A large gray Rolls Royce limousine pulled away from the theater’s curb as the rest of the audience hurriedly stepped out into the brisk November afternoon air. A performance at Covent Garden? The Saturday matinee at the Metropolitan Opera or Philharmonic Hall? No, this Rolls Royce (and the Cadillac limousines that followed it) left the Mark Hellinger Theater, located on a narrow one-way street in New York’s Broadway district, where Jesus Christ Superstar is currently playing.

Directed and conceived by Tom O’Horgan (of Hair and Lenny fame), Broadway’s Superstar is a new creation; the record version forms only the outline. The seven last days of Jesus—minus the Resurrection—are portrayed through bizarre effects and for-the-shock-of-it images.

Meanwhile, across town at Philharmonic Hall, where the Rolls Royces and Cadillacs should be, Benjamin Britten’s new edition of Bach’s St. John Passion had its American premiere, a benefit program for the American Bible Society. Bach’s Passion, first performed on Good Friday, 1723, also covers Christ’s last seven days (again without the Resurrection). The fresh twentieth-century translation of this edition, plus the new organ score Britten provided, give the Passion a modernity rivaling Superstar’s. The dark, haunting tones of Bach’s organ and Superstar’s Moog Synthesizer (used for modern interpretations of Bach) create similar effects. Bach, however, is more traditional on at least one point: Jesus dies on a cross. In Superstar, Jesus hangs on a triangle.

Bach writes with conviction that Christ is the “Truth of God unshaken.” He doesn’t emphasize Pilate’s famous question as do Webber and Rice, the composers of Superstar.

Jesus’ humanity, asserted in the rock opera at the expense of his divinity, isn’t neglected in the older oratorio. But what Webber and Rice fail to portray, the truly human and dramatic response from Christ’s followers, Bach captures exactly.

The focal point is Peter; Bach emphasizes his anguish. Peter is the “beloved disciple,” and his denial of Jesus calls for dramatic elaboration. As Part One ends we hear Peter deny Christ for the third time. The tenor aria becomes Peter’s tormented voice.

Ah! take flight away from human sight, go, find some consolation! Shall I stay? Shall I climb the gray hills in fearful desperation? Through this world I seek in vain, and my grief wins my relief for all my bitter shame, while the servant wins a traitor’s name.

In Superstar Peter suffers no such ambivalence, no such remorse; he is only ordinarily unhappy. He isn’t repentant and does not recognize his need to repent. After his denial, Mary Magdalene approaches him; they consider how nice it would be to “begin again” (an addition for the Broadway show).

Webber and Rice turn the dramatic focus from Peter to Judas. It is the anguish of Judas, not Peter, that is important in Superstar. Judas, after betraying Jesus to the Jews, writhes and moans a remorse that is both sterile and unrepentant.

Against the three-part wooden curtain that lowers to become the stage floor, Judas’s quasi-crucifixion occurs. With arms outstretched and spotlight centered on his lower face and upper chest (as in many Renaissance paintings of Christ’s crucifixion), he asks why God has done this to him. Judas becomes the Christ-figure. He, rather than Jesus, experiences a resurrection—he returns from the ceiling as the center of a butterfly, singing the show’s theme song.

The idea of the composers, “to have Christ seen through the eyes of Judas,” is realized in the original album (the new album is the “original Broadway cast”). But on Broadway, Judas is the star. Tormented and tortured by fate, which is obviously symbolized by four faceless blue men, he is driven to his betrayal. Every noble move Judas attempts is thwarted by his blue companions (they follow him throughout the entire show). Because of them, Judas is not responsible for his actions. He doesn’t even hang himself; the “four fates” put the noose around Judas’s neck, as he stands passively waiting for his death (another Christ image).

One of the central weaknesses of Judas and other characters, especially Jesus, is that they only react to circumstances. Jesus shows little energy and even less emotion (other than childish anger at God and Judas). The sexuality between Mary and Jesus, implied on the record, is overtly depicted in the show. Mary seducingly soothes Jesus’ fevered brow. Jesus caresses Mary as she washes his feet, but his action is absentminded, not passionate.

The “showstopping” scene at Herod’s place falls flat. Rather than being shocking or sickening, Herod dressed in full drag is merely boring. The vulgar costuming and the busyness of the stage detract from the drama. The Hebrew king should mock Jesus, not strut and sway. The words sneer, but Herod doesn’t (he’s too busy trying to walk in his high-heeled shoes). The scene is a dull demonstration of the director’s unerring sense of bad staging. The visual effects, here and in other scenes, are so wildly overpowering that the real action of the opera is submerged.

The same happens in the marketplace scene. The vendors, rubber-headed in varying shapes à la Star Trek—some wrapped in rope—fill the stage. Critics have called this surrealistic or Daliesque; however, that’s giving O’Horgan too much credit.

Despite so many weaknesses, Superstar is a success. An audience of exquisitely dressed adults predominated at the performance this reviewer attended. At the Bach performance on November 10 there were more young, blue-jeaned kids than at Superstar. Yet after each performance of Superstar, kids crowd the theater’s back alley, screaming for autographs.

Why is Superstar so popular with today’s young people? The answer ministers, young people, and the composers themselves give is always the same: “It asks the right questions.” Webber and Rice, who intended to take no religious stand on the subject, wanted Superstar to do just that. The questions come through loud and clear on the record, but the visual antics and theatric pretentiousness of the Broadway version crowd them out.

Kids who attend Jesus Christ Superstar (and curious adults, too) no longer hear haunting questions; they hear lyrics emptied of meaning.

Missions And Mammon: What Leaders Are Saying

Missionaries are feeling a bit of a pinch because of the changing role of the United States in the world economy. A survey, however, failed to turn up any immediate reports of severe hardship. And some missions executives think the long-term impact might even aid the cause of global evangelism.

The biggest threat on the fiscal horizon posed for Christian ministries lies in the fate of American foreign aid. Government subsidies now enable religious organizations to distribute millions of dollars worth of surplus foods overseas. The government also pays the cost of transporting the goods there. If Congress upholds the recent Senate vote to end foreign aid, or if substantial cutbacks are ordered, relief efforts will be severely curtailed. A number of self-help training programs currently being conducted by evangelicals also are jeopardized, because they are built around regular receipt of surplus foods from the U. S. government.

The effect of wage and price controls in the United States and President Nixon’s de facto devaluation of the American dollar is not as clear. Asked how he saw it, Dr. David M. Stowe of the United Church of Christ replied: “Through a glass darkly.”

“This much is clear,” he declared, “We will have to operate on an austerity basis for the near future.” Opinions vary on whether the changes will work for eventual good, and Stowe, who is executive vice-president of his denomination’s board for world ministries, says he is personally uncertain.

According to Washington observers, there is a good chance that Americans living and working abroad will be exempt from wage hike limitations. They have already been allowed to get salary and allowance increases to compensate for loss of purchasing power where there have been fluctuating currencies. Many missions boards, however, are not geared up to make immediate adjustments.

Theoretically, missionaries hit hardest are those who raise their own support and live on minimal incomes. How many notches they must tighten their belts depends on the country in which they serve.

The nearly 2,000 Protestant missionaries currently serving in Japan seem to be faring the worst, because the purchasing power of the American dollar there has fallen by 10 per cent; it may dip even lower.

Wycliffe Bible Translators has some 2,700 workers scattered around the world; they are said to average only about $180 income a month per adult. But most of them work in underdeveloped countries and in bush situations where shifts in the world economy are felt very little.

None of the missions executives consulted in the survey said he knew of any privation among missionaries. Most seemed to be finding ways of taking up what financial slack there was.

The Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board, which has been the largest in the Protestant world, reported it stood to lose between one and two million dollars in purchasing power. The board, studying increased allowances for its 2,500 missionaries, is expected to report in December. It has a current annual budget of some $35 million.

The Reverend Wade T. Coggins, an official of the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association, said he thought that “over a period of time the effect would be neither good nor bad.” Evangelicals, he declared, have responded to needs in the past. “I expect they will donate additional amounts to make up for loss of purchasing power—if they are adequately challenged with respect to the needs.”

An earlier survey conducted by the Seattle Times evoked a sharply critical comment on the 10 per cent surcharge from Dr. Robert A. Thomas, executive chairman of the Division of Overseas Ministries of the Christian Church (Disciples). “Protective tariffs for the United States at this stage in the world’s life are unjustifiable,” he stated. “The Third World nations, desperately trying to improve their productive capacities, could be hurt badly.”

Thomas referred to the “preachy part” of Nixon’s first speech on the economic changes and said he regarded it as “jingoistic and nationalistic, with its emphasis on competition rather than sharing, all of it appealing to national selfishness and pride. The negative effects of those words will be felt for a long, long time around the world. It has made the missionary’s work harder, verifying the feeling that the United States is selfish, militaristic and inclined to act unilaterally whenever it takes the notion.”

But the Reverend Edwin L. Frizen, Jr., executive secretary of the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association, is optimistic about Nixon’s economic policies as a whole. “Over the long haul,” he said, “these policies will help our economy and will thereby make greater investments in the foreign-missions enterprise possible.”

DAVID KUCHARSKY

Pentecostal Evangelism: But Will It Work?

For the first time ever, American Pentecostals assembled for a united in-depth study of the “mission of Pentecostal evangelism.” The study came during the twenty-fourth annual Pentecostal Fellowship of North America meeting in Des Moines, Iowa, last month.

“There have been serious questions by those who analyze us, asking: if we really believe what we profess then why doesn’t it work?” said R. Leonard Carroll, Church of God (Cleveland) general overseer and conference official.

Fewer than 1,000 delegates attended, and they only half filled the main floor of the enormous Veterans Memorial Auditorium. The low attendance may have mirrored the viewpoint of a delegate who complained: “Who would have thought that we would ever have to hold a conference to learn how to evangelize? Old Pentecostals never seem to have had that problem.”

The meeting also served as a fitting symbol of both the strengths and weaknesses of American Pentecostalism. On the one hand, it was a visible sign of the movement’s growth. When first formed in the same city in 1948, the PFNA had only 200 delegates from ten denominations. This time twenty Pentecostal groups were included, representing 16,000 churches and more than a million members.

Other signs of growth: two new colleges are opening (Heritage Bible College of the Pentecostal Free-Will Baptist Church, in Dunn, North Carolina, and Congregational Holiness Bible Institute in Griffin, Georgia); the Pentecostal Holiness Church is considering relocating to larger headquarters in Oklahoma City (present offices are in Franklin Springs, Georgia); and delegates could see first-hand the new half-million-dollar headquarters of the Open Bible Standard Churches in Des Moines.

On the other hand, the small attendance reflected the lack of Pentecostal interest in organizational unity. (By comparison, several of their denominational gatherings often exceed 10,000.) No mention was made of the fact that three of the five largest Pentecostal groups have never been invited to PFNA membership. These are the Church of God in Christ, the largest black Pentecostal organization; the United Pentecostal Church, whose anti-Trinitarian formula is held in special contempt; and the Pentecostal Church of God in America, whose freedom-of-conscience policy regarding divorce is scorned. These groups comprise nearly half of all U. S. tongues-speaking believers.

Delegates failed to come up with a “Des Moines Declaration” that retiring PFNA chairman and Assemblies of God superintendent Thomas F. Zimmerman had requested at the beginning of the conference “to distill the spirit and objectives of evangelism for over two million Pentecostals in North America.”

Still, the conference was useful for its inspiration, even though it appeared to sidestep social issues and to fail to produce new models. Robert Taitinger, head of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, was named the new PFNA chairman.

JAMES S. TINNEY

Pentecostals To Rome

Pentecostal theologians—in Rome—for official dialogue with Catholics? Yes, this month. A team, representing the classical as well as neo-Pentecostal ends of the movement, will meet there, according to an announcement made at the annual meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, which convened in Des Moines following the Pentecostal Fellowship of North America (see preceding story).

