Page 5731 – Christianity Today (2024)

An Interview With Festo Kivengere¹Festo Kivengere is probably the best-known product of the East African revival movement. Since 1962 he has worked as an evangelist around the world. He is the leader of the African Enterprise evangelistic team in East Africa, and since 1972 he has also been the Anglican bishop of Kigezi, with headquarters at Kabale, Uganda. He holds the M.Div. from Pittsburgh Seminary. The following is a condensation of an interview by the editors ofChristianity Today:

Question. What is the East African revival, and why has it lasted over forty years?

Answer. Can I explain? This is a question I have been asked repeatedly for over twenty-five years, and all I have ever been able to do is to share what I have seen. The only explanation I can give is that it is God’s work. It is not a technique. It is a movement that cannot be contained. It is renewal within renewal. It is an attitude toward the Lord, toward the Bible, toward the fellowship, and toward the Spirit. It has always been open to a fresh touch.

Q. What does this revival mean to the people involved in it?

A. It is when Christ becomes a living, risen Lord in the life of a believer. For the non-believer, it is when he is brought into a confrontation with Christ and accepts him as Saviour, thus completely changing his life morally and socially. In other words, revival is when Christ becomes alive in a life, changing that life. The person is born again, and if he has previously had that experience, then his life is changed in such a way that it affects all his relationships.

Q. Is it visible to an outsider?

A. Absolutely! Go back to a village a week after a man comes to the Lord in a meeting in the market. The whole village knows something about it. He has paid the debts he owes. He has gone to people he hated and said, “I’m sorry. I’m a changed man.” He has apologized or asked for forgiveness. He’s now telling them what Christ means to him. He has carried his new belief into his business practices. In other words, it isn’t something he sits on as a comfortable experience. If anything, it is terribly uncomfortable.

Q. How has this differed from other revivals in history?

A. It may be the continued willingness of those who have been revived to be renewed by the Spirit of God. At the Kabale convention last year, celebrating the fortieth year of the revival in that area, we heard up-to-date testimonies from people who were brought to Christ as early as 1930. They had tremendous freshness; yet they had been winning souls for thirty-five or forty years. They have remained open to what the Spirit may want to say to them in the present situation. They learned that when they got into a rut God had to turn them out of it so they could breathe again. The tendency to get into certain patterns can stifle the work of the Spirit and create pockets of hardness. Continued breaking and bringing new streams of life have been the means God has used.

Q. Amid this openness are there some agreed points of emphasis?

A. Yes, three. The basis was the Bible. Christ was at the center. And the Word was not just read; it was obeyed.

Q. How has the Bible been used?

A. It has been preached from Genesis to Revelation. Men who have never been to seminary have taught it as the living book. I know people who were converted at the age of forty-five, born again when they were illiterate. They taught themselves how to read immediately. Even before they could read they quoted what had been quoted to them. They would get the verses in their heads and then go stand up and preach them without having a Bible. They preached it without hesitation, and they allowed it to work on them. They have won hundreds and thousands of people, and I believe their power lay in their attitude of feeding on the Word. Of course, they have no commentaries, so as you can imagine they are limited. But the amazing thing is that they can see the whole spectrum of the Bible in such a way that one must agree they are in fellowship with the Author, the Holy Spirit. To them it is God’s Word. It speaks to them, and they do something about it. It convicts them, and they repent. It fills their hearts with joy.

Q. Explain, please, the centrality of Christ in the revival.

A. All sorts of things have happened: dreams, visions in the night, conviction of sin; but no one ever put these above Christ and him crucified and moving alive among us. We had our excesses, but they were corrected as we kept our eyes on the Word incarnate and preached the written Word.

Q. What about the third point you mentioned, obedience to the Word?

A. The living Christ in the Bible spoke living words to living persons in living situations. This meant that those who listened had to do something about it. It made men move. It made them pay debts of love and money. It made people go and speak to neighbors out of compelling love and concern for their souls. The Word compelled men and women to evangelize.

Q. Has this evangelization spilled across tribal and national boundaries?

A. Oh, yes. It has gone into all parts of Uganda, Ruanda, Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania, and Malawi, and into parts of Ethiopia. And it has had an impact in such faraway places as Indonesia.

Q. Is it interdenominational?

A. Initially, the thrust was in the Church of England, but the fire began to move, and people shared with those in other denominations. It went from church to church, denomination to denomination. Some churches, like the Lutherans, found it hard to move fast at first. They were looking at it from a doctrinal point of view. The very staunch evangelical groups found it terribly hard to accept at first look. Doctrinal loopholes could be found. It didn’t have a neat theological approach. They felt that things might go wild. Imagine 300 people lying on the ground weeping and crying and shouting and shrieking in church. Invite that sort of thing into your church?

Q. They were afraid of enthusiasm?

A. Exactly! Those who saw this considered it too risky. They did not know how to control it.

Q. Were the top leaders of the Anglican church involved from the beginning?

A. No. That would be great for Anglicans if God blessed the men with commanding positions and influence. But he came and blessed girls and elderly women and boys and nobodies, and the ministers remained very dry. Of course, the ministers were embarrassed by what these lively Christians said, and they opposed the revival. Until the pastor was blessed, he had to oppose it. Why did God choose to work “through the back door”? Why not deal with the big man so things could move easily?

Q. How did the “big men” get involved?

A. One example was in Tanzania where some of us went to witness. The doors were shut against us repeatedly. The African pastor got up in the cathedral pulpit one Sunday when the church was packed and said, “Now, look: I want to warn you against some strangers who have recently moved in. They talk big words about salvation, but they are wolves in sheep’s skin. Be careful of them.” And you could see the congregation turn and look at us. Sunday after Sunday this man did not preach anything. Finally, he got up one morning and said, “This is my last warning. If any of you is caught up in this talk and business of salvation I will excommunicate you for six months to show you how wrong you are.” There was silence. We walked outside. We were becoming bitter.

Then the Lord spoke to me and said, “You owe deep love to that man. You need to be helpful. Go to his church, and do what you can, and love him.” We protested that it would be difficult, but we went on for a few weeks, for a month, for three months, for five months. Finally he stood before his congregation one day with tears streaming down his cheeks. He said to them, “Months ago I told you that if any of you experienced this salvation they were talking about I would excommunicate you. I have been saved. Now you can excommunicate me if you like.” We could hardly believe our ears. Public testimony! This man was born again because revival started. But it didn’t start easily.

Q. Why has this been accepted by leaders of the mainline denominations in East Africa, such as the Anglican, when it might not have been accepted elsewhere?

A. It was not accepted at first. That is a part of the picture that has not been reported widely. In Uganda, for instance, twenty students who had only two months or less to go before ordination were expelled from our theological college. They were expelled simply because the warden was not agreeable to their experience, and the bishop agreed with him. I got a lovely letter about a year ago from that bishop, who is now retired in England. He has been deeply blessed in the years since that. We went to see him when we conducted a mission in England. It was interesting that before revival broke out in the country he had asked for missions of evangelistic teams to spread throughout Uganda. He was the only bishop there then, and he had a vision, but many of his ministers were not born again. Then God began to move, and people were repenting of their sins. People were in tears. A respectable part of the church was embarrassed. Ministers did not like it. This poor man, the bishop, was afraid, and he shied away from what he had actually initiated. He turned around and said, “This can’t be of God; it must be of the Devil.” So for twenty-five years he opposed it, but the position of the hierarchy didn’t stop the movement.

I was brought into it when things in the church were really thick and hard, when licenses were being withdrawn from ministers and the revival groups were not permitted to meet in churches. But God did something unique. After the bishop himself suggested that we leave and form another denomination, we went and had prayer. The Spirit of God said, “Don’t you move.” So, our answer was, “This is our church here, and we stay whether we speak or not.” We witnessed, people suffered every week, and one minister after another came into the blessing of God. Now more than 85 per cent of the clergymen know Jesus Christ as their Saviour, as do all our bishops.

Q. To what extent has the charismatic emphasis been a part of the East African revival?

A. None. There are now some charismatic groups in Africa, but they seem to have come through European and American missionaries. In one country I visited, a man told me, “We had a revival.” When I asked him when, he replied that it had been three years earlier. Then I asked him exactly what he meant by “had a revival.” His response was that it was the extraordinary experiences, the unusual manifestations, and now that they were over, so was the “revival.” But real revival is Jesus Christ himself. Now, I do not despise the manifestations God has sent to shake people up. Praise God for them! I have told people who have been involved: “Don’t think the manifestations are going to feed you. They shook you up so that you may go to the bread of life.” Perhaps the only contribution I have made to some of these groups is that I have reminded them not to overlook the fundamental issues.

Q. You have spoken of persecution from within the church; has there also been persecution from outside it?

A. Yes, in Kenya, for instance. Revival broke out there in 1937, but the Mau Mau revolution started in 1952. There is a strong church in Kenya today because many Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans, and others had been blessed in the revival and then gave such marvelous testimonies during the emergency. So many Christians were exposed to these terrible experiences and massacres, but they stood the test of time. The church went through the fire. It was not originally a persecution directed at people because they were Christians. But the believers who knew Jesus and who were witnessing had a hard choice. The Mau Mau got many members from the churches. Those who were in the Kikuyu tribe had a very hard time keeping out of the revolutionary group. The Mau Mau were fighting to liberate the land from white domination. Then the British would come and say, “We want people to fight against these terrible murderers, so join our forces. We’ll give you guns, and your local militia can protect your people from these killers.” Many of those who had been affected by the revival could not join either side. They often agreed with the Mau Mau that their land had been taken from the Kikuyu unjustly, but they also held that Jesus died for men, never for the land. Those who refused to take sides suffered. The British arrested them as supporters of the Mau Mau, or the Mau Mau killed them.

Q. What should Christians say in such situations, where neo-colonialism can be as bad as the old colonialism?

A. We have only one message: the disease is not domination by white men. It is the disease of sin in the human heart, which makes any man the exploiter of another. This is a clear message, and we should not hesitate to make it clear to people wherever we are. I wish there were more gospel preaching in those terms, not in political terms.

Q. Do you mean in Africa, or elsewhere?

A. Everywhere! God’s power knows no boundaries, of course, and we have heard amazing testimonies from many countries of the world. A man from the eastern part of the Soviet Union was a guest at our Kabale convention last year. He had been in prison in Siberia for eight and a half years and then was kicked out of the nation. He gave a lovely word of testimony in which he told us that Khrushchev had said on television in 1970, “I will show you the last Christian in Russia.” He said that since then there has been a wonderful time of revival in the midst of pressure, the church has doubled, and Khrushchev is no more.

Q. Have you seen a similar response in the places where you have preached?

A. Yes. There is a real movement of God now among the young people of Kenya, for instance. There is evidence of a new openness to the Bible in some of the African independent churches. I have never seen such a response to Christ-centered messages as I saw at a university mission organized by students in Ghana. Some pastors from Zaire told me about thrilling things in their churches. In Japan, where Christians are such a tiny minority and often very formal, I sensed a hunger for more vitality and simple, direct presentation of the Gospel. In Germany last year I spoke to a crowd of evangelicals estimated to total 35,000, and we had a wonderful time. Since then I have heard that there is a drawing together of the Christians for the single purpose of presenting Christ.

Q. Do you see any of this as a result of the 1974 Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization?

A. Some of it is. The congress has shaken the established church. In Germany I met a number of Lutheran bishops who want more evangelistic outreaches, and they quote the vision of Lausanne.

Q. You were invited back to the city of Lausanne in 1975 to preach at the 700th anniversary of their cathedral. What did you find?

A. You can imagine a team of two Africans who are conducting an evangelistic mission in Lausanne, of all places! You know what the Swiss people are like. We told them we appreciated their reserve, and then we had tremendous times together with them. The line God has given us is to present to any community the message that has the power to break down the barriers. Christ has entered my culture in Africa, and Swiss culture, and German culture, and all the rest. And out of it he brings brothers and sisters without destroying their cultures. Rather, he releases them from their cultural barriers. In Europe, they need fresh air, and they seemed to appreciate my approach.

Q. What did you discover in your mission in England?

A. We had quite a remarkable response. Our ministry was to the churches, and there were no big crusades. In some places, such as Manchester and Bristol, it was beautiful. Ministers were on fire; there were many young people; churches were packed; testimonies were given. There are wonderful signs of hope in parts of the Church of England, and there is tremendous spiritual impact.

On the other side, there is much to make you sad. There are some churches without much of what you would call the Gospel. They knew all about liturgy and ceremony but were scared of preaching. In one place my colleague on the team, a layman, was assigned to preach in a Roman Catholic church, and the congregation there was more open than in the Anglican church next door. I went to the Anglican church, and since I was a bishop they respected me. The priest said to me very gently, “Bishop, my people are not used to more than eight-minute sermons, so please keep that in mind.”

Q. Is there anything distinctively African in the East African revival that cannot be found in other cultures or that cannot be used in other countries?

A. That is difficult to say. Maybe our music or other forms of expression have made a certain contribution. But when we have gone to share it in the South Pacific or in Central America and elsewhere, we have shared Christ and not Africa. In Indonesia and other places God has done some wonderful things. No, I don’t think there is anything purely African about the revival.

The Zurich authorities had handed down their ultimatum: all unbaptized infants must be baptized within eight days, or those responsible for withholding them would face imprisonment or banishment. After much prayer and soul-searching, on the night of January 21, 1525, a small group of believers decided “to obey God rather than men.” They inaugurated believer’s baptism, baptizing those who confessed their faith in Christ and requested baptism. In less than two years their three leaders, Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz, and George Blaurock, were dead or banished. Manz, after many imprisonments, was executed by drowning in the Limmat River on January 5, 1527, becoming the first Protestant to die at the hands of Protestants. Regrettably, he was not the last.

These believers preferred to be known as Brethren in Christ, but they soon came to be called Anabaptists (ana– in Greek means “again”). Subsequently not only they and their spiritual descendants but many other groups, only superficially related to them if at all, were called Anabaptists. The careless and polemical use of the term has long muddied the waters of historical investigation. We need to make finer distinctions and to strive to understand what the real Anabaptists were saying.

Anabaptism was born when the Reformation itself was still in its swaddling clothes. The meeting at Worms, from which Luther emerged as an outlaw, was less than four years in the past, Luther had not yet married, and Zwingli was still saying Mass in Latin. However, in many respects the reform movement led by Zwingli in Zurich had outrun its German counterpart. The actions of the radical social reformer Thomas Müntzer and his peasant supporters had driven Luther to turn against the peasants and to retreat further from the innovative implications of his own teachings. A seething ferment marked the social, intellectual, and religious climate. Doubtless the pre-Reformation movements of Waldenses, Lollards, and Hussites had contributed to a strong undercurrent of discontent that the Magisterial Reformers—that is, the reformers who had the support of the local political rulers, such as Luther and Zwingli—began to tap. But the socially conservative Magisterial Reformers were no more able to contain the new wine in their patched-up wineskins than had the cautious humanist Erasmus. Nevertheless, they enunciated the initial principles that virtually all Reformation elements were to follow.

The continental divide between the Reformers and the Roman Catholics was the concept of authority. The Bible became for the Protestants the final court of appeal in all matters of faith and practice. Sola scriptura was far more than a slogan; it became a way of life. The publication of a critical edition of the Greek text by Erasmus sparked not only Luther’s translation of the New Testament (1522) but also the Zurich Bible (1529). The Zurich translators incorporated into their Old Testament the work of two Anabaptists, Ludwig Hetzer and Hans Denck, who had combined their linguistic expertise to make the first translation of the Old Testament prophets from Hebrew into German.

For the Anabaptists, as for the other Reformers, the Bible was the supreme source of authority. However, a major difference appears in the way the Anabaptists handled Scripture. They took their interpretative key from Matthew 5 and Galatians 3 and 4. For the Anabaptists, the Old Testament could never stand alone as the last word of God to men. Since the Incarnation, it was clear that the Law was fulfilled in the new covenant of grace that Christ had inaugurated. Therefore, the old Testament could never stand alone, nor could it be interpreted as if Christ had never come. While the Anabaptists frequently quoted the Old Testament and some occasionally quoted the Apocrypha, they found in the New Testament the guidelines for the Christian life and for the Church. The Magisterial Reformers, on the other hand, “sought to construe the New Testament Church after the lineaments of the Old Testament, thus reversing the forward movement of God’s affairs in history …,” as Leonard Verduin aptly put it in The Reformers and their Stepchildren.

