So-called environments of objectivity tend to be closed shops with presuppositions solidly entrenched. The quest cannot be narrowed either to the natural or to the supernatural realm.

“What is truth?” Pilate’s question has reverberated through the centuries of human experience. Behind it we can sense man’s anguished impulse to know the truth and his awareness of the difficulty of finding it.

Man’s search for truth is as noble as it is universal. It is a human prerogative, an ability distinguishing man from the rest of God’s visible creation. The pursuit of truth is the special task of the educational process. Next to the desire to glorify God, the desire to find truth is the most excellent of many good reasons for obtaining an education.

The initial premise that truth-seeking man must recognize is that there is a source of truth. He readily accepts the principle that the existence of something presupposes an origin of the thing. When he sees an automobile or a chair in a display window, he is aware that its existence can be traced back to a manufacturer. He is equally aware that the existence of the visible universe argues that it had a source (even those who deny divine Creation are preoccupied with questions of origin). Yet he often fails to realize that the same principle applies to abstract spiritual qualities. Truth has an origin, and to pursue it wisely we must understand what its source is.

Both reason and Scripture tell us that God is the source of all truth. Reason informs us that only a divine, omnipotent being could originate all truth, and this is also the message of the Bible. The God of Scripture is “a God of truth” (Deut. 32:4). He is “abundant in … truth” (Exod. 34:6), and his “word is truth” (John 17:17). Christ told his followers, “I am … the truth” (John 14:6), and he explained the purpose of his coming as bearing “witness unto the truth” (John 18:37). It is the testimony of the believer, too, that “the truth is in Jesus” (Eph. 4:21).

Since God is the source of truth, truth belongs to him; it is, in a sense, his possession. This is partly what is meant by the repeated references in the Bible to “his truth” and “thy truth,” even when writers intend something more specific than truth in general. Notice the attitude of the biblical writers: “His truth endureth to all generations (Ps. 100:5); “His truth shall be thy shield and buckler” (Ps. 91:4); “Lead me in thy truth” (Ps. 25:5); “I will praise thee with … thy truth, O my God” (Ps. 71:22); “Sanctify them through thy truth” (John 17:17). The principle is clear enough. Truth belongs to God, its source.

From this recognition that God is the source of all truth emerge several important corollaries. It follows, first of all, that the truth we seek and find has been revealed by God. This should strike a note of humility into man’s search for truth. The world responds to men’s achievements and discoveries by extolling the greatness of human ability. It is an error that the Christian has no excuse for following. To praise human discovery without acknowledging that all truth is first of all a revelation of God is as foolish as believing that man saves himself. The humble attitude of the psalmist is the only appropriate one for anyone engaged in the pursuit of truth: “Lead me in thy truth, and teach me” (Ps. 25:5).

God has revealed his truth both naturally and supernaturally—naturally in the created universe, supernaturally in his written Word and in the incarnation of Christ. To neglect either sphere of revelation is to abdicate men’s responsibility in the search for truth. Unfortunately, this abdication is a salient characteristic of the educational scene today. On the one hand, secular education has crippled the search for truth by limiting the quest to the order of nature. Having decided a priori that all truth is to be found in the sphere of nature and empirical demonstration, the secularist thereby precludes the possibility of finding the truth that lies in the supernatural realm. Often it is claimed that secular schools, unencumbered by religious presuppositions and commitments, provide an environment of true objectivity where truth can be pursued without hindrance. But that is far from the truth. Secular colleges and universities tend overwhelmingly to be closed shops in which the possibility of finding truth in any supernatural realm has been effectively strangled. The presuppositions are solidly entrenched; virtually all that can be said is that the presuppositions are secular rather than religious.

On the other hand, Christian education has no pure record either. The tendency here has been to view the pursuit of truth in the realm of natural revelation with suspicion and antagonism. This attitude is based on the unwarranted assumption that somehow the truth man discovers empirically in nature constitutes a threat to what is revealed in the Bible. But if God is the source of all truth, we can rest assured that there can be no difference between the truth he reveals and the truth man discovers (this is not to say, of course, that everything man claims to have discovered, or all the deductions he makes from his discoveries, are truth). The evangelical Christian community should welcome free inquiry into the truths of natural revelation. All that we should demand is that the interpretation of empirical evidence be guided by the supernatural revelation found in the Bible. Daniel 4:37 speaks of “the King of heaven, all whose works are truth”; that is, both God’s natural works and his supernatural works are the repository of truth.

If truth is first of all revealed by God, we might ask whether there must really be a process of searching to find it. Christian parents sometimes wish their young people and the intellectual community would do less searching and be more willing to rest in the accepted traditions. But the need for searching after truth is rooted in both human experience and biblical revelation. In case the truth seems easy to attain, we need only remind ourselves of the variety of answers to religious questions found within the evangelical community alone. It is a serious thought that on most religious issues there can be no more than one right answer. Obviously only one of the various views on the millennium, for example, can be the truth. This means that a great deal of untruth is being embraced and taught in evangelical churches, for their varying views on many issues are clearly incompatible. We ought to be impressed by the seriousness of the need to search carefully, lest we believe something other than the truth.

Scripture tells of the necessity to search for truth. One of the Proverbs enjoins us to “buy the truth” (Prov. 23:23), implying that we acquire truth through some kind of effort. Paul wrote that God “will have all men … to come unto the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4), and again we can infer that truth is something one reaches through learning and searching. We know, too, that it was the mark of the Bereans’ nobility that they were not content merely to receive what they had been told but instead “searched the scriptures daily [to see if] those things were so” (Acts 17:11).

This process of searching is part of fallen human experience. In his original state of innocence man, created in the image of God, was endowed with true knowledge (cf. Col. 3:10). The Fall was, among other things, a fall from truth and an embracing of the lie. That is why Scripture urges us to try the spirits to see if they are of God, to be on guard against false and deceitful philosophy, and to be aware of false prophets whose message will deceive us unless we scrutinize it carefully.

If truth must be sought diligently, it is equally important that the seeker acknowledge the truth when he finds it. Modern thought is often characterized by the idea that the search for truth is an open-ended process carrying no possibility of attaining a goal. Paul describes the pathetic nadir of the intellectual quest when he writes of those who are “ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:7). John Milton seized upon the point and portrayed the fallen angels in Paradise Lost as being trapped in exactly this kind of futility, reasoning about philosphical issues and finding “no end, in wandring mazes lost” (II, 561). Christ himself spoke explicitly about the possibility and result of finding the truth: “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). The same principle is stated by Paul (Rom. 1:18–25), who vehemently denounced those who denied the truth God has clearly revealed and, by refusing to recognize the truth available to them, “changed the truth of God into a lie.”

The notion that all truth is relative and the corresponding notion that truth is simply not very relevant to the daily task are follies of the modern mind. It is refreshing to turn to the writings of earlier ages and observe the high esteem held by truth. When Milton in Paradise Lost portrayed his standard of true virtue and godliness in Abdiel, he made Abdiel’s loyalty to “the Cause / Of Truth” (VI, 31, 32) the keynote of the whole account. Similarly, the sixteenth-century poet Edmund Spenser, in presenting an allegorical narrative about the attainment of holiness (The Faerie Queen, Book I), made Truth the guide to Holiness. We do not usually consider truth the primary prerequisite to holy living; but as C. S. Lewis has observed, Spenser attached such importance to truth because he wrote “in an age of religious doubt and controversy when the avoidance of error [was] a problem as pressing as, and in a sense prior to, the conquest of sin” (The Allegory of Love). The older way of thinking has much to say to us in an age when truth must be disentangled from such a host of counterfeits.

If the search for truth is not an end in itself, neither is the mere finding of truth. Scripture is rich in its statements of appropriate responses to truth. These responses include praise of God’s truth (Ps. 71:22), love of truth (Zech. 8:19), assent to the way of truth (Ps. 119:30), and living according to the truth (Ps. 86:11). John, who in his New Testament epistles was at pains to combat heresy with truth, made it clear that he desired from his readers something more than passive intellectual recognition of the truth: “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth” (3 John 4). Truth must also be our protection in a world of error; it is part of the Christian’s spiritual armor (Eph. 6:14).

Jeremiah lamented that in his day there were none who were “valiant for the truth upon the earth” (Jer. 9:3). May this never be true of the community of believers in the twentieth century. Scripture is emphatic in telling us that we must search for truth and, having found it, must live according to it and be valiant in its cause.

A well-known children’s prayer has these lines:

Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,

Look upon a little child,

Pity my simplicity,

Suffer me to come to thee.

The nineteenth-century English poet Algernon Swinburne once described Jesus as a “pale Galilean.” This conception of Jesus as a mild-mannered, inoffensive man has undoubtedly molded the popular image of him. But is the Jesus of the New Testament, and particularly of the Four Gospels, really “gentle, meek, and mild”? On any impartial reading of the evidence, the answer must be “yes and no, but mainly no.”

The gospel records make it clear that there was in Jesus a deep vein of gentleness and compassion, of sensitivity to human need and sympathy for human suffering. For example, in Luke 19:1–10 it is recorded that Jesus met the publican Zacchaeus and, recognizing his loneliness and alienation, invited himself to dinner at Zacchaeus’s home; through befriending this man, Jesus saved his soul and made a new person of him. In Matthew 26:7–13 we read the well-known incident of the woman who poured her precious box of alabaster ointment over Jesus as he sat at the table. When his disciples called the action wasteful, Jesus at once defended the woman, saying that she had done well and that her self-sacrificing devotion would be spoken of throughout the whole world.

Perhaps the most striking illustration of Jesus’ gentleness and sensitivity is found in the story of the woman taken in adultery, as recorded in John 8:1–11. Under Jewish law three offenses were punishable by death: murder, idolatry and adultery. This adulteress had been caught in the act, and her accusers brought her to Jesus, reminding him that death by stoning was the prescribed penalty. Then they asked him what he thought should be done with her. Jesus did not answer immediately. He bent down and wrote on the ground—doodling, it may be supposed, because he did not wish to shame the woman any further by looking straight at her. Then he stood up and said, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” At this, her hard-faced accusers slipped away one by one, until Jesus and the woman were left alone. He said to her, “Has no man condemned thee?” She replied, “No man, Lord.” Then Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.” Here he showed what has been called “the tender chivalry of a great gentleman.”

