love. May be of interest to some, but it’s only a start toward improving evangelical sexual attitudes.

If the Church Is to Survive, by Louis Evely (Doubleday, 144 pp., $4.95). A French Catholic scholar confronts the conflict of tradition with renewal in his church. He suggests democratic principles of reform in the areas of church structure, authority, the role of the clergy, and missions.

Life in Christ, by Norman Pittenger (Eerdmans, 128 pp., $1.95 pb). A prolific author shares some useful devotional thoughts on a key biblical concept.

Trouble Doesn’t Happen Next Tuesday, by Sallie Chesham (Word, 160 pp., $3.95). Encouraging story of an inner-city ministry, the Old Hat in Chicago, demonstrating the adaptability of the Salvation Army to changing conditions but with an unchanging message of the love of God.

First Easter, by Paul L. Maier (Harper & Row, 128 pp., $4.95). Interesting retelling, with fine photographs, by one who believes the resurrection. Don’t expect anything profound.

People/Profits: The Ethics of Investment, edited by Charles W. Powers (Council on Religion and International Affairs [170 E. 64th St., New York, N. Y. 10021], 214 pp., $2.95 pb). The report of a CRIA seminar that considered questions of investment criteria and investor responsibility. Encourages a “social audit” of corporations and suggests some ethical guidelines.

Private Conscience and Public Law: The American Experience, by Richard J. Regan (Fordham, 245 pp., $8). A study of the claims of individual conscience compared with the public interest (as determined by the Supreme Court). Considers differences on such topics as civil disobedience, medical procedures, education, and population control. A well-documented, informative study with insightful conclusions.

The Sensitivity Phenomenon, by Joseph J. Reidy (Abbey, 134 pp., $4.95, $1.95 pb). An introduction to the sensitivity-encounter-group movement. Gives a brief history and definition of the various types of groups, as well as some of the pros and cons of their effects. Rather negatively disposed.

“The devil keeps advertising,” says a character in William Peter Blatty’s best-selling novel The Exorcist; “the devil does lots of commercials.” Advertising as a profession is relatively young, but as a force, as a method of persuasion, it is as old as the world. Like any other form of propaganda, it can be used for good or ill. Used for ill, it finds its charter in the Serpent’s soft-sell appeal to Eve: “Ye shall not surely die …; ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:4, 5). Satan has been similarly advertising ever since, producing what J. B. Priestley in another context has called “Admass—a consumer’s race with donkeys chasing an electric carrot.”

For centuries Satan has used the old donkey-carrot trick. Except for electrifying his carrot to adjust to the technological age, he has kept his techniques virtually unchanged. He remains the inveterate huckster, peddling his tawdry goods in this world’s Vanity Fair. “At this Fair,” Bunyan wrote in Pilgrim’s Progress, “are all such merchandise sold, as houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not.” Even the Prince of Princes himself, when he was here, was solicited by the lord of the fair to buy of its vanities. Those stern words of warning, Caveat emptor, “Let the buyer beware,” are as applicable to the present-day Christian as they were to the pagan Romans who uttered them in the fifth century B.C.

Basic to both Satanic and commercial solicitation is the appeal to self-indulgence. The sales-pitch Eve fell for was “Try it; you’ll like it.” Our progenitors were literally dying to try it. Adam and Eve bought the notion that “you only go around once in life, so you have to grab for all the gusto you can get,” and the grabbing has continued to this day. The rich farmer in Luke 12 spoke to his soul in the language of modern advertising copy, “Take thine ease—eat, drink, and be merry”; but in God’s sight he was a fool ripe for judgment. The devil’s appeal has always been “Indulge yourself”; God’s is “Deny yourself” (Matt. 16:24). The devil says “Live a little”; God says “Die a little” (John 12:24).

According to Henryk Skolimowski, the images of advertising “are projected to be psychologically appealing. Psychologically appealing images are those which appeal to our seven deadly sins: sexual urges, vanity, snobbery, gluttony, greed, etc.…” Try analyzing, in terms of their appeal to the seven deadly sins (pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth), the television commercials, billboards, and printed advertisements you see in the course of a single day. Then note these same appeals as they appear in the temptations you face. The attraction of Satan’s electric carrot is most assuredly based on that unholy triad: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life (1 John 2:16).

Perhaps the strongest appeal is the appeal to sex. “Sex,” Malcolm Muggeridge says in Jesus Rediscovered, “is, of all forms of self-indulgence, the one which makes the most appeal to the imagination.… Therefore, it is the hardest to conquer.…” Madison Avenue motivational analysts have in recent years been discovering what Vance Packard calls the “hidden persuaders,” which the inveterate huckster has known and used since Eden. The temptation in Eden had built-in sexual aftertones. When Adam and Eve bought Satan’s lie, they knew shame for the first time and sought to cover themselves; and today we hear “Take it off; take it all off.” Before the fall they were nude; after the fall they were self-consciously naked.

Another of the “hidden persuaders” Vance Packard talks about is ego-gratification. The spiritual application is obvious. Malcolm Muggeridge writes: “The devil is always there working on this ego.… And of course, the ego, the Devil’s instrument, is always there to his hand.” The spirit of Satan is the spirit of self, as shown, for example, by the five appearances of “I” in the brief account of Lucifer’s fall (Isa. 14:13, 14). To the extent that man indulges self he manifests the spirit of Satan.

“Advertisers … determine the fashionable type,” C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape tells Wormwood, his nephew and fledgling devil. Consequently, “a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do” to divert man’s attention from prayer and other spiritual matters. Satan’s appeal to Adam and Eve’s desire for power through knowledge diverted them from God’s perfect will. Basic to advertising, and to Satanic solicitation, is both diversion and advertence. To “advertise” is to “advert,” that is, to turn a person to something. Satan attempted both to divert and to advert Christ by selling a sense of power in each of the three recorded temptations: power to turn stones to bread, power to defy natural law, and power to reclaim the world.

This third temptation was also a bargain special. Hear the old huckster: “Get all the kingdoms of the world at a special reduced price, a sensational unheard-of bargain! Why wait and pay the more expensive price at Calvary? Take advantage of this special offer!” The same copywriter offered a “special” on fruit to Eve, on “Wonderbread” to Christ, and on lentil soup to Esau. Before Esau sold his birthright, he bought the “bargain,” a mess of pottage—and he paid dearly for it. Grabbing for all the gusto he could get, Esau sacrificed his future on the altar of the pleasing present. The sales-pitch was “Buy now, pay later,” and pay he did. It was not an “easy payment plan,” for the way of the transgressor is hard; sin, when it is finished, brings forth death (Jas. 1:15). When “later” came, Esau “found no place of repentance though he sought it carefully with tears” (Heb. 12:17).

Eve, Esau, and indeed Everyman have grasped at the elusive, illusive carrot, largely because of the devil’s insidious soft-sell approach. No small part of his success lies in his skilled use of propaganda techniques widely used in advertising. The Institute for Propaganda Analysis some years ago discussed the major devices in an article called “How to Detect Propaganda.” One is the Glittering Generality, and certainly the devil’s assurance to Eve, “Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil,” is both glittering and a generality. A large part of this device is to identify the product or course of action with virtue by use of “virtue words” or “purr words.” Madison Avenue uses such highly connotative terms as “prestige,” “man of distinction,” “satisfying,” “luxurious,” “fashionable,” “modern,” “matchless,” “figure-flattering.” Similarly, the devil uses words to stir up our emotions and befog our thinking, generalities to make us accept and approve without examining the consequences.

Another device mentioned by the Institute of Propaganda Analysis is Card Stacking:

The propagandist employs all the arts of deception to win support.… He stacks the cards against the truth. He uses under-emphasis and over-emphasis to dodge issues and evade facts. He offers false testimony. He creates a smoke-screen of clamor by raising a new issue when he wants an embarrassing matter forgotten. He draws a red herring across the trail to confuse and divert those in quest of facts he does not want revealed. He makes the unreal appear real and the real appear unreal. He lets half-truths masquerade as truth.

What an apt description of Satan’s advertisement of evil!

Stuart Chase, in his book The Tyranny of Words could also be describing the Satanic method: “The advertiser often creates verbal goods, turning the reader’s attention from the actual product. He sells the package and especially the doctrinal matter around the package.” Satan presents only the attractive package of sin, hiding the horrible contents and the high price. He offers deceptive “doctrinal matter”—the doctrine of devils (1 Tim. 4:1). He peddles what Jules Henry has called the advertiser’s “pecuniary pseudo-truth” and “pecuniary logic”—“proof that is not a proof but is intended to be so for commercial purposes.” Satan presented only half-truths to Eve when he promised her that her eyes would be opened. Her eyes were opened, according to Genesis 3:7, but the new knowledge brought with it spiritual death, separation from God. Adam and Eve did in a limited sense become “like God” in their knowledge of good and evil, but they were tragically unlike God in their complicity in evil. Knowledge was their “end,” both their desire and their destruction.

Satan also effectively uses the Band-Wagon approach, an appeal to “follow the crowd.” “Everybody’s doing it!” “Everybody’s talking about the new Starfire!” “Can two million satisfied customers be wrong?” There is also the Transfer device, by which, according to the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, “the propagandist carries over the authority, sanction, and prestige of something we respect and revere to something he would have us respect. For example, most of us respect and revere our church and our nation. If the propagandist succeeds in getting church or nation to approve a campaign in behalf of some program, he thereby transfers its authority, sanction, and prestige to that program.” What could be more subtle than Satan’s attempt to use “religion” and “religious” institutions in opposing Christ, as he used the sincere but impulsive Peter as his mouthpiece in opposition to the redemptive plan (Matt. 16:22, 23)?

