Churches Step up Aid to Peru

“All that remains of Yungay is the white statue of Christ standing with outstretched hands in the cemetery hill,” a United Methodist relief-agency executive reported from Peru. Eighteen thousand Peruvians had died in Yungay when last May’s earthquake tumbled seventy million tons of mud, ice, and water on the city.

The scene was hardly an isolated one. Forty days after Peru rocked for forty seconds, the death count had climbed beyond 50,000. With the rainy season only two months away, religious and government agencies that had leaped to Peru’s relief (see July 3 issue, page 38) were giving priority to providing shelter for more than 200,000 victims of the massive earthquake. The Soviet Union airlifted food and bulldozers.

Church aid came from as far away as Iceland and Australia, and as near as Lima. The Nordic and Evangelical Lutheran churches in Iceland dispatched five airplanes, complete with pilots, mechanics, and spare parts. Seventh-day Adventists in Australia sent $2,000.

From Lima, Adventists provided thirty-two tons of food for quake victims, and five American Lutheran medical students and volunteer nurses trekked by truck and on foot to be the first relief workers in the Andean village of Yautan. In fact, noted a Christian and Missionary Alliance minister, the immediate response of evangelicals in Lima was an impressive number of rescue teams sent to the aid of stricken neighbors.

This month missions began assessing loss of church members, buildings, and schools. The CMA reported that the tidal wave that destroyed Chimbote and its fishing fleet also demolished a CMA church, though the main church there was only slightly damaged. Three CMA church members were killed; forty families were left destitute. The tidal wave also carried off the Roman Catholic Church of San Francisco, leaving only the altar behind, and killed two American nuns who had been working at the Society of St. James clinic there.

Donald J. Sandstrom, who was in Peru when the quake hit, reports that the SDA Church, Peru’s largest Protestant church, lost half a dozen churches, about fifteen schools and chapels, and nearly thirty church members. In Trujillo, a Salvation Army children’s home was severely damaged, and a Lima Salvationist reported thirty relatives lost.

The SDA Church, one of the three volunteer agencies recognized by the Peruvian government (the others are Catholic Relief Service and Church World Service, which expects to raise $1.5 million from member churches), has poured well over $100,000 into Peru. In the first two weeks after the quake, Adventists sent 150,000 pounds of clothing, 29,000 pounds of milk, 2,000 blankets, and 300 large tents.

The Salvation Army was also on the spot with medical aid, hot meals twice a day for as many as 600, and regular religious services. “It was amazing how happy the people were while they were singing,” observed one of the Army nurses. “It was hard to realize that they had absolutely nothing to go back to.”

By mid-July, the Salvation Army had shipped 909 tons of supplies worth more than $500,000. Though many roads have been cleared, volunteers still often travel as long as nine hours by mule train to reach mountain towns. Now that the medical emergency is over, Salvationists plan to build as many as 100,000 shelters to protect homeless Peruvians from freezing night temperatures.

By no means is all Christian concern for earthquake victims expressed through church relief agencies. A number of vacation Bible schools this summer earmarked their offerings for Peruvian relief. Luther Rice Memorial Baptist Church in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D. C., collected $1,150 to buy a bus for an Irish Baptist mission in Moquegua, Peru.

JANET R. GREISCH

The Porch From Which Paul Preached?

Archaeologists unearthed a sheltered portico dating from the sixth century B. C. in Athens last month. Professor Leslie Shear of Princeton, who led the team, identified their discovery as the Royal Stoa, or Stoa of the Basileus, where an Athenian council had condemned Socrates to death for what Plato called “neglect of the gods.”

Classicist Arthur Rupprecht of Wheaton (Illinois) College further identified the site as the porch from which laughter rang when Paul proclaimed Christ to the “Court of Areopagus” (Acts 17:19, 22, NEB) as the Athenians’ “unknown god.”

To ancient Athenians, says Rupprecht, the Areopagus commonly meant the council responsible for religious affairs and related questions of justice—the same council that 400 years earlier had convicted Socrates. The steep, uneven terrain of the hill Aeropagus and its high-velocity winds, he says, “make it hard to keep one’s balance, to say nothing of listening to a speech. Therefore it is all but impossible to conceive of sophisticated Greeks retiring to it to listen to the compelling arguments of Socrates or Paul.”

Shear and his colleagues discovered the Stoa about twenty feet below present ground level, between the Athens-Piraeus suburban railway and the Athenian flea market.

An Old Problem Arises Anew

Just how old is that wood concealed beneath the ice-encrusted slopes of Mount Ararat in Turkey? A search expedition hopes to find out more this summer (see May 22 issue, page 38, and February 13 issue, page 39), but conflicting evidence from samples already recovered poses questions for the scientific world.

