Eutychus
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A Child’S Garden Of Musings
Now that we have baptized Mother Goose and transformed her silly rhymes into bedtime sermons for children, we must strive to conquer new literary worlds and share truth with more people. After all, not everybody reads Mother Goose.
I have long felt that the Sherlock Holmes saga is tailor-made for spiritual messages. Surely “A Study in Scarlet” immediately brings Isaiah 1:18 to mind, and ‘The Valley of Fear” suggests Psalm 23:4. (Oh, why has it taken us so long to see this?) Beyond question, Paul’s “Beware of dogs” (Phil. 3:2) can be related to “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” I could name several more, but I will leave to you, the reader, the thrill of discovering them for yourself.
So much for detective stories. How about applying some sanctification to A Child’s Garden of Verses? I submit an edifying sample:
How would you like to go up in a plane,
Over the bus routes wide?
If you bring twenty to Sunday School,
You shall receive a free ride.
How would you like to enjoy a long trip,
And visit the Holy Land fair?
Bring two hundred people to Sunday School
And we will escort you there!
Vast vistas of evangelical opportunity open to us! Time would fail me to suggest what could be done with children’s games. I ask you: Why should the little ones only enjoy themselves at games, when they could also be edifying themselves? Would it not be wise and profitable to read them Luke 15 before they go out to play “hide and seek”? Would not this add more seriousness of purpose to their play? I’m sure it would.
I tell you, the possibilities are limitless! Why have a ducky or a doggie on a child’s bib when a dispensational chart would accomplish much more? Bars of soap shaped like Noah’s ark, or the tables of the Law, would rescue a child’s bathtime from being merely an exercise in outward cleanliness.
Children of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your childhood joys.
EUTYCHUS X
Finding A Balance
Let me commend the convincing arguments in your December 12 editorial “Just Because Reagan Has Won …” This salutary word is most important for all of us who call ourselves evangelical in today’s American society. With others, I have been looking for a sense of balance in this whole matter of my political interest and stance as a Christian and as a responsible voting citizen of our nation. You have helped us all.
TED W. ENGSTROM
Executive director, World Vision
Monrovia, Calif.
You’ve done it again, droning on about “key issues” for evangelicals while omitting the “rights” of the purest “minority group,” the unborn. Reagan was elected by a margin equivalent to the prolife vote he garnered.
MIKE ALLEN
Tipp City, Ohio
In the wake of Ronald Reagan’s election, news of the so-called Moral Majority has reached expatriate Americans here in England. Has not the “moral majority” learned anything from history? When early Christians captured Constantine for the “moral majority,” the church rapidly sank in the peat bog of spiritual mediocrity. To exchange political power for spiritual strength seems a pretty pathetic substitution.
REV. WAYNE A. DETZLER
Kensington Baptist Church
Bristol, England
The church should be extremely careful lest it transform itself into a pressure group, whether in boycotts on the economic level, or bloc voting on the political scene. Otherwise the church ceases to be the church of Jesus Christ, and becomes another human organization. Efforts to Christianize the social order, divorced from the heart of the gospel, result in the secularizing of the religious mind.
REV. ARNOLD H. JAHR
Trinity Lutheran Church
Waterloo, Iowa
Too Generous
John Stott is far too generous in analyzing the weaknesses of the statement of the Nationwide Initiative in Evangelism in his “Reviving Evangelism in Britain” [Dec. 12]. The statement leaves out the substitutionary atonement, presents a defective view of sin, fuzzifies biblical authority, and completely ignores the Second Coming of Christ. In general, the statement reads as if it had been drafted by a group of scholars committed to watering down the Christian faith.
REV. RAY PRITCHARD
Redeemer Covenant Church
Downey, Calif.
Three Cheers, But …
Three cheers for Larry Richards’s digging and divulging regarding the CT-Gallup Poll, “The Great American Congregation: An Illusive Ideal?” [Nov. 21]. However, his admitted idealism and bias toward picturing the church “as a family of brothers and sisters.” tends to blunt his spade. He seems to be hurt that people overwhelmingly turn to their immediate family for help rather than to church members. Why should that be disconcerting? Family is family! One’s immediate family is the historical biblical and cultural center for the meeting of virtually every need. The current evangelical vogue for “deep interpersonal relationships” (spoken with hushed, intense tones!) goes too far when the implication seems to be that it is something less than “spiritual” for my literal brother to know and care for me rather than a brother in my church.
It appears Richards can’t comprehend why people do not seek help from friends and neighbors. One reason concerns the right to deem some areas of our lives as “personal.” Many of us in the counseling field are not happy with popularists who encourage everybody to “let it all hang out” all the time. There is natural embarrassment connected with many of our intimate needs.
WILLIAM L. O’BYRNE
Director, Family Development Institute
Speculator, N.Y.
All-Time Low?
Your December 12 issue hit an all-time low in the cartoon (?) on the nativity scene. I consider it in very poor taste bordering on the sacrilegious. Perhaps you should do some serious thinking about the holiness of the birth of our Lord, his death and resurrection. Or are you watching too much TV?
W. F. JANKE
Blaine, Wash.
“A Cute Catchword”
Tom Bisset’s December 12 “Religious Broadcasting …” thoughtfully addresses many of its very complex problems. However, I cringe at the continued use of the phrase “electronic church” or “electric church.” It’s a cute catchword but it is totally inadequate, inaccurate, and unbiblical. We don’t refer to the Christian publishing industry as the “printed church,” yet it serves the same functions of edification, information, and entertainment. Why then label Christian broadcasting as the “electric church?” We don’t baptize, bury, or serve Communion to our “congregation.” Broadcast ministries ought not try to be a substitute for the local church nor should they be considered as such.
TOM SOMMERVILLE
Moody Bible Institute Broadcasting
Chicago, III.
Visitation—With Limits
Regarding Neal Kuyper’s “Minister’s Workshop” on pastoral visitation [Dec. 12], I feel that a pastor must look to the Word of God to determine his responsibilities in the local church. One of the frustrations that many a pastor feels is that he is expected to do so many things and most of them are worthwhile in and of themselves. However, he finds that his time spent in productive Bible study and sermon preparation can be greatly eroded if that time is not protected. In larger churches, a pastor can soon be spiritually emaciated because of the many demands upon his time, and visitation can be one of the leading culprits.
Kuyper mentions the involvement of many pastors in sermon preparation, counseling, reading, weddings, and deaths. But no mention is made of the pastor who comes home at the end of a day, having visited in homes, having done everything else that needs to be done only to be met at the door by a family that says, “who are you?”
REV. THOMAS W. MCDERMOTT
Grandview Baptist Church
Davenport, Iowa
News Commentary
After reading the December 12 news article “Faith Formula …” my pen can no longer be silent concerning my views on what has been transpiring at Oral Roberts University. I am a 1978 ORU graduate, and thoroughly enjoyed my studies and relationships there. But I had some difficulties when it came to some of President Roberts’s teachings—that is, faith vs. presumption, seed-faith, and “claiming it.”
My greatest contention is the student’s inability to think for himself and challenge (on the basis of Scripture) some of Roberts’s teachings. Healthy dialogue should be viewed not as threatening, but as a time for learning for both parties. For instance, I have come to realize there is nothing “un-scriptural” about having a physical handicap or being poor. Joni Eareckson and Mother Theresa can attest to that.
DENISE BELTZNER
South Hamilton, Mass.
Clarifications are needed on your December 12 news item concerning the November meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion. The Consultation on Evangelical Theology is not primarily a “beachhead,” which implies a battle with clearly defined warring factions. Evangelicals have often avoided dialogue, thereby cheating ourselves and others. Those of us who initiated the consultation believe (1) we have scholarly work that needs to be done; and (2) we can benefit from the availability of other scholars at the AAR.
MARK LAU BRANSON
Chairperson, Consultation on Evangelical Theology
Madison, Wis.
Correction
We regret errors in two recently published poems by Luci Shaw. In “Theory” (Sept. 19) the word “us” was omitted from line 17, which should read: “to orchestrate us all.” In “The Stars, The Bells” (Dec. 12) in line seven the word “like” should be “light.” Lines seven and eight thus should read: “light runs / like music in the bones …”
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In this issue, CHRISTIANITY TODAY book editor Walter Elwell analyzes a survey of 40 evangelical leaders to discover the books that have proved most influential for their lives and ministries. Among the illuminating facts brought out by the survey is the wide disparity between the continuous stream of “best sellers” flooding our Christian bookstores and the books that have proved most formative in shaping the life and thought of Christian leaders. This may tell all of us something about our own reading habits and the quality of our reading diet.
A relatively new feature in CHRISTIANITY TODAY is the attempt to come to grips with the explosion in the production of audio-visual materials for church and home. An update on video equipment and materials is offered along with versatile suggestions for their use, and Mark Senter evaluates some outstanding films especially suited for church groups.
In a disturbing article, “Sociobiology: Cloned from the Gene Cult” (page 16), Ray Bohlin explains the undergirding philosophy of the new so-called science of sociobiology. While noting its significant insights, he also points out fundamental inconsistencies inherent in any recognizable form of sociobiology. He warns, finally, against some malignant, but frequently unnoticed, aspects of this new face to what is really a very old world-and-life view—the modern heir of ancient materialism.
This month assistant news editor John Maust begins a three-month leave from his duties at CHRISTIANITY TODAY to attend the Spanish Language Institute in Costa Rica, Central America. With his new linguistic skills and greater first-hand knowledge of Spanish-speaking nations south of the border, John will be able to provide us with better understanding and in-depth interpretation of the church in these turbulent areas of the world where so much, both good and bad, is happening with such rapidity.
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A faltering and impatient liberalism is tempted to catapult itself into violent new remedies.
Two years go a former colleague at a midwest college acquainted me with a work group of prominent American liberal theologians who had come together to do “constructive” theology. My friend invited two member acquaintances to lead a colloquy concerning the goals of the group on the campus where I was then serving. Names of some in the work group are familiar to many in the American setting: Edward Farley (Vanderbilt), Gordon Kaufman (Harvard), David Kelsey (Yale), Langdon Gilkey (Chicago), Schubert Ogden (Perkins).
This was my first introduction to the workshop goals, and I was a bit surprised at the vitality and stridency with which the agenda was presented. An informative overview of the group’s goals and membership was published by Julian Hartt in the March 1979 Occasional Papers of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research (Collegeville, Minn. 56321). It is fascinating reading for those who want to keep up with what American liberal theologians are about these days.
I recently learned that the group is still meeting and is planning to publish a textbook they hope will break new ground for theological study and church life in the U.S. Briefly, this is what the group has agreed on as its assumptions in hammering out a reconstructionist theology for our day. Since the workshop first assumes that the scriptural doctrine of the supernatural is wholly discredited in the modern world, a new theology for our time will have to get along without it. In fact, Hartt writes, much of the traditional package of the Christian faith has been discredited and needs to be rethought completely.
Accordingly, the group has assigned specific traditional doctrines to various group members who are responsible for studying them in their historical contexts, assessing them in light of modern secular criticism, and reconstructing them for a new day, following a kind of Hegelian pattern of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The principal aim of the 22 members is to address the challenge of “whether the Christian message can be freed from bondage to arcane models of vertical transcendence. So bound, the church’s message fails to reckon with the shape and movement of the actual world.”
Translated, that means all the traditional doctrines of Christian faith that evangelicals consider essential will be reconstructed and restated in language suitable to the non-supenaturalist assumptions of the present day. The inspiration and authority of Scripture is radically revised, as one might assume. Hartt remarks: “The faith of our fathers may be living still, but we are not under a divine mandate to accept our theological fathers’ views and uses of Scripture. Indeed, hardly anything better illustrates the power of historical relativism in our time than the need to produce constructive—rather than past-regarding—views on the authority and function of Scripture in theological work.” American theologians, he observes, are not as tied to biblical theology as are their European counterparts, and therefore are “not likely to claim direct Scriptural warrant for every serious theological proposal about God, man, nature, and history.”
What, then, is the higher purpose of the group’s agenda, other than meeting the challenging attacks of secularism? Liberation theology is the stated goal, to discover the prophetic vision of the church in wrestling with the world’s political and economic inequities, and so deal with the enormity of evil in our time. This, according to the work group, is not sufficiently addressed by historic Christianity.
Several observations might be made in reply to the project. It seems that liberal theologians who insist that the major obstacle in historic Christianity is its belief in God’s supernatural sovereignty won’t let go of the old liberal-fundamentalist controversy. I had thought that liberal theology was gaining in that it might be at least respectful toward those of us who hold such views—just as we evangelicals are acknowledging more broadly our social responsibilities in political and economic areas. But the issue is clear-cut and the tone strident: historic Christian doctrines must be demolished and reconstructed according to the norms of secularist society.
In a forthcoming study on “New Approaches to Jesus and the Gospels” by this writer, the creative insights of Michael Polanyi, I. T. Ramsey, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Wittgenstein to New Testament study are applied. It is an effort to encourage scholars once again to be relaxed and faithfully imaginative as they interpret the Gospels and not to be intimidated by the “flatness” of ordinary biblical criticism. Ramsey invites those who are logically bound by secular expectations to appreciate the logically “odd” in Scripture—including the miraculous and the supernatural. Lewis claims that only the good reader who is attentive and obedient to the text will hear it and not simply use it for other purposes. And Tolkien begs the reader to let the gospel cast its “spell.”
Polanyi maintains that great discoveries have never been made by the doubting mind but only by the receptive spirit with a searching and heuristic vision. “Unless you first believe, you will not understand.” An apparent concern for the poor and oppressed can often compel a faltering and impatient liberalism to catapult itself into violent new remedies and totalitarianisms. Only the preservation of conservative elements in the tradition, he writes, can check the destructive tendencies in our culture.
The political lessons of the twentieth century, with its horrendous powers bent on radical reforms ostensibly in pursuit of justice and brotherhood, impressed Polanyi that the right of moral self-determination and religious freedom can be preserved only within the conviviality of the conservative free society. The truth is unpalatable to our conscience, he writes, but there is no other way to preserve the free society than to correct unjust privileges by carefully graded stages, realizing that our duty lies in the service of ideals that we cannot possibly achieve on our own.
As for the group’s serious charge that historic biblical faith does not really address human evil in our day, I had thought Christ came to do just that, and at its deepest originative level in the human heart. It is a sickness of the modern mind, C. S. Lewis observes, to focus on the amelioration of the sins and poverty of another, oblivious of one’s own illness and sinfulness. Both must be addressed. But the central question is whether salvation is first something God does for us because it cannot be accomplished any other way, or something we insist on doing our own way in spite of what God says about the human condition. Is redemption centered in Christ’s supernatural work on the Cross, or is it essentially political freedom and freedom from material want? In biblical ethics, the latter arises from the first, but not always and at any price. And never is it a substitute for the Cross.
Once again an old question comes “round for new debate.” One hopes that the proposals of the group on “constructive” theology will challenge evangelicals to respond reflectively, imaginatively, and above all with integrity of commitment to Christ and those for whom he died.
ROYCE GORDON GRUENLER1Dr. Gruenler is professor of New Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts.
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Philip Walters covered a week of the Helsinki review conference in Madrid and filed this report for CHRISTIANITY TODAY. He is on the staff of Keston (England) College.
A neatly bound typewritten volume of 863 pages reached Madrid from the Soviet Union in time for the November opening of the Helsinki review conference in Madrid. Addressed to participants, it dealt with “willful aggression by state atheism in the USSR against the All-Union Church of the True and Free Seventh-day Adventists.” It had been published by the secret publishing house, Verny Svitetel True Witness.”
The group known as “True and Free” Adventists—harshly persecuted since the 1920s—has consistently refused to compromise with what it regards as the unacceptable demands of an atheist state: to register its congregations, to bear arms, to work on Saturday (the Adventist sabbath). Its leader, V. A. Shelkov, died in a Soviet labor camp earlier this year at age 84.