Popular also with Satan is the device called CEBUS (Confirmed Exposure But Unconscious), discussed in a Time magazine article (“… And Now a Word about Commercials,” July 12, 1968). This device involves a repeated barrage of words and images until a “fatigue factor” sets in and with it often a lasting subconscious impression. Satan bombards us daily with images and ideas, hoping for a fatigue factor and submission. The solution is to be found in Hebrews 12:3, “Consider him … lest ye be weary and faint in your minds.” Satan works constantly on and through the conscious and subconscious mind, just as he “beguiled Eve’s mind through his craftiness” (2 Cor. 11:3). The solution lies in “bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5).

Evil solicitation, like advertising, relies upon repetition. Luke’s account of the temptation of Christ states that when the devil had ended the tempting, “he departed from him for a season.” “The genius of advertising,” according to James Webb Young, “is reiteration, and … its prophet, Isaiah, said: ‘Whom shall he teach knowledge? And whom shall he make to understand doctrine?… For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little.’ ” The point is significant: one learns doctrine through repetition, whether the doctrine be commercial, Satanic, or divine.

Perhaps ultimately the basis of all advertising—and of Satanic solicitation as well—is the element of promise, of investing the product or the act with glamorous meanings beyond itself. “Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement,” Samuel Johnson wrote in the eighteenth century. Each temptation offers an attractive but hollow promise: “Your eyes shall be opened”; “Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil”; “All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.” These assurances are the equivalents of such implicit promises as a “new you” if you drink milk, “sex appeal” if you brush with a certain toothpaste, rugged masculinity if you drive a certain kind of car, a mate and domestic bliss if you use a certain mouthwash.

The promise not only invests the product or act with desirable meanings beyond itself but also divests it of associations with evil, guilt, punishment: “Ye shall not surely die.” “One of the main jobs of the advertiser … is not so much to sell the product as to give moral permission to have fun without guilt,” says Ernest Dichter, president of the Institute for Motivational Research. Similarly, the devil seeks to palliate evil, to make sin appear less sinful.

The subtlety of the devil’s promises lies in the fact that they are directed toward pseudo-fulfillment of legitimate, God-ordained needs and desires; they function as counterfeits of divine promises of fulfillment. Accordingly, Satan advertises the superficial but attractive “pleasures of sin for a season” (Heb. 11:25); God offers fullness of joy and pleasures at his right hand for evermore (Ps. 16:11). Satan hawks cheap thrills, temporary euphoria, sensual titillation; God offers peace that passes all understanding (Phil. 4:7). Satan peddles earthly fame, the vain plaudits of a fickle crowd; God offers a crown of glory that does not fade (1 Pet. 5:4). Satan solicits man with treasures upon earth, where moth and rust corrupt and where thieves break through and steal (Matt. 6:19); God offers incorruptible treasures in heaven and treasure in these “earthen vessels” now (2 Cor. 4:7).

Perhaps the prophet Isaiah had in mind this competition of products and promises when he wrote: “Say there! Is anyone thirsty? Come and drink—even if you have no money! Come, take your choice of wine and milk—it’s all free! Why spend money on foodstuffs that don’t give you strength? Why pay for groceries that don’t do you any good? Listen and I’ll tell you where to get food that fattens up your soul (Isa. 55:1, 2; Living Bible).

“What will ye buy?” an inhabitant of Vanity Fair asks Bunyan’s pilgrims. “We buy the truth,” they respond. Is it not tragic that men continue to ignore God’s promises of free, genuine fulfillment and pursue, with ever-increasing frenzy, the devil’s electric carrot?

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.”

The last two years have witnessed a flood of literature advocating tolerance, approval, and even a kind of appreciation for homosexual behavior. Much of this writing comes from ostensibly Christian quarters. Because of the religious or Christian language in which the prohomosexuality arguments are often couched, evangelicals need to familiarize themselves with the biblical approach to this problem. To aid in this, CHRISTIANITY TODAYinterviewed Dr. Klaus Bockmühl, professor at the St. Chrischona Pastors’ Training Institute in Basel, Switzerland. Pastor Bockmühl holds a theological doctorate in ethics from the University of Basel. He was formerly chaplain to students at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.

Question: Dr. Bockmühl, in a German address you charge that a number of supposedly Christian theologians have “given Scripture the boot” as the norm for Christian ethics in regard to homosexuality. Where did this start?

Answer. It began in England. The tremendous increase in publicly reported homosexuality—an 850 per cent increase in homosexual offenses recorded by the police between 1934 and 1954, as compared to a 223 per cent increase for all other offenses—resulted in the preparation of the so-called Wolfenden Report in 1957. This report was preceded by a number of independent investigations, made by the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England, the British Medical Association, and other groups. These reports deal primarily with the legal and sociological aspects of homosexuality, though the Anglican report goes into detail on the pastoral counseling of homosexuals and speaks of the necessity for conversion. The Anglican report, like that of the BMA, makes a sharp distinction between homosexual propensity and behavior: the propensity is morally neutral, but the homosexual has no right to demand greater moral freedom for his behavior than for that of his heterosexual brother, for whom sexual relations are sanctioned by God only within marriage.

Q. This would then suggest compassion for homosexually inclined persons but condemnation of explicitly homosexual behavior. What has changed since 1957?

A. Among German-speaking authorities, the argument was raised in 1959 that because homosexuality had supposedly been proved to result from constitutional, i.e. biological, factors (actually, this “proof” does not exist), it is a variation resulting from Creation itself. Therefore it should be recognized by the Christian Church. Professor Helmut Thielicke of Hamburg published an important article in the Zeitschrift für evangelische Ethik in 1962: after summarily disposing of what Scripture actually says—and of course the Bible never mentions the “constitutional propensity” to homosexuality, but explicitly condemns homosexual behavior—he claims that the question should be decided on sociological and psychological grounds. From all this Thielicke—together with some others—comes to the curious conclusion of recommending “sublimation” for homosexuals, by which he means that they should be given opportunities for social welfare and youth work, and encouraged to go into the ministry. In the same issue of the Zeitschrift, Professor H. J. Schoeps claims that Paul’s opposition to homosexuality resulted from the narrowminded hostility of the Jews of the Dispersion to the Hellenistic culture that surrounded them. Later that year Schoeps called for the abolition of all laws against homosexual behavior.

The discussion in Germany was brought to focus with the publication of a book entitled Sexuality and Crime (1963), in which a number of prominent scientists, theologians, lawyers, and doctors of medicine raised their voices against the German government’s “overly conservative” proposals for legislative reform. Unfortunately the essay by Thielicke was reprinted in this book, giving readers the impression that he spoke for Christian ethics.

Q. Historically, Christianity has taken a strong stand against homosexuality. What arguments were used by religious spokesmen to justify their change of position?

A. A complete presentation of the argument is given in a marriage manual published in 1962 by Dr. Theo Bovet, in which, discussing “The Couple,” he includes as a subsection “Homophile Couples.” Observing that sexual morality is stricter in the atheistic Soviet Union than in the “Christian West,” Bovet concludes that the Christian faith has no distinctive sexual morality of its own. He obviously assumes we can decide what our ethical norms should be by observing present-day practices. Thus the Kinsey Report assumes major importance with its assertion that homosexuality is quite widespread.

Q. What conclusions are drawn from this “finding”?

A. The marriage manual quoted takes an extreme stand, maintaining that homosexuality is just another natural possibility of development, like heterosexuality; the difference between them can be compared to that between right- and left-handedness. Therefore the concept of homosexual seduction of the young—and of laws against it—becomes irrelevant, for all seduced youths must already have been homosexual. If homosexuality is a natural pattern, it can be reconciled with Christian faith. Since homosexuality is not a sickness, it cannot be healed. Since it is not a sin, there can be no conversion from it. Any apparently reformed homosexuals were in reality bisexuals who succeeded in overcoming or suppressing the homosexual part of their inclinations.

Q. What are the consequences of this for the Christian concept of marriage?

A. Marriage is highly exalted, and the essence of marriage is defined as “partnership.” Religious counselors who follow this line would logically try to promote “fidelity” or “marriage-like” relationships between homosexuals.

Q. What argument can be brought against all this?

A. I am glad to say that this development did not go unopposed. As early as 1963, Professor Walter Eichrodt of the Old Testament department at Basel published a defense of the traditional Christian teaching that homosexuality goes against the law of God and of nature. And in June of that year, a number of specialists in medicine, psychiatry, law, sociology, and theology took part in a conference on homosexuality called by the Swiss Evangelical Church Union.

Q. What conclusions did they reach?

A. First of all, the scientists demolished the “proof” that homosexuality is constitutional or determined by one’s heredity. One physician summed it up like this: “ ‘Hereditary homosexuality’ is an empty label we apply when we cannot find any explanation for an individual’s homosexuality in his case history.” A psychotherapist appealed to participants to do everything possible to dispel the myth that homosexuality results from a constitutional predisposition. A number of the theologians present stressed that the Bible not only establishes firm ethical standards but also emphasizes renewal through the power of the Holy Spirit (cf. 1 Cor. 6:9–11).

Q. How do you view the situation?

A. The permissive attitude toward homosexuality came from the false presupposition that it is constitutionally inherited. This contention drags the theological discussion onto unfamiliar territory and silences the Bible’s own teachings, which deal with conduct. Still more harm is caused by the inadmissible conclusion drawn from the presupposition of “constitutional” homosexuality, namely, that anyone who has this predisposition cannot be considered morally responsible for his acts or subjected to ethical judgments. A thorough study of the medical literature on this subject reveals no evidence that homosexuality has a physical or constitutional origin.

The unwarranted presupposition that homosexuality is hereditary also leads to the unsound practice of using statements made by “constitutional” homosexuals as the basis for ethical norms. This overlooks a fundamental fact: Christian ethics is prescriptive, not descriptive, or, to put it another way, Christian ethical standards are the product not of statistical research but of revelation.

Further harm is caused by another inadmissible conclusion drawn from the thesis of “constitutional” homosexuality, namely, that a person who has this constitutional predisposition cannot be considered morally responsible for his acts or subjected to ethical judgments. This is rather like saying that since the heterosexual sex drive is stronger in some people than in others, only those in whom the drive is weak or nonexistent can be held accountable for their behavior.

