A year or two ago I had to spend a night with friends in the Cotswolds in England, not far from the ancient town of Cirencester. The house where we stayed was an old one: some late additions had been made during the reign of Elizabeth I, but otherwise it was fourteenth century. It was not a castle, just an old farmhouse set in a tiny green pocket of a valley that looked as though it had been laid out by Peter Rabbit, or perhaps a Hobbit. Those little lanes and hedgerows and rounded green fields, and the soft, textured, yellowish-grey stone of the cottages and manor houses—these stirred up in our imagination lovely pictures of an epoch, long gone, of tranquility and repose, when life moved at a pace other than pell-mell, and people lived in some sort of courteous harmony with their world. We were greeted in the old cobbled courtyard by the lady and brought into the kitchen, where we had to stoop to avoid the herbs hanging from the great wooden rafters. She offered us heavy goblets of cowslip wine that she had made from flowers gathered on the place. For supper she gave us good thick soup from wooden bowls, brown bread, and butter. That night we slept under feather beds, and we woke in the morning to look out through leaded casement windows set in three-foot-thick stone walls at the meadows still white with the early mist.

The ambiguity I am aiming at here is perfectly clear: we have all had some experience or other that raised in our imagination this ambiguity, or at least this odd discrepancy in things—the discrepancy between what looks good and simple and human (the old days), and what we’ve arrived at by means of that movement we are pleased to call “progress.” The word implies, of course, a going ahead, and that implies “to better things” (you don’t go forward to worse things). In any case, we progress from century to century, or from decade to decade, and things get faster and straighter and cleaner; but every once in a while something (an overnight stay in a Cotswold farmhouse, a picture, a poem, a scene, a memory)—something will jog us a bit, and we feel like saying “Hey. Wait. Stop the music. Now what is it, exactly, that we’re doing?”

You may by this time have said to yourself that this article is turning out to be a back-to-Eden plea, the sort of thing you might expect from Wordsworth or D. H. Lawrence, or some romantic; and that that’s always an appealing invitation, but not one, really, that promises anything very helpful to us now.

Well, it’s not a call back to Eden, except in one way, which I’ll get to in a minute. But why can’t we go back to Eden—to simplicity and innocence and purity and spontaneity? Surely Western civilization, and especially American, we are told, has managed to sell its soul for a mess of computers and pollution, if not pottage. Can’t we take up arms—flowers or placards or Molotov cocktails—against this horror? Can’t we begin, via bells and beads and bare feet, to enact and celebrate that Edenic simplicity and innocence, and perhaps change the face of society?

We are told we can, and some millions of people under twenty-five believe in the possibility of this vision. I emphasize the word “possibility,” since I don’t suppose there is a human being, from Hitler on up, whose reveries don’t take him to some such Eden of tranquility. Everyone loves the vision. Nobody likes the imagery of 1984, or of Brave New World—those hells of metallic efficiency and automation and control. So the quarrel, I suppose, would not be between visions: everybody wants Eden. The quarrel is between those who think that Eden is forever lost to our history because of one implacable fact (some people call it the Fall, and all mythology has some such notion), and those who think that by deciding to do things differently we can somehow restore Eden. I suppose there is a third group (and this is where the prophets of the day would put the military-industrial-labor complex, and the big construction and real-estate speculators, and the money men and the politicians) who, though they may share the dream of Eden in their private dreams, find themselves so caught up in the avalanche of civilization that they hardly ever give a passing nod to the idea of stopping to find out what we’re up to.

I am not among those who think that a shift in style of life, or a new imagery of earthiness and innocence, or a new generation of creatures somehow untainted with the pox that infected the rest of the race for the rest of history—I say I am not among those who think that these things promise a real, historical shift, and that we may look for a greening of America if only we will listen to what “these kids” say.

I suspect that that is not the way things are. I suspect that an authentic response to the horrors of our epoch—the size of cities and the cost of living and the population explosion and the shrill crescendo of non-negotiable demands by one group and another and the ecological crisis and the war—includes neither the effort to fly to Eden nor armed revolution.

I believe this because I believe that there is more than mere horror in our epoch. There is a bitter irony at the root of it all. A bitter irony. And it is this, that not only our obviously gross inclinations but also our best efforts contribute to the chaos. Somehow, ironically, by the way we have set about fulfilling the mandate given to us at the beginning of civilization—the mandate to subdue the earth and have dominion over it—we have ended up creating a hell. It wasn’t by embarking upon something obviously grotesque that we ended up with a grotesquery. That horror came about, somehow, as a by-product of our way of doing what we were supposed to do.

For what is the human job on this planet? We, of all earthly creatures, do have a job. Lions and clams and elm trees seem to have been given the happy task of being gloriously themselves. I used to sit watching a tiny Yorkshire terrier that we had while we lived in New York City, and it struck me one day as I watched him drowsing on a cushion of the sofa in the morning sunlight that he was doing the will of God. He was being a Yorkie, and doing what Yorkies are supposed to do. His day involved playing, eating, sleeping, and generally carrying about and embodying that particular form of perfection and glory that we can see only in Yorkshire terriers. That was his job in life.

We men are supposed to do something, and a good share of that something is to have dominion over this planet. But it seems that, in the process of claiming that dominion of setting about doing what we were supposed to do, we somehow botched it. The irony appears when you look, not at the clearly bad things we’ve done, but at what accompanies the good things we’ve done. We seem to have succeeded in making the good items add up to a bad total.

For example, if you come across a tool or a method that allows you to do a job in half the time it has always taken you, you will, of course, start using it. Not to do so would be stupid. You have been dragging loads on sledges for years, and suddenly the man in the next cave comes up with a new device that eliminates two-thirds of the work. You waste no time in making one of these items yourself, and thereupon your town has advanced way beyond the town on the other side of the crag: you have wheels. Work gets done faster, and life is better. This is a good thing.

The only difficulty is that if you leap across a few thousand years and a few thousand such discoveries and inventions, you find your great-great-great-grand-children trying to find somewhere on the planet where they can leave behind their wheels, and everything that wheels have made possible. Whatever it was you made possible for them, it somehow didn’t bring about the repose and joy you thought you’d gained. By making every single individual task easier (planting, reaping, cooking, traveling, communicating), you somehow, ironically, made the whole picture more terrifying. You raised visions of a whole earth cemented over, its rivers vomiting sludge and trash into a choked sea, its air opaque with smoke and gas, its mountain ranges gutted and its wells leeched dry, its fish drowned in oil slicks and its trees poisoned and wilting, and its neurotic citizens sitting in thousand-mile traffic jams.

Five years ago we would have had the luxury of chuckling at this description of things. Now we don’t, since we see ourselves hurrying headlong toward that state of affairs. We will number, they tell us, eight billion souls in a few more decades. It frightens us, so we begin to take measures to counteract it; but we end up with more frightening pictures than ever.

What, for instance, do we do about the population explosion—which is itself the direct product, let’s face it, of our legitimate effort to fulfill our human task of claiming dominion over the planet? We have assailed disease after disease, thus drastically reducing the infant mortality rate and raising life expectancy. Each one of those achievements is wonderful: certainly Jonas Salk wasn’t doing wrong when he developed his vaccine. (My son is alive now because the hospital knew how to destroy the thing that a few years ago would have destroyed him.) The sum total of those good achievements amounts to a terror, however—an increase of our numbers that promises a pushing, heaving struggle for elbow room on this globe that will make the worst wars in history look like pat-a-cake.

So now we turn to that problem with our knowledge, skill, and good intentions, and we get a cover story in Time magazine, treating as sober realities what Aldous Huxley and George Orwell fancied not too long ago as futuristic nightmares!—the calculated, determinative, test-tube manipulation of human existence from conception to death (and beyond: they’re thinking of freezing us instead of burying or burning us now, so that we can be resuscitated when they find out what it is that makes us die, and get a vaccine for that; religious people have had a way of thinking that that particular vaccine won’t show up in laboratories—it comes from the veins of God).

Well, it was all very enchanting. Enchanting, we say: why enchanting? That has to do with magic, but the goodwoman there was neither a fairy nor a witch. The only brew she stirred was that good soup, and some thick oatmeal she gave us for breakfast—all covered with heavy cream, of course. What, then, was the spell that seemed to be at work there?

Surely it was something like the spells you get in old tales: we were somehow spirited away from our ordinary world into another world—one that appeared to be free from the plagues that curse our own world, and that took us back somewhere—to some remote past where things were “better.”

Now I know this is fanciful. I know perfectly well that I could have been seized with appendicitis that night and have had to be rushed to a hospital, at the risk of a smash-up on the road, and that the faster the car, the straighter the road, and the more gleaming the hospital, the happier I would have been.

But we can’t have it both ways. We can’t have wooden bowls and quiet, winding lanes and the creak of wagon wheels, and at the same time speed, sterility, and efficiency. Our world has to be one or the other, it seems. We’ve got to have things either old and simple and quaint (and hence inconvenient) or new and complicated and metallic (and hence horrifying). All the plastic and stainless steel and concrete has been added, surely, to make life better, and easier, and more human.

Wherever we look, we see the irony: that the good and necessary fruits of our labors—our God-commanded labors, if you like—are somehow botched, and tainted with doom, and that what we call progress may be hurrying us into a howling nightmare. Do we really, in the long view, want to split atoms? We get not only Hiroshima but atomic waste to cope with. Do we really, in the long view, want another six lanes of concrete along the Schuylkill or the Hudson? Do we really want to get to Paris in forty-five minutes, sonic boom and all? Do we really want every single hillside and meadow in Westchester County bulldozed into used-car lots, trailer parks, and McDonald’s stands (I happen to like McDonald’s hamburgers)?

Our efforts at power, speed, and convenience seem to go askew somewhere. Even our efforts to look inside ourselves seem touched with rottenness. Has the rise of behavioral sciences contributed to the equanimity of the race? Has the supposed knowledge of the deeps inside ourselves made us more or less frightened? Were the citizens of twelfth-century London more or less able to cope than their children of twentieth-century Philadelphia?

This is all very bleak. Shall we, then, opt out of it all in sheer terror or disgust? No. No reflective person, and certainly no one who takes the Judeo-Christian view seriously, can take quite that attitude about history and human existence. There is more to be said than “alas.” But I am not about to offer either the onward-and-upward view that sees the City of God just beyond the next round of legislation and reform, or the cop-out view that says, “Well, since there’s no hope, we can pretend human history and existence is unreal.”

