High Theology in the Andes

At the first Latin America Congress on Evangelism held in Bogotá in the fall of 1969 (see December 19, 1969, issue, page 33), a hope was born that a nucleus of conservative evangelical theologians could be brought together to reflect on the Word of God and consider the present theological trends within the continent.

That hope became reality last month, when twenty-five key theologians gathered in Cochabamba, Bolivia, high in the Andean valleys, for the first consultation of the Fraternity of Latin American Theologians. The “fraternity” was brought together by invitation only in an attempt to produce a fruitful biblical theology directly related to contemporary Latin America.

Virtually every major republic of the continent including the Hispanic-American community of the United States (the fourth largest Spanish-speaking community in the hemisphere) was represented. The churchmen were members of Pentecostal, Anglican, Presbyterian, Baptist, Plymouth Brethren, Methodist, Lutheran, Nazarene, Covenant, Friends, and independent “faith mission” communions.

Peter Savage, rector of the George Allan Seminary of Cochabamba, skillfully kept the group on a single track: making theology. In his keynote address, he made a strong plea for transcending prejudices and human traditions “in order that God may once again speak to us in a voice of thunder.” A spirit of openness pervaded the six days of sessions: doctors of theology listened to Pentecostal Bible Institute graduates, covenant theologians listened to dispensationalists, Arminians listened to Calvinists, gringos listened to Latins, and men of 57 listened to those age 25.

Common to all was the desire to articulate an authentic Latin American theology. A 1,000-word statement, the Evangelical Declaration of Cochabamba, noted: “We recognize our debt to the missionaries who brought us the Gospel. At the same time we believe that a theological reflection relevant to our own peoples must take into account the dramatic reality of the Latin American scene, and make an effort to identify and remove the foreign trappings in which the message has been wrapped.”

Reflecting this consensus, Samuel Escobar scored missionaries who continue to fight the fundamentalist-modernist battle since “modernism has never made a significant impression on the Protestant Church in Latin America.”

As a historic event for Latin American Protestantism, the Cochabamba consultation may well rival the famous Panama Conference of 1916. During the 1960s the radical element of the Protestant Church, though numerically small, made a powerful impact in theology and social ethics. The Church and Society (ISAL) bloc, led by men like Julio de Santa Ana, Rubem Alves, Richard Shaull, Gonzalo Castillo, and Joel Gajardo, outpublished the evangelicals on theology and ethics fifty pages to one. Their influence could even be seen on students in higher-level evangelical seminaries.

Now, critics feel their exaggerated humanism, open identification with the Marxist political line, and blatant anti-institutionalism with respect to the Church have brought them into disrepute with many previously friendly Protestant groups—and exhibit what some observers believe to be the bankruptcy of their spiritual message. It is hoped that the Evangelical Declaration and the published position papers from the fraternity consultation will mark the beginning of a new era of theological production calling the Church back to the Bible and the message of evangelism.

Missionary participation in the consultation was minimal (although five attended); the really decisive theological contributions were made by Latin American leaders, and the declaration was written by them.

What some called the “Inter-Varsity bloc” was undoubtedly the strongest united voice in the consultation. Led by René Padilla, associate director of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES) for Latin America, they pushed hard for a Reformed theology and a more open view of biblical inspiration.

In his position paper on authority, Padilla argued that insistence on an inerrant Bible means asking for something unavailable—since no present edition or version is free from difficulties of transmission and/or translation. The result, said Padilla, is the danger of ending up with no Bible and no authority. Exaggerated insistence on inerrancy, he added, in effect saws off the limb that supports evangelical theology. Significantly, the word “inerrant” doesn’t appear in the final declaration.

Not all were convinced by Padilla and his backers. Holding uncompromisingly to an inerrant Bible and verbal inspiration, Andrew Kirk of Union Seminary in Buenos Aires declared in his closely reasoned paper on hermeneutics: “What the text of the Bible says, God says, without reservation and without reduction.”

Many were surprised at such a clear evangelical option proposed by a faculty member of the institution that has become the principal symbol of liberal and radical thought in Latin America. Some other participants shared Kirk’s high view of inspiration.

A result of the debate—the liveliest and most sustained of the consultation—was an agreement that the word “error” could well be replaced by “problem” or “difficulty” to aid communication with the grass-roots churchman.

Despite such differences, mutual confidence permeated the conference; no one doubted the theological orthodoxy of his colleagues. A second consultation (for twenty-five men) was projected for December of 1972, with five regional consultations this year on the subject “The Doctrine of the Church.”

Perhaps Samuel Escobar best summed up the burden of the Cochabamba fraternity (the average age of its delegates was 33): “We’re up against a situation in Latin America traditionally hostile to theology. The very fact that we gathered here in Cochabamba to make theology is exceedingly significant for the Latin American church.… We can expect to move ahead together, recognizing our present differences, toward the formulation of a truly evangelical and vitally relevant theology-in-formation for our continent.”