As a result of all this, the important distinction between propensity and practice, which had to be made at the start in order to discuss homosexuality at all—in view of the Bible’s categorical condemnation of it—has now again been abandoned. The Anglican report of 1956 carried the distinction through to a consistent condemnation of homosexual behavior, but some more recent writers have gone so far as to claim that abstinence would be harmful for homosexuals.

The remarkable and distressing thing is that not only have church spokesmen lost sight of the biblical condemnation of homosexual acts; they have also abandoned the biblical message of healing and restoration for those involved in homosexual sin on the same terms as for those involved in other types of sin. Thus “Christians” appear to be denying what many secular psychiatrists affirm, that homosexuality can be cured. Whenever churchmen of this persuasion hear of a “converted homosexual,” they dispose of the problem by saying that either he was not a “true” homosexual or he has simply subjected himself to effective—but by implication unnecessary—self-discipline. The naturalistic bias is revealed, for example, when some disparage a healing that leads “only” to abstinence. They think that a “cure” for homosexuality must necessarily involve heterosexual excitement or temptations.

Q. Dr. Bockmühl, you still haven’t explained how these people deal with the straightforward biblical condemnation of homosexuality.

A. In the Scripture homosexual acts are forbidden or categorically condemned in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, Romans 1:22–28, First Corinthians 6:9–11, and First Timothy 1:10. Most Protestants who have discussed homosexuality have felt obliged to deal with this unanimous biblical verdict, but few have done so adequately.

The most comprehensive treatment of the biblical position is given by D. S. Bailey, the editor of the Anglican report, in two chapters of his book Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (1955). Bailey’s treatment of the biblical passages is feeble, especially when compared with his presentation of historical material. He holds that the Christian “prejudice” against homosexuality results from a misunderstanding of the story of Sodom in Genesis 19. The Hebrew verb jada, know, does not necessarily mean sexual knowledge. Perhaps, he suggests, the Sodomites really only wanted to get acquainted with the strangers. How that could have been interpreted as a breach of hospitality, or why Lot would feel it necessary to offer to sacrifice his daughters to prevent it, Bailey does not explain. He devotes only two and one-half pages to the New Testament, chiefly to a discussion of whether the Greek terms are correctly translated in the Bible. At any rate, he concludes, the Bible does condemn certain vices of the ancient world but does not touch on the problem of constitutionally inherited homosexuality, which is what is supposed to concern us today.

The clear prohibition of homosexual acts in Leviticus 18:22 is often dismissed with the claim that what the text really has in mind is not homosexual activity as such but only contact with the alien religions that practiced male prostitution. In other words, it is a question not of morality but of religious purity. This bold argument is put forward on the basis of dubious evidence, for even Bailey observes that there is scant reason to suppose unnatural vice was widespread among the Egyptians and Canaanites and no reason at all to suppose it had a place in their worship.

At least Bailey finds the New Testament passages “quite clear.” Some other interpreters, however, see Romans 1:22–28 not as condemning homosexuality as such, but only as making it an “illustration” for the depravity of the ancient world. They leave it to the reader to answer the question: If the whole pattern is rejected as depraved, how can we accept the feature of it that is expressly cited as an illustration? Others claim that homosexuality is presented not as sinful in itself, but as punishment for sin. This explanation is more than naive. In Romans 1, Paul is completely in tune with the Old Testament idea that God can punish a sin by delivering the sinner over to it completely.

First Corinthians 6:9–11, by contrast, not only explicitly condemns homosexual practices but also clearly proclaims liberation from them. As a result it is popularly ignored. Some writers do not even mention it, while others simply list it without devoting even one sentence to what it says. The same thing happens to First Timothy 1:10, a passage that has an important bearing on the question of the political applicability of the moral law (the usus politicus legis) inasmuch as it places homosexual offenses in the same category with other deeds that are to be punished by public law.

Q. Can you sum that all up for us?

A. As far as the New Testament passages are concerned, the usual method is to say that Jesus does not expressly condemn homosexuality, and that even Paul was thinking only of the excesses of ancient society. Paul, it is claimed, could not have been speaking about constitutionally inherited homosexuality, because in his day it was completely unrecognized. Once the biblical standard has thus been shown to be “irrelevant,” sociological or psychological values can take its place. Other commentators on the subject draw on a nebulous, cover-all principle of “love,” which will always make it possible to show great “compassion” for the homosexual in his variant way of life. This procedure is always alleged to be based on a “pastoral, compassionate understanding” of the individual.

At this point I have to ask myself whether this proposal—to abolish the biblical standard as an act of compassion, “for the sake of the individual”—can possibly be meant seriously. Anyone who looks at First Corinthians 6 without the prejudice that permits the fantastic exegetic somersaults we have been discussing will discover that in the New Testament the Law is for the good of man. How can it then be compassionate to eliminate it?

Q. What do you think the attitude of believing Christians should be on this issue?

A. We must make certain distinctions. First, we should recognize that the central doctrine of the permissivist position, that homosexuality is inborn, has been virtually demolished.

Second, as wide reading on the subject and pastoral experience have shown me, such a thing as a psychic predisposition to homosexuality does exist. Again and again we see a case unfolding as in the textbook: a physically or psychologically absent father and/or a dominating mother produce lasting damage in the child or adolescent in the form of a homosexual fixation. In cases where a fixation has already occurred through early childhood experience or other factors, we can only agree with the Anglican report: such a fixation relieves the homosexual of accountability for his homosexual propensity, but it cannot relieve him of responsibility for his homosexual acts. We must always make this distinction.

Third, there is the ethical question. In his remarkable sociological and psychological study made for the British Home Ministry, The Homosexual Society (1962), Dr. Richard Hauser warns that a narrow line divides abnormal from normal behavior, and that there is great danger of crossing this line during adolescence, when a person passes through a phase of sexual ambivalence. This is the time when a homosexual fixation of emotional and social development can most easily take place. We must firmly repudiate the myth that such a fixation is necessarily irreversible. Hauser produces evidence to show that only 4 to 8 per cent of the active homosexuals are exclusively homosexual in their orientation; the far greater number are bisexual. This brings the real problem into focus: it lies not in the existence of a miniscule number of people who really might have a strong predisposition to homosexuality but in the greater number of those who have chosen homosexual behavior, so that homosexuality threatens to become an aggressive social epidemic.

As Hauser points out, putting oneself above the law on the question of homosexuality often goes along with a feeling of being above the law in other matters as well. A celebrated and typical example is the case of Guy Burgess, but similar attitudes are shown in the statements of homosexuals cited by Hauser: an attitude of being “beyond good and evil.” One is reminded of Karl Barth’s treatment of the problem in Church Dogmatics (Vol. III, Part 4, p. 185 of the German edition), that the first steps on the homosexual path can seem to “shine with a special beauty and exotic spirituality, even with an aroma of sanctity,” and that therefore we should warn against them from the beginning, and not begin to confront people with the law of God only when faced with serious, overt offenses. This is all the more crucial when we recognize that every human being has the possibility of a more or less far-reaching homosexual development.

Fourth, there is the matter of healing. A number of ecclesiastics today are thoroughly skeptical about the possibility of healing or cure for homosexuals. The sociologist Hauser, by contrast, believes that homosexual behavior patterns can be overcome when the particular pressures that led to them are lifted: “You have to have seen their joy and relief when people realize that they do not have to stay that way.” Some time ago the New York Academy of Medical Science reported a rate of cure of 50 per cent in the psychiatric treatment of homosexuality. Convincing overt homosexuals to begin treatment remained a major problem, doubtless aggravated by the current climate of permissiveness, even approval, in certain church circles.

A believing Christian certainly ought to be able to have even more hope than Hauser expresses. We know that in the early Church there were Christians who had been “like that.” But it was behind them, because they were subsequently “washed, sanctified, and justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:11). Finally, we ought to note that a number of practicing physicians have been convinced that an encounter with the saving power of Jesus Christ can decisively change the homosexual’s situation.

When such cures are cited—as in the BMA report—two things always stand out. First, when the individual has been claimed for a higher purpose and brought into the battle to fulfill God’s will on earth, his previous preoccupation with himself diminishes. Second, true Christian fellowship is a prerequisite. Again and again we hear that a change began in the life of a homosexual when a Christian group created a new moral and spiritual climate for him.

Nevertheless, every healing in the Christian sense depends on the individual’s answer to the question, “Wilt thou be made whole?” It is necessary for him to admit the sin in his past life, make confession, accept forgiveness, and begin to struggle against his impulses and for the cause of Christ, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, in the light of God’s plan of salvation for the world.

Finally, I would like to say this: The Church of Jesus Christ has to resist the trend that would ironically make it the agent for the abolition of its own ethical norms, an abolition for which neither the Old nor the New Testament offers the slightest justification. The biblical norms are relevant precisely because they deal with homosexual behavior, which is exactly the problem today. It is impossible to see why the principle of the lordship of Christ, which is applicable to every other aspect of human shortcoming and error, should not also have a healing and helpful impact in the area of homosexuality. In First Corinthians 6, Paul gives us a model of a creative approach, for he describes not only the required standard but also the source of power for a new life.

The decisive criterion of Christian ethics is the lordship of Christ, and in the area of sexual ethics this means that physical inclinations must be subordinated to his will, not used as an excuse for transgressing it. For this reason our attitude toward the current campaign to rehabilitate homosexuality in Christian ethics must be the same as that toward other, similarly based attempts to “modernize” Christian ethics—for example, in the field of heterosexual relations.

Today it is not only in systematic theology but also in Christian ethics that theology is being reduced to mere anthropology. What it really comes down to is this: Our whole generation is facing the choice, “Whom will you serve?”

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.”

