Page 5792 – Christianity Today (2024)

For reporters, last month’s International Congress on World Evangelization (ICOWE) at Lausanne, Switzerland (see August 16 issue, page 35), was a special challenge: story possibilities abounded, time to collect them and space to report them did not.

A digital population clock was activated as part of the opening ceremonies. At the end of the Congress ten days later it registered a net population gain of 1,852,837. It also noted a world population gain of 590,193,076 since the Congress on Evangelism in Berlin in 1966. An “Unreached Peoples Directory” released at the ICOWE listed thirty-five groups of people totaling more than 12 million population as having no Christian witness.

There were striking incidents of international and cross-cultural pollination. For example, in a seminar on youth outreach, Uganda pastor Stephen Mung’Oma told of a problem: In a crusade he’d conducted in a neighboring village weeks earlier 800 young people had professed Christ; what could he do to disciple them? In quick order youth workers from Egypt, Nigeria, and Argentina offered advice based on how they had handled similar situations.

Interviews with nationals revealed striking growth and spiritual activity among large numbers of Christian young people in many lands, including Norway, Holland, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Romania, northern Egypt, much of black Africa, Cambodia, South Viet Nam, and South Korea.

Similarly, one of the main points that kept coming through in both plenary and small-group sessions was that evangelical Christianity is growing all over the globe. Samples: Based on current growth rates, projections show that more than half of black Africa will have embraced Christianity (mostly the evangelical variety) within the next thirty years. Evangelical Christianity in Latin America is growing faster than the birth rate. Prior to 1967, seventy years of mission work among the Quichua Indians of Ecuador had resulted in only a handful of believers in a few churches; today there are more than 8,000 baptized members in some 100 churches. Of the estimated 11,000 Stieng tribespeople in the western mountains of South Viet Nam, fewer than 1,500 were Christians at the time of the North Vietnamese invasion in 1972; now there are more than 6,000 baptized believers. More than 190,000 of the 230,000 in a North Borneo tribe have professed Christ—mainly under the ministry of missionaries from the mountain people of Taiwan.

In another sidelight, radio preacher Carl McIntire, complaining that evangelicals are too inclusivist, announced several months before the ICOWE that his International Council of Christian Churches would hold a simultaneous opposition congress on evangelism. It did, but only two dozen or so people showed up, advertised speaker Ian Paisley of Northern Ireland failed to appear, and McIntire left town several days early. But before leaving, having been denied ICOWE press credentials and admittance to the ICOWE meetings for not applying in advance, he and several followers picketed and passed out leaflets outside the ICOWE meeting hall.

Other problems added to the corporate headache of the ICOWE executive staff.

Four Catholic officials, including Vatican evangelism coordinator Benjamin Tonna, were invited to attend the congress as visitors. This upset some ICOWE convenors and several of them resigned, said Anglican bishop Jack Dain of Australia, the ICOWE’s executive chairman, in an interview. He declined to disclose their names. The Catholics meanwhile said they were favorably surprised by the faith and sincerity of the participants but wished there had been more emphasis on the sacraments. They also said that Catholics do not feel threatened by the growth of evangelical Christianity, say, in Latin America, so long as Christ is being preached. Furthermore, they added, evangelical Christianity is to be favored over the “Christo-paganism” embraced by many Latin American Catholics.

At one time plenary speaker Francis Schaeffer of L’Abri threatened to drop out because British journalist and social critic Malcolm Muggeridge had been invited to participate. Muggeridge is moving, explained Schaeffer, but he’s not yet entirely in the evangelical camp. As it turned out, Muggeridge’s address (see August 16 issue, page 4) was one of the best received of the conference, and he was one of the few to get a standing ovation.

The South Koreans fretted over a North Korean flag outside among the scores of others left over from a preceding convention. At the ICOWE staff’s request, the management of the hall removed it. (The Koreans, in keeping with practice back home, held 5 A.M. devotional periods daily, rousing others in dorms and hotels to join them.)

A worse problem was the food situation. Most participants on the basis of advance payment were required to eat lunch and dinner at the congress hall, where a Lausanne caterer, M. Rene Jaquier, holds a monopoly on food service. The fare was miserably below Swiss standards, served poorly, and outrageously priced ($5 for a dish of baloney and applesauce). Complaints poured in, and hundreds forfeited their payments (many included in scholarship fees) to eat elsewhere. During a visit of ICOWE executives to Jaquier, Dain exploded and Jaquier broke into tears. The food quality improved somewhat over the last few days, but the price gouging continued to the end.

There were complaints that not all the invited participants were evangelicals, that most of the Rhodesian and South African blacks had been assigned to segregated housing, that too few women and young people had been chosen as participants, and that despite the use of transistorized receivers enabling participants to listen to the predominantly English-language proceedings in French, German, Spanish, Indonesian, Japanese, and Chinese, some who had been invited could understand none of those languages and were adrift.

But the overall consensus of those at Lausanne was that the blessings and benefits far exceeded the shortcomings and annoyances.

One of the blessings, say ICOWE organizers, was that several dozen eastern Europeans were able to participate. (Many others, however, were unable to obtain exit visas, a situation not confined to Communist lands. There were no representatives from the U.S.S.R. or Bulgaria—but none from Burma or Bhutan either.) The eastern Europeans met jointly part of the time during national strategy sessions, and evangelist Billy Graham addressed them one day, offering encouragement and stating his desire to visit the eastern European churches some day. Discussion among these participants was restrained, but the Poles (ten had come to the congress) issued an appeal for greater religious freedom in the totalitarian camps, especially the U.S.S.R. It was agreed that Christian literature was a priority need in most of the countries.

In a number of instances participants brought to Lausanne the divisions that exist back home, and the national strategy periods were often tense and stormy. Some groups were able to resolve their differences and returned home with a new spirit of unity; others went home as they had come, divided.

The seventeen Italian participants came from eight denominations and independent churches. Antagonism toward Elio Milazzo, the ICOWE Italian convenor, surfaced when the group at its first national session elected Pastor Mario Affuso of the Apostolic Church as chairman. Affuso proceeded to direct the discussion in an attack on the formation of an Italian evangelical alliance, which Milazzo had proposed. Wrangling ensued, and when the group decided to turn its attention away from the alliance to evangelistic strategy for Italy, Affuso resigned and sulked in a corner. But the ice melted quickly amid laughter when a member quipped: “We Italians have broken another record; our government has lasted only three days.” A new chairman was elected and a committee appointed to study the feasibility of proposing to the evangelicals of Italy a national congress on evangelism. It was noted that university students are among the most receptive to the Gospel.

The Greece strategy group discussed the difficult legal and ecclesiastical conditions in that land. Several participants conceded, however, that an even greater need was to overcome the disharmony that exists between denominations and individuals. Differences erupted within the group itself over the issue of glossolalia; elder Thanos Karbonis of the Athens Free Evangelical Church declared there could be no working relationship between the Pentecostal and Athenian Free churches. Not so in northern Greece, said several delegates, pointing to prayer meetings in Thessaloníki attended by evangelicals of all stripes.

FINDING EACH OTHER

One of the potentially significant accomplishments of last month’s International Congress on World Evangelization at Lausanne was that black evangelicals from America and the Caribbean got together with blacks from Africa. More than 100 in a rump session organized an as yet unnamed organization to mobilize Christians of African descent for worldwide evangelization, especially of “brethren of African origin wherever found.”

An executive committee of fifteen was selected. Officers include co-chairmen Howard Jones of the United States and David Gitari of Kenya. Clarence Hilliard of the United States and Kwame Bebiako of Ghana are administrative co-secretaries.

Correspondent Billy Hall of Jamaica reports that a quarterly newsletter will be launched in January.

The Greeks discussed missions and missionaries also. Some felt the Greek church needs to place more emphasis on cross-cultural missions (most Greek missionaries work among Greeks). Others cautioned incoming missionaries against using methods incompatible with Greek culture or doing things that damage existing evangelical work—as some foreign workers allegedly have done in the past.

The Turkish invasion of Cyprus threw a sense of urgency into the sessions. At one point, following a radio newscast of the situation, associate pastor Apostolos Bliates of the Greek Evangelical Church of Katerini embraced a Turkish Christian leader who happened to be standing nearby, saying, “It doesn’t matter what our national background is; we are brothers in Christ.”

Correspondent Johan Bos says little was accomplished in the Netherlands group. There were no representatives of the traditional churches (such as the Dutch Reformed Church) or of several important evangelistic movements (Youth for Christ, for example) among the twenty participants and observers. A committee was formed to draft a plan to stimulate cooperation among the evangelical movements back home.

Correspondent Wolfgang Müller says that “the typically German weakness of discussing ‘basic issues’ endlessly without reaching practical conclusions” afflicted the German group. Many had come to Lausanne anticipating the establishment of a broad German evangelical fellowship for the evangelization of their country. But they got bogged down in trying to frame a doctrinal basis for the fellowship. One bone of contention was whether the “Frankfurt Declaration” should be included. The fellowship remained unfounded, but the saddened participants pledged to stay together and to work more closely with one another in the days ahead.

Arab groups called on the churches to step up efforts to evangelize Israel; also, they want to sponsor an Arab congress on evangelism. The Ethiopians rapped Western missionary life-style and alleged paternalistic practices, and asked mission boards to tool up for Ethiopian leadership in the churches. The Liberians set as a five-year goal the establishment of an evangelistic witness to all groups in Liberia. The Canadians groused about not having a Canadian address a plenary session, then went on to issue a call for spiritual renewal of Canadian Christians and for greater involvement in missionary outreach. Apartheid kept the blacks and whites of South Africa and Rhodesia from getting anywhere; the whites said they wanted to discuss evangelism, but the blacks insisted that renunciation of racism is a necessary prelude to evangelism.

The U. S. contingent chose Fuller Seminary’s David Hubbard as chairman, discussed the need for a pre-bicentennial evangelistic campaign, especially through the mass media, and explored the idea of a national movement of evangelism, linking the majority of the nation’s evangelical churches in a common cause.

Jakarta Jettisoned

Plagued by money problems and by increasing protests from Indonesian Muslims, who form the majority in that island nation, the World Council of Churches dropped plans to hold its 1975 Assembly in Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital.

The decision was made at a meeting of the WCC Central Committee in Berlin earlier this month. The committee instructed WCC staff to search for another site.

Indonesia officially has a policy of pluralism, but the Muslim community makes up 85 per cent of the 121 million population. Christian-Muslim tensions are not unknown on the island, and have picked up as Christian revival has swept into some areas. Muslim pressure on the Indonesian government has been reportedly growing, and while the government declared itself in favor of the meeting it warned it did not want the WCC to upset national unity.

With the ball tossed back in their court, committee members opted out of Jakarta, although General Secretary Phillip Potter said he thought there’d been a misunderstanding by “some sections of the Indonesian community” of the nature and purpose of the ecumenical movement and therefore of the WCC meeting.

The decision was aided by the fact that the council has been having difficulty raising funds for the gathering. At a joint breakfast meeting of the United Presbyterian Church and the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. in Louisville, Kentucky, in June, Paul Verghese, an Indian who is chairman of the Jakarta program committee, warned that the projected $3 million budget might be difficult to meet.

Opposition In Israel

C. Douglas Young, president of the American Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem and one of Israel’s staunchest supporters, was accused last month of desecrating holy Scriptures and of carrying on missionary activities. The charges were made by a “public committee” headed by a former member of the Jewish Defense League. The controversy began over a property dispute on Mt. Zion, where Young’s institute is located.

At a press conference called by Young, several prominent Israeli officials declared that the “smear campaign” against him was a “disservice to Israel and the Jews.” Among those present were Bernard Resnikoff of the American Jewish Committee in Israel and Yosef Emmanuel, secretary of the Israel Interfaith Committee. Jerusalem’s mayor, Teddy Kollek, said in a letter that “I am disgusted at the slanderous accusations … made.”

Meanwhile, two American Jewish tourists were sentenced to a three-month prison term for posing nude in front of the traditional site of Christ’s tomb at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The judge told the defendants they needed to learn “the hard way” to respect another religion.

Election Returns

In the recent Canadian general election the Reverend Andy Hogan became the first Roman Catholic priest to be elected to the Canadian House of Commons. He will represent a Nova Scotia constituency and will be the only New Democratic party member elected east of Ontario.

Hogan will join two Protestant clergymen of his socialist party who were re-elected to the House of Commons. They are Stanley Knowles, a United Church minister re-elected in Manitoba, and Tommy Douglas, a Baptist minister re-elected in British Columbia—both long-time members of parliament.

The election, which returned the Liberal party and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to power, saw the return of two clergymen on the Conservative side of the House. They were David MacDonald, a United Church minister from Prince Edward Island, and Alex Patterson, a Nazarene minister from British Columbia.

Two other Conservatives who were handily re-elected have been closely identified with church activity. They are Douglas Roche, former editor of the Western Catholic Reporter, elected in Alberta, and Walter Dinsdale, a prominent Salvation Army member, elected in Manitoba.

Anglican minister Reg Stackhouse did not try for re-election in Toronto and Evangelical Free churchman Robert Thompson (a former leader of the splinter Social Credit party and later a Conservative strategist) didn’t attempt a comeback in British Columbia.

Another interesting development was the continuing emergence of Mennonite Brethren church members as politicians. Two, Jake Epp and Dean Whiteway, were elected as Conservatives in Manitoba. Just a few years ago many Mennonites were opposed to political involvement of any kind. The election ended eighteen months of minority government for the country and assured Trudeau of a majority, guaranteeing no elections for at least four years.

LESLIE K. TARR

Bangladesh Update

An abandoned brick-field was recently the site of the largest Protestant Christian meetings ever to be conducted in Dacca, Bangladesh. “Brother” Ray Jennings, an independent American Pentecostal preacher, attracted crowds of as many of 20,000; they stood shoulder to shoulder in rapt attention. After each service, Muslims, Hindus, and Christians rushed to the microphone to tell the lingering audience of their bodily healing.

On the fifth night, the police moved in and arrested Jennings and his party of five along with their Assembly of God Bengali translator. Their plight was dealt with quite sympathetically on the front page of several national newspapers. However, after ten days in jail the group, which included a pregnant German woman and her husband, were all declared persona non grata and expelled from the country. Their translator remained in the Dacca central jail for two weeks before being released.

Other recent developments in Bangladesh include the open profession of faith in Christ by a teacher at the University of Dacca, Dr. Khondokar Rahman, who earned his doctorate from Colorado State University. He plans to enroll in the Wheaton College (Illinois) Graduate School this fall, aiming to tool up for witnessing for Christ among the university faculty and students.

An evangelical interdenominational committee has been formed to give guidance to the nation’s first Christian “Ashram.” This outreach to win and disciple Muslims is spearheaded by Andrew Akand, an M.A. graduate who is himself a convert from Islam.

Other encouragements include continued conversions of groups in rural Hindu areas, a new direction of functional unity among the country’s evangelical missionaries, and plans for a church-growth seminar directed by Fuller Seminary missiologist Donald Mc-Gavran.

The blessings have been accompanied by some setbacks, including a large number of ailments and injuries among missionaries.

PHIL PARSHALL

Spain: A Devastating Precedent?

Two recent actions by the Catholic Church in Spain have caused deep concern among Spanish Protestants. Both cases, involving marriage partners in Huelva and Bilbao, stem from the conversion of the wives to a non-Catholic religion (Jehovah’s Witnesses). Citing “mixed religion,” the church subsequently dissolved the marriages. Civil courts upheld the decisions and deprived the wives of their children, rights of subsistence by the husband, and all possessions.

