Thoughts On CT’S Thirtieth

Your Thirtieth Anniversary Issue [Oct. 17] was remarkable. Your enumeration of problems was comprehensive and you offered timely solutions. May I suggest one more bright ray of hope: in the same year CT began, George Eldon Ladd said, “God will not permit Satan to exercise his power in human history forever.… [The] glorious destiny for man will be achieved only by the personal, visible, glorious return of Christ.… The second coming of Christ is thus both the Blessed Hope of the Church and the hope of human history.”

NORMAN L. MEAGER

Akron, Ohio

Congratulations on CT’s thirtieth anniversary. The special issue articles were illuminating and useful, although they cloud some factors known to actual participants in beginnings. For example, the reference to Fuller Seminary’s founding faculty incredibly passes over the name of Dr. Everett F. Harrison, one of the central three.

CARL F. H. HENRY

Arlington, Va.

Defining The IBR

The nature of the Institute for Biblical Research, mentioned by Mark A. Noll [Books, Oct. 17], may not be as self-evident or well known as the Evangelical Theological Society or the Wesleyan Theological Society. The IBR in the U.S. was inspired by the model of the British Tyndale Fellowship for Biblical Studies begun at Cambridge by scholars such as F. F. Bruce and D. J. Wiseman. The purpose of the IBR is “to foster the study of the Scriptures within the evangelical context.”

EDWIN YAMAUCHI

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

Pat Robertson’S Prayers

I am not necessarily a Pat Robertson supporter, but I have followed reports of his candidacy with some interest [News, Oct. 17]. It will be interesting to see what criticism he receives. A case in point is the guffawing about Robertson’s claim to have moved Hurricane Gloria away from Virginia Beach, Virginia, in 1984. Reporters do not snicker at prayer breakfasts held in Washington, nor prayer at a Presidential inauguration. It is obvious they feel it is acceptable to pray—but not to become fanatical by claiming it has any effect!

REV. LARRY D. KELLEY

Highland Baptist Church

Junction City, Kan.

If Hurricane Gloria was indeed diverted from Virginia in response to Pat’s prayers, the least he could do is offer some measure of apology to his Christian brothers and sisters in Long Island and Connecticut who took a beating from the storm.

DAVID W. MULLEN

Manchester, Conn.

Poor Arguments For Poor Policy

Poor public policy is poor public policy, in spite of even poorer arguments in its defense. Such is the case with Paul R. Spickard’s “Why I Believe in Affirmative Action” [Speaking Out, Oct 3]. In fact, affirmative action goes against the grain of the biblical concept of public justice. According to Exodus 23:1–9, public justice is to be “blind,” including a specific provision prohibiting favoritism to the poor.

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REV. HAROLD ORNDORFF, JR.

Christian Student Fellowship

Highland Heights, Ky.

How Does The Canon Speak?

John Stek seems to object to using the Bible as an impressive source of unrelated clichés [“Interogating the Bible,” Oct. 3]. He seems to prefer that I burn the midnight oil to learn how the entire canon speaks with one voice. But he—along with almost all evangelicals—gives no logically compelling reason to justify that huge effort. Can’t we evangelicals do any better to show that the canon is more authoritative than Aesop’s Fables than by pointing out, in a circular argument, that the Bible is divinely inspired and proved so by its own statements to that effect?

KENNETH J. RADIMER

Little Falle, N.J.

Cheap Shots

There are many worthy causes deserving support, but probably none more than SPAMSIN (SPAM for short), or the Society for Preventing Abuse of Minister’s families in Sermon Illustrations Now!

The society was started a few months ago by a pastor’s wife, Ida Killtim. Ida’s limit was reached one Sunday when her husband Otto’s 37-minute sermon caused her pot roast lunch to be burned, then his Sunday evening sermon burned it again as an illustration of Elijah’s fully consumed meat offering.

As always, Ida politely smiled from the second row while the congregation roared. But the next day she founded SPAM.

SPAM is especially popular with pastors’ children. They are finally coming out from under the pew to describe the humiliation they have felt when the Reverend Dad recounts with dangerous ministerial license the “cutest” events of their childhood. Some have even described how they feigned illness on Sundays when Dad’s sermon topic was “The Prodigal Son” or “The Wayward Children of Israel.”

It may take a while to undo what centuries of ministerial license have done, but SPAM is determined. As Ida has so aptly put it, “The name SPAM won’t be taken lightly. We won’t rest until we’ve found a substitute for some of the HAM in the pulpit today.”

