Page 5693 – Christianity Today (2024)

In the following interview two Gordon College professors, Dr. Richard Wright, professor of biology, and Dr. Jack Haas, chairman of the chemistry department, talk about their approach to teaching creation, origins, and evolution. Both have been active in the American Scientific Affiliation, and Haas is its current president. The discussion was conducted by David Singer, art director of Christianity Today.

Singer. Do you see in Scripture a starting point for the discussion of origins?

Haas. I feel that Scripture provides the framework for the consideration of any basic question. It is not a book of science, but it gives the framework for looking at science.

Singer. It seems to me that if one accepts the Genesis account of creation as literal, as an account of a cataclysmic event wherein God created the world in six twenty-four-hour days, that’s one way of dismissing all the speculative explanations for the origins of life.

Haas. I find most biblical scholars unwilling to restrict “day” to a twenty-four-hour period, and surely the seventh day, on which God has rested from his work, is more than twenty-four hours long in that it’s extended from the era of creation to the period of the new heaven and the new earth.

Singer. What about the creation account in the first and second chapters of Genesis?

Haas. Evangelical scholars haven’t come to a unified conclusion about the nature of the account, whether it involves a long time-span or a short time-span, the meaning of some of the key words, the chronology, or the purpose of the account. Must we find in Scripture a statement of scientific detail which will square with the scientific data of any period and time? Or should we focus on the broad sweep of Scripture which sees God as creator, superintending each detail of the process leading to the world about us? I think the conflict comes when we’re forcing Scripture to supply the kind of evidence one employs in scientific discussion.

Wright. I think much of the difficulty in this evolution question arises from trying to interpret the Bible in the light of the scientific perspective of maybe 125 years ago.

Singer. Is evolution being presented in the Christian colleges?

Wright. Let me refer to the questionnaire that originated from the first Faith-Learning Seminar held by the Christian College Consortium in 1972. Dr. Al Smith of Wheaton College surveyed the science and math faculty of the Consortium’s member institutions about their teaching approach in dealing with evolution. The data indicate that the topic of evolution and creation is handled primarily by the biology departments. Sometimes there are special courses in evolution or evolutionary biology. The Christian college is a good place to work with an issue like this. As long as the faculty are given the freedom to deal with it, a lot can be done to defuse it as a highly emotional issue.

Singer. Did the consortium questionnaire reveal any particular evolutionary models that are presented as alternatives?

Wright. Smith said that, from the results of the questionnaire, he felt that the majority of the science faculty members take either a progressive creationist or theistic evolutionist position. But they try to present a variety of possibilities to students. They don’t attempt to proselytize in favor of their own views.

Singer. What is an evolutionary view of creation?

Wright. An evolutionist would hold that there are processes of natural selection at work today in the living world. Genetic differences in organisms provide the raw material on which natural selection can work and bring about changes in a species. And, in fact, as long as you have some geographical isolation, over a period of time, you can have the evolution of two species from one. This is what we would call microevolution or speciation. Most creationists would find it very hard to deny that this is going on today. The evolutionist, however, would extrapolate this method into the past to explain how all the different organisms came to be.

Singer. How does a creationist’s view of evolution differ from an evolutionist’s view?

Wright. Are you using creationist to mean a person who believes in the six-day creation of a young earth?

Singer. Are there other ways of understanding that term?

Wright. There definitely are. Any scientist who approaches this problem of creation and evolution as a Christian would way, “Yes, I’m a creationist; I believe that God is the creator and the sustainer of the universe, and in fact is the author of all things that exist.” The differences would come down to the involvement of natural process and the degree to which God, in his creative activity, either suspended natural processes or just worked through them to bring about his own purposes in creation.

Singer. How plausible is it, considering the complexity of design in our universe, that this just developed randomly, by chance?

Wright. You’re talking about impersonal mechanism vs. a creator God who fashions the natural world. A mechanistic view of evolution doesn’t necessarily bypass the need for God; it’s just saying that the known mechanisms are sufficient to explain the origins by some sort of natural means. It doesn’t attempt to explain where the mechanism originated or why the universe is orderly. Science simply isn’t competent to speak to these ultimate questions. Christian scientists agree that God is the author of the universe and is actively involved in this world. The basic disagreement is between the literal creationist point of view and the Christian who believes in some sort of evolutionary process. Fiat creation—the view that creation occurred in a kind of instantaneous fashion in a short period of time, say six days—implies that the process which God used is supernatural, which means that it’s out of the realm of investigation; we can’t touch it scientifically. Good exegesis doesn’t require this. The alternative view is that God is involved in process, and there’s good evidence, in Scripture and certainly from nature, that points to this conclusion.

Singer. Could you cite some of the scriptural evidence?

Wright. The wording of Genesis, “Let there be a firmament,” “Let the waters bring forth,” “Let the earth bring forth,” is obviously not the same as saying God created the earth as it is instantaneously. There’s also a very nice comparison between God’s creative activity and his sustaining activities. The Word of God indicates his creative activity. I make reference here to Psalm 33, where we are told that by the Word of God the heavens were made. Later, in Psalm 147, it says that his Word spreads snow like a blanket; he sent his Word to bring the thaw and warm wind to melt the snow. This refers, of course, to God’s sustaining activity. He’s involved in the natural processes, and these are ascribed to the Word of God. Therefore to deny that there’s process in creation is to deny that God could have achieved his aims in natural ways, using his own “natural methods” to bring about his will. We call these methods “natural forces,” and we explain them with the use of “natural laws.” However, this doesn’t explain their origin or how they’re upheld or why such order exists.

Singer. What is your own approach in teaching origins?

Haas. First of all, I look at origins from a theistic perspective, and at no point in the discussion do I talk about chance and randomness. I continually emphasize a creating and sustaining God involved in every intimate detail of every moment.

Wright. In my core course, when I talk about evolution and creation, I present the various viewpoints held by Christians. My desire in doing this is to make very clear to the students that there is no single orthodox Christian approach to origins and creation; Christians need not feel constrained to reach total agreement on this subject. I present some of the viewpoints of fiat creation, of progressive creation, and of theistic evolution. I try to present these fairly, and I tell the students that they certainly should not assume anything about a person’s Christian commitment on the basic of his approach to creation or evolution.

Singer. Earlier you spoke about speciation, or micro-evolution, and said that most creationists would find it hard to deny that this is going on. Is there any evidence for a more fundamental change, like going from one phylum to the next?

Wright. Here I wish I were more familiar with the total evidence for evolution. I would judge that there’s very little evidence for the evolution of the phyla. There are many gaps between different forms.

Singer. In the classroom, how would you deal with this matter of gaps?

Wright. Well, I would say that the Christian could postulate a couple of reasonable explanations. Evolutionarily speaking, one could say that the gaps are there because the forms were not preserved in the fossil record. Fossil preservation is a very haphazard process. It’s possible that, especially during the period of evolution of invertebrate phyla, the organisms involved really didn’t have any major hard parts that were preserved as fossils. Another Christian response would be that of progressive creation. This seems to be the view of a number of faculty in the Christian College Consortium. According to this view, God created various “kinds” or organisms as the word “kind” seems to be used in Genesis. These kinds were major types, perhaps at the phylum level, which then proceeded to evolve over a period of time into the great array of different species, phyla, classes, orders, and families. But the original creation of kinds is implied.

Haas. People involved in origins-of-life studies are remarkably candid about their presuppositions and the tentativeness of their conclusions. And you have to remember that historical reconstruction of natural events poses problems that simply aren’t found in the typical laboratory investigation. That life arose in the distant past, from simple living forms emerging from increasingly complex molecules, is assumed. No other approach makes scientific sense.

Singer. You’re saying scientists have to assume that this is the way life originated.

Wright. Yes, that’s right. The evolutionary model is the only one.

Singer. You mean a scientist doesn’t have an alternative to assuming that?

Wright. That’s right. Not, at least, an alternative that can be considered on scientific grounds.

Singer. In suggesting explanations other than the evolutionist view, then, are you no longer acting as scientists?

Wright. No. But neither is the scientist who says all this has been brought about by chance. He doesn’t know this; science doesn’t allow us to make such statements. His approach to this question of chance versus design will be influenced by other elements of his world view.

Singer. As soon as you postulate some alternatives to the evolutionary view of origins, you’re no longer acting as a scientist.

Haas. No, I disagree. I’m functioning as a scientist, and I’m functioning as a person. The scientist is a person, and the scientist speaks out of the context of his personhood. His own presuppositions are going to be involved. I feel that my explanation of origins and of evolution is more valid than his. I know where all this came from.

Singer. So you’re saying that really there aren’t satisfying scientific answers, that this whole realm of creation and origins goes beyond the ability of science.

Haas. Yes. Certainly to establish what has happened in the past goes beyond the ability of science.

Singer. In a Harper’s article entitled “Darwin’s Mistake” [see page 12], Tom Bethell makes two points. One, by inference, is that Darwinian evolution assumes progress, that things move from disorganization to organization. Others have pointed out that this is in direct contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics.

Haas. That old chestnut again!

Wright. As long as you have a continual input of energy from outside the system, things can indeed move from disorganization to organization. It can look as if you’re going against the second law of thermodynamics.

Singer. His second argument is that Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest is a circular argument: we say the fittest survive, and we determine the fittest by looking at what has survived. This is another reason, Bethell says, why Darwinian evolution is quietly being dropped. Have you found it is being dropped?

Wright. No, not in the least. I haven’t seen any reference to this in any serious scientific journal, and certainly not in textbooks. I see Bethell’s point, however. You don’t have a good quantitative measurement, a good technique, let’s say, for measuring fitness other than seeing which organisms survive through time. We can determine non-fitness, for example, by seeing which organisms are more readily preyed upon by a predator. We can apply the concept of fitness, and say that from what we can tell from this particular organism’s environment, it’s good to look like a leaf, and so the guy that doesn’t look like a leaf is going to be more preyed upon. However, survival of the fittest has come to be understood as survival of the ones that reproduce successfully.

Singer. Well, would you say that the scientific community is now less enamored of Darwin? Is his influence waning?

Wright. The scientific community continues to be grateful to Darwin. The basic insights he gave us into the evolutionary processes we recognize to be an extremely important historical development. However, the fact that he had published his Origin of Species over a hundred years ago on the basis of the scientific knowledge of that day means that there’s going to have to be continual refinement, revision, reexamination of what he has said. A great deal has been added to what you would call the theories of evolution. In fact, people speak nowadays of neo-Darwinism, which means basic Darwinism informed by modern science.

Singer. In the argument from design, we say that we can see how the elements of creation followed a pattern of design. But isn’t design an a posteriori conclusion drawn out of what is?

Wright. That’s another kind of tautology, I guess. At some point, we started talking about the fact that there is design and a sense of orderliness in the creation. Certainly there is, in the functioning and existence of natural law. This design is often what attracts people, especially people who have looked into science thoroughly, to consider the Christian faith. A good number of Christian faculty members on secular campuses are in the sciences.

Singer. Let me read a statement put out by the American Humanist Society: “Evolution is the only presently known strictly scientific and non-religious explanation for the existence and diversity of living organisms. It is therefore the only view that should be expounded in public school courses on science which are distinct from those on religion.”