The practice that called forth the label “Anabaptist” can also provide a key to understanding the major thrust of the movement. Believer’s baptism became for the Anabaptists both an affirmation and rejection. By this act the Anabaptists said yes to Christ and no to the world. It was for them an act of confession and discipleship as well as a repudiation, not only of infant baptism but also of that which they felt infant baptism implied, i.e., coercion, the sacral society, the authority of tradition as opposed to the Bible, and a church composed of the mixed multitude.

Much of what the Anabaptists taught came from their concept of faith. For them Christian faith was not subject to coercion. Balthasar Hubmaier, an early Anabaptist martyr wrote, after having been tortured in the water tower in Zurich, “But faith is a work of God and not of the heretic’s tower in which one sees neither sun nor moon, and lives on nothing but water and bread.” Claus Felbinger, a Hutterite missionary, shortly before he was beheaded on July 10, 1560, declared, “God wants no compulsory service. On the contrary, he loves a free, willing heart that serves him with a joyful soul and does what is right joyfully.”

The concept of complete religious liberty and the corresponding limitation of the state’s authority to temporal affairs was clearly expressed as early as 1524. For the state to deny a person the right of choice in matters of faith was, according to Hubmaier, a denial of the Incarnation. For him, freedom of religion was rooted in the revelation of God in Christ. Indeed, it was inherent in the Gospel itself. For the state to insert itself into this realm was tantamount to blasphemy. In attempting to transcend its God-given limitations, the state violated the integrity of the Church.

Moreover, for the Church to baptize an unbeliever or an infant incapable of a voluntary faith-commitment to Christ was also a clear violation of the teachings of Christ and the apostles. The New Testament called for a personal and voluntary commitment that was seen as solely the work of God through the Holy Spirit in response to the proclamation of the Gospel. Faith was the scriptural prerequisite to baptism.

The Anabaptists also went beyond the Magisterial Reformers in their concept of faith. To them, a claim of faith that did not eventuate in a new life of Christian discipleship was nonsense. Hubmaier expresses it in this way: “Such faith cannot remain passive but must break out to God in Thanksgiving and to mankind in all kinds of works of brotherly love.” Some Anabaptists referred to the new life as “walking on the resurrection side of the cross.” All Anabaptists stressed that the essence of the Christian life was discipleship.

While the Anabaptist concept of discipleship is one of the clues for understanding the genius of the movement, Anabaptist ecclesiology is even more significant. It is here that Anabaptism made its most telling point. For sixteenth-century Anabaptists, the guidelines for the Church were found in the New Testament. In baptism an Anabaptist congregation found a visible means of expressing its corporate discipleship. In this act, confession, voluntarism, obedience, and the fellowship of disciples bound together in Christian love for witness became a reality.

For the opponents of the Anabaptists, the sting of believer’s baptism was in part its implied repudiation not only of the Roman Catholic Church but of the other Reformers as well. Infant baptism was seen as the unfailing symbol of continuity between the churches of the Magisterial Reformers and the Roman Catholic Church. Regardless of the harshness with which Magisterial Reformers castigated Rome, their continued recognition of Rome’s baptism as valid baptism implied a recognition of Rome as the true church of which their churches were reformed branches. In the Magisterial Reformers’ eyes, then, the fall of the church was never complete in the sense that the pre-Reformation Roman Catholic Church had ceased to be The Church. This is one of the reasons why the Anabaptists viewed the Magisterial Reformers as half-way reformers.

Of course, infant baptism doubtless appeared an indispensable rite for the territorial churches that the Magisterial Reformers set up. It is at this point that Anabaptists moved from heresy to sedition, in the eyes of their opponents. Their ecclesiology demanded the separation of the church from the state. For them, the state was God-given, to be sure—they were far too biblical to deny this—but its sphere of legitimate activity was severely reduced. It could never interfere with a person’s right to believe or disbelieve. Hubmaier makes this point quite clear: “Therefore, it is well and good that the secular authority puts to death the criminals who do physical harm to the defenseless, Romans 13. But no one may injure the atheist who wishes nothing other than to forsake the gospel.” This is at once the most logical and the most radical statement of the Anabaptist consensus. This meant that neither the prince in Saxony nor the city council in Zurich, much less the King in England, could command the conscience of those to whom Christ only was “the Lord and lawgiver of the church and conscience.”

Anabaptist ecclesiology held serious implications for medieval concepts of the state. The pattern of persecuting in which the Magisterial Reformers engaged was due, to a considerable extent, to their inability to extricate themselves from the Constantinian synthesis of church and state. In such a configuration a sin against the church (heresy) became an act of treason against the state. It is precisely at this point that the Magisterial Reformers appeared powerless to change the medieval structure of society. Almost from the very beginning of the movement the Anabaptists saw the serious deficiencies of this social structure. In fact, it is precisely this issue that gave rise to the movement. A church that was subject only to the Lordship of Christ could never become captive to the state or to the powers of this world.

While the Anabaptist attitude toward the state appears almost wholly negative, the Anabaptists were not anarchists. One may glean from their writings and actions certain concepts that reveal a more balanced view than has at times been apparent. While the state in Anabaptist thought is temporary, it is nevertheless ordained of God and must be obeyed.

One’s ultimate loyalty, however, belongs to Christ. When allegiance to Christ and allegiance to the state conflict, there can be no question of which demands priority. And the Christian must be prepared to suffer the consequences. Hubmaier went beyond most Anabaptists in attempting to work out a more positive orientation toward the state. He even advocated the use of the sword in defending the state from attack by its enemies. However, the majority of Anabaptists followed the teachings of the Schleitheim Articles, which prohibited a Christian to use the sword for any reason.

After four and a half centuries, numerous documents written by Anabaptists are coming to light. The twentieth-century student can now read many of these in English. No longer does he have to depend upon the accounts of persons who had little interest in understanding the Anabaptists or in representing them fairly. From these documents as well as other sources it now appears that the Anabaptists were the first to enunciate clearly, and to attempt to implement, the truths that gave rise to the free-church movement. For this reason modern evangelicals will always be indebted to these much maligned Christians, whether they recognize this debt or not. Their gratitude can best be expressed, not in an attempt to reproduce sixteenth-century Anabaptism, but rather in an attempt to recover New Testament Christianity in a twentieth-century context.

A new edition of the sermons of Johann Arndt that appeared in March, 1675, included a preface entitled Pia desideria (“pious longings”). The author of the preface was Philip Jakob Spener, a prominent pastor in Frankfurt. Soon the book was being bought not for the sermons but for the preface. Pia desideria became so popular that it was revised and published separately the following September.

Spener had initiated a renewal, called “German Pietism,” that has influenced evangelicalism almost as much as the Reformation has. The Pietist movement was, as A. Skevington Wood has said, the spiritual bridge between the Reformation and the Evangelical Awakening of the eighteenth century. Much that characterizes evangelicalism—evangelism, missions, lay-witness—was nourished by Spener’s work.

When Spener was born in Alsace on January 13, 1635, northern Europe was in political and theological turmoil. It was the midpoint of the numerous religious wars known collectively as the Thirty Years War. And it was the “scholastic” period of Lutheran orthodoxy. Luther’s works had long since been practically canonized, and theologians and pastors were involved in academic disputes that had little relevance for the layman. These conditions fostered spiritual ignorance and moral lethargy in the churches.

But young Philip was directed along a more positive path. Throughout Alsace a moderate Lutheranism prevailed. The movement derived its principles of devotion and simple piety from the influence of Zwingli and the writings of Johann Arndt (True Christianity), Immanuel Sonstrom (Golden Treasure), Lewis Baylys (Practice of Piety), and other devotional writers. Furthermore, Philip was permanently influenced by the spiritual counsel of his godmother, Agatha von Rappolstein, and of the court chaplain, Joachim Stoll. As a result, Spener developed a sensitive religious nature early in life.

Spener studied Greek and Latin at Colmar and matriculated at the University of Strassburg in May, 1651. He specialized in biblical languages and history, and he earned the master’s degree in 1653 for a refutation of Thomas Hobbes. In 1654, while a lecturer at the university, he began serious theological study. His professors introduced him to a remodeled Lutheranism that understood justification as rebirth, replaced eschatological speculation with interest in the present, and promoted a severe asceticism.

Professor Konrad Dannhauer stimulated young Spener’s interest in Luther. Spener revered Dannhauer, who often functioned as a pastor-counselor to his students, and may have used him as the model for the ideal professor described in Pia desideria. Spener was impressed by Luther, Melanchthon, and other German theologians, as well as by the Dutch theologian Hugo Grotius. At this time Spener’s lifelong interest in heraldry emerged, and he wrote a two-volume work on the subject that was republished after his death. In 1659 he finished his studies at Strassburg.

While traveling to broaden his education, Spener was forced by illness to stop for a while in Geneva. There he developed such a great admiration for Calvinism that he later refused to join his fellow Lutheran pastors in their bitter condemnation of Reformed theology.

At Geneva he met Jean de Labadie, a former Roman Catholic priest who had brought opposition upon himself in France because he emphasized the need for personal Bible study and for regeneration. In 1650 Labadie had joined the Reformed Church in Montauban. He was ordained and in 1655 became the rector of the Reformed academy there. However, he had been forced to flee from France and eventually settled in Geneva. While there he devoted himself to preaching on repentance and establishing a church that followed the apostolic model. Spener may have participated in his home Bible-study classes. Although the degree of Labadie’s influence is debatable, Spener almost certainly drew upon his Reformation of the Church Through the Clergy in writing Pia desideria.

After much prayer and consideration Spener accepted a pastorate at Strassburg in 1663. He received his doctorate there, and he married Susanna Erhard. They had eleven children. Because his pastoral duties were light, Spener had time for his studies and time to give lectures on theology. After three years he was called to become chief pastor at Frankfurt.

Shocked by conditions in Frankfurt, Spener abandoned the prescribed texts and began to preach from the whole Bible. His fearless preaching called for repentance and discipleship but had little impact. Then, in 1669, he preached a sermon on Matthew 5:20–26 (“Whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment …” etc.). The response was immediate and surprising. Spener’s prayer and study group (modeled after Labadie’s) grew, and others were formed. Family life changed. Many persons were converted. Interest in devotional literature increased, and this accounts for the republication of Johann Arndt’s sermons early in 1675. Spener’s introduction to this volume, Pia desideria, was a call for revival. His influence spread through this statement and through another book he wrote, The Spiritual Priesthood (1677). At Leipzig and elsewhere, similar renewals were motivated by Spener’s writing.

In 1686 Spener accepted an invitation to become court preacher at Dresden. But because of his uncompromising preaching he was often in trouble with the authorities, and in 1692 he welcomed an invitation from the elector of Brandenburg to come to Berlin. That same year he persuaded Frederick, the future king of Prussia, to invite August Hermann Francke to become a professor at the new University of Halle. In this Spener showed great wisdom and humility. Francke later became the leader of the Pietist movement, and his influence came to be greater than Spener’s. Spener continued writing and preaching until his death in February, 1705.

Pia desideria is divided into three parts. The first describes society in Spener’s day, the second surveys the biblical basis for hope that God would revive the Church, and the third lists the ways by which Spener believed renewal would come.

In the first part Spener analyzes the spiritual ills of the three levels of society: rulers, clergy, and laity. Most rulers are either so secular that they have no interest in religion, or so blindly dogmatic that they become guilty of “an irresponsible caesaropapism.” Spener concludes that “in some places congregations are better off where they are under a ruler of a different religious persuasion than are those who live under a ruler of their own religion” (Pia desideria, edited and translated by T. G. Tappert, Westminster, 1964, p. 44; subsequent page references are to this edition).

The clergy’s insatiable appetite for theological speculation produced tragic results for the spiritual life of both the clergy and their congregations. Even sincere Christians who are involved in such exercises find, wrote Spener, that “it becomes exceedingly difficult to grasp and find pleasure in the real simplicity of Christ and his teaching. Men’s taste becomes accustomed to the more charming things of reason” (p. 56).

Concerning the laity Spener lamented, “It is evident that on every hand none of the precepts of Christ is openly observed.” Lovelessness, drunkenness, the many lawsuits involving Christians, and unethical business practices were among the sins that distressed Spener.

Convinced that the promise of Christ’s protection for the Church implied a promise for revival, Spener outlined a program for renewal. First there must be “a more extensive use of the Word of God.” Preaching was not enough; Spener encouraged daily family Bible reading, the systematic public reading of the Bible for those unable to read, and group discussions led by laymen.

Second, Spener encouraged the “establishment and diligent exercise of the spiritual priesthood.” Every Christian is charged with responsibility of studying the Word of God and ministering to others. The pastor cannot do all that is necessary for the spiritual growth of those entrusted to his care; all Christians have been called “to exercise spiritual functions.”

Third, Spener insisted that doctrinal knowledge must be accompanied by the faithful practice of Christian love. He took special pains to extend this principle to the arena of theological debate. In an age of bitter feuds, Spener argued that “a proper hatred of false religion should neither suspend nor weaken the love that is done the other person.”

Fourth, he called for reforms in ministerial training. Theological schools should be “nurseries of the church,” that is, they should promote the spiritual development of the students, for “study without piety is worthless.” Spener was particularly irked by the frivolous use of Bible texts and hymns as puns. He also recommended changes in the curriculum. Certain students should specialize in polemics in order to create a body of specialists to help resolve important issues.

Spener called for better sermons, but not simply for homiletical excellence:

Many preachers are more concerned to have the introduction shape up well and the transitions be effective, to have an outline that is artful and yet sufficiently concealed, and to have all the parts handled precisely according to the rules of oratory and suitably embellished, than they are concerned that the materials be chosen and by God’s grace developed in such a way that the hearers may profit from the sermon in life and death [p. 115].

The best sermon is one that allows the Holy Spirit to use the Word of God to produce new life.

Spener’s thought and the revival it helped produce had worldwide influence. Spener and Francke modeled the University of Halle upon the pattern set down in Pia desideria. In 1705 Bartholomew Ziegenbalg and Henry Plutchau left Halle to become the first Protestant missionaries in India, where they sought to develop an indigenous church. Count von Zinzendorf, another graduate of Halle, became the leader of the Moravians, whose influence on the Evangelical Awakening is suggested in the classic statement of William Warburton about that revival: “William Law was its father, and Count Zinzendorf rocked the cradle.” In the American colonies Theodore Frelinghuysen, a young German Pietist, preached against the shallowness of his Dutch Reformed parishes in New Jersey’s Raritan Valley; from his preaching the middle colonies experienced the first wave of the Great Awakening.

Later doctrinal aberrations, such as the Moravian fascination with the wounds of Christ, and a sentimentalistic tendency to eschew theological precision demanded the counterbalance of a strong orthodoxy, but the spirit of Pietism lives on. Spener’s influence continues in the evangelical tradition of devotion, missions, and evangelism, though his name is often forgotten and the Pietist movement is often ridiculed.

Happy Mother’s Day to all our reading moms! I’m married to a mother and a grandmother as well. In praising mothers, let’s not forget the wives who are not mothers and the single women. I’ve had two single secretaries who helped me for at least eighteen years, and they deserve kudos for their service to God and to the work of the kingdom.

Dr. Blaiklock’s article on permissiveness, which not infrequently has been the sign of a decadent culture, should alert us to the fact that Western man has lost his bearings; without an accurate compass to guide him, he’s headed for disaster.

Gasoline prices are on the rise again. In my article I suggest that we close all businesses and stay home one day a week. It would help!

For decades now there has been a shaking and winnowing of the symbols by which “the something beyond man” has traditionally been expressed. Some seemingly having misread the process of change within meaning-systems, have decided that only a “death of God” or some totally new theological beginning can help Western man toward a new understanding of our Ultimate Source of existence—toward a doctrine of God.

Under the spell of secularist ways of thinking, some theologians profess actually to believe that God has undergone a real death. This they infer from the assumption that the forms by which his reality has been expressed have permanently lost their hold upon the minds of thinking men and women in our time. Others have contented themselves with a declaration of God’s absence from our scene.

One interesting phenomenon of recent times has been the gradual shift by some radical theologians toward belief in the reality of a Divine Being. Perhaps the stages by which these theologians have moved toward a doctrine of God indicate the outlines of a path along which others can be expected to move. That remains to be seen. At any rate, the process merits our observation.

