Page 5918 – Christianity Today (2024)

CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S Current Religious Thought column is a popular and sometimes explosive feature. In this issue John Montgomery, a Lutheran, writes a hard-hitting piece on the troubles of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. Contributors to this column have freedom to express their views, and what they say does not necessarily reflect editorial opinion.

Montgomery has drawn attention to a sticky problem that is troubling more than one denomination today. How are deviant theology and dissent from creeds and statements of faith to be handled? What should denominations do about their seminaries that have moved away from their theological underpinnings and about professors who promulgate aberrant views? The current plight of several denominations can be traced to their failure to deal with unbelief when it first reared its head. For some it is now too late. But for those where correction is still a possibility, how shall it come about?

In the case of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the defeat of Dr. Harms and the selection of Dr. Preus to succeed him were a sign of discontent and a mandate for corrective action. Probably Dr. Preus has discovered, as most presidents of the United States have, that from campaign promises to their fulfillment is a giant step. He and his associates need time to implement their mandate and to maintain the integrity of the synod’s historic witness without doing irreparable damage to its structures.

Recently two Berkeley sociologists investigated the relation of belief to the practice of religion. They concluded “that a demythologized modernism is overwhelming the traditional Christ-centered faith,” in some segments of the Church, and that traditional belief lies beneath all other forms of commitment, attendance at church, the practice of prayer, and Christian charity. Need we appeal thus to the surveys of sociology to demonstrate the obvious? Can we expect evangelism to make any impact when the Church gives the impression that it is not sure of its Gospel? Can we expect a congregation to gather to worship an empty sky? Or to bother much about a church that produces the theology, or, if you will, the theothanatology, of Harvey Cox? “We shall have to stop talking about God for a while … until a new name emerges,” said this “brilliant young theologian,” as Bishop Robinson described him. You will agree that such doctrine makes a prayer meeting farcical and giving for Christian missions a patent waste of money. And the response of the average secular man to such surrender is simple derision, or, as Housman put it,

Why then, ’twere iniquity on high
To cheat our sentenced souls of aught they crave,
And mar the merriment as you and I
Fare on our long fool’s errand to the grave.

We have a proclamation to make to this decade and this century. We must charge our spokesmen to deliver it, with authority and conviction. We must demonstrate, one and all, that there is one happy breed who can find zest for life, health of mind, and creativity in self-control, chastity, and the age-old values of Christianity. Only then shall we permeate society, and win a distracted mankind to Christ. There is a stinging word from Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher who provided the Nazis with some of their rationale and the Prussian theorists with their Blond Beast and who invented the phrase “God is dead.” “You Christians,” he said, “must look more redeemed if you expect me to believe in your Redeemer.”

E. M. Blaiklock is emeritus professor of classics, University of Auckland, New Zealand.

It was a shabby sort of notice in every sense. “You are now entering a military guarded area,” it warned. “When called ‘Halt’ stop immediately and follow the instruction of the military guards. The troops are ordered to shoot if the first warning to stop is ignored.” I was thinking of the fellow in the Bible who pioneered delicate walking when I was stopped and searched for the first time in my not untraveled career. The place: Geneva airport in peace-loving Switzerland.

Before I reached my destination next morning, the indignity was repeated at three transit stops. Finally, as our Ethiopian airliner winged in toward Addis Ababa with its jaded and cramped consignment of the overfrisked, the loudspeaker struck up the improbable strains of “God rest you merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay.”

The prospect thereafter became more pleasing when those of us who had come for the WCC Central Committee meeting were taken in tow and spared the miseries of immigration, baggage-claiming, and customs formalities. The administrative department from Geneva superbly organized every aspect of our Addis sojourn.

It seemed boorish, then, not to remain decently undismayed during the twelve-day sessions, but a WCC staff member cornered me near the end with, “Well, have you got enough controversial material this time?” Touche! A salutary thoughtfulness ensued. Was I really falling into the trap, which tendency I am wont to condemn in other evangelicals, of being a chronic and unbalanced critic?

At that point in the Addis proceedings I was more puzzled than anything else. Here let me concentrate on one specific controversial subject. Without a single dissenting vote, the Central Committee upheld the Executive Committee’s decision to make financial grants to groups of “racially oppressed peoples.” I had talked privately with a number of delegates, and their combined views did not tally with the near unanimity achieved.

Contrary to the WCC press release that attributed the decision to the “120-member” committee, only 103 were at Addis, and some of these were absentees or unrecorded abstainers when the crucial vote was taken.

Still, that some ninety yeas were not offset by one nay was remarkable.

In the British Council of Churches there had been a real battle before a dubious appeal (“the fate of the ecumenical movement is at stake”) helped carry the vote for “general support” of the WCC action. Five weeks later, on returning from South Africa, the archbishop of Canterbury said he felt more than ever “certainly bound to criticize” the WCC decision. In West Germany there was an outcry; the Evangelical Church pointed out that “white” racism provoked an opposing “colored” racism, and that all forms needed to be combatted. In South Africa, 43 per cent of the Presbyterian General Assembly favored leaving the WCC.

How explain the Addis vote and the lack of the intensive criticism expected? Right at the start someone complained about the way in which the awarding of the grants had (or had not) been communicated to member churches—and there is nothing so impressive as this committee in full cry after peripheral hares. They disappeared out of the journalistic sight into policy reference groups soon afterwards. When the matter was brought back to the floor of the house, we found Germans and Britons docilely voting in the affirmative with others who had earlier expressed misgivings. And unhappily the South African churches had no voting member at Addis.

But what was the Addis vote about? The Central Committee was not voting to give aid to racially oppressed groups. It was voting on whether the grants already made by the Executive Committee were “in accord with the Programme to Combat Racism” which the Central Committee itself had authorized at Canterbury in 1969. The fact that some delegates had obviously not realized the implications of the blanket mandate then given was apparent but irrelevant. How could a fast one have been pulled when it was covered by the rules?

Even so, there is something about these ecumenical occasions that makes members avoid head-on collisions. This might on one view befit a “fellowship of churches.” Yet such passivity might truly be not a mark of health but rather an indication of fragility protected by certain well understood taboos. Here I stick my neck out further …

It would jolt the committee if an Eastern church delegate were to vote in a way disapproved by his government. The Orthodox generally, whether under Kremlin or colonels, are notoriously touchy and alert to political implications—and are the largest group in the WCC. For their part. Western delegates would hesitate to take a strong line that they knew their Eastern colleagues would be bound to reject. Delegates from Third World countries are politically watchful: other things being equal, this would ensure, for example, a pro-Arab majority on the Middle East issue (the WCC includes no Jews), and black African unity on white racism or anti-colonialism.

But just as revealing are the subjects seldom mentioned, much less brought to a vote. One dogged journalist at Addis continually raised this point in press conferences. Racism, he insisted, was a dreadful thing, so where was the WCC’s voice over anti-Semitism in the U.S.S.R., or over political tyranny generally? Denying partiality, officialdom stressed that protests were often made quietly in delicate areas where publicity would be embarrassing. This view, which should elicit sympathy, would be more credible if the results of past discreet protests could somehow be made known, and if it were not that South African Christians had been greatly embarrassed by the grants issue.

Could it be that the WCC looks first at the extent of a country’s or a church’s representation in its councils, and the probable reaction, before certain policies are protested? (“I must put on different spectacles to look at that problem,” as the late President Nasser would say.) On that basis it is safe to clobber South Africa, Rhodesia, and Portugal. For different reasons it is also all right to attack the United States and Britain, whose delegates, far from taking umbrage, might even lead such an attack (say on Viet Nam, or arms for South Africa). With other nations it would be tricky—or decidedly nasty (Greece, Iron Curtain countries).

The Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa, guilty as it is of a particularly odious doctrine, nonetheless was on to a sure thing when its synod acidly stated how noticeable it was that “movements organized against Communism don’t receive support from the WCC.” Indeed, the WCC’s alleged choosiness might prompt the charge of what the London Times described recently in another context as a sort of Doppler shift effect—“the change in the observed frequency of a vibration due to the relative motion between the observer and the source of the vibration.” All this might suggest that if I am still confused after Addis, it is at a much higher level.

When Christ walked the shores of Galilee the world population was about 250 million, a little more than the present population of the United States. About five to eight million were Jews, but Jesus’ words reached only a few of them. Since then, the spread of the Gospel has barely kept up with the rise of the world’s population. The percentage of Jews reached with the Good News has not even equaled that.

During the week of April 4–10, the American Board of Missions to the Jews, through a single-shot, prime-time television program, may reach upwards of one million Jewish persons in the United States and Australia—7 per cent of the world’s Jews and 15 per cent of those in this country. This may well be the most Jews to whom the Gospel has been communicated at one time in man’s history.

The telecast, a remarkable presentation called “Passover,” is timed to coincide with the Jewish Passover holiday on April 10—as well as the Western Christians’ Good Friday, April 9, and Easter, April 11. At various times during that week the program will be televised in twelve U. S. cities: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, Dallas, Miami, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, and Denver. It will also be shown in five Australian cities.

In the quiet setting of a Jewish family around a table, the telecast will portray the Feast of the Passover. It will illustrate the Old Testament story in vivid water colors, and the cameras will capture the symbolism of the utensils. In a muted, appealing way—with no mention of missions—the program will draw the connection between Passover and Calvary.

“Perhaps no celebration has deeper significance for the Jewish people than Passover,” the narrator says. “God in his sovereign wisdom chose first to reveal his plan of redemption to his ‘chosen people’—those to whom he referred as ‘Israel my firstborn.’ To the Christian, these symbols also carry deep significance. Christians believe Christ took the place of the Passover lamb and no further sacrifices were necessary. In fact, deliverance in Egypt by means of a blood sacrifice is seen as a picture of a greater deliverance to come for every man through Christ.”

“Passover” was first shown in 1970 in Los Angeles. An estimated 20 per cent of that sprawling metropolis’s 500,000 Jews watched. And 5,000 persons (3,000 were Jews) wrote letters about it.

The surprising success of “Passover” is compelling the ABMJ to make the most innovations in the thrust of its ministry since the days of its founder, Leopold Cohn, in Brooklyn in the 1890s. ABMJ’s first missions were store-fronts. They reached only the poor Jews living in ghettoes. There were small bands of believers at each mission, but as one ABMJ official put it, “nobody expected much success.”

During the last fifteen years, the ABMJ established clean, attractive centers where—to quote the same official—“any middle-class Jew would feel at home.” There are now thirty-three of these mission stations on four continents, in big cities where Jews are likely to live. The centers are manned by a staff of seventy-five missionaries.

Still, for all their toils, the ABMJ missionaries have reached only handfuls of persons. The well-to-do and more sophisticated Jews pay them little attention. “Passover” is done so well, however, and the Gospel presented so winsomely, that it can confront Jews of every stratum with the message of Christ. There is, of course, no way to learn how many of them will become Christians. But the confrontation will take place—often, perhaps, for the first time in the Jewish person’s life.

“We have gone as far from store-fronts as we possibly can,” says ABMJ general secretary Daniel Fuchs. “If we are going to reach the masses of Jewish people we must use modern communications.” Perhaps the prophecy that in the last days the Jews will come to Christ is near fulfillment.

Showing Who’S Boss

The archbishop of Canterbury returned to the attack on the World Council of Churches’ grants to combat racism when the Church of England general synod met at Westminster last month. In his presidential address Dr. Michael Ramsey reiterated his earlier warnings that the grants were “encouraging a sort of emotional belligerence which does not face the serious questions about what a just war or a just rebellion would involve.”

The primate left the packed house in no doubt that he considered “very mistaken” the limitation of the WCC program to the generally abhorred white racism, and called for “far clearer thinking … about the methods of the Church’s witness in the fields of social and political action.” However understandable, passionate concern might in this case bring misleading results. “In the coming period of history,” concluded Ramsey, “questions about resistance to oppression are likely to become prominent in new ways. All the more necessary will it be for the churches not to be selective in their symbolic acts of moral judgment upon human sin, and not to blur the distinctive role of the Church in prophecy and in reconciliation.”

Whatever the wider implications, Ramsey’s words apparently reflect a rift in episcopal ranks, for the bishop of Bristol. Dr. Oliver Tomkins, is a member of the WCC executive committee that made the original decision on the grants.

That many in the Anglican synod were still grieving for the merger scheme that failed was seen when a motion was accepted that would set up a joint group with the Methodists to report on those points that “have created stumbling blocks for significant numbers of persons in either church.” Many observers consider this pointless on the grounds that continuing opposition from different Anglican quarters will make unattainable the required 75 per cent majority (already achieved by Methodists).

But the groans that day were not all ecumenical. The new general synod, widely heralded last fall as giving bishops, clergy, and laity joint responsibility for governing, came to its moment of truth at this second meeting. It started innocently enough. A layman moved that copies of a controversial report be distributed so that members might come equipped two days later when the bishops’ decision to close certain theological colleges was due to be “noted” by the synod.

