Page 5670 – Christianity Today (2024)

An introductory look.

Genetic engineering has sparked more controversy than any scientific subject since the birth of the nuclear age in the 1940s. Scientists, congressmen, and citizens’ groups have hotly debated man’s newfound power to manipulate genetic material. These genes form something like a set of blueprints. It determines all of the hereditary characteristics of an organism.

Nothing is more fundamental to life than genes and heredity. We know that differences between various life forms, such as birds, insects, and plants are due to genetic differences. And we all know how many of our own characteristics are fixed by what we inherited from our parents. Thus, when scientists toy with genetic material, it’s the same as manipulating life itself. It’s perhaps the greatest act in the game of man attempting to “play God.” And the implications of genetic engineering for Christians and non-Christians alike are profound.

The cauldron began to boil in 1973. It became apparent then that spectacular genetic manipulations weren’t just the stuff of science fiction, but real possibilities. The key development was the discovery of methods to chop up genetic material and put it back together. In this way, material from different species can be “spliced” together, to give a new recombined (or recombinant) set of genes. The result is the creation of new genetic species with unique hereditary traits.

So far, most of the new genetic species that have been created are simple bacteria. These are far easier to manipulate than such higher life forms as fish or birds or insects. This is not to say that manipulations with higher life forms won’t be done at some future point. But apart from that, the implications of the bacteria work are in themselves staggering.

For example, take the spectacular achievement in genetic engineering announced during congressional hearings held in the fall of 1977. Through an elegant series of clever tricks, scientists in San Francisco successfully inserted into a common bacteria the gene that gives instructions for producing an important human brain hormone. In this way, a bacterium—one of the lowest forms of life—was made able to produce a hormone associated with the brain of the highest form of life.

The San Francisco experiment highlights the major issues surrounding genetic engineering. On the one hand, it shows the enormous benefit that comes from this technology. The brain hormone in question, somatostatin, is extremely valuable for medical purposes. But it’s hard to obtain in sufficient amounts; it’s usually obtained only by grinding up brain tissue. But having it produced by a simple bacterium solves the problem; the bacteria can be grown in large amounts in an ordinary laboratory. And these bacteria will produce in a day more brain hormone than can be obtained by extracting the tissues of thousands of brains. Thus, by genetic engineering large amounts of heretofore rare and precious substances can be readily isolated.

But there’s another side. There is potential danger when a human hormone is placed in a simple and common bacterium. The difficulty is that bacteria closely related to those used in laboratory research commonly inhabit the human intestinal tract. Moreover, bacteria such as these are readily airborne and thus transmitted among and between populations. This situation creates a hazard.

For example suppose that some laboratory bacteria produce large amounts of a human hormone; the bacteria escape the laboratory and end up in a human intestinal tract, or pass the hormone gene to a bacterium that resides there. If large amounts of the hormone are now produced in the intestinal tract, one can easily imagine that this could lead to serious, perhaps fatal disease. This is because hormones generally regulate the body’s equilibrium. Too much of a particular hormone could tip the scales too far in one direction.

This worry is shared by laymen and scientists alike. It has sparked a congressional investigation and the establishment by the National Institutes of Health of restrictive guidelines for this kind of genetic research. Fortunately, in the case of the San Francisco experiment, elaborate precautions were taken so as to assure that the hormone-producing bacteria would not pose a threat to humans.

Another question raised by genetic engineering experiments is whether artificial genetic species created by scientists will upset the balance of nature in some unforeseen way. The argument is that by tampering with the very essence of life itself, through the construction of artificial genetic combinations, scientists will unwittingly perturb nature to the detriment of all. This argument is difficult to prove, but it’s still a worry.

Regardless of the viewpoint, it’s clear that genetic technology has opened up a bold new era for science. Bacteria producing human hormones is but one example of countless applications of this technology. Research is moving at a blistering pace; the excitement is white hot; and imaginations are running wild. Many biological scientists view it as a glorious age.

At this point, we can raise the question of how we should respond to these exciting developments and the complex issues that they raise. And we can also ask about the impact of the new technology on spiritual values.

First of all, we are obliged to take seriously the recent advances in genetic engineering. These advances cannot and should not be ignored. The new genetics is not simply another one of the breakthroughs in technology of the kind that made possible television, jet travel, or high-speed computers. These technologies affect the way in which we live. But the ramifications of genetic engineering are far more profound. This technology, which gives scientists the ability to manipulate genes and heredity, has to do with the process of life itself. That means it affects everyone.

Congress hopes to come up with legislation that will regulate genetic engineering in such a way as to allow the maximum benefits with the minimum risk. It’s a tough order to fill. A key issue is how much autonomy should be given to local governments to formulate rules and to regulate genetic engineering in their own geographical areas. The research and technology have spread so fast that medical centers, universities, and industrial laboratories throughout the country are now doing research in this area. Also, in any locale some of the simpler experiments can even be done by a college undergraduate. Obviously, with the rapid dissemination of this technology local citizens should be concerned and should discuss the policies that will regulate the activity in their region. Citizens’ groups have already formed and local debate has begun. It’s not yet clear what legislation will come out. But regardless of that, we must educate ourselves so that we can influence the decisions that are made. The main concern is to assure that dangerous pathogens, which have a chance of escaping to the population, are not created. There are procedures that can be followed to greatly minimize this risk. And in every locale we must encourage strict adherence to these procedures.

We must also think about the broader implications of this new technology. For years to come there will be a concern about whether, in the course of time and of large scale genetic experimentation, living organisms will be adversely affected by an unfavorable restructuring of the balance of nature. There is little to say about this possibility; we don’t know enough. But it behooves us to be sensitive to the possibilities and to act with discrete and conscientious concern should we become aware of a worrisome situation.

There is no question that genetic engineering has spiritual ramifications. It’s one of a long series of scientific advances that shifts thinking from the metaphysical to the physical. It takes some of the mystery out of life. This is not to say that this is bad or that we shouldn’t try to understand life and nature with penetrating scientific insight. But if we substitute that insight for faith in and mystical reverence for the God behind it all, then we’ve lost something.

What’s more, we have to worry that the great insight into the mechanisms of life and the power to manipulate these mechanisms in extraordinary ways can make us see humans and life itself as so much machinery. It can boil down to a distraction from the concept of a human as a child of God, with special spiritual endowments. This is not the fault of genetic engineering or of any other technology; it’s simple human short-sightedness. And here Christians can bring a sensitive spiritual perspective to the issues at hand.

Genetic engineering is an extraordinary achievement of science and technology. The potential benefits are immense, but there are enough dangers and unknowns that it could become a curse instead of a blessing. Which it will be depends upon the conscientious participation of all of us in the decisions that govern this activity. Christians must maintain a spiritual perspective and encourage that perspective among others. In these ways, we can assure that our scientific explorations into genetics bring the blessings they’re intended to give.

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

Another look at Whitehead.

The world was veering crazily between the evils of two world wars when A. N. Whitehead argued that evil was explainable within his “process” view of reality. His proposal so impressed Daniel Day Williams that he could promise:

“A radical new possibility has opened up for theology. This is the interpretation of the love of God in relation to a new metaphysical doctrine in which God is involved in time and becoming. In this conception of God’s being it is possible to reconceive the relation of love to suffering and to consider what it means for God to act in history” (The Spirit and the Forms of Love, pp. 90, 91).

How radical, really, is this possibility? And now that it has been with us for more than a generation, how successful has it been?

In Whitehead’s day, theodicy—the attempt to justify the ways of God in the face of evil—had come to a tired standstill. The argument that evil is merely the absence of good tended to pale amid the atrocities of war. Something more powerful than nothing, than the mere absence of something, seemed to seethe beneath mankind’s evil acts. And do the evils of existence—“natural disasters” such as earthquake, famine, and flood—spring from nothing? For some, such facts of life have always pointed to malevolent being, not to a vacuum; to something like C. S. Lewis’s “hideous strength,” not to the absence of power.

Evil as the result of man’s freedom, and in punishment for his wrong choices, had met with greater success but had not really won the day. “God wills the good but allows the evil” offered comfort of sorts. But it was more difficult to explain why we choose evil when we know the good. And Calvin’s highly logical “dreadful decree,” that God’s sovereignty requires that he be responsible even for particular evils, had cast doubt on the adequacy of this solution.

A related idea held that evil is necessary, or contributory, to the good. Were it not for the cross, we could not experience the joy of the crown. “O felix culpa!” went the Roman prayer—O blessed fault (Adam’s sin), without which we would never have known God’s grace. And Leibniz constructed a mathematician’s theorem to describe God standing at creation and gazing knowingly down the stream of history before selecting the best of all possible worlds. Evil for him (as for Whitehead) was a condition without which there could be no world at all.

But for all their ingenious logic, theologians had never been able to show a reasonable relation between our sins and our agonies, or between the way the world must work and the way we suffer. The God of Augustine and Aquinas, Calvin and Leibniz, was omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent; immutable, impassible, and alone having necessary being. What, then, can it mean to say that in the world of a God like this evil is also “necessary”? Is God, after all, limited by his creation? If this much evil—the slow death by starvation of innocent children in drought-stricken India, for example—is necessary, then why create a world at all?

And although Adam and Eve succumbed to the serpent, and I, too, succumb, could not an omnipotent God dam the flood of subsequent evils just this side, say, of the more hideous forms of cancer? Or if God’s sense of justice requires a life here and there, can he not be satisfied with the life of some incorrigible criminal and spare my six-year-old friend who is dying a lingering death from a disease that was built into his genes? Suppose we all miss a base now and then; is that reason enough to expel us from the game?

Such questions against the classical arguments seemed to be gaining more credibility than the arguments themselves. They contributed to the comparative silence of neoreformation theology on the problem of evil. Even Luther had held that evil is an irrational, “alien work” of the hidden nature of God. Similarly, for Karl Barth, evil cannot be rationalized because it is related to das Nichtige, the unspeakable break in the relationship between Creator and creature.

With theodicy ridden to exhaustion, how could Whitehead and his followers dare to take it up again? They did it seizing the dilemma by its two horns, God and the world, and redefining both. First we must rid theology of the static concept of a God to whom we pay, in Whitehead’s phrase, “excessive metaphysical compliments”—attributing to him omnipotence, perfection, and all the rest. Neither can the world be considered simply an object over against God, a lifeless creation separate from a distant Giver of life. Rather, we are to think in terms of a God-world organism, an ensouled universe, a stream of vitality and creativity, a becoming of events.

Very well. What’s a problem like evil doing in a world like that?

Creativity and Conflict

The one overriding fact of life, process holds, is that it is teeming with creativity, “the category of the ultimate.” Everything that exists has the capacity to react to its environment and to act, in turn, on other realities (Whitehead called them “actual entities”). Since God himself exists, he not only partakes of this creativity but also is acted upon. Instead of seeing God as the awesome but distant Creator pictured by classical theism, Whitehead viewed him as “the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands.” In this, his “consequent nature,” God can be touched with the feeling of our infirmities because he is very much a part of the infirm world.

But why is the world infirm? Simply because in a world where all actual entities or events are endowed with creativity, they must also be presumed to have some sense of choice. That is the essence of creativity. But in a world of space and time, those choices often conflict. It is in one sense an evil that I cannot at once be here with my family and there with my ailing mother. But it is not an ultimate evil; it is simply an inevitable part of living in a real world.

Obviously we have heard this line before, in terms of Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds. But process believes that its dynamic view of matter contributes an element of freedom not previously entertained. Absolute evil is denied because every particle of reality retains the “indeterminancy” of the proton and electron, whirling about their nucleus. And why do some molecules form themselves into copper, rather than flesh; some into matter, rather than mind? And what force within the brain cell enables a material body to be influenced by an immaterial thought? Only a kind of low-grade, or at least metaphorical, “consciousness.”

Of course this picture of a virile, creative universe is interrupted when the present passes into the past. Minds and bodies and matter all “die.” But we quote the world, for a second glance reveals the old life taken up into the new. The young sapling has within its cells the nourishment of the leaves decaying at its roots; the dying father’s seed lives in his heir; the stone thrown into the pool sends ripples to the farthest edge before it sinks to the bottom. Hence the “perpetual perishing” of the world is not tragic. All passes into “objective immortality.” Because God is also an actual entity, he is so present to this process that he can ensure that nothing of value will ever be lost.

Still, process must admit that no actual event is absolutely free. The molecule of copper inherited a past. Its potential was not unlimited; it was suited for becoming metal and not flesh. Some principle of limitation seems to be at work, outlining and limiting the options from which units of reality “choose.” But who sets these options? “God,” process answers—this time, God in his “primordial” aspect.

For a process theodicy, this means that God has not abandoned the world to chaos. While his creation enjoys freedom, it is a freedom within certain boundaries. God longs for creation to follow his “subjective aim” for it, but it sometimes rebels, in its freedom, and evil results. Hence his power of limitation is only a gentle nudge, a persuasive but never a tyrannical or omnipotent force. God is “the Eros of the universe,” not its Absolute Ruler. For Whitehead, notions of God’s omnipotence were a distortion modeled after the medieval king: “When the Western world accepted Christianity, Caesar conquered, and the received text of Western theology was edited by his lawyers” (Process and Reality). God is only “the poet of the world,” asserted Whitehead, “with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.”

What Has Process Wrought?

The process approach has a certain beauty, and it seems to offer all the right pieces to the puzzle of evil. Its God is more akin to the biblical God than the distant, Unmoved Mover of Hellenistic theology. But despite these positive aspects, we must ask what it has done to go beyond the inadequacies and inconsistencies of older theodicies.

First, it is fair to ask whether process is consistent with its own stated limitations and goals. Does it abide by its own rules?

One of Whitehead’s rules was that God must be the exemplification of, not the exception to, the way the world works. We must not have one category for bodies and another for minds, one metaphysic for creation and another for God. This has proved an attractive rule for philosophers interested in developing natural theology. But a difficulty appears when we ask this sort of God about the problem of evil. Our most profound reflections on suffering and evil usually end in a cry, and appeal to One far greater than the structures of our evil world. Unexceptional beings suffer and die, without the capacity to redeem such a loss of values. All actual entities perish. In the process system, even God is an actual entity, an unexceptional being. What hope can agonizing humanity gain from a God-in-process if that process leads toward even the death of God?

Whitehead suddenly shifts ground at this point. There is, after all, one exception to the rule about an unexceptional God. Unlike all other actual entities, God does not participate in the perpetual perishing of the world. As it turns out, therefore, even process appeals to a category that is a glaring exception to its own metaphysical game plan. A nonperishing God is needed by theodicy; but it is not a God yielded by Whitehead’s own method.