Seminaries are under scrutiny because their main product, organized religion, is under pressure. Religion in America once fitted comfortably into an agrarian setting, but now it is struggling to adapt to an urban culture. Once it could assume in society a supernaturalistic view of life, but now it must contend with a naturalistic one. Once the minister was among the few educated people in town; now he is hardly distinctive at all and very little revered. The status and role of the Church in society has changed, and, it is being argued, the seminaries behind it must change too. It is clear, Nathan Pusey says, “that if the church is ‘on journey’ in these modern times, its ministry must be newly accoutred to travel with it.”

But to where is the Church traveling? The World Council of Churches has repeatedly faced this question, with little success. Changes made in response to the challenge do not seem to have been steps in the right direction. Sociologists Stark and Glock have shown that if the present state of affairs continues, “liberal” religion is headed for both financial and spiritual bankruptcy. The problem posed for this essay, then, is one that is being widely considered, has profound implications for both the Church and society, and bristles with difficulties.

The Purpose Of A Seminary

One might safely say that seminaries exist, first, to teach their students to think creatively within the intellectual framework they provide, principally through biblical, historical, and philosophical studies; second, to nourish the maturing process in students so that they emerge more spiritual as Christians and more whole as persons; third, to teach students to apply what they have learned, academically and personally, in a pastoral context. Within evangelical seminaries there are differences over whether the academic, the personal, or the practical factor should predominate, but few would deny that all three ought to be present. “From three sources men’s lives are made better or worse,” wrote John Oman. “First, there is the influence of their surroundings; second, the effect of their actions; third, the power of their beliefs.”

These factors in the students’ preparation are underscored because of the conception of ministry that is here assumed. The minister is a man with many roles, of course, and must be equipped with many skills; Gerald Kennedy has spoken of his seven “worlds”—as preacher, administrator, pastor, prophet, theologian, evangelist, and teacher. Yet if the faith in the pew is not structured and fed by the biblical Word, it will be less than evangelical and less than apostolic; if the Word thus preached and pastorally applied is not accompanied by the Spirit’s witness, it will be less than fruitful; and if the minister lacks love, sensitivity, and finesse in counseling his people, he will be less than Christ’s man in that moment.

The Academic Preparation

At the center of seminary education must be the study of Scripture, regardless of what changes have engulfed our society and regardless of how secularization has changed the psychology of our times. To say this is simply to affirm the finality of Christ’s saving work. In historical terms, it is to endorse the sola scriptura principle of the Reformers, and it is this that makes evangelical theology what it is. It is this that makes it apostolic. We succeed the apostles when we believe the same truth (2 Thess. 2:13; Titus 2:14, 15), the same word (1 Thess. 1:6; 2 Thess. 3:1; 1 Cor. 14:36; Gal. 6:6; Phil. 1:14), the same Gospel (Gal. 2:2; Rom. 2:16; 1 Cor. 15:1), and the same faith as they (Gal. 1:23; Col. 1:27; Eph. 4:5; 1 Tim. 1:19, 5:8). Our belief and practice must duplicate theirs because central to both is the same unchanging Christ.

Knowing Scripture, being able to unfold it and apply it, is what the New Testament requires of ministers. This is why they are spoken of as stewards (oikonomos)in charge of the provisions of the household (the Church); heralds (keryx) charged with proclaiming the deeds and decrees of the king (in the Christian context, God) and armed with his authority; and witnesses (martyrs) who validate evidence (martyrion), in this case, the reality of Christ’s saving work and the providential care of God. Without a knowledge of the biblical revelation, the minister cannot fulfill any of these roles.

Studying Scripture in a seminary program proceeds, of course, in several different stages. First there is the work of careful exegesis. The aim is to see the text in its own intellectual framework and then in relation to the cultural setting into which it was born. Second, the results of exegesis must be collated to reveal the thematic structure of biblical teaching. Third, as an adjunct to this process, the student must undertake historical study. History highlights deficient interpretations of Scripture and acts as a storehouse of the best piety and wisdom of the ages. Finally, the structure of biblical faith must be seen to yield implications for a philosophy of religion. Faith seeks understanding of itself through the intellect.

The prototype of this type of education was Calvin’s academy in Geneva, but it was closely paralleled by Luther’s work in Wittenberg and Jean Sturm’s and Martin Bucer’s in Strassburg. These were the forerunners in a long tradition of seminary education that was to become established in distant lands. In recent years in the United States, something has been lost in this tradition. During the era of fundamentalism, attention was directed away from serious confrontation of the biblical text to the personal and practical concerns of a seminary. James Barr, in an otherwise bitter attack on conservative faith, exposed a raw nerve when he remarked that very little serious biblical scholarship has emerged from conservatives in recent years despite their unyielding insistence on the importance of Scripture. If Scripture is so critical for evangelicals, why are they allowing others to produce most of the fruitful scholarship on it?

Displacing a scholarly commitment to biblical study, the honoring of God-controlled intellectual life, we now have a widespread anti-intellectualism. This has taken its toll on the Church in two ways, it seems to me. First, it has opened the door to a trivialization of faith; and second, it has failed to commend biblical Christianity to younger generations in terms of the questions they are now asking. They are increasingly more educated, more sophisticated intellectually, and less willing to receive Christian teaching simply because it is Christian.

It is true that only intellectuals complain about anti-intellectualism. “This species complains; therefore they exist,” was Valéry’s sage restatement of Descartes in this context. Nevertheless, the tendency to debunk intellectualism in certain Christian circles is dangerous and unbiblical. Christianity, after all, is a religion of knowledge because at its center is a rational revelation. It is a body of truth that must be taught.

In view of this, one of the most urgent problems is the yawning chasm between the kind of mental habits our best seminaries consider indispensable for the ministry and those that emerge in many pastors once they are in their work. The Hebrew and Greek so painfully learned are soon forgotten and never used; historical studies, in retrospect, appear more like an obstacle to be overcome than a significant means of upgrading the ministry; and theological and philosophical studies, though of passing interest, have little bearing on growing potatoes in Idaho. Is the academic aspect of seminary so important after all? If so, why can it be forgotten at such a small cost?

But is the cost so small? Harvard, remember, was founded because it was wisely feared that an unlearned ministry would leave behind it a moribund Christianity. Indeed, the dominant feature in the best chapters of pastoral care in church history has always been this concern to love God with the mind no less than the heart, to think our thoughts after him. In Zurich in the sixteenth century it was customary for all ministers and ministerial students to meet five times a week for “prophesying,” that is, exegetical and systematic expositions of Scripture. And in Puritan England, ministers usually gathered together at least weekly for theological lectures, biblical exposition, and discussion. This practice is referred to in a little ditty about Precise (Puritan) Taylor:

Precise Taylor bought a Bible of the new translation,

And in his life, he shew’d great reformation,

He walked mannerly and talked meekly,

He heard three Lectures and two Sermons weekly.

And John Wesley, in the midst of a revival, still demanded of his preachers that they do no less than five hours of study every day on Scripture and in the profound Christian writers.

In urban areas in the United States, the seminaries could do much to upgrade the level of ministry by reviving the practice of mutual edification among ministers. This would help to bridge the gap between the mental habits the seminaries foster in students and those that often emerge in the practice of ministry. In addition, an extension program of tapes and correspondence courses should be a part of every minister’s continuing education.

The Practical Instruction

Turning from academic to practical matters, how can the seminary best serve the needs of people today through its students? The answer, I suggest, lies in three basic shifts in the traditional pattern of doing things. First, practical subjects, such as homiletics, field education, pastoralia, and Christian education, should be taught more practically and less theoretically; second, their location should be shifted from the seminary to the local church; third, what is taught should be far more varied and in accord with contemporary needs than it currently is.

In seminary curricula in recent decades, more and more attention has been given to the proliferating practical disciplines. Some of these subjects are new. Others are aspects of older subjects that have become autonomous; practical theology, for example, used to be taught by the systematician, and missions by the church historian. It has been argued that these subjects became autonomous because they were mishandled or underplayed, but it is debatable whether the situation is more desirable now than formerly.

A major and recurring criticism concerns the theoretical teaching of practical subjects, through lectures, seminars, research papers, and examinations. What this kind of teaching means is that a student gains theoretical knowledge of the practice implied in the theory of the other subjects (biblical, historical, and philosophical studies). This is like teaching a child the molecular structure of a spoon before teaching him how to use it.

The consequences of this drift are quite clear. First, students are not receiving adequate guidance in working out Christian practice in the ministry. Second, the practical disciplines that are operating on a quasi-theoretical level and proliferating alarmingly are competing with the older disciplines (such as biblical and historical studies) for places in the curriculum. Third, in gaining autonomy, some of these disciplines have sloughed off the biblical controls under which they formerly worked.

A clear case of this third problem can be seen in some of the homiletics departments. Few evangelical homileticians would deny that Scripture is authoritative in all matters of faith and conduct. Yet the sermons they superintend in their homiletics classes suggest the opposite, for they are neither structured nor disciplined by the biblical Word. Exegetical studies and preaching seem to be largely unrelated to each other. The hours of work put into language study, then exegesis, systematics, and historical research, are apparently in vain. The text becomes a pretext for a discourse on some problem near to the pastor’s heart. However unwittingly, the preacher substitutes human wisdom for an authoritative Word.

Many ministers and ministerial students are blind to this grave error. They think they are doing exegetical-expositional preaching when in fact they are doing nothing of the kind. No matter how orthodox, how evangelical, how Christian a sermon might be in its tone, if it is not biblical in its substance it is not biblical. Congregations across the country show that this is a day of famine, a famine of hearing the Word of God (Amos 8:11). The reason, I suggest, is that in some seminaries homiletics has been allowed to develop its own principles of functioning apart from the biblical controls under which it should work.