The True and Free Seventh-day Adventists have offered determined resistance in the form of a flood of documents detailing their sufferings and outlining their beliefs. This latest document opens with a message from its church council. Then follows an appeal by its late leader Shelkov, a 140-page account of Shelkov’s trial last March, 400 pages of testimony in Shelkov’s defense, a list of 257 searches of homes of True and Free Adventists between March 1978 and July 1980 with names and addresses of believers involved, and a list of 55 True and Free Adventist prisoners, nearly all with photographs attached.
Thoroughly prepared especially for the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the volume indicates both the degree of persecution suffered by these believers and the importance they place on the Helsinki accord, known as the final act, as a safeguard of their religious freedom.
Thousands of victims of human rights violations in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe see the Helsinki act as a standard by which their governments should be measured and as an international commitment that their governments should honor. Many of them are in jail for acting on this conviction. They were obviously counting on Western nations to refuse to close their eyes to violations and to protect the Helsinki process. Other examples:
• Representatives of the 30,000 Soviet Pentecostals who are campaigning for the right to emigrate from the USSR announced a hunger strike, organized during the first week of the Madrid conference. The five-day strike was joined by virtually all those who have applied to emigrate as well as some other Christians who wished to draw attention to the recent wave of repressions.
• Imprisoned Romanian Orthodox priest Gheorghe Calciu began a protest hunger strike to coincide with the opening of the Madrid conference.
• At a press conference Stephen Roth, chairman of the Helsinki monitoring group attached to the World Jewish Conference, deplored the arrest on November 13 of the Soviet Jew Viktor Brailovsky, who has been denied an exit visa from the USSR. He was arrested because he told foreign journalists about a hunger strike being held by 300 Jews in the Soviet Union to coincide with the opening of the Madrid conference and to bring their plight to the attention of the delegates. Roth called Brailovsky’s arrest an “act of contempt” for the Madrid conference by the USSR.
The conference began although the agenda was not agreed on. For more than eight weeks preceding the opening, fruitless controversy over the agenda between delegates from East and West had threatened the whole enterprise. Opening speeches were delivered by representatives of all 35 participatory nations in the hope that an agenda would emerge. On the afternoon of the fourth day a compromise agenda put forward by neutral and nonaligned nations was accepted first by the United States and its Western allies, and then by the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc countries.
Originally the West had wanted the conference to begin with a thorough and indefinitely extended review of the human rights record of all participatory states, while the East opposed this as a plan for “sterile demagogy” and wanted the conference to concentrate chiefly on plans for military detente in Europe. The compromise agenda allowed a six weeks’ review of the record on human rights. After Christmas the conference moved on to other matters.
The final act was accepted in 1975 at Helsinki, Finland, by the USSR, the U.S., Canada, and all European countries except Albania. It was seen as an evolutionary document rather than as a call for immediate and far-reaching changes, and it envisaged periodic follow-up conferences. The first of these was held in Belgrade in 1977, and the second was the Madrid meeting.
The final act contained three parts, called “baskets.” The first basket deals with security in Europe. It contains two sections defining conditions for European security that still cause controversy because of the differing emphasis put on them by East and West. Section VII calls on participatory states to manifest “respect for human rights, and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief,” while Section VL calls on them to “refrain from any intervention … in the internal or external affairs falling within the domestic jurisdiction of another participating state …”
The agenda controversy at Madrid centered on the fact that the Western countries wanted a preliminary period of review of each country’s record on human rights. The Eastern bloc countries disagreed, saying such a discussion would violate the Helsinki agreement by interfering in the internal affairs of participating states. The Soviets proposed moving immediately to new topics and specifically a plan for a general European conference on disarmament.
The second basket concerns cooperation in the fields of economics, science, technology and the environment, and caused the least controversy during its formulation. The third basket concerns cooperation in humanitarian and other fields.
The USSR did everything in its power to cut down the amount of time to be spent discussing human rights, but in the end compromised, being too concerned with its international reputation to withdraw and allow the conference to break up.
Despite the lack of an agenda, the opening week of the conference proved eventful. While the inaugural speeches were going on in the Palace of Congresses, Madrid hotels were alive with all kinds of alternative seminars, press conferences, and exhibitions generally devoted to the theme of human rights. Such well-known figures as Alexander Ginzburg and General Pyotr Grigorenko, the ex-Soviet general who spent many years in Soviet psychiatric hospitals for his human rights activities, participated in the events, which were relatively well publicized in the West’s communications media. The French-based Help and Action organization displayed some samizdat (typewritten and smuggled) documents from the USSR. Poland, and Czechoslovakia. There were 50 or 60 Latvian exiles in Madrid during the opening week. They organized two demonstrations. During one of them, a Soviet flag was burned and a Latvian priest slashed his arm and dripped blood on the Soviet flag.
Apparently to balance these events, leaders of the Orthodox, registered Baptist. Catholic, and Muslim religious communities in the USSR held a press conference in Madrid. The substance of their remarks was predictable: Is there freedom of worship in the USSR? Yes, it is guaranteed by the constitution. How do churches regard the activities of religious activists imprisoned for their faith? Such people are only arrested if they break civil laws; the church is separated from the state.
Opening speeches at the conference reflected a divergence of aims. The U.S. and other Western delegations made it a policy to name names and raise specific human rights cases, while this was exactly what the Soviet Union hoped to avoid.
Two themes were raised again and again by Western delegates: Afghanistan and human rights. The U.S. representative, former U.S. Attorney General Griffin Bell, spoke on Afghanistan, and devoted about a third of his speech to a “lamentable record of continual denial of human rights written over the past three years by the governments of some signatory nations.” He deplored the fact that Jewish emigration from the USSR had fallen sharply in 1980 as compared to 1979. He then outlined the fate—confinement or exile—of 71 Soviet citizens who had set up organizations in the USSR to monitor observance of human rights. He mentioned specifically: Yari Orlov, Anatoli Shcharansky, Mykola Rudenko, Viktoras Petkus, and Andrei Sakharov. The entire Soviet delegation took off translation headsets and sat in stony silence during that section of the speech.
The Soviet Union’s response was more moderate than had been expected. Deputy Foreign Minister Leonid Ilyichov did not threaten to block the conference: he called instead for concentration on European disarmament. He voiced “strong feelings of indignation and bafflement” at the speech by Bell, but expressed Soviet readiness to discuss Basket Three and in particular indicated that the USSR “would consider in a businesslike way problems concerned with the conditions for the reunification of families and the facilitation of marriages between citizens of different states.”
Once the agenda was agreed upon, the conference got down to business. On the first day the head of the British delegation, John Wilberforce, set the tone adopted by successive delegates. He spoke of the need for a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and criticized the Soviet Union’s repression of human rights and restriction of religious freedom. He also criticized the Council for Religious Affairs in the USSR for refusing to register some religious congregations, thus putting them in a position of official illegality. At the beginning of 1979, he said, 49 unregistered Baptists were under arrest or restraint for this reason.
The USSR seemed interested in keeping the Madrid conference alive. It is also obvious, however, that the Eastern bloc countries will not approve any discussion of the Afghanistan question, and that they were profoundly disturbed at the prospect of a thorough review of their own internal human rights records. Over the last several years the Soviet Union has conducted its most comprehensive crackdown on dissidents since Stalin. Its unwillingness was therefore understandable.
Archaelogy
Iraq Takes A New Dig At Its Ancient Capital
The site of once-mighty Babylon is being excavated by the government of Iraq, which has committed $40 million to the project. Director Ali Muhammad Mahdi explained to Joseph Kraft of the New Yorker, “Babylon is the leading feature of our long cultural heritage. The revival of Babylon is a national duty.”
For the past 26 months he has led a team of more than 20 archaeologists and some 750 workers in the dig. Their basic goal is to lay out in fullest detail the city as it existed at the time of Nebuchadnezzar some 2,500 years ago. The site was first worked by German archaeologists before World War I. Mahdi claims they were chiefly interested in “sending back trophies to Berlin,” and that their conclusion about the original site of the Hanging Gardens was incorrect.
Using thousands of cuneiform tablets describing life in Babylon, Mahdi’s team purports to have identified the full outlines of the city and the sites of the great Southern Palace of Nebuchadnezzar and other major temples, including the Tower of Babel. The latter, according to reporter Kraft on the scene, is a “huge hole in the ground, half filled with water, choked with weeds and grasses, and surrounded by crumbling earth streaked with traces of salt accumulation.”
Salt appears to be the major danger to restoration. In a speech at an archaeological seminar, Mahdi himself warned: “Our eternal city, Babylon, is in danger of decay and destruction due to the serious dangers surrounding it, particularly the high level of underground water … and salinity which cause the decay of the foundations and walls of the structures.”
Neil Johnson
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Fort Pierce seemed an unlikely spot for a fight against pornography. The city of 47,000 on Florida’s east coast already had two topless bars, a struggling massage parlor, and several bookstores with adult literature in the back room.
But maybe the addition of an X-rated theater became too much. When the local newspapers announced last April that someone planned to convert a rug outlet into an adult movie theater, a citizen’s group—composed mainly of members of the city’s 70-plus churches—had formed in opposition within a week.
An angry group of about 500 met at Southside Baptist Church, located within sight of the proposed theater. For more than two hours they voiced strong feelings against the theater, and discussed how to block its opening. They feared higher crime would follow, plus further decay of the town’s moral standards, and objected to becoming the only town in a four-county area with an adult theater. (None of the bordering counties, in fact, permitted topless bars or massage parlors.) Also, the attenders said they didn’t want their children growing up where that sort of enterprise flourished. The group ignored denominational lines: Baptists joined with Lutherans, Methodists with Catholics. Presbyterians with Episcopalians.
Despite the growing furor, theater operator Richard Sparks insisted he would continue with plans for his Barn Cinema. The local press latched on to the pornography issue, and news articles appeared almost daily. By the time the group decided to meet again, the theater’s fate was a hot discussion topic city wide.
More than 800 attended the second meeting, when the group adopted the name Saint Lucie [County] Citizens Against Pornography (CAP). Southside Baptist pastor Tony Carson, known for his opposition to pornography in any of its forms, was elected president, and spearheaded CAP’s subsequent efforts.
CAP leaders chose a basic strategy: appeal to the five-member county commission to halt the theater’s opening. Should that attempt fail, CAP planned at least to seek a county ordinance outlawing the showing of pornographic films.
CAP met with the commissioners twice last May. Each time, the meetings moved to larger quarters in the civic auditorium because of large crowds. The 1,500 attenders at the second meeting learned that a state obscenity law had been on the books for years, but was never enforced in Fort Pierce. CAP leaders met soon after with the sheriff, who vowed to enforce the dormant law.
The first casualty in the war against smut was a drive-in theater, which for years had featured soft-core pornographic movies. With reels of the Pig Keeper’s Daughter tucked under their arms, deputies led the theater’s projectionist and manager to jail. Kent Theaters, owner of the drive-in, agreed to halt the week-end flesh features before the case came to trial, although in their place the management began showing a steady diet of gory honor films.
In the meantime, remodeling of the Barn Cinema building proceeded on schedule. Sparks by then was getting support from a counter group to CAP, the much smaller, but more shrill Citizens for Freedom of Choice. Sparks carefully followed local building codes and zoning regulations—the only areas where county officials might have found cause to block the theater—so it opened on schedule, three months after word of his plans first got out.
Opening day, however, lasted less than 24 hours. Sparks was arrested the first day on charges of violating the state’s obscenity law.
A merry-go-round endurance test followed: Sparks bonded out on the first charges and reopened the theater. He was arrested again, and got out on bond again. This pattern continued until a federal judge ordered a stop to the arrests until Sparks could be tried on the first arrest.
After a series of pretrial motions and two days of jury selection. Sparks stood trial on the first four films seized by the deputies. The jurors viewed some four hours of the X-rated movies—trying to judge whether they were obscene and “patently offensive.” CAP members constantly flowed to the courthouse during the week-long trial, although many stood in hallways while jurors watched the movies.
They were pleased when the jury ruled that three of the four films appealed to the prurient interest and were obscene. Sparks received a suspended sentence on the first convictions. But he also had to stand trial on 13 other misdemeanor charges for obscenity, plus more serious felony charges of tampering with evidence. These charges were eventually dropped when Sparks agreed to close the theater last October and leave the county.
CAP members attributed their success to letting authorities know their feelings about the theater and pornography. They had placed constant pressure on the proper authorities to enforce existing state laws—tools, they say, available to concerned groups almost anywhere in the country. CAP members note that it didn’t hurt their cause that the sheriff and three commissioners were up for reelection.
Political Appointments
Halverson Gets The Nod For The Senate Chaplaincy
The U.S. Senate’s new Republican majority nominated the well-known evangelical Richard D. Halverson, pastor since 1958 of Washington’s Fourth Presbyterian Church, located in Bethesda, Maryland, as its fiftieth chaplain. His nomination for the post came during a Republican caucus session in late November, during which Senator Howard Baker was selected as majority leader. The full Senate is expected to approve the nomination on January 5.
Halverson, 64, said he spent a week praying about the offer, which reportedly was conveyed to him by Senator Mark Hatfield (R-Oreg.). He will assume the $40,100-per-year post (the current figure) on February 1, and is refraining from public comment until then.
The swift nomination came as a surprise to current Senate chaplain Edward L. R. Elson, a fellow Presbyterian pastor and close friend of Halverson. Elson began serving as Senate chaplain in 1969, shortly before he retired from the pastorate of the National Presbyterian Church in Washington. He indicated to Baker on November 12 his desire to vacate the chaplaincy, and delivered in writing his intention “to retire in a nonpartisan, nonpolitical manner,” by waiting until after the inauguration on January 20. However, he did not expect the nomination of a successor so soon.
His primary concern is the possibility that the post will appear to be a partisan plum, handed out in the same manner as many other new administration appointments. In retirement, Elson plans to complete his autobiography and publish his sixth book of Senate prayers. At 74, he has composed a total of 1,745 prayers in more than a decade. He is also writing a history of Senate chaplains.
The chaplain opens the Senate each day with prayer. He also becomes a resource person to the 100 senators and their 6,500 support personnel. Elson noted, “I may be approached by a Catholic senator, who says, ‘I’m going to speak to a group of Baptists—what do I say?’”
Halverson, who currently is board chairman of World Vision International, will not be a newcomer to Capitol Hill. He has long been involved with Senate prayer breakfasts and the National Prayer Breakfast movement. The Princeton Seminary and Wheaton College graduate announced from the pulpit on November 30 his decision to accept the offer, and left his congregation of 2,000 surprised and happy for him.
There was no announcement about who will succeed Halverson at one of the metropolitan area’s most prominent evangelical churches.
BETH SPRING
Koop Is Mentioned For The Surgeon General Slot
C. Everett Koop, chief surgeon at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia and a well-known opponent of abortion, is under consideration for the job of surgeon general in the Reagan Administration.
At press time it was uncertain when the job would be filled and how strong Koop’s chances were. About 40 members of Congress so far have written to Reagan urging that he appoint Koop. The appointment requires Senate ratification.
Koop is widely admired among evangelical Christians for his views on the sanctity of life. He coauthored a book (and related film series) with theologian Francis Schaeffer, titled How Should We Then Live?, on the moral decline of Western Civilization.
The surgeon general is the federal government’s chief medical officer, and oversees the following federal agencies: the National Institutes of Health: the Center for Disease Control; the Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration; the Food and Drug Administration; the Health Resources Administration; and the Health Services Administration. The job pays $61,600 a year.
Those congressmen pushing Koop for the job believe he is by far more qualified than others whose names have been advanced. Chief surgeon at Children’s Hospital since 1948, he has also been an assistant surgeon at the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and a consultant in pediatric surgery at the U.S. Naval Hospital of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Hospital. He was widely acclaimed after heading a surgical team that separated a pair of Siamese twins, from the Dominican Republic, during a 10-hour operation in 1974.
Bangladesh
Missions Hemmed In As Result Of Islamic Turmoil
Mission societies in Bangladesh continue to feel the backlash from turbulence created by the Islamic revolution. Each organization in Bangladesh that is funded from abroad must receive official government registration. This recognition is preceded by extensive “inquiries” conducted by the intelligence branch of the government. Detailed audits and spending projections now are required. All mission agencies have been placed under the general supervision of the Ministry of Social Welfare.
