Page 5804 – Christianity Today (2025)

Persons Of The World, Arise!

For about the fiftieth time in recent weeks, a bit of correspondence crossed the Eutychean window-sill signed by a “chairperson”—in this case, a male. Inasmuch as (1) “chairwoman” is common in both early and recent literature and (2) the masculine-sounding ending-man can be used to designate a person of either sex, “chairperson” seems a deliberate provocation.

Of course, radical thinkers will be quick to note the possible connotations of these changes in our language. According to Orwell’s prophecy in 1984, the government of the future would attempt to alter language so that it could no longer express the traditional values and thus alert people to what the government was doing to them. In fact, America’s own beloved Department of Labor has issued a number of directives intended to banish from spoken and written Middle Bureauc-ratese, if not from English altogether, all words related to labor matters that could be interpreted as referring to only one sex and not the other.

In most cases the -man ending in English isn’t sexually specific, any more than are the masculine endings -or and -er in words like doctor and teacher. But -man (and -woman) is somehow a little more human than -person. Person comes from the Latin persona, as in the old expression dramatis personae, and originally meant nothing more than actor. It is a legal, an abstract term, as shown by the fact that not only friendly small-town corporations but also giant international ones such as ITT are considered persons by the law.

The abstract, legalistic, fundamentally inhuman associations of person are further revealed by the fact that it has been successfully attached to “chair-” to describe a sort of abstract, legal, or governmental functioner, but so far not to professions where the human element is primary and essential: we still have firemen (and women) for example. When the policeman or -woman on the corner becomes the policeperson at the “security organ” (cf. The Gulag Archipelago), something rather gruesome will have happened. Maybe it would be wise to demand masculine and feminine endings for Social Security numbers, before it’s too late.

EUTYCHUS VI

A Matter Of Motive

This is to clear up a misunderstanding which was apparent in Ronald J. Sider’s otherwise favorable review of my book The Evangelical Renaissance (July 5). I would not say that secular work per se is spiritual work, but I would affirm that secular work done in the name of Christ and for the advancement of the kingdom becomes spiritual work, since it then has a spiritual motivation and goal. I think it is necessary to distinguish between the sacred and the secular if we are to avoid a kind of pantheism, but we must never separate the two lest we fall into either an other-worldly mysticism or a this-worldly naturalism. I rejoice in the growing social witness of the evangelical community, and my only hope is that it will always be integrally related to the spiritual message of the coming kingdom of God.

DONALD G. BLOESCH

Professor of Theology

Dubuque Theological Seminary

Dubuque, Iowa

Limited Production

In his “Response” (June 21) to Carl F. H. Henry’s article on the young evangelicals, Jim Wallis writes that his goal was “to clarify some points that could foster division and misunderstanding among evangelicals.” May I say that he missed his mark considerably. His arrogant, “we’ve-got-the-goods” attitude will do little to promote any unity or understanding. If Wallis could only muster the same sort of sweet openness toward the members of Christ’s body with whom he disagrees—such as the dispensationalists, whom he excoriates as ethically crippled heretics—as he advocates toward those who promulgate true heresy, he might then make a unifying contribution. Until that time he can expect to produce little but strife.

As an evangelical who is young, I sense that Wallis and company have something to say I need to hear. But their shell of belligerent self-righteousness and sophomoric iconoclasm is difficult for me to get past. Wallis sounds more like the New Left than the New Testament. I have not yet been able to obtain Quebedeaux’s book, but I hope he writes with a more sensitive and humble spirit of his fellow Christians than does Wallis.

A. DUANE LITFIN

Metea Baptist Church

Lucerne, Ind.

After reading Dr. Henry’s original article, “Revolt on Evangelical Frontiers,” I felt that there needed to be a response from some of the “young evangelicals” themselves. Jim Wallis’s article is precisely what needed to be said. His response brought into focus many of my feelings regarding the role and contribution which we have to make to the Church today. This seems to be particularly significant at the point of our understanding of the claims of the Kingdom of God, in the light of the economic and political system within which we find ourselves. I also would affirm Wallis’s comment that it is possible that the young evangelicals take biblical authority more seriously in their socio-political attitudes than do some of their “establishment” brothers. Too often I have sensed the tendency to respond to society from the standpoint of the status quo, rather than lead society from the foundation of our biblical commitment. In short, Jim Wallis’s article was a concise expression of what some of us are struggling with today.

JAMES A. HARNISH

Trinity United Methodist Church

DeLand, Fla.

Worship With Watts

The concise, informative articles in the July 5 issue under the title “Young Man, Give Us Something Better” (William L. Coleman, Norman V. Hope) were greatly appreciated. Upon reading them, I began formulating the next Sunday’s service around the hymns of Isaac Watts found in the Lutheran Hymnal. The people really appreciated this worship experience.

D. J. POGANSKI

Zion Lutheran Church

San Luis Obispo, Calif.

Tools Of The Trade

On reading in “Eutychus and His Kin” (June 7) the reactions to Carl Henry’s review of Richard Quebedeaux’s book, I wonder why your correspondents are uneasy about having “acceptance of higher criticism” imputed to them. Since higher criticism is neither more nor less than the assessment of the structure, date, and authorship of literary works (biblical or non-biblical), it is part of the business of every serious Bible student. I know that in some uninstructed quarters it is viewed with suspicion, if not used as a term of abuse, but a practitioner of this discipline expects to see it treated more accurately in the pages of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

F. F. BRUCE

Rylands Professor of Biblica Criticism and Exegesis

University of Manchester

Manchester, England

David Moberg repeats a commonly held conception when he says, “To my knowledge, the first use of the term ‘new evangelicalism’ was by Harold J. Ockenga in the October–December issue of the Bulletin of Fuller Theological Seminary.” I am not certain who coined the term “new evangelicalism.” I do know that Carl Henry used the term in a series of three articles on “The Vigor of the New Evangelicalism” in the January, March, and April, 1948, issues of Christian Life and Times.

MILLARD ERICKSON

Professor of Theology

Bethel Theological Seminary

St. Paul, Minn.

Covering Celebration

I hasten to compliment CHRISTIANITY TODAY and Cheryl Forbes on the magnificent article she wrote covering the installation of our new presiding bishop, John M. Allin (The Refiner’s Fire, “Te Deum Laudamus,” July 5). I don’t know when I’ve read such a beautiful story. The whole article was splendid, but the first three paragraphs were outstanding!… Just a few weeks ago I sent in my subscription renewal for a five-year period; glad that I did it then, for after reading this article I might have been moved to make it ten! Again, my compliments on a well-produced Christian magazine.

GERALD L. CLAUDIUS

St. John’s Episcopal Church

Kansas City, Mo.

More Than Observers

It is good to see that CHRISTIANITY TODAY mentioned that which has previously been untongued (to use Michael Novak’s phrase) (“That Roof Over Your Head,” July 5): the return to the city by whites’ and the housing problems for the poor which accompany this move.… I was disappointed, however, that the editorial states, “Christian concern for the poor ought to be manifested in this situation but how? The problem is too new to hazard specific corrective proposals.”

As an elected representative to SEPAC, established by the mayor’s office to watch-dog urban renewal in the South End of Boston, … I wish we Christians could have helpful advice to give one another before it is too late to be of any practical value. Already the shape of future housing in the South End is probably irreversably determined, and many feel the poor are not receiving just consideration, largely due to local economic and political considerations. We must do more than just observe changes in our society. By the time such movements are generally recognized by the population as a whole, it is probably too late to influence the direction the movement will take.

RALPH A. KEE

Director

Boston Urban Ministries

Boston, Mass.

The ‘Theology’ Of George Harrison

The Beatles, an extension of the heady pragmatic materialism of the late fifties, claimed they were more popular than Jesus Christ. Their song “Eleanor Rigby” sees the church as an irrelevant symbol, “Father McKenzie preparing sermons that no one will hear.” In an early press release George Harrison says, “There’s nothing better, for me, than a bit of peace and quiet. Sitting around a big fire with your slippers on and watching the telly. That’s the life!”

This narrow approach to reality gave way to a drug period. But eventually drugs offered too limited a vision. Allen Ginsberg put it this way: “The Beatles satiated every fantasy in relation to the material universe and realized that in order to go any further they would have to go into inner space.”

George Harrison prepared the way for this inner journey by traveling to India in 1965 to buy a sitar. He met Ravi Shankar and spent a few months meditating. The first effects of this study became apparent on the album “Revolver” and especially in the song “Norwegian Wood.” Overnight the sitar became a popular instrument, and Indian culture became fascinating to Westerners. This came to a head in the promotion of a kind of Hinduism by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and in its acceptance by the Beatles. In a TV interview Harrison asserted, “I believe in reincarnation.… You keep coming back until you have got it straight. The ultimate thing is to manifest divinity and become one with the Creator.”

The Beatles aided the meteoric rise of the Guru Maharishi, though later they separated themselves from his commercialism. “We have not broken with the thoughts of meditation,” said George Harrison. “We have only broken with the Maharishi and his ideas of making the whole thing subject to mass media.”

The synthesis of the drug interest and the growing awareness of religion was expressed in the Beatles’ unified work called “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” In “Within You Without You,” George Harrison expresses the desire for true spiritual values:

When you’ve seen beyond yourself,

Then you may find peace of mind

Is waiting there;

And the time will come

When you see we are all one.

This interest in religion shown by the Beatles at the end of the sixties totally left out Christianity. The trend toward Jesus got a gradual start with “Let It Be,” which was a hymn to the Virgin Mary. At about this time Harrison said in an interview:

The only reason for being here is to have full understanding of the spiritual aspect of life. Eastern religion taught me that the ideal is to become one with God through living-work, self-control, meditation and yoga. If you sweep roads then you should do it for whoever you have chosen as your deity. If you work for him then he will do his work for you.

The inner tensions and developing personal positions of the individual Beatles ultimately led to their breakup. This is expressly seen in the album “John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band,” which stands in contrast to George Harrison’s single-minded “All Things Must Pass.” It’s a collection of songs about Lennon’s feelings—personal rather than cosmic, emotional rather than meditative, cathartic rather than persuasive, and disillusioned with religion.

“All Things Must Pass,” released in 1970, and “Living in the Material World,” released in 1973, give an overall picture of George Harrison’s religious development. Although religion is a major theme in “All Things Must Pass,” it is love viewed as religion: Love is God rather than God is love. Harrison becomes the preacher of love. In “Living in the Material World” love is still present, but Krishna is the central point. There is a marked ambiguity about “My Sweet Lord.” Jesus is just one avatar or descent of god among many, Krishna and Rama being others. The “Hallelujah” switches to “Hare Krishna” as Harrison reduces incarnation to a mere emanation of the One. By the time of the Bangladesh Concert, George Harrison was prefixing “My Sweet Lord” with Hare Krishna, making clear the direction of his thought. Billy Preston appears by the grace of God, but the whole project is presented to Sri Krishna.

When “Living in the Material World” appeared it was evident that George Harrison had thrown off all connections with his Christian heritage. Again we read, “All Glories to Sri Krishna.” The Lord of George Harrison’s life is Krishna, emanation of Vishnu. George Harrison wants us to be under no illusions—he is a Hindu. In the song “The Light that has Lighted the World” Harrison gives his personal testimony, thanking all who have helped him:

I’m grateful to anyone,

That is happy or free

For giving me hope

While I’m looking to see

The Light that has lighted the world.

In “Awaiting on You All” Harrison sings:

You don’t need a love-in,

You don’t need a bed pan,

You don’t need a horoscope

Or a microscope to see

The mess that you’re in.…

You’ve been polluted so long … and

You don’t need no church house

And you don’t need no Temple

And you don’t need no rosary

Beads or those books you read

To know that you have fallen.

In a prayer, “Hear me, Lord,” he implores forgiveness for his neglect of God. Here he seems to be addressing the Jesus of his youth, but placed in a Hindu context. Repentance offers escape from material existence, viewed as evil in itself. Man has a native “Jesus” consciousness just waiting to be realized. In “Awaiting on You All” it is spelled out:

You don’t need a passport,

You don’t need no visas,

You don’t need to designate

Or to emigrate

Before you can see Jesus;

If you open up your heart,

Then you will

See He’s right there.

He always was and will be.

This is not a matter of atonement with God through the one incarnation of the Personal-Infinite I AM. No, by merely “chanting” the names of the Lord one is free. “The Lord is awaiting on you all to awaken and see.…” The Lord of Harrison’s lyrics waits for sleeping men to wake up; the Lord of the Bible reaches down to dead men and gives them resurrection life. In Harrison’s view, then, Jesus is reduced to an emanation of the absolute soul.

In “Living in the Material World” George Harrison tells us his material history—his meeting the other Beatles, his absorption with success, and his general sense of frustration.

Senses never gratified,

Only swelling like a tide

That could drown me in the material world.

Harrison views the world as evil and, giving the proceeds of the album to charity, suggests that he views making music as getting soiled by the world.

Got a lot of work to do,

Try to get a message through

And get back out of this material world.

Is this charity merely tokenism? Harrison’s palatial home shown in a picture on the album jacket certainly seems very much a part of the material world.

George Harrison treats Krishna as a personal god. It is certainly true that the ordinary Hindu views the gods as personal. This Bhakti or devotional Hinduism teaches the need for a personal approach to religion. The main thinker of this school was the twelfth-century teacher Rāmānuta. He believed in a pulsating universe, and he thought that God creates ad infinitum. He saw the soul as like God but not identical to God. He definitely believed in a personal god. However, Rāmānuta never showed how the idea of an infinite universe and the idea of reincarnation could be thought not to lead one back to the impersonal origin of all things.

The dominant Hindu view is expressed in the eighth- or ninth-century Unity School of Sankara. He believed in One Reality and no dualism. He taught that a “lower” and a “higher” truth exist. As long as man believes in the reality of the multiple world, it exists for him through the cooperation of soul and matter that has arisen from the personal god who directs everything. When through meditation one attains the insight that all diversity is only maya, an illusory appearance, then the person seeking salvation becomes conscious of his identity with the All-in-One—the only true actual deity possessing the impersonal Absolute, the Brahma. Sankara elucidates the contradiction between the naïve realism of the childish man, who holds the world to be real and personal in origin, and the idealism of the Enlightened One, who realizes the absolute impersonality of all. Francis Schaeffer writes in He Is There and He Is Not Silent, “To the pantheist, the final wrong or tension … the final Karma, if you will, is the fact that he will not accept his impersonality. In other words, he will not accept who he is.”

