Anniversaries are celebrated in different ways, but seldom can there have been a parallel to the way the Protestant Episcopal Church has honored the final acceptance of the Thirty-Nine Articles by the English Convocation and Parliament in 1571. Having for many years relegated the articles to an obscure place in small print in the Prayer Book, this church has in the anniversary year brought out an experimental liturgy from which the articles are omitted altogether. Perhaps this is at least honest, for what many of the clergy and people know about the articles seems to be infinitesimal. All the same, it is strange and regrettable that the articles should be treated this way, and the possible consequences are grave in the extreme.

It is strange because the Protestant Episcopal Church regards itself as a Catholic body, and in many respects the articles are a solid reaffirmation of Catholic (as distinct from Roman Catholic) teaching. By formal endorsement the doctrine of the early creeds is incorporated into the structure of Anglican doctrine. The historical canon of Scripture is accepted with a distinction between the Hebrew and Greek books of the Old Testament derived from Jerome. As in the early fathers, only what is found in Holy Scripture is to be regarded and taught as necessary to salvation; the conclusions of councils as well as individual theologians are brought under this rule. When medieval errors are rejected, it is because they are uncatholic as well as unbiblical. They are inventions or innovations representing a departure from the primitive church. While it is not explicitly stated, the thesis of Cranmer and Jewel, and indeed of Zwingli and Calvin, implicitly underlies the articles. The medieval aberration, not the Reformation, is the “new learning.” The point of the Reformation is to get back behind this to the real “old learning.” One would have thought that the Protestant Episcopal Church would gladly have paid its respects to this thesis underlying the articles. That they should rather be dropped out of sight is strange indeed.

And it is not only strange but also regrettable. For if the Thirty-Nine Articles endorse early teaching, they also embody some of the new insights into the biblical message that are the distinctive contribution of the Reformation.

In part these new insights derive, as we have seen, from an application of historical doctrine to medieval teaching and practice. Augustinian teaching on sin, grace, and predestination cuts across much of the distortion of the later medieval church. The christological understanding of the eucharist, based on the work of Hilary and Theodoret, provides both a decisive criticism of transubstantiation and a luminous, profound, and biblical alternative to it.

In part, however, these insights into the biblical message found in the Thirty-Nine Articles are genuinely new insights resulting from a more scientific study of Scripture and its application to complicated developments in theology. The doctrine of justification is the most obvious example. In relation to this, it is tragic and astonishing that Episcopalians should value their heritage so lightly just when Roman Catholics like Hans Küng have come to appreciate, understand, and very largely accept the Reformation witness. It is also regrettable that they should abandon it at a time when it has very pertinent implications for such matters as the subjectivism of modern liberal theology and the contemporary activism that so often fails to grapple with the proper relation of indicative and imperative in the Christian life.

Another instance of new insight is found in the articles’ extended definition of the Church in relation to its ministry of the word and sacrament. This is not meant to replace the four “notes” (unity, sanctity, catholicity, and apostolicity) of the ancient creed. But it does provide a dynamic definition in which the Church is also related to its mission. To be the Church, the Church must be doing what it is meant to do. At a time when the Church suffers from a confusion of role or identity, it is particularly unfortunate that this definition should be ejected even from the basement. Is it so mistaken, so self-evident, or so generally irrelevant that we can now afford to disregard it?

The banishing of the articles is strange and regrettable; it can also have very serious consequences. An obvious danger is that a church which ignores its historic landmarks is much inclined to repeat its mistakes. Up to a point it will probably do this in any case. But it is one thing to do so with past discussions in view and another to do it as though for the first time. Already the new books of our day are full of “original” and usually not very helpful ideas that, though they are hundreds of years old, the brilliant explorers of the present seem to have missed in their theological training. The relevant modern church is thus condemned to the tiresome repetition of old aberrations simply because it has fallen victim to the illusion that what is past is outdated and irrelevant. When there is so much exciting work to do, not only in winning authentically new insights from Scripture but also in applying the insights of the past to changing situations, nothing could be more sterile and unprofitable than repeating the cycle of old and avoidable error.

A second and related danger is that the door will open to a full-scale relativism in which subsidiary standards can no longer do their proper work. The context of the dropping of the articles makes this clear. In some Anglican circles there has always been a tendency to use the liturgy as a doctrinal standard, and it is pertinent that an experimental revision of the prayer book, which can also be the occasion for introducing new doctrinal content or emphasis, should go hand in hand with a quiet dumping of the articles. The point is that the proper function of the articles is to act as an objective theological reference by which all else, including the implications of liturgical revision, should be tested. Without the articles, individual or partisan positions can easily be slipped in either to the perversion or to the confusion of the church.

In other denominations, of course, the same thing may be done in different ways. Presbyterians relativized their confession by associating it with several others, including the new and dated creed of 1967. Practical changes may also be made in worship, ministerial techniques, or organization that are not thought out theologically but will have theological implications, and will thus serve to change the real theological position whether given confessional status or not. The absence or ignoring of confessions obviously hastens this process of change, and may in some cases be used for this very purpose.

Honoring a confession can, of course, result in rigidity, but it does not have to do so. The possibility of revision is always open. Again, new issues arise on which there may be new insights, as at the time of the Reformation itself. In the long run a new confession may have to be worked out that can still incorporate historic teaching. But in the meantime the findings of the past act as an objective control, not of an absolute kind, but in the form of an agreed interpretation of the biblical norm that can check uncontrolled relativism in new theological, liturgical, or practical work.

A final and again a related danger is that ignoring the articles might mean a virtual end to serious scientific theology. Not the least value of historical theology is that the most significant theologians of the past really think and work theologically in contrast to many modern writers who substitute subjective or speculative philosophizing, or phenomenological religious investigation, or a purely historicist study of Scripture, for authentic theology. Now past theology can be presented in an abstruse, theoretical, and sterile form that robs it of vitality and power. It can also be advanced as a legal norm that creates impatience and revolt. In itself, however, the theology of the past that has survived is in the main an exemplary attempt at theology scientifically related to its object and allowing itself to be shaped and controlled by this rather than by subjective considerations, preconceptions, or requirements.

Very easily, then, abandonment of the articles may denote or become a rejection of all serious theological method, an opening of the gates to real theological irrelevance, and an end to authentic theology in the church. The modern Episcopal church is very vulnerable at this point, for years of confessional neglect have already produced a situation in which dogmatics counts for little and a-theologians are increasingly dominating the scene, unwittingly helped by those who pursue serious theology but have never come to appreciate, or perhaps to understand, the Reformation contribution. But the Episcopal church is by no means alone at this point. It is accompanied by many other churches that have never had confessions at all, or have seriously compromised them, or are in immature revolt against them, or carry on their business as if the confessions did not exist.

Certainly a purely formal honoring of the Thirty-Nine Articles would serve no useful purpose. But if elimination of the articles is more forthright, one may still see in it both a symptom of the contemporary malaise and an evil omen for the theological and practical future of the churches. An honest or even an honestly enquiring commemoration would be more to the point.

Geoffrey W. Bromiley is professor of church history and historical theology at Fuller Theological Seminary. He holds the M.A. from Cambridge University and the Ph.D. and D.Litt. from the University of Edinburgh.

Has it ever occurred to you that the Protestant Reformation was largely a youth movement? Many of its leaders were young men. Ulrich Zwingli at twenty-two imbibed the message of the Gospel from the Greek New Testament and learned from his professor Thomas Wyttenbach that Scripture is the revelation of God and that forgiveness is through Christ alone. And he preached God’s perfect remedy in Christ with amazing skill. The theological father of Presbyterianism, John Calvin, made the Scriptures his chief study after his conversion at age twenty-three. When he was twenty-six he brought out the first edition of his famous Institutes of the Christian Religion, which became the definitive rationale for the Protestant position.

Undoubtedly the most celebrated firebrand of the Reformation was a young Augustinian monk from Thuringia, Martin Luther. The early life of Luther seemed to indicate nothing outstanding. He was born to poor parents in Eisleben on November 10, 1483, and in less than a year the family moved to Mansfeld. His father was a laborer in copper mines. But though money was scarce in the Luther home, determination was there in abundance. By the time Martin was twenty-eight, his father had worked his way up to part ownership of six shafts and two foundries. Martin showed the same kind of determination as a theologian, translator, and preacher.

Two experiences had a great effect on young Luther. When he was a student at the University of Erfurt, he often went on trips to Mansfeld during his holidays. The journey on foot took three days. On one of these trips, when he was twenty-one, he accidentally fell on his sword a half mile from Erfurt and cut an artery in his thigh. In his distress he prayed, “O Mary, help!” The next year was a time of inner conflicts. His father wanted him to study law, but he felt inclined toward theology. He left law school for a while to visit his parents. On his return trip to Erfurt he got caught in a ferocious thunderstorm that nearly claimed his life. A thunderbolt that struck nearby threw him to the ground. But though he was shaken, he was unhurt. Nevertheless panic seized him, and he invoked the name of St. Anne. This experience confirmed his leanings toward theological study, and he vowed in the rain to enter the monastery. In his words, “walled around with the terror and agony of sudden death” he made his vow.

