Superchange: From Bach to O’Horgan

A large gray Rolls Royce limousine pulled away from the theater’s curb as the rest of the audience hurriedly stepped out into the brisk November afternoon air. A performance at Covent Garden? The Saturday matinee at the Metropolitan Opera or Philharmonic Hall? No, this Rolls Royce (and the Cadillac limousines that followed it) left the Mark Hellinger Theater, located on a narrow one-way street in New York’s Broadway district, where Jesus Christ Superstar is currently playing.

Directed and conceived by Tom O’Horgan (of Hair and Lenny fame), Broadway’s Superstar is a new creation; the record version forms only the outline. The seven last days of Jesus—minus the Resurrection—are portrayed through bizarre effects and for-the-shock-of-it images.

Meanwhile, across town at Philharmonic Hall, where the Rolls Royces and Cadillacs should be, Benjamin Britten’s new edition of Bach’s St. John Passion had its American premiere, a benefit program for the American Bible Society. Bach’s Passion, first performed on Good Friday, 1723, also covers Christ’s last seven days (again without the Resurrection). The fresh twentieth-century translation of this edition, plus the new organ score Britten provided, give the Passion a modernity rivaling Superstar’s. The dark, haunting tones of Bach’s organ and Superstar’s Moog Synthesizer (used for modern interpretations of Bach) create similar effects. Bach, however, is more traditional on at least one point: Jesus dies on a cross. In Superstar, Jesus hangs on a triangle.

Bach writes with conviction that Christ is the “Truth of God unshaken.” He doesn’t emphasize Pilate’s famous question as do Webber and Rice, the composers of Superstar.

Jesus’ humanity, asserted in the rock opera at the expense of his divinity, isn’t neglected in the older oratorio. But what Webber and Rice fail to portray, the truly human and dramatic response from Christ’s followers, Bach captures exactly.

The focal point is Peter; Bach emphasizes his anguish. Peter is the “beloved disciple,” and his denial of Jesus calls for dramatic elaboration. As Part One ends we hear Peter deny Christ for the third time. The tenor aria becomes Peter’s tormented voice.

Ah! take flight away from human sight, go, find some consolation! Shall I stay? Shall I climb the gray hills in fearful desperation? Through this world I seek in vain, and my grief wins my relief for all my bitter shame, while the servant wins a traitor’s name.

In Superstar Peter suffers no such ambivalence, no such remorse; he is only ordinarily unhappy. He isn’t repentant and does not recognize his need to repent. After his denial, Mary Magdalene approaches him; they consider how nice it would be to “begin again” (an addition for the Broadway show).

Webber and Rice turn the dramatic focus from Peter to Judas. It is the anguish of Judas, not Peter, that is important in Superstar. Judas, after betraying Jesus to the Jews, writhes and moans a remorse that is both sterile and unrepentant.

Against the three-part wooden curtain that lowers to become the stage floor, Judas’s quasi-crucifixion occurs. With arms outstretched and spotlight centered on his lower face and upper chest (as in many Renaissance paintings of Christ’s crucifixion), he asks why God has done this to him. Judas becomes the Christ-figure. He, rather than Jesus, experiences a resurrection—he returns from the ceiling as the center of a butterfly, singing the show’s theme song.

The idea of the composers, “to have Christ seen through the eyes of Judas,” is realized in the original album (the new album is the “original Broadway cast”). But on Broadway, Judas is the star. Tormented and tortured by fate, which is obviously symbolized by four faceless blue men, he is driven to his betrayal. Every noble move Judas attempts is thwarted by his blue companions (they follow him throughout the entire show). Because of them, Judas is not responsible for his actions. He doesn’t even hang himself; the “four fates” put the noose around Judas’s neck, as he stands passively waiting for his death (another Christ image).

One of the central weaknesses of Judas and other characters, especially Jesus, is that they only react to circumstances. Jesus shows little energy and even less emotion (other than childish anger at God and Judas). The sexuality between Mary and Jesus, implied on the record, is overtly depicted in the show. Mary seducingly soothes Jesus’ fevered brow. Jesus caresses Mary as she washes his feet, but his action is absentminded, not passionate.

The “showstopping” scene at Herod’s place falls flat. Rather than being shocking or sickening, Herod dressed in full drag is merely boring. The vulgar costuming and the busyness of the stage detract from the drama. The Hebrew king should mock Jesus, not strut and sway. The words sneer, but Herod doesn’t (he’s too busy trying to walk in his high-heeled shoes). The scene is a dull demonstration of the director’s unerring sense of bad staging. The visual effects, here and in other scenes, are so wildly overpowering that the real action of the opera is submerged.