A similar inconsistency lies in the process concept of the mental quality of matter, although we cannot pursue it here. We can only note that attributing “choice” to the material world requires a language game other than pure metaphysics. Whitehead does not show how he overcomes Kant’s “limits” against moving from the phenomenal to the noumenal. Biblical theology may do something like what process wants to do when it speaks of a “fallen” world, or of a creation that “groans,” or of tombs that burst open; but that is the language of revelation. A consistent process approach rules out that move, seeking salvation by metaphysics alone.

Whatever Happened to God?

The process theologian John Cobb was concerned about Whitehead’s inconsistent shift to an exceptional God, or to a God in his primordial nature, when the going gets tough in the empirical world. Cobb insists rather that we search for a deity fully explicable “in terms of the principles operative elsewhere in the system” (A Christian Natural Theology). What sort of God would this yield for theodicy, even if it could be done consistently?

It must be admitted that God as “actual entity,” alongside the rest of us, is companionable. He is even heroic, stalwartly enjoining us to submit bravely to the world process even though, to the empirical eye, it ends irrevocably in death. Further, there is a certain attraction these days to any scheme that can debunk scholastic ideas of immutability, omnipotence, and the rest of the attributes of God that have survived the razors of generations of Occams. We no longer delight in paying metaphysical compliments.

Yet when we have enjoyed the companionable, heroic, pared-down God, whom do we worship? And to whom do we attach our hopes that prima facie irredeemable evil will one day meet its Redeemer? In his consequent nature God is incapable of functioning as Redeemer. In his primordial aspect he is too gentle to overpower even actual entities, not to speak of any Cosmic Adversary. In short, Stephen Ely’s perceptive title of nearly thirty-five years ago is still relevant; we must question The Religious Availability of Whitehead’s God.

Paradoxically, even the classical God was more “available.” To use such ideas as immutability, impossibility, and aseity to suggest that the orthodox God is brittle, distant, and insensitive is to construct a straw God in whom few have ever believed. These ideas were developed by the early church fathers under the pressure of paganism and polytheism. They were designed not to show how God was removed from history or the world process but to show that he was One God; that he was not ruled by the passions that embroiled pagan deities in debauchery; and that the world depended on him for its being, not he upon the world (Cf. G. L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought).

This is no brief for clinging to the patristic language of God. A part of the task of theology is to develop more adequate terminology. The point is that process has often substituted its own terms with no advantage for theodicy and with considerable loss in religious availability. For transcendence, process substitutes a primordial God, but one who lacks any real divine power. For immanence, process prefers a consequent God, but one who does not outlive his perishing companions. We may be excused for being reluctant to make this swap, which neither solves the problem of evil nor leaves intact a God who can promise one day to do so.

The Gospel in Process

A consistent process view of reality has little place for the one event Christians consider to be centrally important to the problem of evil: the incarnation-resurrection, the Good News that God was in Christ reconciling this process to himself. The claim of the New Testament documents is that if we ever hope to see the point (telos) of currently baffling evil, we must view reality from the standpoint of that supreme evil, the cross. And we are offered the resurrection faith as the proleptic triumph over the power of darkness. Far from being an example of the way the world usually works, this event was an intrusion, an enfleshed Message from another realm who was then transformed in order to “return.” Christ appears in the mode of the prophet, one with a message he claims to have received from outside the world process, which otherwise seems doomed. What happens to this claim in process theology?

Whitehead’s answer is that prophets, or those who believe themselves to be revealing a message from another realm, are mostly mad, ignorant, or deceived. The odds are so heavy against their authenticity that “apart from some method of testing perhaps it is safer to stone them, in some merciful way” (The Function of Reason).

The process theologian Norman Pittenger cannot accept without reservation the claim that Christ’s nature was qualitatively different from that of the common run of men (see his books The Word Incarnate and Christology Reconsidered). And for Schubert Ogden, “There is not the slightest evidence that God has acted in Christ in any way different from the way in which he primordially acts in every other event” (Cf. Process Philosophy and Christian Thought, p. 349). Such denials of the biblical witness are serious for a Christian view of evil. Even though we do not grace our concept with the term “theodicy,” living and dying in faith requires an implicit and functional notion of evil. For this, as John Hick says, “a knowledge of the structure of reality, or of the character of our total environment is required” (Evil and the God of Love). While “Jesus came preaching,” not doing theodicy, he did claim to know, beyond what man knows, “the character of our total environment.” Against Whitehead, the early Church measured this prophet’s authenticity by the resurrection. It was this event that designated the visible Christ the Son of the invisible God (Rom. 1:4). The means of this miraculous fusion of Mind with matter is not described. But when the early fathers defined Christ as one who was “of the same substance” as the Father, it was not paying Jesus excessive metaphysical compliments. The fathers knew that our struggle with evil hinges on whether Jesus was in some sense one with the Creator. Against Barth, it is at the point of the consummate evil of the cross that we can speak, at least in faith, of the containment, if not the explanation, of all evil.

Obviously, we should not expect process thought or any other philosophy to develop a high Christology. But neither should we be expected to welcome enthusiastically a system that can only reassure us, when we cry from our pits of despair, that we should take heart because God is there with us, albeit with no plan and no power and no precedent to kindle our hopes. We can rightly question an approach that slights the most important ground Christians have for believing that the problem of evil has a solution, however hidden it may be at present.

And Christian humility seems to require that we admit that the solution does in fact remain hidden. Those who accept the “answer” of Christ do so in hope, and “hope that is seen is not hope.” We confess we live in a world that includes apparently structural evil, great injustice, and excruciating pain beyond all human reason. On the basis of the Christ event, we believe that such a world is not outside the rational structure of creation; but the rationale itself escapes us. And it is that event, not metaphysics or elaborate logic, which must be proclaimed to a world sometimes numbed by what the Apostle Paul admitted is a mystery of iniquity.

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

Several denominations have more clergy seeking positions than they have positions seeking clergy. This is particularly true for denominations that have been losing members. The situation is such that if present trends continue (and of course they never do exactly), according to one report, “there will be an Episcopal priest for every lay member of that denomination in the year 2004.” The United Presbyterians would find themselves in the same fix only seven years later.

We would remind would-be clergypersons who can’t find positions that there is a long tradition of ministers gathering a flock through evangelism. Whatever shortage of vacant pulpits certain groups may have, there is no shortage of potential converts to Christianity. In fact, many denominations are growing instead of shrinking. Although much of that growth may be at the expense of declining denominations, at least some of it is by gaining adherents from among the previously unchurched.

Nor is there any shortage of Christians who need to be ministered to. The rising divorce rate among believers is just one example of the need for counseling and other forms of mutual ministry in the body of Christ.

God may never lead you into full-time ministry, but this in no way lessens your potential to wholeheartedly serve God as an active member of a congregation. (Conversely, holding a full-time position does not automatically mean that you are a servant of God.)

The responsibility for the ministry of the church ultimately belongs to God himself. The Lord Jesus Christ is the head of the Church, and he is not capriciously equipping disciples for ministries that don’t exist. It may be that denominations have created job descriptions and academic programs that contribute to an apparent oversupply of ministers. But let us never confuse what denominations do and the mistakes they make with the work of the Holy Spirit.

We need not worry about any excess supply of clergy. People with suitable gifts and training who faithfully proclaim God’s Word and who are genuinely guided by him will find sufficient opportunities and challenges.—D.T.

Economic Enemy Number One

In its 1978 convention in Minneapolis, the National Association of Evangelicals called upon the United States government to “take to itself a new sense of economic responsibility including a balanced budget, more careful spending and the limitations of its bureaucratic growth.” One can hope that this signals increased concern by Christians for seeking solutions for America’s biggest economic problem: inflation.

Like the sun that shines on the just and the unjust, so inflation shines equally upon the church and society. The price of goods and services is presently climbing at an annual rate of about 7 per cent in America. But inflation is not just a problem for people here.

Churches have been appalled at the financial needs of missionaries. Some of them have added a cost-of-living increase to their missionary support program, just as they have done for their own pastors. Some churches have decided not to support additional missionaries until the ones they presently help are adequately compensated. A few churches, because of rising costs, have chosen not to expand their present missionary program.

Many Americans wrongly assume that it costs less to live in other countries. But Organization Resources Counselors reports that a couple who lives on a thousand dollars a month in the states needs $1,400 to live comparably in Rome or Buenos Aires and about $2,000 a month in Manila or Vienna.

The local church is also feeling pinched. The cost of building new churches and adding to present structures has been increasing at the annual rate of 12 to 15 per cent for several years.

The purchasing power of the pastor’s salary can keep pace with inflation only if he has an automatic cost-of-living increase of about 6 to 8 per cent annually. A pastor is not getting a raise unless it surpasses the 7 per cent rate of inflation. Otherwise, he is merely keeping pace. Among older pastors, inflation wipes out early retirement. With only Social Security and little in savings through the years of active service, many pastors will find the cost of living too high to manage with their meager earnings. Many ministers living in church-provided homes could not face the cost of living and of their own housing.

Yet another area that should be of concern to the church is voluntary giving. Inflation erodes the givers’ disposable income. Discretionary funds are the largest source of funds for voluntary agencies in this country. Inflation restricts the ability of a generous spirit to give as he or she would like. The pressure of voluntary agencies to survive is real. Missions have had to cut back on needed projects. Churches have had to cut back on their 1978 budgets. Unless they are exceeding a 7 per cent growth in receipts per year they are standing still economically. But what about solutions?

William Simon, former Secretary of the Treasury, recently said that “out-of control government is the root cause of unbridled price increases.” Part of his suggested solution to the runaway economy and the erosion of the dollar is to “slow down the tremendous growth in government by first attacking the budget deficit and then by a cut in spending across the board.” He even goes so far as to find merit in the proposal to amend the Constitution to require a balanced federal budget at a level no more than a certain fixed percentage of the gross national product.

However, President Carter in a speech in April to the American Society of Newspaper Editors comes closest to exposing the root of the problem: “We want something to be done about our problems—except when the solutions affect us. We want to conserve energy, but not change wasteful habits. We favor sacrifice, as long as others go first. We want to abolish tax loopholes—unless it’s our loopholes. We denounce special interests, except for our own.”

This statement reminds us that economic enemy number one is not only inflation; it is the individual who insists on looking out for his own interests, the interests of “number one” as slang puts it, instead of being willing to change his habits, to sacrifice the loopholes favorable to himself, and in general to look to national and worldwide interests as well as his own.—C. RICHARD SHUMAKER, director, Institute of Slavic Studies, Wheaton, Illinois.

Test of Current Religious Knowledge

Here is the first Eutychus Quiz. Answers will be found at the end of this column. If you get all six right, you live in California. Four or five, you work for a Christian advertising agency. Three or under, you are reading this in a study. (Shame on you.)

1. What new product will “guide family members while walking in the house at night … offer the gentle reassurance and inspiration of religious faith shining through the night]

(a) Gospel flashlight; (b) 700 Club’s satellite telecast; (c) Faithful Night Light.

2. A string sonata is horsehairs scraping across catgut, producing sound at predictable decibel levels in a particular pattern. This description is similar to what current phenomenon:

(a) Description of sexual love in books; (b) Portrayal of sexual love on stage and in movies; (c) Inferences about sexual love on TV.

3. What two words in the English language have a greater number of synonyms than any other words:

(a) faith and hope; (b) shirts and pants; (c) drunk and insane.

4. Americans are on a collecting binge. What are they collecting:

(a) dolls, miniature furniture, beer cans, guns, model railroads, African violets, stamps, coins, buttons; (b) lasting friendships.

5. Who said this? “Christians who would not expect Paul to have had in mind the entire range of 20th Century knowledge about geography … stumble blindly into assuming he had a 20th Century knowledge of behavioral science”:

(a) Karl Menninger; (b) John Ehrlichman; (c) Ralph Blair.

6. Name the version in which the following quotation is found, “Where two thousand or three thousand are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them”:

(a) TEV; (b) LB; (c) NASB; (d) TCV.

Answers: 1. (a) Faithful Night Light, developed by Faithful Enterprises of Beverly Hills, “casts sky-blue light through the image of either a Christian cross or a Jewish Star of David.” 2. All three. 3. (c) 4. (a) 5. (c) Self-styled “chief apologist for the homosexual lifestyle,” in “Evangelicals Concerned,” homosexual newsletter. 6. (d) The California Bible.

EUTYCHUS VIII

On Sex And Sources

I am relieved that someone so expert in early church history has unscrambled the dates I wrongly assigned to Tertullian and Ambrose (“Were the Puritans Right About Sex?”, April 7). The remainder of Mr. Dunaway’s objections are matters of interpretation and in no way affect my main thesis.

I think I can restate my summary of Athanasius’s views on virginity to my critic’s satisfaction: Athanasius cites virginity as a doctrine distinctive to the teaching of Christ and therefore proof that Christianity is the true religion; this argument appears in De Incarnatione Verbi Dei and Vita Antoni. For his additional views, one should consult De Virginitate and In Pasionem et Crucem Domini.

Regarding Origen’s castration, I did not, of course, intend to imply that his shocking extremism was the norm in medieval Catholicism. I do maintain, contrary to Dunaway, that Origen’s view on the virtue of virginity is indeed representative of the early church’s attitude, since it has many parallels in the writings of the fathers. Nor can I agree that the church excommunicated Origen “for that very act.” St. Jerome insists that the proceedings of the councils against Origen were not based on any doctrine but were due solely to jealousy over his eloquence and reputation. The New Catholic Encyclopedia accepts this interpretation, showing that Origen found himself in trouble because he preached while still a layman and was ordained as a priest without the knowledge of his bishop Demetrius, who was the moving force behind his loss of ordination.

Dunaway’s personal aversion to the Council of Trent should not be allowed to obscure the accuracy of my statement that it was a major Catholic council whose object, according to The Catholic Encyclopedia, “was the definitive determination of the doctrines of the Church” and which made official many of the teachings of the medieval Catholic church, including the doctrine of virginity that I cited.

