Much is being written in our time about the probable shape of the Christian Church in the decades ahead. It is currently fashionable to use such clichés as “the post-Christian era” and “man come of age” to describe the coming role of the Church. Conventional wisdom has it that if the Church is to survive, it must come to terms with technopolitan man “with all of his secularity and profaneness.”

Judgments implied by the words “post-Christian era” have gained acceptance by repetition rather than by logic. One is astonished, upon reflection, at the naïveté of those who assume we have passed through a genuinely Christian epoch from which Modern Man has emerged.

One day, scholars may look back with amazement at how religious thinkers of the sixties and seventies have taken at face value the depressed view of a man who translated his own helplessness in a Nazi prison into terms of God’s powerlessness. More astonishing still is the acceptance, by scholars who were not in prison for resisting a godless tyranny, of the view that persons young and old who shrieked mindlessly in Nuremberg for a triumph of Hitler’s armies represented mankind come of age. We can respect the courage and dedication of Dietrich Bonhoeffer without being under obligation to accept his theological judgments.

Since Hegel, it has been fashionable for those who formulate philosophies of history to find culmination in the events of their own present. Few have been able to resist the temptation to paint their own generation, their own group, or even themselves into the picture in a self-congratulatory manner. We wonder whether the “secular theologians” have not fallen into the same intellectual trap.

D. Elton Trueblood has projected the “shape” of the Christian in the world just ahead of us in his book entitled The Future of the Christian (Harper & Row, 1971). He proposes several challenging theses. Beginning with a survey of the Church’s history as a “miracle of survival,” he confidently proclaims that in an affluent and technological age, man will increasingly demand a type of committed fellowship that the Christian Church is in a strategic position to provide. The vast need of the time appears, not as a signal to the Church to surrender to the forces of secularity, but as a challenge to the Church to proclaim its message aggressively. That is to say, the Church’s task is to provide a new set of dimensions for man in his hunger.

That the Church will survive, Trueblood has no doubt. Yet no generation should take this survival for granted, he says. Trueblood summons the Church in our time to a new and deepened understanding of ministry, one that blends the servant role with participation in communities or groups marked by the committed fellowship of Christ’s own.

He expresses deep concern over vast areas of human resource virtually untouched by today’s Church: laymen, women, retired people, and youth. Failure to develop available resources is sinful, he says, and he proposes a vast forward thrust to bring persons in these four categories out of noninvolvement into unconditional commitment.

Trueblood is convincing in his assertion that these groups offer persons of strong intellectual perception, keen moral and spiritual sensitivity, and a relative freedom from religious professionalism. Many of them will also be less preoccupied with the grinding pressures of today’s life than some currently in church leadership roles.

In attempting to use those who are now largely unused, the churches must have something more than “busy work” to offer them. Trueblood is persuaded that there must be a clear understanding of that to which commitment is made, and he calls for clearer articulation of the Christian faith and the production of “an entire generation of Christian intellectuals.” It is intriguing that he sees women as a major potential source for such a development.

The strategy of the Church should involve the use of the resources of both the “mainline churches” and the “sects,” says Trueblood. He keenly appreciates the genius of the “hitherto despised Christian groups” and the insights and usages they bring to the Christian enterprise. He is likewise very optimistic about the small groups that are arising within the churches as agencies for the revitalization of the Church as a whole.

It is also heartening, he thinks, to see how small groups “intent upon making a difference in the world” are calling up the submerged energies and gifts of persons hitherto uninvolved. These offer great promise, he thinks, of penetrating circles, such as the academic, that desperately need a new thrust of the Good News.

In a penetrating chapter entitled “The New Evangelicalism,” Trueblood offers a highly sympathetic appraisal of Basic Christianity. He sees it as a “third force” between an ingrown obscurantism and a sterile liberalism. Men such as John Baillie, C. S. Lewis, and William Temple he credits with providing a great deal of the “background music” of today’s evangelicalism. (Here he is not as explicit as he could have been in noting that its orchestration has been largely the work of those whose roots are in fundamentalism.)

Trueblood directs attention to the manner in which leading analysts of today’s religious scene largely ignore the presence and influence of evangelicals. Certainly the thrust of this volume is toward a fairer appraisal of their place in the Christian movement. Perhaps its author might have said more about the growing sense of social responsibility that marks the more recent evangelicalism.

In envisioning the role of the individual Christian in the times just ahead, Trueblood says that the influence that Christians wield through the Church may well be exerted most vitally from within small groups of committed persons.

The Christian will also, thinks our author, welcome any support given to the cause by the usages of “Civil Religion,” of which he speaks perceptively in the final chapter of the book. What matters is that the committed Christian shall not seek to fulfill his spiritual needs by a mere gesture toward “Christianity beyond the Church.”

Trueblood maintains that the Christian can move into tomorrow with a calm confidence that he and his message will have a significant future. His commitment to Basic Christianity binds him to a Christ who is utterly dependable and perennially meaningful to man in his predicament. In Him men and women find resources to maintain idealism in a forbidding world, without cynicism or moral shock. More important still, the Christian’s hope of “the Life Everlasting” gives wholeness to life and affords resources for godly and creative living, whatever the shape of his world.

Panorama

Speaking at a rare joint session of both houses of the California legislature in Sacramento, Billy Graham lobbied for Jesus power instead of police power as a method of handling disruptive demonstrations.

Membership in the Evangelical Free Church of America, with a constituency of 120,000 persons, grew by a record 10.6 per cent last year, according to figures released at the church’s annual conference in Seattle.

Dillwyn T. Evans, last year’s moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, has been appointed Canada’s first “chaplain on call” by Holiday Inns (see also June 18 issue, page 31).