Haas. The first part is true. That’s what we have said. To go back to an earlier question that Dick answered: it’s my view that the supporters of fiat creation really base their case on a narrow reading of Scripture and a flagrant ignoring of the scientific evidence.

Singer. Do you agree that evolution is the only view that should be taught in public school courses on science?

Wright. The way it’s taught makes a whole lot of difference. Quite often it is presented as dogma rather than theory. That’s not good science.

Haas. I think not only the presuppositions of evolution but also its implications for other areas of life need to be examined. For instance, a high school biology teacher may say that evolution disproves the existence of the creating God; a statement like that certainly shouldn’t be imposed.

Wright. There is a tendency in these science textbooks, especially at the high school level, to absolutize things that a good scientist would never want to state absolutely.

Singer. They present evolution as a fact?

Wright. Many times scientists will talk about the fact of evolution. We may not completely understand the mechanisms, but many scientists simply don’t seriously question the idea that it has occurred. It simply is assumed.

Singer. You would say that a Christian alternative is not necessarily that the Bible provides us with another explanation but that the Bible tells us who devised the evolutionary process?

Wright. Yes, that’s true. The Bible gives us the identity of the creator and tells us why, in fact, he created things.

Singer. Why is it that the evidence for mechanistic evolution is so inconclusive? Since the scientific arguments sustaining non-theistic forms of evolution aren’t substantiated, isn’t this sufficient reason to consider seriously the Genesis account suggesting six twenty-four-hour days of creation?

Haas. When you say the evolutionary arguments can’t be substantiated, remember that evolution is a broad, encompassing perspective. There are details that may never be established simply because we haven’t the time frame to observe these changes. Evolution is a framework of views. Within this overall perspective, particular parts may change in the light of new evidence.

Singer. Science does not deny “providence” or “miracles”; it is just blind to them. We’ve talked about how scientists, in order to be scientists, have to look at things in a certain way. How are Christian science students asked to deal with miracles?

Haas. Some Christians have attempted to approach miracles with a statistical sort of argument, allowing God to operate in the normal context of nature, but I really have been unsatisfied with these kinds of approaches. I’m willing to accept what the biblical passage says on faith.

Singer. That God has chosen in these instances to go outside the normal processes that he otherwise uses?

Haas. Yes, that’s very definitely a possibility, but then we don’t know what he actually did.

Singer. Are there other options that you would present in the classroom?

Wright. I think a lot of people have spent a lot of time trying to explain how some of these miracles could have occurred under natural conditions, but it’s just speculation. We don’t know what happened. It doesn’t make it any less a miracle to me to think that God could have caused a whole sequence of natural events to occur simultaneously at some very specific point in time. That still is a miracle to me. I’m not saying that that’s how God performed miracles. He’s certainly not limited to using what we call natural means.

Let’s Hear It For Anita Bryant

By the time this is published, the Dade County referendum will have been held and we’ll know whether Anita Bryant has been upheld or disowned by her Florida neighbors. That isn’t quite correct; it’s whether her concern that children not be taught in public or private schools by practicing hom*osexuals has been upheld or disowned.

Regardless of the outcome, let’s hear it for Anita Bryant. I don’t know of any other person in recent years, male or female, who has put a career on the line for a moral principle as she has. No college or Bible-school or seminary president, no pastor, no editor or writer, no business executive. I’m pretty sure that some have done it, but they are probably much less visible than she.

At the very beginning, in early January, Ms. Bryant was asked if she realized that there was power on the other side, and that she could suffer severely for righteousness’ sake. She replied that she did.

I am tempted to discuss what has been going on in the United States during recent years, how the battle for minority-race rights and women’s rights—areas of discrimination with an immoral base—has been extended to hom*osexuality and other areas with a moral base. Can people be “good” Christians and be opposed to having their children taught by practicing hom*osexuals? Ten years from now, will it be possible for Christians to be opposed to having their children instructed by a child molester or p*rnographer?

I resist the temptation to explore Alice in Wonderland because the Eutychus letter shouldn’t be so long that it usurps other letters.

So thank you, Anita Bryant, for your willingness to see your public Christian testimony go down the tube for what you perceive to be a Christian principle. You reached out for God rather than Las Vegas. So did the prophets before you.

As for me and my house, we shall wait to buy a new sewing machine and stock up on tomato juice. Just in case.

EUTYCHUS VIII

Bravos For Best

Thank you for printing the interview “Music: Offerings of Creativity” (May 6). Cheryl Forbes’s discussion with Harold Best revealed more good theology and exciting philosophy than any other article I’ve read for a long time. It also reminded me of Dorothy Sayers’s thoughts on the creative mind.

DOROTHY ALFORD

Elkhorn, Neb.

By skirting the issue of how music affects the masses and by emphasizing music as an individual offering or sacrifice, Dr. Best seems to appear almost snobbish. “This is my offering to God, whether anyone else likes it or not.” His assertion that this offering of creativity reflects the imago dei and Donald Hustad’s point (“Music Speaks … But What Language?,” May 6) about music being revelation as well as expression are harmonized by a fact which both men omitted from their articles. This very fact, I believe, clarifies the meaning and purpose of music in a context of worship as well as evangelism.… That fact is that the Lord is the original Creator-Artist. He created all things, and not without purpose.

TIM GILLESPIE

Bedford, Ind.

Dr. Best’s emphatic assertion that God had to make the world is more consistent with certain strains of Hinduism, the emanational philosophy of Plotinus, and many process theologians than with the God of the Bible. As Dorothy L. Sayers, among others, so rightly stressed, the Triune God who creates is indeed the basis for all human aesthetic endeavor. But Sayers began with a thoroughly Christian doctrine of God when developing her analogies.

TIM ERDEL

Pastoral Intern

South Shore Bible Church

Chicago, Ill.

The interview with Harold Best is one of the most stimulating and thought-provoking articles I have read in any magazine for some time. I’m glad to see some serious thought being given to the function of music and art in the church.

GARY L. JOHNSON

Manager, Publishing Division

Bethany Fellowship, Inc.

Minneapolis, Minn.

Dealing With Doctrine

On the whole I thought your editorial “Doctrinal Hodgepodge in the Churches” (May 6) was a good assessment of denominational moorings being ripped out of the biblical foundation. But I think that your illustration of confessional inconsistency was bad. The issue of eternal security or losing one’s salvation is highly controversial, and evangelicals historically have been divided on this issue. Also, it is a minor doctrine compared to Jesus’ deity and humanity, God’s sovereignty or the Trinity.…

What is needed is for evangelicals to have clear sight on essential doctrines so that there is no repetition of the Unitarian-Universalist pattern, but we need to accept the inconsistency of the different views with which we see secondary doctrine. After all, we are not omniscient.

O. SCOTT OLIVER

Oak Park, Ill.

In your editorial you noted that the Roman Catholic Church is undergoing major changes of belief, and state that they are questioning teachings not based on Scripture, such as the Assumption, the Immaculate Conception, and transubstantiation. As a Roman Catholic who has accepted Christ as Lord and Saviour … I am more than happy to see traditional concepts such as the intercession of saints, adorations of Mary, and salvation only by membership in the Roman Catholic Church being discarded.…

Whether or not Scripture requires that Christ’s words upon the breaking of the bread be interpreted to mean the literal transformation of the physical substances of the Lord’s Supper into the physical substance of Christ is open to question.…

The real presence of Christ, either intermingled with or fully supplanting the bread and wine, may very well be mandated by Scripture; it certainly is not contradictory thereto, and your “not biblically based” identification leaves much to be desired. Otherwise the editorial (on the Reformed churches), typical of your magazine, was excellent.

MICHAEL C. TRIPKA

Highland Heights, Ohio

More Digging Around ‘Roots’

Roots seems to have conveniently replaced the quiescent agony over Viet Nam in satisfying that undisguised appetite of Americans, not all, for self-flagellation. There is but a thin line separating this national tendency for beating ourselves over the past and a potential recrudescence of widespread race hatred to which this book and telecast series might have unconsciously contributed.

Like Cheryl Forbes (“From These ‘Roots,’” May 6), bless her heart, I too have my “roots” in Scandinavia. Our common ancestors, in point of fact, were devil worshipers in northern Europe who settled disagreements by beating each other with clubs. With such an illustrious family tree, I prefer to allow my roots to be buried in history. Forgetting those things which are behind, the view before us expands with joy and true liberation in Christ as we become “rooted and grounded in Him” (Col. 2:7).

FRANCIS ANDERSON

Seattle, Wash.

Thanks to Cheryl Forbes for writing on Roots. One of the reasons that the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America (the “Covenanters”) is a small denomination is that 150 years ago she disciplined her members who held slaves. You had to have slaves in that day to go first class economically in some parts of the country. They chose second class.

RAYMOND P. JOSEPH

Reformed Presbyterian Church

West Lafayette, Inc.

I wanted to let you know of an incorrect attribution in the article. The director of the film The Emigrants is Jan Troell, not Ingmar Bergman.

JOSEPH DOSTAL

Columbus, Ohio

The whole business of evolution as a philosophical option for a world and life view warrants our continuing attention. When considering the evidence pro and con, it is essential to include the biblical data for source information, especially Genesis 1–11. Evolution as an explanation for creation, in any event, can never be more than a theory, whereas Christians regard divine revelation as factual when it speaks about origins.

Be sure to take a close look at “The Chicago Call: An Appeal to Evangelicals,” discussed in our editorial section this issue (pages 27–29) and in our June 3 News (page 32). It appears to be calling for a better appreciation of Christianity’s rootage as over against the current existential subjectivism based largely on visceral reaction, hunches, and feelings.

No previous age studied the art of communication as ours has. Whole professions are dedicated to getting out the message. We are urged to work out the implications of the dictum “the medium is the message.” We are warned against thinking that what is clear in our own minds will necessarily become clear to others if we speak about it. We must choose our words with care, for we may cause misunderstanding if we use the wrong words. In our seminaries the departments of practical theology give a good deal of attention to the way our young men and women try to convey their message.

Underlying all this there is often the implication that if we communicate well we will solve most of our problems, including the most serious ones. For instance, we take it as basic that in the modern world all nations wish to live at peace. But we speak many languages and we do not understand one another very well. There is always the danger that the leaders of one nation will take the sort of action that will inflame the leaders of another in part at least because neither understands what the other is really saying.

We believe that in industrial disputes the basic interests of all are best furthered by industrial prosperity. When there are strikes and lockouts, we feel this must be because people have not really considered what the other side is saying. So with local disputes and with what takes place within the family. We are not naive enough to believe that all our problems would be solved if we communicated better. But we hold that many of them would, or would at least be less serious. Communication is a most important art.

I am not in disagreement with much of this. I am as much in favor of improving our communications as anyone. I agree that often we have had troubles because the parties to a dispute have not fully understood one another. Where the protagonists are hitting at shadows, it is not surprising if there is no effective contact.

And, as one whose living is in training young men and women for Christian service, I am well aware that there is a crying need for Christians to be more articulate. In most parts of the so-called Christian world, those outside the Church have only the haziest idea of what Christianity is about. We have done a pretty poor job of conveying to our contemporaries some of the most exciting news there has ever been. For we have all too often made the Christian way seem full of negatives, a way of life crowded with prohibitions. We have made Christianity dull, and that is about as devastating a criticism as our generation can bring against anything.