The letters and telephone calls I have received about my article suggest that Dunaway is not alone in wishing to know where the data that I cited can be found. There are several surveys that cover the material very well and that will direct a reader to the primary sources. They include the following:

Roland Bainton, What Christianity Says About Sex, Love, and Marriage; William G. Cole, Sex in Christianity and Psychoanalysis; Oscar E. Feucht, ed., Sex and the Church; Roland M. Frye, “The Teachings of Classical Puritanism on Conjugal Love,” Studies in the Renaissance, II (1955), 148–159; C. S. Lewis, chapter one of The Allegory of Love; E. C. Messenger, The Mystery of Sex and Marriage (volume two is the key book and bears the individual title Two in One Flesh); G. Rattray Taylor, Sex in History; Maurice Valency, chapter one of In Praise of Love. Anyone who reads these sources will find my data corroborated several times over and will see that in regard to medieval Catholicism I have uncovered only the tip of the iceberg.

For the apparently numerous Lutherans who suspect that I pulled Luther’s comment “if the wife refuse, let the maid come” out of the air, may I say that the source is Luther’s sermon entitled “The Estate of Marriage,” volume forty-five, page 33, in the fifty-six-volume American edition of Luther’s works.

LELAND RYKEN

Professor of English

Wheaton College

Wheaton, Ill.

Kantzervative

Your April 7th interview with Dr. Kenneth Kantzer reveals the wisdom of your choice. Looking forward to CHRISTIANITY TODAY’s Kantzervative approach!

DAVE MACPHERSON

Liberty, Mo.

Praise and Questions

The interview with Malcolm Muggeridge (April 21) was the most refreshing article I have read in many a day. Instead of relativism and situation ethics here is a vital relationship between a man’s faith and his understanding of life and reality in general. Wow! But now … you should indicate why in the italics before the article, you wrote, “You may not agree with all of Muggeridge’s views; we do not, but the interview is thought-provoking, nevertheless.” Why do you not agree with him? I do! It’s your tum; the ball is in your court. That is, how do you differ from Muggeridge?

GIFFORD H. TOWLE

Amherst, Mass.

• We do not agree with him that birth control is unnecessary in India.-ED.

Why are the evangelical magazines so enamored with Malcolm Muggeridge? Is be another of the trophies in the evangelical game room? If he has been captured, it has certainly not brought him into the fold of evangelicalism. This is obvious from his own doctrinal confession, whether he likes being cross-examined about dogma or not.

I think the secularists are laughing at us all. “Well, they couldn’t get Muggeridge all the way down the aisle, but they’ve at least gotten him to raise his hand for evangelicalism.” Shame on us all for displaying so prominently in our magazines and conventions such a half-done convert.… better evidences of the gospel’s power can be found.

WILLIAM VARNER

Independent Bible Church

Willow Grove, Pa.

With this issue Carl F. H. Henry begins a three-part analysis of the most vigorous attack against evangelicalism to surface in recent years. Oxford University don James Barr writes this hard-hitting polemic mistitled Fundamentalism. Henry’s response is stiff theology but worth reading for two reasons. It reveals clearly the theological climate faced by conservative evangelical students in the religion departments and theological faculties of the great universities of Christendom. It also demonstrates that evangelicals, left, right, and center are in this thing together—all tarred with the same brush.

For over a year now, a cloud has hovered over the village of Oberammergau, location of the world-famous Passion Play. My wife and I recently visited this Bavarian village, spending some time with persons vitally concerned with the course of the upcoming decentennial commemoration of the crucifixion of our Lord, due in 1980.

The mood of Oberammergau has for months been one of uneasiness, due to the controversy over the form and staging of the coming presentations. The text used in recent presentations has been adapted from a script written 300 years ago. Until recently, there were few major objections to it. From time to time members of the Jewish community have felt that parts of the script made too much of the role of Jewish authorities in the trial and death of Jesus. However, the major stimulus to controversy came with pronouncements in the midsixties of the Vatican Ecumenical Council, which sparked suggestions for a radical revision of the Passion Play script that would avoid reference to, or suggestion of, Jewish responsibility for the death of our Lord.

The village of 4,200 has for a decade been divided into two camps, that of the “no-change traditionalists” and the “now-play progressives.” The latter have campaigned for a replacement of the seventeenth-century script with a more recent one, in which the forces of evil leading to the death of Jesus are shown allegorically. This would serve to absolve the Jewish religious authorities of our Lord’s time of responsibility for the crucifixion event. As the controversy has progressed, however, it has become clear that the demands for the elimination of that, plus the correction of some historical errors, have served as a pretext for a demand by some for a thorough updating of the play. Such a script has been prepared. The traditionalists, who call themselves the “1980 Passion Play Citizens’ Action Group,” reject the new version as newfangled and irreverent. Anton Preisinger, who played the part of the Christus in 1970, feels the new version is unsuited to Oberammergau and to amateur players.

We were privileged to go behind the scenes and see the displays of costumes and properties. A survey of the materials made ready for the revised presentation (and there have been three rehearsals with the new format this summer) indicates that there is a wide departure from the historic Play. Such props as the cross, the staging, and the costumes for most of the lead characters, suggest a thorough modernization of the upcoming presentations of 1980. The August rehearsals, which were an immediate sellout, seem to have been trial balloons, by which sentiment for or against the new form could be determined.

There are other significant departures in the proposed new version. Formerly this presentation was designedly “amateur,” using (with a solitary exception in 1950) only villagers as characters. The newer format would require not only cast members from outside Oberammergau, but some professional actors as well. The part of Mary, formerly reserved for a single woman of the village under age thirty-five, may now be played by one not meeting these specifications.

By the best information that visitors from outside Oberammergau can secure, the alteration goes much further. Responsible citizens of Oberammergau have held that the proposed new version will radically alter the deeper meaning of the play. Originally planned and presented in response to a vow, made as the village was spared in the plague of 1633, the Passion Play was essentially that—a pledged dramatization of the death of our Lord. The new version is said by persons familiar with it to be more in the manner of a medieval morality play, out of keeping with the original design.

The play as given in recent decades has been embellished by a number of supportive scenes, given by groups from the two wings flanking the main stage. These scenes are introduced by a narrator whose lines highlight the coming main-stage presentation. The wife of the narrator, who served as a personal guide to our party, confided to my wife and me the misgivings of her husband, and the feeling that he would probably not narrate in 1980 if the revised script were used.

The modernization proposed would, it seems clear, alter greatly the thrust of the play, and thus appeal to a somewhat different audience than has been the case in the recent past. It was reported that some of the supporting scenes would, if the new plan were adopted, reflect Bavarian folk festivals, rather than the emphasis originally intended. Some have maintained that the proposed musical alterations would include adaptations of the Bavarian Schuhplattler and the introduction of some rock music.

Although much of the pressure for modernization has come from the younger townsfolk, whom the conservatives view as being overly reflective of the secularized German society, there have reportedly been some older people favoring change. The people who want the traditional script regard themselves as guardians of the historic vow and spirit of Oberammergau. These people are also distressed by the commercialization of the Passion Play, as visitors from distant lands seek out the village’s major event and repeatedly fill its 5,200-seat theater with its mammoth open-air stage.

Word has just come to the effect that the issue has been resolved, at least for the present (according to the Washington Post, March 7, 1978). It seems that the municipal council in charge of the affairs of Oberammergau had decided that on the basis of the response to the three presentations last August, it was prepared to go along with the use of the modernized version in 1980. Then in March in the municipal elections, the present council was voted out, and one was elected that opted for the traditional presentation.

This decision does not, of course, settle the matter of the feelings of the world Jewish community, to whom the presentation of the passion of our Lord is, quite understandably, offensive. Whether or not the script is needlessly expressive of the involvement of first-century Jewish leaders in the crucifixion, it remains that any such presentation, if true to the Gospel narratives, can scarcely be regarded as complimentary to them. We attended the play in 1950, 1960, and 1970. We followed the German text carefully, and did not ourselves feel the material to be as negative toward the Jewish leaders as some regard it to be.

The naïve person would, of course, say that Jewish organizations today should take this in stride, just as do persons of other nations or races when they see presentations that are not especially complimentary to them. However, as Christians we must remember that none of us has experienced any national or racial catastrophy of the extent and the malignancy of the Holocaust during the nightmare called Hitlerism.

Bearing the Holocaust in mind, one can understand the fears of Jewish people that even if the Oberammergau presentation expressed only the New Testament narrative, yet it is a selective presentation, and is seen by well over 200,000 persons from all parts of the world every ten years. Fear of anti-Semitism is understandably a constant with the Jewish community, and the fear of actively reviving this disease is a very real factor in the thinking of Jewish people, and especially those who narrowly survived the Holocaust or who lost loved ones during this nightmare.

As Christians we need to understand this aspect of the question that revolves around Oberammergau. Although it would alter the entire economics of this delightful Bavarian village, one could wish that the observance of our Lord’s Passion could be less commercialized, less showy, and perhaps inclusive of a smaller number of people. The controversy catches evangelicals between their concern for God’s ancient people on the one hand and the integrity of the passion narratives in the Gospels on the other. I feel this dilemma keenly and have no final word of resolution for it.

Following a political battle of monumental proportions, Oklahoma evangelist Oral Roberts emerged late last month with state approval to start construction of the hospital portion of a huge medical complex on his university campus in Tulsa. The evangelist had first sought permission for a 777-bed hospital. During controversy over whether Tulsa needs or can afford another hospital, Roberts earlier this year offered a scaled-down request for 294 beds as a compromise. Authorities okayed the 294 beds with the understanding that Roberts can proceed with the other beds if the need is demonstrated and if the other hospitals in town are not hurt by the newcomer.

Roberts says God told him to build the medical center and gave him the details for it in a vision during a sojourn on a desolate California desert. He explained that he had gone to the desert to pray following the death of his daughter and her husband in a plane crash in February, 1977.

The evangelist returned from the desert and announced the launching of the City of Faith medical complex. He described it to his television audience: Arising from a common base would be a sixty-story clinic and diagnostic center, flanked on the west by a thirty-story hospital and on the east by a twenty-story research center. At the front would be sixty-foot-high sculptured hands (signifying the hand of medicine and the hand of prayer), with a wide tree-lined stream flowing from a large fountain. Further, said Roberts, God told him that it was to be opened debt free and that he should ask his “partners” (donors) to send contributions of $7, $77, $777, and $7,777.

The price tag of the complete complex: an estimated $250 million or more. So far, according to sources at the 3,800-student Oral Roberts University (ORU), the evangelist has raised more than $27 million of the $55 million initial-stage costs. The complex is to be an integral part of the ORU medical school, which is scheduled to open this fall with fifty students. A dental school is also to open this fall. (The twelve-year-old ORU is located on 500 acres on Tulsa’s posh south side, with assets estimated at $150 million.)

Ground-breaking for the center came on January 24, Roberts’s sixtieth birthday. Then came protests and pressures from some in Tulsa’s medical and political communities. The Tulsa Hospital Council went on record opposing the complex and endorsing “appropriate means to discourage project implementation.”

Members of the hospital council said that the city’s five big private hospitals and suburban facilities were already in trouble, with nearly 1,000 of 2,944 licensed beds not in use because of lack of demand. At the same time, said the medical people, the hospitals were struggling to pay off $150 million in construction bonds. The proposed ORU hospital, they pointed out, would be located only two miles from the largest general hospital in the state. The new hospital, they predicted, would drain patients and staff from the others, driving costs of health care still higher. Some hospitals might go under, they warned.

Roberts, known best for his emphasis on faith healing, argued that the City of Faith would not be simply another local operation. It would, like the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, attract patients and staff from around the world, he insisted. The center, he said, would emphasize research on heart, cancer, and aging problems.

ORU’s vice provost for medical affairs, James E. Winslow, Jr., went even further and suggested that the City of Faith would draw so many ailing people to Tulsa that all the other hospitals would benefit from the overflow. Of the 400,000 prayer-request letters that Roberts gets each month, 100,000 refer to “clear-cut medical problems—22,000 with cancer, 26,000 with heart disease,” he said. Already, 250,000 visitors come to Tulsa every year to visit the ORU prayer tower, he said, and 30,000 of Roberts’s “partners” come annually to attend spiritual seminars. If that many healthy people come to ORU, he theorized, from 500,000 to 1.2 million sick people a year might seek help at the City of Faith. (Winslow was formerly the ORU basketball team physician.)

Federal laws required Roberts to submit the hospital part of the proposed center to a review process. The review proceedings were set up under 1974 congressional legislation designed to eliminate costly duplication in health-care facilities around the country. State or regional planners are required to certify that a new facility is needed. The three-member Oklahoma Health Planning Commission is the certifying body in that state. It is served by an advisory body, the Oklahoma Health Systems Agency (OHSA), which has both staff and volunteer members, including consumer representatives.

Dented Income In Dentsville

They believe in taking a stand on principle at Rehoboth United Methodist Church in Dentsville, a small community near Columbia, South Carolina. Eight years ago the church agreed to let Dentsville Piggly Wiggly supermarket use a church-owned parking lot on a ten-year lease basis at $400 a month. Recently, the store began selling beer and wine, and the church board unanimously voted to cancel the lease. A fence encloses the parking lot today, and a large sign informs passersby and wouldbe parkers that Piggly Wiggly broke the lease by deciding to sell strong drink.

The action was taken because the United Methodist Church’s Book of Discipline that was operative when the lease was written “prohibited United Methodists from making any profit, directly or indirectly, from the sale of alcohol,” explained pastor Ron Pettit. Earlier, his members had opposed the store’s license application at a hearing.

Piggly Wiggly owner James P. Mc-Keown III, whose store is open seven days a week, says that he must sell alcoholic beverages now in order to meet the competition from other stores in the area. “No one sold beer and wine when we first came out here,” he said, so the no-alcohol stipulation was not a big problem at that time.

Piggly Wiggly’s customers will have no major hassle in finding a place to park, but the church will miss the income from the parking lot. The amount represents one-eighth of the church’s budget.

Twice the OHSA voted (by 19 to 6 and 12 to 7) to recommend that the planning commission reject the hospital proposal.

Roberts pulled out the stops. He asked his three million partner-families to pray and to write letters to Oklahoma government officials and the health planning commission. An amendment was introduced in the state legislature; it apparently was designed to exempt ORU from planners’ control. In March, Roberts traveled to HEW headquarters in Washington, where he complained of unfair hearing procedures to Henry Foley, head of HEW’s Health Resources Administration. Foley said he would send a top aide to investigate. The Washington Star later quoted sources as saying that the probe never occurred.)

The campaign paid off. Some 400,000 letters poured into commission headquarters during a six-week period, virtually all pro-Roberts. Governor David Boren said his mail hit 1,500 pro-Roberts letters a day. Thirty-eight of Oklahoma’s forty-eight state senators and forty of the 101 house members—some with budget authority over the health and welfare agencies headed by the three commissioners—publicly backed the hospital.