Killian McDonald, Catholic theologian and Benedictine monk, broke the news to the thirty-five members present. “This has greater meaning for the Secretariat in Rome than dialogue with Lutherans, Presbyterians, or Methodists,” he urged. “And it would be embarrassing and narrow, to say the least, if you Pentecostals should remain silent, waiting for Rome to announce this historic event.”

But Pentecostals, especially their educators and theologians, have come a long way since the days when the pope was attacked as anti-Christ in Luther-style. No negative ripple followed.

The theme of the meeting dealt with higher education against the background of Pentecostal theology. Dr. R. Hollis Gause, dean of the school of religion at Lee College (Church of God), Cleveland, Tennessee, is president.

JAMES S. TINNEY

Wesleyan Vigor

Conservative Wesleyanism seemed to reach a new level of theological maturity at the seventh annual meeting of the Wesleyan Theological Society held last month at Trevecca Nazarene College in Nashville. In evidence were renewed social concern, more open dialogue with contemporary theology, and increased historical awareness.

There was a quiet sense of vigor, or at least of growth, in the meeting; no sign appeared of the controversy that had rocked the society for the last two years. Membership increased over the last year by a third, to 400.

The WTS draws its members from some twenty denominations including United Methodist, Wesleyan, Free Methodist, Nazarene, and Church of God (Anderson, Indiana). It serves as a “commission” of the Christian Holiness Association, a product of the holiness revival within Methodism in the middle of the last century. Regional sections are being established in North America and overseas, especially in the Caribbean and the Orient.

DONALD W. DAYTON

Religion In Transit

More than fifty Hare Krishna devotees, clad in saffron robes, danced, chanted, clapped, and explained the four principles of spiritual advancement to some 200 guests at the grand opening of the Sri Sri Radha Krishna Temple in San Francisco last month.

For the first time, Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox leaders of American Judaism have joined together in a declaration supporting Jewish day schools.

Twenty North Dakota Lutheran youths attending a weekend youth convention of 450 spent two nights in the Barnes County jail. Reason: no room in the inn. They were allowed to stay in the pokey when housing ran out.

Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock was named the most significant book of the year by Eternity magazine. Two evangelical books tied for second place: Conflict and Conscience, by Mark Hatfield, and The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century, by Francis Schaeffer.

Nondenominational, liberal Union Seminary of New York has 485 students this fall, thirty-eight fewer than a year ago and the lowest number of the past decade.

Women’s Lib has infiltrated the male-dominated field of academic theology: a caucus formed a section on Women and Religion of the American Academy of Religion during its annual meeting in Atlanta recently. About thirty women joined.

About sixty ministers and elders from nine Presbyterian and Reformed denominations have voted to secure a full-time executive director for the National Presbyterian and Reformed Fellowship. NPRF was formed a year ago as an unofficial alternative to COCU.

Personalia

Dr. Wilber T. Dayton, chairman of the Division of Religion and Philosophy at Marion (Indiana) College, will become president of Houghton (New York) College when outgoing president Stephen W. Paine retires next June.

For the first time in its history the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod has chosen a black to head one of its twenty-six schools of higher education. Dr. William Libert Wright is president of Alabama Lutheran Academy and College in Selma, a black institution.

The pastor of Due West Baptist Church was fired one week after the South Carolina church’s deacons dismissed services because a black student tried to attend. Pastor Don Stevenson held a service at a nearby college instead. Ironically, during the same meeting at which Stevenson was fired, the deacons voted to admit people of all races to all church functions.

Albert J. Page, administration manager of the IBM Space Systems Center in Huntsville, Alabama, is the new international chairman of the Christian Business Men’s Committee International.

Retired Toronto minister Wilfred N. Charlton was elected president of the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada at that denomination’s annual convention in Sarnia, Ontario. The denomination has 340 congregations, and overseas missionaries in five countries.

Deaths

WILLIAM CULBERTSON, 65, dean of Moody Bible Institute from 1942 to 1948, president of the school since then; in Chicago, of cancer.

J. H. HAMBLEN, 93, founder of the 11,000-member Evangelical Methodist Church in 1946, father of singer-songwriter Stuart Hamblen of Hollywood, California; in Abilene, Texas.

R. K. JOHNSON, 61, business manager of Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, for thirty-six years, during which time he directed development of BJU’s $37 million campus; in Acapulco, Mexico, while vacationing, of a heart attack.

Priest and civil-rights agitator James E. Groppi of Milwaukee has averaged more than $21,500 in income during the past four years, Religious News Service reported. He reportedly paid $1,347.81 in additional taxes and penalties after the Internal Revenue Service investigated his bank accounts.

In a group lawsuit in Charlotte, North Carolina, last month, fourteen people charged that Secret Service agents and local police refused to honor their tickets to a rally honoring Billy Graham and attended by President Nixon October 15. The plaintiffs said they were denied admittance because of their long hair and hippie-style dress.

World Scene

Attendance ran in the thousands for a recently completed five-week evangelistic campaign in Singapore under the leadership of John Haggai; hundreds made decisions for Christ.

The Billy Graham Association film His Land emulated its Atlanta triumph by taking highest marks in all categories when pop star Cliff Richard presented the Filey Film Awards in London. Also participating was lay evangelist Lindsay Glegg, founder in 1955 of the annual Filey Christian holiday crusade that takes over Butlin’s holiday camp in Yorkshire for a week.

Seventh-day Adventist Welfare Services has voted $10,000 aid for refugees from a Muslim-Christian conflict reportedly raging in the South Philippines; a letter from the Far Eastern Division of the church says a number of Adventist churches have been destroyed and several members killed.

Some fifty Muslim divinity-school graduates will be inducted by March into a Religion Corps of the Iranian Army. They will serve eighteen months, wear the garb of Muslim clergy.

The executive secretary of the United Methodist Committee for Overseas Relief, just returned from an inspection trip of India, described the flight of more than 9.5 million refugees from East Pakistan as the worst human tragedy of modern history.

Churches in Communist East Germany have contributed $418,000 to the controversial World Council of Churches fund to combat racism (particularly in Africa), the WCC reported.

A new round-the-clock telephone counseling service (“Telephone of Life”) backed by Protestant and Catholic groups in Tokyo became so popular sponsors had to suspend local advertising temporarily; spokesmen speculated that the world’s largest city may also contain the most lonely people.

NEWS

Once Madalyn Murray O’Hair had knocked school devotional life into a tizzy, Presbyterian-Reformed Senator Everett M. Dirksen (R.-Ill.) battled to let Americans demonstrate their faith on tax-supported property. Then, when Dirksen died, his Presbyterian son-in-law, Senator Howard H. Baker (R.-Tenn.), took up the cudgel. Dirksen came within six votes of the two-thirds needed in the Senate to get the bill on the way, to its next big hurdle.

On the House side, meantime, a similar but stronger measure was bottled up for eight years in the House Judiciary Committee. Representative Emanuel Celler, 83 (D.-N.Y.), said he couldn’t produce a wording that his committee deemed constitutional.

But when Representative Charles J. Carney (D.-Ohio) provided the 218th signature to a discharge petition, the proposal suddenly found new life; it was automatically sent to the House for a vote. On November 8 the House reaffirmed the discharge of the committee by voting 242 to 156 to consider the issue immediately. Two hours after that vote, when the smoke and rhetoric had cleared, the final vote on the proposed constitutional amendment (it would have been the first change in the Bill of Rights) was 240 to 162, 28 short of the required two-thirds.¹After clearance by the House, it would still have had to go through the Senate (also by a two-thirds majority), then pass in three-fourths of the states within seven years of congressional approval.

The amendment, as first put to the House, read: “Nothing contained in this Constitution shall abridge the right of persons lawfully assembled, in any public building which is supported in whole or in part through expenditure of public funds, to participate in nondenominational prayer.”

But the prayer proposal’s chief sponsor, Representative Chalmers P. Wylie (R.-Ohio), aware that his forces lacked the necessary two-thirds, acceded to the substitution of “voluntary prayer and meditation” for “nondenominational prayer.” Critics had asserted that “nondenominational” either was impossible to define or was a threat to—rather than a safeguard of—religious freedom. The change from “nondenominational” to “voluntary” was offered by Representative John Buchanan (R.-Ala.), a Baptist minister—one of the two clergymen in the House.

The other, Robert F. Drinan (D.-Mass.), vociferously opposed the entire amendment. The Jesuit priest and former dean of Boston College’s School of Law charged that its passage would create an “ersatz religion” dictated by government.

Thus, with Mosaic caution, the 402 congressmen who voted apparently laid to rest the long-standing move to strike down Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that outlawed government-supervised prayers in public schools as violating the freedom-of-religion guarantee of the First Amendment.

Did the “religious lobby,” as some claimed after the vote, sway the House against the amendment? No fewer than thirty-eight major religious bodies opposed the amendment. And within the House, some of the most actively religious congressmen frowned on the amendment. Among them was Iowa Republican Fred Schwengel, a Baptist said to carry seventeen prayers in his coat pocket. “I believe in the great bulwark of separation of church and state,” he said after the vote. “I think we’d lower the quality of prayer if we let the state write it.”

Pro-prayer amendment forces frequently quoted polls indicating that the “people” were strongly in favor of the amendment, and argued that, if prayer is disallowed in the schools, the next step will be to remove prayers at the beginning of each session of Congress and the motto “In God we trust” from above the House Speaker’s chair.

Those favoring the amendment were various individual churchmen, including Billy Graham, and the National Association of Evangelicals. NAE general secretary Clyde Taylor said the amendment would “not promote or inhibit prayer by anyone.… It will restore the freedom of persons to pray in public places when and if it is appropriate.”

After the final vote was announced, a disgruntled middle-aged woman in the visitors’ gallery muttered: “Atheists, atheists! They’re making an atheist country.”

But the roll-call vote revealed that the representatives voted more along party than religious lines (with a few exceptions), according to the announced stands of the religious bodies with which the congressmen are affiliated.

Among the Democrats, 102 voted in favor of the bill and 136 voted against it. Republicans cast 138 votes in favor and 26 against.

But of the sixty-five Methodist representatives voting, forty-one favored the amendment, seventeen voted “nay,” and seven didn’t vote. (The stated position of the United Methodist Church was against the amendment.)

And though the three largest Lutheran denominations in the United States opposed the prayer amendment, eight of the eleven Lutheran representatives voted for it (one didn’t vote). The Episcopal Church Executive Council opposed the amendment, but twenty-five of the forty-nine Episcopal representatives voted in favor of it, with three not voting. Similar relationships held for the Presbyterians (45 yes, 16 no, and 6 not voting), and for the Baptists (27 for, 10 against, and 5 not voting). Although a few Baptist bodies favored the amendment, the heads of the Southern and American Baptist Conventions publicly opposed it.

Roman Catholics, by far the largest religious grouping in the House, split 46 for, 48 against, and 6 not voting, though the U.S. Catholic Conference went on record opposing the prayer bill.

All four Friends representatives voted for the amendment, while the four congressmen listed as having “no religion” (see December 4, 1970, issue, page 33) all declined to vote in favor of it. Other breakdowns are listed in the accompanying chart (see next page). Jewish representatives overwhelmingly rejected the proposal, as did the Mormons, while those of the United Church of Christ, following the denomination’s lead, voted 7 yes, 12 no, with 2 not voting.

The two Evangelical Free Church members (the denomination belongs to the amendment-favoring NAE) split on the issue: powerful John B. Anderson (R.-Ill.) voted against, while Elford Cederberg voted for, the bill.