When we consider the vital message of the New Testament, this is positively astounding. There we read of the most gripping event that ever happened in the history of this old world, the coming of God himself into the life of man. There we read of the high drama of the cross, of the sensational joy of the resurrection, of the inexplicable ascension. The story goes on to the coming of the Holy Spirit of God in power and of the way the early missionaries went out a crazy band (“fools for Christ’s sake”) with the program of winning the world for Christ.

It can scarcely be denied that we have done a poor job of communicating this to our generation. It is well that God’s people give themselves over to serious thought about how best to make our world see what the Christian message really is. All the expertise the Church can command should be brought into the task.

But having made that point emphatically I want to go on to say that the ability to communicate is not everything. Sometimes the problem is that people do communicate and then don’t like what they hear from the other side. On the level of war and strife, it is sometimes the people who speak the same language who come up with the most intractable problems. One example is northern Ireland. Others are not hard to find.

In industrial disputes and the kind of quarrel that splits communities, the parties may understand each other all too well. Each recognizes that the other wants something it is not prepared to concede. Under such circ*mstances good communication does not mean that the enmity is eliminated; it means that the enmity is fueled.

To put all our emphasis on communication is to overlook the deeper problem, which is what goes on in the heart of man. Long ago the prophet Jeremiah put it this way: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked [or sick]” (Jer. 17:9). Unless this is taken into account, the best communication this world can produce will not solve problems.

It is important that we find the words. But it is more important that we find the Word.

The Word is an intriguing name for the Saviour. Its background can be sought among the Greeks with their concept of the philosophical Logos, the rational principle behind all things, “the omnipresent wisdom by which all things are steered” as Heracl*tus put it. Or we can think of the Jews with their Memra, the Word of God, and with their personifications of wisdom (Prov. 8) and the like. Such studies help us see that the concept was one that would convey meaning to people of widely differing backgrounds.

But as it is used in the New Testament, the term is a Christian one. Studies in its background may show us how some would understand it, but they do not lead us to the essential Christian meaning. That is bound up with the second Person of the Trinity and points us to God’s will to reveal himself. The Word is God speaking to man, making himself known. The Word is God coming to earth with a message of salvation and peace and joy. The Word is God triumphant over sin and death and hell. The Word is God taking notice of our plight and speaking to us where we are, not first demanding that we get where we ought to be.

The danger in concentrating on the words is that we put our emphasis on what we do and say. The words are ours. We know that our words can make all the difference in our contacts with our fellows. The right words can bring peace and harmony, the wrong words strife and hostility. The words are under our control.

But the Word is not. The Word is sovereign. The Word is God taking the initiative. The Word is divine wisdom. It is not to be countered or argued with but welcomed and accepted. The Word is the word of the cross, the word of salvation and grace, the Word that is to be received with gratitude and awe and love.

Meeting within blocks of Cincinnati’s Riverfront stadium, the governing board of the National Council of Churches was reminded last month that it is in a new ball game now. The “outs” for many years in federal government matters have now become the “ins” and therefore should change their tactics, NCC president William P. Thompson urged.

“It is no secret,” the United Presbyterian executive said in a presidential address, “that it had been very difficult for the council to communicate with officials in the executive branch for more than eight years. As a result, many of our staff colleagues had become accustomed to a confrontational style which assumed that the addressee would not give serious consideration to the arguments advanced and the recommendations proposed.”

With the change in administration in Washington, that “confrontational style” is no longer appropriate, the NCC’s top officer claimed. He mentioned that the doors opened even before President Carter’s inauguration, and he was a part of a group that met with presidential advisor Charles Kirbo before Carter moved into the White House. He did not mention the new access to the Oval Office made possible by the appointment of ex-NCC staffer Andrew Young to a top administration post (that of United Nations ambassador).

In his address, Thompson lamented that council staffers were so overworked and tired that they sometimes were unable to reflect on current trends enough to realize when they should try different approaches. He cited the change in federal administration to prove his point: “After the inauguration, the first staff-drawn communications addressed to the executive branch submitted for my signature did not reflect this new posture [the Carter openness to the NCC]. Indeed, the old confrontational rhetoric was still present.” He went on to note that when the problems were called to the attention of staffers, they came up quickly with new and satisfactory drafts. He suggested that they “would have adjusted more promptly to the changed situation on their own initiative, had they not been so burdened and overextended.”

With the staff half the size it was a decade ago, the NCC president called on board members to give better leadership to the staff by identifying priorities and cutting out certain programs. He did not say which programs he thought should be eliminated, but he got the board’s backing to pursue a study of the council’s purposes.

The board followed its president’s lead in changing the style of addressing the federal government. For instance, a resolution on nuclear testing “commends President Carter for [his] new disarmament initiative, urges him to pursue a treaty for complete cessation of all explosive nuclear testing by all nations,” and urges churches to get members to commend him. Carter’s energy policies were also endorsed.

Another resolution, urging more federal funding and administration of childcare centers, was non-combative in tone.

On a more sensitive issue in ecumenical circles, the board passed a resolution “on grand jury abuse.” It mentioned the work of federal investigators currently probing terrorist activities and said agents “routinely threaten uncooperative persons with subpoenas from a grand jury,” but the document addressed no demand to the nation’s chief law-enforcement officers, the President and the Attorney General. The current investigation of Hispanic organizations in the churches was noted, but the resolution reached back into earlier administrations to identify probes of “the anti-war movement, the activist student movement, the Native American movement, the Black movement, the trade-union movement, the Roman Catholic peace movement,” and others.

Concerned that “the bail process guaranteed by the Constitution is being abused by the use of excessive bail … to incarcerate poor and/or politically active minority persons,” the board authorized its president to “visit the Attorney General” and other officials “to urge upon them the NCC’s grave concerns” (but not to demand anything). An Ecumenical Minority Bail Bond Fund was authorized by the board last year, and it recently posted a $50,000 bond on behalf of a youth in a Georgia murder case.

Although the Carter administration was treated with great respect by the governing board at this meeting, leaders of a member denomination did not fare so well. The two Episcopal Church officials primarily responsible for allowing federal agents to see some of the records of that denomination’s Hispanic office would have been “repudiated” for their actions under terms of a resolution submitted late in the meeting. As finally passed, however, the document calls for an NCC commission “to meet with the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church to aid him” in getting out of jail the two members of his headquarters staff who refused to cooperate with a grand-jury probe of the church’s Hispanic commission (see March 18 issue, page 55). The presiding bishop, John M. Allin, is a member of the board but was not at the Cincinnati meetings (held in an Episcopal church). The resolution calls for restoration of the salaries of the jailed staff members and payment of their legal expenses. In an unusual move, the board also set a deadline for the commission to report results to its executive committee. The executive committee of the board was instructed to distribute to the board an early report of its action on the commission’s work (due in the hands of the executive committee by June 15).

Some of the states of the nation also got less than respectful treatment from the NCC policy-makers. A classic case of “confrontational” tactics was employed against the states that have not yet ratified the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. The board authorized a boycott of national NCC meetings in any such state (most of which are in the South), and it asked member denominations to avoid having conventions there.

Excellent Religion Reporting

Russell Chandler, religion writer for the Los Angeles Times, won this year’s top award of the Religion Newswriters Association (RNA)—the Supple Memorial Award—for excellence in the reporting of religion in the secular press. The award was presented at last month’s annual meeting of the RNA. Chandler is a former news editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

The St. Petersburg, Florida, Times won the RNA’s Schachern Award for its weekly supplement on religion, edited last year by Lee Kelly, now a reporter in Austin, Texas. Gen Hammong of the Niagara Falls, New York, Gazette won the Cassels Award for excellence in reporting religion for papers with 50,000 or less circulation.

RNA membership is limited to reporters who cover religion for secular newspapers, wire services, and news magazines. The awards are named for pioneer members of the organization who have since died.

Evangelical Press: Issues and Awards

More than 300 editors, writers, and publishers associated with evangelical publications met last month in Springfield, Missouri, for the annual convention of the Evangelical Press Association. There were headline speakers (British author and social critic Malcolm Muggeridge, revivals researcher J. Edwin Orr, biblical archeologist Robert Cooley), tours (the headquarters of the Assemblies of God and the hospital that services the nation’s forty federal prisons), and awards.

The American Baptist, the monthly periodical of the American Baptist Churches that joined the EPA only last year, was named “Periodical of the Year.” Other magazines that won first-place excellence awards in their categories were: Moody Monthly (Moody Bible Institute), Worldwide Challenge (Campus Crusade for Christ), Navlog (Navigators), Christian Living (David C. Cook), Campus Life (Youth for Christ), Group (Thom Schultz Publications), and Success (Baptist Publications).

In the eighteen-category “Higher Goals” competition, CHRISTIANITY TODAY won five first-place awards (cartoon, “Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel,” by John Lawing; personality, “Solzhenitsyn—Whose Face in the Mirror?” by Cheryl Forbes; first person, “The Ones Who Are Left,” by Elisabeth Elliott; critical review, “The Omen,” by Thomas Howard; reporting, “A Minister Is Missing,” by Edward E. Plowman).

Among the other first-place awards: Eternity (best cover, full color); Beyond, published by JAARS, the air arm of Wycliffe Bible Translators (best editorial); Campus Life (fiction, humor, and single photo); His (poetry and original art); Reformed Journal (tie, critical review, and standing feature); World Vision (photo feature).

Eleanor Burr of OMS Outreach was elected president, the first woman to hold the post in the EPA’s thirty-year history.

Lively debate marked several panel discussions; the main argument was over whether denominational news organs have a responsibility to inform constituents of all vital developments, even when what is happening involves controversy. Generally, the journalists favored disclosure, the publicists favored burial.

Muggeridge, 74, gave a speech he has given often: the moral standards of society are eroding hopelessly, and the media carry a large share of the blame. He held up Christianity as the only hope in a darkening world that someday will be engulfed by Communism.

Reporters found him in interviews to be witty, friendly, and candid. Although he spoke freely about his conversion to Christ (he says friends in England attribute his God talk to senility), he declined to be identified as an evangelical. He believes evangelical “dogma” is too “strict.” He had unkind things to say about the spiritual condition of the Anglican Church, about legalization of abortion, and about hom*osexuality. He expressed belief that the world’s moral and spiritual decline is “irreversible.” The main question, said Muggeridge, is: “How long can the Christians hang on?”

The Praying Editors

Struggling to stay afloat, the largely Protestant Associated Church Press appeared to succeed at its spring New Orleans convention. The attendance was up slightly from a year before, the number of paid-up member publications was reported to be a respectable 105, and a new leadership team was installed.

As in several recent years, the ACP met in joint convention with the larger Catholic Press Association (CPA), and editors from each group were free to sample parts of the other’s program. In both the ACP and the CPA this year, there was greater interest than in recent years in what banquet speaker George Gallup, Jr., called the “inner life.” One ACP session entitled “The Editor as a Person of Faith” attracted a capacity crowd, and CPA “praying and sharing” sessions drew unexpected turnouts—even at times when editors were otherwise free to tour New Orleans.

Gallup, who has been commissioned to survey CPA readers, reviewed the results of recent polls that show that “the inner life is in.” With the evangelical movement providing the thrust, America is in the early stages of spiritual revival, the pollster reported. The accent is on youth and on experiential religion, he said, and this raises questions of whether the country will be more religiously mature by the turn of the century. Gallup challenged members of both associations by declaring that the religious press “will have a lot to do with how this question is answered.”