Following a two-hour hearing in a packed auditorium in the capitol at Oklahoma City, the commissioners voted unanimously to approve the City of Faith hospital. Both Roberts and his opponents in the Tulsa hospital community gave strong emotion-laden appeals for their respective causes during the hearing.

A spokesman for the commissioners said that their staff study had turned up fewer empty beds than reported by the OHSA and that there were doubts about the ability of Tulsa’s existing hospitals to handle ORU’s medical students. It would be wrong to assume that the commissioners had caved in under pressure from legislators, he told reporters. The action, he affirmed, “is an expression of the sentiment of the people of Oklahoma.”

(HEW secretary Joseph A. Califano, Jr., acknowledged in a press conference that he had once represented Roberts as an attorney. But, said he, that would not require him to disqualify himself should an appeal be lodged with HEW against the hospital’s inclusion of construction costs in Medicare-Medicaid reimbursement—as recommended in the commission’s action.)

Roberts and his followers meanwhile are exulting in God’s power “to move mountains.”

Church of Scientology documents seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (see May 5 issue, page 46) “indicate that the church has been waging an extensive, sophisticated campaign to identify, attack, and discredit its ‘enemies,’ including Justice Department investigators, other public officials, and inquiring journalists,” the Washington Post reported late last month in a copyrighted story by reporter Ron Shaffer.

Quoting sources “close to an intensive federal investigation of the Scientologists’ activities,” Shaffer said that an attack-and-destroy campaign by the church’s Guardian’s Office to silence critics “has involved illegal surveillance, burglaries, forgeries, and many forms of harassment.”

A number of covert operations carried out by Scientologists are documented in the church’s internal memoranda and directives, the sources alleged to Shaffer. The reporter cites the following allegations:

• Scientologists obtained the personal stationery of author Paulette Cooper, who had written a book in 1971 entitled The Scandal of Scientology. A bomb threat was typed on the paper, and it was mailed to a Scientology office, which reported the threat to police. Miss Cooper was arrested in connection with the charge. She denied writing the note, but the paper had her fingerprints on it, and federal prosecutors charged her with perjury. The charges were eventually dropped after Miss Cooper submitted to lengthy questioning under a truth-serum drug, but in the process she reportedly suffered a nervous breakdown.

• Scientology agents staged a phony hit-and-run accident involving then mayor Gabriel Cazares of Clearwater, Florida. Cazares had been a central figure in a dispute with Scientologists over the church’s purchase of a Clearwater hotel (see February 27, 1976, issue, page 41). During a visit to Washington, D.C., the mayor was a passenger in a car driven by a female Scientology agent. The agent struck a pedestrian in a park, sped from the scene, and urged Cazares not to report the “accident.” Unknown to Cazares, the pedestrian was another Scientology agent who helped to stage the accident. Later, the Scientologists tried to use the incident against the mayor in a political campaign.

• An attempt was made to discredit a Clearwater reporter who had covered the arrival of the Scientologists in town and the ensuing dispute. A Scientology agent forged the rough draft of a newspaper story under his byline and slipped it to state legislators whom the reporter was covering. The story supposedly linked Florida politicians to the Mafia.

• Scientology members were placed in at least three government agencies to collect information and steal documents related to the agencies’ dealings with the church. The agencies: the Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

• A harassment campaign was directed against prosecutors handling Scientology cases. The campaign included telephone calls and background investigations that sought details ranging from grades in school to personal habits.

Spokesman Greg Layton of the Founding Church of Scientology in Washington denied the allegations in the Washington Post story. He said the church has documentation to refute the charges, and he implied that the Post had been supplied with a compilation of “false reports” as part of a government harassment campaign against the church. Other Scientology members voiced similar sentiments, but as of early this month the church’s national headquarters in Los Angeles had not released any official comment regarding the allegations. Information officer Arthur Maren did issue a news release that suggested “corrupt officials” in government had used the press, including the Post, “for smear campaigns to try and invalidate the traditional reform role of the church.…”

After the Post articles appeared, Scientology attorney Phillip J. Hirshkop petitioned the federal district court in Washington. He asked the court to obtain and destroy whatever seized documents the Post might possess along with notes pertaining to them. He argued that the documents had been improperly leaked to the newspaper by government agents who were reviewing them. Judge John H. Pratt, however, rejected the request. He said that it was a “clear violation” of First Amendment rights, and he indicated that a subpoena for the reporter’s materials would not be enforced. Pratt agreed with a Post attorney that Shaffer could invoke privilege and not answer questions about the documents if he were called on to testify in court.

A Justice Department official said that an investigation would be conducted in an attempt to find out the source of the Post story.

Maren’s news release was issued to acknowledge that the Church of Scientology “has been ‘spying’ on the government for years.” The government, he said, calls it spying, “but we call it reform action.…” He explained that Scientologists “have been involved in exposing government illegalities and coverups for years, and this is a legitimate and traditional function of the church.” The reform-action program was code-named Snow White in Scientology’s inner circles, Maren indicated.

The publicist, recently released after spending some seven months in jail for refusing to answer questions for a federal grand jury investigating the church, explained that the Snow White project was kept confidential because “we didn’t want to embarrass government officials.” He said that when certain materials were found, they were turned over to government agencies and congressional committees. The raids of Scientology churches and seizure of documents by FBI agents last July were aimed mostly at Snow White, he suggested. “Apparently some dishonest bureaucrats found the Snow White program upsetting,” he commented. (The Scientologists have filed a $750 million lawsuit against the FBI agents and virtually every government officer and agency connected with the raids.)

Maren outlined what he claimed were some Snow White accomplishments and activities (documentation concerning Interpol, the international police intelligence agency based in France; publication of confidential IRS policies; exposure of inhumane conditions in South African mental institutions where more than 8,000 blacks were confined; leadership in use of the Freedom of Information Act). He then announced the formation of a national “spy network of honest citizens” to “expose and publicize illegal government activities.” Maren urged “every honest government employee” to turn over to the new group information on illegal government activities and dishonest officials. “We will investigate, document, expose, and publish what we find,” he pledged.

The release concluded by listing the names of thirty-eight present and former employees of the Drug Enforcement Agency who at one time worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. There is no indication in the release as to why they were named. Also named were two foreigners connected with Interpol: the Scientologists say they have been involved in drug traffic. In addition, the release cited alleged FBI intelligence operations against groups in Los Angeles.

There are about two dozen Scientology churches in the United States and three times that number abroad. More than three million members are claimed, according to press reports. Observers question the membership figure (an average exceeding 30,000 members per church), but it seems to be in line with Scientology’s broad definition of membership and with reported income. Informers have told federal investigators that Scientology’s U.S. churches may gross more than $100 million a year. Much of this money comes from fees for church courses and Scientology-style counseling, in which advanced members attempt to help others to achieve a “clear” or untroubled state with the assistance of a mechanical device known as an E-meter.

The church has been embroiled in legal confrontations almost since its founding in 1952 by L. Ron Hubbard, a science fiction writer and author of Dianetics, The Modern Science of Mental Health, the bestseller bible of the Scientology movement. Many of the church’s problems with the government involve tax issues. Only about half of its U.S. branches have been able to obtain tax-exempt status. Some legal decisions have viewed it more as a business or secular philosophy than a religion.

One thing is certain in light of the Washington Post revelations: Scientology’s most serious legal battle is yet ahead.

A Jewish Look At Luther

Martin Luther’s legacy to his spiritual heirs includes a certain discomfort about Jews. Generations of Lutherans have disclaimed his 1543 treatise, “On the Jews and Their Lies,” but it keeps coming up, most recently on the NBC television network’s “Today” show. In his old age the Reformer wrote that Jewish schools and synagogues should be burned. A New York psychoanalyst and author of a book on the Nazi era, Arnold Hutschnecker, cited a passage from the 400-year-old controversial work during a “Today” interview that dealt with NBC’s “Holocaust” series last month. Luther contributed to anti-Semitic feeling that “has existed in Germany for hundreds of years,” Hutschnecker claimed.

Lutheran leaders issued protests immediately. They requested air time from the network to reply. NBC said no, but “Today” host Tom Brokaw next day told viewers that the remarks had “caused a stir in the Lutheran community in this country.” He then attempted to put the quotation in context and expressed the hope that the Luther statements “will not be misused.”

The NBC’s dramatized documentary, viewed by an estimated 120 million persons on four successive evenings, was widely hailed as a broadcasting triumph. More than 50 per cent of the nation’s television audience watched some nights. In New York alone an estimated six million saw the initial installment. The series sparked commentaries and letters to the editor in media all over the nation. Critics were unhappy with the film’s commercial interruptions, and some thought the production smacked too much of Hollywood.

A carefully planned educational program was prepared for use in schools and churches in connection with the telecasts. Interfaith “remembrance” services were held in many communities. The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith said it had distributed nine million newspaper supplements about the Holocaust. Religious News Service reported that a Washington pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, sent a copy of the novel on which the series was based to each member of Congress, key administration officials, and members of the Washington press corps. A note was enclosed mentioning the committee’s opposition to the proposed sale of jet fighters to the Jewish state’s Arab neighbors.

The telecasts and associated emphasis on the Holocaust came on the eve of the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the modern state of Israel.

Martin Luther’s offensive quotation was not cited as such, but one prominent Jewish spokesman accused the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS) of having “sadly revived the medieval image of the Jews” in an evangelism program. Rabbi James Rudin of the American Jewish Committee last month scored the synod’s 1977 convention resolution on Jewish evangelism and a witnessing manual used in the church. “By singling out Jews for intensive proselytizing,” he declared, “the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod has, in effect, branded Judaism as an inadequate and incomplete religion.… The resolution is a moral affront to the Jewish people and to forty centuries of Jewish religious life and theological self-understanding.”

Rudin’s blast came after a series of consultations with Missouri Synod officials. Accounts of the results of the conversations differ. Erwin J. Kolb, executive secretary of the LCMS board of evangelism, said members of the synod’s Jewish-witness committee agreed that Rudin had some valid criticisms of their materials. He disclosed that the committee also agreed to make certain changes in the manual and that Rudin would be allowed to review the final manuscript. Meanwhile, stated Kolb, all parties agreed not to make public statements. The new edition of the manual is not due until this July, but Rudin went public with more criticism in April. Rudin, when asked about the agreement, said he had agreed with Kolb that no reporters would attend their meetings but that he made no promise about public statements.

In another ticklish situation related to Lutheran views of Jewish questions, the American Lutheran Church recently suspended two Long Island congregations that incorporated Hebrew traditions into church life. Following a long squabble, denominational officials last year officially charged that the Gospel was being “subordinated” to Jewish tradition. Pastors and people wore skull caps and prayer shawls, and one ritual slaughter of goats was reported. Kosher kitchens were being kept by some members of the congregations. Neighborhood Jews, as well as area Lutherans and some other Christians exclaimed “about time” when the denomination cracked down, reported the Lutheran Forum Letter.

Memo to Lutherans: ‘Let’s Merge’

At its founding convention in December, 1976, the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches (AELC) formalized the split in the 2.8-million-member Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS). This followed years of controversy over doctrinal interpretation and administrative practice.

At the AELC’s second convention, held last month in Milwaukee, the 135 voting delegates gave almost unanimous voice approval to the view that the young denomination’s chief business is to go out of business—by trying to spark “organic church union” among the bulk of U.S. Lutherans. (The AELC has about 110,000 members in 245 congregations.)

A “Call for Lutheran Union” adopted by the delegates envisions in late 1979 a “consultation … to establish an implementation process” for the union of the Lutheran denominations that have formally committed themselves to a merger goal by that time. The document states as axiomatic what the LCMS would officially reject: “Lutherans are already united in a common, Gospel-centered witness to the Christian faith through our common commitment to the Scriptures and the Lutheran Confessions.” Therefore, the call reasons, there should be a “move beyond cooperation, which though admirable in itself, does not enable Lutherans to exhibit and express fully the oneness which God has given.”

A few delegates argued that it is presumptuous or premature for a denomination so young and so small to speak up in such a way. After a couple hours of polite discussion, however, those who felt that the call would be salutary—or that the AELC at least should speak its collective mind and see what happens—easily carried the day.

Although the call is addressed to “all Lutheran church bodies in North America,” no one suggested at the convention that a favorable response is likely from the LCMS, the 400,000-member Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, or the several largely isolationist U.S. Lutheran minibodies. Instead, chief targets of the call are the three-million-member Lutheran Church in America (LCA) and the 2.4-million-member American Lutheran Church (ALC), both of which have national conventions this year.

The presidents of the ALC and LCA brought fraternal greetings to the assembled delegates. The ALC’s David Preus endorsed coordination, cooperation, and even partial merger “whenever such actions … clearly” make the church “more effective in mission.” But as a result of the ALC’s own recent restructuring, he said, “we are a church on the move. We have gotten our act together. We are functioning effectively.…” This is not the time, he suggested, to spend time, energy, and resources on “organizational matters.” He foresaw the likelihood of “booby traps,” including “unnecessary theological … battles,” in major merger efforts.

Greeted with a standing ovation, Preus was simply applauded when he finished. The LCA’s Robert Marshall, though, managed to bring the delegates to their feet after as well as before his endorsement of the AELC call. Having recently surprised many by announcing he will not run for reelection as LCA president, Marshall forcefully reiterated his personal as well as the LCA’s constitutional support for North American Lutheran union. Working at structural union, he affirmed, would help, not detract from, Lutheran mission and ministry. Citing examples of the difficulties he has experienced in cooperative efforts, Marshall said “the time that we have spent on cooperation that fizzled is far greater than any time that’s going to be spent on achieving Lutheran union.”

Besides approving the union call, delegates overwhelmingly reelected AELC’s part-time president William Kohn, pastor of Capitol Drive Lutheran Church in Milwaukee. Also, they directed the AELC national office to “refuse to do business with any financial institutions making loans to the private or public sector of South Africa until apartheid injustice is eliminated.” Other resolutions were adopted urging AELC members to join Jews in commemorating the holocaust, to “respond to the issues of injustice to American Indians,” to support programs fighting world hunger, and to “continue working toward changing our language style in church communications … to be non-racist and non-sexist.”

TOM DORRIS

Churchmen in a Huff

Tuition tax credits, abortion, human rights, foreign sales of military hardware, deductions for charitable contributions, and youth camp safety are issues enough to keep Washington’s church-related lobbyists busy. But in this congressional election year they have another worry: a bill to regulate lobbying.

