Eutychus and His Kin: June 12, 1981

Knowing—As I Am Known

My, but it’s getting expensive to be a church member—at least at the church where I belong. And I don’t mean the offerings. It’s the extras that are attacking my budget.

Exhibit A is the “church directory” for which all of us had to have our pictures taken. The picture was free, I guess, but it cost me money to order extra copies for our friends and relatives. The whole project just about wrecked the church, even though the pastor said the book would help us get to know each other better. We saw people in the directory that we have never seen in church, and this raised some furor. Then the deacons took up a special offering so we could mail copies to our missionaries. Surely missionaries see enough weird-looking people without sending them our pictures.

No sooner did we recover from the directory drain than the pastor suggested that we start wearing name tags. “It will help us to know each other better,” he explained. (I think we’re getting to know him better.) The deacons displayed samples at prayer meeting and the battle started again. Mrs. Hawkins said the type was too small and she couldn’t read it. But her eyes are so weak that we would all have to wear sandwich boards for her to be able to read our names. Mrs. Lorrimer wondered if the tags were available in different colors so she could match them to her various apparel ensembles, and Mrs. Olsen said that the pins would ruin her clothes. “Why don’t we get the kind that clip on your pocket, like they wear at the hospital?”

Well, the name tag idea was tabled. Then the pastor came home from a “group dynamics” conference and decided we needed to be more dynamic. It turned out to be dynamite instead. “We will cancel the evening services,” he said, “and start meeting in house groups. This way we can get to know each other better. We will also save light and heat at the church.” When somebody asked about wasting gas driving all over town, he just said, “Well, this way we can get to know the town better, and you may lead a hitchhiker to the Lord.”

Don’t ask me how the house groups are doing. I hear that some people are complaining because it’s costing a lot to provide coffee and refreshments. “You don’t have to feed us,” the pastor explained, “but it will help you to get to know your grocer better.” Forgive me, but I’m staying home instead and reading my Bible and praying for the people in the church directory. Would you believe it? I’m getting to know myself and my Lord better.

EUTYCHUS X

A Realistic Portrayal

Bernard Rifkin’s evaluation of Ordinary People [April 24] astonished me. I could not see any sinister and ulterior motives lurking in the shadows of this movie.

Rifkin confuses biblical values (or “Calvinist values”) with “traditional culture,” a common but dangerous misconception. There are elements in our culture that do contribute to repression of feeling, to artificiality, and to mental illness. This is not the fault or the result of biblical values, nor does Ordinary People claim that it is.

The film’s crucial message to Christians is (1) hurting is human, (2) keeping hurt inside can be self-destructive, and (3) there are people out there, even unbelievers, who can help us work through our hurt.

JESSICA SHAVER

Long Beach, Calif.

Why Rifkin sees this movie as an attack on Protestant values is beyond me. This descriptive movie is harshly realistic of what happens when anger and negative feelings are denied and parents do not have a healthy relationship. Rifkin is attacking a straw man and is overspiritualizing what he sees.

We have in today’s culture a large number of evangelical families exactly where the Jarretts were in Ordinary People: good families with relationships lacking depth and true intimacy. A major factor is our emphasis on cognitive and behavioral components of human personality. Many people—like Rifkin, I suspect—are fearful of the affective component of their personality, so they repress their feelings and never allow themselves the openness and spontaneity that make true intimacy possible.

WAYLON O. WARD

Richardson, Tex.

Ordinary People is a morally poignant movie precisely because it penetrates the spiritual vacuity inherent in the value orientations and cultural consciousness of people like Rifkin himself. It shows us, in a painfully familiar (and attractive) setting, the structured strains and existential ambiguities that are emotionally pathogenic, not in spite of, but because of middle-class secularized Protestant values.

JEFFREY W. SWANSON

New Haven, Conn.

Humanism In Education

The April 10 issue was of special value to me as it provided encouragement, advice, information, correction, and a basis for discussion.

If Christian writers such as Crater [“The Unproclaimed Priests of Public Education”] listened less raptly to and quoted less frequently from the educational experts, they would give their readers a more balanced picture of public education in America. There is a great difference between what is said in the orderly, quiet expert’s office and what is done in the stuffy, busy, crowded classroom.