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EUTYCHUS

Using Women’S Gifts

Thank you for the Christianity Today Institute’s symposium on “Women in Leadership: Finding Ways to Serve the Church” [Oct. 3]. As a conservative, evangelical Christian, I was pleasantly surprised that a conservative, evangelical magazine would publish and support the viewpoint that women have the gifts and abilities to serve in positions of leadership in the Christian church and community. However, I disagree with Kenneth Kantzer’s view that we must “proceed with care” and have Christian women” … seek avenues that are less disturbing to the peace of the church.” His advice flies in the face of Christ’s words and examples. He turned the established church upside-down and revealed its male-dominated, perfectionistic heresy about salvation, in less than 3 years! Isn’t almost 2,000 years enough time to carry out Christ’s desire that both men and women be set free in order to worship and serve the Living God?

ROBERT R. KING, JR., PH.D.

Counseling Ministries of the Mountains

Blue Jay, Calif.

Kantzer asks, “What shall we do about all the highly gifted and well-trained women …?” Paul has an answer: whether women or men—let’s see how they do in their own homes and families and marriages before they look for a ministering place in the church!

PAUL K. HAGEDOREN

Bonanza, Oreg.

The articles were encouraging to evangelicals in saying that biblical people do not have to be trapped by their culture or its fads and extremes. We have been the loser in our reluctance to take advantage of the gifts God has given women.

RICHARD L. GATHRO

Christian College Coalition

Washington, D.C.

Many evangelicals have not been exposed to recent scholarship on the biblical passages relating to women, and I appreciate CTi’s willingness to thoroughly study this issue and include well-known female scholars and role models.

JACQUELINE LEKSEN

Lynnwood, Wash.

Kantzer’s conclusion, “To refuse ordination to women is to maintain that God does not call women to ministry,” is not true. The Bible does not prohibit women from teaching children, which is a great ministry of the church, nor prohibit women from teaching other women.

ANTHONY D. BURCH

Family Radio School of the Bible

Oakland, Calif.

I doubt that most of the church has ever heard of four of the five women you selected. Were influential women like Elisabeth Elliot overlooked because they would have taken issue with the pro-ordination, feminist-tolerant view your articles seemed to lean toward?

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MAUREEN J. RANK

Knoxville, Iowa

Leadership, for the Christian, means servanthood. Fulfillment, for the Christian, is not an achievement but a byproduct of self-denial (Matt. 16:25). True liberation for the Christian woman is not a right but the reward of humble obedience. Wouldn’t the unutterably boring “women’s issue” dissolve into nothingness if all of us, men and women alike, would forsake the power struggle and follow him who did not count equality a thing to be grasped at, but stripped himself of all privilege and humbled himself even to the point of dying?

ELISABETH ELLIOT GREN

Magnolia, Maine

The articles answered some of my questions, but raised others. The authors interpreted differently what Paul told the Ephesus church in 1 Timothy 2:12. Paul says he does “not permit a woman to teach or have authority over the man; she must remain silent.” Does this mean women should not teach because of their gender or because they are not qualified? Wouldn’t it be better to have an educated woman teacher than a man who wasn’t educated? Why is it that women are able to pray and prophesy, but not able to share their knowledge by teaching in the church?

MICHELLE RENEE THOMAS

Montreat, N.C.

Kaiser and Kantzer both mishandled 1 Timothy 2:12: It does not refer to educated women—there is no qualifier in the verse. Lots of “spiritual” reasons are given why women should teach and lead men, but to obey is better than to be “spiritual.”

RON CRAM

San Bernardino, Calif.

I look forward to the day when people will no longer regard me as a novelty but as a child of God who loves Jesus Christ and has answered his call to be a pastor. It’s tough being a pioneer.

REV. REBECCA PRICE JANNEY

DuBois Regional Medical Center

DuBois, Pa.

The fact that God uses women in biblical history proves nothing about ordination, unless someone wanted to argue that we should ordain asses and birds, because they too were used of God.

REV. STEPHEN LARSON

Beverly Orthodox Presbyterian Church

Los Angeles, Calif.

Bravo for Walter C. Kaiser, Roberta Hestenes, Mary Van Leeuwen, Kenneth Kantzer, and the CT Institute for their sane, scriptural stand on the ordination of women. We evangelical conservatives may take a while to clean neo-Platonism and other pagan influences out of our faith, but ultimately the authority of Scripture as fleshed out by God in the church that the Spirit creates of us prevails.

DR. WILLIAM DAVID SPENCER

Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

South Hamilton, Mass.

Great George And Great John

Did J.I. Packer make an error or did England’s actor Garrick plagiarize John Wesley in Packer’s article “Great George” [Sept. 19]? Speaking about the great George Whitefield, John Wesley said, “I lacked his eloquence and polish; whereas, he could slay thousands simply by the way he pronounced “Mesopatamia.”

GLADYS MCLAIN

Quincy, Mass.

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