There is a fear among Protestants that these cases may set a devastating precedent. In a country where there are many mixed marriages, they point out, the ability of the Catholic partner to deprive the other of all rights is a severe blow to religious liberty.

It is the first time that the church has used this power, which was granted by Article XXIV of the Concordat of 1953. The actions, however, clearly violate the Law of Religious Liberty of 1967 and the spirit expressed by Vatican II, say Protestant leaders. Therefore, what assurance exists, they ask, that the church will not again use its “right” to destroy marriages?

DALE G. VOUGHT

DEATHS

GEORGE R. WARNER, 73, retired president of the World Gospel Mission and former missionary to China; in Duarte, California; of cancer.

CANON LESLIE GEORGE MANNERING, 90, founder of the Bible Reading Fellowship to promote devotional Bible reading throughout the British Commonwealth; in Malvern, England.

L. H. APPEL, 52, president of Lincoln Christian College and Seminary, Lincoln, Illinois; on vacation near Park Rapids, Minnesota, of a heart attack.

Religion In Transit

Rabbis Judah Nadich and Robert I. Kahn, heads respectively of the nation’s major Conservative and Reform rabbinic bodies, urged the Israeli government to resist demands for an exclusive Orthodox interpretation concerning conversion to Judaism. Currently, any person converted to Judaism by a rabbi can enter Israel and be recognized as a Jew, but the politically powerful Orthodox rabbinate in Israel wants to restrict recognition to those converted by an Orthodox rabbi.

Prime beneficiary in the will of actress Agnes Moorehead (she played a witch in the long-running TV series “Bewitched”) is John Brown University, Siloam Springs, Arkansas. JBU gets the actress’s Bibles and biblical research items and a 310-acre farm in Ohio, and is to receive the rest of the estate after the death of the actress’s mother. Miss Moorehead was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. John Brown is an interdenominational Christian college.

Mormon membership reached a record 3.32 million last year, an increase of nearly 84,000. President Spencer W. Kimball said 17,500 full-time missionaries now serve the church.

A new poll shows that religion is of decreasing importance to American youth. Pollster Daniel Yankelovich surveyed 3,522 youths between 16 and 25 and found only 28 per cent of college students and 42 per cent of non-college youths find religion very important. The figures are down from 38 per cent and 64 per cent in 1969.

A textbook that teaches creation was turned down as a science text by the Atlanta School Board recently because it was biologically inaccurate and biased. Atlanta educators said that they didn’t object to the teaching of different theories of creation but that the book—Biology: A Search For Order in Complexity—was poorly written and out of date.

North American Lutheran membershipdipped by 44,279 in 1973—the fifth successive drop. The report was compiled by the Lutheran Council in the U.S.A. and covered Lutheran denominations in Canada and the U.S.

A survey by the Institute of Life Insurance shows that 80 per cent of Americans over 18 choose “a happy family life” as their Number One goal. Only 3 per cent chose “making a lot of money” and 4 per cent voted for “a fulfilling career.”

The Mormon Church is currently under pressure to drop its policy that prevents blacks from taking leadership roles in church-sponsored Boy Scout troops. A civil-rights suit has been threatened by the Utah branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The Baptist Bible Fellowship has moved into Canada, electing Gary Lawrence of Winnipeg Baptist Temple as its president during the first Canadian convention recently.

The Carillon News, a weekly newspaper published in Steinbach, Manitoba, has refused all movie-theater advertising. Said publisher Eugene Derksen, the policy is in effect because of increasing numbers of adults-only movies. Reaction in the largely Mennonite community has been favorable.

A Canadian stamp will be issued this fall to commemorate the Mennonite centennial in Canada.

Personalia

Presidential resignations: Robert F. Oxnam from Drew University in New Jersey, a United Methodist school, for health reasons; Paul Hardin from Southern Methodist University, under pressure amid conflict over his policies; C. Adrian Heaton from the American Baptist Seminary of the West.

Leon E. Fanniel, executive director of the United Presbyterian Church’s General Assembly Mission Council, has quit his post, one of the top two in the denomination. The black cleric charged there is a crisis in UPC leadership caused by financial problems, membership drops, and proposed staff cuts.

M. Jean Perry, pastor of the Sunnyside Free Methodist Church in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, is the first woman ordained in the Free Methodist Church. Her full ordination to Elder’s Orders took place in mid-July.

Don Luce, an investigative reporter who helped expose South Viet Nam’s “tiger cages,” where political prisoners were held, was named executive director of Clergy and Laity Concerned, an inter-religious peace organization.

The new general secretary of the Lutheran World Federation is 52-year-old American Lutheran Church pastor Carl H. Mau. The eighty-seven LWF member denominations have some 55 million members.

Leonard E. LeSourd resigned as editor of Guideposts to devote full time with his wife, writer Catherine Marshall, to developing a “creative Christian center” in Lincoln, Virginia. Part of the project will involve a magazine that will “pick up where Guideposts leaves off,” says LeSourd.

W. Barnett Blakemore, an American seminary dean, is the new president of the World Convention of Churches of Christ (Disciples). He was selected during the organization’s world convention, held earlier this month at Mexico City. Blakemore is dean of Disciples Divinity House at the University of Chicago.

World Scene

British Methodists are no longer officially teetotalers. Their annual conference this summer, reversing a 1933 decision, decided that personal conscience should now determine attitudes toward alcohol.

The Full Gospel Assembly of God Church in South Korea recently raised $53,000 in one service as part of its first annual missionary convention. (The average wage for Korean industrial workers is about $55 per month.)

A total of 127,326 persons were baptized through the overseas ministries of the Christian and Missionary Alliance between 1963 and 1972, or thirty-five baptisms per day.

A spokesman for Overseas Missionary Fellowship says he believes two women missionaries kidnapped April 30 and held by bandits in southern Thailand are “alive and well” (a letter from them acknowledged receipt of Bibles and packages sent them). It was thought that the women, British and New Zealand subjects, were kidnapped to administer medical assistance. Their captors recently demanded $500,000 ransom.

When he assumed the vice-presidency ten months ago, Gerald R. Ford told newspaper reporters that his faith “is a personal thing. It’s not something one shouts from the housetops or wears on his sleeve. For me, my religious feeling is a deep personal faith I rely on for guidance from my God.” Now that he is President, Ford is still reluctant to publicize his faith—but he’s not about to hide it, either.

Faced with uncertainties and conflicting reports about his status in the week preceding Richard Nixon’s resignation, Ford continued his regular routine, which included a prayer meeting with two of his close friends in the House of Representatives—Albert Quie, a Minnesota Republican, and John Rhodes, House Republican leader, who is from Arizona (the fourth member of the group, former defense secretary Melvin Laird, was not present). Questioned by reporters who were convinced it was a political strategy session, Ford said the prayer meeting was “a very quiet, much off-the-record group.” He reportedly assured his three friends that if he were to become President, the meetings—which have been held at 11 A.M. every Wednesday for several months—would continue.

There were other signs of Ford’s quiet faith. At the swearing-in ceremony his left hand rested on a family Bible open at Proverbs 3:5, 6, one of the new President’s favorite Scripture passages and one that he reportedly repeats nightly as a prayer.¹“Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.” On his first Sunday as President, Ford attended Immanuel Church-on-the-Hill, (Episcopal) the Fords’ family church in the Washington area. (Ford is the nation’s tenth Episcopal president). The Ford family arrived at the Alexandria, Virginia, church shortly before the service started and slipped quietly into a back pew. There they heard prayers for the new President—something he’d asked for at his swearing-in ceremony—and a sermon urging parishioners not to “gloat and glower and grimace” over the events of the week.

Ford’s request that he be confirmed as President “by your prayers” was typical of the man, say his congressional colleagues. It was, said his closest friend, Congressman Quie (who was listed by some as a vice-presidential possibility), “the real Jerry Ford.” The swearing-in speech plus Ford’s address to Congress also impressed Oregon Republican John Dellenback, chairman of the House Prayer Breakfast Committee. “There were such easy references to God,” said Dellenback. “They weren’t strained or laborious speechwriters’ references.” In the Senate, Iowa’s Harold Hughes, who is leaving the Senate this year for full-time Christian work, said of Ford, “There’s no doubt he’s with it. He’s really committed to God.” Senator Jennings Randolph, a West Virginia Democrat, added that Ford brings to the presidency “strength of character, belief in God, and a record of family devotion, regular church attendance, and a reliance on our common Creator.” Nebraska’s Senator Carl Curtis noted that the intensive investigation of Ford after his nomination to the vice-presidency gave him a clean bill of health for honesty, integrity, and ability. Ford’s words, Curtis added, indicate that his thinking “is based on sound Christian doctrine.”

But while they are pleased with the new President, many evangelicals in congress are also cautious. Few are willing to go out on a limb regarding Ford’s faith; they’d rather he speak for himself. “Let’s not make the same mistake we made with President Nixon,” said one congressman, who preferred not to be named. “That is, present him as a born-again Christian without really knowing his true commitment.” The congressman said that in several speeches to religiously oriented bodies (Ford spoke to the National Religious Broadcasters in January and the Southern Baptist Convention in June) the President had not mentioned “the name of Christ.” Arizona Republican John Conlan agreed that evangelicals should tread lightly on the spiritual side of the President’s life. “We should let him speak out for himself about his spiritual commitment and relationship rather than others speaking for him. It’s wise for a man to give his own testimony.”

But if evangelicals expect President Ford to declare himself on national television, say his supporters, they may have a wait. There are dangers that a President closely identified with one group or another might use his association with that group to garner votes, or else be accused of doing so, said Quie. There is also the danger that religious groups would use that association to further their own ends, he added. Ford, he said, is aware that many people are suspicious of such declarations while others want to turn people “into something they’re not,” For Quie, it is enough that the President “is a man who believes in prayer and doesn’t wear his religion on his sleeve.”

While some evangelicals in Washington are reluctant to name Ford as a fellow believer—even though they welcome the signs—Newsweek magazine and the New York Times showed no such hesitancy. In a post-resignation cover story Newsweek flatly declared that “like a growing number of Washington figures, Ford is an evangelical Christian.” Said the Times: “It is widely assumed that [Ford’s religious beliefs] embrace the evangelical Christian faith.” Similar thoughts were expressed by friends and supporters when Ford became Vice-President (see December 7, 1973, issue, page 50). At that time also, his son Michael, a 24-year-old student at Gordon-Conwell Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, described his father as “a man very committed to God” who preferred to show his faith through deeds rather than words.

And the son’s faith has been an influence on the father. At a House prayer breakfast earlier this year Ford told his colleagues that he had been strengthened in faith himself by seeing the impact of a strong faith on Mike’s life. Said Dellenback: “Normally, influence flows from parent to child. In this case it flowed the other way. [Ford and his wife Betty] were impressed by the way the Lord took a grip on Mike’s life.” At a prayer meeting in Congress shortly before his father became President, Michael prayed: “Protect him and keep him strong in spirit.… Grant him the courage to trust in you always and not in the things of this world. Work in his heart … to seek your guidance and direction in all things.”

Meanwhile evangelist Billy Graham called for thankfulness that “the trauma of the past months is passing” and that “a man of the moral caliber of Gerald Ford was waiting in the wings to take over.” Graham, along with others, also called for prayer for the former president and his family.

But there were also some backward glimpses. Presbyterian minister John Huffman, formerly pastor of the Presbyterian church that the Nixon family sometimes attended in Key Biscayne, Florida, told newspapers that the Nixon resignation was “the very best thing for the nation.” He added that Nixon had “lied to the American people and to me personally.” Huffman, now pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, said that he was assured by Nixon in personal conversations that the president was “doing everything in his power” to get to the bottom of Watergate. The resignation and disgrace were a tragedy for the family, Huffman declared, “but justice must be served.”

At the Southern Baptist Convention’s Home Missions Week in Glorieta, New Mexico, some 2,200 heard Nixon’s resignation speech and then knelt in prayer for Nixon, Ford, and the nation.

The troubles facing Ford as he assumed office were many. High on the list were inflation, lingering bitterness over Watergate, a shaky Mideast peace, and the crisis in Cyprus. But his congressional prayer colleagues are convinced that President Ford will meet those problems as he has met many others—in prayer and with a quiet faith.

BARRIE DOYLE and JAMES C. HEFLEY

Compassion And The Law

The resignation of Richard M. Nixon created a hard question for evangelicals and others in Congress: Can compassion for the former president be allowed to overcome the legal process? Or can the two operate at once?

“This is a time not alone for compassion, but for fairness and reasonableness,” declared Senator Carl Curtis (R-Neb.), “For civil authorities to proceed further is not a matter of compassion but of justice.”

Those thoughts were echoed in many congressional offices. Christ’s message was one of repentance before forgiveness, said Congressman John Dellenback (R-Ore.) and while “my heart goes out to Mr. Nixon and his family” Christians in Congress have an obligation to their oath and to the standard of equality under the law. “I didn’t hear [Nixon] say ‘I was wrong,’ or ‘I committed a serious offense; I’m sorry and I ask for your forgiveness” in his farewell speech. Only that there were a few errors in judgment,” said Dellenback. Without any sign of repentance, he said, forgiveness will be harder to come by. But he added that vengeance should not be a motive for any prosecution. Senator Jennings Randolph (D-W.Va.) said any moves to press prosecution of the former president should be “a matter of careful thought and not a hasty action.”

Congressman John Anderson (Ill.), third-ranking Republican in the House, said he hoped “the deep moral lessons of Watergate will not be forgotten.” Senator Mark Hatfield (R-Ore.) added that “a spirit of reconciliation” is needed to restore trust and confidence. “Instead of malice and retribution we should pause and reflect on those individuals this pervasive web has entangled and shattered.”

Those who are trying to make up their minds on the matter of prosecution have one comfort: immunity from prosecution is a technical question. The final decision rests in the hands of Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski.

AT EASE, ZION

Contrary to rumors circulating among church groups throughout the country, Congress has no plans to cancel tax-deductible contributions to churches and tax-free housing allowances for ministers. A bill was introduced in 1972 calling for reexamination of special tax treatment and lifting of such exemptions “if good reasons could not be found for retaining the special and favorable treatment,” but co-sponsor Wilbur Mills himself later repudiated the bill and it died in January, 1973. A similar bill was introduced in the current Congress but abandoned in April.

No such bills are now alive and no hearings are being heid, according to findings of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs. A committee official lamented the falsely grounded floods of protest letters and lobby efforts directed against Congress; future credibility of persons with valid concerns may be damaged, he implied.

Washington: City For God?

The day after Gerald Ford announced that “our long national nightmare has ended,” Senator Harold Hughes kicked off the first of a series of Saturday-morning “Upper Room” rallies on Capitol Hill intended to “help make Washington a model Christian city.”

Speaking to a racially mixed crowd of 300, most of them young Jesus people, Hughes asked if they believed God was with them and if they were agreed that “Washington shall stand as the Lord’s city this morning.” The crowd, meeting in the Ebenezer United Methodist Church, five short blocks from the Capitol, voiced its approval. Citing Jesus’ instructions to his disciples, Hughes declared that the solution for national survival was for Christians “to love one another and to seek first the Kingdom of God.”

John Staggers, a young black Christian activist who formerly served in the office of Washington’s mayor, presided at the first rally. He said that the Upper Room rallies can be a vehicle for bringing together people from all walks of life, and that through this means Washington can become the moral capital of the nation. “God can revolutionize this city if we pray, witness, and put him first,” Staggers declared.

