From my window in the Curtis Hotel I look out on the Minneapolis Auditorium, where, as I write, the U. S. Congress on Evangelism is taking place. At the opening session, led by Billy Graham and Oswald Hoffmann, more than five thousand people responded enthusiastically.

Just a few hours ago Leighton Ford presented the first position paper, “The Church and Evangelism in a Day of Revolution.” He was roundly applauded because he raised the toughest questions and gave some biblical answers.

Everywhere the delegates are acknowledging their spiritual needs and are looking expectantly for the Holy Spirit to do a new thing in every heart. I hope to be able to report in the next issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY that God has abundantly met this need and fulfilled all the hopes and answered all the prayers. If this happens the churches will be renewed, the Gospel preached, sinners saved, and the saints of God refreshed in their faith.

Whatever God may do in Minneapolis must be carried on by the faithful prayers of people that the fires lit there may burn on a thousand altars around America and the world in the days ahead.

American evangelicals have long been engaged in a visibility and identity struggle. They have sought, often without success, to gain exposure for biblical truth in the contemporary milieu. They have tried particularly hard to re-establish respect for biblical evangelism, and it may well be that they have come to a turning point. The six-day United States Congress on Evangelism attracted some 5,000 influential clergy and lay churchmen to Minneapolis this month. And it is doubtful that there has ever been a distinctly evangelical event that won more attention in the mass media.

The excitement over the Minneapolis gathering was all the more remarkable in light of a somewhat indifferent mood among evangelicals prior to the congress. Few evangelical media bothered to discuss it in advance as they did the 1966 World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin. Even some evangelical leaders had shrugged off the significance of Minneapolis. “What value is there in just getting together?” they asked.

Evangelist Billy Graham spoke to that point in a news conference prior to the congress opening. “Jesus spent about two-thirds of his time just meeting with his disciples,” Graham said, “and I think that suggests there is some importance to conferences.”

Disagreements abounded during the congress, and many evangelical shortcomings were brought into the open. But Minneapolis showed America that most denominations include a strong evangelical element—in many cases a majority element—and that there is an impressive area of agreement on what constitutes biblical evangelism.

Secular newsmen were surprised to learn the degree of social concern on the part of evangelicals. Delegates were reminded that American affluence entails unique responsibility by a stage backdrop taken from Luke 12:48: “Much is given, much is required.”

In subsequent issues, CHRISTIANITY TODAY will relate in more detail what went on at the congress. Texts of several major presentations will be published.

Dr. Oswald C. J. Hoffmann, preacher on the worldwide “Lutheran Hour” radio broadcast, asserted in the keynote address that “the Gospel is the product that makes everything else go. Everything else is a by-product—often invaluable, sometimes indispensable, but still a by-product.

“If the Gospel is not at the heart of the body, which is the Church, the whole thing dies. If the Gospel is proclaimed in anemic fashion, the whole thing becomes anemic. If the Gospel is demonstrated only vocally and not vitally in the everyday actions of Christ’s followers, the whole thing becomes a farce, and the world knows it.

“It is a remarkable fact that the world often has seen what is wrong with the Church before people inside became aware of what was happening. This is a practical world where people are not interested in frittering away time, energy, and resources on stuff that is obviously meaningless, purposeless, and fruitless. This is no time for fooling around. The time has come to get with Christ, and to go with him.”

Hoffmann, chairman of the national committee of the congress, added that some find evangelism distasteful because “they resent the very idea of personal commitment which the good news of Jesus Christ commands, which it demands, of a man. People can commit themselves to everyone and everything else, but not to him!

“Still others have a view of the Church that makes it seem like a social club, consisting of first-class snobs who want to make others over in their own image. If that is evangelism, they tell us, you can have it. It demeans the Church and it degrades the people whom the Church is trying to reach.

“If we who are here have contributed in any way to false impressions regarding the meaning and purpose of evangelism, we must apologize.… In behalf of the Christian groups to which we belong, we say ‘forgive us. We meant to say something else and apparently we didn’t say it very well. We have only one thing to say to you: Get with Christ, and go with him. He is everything to us and he can be—He will be—everything to you.’ ”

Evangelist Leighton Ford characterized the battle for men’s minds as crucial. “The strange plight of modern man is that while his knowledge is exploding, the whole idea of ‘true truth,’ truth which is the opposite of falsehood, is disappearing. In art, philosophy, theology, and the total pattern of his thinking, twentieth-century man seeks to escape from reason. Everything is relative. This has led inevitably to a moral revolution, a shift from an absolute ethic to a situation ethic, from a morality based on God’s eternal law to one based on man’s personal likes.

“Neither pot nor pornography forms the moral crisis of our time. That crisis lies in the widely held assumption that no moral standard is really important. There have always been those who violated society’s moral codes, but has there ever been a generation which repudiated the very idea of any binding standard?”

Ford, who alternates with Graham on the “Hour of Decision” radio broadcast, added: “The poor we have always had with us, but the gap yawns wider every year. The new factor is that poor people are learning that not everyone is poor and that change is possible. Put TV in a ghetto, let a slum mother see ads for low-calorie dog foods and electric toothbrushes when her baby has had his ears chewed off by a rat, and you’ve got a revolution!

“Racism is not just a problem of the South, or of America, or of the white man. It is a worldwide system of sin. But God has told us to confess our own sins, not those of the rest of the world. I hold no brief for James Forman’s Black Manifesto. Yet if our reaction is simply to lash back at Forman, and if we do not seek to heal the gaping, aching, rubbed-raw wounds of racial strife, then we shall deserve ‘the fire next time.’

“What, you may ask, does this have to do with evangelism? Well, let me ask what kind of Gospel we are preaching when a church sends missionaries to convert Africans but suggests to the black American that he go to his own church with his own kind? Why should the black man listen to us talk about a home in heaven, when we refuse to make him at home in our neighborhood and our schools? What, I ask you, does this not have to do with evangelism?”

For many delegates, the high point of the congress was an eloquent, fifty-minute address by Tom Skinner, a 27-year-old black evangelist from New York. Skinner pleaded with evangelicals in the name of Christ and the Gospel to demonstrate their oneness with blacks. For many, he related more articulately and meaningfully than anyone else biblical truth to the black revolution. Delegates repeatedly interrupted his speech with applause and at the close gave him a standing ovation.

Secular business organizations spend millions of dollars annually in recruiting talent. It is their assumption that the progress of the organization, indeed its continued existence, depends upon its ability to enlist, train, and retain people who can competently perform the tasks that are a part of organizational goals. In stark contrast, most evangelical churches expect workers to walk through the door and ask to be used. And when people do volunteer, very little concern is given to their capabilities, since it would be foolish to turn down anyone who offers his efforts to the church (or so it seems).

But the future of the church is dependent upon a dedicated and competent volunteer staff. The lack of efficient personnel eats away at the church’s ability to carry on its teaching and reaching task.

The causes of “evangelical unemployment” are in most cases quite obvious. Many Christians are indifferent to the responsibility of service; some lack consecration to the Master and his Church; others lack confidence in their ability to teach or lead; and some have never been properly approached by the “management.” Almost all these factors and others like them can be categorized under two basic deficiencies: spiritual immaturity and organizational inadequacy.

The first step in bridging the manpower gap in the local church is to undertake a complete analysis of the present jobs plus those anticipated in the near future. This “task survey,” under the direction of the Board of Christian Education, should include a description of the responsibilities involved in each position in the total educational program. In 1970 the progressive church will be looking forward to the kind of program it will want to carry on and the kind of workers it will need in 1972, 1975, and, in a more general way, 1980.

First cousin to the task survey is the talent survey. In 1956 the American Telephone and Telegraph Company launched a long-term management study to uncover information about the development of managers within the Bell system. This study, still in progress, gave birth to “assessment centers” where evaluations of managerial talent are made by trained executives. In the educational program of the church, this assessment is the responsibility of the Board of Christian Education. The information gathered for its personnel files should cover such topics as service interests, experience, and abilities. Personal interviews should be used whenever possible. And as in industry, the more opportunity management has to see the worker on the job, the more accurate will be the evaluation of his talents and the more effective the use of them.

This kind of personal involvement is based on sound research in industry. Delta Airlines gives every employee (including the baggage clerks) a chance to discuss his job with a top executive at least once a year. Some companies describe such operations as “enlargement theory”—a reference to the process of enlarging jobs so as to make them more meaningful and more interesting, and thereby increasing efficiency.

Instruction plays an important role in personnel recruitment in the church. From pulpit and classroom, through bulletin and newsletter, on announcement board and poster, the entire congregation should constantly be informed of what Christian education is and the teaching and nurturing ministries of home and church.

A dominant theme in administrative theory during the past decade has been the emphasis on new types of motivation. Great industries are discovering that the affluent society will no longer allow them to treat employees according to the old “carrot and stick” principle. Herzberg suggests that “the promise of money can move a man to work but it cannot motivate him. Motivation means an inner desire to make an effort.”

Most evangelical churches are not going to be faced with the question of paying their Sunday-school teachers more or less money. They are faced, however, with the need to stimulate motivation, from the moment of initial contact through the entire term of service. Too often people are asked to serve Christ through the church in order to head off a crisis or solve a predicament. In a “person-centered” approach to personnel recruitment, there may be talk of need but not of desperation. The representative of the Board of Christian Education asks a person to perform a specific job for a specific length of time. The potential worker receives a written description of what the task entails. His decision is never hurried.