There is an old notion, however, about the origin of this tragic irony in things, and a view that grasps the human situation in that light and proceeds from there, rejecting on the one hand the utopian nonsense that holds center stage at the moment, and on the other, the defeatist cop-out that well-intentioned religious minds sometimes fly to.

It goes something like this (and this is where we must go back to Eden and look at what happened in that old account): In that lovely paradise, we (let us read “we” for “Adam”) rashly shouldered a burden we ought never to have picked up. It was a burden too heavy for human backs to bear. It was the burden of the god. It was called the knowledge of good and evil.

Presumably the knowledge particularly appropriate for our species in the design of things is a knowledge of good. I do not, alas, understand the state of innocence, so I cannot try to explain just what our outlook and our relationship with our world was like in that state of affairs. But whatever it was, we imagine that there was a lovely harmony between man and the earth. We were certainly free—that’s one thing. It was, of course, a freedom that is terribly difficult for the twentieth-century mind to grasp, since it did not mean “self-determination,” or “lib,” or an absence of rules. It involved responsibility and submission to certain strictures. There was a hierarchy of being, and our particular place was here, with such and such a kind of knowledge appropriate to this level of things. (There were seraphim, with another kind of knowledge, and archangels, and so on, and they didn’t have and weren’t supposed to have exactly what we had. They weren’t men.)

In any case, we thought differently, and reached out for a foothold higher up. Surely, if there’s a fuller kind of knowledge, we deserve to experience it, we thought. We can handle it.

Alas. This inclination is what the old poets used to call hubris, and it is what sent all the tragic heroes crashing down. It was the effort to muscle one’s way up the scale to what looks like a freer, more privileged, more powerful place. Presumably it would be hubris for a clam to want to be a Great Dane, or a lizard to be an eagle, or Macbeth to be king. And for a man to want to be a god. You get what goes along with that higher station, and it turns out to be more than you can control. It doesn’t work. The clam finds that Great Dane-ness is too much—it runs away with him. The result is chaos.

This ancient account, it seems to me, suggests that, for whatever reasons, the kind of knowledge we reached out for in Eden was too much for us. It was like Great Dane-ness for a clam. It was appropriate for higher orders of being than we are, and it ran away with us.

We do not know what the history of civilization would have looked like if that primeval tragedy had not occurred. But we do know what it looks like now that the tragedy has occurred.

It is perhaps one way of understanding what that heady and interdicted “knowledge of good and evil” was, and one way of understanding our own resulting situation, if we say that at that point we shouldered the burden of a knowledge too keen for ourselves—a knowledge that could probe so far into things, and open up such vistas of discovery for us, that we, not being gods and hence lacking both the wisdom and the authority to control it all (remember the clam and the Great Dane), found ourselves whirled and dragged along by our knowledge rather than controlling it. And that is a great evil. It opened up possibilities of power and ecstasy, and it is the scramble for power and ecstasy that has engendered all cupidity and cruelty and hatred.

So once again we seem to have come to a point where we might well say, “Right. Fie on history. Fie on human existence,” and where we are left either with despair or with some gnostic cop-out.

But (to borrow from a well-known contemporary thinker) we must not immanentize the eschaton.

The prevailing political and philosophical manifestation of that error is to be seen in the ineffable liberal (and third-world) inclination to insist, in spite of all, that we can, given a teeny bit more patience and pulling together, immanentize that lovely classless, pluralistic, amiable eschaton. There is also an antiphonal variation of the same error to which the conservative (and certainly the religious) mind finds itself inclining, if only in its reveries. It is the wish to immanentize the eschaton by rejecting the validity of human history and existence, and by merely looking for Apocalypse. Repeat “merely,” since it is part and parcel of the view that takes the imagery of Eden and the Fall seriously to take the imagery of Apocalypse seriously. But we do not have the luxury of turning in our keys and sitting about clucking and tut-tutting about how awful everything is. There is more to do than that. We must live and participate in our own epoch.

But any orthodox Christian is, I should think, in an ambiguous position vis-à-vis his own epoch. On the one hand, he probably harbors deep skepticism about the ultimate efficacy of human efforts to solve human problems (and hence cannot but hear most of what goes on in public dialogue as nonsense); but on the other, because his faith is a historical faith, anchored in real events and processes in history, and above all because the God he affirms is a God who appeared in our history and in our flesh, he cannot, no matter how bleak and chaotic things seem to be, deny the validity of history. And, since history is made up of human events and enterprises, it is assumed that one will find his vocation in some relation to those events and enterprises.

His race—and hence he himself—has taken up the burden of the god. There is no redoing that. Nostalgia for a lost perfection, anger at the poor job we have made of history—these attitudes are hardly biblical. Redemption itself—that whole great glorious scheme whereby all things are made new—was unfolded in our history, and will culminate our history. Because of that unfolding, in the Law, the Prophets, the Incarnation, and the Apocalypse, a Christian sees history as invested with literally infinite significance.

He accepts, then, the burden of the god; but he does not pretend it is other than a burden.

Thomas Howard is assistant professor of English at Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts. He has the M.A. from the University of Illinois and the Ph.D. from New York University. He is author of “Christ the Tiger.”

In this issue Thomas Howard delves into one of the ironies of life: that men are ultimately incapable of solving human problems, for with each solution other and even more serious problems arise. Howard offers a biblical explanation for why this is true, rejecting the conclusion of many that the only possible response to the evils of this world is to withdraw, to cop out. This is fascinating reading.

“J. Edgar Hoover” is a name toward which few Americans are neutral. As “the establishment’s” prime symbol of law enforcement, Hoover is loved by “law and order” supporters, hated by revolutionaries. Perhaps to promote objective reading of his article we should have used as a byline John E. Hoover! In this article he analyzes the life- and world-views of the New Leftists and suggests how we can meet the challenge they present. Following this is a bibliographical study by James Moore of the literature of the counterculture. The lead editorial emphasizes that no one can hope for good fruit from poisonous trees. And L. Nelson Bell’s column, “Vaccination,” ties in with this whole discussion; he suggests that we may be immunizing children against Christian faith.

Coming up next issue: a view of alcoholism by a minister who speaks out of his own experience; a soundly biblical devotional article on the secret of spiritual strength; a historian’s plea for evangelicals to continue their tradition of involvement in social concerns; and a Mother’s Day musing on the example set by Christ’s own mother.

It is an exceptionally courageous writer of theology who does not today sprinkle his pages generously with quotations from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The influence of the martyr at Flossenbürg upon current theology may be estimated by the frequency with which his name appears in the indexes of today’s religious volumes.

It is not only the quantity of these references that is impressive. More revealing is the selection of materials, and way they are used. Evangelicals will do well to cast a continuing discerning eye over these matters.

Bonhoeffer’s influence has been enhanced, of course, by the fact that he was martyred by a vicious, totalitarian government. Not only has this affected his image among theologians; his brutal imprisonment also greatly influenced those writings that have been most influential in shaping subsequent thought.

The critical thinker who reads today’s avant-garde theological writings will at once recognize that there exists a “Bonhoeffer problem.” Able and discerning students frequently ask me how Bonhoeffer’s most quoted statements from his Letters and Papers From Prison can be reconciled with many of the positions taken in his earlier works, notably his Cost of Discipleship.

These students have in mind, of course, the “standard” quotations, centering in the expressions “a world come of age,” “religionless Christianity,” “Jesus, man for others,” “a non-religious interpretation of the Gospel,” and “a this-worldly transcendence.” These have unfortunately gained popular currency, to the neglect or exclusion of the settings in which they occur.

The conventional wisdom thus confines its excerpting to a very narrow range of sources. The quoted statements are all too often made to function within a context of security in which the answers to all problems are sought solely in terms of the world and its categories. It was precisely this mood of secularity that responded with such eagerness to Bonhoeffer’s attack upon the position he ascribed to historic Christianity, that its God was a problem-solver, a “God of the gaps.”

It is perhaps time for evangelicals to point out that this is a caricature of the God of the Bible. No responsible evangelical portrays God as a mere need-filler, a kind of universal anodyne for the aches of humanity. Bonhoeffer probably misunderstood historic Christianity, or at least saw it through lenses that distorted his vision. Could it be that his alienation from the Church served to condition his attitude toward the Gospel until he could see little or no good in its historic proclamation?

In any case, it seems clear that the “secular” theologians have selected from his writings those which came largely from times in which he sustained great inner shock. And the selection seems to have been tendentious in the extreme.

No less open to question than the choice of quoted materials is the use of those materials. Seldom in recent times has the scholarly world seen a larger reliance upon the proof-text than here. The excerpts from the Letters have been quoted in an Olympian tone until it has become virtually a mark of theological irreverence to question them.

The impression prevails that quoting a statement such as “modern man must learn to live without God” settles conclusively all questions of theism. Seldom in recent times have we witnessed such an authoritarian use of proof-texts.

Certainly a man who helped plot to destroy one of the worst tyrannies of our century, and who lost his life in the process, has a right to be heard. I would in no case sit among Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s detractors—although I would personally find it difficult to imagine myself participating in a plot involving the methods used unsuccessfully on July 20, 1944. What may be questioned here is whether even a course of conduct involving such an agonizing decision and such courage entitles a man to the definitive hearing that Bonhoeffer enjoys today. Would not the Christian world do better to evaluate the man’s deeds by themselves, and his words by other standards?

In addition to the manner in which avant-garde theologians of our decade have resorted to an uncritical form of proof-texting, and have shown an almost servile deference to Bonhoeffer’s statements, they can be faulted at a third point. Despite all the emphasis upon Sitz im Leben in today’s hermeneutics, theologians seem to bypass this motif in the present case. The Letters, especially those dated from April 1 to August 30, 1944, are taken as the major theological source, without much regard for the circumstances surrounding the writing of them.

It has been left to the biographers of Bonhoeffer to grapple with this problem. One thinks of the words of Mary Bosanquet in her in-depth study entitled Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Speaking to the point of the use of parts of the Letters, she writes, “In the years which have followed his death many have been appropriated and carried away, like stones from a half-built church, to be used as a foundation for theological superstructures for which he would have disclaimed any responsibility” (p. 256).

Dr. Eberhard Bethge, a companion of Bonhoeffer who is recognized as his authentic biographer, gives a careful analysis of the Letters in his work Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Usually, writes Dr. Bethge, Bonhoeffer sketched a projected new work as much as three years in advance before he gave it final shape. This suggests that the Letters were aphoristic, set forth tentatively and as a basis for discussion, and “not, indeed, the mature fruit of a new branch in Bonhoeffer’s work …” (p. 766).