A number of Christian development organizations have been denied registration, especially those that started after the 1971 War of Independence. Some parachurch groups, such as Campus Crusade for Christ and Every Home Crusade, were told they are no longer permitted to bring foreign funds into the country. One mainstream American denomination, which has been working in Bangladesh since the early 1950s, has been denied registration. These organizations are in the process of appealing the decisions.
Other missions have been registered but were told to cut both foreign personnel and funding. Mission leaders are in consultation over these new restrictions.
Recently an official government release, appearing in all Bangladesh newspapers, announced the banning of a book that documents the story of a Muslim convert. The release said the book “deliberately and maliciously intended to outrage the religious feelings of the citizens of Bangladesh professing the religion of Islam by insulting their religion and religious beliefs.”
One literature-producing mission has been told it must strictly censor its materials or face government involvement in the selection process of tracts and books.
Members of Parliament have demanded to know the number of converts from Islam to Christianity. A member of the president’s cabinet has assured Parliament that an investigation will be made.
These winds of change and uncertainty have created a climate of apprehension among the tiny, 200,000-strong. Christian minority in Bangladesh. Nationally administered institutions continue to be almost totally supported from external sources.
The National Christian Council of Churches recently split down the middle, creating serious rifts in the Christian community. Efforts are being made toward reconciliation.
In spite of the convulsive trauma of these events, there is forward movement in church growth in certain areas of the country. New outreaches are being started. There is a spirit of urgency prevailing among missionaries who realize that the unbroken line of foreign Christian input into Bangladesh since William Carey’s day (1793) may soon be interrupted—or severely curtailed.
Evangelism
U. Of Maryland Is Buzzing With Evangelical Activity
Evangelical activity at the University of Maryland dissolved apathy at the College Park campus last fall, provoking student newspaper coverage and resistance from some denominational chaplains.
Thriving, established parachurch groups have been joined in the past year by a number of unaffiliated Bible studies and by two highly visible Christian groups.
The New Life Evangelical Church, a conservative independent group, has doubled in size to between 60 and 80 members. ACTS (Active Christians That Serve) began with 5 people and now claims 100.
Crowds of up to 500 students cluster on the library plaza to hear Tom Short, one of four New Life elders, preach daily from noon until 3 P.M., weather permitting. He often zeroes in on sin in students’ lives, inviting a barrage of questions and heckling—once including a pie in the face. Short views these sessions as “an open forum,” a vehicle for students who “know all the questions about the Bible” to hear some answers.
Short’s open-air evangelism, along with New Life’s distribution of 16,000 paperback New Testaments, provides fodder for frequent student newspaper coverage. One reporter infiltrated the group, posing as a born-again believer. He “hounded Short’s footsteps for two weeks,” he wrote, and “the most ungodly thing I saw Short attempt was a hellacious spike shot during an otherwise Christian volleyball game.”
The university’s Episcopal chaplain described New Life’s activities as “blitzing” the campus, but the group is quick to deny credit for any ongoing signs of revival. “We don’t want anyone to get the idea that when the spiritual paratroopers arrived, God started working,” elder Jack Stockdale said. The church and campus fellowship began in 1979, when organizers moved to the College Park area from Ohio State University. There, they had established a similar, ongoing outreach called OSU Bible Studies.
One outspoken critic of New Life’s approach is the university’s campus pastor, Elizabeth Platz, who recently celebrated her tenth anniversary as the first ordained woman in the Lutheran Church of America. In October, Platz sent a letter to 1,000 students and numerous clergy in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., that seemed to link increased evangelical activity with recruitment drives by the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis as causes for concern. “We pray that the judgmental presentation of Christianity and the activities of the Nazis and KKK are but a passing confluence of events, but we dare not trust to this as being true,” she wrote.
To fortify her point, Platz enclosed a reprint from the Lutheran Quarterly, which portrays Campus Crusade for Christ in unflattering terms: “The typical pattern of operation of Campus Crusade leaders is to make uninvited visits in the dormitory rooms of individual students.… In their personal contacts, they often invite their intended quarry to parties … which are purely evangelistic in nature, design and intent.
UM’s Campus Crusade leader. Dan Mosely, aware of the Platz mailing, said with a laugh, “They’ve got our number.” What Mosely emphasizes in his growing ministry to 150 students is “being sensitive to people and clearly communicating the gospel without being judgmental.” He readily acknowledges that “some students blow it” when they first attempt to share their faith in Christ. “Balance comes with maturity in their walk,” he adds.
Platz said her counseling involves increasing numbers of students who are bruised by an onslaught of exuberant witnessing. “I get the battlescarred ones,” she said, noting that one student with cerebral palsy was told simply to believe in order to be healed. Some Roman Catholic students in past years have been told that they are categorically destined for hell.
Platz has not attempted to make contact with any of the evangelical groups, but she believes their success “should be saying to us that there are great questions and great needs out there that perhaps we are not addressing as we should.” After 15 years on campus, Platz is not without battle scars herself, recalling that an unnamed group once told her she was an instrument of the Antichrist.
The fact that Christian groups are thriving at Maryland is particularly noteworthy because of two obstacles unique to that campus. The undergraduate student body numbers 35,000 and a full 70 percent are commuters, many unreachable by traditional methods of dormitory evangelism. Religious groups on campus must also content with a “no proselytizing” rule that went into effect when the Hare Krishnas were granted chaplaincy status.
Platz attributes resurgent “fundamentalism” to the human need for shelter and assurance in times of uncertainty. The present mood of withdrawal, she feels, indicates that students have come full circle from the radical activism of the 1960s. Others view the ongoing Christian harvest as a result of many years of planting and watering, as well as persistent prayer.
The four New Life elders meet each morning for prayer. Another group, consisting of the leadership of campus chapters of Campus Crusade, Navigators, InterVarsity, Young Life, New Life, and ACTS, meets weekly for mutual prayer support and friendship.
“We all have a positive attitude about what the Lord is doing in each of us, and that carries over to the students,” according to Lance Hudgens, associate pastor of Wallace Memorial United Presbyterian Church, who coordinates the meeting. “Everyone has strong convictions, but no one feels they have all the truth cornered,” he said.
Platz agrees heartily that no one has the truth cornered, especially in terms of method. But she expressed one of her goals as a campus minister in words nearly identical to Mosely’s: “I think the biggest thing is to help people be articulate about their faith,” she said. The attention-getting efforts of New Life, in particular, appear to be spurring large numbers of students to do just that.
BETH SPRING
Austria
Even Visibility Calls For Evangelical Unity
Seven hundred evangelicals gathered at the Vienna Kongresshaus in November to participate in the second annual community worship service sponsored by the various “free churches” in the city. Such a gathering—unthinkable a few years ago—gave evidence to the growth and multiplication of churches in the Vienna area. Horst Fischer, pastor of the Huetteldorf Baptist Church, addressed the crowd, which consisted of the congregations of the various Baptist churches in the area, the growing family of churches planted by the Brethren-related Tulpengasse Fellowship, and churches or fellowships established by The Evangelical Alliance Mission and Greater Europe Mission.
Later that same day, leaders of Austria’s minuscule evangelical minority (less than 1 percent of the 7.5 million population) gathered at Schloss Mittersill, InterVarsity’s medieval castle in western Austria, for a week of training. George Peters, retired professor of missions from Dallas Theological Seminary and recognized church growth authority, lectured in German on the principles of church growth. Ingrid Trobisch, well-known writer on marriage and family matters, discussed in a series of evening presentations ways to help pastors and missionaries cope with stresses in their marriages.
Many conferees were encouraged by an emerging sense of cooperation among the free churches. (Free church in this context means non-Catholic and non-Lutheran believers who usually teach some form of believer’s baptism.) Although the idea had surfaced earlier, Peters reemphasized the need for a united effort in order to achieve an evangelical breakthrough.
Three Austrian denominations—Baptist, Mennonite, and Brethren—envision an umbrella organization, which, while not impinging upon the members’ independence, will allow coordinated ministries and outreach efforts. Other evangelical groups and missions probably will be invited to participate.
DEVERE K. CURTISS
World Scene
Legislation establishing an emergency grain reserve was signed into law by President Carter last month. The idea of the four-million-ton domestic reserve, which would be used for overseas relief to cope with famine and other urgent needs, is to replenish it when grain is plentiful and prices are normal, rather than bid for scarce grain when prices have been driven up. Thus it works as a stabilizing force in the market as well as feeding the hungry. Bread for the World and several church-related groups had drafted suggested legislation and pressed for its passage for three years.
Mexican officials in the border city of Juarez recently jailed and deported three Americans connected to U.S. church-supported orphanages. Brighton Claiborne, who operates the House of Refuge orphanage in Juarez, was ordered out primarily because he had only a tourist visa and not a work permit. Pat Zullo and Dan Atwood, from an orphanage in nearby Zaragosa supported by Full Gospel Native Missionaries in Joplin, Missouri, were told their orphanage didn’t have a “business license,” and that they were in the country illegally. Hundreds of American missionaries work in the country with tourist visas, so the requirement that Claiborne have a work permit may be significant.
The three Roman Catholic nuns and one lay worker found shot to death last month in El Salvador were believed the first Americans to die in several years of violence there. Salvadorian Bishop Arturo Rivera y Damas blamed the murders on rightist forces supported by the ruling government junta in a statement broadcast nationwide by radio. In the aftermath, the U.S. suspended more than $25 million in economic aid to pressure the 15-month-old reformist junta to reconcile warring leftist and rightist factions. An estimated 8,000 persons died in the violence last year, including at least 10 priests. Right-wing terrorists often regard Catholic missionaries who work with the poor as subversive.
The government of Spain has offered concessions for a limited number of new FM radio stations in the country. An evangelical media organization, MECOVAN, is requesting permission to open FM stations in two important cities: Madrid and Barcelona. If permission and financing are secured, these two stations will cover an area with 10 million people, or one-third of the total Spanish population. Juan Gili, director of MECOVAN, calls this “a unique opportunity in the European context.”
The Free Evangelical Theological Academy in Basel has grown in its first 10 years to become Switzerland’s second largest seminary. The academy now has about 170 students, 55 of them in their first year. The academy’s aim is to “offer an alternative to official state and church education institutions that demonstrates that thorough theological work can be achieved without [negative] Bible criticism.”
The established (Lutheran) Protestant Church in Germany may let private religious broadcasters in on cable television. The EKD broached this possibility for the first time at its synod in Osnabrück in November. Groups such as Trans World Radio’s associate. Evangeliums-Rundfunk, long have advocated such a step. Encouraged, the five-year-old West German Association of Evangelical Communicators voted to upgrade from an informal grouping to a registered society involved in training, evaluation, and support.
Italy’s worst earthquake in 65 years left more than 3,000 people dead and 300,000 homeless. Thousands of volunteers streamed in to help with relief efforts that were hampered by rain, mud, and snow. Church and private organizations, including the Italian Evangelical Alliance and the Federation of Italian Evangelical Churches, organized relief centers to help provide food and shelter in the nation’s southern region.
Widely reported workers’ gains in Poland have been accompanied by gains for the church. The Bible Society in Poland reports the demand for Bibles rose sharply in the wake of the appearance of the Roman Catholic Mass on state television. The Polish-language edition of the Vatican monthly newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, has been allowed “unhindered” entrance into the country and unhampered distribution. The Catholic church was planning to import 90,000 copies of each issue.
Orthodox Christians in Azerbaijan want to know why all their churches—there are at least 50—have been closed while mosques are permitted to remain open. Keston College in England received a copy of a petition to Patriarch Pimen, signed by more than 400 Orthodox Georgians and Russians from three regions in the Azerbaijan Republic of the Soviet Union. They said they represent up to 23,000 Orthodox believers in the area, and appealed for help in their quest to open one church for worship.
Israel’s minister of religious affairs has been indicted for bribe taking. Aharon Abuhatzeira, a Jew of Moroccan origins, was formally accused last month of taking bribes from two religious institutions in exchange for inflated government grants and loans and other favors. It was the first time an Israeli cabinet minister had been indicted. “Rarely,” says reporter David K. Shipler, “has a single development become the focus of so many of the complex tensions that run through Israeli society—between religious and nonreligious Jews, between those of European and North American origins and those from Arab and North African countries, and between politicians and the press.”
Cambodia’s winter rice harvest is believed to have yielded about half what was typical before the warfare and famine of the last several years. But that is twice as much as was produced last year—thanks to some 60,000 tons of seed rice provided by aid agencies. For this reason the agencies, which have pumped half a billion dollars into relief operations, are tapering off markedly on food deliveries or even suspending them until the critical period shortly before the next harvest. “Cambodia’s recovery is far from complete,” the New York Times editorialized recently. “But Cambodians are no longer starving, as people are in East Africa. The emergency has shifted and so should the relief efforts.”
The first Mormon temple in a “non-Christian” nation has been dedicated in Tokyo, Japan. The $10 million temple is the eighteenth operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints worldwide. Mormon President Spencer W. Kimball dedicated the structure, built for special sacred ceremonies, including baptism for the dead, and marriage and “sealing” ordinances.
How to relate to the “cargo cults” was the topic of a unique Seminar on Melanesian Movements held at Pyramid. Irian Jaya, last fall. (The term comes from South Pacific island leaders who prophesied the coming of ships laden with gifts for their followers.) Seventy-five evangelical missionaries interacted with two experts on new religious movements in primal societies. Harold W. Turner of the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and John G. Shelan of Luther Seminary at Lae, Papua New Guinea. They considered how to detect embryonic movements, how to keep channels of communication open with the aberrant groups, and how to equip the national churches to deal with them.
Bible Translation
Male Bias In Scripture Is High On Ncc A-Gender
The National Council of Churches (NCC) intends to do something about “sexist” language in Scripture. Its education division voted last month to prepare a collection of Bible passages used in public worship (lectionaries) that are more inclusive of women.
A task force will adapt portions of the Revised Standard Version Bible for the lectionaries, three-year cycles of Scripture readings used in worship by thousands of local churches. If the churches respond favorably after an experimental period through the mid-1980s, the council’s Division of Education and Ministry (DEM) will consider producing an entire Bible with the “inclusive language” texts.
Heretical? Unnecessary tampering? Even conservative scholars agree there are instances of male bias in various Scripture translations (CT. Oct. 5. 1979, p. 23). They cite Psalm 68 as an example: the King James version reads “great was the company of those that publish the word of the Lord.” even though the Hebrew is the explicitly feminine, “great was the company of those women who publish …” However, scholars disagree on when and if the original Greek and Hebrew texts allow such “inclusive language” changes—especially in language referring to deity.
The NCC has pursued its “inclusive language” course since the early 1970s. Two years ago the DEM appointed a 13-member task force with a mandate to deal with Scriptural language where it is “sexist, racist, classist, or anti-semitic,” said DEM staff executive Emily Gibbes.
The task force’s eight men and five women, including Harvard theologian Krister Stendahl, United Methodist official Jeanne Audrey Powers, and Bangor (Maine) Theological Seminary president Wayne Click, arrived at eight recommendations last June. However, the full DEM unit committee at its November meeting dropped several of the more controversial ones. For instance, the task force had wanted to replace “he” with the impersonal pronoun “it” in references to the Spirit of God when the Greek is neuter, and to speak of Jesus Christ as the “Child of God.” rather than the Son of God.
Princeton Seminary professor Bruce Metzger objected to changes not in keeping with a literal translation of Scripture. Metzger chairs the NCC’s Revised Standard Version committee—a 24-member subcommittee of the DEM. It has the final say in language changes in the RSV, and is working to finish a new edition of the 29-year-old RSV by the end of the decade. (The NCC holds the copyright to the RSV—the most widely used English language translation.)
Metzger’s committee on occasion has changed masculine pronouns used to describe people when the meaning of the original Greek and Hebrew texts isn’t altered. For example, it has suggested more than 240 changes in masculine pronouns in its updated version of the Psalms. The well-known “What is man that thou art mindful …” becomes “What is a human being …” and so on.
However, this hasn’t been enough for hardliners. Feminists charge that “sexist” language contributes to the modern oppression of women. They would like also to change the masculine designations for God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit.
