A Worthy Tribute

Near Eastern Archaeology in the Twentieth Century: Essays in Honor of Nelson Glueck, edited by James A. Sanders (Doubleday, 1970, 406 pp., $14.95), is reviewed by Edwin M. Yamauchi, associate professor of history, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.

Nelson Glueck, who next to W. F. Albright must be ranked the greatest Palestinian archaeologist produced by America, died this past February at the age of seventy. After studies at the University of Cincinnati and Hebrew Union College, Glueck received his Ph.D. from Jena in Germany in 1926. He came under the influence of W. F. Albright at the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem in 1927–28, and served as director of that school in the thirties and forties. In 1947 he became the president of Hebrew Union College, the foremost rabbinical school for Reform Judaism.

Glueck’s greatest fame lies in his indefatigable activity in making arduous surveys in Transjordan between 1932 and 1947, and in the Negev of Israel between 1952 and 1964. His belief in the accuracy of Old Testament traditions led him to many discoveries, including evidence for copper mines in the Arabah Valley south of the Dead Sea and the site of ancient Ezion-Geber at Tell el-Kheleifeh on the Gulf of Elath—Solomon’s port. His advice was: “And above all, read the Bible, morning, noon and night, with a positive attitude, ready to accept its historical references in whatever context they occur as arising from fact, until or unless other factors suggest other procedures” (in The Biblical Archaeologist Reader, edited by D. N. Freedman and G. E. Wright, p. 2.)

The most important result of his exploration of the Negev was the discovery that it was only during the twenty-first to nineteenth centuries B.C. (Middle Bronze I), and not for a millennium before or after, that there were settlements with pottery in this area. This fits very well the period assigned on other grounds to the narratives of Abraham in the Negev.

The major result of his surveys in Transjordan was the discovery of a break in intensive sedentary occupation between c. 1900 and 1300 B.C. Since the biblical narrative implies the opposition of settled communities to the children of Israel as they traveled from the Arabah to Mount Nebo, most scholars. would date the Conquest of the Promised Land in the thirteenth century, when there were such communities in Edom, Moab, and Ammon.

Another of Glueck’s great achievements was the light his explorations shed on the activity of the Nabataean Arabs, who controlled the trade routes from their center at Petra west to Gaza and north to Damascus during the early Roman Empire.

It is no reflection on the magnitude of Glueck’s achievement that more recent discoveries have now called into question some of his earlier conclusions. His former assistant, Benno Rothenberg, questioned Glueck’s interpretation of holes in a building at Tell el-Kheleifeh as flue-holes in a smelter and suggested that they had resulted from the decay and/or burning of supporting timbers. Glueck accepted this correction.

Then in 1969 Rothenberg discovered, at the base of the so-called Solomon’s Pillars at Timna just north of Elath, an Egyptian temple complete with seal inscriptions from Seti I to Ramesses V. Rothenberg now suggests that it was these Egyptian kings of the fourteenth to twelfth centuries, rather than the Judean kings of the tenth to sixth centuries, who were responsible for the copper mines in the Arabah Valley. Albright has recently accepted this major reinterpretation.

Other discoveries in Transjordan, if they have not radically challenged Glueck’s general conclusions, have at least raised questions about the completeness of his proposed occupational gap there in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages. In 1955 a bulldozer accidentally uncovered a Middle and Late Bronze Age temple under a runway at the Amman airport! Middle and Late Bronze materials have now been discovered at other parts of Amman and from tombs at Mt. Nebo, Naur, and Madaba.

Most serious of all is the charge by H. J. Franken and W. J. A. Power that Glueck published only those potsherds that were familiar to him. Another charge is that Glueck labored under the assumption that Transjordanian pottery was similar to that of Cisjordan (the area west of the Jordan River). However, this assumption was difficult to avoid because of the lag of excavations in Transjordan. Only with the recent excavations of Franken at Deir Alla and of Siegfried Horn at Heshbon have we begun to realize how different the pottery of Transjordan could be.

These criticisms should not be thought to diminish the greatness of Glueck’s work; they only point up the very tentative nature of archaeology. It lies in the nature of the discipline that almost all conclusions are subject to later revisions.

The essays in the volume under review pay tribute to the many accomplishments and interests of Nelson Glueck. After a prefatory article by Fritz Bamberger, which points out that Glueck managed to combine a dedication to archaeological objectivity with a profound respect for the religious truths of the Old Testament, there are four sections of some twenty articles and a concluding bibliography of Glueck’s writings compiled by Mrs. Eleanor K. Vogel. Some forty-five photographs, additional line drawings, plans, and maps greatly enhance the value of the volume.

I. INTRODUCTION. G. Ernest Wright narrates the fascinating history of American involvement in Near Eastern archaeology, beginning with the researches of Edward Robinson, who first identified many of the biblical sites in the nineteenth century, and concluding with current work. Also reviewed are the pivotal roles of W. F. Albright and of Glueck, who is described as “the first and only American Jew” to have involved himself in Palestinian archaeology before about 1965.

John A. Wilson relates the monumental achievements of James Henry Breasted, the greatest of American Egyptologists—a man so in love with his work that he spent his honeymoon copying inscriptions in Egypt! Wilson also describes the important work of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, which was funded by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. W. F. Albright whites of “The Phenomenon of Israeli Archaeology” since the independence of Israel in 1948.

R. de Vaux argues that archaeology cannot “prove” the Bible, for the truth of the Bible is of a religious order. He makes two important points: (1) the fragmentary nature of the archaeological evidence means that arguments from silence cannot be sufficient in themselves “to cast doubt on the affirmations of the written witnesses”; (2) much of the evidence is ambiguous and can be interpreted in more than one way.

II. THE BRONZE AGE. The remaining articles in the book are technical and will be of more interest to the advanced student than to the general reader. For example, Ruth Amiran discusses the finds from Arad and the evidence they offer for the transformation of villages to walled cities in the early third millennium B.C.

Paul W. Lapp, arguing in part from the evidence of the spectacular cemetery of Bab edh-Dhra on the Lishan of the Dead Sea, makes some far-reaching proposals. He suggests that newcomers during the Early Bronze Age came to Palestine from Anatolia, and that at the end of that age others with roots in Central Asia north of the Caucasus came to Palestine. William G. Dever discusses the same Middle Bronze I period, but in disagreement with Lapp identifies the newcomers of this period as Amorites from Syria.

Abraham Malamat points out the evidence for contacts between Mari on the middle Euphrates and Laish (Dan) and Hazor in northern Palestine in the early second millennium B.C. Such ventures to the west from Mesopotamia may illustrate the background of the invasion of the eastern kings narrated in Genesis 14.

Marvin H. Pope traces the history of the saltier or chest bands in the form of an X through four millennia. They evolved from a harness for weapons to adornments of Atargatis—a goddess of war and love—and later became features of military dress.

III. THE IRON AGE. From a comparison of materials found at Carthage, Yigael Yadin concludes that the pagan temple he found at Hazor was dedicated to the Canaanite-Phoenician moon cult of Baal Hamman and Tanit.

Kathleen M. Kenyon summarizes the results of her 1961–67 excavations for Old Testament Jerusalem. Among her great discoveries were a “Jebusite” wall of the city captured by David, and cave shrines dedicated to heathen deities from about 700 B.C.

Yohanan Aharoni suggests that Jael, who slew the Canaanite general Sisera, may have inspired the enigmatic Shamgar Ben-Anath to smite the Philistine mercenaries of Egypt at Beth-Shan in the days before the Israelite struggle with the Philistines.

A few years ago Yigael Yadin examined the stables at Megiddo and concluded that they were not Solomon’s but Ahab’s stables. James B. Pritchard now goes so far as to doubt that these structures are stables at all.

Joseph Naveh describes the evolution of Phoenician, Hebrew, and Aramaic scripts, and N. Avigad comments on some Ammonite and Moabite seals from Transjordan.

IV. THE PERSONAL PERIOD AND BEYOND. Frank Moore Cross, Jr., retranslates some interesting graffiti found in a cave five miles east of Lachish, first published by Joseph Naveh in 1963. Cross suggests they were inscribed by a fugitive fleeing from the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587 B.C.

George M. A. Hanfmann and Jane C. Waldbaum summarize the excavations at Sardis, the capital of ancient Lydia in western Turkey. The finds include evidence for the gold treasures of Croesus, and a gigantic Jewish synagogue built in the second century A.D.—the largest of antiquity.

R. D. Barnett adds to the Nabataean examples collected by Glueck a figure of a young man or deity bordered by dolphins found in the treasure of the Oxus River, east of the Caspian Sea.

Jacob Neusner points out the “anti-archaeological bias” of traditional Talmudic studies. As a first step in remedying this neglect of non-literary materials, he cites some evidence from the Aramaic and Mandaic magic bowls of the sixth century A.D. found at Nippur.

Finally, Peter J. Parr provides a preliminary report of his excavations at Petra (1958–64), the capital of the Nabataeans.

All in all, this collection of essays is a fitting tribute to a great man, whose untiring labors in the company of Bedouin in the deserts and whose enthusiasm for the Bible have immeasurably advanced the cause of biblical archaeology.

Of Romance, Fantasy, And Religion

Romantic Religion: A Study of Barfield, Lewis, Williams, and Tolkien, by R. J. Reilly (University of Georgia, 1971, 249 pp., $9), and Shadows of Heaven: Religion and Fantasy in the Writing of C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and J. R. R. Tolkien (United Church, 1971, 186 pp., $6.95), are reviewed by Nancy J. Young, religious education teacher, Rockingham County, Virginia.

The religious person is usually considered dutiful and ritualistic whereas the romantic is carefree and imaginative. Professor Reilly’s title suggests a fusion of romanticism and religion, a fusion he finds evident in four modern writers. He shows that these men are not merely Romantics who go to church on Sundays; their very religion is romantic and their romanticism is religious. They are concerned with the romantic experience because it brings them closer to God.

Reilly begins with a study of Owen Barfield, who is the least read and most complex of the four but whose philosophy is basic to the work of the other three. Barfield is a philologist and through the study of language has come to conclusions that are in sharp contrast to the post-Darwinian theory of evolution. He says that through the human imagination God is progressively creating the world; the world “out there” can be known only through imagination. Through the senses man perceives, but his mind organizes and names the experiences. Thus it is naïve to think that phenomena are fixed and independent of our minds. Primitive man did not think or see as modern man does. He was un-selfconscious, but through the centuries we find the cosmic intelligence (God) incarnating itself. The Incarnation of the Word is the meaning of history. Religion (Christianity) is really romanticism come of age. In each of the other three writers Reilly points out the influence of Barfield’s view.

Lewis in his early years saw religion and romanticism as opposites. The grim formality of the church was a stark contrast to a certain longing, stabbing desire that he felt in some aesthetic experiences—the reading of Norse myths, the sight of the distant hills, the touch of autumn. For years he pursued this desire in philosophies far from Christianity. One day he was reading George MacDonald’s Phantastes and for the first time experienced the romanticism of Christianity. At that moment, Lewis claims, his imagination was baptized. When he was finally converted he found the joy he sought in God. Since then, in all his writings, the romanticism of Christianity comes through. All Lewis’s readers know the shocking, imaginative way in which he brings us the good news of the Gospel.

The chapter on Williams is an excellent introduction to his work. Williams describes the fall of man as a loss of vision. Since the fall, man has seen evil as good and good as evil. To restore the true vision some men resort to asceticism. Williams, however, chose the “Affirmative Way.” The world is basically good and is to be used in a redemptive way. The characters in Williams’s novels learn to know and love God through romantic love. Though romantic love does not automatically redeem a man, if approached rightly, it can lead to God.