During his address the pollster announced that Gallup International is starting a center for religious research at Princeton. It will house archives and help persons who are doing research in religion.

Ray Dobbins of the Cumberland Presbyterian, outgoing ACP president, told members that even though membership declined by about twenty-five publications in the last year, the ACP still has a vital role to play. He noted that it is “one of the most inclusive ecumenical expressions of the whole Christian Church.” Dobbins said the ACP “can help discover and make manifest this one Church of all Christendom.”

Elected to succeed Dobbins was Howard E. Royer, Church of the Brethren executive and editor of that denomination’s monthly, Messenger. Lutheran pastor Donald Hetzler of Geneva, Illinois, former director of the National Lutheran Campus Ministry, was named executive secretary of the ACP on a half-time basis. He succeeds Dennis Shoemaker, who had served full-time. The ACP adopted a 1977 budget of $37,000 and a 1978 projection of about $39,000.

The CPA installed Robert Fenton, publisher of Catholic Digest, as president. Ethel M. Gintoft of Milwaukee, associate editor of the Catholic Herald-Citizen, was named vice-president; she is the first woman ever elected to a high CPA post.

Both associations got reports on the latest postal developments. They were reminded that the Commission on Postal Service had recommended only a few days before the New Orleans convention that all preferred (subsidized) mail rates for non-profit organizations be phased out by 1997. In a related matter, the CPA passed a resolution opposing a government effort to tax the advertising revenue of non-profit publications.

British Baptists

For the first time in its 153-year history, the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland will have a woman as president: Nell Alexander, 62, a dramatist who is a member of Zion Baptist Church in Cambridge. She was elected vice-president at the recent annual assembly of the union in Nottingham, England, and will be installed as president next year.

Former general secretary Ernest A. Payne was installed as this year’s president. In an address, he noted that a majority of Britain’s Baptist churches practice open Communion and open membership (inviting any believer to join whether baptized or not).

The some 1,500 delegates at Nottingham heard that membership has decreased to 181,798 (in 2,137 churches) since last year (continuing a trend), that fewer children and young people are involved in church programs, and that baptisms have fallen off. The delegates quickly approved a resolution requesting the union’s executive council to set up a commission “to examine the reasons for the numerical and spiritual decline.”

The Baptist Missionary Society, which has work in ten countries, reported at the meeting that mass baptisms of hundreds of converts were taking place in northern Angola. Things elsewhere in the war-ravaged land are unsettled, though, and missionaries and pastors have been uprooted, the report indicated.

General Secretary Alexei Bichkov of the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists in the Soviet Union, the current president of the European Baptist Federation, brought the assembly’s closing address. He was interrupted several times by enthusiastic applause. “We praise the Lord that more doors are wide open to proclaim Jesus Christ,” he said. “We are proud to be his ambassadors in our country, for our people are thirsting for the good news of the Gospel.”

Responding to the constant stream of criticism leveled at the All-Union Council by supporters of the non-registered or “underground” churches, Bichkov said: “Our first task is to witness. We don’t belong to any political party. There is no such thing as ‘saving’ or ‘unsaving’ churches.… There is only the saving power of Jesus Christ.” He said the people in the mainstream Baptist churches in the Soviet Union “pray for our brothers who are in prison.” He also stated his belief that all forty-one dissident Baptists now in Soviet prisons—including well-known leader Georgi Vins—will be released by the end of this year.

Religion in Transit

The People’s Church, Canada’s largest evangelical congregation, again exceeded its goal in its annual “faith-promise” missionary fund-raising effort. Total pledges for the coming year: $1.13 million. The amount includes $143,000 to help alleviate poverty in Haiti. The church shares in the support of 470 overseas missionaries (thirty-five from its own congregation of 2,000-plus) and numerous mission projects both abroad and in North America. The church’s total income for all purposes topped $2.6 million in 1976, a $1 million increase over the preceding year.

While he was in London last month, President Carter attended an 8 A.M. Sunday service at Westminster Abbey. Anglican bishop Knapp Fisher led the congregation in prayers for Carter and the American people. When the collection plate was passed, the President found himself without British money and borrowed a handful of coins from a British bodyguard. On a tour later to the abbey’s Jerusalem Chamber, where a group of scholars translated the King James Bible (1611), Carter said, “That’s the one I use,” and praised its beauty.

Death

CLEAVANT DERRICKS, 68, black clergyman who composed hundreds of gospel songs (“Just a Little Talk With Jesus,” “We’ll Soon Be Done With Troubles and Trials”), many of them published with little or no remuneration to him; in Knoxville, Tennessee, after a long illness.

At the July, 1974, convention of Lutheran Church of America, delegates issued an appeal for funds for world hunger. More than $9 million has come in since then for that purpose, say LCA officials.

The University of Pennsylvania agreed to buy the five-acre campus of the old Philadelphia (Episcopal) Divinity School for $608,000—$400,000 less than what Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church offered. A Moon spokesman accused the Episcopal Church of bias in the transaction.

A group of seminarians and teachers at the Presbyterian seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, believe it’s time to purge sexist language from sermons and religious publications—and to recognize God the Mother. In places in the Bible where God is more like a mother than a father, he should be called God the Mother, says Thomas Parsons, moderator of the group.

World Scene

The 31,000-member Church of Christ in Thailand, formed by a 1934 union of Baptists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists, added a new presbytery to its existing geographical and ethnic ones. It will consist of lepers, ex-lepers, and others who have felt isolated and want to express their identity. In other action taken by the 150 delegates at the church’s recent general assembly, youth work and evangelism were added as priorities. Existing ones; renewal, leadership training, reorientation of mission strategies, revaluation of the ministry, and witness to Thai society.

Nearly 3,000 persons from ten European countries gathered in Essen, West Germany, recently for the Third European Congress on Disciplemaking, sponsored by the Colorado-based Navigators organization. Special tribute was paid to Gien Karssen of Holland, a woman pioneer of Navigators work in Europe.

Would Billy Graham conduct a crusade at the Vatican? If a place were made available and Christian leaders in Rome wanted him to, he might.

No campaign in Catholicism’s capital is on the evangelist’s calendar now, but his five-day crusade last month on the Notre Dame University campus proved he is not afraid to go deep into Roman Catholic territory. It also showed that many elements in the once-hostile Catholic community are now receptive to Graham’s type of ministry.

Only “Fighting Irish” football games have ever drawn more people to an event on the South Bend campus of America’s premier Catholic educational institution. The final rally of the crusade attracted approximately 45,000 to the Notre Dame stadium, which seats 59,075 for games.

The Sunday-afternoon outdoor meeting climaxed a series that also set a record for the indoor facility across the street, where the first four services were held. Around 13,500 people, the largest crowd ever to attend a program in the Athletic and Convocation Center, came to the Saturday-night service. Of that number, some 3,000, unable to get into the main arena, watched on closed-circuit television in the adjacent fieldhouse. Cumulative attendance for the crusade was estimated at 95,600, and 3,421 decisions for Christ were recorded.

Officially known as the Michiana [Michigan and Indiana] Billy Graham Crusade, the campaign was also called “the Michiana miracle” by members of the executive committee and other local supporters. For them, the miracle was not that Notre Dame facilities had been made available but that Graham had come to these small industrial communities ninety miles east of Chicago. Some committee members had been praying specifically for a Graham crusade there for nineteen years. People in northern Indiana and southwestern Michigan attached little importance to the site of the meetings. The convocation center is often used for business, social, and entertainment events unrelated to Notre Dame or Catholicism. It is the closest thing South Bend has to a civic auditorium, and it has housed a number of non-Catholic religious events, from a 1975 crusade by Graham’s associate evangelist John Wesley White to Jehovah’s Witnesses conventions and Lutheran meetings.

While it was the first time the evangelist had conducted a full-scale crusade on Catholic grounds, it was not the first time he had preached on Catholic property. Twice on one day in 1967 he preached on the soccer field of a Catholic school in Zagreb, Yugoslavia. Still, he described the Notre Dame event as “historic.” On several occasions he publicly thanked university officials for their cooperation.

Roman Catholic leaders maintained a low profile. Before the series began Graham talked on the telephone with Theodore Hesburgh, the president of the university. Midway through the crusade they had lunch together, but the priest did not appear in public with the evangelist. He sent Notre Dame’s director of campus ministries, William Toohey, to represent him on the platform at the final service. Toohey welcomed the crowd to the stadium on behalf of the university. His clerical collar was one of the very few in evidence during the crusade.

One priest who attended in clerical garb removed his collar as he came forward at the invitation. When the counselor asked if he intended to rededicate his life to Christ, he insisted that he was receiving Christ as Saviour and Lord for the first time.

The Catholic bishop appointed two observers to attend meetings of the crusade executive committee in the early stages of planning. Priests throughout the diocese understood that they were not to oppose the event, but neither were they encouraged to get involved in any public way.

Being thus uninstructed, many lay Catholics felt free to participate in a variety of crusade activities. Some attended the Christian life and witness classes and worked as counselors. Others volunteered to usher or sing in the choir. Many attended preliminary meetings. Hundreds of them responded to the evangelist’s invitation to make a public commitment to Christ. More than 11 per cent of those counseled said they were Catholics.

Christian students at Notre Dame and at the adjacent St. Mary’s College for women had prayed and worked for weeks in the hopes that fellow students would hear Graham’s preaching. At St. Mary’s, a weekly prayer meeting was held on each floor of each dormitory. During the week of the crusade, tables were set up in strategic spots, including the foyer of the Notre Dame library, offering literature and tickets for reserved seats. If evangelization of the collegians was the goal, however, the timing was faulty. It was final-examination week at Notre Dame, and few were able to leave their studies to go to the services. While some from the host campus took time out from cramming to attend, most of the students who participated were from other institutions. One-third of the recorded decisions were by young people.

The responses came at the end of services that followed the standard crusade format in use for several years. Graham’s sermons were of the type that audiences throughout the world have heard, with only a few more references to such Catholics as Bishop Fulton Sheen and Mother Theresa of Calcutta. The necessity of a new birth and a personal relationship to Christ were stressed.

At the time of the invitation, Graham emphasized that he was not asking for denominational allegiance. “You may be Protestant, or Catholic, or Jewish,” he declared, “but if you have doubts about your relationship with Christ get up out of your seat and come forward. You may have been confirmed and baptized, but come. I’m not asking you to join a particular denomination.”

Counseling and follow-up, areas in which Graham has often been criticized, were planned with particular care in the Michiana crusade. The names of Catholics making decisions were not referred to any churches, Catholic or Protestant, crusade officials said. Instead, other follow-up methods were planned, including enrollment in nurture or discipleship groups. The names of inquirers not indicating a church connection were sent to “participating” congregations, and no Catholic parishes were considered to be “participating.”

There is a slight variation in follow-up procedures from crusade to crusade. Decisions are made locally by the crusade’s counseling and follow-up committee in cooperation with the Graham team members who assist them. The next test of the system will be in another strong Catholic territory, Cincinnati, Ohio. The evangelist is scheduled to preach in that city’s Riverfront stadium October 21–31. The resident bishop there is Joseph L. Bernardin, current president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, who is widely known for his interest in interreligious cooperation.

