Page 5703 – Christianity Today (2025)

Thomas Howard

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If one were vouchsafed in a dream to listen in on two voices, and he heard the following fragments—“Who am I?” “… my self-concept,” “… identity crisis,” “… self-awareness”—uttered repeatedly, and then were asked to guess from this little scrap of data, what century he was listening in on, he would not have much trouble deciding. It will probably not have been Aeschylus and Herodotus talking, nor Aquinas and Siger of Brabant, nor even Alexander Pope and Dr. Arbuthnot. His first guess would be, “Those were voices from the twentieth century.”

How can he tell? Why would he not guess fifth century B.C. Athens, or thirteenth century Paris, or eighteenth century London? Because, he would tell us, he was assuming that the voices were typical of their era, and those remarks belong to the twentieth century.

And he will have been correct, of course. No other century or culture of which we have any records has ever been so galvanized by the particular notion that underlies those remarks. No Icelandic saga, no Hebrew psalm, no Navajo legend, no Latin georgic, no Russian novel, has anyone talking quite like that.

The point here is, those fragments are straws in an enormous wind. You can tell a great deal about what is occupying people in a given era by listening to what they say. And you do not have to read very far in the annals or poetry, say, of Greece, or the Middle Ages, or the Enlightenment, before you pick up some notions as to what big questions were at work in their imaginations. If you find people consulting oracles you will conclude (correctly) that they thought it was terribly important to find out what the gods wanted them to do. Again, if you find them confessing their sins to a priest, you will conclude (correctly) that they thought it was terribly important to behave themselves in a way that would bear the scrutiny of some divine tribunal. Or again, if you find them briskly dismantling erstwhile superstitions in the name of Reason, you may safely infer that they trust this faculty.

Our own time is especially marked by the tormented pursuit of the question Who Am I? To say “especially marked” is to understate it: say rather hag-ridden, or bedevilled. We seek the answer earnestly, assiduously, nay desperately. There is hardly a single exchange of cocktail-party chat which in its own blithe way does not assume this vast, laborious quest as being the natural occupation of us all. “My dear, my shrink told me.…” “Oh, she’s very insecure.” “I have this thing about my self-image.” “He’s going to take a year off from seminary to try and find himself.”

But it is not only in random chat that we hear the news of this pursuit. The whole enterprise of art in our century bears loud witness to it. The sole burden of poetry, theater, cinema, painting, and fiction in our time is that somewhere in there we lost ourselves and hence must grope pathetically for any straw of affirmation that may float by in the dark. From Eliot’s The Waste Land, through the theater of Ionesco, Pinter, Beckett, and Albee, the films of Bunuel, Truffaut, Robbe-Grillet, and Bergman, the painting of the Dadaists, the Bauhaus, the surrealists, and the ilk of Warhol, to the novels of Faulkner, Camus, Vonnegut, and Saul Bellow, we have sent up flares signaling “Help! What are we?” (We hesitate even to make the cautious affirmation implicit in the question “who are we?”)

What does it all spring from? From two assumptions, really: first, that it is in fact our business to look into this question of our identity; and second, that somewhere in there the quarry has got lost.

To take the second one first: everyone’s identity has got lost somewhere. That is the assumption. Who am I? we ask, and can find neither an answer nor any sage who can tell us where to look. To be sure, we attempt it: you can stop at a thousand roadside palmists in Florida and find solace; or you can consult the stars in the afternoon paper in the hope that the Archer or the Crab will help; or you can sign in with a guru of one sort or another, or join a group that will nudge you along towards an answer by getting you to sit in a circle with them, or breathe with them, or take off your clothes, or dance with them, or work through your hang-ups with them. People used to be told to go on an ocean voyage when they were at the end of their tether, the notion being not so much that they find out who they were as that they simmer down and let the salt and the spray and the breeze freshen them up. There was a more remote time when people turned for help to soothsayers, priests, or sibyls, since these practitioners are adept at peering into the darkness where the god lurks and it was the god who knew the answer they wanted. Now we turn to other practitioners who are adept at peering into the darkness where our identity lurks, since that is what we seek rather than the god.

Where was it lost, this thing that we pursue with such zeal? Is it not a naked contradiction for us to be asserting that such a thing as our identity can even be in doubt? Surely (a visitor from another planet might protest) you can’t mean what you are saying—that you aren’t sure who you are? You’re you, clearly. What is it you want to know?

Ah, yes, we would have to explain wearily, but there’s more to it than that. These shells by means of which we present ourselves to you are mere carapaces. You think this is what we are, but if you were to poke into us a bit you would find that what is in there has only a very tenuous connection with what you see. In fact, we are almost afraid to raise the question, but a horrible doubt flits by now and again as to whether there is anything in there at all. We’ve tried poking, and whatever it is in there feels more and more like less and less. Most disquieting.

But how, our interlocutor might pursue, did this state of affairs come about? I have never yet met creatures who weren’t sure who they were. Most creatures aren’t especially interested, much less puzzled, by the fact that they are, leave alone who they are. Dogs appear to have no problems on this level, and nothing we hear of angels indicates anything like it. But here you all are, paralyzed by the question. How did it all come about?

What would we say? It would be extremely difficult to rake back through history and locate the spot where the question Who am I pushed its way to center stage. We could probably find it somewhere after the Renaissance—somewhere in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, no doubt—when, having exiled the gods, we had nothing left to contemplate but ourselves.

But whether Adam knew any such curiosity would be impossible to guess, although given the perfectly harmonious nature of Eden, it may be doubted whether any disjuncture at all had been introduced into the blissful wholeness of his being whereby he might have been disposed to ask who he was. A certain distance is necessary between the asker of any question and the thing asked about, so that when we find an entity (a man) asking about himself, we have found an entity with a fissure running through the fabric of his being. An “asking self” stands on one side and peers across the fissure at the “asked-about self.” One way of imagining the perfection and integrity of Adam’s being is to say that he enjoyed, like God in whose image he had been made, an undivided wholeness (the Persons of the Trinity aren’t divisions) totally free from any perplexing and paralyzing question about itself. It may further be wondered whether self-consciousness was not introduced at the Fall, when we made a grab for varieties of knowledge that turned out to be too much for us. (Perhaps it was one of the flies in Pandora’s box, too.) Whatever may be the truth here, it is most interesting to note that in the picture of Eden in the Bible, there is not one rag of suggestion that Adam’s consciousness was ever turned toward himself. Two things are presented to him, neither of them himself. There is the earth, and he is told to subdue it and fill it and rule it, and to receive its bounty. And there is Eve. She is brought to him and immediately his attention is focused on this other. His eyes look at her and he bears witness of her in his first recorded words. She is the form of humanity made for the eyes of the man to contemplate, and vice-versa. There were no mirrors in Eden, and the myth of Narcissus may suggest something frightening and important about that.

But of course all this is conjecture. We can only make of Eden what we can from the sparse narrative. It is perhaps worth wondering about.

If we look through ancient history, we find that the question Who art Thou is much more lively than the question Who am I. Men seem to be troubled by the gods, who keep addressing them and presenting themselves to them and asking things of them. The Old Testament bears witness to this, too. Who art Thou, Lord? Alas, I am undone, I have seen the Lord. Where shall I hide from Thy presence? I will not let thee go except thou bless me. The main thing seems to be to come to terms, not with oneself but with what is required of one. There is, before very long, a whole Law, imposed by fiat from outside, describing in effect exactly how things will be, and demanding acquiescence on pain of death. Here is what we are to give our attention to. No one is asked for input. No one’s convenience or comfort is considered. And there is not a syllable’s worth of recognition given to any problems someone might have over discovering who he is.

That makes it sound grim beyond belief, but if we step back and look at the human phenomenon and how salvation came to it, some such picture emerges. It is all very alien to our gentle ways of thinking, and much too peremptory. God ought to have begun on a much more conciliatory note. He ought to have sat down with us and listened to us. We could have rapped with him about our hang-ups. We could have worked through our problems.

But alas, there it all is, this daunting set of absolutes, imposed on us from the top, and not a whisper in there allowing me time or room to discover myself first.

Or is it quite so grim? Put that way, it is daunting indeed. But then it turns out that the giver of that high Law is no capricious and maleficent deity tormenting his creatures as wanton boys torment flies. He is Elohim, Adonai, El Shaddai, Jehovah-nissi, the God of Abraham, even, it turns out, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ—Jesus Christ who loved to call himself the Son of Man. One of us. Immanuel.

Ah. Now there is relief. The picture, surely, has changed. The demands will be relaxed. He knows our frame. He was in all points tempted as we are. He is afflicted in all our afflictions. Perhaps he will help us out of our dilemma. Perhaps, being the Word of God, he will speak comfort to us, and affirm us in our sorrowful quest for ourselves. What does he say?

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Deny yourself. Follow me. Be kind. Be faithful. Blessed are the pure in heart, and the merciful, and those who mourn, and the peacemakers …

Yes. Yes of course. All that. But is there a word about my self-image? Can you tell me how to come to terms with myself? After all, I must find out who I am before I can do anything else.

Must you? To him that overcometh will I give a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it. Your identity, perhaps, is a great treasure, precious beyond your wildest imaginings, kept for you by the great Custodian of souls to be given to you at the Last Day when all things are made whole.

Some such picture as the above would seem to be indicated in the biblical emphasis. There is a curious lack of any suggestion that our business is to find out who we are. And, if we object that we have to work through our problems before we can set about disposing ourselves rightly vis-à-vis God and our neighbor, we find that the language of both testaments lacks what we might call any “problem-orientation.” We are not addressed, either by Yahweh from Sinai, or by the Son of Man from Olivet, as primarily creatures with problems. The cues given in the law and the prophets and the Gospel and the epistles seem, oddly enough for us men who live in the epoch of the quest for identity and self-realization, to point us right away from that focus, right away from much attention on ourselves as objects of our curiosity. Even the very injunctions to repent, or to keep our hearts with all diligence, or to examine ourselves, carry no suggestion that this self-examination is by way of discovering something there (myself) which will be the proper object for my attention. It is to be a clearing away of rubble and impediment so that I can get on with the business at hand, which is that I be delivered eventually from all forms of egoism, and that I learn that my real freedom and personhood will be discovered, lo and behold, not in looking for it, but in learning to love God and my neighbor. It takes the combined efforts of the Law, the prophets, the Gospel, and the epistles, to help me in this enterprise, but there it is.

There is an obvious objection to this hasty line of thought, of course. It would go something like this: surely you aren’t going to string together a few maxims from the Bible, and set them suddenly over against the entire, gargantuan preoccupation of our whole epoch? After all, this is the era of behavioral sciences. They are the sovereign disciplines in our century. Here we are, this late in history, only now uncovering the whole unhappy complex of things deep in our insides that poison the well for us, and you tell us to drop all that—the whole enterprise—and pick up a few scraps of Scripture and get on with it. That, surely, is bibliomancy. What about the whole burgeoning area of counselling? The industrialized, computerized, management-oriented, profit-obsessed, materialistic, rationalistic modern era has brutalized people; nay, worse, it has depersonalized them wholly, and is stamping them out in stereotypes like nuts and bolts from a press, when all the time their humanity cries out piteously for some recognition and attestation and liberation. And you want them to deny themselves. Fie.