Tolkien’s romantic religion, though not obvious, is perhaps the easiest to comprehend. Man is made in the image of God; he is a sub-creator. When he writes fantasies he is creating secondary worlds. The happy ending, basic to the good story, is really an echo of the Christian story of the Incarnation and Resurrection, which took place in our world (although the end of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings does not fit the traditional “happily ever after” pattern). The romantic experience occurs in the thrill felt when the fairy story takes a “turn” for the better. The experience is, in quality, identical to Christian joy.

Except where he compares writers, Reilly is not critical and not greatly concerned with the style and literary merit of the writings. His purpose is to help us understand the romanticism of these men and to show how it is inseparable from their Christianity. Perhaps the title could read “Romantic Christianity.” Reilly is most helpful in his explanation of romantic philosophy, but will also help Lewis lovers return to his works with greater insight.

In Shadows of Heaven, Urang examines the theology and literary style of the Christian fantasies of Lewis, Williams, and Tolkien. He faults Lewis and Williams for didacticism and for allegorizing (a term he appears to misunderstand), but feels that Tolkien’s symbolism in Lord of the Rings is more consistent and allows for broader interpretation. At times Urang’s criticism seems valid; where the average reader senses a weakness in Lewis and Williams, Urang offers an explanation for it. But after all most good literature contains weak passages. Urang’s rigorously censorious remarks are hardly justified by a few admittedly weak passages.

Urang’s substantive criticism of the three writers is that they fail to come to terms with modern culture. (The authors and their admirers would probably take this as a compliment.) They satirize it and expose its faults, but instead of leading to a new way they advocate a return to pastoral or medieval culture.

Has Christian fantasy then any merit? Perhaps it will wake us from dullness and enable us to see our world and our religion with new wonder. It can help us reevaluate our way of life. Urang’s views may not be appreciated, but he can help those who read Lewis, Williams, and Tolkien to do so with greater discernment.

Religion In The Soviet Union

Aspects of Religion in the Soviet Union 1917–1967, edited by Richard H. Marshall, Jr. (Chicago, 1971, 489 pp., $19.75), is reviewed by David E. Kucharsky, managing editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

The most neglected social issue in the world today is suppression of the religious liberties of those who live in Communist lands. More than a billion people lack the most basic of human freedoms, to be able to live according to their conscience. Inasmuch as the academic community has shared the indifference, this collection of essays by scholars conversant with the state of religion in the Soviet Union is to be greatly welcomed. The authors present carefully researched studies on contrasting ways in which Soviet leaders have sought to put down religion, how the various religious groups (such as Mennonites, Armenians, Muslims, Jews, and Catholics) have reacted, and how individual religious sentiment continues to surface despite the strictures, even in government-controlled art and literature.

But the work is not as distinctive for its accumulation of data as for intelligent analysis. Perhaps the most profound conclusions are those of Bohdan R. Bociurkiw of Carleton University. He notes that somewhere along the line Soviet leaders realized they were laboring under an illusion to think that religion was merely an illusion! The search for a new tack in recent years has resulted in ambivalence—times of increased persecution alternating with periods of openness toward religious communities in the West. To the extent that the state succeeded in eroding religious belief, it also helped to bring about a secularization that is resulting in something of a paradox. “This secularization,” says Bociurkiw, “undermines the commitment to ideology in general and creates a growing number of citizens indifferent to or tolerant of religion.”

The book is a festschrift for Paul B. Anderson, who was associated for many years with Nicholas Berdyaev and who has devoted his life to discreet efforts in behalf of Russian Orthodoxy.

A major disappointment of the volume is a failure to recognize the special religious character of Ukraine. There are probably more churches, more churchgoers, and more active Christians (both Protestant and Orthodox) in Ukraine than in any of the other Soviet republics. But the closest the reader comes to learning this is a sentence saying that in 1961 the majority of all active churches and monasteries were located in Ukraine (which has had only 20 per cent of the total Soviet population). Ukraine figures prominently, however, in a recent competent study for which Anderson wrote the foreword: Icon and Swastika: The Russian Orthodox Church Under Nazi and Soviet Control, by Harvey Fireside (Harvard, 1971, 242 pp., $8). For another related book, see the following review.

The Russian Orthodox Church Underground 1917–1970, by William C. Fletcher (Oxford, 1971, 336 pp., $9), is reviewed by Paul D. Steeves, Ph.D. candidate in Russian history, University of Kansas, Lawrence.

William C. Fletcher is one of the leading students of religion in the Soviet Union. With this volume he breaks new ground in the academic investigation of Christian faith under Communism. The book is the first scholarly study of Russian Orthodoxy under the Communists that does not focus on the Patriarchal Church but rather investigates those believers who were, and are, vehemently dissatisfied with the conduct of that church toward the state.

By gathering information from a wide range of sources and analyzing an extremely great variety of data, Fletcher confirms the existence of a phenomenon about which considerable doubt has been expressed: underground Christianity in the Soviet Union. In the West, one hears two conflicting opinions on this matter. The official line of the Soviet government, followed by the Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church and the World Council of Churches, is that there is freedom of religion in the U. S. S. R., and thus there is no need for a religious underground. On the other hand there are those who speak of a huge underground church in the Soviet Union made necessary by the regime’s aggressive policy of the destruction of religion; in this church, say these observers, is found the only pure Christian faith in that country. Since the second picture has usually been drawn by émigrés, or based on obviously biased sources, scholars have treated it with suspicion. Fletcher shows that not all the suspicion has been warranted, but that the truth lies between the two extremes.

There are, he says, considerable numbers of underground religious movements in the Soviet Union whose existence can be documented with data collected by the Academy of Sciences of the U. S. S. R., by articles in the Russian state and church press, and by information available from the movements themselves. While it is clear that these movements range over a vast geographical spread, their numerical strength cannot as yet be precisely determined. Fletcher concludes, however, that they “appear to embrace only the most miniscule of fractional percentages of the population”—a “scattered few adherents here and there throughout the Soviet Union.”

“The Russian Orthodox Church Underground,” as used in this work, is a generic term, designating in general those Orthodox clergy and laymen who reject the authority of the Moscow Patriarchate; it does not refer to a single organization or to an underground church as such.

Fletcher shows that much of the religious activity that goes on in the Soviet Union is technically illegal, for a variety of reasons. In some cities and towns, Orthodox believers have refused to worship in the legally registered churches, considering them compromised by association with the atheistic state, and have begun worshiping clandestinely in private homes or out in the countryside. In many more places, the local churches have been closed by the authorities; this forces the believers, if they are at all to satisfy their religious needs, to do so illegally. In yet other places churches have been ordered closed but continue functioning, nevertheless. These, says Fletcher, “are by far the most widespread phenomenon of present underground Orthodox life.”

Physical persecution, particularly imprisonment, has not been absent from the experience of believers since the Bolshevik revolution, but it has considerably diminished in frequency since Stalin’s death. It is the psychological threat of prosecution for illegal activities, in which almost every believer at some time indulges, that is now the essence of the religious persecution being suffered in the Soviet Union.

This work provides an easily read survey of the twists and turns of Communist anti-religious policy since the 1917 Revolution and the response of Christians to it. Fletcher’s lucidly told story contains a considerable amount of excitement, suspense, and tragedy as he shows how the government now launches a frontal assault on the churches, now sheathes its sword, and at yet another time subtly pressures Christians to forsake their faith.

The study is short on discussion of the theological and ideological motivations of those Christians who have decided to sever relations with the Patriarchate and thus undertake a clandestine religious life. And its scope is intentionally limited to those within the Orthodox tradition. We can but hope for an equally scholarly and illuminating study of the experiences of evangelicals who have faced the same circumstances as their Orthodox compatriots.

One of the most persistent phenomena in the theological thought of our era is the resistance to belief in a personal agent of evil—a devil—who masterminds the morally destructive forces in our world. Even some who find no difficulty in believing in a personal Deity seem to face immovable mental barriers to the acceptance of the biblical understanding of Satan as a personal prince of evil. Theological polls show that the majority of clergy in our time doubt whether such a being as Satan exists.

Should this majority opinion among theologians and clergymen prove to be wrong, it might well be the supreme irony of our time that those trusted to warn the people against the evil one should seek to surpass one another in denying his existence.

This bold departure from historic belief seems to demand some substitute tenet. Merely to deny the existence of a prince of evil has evidently been insufficient. Nor has it been enough merely to assert that the scriptural understanding of a personal devil was derived from the mythology of Babylonia and Persia, or more specifically, from the dualistic system of Zoroaster.

One of the fashionable evasions has been substitution of the concept of “the demonic” for that of the devil. The term has frequently remained imprecise, even undefined. In general, however, it suggests that the structures of the world embody elements of an impersonal sort that coerce or even compel men to evil.

At times, the “demonic” is held to operate primarily in individuals. In other cases, it is said to be manifested in collective “entities” or situations. Whether regarded as individual or social, it is often held to inhere in a wrong-headed assertion of human power or ambition.

Reinhold Niebuhr in his Gifford Lectures (I, pp. 180 f.) sketches a correct understanding of the “Biblical satanology”—but of course without himself accepting that view. While tracing the scriptural view of Satan to Babylonian and Persian sources, he feels compelled to recognize elements of profound truth in this view, especially the insight that something preceded human transgression.

But Niebuhr does not clearly define what this something may have been. He seems to say that some positive drive or force preceded the sin of humans, a force summed up in the formula “sin posits itself.” This of course drains the scriptural understanding of its propositional accuracy, and leads him to his conclusion that sin is not a “perverse individual defiance of God.”

Sin is thus held to pre-exist, but only, it seems, as a possibility inherent in the structures of finiteness and freedom. In this view, actual transgression would stem from a wrong and prideful assertion of autonomy, rather than from a voluntary yielding to an external solicitation to evil. Thus there seems to be in prominent theological circles a studied distaste for any belief in a personal tempter who solicits men and women to undertake a voluntary and willful contravention of God’s known will.

What is held, rather, is that the whole of historical reality bears a contagious admixture of sin, and prompts individual transgression. Man is led astray by his rootage in nature and the involvement of all his institutions in the relativities of history. And the demonic quality of institutions, especially economic and political ones, stems, not from their corruption through their inclusion of corrupt persons, but from their false claim of absoluteness for themselves.

It is remarkable that theologians feel no need for a concrete embodiment of evil in a person. Even many poets and dramatists who are far from Christian in their outlook sense a practical requirement at this point. Goethe’s Faust would have been ineffective as a drama and unrealistic as a portrayal of life without its Mephistopheles. Wagner’s Lohengrin has its Ortrud, his Parsifal its Kundry. It does not detract from the force of this argument that Mephistopheles was hardly an “orthodox” devil, or that Kundry was eventually shown to have been redeemed. Writers of genius often reflect the common sense of the plain man; and so it seems to be in this case.

One is inclined to ask upon what basis leading theologians feel they can without loss dispense with belief in a personal devil. It scarcely explains the phenomenon to suggest that this denial is a part of a larger rejection of dualism. After all, the duality of good⸬evil persists; it seems in no way deprived of its sting by being depersonalized. Nor is the explanation that the doctrine of Satan is of pagan origin satisfactory, for it is possible that sources other than our Judeo-Christian tradition may have an adequate grasp upon certain essential and realistic elements in the moral area.

Rejection of what Niebuhr calls the “Biblical satanology” is clearly the result of a pattern of deeper spiritual apostasy. There has been in our time a lessening of the sense of man’s spiritual emergency. Once his lostness without Christ was sensed vividly within Christian circles, but recent decades have brought a sharp decline of this emphasis. Closely related to this, and indeed underlying it, is the loss of the belief that sin causes a breach between the sinner and God.

With the loss of these poignant awarenesses, the critical problem of temptation as a solicitation to sin coming from outside the individual became less serious. Some have maintained that the supposed existence of Satan jeopardizes the proper understanding of human freedom, and thus weakens man’s sense of personal responsibility. In reply, we would suggest that the temptation of our Lord is a highly instructive paradigm for understanding the question in hand. The records of this event bear unequivocal witness to the reality of a personal Tempter who had access to the inner mental processes of Jesus Christ.