This tension is manifest in George Harrison’s work. First it is seen in the idea of reincarnation. In the “Art of Dying” he sings:

There’ll come a time

When all of us must leave here;

Then nothing Sister Mary can do

Will keep me here with you.

There’ll come a time

When most of us return

Brought back by the desire

To be a perfect entity.

Or in “Give Me Love”: “Keep me free from birth.” Reincarnation is not me returning as personal but eternal soul manifesting itself in material forms.

In “Beware of Darkness,” we are told to beware of maya, illusion. In reality Krishna is not personal but only maya: an illusory personification of the impersonal. Perhaps in “Be Here Now” George Harrison is expressing this:

Now, is, here now

And it’s not what it was before;

Remember, now be here now

As it’s not like it was before—it was.

“It was” is the basis of all—the final impersonal; yet Harrison says, “I hope to get out of this place by the Lord Sri Krishna’s grace/My salvation from the material world.” Or in “That Is All”:

Silence often says much more

Than trying to say what’s been said before;

But that is all I want to do

To give my love to,

That’s all I’m living for,

Please let me love you more—and That is all.

The introduction of the “you” by Harrison is understandable but unwarranted if one takes Hinduism seriously. We have already seen George Harrison’s search for a personal deity expressed in his songs about love:

The Lord loves the one

That loves the Lord

And the law says if you don’t give

Then you don’t get loving.

But Hinduism, being impersonal at heart, cannot provide a consistent basis for a personal relationship between finite man and infinite God. It is only through God the Son, the Second person of the Trinity, in his incarnation as God and man, that the I-You relationship Harrison seeks can be found. Harrison’s “theology” is fragmentary and self-deceived, looking to Hinduism for the fulfillment of a longing that is an unconscious remainder of rejected and largely forgotten Christianity.

MICHAEL GARDE

Michael Garde, a Baptist, is a student at the Pontifical University, Maynooth, Ireland.

Christian worship is many things. It is an assertion—both inward and outward—of faith in Jesus Christ. It is an acknowledgment of the consequences and the implications of this faith, and it is a confession of failure to live up to these consequences and implications. Through worship the Holy Spirit increases the believer’s faith and commitment to Christ’s mission. Believers gather in public worship to strengthen and encourage one another and also to show concern for those outside the community of believers.

Worship is not limited to assertion and commitments. It also calls to mind and teaches the data of the faith. To borrow a term from the social sciences, the model of man’s predicament and God’s love presented in the Gospels and enlarged upon elsewhere is, Christians believe, the one most adequate to describe the world we know. This model consists of rational concepts, capable of being grasped intellectually. For example, God is characterized by such attributes as goodness, power, wisdom, immortality, justice, purpose. Because of this rationality, belief, as distinguished from feeling, is possible. Early Christian worship, by carrying over from the synagogue the reading and expounding of the Scriptures, recognized the importance of the educational element in worship. The emphasis on the Word in Scripture and sermon was renewed in the Reformation. We go to church not just to be reminded of what we were supposed to have learned in Sunday school, or to catch those odd bits and stories that somehow we have missed, or to hear a new angle on just how all of this can be applied in an ever-changing environment. Worship is not only a lecture or a seminar.

The bold, simple invitation in that marvelous opening “Let us worship God!” is to something more than a rally of the faithful. Man’s chief end may be to glorify God, but God provides the wherewithal for doing so. In worship, the primary action is God’s. A report in the Church of Scotland General Assembly puts it as follows:

Through the Holy Spirit God comes to meet us in worship, in the ministry of Words and Sacrament, and summons us to respond in faith and obedience and thanksgiving.… In our human, frail, broken, unworthy response, the Spirit helps us in our infirmities, lifting us up to Christ.… That is, the Spirit is not only speaking Spirit, but also interceding Spirit [“Report on the Doctrine and Practice of Public Worship in the Reformed Churches,” Blackwood, 1970, p. 8].

“We do not even know how we ought to pray,” writes Paul, “but through our inarticulate groans the Spirit himself is pleading for us, and God who searches our inmost being knows what the Spirit means” (Rom. 8:26, 27, NEB).

Rudolf Otto, in an attempt to explain these inarticulate groans, explored the importance of the non-rational in religion and attempted to analyze “the feeling which remains where the concept fails” (The Idea of the Holy, trans. by John W. Harvey, Oxford, 1950). Otto does not mean to suggest that religion is irrational, as that term is normally applied, nor does he wish to denigrate the rational component of religion. In his foreword to the first English edition (1923), he wrote, “The ‘irrational’ is today a favorite theme for all who are too lazy to think or too ready to evade the arduous duty of clarifying their ideas and grounding their convictions on a basis of coherent thought.” The feeling remains when the concept fails; it does not replace the concept.

Otto coined the word numinous to refer to that part of the holy which is left over when absolute goodness has explained as much as it can. The numinous cannot be taught; it can only be felt. It can be evoked or awakened only in the way in which anything that comes of the Spirit is awakened. Since it is the meaning left over when thought has gone as far as it can, it cannot be defined. It is inexpressible; Paul refers to it when he says, “Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift” (1 Cor. 9:15). It is the part of the holy we try feebly to describe in the avalanche of adjectives of the hymn by Walter Chalmers Smith:

Immortal, invisible, God only wise,

In light inaccessible hid from our eyes,

Most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days,

Almighty, victorious, thy great name we praise.

Unresting, unhasting, and silent as light,

Nor wanting, nor wasting, Thou rulest in might;

Thy justice like mountains high soaring above

Thy clouds which are fountains of goodness and love.

The numinous, wrote Otto, has a dual character encompassing both boundless awe and boundless wonder, both fear and fascination. The awesome aspect, the deepest and most fundamental element in all sincere religious emotion, found in outpourings of personal piety, in solemn rites and liturgies, and in “the atmosphere that clings to old religious monuments and buildings,” he called the mysterium tremendum (from tremo, tremble; also tremor, dread). The term, he insists, is an analogy or ideogram, since the dread expressed by tremor is not an ordinary dread. For primitive man, religious awe began in the feeling of something “uncanny,” “eerie,” or “weird,” and although numinous emotion in its fullest development is very different from mere “daemonic dread,” that feeling is part of its origin. The absolute unapproachability and absolute overpoweringness, which constitute the tremenda majestas or awe-inspiring majesty of God, form “the numinous raw material for the feeling of religious humility.” The wrath of God is “gravely disturbing to those persons who will recognize nothing in the divine nature but goodness, gentleness, love, and a sort of confidential intimacy, in a word, only those aspects of God which turn towards the world of men.” Nevertheless, insists Otto (and Kierkegaard), the disappearance of the uncanny and the awesome would be an essential loss.

But mysterium tremendum is more than tremor. The mysterious, itself also an ideogram, is denoted “the wholly other” or “that which is quite beyond the sphere of the usual, the intelligible, and the familiar, which therefore falls quite outside the limits of the ‘canny,’ and is contrasted with it, filling the mind with blank wonder and astonishment.”

This daunting aspect of the numinous is balanced by the attractive and fascinating. The other side of God’s wrath is his love that gave the world “his only begotten son” (John 3:16). Without this side, worship would be only “expiation and propitiation, the averting or the appeasement of the ‘wrath’ of the numen.” With only the daunting, it would be impossible to understand why the numinous is sought after and yearned for, why it is desired for its own sake and not just for the aid it can give to other activities. Love, mercy, pity, comfort are the concepts on the rational side of this non-rational element of fascination, but, as in all of the numinous, the concepts cannot exhaust it (Otto, pp. 5–40, esp. pp. 12, 14, 19, 20, 26, 32).

In worship, how do we know we have experienced the numinous and not simply joy or aesthetic rapture or moral uplifting? Otto’s answer that one simply knows seems not entirely satisfactory. He distinguishes among these states, but since he is dealing with undefinable feelings, his distinctions are essentially ones of assertion. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, on the other hand, has given the answer that the test of meditation is its effect on us when we are alone in an unchristian environment. Surely worship, like faith, without works is dead. Yet, as the previously quoted Church of Scotland report warns,

To stress mission at the expense of worship, or to subordinate worship to mission in the interest of a “relevant liturgy,” may be to fail to bring our missionary witness under the scrutiny of the Gospel. This could lead to a dangerous reductionism, where our message is more the reflection of contemporary secularism than faithful witness to the Word of the Cross [p. 12].

The numinous must inform mission.

On the other hand, mission may aid in evoking the numinous. To respond to a child in need can awaken a deeply moving religious experience. Likewise, participation in the fellowship of the community of believers can help in our search for the holy. The old example of the single coal whose fire dies versus the bed of coals whose warmth continues is no less true for its frequent telling. The educational-rational element of worship may also give rise to an experience of the numinous. In the human reading of the Scriptures or the preaching of the sermon, God may speak his Logos-revealing truth of his unknown, inscrutable Self. In music, nature, architecture, and prayer, feelings associated with the numinous may call it into consciousness. At other times such an experience may come not in the earthquake, wind, and fire, but in the still, small voice of silent worship.

One suspects that for most twentieth-century men and women, the numinous does not come often in strength. The secular world, for one thing, mitigates it. “Both imaginative ‘myth,’ when developed into a system, and intellectualist Scholasticism, when worked out to its completion,” writes Otto, “are methods by which the fundamental fact of religious experience is, as it were, simply rolled out so thin and flat as to be finally eliminated altogether” (p. 28). Through one way or another, most of us attempt to domesticate the holy, and this leads quickly to the transformation of our solemn assemblies into social gatherings, our communion with God into nothing more than friendliness with one another. Moreover, it is very difficult for us to distinguish the numinous from its associated feelings.

Nevertheless, it is important for the religious man to expect a Pentecost and to attend worship regularly not only for assertion and reminding but also because traces of the numinous are cumulative and its coming is unpredictable. Worship, therefore, is not optional; it is at the very center of the religious life. Reverence is not optional; it is essential for the expectation.

Men are not alike, and their worship could hardly be expected to remain the same from place to place and from time to time. The feelings associated with the numinous vary as the rest of life varies. Faith is possible for all stations of life; both the shepherds and the magi came to the Christ child. The numinous can be experienced by all. On the day of Pentecost the apostles spoke with tongues and every man heard in his own language: Parthians and Medes, Elamites and Mesopotamians, Egyptians and Romans, Jews and proselytes. Today the apostles’ descendants speak with tongues and men hear in their own language: the Jesus people and the suburban churches, the agape groups and the crusades, the God squad and the new Catholics, the university community and the country church.

The numinous may be awakened in any of these environments, but also in any the seeking can easily go astray. It can become no more than, for the highbrow, a search for the aesthetic, and for the holy-roller, wild emotionalism. Forms can ossify; practices that were meaningful at some earlier time may be maintained for sentiment or from habit or because there clings to them the memory that they once evoked the numinous. Neo-frontiersmen and neo-medieval men alike run the risk of making no distinction between tastes and values and, in the defense of the former, may lose the latter. Our poverty of worship may well be due to the desperate holding by many people to the superficial and the rejection by even more people of these same superficialities as nothing more than silly pomposity.

The constant search for the meaningful is not the constant search for the new, of course. It is just as easy to be busy changing the superficial as it is to be diligent in maintaining it. If religious language must of necessity be poetic or symbolic language, then why throw over a history rich in symbols? The Sanctus can take on meaning far beyond its mere words for the person familiar with only a bit of its history. And if the symbols are not very meaningful for modern man, there is always a remedy for ignorance. The church can lose its own soul in an age of secularization if it makes too many compromises with the culture.

The forms, whatever they are, must speak both to the real-life experiences of the worshipers and to the truths of the Gospel. They must remind us of the love and mercy of God and also of his majesty and awesomeness. They must be of the sort that will awaken within us that essential religious experience which is beyond rational concept.

On a late afternoon flight from Detroit to Minneapolis, my colleague slipped into the window seat and I took the seat on the aisle. But on this crowded flight we could not have the luxury of an empty seat between us. It was soon occupied by a young businessman who in the course of conversation discovered he was sandwiched between two seminary professors. “That’s interesting,” he said. “I have a young fellow working for me who is planning to enroll in seminary next year. I don’t know why he would do a thing like that; he’s one of the best engineers I’ve ever had. He really used to live a wild life, too, but there’s been a big change in him recently. I don’t understand it. Maybe getting married made the difference.” Gently I shared with him the fact that “if one is in Christ, he is a new creation.” It was a reminder to me that the doctrine of regeneration is a perplexity to the world. And it is also a doctrine that Christians should reexamine periodically.

The English word “regeneration” is a translation of a Greek word that occurs alone only once in Scripture, in Matthew 19:28, and there the concept is eschatological rather than personal-individual. (It also appears in a compound form in John 3.) But there are many other ways in which the phenomenon is indicated in the Scriptures, and our understanding of the term must include these references. The believer is spoken of as “born of God” or “by the word of God” in John 1:12, 13, in 1 John 2:29; 5:1, 4, in James 1:18, and in 1 Peter 1:3, 23. He is designated a “new creation” in Second Corinthians 5:17. The process or event is called “renewing of the mind” in Romans 12:2, “renewing of the Holy Spirit” in Titus 3:5, “resurrection from the dead” in Ephesians 2:6, “being quickened” in Ephesians 2:1, 5. The principle of these various verses is that when a person accepts Jesus Christ, God performs a supernatural work upon his life, and it changes him so sharply that the phenomenon can only be called a new birth.

This concept of new birth is difficult for us to understand, just as it was for Nicodemus long ago. Can we find a concept that is the basis and ground of new birth and thus unlocks its meaning? The doctrine of new birth appears to be inextricably linked with the concept of union with Christ in the teaching of both Jesus and Paul. If we can grasp this in terms of our day, perhaps the new birth will fall into an understandable pattern.

Jesus not only told Nicodemus, “You must be born again” (John 3:7), but also insisted that he had come to give life, abundant life, and that he was the only source of this life (John 10:10). He tied this life so closely to him that he spoke of believers as eating his flesh and drinking his blood (John 6:47–59). He pictured the connection between himself and his followers to be like that of a vine and its branches (John 15): unless a man abides in Christ and Christ’s words abide in that man, he cannot bear fruit. The branch has no independent life, and neither has the Christian, so far as this type of life is concerned.

