Mideast Raid Reaction Mars Christian-Jewish Relations

Christian-Jewish relations, touchier since the 1967 Mideast war, slid again this month in the aftermath of Israeli commandos’ attack on the major airport at Beirut, Lebanon. The raid was condemned by Pope Paul, leaders of the U. S. National Council of Churches,* and Moscow’s Orthodox patriarch, as well as the United States and the Soviet Union.

But top Jewish leaders, irritated that these spokesmen had not similarly opposed a previous Arab terrorist attack on an Israeli plane in Athens, charged the Christians with a double standard.

Jerusalem’s Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Nissim called Pope Paul’s sympathetic wire to Lebanon’s President Charles Helou “one-sided” and “materialistic”—the latter because the Arabs had killed a man, while the Israeli commandos took no lives while destroying thirteen civilian aircraft worth $44 million. Israel’s Minister of Religion Zerah Wahrhaftig said “the Vatican turned a blind eye” to the Athens raid and, for that matter, to the plight of Jews in World War II.

Israeli officials dissociated the government from this view, but Israel’s Roman Catholic hierarchy complained publicly of a “malicious” campaign against the Pope.

Paul’s wire had deplored violent acts on both sides and expressed hope that Lebanon (the Mideast’s most Christian nation) would hold to its previous moderate stance amid Arab-Israeli tensions. Subsequent events proved political realities would make that a treacherous task for the Helou regime.

In the United States, the alliance of Orthodox rabbis warned of “a Christian backlash,” alienating supporters of Israel. The group spoke after Christian timing and balance had been criticized by the Synagogue Council of America, American Jewish Congress, B’nai B’rith, and the New York Board of Rabbis.

Among those sounding the double-standard theme was Monsignor John Oesterreicher of Seton Hall University’s Institute of Judeo-Christian Studies, himself a convert from Judaism. Of the Beirut raid he said:

“I fear that the government move may have been politically imprudent. But I cannot denounce the action from a moral point of view. I do not consider it so much a reprisal as an act of self-defense. I think the Israeli government, by these so-called ‘reprisals,’ wishes to serve notice on Arab governments supporting terrorist organizations in one way or another that they do this at their own risk.”

He added, “The Jew is expected to live by the Sermon on the Mount; we are not. Jews are almost by definition people who avoid getting into a fight. Now this image has been destroyed, not only in Israel but elsewhere.”

Monsignor Marvin Bordelon, peace director for the U. S. Catholic Conference, fears “a conflict of global proportions” unless the refugees on both sides get permanent relief and Arabs recognize the existence of Israel.

Some Protestants were reluctant to speak out on the raid issue, mindful of missionaries’ delicate status. But chief United Church of Christ missions executive Alfred Carleton, who served three decades in Muslim lands, wired President Johnson that all aid to Israel should be suspended “pending evidence [that] constructive policies will prevail in their relations with Arab states.”

In a January 15 speech, Moderator Robert McClure of the United Church of Canada told the Toronto Zionist Council that non-Jews see something of a “guilt complex” and “a certain element of paranoia” in Jewish reaction to criticisms on current political controversies.

In a press conference called by the American Jewish Committee, President G. Douglas Young of the Institute of Holy Land Studies gave the views of an American Protestant living in Israel. In contrast with the bloodless Beirut raid, he said, Arabs have been “planting bombs in schools, mosques, and theaters.”

One current Protestant-Jewish irritant is Israel’s effort to take over Jerusalem land owned by the Lutheran World Federation for building temporary city defenses. After negotiations in Geneva, the LWF made tentative arrangements to rent the site, where the Lutherans had thought of building a Bible-study center.

But by mid-January, Catholic-Jewish relations seemed to be settling down a bit. The Pope held an unusual audience with leaders of the World Jewish Congress, who happened to meet in Rome this month. The Pope explained his telegram and expressed his regard for the Jewish people.

Parochial Rumblings Up North

George Romney, a member of the Nixon Cabinet, thinks church schools should concentrate on religious education and send their students to public schools for secular education—at least in Michigan. In his farewell as governor of that state before becoming secretary of housing and urban development, Mormon Romney commented on the simmering debate about the state’s aid to parochial schools.