The Reverend Charles A. Tipp, director of Christian services and associate professor of history and missions at Ontario Bible College, Toronto, has been elected president of the Evangelical Theological Society of Canada.

The Christian Century has named Stephen Rose to be an associate editor based in New York.

Prebendary Maurice A. P. Wood has been nominated the next Anglican bishop of the 900-year-old diocese of Norwich. A longtime contributing editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Wood has been principal of Oak Hill Theological College in London for ten years. His appointment is the first granted to a conservative evangelical in many years. Billy Graham welcomed the news, saying, “I do not know any man in Great Britain more qualified to be a bishop in the Church of England.”

Dean M. Miller, 36, pastor of York Center Church of the Brethren in Lombard, Illinois, was elected moderator of the 190,000-member Church of the Brethren during its annual meeting in St. Petersburg, Florida, last month. He will serve in 1972–73.

A new group within the Christian Church (Disciples) called Disciples Concerned is working to make evangelism the top priority in the church.

Jim Vaus’s Youth Development group has provided a $10,000 grant to the year-old Satellite Christian Institute in San Diego, California, to reach wayward youth.

Deaths

GEORGE C. PIDGEON, 99, first moderator of the United Church of Canada on its formation in 1925; in Toronto.

GODFREY CLIVE ROBINSON, 57, vice-president and president-elect of the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland; unexpectedly in London.

The U. S. Supreme Court laid down major new lines of church-state separation last month.

By voiding parochaid legislation in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, the court barred the spending of public funds in sectarian schools, even if the money is used only for instruction in “secular” subjects. The court gave qualified approval, however, to a federal law that subsidizes building construction at religious colleges.

Roman Catholic elementary and secondary schools are expected to be hit hard by the decisions. They have been suffering from a financial pinch, and influential Catholic politicians have been actively working for state aid. Protestant grade schools in the United States, which are rapidly increasing in number, have thus far escaped severe financial pressures, and very few have campaigned for public money.

The Pennsylvania statute, passed in 1968, provided reimbursement to parochial schools for teacher salaries, textbooks, and instructional materials in subjects regarded as non-religious. Some $5 million has been spent annually. The Rhode Island program, limited to teacher salary supplements, began in 1969 with a $375,000 budget.

The Pennsylvania decision was technically unanimous. The only dissent in the Rhode Island case was Justice Byron R. White (who said he would have dissented in the Pennsylvania case as well had it not been for a quirk in the appeal).

The federal law in question was the Higher Education Facilities Act of 1963, which so far has paid out $240 million for construction of academic buildings. A number of private, sectarian colleges had benefited. The law was challenged by a group in Connecticut. It was upheld by a 5–4 vote. Justices Warren E. Burger, John M. Harlan, Potter Stewart, Harry A. Blackmun, and Byron White formed the majority. The dissenters were Justices William J. Brennan, Jr., the only Roman Catholic on the court, William O. Douglas, Hugo L. Black, and Thurgood Marshall.

The justices distinguished for the first time between the church-state implications of grade school and of higher education. The majority opinion declared that “there is substance to the contention that college students are less impressionable and less susceptible to religious indoctrination. Common observation would seem to support that view and Congress may well have entertained it. Since religious indoctrination is not a substantial purpose or activity of these church-related colleges and universities, there is less likelihood than in primary and secondary schools that religion will permeate the area of secular education. This reduces the risk that government aid will in fact serve to support religious activities.”

A new line is also represented in the court opinion’s references to “excessive entanglement.” It may mean that the court has tried to put forth a durable verbal vehicle to help differentiate between constitutional and unconstitutional aid to religious enterprises.

Burger said that total separation of church and state “is not possible in an absolute sense.… In order to determine whether the government entanglement with religion is excessive, we must examine the character and purposes of the institutions which are benefited, the nature of the aid that the state provides, and the resulting relationships between the Government and the religious authority.” “Excessive entanglement” is admittedly vague, but it may be the most objective criterion so far devised.

Dr. Glenn L. Archer, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, predictably praised the court decision. It “will no doubt have the effect of nullifying similar parochaid laws which have been passed in Ohio, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Illinois,” he said.

The justices noted that their decisions “have permitted the states to provide church-related schools with secular, neutral or nonideological services, facilities, or materials. Bus transportation, school lunches, public health services and secular textbooks supplied in common to all students were not thought to offend the establishment clause.”

The District Court that handled the Rhode Island case saw parochial schools as “an integral part of the religious mission of the Catholic Church” and “a powerful vehicle for transmitting the Catholic faith to the next generation.” Because of this, legislators provided for considerable government surveillance “to insure that state aid supports only secular education.” But this control feature itself was found by the Supreme Court to constitute an area of excessive entanglement.

The high court added that “a broader base of entanglement of yet a different character is presented by the divisive potential of these state programs. In a community where such a large number of pupils are served by church-related schools, it can be assumed that state assistance will entail considerable political activity.” The justices said that political debate is healthy, “but political division along religious lines was one of the principal evils against which the First Amendment was intended to protect.”

On the same day it handed down its parochaid decisions, the court cleared former heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali of refusing induction into military service, saying he was improperly drafted because the Justice Department had misled Selective Service authorities.

Iron Curtain Bibles: Smugglers Too Smug?

The current evangelical passion for smuggling religious materials behind the Iron Curtain sometimes ignores the actual needs of the recipients, according to several European observers.

In some cases materials are sent where they are not needed, and in others, political opinions are included in “gospel” material, critics say.