A bill (H. R. 8494) opposed by most religious lobbies passed the House of Representatives last month by a vote of 259 to 140. Congresswoman Barbara Jordan of Texas, one of the bill’s staunch supporters, said it would simply “… require these organizations to disclose … exactly what they are doing.” Introduced by George E. Danielson of California, the measure requires lobbying groups that spend a certain amount of staff time or money in Congress to report to the comptroller general their total expenditures for such activities, the identity of lobbyists, and a description of the issues on which they are working. Churches must report if they seek to influence legislation, and then must pass the expenditure “thresholds” described in the bill.

Similar proposals are pending in the Senate but they are sure to encounter stiff opposition in committee. Among the opponents of tighter regulation of lobbying are the U.S. Catholic Conference, the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, the United Church of Christ, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Among the proponents are Common Cause and AFL-CIO union lobbyists. Barry Lynn, a United Church of Christ representative on Capitol Hill, called the measure “a slap in the face of democracy.” John W. Baker of the Baptist committee considers it a simple question of religious liberty and served notice that if enacted into law the provisions would not be followed by his organization.

At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington’s best-known Baptist went on record in favor of the legislation. President Carter told a news conference that his Adminstration has “been actively involved in drafting (the bill) in the strongest possible terms, and I do support it.”

The Capitol Hill Baptists were closer to the position of their White House brother on another piece of hot legislation: tuition tax credits. The Administration continued to oppose the credits as unconstitutional aid to private schools (many are church-related). Instead, White House spokesmen asked Congress for more grants and loans for students and their institutions. While the Baptists and Methodists active in Congressional affairs generally agreed with the Administration position, Roman Catholics and some evangelicals in the private school movement continued efforts to salvage tax relief for parents of their students.

Members of the House Ways and Means Committee, who handle all tax proposals, dealt the Administration a serious blow last month when they rejected a Carter proposal on charitable deductions. They voted to permit taxpayers who choose the “standard deduction” on their income tax returns also to itemize their charitable contributions—including gifts to churches. William P. Thompson, the United Presbyterian executive who is president of the National Council of Churches, had asked the committee to treat such contributions differently from other deductible items. In his testimony he said such treatment “is not a ‘loophole’ for avoiding taxation since the gifts deducted do not remain under the control of the giver but go to benefit the whole community, often with greater efficiency and effect than the same amount paid in taxes.”

Even if Congress settles all the tax questions early, as it would like to do in this election year, it will still have plenty of other issues to keep the lobbyists busy. Revision of the federal criminal code (including gun control), foreign aid, and ethics in government are issues about which church representatives are waiting to have their say. A “sleeper” issue that has aroused heated discussion in past years, the Youth Camp Safety Bill introduced by Senator Alan Cranston of California, has recently come back to life with White House blessings. Administration support came with introduction of provisions to encourage state enforcement. Some camp operators and religious groups have opposed similar legislation in the past on grounds that it would mandate government interference in religious activities.

St. Paul Speaks: ‘No’ to Gays

Homosexuality, seldom discussed publicly a few years back, may be one of the top political issues of 1978. Voters in St. Paul, Minnesota, last month served notice that Middle America might be tuning out the talk about gay rights. Led by Pastor Richard A. Angwin of Temple Baptist Church, citizens of St. Paul went to the polls in unusually large numbers for a referendum and voted two-to-one to repeal a city ordinance banning homosexual discrimination. Television viewers around the nation saw some of the victory celebration at Temple Baptist. Asked why a city with liberal leanings would produce such a vote, Angwin told reporters, “You can’t be progressive about sin.”

As in other cities around the country, however, the religious community was not all on one side of the St. Paul issue. United Methodist bishop Wayne K. Clymer sent a letter of support for homosexuals’ rights to St. Paul members of his denomination. The Minnesota [Methodist] Conference Board of Church and Society opposed the repeal of homosexual protections in the ordinance. Charles Purdham, United Methodist district superintendent in the area, said of the vote, “It appears that those who support human rights issues did not take seriously the possibility that the repeal vote would win and thus did not bother to vote. If so, then fear and apathy have combined to deprive people of their just rights as citizens and children of God.” The bishop commented that the vote was indicative of “how deeply imbedded fear and anxieties of people are on this issue.” He also suggested that “the vote accurately reflected where the country is at this time.”

Both proponents and opponents of repeal quoted Roman Catholic archbishop John R. Roach of the Minneapolis-St. Paul archdiocese to bolster their positions. Those favoring retention of the gay rights measure quoted the part of his statement that said “economic security and social equality” should be provided for those who “find themselves to be homosexual in orientation through no fault of their own.” Champions of repeal quoted Roach when he said, “In affirming the rights of homosexuals, we must not neglect the right of the larger community. The Catholic Community … cannot sanction the gay lifestyle as a morally acceptable alternative to heterosexual marriage.” The archdiocesan newspaper, the Catholic Bulletin, was clearer on the issue. It took a position against granting “special protection” to homosexuals. A representative of the archbishop noted that the paper has always been free to express views independent of those of the prelate. The priests’ senate of the archdiocese opposed repeal.

Among the national figures associated with the pro-repeal forces were Carl Lundquist, president of nearby Bethel College and Seminary and of the National Association of Evangelicals, singer Anita Bryant, and television preacher Jerry Falwell.

After the St. Paul vote, gay activists served notice that they were preparing to fight those who are out to set back their cause in other parts of the country. Not only are the homosexuals and their supporters trying to get friendly ordinances onto the books in many cities, but they also are trying to put those already enacted beyond voter recall. Politicians in the District of Columbia are currently debating procedures that would make it impossible for the citizens to vote on certain “human rights” measures. So far the discussion concerns procedures recently added to the District’s home rule charter providing for initiatives and referenda. No one has formally proposed an election on any part of the human rights issue. However, candidates for mayor and city council posts are taking sides on the subject, and voters may be able to take an indirect stand on the issue when they choose the District’s executive and legislative leaders later this year.

San Francisco, meanwhile, has elected an avowed homosexual to the city council and has passed an anti-bias ordinance. Over 300,000 signatures were collected in California to put on the state ballot this year an initiative that would bar homosexual teachers. Some 1,000 people attended a Los Angeles rally against the referendum. Among the national and state politicians lending their names to the cause was former Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. The senator told the crowd, “I had to accept this invitation because of the basic principles you and I stand for in all the struggles against discrimination. I don’t think anyone needs to be told this is a controversial area, but I don’t think there’s any need for controversy over someone’s freedom to personal privacy and against prejudice.” He added that he came to the meeting because he did not want “any Americans to feel alone and deserted.”

Homosexual teachers have won court cases in several states, but their cause suffered a setback last year when the U.S. Supreme Court let stand Washington state and New Jersey decisions that allowed the dismissal of homosexuals. Teachers have been the focus of the argument in many of the cities and states around the country. A Gallup Poll last year indicated that although the majority of those surveyed believe that homosexuals should have their job rights protected legally, about two-thirds feel that such protection should not be applied to school teachers.

The issue may eventually reach a showdown in Congress. Edward Koch, now New York City’s mayor, is known as the principal sponsor of a bill still pending in Congress to guarantee homosexual rights at the federal level. Among the cosponsors was congressman Frederick W. Richmond of Brooklyn who last month entered the District of Columbia’s first offenders’ program after being caught soliciting homosexual favors from an undercover policeman. Earlier he had been seeking to buy the sexual services of a sixteen-year-old boy. About twenty New York politicians, mostly fellow members of Congress but including Koch, rallied to Richmond’s defense. In effect, they called for his reelection. Homosexuals and their opponents probably will be watching closely to see whether the voters return Richmond and the colleagues who supported him to Congress.

Future Church: One on One?

Are there too many clergy in the pipeline? How many are too many? Would one minister per lay person be more than enough?

A study released last month indicated that if current trends continue the Episcopal Church will have an equal number of lay and clergy members in just over a quarter century. They found that other groups have a similar clergy glut.

The study of twelve main-line predominantly white denominations was reported at a recent conference of seminary placement officers, denominational executives, and regional church leaders at Duke University. The conference and the research—by Jackson W. Carroll of the Hartford Seminary Foundation and Robert L. Wilson of Duke Divinity School—were financed by the Lilly Endowment.

Findings of the researchers did not get high grades from one United Methodist official who had earlier withdrawn from the study’s steering committee. Robert Watts Thornburg, an executive in the United Methodist Division of the Ordained Ministry, complained that the Lilly project’s study method was so broad-based that it failed to consider the uniqueness of the Methodist itinerant system. Carroll and Wilson had predicted that the Methodists would have a preacher for every person in the pew by the year 2038 if membership continues to decline and ordinations continue to increase at the current rates. To the contrary, said Thornburg, “all indications are that there is no oversupply and that, in fact, there could be a shortage by 1984.”

The authors of the study concede that the trends may not be reliable long-term indicators. For instance, they suggest that the declining membership may soon “bottom out.” They even see the possibility of a “significant religious awakening” that could throw out all their predictions. Such awakenings, they admit, are hard to predict, since “the Spirit, like the wind, blows where it will.…”

Lacking any significant change in the trends, however, they predict that at least through 1985 the effects of the current oversupply are likely to be felt. One reason for the oversupply in most major denominations is the increasing number of women studying for the ministry. In the Episcopal Church, for example, 18.4 per cent of those earning seminary degrees are female, the researchers said. Other figures show that about half of all current Episcopal seminary students are women.

Another reason has to do with the post-World War II baby boom’s contributions to the job market in the past decade, coupled with the sudden falloff in the birth rate in recent years.

In addition to the Episcopal and United Methodist churches, the greatest oversupply of clergy is in the United Church of Christ, the United Presbyterian Church, and the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (Southern), according to the researchers. Even the 13-million-member Southern Baptist Convention faces a serious situation, they said. Although membership is not yet in decline, they pointed out, the denomination’s seminaries are virtually filled (with about 9,000 students). Current projections show the Baptists having one pastor for every lay member by the year 2023, the study concludes.

Catholic ‘Crisis’

Although one study indicates that American Protestantism is faced with an oversupply of clergy (see preceding story), that is certainly not the case with the Roman Catholic Church. It is generally agreed among Catholic leadership that a critical clergy shortage exists, and a number of Catholic researchers say the situation will get much worse before it gets better.

Sociologist Richard Schoenherr of the University of Wisconsin, who codirected with Andrew Greeley a landmark study of the American priesthood in 1972, is quoted in the National Catholic Reporter as saying that the random closings of parishes and the cancellation of programs headed by priests are bound to reach “epidemic proportions” in the early 1980s.

The independent Catholic weekly in a special report on the crisis points out that there were 59,000 priests and 46,000 seminarians in America in 1966. Currently, according to estimates, there are 51,000 active priests and 16,800 seminarians—a net loss of 14 per cent of the priests in twelve years and 64 per cent of the seminarians. The experts, according to the newspaper, predict a net loss of 25 per cent of the priests nationally by 1985, “and no one has attempted to estimate where the seminarians will be by then.”

The loss factors involve resignations, retirements, and deaths. Schoenherr’s studies found that between 1966 and 1973 the church lost about 17 per cent of its active priests (more than 10,000) through resignations. About 15 per cent of the priests (8,800) have retired since 1966, the Reporter concluded from its studies, noting that some men retired early and some were persuaded to stay on past retirement age. An estimated 10 per cent (5,900) of the non-retired priests died between 1966 and 1978, the paper added. The priests who remain are frequently overworked and frustrated, adding to the pressures to drop out, the paper indicated.

If the present rates of loss persist, projections indicate that by the year 2015 the church will experience a 50 per cent loss of clergy, said the Reporter.

Conditions vary from diocese to diocese, the newspaper found, and in some dioceses in Texas and the Dakotas “the shortage generally is regarded as a fullblown crisis.”

To illustrate its story, the paper cited the following incidents:

• A 110-year-old church was closed in Freeburg, Minnesota. A clergy spokesman told the press that the move was necessitated by the “extreme shortage of priests.”

• Bishop Joseph Brunini told a Jackson, Mississippi, church audience: “There is a vocation crisis in this diocese at the present time and in five years it will be a major disaster.… [Therefore] I am calling a five-year moratorium on any priest serving outside the diocese.”

• Bishop Glennon P. Flavin of Lincoln, Nebraska, noted in a pastoral bulletin that only seven young men were beginning studies for the priesthood in the diocese, less than half the number of entering students the year before. He called on his priests to promote vocational ministry, then added: “By the way, since we will have no ordinations to the priesthood until June, 1979, no priest of the diocese may die until then. This is an order.”

Religion in Transit

A suit was filed against the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., seeking to halt the museum’s use of taxpayer’s money to propagate the evolutionary theory of the origin of man. The move was led by radio evangelist Dale Crowley and his son Dale, Jr., a Washington pastor.

The 200,000-member Morality in Media organization has called for a national TV blackout on May 23 to protest the networks’ plans to increase sex-oriented television programming in the fall season. A reduction in advertising revenues “seems to be the only language the networks understand,” said MIM’s chairman, Rabbi Julius G. Neumann.

A Dallas Seminary student, Jeff Wells, 23, finished second in the famed Boston marathon last month. He ran the twenty-six-mile course in two hours, ten minutes, and fifteen seconds—two seconds behind winner Bill Rodgers of Massachusetts, but ahead of 862 men and 154 women. His seminary roommate John Lodwick finished eighth. Wells has his eyes on the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.

The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland has relaxed its opposition to legalizing contraceptives, making it likely that the Irish parliament will pass legislation this year allowing them to be sold. The bishops reiterated their stern opposition to contraception on moral grounds but said that the state is not necessarily bound to prohibit what the church deems wrong. Studies indicate that tens of thousands of Irish Catholic women are using birth control pills.

Ukrainian Baptist Peter Vins, 21, of Kiev, the son of Georgi Vins, the imprisoned leader of dissident or unregistered Baptists in the Soviet Union, was sentenced last month to one year in prison for “parasitism” (not having work) and “hooliganism” (possession of two Bibles). Stated Clerk William P. Thompson of the United Presbyterian Church sent a cable to Soviet leader Leonid I. Breshnev, appealing for the release of both Peter and Georgi Vins.

The Chili Wasn’T So Hot

The 500-member First Church of God in the little town of Benton, Illinois, had a problem: How do you pay off a big mortgage on a new church building when income is already tight?