This raises at once the question of the sense in which biblical categories are perennially valid. Do Christ’s words to us all need to be recast for this new age of ours, so remote from his early, simple world? Or again, should our understanding of his words be revised so that we hear in his apparently peremptory and harsh maxims some entirely fresh note, unheard by the Fathers, the Reformers, the Pietists, and the rest of our predecessors? Or again, is it a false problem altogether: is there no tension between these biblical suggestions that our great task is certainly not that of finding out who we are and our own earnest pursuit of this very thing?

Sooner or later it comes down, for any one of us, to how we understand these biblical cues for our own health, and how we are going to help the people who come to us struggling with what are called identity crises and other awful burdens laid on them by the cruelties of life. We can’t just quote “Deny yourself” at them and wave them away. How shall we bear faithful witness to the biblical vision of liberty and health and wholeness lying in a direction straight away from ourselves (for the motion of Charity is forever outwards) and at the same time patiently and mercifully help them along towards some capacity even to begin to perceive, then to grasp, this great and bracing and taxing self-forgetting bliss that they were made for?

It is a sticky question. For, as long as the Word of God lasts, there is no alternative vision of bliss possible, nor any new definition of freedom. We have no warrant to suggest alternatives. The saints are the ones who have won through to that glorious state of affairs—despite whatever frightful personal limitations they staggered along under—where giving equals receiving, and self-forgetfulness equals, lo, self-discovery. The white stone is given, not sought. If that name engraved on that stone is not our identity, then what is it?

Perhaps it is a question of our realizing two things: first, that like so many other thunderous achievements of modern civilization, this acute self-consciousness and self-scrutiny that has been laid on us by the sciences of the last 100 years may be a burden beyond our capacity to manage. Our ids may be there, so to speak, but they may be none of our business, just as the fruit in Eden was there but was not healthy for us to chew on.

Secondly, finding ourselves willy-nilly in such a situation, we may be obliged to use tools never before necessary in human history, the tools of psychological analysis and so forth, to help extricate us from the prison of our own building. But we shall have to remember that they are, precisely, tools, like forceps or scalpels, which may be called in to excise or gouge in order to relieve a terrible condition; but they are not part of the living thing itself; they are not bone and sinew and nerve. Or, to change the metaphor slightly, the scrutiny of ourselves may be like a drug or a purgative, swallowed not as food and nourishment, but in order to assist us as quickly as possible back to health, which is that state of affairs in which our own insides are working quietly and efficiently so that we can get on with the job. The Law and the Gospel may be like old prescriptions, stowed on a high shelf from earlier days. Perhaps the medicine they prescribe—confession (with its corollary of forgiveness), and obedience (with its corollary of freedom)—are more useful than we think. If a patient is so debilitated that he cannot swallow even these nostrums, then of course we must help him with all the secondary skills at our disposal. But sooner or later we will be wanting to get him to the point where he can take these, for then he will be en route to health.

But what of the original question, Who am I? The Christian vision would not be able to see it as the crucial question for us mortal men and women. We seem to have been obliged to affirm a paradox, namely that we get to Point A (real selfhood) by heading towards Point Z (self-forgetfulness—the sort of thing enjoined on us in the Law and the Gospels). Whoever we are, these identities of ours are in the keeping of a faithful and able Custodian, and they will be given to us one day. Our task now is to participate in the ripening of those identities by following the cues, not by pawing into the safe.

Paul D. Steeves is assistant professor of history and director of Russian studies at Stetson University in Deland, Florida. He has the Ph.D. from the University of Kansas and specializes in modern Russian history.

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John M. (Kim) Batteau

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More than orange juice flows from the Florida sunshine tree these days when Anita Bryant is around. Politics, lobbying, protest marches: she’s involved in all of these under the name of Save Our Children, Incorporated. Bryant asked Dade County, Florida, to repeal its ordinance guaranteeing the civil rights of homosexuals (i.e., banning discrimination against them in employment and housing). Such an ordinance, she claims, threatens our children, our homes, our way of life. Homosexuality is an abomination, declares Bryant. The voters of Dade County supported her; in June they repealed the ordinance.

Just what do Christians believe about homosexuality? What does the Bible say about it? Do we have answers for those who argue that Scripture speaks quietly about a gay life-style? Can it be argued that Paul condemns promiscuity, not homosexuality per se? After all, we are told, Jesus never mentioned homosexuality.

The Bible is frank about sexuality. We find no euphemisms or vague sentimentality there. In Genesis we learn that the human body is one of God’s good creations. Specifically, God shaped male (Hebrew, zakar) and female (Hebrew, neqevah). We find no mention of a third or fourth type of human sexual being. God created a biological difference out of which the other contours and polarities of maleness and femaleness emerge. He deliberately created male and female. This sexual difference is not an arbitrary or culturally conditioned convention, as some gay liberationists claim.

The fall affected every aspect of human life, including the sexual. Marriage is continually threatened by adultery (Gen. 12:17; 26:10), by incest (Gen. 19:36), by rape (Gen. 34:2), and by prostitution (Gen. 38:15 f.). The story of Sodom and Gomorrah vividly depicts homosexual lust linked with murderous hostility (Gen. 19:5 f.). These passages remind us of the fragility of sexual life in a perverse and often aggressive human society.

The Mosaic Law crystallized the creation order into precise, explicit forms. God’s commandments originate and terminate in the great indicative and imperative of biblical faith: “I am the LORD your God.… You shall have no other gods before me” (Exod. 20:2, 3). God gives us his interpretation of the goal of human life, day by day, season by season, task by task, relationship by relationship. And his verdict upon homosexual activity is inescapably clear: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination” (Lev. 18:22), and, “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them” (Lev. 20:13). Homosexuality violates the basic sexual structure God created, and he rigorously condemns it. In the instructions about punishment we find no qualifications about motivation or contributing factors, such as we do with rape (Deut. 22:23–29) or killing (Deut. 19:4–13). The act of homosexual love-making (“to lie with,” Hebrew, shakar eth), like bestiality (Lev. 18:23), has no excuse.

But what about the New Covenant? Hasn’t the harshness of the Old Testament law been superseded by the law of Christ, the law of love? Christ stopped the stoning of the woman caught in the act of adultery (John 8:1–11). And he softened the Pharisees’ too rigorous application of the law. Didn’t he bring in an age of grace rather than law, tolerance rather than severity?

While there might be some validity to that view (though not as popularly understood), it is nonetheless true that Christ in many ways strengthened the force of the law. He showed how God’s judgment extended into the far recesses of our secret imaginations: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matt. 5:27, 28). Jesus never intended to dispense with the Mosaic Law (Matt. 5:17); he wanted rather to clarify and extend its radical demands for perfection.

Paul’s writings give us in detail God’s mind on a wide range of ethical issues. In Romans one Paul talks about homosexual desire and activity and denounces it as “shameful lust” (Rom. 1:26, NIV). He characterizes homosexuality as abandoning “natural relations,” that is, the normal and normative heterosexual responses and behavior. The phrase “natural relation” (Greek, fusike chresis) refers directly to God’s creation order, nature (Greek, fusis), here meaning the way he intends man and woman to relate sexually.

Today some people assert that what Paul castigates here is homosexual promiscuity, not homosexual activity per se, and that God can tolerate homosexual monogamy just as easily as he can commend heterosexual monogamy. Is this exegetical proposal valid?

Paul certainly had in mind the entire range of homosexual practice in Greco-Roman culture. He would have known how Greeks and Romans justified this aberration to themselves. Plato in the Symposium and other writers of the classic Attic period had commended certain kinds of homosexuality. Certainly Paul would have told the Romans if any homosexual behavior were approved. He does this with other ethical issues: he carefully distinguishes a proper from a false use of meat offered to idols, he contrasts worthy and insufficient grounds for divorce or separation, he explains the difference between a good and bad use of the law and between genuine exhortation and uncalled-for rebuking. How would it be possible for Paul, who knew of the philosophically justified homosexual practice of the time, not to distinguish that from the “unnatural relations” he speaks of in Romans 1:26 if he intended such a distinction? And Paul criticizes not only the act of homosexual love-making but the “sinful desires of their hearts” and the “lust” that “inflamed” them. Just to have a homosexual desire, then, is sinful. Further, is it likely that Paul would overthrow the entire weight of Old Testament teaching on this subject, which had Jesus’ indirect but nevertheless forceful backing?

Paul in First Corinthians 6:9 again condemns all homosexual activity without qualification: “Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals … will inherit the kingdom of God.” Two Greek words are translated here by the one English word “homosexuals”: malakio, probably meaning the passive “female” partner in a relationship (NIV says “male prostitute,” for which malakos was used, but this may be constricting its meaning a bit), and arsenokoitai, meaning the active “male” partner (though it may have a more general meaning). These words were applied to any and every continuous homosexual engagement by the Greek authors, whether a monogamously permanent or a promiscuous one. Paul used these terms knowing precisely what he meant and how he would be interpreted. The attempt to avoid the force of his unambiguous intention is a pathetic piece of modern rationalistic evasion.

The current debate over homosexuality is complicated by the voices of psychologists who are often in strident conflict. Although Freud saw homosexuality as a definite psychosis that could be cured, there is currently no consensus about either the abnormality or the possibility of a cure for exclusive homosexuals. Here are some voices in favor of updating Freud: “Opinion among British psychiatrists has moved away from the traditional view that homosexuality is a disorder” (R. E. Barr and S. V. Catts, “Psychiatric Opinion and Homosexuality,” Journal of Homosexuality, Winter, 1974/75, p. 213). “The authors of this book are not in favor of continuing to regard such behavior as psychopathological” (G. C. Davison and J. M. Neale, Abnormal Psychology, 1974, p. 239). On the other hand, among diehard Freudians and Skinnerian behaviorists, homosexuality continues to be considered a serious dysfunctional illness or behavior pattern.

Although there is strife, it seems evident that the dominant opinion (amplified by a militant gay movement) is the one expressed by the highly regarded Dr. Thomas Chalmers of Detroit, Michigan. He asserts, as a result of his clinical investigations:

1. Homosexuals are no more neurotic or psychotic than heterosexuals.

2. Homosexuality is not a mental illness.

3. The only real distinction between homosexuals and heterosexuals is a non-voluntary sexual orientation resulting from a complex set of learning factors.

4. A lasting change of sexual orientation is improbable if not impossible.

5. The vast majority of males fall somewhere on a graded scale between homosexual and heterosexual and are therefore ambisexual in varying degrees of intensity.

Notice that Chalmers admits that homosexual behavior is learned. And what has been learned can, with God’s help, be unlearned.

Christian psychologist Ted R. Evans contested the approval granted homosexuality by the psychological establishment in an article for the Journal of Psychology and Theology (Spring, 1965) entitled “Homosexuality: Christian Ethics and Psychological Research.” Evans, a psychology fellow at the Neuropsychiatric Institute of UCLA, states what to most non-Christian psychologists must seem a gross absurdity: “Homosexual activity is in rebellion against God.” Evans cites research that in his opinion shows that there is no evidence whatever of any genetic or hormonal causes for homosexuality. Homosexuality, he says, is a “socially learned process” that can develop in a boy when the mother is frustrated and allies with the son against the father, the mother wanted a daughter, or the boy is rejected by girls in his peer group. Homosexual feelings cannot be condemned, he adds, though homosexual activity should be. Evans concluded that it is possible, however difficult, to change one’s predominant sexual response pattern.

