John Oman suggested some years ago that the importance of any matter can be measured by the difficulty of defining it. We can understand his point: ordinary things are settled by ordinary explanations, extraordinary things constantly demand further explanation. If you announce that you are “in love,” that may well be understood by someone else who is “in love” but impossible to define to anyone else. In fact, to explain love to someone “in love” sounds like nonsense. Louis Armstrong once said about jazz music, “If I have to explain it to you then you ain’t got it,” or as they are saying in youthful circles today, “If you have to ask what it is you don’t know where it’s at.” There is a measure of truth for us in all this these days as we experience an inundation of information and misinformation, experience, pseudo-experience, and quackery regarding the Holy Spirit. But with others in these confusing times we can try to sort out a few things.

One idea clearly evident from Scripture—and Scripture is the only source for information on this subject—is that the Holy Spirit is “the Spirit of Truth” (John 14:17; 15:26). It would seem, therefore, that he is the subject and source of truth and not the object. When we try to define him we are going at him objectively, and this is quite impossible. We are faced with the same kind of problem when we try to examine our own ego. The ego is always the subject of our examining and not the object of it. In the case of the ego, even our own ego, we can examine only the manifestations of the ego, the outgoing of the person; we can know our own selves essentially only by what shows itself, and the ego never shows itself; in short, we know only indirectly and by implication what the true nature of self or other selves may be. Thus the Holy Spirit is recognized in his works—mighty acts, words of truth, gifts of the Spirit like tongues or healings, fruits of the spirit like love and joy, troublings and anxieties of our own spirits within, reflecting perhaps the work of the Spirit through conscience. And since spiritual things are spiritually discerned, we must be a little hesitant today in passing judgment on all the opinions we hear about manifestations of the Spirit. Since we are directed to “test the spirits” (1 John 4:1), there must often be much to be said on both sides.

The Scriptures also tell us that the Spirit is given to “guide you into all truth” (John 16:17). I take it that these words mean what they say about “all truth.” We hear it said that “all truth is God’s truth,” and surely that statement is true. What other ground for truth can there be except in Truth Himself? It follows, then, does it not, that the work of the Holy Spirit could be manifested in many areas not usually thought of as religious or churchy. William Temple once remarked that on the day of judgment many good people will be surprised to discover that God is interested in many other subjects besides religion. God is surely interested in earthworms and oysters, the stars in their courses and the laughter of children. And if all truth is God’s truth, then good Christian people should rejoice in mathematics and poetry, a nice double play, and statues in the park. In religious circles there has been a constant error, a false dichotomy, concerning the sacred and the secular. The Incarnation should have headed that off long ago; surely the idea of “all truth” in the work of the Holy Spirit forces us to rethink such things. “The heavens declare the glory of God,” and “there is a true light that enlightens every man.” Paul says in the first chapter of Romans that even pagans can understand God’s power and deity from the created world, and the wrath of God is against them if they don’t. There is something of the Holy Spirit at work, therefore, in all those who are working on truth, or are concerned with truth, who seek the truth, who wonder, or are troubled, or question. We Christians can rejoice that such seekers are in some measure “in the Spirit” and can earnestly pray that they can recognize what Spirit it is and be led to loyalty and worship.

Another clear office of the Spirit is set forth in these words of our Lord: “He will take what is mine and declare it to you” (John 16:15). Since all things are summed up in Christ and since it is in him that all things “consist,” we can entertain the hope that all seekers after truth will end with Christ. In any case this should be the be-all and end-all for the Christian. Whatever is truly of the Spirit will lead us to Christ. We recognize how this works out in experience. We set ourselves to examine the Spirit only to find that the longer we look at him the more we are looking at Christ. This is a strange and also informative experience: examine the Spirit and he is always pointing away from himself to Christ, so in a sense we miss the Spirit and find Christ. But this is the way it is supposed to be, this is the way the Trinity seems to function: we look at the Spirit and see Christ, who reveals the Father. At this Pentecost season, any sober analysis of the Spirit, therefore, will not, and should not, end with analysis or definition of the Spirit (impossible in spiritual things anyway) but will lead to those things that are essentially visible, the Word become flesh. And Christ incarnate is now in his body, the Church; yet some enthusiasts of the Spirit in our day have forgotten all about the Church. The manifestations of the Spirit will always be related to Christ and therefore always related to the Body of Christ. This is a sobering and controlling fact. The Spirit and the Word are also inevitably bound up together; as the reformers made plain, never the Spirit apart from the Word, never the Word apart from the Spirit.

The coming of the Spirit at Pentecost suggests some other things. Notice on that day, and notice indeed when the Spirit descended on Jesus at his baptism, how the observers and the recorders have to shift to figures of speech to tell what happened. The Spirit descended on Jesus “as a dove,” and the phenomenon of Pentecost is described “as it were” tongues of flame and “as it were” the sound of rushing wind. There were no exact words or exact analogies and parallels to describe what happened. Charles Finney in his autobiography describes his experience of the Spirit as the shock of electricity going through his body. In the history of the Church there have been shakers and quakers, ecstasies and outcries. It is not an argument in favor of quackery or against Spirit-filled Christians to point out that there can be some pretty wild manifestations of the coming of the Spirit: this may be one of the expectancies of his coming in some situations. We argue that he comes in sober truth, that he comes with the reading and understanding of the word or in the preaching of the word: yet we cannot dismiss out of hand other manifestations that come outside the ordinary experience and structure of things. Our day is filled with reports of the coming of the Spirit. Is there someone wise enough to tell us just how he has to come, in what manner and with what accompanying phenomena? I think not.

A helpful book for me was The Faith That Rebels by D. S. Cairns. Cairns’s rebellion was against the easy dismissal of the manifestations of the Holy Spirit, the limiting of his work to certain works and ways. This won’t do. The Holy Spirit works when and where and how he pleases. We can expect the gifts of the Spirit and we can expect the fruits of the Spirit, but we cannot expect to be the referee and call the game. It isn’t our game. We are recipients, not directors.

All this leads to something else that is true. “The wind blows where it wills …” (John 3:8). We do not and cannot know whence it comes and whither it goes. The Pneuma of God is something like the pneuma of nature: he has his own ways and his own times and seasons. How refreshing a gentle breeze; how frightening a tornado! So is the Spirit of God.

Music, language, ecstasies, Jesus freaks, glossolalia, strange accounts of strange healings—these and much more are about us in these days. Who is wise enough for these things? Are these all movements of the Spirit of God or are some demonic? Some things we can say for sure: explosiveness, differences, a certain wildness, need not be unexpected. But there are controls. What of the things of Christ, what is the relationship to the Scriptures, what of the building of the body of Christ? Do the gifts of the Spirit also bring with them the fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control? Against such there is no law, and we shouldn’t try to enforce one.

Addison H. Leitch is professor of theology at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, South Hamilton, Massachusetts. He has the Th.M. from Pittsburgh Seminary and the Ph.D. from Cambridge University. Among his books is “A Reader’s Introduction to the New Testament.”

Scripture-Sanctioned Revolution

Radical involvement in social change on the part of churchmen allegedly finds wide support in both the Old and the New Testament and in historic behavior patterns of the Christian community. Moses’ ultimatum to Pharaoh and the ensuing rebellious action are often cited as biblical warrant for revolt by a covenant people against a corrupt political and social order. Standing in this line of protest are the great prophets of Israel, more than one of whom spent some time in jail, the reward for bashing their heads against an insensitive establishment. Turning to the New Testament we find the often quoted words of Jesus: “I have come to set fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled.” And we are assured that Jesus’ followers of post-apostolic days, acting out the moral and ethical implications of the Christain Gospel, were frequently charged with atheism and civil disobedience. On the face of it there appears to be plenty of evidence that biblical religion, far from being inimical to revolution, actually fosters it.

But what kind of revolution? At this point some of us had better do some soul-searching. The revolution supported by Scripture is the revolution that replaces the evil that is in the world with the doing of God’s will. Said Ezekiel: “Ruin! Ruin! I will bring about such ruin as never was before, until the rightful sovereign comes. Then I will give him all” (21:27, NEB). According to the Old Testament, divine judgment rests upon every human enterprise that stands in the way of God’s righteous and holy will. Implied in this insight is the recognition that divine judgment rests upon the economic and political systems of our own day that foster war and widen the gulf between men and nations. But what economic and political system does not do that? Man in his sin is not capable of building God’s kingdom, here or anywhere else. All that man can do is to structure for the day his own systems, out of which violence and strife, always endemic to man, come.

This is not to say that one temporal kingdom is as good as another, or as bad as another. Nor is it to say that the Church ought not to pass discriminating judgment on the works of men and nations. The sovereignty of God works in and through the works of men and nations, and part of the task of the Church is to point to the ways and means through which God’s righteousness is asserting itself in the circumstances of life. The God who in ancient times used pagan King Cyrus as well as the spiritually sensitive Isaiah to work his will can, in our time, use a Marxist as well as an Episcopalian to serve his ends. But the goal of God’s work is neither a Marxian state nor an Episcopal kingdom. The goal of biblical revolution is God’s kingdom in which God’s righteousness dwells.

The churchman who insists on God’s righteousness as the goal of the kingdom will be no less discriminating about the means of bringing it in. The means must be as demanding as the goal. For the sake of argument let us assume that in a particular social situation today, a Marxian solution would make for a more “just” order than the existing one. From this it does not follow that the Christian can either condone or use the means a Marxist uses to achieve his end. The Christian does not deal in human relativities when presenting the mind and will of Christ.

When we study the biblical mandate for revolution, we find the context illuminating. The command of the Lord through Moses to Pharaoh, “Let my people go!,” is invariably coupled with the plea, “that they may serve me in the wilderness.” The prophets most vocal in condemning incompetence and corruption—Isaiah, Amos, and Jeremiah—are the ones who eventually moved furthest toward grace. Their final plea is not for a new social order but for a new covenant between man and God. The purpose of Jesus’ one militant act—the cleansing of the temple—was to restore the room as a house of prayer for all people.

As the most significant works that Jesus’ followers can hope to do, the New Testament cites acts of mercy, love, forgiveness, gentleness, which are the fruits of the spirit of Christ (1 Cor. 13; Matt. 5:7). The New Testament Christians who turned the world upside down wielded the sword of Christ’s spirit.

What disturbs me in the situation today is that some of our clerical revolutionaries, like Jesus’ tempter in the wilderness, want to short-cut the means. They say that there isn’t time to wait for men to love the Lord their God with all their heart, and their neighbors as themselves. They would love the neighbor as Che Guevara loved him, half hoping that from the ruin of a no-good world something better is bound to rise. They want a kingdom now that men and women can manipulate while they are still in their sins. This isn’t necessarily an ignoble or unworthy goal. It is always being tried, and sometimes the new order proves to be an improvement—though often temporary—over the old. But we should not confuse this kind of kingdom with the kingdom of God and his righteousness, which Christians are asked to seek first.—The Reverend VICTOR FIDDES, Westminster United Church, Regina, Saskatchewan.

Turbulence is no stranger to the Christian campus, but the intensity varies from year to year, as do the issues. Although evangelical colleges have been spared the embarrassment of open student rebellions, the more subdued forms of dissent have been plentiful. Some of the dissent is mature. Some is not. Be that as it may, CHRISTIANITY TODAYfeels that responsible student spokesmen deserve a wider hearing among church leaders as well as among rank-and-file churchgoers. We present a selection of editorial comment—on a variety of topics—from evangelical college newspapers published during the current academic year.

From The Oracle, Oral Roberts University, Tulsa, Oklahoma:

Militancy is essentially unknown at ORU. Riots, demonstrations, and the marks of unseemly mass behavior simply do not exist. We proceed in an undeniably orderly fashion, pacified if not peaceful.

Our purpose is not to condemn this prevailing air of calm. Assuming the proper role of the University to be teaching and inquiry, reason and rationale, the proper atmosphere of the university should be an atmosphere conducive to quiet reflection, and intensive and extensive study. Our question: is our pacified campus used for this active pursuit of wisdom? Or are we employing peace as a facade to mask an intellectual void and a dearth of problem-solving creativity? What do we do in our state of peace?

Demonstrations, whether in a peaceful or militant context, tend to rely on two initial and subsequent states for their manifestation. First: problem awareness—essentially a process of education, also implying the formulation of attitude and opinion. Second: conviction and a motivation—reflecting just “how much” we believe what we believe. The progression may be expressed as “know, believe, show.”

