WITH A SONG IN MY HEART

It was recently my happy privilege to interview Hank Pulaski, dynamic prince of gospel music. Hank has just returned from a highly successful world tour that took him to Tegucigalpa, Manicore, Piparia, and Bontang.

Hank, rotund, handsome, and well tanned, has come a long way since his birth in a logging shack in the foothills of the Florida mountains. He laughingly comments that lying in a manger is probably a notch above lying on a heap of logging rope.

Hank maintains a wonderful sense of humor about those early hardships. “Why, I was ten years old,” he recalls, “before I knew a McCulloch chain saw wasn’t a piece of furniture. We were so poor the squirrels used to leave nuts on our doorstep.”

Young Hank regularly occupied a place in the choir of the Swedenborgian Mission Church. His booming bass-baritone became well known in the area, and he was called on to sing at many wakes and bar mitzvahs.

In his teens Hank felt the lure of the big city, but he got his directions confused and ended up in New York. His big voice and commanding stage presence earned him a place as a substitute in the chorus of the Jimmy Dean show.

After a few years he moved to Nashville and the big time. He landed a berth with the Birch Brothers, which put him in the middle of the gospel-music business.

“I sang the Gospel in song just about every night,” he says. “I guess I just wasn’t listenin’. My personal life was pretty wild about that time. I was smokin’ cigars and datin’ a couple of go-go dancers.”

Then the Birch Brothers hired Marilee Williams as their booking secretary because she knew how to write. Things began to happen to Hank.

“I took one look at her and thought, a guy would have to be crazy to marry a prude like that.” However, the Lord had his way, and they were married three weeks later.

At first married life was pretty good, according to Hank. “Instead of eatin’ overcooked food in some strange restaurant I could eat overcooked food in my own home.”

Then some of his old habits began to reassert themselves. He began to smoke cigars again and stay out late at night.

Hank knew that Marilee was praying for him during these rough days and resented it. “It made me so mad I caroused all the more. By this time I had moved up to rum-soaked cigars.”

Then a dramatic change occurred. “I was way down,” Hank recalls. “It was the middle of the night and I had run out of cigars and it just didn’t seem worthwhile goin’ on so I knelt right there by the go-go cage and gave my heart to the Lord.”

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“Now I sing the Gospel with my heart, not my mouth—although it’s a little muffled that way,” he says, that irrepressible sense of humor coming to the surface.

When you see Hank out on center stage, down on one knee, arms outstretched, chartreuse silk suit glowing in the spotlight, singing about that old rugged cross, you know he’s singing about his own experience. If you don’t have the opportunity of seeing Hank in person, be sure to hear this marvelous performer on the Hominy label.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL GUIDELINES

I would like to express my hearty thanks for the recent bibliographical articles in CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Being in Hong Kong, I cannot go to a seminary library or a Christian bookstore to find out and browse through the recent theological publications. I am already teaching at the school with the best theological collection in Hong Kong. So those bibliographical articles give us faculty good guidelines in ordering books.… Anyway I am grateful for such an evangelical voice as CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Department of Philosophy and Religion

Chung Chi College

Chinese University of Hong Kong

BELATED PROTEST

I have recently been shown a copy of your report on my Boston speech (“The War on Church Establishment,” March 3). If you call me such flattering (and undeserved) names as “probably the world’s foremost expert on the state of Christianity in the Soviet Union,” could you at least do me the courtesy of reporting me accurately?

I have always maintained, as you say, that the majority of Soviet Christians wish to legalize their position and not operate as an “underground church.” They often call themselves the “persecuted church,” which I prefer—but this is really only a question of terminology.

I would like to place on record (which I have already done elsewhere) my attitude to taking Bibles into Russia. This is both one’s legal right and one’s Christian duty—which I have fulfilled on every single one of my own visits to the Soviet Union. However, although the Soviets have never published any law against importing Bibles (how could they when a small number are produced quite legally inside the country?), in fact they treat those who take in large quantities as offenders. I know this—I had many confiscated in 1960. Sometimes confiscated Bibles find their way on to the black market. Therefore I advocated caution in trying to take in large numbers. I have never taken “a dim view of smuggling in Bibles” and I have been seriously misquoted. Perhaps your reporter heard me say: “I repudiate the word ‘smuggling’—you cannot ‘smuggle’ something which is not legally banned and on which no duty is payable. However, for your own sake be cautious.”

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The CSRC is not itself an organization dealing with Bible importation to the U. S. S. R., but seeks to publish the facts about the religious situation there.

Director

Centre for the Study of Religion

and Communism

Chislehurst, Kent, England

AWAITING OUR VERDICT?

Inasmuch as J. W. Montgomery (Current Religious Thought, March 31) censured my essay, “The Impropriety of Evidentially Arguing for the Resurrection,” and at the same time advanced a representation of presuppositional apologetics which is as confused as it is counterfeit, perhaps you would allow me to reply.