Tests made in California, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania from carbon-14 methods agreed that the L-shaped beam is from 1,300 to 1,700 years old, far too young to be part of the biblical ark. But laboratories in Madrid, Paris, and Bordeaux indicate the wood is of “great antiquity,” probably 5,000 years old. These findings were based on the degree of lignite formation, gain in density, cell modification, and the degree of fossilization—not carbon-14 dating.

One explanation for the discrepancy is that the wood was soaked in glacial meltwater for many centuries and may have been contaminated by carbon-14 more recently formed in the upper atmosphere (by cosmic-ray neutrons) and brought down as carbonic acid in rain or snow. The more recent carbon, with its higher portion of the C-14 isotope, could have affected the radio carbon dating, according to this theory.

Another possibility, reported by the SEARCH (Scientific Exploration Archeological Research) Foundation, questions the two major assumptions of the carbon-14 method. Quoting W. F. Libby of the University of Chicago, the man who developed the carbon-14 theory, SEARCH says the assumptions are: (1) for the last 20,000 to 30,000 years the amount of cosmic radiation reaching our atmosphere has remained constant; (2) the quantity of water in the oceans has not changed during the same period.

If these assumptions are incorrect, as the ark-hunters hope, there could be major ramifications for archaeology and other sciences that now rely on carbon-14 dating. By mid-July Turkish officials were still reluctant to allow explorers to climb the mountain in search of the reported wooden structure lurking beneath the ice pack at 13,500 feet.

Open Intolerance?

The Federal Communications Commission reversed the findings of one of its hearing examiners last month and refused to renew licenses for two radio stations owned by Faith Theological Seminary (see also editorial, page 17).

Dr. Carl McIntire, Faith board chairman, immediately vowed to initiate litigation to overrule the FCC’s 6-0 decision. “This decision is a stunning blow,” he said, “but we shall fight it in every proper and lawful way. We shall take it to the Supreme Court of the United States. We shall take it to the people of the country. We shall take it to the Congress. The liberals have revealed openly their intolerance of speech and of religious differences.”

Black Churchmen: Renouncing And Denouncing

Black churchmen made their presence felt this summer in church councils and conventions, in the media, and in a blunt attack on President Nixon. Two of the major issues revolved around funds for black empowerment, and a prominent national group of black churchmen threatened to renounce allegiance to the United States in a “Black Declaration of Independence.”

In Seattle, delegates to the Unitarian Universalist Association voted 426 to 399 to cut off support to the controversial Black Affairs Council the association set up two years earlier. The UUA General Assembly had approved $1 million for the BAC in 1968, payable in four annual lumps of $250,000. But financial problems forced UUA trustees to cut that back to $200,000 a year spread over five years. The angered BAC disaffiliated, and the grant was snipped out of the budget completely (see March 13 issue, page 41).

The controversy turned on black empowerment versus an integrated approach, and the Black Unitarian Universalist Caucus, which boycotted the Seattle assembly, claimed “bad faith” and “backlash reaction” to black empowerment. The black caucus and the council announced a grass-roots drive among local churches to make up the money independently.

Meanwhile, directors of the newly formed National Office for Black Catholics asked the nation’s Catholic bishops to grant it $650,000 annually to provide black Catholics an official national voice in the church. If approved by the hierarchy at their November meeting, the black Catholic agency will have one of the largest budgets among domestic agencies funded by the bishops; it already is the most independent of episcopal control.

In a full-page ad in the New York Times, forty-one clergymen and civil-rights groups of the National Committee of Black Churchmen pledged they would sever all allegiance to the United States “unless we receive full redress and relief” from “injustice … and racism of white America” perpetrated against black Americans.

“Our repeated petitions have been answered mainly by repeated injury,” the declaration said. “A nation, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a racially oppressive regime, is unfit to receive the respect of a free people.”

In an attack on national leadership, the board chairman of the NAACP charged at a meeting of the civil-rights organization that the Nixon administration is racist. “For the first time since Woodrow Wilson, we have a national administration that can be rightly characterized as anti-Negro,” asserted Bishop Stephen G. Spottswood.

Despite denial of Spottswood’s allegations later by several black administration officials, the meeting left the White House and the NAACP at a virtual impasse.

Christian ‘Pilgrimage’

The National Association of Congregational Christian Churches paid tribute to its Pilgrim ancestors at its sixteenth annual meeting. A devotional service was held on the site of the memorial to the Pilgrim dead in Plymouth. Sixty-two association representatives went on a tour of England and Holland after the meeting to mark the 350th anniversary of the sailing of the Pilgrims.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.