Jewish Furor over Key 73

Evangelicals are not the only group gearing up for Key 73. The Jewish community, led by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), is engaged in a crash program of “deepening” Jewish spiritual life to counter evangelism efforts next year. The AJC considers Key 73 an opening to anti-Semitic feeling because, said leaders, Key 73 suggests that Christianity is a substitute for Judaism. In fact, Key 73 “is an assault on the honor, dignity, and truth of Judaism,” said AJC interreligious-affairs director Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum.

AJC annoyance with Key 73 has increased steadily. Tanenbaum’s major complaint concerns the theological relation between Christianity and Judaism. “To suggest that Christianity—and a particular brand of Christianity at that—is a substitute for Judaism is wholly insensitive. That version of Christianity says Judaism is a footstool to stand on and then kick away. It’s a venomous attack.” Tanenbaum made similar charges against Campus Crusade’s Explo ’72 earlier this year and has expressed his Key 73 sentiments at various meetings around the country.

Last month at an interfaith colloquium at Southeastern Baptist Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina, Tanenbaum co-authored a resolution warning that religious pluralism was a basic feature of American civic religion but that civic religion often masked anti-Semitism (see December 8 issue, page 45). The statement repudiated proselytism of various religious groups and said mass-evangelism movements ignore the diversity of American religious life.

“I think Key 73’s logic of witnessing to everyone is inadequate in relation to Jewish theology,” said Tanenbaum. Christianity, like Islam, is a daughter faith of Judaism, he said, “but now the child turns around and says Judaism has no place in God’s plan of salvation. They’ve turned against the mother faith. To us, that’s apostasy.”

Tanenbaum believes Key 73 must immediately state that it has no intention of aiming specific evangelism at Jews. Also, he said, the program should treat Judaism differently “from non-biblical, non-monotheistic faiths.” And instead of worrying about converting non-Christians, Key 73 should aim at the “domestic heathens who are baptized and Christian in name only,” which, he added, would take evangelicals a lifetime to do. “Surely it’s logical to cultivate your own garden before undermining a garden cultivated by others.”

Dr. Theodore Raedeke, executive director of Key 73, said the program was no more aimed at Jews than at any other group on the continent. Tanenbaum’s charges, Raedeke said, might be inspired by the heavy losses of young Jews to Christianity and the Jesus movement in recent years. Nor did Raedeke accept the suggestion of not proselytizing the Jews. “When Christians witness in love there is no need to fear anti-Semitism,” said Raedeke. “Genuine Christians have never persecuted Jews. Persecution against the Jews in Germany only began when the country became nominally Christian.”

Tanenbaum says that confrontation over Key 73 could be a setback for Christian-Jewish cooperation. “It could lead to regression in our relationships and increasing polarization in our society.”

Much of his concern is that Jews for Jesus and the American Board of Missions to the Jews (ABMJ) will “ride the coat-tails” of Key 73, causing further disruption of Christian-Jewish relations. These groups are “particularly offensive” to Jews, Tanenbaum said. “Many of our more militant young people want to ‘get’ the Jews for Jesus in the streets. Feelings are strong.” (“Jews for Jesus” is the generic name for a broad movement of young Jews who have decided to follow Christ as “completed” or “fulfilled” Jews. The name is also used by a specific northern California group, led by Martin “Moishe” Rosen of the ABMJ.)

To prevent such groups from gaining a foothold among Jews, Tanenbaum wants Key 73 to issue statements divorcing the movement from the two groups and asserting that Jews be regarded as distinct from non-biblical people.

At the same time, AJC is circulating among its rabbis an eleven-page memo on the Jewish faith with emphasis on Jewish understanding of the New Testament, Jesus, the Messiah, Christianity, and immortality and resurrection. “We must deepen our understanding of our own faith to be ready for these [Key 73] people,” Tanenbaum said.

Similarly, a task force of Orthodox Jewish rabbis and scholars is visiting college campuses to emphasize the continuity and staying power of Judaism. The effort is acknowledged as an attempt to stop the flow of young Jews to the Jesus movement and is sponsored by the Rabbinical Council of America.

At the same time, the American Jewish Congress has launched a similar program to flood Jewish college students with essays, memoranda, and publications on Jewish religious, cultural, social, and political issues as part of an “ongoing stream” of information. The congress mailed a letter to supporters asking for names of students and calling for a $5 donation.