Evans felt free to make the kind of moral judgment that Chalmers, under the influence of non-Christian presuppositions, is loathe to make. He concurs with Chalmers in denying organic origins for homosexual behavior. What seems to be at issue between them is the criterion of abnormality and the hope for a lasting change of behavior. It is no good for Chalmers to claim that homosexuals are no more neurotic or psychotic than heterosexuals, because it is precisely homosexual behavior that Evans, the Bible, and all of Christian tradition call abnormal, unnatural, and sinful. Nor does Chalmers’s skepticism about a cure threaten the case. Jay Adams and others give evidence of changed homosexuals.

Our society is going through a period of profound cultural unrest and open moral degeneration. The bill for homosexual rights introduced by Congressman Edward Koch (D-N. Y.) and the case of Larry Flynt and Hustler magazine are just two examples. Sadomasochistic and other pornographic literature infests our city streets. The propaganda for a homosexual life-style is part of this moral unrest.

The Christian Church must renew its dedication to uphold God’s high standards of purity, to feel compassion for men and women trapped by their own sins, and to go out into our society with a message of hope and salvation in Christ. Like Jesus did we should go where sinners are and there bring God’s judgment and healing grace. Homosexuals are not freaks or strange creatures in a world of straights. They are human beings, made in God’s image, people to whom God’s message comes in exactly the same way it comes to all of us. Homosexuals must not be left with a stern word of condemnation from a distant and repulsed body of people called the Church; instead they must be faced with a Church, with Christians, with a God who reaches out to bless even through condemnation.

- More fromJohn M. (Kim) Batteau

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You Can Smell When You Can’t Say a Word

“Patricia French Cosmetics, created especially for Christian women.…”

Those words caught my eye, riveted my attention, in the midst of other ads for old books, folding tables, safes, and a fundraising dinner on a two-page spread in a Christian magazine. Or maybe it was the blonde, bare-shouldered woman in the ad.

What are “cosmetics created especially for Christian women”?

Maybe mud packs from the River Jordan.

Or Howfirma foundation cream, Whiter-Than-Snow cleansing cream, Charisma moisturizer.

Total Joy deodorant.

Skinner astringent.

My Salvation perfume.

Myrrh cologne.

Fuller’s soap (99 44/100 per cent pure).

Thou perfume.

Ephesians five-two-seven wrinkle cream.

Stick-on plastic fingernails, with the Four Spiritual Laws imprinted thereon. (Thumbnail in contrasting ivy green.)

Barefoot cool stick-on plastic toenails, with the Four Spiritual Laws imprinted thereon. (Big toe: choice of Pat Boone’s, Andrae Crouch’s, or Tom Netherton’s photograph, all in living color.)

Come to think of it, I may be on the wrong track completely. Maybe these cosmetics have a special quality, something that sets Christian woman apart. Maybe if a non-Christian uses them, she’ll turn ugly, or her toenails will fall off.

That would be helpful. Then we could tell Christian women from non-Christian women by smelling them or looking at their toes.

EUTYCHUS VIII

Beware of Philosophy

A New Church In Poland

Some 50,000 Roman Catholics stood in the rain in Nowa Huta, Poland, last month during the dedication of the first Catholic church in that postwar industrial town near Cracow. Its design is based on Noah’s Ark, and its capacity is 5,000. Funding came from both inside and outside Poland.

The event was symbolically important. Nowa Huta was originally conceived as a new socialist town, one that needed no church. Permission to build a church was first sought by Catholic leaders in 1956, but it was not granted until 1967. In 1960, hundreds of believers, including old women, moved to protect from police removal a wooden cross that had served as a center for open-air worship. The church people threw rocks at the police, who responded with tear gas. In the end, the cross remained.

In a sermon during the consecration service, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla said that Nowa Huta (New Foundry) was built originally with the idea “that it will be a city without God, without a church.” But, said he, “Christ came here and with the people who are working here said that man’s history cannot be judged by economic criteria of production and consumption.” Man, he asserted, is greater than that.

The week preceding the consecration was a troubled one. On May 7 the battered body of a 23-year-old student leader of Poland’s dissident movement was found in an apartment stairwell in Cracow. His colleagues claimed he was murdered by government toughs in retribution, a charge authorities denied. Thousands in Cracow and Warsaw attended memorial masses for the student. Authorities arrested dissident leaders in an apparent attempt to head off demonstrations.

In a separate development during the week, the Central Council of the Polish Catholic Bishops Conference released a study of “some urgent social and moral questions of great importance for the life of the church in Poland.” The council expressed concern over apparent government moves to curtail or eliminate certain church administrative, educational, and communications centers. It also called attention to an “intensification of atheistic propaganda” directed at Polish youth.

Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, Poland’s Catholic primate, injected his advice into the week’s clamor, too. He called on the government to “revise [its] whole system of governing.”

Giving

Americans gave a record $29.42 billion to charitable causes last year, an increase of 9.4 per cent over 1975, according to a report of the American Association of Fund-Raising Counsel. Of this amount, 43.6 per cent ($12.84 billion) went to churches and other religious organizations, an increase of 9.9 per cent over 1975. The next largest share, $4.37 billion, went to charities involved in health operations.

Ethiopia: Pulling Out

“Communications are so erratic” within Ethiopia and between that African nation and the outside world, said a veteran missions executive, “that it’s hard to find out what’s going on there.”

Reports from a variety of agencies indicate that “what’s going on there” is that the missionary presence is being reduced drastically and by the end of this month may be down to less than half its 1974 size. It was three years ago that a coup toppled Emperor Haile Selassie, but differences between the revolutionaries have now led to what one observer calls “anarchy all over the place.” What had been described earlier this year as the largest struggle within a black African country (except for the Nigerian civil war of the last decade) last month took on international dimensions with the introduction of Cuban military “advisors.”

Generally deteriorating conditions, rather than any direct government policy, are forcing the departure of many missionaries. The central government has taken over the Lutheran “Radio Voice of the Gospel” (see April 15 issue, page 57), but other seizures of mission property have been at the order of local “peasant associations.” These associations have been given considerable autonomy by the military rulers in Addis Ababa. Sudan Interior Mission, the largest missionary force in the country, has had its largest medical institutions “nationalized,” for instance. Four United Presbyterian mission station properties have been “nationalized.” But the local governing authorities in a number of communities are reported to have asked overseas workers to stay and have decided against taking over their properties.

Even where expatriate Christian personnel are welcome to stay in certain territories, they face nearly impossible working conditions. In addition to the breakdown in communications, civil strife has disrupted transportation. Many commodities, including fuel, are frequently unavailable at any price.

Because of the unsettled conditions throughout the nation, embassies are telling missionaries from their countries that their safety cannot be guaranteed. The Ethiopian government itself has advised foreigners in some parts of the nation to go to safer areas.

One of the keys to continuing work in remote areas for many missions is the availability of Missionary Aviation Fellowship aircraft. Regular runs of those planes ended last month, and MAF asked government permission to remove the aircraft from Ethiopia. An MAF spokesman said there was a possibility that his organization could still provide some emergency flights, but routine work was getting “more and more complicated and difficult.”

Another important factor in operating remote stations is two-way radio, which gives isolated missionaries a method of keeping in touch with colleagues. SIM’s permit to operate such a communications system in Ethiopia expires at the end of this month. Most of the stations left without aircraft service and radio are being closed, though some will continue to be operated by national Christians.

Four Southern Baptist missionaries have spent some time in Ethiopian jails during the turmoil. One spent sixteen days in detention on what Baptist officials called a “firearms technicality.” No charges were ever filed against the others, and they were freed after two days of arrest. Their arrest was not seen as part of any general campaign against missionaries, however. Less than half of the Southern Baptist group is remaining in the country, and the advisability of their staying will be decided in July.

The Lutheran World Federation announced that all expatriate personnel who were assigned to Radio Voice of the Gospel have now left Ethiopia.

The SIM force in Ethiopia was down to 163 (from a high of over 300) last month, but an early-June departure of missionaries being sent home was expected to drop the strength to well under 100. There are some 2,300 SIM-related congregations in Ethiopia.

Only a “skeleton crew” of United Presbyterian workers—mostly single people—is staying through summer. After June departures, only about a dozen of the fifty usually assigned will remain.

One missions executive said every board he has heard from has “put a hold” on sending personnel into Ethiopia. In most cases that includes missionaries scheduled to return to the field from furlough. Several of the agencies have already started reassigning their personnel to nearby African nations or to other work.

Death in Zaire

One United Methodist missionary was killed and two others were reported missing late last month as a result of the invasion of Zaire’s southern province of Shaba. Word of the death of Glen J. R. Eschtruth, 49, came as his wife and eight other missionaries were evacuated from Kapanga. They had been detained since early March, and Eschtruth, supervisor of the Methodist mission’s medical work in the Kapanga area, was reportedly kidnapped in mid-April. The State Department confirmed his death.

As Zaire’s President Mobutu returned from the Shaba skirmishes to a triumphant welcome in Kinshasa, two Methodist missionaries were still unaccounted for. Frank Anderson and Stanley Maughlin had stayed on to look after the station at Sandoa when other workers were evacuated March 13. When Zairean forces retook Sandoa last month, the men were not there, and local reports indicated that retreating invaders had taken them into Angola.

Eschtruth, a graduate of Asbury College, had been in Zaire since 1961. He supervised eighteen rural clinics as well as the hospital in Kapanga.

German Get-togethers

Thousands of West German evangelicals took part in last month’s three-day Gemeindetag (Fellowship Day) conference in Dortmund, a city of 650,000 in the Ruhr valley. The event, organized by leaders of the evangelical wing in West Germany’s state (Lutheran) church, featured German evangelist Gerhard Bergmann (whose books have sold three million copies) and Latin American evangelist Luis Palau, president of the California-based Overseas Crusades mission agency. Some 35,000 people attended the final rally, held in a stadium and televised over a major network. It was the first time an evangelical program was broadcast live in West Germany, according to Gemeindetag officials.

Earlier, Palau was guest evangelist at Weg 77 in nearby Essen, where crowds during the week of meetings fluctuated between 2,500 and 4,500. The evangelist also spoke at the university and other schools in Essen. Weg (Way) was organized by the Evangelical Alliance of Essen and coordinated by Ulrich Parzany, a youth evangelist and the pastor of Essen’s largest church. Parzany said he was pleasantly surprised by the major attention given to the crusade by the media. Although 95 per cent of Essen’s people are listed as belonging to the church, only 7 per cent attend, he pointed out. (The statistics are comparable for much of heavily populated Ruhr region, which is in the western part of the country.)

After the meetings in Dortmund, Palau traveled to politically troubled Argentina, the land where he was born, for a week-long youth crusade in Luna Park in Buenos Aires.

Church of Compassion: Going For Broke

When James Eugene Ewing—known as “the Reverend” by the estimated half a million “members” of his “mail order” Church of Compassion—moved his operation from Texas to a lavishly redecorated old movie theater in downtown Los Angeles three years ago, he had every reason to appear confident. After all, his advice on fund-raising techniques had helped save evangelist Oral Roberts from financial disaster six years earlier. Other evangelists too had profited by his counsel.

The 44-year-old onetime dirt-floor revival-tent preacher rented a mansion in Beverly Hills opposite the home of Pat Boone and worked at developing his church. He held only occasional services in the theater, yet took in $3 to $4 million a year. He leased a dozen expensive cars, including three Cadillacs, a Rolls Royce, and a Stutz Black Hawk.