Jesus was indeed gentle, considerate, and compassionate. But if “meek and mild” is meant to suggest softness, timidity, spinelessness, indecisiveness, then it is emphatically wrong to describe him that way. For the gospel records make it clear that he was a real man, strong and virile.

What qualities go to make up real manhood? Strength of conviction is one, and Jesus certainly had that. In his day—and for centuries before—the Law as embodied in the Old Testament had been regarded as a unique revelation of God’s righteous character and sovereign will. Jesus agreed with this, saying that not one jot or tittle would pass away till all had been fulfilled. But the Law had become so over-interpreted that the Pharisees, the holiness party in Judaism, held there were 613 commandments to be obeyed—365 negative, 248 positive. Says James S. Stewart:

Orthodoxy declared that these commandments contained the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. If you had ventured to suggest to a Pharisee that the teachers who had given the law had been dead for years, whereas God was still alive, and that therefore there might conceivably by this time be something to add to it, or if you had hinted to him that a good many of his 613 commandments savoured of an obsolete and pedantic legalism and ought now to be decently buried, he would have held up his hands in horror and called it rank heresy. Jesus took that line, and therefore was branded as a heretic (Mark 2:18, 24) [The Life and Teaching of Jesus Christ].

In thus challenging the basic tenets of Jewish orthodoxy, Jesus showed himself a brave man.

Another quality of manhood is courage in action, and Jesus had this in overflowing measure during his days on earth. The first time he preached in the synagogue of Nazareth, in which he had grown up, his sermon was directed against racial and religious prejudice (Luke 4:16–30). And what happened? Those who heard it were filled with wrath and forced him to the edge of a cliff, threatening to push him over the side. Quite clearly, for Jesus to preach this kind of sermon in those circumstances showed courage of the highest sort. The same quality is seen in his cleansing of the Temple at Jerusalem, as described in Mark 11:15–18 and John 2:13–16. Seeing the desecration of the Temple by unashamed commercialization, he said, “My house should be called a house of prayer for all nations, but you have made it a den of thieves.” And with a scourge of small cords he drove them all out of the Temple—the sheep and oxen and the changers with their money. Whether Jesus used physical coercion to do this, as the narratives seem to indicate, or merely moral suasion, his courage in this incident is indisputable.

A third quality of high manhood is willingness to sacrifice, even to resign life itself, for the sake of conviction; and Jesus showed this quality too in outstanding degree. He knew that if he persisted in his protests against entrenched interests in the Palestine of his day—commercial, political, and religious—he would be killed. Those whom he offended would stop at nothing to get rid of him. Though deserted by his disciples and friends, Jesus faced this issue squarely in the Garden of Gethsemane. He did not want to die any more than any other healthy man in his early thirties wants to die; yet he was willing to sacrifice his life for the sake of his convictions. And this he did on Calvary in a horribly painful and humiliating fashion.

Any unprejudiced reading of the gospel narratives makes it luminously clear that Jesus was a man in every worthy sense of the word—in strength of conviction, in indefatigable courage, in willingness to endure martyrdom for the sake of his beliefs. He was not so much the “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” of the prayer or Swinburne’s “pale Galilean” as the “strong Son of God, immortal love,” of Tennyson’s poem, “In Memoriam.”

So it is not at all surprising that those whom he has attracted, those who have sought to follow him loyally, have shown the same manly qualities. His disciples Peter and John, for example, defied the Jewish Sanhedrin in Jerusalem after Pentecost, and the rulers and elders, “when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, … recognized that they had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13). Stephen, the first Christian martyr, was likewise a man of great physical and moral courage, as the record in Acts 7 shows. Paul, after his conversion, embarked upon a Christian pilgrimage that was an incredible saga of endurance and courage, even unto death. No wonder he said, when writing to Timothy: “Endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.” He had done so himself.

The same has been true throughout the rest of the Christian centuries. Martin Luther, in the name of Christian conviction, defied the political as well as the religious overlords of Europe. David Livingstone, one of the greatest missionaries of modern times, not only explored wild parts of Africa where white men had never been before but preached the Gospel to the natives despite all kinds of opposition.

To follow Jesus Christ means, of course, to share his spirit of compassion for human suffering. One of the gratifying features of contemporary Christianity is that the Christian churches are more and more waking up to this fact, and spending themselves and their resources in sacrificial service to relieve human need at all levels, physical and mental as well as spiritual.

To enlist in the cause of Jesus Christ, however, is at the same time to follow a peerless leader who calls, not to softness or ease, but rather to endurance and strength and courage. For the world’s standards of belief and conduct will always be sharply opposed to those of Jesus Christ—and never has this opposition been more apparent than today. To witness effectively for Jesus Christ means to embrace and practice his way of life unswervingly, at whatever cost. It has been well said that “faith is not belief in spite of evidence, but courage in scorn of consequence.” Today as always the challenging words of Jesus ring out: “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”

The Communications Revolution has begun—and few Christians are aware of its arrival or importance. What the revolution means, in a sentence, is: Every person can now communicate with any other person on the face of the globe.

All the essentials of the revolution have been invented already. Any obstacles between the common man and the use of the devices now available are social, economic, and political, not technological. Yet most Christians, whose aim is communication, whose predecessors have been concerned for centuries with the commission and problem of reaching the whole world in their generation with their message, seem completely unaware of and unprepared for the dramatic new tools now at hand.

With the Communications Revolution there will come: more pictures and less print (research shows that 7 per cent of all information received is “heard” and that 20 per cent of “heard” information is retained; 87 per cent of all information received is “seen” and 30 per cent of “seen” information is retained); more talking and less walking; more electronic signals and less paper; more private communication if no less mass broadcasting.

In the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, Christian leaders were quick to see the advantages of harnessing, proliferating industrial wealth, transport developments, medical, social, and educational advances, and a reasonably secure worldwide political system to the Christian Gospel—and the effective “missions” system was born. But where are the Christian leaders who are pondering the significance and possible uses of the Communications Revolution in spreading the Christian. Gospel in the twentieth century?

Church conferences and missionary conventions publish their awareness that in the latter part of the twentieth century, fewer countries want the Christian Gospel communicated by nineteenth-century-type methods, and that even where these are still tolerated, they are becomingly increasingly irrelevant and unproductive. If any feasible alternative were proposed, most churches and missions would be only too glad to drop their problem-cobwebbed present methods, with their restricted recruitment and challenge, for a better way.

Yet this is just what the Communications Revolution presents—an exciting and wholly satisfying way of communicating the Christian Gospel in all its fullness to all peoples and all classes in our own generation.

David Sarnoff, chairman of the board of Radio Corporation of America, a pioneer and guiding genius in radio, television, and aerospace communications for nearly sixty years, has stated that in the next five to ten years high-power satellites hovering above the equator will broadcast television directly to set-owners anywhere in the world, without the rebroadcast at the receiving end required today. At present, “Early Bird” needs special ground stations to broadcast its TV programs; control is thus with the receiving countries. This local option will be eliminated as soon as foreign television can be received direct as today we can receive shortwave radio programs.

Sarnoff has said:

The most momentous communications advance—replete with opportunity and danger—will come, I believe, with the already being produced larger and more powerful satellites, accommodating as many as a dozen television channels, and thousands of telephone-voice, facsimile and computer-data channels simultaneously. These satellites will evolve into huge orbit “switchboards,” automatically relaying electronic signals of every kind from and to any place on earth.

In 1930 communications satellites belonged to the comic strips or science fiction. By 1962 they were real enough, but no one knew how many satellites were needed to provide worldwide communications, nor how high in the sky they should be. By mid-1963 high-altitude satellites, when placed in orbit 22,300 miles above the earth, were found to hover in a fixed spot in relation to the earth, and were therefore called synchronous or gee-stationary. At such heights only three are needed to cover the entire globe.

“Early Bird,” which in 1965 became the first synchronous satellite to go into commercial operation, was provided with 240 telephone circuits (a circuit is a two-way connection) or one television channel between Europe and North America. By the end of this year the new satellites will provide 1,200 circuits, and by the mid-1970s 5,000-circuit satellites will be used.

As more and more powerful satellites are launched, receiving stations will become progressively cheaper (at present a ground station costs approximately $5 million). What is now envisaged is a home television set as a receiver, in a version much cheaper—one costing about $50—than what is now available.

One of the more alarming prospects of this dramatic breakthrough was voiced at a conference of leading scientists in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, last year—that “such satellites could create a system of as yet unimaginable hegemony by the technologically, industrially and economically strongest nation.” In other words, it will be possible for America to put Batman, or for the Soviet Union to put Brezhnev, into everybody’s living-room—or wrist-receiver. Or, in a political context, to see events—such as the recent struggle in Czechoslovakia—as they are actually happening. From its present attitude of disinterest, though, it looks as if there is no danger of the Church putting anything in anywhere.

A nearer stage in satellite improvement, however, is what are called “distribution satellites.” Less sophisticated receiving stations in the $100,000 price range could provide whole national communications networks for under-developed countries. They could skip the landlines phase of communications, just as they have gone straight to the aircraft from the bullock-cart, omitting railways—and the cost is cheaper than providing a hospital or school. Even a relatively developed country like Brazil would find satellites cheaper than conventional links if—or when—a much-needed national radio and television network is established.

This is the challenge to the Christian Church: to reach everyone in a country within ten years with everything from education to salvation for $100,000.

Of course, more is involved than the physical provision of a satellite communications radio and television network. There are also all the attendant skills—space technology, communications techniques, radio and television journalism—plus the tremendous variety of academic disciplines used in programming.

The key professional requirements, therefore, for harnessing the Christian Gospel to the rapidly exploding Communications Revolution would be:

1. Training in High Finance: as a specialized branch of economics expertise, devoted to the accumulating by business expansion, organizing by stewardship and administrating by distribution the vast sums of money required for the new vehicles of communications—satellites, ground stations, computers, publishing, press, radio and television facilities.

2. Training in Mass Media: in acquiring professional creative and technical expertise in all aspects of communications—books, newspapers, radio and television presentation.

