Eutychus and His Kin: August 11, 1972

WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

One of the stranger gifts God has given me is the ability to interpret dress patterns. In view of the fact that most pattern instructions are written in an obscure Polynesian dialect of pidgen English, that’s no mean gift.

The last time I was called on to display this talent was when my 12-year-old daughter decided she could no longer put off her home ec project, much as she hated the course. The assignment was to make a dress from a pattern of her choice.

At her request I had explained some of the intricacies of the diagram to her, and she was at the sewing machine working against the clock with mounting frustration. Suddenly she threw the dress down and exclaimed, “I don’t see why I have to take a dumb course like this anyhow!”

“Why did you?” I asked in typical fatherly ignorance.

“Daddy,” she replied in the patronizing tone she reserves for very small children and me, “it’s required.”

“Oh.” I responded brilliantly.

“But it’s dumb,” she continued. “Why do I need to spend all this time learning how to make a dress when I’ll probably never do it again? When I become a psychiatrist all my clothes will be tailor made!”

Frankly, I thought she had a point, and a glance at the partly finished dress confirmed it. But since we parents and teachers have to stick together in self-defense, I told her she’d better get back to work and stop complaining.

Then in my best counseling manner I went on to point out that even psychiatrists have to do things in their training that are not particularly fun but are necessary to reach their goal.

Although she wasn’t completely convinced, my speech helped a little, since this image of herself as a psychiatrist conditions all her activities. A home ec course has no meaning because she can’t relate it to her future as a psychiatrist. When she’s playing dolls she’s simply the psychiatrist-to-be enjoying fantasy.

She has already begun to answer that very important question: Who do you think you are?

I’m convinced that our answer to that question, our self-image, is crucial in finding meaning for our lives.

The Apostle John reminds Christians of the most important part of that answer: “My dear friends, we are now God’s children …”

TRIUMPHANT IN DEATH

Thank you for that timely and comforting article, “Death: No More Taboos,” by Cheryl A. Forbes (May 26). It was a joy to read this illuminating discussion of the “right to die with dignity,” and “a living will.” It is heartwarming indeed to see this all-important subject brought out in the open. As for myself, several years ago, I placed a “living will” among my important papers. At age eighty I felt the time had come to make my desires known legally. In my “living will” are these poignant words: “In the event I should become so critically ill that nothing but blood transfusions and intravenous feeding would prolong my life, please use neither—just let me die in peace, for that will be the triumphant moment for which I’ve lived these many years!” Hutchinson, Kans.

A PROPOSAL

Thank you for the excellent article by Frank C. Nelsen on “Evangelical Living and Learning Centers: A Proposal” in the May 26 issue. His recommendation consists of a most exciting concept and one which has practical merit.

Hopefully, the suggestion might be incorporated in the Institute for Advanced Christian Studies program and implemented on a campus such as the University of Pennsylvania, by Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin, or by a joint effort of both organizations.

Pittsburgh, Pa.

As the pastor of a church close to a major university I have been exploring for some time the possibility of offering Bible-oriented courses to Christian students as a complement to the university’s curriculum. Currently we have the facilities and personnel but are still struggling with the problem of accreditation.

We differ markedly with Nelsen’s proposal, however, in two areas. The first of these is his insistence on perpetuating the concept in loco parentis.… The advisability of such a practice has been held in question for a long time, and most campus ministries are now recognizing the need for the college student to establish his independence and identity as an adult instead of depending on an institution to serve as his substitute parent.

Our second area is one of money. Is there an alternative to spending huge chunks of money in an enterprise such as this? We think there is. First of all, if we do not need to provide housing for students, classes such as proposed by Dr. Nelsen could be held in a variety of facilities. There are any number of churches, for instance, whose facilities stand vacant most of the week. Most universities have memorial unions where meeting facilities conducive to classroom use are available free of charge to campus groups. Additionally, on a growing number of campuses across the United States the Lord is locating a significant number of evangelical scholars who have academic and spiritual qualifications similar to Dr. Nelsen’s. We … have no reluctance to ask such men to serve on a limited basis, free of charge, using their unique gifts of the Holy Spirit to the spiritual enrichment of the lives of college people. All in all I think Dr. Nelsen is on the right track.