This is going too far for Metzger and other conservative scholars. He told a reporter. “I, for one, refuse to cut myself off from the Judeo-Christian tradition of calling God ‘Father.’”
Any subsequent “inclusive language” adaptation of the RSV would be a “paraphrase,” and not a true translation, Metzger asserts. The council already has promised such a Bible will be totally separate from the RSV. At its November meeting the NCC’s education division supported the RSV committee’s position that the text of the RSV Bible should remain true to the ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek manuscripts.
However, the division did ask that the RSV committee add scholars with “feminist perspectives” as vacancies occur. Metzger said, “We will keep that in mind,” but his committee will choose the most qualified persons. (His committee nominates its own members; the DEM must approve them.)
Most of the specific examples of how language might be made nonsexist were removed from the task force’s original report. The yet-to-be-named group assigned to rework the lectionaries will use “language which expresses inclusiveness with regard to human beings and which attempts to expand the range of images beyond the masculine to assist the Church in understanding the full nature of God.”
Are inclusive language changes worth the effort? Task force member Burton Throckmorton of Bangor Seminary believes “too many people are being offended in church” by male bias in Scripture. That shouldn’t be, he said.
On the other hand. Metzger says his mail has been running against making sweeping changes. Whole Sunday school classes of 15 to 20 have signed requests “asking me to hold fast” against language changes, he said. In his opinion, the average churchman doesn’t care about the inclusive language issue, or finds it irrelevant and irreverant.
Deaths
Dorothy Day, 83, cofounder of the Catholic Worker Movement and well-known pacifist whose protests often landed her in jail, and who founded many shelters for the poor and homeless; November 29, after a long-lived heart ailment that confined her to her austere room in Maryhouse, a residence for homeless women in Manhattan.
North American Scene
Big business is finding that “Jesus Sells,” the Los Angeles Times reports, citing such examples as Disneyland, which is now scheduling two Christian-oriented nights each year, and fast-selling Christian T-shirts. Additional secular companies, such as Scott, Foresman & Company, and MCA Records, are buying into the lucrative Christian book and music industry. The American Research Corporation last spring commissioned a George Gallup Poll of Christians’ buying habits: ARC officials say about 150 clients have paid up to $1,250 for the lengthy “Profile of the Christian Marketplace 1980,” based on Gallup’s studies. The emergence of Christianity as a marketing factor is more noticeable in southern California than elsewhere nationwide, said the Times.
The Church of Scientology and the Internal Revenue Service are locked in another legal battle. The group’s 500,000-member California branch is contesting an IRS position that Scientology, a self-described “applied religious philosophy.” failed to qualify for tax-exempt status from 1970 to 1972, and so owes $1.4 million in back taxes. Key church-and-state issues are involved. Scientologists charge. In November, two high-ranking Scientologists were convicted of burglary charges in connection with the group’s alleged scheme to infiltrate government offices and steal documents. A year ago nine other members were found guilty of obstruction of justice in connection with the same alleged scheme.
American Festival of Evangelism planners request prayer for the nation’s political leaders on Inauguration Day (Jan. 20). The prayer event calls for Christians to pray in small groups for the “Key 16”—the President, U.S. Supreme Court justices, their governor, and U.S. and state senators and representatives. The July 27–30 AFE is expected to draw 20,000 Christians to Kansas City, Missouri. Its purpose, says coordinator Paul Benjamin, is equipping for evangelism the “four out of five churches in America that are not growing.”
Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod president Jacob A. O. Preus has met privately with the Lutheran theologian whom Preus questioned publicly on a doctrinal issue. Concordia Seminary professor Walter Maier, Jr., and Preus both attended a five-hour closed session at the Fort Wayne, Indiana, school. In an earlier letter to all 6,000 LCMS congregations. Preus said doubts need to be resolved about Maier’s view of “objective justification”—the doctrine that God declared the whole world righteous or forgiven such that “in no way should faith be looked upon as preceding justification or as a cause of it.” Maier defended himself in his own letter to the congregations. The LCMS third vice-president is considered a possible candidate to succeed Preus, who is retiring as LCMS president.
Campus Crusade for Christ lost six buildings in the raging fire that swept across a portion of southern California in late November. Its headquarters complex in suburban San Bernardino sustained an estimated $1 million in damages. The main administrative building escaped the fire, fanned by winds of up to 100 mph. But about a dozen staff members were burned out of their homes, and one of the three destroyed office buildings housed Campus Crusade’s Worldwide Challenge magazine. Staff members were evacuated November 24, and all escaped injury. Near-normal operations resumed a week later.
Hispanic Christians are organizing for evangelism under the America for Jesus (AFJ) banner. One hundred Hispanic leaders and workers met last month in Dallas and elected a planning committee of 12 Hispanics, chaired by Raimundo Jiminez, an Assemblies of God evangelist. AFJ national coordinator John Gimenez (who organized last year’s Washington for Jesus rally) participated throughout the two-day workshop, and AFJ cochairman Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ addressed the group. Pentecostals dominated the invited attendance.
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After a 20-year lapse, China’s Three-Self Patriotic Movement held its third National Christian Congress. The 176 representatives from 25 of China’s 29 administrative districts who gathered in Nanjing (Nanking) during October were all Christians. But was their movement predominantly a religious expression or was it basically a political apparatus?
Observers said they could discern both elements from reports of the congress issued by the New China News Agency. On one hand, the congress “proclaimed its support for the process of modernization and the efforts to bring Taiwan back into union with the mother country. The delegates affirmed their support for the struggle for world peace and opposition to hegemony and aggression.” On the other hand, the congress pledged to continue “to make all efforts in defending the religious freedom of the public,” and to “help the government to fully implement its policy of religious freedom.”
The Three-Self Movement (for self-government, self-support, and self-propagation) was organized in 1951 to serve as a liaison between the government’s Bureau of Religious Affairs and the Protestant churches. All of China’s non-Roman Catholic denominations were forced to unite into the movement during the 1950s, and it functioned as the national church structure for about 15 years. During the mid-1960s, when the Cultural Revolution broke out, the movement was deactivated. Many of its leaders and functionaries were humiliated and even imprisoned.
But as the government’s policies on religion have changed in the past two years, the movement has reemerged. The Chinese authorities, recognizing that religious believers had been alienated by a suppressive policy, decided to bring them back into the mainstream of national life. They needed the Christians’ full support in achieving national goals of construction and modernization. “To do this,” comments Wing-on Pang of the China Research Center in Hong Kong, “religion must first be granted recognition and disgraced religious leaders rehabilitated. Religion must then be organized and controlled so that its strengths may be channeled in the desired direction.”
The congress was part of that process. It was to elect new national leadership (the Three-Self president, Y. T. Wu, had died last year), draft new policies to fit the “united front” strategy, and set up a national structure to care for the administrative functions of the church, and services such as ministerial training and publishing.
In a parallel action last May and June Chinese Catholics, meeting in Beijing (Peking), reactivated a national church structure and elected a new primate. This Catholic counterpart to the Three-Self Movement, after which it was modeled, is called the Catholic Patriotic Association.
The Protestant gathering had been postponed several times, leading China watchers to deduce either disagreements between Three-Self leaders and others in the churches, or difficulties in winning widespread participation. In China, they say, open meetings are mere sounding boards for what has already been agreed on behind the scenes.
The congress announced formation of a Chinese Christian Council intended, it is believed, to serve as the right hand of the movement by helping it to implement its policies. Delegates elected Bishop Ding Guangxuan (K. H. Ting), who had been acting chairman of the movement, as president of the council. (Wu Yi-fang, former president of Jinling Women’s College, Nanjing, was elected honorary chairman. She is 88 years old and is expected to be no more than a figurehead.)
The delegates also adopted a council constitution that, according to the New China News Agency, “describes the tasks of the council as supervision of the work of churches and clergy, training of candidates for the Christian ministry, publishing the Bible and other devotional materials, and consolidating links among all churches and believers in China.”
These priorities point to the rather anarchic situation both within the Three-Self churches, as well as between them and the informal Christian gatherings known as house churches. Among the leaders of the movement, pastors of the official churches, leaders of the house groups, and individual lay people, there is no single overall channel for exercising control of the religious scene. Apparently the Three-Self Movement and the Chinese Christian Council are entrusted with the mission of correcting this situation.
A resolution of the congress that Chinese churches should continue to hold to the three-self principles was noted especially by the news agency: “The delegates … stated that they would oppose any form of interference with, or control of the Chinese church by foreign sources … nor should any group be allowed to use the name of the Christian church for illegal activities.”
Activities declared by the government to be illegal were not enumerated at the congress, but what are reported to be published guidelines for reopening churches in China (received by a member of a Hong Kong Christian study group that met with movement leaders in six cities) prohibit:
• Propagating religion to youth and children under 18 years of age, and to government personnel.
• Giving speeches or publishing catechisms and religious educational materials without prior approval by the Religious Affairs Bureau.
• Making any contact with religious organizations outside China or accepting any financial help from them.
• Propagating religion or holding religious meetings outside of approved church buildings.
Observers say these guidelines are not being applied uniformly. They also note that listening to Christian radio programs is not prohibited. Nor is it illegal to take Bibles into China (therefore, they maintain, claims about “Bible smuggling” are misleading, even though larger quantities are sometimes confiscated).
A statement issued at the end of the congress said that the Church of China, while maintaining its “three-self, patriotic course,” is willing to have “equal and friendly communication” with churches outside mainland China, to promote Christian fellowship “under the principle of mutual respect.”
Tens of thousands—including evangelicals who desire to maintain a witness within the official churches—attend the 27 churches that were opened by the movement during 1980. But much larger numbers attend house meetings, especially those located in the rural areas where there was far less disturbance than in cities during the Cultural Revolution, and where as yet there are hardly any official churches.
The biggest obstacle to reopening church buildings for worship is finding alternative accommodations for the factories, schools, and warehouses that took over those buildings, according to Arne Sovik, a Lutheran World Federation China expert. “In any event,” he maintains, “there still wouldn’t be enough churches to accommodate the present number of Christians, which is much larger than 30 years ago.” He said there are now Christian groups in many places where previously there was no church building.
Some members of house groups also meet in the Three-Self churches; others’ understanding of Scripture and the nature of the church prohibit them from worshiping in the Three-Self churches. They distrust Three-Self officials as those who previously betrayed them to the authorities. They are just as suspicious of the movement’s theology, which they consider liberal. They insist, however, that their unwillingness to attend the open churches is not for political reasons. They are often known for their hard work and commitment to a strong and stable Chinese society.
During the Cultural Revolution, when all religious organizations were closed down, the house groups multiplied. The most conservative experts say that there are now more than the 20,000 Protestant places of worship that existed in 1949. House groups are scattered throughout China and range in size from 5 to 20 members to groups with more than 1,000. The largest groups must use schools or other public buildings, now with the full consent of local authorities. Thus, it is inaccurate to call these house meetings “underground” churches. Only very small family groups can meet without the knowledge of local officials.
How to deal with these unofficial groups is the delicate question that now most occupies the authorities. Bishop Ding, the newly confirmed Three-Self leader, delivered a significant speech at the recent government Political Consultation Meeting, of which he is a member. “The mission of our Three-Self Patriotic Committee,” he was quoted as saying in the September 9, 1980, Peoples Daily, “is to unite all the Christians in the country. We cannot consider the house church Christians as a separate party. As one of the leaders of the Three-Self Committee, I cannot comfortably say that the house churches are illegal.”
Some house group Christians in China have rejoiced over Ding’s statement, which seemed to affirm the legality of the house churches. Other believers remained skeptical. Ding implied that all house churches must be absorbed eventually into the Three-Self movement. He went on to say, “we cannot merely organize the Three-Self Patriotic Movement among a tiny minority. We should unite with and incorporate into our movement the millions of believers.”
Researcher Wing-on Pang comments, “After what [the house groups] have gone through all these years, they have no confidence in anything that has any connection with the authorities.” He predicts that “as long as these memories last, there is likely to be either great reluctance to develop a unified Protestantism or a tendency toward something analogous to the Baptist churches of the Soviet Union, where unrecognized groups live in insecurity and some suspicion of the recognized church which has accepted government registration.”
On their part, the house church Christians sometimes forget that among the Three-Self pastors, too, are some of evangelical faith who were imprisoned for their faith and had their churches closed before the Cultural Revolution had run its course.
Evangelism
Las Vegas: Graham And The Mgm Grand Hotel Fire
Evangelist Billy Graham rarely returns so soon to the same city for a preaching crusade. But some called it providential that Graham’s November 19–23 meetings in Las Vegas, Nevada, coincided with the disastrous fire at the MGM Grand Hotel.
The early morning fire on November 21, which claimed 84 lives and 700 injured, added a certain urgency to Graham’s usual salvation message, and the evangelist served as an unofficial chaplain to some of the survivors. He prayed with, and encouraged burn victims, who were stretched out in long rows in the Las Vegas Convention Center. Later that night, in the section of the Convention Center where all the meetings were held, Graham changed his sermon topic to discuss God’s purpose in tragedy and his reasons for allowing it.
Graham had preached a six-day crusade in Las Vegas in 1978, but because of the city’s responsiveness his team decided to accept the local committee’s invitation to come back. “We felt that we left an unfinished task,” Graham explained. This time, the evangelist paired his Las Vegas visit with a preceding November 13–16 crusade in the northern Nevada city of Reno—also a gambling resort.
In Las Vegas, the audiences were smaller than in the earlier crusade: 62,000 total for six meetings in 1978, compared with about 42,000 for the five meetings in November, said the local crusade chairman, First Christian Church pastor Ken Forshee. However, audience response measured higher. Graham called the ratio of inquirers to attenders in Reno and Las Vegas “the largest we have ever had in the United States in the history of our crusades” (about 9.5 percent in Reno, where audiences each night filled a 5,500-seat auditorium, and spilled into a closed-circuit TV viewing area).
Las Vegas volunteers tried “telephone visitation.” Using 30 telephones in the local crusade office, they methodically went through the telephone book, inviting some 80,000 to 100,000 persons to the crusade. Some of the 100 participating churches did door-to-door visitation in assigned neighborhoods. Only about one-third of the 450,000 Greater Las Vegas population is churched, said Forshee; these are equally divided among Protestants, Catholics, and Mormons.
Reno crusade organizers felt particularly pleased with local church cooperation. Local chairman and First Baptist Church pastor Edmund Irvin said about 115 area churches participated in some form. The city’s churches traditionally have been infected by the go-it-alone “rugged individualism that won the day in the West,” he said.
The Nevada crusade received the full support of Governor Robert List, a Presbyterian layman. Las Vegas Mayor William Briare, described by local chairman Forshee as an active Catholic who is “evangelical in spirit,” sat on the speaker’s platform each night. Greater Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce President Frank Johnson heartily endorsed the crusade, noting the positive image that the 1978 crusade gave the city.
(Of the 50 states, Nevada has the nation’s highest suicide rate. Government figures show 24.8 suicides per 100,000 residents—double the national average. Joan Kember of the National Center for Health Statistics attributed this “astounding” figure to the gambling houses and easy divorce laws that attract people to the state.)
In interviews during the Nevada crusades, Graham supported creation of a federal law requiring that religious organizations and parachurch groups file annual financial reports with the Internal Revenue Service. And in a governor-mayors prayer breakfast—in the MGM Grand Hotel just prior to the Las Vegas crusade—Graham warned of the day’s urgency. After citing inflation, world turbulence, and other problems, Graham said the result for the U.S. may be that the next four to five years will become “the roughest period in history since the Civil War.”
Religion in the Schools
New York’S Seekers Have Found School Access Key
About 75 Yonkers, New York, high school students showed up in the auditorium after school for the movie. The Cross and the Switchblade. They generally were orderly, although some hooted and added novel sound effects. Afterwards, members of the sponsoring school club, the Seekers, seemed pleased. They had advertised TV star Erik Estrada in the role of gang leader Nicky Cruz, rather than WASP-y looking Pat Boone as preacher David Wilkerson—being mindful of potential Hispanic attenders. Seekers president Cindy Pagán talked of sponsoring another Christian film at the school later on.
