Book Briefs: September 18, 1987

Defecting To Christ

The Liberation of One, by Romuald S. Spasowski (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986, 687 pp.; $24.95, cloth). Reviewed by Diane Knippers, program director for the Institute on Religion and Democracy, Washington, D.C.

We Americans tend to treat news as entertainment. We are temporarily titillated by the tragedies of others. Our compassion is cursory, trendy.

In December 1981, martial law was declared in Poland. The attention of the world was galvanized by the harsh crushing of Solidarity, Poland’s independent trade union. In response, the U.S. government imposed economic sanctions against Poland. And on Christmas Eve, my husband and I joined thousands when we lit a candle and put it in our window, following President Reagan’s suggestion to show our solidarity with Poland in its dark hour.

Nearly six years later, conditions in Poland have changed very little, but the news earlier this year that the U.S. had lifted the economic sanctions and granted Poland Most Favored Nation status was buried in our papers.

Now comes The Liberation of One, a book by a central figure of those dark and dangerous days, a witness to Poland’s suffering during and since World War II. Even more important, the book is a compelling testimony to the grace of God.

Romuald Spasowski, the Polish ambassador to the United States, became, on December 19, 1981, the highest-ranking Communist official ever to defect to the West. His candid autobiography chronicles his relationship to his father (one of Poland’s most prominent prewar Communists), his family’s harrowing experiences harboring Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland, and his diplomatic career representing Poland in Argentina, India, and the United States.

Spasowski was a committed Communist, an idealist. But as he became more powerful, he became increasingly disillusioned. In the end, he found the courage to repudiate the ideology on which he had built his life—an ideology that he argues has brutalized and tyrannized his beloved Poland. He pleads with the West to realize the horrors the Soviet Union has wrought.

At One With Poland’s Martyrs

But Spasowski’s liberation is not merely political. A lifelong atheist, he was blessed by God with a devout Roman Catholic wife, Wanda. She is a woman of astonishing faith, and faithfulness. During one of the darkest periods of their marriage, when Romuald had left her for another woman, Wanda’s life was threatened by Polish intelligence in an effort to induce her to grant Romuald a divorce. The authorities accurately recognized how dangerous to them her influence on her husband would be.

His wife’s prayers were answered. They were reconciled, and in the spring of 1985 Spasowski, at age 64, was received into the church. “As I was baptized by John Cardinal Krol in Philadelphia,” he writes, “I asked myself whether I deserved the grace of forgiveness and reconciliation with Him who liberated man’s greatest hope. In joining myself to Christ, I felt at last at one with Poland’s martyred people.”

The Liberation of One combines the readability of a spy thriller or a love story with the documentation of a history book. But its greatest strength is the testimony it offers to a patient, forgiving, and gracious heavenly Father.

The Place Of Healing

Ministry and the Miraculous: A Case Study at Fuller Theological Seminary, edited by Lewis B. Smedes (Word, 80 pp.; $6.95, paper), and Power Healing, by John Wimber with Kevin Springer (Harper & Row, xxii + 293 pp.; $14.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Tim Stafford.

These two books, together, give a fair picture of where open-minded evangelicals stand today in regard to miraculous healings. Ministry and the Miraculous is a Fuller Seminary task-force report, drafted by Lewis Smedes with his usual elegant and deceptive simplicity. It came to be because of the brouhaha caused at Fuller by John Wimber’s controversial course, MC510: The Miraculous and Church Growth (see CT, Aug. 8, 1986, p. 17). The book basically says: Miracles happen, and they have a place in the ministry of the church—but we need to keep them in that place. It offers a careful, and in spots very insightful, theological tour of the issues raised by healing ministries.

Wimber’s Power Healing makes clear, at least in part, what the flap was about. This practical book gives admirably frank descriptions of how he goes about healing. An effective healing ministry, he suggests, requires supernatural “words of knowledge,” the discernment of demonic spirits, and God-given faith that healing is about to occur.