It would be unfair to discount Luther’s theological contributions as the ramblings and rantings of an obstinate, angry young man. He was not a perpetual naysayer who delighted in debunking traditions and institutions. As Dr. Boehmer says, “Luther did not discard anything which had once been sacred and precious to him until he had tried every possible way to recast, reinterpret, or, in some form, to save it” (Road to Reformation).

Somewhat like today’s student activists who issue demands to school administrations, the young monk urged some specific reforms upon his superiors. Luther’s demands were not unreasonable. While he called upon the church to abolish the pope’s secular lordship, he held that the pope should remain. While he urged that the college of cardinals be reduced, he did not demand that it be dissolved. Like Luther, today’s youth show remarkable frankness and forwardness, a certain defiance, a boldness to question old laws and to challenge the establishment. Yet it seems that for some, physical force has replaced sound reasoning. To the social revolutionary, philosophical discussion is useful only for making disciples, not for convincing governments.

God raised Luther up to needle the church over the inconsistencies in its theology, and one trait that gained the admiration of his generation was his unflinching honesty. He voiced his dissent and misgivings, even though what he said met with scornful rebuffs and even endangered his life. He showed this same honesty in the confessional box, where his confessions of sin were so full that the director of the cloister said, “God is not angry with you. You are angry with God.” The bureaucrats of Rome resented this outspokenness. But some present-day Catholic scholars admire him for it; Karl Adam, for instance, praises Luther’s “warm penetration of the essence of Christianity, his passionate defiance of all unholiness and ungodliness, … his surging soul-shattering power of speech, and not the least that heroism in the face of death with which he defied the powers of this world” (One and Holy).

Young people liked Luther because he was shrewd without being stuffy, pioneering without being disrespectful. His dogmatism was enlivened with touches of playful irony. His manner in the pulpit was both vigorous and vivid. All through his life he retained a passionate temperament.

Early in life Martin mastered logic, and he showed his fondness for the syllogism to his dying day. He could argue his case for Christ persuasively and cogently. The Reformation got off to a rousing start partly because of Luther’s tremendous ability to defend his position. If he had been unable to convince his colleagues of his views, the Reformation in Germany would have fizzled.

The arena of debate in the Middle Ages was the disputation. The disputation had all the drama of the courtroom, all the excitement of a football game. These disputations were a regular part of the academic program and put both students and faculty to the test. They stimulated thought, and in the case of Luther they convinced a generation. A professor would write the theses to be demonstrated and a student would be chosen to defend them in a large auditorium before professors and students.

Luther twice defended the ninety-five theses, written in 1517 and nailed to the Wittenberg church door. The first defense was before his own order in May, 1518, the second before Cardinal Cajaetan in October. Equally interesting are his other disputations: the disputation against scholastic theology in 1517; the Heidelberg disputation in 1518, which treated the place of works in the salvation process; the disputation on faith and law in 1535; the disputation on man in 1536; in the same year the disputation on justification; and, rounding them out, the disputations against the power of a council and against antinomianism.

Luther’s home became a favorite meeting place of students, and he loved to talk with them. A number of talented young scholars flocked to him. In time way-out Wittenberg “resembled a swarming ant-hill.”

Two hundred Wittenberg students armed with spears traveled with Luther, Melanchthon, and Karlstadt to Leipzig for the disputation with Eck. And young men accompanied him from the debates, for in arguing his cause he picked up more admirers. They admired his candor. They were convinced by his reasons and captivated by his Christ. Luther was heartened by this enthusiastic response; student support cheered him. After the Heidelberg disputation (1518) he wrote to Spalatin, “I now confidently hope that the true theology of Christ which those men who have grown old in their sophistical opinion [the Erfurt Occamists] reject, will pass over to the younger generation.”

Luther’s deep concern for youth is reflected in a searching sentence in his Open Letter to the Christian Nobility: “The young folk in the midst of Christendom languish and perish miserably for want of the Gospel, in which we ought to be giving them constant instruction and training.” As a young man he had experienced anguish, and he knew that the Gospel of Christ was adequate to answer the yearnings of the young heart.

Luther thought that through a prayer-filled life he could get rid of his nagging guilt and quiet his conscience. But he didn’t find monasticism a soul cure, and he bluntly said so. He proved that one can be upright and still be up-tight. Luther once confessed that he never considered himself absolved. He later discovered that he was trusting in his confessions, rather than in the promise of Christ. He was trying to clear his own record, rather than resting in the satisfaction of Christ who bore his sins. Once he realized that he was saved by the merits of Jesus Christ and not by his own strivings, it seemed as if the gates of paradise opened, and for the first time he knew true freedom. This theology, which got Luther into so much trouble, is taken from the pages of the New Testament.

We have lost much of the bite and explosiveness of Luther’s message in our churches. We are more apt to coddle Pharisees than to shock them. We want to keep the peace, sometimes at the expense of offending God. Luther dared to object to the system, to disturb the peace, and this won him the support of the younger generation. But we cannot attribute his success to the fervor of youthful rebellion. The Reformation became a lasting movement, rather than a passing revolt, because behind Luther’s youthful zeal and complete honesty was the substantial and stirring message of the Gospel of sovereign grace.

John Lewis Gilmore is minister of Olivet United Church of Christ in Livingston, New Jersey. He has the A.B. (Temple University), the B.D. (Reformed Episcopal Seminary), and the S.T.M. (Lutheran Seminary, Philadelphia).

Our executive editor, L. Nelson Bell, was honored last month at the eighth rally of Billy Graham’s ten-day Dallas-Fort Worth crusade (see News, page 36). At that meeting Dr. Bell, who spent twenty-five years in China as a medical missionary, gave his testimony, and Mr. Graham announced the publication of a biography of his father-in-law and our colleague. (Dr. Bell is also the author of our popular “A Layman and His Faith” column.) It was written by John Pollock and is entitled A Foreign Devil in China. The book provides excellent background material for those who are interested in China not only as a mission field but also as an emerging great power. Any reader of CHRISTIANITY TODAY can receive a free copy of it by simply addressing a letter to Billy Graham, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55403, and asking for it by title.

October brings Reformation Sunday, and John Lewis Gilmore’s essay Young Luther calls attention to a frequently forgotten fact: the Reformers were young men. Our Lord Jesus was crucified at age thirty-three after a ministry of 2½ to three years. Approximately half of the population of the United States is under thirty, and the percentage is higher for countries like India and China and those in Latin America. But the power still resides in the hands of the elders; prominent on the list of world leaders are octogenarians Chang Kaishek and Haile Selassie and septuagenarians Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, Francisco Franco, and Marshall Tito. We can expect that things will be different as members of the younger generation rise to places of leadership in China and elsewhere in the world. And we fervently hope the change will be for the good!

“NI MARX NI JESUS”: an anarchist slogan left over from the May, 1968, student revolts in Paris? Far from it. The phrase is the title of a book (published by Editions Robert Laffont) that has deservedly captured the attention of the French reading public during the last several months. The author, Jean-François Revel, is a columnist for L’Express, a weekly news magazine that functions in France much as Time does in the United States—but without Time’s essentially conservative-republican slant. L’Express is socialist in spirit, and so is Revel.

Here we must not see red. Revel is by no means Communist. Indeed, his position is what Engels contemptuously called “utopian socialism—an infantile disorder.” Why “utopian” and “infantile”? Because of its refusal to recognize “inevitable dialectic forces” in history and to accelerate them through acts of social violence.

The question for Revel is: What can be done for modern civilization if there is no built-in economic and political perfection? The subtitle of his provocative volume is: “From the second American revolution to the second world revolution.” He is convinced that the modern world—from the rise of secularism in the eighteenth century to our frenetic twentieth century—is in continual revolutionary ferment, and that the particular revolutionary atmosphere in the United States today constitutes the single genuine crucible for proper world renewal.

Obviously Revel operates with a broad definition of revolution (this is generally true of “utopian socialists”!). He specifically lists five “conditions” for genuine revolution: (1) critique of economic, social, and often racial injustice; (2) critique of the managerial and administrative inefficiency whereby human and natural resources are wasted; (3) critique of power politics; (4) critique of accepted cultural values and of the educational system and literary productivity that fosters them; (5) critique of the status quo in so far as it insists on conformity and prevents the individual from realizing his unique potential.

For Revel, the need for world revolution is perfectly plain from the miseries on the planet: every one of his five revolutionary “critiques” can well be leveled at our modern world. Remarkably, however, he expressly endeavors to show that neither in the Marxist sphere (Russia and China) nor in Western Europe and in the developing countries can a proper revolution come about; it can happen, to use Harry Golden’s expression, “only in America”!

Why not behind the iron and bamboo curtains? “If the second world revolution has to create real equality among men, it is clear that the concentration of all power—political, economic, military, technological, cultural, informational—in the hands of an oligarchy or even, in certain cases (Stalin, Tito, Castro), (in an autocracy, is the last means capable of leading to such a revolution.” Why not Europe or the developing peoples? Because in these areas true revolution is dependent, like it or not, on the situation prevailing in America.

The openness of American society allows it to engage in continual self-criticism and self-renewal. This is the spirit that can bring a non-violent end to nationalistic Realpolitik and the substitution of a just world policy. The single illustration of American mass-media—uncontrolled (in contrast to the government-operated TV of France and of many other nations) and able directly to influence events as well as record them (e.g., opposition to the Viet Nam war)—shows how dynamic is the American potential for positive change.