Graham’s next major overseas crusade is also in a nation long identified as Catholic, the Philippines. He plans to preach there at the end of November. This crusade will be followed by meetings in three cities in India: Calcutta, Palayamkottai, and Kottayam. These early December dates were only recently added to his schedule.

The evangelist’s 1978 calendar is also filling up. Only two domestic crusades are scheduled: Las Vegas and Memphis. He will go to Canada also. Graham is committed to another series in Scandinavia, probably in October, and he expects to accept other overseas invitations for 1978. But there is no Rome crusade on the books. Invitations from other places, “Catholic” and otherwise, are more pressing now.

The Bishops Reply

Joseph L. Bernardin, president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, was a tired man when he returned home to Cincinnati after presiding at the Chicago NCCB meeting. There was no time for rest, though, since he had guests coming for dinner at the cathedral—the members of the governing board of the National Council of Churches (see story, page 35). He extended greetings and reported on the bishops’ actions in Chicago.

With good humor still intact after the week with fellow archbishops and bishops, Bernardin suggested that last year’s Catholic “Call to Action” meeting in Detroit (see November 19, 1976, issue, page 56) was akin to the NCC’s 1969 Detroit Assembly (which ended in turmoil and led to a major NCC reorganization). And he added that the Chicago gathering of the bishops was not unlike an NCC board meeting since it ended without a quorum.

After a bit of wit he reviewed for the NCC policy makers the background of the “call” conference and said he and his fellow members of the hierarchy generally welcomed the recommendations from Detroit. A special committee was authorized to begin examining all of them except for the handful “contrary to church teaching.” Included in those which the bishops won’t consider are calls for an end to the requirement for clerical celibacy, an endorsem*nt of a couple’s right to choose a form of contraception, and support of non-discriminatory legislation for practicing hom*osexuals.

The bishops did respond to a call for ordination of women by promising more study of the need to “identify, formally authenticate, and expand ministries’ performed by women in the church. But they stopped short of coming out against the recent Vatican declaration against female priests.

One recommendation from the Detroit conference was endorsed and sent straight to Rome for approval. That was the one asking for an end to the practice of excommunicating Catholics who are divorced and then remarry against church law. The U.S. hierarchy imposed the penalty nearly a century ago, but since it is not canon law elsewhere the Vatican is expected to approve the repeal.

Also discussed in Chicago was the suggestion that members of the church be allowed to receive communion wafers in their hands instead of on their tongues. A mail ballot was required on the question, however, since it came up after many bishops had left and a quorum was not present to pass the recommendation.

Changing the Gender

As international Lutheran women’s consultation that brought together seventy-two women pastors, liturgists, writers, musicians, hymnists, and educators from eleven countries resulted in some potentially explosive recommendations for this month’s Lutheran World Federation assembly in Tanzania. The women, who met in Madison, Wisconsin, last month, called on the LWF to initiate studies aimed at finding ways “to enlarge the images of God and Jesus in the language of worship so that they include female as well as male characteristics.” They also asked that more room be made for women in church and institutional life.

The women asked scholars who are preparing a new Lutheran Book of Worship to reduce the “overwhelmingly male references and imagery about God, particularly the use of male pronouns.” And they asked that the Nicene Creed’s text on the incarnation be changed from “… and was made man” to “… and was made human.”

The Chicago Call

A summons to greater continuity with historic church doctrine and practice was issued May 3 by an ad hoc group of forty-six comparatively unknown Christians who are more or less identified with evangelical institutions or views. Meeting in Warrenville, a western suburb of Chicago, the group recognized “with gratitude God’s blessing through the evangelical resurgence …,” but charged that “evangelicals are hindered from achieving full maturity by a reduction of the historic faith.”

The document, entitled “The Chicago Call: An Appeal to Evangelicals,” limited its focus to eight of the many areas of alleged reductionism: historic roots, biblical fidelity, creedal identity, holistic salvation, sacramental integrity, spirituality, church authority, and church unity. The five-page “call” was a product of careful, often line-by-line scrutiny by persons from about ten denominational traditions. The statement on biblical fidelity was designed to sidestep the dispute involving the issue of biblical inerrancy raised in Harold Lindsell’s The Battle for the Bible. The Bible is affirmed as “the infallible Word of God” and “is to be interpreted in keeping with the best insights of historical and literary study, … with respect for the historic understanding of the Church.”

No stand was taken on ordination at all, much less on women’s role. Sacramentalism was watered down from a more traditional view to simply recognizing that God’s grace “is mediated through faith … in a notable way in … baptism and the Lord’s Supper.”

To the extent that polity was touched upon it was simply to deplore one-man rule in some churches and the absence of practical submission to any godly authority on the part of many Christians and organizations.

The call was planned by eight men, five of whom attend an Episcopal church (though none is of that background) near Wheaton, Illinois, including the chairman, Robert Webber. A theology professor at Wheaton College, Webber is of Baptist heritage, graduated from Bob Jones, and has his doctorate from a Lutheran seminary. Before converting to the Episcopal Church he was a Reformed Presbyterian clergyman. The non-Illinois committee members are best-known for their books: Donald Bloesch of Dubuque Seminary. Thomas Howard of Gordon College, and Peter Gillquist of Thomas Nelson Publishers. Gillquist is one of the top “overseers” of a relatively new church body, the New Covenant Apostolic Order (a number of the leaders, formerly associated with Campus Crusade for Christ, are known as “apostles,” and they stress authority and discipline in congregational life).

Almost all of the conferees had close contacts with one of the four centers represented on the planning committee (Dubuque and Trinity seminaries, Gordon and Wheaton colleges). Those invited were expected to have interests in historic continuity but nearly all were from denominations other than Episcopal. They ranged from two Roman Catholics from a Catholic institution in Dubuque, Iowa, to two Plymouth Brethren members, who represent a far less formalized kind of churchmanship.

DONALD TINDER

Chicago Declaration: Barely Audible

Some three dozen Christian activists from around the United States met in Philadelphia last month to determine the future of Evangelicals for Social Action. The organization, which drafted the widely acclaimed Chicago Declaration in 1973 (see December 21, 1973, issue, page 38), has been torn by dissension ever since, and after its annual gathering in Newark last October most observers wrote it off as finished. Its backers insist it has done a lot to sensitize theologically conservative Christians to social issues. However, except for spawning the Evangelical Women’s Caucus, it has done little to implement the principles of the 1973 statement.

Thorny problems of identity and purpose faced the conferees. Everyone wanted to broaden the group’s base and involve a wider spectrum of the Church. Some, however, argued that the very term “evangelical” impeded this, though one ecumenical participant stated he was not uncomfortable with it. The old controversy between “theorists” and “activists” once again plagued the deliberations. And some felt the group had yet to come to terms with racism and sexism in its own ranks.

More serious was the cleavage between the “radicals” and the liberal or moderate “reformists.” The radicals, working from an Anabaptist theological perspective, were suspicious of organization and stressed communitarianism and a countercultural life-style as the most appropriate form of witness. The reformists were willing to work within existing socio-political structures to bring about change. Although both factions claimed to be biblical in their approach and both articulated a passionate concern for social justice, they differed widely in their views of how to achieve this justice.

According to the radicals, the moderates were simply too cautious and were unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to bring about genuine social justice. Editor Jim Wallis of Sojourners in Washington pointed out that the common ground in 1973 had been a reaction against the “evangelical establishment,” with the Chicago Declaration as a rallying point, but that since then the group’s constituents had gone off in different directions. Another person said that Evangelicals for Social Action had become an “albatross” that could “pre-empt the Holy Spirit,” and recommended that the group consider disbanding. The moderates, on the other hand, contended that ESA could serve as an educational instrument and a clearing-house for ideas, organize people for action, and meet the needs of activists for fellowship.

After rejecting proposals to call a national congress on social justice and to dissolve the organization entirely, the participants decided to keep ESA alive, probably under a different name but with the Chicago Declaration as its basis. The spark plug of ESA from its inception, Ronald J. Sider, who is assuming a faculty position at Eastern Baptist Seminary this fall, agreed to coordinate an eight-person steering committee that would name a permanent board of directors.

RICHARD V. PIERARD

A Gay Get-together

“There is no clear condemnation of the hom*osexual condition and no universal condemnation of hom*osexual activity to be found anywhere in the Bible,” asserted Jesuit priest John J. McNeill, author of The Church and the hom*osexual, at a Kirkridge Retreat Center conference on “Gay and Christian” last month. In lectures, panels, and discussions, the eighty-five conference participants focused on problems surrounding the expressed desire of hom*osexual Christians to be true to their faith and to their sexual orientation.

Ten hom*osexually oriented religious organizations were represented by conferees: the Brethren-Mennonite Gay Caucus, Dignity (a Catholic group McNeill helped to found), Evangelicals Concerned (the Ralph Blair organization), Integrity (Episcopal), Lutherans Concerned for Gay People, Presbyterian Gay Caucus, Unitarian Gay Caucus, United Church of Christ Gay Caucus, United Methodist Gay Caucus, and the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches.

The group comprised men and women, black and white, married and single, gay and straight, liberal and fundamental from more than a dozen denominations and from seventeen states plus Canada. Roughly half were ordained; about half were Roman Catholic and Episcopal.

Robert A. Raines, an author and the director of Kirkbridge, a Christian retreat and study center near Bangor, Pennsylvania, coordinated the event. Other speakers included Nancy Krody, national coordinator of the United Church of Christ Gay Caucus, and Malcolm Boyd, the controversial Episcopal clergyman and author.

The Church generally has held that hom*osexuality is contrary to the will of God, that hom*osexual activity is sin, and that hom*osexuals are a menace to society (McNeill pointed to singer Anita Bryant’s anti-gay campaign in Florida as an example of such a viewpoint). Countering these views, McNeill in his workshop on Scripture summarized his three main theses:

1. “God so created human nature that a certain percentage of men and women always and everywhere develop as hom*osexuals. Thus the hom*osexual condition is according to God’s created plan, [and] it has no necessary connection with sin, failure, or sickness. It is another way of being human.”

2. “Rather than being a menace to society, its values, and the family, hom*osexuals as a part of God’s created plan have particular gifts, qualities, and talents which they bring to human society. This is so true that if hom*osexuals should disappear, the further development of society towards greater humanness would probably be seriously jeopardized.”

3. “The love that exists between hom*osexuals, granted that it is a constructive human love—a love in which both parties can grow and develop in their humanity—is not sinful nor does it alienate the lovers from God. On the contrary, that love can be a holy love, mediating God’s presence into the human community.”

The balance of McNeill’s lectures provided scriptural exegesis and a reexamination of tradition, in and outside the Church, to support his conclusions. Similar arguments are found in his book, which the Vatican forbade him to publish for two years while sixteen scholars investigated the manuscript. (Finally the scholars were convinced that the book is “a prudent work that meets the standards of scholarship for publication of a book on a controversial moral topic.”)

Speaking on “The Lesbian Christian Experience,” Nancy Krody testified to the problems in and out of the Church for a Christian woman who is a lesbian and a feminist. Many hom*osexuals have left the churches, she said, some giving up spiritual life, others to worship in gay churches or gay caucuses large enough to offer worship as well as support. But she herself has chosen to work for change within the Church, she said. She sees herself as a bridge between the Church and the lesbian-feminist movement, even though “as a bridge, you get walked on, in both directions.”