Into the picture stepped Dallas oilman Robert Philpot with an answer. He had a new engine additive named Add-A-Tune that he wanted to introduce, but he needed a way to capture attention. He and First’s pastor, J. Lloyd Tomer, decided to team up. Philpot leased for the church a lavishly appointed Convair 880 jet that had belonged to the late rock king, Elvis Presley. Tomer endorsed Add-A-Tune and organized a nationwide tour of the plane that was to begin this month in Dallas.

Admission to the plane—named Lisa Marie for Presley’s daughter—will be granted for a $300 donation to the church, Tomer announced. Those who tour the plane will receive free color photos of the jet’s interior and a case of Add-A-Tune.

Those who can’t afford or don’t want to tour the plane will be treated to a free “Tribute to Elvis” show featuring the Stamps Quartet, Presley’s backup group for six years. The performance will also feature a thirty-minute puff for the lubricant and a chance to buy Elvis-related photos.

Tomer estimated that “probably 5,000 couples will go through the plane each day” of the tour. If so, he projected, income will total $150 million. As a fundraising idea, he said, “this sure beats chili suppers.”

David Drew and his family live ten minutes away from the Mekong River in the far northern Chiang Rai region of Thailand. Across the river is Laos, now ruled by Communists. Drew is a doctor from Britain serving a year’s hitch as a volunteer with the World Vision missionary relief organization. His job is to provide medical care to the thousands of refugees in the several camps in his area.

A Baptist, Drew became a Christian in 1967 through the witness of fellow students at the University of Bristol. Janet, who later became his wife, accepted Christ the following year as the result of the ministry of American street evangelist Arthur Blessitt. The Drews and their two small children live in a small wooden house perched on poles on the outskirts of Chiang Khong. They like it here. The lush flatlands give way to hills in the distance, accenting the remarkable tropical beauty that visitors to Thailand never forget. For the most part, the people around them are friendly and gentle-spirited. The Drews take special delight in Thai food, and they serve it like their neighbors, who eschew utensils and instead scoop up “sticky rice” with their fingers.

Drew is often frustrated but manages to maintain a bright spirit. Much of his time is spent training young men in the camps to be paramedics. The turnover among the intelligent and skilled refugees tends to be high; they are generally the first ones chosen by interviewers from the West for resettlement in their countries.

Infections are rampant in the refugee camps. Children are everywhere, and the majority have running noses. Sanitary facilities are woefully inadequate. Outdoor latrines and fly-covered food stalls exist side by side in many places. Water must often be carried great distances from an overused well. There is a shortage of good-quality rice, and signs of malnutrition abound in some camps, especially among the young. Chickens and dogs vie for existence with the humans.

Gloom hangs upon many refugees who have been waiting two years or more for resettlement. Some have given up hope of ever getting out, and they simply sit around waiting to die.

The camp hospital or clinic is primitive by American standards. It is usually a long wooden shed. There is a single ward of ten beds or so without screens or partitions, an examination room, a dispensary, and an operating room that is no different from the other rooms except for an occasional coat of white paint. Serious operations are handled in the government and mission hospitals outside the camps.

One of Drew’s first tasks of the day at the 5,000-plus refugee Chiang Khong camp is to take his paramedics and practical nurses on rounds through the ward. He examines each patient and conveys his insight and conclusions to his entourage through an interpreter. Assignments are given, and then it is time to examine out-patients who have been screened by the paramedics. Almost always, the patients should have come much earlier for treatment, says Drew.

Outside he examines a small girl who has been brought piggy-back by a sister only three or four years older. The little one’s right ear lobe is badly infected. In accord with tribal tradition her mother had pierced the child’s ear, but without resard to sterilization. As is true of many of the hill people who have come over from Laos, she didn’t know any better. Drew instructs a paramedic to apply some medicine. “She’ll be all right,” he says.

At times Drew wishes he could engage in a more spiritual-oriented ministry among the refugees, such as organizing a Bible-study group. The relationships, however, among the voluntary agencies that work in the camps, the Thai government officials who run them, and the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, which provides goods and services, are fragile. Agency field executives therefore have passed the word to their workers not to do anything that might jeopardize those relationships. Although Thailand is predominantly Buddhist, some workers—including Drew—feel that the field executives are oversensitive in drawing up policies governing religious activities.

There are fifteen refugee camps in Thailand. They are strung along the serpentine borders of Laos and Cambodia. Most of the nearly 100,000 refugees in them are from Laos: hill people from the Mhong (or Meo), Yao, and Haw tribes, along with the Laos. There are also camps for Cambodians and Vietnamese.

Churches have been organized in most of the camps. These are led by both ordained and lay leaders among the refugees, with assists from missionary workers, mainly from the Christian and Missionary Alliance, Overseas Missionary Fellowship, and Thailand Baptist Mission (Southern Baptist). Other groups, such as World Vision, supply food, medical and educational services, rehabilitation workers (who conduct sewing classes, for example), literature, and the like.

At the Chiang Khong camp there are at least three congregations: Yao (nearly 100 members), Mhong (a similar number), and Haw (about two dozen members). The Yao congregation is led by elder Chong Ling Young, 57, a Haw. He became a Christian ten years ago in Laos under the ministry of missionary Jerry Torgerson of the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA). Young is assisted by another elder, Beer Wong, 33, who was led to Christ in Laos in 1974 by his neighbors. They said they fled Laos because of Communist hatred toward Christianity. “It is dangerous for Christians and Mhongs there,” said Young. The pair said that they had no late news about the churches in Laos (spawned mostly by the CMA) but that there were rumors the Communists were closing churches.

Tens of thousands of Mhongs have fled Laos. Many claim that the Communists are carrying out a program of genocide against the tribe. (The Mhongs have fiercely resisted the Communists, and during the Vietnamese war years the U.S. financed an army of Mhong guerrillas who fought against the Pathet Lao. Some fighting is still reported in certain hill districts.)

The largest Christian congregation is in the 12,000-refugee camp near Loei in the north central border region. It has some 2,500 Mhong members and is served by eight ordained clergy. Several pastors came to Thailand with their entire congregations from Laos. Pastor Nhia Sao Xiong, 27, confirmed the special danger to Mhong Christians in Laos.

The senior refugee pastor at Loei is Seng Pao Thao, 48. A minister since 1967, he accepted Christ in 1951 when a visiting pastor witnessed to him. Later, said Thao, his entire village of Phukabow became Christian. Thao, who often can be found witnessing to large crowds in the “streets” of the camp, disclosed that more than 300 Buddhists have been baptized at the Loei camp, “and many more are waiting.” Thao recently received word that he has been approved for resettlement in the United States. (More than 170,000 Indochinese refugees are in the U.S.)

How should American Christians pray for the industrious, organized Mhongs at Loei? Should they pray about the food shortages, unclean conditions, and occasional brutality from Thai guards?

Yes, affirmed pastor Seng Yang Yong, 34. But a greater priority for prayer, he said, is for strength and wisdom to deal with all the people undergoing instruction as they await baptism and church membership. Also, said he: “Ask the Christians of America to pray that we might find a place in the world where we can all be resettled together.”

Some CMA missionaries, including Reginald Reimer (coordinator of CMA refugee work) and Wayne Persons (resident CMA missionary at Loei who served for years in Laos), are working toward that end, along with relief and government officials in Thailand and Bolivia.

Mission-Mindedness In Europe

More than 900 young people from twenty-two nations and thirty-five Bible schools across Europe assembled last month on the campus of the 145-student Belgium Bible Institute at Heverlee, a town near Brussels. The occasion was the biannual meeting of the European Student Missionary Association (ESMA), an organization founded in 1955 at the European Bible Institute in the suburbs of Paris. The ESMA now has twenty-one member schools; three of them were added at Heverlee.

“God’s dominant concern is the message of redemption for the whole world,” declared American keynoter David Howard of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. That message, he asserted, “was always intended for all nations.”

One of the places where the message is needed most is Europe, other speakers suggested. They pointed to the ascendency of secularism and materialism and to the steady decline of the Protestant and Roman Catholic churches. Jeff Fountain of Youth With a Mission warned that persecution may be ahead if there is no significant Gospel advance in Europe within the near future. The answer lies with Christian young people, he affirmed.

Nearly everybody attended a Saturday-night prayer meeting in which the needs of the world were remembered. The meeting, led by Jonathan McCrostie of Operation Mobilization, lasted nearly all night—“a touch of genuine revival,” reported correspondent Robert J. Campbell.

Platform sessions were translated simultaneously into the four main languages of the conference. Dozens of mission agency representatives set up displays in an exhibit area, handed out literature, and counseled prospective missionary candidates. Conference costs were underwritten entirely by the young participants, and they contributed to two offerings: $800 for a new missionary-placement information agency and $ 1,475 to help with outreach at the World Cup soccer championships in Argentina in July. Hundreds of young European Christians are expected to travel to Argentina to participate in the evangelistic project, which is being coordinated by Youth With a Mission.

Uncertainty In Afghanistan

The future of Afghanistan’s only Christian mission, located in the capital city of Kabul, is uncertain following the recent coup in which the government of Mohammed Daoud was replaced by the Marxist oriented Republican Revolutionary Council.

Only days before the revolution, the Afghanistan government ordered all foreigners without permanent visas to leave the country because of increasing riots and demonstrations. That decree affected the eighteen members of Dilaram House, an evangelical mission which works primarily with tourists and does some individual evangelism among Afghan people. Most of the mission workers left before the coup. Early this month they were in Pakistan waiting for the border crossings to reopen in hope that the new government will issue them visas to continue their work.

Dilaram House, which is the Persian name for Place of Peace, was established as a youth hostel in the late 1960s by the Kabul Community Christian Church. The house is staffed mainly by North American young people who live in Kabul on tourist visas which are valid for six month periods. Many of the youths have been associated with Youth With A Mission.

Originally established to work with drug-oriented western youths traveling to India via Afghanistan, the mission now distributes Christian literature to tourists and provides medical care for those who become ill during the journey. It is estimated that several hundred thousand tourists, primarily Canadians, Americans, and Britians, travel through Afghanistan each year. There are also approximately 1,300 Americans living in Kabul year round working with the U.S. embassy.

A former director of the mission, who prefers to remain anonymous since he hopes to return to Afghanistan, said: “On any given day there are at least 1,000 tourists in Kabul. Behind the travel is a basic discontent with western values. Many people are not just on vacation but are searching for answers and running away from problems. We are here to provide a Christian alternative.”

Although some of their work involves evangelism of Afghans, that aspect of their mission must be done discreetly since the country is predominantly Islamic. Afghanistan is the size of Texas with a population of more than 20 million, 90 per cent of whom adhere to a very conservative form of Muslim faith. Afghan Muslims have been very sensitive to any Christian presence in their country and have introduced a capital-offense statute forbidding its citizens to convert to Christianity.

Because of the strong Muslim faith one of the first announcements made by the new revolutionary government over Kabul radio assured the citizens it would “preserve the spirit of Islam.” In the past the government has tolerated only two or three house churches, located in Kabul, to meet the needs of officials connected with foreign embassies. In 1970 the Kabul Community Christian Church obtained permission to erect a $320,000 church but the government tore it down in 1973 at the insistence of militant Muslims who were upset over the visibility of the church. The government also ordered the founding pastor, J. Christie Wilson, a United Presbyterian missionary, to return to the United States where he now teaches missions at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary near Boston.

VICTOR M. PARACHIN

Unreal

It happened on April Fools Day, but it was no joke. An Episcopal woman priest, Elizabeth Habecker, administered communion to several dozen Roman Catholic nuns and laypersons following a social-action conference at McAuley House, a mission operated by the Catholic Sisters of Mercy in Providence, Rhode Island.

In official Catholicism the communion administered by Mrs. Habecker was only an illusion. The Vatican’s historic position is that Anglican and Episcopal clergy are not validly ordained—and therefore their administration of communion is invalid. Although modern policy permits Catholics to be involved in ecumenical meetings and activities, it does not permit them to partake of non-Catholic communion (and it does not permit Protestants to participate in Catholic-administered communion).

After Catholic bishop Louis E. Gelineau learned of the incident, he issued a letter to his priests and to his ecumenical-relations unit, reminding them about the rules and regulations of the church regarding ecumenical involvement.

The leader of the Catholic sisters expressed regret “for any harm that may have been caused,” but the chairmen of the local Episcopal and Catholic ecumenical agencies issued a joint statement saying that no damage had been done to the relationship between the two church groups.

The chairmen, Catholic priest Lionel Blain and Episcopal clergyman Howard C. Olsen, acknowledged that intercommunion is not approved. Blain suggested that Mrs. Habecker had acted “wrongfully” in acquiring permission to speak in the Catholic diocese without divulging her wishes or intentions about communion. Olsen, however, may have had the last word. The Episcopal Church would not ban Catholics from receiving communion in Episcopal churches, he gently countered.

Evangelistic Round-Up

Redeemed? Say So!, by Robert J. Plekker (Harper & Row, 1977, 191 pp., $3.95 pb), HIS Guide to Evangelism, by Paul Little and others (InterVarsity, 1977, 157 pp., $2.50 pb), That None Be Lost, by Oliver V. Dalaba (Gospel Publishing House, 1977, 127 pp., $1.25 pb), Go Make Disciples, by Rolf A. Syrdal (Augsburg, 1977, 128 pp., $3.50), I Believe in Evangelism, by David Watson (Eerdmans, 1977, 190 pp., $2.95 pb), and Evangelism in a Tangled World, by Wayne McDill (Broadman, 1977, 181 pp., $3.95 pb), are reviewed by Richard V. Peace, assistant professor of evangelism, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, Massachusetts.

Many people are concerned about evangelism. Witness the six different traditions represented in these books, which span the ecclesiastical spectrum from an Anglican rector to an Assemblies of God minister and in between a Lutheran professor, a Southern Baptist denominational executive, a Christian Reformed layman, and an interdenominational campus minister. Each of them is concerned that we get on with the job of sharing the good news. But when it comes to how each one views the work of evangelism, we find quite different viewpoints.

Robert J. Plekker is a Michigan dentist and a layman in the Christian Reformed Church. He opens his book by commending as a model for personal witnessing a man he once met on a plane to Florida. Plekker first noticed the man when he rushed into the plane, late: “His shirt [was] half way out of his pants, his tie was loose and his head was topped off with a red golfer’s cap … He ran down the aisle with bags, camera, books and other paraphernalia” and sat down next to Plekker. Then in a loud, embarrassing way he introduced himself, and proceeded to “witness” to Plekker. Apparently this gentleman confronted each and every stranger he met, without fail, with a plan of salvation. Later that day, he and Plekker shared a fifty-mile car trip in Florida that took twenty-four hours to complete because of this man’s insistence upon stopping for every hitchhiker so he could confront them with his message until they literally “broke down.”