Dr. Bethge further points out that Bonhoeffer’s references to an Arkandiziplin (arcane discipline), which stood as something of a counterweight to his concept of a “religionless Christianity,” have been largely avoided by those who quote other passages from the Letters. This may be due to the greater attractiveness of such motifs as “worldly interpretation,” and “coming of age.” In any case, Bonhoeffer’s biographer believes that had his life not ended at Flossenbürg, he would later have written a theology that would bear little similarity to the more venturesome statements in the Letters.

Finally, Miss Bosanquet (in op. cit., p. 279) quotes Eberhard Bethge as saying in his address at Coventry Cathedral on October 30, 1967: “The isolated use and handing down of the famous term ‘religionless Christianity’ has made Bonhoeffer the champion of an undialectical shallow modernism which obscures all that he wanted to tell us about the living God.” Is it possible that such evaluations from those close to Bonhoeffer himself may ultimately penetrate the area of thought now so thoroughly dominated by catch-phrases?

The superficial use of proof-texts is in this case very congenial to the modern temper. But if at some time in the future a more basic way of interpreting Bonhoeffer gains currency, it just might precipitate a theological disaster equal to the collapse of the “God is dead” movement.

HAROLD B. KUHN

The president of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod is making some bold efforts to restore doctrinal integrity in theological education. His latest moves at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, renewed a furor over biblical inerrancy in the denomination, but Dr. J. A. O. Preus vows to persevere.

“It is quite obvious to me that some things must be changed,” said Preus in a letter sent last month to all Missouri Synod congregations, pastors, and teachers. “I am convinced that there has been teaching which is at variance with the way in which our Synod understands the Word of God and its confessional position.”

Preus took his stand in a case involving Dr. Arlis J. Ehlen, an assistant professor of Old Testament exegesis on and off for seven years at Concordia. The matter came into the open last December when Ehlen was examined by the seminary’s Board of Control for renewal of contract. A four-year extension would have given him tenure. The board reviewed Ehlen’s position in several meetings and after resolving not to renew his contract later reversed itself, granting him, by a reported 6–5 vote, a one-year extension. (Six other teachers were given full-term contracts.)

Preus then directed the seminary president, Dr. John H. Tietjen, to “see to it that Doctor Ehlen teaches no course in which he will have opportunity to advocate his higher critical views concerning Biblical interpretation, effective at the beginning of the spring quarter of the 1971–72 school year.” Tietjen refused to comply, contending that neither he nor Preus had the authority to implement such a prohibition. Ehlen began teaching three courses as scheduled.

Last month Preus released a set of theological guidelines dealing mostly with the approach to Scripture and suggested that the board use them in examining faculty members for doctrinal purity.

Elected in 1969 as an avowed theological conservative, Preus believes he has a mandate from the Missouri Synod constituency. He had been president of Concordia Seminary in Springfield, Illinois. Acting upon numerous complaints he launched an investigation of the doctrinal teaching at the St. Louis school and won endorsement for the probe at last year’s denominational convention. A report on the investigation, based in part on interviews with the other forty-eight professors, is due to be made public this summer.

Those who have taught or studied at the seminary already know what the findings will reveal. Says one professor: “For the past ten years the historical-critical method of interpreting Scripture has been quietly but relentlessly introduced into the teaching at the seminary. A casual reading of the Concordia Theological Monthly, edited by the faculty, will reveal that biblical interpretation is now carried out in the Missouri Synod with no regard, in many cases, to the divine authority, inspiration, inerrancy, Christocentricity and unity of Scripture, Lutheran principles long held in reverence and faithfully employed throughout the synod.” It is said that though pro forma adherence is given to the Lutheran confessions, they are no longer regarded as an essential aspect of the exegetical enterprise.

Persons close to the situation say that those in the anti-Preus faction of the synod did not choose to make the historical-critical method the chief issue in their bid for ideological control. But they were obliged to face up to it in the Ehlen case.

Preus says he opposed renewal of Ehlen’s contract because the professor was “unable to state that he believed in the historical facticity of certain of the miraculous elements surrounding the Exodus of the people of Israel from Egyptian captivity.”

Tietjen says that he has had a number of doctrinal discussions with Ehlen and that Ehlen “has stated that he affirms the facticity of what the Scripture intends to present as fact.” But Tietjen also says it is impossible for any faculty member to teach his assigned courses at a seminary level of instruction “without using historical-critical methodology.”

Tietjen has been president of Concordia since 1969. He holds the Th.D. from Union Seminary. Before coming to Concordia he was editor of the American Lutheran and public-relations chief of the Lutheran Council in the U. S. A.

Tietjen’s hand was strengthened when it was announced last month that the American Association of Theological Schools would send a review team to Concordia. Some conservatives say the threat of a loss of accreditation is being used to stop Preus’s investigation. The AATS associate director is Dr. David Schuller, a former faculty member at Concordia and one-time candidate for the seminary presidency. Presumably he will disqualify himself from the AATS review, which is to be conducted by Dr. C. Benton Kline, president of Columbia Seminary (Southern Presbyterian), and Dean Allen Graves of Southern Baptist Seminary.

Meanwhile, Ehlen continued to teach. The 40-year-old scholar is a graduate of Concordia who has been a pastor of churches in Rochester, New York, and Yuba City, California. He studied at the University of Bonn, Germany, and Brandeis, and has a Th.D. from Harvard Divinity School.

Religion In Transit

The U. S. Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) has given $40,000 to the New Rochelle, New York, school district for a feasibility study of the controversial tuition voucher plan by which private schools would be tax-funded. Meanwhile, parents of children in Kansas City, Missouri, church schools have gone to court to seek a favorable ruling on a voucher plan there.

The closest the Churches of Christ denomination ever gets to a convention is an annual Bible Lectureship at Abilene Christian College in Texas, attended this year by 10,000.

This year’s “Best Score from an Original Cast Show Album” Grammy Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences went to “Godspell.”

Reputedly the largest Christian flag ever made (36 by 58 feet) was unveiled at an Evansville, Indiana, pre-Easter rally sponsored by Tri-State Youth for Christ. It was made by 100 youths who sewed every night for more than a week.

Florida voters went on record four to one in favor of a constitutional amendment to permit prayer in public schools. Prior to the election, Church of Christ minister John B. Book set off a furor in the Florida legislature by offering a prayer in which he favored capital punishment and opposed compulsory busing of school children.

Jesuit Superior Charles W. Dullea of Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute has warmly endorsed attendance of Catholics at evangelist Billy Graham’s crusades because Graham preaches “complete and unconditional surrender to Jesus Christ.” And two Roman Catholic dioceses will participate in the Key 73 outreach, with the American bishops considering membership on a national basis at their meeting this month in Atlanta.

A national interreligious assembly of 500 meeting in Chicago last month appealed to President Nixon to intercede with Soviet leaders on behalf of oppressed Soviet Jews, and voted to send a delegation to Russia to seek to visit political prisoners. Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum plans to lead the group.

Personalia

New Episcopal bishop Wesley Frensdorff, 45, a German-born Jew whose parents died in a Nazi concentration camp, was ordained last month in a hall over a Las Vegas gambling casino. He is the first bishop of the Nevada diocese.

Russian novelist Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, known to be a deeply religious man, has openly demanded greater religious freedom in the Soviet Union and sternly denounced leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church for failing to take a stand against the atheistic Council for Religious Affairs. He implored the church to bring the Christian-spirit back to the people. Scores of priests who uttered similar sentiments in the past have vanished from public ministry.

Maj. Gen. Francis L. Sampson, a Catholic and formerly army chief of chaplains, is new president of the United Service Organization (USO).

American Baptist clergyman and teacher David T. Shannon has been named dean of faculty at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He is the first black dean of a predominantly white denominational seminary.

Mennonite leader J. B. Toews has resigned as president of Mennonite Brethren Biblical Seminary in Fresno, California, to teach and write.

Bob Jones III, president of Bob Jones University, has branded the Jesus movement “undeniably wicked” and unbiblical in a twenty-cent booklet. And theologian Carl F. H. Henry says the movement has “only a limited future” unless it gains “theological power” in providing a Christian alternative to the prevalent culture.

Self-ordained part-time minister Benjamin Franklin Miller, 42, a white, was charged by Stamford, Connecticut, police with strangling five black women.

J. Lester Harnish, president of Eastern Baptist seminary and college since 1968, will bow out in July to pastor the Third Baptist Church of St. Louis.

World Scene

The All Africa Conference of Churches (AACC), which includes most of the Orthodox and major Protestant churches on the continent, has elected United Methodist bishop Abel T. Muzorewa, a Rhodesian nationalist leader, as president. The AACC pledged assistance to “liberation movements” struggling against “colonial, racist rule.”

Evangelical tribespeople of South Viet Nam may be slated for annihilation if Communists have their way. Hanoi radio claims the “stubborn resistance of these Christians has been a primary force in repelling Communist advances in the central highlands,” according to Bishop Chandu Ray. Meanwhile, a Catholic bishop in Phnom-Penh charges that priests are being “systematically eliminated” by Communists in Cambodia.

Total membership in the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland fell by 5,800 to a new low of 262,265 last year, but baptisms increased.

More than 210,000 listeners responded to a recent two-month contest offer by a Korea “Lutheran Hour” radio series beamed over the twenty-four-station government network. Fifteen transistor radios and 1,000 booklets were given away.

Three Russian refugee rabbis in Israel have appealed to world Jewry to prevent the installation by Soviet authorities of Rabbi Israel Schwartzblatt of Odessa as rabbi of Moscow; they claim he is an agent of the secret police.

The Christian and Missionary Alliance, since 1911 the dominant Protestant missionary force in Viet Nam, is carrying out its own version of “Vietnamization.” It turned over $600,000 worth of operational real estate, along with the administration of many programs, to the Tin Lanh Church, the indigenous denomination spawned by the CMA. The CMA will continue to finance them.

Paris police drove hundreds of Catholics protesting Soviet persecution of Christians away from the Russian embassy into a side street where they prayed for an hour.

Deaths

ALICIA V. DAVISON, 59, hostess of Fellowship House, the Washington, D. C., center for the National Prayer Breakfast movement, and Religious Heritage of America’s 1971 Church Woman of the Year; while touring in Hong Kong, of a heart attack.