Malcolm Boyd dealt with “The Gay Male Christian Experience” in largely autobiographical, poetic, and typically very personal language. Before his recent “coming out” (public acknowledgment of his hom*osexuality), friends advised him not to do it since it would destroy his “usefulness.” “My usefulness,” Boyd said he replied, “is not in public relations; it is in Jesus Christ.” He likened his coming out, after weighing positive and negative reactions, to being “born again.” He felt he no longer had a choice: “the long, slow suicide had to end, and I could no longer betray the Gospel, as I felt I was doing—‘How can I lie about this, and be honest about that?’” He claimed it has brought him back to the Church.

The speakers seemed agreed on these points:

• The Church by silence and by negative vocal attitudes toward gay Christians has fostered duplicity or voluntary withdrawal when it should have welcomed honesty and wholeness.

• Since the Church has adopted Western culture’s anti-Christian image of male and female, the primary problem is with sexuality, not just hom*osexuality.

• A monogamous hom*osexual relationship characterized by fidelity, honesty, and love is possible, desirable, and honoring to God.

The conferees endorsed an open letter to Anita Bryant listing three specific grievances against her “Save Our Children” campaign, which is aimed at defeating a Dade County, Florida, ordinance that guarantees the civil rights of hom*osexuals. They accused her of disseminating false and misleading information about gay people; of using Holy Scripture, which teaches of God’s love for all, as a tool for continuing the oppression of some of God’s children; and of using fear and ignorance as a planned part of her strategy.

RICHARD CHRISTOPHER

Invalid Pact

Colorado’s first same-sex “marriage” has gone on the rocks. David Bruce McCord, 28, asked the district court in Colorado Springs to invalidate the marriage on the grounds that his “mate,” David Robert Zamora, 28, had made “a false representation” to him before their marriage in 1975. District judge John F. Gallagher, however, ruled that the marriage was not valid under Colorado law in the first place, and he dismissed the case.

Zamora, who opposed dissolution of the marriage, vowed to appeal the ruling to the Colorado Supreme Court, which has never been tested on the same-sex marriage issue.

The couple were married by a municipal judge in Fountain after obtaining a marriage license in Boulder County (they were turned down in Colorado Springs). The Boulder clerk issued the license when District Attorney Alex Hunter informed her that there was no state law preventing persons of the same sex from being married.

Judge Gallagher disagreed, noting that the state’s laws provide that “a marriage between a man and a woman licensed, solemnized, and registered is valid in this state.” If the law had meant to validate marriages between persons of the same sex, he said, “it would have said so expressly.”

Whatever Happened To Noah’S Ark?

In Search of Noah’s Ark, by Dave Balsiger and Charles E. Sellier, Jr. (Sun Classic Books [11071 Massachusetts Ave., Los Angeles, Calif. 90025], 1976, 218pp., $1.95 pb), The Ark on Ararat, by Tim F. LaHaye and John D. Morris (Thomas Nelson or Creation-Life, 1976, 287 pp., $4.95), and Search For Noah’s Ark, by Kelly L. Segraves (Beta Books, 1975, 128 pp., $1.45 pb), are reviewed by John Warwick Montgomery, professor-at-large, Melodyland Christian Center, Anaheim, California.

No responsible in situ questing for the Ark has taken place since the revised edition of my Quest For Noah’s Ark described the latest efforts in 1974. But the obduracy of the Turkish government in refusing access to Ararat has not discouraged popular writers on the subject, as the three books under review illustrate. All of them of necessity rely heavily on previously published material and add little or nothing of substance to what was already known, and all of them appeal to a popular rather than scholarly audience; but armchair arkeologists will want to obtain them to complete their collections on the subject.

Balsiger and Sellier’s work is a journalistic production rapidly thrown together to provide a book to sell in the lobbies of theaters that show Sun Classic Pictures’ film on the Ark. The film itself, which uses mountain footage obtained in our Ararat expeditions, interviews with explorers such as this reviewer, and a variety of other pertinent material, is generally well done, faithful to the Scriptures, and worth seeing. The Balsiger and Sellier non-book, however, is a very doubtful production. Chapter 5 (“Early Sightings of Noah’s Ark”) simply cribs five and a half pages of my original translations of ancient Greek, Latin, and French sources without acknowledgment! The inaccuracy of the book is reflected in its assertion that I “set up” Senator Moss to announce a possible satellite confirmation of the Ark’s continued existence on Ararat. In point of fact, Moss contacted me, and I never claimed that the satellite imagery was definitive—though I said it may well be corroborative.

The Ark on Ararat by LaHaye and Morris is a physically attractive volume containing many illustrations and photographs that will appeal to the “Bible bookstore” clientele already familiar with LaHaye’s popular books on family and personal spirituality. Its problems are twofold: first, like Balsiger and Sellier’s work, it makes pretensions of scholarship without being able to sustain them. Morris continually passes himself off as an experienced Ararat explorer, whereas his Adventure on Ararat (as he entitled his booklet describing his 1972 experience on the mountain) consisted of climbing about without medical backup, getting struck by lightning, and irritating the natives. LaHaye and Morris’s lack of scholarship is illustrated by their reliance on others’ clumsy translations of original sources. A more serious objection is their continual refrain—so typical of Christian Heritage College and the Institute for Creation Research—that “evolutionists fear the Ark.” I hold no brief for evolutionary theory, but I find the monomaniacal belief that Ark searching may vindicate “creationists” comparable to the idea that “fighting Communism” is a form of Christian apologetics.

Kelly Segraves’s Search For Noah’s Ark is a delight simply because it doesn’t presume to be more than it is: a popular picture book (every other page a photo or illustration) to tell simply the story of the Ark’s probable survival. Just the thing to go with your youngster’s model Ark!

Thielicke’S Theology

The Evangelical Faith, by Helmut Thielicke (Eerdmans, 419 pp., $10.95), is reviewed by Robert Johnston, assistant professor of religion, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green.

You may have overlooked this work. You shouldn’t have. Even though the second half is somewhat dated, being an otherwise excellent response to the supposed “death of God” movement (the German edition first appeared in 1968, when the “death of God” movement was still in vogue), and even though Thielicke has written in the worst of the German stylistic tradition (particularly in the provocative first half of the book), The Evangelical Faith deserves a wide reading among American evangelicals for at least five reasons.

First, Helmut Thielicke is perhaps one of two leading theologians on the European continent who have affinities with the American evangelical tradition. Along with G. C. Berkouwer (a Calvinist), Thielicke (a Lutheran) has helped shape a whole generation of younger evangelicals in this country. Berkouwer’s serious academic work, Studies in Dogmatics, now stretches to fourteen volumes in English translation and has been well received. Thielicke’s influence, however, has up till now come not from any systematic theology but from his stimulating books of sermons, his wise pamphlet A Little Exercise For Young Theologians, and his wordy but thought-provoking studies in theological ethics (of which The Ethics of Sex is perhaps best known). Although his writing has been respected and influential, Americans have lacked from this leading conservative Lutheran any careful systematic statement of his theology. This volume, intended as the prolegomenon of a multivolume work, partially redresses this situation and fully secures Thielicke’s place in the front rank of systematic theologians of our day. In a time when theological writers shy away from large-scale dogmatic treatments, Thielicke has risked “the venture of recapturing the total picture or at least of recalling it, of giving a reminder of its existence.”

Second, Thielicke chooses in the first volume to address the question of the possibility and basis of theological knowledge by assessing contemporary theological trends. He feels it is necessary to dismiss the extremes of American fundamentalism and radical secularism, for they have forfeited an incarnational model of theology that holds kerygma and modern culture in tension. The rest of the theological spectrum can be divided into two main types, he feels. Recognizing differences, and taking care to differentiate between desired goal and actual effect, Thielicke performs the dangerous but helpful task of generalizing upon the current theological situation.

Dismissing the terms “modern” and “conservative,” Thielicke instead calls the two major theological approaches Cartesian theology and non-Cartesian theology. He argues that this change in terminology is necessary, for so-called moderns do not intend to jettison the center of historic Christianity and so-called conservatives do seek, like their counterparts, to express their theology in terms relevant to contemporary hearers.

Cartesian theology is labeled that way because it concentrates on the addressee of the Christian message—on the receiving “I.” Its interest tends to be hermeneutical, concentrating on the act and possibility of faith more than on the content of faith. The acts of understanding and appropriation by the human subject become Cartesian theology’s dominant motifs. Whether “rationality” (Lessing), “feeling” (Schleiermacher), “doubt” (Tillich), or “pre-understanding” (Bultmann), Cartesian theology makes use of an outside criterion by which to understand the kerygma. Such an approach is right, Thielicke states, in taking contemporary men and women’s adulthood, their emancipation, seriously. But it is wrong in allowing (sometimes contrary to its intent) the message of the Gospel to come under alien control.

Thielicke discusses this basic problem with Cartesian theology in several ways. He believes it is too concerned with preliminary questions, failing to see that the Holy Spirit working through the biblical text tosses aside our questions and gives us new ones. Cartesian theology wrongly pushes epistemological and methodological matters to the forefront, making them a filter for the content of the kerygma. Again, such a theology falsely gives thematic rank to the image of empirical man himself, as reflected in his self-understanding. Such a theology is in danger of becoming anthropology.

Instead Thielicke calls for a non-Cartesian theology. He says, “While the present situation and its questions have to be considered, they must not become a normative principle nor must they be allowed to prejudice the answer; they must be constantly recast and transcended in encounter with the text.” Such a theological approach is contemporary; it is also conservative, seeking to re-present the word. Appeal is made to the past, to old truth that has to be understood anew. Christians must be pointed away from themselves and toward salvation history, Thielicke believes. They must be oriented to Christ by having the past actualized and made present in us. This is the work of the Holy Spirit, creating men and women anew, as they are incorporated into the salvation event. Such an approach does not ignore human self-consciousness but sees it as becoming, through the Spirit, the object of a retrospective glance.

The third reason why I consider this book important for American evangelicals is that Thielicke’s prolegomena to his theology begins with the work of the Holy Spirit, not with a metaphysical statement concerning the nature of God himself. It is the Spirit that grants accessibility to revelation affecting the miracle of divine self-disclosure, of participation in God’s self-knowledge. Ontically, God’s being in himself does precede his self-disclosure to man, and systematic theologies have often reflected this absolute order of priorities. Thielicke, however, believes that noetically, to begin by speaking about God in himself is wrong, for ontology is “the final stage in reflection which begins with the actual encounter with God [through his Spirit]. It is thus a conclusion, not a preamble. It is the epilogue, not the prolegomena, to theology.”

There is a growing recognition in evangelical circles of the central position of the Holy Spirit in theological reflection. It will be interesting to see whether Thielicke, in his subsequent volumes, allows his concern for the Spirit to restructure traditional dogmatic orderings. If he does, the Church would benefit as it discovered what a contemporary Christian theology growing out of an experience of the Spirit might look like. A full-scale theology of the Spirit that is at the same time sensitive to the Word has not been written. Schleiermacher’s effort is perhaps the most spectacular failure. Certainly Thielicke has provided us here a provocative and faithful beginning.