Paul, too, makes much of this concept of union with Christ. In Second Corinthians 5:17, where he speaks of being “a new creation,” he says, “If any one is in Christ.…” In the same context, “… that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (v. 21). Elsewhere he writes of “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27). For him, as for Jesus himself, the essential basis of this new life was to be the union between the believer and the Lord.

Many analogies to this union have been offered. Some suggest a sort of mystical oneness; others point to a moral empathy. Foreign as it appears to our contemporary way of thinking, what seems to underlie this union is the idea of blending or merging two selves into one.

An image that immediately comes to mind is that of marriage. Paul pictured the relation of Christ and believers (corporately—the Church) as like that of a husband and wife. In a marriage, individual identities and privileges are to a considerable extent subordinated to those of the partnership. Where property is held in joint tenancy, for instance, the husband or wife cannot dispose of the property without the agreement of the spouse. In a sense, the individuals have in certain respects ceased to be. Important decisions and plans are not made unilaterally. Each partner accepts the assets and liabilities of the other. The two persons have become one person.

Another contemporary model is the merger of two corporations. The assets and liabilities of both are brought together; no longer are there individual balance sheets for the two. The newly formed corporation possesses all that the two formerly had. Ideas, plans, property, are all brought together. Personnel of each organization interpenetrate what had been the structure of the other.

Paul seems to be saying that the necessary condition for the presence of the new life is the surrender of individual autonomy into a union with Christ. Here the independent claims to righteousness, correct opinion, decision, have been abandoned. This means that the Christian no longer lives and functions as an independent individual, even in relationship to Jesus Christ. It is now “Millard Erickson and Jesus Christ, incorporated.” All my assets and liabilities (sin) have become his. His assets are jointly owned by me now.

This merger leads to the manifestation of new life in the individual. Now, in the “merger,” not only is the religious standing of the persons combined, but the feelings, thoughts, and actions of the two are brought together. Thus, as the Christian thinks, it is not his thoughts alone but Christ’s thoughts in him. As he feels, Christ’s feelings penetrate his being. As in a marriage, the emotions of one partner influence those of the other. The new life is more than just an external personality influence. Christ actually affects the springs of the believer’s feeling and thinking. Jesus is more than merely a very good friend; he directly enters the personality of the believer.

This does not mean that union with Christ obliterates the individual personality of the believer. In marriage, the personalities of the two parties are not lost but enhanced. The strengths of each are combined, and the influence of each brings out qualities latent in the personality of the other. Together the two can do what neither could have done separately. Love finds and evokes the best in the other.

Rather than restricting, the very act of giving up complete independence produces desirable results. The self-giving and self-restraint that marriage requires produce qualities such as unselfishness that might not develop in isolation. The interaction, the give-and-take between two different personalities, develops or rounds out each.

Jesus said that the person who saves or keeps his life actually loses it, and that he who gives up his life for Christ finds it (Luke 9:24). As his strength becomes ours we are enabled to do and to become that of which we were not capable independently. “The real you” is not submerged in this experience; it most fully appears here and only here.

The change that results from union with Christ is incomprehensible to unregenerate man. Jesus found this in his conversation with Nicodemus. “How can a man be born when he is old?” asked Nicodemus. “Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus really did not attempt to explain this fact to the teacher of Israel. He compared it to the blowing of the wind. One hears the sound, knows that the wind exists, yet does not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with the new birth of the Holy Spirit: its reality is discerned through its effects. Rather little is said theoretically about the how of the phenomenon; much, however, is said about its results.

How is this doctrine related to other concepts of our day? Is it “relevant”—does it speak to the ideas and experience of modern men?

The idea of new birth is first a denial of the optimism that characterizes the thinking of some moderns. The belief that man is basically good or perfectible underlies many social schemes. While evil and imperfection are acknowledged to exist, they are generally attributed to various influences in society. If these influences could be eliminated or negated, man would emerge in his natural state—desiring, willing, and doing what is good. Sometimes the alteration of these influences involves modifying the economic pattern, sometimes the political organization, sometimes the social structures. Some people advocate gradual modification; others insist upon revolutionary overthrow of the authoritarian powers. The common ground is the belief that man’s problem is not internal but external. He is capable of making himself what he ought to be.

The idea of new birth stands squarely opposed to this ideal view of man. New birth is needed, because the efforts of man are not sufficient to meet the requirements of God. The change is not something that can be effected by human willing or human effort (John 1:13). It must be accomplished by the Spirit of God. Man needs to place his confidence in God, not in man.

Here too is a denial of an opposite idea: the pessimism resulting from a belief in mechanism and determinism. Some persons despair of altering human nature. All is irrevocably determined and will surely come to pass. Man does what he does because of forces that have permanently shaped his personality—his ways of feeling, thinking, acting. Nothing can break through these fixed patterns of causation. The only way to change man’s behavior is to modify these causes or to introduce other forces. The message of the new birth is that the natural is not the whole of reality, that there is a supernatural realm more powerful than the natural.

Further, there is a rejection of any type of non-rational fatalism. In some circles today, the most significant question to ask a person is, “What is your sign?” Astrology is a belief that the events and fortunes of one’s life are determined by factors that cannot be plotted by the usual “scientific” methods. Other varieties of belief maintain that “fate,” some vague indistinguishable force, controls the happenings of life, both internal and external to the person. Other forms of belief in the occult abound. The new birth, however, is an emphatic reminder not only that the beginning of this new quality of life is a result of the plan of an intelligent benevolent being, but also that there is a continuation of this intelligent plan. Irrationality, which breeds pessimism, is not the norm.

Finally, there is the affirmation here that good ultimately is superior to evil. Man is conscious of the power of evil in the world, so much so that the problem of evil is perhaps the most severe intellectual challenge to Christianity. This sweeping problem is seen in smaller scale as the force of sin in the life of the individual. Even when he desires to do good, there is a drag on his efforts. The cruelty of man to his fellow man is poignant evidence that something has gone wrong with God’s creation. And man’s efforts to overcome this evil, both within himself and society, appear doomed to failure.

Regeneration means that this evil in man is not invulnerable. Man can be changed, made alive, given new energy and direction. There is cause for optimism and hope, for there is an all-powerful God who is at work not only in the world but in the individual lives of believers.

The well-known text “With God all things are possible” (Matt. 19:26) was spoken by Jesus not about God’s ability to construct or to lift infinitely large rocks but about his ability to change human hearts. As much as the world has changed since this doctrine was first declared, the truth of the doctrine is undiminished, and it gives us confidence for our tasks as Christian witnesses to the grace of God. We can still say with Paul, “I am not ashamed of the gospel: it is the power of God for salvation to every one who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.”

COMPLAINT: GOD’S PATIENCE

If I were the Truth, wouldn’t I

gather the errant quickly

by hook or by crook?

Use a snapping bait,

a staff with a switch-blade,

a little threat?

Enough of everyone’s hedging, holding

back, trifling with his Maker.

I would not hear of Will;

Fierce Talon God, I’d

drop them roughly into Life

on their sweet

soul’s pomposity;

kidnap them into The Kingdom, War

whoop!

O but who

in the hot sun quietly

as though still on vacation

is rippling a pool with his rod,

relentlessly climbing through tangled briers

for one caught, bleating sheep? What

kind

of shepherd or fisherman? What

sort of

suitor or dove.

SANDRA DUGUID

Whenever I come to the town of Lausanne I always think of a corpulent Englishman named Edward Gibbon, who some two centuries ago was settled here to complete his majestic History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a great masterpiece written with elegance and detachment which characterized the eighteenth-century mind. It is only fair to add that his detachment, if not his elegance, deserted him when he was confronted, not with the breakdown of an ancient civilization, but with actual disorders near at hand consequent upon the revolutionary situation which had arisen in France—what might, perhaps, be regarded as the first shots in a process fated to submerge the civilization Gibbon so rejoiced in and regarded as the acme of all human achievement. We are all, I think, a little like this, and easily endure the troubles of the past while beating our breasts lustily over those of our own time.

Even so, let me boldly and plainly say that it has long seemed to me clear beyond any shadow of doubt that what is still called Western Civilization is in an advanced stage of decomposition, and that another Dark Age will soon be upon us, if, indeed, it has not already begun. With the Media, especially television, governing all our lives, as they indubitably do, it is easily imaginable that this might happen without our noticing. I was reading the other day about a distasteful but significant experiment conducted in some laboratory or other. A number of frogs were put into a bowl of water, and the water very gradually raised to the boiling point, with the result that they all expired without making any serious effort to jump out of the bowl. The frogs are us, the water is our habitat, and the Media, by accustoming us to the gradual deterioration of our values and our circumstances, ensure that the boiling point comes upon us unawares. It is my own emphatic opinion that boiling point is upon us now, and that as a matter of urgency Christians must decide how they should conduct themselves in the face of so apocalyptic a situation.

To talk in this strain, to draw attention to the fact that the temperature of the water is rising alarmingly, is, as I well know, to invite accusations of pessimism. In my opinion, the boot is on the other foot. If I ridicule a prospectus for a housing estate to be built on the slopes of Mount Etna, I am not being a pessimist. On the contrary, it is the advocates of so ruinous and ridiculous a project who are the true pessimists. To warn against it and denounce it is optimistic in the sense that it presupposes the possibility of building a house on secure foundations—as it is put in the New Testament, on a rock, so that when floods arise and streams beat violently against it, it stands firm.

In other words, the most pessimistic attitude anyone could possibly take today would be to suggest that a way of life based on materialist values, on laying up treasure on earth in the shape of an ever-expanding Gross National Product, and a corresponding ever-increasing consumption stimulated and fostered by the fathomless imbecilities of advertising, could possibly provide human beings made in the image of their Creator, sojourners in Time but belonging to Eternity, with a meaningful basis for existence. So each symptom of breakdown, however immediately painful and menacing in its future consequences, is also an occasion for hope and optimism, reminding us that truly God is not mocked, and that men can no more live without reference to him now than could the Children of Israel find their way to the Promised Land without his guidance and support.

A scene that has stayed in my memory bears on the point. I was in a New York television studio with Mother Teresa for one of those morning interviews which help Americans to munch their breakfast cereal and swallow their coffee. It was the first time she had ever been in an American television studio, so she was unprepared for the constant interruptions for commercials. This particular morning, as it happened, the commercials all had to do with different sorts of packaged food, commended to viewers as being non-fattening and non-nourishing. Mother Teresa’s own constant preoccupation is, of course, to find the wherewithal to nourish the starving and put some flesh on human skeletons. It took some little while for the irony of the situation to strike her, but when it did she remarked in a quiet but perfectly audible voice: “I see that Christ is needed in television studios.” A total silence descended on the studio, and I fully expected the lights to go out and the floor-manager to be struck dumb. A word of truth had been spoken in one of the mills of fantasy where the great twentieth-century myth of happiness successfully pursued is fabricated—an unprecedented occurrence. Actually, since the commercial was running we were not on the air, and the impact of Mother Teresa’s interruption was soon spent. All the same, I felt that in the Book of Life, if not in the New York Times, it would rate a mention.

In many respects, then, crack-up conditions are more conducive to the understanding and practice of the Christian religion than ostensible stability and prosperity. The Apostle Paul’s amazingly successful evangelism, remember, took place during the reign of the Emperor Nero, a ruler who makes even some of ours seem positively enlightened and far-seeing. Moreover, the early Christians had the inestimable advantage of believing that the world would shortly come to an end—a belief that, as Dr. Johnson said of a man about to be hanged, wonderfully concentrates the mind. The ill consequences of the opposite proposition—today’s dogma—that the world will go on indefinitely, in the process getting better and better, have become all too clearly apparent. Sooner or later the world must end, anyway; whereas the utopias men persuade themselves are just round the corner, whether realized through the final installation in power of the triumphant proletariat, or through the fulfillment of an American Dream of eternally burgeoning health, wealth, and happiness, or whatever, never even begin.

Think of the advantages the early Christians derived from their conviction that the Last Days would soon be upon them! For one thing, they were spared the illusory hopes in revolution and counter-revolution, in insurrections and liberations and conspiracies, which then, as now, abounded. With thoughts of an imminent Apocalypse, who today would bother his head unduly about such alluring future developments as supersonic flight, computerized literature, birth pills for tiny tots, or transplant surgery with a view to changing our spare parts as they wear out and so keeping us on the road indefinitely like vintage cars? What a blissful relief for the early Christians to turn aside from the capers of an Emperor Nero and the turgid rhetoric of his critics and joyously await the promised Second Coming of their Lord and Saviour! It almost looks as though the best hope of revivifying institutional Christianity would be to convince the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Metropolitan Nicodim, and other dignitaries that the world would shortly be coming to end. Or—maybe better—to get the World Council of Churches to pass a resolution in this sense at its next meeting.

It is in the breakdown of power that we may discern its true nature, the skull beneath the skin, and realize that what the Devil offered Jesus in the wilderness—the Kingdoms of the Earth, to do what he liked with—was, like all his propositions, a fraudulent one. On the other hand, it is when power seems strong and speaks with a firm voice that we are most liable to be taken in, and to suppose it really can be used to advance human freedom and well-being. We forget that Jesus is the prophet of the loser’s, not the victor’s, camp, proclaiming as he did that the first will be last, that the weak are the strong and the fools the wise, and that the poor and lowly, not the rich and proud, possess the Kingdom of Heaven.

Let us then as Christians rejoice that we see around us on every hand the decay of the institutions and instruments of power. On every hand intimations of empires falling to pieces, money in total disarray, dictators and parliamentarians alike nonplussed by the confusion and conflicts which encompass them, and the very weaponry at their disposal so monstrous in its destructiveness as to be unusable except to blow our very earth and all its creatures to smithereens. Confronting this scene it is sometimes difficult to resist the conclusion that Western Man has decided to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania; blowing the trumpet that brings the walls of his own city tumbling down; and, having convinced himself that he is too numerous, laboring with pill and scalpel and syringe to make-himself fewer. Finally, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keels over, a weary, battered old brontosaurus, and becomes extinct.

