Eutychus and His Kin: February 14, 1969

Who Told You It Was Round?

“Everyone’s gone to the moon,” lamented a pop song that the radio intruded into my household last week. I showed respectful interest, only to be rebuked for not spotting an oldie resuscitated in deference to the adult world’s current craze. The latter gave Mr. Nixon a few nifty thoughts for his inaugural address, clobbered a certain durable notion about green cheese, provided a new slogan for Protestant extremists anxious to “keep the Pope off the moon” (are they sure that’s what they really want?), and allowed a New Scientist editorial to thunder: “Is it altogether dignified to strut about in a technological Versailles while the vast hordes of the world’s deprived could make such vital use of all these brains and dollars?” Forgetting biblical rejoinders, I was taken in for a moment by that tirade till it struck me (and I owe the thought to Mae West) that dignity has nothing to do with it.

Impervious to such larger lunacies, however, is Samuel Shenton, the rightful recipient of communications addressed “Flat Earth, Dover, England.” According to information received, his reaction to Apollo was markedly chilly. Mr. Shenton, sixty-five and a retired signwriter (something symbolic there?), is secretary of the International Flat Earth Society. With typical English understatement he defines his ministry as “putting up a little squeak” at the way the cosmos has been conned.

You ask how. Mr. Shenton will tell you. The earth is flat like a plate. A compass (ha! thought you had him?) gives only the illusion of a true course—misguided mariners are really following the circumference of the plate. There is no space. Astronautical pictures? Faked or distorted. And let him tell us another thing: The earth is not merely flat, it is stationary. Obscurely Mr. Shenton appears to take comfort in some innocuous words of one W. L. Cook of NASA who is quoted as having opined that the flat-earthers’ views “are in fact quite universally felt, if seldom expressed.” Among Mr. Shenton’s weightier sources are biblical references, notably First Samuel 2:8b: “For the pillars of the earth are the Lord’s, and on them he has set the world.”

Quizzed once by a reporter about his proselytizing record, Mr. Shenton manfully confessed he had never converted anyone. But, he added hopefully, “there’s my wife. She’s coming round.” Bizarre that last word may be, but Brother Shenton exudes that saintly-perseverance which positively thrives on a cause accounted lost by a flatly perverse world.

What The Doctor Ordered

The doctor’s prescription really works! “Physician to Pastor: Golf Isn’t Enough” (Jan. 17) was exactly right according to my experience.

It became a matter of conscience to me that as an overweight minister I was hurting my influence as well as my health.…

A minister has many gastronomical pitfalls. The traditional chicken dinners, over-solicitous cooks, plus all of the sedentary conditions make him a perfect target for obesity. But here is an opportunity for the practice of preaching about temperance. Some of us have been addicted to food in a fashion similar to the hold that drink has upon its victims.

Bethel College

Mishawaka, Ind.

President

Can I believe my eyes? Do I read correctly that Dr. Dennison is suggesting that the “clergy” abstain from smoking and drinking?

I have been in church attendance for thirty years, from the New England states to Florida, and have never once sat under a pastor who had any need for nicotine or alcohol.

Or is it that I have always sought out a “born-again pastor” when looking for a church home and thus have missed the “clergy”-type of person who do have to be warned about such things? These clerics need a good salvation message, not a doctor’s advice.

Broomall, Pa.

No doubt many will call your attention to the omission of “at ease” in the Amos quotation. That phrase was, no doubt, the purpose of the quotation.

Arnold Lutheran Church

Duluth, Minn.

Right Relations

As with many good insights, Leon Morris’s reconciliation article (Jan. 17) tends to be a little lopsided in correcting current impressions of the importance of reconciliation.

True: God’s initiative is most important. True: reconciliation is inherent in salvation.

But many psychologists and psychiatrists would probably say that often man is worried by the fact that he has done wrong.… Often these guilt burdens are heightened by our social or human relationships. Relationships should help us find release from guilt in God’s forgiveness in Christ.

Jesus himself recognizes this human dimension of the problem when he tells his listeners that if on the way to the altar they remember that someone has something against them, they should put down their sacrifice and go to be reconciled to their brother. Then they return to complete their obligation to God. He seems to say that faulty human relationships can in fact close the door to God.

Elkhart, Ind.

Wesley’S Worry

I read with interest your editorial on “The Church’s Mission” (Jan. 17), regarding social activists vs. evangelicals.

Lecky, the historian, is quoted on the Wesleyan revival’s saving England from oblivion. We certainly should not forget Wesley’s Gospel of reconciling man to God. However, let us neither forget his witness of social action. Wesley did not only worry about men’s souls. He instituted clinics and credit unions, worked with Wilberforce to abolish slavery, and so on.

The evangelicals of today can no more place an exclusive claim on Wesley than the social activists, who are so subtly derided in your editorial. If Wesley was anything, he was a “social-evangelical.” And incidentally, that places him between the two polarities that some of us are so insidiously widening—including CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

The First Methodist Church

Palmer, Tex.

Love And Foreign Policy

I would like to take issue with your editorial, “A Church in Politics” (Jan. 17).