Representative Wylie, after the vote, said that now “everyone” will be waiting to see if what some opponents asserted is in fact true—that the First Amendment already solidly permits voluntary prayer in public buildings. If, he added, court rulings continue to assert that “no practice which smacks of being a prayer is permitted in public school buildings, then we will be back, because the American people will demand that we come back.”

High School Scene: What Prayer Amendment?

It was business as usual for Christians on high-school campuses across the nation before and after the congressional rejection of the prayer amendment (see preceding story). Students conducted Bible studies and prayer meetings on campus, invited Jesus-movement leaders and music groups to hold forth in assemblies, passed out Jesus newspapers, and even held revival services in cafeterias, schoolyards, and gyms. For many of the young activists, all the fuss about the amendment issue was yawningly irrelevant.

The spiritual awakening that has engulfed tens of thousands of older young people in the past few years is now at high tide in countless high schools. Established organizations such as Youth for Christ and Young Life²Youth for Christ has 850 campus workers and sponsors Campus Life clubs in 17,000 schools. Young Life has 200 staffers and 600 clubs reaching more than 60,000 youths. Both groups also rely heavily on thousands of volunteer workers. are a part of what’s happening, but the movement’s spread has been largely spontaneous and student-led.

Three youths at the Barboursville, West Virginia, high school began meeting daily for prayer, were joined by others, then finally were forced to move to the auditorium when more than 500 of the school’s 1,300 students packed in along with principal James Cain and several teachers. A number of students reportedly prayed to receive Christ during the meetings. Recently evangelist Bob Harrington (see August 30, 1968, issue, page 42) spoke at a voluntary-attendance assembly program. Cain says only ten students failed to come.

In January, Cherry Hill, New Jersey, senior Bob Patterson and several classmates began publishing the Ichthus, an underground-type newspaper. Their first press run consisted of 1,000 mimeographed copies beaming the Gospel to the 3,000 at Cherry Hill West. Demand and circulation rose monthly, and Ichthus became an eight-page tabloid by June, with a 26,000 circulation blanketing area high schools. This month Patterson, now a freshman at Philadelphia College of Bible, will increase this term’s circulation from 75,000 to 100,000—“and even higher if we can raise the money,” he says. The paper has made Jesus a big issue in classes, he says. A Jewish Defense League chapter moved to halt Ichthus distribution at Cherry Hill East high school, apparently making the paper more popular than ever.

Student evangelists have been hassled elsewhere, too. When 250 newly turned-on-to-Jesus youths created a revival atmosphere at Kailua (Hawaii) High School, the American Civil Liberties Union objected. Remarked one student bitterly: “Nobody complained when we were on drugs. Jesus has gotten us off drugs, and now they don’t want us to talk about him.”

In Seattle, a Unitarian minister lashed out at the heavy Jesus scene in high schools there. (After testimonies and songs by young Christian musicians in an assembly, students at one school voted to shut down classes and rap about Christ. About sixty students knelt in the halls and prayed to receive Christ, according to a teacher. The same music group—the New Men—has sung in hundreds of assemblies, with similar results at several other schools. Many Seattle-area schools have thriving student-led Bible study groups on campus.)

Christian students use many tactics to get their message across: term papers on the Jesus movement (often sparking classroom discussion), book reports on Christianity, dropping pointed questions, inviting evangelicals to participate in panel discussions on religion, and articles in school newspapers.

“How come all of a sudden people are turning on to a man that lived some two thousand years ago?” asked reporter Vickie Moyer in a feature in the Rosemead, California, high school paper. “Today in our lives we definitely need purpose, peace of mind, and most important of all, love and understanding between one another. Is Jesus Christ, who is becoming more alive to more and more people, the answer to our needs?”

Youth director James Ramsey of the 700-member Bethany Assembly of God church in Alhambra, California, beams a ministry to nine schools, including a Catholic girls’ school. His fourteen campus directors, collegians earning $10 a month, assist Bible study groups on all the campuses. Ramsey himself looks after five groups at the 2,500-member Alhambra high school. He and his staffers operate a five-hour dinner, training, and rally program at The Way Inn, a church facility, on Tuesday nights for the students from all nine campuses. They have staged Show Me, a contemporary Christian musical by Jimmy Owens, in several school assemblies. At an Arcadia high school assembly they featured baseballer Albie Pearson who gave his testimony—and an invitation to receive Christ. The assembly concluded outdoors with more than forty professing Christ. Reporter Harold Britton of nearby Mark Keppel high school wrote that groups held outdoor services at lunch hour, and that “the humanities and senior composition classes have spent most of their time talking about Jesus.”

Some students have been tossed out of school for their witness activities and told they could return only if they refrained from speaking up. Few, if any, have capitulated, and authorities have usually upheld the right of free speech on campus.

Debbie Parks, 14, was reinstated when her father, Spokane Jesus-movement leader Carl Parks (see January 29 issue, page 34), got firm with the principal. He used similar tactics in support of other young people witnessing and holding Bible studies on campus: “If you abuse our rights, we will sue.”

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Kenya’S ‘Madaraka Day’: Passing The Baton

“Madaraka Day” for the church, the Africans called the meeting. Madaraka is a Swahili word meaning “responsibility”; the same term was used by Kenyans when they received full independence from Britain in 1963.

But faith missions made history on October 16 in Machakos, Kenya, when the African Inland Mission (AIM) handed over to its offspring, the Africa Inland Church (AIC), all church and mission department leadership and ownership. About 20,000 people came from throughout the area for the meeting at the AIM’s Machakos station, founded in 1896. (Actual autonomy of the AIC dates to 1933, when the offspring national church took its name from the parent AIM.)

The Machakos meeting was important because it went far beyond implementing church autonomy. Noted AIM associate home director John Gration: “The Africans have had autonomy of their own church for some time; now they are actually being given autonomy of the mission in all its phases in Kenya.” And one missionary joked: “AIC now means ‘Africans in Charge.’ ”

Other faith missions have set plans in motion for such a handing over, but AIM Kenya was the first to implement it on a large scale.

The scope of the new mission-church relationship is very broad: AIM has forty stations and 260 missionaries in Kenya (it also works in Tanzania, Uganda, Zaïre, and the Central African Republic; the total missionary staff is almost 700). But the larger numbers come from the African church: 250,000 baptized members in 1,400 congregations in the AIC in Kenya, making it the largest church in that country and one of the largest in all Africa.

African church leaders and missionaries had met for several years engineering the takeover. Several factors led up to the almost inevitable event: nationalism (how could a church existing in a country now completely independent of colonial domination continue to be under the leadership of foreign missionaries?); pressure from the ecumenical crowd (the large Church of England, for example, is no longer called “The Church Mission Society,” the mission-field designation of the Anglicans—it is now the Anglican Church of Kenya); and the passage of time, which caused Africans and the missionaries to be receptive to greater responsibility by the national church.

The Machakos meeting showed a spirit of harmony and thankfulness. From top to bottom ranks, the Kenyans agreed that the meeting “does not signal that you missionaries are no longer wanted. We need you. And many of the departments that you have handed us, we give right back to you until we can run them with as qualified people as you are.” Missionaries were grateful for this attitude; they shuddered over the chaos caused by some denominational groups in other situations when they handed over leadership and property and then evacuated.

As the four-hour meeting ended with thousands of Africans and several hundred missionaries heading for home, a missionary was asked if things would be greatly changed by the action. “Not really,” he replied matter-of-factly. “This just makes things official.”

Meanwhile, mission societies similar to the AIM were watching and looking for guidelines from the Machakos meeting. Many of them doubtless will follow the AIM’s lead. The historic meeting seemed to indicate that such a handing over is in the best interest of all only when the program of world missions takes on the new concept of international church extension—for independents and faith groups, as well as for denominations. The 1970s will be the decade for “passing on the baton”—the time for “Paul to hand over to Timothy.”

HAROLD C. OLSEN

Libertyville For Lutherans

A new church was born in Libertyville, Illinois, last month. Signing on as charter members of the very conservative Federation for Authentic Lutheranism were six former Missouri Synod congregations and one independent group that split off from a Missouri Synod church that remained in the Synod.³St. John’s, Watertown, and Holy Trinity, Okauchee, both in Wisconsin; St. John’s of Libertyville, and St. Paul’s of Round Lake, both in Illinois; St. Paul’s First of North Hollywood, Grace of Bishop, and St. Paul’s of Escondido, all in California.

The new church body, conceived out of protest to alleged liberalism in the Missouri Synod and born out of opposition to developments at the Missouri Synod’s biennial convention in Milwaukee last July (see August 6 issue, page 31), claims a total of 8,000 baptized members. In addition, about fifteen pastors and laymen joined as advisory members without voting privileges.

By a vote of 19 to 0, delegates to the constituting convention approved a constitution that declares loyalty to the Bible as “the inerrant word of God.” Position papers adopted oppose the ordination of women ministers and hold that, while individual Christians have a responsibility to work for the betterment of society, “we are a Bible teaching church, leaving politics to the politicians and social advancement to the proper agencies.”

The FAL approved pulpit and altar fellowship with the 381,000-member Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod and the 15,000-member Evangelical Lutheran Synod. (The Missouri Synod has 2.8 million members in some 6,000 congregations.) FAL leaders said about fifty major congregations of the Missouri Synod will eventually join the new federation.

Bishops Open Meetings, Close Pulpits

During the first several days of the annual meeting of the U. S. Catholic bishops in Washington, D. C., last month, they (1) called for federal tax credits to aid parish schools, while slapping at recent Supreme Court decisions as denying “the fundamental right of parents to educate their children in non-public schools”; (2) voted against asking the Vatican even to restudy an ecumenical directive with a view toward simplifying pulpit exchanges between Catholic priests and Protestant ministers; and (3) voted to open many of their business meetings to the press and qualified observers beginning next April.

The tax-credit plan, designed to bolster the sagging financial underpinning for shrinking Catholic schools, would steer around direct state tax subsidies granted to parochial schools for the teaching of non-religious subjects. Instead, a parent could deduct from his federal tax payment half of a pupil’s expenses for textbooks and tuition. The bishops favored that plan over a tuition voucher because tax credits apparently avoid the problem of racial segregation and cover public as well as non-public schools. Parents—not schools—get the money. (Earlier this year the Supreme Court ruled against the constitutionality of direct state tax aid to church schools in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.)

In a 181 to 81 vote, the prelates handily defeated a recommendation that might have allowed Catholic priests to preach in Protestant pulpits without special dispensation. Auxiliary John J. Boardman of Brooklyn argued that it would foster reciprocity and allow “heretics preaching in our pulpits.”

Countered Archbishop Philip Hannan of New Orleans: “It might make us more careful about what we preach.”

The U. S. hierarchy elected John Cardinal Krol, 61, of Philadelphia, a conservative, to succeed John Cardinal Dearden of Detroit as their president. Dearden, known as a moderate able to bring cohesion to the often-divided National Conference of Bishops, served five years and was ineligible. Krol was the NCCB vice-president, is an able administrator, and is a recognized leader. Whether his assertive style will polarize the bishops as some predict, remains to be seen.

RUSSELL CHANDLER

It was to the credit of the Institute for Advanced Christian Studies, which for four years has had the character of a mobile academic community, that it sponsored a recent conference providing Christian perspective on the contemporary search for reality. Christian scholars from forty-two campuses discussed what is evangelically authentic and inauthentic in the present counter-cultural revolt. Their deliberations will issue in cassette recordings from Word and in a book from Harper and Row setting the culture crisis in Christian perspective.

Interest is mounting in such a balanced assessment of the social tumult today. Not only are campus intellectuals seeking a discriminating critique of contemporary culture, but also multitudes of parents are reaching for help in discriminating between radical commitments that are neither Christian nor intelligible, commendable departures from inherited moral compromises, and mere culture-badges such as mod dress.