A Crowning Touch

Wherever evangelist Billy Graham goes, Christian beauty queens seem to pop up. This year’s Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, California, was no exception. And, in fact, the selection of Graham as the first clergyman to head the New Year’s Day parade since its founding in 1902 was itself religiously motivated: tournament president A. Lewis Shingler, who picked Graham as grand marshal, is an active layman in Los Angeles’ First Church of the Nazarene.

Kathleen Arnett, a 19-year-old Pasadena City College sophomore, the 1971 Rose Bowl queen, has been a Christian since she was eight years old and has attended a Methodist church all her life. The brown-haired home economics major spoke about her Christian faith in an interview for CHRISTIANITY TODAY with Rita Warren: “I believe the Church is the most important place to teach young people about Christ, and the churches therefore need to reach more young people. The kids have tried drugs looking for life’s answers, and now they are seeing the reality of Jesus Christ. The Church must be prepared to help them find that reality.”

The olive-skinned beauty recalled the time she was “one of the few young people who attended our church’s youth meetings—but then I dropped out. I hope the spiritual movement taking place among the youth of southern California will help my church to grow and prosper too.”

Shingler, who crowned Kathleen December 22, joined the Tournament of Roses in 1946, directed Pasadena’s Rose Bowl Easter sunrise services for ten years, and was a member of the executive committee of the 1969 Billy Graham crusade in Los Angeles. He is associated with a church fund-raising agency.

“I think it is most appropriate in light of world conditions to have Billy Graham as our grand marshal,” Shingler told newsmen when announcing his choice for the New Year’s floral extravaganza. “He is a symbol of hope, peace, and renewed faith in God and a world-recognized leader as well as a friend of mankind.”

And speaking of Kathleen’s coronation (she was one of 472 coeds competing for the title), the Reverend Victor R. Hand, pastor of St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Los Angeles (where the Arnett family worships), had this to say: “She is a girl of real character who extols her family and family life in general along with many other values which are ‘on trial’ by so many kids today.”

Nazareth Elections: Anything Good?

Eighty-two per cent of the eligible voters in the city where Jesus spent boyhood days braved chilling winter rains last month to check a predicted rise in Communist power. While halted, the Reds retained their present (seven out of seventeen) seats in the Nazareth Municipal Council, polling more than 45 per cent of the votes of the city’s half-Christian, half-Muslim population of 35,000.

The government-backed labor list won the same number of seats, now making necessary formation of a coalition council. The head of the labor party, Seif ed-Din Zuabi, wealthy Muslim land-owner and member of the Israel Knesset (Parliament), said that if chosen by the council as mayor, he would form no coalition with the Communists. Many observers believe that this will be impossible and that the fast-gaining National Religious Party (Orthodox Jewish), which won two seats, will now hold the balance of power and may demand the mayorality as its price. Yacoub Salem, Catholic businessman and leader of the local NRP, has already made this clear.

The Communist party appeals to young Arab voters with its emotional nationalistic platform. Scarcely bothering with such “dull” realities as civic progress, better schools, and other local projects, it picks out highly charged issues such as opposition to the government’s policy of holding Israel’s Arab citizens to second-class status, the demand for retreat from all occupied territories, the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, strong backing for the views of the Soviet government, and praise for its support of the Arab states.

DWIGHT BAKER

War Reparations

Israel is giving money to the Lutheran World Federation to help to cover repairs necessary on the Augusta Victoria Hospital after the June, 1967, war. The LWF hospital, located on the Mount of Olives, was extensively damaged by shellfire. Israel refused to reveal the exact amount of the settlement, saying it did not divulge compensation to religious groups.

Presbyterians: Union Hassles

A restraining order temporarily blocking the merger of two presbyteries in Kentucky was dissolved last month by a Louisville circuit court, thus paving the way for the Louisville Presbytery (United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A.) and the Louisville Presbytery (Presbyterian Church in the U. S.) to unite this month.

The two judicatories, representing forty-nine Southern Presbyterian congregations and twenty-three United Presbyterian congregations, were to meet jointly January 9 to consummate the union. The injunction seeking to halt the merger (see December 18 issue, page 41) claimed that the union would impair property rights of congregations involved.

Chester B. Hall, an elder of Louisville’s First Presbyterian Church and a plaintiff in the case, didn’t contest the court action but said he would file suit again unless the union presbytery adopted a standing rule providing that all congregations affected by the merger shall continue to have the same property rights they held before the merger. Jefferson Circuit Court judge Marvin J. Sternberg ruled that the suit was premature since no union presbytery existed at the time it was filed.