Campus ministry isn’t easy, especially in New York City. In many schools, hallway policemen get more respect than the teachers.
Yet for the past 10 years, a unique, mostly student-led organization known as Seekers Christian Fellowship has worked in the area’s high schools and colleges. Until Youth for Christ started two Campus Life clubs last fall, Seekers was the only established Christian group in the city’s high schools; clubs are presently active in 14.
Also, Seekers function in eight colleges. (Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship has chapters in some city colleges as well.) Last spring, a Seekers club started in its first junior high school: Stephen Decatur, located in the rough Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.
Charismatic in orientation, but drawing students from many church and ethnic backgrounds, Seekers clubs make contact with literally thousands of students by sponsoring concerts, films, and other activities. They also provide Christian fellowship and discipleship for members.
The clubs have survived despite today’s challenges nationwide that on-campus Christian clubs violate the constitutional separation of church and state. The main reasons Seekers has avoided criticisms seem to be because the clubs rely on student leaders, rather than outside professionals: members have provided a stabilizing influence in rough school situations: and the groups avoid hard-sell proselytizing.
(Its on-campus presence was challenged in 1974, but Seekers got a favorable ruling from the city’s board of education, which said Seekers is not a church. This established a favorable precedent that has lasted.)
Whether or not Seekers clubs get into a school depends on the attitude of the administration. Some high school principals forbid the clubs, while others have allowed them in, saying, “If even one student is helped it’s worth it,” said Seekers executive director Faith Brown, 37, formerly a high school sociology teacher in Colorado.
Brown said Seekers clubs generally start through the initiative of students: one tells a friend at another school about Seekers, who telephones Brown to ask how to form a club at his own school. She helps secure the administration’s approval and a required faculty adviser.
If there are no Christian teachers present or willing to sponsor a club, she will try to find any interested faculty adviser. In fact, several Seekers advisers are Jewish: “They just like being with the students,” Brown said. (The advisers don’t usually take a leadership role, so Christian advisers aren’t that crucial. However, in schools without Christian advisers. Brown makes sure members are “mothered” a bit more than those in other schools.)
The Seekers began in 1970. A Hispanic, Pentecostal student at New York University, Ben Alicea, couldn’t find a fellowship, so he started his own. Its success spawned groups at other campuses, and Alicea asked David Wilkerson’s Teen Challenge to provide funds and help coordinate activities of the various groups.
Alicea later joined the Teen Challenge staff, and worked in its campus ministry program along with Brown, who had moved to New York to work with Wilkerson’s drug rehabilitation program.
Teen Challenge terminated ministry in 1977 in a disagreement over “indigenous leadership.” Seekers staff preferred training students as club leaders.
However, the program didn’t die. Pastor Ezra Williams of the Pentecostal, and predominately black, Bethel Gospel Assembly Brown attends, took the lead in securing financing. Today the church provides half Brown’s salary. A legal umbrella was formed, Urban Youth Alliance; Brown, Alicea, and Williams are its top officers.
Since the organizational shuffle, the Seekers have operated on a tight budget. Last year, $15,000 covered Brown’s salary and limited overhead costs. She works out of her Brooklyn apartment, and has a part-time staff assistant.
In some respects, the forced cutback has been a blessing, says Brown. The urban poor and ethnic minorities sometimes distrust big, establishment groups with fancy budgets and high-rise offices. By attending a black church and having worked on the street with drug addicts, Brown is better able to relate cross-culturally and to urban problems.
The organization’s primary role is conducting discipleship training for the student leaders, and for organizing inter-group events. It won’t pump time and effort into a dying club, although it will help students who are interested. “It’s between the students, God, and the principal,” to keep a program
Student leaders encounter a variety of problems. Wilda Acosta at Herbert Lehman College laments the difficulty of getting students to join clubs—let alone a Christian one. “Even the gays’ club has more members than we do,” she said.
Many Hispanic students come from families involved in spiritism, called “Santurismo.” Some of the blacks support a “black Jesus only” concept. Many Pentecostal members come from legalistic storefront churches, which distrust ecumenical activity, and forbid girls’ slacks, make-up, and short hair. These groups, in addition to whites who hesitate to join a Seekers group that is predominantly black or Hispanic (as many are), make for an interesting blend and a challenge to Christian unity.
Only about half of the Seekers clubs are located in so-called ghetto schools such as Stephen Decatur Junior High. Teacher Joan Schwartz felt called to the city, and moved there with her husband from Minnesota. She started a faculty prayer group, out of which came the idea last spring to start a Seekers group. Since, two of the school’s faculty have become Christians, the club has grown to 10 members, and administrators detect a “real change” in atmosphere, Schwartz said.
Seekers clubs are also in upper-class, exclusive schools, such as Art and Design High School. There, in the middle 1970s, a Seekers club provided the spark for a mini-revival, in which about 65 students were “soundly saved” over the course of two years, Brown said.
Correction
The following members of Congress were erroneously identified in the congressional religious census published in the December issue: Rep. Benjamin Rosenthal. D-N.Y., who should have been listed as Jewish; Sen. Jennings Randolph, D-W.Va., as Baptist; and Rep. Thomas Petri, R-Wis., as Lutheran. Sen. Ernest Hollings should have been identified as Lutheran and from South Carolina. Republican Rep. Hal Daub should have been listed as from Nebraska. The accompany article should read that all women who ran for House seats won, instead of all women who ran for Congress.
Seekers’ activities depend on additional funding. Brown hopes to find an office away from her home. There is talk of eventually forming a group for international students, a Christian teachers coalition, and of moving into more of the city’s 100 high schools and 50 colleges.
Many secular-minded educators and leaders have tolerated the program, and in some cases supported it. Brown said. However, she added, some in the city would just as soon see Christianity stay confined to the “storefront and Riverside Drive.”
JOHN MAUST
The Press
Local Churches Back Publishers Into Corner
After getting pressure from the “local churches” of Witness Lee, Christian Herald Books ceased distribution of author Ron Enroth’s book The Lure of the Cults, while it excised all mention of the local churches in the book. (The coalition of about 70 churches prefers a lower case spelling.)
Christian Herald, which issued a revised edition about a month ago, apparently acted to prevent being sued. It decided upon this course of action after a September 16 meeting in New York City with several local churches representatives. As a result, the local churches—in an October 6 letter signed by Witness Lee and several elders—agreed not to press legal suit against either Christian Herald Books or Enroth.
In his book, Enroth had described the local churches as an “aberrational Christian group,” meaning one outside the mainstream of organized evangelicalism. Local churches are angry with evangelical publishers and writers who depict the group as outside orthodox Christianity.
They allegedly threatened legal action against Moody Monthly and Eternity magazines for statements made about them. Local churches took exception to their depiction in Enroth’s 1979 article, “The Power Abusers,” in Eternity, and were allowed to have a multisignature statement printed in the October 1980 issue, testifying to “our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ” and clarifying its practices and structures. Elsewhere in the same issue. Eternity editors said: “We have funds for the basics—production of a magazine—but no funds for such luxuries as costly litigation with aggrieved groups. This may help you understand the rather unusual space given to the statement …”
Local churches allegedly threatened InterVarsity Press with a libel suit for a book which still has not been published. The publisher has delayed the scheduled publication of the book for 12 months, and has been consulting with attorneys.
Last summer the local churches filed three law suits totaling more than $37 million against Thomas Nelson Publishers and author Jack Sparks for allegedly libelous statements in his book. The Mind Benders: A Look at Current Cults. Sparks referred to the group as a cult. Although the case still has not reached a court, Thomas Nelson and Sparks have had to pay thousands of dollars in legal fees to prepare their defense.
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Lordship For Today
Jesus Christ Is Lord, by Peter Toon (Judson Press, 1979, 154 pp., $4.95 pb), is reviewed by W. Harold Mare, professor of New Testament, Covenant Theological Seminary, Saint Louis, Missouri.
The task Toon has set for himself in this work is “to explain what the Lordship of Jesus Christ means for Christian faith today.” In developing this theme he expounds the doctrine of the exalted Jesus who is Messiah and Lord, then discusses in detail the meaning the New Testament writers attached to Jesus’ ascension. This discussion includes Jesus as the promised Messiah-King of the Old Testament, the enthroned one who makes possible the good news of forgiveness of sins, who is the head of the church, who gives it the fullness of the Spirit, who prepares a place in heaven for his own, and who prays for them in their struggles against sin.
The author further applies his theme to Jesus as Lord of the nations and as the Lord of the church. He stresses the need for unity among Christians and questions why so many denominational groups are necessary, making it more difficult for competing groups to do the job of evangelism. Toon hastens to add to Jesus’ lordship his kingship over the universe. To this claim he adds that the Bible teaches Jesus is the Lord of all religions. Toon ends his discourse by explaining the exalted Jesus and Lord in the light of early Christian creeds. He climaxes his argument by stating that today’s Christian must consider Jesus as Lord by applying the ethic of Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount to his life and by following Jesus in a life of faith and holiness.
Toon is to be congratulated on his fine exegetical work. His explanation of a cultural, epistemological, and teleological relativism that many use in approaching world religions today is good. Also helpful is his down-to-earth explanation of how early Christian creeds developed out of the controversies and heresies of their day.
One could wish, however, that he had been more careful in some of his statements. For instance, he states that, “today even the most conservatively biblical of us find these statements [i.e., Paul’s talk of ‘principalities and powers,’ ‘evil angels’] to be somewhat mythological.” One wonders just how far Toon goes in accepting Karl Barth’s theology when he says, “we have no basic disagreement with Barth’s argument and proclamation [regarding revelation and religion]. As a true Christian, he honors and exalts Christ.” Toon must be aware that besides the dispensational interpretation of the Second Coming events, which he disparages, there is a covenant premillennial eschatology (cf. J. O. Buswell’s Systematic Theology, Vol. II), but he does not even allude to the latter.
Equally problematic is Toon’s sweeping statement, when talking about the claim of “Lordship for Jesus Christ over other religions of the world,” that “we avoid any suggestion that he who does not know of, or does not submit to, the Lordship of Jesus will be eternally punished. But we do say that such people do not know the real meaning of life and probably [italics added] miss the privilege of having eternal fellowship with God.” Open to misunderstanding and unfortunately stated is the remark on page 131: “These models [to explain the development of the Christian creeds] also help us to understand the task of the theologians of the church today as they are called to create for us new doctrine [italics added] which, while being faithful to Scripture and to the best insights of the church in the past centuries, is nevertheless addressed to contemporary theological problems and makes use of modern ideas which are ‘baptised into Christ.’” Rather, the evangelical Christian believes that the doctrines of Scripture are found in the Bible and that, though they may be restated, they are not newly created by modern man.
The book sets forth an important theme for man’s consideration today and is written in terms that can be understood by the lay person. For further study on this subject Toon includes some bibliographical suggestions at the end of most of the chapters and all but the chapter introducing the theme ends in a prayer.
The Incarnation Debate
Incarnation and Myth: The Debate Continued, edited by Michael Goulder (Eerdmans, 1979, 257pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Charles Twombly, teacher of history, Tennille School, Tennille, Georgia.
The controversy stirred up by the 1977 appearance of The Myth of God Incarnate persists. This volume represents an effort to bring combatants together for an intense but friendly discussion. The seven contributors to the original symposium gathered at the University of Birmingham with seven of their critics in July 1978 (CT, Cornerstone, Dec. 7, 1979). Out of that three-day meeting came these papers and comments that form the basis of Incarnation and Myth.
A book with 36 parts by 14 authors is difficult to assess in limited space, so general impressions will have to suffice. Despite individual differences, the “mythographers” (Basil Mitchell’s term) are fairly united in offering a distinct alternative to orthodox Christianity. Don Cupitt and Frances Young see the basic thrust of the New Testament picturing Jesus in eschatological, but not incarnational, terms. Jesus fulfills the promises of the old covenant, ushers in the end times, and reveals God’s salvation; but in no way can identity with God be claimed for him. Incarnational assertions are seen as covertly Docetic and as compromising Jesus’ humanity.
Maurice Wiles, John Hick, and Michael Goulder challenge the logical propriety of the notion of the Incarnation. Rather than seeing it as a mystery or paradox, in the positive sense, they find instead “mystification” and “nonsense.” For them the religious value of Christianity lies largely in its concrete manifestation of general truths that are by no means limited to the Christian faith.
Goulder continues to hammer away with his thesis that Samaritan converts introduced the idea of the Incarnation in the fifties of the first century. Leslie Houlden comes from another direction with an attempt to knock the props out from under those who hold that such beliefs as the Resurrection and the presence of Christ should form part of the context in which the Incarnation must be understood.
The “traditionalists,” despite individual differences, offer a stout and basically united defense. Biblical scholars Charles Moule and Graham Stanton argue persuasively for the pervasive presence of incarnational faith in the New Testament documents. Moule rejects Goulder’s arguments as gross oversimplifications. The accusation of oversimplifying is echoed by Nicholas Lash who finds the mythographers “not sufficiently puzzled by classical Christological models.” John Rodwell explores a similar theme in his careful analysis of how scientific theories function and how they are related to other kinds of thinking.
Lesslie Newbigin questions the implications of the Incarnation for the meaning of history. His intimate acquaintance with oriental thought enables him to correct facile comparisons between Christianity and other religions. Stephen Sykes finds in the Incarnation a “principle of adhesion” without which the Christian story fails to hang together. Brian Hebblethwaite, whose contribution was for me the most helpful, reinforces Sykes’s contention in his impressive argument for the religious and moral value of the Incarnation.
This is a book to read and study. The debate throughout is of high quality and the issues raised are of compelling significance. Even the arguments with which one must disagree are instructive.
The Example Of India
Ethnic Realities and the Church, Lessons from India, by Donald A. McGavran (William Carey Library, 1979, 262 pp., $8.95 pb), is reviewed by W. Douglas Smith, director, Center for Mission, La Paz, Bolivia.
As a result of the Consultation on World Evangelization in Thailand in June 1980, world attention is focusing on how to reach the remaining least-reached people. The answer comes clear and strong from McGavran in Ethnic Realities, “people by people.”
The author traces chapter by chapter the historical development of each of the nine variations of the Indian church. He subdivides and contrasts the growing monoethnics with the stagnating multiethnics; Part I shows five basic types of churches and Part II, the four secondary types. Against the backdrop of the surrounding population’s response to each church’s proclamation and living example of the gospel, McGavran evaluates the evangelistic potential, advantages, and disadvantages of each.
India appears to have passed through the first stages of exploration and the second stage of occupation, and now is experiencing the third stage of multi-individual decisions from castes and tribes in both rural and urban areas. With many other Third World countries, this country stands at the threshold of stage four: great numbers of Indian missionaries are called for to pioneer new fields. But this is a dangerous place to be, for India may move back into a sealed-off, static condition like the churches of Syria, Lebanon, and Iran. This could, however, also be a place of great opportunity. Some Indian churches are well poised for a breakthrough of enormous proportions. Others are barely incorporating their biological growth. To read this book is to help you discern if your own national church is set for a similar breakdown or breakthrough.
It is hoped the next edition of this valuable volume will provide the easily confused first-time reader with some helps: clearer syntax in some places, relief and general area maps showing where the many groups are located, an index for quick cross reference, and a table relating the rates and trends of growth of all nine types of Indian churches within their respective, responsive populations.
On The Way To Justice
Personal Values in Public Policy, edited by John C. Haughey (Paulist Press, 1979, 275 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by James H. Olthuis, senior member in philosophical theology, Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
The relationship between personal ethics and government decisions is the subject of this unusual publication of the Woodstock Theological Center. Nine academic essays followed by conversations with government officials and career civil servants seek to “cast some light on the virtually opaque process of decision-making that takes place ing government circles in our time.” The book explores in two parts the routes between personal values and public policies. Part one discusses the topography of government decision making, the role of values, and the place of reason, plural loyalties, and responsibility with respect to morally questionable policies. Part two focuses on religious faith and its relation to decision making.
