I find myself in Sydney, Australia, a long way from home, but only a few hours removed from the theological goings-on of Western Europe. These days there is no such thing as isolation; I knew this before, but am discovering it in new ways. We live in a global village theologically, as in almost every other way. The death of Reinhold Niebuhr was known here in Australia as soon as it would have been in Amsterdam. The same theological problems fill the pages of the journals here that keep us reading there.

We live in a single theological world, and that is something to be glad about. To be a theologian is no longer the interesting hobby of a few scholars neatly tucked away in a corner of a university, on a side road away from the freeways of life. Theology has to be on the mainroads of life or it has lost its directions.

Theologies are measured these days by a standard of relevance; the basic question asked about a theology is whether it is relevant, significant for the fundamental questions of human existence in this time. A lot of theological work that, yesterday, we assumed was vitally important and true may today be pushed aside. The historical dimensions of theology get short shrift from this disposition; to those who find only what fits directly into today’s situation important, church history and the history of dogma are studies of theological relics.

But this trend is not a pure blessing; it often carries theological poverty in its heart. Examples are not hard to find. Theological stars, like Hollywood discoveries, rise and fall in the Church’s firmament, and after their fall it turns out that the stars hadn’t shed much light after all. But in this atmosphere, even modest warnings against theological confusion and stupidity, to say nothing of heresy, are shrugged off; what has clarity or truth to do with relevance?

The compulsion to turn one’s back on history can be fatal. The present time can become a myth, an idol that is most fragile. A student can get so immersed in this time that he loses the opportunity to gain the information he really needs to be relevant, theologically, for this time.

I am glad to be able to say that this opinion is shared by more young theologians today than in the recent past. Many young students have rediscovered history. And these are not students who have reacted against the demand for relevance and have retreated from the stern demands that true relevance makes on the theologian. They have, on the contrary, discovered that the route to relevance in the present often leads through the past.

The European student who reads only the publications of the last ten years or so has become a somewhat ridiculous figure. There are symptoms that people are beginning to catch hold of the obvious—that the only way to understand and minister to one’s own time is by understanding the past. Isolation from history brings, in the end, fruitlessness for the present.

To accept this is, of course, a far cry from the historicism or the historical relativism many of us reject. But it is the discovery of the inexpendable usefulness of the past for grasping the meaning and truth of the Gospel for our time. Not to see this is to condemn oneself to irrelevance, no matter how contemporary one’s jargon may sound. On the other hand, not to see that the past must be brought to bear on our ministry in our time is to be orthodox for the sake of orthodoxy, instead of for the sake of service.

I believe that no significant and ministering theology is possible without intense involvement with the past. This was true of Aquinas, of Luther, of Calvin; it was just as true of Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Niebuhr, or anyone else who has been significant in the world of theology. They were sensitive to the tensions and conflicts of the past in direct relation to their sensitivity to the tensions and conflicts of their own times. None of them turned his back on the needs of his day in order to play peaceful theological games with the past. The urgency of their own time forced them back into history to see what God had done and what God had led men to say and do back there.

To leave theology to modernity-intoxicated men who live only in the shallows of contemporary thought is to throw theology into the hands of theological delinquents. The stars of sheer relevance are not long on stage. They offer a bargain-counter theology; it may be tempting to people who want to become stars themselves without the bother of such nettlesome stuff as exegesis and history and other “irrelevancies” in the curriculum. But what they offer is a very inferior product that is obsolete at the next turn of the corner.

So we greet the new theological generation, a generation that appears to have seen through the simplistic bandwagon fads of much theological sloganeering. This generation seems ready to get to work again, free from arrogance, liberated from glittering generalities. To get to work, really to work—this is a decision that bears a promise of greater fruitfulness in theology for the today of Christ’s Church in our world.

Sunshine, rock festivals, and Jesus add up to the ideal way to spend the summer for thousands of young Christians from coast to coast. Each area has its own angle. On a North Carolina beach the Gospel is preached from an ice cream parlor. In Texas 10,000 Baptist youth joined in a “spiritual blitz” of Fort Worth. And in California the July 4 message was “Come to Santa Barbara for sun and Son.”

Billed as Spiritual Independence Weekend, the Santa Barbara happenings included two afternoons of beach evangelism and a “Jesus is the Rock Festival” sponsored by Areopagus, a coffeehouse ministry.

Over a thousand people gathered in an open-air amphitheater in the hills south of Santa Barbara to hear the witness of California’s top Jesus-movement musicians. Surrounded by eucalyptus, pine, and live oak trees, the natural bowl was filled with the folk and rock sounds of groups such as Gentle Faith, Bridge, and Ron Salsbury and the J. C. Power Outlet. Solo performers included folksinger Larry Norman, jazz pianist and singer Tom Howard, flamenco guitarist Drew Crune, and blues guitarist Randy Stonehill.

Though the groups are all veterans of Jesus rock festivals, they agreed that this one was the “heaviest concert” in which they had ever performed.

“The Spirit was so heavy—there was a real movement of the Spirit,” explained David Carlson, associate director of Areopagus. In addition to the usual free-for-all singing, clapping, and shouting, personal testimonies and exhortations by the singers produced an unusual closeness among everyone present: long-haired Jesus people, young straights, older conservatives from local churches, and performers.

Though some responded to the altar call, the majority attending were Christians, and the festival was one of celebration and uplift for the church rather than outreach. About one-fourth of those gathered were long-haired and hip: hitchhikers, dopers, street Christians, and members of nearby Christian communes such as Shepherd by the Sea.

Besides playing at the rock festival, the musicians performed in the afternoons on three Santa Barbara beaches, while witness teams from local churches spoke personally with vacationers. Californians, well aware of Jesus people through recent publicity, took their beach appearances in stride. But the message was Jesus Christ, not Jesus people—and that left some wondering. Others made commitments.

While gospel rock echoed through Santa Barbara, similar sounds were heard in Minneapolis and Portland, where more Jesus rock festivals marked the Fourth of July weekend.

Duane Pederson, publisher of the Hollywood Free Paper, transported the California phenomenon to Minneapolis, leading two rallies of about 400 people each.

The “J-E-S-U-S” cheers quickly became popular, as did a rock version of “Just a Closer Walk With Thee.” Carrying well-worn Bibles and wearing “Happiness is knowing Jesus” buttons, the crowds were for the most part Christian and conservative in dress, though some long-hairs were present.

On the shores of Lake Minnetonka new Christians spoke of their conversion experiences and fifteen were baptized by a dunking in the lake.

A marathon four-hour festival with seventeen performing groups rocked Portland on the afternoon of July 4. Held in the football field of the University of Portland, the event drew more than 2,500 people, including some priests, nuns, and other establishment Christians.

Lutheran Youth Alive, a lay movement among members of several Lutheran denominations, sponsored the festival as part of a weekend conference for encouraging evangelism.

As the festival began, John Rondema, northwest director of LYA, turned down the loudspeakers, fearing to disturb local residents in the surrounding neighborhood. To his amazement they came and asked him to make the music louder again.

About 1,000 high school and college Lutherans attended the full conference, learning outreach techniques such as Campus Crusade’s four spiritual laws and engaging in one-to-one evangelism.

Earlier, forty prayer groups had gathered on the grass to call for a movement of the Holy Spirit. From fifty to one hundred conversions occurred throughout the weekend.

The singing of “Amazing Grace” by the whole group with hands held high “for the Lord” closed the festival on a high level of feeling, according to Watford Reed, Portland news correspondent for CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Representatives of the Roman Catholic university welcomed the Lutherans and afterward expressed hope “that all of us may grow more deeply in the life of Jesus Christ, whom you preached so beautifully in your stay with us.”

At another football field in Hereford, Texas, young Baptists held an evangelistic crusade that resulted in 583 professions of faith.

The overwhelming response may have been partially due to the amazing experience of the two main speakers just before the rally. Terry Bradshaw, quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and Debbie Patton, Miss Teenage America of 1970, were flying in a private plane to the rally when the craft developed engine trouble.

The pilot prepared for a possible crash landing at the closest airport, but the radio went dead and the landing gear locked. While the other passengers prayed, Bradshaw wrestled the landing gear loose and manually lowered it into position, following instructions from the pilot.

After the Hereford crusade, Bradshaw went on to speak to 14,000 young people at the Texas Baptist Youth Evangelism Conference in Fort Worth. One of three Bible-reading, witnessing Christians on the Pittsburgh team, he said he would take Jesus with him as he returned to training camp in July.

“I realize that my right arm and all the talents I have were given to me by God, but … he can take them away,” stated Bradshaw, adding that he would continue to love Jesus Christ if this happened.

A former Cleveland Browns football star, the Reverend Bill Glass, also spoke to the Baptist youth. The conference often turned into a spontaneous revival with all the color of a rock festival as both long- and short-haired youth shouted “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” pointing one finger skyward to signify “one way in Christ.”

The spirit poured out in a “blitz” of Fort Worth as 10,000 young people scattered through the city singing and telling about Jesus. Two days of meetings resulted in 158 professions of faith and 404 rededications.

Folk and traditional music presented by youth choirs and personal testimonies formed most of the programs. At one point, the 14,000 listeners rose to their feet cheering and applauding Skip Allen, son of the President of the Baptist General Convention of Texas.

“I blew off of LSD and turned on to Jesus,” Skip said, after describing the roller coaster of despair that led him to attempt suicide twice. The decisive influence for him was a talk given by Justin Tyne, a former drug addict who operates a Christian coffeehouse in Los Angeles.

Another youth gathering, this one with the emphasis on soul-shaking speakers rather than musicians, was the fifty-first International Christian Endeavor Convention in St. Louis. Keynoter Bill Glass was joined by black evangelist-author Tom Skinner, Dr. Myron S. Augsburger, president of Eastern Mennonite College and Seminary, and Dr. W. Stanley Mooneyham, president of World Vision International.

For exemplifying “the heart of the Christian Endeavor pledge,” Vonda Kay Van Dyke, Miss America of 1965, was presented with the Distinguished Service Citation. Dr. Laverne Boss of Grandville, Michigan, was elected president of the organization.

Though delegates spent most of their time in conference groups, noontimes were devoted to witnessing on downtown St. Louis streets.

While Christians across the country try street witnessing, rock festivals, and crusades to win others to Christ, a North Carolina group uses a simple come-on: ice cream.

The Circus Tent Ice Cream Parlor is located near the site of the Wright brothers’ first flight on the Outer Banks, a popular family vacation spot with miles of national seashore including the pirate Blackbeard’s island.

Crowds fill the four-year-old Circus Tent every night, eating concoctions such as the Fat Lady Sundae and the Sword Swallower Dessert. Meanwhile, Christian folk groups perform and witness, and movies like “The Parable” are shown. Many of the vacationers enter the spirited discussions held after the shows, and many are converted.

Those who flee the message in the tent may wander through the award-winning garden outside and find a little chapel inviting prayer and meditation.

From California to North Carolina, it’s harder for Americans to take vacations from God this summer.

Gospel Via Tube

Christian young people from Texas and California are appearing on a new weekly television variety show this summer. The Monday-night show, called “The Newcomers” and aired nationally by CBS, features fresh musical and comedy talent. Host Dave Garroway is attempting a television comeback.

“The Californians,” a ten-member musical group from the Lemon Grove Baptist Church near San Diego, appears on the program each week. Two young women who have sung in Baptist churches in Dallas, Cynthia Clawson and Peggy Sears, have been soloists. Robert Tamplin, executive producer of variety programs for CBS, is an active member of Hollywood Presbyterian Church; his secretary teaches a Bible class each Thursday afternoon for studio employees.

Evangelical visibility on television this summer extends to the educational network with the appearance of Dr. Sherwood E. Wirt on William F. Buckley’s “Firing Line,” taped for broadcast on August 4. Wirt is editor of Decision. the most widely circulated religious periodical in the world. He appears with Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and Dr. Gerhart Niemeyer, an Episcopal layman who teaches philosophy at Notre Dame. They discuss Wirt’s new book. Love Song, a translation of Augustine’s Confessions.

A Protestant Debut

Ukrainian Protestants finally have a New Testament they can call their own. Protestants are a sizable but somewhat overlooked minority among the 50 million people in the world who speak Ukrainian. Until now they have been obliged to use Scriptures slanted¹Mary is rendered not as the “highly favored” one but as “blahodatnaya.” which implies that she imparts grace. toward the Orthodox and Catholic faiths.

It took the initiative of a Ukrainian Canadian clergyman—the Reverend James Hominuke—and his family to bring out “the first truly Protestant edition” of the New Testament and Psalms in Ukrainian. The family operates an evangelical printing and publishing enterprise in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Hominuke, a graduate of Northern Baptist Seminary, has already devoted nine years of his life to the Ukrainian translation project. He hopes to continue until he completes the whole Bible.

Hominuke brings to the task not only a rare resourcefulness and perseverance but a scholarly understanding of both the Bible and the modern Ukrainian language. His press already has to its credit the publication of an 1,163-page Ukrainian-English dictionary financed by the Rockefeller Foundation and the East European Fund in cooperation with the University of Saskatchewan.

The new Ukrainian New Testament and Psalms appears in an attractive maroon hard cover with thin, quality paper (initial press run was 5,000). It builds somewhat on a translation made in Ukraine in the mid-nineteenth century by a literary group that sought to embrace Christian truth minus Orthodox accretions, but was not Protestant as such. The whole Bible has been available in Ukrainian only since 1903. Since then there have been two complete translations, one by a Ukrainian Orthodox prelate in Canada published in 1962 by the British and Foreign Bible Society, the other by the Vatican in 1963.

DAVID KUCHARSKY

Personalia

Two Southern Baptist missionaries, Mr. and Mrs. Paul E. Potter, 38 and 36, of Marshfield, Missouri, were found slain in bed at their residence in Santiago, Dominican Republic, in early July. The murders were the first among the denomination’s 2,500 missionaries since 1951, making a total of five such deaths since 1861.