The so-called new consciousness is mainly a Western phenomenon; it is not pervading Communist-sphere nations or Eastern culture, although there are surface indications that youth discontent is an almost universal leaven and some signs of youth revolt even in India. As technology inevitably overtakes other cultures (how prevent it?), their presently dominant religions will face new stresses. As scientific concentration invades all realms of life, and confronts the easy notion that religion and science can survive on wholly different levels of reflection, scientism will tighten its grip, and men will reach for distinctively human survival.

Dr. David Carley, head of Inland Steel Development Corporation, thinks the modern turn toward world-reality requires responsible involvement at the frontiers of change and need, and especially so in the struggle for human rights, if one aims to be spiritually authentic. A dominant feature of the new consciousness is keen awareness of problems of race prejudice, population growth, environmental pollution, and poverty; conservation of natural resources is likely to follow on this list of temporal concerns.

But the call of alienated youth especially includes a dimension of love that modern Christianity could and should have had all along. Moreover, the distressing gap between social concern and personal morality now concerns not a few of the countercultural young; they realize that in a new outlook on life the whole person must somehow be involved. This is one level of commitment to which the young Jesus-followers address a Christian witness and invitation. The young seem more receptive today to the call of Christ than we have ever known them to be, and in the decisions they make they are being most influenced not by their elders but by their peers.

Although its present energies are devoted to an unknown God, the youth rebellion, observes Dr. George Mavrodes of the University of Michigan, involves a demand for collision with a higher reality. One feature of the modern search for reality surely lies in this insistence on confrontation—including confrontation of or by reality. This has been one factor, no doubt, in the violent propulsion of many into a new sphere of consciousness through hallucinatory drugs, and in the resort of others to bizarre sexual perversion in quest of “interpersonal truth.” But Dr. Armand Nicholi II of Harvard Medical School now notes a widespread disenchantment with the drug scene and a turning to more promising alternatives. Dr. Douglas Feaver of Lehigh University reports that unrestricted freedom in the world of sex has brought increasing complaints about waning pleasure and intensity of sex, and a feeling of emptiness about love.

Christian claims, too, are approached with the expectation that the God who assertedly revealed himself in Christ must be active now as well in some dramatic way. When misdirected, this expectation leads readily to the demand for charismatic miracles and apostolic powers. But we cannot effectively counter such excesses by treating the Living God as a semi-retired star of past generations. Kierkegaard made the point that the disciples contemporary with Jesus had no advantage over those who acknowledge Christ’s lordship today, since the truth of revelation is revealed not to sight but to faith.

To be sure, modern encounter-theology espoused its dramatic leaps of faith at the insufferable expense of intelligible revelation. Sound evangelical faith will preserve not only the rationality of God’s nature and ways, but also the ongoing drama of redemptive renewal and of the Risen Christ’s own living presence in the midst of his people. Surely the divine integration of fragmented personalities must involve something more astonishing morally and spiritually than many laggard evangelical congregations now realize.

In an anti-intellective mood, today’s youth counterculture deliberately correlates consciousness and personal values with the mystical. In doing so, it forfeits any ultimately intelligible anchorage for the very countercultural values it champions.

Stipulating the proper role of reason is one of the most demanding requirements of a Christian critique of the countercultural mood, and evangelicals are not themselves wholly agreed on this issue.

The fact is that modern philosophical rationalism, in its speculative revolt against transcendent cognitive revelation, promised from human reasoning more than it could deliver, and thereby encouraged the recent modern disenchantment with reason. For the human mind was considered an imminent rational apriori that had an inherent potent for answering all questions, either because man’s mind was considered secretly divine or because human reason was held to supply reality with its intelligible connections. The notion that man’s mind is the source of all truth is about as far as one can get from the Judeo-Christian view that human reason is an instrument for recognizing and receiving truth, and that God himself is truth.

What the modern approach forfeited was the biblical truth of a transcendent rational Creator, of the supernatural Logos as the source of the substance and structures of creation, and of the reality of transcendent cognitive revelation. The counterculture needs to be recalled to a proper regard for reason, instead of an easy tolerance of the present shrinkage of reason and external reality to mere technocratic mathematics and predictable cosmic continuities.

Ronald Nash of Western Kentucky University has warned, and properly, against the epidemic of bad epistemology among alienated youth and among those who speak for them on the public scene. Any outlook so prone to overemphasize the subjective and to disregard rational claims can neither invalidate a false revelation nor validate a true one—its own peregrinations included. Nash’s comment is to the point: “The message that all in the counterculture should heed is this: If you are sincere in your search for the Real, you must not repudiate the Rational.”

CARL F. H. HENRY

We frequently hear the phrase “the whole man,” and its meaning merits serious consideration from a biblical point of view.

Man, the creature Christ came to save, has a body, mind, and spirit.

The body is the tangible, or physical, part of man, which possesses the senses of sight, taste, smell, touch, and hearing. His mind is that which thinks, reasons, remembers, and decides. Through his spirit man is capable of communing with God and receiving God’s revelation of himself.

The body may be developed and trained to perform great physical feats of strength, endurance, and skill.

The mind may be trained, instructed, and developed to the point where it can assimilate a wide scope of knowledge and understanding.

The spirit, in its natural state, is either dormant or in open revolt against God. When touched by the Holy Spirit it undergoes a supernatural change that Jesus speaks of as being “born again,” or “born from above.” Because of this change it is then capable of spiritual perception and of fellowship and communion with God.

Even though a man may have a superbly developed body, that body will in time experience the ravages of disease and regression until death occurs.

The mental faculties may be developed to amazing heights of knowledge and inventive genius, but ultimately the thought processes cease, the ability to reason fades away, the memory fails, the will can no longer be exercised. All these endowments, together with the physical body in which they reside, perish.

But what about man’s spirit? The Bible tells us that “the spirit of man is the lamp of the LORD, seaching all his innermost parts” (Prov. 20:27).

By inheritance and in practice, man’s spirit is in revolt against God, disobedient to him, and “desperately wicked.” It needs to be changed, regenerated, lighted by the Holy Spirit, and thereby brought into subjection to and fellowship with God.

At death the body begins the process of decaying, and the mind ceases to function, but the spirit continues to exist, either in fellowship with God, or separated from him.

For the Christian the body will be raised again, glorified in the likeness of our Lord’s resurrection body. The mind will be restored, with capability to recognize, rejoice in, and worship and adore the King of Glory. The spirit will be in perfect union and fellowship with its Maker—all of this for eternity.

How great the difference for the unbeliever! In speaking of the resurrection, our Lord says: “Do not marvel at this; for the hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come forth, those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment” (John 5:28, 29). The Apostle Paul affirms, “There will be a resurrection of both the just and the unjust” (Acts 24:15).

At the resurrection, the mind of the unbeliever will again function. The Bible indicates that he will protest to the Lord, telling of his many good works, only to hear Jesus say, “I never knew you; depart from me, you evil doers” (Matt. 7:23). The mind will be capable of conscious distress, and there will be “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

The spirit of the unbeliever, made for fellowship with God, will find itself separated from God: “tribulation and anguish upon every soul of man that doeth evil” (Rom. 2:9).

Our sole hope is in Christ, who through the new birth redeems the body, renews the mind, and regenerates the spirit. The body needs the redemption that will eventually change it into the likeness of our Lord’s glorious body. The mind needs to be renewed and enlightened so it can grasp spiritual truth. Without this renewal, the word of the cross is folly, and man is incapable of receiving the gifts of the Spirit.

The mind must also be humbled before God’s revelation of truth, accepting it by faith, not solely by reason. The nature of faith is clearly stated. It is “putting our full confidence in the things we hope for; it means being certain of things we cannot see” (Heb. 11:1, Phillips). In his own reasoning the unregenerate man pits his knowledge and understanding against God’s revelation of truth. He accepts his own conclusions, thereby repudiating God.

The spirit needs regeneration because it is in revolt against God and under the domination of Satan.

Humanity is sick—fatally so—because it is made up of individual persons whose bodies, minds, and spirits are in desperate need of renewal and regeneration. When man is reborn by the Spirit of God, all three components of his being are involved. The result is the redemption of the “whole man.”

The question naturally arises: Is physical healing of the body a part of the atonement? Some say it is.

Unquestionably God heals today. He usually does it through the means of medicine, surgery, and other specific therapies. But there are also many authenticated cases of divine healing outside the framework of medicine. (This has occurred in my own family.) Furthermore, God obviously has given to some the special gift of healing others, through prayer and the power of the Holy Spirit. That this gift seems to be growing in our day may be a sign that our Lord is coming soon.

But to claim that if we have “sufficient faith” we can be healed of all our physical ills is a dangerous doctrine. The Apostle Paul had some ailment that he referred to as a “thorn in the flesh.” He prayed earnestly that God would remove it, but God had something better for him: a demonstration of the marvelous sufficiency of his grace.

Furthermore, to argue that healing depends solely on faith brings us to the obvious conclusion that if our faith were sufficient we could never die.

Spiritual healing of the body is an act of God’s sovereign grace, administered by his Spirit and used for his glory.

The “renewing” of the mind is also a work of the Holy Spirit, opening up to the believer an entirely new vista of God’s grace and mercy, giving him a new perspective on life so that he can rightly differentiate between time and eternity, this life and the next, and evaluate all aspects of his life by this all-important standard.

The regeneration of the spirit too is a supernatural act of God’s grace and mercy, a work of the Holy Spirit.

God offers this redemption of the whole man in its glorious fullness, to be received by faith. The social activist is right in affirming the physical needs of men, but he ministers to the whole man only as he looks beyond physical needs. Man has a body, a mind, and a spirit, and Jesus came to save all three.

Sampler Of Varied Richness

Apostolic History and the Gospel: Biblical and Historical Essays Presented to F. F. Bruce on his Sixtieth Birthday, edited by W. W. Gasque and R. P. Martin (Eerdmans, 1970, 357 pp., $7.95), is reviewed by Richard N. Longenecker, professor of New Testament history and theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Bannockburn, Illinois.

We have become accustomed to the almost annual publication of some highly significant writing by F. F. Bruce, Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis in the University of Manchester. Now in Apostolic History and the Gospel we have both a fitting tribute to one who is “a stellar example of Christian scholarship, genuine devotion, and loyal stewardship” (Bastiaan Van Elderen’s tribute, p. 151) and a rich mine of valuable material on the apostolic age. The book contains twenty-four articles by twenty-four leading constructive scholars, and is carefully planned to parallel Bruce’s own interests and his type of critical, reverent, and expansive scholarship.

In a short review one cannot deal adequately with the variety and richness of a volume like this. Not all the articles are strictly evangelical in tone or in conclusions; Bruce himself would disagree with some of the authors at times, though I’m sure he is honored by their presence. But almost all the articles are significant and constructive. To mention only a few of worth: E. M. Blaiklock writes well on the historical authenticity of Acts (though in language too florid and verbose for my taste); Earle Ellis develops the theme of the Christian prophet in Acts as a teacher and interpreter of the Old Testament; A. J. Mattill, Jr., rehabilitates Schneckenburger’s thesis on the apologetic purpose of Acts (though he supports it with a dubious interpretation of Acts 21); George Ladd deals perceptively with the relation between the traditional and the revelationally unique in Paul’s experience and preaching; Alan Millard relates Near Eastern covenant studies to the Lord’s Supper in First Corinthians 11; and Margaret Thrall roots Paul’s essential Christology in his prophetic call on the road to Damascus.