Contrary to Montgomery, presuppositional apologetics is neither apriorism nor pietism; it neither views fallen man as without evidential reasoning ability nor faith as anything akin to blind credulity. Montgomery’s scholarship is here inaccurate. The presuppositional apologist is not indifferent to God’s acts in history, and he certainly does not discourage rational, scholarly research into history! What my essay was demonstrating, on the other hand, was that evidential argumentation methodologically cannot and morally ought not become the crux or foundation of our apologetical witness.

An apologetic such as Montgomery’s cannot offer any assured hope to an age longing to hear the meaningful affirmation, “He is risen!” Montgomery’s case for the weakened profession, “He probably arose,” is non-telling under cross examination and is easily faulted as statistically improbable, as using the assumption of uniformity to prove nonuniformity (miracle), and (without scriptural presuppositions) as rendering the resurrection a freak event without theological implications (such as Romans 4:25).…

Building our apologetic upon the rock-words of Christ and not foolish sand (Matt. 7:24 ff.), we must in repentant faith renounce intellectual self-sufficiency which assigns God to the dock to await the creature’s verdict. Not as Adam in the garden or Israel in the wilderness, Christ obediently presupposed the truth of God’s word when tempted by Satan to adduce empirical proofs of God’s veracity; he countered with authoritative Scripture: “You shall not put the Lord your God to a test” (Matt. 4:7). The special status of God’s word is that one is not to demand proof of it. This self-attesting word must be central in our apologetic, for “if they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one should rise from the dead” (Luke 16:31).

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North Wales, Pa.

STRAINING THE COUNTERCULTURE

I was pleased to see my article, “The Literature of Countercultural Religion” (April 28), poured in between the FBI and a reactionary editorial. You know what they say about old wineskins. Your readers deserve to know, however, that the two countercultural types my original manuscript specified were “protestant and gnostic,” in line with the article’s religious motif. Clearly, changing “protestant” to “protest” permits one to make gnosticism the religion of all the authors I cited. This obviously appealed to your editorial writer. It does not appeal to me, nor to those who know anything about the counterculture.

Strasbourg, France

PERCEPTIVE PORTRAIT

The article by Thomas Howard, “The Burden of the God” (April 28), presents an unusually perceptive account of why people create evil from the best of motives. The conclusion, however, appears to be one of those “leaps of faith” so vividly described by Dr. Francis Schaeffer. It seems that we are to somehow muddle along knowing that our best efforts are doomed to achieve only disaster, and yet valiantly we are to continue to do the right things, without any reasonable hope of success.

The article portrays the attitude of our times. A forgetfulness that the kingdom of God is meant to be a real country. A community of believers, peculiar, consecrated, called out, spiritually organized under the leadership of Christ, who demonstrate to the secular world a new way of living. This spiritual community has the power to bring good from righteous living because, and only because, of the life of Christ in it. Until Christians recapture the sense of identity and community taught in the New Testament, we will be caught in the same trap as everybody else, trying to do good without God.

Our world teaches that everything depends on people. It docs. If people acknowledge the sovereignty of God, he will pour out his blessings. If, on the other hand, humanity is made to reign, God’s wrath will be upon us all. The choice is clear, God or man. We know that most of our society and institutions have already made the wrong choice. We Christians must now show that there is a better way.

Tempe, Ariz.

Paragraphs 2, 3, and 4 on page 7 of the April 28 issue, which carried my article on “The Burden of the God,” belong after the first paragraph on page 5. It’s rather chaotic the way it appears there, and I guess it was a matter of one page of the manuscript getting out of place on some copy editor’s desk!

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Associate Professor of English

Gordon College

Wenham, Mass.

• The mistake was in the galley-handling, not in the copy-editing.—ED.

A PLACE FOR HOOVER

I was very pleased to read J. Edgar Hoover’s well-written and authoritative article in the April 28 issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY (“A Morality For Violence”).

He earned a prominent place in the history of our nation by his leadership of the FBI in protecting and Preserving our freedoms. As a giant on the national scene, he attracted more than his share of rocks and mud, particularly from the criminals and revolutionaries who felt threatened. His clear-cut Christian testimony, and his outspoken advocacy of Sunday-school attendance, have endeared him to Christians for generations.

Broomall, Pa.

MISSING THE POSITIVE THROB

The coverage given the recent 104th annual convention of the Christian Holiness Association (“Holiness Groups Pare Down Creed,” April 28) is appreciated.

I regret, however, that the prevailing throb of positive Christian expression was not captured by the report. Must a report be hypercritical to be news-worthy?

Alas, perhaps some reports of the incident of Jesus cleansing the temple (Matt. 21:12) would not have majored on his correctness in action, but would have given priority to the unemployment problems of the moneychangers. Matthew’s report had a different focus, and I’m glad.

Executive Director

Christian Holiness Association

Indianapolis, Ind.

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