3. Training in the Humanities: not in the presently limited sense of “the study and practice of philology and polite literature,” but in the wider and generic sense of “the study of that group of interests relating to the whole field of human nature”—philology, anthropology, theology, sociology, psychology, and so on.

With Christians of vision trained in these skills it will be possible to present the Christian Gospel in any form, simple or intellectual, to any country, tribe or class, within the next decade—and where people are illiterate they could be educated by the new, revolutionary methods of educational television.

There are already plans in existence to link up whole towns to a central communications network, which will be used eventually to bring the individual into touch with every communications development. Communist antennae television, which began in rural areas where there was either no television reception at all or very poor reception, are now springing up even in the biggest cities and raising the possibility that the whole country could be re-wired for television (and eventually data transmission) just as it was wired for the telephone. One new town in Britain, as an experiment, has had a communications main installed as a local utility along with the gas, water and electricity lines.

A fairly conservative estimate of the future in communications is given in an “Economist” booklet entitled “The Communications Revolution,” published in Britain, which says:

Within thirty years television pictures should not only be in colour but in three dimensions as well. The world’s libraries and museums should have been catalogued electronically and their collections accessible to anyone with a television screen (provided they can afford to use the service, of course, although the costs of this will have been reduced considerably by then). It should be possible to telephone from anywhere to anywhere—the middle of Richmond Park to the middle of the Sahara—without wired connections on pocket telephones. Satellites should, for better or worse, be broadcasting directly to receivers as well as to the ground stations that will be located in every large city. Every home will have its information-appliance and while postmen and paper money will still exist, they will not be vital to commerce. Most financial transactions will be performed by communications between computers, and all business letters will be sent electronically, typed during the day on electric typewriters and sent over the wires at night when the rates should be cheaper.… By the year 2000 all other progress will pale beside the advance of the computer, which will probably then deserve the extravagant praise that has begun to be heaped upon it—more important than writing, perhaps the most useful invention of all time.…

This is only a preview of the future of satellite communications. Some are potentials; many are realities that are now, or soon will be, made available to all countries of the world. Over the next decade there will be established a world-wide communications system by which governments, universities, institutions, industries, or the individual businessman, can establish contact with anyone, anywhere at any time, by voice, sight or document. When this occurs, the individual’s ability to communicate will have transcended every barrier of time and space.

David Sarnoff says it should be relatively easy to design and produce low-cost, single-channel television receivers for use in primitive or under-developed parts of the world. These sets could be built by assembly-line techniques, housed in simple plastic or metal containers, and equipped with transistorized circuits consuming very little energy. They could be made to run on batteries, re-chargeable by wind, hydraulic or even animal power. Such sets could be distributed throughout the developing regions in quantities suitable to local conditions. If they were programmed from regional stations transmitting through a few broadcasting satellites, illiteracy could be abolished in ten years.

That this is not the fantastic dream of a single visionary in an ivory tower is proved by the fact that the same Japanese firms who anticipated the world-wide demand for the transistorized portable radio have for, the past few years been pouring millions of dollars into the research and development of transistorized portable television sets—even wrist-watch-size receivers.

In Asia a miniature “village” radio station is already being marketed that has a broadcasting range of 300 to 700 square miles, and is being sold for only $5,000. It can be installed by someone who has never seen a radio station before, a “do-it-yourself” kit includes instructions for both its installation and operation. These miniature radio stations are, as their name implies, ideal for village communities, and in the fast-developing, newly emerging nations of Asia—and elsewhere—their potential is enormous. The 130-watt or 250-watt sizes take up no more space than the corner of a normal-sized room or hut; the unit is only five feet six inches high and less than a foot deep. Thus, within a few years millions of people who have never seen a train, an automobile or a telephone will—via outer space, through their country’s ground station—make their first contacts with all that the world has to offer.

Without doubt, the satellites communications ground station has become the latest in national status symbols. Like oil refineries, steel mills or flag-carrier airlines, they put a shine on the modern look of a developing country and have the kind of effect on the morale that status symbols often generate. But more than that, many of these developing countries see in satellite communications a miraculous answer to their crippling problems of illiteracy and for this reason alone, if for no other, are committing large sums necessary for rapid installation.

Asian governments particularly have plunged into this new field, primarily because of the practical benefits as well as potential profits promised. In the spring of 1967 the Philippines and Thailand launched themselves into the satellites communications field by activating temporary ground stations for sending and receiving messages to and from the United States, Hawaii and Japan. By the end of 1968 both of these countries will have completed permanent ground stations. By that time, too. India, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Taiwan, Malaysia, Australia, and possibly other countries around the Pacific basin, will have begun construction of ground stations aimed at completion dates in late 1968 or early 1969.

Hong Kong, the dynamic British Colony that is more concerned with profit potential than status symbols, is building one of the most expensive satellite ground stations, one capable of withstanding winds of up to 210 miles per hour. And in blatantly materialistic Hong Kong, the most significant Christian development within the exploding field of the Communications Revolution is taking place—a planned program to utilize in a co-ordinated Christian Communications Center all the skills mentioned earlier.

A group of Christian journalists, businessmen, missionaries and others have gotten together to see how their various skills and interests could be harnessed to the Communications Revolution.

This year a Department of Communications was opened at the Hong Kong Baptist College as the first step in a complex of activities to be co-ordinated in the Christian Communications Center at a later date. Dr. Wilbur Schramm, author of Mass Media and National Development, who helped India start her first Communications Research Center three years ago, is one of the Department Advisers and will spend part of his sabbatical next year in Hong Kong planning the project’s future development.

The associated School of Journalism has teachers from the rapidly expanding Far East Broadcasting Company: Dr. William Derris (UCLA), mass communications researcher; Terence Madison (Syracuse), editor and audio-visual expert; Carl Lawrence (Stanford), former production supervisor with CBS, and others. There are also professional journalists and editors from international and local newspapers and radio and television networks and agencies, who have offered to teach.

Visiting lecturers include Dr. George L. Bird, former chairman of the Graduate Division of Syracuse University’s School of Journalism, and Dr. Frank C. Laubach, internationally known each-one-teach-one specialist in literacy journalism.

A commercially viable publishing company which already prints everything from religious to government publications, is conducting local and regional market surveys with a view to producing Christian-emphasis newspapers and magazines simultaneously with the development of the School of Journalism.

Radio and television networks and agencies have expressed interest in not only providing technical training but also in employing trained personnel and utilizing radio and television material produced.

Therefore, the Asian graduates, by virtue of their exceptional training, will in the next five to ten years occupy the leading positions in newspapers, radio, television, and publishing in their own countries.

This is all very exciting and highly commendable—but there is a great danger in “development in isolation” of unnecessary and expensive duplication of effort. What is really required for this unparalleled opportunity is a Christian Communications Foundation to collect and to correlate all information on communications development and practice, to attract the best-trained people in all fields for employment in the Communications Centers, to raise the large sums of money necessary for the initial capital investment, to supervise the setting up of Christian Communications Centers in key areas from which other centers can spring into surrounding countries, and to provide facilities for research and technical advice.

Only a concept on this scale is adequate to meet the requirements of finance, skills and organization latent in the challenge of the Communications Revolution to the Christian Church. Even this would only be a first step, but at least it would mean getting in at the beginning of the most significant development in all history for publishing the Christian Gospel to all men in their generation.

Religious tensions rose in New York City as Christians moved to support Negroes against the Jewish-dominated teachers’ union in the school decentralization controversy.

Vitriolic charges and countercharges of Jewish “racism” and Negro “anti-Semitism” and the distribution of hate literature made the situation more ugly.

The teachers’ union, largely white and two-thirds Jewish, defied widespread criticism and continued its third citywide strike since school began. They were demanding reinstatement of 83 teachers ousted by the governing board of the city’s first neighborhood-controlled school district, the mainly Negro and Puerto Rican Ocean Hill-Brownsville section in Brooklyn. More than one million pupils were affected by the strike.

President of the neighborhood school board in the battle is United Presbyterian minister C. Herbert Oliver, a graduate of Nyack Missionary College and Wheaton (Illinois) College.

Outright condemnation of the strikes and support for decentralization of school control came from top officials of the National Council of Churches, United Presbyterian Church, the city’s Protestant Council, United Methodist Board of Missions, and United Church of Christ. Protestant and Roman Catholic clergy participated in a city hall demonstration in favor of decentralization.

A statement by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, famed minister of Marble Collegiate Church and president of the Protestant Council, was typical. He said the union’s “intransigence” was the only barrier to getting the schools functioning again. “The due process cry of the teachers’ union has a hollow ring when they themselves engaged in an illegal strike.” He called for union support of decentralization as stipulated in its contract with the city. “That would be real due process,” he said.

Mayor John Lindsay, who has led the way in decentralization, and the board of education have held illegal both the strikes and the local board’s arbitrary transfer of 83 teachers out of the district. In a test of its power which sparked the current controversy, the board claimed that the dismissed teachers opposed community control and asserted its right to hire teachers it felt were tuned to its pupils’ needs.

Local officials became increasingly concerned as the school dispute fed these tensions, and Lindsay met privately on the matter with a number of Jewish leaders. But it exploded in the mayor’s face when a crowd at a Brooklyn Jewish center, bitter at Negro charges of racism against Jewish teachers who had taught many years in the inner city and furious at Lindsay’s efforts to end the strikes, shouted him down during his speech. And Jewish crowds heckled one of their own, New York Sen. Jacob Javits, the next day when he tried to defend the mayor. “It is unacceptable, this Jewish backlash,” Javits told them.

Virulent anti-Semitic and anti-liquor feelings showed in a Washington Post interview with blacks who claim to have set a series of fires during that city’s April riots.

The historic “identity of interests” may be questionable now. Developments cited recently by the New York Times seem to have made a clash of interests inevitable:

• The move by black militants to control the direction of their own movement excluded many whites. This included many liberal Jews who felt snubbed after their extensive efforts for equal rights.

• More black militants have recently joined the Muslim faith, which carries a traditional antagonism between Arab and Jew. Jews felt more threatened when these militants supported the Arabs in their war with Israel.

• The teaching and social service professions, heavily saturated with Jews, are the two biggest areas where Negroes are demanding control “to teach our own, take care of our own.” With civil service and merit hiring, these fields were open to Jews while others were closed.