Alan Walker, world evangelist, author, and president of the Methodist Church in New South Wales, will be awarded the annual Upper Room Citation for 1971 on August 26 in Denver.

Television and nightclub star Cliff Richard has been named outstanding singer of the year by the Songwriters’ Guild of Great Britain. Since meeting Billy Graham, Richard has combined preaching and singing, getting fifty records into the top ten in his thirteen-year career.

Billy Graham has been named honorary chairman of Explo ’72, a Campus Crusade for Christ-sponsored congress on evangelism to be held in Dallas next June.

The Reverend Wilmina M. Rowland, a Presbyterian from Philadelphia, became the first woman to offer the opening prayer during a session of the U. S. Senate.

Sister Taddea Kelly, a member of the Sisters of the Presentation of Mary, is the first woman to hold a senior Vatican office. The California nun will direct a division of the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation for Religious Orders and Secular Institutes.

Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle, Archbishop of Washington for twenty-four years, has turned 75 and submitted his resignation, in compliance with a 1968 policy recommendation of Pope Paul VI.

The New Jersey Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a couple cannot be denied the right to adopt a child because they are atheists, allowing Mr. and Mrs. John Burke to keep their two-year-old daughter, Eleanor.

The Reverend Jim Wilson, a Canadian who has developed youth ministries in Korea for the past seven years, was appointed executive director of Youth for Christ International.

The Baptist General Conference elected Robert A. Johnson, a layman from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, as its moderator.

Bob Jones III, 32, was invested as president of Bob Jones University, replacing his father, who became chancellor of the school in Greenville, South Carolina.

John A. Evenson, full-time film producer with the American Bible Society, will be ordained to a part-time ministry by the Lutheran Church in America. The appointment is the LCA’s first call to a “tent-making ministry.”

Former Representative Henry C. Schadeberg (R.-Wis.) will return to the pastoral ministry at the First Congregational Church, Greenville, Michigan, after serving eight years in Congress. He is probably the first clergyman to return to pastoral work after being elected to Congress.

Religion In Transit

Three non-subscription periodicals showed large circulation gains over 1970, according to the Associated Church Press directory. Decision, the Billy Graham organ, gained 500,000; Abundant Living, by the Oral Roberts Association, gained 650,000; and the American Bible Society Record gained 100,000. Several denominational publications showed losses.

The Interreligious Council of Southern California, a primarily Judeo-Christian federation, has accepted the membership application of the Islamic Foundation of Southern California.

The fourth annual Charismatic Clinic will be held at Melodyland Christian Center in Anaheim, California, August 15–23.

International headquarters of Wycliffe Bible Translators will move to five-acre grounds in Huntington Beach, California, a few miles from its present location. Ground was broken for a 60,000-square-foot office building, a museum and auditorium building, and twenty transient housing units.

The interdenominational agency Faith at Work has moved its national headquarters from New York City to Columbia, Maryland, a planned suburban city being developed on a large site between Baltimore and Washington, D. C.

The Office of Economic Opportunity will give an additional $159,307 to school voucher experiments, apparently in the belief that the Supreme Court’s recent ruling against parochaid does not affect the principles of the voucher plan.

The Texas Legislature legalized the selling of liquor by the drink for the first time since pre-Prohibition days. Church lotteries were legalized, too, and indirect aid to church colleges was approved through $4 million in tuition equalization grants for needy private-college freshmen and sophomores.

The Lutheran Church in America has designated 1973 as a year of special emphasis on evangelism.

Third World Media News, a national news service to gather and distribute news of minority groups, has been established through a $30,000 grant by the United Presbyterian Church to Ecu-Media News Services.

Christians have no monopoly on the problem: Reform Judaism rabbis recently discussed the growing tensions between congregations and their rabbis; the rift was said to threaten synagogue life in the United States.

You can tell where the money is! Senator Gaylord Nelson (D.-Wis.) topped senatorial journalistic earnings last year by pulling in $9,800, $3,500 of it for two articles in Playboy magazine. Low man was Senator Harold B. Hughes (D.-Iowa), who snapped up a $35 largess for an article in Theology Today.

Deaths

LYNN HAROLD HOUGH, 93, Methodist educator, particularly in the field of Christian humanism, former Drew Seminary professor and National Council of Churches figure; in New York.

KARL AUGUST REISCHAUER, 91, United Presbyterian missionary pioneer and educator instrumental in founding Tokyo Women’s Christian College and the Japan seminary of the Church of Christ; in Duarte, California.

W. HAROLD ROW, 59, Church of the Brethren peace and service ministry leader; in Washington, D. C., after a two-year illness.

JOHN F. WESTFIELD, 64, secretary of church development and building for the United Church of Christ; in New York after he was struck by an auto.

United Methodists’ “silent minority” (evangelicals) began clearing its throat at the renewal group’s first national convention in Dallas last year. This year it found its voice at a four-day convocation (July 7–10) in Cincinnati, and the evangelicals plan to make that voice heard at the highest levels of Methodism.

“We have moved out of the criticizing stage into the action phase,” said Dr. Robert G. Mayfield, general chairman of the Convocation of United Methodists for Evangelical Christianity. “Evangelicals now have power within our own hands to gain representation on our national boards, commissions, and agencies.”

The evangelical strategy to influence the United Methodist hierarchy hinges on laymen. The plan is to elect evangelical laymen as delegates to jurisdictional and general conferences and encourage “selective giving” in the pews. As the convocation met, the denomination reported basic benevolence giving was down 10 per cent from a year ago.

“We are not promoting a cash boycott but regard selective giving as sound stewardship,” explains the Reverend Charles W. Keysor (Keysor’s article “The Silent Minority,” published in Christian Advocate magazine in 1966, launched the “Forum for Scriptural Christianity” and its publication, Good News magazine, which sponsored the Cincinnati and Dallas conventions. Keysor is pastor of Grace United Methodist Church in Elgin, Illinois.)

Two of the twenty-eight convocation seminars were aimed directly at showing evangelicals how to “work within the decision-making processes” of the church. One workshop, conducted by two young Ohio pastors, was called “Strategies for Influencing Annual Conferences.” The other was led by a Dallas pastor on “The Fine Art of Selective Giving.”

Advice given evangelicals attempting to influence church conferences coupled the spiritual with the practical: Read your Bible, pray, get a copy of the Methodist Discipline and Robert’s Rules of Order, watch the professionals—then speak up.

The strong possibility that bucking the establishment lessens a minister’s chances of getting appointed to the better churches was met with the blunt assertion: Where can an evangelical go but up anyway in the United Methodist Church? And where can a bishop send him that God can’t use him?

The bone in the gullet of Evangelical United Methodists was described by the keynote speaker, Dr. Leslie H. Woodson, board chairman of the Forum. He told the 1,600 delegates: “Evangelicals have been given curriculum resources which we cannot use, assigned pastors we cannot follow, handed programs we cannot share, and given leaders we cannot trust. Yet we are told to give our tithes while we starve to death.”

The evangelicals are causing some concern—and obvious irritation—to certain church bureaucrats. At a press conference, representatives of United Methodist publications and agencies were so hostile to the panel of convocation leaders that the religion writer for the Cincinnati Enquirer described it more as a “medieval inquisition than a press conference.” Referring to the public meetings—featuring swinging singers from Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, inspirational messages, and hearty singing and loud “Amens”—one church publication representative said it made him “want to vomit.”

While most of the messages were inspirational, the convocation was far from a “pie-in-the-sky” production. Dr. Gilbert James of the Department of Sociology of Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky, conducted a hard-hitting seminar on “The Evangelical Flight From the City.”

Church-Sponsored Renewal

While out-of-power evangelicals map strategy to bring the United Methodist Church back to theological orthodoxy, the establishment is running a program of its own to aid spiritual recovery. It’s the Lay Witness Renewal Mission, developed under the direction of the United Methodist General Board of Evangelism. A number of lives have been changed.

How does it happen? Laymen of various backgrounds and ages, many of them coming a great distance at their own expense, are invited into a local church for a weekend of spiritual sharing and discovery.

One by one, members of the visiting team relate simply, honestly, and briefly the problems and joys of living a life of faith. They don’t preach or use high-pressure tactics; in simple words they tell of meeting Jesus Christ and how he changed their lives.

After the initial witnessing there is sharing and informal prayer in small groups. In an atmosphere of love and acceptance even the most reserved person feels free to express his doubts and frustrations. In no way do the team members suggest they are perfect, and perhaps it is in this context—one human being honestly relating to another—that the Holy Spirit works.

One Minnesota minister said of a recent mission in his church: “This is very low-key evangelism. All these people do is come in and tell what Christ means to them, but it gets other people excited.”

Five hundred people gathered at a recent Lay Renewal Conference in Wisconsin to learn how to become more effective lay witnesses. In groups of three, sitting with knees touching, they experimented in communicating their faith. Each person had the opportunity to witness, listen, and evaluate.

Young people stood in line waiting to testify to the whole group. Many of them visited a nearby town, confronting people on the street with their eager witness. A feeling of spontaneity and love prevailed; one young woman expressed the wish that she could “take this spirit of love and acceptance back to my home church.”

Perhaps the ability to take such an experience “home” is the key to the reality of renewal. Since a lay witness mission in Minnesota, one Methodist church has seen a spiritual emphasis restored in the life of its people and the formation of a dozen or more small groups to sustain this new life. About ten of the members participate in lay missions in other churches.

One person, in new awareness, noted: “After all those years of listening to sermons that told me how to grow, I finally discovered that first I needed to say ‘yes’ to Christ, and I did.”

MARIAN PARRISH

Dr. James’s address, “The Christian as the Agent of Change,” was laced with Scripture but highly critical of evangelicals who prefer joining “harmless knife-and-fork clubs” to confronting social ills in a way that could cause conflict with vested interests. It was widely applauded. Warned Dr. James:

“A ‘decision for Christ’ is not necessarily the regeneration of a believer, and saying ‘yes’ to a list of religious propositions does not necessarily result in the new birth. Where does social action start? At the Cross, and it could very well end there literally for us, if we take our commitment seriously.”

Even Arthur West of the United Methodist Office of Information—whose stomach apparently was feeling better at this point—ran up to Dr. James to declare: “You just saved the day for some of us.”

Young people at the convocation had separate meetings; they reflected the hyper-fundamentalist feeling of today’s “Jesus People”—and also their concern.

They began with a panel on racism in which a Cincinnati black pastor and a Mexican-American pastor from El Paso, Texas, both charged that blacks and Chicanos are “second-class citizens” in the church. The Reverend Robert Stamps, Methodist chaplain at Oral Roberts University, later gave a moving account of a “miraculous” healing he had witnessed and then delivered one of the hardest-hitting sermons on racism that this reporter has heard in years.

“Blacks and Chicanos should not just be included in the Church—they are the Church,” Stamps told about seventy-five young people. “It’s not enough to give somebody a tract. The saving gospel is always a social gospel.”

Had he attended the evangelical Methodist convocation in Cincinnati, John Wesley’s heart would have been warmed all over again.

Alaska’S ‘Apostle’

A historic-preservation grant of $6,822 by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development to the 1,000-member Metlakatla Indian Community on Annette Island, south of Juneau, will preserve a cottage in which the Reverend William Duncan, often called “Apostle to the Alaskan Indians,” lived from 1887 until his death in 1918 at the age of 86. The home of the English-born Anglican priest will house a library and museum.

In 1857, Duncan, newly ordained at age 25, was sent by the Church of England Missionary Society to convert Indians in British Columbia to Christianity. He was highly successful with members of the Metlakatla tribe.

Thirty years after his arrival in Alaska, Duncan visited President Grover Cleveland to plead for a new home for his people. The Canadian government, he said, was trying to force the Indians to move to government-controlled reservations. Also, the Anglican church was trying to remove him and require the Indians to follow a more regimented form of formal worship.

President Cleveland granted the Indians homesteading rights to any land they selected in nearby southeastern Alaska. Duncan and 800 members of the tribe moved by open canoe to the then uninhabited Annette Island. Suffering extreme hardship, they built log houses and established new trading outlets for fish and furs. The indomitable clergyman who led them and shared their sufferings ministered among them for thirty-one more years, without support from organized mission groups.

The Annette converts are associated today with the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches.

GLENN D. EVERETT

Hutterite Hassle

Hutterites, normally indifferent about political issues, are objecting to Manitoba legislation they feel strikes at the heart of their basic principles. The bill, which has received first reading in the provincial legislature, would force the Hutterite colonies to give money to any member who leaves them.

Communal living is a fundamental with the group, which traces its origin back to 1528 in central Europe. Jacob Hutter led a wing of the Anabaptist movement to adopt “community of goods” based on Acts 2:41.

Four centuries of often intense persecution forced the Hutterian Brethren throughout Eastern Europe and thence to North America. Two-thirds of the world’s 11,000 Hutterites now live in the three Canadian prairie provinces; the others live in Montana, Washington, Minnesota, and the Dakotas.

Hutterite leaders contend that any attempt to disrupt the community of goods is an infringement of their religious liberty. And, adds the Reverend Jacob Kleinsasser, a Manitoba spokesman, the Hutterites will leave the province if the legislation becomes law. If the forty colonies did pull out of the province, Manitoba would lose 4,000 rural residents at a time when the farm population is already in sharp decline.

LESLIE TARR

Ira Sabotage Continues

The reform program of the Northern Ireland government has taken another step forward now that provision has been made for minority-party members to have more say in policy-making.

Welcomed by the parties concerned, the measure will do little to modify the tactics of the illegal Irish Republican Army, which continues its attacks on police and military patrols, as well as general disruption of life and trade in the province. Incendiary bombs and devices placed in factories, stores, and public buildings have caused a number of fires.