This was opposed, ostensibly on the grounds of administrative difficulties in reproducing twenty pages in the interval. Dr. Ramsey didn’t want it either. A vote was called “by houses.” Results showed the motion carried resoundingly by the laity, comfortably by the clergy—and opposed 18–1 by the bishops. So it was lost, for under

the new dispensation in the Church of England the bishop is still boss.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Calendar Power

The date has been set for ending the Indochina war. Twenty-four church, synagogue, and other religious agencies want all U. S. military involvement there to end by December 31, 1971. The campaign backers, who include representatives of national organizations of fourteen denominations, have named the inter-religious coalition “Set the Date Now.”

Participants are attempting to get members of their groups to press government leaders to “get the date set,” according to campaign director Herschel Halbert, a former national executive of the Episcopal Church.

Besides a sponsoring committee of national churchmen. Set the Date Now participants include:

American Baptist Convention; American Ethical Union; American Humanist Association; Church of the Brethren; Church Women United; Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam; Disciples of Christ; Episcopal Church; Fellowship of Reconciliation; Friends Committee of National Legislation; Lutheran Church in America; Mennonite Central Committee; National Catholic Council for Interracial Justice; National Coalition of American Nuns; National Council of Churches; Philadelphia Yearly Meeting—Society of Friends; Presbyterian Church, U.S.; Union of American Hebrew Congregations; Unitarian Universalist Association; United Church of Christ; United Methodist Church Board of Social Concerns; United Presbyterian Church, Women’s Division; United Methodist Church; and World Conference of Religion for Peace.

Charming Power Of Witchcraft

On the eve of the archbishop of Canterbury’s visit to Nairobi last month, the annual accounts of a leading soccer club in Kenya showed an expense item of $3,060 on witchcraft. Other clubs also employ witchdoctors for consultation on strategy and chances of winning, refuse to announce names of players in advance lest they be bewitched, and before vital games have sentries patrolling the stadium to see that no one places a charm on the ball.

This is but one evidence of the bubbling cauldron of witchcraft abrew not only in Africa but also in enlightened England. For instance:

Black magic practices that are “dangerous spiritually and sometimes physically” have taken place in his area, says the Right Reverend Cyril Eastaugh, bishop of Peterborough, seventy miles north of London. Holder of the military cross for valor, the blunt-spoken 73-year-old high churchman warns in his diocesan magazine that “manifestations of evil intelligences” are too common to be rejected as nonsense, and that to open the door to them “is to court evil with unknown possibilities.”

Black magic was suspected last November when the interior of a local parish church was extensively damaged, but police inquiries into this and other curious happenings in the county have proved fruitless.

Law officers in other locales have known similar frustration. In Highgate Cemetery (Karl Marx is buried there) they collared one man stalking around with hammer, stake, and other approved anti-vampire equipment, but the magistrates decided he had broken no law. At Rochford, Essex, five youths were charged under an old act with “behaving violently” in a churchyard, but were freed when the vicar said their quest for witches had resulted from a “villagers’ leg pull.”

Another rural clergyman, however, claims to have quit his parish after telling of finding graves opened, bones placed in a circle, skulls on iron bars, and other jolting sights. Such “nonstop black magic rituals” got him down, said the Reverend Lewis Barker, 67, of Clophill, Bedfordshire.

But all this is nothing compared to the “real orgies,” if we are to believe Charles Pace, who, he declares, is known to witches as “Hamar-At.” Pace confidently puts the number of practicing witches in Britain at around 30,000. Though witchcraft is not illegal in the country, participants tend to be coy and elusive, and not even the most colorful Sunday press story has achieved any substantial uncovering of covens.

Church of England psychical expert Canon J. D. Pearce-Higgins of Southwark Cathedral attributes interest in the subject to “the failure of the churches to have any reasonable eschatology.” The canon gained much publicity some time ago by condemning his church’s Article on the Resurrection as “absolute nonsense,” and by refusing to read in the cathedral an appointed passage from the Book of Revelation.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Forecast For Shelton: A Few Degrees Warmer?

By bailing out a small southern California Bible college, radio preacher Carl McIntire may have kept afloat the degree-granting capabilities of Shelton, his Cape May, New Jersey, college.

The latest McIntire maneuver, announced last month, involves gaining control of Linda Vista Baptist Bible College and Seminary in El Cajon (it is already renamed Southern California Reformation College) by settling its second mortgage of $117,000 for a reported $85,000. The mortgage holders had threatened to foreclose and sell the fifty-acre campus, estimated to be valued at $2.2 million.

Now, McIntire contends, since he had the El Cajon college board of trustees replace three of its five members with Shelton trustees, Shelton has majority control of the newly acquired school. “The college in southern California with its degree-granting privileges will be able to cover and protect the studies of the students at Shelton and also at Cape Canaveral,” McIntire wrote in the February 25 issue of the Christian Beacon. The controversial leader of win-the-war rallies recently purchased a 300-acre resort hotel complex and site for his “Gateway to the Stars” college near Cape Kennedy (see January 29 issue, page 30).

Education officials for the State of New Jersey, who revoked Shelton’s license as of next July, were not so sure about McIntire’s issuing “Shelton of the West” degrees to students from the Cape May campus. An official of the New Jersey Department of Higher Education (who asked not to be named) said in a telephone interview that Shelton students could not attend the Cape May school and take courses designed for academic credit without state approval.

But, he added, they could take courses at Shelton advertised as being only for “student enrichment.” “If it wanted, the California institution could accept such non-credit work toward a degree.” But he cautioned: “We can’t really make a judgment until we find out what Shelton intends to do.”

In any case, according to the Reverend Otto Reese, founder-president of Linda Vista, “We require approximately a year’s residence work at our institution if we are going to give a degree.” His college, which has about eighty-five students, now grants several bachelor’s degrees, as well as the master of library science and the master of religious education degrees.

The El Cajon campus was purchased from San Diego Roman Catholics two years ago for $550,000, but Reese’s college operated from 1946 until 1969 in San Diego.

McIntire, who has appealed the New Jersey revocation that cited “substantial academic deficiencies,” said the three campuses will interchange courses, faculty, and students. “Shelton in its agony gave birth to greatly expanded visions and accomplishments,” he noted triumphantly.

RUSSELL CHANDLER

39 Appeals

Five hundred twenty-four persons were reported to be imprisoned in the Soviet Union “for no other reason but their faith in God.” The tally comes from documents reaching the West from a secret meeting last December 12–13 attended by the parents of jailed evangelical believers. (This was the second such meeting; the first was in 1969.)

Eight persons were said to have been tortured to death either in prisons or during interrogations by the KGB.

The disclosures were reported by the Ukrainian Evangelical Baptist Convention and published in Svoboda, a Ukrainian daily newspaper published in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Thirteen documents containing detailed allegations of religious and political persecution were said to have come to light at the secret meeting, which was held in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. One, a letter addressed to the government of the Soviet Union, said there had been 986 government-instigated and -conducted attacks on Protestant prayer meetings since 1961. Svoboda did not say whether the documents indicated how long ago the killings took place.

The letter to Moscow was quoted as saying that the attacks on prayer meetings resulted in beatings, arrests, and lengthy interrogations, as well as burnings of Bibles, “prayer-books,” and other religious articles. It was reportedly noted that the prisoners’ parents had advised Soviet leaders of the persecution in thirty-eight previous communications, none of which had been acknowledged.

Other letters made public were said to have been addressed to “all Christians of the world,” to U.N. Secretary General U Thant, and to the president of the Baptist World Alliance. Dr. V. Carney Hargroves of Philadelphia, current BWA president, said he has received no such letter. Spokesmen for the BWA headquarters in Washington also said they had no knowledge of it.

The letter to the Soviet leaders was signed by five people and gave a temporary address, noting that the group’s president, where mail was apparently being received previously, had been arrested. The letter cited names of persons that it said had constantly been persecuted for the profession of faith.

“As we are convening here,” the letter said, “168 of our kin are suffering behind the walls of prisons. All this at a time when you are proclaiming to the world that there is freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, etc., in the USSR.”

The document demanded freedom of worship, freedom from persecution because of religious belief, release of the imprisoned and the return of children to their parents, and return of confiscated homes, literature, and money collected in fines.

DAVID KUCHARSKY

Religion In Transit

Sales of the 18-month-old Reach Out! edition of The Living New Testament have reached the one million mark, Tyndale House publisher Ken Taylor announced. The entire “Living” series has sold more than eight million copies, including 500,000 of an inexpensive

serviceman’s edition. Campus Crusade for Christ and World Home Bible League are now printing it under their own names.

The Reverend Gilbert Caldwell of Harlem was named successor to the Reverend James Lawson of Memphis as head of Black Methodists for Church Renewal (BMCR). At its Dallas meeting last month, BMCR also asked the United Methodist Church to earmark the $1.3 million it received from the federal government in war-damage claims for use in inner-city work.

The United Methodist Commission on Religion and Race bailed out the Inner City Parish urban ministry in Kansas City with a $40,000 grant this month after the controversial program was spurned by its founders last year.

Eleven top U. S. Catholic theologians in a report this month favored the re-institution of ordaining women deacons to offset the declining number of religious workers in the church.

All ten teaching nuns at St. Raymond’s parochial school in Detroit have quit, protesting “non-Christian racial attitudes” of parents of the children. The action reportedly had full approval of their order, the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and John Cardinal Dearden.

The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod has dedicated Memphis Deaf-Eternal Mercy Church for the deaf, the only one of its kind in Tennessee, and one of only a few in the United States.

The Federal Communications Commission has again refused to renew the license of Carl McIntire-controlled radio station WXUR in Media, Pennsylvania—no doubt setting the stage for a court test. The FCC contends the station fails to air both sides of controversial public issues.

Plans have been submitted to the Pentagon for construction of a Jewish chapel and religious center at West Point Military Academy … A small religious center, compared to the Sistine Chapel in Rome and the Matisse Chapel in France, opened in Houston last month. Fourteen paintings by the late American abstract artist Mark Rothko adorn the chapel walls.

New York State last month announced dispersal of $10.1 million in state aid to 1,365 religious schools.

Circus Kirk, known as the “Circus with a Difference,” will tour Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Maryland this summer. The interdenominational, interracial circus, a youth ministery project of the Lutheran Church in America, is now recruiting performers, musicians, riggers, and mechanics through Box 181, East Berlin, Pennsylvania, 17316.

Nearly 9,000 converts—most of them rural blacks—joined the Baha’i World Faith during a recent thirteen-county conference in the South.

Led by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, the Foundation for Christian Living has asked Christians around the world to join in a twenty-four-hour prayer chain for all mankind on Good Friday.

Personalia

Killed in a fiery airplane crash near Corona, California, this month were E. W. Hatcher of Fullerton, California, a longtime Missionary Aviation Fellowship employee, and United Airlines employee John Wilson of New Jersey. The MAF Cessna 185 was on a routine flight; the cause of the accident was under investigation.

Dr. L. Doward McBain, pastor of Phoenix, Arizona’s First Baptist Church, has been named chairman of the American Baptist Convention’s committee for planning the ecumenical evangelistic emphasis. Key 73.

The Reverend Mitsuho Yoshida has been elected to succeed the Reverend Kiyoshi Ii as moderator of the United Church of Japan (Kyodan), the country’s largest Protestant denomination.

Myron L. Boardman, executive director of the Foundation for Christian Living, has been elected president of the Layman’s National Bible Committee, sponsor of the annual National Bible Week observance.

A Welsh Baptist, the Reverend Brian Russell-Jones, has become director of the Belgian Protestant Information Service (BELPRO) in Brussels.

Theology professor William H. Weiblen, 52, of Wartburg Seminary, Dubuque, Iowa, has been named president of the ALC institution succeeding ALC president Kent S. Knutson.

Norval Hadley, assistant to the president of World Vision, has been appointed general superintendent of the Northwest Yearly Meeting of Friends (formerly Oregon Yearly Meeting).

Missions and evangelism professor H. Wilbert Norton of Wheaton (Illinois) College has been named dean of the college’s Graduate School of Theology.

Nine prominent church peace fighters, including Stanford University’s religion professor Robert McAfee Brown and chapel dean B. Davie Napier, shut down a San Mateo, California, draft board by blocking the entrances. The San Mateo Nine sought arrest during the Ash Wednesday protest, but police ignored them.

World Scene

Greek archaeologists announced this month that they had unearthed the remains of the original Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre built by the Roman emperor Constantine more than 1,600 years ago on the site many Christians believe to be the spot where Jesus was crucified and buried. The find is under the present high altar about thirty feet from the traditional Rock of Calvary.

A “bugged” Indian basket of gifts is a new tool to aid missionaries to learn more about the primitive Auca tribe in Ecuador. Missionary Rachel Saint says the basket, with hidden radio transmitter, is parachuted into Aucan villages; recorded conversations of the group help identify them to long-separated relatives who have since become Christians.

The Orthodox Church of Greece announced last month that it won’t recognize the independence of the Orthodox Church of America, the former Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church in America.