The conflict comes in the methodology we employ in demonstrating our convictions. The activities of many of our academic brothers would seem to tell us that burning buildings, shouting obscenities and half-formed, half-proved theories, and usurping temporary authority results in studies by Presidential commissions, chaos, tragedy, and very little more. But, what do we have to show for our peacefulness?…

Unfortunately, learning and thinking do not always proceed concurrently. It takes extra energy to become aware, even more energy to act. As an individual, do you have a well-formed opinion as to the whys, wherefores and solutions for Viet Nam, environmental control, racial tension? If not, why not?… Is peace your condition, or your alibi?

Heaven forbid that our pacified campus might be a grave.

From Weather Vane, Eastern Mennonite College, Harrisonburg, Virginia:

Western culture has developed a terrible compulsion—an affliction which compels us to try to institutionalize nature. We don’t just admire a flower in its natural state, we pick it and take it home so everyone can see the beautiful wilted flower.

We don’t sneak up on deer and try to capture their beauty and grace by taking pictures, we sneak up on them and shoot them. Then we cut off their heads and mount them on our walls so everyone can admire the superiority of our guns over the deer’s quickness.

The proposal to build a prayer chapel on the hill behind the administration building is another manifestation of our compulsion to defile.

The hill has always been one of the most sacred spots on campus. Innumerable prayers have been offered while gazing over the panorama offered by that vantage point.… So along comes Western man and says we have to put four walls and a roof up there so we can pray without getting grass stains on our suits.

The Harman Foundation undoubtedly had good intentions in offering the gift. The administration can’t be blamed for accepting the gift. Forty-five thousand dollars is a lot of money—particularly in these days when the economy and therefore gift givers are acting rather anemic. Maybe an argument could even be made that the college needs a prayer chapel more than anything else.

But the college does not need to build a prayer chapel on the hill thereby ruining the chapel God has already built. Not even a rustic prayer chapel. Not even a $45,000 rustic prayer chapel.

If a prayer chapel must be built, let it be built on some vacant land in a less sacred spot.

Better yet, why not let the EMC students do their praying in their hearts and use the money to answer some prayers. The Black Scholarship Fund would look a lot better with a $45,000 transfusion. There are people in Pakistan, in Chicago and even in Virginia who would certainly be glad to have nourishing food.

Is it really necessary to defile our hill?

From The Tartan, Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts:

Just when winter slump starts to set in, and alleged conspiracies and “general escalations” send nihilistic shivers up and down our spines, something good happens like the election of Michael Harrington to a seat on the House Armed Services Committee.

Harrington, of course, is our own representative to the House in Washington. The Armed Services Committee, of course, is the committee that molds and passes recommendations on the Defense Department budget. The combination of the two, Harrington and the Armed Services Committee, just about destroys our faith in the total depravity of the House.

Harrington went to Washington vowing to do all he could to subvert the seniority system which renders new congressmen powerless for their first four or five terms. On top of this, Harrington entered as a vociferous dove and established himself in opposition to old political politics.

This kind of stance for a new representative wasn’t expected to win all kinds of friends for Harrington among the Geritol crowd which holds power in the House. When he spoke at Gordon last term, Harrington said that his most effective role as a representative would be outside the House, helping new-style politicians get elected and educating the people to the reform needed in the House and in policy-making sectors of the government. With his election, Harrington will have a direct voice on allocations of defense funds.

Harrington’s victory is encouraging also because he apparently defeated an organized opposition. His chief opponent for the seat was Louise Day Hicks, a symbol of conservatism, although much of the pressure against Harrington came from higher places.…

He was elected despite this pressure. His response was characteristic, promising to push toward a reordering of priorities in the defense budget.

Which is exactly what we need.

From The Wheaton Record, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois:

Thursday evening, January 21, interested people from Wheaton and surrounding communities were privileged to hear Dr. George Wald, eminent Harvard biology professor and Nobel Laureate, lecture in Edman Chapel.… In short order, Wald not only rejected any supernatural but quickly went on to develop a clearly materialistic philosophy that held that man was merely a collection of atoms and that such “human” characteristics as fatherly concern were solely a result of the organization of these atoms.…

He accepts the entire evolutionary bag, from the initial plasma cloud, through the chance synthesis of organic (carbon chain) compounds, to man. He then applies the same principles of natural selection to the social order, claiming that democracy is the height of the process, the ultimate form of government.

And yet rather than let evolution take its course Wald hopes to arouse public action to oppose those very forces of natural selection he affirms. To applaud the natural selection process in the social sphere and in the same breath to lament the plight of the “little man” at the hands of the gigantic corporations basking in their evolutionary “fitness” seems to me inconsistent.

However, this inconsistency seems to me not nearly so grave as the problems of value that Wald seems to create for himself. What does Wald do when faced with someone who does not share Wald’s concern for pollution, but rather by virtue of the organization of his atoms has a deep concern for himself?

Perhaps this man is organized selfishly, perhaps he wants to pollute. Is the organization of Wald’s atoms right and those of his adversary wrong? And who decides this kind of question? Without an external moral standard Wald seems caught in the inconsistency of making seemingly objective statements of value like “the whole noble human enterprise.”

Doubtless Wald has a concern for humanity, shown perhaps most vividly in his abhorrence of the possibility of nuclear suicide. Yet, as he spoke of how terrible that would be, I tried to put myself in his philosophical shoes, so to speak. As I sat in my seat with visions of the earth as one gigantic glowing cinder, I remarked to myself, perhaps a trifle bitterly, “What would be so bad about that? The atoms could always reorganize.”

From Chimes, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan:

Last Monday night the faculty approved a Student Religious Activities Committee proposal which calls for the suspension of the current regulations imposing regular chapel attendance on students and sets forth a number of avenues for encouraging “lively, significant, and well-attended chapels on campus,” attendance of which is a matter of individual responsibility.

The faculty refused to name their plan “voluntary” chapel because they felt that “voluntary” implied a take-it-or-leave-it attitude which failed to reflect the necessity for communal worship in the institutional life of a Christian academic community. Nevertheless, according to the most commonly understood meaning of the term, Calvin College is about to establish a system of voluntary chapel which acknowledges that the college, by definition, requires the explicit worship of God in addition to the implicit worship carried on in the classroom, library, and coffee shop, a system which demands the active support of everyone who claims to belong to this community, but a system which places the decision of whether to attend a specific service and which service to attend completely in the province of individual responsibility. No more Polaroids, warning letters from the chaplain, six-skips-and-you’re-out.

The faculty’s action is the culmination of years of persuasion and pressure by multitudes of people. But finally reason and trust have won out; finally a majority of the faculty have become convinced that students possess “a reasonable degree of Christian commitment and maturity.” The despair and disillusionment which were created almost every year when the issue of “compulsory chapel” was raised—almost every year in recent memory, that is—are forever dispelled now that the faculty has agreed that willing worship is more likely to engender “a higher degree of spirituality” than forced worship.

But the quest for a vibrant program of significant, voluntarily-joined worship services is only half finished. The burden of responsibility for establishing a new tradition of voluntary chapel now passes to the student body, who must respond to the challenge of the faculty by manifesting a commitment to the communal worship of God [unnecessary] under the old system.…

From The Houghton Star, Houghton College, Houghton, New York:

Because of the rejection of the Christian presuppositions, the most challenging task facing the Church of Jesus Christ is the redefining and reinstatement of the Christian world view as a viable intellectual alternative to modern secular society. The Christian educational institution must bear the responsibility of that task. Such a responsibility demands that the Christian college or university move out of its higher level Sunday school syndrome into an intellectual community dedicated to the investigation of the philosophical content of Christianity found in both Holy Scriptures and doctrines of the historical Church. Our concern should not be with relating Christianity to a particular discipline but rather formulating and developing disciplines which are based upon the Christian presuppositions. For example, psychologists who are Christians should not be concerned with relating psychology to Christianity, but rather developing a Christian psychology which is one discipline within the perspective of the Christian world view.…

The student must endeavor to fully understand to the best of his ability the Christian philosophy. He must abandon any view that he previously had of faith as a non-intellectual subject and discipline himself to the serious study of the intellectual content of the Christian faith. The student must follow this path or cease to call himself a student. The Christian college is not a state college, and the difference does not lie in the fact that we have stricter rules or longer skirts but rather in the basic Christian philosophy to which we adhere. Any student who cannot commit himself to the intellectual investigation of the Christian faith within his areas of study has no place in this academic community.

The deepest problems of secular liberal-arts education today stem from the theory that truth and values are relative, a fallout of this generation’s commitment to evolutionary perspectives. The loss of authoritative norms explains, in part, the strident student shift from reason and persuasion to mob pressure and compulsion. An evolutionary perspective provides no basis for universal and enduring human rights or responsibilities, nor can it fix normative limits of escalation or deescalation of protest and disruption. It cannot, in fact, supply any fixed norms of ethics whatever, or any unchanging truths.

Amid lost confidence in liberal learning on secular campuses, evangelical students have—and yet neglect—a tremendous opportunity to counter radical assaults on liberal education by their own kind of demonstrations. To face the reality of the supernatural, the objectivity of truth and values, and the moral and spiritual significance of Jesus of Nazareth is crucial to any honest system of education and culture. Yet few issues are more evaded, and more arbitrarily prejudged, than these.

Nowhere, apparently, has a vanguard of evangelical students raised the pivotal questions bypassed in most modern classrooms, by pinpointing the failure of secular faculties to wrestle with the ever critical problems of the history of thought that are decisive for human dignity and the role of reason in society. Who is God if he is? What is moral?—and so what? Is any truth final? Is Christ just a “four-letter word”? These are great issues that believing collegians should be demonstrating for. However much some of us might cringe at placards and banners, they are an in-thing that bespeaks the importance of symbols in a mass-media age, and they can be appropriated to bring visibility to the really important questions of life.

Why do evangelical students by and large take less initiative for the triumph of truth than for the triumph of grace? Our evangelical colleges champion the Christocentric view of life. But they often fail to dissect the life-situations and thought-struggles that inundate most people today. Amid basic efforts to preserve and herald the truth of the Gospel, they forgo a direct confrontation over the truth of truth and the meaning of meaning. Too easily evangelical dialogue bounces within personal and pietistic dimensions when, in fact, it ought to grapple with the very survival of civilization.

The image that evangelical colleges present to the world must embrace truth, justice, and grace as concerns indispensable to Christian education. We are debtors not simply to the evangelical community but to the whole modern world in which we live. Evangelical schools bear this global duty in respect to truth no less than evangelical missions bear a world-wide task in respect to grace.

Over half the world population is sealed against overt evangelical proclamation. But the other half is locked up far more than we realize to American evangelical resources for its impressions of the credibility of Christianity. As never before our global burden in these harried years is one of intellectually responsible formulation and communication of the truth. Classrooms where teachers and students use reason to face the agenda of the world, grapple with ideas in the context of the truth of revelation, and apply the test of coherence to every truth-claim are the launch-pads of this witness. Valid ideas presented precisely and attractively through every available means can and must be the stock-in-trade of evangelical education.

The mission of the evangelical college is nothing less than to make known the whole truth for the whole man for new life in a new world. Only a comprehensive perspective like this can undermine the presumptive definitions of human nature and destiny posed by utopian ideologies, speculative rationalisms, and self-fulfillment theories, and can illumine the vision of the ideal man and society by the truth of revelation. This banner maintains, moreover, the indispensable and indissoluble bond linking truth, justice, and grace, and by claiming this present world for God’s spiritual purpose in creation, reopens man’s soul to the eternal transcendent world.

SCIENCE AT THE SECOND COMING

By self-learned charms Pankrator Science flies

Over myths and shadows to the truths of sense.

Iron eyes on scarlet stock, fey with surmise,

Decode all things, miniscule and immense.

Blown like a bubble, kneaded like a paste,

Nature now composes one pragmatic crown.

Roentgen-eyed and flush, Science flies to baste

Seamless truth in one theoretic gown.

Inmost fate says no. The cloud-compelling smith,

Unprogrammed Truth, smites Science in the eyes.

The web is rent, the skeins are split; and myth

Decodes into judgment, free from surmise.

Science avows its Lord, but legions find

Horror before them, vanity behind.

DAVID S. BERKELEY

Unveiling the reality of the supernatural and expounding the special method whereby God and his ways are to be known demand an intellectual precision that draws the world of unbelief and doubt inescapably into the crossfire of ideas. For this engagement Bible departments must be keen and exciting, philosophy classes powerful and relevant. Campus achievements exhibited to donors and alumni must involve victories of Christian thought and truth more than physical expansion, athletic prowess, even evangelistic endeavor.