Dr. Branco Lovrec, publisher of Yugoslavia’s monthly Baptist magazine and other religious materials, explained the situation in his country during a recent interview in Zagreb.

There was, and still is, a law banning importation of materials printed in Macedonian, Croatian, or Slovenian, the languages of Yugoslavia.

In 1952 Yugoslavians needed smuggled materials, but printing restrictions have eased and the need no longer exists. Lovrec says he can print all the religious material that is required, as long as his name and address appear on the title pages. Such material is legal, and those who receive it don’t have to worry about it.

“We don’t welcome literature from abroad for that reason,” Lovrec asserts. The only exception to the rule is Bibles, for which the demand cannot be met by Yugoslav printers. They are legally imported from London and authorized for distribution by imprintation with the Serbian Orthodox Church seal on the title page.

This openness causes Lovrec to declare: “We don’t consider ourselves behind the Iron Curtain. We have no limitations, no problems.”

“Why, then, do America’s largest evangelical smuggling enterprises list Yugoslavia as one of their target nations?” he asks.

“The mission people bring us Bibles and literature and we’re stuck with them,” he says of Yugoslavia. “They go back home and brag, ‘We smuggled 500 Bibles behind the Iron Curtain.…’ They want to be heroes at home, not just to spread the Gospel.”

Lovrec’s work is financially supported by Colonial Hills Baptist Church in Atlanta and by Evangelism Center of Glendale, California, better known as Underground Evangelism. The California group pays several thousand dollars monthly for publication of religious materials in Yugoslavia, according to its director, the Reverend L. Joe Bass.

Underground Evangelism also prints material in Italy for smuggling into Yugoslavia despite the apparent freedom to print anything inside Yugoslavia.

“It’s a matter of business economics. If you can print cheaper in Italy and import legally, why not do so?” explains Bass, who declines to comment on the fact that such imports are illegal.

One of the reasons for Bass’s smuggling may be Lovrec’s publishing policy.

“I will not publish just anything pressed upon me by people who come bearing money. There must be a need for it in Yugoslavia,” insists Lovrec. “Underground Evangelism publishes all the details which the Communist governments need to keep the Christians under their thumbs.”

Though he doesn’t say it, Lovrec implies that some of the “gospel” material being prepared for distribution behind the Iron Curtain is as much anti-Communist as it is pro-Christ.

The American smuggling activity is heaping coals of repression upon the heads of believers in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria, according to the Reverend Robert Munn, theology teacher at European Bible Institute in Lamorlaye, France.

“It seems to me that half the motivation of the campaigns is political,” observes Munn.

Similar problems occurred with the gospel radio broadcasting of the Reverend Richard Wurmbrand from a religious shortwave outlet in Monaco.

“We asked why we could no longer hear Reverend Wurmbrand and we were told his political haranguing had caused embarrassment for the station and problems for the Iron Curtain Christians,” reports Dr. Cleon Rogers, acting director of the German Bible Institute at Seeheim, Germany.

The Dutch preacher known as Brother Andrew popularized Bible-smuggling with the 1968 publication of his book God’s Smuggler. He had engaged in smuggling and preaching trips to Warsaw Pact nations since 1952.

He is now an executive of his own smuggling organization. Interviewed in his Netherlands retreat, he said, “I am not anti-Communist nor anti-capitalist. I am pro-Jesus.”

PETER GEIGER

Wcc Put Off

A high-level multiracial delegation of World Council of Churches leaders scheduled to go to South Africa the last week of this month was cut off at the pass when restrictions imposed by South African prime minister John Vorster were declared “totally unacceptable” by the WCC.

The consultation between the WCC and South African churchmen was to have centered on why the WCC made a $200,000 grant last September to African liberation groups charged with using guerrilla tactics in opposing apartheid and white supremacy in that country.

Vorster, a livid critic of the WCC, had said he would permit the delegation into his country so that its fifteen members could be “confronted” on the grant issue by South African churchmen. The South African Council of Churches (a WCC associate member) had invited the council to send a team.

Council general secretary Eugene Carson Blake told a Geneva, Switzerland, press conference last month that Vorster would not permit the WCC delegation “to go farther than the [hotel] … airport nor to stay longer than the actual duration of the ‘confrontation.’ ” Vorster also said he didn’t see why “such a clear-cut issue” should be debated.

Black Anglican bishop Alpheus Zulu of Zululand, a WCC president, was to have led the thirty-member South African group; about a dozen of that delegation were from non-white churches.

Blake, suggesting that since Vorster could not “manipulate the consultation to his own ends,” he had “evidently decided to make it impossible,” said the consultation would be indefinitely postponed.

Christian Reformed Synod: ‘Mirror, Mirror …’

The agenda of the Christian Reformed Church turned its 1971 synod into a mirror. Although the CRC summons its members to self-examination prior to each celebration of Holy Communion, the 148 synodical delegates discovered that self-examination on its top official level isn’t easy.

The ten-day session held in Grand Rapids (June 8–18) was one of the slowest-moving in memory. Looking into the mirror, the synod often saw darkly, and decisive action gave way to postponement and referral to committees.

The synod faced a six-year-old race problem in its Chicago North Classis, which has jurisdiction over the Timothy Christian School Board (see December 4, 1970, issue, page 35). Board members have persistently refused to enroll black Christian Reformed children from the nearby Lawndale section of Chicago in its Cicero school. Fear is the chief reason given for exclusion.

Past synods had judged such refusal as sin, and Chicago North’s failure to act upon synod’s position as bringing it under the judgment of the church. The 1971 synod looked at Chicago North’s substantial failure and continuing refusal to comply and did nothing except give verbal reaffirmation of its official 1968 decision.¹“That synod declare that fear of persecution or of disadvantage to self or our institutions arising out of obedience to Christ does not warrant denial to anyone, for reasons of race or color, of full Christian fellowship and privilege in the church or in related organizations, such as Christian colleges and schools.”