For me, the most outstanding articles were those by Howard Marshall on the centrality of the resurrection of Christ in the Acts of the Apostles, William Barclay on Paul’s missionary and pastoral preaching, Leon Morris on the dominance of the “God-theme” in the letter to the Romans, and C. F. D. Moule on Philippians 2:5–11 (though I am not convinced that the “name” in question is simply that of Jesus and not Lord). Also of real value, though of more limited dimensions, are the contributions of Bruce Metzger on the claimed astrological geography of Acts 2:9–11, Bastiaan Van Elderen on archaeological evidence regarding Sergius Paulus and the location of Derbe, and Matthew Black on the CHIRHO sign among early Christians as testifying both to the person of Christ (the initial letters of the name) and the crucifixion of Christ (the figure of the cross).

Somewhat disappointing, not so much because of their conclusions (though I personally disagree) but because of their method of arguing probability and coherency of argument more than citing substantial evidence to support their conclusions, are Floyd Filson’s mild redaction-criticism treatment of the journey narratives in Luke-Acts and Bo Reicke’s case for a Caesarean provenance for Philemon, Colossians, and Ephesians (if authentic). Rudolf Schnackenburg raises in his article the current issue of the relation of the Apostles and the Twelve in pre-Pauline and Pauline Christianity, but does little more than restate the problem and give his opinion.

For the scholar, this volume ranks alongside the Festschrift to Paul Schubert, Studies in Luke-Acts (1966). The two, in fact, could be spoken of as fraternal twins: they cover the same ground and are alike in styling: Bruce’s Festschrift, however, serves to balance Schubert’s, which with only a few exceptions moves far to the left. Interestingly, only C. F. D. Moule appears in both—though, perhaps characteristically, when among the left he moves to the right and among the right he moves to the left. For the student and alert Christian layman, here is a “sampler” on crucial issues in apostolic history, dealt with, usually constructively, by thoroughly competent scholars. It is a work to be read for theological enrichment and used repeatedly for reference.

Commenting On Paul

The Broadman Bible Commentary, Volume II: Second Corinthians-Philemon, edited by Clifton J. Allen (Broadman, 1971, 388 pp., $7.50), and six volumes of The Living Word Commentary, edited by Everett Ferguson (Sweet, 1968–71, varying lengths, $3.50 each), are reviewed by D. Edmond Heibert, professor of New Testament, Mennonite Brethren Biblical Seminary, Fresno, California.

These two multiple-author commentaries, covering the Pauline epistles from Second Corinthians through Philemon, come from the evangelical wing of the Church. The writers are well aware of contemporary views in New Testament scholarship.

While quoting the RSV text, both commentaries are based on the Greek. (All Greek words used are transliterated.) The Living Word Commentary (LWC) is written by members of Churches of Christ (non-instrumental) and is essentially a systematic exegesis of the Greek, providing a careful unfolding of the meaning of the text. But little attempt is made to apply the ideas of the text to contemporary life. The Broadman Bible Commentary (BBC) is by Baptists and aims at a balance between exegesis and exposition. Some points of the text receive scant or no attention, while central points are elaborated. The two commentaries admirably supplement each other; neither is exhaustive.

In both, an introduction, outline, and bibliography precede the treatment of the text. The introductions are adequate and generally treat the critical problems in the epistle. Some of the bibliographies are disappointingly meager, failing to cite important works; others are quite adequate and balanced.

Space forbids detailed discussion of these significant commentaries; only a few distinctive points can be cited. Beasley-Murray (BBC) presents a strong case for the partition theory of Second Corinthians and tentatively accepts the view that chapters 10–13 chronologically precede chapters 1–9. Thompson (LWC) discusses the difficulties but holds to its unity.

Both commentaries prefer the South Galatian theory but both opt for a late date for Galatians. The treatment of the eschatological portions in First and Second Thessalonians is from an amillennial viewpoint in both. Mention is made of alternative views.

In his introduction to Ephesians (BBC) Ralph P. Martin accepts the compromise position that “the teaching of the epistle is Pauline but the composition and style of this letter were entrusted by the apostle to a colleague and amanuensis,” and suggests Luke as the real writer. He refers to Paul as the author in a modified sense since “we hear Paul’s voice speaking through his disciple.” This compromise seems to concede the heart of the controversy.

Both commentaries accept Philippians 2:5–11 as hymnic. After reviewing the varied scholarly views, Frank Stagg (BBC) aptly comments, “It is strange that scholars are so sure of the hymnic nature of the passage and so unsure of its poetic structure.” Both accept the probable unity of Philippians.

E. Glenn Hinson’s discussion of the authorship of the pastoral epistles (BBC) is a significant contribution to this thorny problem. Accepting the Pauline authorship “as posing fewer problems than the other views,” he insists that due recognition must be given to the “large number of quotations and near-quotations” in them in considering their authorship. He holds that the purpose of the letters is to assist Timothy and Titus as “personal ambassadors of Paul” to meet the Rome-based Judaistic opponents of Gentile mission. Spain (LWC) offers a critical evaluation of the statistical claims of P. N. Harrison and holds that the vocabulary is consistent with Pauline authorship.

Although the contributions in these commentaries are not of uniform excellence, all reveal a high level of competence. There is no effort to foster distinctive denominational views. Both commentaries offer valuable aid for systematic biblical study and expository preaching. For the price, the Broadman volume is the better buy.

The Lions In Missions

Mission Theology Today, by John Power (Orbis, 1971, 216 pp., paperback, $3.95), Christ the Liberator, by John Stott and others (Inter-Varsity, 1971, 288 pp., paperback, $2.95), and The Future of the Christian World Mission, edited by W. J. Danker and W. J. Kang (Eerdmans, 1971, 181 pp., $5.95), are reviewed by Donald McGavran, senior professor of missions, School of World Mission, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

What changes are in store for Christian missions? In view of the radical changes in the world—particularly the rise of Afericasian denominations, and the end of European empires—in what new ways will denominations, missionary societies, and individual Christians carry out the Great Commission? What in missions is permanent, to be carried on till the Lord returns? What must be altered to fit today’s developments? Answers to these questions fill the three books considered here.

Christ the Liberator is most biblical, practical and evangelical. Its fifteen chapters are addresses given at the great Urbana Convention in December, 1970, to some 12,000 college and university students. It holds that missions mean world evangelization, though it stresses throughout that Christians should act for social justice, and that missions should serve as well as witness.

The speakers—foreign nationals and Americans, black and white—are men who know missions in six continents. Most of them are mission executives or leaders of the younger churches. A more competent panel of mission writers could scarcely have been assembled. Stott, Wagner, Ford, Skinner, Escobar, Howard, Little, Alexander, and others speak out on relevant biblical evangelism and its impact on a world in revolution. The fact that the writers are presenting missions, as they will be tomorrow, to collegians, many of whom declared themselves willing to serve Christ overseas, gives the volume a down-to-earth flavor. These chapters tell it like it is. The book is an excellent one for the minister to read and to give to the choice youth of his church.

Protestants engaged in mission will read Mission Theology Today with profit. Father Power, a professor of Scripture in Ireland (the volume has the imprimi protest of the archbishop of Dublin), has “put into simple words the conclusions reached by Roman Catholic theologians” discussing the value of non-Christian religions as roads to salvation and the place of “development work” in missionary activity today. The book, though sparked by a meeting of SEDOS (an organization to study contemporary mission facts and trends), is not a collection of addresses, but rather a systematic discussion of the enduring theological foundations of missions.

In this book “the church” means the Roman Catholic Church, and the theology and ecclesiology propounded are Roman Catholic. Yet Father Power speaks about “cooperation with other Christian churches” and writes, “If the Churches would turn their gaze from one another to the world, and look out on the millions of men who are totally ignorant of Christ’s message, then perhaps all Churches would … carry the news of Christ’s redemption by the most effective means possible.” Our separated brethren of Rome have probed the theological depths of many current issues in missions better than we have. The biblical base of missions is emphasized. The various options are shown with clarity. Evangelical Protestants have yet to publish a book on mission theology as wide and deep and (on the whole) as true as this.

The Future of the Christian World Mission is a festschrift in honor of Pierce Beaver. The editors and authors are all well-known writers on missions. Nine of the twelve are professors of missions. Harold Lindsell and Arthur Glasser present the conservative evangelical position; Prudencio Damboriena, the severe crisis in Roman Catholic missions; James Scherer, Richey Hogg, and Hans Gensichen, the ecumenical approach; and W. J. Kang and Kosuke Koyama, the viewpoint of the younger churches.

In this fine book one sees answers to the questions with which this review started stretched out along the liberal-conservative axis. Of the three books, this is perhaps the broadest—as well as the most uneven. Hogg’s brief opening chapter, “The Oikoumene,” seems to describe “missions to come” in terms of the whole world, with heavy stress on the ecumenical movement. Lindsell discusses the future of missions in view of the Western decline of orthodoxy. Glasser’s brilliant chapter on “The Evangelicals: World Outreach” is stimulating reading. Anderson has a fascinating chapter on “Mission Research, Writing, and Publishing.” Gensichen probes Christianity’s relation to non-Christian religions.

Except for Glasser’s chapter, the book tends to be unnecessarily pessimistic about missions. Dangers there certainly are. For example, those who construct extra-biblical theories of God’s relation to non-Christian religions and their hordes of nominal and secular adherents have certainly eroded the faith of many Christians. There are lions in the way. But lions have never deterred the faithful Christian and will not do so tomorrow. After reading this book, one should go on to read Christ the Liberator.

New Brief For Inerrancy

Biblical Revelation—The Foundation of Christian Theology, by Clark H. Pinnock (Moody, 1971, 256 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Harold Lindsell, editor-publisher ofCHRISTIANITY TODAY.

This book by a younger and very keen theological mind is one of the most important contributions to the discussion of inerrancy in this century.

Pinnock’s main theses are fairly simple: God has chosen to reveal himself in Jesus Christ and in Scripture; Scripture in turn reveals Jesus Christ; God has not stuttered in his biblical self-revelation: it is inerrant not only in matters having to do with salvation but also in matters of fact, history, and science. While he candidly acknowledges the difficulties that attend this view, he urges evangelicals to apply themselves diligently to the study of Scripture, confident that they have nothing to fear from scholarship.

Pinnock grasps one nettle firmly: he decides for an inerrant Scripture on the basis of a historical apologetic rather than on a fideistic basis, that is, the Bible’s claim to authority alone. In this he joins Warfield over against men like Calvin, E. J. Young, John Murray, and Gordon Haddon Clark. It is important to note, however, that though the two paths of approach are different, the conclusion is the same: the Bible is wholly trustworthy.

At the heart of the book is the thesis that inerrancy is a watershed doctrine between two differing versions of Christianity, the version that puts the Bible above all else and the version that puts something above the Bible. Pinnock shows convincingly that inerrancy is taught in Scripture, that historically it has been the view of the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, that the greatest of the churchmen through the ages believed and taught it, and that it is apologetically defensible and logically tenable. He uses excerpts from liberal scholars to prove a point: they acknowledge that inerrancy has been the accepted viewpoint even though they do not believe it. The late Kirsop Lake, a noted liberal on the faculty of the University of Chicago, said:

How many were there, for instance, in Christian churches in the eighteenth century who doubted the infallible inspiration of all Scripture? A few, perhaps, but very few. No, the fundamentalist may be wrong; I think that he is. But it is we who have departed from the tradition, not he.… The Bible and the corpus theologicum of the Church is on the fundamentalist side.

Pinnock deals with parts of Scripture that have caused some to stumble and demonstrates that many of the so-called errors have been or can be resolved. He admits that some problems are not yet fully answered but says that for the most part these are incidental. He makes an excellent case for his point that the ultimate logical consequence of denying inerrancy is to undermine historic orthodoxy, a consequence that those evangelicals who are hesitant on inerrancy but otherwise orthodox in doctrine do not appear to see clearly.