To say, as some do, that the distinctive contribution of Christianity to the world of learning and life is one of perspective, is not enough. To be sure, the Christian view of God and the cosmos and man does involve a unique perspective on the whole of reality. But so, for that matter, does Buddhism, or any other ism one cares to mention. The unique contribution of biblical religion is the truth of revelation and its implications for human redemption and destiny.

Only if—as we believe—revelational truth is of one and the same order as all other truth, or, as Christians also contend, if the validity of any and all truth depends ultimately on the truth of God and his revelation, have we a platform for integrated learning in the context of Judeo-Christian revelation. Christian education that overstresses the uniqueness of the Christian perspective without attending seriously also to the final truth of the Christian revelation faces rough going in the seething world of thought. Nor is it enough simply to affirm the validity of the Christian revelation; nothing less than lucid marshalling of intellectual evidence will make plain why evangelicals are convinced that they have meshed mind with the eternal world.

If, on the other hand, the truth of revelation is truth of a different order, truth whose validity and authority rest simply on subjective preference or internal decision, then we ought to conserve our time and energy and explore the possibilities of merger with Zen Buddhism.

The world we seek to confront is precommitted to evolution as the ultimate explanatory principle, and the limitation of knowledge to the horizons of human history. Unless we grapple with these prejudices, what seem to us to be bold and brave claims for faith will appear to others as tender-minded credulity. It will not do, therefore, to portray the evangelical campus to the world simply as an institution that believes in the inerrancy of the Bible. To be sure, the Word of God cannot be broken, and the authority and plenary inspiration of Scripture is a foundational affirmation. But our day of intellectual relativism and moral nothingness (even amid notable social concern) requires more than formulas that are mainly intended to reassure apprehensive evangelical donors.

In a 1965 statement, spokesmen for faith-affirming colleges concurred that “the over-all purpose of the evangelical college, as a distinct type of institution, is to present the whole truth, with a view to the rational integration of learning in the context of the ‘Judeo-Christian’ revelation, and to promote the realization of Christian values in student character.”

Only if evangelical learning highlights and vindicates the presuppositions of this umbrella-statement will this comprehensive purpose become significant. For the contemporary mind neither concedes nor comprehends that knowledge is a unitary whole; that integration is ideally rational; that divine revelation supplies the ideal context for integration; that “Judeo-Christian” revelation is incomparably unique; that academic learning has inescapable implications for a student’s moral outlook and behaviour. Because the academic mood on many campuses is implicitly if not overtly naturalistic and relativistic, demonstrating the viability of evangelical alternatives requires an earnest wrestling with undergirding convictions. As the 1965 statement put it, our faith-affirming colleges are called to exhibit “the rational integration of the major fields of learning in the context of the ‘Judeo-Christian’ revelation.” Without a fulfillment of this intellectual priority, non-theistic views, however weak, will remain pervasively influential, while Christian theism, however superior, remains notably unimpressive.

If we take seriously the biblical correlation of learning and values, knowledge and piety, then our schools will strive to graduate men and women who not only know the truth of revelation but also live the real life. We are not in the business of producing Übermenschen or philosopher-kings, but students for whom Jesus Christ is Logos and Light and Life. No one in the moral history of the West has been more unjustifiably reduced to a footnote in modern texts on ethics than Jesus of Nazareth; in an age suffocating with moral pollution, evangelical colleges have the opportunity to rectify this injustice in word and deed.

Christian education needs to recapture the ethical excitement of this dimension of Christian learning and witness. Forged mainly in terms of negations, as often happens, Christian ethical concern soon loses its critically important role of illuminating the line between morality and immorality in terms of the truth of revelation and scriptural principles of conduct. To say this is not to decry campus rules, nor to imply that the alcohol traffic, the tobacco industry, and the cinema no longer pose any moral issues. Indeed, it is ironical that some evangelical schools relaxed rules on movie attendance precisely at a time when X-rated films began to deluge the theaters; and on smoking just when medical research convinced even government agencies to discourage the cigarette habit. Evangelical colleges could become a moral force in our drifting society by training disciplined, dedicated young people who are able to discuss intelligently the issues of our time—from abortion to vivisection and voodoo and Zen. If recent American politics has failed to inspire youth to anything higher than opting out of the system and its commitments, then evangelical education has the special opportunity of integrating the issues of truth, righteousness, and justice in a claim from which no human being can drop out and still remain human.

We should note, moreover, that in expounding “the whole truth, with a view to rational integration … in the context of ‘Judeo-Christian revelation,’ ” the faith-affirming colleges in the 1965 declaration consider the Bible to be “an integrating force” and “not merely … an additive.” The Christian Apostle to the Gentiles set even the atoning sacrifice and bodily resurrection of the crucified Jesus in this scriptural context; fundamentally important to the Christian message, he avers, is “that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised the third day according to the scriptures …” (1 Cor. 15:3, 4).

This rationale for human life and destiny seems as alien to the modern mind as it did to the Athenians when Paul first proclaimed it. The most conspicuous difference between the first and the twentieth centuries is not that the Christian rationale as such now seems foreign. It is, rather, that for modern man, every speculative alternative has lost credibility. Another difference is that much of the Christian task force today, despite its impressive endowments and properties and libraries, its salaried personnel and small army of young followers, lacks the boldness of apostolic times to put the world on the defensive.

While Christian education centers in the manifestation of God in Christ, evangelical colleges have always sensed the need for a more explicit and articulate delineation of basic beliefs. The theological ambiguity of modern ecumenism has, in fact, unwittingly created fresh respect for succinctly stated positions; open-ended pluralistic ruminations on Christian identity are falling out of fashion if not out of favor. Once again, in a day when ecumenical institutions are more concerned with with structure than with truth, the great ecumenical creeds—particularly the Apostles’ and Nicene—provide a basis for stressing central articles of Christian faith. In view of its criterion of the Scriptures as the divine rule of faith and practice, a tenet reaffirmed by the Protestant Reformation, evangelical education holds the ecumenical creeds of Christendom to be proximate normative expressions of the historic Christian faith.

Totalitarianism or even tax-supported education is hampered by the interests or antagonisms of ruling forces; evangelical education, on the other hand, thrives where and because open competition prevails in the world of ideas, and can best serve where it fulfills its specific mission with competence. In a non-evangelical college, a student may easily accumulate a kaleidoscopic confusion of views gleaned from left-of-center liberals, conservatives, naturalistic philosophers, relativistic anthropologists, and Marxist economists, with one or two demonstrative burn-the-building-and-de-stroy-the-system activists thrown in for good measure. In such a time as this, it will be scant credit to evangelical education, however, merely to be able to label itself as unlike other education. As far back as 1945 the Harvard Report on General Education in a Free Society saw no possibility of a return to theistically oriented education. How much more today, then, do faith-affirming colleges have the unique responsibility of propelling a systematic theistic view into a naturalistic climate, and of delineating the unified view of life required by revelational theism.

Carl F. H. Henry is editor-at-large ofChristianity Today, professor-at-large of Eastern Baptist Seminary, and vice-president of the directors of the Institute for Advanced Christian Studies. He is currently visiting professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Education in America, which began with Christian colleges and schools, is in trouble. Private education in particular is facing the greatest crisis in the nearly three and a half centuries of its history. Many independent and private institutions are confronting difficulties that threaten their survival. The shift from black to red has become the common rather than exceptional outcome of annual operations—a trend that, if not checked, will certainly decimate the independent colleges and schools of the nation.

“But for years education has been crying poor,” someone says. “Are things really so critical?” The answer is yes. The New Depression in Higher Education (McGraw-Hill, 1971) by Earl F. Cheit reports an intensive study made for the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. Judging from a cross section of American colleges and universities, Dr. Cheit, former vice-chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, concludes that two-thirds of public and private higher institutions are either having financial troubles right now or are moving toward them. In The Red and the Black, William F. Jellema, research director of the Association of American Colleges, presents the preliminary report of the association’s study of the current and projected financial state of private colleges. A comprehensive questionnaire, sent to most of the independent, accredited four-year colleges in the nation, elicited replies from three-quarters of them. According to the report, the “average” institution among the 554 respondents concluded its annual operations with a net current fund surplus of $39,000 for the year 1967–68; this has now changed to a projected current deficit for 1970–71 of $115,000. No wonder Dr. Jellema says: “Private colleges and universities are apprehensive and they have reason to be. Most colleges are staying in the red and they are getting redder, while colleges in the black are generally growing grayer.”

Averages, however, reflect individual cases. At Columbia the 1970–71 deficit is estimated at $15.3 million. At Princeton, the deficit grew from $1 million last year to about $2.5 million this year. Johns Hopkins estimates a $4.3 million deficit this year. And President Nathan A. Pusey of Harvard, which has a billion-dollar endowment, states in his eighteenth annual report: “Fiscally it [1969–70] was the first year during the Pusey administration when the University did not operate safely in the black.” Deficits are jeopardizing the future of hundreds of other private institutions and of many independent secondary schools, especially those with resident enrollments.

The reason for the deficits is plain. Tuition and other student fees do not fully meet costs of accredited education. Other income—from gifts, endowment, foundations, and federal and state aid—is progressively lagging behind soaring operating costs.

Tuition has been raised so high that it deters enrollment and threatens scholarship funds. (Yale, where annual charges have risen to $4,400, now has a plan under which students may defer up to 18 per cent of the tuition and make repayments at an adjusted percentage of their gross income over a period of thirty-five years after graduation.)

Dipping into unrestricted endowment has in numerous instances led to borrowing to meet current obligations, and this has added heavy interest charges to budgets. Moreover, disruption and violence on campuses have made headline news even though only a minority of schools are implicated, and this has fostered a suspicion of higher education that damages its support.

This, then, is the general scene. And the Christian colleges and schools stand right in the middle of it all. In some areas, such as campus disorders, their problems are far less than those of secular institutions; in others, particularly finances, their problems are if anything more severe. They too are struggling with the inflation spiral and insufficient income, and their administrators are voicing deep concern. When asked, “What do you predict for American higher education ten years from now?” Dr. Hudson T. Armerding of Wheaton College summed matters up like this: “There is a possibility that private higher education as we now know it may not be in existence ten years from now. It will prevail only if the American public believes that the distinctiveness is worth preserving” (Ladies Home Journal, Sept. 1970).

In a statement discussing the dilemma of Christian higher education, Dr. John W. Snyder, who has moved from the presidency of Westmont College to become vice-chancellor of the University of California at Santa Barbara, says, “But you, the reader, must make a decision too. Without your support in very real terms, Christian higher education can well become a thing of the past.” A recent letter to the constituency of Houghton College from President Stephen W. Paine refers to that Christian campus as “unthreatened by the shadow of fear that creeps ahead of student unrest” but goes on to remark, “A shadow does threaten Houghton, however, a chronic lack of funds.…” At Seattle Pacific College, President David L. McKenna, after discussing financial problems in his 1970 report, makes this discerning comment: “The immediate threat … is that there will be an educational deficit created by low salaries, limited instructional equipment, inadequate library resources, and deferred maintenance on a beautiful campus. The will to live is strong, but the will to live effectively is stronger.”

Here Dr. McKenna identifies the critical point beyond which no college or school, least of all a Christian one, dares go. A chronic operating deficit inevitably pushes an institution into an educational deficit. And Christian education cannot slip into a decline in quality without imperiling its very reason for being. In the balances are nothing less than the hard-won gains of the last three decades, during which many Christian colleges and schools have built up their campuses, developed and deepened their programs, and gained full accreditation. If the principle that Christian education stands obligated to excellence for the glory of God is valid, then for our colleges and schools to be driven into the morass of quality deficits would be tragic and ultimately suicidal.

So much for the crisis. What can be done about it? No understanding observer would question that Christian institutions are making sincere and prayerful efforts to continue and to do so on more than a mere survival basis. But not all well-meant policies are wise. One of the hazards of crisis is the temptation to adopt palliative measures that may only aggravate problems. There are no panaceas for present difficulties. Every educational administrator knows that his institution must rescrutinize its operations and learn to practice every economy compatible with maintaining quality, which can never be negotiable. Instead of proceeding on a day-by-day expediency, a college should have, as Dr. Joseph A. Kershaw, professor of economics at Williams College, has said, a clear and comprehensive plan of how it expects to live through the present stress, which may last for years. Faculty, because their welfare is linked with that of the institution, must know the difficulties the school faces and what it is doing about them. Change in both the structure and the practice of education must be considered.