JAMES C. HEFLEY

Farm Fellowship

Jesus ’74, successor to last year’s Jesus ’73 festival, was held earlier this month. Craig Yoe and Joseph Hopkins attended the three-day affair and filed this report.

Last summer 11,000 young people converged on Paul Mast’s potato farm in eastern Pennsylvania for a happening called Jesus ’73. During the first three days of August the 1974 edition of what has been projected as an annual Pennsylvania Jesus festival took place on a 270-acre dairy farm at the opposite end of the state, near Mercer.

In its charismatic emphasis, Jesus ’74 differed significantly from Jesus ’73, according to Presbyterian John Musser, vice-chairman of Jesus Ministries, Incorporated, producers of Jesus ’73. Although led by neo-Pentecostals, most of them Mennonites, Jesus ’73 sought to take in all groups concerned with evangelistic outreach, while Jesus ’74 unabashedly promoted the “gifts of the Spirit” and drew its leadership from charismatic ranks.

Each night an altar call was given. Those seeking salvation or Holy Spirit baptism were directed to one tent, those desiring healing or deliverance to another. There was no head count, but each tent overflowed, though the number had dwindled to several hundred by the concluding sessions on the final day. Approximately 600 young people were joyfully immersed in the farm pond on Saturday afternoon.

Folk singer Barry McGuire (he sang with the New Christie Minstrels in the sixties) and his backup band didn’t show up. The promoters of Jesus ’74 claimed to have a signed contract with his managers, but in a phone interview McGuire said he’d never heard of the festival. Scott Ross, a Christian rock disc jockey from Freeville, New York, says he first learned that he himself was scheduled to teach when he read the festival’s published publicity.

There were other problems. The night before rock singer Randy Matthews was scheduled to appear, he expressed apprehension. “I’m the only authentic rock act here,” he said, “and I don’t know how the audience is going to react.” Matthews usually performs solo but planned to première his rock-and-roll band at the gathering. He has a vision of taking the Gospel to the youth culture via rock music and plans to do the rock concert circuit this fall with a secular group, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. While confident that this is the way God is leading him to present Christ to the rock-and-rollers, Matthews feared that Christians wouldn’t accept rock music as a valid means of presenting the Gospel.

His fears were justified. Thousands of young people walked out on his performance, saying in effect, “The message is fine but the music is the kind I used to listen to before I was saved.” Insult was added to injury when the promoters pulled the plug on Matthew’s sound equipment in the middle of one of his songs, effectively ending the performance.

Matthews immediately went back-stage and fainted. The strain of grueling long hours spent getting the band together, fear of not being accepted by fellow Christians, and then the fact of not being accepted was apparently too much for him. Matthews and his band did not play the next night, by mutual agreement between his manager and the staff of Jesus ’74.

Meanwhile singer Pat Boone made an unannounced visit and was thronged by admirers in the over-30 set and by younger campers who wanted to meet an authentic Hollywood star who was a Christian.

And in the middle of the festival gospel rock singer Larry Norman was flown in, presumably to quench mumbled charges of “rip off” being heard because some scheduled performers had failed to appear. Norman has been semi-retired from the Christian music scene for about a year and a half. His rock-oriented music plus his absence from the music scene led some to believe he’d lost his original zest for gospel music—a charge that has stirred much controversy in recent months. One reporter from a Midwest Jesus paper, asked if he was going to interview Norman, replied, “No. Ours is a Christian paper.”

But if any doubted Norman’s salvation or nearness to God, they weren’t talking after his early Saturday morning set. He interspersed his own songs, “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?” and “I Wish We’d All Been Ready,” with what some observers called “the heaviest teaching to be heard from the stage.”

There were, not surprisingly, a few excesses at the festival. Some attempts at mass exorcisms took place, causing hysteria. And there was some healing extremism: for instance, a crippled boy was laid on the ground and then commanded to “get up and walk for Jesus”; he had to be dragged in dejection back to his wheel chair.

The sponsoring organization, Jesus Ministries, Incorporated, is “totally non-profit,” according to its chairman, 47-year-old Harold Zimmerman. Zimmerman, a free-lance machinery designer from Ephrata, Pennsylvania, devised and constructed the festival’s trailer-stage with the help of building contractor John Musser of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Zimmerman, a Mennonite, at one time wanted to be a minister.

Jesus Ministries has plans for future crusades with Billy Graham teams in South America and (it is hoped) Cuba.

Baptist Youth: A Challenge To Live

More than 5,000 Baptist youths from fifty-four countries gathered in Portland. Oregon, this month for the eighth Baptist Youth World Conference, sponsored by the Baptist World Alliance (BWA). Their objective: “To explore and affirm each other as different peoples who share the common challenge to live—as the body of Christ.”

BWA youth conferences have been held since 1931. This was the first one in the United States.

More than 600 delegates came from Europe, and several were from eastern Europe. The largest European delegations were from West Germany and Sweden.

Mass meetings were held to a minimum. The action was centered around smaller “core” groups at which participants were able to express their own experiences, doubts, and hopes.

Performers included Denise Johnson, a folk-rock soloist with the Young World Singers of Sydney, Australia; Louise Rose, a professional musician from Pennsylvania; Ken Medema, a blind pianist who writes and sings his own songs; and Ingemar Olsson, a Swedish singer and guitar player. Indonesian delegates interpreted the story of David and Goliath through folk dance.

Don Kim of Los Angeles told the youths that more than five million Koreans—one out of six—are now professing Christians. When the first Christian missionary, a Scotsman, tried to go to Korea ninety years ago, Kim said, he was slain before he reached dry land.

Dr. Robert S. Denny of Washington, D. C., BWA general secretary, told the youths that they are “tomorrow’s world leaders in all fields of endeavor.”

One of the principal addresses was given by the Reverend Roger Valasquez Valle, minister of the First Baptist Church of San Salvador, El Salvador. “We Christians are the only people on this planet with a firm hope,” he said. “We should be known as the people of hope, the people who possess the confidence in a mighty God who will make all things new, the people that work hard no matter which system, because one day there will be peace and justice in a belligerent and unjust world.”

More than $5,000 was given in offerings for aid projects in Zaire and India.

Christian Books: Business Is Good

Of the making of books there is no end Solomon once observed. If he were alive today he might note with interest, that between the making and the reading there is another consideration: selling. Such is the business of the members of the Christian Booksellers Association (CBA), the trade organization for evangelical book retailers.

Last month some 4,000 people gathered at the Minneapolis Auditorium and Convention Hall for the CBA’s twenty-fifth annual convention. Approximately two-thirds of the registrants came from about 900 stores; the rest represented some 220 publishers and manufacturers whose wares were displayed. The convention was not open to the public.

There were numerous workshops (on motivating employees, controlling cash flow, designing displays, and the like), a wide variety of soloists and musical groups, and several inspirational speakers, all authors. However, the main purpose of the convention was to allow the booksellers to roam the aisles of the exhibit area (larger than a football field) to inspect the Bibles, books, curriculum materials, cassette tapes, phonograph records, posters, trinkets and what-nots, and to place their orders for the coming year. Exhibitors generally offered incentives to the stores such as bigger discounts and free shipping. Many promoted their wares by having authors personally autograph give-away copies.

The number of Christian bookstores in the United States and Canada is estimated at 3,400, of which nearly 1,600 (80 of these in Canada) are CBA members. There are also nearly 100 member stores in other countries. Membership increased by more than 450 stores over last year. (The number of general bookstores is about 10,000.) Christian bookstores are still relatively small operations, the average annual sales of CBA members are not quite up to the $100,000 level. However, the growth rate is rapid. From mid-72 to mid-73 average sales increased 22 per cent. This came on top of a 19 per cent increase the previous year.

Probably the key person in the launching of the CBA a quarter-century ago was William Moore. He began to develop the idea with the continued encouragement of his boss, well-known paraphraser Kenneth Taylor, who was then director of Moody Press. The first convention (held in Chicago, as were nine of the next fifteen) had fewer than 300 registrants and 50 exhibitors. Just over 100 stores signed up as charter members. (Taylor, a speaker at this year’s convention, said the future of Christian literature is “tremendous” because “everybody is reading Christian books.”)

The convention is the biggest event each year for the CBA, but the organization’s twelve-person staff, directed by executive vice-president John Bass and headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colorado, provides several year-round services. Among these are the monthly Bookstore Journal, seminars in various parts of the country, insurance, legal advice, and computerized record-keeping facilitated by a special cash-register network.

Richard Fish of the Christian Book and Supply Center in Kalamazoo, Michigan, was elected president for the next two years.

Meanwhile CBA member publishers are taking Solomon’s injunction to heart and “making” more books of a greater variety to tap that vast potential market Taylor pointed out.

DONALD TINDER

The Angry Arabs, by W. F. Abboushi (Westminster, 1974, 285 pp., $8.95), is reviewed by William Sanford LaSor, professor of Old Testament, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

The Angry Arabs is one of the very few books I have read over the past twenty years that present the Arab side without undue emotionalism or bitter anti-Zionist invective. Usually the Arab’s case—and he does have one—is weakened by being overstated while the Israeli side is either ignored or made to look very bad.

Professor Abboushi begins before the beginning by giving a fairly full sketch of the background of the Arabs. My first reaction was, “Why include this?” As the author developed his work, I saw the reason. The Arab problem today is the result of several factors, one of which is the feeling of inferiority or frustration that has resulted from the decline of the Arab world. Unless you have read something like Baron Carra de Vaux’s Les Penseurs de l’Islam—a five-volume work presenting the history, science, jurisprudence, philosophy, theology, and other significant elements of Islamic scholars—you probably have little idea of the tremendous contribution that the Arabs have made to the Western world. It is not correct to describe the Arabs, as is sometimes done, as “ignorant barbarians just out of the Arabian desert”; they preserved the light of civilization in the Dark Ages of Europe. Abboushi traces the rise, zenith, and decline of the Arabs in the first three chapters.

He also presents the background of events in World War I, and shows the double-dealing (or perhaps better, triple-dealing) of the British during and following that war. Specifically, the dismembering of Syria and Iraq is discussed in chapter four, and the rise of the Palestine problem is told in chapter three.

After all this background, the presentation of the present problem is much too brief. The Arab-Israeli wars of 1948–49 and 1956 are discussed in chapter six, the 1967 war and the rise of the Palestinian guerrilla movements in chapter seven, and the relations between the United States and the Arabs (not including the Kissinger developments that took place after the book was finished and before it was published) in chapter eight.

Certain problems cannot be satisfactorily covered in the space the author has given them. First, and of great importance, is the definition of “Arab.” Abboushi recognizes that “Arab” is not synonymous with “Muslim” (or less properly “Mohammedan”). There are Christian Arabs, and there are Muslim non-Arabs (notably the Turks and the Iranians). There are Arab states that include peoples who did not originate in the Arabian desert, such as the “Phoenicians” of Lebanon, the Copts and the Nubians of Egypt, and the Berbers of the North African states, not to mention Western converts to Islam. At least one of these states (Libya) is far more hostile to Israel than are some of the Arab states (for example, Jordan). Christians of Lebanon, who will remind you that they are “Phoenician” and not “Arab,” find their loyalty definitely on the “Arab” side when the Israeli question comes up. We of the West simply cannot understand the problem unless we attempt to understand the total background of the Arab world. Abboushi has given us an excellent, if brief, presentation.

A second problem is that of the “Palestinian.” Before the State of Israel was created, indeed before Zionism was a force (which we usually date to the work of Theodore Herzl in 1896 and the World Zionist Organization in 1897), there were Muslim Arabs, Christian Arabs, Jews, and other ethnic groups living in the area that has come to be known as Palestine. The wars that followed the creation of the State of Israel have had the tragic result that large numbers of native Palestinians (mostly Muslim Arabs) have been made homeless. The Arab attitude—and particularly since 1967 the anger of the Palestinian refugees—is closely connected with this tragedy. But Abboushi, I think, deals too lightly with the fait accompli argument, just as those who support the Israeli cause use it too simply. Since 1948, an entire generation of Israelis has been born, and all of them are native Palestinians. During the same period, an entire generation of former Palestinians has been born in exile—and none of them, strictly speaking, is a native Palestinian. History must deal with facts as they are (faits accomplis), otherwise we shall have the injustice of Goa (where Portuguese who lived in India for 400 years were driven out) repeated not only in other long-term colonial states but even in all of North America which was taken from the American Indians. Justice, in the full sense, must include the rights of Jewish Palestinians as well as Arab Palestinians. Abboushi recognizes this, but his reader may overlook the brief statements that support the rights of Jewish Palestinians.

I find Abboushi’s presentation of the Palestinian guerilla movement disturbing. The movement came to the fore after the 1967 war because the other Arabs seemed to have forgotten that the basic problem concerned the rights of the Palestinian refugees. Abboushi suggests that the “Palestinian guerrillas could increase the chances of peace in the Middle East” and points out that the only effective way the Arabs can close the military gap between themselves and Israel is by the tactics of guerilla warfare. This could cause Israel to tone down its beligerent attitude and its constant desire to grab more land.

Abboushi does not of course, countenance the massacre of Israeli children in a kibbutz school, or the slaughter of innocent tourists in Lod airport, or many other acts attributed to and claimed by the guerrillas. But the Palestinian guerrilla movement seemingly is not disciplined. It does not confine its activities to what are commonly considered military objectives. In fact, it claims that everything is of military significance, even the tourist who wishes to visit the sea of Galilee and the Holy Sepulchre but who by his money is actually supporting the Zionist effort. In a civilized world, this argument must be rejected. By offering such an argument the Arab actually lends support to the fiction that Arabs are uncivilized.

The Angry Arabs deserves wide and careful reading, especially by Christians who, whether for humanitarian reasons or because of scriptural interpretation, have given their sympathies entirely to the Jews and to Israel. Without being “anti-Semitic” (i.e., anti-Jewish) we should remember that the Arab, too, belongs to the race that God created, and is the object of redemptive love. Without hardening our hearts to the Jewish problem and becoming indifferent to the sufferings that the Jew has endured for his faith, we can become sensitive to the Arab problem and the sufferings that the Palestinian refugee still endures. The Angry Arabs can help us to understand the Arab side of this perplexity.

The Leading Creative Theologian?

Wolfhart Pannenberg, by Allan D. Galloway (Allen & Unwin [Britain], 1973, 143 pp., 3.25 pounds, 1.50 pounds pb), Wolfhart Pannenberg, by Don H. Olive (Word, 1973, 120 pp., $4.95), and The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg, by E. Frank Tupper (Westminster, 1973, 322 pp., $10.95), are reviewed by Donald W. Dayton, director of Mellander Library, North Park Theological Seminary, Chicago, Illinois.

It is now somewhat over a dozen years since a group of young German theologians issued a programmatic manifesto (published in English by Macmillan as Revelation as History, 1968) calling for a new style and direction in theology. The editor of that volume and the dominant figure in the so-called Pannenberg Circle behind it was Wolfhart Pannenberg, a one-time student of Karl Barth, who holds the chair of systematic theology at Munich and has emerged as one of the most creative theologians of this generation.