Bethany Baptist Church

Iowa City. Iowa

The article … describes what in fact has already been established by Regent College since 1970. We are on the campus of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. We are training students for a one-year Diploma in Christian Studies, with plans for advanced degrees also. In 1971 some theological colleges followed our lead with similar offerings of one-year courses. It is precisely our vision to see similar evangelical centers established in other major universities throughout the world.

However, we differ from the proposals in two important respects. Firstly the proposal for undergraduate centers may conflict with university syllabi, since universities could reasonably object that students attending the centers may have conflicts of interests, timetables, and subject matter with the courses on the campus. We have felt it was wise to establish our center at the graduate level, so that students coming to us with the accreditation of their first degrees can be trained to view their faith more maturely.…

Secondly, we believe that to own property.… is an unnecessary expense.… Rental facilities on the campus are adequate, and much cheaper. Moreover, we believe the “ghetto” mentality of living in a “holy huddle” does not necessarily generate the wholesome, mature outlook that will prepare Christian young people to live in the world, though not of it. It is the faith and commitment of their teachers, not the “atmosphere,” that inspires them.…

It is, however, exciting to see the growing evidence of emphasis on evangelical scholarship, seeking to re-establish itself on our university campuses and in public life. This is what we need. Regent College

Principal

Vancouver, British Columbia

WEEKLY NECESSITY

“If I were the editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY I would make it a weekly (Eutychus and His Kin, “If I Were Editor …,” July 7). Of course this would mean an increase in the subscription price, plus increases in personnel, etc. Maybe a poll should be taken of the readers to discover if there are enough readers who would pay the price of a weekly.

Minister of Music and Education

Bethel Baptist Church

Salem, Va.

‘IN ALL THINGS LOVE’

Your editorial “The Lord Is Coming Again!” (June 23) was superb. The realistic recognition of diversities of interpretation of the Christian conviction about the final redemption and judgment of God over our world through Jesus Christ is a good illustration of the apostolic advice “speaking the truth with love” (Eph. 4:15). I believe that some of the passionate insistence that Jesus is coming again according to a specified program and timetable is actually a sign of the inability to deal constructively with threats to a belief. The heat in some of our arguments is not always the product of the conviction fires of the Holy Spirit. It is sometimes a part of the oscillation of fever and chills resulting from the struggle with an insecure faith.

In the long struggle of Christians to live with both their convictions and their brothers I think one of the best guidelines we have been given has come from Rupertus Meldenius (A.D. 1627): “In faith unity, in opinions liberty, in all things love” (Schaff’s History of the Christian Church, vol. VII, Eerdmans, 1950, p. 650 f.). Surely on that day when many will gather from East and West and North and South to sit at table with our triumphant Lord Jesus both the passionately convicted and the dispassionately tolerant will find their truth and love made complete and pure.

First Christian Church

Cedar Falls, Iowa

SOUTHERN BAPTIST COMMENTS

In all my years of reading CHRISTIANITY TODAY I have found it to be a magazine which presented a conservative viewpoint concerning the inspiration of God’s word, and I have appreciated its attempts to maintain a conservative and what some would call a fundamental interpretation of the word.

However, your editorial entitled “Southern Baptist Watershed?” (June 23) is, it seems to me, redeemed from outright prejudice only by the addition of the question mark to the title. It is obvious that the writer of the editorial was in sympathy with the one who presented the motion to withdraw the commentaries and did not even consider the arguments against the withdrawing.

All Southern Baptist churches are independent churches and differ in their interpretations of the Scripture. It is true that some are liberal, some conservative, and some fundamental. But to consign all to the unhappy fate suggested in the last paragraph because of the decision in a convention reveals a very poor understanding of the nature of Southern Baptists.

Genesee District Baptist Assoc.

Flint, Mich.

Let me thank you for the excellent editorial. I wish this might be in tract form and put into the hands of all Southern Baptists. I assure you many have read it and will be greatly encouraged by it. I read several state Baptist periodicals and so far I have not seen one which takes your position.… I predict that there will be another effort at Portland, Oregon, to reverse this action. I also predict that if such action is not forthcoming, there will be a split in the SBC.

Keep up the good work!

Area Representative

Wycliffe Bible Translators

Washington, D. C.

As a Southern Baptist pastor having attended the Philadelphia meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, I thoroughly disagree with your conclusions regarding the defeat of the motion to withdraw the “Broadman Bible Commentary.”