Now all that is gone, for Ewing and his church filed for bankruptcy last month in Los Angeles federal court. No spokesman for Ewing or the church could be located, but it was learned that he was plagued by about fifty lawsuits, dwindling contributions, and rising costs for publication of World Compassion magazine. The bankruptcy petition listed more than $2.7 million in secured and unsecured claims and only $486,000 in assets, most of the latter in antique furniture and works of art that adorn the theater-church. There was also a piece of property valued at $120,000 in Fort Worth, where the church was originally chartered in 1958 as Camp Meetings Revivals.

Ewing, who is divorced, in recent years drew a salary of between $63,000 and $76,000. He personally guaranteed some of the loans made to the church, in one instance pledging as collateral his $40,000, forty-seven-foot boat. Two other church officials, M. R. McElroth and O. Duane Snyder, also filed for bankruptcy.

Portents of the church’s financial fall were evident last year when nearly half of the thirty-two persons on the staff were laid off and others found that their pay checks bounced. In April, services at the theater were halted.

According to an “unauthorized” biography of Oral Roberts by former associate Wayne Robinson, Ewing was a master at eliciting contributions through mail appeals. In the past he had helped Roberts, Rex Humbard, Billy James Hargis, T. L. Osborn, Don Stewart (A. A. Allen’s successor), and others. Stripped of embellishments, the pitch was that if you give a dollar to God (through the evangelist), God will bless you with two. Ewing created the slogan that was to become a Roberts hallmark: “Something good is going to happen to you!”

The turning point for Roberts, said Robinson, came in 1968 when Ewing told him to write supporters that he would take all their letters into his prayer tower and pray for their requests for three days and then write replies. The appeal was so successful, Robinson recalls, that sacks of mail overflowed the prayer tower and donations in 1969 doubled to $12.3 million. Another admirer of Ewing fiscal genius was Humbard, for whom Ewing once composed a letter that Robinson said brought in an average return of $64 per copy.

Ewing sometimes hosted lavish banquets, to which he invited leaders of religious organizations. Here he would advertise his fund-raising services. One source said Ewing offered his help on a commission basis.

Although Ewing had only an eighth-grade education, his folksy form letters—with words purposely misspelled—were personalized by computer typed-in names and mailed to as many as 1.5 million homes a month, a worker said. Promotion campaigns often involved mailing inexpensive items like prayer cloths and glow-in-the-dark light-switch plates “free” in return for donations. Particularly controversial was the church’s Giant Family Bible plan. Bibles that cost the church $10, including mailing charges, were “given” to members who signed a pledge card committing themselves to paying $108 in monthly installments of $6.

By filing the voluntary bankruptcy petition, Ewing and the church may now start anew in Los Angeles or elsewhere, free of the $2.7 million in church debts. A former employee said Ewing had held a crusade in Florida recently and perhaps would try to relocate the church there.

RUSSELL CHANDLER

Religion in Transit

An elderly woman tourist from Missouri was stricken with a heart attack on the Capitol steps in Washington last month. Democratic congressman Robert J. Cornell of Wisconsin was summoned. Cornell, one of two Catholic priests in Congress (the other is Robert F. Drinan of Massachusetts), administered last rites. The woman died later at a hospital.

Six Canadian church bodies have called on President Carter to back their plea for an “open-ended moratorium” on the proposed construction of an oil and gas pipeline from Alaska across western Canada. Among other things, the churches want land claims to be settled, rights of Indians to be guaranteed, and environmental safeguards to be instituted before construction begins. The church coalition includes Catholics, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Mennonites, and the United Church of Canada.

Separatist preacher Carl McIntire has taken up yet another cause: he wants to stop the switch from Fahrenheit to Celsius (or Centigrade) temperature readings. He says it’s all part of a Soviet plan to take over the world—by degrees.

Signed into Rhode Island law last month was a measure prescribing a period of silent meditation not to exceed one minute at the start of the day in all the state’s public schools.

The United Methodist Board of Global Ministries adopted a resolution urging the U.S. government to break diplomatic relations with Taiwan and seek to establish them with Peking.

On the second anniversary of the fall of Cambodia, Klong Yai Baptist Church was chartered, the first Cambodian church organized in Thailand. Located in a refugee camp, the church has 251 charter members, most of them Cambodians but some Vietnamese and Chinese. Nearly 600 persons have been baptized in the Klong Yai camp since Southern Baptist missionary Daniel R. Cobb and nalional worker Has Savile (the church’s pastor) began work there. The pair and another missionary have also baptized nearly 1,250 in three other camps, according to press sources.

- More fromStephen R. Sywulka

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For months, an intense struggle has been going on between modern religious groups known popularly as “cults” and their enemies: parents of members, professional deprogrammers, and even—in some places—the political, judicial, and law-enforcement establishment.

It is hard to tell which side is winning. Ever since parents discovered last year that through conservatorship (guardianship) proceedings they can gain temporary legal custody of their adult young, they have been picking off members of the cults by the scores and possibly by the hundreds (see February 4 issue, page 57). During the period of custody, deprogrammers work at dislodging the member from his or her cult psychologically, and in more instances than not it seems to work. With the young person no longer interested in returning to the cult, the custody case is dropped, and there is not much else the cult can do about it in court.

But now the cults are fighting back, and they are getting strong support from legal experts and rights leaders, including some in the mainline church community. One important weapon is the lawsuit that can be filed by a member who survives—or escapes—deprogramming attempts and returns to the fold. There have been several such suits recently:

• Donna Seidenberg Bavis, 24, a Hare (pronounced hah-ree) Krishna devotee, last month filed a $500,000 federal lawsuit in Baltimore against eleven persons, including a judge in Montgomery County, Maryland, a lawyer, and several deprogrammers. It may be the first time a judge has been sued for issuing a secret order finding a person mentally incompetent without psychiatric testimony and due process. The case is the first major federal lawsuit on the East Coast designed to prevent the practice of deprogramming adult members of religious groups through court-issued guardianship orders. Judge Richard B. Latham’s order specifically authorized “lay persons” to counsel, examine, and treat Mrs. Bavis. She is represented by a coalition of lawyers from the Mental Health Law Project, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

• Wendy Helander, 20, a member of Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, filed a $9 million suit in New York last month against seven persons. She became a “Moonie” two years ago, and twice her parents seized her for unsuccessful deprogramming episodes. The second time, her suit alleges, she was taken from the church’s Barrytown, New York, campus by her parents and deprogrammers and held for eighty-six days in twelve places, where her civil rights were violated. She says she has been in hiding in church centers since February, 1976. Those sued include Ted Patrick, the pioneer deprogrammer from San Diego now serving time in a Colorado jail for such activities, Joseph Alexander, his wife Esther and son Joseph, Jr. (they help staff a deprogramming center and rehabilitation facility run by the Freedom of Thought Foundation in Tucson, Arizona), George Swope, an American Baptist minister who teaches at Westchester Community College in New York (he deprogrammed his daughter from the Moon group), and Citizens Engaged in Reuniting Families, an anti-cult organization Swope helps to direct. Attorney Jeremiah Gutman says his client’s suit seeks to prevent imposition of the thoughts and desires of one person on another by unlawful and forceful means. (A Connecticut court earlier awarded Miss Helander $5,000 from Patrick.)

• Father Philaret Taylor, 22, a member of an Old Catholic monastery in Oklahoma City, filed a $3.3 million suit against twelve persons, including his parents, the Alexanders, and the three top Freedom of Thought Foundation figures: Kevin M. Gilmartin, Michael Trauscht, and Wayne N. Howard.

• Susan Jungclaus, a member of Victor Weirwille’s The Way sect, filed a $20,000 suit in Minnesota against her parents, a Lutheran pastor, and five others for attempting to deprogram her. (Her parents countered with a $1 million suit against The Way for alienation of affection, but the judge threw it out of court.)

• Nancy Lofgren, 22. of Rochester, Minnesota, filed an $800,000 suit against twelve persons, including a county sheriff and two deputies, for attempting to deprogram her from a small sect led by Brother Rama Behera of Shewano, Wisconsin. Behera is described as a Hindu convert to Christianity who claims that Jesus appeared to him.

• Julie Appelbaum, a Jewish woman with no religious training who joined the Moon movement, filed a $1 million suit against the Freedom of Thought Foundation. Under a guardianship order, she was whisked away from a Moon center in Oakland, California, to Tucson, where she smuggled out a letter to her lawyer, Ralph Baker. He succeeded in getting her a court-ordered psychological test, and as a result she was released. Baker, of Armenian Apostolic and Seventh-day Adventist extraction, is a leading West Coast foe of deprogramming. He says a common criminal has more rights than a person in conservatorship proceedings.

Some parents still resort to pre-conservatorship tactics like Patrick’s early body-snatch routine—but at considerable risk. A Montgomery County, Maryland, grand jury recently handed down an indictment against nine persons for abducting 23-year-old Karen Marie Mischke, a worker in a Moon office in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. The nine, including Miss Mischke’s mother, are charged with kidnapping, false imprisonment, assault, and other crimes, and if they are found guilty they can face prison sentences of up to sixty years.

Deprogramming received some bad press with the disclosure last month by Houston Chronicle reporter Louis Moore that Patrick had attempted to deprogram a member of the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer in Houston. Although the church is charismatic oriented it can hardly be classified as a cult (Patrick maintains it is on his list of 5,000). Huffed Bishop J. Milton Richardson of Houston: “It is a bona fide Episcopal church in good standing in the Diocese of Texas.”

Patrick was retained for the Houston assignment by the American Baptist mother of Patrick Willis, 28, who grew up in American Baptist and Evangelical Free churches. The deprogramming attempt took place last November—when everyone assumed Patrick was in an Orange County, California, jail, doing time in a deprogramming case. Actually, he was serving under a work-release program with the understanding that he would refrain from questionable activities.

Reporter Moore also came across Joyce Daly, 20, who was deprogrammed out of The Church at Houston, a branch of the Local Church movement of evangelist Witness Lee. The deprogramming team included a psychiatrist and an Assemblies of God campus minster. Miss Daly, who was a member of The Church for about eighteen months, now believes it is a cult. She describes her attendance at three ten-day Witness Lee conferences in Anaheim, California, as “brainwashing” experiences. Elders of the church deny it is a cult, and they say the Anaheim conferences are no more intensive than those sponsored by the Southern Baptist Convention.

Like Miss Daly, many of those who undergo deprogramming emerge with strong negative views toward the group they were once willing to die for, and they become active in trying to lead others out.

The batting average of the deprogrammers may be reflected by the case of “the Faithful Five” in San Francisco. In March, California superior court judge S. Lee Vavuris ruled that five adult members (four women and one man, ranging in age from 21 to 26) of the Unification Church should be placed in custody of their parents for thirty days. He did not bar deprogramming during the custody but specified that the parents should be present at all times.

Lawyer Ralph Baker appealed the ruling on behalf of the Unification Church, and four days later the California Court of Appeals decreed that no attempts should be made to change the five’s religious faith while the constitutionality of the conservatorship law was being argued (deprogrammers, however, had already done some work). On April 12 the appeals court released the five from their parents’ custody and allowed those who wished to to return to the Moon church. Only the man, John Hovard, Jr., 24, returned. The women instead went to Tucson for a month of rehabilitation. They said that “hearing both sides” in court and talking with ex-Moonies between sessions led them to make the break. One woman, Barbara Underwood, said she now believes she was “definitely under mind control” as a Moonie and that the issue must be exposed to the American public. Retorted Hovard: “Deprogramming is brainwashing!”