If some theologians move by easy stages from radical secularism to some form of “Christian” theism, multitudes of plain people are skipping the preliminaries and moving abruptly into faith in a self-disclosing and personal God. Surprisingly, many are coming to see him as revealed uniquely and supremely in Jesus Christ.

Young people who move into Christian faith through the ministry of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, Campus Crusade, and similar agencies do not fulfill the prophecies of the secular theologians. They seem to develop not only the conviction of God’s reality but an understanding of him in terms of many of the traditional symbols and expressions. Evangelically oriented seminaries find this to be suprisingly true among those who come into ministerial training from the secular campuses.

John Wild reminded us a dozen years ago that the God who was declared absent by the secularists in the sixties would in time again be declared present. Writing in a book entitled Christian Existentialism, Wild held that “man is open to the lure of transcendence,” a fact evidenced by “the restlessness that lies at the core of our human history.”

Will this return be described in totally new and perhaps alien terms, or will many of the historic definitions and symbols be used? If the latter proves to be the case, will formulations maintain the essential content of biblical revelation, and at the same time be perhaps more meaningful than former modes of expression? The current state of indecision seems exciting to many.

One of the most spectacular turnabouts in theological approach in our decade has been that of Professor Paul van Buren of Temple University. In the middle sixties he was considered to be in the right wing of the God-is-dead movement, and one of the radical theologians. The religious world was astonished when in 1974 Professor van Buren declared himself, in the columns of the Christian Century (issue of May 29), in favor of a return to a belief in the transcendent.

At that time, van Buren expressed the feeling that such a return would amount to a rediscovery, but seemed uncertain about the direction in which theologians should look for their cues. With part of his mind, “it seems, he would seek for transcendence in the secular structures all about us. With the other part, he seemed encouraged to believe in the possibility of “an intense systemic consciousness-raising effort” by which men and women will again turn in faith to the Word-made-flesh.

In an address given in November, 1975, van Buren issued a call to theological renewal through a refined and chastened approach to four elements: the nature of God, Easter, the motif of “the Messiah,” and the relationship between the New Testament and the Old Testament. According to van Buren, then, the impetus for the return to theism is to come not from an analysis of the secular but from within a religious context. This call for renewal represents a 180-degree turn in emphasis. So far, so good.

The address in which van Buren issued this call was entitled “The Status and Prospects for Theology” and was delivered before the theological section of the American Academy of Religion. Starting with the current historical, geographical, cultural, and political renewal of Judaism in our time, van Buren suggests that the Holocaust, so tragically symbolized by Auschwitz, Belsen, Treblinka, and Dachau, has pressed a new and inescapable call upon the Christian world. Van Buren’s initial demand is that we reassess our understanding of God’s nature, in terms of what van Buren believes to be God’s compromise of his own freedom—an abiding and limiting compromise—in establishing the Covenant with Abraham.

Human history is thus held to have operated outside the divine sovereignty, particularly with the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A. D. and with the horrendous expressions of the disease of anti-Semitism in Central Europe from 1033 to 1945—masterminded, as van Buren insists, by “baptized Christians.”

Van Buren lays much of the onus for the perversion of Christian history upon three factors. The first is the Church’s misunderstanding of Easter, by which a triumphalist view of the Church led to an insistence upon the radical bypassing of Israel. The second wrongheaded view is Christian Messianism, which van Buren sees as having led to a deep and fateful misunderstanding of Romans 9–11, in which a controversy within Judaism was translated into a doctrine of “a Gentile interim.” The third Christian error was the acceptance of the priority of the New Testament: this error, van Buren contends, charted a course from Matthew’s Gospel, through the Church Fathers, in a direct line to the gas ovens.

Historic Christian theology is thus to be set aside. In its place is to be a radical reconstruction, based upon the assumption that mainline Christianity has been perversely wrong all along. In this restructuring, there would certainly be a rejection of the saving Deed on the Cross, the continuing lordship of Jesus Christ, and the proclamation of “no other name.”

The question that will not go away here is, Would such a restructured form of theology merit the title “Christian” at all? To this the vast majority of those who owe vital allegiance to the Lord Christ would reply with a ringing No!

HAROLD B. KUHN

Baptist church leaders from the free world confronted Soviet officials face to face in late March and demanded explanations for recurring reports of religious persecution.

“I made it perfectly plain,” said Dr. David S. Russell of London, “that many of us in the West are extremely concerned about the treatment being meted out to Christians in the Soviet Union … because of their religious convictions.”

Russell was one of five representatives of the European Baptist Federation (EBF) and the Baptist World Alliance who met for two hours with Victor N. Titov, deputy chairman of the Council for Religious Affairs of the U. S. S. R., in Moscow. The group was attending an EBF executive committee meeting being held for the first time in a Communist country.

Russell later reported in the Baptist Times that there was some straight talk at the meeting “during which I was able to make a strong plea for clemency to be shown to those still in prison.” Particular reference was made to Georgi Vins, currently serving a five-year prison sentence. On a side trip to Kiev, Russell attended the “Reformed Baptist” church where Vins once was pastor. He met Vins’s wife, who speaks good English. She told Russell that she was grateful for the prayers of so many people for her husband. She added that she had been able to visit him in Siberia and had found he was not in very good health.

Russell quoted Titov as saying that the people in question were in prison not because of their religious convictions but because they had broken laws. Titov quoted the criminal code that Vins allegedly violated, and said Vins has the right to appeal to the Soviet Supreme Court, if he is willing to “acknowledge his mistakes.” According to Russell, Titov also said that Soviet law is “in the process of further democratization” but has to be respected.

Russell declared that conditions for Christians in the Soviet Union have improved in the past year. In the crowded Kiev church, he estimated that 75 to 80 per cent of the males in the congregation were under 30. There were three rows of young children in the church. He observed that increasing numbers of young and educated persons are joining Baptist churches in the Soviet Union.

Russell also met with a state official in Kiev and voiced a plea similar to the one he made in Moscow. There are now reportedly seventy-nine persons in Soviet prisons for their religious beliefs.

Titov announced to the visiting church delegation that Janis Smits, a Baptist minister in Latvia whose repeated requests to leave the country with his family had been refused, has now been given the permission he sought.

Russell witnessed a church baptismal service in the Soviet Union and was interviewed for about an hour by Ukraine Radio. European Baptist Press Service noted that during the interview “he was able to answer questions and explain his purposes in coming to the U. S. S. R. and items from the … discussion with the deputy chairman in Moscow.”

Earlier this year, two Baptist clergymen from the Soviet Union visited the Assembly of God headquarters in Springfield, Missouri, and reported that their All-Union Council had baptized 6,185 new members during 1975. That was an increase of more than 1,100 over the previous year. The council includes more than 5,000 churches in the Soviet Union; among the members are Mennonites, some 50,000 Pentecostals, and others, as well as Baptists. Total membership is about half a million. The Baptist clergy also said that the council had registered forty-four new congregations in 1975 and that “prayer houses” were built or restored in more than eight cities.

The Assemblies of God has given the council a $2,000 gift for enlarging the printing ministry among its churches. A 100,000-copy edition of a Russian Bible is being published in the Soviet Union, according to press reports. The printing is said to be sponsored jointly by the Baptists and the Russian Orthodox to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the first Russian Bible.

A group of representatives of organizations involved in beaming radio programs to the Soviet Union met recently in Britain to compare notes with a researcher from Keston College, a suburban London center specializing in the study of religion and Communism. The meeting came in connection with a study Keston is doing on the impact of Christian broadcasts in Communist countries. There has been some criticism of the programming because of its failure to relate to the more educated classes in the Soviet Union. Anglican clergyman Michael Bordeaux, who directs Keston, says that the research is not far enough along to warrant any conclusions. And, he adds, another $15,000 is needed before the study can be completed.

East Meets West

Two meetings in rural Maryland last month attracted a Who’s Who of American ecumenical leaders and some of their counterparts from Eastern Europe. Leaders of the Prague-based but Moscow-dominated Christian Peace Conference were prominent in both.

The first meeting, at a Roman Catholic retreat center in Marriottsville, was attended by sixteen churchmen from behind the Iron Curtain and twenty-four Americans. It was not publicized in advance, and one of the Americans who took part told the Associated Press that American security officers assigned to protect the visitors had requested the news blackout. Hosting the meeting and issuing the invitations was an ad hoc group of denominational executives: Robert Moss of the United Church of Christ, William P. Thompson of the United Presbyterian Church, and Robert Marshall of the Lutheran Church in America.

The second meeting, at New Windsor’s Church of the Brethren Service Center, was an official session of the working committee (executive committee) of the Christian Peace Conference. It was the CPC’s first meeting in America, and the invitation came from CAREE (Christians Associated for Relationships with Eastern Europe). CAREE was organized in 1971 by Westerners associated with the CPC who were distressed by the CPC’s failure to condemn the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The New Windsor sessions included, in addition to the Europeans, a number of Third World members who reportedly came at the expense of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Metropolitan Nikodim, the Russian prelate who was elected to the World Council of Churches’ presidium last year, shared the chairman’s responsibilities at Marriottsville with Moss. At New Windsor, the Orthodox leader presided. He is the CPC president.

The Marriottsville gathering was designated “Karlovy Vary III” since it was the third in a series that started at Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia, in 1962. The second was held in 1974 in Prague. Spokesmen for the session emphasized that it was an “informal” meeting of leaders. Among those invited was Claire Randall, National Council of Churches general secretary. The NCC provided some staffing for the conference.

Thompson, who is the NCC president, gave one of the major papers. The other came from Pastor Rolf-Dieter Guenther of the Church of Berlin-Brandenburg, East Germany. Their theme was “The Serving Church: How the Churches Represented in the Consultation Relate to Government and Society.”

After the papers, “open and frank discussion” was conducted on “the roles of the churches in these diverse societies,” according to a communique issued at the meeting’s end. The document also expressed regret that the U. S. State Department had denied a visa to a Cuban who had been invited. While the communique did not mention the CPC, that organization’s Prague headquarters put out a news release identifying the Eastern Europeans at Marriottsville as representatives of the CPC. An American spokesman for the meeting denied, however, that all those from behind the Iron Curtain were members of the CPC.

The New Windsor CPC conferees issued a “Letter to American Churches.” It called world disarmament a key factor in working for peace, along with the search for an international economic order. The document said nothing about how to enforce disarmament treaties.

Ms. Randall was a guest speaker at the CPC meeting. She emphasized the “interdependence” of nations instead of U. S. independence. While CAREE membership is held only by individuals, a number of NCC member communions support its work. A spokesman for the New Windsor meeting said support comes from the Mennonite Central Committee and agencies of these six denominations: American Baptist Churches, Church of the Brethren, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), United Church of Christ, United Methodist Church, and the United Presbyterian Church. Some of CAREE’s members were active in the defunct U. S. Association for the CPC.

New Life In New Orleans

Members of 329 congregations representing twenty-six denominations took part in a “Christian Spirit of ’76” campaign sponsored by the Greater New Orleans Federation of Churches. The coordinated project was conceived by Southern Baptist clergyman David E. Mason, the federation’s executive director. Catholic archbishop Philip J. Hannan was among the endorsers. The idea was for each congregation to design its own form of involvement in a program of community outreach and church renewal. Events ranged from coffee parties (700 on a single day) to census taking, Scripture distribution, and special preaching services. Many congregations reported record attendance at worship services on the first two Sundays of April.

Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor Edgar Homrighausen summed up the comments of numerous church leaders. The program, he said, has brought unity, joy, and spiritual oneness to the congregation and a feeling of responsibility to the entire Christian community.

Mobilized In Mexico

Some 12,000 people filled the bullring in Merida, the capital of Yucatan, Mexico, to hear Latin American evangelist Luis Palau preach on Christ’s second coming. The meeting last month capped a three-week, eight-city Yucatan crusade by Palau and his associates. There were more than 5,300 recorded professions of faith. In Ticul, nearly a third of the city’s 22,000 population turned out to hear the evangelist in a one-day visit to close a campaign begun by one of his associates. He made similar preaching visits to six other cities but concentrated on the eight-day crusade at Merida.

After each nightly rally Palau counseled callers live on a TV program. One night in Merida a husband and wife shared their telephone as Palau led them to receive Christ together in prayer. Several Bible study groups for middle-class and upper-class people were organized as a result of the telephone-TV ministry, say crusade leaders.

Crusade committee head Ricardo Magana, a businessman, said the outreach campaign was successful because “it was a crusade of the people and the first time the local churches were truly mobilized for such an event.”

Japanese Students: Better Prepared

Of Japan’s 933 universities and colleges, fewer than 200 have an active, organized Christian witness, states a staffer with Kirisutosha Gakusei Kai (KGK), a thirty-year-old indigenous Japanese counterpart to Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. Recently, KGK—a member of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students—held its largest-ever student conference, attended by 350. The six days were filled with major addresses, Bible teaching, special-interest workshops, and reports on Christian student work in various parts of the country. An offering of $1,200 was received for overseas student missionary work (outside of Japan). Many of the delegates indicated that as a result of the conference they were returning to their campuses fired with new zeal and better preparation for Christian witness.

The Army In Japan

Eighty years after its beginning in Japan in 1895, the Salvation Army boasts 240 preachers and workers, fifty-eight churches, and forty-four evangelistic centers there. The Army runs twenty different social institutions, including two hospitals which accommodate five hundred patients, four children’s homes caring for 170 children, five day-care nurseries for the children of working mothers, three homes for the rehabilitation of young women, an alcoholic rehabilitation center and home for men, and other residences for working men and young working girls and students. The name of the group in Japanese, Kyu-Sei-Gun, literally means “Save-the-World Army.” (The Army has work in about eighty countries.)

More than 9,000 Japanese are Salvation Army members, adherents, or members-in-training, according to Commissioner Shinichi Yoshida, Japanese leader. At present eight non-Japanese officers are assisting in the work. Due to the uniforms and special terminology, the Salvation Army was considered a “foreign army” during World War II and was forced to disband by government decree until the war was over. In Army jargon, a member is called a “soldier,” and ordained ministers are “officers.” Churches are known as “corps” and a student in training for various ministries is a “cadet.” The Army’s members are those persons who have accepted Christ as Saviour, and have chosen the Salvation Army as their “church home.” Lay members may wear the uniform; it is not limited to “officers.”

A Training College for Officers (seminary) in Tokyo provides two years of classroom work. Then come two years of on-the-job training during which the cadet continues to do lessons by correspondence and to do practical work that is observed and graded. Lay leaders enroll in specific study courses in order to become Sunday-school teachers or instructors in the five-year Bible course for Salvation Army Youth.

NELL L. KENNEDY

Re-Tracting

The American Tract Society did some digging and came up with a number of interesting tract stories. Among them:

• Benjamin Franklin ghost-wrote and printed tracts of several early American evangelists, including those by George Whitefield.

• John Wesley organized 160 tract distributors in 1757 who “reformed the Lord’s Day habits” of the entire city of London.

• Whistler’s mother was called a “preacher in skirts” because she distributed tracts to the workers on the railroad between Moscow and St. Petersburg (Leningrad).

• Among the precious items of cargo on the Mayflower on its first trip to America were Pastor John Robinson’s tracts.

• A son of one of the chiefs of Burwain, India, was converted through a single tract and was instrumental in winning 1,500 others to Christ.

Rebuttal

Reporters were invited to attend chapel at 1,180-student Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California, one day last month. The occasion: a response by Fuller president David A. Hubbard to charges in the book The Battle For the Bible, written by CHRISTIANITY TODAY editor Harold Lindsell, one of the founding faculty members. The book alleges that Fuller has veered from the historical evangelical position on biblical inerrancy. This inerrancy includes not only the intent of biblical authors but also their very words as originally written, according to the book. Only those churches, institutions, and individuals that adhere to this view of biblical inspiration, the book contends, are truly evangelical.

In his address, Hubbard said the book’s “narrow definitions” of evangelical threaten unity among evangelicals. “My deepest concern about [the] book,” he said, “is not that it criticizes Fuller, but that its inadequate and unbiblical view of Scripture will divide our evangelical fellowship worldwide.”

Priorities for the evangelical camp are “jeopardized by [such] distraction,” warned Hubbard. He went on to imply that the book is an outdated rehash of nineteenth-century issues.