But why, since America is a “Christian country,” does Revel title his book “Neither Marx nor Jesus”? (This is a nagging question for all readers, since Jesus is first mentioned in the last chapter—twenty five pages before the book ends!)

Revel notes the amazing religious pluralism in the United States and the absence of any church establishment, and regards these factors as important elements in the American open society. But any search for a revolutionary Christian vitality leads one beyond the formally organized religious groups to the “Jesus freaks” who “drop out” of the societal stream to become “very first century” with their communities in which Jesus substitutes for alcohol, drugs, and promiscuity. Revel, however, sees this as an irresponsible retreat from the grave crises of the day, and he cites Bruno Bettelheim and André Stephané on the immaturity of sidestepping reality: “The narcissistic stage consists of wanting everything in one fell swoop and if one doesn’t get it, one hallucinates.”

This vague Jesus-mysticism will solve the problems of our revolutionary era no better than a Procrustean and doctrinaire Marxism. What is needed is responsible and positive revolutionary change within the imperfect political and economic frameworks whose functioning is essential to twentieth-century life, and the furtherance of open society where change can in fact occur responsibly.

Locating points to criticize in Revel’s thinking is not particularly difficult (like most humanistic utopian socialists he thinks, with utter naïveté, that proper values will be recognized and followed by reasonable men and that self-interest falls by the wayside in the face of true values; and he does not observe that the glories of American open society arose, indirectly and in part at least, from a biblical view of man). But are we mature enough to take his criticisms seriously? As an outside observer of our society (and such observers, like De Tocqueville in the nineteenth century, generally have much wisdom to impart to us if we are humble enough to listen), Revel sees our Christianity and our social existence as two separate and hermetically sealed compartments. “Separation of church and state” has become “separation of Jesus and society.” (I am haunted by the enthusiastic advocacy of this “separation” by a high-ranking East German government official whom I spoke with in Berlin recently: the church must stick to the “spiritual.”)

How sad that the Jesus freaks so vastly outnumber the Mark Hatfields. How sad that in our fear that we will alienate Christian brethren over “practical applications” we refuse as churches to speak and act decisively in fighting biblically condemned injustice. How sad that we will send our sons and daughters to third-rate Bible schools with the anointing of “full-time Christian service” and not encourage them to go to a university where, after training in political science, economics, and law, they could enter into the maelstrom of our modern revolutionary age and seek to revolutionize it responsibly for Christ. Only then will books be written with the adversative title: Not Marx but Jesus.

JOHN WARWICK MONTGOMERY

On the eve of its twenty-first birthday, the beleaguered National Council of Churches agreed on a reorganization aimed at getting a new lease on life.

The plan is a compromise. But it represents something of a victory for ecumenists over activists. A struggle between those whose main interest is to see how inclusive they can make the NCC, and those who are primarily interested in its social clout, has increasingly been coming into the open.

Dr. Thomas J. Liggett, now the key figure in the reorganization move, suggested that the council may do less in the future but do it better. Meanwhile, he declared, “We hope this plan will commend itself to some denominations not now in the council.”

The reorganization plan was approved by the 255-member NCC General Board during a two-day meeting in New Orleans last month. It now goes to the NCC’s thirty-three member denominations for further consideration. A timetable calls for final ratification by the NCC General Assembly, to be held in Dallas in late 1972.

The restructure proposal, which represents the work of a twenty-two-member committee headed by Liggett, calls for that to be the last General Assembly, a triennial legislative meeting. The assembly’s functions would then be assumed by a Governing Board that would be an enlarged version of the present General Board.

The most debated facet of the reorganization plan during the New Orleans meeting was how much money should be set aside each year for the Governing Board to use as it sees fit. The lack of any appreciable amount of such funds frustrates the present General Board. Most of the money that comes to the NCC is earmarked, and the General Board has in the past adopted numerous programs for which little money could be found.

Activists sought, in effect, to make relatively large undesignated donations to the council a virtual condition of membership. The Reverend Robert G. Torbet, ecumenical officer of the American Baptist Convention, warned that such a move could nudge the ABC out of the NCC; the board voted to keep the restructure committee’s ceiling of $50,000 a year for the so-called priority contingency fund.

Another tension that has plagued the council since its inception in 1950 is that it has been out of touch with the grass roots. The restructure seeks to guarantee more involvement in decision-making by lay men and women, young people, and minority ethnic people.

Dr. Michael Watson, a physician from Bamberg, South Carolina, who serves on the United Methodist delegation to the General Board, doubts that it will work. “Liberal church professionals will continue to dominate the council,” he said in an interview.

The 52-year-old Liggett concedes that the plan doesn’t please everyone, but argues that a compromise was necessary. He characterizes the proposal as an attempt to accommodate the “diaspora of decision-making in the denominations.” He says it will seek to bring to the Governing Board those people who really hold the power in the NCC member denominations, both lay and clergy.

Liggett, a round, pleasant man, is head of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) missions arm. He was a missionary to Latin America for twenty years and for a time served as president of the interdenominational Protestant seminary in Puerto Rico. He also taught at the interdenominational seminary in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Liggett’s committee was created in January of this year after the General Board failed to show enough enthusiasm over the work of a special task force. That group had called for the NCC to be succeeded by a new organization composed almost entirely of consortia. Black churchmen construed it as a “cop-out” and called for continuation of the present NCC.

The new model provides for continuing program units along with consortia. It also introduces the concept of “matrix management,” an organizational process currently being tried by a number of business enterprises. Under this arrangement there are both horizontal and vertical lines of authority and responsibility. The horizontal lines are set up to make use of specialists for key projects, often when these need to be accomplished quickly.

It is clear that the new structure will provide the possibility of tighter control over programs and pronouncements. Whether this potential control is exercised, however, is an open question.

Because of unresolved differences, the NCC in recent years has been increasingly obliged to trim its budget. The result has been slow disintegration. Its youth ministry has gone out of existence. Its women’s organization has broken away. Numerous programs have been curtailed because of inadequate funding for executive salaries, including Faith and Order, and Evangelism.

Latest to part company with the NCC is A Christian Ministry in the National Parks (see June 18 issue, page 31). Director Warren Ost said savings to be made “by severing our administrative relationship to the NCC at this point in our history, we believe, will mean the survival of the program.” Ost reported that the NCC had ceased giving money to the ministry and that the ministry’s affiliation with the NCC was proving an impediment to obtaining outside funding.

The NCC is also losing sponsorship of the newsletter Religion in Communist Dominated Areas after terminating a stipend for its managing editor, the Reverend Blahoslav Hruby. A board resolution adopted in New Orleans expressed thanks to Editor Paul B. Anderson and Hruby and noted “the possibility of some continuing cooperative relationship to the council to be determined hereafter in accordance with established procedures.” Hruby is determined to resume publication if funds can be secured.

In other action, the board called for further investigation of the Kent State killings and urged suspension of all military and economic aid to Pakistan until “the President reports to the Congress that the government of Pakistan is cooperating fully in allowing the situation in East Pakistan to return to reasonable stability and that the refugees from East Pakistan in India have been allowed, to the extent feasible, to return to their homes and to reclaim their lands and properties.” The board also urged support to assure for East Pakistan political leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman “a full and open trial … and clemency in the event of his conviction.”

But the board turned down a request to review the case of an American girl who had to leave her husband, a Soviet citizen, because she was refused a residence visa by Soviet authorities. The board cited “the inadequacy of firm information with respect to the facts in this case.”

A welfare reform bill passed by the U. S. House of Representatives was termed “unacceptable” because it falls short of criteria the NCC has set up. A major policy statement on health care was adopted, urging equal access to health services with the burden of payment varying in proportion to ability to pay.

A sad note hung over the meeting after it was announced that a young student member of the board had been murdered the week before.

Let’S Hear It For Asbury

Francis Asbury, only 26 when he left England for Philadelphia to aid John Wesley, became the “father of American Methodism.” His arduous journeys, undertaken despite frequent illness and great pain, and his adherence to the simple themes of the Gospel give American Methodists something to be proud of—and they showed it last month when they celebrated the bicentenary of Asbury’s landing in the United States.

Held immediately after the World Methodist Conference in Denver, the Lake Junaluska (North Carolina) celebration September 3–5 included Methodists from several parts of the world. Bishop Paul Hardin, Jr., of Columbia, South Carolina, gave one of four historical addresses. He stressed the hardships Asbury endured, but refused to credit his success in the colonies to Asbury’s habits of rising at daylight or reading the Bible and meditating while riding. Asbury himself probably would have disagreed.

Another of the addresses emphasized Asbury’s lack of formal training—he quit school at an early age. Asbury felt it was a help rather than a hindrance; he didn’t have to unlearn a formal, stiff pulpit style.

Of the 500 delegates who attended, one-third were youth. A folk mass and musical about drugs highlighted the three-day affair. “Just Us,” a folk quintet from Emory and Henry College, Virginia, inspired the delegates with an enthusiastic version of “Amazing Grace.” At that point Francis Asbury would have felt right at home.