What is most needed in the area of service responsibilities in many churches? Is it change in motivation? Paul C. Buchanan suggests that motivation is “inherent within people. Hence the task of the leader is not so much that of ‘motivating others’ as it is of ‘unleashing’ and helping to harness the motivation which is already there.” Though he is writing from a secular viewpoint, Buchanan has unwittingly defined the role of the Holy Spirit in relation to personnal work in the local church. The pastor and his executive staff should become familiar with the results of industrial management research as they face the task of procuring competent workers. This information should then be bathed in the wisdom of the Holy Spirit and applied within the framework of a biblical ecclesiology. As men change things and God changes people, the church can meet its quota of efficient workers and face the challenges ahead with a full staff.—KENNETH O. GANGEL, academic dean, Calvary Bible College, Kansas City, Missouri.

Of the many articles to appear in this column over the years, “Peripheral Christianity” was one of the best received. What it says about the Church is still very timely. It is here reprinted from the June 18, 1964, issue.

One of the gravest dangers to contemporary Protestantism is its obsession with the periphery of Christianity, to the neglect of the vital center of the Christian faith itself.

To the observer of modern church life, it becomes depressingly obvious after a while that much of the activity takes place around the rim of a wheel whose spokes are made up of innumerable councils, commissions, committees, conferences, assemblies, and organizations.

We would hardly imply that the rim is an unimportant part of the wheel, for it is at the rim that contact is made with the road and the wheel becomes effective. In like manner, the Church must make effective contact with the world if it is to be useful.

However, just as a wheel collapses unless its spokes are firmly centered in the hub, so too church activity cannot be effective unless it is firmly centered in the doctrinal content of Christian truth.

By some strange conspiracy of silence, “doctrine” is almost an ugly word in Protestant circles today. There seems to be a distaste for any reference to the revealed truths basic to the Christian faith. The facts of the person and work of our Lord are shunned. So long as an individual, a congregation, or a denomination is engaged in social engineering, the reason for the activity seems, to many, to be of little importance.

We hear a great deal about the “prophetic role of the Church.” This is good in so far as that role is concerned with individual and corporate sin and the message of the cleansing blood of Calvary is proclaimed as God’s way of redemption. But too often those who emphasize this prophetic role become exclusively concerned with the symptoms of personal and social disorder, while ignoring the cause of man’s distress—his separation from God through sin.

Some time ago a discerning Christian went to hear one of America’s most publicized young ministers. He came away with this remark: “He can say nothing the most beautifully I have ever heard it said.” Little wonder that this man’s ministry fizzled and sputtered out in the ashes of lost convictions. The periphery collapsed because the hub of vital faith was not there.

The Church is in great danger of saying nothing beautifully. Unless there is a positive message of redemption from sin—in God’s way and on God’s terms—what is there to preach? Unless the Christ of the Scriptures is preached, of whom shall we preach? And unless the correct diagnosis of sin is made and God’s remedy in the sacrifice of his son on the Cross is stressed, why preach at all?

In our obsession with the peripheral things of Christianity, we cater to the pride and restless energies of the flesh while suppressing that which could keep our activity from becoming so much beating of the air. Concern for man’s predicament is no more than humanism unless it centers on the divinely ordained way out of that predicament.

Again we stress that Christianity does have a periphery. It is possible to say something and do nothing—and without an outward demonstration of the Christian faith, the inward becomes a mockery. No amount of emphasis on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit can be effective unless the fruits of the Spirit are evident in the lives of those who profess his name. A wheel consisting of only a hub is a caricature. A hub with projecting spokes alone would wobble and fall apart. A true wheel is a perfect combination of hub, spokes, and rim.

When we consider the great emphasis in Protestantism on the spokes of organization and the rim of activity, and when we note how much the hub of Christian doctrine, which holds together the wheel of Christianity, is ignored, we are struck by the difference of those who went out to establish the early Church. These men had a burning faith in the crucified and risen Christ—a Christ about whom certain things were true, a Christ who had performed certain acts for man’s redemption, the central one of which was dying on the Cross.

Small wonder that so many church-sponsored activities do little more than consume the time of those engaged in them. Small wonder that the average church member, lacking indoctrination, finds himself at a loss to give a reason for the faith he professes. Is it strange that the Church makes such a limited impact on the world?

How different it is with the Communists, who, thoroughly indoctrinated in the evil philosophy, go out to win the world to their beliefs.

The analogy between a wheel and the Church is valid. Just as a wheel must have a sturdy hub to be strong and effective, so a church must have an intelligent doctrinal faith as the basis for effective Christian living, both personal and corporate.

But by and large Protestantism eschews the strong center of Christian doctrine, which it regards as “divisive.” It seeks a unity of organization and activity based on a willingness to play down those doctrines upon which the Christian faith must be firmly based if it is to be translated into Christian living.

“Saying nothing beautifully” may soothe our consciences and keep us busy. But that “Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures” is the message of the Church to a lost world.

Do we preach that message? If not, we are leaving out the hub—the Gospel.

Let us suppose that from every pulpit in America there should come a new emphasis, a return to simple preaching of the basics of the Christian faith. Suppose that study books, programs, and activities out on the perimeter of Christianity were dropped for the time being and church members were taught the facts and meaning of the Christian faith.

Should all of this happen, the problems of the individual and of society would remain, but people would begin to look at them in a new light—in the light of Holy Scripture and by the Spirit of the living God. And people whose lives had been transformed would do more to right the ills of the world than all the hosts of unregenerate people whose efforts are directed toward a reformed rather than a transformed society.

For a change, let us start with the hub of Christian doctrine and begin building the wheel of Christian conviction, organization, and program soundly on it.

A Crucial Question

How Modern Should Theology Be? by Helmut Thielicke (Fortress, 1969, 90 pp., $2.50), is reviewed by James P. Martin, professor of biblical interpretation, Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia.

The title of this book asks the most crucial of all questions confronting the Church today. It is more crucial than questions concerning forms of ministry and institutional weaknesses. Just because this question is so vital, it will be easy for readers of different persuasions to prejudge this book before reading it. Or, at least, many will read it to find out if it will confirm their own opinions. For possible answers to this important question are already fixed in many minds as settled and unshakable conviction, and the answers involve our emotions. Indeed, they must, for as this book shows clearly, the answer centers upon what is to be proclaimed and preached as Christian faith for today, and no one can truly fulfill the task of proclamation unless he is totally involved in the event of proclamation. Those who try to avoid this involvement usually end up being professional ministers, the plague of Ecclesiastical-dom.

In his first chapter Thielicke discusses the two boundaries to the problem. One boundary is the stance which holds fast to tradition and says in effect that a detailed and final answer was worked out centuries ago. All we have to do today is return to and repeat the old answers. Theology therefore can be modern only insofar as it is truly ancient. Since Thielicke rejects this approach, his argument may disappoint readers who hope for a solution of repristination. The other boundary is the stance of faddish modernity, so well represented by much of the journalistic theology in vogue in America today. On this boundary the subjectivism of the interpreter rules, with the result that he often succeeds in calling attention more to his proud radicality than to Christ. Theology, in this view, can be modern insofar as it rejects and forgets the past. Both of these boundary mentalities are destructive of the authority of Scripture and bind the Word of God in chains, whether of confessionalism or of modernism.

Thielicke seeks to avoid these extremes, and I think he succeeds within the limits he has set for himself in this book. He does not, however, wish to be judged as a mediating theologian whose solution to the problem is to select bits and pieces from old answers and from modern ones and fit them together for publication. He correctly sees that what is needed is a serious attempt to find a third position. Such a position can be obtained only when the interpreter asks the questions differently. Some readers may be impatient with this attempt, but in my opinion, the chief merit of the book is the way it searches for the right questions for the problem. Of course, the Gospel comes with its own questions, too. The supreme question is, What shall I do with Jesus who is called Christ? And Thielicke knows that the answer to this one is not, Take him down from his cross and make him pastor emeritus.

We cannot solve our problem by appealing to the magic word “relevance.” Far too many theologians and preachers today who worship this word and try to serve it by means of the Pauline injunction to become all things to all men, surprisingly end up by being nothing to anybody. In the Pauline sense, as our author remarks, we must indeed become a Marxist to the Marxist, an existentialist to the existentialists, and even a hippie to the hippies. But this does not mean, as it is too often assumed to mean, that one becomes what the Marxist or the existentialist or the hippie wants us to become. Rather, we must become for them what Christ wants both of us to become together. Thielicke centers the discussion where it must be centered today, upon Christ. We have diagnosticians in abundance, but where are the physicians who know how to prescribe Christ for modern man? A critical reader will wish that the author had given us much more than he does on the language of this prescription, especially with respect to the Resurrection. For so many quack doctors prescribe every medicine under the sun for the sick Church today, but have no Gospel and do not speak of the crucified and risen Lord of the Church as though he had power to accomplish renewal.

Since he tries to take seriously and practically the authority of the Bible for preaching, Thielicke argues, correctly I think, that the historical-critical problems in Scripture are of a theological nature and belong in proclamation. They are not mere prolegomena to proclamation restricted to the study and forbidden in the pulpit. How these problems belong in proclamation is illustrated in the discussion of miracle and of the meaning of the final coming of Christ. Matthew’s redaction of the story of the storm on the lake is used as an example of how to face and use the interpretation of miracle made by the gospel writers themselves.

Perhaps the most remarkable fact about this book is that it comprises a series of sermons preached in St. Michael’s Church, Hamburg, on Saturday afternoons. This format imposes its own limits on the materials. The sermonic form precludes the extensive and detailed argumentation that some readers may desire. At the same time, it is a practical proof of Thielicke’s conviction that preaching has primacy over theological discussion. His arguments for this conviction, and for the style of his book, are provided in a helpful post-script “for theological readers,” in which he allows us to enter his lab and observe his method. No words are needed to convince anyone that Thielicke is well qualified to teach us how the Church under the authority of Scripture must be semper reformanda.