This book is unabashedly controversial and will raise the hackles of many. But irritation and anger won’t answer Pinnock’s arguments. Those who reject inerrancy owe it to themselves to read this literate, scholarly, and provocative book if for no other reason than to be aware that believers in inerrancy do have a case, that there are scholars who can present it effectively, and that the dispute is by no means settled in favor of those who opt for an errant Bible. This volume should grace the shelf of every minister and literate layman.

Newly Published

The Jesus Generation, by Billy Graham (Zondervan, 201 pp., $4.95 and $1.95). The bulk of the book is Graham’s worthwhile and time-tested sermonic advice to young people. It is not so much on the Jesus movement as addressed to it. Only the first chapter deals with the current spiritual explosion among young people, and much of that is a review of reports already published. In other chapters background material on the youth culture is inserted.

Rappings, edited by Robert Webber (Tyndale, paperback, $1.25). From a conservative Christian college (Wheaton) comes a book that should be circulated among non-Christian as well as Christian kids. Photography, layout, and writing “make it.”

Letters to Street Christians, by “two brothers from Berkeley” (Zondervan, 224 pp., paperback, $1.65). A right-on paraphrased summary of the major “message” portions of the New Testament epistles—in the sometimes shocking language of the street scene—by two leaders of the Christian World Liberation Front ministering in the scene. Perhaps helpful in bridging the communication gap at street level, but will alienate many church members, thus widening the gap at pew level.

Jesus People Come Alive, compiled by Walker L. Knight (Tyndale, 128 pp., paperback, $1.25). Mostly a reprint of a special issue of the Southern Baptist Home Missions magazine, and one of the better chronicles of the surging spiritual movement among young people, especially as it relates to churches. Knight’s last-chapter analysis, challenge, and caution should be must reading for every pastor.

Between Christ and Satan, The Devil’s Alphabet, and Occult Bondage and Deliverance, by Kurt Koch (Kregel, 192 pp., 156 pp., 198 pp., paperback, $1.25 each). In view of the resurgence of occultism, these new editions of some works by a leading evangelical writer are especially welcome. The first title examines fortune-telling, magic, spiritism, and healing. The second looks briefly at forty-seven topics from amulets through moon-mancy to yoga. The third is a guide to counseling occultists. Copious examples of involvement with the occult and its consequences permeate the books.

Mind, Man and the Spirits, by J. Stafford Wright (Zondervan, 190 pp., paperback, $.95), and Psychic Phenomena and Religion, by H. Richard Neff (Westminster, 176 pp., paperback, $3.50). Wright offers a fresh, offbeat study of the nature of man, probing into man’s mind and spirit realms, tackling such topics as psychic phenomena, miracles, ghosts, spirits of the dead, angels, and even speaking in tongues. Neff’s book is a disappointing rehash deliberately offering no conclusions.

The Untapped Generation, by David and Don Wilkerson (Zondervan, 256 pp., paperback, $1.95). A gold mine of advice and illustrations for those who counsel youth. Includes helpful insight into modern youth’s problems, from drugs and free sex to racism and radical politics. By the experienced co-directors of Teen Challenge.

Living With Anxiety, by Randolph Crump Miller (Pilgrim Press, 190 pp., $5.95). The author astutely analyzes anxiety, synthesizing biblical and modern psychological insights.

The Holiness-Pentecostal Movement in the United States, by Vinson Synan (Eerdmans, 248 pp., $5.95), and The American Holiness Movement: A Bibliographic Introduction, by Donald Dayton (Asbury Seminary [Wilmore, Ky. 40390], 59 pp., paperback, $2). Very competent works that can fill a gaping hole in most personal and institutional libraries. For too long evangelicals of baptistic and Calvinistic bent have condescendingly disregarded their “holy roller” brethren. These studies should help develop more accurate understanding.

Critical Guide to Catholic Reference Books, by James Patrick McCabe (Libraries Unlimited [Littleton, Colo. 80120], 287 pp., $11.50). All students of Roman Catholicism and of church history will be grateful for this annotated and classified list of more than 900 books useful for research. Should be in all seminary libraries.

Graduate Education in Religion, by Claude Welch (University of Montana, 279 pp., paperback, $3.95). Based on a thorough study of sixty-nine schools in the United States and Canada offering courses of study leading to research and teaching doctoral degrees (as distinguished from professional theological degrees). Should be read by all those connected with these schools and by any students considering enrollment in them.

The Sex Manual for Puritans, by Vernard Eller (Abingdon, 78 pp., $3). At first glance, a book not worth the price. But through humor (some of it pretty corny) and good sense, Eller speaks sanely about sex.

THOMAS AQUINAS NEVER WASHED SOCKS

I was helping my wife fold the clothes still warm from the dryer. I had piled the socks to one side to sort and match them after the larger stuff was taken care of.

With some diligence I managed to get together seven pairs but was left with five unmatched socks.

“Where’s the rest of the wash?” I asked my wife.

“That’s it,” she replied.

“It can’t be,” I protested. “I’ve got five unmatched socks.”

“Happens all the time,” she responded.

“What’ll I do with them?”

“This,” she said, opening a drawer filled with mateless socks and tossing them in.

“What do you mean it happens all the time?”

“I mean I can put twelve pairs of socks in the washer and get out nine pairs and seven unmatched socks. Happens all the time.”

“That’s physically impossible!” I said. “If that were true it would bring into question the dependability and regularity of the universe.”

“I believe in the regularity of the universe,” she countered. “I regularly put in matched socks and regularly get out unmatched socks.”

“That’s not the kind of regularity I’m talking about. Let me explain it simply.”

“Don’t be patronizing,” she riposted. “If you’re going to become a male chauvinist you can just forget the whole thing. And by the way, what law says that I am charged with the responsibility for the family wash anyhow?”

Refusing to be sidetracked by peripheral matters, I continued, “What I’m trying to say is that the regularity of the universe is one point of the theistic apologetic. If you put in matched socks and get out unmatched socks that means the universe is not dependable, and where does that leave Thomas Aquinas?”

“Thomas Aquinas had his experience and I have mine,” she responded with unassailable accuracy.

“You don’t test theology by experience,” I pointed out. “It’s the other way around.”

“Correct theology doesn’t make matched socks out of unmatched ones,” she said, eyeing me coldly.

Experience, I have concluded, looms large in the formulation of personal belief. And that’s not altogether bad. One fellow, when told that his experience did not conform to orthodox theology, said simply, “One thing I do know: I was blind and now I see.”

THE CHILDREN UNDER COVERAGE

Your coverage of the Children of God (“Where Have All the Children Gone?,” Nov. 5) is the finest piece of reporting I have ever read in a Christian publication. Congratulations.

Editor

Decision

Minneapolis, Minn.

ON COUNTING THE HOURS

I regret that an editorial change in my review “Old Wine in New Bottles” (Books, Oct. 8) makes it appear that I (rather than the translator) believe that the Gospel of John used a different system of counting the hours of the day from the Synoptic Gospels. This is not my position, since all the available evidence shows that there was only one system of counting the hours of the day at that time, and that was to number them from sunrise. The conjecture that the Gospel of John used a system like the modern one arose in order to explain the difference between John 19:14 and Mark 15:25 concerning the hour of the Lord’s crucifixion.

Setauket, N. Y.

MISPLACED HEADQUARTERS

For a number of years I have … appreciated the unbiased attitude of the editors and contributors.

However, I would like to correct a statement made by James S. Tinney (“Black Origins of the Pentecostal Movement,” Oct. 8). He states that “The International Church of the Foursquare Gospel which has headquarters in Azusa.” This is incorrect, as the headquarters are, and always have been, in Los Angeles.

Also concerning the statement that “Pentecostalism” is a “black faith,” I wish to state that my parents received this experience in 1906 in Kilsythe, Scotland, under the ministry of a rector of the Church of England named Pastor Boddy—who had never been to Azusa Street nor any other place in the United States to my knowledge.

Assoc. Pastor

First Foursquare Church

Santa Maria, Calif.

LOVE, FAITH, ENERGY

If there is one man whose work has been of the greatest encouragement as well as apologetic value to me during my years at UC Berkeley and now as part of what the mass media has dubbed the “Jesus Movement” it has to be John Warwick Montgomery. As a history major whose M.A. thesis was titled “Contemporary Christian Philosophy of History” with a full chapter devoted to [him], I have devoured his many volumes as fast as he has released them.

I must confess, then, my sadness at reading his “Neither Marx Nor Jesus” (Current Religious Thought, Oct. 8). For the precise, learned theologian to stoop to the same level of overgeneralization and unkind insinuation as Revel himself was at the least disappointing. Revel’s remarks about “Jesus freaks” were centered on his shallow and insufficient knowledge of the Christian World Liberation Front in Berkeley and our underground paper, Right On. Anyone who has read Right On in recent months and been aware at all of CWLF activities—the latest being a new Liberation University in Berkeley, a youth hostel, and work for the Prince of Peace at the November 6 Peace March—will see that for us Jesus is hardly to be limited to “a substitute for alcohol, drugs, and promiscuity” (is that bad anyway?), that we hardly advocate a “vague Jesus-mysticism,” that we do strive to make those “practical applications,” and that we are in no sense antithetical to Mark Hatfield and his fine testimony.

I remind [Montgomery] that he has argued that the answer to the problem of defective or deficient Christianity is not to throw out Christianity but to judge it and reform it by the biblical norms. Similarly, I ask him not to throw out the thousands of “Jesus freaks” and “street Christians” but to praise the Father for all the returning prodigals, run down the road to embrace them, and then lovingly, faithfully, and energetically work for reformation and growth among us, his fellow-workers for Jesus the Lord and Liberator.

Co-editor

Right On

Berkeley, Calif.

REPUTATION AND RHETORIC

Your editorial “The Amish in Court” (Oct. 22) is a surprising statement coming from a journal which has a reputation for so zealously defending religious liberty. The startling assertion that “religious convictions are not per se inviolable” appears more like the liberal rhetoric of accommodation than the strict constructionism we have come to expect from CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

The case is indeed important. Not primarily for the Amish, because they will follow their conscience whatever the court says (they are not even fighting the case—other interested parties are doing that), but because if the Amish are not free to practice their own faith, none of us are! It is worth recalling that the tradition of elementary education began in the religious community. Later it was taken over by the government.… Various studies have shown the superiority of Amish education with regard to both basic skills and vocational training. No one needs to add to the literature of the failures of American public education. In such a setting, perhaps we should be asking what we can learn from the Amish approach to education rather than to destroy one of the few authentic educational experiences which continue to challenge us.

Executive Secretary

Peace Section

Mennonite Central Committee

Akron, Pa.

Your stand against freedom of religion in the Amish case is disturbing to say the least. The Bible makes it abundantly clear that education is a parental responsibility and the state has no right to usurp this perogative. You would release Amish teen-agers from God’s command to obey their parents but not in favor of freedom. They would in a very real sense become children of the state and be forced against their will to attend a purely secularistic public school shot through with anti-Christian influences.… Scores of … objectionable situations prevail in the public schools, where everything religious is outlawed, including voluntary corporate prayer or Bible reading. Many Christian parents who reluctantly elect to send their children to public schools do so with serious apprehensions. Your editorial recognizes that this “brainwashing” (my word) process of public education will probably undermine the religious heritage of the Amish child and cause him to leave it. Do you really endorse this as a proper function of the government?

It appears to us that you have elevated constitutional interpretation above biblical authority and subordinated religious values to educational achievements. Notwithstanding any serious reservations a parent may have, you argue that no religious consideration could ever justify the excusing of a child from education in a public school. Is the difference of one or two more years of formal training under the most aggravated circumstances all that important?

General Secretary

Christian Servicemen’s Fellowship

Washington, D. C.

JEAN PAUL—FRENCH OR GERMAN?