At the recent American Jewish Committee’s national executive council meeting in Hollywood, Florida, Tanenbaum and other speakers attacked evangelistic activity in public life. Dr. Eric Meyers, religion professor at Duke University, deplored “the use of public institutions” for evangelism. He cited growing youth activity in public high schools, campus athletics, pro-football circles, and public rallies for Christ.

He added that while few Jewish college students were “actually converted to Christianity,” evangelism activities created guilt feelings among students—feelings, he said, they can do without. He charged that students involved with Campus Crusade are undermining their own college experiences by making them merely “way stations in personal religious treks.”

There are fears that strong anti-Key 73 statements from Jewish sources may cause some liberal-minded leaders to take second looks at their denominations’ participation in the movement. “Smokescreen,” said Dr. Orlando Tibbetts, executive minister of the Connecticut American Baptists. “Some people are starting to use this as a rationalization for playing a game of chicken in terms of strong witness.” Tibbetts said that while there have been no such moves as yet, there are rumblings, even among some of his own ministers.

“Key 73 is not a threat to the Hebrew but a threat to the existence of the quasi-religious, happy pagan American who claims to be a Christian but isn’t,” he said. In fact, the largest field of evangelism is the Christian Church, he added.

While there is no place for anti-Semitism in Key 73, said Tibbetts, neither is there a place for “hiding our light under a bushel.”

Religion in Transit

A group of 100 students at Claremont Men’s College in Southern California petitioned for a professor in the religion department “who would regard the Bible as something more than another piece of literature.” They got one: Don Williams, a member of the pastoral staff at Hollywood Presbyterian Church, now teaches Paul’s Letters to a large class.

Another Asbury-type awakening has occurred, this time at Houghton College in New York. It was sparked during services conducted by evangelist Akbar Abdul-Haqq. The campus revival “escapes the full description of human words,” writes Houghton pastor Melvin H. Shoemaker.

Public opinion went against “Church of Canada” as the name for the church to come out of a proposed merger of the United Church of Canada, Anglican, and Disciples of Christ denominations, so the General Commission on Church Union in Canada is now trying for “Church of Christ in Canada.”

Catholics in Toronto say they will withdraw from the Miles for Millions charity program because another participant, Planned Parenthood, has come out for abortion on demand. Through their 166 schools, the Catholics have provided 35 per cent of the 70,000 marchers who annually raise more than $600,000 for aid programs in Canada and in developing countries.

About thirty nuns at the Sacred Heart Convent of the Dominican Sisters in Houston have applied for Old Age Assistance payments, say Texas authorities, who expect to approve monthly stipends of $130.

Several cadets at West Point swear they have seen a ghost in barracks room 4714. A plebe claims it turned on the shower once. The academy has emptied the room and placed it off limits. Chaplains and officers say they don’t know what to believe. They discount reports that it’s all a Navy prank.

After 308 years, the First Church (United Church of Christ) of Newton, Massachusetts, called it quits. It disbanded, gave its assets to a museum and church agencies, and sold its building to a Greek Evangelical church. Established in 1664, the church declined from a high of 1,200 members in 1952 to about 325 this year, three-fourths of them over fifty.

Catholic pastors in the archdiocese of Philadelphia have been urged to involve their parishes in Key 73, following the endorsement of Key 73 by John Cardinal Krol.

The San Francisco area Episcopal Diocese of California, in contrast to an adjoining diocese, overwhelmingly endorsed the ordination of women. By a close vote, the Philadelphia diocese voted to think about the issue another year. The issue is getting hotter on the denomination’s 1973 convention agenda.

Officials of the 275-year-old Trinity Episcopal Church in New York City are cracking down on peddlers pushing hard drugs in the churchyard. A while back, thirteen were arrested, most of them Wall Street office workers. They had ignored a sign posted outside the church warning against such evildoing.

The United Methodist Church’s Judicial Council, the denomination’s supreme court, ruled that a lay person cannot become a bishop. The council also invalidated some broad legislative powers delegated to the General Council on Ministries, which oversees the interim between sessions of the General Conference.

The fastest-growing church in the Miami Baptist Association is Glendale Baptist Church, a black church that claims 80 per cent of its 519 members are under forty, 150 of them teen-agers.