RUBEN JOSEFSON, 64, archbishop and primate of the Church of Sweden (Lutheran); in Stockholm, after a long illness.

“I’m never going to be old and ugly. Before that happens I’ll kill myself.” An intense fear of old age—conjuring up visions of uselessness, loneliness, and ugliness—forced this confession from one intelligent, attractive teen-age girl. This antipathy toward old age, unspoken by many in our youth-oriented society, is one of the serious problems churches face when dealing with gerontology, about which they had done little until recently.

Sociologist John O’Brien of Portland, Oregon, says the Church, not social agencies, has the answers for the aging. “Sociologically, there is no reason for old people to exist,” he observes. “If all the elderly were killed today society would continue to function.” The Church, on the other hand, teaches the worth of each individual under God. Or as one minister at last month’s Interfaith Conference on Aging put it, “The Gospel speaks to the needs of the total man throughout the total life cycle. Christ cared; we should too.”

The conference, first of its kind, was held in Athens, Georgia, and included representatives of several Protestant denominations plus Jews and Catholics. It grew out of the 1971 White House Conference on Aging, which stressed the importance of concern for “spiritual well being” in ministering to the aging.

The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod has had programs for the aging for 100 years, probably longer than any other denomination. The Eastridge Lutheran Retirement Village in Miami, Florida, a non-profit housing ministry financed through FHA, opened in 1962. The village now has a population of 400, and the average longevity has risen by about five years. (The over-sixty set is the population’s fastest growing group, according to statistics.) An expert considers Eastridge one of the best retirement centers in the country.

B. F. Schumacher, executive secretary of the denomination’s social ministry, explains that the elderly dislike regimentation but need security. At Eastridge, he says, residents choose their own housing, live independently, and still have the security of a fully equipped and staffed medical center.

Eastridge also provides educational opportunities. The village, in cooperation with HEW, is “community-coordinated” with junior colleges in the area. Professors teach non-credit courses at the center. One 80-year-old woman who believed that age was no deterrent to learning signed up for all thirteen courses offered one semester, ranging from Spanish to investments, and surprised everyone by successfully completing them all.

The retirement village also emphasizes Christian education and evangelism. The chaplain, said Schumacher, is the focal point. Bible studies, often led by residents, and worship services form a major part of the spiritual thrust. Eastridge also encourages participation in churches outside the village, since not all its members are Lutheran.

Many other denominations and local churches run similar retirement centers, most financed through FHA. Some have recently encountered tax problems. In Minneapolis, Calhoun Beach Manor, a retirement home operated by an arm of the United Church of Christ, must now pay property taxes. The reasons Chief Justice Oscar Knutson of the Minnesota Supreme Court cited were: the residents are not charity cases but must pay their own expenses, and the facility is not strictly church-owned property. This is true for other denomination-owned non-profit housing. In some cases, explained Mrs. Wilson Sterling of the Episcopal Church, the rent charged is too high for low-income elderly while the high-income elderly are ineligible for such non-profit housing.

One example of this is the FHA-financed First Community Village, sponsored by the First Community Church of Columbus, Ohio. Entrance fees range from $7,900 for one person to $24,000 for two, depending on the type of housing chosen, with monthly fees from $145 to $530.

The same problem exists with Episcopal homes in California. Canon Edwin Moss and his wife paid $18,500 for an apartment; they now pay $550 a month maintenance fees. The general policy for such retirement homes is that the apartment or cottage is resold after the resident’s death. Shell Point Village, a plush, privately financed Christian and Missionary Alliance center in Fort Myers Beach, Florida, charges a $1,000 membership fee, a “Founder’s Gift” health-care fee, and an apartment purchase price ranging from $10,400 to $35,000, as well as a monthly service fee.

The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) operate twelve retirement centers, most of which are privately funded and also often restrictive because of rising costs. However, not all elderly people, even if they can afford it, want to participate in congregate living, commented Donald F. Clingan, executive director of his denomination’s National Benevolent Association. The Christian Church is developing two new programs to minister to the elderly still living in private homes. One is a mobile center that will provide educational and nutritional aid. The other is a national training program designed to help pastors and laymen establish ministries to the elderly. Some of their churches, however, need no prodding from headquarters.

The Reverend Andrew Crawley, pastor of Chapel Christian Church in Winder, Georgia, discovered a nursing home full of needy people. He asked members of his congregation to dedicate themselves to a twelve-month visitation program at regular intervals (once a week to once a month). Forty-one people, from 12 to 80, “adopted” one person each.

One result of this program has been a community chaplaincy program for the nursing home. Ministers of area Baptist, Methodist, and Disciples churches take turns leading Sunday-morning worship services. In Crawley’s own church, missions giving has increased.

Some United Presbyterian and American Baptist churches are also striking out on their own for the aging. Evanshire Presbyterian Church in Skokie, Illinois, “hustles work for the elderly in the area,” said Kris Ronnow. The church provides the place, the elderly provide the labor. Unfortunately, he says, many of the jobs are menial, such as stuffing envelopes or packing boxes. But still the work is useful, puts them next to other people, and produces income for the program.

Donald Crosby of the American Baptist Convention conducts one-day training sessions to stir church interest in gerontology. His “multi-media show” with a collage-like presentation and rock background music attempts to combat fear and misunderstanding of the aging process. “You can’t help the elderly unless you have a healthy attitude toward your own aging,” says Crosby. He encourages pastors and laymen to visit their community’s older people and find out their needs. “Until you find the need, you can’t find the solution,” he insists. Not all communities, for example, need to supply “meals on wheels.” In some cases, meals on heels is a better idea. The inner-city National Baptist Memorial church in Washington, D. C., provides free dinners at the church five days a week. This gives the elderly a chance to meet new people and get out of their often dismal homes.

Other churches, explains Crosby, could provide telephone reassurance programs (hot lines). Transportation needs are more acute in some communities than in others. “How many elderly people have died of malnutrition because they couldn’t get to a grocery store?” asks Crosby. (An 88-year-old woman outside Athens, Georgia, was found dead of malnutrition in her home, and the problem wasn’t lack of income, said a conference official.) Others, Crosby adds, have no way to get to a doctor, or to get medicine. The days of drugstore delivery are over.

Crosby discussed other ideas. Churches can serve as information and referral centers. Many talented retired men and women (teacher, doctors, lawyers, for instance) want to work, but have nowhere to go to find it. Not only could churches refer these people to jobs; they could also serve as job-bank centers for employers looking for part-time or specialized help.

A San Francisco church enlisted retired members to “adopt” their neighborhood blocks. They served as census-takers for the church, evangelists, and friends to the forgotten elderly.

The First Baptist Church in Melrose, Massachusetts, mobilized its community to help the aging after Crosby held a training session there. The church surveyed the community, discovered the needs, and offered its facilities to the city as an information and drop-in center five days a week. An elderly woman in the congregation spearheaded the program. (It’s vital, says Crosby, to involve the active elderly members of the congregation in any ministry to the aging.) From this small beginning, the city received a $40,000 grant from the state to develop a full-time center for providing meals and other services. Crosby points out that state and federal funds are available to non-profit organizations for meals programs.

One major problem area yet unfaced by most churches is the matter of death education: how do you get ready to die? It’s there, if anywhere, Crosby points out, that the Church really has the answer.

NEWS

Evangelicals have a lot more going for them in Canada than ever before. Revival is revitalizing scores of churches and reaching into hundreds of others, especially in the western provinces. Enrollments in Christian higher-education institutions are at an all-time high. Young Catholics who say they are turned off by their church but turned on by Jesus are joining evangelical churches in the eastern provinces, where there is also growing rapprochement between evangelically oriented charismatics in Catholic and Protestant communions. And it’s an evangelical image that comes across loud and clear on a nationwide television program that pulls higher audience ratings than any other religious show produced in Canada.

Yet getting it all together is something else. Leaders in the eight-year-old Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC) would like to see that happen. Statistically, the odds are in their favor. Canada has a population of only twenty-two million, and the EFC leaders say that fully one-fifth of the ten million who claim Protestant affiliation are evangelicals. And there are only thirty denominations (the United States has more than 200). But other factors work against the favorable odds.

At last month’s annual EFC meeting, held for the first time in Ottawa, the nation’s capital, EFC secretary Charles Tipp pointed out that language distinctions, geographical distances, cultural factors, “and carnal differences have divided us.”

There are also theological differences that make some shun the EFC. Separatists complain about evangelicals in the EFC who allegedly “compromise” on some issues. Anti-tongues groups dislike the EFC’s inclusion of Pentecostals in the circle of fellowship.

Prior to the meeting, EFC president Robert N. Thompson, member of parliament known for his international troubleshooting abilities, stated: “It seems so difficult to understand why some Christians take a passive and disinterested attitude toward something which is for their own spiritual benefit and strengthening. The problems of financial support, of positive and realistic action in the areas of spiritual and social responsibility, of laying a framework for activity which must come with any genuine awakening, tend to frustrate me. In spite of this, we must carry on.”

Thompson said he was encouraged by the annual meeting. Nearly 200 voting delegates registered, and evening attendance approached 1,000. The delegates voted to set up a full-time staff office headed by a paid executive secretary (the EFC’s leaders are non-paid elected officers, aided by volunteer workers), but not until adequate funds have been pledged.

The delegates also voted to open up membership to denominations and evangelical groups within denominations. Until now, membership has been limited to individuals, local churches, institutions, and certain organizations. Insiders say the move may be just the impetus needed to get the EFC moving.

Several smaller denominations have already indicated their desire to join. Among them is the Canadian branch of the New York-headquartered Christian and Missionary Alliance. A CMA spokesman said Canadian CMA money could thus be channeled into the EFC instead of to the National Association of Evangelicals in the United States, as it now is.

This sense of nationalism was noticed among EFC educators too. They would like to see fewer students going south to Christian colleges and seminaries in America. The exodus, says Tipp, results in slimmer pickings for Canadian schools and in a money shortage that prevents the building of new schools and bolstering of older ones.

More than 3,000 students are enrolled in the member schools of the Association of Canadian Bible Colleges, and there are about 2,000 in other Bible schools that do not grant degrees. Additionally, some evangelicals attend denominational schools affiliated with state universities. But the scene is bleak at the thoroughly Christian liberal arts undergraduate and graduate levels, where only a few schools¹Among them: Regent College in Vancouver, Trinity Western Junior College in Langley, Richmond College and the Institute for Christian Studies, both in Toronto, and the Canadian Theological College in Regina. A Christian university to be located in New Brunswick is on the drawing board. are functioning—hence the exodus to America. (The bulk of Christian students, however, are getting a secular education in Canada’s state schools.)