Citing the 1925 and 1963 adoption of “The Baptist Faith and Message” you conclude that this recent action “opens the floodgates to all kinds of serious theological errors.” You could not possibly be more wrong. The action merely confirms the long-standing Baptist conviction of the competency of the individual believer to interpret the Scriptures aided by the Holy Spirit.… What the action does is to avoid an “official orthodoxy” for Southern Baptists. The business of the convention does not include the prerogative of defining belief for the autonomous churches. While Baptists have throughout their history approved statements or confessions of faith they have never had the status of creeds and I pray they never will. Your conclusions smack of “creedal fundamentalism” which in my opinion are not shared by most Southern Baptists.

Cradock Baptist Church

Portsmouth. Va.

To those of us not familiar with Southern Baptist Convention procedure the report (“Southern Baptists Veto Book Recall”) was somewhat confusing. Please explain. You state: “Gwin W. Turner offered the motion to recall the entire commentary.… Bates ordered a standing vote, and the motion was adopted by a wide margin … This led to Turner’s unsuccessful move at the convention in Philadelphia.”

The North American Baptist General Conferences

Winnipeg, Manitoba

• Substitute “defeated” for “adopted” and sense is restored. Sorry for the confusion—ED.

SPECIOUS APPEAL

The review of Norman Macbeth’s book, Naturalistic Evolution (June 23), refers to the second law of thermodynamics as scientific evidence that “naturalistic evolution cannot be true.”

As discussed in a paper by J. A. Cramer, published in the March, 1971 Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, “the idea that the general theory of evolution and the second law of thermodynamics are mutually contradictory is an error based on failure to recognize that the second law allows parts of the universe to decrease entropy (increase order) while requiring that the total amount of disorder in the universe must always increase. Thus the second law cannot be used against evolution.…” I am sure we would agree that benefits to biblical Christian theism are at best temporary, limited, and questionable when such a specious argument is used to refute an antagonistic philosophy.

Wauwatosa, Wis.

USING WOMAN

Edwin M. Yamauchi’s use of the woman issue to illustrate the problems of “Christianity and Cultural Differences” was quite apt. Unfortunately, however, he seems to have succumbed to the temptation he was warning against: making our own cultural ideas the norm for the New Testament or uncritically transposing first-century norms into the twentieth.

Most scholars will readily admit that First Timothy 2:11–15 is ambiguous, to say the least, in regard to woman’s role. To say as Yamauchi does that it “stresses woman’s pre-eminent role as a mother” is highly selective. If indeed the passage does teach that (the assertion is highly debatable), the rest of the New Testament does not support it.

While the Gospel does not downgrade motherhood, it nowhere teaches that this is to be woman’s only role or even the predominate one as Yamauchi suggests. Christ never taught that woman’s salvation was in childbearing (though in the Old Testament her hope, as did that of all Jews, rested in the birth of the coming Messiah). Rather woman’s salvation was accomplished once and for all in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Her calling is to commit her life to him and to serve him—whether in marriage or celibacy, in rearing children or pursuing a career. To follow Yamauchi’s suggestions would be to deny full Christian personhood to all single women or barren wives.

Likewise the phrase “to usurp authority over the man” (v. 12) is a unique one, ambiguous in its meaning, and thus should not be used alone to establish any major teaching. Yamauchi would be on more solid ground if he took his stand on Galations 3:28 and stayed there. By labeling that passage “ideal” and declaring woman to be in “subordination to her husband” two paragraphs later, he has vitiated any equality. In a modern democracy where woman (as an outgrowth of New Testament teachings) is seen to be a full person in her own right, are we to impose a role on her which is left over from the days when women, like slaves, were considered the property of the “master”? After 1,800 years Christians managed to decide that the Bible no longer decreed that we must live in a slave-master culture. When are we going to apply the same kind of thinking to the woman issue?

And how can Yamauchi cling to woman’s subordination in marriage while blithely labeling as cultural the injunctions that she remain silent in church? Both positions could be argued equally well from New Testament evidence. Is this just another evidence that when it comes to the woman issue (as with many others) we pick and choose which scriptural paths we wish to follow? Just as modern society offers woman “a more equal public role with men,” so we have found (as the Bible tried to teach us, especially in Genesis and the Song of Songs) that a more equal marital role for women builds the strongest marriages. God created men and women to complement one another, not to dominate or submit to one another.