Michigan, a state of eight million population, has nearly 1,000 parochial schools educating 335,000 of the state’s 2.4 million school-age children. Romney stopped a breath short of advocating outright closing of the parochial schools, saying all children should be sent to public schools for secular education and the church institutions should concentrate on religious instruction. “The state has an obligation to pay for the education of all its children,” he said.

“His proposal is too absurd to argue about,” retorted Dr. John F. Chiotz of the Michigan Association of Non-Public Schools. Besides, he pointed out, it doesn’t line up with a Nixon campaign dictum saying a “significant role” awaited religious schools in the future of the country. Missouri Synod Lutheran executive Carl Mehl said Romney “has put his foot in his mouth again.”

For many, the question is dollars and cents. One source puts the extra burden on Michiganders at $209 million annually. But Romney, in a commonsense stance, viewed state aid as nothing more than “a temporary expedient. Once we start down the road of state aid to private and parochial schools, it would only be a matter of time before they were getting as much aid as public schools.” To Romney, the children’s allowance ultimately was destined to come out of the same pocket.

Religion And ‘Right To Work’

A number of fundamentalist groups take to work with them every day the biblical admonition not to be “unequally yoked together with unbelievers.” As a result, efforts in the Ninety-first Congress to repeal controversial Section 14-B of the Taft-Hartley Act will draw them into a real legislative-moral donnybrook.

The Mormons will join them, but from a different theological stance. They believe repeal of 14-B will infringe on the doctrine of free choice, held by them as necessary for spiritual maturity.

The problems are these: First, for the Mormons, if the law is repealed, then, as in the thirty-one of the states, once a shop votes to unionize, they have no real choice but to join or contribute to a designated charity. This lack of real choice boxes them in; hinders the free working of God in their lives, they say.

For the fundamentalists, to join is to enjoy the benefits of unionization, but it also means compromise. Many of the factory workers are non-believers, and so pacts with them are taboo.

During the fight in the Eighty-ninth Congress, members of such groups as the Plymouth Brethren and the Christian and Missionary Alliance got pallid support from the National Association of Evangelicals in their effort to avoid compulsory union membership. And although the National Council of Churches endorsed repeal, it strongly supported loopholes for conscience’ sake in behalf of Mormons and fundamentalists.

The fight is on, with AFL-CIO President George Meany leading the way after a still-smarting debacle during the Eighty-ninth.

Campus Revolt In Reverse

Student rebellion has even reached Presbyterian-supported Pikeville College, whose campus is dug into an Appalachian Mountain slope. But with a twist. The students aren’t griping about mossbacked administrators or tight rules. They object to women teachers in miniskirts, long-haired professors, and a liberal president who says he wants to give students more freedom and make their education more relevant.

Thanks largely to this protest in reverse, Pikeville College is being investigated by the Kentucky Committee on Un-American Activities. College President Thomas Johns, a Presbyterian minister, complained at a recent hearing: “The people of Pikeville take everything that goes on at this committee’s hearings as the gospel.”

“We must have the only right-wing student protest movement in the country,” says senior Dave Cleavanger, proudly. The primary target is progressive policies instituted since Johns took office in the spring of 1967.

In often defiant tones, conservative students—who seem to have the numerical upper hand in the 1,200 enrollment—have accused Johns of ousting elderly teachers and replacing them with faculty members of “leftist” leanings. They complain that Johns puts too much emphasis on sociology and psychology courses.

Johns, in an effort to take education “out of its box” and address it “to the twentieth century,” has required courses on contemporary issues, and secured federal grants so students can work in local anti-poverty projects. He put students on faculty and board committees; urged them to get involved in such local issues as water pollution, strip mining, and illiteracy; and has generally encouraged them to “do your own thing.”

These moves would have made him the campus darling of Berkeley or Columbia. But not at Pikeville (population 5,800), a town where newsstands refused to sell copies of Life and Look when they carried stories of the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution.

“We don’t know what our thing is,” remarked one bewildered sophomore. “And even if we did, we don’t know how to do it.”

At other campuses, students complain that the faculty is too distant. The Pikeville gripe is that teachers are too chummy. “I just don’t want my professor to be a pal,” cried junior Holly Bowling.

Johns, who is backed by the college board and United Presbyterian leaders in the area, believes the campus controversy is healthy and educational in itself. But he admits that earlier student testimony to the KCUA, which is mainly investigating anti-poverty workers in the Pikeville area, has caused him “a great deal of anguish.”