Here I speak with some feeling, since it is through a realization of the fantasies of power that I have come to recognize the irresistible truth of the gospel of love that Jesus came into the world to expound. The trade of journalism which I have followed for something like half a century is calculated to induce this awareness. Who can be engaged in the quest for news without realizing that what he purveys bears as little relation to what is happening in the world as Muzak does to music? Indeed, the two—Muzak and what might be called Newzak—are decidedly similar, the one being a drooling mélange of tunes and the other of ostensible events, both calculated to keep the mind of a motorist in a suitable condition of somnolent vacancy as he cruises along mile after mile of motorway. How many liberations celebrated that only led to new servitudes! How many reigns of peace ushered in that only generated new wars! How many liberators installed in power only to become even more ferocious tyrants than those they replaced! The splendid words of the Magnificat go on being fulfilled; the mighty are put down from their seats and the humble and meek exalted, the hungry are filled with good things and the rich sent empty away. Yes, but how soon, how very soon, the humble and meek who have been exalted become mighty, and in their turn fit to be put down! How quickly the poor who have been filled with good things become rich, thereby likewise qualifying to be sent empty away!

My earliest memory of the public scene is of the First World War, which, I was given to understand, was a war to end war and make a world fit for heroes to live in. God, I gathered, was on our side, and when victory was achieved his spokesman turned out to be Woodrow Wilson, who in Princetonian accents delivered to us Fourteen Points as Moses had Ten Commandments. Later, in the columns of the old Manchester Guardian I thundered away about how the League of Nations would ensure peace for evermore if only everyone would disarm, and institute free education for all and universal-suffrage democracy. As the events of the inter-war years unfolded, it was borne in upon me that the governments of the world were failing to follow this enlightened advice.

Jesus, I was brought up to believe, was a most high-minded and altogether estimable man, who, if not actually a paid-up member of the Labour party, would have been if a Labour party had existed in Palestine in his time. By setting up a welfare state, in accordance with Labour party policy, dismantling the British Empire, and otherwise reforming our capitalist-imperialist ways, we should effectively bring his Kingdom to pass, whereas, through the centuries of Christendom, it had been relegated to celestial regions, thereby inducing the down-trodden and oppressed to be content with their lot. Alas, the Labour party in due course was in a position to form governments, but Jesus’ Kingdom seemed as far off as ever, if not farther. As for the dismantled British Empire, its liberated components tended to become mirror images of the authoritarian regimes which had been dispossessed.

Feeling thoroughly disheartened and disillusioned, I directed my hopes for a better world towards the U.S.S.R., where, the then Dean of Canterbury, Dr. Hewlett Johnson, regularly proclaimed from the cathedral pulpit, Stalin was busily constructing the Kingdom of Christ. At the time, the dean was commonly regarded as a buffoon; on the contrary, he has proved to be something of a pace-setter, and would today find himself very much at home among large numbers of his fellow clergy. Managing to get myself posted to Moscow as a newspaper correspondent, I soon realized that, far from giving a new validity to liberty, equality, and fraternity, the Soviet regime was rapidly turning into one of the most absolutist tyrannies of history, presided over, in the person of Stalin, by one of its most cruel and obscurantist tyrants. The only original feature, as compared with other tyrannous regimes in the past, was that for some bizarre reason it met with the unstinted approval of the flower of our Western liberal intelligentsia, who, as long as it was humanly possible, went on applauding each restriction of liberty, each brutal suppression of dissidence, which at home their lives were dedicated to opposing.

Thenceforth I had no expectation whatsoever that Man could perfect his own circumstance and shape his own destiny. As Pascal put it:

It is in vain, O men, that you seek within yourselves the cure for your miseries. Your principal maladies are pride, which cuts off from God, and sensuality which binds you to the earth. Either you imagine you are Gods yourselves, or, if you grasp the vanity of such a pretention, you are cast into the other abyss, and suppose yourselves to be like the beasts of the field and seek your good in carnality.

So, without God, we were left with a choice of megalomania or erotomania; the clenched fist or the phallus, Nietzsche or Sade, Hitler or D. H. Lawrence.

Meanwhile, I managed to sleep-walk my way through the Second World War and its aftermath, increasingly conscious that the weird human scene which I had to go through the motions of reporting and commenting upon and interpreting, and its cast of men seeking power with a view, as they all insisted, to promoting the public good, belonged rather to fantasy than reality. In a way it was easier to cope with it as editor of Punch than at what passed for being “serious” journalism, except that, in trying to ridicule those, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it, set in authority over us, one was constantly frustrated because, as it turned out, they were themselves infinitely more absurd in what they did and said than one’s wildest inventions.

This applied particularly to the clerical echelons, whose strange gyrations were the envy and despair of professional humorists. What satirical invention could hope to equal a bishop in gaiters appearing in a court of law to testify that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a representation of Christian marriage at its best? Or a dialoguing Jesuit looking for common ground between the Sermon on the Mount and the Communist Manifesto—like an ardent vegetarian exploring the possibility of teaming up with the Worshipful Company of Butchers. Or a priestly dispenser of gelignite to freedom-fighters as representing the readiest means of manifesting how they love their enemies and seek the good of those who persecute them.

The fact is that the quest for power itself is a deadly serious one. Dictators, like brothel-keepers, abominate laughter, which the saints have all loved, hearing it ringing out from Heaven itself, louder sounding when Heaven’s gates swing open, abating and dying away as they swing to. Shakespeare makes his King John refer to “that idiot laughter, a passion hateful to my purposes,” therein speaking on behalf of all power-maniacs at all times. In this sense, power is a sort of pornography of the will, corresponding to the other sort—equally humorless—of the flesh. When the Roman soldiers played their sick joke on Jesus, dressing him up in a scarlet robe, putting a crown of thorns on his head, bowing low before him in mock reverence as King of the Jews, they were not, as they supposed, just ridiculing a poor deluded man about to die; they were holding up to ridicule all kings, all rulers, all exercisers of authority who ever had been or were to be. They were making power itself derisory, ensuring that hence-forth we should see thorns beneath every crown, and beneath every scarlet robe, stricken flesh.

The only alternative I could discover to the ultra-solemn quest for power was Jesus’ ultra-joyous quest for love, but I confess I did everything in my power to evade it. Contrary to what is often suggested, a hedonistic way of life, if you have the temperament for it and can earn a living at it, is perfectly feasible. The earth’s sounds and smells and colors are very sweet; human love brings golden hours; the mind at work gives great delight. Unfortunately, however, I was driven to the conclusion that something was lacking in the hedonistic set-up, some essential ingredient, something I had vaguely glimpsed, and whose lack made everything else seem somehow savorless. The words that most often sounded in my ears were Peter’s reply on behalf of the twelve when Jesus asked them whether they, too, proposed to desert him: “Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.” If only there had been someone else, some other words, some other way!

This is how I came to see my situation, in a sort of dream or vision, something more vivid and actual than most happenings and experiences. I am confined in the tiny dark dungeon of my ego, manacled with the appetites of the flesh, shackled with the inordinate demands of the will—a prisoner serving a life sentence with no hope of deliverance. Then I notice that high above me there is a window through which a faint glow of light comes filtering in—seemingly far away, remote and inaccessible; yet, I realize, a window looking out onto Eternity. Inside, darkness, a place of fantasies and furies; outside, the white radiance of God’s love shining through the universe, what the Apostle Paul called the glorious liberty of the children of God.

And the window? I know what that is, too—the Incarnation. Time and Eternity intersecting in a Cross; Now becoming Always. God revealing himself as a Man, and reaching down to us, in order that we, reaching up, may relate ourselves to him. Now I observe that the window is not, after all, far away, but near at hand, and that seen through it everything makes sense, so that, like the blind man whose sight Jesus restored, I can say: “One thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see.” Thenceforth, whenever I am looking through the window I see life as being full of joy and hope and brotherliness, whereas the moment I turn away the darkness encompasses me again. The ego once more lifts up its cobra-head, the servitude to the appetites and the will resumes. I am back in prison.

Through the window I look out on reality; within, there is only fantasy. Oh, the glory of reality, the horror of fantasy! The one, Heaven; the other, Hell—two states as clearly differentiated as are light and darkness, joy and wretchedness, life and death. As Simone Weil writes:

Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good; no desert is so dreary, monotonous and boring as evil. But with fantasy it is the other way round. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound and full of charm.

Blake was making the same point when he wrote:

This life’s dim window of the Soul

Distorts the Heavens from Pole to Pole

And leads you to believe a Lie

When you see with, not thru, the Eye.

He might have been predicting the coming of television, which pre-eminently requires us to see with, rather than through, the eye. And what a multitude and variety of lies it has induced belief in!

Let me conclude by recounting briefly two recent experiences which seem to me significant in relation to what I have been talking about. Both occurred while I was preparing the commentaries for a series of religious documentary films. In the first case, I found myself standing amidst the ruins which are all that now remains of Carthage, and trying to reconstruct the scene there when, in the year 410, the Bishop of Hippo, better known as Saint Augustine, heard the news that Rome had been sacked. For him, it was the end of civilization and of the world as he had known it—a world in many respects uncannily like ours, with a similar obsessive interest in public spectacles of violence and eroticism. Augustine compared Rome’s destruction with Sodom’s, and told his flock not to lose heart, since “there will be an end to every earthly kingdom.”

You are surprised that the world is losing its grip and full of pressing tribulations. Do not hold onto the old man, the world; do not refuse to regain your youth in Christ who says to you: “The world is passing away, the world is short of breath. Do not fear, thy youth shall be renewed as an eagle.”

Then he devoted the remaining seventeen years of his life to the deeper question of the relation between earthly cities like Rome which men build and destroy, and the City of God, which is everlasting, embodying his conclusions in his great work The City of God, which defined for successive generations of Christians what they owed to God and what to Caesar.

Now I move on through fifteen centuries, and stand beside Tolstoy’s grave at Yasnaya Polyana, in Russia, where he lived. As Augustine held the secret of what would follow the fall of Rome, so I had somehow the feeling that what lay ahead for us might be sought here where Tolstoy was buried, at the edge of a ravine and looking over a forest, with no monument or memorial, just as he wished it to be; simply a mound of earth, as usual piled high with flowers. Speaking about him in that place, about his beautifully lucid exposition of the Gospels, about his incomparable short stories—parables, like Jesus’, about his distrust of all governments, all systems of power, as instruments for ameliorating our human condition—was one of the most enchanting experiences of my life. The words were addressed only to a camera and a camera crew, along with one or two Russian helpers, but they seemed to fly into the clear September air and lose themselves among the silver birches like joyous birds. I thought of Russia’s fifty years and more of ruthlessly authoritarian rule, reaching into every aspect of the lives of those subjected to it, into their work and play and education, into their innermost thoughts and hopes, of how this immense apparatus of power, probably the greatest concentration ever to exist in the world, had been dedicated to the extirpation of the Christian religion and all its works; and of how nonetheless, thanks to the genius of Tolstoy, Jesus’ message, the enchantment of his words and presence, what he came into the world to do and say and suffer, had remained accessible.

For confirmation we have Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet regime’s foremost rebel, who so brilliantly and forcefully challenges its pretensions, in the name not of freedom or democracy, or of any of the twentieth century’s counterfeit hopes, but of his Christian faith, with its insistence on the absolutes of love rather than the relativities of justice, on the universality of brotherhood rather than the particularity of equality, on the perfect freedom which is service rather than the perfect service which is freedom. The odds against its happening were astronomical, but it has happened. If, when I was a journalist in Moscow, someone had said to me that the most distinguished Russian writer and the product of the Soviet regime would write as Solzhenitsyn has, and I quote, “I myself see Christianity today as the only living spiritual force capable of undertaking the spiritual healing of Russia”—if anyone had predicted that which was said by such a one as Solzhenitsyn, I would have given a million to one against it. Yet it happened. Surely, a miracle, and one of the greatest.

For me now the experience of living in this world is nearly over. My lines, such as they are, have been spoken, my entrances and exits all made. It is a prospect, I am thankful to say, that I can face without panic, fear, or undue remorse, confident that, as an infinitesimal part of God’s creation, I am a participant in his purposes, which are loving, not malign, creative, not destructive, orderly, not chaotic; and that, however somberly at times the darkness may lower, and however men may seem at times to prefer the darkness, the light that first came to Galilee two thousand years ago, and through the succeeding centuries has illuminated all that was greatest in the work and lives of men, can never be put out. The other day there were published in English the last words Tolstoy wrote. They, too, were about this light, and he concluded: “That, my dear brothers, is what I have been trying to say.” I echo his words.

Copyright 1974, ICOWE. Used by permission.

I want to thank every congregation, pastor, and lay person who responded to our repeated requests for financial as well as prayer support for the International Congress on World Evangelization. The $3 million budget was raised, and much of the money came through sacrificial giving by hundreds of God’s people.

Among the conflicting currents swirling about at the congress were questions of the relation of social action to the Gospel, biblical inerrancy, the role of the West in current missionary outreach, the nature of the Church’s mission, and the possibility of a continuing fellowship specifically concerned with the evangelization of the world. Of these we shall be saying more later.

I covet your prayers that God will use Lausanne 74 to spark a worldwide missionary revival that will bind God’s people together by enlisting their commitment, combining their efforts, calling forth their prayers, and leading Christians from all nations to proclaim the Gospel to the ends of the earth.

Copies of the Lausanne Covenant and signature cards can be secured from ICOWE offices. Until October 15 write Case Postale 225, 1001 Lausanne, Switzerland.

For many Latin Americans the former President of Chile, Salvador Allende, was a symbol of hope. Democratically elected in 1970, he was for them the embodiment of a cherished desire for revolution without bloodshed. Under him Chile became the laboratory for a new political experiment that sought to combine radical social change with the rights commonly recognized in a country with a long-standing democratic tradition.

But the experiment was doomed to failure. Whatever one may think of the ideological color of Allende’s revolution, the fact remains that no small nation in the Third World is truly free today to follow its own course and to keep its economy unaffected by international pressures at the same time. Add to this the internal pressures created not only by the political conservatives but also by the extreme leftists, and you will easily understand the great economic chaos that overtook Chile in the months preceding the military blow of September, 1973.

For anyone who had no firsthand acquaintance with the Chilean Situation under Allende’s regime it is difficult to imagine the degree to which society was politicized during that period. Regardless of whether one had a political affiliation or not, he could not avoid siding either with or against the government and being labeled accordingly by everybody else among his neighbors, his fellow workers, and even his relatives. Not only neutrality but even fairness to those across the ideological barrier was nearly an impossibility. Even some evangelical churches were divided over political issues.