A third nationwide Baptist evangelistic campaign in Portugal is planned for May 16–30.

World Radio Missionary Fellowship of Quito, Ecuador, won the Moody Institute of Science Operation Mobile Missionary prize package: a thirty-one-foot trailer fully equipped as an audiovisual center, towed by a camper pickup. There were 162 applications from 64 countries.

The first French-language Baptist congregation in the Ivory Coast recently dedicated its new building in Abidjan.

NEWS

For forty years, under the able leadership of editor-minister Daniel A. Poling, the now 93-year-old Christian Herald was known as a bastion of conservative, evangelical Christianity. When Poling stepped down in 1966, two years before his death at 83, more than the masthead began to change.

Ford Stewart became editor, and in 1968 Poling’s nephew David, who had joined the magazine in 1964, became its president. The present editor, Kenneth L. Wilson, took over in 1967, and Laurence S. Heely, Jr., became publisher in early 1968.

The tone of the Herald, the nation’s largest interdenominational Protestant monthly, shifted rather markedly toward a liberal theology and a conciliar ecumenism during those years. Circulation, once at the 400,000 mark, began to slip. And rightly or wrongly, David Poling, urbane, talented, and a man with many an iron in journalistic fires, was both praised and assailed for the Herald’s changing image.

This month Poling resigned, severing formal contact with the magazine except for a position on its board of directors. And last month Heely, the publisher, resigned after eighteen years at the Herald. He now sells religious lists for an advertising brokerage firm in New York. About twenty-five Herald employees have been laid off in the past year, and circulation, by a planned reduction, now hovers just over 300,000.

Sources close to the Herald say Heely and Poling were “let go by mutual consent,” but both they and editor Wilson say the departures were strictly voluntary. And there is disagreement as to whether the theological change in the magazine is a root cause of financial difficulties and masthead turnover.

Poling, reached at his White Plains, New York, home by telephone, said his leaving was “not an overnight thing.” He said he had “indicated my willingness to resign in order to write and speak for some time.” Poling, prolific and energetic, is coauthoring a book on Albert Schweitzer. He writes a regular column for the Newspaper Enterprises Association and plans, among other things, to write a series of twenty-five booklets of commentary on medals of the world’s great religions to be struck by noted sculptor Ralph Menconi (he made medals of the last four U.S. presidents).

David is of a different breed from his late uncle, though both men have exhibited great diversity. Daniel was theologically conservative, anti-Communist, and anti-pacifist, and was one of the few big-name churchmen to oppose the Supreme Court prayer decision. David freely acknowledges responsibility for changes at the Herald. “As I move pretty easily and freely in several denominational camps,” he explained, “I’d probably be considered the cause of the Herald’s wider range of interests.… We needed to camp in the mainstream.”

While David was president, the Herald came out with a series of articles critical of the Viet Nam war and took on a stable of regular contributing writers who often choose controversial subjects—frequently serving them up with a liberal flavor.

Wilson seems firmly entrenched and now wears the double mantle of editor and publisher since Heely’s departure. He sees the changes at the Herald in a different light than Poling. In a separate interview Wilson told a reporter: “Any blame for the direction of the magazine falls on my hands,” not Poling’s. But he says the most “dramatic changes” took place under Ford Stewart’s editorship. Wilson, considered a liberal who “plays it close to the chest,” said there is more of a relationship between the magazine and himself than there was between the magazine and Poling.

And Wilson, a Herald employee for twenty-two years, flatly denied that the board in any way interferes with his editorial decisions. Those who think the magazine will revert to a more conservative stance without Poling better think again, Wilson believes. He points out that he—as editor—would have been axed had there been board dissatisfaction with the Herald’s editorial thrust.

One man outside the Herald staff but long associated with it (he asked not to be identified) thinks the Herald’s policy-makers have misjudged its readership. “It is losing circulation because of the swing away from the evangelical position,” he maintains. “Dave has been taking it more and more down the liberal line and [toward] the National Council of Churches.… But the market is the old-line conservatives in the major denominations, and the evangelicals, and it has been since the time of Dan Poling.”

In any case, the Herald—not alone among major religious publications—has been in a financial sweat the last several years. Ad linage is down this year, according to Poling. “The last year has been a crusher,” he admitted, adding that the Herald had sold its 39th Street building in New York and is leasing back space from the purchaser.

Those interviewed agreed that the present circulation of slightly more than 300,000 was a planned cutback, and at least partially a response to the general sag in the national economy. “We have eliminated the most unprofitable segment of the magazine,” Wilson said, noting that there is “an optimum point of circulation of any magazine.” Keeping mail-sold circulation at a higher level, plus continuing expirees on the circulation list, were simply not profitable.

There also was agreement that the recent death of department-store executive J. C. Penney, a prime benefactor of the Herald during the 1920s, had nothing to do with the staff changes in the past few weeks. Penney apparently gave no money to the Herald through his will, and had contributed only token amounts since 1934, according to Wilson.

The magazine itself is not self-supporting, but the Herald enterprises as a whole (including the book club, travel tours, and other projects) are.

The magazine may have been losing money partly because of high-priced overstaffing. A sign that this is being corrected is that two advertising salesmen now take the place of the previous five or six. Intimates are optimistic that the publication can avoid the terminal illness that has stricken such secular greats as the Saturday Evening Post. Says one: “The Herald could be in the black with 300,000 circulation, good management, and lower overhead.”

The Herald’s new president keeps a tight hand on the pursestrings. Fenwick D. Loomer, a Lutheran Church in America layman who joined the Herald staff only seven months ago, was treasurer before he stepped into Poling’s shoes this month. He is seen by some as the new power behind the throne. Friction between him and Heely reportedly was a cause of Heely’s leaving, and there are signs that Loomer is doing the staff housecleaning.

Before joining the Herald, Loomer was vice-president and treasurer of the National Retail Merchants Association. In Wilson’s words: “Loomer brings [us] professional know-how.”

No one is publicly saying there will be any big changes at the Herald. But in the March issue, the well-known “Lines of a Layman” by Penney (a longtime Herald hallmark) appears opposite the popular “David Poling Answers Your Questions” column. Now that the one author has passed to his reward and the other has moved to different fields, the Christian Herald appears to be on the brink of a new era.

Final Editions

Financial pressures on religious periodicals may be exacting their biggest toll in more than a generation. Two tabloids are the latest to fold: the Canadian Mennonite, a weekly published in Winnipeg, and Tempo, a monthly put out by the National Council of Churches in the U.S.A.

The last issue of the Mennonite paper was dated February 19. At the top of the front page a black box appeared with the headline: “Final Edition.” The Canadian Mennonite, independently published, began about eighteen years ago.

Tempo ceased publication in its third year. It had about 10,000 paying subscribers. The editors said in a parting note that they had plans to begin publishing in 1971 a periodical newsletter reporting news of the ecumenical life of the churches.

Another NCC publication may soon fold. Religion in Communist-Dominated Areas, a documentary newsletter often threatened with extinction, is now scheduled to go out of business by June 30 unless more financial support can be mustered.

Methodist Edward H. Beck, a Syracuse University journalism scholar, found in a survey of editors and circulation managers of Protestant periodicals that reader dissatisfaction with denominational actions and competition of other interests such as sports and travel were chief causes of widespread circulation decline.

Revival Reaches Out; Sda Students Carry It On

It was chilly and overcast outside, and patches of brown snow lay amid watery quagmires, but warm revival fires of love and joy in Jesus burned brightly inside.

The site: Camp Berkshire, New York, where late last month more than 400 Seventh-day Adventist students gathered—on less than one week’s notice for most—to compare notes about the spiritual revolution that had recently engulfed them. They had come in cars, vans, and chartered buses from eight SDA colleges and two high-school academies located as far away as Nebraska and Alabama. Some hitchhiked from Michigan in order to witness about Christ along the way. A station wagon arrived with “Carry It On” emblazoned in large letters.

During the long weekend at camp they discussed methods of personal witness, the filling of the Holy Spirit, and Bible teachings about Christ’s second coming. To the accompaniment of spirited guitarists and soul pianists they sang such songs as “He’s Everything to Me,” “They’ll Know We Are Christians by Our Love,” “His Name Is Wonderful,” and choruses from Ralph Carmichael’s Tell It Like It Is. Groups of four or five seemed to link arms almost spontaneously and break into fervent prayer for one another and for spiritually lost friends.

“Sharing” sessions were marked by stirring accounts of recent conversions, joyous “Amen” responses, and soft “Thank you, Jesus” prayers. Recurring testimonies: “I’ve been an Adventist all my life but I’m a Christian now,” and “I’ve been into legalism and into drugs but now I’m into Jesus and the Bible.”

Graham Text Favors Public Aid To Private Schools

Billy Graham, in an address prepared for delivery March 14 at a Cleveland meeting of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, called for public aid to private schools. It was the first time the Southern Baptist evangelist has taken such a stand.

Graham was invited to the banquet to receive the 1971 NCCJ International Brotherhood Award.

Graham stressed that he was “irrevocably committed” to the traditional separation of church and state. But he noted that “religiously oriented schools all over the nation are threatened with bankruptcy.…” Calling for “some creative solution to this complex problem,” Graham suggested as possible answers dual enrollment (shared time), tax rebates, or tuition grants students could use “where they please.”

His remarks were set in the context of an uncompromising witness to his personal commitment to Christ as Saviour. “It seems wrong in principle for people to be taxed to support truly secular education while at the same time having to pay for educating their children in church schools,” Graham asserted. “Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish Americans are now helping to pay for materialistic, atheistic … and in some instances anti-Christian and anti-Semitic teaching.”

Graham’s choice of time and audience to declare his views appeared significant. Roman Catholic leaders have mounted an intense campaign for government assistance to parochial schools. Some Jewish bodies have recently swung to that side. Presidents Nixon and Johnson—both Protestants—have also leaned in that direction. The Supreme Court is now considering several cases involving forms of public aid to private schools.

Graham again urged the return of prayer to public schools. “Students should have the right to pray silently on a voluntary basis or to repeat prayers used in the Supreme Court or before Congress,” he said. “I also believe that the Bible should be read … perhaps limited even to the Ten Commandments,” he added.

At one meeting a young black stopped the music and told of his recent conversion. He said he came from a background of militancy and hate. “I didn’t like white people,” he confessed. But he said something happened when he accepted Christ: “Now I love you all.” A white immediately popped to his feet and in a decidedly British accent told of his prejudice as a South African against blacks in his land. “But Jesus has taken it away,” he declared, “and I love you, too, brother.” Blacks and whites tearfully embraced.

Occasionally, small groups armed with Reach Out! editions of The Living New Testament slipped away to witness in a nearby resort community.

The revival broke out simultaneously on several campuses last fall, most dramatically at Andrews University (2,000 students) in Berrien Springs, Michigan. Andrews had been plagued by student rebellion, wide-scale drug use (one student said he once had $3,000 worth of drugs stashed on book shelves in his dorm room), and polarization among faculty and student groups.

Alf Lingstrand and Art McLarty, two student leaders banned from campus earlier, found Christ after bad drug trips elsewhere and revisited Andrews in May to witness to old friends. Their testimonies sparked a summer of spiritual crisis for many students. Meanwhile, the pair joined religion professor Paul Cannon, himself newly committed to Christ, to spread the Gospel on the streets of Detroit.

In October, 150 students attended a Campus Concern retreat near Andrews where, reported one, “the Holy Spirit really got hold of us.” There were confessions of sin, conversions, statements of consecration. In a “routine” chapel assembly back at school they reported what God had done in their lives, inviting others who wished a similar experience to come forward. More than half the assembled students walked forward to pray and testify, and the chapel session, like that at Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky, a year ago (see February 27, 1970, issue, page 36), went on for hours. Many declared they were accepting Christ on the spot. Some telephoned their parents to ask forgiveness.

Scores of prayer and Bible-study groups were formed. Teams took the news to other colleges, academies, and churches; revival followed virtually everywhere they went.

Doug DeLong, who reportedly underwent exorcism of a demon when he was converted in a dorm prayer meeting, went to his alma mater, Battle Creek Academy—described as a hotbed of discontent—and boomed: “I hope you guys get into Jesus!” Many did.

At Forest Lake Academy, two recent “services”—the official one inside and an unofficial prayer meeting outside (where students prayed for unconverted friends inside)—went on past midnight. “This is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit!” cried one student. “This is Pentecost!”

At Columbia Union College (950 students) in Takoma Park, Maryland, visiting Andrews students prayed and exchanged testimonies with crowds of spiritually ready CUCers until the wee hours.

One hundred students from Andrews, CUC, and other schools spent their Christmas holidays reaching people for Christ in the streets of New York City. Groups from Pacific Union College (1,850 students) in Angwin, California, launched street campaigns in San Francisco and door-to-door visits in the suburbs. PUCers were in the center of things when more than a third of Monterey Bay Academy’s 350 students at a California retreat requested salvation and filling by the Holy Spirit. And Kingsway (Canada) collegians witnessed to hippies in Toronto.