The synod also looked to itself in deliberating what to do with members who, influenced by neo-Pentecostalism, deny their first (infant) baptism by submitting to a second rite of baptism but do not wish to leave the CRC. Since the Christian Reformed theology of church membership limits excommunication to those judged to have “no part in the kingdom of Christ” and permits membership transfer only to Reformed churches, the synod could make no decision. The matter was referred for long-term study.

A request from one of its Canadian classes that the CRC re-express its faith in a new confession that would replace its current confessions produced a long and serious discussion—to the surprise of many delegates. The CRC is one of the most creedally bound churches in the United States. Yet there was such an urgent desire to be a truly confessing church that a committee was appointed to study the whole matter.

Many delegates felt the church could not adequately speak its faith to the contemporary world through the CRC’s 400-year-old confessions. The decision may be historic.

JAMES DAANE

Rejuvenating The Ucc?

Youth delegates numbered 140 among a field of 700 at the eighth biennial General Synod of the 1.9-million-member United Church of Christ at Grand Rapids, Michigan, last month. Right from the outset they made their presence felt, pushing through amendments at the first session that pointed to Christ as the answer to the “crisis of faith” in the UCC. They urged their church to “wrestle” with the biblical meaning of life and “to become committed to behavior consistent with beliefs.”

Although the statement by the young people—accepted less enthusiastically by their elders—smacked of old-fashioned religion, the proposed applications to modern life were far from conservative.

Dealing with the issue of “Peace and United States Power” the synod favored: support for “indigenous liberation movements throughout the world which oppose elitist oppression or totalitarian subversion”; diplomatic relations with Red China and her admission to the United Nations; amnesty and church support for draft evaders; and withdrawal of U. S. economic aid to Pakistan.

The UCC became the first major denomination to act on the controversial Pentagon papers. By a vote of 614–23 the delegates said the papers show that the American people were deceived by government officials and that war aims and strategies in Indochina are “cruel” and “unjust” and must therefore be condemned by Christians. Delegates also called the U. S. “Vietnamization” program immoral, and they requested President Nixon to end the Indochina conflict “within the next six to nine months.”

In a showdown between the UCC’s social-action and foreign-missions units on the subject of U. S. business operations in southern Africa, the UCC voted not to ask Gulf Oil Company and other firms to withdraw but to ask that they use their influences to help “liberate” the African countries from minority and colonial rule. The UCC stance was bitterly contested by social-action leaders who have especially opposed Gulf’s alleged support of Portuguese control over Angola. Missions spokesmen argued successfully that American interests would simply be taken over by other industrialized nations, a point emphasized by Gulf executives in preconvention hearings.

One measure asked UCC leaders to probe attitudes of the Christian Reformed Church and the Reformed Church of America toward apartheid practices of their sister churches in South Africa.

Delegates were unmoved by Wisconsin layman John Esch’s charges that they were hypocritical for judging Portugal and South Africa by name while refusing to similarly denounce North Viet Nam and Russia for their roles in global unrest.

In the area of women’s liberation the synod adopted a substitute motion that called for “repeal of all legal prohibitions of physician-performed abortions” and asked that more room be made for women in UCC pastorates and other leadership offices.

UCC blacks were given a piece of the action but not as much as they had wanted. Instead of a campaign for $10 million and establishment of a black university, delegates decided to let the UCC Executive Council launch a “major campaign” (no amount specified) and to negotiate loans up to $3 million for black students in the next two years.

The youth caucus backed out of a move to ask for legal defense funds for Angela Davis and other “political prisoners” in the United States. Instead the young people supported an easily passed statement simply endorsing Miss Davis’s right to a fair trial. A youth spokesman said Miss Davis had more than enough money already for her trial. The Davis family’s pastor, Andrew L. Cooper of a Birmingham, Alabama, UCC church, argued for UCC support.

A North Dakota Indian rancher, August Little Soldier, became the first Indian to serve on the UCC Executive Council. David Colwell, a Seattle minister, was elected moderator. Although last year’s income was down $500,000 to $16.9 million, an optimistic budget of $17.7 million was proposed for each of the next two years.

A bylaw change ensures that at least 20 per cent of future UCC delegates will be young people. In the convention’s final moments, the youths led the way in defeating a measure that would disqualify UCC top leadership after age 65. Said one young delegate: “Youth is a matter of spirit, not age.” Everyone applauded.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Computerizing Sampson: When Push Comes To Shove

Four professors at Kansas State University, assisted by an electronic computer and an engineering equation, say they have “proven” the plausibility of the biblical record of Samson’s destruction of the Philistine temple.

Mechanical-engineering professor Wilson Tripp first struggled with the reliability of the text when he audited a course in English Bible. “Then it came to me that perhaps the grandstands in the Samson story had two main, slender wooden columns that bowed under because of the weight of the people on the roof,” relates Tripp. “As long as the crossbrace was in place, it prevented buckling. Samson knew if he got between and pushed outward the pillars would bow the other way and break.”

So Tripp enlisted English professor Dale B. Jones and two other faculty members to test his theory. Architecture and design professor Alden Krider served as artist for the model, depicted as the grandstand of a ballpark rather than the traditional temple.

“There was a tendency for Hebrew writers to call any large, important building a temple,” noted Jones. The profs estimated that the 3,000 Philistines on the roof put a load of 246,082 pounds on each column. The pillars were envisioned as twelve inches by twelve inches and thirty feet long, crossbraced in the middle, and bowed inward one and one-half inches.