• Negro migrants to the city have settled in areas most recently occupied by Jews. Jews still own land and shops there. “In this conflict situation, the symbol of white ‘oppression,’ the slumlord, the overcharging of shopkeepers, was the Jew,” said an American Jewish Committee official. For this reason, many say that Negro anti-Semitism is mainly a spin-off of a general anti-white mood among black people.

At any rate, the school conflict reveals a break-up of the old liberal coalition of labor unions, Jews, Christians and Negroes. Jews who think of themselves as “liberals” find themselves allied in reaction with unions, while Christians seem to side with blacks in their struggle for self-determination. Jewish and Negro leaders who hope to close the gap wonder if they can control their alienated constituencies.

Miscellany

Czech aftermath: The Soviet-leaning Christian Peace Conference headquartered in Prague will continue its work despite deep differences over the Soviet invasion. Professor Amedeo Molnar of the Comenius Faculty of Theology, Prague, says a new element in Czech reaction was rejection by statesmen and citizens of the use of violence—even in self-defense. A Lutheran World Federation observer said Czech churches are working freely under the new situation. A statement from Hungary’s Roman Catholic bishops appears to support the Warsaw Pact invasion, but Austrian Catholic newsmen fear the Czech regime will try to regain control of church appointments and policies. Eurovangelism Director Dave Foster reports Czech evangelicals, who have been witnessing to some of the Soviet soldiers, also fear stringent controls are ahead.

Responding publicly to a circular from Reinhold Niebuhr, John C. Bennett, and Rabbi Abraham Heschel seeking endorsements for Hubert Humphrey, ex-President Howard Schomer of Chicago Theological Seminary said the “best witness” for clergy is to refuse to vote for any of the three presidential candidates.

A straw poll among Missouri Synod Lutheran seminarians went: Nixon, 378; Humphrey, 117; Wallace, 27; with 37 favoring “an alternate Democratic candidate.”

A straw poll among readers of the Camden, New Jersey, Roman Catholic weekly went: Humphrey, 303 votes; Nixon, 296; Wallace, 274, with Wallace leading within the city itself. At St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, Wallace edged out Humphrey for second place in a student straw poll.

The U. S. Supreme Court held only a thirty-minute hearing on the suit challenging constitutionality of the Arkansas law against teaching Darwinian evolution. Justice Potter Stewart asked the state spokesman if the law was designed so that teaching “would not collide with the Bible story” of man’s creation, and was told the state merely seeks “neutrality” to “keep the religious question out of the school system.”

More than 7,000 persons, half of them Marines from a nearby base, attended the final meeting of evangelist John Haggai’s two-week crusade, sponsored by 125 churches in the San Diego area.

A hand grenade thrown into a crowd of worshipers in Hebron during the Feast of Tabernacles injured four dozen persons, eight of them seriously. The area came under Israeli control during the 1967 June war.

A legislator from Denmark’s People’s Socialist Party proposed new marriage laws to legalize polygamy, marriage between siblings, and marriage between homosexuals.

DEATHS

W. KENNETH WAGGONER, 34, Assemblies of God missionary pilot, whose plane crashed into the Atlantic off the coast of Liberia at night. On board were visiting Texas pastors James Parsons, 46, and B. J. MANLEY, 42.

DAVID H. JOHNSON, 74, general director emeritus of The Evangelical Alliance Mission; of a presumed heart attack at TEAM’s Wheaton, Illinois, offices.

ROBERT H. H. GOHEEN, 88, pioneer Presbyterian medical missionary in India for four decades; father of Princeton University’s current president; in Princeton, New Jersey.

ELDER LIGHTFOOT SOLOMON MICHAUX, 84, one of the nation’s best-known freelance Negro religious leaders; founder of the Gospel Spreading Association of the Church of God; “Happy Am I” radio preacher; pioneer in church housing developments and use of showmanship and gospel songs; in Washington, D. C., of a heart attack.

Church Panorama

In a 43–20 vote, Asheville (North Carolina) Presbytery decided only contributions designated for specific agencies will go to the national denomination. All undesignated gifts will go to presbytery or synod causes. The move is interpreted as a protest at liberal agency trends in the Southern Presbyterian Church.

The Southern Presbyterian education board approved joint long-range planning with the United Church of Christ, United Presbyterian Church, and Episcopal Church. Episcopal Presiding Bishop John E. Hines will file a “friend of court” brief on behalf of the Southern Presbyterian suit to the U. S. Supreme Court against breakaway churches.

The Protestant-Catholic worship committee said that in its new text for the Nicene Creed (October 25 issue, page 42), brackets should appear around “and the Son,” in the statement that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son.” The phrase was a major factor in the Eastern Orthodox-Catholic schism.

First Baptist Church of New Orleans, after a fifteen-minute discussion at Sunday worship, reaffirmed affiliation with the local church federation. Pastor J. D. Grey, former Southern Baptist president and head of the city crime commission, supported the church federation.

A New York Times survey found many churches in Greenwich Village, New York City, have suffered such theft and desecration that they have had to lock up in off hours, install burglar alarms, and cancel evening meetings.

The Washington (Episcopal) Cathedral claims a loss of $11,000 last year in sale of Christmas cards through theft by postal workers.

The Los Angeles Times reports Jehovah’s Witness publications are increasingly hinting that the end of the world will come in 1975. The group’s prediction of the Second Coming for 1914 once caused considerable theological reshuffling.

Project Equality closed its regional office in Los Angeles because of lack of church support. National director Thomas Gibbons, Jr., blamed the Protestants. Protestants blamed the Catholic archdiocese.

Personalia

The Rev. Adam Clayton Powell told his Harlem congregation in a sermon that James Earl Ray—scheduled for trial this month—“didn’t kill King,” and that this murder was part of a racially motivated “conspiracy” linked to the deaths of John and Robert Kennedy.

The Rev. Homer Tucker, urban-work director for the New Jersey Baptist Convention, is the first Negro chairman of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs.

Editor Norman DePuy of the American Baptists’ Mission magazine praised evangelist Billy Graham for “taking sides” by befriending Richard Nixon in the 1968 elections, and supported announcing of political opinions from the pulpit.

Resigned Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike—who has helped create a “find your date by computer” service—will be honorary pastor at small, pacifist oriented Mount Hollywood Congregational Church in California, and preach at least four times a year.

A U. S. attorney charged Catholic Father Robert Niklibore, president of Boys Town of the Desert in Banning, California, with living a double life as a layman in nearby Palm Springs and failing to file taxes on $119,960 income over three years.

United Church of Christ minister Oscar Remick will be vice-president of Assumption College (Roman Catholic) in Worcester, Massachusetts. And the Milwaukee Catholic archdiocese named United Church layman Kenneth Burgess, Jr., 49, as it first full-time financial administrator.

The Rev. Ben Mohr Herbster, 64, said he will retire as president of the United Church of Christ in a year. His successor will be elected at the June General Synod in Boston.

Missing, since October 13: a single-engine plane in dense rainforest in the northern Congo. Aboard: Disciples of Christ missionaries Max L. Myers, a pilot, and Mrs. Harrison Goodall, a surgeon’s wife; and Mrs. Mary Hoyt, a Roman Catholic missionary nurse.

“If that isn’t exactly like Americans: they bring us to one of our own 900-year-old castles and involve us in something so futuristic that it seems like science fiction.” So remarked a German pastor at Schloss Mittersill, near Salzburg, Austria, during the three-day All-Europe Conference on Computer Technique for Theological Research (September 16–18), which brought together thirty-five stellar European theologians and Christian leaders to discuss the establishment of an international computer network to aid the Church’s apologetic task. The sponsoring organization was the Christian Research Institute of Wayne, New Jersey, which is at work activating the network in the United States and on the European continent. Walter R. Martin, the institute’s general director and a renowned authority on contemporary cults, flew to Mittersill for the conference, as did the undersigned, who is serving as executive director for CRI’s European operations.

Present at the fairy-tale castle in the Austrian alps—which inevitably reminds one of The Sound of Music and regularly resounds with hymnody now that it is owned by the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students—were such realistic persons as J. Levery, director of non-numerical research applications for Compagnie IBM France (Paris), and Monsieur Lellig, representing the Strasbourg agency of IBM. Strasbourg, the seat of the Council of Europe and the center of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School’s annual European Program at the University’s Protestant Theological Faculty, will serve as the site for the main European computer, containing the “apologetic memory” to which a network of “consoles” (terminal receivers) will be connected. These consoles, placed in Christian institutions across the continent, will offer immediate access to the central memory bank, containing evangelical apologetic resources, past and present.

In an exemplary address, simultaneously translated into German and English, M. Levery demonstrated the technical feasibility of such a project and provided valuable illustrations from analogous systems now in operation outside the theological field. So sophisticated is current computer technology that a student at the lycee or gymnasium level can type questions in ordinary language on his local console keyboard, and answers—or clarifying questions to him!—will flash almost instantaneously on the cathode screen of his receiver. With a print-out attachment, he can be the immediate recipient of a bibliography, a quotation, or extended passages dealing with his apologetic problem.

A plenary session was devoted to CRI Director Martin’s analysis of “The Needs of the Hour and the Aims of a Christian Computer System.” Martin described the effect of contemporary secularism on Christian testimony: “The spirit of secularism is an agnostic skepticism about almost everything that the Church of Jesus Christ has taught as Divine revelation. Indeed, the revolt against Heaven has in some areas even become a revolt against reason.” The bewildered Christian in such a milieu—in a Europe even more secularized than America—finds himself “shamed into silence by the almost deific pronouncements of professors who present only one side of the case and leave it to the student to ‘come to his own conclusions.’ ” Such a tragic imbalance will be overcome by the computer network, which will put at the believer’s disposal “the combined contributions of the great minds of the Church in all ages, augmented by the contributions of contemporary evangelical scholars.”