Fuller, he said, is committed to the “uniqueness and full inspiration of the Bible,” with the realization that it is the Word of God “given to us in the context of human language, human culture, and human history.” It is “the only infallible standard by which our Christian thinking and Christian living must be judged,” he affirmed. “The purpose of our scholarship is not to destroy but to build up. It is not to lay bare the humanity of the Bible but to expose the way in which the Spirit of God used the humanity of the Scripture in order to bring us his truth.”

As for the future, he said, Fuller must “affirm more consistently and effectively what we believe,” learn from “responsible critics,” and be open “to review and renewal.” It is not enough “to brand ourselves evangelical,” he asserted. “We must be about our evangelical tasks.”

Hubbard indicated he had discussed the book with other evangelical leaders. They “have sensed the pending gale and assured us of their stout convoy as we sail ahead,” he said.

Religion In Transit

There is a movement afoot among some Southern Baptists to get denominational officials to withdraw the invitation to President Ford to address next month’s annual meeting of the 12.7-million-member Southern Baptist Convention. Editor Robert J. Hastings of the Illinois SBC newspaper doesn’t want any candidate to have a platform for free advertising during an election year. Besides, said he, one of the SBC’s finest laymen—Jimmy Carter—may be Ford’s opponent in the election.

Citing a recent survey, pollster Louis Harris concludes that it is not “politically dangerous” for presidential candidates to support abortion, as widely supposed. The poll indicates that 54 per cent of Americans support the U. S. Supreme Court’s decision liberalizing abortion while 38 percent oppose it. Last year the figures were 54 and 38 per cent.

The American Bible Society last month gave President Ford a “Good News for Modern Man” New Testament, symbolic of the two-billionth copy of the Scriptures distributed by the ABS since its founding in 1816. The society reached a distribution of one million copies in 1829 and one billion in 1969. These include Bibles, Testaments, and smaller portions. Circulation of the “Good News” modern-English translation, introduced in 1966, has reached fifty million, according to the ABS.

Twelve U. S. senators last month introduced a resolution designating July 2 a “National Bicentennial Day of Prayer of Thanksgiving and Guidance.” It would ask the President to issue a proclamation designating the day “in remembrance of the time 200 years beforehand” when the nation’s founders sought assistance “from their Creator for the momentous decisions they were about to make.” Republican senator Dewey F. Bartlett of Oklahoma is chief sponsor.

Republican congressman John H. Buchanan, a Southern Baptist minister from Alabama, and twenty-four co-sponsors have introduced a resolution asking Congress to go on record calling for the release of Ukrainian Baptist leader Georgi Vins from a Soviet prison. Vins, head of a dissident Baptist movement branded illegal by the Soviets, was jailed early last year on charges related to the exercise of his faith.

A spokesman for the National Institute of Education says the “voucher plan,” that would have given parents vouchers to pay for educational costs at the public or private school of their choice, is virtually dead. Voters in New Hampshire and Connecticut rejected trials of the plan, and the only test now under way is in the San Jose, California, area, where parents are restricted to a choice between different public schools. Even if the concept is adopted eventually in some states, it is likely that private religious schools will be ineligible because of constitutional considerations.

Bills have been introduced in Congress that would allow taxpayers a tax deduction of up to $1,000 a year for tuition paid for their children at any private (including religious) or public school, from first grade through graduate school.

A special commission has been set up by the government of the province of Ontario to study the possibility of extending property taxation to churches, schools, and hospitals.

The board of trustees of St. Clare’s Hospital in Denville, New Jersey, voted unanimously not to appeal the New Jersey Supreme Court ruling that authorized the removal of a mechanical respirator responsible for keeping 22-year-old Karen Anne Quinlan alive for nearly a year. Her parents said they prayed that God would take her before it became necessary to unplug the machine.

Rita Warren, 46, a school-prayer crusader from Brockton, Massachusetts, is calling on church people across the country to organize a Christian Civil Liberties Union to counteract the “threat” posed by the American Civil Liberties Union. When the ACLU goes to court to take away “some of our rights,” she says, “we will have Christian lawyers fighting for our rights.” (Mrs. Warren is of Catholic background but says she prefers to be known simply as a Christian. She has debated atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair seven times, and surprisingly they have become good friends, she told Religious News Service.)

A government study, based on a survey of 2,917 households, found that nine out of ten U.S. households gave an average of $350 in one year—$26 billion—to churches and charities. They also donated an estimated $29 billion worth of their time. The researchers, said to be astonished by their findings, reported that 88 per cent of the families gave to charities on a regular basis and that they were giving more than ever before. The study was based on 1973 figures.

Death: Gerald L. K. Smith, 78, Disciples of Christ minister who exchanged his pulpit and liberal social views for right-wing politics; known for his views against blacks, Catholics, Jews, and labor unions; publisher of The Cross and the Flag; founder of the Committee of One Million and the Christian Nationalist Crusade.

Well-known Canadian missionary surgeon Robert McClure, 75, came out of retirement in 1968 to serve a two-year term as moderator of the United Church of Canada. Then he went off to work for nearly three years among former headhunters in the wilds of Borneo. Last fall he came out of retirement again to head a jungle hospital in Peru that was sponsored in part by the Canadian government. But in late March McClure quit and came home, blaming his decision on financial headaches and administrative mixups that disrupted the hospital work.

Mormon officials are upset with Douglas A. Wallace, 46, and Larry Lester, 22, of Vancouver, Washington. Wallace, a white life-long Mormon, ordained Lester, a black, into the Mormon priesthood. Lester than baptized and ordained a white businessman. The actions, performed before TV cameras and reporters, were carried out in an attempt to force a revision of Mormon doctrine, which teaches that blacks are ineligible for the priesthood because they sinned in a pre-existent state. Mormon church officials declared the ordination by Wallace invalid because it lacked authorization by a bishop.

Contrary to earlier reports, a Vietnamese ordained recently to the Southern Baptist ministry in Florida was not the first Vietnamese refugee to be ordained in this country. Last November, five Vietnamese refugees were ordained to the ministry of the Christian and Missionary Alliance in a ceremony at Chula Vista, California.

Members of the Eastminster Presbyterian Church of Wichita, Kansas, designated $120,000 from their local building fund to help rebuild twenty-six churches and twenty-eight pastors’ homes in earthquake-ravaged Guatemala City.

Chaplain John W. Vannorsdall, 51, of Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, was named to succeed William Sloane Coffin as senior chaplain of Yale University. The Lutheran Church in America clergyman is also speaker for the fifteen-segment 1976 Lutheran series of “The Protestant Hour.”

Quietly but steadily, churches are withdrawing from the Santa Clara County (California) Council of Churches over the council’s December acceptance for membership of a gay church in San Jose. So far, nine churches have withdrawn. Some were heavy contributors to the council’s budget, now strained. Other churches pledge to take up the slack.

A well-publicized evangelical experiment in inter-racial urban ministry came apart recently. As a result of policy differences and intra-staff tensions, black evangelical leader Clarence Hilliard was asked to leave the pastoral staff of Circle Church, an Evangelical Free Church of America congregation in Chicago. He had served about six years. Most of the forty or so blacks in the congregation of about 400 left with him to help organize another church.

A new cooperative series of Christian education materials for elementary-grade children, “Discovering the Bible with Children,” will be launched this fall by eleven denominations. The goal of the series, says a spokesman, is that by age 12, children will be aware of nine major doctrinal themes, will have discovered that the Bible speaks to issues in their lives, and will have developed a variety of skills promoting effective Bible study.

Hard to stomach: In an out-of-court settlement, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) has agreed to pay $3,000 to a San Antonio caterer who claimed an $86,000 loss in food costs and salaries when a special cafeteria set up during the denomination’s biennial general assembly last year was little used by delegates.

For theological rather than sociological reasons, women will never be ordainedpriests in the Catholic Church, declared Archbishop Jan Jadot, the Vatican’s representative in the United States, at the recent annual meeting of the National Federation of Priests’ Councils in Houston. But at a meeting of 600 nuns in New York, Sister Elizabeth Carroll of the Religious Sisters of Mercy got an ovation when she asserted that neither the Gospels nor the central doctrines of the church exclude women from the ordained ministry.

A nationwide campaign is underway to raise $21 million for the Graham Center at Wheaton College. The center will house the archives of evangelist Billy Graham, a library on outreach and church renewal, training facilities, and television and radio studies.

The suicide rate among 15-to 24-year-olds in America has increased by 250 per cent in twenty years.

The American Bible Society received $1.4 million in support from some sixty denominations last year. Southern Baptists led with $238,500, the Missouri Synod Lutherans placed second with $161,400, and United Methodists followed with $132,600.

Personalia

David K. Winter, 45, executive vice-president of Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington, was named to the presidency of 950-student Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California.

Anglican bishop Alfred Stanway, an Australian educator and former missionary bishop in Africa, will assume the presidency of Trinity Episcopal School For Ministry, a new evangelical seminary in suburban Pittsburgh.

Joseph J. Sisco, 56, U. S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, will become president in July of 13,800-student American University, a United Methodist-related school in Washington, D. C.

World Scene

Father Dmitri Dudko, the popular Russian Orthodox priest removed from his last two parishes for sermons and statements interpreted by authorities as critical of the Soviet government, has been reassigned to a village parish twenty miles from Moscow. Considerable pressure was exerted against church and government officials on behalf of Dudko after it appeared he would be banished from the ministry.

Hundreds of thousands of Cambodians have been executed or have died of disease since the Communists took over a year ago, according to Time. Sources say former government employees, former soldiers, and educated persons are being killed systematically. If so, many of the key leaders of the young Protestant church (which was growing phenomenally at the time of Phnom Penh’s fall) have been or will be killed. Most of Cambodia’s Protestant churches were related to the Christian and Missionary Alliance.

Anglican bishop Festo Kivengere of Uganda recently found doors open to his evangelistic teams in Catholic churches, in a Catholic seminary, and even in a Muslim mosque in the West Buganda area of the country. A judge in Masaka, where more than 100 reportedly professed Christ, suspended hearings and called a team to speak to all gathered in the courtroom.

Operation Mobilization’s witness shipLogos visited Tunisia recently at the invitation of the Ministry of Education, and more than 16,500 persons came aboard to view book displays and make purchases. Many took Scripture portions, and some 500 attended a concert by the Logos choir.

Twenty-one persons, many of them cripples seeking a miraculous cure, were trampled to death in a stampede during a service in Rio de Janeiro conducted by faith healer David Martins de Miranda, according to press reports.

Ramon Calvan, a lay pastor of a Baptist congregation in the Philippines, was shot to death as he was walking to church with his wife and two of his seven children. He was executed by insurgents who accused him of being a government informer, a charge denied by Calvan’s friends and Southern Baptist missionaries with whom he worked.

World membership of the Mormon church increased by almost 50 per cent over a ten-year period, from 2.39 million in 1965 to 3.57 million in 1975, according to a church press report.

Christian Aid, the relief arm of the British Council of Churches, had a record income of $8.4 million last year.

Reports of the United Bible Societies indicate that the organization is assisting twenty groups of translators in Eastern Europe, most of them working on entirely new translations of Scripture.

The Assemblies of God denomination has come a long way in Italy since World War II, when there were only thirty-five small congregations meeting underground. Now there are 700 churches with more than 150,000 constituents. Growth is so rapid that there are not enough pastors to go around.

Evangelical Christians who shun involvement in politics in an effort to remain “pure” are handing over by default an important realm of life “to those who don’t share the moral vision of Christianity,” says American Baptist Paul Henry, a political science professor at Calvin College and a Republican county chairman.

His is one of many voices in the past few years calling for evangelicals to get involved politically. There is mounting evidence lately that the idea is catching on.

A number of developments make this election year one of special interest for evangelicals. Among them:

• Of the leading presidential candicates, four are professing Christians: Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George Wallace, and Ronald Reagan.

• Religion is getting national attention in campaign press coverage.

• Hard feelings have developed between some Christians in Congress over differences in political ideology.

• Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ has become a center of controversy in connection with politically oriented statements and activities.

Ford is open, though not vocal, about his religious views. A lifelong Episcopalian, he credits the spiritual deepening of his life in recent years to involvement in prayer groups, study of the Bible, and the influence of other Christians, especially evangelist Billy Zeoli. In a letter to Zeoli he stated that he had received Christ as his personal saviour and was being helped through prayer and Bible study (he and Zeoli study together periodically using the paraphrased Living Bible). He encouraged his son Michael to select an evangelical seminary. But he smokes a pipe, dances, and drinks co*cktails before supper, and these practices disturb many conservative Christians (Episcopalians traditionally have not looked on them as vices).

Reagan attends the Bel Air Presbyterian Church when he’s at his Los Angeles area home but talks very little in public about his faith. Bel Air’s pastor Donn Moomaw, an evangelical, told Howard Norton of the National Courier that Reagan is “a knowledgeable Christian” who “really knows doctrine” and has “an alive faith.” Reagan’s mother was a devout member of a Disciples of Christ church who raised her son in the Christian faith. They both taught Sunday school in Eureka, Illinois. His wife Nancy says he prays before making major decisions. He recently told a Christian group in Florida that he feels the country “is in need of and ready for a spiritual renewal,” and he called for Christians to join forces and reclaim their Judeo-Christian heritage for the healing of America. “As a Christian,” he stated, “I commit myself to do my share in this joint venture.”

Wallace was raised in Methodist churches in Alabama. His religious views have been described by his pastors as strongly fundamentalist. Other preachers who have known him say they wished he had shown more love and a sense of humor during the social turmoil of the last two decades. He does seem to have mellowed a bit in recent years, and a deepening of his faith has been apparent since the attempted assassination that crippled him in 1972. He told the members of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, that regardless of physical condition “if you have Jesus Christ in your heart and he has you in the hollow of his hand you are whole.” Said he: “I do know from experience that God is alive and that Jesus saves.”

Carter, a Southern Baptist who takes a regular turn teaching a men’s Sunday-school class at the rural Plains (Georgia) Baptist Church is the most outspoken of the four about his faith. He grew up in the church but not until 1966 did he have a conversion experience. He won’t discuss details but says he emerged from the experience a transformed person and began spending a lot of time in prayer and Bible reading. He said he spent more time on his knees during the four years he was governor than in all the rest of his life put together. He tells his critics that he’s never tried to use his position as a public official to promote his beliefs, adding, “and I never would.” But whatever role he might have in the future, he explains, it will be with the same personal relationship with Christ he’s had in the last ten years.

Carter’s sisters, also outspoken Christians, have received press coverage in connection with their faith too. His sister Ruth Carter Stapleton, also a Southern Baptist, is known for a low-key healing ministry, and she has a wide following among charismatics.

Many black clergymen support Carter, and that may be a key factor next November if he wins the Democratic nomination.

Possessing an evangelical faith does not necessarily color the way one votes. Among the Christians in Congress are Mark Hatfield, John Anderson, Andrew Young, Don Bonker, John Conlan, Jesse Helms, Albert Quie, and John Stennis, yet they represent a broad political spectrum, and they vote accordingly. Privately, they sometimes wonder how a brother can vote the way he does on a certain issue and still call himself a Christian, but the thought usually passes quickly. In an election year, though, feelings are sometimes more intense and lasting.

Compounding the situation this year are activities identified with Campus Crusade’s Bill Bright and Arizona congressman John Conlan (he’s now running for the Senate), both staunch political conservatives. A dim view of these activities is taken in the April issue of Sojourners, a magazine published by young evangelicals in Washington, D. C. and known formerly as the Post American.

Editors Jim Wallis and Wes Michaelson, a former aide to Senator Mark Hatfield, trace links between Bright and Third Century Publishers, the Christian Freedom Foundation, Campus Crusade’s Christian Embassy, and a national recruitment-for-political-action campaign, all reflecting Conlan-styled ideology (some of which Hatfield, for one, finds distasteful). Bright and Conlan have been close friends for years.

The article states that Bright brought together key individuals, many of them wealthy, to help organize Third Century two years ago as a for-profit company in Washington to publish God-and-country books and practical helps for getting organized politically at the local level. Through a shake-up of board members, Christian Freedom Foundation became part of the Bright-Third Century-Conlan camp as sort of the educational non-profit counterpart to Third Century. Meanwhile, the Christian Embassy was founded as an outreach center in Washington by some men who were on the boards of the other organizations.

Among other things, Third Century publishes a newsletter and a rating chart showing how legislators voted on issues of special interest to conservatives. Some prominent Christians, including Hatfield and Anderson, have scored low on the charts.