Using Euler’s Buckling Load Formula, the men then fed the calculations into a CDC 6400 computer, using an interactive time-sharing device. Results showed that Samson would have had to push 917.57 pounds. K-State weight lifters assured them that one could push 600 pounds. And Tripp theorized: “Persons under emotional stress sometimes do things they can’t normally do. This is evidently what happened.”

JAMES S. TINNEY

Two explosive issues to come before the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church U. S. on its final two days at Massanetta Springs, Virginia, last month were the Indochina war and the relation of an independent missions group to the denomination. Commissioners declared continuation of the Viet Nam conflict “cannot be morally justified” and called the Executive Commission on Overseas Evangelism (ECOE) a “grave departure” from normal church organizations likely to cause “grievous harm” to the life and health of the church.

Debate on these and other matters—there were a record forty-one resolutions introduced by commissioners—waxed even warmer than that generated earlier on main events like synod restructure and continuing membership in the National and World Councils of Churches (see July 2 issue, page 31).

The assembly praised President Nixon’s efforts to end the Indochina war. But the compromise statement of conservative and liberal positions added: “The continuation of this war cannot be morally justified. The killing must be stopped.”

This, the denomination’s strongest antiwar statement, wasn’t biting enough to suit the majority of the seventy youth delegates, appearing at an assembly for the first time. In protest (some were in tears), the youth entered a statement of “deepest disappointment” into the records. They had favored a deleted part of the resolution that called for an immediate ceasefire and concurrent withdrawal of all U. S. military forces from Indochina.

The independent mission agency, ECOE, an arm of the Presbyterian Evangelistic Fellowship, has been an increasingly sore point for denominational leaders because it siphons money from Southern Presbyterians contrary to Board of World Missions policy and sends it to selected missionaries deemed theologically and politically conservative. A motion that would have recommended that presbyteries take no disciplinary action against members involved in ECOE prior to the assembly failed on a close vote.

Newly elected moderator Ben Lacy Rose in a press conference thumped conservative groups that work outside regular church channels. “I wish they would all go out of existence,” he said, stressing that “loyal” opposition is that which works within the official boards and agencies. Rose also frowned on the so-called escape clause still extant in the proposed union plan with the United Presbyterians. It would permit dissident congregations to retain property.

In an action related to secession, a resolution to allow realignment of the church into two continuing bodies (conservatives and liberals) was turned down. The Constitution Committee ruled that the constitution grants no such authority to the General Assembly, thus scuttling hopes of some conservative for a peaceful and equitable division of properties, institutions, and funds on that basis.

Other actions at Massanetta Springs:

• Approval of continued work on a new confession of faith, despite an attempt to suspend the work.

• Overwhelming approval of a major study, “The Person and Work of the Holy Spirit,” after several attempts to recommit it for study. Tongues-speaking, the 11,000-word paper said, should be regarded as God’s gift. Criticism of the work centered on identifying “ecstatic utterances” and modern miracles with those described in the New Testament.

• Funding of a total of $40,000 for the Black Presbyterian Leadership Caucus for this year and next.

• Refusal to dissociate the denomination from three controversial publications: Colloquy, an interdenominational magazine attacked as “profane, blasphemous, and immoral”; FOCUS, a tabloid newspaper criticized because it allegedly gave open support to drug use by youth; and the social-action monthly Church and Society.

• Adoption of five position papers on welfare, social development, and drug abuse. Youth delegate Rusty Wright, a Campus Crusade staffer, was instrumental in getting the drug-abuse paper amended to include recognition that Christ can bring new life to those hooked on drugs.

There are signs that revival, low-key Pentecostal in style, may be on the way for the Roman Catholic Church. Tens of thousands of Catholics meet weekly in churches, homes, dorm rooms, and borrowed halls for Bible study, prayer, spirited gospel singing, and exercise of the “gifts of the Spirit”: healing, prophecy, speaking in tongues.

Indeed, the average Catholic Pentecostal meets one night with a small home group, another night with a large “prayer community.” The ranks have swelled in just four years to an estimated 50,000 American and Canadian Catholics.

Last month 5,000 registrants and about 500 gate-crashers crowded onto the Notre Dame University campus at South Bend, Indiana, for the Fifth International Conference on the Charismatic Renewal in the Catholic Church. There were street people, straight collegians and young professionals, middle-American adults of all ages and vocations, hundreds of priests and nuns, a smattering of Protestants, a few blacks. (Registration for the 1970 conference was 1,270, with some 10,000 to 20,000 in the movement at that time.)

“Let us proclaim right from the start that Jesus Christ is our King,” declared leader James Cavnar, 25, on the first night. The crowd responded with a standing ovation, cheers, and uplifted fingers in “One Way” signs. Without cue, the people burst into a chorus, “Jesus Is Lord.” Afterward, the rather startled Cavnar mildly rebuked: “This is not a spiritual jamboree. We are an assembly of believers gathered here for worship and praise.”

Amid the songs and prayers were testimonies. Teenager Chris Jaerling told how Catholic Pentecostals at Ann Arbor, Michigan, led her from drugs to Christ and into the Spirit-filled life. “Life isn’t hopeless now,” she beamed, and the crowd applauded. She is devoting her summer to street evangelism.

Cavnar’s father, a much decorated war hero, said he submitted to “Spirit baptism” a year ago after long and bitter hostility over his son’s involvement in the movement. Because of his suspicions he once arranged for a federal investigation of the movement, he said; the investigators, reporting it was the first time they had ever met a group of young men who prayed so much, gave it a clean bill of health. The elder Cavnar organized a Dallas group that meets in a Dominican high school and now numbers nearly 300.