The same happens in the marketplace scene. The vendors, rubber-headed in varying shapes à la Star Trek—some wrapped in rope—fill the stage. Critics have called this surrealistic or Daliesque; however, that’s giving O’Horgan too much credit.

Despite so many weaknesses, Superstar is a success. An audience of exquisitely dressed adults predominated at the performance this reviewer attended. At the Bach performance on November 10 there were more young, blue-jeaned kids than at Superstar. Yet after each performance of Superstar, kids crowd the theater’s back alley, screaming for autographs.

Why is Superstar so popular with today’s young people? The answer ministers, young people, and the composers themselves give is always the same: “It asks the right questions.” Webber and Rice, who intended to take no religious stand on the subject, wanted Superstar to do just that. The questions come through loud and clear on the record, but the visual antics and theatric pretentiousness of the Broadway version crowd them out.

Kids who attend Jesus Christ Superstar (and curious adults, too) no longer hear haunting questions; they hear lyrics emptied of meaning.

Missions And Mammon: What Leaders Are Saying

Missionaries are feeling a bit of a pinch because of the changing role of the United States in the world economy. A survey, however, failed to turn up any immediate reports of severe hardship. And some missions executives think the long-term impact might even aid the cause of global evangelism.

The biggest threat on the fiscal horizon posed for Christian ministries lies in the fate of American foreign aid. Government subsidies now enable religious organizations to distribute millions of dollars worth of surplus foods overseas. The government also pays the cost of transporting the goods there. If Congress upholds the recent Senate vote to end foreign aid, or if substantial cutbacks are ordered, relief efforts will be severely curtailed. A number of self-help training programs currently being conducted by evangelicals also are jeopardized, because they are built around regular receipt of surplus foods from the U. S. government.

The effect of wage and price controls in the United States and President Nixon’s de facto devaluation of the American dollar is not as clear. Asked how he saw it, Dr. David M. Stowe of the United Church of Christ replied: “Through a glass darkly.”

“This much is clear,” he declared, “We will have to operate on an austerity basis for the near future.” Opinions vary on whether the changes will work for eventual good, and Stowe, who is executive vice-president of his denomination’s board for world ministries, says he is personally uncertain.

According to Washington observers, there is a good chance that Americans living and working abroad will be exempt from wage hike limitations. They have already been allowed to get salary and allowance increases to compensate for loss of purchasing power where there have been fluctuating currencies. Many missions boards, however, are not geared up to make immediate adjustments.

Theoretically, missionaries hit hardest are those who raise their own support and live on minimal incomes. How many notches they must tighten their belts depends on the country in which they serve.

The nearly 2,000 Protestant missionaries currently serving in Japan seem to be faring the worst, because the purchasing power of the American dollar there has fallen by 10 per cent; it may dip even lower.

Wycliffe Bible Translators has some 2,700 workers scattered around the world; they are said to average only about $180 income a month per adult. But most of them work in underdeveloped countries and in bush situations where shifts in the world economy are felt very little.

None of the missions executives consulted in the survey said he knew of any privation among missionaries. Most seemed to be finding ways of taking up what financial slack there was.

The Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board, which has been the largest in the Protestant world, reported it stood to lose between one and two million dollars in purchasing power. The board, studying increased allowances for its 2,500 missionaries, is expected to report in December. It has a current annual budget of some $35 million.

The Reverend Wade T. Coggins, an official of the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association, said he thought that “over a period of time the effect would be neither good nor bad.” Evangelicals, he declared, have responded to needs in the past. “I expect they will donate additional amounts to make up for loss of purchasing power—if they are adequately challenged with respect to the needs.”

An earlier survey conducted by the Seattle Times evoked a sharply critical comment on the 10 per cent surcharge from Dr. Robert A. Thomas, executive chairman of the Division of Overseas Ministries of the Christian Church (Disciples). “Protective tariffs for the United States at this stage in the world’s life are unjustifiable,” he stated. “The Third World nations, desperately trying to improve their productive capacities, could be hurt badly.”

Thomas referred to the “preachy part” of Nixon’s first speech on the economic changes and said he regarded it as “jingoistic and nationalistic, with its emphasis on competition rather than sharing, all of it appealing to national selfishness and pride. The negative effects of those words will be felt for a long, long time around the world. It has made the missionary’s work harder, verifying the feeling that the United States is selfish, militaristic and inclined to act unilaterally whenever it takes the notion.”

But the Reverend Edwin L. Frizen, Jr., executive secretary of the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association, is optimistic about Nixon’s economic policies as a whole. “Over the long haul,” he said, “these policies will help our economy and will thereby make greater investments in the foreign-missions enterprise possible.”