Churches have reported all-night prayer meetings and new spiritual vitality following visits by students. In some cases, factional feuds and disharmony have disappeared.

At the Camp Berkshire meeting (initiated by Columbia Union students), observer Arthur White, grandson of SDA founder Ellen G. White, told CHRISTIANITY TODAY: “We at headquarters have been silently sitting back and watching all of this. I am now ready to say that it is a genuine movement of the Holy Spirit.”

“This revival will last,” predicted SDA world youth director John Hanco*ck in an interview. “These kids have an insatiable desire to study the Word of God. Their testimonies are Bible-centered.” It is time now not to evaluate but to participate, he exhorted the SDA executive staff this month.

What do others think of the movement?

“I thank God for it!” exclaimed Kettering College (Ohio) dean Marthine Bliss. “I’ve been praying for this for a long time.” She told of a veteran SDA foreign missionary who accepted Christ on a recent visit at Kettering.

Columbia Union dean Lawrence Stevens, himself a leader in the movement, said he and other SDA deans are no longer running around trying to put down student unrest. “We’re now kept busy counseling kids who want to know about Christ and the Spirit-filled life,” he said. “We’ve never had it so easy before.”

Some older SDA leaders privately voice hopes that the movement will get more excited about Adventism as a cause or system.

Never, says an Andrews student. “The traditional system failed to communicate Christ.” Yet he and others in the movement speak of new respect for Mrs. White because of insights they have gleaned from her devotional writings.

Meanwhile, reports Tyndale House publisher Ken Taylor, SDA bookstores can’t seem to keep enough of his Reach Out! New Testaments in stock; thousands have been sent, but the stores keep running out. EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Membership Plateaus

One word describes church membership in the United States, according to the 1971 edition of the Yearbook of American Churches: static.

The annual tally revealed that the membership of 230 church bodies rose 35,448 to an all-time high of 128,505,084. But that is only a .03 per cent gain, compared to the previous year’s gain of 1.6 per cent, and far below the general population increase of 1.1 per cent. The data, which mainly reflect figures for the year 1969, show that 62.4 per cent of Americans hold church membership, compared with 63.1 per cent in the previous listing. Church attendance figures were 42 per cent for the new survey, down 1 per cent from the year before.

Among the larger communions showing a slight membership loss were Roman Catholics, United Methodists, Episcopalians, United Presbyterians, American Lutherans, the United Church of Christ, and the Lutheran Church in America.

A few major bodies showed gains: the Southern Baptists, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, and the National Primitive Baptist Convention. Most small, conservative church bodies followed a well-established pattern of growth.

Forty-eight reporting Protestant church bodies indicated that their members gave a combined total of $3,099,589,399, up about $99,500,000 from the 1968 figure. About 70 per cent of the money given in 1969 stayed at the local congregational level.

Large increases in the number of ordained clergymen were reported by the Yearbook. The 230 church bodies had 387,642 ordained clergymen in the latest survey, up from 361,506 in 226 bodies reported in the 1970 Yearbook.

The statistics, published by the National Council of Churches, also show that church construction was off in 1969, and that Canadian Christian communions reported 11,455,241 members for 1969–70; 8.7 million are Roman Catholic. The largest Eastern Orthodox group is the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America with 1.87 million.

Expelling Missionaries

A series of government raids on the homes and offices of church officials, and deportations of clergymen have shaken up church leaders in southern Africa and in the United States.

Three young American church workers were ordered to leave South Africa by March 14. No official reason was given for the deportation of United Methodist special-term missionary Gus Kious of San Leandro, or Mr. and Mrs. Reed Kramer of Knoxville, serving an ecumenical mission project. News accounts speculated the ouster may have been related to multiracial aspects of the programs. The Kramers’ apartment was reportedly raided twice.

A few days later, Howard Trumbull, a Congregational Church lay worker, and his family of five were ordered out of South Africa by May 28; the order was the tenth for a church worker during one week.

As a result of seizure of an interchurch agency’s records by security police in Capetown, thousands of persons face starvation, according to an agency official. Without the records, he said, administration of the organization’s charity program that provides subsistence-level income to families of persons detained by police on political charges is impossible. The police removed files from the Inter-Church Dependents’ Conference in an alleged search for “subversive literature.” Raids also were made on denominational offices and religious leaders’ homes in Capetown, Johannesburg, and Durban.

Two American-born Mariannhill missionary priests, meanwhile, were expelled. The South Africa government told Father Casimir Paulsen of Detroit to leave by March 31, the same date Father Henry Heier of Aberdeen, South Dakota, was given by the Rhodesia government to leave that country. Both men have been outspoken against apartheid.

And in Taiwan, the Nationalist Chinese government this month without explanation placed a United Methodist missionary and his wife under house arrest and ordered them out within forty-eight hours. The Reverend M. L. Thornberry, registrar and teacher at Taiwan Theological College, a Presbyterian seminary, is known to have been friendly with a number of politically disaffected native Taiwanese, the New York Times reported. The expulsion was believed to be the first for an American citizen in Taiwan.

If All Else Fails …

Renewed outbreaks of violence in Belfast last month sparked an all-day prayer meeting held by a group of local businessmen. Granted free use of the city’s Ulster Hall for the day, leaders called the meeting to pray for “the province in the present emergency.”

Those attending—including the governor of Northern Ireland, the Lord Mayor and other political, commercial, and religious leaders—were requested to pray silently. Approximately 7,000 attended during the course of the day.

S. W. MURRAY

A New Folk Musical: Do The Answers Ring True?

Chimes from a church steeple ring as a baby wails and sounds of the street and war are heard. Tedd Smith’s “quest in folk rock,” New Vibrations, tells of John’s search for meaning through the pain and confusion that the initial sound effects symbolize. In the confusion, the church bells never stop chiming. The answer is in the midst of the confusion, but will it be heard?

The structure is cyclical; we hear John search through adolescence, middle age, and old age without finding answers. His son, John, Jr., asks the same questions his father did but—unconvincingly—finds answers in Christ. “Life Is Why” expresses most of John’s questions. The girl, intended as a foil, replies: “You were born to glorify the one who died.”

Smith develops his quest through poetic preludes that probe the problem more seriously than the songs. The musical hammers away at some of the pet grievances of this generation: materialism, lack of love, and the institutional church (John sings, “[I] looked for you in stained-glass windows, but you weren’t there”). Although the subject is trite, the questions are honest, with a certain freshness to the approach.

John’s son follows in his father’s footsteps, but with only two songs in which to find his answers. In the finale, “New Vibrations,” he “tries to believe.” (With the girl and the chorus shouting at him, he has no choice.) He breaks into a chant of the Apostles’ Creed; while reciting “the third day he rose again from the dead” he stops and begins shouting: “I believe, yes, I believe!” The conversion, however, is too abrupt and theatrical for credibility.

Although the composer tries to give hope to a generation convinced of the hopelessness of life (starting with the butterflies on the album cover), his effort suffers from answers too quickly and easily found by John’s son.

Smith’s conclusion may ring true to young people who have found Christianity easy to accept, but uncommitted listeners of this generation may fare no better than John, Sr. CHERYL A. FORBES

Followers Of The Way

One of the latest outbreaks of the spiritual awakening on the nation’s youth scene is centered at Rye, New York, a wealthy bedroom village near the Connecticut state line.

Photographers for Life magazine, which is preparing an article on the movement, clicked away at a recent meeting of 170. Writer Jane Howard interviewed parents of the young people, whose lives reportedly have shown remarkable changes since they received Christ.

The leaders of the movement are associated with The Way Biblical Research Center of New Knoxville, Ohio, headed by Dr. Victor Wierwille, former Evangelical and Reformed minister.

Mixed Vibes

Staging and production were blah, but the lyrics and poetry sounded mighty fine.

These were some of the reactions from the capacity audience at the premiere of pianist-composer Tedd Smith’s one-hour folk musical, New Vibrations. The majority of the 1,600 persons—mostly straight young people and adults—at the San Gabriel, California, civic auditorium accorded the musical a standing ovation. Ralph Carmichael conducted a select group of singers for the occasion.

“I think Mr. Smith did a wonderful job in capturing the questions man asks all through life about God and his own existence on this planet,” said one adult.

Richard George, a college student, said: “I think mostly Christians and straight people will go to see New

Vibrations, which is good. There are a lot of things being written and produced to reach the hippies and exiles of society. This is something which a short-haired kid can identify with. The poetic readings were excellent—the best part of the show!”

One teen-ager said she liked the music and the words but not the staging, mainly the lack of movement. Others complained that a back-up light show detracted rather than enhanced.

Several youths reportedly received Christ afterward. One middle-aged mother commented that she had never before thought so seriously about life.

Smith’s work is the latest of a growing number of Christian folk musicals, a medium popular among hundreds of new church youth choirs since the advent of compiler Bob Oldenburg’s Good News in 1967.

RITA WARREN

Until 1968 The Way was largely confined to a few adults in Ohio. Then Wierwille’s lectures were put on tape and film. He also persuaded Steve Heefner and Jim Doop, whom he met on a visit to a California Christian commune, to join him. Heefner, a drugscene convert and former popular disc jockey known on San Francisco and New York stations as Steve O’Shea, became The Way’s East Coast director in Rye. Doop, a former tobacco salesman who mixed right-wing politics with dope trips, took over West Coast activities.

The new youth-beamed outreach successfully reached thousands—straights and street kids alike—and many of them are still out on the streets winning others. Large contingents meet in the San Francisco area, Wichita, and on the university campus at Greenville, North Carolina, as well as at Rye. There is a current upsurge on Long Island directed by new leaders Steve and Lori Perez.

The way is rigorous for followers of The Way: a thirteen-session course with a $45 tab for materials (“satisfaction guaranteed or your money back”). “Abundance of life” is advertised as the main emphasis. Water baptism is not recognized. Healing is always God’s will, The Way teaches, and God doesn’t like it when a believer dies (“one less witness”). The Way incorporates views associated with anti-legalist, dispensationalist, Calvinist, and charismatic positions. Wierwille also teaches an unusual non-Trinitarian view of God. All members are encouraged to speak in tongues (“one of nine gifts given to every believer”) at the end of the course.

The Rye meetings are held in the manse of the Rye Presbyterian Church. Pastor Joseph Bishop, who has taken the course, says he has reservations about some of Wierwille’s teachings but none about the changed lives he sees in the movement.

Heefner no longer thinks communal life is good for Christians, and he believes the bulk of the so-called “Jesus movement” burgeoning throughout the nation is too long on experience and too short on intensive Bible study.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Selling Out?

The Federal Communications Commission has been asked to approve the sale of radio stations WAVO AM and FM, in Decatur, Georgia, by Bob Jones University. Robert W. Sudbrink of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, owner of several radio stations in Ohio and Florida, has offered $675,500 for the stations in which the university invested $319,425 in 1963.

The university said it wants to sell the stations to help fund construction of a campus amphitorium. License renewal is being held up on the Decatur stations and also on the university’s stations WMUU AM and FM in Greenville, South Carolina, pending a reply by the university to the FCC’s demand that it demonstrate it is following fair-employment practices in hiring station personnel. Sudbrink says he will comply with all FCC policies.

Off With The Old Face, On With The New

A New Face for the Church, by Lawrence O. Richards (Zondervan, 1970, 288 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Norman H. West, West Woods Bible Chapel, Hamden, Connecticut.

To use a current phrase, this book really blew my mind. It forced me to face up to the many ways in which our evangelical churches have fallen into meaningless ritualism, and to the fact that in our practice we often deny truths we profess to hold in theory. Mr. Richards argues, quite convincingly, that our local churches must change if they are going to be true to their calling and relevant to their members. “Measured against the divinely ordained pattern, much of our church life today stands out starkly as irrelevant, misshapen, and perverted.” “Like it or not, we have to agree that … somehow, through all our forms and organizations and agencies, vital Christian personalities are not being grown.”

However, in contrast to many other writers on renewal, Richards is firmly committed to working within the established church. “I am not … suggesting a ‘no church’ movement, in which small groups are the only form of gathered life,” he says. “I am suggesting instead that the church must be reorganized.”

In Section I, Richards briefly sketches the problems of today’s evangelical churches. “Many Christians … dutifully attend services and meetings, yet are burdened by the meaninglessness of so much that is traditionally a part of our churches.” “Today’s church does not promote mutual ministry.… The majority sit, silent, passive, listening to the Word.” “Today we prod the professional staff to ‘preach the gospel’ to the saints—who alone fill our churches—while a disinterested world passes by.” “The major deliberations of church leaders focus on organizational problems.… Is spiritual growth encouraged when the biblical values we profess are seldom actually discussed?… Yet we not only give such matters priority, but these then become the criteria by which we evaluate success. Is the Sunday School growing? Is the budget up?… Then the church is doing fine!”