A Publishing First

Luther: Right or Wrong? An Ecumenical-Theological Study of Luther’s Major Work, The Bondage of the Will, by Harry J. McSorley, C.S.P. (Newman and Augsburg, 1969, 398 pp., $9.95), is reviewed by M. Eugene Osterhaven, Albertus C. Van Raalte Professor of Systematic Theology, Western Theological Seminary, Holland, Michigan.

It is no longer news when a Roman Catholic theologian finds causes for the Reformation within the pre-reformation church. It is news, however, when a Lutheran and a Roman Catholic press co-publish a study of Martin Luther. This one, called a “first” in book publishing, is an excellent study of Luther’s major work, The Bondage of the Will. Written by a Paulist professor of ecumenical theology and ecclesiology at St. Paul’s College, Washington, D.C., the volume is a contribution to ecumenical theology. This theology is said to be not “a special discipline but a dimension and a structure of theology in general,” a theology “which seeks to re-open supposedly closed questions of the Reformation and to question some long-unchallenged assumptions of both Catholics and Protestants.”

The subject of the present study is an important one. The bondage of the will, Luther declared to his opponent Erasmus against whose ideas he wrote the book, is the “real issue, the central concern.” Professor McSorley’s purpose is to pose an ecumenical question: “Is Luther’s doctrine of the unfree will—his ‘summa causae’—a doctrine that truly, that is, in the dimension of its deepest intention, separates Catholics and Christians of the Reformation tradition?” He does not think so. In spite of Luther’s exaggerated language, which at times denies any freedom of will whatsoever to the sinner, and an unfortunate necessitarian logic, the Reformer’s intention is good. Moreover, he properly attacked the theology in which he had been trained, says McSorley, for it was a Semipelagianism which attributed the beginning of salvation to man’s fallen free will instead of to God’s prevenient grace which converts the will and enables it to assent to grace. The author shows clearly the subtle weakness of the Semipelagianism condemned at the Second Council of Orange in 529 A.D. and of the Neo-semipelagianism of Ockham and Biel in the late Middle Ages. Gabriel Biel is shown to have been especially influential in Luther’s theological development and it was against this teaching that Luther began to react in 1515 and later reacted with all his might.

Luther’s concern, says the author, was “clearly Catholic. Like Augustine, he [was] struggling against those who so exalt the free will that the necessity of the grace of God is ignored.” His error was in rejecting the old distinction between man’s natural freedom, possessed by all, and acquired freedom, given by grace. Man always retains the first and, in spite of his strong language and denials, Luther knew it. Hence he says, “The free will of the slave to sin is not nothing.” It is free, indeed, only to sin! Freedom of the will after the fall is not true freedom. That is Luther’s point against Erasmus’ confused Semipelagianism, but he was condemned for it. As early as 1520 in the bull Exsurge Domine Leo X had condemned him. McSorley challenges that condemnation and criticizes the popes of Luther’s day who “certainly did not censure the late Scholastic theologians such as Biel who had—probably unwittingly—departed from the teaching of the Catholic doctrine of the Second Council of Orange. In this sense again it could be said that the popes of Luther’s time did not teach that we are saved solely by the grace of Christ.” The impression is given that the Council of Trent straightened the church out in this matter. But, we ask—though reluctantly because of the charity shown throughout this volume, what about the popes after Luther’s time who condemned Jansenism on the very points discussed in this volume? What about the bull Cum Occasione of Innocent X in 1653, reaffirmed by Alexander VII in 1665, or the bull Unigenitus Dei Filius of Clement XI in 1713 in which 101 propositions of Quesnel are condemned? Many of these, on sin and grace, are purely Augustinian and anti-Semipelagian. Professor McSorley is not unaware of that history, for he refers to the “en globo” censure of Quesnel by the pope as the last incident of such sweeping condemnation. Although he does not elaborate on the history—nor need he do so, it is there as another indictment of a church which has declared its own infallibility, an infallibility which, incidentally, McSorley seems to question: “History can provide us with innumerable examples of the fallibility of the infallible Church of Christ.” (For a contemporary example of the very heresies against which McSorley contends we refer to the popular two-volume symposium edited by George D. Smith, The Teaching of the Catholic Church, Macmillan, 1949, Vol. I, pp. 331 ff. where the Pelagianism leaps from the pages.)

This is dogmatic-historical research of high order. The study is exhaustive and fair. McSorley courageously questions the doctrine of de congruo merit, and his desire to make preaching conform to sound theology is wholesome. The statement that “many seminarians declare they ‘follow Thomism, but Molinism is easier to preach,’ ” and his judgment that “what they preach is often some form of Semipelagianism” are reminiscent of the Calvinist-Arminian hang-up of students we have known.

With Mixed Emotions

Furnace of the Lord: Reflections on the Redemption of the Holy City, by Elisabeth Elliot (Doubleday, 1969, 129 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by G. Coleman Luck, chairman, Department of Bible, Moody Bible Institute, Chicago, Illinois.

On July 30, 1967, less than two months after the Israelis occupied the ancient city of Jerusalem, it was my privilege to stand beside the Wailing Wall and witness a little of their intense joy at that traditional site of sorrow. Elisabeth Elliot (widow of the martyred missionary of Aucaland, and recently the bride of Dr. Addison Leitch) arrived there a couple of months later and spent some weeks in the Holy City.

Mrs. Elliot had three reasons for visiting Jerusalem: (1) She had heard: “Prophecy is being fulfilled. Jerusalem is redeemed.” If so, she wanted to see it. (2) But “primarily” she wished to see the place “where Jesus lived and taught and died and rose from the grave,” though she more than once expresses scorn for the ordinary “Holy Land Tour” and the unimaginative souls who take such tours. (3) She also went “expecting to be bowled over by the new ‘excitement’ of the capital of the Jewish state.”

From fulfilled prophecy I fear she expected too much. She candidly acknowledges on page 1 that “the Bible prophecies about the New Heaven and the New Earth had been obscure to me, but intriguing.” She evidently expected to see fulfilled before her eyes the glorious prophecies of Isaiah’s latter chapters and of Ezekiel’s vision of restored Israel which picture Jerusalem as redeemed by Jehovah and at long last a city of true righteousness and holiness. Instead she found a city of ordinary human beings, the majority of whom seemed to have little thought of God, a city full of bitterness, with charges and countercharges between Arab and Jew.

As for the historic sites, Mrs. Elliot saw them with mixed emotions. That some evidently brought blessing to her is reflected in the chapter on the Garden of Gethsemane.

The major thrust of the book comes out of the third purpose for her trip. I judge that Mrs. Elliot was considerably less than “bowled over” by the “excitement of the capital of the Jewish state.” She expresses her reaction: “You go to Jerusalem pro-Israel. You quickly learn that there is another side, and you decide to be pro-Arab. (If, in your first few days, no Jew gives you his seat in the bus, and six Arabs do, it is hard to remain unprejudiced.)” Even before she left New York, however, an Israeli girl warned her “You’re in for the worst food and the worst manners in the world.” Mrs. Elliot tried hard to be objective and dig out the truth. She visited Jewish friends and recorded their side of the story. She visited Arab friends and recorded their side. My final impression is that she ended up “pro-Arab.” Indeed, I would call chapter 16, “Make Straight in the Desert a Highway,” almost a polemic for the Arab cause. In the chapter headed “Zionism” she insists there still remains a question as to “whether or not there is any ethical basis for the State of Israel.”

Personally I have never doubted that both sides have committed improprieties. However, I believe that Israel alone, of all nations, has a “title-deed” from God himself on a portion of this earth. All the disagreements over what actually constitutes a “Jew” (which Mrs. Elliot pursues at some length) cannot invalidate this claim. Although they were cast out of their land as a judgment for their sins, at the same time promise was made of future restoration. I also recall that the Lord promised blessing to those who bless Israel, and the opposite to those who curse this nation (Num. 24:9). I feel compelled then to side with Israel, without at all condoning any injustices they may have committed. I feel that Mrs. Elliot has gone to considerable length to present the Arab arguments, but I believe that a much stronger case could have been made for Israel than she has adduced.

Prelude To The Great Awakening

The Log College, by Archibald Alexander (Banner of Truth Trust, 1969, 251 pp., $4), is reviewed by Robert W. Newsom, pastor, Trinity Presbyterian Church, Newberg, Oregon.

This book, first published in 1851, is a study by Archibald Alexander for the Presbytery of New Brunswick, of the men connected with William Tennent’s “Log College”—men who spread many of the fires of the Great Awakening, fires of spiritual fervor and ecclesiastical heat. Alexander’s highly selective, intensely personal, and amazingly interesting story may prove to be more than a little alarming to those who have never before read accounts of this period.

The “Log College” was a derisive term applied to the school founded and tutored by Tennent. As his answer to the need for a clergy to labor in a time of obvious lack of spiritual vitality, the school emphasized not only the instructed mind but also the illumined spirit. William Tennent, his sons William, Jr., Colbert, John, and Charles, and their fellow students Samuel and John Blair, William Robinson, Samuel Finley, John Rowland, and Charles Beatty, are brought before the reader. Their sacrifices and successes, their trials and honors, are stirringly presented. Alexander makes wide use of contemporary correspondence and comment and relates a number of anecdotes, many of them very moving. The deep consciousness of sin these men reveal is likely to disturb the contemporary reader. Yet it is a stirring he might find fruitful. There is certainly much food for the soul in these biographical sketches.