Bright denies that he is involved in promoting partisan politics, but he does acknowledge that he believes America is in desperate straits, and that if things don’t go right in the 1976 elections the country may “fall” within two years. Christians involved politically can turn the nation around, he says, and he openly encourages such involvement. In scattered parts of the country, some evangelicals are running for public office for the first time, reportedly in response to Bright’s challenge.

Wallis and Michaelson insist that Bright is using his influential position to promote narrow conservative positions and to harness wealthy people to the cause. They also object to Bright’s alleged mixing of evangelism with political objectives.

Whatever the outcome, all of these things are making this election year one for evangelicals to remember.

NEW HAMPSHIRE REMEMBERS

The flags on New Hampshire state buildings flew at half staff on Good Friday. Governor Meldrim Thomson, 64, who has a reputation for being independent minded, ordered it done to “memorialize the death of Christ on the cross on the first Good Friday.”

The New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union called his action “an utterly inappropriate usurpation of power.” It lamented that “the lowering of flags, which are the symbols of the secular state, in this connection is … in blatant disregard of the separation of church and state.”

Thomson, running for his third two-year term, declined to comment on the group’s complaint. “Christianity speaks for itself,” he said. (He attends a Conservative Baptist church in Wentworth.)

Deprogramming: A Right To Rescue?

A grand jury in Westchester County, New York, last month dismissed charges against cult foe Ted “Black Lightning” Patrick and seven others accused of abducting Mark Goodman, a 19-year-old member of Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. Patrick and the others, including Goodman’s mother and uncle, had been free on bail on a felony charge of unlawful imprisonment in an attempt last January to “deprogram” the youth out of the Moon sect. A passing motorist spotted the sidewalk scuffle as the group seized Goodman, and police were alerted. Everybody was arrested, and Goodman pressed charges.

The defense pleaded that the action was justified, and the jurors agreed. “Implicit in their findings,” said district attorney Carl A. Vergari, “was the belief that the family had the right to take reasonable steps to rescue the child from a situation which they believed constituted a danger to his health and welfare.”

Goodman is still in the Unification Church but leaders aren’t telling where he is. His mother, at home in San Francisco, reflects sadly that the family had always been closely knit. She said she hopes that communication with her son will be reestablished someday.

Patrick, a full-time deprogrammer working out of San Diego (see March 12 issue, page 45, and August 31, 1973, issue, page 40), may go to jail if appeals fail in cases in Colorado and California. Moreover, sources inside the Justice Department indicate that a federal investigation of his activities is quietly underway. Federal agents have quizzed teen-ager Wendy Helander who twice returned to the Unification Church after attempts by Patrick and her parents to deprogram her.

Patrick has removed some of the mystery surrounding his deprogramming activities in a just-published book, Let Our Children Go! (E. P. Dutton). Told with high interest (thanks to novelist Tom Dulack), Patrick’s story includes details of actual deprogrammings (they last from one hour to three days and consist mostly of questioning and badgering designed to make the cultist think independently and thus break the supposed hold of the cult on his mind). The book tells of conspiracy, kidnappings, assaults, questionable actions by police, and outrageous cult practices. It describes Patrick’s failures as well as his successes.

The illegal body-snatching associated with deprogramming may become legal and be carried out by police if a tactic employed by Arizona attorneys Michael E. Tauscht and Wayne N. Howard survives the judicial process. Through a recent conservatorship proceeding (a case where someone is named to protect the interests of another), they were able to get a California judge to send sheriff’s deputies to the controversial Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation center near Los Angeles and take 25-year-old Lane Petri into custody. Her mother, who had a team of deprogrammers ready, was named temporary guardian. Other legal phases of the case were continued to a later date. By the time the hearing is held, and if the deprogramming works, Lane Petri may testify in support of her parents’ contention that she had been “psychologically kidnapped” by the Alamo people when she joined them more than two years ago.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Creating Confusion

Scientific creationists in California want equal time with evolutionists in the state’s classrooms, but boards of education and textbook companies are not cooperating.

“Not all scientists are evolutionists,” declares Nancy Stake, 32, founder and chairperson of “Citizens for Scientific Creation,” a non-profit, non-denominational group in Saratoga, a suburb of San Jose. “It’s all the same evidence,” she observes, “but the scientific creationist interprets the data quite differently from the evolutionist. All we are asking for is equal space in the texts.”

That space continues to be elusive. The California State Board of Education declared in a February 26 “memo” that “various alternatives [on the origin of life] should be presented appropriately,” but board members concede that the approved textbooks do not do this. Local school boards, when asked why alternative views are not being taught, reply that the state has not yet approved appropriate textbooks. And textbook companies apparently are waiting it out with the hope they will not have to spend large sums to revise the social-science textbooks. Such changes might not be approved in other states where the books are marketed.

“Our only solid hope,” says Mrs. Stake, “is that citizen groups such as ours will spring up across the country and make their views known. We believe that scientific creation—the concept that the theory of creation can be studied and taught on the basis of scientific evidence rather than religious beliefs—is viable, and we have evidence to show that the public wants it in the curriculum.”

Citing a 1974 community-opinion sample taken in the Cupertino school district, Mrs. Stake points out that 84.3 per cent of those polled on a random basis, including evolutionists, declared that they want creation taught along with evolution. “We don’t want evolution taken out of the text,” she emphasizes. “We just want creation to have its chance to be heard.”

Some organizations are producing texts reflective of the scientific creationist view. Among them are Creation Research Society in Ann Arbor Michigan, and the Creation-Science Research Center in San Diego, California. Whether these materials will ever get on the approved curriculum lists and then into the classroom is, however, anybody’s guess.

ROGER KOSKELA

The Signature Must Be Valid

Following the ouster of four district presidents of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod last month (see April 23 issue, page 45), LCMS president J. A. O. Preus named four acting presidents to take their places until the districts hold their conventions within the next two months. At that time, new presidents are supposed to be elected. But the four who were ousted say they consider the action invalid, and the boards of directors of the four districts have voted not to recognize the acting presidents but to go on affirming the leadership of the men Preus removed. They are: Herman Frincke (Eastern), Harold Hecht (English), Rudolph Ressmeyer (Atlantic), and Robert Riedel (New England).

The four acting presidents named by Preus are pastors: Henry L. Koepchen of Setauket, New York (Atlantic); Albert W. Bahr of Niagara Falls, New York (Eastern); Paul G. Barth of Buffalo, New York (English); and Oscar E. Milke of Norwalk, Connecticut (New England). They were named after the vice-presidents of the districts declined appointment by Preus.

Just how these acting presidents will be able to conduct the affairs of districts that do not recognize them is unclear. In the face of mounting district rebellion, Preus warned that no district papers requiring a presidential signature would be considered valid unless signed by an acting president. The actions of the district boards, said Preus, “have shown grave misunderstanding about the nature of a district and its relation to the Synod.”

The four ousted presidents say they plan to attend this month’s meeting of the LCMS council of presidents (there are about forty district presidents). Preus says they will not be barred from the meeting but their votes won’t be counted.

Selective Service

Nearly 500 registered delegates and more than that many visitors attended last month’s three-day National Assembly of Evangelicals in England. The assembly, held annually, met on the campus of Salford University in Manchester. It was organized by the Evangelical Alliance, which represents more than 700 churches and church-related groups in Britain.

A battery of speakers drove home a variety of themes, from the need for structural changes in the church to biblical ways of handling interpersonal relationships within the Christian community. John Boyd, a Salvation Army member who is general secretary of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers and is active in Labour Party politics, urged Christians to become involved in public affairs. Believers should be known for their honesty, sincerity, and concern for the welfare of others, he said.

Social worker John Benington of Coventry told how his work had influenced his faith, forcing him to change his mind about causes and treatment of social ills. He said he now believes economic pressures in the present system make it impossible for money to be allocated according to need. Therefore, said he, the structures of society need to be changed. But, he cautioned, the church should not get involved in political and social activism—contrary to an opinion he held earlier. The local church, he explained, should be a symbol of unity-regardless of the views of individual members. All Christians cannot be expected to hold the same political viewpoint, he added.

A number of the delegates took time to visit the nearby John Rylands Library under the guidance of Professor F. F. Bruce to see some of the biblical and other ancient manuscripts in its priceless collection. Among the treasures: the earliest known piece of New Testament writing, a papyrus fragment of John’s gospel which is dated between A.D. 130 and 140.

The Emperor: Still God To Some

Protestantism is only in its twelfth decade in Japan, and for more than five of those decades the venerable Hirohito has been emperor. He is a follower of the Shinto religion (in which ancestors and nature are worshipped), and he is expected to make an annual pilgrimage to the Ise Shrines dedicated to the sun goddess and the goddess of agriculture. Last month, in observance of his seventy-fifth birthday as Japan’s head of state, millions of well wishers waved the national flag and bowed before him. Twice a year the palace grounds are open for the people of Japan to congratulate the emperor on New Year’s Day and on his birthday.

Although New Year’s Day is January 1, the calendar year continues to be counted from the year of Hirohito’s ascendancy to the throne upon the death of his father on Christmas Day, 1926. Thus in daily newspapers, school assignments, and other writings in Japanese this is the year “Showa 51” instead of the Christian year 1976. A misnomer of sorts, “Showa” designates the current emperor’s reign as an era of “light and peace.”

Following World War II the emperor made an offical disclaimer of his divinity. Many people committed suicide after the announcement. Having been acclaimed as a god in Japan, he was the first in a 2,000-year history of emperors to break the god-myth that the emperor is a direct descendant of the sun-goddess to whom the Japanese history books and legends accredit the founding of Japan itself.

A missionary who served in Japan prior to the second world war recalls that the Japanese “were told that the emperor was not only emperor in temporal things, but also that he was the high priest of every form of religion and worship, and therefore, anyone joining any other community was guilty of a personal insult to him. Consequently, there were great difficulties in the way.”

Thirty years have passed and that same emperor is looked upon today as only a man. But not by everyone, apparently. In a recent newspaper survey 3,000 Japanese of a wide age range and various backgrounds were questioned. Though most indicated they realized the emperor is a political figure head stripped of any real power, others wavered on his exact role. Asked just what the emperor really is in today’s Japanese society, 4.5 percent called him “a sort of deity or a god.” If that survey is truly representative of Japan’s 112 million population, it suggests that five million persons may possibly hold to emperor worship three decades after the proclamation of his manhood.

NELL L. KENNEDY

Church Conduit Between Two Germanys

Protestant and Catholic churches have served as a secret conduit for hundreds of millions of dollars in West German payments to East Germany, according to an account by reporter Craig R. Whitney in the New York Times. Thousands of political prisoners have been freed by the East German government in the past fifteen years because “churches made their unofficial channels available to Bonn and East Berlin,” said Whitney. His Times article stated that an East German Catholic lawyer negotiates every year the release of 1,200 to 1,500 political prisoners held in East German jails, using money supplied by the West German government, most of it channeled through the Bonn office of the Evangelical Church of Germany. In 1975 $42 million was spent for prisoner releases, said the paper, about the same for each of the preceding ten years.

In return, authorities look the other way when churches in the West send money to the East to help build and maintain churches, church-operated hospitals, and even expensive pipe organs. A priest is quoted as saying the 1.2-million-member Catholic Church in West Germany had transferred about $14.8 million a year to East Berlin through the East German Ministry of Foreign Trade despite the fact that “officially, the churches in the East are cut off from the official support from churches in the West.”

Probing The Campus

In the past two-and-a-half years, nearly 43,000 college and university students in the United States and Canada have heard the Gospel in the most familiar academic setting they know, the classroom, through the efforts of Probe Ministries International.

Based in Dallas, Probe is directed by Jim Williams, a Dallas Seminary graduate, and Jon Buell. Both formerly served on the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ. “There is a seemingly irreconcilable gap in the minds of most college students between biblical Christianity and their class studies,” says Williams. Wanting to harmonize the historic Christian truths with academic disciplines, the two men and their wives began Probe in the fall of 1973. The organization presently has more than two dozen team members.

The Daily Skiff, Texas Christian University’s student newspaper, described a Probe effort on the TCU campus as “a week-long lecture series relating the Christian Gospel to the subject matter in the classroom” that “is being sponsored by several campus non-denominational Christian groups in an effort to show the academic mind the basis for Christianity.… Lecturers are speaking on over forty topics during the regularly scheduled class periods of consenting teachers.”

Probe’s method is to sponsor a “Christian Update Forum” on campus. Forum “lecturers” are team members and guest professors such as Dr. Bruce Waltke (Regent College), Dr. Mark Cosgrove (Purdue University), and author/speaker Hal Lindsey. Their schedule for the week is arranged by student Christian groups such as the Navigators, Campus Crusade for Christ, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, the Baptist Student Union, and local church groups.

The forum consists of classroom presentations in twenty-five classes per day; a two-or three-day lecture series for the campus at large; evangelistic meetings in fraternities, sororities, dorms, and clubs (these feature Probe speakers and Christian students); and an Institute of Christian Academics. The institute offers twelve hours of teaching for Christian students; biblical perspectives are presented on a variety of current issues. The purpose is not only to integrate faith with studies but also to help equip the students to communicate their faith to fellow students and professors, according to Probe spokesmen.

Instructors who agree to having a Probe speaker address their classes are able to choose from a list of about fifty topics the one that would be most appropriate to the course content. Topics available range from current social issues (energy crisis, ecology, abortion, the occult) and the influence of Christianity on society to psychology and the nature of man, the physical and natural sciences (evolution versus creation, the origin of the universe), the need for moral values in education, and the historicity of biblical documents.

Staff member Scott Hanson explains: “Once in the classroom, we offer to our student audience intellectually tenable grounds for a synthesis to life, a Christian world-view, and an appeal for belief in Jesus Christ. Whatever the initial response, the ground is softened and seeds are sown for future harvest by Christians continuing actively with outreach and follow-up on that campus.”

At least 1,000 classroom presentations have been given in various parts of the country, and approximately half the students who heard talks gave their reactions to Probe through comment cards. A statistical analysis of the ministry’s history shows an overall 66 per cent “positive” response, says Hanson.

“Honestly,” wrote a student from Baton Rouge, “this was my first opportunity in four years of college education to hear a college lecturer advocating that God exists and God has spoken.” Another said, “I found the lecture very direct, informative, and interesting. I am not a Christian yet, but I keep an open mind. Lectures like this help a lot.”

Instructors themselves are sometimes influenced by the talks. A biology instructor from Stephen F. Austin University wrote that his field would soon take on many new perspectives because “I have asked Christ to come into my life … and ask you to assist me in finding even more meaning and involvement with my new love for Christ.”

Probe’s people say they are concerned about the needs of the Christian student as he faces the secularism of his university and often the ridicule of professors and classmates. As a result, a scholarly literature series is being developed. Called the Christian Free University Curriculum, the series analyzes the biblical and secular positions on topics within each of the academic disciplines, discusses the weaknesses of the secular philosophy, and presents a scriptural and academic basis for the Christian view. Christian students and faculty have access to the material for use in the classroom.

Probe also sponsors “Spartan Summer” camps, two-to eight-week conferences for the freshman entering college. The aim is to prepare conferees for the secular biases they will encounter in college, to introduce them to the Christian Free University Curriculum, and to provide training in witnessing and in how to act on biblical concepts.

ELOISE HATFIELD

MARY HARTMAN, MARY HARTMAN AND SUE PERLMAN, SUE PERLMAN

An attorney for TV producer Norman Lear last month demanded that Sue Perlman “cease and desist” her use of an evangelistic tract entitled “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.” Ms. Perlman is information officer for the Jews for Jesus outreach organization of San Rafael, California, publisher of the tract. Like many other pamphlets published by Jews for Jesus, the tract employs a light touch to make a serious appeal (see cut).

Lawyer Glenn A. Padnick didn’t seem amused. He said that the producer possesses a copyright on the lettering of the title and that Louise Lasser, the star of the comic soap opera, possesses rights “with respect to advertising uses of her likeness.” The pamphlet, he claimed, infringes on those rights because it “suggests a common source and dilutes the distinctiveness of the mark.” He warned of “legal remedies” if compliance was not forthcoming within ten days.

Leader Moishe Rosen of Jews for Jesus observed that the Hartman show lampoons anything and everything—including the Church. It all proves, he stated, that some people can dish it out but can’t take it.