Although I found a number of the essays helpful and some of the conversations interesting, the volume as a whole did not excite me. What is missing is a discussion of the institutional contours of state and government that form the parameters for individual decisions within the government. Without attending to the fundamental stance of the government and comparing that with its God-given mandate to make for public justice, one too easily gets lost in specific policies or escapes in unhelpful moralisms. On the other hand, having arrived at some decision about the fundamental justice or injustice of a government in terms of its God-given task to foster public justice, individuals have a principled basis for monitoring specific policies and personal involvement. Only when convinced of a government’s fundamental direction towards justice is one able to cope with its weaknesses and to move with it. It is to the credit of editor John Haughey that he included an epilogue by John Rohr that basically makes this point.
It is the project that excites me. As a socially concerned evangelical, I can only applaud the efforts of the Woodstock Center to reflect theologically on contemporary human issues. We need to join hands in communal reflection and praxis.
Facing Up To Death
Don’t Take My Grief Away from Me, by Douglas Manning (Insight Books, 1979, 129 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by Guy Greenfield, professor of Christian ethics, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas.
The funeral as a gift to the life being memorialized and the rights of the family in planning the funeral are set here against the traditional and often ridiculous “wishes of the deceased.”
The choice of officiating minister is carefully handled: he should minister and not be ministered unto. This may mean a pastor stepping aside for a minister closer to the family. With wisdom Manning discusses viewing the body, flowers, and concern for children in the family of the deceased, and he seeks to recapture some lost emphases. “A funeral should be a very personal celebration of the life, love, death, and hope of the person.” Canned or stereotyped funeral services are out. The eulogy could be a statement prepared by family members.
The author tactfully handles the problem of guilt, dealing mainly with false guilt that is needlessly created. The best part of the book is the section on grief. Manning attacks the belief that grief explained is grief eliminated, and that grief is bad and should be avoided at all costs. Grief is an important part of the healing process when the pain of loss has been experienced: everyone has the right to grieve. The stages of grief are set forth helpfully as a map for this difficult journey.
The final resolution of grief is being able to “say good-bye and say hello.” Those who grieve need to make a final break with the past and strike out into a new future. Most important is for the grief-growth process to enable us to discover the purpose for which we were born.
This book needs to be put in the hands of every person who has just experienced the death of a close relative or friend. It would also be helpful for people who have experienced deep loss when used as a resource in grief seminars, study groups, or retreats.
Insight Into Lewis
They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914–1963), edited by Walter Hooper (Macmillan, 1979, 592 pp., $13.95), is reviewed by Ronnie Collier Stevens, pastor, Faith Evangelical Bible Church, Newport, North Carolina.
Sixty-four years ago a 17-year-old student wrote to his best friend from his tutor’s house in Surrey, England. As a joke he suggested: “I think you and I ought to publish our letters (they’d be a jolly interesting book by the way) …” The student’s name was C. S. Lewis. The friend back home was Arthur Greeves, the “first friend” of Surprised by Joy. Sixteen years after his death Lewis’s joke has become a reality, and his hopeful estimate of the book’s interest has proved a colossal understatement.
This book, in a word, is a feast. It is a feast that is not merely sumptuous, but soul nourishing as well. A recent article (CT, Dec. 21, 1979) called for a “restful moratorium” on books about Lewis. Here, though, we have not just a book about Lewis, but, in a substantial addition of over 500 pages to the Lewis corpus, we have the man himself.
The volume contains all of Lewis’s extant letters to Greeves from 1914 to 1963, along with a few letters by Lewis’s brother, his wife, and Arthur Greeves himself. The reading pleasure these letters provide is diminished only by the realization that we may be witnessing the completion of the Lewis canon. Year after year the posthumous works have appeared. They Stand Together is possibly the last major episode in a remarkable publishing history. These letters are no minor addition to that history. Walter Hooper, who edited them, writes that the letters may be “as close as we shall get to the man himself.”
Hooper’s lengthy introduction is a key that unlocks many passages that otherwise would be unintelligible, and the research behind the footnotes is both painstaking and prodigious. The editor’s great effort is marred by one surprising lack of judgment. Much of the correspondence covers Lewis’s late adolescence and early manhood, and quite naturally these dialogues with an intimate friend deal with intimate topics. Late in life Lewis deleted those sensitive sections. Walter Hooper has reproduced these extremely personal revelations (which were chemically retrieved) in brackets in this book. Such an invasion of privacy seems less an effort at an accurate record than an exercise in historical voyeurism. It is ironic that when Arthur became nervous about the future discovery of the confidential disclosures, Lewis replies that any person who reads the letters would be “an ill bred cad … we shouldn’t mind what he saw.”
Offering much more than standard juvenilia, most of Lewis’s great themes are here in seed form. Early on we see his preference for the ancient over the recent, and the literary over the personal experience. Later we see the famous discovery of George MacDonald and the conversion to Christianity. Subsequently Lewis wrote evangelistically to the apostate Greeves, who grew up a nominal believer.
The last line of the final letter is stunning in its pathos. It should not be read out of sequence.
A Bible Survey Of Sorts
Divine Struggle for Human Salvation: Biblical Convictions in Their Historical Setting, by Andrew C. Tunyogi (University Press of America, 1979, 474 pp., $15.00), is reviewed by James C. Moyer, professor of religious studies, Southwest Missouri State University, Springfield, Missouri.
Andrew Tunyogi, professor emeritus of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, has collected in this book a lifetime of research on the Bible. He used the book in an earlier form in his classes, and suggests its usefulness will be as either a textbook or a reference book. He covers both Old and New Testaments, with an almost equal division of material. Very little space is devoted to the Apocrypha except for a brief reference here and there. He approaches the Bible academically with emphasis on the historical-critical method, He stands, for the most part, in the mainstream of critical scholarship. What is unique, however, is his emphasis on biblical convictions, beliefs, or theology. These are described not by the individual Book, but by units of material: Deuteronomic History, Prophets, Synoptic Gospels, Paul, for example.
Unfortunately, the book is not entirely successful. The title is something of a misnomer. There is a general survey of beliefs and convictions, but no special emphasis on salvation as a unifying theme. Space limitations undoubtedly led to selectivity of material, but we are never told any principles of selectivity. The omission of the Joseph cycle in Genesis 37–50 certainly overlooks a strong emphasis on the sovereignty of God in working out his plan in spite of human attempts to thwart it. Likewise, we are surprised to learn of James that an “attempt to present the teachings and religious convictions of the letter would be of little use.” Actually, only about 30 percent of the material on the Old Testament deals directly with beliefs. We would expect about half to be devoted to beliefs and half to the historical context; such a balance is reasonably well achieved in the New Testament material.
Neither is it entirely successful as a potential textbook. It is well outlined, uses only a few footnotes placed at the end of the Old and New Testament units, and is written in a straightforward fashion. But probably it would not excite the less-interested student. It contains no illustrations, and only one drawing. Brief chronological charts are hidden at the end of both Old Testament and New Testament sections, but the student is not alerted to them. Books and articles for further reading listed at the end of each unit are sometimes in foreign languages, and abbreviations are often used without any explanation. Proper names are spelled in a variety of ways, sometimes departing significantly from the RSV, which is used for all biblical quotations. The addition of maps and a glossary of key terms would be helpful. Worst of all, there are several hundred mechanical errors, which appear in every section of the book; these are especially numerous in the books and articles suggested for further reading.
Although issues of special importance to evangelicals do not receive attention, this book has some value to teachers as a reference book: it is a fairly up-to-date summary of critical scholarship on the Bible with emphasis on a survey of biblical beliefs.
BRIEFLY NOTED
New or Recent Periodicals.The Evangelical Review of Theology is a relatively recent international journal comprising a selection of articles and reviews from current evangelical serial literature. It is ably edited by Bruce Nicholls and appears twice yearly, at a cost of $10.00 a year. Subscription requests may be sent to WEF, Box 670, Colorado Springs, Colorado 80901, or to Paternoster Press, 3 Mount Radford Crescent, Exeter UK, EX2 4JW. Theological Students Fellowship Bulletin, edited by Mark Lau Branson, is an updated version of the TSF News and Reviews. It is designed to reach a larger audience (college preseminarians, religion majors, graduate students) with a wider range of topics. Published five times a year (Oct.–May), it is available separately for $6.50 a year from: Theological Students Fellowship, 233 Langdon, Madison, Wisconsin 53703. Members of TSF receive the Bulletin and Themelios (the Theological Journal of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students) free.
Foundations, edited by Dr. Eryl Davies, is a theological journal published in November and May by the British Evangelical Council. It contains valuable articles and reviews, and may be ordered from the business manager, Mr. Aubrey J. Roberts, 58 Woodstock Road North, St. Albans, Herts, England, AL1 4QF. The cost is 75d. per issue. The Christian Counsellor’s Journal, edited by Selwyn Hughes, makes a much-needed contribution to the so-called helping ministries from an evangelical point of view. It is published quarterly for £3.00 a year, and may be obtained from Crusade for World Revival, Box 11, Walton-on-Thomas, Surrey, England. John C. Whitcomb is editor of the new Grace Theological Journal, the first issue having appeared in April 1980. Basically a journal of scholarly biblical and theological research, it may be ordered from Grace Theological Seminary, Winona Lake. Indiana 46590, for $7.50 a year.
There are four journals of Reformed interest worth mentioning. The Clearing House of the International Conference of Reformed Institutions for Christian Scholarship Circular is available free of charge from Dr. B. J. van der Walt, % Institute for the Advancement of Calvinism, Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education, Potchefstroom, 2520, Republic of South Africa. Circular 13, April 1979, was 64 pages of valuable comments, notes, book reviews, personalia, and so on. Reformation Canada is a high-quality scholarly journal of articles, edited by William Payne, which appears three times a year. It may be obtained from Sharon Morden, 8 Hailey Court, Bowmanville, Ontario, LIC 3ˣ5, Canada, for $4.00 per year. The excellent thrice-yearly Reformed Theological Review may be obtained from The Editors, Box 2587W, Elizabeth St., P.O., Melbourne, Vic., 3001, Australia, for $5.40 (U.S.) per year, postpaid. The Baptist Reformation Review, edited by John Zens, is published quarterly by Baptist Reformation Educational Ministries, Box 40161, Nashville, Tennessee 37204, at a cost of $4.00 a year. It has helpful articles, reviews, and information.
The Christian Legal Society publishes two quarterly items, The CLS Quarterly and The Advocate. They are packed with news, briefs, information about upcoming court cases, and comments on matters relating to Christians and the law. They are sent as a package for $10.00 a year and may be obtained from the Christian Legal Society, Box 2069, Oak Park, Illinois 60303.
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When God reasons with us it is not by creed or abstract propositions of dogma, but by images.
Truth is a touchy topic, a daunting word. It sounds so ultimate, so solemn, with nothing whimsical or casual about it, so that we cannot joke about it without feeling uneasy. It demands our serious thought, our total commitment—and still we’re baffled by it. After all, thinking people have been searching for truth for eons and it has proved eternally elusive, defying definition.
Although its shape escapes us, we sense its relation to the way things really are, actuality beyond mere fact, the core, the root of things, the rock bottom. (But notice how, to get at a definition of truth we are forced to use metaphors like core, root, rock, bottom. Because of its disconcerting abstraction, its largeness and inscrutability, we must choose symbols to make it seem more manageable, more concrete.)
Truth also connotes consistency. Unchangeable in any final sense, it is never discontinuous, and though daunting, it is generally perceived as desirable, a remedy for our insecurity and restlessness because it promises something sure and firm.
Consider two statements, which reflect two ways of coming at the essence of truth: 1. “Only propositions have the quality of truth.… The only significant view of revelation is rational-verbal.… Truth is only propositional” (Carl F. H. Henry in God, Revelation and Authority).
2. “So, the world happens twice—/once what we see it as, / second, it legends itself / deep, the way it is” (William Stafford).
On the first view, truth is presented as an abstraction, which we must attempt to tie down by means of analysis, reason, logic, and verbal symbols (words) that are themselves abstract. Words and propositions are empty when divorced from their referents. They are about something else. And the bridges built by abstract propositions between our minds and ultimate reality don’t quite make it across the river.
The second example, from the work of a contemporary poet, shows us “the world” at two levels. First, it appears superficially, “what we see it as,” and then “deep, the way it is.” The key word in this more profound revelation is “legend,” used here as a verb, which stands for the other route to truth—through myth, story, imagery. The statement that the world legends itself also implies that truth is actively self-revealing—an exciting but hardly new idea for the Christian. Remember—“The heavens are telling … the firmament proclaims.… Day unto day pours forth speech. Night unto night declares knowledge” (Ps. 19).
But these disparate avenues to ultimate reality seem mutually exclusive, or at least incompatible. We find ourselves taking sides: the objective versus the subjective, cognition versus intuition, linear thinking versus the leap of imagination. The two approaches also seem to be represented by different personality types: those who stand back, coolly analyze, and then organize information to conform to the patterns they recognize in matter and thought; and those who feel deeply, get emotionally involved, act impulsively in response to a gut feeling that demands response and expression. Poet-biochemist Walter Hearn, who participates in both worlds, informs us, in the Fore Word to Eugene Warren’s poems, Geometries of Light, that “modern brainwave detectors have located two distinct modes of mental activity in different halves of the human brain.” Distinguishing between intuitive/sensitive “right-brain” people and rational/analytical “left-brain” people, he admits that “so far, the neuroscientists confirming the dichotomy have done little to help us become ‘wholebrain’ people. Most poets aren’t much help either.”
In an increasingly technological society that sees science as the paramount source for solutions to all problems, it seems that the power is swinging into the hands of the “left-brains.” It is here that poets, artists, intuitive thinkers may be helpful to our society, righting the imbalance by calling us all to recognize, develop, and properly exercise the imagination.
The word imagination names our ability to see and bring into focus mental images. The word image, in turn, is derived from imitari, to imitate, and is akin to the word symbol, meaning “the same as.” Metaphor adds the idea of a transference of meaning from one object over to another, linking the two by analogy. An image or symbol is a likeness to reality. It is like and also unlike (it is not identical). Real enough in itself, a symbol points to a more meaningful reality. For instance, in Holy Communion, the symbols of bread and wine speak to us of Jesus’ body and blood. Bread and wine are physically real and almost universally recognizable as the archetypal food and drink. And while they are like Jesus’ body and blood (in color, in texture, in form—solid and fluid) they are also unlike it. For bread and wine are common but Christ’s body and blood are unique, broken and poured out “once for all.” It is our imagination that transfers the stark symbols of body/blood to another level, on which we perceive their meaning—Jesus himself, broken and made available for our spiritual life and nourishment.
As at his dark birth and death
we had his body in our fingers,
now, again, we split the whiteness
of his loaf by turns, and tasting
his imaged life against
the cup’s cool rim
we take him in.
(From the author’s poem “Bethany Chapel.”)
Jesus reminds us of the importance of having “eyes to see.” An inventor will see something in his mind and then reproduce it in steel or plastic. A composer like Moussorgsky will write: “On a snowy day, seen through my window, suddenly appeared a colorful group of peasant women laughing and singing. The image this picture left on my mind became a musical form.” C. S. Lewis commented on his facility for creating story: “Everything began with images.…” and again, “With me the process is much like bird-watching … I see pictures.”
Here’s an exercise. When you read the word “winter” what do you see in your mind? If you had been with me during the infamous winter of ’78 you would see, by means of memory, the weight of the windblown snow on the roofs, the clogged streets, the sidewalks narrow as tunnels. (What I remember best is the huge, bread-shaped loaf of snow that rose on our back porch!) But imagination does more than recall. Rightly exercised it gives us clues to the meaning of experiences. What does winter signify to you?
Under the snowing
the leaves lie still.
Brown animals sleep
through the storm, unknowing,
behind the bank
and the frozen hill.
And just as deep
in the coated stream
the slow fish grope
through their own dark,
stagnant dream.
Who on earth would hope
for a new beginning
when the crusted snow
and the ice start thinning?
Who would ever know
that the night could stir
with warmth and wakening
coming, creeping,
for sodden root and fin and fur
and other things lonely
and cold and sleeping?