It’s about time evangelical scholars and laypeople stopped relying on personal prejudices and biblical proof texts and seriously looked at what the entire Bible teaches in regard to full Christian personhood.

Mundelein, Ill.

Apparently the key sentence to which Ms. Nancy Hardesty objects is my statement: “I believe that what Paul taught about a woman’s role as a mother and her subordination to her husband is still quite valid.” I did not mean, as Ms. Hardesty seems to have inferred, that “this is to be woman’s only role or even the predominate one,” nor would I deny “full Christian personhood to all single women or barren wives.”

I believe that Ms. Hardesty would agree with me that each Christian man or woman needs to seek God’s will individually as to marriage. He may very well call some to remain single (Matt. 19:10–12; 1 Cor. 7:27 ff.). I would deplore rushing into marriage simply because it seems to be the thing to do as I would deplore the tendency for some to avoid marriage because they do not desire the responsibility of raising a family. Nor should Christian mothers be beguiled by the literature of the women’s lib movement into despising the care of children as an oppressive burden instead of the glorious vocation from God that it is.

Where Ms. Hardesty may disagree is in the matter of a wife’s subordination to her husband, which, she believes, vitiates any equality. Her basic point is that “God created men and women to complement one another, not to dominate or submit to one another.”

There is a question of semantics here. I believe that it is possible for a wife to be subject to her husband without being inferior to him, to be obedient without being obsequious, and to be submissive without being passive. A wife should be able to complement her husband without being dominated by him.

The more substantive issue is whether or not the subordination of wives to their husbands in such passages as First Timothy 2:11–15; Ephesians 5:22–33; Colossians 3:18–25, and First Peter 3:1–8 is an intrinsic, transcultural duty or a conventional, cultural pattern.

An indication that this is not simply a cultural pattern (although the degree of the dominant patriarchal authority in biblical times was culturally informed) is the appeal in these passages to the pattern of the primeval marriage of the first man and woman in Genesis: Genesis 1 and 2 cited in First Timothy 2:13, 14 and Genesis 2:24 cited in Ephesians 5:31.

But as E. O. James, commenting on the subordination of wives to their husbands in Christian marriage, points out:

The obedience demanded of the wife, however, was based on the underlying theological conceptions in which human relationships were interpreted in terms of God’s relationship with man. Thus, for the Christian obedience was the supreme virtue valuable for its own sake when freely given not from weakness but from strength, as exemplified in the perfect self-oblation of Christ wherein was manifested the highest expression of love. It was only when it was deprived of its theological foundations in a secularized society that it lost its spiritual significance and degenerated into a degrading act of submission involving a loss of personal freedom—a derogation from personality rather than a means of attaining the subsistence of the spiritual self by way of love [Marriage and Society, 1952, p. 99].

Oxford, Ohio

‘PUN-FUN’

Edward E. Plowman should be congratulated, no doubt, for restraining himself from having some pun-fun with his mention in “Explo ’72: ‘Godstock’ in Big D” (July 7) that Campus Crusade director Bill Bright “… got the idea for Explo.…” That would undoubtedly make it a “Bright idea”—or, as some critics might put it, a “bright idea” (or even a “Bright bright idea”).

Washington, D. C.

UNNATURAL?

As a Christian, and as a homosexual preparing for the ministry, I am greatly disturbed by your editorial on the “gains” made by homosexuals (“Gay Ground-Gaining,” June 23). How unfortunate that a magazine which has been, in the past, noted for its high sense of compassion and understanding toward the plight of the homosexual—and especially the Christian homosexual—should resort to such silly and naïve editorializing. However good your intentions might have been, you helped immeasurably to continue some sad misconceptions and myths about homosexuals—namely, that we are a sad lot of child molesters with little or no sense of values, and that, like the forty-nine-year-old father mentioned in your editorial, we are, for the most part, degenerates of the lowest kind. You do us and yourself a grave dishonor. Your statement, “We do not condemn the homosexual, but we do oppose the practice of homosexuality as contrary to God’s commands,” does little to erase the senseless and certainly untrue picture which the rest of your editorial conjures up in the mind.

I am a Christian, a homosexual, and a Baptist, and I do not find anything grotesque, unnatural, and sinful about loving a man and having sexual relations with him. What I do find unnatural, grotesque, and sinful is silly, trite, and inconsiderate editorials perpetuating old myths and making life impossible for those who already find life difficult.

New Orleans, La.

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