Corpus Christianum?

Corpus Christianum?

What may be the nation’s largest and most significant evangelistic effort of the twentieth century, Key 73, has become the target of intense criticism by the American Jewish Committee and by Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, its director of interreligious affairs.

At a colloquium on “Civil Religion in America,” co-sponsored by the American Jewish Committee and Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, a resolution was adopted that the American Jewish Committee leaders said “marks the first time that a Southern Baptist group joined in a resolution repudiating proselytism of other groups, including Jews.” A careful reading of the resolution does not seem to bear out this evaluation. It is clear that the American Jewish Committee is deeply concerned with the impact Key 73 might have on the Jewish community as the Gospel of Jesus Christ is carried to Jews in 1973.

We can dismiss as wishful thinking any announced aim by uninformed Key 73 participants of making the United States a Christian nation. It never has been a Christian nation and it very probably never will be. No one takes seriously the idea of a “Corpus Christianum.” Nor should we hesitate to pronounce judgment upon the concept of civil religion in America; if there were such a thing, it would turn out to be a Frankenstein monster that no devout Bible believer would want any part of.

The real source of concern for the American Jewish Committee is its fear that Key 73 may succeed in wooing Jews to the Christian faith, not simply to a civil religion, and this it intends to prevent if at all possible. This is quite understandable, and in the open marketplace Jews have every right to do this. The American Jewish Committee, however, is dead wrong if it thinks evangelical Christians hold that “Judaism [is] a complete faith not requiring ‘fulfillment’ by Christianity.” Evangelicals believe strongly that the Jew Jesus is the Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament Scriptures. They believe that the Messiah many Jews look for to enter Jerusalem’s closed gate has already come and that they must share this good news with everyone they meet, including Jews.

The implication that to proselytize among Jews is to be anti-Semitic is far from the truth. Nobody is about to coerce any Jew into accepting Christ as Saviour, and nobody is going to rob Jews of their civil rights in a pluralistic society. Above all, no evangelical can take the New Testament seriously and be anti-Semitic.

The great problem for the Jewish community is that substantial numbers of Jews are turning to Christ and that Key 73 may accelerate the trend. But in a free society that guarantees religious liberty, this is a normal risk that all religions must assume. There is nothing to prevent Jews from proselytizing among Protestants and Catholics. Nor are Jews to be thought of as a special category in Key 73 strategy, which has for its basic aim the presentation of Jesus Christ as Saviour to all who do not know him. This includes atheists, agnostics, and adherents to the large variety of sects in America as well as Jews, for whom Christians feel great concern, seeing them as the chosen people of God to whom was imparted the Old Testament revelation and through whose Davidic line the Messiah came.

The Vd Epidemic

The high cost of permissiveness in American society is well documented by Public Health Service statistics that show more reported cases of gonorrhea than of all other infectious diseases combined! And there are undoubtedly many unreported cases also. The grim figures show an epidemic of venereal disease far more serious than most people realize.

In the first nine months of 1972, physicians reported more than 573,000 new cases of gonorrhea. No other infectious disease even approaches this total. During the same period there were only 115,000 reported cases of chicken pox, the only major childhood disease for which there is still no mass-administered preventive vaccine. Even infectious hepatitis, which has been spreading rapidly in recent years through drug addicts’ use of dirty hypodermic needles, has a far lower total—about 42,000 reported cases through September.

Despite intensive public educational programs, the VD epidemic shows no sign of letting up. The 573,000 cases this years compare with 503,000 for the same period in 1971; we appear to be on the way to a rate of 2,000 new cases every day! The incidence of syphilis also continues to rise: last year about 18,000 cases were reported in the first nine months, and this year the figure was approaching 20,000.

Although gonorrhea can be cured by modem antibiotics, it frequently leaves permanent scars in the male urethra and the female vagina. It is a leading cause of sterility, both male and female. Physicians emphasize that there is virtually only one way of contracting venereal disease, through sexual intercourse with an infected person. The epidemic is therefore a reflection of increasing promiscuity (and a good argument for natural law). There is reason to think the disease is no longer spread mainly by prostitutes and their customers but is more and more common among sophisticated “swingers,” both male and female, married and unmarried.

The modern obsession with sexual gratification directly violates scriptural principles. Those who give way to it are ill inclined to take into account the price in mental and physical anguish that is more and more likely to be required of them. Literally millions of marriages are being affected. The inevitable result, if promiscuity continues to increase, will be an even higher divorce rate and many more alienated children.