Nearly all these men found themselves in ecclesiastical turmoil. Alexander’s account is candid and balanced. He points out both their unwise zeal and the uncharitable criticism by their opponents. Alexander the churchman regrets that they were often rash, occasionally obstinate, usually unwilling to submit to ecclesiastical procedure. But Alexander the man of God will not follow their critics and discount the mighty work that God did through them. His own evaluation is:

While I consider the ministers of New Brunswick Presbytery and their coadjutors as the real friends and successful promoters of true religion in this land, I do not mean to exonerate them from all blame. [They] were men approved of God and greatly honored as the instruments of winning many souls to Christ, while their opponents were for the most part unfriendly to vital piety [p. 176],

Is this story relevant? Can we justify the time and expense of printing and reading books about the past when the present overwhelms the Church of God? Truth, sin, grace, the ways of God with man—these are items of enduring significance. And they are what these biographical sketches are all about.

Confronting State Authority

Civil Disobedience and the Christian, by Daniel B. Stevick, (Seabury, 1969, 209 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by John C. Howell, professor of Christian ethics, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Kansas City, Missouri.

The diversity of opinion among Christians concerning civil disobedience is illustrated in statements by two U. S. congressmen. Representative Don Edwards (D.-Calif.), addressing a group of American Baptist students in March, 1968, declared that “the most important part of the Bill of Rights is the right of dissent,” since this is “the single right that distinguishes us from a totalitarian government” (Report from the Capitol, April, 1968, p. 5).

But Senator Sam Ervin, Jr. (D.N.C.), maintained an opposite view in his 1966 Law Day address at Wake Forest College: “The right of clergymen and civil rights agitators to disobey laws they deem unjust is exactly the same as the right of the arsonist, the burglar, the murderer, the rapist and the thief to disobey the laws forbidding arson, burglary, murder, rape and theft” (Christianity and Crisis, June 10, 1966, p. 126).

In view of this difference of opinion among Christian laymen, we need a careful analysis of the relation between Christian attitudes toward the authority of the state and the involvement of Christians in disobedience to the laws of the state. Professor Daniel Stevick of the Philadelphia Divinity School has provided just such an analysis.

Stevick limits his study to the “relation between Christian obedience and responsible civil disobedience” with emphasis upon the importance of responsibility. He does not attempt to make situational judgments on specific incidents of disobedience but is concerned that principles of moral responsibility be examined apart from the emotional rhetoric that so often surrounds any act of resistance to governmental authority. The book is concerned primarily with civil disobedience that is public, planned, and responsible, rather than with revolt.

Stevick briefly analyzes the arguments against civil disobedience but asserts that such disobedience may at times be the only way to relieve injustice in society. For those who suggest that Christian disobedience can be justified only when the state interferes with religion, Stevick points out that “an attack on man and the structures of justice needs to be recognized as an attack on the whole just as truly as if public worship were banned.” Therefore, “any piety which can survive intact and untroubled in the midst of social injustice betrays its own delusional quality.” This is a needed judgment on any theological stance that is more concerned for self-preservation than for identification with the servanthood of Christ in the redemption of all men.

The author’s excellent historical survey begins with the New Testament and follows the thread of dissent from authority through the early church period to modern America. Stevick rightly observes that American freedom of worship and civic participation “were secured in part by persons who followed conscience in defiance of laws and authorities.”

Responsibility in social action is clearly described in Stevick’s discussion of responsible disobedience and Christian non-violence as well as in the section on revolution. In both these forms of political protest the Christian must recognize that his final loyalty is to the Lordship of Jesus Christ; but his citizenship in the Kingdom of God must be demonstrated in the struggle for human freedom for citizens of the temporal order.

Church statements on civil disobedience in the appendix offer a helpful resource. This is a well-written and valuable book.

Book Briefs

On Becoming a Group, edited by John Hendrix (Broadman, 1969, 118 pp., paperback, $1.95). This symposium offers practical help in group dynamics.

We Need You Here, Lord, by Andrew W. Blackwood, Jr. (Baker, 1969, 124 pp., $3.95). A collection of straightforward, down-to-earth prayers that reflect a sensitivity to the political and social problems of the day as well as the irritations and blessings of everyday living.

Escape from Emptiness, by John D. Jess (Tyndale, 1969, 87 pp., paperback, $.95). Collection of radio sermons first delivered on the “Chapel of the Air” broadcast.

The Strangest Thing Happened …, by Ethel Barrett (Regal, 1969, 137 pp., paperback, $.69). Old Testament characters come alive in these vivid accounts of God’s working in their lives.

Christianity in Communist China, by George N. Patterson (Word, 1969, 174 pp., $4.95). A behind-the-scenes account of the struggles and continuing vitality of the Church in China under the Communists.

The Building of the Church, by C. E. Jefferson (Baker, 1969, 306 pp., paperback, $2.95). Reprint of a classic work in ecclesiology.

Building the Family Altar, by Tenis C. Van Kooten (Baker, 1969, 144 pp., paperback, $1.95). Helpful study of a vital but neglected area of Christian living.

The Prophecies of Daniel, by Lehman Strauss (Loizeaux, 1969, 384 pp., $4.95). This popular evangelical commentary emphasizes the sovereignty of God over the affairs of men and nations.

Babylon and the Bible, by Gerald A. Larue (Baker, 1969, 86 pp., paperback, $1.95). A brief survey of the history of Babylon to the time of Nebuchadnezzar.

The Quality of Mercy, by Juliana Steensma (John Knox, 1969, 143 pp., $3.95). A moving story of Christian compassion in action in a ministry of rehabilitation to many of Korea’s disabled.

The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible, by Charles F. Pfeiffer (Baker, 1969, 153 pp., paperback, $2.95). A popular introduction to the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Qumran community.

Fifty Key Words in Philosophy, by Keith Ward (John Knox, 1969, 85 pp., paperback, $1.65). A brief, handy reference guide to contemporary philosophical terms.

Attacking The Idyll

When younger I seldom looked at the Apocrypha. In some perverse way my defensive testimony to the authority of the Bible seemed to require the codicil that it would be disloyal to peruse something that didn’t quite make the canon (though Pilgrim’s Progress was naturally required reading). To my great benefit I got over this adolescent whimsey.

Anyway, last week I renewed acquaintance with Ecclesiasticus 38:24. “The wisdom of a learned man,” it says, “cometh by opportunity of leisure; and he that hath little business shall become wise.” I got to mulling it over, for that morning my usually reliable newspaper reported that a law had been passed in a New Jersey township, prohibiting loitering by anyone under the age of eighteen. The parents of delinquents were to be liable to thirty days in jail, a fine of $200, or both. Authority’s definition of loitering in this case was: “Anyone who shall remain idle in one location, and shall include the conception of spending time spent idly loafing, or walking about aimlessly and shall also include the colloquial term ‘hanging around.’ ”

That somewhat self-conscious command of the vernacular should not be permitted to divert attention from the fact that here essentially is a confession of guilt that does the city seniors credit. I know very well what’s at the back of it. Part of my own youth was spent near a wharf, and culture was early instilled into me through singing such ditties as,

We’re dockworkers’ children

Sitting on the dockyard wall,

Watching our fathers

Doing no work at all;

And when we grow older

We’ll be dockworkers too.

Our N. J. friends have grasped very well the truth of Samuel Johnson’s word that “every man is, or hopes to be, an idler.” Not for them any nonsense about the serviceability of the standers and waiters, or the motionless staring that made life tolerable for one Irish poet with all the traditional irresponsibility of his race. As for that culpable lore about T. Sawyer and H. Finn … why, these children shall win their Master of Activity degree before their eighteenth birthday, on which date the city will presumably present them with the much coveted License to Loiter diploma.

“He that hath little business shall become wise”? The Apocrypha might after all be the right place for a statement like that, for after eighteen years of masterly activity the habit might become so ingrained that the N. J. dockworkers’ union will have a real crisis on its hands.

EUTYCHUS IV

Youth’S Better Way

Jan J. Van Capelleveen’s article “A Theology for Today’s Youth” (Aug. 22) can help to answer the pressing questions which bother our young men and women today, in that it brings the light of truth upon the fallacies of the modern-day (or are they so new?) ideologies to which some of them are turning in lieu of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Surely these young people are searching for a better way; they hunger for answers; they are sick and tired of the inhumanity of man to man, the cruelty, the sickness they find in this world, but no one has presented to them the true Gospel of love, the Gospel of our Lord and Saviour in all its truth and glorious beauty, and so they go on hungering and searching. Oh, would that God would give us a new heart and new understanding and a burning concern for these young people.…

One has the feeling that the author has this understanding and concern for our young people, and it is such men who, I believe, can and must analyze and bridge the so-called generation gap, which is indeed a shameful blot upon our record.

Mesilla, N. M.

I became engrossed in the article until I read the two concluding paragraphs. His statements of youth’s problems and their inability to cope with them were beautifully done; but his solutions were the same garbage that evangelicals are throwing out to bait young people into Christianity. The solution of “the new heaven and new earth” is a trick to make young people uphold the status quo until they are dead. This solution does not stimulate a young person’s thinking to find workable answers to his world’s needs.

And I was especially disappointed with the last paragraph. Not only does he tell the young person to wait for a better world in the New Kingdom, but he gives nebulous instruction as to how one lives in the present. If constructive avenues, such as social, psychological, and political improvements, do not bring men closer to God, how does one reveal God’s way of life so that men will accept it, improve by it, and better his world because of it?

Chula Vista, Calif.

Jan J. Van Capelleveen’s “Theology for Today’s Youth” is at once a praiseworthy attempt and a dismal failure. He does well to tease Christians “who will not hear of changing their preaching.” And his analysis of youth’s consciousness of corporate sin is at least partially correct.