In the only other major action of the convention, the EFC came out against abortion on demand. The resolution declared that life begins at fertilization, and urged that legal rights be extended to the fetus. The statement will make no new enemies for the EFC among the many conservative-minded outside its rolls, and certainly not among the Catholics.

The EFC now wants to concentrate on making new friends. The time seems ripe enough. For instance, the huge liberal-controlled United Church of Canada recently proclaimed evangelism as its number one priority, thanks in part to a four-year-old growing band of evangelical activists known as the United Church Renewal Fellowship.

A leader of the eleven-denominatior. Canadian Council of Churches noted that merger talks were going on among a number of denominations but added: “The polarization between conservative evangelicals and those of a more liberal persuasion cuts right across denominational lines and is more significant than the differences between the denominations.”

The EFC says its task is “to seek out the evangelicals of our land and unite them in a common purpose for the revival of the church,” implying that fellowship is only a means to an end. Currently, however, most evangelical churches and groups seem bent on going it alone and getting things done their respective ways.

Conceivably, EFC’s end purpose may be achieved before its means.

Quebec: Breaking The Ice

In what was billed as the first interdenominational evangelical crusade in the city of Quebec’s 364-year history, more than 100 Quebecois last month made first-time decisions for Christ, according to television evangelist David Mainse, the man who conducted the crusade. Many of the sponsoring churches, both French- and English-speaking, have launched follow-up classes for the new converts, he said.

Protestant churches in the mainly French-speaking, mostly Roman Catholic city rarely average more than 600 total attendance at Sunday services, and evangelical churches average fewer than fifty members. Thus the gains may have a larger impact than the number suggests, Mainse added.

Mainse, 35, is an Assembly of God minister who gave up the pastorate to work full-time as host of Canada’s top-rated religious television show, “Crossroads” (see March 17 issue, page 41). He credits the TV exposure (his program has been on an English-language Quebec station for six years) for swelling the nightly crusade audience to more than 200, said to be a large crowd by evangelical standards in the area.

The crusade was held in the gymnasium of the Quebec High School, an English-speaking. Protestant school in a city and province where most secondary education is provided by French-language Catholic schools. Those who responded to the bilingual crusade’s appeal (French-Canadian pastor André Gagnon interpreted for Mainse) were divided 60 per cent English and 40 per cent French, with most indicating Roman Catholicism as their background. (Fewer than 25,000 of the city’s 500,000 claim English as their primary tongue; more than 90 per cent of the province’s six million people are Catholics.)

Much of the new life in the province’s evangelical churches is coming from young Catholics who voice disillusionment with their church but enthusiasm for Christ, said a French pastor. It is estimated that 75 per cent of those in the evangelical churches are under thirty, and that 95 per cent have come from Catholic backgrounds. One pastor says he has only one member with a non-Catholic past.

Evangelism in Quebec province is mostly a one-to-one matter and seldom done on a crusade level, says French Canadian pastor Jules Mailloux, but the scene may be thawing a bit. To help break the ice a little more, Mainse is planning a French-language edition of “Crossroads” with Gagnon as host. Negotiations with five stations are under way, and the program is slated to go on the air in June as the first gospel program to appear on French television in the province.

BARRIE DOYLE

Agenda: The World

Evangelist Billy Graham and a group of evangelical leaders from five continents meeting in Vero Beach, Florida, last month announced that an International Congress on World Evangelization will convene in Europe in the late summer or early fall of 1974.

The congress will be sponsored by many of the world’s evangelical church leaders, and between 3,000 and 5,000 delegates from throughout the world will be invited to participate, said Anglican bishop A. Jack Dain of Australia, presiding chairman of the group.

An earlier congress, sponsored by Graham and CHRISTIANITY TODAY, was held in Berlin in 1966 and attended by 1,100 delegates. Since that time, regional congresses on evangelism have been held in Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and North America. The call for an international congress came in “a groundswell of interest and requests” from these regional meetings and individual leaders, Dain said.

Explo 72: The Long Haul

Finding a place big enough for the 250,000 persons expected at the closing-night rally of Campus Crusade’s Explo 72 was a challenge even for a city the size of Dallas, one known as a convention-pleaser.

Explo director Paul Eshleman thought he had just the spot in mind—a beautiful lakeshore field reminiscent of the area around the Sea of Galilee. But logistics of getting 250,000 souls in and out appeared more formidable than feeding 5,000 with two loaves and five fish.

Eshleman figured it would take thirteen hours to get everybody bused in and thirteen more to get them out. Billy Graham and Bill Bright are slated to address the mammoth gathering’s climax June 17. (A worldwide day of prayer for Explo was set for April 22.)

Prayers were answered, however, last month when the Dallas City Council unanimously voted to let Explo use a half-mile-long mall one block wide between two freeways. The motion to allow use of the mall was made by a councilman who plans to house twenty-nine Crusaders in his home during the six-day extravaganza. Explo’s purpose is to train 100,000 to evangelize the world (see January 1, 1971, issue, page 43).

Sixty-seven arterial roads connect to the long mall, say Crusade staffers, so transportation should not be a big hassle.

Meanwhile, Crusade staffed the second annual Pro Football Christian Leadership Conference, sponsored in Dallas by unofficial chaplain of the pros Ira Lee Eshleman.

Seventy-five pro players from twenty-nine teams attended. Many took part in witness excursions to high schools and hospitals, and “numerous” decisions for Christ were reported.

In testimony sessions a number of players recounted their own recent conversions and spoke of a deeper desire to share their faith with others. Speakers included Crusade’s Bill Bright; film producer Billy Zeoli, who holds chapel services regularly with the Dallas Cowboys; evangelist Tom Skinner, unofficial chaplain of the Washington Redskins; and Cowboys Coach Tom Landry.

Population Fallout

Protestant and Catholic leaders are falling out over the report of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future. It contains a controversial section that more or less endorses abortion and sterilization on demand and recommends that contraceptives be made available to teen-agers.

Monsignor James T. McHugh of the Division of Family Life, U. S. Catholic Conference, accused the commission of floundering in an “ideological valley of death.” Methodist bishop John Wesley Lord labeled the Catholic position “if not immoral, less moral than the Protestant position.” Population growth for its own sake, he explained, presents a vicious moral problem.

Lord made the statement at an ecumenical press conference held last month to urge that the population report not be shelved because of the controversial section. Dr. Cynthia Wedel, president of the National Council of Churches, read a statement calling for careful study of the report’s recommendations. United Presbyterian Church moderator Lois Stair and United Methodist executive A. Dudley Ward asked that President Nixon develop an executive office on population growth.

All four declined to express direct approval of the entire report, saying that their denominations had not yet studied the commission’s findings. Resolutions concerning it will be offered at the United Methodist Church convention this month. In May the United Presbyterian Church at its General Assembly will use the study to supplement its own report on population.

Calling the report a “great and signal event,” Lord and the other panelists predicted that the study would become a major resource tool for churches’ adult-education programs.

CHERYL A. FORBES

Catholics: Plus And Minus

Catholics around the world have grown from 526.5 million to 533.6 million since 1969, according to the latest Catholic yearbook, covering 1971. But the total of priests declined by 4,228, and there are ninety-three fewer seminaries (forty-four of them classed as “major”) than in 1969.

Amnesty: Grasping For Leverage

Except for those “convicted of violence against persons,” total and unconditional amnesty should be granted to dissenters from the war in Viet Nam, according to a statement adopted by about eighty participants in an interreligious conference on amnesty. The meeting, sponsored by the National Council of Churches, was held in Washington, D. C., last month.

The lone opposition came from American Baptist Herman Benner, who wanted to tie amnesty to two years of community service.

The statement covers draft resisters, deserters, veterans with less than honorable discharges, and others “in legal jeopardy because of the war in Southeast Asia.”

In rejection of the concept of conditional amnesty (involving only those whose acts were based on principles of conscience and who will accept compensatory service) now being discussed in high government circles, the group stated: “We do not presume to judge [dissenters’] motives.” Presbyterian William Yolton said that conditional amnesty would create an “impossible” administrative task because of sheer numbers and the difficulty in sorting out motives. He conceded that some draft dodging is a matter of “personal expediency” rather than conscience. His effort to inject into the statement a reference to the ultimate judging of hearts by God was defeated after Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr., objected. Coffin argued that the insertion of “God-talk” would make the resolution—addressed to the “religious community in America”—less acceptable.

Many participants seemed more bent on using the amnesty issue as a crowbar on President Nixon for his failure to stop the war. American Civil Liberties Union official Henry Schwarzchild declared, “Amnesty is the leverage by which we can again raise the issue of the morality of the war.”

HAROLD O. J. BROWN

The Vice-President Is Missing

Has a rift opened between cultist Herbert W. Armstrong (“The World Tomorrow” broadcast and Plain Truth magazine), 79, and his son, Garner Ted, 42, number-two man in Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God?

“Definitely not,” says publicist Les Stocker of Armstrong’s plush Ambassador College in Pasadena, California. He insists that Garner Ted’s disappearance from the scene is for “purely personal reasons.” A secretary said he is merely on a leave of absence until July.

In February the elder Armstrong suddenly appeared in his son’s place on the broadcast (300 stations) and telecast (fifty stations). And the March issue of Plain Truth (circulation: two million) listed David Jon Hill as managing editor instead of the younger Armstrong. It was learned that a long explanatory letter from the senior Armstrong was read to the cult’s 250 congregations (they meet in rented halls) on February 12, with instructions that the letters be destroyed immediately afterward. Contents was not divulged.

Stocker hinted that Garner Ted may be suffering from exhaustion. Asked whether it wasn’t unusual for an official to be stripped of his titles during a leave of absence, Stocker replied: “That’s part of the problem; he’s had to handle too many jobs.” In addition to his broadcasting and editing positions, Garner Ted has been listed as vice-president of the denomination and vice-chancellor of the sect’s three colleges—in Pasadena (700 students), Big Sandy, Texas (550 students), and a London suburb (350 students).

The elder Armstrong was on a world tour and unavailable for comment, and Garner Ted likewise was reportedly unavailable for comment while traveling in the Pacific Northwest.