Nothing is more clear in this account than the fact that Christ experienced the temptation as from a personal being of great wisdom and deep malice. It is further clear that this was no sham battle but an encounter that shook his divine Person to the depths. Thus those who reject the existence of a personal embodiment of evil in a concrete and malicious being must cast the most serious aspersions upon our Lord’s understanding and integrity. Interestingly, no one has ventured to suggest that the circumstances surrounding his temptation compromised his freedom or his personal responsibility.

The rejection of belief in a personal agent who masterminds the massive forces of evil in our world is part of a larger package of theological denial. Involved is the integrity of the Word, the credibility of our Lord, and the larger understanding of the issues of sin and of redemption. Certainly no one would wish to make belief in Satan an explicit item in the Christian creed. But those who regard the concept as expendable face major theological difficulties.

HAROLD B. KUHN

A Presbyterian pastor from Toronto confides he came to learn how to convince his church it should be involved in community problems. Another minister hikes up his trouser leg, testifying to a healing experience that permitted him to shed his elastic stockings. A young man relates how a residential center can be a life-changing refuge for drug addicts. Two long-haired “Jesus people” unashamedly embrace on the platform, enraptured by an ecumenical choir’s singing of an anthem. An entire row of persons stand with arms raised over their heads in Pentecostal fashion while a black minister gives the benediction. A surprised layman whispers to a friend, “I never thought I would see Presbyterians acting like this.”

It all happened at the Celebration of Evangelism September 20–24 in Cincinnati, where 3,150 persons from five Presbyterian-Reformed denominations gathered to revel in a “Revolution of Love.” The delegates discovered that evangelism and love are many-splendored things—and that you can’t have one without the other.

The public ministry at both the morning and evening meetings in Cincinnati’s new Convention Center, the afternoon workshops dubbed “Models of Ministry,” the exhilarating singing and creative worship services, the uninhibited sharing on a personal level—all were elements that left delegates overjoyed almost to the point of being overwhelmed by it all.

Jubilant national committee members met for a luncheon on the last day of the conference to assess the Celebration. Gary Demarest, program chairman and pastor of La Canada (California) Presbyterian Church, suggested the response demanded a repeat performance next year; others cautioned they wanted to let their feelings and thoughts simmer a few weeks. The fifty-member national committee will meet in Chicago next month to chart its future course.

At least one participant—Mrs. Lois H. Stair, moderator of the United Presbyterian Church—was not “completely thrilled” by what she saw. “I’m a little frightened by it,” she admitted at a press breakfast attended by the moderators of all five sponsoring denominations. “I hope this means that evangelicals are beginning to accept a little broader definition of evangelism—that it may mean reaching out with bail money for Angela Davis.”

Mrs. Stair said she would judge the success of the Celebration by whether it “serves as a bridge to bring together those on both sides of the theological spectrum or whether it merely further isolates” evangelicals from those more liberal.

In contrast, Dr. Ben Lacy Rose, moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern), saw the Celebration as a “point in a movement. I see a tide running toward a broad spectrum of evangelism.”

The other three moderators enthusiastically endorsed the Celebration: the Reverend Roy E. Beckham of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, the Reverend E. Thach Shauf of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, and the Reverend Christian H. Walvoord of the Reformed Church in America.

If the Celebration proved to be a mountain-top experience for most, it was not at the cost of ignoring social ills. Of the fifty-seven “Models for Ministry,” roughly a fourth dealt with nittygritty topics such as “Congregations in Changing Communities,” “The Church in Housing and Evangelism,” and “Hunger, Poverty and Evangelism.” Proponents of healing and the charismatic movement also found a platform for their views.

At the seminar on “The Church in a Changing Neighborhood,” a black pastor from an inner-city church in Los Angeles explained he was having the same problem as most white ministers: how to get his congregation involved in the problems of the community.

“It is amazing how much whites and blacks are alike in that respect,” he noted.

It wasn’t difficult, however, to determine where the true affections of most of the delegates lay. Only fourteen persons attended the workshop on the “Church in a Changing Neighborhood,” while next door delegates spilled out into the hallway at the seminar on personal witnessing.

The “Jesus people” were the most visible of all groups and perhaps wielded the greatest influence in proportion to their numbers. They simply sang and loved their way into the hearts of the delegates.

Evangelism professor Robert B. Munger of Fuller Seminary in the keynote sermon declared that the “Jesus people movement is far more than a bizarre fad on the part of irresponsible youth looking for a religious kick.”

Bill Pannell, vice-president of Tom Skinner Associates, told the delegates on the succeeding night: “What you got yourself involved with when you signed up with Jesus is the high cost of loving.”

In an interview with CHRISTIANITY TODAY, affable Robert Pitman, the Celebration committee chairman, said he believes its impact will spill across Presbyterian boundaries. “We are not the largest denomination in the nation, but the Presbyterian Church has always provided resources, leadership, and life style for the church at large,” he said.

Mrs. Billy Graham, also an organizer of the Celebration, said in an interview near the close of the event that it was an example of the “contagion of infectious Christianity.… Some of this is not happening in the churches.…”

At the last morning’s mass communion service—preceded by foot-washing!—a young black attempted to get to the microphone to make a statement. The platform committee denied him the privilege.

Dr. Munger, obviously baffled as to why the youth was not permitted to speak, explained to the committee members at the luncheon: “The young man said he felt he had been responsible for part of the division in the church because of his efforts in behalf of the Angela Davis fund. He said he wanted to stand up and say he was sorry in order to promote healing.…”

A multitude of voices were heard at the Celebration of Evangelism; the only regret anyone could have was that at least one more could have been heard at the concluding communion service. It would have been a fitting benediction to a week of spiritual serendipity.

Lighting Moral Darkness

Beneath Nelson’s column, monument to one of Britain’s better-known adulterers, 35,000 people last month packed London’s Trafalgar Square in a “Nationwide Festival of Light” to protest moral pollution. Predominantly youthful, they came from all over Britain and reflected a wide range of religious viewpoints, including Roman Catholic and Jewish. They sang hymns ancient and modern, and with a fervor to satisfy even the most demanding football coach frequently broke into their slogan, J-E-S-U-S.

The assembly called on the government to check “the vile commerce in cruelty, perversion and loveless sex,” demanded curbs on sex films shown in schools, and urged the Church and mass media to establish sound standards.

Among festival sponsors were Malcolm Muggeridge, pop star Cliff Richard, anti-apartheid leader Bishop Trevor Huddleston, and the indefatigable “Clean-up TV” warrior Mrs. Mary Whitehouse, recently returned from a talk with Pope Paul. Prince Charles also sent a letter supporting the festival.

During the meeting smoke bombs and other diversions were ineffectively tried by various groups whose “liberation” tendencies do not extend to free speech for others.

“We have a positive purpose,” said former Punch editor Malcolm Muggeridge. “We stand up and say that we still believe that to be carnally minded is death, and that to be spiritually minded is life and peace.”

Fifty thousand people attended a later meeting in Hyde Park.

Earlier, prayers for the cause were given in churches across the country and more than 250 hilltop beacons were lit; these were used as signals in olden times to warn of danger and calamities.

In another festival mass meeting, four thousand persons jammed British Methodism’s great Central Hall at Westminster. But Huddleston was forced to abandon his prepared address and Muggeridge could say only a few words because about one hundred demonstrators representing homosexual and women’s liberation groups clapped, hooted, and chanted four-letter words. Eventually about eighty disrupters were thrown out.

The campaign to rid Britain of written and theatrical pornography will be continued by various groups under the title “Keep the Light Burning.”

J. D. DOUGLAS

Bob Jones Admits Black

Bob Jones University has broken its longstanding ban on admitting Negro students. One was enrolled this fall.

The black male (his name was not released) is married, thus circumventing the university’s main objection to allowing Negroes: interracial dating.

“We began accepting Orientals some time back,” Bob Jones III, who at age 32 took over as president of the fundamentalist school last month, told the Associated Press. “But we stipulated to them that they could not date across racial lines and they accepted that rule.”

The board of trustees thought blacks wouldn’t accept such a rule, Jones added, saying: “We feel we can take qualified married Negroes, and maybe take them for the Lord’s service, which is the purpose for all our students.”

Nativity And A Pear Tree

In an effort to satisfy those who want a religious motif on the annual Christmas stamp issued by the United States Postal Service as well as those who object to sectarian themes on government-sponsored stamps, Postmaster General Winton M. Blount has again authorized both secular and religious stamps this year.

The religious stamp will depict a portion of the sixteenth-century painting “Adoration of the Shepherds,” part of the Samuel H. Kress Collection at the National Gallery of Art. The secular stamp will picture “A Partridge in a Pear Tree,” painted by Jamie Wyeth of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. The opening words of an English ballad, “On the First Day of Christmas, My True Love Sent to Me,” will appear in vermilion lettering against a dark green background. One pear will be embellished with the denomination of the stamp, eight cents.

The Nativity stamp will depict five figures—the Holy Family and two shepherds—as painted about 1510 by the Italian artist Giorgione. It will be printed in eight colors, with the word “Christmas” in gold.

The stamps will be placed on sale November 10 at the National Gallery in Washington and will become available at post offices nationwide soon after. The Postal Service expects the Nativity stamp to outsell the partridge; a printing of 1.2 billion of the religious stamp, and only 800 million of the secular design has been ordered.

GLENN EVERETT

Abernathy Woos Communists As U. S. Backing Drops

While financial support for the civil-rights-oriented Southern Christian Leadership Conference lagged at home, the SCLC’s present president, Dr. Ralph David Abernathy, was in the Soviet Union and East Berlin courting Communist leaders.

At an ecumenical service in St. Mary’s Church, the main Protestant sanctuary in East Berlin, Abernathy (amid applause) demanded immediate withdrawal of U. S. troops from Viet Nam and the freeing of Angela Davis and other “political prisoners” held in America.

The SCLC president and successor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was given the Peace Prize of the East German Peace Council.

Saying that any country is “stupid” if it ignores East Germany, the black Baptist pastor from Atlanta added that West Berlin reminded him of conditions in the United States and that he was “homesick” for East Germany.

Communist party papers hailed Abernathy as “the leader of the suppressed colored U. S. population who together with the U. S. Communists denounce the cold-blooded terror of U. S. imperialism and its unscrupulous genocide in Viet Nam.”

While in Russia Abernathy preached in Russian Orthodox churches and on campuses. He said his visit was to promote “world peace and understanding.”

Meanwhile, SCLC sources in Atlanta said Abernathy got only $3,000 from the three largest black Baptist organizations in the nation when he appealed for funds at their national conventions last month. The bulk of the SCLC’s support is from whites, but even that has slowed, according to Abernathy. Staff workers have been cut from a peak of 160 during the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D. C., to 60 currently. SCLC income last year reached $1 million, up from $195,040 in 1961. But expenses have leaped from $191,048 then to $900,000 this year.

“Our present income does not indicate we will be able to carry on very long with a paid staff unless we start getting financial support,” Reuters reported Abernathy as saying.

Religion In Transit

In Kabul, Afghanistan, a Swedish missionary was arrested, tried, and fined $20 for giving away a copy of the Gospel of Luke. Karl Arne Nilsson was also ordered to leave the country, where anti-Muslim literature is prohibited. Nilsson serves in Pakistan and had been in Kabul on a holiday with his family.

The Black Unitarian-Universalist Caucus (BUUC) is floating an initial $5 million bond issue in a program to redirect church investments into minority enterprises. Investors will receive a return of 5 per cent, a prospectus says.

A new Hollywood, California, organization, Audio Bible Studies International, has been formed to distribute Bible teaching material utilizing tape cassettes to a worldwide market through a non-profit service program. Latin America will be the original target area.