Extensive precautions were taken to keep the peace during the Twelfth of July celebrations, when thousands of Orangemen marched in commemoration of victory gained at the Boyne over the Catholics in 1690. Protestants deny that the celebrations are an affront to the Catholic community, which, they point out, is free to celebrate like occasions in its own history.

S. W. MURRAY

On Criswell’S Brow

“This is my real calling,” quipped Dr. W. A. Criswell of the Dallas, Texas, First Baptist Church as he dug a hole in which to plant a tree recently in the young Baptist Forest between Nazareth and Mount Tabor. The immediate past-president of the Southern Baptist Convention told how the people of his church had raised more than $2,000 for the project because “our Lord loved this land.”

“Please observe,” joked a ceremony official, “that the first water for the trees is holy water—the sweat off Dr. Criswell’s brow.”

More than 100 million trees have been planted in Israel since the founding of the state in 1948. Some 400 members and friends of Criswell’s church attended the plaque unveiling and tree planting. Criswell and congregation, in the Holy Land for the Jerusalem Conference on Biblical Prophecy, also took part in a symbolic groundbreaking in the strip that borders Upper Nazareth (Jewish) and the old city of Nazareth (Arab) for an anticipated “Baptist-Jewish Friendship House.”

DWIGHT L. BAKER

God In Small Type

Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn may publish his newest book, August 1914, in the Soviet Union if he prints the word “God” in small type.

Solzhenitsyn, who received the Nobel Prize for literature last year, writes this in his prologue to the book, which was published in Paris recently. The order was reportedly given by the Russian office for censorship.

The Russian author says of “atheistic narrowmindedness”: “If we write the names of regional party leaders and of the secret police with capitals, why shouldn’t we use capitals for the highest, creative power in our universe?”

JAN J. VAN CAPELLEVEEN

Catholic Lay Group Seeks World Parley Of Christians

The National Association of Laity, a 12,000-member group devoted to reform of the Roman Catholic Church, wants a worldwide Christian meeting: “a council of the entire Church called by independent laity, not subject to appointments or control by Pope or bishops.”

The suggestion was in one of several resolutions passed by the body at its fifth annual convention on the Bronx campus of Fordham University. The world-wide gathering, the resolution said, should go through at least three phases: a study of strictly Catholic doctrine and structural questions; an investigation of the common problems of all Christians; and a study of common grounds with all who believe in God.

The NAL was established four years ago in the aftermath of Vatican Council II. The name was changed from the National Association of Laymen at this year’s meeting in deference to its women members, who are said to compose half the body of twenty-five local chapters.

In another nod to women, the association called on the American representatives to the fall bishops’ synod in Rome to recommend the ordination of women as priests.

The 600 delegates also adopted a statement on abortion that struck a middle course between traditional Roman Catholic doctrine and statements presently being made by many liberal Protestant bodies. It said that forbidding abortion under any circumstances is “much too narrow and totally ignores the rights of the mother and father and of the family in general.” But the delegates went on to say: “The abortion-on-demand position is equally as narrow … proclaiming the superior and absolute rights of the mother to determine the fate of the unborn fetus.” About 60 per cent of the delegates favored the abortion statement.

NAL outgoing president William Caldwell, 44, an aluminum-company executive, lamented that liberal Catholics don’t appear as interested in church reform as in the past. But, he continued, people are “just as interested as ever in living their day-by-day lives as Christians and they are open to all sorts of new religious life styles.”

Dr. Joseph O’Donoghue, the NAL’s only paid staff member and one of the priests suspended in 1968 by Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle of Washington, D. C., for opposing Pope Paul’s birth-control encyclical, said the liberal reform group was attempting to forge an alliance with conservative Catholic laymen. All strata in the church are interested in “spiritual development,” according to Caldwell. Two resolutions, introduced by O’Donoghue, were supportive of conservative Catholics.

Other resolutions favored the removal of all U. S. troops from Viet Nam by December 31, and congressional action to stop the funding of military operations; the encouragement of diverse liturgical forms with laymen allowed to exercise their own “lay priesthood” in liturgies in family homes or “wherever they may choose to gather”; and a continued strong stand for open financial accounting by Catholic dioceses and institutions.

At one NAL presentation, Sister Janice Raymond of the Sisters of Mercy gave a paper on “Women’s Lib and Nuns.” Women have been seen in three major roles, she said. One is “relational,” such as being “Jenny’s mother,” or “John’s wife.” Another is that of a sex object, as in the “Playboy cult.” The third she called “the eternal feminine.” In the case of nuns, she added, this involves “the consecrated Virgin syndrome.”

In a separate development, a draft—possibly the final version—of a constitution for the Catholic Church stirred up a beehive of controversy in Europe between progressives and the Vatican old guard. Progressives were sounding the alarm that the document, called Lex Fundamentalis and composed of ninety-five canons, could freeze present church reforms, thus stifling the spirit generated by Vatican II.

The world’s 3,000 bishops had been asked to give approval (by mail) of the document by August 1, a date said to preclude responses from many national hierarchies and scholars. The document is not set for discussion at the world bishops’ synod in October, but the Vatican hopes for final approval from a special commission of cardinals immediately following.

Reaching The Groovy Ones: Jesus Nightclub

The Gospel is going high class on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip, once the turf of the unpretentious Jesus people.

Right On, a Jesus nightclub believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, opened last month in a building once the scene of topless and bottomless shows, female impersonators, and lesbian entertainment.

With a dark-wood bar (soft drinks only) and tables, elegant red walls and carpeting, pool tables, and a door charge of $2.50, Right On is designed to appeal to the young sophisticates who visit other clubs on the Strip, according to co-manager Barry Wood, pastor of First (Southern) Baptist Church of Beverly Hills.

“The groovy ones with change in their pockets are not being touched,” says Wood. He thinks that the current emphasis on hippie culture in evangelistic circles has resulted in a neglect of the middle-class, over-25 age group.

Right On’s unique ministry reaches out through both entertainment and preaching. In addition, Christians ready to witness mingle in the crowd.

Opening-night shows before a full house featured Larry Norman, perhaps the best-known Christian pop singer in the country; the Philharmonic, a Christian rock group; Karon Blackwell, a folk-soul nightclub performer; and Cynthia Clawson, a singer in the television summer variety show “The Newcomers.”

Located among nude clubs, discotheques, and gas stations in the heart of the Strip, the building is being leased for four months from Bill Gazzarri, who also operates a teen hard-rock dance hall featuring movie projections and closed-circuit television of the young writhing dancers in jeans and hotpants.

Scheduled summer appearances in Right On include the first Hollywood performance of Jimmy Owen’s new Christian rock musical, Show Me (see May 21 issue, page 50) and a new two-act play, Requiem for Man.

Wood insists on professionalism and first-class talent. Some disagreement exists over just how much preaching should occur and how many Christians should be placed in the audience, but managers hope to avoid both extremes—appealing only to church-goers and becoming too secular.

Two and a half years ago, His Place was evicted from the adjacent building because owners felt the Gospel was bad for Strip business. Blessitt’s staff prayed that business in the buildings would stagnate. His Place has moved, but the Gospel is going Right On.

NEWS

A more fitting theme for the forty-ninth biennial convention of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod could hardly be imagined: “Sent to Reconcile.” As the convention opened in Milwaukee last month, everyone agreed reconciliation was sorely needed. The 2.8-million-member denomination has been increasingly riddled with tensions and suspicions—mostly over doctrinal matters—since Dr. Jacob A. O. Preus took over as Synod president two years ago.

At the convention’s close, delegates were still divided—even over whether the tumultuous eight-day session had moved factions closer together or further apart. The net result was to please those happy with Missouri’s apparent shift toward a more open stance on doctrine and relations with other Lutheran bodies. And to make unhappier those already upset by what they see as a drift toward unionism and the lack of synodical authority to make binding convention resolutions on doctrine.

The church may have moved a shade to the right from its position at Denver two years ago. But overall, the important victories went to the theological moderates. Preus could only say at a closing press conference: “It is not quite correct to call this a major defeat.”

This was the showdown convention between progressive forces and conservatives who wanted to roll back pulpit and altar fellowship with the American Lutheran Church (enacted at Denver), disengage the Missouri Synod from the Lutheran Council in the U. S. A., and bind LCMS pastors, teachers, and professors to convention interpretations of the Bible.

Of particular concern to the progressives was Preus’s bid for “adequate machinery” to oust—if it came to that—professors at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis who have been the subject of a lengthy investigation for alleged heretical teachings. Moderates won four of five vacancies on the eleven-man Concordia Board of Control, causing seminary president John Tietjen to remark: “I don’t think any faculty member is in jeopardy.”

Both sides came to Milwaukee in battle dress (each time delegates entered the auditorium they had to “run the gauntlet” past a formidable array of leafleteers boosting pet causes). Odds-makers were picking the conservatives to have a slight edge in their fight to erect firmer fences around the position that inerrancy is to be understood as meaning that Scripture is literally true.

President Preus led off the taut meetings, attended by 1,035 voting delegates and another thousand advisers, youth delegates, and visitors, with a strongly worded, comprehensive, and extremely candid report. It laid bare the doctrinal issues facing the Synod. And it clearly enunciated Preus’s own views on each point.

Preus made no bones about the deep polarization and probable schism threatening the church. Speaking about whether variations of doctrinal opinion—especially regarding biblical inspiration and authority—should be tolerated within the Synod, he said:

“The question that has to be answered by this convention is whether we are willing to allow such matters (and many more) to be regarded as open questions on which we may take any position we wish. If the Synod feels that we should be this permissive and wishes to understand Article II of the Constitution in this loose sense, then let us realize that we have departed from the position maintained by Dr. Walther¹Dr. C. F. W. Walther, the first president of the Missouri Synod. In 1868 he wrote a long scholarly article on “The False Arguments for the Modern Theory of Open Questions.” and other fathers of our church. If we do not want this kind of latitude because we feel that it threatens the faith we confess and the message of reconciliation with which we have been entrusted, let us state clearly … that deviations from the official position of our church must be dealt with and cannot be permitted.”

In general, progressives and moderates argued that rigid adherence to Synod statements would commit them beyond their ordination vows and would impose a “strait jacket” of biblical interpretation not called for by the church’s constitution. (Missouri’s constitution sets only the Scriptures and the exposition of them in historic Lutheran confessions as its criteria of belief.)

After hours of parliamentary haggling and stiletto-like wielding of Robert’s Rules of Order, a conglomerate resolution was approved that incorporates a statement by the Council of Presidents of the church.

On a 485–425 vote, the original conservative-sponsored statement “To Uphold Synodical Doctrinal Resolutions” was replaced by the presidents’ affirmation (adopted in February of 1970). It calls on Missourians to “honor and uphold” synodically adopted statements as “valid interpretations of Christian doctrine.” But it adds that they shouldn’t be given “more or less status than they deserve.”

After the main vote, but before the resolution was perfected by being lined with the preamble and “whereas” sections of the original conservative resolution, Preus stepped down from the chair on a point of personal privilege. Bitterly disappointed, he said the action would cause “great difficulty,” and would set the Synod back to its status at Denver “with all its attendant confusion.”

The rejected resolution, Preus said, “represents my heart and soul and mind.” In a rare show of unity, however, after passing an implementing resolution that said resolutions do not “make or give birth to Christian doctrines,” delegates stood and sang the doxology.

Moments before, though, an unidentified young man in the gallery shouted out, “The Spirit of Christ is being choked by Robert’s [Rules].” Later, Preus said he was inclined to agree. And that night at a rally held by the very conservative Federation for Authentic Lutheranism, spokesman Alvin E. Wagner of North Hollywood, California, told several hundred persons that conditions in the LCMS were “irremediable” and that his group was “preparing a divorce.” FAL leaders estimated fifty major congregations would pull out.

Fellowship with the theological middle of the Lutheran triumvirate—the American Lutherans—was reaffirmed, but pulpit exchanges and intercommunion have not been enacted by about 1,000 of the 6,000 LCMS congregations since the 1969 decision declaring fellowship. The Milwaukee resolutions “freeze” any further implementation of fellowship with the ALC, and express “strong regret” over the ALC’s decision last year to ordain women ministers.

Missourians declared that the “Word of God does not permit women to hold the pastoral office …,” and the Synod “respectfully” requested the ALC to reconsider its positive position on the issue.

ALC president Kent Knutson delivered a heart-warming, hand-holding homily on the virtues of fellowship between the two churches (“Missouri Synod, we love you”) before the crucial vote, but he made it clear in a press conference that Missouri wasn’t going to call the tune for the ALC: the ordination of women was a closed issue.

Delegates also decided to continue Synod’s participation in the Lutheran Council in the U. S. A. But, as in the ALC matter, conservatives won what some considered partial victory by hedging participation with restrictions. Committee studies of both ALC fellowship and Missouri participation in the LCUSA will be reported at the 1973 convention in New Orleans. A LCUSA task force will take a critical look at the council’s operations and its theological stance.

In other actions at Milwaukee, delegates:

• Ruled willful abortion is contrary to the will of God.

• Declared the church has the right to influence government, business, labor, and other segments of society through corporate statements and action; two attempts to bar the church from speaking on “secular issues” were defeated.

• Retained the much disputed parish education program, “Mission: Life,” but ordered revisions and cautions to make the material conform to approved doctrine.

• Abolished the post of executive director of Synod, now held by Dr. Walter F. Wolbrecht of St. Louis, and created a new position called “administrative officer.” Wolbrecht’s exact status was left dangling.

• Set a goal of 125,000 new converts during the Synod’s 125th anniversary next year.

• Voted to take part in Key 73 evangelism efforts “as far as fellowship principles will permit.”

• Rejected membership in the Lutheran World Federation for the third time in nineteen years, but indicated willingness to move toward re-establishing fraternal relations with the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod and the Evangelical Lutheran Synod.