Because Christian education is committed to the living Lord in whom all things hold together and who makes all things new, it need never fear change, even sweeping change. The biblical world view is spacious enough to comprehend all truth and all necessary change. Therefore, Christian education must explore new paths, though this may mean breaking with traditional ways of doing things. Not only shifts like restructuring the curriculum or reordering the academic calendar, but such things as the consortium plan, in which colleges share their resources (ten Christian colleges—Gordon, Eastern Mennonite, Messiah, Taylor, Bethel, Wheaton, Greenville, Seattle Pacific, Malone, and Westmont—are already involved in such a plan, see April 9 issue, page 44), and other new patterns of student life and extramural learning, require consideration. Historically, independent education has made some of the great forward steps in teaching and learning. Christian institutions must realize that responsiveness to new situations and varying needs can be entirely compatible with unchanging doctrine and abiding spiritual values.

Dr. Earl F. Cheit, whose New Depression in Education has already been mentioned, names in this book three things colleges and universities must do to surmount their economic problems: First, they must show they are “reasonably governable”; second, they “must demonstrate that they are reasonably efficient in their internal operations”; third, they must have “a unifying set of purposes … that the supporting public can understand and defer to.”

Measured by such requirements, the confessing Christian colleges richly deserve support. They have not had violence on their campuses. To be sure, their students are by no means free from the impatience and rebellion of youth today, nor do all their students escape the pitfalls of present-day society. Yet there are Christian colleges and secondary schools that are showing they can relate to the restless student mind and can do so in a context of prayer, trust, and love. As for the reasonably efficient internal operation of which Dr. Cheit speaks, few institutions have had more experience in dollar-stretching than the Christian colleges and schools. And when it comes to unified purpose, if there is one distinctive that puts Christian education in a class by itself, it is the definiteness of its purpose. Christian education knows its identity. It is committed to the unity of all truth in God and to the integration of all fields of learning with the biblical world view. It knows what it is for and where it is going. Judged by these criteria, then, it deserves adequate support.

But is it getting it? Honesty compels a blunt no, and some plain speaking is in order. A crisis cannot last indefinitely; it has to be resolved either favorably or unfavorably. So with private Christian institutions today. These schools must have greatly renewed and enlarged support or else suffer mortal damage. Mere maintenance of their present level of support would be tantamount to a vote for their shutdown.

Where is this help to come from? There are only two avenues—government or private sources.

A proposal linking indirect federal aid with private giving comes from Congressman John B. Anderson (R.-Ill.). He has introduced a bill in the House enabling persons who contribute up to $100 to a college or university of their choice to subtract that amount from their federal tax, providing it does not exceed 20 per cent of their tax liability. Corporations would also receive a tax credit on gifts up to $5,000, providing it does not exceed 10 per cent of their tax liability. If enacted into law, this plan might well lead to increased giving.

Meanwhile, four-year colleges are now facing a definite decrease in federal assistance. Urban renewal, transportation, and ecological needs are competing with education for tax dollars. Aid to junior colleges and community colleges is outrunning that available to private four-year colleges and universities. The pinch comes particularly in relation to capital funds. One Christian liberal-arts college had top priority in its state for capital funds needed to begin a new science building, but the state had no federal money to dispense.

To accept or reject federal aid is a matter of conscience that different Christian institutions will determine differently. But those that decide to accept it stand on shaky ground if they put their hope for survival in government funds.

The other source of help is private giving. Recent federal legislation limiting the lifespan of foundations and requiring them to distribute principal as well as income will doubtless be reflected in more foundation support for independent education. And in support from its entire constituency—alumni, parents, friends, churches, indeed the Christian public as a whole—lies the chief hope for resolution of the crisis. But this hope will not be realized without radical changes in present patterns of stewardship.

Christian education is the poor relation of many evangelical givers. Maturity in stewardship entails the capacity to see beyond immediate results and to support enterprises having long-range goals. Certain forms of witness and outreach bring quick and often dramatic responses. This is neither to decry their importance nor to begrudge the help they receive. Compared with these more spectacular enterprises, Christian education, like a time bomb, has delayed results. Also like a time bomb, it does not always go off—a fact it shares with all forms of witness. So it takes maturity in stewardship to support Christian education.

Another mark of maturity is resistance to superficial judgments. As has already been said, the shocking breakdown of control on some campuses has bred a mood of disillusionment with higher education. Such an attitude, which spreads by a kind of osmosis, ought not to hamper giving to Christian institutions, which have been free from violence and disruption. Likewise, maturity carries with it an understanding tolerance that does not confuse nonessentials with vital issues. For a college or school to lose support, as some most regrettably have, because of students’ dress or hair styles, points to inability to understand that these outward changes should not be equated with departure from the faith.

But more must be said. Despite recession and inflation, this remains an affluent society. Important exceptions there are, and the existence of so many poor and disadvantaged among us stands out as a sore spot in our national life. But evangelicals by and large belong to the majority sometimes called middle America. On the one hand, the cost of living has gone up; on the other hand, as a feature article in the New York Times (December 9, 1970) shows, opulence is becoming a way of life for the middle class. Even reckoned in inflation-adjusted dollars, the earnings of the average family rose from $6,900 to $9,400 during the last decade. Many a Christian family is in the $12,000-plus bracket and has color TV sets, two or more cars, and other luxuries. Advertisements for expensive foreign travel dot the pages of Christian periodicals. One speaks of these things not judgmentally but factually; they are signs of material prosperity. And as one contemplates them, some of the things the New Testament says about stewardship come to mind.

To what extent is our Christian giving sacrificial? What was our Lord really saying to us when he commended the widow who gave her two mites? Have we ever given up anything—the purchase of the latest model car, an additional TV, a better hi-fi set, a luxury vacation—for the sake of giving more to Christian enterprises? These are not comfortable questions. Yet they may show us that a more mature pattern of giving, one that includes even modest sacrifices of what some euphemistically call “the good things of life” and persuade themselves they simply must have, could greatly help Christian education continue its important work.

If our colleges and schools are being winnowed in this time of troubles, the faithfulness of their constituencies is no less being sifted. The kind of stewardship with which Christians respond now and in the next few years will make the difference between life and death for not a few worthy Christian institutions. Colleges or schools die in different ways—some by merger and consequent loss of identity, others by closing through bankruptcy, others by slow bleeding through diminishing enrollment resulting from a decline into mediocrity. Every good institution lost will mean a larger deficit in Christian leadership while secularism and materialism continue to offer stones to people who are starving for lack of the bread of life. It will mean the curtailing of the kind of education that can fill the empty place in young lives—and this at a time when youth so greatly need the unambiguous presentation of Christ and his claims upon them.

But if the Christian public, realizing the extent to which future leadership in all forms of Christian life and service is at stake, would prayerfully revise their giving so that at least a third of it would go to education committed to the biblical world view and the maintenance of quality to the glory of God, then the crisis could be surmounted.

Frank E. Gaebelein is headmaster emeritus of the Stony Brook School and former co-editor ofChristianity Today.Two of his books, “Christian Education in a Democracy” and “The Pattern of God’s Truth,” are widely recognized contributions to the field of Christian education.

In this issue we call attention to the plight of Christian higher education and its pressing need for the prayers, encouragement, and financial help of God’s people. A school can perform no greater service to the nation and to the world than to boldly declare its fidelity to Jesus Christ and his Gospel and to educate men and women in the Christian life and world view. One of the most effective ways for the Church to encourage social betterment is to send capable, Christ-loving young people into the world of men to witness and to serve as professional men, businessmen, teachers, politicians, voters, parents—not to mention missionaries and ministers and full-time Christian workers.

We managed to go to press with this issue on time despite the threats of the anti-war demonstrators to seal off access to downtown Washington and thus shut down government operations. There were moments of unpleasantness; “trashing” was common, and here and there traffic was slowed to a crawl. While a city bus with one of our staff members aboard stopped for a traffic light, several demonstrators pulled out valve stems from the tires, and our colleague was obliged to finish his journey to the office au pied. But then, probably more walking would be beneficial to us all. After the Monday effort ground to a halt, Tuesday dawned bright, fair, windy, and generally peaceful. We hope the end of the Mayday thrust also marks the end of what is surely a less than persuasive way of making dissent known.

The debate between Hans Küng and Karl Rahner is surely one of the most remarkable events within today’s remarkable period of Roman Catholic history. The debate was struck off by the appearance of Küng’s book, Infallible? An Inquiry. Rahner responded vigorously to the book by saying that if Küng continued to theologize along these lines, he would have to be dealt with theologically as a “liberal Protestant.” To Rahner, Küng’s views were rationalistic, a clear transgression of the limits for any Catholic critique of the church’s infallible teaching authority.

Understandably, Rahner’s sharp attack was hard for Küng to digest. He responded, in two lengthy articles, by saying that he owed his understanding of the time-conditioned and limited character of dogma to Rahner himself.

In the March edition of “Stimmen der Zeit,” Karl Rahner offered his reply to Küng’s response to him. It is clear that Rahner is not about to take back anything from what he has often said about the history of dogma. Dogma is historically conditioned and time-bound, and therefore always remains an inadequate, human formulation of God’s absolute truth. This is exactly what Küng, too, has insisted, what he has developed, and what, he says, he has learned from Rahner himself.

But now a crucial disagreement rises between Rahner and Küng. Rahner distinguishes between the relativity, inadequacy, and limitation of dogma on one hand and any element of error on the other. Say what one must of the relativity of dogma, it is, in its infallibility, kept free from all error, according to Rahner. He characterizes his way of doing theology as “system-immanent.” What he means is that he works within the Catholic system of infallible teaching. Any element of error would be an attack on the system.

The fact that dogma is affected by its time and circumstances implies that we may and must interpret it. But we must also respect the truth, which has always been embodied in dogma. We must bow before the unchanging truth guaranteed by the Holy Spirit, who was given to the church to lead it into truth. To interpret dogma is another matter than to give dogma a new meaning. From this it is clear that the nature of interpretation plays a crucial role in Rahner’s thinking. If one works within the system, he is bound to see to it that all the new interpretations of dogma (e.g. Mariology, transubstantiation, the sacrifice of the mass) come out in agreement with what the church intended to express in them. The motto of Paul VI applies to dogma: “What was, is.”

Küng has been working for over a decade with all sorts of historical and exegetical questions that surround the notion of infallibility. Obvious errors have been made, Küng has argued, that demonstrate the relativity of the church’s teaching authority. And, he has said, exegesis has compelled the church to rethink its convictions about the primate and offices of the church.

Küng has looked at the church’s history a good deal more critically than has Rahner. It is not as though Küng does not believe that the Holy Spirit has guided the church through its history. He does contend that the Spirit’s guidance—as promised by the Lord—means that the church will not swerve from the truth in a fundamental sense. But he does not think that the Spirit guarantees immunity from all danger or error.

In taking account of what Rahner has said about dogma, we cannot avoid the impression that there remains severe tension. For example: Rahner criticized the traditional interpretation of the saying, “no salvation outside the church,” as being “rigoristic”—harsh. But this expression is not just another theologian’s word. It comes from church doctrine; it was used in the Council of Florence (1439) to exclude Jews, heathen, schismatics, and heretics from the possibility of salvation. Later the expression was softened, as, for example, by Pius IX in the nineteenth century. A distinction was drawn between what was done in ignorance and what was done in willed persistence; only in the latter instance was one excluded from salvation. When, in 1949, the American theologian Feeney wanted to use the ancient expression against American secularization, the Holy Office instructed Cardinal Cushing that Feeney’s interpretation was intolerably rigoristic. Subsequently, Feeney was excommunicated in the famous Boston heresy case.

Thus we note a significant shift in one of the important utterances of the church about the exclusiveness of salvation. A transition was made from a rigorous to a flexible or mild interpretation. Rahner opts for the milder. His feelings were expressed in his view of “anonymous Christianity.” Here he took a broad and tolerant view of those who were otherwise thought of as “outside” the walls. Now, my point is that it seems impossible to contend that what is now interpreted as the real meaning of “no salvation outside the church” is what was intended in earlier days.

Hans Küng has insisted that Catholics should openly admit that profound changes have taken place in the understanding of church dogma. He wants Catholics to stop insisting that the church has always and really taught one and the same truth.

But Rahner has chosen not to accept Küng’s way. He opts for the other solution: there has been no change; there has only been interpretation. The task is to keep interpretation within the unchangeable and infallible dogma of the church. Everything that can be said about the time-conditioned character of dogma must be said without threatening the absolute teaching authority of the church.