Care At 25

An eight-cent commemorative stamp will be issued October 27 at New York to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of CARE (Cooperative for American Remittance to Everywhere). Among the organizations that founded CARE and have helped direct its program for a quarter of a century are American Baptist Relief, Church of the Brethren World Ministries Commission, Congregational-Christian Service Committee, the Salvation Army, and General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.

Starting originally with food and clothing packages for war-stricken Europe and Asia, CARE now sends thousands of self-help kits annually to assist poverty-stricken persons in underdeveloped nations in raising their standard of living.

Among other things, CARE has sent 750,000 kits of farm implements, 275,000 sewing machines, 297,000 woodworking kits, and enough seeds to raise 77,000 tons of fresh vegetables.

GLENN EVERETT

Black Baptists Condemn Racial Separation

The head of the nation’s largest Negro organization last month lashed out against the “theology of liberation,” put down black theology as “racist,” and suggested that eliminating persons over age sixty-five would be a more humane way to ensure population control than legalizing abortion.

Dr. Joseph H. Jackson, for the past seventeen years president of the 6.3-million-member National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Incorporated, described black theology as “a gospel of blacks against whites” in a paper given at the denomination’s annual convention in Cleveland, Ohio. More than 25,000 delegates attended.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, the president of the three-million-member National Baptist Convention of America, another black denomination, made a plea for quality education. “The only thing we want is the chance for our children to read and be taught from the same books that Mr. White Man is taught from,” said Dr. James Clark Sams, 62, in an address to 5,000 at the city’s Civic Auditorium.

The head of the church’s Social Justice Committee, Dr. E. Edward Jones, plugged for a nationwide campaign for quality education for black children through busing and insistence upon qualified teachers. “Busing is necessary to achieve racial balance which leads, in part, to the kind of quality education we seek,” said Jones, a Shreveport, Louisiana, resident.

In his presidential address, Dr. Sams—like his counterpart in the larger National Baptist Convention—took a slap at racial separatism: “As Christians, we are lightholders for a confused and disturbed world. Unless we get to the point where we can take a brother, regardless of race, by the hand, we’ll all end up in hell.”

Dr. Jackson, at the Cleveland meeting, charged in his paper on black theology that it polarizes races, promotes racial segregation, and could negate civil-rights progress. A special target for his criticism was the Reverend James H. Cone, a Negro who is a theology professor at Union Seminary in New York. Cone is an exponent of radical black theology, and his writings espouse the revolt of blacks against whites.

“He not only polarizes blacks and whites in this country,” Jackson said of Cone, “but he freezes the polarization and leaves little or no latitude for future harmony to be achieved.”

Jackson’s paper was unanimously approved—and became an official position of the denomination—by the church’s board of directors.

Jackson, who doesn’t reveal his age, was re-elected to his nineteenth term as president of the church. In the prepared text of his annual address, he compared abortion to euthanasia as a destroyer of life. Delegates approved his statement condemning abortion—the denomination’s first stand on the issue.

The forced sterilization of welfare mothers is “too high a price” for relief, he said, adding: “A dollar in exchange for the right of life and a threat to the vitals of one’s being is a dollar for damnation.”

On the subject of euthanasia versus abortion, Jackson rhetorically asked: “Would it not be better to begin with people over sixty-five and eliminate the undesirables and clear the way for a new crop of human beings to come? Would it not be better to eliminate the confirmed criminals, dope addicts and peddlers, and all of those who have had their chance in life and have sinned against the opportunity? Would it not be rather selfish for this generation to insist upon remaining while it eliminates the innocent and makes a place for the guilty and for those who have proved to be unworthy?”

Australian Evangelicals: Up From Down Under

Over the platform hung the sign, “Christ calls us to a new obedience.” The National Evangelical Congress of Australia, the first such gathering to be held in that country, took the motto to heart as it tried to find out what obedience to Christ means for evangelicals in Australia in the 1970s.

Some 550 evangelicals from throughout the country gathered in Melbourne for the congress. Delegates followed a rigorous schedule, listening to position papers and participating in discussion groups from 7 A.M. until 10 at night.

Sir Paul Hasluck, Australia’s governor general, opened the August 23–28 conference by advising theologians to challenge men to respond to the whole of existence rather than simply to tell them they are sinners. Dr. Leon Morris, principal of Ridley College at the University of Melbourne, gave the opening address on “The Authentic Gospel.” Sharing the platform were the primate of Australia, Archbishop Frank Woods of Melbourne, and the archbishop of Sydney, Marcus Loane. Principal speaker was Canon Michael Green, head of St. John’s College, Nottingham, England.

A key thrust of the congress was the responsibility evangelicals must assume for their full role in the community regardless of whether this affords them opportunities for evangelism. In line with this, several speakers from outside the evangelical tradition were asked to say how they view evangelicals—an unusual feature for this country.

Mrs. Faith Bandler, an Australian aborigine, grabbed headlines in the daily papers with her accusation that Australians in general are racists. As a result, an action group to promote evangelical concern for aboriginal people was immediately formed.

Others from outside included a prominent Anglo-Catholic and a trades unionist. Several Christian radicals, speaking for alienated youth, criticized the faults of the older generation.

The congress adopted a statement recommending that evangelicals play a larger role in community affairs, and that they work for a church less dominated by the clergy and more ready to allow laymen to fulfill their ministry and to participate fully in liturgical reform.

Delegates were impatient at what they felt was the stuffiness of many Anglican practices, and were wholeheartedly with Green when he complained that too often converts are asked to be converted not only to Christ but to “sixteenth-century English, twelfth-century architecture, and fourth-century clothes.” If the will of the congress prevails, Anglican worship will be drastically altered—but it will be done in obedience to the Gospel. The primacy of the biblical revelation was never questioned.

Although there were discussions about the ministry of women—centering on what the Bible has to say about the matter—there was no central agreement (some held it teaches a subordination, others, that in ministry as in salvation all are one in Christ). The last word hasn’t yet been said.

There will also be much future discussion about the charismatic movement. Many wanted the congress to endorse neo-Pentecostalism; others hesitated. In the end the congress recognized that the Spirit gives gifts as he wills and commended the whole subject to the church for further study.

On the ecumenical movement, the congress held that evangelicals already have a unity that spans denominational barriers and that should be regarded as truly ecumenical. This kind of unity, the congress said, should be stressed in proposals for closer denominational unity.

LEON MORRIS

The Indefectible Dr. Küng

Four years after an invitation from Trinity College, Melbourne, to Swissborn Catholic theologian Hans Küng to speak at the school’s annual School of Theology, the noted professor was able to come; his visit coincided with the release in Australia of his book Infallible?Not surprisingly, the topic of papal infallibility held sway during his visit.

A disgruntled Roman Catholic commented: “Anglicans would be angry if Catholics brought out a radical Anglican theologian to deliver an attack on basic Anglican principles.”

Capacity audiences—including many Catholics as well as Anglicans and Protestants—attended. Küng asserted that not only can the Pope make errors; he has in fact made them, as have general councils. For good measure Küng suggested the Scriptures also contain errors. He argued for the indefectibility—rather than the infallibility—of the Church: the idea that though it may make mistakes, the Church will not finally fail of God’s purpose for it.

LEON MORRIS

Tycoons In The Temple

In the best tradition of Madison Avenue, radio preacher Carl McIntire last month tweaked the imagination of many Jews and students of Bible prophecy by announcing he will rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem—on fifteen acres at his new Cape Canaveral, Florida, complex.

McIntire refuses to disclose how much it will cost or when construction will begin. Finances of his own splintered organization are sagging, but—despite the arch-separatism he preaches—he may yoke himself to wealthy Jewish businessmen to fund the multi-million-dollar project. Several—including Maryland comptroller Leo

Goldstein—were invited to talks at McIntire’s Cape May, New Jersey, base where a model of the temple was on display (admission price: “a three-dollar donation”). McIntire escorted several others in a private plane to inspect the Florida site. Goldstein, for one, is for the venture. “It’s a great ecumenical idea,” he says. “I’m for anything that will bring people closer together.”

The 26-by-20-foot model is the creation of Lazare and Suzette Halberthal, Jewish refugees from Rumania. The couple spent more than thirty years building the one-fortieth scale model of Herod’s temple. Ten million visitors made it the leading attraction at the Pavilion of Judaism at Expo 67 in Montreal. It will serve as pattern for the full-sized temple in Florida.

After McIntire brought the Halberthals and their model to Cape May on a concession basis he told his radio audience it “is the most important thing ever in our possession.”

Citing Cape Canaveral’s proximity to Disneyworld (fifty miles away in Orlando), McIntire reportedly plans to market the Jerusalem temple nationally as a piggy-back tourist attraction. He already operates double-deck sightseeing buses between the two locations. The temple will be built in conjunction with his proposed biblical museum.

Wcc Racism Grants: Repeat Performance

The World Council of Churches apparently likes being controversial. The ecumenical body allocated another $200,000 to “anti-racist” groups around the world last month. A decision to fund such groups, including African guerrilla fighters, with a like amount a year ago (see October 9, 1970, issue, page 39, and November 20, 1970, issue, page 44), provoked a storm of protest and cost the WCC support from various sources.

The current grant is to twenty-four organizations, nine of which are southern Africa activist “liberation fronts.”