Loyola chaplain Harold Cohen, one of 150 who came from the New Orleans area, said that he was baptized in the Spirit in the 1969 conference and that the Loyola prayer group he subsequently organized now numbers more than 500, with satellite groups “all over Louisiana and Mississippi.”

The weekend, saturated with bubbly joy and conversation that centered on Jesus, featured scores of workshops and seminar talks on topics ranging from marriage and sexual concepts in “the charismatic renewal” to principles of Bible study. Couples lounged in the sunshine, holding hands over open Bibles and praying. Impromptu groups gathered under shade trees to sing, pray, and share their Christian experiences. New converts lugged copies of the massive Jerusalem Bible to discussions on the Christian life.

“Let’s get away from the psychology and other junk we give out in our sermons,” Cohen urged fifty parish priests. “Let’s give out Jesus.” The event concluded with a colorful folk mass presided over by San Angelo, Texas, bishop Stephen Leven and Auxiliary Bishop Joseph McKinney of Grand Rapids.

The Catholic Pentecostal movement began spontaneously on several fronts in early 1967, most notably at a weekend retreat of students at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. It was preceded, say spokesmen, by mounting frustration over spiritual stagnation, prayers of concerned laymen, and the reading of evangelist David Wilkerson’s book The Cross and The Switchblade. News spread to Notre Dame University where students and faculty members enlisted local charismatic Protestants to help launch a group. Early members included theology professor Edward O’Connor, who has emerged as the movement’s respected theologian. From Notre Dame the revival fanned out quickly to other campuses, then to lay groups in parishes.

Other fronts, independent of the Duquesne-Notre Dame beginnings, opened at about the same time. Influences of Wilkerson’s book and charismatic Protestants led to the establishment of large groups in St. Louis and the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D. C.

Disturbed, the Catholic hierarchy in 1968 instructed its Committee on Doctrine to investigate. The committee’s report in 1969 (see January 2, 1970, issue, page 41) spoke rather favorably of the movement. It noted “a strong biblical basis,” deepening of spiritual life for many, and an attraction to Bible study. But it cautioned adherents to avoid “the mistakes of classic Pentecostalism,” and warned against substitution of religious experience for doctrine. The committee recommended that the bishops involve “prudent priests” in the movement.

The bishops seem divided over the movement today. Archbishop Philip M. Hannan and black auxiliary Harold R. Perry of New Orleans have been prayed over and reportedly are favorably impressed. Canadian bishop G. Emmett Carter endorsed the movement in a pastoral letter, stating his hope that its spirit would spread and affect his diocese. McKinney joined up at a Michigan retreat for priests last year. (He says that to protect his role he has not yet publicly prayed in tongues but “could have” on numerous occasions.) He received an ovation at the South Bend mass in his call for the Holy Spirit to be the chief delegate at the Synod of Bishops in Rome this fall.

Los Angeles archbishop Timothy Manning, however, on the eve of the South Bend conference issued a pastoral letter warning against ecumenical “equation with other denominations.” (Catholic Pentecostals often attend pan-denominational charismatic meetings, and about one-fourth of those who attend the average Catholic meeting are Protestants. Some Catholics operate Teen Challenge centers under Assembly of God sponsorship.) He also warned against disengaging the Holy Spirit from the institutional church and its hierarchy “as if they were two antagonistic expressions of Christianity.”

Manning’s concern reflects growing anti-institutional inclinations among a minority of the Catholic Pentecostals (home masses, lack of interest in traditional liturgies, objections to certain doctrines). On the other hand, Cavnar, O’Connor, and other leaders strive to keep operating within the bounds of parish life. Only in this way, they say, will Pentecostalism stay intact to renew the Church.

National communications coordinator James Byrne of Notre Dame says those who leave the church are “disobedient to the Spirit and cause the charismatic renewal great damage.” Besides, says Byrne, the church needs them because it’s undergoing crises in faith and leadership and the charismatic renewal is a remedy for both.

Catholic charismatics are generally not as emotional in worship nor as narrow in viewpoint as classic Pentecostalists. Most leaders say they can be Spirit-baptized without speaking in tongues; all that is needed is a sincere desire for the Spirit’s filling and the laying on of hands. Reformed Church of America minister Robert Eggebeen of Grand Haven, Michigan, says he has found a “home” in Catholic Pentecostalism because of “this balance between shallow emotionalism and cold theological correctiveness.”

Initiates are given a six-lesson course on “Life in the Spirit” that is strongly evangelical in content. Kevin Walsh, 22, a graduate of Loyola of Chicago and a part of the 1,500-member Chicago prayer community, says he realized he was “blowing my mind trying to get into Christ when what I really needed to do was let him get into me.” Says George Keen, 23, former Society of Mary priest who is now supervisor of the Cleveland Catholic Boys Home: “The Lord has convicted me of my sins, but I’ve discovered a fantastic concept of God’s forgiveness. He holds on and doesn’t let go.”

At the same time, he—like many other Catholic charismatics—says he has new appreciation for Mary and sees deeper meanings in the sacraments.

Will the movement be able to continue its evangelical course amid the maze of institutional tradition? Canadian bishop Carter hopes so: “We had no right to doubt that God would make himself felt, but at times we felt almost abandoned. The dawn of a new spiritual era in the church may be beginning to break.”

Conservative Baptists

World evangelism was the chief topic for the nearly 1,000 delegates at the twenty-eighth annual meeting of Conservative Baptists last month in Wheaton, Illinois. Of thirty-nine missionary appointees, twenty-seven are slated for foreign work. And more than 200 have applied this year for short-term service of one year or more.