At the same time that thousands of citizens opposed to Allende left the country permanently, Chile became the Mecca of leftist activists from all over Latin America, particularly from countries under rightist military dictatorships. It was no coincidence that Santiago was chosen as the headquarters for one of the most significant Conferences ever to be held on the question of Christian political involvement in Latin America—the “Christians for Socialism” Conference (April, 1972), a meeting that according to an observer was a launching platform for the theology of liberation. Nor was it a coincidence that the same city should be used as the basis for the Study Department of “Iglesia y Sociodad en America Latina,” led by Roman Catholic theologian Hugo Assmann. Santiago was undoubtedly becoming the most important center for the preparation of the Marxist revolution and for the spread of its theological justification in this part of the world.

I will not attempt here to explain the factors that precipitated the military blow led by General Augusto Pinochet and his colleagues (all of them professing Roman Catholics) last year. According to a common opinion, it would have never taken place aside from the encouragement of the U. S. State Department. Be that as it may, Allende’s Marxist experiment came to an end marked by his own suicide and followed by a systematic effort to reverse the revolution that he had initiated.

As soon as the military had taken over, several evangelical leaders expressed their adherence to the new government. That God had directly intervened to deliver the country from Communism was a widespread view among evangelical Christians. And I know of at least one missionary statesman whose interpretations of the military takeover as God’s doing was widely circulated abroad. Nothing was said, however, about the negative aspects of the whole Situation and particularly about the appalling cruelty displayed by the military regime in dealing with its political opponents.

A reason for this silence might have been the lack of Information within Chile concerning the methods used by the military junta to eliminate every possibility of a leftist reaction. As could be expected, the military repression did not receive locally the same press coverage it received internationally. One does wonder, however, whether the acquiescence on the part of so many evangelical Christians was not due less to ignorance of the facts than to political views leading them to overlook crimes that they would not have over-looked under the Marxist government. And one need not be a leftist to see that the cruelty of an anti-Communist government is also an abomination before God!

For several months the Roman Catholic Church, in Chile withheld any official pronouncement on the political Situation, until it apparently ran out of patience in April. As a result, Cardinal Raúl Silva Henriquez handed over to national and international newsmen a declaration representing the position of the large majority of Chilean bishops, severely criticizing the safety measures and financial policies adopted by the government. The declaration stated that the reconciliation needed by the nation could be attained only through “an unlimited respect toward the human rights upheld by the United Nations and Second Vatican Council.” It expressed concern about “the climate of insecurity and fear,” the increase in unemployment, and the ideological discrimination in relation to work opportunities. It pointed out the lack of legal measures to protect people from arbitrary or excessively long imprisonments (“without specific charges being known either by the persons affected or by their relatives”) as well as from restrictions regarding the possibility of legal defense.

Cardinal Silva Henriquez requested the press not to regard the declaration as “a political document.” “Our judgment,” said he, “is that of pastors who humbly explain their concern to their children and exhort them to work toward reconciliation.” Despite such Claims and the conciliatory attitude toward the authorities displayed by the Cardinal in his public Statements about the ecclesiastical pronouncement, one of the members of the junta, General Gustavo Leigh, referring to the declaration expressed the fear that “the bishops may well be the instruments of international Marxism.”

Some observers may doubt the value of the Roman Catholic declaration. It is interesting, however, that according to a recent press release the military junta has agreed that if any of the members of the “Christians for Socialism” movement is arrested, he will be handed over to the ecclesiastical authorities for them to take Charge of his exile to a foreign country. If, as Camilo Torres stated, the duty of every Christian is to make the revolution, it does seem that at least for now no one can exercise his Christian duty in Chile!

Will Christians ever learn not to try to enlist God under the political banner of their preference?

A cloud is hanging over the 19-story Interchurch Center at 475 Riverside Drive in New York City this summer. That’s the site of headquarters Offices for the National Council of Churches, which is in the midst of the biggest shakeup of top-level management in its twenty-three-year history.

Six Veteran NCC executives got their walking papers last month. Five were let go, according to NCC spokesmen, as part of organizational changes designed “to implement the new structure and management style voted by the NCC General Assembly in December, 1972.” The sixth, the head of the NCC’s big relief arm, said one reason for his dismissal was “deep theological differences.” Announcements of the firings stressed that the action in no way reflected on the personal integrity of the people involved.

NCC general secretary Claire Randall, who took Office January 1, refused to describe how the decision was made to fire the five.

Dismissal of the other official, James MacCracken, executive director of Church World Service, was announced in somewhat more explicit terms by Dr. Eugene L. Stockwell, associate general secretary for overseas ministries. Reportedly, the two had long been at loggerheads. Stockwell is a United Methodist clergyman and MacCracken a Presbyterian layman. Stockwell was quoted as saying that MacCracken was fired for complex reasons rooted in organizational factors. But MacCracken, 51, went beyond that, citing “personality conflict as seen by Dr. Stockwell,” criticism of CWS among certain denominational leaders and overseas church leaders, and “deep theological differences.” CWS has one of the world’s largest relief operations, and its budget is greater than those of all the other NCC agencies put together. Because of its reputation and because church people are willing to support compassionate works, CWS has raised funds more readily than other NCC agencies have done.

MacCracken’s relationship was severed immediately. The other victims may stay till the end of the year. They were initially said to be taking “early retirements,” but one of them, Dr. H. Leroy Brininger, objected to the phrase. “When a guy has a family to support and plenty of energy and some clear plans that extend past age 61, this is not an early retirement,” said Brininger, a United Methodist who has been the NCC’s associate general secretary for administration. The five are all white males over 60.

Another of those fired, Dr. David Hunter, an Episcopal clergyman who has been deputy general secretary since 1963, viewed the action as reasonable. “This is no half-baked, tyrannical act on her part,” he said, referring to Miss Randall.

Also leaving are two other United Methodist clergymen, Donald Landwer, assistant general secretary for denominational support, J. Allan Ranck, associate general secretary for program planning, and Fletcher Coates, an Episcopal layman who is head of the NCC’s information department (a news release making the dismissals public was initialed by his associate, Dorothy Rensenbrink, a Presbyterian).

The posts occupied by the five men are being abolished and the work reassigned to lower levels. Brininger said they were told by Miss Randall that they were not being considered for lesser positions.

One other position is being phased out, that of associate general secretary for communication and Interpretation. The holder of that job, L. Maynard Catchings, a black clergyman, will be made a special assistant for minority communication and Interpretation.

Miss Randall explained that posts are being dropped to make way for a management style that she describes as collegial, facilitative, open, flexible, and horizontal. “I believe this is the direction the Governing Board primarily wants to go,” she said.

Appeal to the NCC restructure voted in 1972 surprised some observers, inasmuch as the organizational changes required by that action were less than drastic. Several much more radical restructure proposals had been decisively rejected. The new move is expected to arouse concem that staff leaders are trying to accomplish administratively what was rejected legislatively.

Rumors floated around church circles for several days before the firings were made public, after repeated inquiries from Religious News Service. Little was communicated within the Organization, apparently, and the New York Times reported that the unexpected moves “stirred some discontent.” NCC employees were reportedly mimeographing RNS reports to keep informed on the developments.

The affair received surprisingly scant notice in the secular press; many key religion reporters were covering the Presbyterian conventions in Louisville at the time, and some did not hear of the firings until days after they occurred.

Miss Randall and NCC treasurer Carl W. Tiller, an American Baptist layman, denied that finances played a large part in the terminations. Rumors persisted, however, that the NCC’s financial state is not expected to improve and that hard-headed decisions are required for the future. The NCC has been feeling the pinch for a number of years, and its administrative agencies have always had trouble raising funds.

On a related front, finances have been much more of a concern for the World Council of Churches. Unless there is soon a marked change for the better, the WCC’s Fifth Assembly may have to be moved or even canceled. Father Paul Verghese, chairman of the assembly’s program committee, says the WCC has been able to raise only half of the $3 million assembly budget. The meeting is now scheduled to be held in Djakarta, Indonesia.

GOSPEL BLACKMAIL

Dean Harvey H. Guthrie, Jr., 50, of the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told the 1974 commencement audience he will resign if the seminary does not hire “an ordained female Anglican faculty member.” “This is blackmail, but I believe it is gospel blackmail,” he said.

There were twenty-eight male and four female graduates this year at the 107-year-old school. It has one female faculty member, a Catholic sister who teaches pastoral theology. The Episcopal Church admits women to the office of deacon, a sub-clergy level, but it does not ordain them to the priesthood.

Presiding Bishop John M. Allin, who voted against women priests in a House of Bishops vote, declined to comment immediately on Guthrie’s threat.

Patrick: Deplugged

San Diego deprogrammer Ted Patrick (see August 31, 1973, issue, page 40) was sentenced to a year in prison and fined $1,000 for a misdemeanor of which he had been cönvicted earlier in Denver. But Judge Zita Weinshienk suspended the fine and all but seven days of the prison sentence. The week in jail, she said, was intended to show Patrick “what deprivation of physical freedom means.” She admonished him not to participate in the kidnapping or detention of anyone.

The case marked Patrick’s first conviction since he began helping to “rescue” members of off-beat religious groups in 1972. In it, the jury had found him guilty of a misdemeanor count of false imprisonment. He was acquitted of more serious charges of conspiracy and kidnapping. These were the outgrowth of an incident last year, when families of two young women enlisted Patrick’s help in forcibly removing the girls from Denver to San Diego, where Patrick attempted to deprogram them. The parents alleged that their daughters had been alienated from them and the Greek Orthodox faith by the leaders of a Denver home prayer group.

Patrick more recently has been making headlines in Canton, Ohio. His target there has been a charismatic prayer group named “the Body of Christ.” It is headed by a former Presbyterian minister, Milton Vereide, son of the late Abraham Vereide, who founded the national prayer breakfast movement. One member of the group, Greg Gratny, 18, was seized the day he graduated from high school when his parents arranged a rendezvous with Patrick following a dinner in the boy’s honor. After three days of the Patrick treatment the boy reportedly decided to leave “the Body of Christ,” and he was sent for “recuperation” to an East Coast farm owned by one of Patrick’s friends.

SAFE

Deborah Dortzbach, the 24-year-old pregnant missionary nurse taken captive by guerrillas in northern Ethiopia (see June 21 issue, page 40), was released unharmed after twenty-six days. In fact, said she shortly after being reunited with her husband in Asmara, “My time in captivity fshowedl how much they all need help, and I would like to return some day.” The guerrillas reportedly abandoned a cash ransom request and asked missionary negotiators instead for medical supplies to counter an outbreak of Cholera. Mrs. Dortzbach was serving in a mission hospital as a short-termer with the Orthodox Presbyterian Church at the time of her capture. A Dutch nurse was shot to death in the episode.

In another Body of Christ case, however, Patrick apparently failed. A 38year-old woman, Mrs. Carl Barnard, charged she was held six days against her will at the home of her mother while Patrick tried to win her away from the group. A judge in a civil hearing ruled she was indeed illegally detained; a grand jury investigation of Patrick was expected to begin soon.

Deprogramming is a mind-altering treatment involving isolated detainment and hours—sometimes days—of psychological pressure. Its purpose is to “liberate” persons from attachment to certain beliefs or persons considered objectionable by one’s relatives.

Patrick told a reporter in Akron that the Hearst family has contacted him: if Patricia Hearst turns up, they want him to deprogram her out of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Australia: Uniting And Continuing

For many years the Congregational, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches in Australia have been moving toward union. There has been little doubt about the Methodists’ commitment to the project, and the Congregationalists too have been fairly strong in favoring it. A year ago both these denominations agreed to join the union, and the Methodists ratified their earlier decision 160 to 11 after the Presbyterians, divided on the issue, finally voted approval.

In the heart-searching among the Presbyterians, two questions were referred to the local churches in an attempt to discover the thinking at grassroots level. One concerned the general question of the denomination’s going into the union; the other asked the individual congregation whether it would enter the union to remain in a continuing Presbyterian church. When the result proved difficult to interpret, a second vote was taken. May 1, a bleak, grey day in Melbourne, was the day of decision: the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Australia accepted the proposal for union with a vote of 230–143, 230 being a bare six votes over the required three-fifths majority.

The assembly was not without drama. The Right Reverend Neil MacLeod, moderator of the Presbyterian Church of New South Wales, rose to his feet and began, “In charity and love and with malice towards none, and with firmness in the right I crave leave to dissent.” He went on to make a speech disclaiming responsibility for schism, after which he led a walk-out of about thirty dissenters. They proceeded to a nearby hall where they formed the Continuing Presbyterian Church in Australia, electing MacLeod as moderatorgeneral. This does not represent the totality of the supporters of the continuing church. Many remained in the assembly, unwilling to leave while the church still remains Presbyterian.

It is plain that Presbyterians are deeply divided on this issue. There are 1,442 Presbyterian congregations in Australia, and 521 of them (more than a third) have declared they intend to stay out of the union. Opposition is strongest in New South Wales, but there will be continuing Presbyterians in all States.

There are trying days ahead both for those who favor union and for those who prefer to stay out. Denominational property poses problems. What is to happen to Presbyterian schools, theological Colleges, and institutions generally? To whom will trust funds belong? Neither group wants litigation, but the possibility is very real. In an attempt to avoid it the General Assembly has set up a Commission to deal with property questions. It has three members favoring union, three against, and three independents. Millions of dollars are involved, and the process will not be easy.

Other legal questions arise. There is division of opinion about the legality of the second vote taken in the congregations and how it affects the union. There is also the question of whether the Continuing Presbyterian Church is already in existence or whether it will not become a reality until the union, planned for June 2, 1976, takes place.

Many evangelicals voted against the union, and it is accordingly probable that the continuing church will be more evangelical than its predecessor. But many of those who voted to stay out were more traditional Presbyterians than convinced evangelicals. The actual nature of the continuing church will not become clear for some time.

The Uniting Church of Australia will be the third-largest denomination in the country, behind the Anglicans and the Roman Catholics.

LEON MORRIS

In Defense Of Life

Southern Baptist pastor Robert Holbrook of Hallettsville, Texas, chairman of Baptists for Life, addressed more than 2,000 persons as the keynote Speaker for the second annual Convention of the National Right to Life Committee last month in Washington, D. C. (The right-to-life people are against abortion on demand. They disseminate information and are seeking a constitutional amendment to Override the Supreme Court decision that liberalized abortion practices. Of late they have also been speaking out against euthanasia and genetic control.)

Holbrook’s role was among the latest indications of growing interest in the right-to-life issue among evangelicals. Interest has been increasing among other Protestants and Jews as well. Until recently, so much of the Support for the pro-life movement has come from Roman Catholics that many opponents have charged it with attempting to “write a particular theological view into the law of the land in violation of the principle of the Separation of church and state,” to quote United Methodist bishop A. James Armstrong.