Some powerful voices are speaking out on the topic. Deprogramming, says executive director James Wood of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, “is a serious violation of religious liberty and poses a threat to groups other than cults.” And rights specialist Dean Kelley of the National Council of Churches calls deprogramming “the most outrageous infringement of religious liberty in a generation.”

In Significant

Publication of the new California state government telephone book was held up for more than a month over a religious issue. On the cover is a two-color satellite photograph of Earth, accompanied by a quotation from the first chapter of Genesis: “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” The quote raised questions of whether the directory is constitutionally permissible because of its cover design, which was selected by Governor Gerald Brown. Attorney General Yvelle J. Younger was asked to study the issue and render a legal opinion.

Weeks later, Younger ruled that the book is okay constitutionally. He compared the quotation to the phrase “In God We Trust” on U.S. coins. Both, he said, are devoid of religious significance.

Open Tenure

How much is academic respectability worth? For Davidson College, sometimes described by admirers as “the Princeton of Southern Presbyterians,” it may cost the last link in the faith commitment it once had.

Trustees of the North Carolina college approved on first reading last month a proposal that would allow non-Christians to hold tenured faculty and staff positions. Final approval is expected at an October board meeting. Hundreds of faculty members and students had pressured the board to change the rules after the college withdrew a job offer to Ronald Linden, a political science teacher who is Jewish. Linden was offered a teaching post after being told of the school’s policy that generally restricts tenure to “committed Christians.” He accepted the offer but said he found the policy “repugnant” and would work to abolish it. At this point officials withdrew the offer.

At the height of the controversy the American Association of University Professors and the American Political Science Association announced they would investigate the case. (Linden has since accepted a job with the University of Pittsburgh.)

Andrew Leigh Gunn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, defended the church college’s right to “use religious criteria in selecting” teachers except when the college uses tax funds. Davidson, he said, received $170,000 under the North Carolina direct-tuition grant program that was recently upheld by a federal court. “We believe the court erred grievously in its decision, and the Davidson College case highlights it,” asserted Gunn.

Endangered Species

Twenty-two of the United Methodist Church’s 107 colleges and universities will have to close, merge, or find major new sources of financial support.

That is the upshot of findings by a special fifteen-member UMC commission. The commission declined to announce the names of the schools, choosing to notify the presidents first.

“This is not a death list nor a decision to withdraw church support but a ‘most endangered’ list,” commented T. Michael Elliott, the commission’s executive director. He and others, however, indicated that closure is a likely possibility for most of the schools. The findings, said Elliott, are based on public records and data from institutional audits.

The UMC sinks $20 million annually, plus additional money for capital improvements, into its educational institutions. It supports more colleges and universities than any other Protestant body. The schools are related to the UMC in a variety of ways, from loose historical connections to outright ownership by a regional unit of the denomination. Most support is channeled through regional units, but the twelve predominantly black colleges receive direct national support.

Seventeen other schools have questionable health, said the commission in its report. It advised the UMC’s staff to complete a major study of denominational higher education by 1980 that would lead to the recommended disaffiliation or merger of as many as thirty schools, leaving “roughly seventy-five institutions of maximum academic and fiscal strength” in which the UMC’s resources “would be concentrated.”

The commission also recommended:

• That scholarship and loans be limited to UMC members attending denominational institutions.

• That as a condition of continued affiliation with the church, a college or university must be accredited, must submit a written statement of agreement regarding its church relationship, and must be financially viable.

Catholic Labor Pains

William Ball can turn a neat phrase. A lawyer from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he has a national reputation based on some of the phrases he has turned to win church-state cases. One of his toughest cases is now before the courts, and he has been doing some overtime semantic work.

He is representing pastors in the Philadelphia Catholic archdiocese who do not want the National Labor Relations Board to conduct a union-representation election among lay teachers in their parochial elementary schools. The federal agency has no business in the church schools, Ball declared. He likened the NLRB’s competence in religious matters to that of “an orangutan playing a violin.”

Supreme Court justice William J. Brennan, Jr., was not very impressed by the argument, however. In May he cleared the way for the election to be held this month, but he ordered that the ballots must be impounded until federal courts dispose of certain appeals. Ball has promised an appeal to the full Supreme Court on behalf of the pastors. They have vowed to refuse to cooperate in any way with the election. They say that they will deny the use of church property and will refuse to provide lists of teachers to the NLRB or the union.

A similar case from Gary, Indiana, was turned back by the Supreme Court early last month. The tribunal refused to hear any arguments of the constitutional issues until all “administrative remedies” are exhausted by the bishop who wants to prevent NLRB involvement in a disputed election there. In a “friend of the court” brief in that case, the house counsel for the American Baptist Churches argued that the NLRB should not be allowed to become excessively entangled in church affairs.

An appeal is also coming to the nation’s top court over the lay-teacher unionization issue from the archdiocese of Los Angeles.

Lawyers for all the bishops fighting the NLRB are having to weigh their words lest they seem to contradict the church’s social teachings regarding the rights of workers to organize.

Expensive Help

A 1971 firebombing of a grocery store in the North Carolina coastal city of Wilmington has become an international issue. One reason the world knows about it is that the United Church of Christ has put over $500,000 into the case, in addition to $400,000 in bond money for the defendants—better known as “The Wilmington Ten.”

A North Carolina judge, after a two-week hearing, last month denied a new trial for the ten. Soviet journalists and East German television crews came to Burgaw, North Carolina, to report on the hearing. As a result, when the representatives of the signatory nations of the Helsinki accords meet in Belgrade this summer to review human rights in Europe and North America, the Wilmington case is likely to be Exhibit Number One to show that the United States is not without problems.

The principal defendant and the leader of the ten is Ben Chavis, field representative of the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice. The UCC claims he was dispatched to Wilmington in 1971 to calm a tense racial situation, but the state accused him of leading a group that set the store afire. The ten were convicted in 1972. During last month’s hearing, witnesses at the original trial recanted some of the testimony that led to the convictions. One of the key witnesses, however, recanted his earlier recantation. The judge ruled that there had been no “substantial denial” of the group’s constitutional rights.

The UCC plans to appeal the latest North Carolina decision. Chavis was reportedly ordained by an independent congregation, but he does not hold UCC ministerial credentials. He was hired by the UCC agency in 1970 as a community organizer. His eventual cost to the 1.8-million-member denomination may eventually run to more than $1 million. UCC president Joseph H. Evans acknowledged that it took a lot of work to keep up the support for the case. He said, “You’ve got to tell the story all the time, up and down, across the church through campaigns, literature, meetings.”

Among those in Burgaw to rally the pro-Chavis forces was Angela Davis, who drew wide church attention several years ago when United Presbyterian funds were used in her defense. The Marxist teacher was also the star of a Wilmington Ten rally in Paris.

Ford: The End Is Not Yet

In a fifteen-minute commencement address at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, former President Gerald R. Ford said that his faith in Christ had deepened during his stay in the White House. “My presidency led to a great reliance on God,” he said, mentioning how he had sought God’s help and wisdom on various occasions. Leaving the White House was “not the end of the world,” he affirmed, because he possessed “the conviction that God works his own way on our lives.”

Ford’s voice cracked with emotion as he spoke about his wife’s struggle with cancer in 1974: “Those were the days we came to a deeper understanding about our relationship with ourselves and Jesus. We could see for the first time that Christ’s strength is made perfect through our own weaknesses.”

The 181 graduating students and 2,000 visitors gave the former President a warm ovation. Ford remained on the platform to congratulate his son Michael, 26, the recipient of a Master of Divinity degree. The younger Ford plans to engage in a youth ministry.

Camp Safety

If youth camps across the country—including church camps—have a safe season this summer, it will be with no thanks to the federal government. Capitol Hill advocates of federal regulation of camp health and safety are not optimistic about getting any of their bills through Congress even though the full Committee on Education and Labor of the House voted for such legislation last month. In 1975 the House passed a Youth Camp Safety Act but the Senate did not.

For the simple reason that the Carter Administration is not yet ready to join the crusade, the Committee-approved bill, H.R. 6761, is not expected to pass this year. C. Grant Spaeth, a legislative specialist in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, asked a congressional subcommittee to defer action until 1978, when the Administration will decide on the appropriate federal role. He said surveys conducted in three states indicate that “youngsters are far safer in camps than in their own communities.”

The Administration position was praised on the House floor by Republican John B. Anderson, an evangelical leader from Illinois who has listened sympathetically to many Christian camp operators opposed to federal regulation. Anderson offered an alternative bill that would provide a one-time, three-year grant program to encourage states to establish campsafety programs. The majority of states have no camp-safety legislation or policies on the books, according to a research source. (Many states leave such matters in the hands of local jurisdictions, whose standards may vary widely.)

Although H.R. 6761 does not spell out specific standards for camps, it provides for an office of camp safety that would formulate guidelines and work with state agencies to ensure safe facilities, a healthful environment, and qualified, adequate supervision.

The House committee claimed support for its bill “from groups most experienced in youth camps,” such as the American Camping Association, the Boy Scouts, and the Girl Scouts. Opponents at hearings included operators of independent religious camps, the Southern Baptist conference center in Glorietta, New Mexico, and Christian Camping International. Many fear privately that regulation will result eventually in unrealistic standards and prohibitive costs.

The Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs has kept a close eye on the proposed legislation without taking a position. “No church-state issue exists,” commented a spokesperson. The group’s executive director, James E. Wood, Jr., did draft language that strengthens the “non-interference” section of the bill. The Wood wording specifies that no government agencies enforcing the law can dictate the religious affiliation, admission policy, or program of any camp “operated by a church, association, or a convention of churches, or their agencies.”

In California, meanwhile, two Christian organizations that operate camp facilities and programs failed in their attempts to avoid paying state unemployment insurance taxes. The Mount Hermon Association and Young Life had been considered “churches” and were not paying the taxes until their cases were taken to the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board. The groups have appealed the board decision, which reversed an earlier ruling by an administrative law judge. The outcome of the case is being watched closely, since it could affect state policy toward all ministries not controlled by a church or denomination.

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What Kind Of Life?

The Dignity of Life, by Charles J. McFadden (Our Sunday Visitor, 1976, 296 pp., $8.50), Medicine and Christian Morality, by Thomas J. O’Donnell (Alba, 1976, 329 pp., $7.95), Science, Ethics, and Medicine, edited by H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., and Daniel Callahan (Hastings Center [360 Broadway, Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. 10706], 1976, 278 pp., $4.95 pb), and Genetics and the Law, edited by Aubrey Milunsky and George J. Annas (Plenum, 1976, 532 pp., $22.50), are reviewed by Robert A. Case II, associate in ministry, McLean Presbyterian Church, McLean, Virginia.

Do medical science and metaphysics come together as adversaries or companions? As research pushes the frontiers of medical knowledge and ability farther and farther beyond the traditional limits, the question of ethics looms larger and larger. There is a direct correlation between scientific advances and ethical confusion. And no group is more confused when it comes to bioethics than evangelicals. The Bible simply does not talk about cloning or test-tube fertilization or eugenics or psychosurgery. There are principles in Scripture to show us the way in areas like these, but it is a lot easier to discuss the options in dealing with the economically deprived than with the biologically deprived.

Four recent books are attempts to show us the way to final solutions in these difficult areas, but none really succeeds. Two are by Roman Catholic moral theologians and two are collections of essays by non-theologians.