IFCO (Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization), the outgrowth of James Forman’s financial assault on the churches, has opened the Community Organization Training Institute (COTI) in the nation’s capital to provide study of the “liberation arts.” COTI will seek to involve minority seminarians in “what should be their most urgent and demanding mission—self-determination for their communities.” An intensive investigaton of IFCO by the Internal Revenue Service is meanwhile under way.

Fire killed nine elderly residents and injured more than thirty others in the Baptist Towers, a home for the aging in Atlanta sponsored by six Southern Baptist churches.

Theological guidelines issued last spring by Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod president J. A. O. Preus were upheldwithout dissent by the denomination’s twenty-three-member Commission on Theology and Church Relations.

Personalia

President Nixon dropped in for the Sunday-morning service late last month at New York’s 3,000-member Marble Collegiate Church, where he had worshiped when he lived in that city. Pastor Norman Vincent Peale’s sermon topic: “Enthusiasm Sweeps All Before It.” Meanwhile, evangelist Billy Graham told reporters Nixon will “be putting a lot more emphasis on moral and spiritual affairs” his next term because the President realizes that “the greatest problem we’re facing is moral permissiveness and decadence.”

President Kent S. Knutson, 48, of the 2.5-million-member American Lutheran Church was not expected to live, according to Mayo Clinic authorities early this month. He was stricken with an unusual disorder of the central nervous system following a trip to Indonesia and the Far East.

Congressman John Myers (R.-Ind.), an Episcopalian, was elected president of the Congressional Prayer Group.

Bishop Joseph L. Bernardin, 44, general secretary of the U. S. Catholic bishops’ conference and its action agency, the U. S. Catholic Conference, was named Archbishop of Cincinnati by Pope Paul. He is the youngest archbishop in the nation and one of the youngest in the world.

Vicar Timothy John Bavin, 37, of Brighton, England, will be the new Anglican dean of Johannesburg. He succeeds Gonville A. ffrench-Beytagh, who left South Africa after winning an appeal of his conviction of violating the country’s Terrorism Act.

Aaron Ruhumuriza, director of the Free Methodist Bible School in Rwanda, was elected president of the Protestant Council of Rwanda.

Progressive National Baptist Convention executive secretary S. S. Hodges was elected chairman of the North American Baptist Fellowship, which links the leaders of nine Baptist groups in Mexico, Canada, and the United States.

Episcopal bishop Robert F. Gibson, Jr., a former chairman of COCU, will retire from the bishopric in 1974.

Black staffer Charles S. Spivey of the World Council of Churches was to have been elected executive director of the ailing Church Federation of Greater Chicago last month, but a quorum was not present. The vote was postponed until this month.

Fuad Hadad, assistant headmaster of the Nazareth (Southern) Baptist Schools, was elected general secretary of the United Christian Council in Israel.

Remember that wild multi-finish Olympic basketball game between the United States and Russia? Doug Collins, an active member of the Benton, Illinois, First Baptist Church, was the player who dropped in the two foul shots that gave the United States a one-point victory in the “first” finish. And brothers Ben and John Peterson of the Evangelical Free Church of Comstock, Wisconsin, brought home gold and silver medals in wrestling.

Stated Clerk James A. Millard, Jr., chief executive of the 950,000-member Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern), will hand in his resignation at the General Assembly’s meeting next June. He has served for fourteen years.

In one of his first pronouncements as the new general secretary of the World Council of Churches, Philip Potter urged President Nixon to end the Vietnamese war immediately.

Editor William H. Stephens of People magazine has been named editor of inspirational books for Broadman Press, the Southern Baptist publishing facility.

One of the many government officials asked to resign by President Nixon is outspoken Nixon critic Theodore Hesburgh, Catholic cleric and University of Notre Dame president. He chaired the U. S. Civil Rights Commission.

David Hyatt, a staffer with the National Conference of Christians and Jews, was named NCCJ president by the NCCJ board.

World Scene

The stone work of the famous twinspired cathedral in Cologne, Germany’s largest church and a chief monument of Gothic architecture in Europe, is decaying so rapidly from atmospheric pollution that the cathedral may soon be closed to the public.

Pandemonium broke out at the first meeting of the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church in Greece in nearly four years. Archbishop Ieronymos of Athens stormed out of the meeting after being hit by criticism from three metropolitans (bishops), then returned and engineered the ouster of one and censure of another. The issues were various trivia and speaking to the press.