In Section II he outlines biblical principles relating to the local church. His main point here is sure to stir controversy, both among social activists and among those who use church services for evangelism: “The function of the church is foremost and essentially the personality transformation of its members, and of itself as a community.” “The church … exists only for its members.” Richards contends that evangelism is not to be one of the purposes of our church gatherings, that it is to be carried on by individuals in their daily situations. And he feels we have been off target in devoting so much time to reaching children, rather than trying to reach their parents first.

Another major point is the importance of mutual ministry among believers. “Too often laymen see themselves as a different order of Christian than the clergy. The clergy are to evangelize. The layman is to pay his salary, and perhaps bring in the unsaved for the pastor to preach to.” “The entire New Testament concept of the church demands that the meetings of a church be structured for mutual ministry.… There must be openness in all our meetings to permit the participation of any and every member.”

What he says about leadership in the church is likely to shake up many pastors. “I can find no case in which local leadership was limited to one person. All New Testament references are to elders (plural), none to ‘the elder’ (e.g. leader) of the church at such-and-such.” Nevertheless, Richards devotes a chapter to the role of the pastor in change, a chapter that every pastor could read with profit.

In Section III he gives basic steps for transforming the church as it is to the church as it should be. Here he deals with the “small group” approach and has many insights into the strengths and weaknesses of such groups. Those who have worked with a home Bible-study group or would like to form one will find plenty of help here.

For me, the most helpful parts of the book were those dealing with Christian education. The author gives a good survey for analyzing the efficiency of a Christian-education program; those who use it will no doubt find it very discomforting!

His simple observation that effective Christian education and nurture must be centered in the home, rather than in the church, is what really “blew my mind.” Richards began to think about this when he visited a typical evangelical church:

I asked Sunday School teachers who had children in other departments to tell me (1) what their children in other departments were taught the past Sunday and (2) how they had guided the children to relate the Bible to experiences during the week. Not one person even knew what his child had studied.

Referring to Deuteronomy 6:1–6, Richards comments,

The passage … locates the context of such teaching [of children] and that context is daily life. Living together provides the ideal context for sharing God’s words.… Divorced from that life context, biblical teaching leads to deadened orthodoxy.… The ideal way is to bring into experiences we share with our families the perceptions of life God gives in the Word.

Some will think this book is the answer to church renewal; others will no doubt dismiss it as the idle speculation of a seminary professor in his ivy tower. But I hope most readers will accept it for what it is: an attempt by a very earnest Christian to stimulate other Christians to examine their local churches in the light of Scripture. The ideas expressed in this book have evidently been developing in Richards’s mind for several years, and he has tried to think through the implications of his “plan” for the reorganization of the church in such areas as foreign missions, stewardship, and church buildings.

Perhaps the most obvious weakness of the book is that, like other books on renewal, it tends to be overly idealistic. Also, Richards gives few examples of churches where the steps he advocates are being taken with success.

By all means buy and read this book. Pass it on to others and discuss it with them. You will be helped by it, and you may even find a “new face” for your church.

To Tell The Truth

Good News from Tolkien’s Middle Earth, by Gracia Fay Ellwood (Eerdmans, 1970 160 pp., paperback, $2.95), and The Shattered Ring: Science Fiction and the Quest for Meaning, by Lois and Stephen Rose (John Knox, 1970 127 pp., $3.50), are reviewed by Janet Rohler Greisch, Woodbridge, Virginia.

Truth wears many hats. One of the least likely, by the standards of a fact-centered technocracy, is fiction. That fiction is, nonetheless, a fitting garment for truth is reflected in such instances as Nathan’s use of narrative to prick David’s conscience. Even less likely garb is fantasy or myth. That it too has a hook on truth’s hatrack is the thesis of two recent books.

For Gracia Fay Ellwood, the discovery that J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantastic Middle Earth is, in fact, true is “good news.” Everything there is alive, she notes, and—good news!—there is more alive in our earth than may be apparent at first glance. Objects come to life in the unconscious, as psychic phenomena. Seeing that aliveness, says Mrs. Ellwood, is a matter of viewpoint; dispassionate, scientific objectivity is only one way to look at life.

Contemporary science fiction tends to agree, say Lois and Stephen Rose. Much of it seems to echo sentiments of Kurt Vonnegut: “I used to think that science would save us,” the middle-aged hero of youth once said, “but we can’t stand any more tremendous explosions either for or against democracy. Only in superstition is there hope.”

Not that recent works take all the science out of science fiction; settings maintain the familiar unfamiliarity of future worlds, far-flung galaxies, and post-holocaust societies. In such settings, say the Roses, the “new wave” of science-fiction writers create new myths, stories with “some special insight into the problems of life and death,” stories that explore inner as often as outer space. What they find—or at least seek optimistically—is newness, expanded human consciousness. Their hope can be fulfilled, the Roses claim, because myth shatters old boundaries of thought and deed.

Such a search for Reality beyond science and history is what popularized Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, according to Mrs. Ellwood. Having established the truth of myth in the first part of her book, she goes on to examine the Christ-symbolism of some of the heroes—the “good guys” who, despite “human limitation,” accomplish some “saving activity,” produce some “salutary effect.” Their heroic adventures, encompassing life, death, and a return to life, appeal to the reader in quest of meaning, integration, absolutes.

Many readers will raise eyebrows at some of the theology in these books; some will wrinkle their noses at the serious consideration given fantasy and science fiction. But Mrs. Ellwood and the Roses merit a tip of the hat for showing that imagination can—and often does—tell the truth.

Needed: A Reverence For Life

Science and Secularity: The Ethics of Technology, by Ian G. Barbour (Harper & Row, 1970 151 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Paul D. Brewer, professor of philosophy, Carson-Newman College, Jefferson City, Tennessee.

Professor Barbour’s book is concerned with the problem of values that has resulted from the many technological advances in recent years. In dealing with these complex issues he avoids technical jargon but also makes it clear that he understands the disciplines involved. Many similar attempts have been made by theologians totally unequipped in scientific method, or by scientists who are naive about theological methods, and the result has been that one discipline is defined in terms of the other. Professor Barbour is a physicist who has conducted scientific research and understands its method, and who also has had solid training in theology. His book offers us dedicated scholarship at its best.

Barbour first discusses modern science’s use of models for symbolically representing certain aspects of reality that are not directly accessible to man. These models are understood as partial and tentative ways of presenting the non-observable. The method of science is autonomous in its realm and should be so recognized and permitted to explore whatever falls within its area of investigation. With the recognition of its autonomy, there must also be the willingness to acknowledge that these tentative models do not displace all other approaches to experience.

Although modern science as a form of knowledge has important intellectual implications, it is as a form of power and control that it raises significant ethical issues. The technological innovations have such far-reaching effects that society can no longer allow the developments of applied science to depend solely on corporation profits. There is a necessity for more careful planning of technological change. Professor Barbour suggests the need for an ethic of nature that directs man to cultivate a reverence for life and a respect for the integrity of the natural order. A destructive technology can be redirected by a value orientation that is interested in the quality of man’s life in this world. The author suggests that biblical religion with its theological models can witness to dimensions of human experience not accessible to human reason, and can offer correctives for the dangers of a technological mentality.

Since both science and theology operate with models that are not to be taken literally but must be taken seriously, they learn from each other. The religious outlook can provide a framework for the technological application of scientific truth, but religion is not just a framework of value restraints. It must always be open to the whole range of modern knowledge that scientific method has opened. The disciplines can be fulfilling rather than antagonistic.

The book is well written and is an excellent introduction to this complex area. Though many who are theologically conservative will not approve Dr. Barbour’s process theology, a different theological model still must face the same questions. This book offers one option for dealing with the problem.

On Evangelism

How to Win Them, by John R. Bisagno and others (Broadman, 1971, 158 pp., paperback, $3.95), and People-Centered Evangelism, by John F. Havlik (Broadman, 1971, 92 pp., paperback, $1.75), are reviewed by John A. Baird, Jr., vice-president, Eastern Baptist College, St. Davids, Pennsylvania.

Southern Baptists have scored again with two new books on evangelism. Both will provide the minister plenty of questions and answers concerning this often misunderstood subject, which, as Havlik points out, must be “caught, not taught.”

How to Win Them contains thirteen talks from state evangelistic conferences. Pastors, professors, and denominational leaders give provocative illustrations to dramatize the dimensions of evangelism in this decade. One contributor, for example, portrays Jacob, the son of Abraham, as a Southern Baptist! He shows how the Old Testament leader and many contemporary Christians in Dixie substitute self, numbers, dollars, and organization for the power of prayer. Other memorable parts of the book are reflections on the arithmetic of death (124,000 persons per day), the values of adversity, the apartness of apartment dwellers, and what it means to be filled with the Holy Spirit. The dreary limitations of the social gospel are placed in focus. Clean air and clean government will not in themselves suffice for sinful man.

The reader is treated to some lively writing, such as, “Some pastors are like stray dogs at a whistler’s convention.”

Each of the nine chapters of People-Centered Evangelism has the word “people” in its title. Probably the best chapter is on the Bible as a book of the people. Evangelism is defined as the principal distinction between Communism and Christianity, because it combines personal salvation with social justice. Havlik is also to be commended for saying that evangelism is the essence of the faith rather than, as some denominational literature implies, an option for specialists.

Regrettably, other things he says fall into the category of what might be called homiletical license. One did not need “clever lawyers” to avoid paying income tax if his total earnings were from municipal bonds. Nor is the “suburbanite riding his power mower” necessarily a man with an empty heart. For many, the chore is re-creative.

Newly Published

Shalom! The Biblical Concept of Peace, by Douglas J. Harris (Baker, 79 pp., paperback, $1.95), and Brethren and Pacifism, by Dale W. Brown (Brethren, 1970, 152 pp., paperback, $2). Many previously non-pacifist Christians are reopening discussion on the rightness of participating in war. The first book summarizes the biblical data. The second complements it with a survey of various kinds of pacifism, past and present, and includes the author’s advocacy of the kind he prefers; though written for Church of the Brethren readers, it can be helpful to a wider circle.

John Calvin: Selections From His Writings, edited by John Dillenberger (Doubleday, 1971, 590 pp., paperback, $2.45). An outstanding value, about two-fifths from the Institutes, the rest from the whole range of the great reformer’s ministry.

House of Acts, by John A. MacDonald (Creation House, 1970, 124 pp., $3.95). An evangelical pastor relates the joys and sorrows of his ministry among converted hippies, and documents part of the Jesus movement in the San Francisco area.

Tradition: Old and New, by F. F. Bruce (Zondervan, 1971, 184 pp., paperback, $2.95). Basically an excellent study of tradition in the apostolic and sub-apostolic church, but with considerable application to current proper and improper uses of “tradition.”

For Blacks Only: Black Strategies for Change in America, by Sterling Tucker (Eerdmans, 1971, 211 pp., $4.95). Reflections and suggestions that are highly readable and realistic. For whites also, but no explicit religious perspective.

To Apply the Gospel, by Henry Venn (Eerdmans, 1971, 243 pp., $6.95). Selections from the influential writings of the great nineteenth-century leader of the Church (of England) Missionary Society, ably edited by Max Warren.

Responsible Sexuality—Now, by Deane William Ferm (Seabury, 1971, 179 pp., $4.95). The author bases his idea of responsible sexuality on love—a commitment between two persons. The right or wrong of premarital intercourse is not the issue, “for this is to put the entire emphasis on the sex act itself.”

Subduing the Cosmos: Cybernetics ana Man’s Future, by Kenneth Vaux (John Knox, 1970, 197 pp., $5.95). In putting the first man on the moon we have reached “the beginning of adulthood of the human race.” The future of this adulthood, and the problems to be faced, are considered in relation to cybernetics.

Alone at High Noon, by Emile Calliet (Zondervan, 1971, 94 pp., $2.95). The problem of loneliness haunts all men. Blaise Pascal and Baudelaire, among others, struggled to conquer the emptiness of solitude. But solitude can also be creative and rewarding if man’s soul is at peace with God. This is a book to calm the spirit and refresh the mind with new insights into an age-old question.

The Religion of the Republic, edited by Elwyn A. Smith (Fortress, 1971, 296 pp., $8.95). Eleven scholars offer essays from varying perspectives on different aspects of a “common denominator” quasi-religion in the United States. Especially timely in view of an increasingly felt need to distinguish clearly evangelicalism from Americanism.

When the Walls Come Tumblin’ Down, by Gordon C. Hunter (Word 1970, 139 pp., $3.95). Reconciliation is the word for our time. All of us need to be reconciled to God and to one another. Here the author explores this need, offering practical suggestions for help on both the spiritual and physical levels of life.

A Sensitive Man and the Christ, by Robert K. Hudnut (Fortress, 1971, 110 pp., paperback, $2.50). “The thrust of a man’s life is to move from thinking to feeling. It is to become sensitive.” Without sensitivity, says the author, no man can know Christ, others, or himself. Using the apostles as examples, Hudnut tells how to obtain this vulnerable sensitivity.

Faith and Philosophical Enquiry, by D. Z. Phillips (Schocken, 1971, 285 pp., $9). Thirteen previously published papers by a leading British philosopher.