(From the author’s poem “Under the Snowing.”)
The clues in this simple nature poem all point to a deeper reality: all of deadened creation is waiting for the spring of redemption, for the Creator’s wakening touch, for revival, in its ultimate sense. And here meaning has been derived from a natural phenomenon or image because imagination jumps the gap from the surface reality of winter to a meaning that lies beyond it, at another level.
Thomas Howard, in Chance or the Dance, observes that “it is in the nature of things to appear in images—royalty in lions and kings, strength in bulls and heroes, industriousness in ants and beavers … terror in oceans and thunder.… The inclination to trace correspondence among things transfigures those things into images of one another so that on all levels it is felt that this suggests that.” One of the symptoms of our age is its tunnel vision, by which we fragment the universe. Because of its extraordinary complexity, we cannot handle more than a few facets of existence at a time. The result is that we each do our own narrow little thing—politicians, farmers, housewives, musicians, merchants, socialites, mechanics, neurosurgeons. Not even a Buckminster Fuller or an Isaac Asimov or a C. P. Snow can pull it all together. It is my hope that the creative Christian may, by means of his “baptized imagination,” help integrate the universe by widening and sharpening his focus, by seeing through God’s eyes, by observing man and his environment and saying, “Yes, I see. This is like that, and it is significant.” Here the artist and the analyst, the poet and the pragmatist can collaborate, joining reason with imagination.
Imagery in the created world around us speaks truth to us. This is God’s general revelation, for “ever since the creation of the world, his invisible nature, his eternal power and deity have been clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (Rom. 1:20). The word poet means “maker,” and God, the First Poet—in his special, direct revelation, the Bible—sets his stamp of approval on the imaginative mode of perceiving truth by his constant use of imagery to link earthly phenomena with spiritual verities at the core of truth.
Jesus said this is like that: sower and seed, lost sheep found, precious pearl, wheat and tares. (Robert Frost, speaking of parable, defines it as “a story that means what it says and something besides. And in the New Testament, that something besides is the more important of the two.”)
We are asked to visualize the church as a human body, as a bride, as a building formed of living stones, as salt, as light—varied but vivid pictures in which we see ourselves and understand more clearly our roles as Christians.
See the Lamb and the Lion. The Lamb says: simplicity, meekness, white fleece, smallness, innocence, purity, helplessness, submission to sacrifice. The Lion says: strength, size, untamed power, golden mane, grandeur, courage. How paradoxical that both images speak of Christ! Neither is a perfect image; each symbolizes different characteristics of the same infinite Person.
The righteous, God-related person is imaged by David as a green olive tree; by Isaiah as an oak, planted by God; by Jeremiah as a riverbank tree. And in Hosea, God compares himself to an evergreen tree that provides his people with fruit in all seasons.
Remember the sheep and the shepherd. Remember the Morning Star. Search out and visualize for yourself a thousand other truth-revealing metaphors of Scripture.
And when God reasons with us, his people, how does he do it? By a creed? By a rational, abstract proposition of dogma? No. In Isaiah 1:18, he projects for us an image we can all see: “Come now, let us reason together … though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool”—a vivid picture we can neither ignore nor forget because it prints itself on our imagination. God says: this is like that; our sin, a stain as deep as a dye, has been bleached out and we are seen by God as snow-pure or fleece-white in the light of divine atonement and forgiveness.
Imagery holds a key to truth as God exposes himself to us in a thousand images stronger than words that leap into life to embody truth.
Annie Dillard speaks of Christ
corked in a bottle: carrying the wine
to communion in a pack on her back
she feels him lambent, lighting
her hidden valleys through the spaces
between her ribs. Nor can we
contain him in a cup. He is always
poured out for our congregation.
& see how he spills, hot, light,
his oceans glowing like wine
flooding all the fjords among
the bones of our continents.
Annie Dillard once asked: How
in the world can we remember God?
(Death forgets and we all die.)
But truly, reminders are God’s business.
He will see to it flashing his hinder parts, now,
then, past our cut in the rock.
His metaphors are many, among them
the provided feast by which
our teeth & tongues & throats
hint to our hearts of God’s body,
giving us the why of incarnation,
the how of remembrance.
(From the author’s poem “Two Stanzas: the Eucharist.”)
LUCI SHAW1Editor for Harold Shaw Publishers, Wheaton, Illinois, Mrs. Shaw has published several books of poetry.
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The courts are trying to protect the public from the very sources of morality and justice on which they stand.
Christian students at the University of Missouri at Kansas City are prohibited by the administration from meeting together on campus in their free time or distributing literature of a religious nature to other students. At the university’s Saint Louis campus, speaking of religious matters from the “free speech platform”—established to allow students to express themselves on miscellaneous issues of common interest—is forbidden.
•A student court at the University of Nebraska convicts four student ministry groups of violating a board of regents policy that prohibits “testimony in any of its various forms.”
•Religious students at Western Washington University are limited to two meetings of a religious nature per quarter and, unlike nonreligious student groups, must pay rent to use university facilities. Any funds raised by such groups, irrespective of their source, are subject to strict administration control.
•The First Orthodox Presbyterian Church of San Francisco, a congregation of about 50, is forced to incur substantial expense in order to defend its right to release the church organist when it becomes known that he is a practicing homosexual who does not intend to change his lifestyle. According to the church’s attorneys, John Whitehead and Thomas Neuberger, the discharged organist stated in his deposition that his intention in the lawsuit, brought under a local “gay rights ordinance,” is “to force the church to change its religious beliefs and to punish it for teaching that homosexuality is a sin.”
•The Department of Building and Safety for a major West Coast city (undisclosed due to the sensitive nature of present negotiations) issues a “cease and desist order” forbidding two home Bible study groups to meet because the houses in which they gather are not zoned for “church purposes.” Both groups, each involving about 20 persons, volunteer to eliminate singing—reportedly neither loud nor boisterous—and to disperse the cars that brought them to the residences. A department supervisor, however, states at a hearing that it will be the department’s policy to issue cease and desist orders against any religious meeting in a private home not zoned as a church even if “just one nonresident” is present.
•Two Harvard law students bring a lawsuit as “taxpayers” against the Secretary of the Army, asking the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York to declare unconstitutional the chaplaincy program, charging it constitutes an establishment of religion in violation of the First Amendment. Meanwhile, another U.S. District Court in New York holds that a woman’s “free exercise of religion” includes the constitutional right to a federally funded abortion.
Other cases and controversies before courts and legislatures include such diverse issues as whether parents have a right to object to “amoral” (immoral) sex education or humanistic “values clarification” courses being taught in the public schools; whether adoption and foster care agencies can employ religious criteria in selection of homes for the placement of children; whether religious camps can be closed for failure to comply with burdensome and much criticized Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations; whether or to what extent private Christian schools are subject to governmental regulation and control; and whether individuals or organizations involved in student ministry can constitutionally be granted access to public high school or college campuses.
A primary reason such cases and controversies are being considered owes to a relatively recent change in interpretation of the First Amendment, the part of the U.S. Constitution that governs and guarantees religious freedom. Even proponents of radical secularization would have to concede that the positions they take in such issues would have been unthinkable 25 years ago.
Certain legal and political commentators are becoming increasingly vocal in criticism of the trend to restrict religious expression entirely to the personal level. A recurring theme is that theological differences, not legal or political disagreements, lie at the root of present cases and controversies. It is as if fundamentally different belief systems are at war with one another—but most involved in the fray do not realize the true identity of the combatants.
Leading conservative Russell Kirk analyzes our predicament in the new Journal of Christian Jurisprudence: “In the domain of Law today, as in all other realms of human endeavor, there is waged a battle between those who believe that we human creatures are made in the image of a Creator, and those who believe that you and I are not much more than fleshly computers. Even within the courts of law, created to keep the peace, this war is fought to the knife.”
One commentator after another observes the danger intrinsic in relegating religious conviction to strictly private concerns. In an article on democratic pluralism, recently published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, authors Theodore M. Kerrine and Richard John Neuhaus call for a reevaluation of the accepted role of churches in modern American society: “The view that the public sphere is synonymous with the state has been especially effective in excluding religion from considerations of public policy. Two assumptions in modern social thought, deriving from secular Enlightenment traditions, have operated to minimize the role of religion. The first assumption is that religion will inevitably decline in the face of the processes of education and modernization. The second is that, even if religion continues to thrive, it deals purely with the private sphere of life and is therefore irrelevant, if not hostile, to public policy. Both assumptions need to be reexamined.”
Harold J. Berman, Story Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, is one who decries the compartments into which the world has been divided, thus estranging everything religious from everything public. He warns in his book, The Interaction of Law and Religion, that “if they [the compartments] are not opened up to each other they will imprison and stifle us.”
Professor Berman, along with a growing number of other concerned commentators, concludes that the problem is serious: “Western man is undergoing an integrity crisis—the kind of crisis that many individual men and women experience in their early fifties when they ask themselves with utmost seriousness, and often in panic, what their lives have stood for and where they are headed.… Our whole culture seems to be facing the possibility of a kind of nervous breakdown.”
Many early settlers saw their pilgrimage, prior to our nation’s independence, as deeply religious. John Winthrop could thus write in A Model of Christian Charity (1630): “Wee must Consider That wee shall be as a City upon a Hill. The eies of all people are upon us …” America’s first education laws, enacted in Massachusetts in 1642 and 1647, reflect a similar self-understanding in authorizing schools to teach children “to read and understand the principles of religion” and thereby to counter “ye ould deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of ye Scriptures.”
In the following centuries, particularly in the early nineteenth century, many states enacted constitutional or statutory provisions that had the effect of establishing Christianity—usually Protestant Christianity—as the religion of the state. Professor Berman articulately makes this point in his essay “The Interaction of Law and Religion” (published in the Spring 1979 issue of Humanities in Society, not to be confused with his book by the same title), where he cites as evidence of this historical trend state laws “declaring it to be ‘the duty of all men to worship the Supreme Being, the great Creator and Preserver of the Universe’; regulating membership in Christian denominations; imposing fines for failure to attend worship services on the Lord’s day; requiring elected officials to swear that they ‘believe the Christian religion, and have a firm persuasion of its truth’; and establishing public education for the purpose of ‘religion, morality, and knowledge.’”
The return to an intolerant system where religious beliefs or practices are legislated and dissenters are banned or punished is certainly not espoused. These historical enactments and the following cases are offered primarily to show the vast ideological distance to be traversed in order to connect today’s radical secularism with its opposite historical counterparts. Neither extreme appears to accomplish the “benevolent neutrality” this writer believes to be the proper relationship between church and state.
Courts have historically been equally zealous in upholding what they regarded as “true religion” with respect to its influence upon public life. Typical is an 1811 New York case approving a criminal indictment of an individual charged with blasphemous utterances against Christ. Justice Kent reasoned authoritatively for the court that “we are a Christian people and the morality of the country is deeply engrafted upon Christianity.” Similarly, in 1822 a Pennsylvania man was convicted of blasphemy for stating that “the Holy Scriptures were a mere fable” and “they contain many lies.” In 1890 the Supreme Court of Illinois upheld the expulsion of a student from the University of Illinois for refusing to attend daily chapel exercises.
Even the Supreme Court of the United States, which in large measure has been the battleground upon which the secularization of public policy and life has been won, has engaged in similarly enthusiastic pronouncements in the not-so-distant past. For example, in Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States (1892), after reviewing some of the major features of American history, our highest court concluded: “These, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation.” In 1931, in United States v. MacIntosh, Justice Sutherland wrote similarly for the Court that “we are a Christian people.” Even as recently as 1952, in Zorach v. Clauson, the court again observed that “we are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.”
The enactments and decisions that historically had the effect of establishing Christianity as the religion of many states have not been described for their current authority; all except the two most recent Supreme Court decisions have been overruled. They have been cited rather to give perspective to the current constitutional framework, which many believe has become antagonistic or even hostile to religious expression.
It is important to recognize how young an offspring is the current interpretation of the First Amendment, that ultimate provision governing all aspects of church-state relations. In Wall of Separation, Frank J. Sorauf, professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, effectively shows the recent vintage of constitutional law in this area. He observes: “Church and state came very late to the U.S. Supreme Court. The entire body of major precedents in the area contains only two [cases] decided before 1951, and both of them were decided in the 1940s.…”
The First Amendment was adopted and became a part of the U.S. Constitution on December 15, 1791. The section of the amendment that regulates and protects religious expression contains only 16 words: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …” Hardly self-explanatory in the host of different factual situations that arise, it is the Supreme Court’s responsibility to apply and interpret the amendment in the cases and controversies of contemporary American life. Once decided, these holdings become precedents to be followed and form what we call the “constitutional law” of church-state relations. In other words, contrary to what most nonlawyers probably believe, most of our constitutional law is not found in the Constitution!
It would be nice to be able to assume impartial benevolence and wisdom on the part of the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. This is certainly a warranted assumption much of the time and this article is not a new conspiracy theory. However, in light of what many view as the increasingly restrictive interpretation of the First Amendment religion clauses, it is important to examine carefully the legal bases upon which the Supreme Court and state legislatures and judicial tribunals must depend for authority.
Almost 150 years passed before the Supreme Court systematically confronted the First Amendment, because it was assumed and accepted for as many years that the amendment applied only to actions of the U.S. Congress. In the mid-1920s, however, by a process known as “selective incorporation,” the Court began to hold that provisions of the Bill of Rights were applicable to official actions by the states. In 1940, the “free exercise clause” of the First Amendment was first held to apply to state actions, and in 1947 the “establishment clause” was similarly incorporated.
Although the authors of the amendment adopted in 1791 probably intended little more than to prohibit the establishing of a national church (such as the Anglican church in England), the intent of the constitutional framers is considered largely by most jurists and legal commentators today to be irrelevant to current litigation. Those who argue for “strict construction” of the amendment—based even roughly upon what was originally intended—are regarded with disdain as anachronistic, comparable to formerly prevailing attitudes toward those advocating a balanced federal budget before that issue was popularized by 1976 presidential politics.
Thus, in the 1940s the Supreme Court took the significant step of expanding its jurisdiction in First Amendment cases to enforce the “separation of church and state” on the state level. Professor Sorauf in The Wall of Separation effectively shows how three national separationist groups—The American Civil Liberties Union, the American Jewish Congress, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State—then proceeded to dominate “several decades of increasingly feverish litigation,” choosing specific cases in an overall agenda intended to dismantle the “American religious establishment.” Radical secularism in public life was strongly preferred over policy that allowed religious influence a broader role; the Supreme Court decisions that resulted, and not anything in the Constitution itself, became our current constitutional law of church-state relations.
Although the Supreme Court has held that “benevolent neutrality” should be the government’s attitude toward religious matters, and that “only those interests of the highest order … can overbalance the legitimate claim to the free exercise of religion,” relevant cases and controversies hardly testify to the dominance of benevolence or neutrality in the current process. An increasing number of legal scholars are questioning both the wisdom and the authority of the Court’s policy decisions in this vital area. Raoul Berger, for example, who until 1976 was the Charles Warren Senior Fellow in American Legal History at Harvard University, criticizes the Court’s “continuing revision of the Constitution under the guise of interpretation” in his recent book, Government by Judiciary.
The controversy is not new. In 1907, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes surprised many with the candid relativism of his often quoted statement, “We are under a Constitution but the Constitution is what the Judges say it is.” Many cases in a host of different areas of the law have since been decided pursuant to this prevailing theory of jurisprudence. This moved philosopher Morris R. Cohen to write to Prof. (later Supreme Court Justice) Felix Frankfurter that “the whole system is fundamentally dishonest in its pretensions (pretending to say what the Constitution lays down when they [the Justices] are in fact deciding what [they think] is good for the country).”
Mr. Berger of Harvard agrees. This, and his strong conviction that policy making was intended to be the business of legislatures and not courts, causes him to ask rhetorically, “How long can public respect for the Court, on which its power ultimately depends, survive if the people become aware that the tribunal which condemns the acts of others as unconstitutional is itself acting unconstitutionally?”