Both Charles McFadden and Thomas O’Donnell write from the traditional Roman Catholic position. Both look to the Holy See and Canon Law to steer them through the tricky shoals of bioethics. As Roman Catholic moralists, they are convinced that reasoning according to Thomistic natural law will see them through. While we evangelicals are more persuaded by divine law (teachings of Jesus) than natural law, we must admit, in the absence of evangelical biblical scholarship in these areas, that this reliance on the reasoning of rational creatures committed to the Christian tradition is better than nothing. O’Donnell and McFadden give us chapter after chapter of case-by-case applications of general ethical principles in the area of medical ethics. While these chapters tend to become tedious, they nevertheless provide something of a reference tool for the neophyte and a guide to some of the best conservative Catholic opinion about the life sciences.

Both authors attempt to deal with a paradox of Christianity that has been brought to the fore by the acceleration of medical progress: We Christians affirm life with great vigor because it is sacred, and we oppose whatever endangers life (i.e., disease, hunger, war); at the same time we are not afraid to affirm death because of the resurrection of our Lord Jesus. From within this paradoxical faith these Thomists attempt to deal with the frightening irony that medical science can now fight so effectively for life that society is beginning to use that same technology to encourage people to cease their resistance to death. Regrettably, these warrior theologians are not armed with the “Word of life,” and so their answers fall short of being totally convincing to an evangelical mind.

Turning to the two collections of essays, one quickly finds that they are not for the beginner; both presuppose a knowledge of vocabulary and background and an understanding of the basic issues. The Hastings volume is the first in a series of four on ethics and science. It reflects the fact that there is no moral consensus among those engaged in bioethics. As the editors point out, “That moral philosophy has been in disarray for some decades is a proposition with which few will argue.” Clearly, the ethical system holding the field at present is contextual in foundation, but it breaks under the burden of trying to come up with answers when every situation is (by definition) “borderline.”

The nine essays in this collection range in subject from “Are Science and Ethics Compatible?” to “Toward a Theory of Medical Fallibility.” In the course of them, opposing propositions are argued (e.g., science is value-free, science is value-laden; medical ethics is derivative of other ethical systems, medical ethics is orginative). As one reads the essays, it becomes apparent that the confusion in bioethics stems in part from a defective epistemology and a failure to distinguish universal principles from particular applications. Once again we see that ethics without God is not satisfactory ethics.

The genetics volume is more esoteric than the Hastings collection. It is clearly aimed at the person who is seriously involved in genetics or the life sciences. This group of writings is more unified in its thrust, since it deals primarily not with ethics but with the present state of genetic research and how that research is transferred into public policy. Obviously this involves ethics, but for the most part the discussion deals with the practical decision-making process (mechanics) rather than with the origins, nature, and validity of ethical systems (universal presuppositions). Therefore, there is very little here about which one can constructively argue. The authors (forty-four scientists, physicians, and lawyers—no theologians) deal with such topics as the rights of the fetus, human experimentation, eugenics, cloning, and artificial insemination. After some of the essays there are round-robin discussions that make it apparent that a consensus among secularists cannot be found.

My recommendation concerning these books is this: If you are beginning your study of bioethics, forget them all. If you have done some reading in the field, you might profit from the Hastings volume. If you are deeply into medical ethics, then the genetics volume might be worth the time and money. The two Roman Catholic casuistic works are of limited worth unless you are willing to follow the finicky case-by-case application of certain rationalistic principles.

It is a tragedy of the first order that the two collections of essays do not contain any evangelical scholarship. This speaks more of our ethical forfeiture than of editorial prejudice. Because the secular ethicists have such a difficult time finding a normative ethical system from which to view the life sciences, we evangelicals are led to believe that bioethical problems and conflicts are inherent in bioethics and not (as I am convinced they are) in the secularists’ ethical systems.

Surely there are evangelical ethicists who are capable of providing pioneer leadership in these areas. Medical science and biblical scholarship are companion disciplines for the honoring of God and the service of mankind; Paul’s words in Second Corinthians 10:5 press us to this conclusion. As Nathan Hatch of the University of Notre Dame has said, “Evangelicals need to be so culturally self-conscious that we do not have our agenda for concern determined by the secular world.” There should be forums for biblically informed ethicists to interact on these various life-science questions. The Church is still waiting for gifted men and women who know the Scriptures to help our thinking in this most human of all scientific areas of study.

What Kind Of Death?

Death and Ministry, edited by J. Donald Bane, Austin H. Kutscher, Robert E. Neale, and Robert B. Reeves, Jr. (Seabury, 1975, 278 pp., $10.95), Care For the Dying, edited by Richard N. Soulen (John Knox, 1975, 141 pp., $4.95 pb), Pastoral Care and Counseling in Grief and Separation, by Wayne Oates (Fortress, 1976, 86 pp., $2.95 pb), The Minister and Grief, by Robert W. Bailey (Hawthorn, 1976, 114 pp., $4.95), Before I Wake, by Paul R. Carlson (Cook, 1975, 156 pp., $1.50 pb), Elsbeth, by Harold Myra (Revell, 1976, 159 pp., $5.95), Grief, by Haddon W. Robinson (Zondervan, 1976, 23 pp., $1.50 pb), and When a Loved One Dies, by Philip W. Williams (Augsburg, 1976, 95 pp., $2.50 pb), are reviewed by Dale Sanders, Myrtle Creek, Oregon.

Books on death and dying must be dated B.K.-R. and A.K.-R. The great divide is 1969, when psychologist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying described the five emotional stages of dying: denial, anger, bargaining, despair, and acceptance. The last three of the nine books here reviewed do not so much as doff their hats to Kübler-Ross, but the first six all bow, more or less deeply.

Death and Ministry is the best of the group for the pastor/counselor. Edited by four well-qualified persons, it is a collection of thirty-six essays by thirty-six authors under five headings: “Personal Perspectives,” “Ministry to the Dying,” “Ministry to the Bereaved,” “Clergy and Medical Professionals,” and “What Does Death Mean?” A high level of writing prevails, and a few essays are outstanding.

Death and Ministry begins where all better books on the subject do—with the pastor/counselor’s feelings about his own impending death. The reader is also brought as evocatively close to the death of another as possible. The essayists represent a wide variety of theological and psychological schools. In addition to Kübler-Ross, Paul Tillich is a pervasive influence. He is encountered first in the Foreword and repeatedly thereafter. For instance, the late Carl Nighswonger, who was a chaplain at the University of Chicago hospital, tells about his ministry to the dying as a “learning encounter.” He describes the patient’s ultimate resignation as “the sickness unto death”—shades of Kierkegaard—and the positive, reverse side of resignation as eventual affirmation, the “courage to be”—shades of Tillich. David H. C. Read, one of only two pastors listed as contributors, in his fine essay “Dying Patient’s Concept of God,” states: “I have never heard expressed any sort of confidence in being absorbed into a ‘stream of being,’ or being confronted with ‘one’s ultimate concern.’” Indeed, he identifies the chief weakness of the collection as a whole: “It is my experience that the impersonal and highly philosophical concepts of God that have been promulgated in many quarters have little relevance at this point of crisis.” The other clergyman listed as a contributor, Ralph Edward Peterson, cannot be found anywhere in the book. The rest are professors, psychologists, medical personnel, and chaplains.

Death and Ministry is largely a collection of theologies and theories; for the actual outworking of some of the positions taken, Care For the Dying is a good companion volume. Eight contributors react to five case studies, two of which are of suicidal persons. There are no pastors among the contributors.

In Death and Ministry the advisors almost uniformly oppose any attempt to speak encouragingly of the opening of the gate of heaven to those about to die. In Care For the Dying we can hear the chaplains dispensing palliatives. If those who died under such ministrations could now write essays (perhaps edited by a certain rich man of whom Jesus spoke), the spiritual poverty of most of the contributors to both volumes would be starkly revealed. Nevertheless, there is much valuable human insight to be gained from a careful reading of these two books, especially Death and Ministry.

Counseling in Grief and Separation, by Wayne Oates, long a professor of psychology at Southern Baptist Seminary and now at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, is a part of the Creative Pastoral Care and Counseling Series edited by Howard Clinebell. In addition to grief over death, Oates talks about grief over separation through divorce. Perhaps in a future book he will expand his treatment of grief counseling for divorce. A thorough discussion of that topic is greatly needed in our day.

Oates does not doff his hat to Kübler-Ross, but in his “I would like to take exception …” chapter he must swear negative fealty. His exception is to Kübler-Ross’s assertion that the suddenly, acutely bereaved pass through the same cycles as the dying. He includes shock, panic, and numbness as part of bereavement. His opinion on this is regularly borne out in Christian periodicals that give the testimonies of those who experience the suffering and death of loved ones.

Another Southern Baptist, Robert Bailey, covers much of the same territory as Oates but as a practicing pastor. Bailey begins The Minister and Grief with the pastor’s attitudes toward his own death. In an eminently readable style he offers valuable suggestions from the wealth of his pastoral experience. He wisely comments, “We believe in spiritual healing as long as it includes death.” I wish he had addressed himself to the pastor’s role to the dying lost. In my own pastoral experience, the deathbed conversions of two adults were dramatic turning points in the life of the congregation, to say nothing of the eternal benefits gained by the two converts at the very gate of death.

Bailey is appreciative of the role of funeral directors, but he also favors cremation and memorial services sometime after burial in lieu of the traditional funeral. While Bailey is diffident in these matters, the author of the next work is not. Before I Wake was written by an evangelical Presbyterian, Paul R. Carlson, and published by a major evangelical press, and it is an unabashed defense of the funeral industry. I do not doubt that the industry has been unfairly attacked from some quarters, and I would be quick to acknowledge that my own experience in working with funeral directors has been positive. But I was taken aback by the force, almost vehemence, of Carlson’s defense. He uses mostly industry sources for evidence. He disapproves of cremation, and opposes memorial services in lieu of funerals with the body present. He lumps memorial societies together with labor-union and cooperative funeral homes, which greatly reduce funeral costs. The memorial societies are then subjected to three pages of attack with ammunition supplied by the National Funeral Directors Association, while there is nary another word about the funeral cooperatives. Using the tactic of guilt by association is inexcusable. Besides, the co-ops are a real boon.

Death and Beyond by Andrew Greeley is a popularly written book by a noted Roman Catholic sociologist who directs the Center for the Study of American Pluralism at the University of Chicago. By “popular” I mean that informed laypeople can appreciate the author’s breezy way with big names and big ideas. Greeley is also an ecumenical alchemist fusing traditional Catholicism with modern notions in search of what I would call “resurrection nirvana.” Like the preceding five authors he bows to Kübler-Ross, who, by the way, recently abandoned her religious agnosticism regarding personal survival after death.

Elsbeth, Grief, and When a Loved One Dies are also popularly written books but are not intended for the highly literate layperson that Greeley has in mind.

Harold Myra’s Elsbeth is the true story of the “lovelife” and death of Elsbeth Christensen, a Swiss missionary to Africa, whose husband, David, was a doctor. A powerful story because of the intensity of the two subjects and their experience, Elsbeth is marred by certain weaknesses. The author appears uncertain whether his audience is adolescent or adult. Therefore he constantly wavers between the GP and R range of evangelical readership. Also, there are awkward and wooden scenes. Nevertheless this is a moving story, especially from midway through the book to the end.

