Eutychus and His Kin: October 8, 1971

GOING, GOING, GONE

When the daily paper arrives, my wife hastens to cut out the auction advertisements and burn them. Otherwise I would attend the auctions—all of them. I have a mania for them, no matter what’s being sold.

One hot summer afternoon I found myself standing for two hours in the blazing sun at a bicycle auction. Nothing else there—just bicycles. That has to be considered a strange use of time for someone whose storage shed already housed four bikes.

To justify my strange behavior I pointed out to my friends that auctions provide an interesting study in the values and tastes of the bidders as well as a glimpse into the lives of those who originally collected the junk—or treasure, as the case may be.

I have pondered the generation gap while watching a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and a Queen Anne chair being auctioned as part of the same estate.

What schizophrenia of taste, I have wondered, could account for the fact that one house spawned both a reasonably good collection of original art and a vast collection of Reader’s Digest condensed books?

But the most interesting exercise at an auction is trying to deduce why people are willing to pay what they do for some of the stranger items. What inner longing is satisfied by the acquisition of an item that is totally useless or consummately ugly?

At one sale the auctioneer held up an intricately contrived device incorporating two cog wheels, three prongs, a spring, and a lever arm. It was the kind of thing my teen-ager would call a “do-golly.”

When the auctioneer called for a starting offer, one cautious bidder asked, “What is it?” The auctioneer examined the device with a puzzled look and replied, “I don’t know, but if you’ve got another one this one would make it a pair.”

Everyone laughed, but someone bought it.

At another sale I watched with fascination as two sixtyish women claimed their purchases: two Mae West shaped vases garishly decorated with blue-green vines. They were aglow with their triumph in being the successful bidders on the twin monstrosities.

I have observed perfectly sane people bidding more than the current retail price for items that had been badly used.

Over and over again as I’ve attended auctions I’ve found myself saying, “They paid that for those?” I’m sure some of those people have later said the same thing to themselves.

I wonder if some dweller in a far-off planet looks at God’s redemptive transaction on earth and thinks of his choices, “He paid that for those?”

But as Publilius Syrus pointed out, “Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.”

A BRIDGE BETWEEN

The generation gap closed completely between this almost sixty-year-old “conservative” Christian and D. John Benson when 1 read “Please, Before I Hit the Ground” (Sept. 10).

Rarely is one so young blessed with such a marvelous gift of insight, or able to write with such pathos while blunting the sting of his satire with such love and gentle humor. Rarer still his ability to bridge not only the generation gap but the communication gap between practitioners of hide-bound orthodoxy and hard rock evangelism.

Carl Junction, Mo.

In pain I write, having just fought my way through D. John Benson’s “Please, Before I Hit the Ground.” With incisive awareness, the author discerns the publican’s plea and with laser beam, penetrates deep into pharisee fog.

Okeene, Okla.

CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE

In the editorial titled, “How Well Do You Support Your Pastor?” (Sept. 10), we read: “ ‘The laborer is worthy of his hire,’ Jesus said, but when making out the pastor’s paycheck, many Bible-believing churches do not seem to believe that Jesus really uttered those words.” …

The instruction of the churches on the subject of ministerial support is sadly, almost criminally, neglected. No subject of like importance receives so little attention from the preacher in his pulpit ministrations or his personal pastoral instruction. Some neglect to teach the duty of pastoral support because they are so obsessed with iridescent dreams and utopian theories that they cannot come down to a thing so practical. Others neglect it because of a spurious timidity lest they be preaching for money! Still others neglect it because they do not realize how fundamentally the doctrine is grounded in Scripture teaching. Every word spoken on the subject and every example illustrating it, either in the Old or the New Testament, teaches unequivocally that the preacher must give his undivided time to his ministry, and further that those to whom he ministers must provide his temporal support! The preacher or the church that wantonly, heedlessly, and willfully disobeys or thoughtlessly disregards this reasonable and clearly enunciated Scripture law will come to speedy and irretrievable disaster!

Richfield, Minn.

A SUGGESTION FOR PUBLISHERS

Thank you for your article “Thou Shalt Not Copy, Right?” by Cheryl A. Forbes (Sept. 10). The article saved my church from violating this law; we weren’t aware that what we were about to do was wrong. We had planned to duplicate hymns on a copying machine and then put them in a looseleaf binder as a supplemental hymnal to the one we already use.

We are still, however, in a dilemma. As you are probably aware, no one hymnal is fully satisfying to any one congregation. There are always hymns left out that people feel should have been included. An additional hymnal is not the answer; you get too much duplication, and even then favorite hymns are often not found in either book. I would like to suggest to the publishers that they make available copies of individual hymns suitable for binding in a looseleaf binder. The cost to the publisher would be only a few cents a sheet that he could in turn sell for between five and ten cents a sheet. This would mean that a congregation of two hundred with one hundred looseleaf hymnals could introduce new hymns for five to ten dollars. I am convinced that churches would be willing to pay this much to do this. I would be interested to know the reaction of some publishers to this suggestion.