The Golden Core of Religion, by Alexander Skutch (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, 270 pp., $6.95). The major contribution made by religion throughout history has been the idea of caring for and about things, says Skutch. This is a very sweet theory, but unfortunately most people practice little of such caring.

Human Energy and Activation of Energy, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971, 191 and 416 pp., $5.95 and $7.50). Thirty-four previously unpublished essays written between 1931 and 1955.

Immortality, Religion, and Morals, by Ashley Montagu (Hawthorn, 1971, 176 pp., $6.95). Essays that depend heavily on literary sources (T. S. Eliot, John Donne, Emerson) for the ideas prosaically promoted. An anthology of the authors quoted, retaining the same title, would have been more interesting.

Born to Burn, by Wendell Wallace (Logos International, 1970, 95 pp., $1.95). Deeply moving account of a black pastor’s search for spiritual power, and his discovery that Jesus can unite blacks and whites, radicals and straights in a new kind of family under the same church roof.

The Conspiracy of the Young, by Paul Lauter and Florence Howe (World, 1970, 399 pp., $8.50). An important book, thoroughly documented, revealing some amazing facts about the various revolutions taking place.

The Evolution of Christian Thought, by T. A. Burkill (Cornell, 1971, 504 pp., $12.50). A rather conventional survey, that needs supplementing for the recent period to give balance. Useful as a refresher for seminary graduates.

Dialogue and Tradition, by Jacob Bernard Agus (Abelard-Schuman, 1971, 621 pp., $12.95). “The central theme of this collection of essays is the tension between tradition and dialogue.… The dialogue between Jews and Christians in our day is but one manifestation of a many-sided quest.” A thorough, comprehensive treatment of this subject.

Contemplation in a World of Action, by Thomas Merton (Doubleday, 1971, 384 pp., $7.95). A collection of articles, many previously published, on contemporary monasticism by a widely read monk. Many seek to make a case for having more hermits.

The Triple Knowledge: An Exposition of the Heidelberg Catechism, by Herman Hoeksema (Kregel, 1971, c. 2,100 pp., three volumes, $24.95). The last two volumes are due later this year. A reprint in full of a work originally appearing in ten volumes, 1943–56.

Parables of Jesus, by Edmund Flood (Paulist, 1970, 64 pp., paperback, $.75). A helpful book for those having little familiarity with the background and cultural setting of Jesus’ parables. The explanations are succinct and pointed.

Roman Catholic Modernism, by Bernard M. G. Reardon (Stanford, 1971, 251 pp., $7.95). Selections from the writings around the turn of the century by Loisy, Tyrrell, Hugel, Blondel, and others, who, it now turns out, had their way after all.

Leave a Little Dust, by Rachel Conrad Wahlberg (Fortress, 1971, 140 pp., paperback, $2.50). A practical, interesting book about woman’s role in marriage.

Some of the above books will later be reviewed at greater length.

EDITORIALS

The discovery a few months ago of the remains of a victim of crucifixion revealed that this form of execution may well have been even more torturous and barbaric than the literary evidence had indicated. The body was contorted into an unnatural position. The nails pierced the forearms instead of the palms. The cruelty of men to men is here seen at its basest in that this means of capital punishment was used by one of the more enlightened governments of the time!

Those who bear the name Christian must never allow the ornate gold or fine wood crosses of our day to obscure the fact that the cross in the first century was an official means of executing criminals. Among law-abiding Roman citizens, to glory in a cross made no more sense than for someone today to glory in an electric chair or firing squad or hangman’s noose.

But God showed the first Christians that it was their sins that sent Christ to the cross. They were enabled to look beyond the scandal of a condemned man to see that God used Jewish rejection and Roman “justice” to make it possible for the sins of all men to be forgiven through the bloody sacrifice of his sinless son. It was what God did at Calvary, not man, that enables us to call that Friday “Good.”

As the centuries passed, men overlooked the challenge to the Roman Empire that identification with one of her alleged enemies implied. They came to accept the cross as a covering for sin. But offense remained. For most men were unprepared to accept the death of Christ as the sole and sufficient means of their acceptance into the family of God as forgiven and cleansed sons. Men wanted in some way, large or small, to earn their salvation. Christendom was scandalized when men arose to proclaim the forgiveness of sins solely because of Christ’s death on the cross, apart from any human ceremony or work.

Even today, many labor far and wide to proclaim a “gospel” that does not offer acceptance with God on the basis of what Christ did on the cross alone. What it prescribes is Christ’s death plus something we do.

Others today do not so much pervert the message of the cross as ignore it; they seem to sense no need to have their sins paid for by the death of another. Indeed, they’re offended at the serious suggestion that they are heinous sinners in the sight of a righteous God. To be sure, men will joke about being sinners. And they will freely discuss the sins of others—of long-hairs or hard-hats, welfare recipients or establishment-types, communists or capitalists, peace-marchers or war profiteers, conservation nuts or industrial polluters. There is indeed a strong sense of sin in our day—but the sins of others are what most men are concerned about. Their own sins are denied, excused, blamed on others. So the aspect of the cross most scandalous to men today is not that its victim was considered a criminal, nor that the cross provided the sole and sufficient means of atoning for sins, but rather the assertion that man—each man—has sins that need to be taken care of in this drastic way.

The Church has handled previous kinds of offense by meeting the issue head-on. Christ crucified was proclaimed regardless of the consequences. The imperial authorities might take action lest the power of Rome be undermined; the ecclesiastical authorities might rail lest the power of their institutions over the lives of men be sapped; the people might scoff at the message because they were loyal citizens or because they liked the delusion that they had a role in their salvation; yet still the message was boldly proclaimed.

Regardless of the changing attitudes and responses of men, whether or not men feel a need for salvation, the Christian is to be faithful in proclaiming Christ’s death on the cross as the only and complete means of reconciling rebellious man to his loving but just creator. We should not be surprised when men scoff at or ignore this message; men have always taken offense at the cross. But the Holy Spirit, as he does his work of convicting men of their personal sins, has proved able to overcome all kinds of objections to the cross in order to make men see that this cruel instrument of execution, this sign of human bestial*ty, was the means God used to bring us to himself.

Explosive Power: Carnal Or Christian

The bombing of the Capitol was a despicable act. Experience has shown that we have little right to speculate about who did it; the assassins of the Kennedy brothers were hardly representative of most of their political opponents. We can hope, however, that the culprits are found before some future outburst results in death. And we need to recognize anew that some persons in our midst are so disaffected with our country that they have given up on normal means of winning others to their point of view. Bombings, like the tantrums of children, are among the tactics they use to dramatize their rage.

Although they arouse feelings of hostility in most of us, bombers need to be seen as persons for whom Christ died. If they knew him as Saviour and Lord, they would recognize that their hopes for a just society are not in vain, that one day Christ will reign, that one day there will be no more wars and injustice and sickness, not to mention fallible congressmen. And they will also recognize that human attempts to improve society are to be neither dependent on unrighteous methods nor judged by their success in making men better. We are to do right even when others do wrong, and even when our doing right does not bring about the desired improvement.

If those whose perverted passion for righteousness leads them to wrongdoing (in part because they have given up on achieving their goals) could only see the One who in righteousness will one day reign, their passion could be diverted into truly constructive channels. We who are Christians must never forget that before he saw the light and was converted, the Apostle Paul was as vigorous in his opposition to the Church with the means at his disposal as is any violent revolutionary of our own day.

Honesty In Government

A recent Gallup poll found that seven out of ten Americans do not think the administration is telling the people all they should know about the Viet Nam war. Certainly high government spokesmen severely undermined their credibility when they used a pipe acquired months ago in testimony before a congressional committee in a way that implied it had just been obtained from a severed pipeline along the Ho Chi Minh trail. Truth-in-advertising and truth-in-lending laws have recently been enacted. Do we need to legislate “truth-in-testimony” for the executive branch? And for that matter, don’t we need enforced laws on “truth-in-campaign-financing” for legislators?

Inadvertently we learned recently that we cannot trust what the government tells us in the event of nuclear attack. In the wake of the largely unheeded, and fortunately mistaken, notice to radio stations to go off the air because of impending attack, it was learned that radio stations years before had been instructed that, in the event of attack, they were to broadcast reassuring messages that our air force was devastating the enemy in retaliation!

Repeatedly in the Scriptures the Christian is told he must be honest and truthful, within the guidelines of love and what contributes to edification. There may be times when it is appropriate to withhold information. But for the government to attempt to deceive the people is folly. Christians in every level of government have the responsibility to be truthful in all their dealings and to correct untruth wherever possible. In this way they not only obey their Lord but help strengthen, instead of undermine, the confidence of the people in the civil authorities.

Easter: Made In Israel

Hippity, hoppity, Easter’s on its way, springing straight out of the Holy Land. Israel produced the makings of Easter well before this year’s commemoration of the event that silences the knell of death to sing of life renewed, that shatters the somber chill of winter to celebrate the emergence of spring.

The significance of Christ’s resurrection needs no seasonal reinforcement, of course, and Down Under there is none. Instead in Australia, where April is autumn, this Easter’s signs of new life are finger-lickin’ good—and made in Israel. Perhaps there is nothing strange about chocolate eggs and rabbits coming from the Holy Land to fill the Easter baskets used to observe Christ’s resurrection. But from crucifixion to confection is a remarkable hop.

Draft Defiance

On Monday, March 8, heavyweight champion Joe Frazier decisively beat Muhammad Ali, whose life in and out of the ring has been disrupted for more than three years by his efforts to avoid the draft. Curiously, that same day the Supreme Court rendered a decision that, while it did not concern Ali directly, did speak to the issue of selective conscientious objection.

Guy P. Gillette and Louis A. Negre had argued that they were opposed in principle not to all war but to the one being waged in Viet Nam. The court ruled that conscientious objectors, religious or otherwise, must be opposed to “participation in war in any form.” Objection to a specific war affords no grounds for relief from military service. The vote of the court was 8 to 1.

The decision of the high court is sound if for no other reason than that the alternative would be chaotic. However, it still leaves unanswered the question of what Christians ought to do if they conscientiously believe that a particular war is immoral. No one can dispute the fact that some wars are immoral and offensive to Christian conscience. Any Christian who feels this way about a particular war should obey his conscience and refuse to serve. When God’s law and Caesar’s are at variance, then God’s law must prevail. The Christian who so determines must then face and accept whatever penalty he is required to pay for his refusal to obey Caesar’s law if he wishes to stay within Caesar’s domain. This is suffering for righteousness’ sake. He is free not to obey, but he is not free to run away from the consequences of his disobedience. Nor is he free to presume that his decision is infallible and that other Christians who see matters differently are necessarily wrong.

Gillette and Negre, who did not base their cases on Christian grounds, lost their fight. Now let them pay the price for their convictions. Muhammad Ali lost a boxing match the same day. It remains to be seen whether he soon will lose a second and perhaps greater battle over the draft.

Labor’S Double Standard?

Organized labor relies heavily on the support of society at large. Its clout would be appreciably diminished if it did not resort to a variety of social pressures to sign up workers as members. In any office or shop where a union is recognized as bargaining agent by the employer, the individual employee most likely does not have a truly free choice on whether or not to join the union. Labor’s rationale for coercion is that everyone who benefits from collective bargaining should contribute to it.

Our society has accepted this infringement upon individual freedom, for better or worse, feeling that the benefits outweigh the loss of liberty. Unfortunately, however, labor seems lately to be reluctant to recognize its debt to society. Unions still have a long way to go in eliminating racial discrimination, but they are resisting government proposals designed to help correct biased policies and practices.

The nation’s construction unions issued a strongly worded statement last month saying they would fight government-imposed quotas on non-white workers in apprenticeship programs. We agree that quotas are probably not the answer. But isn’t it merely something of a twist on the quota principle that enables the unions to achieve a de facto closed shop? If the government shouldn’t force the unions to take in applicants it doesn’t want, why should the unions be allowed to force into membership workers who don’t want to join?

Home As A Wicked Stepmother

No Christian who travels extensively behind the Iron Curtain can return without a somber new awareness of the value of religious liberty, linked with deep compassion for fellow believers subject to harsh restrictions. Surprisingly, however, these believers seem to accept their lot with little apparent consciousness of an exile other than that common to all Christians who are strangers and pilgrims on earth.

That it is very different with the Jews of the Soviet Union has again been poignantly highlighted by a letter published last month in the Times of London from Mr. and Mrs. Valentin Prussakov of Moscow—a letter that, the newspaper said subsequently, “may be their death warrant.” The couple tell of frequent unsuccessful applications to leave for Israel, and cannot understand the official refusal to let them go. In support of an incontestable principle they cite Pravda (March 6, 1970): “Every citizen has the right freely to select his citizenship, and to live in one or another state.… This is a democratic, progressive principle.” They appeal to all people of the free world for help “to escape from a country which for us is a wicked stepmother, and depart to our spiritual home—Israel.” It is difficult to reconcile the Soviet detention of Jews legitimately wishing to leave the country with Moscow’s continued denials of anti-Semitism in any form.