JOHN F. NELSON

A RISE IN ANTI-SEMITISM?

Increasingly violent America appears to face a period of organized anti-Semitism. New York Mayor John Lindsay created a special police unit this month to investigate fires and vandalism after the fourteenth in a series of burnings of Jewish schools and synagogues. The latest caused $1 million damage to 56-year-old Shaaray Tefila Congregation in Queens. Arson is suspected but was not immediately proved. One area Jewish council has ordered twenty-four-hour guards for all synagogues.

Lindsay said fourteen of thirty-two fires at religious buildings last year were at Jewish institutions. The 1967 figure was eight out of twenty-seven.

Days later a bombing at Shaare Tikvanh Synagogue near Washington, D.C., did $150,000 damage. If a dance had not been shifted because of the flu, many young people would have been killed or injured in the blast. And award-winning Temple Anshe Amunin in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, was damaged in a nighttime shooting attack.

Meanwhile, moderate black leader Whitney Young, Jr., condemned the desecrations and noted that Negroes had not been involved in any known case. But he warned that some anti-Semitic expressions by blacks in the city school controversy could hurt racial drives, and condemned “malicious baiting of teachers” because of their religion.

The Gallup Poll Says …

Billy Graham and Pope Paul remain among the world figures most admired by Americans, according to an annual Gallup Poll survey. Gallup’s data from questioning of 1,501 persons the first week in December lists the top ten as follows: Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Edward Kennedy, Billy Graham, Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, George Wallace, Pope Paul, Harry Truman, and Eugene McCarthy.

Other religious leaders who received significant mention were Richard Cardinal Cushing, Mormon President David McKay, Norman Vincent Peale, Oral Roberts, and Bishop Fulton Sheen.

Americans score the highest in religious orthodoxy among persons in a dozen nations surveyed by the international arm of the Gallup Poll.

Only 2 per cent of the Americans did not affirm a belief in God, while nearly one-fourth of Frenchmen and Swedes were agnostics.

In the U. S. sample, 73 per cent believed in life after death, 19 per cent did not, and 8 per cent had no opinion. The affirmative response was 16 per cent higher than in the second-place country, Greece.

However, Greece was close to the U. S. percentage of 65 percent who believe in hell, and the Greeks showed the highest percentage of belief in the devil (67 per cent).

Comparing figures from as far back as 1948, Gallup says Americans have maintained religious beliefs over the two decades, and even strengthened belief in an afterlife. But a dramatic downward turn has occurred in Europe.

The 1968 polling of more than 12,000 adults was done between July and November and reported late last month. In the following nations the poll showed more people disbelieve in hell and the devil than believe: Norway, Finland, Holland, Austria, Switzerland, West Germany, Great Britain, France, and Sweden.

Lutheran Football

It was Super Bowl Sunday, and in mild Miami the New York Jets were enjoying their fellowship with the National Football League by beating the Baltimore Colts 16 to 7; but in wintery River Forest, Illinois, 1,200 Lutheran laymen were not so enthusiastic about the prospects of inter-church cooperation.

The laymen had forsaken televised football to gather at Concordia Teachers College for a discussion between Dr. John Warwick Montgomery, professor of church history at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and Dr. William H. Weiblen, associate professor of theology at Wartburg Theological Seminary. At issue: the proposed “altar and pulpit fellowship” between the American Lutheran Church and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

The Missouri Synod, whose churches comprise the majority of Lutherans in the Illinois region, has a history of opposition to ecumenical ties of any kind. Montgomery represented the anti-fellowship position, saying: “This proposed union would be a terrible mismatch.” Both the ALC and Missouri have theological difficulties, according to Montgomery. But while Missouri is making attempts to “clean things up,” the ALC “has lost its concern for the disciplined purity of church theology.”

Weiblen, who represented the middle-of-the-road position taken by the ALC in its dealings with Missouri on one hand and with the Lutheran Church in America on the other, stressed a theology of grace and urged that “in repentance we can find a new life together.” He told the predominantly Missouri audience that “we have common confessional roots; we need each other; we can learn together.”