Following its reaction of a year ago, the South African Council of Churches again dissociated itself from the allocations. The largest slice of the grant—$130,000—goes to liberation movements in Rhodesia, South Africa, Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissao. The nine southern Africa groups listed as recipients by the WCC office also received money from the council in 1970. The largest individual grants are for $25,000; three groups, including The Peoples’ Movement for the Liberation of Angola, is allocated this amount. But The Revolutionary Government of Angola in Exile turned down its offered grant of $7,500, saying it was a “trap” and that the WCC had become “political.”

New in this allocation are funds to North American organizations. Two sure to evoke controversy are $7,500 grants to Malcolm X Liberation University in North Carolina and to the Southern Election Fund (it supports black political candidates in the South). Cesar Chavez’s California-based United Farm Workers will get a modest $2,500.

The WCC’s Executive Committee, which made the grants during its meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria, explained that the basic concept of the special fund “is to assist in the process by which the racially oppressed and powerless people of the world are enabled to become powerful, be self-reliant, and determine for themselves the political and social system under which they want to live.”

The Executive Committee also said the grants are made without any control over how the money is spent.

Meanwhile, McIntire is reminding his followers not to forget the top priority on his agenda: fight Communism. He has scheduled another “Victory March” and rally in Washington, D. C., on October 23 to protest President Nixon’s upcoming visit to Red China.

When Nixon announced he would receive Red Chinese ping pong team members who will tour here, McIntire countered with some ping pong diplomacy of his own. He organized tournaments among Christians on Taiwan and brought a championship team of nine to this country, challenging the United States Table Tennis Association to matches and goading Nixon to invite the Christian team to the White House. The top brass of the USTTA, host for the Red Chinese team, ignored McIntire and ordered members to do likewise, an order that split the USTTA ranks.

McIntire featured the team in protest rallies across the nation; all opponents—including some sharp USTTA players—were defeated.

Last month McIntire and aide James Shaw played ping pong on a table carried in front of the White House, then featured the Taiwan team in exhibition matches in a park across the street. In interviews, the Chinese players indicated they were led to believe they would be playing tournament games before large crowds instead of the impromptu matches in small church-related meetings. They insisted their American visit was an expression of friendship for America and not a protest.

However, twenty Chinese Christian leaders in Taiwan have announced they will visit here to mobilize church support-against Nixon’s China policy. McIntire invited them to share his protest platform on October 23, but they did not immediately respond.

McIntire is claiming that the Communists “murdered ten million Christians” in China and thus should be defeated, not courted.

Deaths

WILLIAM F. ALBRIGHT, 80, a leading biblical archaeologist, scholar, author, and longtime professor at Johns Hopkins University; of a stroke in a Baltimore nursing home (see editorial, page 32).

ROLAND DE VAUX, 68, biblical scholar and archaeologist who, as a French Dominican priest, achieved fame for his part in the discovery, transcription, editing, and publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls; in Jerusalem.

VICTOR J. REED, 65, bishop of Oklahoma City-Tulsa, ecumenical leader and critic of the Viet Nam war; of an apparent heart attack in Oklahoma City.

(Actually, there were fewer than four million church members and catechumens when the Communists took over the government. Nearly three million were Roman Catholics. A missionary writing in last month’s Eternity magazine claims that the ranks of evangelical Christianity have in fact doubled since 1950. Many house church groups are thriving, he says.)

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Graham Kicks Off Cowboys

Billy Graham christened the new home of the Dallas Cowboys professional football team last month with a ten-day Greater Southwest Crusade. It was the first public use of the 65,000-seat stadium. Appropriately enough, Cowboy coach Tom Landry, a Methodist known for his evangelical convictions, served as crusade general chairman.

Crowds ranging from 41,300 to 51,200 were on hand for the first five services. A total of more than 7,000 responded to Graham’s invitation during that period.

Among the celebrities who paid a visit were former President and Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson.

The new stadium is located at Irving, Texas, between Dallas and Fort Worth (it is not the stadium selected for use by the Washington Senators baseball club, which is being moved to Texas). The Cowboys were scheduled to play their first game there October 10.

Panorama

Nearly 120 persons gathered at Elmhurst (Illinois) College last month for the first conference of the Fellowship of Concerned Churchmen, a spiritual renewal group within the United Church of Christ. The fellowship is composed mainly of pastors who are disenchanted with secularistic and humanistic trends within the denomination.

Zondervan will release The Jesus Generation by Billy Graham October 29. The book is Graham’s first youth-oriented title in fifteen years.

A youth-led volleyball marathon sponsored by Fall River, Massachusetts, Baptist churches netted $1,250 for a cancer-research fund last month. The game lasted 132 hours and “made people aware that evangelicals are alive and well in Fall River.”

Former Beatle George Harrison’sMy Sweet Lord was voted the best single record of the year last month in both the international and British sections of a poll by the Melody Maker, Britain’s largest-circulation music paper.

An eight-day evangelistic crusade in Gulfport, Mississippi, brought 1,032 professions of faith. Baptist leaders called the interdenominational crusade, led by evangelist James Robison of Fort Worth, “the greatest Christian happening on the Gulf Coast” in recent history.

COCU has a new associate general secretary: the Reverend William C. Larkin, 30, a former district executive of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Larkin succeeds W. Clyde Williams, who has become president of Miles College in Birmingham.

Archbishop Marcus Loane of Sydney, who made headlines during the Pope’s visit to Australia in 1970 by refusing to attend an ecumenical service in which Catholics and most Protestant denominations took part, was in the news again last month when he declined to attend the installation of Catholic Archbishop Freeman of Sydney.

Ben Haden, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Chattanooga, Tennessee, preached in a White House religious service September 12. Billy Graham gave the benediction.

Greek Orthodox primate Archbishop Iakovos baptized the granddaughter of the late Russian dictator, Joseph Stalin, in ceremonies in Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Milwaukee last month. The child, Olga Peters, is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. William Wesley Peters; Mrs. Peters is the former Svetlana Alliluyeva.

Dr. Paul M. Nagano, pastor of the Japanese Baptist Church in Seattle, has been elected chairman of the newly formed Asian American Baptist Caucus.

World Scene

The first complete Bible concordance in Hausa, the native language of six million and a commercial language for many others in West Africa, is expected to be off the press this fall. Its author is a Southern Baptist missionary who has been in Nigeria since 1948, Bonnie Mae Moore.

Febias College of Bible in Manila has been accredited to grant the bachelor of arts degree. The school, under another name, was established in 1948 as the first project of Far Eastern Gospel Crusade.

The Swedish Ecumenical Council has appealed to the Soviet Union and other Eastern governments to respect freedom of religion in their countries. The council cited “undue interference” by authorities and cautioned against “the lessening of tension by silence.” Nearly 3,000 mainstream Protestant pastors and lay leaders from throughout Korea reportedly descended on Holiness Interdenominational Church in Pusan for an institute conducted by San Diego, California, charismatic evangelist Morris Cerullo, breaking down the church doors and smashing windows in order to gain entry to the packed church.

World Gospel Crusades has completed its Every Creature Crusades in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic; 850,000 homes were reached with Gospels of John. The nondenominational missionary literature agency is planning another crusade in Honduras this winter.

Between 6,000 and 8,000 Honduran villagers were touched with Christian love and the helping hands of Atlanta physicians from Northside Baptist Church during a medical mission program. In one village 1,691 patients were treated, 891 teeth extracted, 1,300 persons heard the Gospel, and 36 decisions were recorded.

A slight, bespectacled, 73-year-old dental technician has established his twenty-seventh church in the Philippines. “I manufacture dentures for a living,” says Urbano Castillo, who averages $85 a year for his dental work, “but my main business is winning souls to Christ.”

Another British religious weekly, the 56,000-circulation Sunday Companion that offered “family reading,” ceases publication this month.

The Baptists in Czechoslovakia have published a new hymnal with 670 hymns, the largest thus far for that country.

British humanists—like British churches—are having membership and financial woes: membership last year fell from more than 4,000 to fewer than 3,000, and the financial deficit increased threefold.

Gospel Films’ High on the Campus, a fifty-two-minute color documentary, will be used by the government of Brazil in its nationwide effort to halt the use of dangerous drugs.

University of Singapore medical students receiving evangelistic training from The Navigators organization say they have witnessed to all the non-Christian medical students in the school. Now they are evangelizing a nearby housing estate of carpenters and masons. Dozens of teen-agers and young adults have become Christians and are engaged in Bible study.

Television preacher Rex Humbard, 51, means business in Akron, Ohio. Last month—despite pending litigation by neighbors—he ordered pile drivers to begin construction of Ohio’s tallest building next door to his posh Cathedral of Tomorrow. The 750-foot structure will serve as a transmitting tower for his new commercial UHF station, and it will house a revolving 250-seat restaurant near its top—to help pay the $3.9 million building costs financed by a Teamsters Union pensionfund loan. Opposition has been sparse; the tower will generate more than $50,000 in local taxes annually.

Profits from the station will be used to help stake the Cathedral’s ministry, the same as profits from other Cathedral-related enterprises, says business manager Ellis Baird. These other enterprises range from girdle manufacturing to publishing, videotape production, and real-estate management.