This troublesome problem of the relation between theoretical and practical subjects has been faced in other fields. For example, medical schools now use the hospital for both research and teaching. Instead of spending several years learning theory before they are introduced to live patients, students now do the two sides of their work at once, beginning in the hospital in their first year. Seminaries should take this cue and locate practical instruction in the most suitable place. Students preparing for an inner-city ministry, for instance, would take much of their practical training in the ghetto rather than in the seminary or in a suburban church. The centralization we now have in which almost all the practical training takes place in the seminary obviously offers many administrative advantages, but the price is inadequate instruction.

It may take time to persuade churches that they have a stake in the seminary’s life. Some may resist seminarians, denying them a large role in the life of the church, especially when this means having them teach, preach, and visit (all under supervision, of course). Seminarians would also have to be at all the elders’ or deacons’ meetings, learning how congregations function and squabble. The congregation may think it is being used as a guinea pig, but this is the price of better ministry. Hospitals understand this principle well; it would be strange if the churches could not learn to do so, too.

This essay focuses on the pastoral ministry, but of course the concept of ministry now extends much beyond that one path. Now it can mean working in the armed services, hospitals, prisons, high schools, colleges, student organizations, among special age groups or nationalities, or through the expanding means of communication such as radio, television, and films. The training offered in our seminaries is nowhere near as varied as the opportunities open to graduating students today.

Students also need to be exposed to a far greater range of experiences. A program of clinical training, for example, might well include a period of compulsory service as a hospital orderly. No congregation is immune to sickness and death; every minister is called on to offer counsel on various medico-spiritual problems. For instance, knowledge of the drug problem and some experience with drug-users would be highly beneficial for the future pastor of an urban church.

Today the evangelical church is awakening to its social responsibilities, but few prospective ministers have a clear idea of what problems a congregation should confront. Crime in our society, the attitudes and needs of prisoners, the social, educational, and political frustrations of minority groups, are areas that are still largely unexplored by the seminaries. These are a few examples of the directions that future practical work might take.

To sum up: the seminary curriculum needs to recover the cohesiveness it once had when the sola scriptura principle was more rigorously honored; on the other hand, it needs far greater diversity in the practical areas of training.

The Personal Growth

But even when this is achieved, the seminaries will not necessarily have produced men of God. And this, after all, is what the churches need. The personal facet of seminary training, the most elusive and intangible of the three, will become increasingly more difficult to realize.

The future holds little hope for small seminaries; financial pressures and the increasing need for diversity will force them either to close or to merge with others. But the larger seminary, more viable economically and varied educationally, is also less personal. It can become merely a teaching center in which the students are strangers to the teachers and even to one another. In such a situation, faculty members have less and less opportunity to guide students in their spiritual lives; more and more they will have to depend on careful screening by the registrar in the hopes of accepting only those students who can care for themselves. But is this really an answer?

There is no blueprint for success in this matter; indeed, even finding a plan of action may be difficult. But at least the goal must be clearly visible for faculty to see. However it is done, students must be led into a deeper experience of Christ. No matter how professional their seminary training may be in other areas, the churches will judge it a failure if the ministers of the future are not dedicated men of God.

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.”

The other day a friend told me he had recently heard a sermon by a young minister who was leaving the church he had served as assistant pastor for five years. Looking back over that half-decade, he measured his ministry by an odd standard: “If during these five years I have caused just one person to ask a question, then my work among you has been a success.” One is tempted to grab a line like that and run with it in all directions, but I shall content myself with the simple observation that if there is one thing the Christian layperson already has today, it is questions—questions about God, about ethics, about social change, about clergy whose perception of the layperson’s needs is 180 degrees removed from the layperson’s self-perception.

A few years ago it was common for the theologian to call the Christian layman a “secular” man, and then to describe him in language that seems in retrospect to cluster about attributes the theologian admired in people who were in few respects like himself. That admirable man was on the move (the theologian stuck at the seminary), he was active (the theologian reflective), he was pragmatic (the theologian impractical), he had no need for religion (the theologian was burdened with doctrines he neither believed nor was quite free to disbelieve), and questions about the meaning or hope or purpose of existence were irrelevant to him (while the theologian agonized about them continually). The only thing wrong with this new-model secular Christian is that he is only one among many types living both inside and outside the visible church. In the church I attend as a worshiper and on the sessions of churches I work with as a presbyter and among the Christian faculty of the university where I teach, I find this secularist to be more puzzled, more tortured by doubt, more religious—in a word, more complex—than those theologians who lately danced about the maypole of secularization (to use Peter Berger’s figure) ever suspected.

Let me illustrate. Several months ago I was asked to meet with the elders and minister of a nearby church to hear disagreements that had arisen between them and to try to make some preliminary judgment about what the ministerial-relations committee of presbytery could do. It was a frustrating evening because no one seemed to be able to articulate just what was wrong, except that the church was slowly slipping downhill. Finally one exasperated man blurted out: “I know this will seem petty to you, Dr. Graham, but my main complaint is that my minister makes me feel like I’m on the losing side. Membership and attendance are down, the Sunday school is nonexistent, he won’t call on prospective members, and it seems to me that the reason for all this is that he doesn’t believe what we’re supposed to believe. So he can’t get excited about the Christian Gospel, we catch his discouragement, and one of these days we’ll wake up and find we have no church at all!”

This sense of being on the losing side is a discouraging product of secularization. The layperson believes, with pretty good historical evidence, that there was a time in Christendom when almost everyone believed the Christian message. But today the invisible world above, which both church and society once made real here below, seems more and more questionable. Society has largely quit embodying it, as man’s greatest works number among them fewer and fewer cathedrals and more and more giant business, military, or amusement complexes. He looks to his pastor to reassure him of the reality of God and His plan for mankind and gets instead the proclamation of doubt or the glorification of some faddish secular movement, and his spirit, if not the Spirit of God, is quenched. Far from acquiescing in this genteel agnosticism (though as a secularist he is supposed to have progressed beyond worry over such questions as whether life has meaning), he hurts and despairs like this elder, or searches desperately for evidence that the Gospel is true, or retreats into some impoverished meaning system of his own.

Of course, Christian laypeople come in every kind of package, from Toffler’s cool modular man, through angry Women’s Liberationists, to Black Panthers and frightened ghosts in the Ku Klux Klan. In the middle of that pack of extremists are some who seem to have no agony; a camping trip or a visit to Disneyland can make their world right again. But the search for some kind of assurance about the truth of their religion is a powerful component in the lives of many, as is the sense that the Church and its official leadership are not much help in their search. If there is an “average” layperson, that’s probably where he is.

For some the route to that assurance is the way of ecstasy. As an aunt of mine said, “Why not search for a convincing experience of God’s being when preachers and theologians have given us a stone?” I think a good case could be made that the way of ecstasy—glossolalia, healing, demonic exorcism, and so on—comes to the fore when (1) society no longer supports one’s self-esteem, and (2) culture no longer expresses one’s religious feelings and yearnings. Like the early Christians, we live in a society that counts no one as very valuable unless he is very rich, politically powerful, or otherwise famous. Family ties are loose, and most kinds of community (such as the village, and the ethnic enclave) have broken down. So the individual has little support in his human need to be accepted, regarded, and cared for. In the midst of an increasingly non-supportive social system, to be able to speak in tongues, for example, is positive, first-hand experience that Someone cares. Such religious energy, which St. Paul identified as an aspect of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, might in another age have been channeled into cultural expressions that mirrored an overarching religious understanding of life, such as music, art, cathedral-building, or even warfare (crusades).

The dark side of this route is that it can take the way of what might be called spiritual greed. Every pastor knows laypeople who will traverse land and sea in hope of getting the experience that will satisfy their need for religious assurance, but for whom multiple experiences just seem to increase the need. In their effort to seek the higher gifts, they read eagerly the latest from Keith Miller, drive in droves to hear Bruce Larson and the latest word from Faith at Work, laugh and revel with every name person who speaks within 200 miles, never miss a healing service, a neo-Pentecostal rally, a Jesus rock concert, or an evangelistic crusade. Never satisfied, they are like Luther with the Law—it compels their every effort but leaves them unsaved.

All of this helps reinforce in many laypeople another aspect of modern existence that bodes ill for the Church: the phenomenon Thomas Luckmann calls the “privatization” of religion. Since our society presents no overarching meaning system or coherent world-view, the individual is driven to find meaning for himself. He is forced to this, further, by the fact that the Church is no longer a primary institution; that is, unlike family, school, work, and government, it need never command his allegiance at any time in life if he doesn’t want it to. (And those institutions command his involvement but not his loyalty: all our institutions have failed us and are in trouble.)

But even the Christian who cares for the Church is pushed to privatize his values and his beliefs. He is driven to this partly because unbelief and diversity of belief are rampant within the churches themselves, partly because no strong belief system popular today really ties Christian doctrine and an unchristian world into a meaningful whole, and partly because the desperate quest for experience emphasizes the experiencing I over the claims of the Church to embody truth within itself. The sharpest illustration of this is that growing number of Catholic neo-Pentecostals who have found the two greatest gifts the church is supposed to incarnate—Truth and Life (Protestants would say Gospel and Grace)—outside the teaching authority and life-giving sacraments of the church. The Catholic Pentecostal really has no need of the church at all, and written efforts to convince himself that he still does seem very weak indeed.

THE PAWN

White glow shining

In center board.

Left Right Front

Spears of bitter slaves

Foam-spewing horses

Knights steel-visored

A serpent-eyed queen

Impenetrable bastions

A black king, smiling.

Rear support deliberately withheld

He clears in death the opening

Through which his King

Will checkmate evil.