But the writer errs seriously when he identifies youth’s rebellion and idealism as escapism. Like most distant observers of the contemporary youth movement, Van Capelleveen sees only its reaction against and fails to recognize its positive movement toward. This shortsightedness fosters the belief that changing the language of the Christian message will make it more palatable and so attract youth to it once again.

But what we are rejecting is not the language but the concept. For all his “enlightenment,” Van Capelleveen has no new God to offer. “What is needed more than ever is the biblical message that God comes into this world to change it by redeeming it unto himself.” Indeed! This is precisely the message that has so screwed up the Christian world. This God still invades my privacy uninvited. This arrogant God still puffs himself up as something better than the rest of us. This God is still a capitalist who thinks he can buy back (redeem) human souls as though they were property in hock. This God still demands that we “accept our part,” a phrase that sounds remarkably like “keep his place”.…

If Christians want a change in language that also reveals a God appropriate to the contemporary world, let them change “God is” to “we must do.” God is certainly not dead. He is alive and well in Cuba inspiring St. Eldridge Cleaver to write a new Apocalypse.

Kent, Ohio

Sunday Wonder

With considerable concern I read your editorial “The First Amendment and Christian Principle” (Aug. 22). You heartily commended Robert Kenneth Dewey in his legal bid to avoid working on Sundays.…

It would be of considerable interest to learn if Dewey is such a strict legalist that he—as well as you, Mr. Editor—does not dine in a restaurant on Sunday, drop into a grocery store for a bottle of milk, or drive into a service station for gas. I just wondered.

Seattle, Wash.

Contrary To Youthexpo

It is difficult to comprehend how such a short news article, “Is Detroit Any Place for Nice White Kids?” (Aug. 22), can be full of so many blatant errors.…

First of all, YOUTHEXPO was not for Lutheran youth only, but was open to all. Participants would not have been “bombarded with exhibitions,” but given an array of worship and life experiences from which they might choose according to personal needs and interests. Your examples were obviously slanted, considering the information which was made available to your writer. The statement that “fear of the city” was the number-one reason is true, but the quotation ascribed to the Illinois Synod Youth Committee, that “fear of the city is legitimate,” is not true and is totally alien to the spirit of their intent in sharing concerns with us.

Again, YOUTHEXPO’s most serious snag did not come from the Association of Black Lutheran Churchmen but, as I indicated to your writer pointedly and repeatedly, from arch-conservatives whose confusion over the purpose, aspirations, and content of YOUTHEXPO was akin to your own. The ABLC was not “irate over [my] failure to contact them,” but was doing its best to say to us that it could guarantee no safeguard for our youth. (Who could? The point is that the city rife with pain is exactly where the healing presence of Christ should be through his people—that’s why we chose Detroit. It would have been much easier—and more “acceptable”—to “retreat” to a Bible campground somewhere.) The YOUTHEXPO cabinet had a black member long before discussions even began with the ABLC.…

It may be valid to make the judgment you have … that “YOUTHEXPO ignored the signs.” At the risk of sounding presumptuous, I would submit that our Lord “ignored the signs” leading to his end as well. We did proceed, to be sure, hoping beyond hope that the rightist swing which presently is in the process of finishing our country had not penetrated our churches to the point which the demise of YOUTHEXPO—and similar signs of the times—demonstrates it has.

A prime purpose in YOUTHEXPO was to better understanding and love between peoples in Christ; your article has tended to the contrary.

(THE REV.) CLAIR B. HOIFJELD

Commission on Youth Ministry

Lutheran Church in America

Philadelphia, Pa.

Happiness Out Of The Pulpit

I do not approve of women preachers (“Reverend Ladies: Collars and Curls,” News, Aug. 22) as I would not want a woman president of the United States either.… Women can teach in the Sunday schools and their church schools, as well as public life. Women also can use their political vote for good moral men in Congress. Our country needs good moral, spiritual women to guide and teach truth.… Women can achieve much happiness this way.… Men are more capable in some things.

Mukwonago, Wis.

The Grammar Of Hand-Clapping

As much as I appreciate your news coverage of “East Asia Pentecostals” (Aug. 22), I wonder why the derogatory remarks, or adjectives, always apply to the Pentecostals: “… the hand-clapping, hallelujah-shouting Pentecostals are enthusiastically expanding their missionary activity.”

You must be consistent! Why not:

“… the water-dunking, tobaccosmoking Baptists”;

“… the hand-wringing, new morality Presbyterians”;

“… the bead-counting, superstitious Catholics.”

Some rule of grammar always adds descriptive adjectives to editorial comment about Pentecostals.…

Aren’t hand-clapping and hallelujahs better than the fearful uncertainty that emanates from far too many Protestant pulpits?… Pentecostals pray, they shout, and they give because they are prompted by a vital personal Christian experience.…

When I think how much God has blessed the faith and sacrifice of the humble Pentecostal people, how much God continues to bless them, why, I can’t help but—clap my hands and shout hallelujah!

Northeast Assembly of God

Philadelphia, Pa.

Food For Faith

I do so appreciate the sound doctrine and scriptural authority which permeate the articles and editorials in CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

In the August 1 issue “The One True Religion,” “Does the Gospel Make Sense?,” and, as always, “A Layman and His Faith,” with L. Nelson Bell’s moral integrity and marvelous insight shining through, especially nourished my faith.…

Since I’m not a theologian, a biblical scholar, or a learned layman, it is very reassuring to find in your pages those who are not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ or apologetic about their own faith, and who express their convictions in such a valid and convincing way.

Carl Junction, Mo.

Perplexities And Happy Letters

Many times I have thought of writing you about your commonest intellectual sin. The article “The One True Religion” (Aug. 1) is typical of your pieces on problems that perplex twentieth-century Christians. You simply restate the traditional Christian position and don’t bother to face the problems it creates. Now, this brings in a lot of happy letters from Christians who are just concerned with being told over and over that they are right and have been all along.

But what about those of us who are looking for answers to the religious and philosophical perplexities some of these old doctrines present? We already know the doctrines are part of our faith. But, believing Christianity to be the one true religion, we wonder how we’re supposed to account for the millions of people in history who never heard the Gospel. We wonder about people of other faiths who appear to have a genuine relationship with God and exhibit more Christ-like charity than most Christians. To expect you to give final solutions for age-old problems would be too much, but it’s disturbing to see you give the appearance of tackling them and, as a result, give Christians false security and self-satisfaction and leave some of us more confused than ever.

APO San Francisco, Calif.

Discussing Missouri

I would like to offer a few comments on Mr. Chandler’s news report (Aug. 1) on the recent convention of our Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.… The impression is given that after a long day of discussions on the fellowship issue, the vote was taken. There had been “hours of discussion” on Friday, a day of open hearings, but that was five days earlier. There had been only some fifteen minutes of speaking from the floor on the question when a delegate moved the question to bring it to a vote.

Many felt that not nearly enough time was given for discussion on the floor on this important matter. I counted eighty-four people at the microphones when the question was moved, and at another point on another day, there were over 100 waiting to speak to the motion. (The article stated that sixty-five were waiting to speak.) The synod is badly split on this issue, even now, and this passed resolution does not change this. In my opinion, it would not have passed at all but for the “politicking” by our “hierarchy,” … and others who used all sorts of methods to push the fellowship resolution.…

I wish Mr. Chandler had mentioned the fine resolutions that the convention passed reaffirming the historic doctrinal position of the synod. One of these resolutions in no uncertain terms reaffirmed the “historicity and historicalness” of Jesus, together with his virgin birth, perfect life, atoning death, physical resurrection, and ascension. Not many—if any—other major church bodies could or would pass such a resolution in our day. We also refused to go along with an open-end offering for social purposes together with the ALC and LCA, showing that our involvement with them is not as close as some people think, and showing that we still believe that the churches’ main work is spiritual, not material or social.

Trinity Lutheran Church

Bend, Ore.

The philosophical problem of evil lies in the difficulty of reconciling the all-pervading presence of evil in the world we know with the goodness and omnipotence of the God who created that world. Three hundred years before Christ, Epicurus presented the problem in its classic formulation: Either God wants to prevent evil and he cannot do it—in which case he is impotent; or he can do it, and does not want to—in which case he is not good; or he neither wants to nor can prevent evil—in which case he is neither good nor omnipotent; or he wants to and can—in which case no reason can be given for the existence of evil.

Space cannot be taken here to trace out in detail the evils—due both to moral and to natural causes—that plague mankind. This might help us better comprehend the gravity of the problem before us, however, since we all tend to put out of our minds those things that are unpleasant. But whether we want to think about it or not, evil surrounds us on every side. Evil is in fact an inescapable datum that colors the whole of our existence from cradle to grave. Life can be described as a sorrowful vale through which man passes, ending in that apparent cul-de-sac, the last and most menacing of man’s enemies—death. At the end of his moving novel The Plague Albert Camus has one of his characters say: “But what does that mean—‘plague’? Just life, no more than that.” The question before us therefore is not simply “Why evil?” but also, and more perplexingly, “Why so much evil?”

The ubiquity of natural and moral evil in our world on the one hand, and on the other, both the goodness and the omnipotence of the God who created that world—this constitutes the problem of evil. It can be seen to have three essential components: (1) God is omnipotent; (2) God is good; (3) evil exists. Philosophers have termed these three components an “inconsistent triad,” since if any two of them are true the third seems necessarily false; all three components cannot simultaneously be true, it would seem. It is not surprising, then, that the various attempted solutions of the problem have tampered with one of the three components. Although they often touch on more than one of the components, I will summarize some of the proposed solutions under these three headings and then try to show why none of them can be acceptable to the Christian.