Rahner, in short, has elected to follow the path of the traditional construction of the infallible church—all his well-known progressive tendencies notwithstanding. As a result, a kind of necessity, even coercion, hangs over all interpretation of dogma. Any critical testing of dogma by the Word of God has a hard time finding a place within Rahner’s “system-immanent.”

Rahner says that in his last semester of lectures on dogmatics he has had a biblical exegete present. But this is hardly convincing. The real question is whether we can tolerate a disturbance in the development of dogma when the Word of God tests it. At bottom, Rahner’s notion of the untouchability of the infallible dogma sets us before the same problem as that faced by Luther and Calvin. I do not mean to say that Kung is really a crypto-Protestant and that Rahner is at heart a conservative Roman Catholic dogmatician. The business is too complicated for that.

But Küng does put his finger on very weighty problems of tradition (historical development and historical changes), and calls the church to reconsider its understanding of the infallibility of the church and the pope. At this critical period in the church, Rahner has taken up the case for the traditional doctrine. The conservatives in the church will surely be obliged to him. But the problem that Küng puts on the agenda cannot be resolved by summoning up the traditional stand. The problem will stay there, and will finally be decisive for the future of Roman Catholicism.

Several international meetings have been held to collect and analyze information on Communist policies toward religious bodies, anti-religious propaganda, “underground” churches, and related matters.

The latest and probably most significant of these meetings took place in Ottawa last month. More than seventy persons participated, including two professors from Yugoslavia. Scholars who had been invited from the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland did not arrive because of “pressing” duties.

The International Symposium on Religion and Atheism in Communist Societies was closed to the press in an apparent effort to create a relaxed atmosphere in which a dialogue could develop between participants from varying ideological persuasions. Thus observers couldn’t quote participants directly. But papers presented at the symposium are to be published by Carleton University. The university, along with its Committee on Soviet and East European Studies, sponsored the symposium in cooperation with the Canadian Association of Slavists and the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies.

Certain apprehension was expressed during the five-day session about the relations of the Vatican and the World Council of Churches with the Soviet Union and other Communist countries. Several participants voiced fear that both the Vatican and the WCC might be going too far and too fast in efforts to accommodate Communist leaders.

Some wondered whether an “ecumenical Munich” might not be in the offing in which dissenting Christians and underground churches would be forgotten or sacrificed to obtain a modus vivendi with Communist governments. Such an appeasement mood is seen, it was pointed out, in the failure of such international bodies as the Vatican and the WCC to recognize documents that have been coming from religious dissenters in the Soviet Union.

The problem of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union received considerable attention. Those present seemed to agree that the Jewish community in North America does more for Jews in the Soviet Union than Christians do for their fellow believers there.

It was emphasized that recent worldwide protests against harassment of Jews and, in particular, their difficulties emigrating to Israel, had had some positive results. It was suggested, moreover, that an interreligious and ecumenical approach to the problems of the Jews, anti-Semitism, and religious and national dissenters would be more effective than fragmented efforts.

One of the speakers who had been invited to the Ottawa symposium was Dr. Erika Kadlecova. She had lost her position as director of the Office for Church Affairs in Czechoslovakia as punishment for her “liberalism” under Alexander Dubcek. She had supported the Christian-Marxist dialogue and urged that Christians not be treated as second-class citizens. The dialogue fell into disrepute after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Dr. Kadlecova has been reported working as a ticket-seller in a cinema.

Participants in Ottawa agreed that international meetings should continue at regular intervals and that their work should be coordinated. Another meeting will probably be held in London in 1973 under the auspices of the Center for the Study of Religion and Communism.

Although the religious issue is primary, the meetings have been organized not by churchmen but by scholars. Major denominations in the United States and abroad have yet to demonstrate any substantial interest in the plight of persecuted believers in the Communist countries. Neither has there been much grass-roots interest: Religious Ferment in Russia by Michael Bourdeaux has sold only 600 copies in the United States.

Seasoned Insight

The American general who led the United Nations peace team to an armistice in Korea seriously doubts that a settlement to the war in Viet Nam can be negotiated.

“We’ve practically thrown away the lives of 50,000 men,” says retired Lieutenant General William K. Harrison. “The only thing we can do is get out slowly, and Mr. Nixon is doing his best.”

Harrison feels it would be suicidal to pull out all American forces at once. He wonders why anti-war critics now urging such a move did not speak up when the American military buildup began. “Nobody complained about the war until it started to drag out,” he declares. “Now it is being called immoral.”

Harrison, now 75, was chief U. N. negotiator at Panmunjom, Korea, from May, 1952, until a truce was signed on July 27, 1953. He probably has more experience negotiating with Communists than any other living American. Long active in the Officers Christian Union, he currently serves as its president.

In an interview in his home near Clearwater, Florida, last month, Harrison said that time is on the side of North Viet Nam. “The enemy has got us by the throats,” he stated. “The situation is such that we cannot expect to get any concessions from them at the negotiating table.”

Harrison said that he does not feel the United States should have become involved militarily in Viet Nam, but that once forces were committed victory should have been sought. Military strategists may have underestimated enemy capability, he added, but the cause of much of the problem is that U. S. forces’ hands have been tied. He doubts that the Soviet Union or even China would have entered the war had the harbor at Haiphong been bombed. “They have more to fear from each other,” he observed.

Harrison expressed sympathy for Lieutenant William Calley because “in the heat of battle anything can happen,” but noted that “from all evidence, he committed murder and should be punished.”

DAVID KUCHARSKY

Distinguishing Holiness

To distinguish itself from “mystical sects who currently make use of the word ‘holiness’ ” and to make room for Canadians, the National Holiness Association has changed its name to the Christian Holiness Association.

The decision came at the organization’s 103rd convention in Kansas City last month, where 2,000 delegates represented 1.5 million constituents of twelve affiliated and eleven cooperating denominations. The theme of the meeting was “Absolutely the Lord’s!”

The convention demonstrated the relevance of rigorous self-surrender for the modern generation. Youth from the association’s eighty educational institutions swarmed the conclave. In a seminar titled “Rapping With the Now Generation,” hippies—puffing on cigarettes in front of the anti-tobacco Wesleyans—were brought in from the streets to serve as impromptu panelists. Listening teams from seven area seminaries and numerous colleges engaged in dialogue with speakers. “There is a new religious revolution among young people that has not yet fully bubbled to the surface in all news media,” commented Asbury College president Dr. Dennis Kinlaw.

Female delegates also confronted the feminist revolution when Verda Nye, vice-president of the National Organization of Women, spoke. She was invited over the protest of one CHA executive member who had misgivings about bringing in outside “trouble-makers.” Miss Nye was instead moved by the warmth of Wesleyan women. She broke into tears as Miriam Millenger, Nazarene missionary-nurse, testified. “Oh, I was blessed,” she later commented, expressing what seemed to be sincere interest in the Gospel. A personal follow-up was planned.

Another group, however, received scant attention. Only two blacks attended the convention, and speakers bypassed specific mention of ministry to Negroes. A social-action seminar was attended by only a dozen persons, and seminar speaker Dr. Leslie Parrott said: “I’m not so sure I believe in social action. If you preach to the needs of people that will take care of it.” Some of the Wesleyan denominations originally came into being over the anti-slavery issue.

Realignment, Southern Style

Three independent, conservative groups within the one-million-member Presbyterian Church, U. S., called for a realignment of Presbyterianism last month that would create a “fervently evangelistic Church, faithful to the Bible, the Reformed faith, and Presbyterian polity [government].”

The proposal, issued in Atlanta, in effect asks for the formation of a denomination by persons of Presbyterian and Reformed faith who oppose both the Consultation on Church Union (COCU) and a projected merger of the Southern Presbyterian Church with the 3.2-million-member United Presbyterian Church.

Executive committees of Presbyterian Churchmen United (composed of clergymen and elders), Concerned Presbyterians (laymen), and the Presbyterian Journal (a weekly magazine long opposed to UP-Southern Presbyterian merger) released the document.

The statement reaffirms commitment to the constitution of the present Presbyterian Church, U.S., and opposes actions that would “destroy the historic witness of our church to the true message and mission of the Church of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

The document continues: “We hope and pray for the restoration and preservation of our church as a truly Reformed and evangelical body.”

In other sessions the Executive Committee urged cooperation with Key 73 as well as between sister holiness bodies. “We do not need organic merger as badly as we need unity of purpose and spirit …” pleaded Myron F. Boyd, CHA president and bishop of the Free Methodist Church. He and the other officers were reelected.

JAMES S. TINNEY

Religion In Transit

The Roman Catholic archdiocese of New York has announced that Birthright, a counseling service giving alternatives to abortion, has been set up as its special service to residents of New York (see April 23 issue, page 36).

The rector, wardens, and vestry of St. Thomas Episcopal Church (New York), one of the denomination’s most influential parishes, charged national Episcopal leaders with “authoritarianism” and said the parish had lost confidence in them because church money had been allocated to some groups “practicing or advocating” violence and radical social reform.

The United Presbyterian Church reported that for the first time since 1967 giving to the general mission of the church was up for a quarterly period: an 18 per cent increase for the first quarter of 1971. Local income also rose markedly.

United Methodist churches in the southern California earthquake suffered between $700,000 and $1 million in damages.

The Mormon Church will have three million members by July, according to reports at its 141st anniversary in Salt Lake City last month, where record growth was cited.

The American Bible Society has sold or given away nearly two million copies of its 1971 Daily Bible Reading plan—more than twice as many as in 1970.

A new type of gonorrhea, resistant to conventional treatment, has aggravated an already “rampant epidemic” of venereal disease in California, according to public health officials. They cited, in order, promiscuity, parental permissiveness, and the Pill as causes for the rising incidence of the disease among the young. Three-fourths of the infected are said to be under age 24.

A two-week crusade coinciding with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Alaska Baptist Convention brought 450 new members to churches there.

The smallest Lutheran synod in the United States, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (Eielsen Synod), is now down to five congregations and about seventy-five members—and counting.

The rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar has sold more than one million albums and is headed for the two-million mark, according to a Decca Record spokesman. Superstar is also scheduled to become a movie.

Regional offices of the American Lutheran Church in Washington, Chicago, Dallas, Palo Alto, and Minneapolis have been closed; twenty-two positions were dropped in the action.

Personalia

After eight years as editor of the California Southern Baptist, Dr. J. Terry Young will become a theology professor at New Orleans Baptist Seminary.

Noted biographer Gerard Noel has become editor of the Catholic Herald, one of Britain’s two leading mass-circulation weeklies.

American Baptist missionary Roger W. Getz of the Philippines will become head of Viet Nam Christian Service in June. The organization is administered by Church World Service, Lutheran World Relief, and the Mennonite Central Committee.

Dr. Raymond M. Olsen has resigned as president of California Lutheran (ALC and LCA) College in Thousand Oaks, reportedly because of frustrations encountered in trying to make the small liberal-arts school financially stable.

They Say

Methodist Bishop Gerald H. Kennedy of Los Angeles about reports that the COCU effort to merge nine Protestant denominations may be dead: “The best news I’ve heard of in a long time.” On preaching (to the Minneapolis Ministerial Association): “Preaching only gets dull when fellows forget what the Gospel is.… It takes a real gift to make preaching boring, but we can do it.”

Dr. Charles S. MacKenzie, Presbyterian educator and evangelical clergyman now pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in San Mateo, California, will become president of Grove City College, Pennsylvania, September 1 … The Reverend Charles A. Platt, pastor of First Presbyterian Church, Ridgewood, New Jersey, has been named president of the Lord’s Day Alliance of the United States.

The Latin America Mission has extended until 1974 its loan of Mr. and Mrs. David M. Howard to Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. Howard will continue as IV’s missionary director during this period and will head the 1973 Urbana missionary convention.

The Reverend C. Peter Wagner, a Quaker, has been named associate professor of Latin American studies at Fuller Seminary’s School of World Mission and executive director of Fuller’s Evangelistic Association. He has been active in Bolivian interdenominational activities for fifteen years.

Jewish evangelist Morris Cerullo, president of World Evangelism, plans two Spanish crusades this summer: Miami, June 21–25, and Los Angeles, July 28–August 1.

Ailing Adam Clayton Powell, 62, the former U. S. congressman, announced his resignation last month from the pastorate of Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York. The clergyman is also retiring from politics, plans to live at Bimini in the Bahama Islands.

United Presbyterian activist professor-theologian Robert McAfee Brown was arrested Good Friday for blocking the entrance to the Berkeley (California) draft-board office. The Stanford University Religion Department head’s son, Peter, 22, was arrested with him.