Recently formed in Oklahoma City is the American Association of Christians in Behavioral Sciences, a group interested in applying Christian teaching to the problems of the classroom, the clinical and experimental laboratory, and the community. Dr. C. M. Whipple, P.O. Box 14188, is executive director.

The Church of God of Prophecy plans to build a $1,780,000 auditorium in Cleveland, Tennessee, to accommodate the denomination’s annual assemblies.

Pope Paul has given Duke University a facsimile copy of the Codex Vaticanus, a fourth-century Greek manuscript of the Old and New Testaments.

The Graymoor Ecumenical Institute, an arm of the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement, has announced plans to sponsor an ecumenical religious community. The location and life style of the group will be up to the new community.

The Enquirer, a Christian tabloid edited by Ron Marr in Toronto, has launched a U. S. edition that was mailed to 100,000 this month. Like its Canadian counterpart, the American edition (a monthly) will emphasize a Christian perspective on contemporary news.

A ten-day crusade in Marion, Indiana, led by evangelist Leighton Ford last month drew a total attendance of 52,000 to the packed coliseum. More than 1,100 persons went forward to register decisions. A four-mile “One Way” demonstration march for Christ by 1,200 young people launched the crusade.

Connecticut became the second state to permit homosexual acts between consenting adults last month, following Illinois. Oregon, Idaho, and Colorado will allow this beginning next year. Celebrating Connecticut homosexuals held a church service, danced, and marched on the capitol.

Support for union with the United Presbyterian Church and for merger through the Consultation on Church Union has diminished during the past year, according to a sampling of Southern Presbyterian Church members made by the Presbyterian National Sample. The first testing was in May, 1970.

Wycliffe Bible Translators has broken ground in the Dallas suburb of Duncanville for a $4 million international linguistics center that will serve as a worldwide research and training facility. Initial units should be operable in one year.

Amish parents in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, have vowed to refuse new state subsidies for nonpublic schools that could bring them $210,000. Amish spokesmen said their 2,800-pupil county school system, which stops with eighth grade, will decline the direct aid to avoid possible interference by the state; education laws require children to attend school until they are sixteen.

Thirteen hundred young people stamped, whistled, and cheered for Jesus at a Lutheran Youth Congress in San Diego last month; the four-day event was the fifth such gathering sponsored by Lutheran Youth Alive, an independent, inter-Lutheran movement headquartered in Van Nuys, California. The congresses have been dubbed “Lutherans’ contribution to the Jesus People Movement.”

With about two-thirds of the nuns in the United States out of the traditional habit, the nation’s leading nunswear firm is stretching to make ends meet. “Prayer and perseverance” has kept Jamieson, Incorporated, of Chicago from closing during the past four years, the owner says. He thinks the situation has bottomed out, however, with the company shifting to ready-made dresses of secular and contemporary-religious style.

Bookrack Evangelism, a growing effort throughout Canada and the United States promoted by Mennonite missions agencies, last year sold 159,000 paperbacks through racks in secular stores. Pioneer J. Mark Martin now sells 7,900 in Virginia and North Carolina alone.

Personalia

Lloyd Ogilvie, pastor of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania’s First Presbyterian Church, has been named pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, California, the United Presbyterian denomination’s largest.

Paul N. Kraybill of Landisville, Pennsylvania, will become general secretary for the Mennonite Church’s General Board next month.

The Reverend Carl H. Mau, Jr., associate general secretary of the Lutheran World Federation, has resigned to become general secretary of the United States wing of the agency.

After a free country-music concert to 12,000 at the college auditorium, superstar Johnny Cash received an honorary doctor of humanities degree from Gardner-Webb College in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, for his Christian work with drug and alcohol victims and with prisoners.

Washington Redskin fullback ace Charley Harraway made a “dramatic” commitment to Christ at a prayer meeting for the players arranged by the Fellowship of Christian Athletes last month. Harraway, who told a Washington Post sportswriter about his conversion a week later, was reached by the message of black evangelist Tom Skinner.

Dr. Walter F. Wolbrecht, 55, reputed target of conservative opposition within the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, lost his job as executive director of the Synod after the board of directors ruled that the post was abolished and that he was not a candidate for a new post to be called “administrative officer of the Synod’s board of directors.”

An American Holy Cross priest, Edward L. Heston, has been named to head press relations for the Vatican in Rome. He told a news conference the best approach is for the church “to be open, not insisting on secrecy and confidentiality as in the past.”

The Reverend Shirley Carter, chaplain-in-residence at the South Carolina State Hospital, has been ordained to the gospel ministry by Columbia’s Kathwood Baptist Church. She is believed to be the second woman in the United States to be ordained by a Southern Baptist church.

John Allen Templeton, associated with the All-Church Press since 1959, has been named editor of periodicals for the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. He will also edit Presbyterian Survey, the official denominational magazine.

Dr. Thomas C. Campbell, 42, associate professor of church and community and coordinator of professional education at Chicago Seminary, became president of the interdenominational school last month.

American evangelist John Haggai will conduct a large evangelistic crusade in Singapore later this year at the invitation of a multi-denominational coalition of the city’s religious leaders.

Dr. B. Dave Napier, a United Church of Christ minister and religion professor at Stanford University, has been elected president of Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley.

Dr. Warren Wiersbe is the new pastor of the historic Moody Memorial Church in Chicago. He is a prolific youth-ministry writer, was a Youth for Christ executive, and has been pastor for ten years at the booming Calvary Baptist Church of Covington, Kentucky.

Dr. Glenn A. Olds, 50, a Methodist minister and educator, has assumed the presidency of Ohio’s troubled Kent State University. Until recently he served on the United Nations Economic and Social Council.

World Scene

The national assembly of Catholic bishops and priests for Spain last month called for an end to the ties between the Spanish church and the Spanish government.

For the first time, an entire order of the Roman Catholic Church has defied a local hierarchy of bishops and pulled out of a missionary country. The White Fathers left the Portuguese overseas territory of Mozambique, which has 860,000 Christians including 660,000 Catholics. “We are anti-colonialists. The Portuguese are colonialists. We don’t speak the same language,” a superior general assistant told a Christian Science Monitor correspondent.

The Vatican has declined to grant patriarchal status to the Ukrainian Rite Catholic Church, ending nearly a year of protest by leaders of that rite against what they called second-class treatment.

Some 2,000 Catholics from a single parish in the Lithuanian Republic charged in an open letter to the Soviet leadership that freedom of religion is being curbed by local authorities.

The World Council of Churches made anti-racism grants to three different Angolan groups (see October 8 issue, page 56) precisely to avoid the charge that it was aiding any one political group, according to WCC general secretary Eugene Carson Blake.

The Central American Mission, which has served the region for eighty-one years, is expanding its ministry to Spain. Five missionary couples are scheduled to move there this fall.

Presbyterian and Reformed Church missionaries in Mexico plan to leave that country by the end of next year when the National Presbyterian Church of Mexico becomes autonomous.

Prelates of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia attacked the Orthodox leadership in Russia as “Soviet-appointed” and called on the Russian people to stand fast in their faith; the message was in a joint pastoral marking the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the new U. S.-based church. Headquarters of the staunchly anti-Communist jurisdiction were transferred to New York in 1950.

Some 1,700 Puerto Rican Protestant churches are participating in a campaign to put a Christian book in every home on the island.

Lutheran World Relief has allocated $500,000 for agriculture, education, and welfare projects in Africa and Asia. The largest grant ($321,000) will go to establish oil palm plantations in Nigeria.

Catholic theologian Hans Küng says he expects Rome soon to publish a book rejecting his ideas as liberal. The book has been written by several theologians and edited, according to the Netherlands Roman Catholic Press Agency, by Karl Rahner, himself a target of Vatican missiles. Rahner has attacked Küng’s study of papal infallibility.

Deaths

PARKIN CHRISTIAN, 87, great-grandson of Fletcher Christian, leader of the mutiny on the Bounty; in Auckland, New Zealand. The mutineers established a successful experimental Christian community on Pitcairn Island.

EDWIN KAYEA, 35, personnel manager of radio station ELWA and director of Youth for Christ of Liberia; of liver failure in Liberia.

NEWS

When Billy Graham came to the Fort Worth-Dallas area two decades ago, he stayed for a long seven-week crusade. When he returned for ten days last month at the new Dallas Cowboys Texas Stadium that seats 65,000, more people responded to the invitation the first four nights than during the entire crusade twenty years ago.

The Dallas crusade was attended by 456,400 people; on several nights about 75 per cent were under twenty-five years of age. Some 69,000 cars and 4,100 buses rolled into the parking lots. And on the second Friday, a rainy night, more than 61,000 persons jammed the stadium. Police reported that several thousand carloads of people never made it into the parking lot.

By the crusade’s close, 12,830 decisions had been recorded. Human-interest stories would fill a book:

Two Delta Airlines stewardesses were counselors at all three major U. S. crusades (Chicago, Oakland, and Dallas). They arranged their schedules so they could be in the right city at the right time.

A group of forty kids from Lewisville, Texas, collected 4,275 soft-drink bottles and used the money to rent four buses for the crusade.

A couple from Iran came forward to receive Christ. A Fort Hood soldier was converted in the stadium parking lot.

Johnny Cash and his wife paid their own way to come, and Cash put a $7,500 check in the offering basket.

Counselors reported that the question asked most frequently by the young people who came forward was: “How do I lead my parents to Christ?”

Not everything went well, however. The stadium was finished and usable but the parking lot hadn’t been completed; hundreds of autos never made it because of massive traffic jams.

The weather was uncooperative, too. The crusade started off with the temperature hovering over 100 degrees. Next it plummeted to the fifties. Then the rains poured down. Although spectators in the stadium were protected, the speakers and musicians were not.

Then, fickle weather changed again. On the closing Sunday the skies were sunny but the humidity was high and the temperature on the podium reached 103. Graham told his team he came close to blacking out four times as he preached his final sermon—on preparing for Judgment Day.

Night after night the crowds, which averaged 45,000, listened to music by Ethel Waters, Norma Zimmer, George Beverly Shea, and the choir. Cash and crew were warmly welcomed on the eighth night; Johnny said he plans to devote more of his time and attention to gospel songs and working for the Lord.

A noted Texan was on hand for the opening night: former President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Those giving testimonies included Tom Lester of Green Acres; Cowboys coach Tom Landry, who chaired the executive committee; Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach; and players Danny Reeves and Rayfield Wright. The footballers spoke to a large group of young people gathered in the Stadium Club prior to a “youth night” service.

At the closing service Campus Crusade founder and president Bill Bright told of Explo 72 that will gather in Dallas next June; 100,000 young people are expected to assemble for training to evangelize the world, Bright said. The evening meetings of Explo 72 will be held in the Cotton Bowl and will be televised nationwide. Graham is honorary chairman.

The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association sponsored a five-day School of Evangelism in Arlington, Texas, presided over by Kenneth L. Chafin, evangelism head for the Southern Baptist Convention, and directed by Victor B. Nelson.

Graham, a member of the 15,000-member First Baptist Church of Dallas pastored by W. A. Criswell, told of his love and concern for Texas during the final crusade meeting. He promised to return. Texas didn’t have to wait long; he was scheduled for a one-night stand in Longview on October 17.

The crusade budget was met on the seventh night. Offerings above the $394,000 costs were designated for televising the Dallas crusade worldwide later.

Graham’s concluding message was on God’s day of wrath. He urged his listeners to make certain that their names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. Many did.

Bishops In Rome: No Final Solutions

With Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, the Catholic primate of Hungary who recently ended his fifteen-year exile at the U. S. Embassy in Budapest (see editorial, page 25), at his right side, Pope Paul VI opened the third session of the world Synod of Bishops September 30 with an eighty-minute mass in the Sistine Chapel.

In a homily delivered to the 210 bishops, the Pope exhorted the prelates to “be united in spirit and ideals” and to build up the church, not caving in to pressures of opinion, over-anxiety, fears, and troublesome publicity.