1. God is omnipotent (or, God is sovereign). Perhaps the most common attempt to solve the problem of evil is to redefine “omnipotence.” There are many variations in this redefining, but beneath them all is a limiting of God’s omnipotence in the interests of reconciling his existence with the existence of evil. However, if language means anything, the idea of “limited omnipotence” is unintelligible. There is only one thing God cannot do: the logically impossible—that is, that which is meaningless. God cannot, for example, make a four-sided triangle or a dog that is non-dog. Beyond this, however, an omnipotent God is not limited.

The classic solution of the problem of evil that cuts away the omnipotence of God is, of course, dualism. In dualism there is no problem of evil since the principle of evil is said to exist eternally, and God accordingly cannot be held responsible. Thus for the dualist religions of Persia, the Manichaeans and Gnostics, the struggle between good and evil is an eternal one and its outcome remains forever in question. A variation of this can be seen in the finite god of Plato, who has not created ex nihilo but is working with a given material that to a certain extent frustrates his good purposes. Dualism, therefore, saves for us the goodness of God, but at the price of his omnipotence and sovereignty.

Theists, however, often fall into the same trap in attempting to solve the problem of evil. For example, it is occasionally argued that “good” cannot exist without “evil.” While this sounds plausible enough at first, it can be shown that logically the argument does not stand (unless you are content to argue that evil is nothing more than the simple privation of the good). God can create “good” without “evil” as he did in his initial creation. Indeed, this view is really a covert dualism, since before any of his creative acts God himself presumably could not have been “good” without the existence of evil. Moreover, and most importantly, the argument cannot answer why there is so much evil, since only a modicum is needed to make the “good” possible.

Another argument, one that is but a variation of the above, is that evil is necessary as a means to good. But again, and for the same reasons, this cannot be so for an omnipotent God.

Perhaps the most appealing of the arguments of this type, however, is that which claims God purposefully limited his omnipotence and sovereignty by giving man free will. Evil is thereby traced back solely to the exercise of this free will. The question here is whether God could have given man free will and yet made him so he would always freely have chosen the good. My own feeling is that had God chosen to, he could have done so. If man freely chooses good on one occasion, there is no logical impossibility that he could always do so. Moreover, unless in heaven we are reduced to automatons, we will there be able continually and freely to choose the good, as Jesus of Nazareth did when he walked this earth. Further, the notion that man has absolute free will and that God’s sovereignty is thereby limited leads to the appalling conclusion that the world is out of God’s control and we are at the full mercy of evil. But while the Bible makes clear the reality of free will, it makes equally clear the fact that free will never limits the omnipotence or sovereignty of God. And we cannot fall back on the relation of these two realities, which in itself is a mystery, and expect thereby to find a real answer to the problem of evil. Indeed, the one mystery but mirrors the other. Thus it seems wrong to allow that when God gave man free will he limited his own omnipotence.

All these arguments and others that could be mentioned go astray in overtly or covertly compromising the sovereignty and omnipotence of God. The answer given to the existence of evil is this: God is not to be held responsible; he is after all doing the best he can under the circumstances. However, this is not the God of the Bible.

2. God is good. The statement that God is good is an irrelevant one to those who do not believe in the existence of God. For theists, however, it is an important statement. Although they rarely challenge it directly, some of their proposed solutions to the problem of evil do indirectly call into question the goodness of God.

Thus not infrequently one hears it argued that the problem of evil arises from a faulty conception of “good.” We err, it is said, in supposing there is a standard of goodness above or apart from God by which he is to be judged. Since there can be no such standard external to God, the argument runs, the “good” must simply be redefined as that which God does: Whatever God does is “good.” This is, of course, ultimately a true statement. But it cannot be pressed in the present connection (i.e., as an answer to the philosophical problem of evil), since to do so would be to erase the distinction between good and evil as we know it, and thus to land in utter meaninglessness. Another way the same argument is occasionally put is that while we can understand goodness, infinite goodness is necessarily beyond our comprehension. This again may be true, but certainly infinite goodness must qualitatively be the same as finite goodness or else the term has lost all meaning. If God is not good in the sense that we normally understand “good,” our whole theology stands in danger.

We hasten to add that we know what “goodness” is only by revelation. It is from the Scriptures that we really know what “good” means. It is from the Scriptures too that we know what “evil” means. And note that the Scriptures do not flinch at calling evil evil—nowhere do we read or are we led to believe that evil is good. It is ironic that those who sit in judgment upon the goodness of God employ the very standard of goodness that God himself has made known to man, for apart from the Scriptures there is no escape from the morass of relativism.

Other proposed solutions of the problem of evil implicitly or covertly call into question the goodness of God when they are further pursued. Thus to argue that the universe is better with evil in it implicity questions both the omnipotence and the goodness of God. To say that evil is the result of free will implicitly questions the goodness of God in giving man free will. To say that evil is sent to chastise men for the purpose of bringing them to repentance is to question God’s goodness when a hardened heart results. To say that evil is sent to punish sin is to question God’s goodness in allowing the innocent to suffer. If someone retorts that all are guilty because of Adam’s sin, then the establishing of such a system makes the goodness of God suspect. While many of these statements are doubtless true in themselves, let it not be supposed that any of them satisfactorily answers the problem of evil.

From the Bible we know that God is good—not good in some unknown way, but good in the same way Jesus was. By relevation we know what “good” is, and by relevation we know that God is good in this same way. Solutions to the problem of evil that in any way compromise the goodness of God are therefore unacceptable to the Christian.

3. Evil exists. The most obvious way to be rid of the problem of evil is simply to deny its reality. This expedient, however, is the least popular of all, and since not many have the courage to travel down this road, we need not detain ourselves long. The classic solution that denies the reality of evil is, of course, pantheism. If everything is God and if God is good, then obviously there can be no evil. Or, alternatively, the terms good and evil become irrelevant. For Spinoza, reality consists in the order of necessary relations: what must be must be. Just as it is neither good nor bad that a triangle is necessarily three-sided, so all that happens in the world is necessary, and accordingly neither good nor bad. Related to the pantheistic solution is that proposed by Christian Science, in which evil—however real it may seem—is regarded simply as an illusion of the material sense.

Even within theism solutions to the problem of evil have been proposed that implicitly call into question the statement that evil exists. Thus no less a one than Augustine calls evil a negation, the privation of that which is morally good. Others such as Aquinas have similarly argued that evil has no real objective existence; it is instead, according to them, merely the limitation of Being.

But the Christian cannot be satisfied to save the omnipotence and goodness of God at the cost of having to deny the objective reality of evil. What he sees in the world around him confirms what he reads in the Scriptures, and he cannot be lured to this easy solution.

We see, then—to summarize—that Christians cannot resort to the solutions mentioned above (and others like them) for they must fully retain each of the components of the inconsistent triad. We accept on the basis of revelation that God is omnipotent and sovereign, that he is good, and that evil really exists, the latter point being confirmed empirically in our daily life. Because the problem of evil cannot be solved without tampering with the triad of its components, there apparently can be no solution to the problem that is philosophically satisfactory to the Christian.

The Christian thus faces the problem of evil in all its forcefulness, being unable to compromise any of the three components, and thus unable to take refuge in facile solutions. What then can we say of the Christian position? How does the Christian live with a problem he cannot solve?

I will briefly speak to this question under two points: (1) the apologetic, i.e., relating to non-Christians, and (2) the practical, relating to Christians.

The non-Christian sees the problem of evil as an obstacle to believing in the God of the Bible: “When I look at all the evil in the world, I can’t believe that God is a God of love.” Our reply is, I suggest, basically this. First, we insist on our right to accept the omnipotence and goodness of God on the basis of revelation. Secondly, on this same basis we reject any supposition that this is the best of all possible worlds. It is indeed utterly useless to attempt to establish (or refute) the existence of God, or to determine his character, by using the world in its present condition as the primary datum of the argument. We live in a fallen world, for we believe that all evil, both moral and natural, is somehow related to and caused by rebellion against God. It is true that at this point we hold the important reservation that such rebellion, real though it is, simultaneously remains within God’s sovereignty. Our only justification for this point is that it is biblical, and we are content, for the present at least, to allow that philosophically we seem to be confronted with mystery. But the point we want to make is that the world we live in is not what it was originally meant to be, nor is it what it will ultimately be. Christians accordingly do not infer God’s omnipotence and goodness from empirical observation of the world—they accept it from the Scriptures (which, it should be noted, give an account of things that happened in the world). The place to look for the character of God is in the Scriptures, in the face of Jesus Christ. The good news that constitutes Christianity—the foundation of which is that God loves us—is found not in natural revelation but in special revelation.

We further argue that the existence of God is not logically incompatible with the existence of evil—certainly not as four sides are with a triangle. Our intellect may be frustrated, but we have not sacrificed it by believing something that is logically contradictory and therefore meaningless. Even Hume allows that the existence of an omnipotent, good God, once accepted on the basis of revelation, is not ultimately incompatible with the mere existence of evil.

It may be well enough to accept the omnipotence and the goodness of God, indeed the whole of the Gospel, because these things are found in revelation, but on what basis is the revelation itself accepted? We accept the whole of revelation by faith, but we immediately add that this faith is not a blind faith, a leap that bypasses rationality. We do test the revelation (we are under obligation to do so), but we also use our intelligence in framing the tests. We do not send a man up in a space capsule to test whether God exists. Nor do we send a man to a funeral parlor to test whether God is omnipotent and good, any more than we would send him to watch at a cemetery (now) to test whether Jesus rose from the dead. We test the revelation initially by going to the historical phenomena recorded in the New Testament, such as the resurrection of Christ, the birth of the Church, and the mission to the Gentiles. An assessment of the truthfulness of Christianity does not begin with a discussion of the problem of evil; it begins with a discussion of Jesus Christ.