NEWS

As trumpets blared, a procession of conference personalities filed in to take their places on the platform of the Benyenei Ha’ooma (convention hall), opening the four-day Conference on Biblical Prophecy in the city of the prophets. Leading the procession, the Reverend Shlomo Hizak, a Hebrew Christian who heads the Mount of Olives Bible Center, carried a large Bible, open to Isaiah 61: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me.…” He placed it under the conference emblem depicting the citadel of David and the Old City walls. With the spotlight on the Bible, delegates were assured they would get what they had come for: a Bible-centered conference.

None of the 1,300 attending evangelicals, who came from thirty-two countries (the majority were from the United States), entered without a pass. Even local Christians who wished to attend had to pay $75 for the privilege. Still the sponsors are likely to be left holding a sizable bag. But no one complained.

The music alone was worth the price of admission. Featured musicians included Metropolitan Opera star Jerome Hines, recording and television artist Anita Bryant, the Azusa choir from California, and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra conducted by director-composer Ronn Huff of Nashville.

Former Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion, 85, told the assembly the Jews have given three great ideas to the world: the concept of one God, love for one’s fellow man as for oneself, and the teaching against war.

The warmer issues were not slow in coming. Rather than dividing the delegates into opposing camps, they produced subdued confusion—an indication that not all had done their homework. Or perhaps it was too soon after the June, 1967, war, when the Israelis united the city of Jerusalem and claimed administration over the Temple Mount.

The two addresses during the first afternoon that caught the prophetic-minded with their futures down were “Prospectives on the Rebuilding of the Temple,” presented by President Edmund P. Clowney of Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia and Charles L. Feinberg, dean of Talbot Seminary in La Mirada, California.

Dr. Clowney, espousing a traditional Reformed view, held there would not be a literal edifice to replace the ancient Temple. It was God’s presence that made it the “house of God,” he said, and it’s impossible to “shut God up in a box or imprison him on a hilltop.” Jesus ended the old Temple concept with his words: “Destroy this Temple and in three days I will rebuild it.” Now, the speaker insisted, Jesus is the Lord of the Temple but greater than the Temple. The symbolic yields to the person of the Lord. The veil is torn away, “and there remains only Jesus.”

With his logic straight but his theology open to assault, the speaker concluded that “the greatest teaching of the Old Testament is fulfilled in the Church. Jesus’ blood was the final sacrifice, and there can be no going back.”

Some wondered where this leaves restored, modern Israel today. It is no longer a corpse but very much alive and flourishing. Although the speaker challenged Israelis to join in that “heavenly citizenship,” most of them will take a dim view of the idea of a modern, physical state’s renouncing its historical and present reality for a non-literal, undefined spirit existence.

Feinberg, born and reared in an Orthodox Jewish home, held that there would be a literal rebuilding of the Temple and insisted that the last nine chapters of Ezekiel are to be taken whole as written. His outlook represented that of mainline dispensationalism (the ultras with their charts and diagrams were not in evidence at the conference).

Feinberg methodically employed a sharply honed mind to cut down one by one the arguments against the literal interpretations of a restored Temple as seen in Ezekiel 30–38. First, he noted, some say the literal view is too Jewish. But, from Abraham to Jesus, including the disciples and the apostles, he said, it was Jewish all the way. “If the literal interpretation is too Jewish, where do you stop?” Feinberg asked.

“Speak to a Jew who does not believe that Jesus is the Messiah. You assure him that Micah’s word concerning Bethlehem, Isaiah’s prediction of the miraculous birth, the psalmist’s foretelling of the crucifixion, and others, are all to be understood literally. But when he refers to numerous passages involving peace through Messiah’s rule … with Israel … in its own land according to promises made by the Father, you inform him that these passages must be treated ‘spiritually’ or ‘symbolically.’ Do you wonder that he cannot follow your interpretive logic?”

Dr. Arnold T. Olson, president of the Evangelical Free Church of America, told delegates in his keynote address that “the interest in rediscovering the historical Jesus by many Jewish scholars calls for a new effort on the part of evangelical Christians to understand the modern Jew, his problems, his thinking, and his faith.” Olson’s address presented one of the few solid emphases on taking modern Israel and the Israelis seriously in today’s eschatological reckoning.

The second day accented youth. Youth for Christ International director Sam Wolgemuth presented a Christian pop group in a musical entitled “Youth and the End of the Age.” Their selections of religious rock and interspersed dialogue sent chills to the cheek bones more than once. By the time they invited the switched-on audience to “Put Your Hand in the Hand,” the delegates, who long since had succumbed to foot-tapping, surrendered and joined in with a solid clap-beat to the music.

With “Amazing Grace,” their downfall was complete. The prophetic enthusiasts sang out with the group in abandon in the here and now; for a while the standing, sustained ovation refused to subside. If prophecy-conference people can’t dance in the aisles, they did what they could to let it out. They sat and wept with joy.

Black evangelist Tom Skinner from Brooklyn kept the pitch with his message on “Modern Youth in Biblical Perspective.” Having already let go, the audience responded to Skinner’s potent points with rousing cheers.

That afternoon the conference considered the Land of Israel. Dr. Herman Ridderbos, professor of New Testament at the Kampen Theological Seminary in the Netherlands, and Dr. John Walvoord, president of Dallas Seminary, spoke on “Prospectives on the Future of Israel.”

Dr. Walvoord believes that the prophecies require the Jews to return to Israel to await the Second Coming, and that the current return of Jews is a principal sign of its nearness.