A review of recent cases and controversies that have arisen under the First Amendment religion clauses can be deeply troubling. Besides what appears to be increased incidence of discrimination against traditional religious expression, more disturbing is the underlying assumption of many judges, opinion leaders, and policy makers that any religious influence on governmental or other public affairs should be eliminated by constitutional decree.
Historically, Western law has been immensely influenced by religious individuals and groups. This is true from the conversion of the Roman emperors in the fourth century through the veritable marriage of law and religious beliefs and values in seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century America. One wonders, for example, whether the civil-rights movement would ever have gained sufficient momentum to be effective without the key leadership of religious individuals or groups—groups such as those the ACLU attorney in the recent Hyde Amendment case disparagingly referred to as “pervasively religious.”
The current interpretation of the First Amendment by the Supreme Court, and by other governing bodies attempting to apply the Court’s decisions, is not sacrosanct. In fact, as has been pointed out, an increasing number of experts object strongly to the principles of law articulated by the Court in this vital area. Moreover, if anything is gleaned from a study of recent Supreme Court history it is that the nine justices are not free from personal, political, or jurisprudential philosophies that often influence the way they vote.
These case studies are not hypothetical. Christian students are being denied the right to meet on public college and university campuses for any religious purpose, based upon a confused and distorted view of the separation of church and state, although the University of Missouri case was decided favorably in the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Churches and seminaries are having to go to court to defend their right to terminate or refuse to ordain practicing homosexuals. There are increasing reports of the use of zoning power to prevent religious meetings in private homes. Each of the other case studies also represents an existing or recent controversy where religious freedoms were directly at issue. And for each identified situation there are literally thousands of others festering across the country.
Concern is justified when one as qualified as Raoul Berger warns that the Supreme Court’s recent expansion of its jurisdiction “perilously resembles the subordination of ‘law’ to the attainment of ends … the hallmark of Hitlerism and Stalinism.” Perhaps even more prophetic is the injunction of William Penn in 1681: “If you are not governed by God, you will be ruled by tyrants.” In a pluralistic society we may not enjoy the theocracy envisioned by Penn. But to allow discrimination against religious individuals, including rejection of their involvement in public affairs, is a dangerous step toward totalitarianism.
For the Turn of the Year
This year is all my years together: laced
and twined and interwoven younger years.
Sunbonnets, pigtails. Oxford, Chartres. These ears
first tuned to Handel. Once, four-year-old haste
to read my sister’s schoolbooks. Feet brisk-paced
across high Alpine trails. “The cup that cheers”
poured to dear hordes of students. Altared tears
in formal church, in silent pillows.
Graced
with this new year, I give praise for the old;
acknowledge folly, weakness, fears, delays;
rue-wonder which months I would now unmake
if I were able; touch new tasks I hold
with pristine awe. In lilting voice, I praise
the One Who keeps on saying, “For My sake.”
ELVA McALLASTER
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The notion that pornography is a victimless crime has allowed it and its peddlers leniency under the law.
is pornography protected by the First Amendment—or is it properly subject to legal restraint? Does it have damaging effects—or is it relatively harmless? Do Christians have a moral and civic obligation to be involved in the dispute?
This author, who has lectured on pornography before university audiences for 20 years and has testified as an expert witness for the prosecution in federal pornography cases, is convinced that pornography is an even graver menace than most Christians are aware. I believe that it is not protected by the First Amendment and that it is urgently important to curb this abomination. And I believe, moreover, that the intellectuals who oppose censorship can be refuted on every front.
Is pornography a form of expression protected by the free-speech, free-press provision of the First Amendment? The answer is—absolutely not. The Constitution has always permitted certain restrictions on freedom of speech and press. For example, laws properly forbid incitement to violence, libel, slander, partisan campaign speeches by federal civil servants, misleading and fraudulent advertising, the divulgence of military secrets, verbal interference with court proceedings, picketing in a context of violence, and a score of other restraints.
Reasonable restrictions on marginal aspects of speech and press are not only constitutional but essential to the functioning of an orderly and self-respecting society. Among those restraints are long-standing curbs on obscene materials, curbs that were never rebuked by our constitutional fathers or by any court. Specific obscenity laws have been found wanting—but the principle that the state may proscribe the distribution of obscene materials has never been successfully challenged in any court.
What the First Amendment does do, however, is protect the expression of all heretical opinions, however subversive or obnoxious they may appear to others. Thus dissenters have the right to attack any sexual code, to recommend polygamy, or to agitate for abolition of marriage and the family. So long as people have this sweeping freedom to challenge any cherished idea or institution, and to recommend any religious, political, economic, or social policy, the First Amendment is adequately protected.
Chief Justice Burger put it well: “To equate the free and robust exchange of ideas and political debate with the commercial exploitation of obscene material … demeans the First Amendment and its high purposes in the historic struggle for freedom.”
Much is made of the lack of precision in defining what is obscene, and in the difficulties of meeting due process standards because of the vagueness involved. But if obscenity is impossible to define, why do opponents of censorship concede that society can legitimately protect children from it? If we can’t define it, what do we keep from our kids?
While the lack of precision in defining obscenity is worrisome, the problem is by no means unique to this area. In most criminal or regulatory laws, behavior relating to those laws is clearly forbidden at one end of the continuum and clearly permissible at the other. But as we approach the center of the continuum, a zone of uncertainty is reached which yields much of our litigation. Pornography laws share this zone of uncertainty with a host of other laws. (I have yet to hear liberals deplore the unreasonable search and seizure provision of the Constitution because it is too vague.)
Pornographers merit precious little sympathy when they are uncertain about what is legally obscene and what is not. If they choose to operate in the danger zone, it is because that is where the profits are greatest. If they want to play for these kinds of stakes in this kind of game, let them take the risks that go with their wretched business.
Having established the fact that obscene materials can be curbed constitutionally, are they a sufficiently serious evil to merit major attention by Christians?
Defenders of the $4 billion pornography racket contend that the production and distribution of pornography is a relatively innocuous enterprise. They cite findings by the President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography in 1971 that no measurable damage to consumers of pornography could be found.
But the commission report has been subjected to more withering criticism than almost any commission report in modern times. Half a dozen reputable social scientists have either pointed out serious flaws in the scientific character of the commission’s work or have rejected its conclusions as inadequately supported by the evidence.
nonetheless, the notion persists that pornography involves a “victimless crime,” an assumption that leads law enforcment officers to give antipornography law enforcement a very low priority. A cogent case can be made, however, that four groups are victimized by pornography.
1. Women. The image of women so relentlessly propagated by pornography is that they are creatures whose hypnotic anatomical features proclaim their role and their relationships to men. They are a gender ordained for the sexual pleasure of men, and are principally distinguished by their possession of genitalia offering rich possibilities for male gratification. Much contemporary pornography highlights the joys of sadomasochistic sex, since sexual experience allegedly acquires a special flavor when women are physically abused.
Even if one cannot follow cause and effect with scientific verity, common sense tells us that millions of men cannot consume quantities of these products year after year without being affected by them.
For those who believe pornography relieves rather than intensifies unhealthy sexual urges, it should be noted that psychologists are now largely convinced that violent entertainment stimulates rather than reduces violent impulses. Only the willfully dogmatic can believe that the reverse effect takes place in pornography.
2. Adolescents. Teen-agers who read pornography are the second category of victims. There is no way that pornography can freely circulate around this country, as it is doing today, without falling into the hands of millions of teen-agers.
But does this really matter? To answer this question we must ask what is pornography’s subliminal “message” to its viewers—what impression emerges from the totality of its pictures and narrative?
In addition to portraying a demeaning picture of women, pornography tells adolescents (and others) that sexual activity need not be related to love, morality, commitment, or responsibility. For people, as for animals, sex is designed to satisfy a purely physical desire.
Thus if sex is nothing but fun and games, to be indulged without shame as impulses dictate, why be faithful to one’s spouse if someone more attractive—and willing—is at hand? Why not follow your lust wherever it leads? And why not have sex with whatever 14-year-old is willing to copulate with you?
Pornography denies that sexual experience is essentially a private matter. Group sex—why not? Wife-swapping—why not? Invite the kids to witness the fun when Mom and Pop are having sex—why not? What’s so private about sex? And what’s so wrong with voyeurism?
Pornography tells adolescents that aberrational sex is the most exciting and appealing form of sex. Hustler magazine, for example, has presented bestiality as an unrivalled form of sexual gratification—the supreme sexual experience.
Pornography encourages impulsive sex, careless sex, daring sex, irresponsible sex, and it implies that there are no adverse consequences. You would never guess from viewing pornography that irresponsible sex leads to teen-age pregnancies, premature marriages, abortions, illegitimate children, venereal disease, or psychic traumas. Nor would you suspect that extramarital sex had any unhappy consequences.
Pornography’s message may not do much harm to adolescents from good homes who are taught sound values and whose parents set a good example of moral behavior. The question rather is what it will do to adolescents from the millions of homes in which little moral instruction is given, and where poor moral example is set. Such is their lot, moreover, when they are in a rebellious mood and inclined to challenge societal standards.
Does this concern for adolescents run athwart the Supreme Court’s ruling in Butler v. Michigan (1957) that no state should quarantine “the general reading public against books not too rugged for grown men and women in order to shield juvenile innocence …”? It does not. It is not being suggested that any books should be banned; pornographic magazines, movies, and peep shows are the target.
3. Children. Youngsters who pose for pornographers are obvious victims. Thousands of children are photographed after being seduced into various forms of explicit sexual behavior. The pornographers make obscene profits peddling such wares to the sick souls who feast on them. These children would not be caught up in this vicious business if the pornography merchants weren’t confident they could sell this stuff with relative impunity.
4. Society in general and the family in particular. Both groups are victimized by pornography.
Pornography is a direct challenge to the family because it encourages attitudes that are destructive of it. We have a right to be concerned about material that undermines the family, not by an open and reasoned attack (which would be protected by the First Amendment), but by inference, implication, and subliminal messages that infiltrate the mind while numbing the rational zone. Family stability lies at the heart of a stable society, and a healthy attitude toward sexual behavior is central to a sound, general moral code.
It cannot be reasonably denied that today’s pornography scene is making a contribution toward the decline of moral standards. True, pornography has been around for centuries. But the pornography of the past does not remotely compare in volume to that which exists today. In previous eras, most people saw it infrequently, furtively, with an aura of social disapproval surrounding it. Because it is viewed with greater social tolerance today, its subversive impact is bound to increase. Its prevalence partially explains why material of increasing raunchiness is invading television and motion pictures. Five years ago we would not have tolerated scenes that now appear on television and in the theater; each year both media offer more daring material than the year before. Pornography leads the way; it is the cutting edge of our future.
Recent news reports indicate that videotape cassettes featuring both soft- and hard-core pornography are selling like hot cakes in some of our larger cities. Along with cable TV pornographic offerings, the spectacular growth of this field foreshadows America’s future—if we let it happen. We could become a nation of vicarious voyeurs, with growing numbers of men huddled around TV sets after 11:30 P.M. watching performers engage in every form of explicit sexual behavior that commercial ingenuity can invent. How could one evaluate that scene as anything but evidence of a decadent culture?
The French nobility, before the French Revolution, used to amuse themselves by watching people have sexual intercourse. The Fascist African despot Idi Amin would order condemned prisoners to “make love before him” while he sipped wine and enjoyed the spectacle. The implications and parallels are worth reflecting upon.
some will say that as adult citizens of a free society we should have the privilege of reading or watching whatever we wish. What’s wrong with this view? In the first place, laws forbid the distribution and exhibition of obscene material, whatever people’s tastes may be. Second, if the libertarian assumption is correct, why shouldn’t entrepreneurs sell tickets to live sex shows? Why not give the customers live exhibitions of women having relations with animals? And why not give the interested public the opportunity to watch women being sexually abused and humiliated by men, in demonstration of the pornographic theory that sexual pain can become pleasure if we approach it with the right attitude? If some want to see these things, why shouldn’t they be free to do so? If others dislike them, they can stay away.
I find it hard to believe that intelligent people would solemnly argue that society has no right to intervene in matters like these. But does society have no right to establish minimum standards of decency, whatever a minority may think? Has it no right to say, This goes beyond the bounds of the minimally civilized, this we will not tolerate?
The attitude that “I want to see what I want to see,” without regard for the larger and long-run interests of society, is a posture common to our times. But it is a narcissistic, self-indulgent, and socially irresponsible view. In Maoist China, the interests of the state were almost everything, the interests of the individual, almost nothing. In America we have moved toward the opposite extreme, with the claims of individual freedom often transcending society’s needs. A point somewhere between the anthill mentality of Mao’s China and the individualist primacy of America represents a greater wisdom than either society has recognized.
Some will ask, why censor pornography and not the violence that abounds in movies and TV? Excessive violence in the entertainment world is an important social problem with which we should be concerned. But as entertainment, illegal violence is normally presented as an evil to be punished while pornography presents heedless, irresponsible sex as a good to be sought. That difference is a quantum leap, and one which warrants giving priority to pornography control.
Does history warn us that effective enforcement is impossible? As in every area of crime, perfect enforcement is, of course, unattainable. But those who believe we cannot stem the pornographic tide overlook the probability that a few stiff jail sentences (not just fines) would go a long way toward diminishing the supply of pornography. If major publishers or distributors were obliged to spend years in jail for their criminal activities, pornography would rapidly revert to its former underground status. And that is where it belongs.
Isn’t any censorship terribly dangerous, since it may spread to other and wholly legitimate publishing enterprises? Won’t censorship spread to the newspapers, to the political journals, and elsewhere?
Such questions provide more of the solemn malarkey the anticensorship forces have peddled so long—and so successfully. We have had obscenity laws throughout our history and they have never led to a creeping repression of press freedom. There is not a shred of empirical evidence to support the notion that censorship of obscenity threatens free expression of heretical political, social, or religious ideas. What sensible person really believes that if we enforce the antipornographic laws we would start censoring the New York Times?
What, then, should conservative Christians (and others who share their concern) do about all this?
Antipornography laws currently are not being enforced. Just why state laws should be enforced against the rest of us but not against pornographers is unclear. Why should they be privileged characters? Unhappily, experience makes it clear that the laws will not be enforced unless concerned citizens demand it—and hold the proper officials responsible if they fail to do so.
An appropriate course of action would seem to be first to ask your librarian to help you locate the provision of your state law that deals with obscenity. Then obtain copies of several of the more flagrantly obscene publications sold in your community—publications that deal primarily with explicit sexual activity in pornographic fashion. Take those offensive publications to your local prosecutor, invite his attention to the law, remind him of the “community standards” provision of Miller v. California (413 U.S. 15 [1973], pp. 23–24) and request that the local dealers (or publisher, if the magazine originates in your city) be prosecuted. If the prosecutor is uncooperative, ask members of your church to write a staggered succession of individually composed letters to local newspapers, courteously but firmly demanding that the obscenity laws be enforced, and briefly explaining why. If the prosecutor is an appointed officer, let the elected official who appointed him know that failure to enforce obscenity laws will seriously affect his political future. If the prosecutor is locally elected, the warning should go directly to him.
The same general procedure should apply to “adult films” that feature explicit sexual behavior. Someone must undergo the disagreeable task of viewing some of these films in order knowledgeably to protest their showing, but that is not an insuperable barrier.
To be most effective, such a campaign should be conducted by those more temperate, rather than those more strident, members of the religious community—and by those who have the interpersonal skills that successful community action requires. It is possible to be resolute and persistent without being shrill and obnoxious.
Finally, the Attorney General of the U.S. should become the recipient of a blizzard of mail requesting the enforcement of the federal law that prohibits obscene materials from moving in interstate commerce. Wave after wave of local prosecutions in every state, along with prosecutions in federal district courts, could deal the pornographers the staggering blow they so richly deserve—and which social responsibility requires.
With morality, logic, and the law all on their side, it is imperative for concerned Christians to organize at the community level and channel their indignation into effective action. If they lose this battle by default—by refusing to do what they can—their consciences will have a heavy burden to bear. It is their children—and everyone’s children—whose future is involved.
A report on how citizens in Fort Pierce, Florida, banded together to close down X-rated movies is on page 52.