Meanwhile, in the Houston area, Texas Presbyterians girded for a hassle over a vote on a presbytery union set for February 8. Opponents of the Gulf Coast (United Presbyterian)-Brazos (Presbyterian, U.S.) presbytery merger said they can muster enough votes to defeat the union plan.

A two-thirds majority of approximately 200 lay and clergy delegates is required to approve union; this means that about sixty negative votes would scuttle it. Brazos has about 105 churches, Gulf Coast, about 33. If approved, union will take place in 1972.

Pentagon Prayer Room

A brief pre-Christmas ceremony led by military chaplains and Defense Department officials officially opened the newly constructed “Pentagon Meditation Room.” It is patterned after the prayer room in the U. S. Capitol set aside in 1955.

Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, a United Presbyterian elder, said the room would be a “place where needs of the spirit … can find satisfaction.” He declared that “peace is the business of this building,” and that “this room is an affirmation of this goal.”

There are actually two rooms, located adjacent to each other just off the Pentagon’s huge main concourse. One is for group functions, the other for private devotions. Each holds about a dozen people. The group room consists merely of a few chairs clustered about a coffee table and two back-lighted stained-glass windows. The other room has six of the windows and a semi-circular altar. Both are tastefully decorated in a simple, elegantly modern scheme of gold, beige, and walnut.

Antidisestablishmentarianism

That the Church of England “ought to stand further apart from the State than it now does” is the unanimous view of a sixteen-member commission whose report was published in London last month. How this should be done, however, caused considerable disagreement.

A majority was against severing historic links with Caesar: “the people of England still want to feel that religion has a place in the land to which they can turn on the too rare occasions when they think that they need it.” Disestablishment might suggest they were “going unchristian.”

Presenting a minority report, Miss Valerie Pitt, 45, wanted total disestablishment. The church’s place in national life she held to be not a matter of law or legal status. Declared Miss Pitt, a college lecturer whose lively statements have brightened many Anglican occasions: “To be a Christian a man must answer—‘Jesus is Lord’. Writing ‘C. of E.’ on a form is not quite enough.”

The main report recommended some change in the system for appointing bishops (at present the queen acts on the prime minister’s nomination), and insisted that in matters of worship and doctrine the Church of England should not be subject to Parliament.

The General Synod will now debate the report, the fifth on the subject this century. Comments Canon Max Warren of Westminster: “Why is it that discussions on the relations of church and state by churchmen so often tend to be measured in terms of the church’s independence from the state, and not in terms of the church’s ministry to the state?”

Later this month a liberal peer is to test parliamentary and public opinion by moving a disestablishment bill in the House of Lords. With twenty-six of Caesar’s buddies sitting as episcopal members of that assembly, all that will be rendered is a clobbering for lordly impudence.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Personalia

Evangelist Billy Graham will receive the International Brotherhood Award of the National Conference of Christians and Jews in Cleveland this March.

Dr. Marshal L. Scott has been named president of McCormick Seminary (United Presbyterian) in Chicago.… Dr. Timothy M. Warner, dean of Fort Wayne (Indiana) Bible College, has been appointed president of the college.

Retired radio evangelist and former Methodist pastor Clinton H. Churchill has given $500,000 toward construction of a tower at Jesuit-maintained Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. He said he hopes the gift will encourage others to lower the bars separating religious groups.

Lawyer-author William Stringfellow and poet Anthony Towne were indicted by the federal government last month on charges of harboring Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan in their Block Island, Rhode Island, home last August when Berrigan was evading a three-year sentence for destroying draft records. The two pleaded innocent and were released on $2,500 bail each.

The first black Jew ever to serve as an executive of a national Jewish agency in the United States has been appointed to the staff of the Synagogue Council of America. Robert Coleman, once an organizer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, will head the council’s social justice division.

It took eight hours and fifty-three minutes, but organist Clayton Lee of St. Alban’s Anglican Church in Winnipeg played all 812 hymns and 955 tunes in the Anglican hymnbook in a money-raising hymnathon; the medley netted about $500. “I knew my organist would make it,” said the pastor, “but I wasn’t sure about the organ.”

The Association of Foreign Correspondents in Viet Nam and the Church and Society arm of the United Presbyterian Church have protested the South Vietnamese government’s decision not to renew the press credentials of Ecumenical Press Service correspondent Don Luce, a longtime volunteer welfare worker in Viet Nam and a leading figure in exposing the “tiger cage” cells on Con Son prison island last August. His visa expires next month.

Robert N. Thompson, a former missionary to Ethiopia and a member of the Canadian House of Commons for Red Deer, Alberta, has been elected chairman of World Vision of Canada.

A contract was let last month for construction of the $900,000 L. Nelson Bell Learning Resources Center at Montreat-Anderson (North Carolina) College. The new library is named for the executive editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY and associate editor of the Presbyterian Journal; Dr. Bell served many years as a medical missionary in China.