As time wore on during the Milwaukee convention it seemed progressives and moderates got themselves better organized and mustered more votes on key issues—a repeat of what happened at Denver. At any rate, it seemed clear at Milwaukee that if Preus wanted Missouri to waltz, he wouldn’t get to call all the tunes.

Transplant Trepidation

The most difficult moral and ethical problems to face surgeons, lawyers, and theologians in the next few years will arise from the perfection of organ-transplantation techniques, according to the heart specialist who taught Dr. Christian Barnard how to transplant hearts.

Immunology problems (rejection of an implanted organ by the receiver’s system) will be solved within five years, Dr. Derward Lepley, Jr., said in a speech to the Religion Newswriters’ Association in Milwaukee last month. Then there won’t be enough donors to fill the need. “Who will get the organs that can be transplanted?” asked Lepley, an American Lutheran Church member and head of the surgical team that performed Wisconsin’s first heart transplant in 1968.

Citing the moral problems involved, Lepley said diabetics wanting “new” pancreases, emphysema sufferers desiring lung transplants, and cardiac patients waiting in line for “new” hearts will cause a mammoth headache for those who must make the critical decisions. Factors such as age, race, life expectancy, and ability to pay further complicate the matter; as a partial solution Lepley suggested that boards composed of doctors, lawyers, and ministers be assigned to decide individual cases.

He also said the anticipated large-scale success of transplanting human ovaries and uteruses will raise thorny legal and religious questions about parenthood. That issue, which “has exploded over the past three years,” makes it necessary to decide: “Who is the individual born” in such a case? The newswriters’ annual meeting was held in conjunction with the biennial convention of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod in Milwaukee. Lepley spoke at the awards banquet; Ray Ruppert of the Seattle Times won the RNA Supple Award for outstanding reporting of religious news during 1970.

RUSSELL CHANDLER

‘Divisions In Cod’S Army’

Still smarting from the 1969 rejection of the proposed merger with Britain’s Methodists, Anglican unionists raised the matter again at their general synod in York last month. They made no concessions but stuck by the old scheme, which has been accepted by the Methodists.

At York, the Church of England lineup, speeches, and voting all followed a now traditional pattern: archbishops and most bishops in favor, followed by a majority of clergy and laity; high churchmen and evangelicals against, aided by a maverick or two. One of the enfants terribles, the Reverend Christopher Wansey, declared that both Anglicans and Methodists were “divisions in God’s army”—and divisions in the Church were not necessarily wrong or unhappy.

The vote: 307–163 favored persevering with the scheme. Dr. Ramsey considered it “a fair majority,” but it was 10 per cent short of the required 75 per cent, and 2 per cent less than two years ago.

Regular Baptists

Nearly 2,000 registrants at the fortieth annual conference of the General Association of Regular Baptists last month passed resolutions denouncing pornography, abortion on demand, and profanity and sexual suggestiveness on television.

They charged that public schools are “permeated with an anti-Christian philosophy in both content and method” that is “increasingly” corrupting children from Christian homes, and they asked for the establishment and support of private Christian schools. They also reaffirmed belief in the verbal, plenary inspiration of Scripture and the Bible’s position as “final authority” in matters of faith and practice. The number of GARB churches grew by thirty-seven in the past year to 1,426.

European Congress

Billy Graham will be the only non-European to address the seven-day European Congress on Evangelism beginning August 28 in Amsterdam; over 1,000 delegates are expected.

Among major speakers are Gilbert W. Kirby, congress chairman, who is principal of London Bible College; Dr. Gerhard Bergman of the German “No Other Gospel” movement; John R. W. Stott, a chaplain to Queen Elizabeth, who is probably the best-known Anglican evangelical; and CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S correspondent Jan Van Capelleveen.

There will be contributions also from Professor Carl Wisloff of Norway, José Grau of Spain, pastors Henri Blocher and Charles Guillot of France, Professor Paaro Kortetangas of Finland, and Professor Hendrik R. Rookmaker of the Netherlands.

Today an emerging evangelical vanguard of state university graduates (and a smaller number from evangelical campuses) who are disenchanted with modern culture are calling, in the name of the Gospel, for a radical faith and a revolutionary commitment. Their discontents include not only secular society but also institutional Christianity. If they reproach the contemporary world-view for its technocratic depersonalization of human values, no less do they fault the ecumenical churches for secularizing the supernatural Gospel, and the evangelical churches for spiritualizing man’s material needs. On the edge of the Vietnamese war, most of them question the legitimacy and effectiveness of violence in settling international differences, though not all are pacifists.

Some of these young people have emerged from the youth counter-cultural revolt to a thoroughgoing Christian commitment. While they share the evangelistic concern of the Jesus people, they are not content simply to withdraw from the world they once knew, nor do they think Christianity can long survive in free-floating patterns not theologically informed. And they are determined to bear Christian witness at socio-cultural frontiers.

Not a few are attending evangelical seminaries for an exposure to dogmatics and apologetics. They do not question the validity of the gathered church, though some question the legitimacy of the ministry, as it is presently conceived, as a Christian profession. Few of them think the pulpit ministry is their thing; most are unsure just what their vocation is. Some hopefully contemplate exploratory careers in mass communications, free university or community student centers, and the like.

A dozen or so of their number attending Trinity Evangelical Divinity School plan soon to mount their witness through a sub-culture newspaper. They hope to champion a Christian faith matched to the contemporary mind-set. They insist that what Christians offer must be intellectually satisfying, ethically sensitive, and experientially adequate. In the modern context, their message is radical. The supernatural, not society, is the decisive setting for human life; sin, not environmental deformity, is man’s basic problem; Christ and catastrophe are life’s only enduring options. God’s offer of new life through Jesus Christ crucified and risen is their good news. They are committed to an authoritative Bible.

To this point many evangelical churches will approve. However, an establishment imprimatur means little to the new vanguard. Many evangelicals, they complain, uncritically espouse a two-car materialistic faith and a pro-American Gospel; their social and political values, moreover, are not derived from the Bible. Thousands of such evangelical churches, they say, concentrate on microethics (personal legalisms) to the neglect of macroethics (war, race, and poverty are most frequently mentioned). The student world, we are told, has largely gained the impression that Christian identification involves at least a neglect of the issues of social justice if not the negation of any commitment to it.

The questions that the young intellectuals feel they must answer are pressed upon them by non-Christians whose primary focus is the reality of the body, of society, of this world. In this milieu the worst of all options open to the evangelical is to be silent and tolerant toward social wrongs, for this adds up to implicit participation in them. A biblical faith alive to social ethics and energetically addressed to the multitudes in captivity to American culture is indispensable.

Most of these aroused intellectuals shun not only the traditional pulpit ministry but also a career in the military or in corporate business. As they see it, if the “just war” ethic is applied to Viet Nam, they want none of it. And if capitalism is to be identified with freedom to pollute the earth or to promote cigarette addiction through the mass media until government interferes, or with buy-at-your-own-risk manufacturing, they want some moral alternative. Modern America little senses how much of the revolt against inherited traditions has been bred and nourished by recent political and commercial compromises of those ideals.

Perhaps more evangelical churches than one might suspect will say, “Right on!” But these young intellectuals are wary of the right and are leaning toward the left. They are committed to social revolution and to eliminating social injustice. This does not mean, however, that they espouse anarchy or the forceful overthrow of government; after all, recent American presidents and leading evangelical evangelists alike have embraced the term revolution. Nor do these young people attach post-millennial Kingdom of God expectations to political change. What they promote is a humane society in which personal values hold the center of human existence. And because the political left is against the Vietnamese involvement and specializes in the vocabulary of values, the young evangelical vanguard finds a ready shelter and welcome there.

The left-leaning intellectuals desperately need funds for the bold, creative thrusts through which they seek new visibility for the Gospel. But because of apprehensions about the left—derived from the long-standing correlation of theological liberalism and political liberalism—the evangelical establishment has taken little interest in funding nonconformist evangelical ventures that combine biblical theology with a leftward look in socio-political affairs. Funding is more likely to be available from ecumenical agencies that will overlook a strenuous emphasis on biblical theology if evangelicals can be involved for political change. Even in an ecumenical context, evangelical intellectuals can probably be counted on not to muffle their gospel witness. But by its support or non-support of their efforts the evangelical establishment will, as many of these young people see it, confirm or disavow the charge of being socially insensitive and identified with a right-wing cultural establishment.

Evangelical churches are not alone in facing an identity crisis. The young evangelical intellectuals themselves face such a crisis, and detachment from an authentically evangelical milieu could worsen their plight. If, as they feel, fundamentalist Christianity has forgotten that all cultures remain subject to God’s judgment, and that no economic system is to be regarded as identical with the Kingdom of God, then does not the new vanguard itself repeat and compound that error by uncritically supposing that the program of the political left is identifiable with the content of God’s New Covenant? Should not any philosophy of society—left or right—furnish and sustain norms of commitment and action? Should evangelicals be taken in by a Marxist antithesis of personal and property values, or is property, rather, a personal right and stewardship?

The young intellectuals and the evangelical churches need each other—the one for evangelical illumination, the other for social concern. It would be the saddest of mistakes if, instead of complementing and building each other, they were to exhaust themselves in mutual destruction.

With the resurgence of lay movements within the Church, it is increasingly important that we who are laymen have a clear understanding of the basic doctrines of the Christian faith. Christ founded his church with laymen, and they should remain the strength and stay of every department of his work.

I want us to think about a word that carries deep spiritual significance, one whose concept is absolutely essential to the Christian faith. That word is atonement.

At the level of our worldly experience, atonement means a satisfactory reparation for an offense or injury. Unjust as some awards may be, payment for injury to persons and property resulting from an automobile accident, for instance, carries with it the idea of an atonement to the one injured.

In the realm of the spirit and of theological usage the Atonement means “at-one-ment” between God and man, made possible by Christ’s death on the cross for our sins and all that is implied thereby.

We must frankly admit that no one definition of the Atonement can possibly cover all the marvelous facets of this sublime truth. What is very clear in biblical teaching, however, is that Christ died for our sins, taking upon himself the penalty rightly belonging to us, so that, through faith in him, we are freed from our penalty and guilt.

There are immediate as well as eternal results of the atonement that transcend many other doctrines of Christianity. In fact, many other doctrines revolve around the central truth that Christ, God’s Son, came into this world to make atonement for our sins.

Man’s need for the Atonement goes back to the basic problem of sin.

Sin is a universal disease; it affects all men everywhere. Our news media daily recount multiplied acts of overt sin against God and man, and if we are honest we will face the dismal fact that we ourselves daily sin against God in thought, word, and deed. The Bible tells us that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23).

And sin has its effect: its wages are death—separation from God. Man’s need for the Atonement can be understood only in the light of God’s holiness. Because of that holiness, fellowship is impossible, for between unregenerate man and this holy God there is a gulf of separation across which no man can pass.

The atonement of Christ, designed in the councils of eternity and carried out on the Cross of Calvary, is God’s marvelous way of combining in one glorious act his holiness, righteousness, and justice with his love, mercy, and forgiveness. It is the bridging of the chasm.

On the Cross we have the eternal Son of God, also the perfect Son of man—the only person who ever lived who could take on himself the guilt, the penalty, and all the implications of sin and make it possible for the believer to be completely transformed into a new person, righteous in God’s sight.

These are not my ideas but the clear teachings of the Bible. To evade them requires rejection of words capable of no other honest interpretation.

But some quickly object: Does this not make God a vengeful being, full of hate that can be only requited by the sacrifice of his Son? Just the opposite is the case. It is because of his great love for mankind that God provided atonement through his own Son, whose death alone would suffice.

Perhaps man’s greatest stumbling block is his unwillingness to admit either the awfulness of sin, with its rebellion against God, or the holiness of God, into whose presence nothing unclean or rebellious can come. Recognize these two truths and all other implications of the atonement fall into a glorious picture of God’s love and grace.

Humanists and others may reject the truth of the substitutionary atonement, saying that it makes God a bloody tyrant, willing to forgive only on the basis of the sufferings and death of a sacrificial victim. These people speak of the blood atonement as a “slaughterhouse religion.”

But if God loved us enough to send his Son to redeem us, there must have been a valid reason. Certainly it was not a matter of tyranny, but rather of the magnitude of sin’s offense and the necessity for the greatest possible sacrifice—the death of God’s own Son.

What is man that he should argue with his Creator? Who is he that he should question his Redeemer? How can he rightly question the God-designed method whereby he may be freed from the guilt and penalty of sin? Surely God is neither arbitrary nor unreasonable in laying down the terms of his own free gift.

In the Atonement the Lord Jesus Christ has done something for us that no one can do for himself. Salvation is a matter of believing, not achieving; of accepting God’s gracious gift by faith and in no other way.

The great marvel of the Atonement is its end result for mankind. Through our faith in Christ our sins and guilt are imputed to him—he has become sin in our stead—and his righteousness is imputed to us so that we, redeemed sinners, become righteous in God’s sight. Impossible? We have God’s word that it is true. Unbelievable? Not when viewed in the light of God’s love. Unacceptable? Only to those who willfully reject it—and who are therefore lost.

The Apostle Peter writes, “And he personally bore our sins on the Cross, so that we might be dead to sin and alive to all that is good. It was the suffering that he bore that has healed you” (1 Pet. 2:24, Phillips).

The Apostle Paul is equally explicit about the Atonement: “For I passed on to you Corinthians first of all the message I had myself received—that Christ died for our sins, as the Scriptures said he would; that he was buried and rose again on the third day, again as the Scriptures foretold” (1 Cor. 15:3, 4, Phillips).

Christ’s atonement for our sins was foreshadowed in the Old Testament sacrifices: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul” (Lev. 17:11).