Fourth, Thielicke concludes his book by stating, “The value of a dogmatics depends on whether it can be preached.” If that is so, and I believe it is, he has succeeded admirably in this volume. For example, his discussion of the experience of “God’s absence” as not being uniquely modern (he refers to Psalm 73, Job, and Mark 15:34) is provocative and worthy of sermonizing. So, too, his dialectical analysis of the prodigal son’s identity. His comparison of that text with Galatians 2:20 is suggestive. The book as a whole evidences an impressive grasp of the biblical text as well as the theological and philosophical tradition, a desire to be faithful to the Word as proclaimed, and an ability to apply theological insight to life today. The minister willing to work his way slowly through these pages will be rewarded for his effort, as will the congregation that listens to him.

Lastly, Thielicke has rightly addressed the matter of theology and culture. Recognizing that because all theological reflection belongs to the category of address it is time-bound, he sees the necessity of theological restatement by each generation. Therefore the question of theology and culture is not whether it is proper and necessary for the theologian to deal with our contemporary culture. He/she must. Rather, the question is whether in the act of contemporary restatement there has been accommodation of the Word to our modern age, or whether there has been a new actualization of the Word within our current context. Are we called anew “under the truth,” or do we put the truth “under us”?

Thielicke believes Cartesian theology’s focus on the question of appropriation shifts the emphasis away from the creative Word and instead seeks to draw that Word into mankind’s self-consciousness. Instead, a non-Cartesian theology of the Holy Spirit is called for, one based in proclamation of the divine self-disclosure. With such a theological approach, the divine Word creates its own hearers, the subjects of understanding through faith.

‘Bacic Youth Conflicts’

Gothard: The Man and His Ministry, An Evaluation, by Wilfred Bockelman (Quill/Mott Media [Box 236, Milford, Michigan 48042], 1976, 150 pp., $2.95 pb), is reviewed by Stephen E. Smallman, pastor, McLean Presbyterian Church, McLean, Virginia.

Almost everyone who is aware of the ministry of Bill Gothard would agree that his Basic Youth Conflicts seminars are a notable phenomenon of the current religious scene. An unknown youth worker in 1964, he is now ministering to hundreds of thousands nationwide. There would not be the same agreement, however, about the worth of those seminars and the ultimate value of the Gothard ministry.

Sensitive to the need for some perspective on Gothard, Wilfred Bockelman (director of communication research and special projects for the American Lutheran Church) has put together a carefully researched and thoughtfully written evaluation. He attended both beginning and advanced seminars, read all materials available, and tried, with some difficulty, to spend time with Gothard himself. The result is a sympathetic overview of the ministry as well as some telling criticisms.

Gothard’s reaction to the attempts of both author and publisher to talk to him about the content of the book leads us to the most significant criticism of his work. He declined to have anything to do with the final edition of the book because of “God’s way” in Matthew 18:15–18 (when a brother has sinned against another, he should deal with the matter first privately rather than in public). But Bockelman correctly questions that use of the passage: “When I say that I don’t agree with Bill Gothard in a particular matter, I am not saying that he has sinned against me.” This is one example of Gothard’s frequently problematic use of Scripture to reinforce principles he has deduced from Scripture.

Bockelman does not suggest there is any intentional distortion of scriptural truth, and the multitude of Gothard’s valuable insights, particularly into the Wisdom literature, must not be overlooked. But as one source cited by Bockelman notes, Gothard’s interpretations “are governed more by his personal experiences than he cares to admit.” What about biblical principles and themes that may not have impressed Gothard as important? For instance, Bockelman feels the lack of a focus on grace and the freedom we have in Christ. And is it valid to view the Bible fundamentally as a book of divine principles rather than as the Word through which we come to know and love the living God? Bockelman has some important questions about Gothard’s view of God (sovereign monarch rather than loving person), and his trichotomist view of man (and frequent equation of the physical with “flesh”), but the cutting edge of the evaluation comes back finally to the way Gothard uses Scripture.

For many evangelicals, the validity of this criticism will be undercut by the author’s own view of Scripture. He denies not only inerrancy (p. 51) but also the possibility of propositional revelation (p. 62). He is in the strange position of holding a low view of inspiration while advocating a high view of authority. Nevertheless, his evaluation of Gothard at this point rings true.

As a pastor I have profited greatly from the basic and advanced seminars and will continue to encourage others to attend. Bill Gothard is a gifted man whom God has used greatly—but that doesn’t mean he has all the answers. I agree with the three potential effects on people noted by Bockelman: (1) Basically healthy Christians derive great benefit from the teaching and feel free to question and reject what they feel to be inconsistent with Scripture. (2) Those who are inclined to have a rigid and legalistic view of life are fortified by Gothard’s ministry and tend to apply his principles woodenly. This is particularly true of the application of the “chain of command” principle to the home. (3) The casualties are those with low ego strength to begin with. Anecdotes are cited in such a way that they assume the formulas (for obtaining forgiveness, clearing the conscience, and the like) always work, and if the formulas don’t work for them, their already heavy load of guilt becomes crushing. Counselors complain that their case load rises dramatically soon after the seminar comes to their city.

I appreciate this balanced and thoughtful examination. Bill Gothard has presented his work to the public as a biblical ministry, and therefore he should welcome a public, biblical critique of it.

What Does James Mean?

The Epistle of James, by James B. Adamson (Eerdmans, 1976, 227 pp., $8.95), is reviewed by Peter Davids, assistant professor of biblical studies, Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry, Coraopolis, Pennsylvania.

I eagerly awaited a replacement for Ross’s commentary in the New International Commentary series, and Adamson’s 1954 doctoral thesis proves that he is capable of providing such a work. Yet now that the new volume lies before me, my reaction is mixed. Certainly the work does improve on Ross and will be very helpful to pastors and educated laypersons, but I fear that the research hardly moves us beyond C. L. Mitton’s 1966 commentary on the epistle.

Adamson’s introduction is direct and positive. He simply assumes that the Lord’s brother wrote the epistle and works from this assumption with such forcefulness that one might never suspect how hotly disputed it is. While he never dates the epistle, he clearly assigns it to “the earliest strata of Jewish Christianity.” His long discussion of James’s theology is similarly direct, though at times weakened by foreign words or classical citations unnecessary to his argument. The only real fault in the introduction is his failure to discuss the form of the epistle adequately.

The body of the work is generally satisfactory. The comments wrestle with the meaning of the text, and the application to the Christian life is one of the stronger features of the book. One need not read the editor’s preface to realize that Adamson is an experienced pastor. The occasional wordiness of the comments only slightly weakens this strength.

I am impressed at the large number of classical parallels Adamson cites, but I wish he would answer the question these parallels raise: Can this work really be very early Jewish-Christian and yet be so thoroughly Greek in thought, or are the parallels only apparent? Adamson probably feels the latter is the case, for he cites numerous rabbinic parallels as well. Yet this also raises problems, for rabbinic material is notoriously hard to date, and Adamson does not appear to differentiate early from late material. Qumranic parallels would have provided a control here, but the wealth of material in Dibelius’s commentary (1964, English translation 1976) or F. Muszner’s fine volume (1964) is ignored; I have found only one reference to the scrolls in the notes, despite their relevance to the exegesis of such passages as 3:18 ff.

I do not wish to imply that this is a bad commentary: it is helpful and has very interesting and original ideas at some points. Pastors can make use of it.

C. T. Wilson, representing the first contingent of Christian missionaries sent to what is now Uganda, told of the elaborate ceremony with which he was ushered into the presence of the “king.” Henry M. Stanley, following up the efforts of David Livingstone, had called for workers to minister in that equatorial land, and Wilson was one of those who volunteered. Shortly after his arrival he presented himself to the African leader, who stepped down from his throne in the audience hall of his palace and extended a Western handshake. During the translation of a letter from Wilson’s sponsors, the Church Missionary Society, a roll of drums greeted the name of Jesus.

The next morning, Wilson recalled, there was another meeting. “He wanted us to make guns and gunpowder and seemed rather disappointed when we told him we had not come to teach such things; but afterwards he seemed satisfied and said what he wanted most was to be taught, he and his people, to read and write.”

That was 100 years ago this month. The missionaries had come to a part of Africa that despite illiteracy had a relatively sophisticated civilization. The high altitude tempered the climate, and the people could boast a progressive culture. For the missionaries the challenge resulted in a rare blend of success and suffering. The Church under the evangelizing influence of Anglican missionaries grew amazingly fast, and by 1919 a cathedral was being erected at Kampala that is still probably the largest Christian place of worship in Africa. But the price was paid mostly in blood: few foreigners survived for very long.

Most notable among the pioneers were the Scottish engineer Alexander Mackay and Bishop Alfred R. Tucker. They endured not only persecution but bitter competition with Roman Catholics and Muslims, not to mention extensive civil and political strife. The ruler Mutesa was said to have sacrificed 2,000 captives to the spirit of his dead father. Mutesa’s son Mwanga was even worse. Erratic behavior not unlike that of Uganda’s present leader, Idi Amin, characterized their reigns. Their very vacillation, however, kept the missionaries hopeful, and doors of opportunity were quickly entered. Replacements for the fatalities kept coming.

Uganda has now entered a new era of persecution. The most notable death has been that of Anglican archbishop Janani Luwum (see “Making Headway Painfully in Uganda,” by Festo Kivengere, April 15, 1977, issue). The circ*mstances of his death will probably never be known in full. They recall, however, the death of the first Anglican archbishop of eastern equatorial Africa, James Hannington, upon his arrival in 1885. Historians agree that Hannington was the victim of a politically inspired assassination.

Through it all the Church marches on. In recent decades one of the most talked about revivals in the world has been a revival in Uganda. Whether it is still going on cannot yet be determined, but shortly before his death Archbishop Luwum was still optimistic. The last devotional talk he gave before his council of bishops he entitled “The Blessing of Harassment.”

We are brought back to the old principle that Christians quite often prosper under tribulation. Should we therefore seek it? That would be foolhardy or perhaps cynical. What we should do is to try more fervently to deal with the problems of lethargy and indifference that often seem to accompany free opportunity.

Rights With Rites

We are delighted at the increasing attention being given to human rights since President Carter began to exert leadership in this area. Even the National Council of Churches is establishing a human-rights office. Its director will be the Reverend William Wipfler, who until recently handled the NCC’s Latin America desk. Wipfler led the NCC group visiting Cuba earlier this year and reported that accounts of human-rights violations in that Marxist nation were overblown.

He might bring a better perspective to his new job if he considers what United Church of Christ executive David Stowe said about China: “[There are] no beggars but also no artists; no crime but no literature; no p*rnography but no press freedom; no gross wealth but no political options; no drug abuse but no news; no inherited privilege but no religion.”

As evangelicals who work and teach in a Latin American theological context, we were disturbed by numerous inaccuracies in Harold B. Kuhn’s analysis, “The Evangelical’s Duty to the Latin American Poor” (Current Religious Thought, Feb. 4). To mention a few: the Exodus theme in Latin American theology is referred to as an example of “uncritical use of biblical models.” Yet in documenting this allegedly uncritical use. Dr. Kuhn shows a disturbing unawareness of current Latin American thinking on this subject. To say that “Latin American theologians assume that today’s oppressed people are the heirs of God’s Exodus—that they are the present-day counterparts of the Israelitish people in Egypt” is to caricature the position of many Latin American thinkers, including those Kuhn himself mentions. The use of the Exodus is generally related by Latin American theologians to the larger Old Testament theme of God’s alliance with the poor and oppressed and his promise to aid them. The significant element of the Exodus is the fact that God’s initial revelation of himself to the nation of Israel is in the context of deliverance from oppression, and that this deliverance is essential to understanding God’s actions in history.