Finally, the practical question of the Christian’s own relation to the problem of evil. (Doubtless the non-Christian will be interested to see how Christians rationalize the problem to themselves.) I have only two brief points to make. First, “Why evil?” is ultimately a question that is unanswerable and hence, for the present at least, meaningless. For what we are really asking is why God created the universe the way he did. But why did he create at all? Why did he create me? Why is God the way he is? Or, for the perennial children’s favorite, “Where did God come from?” There are no answers to such questions as these: we simply don’t know, but we are grateful that we don’t need to know.

But secondly, from what we know of God’s character as revealed to us in the Scriptures, we are convinced that God has a morally sufficient reason for all he does. Our God never acts capriciously. We do not understand his reasons at every point—but there is no cause for alarm, for we know that he is good, as well as omnipotent.

My conclusion, then, is that although we cannot solve the problem of evil, we can live with it. Although philosophically we are frustrated because we can allow no “solutions” that either explicitly or implicitly question any of the three components, existentially, in our hearts, we are at peace. From our finite point of view the fact of evil remains a mystery. However, though we do not understand the whys and wherefores, we look at the God who sent his own Son to the strange contradiction of the cross but raised him up the first-born from the dead—we look at the One who at such great cost has made us his children—and with a full and confident trust we say Abba, Father.

Donald A. Hagner is a candidate for the Ph.D. degree at the University of Manchester, England. he received teh B.D. and Th.M from Fuller Theological Seminary.

“Then he who is seated upon the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new!’ … If a man is in Christ he becomes a new person altogether—the past is finished and gone, everything has become fresh and new” (Rev. 21:5a; 2 Cor. 5:17, Phillips).

The mood of our age of disillusionment is aptly portrayed in Pinero’s play The Second Mrs Tanqueray. The heroine, an intriguingly beautiful woman who has had many lovers, finally meets a man with whom she falls in love. Emotions are stirred within her that lust had long quenched. He is handsome and personable, a man who enjoys the prestige of wealth and a long-respected name. He seems to be all that a woman might want in a husband arid in a father for her children. His love is selfless; he desires above all else to make up to her somehow for the years of sordidness she has endured.

They sit down like the intelligent people they are and attempt to foresee all the possible threats to their marital happiness because of the hangovers from her past. This may happen, what will we do? This former lover may call, what will we say? They are completely sincere, almost naive; there is no hint of the morbid or sordid, no thought of forces outside themselves that might bring to destruction their well-made plan. It is beautiful, idyllic, and seems certain to succeed.

But they find that despite their noblest efforts, they are using only the same old inadequate block’s that proved tragic before. They are only rearranging the furniture of their lives, and the new room fails to make old furniture new. Too late they discover the impossibility of their task. The suicide of Paula Tanqueray comes as an inevitable conclusion. Just as she is about to take her life, Paula speaks the key line of the play: Tomorrow is but yesterday entered through another door. Is this not the essence of our disillusionment today?

What is there in man that makes him so desperately want a better life?

In a frequently cited psychological experiment, thirty kindergarten children were brought into a playroom furnished with a great variety of attractive toys. The problem was that none of the toys was perfect: there was a phone without a receiver, an ironing board without an iron, a table with no chair, a boat with no pond. Yet the children got along together very well, without crying or fighting or complaining. The child who picked up the boat made a pond out of paper and sailed merrily away; the child who wanted to phone used his fist for a receiver; two girls sat on boxes at the table.

The next day the children returned to the same room and the same toys. The only difference was that now they could see through a glass window an adjoining room where there were perfect toys, where everything fit together and was complete. And from the moment they entered and saw these perfect toys that were denied them there was nothing but quarreling and unrest. Some withdrew from the conflict (one just lay on the floor); others became aggressive. On the second day they had discovered that a better world lay beyond their reach and so were discontent with the world they were in.

If we did not realize the possibility of a world better than ours, we would not suffer from disillusionment. But we know there must be something better. We know that war, violence, poverty, are not fitting characteristics of human life. The cruelty and exploitation we see in human relationships are not appropriate for man; this cannot be why we are here.

Herein is Christ’s opportunity to make his revolutionary claim, one based upon his resurrection from the dead: “Behold, I make all things new.” Not new in time alone, but new in quality of life. At the Last Supper Jesus told his disciples, “I will not drink again of this cup until I drink it new with you in the kingdom.” He took symbols of the old covenant—old because now a new quality had been revealed—and fulfilled them in himself, thus making the symbols radically new. Then he gave his Church the Lord’s Supper in remembrance of himself. But this still is not the end, for he will drink with believers again in the kingdom—the same feast but made new.

In Christ is the only source of newness. Like Mrs. Tanqueray we think we can create a new world for ourselves by our own determination. We will reform society, banish ghettoes, rid the world of prejudice and oppression, all through sincerity and zealous love. But we find our brave new tomorrows neither brave nor new—only yesterday all over again, entered vainly through yet another door.

Yet in the midst of the chaos of disenchantment with the past and with the present, the stone is rolled away to reveal, not another door to yesterday, but newness of life. The old disillusionment with the historical record of age-long futility, with too easy answers to perennial questions, with shouted clichés that reveal only how stupidly anachronistic the truth can be made to appear—this fades away when one receives the Christ who makes all things new. The haunting realization that just out of reach there are better blocks with which to build gives way to a spiritual experience of newness of life when a man sees Christ dying for sin and creating an access to resurrection life. The believer begins to realize what it means to receive him who is created wisdom from God, one person who is unique in his perfect adaptability to each unique creature, the one who is “our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1 Cor. 1:30).

This wisdom in the received Christ provides the tailor-made way of escape from temptation, created new according to each person’s most intimate need at each moment of trial. “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your strength, but with the temptation will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it” (1 Cor. 10:13).

The creation of the believer is both a perfect work and a process of maturation. Christ’s own analogy is that of the vine and the branch: the branch is alive through its union with the vine, and in due season it reproduces fruit according to the nature of the vine. The believer receives a new quality of love, love based upon an irrefutable experience of divine grace, forgiven-forgiving love. Christ provides a man the wisdom of God to love and creates an ever-increasing and abounding love toward all men (1 Thess. 3:12). As a corollary the life of the believer is transformed from the chaos of self to the cosmos of love—for God so loved the cosmos that he gave. In this manner Christ creates others new through their contact with his own love in believers’ lives. Love grows by contact with love; it is contagious; love infects. Christ creates in his disciples the quality of love that makes them, each in his particular way, become fishers of men.

All this, finally, is accomplished through the Word: the Scriptures alone are able to create in a believer this full wisdom unto salvation (2 Tim. 3:15). The window between us disillusioned children and the perfect toys beyond our reach is God’s revelation of his love, the Scriptures of the Christian faith. The window reproves and sets limitations of love, but it also enables, becomes a door. Like the cherubim guarding the tree of life in the Garden of Eden, the Word of God shuts man out from the perfection of which he is aware but deprived, but shuts him out that it may bring him in, created new. These are the new blocks for new men to discover and to use for building liberated lives.

J. Furman Miller is chairman of the Department of English at Athens College, Athens, Alabama. He holds the M.A. degree from Ohio State University, and teh Ed.D. degree from the University of Georgia, and he is also a graduate in theology of Nyack Missionay College.

A controversy is sweeping America, one that has stirred up some communities more than anything else since McCarthy’s hunts two decades ago. The issue: sex education.

Actually, “sex education” in the schools extends back for decades, if the phrase is taken to mean high-school courses on the family or biology lectures on reproduction. But the current controversy has developed since 1962, when researchers for School Health Education Study discovered after extensive surveys that most young people were receiving haphazard, deficient sex instruction at home. Alarmed, though not really shocked, the National Education Association and the American Medical Association decided to form a “voluntary health organization” that would serve as an inspiration, guide, and clearing house for sex-education programs in local schools across America. They named it the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS). And, unwarily, they planted the seeds of today’s controversy.

For five years, SIECUS directors and officers were continually called upon by school administrators throughout the country to help develop materials and guidelines for sex-education programs. They published study guides, served as consultants, and spoke at schools and seminars, in an effort to create a more wholesome national sexual climate. Their aim, as they describe it, is “to help people five their total lives as whole human beings, neither sex machines nor repressed hermits, neither sexual exploiters nor sexually exploited.”

Programs spurred by SIECUS ranged from popular three-week pilot classes for 3,000 fifth graders in Chicago to family-living courses for 166 of New York City’s schools. In Kansas City, Missouri, seventh-graders started learning about sex through television. Fayette County, Kentucky, began sending teachers away to workshops on human development. By fall of 1968 more than 60 per cent of America’s school systems had begun formal courses on sex. And the public paid little attention.

Then came the harvest. At first, scattered parents and church groups took surprised note of what was happening and began campaigns against sex education in the schools. They adopted such names as People Against Unconstitutional Sex Education (PAUSE), Sanity of Sex (SOS), Mothers for Moral Stability (MOMS), and Parents Opposed to Sex and Sensitivity Education (POSSE). By January of this year, the movement was growing rapidly. In Liberty, Missouri, the Faith and Freedom Center sponsored a community book-burning to publicize its cause. In Anaheim, California, home of a “model” sex-education program, voters surprised everybody by filling two of three contested school-board posts with sex-education opponents. In Michigan, a meeting of the state board of education was disrupted by sex-education protesters. And by spring, few regions were untouched by the controversy.