DAVID KUCHARSKY

Pentecostal Evangelism: But Will It Work?

For the first time ever, American Pentecostals assembled for a united in-depth study of the “mission of Pentecostal evangelism.” The study came during the twenty-fourth annual Pentecostal Fellowship of North America meeting in Des Moines, Iowa, last month.

“There have been serious questions by those who analyze us, asking: if we really believe what we profess then why doesn’t it work?” said R. Leonard Carroll, Church of God (Cleveland) general overseer and conference official.

Fewer than 1,000 delegates attended, and they only half filled the main floor of the enormous Veterans Memorial Auditorium. The low attendance may have mirrored the viewpoint of a delegate who complained: “Who would have thought that we would ever have to hold a conference to learn how to evangelize? Old Pentecostals never seem to have had that problem.”

The meeting also served as a fitting symbol of both the strengths and weaknesses of American Pentecostalism. On the one hand, it was a visible sign of the movement’s growth. When first formed in the same city in 1948, the PFNA had only 200 delegates from ten denominations. This time twenty Pentecostal groups were included, representing 16,000 churches and more than a million members.

Other signs of growth: two new colleges are opening (Heritage Bible College of the Pentecostal Free-Will Baptist Church, in Dunn, North Carolina, and Congregational Holiness Bible Institute in Griffin, Georgia); the Pentecostal Holiness Church is considering relocating to larger headquarters in Oklahoma City (present offices are in Franklin Springs, Georgia); and delegates could see first-hand the new half-million-dollar headquarters of the Open Bible Standard Churches in Des Moines.

On the other hand, the small attendance reflected the lack of Pentecostal interest in organizational unity. (By comparison, several of their denominational gatherings often exceed 10,000.) No mention was made of the fact that three of the five largest Pentecostal groups have never been invited to PFNA membership. These are the Church of God in Christ, the largest black Pentecostal organization; the United Pentecostal Church, whose anti-Trinitarian formula is held in special contempt; and the Pentecostal Church of God in America, whose freedom-of-conscience policy regarding divorce is scorned. These groups comprise nearly half of all U. S. tongues-speaking believers.

Delegates failed to come up with a “Des Moines Declaration” that retiring PFNA chairman and Assemblies of God superintendent Thomas F. Zimmerman had requested at the beginning of the conference “to distill the spirit and objectives of evangelism for over two million Pentecostals in North America.”

Still, the conference was useful for its inspiration, even though it appeared to sidestep social issues and to fail to produce new models. Robert Taitinger, head of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, was named the new PFNA chairman.

JAMES S. TINNEY

Pentecostals To Rome

Pentecostal theologians—in Rome—for official dialogue with Catholics? Yes, this month. A team, representing the classical as well as neo-Pentecostal ends of the movement, will meet there, according to an announcement made at the annual meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, which convened in Des Moines following the Pentecostal Fellowship of North America (see preceding story).

Killian McDonald, Catholic theologian and Benedictine monk, broke the news to the thirty-five members present. “This has greater meaning for the Secretariat in Rome than dialogue with Lutherans, Presbyterians, or Methodists,” he urged. “And it would be embarrassing and narrow, to say the least, if you Pentecostals should remain silent, waiting for Rome to announce this historic event.”

But Pentecostals, especially their educators and theologians, have come a long way since the days when the pope was attacked as anti-Christ in Luther-style. No negative ripple followed.

The theme of the meeting dealt with higher education against the background of Pentecostal theology. Dr. R. Hollis Gause, dean of the school of religion at Lee College (Church of God), Cleveland, Tennessee, is president.

JAMES S. TINNEY

Wesleyan Vigor

Conservative Wesleyanism seemed to reach a new level of theological maturity at the seventh annual meeting of the Wesleyan Theological Society held last month at Trevecca Nazarene College in Nashville. In evidence were renewed social concern, more open dialogue with contemporary theology, and increased historical awareness.

There was a quiet sense of vigor, or at least of growth, in the meeting; no sign appeared of the controversy that had rocked the society for the last two years. Membership increased over the last year by a third, to 400.

The WTS draws its members from some twenty denominations including United Methodist, Wesleyan, Free Methodist, Nazarene, and Church of God (Anderson, Indiana). It serves as a “commission” of the Christian Holiness Association, a product of the holiness revival within Methodism in the middle of the last century. Regional sections are being established in North America and overseas, especially in the Caribbean and the Orient.

DONALD W. DAYTON

Religion In Transit

More than fifty Hare Krishna devotees, clad in saffron robes, danced, chanted, clapped, and explained the four principles of spiritual advancement to some 200 guests at the grand opening of the Sri Sri Radha Krishna Temple in San Francisco last month.