Imagine: this is going on in what is supposedly the most enlightened and most affluent society in all of human history.

Back Under Fire

Violent protest erupted on the American scene again last month. After many months of welcome quiet came news of renewed campus disorder. Students at Southern University in Louisiana, complaining about allegedly poor living conditions and high costs, kept demonstrating angrily until there was a major confrontation. Two students were killed. Although the circumstances are unclear, the incident appears to have been a needless tragedy.

In Washington, meanwhile, a group of militant Indians assembled to air grievances against the government. They took over the beautifully situated Bureau of Indian Affairs building along Constitution Avenue and eventually left its interior a shambles. The specific outcome of their “negotiations” with government officials was not made clear. What was very apparent was that the Indians left rather quickly upon receipt of some $66,000 in cash from the government.

These new outbreaks show the increasing difficulty that even the most responsible authorities have in dealing with dissidents with causes. What it seems to come down to is that the protesters who manage to make the greatest nuisances of themselves are the ones who get their way, or else there is bloodshed. They may or may not represent the most legitimate causes.

There are, of course, many causes that are worthy of attention and injustices that need to be corrected. Indeed, that is part of the problem. There are so many that one has to be somewhat arbitrary about which he chooses to pay heed to—unless that decision is made for him through some public medium.

The Reality Of Demons

That the present widespread renewal and extension of commitment to Jesus Christ should be accompanied by a resurgence of occultism is not surprising. Over the centuries, including the period of our Lord’s earthly ministry, there has been a close correlation between increased spiritual activity Godward and Satanward. In this self-proclaimed enlightened age, many people think the idea of demons is passé. But at the same time, the lure of the occult or of witchcraft, or the potentially dangerous aspects of the psychic, has ensnared many others. Often entrapment begins with what was thought to be harmless curiosity.

In a recent speech, said to be his first devoted entirely to the devil, Pope Paul properly calls attention to the need for awareness of Satan and his legions. Our “A Layman and His Faith” column this issue is devoted to demons (p. 26), and we review several books dealing with the occult (p. 19). Some of the books are written by advocates of false religion and must be consulted with care. To ignore the revival of the occult is to leave oneself or those to whom one ministers more vulnerable. But to become too absorbed in the “study” of it is likewise perilous.

Many Christians in the charismatic movement are insulted by the comparison often made between their spiritual experiences and parallel phenomena in non-Christian religions. Yet these believers need to be especially aware of the wiles of the devil in infiltration and counterfeiting.

While clearly indicating the superiority of God, the Bible attributes reality and personality in similar terms to God, the holy angels, Satan, and the demons. It is therefore not surprising that the theological tendency which a century and a half ago began by denying the personality of Satan should in our own time culminate in a denial of the personality of God! In the great spiritual warfare, all men are witting or unwitting participants. Our loyalty and reverence is to the triune God. But his—and our—adversary must not be ignored, mocked, or allowed to trick us. Knowledge of God and fellowship with him are preeminent; but let us not neglect to know and beware the enemy and his wiles.

Faith And Order Make A Comeback

During the early postwar years, ecumenical enthusiasm ran high. Neo-orthodoxy, which many of its adherents prefer to call “biblical theology,” was still the dominant influence in Protestant circles and was even getting a hearing among Roman Catholics. It brought a renewed interest in great doctrinal themes such as revelation, the Atonement, grace, the sovereignty of God, resurrection, and judgment, although—as one of its representatives pointed out—the recovery of biblical language did not imply a recovery of biblical content, inasmuch as neo-orthodoxy did not break free of the anti-supernaturalist world-view of liberalism (Langdon B. Gilkey, “The Travail of Biblical Language,” in Journal of Religion, 1961). The interest in form combined with a certain ambivalence about content also characterized the ecumenical movement in its early days. Protestants developed a romantic fascination with liturgy, the monastic life, spiritual discipline, church structure, and religious symbolism.

Observers of the World Council of Churches during its early years predicted that it would develop into a kind of super-church with a highly developed liturgy and organization, but with considerable ambiguity about the objective validity of what the liturgy, especially the creeds, specifically proclaim. All these things were the province of the “Faith and Order” sector of the WCC.