Grief and When a Loved One Dies are designed for those who wish to give a simple gift of condolence to bereaved persons in need of the consolation of Christ. Grief is a collage-like production of the Christian Medical Society. It is visually attractive, but its text seems strangely cold because it is too clinical. I prefer, and highly recommend, Philip Williams’s When a Loved One Dies. Williams, a hospital chaplain, is acquainted with death and grief. Essentially the book is a month’s worth of four- and five-page devotions, rooted in harsh reality, Scripture, and prayer. This is a moving, lovely book, a helpful gift for anyone who has suffered loss through death.

New Periodicals

All Bible colleges and seminaries and many missionaries will want to subscribe to the Occasional Bulletin of Missionary Research. Despite its title it is a quarterly, and the first issue is dated January, 1977. Its publisher is the Overseas Ministries Study Center (Box 2057, Ventnor, New Jersey 08406). It is the successor to the Occasional Bulletin from the Missionary Research Library but will have much broader coverage. The term “bulletin” could be misleading, since it is not primarily news-oriented but contains articles and book reviews. A variety of theological positions will be represented. Subscriptions are on a calendar-year basis and cost $6.

Journal of Christian Counseling has been launched with a variety of editors from the conservative side of the theological spectrum, including Gary Collins of Trinity, authors James Dobson and Morton Kelsey, and Lee Travis of the Fuller School of Psychology. Anyone with an active counseling ministry should consider subscribing. Rates for the quarterly are $12 per year. Address: Box 548, Mt. Pleasant, Michigan 48858.

Traditionally religion has been the major social institution concerned with preparing people for death. However, like other areas, preparation for death is increasingly being handled in a secular context also. A major journal, Death Education, has just been launched with the Spring, 1977, issue. Most of the editors and editorial board are from university faculties, but there are a few clergymen among them. The first issue has nine papers, many of which were originally read at the Conference on Death and Dying held last December in Orlando. All major seminary libraries should subscribe, and teachers responsible for training ministers who can counsel the dying should be familiar with the journal. Rates: libraries, $40 per year; individuals, $19.95. Address: Hemisphere Publishing Corporation, 1025 Vermont Avenue N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005.

Not new but newly named is the Concordia Theological Quarterly. Volume 41 began with the January, 1977, issue. The journal was formerly entitled The Springfielder and was published by the Concordia Theological Seminary (Missouri Lutheran) in Springfield, Illinois. With the removal of that seminary to Fort Wayne, Indiana, a new name was necessary. Do not confuse this with the Concordia Journal, edited at Concordia Seminary, or with Currents in Theology and Mission, edited at Concordia Seminary-in-Exile, both in St. Louis. All three journals should be in theological libraries. CTQ averages 100 pages an issue and costs only $4 for a year’s subscription. Confessional Lutheranism is ably represented in its pages. Address: 6600 N. Clinton St., Fort Wayne, Indiana 46825.

The Christian Poetry Journal is published three times a year as “a vehicle of expression for Christian poets.” Its second issue (fall, 1976) has some quite good poems and some rather bad ones. Higher standards are needed and, given the number of Christian poets doing good work today, possible ($4/year; Ouachita Press, Arkadelphia, Ark. 71923).

When Pentecostalism is mentioned, people normally think first of the white Pentecostal denominations and charismatic movements, even though black Pentecostals have been around from the beginning. They have long been organized chiefly into their own denominations. Members of several of them have joined together to launch Spirit: a journal of issues incident to black pentecostalism to be published three times each year: April, August, and December. The first issue has five articles, including one on “doctrinal differences between black and white Pentecostals” by James Tinney, who is the journal’s editor and who has written and reviewed for CHRISTIANITY TODAY. The lamentable absence of periodicals by or about black Christians in most theological libraries calls for special effort to add this to collections. The rate is $3 per year; checks should be made payable to the editor and sent to Box 386, Howard University, Washington, D.C. 20059.

The Spiritual Counterfeits Project is a group of evangelicals who have gained a good reputation for in-depth and practical research on various alternatives to and opponents of historic Christianity. They have outgrown their newsletter format and have launched, with the April 1977 issue (Volume I, Number 1), a Journal of the Spiritual Counterfeits Project. The feature article is on death and dying with special reference to various claims of secular confirmation of life after death. For subscription information, write to the project at Box 4308, Berkeley, California 94704.

The Melodyland Christian Center and its related school of theology across from Disneyland in southern California are an increasingly well-known charismatic ministry. With the April–May issue, they have now launched their own magazine so that those further afield can keep informed of their views and activities. The title is Melodyland! Write Box 6000, Anaheim, California 92806 for subscription information.

Increasing publicity has been given in print and on television to so-called para-normal activities, such as clairvoyance, astrology, and ancient visitors from other planets. The Zetetic has been launched as a twice yearly forum for scientific investigation of such claims with an admittedly skeptical starting point. Religious libraries should subscribe, since many of the para-normal claims are rivals to traditional Christianity. However, it should be noted that the sponsors of the journal are primarily humanistic in their own orientation, and therefore in other contexts they are skeptical about traditional religious claims as well. The subscription rate for two issues per year is $10 for individuals, $15 for libraries. Address: Box 29, Kensington Station, Buffalo, New York 14215.

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I suppose you know about his divorce and remarriage,” she said matter-of-factly.

“And he’s a minister, too!” she added, not so matter-of-factly.

My surprised look must have telegraphed a negative reply. I finally stuttered, “No … I … I … didn’t know.”

“Oh, yes, Tim divorced his first wife, Nancy—or maybe Nancy divorced him—after eight years of marriage and two children. And that’s not the worst of it. Only six months later he married a divorcée named Jill. And for a month before they were married he practically lived at her house. Jill was my neighbor, and no matter what time of night I looked out my window, I saw his car.”

I had met Tim on a committee that extended across denominational lines. During our weeks of committee work I felt a deep rapport with him. He had never mentioned his marital status, and I knew nothing of the situation until this day when I was telling a friend about the work of our committee.

I said little at the time because shock overrode any other feeling. The person my friend described seemed so unlike the person I had met a few weeks earlier. But for the rest of the day I thought a great deal about what I had heard. Perhaps Tim was guilty of everything my friend implied—and even more. Perhaps he had committed a thousand other sins. What troubled me was how I was to react.

I am against divorce. God joined man and woman together and intended that only death break that sacred bond. As a clergyman and a Christian I do whatever I can to prevent marital breakups. But divorce is certainly a fact of life in our society. I read recently that 70 per cent of American homes are affected in some way by divorce.

As I lay in bed that night, unable to sleep, I couldn’t stop thinking about Tim. I knew he was the pastor of a bi-racial church, which is not an easy task. His marital troubles must have made the day-to-day struggle even harder for him.

I thought of Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan. Did the stranger, coming upon the badly beaten Jew, inquire about the purity of his life or the depth of his religious faith? No. Without asking any questions, he bound up the wounds, then took the injured man to an inn where he himself paid for a bed for him. The Samaritan realized that the first need was for compassion and healing.

In the morning I telephoned Tim. After identifying myself, I said, “The other day I heard a little about your divorce and remarriage. It’s none of my business, and please don’t feel it’s necessary to explain it to me. I’m calling for only one reason: to tell you I care about you.”

After a brief pause, a husky voice answered, “Thanks … thanks for being concerned.” Tim went on to say a little about his situation, but only in general terms. We both knew it wasn’t necessary to say more.

One time his voice broke and he stopped talking. He finally continued, “Of all the pastors I know in our conference, only eight or so have expressed any real concern for me. Most of them avoid me. Some won’t even acknowledge that they know me, either in meetings or on the street. One of my closest friends told me he couldn’t be of any help to me. He was a good friend to both Nancy and me and said that befriending me would be a slight to Nancy.”

My words of response seemed shallow and futile. All I could answer in several different ways was, “Tim, I care.”

We talked for ten or fifteen minutes. The heaviness still had not gone from my heart. I felt better for having called, but my gesture seemed inadequate.

“Lord, I wish I could heal his hurt and take away the pain,” I prayed. “I wish I could really help.”

Then that Inner Voice said, “You did. You eased the pain—only I can totally erase it. You reached out to him in love. Have I ever asked more than this from my disciples?”

Another portion of Scripture flashed into my mind. A woman had been caught in the very act of adultery and was brought before Jesus for pronouncement of sentence. They expected the Lord to enforce the rule of having her stoned, but he refused to give sanction to those plans.

Because he condoned adultery? Hardly.

Because he knew facts about the situation they didn’t and his evidence could clear the woman? We have nothing to support that idea.

Jesus uttered one sentence: “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.”

God gave me one great commandment in regard to human beings: love them as totally as I love myself. When I myself fail, I already have enough self-judgment and guilt without having anyone else heap more guilt on me. When I fail, I need Christians to encourage me, not to make me feel worse.

Why can’t we love people like Tim in the midst of their trauma? Why does their sin, or the fact that they are ministers or church leaders, horrify us? They are only human beings, too. Why can’t we extend compassionate hands in the midst of their ordeal? We want to wait until they’ve repented, or straightened out, or conformed to our standards. But now is when they need us.

In this instance I was compassionate. I extended a hand to Tim, showing him that I care. But how many times have I been on the other side? How many times have I stood with an accusing finger when people like Tim need a helping hand?—CECIL B. MURPHEY, pastor, Riverdale Presbyterian Church, Riverdale, Georgia.

Ideas

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However self-satisfied other growing religious movements—such as Hare Krishna, Scientology, or the Unification Church—may be, it should be clear to everyone that evangelicalism is different. Self-examination and self-criticism are widespread in evangelical circles. The latest prominent example is “The Chicago Call,” issued by an ad hoc group of forty-three Christians with evangelical sympathies. It was actually prepared in Warrenville, a distant suburb of Chicago, May 1–3 (see News, June 3 issue, page 32). Such is the perception of evangelicalism by the media these days that the Call, printed in full on the following pages, was the subject of Newsweek’s entire May 23 religion section.

The Call was consciously prepared in the tradition of the Chicago Declaration (December 21, 1973, issue, page 38) and the Lausanne Covenant (August 16, 1974, issue, pages 22–24, 35–37). Unlike them, this new statement will almost certainly not lead to a continuing organization. Like them, it will not cause much to happen that would not have happened anyway. But it can serve as a useful stimulus for discussion and debate. The Chicago Declaration challenged evangelicals to greater concern about the ills of society; the Lausanne Covenant focused on world evangelization. The Chicago Call supplements, rather than differs from, the others with an appeal to greater concern for more traditional “churchmanship.”

Despite the Episcopal ties of six of the eight convenors (their roots, notably, were non-Episcopal), the Call is not a veiled appeal for more converts to Anglicanism. Indeed, the majority of the participants were from and intend to remain in distinctly non-Episcopal traditions. The preparers feel that all Christian traditions have broader heritages than are generally being tapped.

Basically, the Call is a warning against ignoring or scorning the past. In our culture, the needs of the present and of the future are stressed; ties with the past are played down. The response to Alex Haley’s search for his “roots” is a welcome counter-trend, but the damage symbolized by the replacing of “history” in school and college curricula with a more present-oriented “social studies” will take a long time to undo.

To ignore the past, we are often told, is to repeat the mistakes that were made. For the Christian, ignoring the past is also an implicit denial of a cardinal truth: there is one body of Christ; all believers, whether now alive on earth or not, are members of that body. Gifted teachers, writers, exegetes, and theologians are God’s gifts to the Body for subsequent ages as well as for their own.

To be sure, our existing denominationalism and independence of action contradict our profession of the unity of the Body, and the Chicago Call addresses itself to that divisiveness as well.