Although it was still too early during the opening days of the month-long synod to pinpoint how strong these varied pressures might become, disagreement over the possibility of making priestly celibacy an option soon loomed large on the official—and unofficial—agenda.

Still, the synod has a purely advisory role. It is an assembly of the world’s Catholic bishops for the purpose of discussing vital topics—specifically the priesthood and world justice—and then giving advice to the pontiff on how to steer the rocking barque of Peter in a more pastoral and effective manner.

John Cardinal Dearden, heading the American delegation of five, said the synod could hardly be expected to provide final solutions, a point that should have surprised no one. Variant opinion at the first working session bore this out. Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski of Poland, second of nine speakers in the initial debate on the priesthood, said there was “nothing to be discussed on that subject” because the doctrine had been set out by the Vatican already.

The crisis in the ministry, he said, is in “great part due to insufficient knowledge of conciliar teachings.…” Bishops should be more “faithful to their mission” and be an example of “docibility to their clergy.” The Polish cardinal also handed a stinging attack to the press for “distorting and politicizing” the bishops’ reports and urged that synod proceedings be kept secret. He rapped fellow bishops who released copies of their speeches to the press (his own was given newsmen by a synod press official).

Before sending their delegation to Rome, Canadian prelates voted overwhelmingly in favor of the ordination of married men in areas “where the need is very urgent.” And by a vote of thirty-eight to thirty-one they favored the ordination of married men under ordinary circumstances.

Synod-watchers tended to see the issue shaping up as a loyalty contest to the Pope versus outside influences. Educated guesses were that married men might get approval for ordination and that if so, great play might be made of this as a compromise solution at the synod.

Meanwhile in the United States, the National Catholic Reporter said in a copyrighted story that a $500,000 study on priestly life and ministry questions the doctrine of apostolic succession. The study was commissioned by the U. S. Catholic hierarchy (see May 21, 1971, issue, page 45). The report questioned the notion “that twelve apostles appointed immediate successors, from whom in turn further successors were commissioned in an unbroken historical chain to the present.”

A majority of the bishops at the synod represent the “Third World” countries where attitudes on social justice, revolution, and radicalism are crucial to the bishops’ consideration of social reform. These decisions may overshadow those on celibacy.

Every generation presents crises and problems to try the souls of men. David could well have been writing for today when he prayed, “Do thou, O Lord, protect us, guard us ever from this generation. On every side the wicked prowl, as vileness is exalted among the sons of men” (Ps. 12:7, 8).

Our Lord spoke of the people of his own time as “an evil and adulterous generation” (Matt. 12:39) and also predicted that in the end times “iniquity will abound” (Matt. 24:12).

The Apostle Paul describes in Romans 1:18–25 the unspeakable depths of degradation of which mankind is capable, and his letter to Timothy tells what may be expected in the “last days.” These will be “times of stress,” or “perilous times,” says Paul. He then gives a detailed description of those who are to walk the earth during those days: “Men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, inhuman, implacable, slanderers, profligates, fierce, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding the form of religion but denying the power of it” (2 Tim. 3:2–5).

Whether we are living in the last times no one knows, but those conditions that Paul tells us will obtain at the end of the age are surely upon us now. The accuracy of his prophecy can be seen in any newspaper, any day.

When he says to “Avoid such people,” Paul unquestionably means that we are to avoid their evil ways and to show by our own lives that the Christian is different, that he lives in the world to glorify God and not himself in all that he does.

Having described the godless generation that will bring about perilous times, Paul gives Timothy some detailed advice: “But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed” (v. 14).

To “continue,” to “endure,” to be “faithful”—this God requires of his own. We continue in our faith because of the utter sovereignty and trustworthiness of God. In reminding Timothy of the origin of his faith, which was rooted in the holy Scriptures that are “able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (v. 15), Paul proceeds with an incomparable affirmation of the integrity and authority of the Word of God: “All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (vv. 16, 17).

Can it be that many young men now graduate from our seminaries as spiritual cripples because their faith in the truthfulness of this statement has been destroyed?

Several years ago an evangelical scholar was invited to speak at a world-famous liberal seminary. In later conversations one of the students remarked, “We have enjoyed your lecture because you are the first scholar we have heard since I came here who has convictions on the eternal verities.”

The Apostle Paul gives Timothy a solemn charge: “I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and kingdom: preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season, convince, rebuke, and exhort, be unfailing in patience and in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths” (4:1–4).

In the face of apostasy Timothy was told, “Be steady, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry” (v. 5).

Here is a lesson for us today. All around us there are signs of multiplied and multiplying evil, of subversions of the truth, of apostasy. We must stand firm, look beyond these things to the Lord Jesus Christ, and realize that he is eternal, always the same. What he requires of us is faithfulness. What he has supplied is his unchanging Gospel. There is much talk today about “making” the Gospel “relevant.” Well, it is the most relevant thing in all the world because it speaks to man’s ever present need, that of a new heart.

I regretfully admit that for some the message of the Gospel has been reduced to a sequence of clichés, correct in form but lacking in power. The power of the Gospel rests solely in the love that prompted God’s redemptive work and love in our hearts through the presence of the Holy Spirit. A loveless orthodoxy is a travesty, one of which many of us have often been guilty. At the same time a Christless humanitarianism may make the bodies of men more comfortable but leaves their spirits barren and empty.

Paul’s admonition to Timothy speaks clearly to us today: In the face of evil on every hand, stick to your message, a message based, not on the philosophy or opinions of man, but on the holy Scriptures with their offer of salvation through Christ. These, Paul affirms, are inspired by God and because of this are “profitable” in meeting man’s basic needs for:

“Teaching”—man is ever searching for truth, and that truth is to be found in God’s revelation, not in human speculation.

“Reproof”—like a wayward child, man needs repeated warnings against sin and reproof, lest he continue in the way that means certain death.

“Correction”—the level, the square, and the plumb line enable the builder to erect a house properly. The Bible shows man where his life is out of line with God’s requirements and gives him the solution to his moral and spiritual problems.

“Training in righteousness”—man needs reproof and correction, and he also needs training in the ways that are right. In the Scriptures he finds the answers to the problems of everyday living, and clearly stated principles by which he is put on the right track and kept there.

Finally Paul tells Timothy that with the Scriptures as the basis of faith and life, the Christian may become “complete, equipped for every good work.”

It is precisely at this point that we are weak today. We are influenced too much by man rather than by God and his Word. We are more prone to accept the philosophical presuppositions of man, even when contrary to revealed truth, than to accept truth itself.

Because the days are evil, we must look as never before to God for his sustaining grace. He does not require of us anything for which he does not provide the necessary wisdom, strength, and guidance. Because he is faithful, we must be faithful; we must endure hardness and keep hearts and minds open to his leading. The distractions are legion, the attacks come from every side; but the “whole armor of God” is complete in every detail. The Sword of the Spirit is the one weapon against which Satan cannot stand.

YOU DON’T MISS THE JANITOR TILL THE GARBAGE PILES UP

“Come in, gentlemen. How may we of Aardvark Investigating Service help you? My name is Jones. I’m president of our little company. We’re not often privileged to serve men of the cloth. Our clientele usually runs to a seamier sort, if you’ll pardon the pun. Oh, well, how may we help you?”

“Can we be absolutely certain that what we say will be held in complete confidence?”

“Reverend, discretion is our byword. You can trust Aardvark. In fifteen years we have never revealed a client’s name or problem.”

“Very well, then let me introduce myself. I’m Dr. Andrews and this is my assistant, the Reverend Mr. Brown. Our problem is a matter of some delicacy: our superior has disappeared.” “Good heavens, if your grace will pardon the expression, this does sound serious! When did you last see the subject?”

“Well … it’s a little embarrassing … but … we’re not exactly sure. You see, he had become sort of an honorary figure in our operation without much real responsibility. We got so we didn’t notice him. Sort of like the janitor. You don’t notice him till he’s gone and the garbage starts piling up—that is to say, I’m not making a comparison, just speaking figuratively.”

“I understand perfectly, your eminence. Perhaps as a start you could tell me something about him personally. His habits, eccentricities.”

“He’s a very loving, generous person. Prodigally generous, you might say. You knew him well, Father Brown; can you think of other characteristics?”

“Well, he always showed an affinity for the poor. Perhaps he’s gone into social work.”

“Tell me, reverend, do you have any idea of where he may be? Did he ever speak of leaving?”

“Some of the things he said did seem to suggest he might leave the institutional church. And we have heard that he may be working among the Pentecostals or in some other small group. But we haven’t been able to verify this.”

“Your holiness, I can see this is going to be one of the most challenging cases Aardvark has ever undertaken. I’m going to put my two top men on it right away. You’ll have the bishop back in no time at all.”

“Bishop! Who’s talking about the bishop?”

EUTYCHUS V

OBJECTIVE AND HONEST

Having just reviewed a number of issues of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, I was impressed with the accurate and objectively favorable coverage on Billy Graham—seen specifically for the Chicago and Oakland Crusades (News, “Graham Crusade: Satanists Lose to Jesus Power,” July 2, and “Northern California Crusade: Decisive Hour for 21,000,” Aug. 27). With so many so-called “evangelicals” attacking Graham for one type of evil or another, it is refreshing to see him reviewed honestly.

Of all times, Christians today need to be unified in their support of the outgoing Gospel; there is no excuse for “intrabody” strife over ideological methodology and petty issues. The Church of Jesus Christ has as its duty the prayer, moral, and financial support of this unique evangelist; for Dr. Graham is more than just an evangelist—he is a modern apostle and prophet of God.

Deerfield, Ill.

MOTIVATING SANITY

Just a brief word of hearty commendation on Robert Larson’s excellent article, “China: Open Door to What?” (Aug. 27). How often wishful thinking takes the place of sane judgment. Larson’s exhortation to motivation in Christian missions is very well taken. It is our opinion that the Holy Spirit is quietly doing far more behind the Bamboo Curtain now than many thoughtless zealots might accomplish should the door even open now.… Thank you for the excellent work you are doing. Escondido, Calif.

CONFESSING CANDOR

I have just returned from three weeks out of state to find myself the recipient of your very kind remarks in the editorial “God-Talk Is News” (Sept. 10).

You do me great honor in writing of me along with such distinguished and veteran religion writers as Lou Cassels and George Cornell, both of whose friendship I cherish.

The same applies to your able and thoroughly congenial news editor, Russ Chandler, who, with Dick Ostling, has in my opinion made your news coverage outstanding, and certainly far better than a certain Christian publication in Chicago.

Sometimes, I must confess, your editorial policy has incited me to refer to you as “Christianity Yesterday,” and I once addressed a letter to Russ Chandler with this needle on the envelope. He responded with admirable good cheer by writing “Christianity Yesterday … Today … Tomorrow … And Forever.” Touché!

I would be guilty of less than the candor which you kindly attribute to me in your editorial if I did not mention one aspect of my reporting of the Billy Graham Crusade in Oakland: his prediction that those not listed in the Book of Life will be cast into the Lake of Fire.

Whereas this may be mentioned in Scripture (along with a number of other practices which most Christians would reject today) I carefully designated as my editorial interjection, in this news report, that: “This listener found it inordinately difficult to imagine the warmly congenial Graham (or God) being capable of hurling even the most reprobate sinner into a Lake of Fire.”

As for Mrs. Billy Graham, whom I met for the first time and can affirm that none of the photographs do credit to her beauty, I wonder why Billy is so strongly concerned with devils when he has such an angel at home in Montreat?

For example, when I interviewed Mrs. Graham after her arrival midway through the crusade, I opened with the following query:

“Mrs. Graham; your husband told 34,000 people last night that he had committed adultery—by looking upon a woman with lust. That would have been my lead, but my city desk wanted the identity of the woman!”

A loud guffaw from Billy.

With a smile of sufficient radiance to melt casehardened steel, his lovely spouse replied:

“We never tell house secrets! Besides, don’t you think there is an important difference between window shopping and shoplifting?”