How serious it is if we reject God’s offer! The writer of Hebrews warns, “If we sin deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful prospect of judgment, and a fury of fire which will consume the adversaries. A man who violated the law of Moses died without mercy at the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by the man who has spurned the Son of God, and profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and outraged the spirit of grace?” (Heb. 10:26–29).

Those confronted by an epidemic (cholera, for instance) may gain immunity from the disease by receiving an injection of vaccine. Men, all of whom are confronted by the fact of sin and its consequences, may receive forgiveness and eternal life by receiving into their hearts Jesus Christ and his atonement for them.

PAY YOUR MONEY AND TAKE YOUR CHOICE

He looked at me intently, and his big brown eyes radiated all the cosmic concern that an eight-year-old is capable of as he asked, “Dad, how can I become a race-car driver?”

Frankly, I didn’t have the foggiest idea. And as it turned out, the problem was more complex than I realized.

It seems that some months ago he and his older brother entered into a type of agreement that is frowned upon in our house and usually goes under the name “bet.” The terms were that he has to pay his brother five dollars if he does not become an astronaut.

I began to smile as he told me about it, but the gravity of the matter was reconfirmed by his solemn look. Put yourself in his place. You have your whole life ahead of you. The excitement in anticipating a career as an astronaut has palled. Now nothing looks quite so exciting as driving a race car. But standing in the way is a bet that involves the gigantic sum of FIVE DOLLARS and a considerable amount of personal pride. I tried to assure him that when the time came to make the final decision, the five dollars wouldn’t really matter. But it didn’t seem to help much. He still feels vocationally boxed in.

A few months after this incident I talked with a twenty-eight-year-old whose vocational problem was similar. It seems this young man holds a Ph.D. in a rather obscure branch of engineering. He got this degree, he said, “sort of by accident.”

The way he explained it, his grades were good in physics and so he was encouraged to consider engineering. When he finished his bachelor’s degree, he was encouraged to consider specializing in an area where there was scholarship money and little competition.

As a result he holds a Ph.D. and a considerable commitment to a field that he finds unrewarding.

The two incidents brought to mind my own vocational choices and the fact that we are often called upon to make these choices before we have the necessary information or maturity of judgment.

Perhaps the Church can help. Perhaps we should abandon our preoccupation with four-year liberal-arts colleges and take another look at the two-year junior college. Perhaps the churches by providing a two-year program could give the student a good liberal-arts foundation within a Christian perspective and still leave him time to pursue a specialized vocation.

Perhaps they could, but I’ll bet you five dollars they don’t.

BOLD ABOUT ABORTION

The latest in your series of articles and editorials on abortion (“Abortion: The Psychological Price,” by Kenneth J. Sharp, June 4) expresses certain opinions which need further examination.

The overriding fact about abortion under any circumstances and for any reason is that an innocent human being is killed. This has been stated quite boldly even by pro-abortion groups such as the California Medical Association.…

When morally responsible people express an opinion favoring abortion, there are usually two factors at work. One is that they are thinking of abortion as “termination of pregnancy,” not as taking a human life. The second is that they are not aware of how abortions are performed. On this latter point, abortion has to be one of the most barbaric methods ever devised for killing. There are laws in most states that prohibit the killing of animals by the cruel processes used to kill the innocent unborn baby.…

But above all one must bear in mind that the human being who begins life [because of rape] is innocent, and simply cannot be killed because the circumstances of conception are emotionally painful.…

A careful examination of liberalized abortion laws, such as the one in California, reveals that rather reasonable sounding reservations, such as permitting termination of pregnancy in the event of a serious threat to the mental health of the mother, have become through interpretation abortion on demand. This was not, perhaps, intended by the legislators, but it is what has happened, and what will happen everywhere there is any relaxation in abortion laws. There is a massive movement afoot in the culture to make abortion solely a matter between a mother and her doctor. These forces are pushing for, and take immediate advantage of any change in abortion laws, or any weakness or equivocation on the part of those who oppose abortion.

Donald S. Smith Associates

Anaheim, Calif.

THE LAST RESORT

The Dallas Independent School District has received a number of letters from readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY who were concerned over the editorial, “Making the Rod Count” (June 18).…

We feel that each student has the right to receive an education that will prepare him to be a productive member of society, to explore relevant materials which relate to his learning ability, to be treated by faculty and students with courtesy and respect, and to participate in the development of standards within his school community. We also expect students to respect the rights of others, to abide by school regulations, and to recognize and accept the authority of faculty and staff.

We firmly believe that the relationship between teachers and students should emphasize the positive and de-emphasize the negative. In addition, we feel it is the principal’s responsibility to maintain order and discipline in his school in order to insure its effective and efficient operation.

Occasionally, despite the efforts of the faculty and fellow students to provide a worthwhile and effective educational environment, there are some students who cannot or will not control themselves and repeatedly disrupt the school program.… Through counseling and special attention, these children usually develop self-discipline and a more positive self image. But, … there are times when corporal punishment is the only process remaining.… This technique is used as a last resort, just as a parent spanks as a last resort.

General Superintendent

Dallas Independent School District

Dallas, Tex.

OUT OF THE WILDERNESS

Praise the Lord for fresh winds blowing! I hear the strains of the Hallelujah Chorus. Thank you for Calvin Linton’s “Literary Style in Religious Writing” (June 18, July 2).… His voice crying in the wilderness of words refreshes as only the unexpected oasis that sends forth living springs of water to the dying soul.

Okeene, Okla.

BALANCED DISENCHANTMENT

Stanley Sturges’s revelation that polarization exists within the Adventist church will not surprise anyone familiar with groups of human beings and how they act (“The Growing Quarrel Among Seventh-day Adventists,” June 18). What is more remarkable is the undeniably large measure of unity evident among so heterogeneous a church, whose two million members include almost every nationality, culture, color, and educational level.

Sturges is correct when he deplores “the slavish use of her [Ellen G. White’s] comments to support almost any point the writer wishes to make.” Compilers of such lists have probably done more damage to Mrs. White’s image as a Christian leader and writer than all her detractors together. However, Sturges errs when he says Adventists put E. G. White writings on a par with the Bible. Some unwittingly do. But she herself spoke of her writings as a “lesser light to lead men and women to the greater light”—the Bible.

Though disenchanted with certain aspects of Adventism, Sturges is to be commended for a certain balance. His is no vengeful tirade. In fact, I have never seen so many complimentary things about Mrs. White in any other evangelical paper.

Book Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Association

Mountain View, Calif.

As a Seventh-day Adventist in his early thirties and one who has worked inside the church and outside for ten years now, I would like to report there is no “growing quarrel”.… Like a fresh breeze, revival has been spontaneously and quietly spreading through our ranks for several years. Beginning with our young people who are falling in love with Jesus Christ, the revival and reformation are permeating Adventists of all ages everywhere.

Seventh-day Adventists are a people who love Christ. Because this is so, most of us are too busy trying to fulfill the commission he gave each of us to have time for quarrels.

Instructor of Journalism

Andrews University

Berrien Springs, Mich.

CONFUSING COMMISSIONS

Mr. Tarr’s report on the Canadian Presbyterian General Assembly (News, “Canadian Presbyterians: Down the Middle of the Road,” July 2) illustrates what happens when a reporter, unconnected with the church written about, fails to get the official record or otherwise to check his report.

I refer in particular to his paragraph on the “charismatic renewal.” The appeal to Assembly from a member of the Westminster Presbytery concerned the presbytery’s procedure. A judicial committee of Assembly made a preliminary report that the procedure was in order. It was the presbytery itself that petitioned for the appointment of a judicial commission, which was granted. The judicial committee, with two members added, became the commission. That commission has now found the presbytery’s actions legally correct, and is proceeding to make an investigation under wide terms of reference. The doctrinal aspects were not handed to another “commission.” The Assembly’s standing committee on church doctrine has been assigned the duty of making a study and of reporting to another Assembly.

Clerk of Assembly

The Presbyterian Church in Canada

Ontario

THE COLOR OF TRUTH

Having heard one verbal report on the 111th General Assembly, and having read all of the printed reports which came to my attention from official and liberal sources, there seemed to linger a questioning echo in my mind. That echo I now believe to have been “the death knell of the Presbyterian Church as a historic entity,” reverberating all the way down to Texas.

The reports I read no doubt were factual, as statistics are factual, but they lacked the subtle color and the “ring of truth” expressed and implied in Russell Chandler’s smoothly written report, “Death Knell for Southern Presbyterians?” (July 2).

The professionals who wrote the other reports could sell arrowheads to Indians, but they can’t fool a battle-scarred conservative with fifty years of observation stored in his mind.… Thank you for the excellent report; well-written, restrained, statesman-like. Tyler, Tex.

SLEEPING LIFE AWAY

CHRISTIANITY TODAY quoted me as saying that I’m against the church (News, “Graham Crusade: Satanists Lose to Jesus Power,” July 2). This is a misquote. What I did say is as follows: Street people that we reach for Christ today are turned off by formalism and “church” that has a form of life but not life itself. I’m referring to the great sleeping giant, evangelical fundamentalism.

Chicago, Ill.

PREDETERMINED NONSENSE

I read with interest your report on tongues-speaking (News, “Testing Tongues,” June 4).… It seems that the study, reporter, and forthcoming book have already predetermined tongues as nonsense. However, the Holy Spirit cannot be tested scientifically, for he is God.

Highland Heights Presbyterian Church

Little Rock, Ark.

HUMORLESS JUDGMENT

I … appreciate CHRISTIANITY TODAY. I read it with real profit.

However, I criticize your editors for what I consider a judgment of poor taste in the use of the so-called art of Mr. Lawing (“What If …,” July 2). For a conservative religious periodical I thought this was a cheap attempt at humor.

East District Bishop

Church of the United Brethren in Christ

Grand Rapids, Mich.

EDITORIALS

Nothing in Ireland lasts long except the miles, said the novelist George Moore. This fit of poetic license took no account of the Twelfth of July festivities in that seventeen per cent of the Emerald Isle still British and Protestant. As though the news had just hit the headlines, Dutch William’s victory over the Catholic James at the Boyne in 1690 was again celebrated last month with astonishing enthusiasm. All over the province and in British cities such as Liverpool and Glasgow, sash-wearing, drum-beating processions served as a forceful reminder to any uppity papists that the Protestant boys are in the ascendancy and mean to keep it that way.

Sponsoring the occasion was the Orange Order, founded in 1795 “to maintain the laws and peace of the country and the Protestant constitution.” The implementation of this policy is, however, both broad and baffling. One of the early Orange clubs, for example, had a toast to King Billy (a kindly sideglance was directed also at Oliver Cromwell) with impressive maledictions on him who would not drink to it: “May he have a dark night, a lee shore, a rank storm, and a leaky vessel to carry him over the river Styx!… May the devil jump down his throat with a red hot harrow, with every pin tear out a gut, and blow him with a clean carcase to hell! Amen.” That splendid opportunistic Amen, far from being a quaint relic of yesteryear, still sonorously echoes the pseudo-religious motif so often used to justify sinister activity in Ulster.

After the riots in 1857 a government commission of inquiry declared that the Orange system seemed to have “no other practical result than as a means of keeping up the Orange festivals … leading as they do to violence, outrage, religious animosities, hatred between classes, and too often, bloodshed and loss of life.” The commissioners expressed the hope that “kind and generous” minds in the movement would take note and see “no controlling necessity to keep it alive.”

Alas, 114 Twelfth of Julys later, the disease is precisely the same, the remedy disregarded. The Orange Order’s maintenance of the Protestant ascendancy has involved discriminatory practices in jobs, housing, and local government. Its political influence is such that no Ulster Unionist member of parliament can be elected without the Order’s sanction. Prime Minister Brian Faulkner himself dutifully marched last month with his local lodge on the Twelfth.

The result has been that the Orange Order and its more evangelical fellow traveler Ian Paisley have conjured up an association of “true religion and undefiled” with a waving of the Union Jack, and the harassment and general discomfiture of the Man of Sin’s local emissaries. The Gospel itself is brought into disrepute—and this is the ultimate tragedy of Northern Ireland. If Islam pioneered it and crusading medieval popes exploited it, Ulster has perfected the device of the holy war with its swirling banners and its appeal to fear and intolerance. There is the spectacle of a majority brainwashed into thinking they are fighting for their religious beliefs (which many of them would have difficulty in enunciating) when their more clearly grasped thrust is against the religion of others. Even Ian Paisley is not without justification identified in a recent book as “the most prominent and the most formidable anti-Catholic in Northern Ireland.” That such shameful subjugation of a minority is done ostensibly on religious grounds is a piece of sickening hypocrisy paralleled only by Paisley’s strictures on Communist oppression or Vorster’s bizarre biblical basis for apartheid in South Africa.

Mention of such things elicits from Ulster’s extremists charges of apostasy and distortion of the facts. One evangelical writer on the subject has been attacked variously as a hired lackey of the Vatican, a tool of Communism, and a sympathizer with the so-called Irish Republican Army, which fanatically opposes the fifty-year-old partition of Ireland. This too is part of the tragedy: that any attempt at moderation or objectivity brings allegations of weakness or partiality. Lights must always be heightened, shadows darkened.

No one can deny that the IRA dream of a united Ireland has led to atrocities that are continually taking the lives of British soldiers; that Dublin has never developed highly the art of bridge-building over troubled waters; that Catholic insistence on separate schools is an exacerbating feature; that disingenuous elements have exploited the civil-rights movement. But too many Protestants give the impression that their whole religious duty can be discharged through vehement opposition to those whose churchmanship differs from theirs.