A few days after federal indictments against twenty-three members of the Black P Stone. Nation charged with defrauding the government of almost $1 million in antipoverty funds, the Reverend John R. Fry, pastor of Chicago’s First Presbyterian Church, announced his resignation. Fry, who had been criticized for harboring the coalition of street gangs in his church, defended them as having “great influence and promise.” Fry will become visiting lecturer on social ethics at San Francisco (United Presbyterian) Seminary.

As expected (see April 23 issue, page 42), the Reverend George Sweeting, senior pastor of Chicago’s Moody Memorial Church, will become president of Moody Bible Institute August 1. Dr. William Culbertson, MBI president since 1948, will stay on in the newly created post of chancellor.

The editor of the Toronto Presbyterian Record, Decourcy H. Rayner, was elected president of the Associated Church Press at its fifty-fifth annual convention in Philadelphia last month, succeeding Christian Herald editor Kenneth L. Wilson, who completed his two-year term.

World Scene

The Navigators have resumed work in Taiwan after an absence of more than a decade. Two staffers have moved to Taichung, and nationals from Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, and Australia are expected to join them shortly.

A small band of militant Jewish youths released frogs and mice in the offices of two New York Soviet agencies to harass Russians with ten symbolic plagues during Passover week.

Papers read at the Jerusalem Conference on Biblical Prophecy, to be held in Israel June 15–18, will be published in book form, according to conference coordinator Gaylord Briley. He said that some 3,000 participants are being asked to the parley and that attendance is by invitation only.

American archaeologists are expected to begin excavations this July in Hesban, presumed site of the remains of the biblical city of Heshbon, the Israelites’ first great military conquest on their way from Sinai to the Promised Land, The effort is sponsored by Andrews University (Seventh-day Adventist) in Berrien Springs, Michigan.

Roman Catholics in the city of Worms have appealed to Pope Paul VI to reconsider the papal order condemning and excommunicating Martin Luther as a heretic 450 years ago.

The Vatican’s Liturgy Congregation has renewed an old campaign to get rid of such old favorite wedding marches as “Here Comes the Bride” in church weddings. More “sacred” music should replace the offending selections, the commission said.

While the priest’s away, the laymen will pray—in Church of Our Lady (Catholic) at Fort Qu’appelle, Saskatchewan. The laity, with official consent, prayed the rosary, read Scripture, and distributed Communion while their priest attended a priests’ conference at Regina.

The International Christian Broadcasters have set June 13 as the annual day of prayer for gospel broadcasting around the world. The ICB has more than fifty missionary radio and TV stations.

Dr. Carl McIntire, the usually indefatigable fighting fundamentalist, threw in the towel twice last month after being clobbered by the New Jersey state board of higher education and, in unrelated action, by estranged leaders of the Valley Forge-based American Council of Christian Churches, which he founded in 1941.

The radio preacher announced that his embattled Shelton College will move from Cape May, New Jersey, to the former Boeing building in his recently acquired multi-million-dollar complex at Cape Canaveral, Florida (see January 29 issue, page 31), in time for the fall semester. The exodus marks the end of McIntire’s hassle with New Jersey over loss of Shelton’s right to grant degrees (see February 12 issue, page 45). The board had cited the school for alleged inadequacies and infractions.

McIntire at first vowed to fight the case in the courts, but, he explained on radio, he would lose too many students and dollars in the long litigation. He switched money solicited on his broadcasts for the legal battle to a “refugee fund” for moving expenses. What about the new building Shelton will leave behind, a million-dollar white elephant? “It will stand as a monument to the educational tyranny of New Jersey,” McIntire says. (The board may not have heard the last of McIntire; he is dickering to buy a huge but deteriorating YWCA building in Atlantic City for a Bible institute and conference center.)

McIntire predicts Shelton will thrive in the milder climate of Florida’s educational requirements. The move aborts his previously announced plans to open a new Florida school named Reformation College.

In the American Council of Christian Churches (ACCC) matter, McIntire acceded to a New Jersey superior-court injunction that forbade him to hold a scheduled convention in Virginia in the name of the ACCC. He canceled the meeting.

The action stems from the ACCC’s annual meeting in Pasadena, California, last fall when McIntire took the floor during a recess, installed himself as president, and purged the ACCC rolls of its incumbent leaders (see November 20, 1970, issue, page 44). McIntire, declaring his group the true ACCC, called for a spring convention in Richmond and set up new ACCC headquarters in New York. The Valley Forge ACCC meanwhile carried on business as usual—though with financial hamstrings.

The dispute resulted in the freezing of ACCC funds by two banks. After months of intrigue and tension, and faced with mortgage foreclosure on its property, the Valley Forge ACCC filed suit.

In addition to banning McIntire’s use of the ACCC name, the court ordered the banks to release their funds to the Valley Forge group, and set a later hearing on the other charges.

The suit charges that McIntire pirated away the ACCC’s International Christian Relief commission, that he misappropriated ICR funds, and that he wrongfully solicited money in the name of the ACCC for his own use. It calls for an accounting and a refund of the money to the ACCC.

In an interview McIntire said he would seek no counter-injunctions: “I would take apostates to court, but not brethren.” He asked ACCC president J. Philip Clark to meet with him and to dismiss the suit. But ACCC executive secretary John E. Millheim vowed to a reporter: “We refuse to back down one iota in our demands.” He said many McIntire backers have become disenchanted and are now in the ACCC corner.

Other troubles plague McIntire. A “truth squad” that says it represents fifty members of his church—the 1,800-member Bible Presbyterian Church of Collingswood, New Jersey—charges that he is neglecting pastoral duties, that attendance is sagging, and that he is not telling the truth about finances or how many stations carry his “Reformation Hour” broadcast (he mentions 600 on the air).

McIntire says the squad’s leaders—George DeFebb and Wayne Rambo—are no longer members of the church. Not so, reply the dissidents, who still attend. They say that since the church board removed them from membership without a hearing or charges (required by church law), the ouster is invalid. Both are former McIntire aides. DeFebb was a liquor salesman when hired by the minister in 1963 as a troubleshooter and advance man. Rambo, who worked in the office, was expelled from Shelton in 1967, says McIntire, “for discipline reasons.”

McIntire tells his listeners that the press is out to get him. In March the Miami Herald ran a two-part article that contained devastating allegations about his broadcast practices and financial dealings. He said he would reprint it in the Christian Beacon with a line-by-line refutation. He hasn’t yet done so.

The April 1 issue of the Wall Street Journal linked McIntire and ICR head James T. Shaw to an international highfinance scandal, involving ICR’s practice of “bartering” donated surplus and unwanted relief goods for cash and other usable commodities. The article said the ICR had on hand $12 million worth of powdered-milk products that contained cyclamate. It quotes McIntire as saying that a John H. Bevel, the central figure of the story and the current object of a police search, came to Shaw with a barter idea. Correspondence on ICR letterheads over purported signatures of Shaw, the article went on, showed that the ICR wanted to make a swap for motor vehicles, and that Shaw granted Bevel “exclusive right” to trade the goods.

The ICR reportedly was unable to deliver relief supplies it had collected for war-starved Biafra because of the Nigerian army’s blockade. After the war, the Journal said, Bevel worked on a deal to sell more than $1 million of these goods to—ironically—the Nigerian army. Last summer, the story asserts, the ICR received for certain supplies $100,000 of a sum Bevel had allegedly obtained fraudulently from American Express—using worthless stock certificates and ICR shipping receipts as collateral.

McIntire told Journal reporter Jonathan Kwitney that he and Shaw backed out of the deal after American Express warned that something was amiss.

However, in an interview with CHRISTIANITY TODAY, McIntire denied ever having had any connection with Bevel, and said the ICR had not received the $100,000. He also denied complicity in the Nigerian army deal. The relief goods had been delivered to Biafra through secret connections, he explained. He refused to answer questions about the whereabouts or disposition of the controverted milk products, but it was learned that some are still stored in the ICR’s name in Baltimore and Houston warehouses. Some have simply been dumped, one foreman said.

Meanwhile, McIntire stepped up recruitment for a big “Victory in Vietnam” demonstration in the nation’s capital on May 8. He thinks Nixon has thrown in the towel on Indochina.

The Nnea: ‘Important Crossroads’

It was no accident that the eighth annual convention of the National Negro Evangelical Association and the twenty-ninth of the predominantly white National Association of Evangelicals were both held in Los Angeles last month only a day apart.

NNEA president William Bentley told NNEA delegates in the convention’s opening address that the eight-year-old organization now stands at an important crossroads. Speaking of possibilities for cooperation, he declared: “How we proceed to do the God-imposed task, and in what direction we will go in fulfilling the charge given us, are questions only we—and not our critics—can answer.”

“The diversity of our leadership can work to our advantage …” Bentley, a Chicago clergyman, continued. “It can also most easily develop down-to-earth strategies for reaching the entire spectrum of black Americans more efficiently than can other less-diversified groups.” Then, speaking of cooperation between evangelicals of different races, Bentley added: “The presence on our board and in our membership of white Christians of good will and honest intent … can be a strength rather than a handicap.”

A pulpit exchange on the closing day of the NNEA convention and the day before the opening of the NAE enabled about a dozen white ministers to speak in black churches in the Los Angeles area and about the same number of black pastors to speak to white congregations.

A dialogue session to explore cooperation possibilities between the black and white groups was planned the same day to bridge understanding gaps between the two evangelical organizations. But the session failed to materialize, and a final press conference was also called off.

The NNEA was organized in Los Angeles in 1963; this was its first convention since in the City of the Angels. It was the first time that the NNEA and the NAE held national conventions in the same city.

The stated objectives of the NNEA are “to promote and undergird a dynamic Christian witness among Afro-Americans and to help all evangelicals to find involvement with vital social issues.”

The sessions at the Los Angeles Hilton were mainly inspirational, however; no resolutions were brought to the convention floor. NNEA field director Aaron Hamlin explained that the convention purpose was to give “an opportunity to pool ideas and discover ways of working together.” About 200 denominations are represented in the NNEA, Hamlin said.

The convention theme was “Christians in the Winds of Change.” Besides Bentley, evening speakers included international evangelist Bob Harrison of San Francisco; William Pannell of Detroit, vice-president of Tom Skinner Crusades; and John Perkins of Voice of Calvary Bible Institute, Mendenhall, Mississippi.

Workshops were conducted in evangelism, Christian education, social action, missions, and youth.

VIRGIE W. MURRAY

Up With Humbard

Mackinac College, Michigan birthplace of Moral Re-Armanent’s popular Up With People youth program, is now the Rex Humbard Center for Christian Development. The plush, well-equipped, thirty-two-acre island campus was purchased by the Cathedral of Tomorrow, Humbard’s suburban Akron, Ohio, church. The purchase price was not disclosed; the school had asked $7.5 million after it folded last year, but some real-estate sources say Humbard got it for $1.7 million. Its value has been estimated at up to $17 million.

Humbard, whose own college degrees are all honorary, immediately commissioned a feasibility study to determine whether he should establish a college and seminary. Initially he hopes to offer training in language, practical ministerial work, and all phases of television. His morning services, attended by 6,000, are televised on 321 mostly UHF stations to a claimed audience of 18 million. His church already owns a UHF station and a videotape production house.

The Nae: New Marching Orders?

In Los Angeles twenty-two years ago Billy Graham started in earnest his march for Jesus that catapulted him and the evangelical movement into a place of respect and power. As the twenty-ninth annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals drew to a close at the Hollywood Palladium last month,¹A full report of the NAE Los Angeles convention will appear in the news section of the May 21 issue. the 52-year-old Graham was giving what amounted to new marching orders.

But many of the troops would find some of those orders difficult, such as the suggestion that “perhaps” it is time for evangelicals to lead demonstrations on Washington. “We are concerned about race, war, and pollution, but our greatest concern is for the spiritual welfare of America,” the evangelist declared in his prepared text. Most evangelicals to date haven’t had an overwhelming zeal for this type of activism.

Possibly even more difficult for some of the sixty-nine mostly small denominations connected with the NAE is his proposal that some kind of new umbrella group be formed to embrace evangelicals around the world. It should be, the evangelist suggested, “wholly for fellowship, sharing experiences, and prayer—and to stimulate evangelical theology, modern missionary activity, and evangelism.”

The idea of bringing evangelicals together sounds superb on the surface. But for some of the denominations that seem to thrive on theological hair-splitting, Graham’s proposal was a bit wide. It would mean establishing contact with evangelicals in churches affiliated with the liberal World and National Councils of Churches.