Armstrong’s teachings have been described as “an eclectic blend of Seventh-day Adventism. Russellism, Mormonism, and British-Israelism” (see December 17, 1971, issue, page 6).

First in a Series

Theology in the west continues to be plagued by convulsive upheaval. Deepening controversy shadows the Church of Rome, wherein problems of authority challenge the hierarchy up even to the papal summit. Neo-Protestant ecumenism has now drifted from earlier programming of faith-and-order concerns to doubt and disorder as vexing dilemmas of the day. The Protestant world, whose liberal leadership envisioned a Christian century and one great world church given over to socio-political priorities, is today more divided theologically and at odds ecclesiastically than for a century.

No fact is clearer than the loss by many of the churches of any sure Word of God. The distressing disarray of contemporary theology is plainly related to the ecumenical community’s ambiguity in this sphere. Prestigious modern theologians have exercised magical gifts with words, but despite semantic ingenuity and verbal prestidigitation, their momentarily spellbinding theories have lacked abiding power. Each novel alternative in turn becomes part of the predicament of modern theology, rather than holding promise of enduring import. Protestant seminaries increasingly assign conversation a priority over proclamation, and sustained searching of Scripture progressively yields to team-taught diversity.

The Bible has much to say about God’s chastisement of his people for neglect of his counsel, and it contains dire warnings against distortion and defacement of the divine Word. It is not an idle question, therefore, whether ecumenical bewilderment over an authoritative Word of God may not reflect divine judgment upon professing Christendom for its disregard of the truth of revelation. Ecclesiastical dilution of the biblical disclosure not only clouds the truth-content of revealed religion; it also forfeits the Church’s distinctive cure for the secular man’s spiritual lifelessness and moral suicide, and compounds his growing sense of human futility.

On the other hand, it is not forbidden to ask whether some portents may be appearing of a better day for twentieth-century theology. Has the murky tide of anti-intellectualism now perchance run its course? Will religious claims soon be correlated again with an imperative reason for human hope and faith? Has evangelical theology, as currently verbalized, the necessary potency for a spiritual turnabout? Can it now hope to become formatively influential in American life as an evangelistic message addressed solely to the needs of isolated individuals, without bearing decisively upon the national outlook and offering a social vision as well?

Reflection upon the theological ferment of the recent past may illumine the intellectual eclipse that seems to be settling over Western Christendom. If these observations do not venture any prophecies about the near future, they may at least set in perspective some costly theological mistakes of the near past.

1. Non-evangelical theological alternatives to historic Christianity put forward by neo-Protestant scholars have been successively smitten by an unsuspected malignancy; their plummeting into terminal illness happens even more swiftly than their dramatic rise to influence.

The various neo-Protestant theologies are short-lived novelties, prominent only for a brief season; like fashions in clothes, they yield to ongoing replacement. The fashionable theories of our day have had even less staying power than their speculative antecedents that were grounded in nineteenth-century enthusiasm for philosophical idealism or religious feeling or moral values. Protestant modernism, naturalistic humanism, dialectical disclosure, existential decision, and “God is dead” postulation have, one and all, no more obvious identifying characteristic than a high mortality rate. The life-span of contemporary theological theories is now briefer than that of reigning scientific theories whose champions, claiming neither revelation nor authority, openly anticipate revision of their formulas. The theology of the death of God sagged in audience interest not very long after a major denominational publishing house had rearranged its book publication schedule to focus on the God-is-dead thought.

The short life expectancy of the distinctively modern theories of theology is therefore one of their most evident traits. All influential neo-Protestant theologians of the twentieth century have lived to see a widespread acceptance and abandonment of their formative frontier expositions.

2. Diagnosis of these neo-Protestant views—from the theology of a thundering other-worldly dialectical Word to that of an explosive this-worldly God of revolutionary violence, or the more timid process-theology deity given to collective bargaining—discloses, amid their transientness, a developmental pattern common to them all. Their undergirding rationale involves a three-step maneuver in respect to the Bible.

First, a given theologian isolates for ridicule (as intellectually intolerable, or as a vestigial remnant of the prescientific past) those aspects of the scriptural account that his system aims to replace (e.g., for Barth, divinely revealed truths claiming objective validity; for Bultmann, supernatural reality and miracle; for Ogden, God’s transcendent revelation in Jesus Christ the Word; for Van Buren, the transcendently divine).

Second, Jesus Christ is appealed to as validating the non-evangelical alternative manufactured by the contemporary savant. The prestige of the prophetic-apostolic witness and of the Reformation heritage is then likewise arrogated to the newly minted theory.

Finally, having stripped the Bible of controlling contrary elements by dismissing them as mythical or marginal, the contemporary theologian asserts that what is left of Scripture teaches or supports the new view. The modern speculations are therefore freely depicted as biblical, and as expressing either the highest emphasis, or the real doctrine, or the intention, of the sacred writers. [To be continued.]

CARL F. H. HENRY

Out Of Focus

Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, by Walter Bauer (Fortress, 1971, 326 pp., $12.50), and Trajectories Through Early Christianity, by James M. Robinson and Helmut Koester (Fortress, 1971, 279 pp., $9.95), are reviewed by Richard N. Longenecker, professor of New Testament history and theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.

Originally published in 1934 and reprinted in 1964 with two extended appendices, Walter Bauer’s epochal Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum has now been translated into English. New Testament scholarship cannot help being appreciative for the translation, for the work is a notable treatment of the origins and development of early Christianity. And those who participated in the translation and editing from the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins, particularly Drs. Kraft and Krodel, are to be thanked for their careful work. The argument of the book and its use of sources, however, are something else, and need to be carefully evaluated.

The first half of Bauer’s work is a discussion of the rise and development of Christianity in Syrian Edessa, Egypt, Asia Minor, Macedonia, and Rome. Believing that the true situation has been distorted by the “narrow sieve” of “ecclesiastical censorship” imposed (consciously or unconsciously) by the later dominance of orthodoxy, Bauer attempts to acquire a proper historical assessment by a more sympathetic appraisal of the so-called heretical writings, a highlighting of what he believes to be significant silences on the part of early church historians, and a noting of the defensive stances of certain patristic writers. He seeks, in effect, “a true-to-life picture from indications in the sources, even if some degree of imagination should be necessary in order that this picture be brought into focus.”

Bauer concludes that Christianity at Edessa was established during the second century under the impetus of Marcion, Bar Daisan, and Mani, and only in the fourth or fifth century became dominantly orthodox; that Egyptian Christianity originated apart from sanctioned ecclesiastical structures and exhibited during the second century a latitudinarianism that was subdued by more orthodox Alexandrian bishops during the third century; that Asia Minor was predominantly heretical in its various forms of Christianity in the early part of the second century, as a closer reading of Ignatius and Polycarp indicates; that Macedonia soon after the Pauline ministry espoused various heretical forms of the faith; but that Rome, largely because of its Western organizational mentality and the presence of many orthodox leaders, became the center of orthodox Christianity in the patristic period, and gradually asserted its authority and influence over all of Christendom.

Having singled out particular regions for study, Bauer then turns to his two principal questions: (1) How dominant was heresy in comparison to orthodoxy in the second century?, and (2) What impact does this have for our understanding of apostolic Christianity? His answer to the first question is that the massa perditionis (“condemned multitude,” from an orthodox perspective) were the great majority during the second century: “East of Phrygian Hierapolis we could hardly discern any traces of orthodoxy. Christianity and heresy were essentially synonymous there. Rome, on the other hand, was from the very beginning the center and chief source of power for the ‘orthodox’ movement within Christianity.”

Bauer’s answer to his second question is that in the beginning there existed no “pure” form of Christianity or one that could be called orthodox; only in the post-apostolic era were the issues drawn and were there pressures for a solution. Jesus himself was the original heretic, and Paul was extremely latitudinarian in his attitudes (if not always in his doctrines). Only when Christian thought shifted from its original Oriental outlook to a Roman basis did questions of heresy and orthodoxy become pressing, and in such a shift the older position became “heretical” when the development of thought moved beyond it. “Faith,” therefore, rather than “theological formulation,” was the distinctive mark of earliest Christianity, and “heresy” rather than “orthodoxy” appeared first in Christian speculation, though both have tended to disappear under orthodox censorship.

It is impossible to be original in evaluating Bauer’s magnum opus, for the book has been extensively discussed by scholars (cf. appendix 2), beginning in Germany at its first appearance and continuing in the English-speaking world since at least the mid-fifties. Without a doubt the work is epochal, charting out a methodology and marshalling data that have become normative in Bultmannian circles. This reviewer, however, while applauding the effort and appreciating a number of valuable insights on specific matters, finds a number of features in Bauer’s historiography highly objectionable.

In the first place, Bauer makes the fatal mistake of equating “Jewish Christianity” with “Ebionism,” thereby employing without further ado Jewish Christian writings and references to Jewish Christianity in his description of heresy. Strecker, of course, attempts to moderate Bauer’s views here (cf. Appendix 1, “On the Problem of Jewish Christianity”), but succeeds only in raising the problems without allowing any differing evaluation of the data to affect the conclusion.

Second, Bauer makes extensive use of the argument from silence, asserting that where there are no orthodox records from a given locality (having ruled out most of the Jewish Christian materials) or no references to orthodoxy in that locality by later writers, the Christianity of that area was probably heretical. Admittedly, our sources for this early period aren’t as extensive and don’t tell us as much as we’d like. But to conclude from scanty evidence that there never was evidence for an early orthodoxy in various areas is a non sequitur.

Third, Bauer is guilty of multiplying hypotheses in the construction of his thesis. Conjectures are reused as foundations for further conjectures, all of which become validated by the criterion of coherence. But regardless of how forcefully or how appealingly they may be stated—or how inevitable they may be in any historical reconstruction—it still needs to be clearly recognized in a proper historiography that conjectures and inferences can never replace solid evidence and fact.

Fourth, Bauer has an excessive distrust of the patristic writings. There is certainly a need for “critical discretion”; and as Protestants, while we may respect the Fathers, we are not prepared to “bow to the Fathers.” But Bauer understands the “protest” of Protestant to mean antagonism, and thereby vitiates the evidence from this source.

On the other hand, fifth, he has an overly high view of the veracity of the heretical writings and cause. In opposition to the Fathers, who demonstrate “a pronounced inability to admit anything good about the heretics,” Bauer finds it difficult to say anything bad.