JOHANNA PATTERSON

While college students’ religious behavior probably cannot be projected to predict how they will behave later in life, it is instructive, I believe, to note what has gone on in the past couple of years on one campus. There has been a dramatic increase in the number of students who claim to have been converted. According to a questionnaire I gave out in a class of twenty-eight students, all twenty-eight consider themselves personally religious; yet attendance at public worship (in contrast to small-group prayer and Bible-study fellowships or at Transcendental Meditation seminars) and church membership were seen as important by only eight of those. It is perhaps no accident that the organizations that do the most work with students—and seem to have all the success!—are avowedly non-church. Not that Inter-Varsity, Young Life, and Campus Crusade for Christ do not believe in the Church and urge their converts to become active church members—for they do—but it is not lost on the young that the Gospel was proclaimed to them not by the churches as they know them but by these groups, which represent a thin, horizontal, evangelical slice from all the churches. One girl in a paper this spring contrasted what it meant to be a Christian and what it had once meant merely to be a church member as if the two states were mutually exclusive. Like her, laypeople who are not satisfied when the Church gives them a stone may well privatize and internalize their faith, sharing it with small communities of fellow believers and gradually abandoning the larger organized church to expire in its own anomie.

To summarize thus far, we see that secularization has eroded belief to the place where the layperson often feels a need for assurance that the Christian message is true. Society no longer assures him of this as it did his ancestors, who were indeed compelled in some instances to believe. Many are seeking this assurance through experiences that confirm the message for them, and because of the weight of confessional traditions, often such experiences are not available within a church but only in occasional groups or quasi-occultic fellowships. This reinforces the privatization of belief and values—already a strong trend in our pluralistic society—and is helped by and contributes to a sense of anti-institutionalism that is the other side of privatization.

Almost as an aside it should be said that the rejection of all our institutions as objects of loyalty (who today feels loyal to job or school?), the erosion of an overarching religious world-view, the uncertain quality of the churches’ proclamation of the Gospel, and the privatization of meaning and values in many cases push or allow modern church members to find their most precious associations in private or small-group activities that have no obvious religious connection but that help order life and determine priorities. Thus the power of golf, boating, and the Scots housewife’s bingo (to give obvious examples) lies partly in their anti-institutional, private character, as well as the chance they give to make choices and small judgments that give the participant some sense of control of his life. The church member so tempted may for a long time hesitate between church and hobby (or escape) and finally choose one or the other as central depending on the quality of life it seems to offer. It is no tribute to the way we proclaim the Gospel to observe how trivial are the islands of meaning people choose instead of the Church!

It is not, of course, a part of Christian faith to despair over the Church. A Scottish pastor recently told me in sepulchral tones, “Fred, the Church is going to die, and we’re privileged to preside at the burial.” Such gloom ignores the historical fact that the People of God have existed in almost every conceivable social form. They have been ass nomads in Mesopotamia, slaves in Egypt, bedouins in the Sinai Peninsula, a tribal confederation in Canaan, a small nation caught fatally between major powers, a refugee people, a tiny ghetto of believers in the Roman Empire, the warp and woof of the social fabric of Western Europe—and many other forms besides. Presumably God’s Spirit has worked and does work in, with, and under all kinds of social forms to create and preserve himself a people. So despair about the Church is hardly a prerequisite for a modern commentator on the religious scene, though there are enough who claim to be believers who show a lack of faith in the secret work of the Spirit of God.

But still we have been called to be the Church, God’s people, and we cannot claim to be disciplined seekers for wisdom if we give no thought to the malaise secular society has brought upon the Christian, nor fail to probe for ways of helping people find the Christian life a satisfying rather than a frustrating way. Obviously we are dealing with a crisis in belief, and if we take theology seriously we are not deluded into thinking that any tricks will change the world, or that any finesse of ours will miraculously convince a world that no longer believes. For example, coffeehouse ministries will not help young people to faith if those who run them do not believe in the Gospel. Nor will reintroducing prayer in the schools fool children brought up to believe rather that money, athletics, or knowledge determines the successful life.

I have twice used the biblical metaphor of hungry people who are given not bread but a stone. This metaphor suggests that what pastor and layperson alike need is bread—the sustenance God provided in his Word. And while the book that traces the history of God’s dealings with men contains many strands of literature and various modes of God’s communication with men, I want to highlight three of those in order to describe some qualities of that bread.

First, we must not—like some evangelicals—mute the prophetic message of judgment of all our social institutions, nor reduce it to a petty moralism of not drinking, whoring, and swearing. (Not that personal holiness is passé. Its relation to good theology has seldom been examined, but there is probably a close link between saintliness and theological honesty and faithfulness.) The negative side of this need for proclamation of the prophetic word of judgment and forgiveness is that lay Christians have had enough of ministers who do not build trust with their congregations, whose glib one-directional editorials on society therefore fall on ears that cannot hear because the modern prophets are negligent in their pastoral homework, and who then glorify themselves by pointing in anger at their “unchristian” people and (by implication) with pride to their own Amos-like fulfillment of prophetic office. What a faculty colleague recently said about educational reformers and change-agents applies to some ministers: they guarantee beforehand that they will fail, he says, because they never seriously relate to those they are trying to convince and change; they spend all their time communicating and never pause to listen.

I want to emphasize that when the minister proclaims the prophetic word, “Let justice flow down like waters and righteousness like an everlasting stream,” he is not called to substitute one social system for another. For example, he may become aware that the eroticization of American society (or the mechanization and genitalization of the God-given erotic) that threatens his children is a product of an acquisition business ethic released from community restraints. Far from being a sign of psychological and social health, Playboy, Oui, X-rated movies, and sexually stimulative advertising represent an exclusively genital focusing of psychic energy that is at least as warped as Victorian sexual repression. The modern prophet, looking longingly at the “Puritanism” of Communist societies, may be tempted to prescribe Communism as the antidote to Western commercially based prurience. But the biblical prophets did not plead for the substitution of a new social and economic system to replace the agrarian societies of Israel and Judah. For all social orders and economic systems are under the judgment of God. The preacher’s handling of the prophetic word in this instance must rather be a call to holiness, to community, to a life-style that stands as a barrier and a rebuke to sexual exploitation for any reason and under any guise.

Secondly, we cannot forget the apocalyptic note that has such an important (if neglected and scorned) part in the biblical proclamation. The apocalyptic message—whether from Daniel, Revelation, or the mouth of Jesus—is that when all is said and done, God is Lord. His ways are not our ways, and the belief that the world progresses toward better and better is a myth of dubious aid to the Christian walk, for the Christian should not expect salvation to come from the world.

There are some Christians, pastors and laypeople alike, who have believed that the proclamation of the prophetic word would purify our society, leading us to justice and peace. This is but one facet of the myth of progress. It has been a particularly pernicious one for many Christians, for they lose heart in the struggle against evil and begin to doubt the truth of the Christian message because they were led to believe men can be made just. In the Bible it was usually judgment and destruction that followed the message of the prophet.

As I write these words I have just heard that Arab assassins murdered almost the entire Israeli Olympic team in a fanatic and senseless act of destruction. So it is—so it has ever been. Crucifixion is still the lot of men, a fact we tend to forget in the upholstered suburbias of East Lansing and Mount Lebanon. “If in this world only we have hope, we are of all men to be pitied.” The apocalyptic word is that judgment and the end are finally in God’s hands, and while social quiescence is no more Christian than social activism, the salvation of the social order is not finally secured by the prophet. Judgment may come from the world—witness Assyria. But not salvation. Whether for the individual or for society, whether things seem to get better or grow worse, there is no New Jerusalem among men save it be let down out of heaven.

Finally, we must trust that the Gospel has not lost its power, and we must proclaim that Gospel in whatever ways are available to us and congruent with our responsibilities and personalities under the direction of God’s Spirit. The layperson has been put off and confused by voices that proclaim new gospels, as well as by others that claim to proclaim the old, but in reality, proclaim rigid spiritual formulas, lock-step methods to salvation, divisiveness, hatred, occultism, and thinly disguised socio-economic theories masquerading as Gospel, on the political left and the right. Somehow our proclamation and our lives must combine the universality of Paul, the love of John, the immediacy and personal holiness of Matthew and Mark, the open wonder and joy of Luke and Acts. And this must be done within the tension caused by holding tightly to both Cross and Resurrection. For it is the Cross that focuses the human condition in all its bitterness and all its horror, and it is the Resurrection that proclaims the final response of God: his promise of freedom from sin, the overcoming of death, and abundant life at last.

As a part-time pew-sitter and semi-layman myself, I could write much more about the layperson. His fear and delight in new musical and worship forms, for example; or his belief that the Church is valuable to him, and his unrest when its programs turn out to be trivial as well as time-consuming. Or I could point to many who seek in the Church the sense of a caring community that our mobile, anonymous society denies us; but they want that community to support, never reject, them, not knowing that members of traditional communities came to one another’s help in time of need, but also viewed those whose actions hurt the morale of the community with suspicion and alarm. I could write of his need to have the Christian faith “modeled” and his frustration when the pastor refuses to be that model. But most of all, he wants assurance that the Gospel makes sense of life, that it is true, that others believe it and are trying to live out its daily requirements. If the Church—clergy, laymen, and laywomen—are faithful here, then the treasure we hold in earthen vessels will not be spilled and lost in a hungry and thirsty world.

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.”

This issue contains the prize-winning essays of the contest that closed October 1, 1972. The judges awarded the $1,000 prizes to W. Fred Graham and David F. Wells. The subject of the contest was “The Pastoral Ministry”: Graham dealt with “The People” and Wells with “The Preparation.” Judges were Frank E. Gaebelein, retired headmaster of the Stony Brook School; Calvin D. Linton, dean of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, George Washington University; Gladys Hunt, author, homemaker, and Inter-Varsity worker; and Jay Adams, professor at Westminster Seminary. Our thanks to the unnamed donor whose generosity made the contest possible.

Three important items are dealt with in our editorial pages: the end of a controversial war, the death of a controversial president, and the effects of a controversial decision (the Supreme Court on abortion). The latter is a landmark in American jurisprudence and marks the incursion of the Court into the legislative realm. It gives further evidence of our departure from the Hebrew-Christian tradition and the almost complete secularization of national life.