I have not always agreed with Billy Graham. But I will here affirm that he married gloriously.

(REV). LESTER KINSOLVING

National Newspaper Syndicate

San Francisco, Calif.

ONLY A FIGMENT

If it takes a “Jesus with a red heart painted on his forehead, … dressed in striped pants, a Superman shirt, and sneakers resplendent with pompons” (“Box-Office Religion,” Aug. 27) to “reach today’s kids with the Gospel and to open them up to the claims of Jesus Christ,” then it is indeed true that the Bible is irrelevant for our day.

This sacrilegious caricature of our Saviour God is not the Christ of the Bible, but is rather the figment of carnal imagination.

West New York, N. J.

Surely you must not have been aware of the true nature of the Broadway plays you described with approval. “Godspell could well be one of the best ways to reach today’s kids with the Gospel and to open them up to the claims of Jesus Christ.” Really? By depicting Jesus and the apostles as clowns? By having them on all fours bleating and baaing like sheep? What’s happened to CHRISTIANITY TODAY?

Roscoe, N. Y.

PRAISING JESUS AND HIS MOVEMENT

I was happy to see the article by Donald M. Williams, “Close-up of the Jesus People” (Aug. 27). I have never even been to the West Coast, but have followed reports of the Jesus movement fanatically and with scrutiny. After reading so many self-righteous slams on what appears to be the Spirit’s greatest foothold in this century, I was refreshed to see this appear in your magazine.

Maybe, just maybe, some of the establishment-type churchgoers will be challenged to live up to their responsibility to the Jesus culture, even if their own social/cultural norms do not coincide.

Bel Ridge, Mo.

WHO’S HELPING WHOM?

I have just read Cheryl A. Forbes’s article Thou Shalt Not Copy, Right? (Sept. 10). I have worked with a music and publishing company, and I know some of the problems aired in this article. However, I know some other things, too. I know that the authors and publishers of sacred music have a restricted field of sale, generally. The churches and church members, gospel singers, and other musical groups who use sacred music constitute the major source of income for music publishers. On the contrary, secular writers and publishers find a much wider sales outlet which includes both secular and religious sources.

If the publishers want to sue the infringers, then let them run the risk of biting the hand that feeds them. Let’s be brutally frank about a gospel fact. The churches can do without the song writers and go strictly with the preached word. But the song writers and publishers will find a hard go of it without the churches, if it comes to that. In brief, the churches, to whatever extent they use music, are doing the composers and publishers a much bigger favor than the composers and publishers are doing the church. It is rather that the composers and publishers are beginning to feel just a little exclusive, superior, and judgmental about the only folks who can keep them in business, in the religious business. If they should choose to depart and go in the secular business, then that is on their conscience.

I am not pleading for the right to copy. We have done very little of it, then only of necessity, and have chosen the path through the years of buying the books, whatever the cost. We use Singspiration and John Peterson music more than any other, but if Mr. Raisley and Mr. Peterson want to be hardnosed about it, then we can stick to the church hymnal at less than a penny a song.

Further, church folks are very generous in recommending music to others. If the composers and the publishers had to pay for this kind of very effective advertising and promotion, they would not be able to afford the price.

Goshen, Ind.

ON GRACE

Just couldn’t let the day end without writing to say thank you for L. Nelson Bell’s column entitled “Amazing Grace” (A Layman and His Faith, Sept. 10). You can tell he is a man that truly has and lives the “grace of God.”

Cross View Lutheran Church

Edina, Minn.

IN PURSUIT OF TRUTH

I must apologize for writing this letter in response to your editorial “No Private Affair” (Aug. 27) at such a late date. Having returned from that most hospitable land in late August, it has taken me some time to recover from my Grecian holiday and return to the preoccupation of being an ecumenist.…

It was not at all my intention to plead that Orthodox Christians be “left alone” by conservative evangelicals or anyone else. Precisely the opposite. More exchange of views, more understanding, more collaborations, more charity—this is what I want also. This was said plainly in my letter. Therefore, I can only agree fully with your sentiments as expressed in the latter half of the editorial in question.

Perhaps where you misunderstood me is in my reaction to the particular issue which was addressed, that is, the divisive activities of people like Mr. Spiros Zodhiates. Unless one is prepared to admit that the Greek people and the Greek Orthodox Church are not Christian and therefore stand in need of a thoroughgoing evangelization, then Zodhiates’s mission stands under the kind of criticism I have in my letter. In my opinion, his mission to the Greeks is an uncharitable and ecumenically destructive act of proselytism which prevents the true interchange of ideas and any mutual benefit which the various Christian traditions may have upon one another. Openness to authentic dialogue and the pursuit of truth under the guidance of the Holy Spirit is where we must begin, not through the tactics of Zodhiates or for that matter those of triumphalist Orthodox Christians.

Director

Interchurch Office

Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America

New York, N. Y.

In every generation Christologists have sought to keep the Christ of the Gospels from being displaced by philosophically generated substitutes. One such alien Christ has arisen out of existentialist fiction, in a form that the four Evangelists would not have recognized. Since the vastly influential symbolism of the existential imagination is “anti-Christ,” Christian apologetics must offer a persuasive refutation. Let us seek to counter that existential symbolism by using three of its favorite terms: freedom, being, and reason.

Freedom And The Existentialist Christ

The disturbing thing about one prominent existentialist view of the freedom of man is its insistence that freedom can be realized only in the “death of God.” The “death of God” as a theological event in the teachings of the Christian atheists has been short-lived and only vaguely influential. But in philosophy since Nietzsche, the death of God has been considered a valid philosophical position and, oddly enough, one whose acceptance grants man freedom. Thomas Altizer may not have spoken for very many theologians but he did speak for a host of existentialists when he wrote: “Yet the ‘good news’ of the death of God can liberate us from our dread of an alien beyond” (The Gospel of Christian Atheism, p. 145).

The creators of existentialist fiction have tended to see man as free only when he is free from the necessity of God. Consider the dialogue between Zeus and Orestes, who (as the redeemer of Argos) approximates a Christ figure himself, in Sartre’s The Flies:

ZEUS: Impudent spawn! So I am not your king. Who then made you?

ORESTES: YOU. But you blundered; you should not have made me free.

ZEUS: I gave you freedom that you might serve me.

ORESTES: Perhaps. But now it has turned against its giver [No Exit and Three Other Plays, 1948, p. 120].

Orestes can be free only when he is free of Zeus. When Orestes threatens to become an evangelist and publish his “good news” that Zeus (God) is no longer necessary, Zeus remarks:

Poor People! Your gift to them will be a sad one: of loneliness and shame. You will tear from their eyes the veils I had laid upon them, and they will see their lives as they are, foul and futile, a barren boon [p. 123].

Thus the freedom given to man in the death of God is not a beautiful and wondrous freedom. Rather it is an awesome and fearful freedom for which man must bear all the responsibility.

This same view of man’s freedom in the death of God is influencing many current novelists and dramatists. One reviewer, Andrew Sarris, wrote of the movie Rosemary’s Baby:

The Devil in Rosemary’s Baby is reduced to an unimaginative rapist performing a ridiculous ritual. It could not be otherwise in an age that proclaims that God is dead. Without God, the devil is pure camp, and his followers, fugitives from a Charles Addams Cartoon [Films, 68/69, p. 50].

Rosemary Woodhouse, the heroine, is seen in the book as a psychological captive; she is manipulated by her husband, neighbors, and physician. Her baby, once born, seems not so much the son of Satan as a negative infant Jesus (born in the year one of the new Satanic Age), whose life is threatened by his knife-bearing mother much as the Christ child’s was by Herod’s henchmen. Rosemary herself does not become finally free until she accepts the son of Satan as her own. If this logic does not symbolize the death of God, it certainly does symbolize his dismissal as sovereign.

The dominant error in the view of total freedom without God is the presupposition that in the biblical view freedom is light and easy. Christ taught consistently the awesome responsibility in the autonomy that God has extended to man. Matthew 25:31 ff., for example, illustrates the final fate of those who would not answer with seriousness the responsibility implicit in Christian freedom.

Further, Jesus taught that the path to ultimate human freedom lay through complete self-negation (Luke 9:23). Becoming free requires not the “death of God” but the “death of self.” It is an intriguing paradox in Christian thought that self-denial does not end the Christian’s responsibility but rather increases it. While the Christian does negate himself in entering into discipleship and while he continues to negate himself in his daily walk with Christ (Gal. 2:20), still as an individual he is accountable unto God (Rom. 2:16). Because Christian existence ultimately must face God for approval, it carries with it both temporal and eternal accountabilities far graver than those established in existentialism. Therefore Christologists may confidently bring the full force of Christ’s teaching on freedom against the second-rate freedom of the God-slayers.

Being And The Existentialist Christ

Being as posited by the Christ of existentialist fiction is ever a bleak affair. In Christ’s Address From the World Temple, Sartre has the Christ say:

I have been through the worlds, ascended to the suns and flown along the milky ways, through the wastes of heaven, but there is no God. I have descended as far as existence casts its shadow and looked into the abyss and cried, “Father, where art thou?” But I heard only the eternal tempest which none controls [quoted in Helmut Thielicke, The Silence of God, p. 5].

Then, in such a way that the drama tugs with pity, the dead infants come out from their graves and cry to the Lofty Christ, “Jesus, have we no father?” And the Christ is forced to answer, “We are all orphans, I and you, we have no Father.” Such views of being are indeed bleak.

This same ontology is offered by the 1964 film Parable, in which the Christ figure is a circus clown who goes about with wordless gestures of kindness trying to help other performers. In the end he is beaten lifeless by the ruffians he was trying to help. The film might have been a more adequate conceptualization with the addition of resurrection symbolism. Without this, it can offer only a barren view of essence.

The current rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar presents the Christ symbol as a dream-filled messiah, crushed by an existence that is completely absurd and void. Again, no hint is offered that resurrection followed the sequence and replaced absurdity with ultimate being.

William Blake pointed to the cyclical absurdity of existence in his poem The Mental Traveller, in which the Christ figure suffers symbolically for all who suffer and live:

And if the Babe is born a Boy

He’s given to a Woman Old,

Who nails him down upon a rock,

Catches his shrieks in cups of gold.

She binds iron thorns around his head,

She pierces both his hands and feet,

She cuts his heart out at his side

To make it feel both cold and heat

[quoted in Literary Symbolism, ed. by Maurice Beebe, p. 143].

These lines are toward the beginning of the poem; the last two verses suggest that absurdity is cyclical and the ever-present circumstance of every man in every generation.

Being in the existentialist imagination is not subject to objectification or defined identity. As The Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, “Existentialists, believing as they do that reality always evades adequate conceptualization, are especially apt to treat ‘being’ as a name, the ‘name,’ in fact, of a realm which we vainly aspire to comprehend” (p. 148). Being thus is a kind of animated blur to existentialists.

Again we can see that the Christ of the existentialists is weak where the Saviour of the Scriptures is strong. Christ offers a fullness of being that can be complete only in himself, being that is characterized by hope and not despair. Christ offered himself as Ultimate Being, which, when contingent with human being, provides for man the qualities of greatness inherent in Christ’s being. One such quality is eternal life (see John 10:28).

If we substitute the word being for the word life in any number of Scripture passages, we can successfully answer the existentialists that being without absurdity is real in Jesus Christ: “This [being] is in the Son” (1 John 5:11). “In him was [being] and that [being] was the light of men” (John 1:4). “For God so loved … that whosoever believeth in him should not perish [eternal absurdity] but have everlasting [being]” (John 3:16). Paul ecstatically affirmed the ultimacy of human being when he proclaimed, “For me to [be] is Christ …” (Phil. 1:21).