A Charlottesville, Virginia, federal district court ruled last month that Juliana Willson, 8, had to stay at a hospital until diagnostic tests on the child were completed despite her father’s objections on religious grounds. Willson filed a $1 million suit against the county welfare department and the hospital.

The U.S. Supreme Court last month let stand a lower court ruling supporting the state of California’s action in dismissing a Seventh-day Adventist employee, Thomas Stimpel of Placerville, who refused to work on Saturday, his sabbath.

Mother Teresa, founder and superior general of the Missionaries of Charity, received the first Pope John XXIII Award from Pope Paul VI last month for her twenty-two years of ministry to the poor in India and Rome.

Kathleen Ryan, 33, was ordained the first woman deacon in the Episcopal Church last month in Tucson, Arizona. A canon change adopted by the denomination last October allows women on the first rung of the Episcopal clergy ladder but forbids them to become priests or bishops.

The “Walk-in-Light” cane, equipped with two small batteries that illuminate the area immediately in front of the pedestrian, was designed by the Reverend Allen B. Barnes, founding pastor of the First Baptist Church of Sun City, Arizona. The first U. S. patented cane of its kind, the metallic walking aid comes in eighteen colors and five lengths, and costs $19.95 at Family Enterprises in Tucson.

Falling income from American churches has caused the World Council of Churches to cut its New York elected staff from three to two; program secretary Frances Maeda and executive secretary Dr. Eugene L. Smith will remain.

The Reverend Marc Boegner, known as the “grand old man of French Protestantism,” died at age 89 last month in Paris. He was president of the French Protestant Federation from 1929 to 1961, and a World Council of Churches president from 1948 to 1954.

A former Episcopal chaplain at Michigan State University has been named the first full-time church-staff worker among American draft-age immigrants in Canada. The Reverend Robert C. Gardner, who will work in the Canadian Council of Churches headquarters in Toronto, will handle a $70,000 budget to aid various draft groups.

Ernest C. Manning, premier of Alberta for twenty-six years before his retirement in 1969, has been appointed to the Canadian Senate, the Parliament’s upper house. A prominent evangelical, Manning stressed that he will continue his radio ministry on Canada’s “National Back to the Bible Hour.”

Panorama

A Southern Baptist Convention statistician has predicted that the denomination will soon have 11.6 million members;the 1969 membership totaled 11.4 million. Projections also showed probable increases in baptisms, total receipts, mission expenditures, and church music enrollments. Decreases were forecast for Sunday school, training union, brotherhood, and women’s missionary union enrollments.

President Nixon signed a bill last month restoring 48,000 acres of land surrounding Blue Lake to New Mexico Taos Pueblo Indians, who consider the ground sacred for their nature-worship rites.

The Rosemead (California) Graduate School of Psychology added a new faculty member for the coming spring term; the new institution, headed by Dr. Clyde M. Narramore, had a student body of thirteen for its first class last fall, and eleven faculty and administration members.

“A Day on Drug Abuse” was the first major project of the Academy of Christians in the Professions, a new evangelical research fellowship and service organization based in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Mississippi’s law against the teaching of evolution—the last such state law in the nation—was overturned by the state’s supreme court last month as being in violation of the first and fourth amendments to the Constitution.

More than 300 persons who pulled out of Birmingham’s First Baptist Church over the downtown church’s action barring Negroes from membership formally chartered a new congregation last month. The Church of the Covenant, pastored by Dr. J. Herbert Gilmore—who resigned from First Baptist—is dedicated to an interracial ministry.

Billy Graham team members Lane Adams, Tom Bledsoe, and Bill Fasig ministered to 61,787 persons during the Kanawha Valley Crusade in Charleston, West Virginia, last month; 1,202 persons came forward as a sign of commitment to Christ.

Now competing with underground campus newspapers is a new eight-page tabloid For Real, designed for mass distribution by the Christian Freedom Foundation. “Our American freedoms, free enterprise included, are rooted in the Christian ethic,” says foundation president H. Edward Rowe.

Many Toronto Roman Catholics will watch eight-minute color movies on “complex moral situations” rather than hear sermons during some Sunday masses this year.

Six seminaries in Minnesota have organized a consortium to pool their resources and to conduct some joint educational programs: Bethel (Baptist General Conference), with an enrollment of 222; Luther (American Lutheran Church), 549; Northwestern (Lutheran Church in America), 149; St. John’s (Roman Catholic), 60; St. Paul (Roman Catholic), 122; and United (United Church of Christ), 138.

February 13 will be Spiritual Revolution Day in California, according to a resolution adopted by the state’s Senate. Students for a Spiritual Revolution, a coordinating coalition of Christian students, is planning a statewide march and a rally on the Capitol steps in Sacramento that day.

Trans World Radio has received permission from Swaziland, Africa, authorities to establish a superpower international radio station near Mbabane, the capital, early this year.

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