Hints of this new theology created a stir that filtered even into the popular press of the English-speaking world. Especially newsworthy was the fact that he affirmed the factuality of the resurrection of Jesus while at the same time calling for reaffirmation of the role of reason and other Enlightenment themes. The evangelical world was in the vanguard of those welcoming this new theology. Daniel Fuller of Fuller Seminary affirmed much of Pannenberg’s position in Easter Faith and History (Eerdmans, 1965), and CHRISTIANITY TODAY praised his emphases on the reality of the resurrection, the role of reason in theology, the objectivity of revelation, and the universality of the Christian truth claim.

The most influential introduction of Pannenberg to American readers came, however, when he was treated by editor James Robinson as the subject of Volume III of “New Frontiers in Theology” (Theology as History, Harper & Row, 1967). Since the publication of that volume most of the major works of Pannenberg have been published in English. The first was his impressive Christological treatise, Jesus—God and Man (Westminster, 1968). His essays have appeared as Theology and the Kingdom of God (Westminster, 1969) and as three volumes of Basic Questions in Theology (two Fortress, 1970 and 1971; in the United States the third volume was retitled by Westminster The Idea of God and Human Freedom, 1973). In a more popular vein, the published works of Pannenberg include a small essay on theological anthropology, What Is Man? (Fortress, 1970), and an exposition of The Apostles’ Creed (Westminster, 1972).

That Pannenberg is now widely read and perhaps better understood in the English-speaking world is indicated by the fact that a single publishing season brings the first three secondary works on Pannenberg in English. The best of these is by E. Frank Tupper of Southern Baptist Seminary, who attempts a sympathetic and systematic exposition of Pannenberg’s thought for use until we have the theologian’s own systematic theology. The book is a revised version of a dissertation submitted to Southern Baptist Seminary and draws upon a year of study with Pannenberg. In addition to the exposition (Pannenberg himself praises its “careful interpretation and balanced discussion” and has pronounced it “the most comprehensive report that has been published so far on my theology”), Tupper provides some background material and a helpful and careful review of the reaction to Pannenberg’s thought up to 1972. An excellent index and a detailed bibliography (primary literature only) add to the value of this book. It will surely become the standard introduction to Pannenberg in English.

The other two books are much shorter and more oriented toward the sophisticated layman or the casual student. Galloway’s book appears in a new series devoted to “Contemporary Religious Thinkers” edited by H. D. Lewis. The author, who teaches at the University of Glasgow, provides, in the British style, a clear and concise summary of eight basic themes in Pannenberg’s thought and reveals a higher level of engagement and critique than the other two. By affirmation of the analytical and empirical elements in Pannenberg, Galloway attempts to bridge the gap between British and Continental philosophical and theological thought and suggests that both could profit from interaction.

Don Olive of Wayland Baptist College has written the fifth in Word Books’ series called “Makers of the Modern Theological Mind.” In some ways this is the most superficial of the three. Less than a third of the book is actual exposition. Olive does provide more detail about the intellectual background (including analysis of specific figures) and development of Pannenberg. He also devotes more space to a comparative analysis that sets Pannenberg over against such figures as Barth, Bultmann, Cullmann, Harvey Cox, and Moltmann, as well as the school of “biblical literalism” (here focusing on Clark Pinnock). The last is faulted for affirming historicity from a revealed rather than a historical perspective.

It is much too soon to pass any sort of final judgment on the thought of Pannenberg, and none of the authors here really attempts this. Each offers merely a preliminary report. Pannenberg is as theologians go a relatively young man, still in his forties. And as Galloway comments, Pannenberg’s significance is as an “inventor of a programme of work rather than as the author of a fully elaborated system.”

But neither are these authors reluctant to use superlatives in describing the promise of Pannenberg’s approach. Olive comes close to endorsing the claim that “Pannenberg’s work is … the most creative that is now being done in theology.” Galloway comments that Pannenberg makes the “biblical teaching about Jesus Christ look more credible than it has seemed for many centuries.” And Tupper claims that for the most part Pannenberg has bridged the great gap in the modern theological world by achieving a “synthesis of classical theological concerns with a modern critical posture.”

If Pannenberg is indeed able to take critical history and make it a source of confidence rather than doubt (cf. Galloway, p. 11), the result of his work will have profound apologetic significance and contribute to a radical redrawing of the battle lines of contemporary theological camps. Whether the historiography of modern autonomous reason will so readily allow the validity of Pannenberg’s critique and make room for the event of the resurrection as factual history remains to be seen. On one level, at least, the viability of his position will be tested only by time and the reception it receives not only in the Christian world but also in the broader intellectual world.

There also remain in Pannenberg’s thought certain areas that need development and clarification. Among these are: whether historical and theological modes of thought can be synthesized as easily as Pannenberg suggests; whether the profound reliance on Hegelian thought patterns facilitates or short-circuits the explication of distinctive biblical themes; whether it will be possible to develop the ontological and metaphysical details of an eschatologically oriented Christian faith in such a way as to allow real meaning to man’s action in history; whether the details of Pannenberg’s affirmation of the universal validity of apocalyptic thought patterns can be sustained over against both historical and theological criticism; whether the still somewhat ambiguous statement of the nature and meaning of the resurrection of Jesus can be developed in a convincing manner that also allows the crucifixion the central and crucial significance that it seems to have in the New Testament.

But whatever the final resolution of these issues, Pannenberg’s work should be the stimulus for solid theological reflection by all types of theologians. The issues that he has pinpointed are basic, and interaction with them is essential. These three efforts to enable a wider and more informed reading of Pannenberg are therefore to be welcomed and received as a call to renewed theological engagement.

NEWLY PUBLISHED

Encyclopedia of the Unexplained, edited by Richard Cavendish (McGraw-Hill, 304 pp., $17.95). Concepts, people, organizations, and events of occultism and parapsychology presented in a relatively objective manner. Stresses background, from ancient times to the present. “Luck,” “Mediums,” “Numerology,” and “Theosophical Society” are sample entries. Tastefully illustrated.

Pilgrims Pray, by Thomas Dubay (Alba, 272 pp., $5.95). Protestants too can profit from this popular Catholic speaker’s thorough discussion of prayer as presented in the Bible and as a present reality.

Mennonite Safari, by David W. Shenk (Herald, 136 pp., $1.50 pb). A Mennonite “missionary kid” reflects on the development of his denomination in Tanzania and the effects that such evangelism had on the churches in the Pennsylvania homeland. Very good.

Ten Fastest-Growing Southern Baptist Sunday Schools, by Eugene Skelton (Broadman, 158 pp., $2.95 pb). What Elmer Towns did for Baptist Bible Fellowship congregations Skelton has now done for the Southern Baptist Convention. Doubtless other denominations will enter the scene. Skelton’s book is of considerable value in showing diverse ways congregations can use to grow effectively. (One of the congregations, for example, doesn’t have specially promoted days, revival meetings, or buses. Over a six-year period 70 per cent of the baptized were over eighteen.)

An Evangelical’s Guidebook to the Holy Land, by Wayne Dehoney (Broadman, 159 pp., $4.95 pb). A tourist guide that provides history and geography in an informal discussion of what to see and what you are looking at. Many pictures.

With Sovereign Reverence, by Harold Fey (Roger Williams Press [8120 Fenton St., Silver Spring, Md. 20910], 87 pp., $4.95). A brief account of the first twenty-five years of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Worship: Good News in Action, edited by Mangus Egge (Augsburg, 144 pp., $3.50 pb). Eight messages on the nature and form of worship within the modern church from the Inter-Lutheran Conference on Worship.

How to Carry Out God’s Stewardship Plan, by Truman Dollar (Nelson, 191 pp., $3.95 pb). Practical suggestions by a pastor (it’s his real name) on financing Christian ministries.

The Phenomenon of Obedience, by Michael Esses (Logos, 190 pp., $2.50 pb), and How God Can Use Nobodies, by James Montgomery Boice (Victor, 156 pp., $1.25 pb). Case studies of Old Testament characters from different perspectives. Esses deals with obedience and its results in the lives of twelve Old Testament men. Emphasizes the work of the Holy Spirit. Boice writes in greater depth of Abraham, Moses, and David and the lessons their lives have for Christians today.

Noah’s Ark: I Touched It, by Fernand Navarra (Logos, 137 pp., $2.95 pb). Another book for Arkeology buffs; tells about four expeditions in the fifties and sixties.

Jesus in Christian Devotion and Contemplation, by Irenee Noye et al., A Christian Anthropology, by Joseph Goetz et al., and Imitating Christ, by Edouard Cothenet et al. (Abbey, 116, 92, and 122 pp., each $3.95 pb). Useful historical studies—from biblical times to the seventeenth century—of Christian spirituality in theory and practice.

Christianity Meets Buddhism, by Heinrich Dumoulin (Open Court, 206 pp., $7.95). Excessively sympathetic portrayal by a Jesuit who has long resided in Japan.

Thoreau: Mystic, Prophet, Ecologist, by William J. Wolff (Pilgrim, 223 pp., $5.95). This latest study of the nineteenth-century American philosopher stresses the unity within his thought and behavior and brings out some interesting points for a better understanding of him.

Sent From God, by David H. C. Read (Abingdon, 112 pp., $3.95). Six worthwhile messages on preaching (such as “The Survival of the Sermon in an Age of Distraction”) by the pastor of Madison Avenue Presbyterian in New York.

Religion and Political Modernization, edited by Donald Eugene Smith (Yale, 340 pp., $15). Sixteen papers originally presented at a conference to analyze the interaction of religion and politics in the transitional societies of the Third World. Scholarly treatments of secularization and the “use” of the churches in the Middle East, Latin America, and the Far East.

Tara, by Michael and Donna Nason (Hawthorn, 160 pp., $5.95). Moving story by her parents of the beginnings of recovery of a profoundly brain-injured child. The help rendered by Christians, among others, contributes to the family’s coming to Christ.

The Meaning of Teilhard de Chardin, by Alice V. Knight (Devin-Adair, 173 pp., $7.50). A useful summary by an admirer. Full bibliography of writings by and about him.

Commentary on First and Second Thessalonians, by Ronald Ward (Word, 178 pp., $5.95). A very helpful phrase-by-phrase commentary by a Canadian evangelical. Includes background material and a good bibliography. Neither superficial nor overly technical.

Contemporary Reflections on the Medieval Christian Tradition, edited by George H. Shriver (Duke University, 279 pp., $9.75). A dozen essays in honor of Ray C. Petry (plus three of his sermons) on such topics as Catharism, Nicholas of Cusa, John Wycliffe. Important for students of the Middle Ages.

Jesus and the Eucharist, by Ted Guzie (Paulist, 161 pp., $5.95). A contemporary Jesuit studies the biblical data and dogmatic reflections on it and suggests modern understandings.

How To Study Religion

The Phenomenon of Religion, by Ninian Smart (Seabury, 1973, 157 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by Myron Miller, associate professor of philosophy, Nyack College, Nyack, New York.

The author invites us to assume that there is a supernatural world lying behind or beside the natural. Any manifestation of the supernatural in the natural would involve natural events. Also, the means of affecting the supernatural would be natural. These two classes of natural events could be thought of as the phenomena of the supernatural world. Since religion is the area of human activity that has been concerned with contacts between the natural and supernatural worlds, all such manifestations could be classified as religious phenomena.

Because it requires apparent concessions to claims of truth made by a whole host of religions, the phenomenological study of religions has been highly objectionable to many evangelical Christians. How can one committed to the exclusiveness of the claims of Christ also “believe” the claims (and adopt the rituals) of another religion?

Smart does two important things in regard to this issue: first, he develops the relation between myth and language, defining and clarifying “phenomenology” along the way; and second, he attempts to resolve the tension between personal commitment to a religious point of view and the scientific, detached study of religions.

Although at times Smart’s discussion of the first point is tedious, given the considerable amount of work already done on the logic of myth, he nonetheless offers some important observations. His suggestions for reapproaching the question of the fact-bearing nature of religious language through the mythical structure of religious discourse merits further exploration.

The second point is one of greater interest and ought to give rise to considerable discussion. Smart contends that the phenomenological study of religion bridges the gap between a purely scientific study of religion, in which explanation is by means of description, and the theological study, which involves commitment to the truth of the interpretation of the phenomena. Hence we can reconcile the phenomena of miracles or of conversion with the tasks of objective investigation without having to invent competing “scientific” theories.

Those who are working on the interaction of competing ways of viewing religion should find Smart’s attempts to reconcile psychological and theological explanations suggestive and stimulating.

Getting To Know God

Jesus Spells Freedom, by Michael Green (InterVarsity, 1973, 127 pp., $1.50 pb), Hereafter, by David Winter (Harold Shaw, 1973, 91 pp., $1.25 pb), Blest Be the Tie That Frees, by Ken Berven (Augsburg, 1973, 104 pp., $1.95 pb), and Right With God, by John Blanchard (Tyndale, 1973, 137 pp., $1.25 pb), are reviewed by John W. Yates II, minister of youth, Trinity Church, Columbia, South Carolina.

Here are four brief, handy paperbacks that present the Gospel in four quite different ways. Ken Berven is the only American author; the other three are British.

Of the four, Jesus Spells Freedom is probably the best written and the most satisfying intellectually. Michael Green, who is principal of St. John’s Theological College, Nottingham, is his usual entertaining self, and throughout the book he seems to guess the questions that the reader may be having, answering them thoroughly. This book is full of strong, hard-hitting Christian apologetic. It is written for the practical and thoughtful skeptic—one who is unconvinced but interested enough to investigate. It has much appeal for someone who uses his brain, and particularly for college students who have given some thought to their own reason for being. Green begins by examining modern concepts of freedom and argues that though man believes himself to be free, he actually is not. He shows that man is a prisoner of his own sinful nature, and then describes how Jesus truly frees us from sin. All the while quoting from current songs and spokesmen of our day, Green describes Jesus as Free Man’s Model. He gives a long, thoughtful account of the uniqueness of Christ and seeks to explain the reality of Christ for today, showing practical ramifications of how Jesus frees us from guilt, loneliness, habit, aimlessness, and fear.

In his chapter on “Free Love” Green first shows how cruel and enslaving this philosophy actually is and then describes love that liberates—God’s love. This is a good chapter for use in counseling couples about to be married. In describing a “Free World” Green discusses Christian responsibility in society and the dynamic power of the Christian community in society, showing effectively how most of the crises of the world are rooted in man’s selfishness.

Throughout the book, I was impressed by Green’s ability to cover multitudinous ideas and to use effective illustrations in making his point. This is best seen in the highly imaginative final chapter, “Free Offer, Free Choice,” in which he gives us a fascinating commentary on the parable of the man who prepared the wedding banquet to which none of his friends could come. He uses the banquet theme to invite the reader to accept Christ’s gift of salvation and freedom and makes clearer than most the cost involved even initially in a commitment to Christ.

Although similar to Jesus Spells Freedom in purpose, John Blanchard’s Right With God is quite different in effect. It too is written for the seeker after God, but it has little of the polish and witty appeal of the first book. Blanchard presents basic Christian doctrine—what it means to become a Christian. After giving six short pages to establish the trustworthiness of the Bible, Blanchard then moves on to discuss what God is like, ways men seek to get right with God, God’s answer to man’s problem, and the nature of the new birth and conversion. The book is biblically accurate and is a thorough introduction to what it means to become a Christian. The author maintains a rather dry lecture-hall tone throughout. The book is well organized and thorough, but it is largely lacking in modern-day examples to “bring home” the points. The author’s habit of always using biblical terminology and of quoting Bible verses to support every point becomes excessive. This book would not appeal to younger minds unless the reader was really seeking God and already trusted the Bible as authoritative. The truth is presented in orderly fashion here, but there is little winsomeness in the witness.