Sixth, Bauer has a decided tendency to oversimplify issues and run roughshod over evidence that fails to support his view. If Bauer, for instance, had interpreted the data regarding Rome as he does the writings of Ignatius, he could argue that heresy controlled the capital of the empire as well. Likewise, his treatment of orthodoxy in the New Testament is a classic example of a conclusion in search of support.

Finally, Bauer has been insensitive to what may be called, in James Moffatt’s expression, “the sense of Center in early Christianity.” He has focused on the “diverse patterns” within the New Testament and post-apostolic Christianity, but has ignored the possibility of various circumstantial expressions of a basically common core. He has rightly noted the fact of diversity but failed to note the sense of unity and commonality, and this is a serious gap in his treatment.

The book by Robinson and Koester, Trajectories Through Early Christianity, blends Walter Bauer’s historical understanding of early Christianity with Rudolf Bultmann’s philosophical understanding of the nature of Christian faith, thereby seeking to foster “the current indigenization of the Bultmann tradition on American soil.” In the opening chapter, Robinson pleads that we replace “the traditional static, substantival, essence/accidence-oriented metaphysics” with “a dynamic, historic, existence/process-oriented new metaphysics,” for “that traditional metaphysics has loaded our concept of reality in a way prejudicial to our own being as historic persons.” In the closing chapter, Koester asserts that to make proper headway in the study of early Christianity and our understanding of the Christian faith, we must recognize that (1) such distinctions as canonical and noncanonical, orthodox and heretical, are obsolete, (2) the gospel form and content have parallels in the non-Christian world, (3) “divine man literature” (the deity of Christ) is not confined to the New Testament, and (4) every philosophy of history and explanation of faith is totally culturally conditioned. The six chapters between these two chapters are traditio-historical studies tracing out particular movements of thought during the early Christian centuries in demonstration of this view.

The presentations of Bauer, Strecker, Robinson, and Koester in these two books are attempting to deal with the phenomena of diversity and development in early Christianity. The subject is both historically significant and personally relevant to the nature of Christian faith today. And it is increasingly so, what with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi texts.

But while applauding the effort and appreciating a number of valuable insights on specific points, this reviewer cannot help being convinced that the issues and data in question have been put in more accurate focus historically and more proper fashion theologically by such writings as H. E. W. Turner’s The Pattern of Christian Truth (1954), Jean Daniélou’s The Theology of Jewish Christianity (1964), and his own The Christology of Early Jewish Christianity (1970).

All Creation Waits

Nature: Garden or Desert, by Eric C. Rust (Word, 1971, 150 pp., $4.95), and In Defense of People, by Richard Neuhaus (Macmillan, 1971, 315 pp., $6.95), are reviewed by James M. Houston, principal of Regent College, Vancouver.

Although books on the environmental issue are already legion, relatively few give a Christian perspective. In a useful contribution to the discussion Eric Rust attempts to deal with the subject from a theological perspective. His contention is that we must take much more seriously than we have done the tie that binds the redemption of nature with the redemption of man and of his social order.

In five chapters Rust considers the biblical approach to nature, the scientific background of the environmental issue, man viewed as a predator, contemporary philosophical and theological insights, and the relations of theology and ecology. Much that he says is suggestive, but perhaps the weakness of the book lies in its broad sweeps. The work is an uncritical summary of ideas culled from scholars of very different positions: Tillich, Bloch, Pannenberg, Moltmann, Whitehead, and Heim. Nor is the author critical enough about the eco-enthusiasts—their motivations and presuppositions. Rust ends without creating an effective synthesis or an original perspective.

The author of In Defense of People is much more illuminating and incisive about the environmental movement. His subtitle is Ecology and the Seduction of Radicalism. Neuhaus does not suggest that “pollution and unlimited population growth are not very real or serious problems”; rather, he warns us against dangers in the current response to these problems.

Rust argues that the Church has failed to be the social conscience of the community. “Perhaps we can exercise our Christian responsibility better when it applies to our natural environment!” he suggests. Here Neuhaus is more realistic, for he warns us of the unrighteousness of putting the “right of nature” first before the “right of man.”

Neuhaus thinks that eco-enthusiasts have diverted attention from the racial issue, the poverty of the inner city, and the underdeveloped third world. Intellectuals are using ecological concern as a substitute for moral purpose, he says, while parts of the counterculture are using it as a new religion. He describes the manufacture of crisis by the revolutionary mood of our times, and discusses the totalitarianism inherent in the control of the “population bomb.” He also spotlights big industry’s profit-motivated attempts to make business out of the environmental campaign. Altogether the book is a sharply worded, critical, and original study of a humanistic radical. Neuhaus, pastor of the Lutheran Church of St. John the Evangelist in Brooklyn, has himself participated in political radicalism, over both Viet Nam and racial injustice.

Unfortunately neither book has an index, surely necessary in dealing with such wide issues and disciplines. Rust’s book is more scholarly and theological, but Neuhaus points up more effectively how the ecology movement has capitalized on the disillusionment and moral nihilism of American society.

Believing The Witness

The Formation of the Resurrection Narratives, by Reginald H. Fuller (Macmillan, 1971, 225 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by George Eldon Ladd, professor of New Testament exegesis and theology, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

Theological literature sometimes appears in cycles. Fuller notes in his opening pages that no critical study of the resurrection narratives to probe the historical basis of the proclamation has been undertaken in the English-speaking world for over a generation. Since he wrote these words two such books have appeared, those by Willi Marxsen and C. F. Evans. Fuller’s primary purpose is not to discuss the facticity and the theology of the resurrection of Christ, but “to reconstruct the history of the tradition from its earliest recoverable form in allegedly factual reports.”

Much of the book is devoted to a “redaction” study of the Gospels. Because Fuller thinks the gospel records are full of inconsistencies and contradictions, he finds them to be of little historical value for determining what really happened. They have value, however, in revealing the way the early Church expressed its faith in the resurrection: “Resurrection faith then becomes not a matter of believing in the historical accuracy of these narratives but of believing the proclamation which these narratives, for all their differences, enshrine.” This is a technical study that will confuse the ordinary layman and be of interest only to professional critics and to those who want to see how an advanced criticism works.

One cannot avoid asking: After engaging in his extensive critical dissection, does Fuller think the New Testament requires us to believe that the resurrection actually occurred? The answer is yes. Fuller believes that the earliest Easter tradition is found in First Corinthians 15 and is basically trustworthy. He believes that some real event, which cannot be described in terms of either subjective or objective visions, created the faith in the resurrection.

Fuller rightly points out that no one witnessed the resurrection itself. It left its mark positively in the resurrection appearances to the disciples, and negatively in the empty tomb. What actually happened cannot be proven historically, for the resurrection of Christ was “an eschatological and not an historical event, occurring precisely at the point where history ends.” By this language, Fuller means to say that the resurrection has no analogy in human experience and cannot be described in historical terms.

However, it was not merely Jesus’ spirit that rose. “The total being of Jesus, his concrete psychosomatic being, the whole man, was translated into eschatological existence and thereby transformed.” The empty tomb must be interpreted as “a sign that Jesus entered as the ‘pioneer of our faith’ … into that eschatological transformation of man’s existence which is initiated likewise in the believers at baptism and is consummated for them at the End.” “Christian faith is not acceptance of the faith of the first disciples, but acceptance of their testimony to what God has done.”

Fuller believes, however, that this new mode of “eschatological existence” excludes the possibility that Jesus literally walked on earth as in the Emmaus story, or actually ate fish as in the Lucan story, or invited physical touch as in the Thomas story. While one cannot believe such physical manifestations, one can believe the earliest witness, including the facticity of the empty tomb. One can believe that the whole Jesus was raised from the dead into eternal life.

In The Journals

Higher Education: A Christian Perspective is unfortunately off to a slow start; last summer’s issue, the second, arrived only recently. But it deserves wide circulation since it is a forum where evangelical scholars can publish research results and engage in theoretical discussion. The current issue surveys the value commitments of theological students and the seminarian-production rates of evangelical colleges, and inquires into “the idea of a Christian University.” (Box 711, La Mirada, Cal. 90638; 3 issues for $8/yr.)

The Mennonite Brethren colleges and seminary have just launched Direction as a quarterly journal. Evangelical schools of other traditions should subscribe to see how common concerns are treated from a different perspective. (77 Henderson Highway, Winnipeg, Man., Canada; $2/yr.)

Newly Published

The Chinese Church That Will Not Die, by Mary Wang (Tyndale, 200 pp., $1.25 pb). A moving, intimate account of persecution and survival of faith in China by one who experienced it, with revealing side glimpses of Watchman Nee and other leaders. The book closes with an introduction to the ministry being carried out among the 25 million Chinese who live outside the People’s Republic.

Arguing With God, by Hugh Silvester (Inter-Varsity, 128 pp., $1.50 pb). An important treatment of the problem of evil. Does not confine itself to philosophy and theology but moves right down into the life of the individual—to his sin, personal antagonisms, and physical and spiritual suffering.

A History of Pentateuchal Traditions, by Martin Noth (Prentice-Hall, 296 pp., $11.95), and The Old Testament: Its Claims and Critics, by Oswald T. Allis (Baker, 509 pp., $9.95). The first is a posthumous translation of a 1948 German “classic” of Old Testament source criticism. Noth takes no account of more recent, contrary views; his work illustrates self-confident criticism at its height. Allis (born 1880) takes up in detail many of the “classic” critical points and offers valuable evidence and arguments in favor of the reliability of the Old Testament. Concludes with an interesting chapter on Old Testament chronology.

The Way of All the Earth: Experiments in Truth and Religion, by John S. Dunne (Macmillan, 240 pp., $6.95). See editorial, page 25.

Holy War in Belfast, by Andrew Boyd (Random House, 220 pp., $1.95 pb). Recounts with a partisanship for which allowance can readily be made the recurring violent conflicts of the nineteenth century. Brief description of some events of 1964–69 is added. Very depressing.

The Cambuslang Revival, by Arthur Fawcett (Puritan Publications [Box 652, Carlisle, Pa. 17013], 256 pp., $4.50). In 1742 near Glasgow, Scotland, a great awakening burst forth similar to the one across the Atlantic. This is a careful history based on thorough, but long neglected, contemporary documents. “Jesus movements” are scarcely new!

Religion and the Solid South, edited by Samuel S. Hill, Jr. (Abingdon, 208 pp., $2.95 pb). Six papers by five professors on such topics as God and the plantation system, the role of women in religion, and an anthropological approach to white working-class beliefs.