To tap the apologetic resources of the participants, intensive small-group meetings were held in Old Testament, New Testament, dogmatics, religion and science, and religion in contemporary society. In each group, efforts were made to explore (1) the fundamental non-Christian objections to the Christian world view in these areas, (2) the structure of informed Christian response, and (3) the most significant bibliographical resources for meeting the objections posed. The contributing presence of such men as the following established a uniformly high level of discussion: Professors Blocher and Külling of the Free Faculty of Evangelical Theology and Pastor Courthial of the Eglise Réformée (France); Dr. David Hedegaard of Sweden; Dr. Uuras Saarnivaara of Finland; Elio Milazzo of “Parole di Vita” (Italy); Dr. Wilhelm Oesch of the Lutherische Theologische Hochschule and Dr. Kurt Koch, world’s authority on the theological treatment of occult phenomena (Germany); President Kreiss of the Free Lutheran Church of France and Belgium; Dr. Harold J. Brown of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students and Professor Frank Horton of Institut Emmaus (Switzerland); Juan Gili and Angel Blanco of Spain’s Youth for Christ; Irving Hoffman of the North Africa Mission; George Clark of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association; and Messrs John Bolten, Sr. and Jr., of F.E.S., Christianity Today, and Schloss Mittersill.

Letters and telegrams of encouragement were received from distinguished invitees who were unable to attend: Dr. Heinrich Bornkamm of Heidelberg; Jean Cadier, dean of the Protestant Theological Faculty at Montpellier; Old Testament specialist Edmond Jacob of Strasbourg; Dr. Walter Künneth of Erlangen; Pierre Marcel, secretary general of the French Bible Society; David Mellon, dean of Fleming College and the Institute for European Affairs, Switzerland; Pastor Poetsch of the German “Lutheran Hour”; Dr. H. Rohrbach, rector of the University of Mainz; and Dr. Carl Fr. Wislöff of Norway.

In contrast, one respondent—who did not attend the conference—wrote that he could not support the project because (1) the computer memory “will very rapidly swallow up the human user, blocking his capacity for individual thinking”; (2) the system will encouage citing material out of context; and (3) automated apologetics will detract from a “living testimony of faith” and from “prophetic and apostolic confrontation.”

In a French-English lecture on “The Apologetic Application of the Computer System,” the undersigned dealt with these objections, pointing out that the computer revolution of the twentieth century has remarkable parallels with the introduction of printing from movable type in the fifteenth century, and that Christians are called to use intelligently the technology of our time for the spread of the unchanging Gospel.

The judgment of Servan-Schreiber, one of Europe’s foremost political and economic analysts, was underscored: “The arrival of the computer is the most important event of the twentieth century. Many people are afraid of the computer here, a Middle Ages conception. But it is only a servant of the human mind.” No one at the conference suffered from this irrational fear, however. The participants demonstrated once again the supreme relevance of an uncompromisingly biblical theology: its eagerness to bring all things, new and old, into captivity to the mind of Christ.

JOHN WARWICK MONTGOMERY

Many months ago former editor Carl F. H. Henry in conjunction with the Christian Medical Society arranged for a symposium on contraception and abortion. The symposium convened the last week of August in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and included in its roster theologians, physicians, and sociologists who addressed themselves to the major questions and worked out, at least tentatively, some biblical and timely answers.

In this issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY we publish in condensed form some of the papers delivered at the symposium. None of the material is available for reprint without the permission of the Christian Medical Society. All of the papers as well as the Declaration (which we are also publishing) will under the imprint of Tyndale House Publishers, which has distributed millions of copies of Living Letters.

The readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY are urged to peruse the material thoughtfully and critically, and to regard the effort as an introductory rather than a final one. Because the issues are significant and the opinions varied, we expect to receive a heavy mail and we welcome all letters. Insofar as space permits we will share the reader response through the Letters to the Editor column. So, if you have anything to say, be sure to write—tersely and succinctly! appear in book form next spring

The plot thickened in the Lutheran love triangle last month.

The American Lutheran Church (ALC) met in Omaha and floated a fellowship bid down the Missouri River to St. Louis. Come July the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod will decide on its reply. The more conservative Missouri Synod’s vote on fellowship with the ALC is rated a toss-up by insiders.

The ALC also approved the same “pulpit and altar fellowship” (meaning legalized intercommunion and pulpit exchanges) with the Lutheran Church in America, third and largest of the major U. S. Lutheran groups. One wag said this just legitimized a common-law marriage.

The big three in Lutheranism have a total baptized membership of 8.7 million and with the Baptists form the major blocs outside the current talks toward a giant united Protestant church.

In a third action, the ALC expressed readiness to talk three-way organic union with Missouri and the LCA as soon as both are interested. By a close standing vote the 1,000 delegates (half clergy, half lay, nearly four-fifths Midwestern) rejected a motion to talk union with any interested Lutheran group. The motion’s meaning was clear: if Missouri wasn’t interested, the ALC would talk merger with the LCA. And if Missouri votes no in July, that could be just what happens.

Also involved in all this is the 21,500-member Synod of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, a Slovak-background group that is a satellite of Missouri Synod. The four groups compose the Lutheran Council in the United States.

Technically, ALC fellowship policies need approval of two-thirds of the delegates to next year’s district conventions. But passage—a foregone conclusion—will not be announced until Missouri votes.

The LCA meets in 1970 in Minneapolis, ALC headquarters town. While it has previously proclaimed open fellowship with other Lutherans, the ALC merger invitation will be new on the agenda.

New LCA President Robert Marshall told the Omaha convention, “We err when we allow differences of origin, geographical concentration, polity, or discipline to separate us indefinitely.… Either cooperation or union must join us as saints who rejoice in the same Triune God, the same revelation, and the same confession of faith. Either cooperation or union must serve to increase our unity; for while unity must exist before union, we know that unity also increases after union.”

The three denominations have engaged in exploratory talks for four years. A key breakthrough was Missouri’s entry into cooperative work through the Lutheran Council, despite its theological reservations about the other two groups.

The ALC convention postponed for two years a decision on whether to join the National Council of Churches. The NCC could use the boost, since the ALC is the only major non-member likely to join in the foreseeable future. But a motion for immediate NCC affiliation was withdrawn without even a floor test after President Fredrik Schiotz said the ALC is sharply divided on the issue. A delegate added that non-NCC member Missouri might also be offended. NCC opponents were spared embarrassment when a layman failed to introduce a motion against the NCC that rummaged through the Communism files of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

The ALC approved guidelines stating that relations with non-Lutherans and church councils must not violate “its confessional position regarding the primacy of the Gospel according to the Scriptures in all matters of faith and life,” and that the other bodies must “confess their faith in the Triune God.” The convention also expressed preference for the word “Christian” instead of “Catholic” in the Apostles’ Creed.

If Omaha will symbolize Lutheran unity in the future, it symbolizes Lutheran racial anxiety in the present. This was the city where the Rev. L. William Youngdahl tried two years ago to start a modest exchange series between his LCA parish and a Negro Presbyterian church. The idea met a wall of lay opposition, and Youngdahl left. But not before hand-held cameras had recorded the embarrassing saga for the award-winning film, A Time for Burning.

Youngdahl is now running the new urban-action program at the ALC’s Augustana College, Minneapolis. And the ALC used the Omaha meeting not only for rhetoric and resolutions but also for allocation of $511,552 for “national crisis” spending next year, plus $1,250,000 in reserves to be invested in black housing, banks, and business—all this despite a 5 per cent cutback in operating expenses this year because income isn’t matching the budget.

The delegates also:

• Deferred as too liberal a resolution supporting conscientious objection to particular wars.

• Deferred as too conservative a statement asking pastors to distinguish their church role from political stands.

• Joined “Project Equality” despite claims it constitutes a boycott.

• Declared opposition to interracial marriage has no Christian basis.

• Chose Dr. Kent Knutson, 44, as president of Wartburg Seminary in Iowa; the last seminary president to be elected in convention. Knutson has edited dialog, which reflects the ALC’s theological left.

A.L.C. Man To Watch

Don’t be surprised if 46-year-old activist David W. Preus is elected president of The American Lutheran Church two years from now.

At the ALC’s Omaha convention last month (see story above), Minneapolis pastor Preus upset by 476–458 incumbent William Larsen for the denominational vice-presidency. Larsen, 59-year-old executive secretary of the theological education board, was president of the former United Evangelical Lutheran Church and was elected secretary of the merged ALC when it formed in 1960.

ALC President Fredrik A. Schiotz, 67, must retire at the next convention because of statutory age requirements.

Preus, only parish clergyman in the seven-man Omaha runoff, has served a decade at a large church near the University of Minnesota, where he was a campus pastor for a year. The congregation has several black and Oriental families, and has managed to hold its own despite a neighborhood shift from residential to apartment-commercial, and a parish that mixes campus types with working-class residents.

Concerned to maintain school quality in the urban shift, a neighborhood council Preus headed decided to work to get him on the Minneapolis school board. He was appointed to a seat in January, 1965, and has been board chairman for a year and a half. In the post he has established a citywide reputation as a champion of racial justice.

Preus graduated from the ALC’s Luther Seminary and also studied a year at the University of Edinburgh and a summer at Union Seminary, New York. In addition he did a stint at the University of Minnesota Law School.

He has been chairman of the denomination’s youth board since the ALC formed in 1960, and once defended its staff when a publication was attacked as being too humanistic.

“Theologically, I like to think of myself as a confessional Lutheran,” says the suave, handsomely graying pastor, “and part of that confessionalism is a passionate social concern. It is an unfortunate notion that either you are confessional or you are a social activist.”

He thinks the three major U. S. Lutheran groups have the same theological “mix, in somewhat different degrees,” and would like to see them in a working unity, if not organic union. “With the kind of issues facing the Church today, it is tragic to knock heads over something like lodge membership,” he believes.

With the pressing “intra-Lutheran requirements,” he foresees no Lutheran role in the Consultation on Church Union. Preus says that “ ‘one Lord, one faith, one baptism’ does not require organic joining of machinery” but should mean acknowledgement of “my Christian brethren.”

Personally, Preus would like to see the ALC join the National Council of Churches, but he knows many disagree and thinks “it’s not an issue on which we should split the church.”

Preus, cousin of two well-known Missouri Synod theologians and nephew of a former Minnesota governor, is optimistic that the Missouri Synod Lutherans will approve fellowship with the ALC next July.

He also believes black and white Americans “will learn to live together” in the “long haul,” but in the short run, “I can’t imagine it being less tense.” With social change “causing all kinds of illness, anger, and frustration,” he believes “Christians must involve themselves in the gluing mechanism.”