The final two books are somewhat more specialized, and are both very helpful and readable. Hereafter is a study of death and life after death that will appeal to persons of any age and practically any religious background who have simple questions about death. It is biblical and simply written with many fascinating illustrations, quotations, and accounts supporting life hereafter.

After a captivating introduction about man’s purpose, Winter discusses what death is and the relation between body, mind, and spirit, arguing that our personalities survive death. He gives several interesting examples from psychical research concerning the post-death existence of the personality and then uses the example of Christ’s resurrection and Paul’s teaching in First Corinthians 15 to teach us what our new body will and will not be like. Our new body develops from our earthly body but is superior. Our personality does not change—“The message remains the same, but the transmitter is different.” Life after death is superior in every way, having everything good of earthly life but without any earthbound limitation. After discussing what heaven is and is not like, Winter finally asks, “Who goes there?” His answer is sketchy, giving only a very brief explanation of the biblical plan of salvation. This book is not so much an evangelistic book as it is a good, practical, simply written book to give encouragement to someone concerned with death.

Finally, Blest Be the Tie That Frees, written by a businessman involved in the evangelism department of the American Lutheran Church, is a light, pleasant look at the grace aspect of the gospel. Ken Berven recounts in a humorous winning way his own up bringing in a typical evangelical home and the hangups over law and grace with which he had to struggle before he made his discovery of grace.

This book is especially good for Christians who have not yet realized God’s forgiving love. Berven describes effectively, in a folksy, anecdotal fashion, our basis of forgiveness in Christ, our Christian freedom from the law and from sin, and how we learn to trust God. He uses catchy phrases and says quite a lot in simple terms. Blest Be the Tie That Frees would be a good book to use in an adult study group for new Christians, especially those in business or professional life. It includes a study guide for group discussions.

The International Congress on World Evangelization laid the groundwork for a great Christian offensive.

There is no doubt that evangelicals have the tools and resources to mount such a movement. Never has there been such opportunity. Never so much potential. Never so many means. The only questions that remain are whether enough motivation will be generated to complete the task of world evangelization, and whether there will be adequate leadership and enough of a spirit of cooperation. The ten-day congress held last month in Lausanne, Switzerland, took two long steps toward resolving those questions.

One was the formulation of what was called the Lausanne Covenant, a fifteen-point statement that commits signers “to pray, to plan, and to work together for the evangelization of the world.” The covenant aids in the accomplishment of the task by expressing in contemporary language the basic tenets of biblical faith. It represents a major attempt at an evangelical consensus transcending ecclesiastic and political boundaries (for the complete text see the August 16 issue, page 22), one that stems from collective recognition of mankind’s great spiritual need. As George Beverly Shea said at Lausanne, “The wheat was so high you could not see the fences.”

The other big step was the decision to name a “continuation committee” which will, it is hoped, oversee creation of a more tangible world-wide evangelical fellowship. Participants at the congress indicated overwhelmingly that they wanted such a fellowship; with the emphasis upon regional and functional cooperation.

There was little desire to set up a power structure to compete with the World Council of Churches, but some kind of organization will obviously be necessary. As executive chairman Jack Dain put it, “You have to be honest: when we say we don’t want structure, nothing is going to happen unless somebody does something and someone has a desk somewhere.” At the very least a global network of information needs to be established so that evangelicals can readily communicate with one another.

Billy Graham has provided admirable leadership in bringing evangelicals together in recent years, but they now should increasingly curtail their dependence upon his charisma. Graham told newsmen in Lausanne, “These congresses have come largely as a result of the Billy Graham association, and I want to move away from that.”

There are no plans for a future congress. Evangelical togetherness is dependent for the time being on the covenant and the Continuation Committee, the selection process for which has yet to be concluded. The urgency of the task demands that the committee begin work quickly to develop some concrete plans. Many ideas surfaced at the congress that should help evangelicals to cooperate in theological education, mass communications, and social action, among other things.

It speaks well of the growing maturity of the worldwide evangelical constituency that there was nothing resembling a party line at the congress except the common allegiance to the Word of God. Within that framework, widely varying opinions were expressed. The two main strains that were most obvious were the data-oriented church-growth school and the discipleship-demanding compassion and justice group. Neither, unfortunately, showed enough sensitivity to the kind of evangelism that permeates society across a broad spectrum embracing the arts and, in fact, all vocational pursuits. Evangelism is always going to be excessively difficult until Christians are moved to express their faith in ways that penetrate the workaday world.

One key aspect in which this kind of concern did manifest itself is found in a sentence in the covenant that will probably be one of the hardest of all to live up to: “Those of us who live in affluent circ*mstances accept our duty to develop a simple life-style in order to contribute more generously to both relief and evangelism.”

Evangelicals tend to be more individualistic than other people, and so their getting together is a greater achievement. It now remains to be seen to what extent they submerge private causes for the larger good. Some of those who were in Switzerland may have found a good lesson in the differences between the various regions of that small, very beautiful country. Several languages are spoken, and there is a very discernible competitive spirit. The people of Lausanne and those in Geneva, just forty miles away, can’t even agree on the name of the big lake they share. Yet in things that matter the most the Swiss are as one.

Maybe the Reformation had something to do with that.

The last fifteen years probably have been the most turbulent in the history of the United States since the adoption of the Constitution and the inauguration of President George Washington.

During the last decade and a half John F. Kennedy was assassinated; the armed forces fought in Viet Nam and finally came home; Lyndon B. Johnson was eliminated from the 1968 presidential campaign by the pressures of an unpopular war despite his election in 1964 by a great landslide; Robert Kennedy was assassinated at a time when his candidacy for the office of president was reaching a high tide; Richard Nixon won the election in 1968 with the promise to end the war in Viet Nam and bring peace to the world. The end of Nixon’s first term was marred by the Watergate charges, but his re-election was an overwhelming victory against Senator George McGovern, whose campaign never got off the ground.

Early in his second term Nixon succeeded in bringing U.S. participation in the Viet Nam war to a conclusion. Not long thereafter came the exposure and finally the resignation from the vice-presidency of Spiro Agnew, whose “law and order” mentality was grossly at variance with his personal practices. Meanwhile the Watergate situation was moving slowly but inexorably to a climax, which finally came on the evening of August 8, when President Nixon announced to the nation that he would resign the following day.

During the time that the Watergate break-in was being investigated Mr. Nixon was changing the face of the global struggle with Communism by his rapprochement with Red China and the Soviet Union. This new direction in American foreign policy and the political realignments wrought more profound changes than have yet been realized by the citizenry; the effects are still to be fully understood.

The resignation of Richard M. Nixon meant that for the first time in almost two hundred years the White House would be occupied by a man selected not by the people but by his predecessor, with the approval of Congress. And he would then propose his own successor for the vacant office of vice-president, for confirmation by Congress. This meant that the two chief offices of the United States would be filled by men not chosen by popular ballot. Truly the United States has come through a radical series of events, the meaning of which the historians will try hard to grasp and interpret for years to come.

In the confusion surrounding Mr. Nixon’s resignation some things stand out clearly. On August 5 he released a statement in connection with the surrender of three tapes of conversations with H. R. Haldeman. Mr. Nixon admitted that the tapes were at variance with earlier statements he had made and that he had ordered a halt to the investigation of the Watergate break-in for political reasons as well as for national security reasons. He acknowledged that he had kept this damaging information from his attorneys and that he had failed to notify the House Judiciary Committee of the variance. It became apparent immediately that the House would vote to impeach him, and there was little doubt that the Senate would then remove him from office. His guilt was established beyond reasonable doubt; his claim that the cover-up was done in the interest of the nation revealed his commitment to situation ethics. His most loyal defenders were left helpless by his announcement of this deception, and his cause was lost.

Many unresolved problems remain. Will the full truth of Watergate be made known to the American people? Will Mr. Nixon be prosecuted, or has his resignation from office been sufficient punishment? Will it be considered just for those who aided and abetted the commission of these crimes to serve prison sentences if their leader himself remains free? And if he is not to be sentenced, should not the lesser luminaries be pardoned, too? Until these questions have been answered satisfactorily the unsavory odor of Watergate will linger.

America’s new president, Gerald Ford, seems to have grasped the central demand of the nation from the ethical standpoint: the need for truth, honesty, and integrity in the White House and throughout the government. He has promised to make these principles the pole-stars of his administration. No government can long stand when these virtues have disappeared. We hope that Mr. Ford will clearly exemplify them, that in his conduct of the government there will be an openness and honesty and an obvious commitment to righteousness.

President Ford would be well advised to choose men and women of Christian faith and prayer to work with him—not just career bureaucrats, businessmen, and financiers. He should appoint to high office people who have shown their spiritual colors and their commitment to the same standards of morality he himself has professed. He should be prepared to espouse the cause of persecuted Christians even as men like Senator Jackson have that of persecuted Jews. He should not kowtow to either Red China or the Soviet Union—friendship, yes; blind collaboration with injustice, no!

One of his chief priorities should be the battle against inflation, and at the heart of this struggle is the need for a return to honest fiscal policies in which the nation spends no more than it takes in in taxes from its people.

Mr. Ford assumes the presidency after a decade and a half in which the nation has suffered one tragic event after another. We wish him well and assure him of our prayers and, we hope, of the prayers of the nation. With them the going will still be rough; without them he stands little chance of solving the grave problems that beset the American people.

Another President Topples

Earlier this year we carried two reports on Cyprus (see “God and Caesar,” February 15, and “A Long and Winding Road,” April 12). We claim no prophetic quality for them—they reflect rather this magazine’s routine coverage of international affairs—but are glad that the background thus supplied might have helped our readers understand the current crisis in that Mediterranean republic. More than the toppling of a president was involved here: Makarios since 1960 had combined in himself offices that in England are held by the queen, prime minister, and archbishop of Canterbury.

He made no attempt to be all things to all men. His Beatitude forgot the word about peacemakers. His treatment of the 18 per cent Turkish Muslim minority has done little to commend Christianity, particularly since his 1964 abrogation of the 1959 treaty eroded that minority’s rights. The latter complained, indeed, that Greek children were brought up in the home, educated in school, and indoctrinated in church to hate the Turk. So the Turks stayed in their own sectors and for a decade have spoken of harassment, deadly assault, violation of their mosques, and discrimination against them in areas such as public services. For a decade the government of Cyprus has been entirely Greek.

It is ironic, therefore, that the present troubles in Cyprus should have been precipitated by a Greek-versus-Greek confrontation in which the Turks were not involved. The mainland Greek officers serving in Cyprus, coupled with nationals who sought union with Greece, successfully overthrew Makarios but otherwise were astonishingly inept from their own viewpoint: they failed in their assassination attempt; replaced Makarios by a notorious killer; forced two NATO allies (Greece and Turkey) to the brink of war; brought down the detested Athens junta and so opened the way for the restoration of democracy in Greece itself; and presented Turkey with a long-sought opportunity for legal invasion of Cyprus under international treaty. The results were therefore a mixture of good and bad.

Meanwhile this beautiful island is once more the scene of dreadful atrocities. The Turks have old scores to settle, are determined that their co-religionists shall never again be left dependent on the mercy of the Greeks, and are demanding a federation similar to the Swiss cantonal pattern. For their part the Greeks are not prepared to accept this new challenge without a bitter fight, and like the Turks have taken hostages for bargaining purposes.

Although they have had mixed success in standing between implacable enemies, the United Nations troops in their thankless task have alleviated much suffering, and have played their peace-making role in unpromising places while the island’s two British bases have given sanctuary to thousands of refugees. We pray for the success of the present Geneva peace talks. At the same time it is difficult to resist the conclusion that Makarios’s dual role has perpetuated old antagonisms. His enemies warned him that “no man can serve two masters”; the discreditable involvement of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus in political intrigue has something to say to all of us.

The Power Of Obedience

The last fifteen years have been marked by a drastic decline in respect for and obedience to the authority of society’s traditional institutions: family, church, school, government. Now there is evidence of a longing for a recovery of legitimate authority. In conservative church circles, teachers such as Bill Gothard and Jay Adams who speak about family structure and parental authority have a wide appeal. And in the secular community as a whole there are signs of a growing willingness to accept authoritarian solutions to the increasingly complex problems of life today. At all levels of society it is becoming increasingly evident that total liberty leads to total chaos, which is an intolerable situation for almost everyone.

The tension between chaos and control has been familiar throughout human history. At certain times and in certain societies it has found a relatively successful and bearable resolution; elsewhere it has degenerated into chaos or tyranny. This tension is not a feature of the social structures alone; it is in fact rooted in the fundamental inner conflict of fallen man, made in God’s image and intended to inherit eternal life, but self-enslaved to the power of sin and death. In Romans, Paul evokes the frustrating perplexity of the spiritually awakened man constantly confronted both with the evidence of a “law of sin” in his members and with the good and yet apparently impossible demands of the Law of God.

The resolution that Paul proclaims in Romans 6 lies first of all in what we may call the power of the Resurrection, the real victory won over sin and death in the finished work of Jesus Christ, culminating in his resurrection from the grave. This victory is already ours by anticipation, by virtue of our identification with Christ, which Paul speaks of as “baptism into [his] death,” and it will be ours fully when we ourselves are raised. The reality and finality of the work of Christ is the ground of true freedom, not merely from oppressive structures but more fundamentally, from death itself, and from the law of sin and death operating within us.

Beyond this foundation of our freedom in the Resurrection, there is its exercise in obedience: Romans 6:12–23 has been appropriately entitled “the power of obedience.” The power of the Resurrection liberates us from slavery to sin, which is bondage resulting in temporal and eternal death. But this liberation is exercised, developed, and lived out in what Paul refers to as obedience “from the heart” to the doctrine to which Christians have committed themselves.

On a practical, interpersonal level, the practice of obedience to those human agents to whom God has delegated a relative authority creates a certain order and fosters a healthy emotional life, and hence a situation in which true personal freedom can be experienced. Over and above this relative good there is the still greater reality that it is actively obeying the God who has liberated us from the power of sin and death that we experience the most essential and meaningful freedom.

Marxist Inroads

On January 16 the Russian Student Christian Movement (composed of Russians living outside the U.S.S.R.), one of the early member movements of the World Student Christian Federation, withdrew from that organization. This dramatic step was largely overlooked by the news media until it was brought to light by the Reverend Blahoslav Hrubý, editor of the documentary periodical Religion in Communist Dominated Areas, and later picked up by the Religious News Service.

The WSCF is the student counterpart to the WCC. If the World Council has been justly accused of using its new slogan “Salvation Today” to cover a grab-bag of social, political, economic, and military programs more of Marxist than of biblical inspiration, the WSCF has been even more explicit in replacing Christian concerns with a zeal for “liberation” based on the Gospel according to Marx. Under the leadership of its former European secretary, Czech Milan Opovenský, the WSCF manifested not merely a pro-Marxist but an actively pro-Soviet program. It discreetly overlooked the brutal Russian repression of the “Prague spring” in 1968 and the subsequent Polish suppression of the workers’ revolt in 1970, as well—of course—as religious persecution in the U.S.S.R., while continuing to agitate against both real and imagined racial and economic injustices elsewhere. In October, 1973, the WSCF proposed that as “a means of rapprochement and détente among nations … history books containing unsavory facts about the Russian regime of the 1930s should be modified.”

The WSCF is characteristically a bit more dramatic than the WCC in substituting Marxist-inspired doctrines about “liberation” for the Gospel of Christ. However, the same trend is evident in the World Council. Christians who permit their contributions to be used for the support of these “ecumenical” bodies should understand and ponder these increasingly inescapable facts.