An all-party motion on the plight of Jews in Russia has so far attracted the signatures of more than half of Britain’s members of parliament. On another front, it is to us inexplicable that the World Council of Churches, with all its laudable concern for the downtrodden in whitest Africa, should have made no pronouncement on this subject at its Addis Ababa meeting.

At last month’s Brussels world conference on Soviet Jewry, Simon Wiesenthal told how a French delegate to the conference was telephoned at two A.M. by a Russian Jew. “Why are you calling me at this hour?” came the demand. “Because,” said the man, “you were sleeping.”

Stoking The Flames

Bernadette Devlin, in a chapel appearance at Mercer University last month, delivered a tirade against the United States and capitalism, attributing all the world’s ills to those who disagreed with her economics. For such a simplistic diagnosis the young Irish radical got a standing ovation from the audience at the Southern Baptist school in Macon, Georgia. It is difficult to see how an academic community can justify such an approach to problem-solving. In our view, it merely fuels the flames of Miss Devlin’s equally irrational extremist adversaries.

An Invitation To Passover

A million or more Jews—along with millions of other Americans—will behold the Lamb of God on a prime-time color telecast next month, if sponsors’ hopes are fulfilled (see News, page 40). Just as Christ at the Last Supper used the occasion of the traditional Passover to communicate new spiritual realities, the special television production skillfully and tastefully superimposes those realities upon the modern practice of the Passover. In a bold—and expensive—departure from tradition, the American Board of Missions to the Jews is using a twentieth-century means to communicate Christ to the masses. We applaud the mission’s action. The project deserves evangelicals’ support, both through prayer and through gifts.

Readers may send names and addresses of Jewish friends to the American Board of Missions to the Jews, 236 West 72nd Street, New York City 10023.

Surprised By Piety

Two liberal scholars who recently completed an extensive survey of churchgoers have concluded that piety and prejudice don’t necessarily go together after all!

Dr. Thomas C. Campbell, associate professor of church and community at Chicago Theological Seminary, and Yoshio f*ckuyama, professor of religious studies at Pennsylvania State University, concentrated on the United Church of Christ, which is easily one of the most liberal of American denominations. Their findings, published in The Fragmented Layman (Pilgrim Press) suggest a contrast to the famous Glock and Stark survey, which found that churchgoers were more prejudiced than non-churchgoers. According to Campbell and f*ckuyama, “the devotional man in this study of a liberal denomination was more likely to favor action in the area of civil justice,” as well as in many other areas of social concern.

Campbell and f*ckuyama questioned more than 8,000 churchgoers. Those who accepted a credo of religious beliefs without any personal involvement proved more prejudiced socially than those who insisted on daily devotional prayer and Bible reading as necessary parts of the Christian life.

The two sociologists, both active church members and liberals, were admittedly surprised by the results. In announcing their findings, they called for a reevaluation of and reemphasis on the devotional life of the church, “recognizing that devotionalism is often seriously questioned within churches of the more liberal Protestant type” and that “piety is very often a pejorative term and concept.”

Statistically, Campbell and f*ckuyama have shown that devotionalism does not inhibit concern for social justice. But the study did not survey the actions of churchgoers, only their stated attitudes. Paper proof is not enough to prod liberals to promote “the devotional life of the church.” Without deeds to back up words, piety may remain a second-rate interest of the church.

Keeping Uncle Sam Afloat

With the April 15 federal income-tax deadline fast approaching, the following will hardly lift harried taxpayers out of the doldrums: The average American will pay more than $3.20 in taxes for every calendar day this year. The U. S. Chamber of Commerce points out that governments of all levels will collect an estimated $1,175 in taxes from each man, woman, and child in the country. That’s almost twice the per-capita figure of $628 in 1960, itself nearly double the 1950 figure of $337. In 1940, per-capita taxes were a mere $96.

Hand-wringing won’t help. But the whopping tax bite causes us to wonder how much Mr. Average Christian is spending each calendar day for advancing the Kingdom of God. A safe bet is that it’s nowhere near double what he spent in 1960, or twelve times his 1940 contributions. (Reports from forty-eight Protestant church bodies show that in 1969 their confirmed members gave an average of $99.68 during the year, just over 27 cents per day.)

If Christians upped their giving to the cause of Christ as substantially as they have been required to increase their tax dollars, maybe Uncle Sam would soon find he didn’t need such inflated levies to stay afloat.

The Fat God Gives

The Reverend Ronald Stephens, a clergyman of the Church of England, wants to be completely modern in his witness. To accomplish this he has signed a contract to film margarine commercials. Part of the script reads: “Margarine has goodness in it. And the body needs the fats of margarine as the soul needs God.”

Food imagery is not as incongruous with Christian witness as it might first appear. The Bible is filled with such imagery; Paul, for example, often compared meat to God’s Word. In Stephens’s commercial the food image has a double thrust, for it is that of fullness, of eating the fat of both physical and spiritual worlds. It reminds us that God’s goodness is evident on both these levels. As Nehemiah said to the people of Israel: “Go your way, eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions to him for whom nothing is prepared … for the joy of the Lord is your strength” (Neh. 8:10).

Living Proof

The early-morning light of revival has dawned upon countless thousands of persons in recent months, a morning of new life into which joy has come. In fact, the joy is so noticeable that even hard-bitten secular magazine reporters and network television producers have commented about it. It is a joy that is expressed not only in songs and smiles but also in attitudes and dispositions. And it is living proof that Jesus Christ is alive and well, for Christian joy has its source in him.

One of the tasks of the Holy Spirit is to translate the dynamic traits of Christ’s life into the personal experience of believers. Joy is among these traits (John 17:13). Through the Spirit’s husbandry it can blossom and become fruit in our lives (Gal. 5:22).

This joy transcended the sorrow of the cross (Heb. 12:2). In the same unspeakable way it can survive the deepest woes as well as the slight irritations of our earthly sojourn (Jas. 1:2; 1 Pet. 1:6–8). We may not be able to explain it, but we can experience it. Its roots are in a total commitment to God.

There are, of course, many bright and clear reasons for joy. Having Jesus as a personal friend. Answered prayers. Christian fellowship. Being included in God’s plans. And even heaven shares our joy over a new birth in the household of faith (Luke 15:7).

These are conditions that evoke joyous responses in words, songs, and sanctified laughter—a welcome symphony for our otherwise rather joyless age. More importantly, beneath every true expression of Christian joy is an abiding experience (John 15:4, 11). So let’s open our souls’ windows and let the Son shine in!

First of Three Parts

Three years ago I was bored with the Sunday church services over which I presided. The Order of Worship had developed rigor mortis: the doxology, the hymns, the prayers, the special music, the responses, the announcements and offering, and the sermon had over the years settled into virtually the same slots in the church bulletin week after week. Stand, sit, sing, pray, listen, speak—we had programmed ourselves right into a rut.

By the dictates of tradition (and possibly the church constitution), I did most of the talking while the congregation did most of the listening for most of the Sundays every year.

As a result we came down with a painful case of The Uncomfortable Pew, and attendance sagged (I wasn’t the only one bored). We had ample ecclesia but little koinonia.

At the same time, fortunately, our youth groups were thriving. Our high schoolers and collegians began asking pushy questions. “Pastor, why can’t we have more life in our church services?” “What if the Holy Spirit’s agenda isn’t the same as the one you have in the Sunday bulletin; would he have a chance?” “How do we find out about God’s blessings in the lives of the other people who attend our church?” “Will we ever have a sense of spiritual togetherness?”

I considered resigning, but God wouldn’t let me go. We didn’t need a new man—we needed new life.

I took a summer sabbatical to pray, think, and view our church from a distance. When I returned, I cautiously became a co-conspirator with a few others in a revolution aimed at gradual overthrow of the established order of service. Although we mounted renewal efforts along a wide front, we chose to give prime attention at first to the Sunday-morning service, because that was the one time during the week when most of our people were together. We knew that God’s blessings came in many packages, not just the ones marked pulpit or preacher, so we made room for the people to participate. And, to prevent the ruin of otherwise good things through repetition, we determined that for as long as possible we would not structure any two services alike.

To give God sufficient opportunity to take matters into his own hands, we even adventurously scheduled some “unstructured” services. (I confess that at first I carried notes and lists of hymns to these meetings—just in case!)

The same location, time, and familiar faces up front every week provided the necessary sense of continuity and stability; longtime members did not feel they were being uprooted.

Within a few months interest and attendance picked up, and our meetings gained a reputation of being among the most exciting in the city. Members would call and apologize for an upcoming weekend vacation trip, then conclude with something like, “I really hate to be away on Sunday, pastor. I just know I’ll miss something I shouldn’t.” They were talking about vital fellowship, not sermons or guest superstars.

These services spanned the generation gap. The ratio of college-age young people to the rest of the congregation was reputed to be the highest for miles around. The next largest group was the over-sixty set. We were an urban church.

Best of all, the Holy Spirit was liberated in our midst. No dancing in the aisles, no shouting, no rah-rah platforming or anything like that. It was simply a soul-stirring sense that he was present in the lives of his people, and that we believers truly were “members one of another.” Often when I entered the sanctuary for a service I could feel a radiant atmosphere of love and joy. There was an air of expectancy, too, because we knew that God had been at work in people’s lives during the week, and we anticipated sharing in those blessings. Koinonia had come!

It could not have come had we bypassed the practical application of some basic truths. A partial list:

1. The Church is Christ’s; he—not the minister—must be the predominant figure when believers come together. Jesus is “in the midst.” This involves our attitude—and the occasion to express it together.

2. The Church is Christ’s body. Members have affectional and functional relationships to one another. This involves interpersonal ministry—and the opportunity for it to happen.

3. The Church is a miraculous fusion of people to each other (Col. 3:11), with positional and practical realities. The Holy Spirit is both convener and catalyst of this dynamic community. He must have freedom to do his work not only in lives of individual Christians but also in the corporate life of the Church—when believers are together.

4. The Church has no divinely prescribed structure or forms to which believers must adhere when they meet together. (Our liturgical roots are not very deep in history. Those who do claim to practice the pattern of the early Church surely would admit that forms extant then were but extensions and adaptations of Jewish synagogue styles that in turn were forged of utility during the Exile. We have scriptural guidelines for behavior when we are together but none for an Order of Worship. We are not even told when or how often to schedule communion. Those who are by tradition committed to liturgy can make use of prefixes—spontaneous, free, contemporary—or adapt or work around the liturgy to give koinonia a chance. Vatican II and denominational reform movements reflect this need.)

For a long time I thought that any attempts to bring significant change into such sacred institutions as the morning worship service would cause serious dissension among members. Not so, if change occurs by evolution instead of sudden revolution, and if the members are deftly drawn in as participants in the change-making processes.

Another myth I believed was that only small churches could have the kind of services that spawn koinonia, but recently I learned that the attendance at Peninsula Bible Church in Palo Alto, California, jumped from 250 to nearly 1,000 during Sunday-night “Body Life” services.

In next month’s Workshop column. Part II of this article will list many of the koinonia-supportive features we introduced in our morning services. Part III will describe the evening services at Peninsula Bible Church.—EDWARD E. PLOWMAN, assistant editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY; formerly pastor of Park Presidio Baptist Church, San Francisco.

Of all man’s physical endowments, none is more precious than the ability to see. Only those deprived of sight after having known its blessings can fully appreciate it.

In the dictionary we find the eye spoken of as the faculty of discrimination, perception, or discernment, and there are repeated references to the eye in Scripture. These scriptural references usually have a spiritual application. Let us consider some of them.

Spiritual blindness is ascribed by Isaiah to those who should be God’s watchmen but have failed: “His watchmen are blind: they are all ignorant, they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark; sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber” (Isa. 56:10).

This same spiritual blindness is ascribed to deceitful teachers such as the Pharisees of our Lord’s day: “Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind” (Matt. 15:14).

Those who willfully rejected the truth in all ages were said to be spiritually blind. Isaiah described the condition in his day: “See ye indeed, but perceive not” (Isa. 6:9), and our Lord said the same was true in Israel during his ministry. Paul wrote: “In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not” (2 Cor. 4:4). And this is still true today.

But one does not have to be blind to have a serious vision problem. Like our physical eyes, our spiritual eyes can be out of focus, causing us to confuse immediate advantage with eternal values, secular issues with spiritual, human accomplishments with the work of God, and our own opinions with the divine revelation.

The Apostle Paul speaks of those whose spiritual eyes are in focus: “We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal” (2 Cor. 4:18). Properly focused eyes belong to those who set their sights on things that are above, those who see a city beyond the earthly sphere and who long for others to see it too.

Then there is the evil eye—the eye of him who judges the acts of God by human standards, even daring to criticize God. Jesus speaks of the impossibility of clear sight with such an eye: “If thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!” (Matt. 6:23). Again he refers to the darkness that exists for those whose eyes are evil, in Luke 11:34, when he says, “When thine eye is evil, thy body also is full of darkness.”