Holbrook pointed out that the Texas law against abortion, overturned by the U. S. Supreme Court, was drawn up by Protestants, and that voters in predominantly Protestant North Dakota in 1972 overwhelmingly defeated a referendum calling for liberalized abortion.

Commented Oklahoma Senator Dewey F. Bartlett: “To hold that life has only relative value and not absolute value is to advance the Machiavellian philosophy that the end justifies the means.”

Mrs. Barbara Ruchowski of Pittsburgh cited documentation she said was evidence that the U. S. government is heavily financing pro-abortion and pro-euthanasia Propaganda for use in public schools across the nation.

Participants spent much of their time discussing how to overcome the view that the right-to-life issue is a “Catholic” one threatening church-state Separation and how to counter the impact of anti-life Propaganda in the media and in schools.

HAROLD O. J. BROWN

PRAYER DAY

National repentance and intercession for oppressed Christians in Communist and Muslim countries are the themes of an international day of prayer scheduled for August 17 in some sixteen nations.

The prayer day is backed by a bevy of Christian leaders, among them Senator Mark Hatfield, singer Pat Boone, broadcaster Pat Robertson, and evangelist David Wilkerson. The project is entitled “If My People” and is based on Second Chronicles 7:14, says International Coordinator D. Leland Paris. Activities are scheduled for most capitals and leading cities; Christians are expected to pray in front of embassies and consulates. In Washington, D. C., Bible smuggler Brother Andrew will lead the observance, which will include prayer in front of the Soviet and Afghanistan embassies as well as prayer “for the peace of Israel” at the entrance to the Israeli embassy.

Convention Circuit

Summer months bring church conventions. Here are the facts and figures on some of them:

Evangelical Free Church of America. Delegates to the ninetieth annual Conference, held in Green Lake, Wisconsin, voted to cut denominational ties and make Trinity College, Deerfield, Illinois, an independent Christian College. Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, on the same campus, will remain within the denomination. The primary reason for cutting the College loose was finances; the College should now be able to develop a broader financial base, say church officials. Nevertheless, three board members will be from the denomination. The 1,000 delegates also voted to increase missionary work in Asia. The denomination has 616 churches in North America and twenty-three in Japan. The Japanese branch is itself sending missionaries to other parts of Asia.

Church of fhe Brethren. Reacting to widespread hunger problems, delegates to the church’s Convention, held in Roanoke, Virginia, approved a broad plan for local churches to collect and störe food to meet community needs. Individuals were asked to cut their intake of animal protein. The hunger Problem gets top priority, said the 1,054 delegates, urging increased “sensitivity” in local churches to the world hunger Problem. Chosen moderator-elect for the 1976 Convention was A. Blair Helman, 53, President of Manchester (Indiana) College. He defeated the first woman nominated for the post, Phyllis N. Carter, chairman of the denomination’s World Ministries Commission. In other action, delegates appealed for no “re-intervention” in Indochina by American forces and approved sex education as part of the church-school Curriculum.

Conservative Baptist Association in America. At St. Paul, Minnesota, delegates heard that Conservative Baptist missionaries baptized an “all-time high” of 5,253 last year and that there is a prayer goal of 6,500 baptisms for this year. Missionary giving reached $4.9 million in 1973. Approved was a worldwide day of fasting with funds saved to be channeled to church relief agencies. The group urged rejection of those portions of the charismatic movement not “true to God’s word.” Watergate was hinted at in a resolution noting dishonesty and deception in government and urging Baptists to get personally involved in the political process.

DEATHS

SANDFORD FLEMING, 86, former president of the then Berkeley (California) Baptist Divinity School; in Santa Barbara, California.

TONY FONTAINE, 47, Gospel singer and recording artist; in Los Angels, of cancer.

ARTHUR J. MOORE, SR., 85, retired Methodist bishop, a self-educated former railroad flagman who gained recognition as a leader of wold Methodism; in Atlanta.

MALCOLM E. PEABODY, 86, retired Episcopal bishop; in Boston.

Cumberland Presbyterian Church. Commissioners approved the Start of a two-year study of church unity—first in the denomination’s 144-year history. A Huntsville, Alabama, pastor, David A. Brown, was chosen moderator. The delegates learned that the 90,000-member church took a slight upturn in membership last year. They approved support for the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution; supported amnesty; agreed to expand the church’s work with prisoners; and deplored moral decline “represented by Watergate.”

General Association of Regular Baptist Churches (GARB). Resolutions adopted at the annual Conference, held in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, severely criticized the charismatic movement and “the new evangelicalism” as unbiblical. The 3,100 delegates also opposed the Equal Rights Amendment.

Religion In Transit

Stirred by the appeals of Catholic Relief Services to alleviate hunger in drought-stricken sub-Sahara Africa, an anonymous donor sent the agency a single coin. But the coin proved to be a solid gold 1908 Austro-Hungarian crown, valued at more than $200. Said the donor in a message to CRS: “1 love that gold—but I love Christ more.”

On the tax front: The United Methodist Publishing House will be severely curtailed in tax exemptions under a ruling by the Tennessee Supreme Court. Now the Publishing Company will be allowed exemptions only for that property used for Publishing material solely for the denomination. Meanwhile, Colorado tax officials are giving the Guru Maharaj Ji’s operations a close scrutiny. The tax men are bothered by the scope and variety of the Guru’s tax-free purchases (among them fifty-six cars and trucks, including a Rolls Royce and three Mercedes-Benz) and are questioning their legality.

Nearly a year after Alice and Lawrence Parker withheld insulin from their dying diabetic son (see September 14, 1973. issue, page 50) in the belief that he was healed, Alice Parker admitted in court that she’d made a mistake and should have given 12-year-old Wesley the insulin. The two were charged with involuntary manslaughter after the death. The Parkers had also refused to have the boy buried, believing he would be resurrected.

Calvin Christian Retirement Home of Grand Rapids, Michigan, is bankrupt. A number of investors lost sizable sums in the collapse of the $5 million project.

Tornados blew the roof off the headquarters building of the Oral Roberts Association in Tulsa, resulting in extensive water damage, and severely damaged a $2 million aerobics building under construction on the Oral Roberts University campus.

Personalia

Marjorie Hyer of The Washington Post won the Supple Memorial Award, the top honor for reporters who cover religion for the secular press, at the twenty-fifth anniversary meeting of the Religion Newswriters Association in Louisville. The Schachern Memorial Award for excellence in religion sections went to the St. Petersburg Times (Ms. Lee Kelly is religion editor), and the Supple Special Award for writers on papers with 50,000 or less circulation went to Roger Ipswitch of the Ventura County (California) Star-Free Press.

United Methodist clergyman Gerald F. Moede, 44, since 1967 a research executive with the World Council of Churches, was named general secretary of the nine-denomination Consultation on Church Union (COCU). Dr. John Satterwhite. an African Methodist Episcopal Zion clergyman and professor at Wesley Seminary in Washington, D. C., was selected as associate general secretary.

Another male bastion has fallen. The Reverend Alice M. Henderson, an African Methodist Episcopal minister from Tndian Springs, Georgia, is the first woman chaplain in U. S. Army history. A graduate of Turner Theological Seminary, Atlanta, Georgia, the new chaplain will be assigned to duty after spending time at the army’s school for chaplains.

United Methodist bishop Paul Wash-burn of Chicago announced he will actively serve as “chief pastor” of the strife-torn First United Methodist Church of Evanston with Dow Kirkpatrick remaining on as senior pastor. In a split vote First’s congregation had asked Washburn to remove Kirkpatrick (see June 7 issue, page 50), but Washburn refused, saying, “I cannot give the signal to the whole United Methodist Church that our episcopal System is about to yield to a congregational System.”

United Methodist home-mission executive Paul Stauffer was elected President of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO). He succeeds American Baptist home-mission staffer Atha Baugh. IFCO’s board also approved grants of $320,000 for U. S. and foreign self-help projects. The largest was $140,000 for relief in Africa’s drought-stricken Sahel region.

World Scene

The Catholic Church in Portugal is in turmoil, Many in the laity accuse the bishops and priests of collaborating with the former authoritarian regime and even with its secret police and of remaining silent in the presence of oppression and torture.

Colombia’s president-elect Alfonso Lopez has promised to exempt evangelical church buildings and Jewish synagogues from taxation (Catholic churches are already exempt). He says he will also press for equal legal rights for women and for the right of divorce for civil marriages (the only alternative to Catholic marriages in Colombia).

Panamanian authorities, citing lack of evidence, released two men held in connection with the February murder of Canadian missionary Gilbert Reimer of the Gospel Missionary Union. No motive for the murder was established. He was stabbed and beaten to death, and no valuables were taken. Some theorize it was a case of mistaken identity, others that he was counseling a drug addict whose supplier got worried or wanted revenge.

One immediate result of the first-ever Iberian Congress on Evangelism held in Madrid, Spain, recently, was the formation of a group to coordinate evangelism activities of churches, missions, and para-church organizations working in Spain and Portugal. More than 700 delegates from both countries attended the affair.

“What will make this assembly memorable,” observed the Reverend Robert C. Lamar, new moderator of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (UPC), shortly before he was elected by the 186th General Assembly in Louisville last month, “is its meeting with the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern).” That may be true. Except for the vote to receive for study a plan that could unite the two denominations by 1977, little that was new or even striking emerged during the ten-day marathon of discussions and resolutions.

The Plan of Union will now be studied by the presbyteries; no official action is expected before 1976. Then, if the plan is passed, presbyteries would need to ratify the revised union document, and another churchwide convocation would need to finalize their recommendations.

Underlying nearly every action of this year’s assembly was a report of sharply declining giving to General Assembly causes, a trend that has already caused major cutbacks in denominational staff and may produce yet another 25 per cent cut for 1975. Several years ago the General Assembly budget stood at $40 million. It is now $32 million and will drop to $26 million for next year. Unrestricted reserves were drawn upon to make up deficits in recent years, and the 1975 budget reflects the depletion of these. It rather than higher budgets will now be normative. The denomination still has reserves totaling approximately $20 million, but these are committed to other causes. “The grim fact is that the United Presbyterian Church could face claims against it totaling more than it has in reserve funds,” declared Richard H. Miller, chairman of the General Assembly Mission Council’s section on budgeting.

Last year, total UPC giving rose $37.6 million to a new high of $410.4 million, but nearly all increases were at the local level. Many commissioners privately asserted that the money crisis at the General Assembly level, occurring at a time of record giving elsewhere, indicates a widespread lack of confidence in the denominational leadership, and that this was brought on by the controversial actions of some boards and agencies in recent years.

Reports for 1973 also showed a drop of another 100,000 in church membership. UPC membership now Stands at 2.8 million, reflecting a 10 per cent drop in the last decade.

If budgets at the General Assembly level must be cut by 25 per cent for next year, does this mean that overseas missionary personnel will also be reduced by that proportion? Perhaps, acknowledged George E. Bushneil, President of the Program Agency. He denied a rumor that plans are already being made to recall 155 overseas missionaries, saying: “There has been absolutely no action taken respecting the diminuation of any staff, either overseas or at home.” But he pointed out that if the level of General Assembly giving is not increased, there will have to be reductions. If the level is lower, he added, there will be great reductions. The UPC overseas missionary force has already declined from a high of approximately 2,000 to fewer than 600 today. Upon recommendation of Bushnell’s committee, the assembly approved development of a long-term campaign to meet mission needs anticipated at between $100 and $150 million.

Budgetary matters also figured strongly in a decision to reject a plan that would have revised the denomination’s Worshipbook to remove allegedly “sexist” Ianguage. A committee on the Worshipbook had provided a number of plans ranging in cost from $37,000 to $1.07 million, but all were rejected. The most elaborate plans called for rewriting prayers, altering some biblical texts (for instance, replacing “you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife” in the Ten Commandments with an ellipsis), and rewriting some hymns. How such hymns as “Rise Up, O Men Of God,” and “God of Our Fathers” would be handled was not specified.

In further action the assembly:

• Granted to the denomination’s advisory council on church and society the right to speak directly to the church on matters of Christian social concern. The right had been challenged on grounds that it belonged instead to the General Assembly Mission Council.

• Adopted a “Bill of Rights” for ministers’ spouses (whether male or female); it includes the right to seek employment, choose or reject church membership, serve the church without either special obligations or Privileges, and be considered for election to the session (local controlling board) as well as to other boards and committees.

• Supported the Korean Christian Church in Japan by urging a boycott of products of the Hitachi Company for alleged discriminatory employment policies.

• Refused to rescind an action of the General Assembly Mission Council directing the United Presbyterian Foundation and Board of Pensions to divest themselves of holdings in the Duke Power Company, currently in dispute with the United Mine Workers over safety conditions in the Brookside, Kentucky, mine.

• Refused to endorse a list of “Current and Emerging Needs and Issues,” that denominational officials sought as guidelines for the church’s future mission. Commissioners referred the list to the Mission Council.

• Amended action taken by prior assemblies relating to the consolidation of all General Assembly agencies in New York City in Order to allow the Board of Pensions, the A. D. circulation department, the Publication Unit of the Program Agency, and related Support Agency personnel to remain in Philadelphia.

• Authorized study toward the establishment of a nationwide UPC Organization for high school youth.

As the commissioners left Louisville most seemed to be musing on the prospect of union with the southern church, which is at least three years away. There were other matters more pressing. Said Hollywood pastor Lloyd Ogilvie, who presented the report of the Advisory Council on Discipleship and Worship: “We are facing a crisis of faith of the clergy, a crisis of accountability among church officers, and a crisis of agnosticism among the members of the local parish.”

If he is right, these conditions may be at the heart of the UPC troubles; but neither commissioners nor church staff did much in Louisville to counter them.

Southern Presbyterians: Phasing Out Unhappiness

Shaken by a split that so far has cost 250 churches, and faced with continuing grass-roots dissatisfaction, the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern) nevertheless embarked on a path last month in Louisville, Kentucky, that may lead to Union with the United Presbyterian Church (UPC). It also took the first legislative steps toward approving a new “confession” of faith. Controversy over both issues has been responsible for much of the internal turmoil.