God’S Inerrant Word

Church history offers much evidence that it is difficult, if not impossible, to create a creed or statement of faith that will protect a denomination, fellowship, or institution from losing the vitality of its faith. Within some denominations the great confessional statements are retained but honored only as museum pieces, not really accepted and held to be true.

It is good for a Christian fellowship or an institution to have a forthright confession of faith to which its members can wholeheartedly subscribe. But over and over again we see that the most vital document for the preservation of faith is not a specific confession but the Holy Scriptures. Where the doctrine of the inspiration and authority of the Bible is relativized or downgraded, no matter how orthodox a group may be on other points, including those of the major creeds, theological and spiritual decay is almost inevitable. Where the authority and truthworthiness of Scripture is accepted without reservation, a fellowship can survive quarrels, confusion, and even error on other points, because the teaching of Scripture will eventually set matters straight.

In the fall of 1973 several noted Christian scholars met at the Ligonier Valley Study Center in Pennsylvania, and out of this meeting came the Ligonier Statement, a reaffirmation of the inspiration and inerrancy of the Scripture. Now, under the general editorship of John W. Montgomery, Bethany Press has made available the seminal papers presented at that meeting. God’s Inerrant Word deserves to be recognized as a major reaffirmation and defense of a crucial doctrine in an age of crisis.

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Circulation Department

Second of Two Parts

Here are six examples of what happens when laymen are trained and given the opportunity of Christian service.

1. Previously I told about Bob Schneider, a career Army officer, whom God used to impress upon me the need to train laymen. Bob had been instrumental in setting up our evangelism, follow-up, and disciple-building ministry. Then he had to go overseas for two years. Well, Bob has been back since last fall, and in February he took over the complete administration of that ministry he had helped to start. One of the most significant nights of my life came when, having been introduced to the group as their new leader, Bob remarked, “I believe that God has used the first forty years of my life to prepare me for this ministry.”

2. Then there is Bernie Radford, an electrical engineer, who was the first layman I trained for service. I’ve been a bystander on numerous occasions as God has worked through this man. Bernie has led many to the Saviour and followed them up. God has given him teaching ability, and little by little he has taken over more responsibility in that area. When the superintendent of a denomination asked me to meet with some fifty pastors and laymen to instruct them in some of these principles of lay ministry and my schedule prevented me from accepting, I recommended Bernie. The letter I later received from that superintendent said in short: “It was better that you didn’t come. This man had commitment written all over his face, and the fact that he was a layman spoke volumes!”

Then there was Dan, whom Bernie led to Christ during a lunch hour. Within four months Dan had seen several professions of faith through his own witness.

God gave me the privilege of seeing Tom Titus come to Christ, and after some basic follow-up I turned him over to Bernie for nurturing. Before long Tom was leading others to the Saviour.

3. A few years ago God impressed upon me the idea that if we were to be a New Testament ministry we’d have to be a church-planting ministry. So I dropped that thought into the hearts of our people. Two years later (after much prayer and planning) I found myself in an elders’ meeting where assignments were being made by laymen for laymen.

Some forty of our people began meeting in a mission church six months ago. We trust that before long that assembly will be on its own, ready to plant another. Our associate pastor is interim pastor to that flock, but most of the spade-work was done by laymen.

4. In the area of church discipline, it often is not only appropriate but essential to have another person along. Some of my most meaningful times of ministry have been with laymen in such situations. They not only provide company and support but have sometimes been the salvation of the call.

Sickness, death, sorrow, marital difficulties, despondency, and other human needs that call for ministry often come at what from a human point of view are very inopportune times for the pastor. But God did not intend that pastors bear the burdens of the entire flock. The counseling ministry must be distributed among laymen.

No matter how good our academic training, most of us pastors learn the practical outworking of the ministry in the trenches. And that’s where laymen must receive their training. Sometime a layman and I go together, and on other assignments two of them go without me.

5. The midweek service is without a doubt the gathering most susceptible to the evangelical blahs! An opening hymn, a word of prayer, another hymn, Bible study and then “Let’s all go to our prayer groups.”

When I was looking for ways to improve this service, I began to seek out laymen in whom I had recognized spiritual capabilities. They were assigned the first fifteen to twenty minutes of the Wednesday-evening meeting. When they asked, “What should I do?” I replied, “That’s up to you. I have confidence that the Lord has given you ability, and that as you seek his guidance you’ll come up with just what is needed.” Although this is still in the embryonic stage, the results have been refreshing and exciting. These laymen are bringing new life to our gathering.

6. On a recent Sunday evening just after the service I had a telephone call from a girl in her early twenties, a believer, but one with a multitude of problems. After counseling over the phone for over a half an hour, I led in prayer and told her that a girl would be calling her to take up where I had left off. I then dialed the number of another young woman and explained to her the ministry she could have to this needy part of the Body. She was delighted at the prospect of service and assured me that she would call the other girl right away and make plans to meet with her for Bible study, prayer, and encouragement. Again, here was a lay person who had been trained for service and was ready when the need arose.

Other examples come to mind, but suffice it to say that God is using laymen in our ministry. I want to make it clear, however, that this has been years in the making.

As far as I am concerned, the most significant change has taken place in me. Once I saw myself as a “preacher” who ran here and there helping people, knowing that in the process something would happen. (God is sovereign, and he blesses his Word.) Now I see myself as an equipper of men for the work of service, and my pulpit teaching ministry has become even more meaningful. I evaluate my ministry now not in terms of meetings held, sermons preached, people counseled, offerings received, but in terms of lives developed for the work of the ministry.

As I was renewed, so were some of my people. A growing core of them sense that they and I are in the work of the Lord together.

A year ago we began quarterly elders’ retreats. We go to a nearby motel for Friday evening and all day Saturday, and have time not only to deal with the issues but to get to know one another on a different level. More and more of this time is being spent in the Word. We begin by looking at passages of Scripture that pertain to the matters we are going to discuss.

One of the natural results of an equipping ministry is that increasingly people are recognizing their spiritual gifts and comprehending the biblical concept of functioning as the Body of Christ. They are aware that members of the Body can minister to one another’s needs.

We have introduced into some of our evening gatherings a ten-to-fifteen-minute segment called “Body-Consciousness”—a time when believers are free to walk all over the sanctuary and find someone with whom to exchange name cards and discuss some pertinent questions suggested from the pulpit. Innovations like this lead away from a pastor-centered, program-oriented assembly into the fresh air of operating as God intends—as the Body of Christ.

Have there been difficulties? Of course! The following list is by no means exhaustive:

1. Misunderstanding from those who operate on traditional concepts. Ralph Neighbour hit the nail on the head when he entitled his book The Seven Last Words of the Church. They are: “We’ve Never Tried It That Way Before!” When the excitement of employing God’s methodology begins to explode in your assembly, some people will not understand and, rightly, will say so.

2. Hurt feelings on the part of some who are not involved in what you are doing.

3. Accusations, often based on lack of information. Since I’ve been training laymen I’ve heard everything from “This is just the pastor’s thing” to “The pastor has too much power.” (The latter speaker had obviously not attended any of our official board meetings.)

4. Satanic attack. You’ll never be more aware of the spiritual warfare than when you start outfitting saints for service. And what hurts is that he often operates through carnal Christians!

5. The frustration of knowing you must revamp your schedule while you still feel the pull of the traditionally accepted ministry you have known in former days. The tendency to conform is always there. It is then that we need the principle of Second Timothy 4:16. Perseverance brings deliverance!

6. Discouragement because progress seems slow in coming. At such times I ask myself: (1) How long did it take you to get where you are? and (2) Where might you be if you had never jumped out of the stands and become a participant in the training of men?

7. The battle of time. We all wish we had more of it. But God has provided all the time we need to do his will. In the initial stages you’ll have to spend countless hours studying, planning, developing curricula. As you pass through this period you will see that some of your key people are with you. They’ll be a part of the process and can take care of some of this load in the future.

8. The tendency to go to extremes as your ministerial pendulum swings away from the traditional ways of doing things. This is especially true in the beginning. But the answer to one extreme is never the establishment of another.

9. Constant pressure from well-meaning brethren who want you to return with them to the leeks and garlic of program-oriented ministry down in ecclesiastical Egypt. This is discouraging. But by faith we can look beyond their remarks and claim some of these very people to train for the work of service!

10. Last, the ever-present possibility of losing heart and “growing weary in doing good.” We are all prone to find ourselves with Elijah under the broom tree (1 Kings 19:4). But that’s how we grow!—The Rev. MARLIN C. HARDMAN, pastor, Barcroft Bible Church, Arlington, Virginia.

We hear a lot about meditation these days. People try eagerly to sit in just the right position—toes curled up over their thighs, hands at rest with palms up, shoulders relaxed. They breathe deeply, pull in their abdomens, exhale in the proper rhythm. Some learn to slow down their heartbeat. Others help along the arrival of the meditative state by taking some sort of powdered chemical substance into the stomach. Yet others smoke, with what they feel is correct puffing, various plant substances, and with clouded eyes and minds wait for the great meditation to commence. Mystical, cloudy, and floating, separated from logical thought, from understanding, and from verbalized explanations, modern meditation drifts with no defining framework. A student in an American seminary writes a friend, “Don’t mention the word ‘prayer’ to me anymore. We don’t pray. We meditate. Often we find it is necessary to smoke pot to meditate properly.” A pastor in Sweden selects certain nights of the month to teach the bodily positions for Transcendental Meditation. A church in an eastern American city opens its doors for serious lectures on this subject.

What should “meditation” mean to us who have come into communication with the living God through the one way he has opened up into his presence? What does the Bible teach about meditation?

The meditation spoken of in Psalm 119:97—“O how love I thy law! It is my meditation all the day”—requires no special bodily position; it is taking place all the day.” Here is no empty mind, no slowed down pulse, but a mind filled with the content of God’s law. What is “thy law”? Not the Ten Commandments in stark outline but the full richness of Scripture’s explanation of the commands of God. Never do I come to the end of the possibility of meditating upon that. Sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, idea by idea, the seeds of God’s law, God’s teaching, dropped into the tilled ground of my mind, burst and send forth shoots of green understanding that I can put into words of my own. All the day long, as I walk in fields or city streets, as I sit at a typewriter or make a bed with fresh sheets, as I converse with professors or with three-year-olds whose questions are endless, as I work in a lab or scrub a floor, all day long in office or factory, I can meditate upon the law, the Word of God, which my eyes have read or my ears have heard or my fingers have felt in Braille. This meditation has a base, a changeless base that is as meaningful as it was centuries ago, and as true.

Then on to verse 99: “I have more understanding than all my teachers: for thy testimonies are my meditation.” How can I have more understanding as a child, as a primary school or high school pupil, or a university student? By meditating upon the testimonies of God! The Bible is the place where we can have enough content to give us understanding that is complete in being true. We do not “understand” with vague feelings that change with the weather. Meditating upon the content of God’s Word is not an airy fairy thing, nor a practice to be reserved for later, more brilliant or leisurely times of life. Listen to the admonition to Timothy (2 Tim. 3:14–16): “Continue in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them.… From a child thou hast known the holy scriptures … All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable … for instruction in righteousness.” Yes, meditation with the content of the Bible in one’s mind is possible from childhood to old age, and can give understanding of what really is true in oneself and in the universe.

All the day, throughout the days of my life, I am to meditate, even in the wee hours when others are sleeping. “Mine eyes prevent the night watches, that I might meditate in thy word.” Here in Psalm 119:148 we are given the picture of this one being unable to sleep, and using that time to meditate in the Word of God. In a comfortable bed with the bedside light on, in the hospital ward with pain or fears making sleep impossible, in long times of waiting for news when sleep will not come, in prison where cold floor and hideous odors drive sleep away, I can and must meditate in the Word of God, which gives me what I need to know for comfort and direction. God is communicating to us as we think for periods of time upon what he has given in written form. It is in this way our help comes from him time after time.

In Psalm 63:6 and 7 David makes this more vivid to our understanding: “I remember thee upon my bed, and meditate on thee in the night watches. Because thou hast been my help, therefore in the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice.” In our times of worry about violent death, rise and fall of governments, taxes larger than our incomes, we meditate rather than worry. Meditate upon God. We have his Word telling us who he is. We read of his creation and power, of all he has done in centuries gone by. We meditate upon him and the help he has been through the ages, and upon the help he has been to us individually, and the reality of being in the protective shadow of his wings becomes so real that before the time is over a real rejoicing comes.

In Joshua 1:8 God speaks to Joshua and also to us as we read frightening news in the paper. Just before this God has said, “Be strong and of a good courage.” Joshua is faced with leadership in a very difficult moment. He is weak, with human limitations. What is the practical admonition and advice given before the direct guidance is unfolded? “This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success.” Joshua and you and I are told as clearly as can be that we are to read and know the content of the Bible and then constantly meditate upon it, so that as we speak the truth will come out in words others will hear and understand. How can Joshua or any one of us do God’s will if we don’t know the base of his law, his teaching, his character, his history? We have been given sufficient information to prepare us to be ready to understand his will and then to do it. But what we do is to be based on that which has been written in human language, understandable to brains that can think and follow sentence after sentence during times of meditation.

Is there danger in trying out the wrong kind of meditation? Yes. Satan’s traps are sharp steel, and they tear the flesh of those who pull away. Both kinds of meditation cannot take place in one portion of time. One kind drives out the other! Which meditation will we have? How serious it is to waste minutes, hours, days, when God has clearly commanded us to do that which is a solution to our deepest needs. Meditate day and night that you can know, do, rejoice, and have success spiritually and in God’s plan for you.

Eutychus’ Law

Every great thinker would like to leave mankind a simple, easily remembered principle. Besides the good it does, such a principle helps ensure his fame in perpetuity.

Pythagoras, for instance, left a theorem since known to every schoolperson: “The sum of the squares of the legs of a right angle triangle is equal to the square of the hypotenuse.” That is a trifle stiff, but manageable. The unfortunate German biologist Häckl, however, muffed his chance with “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” (or was it “Ontology recapitulates philology”?). It has a certain lilt, but the common person cannot understand it; hence it is quickly forgotten, and Herr Häckl with it. Likewise the famous philosopher Hegel and his “Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht,” which can’t even be translated in less than a paragraph.

Fortunately modern thinkers have been more straightforward with their laws. The great Parkinson propounded one that even the simplest mind can understand: “Work expands to fill the time allotted.” Among scientists and engineers it is the terse and rememberable Murphy’s Law, with its bitter-sweet realism, that appeals: “If anything can go wrong, it will.”

Gresham’s Law originated among economists, but everyone lives by it, whether consciously or not: “Bad money drives out good.” When the late President Johnson began debasing the coinage in 1965, no one required the silver dimes, quarters, and half-dollars to disappear. But disappear they did, driven out by cupro-nickel “sandwiches” according to the inexorable working of Gresham’s Law.

Now, with no thought of securing a niche in history but with purely altruistic intent, Eutychus wishes to share with his readers Eutychus’ Law: “When good religion goes out, bad religion comes in—with worse religion hot on its heels.” Regrettably, this simple principle (which might be considered a variant of the better-known “Nature abhors a vacuum”) has generally gone unheeded among American law-makers and educators. In Washington, D. C., for example, after scrupulously excluding Christianity from federal life, patriots and other well-wishers proceeded to erect not only pseudo-Grecian temples (paganism, i.e., bad) but a psuedo-Egyptian obelisk (if anything, worse) which they would have surrounded by a Pantheon (“temple of all the gods”) dedicated to “revolutionary heroes” had they not run out of money in the nick of time (Gresham’s Law to the rescue). Under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, prayer and Bible-reading (good) were banished from public schools. Now, hardly a decade later, there are courses in transcendental meditation (bad) and witchcraft (worse).