Montgomery doubted whether a theology of grace is possible if a church allows a “deterioration of scriptural authority.” He brought charges against ALC seminaries on this count. Montgomery stated, “In my own studies with ALC professors I never encountered one who believed in the inerrancy of the Bible.” He further quoted a survey conducted by sociologist Jeffrey Hadden that found only 23 per cent of ALC clergy believing in inerrancy, contrasted with 76 per cent of pastors in the Missouri Synod.

Weiblen’s rejoinder was that surveys also show a large amount of unbiblical race prejudice among Missouri churchmen, demonstrating that all Lutherans “need humility in making statements about what we take the Gospel to be.”

Missouri members of the Lutheran Laymen’s League, which sponsored the discussion, complimented Weiblen on the dignity of his appeal for them to move into “wider circles of relationship.” Yet they identified themselves with Montgomery’s statement of their predicament: “When faced with a Protestantism characterized in the main by compromising radicalism and irrelevant fundamentalism, it is not difficult or inaccurate to consider genuine Lutheranism the last, best doctrinal hope of earth.”

The audience was Lutheran grassroots, mainly middle-age and older. These people fear that administrative leaders of the Missouri Synod are pushing them into a compromising situation where they will have to give approval to people and doctrines that are not “genuinely Lutheran,” and that eventually they will follow the ALC into the Lutheran World Federation, the National Council of Churches, and the World Council.

Missouri leaders in 1967 called for communicant acceptance and pulpit exchanges with the ALC. The synod, which has a congregational base, will vote on the precedent-breaking proposal at its convention in July. So far, few Lutherans realize what they might be getting into. According to Larry Marquardt, a Missouri layman who organized the River Forest meeting, few attempts have been made to bring together and inform them about the theological issues raised by the move toward communion.

Some pastors brought groups from their congregations to the discussion, while others, according to reports, boycotted the meeting in opposition to the anti-fellowship tone they supposed it would have.

FRED PEARSON

Thwarted Again

The Third Latin American Evangelical Congress scheduled for next month has been postponed for a second time. The decision represents a serious setback for UNELAM (the Provisional Council for Evangelical Unity), headed by Uruguay’s Emilio Castro and backed by the World Council of Churches.

Since the second congress, held in Peru in 1961, efforts to stage the third congress have been frustrated. Rising opposition of conservative evangelical forces to UNELAM activities has been a contributing factor.

The congress will now be held July 13–19 in Buenos Aires, under sponsorship of the Argentine Federation of Evangelical Churches, headed by the Rev. Luis Bucasusco. The congress, promoted by UNELAM, is expected to be a sounding board for many of Latin America’s more liberal theologians.

UNELAM’s Castro sent a wire the day before Christmas notifying the U. S. National Council of Churches.

NCC Latin America director Dana Green said that besides the continuing controversies within churches over WCC-type ecumenism, church-and-society programs, and Roman Catholic relations, the original plan to meet in Sao Paulo, Brazil, was unsettled by the uncertain political climate in Brazil. He said Brazil’s churches, which were to sponsor the meeting, have a conservative-liberal polarization that reflects political opinions.

Meanwhile, many evangelicals are focusing interest in the First Latin American Congress on Evangelism, scheduled for Bogota, Colombia, November 21–30. Last month the sponsoring committee of Latin American leaders prepared a preliminary program in a meeting at Cuernavaca, Mexico. The Rev. Efrain Santiago is coordinating the congress. Co-chairmen are Carlos Lastra, Puerto Rican economics professor and former secretary of state there, and General Director Clyde Taylor of the U.S. National Association of Evangelicals. Some 800–1,000 delegates are expected to meet to stimulate evangelism in a continent that already has some of the world’s fastest growing churches.

C. PETER WAGNER

OFFERTORY BY COMPUTER

The collection plate may be old hat by the late 1970s, claims computer researcher Warren Winsness. He warned forty stewardship experts from the three big Lutheran denominations last month to gear for the “checkless society.”

Remember when bank checks began competing with cash money as a common medium of exchange? Now checks stand to be replaced by “an electronic fund transfer system” using computers and communications networks.

LCA layman Winsness thinks more dependable “pre-authorized withdrawals” from church members’ bank accounts will eventually become the chief source of church funds. All this could erase the offertory from the church service. But Winsness thinks that presenting money as part of worship involves “a very personal psychology,” and that new forms may be devised.

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