BOTTOMS AT THE TOP

When Lawrence Wendeil Bottoms, 66, was elected moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern), he became the first black to attain the church’s highest elective office. (Of the 900.000 PCUS members, only about 7.000 are blacks.) As a ceremonial chain that goes with the office was placed over his shoulders by outgoing moderator Charles Kraemer, Bottoms evoked Iaughter with a slightly barbed poke at the past: “It always makes me nervous when a white person puts anything around my neck.”

Interestingly, many conservatives helped him snag a first-ballot win over two whites. He is considered orthodox in theology but liberal on some social and church issues (he’s for amnesty and for increased participation in church structures by women and minority groups), and he favors union with the United Presbyterians.

A graduate of Geneva College in Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh’s Reformed Presbyterian Seminary, he has been pastor of the integrated (160 white, 50 black members) Oakhurst Presbyterian Church of Decatur in suburban Atlanta since 1971. He was formerly a PCUS home-missions executive and has been active in ecumenical affairs.

The 430 PCUS commissioners (delegates) to the 114th General Assembly quickly and quietly approved both measures for study in the local presbyteries. Conservatives remaining in the 900,000-member church have vowed to fight it out on the local level, where, they believe, they have enough votes to defeat both moves. Three-fourths of the sixty presbyteries must vote approval before the General Assembly can act.

The conservatives claim the proposed confession is theologically imprecise. (A telling example, they say, is a reference to the Virgin Birth: “He came as a child born of a woman as is every child, yet born of God’s power as was no other child.”) They also complain that liberals want the new confession to replace the traditional mainstay of Reformed theology, the Westminster Confession of 1647. A minority report by Robert T. Liston, a member of the confession committee and former President of King College, Bristol, Tennessee, outlined the conservatives’ theological objections. The new document may not replace Westminster but will certainly displace it, argued Liston. His report was also sent to the presbyteries for study.

Uppermost on the PCUS agenda was the issue of Union with the UPC (predecessors of the two bodies divided at the beginning of the Civil War). The two denominations held concurrent meetings in Louisville, and each elected a pro-union moderator: Lawrence W. Bottoms, first black to hold the PCUS post (see box), and the UPC’s Robert C. Lamar, co-chairman of the joint PCUS-UPC Union committee.

At a historic combined meeting the two assemblies approved the union plan for study. But misgivings mounted in PCUS ranks as the week wore on. A major cause was news of the financial plight of the UPC (see preceding story). Andrew A. Jumper, a PCUS pastor in St. Louis, Missouri, and board chairman of the conservative Covenant Fellowship of Presbyterians, agreed that anti-union sentiment in the PCUS might increase as a result, but he warned against complacency. The PCUS will be “in the same fix” within a few years if current giving and membership trends continue, he warned.

Internal problems will be solved only if liberals are more open in their dealings with conservatives, Jumper believes. But the chances of that may be slim. A proposal for a permanent grievance committee where conservative complaints could be aired was turned down. Voted out of existence was an “unhappiness committee” formed last year in a vain effort to prevent schism. The committee suggested later that the PCUS normalize relations with the breakaway group, the National Presbyterian Church (NPC). Instead, at a sparsely attended late-night session the commissioners approved a pastoral letter warning PCUS churches of groups “whose future and life depend on nurturing unhappiness” in PCUS ranks. Identified as trouble-makers were the Concerned Presbyterians, the Presbyterian Evangelistic Fellowship, and the Presbyterian Journal, all linked with the NPC, as well as the NPC itself.

In a related plug-the-dike move, the assembly upheld a judicial committee’s ruling that voided the independence of three breakaway Florida churches. The PCUS Florida synod had successfully argued that churches can be released only to “another Reformed church with which union is permitted.” The decision will affect other freedom-minded groups since the Florida churches’ properties and funds will revert to the denomination. Several presbyteries have released churches to the NPC without assembly challenge so far. Conceivably, the Florida churches could still leave to join the NPC.

In its final report, the “unhappiness committee” warned that further splits are inevitable unless existing internal Problems are ironed out. Committee members listed twenty-four trouble spots in four major areas: theology, polity, ecumenism, and policy. If these are not resolved, as many as 200,000 members—18 per cent of the clergy, 25 per cent of the laity, and 33 per cent of the missionaries—may renounce the PCUS, the committee predicted.

The commissioners dealt with other controversial matters also, both theological and social. A document on the doctrine of universalism was sent to presbyteries for study after rejection of an amendment calling for recognition that “all men are lost apart from the grace of God” and that church members should call for repentance and belief in Jesus. The two-year study was made by the church’s theological committee. It concluded that God’s purpose “for humankind” is “gracious and loving” and that salvation is God’s gift to “undeserving man.”

In an emotion-packed abortion debate, a spokesman for the little-known church-administered Council on Therapeutic Abortion (COTA) denied that his group ever advised or paid for abortions. The issue was raised by a Petition calling for an end to church-sponsored abortion payments. COTA spokesman Robert Tabscott said the group was prevented from appearing at earlier assemblies because the overseeing agency, the Board of National Ministries, felt the issue was too “volatile and dangerous.” COTA was funded by a $50,000 private donation and built by Investments to $100,000 in four years. Tabscott said that $75,000 had been “lent” to those seeking abortion counseling.

The assembly approved its Washington, D. C., lobbyist’s membership in three political-action coalitions but said he is to support only PCUS-approved Stands. Involvement of the lobbyist in the coalitions had been a sore point among many members, especially since outgoing moderator Charles E. S. Kraemer refused earlier this year to heed requests by conservatives to call an emergency assembly over the issue.

The commissioners also:

• Called for the release of some South Korean Presbyterians jailed for speaking out against constitutional changes and repression of freedom in their land;

• Approved program priorities for 1975, with a ministry to “persons and Problems” that includes evangelism at the top of the list:

• Adopted a $9.4 million budget, $8.7 million of which is to come from church giving;

• Called on the Federal Communications Commission to ban alcohol advertising from television;

• Returned to the theology and culture committee for revision a paper advocating “full … and absolute amnesty” to those who refused to serve in the armed forces during the Viet Nam war (a section is to be added giving the case against amnesty so that both sides are “fairly presented,” and the paper is to be presented at next year’s assembly):

• Passed a resolution saying the White House transcripts reveal “a level of morality that is as disheartening as it is outrageous,” and calling for Congress and the courts to pursue “with vigor” justice in the Watergate case.

BARRIE DOYLE

The Burden At Calvary

Several big churches have been tottering on the brink of bankruptcy for more than a year, and last month one of them went over: Denver’s big independent Calvary Temple, whose well-known pastor is Charles E. Blair.

Blair insists that the church itself is solvent but that because of its identity with two insolvent sister organizations, the Charles E. Blair Foundation and Life Center, the church entered with them into Chapter 11 bankruptcy rather than fight in court the issue of legal Separation of the corporations. (Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy law permits time for reorganization in an attempt to pay off creditors.) The foundation was set up as a marketing vehicle for Blair’s books, a film, and other properties. Life Center was organ ized by Blair and others, including some Calvary board members, as a community project to operate nursing homes for the aged. The largest, Cherry Park in Denver, with about 300 residents, has become Calvary’s direct responsibility; two others, in nearby Colorado Springs and Yuma, Arizona, with a total of about 160 residents, are still in Life Center’s name but have been operated by Geriatrics, a secular firm, since the financial upheaval began.

Calvary’s financial troubles got national news attention in March when the Colorado securities commission asked a court to place Calvary and the other two enterprises in receivership. The commission alleged that the church organizations had sold nearly $12 million worth of securities through unlicensed employees, an illegal act, and that the corporations were sustaining heavy financial losses. Calvary’s attorneys acknowledged the losses, but they said conditions were improving under new management and asked for time to work things out. Securities sales had already been halted months earlier; the question of their legality was left hanging for the time being.

Calvary was granted time, but the Situation deteriorated. Several elderly investors wrote letters to District Judge Robert Kingsley saying they had not been paid the promised interest and needed the money to live on; a few complained they had invested their life savings, were now destitute, and had been turned away when they sought needed care at Cherry Park. At Kingsley’s prodding, Calvary in early June filed for bankruptcy, asking that its own directors be permitted to remain in Charge during reorganization.

Blair meanwhile vowed not to let the investors dangle and publicized a campaign aimed at raising $3.5 million.

Court documents showed the three corporations had combined assets of about $20 million, mostly in real estate, and liabilities of $23 million, including the securities, on which interest-due payments were reportedly piling up at the rate of nearly $20,000 a week. A “fund deficits” figure of more than $4 million was listed. Blair implied the blame rested with unwise policies of the church’s former fund-raiser.

Later in the month Kingsley placed Calvary Temple and Life Center in receivership; the Blair foundation was ordered to remain as a bankrupt petitioner with the debtor in possession. Two Denver businessmen, not associated with Calvary, were named receivers, which in effect placed the church under outside control. It was not immediately known what Steps the two might take, but the court virtually instructed them not to do anything to interfere with the ministry of the church.

Blair says he has won assurances from the men that they will not attempt to cut back any of the twenty-five TV stations that carry Calvary’s telecast (the church is behind in payments to some) or to thin out the staff of eighty (a fourth of them part-time). Either action would result in reduced income, says a Calvary spokesman.

The nursing homes are another matter. Even Blair concedes it is an open question whether Calvary can or should rescue them. If they are liquidated, a number of the residents who turned over all their assets in life-care contracts or who invested heavily may be hurt financially. But Blair vows every penny will be repaid. A plan to that end was due to be presented in court at the end of July.

Meanwhile, says Blair, the Sunday crowds and income of the 6,000-member church are up, there is no dissension, and the financial crisis has been an occasion for purging and cleansing in the church.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Armstrong: Cutting Back

Suspicions that the Worldwide Church of God may be in financial trouble as a result of Publicity about its spending, its doctrine, and the habits of its top leaders (see March 15 issue, page 49, and May 24 issue, page 53) received new substance last month when spokesmen for the multi-million-dollar church and College complex admitted that severe budget cuts are proposed for the coming fiscal year.

Official spokesmen for the Armstrong empire admitted only to “a rearrangement of priorities.” But Albert Portune, who previously resigned the post of vice-president in Charge of finance, said a $3.8 million deficit in the current budget is the reason for a 5 per Cent budget reduction.

Cost-cutting projections: closing elementary and high schools (with about 1,000 students) at all three Ambassador Colleges (Pasadena, California, Big Sandy, Texas, and Bricket Wood, England), and selling press facilities at Pasadena, livestock at Big Sandy, and college-owned faculty homes at the three locations.

The three jet planes either owned or leased by the College for Herbert W. and Garner Ted Armstrong may also be sold (one is valued at around $3.5 million).

It was unclear at month’s end—no one of official rank was available for comment—whether sale of the jets and modern printing plant might only be transfers to holding Companies substantially controlled by WCG interests.

RUSSELL CHANDLER

The Virtue Of Simplicity

The Simple Life, by Vernard Eller (Eerdmans, 1973, 122 pp., $2.25 pb), and Beyond the Rat Race, by Arthur G. Gish (Herald Press and Keats, 1973, 192 pp., $1.45 pb), are reviewed by David Gill, instructor in church history and ethics, California Center for Biblical Studies, Culver City.

Jacques Ellul’s lament that “there is no life-style, neither individual nor collective, which is showing forth the Christian faith” (False Presence of the Kingdom) is regrettably still applicable, at least on the whole. If Vernard Eller, Arthur Gish, and others now moved to write on the subject have their way, however, the problem may yet be solved. Eller, a religion professor at LaVerne College in California, and Gish, an itinerant preacher and member of an intentional community in Philadelphia, have in common theological education at Bethany Theological Seminary of the Church of the Brethren. Both speak from a perspective that mandates a life in the world, yet a life-style radically not of the world.

For both Eller and Gish the point of departure in developing an authentic Christian life-style is this text: “Set your mind on God’s kingdom and his justice before everything else, and all the rest will come to you as well” (Matt. 6:33, NEB). The central motif in the Christian life-style is “simplicity.” The two books make a good pair as Eller gives us the theoretical/theological constructs and Gish forges ahead with the applications.

Eller’s The Simple Life is really an extended commentary on the Matthew text quoted above. In the first half of his book Eller examines hedonism, service to the poor, ecology, asceticism, and dissociation from society as possible motivations for the simple life and finds them of value only when relativized and qualified by a higher purpose. The higher purpose that Eller adduces from the teaching of Jesus and Paul is absolute allegiance to the Kingdom of God. The Gospel brings liberation from our prior enslavement to things and to the “necessities” of life under the sun. We are brought into a dialectical relationship wherein, at one level, we place our absolute loyalty with Jesus and his kingdom and, on the other level, we develop relationships to “things.” The first relationship is absolute and normative; the second is relative and must always be conditioned by and subordinate to that prior fealty to God’s kingdom and righteousness. A second dialectic is the familiar “in the world but not of the world” of John 17.

The tension involved in these dialectical patterns is inescapable, but a solution to any specific problem of application is possible if we clearly understand and act on our priorities (His Kingdom first—the rest later) and follow the example of Jesus: loving, serving, suffering with and for others. Eller summons Kierkegaard, whom he calls “the major thinker from Christian history who has given the most (and most effective) attention to the doctrine that we have been calling ‘the simple life,’” for forty pages of help (annotated quotations) in understanding the Christian life-style.

In the end, however, Eller refuses to make specific applications for us. To do so, he argues, would violate the promise of Matthew 6:33, that “all the rest” will follow in the wake of the first commitment. While his position leaves itself wide open to abuses, rationalizations, and hypocrisy on the part of Christians, specific directives about “all the rest” would undercut the whole ethic. The “all the rest” would attract primary attention, leaving “seeking the kingdom” in second place. Eller leaves us with a well-argued and illustrated understanding of the importance of elevating Jesus and the Kingdom to ab solute authority in our lives with its imperative to judge all other aspects of our life(-style) by reference to the purposes of that kingdom.

If Eller is afraid to make specific applications, Arthur Gish is emphatically not! Beyond the Rat Race is a fast-paced barrage of both criticisms of contemporary living and constructive suggestions for implementing a specifically Christian life-style whose hallmark is simplicity. Gish views his book as a sequel to his earlier The New Left and Christian Radicalism. It applies “the radical theology of revolution to the area of life-style, showing both the personal and political implications of a life lived in complete faithfulness to Jesus Christ.” The claim, rather bold, is in large measure fulfilled.