The heart of Wimber’s book, then, is not theology, but “how to.” This emphasis goes with Wimber’s conviction that the presence of the Holy Spirit can often be observed. He explains he does not close his eyes when he prays, because he wants to “watch closely for manifestations of the Holy Spirit.” He lists and analyzes these in some detail: falling over, shaking, sobbing, laughing, screaming out, among others. The Holy Spirit’s ministry of forgiveness to those plagued by guilt is “usually associated with what looks like ripples of energy and heat coming over their bodies.” Wimber offers many other such diagnostic descriptions. He believes the workings of the Holy Spirit are mysterious, but not quite so mysterious as the Fuller document would suggest.

Common Ground

Between these two books is a sizeable gulf. Yet there is common ground. Particularly, both recognize prayers for healing as a legitimate and important ministry. The Fuller book states, “We want to encourage students to be disposed toward belief in and readiness to receive miracles and to be men and women who publicly pray for the healing of stricken people.” This affirmation, however carefully hedged, represents the state of many churches that are launching healing services, prayer teams, and the like. They might be leery of Wimber’s approach. Yet they have recognized their obligation to pray for healing.

From Wimber’s side comes the unifying admission that many prayed for—himself included, for he suffers from serious heart problems—are not healed. He affirms, “Suffering in sickness plays a part in spiritual growth.” He emphasizes that sick people are never to be blamed for lack of faith when they are not healed.

One crucial difference between the two books is their view of medicine. In discussing world views, the Fuller faculty opt for a “God-permeated” world in which “the laws of nature are laws, notations of predictability, only because the God of creation continuously orders as he upholds his creation.” They would prepare seminary students “to minister to people in ways that open their minds and hearts to the presence of God in the ordered world of medicine where technology is his visible hand and where physicians are his healing servants.” Miracles, rather than being a sign of God’s special power and presence, are “a signal that God is, for a moment and for a special purpose, walking down paths he does not usually walk.”

John Wimber certainly favors proper medical attention, but there is no sign he is interested in it as a means for Christ’s healing. Rather, he reports that hospitals are “perhaps the most difficult places in which to pray for healing” because doctors’ materialistic approach often “mitigates [sic] against the practice of divine healing.”

Wimber emphasizes that healing flows from Christ’s compassion, but his principal interest appears to be in the demonstration of spiritual power. Compassion, after all, is probably served more by modern medicine than by healing services. No healer, not even Jesus, could claim so many healings as the discoverers of penicillin. But modern medicine, while it may be understood as a tool of Christ’s healing, does not proclaim itself so to the world. Miraculous healing is, to John Wimber, a proof of God’s power.

It seems that Wimber could agree with Fuller that the chief purpose of miracles is revelation. However, Wimber sees this revelation as normal and ongoing, while the Fuller faculty see it as unusual.

Pragmatic Assessment

Where do these books lead us? Theologically, the Fuller document offers a helpful, mediating view of healing prayers. But since when have movements been decided by theology? I would hazard a more pragmatic assessment: The prominence of healing ministries will be decided by the observation of how many people get well. If, as Wimber’s (and others’) teachings spread, the world is forced to stop and wonder at the number of miracles, then healing ministries will grow and gain our attention. But if healings are occasional, difficult to verify, and mainly of minor ailments, then I suspect interest in healing ministries will eventually fade to a level close § to what the Fuller book g endorses.

Many people would rather choose sides strictly on their reading of the Bible, but we must leave room for watching whether God may wish to walk paths he does not usually walk.

A New Idea In A New Nation

The First Liberty: Religion and the American Republic, by William Lee Miller (Knopf, 373 pp.; $24.95, cloth). Reviewed by James W. Skillen, executive director, Association for Public Justice, Washington, D.C.

The “new idea” that took hold in the founding of America was religious liberty, including the institutional independence of churches from the federal government. Exploring the historical origins, development, and ambiguities of that idea in the United States is the task that University of Virginia historian, William Lee Miller, has fulfilled in this wonderfully written book.

The First Liberty illuminates much more than the First Amendment, partly because Miller has a wide reach and broad peripheral vision, and partly because religion has determined the shape of the whole country, not simply the First Amendment to its Constitution.