In June, Humbard’s Cathedral acquired Akron’s huge downtown Cascade Plaza, including the twenty-four-story Akron Center office building and $20,000 annual air-rights payments from two others, for an estimated $10 million from contractor John Galbreath. Galbreath required no cash from Humbard, will stretch the down payment over ten years, and may forgive most of it, says Baird. Meanwhile, Humbard hopes only to keep abreast of the mortgage and says he expects no profits from the deal for at least five years. “Paul made tents for a living,” he explains. “We’re gonna rent buildings.”

Humbard plans to move the Cathedral business offices to the center and also to open a counseling clinic. No contributions to the Cathedral will be used to support any of the business operations, Baird vows. This includes the estimated $80,000 a week pouring in from those who tune Humbard in on more than 350 stations, mostly UHF. Humbard’s TV bills are reportedly about $100,000 a week.

A year ago the Cathedral purchased the nearby Shoppers Fair building for $3.1 million, also financed by the Teamsters. Humbard converted it into television studios, a restaurant, Sunday-school rooms, and offices for an advertising agency he bought. Local taxes yield $43,000 yearly.

Next month, says Humbard, he will open the most modern videotape facility between New York and Hollywood. Producers, directors, and other staffers have already been hired, and negotiations are under way involving several large Midwest firms that may let Humbard produce their TV ads. As a by-product, Humbard’s own TV ministry stands to be enhanced—and subsidized.

Under recent federal laws the Cathedral must pay income taxes on profits derived from its new businesses, and on businesses owned prior to this year beginning in 1976. Baird says the Cathedral will sell the latter as soon as possible. Unity Electronics of New York City has already been sold, and Real Form Girdle company in Brooklyn is up for grabs. Humbard bought these firms in 1965 after paying off the original Teamsters mortgage on the Cathedral.

Humbard’s business associates are holding their corporate breath over one of the latest acquisitions: the Mackinac College campus in upper Michigan (see May 7 issue, page 37). Humbard reportedly plunked down $3 million for the thirty-two-acre island campus, valued at $15 million, and announced plans to open his own college in September, 1972, to replace the Moral Re-Armament school that folded three years ago. Many blamed the isolated site and bleak winters for enrollment decline.

But Humbard says he can turn the liability into an asset. Last month he told the island’s residents he will buy additional land and turn the campus into a ski resort during winter months. Students will spend these months in work-related “cooperative educational programs” in businesses and industries elsewhere. Construction of the ski run has already begun, and ski instructors have been hired. During summers the campus will double as a Bible conference center and family vacation spa. Meanwhile Humbard is scouting for faculty and students.

The 6,000 who attend the Cathedral’s Sunday-morning services have no say in business affairs. The church and business operations are under the supervision of a six-person board; Humbard and his wife Maude Aimee are to of them.

The Cathedral’s ministry budget is $600,000 this year, with the bulk earmarked for mortgage payments and $25,000 designated for missions. The church has thirty paid staffers, half of them ministerial. It operates eighteen Sunday-school buses.

Humbard and brother-in-law Wayne Jones, the Cathedral’s assistant pastor, came to Akron in 1953 as an evangelistic team. They rented theaters and built up a following, then erected the $3.5 million Cathedral in 1958. (They were rescued from bankruptcy by the Teamsters) In lieu of salaries the pair lived on “love offerings” until the board put them on salary two years ago. Humbard gets $25,000 a year (from bond interest not the collection plates) plus housing, autos, and an executive-style expense account. He flies to out-of-town meetings is a private four-engine Viscount prop-jet.

The Humbard road show is largely a family affair: his wife, sister, and two sons all sing; Jones helps with platform chores and announces the offerings. Humbard preached to 8,000 at the recent Canadian National Exposition in Toronto, and this month he was scheduled to preach at Carnegie Hall.

The folksy Arkansas-bred Humbard, a fundamentalist, comes across on TV as a half Bible-belt Baptist, half hillbilly Pentecostal evangelist. He often mixes up verb tenses. His image is sometimes incongruous, as in his latest TV special aired on 344 stations from a beautiful Hawaiian coastal setting. Against an instrumental backdrop of “Beyond the Sunset” Humbard twanged out a recitation to his wife.

“I told my husband I’d live with him in a tent when he asked me to marry him,” Maude Aimee told a reporter when Humbard bought the Akron Center. “He was so poor we couldn’t afford a house. But I said I’d rather live with a man I loved than to live in luxury. Who would have thought it would come to this?”

Man From Miracle Valley

“Compassion Explosion” is what handsome, 31-year-old Don Stewart, successor to revivalist A. A. Allen, calls his current campaign. Some 15,000 people jammed New York’s Madison Square Garden September 11 to shout choruses, clap hands, sing praises and listen to the electric words of the evangelist from Miracle Valley, Arizona.

About half of the audience were black or Puerto Rican. Many had come for the healing sessions, the climax of Stewart’s meetings and a hallmark of the A. A. Allen operation. Allen died last year of acute alcoholism (see July 17, 1970 issue, page 38), and Stewart was “anointed” to take his place.

Located on a 2,400-acre tract about 100 miles southwest of Tucson, Miracle Valley enterprises have a staff of 200, a mailing list of 400,000 supporters, and a yearly budget of $3.5 million. The center includes a dozen major buildings, a two-year Bible college, a publishing plant, a motion picture and television lab, a 2,500-seat church, and the “Pool of Bethesda” healing residence. The organization has licensed about 8,000 independent evangelists.

“The Compassion Explosion may not have broken out in the beautiful temples and churches and synagogues of the outer world yet—but it has broken out in the hearts of you, and in the hearts of thousands of youth in the Jesus Movement,” Stewart told the New York audience.

During the healing service, apparent arthritis victims and drug addicts reportedly were cured. A thousand-voice predominantly black choir presented numbers during the three-hour meeting. It ended with an altar call during which about one-third of the audience streamed forward to receive Christ.

Most of the New York meetings were held in a huge tent set up in the Bronx. Following three weeks there, Stewart was slated to take Compassion Explosion to Dayton, Ohio, and thence to Knoxville, Tennessee.

Stewart, who stands six feet tall and weighs 200 pounds, said that he receives no fixed salary but that occasional offerings for personal expenses average about $50,000 a year.

NEWS

Leonard Bernstein, Kennedy friend and Angela Davis sympathizer, dedicated the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts with what Paul Hume of the Washington Post called a “spiritual masterpiece” and Father Gilbert Hartke of Catholic University described as a “mish-mosh solemnis.” Although critics were generally harsh on Mass, audiences at all eleven performances gave the show long, boisterous standing ovations.

The Center also got its share of derogation: one critic called it a “Brobdingnagian shoebox.” Made of Carrara marble—all 3,700 tons donated by Italy—the building is a rectangle the size of four football fields decorated in a red and gold combination that verges on the gaudy. The Opera House, the Center’s middle theater, is designed for opera and ballet. Mass contains a little bit of both—as well as blues, jazz, marches, and even some fairly hard rock. To perform this motley music, Bernstein uses a string orchestra with organ and percussion in the pit, two rock bands, a brass marching band, and a woodwind ensemble on stage—plus two choruses, assorted soloists, and twenty-three well-trained dancers.

Kyrie eleison, a prerecorded twelve-tone soprano duet increasing in intensity and confusion, pierces the silent, darkened theater. The curtain rises and the celebrant, melodramatically played by Alan Titus, sings “A Simple Song” to and about his God. “God,” he says, “is the simplest of all.” The viewer isn’t told what this means, but apparently Titus plays a believer; as the song ends he dons the first robe of his clerical garb.

From this point on, the action never lags. The congregation—some dressed as straights, others as hips—sing, swing, and dance across the entire stage. The choreography is excellent, and most of the soloists certainly know how to sing; in fact, the enthusiasm and professionalism of the performers surprises and impresses.

When the purple-clothed monks enter with the elements, the mass begins to throb with conflict. The celebrant kneels to pray, mumbles a few Latin words, and is drowned out by the congregation and orchestra. As he begins the confession he is again silenced by the clamoring questions of the congregation, who refer to the Incarnation as a “small social call” and to God as “plastic.”

The Credo is turned upside down, becoming non credo in unum deum: One man wants to believe but can’t, another once believed but doesn’t anymore, and a third will believe “in any God who believes in me.” One God, three, or twenty-three—it makes no difference if only God will make himself known. “We’re fed up with your heavenly silence,/And we only get action with violence.” Perhaps the crowd has never stopped declaiming long enough to hear God’s still, small voice.

The celebrant is the thematic key. It is essentially his mass and his conflict. The congregation look to him as the answer man for all their doubts: he acts so self-assured. As he walks through the congregation, people rise with arms outstretched to him. After he reads the epistle, the song “The Word of the Lord” affirms that God’s truth will survive. But Bernstein’s political allusions to “men of power” and “local vocal yokels who we know collect a crowd” shatter what could have been his most positive religious statement:

For the Word,

for the Word was at the birth

of the beginning

It made the heavens and the earth

and set them spinning,

And for several million years

It’s withstood all our forums and

bad ideas …

It’s been tough

but it seems to be winning.

As in the traditional mass, the celebrant adds vestments as it progresses. The more outwardly religious he appears, the more confusion is seen in his face and heard in his voice. “Let us pray,” he repeats with increasing desperation. But there are no prayers, only plaintive music interrupted by painful electronic organ sounds.