Many of Gish’s suggestions will have you nodding with approval (e.g., “Give up time consuming rituals such as … washing the car”). Neckties, soft drinks, electric can-openers, and a host of other “necessities” come in for criticism. Walking, gardens, home-made clothing, and Sassafras tea made from roots you go out and dig up are on the approved list. Those who, like C. S. Lewis, prefer their theology over “tea, tobacco, and public house ale” will be jolted by Gish’s disapproval. All his suggestions are worth serious consideration. While some make amusing reading, they all search the conscience of those taking their stewardship of creation and time seriously.

But simplicity, for Gish, goes far beyond our relationship to things such as those mentioned above. Speech, thought, titles of distinction, recreation, relationships—these and all areas of life should be characterized by simplicity, he says. Many will find Gish’s attitude toward using titles (Dr., Professor, even Mr.!) and oath-taking a bit eccentric, but his treatment of larger issues cannot be passed over. He is a declared enemy of the whole consumer-oriented American way of life. Violence, dehumanization, evil manipulation of Consumers, and pollution are direct effects of the system.

In contrast to this Babylon doomed to failure, Gish proposes radical discipleship to Jesus Christ. Discipleship must be thoroughgoing in each of our lives, and we must build communities in (not separate from) the world. The advantage of community is great, not least in better discerning the leadership of God’s Spirit. A caring, sharing community recognizing only Jesus as President, living in the spirit of the coming Kingdom, does present a viable alternative to a frenetic, despairing world.

Gish devotes the last quarter of his book to the specific biblical basis of his plan for the simple life. Beginning with the same text as Eller, he branches out to a discussion of economics, property, poverty, and faith as understood in the Scriptures. In conclusion, Gish (fortunately) admits that his specific suggestions are not necessarily the only options for everyone: “One cannot divorce Christian faith from its concrete expression even though it can never be identified with that expression. No one cultural form can be called the Christian life-style, but there are many life-styles that are definitely not Christian.” One suspects it would be hard to convince Gish that God could be pleased with any wealthy Christian. There are very compelling elements both theologically and practically in Gish, but it is wise to recall Eller’s caution and leave God room for a certain diversity among the citizens of his Kingdom.

NEWLY PUBLISHED

God’s Forever Family, by Jack Sparks (Zondervan, 287 pp., $1.95 pb). Story of the Christian World Liberation Front and related ministries to students and others, based in Berkeley, California. Honest sharing of trials and triumphs. Challenging examples for Christians who want to introduce Christ to others.

A Guide to the Study of the Holiness Movement, by Charles Edwin Jones (Scarecrow, 946 pp., $27.50). An indispensable guide to the scores of denominations, periodicals, and schools in the holiness movement, which began last Century to preserve and restore original Wesleyanism and from which much of Pentecostalism emerged. Identities some 2,000 leaders. Also includes extensive bibliography and information on the principal trans-denominational bodies. Indexed.

A Lawyer Among the Theologians, by Norman Anderson (Eerdmans, 240 pp., $3.95 pb). An evangelical law professor finds prevailing academic theology and biblical study wanting in light of “rules of evidence.” By the same Standards he finds the testimony of Scripture reliable.

Foul-up or Follow-up, by Lloyd Mattson (Victor, 48 pp., $.95 pb). Creative, practical, and much needed guide to following up decisions for Christ made at summer camps.

Yale: A History, by Brooks Mather Kelley (Yale, 588 pp., $17.50). Founded in 1701 with the intention of preserving pure doctrine, in distinction from the drift at Harvard, Yale became more influential in shaping and studying the course of American religious history than any other university. Although its character is now secular, for much of its history Yale demonstrated that high standards of orthodoxy, piety, and scholarship are compatible.

The Future of the American Past: A Study Course on American Values, by Earl Brill (Seabury, 96 pp., $2.95 pb), and Defining America: A Christian Critique of the American Dream, by Robert Benne and Philip Hefner (Fortress, 150 pp., $2.75 pb). Two brief, helpful studies on the inevitable interrelations between American civil religion and historic Christianity.

Rome Before Avignon, by Robert Brentano (Basic Books, 340 pp., $15). History of the social structure of Rome in the thirteenth century. Deals with physical features, papal influence, and family life and reveals interesting parallels with aspects of modern life.

Churches and Church Membership in the United States: 1971, by Douglas Johnson, Paul Picard, and Bernard Quinn (Glenmary Research Center [4606 East-West Highway, Washington, D. C. 20014], 237 pp., $15 pb). Fifty-three denominations, comprising about 80 per cent of all church membership, have their statistical data of three years ago compiled in this convenient volume. Data are recorded by state and then by county. A full-color fold-out map (available separately for $3) shows the dominant denominations for each county. For various reasons omits several large denominations (such as the Eastem Orthodox, black denominations, Churches of Christ (non-instrumental), Assemblies of God, Jehovah’s Witnesses, American Baptist Association, and Baptist Bible Fellowship). Nevertheless this is a valuable guide to the denominational make-up of the country and belongs in all theological and reference libraries.

Render Unto God, by Thomas A. Shannon (Paulist, 180 pp., $4.50 pb). A theological underpinning within a Catholic context for selective obedience to civil authorities. Originated as a doctoral dissertation.

Forgiveness in Action, by Helen Kooiman (Hawthorn, 144 pp., $5.95, $2.50 pb). An insightful study of forgiveness. Biblically based and applicable to everyday life.

The Goodness of God, by John W. Wenham (InterVarsity, 223 pp., $2.95 pb). An in-depth study of God’s goodness in light of the evil seen in Bible times and in the world today. The author deals with the difficult questions of cruelty, suffering, war, famine, and hell. A sequel to Christ and the Bible.

St. Caesarius of Arles: Sermons, Volume 3 (Consortium Press [821 15th St. N.W., Washington, D. C. 20005], 303 pp., $14.95). Caesarius was bishop of Arles in what is now France from 502 to 542. His influence was especially wide because he had his sermons distributed far beyond his own diocese. The fifty sermons making up this volume are published in a fresh translation as volume 66 in “The Fathers of the Church,” a series begun in 1947 that is to be completed in some 100 volumes at the hoped-for rate of about three a year. All theological libraries should have this series.

The Sexual Revolution, by J. Rinzema (Eerdmans, 107 pp., $2.35 pb). Useful overview of the roots and manifestations of the rapid change in sexual mores, written in a European context by a Protestant pastor. His points are thought-provoking even when one disagrees.

Call the Witnesses, edited by Paul M. Robinson (Brethren Press [1451 Dundee Ave., Eigin, 111., 60120], 144 pp., $2.95 pb). Thirteen leaders of the Church of the Brethren write on evangelism. Much is applicable to all evangelistically minded Christians.

Pro-existence, by Udo Middelmann (InterVarsity, 126 pp., $1.95 pb). An associate of Francis Schaeffer deals with creativity, work, property, selfishness, and Christ’s retum in an eloquent plea for Christians to recognize the significance of their lives.

Free the Child in You, by John K. Bontrager (Pilgrim, 192 pp., $5.95), The Gospel of Liberation, by Jurgen Moltmann (Word, 136 pp., $5.95), and Guilt and Freedom, by Bruce Narramore and Bill Counts (Vision, 159 pp., $4.95). Three practical treatments of a subject of great contemporary interest. Bontrager makes a direct application of the theory of transactional analysis to the Christian life and faith. Moltmann’s book is a collection of speeches and sermons that apply the principles of the Gospel to basic practical situations in life. Narramore and Counts are counselors who use case studies to illustrate the guilt often suffered by Christians and biblical psychological principles to show how to gain freedom.

The House of David, by Jerry M. Landry (Saturday Review Press, 272 pp., $14.95). A journalist presents a lively narrative of Saul, David, and Solomon. Descriptions are embellished imaginatively to amplify the biblical record without contradicting it. Lavishly illustrated.

Boasting in the Lord, by David M. Stanley (Paulist, 192 pp., $2.95 pb). A thorough study of the practice and precepts of prayer as revealed in Paul’s letters.

Confrontation at Worms, by DeLamar Jensen (Brigham Young University, 112 pp., $10.50). A concise history of the struggles of Martin Luther, strikingly illustrated with prints of woodcuts, paintings, and publications from the period. Contains text and translation of the edict.

Christianity Confronts Culture, by Marvin K. Mayers (Zondervan, 384 pp., $5.95 pb). Using models, case studies, group activities, and questions for discussion, a former missionary who now teaches anthropology at Wheaton tries to sensitize readers to the procedures of cross-cultural evangelism. Useful not only for missionaries but also for those ministering in such a multi-cultural land as the United States.

Finally, both Eller and Gish use the concept of the Kingdom of God and our citizenship in it as a basis for their articulation of the simple Christian life-style. Gish does this quite well, it seems to me, but makes an unfortunate omission: the Kingdom is not only now but also coming in its fullness with the retum of Jesus Christ. Our efforts to live as faithful citizens of the Kingdom now are exceedingly important but nevertheless relative in view of the Second Coming. This double aspect of the coming of the Kingdom is noted by Eller but ignored by Gish. A greater realization of the Second Coming would give us greater hope and a stronger ethical imperative, and place our efforts to live in anticipation of that Kingdom in proper perspective.

A Skeptic’S Look

Back to Jesus, by Peter Michelmore (Fawcett, 1973, 192 pp., $.95 pb), is reviewed by Russ Pulliam, reporter, Associated Press, New York City.

It’s always hard for a Christian to write fairly and objectively about other Christians and their ministries. The easy approach is to write up their good side, to show how God is using them, and to refrain from searching for weaknesses. So it’s good that this report on the Jesus movement was written by a skeptic rather than by some enthusiastic Cheerleader who never would raise critical questions about the rediscovery of Christ among young people.

Michelmore is not an atheist or a humanist, but he has not found Christ as the answer to everything. He struggles with his own faith and cannot adhere to all the common evangelical beliefs. Above all, he is a reporter who strives to be objective and truthful, so the book has a critical and balanced perspective that is so often lacking in autobiographies written by evangelists.

His reporting takes him all over the country, and he teils about Jesus people at the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami, the Children of God in Texas, various West Coast groups, and Jews for Jesus in New York.

In an interesting historical analysis, he cites David Wilkerson as a catalyst for the Jesus movement of the late sixties and early seventies. Through his Teen Challenge Street ministry in New York City and his book, The Cross and the Switchblade, Wilkerson provided an example of what the Holy Spirit could do in the life of a person who puts his whole trust in Christ.

But Michelmore also is critical of Wilkerson for leaving the inner-city ministry for a home in Dallas, Texas. He finds this turning away from the inner-city ghettoes all too common among the Jesus people. Sometimes it’s part of a general tendency to turn away from worldly concerns, or social action, in favor of the spiritual side of a new life in Christ. But also “it must be the old success ethic. White evangelists find more receptive, and generous, audiences in the suburbs. Black evangelists also strive for pastures far greener than rowdy street-corner meetings.”

He also is critical of Hal Lindsey and others who prophesy that the end is near, and finds that the love and grace of Christ are “too often hidden in the thicket of dire prophecies by the men who are rooting for the apocalypse.”

Michelmore also gives the good side. For someone who has not personally experienced the moving of the Holy Spirit, he picks an unusual theme: that the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit described by Luke in Acts, is the prime force behind the Jesus movement.

The book covers more than charismatics or Pentecostals. He bridges over the split between Pentecostals and evangelicals who do not see tongues as necessary evidence of the Holy Spirit. Rather than taking sides, he looks at all the new Jesus people who are experiencing dramatic and undeniable changes in their own lives. The common denominator is a total commitment to Christ, an openness to the Spirit.

Pointers To Transcendence

The Analogy of Experience: An Approach to Understanding Religious Truth, by John E. Smith (Harper & Row, 1973, 140 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by Paul Gooch, associate professor of philosophy, Scarborough College, University of Toronto, West Hill, Ontario.

In this book John E. Smith, Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, presents the substance of his 1970 Warfield Lectures at Princeton Seminary. The result is a philosophically perceptive statement of the centrality of experience for the understanding of Christian faith.

Smith begins with the classical theme of faith seeking understanding. Though he places himself in the Augustinian-Anselmian tradition, holding in tension rationalist and fideist approaches, Smith advances this tradition by arguing that we must not only clarify the content of faith but also relate it to the matrix of human experience. Since experience must be seen as dynamic, changing throughout history, theology becomes an ongoing enterprise, and the theologian must know the experience of contemporary man if he is to communicate with him.

But it is not for some watery notion of “relevance” that Smith argues: he is after instead an elucidation of the very structure of human experience, that structure which persists through change and development. He suggests that much of our present theological and philosophical thinking about experience has been infected by the views of the British empiricists: that experience is private and subjective, Standing between us and the world. Smith rather argues that experience should be seen to have a shared, inter-subjective character; it is a reliable discloser of the nature of reality. Further, when the structure of experience is properly understood it can be seen to contain analogues that point to the transcendent reality of God.

It is through analogy that we come to understand God and religious truth. Smith sketches in chapters IV through VII some outlines for a theology based on the analogy of experience. He begins with human experience as it is: flawed by man’s fundamental self-assertiveness, our own responsibility but beyond our remedy. We are caught in a “circular predicament.” Nevertheless, we can still understand something of God; he is not so wholly other that we cannot know him analogically in the experience of selfhood as a center of intentional action and overarching purpose. God is thus the transcending center of intention. And Jesus is the concrete manifestation of that center; in the fully human experience of a selfless love for God he is able to break through our predicament. He establishes a new reality in history, the “spiritual body” of the Beloved Community, through which men may now realize in their own experience God’s intention to save us.

Though philosophically perceptive, the book does not set out to be a piece of philosophy in the technical sense. Smith does not attempt to provide philosophical justification for many of his Claims: he does not explain on what basis we can decide which aspects of experience are proper analogues for our understanding of God, nor does he answer the problems philosophers have uncovered in the verification of analogical language about God simply by focusing attention on the analogy of experience. His approach also raises provocative questions for biblical interpretation. He introduces a distinction between analogues of experience (which point to a transcendent reality) and counterparts to experience (which function as bridges across the experiences of different persons), which distinction then seems to disappear: one wonders how these may come together in the life and experience of Jesus.

Smith shows considerable skill in the delicate task of interpreting Christian faith in experiential terms without sacrificing the full content of faith. There will be differences about the degree of his success, but The Analogy of Experience should be read by anyone who assumes that such interpretation is unnecessary or optional; and it will be read with great profit by the reflective Christian seeking a comprehensive framework for understanding and communicating his faith.