Padnick told a reporter he had to take the matter seriously in order to protect the service mark in future cases “where it matters.” Ms. Perlman and the Jews for Jesus people meanwhile have stood their ground; the ten-day warning period passed, and they are still circulating the tracts.

Some others are not treating the show so lightly. Our Saviour Lutheran Church in Milwaukee is contacting other congregations of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod to organize a protest against low moral standards in TV programming in general and on the Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman show in particular. A church committee, expressing concern at “the erosion of morality in our area,” cited “the use of the Lord’s name, sex, sexual perversions, and abnormal life styles” on the programs. But TV people say ratings matter more than protests.

Bucharest Protest

The twenty men studying for the ministry at the Baptist Theological Seminary in Bucharest, Romania, have signed a petition protesting the training they are getting at the school, according to a report by Keston College, a suburban London research center for the study of religion and Communism. Keston, quoting from a copy of the petition, says that with two years of their four-year course gone the students are upset by the sparseness of their theological knowledge. They claim they are getting a poor reception from the Baptist congregations where they have been sent on practical preaching assignments. Now, they lament, they are ashamed to stand before the people and preach poor-quality sermons based on what they’ve been taught. It all reflects badly, they suggest, on the quality of the theological education at the seminary.

To help remedy the problem, they propose the return of two ex-teachers who could easily be relieved of present duties to teach at the school: Petru Belicov, a retired director of the seminary, and Josif Ton, a scholarly evangelical pastor in Ploesti. Ton studied theology for three years at Oxford, then taught at the Bucharest seminary for two years after his return from England in 1972. An advocate of greater religious freedom, he was well liked by the students but was removed from his teaching post in action apparently prompted by state officials alarmed at Ton’s growing influence. In pressing their case, the students in their petition praised the achievements and theological knowledge of their predecessors who had sat under Ton.

Currently, five Baptist pastors are responsible for their training; only one of them is full-time, and one of the part-timers is on study leave.

Official reaction to the student protest has been along subdued wait-and-see lines, according to Keston.

The Joy And Task Of Parenting

I Want To Enjoy My Children, by Henry Brandt and Phil Landrum (Zondervan, 1975, 184 pp., $2.95 pb), You Can Have a Family Where Everybody Wins, by Earl Gaulke (Concordia, 1975, 93 pp., $1.95 pb), What Is a Family?, by Edith Schaeffer (Revell, 1975, 255 pp., $6.95), Confident Children and How They Grow, by Richard Strauss (Tyndale, 1975, 155 pp., $5.95), and Raising Children by Linda Raney Wright (Tyndale, 1975, 158 pp. $2.95 pb), are reviewed by Norman Stolpe, editorial director, Family Concern, Omaha, Nebraska.

Today, with so many articles on rearing children, so many ‘experts’ to advise parents, and so much talk among themselves, young mothers are almost developing an insecurity in regard to their own motherly instincts.” This observation by Ruth Peale, quoted in Raising Children, points out the confusion generated for many parents by the recent outpouring of child rearing literature. Of the five books considered here, no two are completely compatible. No wonder parents are confused.

Though the title I Want to Enjoy My Children sounds fresh and positive, and though much of the content is true and good, Brandt and Landrum offer little that is new. Raising Children is the collected results of interviews with the wives of twelve prominent Christian men. It communicates more warm feelings about motherhood than information about how to be an effective parent. While much of Richard Strauss’s Confident Children and How They Grow is a restatement of standard, conservative Christian perspectives on parenting, he does have some good insights into parental authority.

Edith Schaeffer’s What Is a Family? and Earl Gaulke’s You Can Have a Family Where Everybody Wins both challenge conventional thinking about parenting and convey a more positive tone than the other three books. Gaulke views parent-child conflicts positively. He suggests that they be seen as opportunities for growth in the relationship as parent and child cooperate so both can win, rather than as power struggles in which one must lose. Schaeffer’s impressionistic descriptions of family life portray a sense of fun, humor, excitement, adventure, and beauty.

The central issue in books on parenting, particularly those by Christian authors, is parental authority. It is a watershed that divides sharply, exposing the writers’ presuppositions. New Testament servant authority (Matt. 20:25–28) is the standard for evaluating on this issue.

Gaulke’s book is most susceptible to criticism at this point. As the subtitle, “Christian Perspectives on Parent Effectiveness Training,” reveals, Gaulke’s book is a commentary on the popular, humanistic work of Thomas Gordon and can be fully understood only after one reads Gordon’s book or takes the “PET” course. Gaulke’s attachment to the “PET” approach seems to cause him to lose sight of the authority God has delegated to parents. However, that authority is implied in what he writes about admonition and confrontation.

Despite this critical oversight, Gaulke constructs a stimulating and biblical model for Christian parent-child relationships based on the Reformation doctrine of Law and Gospel. While the proper use of the Law as a schoolmaster could have been developed further, he rightly appeals to parents not to abuse the Law and encourages them to operate from a gospel perspective. He helpfully observes that “the Law is to be preached to impenitent sinners (including the ‘flesh’ of Christians); the Gospel to those who are troubled and alarmed because of their sins,” a needed emphasis.

Those who argue strongly for parental authority present a more complex problem of evaluation. Though avoiding the difficulties of permissiveness, they tend to miss the servant role of the parent. A parent seeking support for self-serving, autocratic authority can find it (by careful misreading) in I Want To Enjoy My Children and in the comments of some of the women in Raising Children, though in both the support is unintentional.

Schaeffer adds a refreshing note by reminding parents that they are not perfect and challenging them to admit their weaknesses to their children. She goes on to tell about an ivy plant often repotted after being thrown by her husband, Francis, in “flairs of temper.” Over the years that plant became a symbol of the growing human relationship and God’s forgiveness in their family.

In addition to reminding parents that they too have a sinful nature and encouraging them to be honest about their faults, Strauss draws a sharp distinction between punishment and correction. He asserts that children who are spanked to “pay for” misbehavior are not “spanked in a biblical manner.” Commenting on many parents’ understanding of corporal discipline, he writes, “After they have spanked their children they consider the score to be even. But that is not God’s way. He is not interested in an even score but in a holy life.” Strauss is critical of parents who allow children to use spanking to “salve their conscience.” This unconventional understanding of discipline and authority rests on the Gospel; “the whole debt was paid at Calvary and we have been forgiven.”

All five of these books reflect some of the growing emphasis on teaching in the home. While I Want To Enjoy My Children focuses on how parents can control their children, it implies that parents have an important teaching influence. Several of the mothers in Raising Children report their role in teaching.

Gaulke’s chapters on values and growing together show how significant teaching takes place when parents and children have open, communicating relationships. Strauss is even stronger on the teaching responsibilities of parents, criticizing those who “have evidently decided to let the Sunday school and church handle the job of making the Scriptures a vital part of their children’s lives.” He devotes two full chapters to specific strategies for parental teaching.

What Is a Family? is a rich resource for parents who take responsibility for their children’s total education. Schaeffer uses the image of a “perpetual relay of truth” to represent the family’s role in Christian education. “The primary place for the flag of truth to be handed on is in the family,” she asserts. Later she uses the concept of an “educational control” to explain how parents are also responsible for the secular education of their children.

While in two chapters she deals specifically with the educational aspects of family living, the entire book is permeated with the awareness that learning is inherent in family living. It contains a wealth of illustrations and suggestions for parents to use in weaving Christian truth and learning into family life.

Beyond reading and discussing books, like these, parents need to agree to be of help to each other in developing new behavior patterns. They would do well to join forces with a few other parents who are similarly motivated. Churches can help parents do this.

Faith Healers

All Things Are Possible: The Healing and Charismatic Revivals in Modern America, by David Edwin Harrell, Jr. (Indiana University, 1976, 304 pp., $10.95), is reviewed by Erling Jorstad, professor of history and American studies, St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota.

This is a major contribution to one of the most complex and controversial subjects in American religious history. Professor Harrell (of the University of Alabama, Birmingham) presents a carefully researched, scholarly study of the many independent ministries of healing that grew up throughout the country, especially in the South, between 1945 and the early 1970s. It is his thesis that the older classical Pentecostal healing ministries were overshadowed by the work of such leaders as William Branham, Oral Roberts, Gordon Lindsay, Jack Coe, T. L. Osborn, A. A. Allen, and Don Stewart during that period. Now their domination has come to an end, and the ministry of healing has been absorbed primarily by the neo-Pentecostalists who remain within the mainline denominations. I find Harrell’s thesis original and persuasive. And it is heartening that a major university press published a book on a subject usually left to popularizers.

The title, however, is slightly misleading. One should not expect, and Harrell states this clearly, to find here a history of the mainline neo-Pentecostalist movement, that movement led by persons such as Dennis Bennett, Larry Christenson, Rodman Williams, and Bob Mumford. Rather, the focus throughout is on the healing ministries of the major figures of the fifties and sixties. The history of mainline renewal remains to be written.

The author brings many strengths to this work. He defines his terms carefully; he has done exhaustive research in primary sources; he has relied on the evaluation of the best scholars in the field such as Kilian McDonnell and Martin Marty.

Although he says he does “not share the religious presuppositions of the charismatic revivalists,” he discusses each one in straightforward, balanced terms. He avoids taking any cheap shots at the excesses, the frauds, and the nonsense of some of the persons involved. In fact, his caution leaves one feeling that something of the poignancy and deepfelt emotions of a healing service are sacrificed or at least vastly played down.

Harrell has chosen to evaluate each ministry in theological terms and by choice avoids bringing the research tools of behavioral science to bear on his analysis. He writes in a direct, clear manner giving us an abundance of factual information. His introductions to each chapter are especially helpful.

My major difficulty is with the structure of the book. Perhaps there was no other way to organize the material than as Harrell does, in chapters that list, in catalog fashion, the ministries of the leaders. Accuracy and clarity are achieved, but a smoothly flowing narrative is sacrificed. Chapter two, on “Origins” will satisfy neither the specialists, who know that material, nor the new reader, who does not have at hand the information the author assumes. Chapter nine, the finale, is admittedly a tentative probe into mainline neo-Pentecostalism. The author succeeds in showing that the healing ministry of the sixties disintegrated by the early seventies, but chapter nine could be more firmly organized. For instance, he uses some sources dated 1974, but not two highly important studies of mainline renewal that appeared in that year, Filled With New Wine by James W. Jones and The Fire Flares Anew by John Stevens Kerr.

The book has sixteen pages of photographs, carefully selected and useful. So too are the excellent bibliography, the footnotes, and the index.

Given the limitation that it centers on the healing revival far more than mainline charismatic revival, this book becomes the standard work for all who are probing this phenomenon.

Is Divorce Forgivable?

The Right to Remarry, by Dwight Small (Revell, 1975, 190 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by C. E. Cerling, Jr., Ph.D. candidate, Aquinas Institute of Theology, Dubuque, Iowa.

Evangelical discussion about divorce is stalemated. The basic written views are established. Published articles rehash what has been said before. The Right to Remarry by Dwight Small attempts to break that pattern. Small’s authorship of three earlier, highly regarded books places him in a good position to say something new that merits attention.

At the present time two works, both out-of-print, represent most evangelical thinking about divorce. The better known is John Murray’s Divorce. It is probably the most thorough exegetical study of divorce in existence. Murray’s position is plain: divorce is permissible only for adultery. Both parties are free to remarry. Divorce may be tolerated in another situation: if a marriage begins as the marriage of two non-Christians and one of them later becomes a Christian, the stage is set for the special exemption provided by Paul. If the non-Christian partner, for religious reasons, wants to end the marriage, the Christian is not to fight this action. They are both free to remarry.

The other book is by Fisher-Hunter, The Divorce Problem. He maintains that divorce is never right. The passages in Matthew apparently permitting divorce refer to immorality during the Jewish betrothal period but only discovered after the marriage. Divorce is tolerated by Paul, but remarriage is forbidden.

Both of these works are almost exclusively exegetical studies. Murray is exceedingly thorough. Fisher-Hunter is more verbose than thorough, but his work expresses the views of a great many Christians. The exegetical nature of these works is also their most serious limitation. By concentrating their attention on the divorce passages, these authors fail to consider the wider application of the Gospel to the problem of divorce: Can divorce be forgiven and a new marriage formed? Strictly exegetical studies on divorce will always fail because they cannot answer this question. This, however, is the primary question Small addresses.

Those in the mental-health professions are caught in a curious bind by the present stance of the evangelical world. Evangelical writers present an exegetical statement of a particular position on divorce in one part of their work. Then, writing as if they had said nothing about the biblical teaching on divorce, they blithely state something like, “But there are times when divorce is the only solution to a bad situation.” The deficiency in their logic destroys their credibility with those whom they wish to persuade.

It is probable that in 1975, for the first time, more than one million divorces were recorded in the United States. Evangelicals stand by wringing their hands at the growing problem of divorce. Nevertheless, little theological justification is being provided for a ministry to the divorced.

Dwight Small steps into this fray as one well qualified to speak. The book just before this one, Christian: Celebrate Your Sexuality, established him as one of the leading evangelicals writing on marital ethics. But many will find his approach to divorce disconcerting. Others will be delighted. The Right to Remarry combats a popular view of divorce and remarriage. Divorce is wrong. Remarriage following divorce is even worse. Small speaks about the right to remarry for those who have experienced marriage failure. There is no such right—there is only a God-given privilege under grace of having an opportunity to start again even though sin has occured. Following repentance for the sin of divorce and the sins leading to divorce, God provides the opportunity under grace to try again—as he does with all who fail by sinning.

Much of this book is given over to a discussion of the need for what is termed an “interim ethic.” Small distinguishes three time periods established by God. There is the time of Israel and there is the time of the Kingdom. However, instead of being entirely separate, these two overlap, providing the third period, the interim during which the Church functions. During this interim period the laws of the Kingdom do not fully apply. They still express God’s absolute rule for life, but failure to observe them will not bring punishment. Rather, under grace, God provides forgiveness for those who will repent and seek forgiveness. Included in this group are those whose marriages have failed.

Five primary theses provide the structure of the book. Permanence is God’s ideal for all marriages. Nothing written in the book is meant to detract from that ideal. But not everyone will meet the ideal. Some people, Christians among them, will fail. For them God provides forgiveness. Divorce in such a case is justifiable as the lesser of two evils. Confronted with the fact of a dead marriage, the couple must determine whether the sin is greater to remain married or to seek a divorce.

Finally, Small introduces two corollary themes. Since God provides two exceptions to his absolute command for the permanence of marriage, may it not be that there are more exceptions? And, while the Pauline exception has a specific narrow application, might it not also have a wider application to any case where one partner is irrevocably committed to leaving the marriage?

Small is to be commended for his strong emphasis on God’s will for marriage: a lifelong relationship. Although he provides a much broader basis for divorce than most authors have done, he remains firmly committed to God’s ideal.

Similarly, he must be commanded for his emphasis on forgiveness. The divorced need to know that God will forgive their failure and provide them with another chance. This is a clear recognition of the sexual and associational needs in most people. These are needs God created, and we cannot deny their existence. This attitude provides an open door for the Church to minister to the divorced.

While Small’s broadening of the grounds for divorce as the lesser of two evils will strike a positive chord among the mental-health professionals, it will not set well with many people. Is a Christian ever confronted with a choice between two evil acts where he cannot do the will of God and still avoid sin? Can divorce ever be recommended as the biblical solution to marriage problems? With this I have difficulty.

Apart from the emphasis on permanence and forgiveness, a further value of this book lies in its appearance as the opening salvo in a new (I hope) discussion of divorce among evangelicals. We are obviously not ministering to this needy group. (Recent studies of human stress show that divorce is second only to the death of a spouse in causing stress.) Our theology appears to have boxed us into a position where we cannot minister to those whose marriages have failed. When this occurs it suggests the need to reevaluate. Small has begun the process. May others follow.

Ours Is Not A Secular Age

The New Demons, by Jacques Ellul (Seabury, 1975, 228 pp., $9.95), is reviewed by David Gill, doctoral student, University of Southern California, Los A ngeles.

In his latest book to be translated into English, Jacques Ellul takes vigorous exception to the conclusion that our age is secular. It has not, he says, come of age. The “old demon” has been exorcised from Western civilization, but it has been followed by “seven demons worse than itself,” to draw on Jesus’ story that Ellul’s title calls to mind.