Now there is a move afoot to get rid of the Christian relics in Congress (chaplains), the Supreme Court (“God save … this honorable Court”), and the armed services. One who realizes the truth of Eutychus’ Law will not hesitate to predict the results: In a few years Congress will have soothsayers to read the omens, the Court will be opened with incantations, and the armed services will paint themselves blue and take druids and fakirs as chaplains.

Those disposed to scoff should remember that government economists scoffed at Gresham, too. Seen any silver quarters lately, anyone?

EUTYCHUS VI

What Requirements?

I was more amused than amazed to find myself characterized in CHRISTIANITY TODAY (“‘Revolt on Evangelical Frontiers’: A Response,” June 21) as biased “toward the general acceptability of the present American economic and political system” and as holding “a rather paranoid and unbalanced view of socialism.” The main issue—whether evangelical Christians should be post-American or supra-American in their national commitment—I shall discuss on the eve of the Chicago Thanksgiving/74 Workshop in my November “Footnotes” column.

I don’t want to waste words over Jim Wallis’s misrepresentations or misunderstandings of my review of Rich- and Quebedeaux’s The Young Evangelicals in my essay “Revolt on Evangelical Frontiers” (April 26). Wallis uses the columns of CHRISTIANITY TODAY to proclaim that I have “misrepresented much of its basic thrust.” That may be Mr. Wallis’s view, but Mr. Quebedeaux has written me that he considered the review “very fair” and numerous young evangelicals have written that Wallis inaccurately represents their view of the Bible.

Wallis goes on to emphasize that what he rejects in Marxism is “its epistemology and eschatology; … its ethical failures over the question of ends and means; … its inadequate view of the human condition.” Nobody, to my knowledge, has charged him with endorsing those aspects of Marxism. The question is, which elements of the Marxist economic program does he consider expressive of “a Christian’s basic allegiance to the kingdom of God”? What “balanced view of socialism” does Wallis require us to baptize as biblical?

CARL F. H. HENRY

Arlington, Va.

Business Advantage

You have suggested that during the Bicentennial (“Bicentennial—The Personal Touch,” June 21) we emphasize the “spiritual dimension in America’s founding.” All devout Americans would agree, but we must be willing to face the fact that in the beginning the spiritual dimension was not very strong. Financial investment was the dominant motive, beginning with Columbus. Religious dissenters in Europe simply took advantage of the door which business interests opened, and these dissenters became a part of the commercial venture. Only 6 per cent of the early settlers were church members.

It was the Great Awakening just before the Revolution which filled the colonies with religious fervor and made the spiritual dimension an important historical phenomenon. This widespread revival movement made salvation strictly personal, dependent on personal spiritual experience rather than institutional devices, and multiplied the number of dissenters in the colonies. The Great Awakening helped to undermine and force the collapse of the tyrannical colonial theocracies, and religion thus was given the freedom which is essential for its effective practice and survival.

VIRGI A. KRAFT

Director, Exploration II

Americans United for Separation of Church and State Silver

Spring, Md.

With No Excuse

I thank you indeed for Harold M. Best’s “There Is More to Redemption Than Meets the Ear” (July 26). Although no music specialist, I heartily agree that “the need for developing a scriptural aesthetic has still to be met” (and as a layman I appreciate the author’s commitment to the nonmusician’s needs). In fact, CHRISTIANITY TODAY is the only Christian publication I have read that has observed (more than once) that much Christian “art” is merely an excuse for presenting the Gospel.

WILLIAM J. MORAVEC

Tampa, Fla.

Harold Best’s call to Christian responsibility in music provides a desperately needed counterpoint to a growing evangelical view that sound and beat are neutral and only lyrics determine the suitability of music for worship. Granted that a single note (or even a single chord) cannot be considered the Devil’s property, collections of sounds can and do reflect philosophical opinion.… Evangelical musicians display an abysmal metaphysical ignorance when they try to detoxify counter-culture music with a dose of Jesus talk. Music consciously composed to reflect a fragmented, meaningless universe and to facilitate raw hedonism can only dilute and distort a Christian message superimposed on it.

WILLIAM S. SAILER

Department of Systematic Theology

Evangelical Congregational School of Theology

Myerstown, Pa.

Attacking God’S Glory

I applaud the article by Martin LaBar in the July 26 issue, “A Message to Polluters From the Bible.” We are all polluters, and we must face up to this fact as sin. Sin demands repentance but also a walk in renewal of attitude and action. To the fine list of Bible passages quoted by LaBar, I should like to add Isaiah 6:3. Whereas the Bible insists that the glory of God transcends the universe (see Psalm 113), the seraphs surrounding his glory chant in antiphonal song these words: “Holy, holy, holy, is Yahweh of hosts, the fulness of the whole earth is His glory” (see NASV margin). Since the earth is a reflection of the glory of God, pollution is not only a debasing of man—it is in fact an attack on the glory of God. The issue of pollution is not one which we dare leave to our more liberal colleagues. It is an issue of sound biblical theology.

RONALD BARCLAY ALLEN

Assistant Professor of Old Testament

Language and Exegesis

Western Conservative Baptist Seminary

Portland, Ore.

Invoking Dominoes

In the same issue (July 26) in which you published Dr. Martin LaBar’s excellent article on ecology … you have done … a disservice to the population problem. Writing editorially on abortion and euthanasia (“A License to Live”), you seem to overgeneralize your fears and align evangelical Christianity with irresponsible reproductive permissiveness. People are able to make much more subtle distinctions than you appear to give us credit for—a foot in the door does not necessarily mean an elephant in the living room.

In the research of my Population Psychology class at this Baptist college done last January, students expressed as much concern with the population problem and planned no more children than a group of students at a California state college. However, this student body overwhelmingly diverged from the secular norm in opposing abortion as a form of birth control in any circ*mstance. Similarly they favored voluntary limitation of family size to two children (mean 7.7 on a 0 to 10 scale) and tax incentives to limit family size (mean 6.2), yet they strongly rejected a modest proposal of mandatory sterilization after “a given number of children” (mean 2.2 on the same scale).

Obviously the domino theory has not held true, and the people do not seem to be in any danger of succumbing to grossly dehumanizing forms of population control. Of course, if all people, Christian and otherwise, do not exercise responsible control over their reproduction, we may be forced by physical rather than political realities to endure suffering and death more hideous than abortion and passive euthanasia. I wish you had taken care to draw responsible distinctions rather than invoke maladaptive domino theories.

RICHARD D. KAHOE

Chairman, Psychology Department

Georgetown College

Georgetown, Ky.

Your July 26 editorial characterization of me as a “virulent anti-Christian” is grossly inaccurate, unfair, and defamatory. As a religious person in a leadership role in a religious social-concern agency, I am pleased to work with Christian and Jewish leaders in promoting interfaith harmony and in bringing ethical and religious insights to bear on social problems. Your use of slanderous epithets seems inconsistent with the ethical injunctions of the Scriptures you profess to follow.

EDD DOERR

Silver Spring, Md.

• Edd Doerr signed the “Humanist Manifesto II” and is a contributing editor of the journal The Humanist. The sentence in question was meant, not to characterize Mr. Doerr, but to refer readers to an article of which he was a co-author for further information on our assertion that “some virulent anti-Christians … exulted” at the Supreme Court decision on abortion.—ED.

To begin with, one must insist that the detective story is a distinct cultural phenomenon. Only a little more than a century old, the genre has attracted a following more loyal and (on the average) more literate than that of almost any sort of popular writing. Critics have distinguished the “ ’tec’s” form, tone, and intentions from other kinds of fiction; but they are hardly as exacting as detective-story readers themselves, who resent fiercely the intrusion of the spy story, the thriller, the love story, or the Gothic romance on their special territory.

The detective story was invented by Edgar Allan Poe. In three brief tales, published within a year—including “Murders in the Rue Morgue”—Poe struck out, as if by intuition, the whole timeless formula: the detective himself, unruffled, eccentric, scornfully brilliant; his sidekick, useful, bewildered, but admiring (he records the detective’s genius); the slightly dense police official, who fails where the detective succeeds; the murder without apparent clues; the carefully gleaned evidence; the chase; the capture; the explanation.

There are, it is said, only seven plots in all fiction; and of these, the mystery writer can use only one. His problem is to produce new, ingenious, baffling combinations of a desperately few elements: the body, the detective, mysterious facts that lead to a perfectly logical solution. He succeeds only when he outwits his reader fair and square. In this narrow room the mystery writer moves, and counts himself lord of infinite space.

The obvious temptation is to cheat: to build a body of clues that do not explain themselves, or to call on that anathema of the mystery fan, a deus ex machina—some person, clue, or motive that appears first of all on the book’s last page and explains everything. If he is actually playing fair, however—if the clues he gives us are complete, sufficient, and conclusive—then the writer may lead us as baffling a chase as he wishes, may equivocate and obfuscate shamelessly. The denser the mystery, the more satisfying its solution. “Seen from the outside, [the mystery] was perfectly incomprehensible,” wrote G. K. Chesterton delightedly in a Father Brown story, “and it is from the outside [of course] that the stranger must study it.”

After Poe, the detective story lay dormant for a few decades. Some authors, such as Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, laid their hands to it. But it was Arthur Conan Doyle who catapulted the formula to universal popularity. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, the perfectly polar duo, the hopelessly flawless denizens of Baker Street—no one can deny either what Conan Doyle owed to Poe, or the unique genius of his new creation. Holmes has come so alive for generations of readers that he stands with Falstaff and Don Quixote as a literary culture hero of the first magnitude.

After Holmes the mystery story took wing. George Lyman Kittredge, the great Shakespeare scholar, left to Harvard at his death a vast—and well-thumbed—collection of mysteries. W. H. Wright assembled a library of 2,000 detective novels prior to writing a few himself—and this was in the early 1920s. Since then, in novels by Dorothy L. Sayers (whose detective is named Peter Wimsey), Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple), S. S. Van Dine (Philo Vance), Raymond Chandler (Philip Marlowe), and Rex Stout (Nero Wolfe), the mystery story has continued to build its treasure of logic and mayhem.

Detective stories make terrors into fun. Father Brown, wrote Chesterton, shared with a companion “a harmless hobby of murder and robbery.” One might object, of course, that Father Brown made a hobby of detecting, not of violence. But we cannot deny that the detective is helpless without what Sayers called a “bright, novel, and agreeable murder.” What serious values can lie in a genre that makes a mock of tragedy? How seriously can we take authors who treat sin as an excuse for games? “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” demanded Edmund Wilson in stentorian critical dismay. Many people, we might answer; and with some good reason.

A murder mystery is not about murder but about mystery—the ineluctable series of facts logical in itself but puzzling when seen partially or from the wrong perspective. The murder—preferably passionate, clever, and spooky—is only an adjunct of the real story. It is just a fact, a datum; like the grain in the oyster, it is inert but irritating, forcing the detective (and reader) to respond with appropriate curiosity. The murder generates the mystery; it demands to be explained. Only when the mystery has been elucidated can the murder be laid to rest.

The detective story expresses two purposes, one intellectual, one moral. The second waits on the first. But once operative, the “morality” of detective fiction is perfectly strict and unbending. It demands first of all that the corpse embody a real offense. Stories where the murder is a mistake, an illusion, or a suicide only frustrate the genre’s purposes. Second, the offense must generate real, specific guilt. The victim cannot have been killed by “society,” or by God, chance, or blind fate. Some individual must bear the responsibility. Third, the culprit never escapes, for the detective is (ultimately) infallible, and the outcome inevitable.

The detective story can therefore thrive only in a society that can believe in, or at least imagine, such a morality. It is created by the concern for justice. Primitive societies seldom worry about assigning guilt. One killing sets off a blood feud precisely because the guilt can never come to rest on any individual but hovers over families, clans, or entire tribes. Every murder is a fresh offense demanding fresh retribution.

But the detective wishes to assign responsibility, and he does so in the name of society, thereby protecting it from the passions it contains and saving the community from dissolving into chaos. He purges the body politic of its hidden vices, by exposing them and placing their guilt on the right shoulders. In a sense, though we all hope to beat the detective to the solution, he acts for us; he represents the good. And the good always triumphs.

The murder mystery witnesses to two moral laws: “Thou shalt not kill,” and “Be sure your sin will find you out.” The first appears in the inevitable discovery of the offender. The second has a definite application as well, for it is always some part of the sin itself, some small detail that the murderer failed to consider, that betrays him. The murder mystery assures us that sin is, and always will be, vulnerable. The orderly world in which the detective works delivers up its clues intact and intelligible; it offers the murderer no sanctuary, for the truth will always win out. “Thou shalt not kill,” for the victim’s blood calls to us from the ground.

This comforts us, of course. Our lives seldom work out so neatly. Most of what happens to us remains impervious to our minds. The murder mystery offers the reader a chance to exercise his reason on a limited number of facts, in the confidence that behind them lies a satisfactory pattern. That we have a rival, the detective, only whets our appetite for hard thinking. That behind the detective is another rival, the writer, assures us that there is a pattern, and that it will be hard to find.

The universe of the “ ’tec” evinces purpose, planning, design. Nothing happens outside the writer’s care; nothing has to be presumed irrelevant. Perfect economy is the rule.

In our detective stories [wrote Marjorie Nicolson] we find with relief a return to an older ethic and metaphysics: an Hebraic insistence upon justice as the measure of all things … a Calvinistic insistence, if you will, upon destiny, but a Calvinistic belief also in the need for tense and constant activity on the part of man.

To the clarity of its moral intention, the detective story sacrifices the complexity of real life. It is a type of “romance,” with moral issues crystallized into good and bad, white and black. Like fairy tales or myths, therefore, the detective story is escapist. But as Tolkien has reminded us, though escape from duty is infamous, escape from prison is only what every prisoner desires. The murder mystery allows us, for a moment, to dwell in the tents of reason and symmetry.

Why should a Christian read detective stories? First of all, of course, he should read them if and when he enjoys them. Not all the delights of literature are available in detective stories, as they are not all present in the tragedy or the lyric. But however rudimentary a man’s taste for rational exercise—or however withered by the artillery of an emotive civilization—it should provide a base for enjoying the detective story’s special pleasures.

Here the Puritan’s stern rebuke is almost automatically seen to be prudery. The detective story is not that “serious.” It does not pretend to be. It demands strict attention, and its aficionados offer passionate commitment as well. But it is a game, and its rewards are those of a game well played.

It is a civilized and comradely pastime. “To despise such stories,” wrote Chesterton, “is of all things the most despicable. It is like despising pantomimes or the public-houses or comic songs or common enjoyments of every kind that bind us into the brotherhood of man.”

Like romance, the detective story offers escape into another sort of world. Superficially, the mystery world is like ours; but essentially it is different. It is ruled by severe moral fiat: good is good and bad is bad, and good always wins. In actual experience most moral choices come not between good and bad but between good and good and bad and bad, and therefore exact the price of tension and regret. The detective story’s simplification of moral choice leads us away from this world into another, a dream-world, a romance.