The priest tries to praise God, but the choirboys take him from his task with stunts and acrobatics while they continue to sing the gloria patri. The symbolism is apparent. The children vie for the celebrant’s favor and attention with look-at-me hand motions just as human beings, Bernstein seems to say, vie for God’s favor.

As Mass draws closer to the consecration of the elements, the dancers foreshadow what is to come with frenzied, angular movements. The congregation taunt the celebrant with agnus deis and dona nobis pacems. They surround him, screaming, demanding peace—peace, not just meaningless religious ritual. Bernstein’s stage directions to be “menacing, wild, barbaric, and relentless” express exactly the congregation’s attitude. They are the visual image of the celebrant’s own soul, tormenting and mocking him.

The celebrant turns from his congregation to begin his ascent up a long flight of stairs, carrying the bread and wine. He stumbles but continues, bent low. Unfortunately, intended or not, the scene is reminiscent of Christ’s trip to Calvary. At the top of the stairs the priest stands with outstretched arms, still holding the chalice of wine and the bread.

The congregation then go berserk in one of the show’s most bizarre scenes. The lighting changes from purple to red to orange—and the music, singers, and dancers seem on fire with orgiastic ecstasy. The scene is suggestive of the Israelites in the golden calf orgy, with Moses holding the twelve tablets and looking down on the people from the mountain top.

This episode epitomizes the charge made by New York Times critic Harold Schonberg that the show is “vulgar … pretentious and thin, as thin as the watery liberalism that dominates the message of his work.”

The celebrant screams “let us prayer” and the orgy abruptly ends. As he descends the stairs he throws down the elements, crying “how easily things get broken.” “An accident, it was only an accident,” he says while he tramples the bread and wine into the ground. The sequence is meant to be tragic; instead, the celebrant is merely pathetic in his childish agony. He cries, babbles, and whines through sixteen tedious minutes. Ripping off his vestments, he asks the congregation why they look up to him: “Can’t you see? Underneath there is nothing but me.”

He desecrates the altar, plays in a sandbox (how unsubtle, Mr. Bernstein), and finally (thankfully) descends into the orchestra pit and exits.

In places Mass is shocking, almost blasphemous. At one performance a woman yelled: “This is pagan, not Christian.… It is sacrilegious.” She then left, sputtering.

Reaction of Catholics was mixed, but most felt horror and despair, according to Father Hartke, Catholic University’s drama head. He told CHRISTIANITY TODAY he had received numerous telegrams from throughout the country. He said of Bernstein: “It appears to me that this is a mind that neither understands nor believes in the mass.… This work and I are worlds apart.”

Although Bernstein’s intention “is to communicate as directly and universally as I can a reaffirmation of faith,” his conclusion is unconvincing. The congregation, singing laude, laude, resolve the spiritual crisis without God, whose voice is never heard. This emptiness drives the celebrant mad—and leads the congregation to rely on human emotion for salvation.

Even this humanism is shallow and vapid. The lyrics are devoid of deep meaning, the symbolism is overworked, the music is derivative, and the conflicts fail to grip the problem.

“Go in peace, the mass is ended,” Bernstein concludes. But no peace is found in this “reaffirmation of faith.” Man’s restlessness remains.

GOING, GOING, GONE

When the daily paper arrives, my wife hastens to cut out the auction advertisements and burn them. Otherwise I would attend the auctions—all of them. I have a mania for them, no matter what’s being sold.

One hot summer afternoon I found myself standing for two hours in the blazing sun at a bicycle auction. Nothing else there—just bicycles. That has to be considered a strange use of time for someone whose storage shed already housed four bikes.

To justify my strange behavior I pointed out to my friends that auctions provide an interesting study in the values and tastes of the bidders as well as a glimpse into the lives of those who originally collected the junk—or treasure, as the case may be.

I have pondered the generation gap while watching a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and a Queen Anne chair being auctioned as part of the same estate.

What schizophrenia of taste, I have wondered, could account for the fact that one house spawned both a reasonably good collection of original art and a vast collection of Reader’s Digest condensed books?

But the most interesting exercise at an auction is trying to deduce why people are willing to pay what they do for some of the stranger items. What inner longing is satisfied by the acquisition of an item that is totally useless or consummately ugly?

At one sale the auctioneer held up an intricately contrived device incorporating two cog wheels, three prongs, a spring, and a lever arm. It was the kind of thing my teen-ager would call a “do-golly.”

When the auctioneer called for a starting offer, one cautious bidder asked, “What is it?” The auctioneer examined the device with a puzzled look and replied, “I don’t know, but if you’ve got another one this one would make it a pair.”

Everyone laughed, but someone bought it.

At another sale I watched with fascination as two sixtyish women claimed their purchases: two Mae West shaped vases garishly decorated with blue-green vines. They were aglow with their triumph in being the successful bidders on the twin monstrosities.

I have observed perfectly sane people bidding more than the current retail price for items that had been badly used.

Over and over again as I’ve attended auctions I’ve found myself saying, “They paid that for those?” I’m sure some of those people have later said the same thing to themselves.

I wonder if some dweller in a far-off planet looks at God’s redemptive transaction on earth and thinks of his choices, “He paid that for those?”

But as Publilius Syrus pointed out, “Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.”

A BRIDGE BETWEEN

The generation gap closed completely between this almost sixty-year-old “conservative” Christian and D. John Benson when 1 read “Please, Before I Hit the Ground” (Sept. 10).

Rarely is one so young blessed with such a marvelous gift of insight, or able to write with such pathos while blunting the sting of his satire with such love and gentle humor. Rarer still his ability to bridge not only the generation gap but the communication gap between practitioners of hide-bound orthodoxy and hard rock evangelism.

Carl Junction, Mo.

In pain I write, having just fought my way through D. John Benson’s “Please, Before I Hit the Ground.” With incisive awareness, the author discerns the publican’s plea and with laser beam, penetrates deep into pharisee fog.

Okeene, Okla.

CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE

In the editorial titled, “How Well Do You Support Your Pastor?” (Sept. 10), we read: “ ‘The laborer is worthy of his hire,’ Jesus said, but when making out the pastor’s paycheck, many Bible-believing churches do not seem to believe that Jesus really uttered those words.” …

The instruction of the churches on the subject of ministerial support is sadly, almost criminally, neglected. No subject of like importance receives so little attention from the preacher in his pulpit ministrations or his personal pastoral instruction. Some neglect to teach the duty of pastoral support because they are so obsessed with iridescent dreams and utopian theories that they cannot come down to a thing so practical. Others neglect it because of a spurious timidity lest they be preaching for money! Still others neglect it because they do not realize how fundamentally the doctrine is grounded in Scripture teaching. Every word spoken on the subject and every example illustrating it, either in the Old or the New Testament, teaches unequivocally that the preacher must give his undivided time to his ministry, and further that those to whom he ministers must provide his temporal support! The preacher or the church that wantonly, heedlessly, and willfully disobeys or thoughtlessly disregards this reasonable and clearly enunciated Scripture law will come to speedy and irretrievable disaster!

Richfield, Minn.

A SUGGESTION FOR PUBLISHERS

Thank you for your article “Thou Shalt Not Copy, Right?” by Cheryl A. Forbes (Sept. 10). The article saved my church from violating this law; we weren’t aware that what we were about to do was wrong. We had planned to duplicate hymns on a copying machine and then put them in a looseleaf binder as a supplemental hymnal to the one we already use.

We are still, however, in a dilemma. As you are probably aware, no one hymnal is fully satisfying to any one congregation. There are always hymns left out that people feel should have been included. An additional hymnal is not the answer; you get too much duplication, and even then favorite hymns are often not found in either book. I would like to suggest to the publishers that they make available copies of individual hymns suitable for binding in a looseleaf binder. The cost to the publisher would be only a few cents a sheet that he could in turn sell for between five and ten cents a sheet. This would mean that a congregation of two hundred with one hundred looseleaf hymnals could introduce new hymns for five to ten dollars. I am convinced that churches would be willing to pay this much to do this. I would be interested to know the reaction of some publishers to this suggestion.

North Ridge Alliance Church

Raleigh, N. C.

Thank you very much for … [the] article “Thou Shalt Not Copy, Right?” This is an excellent article and [Miss Forbes] handled the material very well.

The Sunday School Board

Nashville, Tenn.

EVIL ‘ECONOMIC WILL-TO-POWER’

Dr. Byron Lambert, in his essay “On Avoiding Work” (Aug. 27), unfortunately underestimates the dimension of evil in man’s work in his attempt to bolster the spirits of the restless and disenchanted worker. While I agree with him that there is no escape from work, I cannot agree with his further implication that all work is therefore intrinsically good, meaningful, and glorifying to God, if only it could be discovered. All work is not intrinsically good. As long as man is able to exercise his economic will-to-power over his fellow man, he will offer him many jobs that oppress and dehumanize him rather than fulfill him and bring glory to God.

His counsel to the worker that he transmute his work into “a discipline that rebuilds the soul” is wholly unsatisfactory—and bad theology. It gives the worker the false impression that what he thinks is degrading in his job really is not and that all he has to do to perceive the goodness of his work is to “engage in it with eternal purpose.” It is bad theology because it blurs the distinction between good and evil in life and gives the erroneous impression that God is not angered with the present, ever-changing subtle forms of evil with which we must constantly struggle. If all work were inherently good, it would be possible to talk about its use for rebuilding the soul. However, since this is not the case, we must not think that personally degrading work ever glorifies God. We do not do justice to God’s sensitivity to evil (or even what should be our own sensitivity to evil) when we attempt to make all evil seem innocuous and potentially good.