But Graham asserted that such an international fellowship is necessary. International meetings of evangelicals in recent years testify that a great segment of the world church is evangelical, evangelistic, and missionary-minded, he said.

Some of the troops have been looking around in amazement at what the new wave of youth evangelism has been accomplishing. Graham indicated that those who have always held that the work of God must be accomplished thus-and-so had better stop quibbling and start welcoming the new converts.

“Some of them could use a touching up here and there in their theology,” Graham told a press conference, “but I’m for them. These youth are finding reality in Jesus.”

Graham said of the emerging group of evangelists: “They have great gifts from the Holy Spirit at communicating the Gospel. Many of these young evangelists are on the ‘frontiers’ to which some of us older traditionalists may have seldom contemplated to venture. Many of them may do it differently, but thank God, they are doing it!”

WILLIAM WILLOUGHBY

Snails And Scriptures

Three armed young men in Istanbul attacked the American director of a Bible shop and a Muslim Turk co-worker. Two of the assailants who were arrested said they acted out of opposition to the distribution of Christian literature. “It is like selling snails in a Muslim neighborhood,” they said.

One of the victims was Paul Nilson, 44, of Wheaton, Illinois, who is in charge of Bible-society work in Turkey. The other is a custodian in the building, which houses a Turkish branch of the United Church of Christ Board of World Ministries. Neither was seriously injured. For many years the Bible society has enjoyed the blessing of Turkish authorities. It operates an attractive bookstore on the main thoroughfare in Istanbul. Within the last two years, however, the shop has been broken into several times and burned once. Informed sources blame the harassment on the extreme right-wing Ulku organization, which is both anti-Communist and anti-Christian.

Discredited

Congress must extend its federal trade laws to include non-profit organizations.

That’s the word from a Federal Trade Commission investigator who says the FTA is powerless to stop the alleged “fraudulent claims” of a Columbus, Ohio, correspondence school. He said the school, Ohio Christian College, headed by the Reverend Alin O. Langdon and his Calvary Grace Christian Churches of Faith, “has misrepresented its accreditation and the value and equivalence of its degrees, credits, and courses, and made other false claims.”

Evidence indicates, he adds, that Langdon is in sole control of the operations and all the church property. The operations include Alpha Psi Omega Society, advertised as an organization of guidance counselors (it is not), and the National Education Accrediting Association (officially unaccredited).

At present the FTA lacks jurisdiction over such state-chartered non-profit agencies.

GLENN D. EVERETT

Heritage Preservers

Religious Heritage of America, an interfaith organization “dedicated to preserving the Judeo-Christian heritage and working to instill its principles and influence into all areas of American life,” handed out its annual recognition awards in Washington, D. C., this month to:

• Presiding Bishop John E. Hines of the Episcopal Church, named Clergyman of the Year for his brotherhoodbuilding work with blacks;

• American Can Company chairman William F. May, Churchman of the Year for a variety of humanitarian concerns;

• Mrs. Howard C. Davison of International Christian Leadership, Washington, D. C., Churchwoman of the Year for organizing the Congressional Wives Prayer Group and her work with the prayer-breakfast movement;

• John A. Redhead, Jr., recently retired pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Greensboro, North Carolina, Gold Medal for a lifetime of service as a relevant evangelist.

A joint award was given to RHA’s Nashville head, James M. Hudgins, and Cecil Scaife of Columbia Records for their efforts to ban pro-drug songs and drug-using artists from the recording, radio, and television industries.

Grieving The Greeks

Orthodox-Anglican relations were strained last month when the dean and chapter of St. Paul’s Cathedral canceled a service commemorating the 150th anniversary of Greek independence. In a statement explaining their very late reversal of the decision to permit the gathering in the famed Wren building, the authorities said the occasion “has been used for propaganda purposes in connection with the present regime in Greece.”

Archbishop Athenagoras, ranking Greek churchman in Britain, who was to have preached the sermon, angrily denied that the service would have any non-religious intention, and charged that the dean had allowed himself to be influenced by those given to fishing in troubled waters.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Nigerian Expropriation

Expressing appreciation for the “selfless services” of medical missionaries, a Nigerian government official last month made official the state’s takeover of the Sudan Interior Mission-hospital at Kaltungo.

Keeping The Wolf From Good Shepherd’S Door

Pay up or get out.

That’s what officials of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS) have been saying for more than a year to Pastor Robert G. Doll and the members of Denver’s Good Shepherd Baptist Church, dually affiliated with the American Baptist Convention and the National Baptist Convention, U. S. A., Incorporated.

Now the Lutherans mean business. They served eviction papers that could bring immediate or delayed expulsion, depending on what section of law applies.

It’s not that Doll, a white, and his predominantly black congregation (two dozen active adults and scores of youth) are deadbeats. Rather, they say, they are trying to strike a blow for Christian ethics and ecumenism. They claim that the building was paid for once by earlier Lutheran occupants and thus became community property of the entire Church.

It all began when a struggling Lutheran congregation abandoned the building in 1964. Later the WELS sold it to Good Shepherd for $24,612.05 at 6 per cent interest in monthly installments of $150. In 1969, Doll, an American Baptist Home Mission Society community organizer, became Good Shepherd’s pastor. The church stopped payments to WELS in April, 1970, with the explanation that the Holy Spirit told them to.

“Why,” Doll asked the WELS, “have some Christians in America been left, with their meager resources, to assume the awesome burden which, in truth, is a total Church responsibility?” Responded WELS executive secretary Harold Eckert: “We must reply that the Holy Spirit … does not speak to us as you claim he spoke to you.” Furthermore, he said later, the WELS had borrowed money against Good Shepherd’s payments and spent it for Lutheran outreach.

In another exchange, Eckert reminded Doll of Psalm 37:21²“The wicked borroweth, and payeth not again; but the righteous showeth mercy, and giveth.” and Doll asked him to reread the second part of the verse.

Doll and other Baptist clergymen who have come to his support concede that Good Shepherd has no legal basis for its act, and plead for mercy from the WELS instead. Yet Doll is willing to argue the case in court in hopes of setting a precedent. A precedent of sorts has already been set by the government of Nigeria, which took over two mission hospitals without compensation on grounds that donors had already paid for them (see above).

A Church of God in Christ minister down the street from Good Shepherd has meanwhile offered to buy the contested property from the WELS, and is raising money for a down payment. Last month a youthful fund-raiser stopped at the Doll house and asked for a contribution.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN.

The commissioner for health and social welfare of Nigeria’s North-East State added that he hoped the hospital takeover would be regarded with “joyous spirit depicting the ability of the government to undertake a function which it rightly owes to the people.”

Several days before the April 8 ceremony, Colonel Musa Usman, a Muslim and governor of the predominantly Muslim North-East State, explained the government’s action to a gathering of mission leaders in the state capital. He said the takeover of SIM’s Kaltungo hospital and the Sudan United Mission’s (Danish branch) Numan hospital is part of a twenty-year plan to assume responsibility for the state’s health services.

There is pressure from some taxpayers, especially in larger centers, he said, for the government to provide free hospital care that missions are unable to do. (The state pays missions’ salaries of Nigerian nurses only; it does not give grants for medicines.) The governor also told the mission representatives his state would encourage new mission work in rural areas where the government can’t provide services.

When asked about the turnover, SIM officials said they saw no problem to future work in the area. While Kaltungo hospital had a spiritual as well as a medical ministry, it was no longer considered essential to church progress in the area, which has 90.000 Christians. Meanwhile, staffing at Kaltungo had become increasingly difficult. The SIM operates a leprosarium and fifteen dispensaries in the North-East State, and three other hospitals, six leprosariums, and sixty-six dispensaries in other states of the federation.

The situation at Numan, seventy miles south of the Benue River, presents a problem for the SUM’s Danish branch. The branch’s central administration is at the same compound, and relocation would be expensive.

The government has so far promised no compensation to either the SIM or the SUM.

Last year another Nigerian state, the North-West, took over a Southern Baptist hospital because the Baptists couldn’t staff it. The nation undoubtedly will nationalize basic medical services eventually, but at present there seems to be no move to control more hospitals.

W. HAROLD FULLER

Doctrinal Changes At Fuller

A few years ago Fuller Theological Seminary was rocked by a theological controversy that led to the resignation of some members of the faculty and board. The seminary has recently published its new doctrinal statement involving changes that were at the heart of the earlier controversy.

The original statement said that the Bible is “plenarily inspired and free from all error in the whole and in the part … [and is] the only infallible rule of faith and practice.” The new statement eliminates “free from all error in the whole and in the part.” The Bible is infallible in those matters relating to faith and practice, according to the new statement.

The former statement committed the school to premillennialism saying that Jesus Christ would return “to establish His millennial kingdom.” Now it reads that he will come to “establish His glorious kingdom,” which permits an amillennial view.

A third change has to do with the condition of the unredeemed dead. The original statement assigns “unbelievers to eternal punishment”; the current statement says “the wicked shall be separated from God’s presence.”

The new doctrinal statement was published at the time the seminary launched a three-year enlargement campaign designed to raise almost $5 million for buildings, endowment, and academic needs.

500Th Anniversary Of Dürer

The West German Federal Republic is noting the 500th anniversary of the famous Reformation artist Albrecht Dürer with a commemorative stamp. The German post office will also issue something new for collectors and art lovers: color postcards depicting five famous Dürer paintings that hang in Nuremberg, including his self-portrait (illustrated above).

Each of the five cards will show a painting on one side and, on the other, the commemorative stamp, with Dürer’s stylized signature. The cards will carry the information that 1971 is Dürer Year in Nuremberg. The artist was born there May 21, 1471.

This year from June 2 to 5 in Augsburg, Protestant and Catholic groups will gather to broaden ties of brotherhood and understanding in place of the annual Kirchentag of the German Evangelical churches and the Katolikentag of the German Catholics.

The West German Federal Republic will issue a commemorative stamp to mark the combined “Okumenisches Pfingsstreffen” (Whitsuntide family gathering).

GLENN EVERETT

NEWS

A giant tidal wave of witness rolled onto the nation’s shores from Daytona Beach, Florida, to the Kona coast of Hawaii during the Easter vacation break. And in between, there were heavy sights and sounds of other Jesus happenings.

More than 6,000 young Christians hit the beaches and streets in personal witness, and thousands more provided backup in concerts, festivals, and other public meetings. Recorded decisions for Christ exceeded 3,000. Mass baptisms of new converts took place in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the Gulf of Mexico, and a Seattle-area lake. There were large witness marches in Honolulu, Seattle, and Santa Barbara, California.

Beer, drugs, and sex flowed freely among the hundreds of thousands of vacationing young revelers at scattered resort beaches. But so did the Gospel.

Campus Crusade for Christ fielded 1,000 students from eighty-two colleges to circulate among the 100,000-plus at Daytona Beach. The workers spent mornings in Bible studies conducted by Crusade evangelist Josh McDowell, afternoons in sharing their faith on the beach, nights in outreach to street people, motel parties, and the hundreds who showed up for the twice-nightly performances of Crusade’s New Folk singers at the Rap Room—a beach facility loaned by city fathers.

Crusade leader Roger Vann said half the workers came from Christian colleges—a record. Each paid his own way. In addition to transportation it cost an average of $65 each for six days’ motel lodging, meals, and program cost-sharing. Most, said Vann, had no previous beach evangelism experience, yet they led more than 1,200 to Christ. Each convert, he explained, will be followed up by a letter from the worker, a computerized headquarters correspondence series, and personal contacts by Crusade staffers back at the campus.

Also on the beach were 300 Southern Baptist students sponsored by a local church, and an undetermined number of church groups and street-Christian evangelists. Area disc jockeys kept transistor radios occupied with Jesus music.

Crusade also had 250 workers at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina (where a record throng of more than 50,000 gathered), and 300 at Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Crusade’s magician-evangelist Andre Kole outdrew a folk-rock festival at Myrtle Beach. “The students are more spiritually open than I’ve ever seen before,” said Crusade’s Myrtle Beach coordinator David Jones.

Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship sent 275 students and staffers to Fort Lauderdale, and featured two Christian rock bands—the Exkursions and the New Wine—at the city-sponsored bandstand. The bands were kept busy singing and rapping about Jesus to thousands who crowded around from afternoon until midnight. Action was also brisk at coffeehouses operated by IVCF and Crusade. Street evangelist Arthur Blessitt preached on the beach—then baptized dozens. One innovation: IVCF’s “floating forums” aboard a yacht. Twice a day it went out with forty kids and six local clergymen who rapped with them about Christ.