For a thousand years or more, “Christendom” held sway in European civilization. Certainly we are now living in a “post-Christian” era. Christian thought-forms and presuppositions are no longer the taken-for-granted frame of reference. But it is a serious mistake, Ellul argues, to conclude that since Christianity and Christendom are dethroned, modern man is secular and irreligious.

Ellul’s three basic categories are the sacred, myth, and religion. He suggests that a broad historical research into the forms and functions of phenomena that for people in the past have qualified as sacred, myth, and religion will generate the necessary definitions in each category. Then we can examine our own culture to see what, if anything, has those same forms and functions for us.

The sacred is Ellul’s basic category, and myth and religion are subordinate expressions of what a society considers sacred. Ellul’s definition of the sacred is in agreement with that of most anthropologists and sociologists of religion. It is a “qualification attributed to completely tangible reality”—to that which threatens or protects, to that which puts us in tune with our universe. Of special interest is Ellul’s argument that the sacred is always given in a two-pole form: a “sacred of respect” is pared with a “sacred of transgression.”

Ellul then identifies the sacred today as the two pairs (respect/transgression) of technique/sex and nation-state/revolution. Technique and the nation-state (sacreds of respect) are supreme, ultimate, good, providential, fearful; i.e., they have the same forms and functions of previous sacreds. Sex (in a most interesting argument) is the “sacred of transgression” paired with technique. It has become modern man’s means of rebelling and declaring his freedom over against the constricting grip of technique. And in a similar fashion, revolution serves as the sacred transgression of the almighty nation-state. Many readers of The New Demons will find Ellul’s fuller treatment in The Technological Society, The Political Illusion, and The Autopsy of Revolution of interest in regard to three of those areas.

Myth, an expression of the sacred, is “a fictive statement in connection with a given portion of the world.” Myths help us map out the sacred and function as “motivating global images”—explaining, orienting, attributing meaning, and inciting to action. Ellul identifies the two basic myths of our time as the myth of history and the myth of science. History has been transmuted into a value and meaning. Everything finds its true place and meaning only in its relationship to history. Science has been elevated as the locus of all salvation.

On these two foundational myths a secondary level of myths is built, applying and making explicit the “basic line.” On this level are the myths of class struggle, happiness, youth, and progress. Finally there is a third level, the most superficial elements, exemplified in such areas as advertising and sloganeering.

Religions are another expression of the sacred. Ellul notes the tremendous proliferation of gurus, mystics, cults, and astrologers taking place in the very heart of our urban technological centers. What is interesting is the fact that these phenomena are almost always quite technical in their forms and functions (meditation techniques, astrology charts, and so on). They agree entirely with the sacred of technique.

Of greatest significance, though, is political religion. Ellul looks first at the extreme forms, such as Maoism, Stalinism, Hitlerism, and points out their exact correspondence to “traditional” religions. They have their sacred texts, prophets, saints, martyrs, clergy, rites of initiation and commitment, eschatological perspective, theology and dogmatics, and even hymns and worship in some cases. The “liberal, democratic” countries are less obvious examples, but the phenomenon of political religion is very much alive and growing even there. Politics is the center of value, the arena of all “meaningful action,” the means to salvation and fulfillment. Even art becomes “serious,” in the estimation of our culture, normally by its inclusion of political themes.

Political religion can only increase given the ever-greater needs for power and resources by a monolithic, totalitarian, technical nation-state, and the instinctual human need for direction and commitment. Lauding the new secular era and “man-come-of-age” does nothing to alter the factual reality: political religion fulfills precisely the same forms and functions as traditional religions did in past ages.

Ellul advocates two responses by Christians in this situation. First, we must undertake a desacralization and demythologization of the real idols, myths, and illusions of our day (such as technique, the nation-state, youth and progress). We must reveal them for what they really are. Second, we must preach the Word of God, just as it is, without the pseudo-demythologizing that has obscured and emasculated the message for so long. It would be cruel to supply only the negative critique without giving the only adequate answer to man’s needs: faith in Jesus Christ.

Ellul’s vocation as a twentieth-century prophet, smashing the idols and proclaiming the liberating Gospel in all its nakedness and offensiveness to fallen man, leaves him open to criticism at a few points in this work as well as his previous books. Let me give two examples. First, he specifies a thoroughly phenomenological and empirical method for defining the sacred, myth, and religion, and criticizes the heralds of the secular age for failing on this point. Yet he also fails to give any of the hard data or even references to such data on which he bases his own definitions.

Second, Ellul’s evaluations of certain persons (e.g., Harvey Cox and Billy Graham) and of movements (e.g., the “Jesus Revolution”) tend to be too harsh and oversimplified. They deserve criticism, but they also deserve a more balanced and fair appraisal. Ellul’s disagreement with Bonhoeffer is, on the other hand, delivered in a sensitive and helpful fashion.

It would also be interesting to hear what Ellul would say if pressed on the relation between the “raw” occultic and demonic manifestations of our times and the more abstract ideological and institutional “demons” he treats in this book. But these are the criticisms of a learner and a disciple. I remain convinced that this is an excellent and convincing work. The New Demons (and, indeed, all of Ellul’s work, which now includes sixteen volumes in English translation) is a genuine and faithful Christian critique of our times and a signpost pointing the way out of the morass. The weaknesses to which I have called attention are remedied in part by Ellul’s other, complementary works, but in the final analysis are simply an occupational hazard experienced by all “prophets.” The New Demons is accurate enough to open our eyes and powerful enough (I think) to energize us into meaningful activity for the Kingdom of God.

The Black Church In Transition

Black Religion and American Evangelicalism, by Milton Sernett (Scarecrow, 1975, 320 pp., $12.50), Black Pastors and Leaders: Memphis, 1819–1972, by David Tucker (Memphis State University, 1975, 158 pp., $8.95), and Community in a Black Pentecostal Church: An Anthropological Study, by Melvin Williams (University of Pittsburgh, 1974, 202 pp., $9.95), are reviewed by James S. Tinney, Ph.D. candidate in political science, Howard University, Washington, D.C.

Most recent books about black religion have concentrated on its biographical, theological and sociological dimensions, rather than on wide, historical developments. In fact, since the early part of this century when Frazier, DuBois and Mays wrote, Washington’s Black Religion has stood almost alone as recent general history, not limited to a single denominational viewpoint. The three books here reviewed help fill this gap by providing a continuous account of the transition of black religion from pre-Civil-War days (Sernett), to the post-war urban South (Tucker), and then to the urban North (Williams).

Sernett provides the shortest and most controversial book of the three. Roughly one-half of the volume is devoted to bibliography and appendices. (Appendix two provides valuable biographical sketches, concisely and alphabetically arranged.) Subtitled, “White Protestants, Plantation Missions, and the Flowering of Negro Christianity, 1787–1865,” its text is divided into white and black halves. The first half tells how whites saw, treated, served, and used blacks. The second part chronicles the rise of black religious organization.

In an introduction, Martin E. Marty lauds the book for portraying pre-Civil-War black religion as something far removed from purported “liberating radical ideology.” The author, in turn, attempts to reconstruct this history from a conservative, white viewpoint. This stance renders this book almost useless to the serious student or scholar. Almost every pathological and debilitating explanation of black religion—now carefully shunned by modern historians, black and white—is resurrected with approval by Sernett.

He refuses to acknowledge any contiguous expressions of African religion; exonerates white “missionaries” who capitulated to the “obedient slave” model in preaching; denies that black religion constituted a valid church during that era; views the slaves as moral indigents; and criticizes the black clergy for “educational backwardness” that “cannot be attributed to a lack of opportunity.”

Sernett gives little credibility to black interpretations of church history, ridiculing even official accounts by black Methodist organizations. At one point, he takes it upon himself to label as false certain parts of Richard Allen’s memoirs. (Allen founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church.) He categorically denies that the black church was an expression of either nationalism or separatism, although other historians have clearly traced these elements within black religion.

Tucker, on the other hand, provides a reasonable and generally undisputable account. While reaching back to the early 1800’s in introductory material, he concentrates on post-Civil-War developments in “the first book to attempt to document the growth of black religion in an urban center.” That the book concerns only one city, Memphis, does not detract from its importance, since Memphis is headquarters to two major black denominations: the Church of God in Christ, and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Tucker fully explores the histories of these bodies and this adds dramatically to the book’s wider importance.

Further, Tucker places the work of a half dozen prominent ministers within larger settings. He chooses men who were nationally influential within their own communions: Benjamin Imes, representing the famous American Missionary Association and the AME Church; T.O. Fuller, Baptist minister and journalist; Sutton Griggs, who was instrumental in the NAACP’s founding; Benjamin Hooks, Baptist member of the Federal Communications Commission; and James M. Lawson, Jr., activist in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the sanitation workers’ strike that led to the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. Black pentecostals and Catholics are also mentioned. In addition, conflicts of the black churches with black fraternal orders, changing political climates, and innovative black theologies serve the expansive scope of this volume, making it easily the most readable of the three books being reviewed.

The periscope of history adds crucial insights to Tucker’s record. He recalls the times when whites burned down every black church in the city and killed forty blacks, and uncovers the competence of black ministers. “None of the churches for Negroes which were kept under white leadership were ever able to prosper; the successful ministries were those established and run by blacks,” he says.

Differences in style, as well as origin, of the four denominations comprising black Methodists are mentioned. He believes the CME Church experienced slower growth than that of the AME because of stronger ties to “the cause of black liberation,” but states the CME survived because they developed churches in small towns, which AME did not. By 1931, the Church of God in Christ outstripped both of these groups, however, he says, because of its discipline, its work ethic, and attention to the poorer blacks. Further, the COGIC presiding bishop, J.O. Patterson, left other black ministers far behind in his early identification with political protest and the SCLC. (The sanitation workers were given use of the COGIC international temple as strike headquarters.)

While Williams’s book is called “an anthropological study,” it has historical significance as well. The only black author among these three, Williams shows the transition of black religion from the southern to the northern urban centers. He focuses on both congregational and denominational organization within a pentecostal group in Pittsburgh. Although he uses pseudonyms, it is obvious that his “Church of Holy Christ” is really COGIC; and names of bishops such as “Jenkins,” “Simpson,” and “Jackson,” actually represent C.H. Mason, the COGIC founder, and O.T. Jones and G.E. Vaughn who were state bishops.

What Williams says about this Pittsburgh church, however, may apply with equal force to other small black churches in the urban North, both pentecostal and otherwise. Refusing to accept models of social and cultural deprivation and disorganization, he demonstrates other prevalent factors such as political interaction, symbolic themes, common values but tolerance for persons who deviated from those values, common southern roots, and the important roles of women. Blacks in these churches “are no more desperate or frustrated” than anyone else, he believes. Given these positive features, one wonders how he can entertain the possibility that churches such as this “may disappear within the next ten years.” Possibly neither this prediction, nor the dynamics he describes, are necessarily valid also for churches larger than 100 members.

Psychologies And Religions

Transpersonal Psychologies, edited by Charles Tart (Harper & Row, 1975, 502 pp., $16.50), is reviewed by Lewis Rambo, assistant professor of psychology, Trinity College, Deerfield, Illinois.

For several decades pastoral counselors and theologians have been turning to psychology in order to expand their understanding of human functioning and therapeutic technique. Transpersonal Psychologies is one of the first books in which the psychologist is seeking information from the religious perspective. One of the reasons for this openness to religion is that psychologists are currently asking fundamental questions about the basic assumptions, methods, and scope of their science. Moreover, there is a growing awareness that the traditional psychological view of human nature is too mechanistic to account for the complexity and range of experience.

Transpersonal Psychologies contains eleven essays, three of them by the editor. Tart, an experimental psychologist at the University of California at Davis, gives a survey of the new science of altered states of consciousness (meditation, dreams, drug intoxication, mysticism, and the like). This new field dramatically demonstrates the poverty of contemporary psychology in even beginning to understand these “transpersonal” experiences. Tart’s chapter, “Some Assumptions of Orthodox, Western Psychology,” is a comprehensive listing and analysis of more than seventy assumptions held by most psychologists. The assumptions are powerful because they are often implicit and thereby render the psychologist “blind” to certain experiences or causes him to dismiss them as merely subjective.

Tart commissioned eight experts in different religious traditions to present the basic position of these traditions in the language of the psychologist in order to enrich the psychologist’s understanding and begin a genuine dialogue between the two fields. The chapters concern Zen Buddhism, Yoga, Arica Training, Sufism, Gurdjieff, magic, and Christian mysticism. Generally, the articles are competent, if not always stimulating.

Evangelical Christians will find William McNamara’s “Psychology and the Christian Mystical Tradition” a good introduction to a generally neglected area among conservative Christians in the United States. McNamara’s essay will also alert the reader to the similarities and the important differences between Christian mysticism and the mysticism of other world religions.

Transpersonal Psychologies is important because it is one of the first attempts of psychologists to seek new information about human psychology from religious traditions. It is to be hoped that the interaction of psychology and religion will continue to be a reciprocal relation instead of as in the past, a borrowing—sometimes at random—by religious people from contemporary psychology. Whatever its limitations, this book is a significant step in the right direction.

A Valuable Guide To Evangelism

Evangelical Witness, by Ralph Quere (Augsburg, 1975, 160 pp., $3.75 pb), is reviewed by Dale Sanders, pastor, Evangelical Covenant Church, Essex, Iowa.

A professor of history and theology at Wartburg Seminary, Ralph Quere begins his theology of evangelism with the assertion that “Law and gospel, rightly understood, become the key to effective evangelism” (p. 12). His book is a felicitous contribution to the literature of evangelism; it is a book of evangelical substance. From a distinctly Lutheran vantage, the author leads the reader through the message, medium, mission, and method of evangelism along this schema: Victor, Victim, Vicar (he acknowledges his debt to J.S. Whale).

As a Lutheran, he forthrightly but gently states reservations about Catholicism’s “theology of glory” (p. 87) as well as several areas of standard American evangelicalism. His reservations include James Kennedy’s Evangelism Explosion (p. 131), and Billy Graham, whom he obviously loves (p. 93).

Theologically Quere is satisfying. Non-sacramental and quasi-sacramental evangelicals can profitably rework his understanding of infant baptism, or even his whole interpretation of baptism’s significance. It wouldn’t hurt for Arminians and Calvinists to wrestle awhile with an orthodox Lutheran. It is salutary to read his affirmation of hell’s reality; it is even more salutary to be reminded of our amazing Saviour, whom Quere likes to call Beautiful Saviour.

Among the many strong points is an understandable comparison of world religions, and their inroads on the West; an illuminating survey of Christian salvation history; and an excellent discussion of practical evangelism.

There is a unique appendix in which he divides the Victor, Victim, Vicar motifs into their biblical parallels, and the biblically evangelical pastor will discover eight pages of gold to be mined for preaching. Best of all, Quere encourages each reader to be free to develop an authentic, truly personal evangelistic style. The publishers have provided a study guide to facilitate group discussion. Evangelical Witness is highly recommended.

Most people would still agree that divorces, if not invariably bad, are at least sad. Christians have traditionally thought that the marriage vows are meant to last till death. In recent years they have tolerated more permissive attitudes on divorce, but they continue to consider the breakup of a marriage as something to be avoided if at all possible. Probably most non-Christians, too, would side with the ideal of stability in marriage.

Yet despite such general agreement that divorce is undesirable, the rate continues to climb. Divorces among Americans last year exceeded one million for the first time and rose 6 percent over the previous year’s figure, according to the U. S. Census Bureau. And the number of marriages significantly declined.

The Church is well aware that it should be responding to the increasing number of troubled marriages. One reaction has been the more liberal spirit toward divorce that is evident in both conservative and liberal churches. More constructively, most churches have also begun new focuses upon the home and family life. The things that make marital partners get along with each other and with their children now come up frequently in sermons and Christian educational activities.

But this is not enough. The Church should begin to attack the problem on a much longer-range basis. It should examine some overlooked presuppositions that may be a key to the problem.

One of these, one that may lurk behind much domestic strife, is the assumption that marrying is the normal thing to do. Our children are brought up to believe that they are expected to marry and become parents, and that if they don’t conform to this pattern people will think there is something wrong with them.

It’s time to take a different tack. Probably the biggest reason for broken homes is that the marriage should never have taken place—that the man and woman should never have married anyone at all. The greatest threat to family life today is not too many divorces but too many marriages.