Sometimes vision is hampered by a foreign body in the eye. A speck of dirt, a cinder, or anything else in the eye causes discomfort and distortion of sight.

The more our faults cause us pain and irritation, the more prone we are to see the shortcomings of others—to prejudge, misjudge, criticize, and slander. Concerning this all too human tendency, our Lord asked, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and fail to notice the plank in your own?” (Matt. 7:3, Phillips).

Then there is the downcast eye, that which sees only the problems and sorrows of life and refuses to look up to the One who is sufficient for all things. Peter walked safely on the water to meet the Lord until he looked down and allowed the winds and the waves—the utter impossibility of what he was doing—to give him an earthly view of a heavenly experience.

The psalmist looks up (Ps. 121:1), knowing that his help comes from the Lord, the Creator of the universe. Paul tells us to seek and set our affections on the things that are above. We are to look to God and not to this world. Our Lord, in describing conditions that will prevail near the end of the age, says to believers, “When these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh” (Luke 21:28).

In like manner, he calls us to our responsibility for world evangelization: “Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest” (John 4:35).

How often our eyes are selfish and calculating! Since the time when Eve “saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise” (Gen. 3:6, RSV), men have disobeyed God for a fancied personal advantage, only to find in time that they have exchanged eternity for a mess of secular pottage.

Many of us have looked at material things and have deliberately put them first. We have forgotten Christ’s command. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God,” and his promise that the necessities of life would surely follow such a choice.

We live in a day when the lustful eye is a deadly spiritual disease. Men love to have it so, and women do all they can to further it. The Apostle Peter describes our day with painful accuracy; “These are the men who delight in daylight self-indulgence.… Their eyes cannot look at a woman without lust” (2 Pet. 2:13, 14, Phillips). There is more to “girl-watching” than meets the eye. It is the lust of the heart.

The aged Apostle John tells us that all things attached to this world, including the “lust of the eyes, and the pride of life,” will pass away, “but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever” (1 John 2:17).

Strange to say, many have deliberately closed eyes—eyes that cannot see because of prejudice, presuppositions, unbelief. Our Lord wept over the people of Jerusalem because they had willfully rejected spiritual truths; “now they are hid from thine eyes,” he said (Luke 19:42). Here we have the weeping eyes of the Lord of love, and the self-blinded eyes of those he had come to redeem. And our own generation is no different. Some eyes are closed because of laziness, some because of fearfulness, and some because of a deadly indifference.

But for all diseases, all impairments of vision, there is a sure cure.

The Laodicean church—so like the Church of today—was urged to admit its wretched condition (“miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked.” Rev. 3:17), and, among other things, to anoint its eyes with Spirit-provided eye-salve, so that it might see.

Our Lord came preaching and healing, giving physical sight to many who were blind and spiritual sight to all who would receive him. And today he offers spiritual sight for the taking. The Holy Spirit opens blinded eyes so that sinners can see. His Word brings spiritual light. “Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law,” the psalmist prayed. Little wonder that Satan attacks the Bible so viciously. He knows it brings sight to those who read and believe!

Pride closes the door to spiritual sight. Like the beggars of old, we must come seeking the boon of sight once more: “Have mercy on us, O Lord, thou son of David.… Lord, that our eyes may be opened” (Matt. 20:31, 33). Until we admit our blindness, we will never be in a position to receive his healing touch. But when we do, we too can sing, “Once I was blind, but now 1 can see!”

PLUMB WISE

Jim Barclay is basically an average looking man. Average height, average build—but with that lean bony face that speaks of his origin in Appalachia. Jim is a Christian by profession and a carpenter by trade.

The other day he was doing some remodeling in my home. “That wall looks crooked,” I said.

“Nary a bit of it!” he replied.

After I had made a few other valuable suggestions Jim said, “I reckon it’s about all a man can do in life to master one trade. You write, don’t you?”

And so we began discussing our mutual difficulties in working for a living. “You know, it ain’t always easy to be a Christian,” he said. “You got to do your best, be fair to the other fellow in what you charge, and give a friend a break when you can—and all the while make a livin’ for your brood. And after you make a living, you got to live and try to raise your family right. Whup the kids often enough but keep on lovin’em.”

“You know, you do all you can for your kids and they still grieve you,” he said somewhat sadly. “They love you but they grieve you.”

“My least son went out and joined the Army and now he’s AWOL,” he continued, shaking his head and laughing the laugh of one who can see the incongruous twist even in a personally painful situation.

“He’s just a baby. He’s so young he don’t realize what he’s doin’ to hisself. But I love him and I haven’t given up on him. I think the Lord is dealing with his heart and they aint no limit to what he can do.”

The conversation moved on to less important matters, and then somehow we were talking about drinking. “Some folks think it’s all right to drink that wine and beer,” he said.

Always the devil’s advocate, I said, “Well, I think you’d have a hard time making a case from the Bible that drinking is wrong in and of itself apart from the abuse.”

He thought for a moment and said, “Yes, but it has a way of leadin’ on to other things. And besides, why see how close you come to sin? Why not see how far you can stay away from it?”

As I went upstairs to do other things I was followed by the sound of his voice as he softly sang “Precious Lord.”

Later, after Jim had gone, I was thinking about this man and reflecting happily on his faith and commitment to Christ. But as I thought further, my good feeling turned to shame when I realized that it was necessary for me to adjust to the idea of a wise carpenter.

A DIFFERENCE THAT HELPS

Patricia Ward’s “The Challenge of Student Idealists” (Jan. 29) is a most interesting, and extremely relevant, article. There is one important qualification that I would like to make, and that is that the “love, selflessness, and sharing [that] few Christians could deny” is not the same “love, selflessness, and sharing” that this group of college students believe in.

Although the symbols are the same, and to a limited extent the outward manifestations of the contents, the spiritual roots are very different—and conflicting. Rather than posing a problem for the evangelist, though, this difference can be effectively used to help students to come to know Christ Jesus. Indeed, it is fruitful to compare the hedonism, occultism, mysticism, and hallucinating experiences which result from an egocentric or anthropocentric “spirit” with the fruits of the Spirit! Stanford, Calif.

WHERE CREDIT IS DUE

In “The Ninety-second Congress: A Religious Census” (Dec. 4) you incorrectly listed Parren J. Mitchell (D.-Md.) as a Methodist. Representative Mitchell, who is the first black congressman elected in the history of Maryland, is, in fact, a very devout and active member of St. Katherine’s Episcopal Church in Baltimore.… The Methodists take credit away from us for the Wesleys, and we would hate to see them do the same thing with regard to the congressman.

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church

Westville, N. J.

• So would we. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.—ED.

GOOD CLEANSING ACTION

The column “Ecology of the Spirit” (Jan. 29) by L. Nelson Bell was very enlightening. I’m glad to know someone is working to help clean up what is published in Christian magazines. I hope by reading the article … other people will be inspired to take action along this line.

Spokane, Wash.

AN OPENING SALVO

I wish to commend you for the … vigorous, clear, and effective editorial “Financing Murder” (Jan. 29). You have proclaimed prophetically … “the demands of the Eternal against the hedonistic, now-oriented culture.” We have been hoping for such forthright denunciation of this growing and growingly accepted practice of “infanticide upon demand,” and we hope it is but an opening salvo. Christian people must not be allowed to be lulled into tacit acceptance of this monstrous immorality of our permissive and decadent culture.

Lavallette, N.J.

THE WARRING ELEMENTS

Professor Hamilton’s critique of “The New Evangelism” (Jan. 29) made many excellent points. His reliance upon Barth in the critique, however, makes me uneasy. For it is a post-Barthian development that new social theologians like Moltmann, Pannenberg, Braaten, and Cox have evolved a theology which is political and eschatological in character to be both secular and Christian. As Barth introduced a theological basis for Christian-Marxist dialogue, so the new social theology has many affinities with the Marxist view of the relation of thought and acting.

Further, Barth’s theological affirmation about the activity of God in history and society became meaningless, if not impossible, because his biblical theology accepted the naturalistic account of space-time events. For Harvey Cox, Barth’s covenant theology provides the basis for a sweeping kind of Christian humanism. It alters in no way the secular, humanistic dimensions. However, the integration of the secular and the Christian view has proved difficult in Barth as well as new social evangelism; the secular elements war against the Christian ones, and the former prevail.

It is at this point that Professor Hamilton’s proposal to “hold sacred and secular in tension” is a report of experience rather than a better alternative to the problematic integration of the two different views, an alternative derived from the social relevance of the Gospel and a God-willed structure for society. One may be afraid that his leaning to Barth and Bonhoeffer makes his conservative alternative rather futile.

Chicago, Ill.

MAJORING ON MINORS

The article by Belden Menkus, “Evangelical Responsibility in Public Education” (Feb. 12), was both well documented and interesting, especially the mention of the National Reform Association and the Christian Amendment Movement (recently renamed the Christian Government Movement).

It seems the article may imply that their century of work (failure?) therefore proves that the United States is in truth a “religious people” with a “Supreme Being” and yet a “secular state.” Disregarding the apparent contradiction and in defense of the C.G.M., two questions are asked:

1. Does even a Supreme Court justice’s statement make it a valid antithesis to the C.G.M.? The Athenians also were fanatically religious, including devotion to their Unrealized God (Acts 17:22, 23). That was not the True God of Paul and the C.G.M. however.

2. Does calling the United States a “secular state” make that verity? Recalling Paul in verse 28 now, “for in him [God] we live, and are being moved, and have our being”.… Has the author biblically demonstrated that a figment of a “secular state” (i.e., neutral to God, autonomous to God’s Kingdom) can exist? Doesn’t Romans 13:1 explicitly state that “the powers that be are ordained of God”?

Consequently, the author himself majored on minors—school religion—whereas he should have treated the authority beneath schools (government), as the Christian Government Movement does.

Reformed Presbyterian Church

Almonte, Ontario

ABUSING GOD’S WORD

The editorial, “Capitalism vs. Communism” (Feb. 12), contains some surprising errors of fact and analysis. For example, Sweden is not a socialistic nation; in fact, “private enterprise is almost as prevalent in that country as in the United States” (Grossman, Economic Systems, Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 67). Also, your allegation that “estate taxes are so prohibitive that the overwhelming proportion of a large estate would go to the government” is simply contrary to readily available facts.

You state that “a good case can be made for private capitalism from Scripture” and then assert (following Marx!) that “Thou shalt not steal” implies the existence of private property in productive resources. This is logically fallacious. A society might, for example stipulate that all productive resources will be publicly owned but that consumer goods may be privately owned. This, in fact, resembles the situation in totalitarian socialist nations. Would not the biblical prohibition against theft apply to consumer goods? Moreover, theft from government is surely just as contrary to this commandment as theft from private owners of wealth.

Even your allegation that stewardship of possessions requires private ownership is not logically valid. A Christian is certainly responsible to God for the use of all material things which he controls or utilizes, regardless of whether he owns them, rents them, or even merely borrows them.

Although I am no theologian, I would have thought that an evangelical publication would consider any attempt to build a biblical case for capitalism or any other man-made economic or political system a gross abuse of God’s Word.

Prof. of Economics

Carthage College

Kenosha, Wis.

NO TO ‘BUMP AND GRIND’

With regard to Mr. Chandler’s story, “Religious Broadcasting Marks Fiftieth Year” (Feb. 12), our conviction is that rock music is aimed at the groin and not at the heart. Obscene music has no … place in God’s house.… If … this bump and grind “music” is not obscene, then what is it? Read what the Reverend David Wilkerson says about kids being hooked on rock music.… [Using it] to accompany religious verse does not redeem it.

Covington, Ky.

NO BESMIRCH INTENDED

Editorial comment, “The Perils of Publishing Satire” (Feb. 12), called attention [to this problem]. The perils of publishing responses to satire may be greater still. I was greatly disturbed by what appeared to be a scribal error in the otherwise helpful letter of Professor Charles Dillman of Greenville College, published in that same issue. In adding to the thesis of the earlier article by Gordon Clark, Mr. Dillman states, according to the published document, “He realized the symbolic relationship of the two kinds of plant.” I am confident that the word intended is symbiotic. I am anxious lest the reputation of Greenville College and of Mr. Dillman be besmirched by the printing of a document which would suggest that a symbolic, rather than literal, evangelical interpretation of Scripture is practiced either by the institution (my own esteemed alma mater) or the professor.

Wilmore, Ky.

• Professor Dillman also wrote “sparing” rather than “spring.” He is not so esoteric as to try to “spring” a tree. We apologize “10,000 per cent.”—ED.

SCHOLARLY PSYCHEDELICS?

I am wondering—is the cover design (Feb. 26) supposed to be psychedelic in nature? If so, is the impression meant to be given that the books reviewed inside (the issue’s theme) give a psychedelic experience? I thought that books (good ones) were to produce rational and responsible experience, rather than the opposite which is often associated with psychedelic drugs, etc. Just wondering.

Executive Vice-President

Southeastern Bible College

Birmingham, Ala.