Crusade also had a contingent at Bermuda. And at Port Isabel, Texas, 100 Children of God street Christians witnessed among the 60,000 bathers there.

Nearly one hundred young Christian activists from the mainland took the Gospel to Hawaii beaches, shopping centers, and parks from Hilo to Honolulu. They included turned-on Lutherans headed by David Anderson of Van Nuys, California, twenty Seattle street Christians led by ex-doper Tiny Carper, and others. A Seattle film crew followed them around and made a movie called Hallelujah Hawaii.

The campaign, organized by youth leader Bob Turnbull and other Hawaiian evangelicals, concluded with concerts on Waikiki Beach. The performers included Pat Boone and his family, the Andre Crouch Disciples group, and others. One concert attracted 6,500, and nearly 150 were baptized afterward. At another, Boone’s wife Shirley gave a testimony that brought tears to many of the 2,000 listeners—mostly young people—and hundreds said they wanted Christ.

Music was central to outreach elsewhere in the land. The two-day Faith Festival at an Evansville, Indiana, stadium drew an aggregate of 15,000 to hear street-Christian singer Larry Norman, recording artist Reba Rambo of Sweet Charity, the Sound Generation, and many others. Everybody clapped in time as the Kandels sang “Put your hand in the hand of the man from Galilee,” a Top 40 favorite. The stadium became still as Kit Field Kruger, a recent Miss Indiana, warned against superficial belief and urged listeners to turn to Christ. Then she sang “Amazing Grace,” another recent Top 40 song—and everyone stood and sang with her: teen-agers, gray-haired adults, street people, and straights together.

On the second night mod-composer Jimmy Owens led the Spurrlows in a premiere of Show Me, a now-sound Christian musical he and his wife wrote.

The festival’s spirit was caught by a CBS television network news team and transmitted to the nation. Another film crew made a two-hour movie of the spectacle to show in commercial theaters.

Faith Festival was organized by Tri-State Youth for Christ, but, observed the Evansville Courier, “the one most responsible for the mood and sentiment expressed at Faith Festival, and who was the most welcome, had his own typical Hollywood director’s chair set up on the stage, bearing his name in big capital letters: JESUS.”

In Dallas, Texas, a higher-keyed week’s Festival of Christian Arts was sponsored by Jerome Hines’s Christian Arts organization of New York. A packed house at the State Fair music auditorium heard Hines’s opera, I Am the Way. Other meetings featured nationally known evangelists including Tom Skinner, Bob Harrington, Lane Adams, and Bill Bright.

Publisher Duane Pederson of the Hollywood Free Paper held a Christian rock concert at the Hollywood Bowl on Easter Sunday featuring the Philharmonic (a former acid group recently baptized by Pat Boone in his backyard swimming pool), Larry Norman (still puffing from a hurry-up trip back from Faith Festival), and others, along with Blessitt. The place was so charged up, reports one youth, that more than one hundred streamed to the front to receive Christ—within minutes after the concert began, and before Blessitt had a chance to preach.

The mood was the same in outreach meetings at Melodyland Christian Center across the street from Disneyland. During the final song of Show Me one night, more than one hundred of the 2,000 young people attending left their seats and knelt at the front. No invitation to receive Christ had been given. Another hundred joined them when an invitation was given at the conclusion of the musical. Daytime seminars on ecology and eschatology drew large crowds. More than 800 youths jammed in to hear author Hal Lindsey (The Late Great Planet Earth) on the second coming of Christ.

Santa Barbara was the scene of a large “One Way” outreach campaign involving 3,000 young Christians, including 2,000 from out of town. They witnessed on the streets, beaches, and campuses, and held forth in coffeehouses and nightly in a large auditorium at the Earl Warren fairground. And they backed up IVCF and Campus Crusade in “Spiritual Revolution Day” activities at the once-troubled Isle Vista campus of the University of California (where the quarter-term system did not permit an Easter vacation break). Westmont College students conducted sidewalk Sunday-school type sessions every day for 800 children. The week’s outreach was sponsored jointly by a number of churches and youth organizations under the direction of Baptist minister Tom Collins and Lutheran youth worker Jerry Liebersbach.

“Spiritual Revolution Week” in Seattle was declared by Jesus-people leader Linda Meissner (see January 29 issue, page 34) and her street-Christian friends. More than a thousand attended nightly gospel rock concerts and rap sessions, and 150 were baptized in a nearby lake.

The outpouring of witness throughout the land took on an international flavor when more than 200 southern California high schoolers teamed up with Mexican evangelicals in Tijuana to proclaim Jesus in that city. The mayor welcomed them and said he was glad they were not coming to town for immoral reasons. One public meeting attended by 5,000 featured testimonies of American and Mexican youths and the Billy Graham film, For Pete’s Sake.

One incident on Waikiki Beach sums up the week for many. After a beach concert a young Christian activist approached a mustached youth and said: “I want to talk with you about Jesus.” Replied the youth: “I’ve been waiting for you.”

So were thousands of others.

Colombian Seminar: Whose Mission?

A strongly critical statement—and a swift refutation of its charges—came to light last month over a controversial seminar on mission and development sponsored by the National Council of Churches in Bogota, Colombia, last February.

The statement blasted the NCC for, among other things, trying to “establish a missionary position for Latin America without considering the positions of Latin Americans who represent the thought of Latin American churches.” It was written by five Colombian Protestants who participated in one discussion at the seminar. Their statement was later published by the executive committee of the Council of the Evangelical Confederation of Churches in Colombia (CEDEC) and prepared for presentation to all Protestant churches in Colombia at the CEDEC General Assembly April 22–23.

The lengthy critique of the mission seminar was distributed internationally through the press service of the Evangelical Confederation of Colombia. The NCC’s Latin America department in New York was not aware of the statement until a copy was provided by CHRISTIANITY TODAY after an editor sought a response to it from NCC staff.

The statement charged that neither the CEDEC nor the Presbyterian Church in Colombia had been officially informed of the seminar, nor had either been permitted to send observers. Listed under “impressions” of those who did attend one afternoon session (after some insistence, according to the press release): “It would appear that the speakers consider it is possible to create an appropriate climate for the development and ‘humanization’ of man only through Marxist principles and practices … and that the speakers did not consider the spiritual work of the Church to be important or necessary. There was disillusionment regarding the ‘lack of power’ of the Church in the present time.”

William Wipfler, acting executive director of the NCC’s Latin America department, said in a statement to CHRISTIANITY TODAY that the allegation the meetings were secret “is a serious misrepresentation of the nature of the seminars, suggesting that the content was secret and the discussion sinister.” The local Protestant group was invited to attend the same day its request was received, not “after some insistence,” according to Dr. Lewistine McCoy, Latin America secretary of the United Methodist Church and seminar codirector with Presbyterian missionary James E. Goff of Cuernavaca, Mexico.

McCoy, who with Wipfler drafted the rebuttal statement for the NCC, called the CEDEC charges “either deliberate misrepresentations or the impressions of someone unable to hear the discussion against the background of the social context of Latin America today.”

He said references to Marxist principles were made “in pointing out that even Christian groups have discovered the usefulness of Marxist theory in socio-economic analysis.” And he added that “at no time was the spiritual work of the church denied.… Rather, there was insistence on going back to Christological foundations.”

Concerning the CEDEC’s accusation that the seminar imposed on Colombia’s churches views not representative of Latin American churchmen, McCoy and Wipfler retorted: “No one who participated in the seminar presumed that he was speaking for the churches (nor could any of those who belong to the confederation).… Those who spoke represented a sector of the church that is thinking about development.”

The CEDEC release concluded with a protest against the NCC’s “lack of courtesy” in not informing the confederation and the Colombian Presbyterian, Church “of its purposes in holding such a seminar” and in not permitting observers from these bodies. “We take note of the irony of the seminar: ‘the liberation of the Latin American man’—studied, discussed, and planned by foreigners who are concerned that the ‘Latin American man be the lord of his own destiny.’ ”

The NCC spokesmen answered by saying that participation in the thirteen-day seminar was interdenominational and interfaith. “Why was only the Presbyterian Church of Colombia singled out for this observation?” McCoy and Wipfler asked rhetorically. “Is it possible local tensions over the choice of certain ‘unacceptable individuals’ as resource persons has been lifted unnecessarily to an international level?”

RUSSELL CHANDLER

Slowly but surely the hard realities of economics are beginning to crowd evangelical colleges in the United States. Some educators—not, it might be added, of the alarmist type—think that in ten years half the presently existing evangelical campuses will be in a last-ditch stand for financial survival, and that some will close their doors even before then.

Economic crisis has engulfed many of the nation’s campuses; even Harvard, Stanford, and Michigan are among the 1,500 academic institutions that may soon be forced to cut back strategic services to three-fourths of the present American student enrollment. Costs are rising more swiftly than income; worse yet, the long-range purpose and future role of the colleges is somewhat obscure, and public confidence in higher education is wavering.

Evangelical colleges are not exempt from such pressures. While their deepest problems may not be financial, without necessary funds they face extinction. It may be true that there is no absolute biblical necessity for evangelical colleges, and that their justification lies in considerations of strategy more than of principle. Yet the present American academic milieu is such that the need for faith-affirming colleges is more obvious than ever.

At the same time, the need for state support of one kind or another for such evangelical schools in a day when government is funding virtually all competitive education is now increasingly acknowledged. Views about government aid are diverse and divided, although some evangelicals insist that having ardently opposed federal funding without success, they are not now called upon to deprive themselves of what is legally available. Evangelical educators are most favorable to the allocation of federal or state loans or support not to institutions but rather directly to students as scholarship grants to offset the rising cost of education.

Many educators have found that the effects of economic recession do not fully register on the campus until two years after the height of the storm. If that is so, then 1972 will be a time of trouble, albeit that is also the year when the federal government will require private tax-exempt foundations to give away more and more funds. Few foundations are interested in merely paying off mortgage debts; like many alumni, they look for creative programs.

A survey of seven leading evangelical colleges gives an illuminating picture for 1969–70. The average unrestricted endowment figure, $1,265,000, is somewhat distorted because of one school’s exceptional position. But in mean averages, the schools’ unappropriated surplus was $6,142. The book value of their physical plants was $7,729,000 (mean average), with an indebtedness on these facilities of $3,131,000 or 40.5 per cent. For 1969–70 the reported deficit (mean average) was $42,285.

The problems faced by evangelical colleges are not confined to educating secularly oriented students; they increasingly include the presence of faculty who, though competently trained, are not deeply informed in the evangelical heritage because their training was secular. Someone has remarked that most church-related colleges now need “to convert the generals as well as the troops.” Not even the best evangelical campuses are wholly immune to such problems. If the view of reality and truth espoused by the Christian campuses differs from the secular dilution of these terms, then their perspectives must not only be precisely formulated in the service of the evangelical in-group but also proclaimed at the critical frontiers of today’s world. Society is seeking new forms of social relationships, either for reorganizing human life as a whole or for carrying out in subcultures. Are the evangelical colleges able to awe the world with a fresh and compelling statement of educational mission in the modern world? If they do not force secular society to come to grips with the basic questions, are they not isolating themselves in a fast-fading glory of their past?

Several cooperative ventures have recently emerged in evangelical college circles. Twenty-six colleges have established a teacher-placement referral service and are now probing possibilities for a common admissions plan that overcomes the problem of multiple applications and unexpected fallout. One year a school accepted 800 students of whom 500 showed up; another year virtually the whole contingent appeared to precipitate a desperate scramble for lodgings. Under a common admissions program, applications would automatically be referred down the line on the basis of expressed preferences.

In another cooperative venture, fifteen colleges are sharing in a new journal, Christian Scholar’s Review. Other larger possibilities suggest not only new patterns of education but also recognized centers of specialization that offer mutually acceptable areas of transfer credit.

In a recent conference Dr. Earl J. McGrath, director of the Higher Education Center of Temple University, stated the risk in a five-year experimental consortium may be less than that “involved in the continuation of the present policities and practices which for some [schools] at least seem to be leading to an ever less significant place in the whole enterprise of higher education, and in American society.”

The obstacles to an effective consortium are many. Dr. William Jellema has remarked that some college trustees might rather see their institutions die than moderate their autonomy, and that the prime reason for a consortium is not to save money but to offer better programs. But the alternative to ultraevangelical collegiate cooperation may well be the ghetto-survival of a small and diminishing number of isolated institutions.