For the first time, Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox leaders of American Judaism have joined together in a declaration supporting Jewish day schools.

Twenty North Dakota Lutheran youths attending a weekend youth convention of 450 spent two nights in the Barnes County jail. Reason: no room in the inn. They were allowed to stay in the pokey when housing ran out.

Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock was named the most significant book of the year by Eternity magazine. Two evangelical books tied for second place: Conflict and Conscience, by Mark Hatfield, and The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century, by Francis Schaeffer.

Nondenominational, liberal Union Seminary of New York has 485 students this fall, thirty-eight fewer than a year ago and the lowest number of the past decade.

Women’s Lib has infiltrated the male-dominated field of academic theology: a caucus formed a section on Women and Religion of the American Academy of Religion during its annual meeting in Atlanta recently. About thirty women joined.

About sixty ministers and elders from nine Presbyterian and Reformed denominations have voted to secure a full-time executive director for the National Presbyterian and Reformed Fellowship. NPRF was formed a year ago as an unofficial alternative to COCU.

Personalia

Dr. Wilber T. Dayton, chairman of the Division of Religion and Philosophy at Marion (Indiana) College, will become president of Houghton (New York) College when outgoing president Stephen W. Paine retires next June.

For the first time in its history the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod has chosen a black to head one of its twenty-six schools of higher education. Dr. William Libert Wright is president of Alabama Lutheran Academy and College in Selma, a black institution.

The pastor of Due West Baptist Church was fired one week after the South Carolina church’s deacons dismissed services because a black student tried to attend. Pastor Don Stevenson held a service at a nearby college instead. Ironically, during the same meeting at which Stevenson was fired, the deacons voted to admit people of all races to all church functions.

Albert J. Page, administration manager of the IBM Space Systems Center in Huntsville, Alabama, is the new international chairman of the Christian Business Men’s Committee International.

Retired Toronto minister Wilfred N. Charlton was elected president of the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada at that denomination’s annual convention in Sarnia, Ontario. The denomination has 340 congregations, and overseas missionaries in five countries.

Deaths

WILLIAM CULBERTSON, 65, dean of Moody Bible Institute from 1942 to 1948, president of the school since then; in Chicago, of cancer.

J. H. HAMBLEN, 93, founder of the 11,000-member Evangelical Methodist Church in 1946, father of singer-songwriter Stuart Hamblen of Hollywood, California; in Abilene, Texas.

R. K. JOHNSON, 61, business manager of Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, for thirty-six years, during which time he directed development of BJU’s $37 million campus; in Acapulco, Mexico, while vacationing, of a heart attack.

Priest and civil-rights agitator James E. Groppi of Milwaukee has averaged more than $21,500 in income during the past four years, Religious News Service reported. He reportedly paid $1,347.81 in additional taxes and penalties after the Internal Revenue Service investigated his bank accounts.

In a group lawsuit in Charlotte, North Carolina, last month, fourteen people charged that Secret Service agents and local police refused to honor their tickets to a rally honoring Billy Graham and attended by President Nixon October 15. The plaintiffs said they were denied admittance because of their long hair and hippie-style dress.

World Scene

Attendance ran in the thousands for a recently completed five-week evangelistic campaign in Singapore under the leadership of John Haggai; hundreds made decisions for Christ.

The Billy Graham Association film His Land emulated its Atlanta triumph by taking highest marks in all categories when pop star Cliff Richard presented the Filey Film Awards in London. Also participating was lay evangelist Lindsay Glegg, founder in 1955 of the annual Filey Christian holiday crusade that takes over Butlin’s holiday camp in Yorkshire for a week.

Seventh-day Adventist Welfare Services has voted $10,000 aid for refugees from a Muslim-Christian conflict reportedly raging in the South Philippines; a letter from the Far Eastern Division of the church says a number of Adventist churches have been destroyed and several members killed.

Some fifty Muslim divinity-school graduates will be inducted by March into a Religion Corps of the Iranian Army. They will serve eighteen months, wear the garb of Muslim clergy.

The executive secretary of the United Methodist Committee for Overseas Relief, just returned from an inspection trip of India, described the flight of more than 9.5 million refugees from East Pakistan as the worst human tragedy of modern history.

Churches in Communist East Germany have contributed $418,000 to the controversial World Council of Churches fund to combat racism (particularly in Africa), the WCC reported.

A new round-the-clock telephone counseling service (“Telephone of Life”) backed by Protestant and Catholic groups in Tokyo became so popular sponsors had to suspend local advertising temporarily; spokesmen speculated that the world’s largest city may also contain the most lonely people.

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