In sharp contrast is an anecdote cited by Mark Pettersen in HIS Guide to Evangelism: “An agnostic friend of mine was approached by a Christian with the lecture approach. After the Christian made his first point, my friend objected that he was not ready to grant the existence of any God let alone a God who loved him but the Christian insisted they finish the outline before they discussed that issue. My friend was forced to listen to a presentation that obviously did not relate to him. The immediate effect was that he lost both warmth for the Christian as a person and freedom to ask further questions.” A style of witness commended in one book is condemned in another. Although the contrast between books is generally not this pointed, it is interesting to note the wide range of ways in which evangelism is perceived.

Oliver V. Dalaba in That None Be Lost uses what might be called a potpourri approach to evangelism. Rather than examining anything in detail, he gives us lists. For example, he discusses eleven methods of outreach, nine philosophies of outreach, eight witnessing plans, seven witnessing places, and six guidelines to compassion. His book tends to be a series of loosely related snippets of information. Dalaba’s approach is oriented to the needs and concerns of the Assemblies of God. (He makes frequent reference, without explanation, to such programs as Royal Rangers and Missionettes.)

Rolf Syrdal, former director of world missions for the American Lutheran Church, is more theological. Although Dalaba focuses on the “have to” in a summary sort of way, Syrdal looks at the theological and historical issues involved in evangelism. He deals with such areas as the relationship between baptism and evangelism, preaching and personal evangelism, and evangelism and Christian service. He is concerned that evangelism be directed not only outside into the unbelieving world, but inward toward those church members who have stopped living in Christ: “At the close of the service of baptism of infants, … the parents and sponsors are admonished to nurture the spiritual life of the children so they will be brought up in the faith.… The very fact that this admonition is necessary implies that it is possible that a child who is baptized may later break the covenant by willful acts.… The prophets were evangelists to the people of the covenant who had departed from the faith.… We are to proclaim (the Gospel) also to those who have fallen away from God and need to be brought back in repentance and faith. The church must have an ‘outreach’ of the Gospel to those outside the church, but it is also necessary that the church has an evangelical ‘inreach’ … to save those who have left Christ.”

The concern in HIS Guide to Evangelism is the college campus. These eighteen articles (by sixteen authors) appeared originally in Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship’s magazine, HIS. As in any collection, the quality of the articles varies. Many, however, are very useful (and not just in a campus context). Some of them, such as Beckey Manley’s “Sharing Christ, Ourselves and Pizza … All at Once” are excellent. She begins: “Christians and non-Christians have something in common: They are both uptight about evangelism. The common fear of Christians seems to be ‘How many people did I offend this week?’ They think that they must offend in order to be a good evangelist. A tension begins to build inside: Should I be sensitive to people and forget about evangelism or should I blast them with the gospel and forget about this person?” She goes on to discuss how we can learn to be ourselves as well as letting others be themselves; at the same time we are transparently honest about Jesus and his claims. This article alone is worth the price of the book.

Often in stark contrast to that approach is Plekker’s book, Redeemed? Say So!, in which the approach is much more mechanistic (e.g., Chapter 13 in which twenty-one “Satanic Tangents” are listed along with concise suggestions on how to get the conversation back on track again) and high pressure (e.g., “The seventh rule may not sound too nice but it is essential. Avoid allowing someone the ‘out’ of thinking it over. Giving someone time to ponder things is bad kingdom business”).

The real gems in this set of six books are David Watson’s I Believe in Evangelism and Wayne McDill’s Evangelism in a Tangled World. Watson’s book is the best general introduction to evangelism I have seen in years. It is profoundly biblical and intensely practical. Watson, pastor of St. Cuthbert’s Anglican Church in York, England, begins with a series of word studies (“evangelism,” “gospel,” “proclamation”), which are academically sound and immensely readable. He establishes a biblical foundation. His chapters on personal evangelism and follow-up are filled with insight and his chapter on evangelism and the local church is a blueprint for healthy church growth. The special thing about the book comes in the final two chapters in which Watson explains the relationship between worship and evangelism and then discusses “the spirit in evangelism.” He begins his penultimate chapter: “In the 1,470 page report of the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelisation there are only 2 short paragraphs specifically on worship. However, on many occasions I have seen the close link between the praise of God, when marked by the freshness and freedom of the spirit’s presence, and powerful evangelism.” He goes on then to amplify and illustrate this relationship. In his final chapter there is as clear, profound, and moving a discussion of the work of the Holy Spirit in evangelism as I have seen.

Wayne McDill is a Southern Baptist, serving as an executive in the Evangelism Division in Texas. McDill’s book shows deep insight into the people we are seeking to reach through our evangelism. Other books (e.g. Plekker’s) seem preoccupied with the Christian’s role in evangelism but McDill forces us to examine our methods and message from the point of view of those to whom our efforts are directed. He constantly asks: Will they understand? Does this touch people at a point of authentic need? For example, in discussing the message of the Gospel, he begins with the biblical material, but then “repaints the ancient pictures” by means of a series of metaphors that will communicate the Gospel content to modern man. He then goes on to discuss conversion, beginning with what he calls “biblical psychology” and then exploring the cognitive, moral, emotional, and volitional aspects of the conversion experience. His examination of the Great Commission is by means of seven questions or options—“Will the believer be characterized in the mind of the church as a salesman or as a witness for Christ?” (he opts for discipleship and for witnesses). Either McDill’s or Watson’s book would be an excellent text in a course on evangelism. Their attitudes and insights will serve as a corrective for much that is being written about evangelism today. They will stimulate each of us to get on with the task of sharing Jesus with others in a loving way.

What About The New Religions?

The New Religious Consciousness, edited by Charles Y. Glock and Robert N. Bellah (University of California, 1976, 400 pp., $14.95, $5.95 pb), is reviewed by Kenneth W. Shipps, associate professor of history, Trinity College, Deerfield, Illinois.

From what might be called the new Fertile Crescent of the world comes the first of a projected series of books on the new religious consciousness. Two professors of the University of California at Berkeley have edited the essays of graduate students and contributed their own thoughts in pondering the “deepest meanings” of the cultural upheavals of the sixties. Using social science techniques, they report on nine of the scores of more or less religious groups that flourish in the Bay area: the Healthy-Happy-Holy Organization, Hare Krishna, Divine Light (Maharaj Ji), the New Left, the Human Potential Movement, Synanon, the Christian World Liberation Front, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, and the Church of Satan. Besides these nine case studies there are several other essays including three fascinating ones on how “traditional religion” has responded to the youth “counterculture” and two that project four alternative futures. The volume also includes a summary of the data collected by Robert Wuthnow, who designed and supervised a random survey of the religious awareness, beliefs, and practices of 1,000 Bay Area residents in 1973.

Filmstrips

Thank You, God is another of the fine products for children from the Thomas Klise Company (Box 3418, Peoria, IL 61613). Designed as a continuation of the biblical material in Praise the Lord (see Oct. 21, 1977, issue, p. 32), it leads children to praise and thank God not only for the revelation of his Word, but also of his world. This filmstrip does require careful preparation by the teacher. Delightfully animated for the very young.

Also from Klise, but for adults, is A Thanksgiving Service, which sensitively blends photos of nature and man’s stewardship as a sacred and secular idyll. We hear both sexes give genuine thanks.

Even though The Spanish Missions: Yesterday’s Dream is about the California missions that were established after the Pilgrims had already come ashore in New England, it is well to remember that the missionary impulse to the New World of which the California missions were a part began two centuries before the Pilgrims arrived. This filmstrip seriously discusses the pluses and minuses of Spanish missions. It raises questions of a historical nature that are also relevant to Protestants. This is a secular production from Multi-Media (Box 5097, Stanford, CA 94305) meant for schools, but it can be studied by churches, particularly as a balance to foreign programs that too often seem happily and enthusiastically oblivious to some of the consequences of mission practices. It is a fair and balanced presentation, but the filmstrip gives no answers to the questions it asks.

Shocking and sobering are the words to describe Christians & Jews: A Troubled Brotherhood. This two-part Alba House (Canfield, OH 44406) production for teens and adults has no peer in the rendering of its theme. Finely crafted in the hands of Suzanne Noffke, a Dominican sister, these filmstrips are an artistically powerful presentation of the troubled relations between church and synagogue over the centuries. The story is told with striking examples of Christian anti-Semitic art that is rarely seen. The music background, by Bloch, Bruch, and Partos, conveys the anguish of the Holocaust. Although this production ought to be viewed by every Christian, there are two troubling aspects to its viewpoint. One is the assumption that anti-Semitism is partly rooted in the Gospel accounts themselves, and the other is the assumption that anti-Semitism is mostly a Christian problem rather than a universal one. These filmstrips deserve wide circulation among Christians.

Although tame by today’s standards, some have thought Gustav Doré’s lithographs of the works of Dante a nineteenth-century excursion into pious voyeurism. However Gustav Doré’s Vision of the Bible is an interesting period piece from Contemporary Drama Service (Box 475, Downers Grove, IL 60515). The black and white pictures have been tinted to add dramatic color. The National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception from Vedo Films (85 Longview Rd., Port Washington, NY 11050) is an exquisite tour of the largest Roman Catholic building in North America. It is aesthetically pleasing, but Protestant viewers will be amazed (or dismayed) at the strength of Marian devotion that raised this incomparable structure in the heart of Washington, D.C. A lavishly illustrated booklet comes with it.

The Great Men of Art series from Encyclopaedia Britannica (425 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611) is an excellently prepared program on da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Van Eyck, and Dürer. All of these artists worked within the Christian milieu; their most memorable works are scenes of biblical motifs. Sadja Herzog of Ohio State University notes the spiritual impulses of the Renaissance and the Reformation. This is particularly evident in the Dürer segment, the great Protestant engraver and friend of Luther.

DALE SANDERS

Portland, Oregon.

Wuthnow’s work is so valuable that it resulted in a companion volume, The Consciousness Reformation (1976, University of California). There Wuthnow details the methodology and results of his survey. In Wuthnow’s essay based on his survey he found that only one out of four in the Bay Area was aware of even one of the thirteen new religious groups listed for the area. Wuthnow’s conclusions suggest that all these movements have garnered their adherents from the better educated; also, interest in counterculture groups is likely to remain limited to a very small minority and only in the years of their youth. In his book he also traces through American history what he calls four symbolic universes: theistic, individualistic, social scientific, and mystical. Unfortunately his projections of religious typology on American history and contemporary religious belief, as well as his theory of change through generational conflict, are misleading and reductionistic.

Each of the movements studied provides a fascinating profile in itself, and in some cases they clearly were an exotic response to the turbulent sixties. Also each chapter suggests why millions of Americans have recently experimented with nontraditional religions and lifestyles. For example, through the Healthy-Happy-Holy process participants find release from the pressures of the material world, a purifying lifestyle, and inner harmony with their Creator. To set themselves apart adherents have adopted the dress of Sikhism—a white robe crowned by a turban. They want to lead the world into a new age of Aquarius.

With the designation “quasi-religious,” the editors can show a more intimate connection between the alternative lifestyles of the seventies and the burned-out political activism of the sixties, but not without straining. Bellah insists that there “was something religious” about the political activism of the period, but he suggests that it was the homelessness, the daring, and the disaffection of youth. Bellah’s imprecise language about religiousness, which is shared by other essayists, leads to confusing, exaggerated, and misleading links between religious, social, and political radicals. In fact only occasional examples are provided to show any connection between the newly religious and the leadership of the broader movements of the time from the civil rights movement through the antiwar movement to the women’s rights movement.

The essays by Donald Heinz on the Christian World Liberation Front, an evangelical group founded in 1969 (much of which survives in the Berkeley Christian Coalition), and by Randall Alfred on the Church of Satan, headed by Anton LeVey, offer brilliant sketches of those groups. Bellah, who is widely known for his oft-reprinted 1967 essay “Civil Religion in America,” in a series of sweeping generalizations assesses the decade of the sixties as an “erosion” of the basic systems of meaning in American history: biblical religion and utilitarian individualism. Bellah sees self-interest undermining “conscience,” his strange paradigm of biblical religion. Religion itself “became for many a means for the maximization of self-interest with no effect link to virtue, charity or community.” Bellah also sees the rising prestige of science, technology, and bureaucracy as further supporting utilitarian individualism and the consequent demise of shared values and ends. Glock, a leading survey researcher, has quite a different set of assertions about science. For him the sciences do not contribute a world view, though they do conflict “with supernatural and individual modes of consciousness.” The sciences must interact with all sorts of forces from the biological to the sociological. From all this monumental reductionism Glock and Bellah proceed to their interpretations of the sixties and beyond.

For Bellah the new consciousness turned its back on utilitarian individualism, indeed the whole apparatus of modern industrial society. Similarly Glock, who evidendy also likes to have his speculations published, says that the counterculture inspired a disenchantment with the historic view that man could control his environment. For Bellah America may continue its mindless accumulation of wealth and power; it may “relapse” into traditional, persecuting authoritarianism as symbolized by a growing “conservative Protestant fundamentalism”; or improbably, as Bellah himself suggests, a revolutionary religious change may promote “greater concern for harmony with nature and between human beings.” This change would provide the simple, free culture suggested in the values and worship of the new groups.

Glock maintains that a “new cognition” has arisen out of the sects of the sixties. This new way “to comprehend the world, but unlike its American predecessors, is not one given to shaping and finding meaning in the world.” In part, according to Glock and contrary to Bellah, the youth of the sixties reflected their predecessors in their search for more individualism and in their condemnation of a people who had turned too far from the God of their creation. Yet the counterculture denied prevailing views and adopted “the new cognition” of the sciences, which Glock sees as the wave of the future. This scientific view, which has emerged slowly in this century, stresses a lack of consensus, a limit to human knowledge in a complex social and biological environment, a set of relative and ambiguous values, and no possible answers to questions of ultimate meaning.