According to many observers, initial responsibility for the furor lay with such right-wing organizations as the John Birch Society, Billy James Hargis’s Christian Crusade, Carl McIntire’s “Twentieth Century Reformation Hour,” and the American Education Lobby, a small group formed in Washington, D. C., several years ago to fight federal aid to education. This observation appears well founded: most of the heat has indeed been generated since the far-right groups adopted opposition to sex education as a “cause.”

Within a few months the American Education Lobby sold more than 150,000 pamphlets calling SIECUS board members “Communists,” “pornographers,” and “subverters.” “We couldn’t get off the ground financially until this issue came along,” said an AEL administrator. “Now we can’t keep up with the demand.” Statements from the speeches of Dr. Mary Calderone, executive director of SIECUS, have been scissored and pasted to make her appear to be an advocate of premarital intercourse when in fact she opposes it. Birch- or Christian Crusade-inspired citizens’ groups have mounted telephone or “community-education” crusades in at least thirty states. And in several of those states they have prompted legislative debates or new laws.

But the ultra-conservatives hold no corner on the opposition; the fight has enlisted many respected, concerned parents and scholars who might ordinarily blanch at the thought of being associated with a far-right cause. One of the best known is New York child-analyst Rhoda Lorand, the author of Love, Sex and the Teenager, who has criticized the new programs for teaching elementary school children what they are not psychologically ready to learn, for overstimulating and frightening them, and for attempting what only the home can do well. Others like her have complained that many teachers are not personally competent to teach sex education, or that society’s views on sex are too pluralistic to allow proper consideration in the public schools.

Despite the opposition, educators in most areas are pushing ahead with sex-education courses. They point to a recent Gallup Poll showing that the great majority of Americans favor some kind of program in the schools, as well as to the failure of homes and churches to give adequate training. As a Minneapolis school administrator recently put it: “The opponents say we are doing things we are not. If we dropped the program now, we’d really catch it. With 78 per cent of the parents in favor, we’d have the other side on our back, I’m sure.”

All this raises several questions for the Christian who wants to act responsibly in the current controversy. Among them:

How valid are the attacks on SIECUS?

To hear the commission’s board members tell it (and they make a case worth listening to), not at all. The organization was founded to foster a healthier attitude toward sex in America and to fight “the commercial and entertainment use of sex,” which is “flagrantly exploitive, focusing attention on women and men as sexual commodities.…” Dr. Calderone, a Quaker, said in an interview that her basic motivation for working with the council was religious. She categorically denied charges that she favors either today’s permissive climate or premarital intercourse.

A careful reading of SIECUS materials gives no support to right-wing claims that the group’s ulterior motives are prurient. Both its study guides and its news letters, aimed at professionals rather than the public, can most accurately be described as scientific and scholarly. Even the popular magazine Sexology, for which several SIECUS board members have written articles, thus drawing from the far right the label “sex exploiters,” can hardly be regarded as lascivious. At least it cannot if one reads the articles themselves rather than just the headlines (for Sexology editors admit to the questionable practice of making covers and titles “provocative” in order to attract the kinds of readers who “need the wholesome and reliable sex information in the articles”).

This is not to say, however, that the Christian who accepts the Scriptures as normative should view SIECUS-related materials uncritically. Much to the contrary. For, while its materials treat sex with a much needed wholesomeness and a medical accuracy, they nevertheless do so from an unbiblical, relativistic point of view that the evangelical finds unsatisfactory.

In a SIECUS study guide on Sex, Science and Values, for example, Dr. Harold Christensen of Purdue University argues for a “morality of consequences” that refuses to be satisfied with the announcement that “God has spoken.” Actions, he says, should be judged solely by their effects. As explained by other SIECUS board members, this means that the matter “of a premarital sexual standard is a personal moral choice,” or that man today should not “depend on revelation for authority.” Clearly, the Christian who accepts God’s Word as authoritative, who accepts Paul’s lists of sins in Romans and First Timothy as part of God’s message to man, will find in this kind of relativism a warning flag at the least, and perhaps a stop sign. He will probably find the SIECUS-related materials useful: they are among the best prepared, most factual in the field. But he will use them cautiously, constantly examining their value judgments against the Word of God.

Where should sex education take place?

Without question, proper sex education is needed. Even extreme conservatives rarely deny this. Many young people have come to grief because they either were unwarily naïve or had learned about sex solely from gutter talk and trashy films. And many others have been sadly stunted by repressive, unwholesome, guilt-producing teaching about sex. The problem is where and how sex education should be given.

An interfaith statement on sex education, produced by major Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic groups, states squarely: “Responsibility for sex education belongs primarily to the child’s parents or guardians.” Indeed, one might add, so does responsibility for all moral instruction. It was to parents that Moses said: “Teach [God’s commandments] diligently to your children” (Deut. 6:7). It was parents to whom children were first commanded to give allegiance (Exod. 20:12). It was the beginning of a home that Paul referred to when he used the metaphor of Christ’s love for his church (Eph. 5:25). No place is so well suited for sex education as the home, with its atmosphere of mutual trust, love-saturated learning situations, and continual contact between pupil (child) and teacher (parent).

Ideally, that is. Many parents fail miserably in this instructional task. They either make no effort to teach their children about sex or, as is more common, impart only their own frustrations, wrong attitudes, or incorrect knowledge. A recent poll of 1,000 teen-agers taken by Purdue professors showed that only 15 per cent of the boys and 35 per cent of the girls learned about sex from their parents. Other studies concur.

Clearly, some other institution must step in if the initiative is to be taken away from the misinformed, often obscene “teachers” of the streets. So, one says, let us turn to the Church. But that raises problems, too. Few churches are equipped or willing to initiate major sex-education programs. And most youths who need such programs do not attend any one church regularly enough to receive adequate instruction. The only institution left, it would seem, is the school. The Christian might do well to put his major effort into seeing that sound, acceptable courses are developed there rather than into emotional, negative crusades against what are probably inevitable programs.

What, then, is left for parents in sex education?

The answer is simple: Everything that was there before. Sexuality, the educators point out, starts at birth; it includes the child’s feelings about his own maleness or femaleness, his social relations with other children, his attitudes toward sex organs. And in a sense, sex education continues until death, since attitudes, bodily functions, and social roles keep changing as long as life goes on.

It thus remains important for parents at home to evidence wholesome attitudes toward this God-given, God-blessed area of life, to discuss it with freedom and dignity, to use correct terminology, to keep communication channels open, to adjust training to the child’s rate of emotional and intellectual growth. If the school teaches sex education, the ideal Christian parent will supplement, and if necessary correct, that teaching. If the school omits it, this parent will give his own flexible, informal, yet complete home instruction.

But that is not enough. Responsible parents will also concern thenselves with what the community is doing. A major reason for the current furor was the failure of most parents to pay attention during the past few years. In Chicago, for example, the school system had been developing its sex-education program since 1966, trying continually to keep parents informed. Suddenly this spring scores of parents had the programs brought to their attention by the rightest organizations. And they blew up. Concern by these same parents from the start might have given educators a better appreciation for community attitudes and saved a good deal of misunderstanding.

The Christian parent should also work to secure wholesome, high-level programs. Many of the school programs need more of a moral framework for the teaching of sex—a framework that should be consistent with Judeo-Christian culture, yet tolerant of varied religious views in the community. Some parents may need to use their influence to ensure that sex instruction takes into account differences in the maturity levels of individual children, as Dr. Lorand insists, and that it is not started too soon. They may also be concerned with seeing that the programs use capable, responsible teachers, that sex instruction treats the whole of life rather than just anatomy, and that developing programs undergo adequate review.

Finally, what is the role of the Church?

Although the divergency of people, theology, liturgy, and social practices precludes a simple, uniform answer, at least three points seem clear.

First, merely criticizing existing programs is not enough. Too many crusaders against sex education do just that. They decry moral corruption; they castigate those who develop sex-education programs; they fling such labels as Communist, pornographer, exploiter; they demand that schools discontinue programs. Yet they offer no constructive alternatives—no ways to deal with the problem of the millions of homes where sex education is grossly inadequate, no suggestions for slowing the process of moral decay.

Second, the Church would do well to back up its message of personal salvation with both active witnessing and its own sex-education programs. Regeneration does not eliminate all frustration, guilt feelings, ignorance, and temptations in the area of sex. Yet the Church has made no widespread systematic effort to cope with these problems. A bright young evangelical recently glanced at the “Letters” section of Sexology magazine, then commented, “They raise a lot of my own questions, but I wouldn’t dare ask them of the church people.” She was typical—tragically so, since the Church has a responsibility to minister to the whole man.

Third, and closely related, the evangelical world needs a new, thoroughly biblical theology of sex. Numerous authors have dealt with aspects of man’s sexuality, some of them skillfully. But to say that the evangelical church as a whole has come to grips with all that God’s Word has to say about sexual activities and relationships would be unrealistic. Often culturally developed social mores have been uncritically accepted, then preached as biblical. As society’s standards change, the Church is caught unprepared.

The Bible has much to say about sex, and its comments need to be studied and drawn into a theological scheme. How, for example, does the Song of Solomon relate to Romans one? How does the command to Hosea to marry a harlot fit Paul’s admonitions about marriage? Are the sexual sins of Paul’s Corinthian list more serious than the covetousness found in the same list?

Dr. Calderone says “there are not authorities in this field” of sex education. Perhaps not. But members of the Church of Christ, believers in the inspiration of God’s Word, do have an authority to which they can turn. One wonders if they can ever hope to make an effective contribution to the current discussion unless they turn more searchingly and systematically to that Source.

James Huffman is now in Japan doing research for a Ph.D. in Japanese history from the University of Michigan. He holds teh A.B. from marion College and master’s degrees from Northwestern university and Michigan. He has been a reporter for the Minneapolis “Tribune.”