From Caribbean To Arctic

Anglican churches from the “Caribbean to the Arctic Circle” moved toward deeper involvement with one another but shunned actual merger like a hot potato, as bishops of the United States and Canada met last month in Augusta, Georgia, for their first joint session.

The bishops supported formation of an “Anglican Council of North America,” to encompass churches in the United States, Canada, and the West Indies. The council, already approved by the U.S. and Canadian denominations, is on the agenda for the 1969 West Indies meeting.

The bishops hope the council will open channels for dialogue and sharing of common problems, and help the churches avoid costly duplication of services. Each member church and province will be represented on the council by seven persons.

The council is not hemisphere-wide, since Latin American nations are not included. Vice-President Stephen Bayne of the U.S. Episcopal Executive Council said cultural differences were partly to blame. Also, he said, the Latin Americans had not indicated a desire to join the council, as has the West Indies church, and the North Americans did not want to be “imperialistic.”

Many bishops felt that in light of Lambeth, talk of “merger” was redundant. There, the emphasis was on an Anglican Church already in union, though not organically. In fact, one purpose of the council, according to its constitution, is to give “expression to the existing unity of the church.”

“We don’t want to start merging among ourselves,” said Bishop Ned Cole of central New York. He feared these moves might endanger union across denominational lines. The Anglican Church in Canada is talking merger with the United Church of Canada. “We will no longer be just Anglican,” said Canadian Primate Howard Clark. And that, he added, might complicate mergers with other western hemisphere Anglican bodies. The Episcopal Church is involved in merger negotiations with eight U.S.-only denominations.

Renewal rather than new structure is more important to some. Said California Bishop C. Kilmer Myers: “I get turned off when we begin talking about union of WASP churches. I get turned on when we talk about renewal.”

WALLACE HENLEY

Baptists Talk Evangelism

Neither the new United States president nor more police power can solve world and domestic problems. Their solution requires Christ, declared black and white Baptist leaders as they rallied North American Baptists to their part in a mammoth evangelistic effort, the Crusade of the Americas.

“Christ—the Only Hope,” the crusade theme, dominated the Continental Congress on Evangelism, held in October to fire up 1,250 representatives of thirteen U.S. Baptist conventions for the movement. It aims to mobilize the 24 million Baptists in the western hemisphere for Christ.

“It doesn’t really matter who is elected President of the United States, for the problems of our world will not be solved by political process. We talk about more police authority and soldiers, but there is enough of that. Something is profoundly wrong in the hearts of the people,” Gardner C. Taylor of Brooklyn, immediate past president of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, Inc., told 4,000 persons attending the congress’s main rally.

“Our only hope lies in [changing hearts by] preaching the Gospel,” said W. A. Criswell, president of the 11-million member Southern Baptist Convention.

Crusade President Rubens Lopez of Sao Paulo, Brazil, called it an “integration” as well as an evangelistic movement, uniting individuals, churches, races, nationalities, and Baptist conventions in Christ.

However, racial integration of the four-day congress in Washington, D.C. was noticeably scant. Wayne Dehoney, North American coordinator, said he was “plainly disappointed” that “extensive efforts” to gain black participation had brought at the most 100 delegates from the three major black Baptist conventions. The three groups had strongly endorsed the crusade, he said, but their loosely organized structures made it difficult for promotion from the top down to the local churches. Lack of travel funds was also a problem, he said.

Dehoney, of Louisville, Kentucky, said one of the largest black contingents came, surprisingly enough, from Mississippi, where white Baptists helped finance the trip for about forty Negro delegates.

The congress’s hard-sell on evangelism was, however, mottled with continual references to the church’s role in social causes. The first night C. E. Autrey, evangelism director of the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board, gave a rip-snorting blast at the Baptist press, accusing it of dividing the denomination through a socialistic emphasis.

“As the secular press is building socialism, so the Baptist press is trying to build a socialistic emphasis into the denomination.… Redemption comes first, all else is secondary.” Autrey said later that by “Baptist press” he meant “many of our publications, state papers, and magazines.”

But American Baptist Carl Tiller, a U.S. Budget Bureau official, took issue the same evening with those who label social involvement “Communist influence.” “Those who would stop the church from seeking to be relevant, are themselves taking a Communist path.… It is the policy of Communist governments everywhere to see that the churches … are irrelevant to the society in which they find themselves.”

The American Baptist Convention was the only major Baptist group whose national board did not endorse the Crusade, although many local ABC groups did. Tiller, former ABC president, urged ABC members to participate in the crusade.

Tiller and many other speakers, however, said the only solid base for social action is Christian conversion and conviction. They said the conflict between evangelism and social action is artificial.

All speakers appeared to agree that one “social action” imperative for all Baptists is to take their witness out of the pews and into the marketplace.

British Bible scholar George Beasley-Murray challenged Baptists to “be adventurous” and substitute traditional revivals with meetings in church members’ homes. Revivals are “fine for people with a religious background,” he said, but other methods are needed for those with “absolutely nothing-to revive.”

Taking the Gospel to urban ghettos and alienated young people received special attention in panel discussions.

“The question of the inner city ministry must be, ‘Are we going to get personally involved?’ We’ve got to bleed with them,” said Robert Tremain, a Worcester, Massachusetts, inner city pastor. “The people have been so exploited in the inner city and they are so suspicious that they do not trust anyone they do not know.”

Thirty per cent of this discussion’s participants indicated they thought the work of a professional social worker employed by a church was part of evangelism.

The Rev. Arthur Blessitt, flamboyant evangelist to youths on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip, told the convention to stop quibbling over evangelism and social action and get concerned about youth in trouble.

Blessitt, wearing a white clerical collar, black shirt, and “love” beads, said misuse of sex and drugs by young people today is really a misguided search for God. “Young people are searching for the truth, a deep spiritual experience, not a new Mustang or a bigger bank account. But they don’t know where to go.”

Blessitt said one of his biggest problems was getting churches to take in new converts from the Strip. “They are afraid the converts will contaminate their kids.”

He recommended twenty-four-hour ministries with pastors working in shifts. “Young people need to know where they can go for help.… We ought to at least have a place that stays open as long as the bars. Churches are made more for the convenience of church members these days.”

Baptist unease over their relation to secular life surfaced several months before the congress in controversy over a gospel march planned from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. The march was replaced with a rally when problems arose over obtaining a permit.

At the congress itself, six manifestos relating the Gospel to world problems also reflected this disquietude.

After giving distressed descriptions of such ills as racial strife, the population explosion, poverty, alcoholism, wars, and highway deaths, the manifestos hurriedly concluded that Christ is, indeed, the “Only Hope.” Only one statement said “the Gospel has deep social implications and … at times the church has failed to realize its obligation in this direction.”

One congress official said he was “disappointed” that the manifestos “didn’t really say much.” No votes were taken on the statements. They are not binding on the participating conventions.

BARBARA H. KUEHN

Business Men In Boston

It was a time of prayer and feasting as the Christian Business Men’s Committee International invaded a plush Boston hotel last month for its thirty-first annual convention.

The 930 delegates, representing a wide variety of vocations, rejoiced in their largest convention to date and stressed that they were meeting not for debating or for formulating resolutions but for fellowship and for reaching unsaved businessmen for Christ.

Plenary meetings and discussion groups explored aspects of the businessman’s life and of evangelism. International Chairman Ted DeMoss, a Chattanooga insurance executive, proposed that ashtrays be set out at CBMC banquets, known as “outreach meetings,” to help establish “conditions when men can listen to the Gospel with ears unstopped.”

Harvard University psychiatrist Armand Nicholi, leading one session, stressed that Christianity is not a crutch but strengthens a person in four areas necessary to emotional maturity: (1) the capacity to love another person and become aware of his or her needs; (2) a sound, consistent conscience with well-formed moral precepts; (3) a sense of personal identity and of how others feel; and (4) the realization that one will die, and a way of coping with this prospect.

The central concern of the gathering, however, was outreach. After an all-night prayer meeting at the beginning of the convention, delegates fanned out day by day to tell how they “found profit in more than just their business.”

About 3,000 men in forty-one civic clubs in the greater Boston area listened to CBMCers tell of finding new life in Christ and assurance of eternal life. Seventy-five area pulpits were occupied on Sunday by delegates who urged fellow laymen to witness.

Four or five outdoor meetings, led by Australia’s Open Air Campaigners, were held on working days at the Prudential Center and on Boston Common. Crowds of varying size and composition heard testimonies of businessmen and sermons whose points were driven home with practical illustrations of the triumphs of faith, such as D. L. Moody’s refutation of the atheism of Robert Ingersoll.

DeMoss was elected to a second term as chairman of the 15,000-member organization. The CBMCI has 700 chapters in forty countries and is strongest in the United States and Canada. International headquarters is at Glen Ellyn, Illinois, where the monthly magazine, Contact, consisting mainly of members’ testimonies, is published.

Definite results of the convention outreach were not made known. A spokesman would comment only that “we had a tremendous impact in many lives in Boston from businessmen to bellhops and waitresses, who will never be the same as the result of this convention.”

KENNETH CURTIS

Adventist Optimism

All the statistics were optimistic at last month’s biennial council of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Toronto, the first ever held outside the United States.

The record 1969 budget will be $47 million; world membership is 1,780,000; per-capita giving in North America is a remarkable $340.42 a year. The figures represented an increase of $2.2 million in budget, of 90,000 members in two years, and $12.60 in per-capita giving. Last year the SDA sent out 421 new overseas workers.

Southern Asia regional president Roscoe Lowry said nationals are taking over leadership of missions in India, since the country is tightening rules on entry permits. Three of the major SDA fields are now administered by nationals.

South American President Roger Wilcox said a new congregation is established every twenty-four hours in his region, and be hopes 1,000 new churches will start by December of 1969.

The Adventists voted a special November 30 offering for relief to Biafra, with an advance grant of $50,000 to be sent immediately. Returning Adventist medical missionary Sherman Nagel told Toronto reporters that he thinks Nigerian soldiers are deliberately slaughtering civilians in secessionist Biafra and have bombed clearly marked hospitals and churches.