The Northern Ireland situation is a complex one (see also news story, page 36), with wrongs done on both sides; our concern in this editorial has been not to analyze the overall position (we have tried to do this before and will do so again) but to point to the Orange Order as an oddly neglected factor. The latter’s ideals are astonishingly lofty: “… detesting as we do any intolerant spirit, we solemnly pledge … that we will not persecute or upbraid any person on account of his religion opinion.…” An Orangeman is, moreover, required to love God and be “of humane and compassionate disposition, and a courteous and affable behaviour. He should be an enemy to savage brutality and unchristian cruelty … wisdom and prudence should guide his actions.…”

Wisdom and prudence, gentleness and tolerance, compassion and love of God—if Orangemen practiced these attributes to which they give lip service, they might be led to give their weighty support to the current program of political reform in Northern Ireland, which is calculated, albeit belatedly, to remove the injustice of centuries. As it is, they tend to see in it a new popish takeover plot, and this at a time when the traditional grip of the Roman Catholic Church has been substantially loosened.

Nowhere is there a greater work for Jesus Christ to be done today than in this unquiet province among the bitter, the bereaved, the incorrigible, the mutilated, the vicious, the arrogant, the terrified, the lonely, the misguided. A British newspaper reports the poignant question found inscribed on a battle-scarred wall in a particularly derelict area of Belfast: “Is there life before death?” It is both indictment of and challenge to the most church-going section of the British Isles.

On Taking It With You

’Tis the season to be moving. “For Sale” signs form ranks on lawns as vans parade down superhighways marking the tempo of American mobility. Job transfers, growing families and finances, and shrinking families and finances join to form a steady beat for a national march that reaches its peak when good weather is in and school is out. In the fall, perhaps the movers, marching in place then, will like a band at half-time spell out FLUX.

Not everything changes, of course. Into the new home go the bubblegum sculpture on the head of junior’s bed, the vase that cracked when a wobbly toddler knocked it over, the table with its cat-claw scratches, and the migrants themselves. Like household goods, the furnishings of human souls do not shed nicks and scratches by moving. Though polish may improve appearances briefly, the substance remains—and the new residence turns out to be remarkably like the old. “Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell,” said Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, and “Tis heaven to me where’er I may be,” a gospel song notes. Between the two is a Word of difference.

Highway Havoc

How often do Americans kill each other in traffic accidents? An average of once every ten minutes! The grim body count exceeded 55,000 last year. The only encouraging aspect was that it was a thousand less than the previous year. Finally enough people are beginning to use seat belts and enough cars have other recently required safety equipment to begin slackening the slaughter. Besides deaths, more than five million Americans were injured in traffic accidents.

Christians, whose bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, should take reasonable precautions to keep them in good shape by the practice of safe driving habits, including fastening seat belts and not driving extended periods without rest. Christians should also do what they can to make the highways safe for all men through support of legislation requiring stricter safety features and through realistic and enforced laws against driving while intoxicated (from either alcohol or some other drug).

Debugging The Mind

Seattle’s police chief George Tielsch was leafing through the city ordinance book one day searching for ways to cut police duties so he could put more men on patrol. Suddenly the chief went bug-eyed when he lit upon a creepy law: the chief of police is responsible for enforcing a law requiring residents to keep caterpillars off the trees.

The caterpillar law reminds us of a quotation, once used by Martin Luther, about birds. A young monk came to an old one, according to the sayings of the Desert Fathers, and confessed that he was vexed by many unsavory desires. The wise old father replied: “You cannot stop the birds from flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair.”

The old monk’s wisdom is still best for those pesky foul thoughts: don’t let them get into your hair. They’re sure to leave nothing good behind—not even butterflies.

Louis Armstrong

The extraordinary musical talent of the late Louis Armstrong was best expressed in a context evangelicals by and large have been unable to appreciate. We owe him a tribute, however, and perhaps even an apology.

Jazz, considered by many experts as the only art form ever wholly originated in America, came out of one of the seamiest sides of this country’s culture. Why has musical creativity of this depth not surfaced in the Church, where it could be coupled with verbal meaning?

Because of the kind of life associated with jazz and because of its jarring quality that contrasts so sharply with traditional church music, jazz is still widely regarded as inappropriate for worship—or even sacrilegious. But the Same objections can be stated against rock music, which is currently making substantial inroads into evangelical usage.

In tribute to Armstrong, who died last month, we recall his performance genius. The Church could have asked him to play an anthem or triple-tongue a gospel song. Unfortunately, neither would have done justice to his ability.

Missouri Synod: Evangelical Persuasion

There was noise and confusion on the floor as people moved in and out of the aisles at a crowded hearing during the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod convention in Milwaukee last month. Several times a man, frustrated because he couldn’t hear, shouted out, “Order in the house!”

The subject of the hearing was whether Missouri Synod president Jacob A. O. Preus acted within his authority when he conducted an investigation into the beliefs and teaching practices of forty-five professors at Concordia (St. Louis) Seminary, one of the denomination’s two theological schools (see News, page 31). Nearly everyone who spoke to the issue during the two-hour hearing said Preus did indeed have that prerogative. But there was sharp divergence of opinion over how unity of doctrine should be maintained.

The pressing need for the sadly divided LCMS is “order in the house.” But how?

There is the way of “law and order,” epitomized in the Roman Catholic concept of the immutable and infallible magisterium of the church that must be obeyed. This approach sometimes leads to oppression and repression.

There is also the way expressed in John Milton’s Areopagitica. Speaking to a religious controversy of the day, Milton wrote as a resolute believer in the power of truth to win its way in the free marketplace of ideas. The Milwaukee convention adopted this approach of “evangelical persuasion,” a pastoral method of dealing with doctrinal deviation.

We commend Dr. Preus for his forthright and uncompromising stand for biblical inerrancy and his insistence that his church hew to the line of the Synod’s confessional commitment. An evangelical and confessional church body has the right and duty to adopt doctrinal statements that are in conformity with Scripture and its confessions—and then expects its pastors, teachers, and professors to believe, teach, and confess according to them.

Unfortunately, Dr. Preus is between the rock and the whirlpool. Who decides what is a binding statement of doctrine that goes beyond the explicit understanding of doctrine expressed in Scripture and the Lutheran confessions? And how are such statements interpreted and enforced? That’s where the rubber hits the road.

If a restrictive resolution introduced at the Milwaukee convention had been adopted, conceivably teachers and pastors in the Missouri church might have had to change their beliefs every two years or so in order to conform to the doctrinal resolutions passed by the latest biennial convention. In 1959, the Synod convention adopted a statement asserting that “every doctrinal statement of a confessional nature adopted by Synod as a true exposition of the Holy Scriptures is to be regarded as a public doctrine in Synod.” The 1962 convention declared that resolution unconstitutional.

Regrettably, Preus appears to have been stymied—at least for now—in his bid to steer the three-million-member church back into a snug harbor of theological conservatism (a feat, incidentally, so far not accomplished by any major denomination).

We pray that, in the tradition of Milton, free inquiry and discussion will provide a middle way for evangelical persuasion and the leading of the Holy Spirit.

The Peking Gambit

President Nixon astonished the world by his announcement that he would step through the bamboo curtain in a personal visit to Communist China by early 1972. No doubt the Kremlin lights are burning late as the Soviet Union plans its next play in the global game of power politics. But if someone could seize the “Kremlin Papers,” we would undoubtedly learn that the Soviets had contingency plans ready for just such a move by Nixon.

However greatly we may dislike the Communism of the People’s Republic of China, this much should be clear: it is a well-entrenched government controlling more than 700 million people; and it has as much right to recognition by the world as the Soviet Union, which murdered multiplied millions of people in its early years. It may even be possible for the United States to use Red China as a counter-point against the Soviet Union in the worldwide struggle for hegemony. Perhaps our stake in Europe would be advanced were we to recognize Red China’s legitimate stake in the Far East mainland, where she could provide a balance of power to the Soviets, who share with China a very tense border.

It is well to remember that of all the powers the United States never took over any part of China’s land and extraterritorial possessions, nor did the United States demand spheres of influence. Traditionally, the United States has been friendly toward the Chinese. Yet the journey to Peking will not be easy. Diplomatic recognition may be long in coming, for the Chinese are a resourceful, tough-minded, pragmatic lot who will bite in the clinches and drive hard, shrewd bargains.

It is not unlikely that Nixon’s step will speed our exodus from Southeast Asia, for it is in the interests of Red China for us to go even as the Soviets might like us to stay. Whatever the outcome, evangelicals can hope that the Peking gambit will in due time lead to a wide-open door for the Gospel, and they should lay careful plans to penetrate this spiritual darkness whenever the opportunity arises.

An article dealing with this possibility—“China: Open Door to What?”—is scheduled for the next issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Viet Nam—Continuing Impasse

In 1949 North Viet Nam as well as South Viet Nam and the United States signed the Geneva Convention governing the treatment and repatriation of prisoners of war. North Viet Nam has consistently violated this pact, and its claim that American prisoners are “war criminals” and “air pirates” because the war is an undeclared one is nonsense, since the treaty binds the parties “even if the state of war is not recognized by them.”

The Viet Cong have tied the prisoner-of-war issue to the political settlement in the Paris peace talks and have used it to help shape American public opinion toward withdrawal. Although North Viet Nam’s latest proposals are substantively no different from previous ones, their form is designed to generate enthusiasm for what has already been rejected.

The United States can only go through the process of trying to determine the intentions behind the “new” proposals. Despite past experience, we can pray for a fruitful outcome. More and more it appears that Mr. Nixon’s Vietnamization program, though far from ideal, is the best of the available alternatives. Perhaps this move toward establishing diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China will do more to bring an end to the war than anything done in Paris so far. Meanwhile he should be urged to end our involvement at the earliest possible date consistent with the safety of our men and a chance for South Viet Nam to remain viable.

A Four-Letter Word Upheld

Public display of vulgar language may be constitutionally defensible, says the United States Supreme Court. In a decision little noticed by the news media, the court reversed the conviction of Paul R. Cohen, who had been charged after he appeared in a Los Angeles courthouse corridor wearing a jacket that bore an obscene remark denouncing the draft. It was a five-to-four ruling in which the normally conservative justices John M. Harlan and Potter Stewart sided with three members of the court’s liberal bloc. Harlan, in fact, wrote the twelve-page majority opinion, joined also by Justices William O. Douglas, William J. Brennan, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall.

Harlan argued that the California law under which Cohen had been found guilty and given a thirty-day jail sentence was inadequate for this particular case. He went on to say, however, that “the ability of government, consonant with the Constitution, to shut off discourse solely to protect others from hearing it is dependent upon a showing that substantial privacy interests are being invaded in an essentially intolerable manner.” It was a victory for the American Civil Liberties Union, which had appealed the case on the issue of free speech.

Much as Christians may loathe the growing respectability of four-letter words once considered immoral, they should now find ways of capitalizing on this legal precedent. A court that has upheld scurrilous discourse in public places will have to allow the communication of the Christian Gospel, for example, in similar situations.

Trouble Is Chronic

The Christian life is not like a ship’s cruise on a calm ocean with shining sun and bracing temperature. Often it is more like the journeying of a well-built ship through rough seas and dense fogs, confronted by opposing currents, contrary winds, and broken propeller shafts.

Those who undergo the severest trials are not the worst saints nor those most careless about the soul-nourishing practices of Bible reading and prayer. Take, for instance, the Apostle Paul, one whose life was wholly devoted to God. He was an expert on the theory and the practice of prayer, and undoubtedly he often prayed that God would keep him from the worst trials of life. Yet his pilgrimage was one of unremitting hardship—he was beaten, stoned, shipwrecked, starved, victimized by evil men, and tormented by a thorn in the flesh. God did not choose to deliver him.

God did, however, give him the courage to endure, and so Paul can triumphantly say, in a heartening series of contrasts, that he was “troubled yet not distressed,” “perplexed but not in despair,” “persecuted but not forsaken,” “cast down but not destroyed” (2 Cor. 4:8, 9). And through his hardship he was able to write words of comfort and assurance that have helped millions of suffering believers.

We have no right to expect the Christian life to take place in some tranquil demilitarized zone, away from the conflicts of life. Believers in Communist lands right now bear the marks of suffering, and the day may not be too far off when Christians in the free world will face persecution. We may endure the loss of many material blessings we have taken for granted. We may know in a way we have not known before that trouble is a chronic part of the human condition. How will we respond to adversity? Sermons and liturgies and sententious sayings can help us little in that day.

Trouble is chronic, to be sure, but there is a sovereign remedy for this condition, one that enables us to live “not somehow but triumphantly.” That remedy is walking in the Spirit.

Declaring Luke Evangelist

Luke: Historian and Theologian, by I. Howard Marshall (Zondervan, 1971, 238 pp., paperback, $2.95), is reviewed by W. Ward Gasque, assistant professor of New Testament studies, Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia.

This new book by one of the foremost of the younger New Testament scholars in Britain today is certainly the most important contribution to Lucan studies since the controversial study of the theology of Luke that Hans Conzelmann published in 1954.

Over the past decade and a half scholars have engaged in much debate about whether the author of Luke-Acts should be understood primarily as a historian of early Christianity (the traditional view) or as a creative theologian who stands alongside Paul and John (the more recent view). Among those who have stressed the theological aspect of the Third Gospel and Acts, some, mostly Germans, have tended to take a rather dim view of the historical value of these writings.

Marshall argues that there need be no contradiction between the two roles of historian and theologian—indeed, that it is important to recognize both aspects. Conzelmann, Haenchen, and others have rightly recognized that Luke was an interpreter of the tradition he received concerning Jesus and the early Church; but they have been wrong in insisting that his theological aims caused him to play fast and loose with the historical data.

The best way to understand the nature of Luke’s writings is to view him primarily as an evangelist. He is one who proclaims the message of salvation. This “message of salvation” is not concerned simply with bringing about “self-understanding” on the part of the hearer, as many modern theologians allege. Rather, the message is a report of actual happenings, to which we are to respond because they are true. If God was not in fact acting in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, then the message is vain. But if he has so acted, and we do not believe it, still it remains just as true, and we are the ones who are lost in vanity.