Thus the book ends pessimistically in unsupported or reductionistic speculation, hypotheses not unlike what the curious professors had found in research prior to their own investigations. Certainly we know more about a few marginal Bay Area religious groups. Several researchers used new methods of social research well, and Wuthnow’s survey of religious beliefs will remain valuable for comparative research. Yet many of the groups have few members and a declining impact. Other movements might have proved more useful for the research and related more to national followings; these include the evangelical charismatics, the Zenists, TM, Muslims, or even the Unification Church. But of course part of the problem in the book is how and when to relate local interests to the larger view. The editors attempt to relate the upheavals of the sixties to history, to the national scene, and to future religious scenes; their efforts, though bold and full of insight, become highly speculative. It appears that a certain millenarian effervescence has captured the professors; they tend to confuse peripheral, transitory religious movements with long-term fundamental change.

More effective in surveying a broader scope is Religious Movements in Contemporary America, edited by I. Zaretsky and M. Leon (1975, Princeton University). Without the coordinated financial backing of the Berkeley group these writers set forth more theoretical perspectives. Subjects include such groups as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostals, Mormons, Afro-Americans, Meher Baba. Chapters relate to law, music, linguistics, theology, political science, and homiletics. This massive book also has a forty-three page bibliography.

Another broad book on contemporary British and international religious movements is Sectarianism: Analyses of Religious and Non-Religious Sects, edited by Roy Wallis (1975, Halsted/Wiley). This book contains useful distinctions to separate the religious from the nonreligious. It has essays on the Krishna movement, Scientology, and various therapeutic sects. Perhaps with criticism and competition, researchers on the new religious consciousness in the new Fertile Crescent will give us more thorough studies.

Although interest in new religions is on the rise, none of the recent works has used a Christian theological perspective in assessing their work. Making generalizations about religious consciousness in America has led to fewer differentiations between the myriad religious groups in the world, past and present. Hence the CWLF, an innovative expression of evangelicalism, submerges into the counterculture as some kind of countercultural force against the overriding traditions of American Christianity. Generalizations on the relationship between peripheral sects and predominant christianizing and dechristianizing movements need more refinement than can be found in most of these books. Also, techniques of religious studies, especially in the Glock-Bellah work, have difficulty accounting for shifts within so voluntaristic a scene as American religion. They tend to overplay an undefined traditional religion or make rash demarcations about major changes in a complex, variable environment. And none of these books point out how destructive these sects can be. Christian churches have long had ways to differentiate between spooky, heretical, and destructive sects as compared with a more serious, religious experience.

Edifying Addresses

Our Sovereign God, edited by James Boice (Baker, 1977, 175 pp., $4.95 pb), is reviewed by D. A. Carson, associate professor of New Testament, Northwest Baptist Theological Seminary, Vancouver, British Columbia.

The title of this book captures a theme that has in recent years rekindled a lot of interest among evangelicals; but the subtitle more accurately reflects the contents of this book. Here are fifteen addresses presented to the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology by seven men. John R. W. Stott deals with “The Sovereignty of God the Son” and with “The Sovereign God and the Church.” Roger R. Nicole expounds “The ‘Five Points’ and God’s Sovereignty,” “The Doctrines of Grace in Jesus’ Teaching,” “Optimism and God’s Sovereignty,” and the historical implications of “Soli Deo Gloria.” Stuart D. Sacks draws relationships between “God’s Sovereignty and Old Testament Names for God,” and James I. Packer contributes a section “On Knowing God.” R. C. Sproul follows up the latter theme with “Why We Do Not Know God” and “Why We Must Know God,” and then discusses two further topics, “Discerning the Will of God” and “Prayer and God’s Sovereignty.” Ralph L. Keiper gives us “The Key to Knowing God” and “Witnessing and God’s Sovereignty.” The editor, James M. Boice, seeks to reconcile “Disobedience and God’s Sovereignty.” I confess I found the book extraordinarily difficult to evaluate, not so much because of the diversity of approaches and of merit from chapter to chapter (a problem in most symposia), but because I enjoyed and appreciated the work more than my critical faculties tell me I should.

The unifying feature is the forum at which they were delivered rather than some common theme. For example, Stott’s second message affirms that “[the] purpose of our sovereign God is not just to save isolated individuals, but to call out a people for himself.” Stott then expounds Acts 2:42–47 in a manner that would be acceptable anywhere in evangelicalism, not just at a Reformed conference. The exposition, as one might expect from Stott, is competent and telling; but its link with the “theme” of the book is no more than could be generated by considering the connection between any biblical passage and the sovereignty of God. The same artificiality afflicts more than half the chapters in the book, but comes to its apex in the second of the four sections into which the book is divided. That section, “Knowing the Sovereign God,” has very little within it that has any exclusive connection to Reformed theology.

The diversity of approaches adopted by the various contributors adds to the reader’s awareness of disarray. In his chapter “On Knowing God,” Packer consciously presents his material as an exposition of Calvin’s thought. In one of his four chapters, Nicole seeks to reformulate the traditional “five points” in ways open to less ambiguity, effectively jettisoning TULIP en route while retaining its essential content. Keiper is largely anecdotal; Sproul, though scarcely less so, organizes his material topically. Boice tries to deal with the difficult topic “Disobedience and God’s Sovereignty” by expounding selected parts of Jonah; but the limitations of the passages chosen preclude the possibility of admitting important considerations from elsewhere, though the centrality of the topic makes some of the exposition forced—a classic case of the mutually destructive homiletical marriage between exposition of a major topic and exposition of a restricted passage.

To this methodological disarray must be added two or three major errors. Considering the fruit of Anabaptist research during the last three decades, it is astonishing to be told that “The Anabaptists of Calvin’s day were similar to the liberal and radical theologians of our time, for they appealed to the spirit in their own minds rather than what was said in the Scriptures. They said, ‘Because we have spiritual intuitions that come strong upon us, we are going to follow them. We accept them as from the Spirit of God; if this means leaving the Bible behind, well, so much the worse for the Bible!’ Calvin denied this, for he denied that the Spirit contradicts himself.” No doubt that is the way Calvin perceived things; but Calvin never enjoyed any first-hand knowledge of the leaders of the Anabaptists, whose writings portray them to be no less biblically oriented (to say the least) than any of the other branches of the Reformation. A little later in the book, a writer takes pains to differentiate between the person who knows God’s will as revealed in Scripture, and the one who seeks to discover it when it is not so revealed. “It is one thing,” we are told, “to put out a fleece in attempting to discover that which God has not revealed. But to test that which God has revealed is to insult the integrity of his word, and I will not do it” (p. 93). I will try not to do it, too; but I can’t help remembering that when Gideon put out the fleece—twice, at that—it was for no other purpose than to test that which God had indeed already revealed.

Again, when a contributor writes that in forty years “I think I have heard only one truly honest prayer from the pulpit,” does he intend to use hyperbole to underline the remarkable candor and humility of the example that he then proceeds to give? It must be so, for I cannot believe his ecclesiastical experience is as limited as his words suggest.

Despite my criticisms, however, I find this little book quite compelling. It cannot be compared with Grace Unlimited (edited by Clark Pinnock), for the latter is openly polemical and designed as a symposium of written essays, whereas Our Sovereign God expounds its position with little polemic, and is scarcely more than transcribed addresses. So little concerned is this book to offer a definitive defense of Reformed theology that there is virtually no mention of such topics as covenant, Romans 9 or Ephesians 1, decree, ordo salutis, or a crux interpretum like First John 2:2. Yet this formal lack nonetheless conspires to make this book a helpful, edifying volume, eminently useful in a wide reading circle. To say this is not to despise the polemical work or to give it no place; but it is to say that its place is rarely for edification per se. Our Sovereign God is a work that, though not very profound, is not polemical either, and is edifying.

Although the reader must put up with an informality of style more suitable behind the pulpit than on the printed page, yet he does not have to read far before gaining genuine and valuable insights. One man writes, “Knowledge of God is more than any particular experience of God. For, like the Biblical writers, Calvin comes out of an era when people were less self-absorbed than we are. They were more interested in the realities that they experienced than in their experience of those realities” (p. 63). Another says, “Foolishness is in many of the catalogues of serious sins in the New Testament, along with adultery and murder and things like that. Foolishness is a moral refusal to deal honestly with the truth” (p. 81). And peppered through the book are choice quotations from Calvin, Wesley (!), Warfield, Kierkegaard, Geoffrey Fisher, Brunner, and others.

If you are looking for a book that will establish the truth of Reformed theology, look elsewhere. If you are looking for a generally interesting and edifying collection of sermons, this is for you.

Teaching Them All Things

With Christ in the School of Disciple Building, by Carl Wilson (Zondervan, 1976, 336 pp., $5.95 pb), is reviewed by Peter R. Grosso, pastoral intern, Cedar Park United Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

From a thorough study of the life of Christ Wilson finds evidence for seven steps in developing disciples: repentance and faith, enlightenment and guidance, ministry training and appreciation of benefits, leadership development and government under God, reevaluation and separation, participation and delegation, and the exchanged life and worldwide challenge. He underscores the urgent need for a balanced biblical emphasis and method for discipleship.

The church’s failure to do this, Wilson thinks, has been the pivotal factor in the crisis now facing the world, particularly Western society. The church has unintentionally through enculturation of the Gospel ceased to build disciples effectively. The incompleteness with which many American Christians interpret the Great Commission is characteristic of this. Often evangelism is emphasized to the neglect of Christ’s command to teach believers to obey Christ’s teachings. Our cultural, social, and political responsibilities are frequently ignored. The church, therefore, has fallen critically short in obedience to Christ’s command to prevent corruption and to drive back darkness, often sinning by placing the pursuit of blessing and man’s well-being above the service and praise of God.

In the midst of this dangerous vacuum of adequate Christian teaching, secular humanism is succeeding in its bid to control our minds, lives, and institutions. Wilson points out that today many churches are subservient to this deceptive philosophy. Our public school system is another sphere of its influence. Wilson traces the history of the causes for the decline of biblical discipleship and lay ministry since the early church. He also delineates the trends causing the loss of effectiveness in disciple building in the United States and the corresponding loss of the church’s influence in our society.

Yet Wilson sees the present kairos as unique for the restoration of the New Testament method of discipleship. Both positive and negative factors could contribute to such a restoration, he thinks, resulting in the return of the church to her rightful identity as God’s holy and healing assembly in an evil and broken world. He calls the church to return to the faithful pursuit of her Lord’s will, and emphasizes the need for making disciples who are able to live the exchanged life, a relatively stable, consistent walk in the Holy Spirit.

The book is instructive and will be valuable for the pastor or layperson.

Briefly Noted

Booksellers, librarians, and bibliophiles take note. Religious Reading 3 appeared late last year, third in a series of annual surveys of religious book publishing in the United States (Consortium Books [Box 9001, Wilmington, NC 28401], 313 pp., $15). Some 1,577 books that were published just in 1975 are classified into thirty-two categories and briefly described (but rarely evaluated). The author and title indexes are essential since many books aren’t classified where one might expect. The listing is definitely not complete, for six of the twenty-two 1975 books that we had considered “choice” are not included. But it has improved considerably since the first in the series. Both popular and scholarly books are included, as are books for children. Many reprints are listed, but contrary to the publisher’s intention, they are not always indicated as such. The two previous volumes are still in print. As this series continues, becomes more complete, enlarges some of the descriptions while shortening others, and adds a subject index, it will become an increasingly valuable tool for every religious bookstore and church or school library.

A recent reference book to assist elementary-age children when reading their Bibles and preparing for family devotions and Bible lessons is The Children’s Illustrated Bible Dictionary by V. Gilbert Beers (Nelson, 316 pp., $7.95) with 1,214 alphabetical entries. Each entry takes one-fourth of a large-size page and has a full-color illustration of the person, place, thing, or concept that is described. There is no denominational bias. An example for four consecutive entries: “Day’s Journey,” “Deacon,” “Dead Sea,” and “Debir.” One serious drawback (although some may not consider it so) is the absence of entries on most of the commonly asked about Bible words relating in some way to sex. If your child asks who publicans are, he can look it up here; but if he asks about harlots, you’re on your own. Baptism and murder are here, but not circumcision or adultery. Both theologically and practically, I think it reflects poorly on the author and publisher that they would presume to omit so many God-inspired words.

For a first-hand account of the tragic Ugandan situation, read Idi Amin Dada: Hitler in Africa (Sheed, 184 pp., $7.95). Written by the last United States Ambassador to Uganda, Thomas Melady, and his wife, the book chronicles Amin’s rise to power and describes life in Uganda since his reign. The authors present chilling accounts of bloodshed, arrest, and torture to support their charge that Amin is another Hitler.

Teaching Children as the Spirit Leads (Logos, 315 pp., $4.95 pb) by K. J. Allison claims to be a complete source book for Christian education. It is a thorough study, covering everything from “Spirit-Led Bible Teaching” to “Materials and Books” to a resource section for running a preschool program. Take note: it only considers preschool-age children. For a Catholic perspective on working with youth, see Youth Ministry (Paulist, 212 pp., $2.95 pb), edited by Michael Warren. The book has sixteen practical and foundational essays about evangelization, programs, and the development of leadership. Help! I’ve Got Problems! (Standard, 48 pp. and $1.50 pb each) is more elementary. The five-volume series is designed to help the teacher identify problems in the Sunday school class, and it offers solutions. Each volume deals with a different group from preschool teachers to administrators. Buses, Bibles, and Banana Splits (Baker, $5.95 pb) is a practical book compiled by Bill Wilson. This revised edition offers tried and tested ideas for children’s church and bus programs, including poster/flyer layouts ready for use with only the insertion of the specific information.

A new style for ministry is being pioneered by Nicholas Christoff. He makes his home and gathers a church in an apartment complex of 1,200 persons, most of them single. In Saturday Night, Sunday Morning (Harper & Row, 143 pp., $7.95) Christoff relates his transition from a family to a singles-oriented minister. He describes in a captivating fashion the seven deadly sins and seven lively virtues of singles. He details twenty-one actions that churches can take to remove barriers to singles. An excellent book.

Funeral Services for Today by James Christensen (Revell, 192 pp., $6.95) is a helpful compilation of twenty-eight complete (Scripture, prayers, hymns, meditations) services for all kinds of funerals, including especially difficult ones such as for infants, accident victims, nominal church members, or persons of poor reputation.

William Rodgers, a former actor, focuses on the “‘average’ homosexual” in setting forth what he believes is a Christian perspective in The Gay Invasion (Accent, 160 pp., $2.95 pb). He traces the development of thinking concerning homosexuality from Freud to the present day. For him homosexuality is a sin that requires therapy. However, he cautions that such therapy usually falls short of complete effectiveness. Nevertheless, the grace and mercy of God can enable a homosexual to repent of his sin and help him to begin a new life.