North Ridge Alliance Church

Raleigh, N. C.

Thank you very much for … [the] article “Thou Shalt Not Copy, Right?” This is an excellent article and [Miss Forbes] handled the material very well.

The Sunday School Board

Nashville, Tenn.

EVIL ‘ECONOMIC WILL-TO-POWER’

Dr. Byron Lambert, in his essay “On Avoiding Work” (Aug. 27), unfortunately underestimates the dimension of evil in man’s work in his attempt to bolster the spirits of the restless and disenchanted worker. While I agree with him that there is no escape from work, I cannot agree with his further implication that all work is therefore intrinsically good, meaningful, and glorifying to God, if only it could be discovered. All work is not intrinsically good. As long as man is able to exercise his economic will-to-power over his fellow man, he will offer him many jobs that oppress and dehumanize him rather than fulfill him and bring glory to God.

His counsel to the worker that he transmute his work into “a discipline that rebuilds the soul” is wholly unsatisfactory—and bad theology. It gives the worker the false impression that what he thinks is degrading in his job really is not and that all he has to do to perceive the goodness of his work is to “engage in it with eternal purpose.” It is bad theology because it blurs the distinction between good and evil in life and gives the erroneous impression that God is not angered with the present, ever-changing subtle forms of evil with which we must constantly struggle. If all work were inherently good, it would be possible to talk about its use for rebuilding the soul. However, since this is not the case, we must not think that personally degrading work ever glorifies God. We do not do justice to God’s sensitivity to evil (or even what should be our own sensitivity to evil) when we attempt to make all evil seem innocuous and potentially good.

It is necessary that we acknowledge much that is patently evil in all economic systems if we ever hope to deal effectively with the plight of the restless worker. No amount of PMA can transmute evil into anything but evil. It is only by rising above, not in acquiescing to, the evil of the particular job that the worker can “grow and rebuild his soul.” While he may grow as a consequence of his confrontation with the evils of his job, the evils themselves will still remain as evil as ever. Dr. Lambert’s advice to the worker might give the disgruntled worker some eternal consolation in his plight; but it is given at the serious expense of removing a solid basis for an effective, persistent attack on the evil of the job itself.…

I would suggest that Dr. Lambert reread Marx. Nowhere, to my knowledge, does Marx suggest that communism will abolish work. It is my understanding that he says communism will relieve the working classes of the oppressive work they must endure under capitalism. It is certainly not necessary to distort Marx in order to disagree with him. If we are interested in truth at all, it is necessary that we state the position of those we disagree with forthrightly so that we, and others, know precisely where our disagreement lies.

Urbana, Ill.

ALLEGIANCE VS. ASSOCIATION?

Your editorial “Affirming Religious Freedom” (Aug. 27) was thoughtful and timely. The new Ontario law indeed restrains labour unions which “demand personal allegiance.” This stipulation, however, is radically different from “association” (as you put it) with both non-Christian employers and unions. Confusion of this essential difference would understandably give rise to the easily answered editorial query. To phrase it in a quasi-biblical way, unlike ancient Jews, Christian Labour Unionists certainly “associate” even with all Samaritans. Those Christians though will never make union with Samaritans on the grounds of a Samaritan allegiance!

Almonte Reformed Presbyterian Church

Almonte, Ont.

PUBLIC EDUCATION: DISGUISED CHARITY?

You report that a Mrs. Ruhlin is lobbying in Congress to discharge a petition to reinstate prayers in public schools (“Prayer Amendment: Second Wind,” Aug. 27). She started when one of her children asked why God is kept out of schools.

He isn’t. He goes there with each Christian child. But consider what else is involved. The subsidized schools’ resources are taken from those who don’t benefit, by force. This is the essence of evil, from which, Christ is quoted as saying, no good fruit can grow.… Public schools teach children that they have “rights” without duties.… Public education is a vast form of cleverly disguised public charity, and, as a careful examination will reveal, vastly a fake, for it takes from the students and their families their basic duty to learn, which is the absolute necessity to moral education.

Plantation, Fla.

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED

I am writing with reference to the allegation of Dr. Carl McIntire of Collingswood, New Jersey, as it appeared in “McIntire’s Mélange” (May 7). Edward Plowman reports McIntire as saying, “Rambo, who worked in the office, was expelled from Shelton in 1967 for discipline reasons.”

The truth of the matter is thus: … Following the leadership of McIntire himself, (I) renounced the jurisdiction of Shelton College’s president, and left Shelton College. It will be recalled many years ago McIntire renounced the jurisdiction of his own Presbyterian Church, and left to form the Bible Presbyterian Church.…

McIntire, being misinformed of the nature of my activities … issued directives against me for “competing with him and his Christian Beacon, trying to put him out of business.”

Oaklyn, N. J.

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