In a brief review one cannot give a full account of Marshall’s monograph. It is a fairly technical work and will be appreciated most by the advanced student. The early part of the book deals with the contemporary scholarly debate over Luke’s writings, in particular the question of theology versus history. But the greater portion of the book (pp. 77–125) analyzes the fundamental theological themes of Luke-Acts. These Marshall organizes under the heading of salvation (rather than “salvation-history”), thus detailing the content of Luke’s evangelistic thrust.

Luke: Historian and Theologian is highly commended to the advanced student as the best of the recently written introductions to the theology of Luke-Acts as well as to the questions raised by contemporary Lucan research. The publishers are to be thanked for making a work of this caliber available in such an inexpensive form.

Milestone In The Quest

New Testament Theology: The Proclamation of Jesus, by Joachim Jeremias (Scribner, 1971, 330 pp., $10), is reviewed by Paul Garnet, assistant professor of theological studies, Loyola College, Montreal, Quebec.

Professor Jeremias starts from familiar form-critical grounds but arrives at some surprisingly conservative conclusions. This is because he thinks form critics have relied too exclusively on the “criterion of dissimilarity” for judging which gospel material is authentic. He adds his own criterion: the linguistic. Certain expressions in the Gospels are found to be peculiar to the Aramaic language (consequently an early tradition) or even to the style of Jesus himself.

These elements do not guarantee authenticity, since it is conceivable that creators of the tradition were consciously or unconsciously imitating the dominical style. “Nevertheless, … the linguistic and stylistic evidence … shows so much faithfulness and such respect towards the tradition of the sayings of Jesus that we are justified in drawing up the following principle of method: In the synoptic tradition it is the inauthenticity, and not the authenticity, of the sayings of Jesus that must be demonstrated.” This confidence enables him also to use the criterion of attestation by multiple sources.

The author has a high estimate of the reliability of Luke. Its divergences from Mark are due not to editorial composition but to the use of an independent source that included the logia. These were not a document (Q) but a highly stable block of oral tradition appearing in different forms in Matthew and Luke. As for the elements peculiar to Matthew, these are often to be explained by the presence or absence of a tradition available to the author, says Jeremias, rather than as theologically motivated redactions.

Professor Jeremias finds that Jesus regarded himself as the eschatological Prophet and Bearer of the Spirit that had long been quenched through Israel’s sin. He saw his mission in terms of the Suffering Servant, not the Son of man; the latter term applied only to his coming exaltation. The resurrection of Jesus was experienced by the disciples as the parousia, and Matthew 27:51b–53 records a genuine reminiscence. Jesus foretold his own violent death and spoke of its vicarious atoning value.

The book contains a mine of information involving extensive exegetical as well as critical work. Unfortunately, there is no subject or author index. Even the index of biblical references is not altogether complete, though nearly so. Although the subject matter is inevitably quite technical, the English of the translation is very readable.

This is an important milestone in the new quest for the historical Jesus. We await succeeding volumes to complete Jeremias’s study of New Testament theology.

For Love Of Earth

Technology: The God That Failed, by Dorothy M. and Gerald H. Slusser (Westminster, 1971, 169 pp., paperback, $2.95), Ecology Crisis by John W. Klotz (Concordia, 1971, 176 pp., paperback, $2.75), and Celebrate the Earth, by Donald Imgland (Augsburg, 1971, 96 pp., paperback, no price given), are reviewed by Janet Rohler Greisch, Woodbridge, Virginia.

It has become popular to blame Christianity for the current deplorable condition of our environment. Despite the apparently damning evidence in Genesis (“subdue the earth”; “be fruitful and multiply”), this is an accusation difficult to balance with the high view of nature in the psalms and in Jesus’ words. Yet Christian communities have indeed failed God’s creation, if not by overzealously subduing it, then by their non-existent-to-mild protest against the ravishing of it.

But that kind of failure is hardly limited to Christians, as the Slussers note in Technology: The God That Failed. It is, they claim, a failure common to both secular and sacred communities because of their separation from one another. At first, science was a kind of natural theology—a process of learning about God through nature. Later, when it began to describe everything as bits of matter in a variety of spatial relationships, science provided for the reduction of nature to something inanimate. That assumption—that nature is a thing to be used rather than life to be shared—along with the evolutionary assumption that survival, as a struggle in an inhospitable world, requires an every-man-for-himself existence and the capitalistic assumption that growth and progress are man’s most important products, underlies the technological outlook currently common to Christian and non-Christian alike. Secular men of all religious persuasions readily step on lower life forms—apparently assuming they exist for that purpose—in the climb toward success (material success, that is).

The real culprit, then, according to the Slussers, is the daddy-fix-it technology that, like an overindulgent parent, came up with bigger and better toys (bought from buck-chasing capitalist competitors) and in the process devalued life. Not until that technological god is desacralized, warn the Slussers, can the situation improve.

All three books in chorus declare that saving the environment (including man) will require of humanity a value-conversion. Man must reevaluate his place in nature, learning to see himself as part of the ecosystem (indeed, as a parasite in it), not independent of it; man the consumer must become man the conserver.

The pollution output of technological man is the subject of scientist Klotz in his broad (but poorly edited) survey of the Ecology Crisis. Clergyman Imsland pleads (note his book’s imperative title, Celebrate the Earth) for a change in human attitudes to be achieved by putting the problem in perspective: the earth is a minute speck in the universe; man is an infant on an ancient planet. (By now ecology has developed a rather standard platform with planks for overpopulation and pollution of air, water, and soil, and these books stand on it with, as one might expect, considerable overlapping. Though all three merit attention, this review focuses on the Slussers’ book because it offers the most comprehensive treatment of both problem and solution.)

A radical change in life style will not be easy, particularly for Americans, whose competitive way of life has assumed the proportions of a religion—and not even for Christians, whom Jesus instructed to “take no thought for tomorrow.” The basis for change suggested in these books, most notably in Technology: The God That Failed, is love—sacrificial and unselfish. Unfortunately, man has never learned to love his brother very well; little wonder he has so badly slighted “sister earth,” as Imsland calls her. But man must learn to love the world—plant, animal, and human—or risk the demise of all life. The conclusion that love does indeed (or can, if practiced) “make the world go ’round” is supremely Christian, recalling God’s example of sacrificial love and casting new light on the words often glibly quoted from John 3:16.

Lifted—The Heavy Hand

The Survival of Dogma, by Avery Dulles (Doubleday, 1971, 240 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Clark H. Pinnock, professor of theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Bannockburn, Illinois.

In this collection of essays and addresses, Avery Dulles, son of John Foster Dulles, examines the role of faith, authority, and dogma in the contemporary Catholic Church. He is a prominent American voice for the moderately progressive theology of Rahner, Kaiser, and Schillebeeckx. He wishes to combine a reverence for the historic Christian symbols with the freedom to strike out in new directions and even undertake revisions. He is convinced that churchly tradition has been too statically conceived, and needs to be viewed historically. Faith has too often been made burdensome because it has been tied to the thought-forms and styles of earlier ages. Dulles believes that an irrelevant form of faith is really a form of infidelity, since it fails to confront the challenges posed by its moment of history. The Christian understanding and structures should be overhauled, he says, to correspond more exactly with the concerns and ideas of the contemporary world.

Several of the essays bear on the kind of apologetics needed in our day. Dulles feels that apologetics in the past has concentrated too exclusively on objective evidences extrinsic to man; it ought to emphasize more of a phenomenological approach. One of the most impressive things about the Christian message is its ability to meet man’s aspirations and speak to his anxieties and needs. Hope is a deeply rooted human response to the world, and cries out for a rationale. Spes quaerens intellectum. Man’s hope exceeds his hopes. What is it that drives him to hope even against hope? Surely it is, according to Dulles, a deep preconceptual experience of the God who has made himself known in Jesus Christ. Dulles is right in saying we need an apologetics of hope.

In an essay on the irreformability of dogma, Dulles allows us to place him within the stream of contemporary Catholic thinking. He is certainly not happy with the scholastic right wing, which understands dogma as fixed and unchangeable formulas. Neither is he at ease with the existential left, which has abandoned the infallibility of the church. Dulles wishes to retain an authentically cognitive role for Christian truths. He affirms the doctrinal infallibility of the church while allowing for reformulation in terminology and concept. Dogma once stated can be developed in the presence of a new context and new questions. The book came out too soon to have had to face the challenge of Hans Küng to the whole concept of infallibility. Progressives like Dulles are now on the spot. Development of dogma, when taken to the lengths that men like Rahner take it, begins to resemble very closely a reversal of thought and a change of mind.

In this book we find some well-written essays from the progressive wing of American Catholicism. The theology is in transition. The heavy hand of authority has been lifted. This fact lends an aura of excitement to the work.

Newly Published

Biblical Revelation, by Clark H. Pinnock (Moody, 256 pp., $4.95). Argues that the Bible is God’s written Word to man, that it is completely truthful, and that its central purpose is to present Christ. “Because Christ’s attitude toward Scripture was one of total trust, we confess inerrancy, even though we cannot yet demonstrate it.” Inerrancy “is restricted to the intended assertions of Scripture.” A significant and timely work.

The Reality of God, by Louis Cassels (Doubleday, 112 pp., $4.95). A sprightly, unpretentious rationale for belief in God by UPI’s religion editor. Written for “wistful agnostics and reluctant atheists” by one who was both. Believers can find in it useful models for their own pre-evangelism. The theological underpinnings vary.

A View From the Streets, by Ron Willis (Broadman, 128 pp., $3.50). The passionate testimony of a young Southern Baptist ministering to the people of the streets. Cutting across simplistic answers and shallow categorizing, he pleads with the Church to get outside its cloisters and face people as people.

The Trial of Luther, by James Atkinson (Stein and Day, 212 pp., $7.95). This vital historical event is related with immediacy and momentum. The book marks the 450th anniversary of Luther’s trial. Welcome reading.

Jerusalem and Athens, edited by E. R. Geehan (Presbyterian and Reformed, 498 pp., $9.95). An all-star cast of twenty-five evangelical thinkers (including Berkouwer, Dooyeweerd, Holmes, Jewett, Montgomery, and Pinnock) interacts negatively and positively with the thought of Cornelius Van Til, in whose honor this volume is published.

International Directory of Religious Information Systems, by David O. Moberg (Sociology Dept., Marquette Univ., Milwaukee, Wis., 88 pp., paperback, $2.95). Descriptions of nearly eighty widely varying agencies with such concerns as bibliography, statistics, and institutional administration.

The Beatitudes, by Thomas Watson (Puritan, 307 pp., $4.50). Sermons by a London preacher first published in 1660.

Discern These Times, by S. I. McMillen (Revell, 192 pp., $4.95), and At the Time of the End, by C. O. Meyer (Vantage, 300 pp., $4.95). Two more in the endless stream of books, ever since the apostles, that seek to correlate current events with signs that are immediately to precede Christ’s return. McMillen is “mid-trib”; Meyer is “pre-trib” and equates biblical Tarshish with America.

A Plea for Evangelical Demonstration, by Carl F. H. Henry (Baker, 124 pp., $3.95). Six lectures by the well-known theologian on such topics as evangelism, revolution, and social justice. Assumes that “the social crisis today has reached proportions so acute that … Christian moral protest has become imperative.”

Catholic Ethics and Protestant Ethics, by Roger Mehl (Westminster, 126 pp., $4.95). A brief, irenic study of traditional and contemporary divergences and convergences.

Mission Theology Today, by John Power (Orbis, 216 pp., paperback, $3.95). A Catholic reaffirmation of the continued need for evangelistic missions in a time when many Catholic thinkers seem to be denying their validity. Also examines the relation between missions and economic development. Outgrowth of a high-level conference of theologians, but written on a non-technical level.

The Harvest of Hellenism, by F. E. Peters (Simon and Schuster, 800 pp., hardback, $15, paperback $4.95). The chairman of the classics department at N.Y.U. presents a highly readable overview of the Near East from Alexander the Great to the triumph of Christianity.

Tongues, edited by Luther B. Dyer (LeRoi, Box 1165, Jefferson City, Mo. 65101, 151 pp., paperback, $2.95). Six Baptist theologians give an excellent overview and evaluation of tongues-speakers from Pentecost to the present. Deserves wide circulation.

Faith Without Religion, by Fred Brown (SCM, 156 pp., $2.28). Former Salvation Army officer says that although “secular man” has outgrown Christian doctrines and institutions, he is unconsciously in tune with the mind of Christ. Derivative and shallow.

Sexual Understanding Before Marriage, by Herbert J. Miles (Zondervan, 222 pp., paperback, $1.95). A basic book for a church sex-education program—too basic for people old enough to marry.

Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove, by Michael Novak (Harper & Row, 240 pp., $5.95). A philosophical-theological voyage culminating in the discovery of personal identity (through subjective analysis of truths the author now considers subjective, once considered absolute). Those who choose to accompany him shouldn’t expect much.

The Untapped Generation, by David and Don Wilkerson (Zondervan, 256 pp., paperback, $1.95). A meatier-than-usual book from the Teen Challenge people.

Research on Religious Development, edited by Merton Strommen (Hawthorn, 904 pp., $24.95). A definitive and indispensable survey of the results of seventy-five years of social-scientific study of religion. The twenty-two chapters, prepared by specialists, treat such topics as “the religion of youth,” “religion and mental disorder,” and “development of internal moral standards in children.”

When Love Prevails: A Pastor Speaks to a Church in Crisis, by J. Herbert Gilmore, Jr. (Eerdmans, 141 pp., $3.95). Sermons from the former pastor of the First Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Gilmore and 300 members of that church left in 1970 when the congregation refused to admit two Negroes.