Calvin Miller in his article “Christianity and the Existential Imagination” (Oct. 22) has made a serious mistake in one of his examples of so-called existentialist fiction. The heart-rending story of a Christ who cannot find his heavenly father in the celestial realms above and therefore is an orphan like the rest of us comes from the German writer Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825), not Jean Paul Sartre. Richter, whose name was often shortened to Jean Paul, was a powerfully imaginative romanticist, who contributed to a stream of eighteenth-century literature that might justly be called proto-existentialist. “Bleak” seems much too mild a term, and Thielicke’s lengthy exposition of the work in his book Nihilism explores many of its features of cosmic horror and dread.

It would be a shame if Sartre were to be credited with such superdramatic imagery of atheism and nihilism since his crass depiction of God as a hindrance to selfhood (see his The Devil and the Good Lord [1960]) is very pitiful and minor-league by comparison.

Professor of Religion and Philosophy

Eastern Baptist College

St. Davids, Pa.

• Professor Shinn is right—and so was the author’s manuscript, until we edited in the mistake. We’re sorry.—ED.

THE VIBES IN PLAY

I was sorry that your valued contributor J. D. Douglas in his short newspiece (“Lighting Moral Darkness,” Oct. 22) failed to bring out the tremendous spiritual enthusiasm of the crowd of (mainly young) people who packed central London on 25th September. The Trafalgar Square rally was intended as a political demonstration—and so it was. But the fervour of the young people wanting to say that “Christ is the answer” spilled over into the political event, was perpetuated in the march of witness that gummed up traffic in the centre of the city for two hours, and came to a climax at the Hyde Park rally.

I believe that evangelism as well as Christian social concern in this country has had a tremendous fillip from this gathering of Christians of so many different kinds, not only in London on 25th September but also at the beacon-lighting ceremonies earlier in the week.… Your lead editorial, “England Awaits the Word,” had a depressing analysis of the present state of play in church unity discussions in England. While these negotiations grind on, please let your readers know that other balls are in much more active play. As the young people at the Festival of Light might say, “The vibes are coming through well here.” Praise the Lord for it too.

General Secretary

Evangelical Alliance

London, England

The man of the cloth suffers from clerical schizophrenia. This seems to be the conclusion of American writers who bring the minister into their fiction. The clergyman is frequently portrayed as confused, frustrated, inept, inarticulate, and irrelevant.

Occasionally a fictional cleric does not run true to form. The ministers in a few novels such as Sheldon’s In His Steps and Richter’s A Simple Honorable Man are effective and dedicated servants of the Word. But many of the positive portraits are sentimental and literarily inferior and do not provide the needed challenge to the prevailing image.

American literature has more often shown us what a minister ought not to be rather than what he ought to be. The clerical image is created from a negative criticism of the profession rather than from an objective and thorough analysis. Most of the ministers who people the pages of fiction are types rather than realistic, three-dimensional characters.

Unfortunately, however, we cannot protest that the prevailing fictional image of the clergyman has no basis in fact. With an eye toward becoming more relevant to the society in which they work, the minister and the ministerial student might well examine their literary counterparts.

The problems of the clergy were presented early in the development of the American novel. The nineteenth-century novelists Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harold Frederic introduced a problem that was to recur in fiction throughout the following century: the minister’s relation to his society.

Dimmesdale, the minister in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, struggles to bridge the chasm between the image the villagers expect and the image he desires. Despite the guilt from his weight of sin, he strives to live the life of a well-respected pastor in the Puritan community. But his attempts are futile. He acknowledges his frailty as a human being and his capacity to sin. Just before he publicly confesses, Chillingworth urges him to salvage his professional honor. “Madman, hold! what is your purpose? Would you bring infamy on your sacred profession?” But Dimmesdale chooses to follow the urging of his conscience and accepts the role of confessed sinner rather than that of respected but hypocritical minister. His expiation is death.

Inability to cope with the demands and strictures of society is the problem of Frederic’s protagonist in The Damnation of Theron Ware. Ware, a young, naïve farm boy new to the ministry, struggles to retain his integrity in a small church financially and intellectualy impoverished and rife with “contumacious fundamentalism.” Through sophistication and rationalism the young pastor attempts to rise above the mediocrity of a minister constantly submissive to the whims and idiosyncrasies of his congregation. The clash between the image he desires and the image his congregation has held for years destroys him. Reconciliation is impossible: he cannot fit into their mold of a conventional pastor. Sadly conscious of his plight, his bishop’s wife concludes, “Whatever else he does, he will never want to come within gunshot of a pulpit again. It came too near murdering him for that.”

During the twenties and thirties, the periods of social reform, American fiction intensified its criticism of the clergy with incisive satires in reaction against churchmen who put the weight of their churches behind prohibition and other social-reform movements. The minister usually appears as a scheming, evil, selfish, ignorant character—as in Sinclair Lewis’s novel Elmer Gantry. This garrulous Midwest minister is perhaps the most crass example of ignorance and hypocrisy in American fiction. He sweeps through the novel praying and playing in a devastating though humorous fashion. Lewis satirizes the minister who leads his congregation into social involvement; Christian motives, he suggests, are often directed by selfish interests. Of this novel John Killinger writes:

These are sweeping indictments, and if they are irritating it is probably because there is enough truth in them to blanch the cheeks of any Christian. All ministers, chaplains, religious teachers, and theological students should be required to read this book at least once a year; it could not but have a salutary effect upon the protestant ministry in future decades [The Failure of Theology in Modern Literature, p. 14].

Fiction of the post-World War II period emphasizes what is perhaps the most serious criticism of the clergy: ineffective ministry in a world of need. Unable or unwilling to act as a prophet to a sick society, the minister withdraws into an insular setting. He offers no relevant message. Society largely ignores him because he seems to be an ornament rather than a functional fixture. He is an accepted but unnecessary person except at weddings, funerals, and Kiwanis Club luncheons (where he offers the invocation).

This is the problem of the Reverend Andrew Mackeral in the novel The Mackeral Plaza by Peter DeVries. Mackeral is a liberal idealist who fights the fundamentalist activities in his town in order to convince himself and the community that his efforts are relevant and necessary. He wants to be accepted by the community—but on his own terms. He struggles to avoid the stereotyped clerical image that he associates with the overzealous preacher.

Mackeral so disliked the term preacher, and so abhorred the term brother, as designations for the clergy that he was always grateful for assurances of their inapplicability to himself. It was not merely the wish to elude prototype that lay at the bottom of this.… it was, more cardinally, a fear of quarantine, a desire to belong to his species that made him want ever so much to be known simply as Mister Mackeral.

The conclusion of the novel suggests Mackeral’s failure to become an effective, positive influence either in the church or in the community. He recuperates from his emotional stresses in a sanitarium while the People’s Liberal Church and the community continue on as they did before his departure.

Another contemporary novel of clerical futility and irrelevance is John Updike’s Rabbit Run. The contrast between old and new concepts of the ministry comes out in a confrontation between the young Reverend Jack Eccles and an old German Lutheran preacher, Fritz Kruppenbach. When Eccles asks Kruppenbach’s advice about his counseling endeavors, the old preacher fires back:

Do you think this is your job, to meddle in these people’s lives? I know what they teach you at seminary now: this psychology and that.… You think now your job is to be an unpaid doctor, to run around and plug up the holes and make everything smooth. I don’t think that’s your job.

The old man continues with criticism of clergymen who become socially involved:

It seems to you our role is to be cops, cops without handcuffs, without guns, without anything but our human nature.… Well, I say that’s a Devil’s idea.… I say you don’t know what your role is or you’d be home locked in prayer. There is your role: to make yourself an exemplar of faith.

His final comments evoke feelings of shame and failure in young Eccles. The man of God is to be concerned not with external action but with internal conviction, says Kruppenbach:

When on Sunday morning then, when we go before their faces, we must walk up not worn out with misery but full of Christ … with Christ, on fire; burn them with the force of our belief. That is why they come; why else would they pay us? Anything else we can do or say anyone else can do and say.… There is nothing but Christ for us. All the rest, all this decency and busyness, is nothing. It is Devil’s work.

The novel ends in tragedy despite the young preacher’s noble, persistent efforts to resolve his problem. The reader is left with a feeling of despair, because of the tragic outcome and also because of the futility of the young minister’s efforts. Updike’s novel is a comment not only on the absurdity of our society but also on the irrelevance of the Churches and their leaders.

One of the few modern novels to present a refreshingly positive and convincing picture of the clergyman is Tell No Man by Adela Rogers St. Johns. In a modern parallel of the Saul/Paul account, protagonist Hank Gavin gives up a $50,000-a-year executive position to become a minister when he experiences a religious conversion and dedicates himself to follow Christ.

Because of his commitment to Christ and to the ministry, Gavin incurs the reproach of his socialite wife, his family, and his friends. His first major difficulty is the ensuing sense of isolation. But he finds in his new faith the courage to face the problems of his new profession. Because of his philosophy of the ministry he becomes more effective and less detached from society: “I can’t separate the Christian life from the everyday life—they’ve got to converge—convergence is our only hope.”

But Tell No Man is an exception. Common in fiction from the nineteenth century to the present is the portrait of the minister as one whose perplexity about his role makes him an ineffective prophet, without the dynamism to lead his people back to the altar. He appears as a member of a peripheral profession. Fiction sees him not as a shepherd leading the flock but as a hireling waiting at the gate; not as an indomitable military leader of an army but as a guard at the rear.

But the negative image of the minister in fiction can have a positive effect; out of it can arise an antidote to the schizophrenia among those who are part of the God-called profession. Writers of fiction then will sketch new images as they observe the changes.

Andrew Mackeral described to his psychiatrist the sort of change needed in the ministry: “Call it an island broken off the mainland and floating away by itself, or trying to if it isn’t fetched back. Or perhaps I can explain it to you in another way. Under these stresses and strains one part of the personality ‘separates’ from the other precisely like the cream in a bottle of milk. Your job—homogenize me.” Perhaps the most urgent prayer of the clerical profession is “God, homogenize us!”

Wilfred Martens is chairman of the English Department at Pacific College in Fresno, California. He received the M.A. from California State College at Los Angeles.

Broad new opportunities present themselves to theological writers within the pale of ecumenism. At the Uppsala assembly of the World Council of Churches a formal dialogue with other religions was initiated, followed by a first session near Beirut and discussions at Addis Ababa, when the WCC Central Committee met there. Further “profitable” discussions are anticipated. Vatican II also opened the doors: though it emphasized that there is no salvation apart from the Church and the Gospel that the Church proclaims, it also asserted that the Gospel is present and operative “in, through, and despite other religions.”

At the end of A History of Christianity in Japan (Eerdmans, 1971), Richard H. Drummond reports:

A second important phenomenon is related to the spirit and documents of the Second Vatican Council but is also to be noted among Protestant Christians. It consists of a new attitude which attempts to understand and appreciate non-Christian religious traditions not only as phenomena worthy of scientific study but also as potentially possessing religious truth and value. This means that Christian theology now considers the possibility that non-Christian religions may be instruments of the God and Father of Jesus Christ to reveal His will and save his people [p. 335].

The syncretistic tendency, the attempt to blend and reconcile various religions, is not new, but never before has it been so prominently espoused by a leading agency for many Christian churches. Promotion of this point of view has come from philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, comparative religionists, and some avant-garde theologians. Arnold Toynbee and many other writers have long declared that Christianity is the most intransigent among the religions because its God will allow no other and its promise of salvation is through its Anointed alone, whose Church alone will prevail in all the vicissitudes and who alone will judge all mankind.