As things turned out, however, after 1966 “Faith and Order” was rudely pushed into the background by the increasingly political orientation of the World Council, which began to concentrate more and more on its “Church and Society” wing. However, although the zeal for faith and order prominent at the WCC’s Second Assembly at Evanston in 1954 was submerged, it was not destroyed. Recently it has come to the surface again in news being made by the Ecumenical Institute, which has spread from Chicago to scores of local churches (see News, page 46). This organization, though not directly related to either the WCC or its Evanston Assembly, has perpetuated some of the concern for “transcendence,” “depth,” and “spiritual life” that marked the theological mood of those years.

Evangelicals ought to be aware of the institute, because for over a decade it has been working hard in areas long neglected by the WCC establishment but still very important to man in his quest for spiritual realities. All that work has produced some remarkable studies, principles, techniques, and results, a number of which could prove very valuable to evangelicals—or, if misapplied and misdirected, quite dangerous.

It would be a mistake to see in the “revolutionary” zeal of the Ecumenical Institute an attempt to implement the “revolutionary” (i.e., political, secularistic) theology of the Church and Society movement. It is far more complex than that, and represents an appeal to man’s spiritual side, which official WCC theology virtually ignores. We do not need to ask whether the Ecumenical Institute represents something important; it does. What we need to find out is whether its theology is biblical, interpreted with the aid of existentialist theological language, or whether it is existentialism seeking expression in biblical language.

Lunar Christianity

A colony on the moon in this generation?

That’s what two scientists from the University of Houston have in mind. “NASA has funded studies of a twelve-man lunar surface base for the late 1980s,” they told the International Astronautical Federation Congress in Vienna earlier this fall. “This paper deals with concepts for expanding this lunar surface base to a more permanent colony of about 180 persons.”

Presumably such a colony would include men, women, and even children—with “normal” family life. Dr. John R. Howell and Dr. C. J. Huang also seem to be thinking of cultural possibilities in their paper. “Consider the possibility of creating or performing a ballet in one-sixth gravity,” they say. The paper goes on to discuss the technical problems and possibilities, and the whole idea appears to be very feasible.

One goal would be to try to make the lunar colony as independent of earth as possible, to minimize the amount of materials that would have to be transported 240,000 miles. The Houston scientists are trying to determine whether food could be produced on the moon. One suggestion, they say, was “to raise edible mushrooms using metabolic wastes as a growth medium during the fourteen-earth-day lunar night. Calculations showed that adequate nutrition required an intake of seventy-five pounds of mushrooms per day per person. The idea was abandoned.”

This kind of talk prompts us to begin to think a lot more seriously about what the ramifications are for Christians who are serious about what the Bible requires of them. What kind of claim ought they to stake on the moon? Is there a new kind of experience they ought to be planning for? Could it possibly hold promise for resolving some of the difficulties faced by the Church here on earth? It is too late not to be considering the spiritual implications of the lunar frontier.

How To Be Angry

Anger is often categorically listed as a sin in the Scriptures, yet at the same time it is repeatedly ascribed to God. In English we partly conceal this by speaking of the “wrath” of God, but there is no corresponding distinction in the original languages of Scripture. Can you think of any other vices in men that are virtures in God?

Actually, a close reading of the Bible shows that it is not man’s anger (or wrath or indignation) as such that is censured, but the universal tendency to abuse it. God’s anger is righteous. Ours should be, too.

Paul and James give two helpful guidelines to the proper expression of anger. In writing to the Ephesians, Paul actually tells us to “be angry” (5:26), but he quickly adds that we should do this in such a way that we “do not sin.” This can be done if we “do not let the sun go down” on our anger. That is, the expression of anger should not be delayed, stored up for some future outburst, turned into a grudge. Anger is sinful when it is postponed or maintained beyond appropriate boundaries. (One must distinguish between God’s present wrath, which rests upon unbelievers [see, for example, John 3:36], and the punishment for sin, which has been mercifully postponed.)

James adds to this insight. He tells us that we are to “be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger” (1:19). If he meant that we were never to be angry, then he would also be saying we should never speak. Rather, James recognizes that we are often too quick to fly off the handle. We haven’t been good listeners or observers; we don’t know all the relevant facts. Just as delayed, anger is sin, so is hasty anger.

Consider these guidelines. Indifference in the face of iniquity is sin. If in the presence of wrong we do not have feelings that can be called anger, we are not godly. But these feelings, if they are righteous, must be neither too quick nor too slow. It’s not easy, and when we err we must be quick to confess to God and to the person we have sinned against. But we can err also if we attempt to avoid the problem by never getting angry at anything.

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