Whether “influencing foreign policy” is evangelism or not doesn’t seem to be the issue. But influencing foreign policy seems to me to be a quite legitimate realm for the Church to work in; indeed it seems almost an obligation.…

Saint Augustine said that “love calls us to the things of this world.” Does not our love for our fellow men in any part of the world demand that we speak out against our government’s policies if we feel they are morally unjust? If our government is representing us as a nation when it acts, it is also representing the Christian element in society. Don’t we want it then to do the right thing? It is time for Christians to make their voices heard if they truly love their neighbors as themselves.

Madison, Wis.

You criticize the United Methodist Church for “influencing foreign policy” by its position on the Viet Nam war. On page 37 you carry a favorable notice of Billy Graham, whose religious views and pronouncements also “influence foreign policy,” indeed help to implement it.

Apparently opposition to the war by a church is unchristian “meddling in politics.” However, support of the war by a churchman appears to be all right under the aegis of “evangelism.”

Many people, in the church and out, feel that the United Methodist Church is nearer to the mind and spirit of the Prince of Peace in its “evangelism” than is Graham with his “evangelism.”

Harrisonburg, Va.

A Course Finished

Whenever a dear friend dies, we at once write to his family expressing our sympathy. Dr. Kenneth Latourette, a dear friend of mine, has died, and I want to write to his family, but he never had a wife and children. His family was his multitude of friends, many of whom no doubt read CHRISTIANITY TODAY. SO I feel I must write this letter to you.…

I first met Ken Latourette in 1916 when I … visited Denison College in Ohio.… [He] had been a missionary in China and his health had failed, and so he had to return to America and was teaching in Denison, and acting as faculty advisor to the YMCA. His health failed—and in the fifty years that followed he wrote more church history than any other living man!

Once I asked Ken how on earth he was able to do all this difficult and scholarly writing, in addition to teaching and serving on countless boards and committees and delivering numerous addresses. He replied that since he had no family he had devoted to his writing the time that most men gave to their families. I am sure this was not the full explanation of his amazing literary productivity.…

Dr. Latourette kept to the end of his life the enthusiasm of the early leaders of the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, of which he had once been a secretary. He rejoiced in the growth of the missionary conventions of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship.…

Kenneth Latourette has finished his course. Now let us press on with the Evangelization of the World in This Generation!

Philadelphia, Pa.

The Depressing Truth

Thank you very much for the article “Missouri Compromise” (Current Religious Thought, Jan. 17). [It] is depressing yet true.…

There will be those who will be unhappy because of his article. They might suggest that he should not make public a family affair. They might even suggest that he has too recently become a part of that family to truly understand and know it. Far worse than making public this family affair are those within the family who are destroying it with their neo-orthodoxy and lack of discipline. Far from being an unwelcome novice in the Missouri Synod, Dr. Montgomery is looked upon by many as God’s answer to their fervent prayers for the restoration of a pure Lutheran confession. We gladly call him brother and teacher.

St. Paul’s Ev. Lutheran Church

Brookfield, Ill.

John Warwick Montgomery has declared that I, among others, have written in such a way as to contribute to the “downgrading of the Bible.” He accuses a number of people, including myself, of undermining the principle that “God’s Word is and should remain the only standard and rule.…” As evidence he quotes a single line. Here are a few other lines from the same essay to which he refers (Lutheran Forum, October 1968):

All the great Lutheran bodies confess—and not one denies—the authority of Sacred Scripture. In all the discussions among Lutheran bodies in our day we should be very clear about this: LC-MS, ALC and LCA according to their constitutions and official statements all believe, teach and confess “Scripture Alone” as norm and authority for the teaching and proclamation of the Church.… And more—there is not one shred of evidence that any one of these church bodies tolerates individual teachers who deny the principle of “Scripture Alone”.…

Indeed, Montgomery’s “expose is so prejudiced and warped that this reader was left wondering:

1. Is Montgomery merely a bad reporter?

2. Or is he simply not interested in speaking words which correspond to fact?

3. Or does he want to polarize and divide rather than edify the Body of Christ?

… I seriously doubt whether historical truth or the Lord of the Church is being served by the series so far.… Concordia Seminary

St. Louis, Mo.

Review Reviewed

I appreciate your selecting my book, Guaranteed Annual Income: The Moral Issues, for review (Dec. 20), and I take no offense from your reviewer’s apparent disagreement with the book’s perspective. Given his more extremely conservative orientation on economic questions, such disagreement is inevitable and ought to be expressed.

At two points, however, the review may have misled your readers. In the first place, Mr. Opitz suggests that I do not believe in work “as a virtue as well as a necessity.” But the book emphatically states my belief that work is of the very essence of man’s nature as God has created him. Work is man’s fitting, proper, and active response to God’s prior gifts of creation and grace. I did make a point of distinguishing between this broader perspective on work and a narrower view which quite unbiblically limits work to what we get paid for doing. Possibly the reviewer understands work only in this more limited perspective.

The other point has to do with the basic theological standpoint. One could read Mr. Opitz’s review without any inkling of the basic theological arguments which form the heart of my perspective, particularly the discussions of grace and creation. My discussion makes no claim of infallibility. But surely every evangelical Christian needs to ponder the relationship between the central doctrines of Christian faith and the economic issues of the day. Otherwise we run the risk of selling out our faith by deciding questions only on the basis of secular economic ideologies.

Wesley Theological Seminary

Washington, D. C.

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