The modern Western emphasis on individualism played an indispensable role in settling this vast continent and in promoting Christian evangelism and nurture while older institutions were proving unable to adapt to changing needs. However, such individualism (whether personal or corporate) needs to be kept within biblical guidelines. For example, the idea that every Christian, no matter how lofty or lowly his role, should be submissive to a group of mutually submitting leaders in a local church will not sit well in a culture in which we are accustomed to making decisions and then informing parents, church leaders, or other ostensible counselors. But the question is not, What suits our culture or temperament?, but rather, What does God say, especially through his Word?

The Chicago Call will serve its purpose if it promotes reflection and discussion about the themes it addresses. One does not have to agree with each of its confessions and affirmations (or with whatever one cares to read between the lines) in order to endorse heartily, as we do, the giving of “careful theological consideration” to these matters. And where present practice is found to be out of keeping with biblical precept, let us “be doers of the word, and not hearers only.”

TO OUR READERS: As happens several times a year, there will be a three-week interval between this issue and the next (July 8). During this period Christianity Today will move to Carol Stream, Illinois. (As announced previously, the news department will remain in downtown Washington, D.C.)

Prologue:

In every age the Holy Spirit calls the church to examine its faithfulness to God’s revelation in Scripture. We recognize with gratitude God’s blessing through the evangelical resurgence in the church. Yet at such a time of growth we need to be especially sensitive to our weaknesses. We believe that today evangelicals are hindered from achieving full maturity by a reduction of the historic faith. There is, therefore, a pressing need to reflect upon the substance of the biblical and historic faith and to recover the fullness of this heritage. Without presuming to address all our needs, we have identified eight of the themes to which we as evangelical Christians must give careful theological consideration.

A Call to Historic Roots and Continuity:

We confess that we have often lost the fullness of our Christian heritage, too readily assuming that the Scriptures and the Spirit make us independent of the past. In so doing, we have become theologically shallow, spiritually weak, blind to the work of God in others and married to our cultures.

Therefore we call for a recovery of our full Christian heritage. Throughout the church’s history there has existed an evangelical impulse to proclaim the saving, unmerited grace of Christ, and to reform the church according to the Scriptures. This impulse appears in the doctrines of the ecumenical councils, the piety of the early fathers, the Augustinian theology of grace, the zeal of the monastic reformers, the devotion of the practical mystics and the scholarly integrity of the Christian humanists. It flowers in the biblical fidelity of the Protestant Reformers and the ethical earnestness of the Radical Reformation. It continues in the efforts of the Puritans and Pietists to complete and perfect the Reformation. It is reaffirmed in the awakening movements of the 18th and 19th centuries which joined Lutheran, Reformed. Wesleyan and other evangelicals in an ecumenical effort to renew the church and to extend its mission in the proclamation and social demonstration of the Gospel. It is present at every point in the history of Christianity where the Gospel has come to expression through the operation of the Holy Spirit: in some of the strivings toward renewal in Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism and in biblical insights in forms of Protestantism differing from our own. We dare not move beyond the biblical limits of the Gospel; but we cannot be fully evangelical without recognizing our need to learn from other times and movements concerning the whole meaning of that Gospel.

A Call to Biblical Fidelity:

We deplore our tendency toward individualistic interpretation of Scripture. This undercuts the objective character of biblical truth, and denies the guidance of the Holy Spirit among his people through the ages.

Therefore we affirm that the Bible is to be interpreted in keeping with the best insights of historical and literary study, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, with respect for the historic understanding of the church.

We affirm that the Scriptures, as the infallible Word of God, are the basis of authority in the church. We acknowledge that God uses the Scriptures to judge and to purify his Body. The church, illumined and guided by the Holy Spirit, must in every age interpret, proclaim and live out the Scriptures.

A Call to Creedal Identity:

We deplore two opposite excesses: a creedal church that merely recites a faith inherited from the past, and a creedless church that languishes in a doctrinal vacuum. We confess that as evangelicals we are not immune from these defects.

Therefore we affirm the need in our time for a confessing church that will boldly witness to its faith before the world, even under threat of persecution. In every age the church must state its faith over against heresy and paganism. What is needed is a vibrant confession that excludes as well as includes, and thereby aims to purify faith and practice. Confessional authority is limited by and derived from the authority of Scripture, which alone remains ultimately and permanently normative. Nevertheless, as the common insight of those who have been illumined by the Holy Spirit and seek to be the voice of the “holy catholic church,” a confession should serve as a guide for the interpretation of Scripture.

We affirm the abiding value of the great ecumenical creeds and the Reformation confessions. Since such statements are historically and culturally conditioned, however, the church today needs to express its faith afresh, without defecting from the truths apprehended in the past. We need to articulate our witness against the idolatries and false ideologies of our day.

A Call to Holistic Salvation:

We deplore the tendency of evangelicals to understand salvation solely as an individual, spiritual and otherworldly matter to the neglect of the corporate, physical and this-worldly implication of God’s saving activity.

Therefore we urge evangelicals to recapture a holistic view of salvation. The witness of Scripture is that because of sin our relationships with God, ourselves, others and creation are broken. Through the atoning work of Christ on the cross, healing is possible for these broken relationships.

Wherever the church has been faithful to its calling, it has proclaimed personal salvation; it has been a channel of God’s healing to those in physical and emotional need; it has sought justice for the oppressed and disinherited; and it has been a good steward of the natural world.

As evangelicals we acknowledge our frequent failure to reflect this holistic view of salvation. We therefore call the church to participate fully in God’s saving activity through work and prayer, and to strive for justice and liberation for the oppressed, looking forward to the culmination of salvation in the new heaven and new earth to come.

A Call to Sacramental Integrity:

We decry the poverty of sacramental understanding among evangelicals. This is largely due to the loss of our continuity with the teaching of many of the Fathers and Reformers and results in the deterioration of sacramental life in our churches. Also, the failure to appreciate the sacramental nature of God’s activity in the world often leads us to disregard the sacredness of daily living.

Therefore we call evangelicals to awaken to the sacramental implications of creation and incarnation. For in these doctrines the historic church has affirmed that God’s activity is manifested in a material way. We need to recognize that the grace of God is mediated through faith by the operation of the Holy Spirit in a notable way in the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Here the church proclaims, celebrates and participates in the death and resurrection of Christ in such a way as to nourish her members throughout their lives in anticipation of the consummation of the kingdom. Also, we should remember our biblical designation as “living epistles,” for here the sacramental character of the Christian’s daily life is expressed.

A Call to Spirituality:

We suffer from a neglect of authentic spirituality on the one hand, and an excess of undisciplined spirituality on the other hand. We have too often pursued a superhuman religiosity rather than the biblical model of a true humanity released from bondage to sin and renewed by the Holy Spirit.

Therefore we call for a spirituality which grasps by faith the full content of Christ’s redemptive work: freedom from the guilt and power of sin, and newness of life through the indwelling and outpouring of his Spirit. We affirm the centrality of the preaching of the Word of God as a primary means by which his Spirit works to renew the church in its corporate life as well as in the individual lives of believers. A true spirituality will call for identification with the suffering of the world as well as the cultivation of personal piety.

We need to rediscover the devotional resources of the whole church, including the evangelical traditions of Pietism and Puritanism. We call for an exploration of devotional practice in all traditions within the church in order to deepen our relationship both with Christ and with other Christians. Among these resources are such spiritual disciplines as prayer, meditation, silence, fasting, Bible study and spiritual diaries.

A Call to Church Authority:

We deplore our disobedience to the Lordship of Christ as expressed through authority in his church. This has promoted a spirit of autonomy in persons and groups resulting in isolationism and competitiveness, even anarchy, within the body of Christ. We regret that in the absence of godly authority, there have arisen legalistic, domineering leaders on the one hand and indifference to church discipline on the other.

Therefore we affirm that all Christians are to be in practical submission to one another and to designated leaders in a church under the Lordship of Christ. The church, as the people of God, is called to be the visible presence of Christ in the world. Every Christian is called to active priesthood in worship and service through exercising spiritual gifts and ministries. In the church we are in vital union both with Christ and with one another. This calls for community with deep involvement and mutual commitment of time, energy, and possessions. Further, church discipline, biblically based and under the direction of the Holy Spirit, is essential to the well-being and ministry of God’s people. Moreover, we encourage all Christian organizations to conduct their activities with genuine accountability to the whole church.

A Call to Church Unity:

We deplore the scandalous isolation and separation of Christians from one another. We believe such division is contrary to Christ’s explicit desire for unity among his people and impedes the witness of the church in the world. Evangelicalism is too frequently characterized by an ahistorical, sectarian mentality. We fail to appropriate the catholicity of historic Christianity, as well as the breadth of the biblical revelation.

Therefore we call evangelicals to return to the ecumenical concern of the Reformers and the later movements of evangelical renewal. We must humbly and critically scrutinize our respective traditions, renounce sacred shibboleths, and recognize that God works within diverse historical streams. We must resist efforts promoting church union-at-any-cost, but we must also avoid mere spiritualized concepts of church unity. We are convinced that unity in Christ requires visible and concrete expressions. In this belief, we welcome the development of encounter and cooperation within Christ’s church. While we seek to avoid doctrinal indifferentism and a false irenicism, we encourage evangelicals to cultivate increased discussion and cooperation, both within and without their respective traditions, earnestly seeking common areas of agreement and understanding.

Issuing the call: Marvin W. Anderson, Bethel Seminary; John S. Baird, Dubuque Seminary; Donald G. Bloesch,* Dubuque Seminary; Jon E. Braun, New Covenant Apostolic Order; Virgil Cruz, Dubuque Seminary; James Daane, Fuller Seminary; Donald W. Dayton, North Park Seminary; Jan P. Dennis,* Good News Publishers; Lane T. Dennis,* Good News Publishers; Gerald D. Erickson,* Trinity College (Deerfield); Isabel A. Erickson, Tyndale House; Donald C. Frisk, North Park Seminary; Pete Gillquist,* Thomas Nelson Publishers; Alfred A. Glenn, Bethel College (St. Paul); Nathan Goff, pastor, College Church (Wheaton); Jim Hedstrom, student, Vanderbilt; Richard Holt, dentist (Wheaton); Thomas Howard,* Gordon College; Morris A. Inch, Wheaton College; Herbert Jacobsen, Wheaton College; Kenneth Jensen, New Covenant Apostolic Order; Richard A. Jensen, Wartburg Seminary; Theodore Laesch, pastor, St. John Lutheran Church (Wheaton); Kathryn Lindskoog, author; Howard Loewen, Mennonite Brethren Bible College; Richard Lovelace, Gordon-Conwell Seminary; F. Burton Nelson, North Park Seminary; Ray Nethery, New Covenant Apostolic Order; Roger Nicole, Gordon-Conwell Seminary; Victor R. Oliver,* Tyndale House; M. Eugene Osterhaven, Western Seminary; Lois M. Ottaway, Wheaton College News Service; Gordon W. Saunders, Trinity College (Deerfield); Rudolf Schade, Elmhurst College; Luci N. Shaw, author; Kevin N. Springer, New Covenant Apostolic Order; Jeffrey N. Steenson, student, Harvard; Donald Tinder, Christianity Today; Benedict Viviano, Aquinas Institute; Gordon Walker, pastor, Grace Fellowship Church (Nashville); Robert E. Webber,* Wheaton College; Matthew Welde, Presbyterians United for Biblical Concerns; Lance Wonders, student, Dubuque Seminary. *Member of convening committee