Besides discussing foreign needs, the council passed a five-point program for inner-city domestic needs. Each major city is supposed to get a model health-and-welfare center with an integrated staff. Each of sixty conferences is asked to maintain emergency disaster vehicles and to hold education classes for preschool, school-age, and adult city residents. Last year the church spent more than $4.5 million in aid to disaster victims and other needy persons.

A Peea For Recognition

A group of autonomous churches that have their roots in the teachings of Alexander Campbell are seeking corporate (collective) recognition distinct from the Disciples of Christ, which reorganized into a full-fledged “church” last month (October 25 issue, page 41).

A twelve-man committee headed by the Rev. James DeForest Murch met in Cincinnati last month in behalf of what is termed “The Undenominational Fellowship of Christian Churches and the Churches of Christ.” Out of that meeting a letter took shape that was sent to the National Council of Churches’ Yearbook of American Churches, commonly regarded as the standard reference listing. The letter asked for a listing of 4,600 Christian congregations with a membership of 1,018,912 and a “located ministry” of 4,038. This compilation is based upon data compiled and published in the Directory of the Ministry, an annual published in Springfield, Illinois. All churches listed are said to have submitted written requests at one time or another to be included; this is an important point, because the Disciples of Christ with headquarters in Indianapolis has published a directory over which there has been much dispute.

It is understood that a few of the 4,600 churches in the Springfield directory are also being counted among the congregations claimed in Indianapolis. Neither group has made any inroads among the predominantly southern Churches of Christ, which have similar perspectives in doctrine and policy.

The Undenominational Fellowship in actuality represents the wing of the Campbellite movement served by the annual North American Christian Convention. There is no direct link, however, because the churches involved recognize no extra-congregational authority.

Out of the September 16 meeting came also a decision to seek membership in the Commission on Chaplains of the National Association of Evangelicals. The application will be considered by NAE directors next April.

East German Split Near

After twenty years of holding on to an illusion, an East-West split in the Evangelical Church in Germany seems inevitable.

For the first time last month, Western delegates held their synod in West Berlin without a simultaneous synod of delegates in East Berlin. During early years of this superorganization of independent Lutheran, Reformed, and United churches, delegates met together. Since the Berlin wall went up this has been made impossible by East Germany’s Ulbricht regime, so two meetings have been held at the same time with couriers going from one to the other to integrate decisions.

Last year the synods restated their wish to stay in one organization, but both got the right to make decisions for their own areas. Now it seems the East Germans have finally decided it will be better to form their own church. Ulbricht, who has forced the split, doesn’t like that solution either, because he would rather deal separately with weaker independent churches than with one strong organization. East German churchmen are still deliberating over the best course.

The West Germans have finally agreed to permit separation. Bishop Dietfelbinger of Munich, the moderator, opened the synod by saying “it is completely understandable that the East German churches want to decide for themselves what will be best for them.”

On other issues, the Western synod proved again that European church meetings can expect to be in for aggressive youth observers. As at Uppsala, and the Reformed Ecumenical Synod in Holland, so in Berlin young pastors and seminarians formed a “critical synod.”

They wanted a decision not to build any new churches for two years in order to give 5 per cent of income to aid young nations. Instead, the synod asked member churches to devote 2 per cent to world poverty, with an increase to 5 per cent by 1975. “Critical synod” members started to yell and unrolled placards with words like “hypocrites,” “mercenaries,” and “blind.”

On the same day a German judge ordered student rebel Fritz Teufel, 25, to prison for seven months for disrupting services last year in the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.

JAN J. VAN CAPELLEVEEN

Perhaps the only major newspaper in the world to be mum on the marriage of Mrs. John F. Kennedy to Aristotle Onassis was the Vatican’s Osservatore Romano.

Its silence was the loudest announcement of church embarrassment over the marriage of Mrs. Kennedy, one of its most noted members and widow of the first Roman Catholic to be U. S. President, to a divorcé.

Mrs. Kennedy, now Mrs. Onassis, put the Catholic Church in a tight spot. Public pressures flared quickly for Vatican approval of the union. But that seemed just short of impossible. For the church to close its eyes to its ancient laws to accommodate one celebrity would both crack its credibility and open the way for many other Catholics to remarry.

If the public sought church approval, Mrs. Onassis apparently did not. She presumably knows well the intricacies of church marital laws, since her sister, Lee, obtained an annulment of her marriage to actor Michael Canfield from the Sacred Rota in Rome, to marry Prince Stanislaus Radziwell. Their mother is also divorced, and remarried a divorcé.

Vatican officials appeared at first to seek a way out, when they suggested that an annulment of Onassis’ first marriage by his Greek Orthodox Church might ease the predicament.

“The church would like to be in a position to show understanding,” a high Vatican source said.

One main problem: There is no such thing as annulment in the Greek church.

A later Vatican statement was more rigid. News agencies quoted Vatican spokesman Monsignor Fausto Valainc as saying: “Mrs. Kennedy is not a child and therefore she must know perfectly well what are the laws of her church. Therefore, if she is not a child and not out of her mind she must have known that she could not legally marry Mr. Onassis. It is clear that when a Catholic marries a divorced man she knowingly violates the law of the church. It is not a question of excommunication. It is what is termed in canon law an irregular situation.” He said Mrs. Onassis is now cut off from receiving the sacraments.

Whatever some churchmen thought, family intimate Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston said he had known the marriage was planned for months and “I encouraged and helped her in every possible way.” He said in a speech, “This idea of saying she’s excommunicated, she’s a public sinner—what a lot of nonsense. Only God knows who is a sinner, who is not.”

Cushing also revealed he had been “contacted by many of those who are identified in high places with the administration of the late President Kennedy, and by others intimately related and associated with the Kennedy family to stop all this from taking place.”

A year ago Mrs. Kennedy’s marriage to a Greek Orthodox in a Greek ceremony would have been legally questionable in the Roman church. Since then the two bodies have agreed to recognize each other’s marriages, though not without reservations, as a result of ecumenical talks.

But in Catholic eyes, the former Mrs. Kennedy has committed adultery in marrying a man whose first wife is still alive, since the church holds that a valid marriage is virtually indissoluble, except by death.

Onassis married his first wife, the former Athina Livanos, after he had known her for three days, according to the Saturday Evening Post. He was 40 and she was 16, daughter of a multimillionaire Greek shipowner. She obtained a civil divorce from an Alabama court in 1960 on grounds of mental cruelty. Onassis’ cavorting with opera singer Maria Callas was said to be a major factor in the divorce. A Greek Orthodox court in New York recognized the civil divorce in 1961. The first Mrs. Onassis, since remarried, is now the Marchioness of Blandford, wife of the son and heir of the British Duke of Marlborough.

There is only one way the Roman church could declare Mrs. Kennedy’s marriage legal. The Roman Rota, the highest marriage tribunal, would have to study the reasons behind Onassis’ divorce, and conclude that the first marriage had been null and void from the beginning.

But the grounds for Catholic annulment are few, among them nonbaptism of one party, a prior marriage, intention by one partner not to have children, or proof that one party had never intended the marriage to be permanent. The last condition is probably the only one Onassis might try to qualify for. But, according to one canon-law expert, he would have to “prove through evidence of general conduct or statements he made before and during the first marriage that this [no intent for a permanent marriage] was his mentality from the beginning.”

It is highly questionable whether the dynamic, iron-willed Onassis and the former Mrs. Kennedy would care to subject themselves to the process. It seems logical, then, that she decided to enter the marriage no matter what the cost to her relations with the church.

Another interesting aspect: Greek Orthodox spokesmen said Mrs. Onassis would be required to sign a pledge that any children from the new marriage would be brought up in the Orthodox faith. This doesn’t directly affect Mrs. Onassis’ children, John and Caroline Kennedy, who are Roman Catholic. But the Roman church would normally require that Mrs. Onassis raise any new children as Catholics also.

Onassis is known not only for his charm with women but also for his fabulous, if sometimes murky, rise from rags to riches. His shipping firm’s ocean fleet, larger than some navies, is the basis of his wealth. The fleet is insured at $500 million. His firms, however, have been fined a total of $7 million for violation of U. S. shipping regulations. He is also one of the lowest-paying employers in the world maritime industry, giving wages about one-fourth those of U. S. shipowners.

One institution that appeared delighted with the marriage was the controversial Greek military regime. It apparently hoped, validly or not, that the marriage would be a boon to fractured U. S.-Greek relations.

God’S Smuggler

To most people behind the Iron Curtain he’s just a tourist who travels in a fast car by day and sleeps in a tent at night. To border guards and customs officials he has all the semblance of the elusive Pimpernel. To Christians in Communist lands he’s one of a small band working to supply Bibles in their languages, as well as tape recorders and cars.

But in England “Brother Andrew” is likely to become known as “God’s Smuggler”—a title he would never choose for himself, but one given to his first book, recently published in England.

In a London interview last month, the 40-year-old Dutch missionary told how he started as an independent evangelist in 1955. Now he has a staff limited to twelve and directs a work which goes under many names. He said he has worked in every Communist nation except North Korea and North Viet Nam, and goes to Cuba once a year for an evangelistic campaign. He has been in Czechoslovakia twice since the Soviet occupation and hopes to visit Viet Nam this month.

Besides preaching, his main task is providing Bibles, and how he does it remains a closely guarded secret. “I take up to 700 complete Bibles with me at a time, and not one page from them is ever seen by the officials,” he says.

He is known only by the pseudonym “Brother Andrew,” and contributions to his work go by that name to Bible Societies or to a post office box in Ermelo, the Netherlands.

He operates on the theory that a Christian should trust in the Lord to protect him, yet use every reasonable precaution. The Bible says it is not enough to love God with your heart alone, he reasons. “We must also use our minds and our common sense and not take needless risks.”

Tactics often change, since doors open and close quickly in Red lands. Poland doesn’t need smuggled Bibles because it has a flourishing Bible store, but it is short of material for children’s work.

Czechoslovakia permits 3,000 Slovak Bibles to be imported each year, but that many never arrive. In East Germany Bibles are printed and distributed openly, and the New English Bible has now been printed there with official permission.

A team of three—including 70-year-old Dutch woman evangelist Corrie Ten Boom—came out of the Soviet Union last month reporting a need not only for Bibles but also for typewriters and tape recorders. (Any Briton can legally send a car to the Soviet Union, and such vehicles meet a great church need).