We report with regret the death at ninety-two of one of our longtime contributing editors, Old Testament scholar Oswald T. Allis, whose last book came off the press less than a year ago.

I Love To Read Fast

A noted publisher in Chicago reports there is a simple technique of rapid reading which should enable you to increase your reading speed and yet retain much more. Rlost people do not realize how much they could increase their pleasure, success and income by reading faster anti more accurately.

According to this publisher, many people, regardless of their present reading skill, can use this simple technique to improve their reading ability to a remarkable degree. Whether reading stories, books, technical matter, it becomes possible to read sentences at a glance and entire pages in seconds with this method.

To acquaint the readers of this publication with the easy-to-follow rules for developing rapid reading skill, the company has printed full details of its interesting self-training method in a new booklet, “How to Read Faster and Retain More,” mailed free to anyone who requests it. No obligation. Send your name, address and zip code to: Reading, 555 E. Lange St., Dept., 690–01, Mundelein, Ill. 60060. A postcard will do.

THIS COLUMN RUNS the gamut between lint-picking and nit-picking. The lint-picking is what I engage in when looking for an idea and the nit-picking follows when people who move their lips when they are reading silently read my stuff. I think lint-picking is the harder assignment. It comes down to this: Where does one get an idea when he needs one? And close at hand is another problem: Where are the sources of that idea written down?

Today the idea came and now I can’t find my quotation. My filing system is where I put stuff to lose it. A filing system can be so complex that it enslaves you; or it can be so simple that nothing is in it, or at least nothing has any clue for the finding. I have written things down in a notebook for years and years and I know exactly where everything is except what I am looking for; there is a complete record of everything I have ever said in a public speech, but everyone knows that I keep saying it over and over again; and I have a complete collection of good jokes and stories from 1942 to 1952, but I can’t find any place to use them.

So why all this review of my troubles? As Sam Johnson said so well, “Knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it” (Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, Vol. I, p. 558, Everyman’s Library, etc., etc.). See? It’s easy. The trouble is that I wasn’t looking for that quotation. I found it while looking for the one I haven’t found and want to use for this column. I looked in Bartlett. I looked in my own notebooks. I read all the underlinings in my copy of Boswell on Johnson and all I found is the profound truth from Johnson that a man either knows something or knows where to find it. Well, I know it even if I don’t know where to find it.

So Johnson says something like this somewhere but he says it better: “If a man wants to rent a room from you, don’t ask him if he has enough money; just ask him what his philosophy of life is.” The closest I could find to that was this: “If he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons” (op. cit., I, 268). This is all a condemnation of the easy tolerance of our day that says, ad nauseam, “It really doesn’t matter what a man believes so long as he’s sincere,” or “That’s what you think and that’s what he thinks and it really doesn’t matter.”

It really does matter what a man believes, and we had better believe that and pretty soon. The whole planet is divided desperately these days regarding beliefs—ideologies, if you like—and differences are tearing us apart. If you think you can be at peace in your corner of the vineyard, simply living out your kind of freedom and doing your own thing, then you are as naïve as any other teen-ager. What is equally serious and closer to home is that we are so full of rejoicing over our pluralistic society that we are missing something basic about unity (in unity there is strength, remember?). Unity of action can come about only on the basis of unity of belief, and pluralistic believing will lead to disintegration—dis-integer!

To pick one out of the blue, what do you believe about the work ethic? This is being bandied about as the kind of thing one should be up on for good table talk. It is sometimes related to the Protestant work ethic, it usually is condemned as somehow or somewhat bourgeois (and what could be worse than that?), and the knowing ones among us know all about Max Weber and John Calvin and how this sort of thing began in Geneva and was picked up by the Puritans and anything related to Puritans is definitely a bad thing in our new society. “Let joy and mirth be unconfined.”

What I am plumping for in all this verbiage is simple enough: Unless we begin to take the work ethic seriously, unless we reintroduce a few Puritan moralities, unless we start to tell the truth and refuse the bribe, we may as well say good-bye to all those nice things everyone wants today but hopes someone else will produce for him. I made myself quite unpopular at a college convocation one time at the end of the semester when everyone was getting ready to go home for the holidays. “Suppose,” said I, “that the last man to check out the jet plane on which you will fly home did his job just as faithfully as you have done yours here during the last semester.” A groan went up. The students all knew that the man on the jet can be depended on to do the right thing. What makes them believe that when there are so few things they do believe?

What makes any of us believe that sort of thing? Have we been educating anyone recently in morality? Or has the separation of church and state finally led us to the place where morality cannot be taught or even talked about, where one evades value judgments like the plague. Milton thought that one did his job as “ever in the taskmaster’s eye,” and some have sincerely believed that one’s daily task, when it is taken out of the monastery and worked at in the street or in the shop, is a daily offering to God. To think about good Sam Johnson again, if a man makes no distinction between right and wrong, you had better count the spoons. Even Huxley, no religionist, said, “The Bible talks no nonsense about rights, only about duties.” If he is even close to being right on there, what is all this stuff we keep hearing about rights and “I wanna be free”?

The glory of Protestantism and the glory of Calvinism and the glory of Puritanism was and is that an emphasis was placed on the incarnation of one’s beliefs in his daily round. When people really believe this sort of thing, it makes a difference in what they choose to do and how they carry it through. One does not, for God’s sake, do shoddy work. And my thesis is simple enough: That great middle section of our society—neither the intellectuals nor the indigent—must be converted or reconverted to a whole series of beliefs that have to do with honesty, integrity, hard work, the bourgeois virtues, or we can quit complaining about dirty trains, planes that crash, autos that go back to the factory by the thousands, the TV man who doesn’t really fix it, the plumber who doesn’t show, the people who steal books from the library, the vandals, the police who take bribes, the shakedown artists at every level.

What a man believes determines how he acts, and it has always been the task of the Church to circulate and fasten down some eternal truths toward belief and then toward action. The excluded middle in our society had better be included or the whole edifice will come crashing down.

“My God, this conference shows the sheer bankruptcy of the church,” declared sociologist and author Jeffrey Hadden (Gathering Storm in the Churches) last month at a Chicago conference of eighty representatives of America’s religious establishment. The conference, “Insearch—The Future of Religion in America,” sponsored by the George D. Dayton foundation of Minneapolis, centered on reports of dozens of “trend-setting” religious groups and interviews with 500 leaders. Hadden thought the future should have been plotted by historical and statistical studies rather than by “looking at fringe groups.” The conference showed, he charged, “the inability of the church to grapple with issues.”

National Council of Churches general secretary R. H. Edwin Espy, complaining that the studies hit only the periphery, added a similar note of caution: “There is a need for looking at the new, but you have to look at the institutions too, which represent 99 per cent of the church.” New experiments and new experiences in religious structures and rites should not be too readily accepted at the expense of proven traditional church rituals and organizations, he advised.

But many of the participants didn’t seem so institutionally inclined—or threatened. In small-group sessions, the participants discussed the decline of mainline churches in the face of phenomenal growth of Pentecostals and other conservative groups, alienation of youth from established churches, the multiplication of religious communes, the array of renewal forms in worship, and the widespread quest for personal spiritual experience. (That there is such a “search for personal meaning today” was underscored by Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, who called for a new emphasis on the needs of individuals instead of over-all social change or church-building materialism.)

If the church is to survive in the future, reported the small groups, there must be, among other things, a greater emphasis on community and intimacy, a more “visible” response to life both within and outside the religious community, a decision-making procedure sought through a consensus of all members of the community rather than imposed by arbitrary authority, and an established, recognized, and accepted guide for behavior fashioned upon the law of God’s love.

Blacks felt left out. “We’re not looking for a new life-style but the essential ingredients of life itself,” said Garrett seminary professor John Cartright. Others wanted more emphasis on social action.

Participants viewed a number of films on religion in America. Among the most discussed was a documentary on a Pentecostal church service in Riverside, California. Another featured a Christian commune in Northern California.

Participant Ron Juncal of the Body of Christ commune in Loleta, California, warned that the future held doom and destruction “as foretold by the prophets.” Theologian Harvey Cox of Harvard Divinity School said this was a misreading of Scripture, that doom would come unless the people changed their ways. (A computer printout said that the global catastrophe predicted for the early part of the next century might be postponed a decade or two, but that people who hadn’t died of starvation might succumb instead to pollution.) But people won’t change because someone scared “hell out of them,” counseled Cox; rather, the church must lead in a return to simplicity and away from an emphasis on accumulation of things. It was one of those rare times when the Jesus people of the Body of Christ commune could not agree more with a liberal theologian’s position.

For their part, many of the conferees seemed ready enough to change their institutional ways—and the direction of their churches and synagogues. Southern Baptist executive Porter Routh perhaps captured the attitudes and intent of most when he predicted that in the future “there will be a celebration of community in terms of persons instead of institutions.”

Marriage Rights By Mail

Eleven Universal Life Church (ULC) ministers ordained through Bishop Kirby Hensley’s mail order plan are in trouble with the law in Richmond, Virginia. But the men, after telephoning their leader in Modesto, California, last month, said they will appeal to the Virginia Supreme Court a ruling that prohibits them from performing marriages in the state. Judge Randolph Tucker, Jr., decided last month that the ULC is neither a religious denomination nor a religious society and therefore its ministers are not validly ordained to the gospel ministry. The judge upheld in what is believed to be its first court test a law empowering state courts to authorize clergymen to perform marriages.

Hensley, who claims he has ordained more than a million ministers (for a “free-will donation” of $1) since he founded the “church” ten years ago in his garage, hailed the court case as “a credentials test.” “I’m glad this has come up because it shows the public that people want to be free,” he told a reporter. “The Richmond judge wondered whether we have a doctrine, but we do. We believe in that which is right.” Speaking of the hearing, the semi-literate Hensley drawled: “Everything was going all right until some hippie-types, I guess, got our minister’s license, and I suppose that shook ’em up.”