In ancient times Gnosticism, Manicheism, and Islam were efforts to unify mankind through religion for a variety of purposes. Similarly, modern writers like Robert D. Young (Encounter With World Religions, 1970) seem to believe that peace and harmony are created in an ideal world by the melting together of various religions. Young offers the pre-Christian logos concept as a basis for religious synthesis.

Robert Young and Lowell D. Streiker (The Gospel of Irreligious Religion, Sheed and Ward, 1969) advocate “openness” in theology: beliefs should not be specifically stated, and structures should give way to the unstructured style of Asian religions. “Conversion” and “evangelistic mission” are frowned upon, yet in some fashion a mission of religion is envisioned. The accent is on elimination of the evils of human bondage to poverty, ignorance, and disease. Is it then a secular millennium that is envisioned in this “open theology”? Shall we accept a further paganizing of America as a step in the progress toward a humanistic utopia? We see here only a misguided propaganda. The opportunity to propagandize is unlimited today, and the “desperately wicked” heart of man responds readily to any attack on established truth and authority.

Many writers restrict themselves to the dialogue with a particular religion. William Johnston writes “Reflections on Zen and Christian Mysticism,” the subtitle of The Still Point (Fordham University Press, 1970):

First of all, I should say that the Oriental technique can deepen the prayer life of those who are already contemplative.… It could be safely argued, then, that anyone who had spent a number of years in ordinary prayer might profitably attempt some kind of vertical meditation.… Too many potential contemplatives smother the tiny flame of love with endless thinking, when they should be silent, empty, and expectant.

Johnson continues with a discussion of satori, the Zen enlightenment:

And obviously it is this (if it exists) that the Christian should aim at. Yet … that satori cannot come to the Christian because he necessarily clings to ideas, dogmas, and beliefs.… In short, Christianity demands fidelity to ideas of God, of the Bible, of dogma—all which are an obstacle to enlightenment in utter nakedness [p. 179].

It has been said for some time that “liberalism” is dead, a statement tending to disarm the unwary. But if it was ever dead, it has risen again to rear its head under a new helmet. Tillich found the “universal spirit” in many religions, but it seems that even he was not ready for the God-is-dead movement launched by some whom he had influenced, a movement basic to “profitable” dialogue with other religions. Add the “secularization” of the Church, the “revision” of Christian morality, and the new interpretation of “salvation” as in the WCC slogan “Salvation Today,” and we see in preparation an ecumenism like that in the Roman empire, when Emperor Alexander Severus is said to have had in his private chapel statues not only of the deified emperors but also of the miracle worker Appolonius of Tyana, Christ, Abraham, and Orpheus. The word “oikoumene” has returned full circle to its pagan origins.

Contact between peoples in this shrunken world of ours brings an inevitable dialogue between religions. Many people need to understand other religions in the pursuit of their professions. Dialogue can be profitable in many ways relating to the external life, and also in the examples it reveals of the dedication of some devotees to their religions. J. N. D. Anderson has treated this matter in his Christianity and Comparative Religion (Inter-Varsity, 1970). But he goes on to caution, “Neither the Christian church nor the individual Christian can participate in anything which savours of syncretism.” Anderson’s book is a worthy sequel to Hendrik Kraemer’s The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World, W. A. Visser ’t Hooft’s No Other Name, and D. T. Niles’s The Message and Its Messengers, all of which are recommended for rereading in the present discussion. These men, all thoroughly familiar with the inner workings of the WCC, show ample evidence that the Church should not neglect the obligation of apologetic writing, though it be a new apologetics.

To think of the Christian missionary as unwilling to confer with other religious leaders on matters of theology would be a misrepresentation: the history of missions offers many examples of this, such as the work of Ziegenbalg and Schwartz in India. Human goals should be sought in common, and they need not involve the destruction of another man’s culture and religion.

In many parts of the world a tolerant pluralism is not easily achieved. Yet a growing enlightenment in many countries may promise a greater toleration, if in the interest of national progress the governments allow the freedom of worship that the principles of pluralistic democracy imply. Evangelical leaders have the opportunity to make their views known to national leaders, who may show greater confidence in honest churchmanship than in the syncretism of a moribund ecumenism.

The words of Stephen Neill in Call to Mission (Fortress, 1970) remind the Church of its abiding task: “The missionary must have no doubt as to the purpose for which he has come overseas. He must be a missionary. That means that, waking or sleeping, he must be dominated by one central concern—that men and women should be brought to know Jesus Christ and to find life in him.”

Otto F. Stahlke is professor of world religions and Old Testament at Concordia Seminary, Springfield, Illinois. He holds the M.A. degree from Wayne State University and the S.T.M. from Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.

A Palestinian maiden hears it announced that through her the Saviour is to be born. Awed by the announcement, humbled by it, she says, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38). Isaiah had said that the virgin would conceive and bear a son (7:14), and it was so. Matthew narrates it in detail (1:18–25); so does Luke (1:26–2:40), with trappings of pastoral beauty.

Always some have been unable to see what the late Karl Barth liked to call “the Christmas miracle.” Many of them are thinking about the requirements of biology. Some think the virgin birth refers to a co-habiting of God with humankind, as in pagan Greek thought. But it was no biological event. Even if non-paternal human births had taken place, they would have nothing to do with the high and sheer miracle by which Mary conceived through the Holy Spirit. This was the method of Christmas.

After I had read a paper on the virgin birth at a theological society meeting, a university professor stood to offer his peculiar defense of the doctrine. He said that female rabbits have been known to be shocked into conception, without the male, and that Mary might well have conceived through the shock caused by the angel’s announcement. This man sought to support the doctrine by denying the sheer miracle involved.

At Christmas time, across the centuries and across the world Christians have believed that an honored maiden conceived through the Holy Spirit, in an inexplicable way, and that in the normal time the eternal Son of God was born into human life.

We call this the “virgin birth.” The phrase is time-honored, and we should still use it. But “virgin conception” would better express what we mean, for the miracle was in the conception, not in the birth itself. The phrase “virgin birth,” with stress on “birth,” was used in the earliest centuries to teach the reality of Christ’s humanity as opposed to the Gnostic teaching that Christ was only “poured through” the womb of Mary and therefore had a human body only “in seeming.”

Scriptural support for the virgin birth as the method really is unassailable. James Orr, at the century’s turn, was convinced of the “integrity” of the virgin-birth narrative (The Virgin Birth of Christ, p. 227). So was J. Gresham Machen, a generation later. More recently, writers on the theme such as William Temple, archbishop of Canterbury, and Edwin Lewis of Methodism were likewise convinced. Karl Barth could say: “No one can dispute the existence of a biblical testimony to the Virgin Birth” (Church Dogmatics, II, 176).

The doctrine has been impugned by such scholars as Emil Brunner (The Mediator, p. 324; Dogmatics, II, 355); Gustaf Aulen (The Faith of the Christian Church, pp. 121 ff.); John Baillie (The Place of Jesus Christ in Modern Christianity, p. 119); Rudolph Bultmann (Theology of the New Testament, II, 30); Paul Tillich (Systematic Theology, II, 127, 149); and Nels Ferré (The Christian Understanding of God, p. 192). Yet it has had supporters in our time from many outstanding theologians, in great part because of its unassailable delineation in Scripture.

Take that beautiful passage in Luke 1:5–2:52. It is included in a second-century harmony of the Gospels, and in all the Greek manuscripts of Luke, and in all the language versions. Those who assail the supernatural conception need to realize that all extant manuscripts include the phrase “as was supposed” in Luke 3:23, where we read, “And Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age, being (as was supposed) the son of Joseph.…” And if the virgin birth was a pagan idea, as many impugners suppose, why is the Lucan story couched in what Machen can call “the most strikingly Jewish and Palestinian narrative in the whole New Testament” (The Virgin Birth of Christ, p. 119)?

Matthew’s telling of the miracle is also unassailable. The whole of Matthew 1:18–25 is for the express purpose of describing the miraculous character of the birth.

That Joseph is included in the genealogies of Matthew (1:16) and Luke (1:27) is understandable when one considers the high view of adoptive fatherhood in the Jewish mind. It is so high, actually, that dead men could have sons in a sense. In Old Testament law, if a man died without an issue, his brother was to take the wife and rear a son for the deceased one.

The meaning of Christmas is tied up with the “method,” the virgin birth, to be sure; for if Joseph had been the actual father, the meaning would have suffered. But the meaning of this birth at Bethlehem is a subject all its own. The birth means that the Son of God pitched his tent among us men—here in this “spoilt and fallen world.” He who was discontinuous with human life, and above it, entered into human life, its blood and sweat and tears—but not its sin.

We men cannot go up to heaven and see what God is like. This fact is clear enough, but the doctrinally interested evangelist states it: “And no man hath ascended up to heaven” (John 3:13). Yet though no one from here could go there, one from there could come down here. And one did.

In all the theophanies of Abraham’s career, that “beforehand” man still had not seen God. A person could not see God and live, though Moses at one time was permitted to see God’s back. No man has seen God at any time, John says (1:18). But on that first Christmas, God the Son entered into human life; and by sojourning here, he made God the Father known. It was possible for the Son to reveal the Father to us because there never was a “time” in the Father’s life when the Son was not also existing, the Word being “in the beginning” (John 1:1) even as “God” was (Gen. 1:1). Moreover, the Son existed “with God” (John 1:1), not in separation from the Father; “with” here means “near to” and suggests rapport. Furthermore, the Son who did this was on the same level of being with the Father, since John also declares that “the Word was God” (1:1).

A man looking for something under the one street light on a city block explained to a passerby that he had lost his keys somewhere along the block. On he looked, but only under the light. When asked why he did not search over the whole distance, he said, “This is the only place where the light is.” It is not to be denied that there is a certain faint revelation of God in the natural world. The heavens declare God’s glory. “The invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead …” (Rom. 1:20). But what man as sinner most needs to know about God is that he is merciful, anxious to forgive, a God of love for sinners. On what golf course, or mountain stream, is this observed? Creative ingenuity, yes; but not love and mercy. The only place where there is adequate light on what man needs most to know is in the Christ revelation, narrated and interpreted in the Holy Scriptures.

The first Adam lived the human life badly. The Second Adam, Christ the Lord, “founded in God,” born at Bethlehem “of a woman” (Gal. 4:4), lived our human life perfectly. And finally, in death the Roman way, he spelled out God’s love in drops of blood, became a once-for-all sacrifice, and was raised from the dead. All this and more—much more—is part of what Christmas means.

Many in our time want to maintain the meaning of Christmas while they deny its divinely chosen method. They impugn the virgin birth, yet still bow down before the Christ. Indeed, their declared intention is to do Christ honor by assaulting this miracle. But the late Edwin Lewis was surely right in saying that to surrender Bethlehem’s “stone of offense” precludes a high view of Christ. He wrote, “The evidence is overwhelming that when men begin to surrender belief in the Virgin Birth … they are also getting ready to surrender that belief regarding Christ Himself [the Incarnation] which is the vital center of the whole body of faith” (A Philosophy of the Christian Revelation, 1940, p. 186).

Similarly, Karl Barth warned against “parenthesizing the miracle of the Nativities and wanting to cling to the mystery as such” (Dogmatics in Outline, p. 100). To him, the virgin birth is the “miracle that is a pointer to the mystery [the Incarnation]” (Credo, p. 70); the virgin birth “advertises what takes place” (p. 60). It is connected with the Incarnation “as sign with thing signified” (Church Dogmatics, II, 184).

In Isaiah 7:14 both the method and the meaning of Christmas are foretold. A miraculous birth by the “virgin” (almah) would take place, and the one born would be called “Immanuel,” meaning “God with us”—which is indeed the special significance of this event that causes the world to wear a halo.

J. Kenneth Grider is professor of theology at Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri. He holds the M.A. from Drew and the Ph.D. from Glasgow University and did post-doctoral work at Oxford and Claremont.