Brother Andrew is a Baptist, but he experienced the new Pentecostalism many years ago: “The basis of Pentecostalism is that the power within us is greater than the power that is without us, and only this assurance has enabled me to go through so much enemy territory. If I had listened to the advice of Christian friends I would not have made one trip behind the Iron Curtain.

“So far as speaking in tongues is concerned, I use this gift in my personal praying rather than publicly, but I find it indispensable when crossing the border with Bibles.”

He says there is no competition with Eurovangelism, Operation Mobilization, and other groups taking Bibles behind the Iron Curtain. He himself is not looking for staff recruits, and refers potential volunteers to OM or Wycliffe Bible Translators, since translation is “the first essential.”

Brother Andrew says he always needs support, “but it must be given from the right motive. I do not accept funds from people who are only anti-Communist. I want support from people who are just pro-Jesus.”

J. ERIC MAYER

Ireland: Paisley’S Shabby Victory

Students of Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, are not normally given to mass demonstration. At present, however, they plan further protest marches calling for such things as a new voting system, a revised housing program, and a ban on job discrimination against Roman Catholics.

What lies behind it? Was one writer correct in saying the marches at Londonderry that turned violent began as a “peaceful demand by British citizens for rights enjoyed everywhere else in the United Kingdom”? There is strong evidence to support the statement.

What rights are claimed by Derry marchers and Belfast collegians? Derry provides probably the best illustration of all. In a population of around 60,000, 3 per cent are reported homeless, and more than one-fourth of the men are unemployed. The city is Unionist-controlled only because large numbers of the Roman Catholic majority are virtually disenfranchised through various devices. Ward boundaries have been manipulated to Unionist advantage. The dice are loaded against the young Roman Catholic couple seeking to set up a home, for a house means a vote—and who knows where that may lead? Some firms openly boast they have never employed a Roman Catholic.

These are the facts, whatever one thinks about alleged police violence, Irish Republican Army infiltration, or papist plots. They are facts, moreover, that should be clearly understood before anyone says a word about the Rev. Ian Paisley.

He is an extraordinary man, with two apparently different sides. There is the pastor who cares for his own large congregation as a faithful shepherd, whose words God has used to bring many to himself, and whose ministry in the homes of his people has brought blessing and comfort to the sick and the troubled.

But there is another Ian Paisley: the pied piper whose summons to rally round the Union Jack, spread like wildfire through certain areas of Belfast, can promptly bring forth a motley crew whose indignation is not notably righteous, whose language is assuredly not that of Zion, and whose need is to have the Gospel preached to them.

Disown the extremists as he might, Paisley does little to discourage them. He needs them. The end may be considered as justifying the means. So last month a police-permitted student march was swiftly countered by one called by Paisley for which no police sanction had been given. His supporters chanted, “You can’t take the Pill,” sang Orange songs, jeered, and taunted the students.

Let no one imagine this was in defense of Protestantism uncompromised. It was a threatening mob trying to intimidate a peaceful, non-religious, thoroughly justifiable demonstration.

The outcome is telling. When things might have become dangerously ugly had the students retaliated in kind, one of their leaders made an effective loudspeaker appeal: “If there is bloodshed in Belfast tonight, there will be a return to violence and pogrom all over Northern Ireland, and the responsibility will be ours. We have made our point. Let us now go home with a little dignity.”

And they did. The Rev. Paisley had won a shabby victory.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Sanctuary In The Sanctuary

The anti-war movement is taking sanctuary in the church.

In a series of actions centering in Boston, organizations opposed to the Viet Nam war have joined congregations to offer disaffected GIs the symbolic protection of church walls against federal arrest.

In the most dramatic incident so far, Army Private Raymond Kroll—backed by student supporters often numbering 1,000—held off police for five days at Marsh Chapel of the Boston University School of Theology (Methodist). Kroll, AWOL for more than a month, was taken into custody last month while several hundred students blocked the aisles in passive resistance.

In the weeks since this “bust,” radical students have been winning support for removing Army ROTC from campus. The only administration response has been creation of a study committee on the issue.

The sanctuary was staged by a group of anti-war seminarians in cooperation with the New England Resistance, a regional organization committed to anti-draft counseling and other protest activities and loosely affiliated with similar anti-war organizations across the country.

“The idea behind this form of protest,” explained Resistance staffer Joel Kuglemass, “is to reach people on the issue of the war who wouldn’t be drawn into traditional radical activity.”

The sanctuary tactic (which dates to early Greek history but is not recognized in Western law) was revived last May at Boston’s fashionable Arlington Street (Unitarian) Church. The same church had sponsored the 1967 draft-card burning ceremony which led to the controversial conspiracy conviction of Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr.

Since May, sanctuary has been extended to at least six soldiers on four occasions in Boston, as well as in several other cities.

The first campus sanctuary came in September at Harvard Divinity School. Besides poor planning, the event was marred when soldier Paul Olympia surrendered to military police on the second day, charging he had been “used” by organizers.

Olympia is known to have made a brief visit to Marsh Chapel moments before Viet Nam veteran Thomas Pratt, his good friend who was participating in Kroll’s sanctuary, surrendered himself and denounced his supporters. This led activists to suspect both were military “plants.”

In the face of controversy, the Boston University theology faculty, like the administration, has remained silently aloof, despite the fact that a majority of the teachers last year signed a petition supporting draft resistance.

Organizers believed last month they had found an effective way to refocus anti-war sentiment, which had dwindled since the start of the Paris peace talks. Their success seemed to assure repeat performances of the tactic-on and off campus-in sympathetic churches across the country.

WILLIAM D. FREELAND

A serious accident has taken place and a loved one, unconscious and bleeding, is rushed to the hospital and taken immediately to the operating room. After what seems like hours of agonized waiting the surgeon comes out, and you immediately ask the questions uppermost in your heart: “How is he?” “Is there hope?”

If the surgeon smiles as he comes to you and says, “Don’t worry; he’ll be all right,” what a relief! What a surge of joy and thankfulness!

As the word and assurance of the surgeon bring hope for the recovery of the injured one, so the Christian faith gives hope for eternity. Christianity is the religion of hope. Christ is the door of hope. To his bewildered and apprehensive disciples of an earlier day he spoke the word of hope; “I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also” (John 14:3b); and to his own of this generation he gives the same promise. But for some the time seems very long, the way very rough.

I have crossed the Pacific by boat several times. On every trip there were days of calm seas and clear skies. But sometimes the waves were high, and on occasion storms seemed to threaten the safety of the ship. Day after day we proceeded on course, with the horizons ever unattainably merging into new ones.

But inevitably the time came when a thrill of excitement ran through the passengers. Land had been sighted, and before long we would be safely in the harbor. All the time the captain and crew had known that beyond the horizon there was land and the desired haven, and the passengers had, by faith, shared in this hope. We read of our heavenly hope in the Book of Hebrews: “So that … we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to seize the hope set before us. We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner shrine behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf” (Heb. 6:18–20a).

What a glorious hope! The anchor of our souls safely fixed in the harbor, unseen but sure because Jesus himself has gone ahead for us.

In contrast, how vast is the hopelessness of the unbeliever! The Apostle Paul wrote the Christians in Ephesus: “Remember that you were … separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12). These same people, once hopeless, had found their hope in the One who died for them, so that Paul could say, “In him you also, who have heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and have believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, which is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory” (Eph. 1:13, 14).

Today there is a grave danger in the organized church of dispensing entirely with the element of eternal hope by substituting humanism for Christianity, with a one-sided emphasis on man’s physical welfare and economic security. Important as these latter things are, they must not be given priority over the soul’s welfare and the eternal verities. Paul warns, “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable” (1 Cor. 15:19, KJV).

Some years ago a man was crossing New York harbor on a ferry and, being interested in machinery, went down into the engine room. Everything was spotless, and the brass shone like a mirror. When he complimented the engineer for this, the engineer replied with a shining face, “I have a glory in my heart.” How few of us reflect the hope and glory of belonging to Christ by the way we look and the work we do!

There are many facets of Christian hope. In Hebrews it is spoken of variously as a “homeland,” “a better country,” a “heavenly” one, a city “God has prepared,” “a kingdom that cannot be shaken,” an “everlasting city,” “the city which is to come.” And Jesus implies that ours is a heavenly citizenship in the words, “They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world” (John 17:16).

The Christian’s hope, far from excluding concern and compassion for the less fortunate, should produce not only love for his fellow men and concern for their material needs but also a strong desire that they might share the same precious hope that is his in Christ.

This hope resets on the sure foundation of the revelation God has given of his truth, his promises that cannot fail, his faithfulness and ability to fulfill what he has promised—all secured through the person and work of Jesus Christ.

It is a hope sustained by the faith that is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). It rests with an unswerving confidence in the fact that Christ has secured our future and that day by day all things are being fitted together for our good by a loving and sovereign God.

The Christian’s hope is nourished by the Scriptures. There he finds his faith strengthened by the assurance that “whatsoever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope” (Rom. 15:4). He is almost intoxicated with a godly optimism. Like David he can say, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil” (Ps. 23:4a).

By the Scriptures he is brought into a full assurance, so that he can say with Paul that he knows the Christ revealed there through personal experience and knows that Christ is able to keep everything committed to him “against that day.”

This hope also involves an expectation of the Lord’s return: “For the grace of God has appeared for the salvation of all men, training us to renounce irreligion and worldly passions, and to live sober, upright, and godly lives in this world, awaiting our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:11–13).

This hope that sustained the early Christians is still our shining prospect. We know a better day is coming, a glorious day when Christ shall return, “coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory” (Matt. 24:30b).

Finally, the facts about our hope should be transmitted to our children—“that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn, and arise and tell them to their children, so that they should set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments” (Ps. 78:6, 7).

How we of this generation are failing in this duty to our children! Little wonder that many are in revolt, disillusioned but desperately poor spiritually—all because they see no good end for the world. Much that we see in young people today stems from an utter hopelessness. They see so little in many Christians to commend the Gospel they profess.

Christianity is the religion of hope, and a joy to experience—for we belong to the Creator-Redeemer, the King of kings and the Lord of lords, now and forever.

L. NELSON BELL