The Death Peddlers: War on the Unborn, by Paul Marx (St. John’s University [Collegeville, Minn. 56321], 191 pp., $1.95 pb). A symposium held in Los Angeles in 1971. As a report on what abortion enthusiasts say to one another, how they counsel overcoming the moral scruples of the pregnant woman, reluctant doctors, and objecting nurses, and their techniques for getting around legal limitations, it is very revealing.

Give Up Your Small Ambitions, by Michael Griffiths (Moody, 160 pp., $1.95 pb). Practical, contemporary, readable look at missions by OMF’s general director. Topics include the call, the need, qualifications and the role of marriage. Enlarges the concept of missions in the light of rapid social change. Recommended for those seeking God’s will for them regarding missions.

Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, by Louis Mackey (University of Pennsylvania, 327 pp., $12.50). A professor of philosophy recasts the melancholy Dane, the theological progenitor both of neo-orthodoxy and of existentialist hermeneutics, as a poet first and a philosopher second, and maintains that scholars have tried too hard to make a system out of his work.

Earth Might Be Fair, edited by Ian G. Barbour (Prentice-Hall, 168 pp., $6.95, $3.95 pb). A somewhat religious approach to the ecological problem with contributions from several scientists, philosophers, and theologians, owing more to the élan vital than to the Word of God.

New Testament Essays, by Vincent Taylor (Eerdmans, 146 pp., $2.95 pb). Collection of ten essays by the late British scholar on such topics as the “Son of Man” sayings, Mark’s Passion-sayings, “Q,” and the origins of Holy Communion.

Charisma: The Gifts of the Spirit, by Siegfried Grossman (Key, 104 pp., $3.95, $1.95 pb). Brief discussions of a score of spiritual gifts, such as teaching, service, word of wisdom, tongues. Though few would agree with all this young German says, he is to be commended for trying to stimulate understanding of all the gifts, not just a select few of them.

No Dark Valley, by Gordon H. Fraser (Good News Publishers, 96 pp., $2.95, $.95 pb), and Miracles in Mexico, by Hugh Steven and James Hefley (Moody, 126 pp., $1.95 pb). Good collections of stories about Indians and Christian ministry among them. Fraser, probably the leading evangelical authority, focuses north of the Rio Grande.

The Puritan Tradition in America 1620–1730, edited by Alden T. Vaughan (Harper & Row, 348 pp., n.p., pb). Fascinating collection of documents from this period, with little commentary. However, the editor in the introduction says he has made “adjustments” in the documents, which should have been, but aren’t, footnoted. The volume also lacks an index and a selected bibliography, limiting its use for the serious student.

Reality and Faith, by Heinrich Ott (Fortress, 456 pp., $11.50). In cumbersome style, accentuated by bumbling translation, Barth’s successor at Basel offers a ponderous tome more useful for seeing Bonhoeffer’s influence on subsequent German theology than for understanding Bonhoeffer himself, whose own writings are easier to read.

The Philistines and the Old Testament, by Edward C. Hindson (Baker, 184 pp., $3.95 pb). A well-documented and illustrated summary of the discoveries at eleven ancient sites together with commentaries on the relevant biblical passages.

If Men Were Angels, by Milton Mayer (Atheneum, 386 pp., $12.50). A long-winded but engaging discussion in sprightly style of the difference between the old man and the “New Man” that various political parties and philosophies propose to create—namely, none.

Let This Church Die, by Rich Weaver (Logos, 159 pp., $1.95 pb). Perhaps excessively negative, but we had better hear out the angry young contemporary who issues these sometimes devastating critiques of the Church. He is really knocking not the Church but what liberals and legalists have done to it.

American Judaism: Adventure in Modernity, by Jacob Neusner (Prentice-Hall, 170 pp., n.p.). Traces the disintegration of the Jew’s religious life and tries to define his role as a modern man. An important survey for those who want to understand the tensions in modern Judaism.

Civil Disobedience and Political Obligation, by James F. Childress (Yale, 250 pp., $7.95). In this revised doctoral thesis Childress avoids facile generalizations praising or denouncing civil disobedience as a Christian option. Accepting Gandhi’s description of civil disobedience as non-violent in principle—not just because one is too weak to be violent—and as civil (i.e., polite) toward those in authority, Childress favors it if conscientiously undertaken, with an eye toward the greater dangers into which it may plunge society.

Bartolomé De Las Casas in History, edited by Juan Friede and Benjamin Keen (Northern Illinois University, 632 pp., $20). Las Casas (1474–1566) devoted fifty years to the destruction of American Indian slavery. He has been one of the most attractive and studied figures in New World history. This important volume contains ten long, scholarly essays (only two previously published) on his life, ideas, and influence. Especially significant in our day of renewed clerical social activism.

Written in Blood, by Robert E. Coleman (Revell, 128 pp., $3.50). Takes up the central biblical theme often ignored because of embarrassment at its “primitive” associations. Short but filled with profound insights.

Beyond Disenchantment, by Merle Allison Johnson (Revell, 123 pp., $3.50). A helpful book for disenchanted ministers by the “Pastor X” who wrote How to Murder a Minister. Johnson knows the minister’s problems and has effectively wrestled with them.

Take Off Your Shoes, by Mark Link (Argus Communications, 119 pp., $3.90). Photographs and poems are creatively combined to explore, as William James did more philosophically, the varieties of religious experience.

Praxis and Action, by Richard J. Bernstein (University of Pennsylvania, 344 pp., $3.95 pb). A broad and yet detailed effort to create order out of modern philosophical schools including linguistic analysis. Shows a high regard for the philosophy of Marx but ignores Dooyeweerd’s critical thought.

The Greening of the Church, by Findley B. Edge (Word, 195 pp., $4.95). Disappointingly, the browning of a good title and topic. Much of the book retraces old ground for those familiar with the literature on church renewal, church-in-world concepts, and the tension between social action and evangelism. Some of the practical guidelines on structures and relationships are worth implementing.

Mission in the ’70s: What Direction?, edited by John T. Boberg and James A. Scherer (Chicago Cluster of Theological Schools [1100 E. 55 St., Chicago, Ill. 60615], 208 pp., n.p., pb). Lectures and responses at an ecumenical missions conference a year ago on “The Missionary Image Today,” “What We Project for the Future,” “Some Theological Issues in World Missions Today,” “Motivating the American Church to Greater Support,” and similar topics.

Did it just “happen” that Jesus was killed at the time the Passover was being celebrated?

It was midnight long ago on the occasion of the first Passover in Egypt. Darkness brooded over the land. A people—those whom God would redeem from slavery and servitude—were to be delivered because of God’s command, because of their faith in and obedience to that command, and because of the death of a lamb.

They might not have understood the implications of what was to be done, but they did understand that a lamb was to be slain and its blood applied by faith and in obedience to God’s instructions, on the two doorposts and the lintel of their homes, and that because of this blood all in the house would be safe. (“And when I see the blood I will pass over you.”)

Suddenly throughout all the land of Egypt there went up a cry. Judgment and death came to every household except those that bore the sign of blood—where the slaying of a lamb had saved those who had believed.

Whether there were unbelieving and disobedient Israelites as well as Egyptians on that night of death and redemption, we do not know. But this we do know: When God’s judgment fell, those who had applied blood to the two doorposts and the lintel were safe. God had seen the blood and had passed over that house.

The Old Covenant passed and a new one took its place. But as in the Old, so in the New, blood was the symbol of cleaning and forgiveness.

Centuries had now intervened, and the annual celebration of the Passover feast had come once more. Jesus and his disciples had gathered in an upper room: “And when the hour came, he sat at a table, and the apostles with him. And he said to them, ‘I have earnestly desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer’.… And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he said, ‘Take this, and divide it among yourselves’.… And he took bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body’ ” (Luke 22:14–20).

Jesus was God’s provision for a world of Satan’s slaves who were living in the darkness of spiritual ignorance and death. He was the Passover Lamb who would take away the sins of the world, who was to “open their eyes” that they might “turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God,” that they might “receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith” in him (Acts 26:18).

The last great Passover did not just happen. We read in Acts 2:23: “This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.”

The fact that many in our time ridicule the reality and merits of Christ’s blood shed on Calvary is an indication of how very far we have departed from the inescapable truths of the Bible.

In our damning sophistication, many churches no longer sing, “There Is Power in the Blood,” “There Is a Fountain Filled With Blood,” and other hymns that stress that Jesus shed his precious blood as a Lamb without blemish. What folly to try to bypass the blood and its significance!

Take any good concordance and see what the New Testament says about the blood. The evidence is overwhelming that our redemption has been purchased by the blood shed at Calvary. Can it be that we have come to the time foretold when men are “holding the form of religion but denying the power of it” (2 Tim. 3:5)? Listen to these solemn words of warning: “A man who has violated the law of Moses dies without mercy at the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by the man who has spurned the Son of God and profaned [counted as an ordinary thing] the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and outraged the Spirit of grace?” (Heb. 10:28, 29).

Just prior to this we read, “Therefore, brethren, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way which he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh … let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful” (Heb. 10:19, 20, 23).

The blood atonement may not embrace all the implications of our Lord’s death on the Cross, but it is not an optional doctrine; it cannot be rejected without eternal loss. From that first Passover blood has had a great significance: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it for you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that makes atonement by reason of the life” (Lev. 17:11).

Through the Bible like a scarlet thread—as it has been expressed—run references to the sacrificial Lamb and his cleansing blood:

“And when I see the blood, I will pass over you.”

“He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities … like a lamb that is led to the slaughter.… Yet it was the will of the Lord to bruise him; he has put him to grief; he makes himself an offering for sin … he bore the sin of many.”

“Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.… And I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God.”

“For even Christ, our passover, is sacrificed for us.”

“And I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain … and they sang a new song, saying, ‘Worthy art thou to take the scroll and to open its seals, for thou wast slain and by thy blood didst ransom men for God.’ ”

“They have conquered … by the blood of the Lamb.”

“All who dwell on earth will worship it [the beast], every one whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb that was slain.”

“If any one has an ear, let him hear.… Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints.”

Obsolete? “Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth … him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood.… Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, every one who pierced him; and all of the tribes of the earth will wail on account of him. Even so, Amen” (Rev. 1:5, 7, 8).

Obsolete? A mere joke?

“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb. 10:31).

This one thing I know: between this sinner and God’s judgment on sin there has been interposed, by faith, the blood of the Son of God. I know I am his, and I know I am safe!