Some people will be tempted to reply, “Yes, that’s right. Not everyone has a temperament suited to marriage. Some people just cannot live with another person.” This reply takes us back to a fallacious presupposition, the idea that celibacy is aberrant, that a person remains single only if some abnormality in his character makes him unable to adjust to marriage. The presupposition arises not from the Bible but from our pagan culture. The Apostle Paul considered celibacy to be desirable Christian behavior. Monasticism, despite its excesses, produced positive results. Paul believed that marriage was second best (“it is better to marry than to burn [with passion]”).

Our culture convinces people that sexual intercourse is necessary for fulfillment in this life, and that a house is not a home if only one person lives there. We set up expectations for marriage and family life that are often not realized, and then trouble sets in.

The place to begin a turnaround in the divorce rate is at the point of the philosophy of marriage being passed on from parent to child. Parents ought to teach the principle that marriage is by no means for everybody. They ought to warn of the possibly tragic consequences of marriage for the sake of marriage. Christian parents ought to go beyond this to teach that it is God’s will for many people not to marry, and that God has many things to be done in the world that are best done by single people. We should look upon matchmaking as a risky activity. And we should not try to persuade those who do marry to bear children. For some marriages, children are a blessing. For others, they are a strain.

Maybe we have celebrated Mother’s Day and Father’s Day long enough. Perhaps it is time to replace these celebrations with Marriage and Family Day and Singles Day. This might help to establish the needed principle that marriage is not for everyone.

Whose Views?

Do you know what universe your next-door neighbor inhabits? Do you know what the possibilities are? If not, or if you want a refresher course in basic world views, James W. Sire’s book The Universe Next Door is for you.

Sire doesn’t try to be scholarly in the main text, though he does footnote extensively for those interested in reading further. He wants to get at the heart of each system—Christian theism, deism, naturalism, nihilism, existentialism, Eastern pantheistic monism, and “a new consciousness,” which has its roots in naturalism, Eastern pantheistic monism, and animism. He succeeds. But the strongest chapter—and the book’s most valuable contribution—is his thorough analysis of the new consciousness. Sire rightly says of it that “a world view of immense cultural impact and penetration is in the process of being formulated.” We see evidence of this in the growing sales of Carlos Castaneda’s books, “one of the major doorways now open to the new consciousness,” Sire concludes. Our culture has become saturated with the tenets of this philosophy. Remember the popular Jonathan Livingston Seagull?

The average Christian is often unaware of the world views slipped into his mind via the daily newspaper, talk show, or popular film. He or she may unwittingly accept aspects of them. Sire shakes the reader out of that complacency and challenges him to reconsider the world views he claims to hold.

A Squeeze Can Hurt Or Help

Postal rates for magazines are climbing much faster than the general rate of inflation in the United States. Religious publications will be affected much more than others because they are distributed almost entirely by mail, not through newsstand sales. Also, most of them are already dependent on subsidy by a denomination or organization, and thus are at the mercy not only of their own revenues but of their sponsors.

The trend does not necessarily spell disaster for Christian publications, but it does call for serious study of future prospects. This matter deserves priority consideration at the conventions being held this month by the Evangelical Press Association, Associated Church Press, and Catholic Press Association. Coordinated research would seem highly desirable at this point. How much governmental or denominational subsidy can be expected, and at what point does it jeopardize editorial integrity? Should not the options of newsstand sales and alternative delivery methods be considered seriously?

For evangelicals, a more basic question is whether their present journalistic state can be considered good stewardship. There is a considerable sameness in the content of Christian periodicals; the much discussed “pack journalism” is not limited to secular magazines. Crucial contemporary issues are being bypassed. Space is filled instead with repetitive inspirational pap. Far more money is being put into packaging than into substantive reporting. Significant new insights are rare. And despite all the emphasis on evangelism in recent years, there is precious little of it even in the most biblically oriented publications. With no newsstand sales, the evangelical community keeps talking largely to itself.

Getting Time On The Tube

The rapid growth of the broadcasting industry has been a boon to proclamation of the Gospel around the world. Countless Christians can trace their conversions to radio or television messages.

But broadcasting in the United States, is apparently at one of those awkward stages through which all fast-growing creatures must pass. There is both good news and bad news for evangelicals in the current situation.

First the bad news. Some television stations, especially those affiliated with the networks, are refusing to sell time to religious groups. Practices vary, but some refuse to sell not only program time (for thirty-minute preaching telecasts, for instance) but also time for spot announcements. However, they often give away the slots they will not allow Christian organizations to buy. These “public service” airings are usually at hours when there are few viewers. The net result is that few evangelicals get on channels that have this policy, and very few get prime-time exposure.

The good news is that some stations are abandoning this policy. Furthermore, there is reason to believe that the networks (whose strong recommendations influence the practice of their individual affiliates) are reconsidering the whole matter. If the networks reversed their stand, then many more stations would open time slots for paid religious broadcasting.

The issue has just come to public attention again in Texas, where sponsors of a Dallas evangelistic penetration effort were unable to buy prime time for their spot announcements. Two stations refused to sell. One of those stations also aroused the ire of some of its viewers when it refused to renew the contract of a preacher who had been buying time for a weekly program.

A third station in the area has a different policy, and it offered to sell space for the spot announcements even on the evening news or at other prime hours. Even so, a judgment factor was involved. The station manager was quoted as saying he was willing to air the commercials then because he considered them “extremely well produced and uplifting.”

If the public is to be offered more good religious programming, the networks and their individual affiliates (as well as the independents) must be free to work out the arrangements. There is little argument that there is room for improvement. The Texas channel that accepted the spot announcements also accepts paid religious programming, but it refuses telecasts that promote a specific church, that make excessive appeals for donations, and that violate the station’s standards of good taste.

We don’t think any more governmental legislation or regulation is necessary to get good religious programs on the air at good times. We do think it is high time that the networks and stations take another look at those policies that have not allowed religion the same exposure as politics, deodorants, and beer.

Games Are For Playing

Sunday was a day of peace and worship during America’s colonial era and during most of its first two hundred years of independence. Then something happened, according to Frank Deford, a writer for Sports Illustrated. In the first article of a series on “Religion in Sport” Deford observes, “After three centuries, Sunday changed overnight.” Now the Sunday trip out of the house is not to visit a church but to see a game or play one. Professional football, “the Sunday game,” has become “the passion of the land,” and the churches “have ceded Sunday to sports, to games.”

Whether or not churches have ceded anything, the fact remains that the passion of the land is too often athletic rather than spiritual. It is for hockey, baseball, soccer, and basketball, as well as for football. Increasingly of late, that passion has become violent. Not only do players get into fracases in and out of the game, but fans are involved also.

Americans enjoyed their athletics during most of those first three centuries. Games were fun. The participants played; they seldom fought. Spectators let off steam by cheering. Opposing teams were not the “bad guys,” just the “other guys.” During this long period “good sport” and “sportsmanlike” were terms of honor. The United States was spared the bloody stadium battles that frequently erupted at championship soccer matches in Latin America and similar events elsewhere.

Now things are changing. Violence is on the rise, and the fans are as responsible as the athletes. The person who pitches a pop bottle at the head of an outfielder is likely to become as much of a hero as the game’s best batter. Hockey has become a new craze in America, and the fans scream for blood. They frequently get it. Skulls are cracked; bones are broken.

Enthusiasm for good, clean sport is one thing. Arousing unholy passions is another. A game or sport is no longer that if mayhem results.

Paul exhorts believers to live peaceably “so far as it depends upon you” (Rom. 12:18). If the Christians working among athletes are having the impact that some claim, there ought to be more evidence of it in the way games are played. A good example in this area could help restore a wholesome quality in American life. Fans can do their part by applauding good conduct, not bad.

When The Good Isn’T Good Enough

No two Christians are identical. Every one is called by Christ to take on certain responsibilities. Whether we are one-talent or multi-talent persons, Christ expects us to devote ourselves to the work he has assigned to us.

Jesus himself had an assignment. He came to earth to accomplish certain things, and he had to withstand the temptation of being diverted to other work. He could have spent all his time doing very helpful things that would have been greatly appreciated by the people of Palestine. Instead, he chose to do what he had been sent to do.

For Christians today, as for Jesus then, there are hard choices. Goals must be put in the proper order.

The best possible example of how to arrange one’s priorities was provided by Jesus. In Luke 4, he took up the task of preaching after his temptations in the desert. His time was limited, and he knew it. He sought opportunities to teach in the synagogues even though not all who heard him there appreciated his teaching. He also taught in the open country, in the marketplace, and in homes.

To be sure, Christ also healed the sick, cast out demons, and fed the hungry. These accomplishments were very impressive, and people crowded around Jesus to get close to the miracle worker. They begged this extraordinarily helpful person to stay in their neighborhoods to do more good.

He refused to be diverted from his primary task, however. He told them, “I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God to the other cities also; for I was sent for this purpose.”

The Bible is full of other good examples of getting priorities in order. Paul wrote, for instance, “One thing I do …” (Phil. 3:13).

Many Christians are tempted to abandon their primary assignments in order to do other good work. It is a problem for the laity as well as the clergy. God has called many believers to secular work, and he expects them to do it well. The teachers, the carpenters, the farmers, the surgeons, are no less important in God’s sight than the preacher. All are expected to accomplish what they have been called to do. Being a good wife and mother is sometimes a tedious job for a woman, and she may be tempted to do less than her best in order to take on other assignments. When these temptations come it is time for the Christian to take another look at priorities, remembering Christ’s example during his short ministry

Fifth in a Series

The issue of biblical inerrancy is today dividing evangelicals into ever more rigidly competitive camps. The inerrancy emphasis of theologians like Charles Hodge and of New Testament scholars like B. B. Warfield has in the main characterized conservative Christianity in America and most evangelical colleges, Bible institutes, and seminaries reflect it in their doctrinal commitments. In Britain, where critical theory took a larger toll, emphasis on biblical inerrancy did not as conspicuously dominate the evangelical scene, although the issue has always arisen in evangelical controversy over the authority of Scripture.

The Wenham (Gordon) Conference on Scripture (1966) was a kind of turning point in the inerrancy controversy. Because of inadequate advance planning, the gathering failed to face issues that ought to have been resolved and therefore achieved little more than the predictable conclusion that reputable evangelical scholars are ranged on both sides of the debate. The invasion of neo-orthodoxy into Southern Baptist seminaries eroded the emphasis on scriptural inerrancy. Other evangelical campuses, Asbury and Fuller among them, experienced internal faculty disagreement. As Fuller hedged on its original commitment concerning Scripture, the enthusiasm of such faculty members as Wilbur M. Smith, Gleason L. Archer, and Harold Lindsell waned; E. J. Carnell also resisted alteration. In 1961 the Christian Reformed Church was impelled to issue synodical study reports and decisions on biblical infallibility and in 1971 and 1972 on scriptural authority. A major issue in the rupture of Concordia Seminary (Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod) was the legitimacy of the historical critical method in Bible interpretation. Right now the Evangelical Theological Society is in the midst of an unpublicized struggle over its inerrancy statement, which some member scholars sign but no longer share.

More and more books and articles support scriptural errancy (e.g., Dewey Beegle’s The Inspiration of Scripture, Westminster, 1963, and Scripture, Tradition and Infallibility, Eerdmans, 1973; Jack Rogers’s Confessions of a Conservative Evangelical. Westminster, 1974; cf. Richard J. Coleman, “Biblical Inerrancy: Are We Going Anywhere?,” Theology Today, January, 1975).

Scores of young evangelicals emphasize that scholars uncommitted to inerrancy are producing substantial evangelical works. They repudiate the “domino theory” that a rejection of inerrancy involves giving up “one evangelical doctrine after another.” They point to the vigorous contributions to evangelical theology by scholars like James Orr in an earlier generation and G. C. Berkouwer, George Ladd, Bruce Metzger, and others in our time; F. F. Bruce, while apparently noncommittal, has written an appreciative introduction to Beegle’s last book. Many young scholars invest their own critical learning in defense of evangelically crucial commitments. Some aspire to posts on non-evangelical faculties, aware that an inerrancy commitment seemingly barred the door to competent evangelical scholars in the recent past. Most would be shocked to learn that, for all his concessions to critical theory, James Orr’s refusal to go further disqualified him as a scholar in the sight of a former principal of New College, Edinburgh, who disapproved the writing of a doctoral dissertation on Orr’s evangelical contribution.

The point is not that biblical inerrancy today lacks stalwart champions in the succession of J. Gresham Machen, B. J. Young, and Ned Stonehouse. Among the present-day champions one might name Geoffrey Bromiley, Gordon Clark, Frank Gaebelein, Kenneth Kantzer, Roger Nicole, Robert Preus, Francis Schaeffer, Cornelius Van Til, and virtually the entire membership of the Evangelical Theological Society. The view is supported in Clark Pinnock’s Biblical Revelation (Moody Press, 1972) and in the volume edited by John W. Montgomery, God’s Inerrant Word: An International Symposium on the Trustworthiness of Scripture (Bethany Fellowship, 1974), which includes an essay by the English scholar James I. Packer. Earlier support can be found in Revelation and the Bible, which I edited (Baker, 1959).

Yet a growing vanguard of young graduates of evangelical colleges who hold doctorates from non-evangelical divinity centers now question or disown inerrancy, and the doctrine is held less consistently by evangelical faculties. Some of its supporters increasingly project inerrancy as the hallmark of evangelical fidelity, so that conflict over the issue more and more ruptures the comprehensive unity of evangelical scholars once evident a quarter century ago amid secondary disagreement on this issue.

The present editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Harold Lindsell, details in Battle for the Bible (Zondervan, 1976) the growing rebellion against inerrancy on evangelical campuses. Some retain the term and reassure supportive constituencies but nonetheless stretch the term’s meaning. CHRISTIANITY TODAY has come to make inerrancy the badge of evangelical authenticity. Francis Schaeffer projects it as the watershed of evangelical fidelity and deplores a “false evangelicalism” that minimizes inerrancy.

For all their commitment to inerrancy, scholarly evangelicals earlier in this century—Hodge and Warfield included—avoided wholly resting Christian theism upon it. With New Testament balance their doctrine of Scripture emphasized first of all the divine authority and then the inspiration of Scripture, much as did the apostles. While scholars disagreed as to whether inerrancy is explicitly or only implicitly taught in Scripture, they did not make inerrancy a theological weapon with which to drive those evangelicals not adhering to the doctrine into a non-evangelical camp.

From the very first CHRISTIANITY TODAY was editorially committed to inerrancy. But its contributors were drawn from the broad evangelical spectrum to wage literary battle against non-evangelical perspectives. To divide this array of contributors over the issue of inerrancy was not in purview. This does not mean that a reasoned presentation of the epistemological significance of inerrancy is unimportant. The magazine editorially affirmed what is the case, that inerrancy and not errancy is the logical implicate of the divine authority and inspiration of Scripture; that champions of errancy have adduced no objective biblical, theological, or philosophical criterion to distinguish supposedly errant from inerrant passages; that errancy introduces epistemic instability as evidenced by disagreements over biblical reliability even among its evangelical advocates, to say nothing of liberal advocates whose irreconcilable differences drove neo-orthodoxy to affirm that no part of the Bible is in itself God’s Word.

The claim by young evangelicals that to reject inerrancy does not automatically drive one to repudiate other evangelical doctrines is wholly right. The real question is whether, once scriptural errancy is affirmed, a consistent evangelical faith is maintained thereafter only by an act of will rather than by persuasive epistemological credentials. A volitional faith may also affirm that God can and does use poor grammar and may equally use errant statements and resort therefore to a theology of paradox. Paul K. Jewett (Man as Male and Female, Eerdmans, 1975) and G. C. Berkouwer (Holy Scripture, Eerdmans, 1975) seem to compromise not only the inerrancy but also the normativeness of Scripture by differentiating within it a timebound and a non-timebound authority.

Yet the appeal to useful contributions made by mediating scholars, and distaste for the use of inerrancy as a polemical weapon in the absence of reasoned supports, must not be ignored. Neither can the increasing fragmentation of evangelical cohesion over the issue of inerrancy. Evangelical churches and campuses that incorporate inerrancy into their statements have every obligation to preserve doctrinal fidelity. But the duty of the evangelical enterprise requires something higher than invalidating every contribution of evangelicals who halt short of that commitment. Those in leadership posts must exhibit the doctrine’s rational roots and openly display its intellectual fruits.

CARL F. H. HENRY