Encyclopedia of Southern Baptists, Volume III, edited by Davis Collier Woolley (Broadman, 512 pp., $9.95). Supplements and updates the original volumes, issued in 1958. Greatly extends the usefulness of this reference work.

The Future of the Christian World Mission, edited by William J. Danker and Wi Jo Kang (Eerdmans, 181 pp., $5.95). A dozen essays in honor of a leading Protestant missiologist, R. Pierce Beaver. Topics include the church in northern Sumatra, the home base and world outreach of evangelicals, the Catholic missionary crisis, and dialogue with non-Christian religions.

Southern Baptists and Their History, by H. I. Hester (Historical Commission, SBC, 144 pp., $1.95). A description of how one denomination has done something about preserving the records and promoting the study of its past. A good example for others to follow.

The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805–1861, by Daniel Walker Howe (Harvard, 398 pp., $15). An award-winning study of the Boston area elite when that city was the nation’s cultural center. Shows that theological radicalism can be very much at home with political and social conservatism.

The Gospel and Unity, edited by Vilmost Vajta (Augsburg, 207 pp., $5.95) Six Lutheran scholars write on such topics as “ecumenical endeavor and its quest for motivation,” “Roman Catholic and Lutherar relationships,” and “secular ecumenism.”

The Problem of Evil, by M. B. Ahern (Schocken, 85 pp., $4.50). An extensively footnoted, dry attempt to face the whys of evil. The author cites C. S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain, a clearer, more vigorous analysis.

In The Journals

American theological libraries should be sure to have A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain (SCM, 56 Bloomsbury, London W.C.l, England), the fourth number of which has recently appeared. Each issue has about ten articles. Sample titles: “Mormons in Britain,” “Religious Activity in a Northern Suburb,” “The Spiritualist Meeting,” “The Faith Mission,” “Conflict in Minister/Lay Relations.”

Probably the leading conservative Wesleyan journal is the quarterly Asbury Seminarian (Wilmore, Ky. 40390; $3 per year). Articles in recent issues look at work and leisure, conscience and war, and computers and Christianity.

Higher Education: A Christian Perspective (Box 711, La Mirada, Cal. 90638; $8 per year—three issues) makes its appearance at a time when economic reality is forcing re-evaluation of the necessity and institutional forms of Christian liberal-arts colleges. The three articles in the first issue are a statistical report on student values, a historical survey of Christianity and American colleges, and an essay on the Christian professor.

Recently there has appeared a small Pentecostal-sponsored quarterly “free to address itself to any legitimate issue,” the Academic Forum (Box 21366, Chattanooga, Tenn. 37421; $2 per year). Articles on the environmental crisis, the role of laymen, and methadone are in the first two issues.

Both of the Missouri Lutheran seminaries publish worthwhile theological journals. The less well known is The Springfielder (Concordia Theological Seminary, Springfield, Ill. 62702), a quarterly. The June issue contains an address by Walter Kunneth, a leading conservative German theologian (yes, there are such), “Christology as a Problem in our Day.” Other articles look at allegory and at the historical-critical method of New Testament study.

We live in a world strangely bereft of love. The characteristic mood is one of loneliness, anxiety, and estrangement. This is powerfully portrayed in Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit, in which three souls drag out their existence in hell, physically together, but hostile, antagonistic, and embittered. The first, a man, had been a Fascist collaborator; the second had been a prostitute; the third, a lesbian. Condemned to the torture of enduring eternally a fellowship that they all hate, these three inmates of hell have no love, no pity, no hope. They long for escape, but hell has no exit. The man finally cries out, “There’s no need for hot pokers in this place. Hell is—other people.” So here on earth we experience hell—the presence of other people with whom one must exist but with whom there is no community, no joyous feeling of relatedness, no loving mutuality. And this by and large is the human lot today.

Psychotherapy is a discipline concerned with understanding and treating personality disorders. In the years since Freud started to explore the subconscious reaches of the mind, psychotherapy has been accumulating a wealth of data, much of it bearing upon the matter of love. In fact, psychotherapists stress the necessity of viewing life as a ceaseless quest for love.

Any discipline that can help to release human beings from a self-centered love, that inverted love which prevents a true self-acceptance and a true self-understanding, ought to be Christianity’s welcomed ally. Can psychotherapy, then, illuminate and perhaps correct the Christian conception of love? Or does the Christian view prove far more adequate than this secular wisdom about man?

Since the vast field before us includes an overwhelming amount of literature, let us arbitrarily select for examination a psychotherapist who is fairly typical. Erich Fromm is an outstanding theorist and well-known popularizer with a rich background of clinical experience. Against this, he projects ideas that unite depth-analysis, anthropology, philosophy, ethics, religion, and history in a remarkably productive alliance. Some of his books have become classics—Escape From Freedom, The Art of Loving, Man for Himself. Suppose we ask Fromm about love.

Man, he says, possesses innately the powers of love and reason, together with a capacity for productive work or creativity (though he also has a propensity for evil and destructiveness). His major task is to establish relationships with others marked by reason, productivity, and love.

But, tragically, man is reared in an irrational culture by parents who, as products of that culture, are themselves irrational. As a result, many human beings cannot live rationally and productively. They are unable to love and so become neurotic. Fromm emphatically states:

There is no more convincing proof that the injunction, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” is the most important norm of living and that its violation is the basic cause of unhappiness and mental illness than the evidence gathered by the psychoanalysts. Whatever complaints the neurotic patient may have, whatever symptoms he may present, are rooted in his inability to love, if by love we mean a capacity for the experience of concern, responsibility, respect and understanding of another person, and the intense desire for that other person’s growth [Psychoanalysis and Religion, 1950, p. 86].

It follows that “analytic therapy is essentially an attempt to help the patient gain or regain his capacity for love.” And what is love?

[It is an attitude] of responsibility, care, respect, and knowledge, and the wish for the other person to grow and develop. It is the expression of intimacy between two human beings under the condition of the preservation of each other’s integrity [Man for Himself, 1947, p. 110].

Thus from Fromm’s perspective,

To love a person productively implies to care and to feel responsible for his life, not only for his physical powers but for the growth and development of all his human powers. To love productively is incompatible with being an onlooker at the loved person’s life; it implies labor and care and responsibility for its growth [ibid, p. 98].

When through therapy this capacity has been gained or regained, a person is marked by not only a proper neighbor love but also a proper self-love.

The love of others and love of ourselves are not alternatives. On the contrary, an attitude of love toward ourselves will be found in all those who are capable of loving others. Love, in principle, is indivisible as far as the connection of “objects” and one’s own self is concerned [ibid., p. 129].

In bare outline, then, this is Fromm’s conception of love, and very impressive it is. Yet we must not forget that Fromm, like the great majority of psychotherapists, is a reductive naturalist, an antisupernaturalist who reduces everything ultimately to chemistry and physics. So, he asserts,

[Man must learn] to face the truth, to acknowledge his fundamental aloneness and solitude in a universe indifferent to his fate, to recognize that there is no power transcending him that can solve his problems for him … that there is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers, by living productively [ibid., p. 44].

Within man himself, Fromm believes, there lies the potential to become loving; he can do this without any assistance except that which other human beings—a therapist, for instance—may give him. Fromm is unequivocal on this crucial point:

To love one’s neighbor is not a phenomenon transcending man; it is something inherent in and radiating from him. Love is not a higher power which descends upon man nor a duty which is imposed upon him; it is his own power by which he relates himself to the world and makes it truly his [ibid., p. 14].

In short, man is the sole ground and single source of love.

Listening to Fromm’s view of love, a theologian nods appreciatively again and again. He agrees that if man is to experience fulfillment, he must live rationally, productively, and above all lovingly. He also agrees that human beings are frustrated precisely at this point: they are unable to live in free, outgoing, creative love, joyfully and responsibly caring for their neighbors as themselves. And he agrees that something must be done to help frustrated people gain or regain the capacity to love.

But having agreed on these points, the theologian begins to disagree vigorously. Psychotherapy, he says, while it may indeed be healing and liberating, cannot penetrate to the bottom of the frustration and failure people experience in their relations with others if it ignores the one all-determinative interpersonal relationship—that between God and man. This concept of the human predicament differs radically from the psychotherapist’s. Assume that in self-love (a self-love for which he is responsible) man chooses to make himself the center of things, shouldering God aside, perhaps even doing this under the guise of religion). Assume, consequently, a malignant relationship between the creature and his Creator. Assume that, though he acknowledges the law of love, man cannot by his own efforts fulfill this law. Then what? In this predicament, a therapy far more radical than psychotherapy is required. What man needs is something that only God’s forgiving grace can provide: the therapy of divine love.

The major components of this therapy are the atonement made by Jesus Christ and the ministry of the Holy Spirit. In the miracle of the incarnation, to quote Emil Brunner, “God has gone down into the midst of man’s plight and shared it with him.” But the Gospel affirms something even more mind-staggering. It announces that in the miracle of the atonement, God has died for man and with man in order that he and man, dying “jointly to an old life,” might “jointly rise to a new one.” In the Cross man beholds the consummate evidence of love. This revelation of sin-bearing love breaks the bondage of self-love and sets man free to live according to the law of love.

Yet in all this process of redemption, this metamorphosis of self-love, the ministry of the Holy Spirit must not be overlooked. Here is another mind-staggering aspect of the Gospel. The indwelling Spirit of God, who is the Spirit of Jesus Christ, comes to fill the love-conquered heart with the love of God, changing the personality more and more into the likeness of incarnate Love. This divine therapy corresponds strikingly to the prescription that philosopher William Ernest Hocking gave for the salvation of the soul mired in self-love:

The question, How is love to God or to man possible if as a fact I do not have it? would be answered if there were, as the moving Spirit of the world, an aggressive lover able and disposed to break in upon my temper of critical egoism and win my response [Human Nature and Its Remaking, 1918, p. 398].

This is John 3:16 rephrased in philosophical language. God, the moving Spirit of the universe, is an aggressive lover who by the miracles of incarnation, atonement, and resurrection, together with the powerful operation of the Holy Spirit, cracks through the sinner’s imprisoning egocentricity and elicits love. What the philosopher sees as indispensable is precisely what the Gospel announces and what Christian experience verifies. The vision of Calvary, where Love died, is brought home to the conscience with ego-penetrating power by the Holy Spirit, winning the response that produces love for God and man.

The theologian has no quarrel with the depth-psychologist concerning therapy. He merely points out that there is a vertical interpersonal relationship just as there are horizontal ones, and that, when the vertical dimension is ignored, even the most effective therapy cannot bring a man to wholeness.

Fromm, as we have observed, is a reductive naturalist who views the cosmos as an energy system devoid of meaning, apparently destined to disintegrate sooner or later. Nevertheless, he holds that on this ocean of meaninglessness man can somehow construct a little raft of meaning. But the theologian has grave doubts about this possibility. It seems to him that enervating pessimism must be a person’s mood if he believes that existence is purposeless and that the entire history of Homo sapiens is only a fleeting episode in an eternal space-time flux. Can man have significance in a cosmos that he believes is both mindless and heartless? Obviously not!

Fromm agrees that man must have “a frame of orientation and devotion” to vanquish his feeling of isolation and nothingness. Listen to this:

Unless he belongs somewhere, unless his life has some meaning and direction, he would feel like a particle of dust and be overcome by his individual insignificance. He would not be able to relate himself to any system which would give meaning and direction to his life; he would be filled with doubt, and this doubt would eventually paralyze his ability to act—that is, to live [Escape From Freedom, 1941, p. 21].

If Fromm is correct, then in order to live, not just drag out his days in paralyzing doubt, man must know that his experience has meaning and direction. But what “frame of orientation and devotion” can satisfy his craving for significance except the Gospel of redemptive agape, the self-disclosure of an eternal, self-giving love? Brunner asks us to ponder a basic fact

Apart from this foundation in eternity, and this goal in eternity, the whole history of humanity is a mere nothing, which is swallowed up in the whirlpool of the temporal.… Either life has eternal underlying meaning or it has no underlying meaning at all. For what is meaning, if it is finally swallowed up in meaninglessness and annihilation?… In the Christian revelation of eternity, however, my eyes are open to perceive the truth that God, my Lord, regards me from all eternity with the gaze of everlasting love, and therefore my individual personal experience and life now receive an eternal meaning.… I, myself, acquire an eternal dignity [The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption, 1952, I, 304].

To be sure, this may be dismissed as speculation or myth. But the fact remains that it satisfies man’s longing for significance, for meaning and direction.

The theologian has another question for the therapist. What if the reality of divine love is denied? Think through the consequences of that denial; they are by no means trifling. Man may stoically pursue self-knowledge and self-understanding, but in the end his pursuit brings him to Nietzsche’s vision of an abyss in which the self disintegrates. Years ago the renowned English physicist George Romanes temporarily abandoned his faith in Christianity. During that time he wrote A Candid Examination of Theism in which he frankly admitted that the pursuit of self-knowledge had become intolerable:

There is a dreadful truth in those words of Hamilton—philosophy having become a meditation, not merely of death but of annihilation, the precept know thyself has become translated into the terrible oracle to Oedipus, “Mayest thou never know the truth of what thou art” [p. 114].

Although the theologian is deeply appreciative of psychotherapy, he argues that, when based on reductive naturalism, it holds a defective and ultimately frustrating wisdom about man. It fails to realize that to experience the highest form of health, healing, and happiness, human beings need a cosmic environment of love—divine love. This love supplies redemptive meaning and hope, and through the Church even the hope of community in a splintered world.

In short, the theologian is persuaded that man needs God, the God who revealed himself in Jesus Christ. As Leslie Paul perceptively said, “Yes, God is the meaning of existence, but love is the meaning of God.”

Vernon C. Grounds is president and professor of pastoral care and Christian ethics at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary, Denver. He has the A.B. from Rutgers, the B.D. from Faith Seminary, and the Ph.D. from Drew.