The being offered by Christ is made secure by two great concepts: the Being of God the Father and the Resurrection. The Being of God the Father is that original being, complete in and of itself, from which all other being stems. God made his own claim of Ultimate Being when he said, “I am that I am” (Exod. 3:14). This statement is a constant and lays down the certitude of God’s being from everlasting to everlasting. Jesus made the same claim for himself (John 8:58).

In his resurrection, however, being became a laboratory proposition. If Christ had ended with his cross, we would have to concede that the existentialists are right in saying life is absurd and necessarily ends that way. Remember Paul’s admonition to the Thessalonians not to grieve over the dead in the same manner as their pagan peers. This is a firm injunction against any insinuation that Christian life ever ends in absurdity (1 Thess. 4:13). Paul further states in his letter to the Corinthians: “And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain.… If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable” (1 Cor. 15:17–19).

The resurrection makes it clear that no life in Christ is absurd, for all life ends in a new kind of being that absurdity cannot threaten. Therefore, let Christologists bring the real Christ against the orphaned model of the existentialists and teach the energized and meaningful ontology of our Saviour.

‘As An Army With Banners’

The hunt:

handlettered

vellum parcht

in Imperial flames,

the written word gave

a flickering,

smoking light/papyrus

scrolls leave

ashes of revelation to darken

the Emperor’s mind.

Burnt words spread

the Word.

Anointed

with Nero’s oil,

the saints

were candles of flesh

but their burning eyes

saw the Beast

cast down into

endless fire & dark.

“These atheists

are foes

of man, god

& state.

Both them & their fool

of a christ.”

Ignatius, Polycarp,

Felicitas, Perpetua,

Blandina, Stephanos,

Petros & Paulos:

blood seeds dropt

in the Roman furrow.

F. EUGENE WARREN

Reason And The Existentialist Christ

Briefly, at least, we must consider the Christ of the Gospels and the issue of reason. The whole field of philosophical existentialism came into being primarily as a reaction against rationalism.

Nietzsche felt that Christ would have found God himself unreasonable had he lived a little longer and reached a greater degree of maturity. In Thus Spake Zarathustra he wrote:

Had he but remained in the wilderness, and far from the good and the just! Then, perhaps, would he have learned to live and love the earth—and laugh also!! Believe it, my brethren! He died too early; he himself would have disavowed his doctrine had he attained my age!

Later in the same work Nietzsche cites the birth of Christ as an absurdity in itself:

‘Twas once—methinks year one of our blessed Lord,

Drunk without wine, the Sybil thus deplored:

“How ill things go!

Decline! Decline! Ne’er sank the world so low!

Rome hath turned harlot and harlot stew,

Rome’s Caesar a beast, and God—hath turned a Jew!”

Zarathustra’s Christ was totally unacceptable on the basis of reason: it was altogether unreasonable that God could or would become a Jew (although because of the anti-Semitism here one wonders if Nietzsche would have found it quite so unreasonable if God had become a German).

It is a strange dichotomy that the existentialists have used reason to demonstrate that faith in Christ is unreasonable, indeed, that reason itself is unreasonable. John 1:1 speaks of the “beginnings” with their logos—Divine, Ultimate Reason. And Jesus claimed in Revelation 22:13 that he was the Alpha and Omega of the human story. Much of what is going on between the Beginning and the End is characterized by an absurdity completely void of reason. But on either end of history stands the logos of God, the Divine Reason, against which the reasoning of the existential fictionalists appears insignificantly shallow.

So we see that freedom, being, and reason in their archetypes belong to the Christ of the Gospels. He is well able to offer meaning and hope to this generation, as he did to those that preceded it. In real freedom, heightened being, and hope, there is always redemption from nothingness and absurdity.

Calvin Miller is pastor of Westside Baptist Church in Omaha, Nebraska. He received the B.S. degree from Oklahoma Baptist University and the M.Div. from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has written four books.

Christians believe that Jesus Christ is incomparable, without a peer, but are often quite ignorant of the lives of great religious leaders with whom he may be compared. On the other hand, secularists, who are often equally ignorant, speak of Christ in the same breath with others without acknowledging any differences. Walter Lippmann in A Preface to Morals remarked, “There is no doubt that in one form or another, Socrates and Buddha, Jesus and St. Paul, Plotinus and Spinoza, taught that the good life is impossible without asceticism.…” Ben Franklin’s advice on humility was, “Imitate Jesus and Socrates.”

The Roman emperor Severus Alexander (A.D. 222–35) set up statues of Orpheus and Abraham, Christ and Apollonius, and offered them equal reverence. Mani, the founder of Manichaeism in the third century A.D., taught that just as God had sent Buddha to India, Zoroaster to Persia, and Jesus to the West, God was now sending Mani himself to Babylonia. Many syncretistic sects both here in the United States and in Japan and elsewhere attempt to combine the teachings of various religious leaders.

I. Sources

From a historian’s point of view there are serious disparities in the sources available for reconstructing the lives of, for example, Zoroaster, Buddha, Socrates, Muhammad, and Jesus. One needs to distinguish sharply between first-hand or nearly contemporary sources and later apocryphal and apologetic materials.

A. Zoroaster (628–551 B.C.)

We do have what appear to be the genuine sayings of Zoroaster in the Gathas of the Avesta. The mass of Zoroastrian texts, however, are in late Pahlavi (ninth century A.D.) recensions. Contemporary Old Persian cuneiform inscriptions betray at best only possible allusions to early Zoroastrianism. There are some Greek and Arabic authors who allude to Zoroaster. The Persian national epic, the Shah Namah by Firdausi, also includes traditions of the prophet.

B. Buddha (567–487 B.C.)

For many centuries Buddha’s teachings were handed down orally. It was in the first century B.C. in Ceylon that his teachings were first set down in writing. The earliest written texts that have been preserved are in Pali, an Indo-Aryan dialect that may or may not be the dialect used by Buddha himself. The Pali canon of the Theravada (the southern) or Hinayana school is known as the Tipitaka or “Three Baskets.” Portions of this collection, such as the Samyutta Nikaya, the Majjhima Nikaya, and the Anguttara Nikaya, may date in origin to a century after Buddha’s death, but other portions originated much later.

The Sanskrit canon of the Mahayana school, which spread to the north to Tibet, China, Korea, and Japan, dates at its earliest to the first and second centuries A.D. According to Christmas Humphreys, “the later Sutras of the Mahayana School, though put into the Buddha’s mouth, are clearly the work of minds which lived from five to fifteen hundred years after his passing” (Buddhism, 1955). In these later sources one notes a conspicuous exaggeration of the supernatural elements in Buddha’s life. It is possible that some of the parallels to the life of Christ in these sources may have been borrowed from Christianity.

C. Socrates (469–399 B.C.)

For Socrates we are fortunate in having the accounts of his disciples Plato and Xenophon as well as notices collected by Diogenes Laertius (third century A.D.). One is faced, of course, with the problem of trying to distinguish how much of Plato’s dialogues is really Socratic and how much Platonic. There is also the consideration that the Memorabilia and other writings of both disciplines were written to refute attacks on Socrates by the Sophists.

D. Muhammad (A.D. 570–632)

In the Qur’an we have the authentic sayings of Muhammad, which were at first written down on skins, palm leaves, pottery, and even the shoulder blades of sheep. Shortly after the prophet’s death the caliph Uthman (644–55) collected these sayings in a canonical edition.

Numerous oral traditions known as the Hadith circulated about the words and actions of Muhammad, involving even such details as his practice of regularly brushing his teeth. Some two centuries after the prophet’s death Al-Bukhari sifted through some 600,000 traditions to obtain 7,000 Hadith that he thought were genuine. The first life of Muhammad, based on the Qur’an and the Hadith, is the Sirat ar-Rasul by the Ibn Hisham in the ninth century.

E. Jesus

Apart from the four canonical Gospels, which were written on the basis of eyewitness evidence, we have very little else that is helpful or trustworthy. References to Christ in the rabbinical literature are veiled and hostile. The famous passage in Josephus (Jewish Antiquities XVIII:63–64) is partially authentic but is also filled with Christian interpolations (cf. P. Winter, “Josephus on Jesus,” Journal of Historical Studies, I [1968], 289–302). References in Tacitus, Suetonius, and in the letters of Pliny the Younger to the Emperor Trajan are witnesses to the spread of Christianity.

The mass of apocryphal gospels of the second and third centuries, which attribute all kinds of fanciful miracles to Jesus as a child, are interesting but historically worthless. Some scholars believe there is a remote possibility that the recently discovered Coptic Gnostic texts, such as the Gospel of Thomas, may have preserved some genuine sayings of Jesus.

[Note: In the following discussion, no sections on Jesus will be included, since the facts about his life, death, and teachings are well known to the readers.]

Ii. Birth And Family

A. Zoroaster (628–551 B.C.)

Zoroaster or Zarathustra was born into the Spitama clan, evidently in northwestern Iran, though he ministered in northeastern Iran. Greek sources placed him 6,000 years before Plato! According to Arabic sources, Zoroaster lived from 628 to 551 B.C. This would accord with the tradition that he converted Hystaspes, the father of Darius, who reigned from 522–486 B.C. Zoroaster was married three times and had several sons and daughters.

B. Buddha (567–487 B.C.)

According to legend Buddha entered his mother in the form of a white elephant—fully formed! Even in this relatively early Majjhima Nikaya we read that after his mother had given birth to him the infant Buddha stood firmly and proclaimed in a lordly voice: “I am the chief in the world, I am the best in the world, I am the first in the world. This is my last birth.”

Buddha, who is also known as Siddhartha (his given name), Gautama (his family name), and Sakyamuni (sage of the Sakya), was born in Kapilavastu, now in southern Nepal. His sphere of activity was northeast India near the Ganges River. Coming from a wealthy background, Siddhartha was married as a teen-ager. But after his wife had borne him a son, he abandoned his family to become a wandering monk.

C. Socrates (469–399 B.C.)

Socrates was born to Sophroniscus, an artisan-sculptor, and to Phenarete, a midwife. We know nothing about his youth. As Tovar has remarked, “you would think the Master was born an old man, with no childhood.”

His wife was the notorious shrew Xanthippe. Socrates remarked that if he could master Xanthippe, he could easily adapt himself to the rest of the world. Women may feel his wife was somewhat justified in thinking that Socrates should have paid more attention to the material needs of their three sons.

D. Muhammad (A.D. 570–632)

Muhammad was born in Mecca around 570 into the Quaraish tribe. His father died before he was born, his mother when he was six. The lad was raised by a grandmother and then an uncle.

As a young man he worked in the caravans of a rich widow, Khadija, whom he later married though she was twenty years his senior. Although Muslims may be married to only four wives, Muhammad himself did not abide by this limit. He had some ten wives and additional concubines. One of his favorites was A’isha, who came to Muhammad when she was but nine, bringing her toys with her. In order to justify his marriage to the beautiful Zainab, who was the wife of his adopted son Zaid, Muhammad received a special revelation (Qur’an 33:37). Despite these many unions the prophet never had a full-grown son, a fact that was to play a role in the struggles for the caliphate or succession.

Iii. Life And Teachings

A. Zoroaster

Zoroaster served as a priest of the polytheistic Iranian religion before he was converted to the sole worship of Ahura Mazda at the age of thirty. He met strong opposition to his new teaching and responded in kind by pronouncing curses upon his opponents. He succeeded in converting some of his kinsmen, and also Hystaspes, a king in eastern Iran. Zoroaster denounced the intoxicating cult of the haoma plant, and exhibited great concern for the care of cattle. For him material prosperity and godliness went hand in hand, a trait that is perhaps reflected today in the remarkable prosperity of the Parsees in Bombay, India.

B. Buddha

After six years of searching for peace through physical asceticism, Siddhartha received enlightenment while sitting under a Bodhi tree and thus became a Buddha or “Enlightened One.” He realized that the way to Nirvana was to eliminate desire not by gratification or mortification but by the Middle Way, which includes the eight-fold path of: (1) right views, (2) aspirations, (3) speech, (4) conduct, (5) livelihood, (6) effort, (7) mindfulness, and (8) contemplation. He succeeded in converting his ascetic companions, then his parents and wife, and eventually King Bimbisara.