Ten years ago our province’s department of education established a humanistic-based “values” social studies program. Experts came from all over to laud and to borrow from this innovative program. Last year the whole social studies curriculum was changed. The values emphasis was not scrapped as a result of mass protests. Rather, an expert left the rarefied atmosphere of his office and talked to teachers. He found that they had not been teaching the new curriculum and had no intention of ever teaching it. The reasons for why they found this curriculum unteachable were as varied as the teachers themselves.

Although evangelicals fear it and college officials wish it, educational experts still are not able to mass produce teachers as Heinz does ketchup.

LUCILLE GLEDDIE

Red Deer, Alberta, Canada

Messianic Jews

I want to express my sincere appreciation for the article, “A Messianic Jew Pleads His Case,” by Pawley and Juster [April 24]. From my own perspective as a Gentile Christian, given a deep love for Jewish people by my parents, I have discovered how helpful Passover, Sabbath, and the other festivals of Leviticus 23 are to Christians seeking to discover their Old Testament roots. Our children have grown up with these festivals and look forward to them with great anticipation. Perhaps one way for evangelicals to begin to appreciate Messianic Jews will be to discover our common roots.

MARTHA ZIMMERMAN

Richland, Wash.

Because of my Jewish background, it is easy to relate to events in the Gospels and in the first-century church. Peter, Paul, James, and John are members of my family and the Rabbi of Nazareth speaks to me in my own language as I sit at his feet. What could be better? The rabbis will tell you that I am no longer a Jew because I have found the Messiah whom Isaiah and Moses foreknew. If I were agnostic or atheistic, I would still be Jewish, but since I have recognized the Messiah by the signs given by our holy prophets, I have ceased to be Jewish, but somehow have not become a Gentile. What am I, then? My heart tells me that I am as Jewish as I was on the day of my birth to a Jewish father and mother.

MURRAY GOODMAN

Tucson, Ariz.

My father-in-law was a converted Jew. He did not come out of strict Judaism, and he was not ashamed of his Jewishness, but upon his conversion, he was not in the slightest interested in “Hebrew Christian congregations.” His position simply was, “I was once a Jew, I am now a Christian. I want to be known as a Christian without any trappings or qualifications.”

As far as the apostle Paul is concerned, at the present time, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile … but all one in Christ Jesus. I am a Gentile Christian. My father-in-law was a Jewish Christian. But both of us are Christians. I do not attend a Gentile church; there was no reason for him to have attended a Jewish church. There is no such thing. The church combines those who were once Jews and once Gentiles into one new body, one new thing, the body of Jesus Christ which is the church.

Furthermore, in my own experience of talking to Jews about Jesus Christ, the vast majority know almost nothing about Judaism. They are Jewish pagans to all practical purposes. So much stress is laid in courses on Jewish evangelism on a thorough knowledge of the law and fulfilled prophecy, although as a matter of fact, the majority of Jewish people to whom we speak about the gospel have no knowledge of either one.

FRANCIS R. STEELE

Upper Darby, Pa.

One place in Juster and Pawley’s article where absolutist statements distort reality and the boundless power of God is in the pronouncement that “one has to be Jewish to relate in total compassion to the hearts of people who have been through the Holocaust.” So much for Corrie ten Boom and other Gentile Christians who suffered and died for the victims of the Holocaust.

ROBERT STROUD

Citrus Heights, Calif.

Rabbi Tannenbaum’s statement that “Jewish tradition allows that Gentiles can believe in the Trinitarian concept, termed in Hebrew as shittuf (partnership)” is not correct. The best Hebrew term, the one used by Israeli believers for whom Hebrew is their native tongue, is the word shilush, which means trinity. Tanenbaum, viewing the Trinitarian concept as a “partnership,” rejects the Christian concept on the basis that the covenant of Sinai “explicitly excludes the possibility of any belief that God shares his being in any partnership with any other being.” We are not talking about a shittuf or a mere partnership between God and a man named Jesus, but we are talking about a shilush in which the one God as a Trinity shares the same essence in a oneness.

Jewish believers represented in this issue were all representative of one branch, that of Messianic Judaism. The Hebrew Christian approach has a far more biblical and theological foundation than the former, whose representatives often represent a very confused and inconsistent theology.

ARNOLD G. FRUCHTENBAUM

Ariel Ministries

San Antonio, Tex.

Letters are welcome. Only a selection can be published. Since all are subject to condensation, those of 100 to 150 words are preferred. Address letters to Eutychus and His Kin,CHRISTIANITY TODAY, 465 Gundersen Drive, Carol Stream, Illinois 60187.

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