It is necessary that we acknowledge much that is patently evil in all economic systems if we ever hope to deal effectively with the plight of the restless worker. No amount of PMA can transmute evil into anything but evil. It is only by rising above, not in acquiescing to, the evil of the particular job that the worker can “grow and rebuild his soul.” While he may grow as a consequence of his confrontation with the evils of his job, the evils themselves will still remain as evil as ever. Dr. Lambert’s advice to the worker might give the disgruntled worker some eternal consolation in his plight; but it is given at the serious expense of removing a solid basis for an effective, persistent attack on the evil of the job itself.…

I would suggest that Dr. Lambert reread Marx. Nowhere, to my knowledge, does Marx suggest that communism will abolish work. It is my understanding that he says communism will relieve the working classes of the oppressive work they must endure under capitalism. It is certainly not necessary to distort Marx in order to disagree with him. If we are interested in truth at all, it is necessary that we state the position of those we disagree with forthrightly so that we, and others, know precisely where our disagreement lies.

Urbana, Ill.

ALLEGIANCE VS. ASSOCIATION?

Your editorial “Affirming Religious Freedom” (Aug. 27) was thoughtful and timely. The new Ontario law indeed restrains labour unions which “demand personal allegiance.” This stipulation, however, is radically different from “association” (as you put it) with both non-Christian employers and unions. Confusion of this essential difference would understandably give rise to the easily answered editorial query. To phrase it in a quasi-biblical way, unlike ancient Jews, Christian Labour Unionists certainly “associate” even with all Samaritans. Those Christians though will never make union with Samaritans on the grounds of a Samaritan allegiance!

Almonte Reformed Presbyterian Church

Almonte, Ont.

PUBLIC EDUCATION: DISGUISED CHARITY?

You report that a Mrs. Ruhlin is lobbying in Congress to discharge a petition to reinstate prayers in public schools (“Prayer Amendment: Second Wind,” Aug. 27). She started when one of her children asked why God is kept out of schools.

He isn’t. He goes there with each Christian child. But consider what else is involved. The subsidized schools’ resources are taken from those who don’t benefit, by force. This is the essence of evil, from which, Christ is quoted as saying, no good fruit can grow.… Public schools teach children that they have “rights” without duties.… Public education is a vast form of cleverly disguised public charity, and, as a careful examination will reveal, vastly a fake, for it takes from the students and their families their basic duty to learn, which is the absolute necessity to moral education.

Plantation, Fla.

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED

I am writing with reference to the allegation of Dr. Carl McIntire of Collingswood, New Jersey, as it appeared in “McIntire’s Mélange” (May 7). Edward Plowman reports McIntire as saying, “Rambo, who worked in the office, was expelled from Shelton in 1967 for discipline reasons.”

The truth of the matter is thus: … Following the leadership of McIntire himself, (I) renounced the jurisdiction of Shelton College’s president, and left Shelton College. It will be recalled many years ago McIntire renounced the jurisdiction of his own Presbyterian Church, and left to form the Bible Presbyterian Church.…

McIntire, being misinformed of the nature of my activities … issued directives against me for “competing with him and his Christian Beacon, trying to put him out of business.”

Oaklyn, N. J.

The ‘New Consciousness’

Although social critics devote considerable attention to the so-called new consciousness, the Zeitgeist is so chaotic that no pulse-readings taken at any one time and place will serve reliably to chart the current situation.

Even the mood on American campuses varies widely. Some universities report that little has changed, while others find life vastly different; student revolt has peaked and is discredited, and job-material needs have become forefront concerns.

For all that, the campus world is haunted by monumental frustrations. The so-called scientific world-view, long the captivating goddess of the oncoming generation, is now a despised ogre of counter-cultural youth. The values long championed by technocratic scientism, with its reduction of the externally real world solely to mathematically predictable sequences of impersonal events, are being cast aside by the alienated young. They repudiate the depersonalization of reality as a kind of addictive mythology of twentieth-century pseudo-intellectuals.

The modern mentality remains bewitched, however, by moral relativism, and simply assumes (without any intelligent understanding of it) that the biblical life-view is out of date. Between a repudiated scientism on one hand and a forfeited supernaturalism on the other, the counter-cultural revolt drifts in muddy, murky waters.

Dr. W. Harry Jellema, one of the brilliant philosophical minds of our day, finds the prime cause of modern frustration not so much in what positively identifies the spirit of the times as in what negatively is lacking in it. In remarks to leaders of the Institute for Advanced Christian Studies, Jellema recently noted that from the American elementary schoolroom onward most of the present generation of both faculty and students has had no education in the Christian heritage. The contemporary classroom steeps its learners in the modern secular outlook but presents no viable alternative in terms of the history of ideas or of world cultures. Whether students come from Protestant, Roman Catholic, or Jewish homes seems to make little difference; all of them are immersed in secular concerns to the virtual exclusion of eternal and spiritual interests.

Much campus frustration today stems from inner dissatisfactions with an academic milieu that offers no impressive defense of an alternative perspective on life. However unsatisfying, the prevalent outlook is assumed to have no reasonable or valid rival.

To be sure, many hundreds of evangelical scholars serve on influential secular campuses in one post or another. But unfortunately professors who negate biblical theism tend to dominate the religion and philosophy departments; however vocal they may be for academic freedom to promulgate special viewpoints, they themselves seldom sponsor proponents of historic Christian theism. Instead, they seem to issue a special welcome to the purveyors of novelty.

Evangelical scholars are aware that modern science has created much of its own bad press because some of its spokesmen arrogantly equated the scientific outlook with a certain highly partisan way of projecting science. Consequently not science but scientism came to identify reality solely with the extrapolations of empirical scientific methodology. It then dignified this arbitrarily limited reading of reality as the scientific world-view.

Some empirical dogmatists now go so far as to scandalize biblical values as the source of many modern problems. The divine exhortation that man “multiply” and exercise “dominion” over the earth is blamed for the modern reproductive rate and for ecological problems. It matters little to such propagandists that empirical scientism itself offers no basis whatever for establishing or vindicating any permanent norms. All that seems to matter to such spokesmen is that their dogmatisms be trusted as the latest word. What this line of argument shows most of all is that the younger generation is not alone in its ignorance about what the Bible really teaches.

Dr. Martin Buerger, a former director of the School of Advanced Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has said that neglect of the Scriptural heritage through professional concentration on empirical laboratory interests is one of the vocational hazards to which scientific technicians are vulnerable.

Neglect of the Bible is no less a vocational danger of theologians. This is perhaps least excusable in evangelical circles, which place a high estimate on scriptural revelation. One can be substituting evangelical for non-evangelical activism while all the while revelational compass-bearings become increasingly obscure.

The new-breed theology now in vogue sacrifices personal piety to social activism, and through its neglect of the Word of God tends to misunderstand both man and society. Indeed, it transmutes theology itself from reflection upon God’s self-revelation and the reproduction of his Word to man into reflection on social problems and the implementation of secular techniques for coping with them. Because, as the secular theologian declares, modern man is assertedly earth-oriented and uninterested in questions of spirit, the biblical message is held to be no longer intelligible or relevant.

Strange as it may seem to the secular scientist and secular theologian, counter-cultural youth are repudiating this reading both of external reality and of the inner life of modern man. They see that scientific reductionism has mythologized the real world, and that secular theologians have accommodated their prognosis of contemporary man to that myth. The technocratic scientist concentrates his interest on impersonal and mathematically relatable events, and the secular theologian accommodatingly deflects his interests from the self-revelation of a supernatural God.

But if, as Christianity insists, man is made in the image of God for a destiny in the eternal world, then the existence of God and the realm of spirit must inevitably remain an abiding interest of all who do not suppress it. Every statistical poll of the masses confirms such an interest in the invisible spiritual world.

The youth-revolt, in its turn to the mystical-transcendent, has pronounced its own verdict on scientific reductionism (and by extension upon secular theologians who share its prejudices). Disaffiliated youth call such thinking not simply irrelevant but mythological. We need not belabor the irony of an oncoming generation’s imputation of a propensity for fairylike legend to intellectuals who prided themselves on having banished even miracles from the world of modern intelligence. What we must note, rather, in a day when secular theologians have dropped a curtain over the transcendent spiritual claims of the Christian religion, is the striking revival in Western society of interest in astrology, spiritism, and fortune-telling, and a resort even to Oriental mysticism.

The modern consciousness is not, of course, in all respects the consciousness of yesteryear. But the propensity for myths—whether on the part of the young or of their elders—endures. It is not so much a new consciousness as a new mythology that seems to characterize the successive lost generations.

The only deliverance from this sad predicament lies in setting the question of authentic selfhood once again in the context of God’s creation and recreation of man. If any new factor marks our generation, it is the almost total loss of an intelligible rationale for a transcendent alternative to the secular reduction of reality. Never since the age of Augustine has a reasoned evangelical faith been more imperative.

CARL F. H. HENRY