Late legendary accounts ascribe all kinds of miracles to Buddha. By washing his hands over the seed of a ripe mango, he caused a tree to spring up fifty hands high. According to another tradition Buddha flew into the sky with fire and water streaming from various parts of his body. He performed these miracles, according to a Jataka account, in order to dispel the doubts of the gods about his mission.

C. Socrates

Socrates was impelled on his life of ever questioning his hearers by a report of the Delphic Oracle, which proclaimed that he was the wisest man in the world. Realizing that this could not be true, he ever sought to find someone who was truly wise. As he interrogated various citizens in the gymnasiums of Athens, he attracted to himself a coterie of well-born young men. Unfortunately some of his disciples, such as Alcibiades and Critias, turned out to be such scoundrels that this factor played a role in the condemnation he suffered. Socratic love, as discussed in Plato’s Symposium, was a type of idealistic pederasty or homosexual love in which an older man sought to instruct and inspire a younger man.

D. Muhammad

Muhammad received his initial vision from Allah when he was about forty. He began preaching an uncompromising monotheism that infuriated the pagan Meccans, and he was forced to flee to Medina in the famous Hijra of A.D. 622. His forces battled with various opponents and slaughtered many, including 600 Jews. The prophet did not fight in person and did show mercy to captives after the capture of Mecca.

The followers of Muhammad do not worship him and should not be called Mohammadans; the right term is Muslims, from the word Islam, which connotes their submission to the will of Allah. The five pillars of Islam are: (1) the Shahada or creed, which holds that “there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet”; (2) Salat or prayer five times a day, facing Mecca (before the Jews of Medina rejected Muhammad, the direction of prayer was toward Jerusalem); (3) Zakat or alms; (4) fasting during Ramadhan, the ninth lunar month, with a strict fast from food and even drink during daylight; (5) the Hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca, which involves traveling around the Kaaba building and kissing the black meteorite stone enclosed in its walls—a remnant of paganism that Muhammad retained.

The Qur’an does not claim any miracles on behalf of Muhammad. But to compete with Christianity later traditions ascribed to him numerous wonders: “Butter, a part of which Muhammad had eaten, increased continually.” “A tree moved from its place of its own accord and shaded Muhammad while he slept.” “A wolf spoke and converted a Jew.” According to Francesco Gabrielli, “his character appeared to later tradition and piety as the sum of all the moral virtues …—by dint of adding to the genuine testimonies of the Prophet’s life and character the fantasies of apologetics” (Muhammad and the Conquests of Islam).

Iv. Death

A. Zoroaster

According to Al-Biruni (A.D. 973–1048) Zoroaster was killed by invading Turanians. The Shah Namah (c.A.D. 1000) describes the event:

And all before the Fire the Turkmans slew

And swept that cult away. The Fire, that erst

Zardusht [Zoroaster] had litten, of their blood did die;

Who slew that priest himself I know not.

B. Buddha

In his eightieth year as he traveled northeast of Benares, Buddha became mortally ill after a meal of pork, perhaps from dysentery. According to the Mahaparanibbana Sutta, his last words to a disciple were these:

I have reached my sum of days.… It is only, Ananda, when the Tathagata [a title of Buddha] ceasing to attend to any outward thing, or to experience any sensation, becomes plunged in that devout meditation of heart which is concerned with no material object—it is only then that the body of the Tathagata is at ease.

The Buddha is further reported as saying, “Therefore, O Ananda, be ye lamps unto yourselves. Be ye a refuge to yourselves. Betake yourselves to no external refuge. Hold fast to the truth as a lamp.”

After his death Buddha was cremated, and his ashes were distributed among eight cities.

C. Socrates

After the end of the civil war between Athens and Sparta, a political reaction set in that was partly responsible for the trial of Socrates in 399 B.C. In his famous Apology, Socrates also speaks of the lampoons of Aristophanes as being responsible for some of the accusations against him. Socrates eloquently defended himself against the charges of “atheism” and of corrupting the youth of Athens. But the jury voted 281 to 220 against him. Though he had ample opportunity to escape, Socrates chose to remain and calmly drank the poisonous hemlock. According to the Phaedo, his last words were: “I owe a cock to Asclepius [the god of healing]; do not forget to pay it.”

D. Muhammad

In 632 Muhammad became ill with violent headaches and a fever. Before he died the prophet exhorted the Arabs to remain united, proclaimed the duties of married couples, and decreed the abolition of usury and the blood feud. When he announced that if he owed anything to anyone that person could claim it, a hush fell on the crowd. One man came forward to claim a few dirhams. Muhammad finally succumbed and was buried in the house of his wife A’isha, who had nursed him during his last days. The prophet’s tomb at Medinah is the most venerated site in Islam after Mecca.

V. Relations To Deity

A. Zoroaster

It seems that Zoroaster originally preached a monotheistic worship of Ahura Mazda, the creator of two spirits—one good and another evil. Classical dualistic Zoroastrianism, which pitted Ahura Mazda against the evil Ahriman, developed only later in the Sassanian period (A.D. 226–652). Later Zoroastrianism also developed a doctrine of a Saoshyan or saviour who would raise the dead. According to Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin,

Zoroaster did not give himself out to be the redeemer. When his prayers call the redeemer who is to renew existence, he means the prince who shall accept his doctrine and realize the Dominion of Righteousness and Good Mind. He even allows the role of redeemer to any man, provided he practises righteousness [The Hymns of Zarathustra, 1963, p. 19].

B. Buddha

It is not correct to speak of Buddhism as an “a-theistic” religion, as some have. But it is a religion whose chief focus is on man himself and not on any god. The Buddhist Annual of Ceylon defines Buddhism as: “That religion which without starting with a God leads man to a stage where God’s help is not necessary.” Buddha himself came out of the polytheistic background of Hinduism. He seems to have treated even Brahma, one of the highest of the gods, with a cool superciliousness. As Junjiro Takakusu of Tokyo University explains:

The Buddha was, after all, a man, but a man with perfect enlightenment. As a man he taught men to become like himself. Though people are apt to regard him as a superman, he did not regard himself as such. He was simply a perfected man. The Buddha did not deny the existence of gods (Devas), but he considered them only as the higher grade of living beings, also to be taught by him.

By the second and third centuries A.D. Mahayana Buddhism developed a doctrine of Bodhisattvas, innumerable perfected Buddhas distributed through space and time who help mankind by their merits. According to the Lotus of the True Law, the Buddha is an eternal sublime being who appeared in human form as the saviour of mankind. The theology of Pure Land Buddhism was introduced into Japan by Honen (A.D. 1133–1212), and his disciple Shinran founded the Shin sect, which is the largest Buddhist group in Japan today. Buddhists of the dominant Amidha school in Japan believe that repeating the chant Namu-Amida-Butsu—“Hail Amida-Buddha”—will gain them access to the Western Pure Land. In Folk Religion in Japan Ichiro Hori tells us, “One nun named Anraku repeated the Namu-Amida-Butsu prayer fifty thousand times on each ordinary day and one hundred thousand times on each festival day.”

C. Socrates

Although Socrates did not fully subscribe to the old anthropomorphic Homeric deities, he was deeply devout in his own way. He was scrupulously obedient to his guiding daimonion, a personal guiding spirit. In Xenophon’s Apology, Socrates says, “When I speak of my daemon I am not introducing a new god. I believe in this divine voice as you believe.…” In his Memorabilia Xenophon says, “For myself, I have described him as he was: so religious that he did nothing without counsel from the gods.…”

D. Muhammad

The Qur’an emphatically stresses the Oneness of the Godhead not only against pagan polytheism but specifically against the Christian trinity. Qur’an 112:1–4 reads:

Say: He is Allah, the One!

Allah, the eternally Besought of all!

He begetteth not nor was begotten.

And there is none comparable unto Him.

Muhammad himself did not claim to be other than a mortal messenger (Qur’an 7:188; 17:95). On one occasion he is said to have exclaimed: “Oh, God! I am but a man. If I hurt anyone in any manner, then forgive me and do not punish me.” His fallibility is shown in the Qur’an, surah 80, where he is rebuked by Allah for turning away from a blind man who had sought him out.

Nor did he claim the power to save others. According to a tradition reported by Athar Husain (Prophet Muhammad and His Mission, 1967, p. 128), Muhammad said:

O People of Quaraish be prepared for the Hereafter. I cannot save you from the punishment of God, O Bani Abd Manaf.… I cannot protect you either, O Safia, aunt of the Prophet, I cannot be of help to you; O Fatima, daughter of Muhammad, even you I cannot save.

When Muhammad died, Abu Bakr, who was to be one of the succeeding caliphs, announced: “O men, whosoever worshipped Muhammad, know that he is dead; whosoever worshipped Muhammad’s God, know that He is alive and immortal.”

Vi. Conclusions

As we review the lives of these great men, we see that they share certain traits with Jesus. They were inspired to preach against the corruption of contemporary religion, often arousing intense opposition and persecution. Their deeds and words have attracted a host of admirers and followers.

On the other hand, to maintain that all these leaders are equivalent is to argue not from tolerance but from ignorance. Each had his own distinctive message and mission. In comparing the life and ministry of Jesus Christ with those of Zoroaster, Buddha, Socrates, and Muhammad, we discover a number of unique features about Jesus.

1. A fact that may be more significant than appears on the surface is that Jesus alone was celibate and left no earthly descendants.

2. Only Jesus came out of a background that was already monotheistic.

3. His death by crucifixion is unique. George Bernard Shaw in Everybody’s Political What’s What (1944) remarked rather cynically: “These refined people worship Jesus and take comparatively no account of Socrates and Mahomet, for no discoverable reason except that Jesus was horribly tortured, and Socrates humanely drugged, whilst Mahomet died unsensationally in his bed.” On the other hand, Jean Jacques Rousseau in “Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyard,” Emile, wrote:

What prejudices, what blindness it takes to compare the son of Sophroniscus with the son of Mary! What distance between the two! Socrates, dying without pain, without disgrace, maintained his character easily to the end.… The death of Socrates, philosophizing quietly with his friends, is the sweetest that one could desire; that of Jesus expiring under tortures, injured, ridiculed, cursed by his entire people, is the most horrible that one might dread.… Indeed, if the life and death of Socrates are those of a sage, the life and death of Jesus are those of a god.

Yet what is so unique about the death of Jesus on the cross is not its manner but its alleged redemptive meaning. The early accounts as opposed to later hagiographical apocrypha do not claim for the other religious founders the ability to redeem men and to forgive their sins.

4. Leaving out of account later legendary and apologetic materials, the early sources do not attribute miracles to these leaders as is the case with Jesus.

5. None of the others is seen speaking on his own unquestioned authority. Zoroaster and Muhammad act as spokesmen. Socrates and Buddha urge every man to consult his own conscience.

6. The followers of the others did not claim to believe in the resurrection of their leader.

7. None of the others had the audacity to claim equality with a sole, supreme Deity. Buddha seemed to have felt superior to the gods of Hinduism in the same manner in which Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, felt superior to the anthropomorphic deities of Roman religion.

Now one may question the Gospels’ claim of deity for Christ and assert that this is a product of paganism, as has Hugh Schonfield in The Passover Plot. Or one may choose to believe with George Bernard Shaw, as expressed in the preface to his play Androcles and the Lion, that Christ was sincere but deluded in believing that he was a god.

As C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity (1955, pp. 52, 53) points out, Christ’s claim of equality with deity leaves us with few choices:

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Edwin M. Yamauchi is associate professor of history at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. Born into a Buddhist family in Hawaii, he was later converted to Christianity. He has studied the Qur’an and Hadith in Arabic. Among other subjects he teaches Greek and Persian history.