Similar rulings have been overturned in New Mexico, Hawaii, and other states, Hensley claims. In California, the ULC can again grant “honorary” doctor of divinity degrees now that a three-year injunction has expired (see September 15, 1972, issue, page 56), and its ministers can perform marriages because the church has a valid state charter.

E. RUSSELL CHANDLER

Questioning Catholics

A three-year church-sponsored study of Catholics in Toronto reported to Archbishop Philip Pocock that a “disturbing” number of Catholics consider the church irrelevant in setting the moral and social tone for modern living. The report revealed that many Catholics live with conflicts between the church’s teachings and what they believe God wants. Sixty per cent of practicing Catholics interviewed, for instance, would advise abortion if a mother feared a deformed child. And a majority placed little stock in papal infallibility.

The commission found that priests felt discrepancies between their value system and what they believe to be the church’s values. The discontent of these priests, said the report, “should add to the concern that the church as an institution could be in serious difficulty.”

LESLIE K. TARR

Hanging In There

At last the count is in. The 100-year-old Prohibition party, which still fields a candidate every four years, received 13,444 votes for Dr. H. Earl Munn of Hillsdale College in Michigan, repeat candidate for President in the 1972 election. The party secured a place on the ballot in only five states. Drawing nearly all its support from the ranks of the theologically conservative Free Methodist Church, it finished behind Congressman John G. Schmitz, who polled 1,080,000 for the American Independent party, Dr. Benjamin Spock, who received 78,801 on the People’s party ticket, and the three Marxist parties, with 29-year-old Linda Jeness receiving 65,290 for the Socialist Workers, Louis Fisher 53,614 for Socialist Labor, and Gus Hall 25,222 for the Communist Party.

Munn did finish above John Hospers, who got only 2,691 votes in California for the anarchist Liberation party. But Hospers received one electoral vote when a Virginia delegate pledged to President Nixon demonstrated that the electoral college, and not the voters, could someday decide an election.

GLENN EVERETT

Religion In Transit

Taking a leaf from Jesus’ parable about the man given a talent, the Aldersgate United Methodist Church of Wilmington, Delaware, recently mailed a $1 bill to each of its 1,129 members and asked them to multiply it for the church’s benefit. One man bet on a horse race—and handed in $110 from his winnings. The highest amount turned in was $373, from a woman who made more than eighty dolls. In all, more than $6,000 was raised.

A federal court instructed the Veterans Administration to keep sending benefits to eligible students at Bob Jones University until a decision in the school’s suit against the VA is reached. The VA, which gave nearly $400,000 in educational benefits to about 225 BJU students in the last school year, had revoked BJU’s approved status because of segregationist admission policies.

THE ODD COUPLE

Common perils often make for strange bedfellows. They won’t announce it publicly, but evangelist Billy James Hargis and National Council of Churches leaders—old enemies—are consorting together in a sort of common-law hassle with the Internal Revenue Service.

It all started in 1966 when the IRS revoked the tax-exempt status of Hargis’s Christian Echoes ministry because it attempted to exert political influence. A federal court in Tulsa finally overruled the IRS in 1971, saying Christian Echoes was a church and therefore entitled to the exemption, and ordered a refund to Hargis of $103.000. But last month a circuit court in Denver reversed the Tulsa ruling, in effect outlawing “direct and indirect appeals” by non-profit organizations “to legislators and the public in general” in efforts to influence legislation.

The NCC and other church groups, some with lobby offices in Washington, engage in more such legislative activities—and more blatantly—than Hargis. The restriction, say NCC leaders, is unconstitutional, hence the decision to move in with Hargis now in order to protect future interests.

Shocked friends of the two parties need not worry: there’s no love-making. It’s simply a case where it may be more expedient to file a joint return than to file separately, even if it means holding hands all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court, where Hargis and the NCC are now headed. It should prove to be a landmark decision.

Meanwhile, in an action some might construe as pouring salt in the wound, the IRS recognized witchcraft as a religion and granted tax exemption to the Church and School of Wicca (seekers of wisdom). Last month, under a full moon over Minneapolis, two witches—Carl Weschcke, 42, and Sandra Heggum, 32, publishers of occult books—were wed in a Wiccan rite. It is said to be the first public witch wedding in modern history.

Latest findings in the National Fertility Study show that two-thirds of the nation’s Catholic wives between 18 and 39 are using contraceptive methods disapproved by the Church.

The Roman Catholic Church’s antipoverty unit awarded nearly $1 million in thirty-four grants to self-help projects.

The Anglican Church of Canada House of Bishops has decided to review the denomination’s membership in the Canadian Council of Churches. There is resentment over the council’s alleged tendency to “railroad” items through without referral to member denominations. Meanwhile, the bishops issued a statement welcoming baptized members of other denominations to receive communion in Anglican churches, a move similar to that taken by Church of England bishops last year.

Nearly half of the 163,273 Boy Scout troops in the United States are sponsored by churches and other religious bodies, according to statistics from the National Boy Scouts of America headquarters. United Methodists top the list with 15,571 units; Catholics are second with 12,861.

Busing to reduce or eliminate racial segregation was approved by a study conference on education sponsored by Detroit’s Central City Conference of Evangelicals. The group is a two-year-old organization of black and white evangelicals seeking to initiate urban ministries. Strong opposition to busing exists in the Detroit area.

Personalia

Pastor Robert J. Lamont of the First Presbyterian Church, Pittsburgh, has resigned to assume the presidency of the Presbyterian Ministers Fund insurance company.

Lutheran Church in America secretary George F. Harkins was elected chairman of the new Lutheran Consultation on Union, the unity-exploration group of the three major Lutheran bodies.

The new president of the Evangelical Theological Society is Arthur Lewis, Old Testament professor at Bethel College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Frederic A. Tatford has retired after thirty-nine years as editor of The Harvester, a monthly Brethren magazine in Northern Ireland.

Vice-president Spiro T. Agnew’s son, James Rand Agnew, will become a member of the Greek Orthodox church before his marriage in May. The vicepresident and his wife are Episcopalians.

Dr. Kenneth L. Teegarden, 50, is the official nominee to succeed Dr. A. Dale Fiers, who will retire this year as general minister and president of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Teegarden heads the denomination’s Texas region.

Mrs. Emma Richards, who serves with her husband as co-pastor of the Mennonite Church in Lombard, Illinois, is the first licensed woman minister among North American Mennonites.

DEATHS

OSWALD T. ALLIS, 92, retired professor of Old Testament and a founder of Westminster Seminary; in Wayne, Pennsylvania.

RAYMOND S. HAUPERT, 70, retired president of Moravian College; in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, after a stroke.

ALBERT E. MILLNER, 75, former president of a number of Seventh-day Adventist conferences in North America; in Oshawa, Ontario.

CLARA WARD, 48, noted gospel singer and recording artist; in Los Angeles, of a stroke.

President Cordas C. Burnett resigned the presidency of Bethany Bible College in Santa Cruz, California, to become executive vice-president of the Assemblies of God Graduate School of Theology to be opened at Springfield, Missouri, this year.

Milton Ferguson, 44, formerly a teacher at the 2,000-student Southwestern Baptist Seminary, was elected president of the 287-student Midwestern Baptist Seminary in Kansas City, the youngest of the six Southern Baptist seminaries.

World Scene

The World Council of Churches has sent fourteen tons of medicines and surgical supplies to North Viet Nam to assist war victims. Funds for the supplies were drawn from more than $30,000 raised by European churches.

A Key 73-type of evangelism project in northern England is meeting with increasing success, according to the archbishop of York, Donal Coggan. The year-long drive, launched as Call to the North last Easter, winds up with a big evangelistic splash this Easter.

Churches in Ireland are distributing more than one million copies of “Good News For Ireland, Told by Luke,” a modern-English gospel portion, throughout Eire and Ulster.

Dialogue between Marxists and Christians in Czechoslovakia came to an abrupt end, apparently because of government pressure. Radio stations and newspapers have been urging Czechs to reject religious views. Interestingly, a Czech journal found in a survey that the majority of adults in Slovakia are Christian believers and only 14 per cent are atheists.

A Czechoslovakian court sentenced Jaroslav Studeny, a Roman Catholic priest, to more than four years in prison for illegal production and sale of religious textbooks. The priest, a Christian art expert, was reported to have received $4,000 for the books.

The Seventh-day Adventist Welfare Service will build low-cost housing for nearly 4,000 persons in Bangladesh with a $100,000 grant from the U. S. State Department’s Agency for International Development.

Scores of Sudan Interior Mission and Mennonite medical personnel are being withdrawn from the Somalian Republic in keeping with that country’s nationalization of all foreign-run schools, hospitals, and social institutions. The predominantly Islamic nation in East Africa was declared a socialist state in 1970 by its ruler, General Mohammed Siad Bare.

As the outcome of a Scripture distribution effort begun four years ago by the Bible Society in Costa Rica and Panama, 300 of the 400 prisoners at Panama’s maximum security prison on the island of Coiba are now believers in Christ, according to a report in The Pentecostal Evangel. “I no longer have a difficult job to do,” the prison’s director is quoted as saying.

President H. Kamuzu Banda of Malawi, a Presbyterian elder, denies that Jehovah’s Witnesses in his country have been persecuted, despite reports in Awake, the sect’s magazine, and in the secular press.

At the request of the All Africa Conference of Churches, the World Council of Churches has launched an appeal for $250,000 to help the churches of Burundi minister to the nation’s needs following the bloodbath there last year. The violence interrupted a revival; hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young converts were slain.

Church of Christ officials say that contact has been made with a hitherto unknown group of 8,000 believers in Mozambique who call themselves the Church of Christ, believed to be an outgrowth of a mission work in Malawi.

Cardinal Joseph Parecattil of India appealed to Indian Christians to become “Hindu Christians,” just as the early believers were both Jews and Christians at the same time.