Up to this point it had been very much a Western, evangelical, premillennial-oriented conference. Perhaps its most noticeable characteristic was a determined, single-faceted approach to prophecy: predictive interpretation all the way. That the prophets also thundered God’s judgments on the injustices of their day, with practical implications for today, scarcely received a nod.

R. J. Zvi Werblowsky of the Department of Comparative Religion at Hebrew University in Jerusalem told the conference that Jews do not constitute a denomination but are a people, bound inseparably to the land.

He pointed out the wide gap between Christian and Jewish thought in the areas of theological and prophetic understanding, holding that biblical prophecy and biblical texts cannot be used to prove Israel’s right to the land. He stressed that the Concept of a “chosen people” is bound up with the idea of a “chosen land.” As a people, Jews can realize their existence only in total union of social and spiritual life in the land, he said, adding wryly: “Some people call this powerful bond a Jewish ‘hang-up.’ ”

Werblowsky’s central point: Israel exists only by right of history (or continuity, for there were always Jews in the land, and those who could not come because of circumstances wanted to come) and not by right of prophecy, though the sense of “rightness” of their claim to the land was nourished by the prophets. “Our claim is in line with prophetic promises, and this is what prophecy means to many in this country,” he said.

Immediately after Werblowsky’s address, theologian Carl F. H. Henry replied in a statement: “Dr. Werblowsky’s alternative exposition of prophecy is a modernistic view insofar as it deprives the inspired prophets of the predictive supernatural and substitutes a religio-philosophic perspective on history.… The cost to Judaism of deleting prophetic specifics is the loss of messianic expectation in its biblical understanding.” But none at the conference appeared to take Werblowsky’s remarks as an evangelical view of prophecy. It was, as he stated, a Jewish view of prophecy, people, and land.

Israeli Christians presented a panel on “The Bible and the Word ‘Israel’ as an Israeli Sees It.” Fuad Sakhnini, pastor of the Nazareth Baptist Church, explained that there are three groups of Arabs in the Middle East: the Arab believer, who agrees that the rebirth of Israel is according to prophecy; the nominal Christian, with ambivalent feelings about the rebirth of the state; and the Arab Muslim, who rejects all prophecies regarding the land of Israel and sees them as Zionist propaganda.

The pastor added: “We Christian Arabs believe in prophecy with justice, recognizing the right of Jews and the rights of Arabs. We are not pro-Israel, nor pro-Arab in a political sense. We are pro-Christ and pro-Gospel.”

Panel chairman and conference host G. Douglas Young, president of the American Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem, pointed out the irony that “no one questioned the closing of the Western [Wailing] Wall to the Jews in 1948 … yet now … many in the Church are calling for an internationalizing of this city in order to protect the rights of all worshipers—rights which need no protection in view of their having been made free to all.”

On one of Jerusalem’s hottest mornings of the year, the delegates assembled on the Mount of Olives to close the conference with a joint communion service led by Richard C. Halverson, pastor of the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Washington, D. C. The sweltering delegates sublimated their discomfort to the pleasure stimulated by the fabulous setting: the Hebrew University (Mount Scopus campus) amphitheater overlooking the Hills of Moab, the Jordan Valley, and the Dead Sea; the ecumenical atmosphere accentuated by the various ethnic groups, some in their national costumes; and the sheer wonder of being in Jerusalem on the Mount of Olives remembering in Holy Communion the last hours of Jesus before his crucifixion, and on the same hill where he ascended to heaven.

Ministers at the conference distributed the bread, baked by Arab Christians in Bethlehem, and served the wine from Mount Carmel in olive-wood cups. For many—perhaps most—it was a rare and unforgettable hour, ending the conference on its highest and most beautifully prophetic note: “For as oft as yet eat this bread and drink this cup, ye proclaim the Lord’s death till he come.”

Prophecy Statement

Although one of the stated aims of the Conference on Biblical Prophecy was that no statements or declarations be issued, six participants issued the following under their own names:¹Meanwhile, Pope Paul VI made a direct call for internationalizing Jerusalem, and twenty-four prominent Catholic and Protestant leaders in a newly organized group called Christians Concerned for Israel supported the reunification of Jerusalem under Israeli jurisdiction (they expressed confidence in Israel’s ability to supervise the holy places in cooperation with Christian and Muslim bodies).

Jew And Baptist Together

They didn’t stand and sing “Onward Judeo-Christian Soldiers,” as one participant quipped, but a three-day colloquium of forty Southern Baptist and Jewish scholars at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati last month did end on a strong note of amity and affinity.

“You are my brothers,” said Dr. Samuel Sandmel, professor of Bible and Hellenistic literature at HUC-JIR, setting the tone at the beginning with a paraphrase of the greeting given by Pope John XXIII to some Jewish visitors.

The friendliness was seconded by the Reverend Joseph R. Estes, a pastor of DeLand, Florida, who responded, “To my Jewish friend, I want to say that your God is my God, too.”

The two groups disagreed on which theological differences most separated them. Attitudes toward the Law of Moses are the essential difference, according to Rabbi Sandmel. But Dr. Ralph L. Smith, professor of Old Testament at Southwestern Baptist Seminary, argued: “The real issue that separates us is the person and work of Christ. One can retain a worthy respect of the law of Moses and still be a Christian.”

Rabbi Alvin Reines, professor of Jewish philosophy at HUC-JIR, bluntly asked: “Does Baptist theology involve the belief that Jews are to be damned as sinners? Is it possible for a Southern Baptist to say, as did Dr. Sandmel, ‘You’re my brothers’?”

“I’m willing to leave the answer … in the hands of God,” Dr. Smith answered evasively.

JAMES ADAMS