An ecumenical French translation of the New Testament was published in Paris. More than 100 Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox scholars worked on the project.

A Coptic Christian church was burned in a Cairo suburb in an apparent new outbreak of strife between Muslims and Copts. Months ago there were incidents in Alexandria when Muslim leaders charged that Copts were trying to proselytize Muslim young people. President Anwar el-Sadat blamed the disruption on “foreign elements,” possibly backed by the United States.

A world meeting of atheists was due to get under way December 22 in India, with American Madalyn Murray O’Hair presiding. Indian atheists have been promoting beef and pork parties to overcome religious taboos that, they claim, have kept the people ill-fed and disunited.

Uganda has ordered a special census for which more than 500 foreign missionaries must show up in person at prescribed locations. President Idi Amin cites security reasons and “Ugandazation of churches.”

The remains of a 2,000-year-old Herodian palace, complete with swimming pool, chariot race track, and guest house, were discovered around the hilltop Herodion overlooking Bethlehem, burial place of Herod the Great.

Israel is assembling examples of surviving wild life species on an 8,000-acre preserve in the Negev. Many of the 120 species mentioned in the Old Testament have disappeared, and others face imminent extinction.

Rhodesia reportedly has removed certain segregationist provisions from a 1970 law that required special registration for churches operating on a multiracial basis.

National Enquirer and the National Tattler, weekly tabloids, are running plenty of stories on religion, miraculous healings, the occult, psychic phenomena, mystics, and ghosts. Some are real scoops, some are fanciful yarns. A recent Enquirer “exclusive interview” with the Pope was based on a two-minute chat with the prelate and a conversation with a Vatican official. The Vatican disavowed the resulting article.

Protesting students at the Shanghai University Teachers’ College have won the right to read foreign books, including European and American literature of the last two centuries.

Until last month all major Chinese-English dictionaries had been produced by Western missionaries (the first was by British missionary Robert Morrison). Now a new innovative dictionary of modern usage is off the press; it’s by bilingual scholar Lin Yutang, 77, of Hong Kong, son of a Presbyterian minister.

Fuller Seminary professor C. Peter Wagner says the rate of growth for nominal Christianity around the world now exceeds the population growth rate.

British Army chaplain Gordon Rideout was cleared in a much publicized court-martial of indecently assaulting three ten-year-old school girls who belong to his choir. Defense sources claim the girls were miffed by the stern discipline of Rideout, who has three children of his own.

The World Council of Churches has appealed to member churches for $100,000 to help Papau, New Guinea, feed 120,000 starving tribespeople in the highlands, where drought, severe frosts, and fires have created havoc.

A Sudan Interior Mission release declares: “What may well be one of the greatest conversion movements in Africa’s history is taking place in the mountains of southwest Ethiopia. Thousands of people are coming to Christ. New churches are appearing everywhere.”

A Greek court ruled that Jehovah’s Witnesses is a “sect of the Christian faith” and has freedom of worship in Greece.

Bishop Chandu Ray says the Christian Church in Burma is on the march. New parish patterns are emerging. Laymen have a much greater say and share in worship and witness with young people “very much the driving force.”

Anglican rector Kenneth Bowler, 36, obtained authority to have his church licensed as a social club so he can set up a bar and serve drinks after services and at other church functions to further the parish’s social life. The church is located near Derby, England. Drinks will be served to members only.

DEATHS

THEODORE W. ANDERSON, 83, retired president of the Evangelical Covenant Church of America; in Chicago.

HENRY H. BROWN, 58, a bishop in the 30,000-member Bible Way Church; in Prince Frederick, Maryland.

THEODORE PARKER FERRIS, 63, nationally known preacher and author, and pastor of Boston’s Trinity (Episcopal) Church since 1942; in Boston, of cancer.

BETHEL H. FLEMING, 70, a Methodist physician who with her husband pioneered Christian medical mission work in Nepal when the kingdom first opened to an ecumenical mission in 1953; in Wenatchee, Washington.

PAUL M. HERRICK, 74, retired United Methodist bishop of Virginia who earlier was head of the Evangelical United Brethren’s mid-west area; in Dayton, Ohio, after a long illness.

EDWARD B. WILLINGHAM, 73, former pastor of the National Memorial Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., and general secretary of the American Baptist Foreign Mission Societies; in New York, of cancer.

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