The structure of Miller’s elegant book is simple: Part I uses a Virginia law of 1777 establishing religious freedom as its focal point for showing how the “new idea” became established in the “new nation.” Part II is the story of James Madison, the not-so-well-known founding father who was nonetheless most important in the establishment of religious freedom. Part III reaches back to the early colonial Roger Williams and follows the influence of his thinking up to 1776. And Part IV tells the story of the next two centuries. Even the reader who is deeply familiar with Jefferson or Williams or the Supreme Court’s First Amendment decisions will find this book exciting and intriguing. There is no boring history here.

What Is Religion?

Despite all the positive things to be said about this book, Miller leaves one of the questions most at issue almost entirely unexamined: What is religion? His explorations take for granted a language and a conceptual framework that is part of the problem he wants to help resolve. Ambiguities connected with the word religion have confounded not only Americans, but also Miller’s book. Let me explain.

In Roger Williams’s day, as Miller correctly points out, religion was not a “separated compartment … divorced from the great issues of politics, government, and the shaping of institutions.” To the contrary, “religion provided the all-embracing terms in which the great issues were debated.” From a historical point of view, says Miller, one must recognize that even the “bare bones of republicanism” and the emergence of this country “have not been disconnected … from ‘religion,’ even in its less spacious definitions.”

To understand the meaning of religion in this all-embracing sense, we must grasp its life-orienting, world-viewish, heart-deep character. From this point of view, the history of religion in America is more than the history of Puritanism, Anglicanism, and Enlightenment rationalism converging upon a relatively happy agreement to separate church and state. That is, religion is not limited to a small, private sector of life. Rather, it provides the basic convictions, energy, and inspiration for the most important struggles of our life, public as well as private.

Religion may indeed refer to institutions like churches, or to beliefs about God, sin, and salvation. But using the term both in this way as well as to describe heart-deep commitments, without clarifying the difference between the two usages, is to leave open precisely the confusion that confounds the Supreme Court. Church and state may be separated relatively easily. But that is quite a different matter from separating religion in general from most of life, or channeling a few of life’s functions into a so-called religious (and private) sphere and giving the remainder to government on the grounds that it has dominance over the “secular.” Insisting on this kind of sacred-secular distinction violates the conscience of many devout people. The staunch commitment to separation of church and state that some of us hold is rooted precisely in our religious view of what a state ought to be.

Miller’s failure to explore the ambiguity of the word “religion” keeps him from seeing the deeply religious character of Jefferson’s or Madison’s view of life. When Miller discusses Jefferson’s use of the word “truth,” he makes one of his own confessions: “It is clearly important for us to hold to the truth that all human beings are created equal, in an age when inequalities old and new persist. It is also important to hold that ‘truth’ can prevail by ‘free argument and debate,’ in an age when many see only ‘preferences’ and therefore manipulation. These Jeffersonian truths stand about as near as anything one can cite to the moral core of the nation he helped to bring into being. They are anchors of the American mind and moral understanding.…”

But why should we believe these things? Why should we reject the conviction that only “preferences” exist? How do we know there is “truth” that can prevail? And why does Miller not see that the anchor of “free argument and debate” is part of an imposed establishment in America? In this country we have actually forced into exile contrary views held by those who wish to establish a single church or to force the end of free debate.

Our religious freedom is not neutrality—it is imposed by a constitution based on religiously deep convictions that a political community should not allow for an established faith. Without doubt this would even call for the use of weapons against any ayatollahs or theocrats who would try to impose a different kind of order.

What then is the proper relation between religion and political life? Part of the debate today is over the discriminating dominance of some groups in schools, the mass media, and other public spaces. And politics, law, government, and the very conception of a republic will differ depending on the roots from which they spring.

Miller has correctly noted that America is rooted, in part, in Christianity. He has done a marvelous job of showing how the separation of church and state came about in America. However, he has not satisfactorily resolved the question of how competing religions, with different orientations to life and society, can all be treated justly in a pluralistic state.

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