The escape is not permanent. Just as a game lets us fight, kill, and exult, but not in earnest, the detective story requires that we cheer for the sleuth and execrate the villain without reference to real moral complexity. That, in God’s sight, Peter Wimsey’s frivolous pride may be as bad as his quarry’s passionate error, or even worse, is no concern of ours. That a casuist might explain away some of the villain’s guilt makes no difference. Within the limits of the game, white pieces play against black pieces—but not in earnest.

On the other hand, to the Christian the “romance” offers another side. However murky the river of actual moral life may be, the Christian holds by faith a vision of altogether clearer and deeper waters. Temporary, worldly confusions aside, the best good is finally separate from the worst bad. The Son works always in redemption, converting the evil to the good. But there is a difference; Christianity rests, finally, on a distinction of perfect clarity. In God’s sight, things are (and have been, and ever will be) that simple.

We may carry a certain amount of this into the detective story, while we recognize nonetheless that it is a limited and self-conscious genre. The mystery shows society redeemed from hidden evil, made innocent again, squaring its accounts. In “real life” this ideal condition may never occur. But it behooves us occasionally to step back from “real life,” if only to see more clearly the ideals that we serve amidst its confusions.

LIONEL BASNEY

Lionel Basney is associate professor of English, Houghton College, Houghton, New York.

It is now a century since Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology first appeared (1873–4). His study was part of an unseasonal blooming in Calvinistic theology, a blooming that also included the theologies of Strong, Shedd, and Smith. It appeared when Calvinism was entering the late autumn of its fortunes in American church life and when evangelicalism was about to gird itself for the conflict that, within sixty years, would leave it largely separated from the denominational mainstream. Hodge’s Systematic Theology is in large measure a summary of nineteenth-century evangelical faith, especially on its Calvinistic side, but was also a determining factor in the emergence of twentieth-century fundamentalism, at least in its early phase. Some have said that Hodge lies buried in these three stout volumes. They are wrong. It would be difficult to overestimate the influence that this study has had and continues to have in forming evangelical beliefs.

The ongoing influence of this great Princeton theologian is surprising. First, ours is not an age that takes kindly to verbose theologians. It is a time of Reader’s Digest, of summaries and précis, of instant communication, quick knowledge, speed reading. In such a time the demands that Hodge makes on the reader appear almost indecent.

Second, Hodge wrote for a church whose theological literacy was probably higher than ours. In his day, over a quarter of all journals and newspapers published in the land were religious, and by and large the level of discussion was high. Ordinary church members, less distracted than we are today, were able to enter into discussions, even on knotty Christian problems, with a fair amount of knowledge. Mark Twain noted this in describing Huck Finn’s experience of some “ornery preaching” one Sunday morning that brought forth its expected result afterwards—a long, animated discussion about faith, works, free will, and “preforeordestination.”

Hodge is not alone in refusing to die; there are other theological authors whose works continue to be reprinted. But a hundred years after the publication of his Systematic Theology is a good time to try to find the secrets of its longevity.

Charles Hodge was born into a pious family whose ancestral roots reached into both English and Irish soil. He was taught the catechism by Ashbel Green, whom he would encounter again as a teacher at Princeton College. He seems to have been one of those remarkable children who, even if they see and hear evil, apparently do very little of it. There were, of course, some moments of indiscretion, one of which Hodge recounted in this way:

I cannot recollect that I ever uttered a profane word, except once. It was when I was thirteen or fourteen years old. I was walking with my brother, and struck my foot against a stone, and said: “D—n it.” My brother was shocked, and exclaimed: “Why, Charles!!” … I am thankful that no similar experience ever occurred to me. A. A. Hodge, The Life of Charles Hodge [New York, 1880, p. 13].

One is reminded of Philip Spener, the father of German Pietism, who was once asked if he had ever been a bad boy. No, replied Spener, he had not—except once. As a child he had decided to go to a dance, but no sooner had he arrived at the hall than his conscience began to accuse him so loudly that he fled, never to visit such a place of conviviality again!

Hodge’s education was unusual for its thoroughness and its Presbyterian emphasis. He went from small schools to Princeton Academy, Princeton College, and the newly founded Princeton Theological Seminary. A few years after he had begun his teaching career, in 1826 and 1827, he went to Germany for the finishing touches.

Before the nineteenth century, theological education had been carried out either under private tutors or in the colleges. In 1807, however, Andover Theological Seminary was founded. Five years later, in 1812, Princeton Theological Seminary was begun with Archibald Alexander as its first professor. One day, as Alexander was walking around the college, he came upon Hodge and heard the young student struggling with the pronunciation of a Greek word. With friendship and fatherly advice, Alexander drew him into the circle of ministerial students at the seminary. Hodge then studied there under the guidance of his mentor, and in 1822, following the earlier appointments of Alexander and Samuel Miller, he became Princeton’s third professor.

Others, of course, such as B. B. Warfield, would be added to the faculty and would through their achievements make Princeton a center of influence. Yet Hodge early became the spokesman for “Princeton theology,” its most characteristic and perhaps formidable representative. He taught there from 1822 almost to his death in 1878, except for the two years abroad. The celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of his professorship in 1872 was without precedent in American academic life. Even the town shops in Princeton closed on the day set aside to honor this aged patriarch, guide, and teacher of more than three thousand ministerial students.

As a Princeton professor Hodge became involved in the ecclesiastical and theological disputes that agitated Presbyterianism throughout the nineteenth century. There had always been two distinct mentalities, tendencies, or streams in American Presbyterianism, and these were always threatening to diverge. The one tended to be more objective, to favor theological precision and centralized church authority. This came to be known as the “Old School.” The other tendency, the “New School,” was more concerned with spontaneity, cultural relationship (sometimes at the price of compromise), and theological flexibility. The “Old School” was located mainly in Pennsylvania and the South, the “New School” in New York and the Midwest.

In the early part of the century the “Old School,” led by Princeton Seminary, undoubtedly had the upper hand whenever matters of dispute reached the General Assembly. During the middle years, between 1837 and 1869, the two parties were divided into separate denominations, each one claiming to be the authentic voice and continuation of Presbyterianism. Princeton’s ascendancy diminished as time passed, and in the years following denominational reunion the seminary fought some tenacious battles. The tension between the two schools was given scandalously tangible realization in a series of public heresy trials and disciplinary actions: David Swing (1874), William McCune (1877), Charles A. Briggs (1891), Henry Preserved Smith (1892), Harry Emerson Fosdick (1924), J. Gresham Machen (1935).

Although Hodge’s best-known writing is his Systematic Theology, his reputation and influence were not built on that. He was over seventy before he began writing it. We need to look elsewhere to find the reasons for his extraordinary theological influence. In doing so, we are led first to his many journal essays.

In 1825 Hodge began a theological quarterly entitled The Biblical Repertory, devoted mainly to reprinting European biblical scholarship. It was not entirely successful so in 1829 it was reorganized as The Biblical Repertory and Theological Review. Hodge edited it for the next forty years, and in 1871, the British Quarterly Review went so far as to say that it had become “the greatest purely theological Review that has ever been published in the English tongue.”

As editor, Hodge wrote approximately one hundred and forty essays for the journal. Here one sees him not so much developing his ideas as applying them. Nathaniel Taylor of Yale, Moses Stuart of Andover, Finney of Oberlin, and Bushnell at Hartford were all taken to task for their departures, small or great, from historic faith. Yet unflinching as he was in his views, Hodge rarely ever lost sight of issues in the heat of personal debate. When he locked horns with an opponent, it was invariably because he believed his adversary was in error, never because he merely disliked him. In these encounters one sees the ideas of Princeton theology assuming a remarkable clarity and power; these, in fact, are among the qualities that made it so influential. In addition to these essays, Hodge also wrote commentaries on Romans, the Corinthians correspondence, and Ephesians as well as a massive study of Presbyterian history, a critique of Darwinism, and some lesser studies. His Systematic Theology was a crowning touch to this literary activity. Begun in 1867 and completed in 1872, it is an entirely fresh recasting of his thinking on matters theological and fills more than two thousand pages.

LETTER ON ITINERANCY (1742/3)

SIR,

these two angels of the End,

James Davenport & Benjamin Pomeroy,

came pretending visions,

as two witnesses to condemn

the “blind & dead” ministers hereabouts;

“a multitude flock’d after,”

singing in streets & lanes

and the like unruly actions.

We heard them shout

of the hell-flames licking our cheeks

& shudderd.

Also, they made holocaust

of books of heresy (such sermons

as the unconverted preach);

& stripping in a most public place,

then made a promiscuous heap

of “Cloaks, Petty Coats and Breeches,”

to burn those idols of thread—

“thereby stumbling the Minds of many.”

Their bodies being arrested

yet they made a mock at our laws

and government, speaking

of the sudden dissolution in flame

and, as false Elijahs, calling

fire down to consume the sheriff.

No fire has yet fallen

thru their empty words

& Mr. Davenport lately abjures

his former works of madness.

Now those voices of shout & singing

from hedges and fields

beyond our meeting-house

are silent; & we await the fall

of fire on our quiet altar

to illumine our reasonable religion.

YRS &c.,

ANTI-ENTHUSIASTICUS

EUGENE WARREN

What kind of theology is it? Why has it survived the corrosive passage of time, defied our predilection for quick, easy knowledge, and overcome our impatience with verbose writers? To answer these questions we need to understand what distinguishes Hodge from other theologians.

In an age neurotically absorbed in self-images (see, for example, Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life), theologians would not go far wrong if they collectively hired a good PR man. For many people, a theologian is someone who troubles the Church, someone who speaks with a false air of authority because he claims access to higher and more reliable knowledge than the laity, and someone who has the irritating habit of working in a cloud of technical and incomprehensible verbiage.

This is not what Hodge was like. Instead, we find in his work an almost classic realization of the kneeling, as opposed to sitting, theologian. He had seen the grace and glory of God, and in his Systematic Theology he turns to the world to explain his vision. When he writes, he writes clearly; what he writes has that extraordinary and elusive ability of reproducing in the reader the sense of worship that was its own original inspiration. Here is no armchair theologian, but one who has felt the deep imprint of divine truth in his own inner life and whose sole desire, as a result, is to let God be God over all that he thinks, does, and writes. What Hodge writes, therefore, has a purpose seldom found in contemporary theological writing, whose jargon and complexity are lost on all but an initiated elite.

Why is so much technical theology still being written today? Judging from the reams of complex linguistic and historical data issuing from the university presses, one might well conclude that an omnivorous army of scholars is poised nearby, eager to consume every newly discovered verbal form. It is not so. One does not have to be overly cynical to agree with Hexter that these presses have gone into high production to advance not so much the world of learning as the private careers of the learned. Every ambitious scholar wants to be able to demonstrate in print his mastery of this whole world of strange equations and forgotten languages. Professional mobility upward (promotion) and sideward (a better job) depends on what and how much such a person has published.

The reason why others buy books that are so self-serving is probably found in the nature of our acquisitive society. Books are often bought, not to be read, but to be collected and then dispensed with as are all other commodities in an economy geared to obsolescence and waste. Therefore when we ask what connection there is between the thunderous outpouring of theological writings today and the business of finding God, of learning how to evaluate life on the same terms and in the same way as he does, we must be prepared for some disappointing answers.

For Hodge, writing theology was not merely a professional duty or a way to make money; it was a sacred task whose central purpose was to enlarge the reader’s understanding of the God of whom Scripture speaks. That, more than anything else, explains why his writing has survived. On his fiftieth anniversary as a professor, Hodge recalled some words that his German friend Neander had written on a gift and that he had adopted as a motto: “Nothing in ourself, all things in the Lord; whom alone to serve is a glory and joy.”

Hodge’s Systematic is a simplification of François Turrettini’s Institutio Theologiae Elencticae, a two-thousand-page classic that was the standard theological text at Princeton for generations. Seminarians were expected to memorize it at the rate of twenty to forty pages per day, working from the Latin. They must have breathed a sigh of relief when the venerable professor finally agreed to replace it with a text of his own in English! Both theologies are arranged topically, but the multitude of divisions in Turrettini is simplified and reduced to four in Hodge: God, man, salvation and “end things.” The division between topics is not always clean. For example, the person of Christ appears in one place and his divinity in another. There are some surprising omissions, too, such as a discussion of the doctrine of the Church, which Hodge would have been eminently qualified to provide.

Yet a kind of self-evident logic knits together the entire three volumes. Rarely does it seem that these volumes are made up of separate essays that have been bound together. Hodge had an extraordinary knack for seeing how aspects of biblical truth relate to one another, how, in fact, they constitute a many-sided whole without ever being swallowed up by that whole. And nowhere does one ever find even the suggestion that something is to be accepted because Hodge says so.

If Charles Hodge’s theology is vulnerable to criticism it is probably in two quite unexpected areas. First, C. P. Krauth, the Lutheran dogmatician, observed that as a Calvinistic divine, Hodge built on only a part of his heritage. He restricted his attention almost wholly to the scholastic Calvinists of the seventeenth century instead of viewing the whole tradition from Calvin to his own day. Charles Briggs even accused him of having deviated from the standards of the Westminster Confession because of his love of these scholastics. More telling than this, however, has been the observation that Hodge (and the Westminster Confession also) went beyond Calvin without satisfactorily explaining why it was necessary to do so.

Others, however, have focused on a different area of weakness. Why was Hodge able to do his work in blithe disregard for the revolutionary developments that had followed the work of both Spinoza and Kant? Horace Bushnell was able to brush aside Princetonian orthodoxy as being antediluvian precisely because it was pre-Kantian in its outlook. Actually, Hodge and his colleagues felt untroubled by Kant because they thought he had been satisfactorily answered by the “Common Sense” Realism of Hamilton, Reid, and Stewart. Obviously others were not so easily convinced that Kant could be ignored. From an apologetical viewpoint, a weakness in Hodge’s theology would seem to be his apparent lack of interest in such philosophical matters. Nevertheless, he still towered over his contemporaries; he towers over ours, a man of fine theological sense, a gifted expositor of Scripture, and a man whose transparent piety was always a striking and sometimes disturbing reminder of the One whom he served.

Why haven’t there been more Charles Hodges during the intervening century? Perhaps the question is unfair, for genius is notable first of all for being rare. Had there been many others of comparable stature and achievements in the recent past, Hodge might even have been forgotten. Nevertheless, in taking another look at the Systematic Theology we are forced to wonder why it remains one of the landmarks on the evangelical scene. What has been going on in the evangelical church in the last hundred years that makes this theology so unusual?

Perhaps we have gone beyond that age of theology-making of which Hodge is so excellent an example. Perhaps the never-ending literary output of biblical scholars today makes it well nigh impossible that anyone will master this world of learning adequately enough to do for us, in a post-Kantian and post-Christian world, what Hodge did for his. Perhaps what we need now is apologetic rather than systematic studies, since so many of the truths that Hodge took for granted are no longer self-evident and have first to be established.

But the small amount of serious theological writing that evangelicals have produced, especially in this century, is not fully explained by any of these reasons. What has been lost is the desire to write great theology. It is a loss that must be debited to the accounts of both the Church at large and its teaching institutions. Both have been willing to live with smaller horizons than in the past; indeed, each has imprisoned the other within its own confined expectations. The fact that Hodge’s Systematic Theology continues to be printed and read suggests, however, that these self-imposed barriers are not always seen as normative or as desirable. And where such a realization lives, there is always the possibility that a fresh flowering of evangelical theology, in its best and most life-giving form, might again appear as suddenly and unexpectedly as it sometimes has in the past.