Dr. Kuhn goes on to cite a lack of consideration on the part of Latin American theologians of other elements of the Exodus, such as Moses’ “forty-year cooling-off period” in the wilderness and the fact that the Exodus was Jehovah’s deliverance, “not a seizure of power by an underground movement.” On the first point Dr. Kuhn apparently is unaware of the whole “theology of captivity” theme of writers such as Rubem Alves and Leonardo Boff. On the second point it would be interesting to know to which thinkers he is referring, since any number of Latin American theologians—Gutierrez, Segundo, José P. Miranda, Julio de Santa Ana, Emilio Castro, Rafael Avila, among others—have stressed exactly this point, that the Exodus is God’s intervention in history to bring his people out of oppression.

This same question may be raised with various of Dr. Kuhn’s other assertions: “… that the ‘liberating’ work of the Church is now a purely horizontal thrust into the world”; “… that liberation theology may fairly be called a ‘guerrilla theology’”; “… North American capitalism is seen as the sole cause of injustice and misery in Latin America.” It would be interesting to know to whom these and similar quotes refer and why Dr. Kuhn feels these statements are representative of Latin American theology.

The article refers several times to “simplistic assumptions.” These are never adequately documented. Not only is it difficult to identify Dr. Kuhn’s sources, but we are also hard pressed to relate his analysis to virtually any of the Latin American theologians writing in the context of the various theologies of liberation.

Unfortunately, Dr. Kuhn is no more illuminating when writing concretely about his sources. He refers to the treatment of salvation and “universal salvation” in Gutierrez and Assman without ever clarifying that these Catholic theologians are speaking against the classic dictum “outside the church (i.e., the Roman Catholic Church) there is no salvation.” While the views of these men are often not compatible with the view of most evangelicals, it must at least be pointed out that for them the term “universal salvation” has a very different meaning than it has in a Protestant or evangelical context. This is eminently clear if one traces this discussion from Vatican II through Medellin to its present usage in Latin America.

There is certainly much that can be criticized in the theologies of liberation, and as evangelicals in Latin America we seek to do this. However, no discussion is helped by inaccurate and irresponsible treatment of its subject.

Dr. Carmelo Alvarez

Professor of Church History

Director, Department of General Studies

Seminario Bíblico Latinoamericano

San José, Costa Rica

Licenciate Victorio Araya

Professor of Christian Thought

Seminario Bíblico Latinamericano

Rev. Plutarco Bonilla

Professor of Biblical Literature; President

Seminario Bíblico Latinoamericano

Dr. José Míguez Bonino

Dean of Graduate Studies

Higher Institute of Theological Studies

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Prof. Julia Campos

Professor of Christian Education

Seminario Bíblico Latinoamericano

Dr. Orlando Costas, Director

Latin American Evangelical Center for Pastoral Studies (CELEP)

San José, Costa Rica

Dr. Irene W. Foulkes

Professor of New Testament

Vice Dean, Diversified Program at a Distance

Seminario Bíblico Latinoamericano

Dr. Richard T. Foulkes

Professor of New Testament Literature

Director, Department of Bible and Christian Thought

Seminario Bíblico Latinoamericano

Dr. Alan Hamilton

Professor of Behavioral Sciences

Seminario Bíblico Latinoamericano

Dr. Thomas Hanks, President

Ministry to the Student World (MINAMUNDO)

San José, Costa Rica

Rev. Paul Leggett

Professor of Christian Thought

Seminario Bíblico Latinoamericano

Rev. Ruben Lores

Dean, Diversified Program at a Distance

Seminario Bíblico Latinoamericano

Dr. Osvaldo Motessi

Professor of Church and Society and Evangelism;

Academic Dean

Seminario Bíblico Latinoamericano

Dr. Laverne Rutschman

Professor of Old Testament

Seminario Bíblico Latinoamericano

Rev. Carlos Tamez

Professor of Education and Pastoral Theology

Director, Department of Pastoral Ministry

Seminario Bíblico Latinoamericano

Dr. George J. Taylor

Professor of Pastoral Psychology

Seminario Bíblico Latinoamericano

Mr. Charles Troutman

Personnel Coordinator

Community of Latin American Evangelical Ministries (CLAME)

Advisor, Ministry to the Student World (MINAMUNDO)

Licenciate Hugo Zorilla C.

Professor of New Testament

Seminario Bíblico Latinoamericano

In the course of a million miles of air travel I have bunked overnight in some exasperatingly noisy hostelries. Until last summer I considered one of the worst experiences to be the one I had in St. Louis shortly after the new Marriott airport motel opened there. What one presumably pays for is a good night’s sleep. So my midnight complaint to the front desk about the miniature rock festival that had erupted in the room above mine seemed fair enough. Unfortunately, the house detective must have identified the source of the complaint, for soon hastily retreating aggressors were pounding on my door every half hour.

At 2:30 A.M. I finally notified the desk clerk that I would spend the night in the lobby and that, while I would cover meal and service charges, I absolutely refused to pay a cent for my room. Indeed, I added, should the manager wish to notify the sheriff and the local press, I would be more than glad to meet with them. Once ensconced in the lobby, I posted word to a newsmagazine that I was minded to lead a consumer crusade requiring hotels and motels to cancel room charges when guests are deprived of sleep because of poor hostelry management and controls. The Marriott management, I should add, later apologized (and canceled room charges), and despite my private vow never to frequent that place again I did return and had a far happier experience.

There is, it seems to me, another situation when intrusive clatter is even worse and less appropriate than at midnight in a hotel. That is in the church sanctuary during the ten minutes or so preceding the so-called worship service. Some devout people—although they seem to be a vanishing tribe—come a bit early not simply to be on time but also to ready their hearts spiritually to meet with God in his sanctuary. Yet a blustering evangelical glossalalia, a veritable tornado of chatter, frequently thrusts itself upon all comers, pushing the organist into an ever louder prelude. The chatter—about Sally’s wedding, or Junior’s car, or Phil’s vegetable patch—often continues well into the service, hardly to the edification of seeking sinners or to the good of the local church, let alone the church universal.

Not all evangelical congregations, thank God, display this spiritual insensitivity and irreverence. But it is nonetheless characteristic of even some of the most prestigious churches. Recently a visiting college professor was so disconcerted by the chatter in a church that prominently placards itself as “an N.A.E. Church” that he subsequently wrote the pastor to inquire whether this pre-service prattle was a newly developed N.A.E. ritual. The letter was, of course, both rash and unfair to many non-N.A.E. churches that specialize no less in congregational gabbling. Some staunch Southern Baptist churches, for example, have lost prospective members because what happens in the moments before a church service somehow suggests how members conceive of worship.

The past summer added a new dimension to both my hotel and my church experiences. That was in Dae Jong, South Korea, a city completely leveled by North Korean Communists in the 1940s and now rebuilt into a thriving community. Stored in nearby mountains for future emergency, so it is rumored, is the largest stockpile of atomic missiles to be found anywhere in the world outside the United States. I could glimpse those hills as I drove to speak to Dae Hueng Baptist Church about a spiritual peace and power the world does not know.

Ten minutes before the morning service I was startled by an outburst of singing in the auditorium. The singing starts, I was told, as soon as a cluster of believers has assembled; one person simply leads out in some familiar hymn or announces a page number in the hymnal. The spirit of devotion carries over into the scheduled service, and a distinctive witness about transcendent power and peace is borne to visitors and to the community. During the past five years South Korean Baptists have increased by 50 per cent and their churches by 38 per cent. When I asked about the worship atmosphere of the churches, a missionary replied: “Korean churches are more reverent than American evangelical churches.”

He might have added that American churches sometimes remind the experienced traveler of an Asian hotel. In many Oriental cultures, one expects noise as a kind of norm. Silence is often considered a mark of rejection, while participation in group demonstration signals acceptance. Radios blare incessantly. To be heard one must raise his voice above the varied background chatter.

In my Dae Jong hotel, therefore, I quite expected the intense adjoining-room conversations, the big-sounding discussions in the hallway, the loud knocking on doors by friends calling on each other, and perhaps even the canned music (imported from the West) blaring through the halls. I had the further misfortune of being lodged in “the only available room” directly below a nightclub where curfew hours from midnight until four in the morning were enjoyed to the full by combo-whetted merrymakers. Crowning that, two hotel employees conversed so vociferously at the porter’s desk that their voices bounced through the long hallway and into Room 713. In my red-striped pajamas I finally padded down the hall to the porter’s desk to ask them to contain their boisterousness. They willingly accompanied me back to my room and—believe it or not—tried to help track down the offending noise-makers; I just couldn’t get across to them the fact that it was they themselves who were the transgressors. I suppose that when one thinks that what he or she does is the norm, then the offending culprits are always somewhere around the next corner. There’s a hidden lesson here, no doubt.

Could those ten minutes before morning worship be the secret passage to evangelical awakening? Those who ignore the divine injunction “Be still and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10) are readily deceived into a preoccupation with assorted false gods. The true and living God is deprived of the full opportunity to speak to us when we turn church-going into a secular social dialogue. It could be that loquacious communicants assume that the silent meditators in the pews are merely in need of a good night’s sleep. But the garrulous, if they come to church to be on speaking terms with high heaven, need to talk to God rather than to Cousin Bill and Neighbor Jill. The threshold of morning worship is prime time to listen to the transcendent Voice and to meditate on his written Word.

Food concerns everyone to some degree. Everyone eats something, and everyone eats at intervals during the twenty-four hours that make up the time in a day.…

God could have created all food as a bland mixture of proper nutrients: something like wheat germ, yogurt, and honey in a cake form, or some sort of fruit which would have contained everything necessary to good health. However pleasant the mild flavor might be, we cannot imagine eating just one single flavor all the time, the reason being that we have been created with taste buds, a delicate sense of smell, and a sensitive appreciation of and response to texture and color. God has not given us sensitivities and appreciations which cannot be fulfilled anywhere in the universe he has created. In his perfect economy of creation God did not create loose ends. God made man with tremendous diversity in many areas, including the area of enjoyment of food. To meet this diversity, God made a tremendous variety or diversity of kinds of food.…

Therefore cooking as an art—“Hidden Art,” if you want to call it so—should be recognized and then developed in everyone who has to cook, wants to cook, or could cook! Cooking should not be thought of as a drudgery, but as an art. Talent in this art form differs, of course, and would not be identical in each individual even if developed, but that is not the same thing as not recognizing it as an art form and not attempting to develop it.

The danger today, for both men and women cooks, is to take the shortcut of using prepared and frozen foods all the time, using things from packages, bottles, tins, and cans, rather than starting with fresh food, or food from one’s own garden. I am not advocating that we never use anything prepared, to save time for other things, and I realize that many—perhaps most—people do not have a garden; but one can at least try to get away from the “plastic trend” in the area of cooking and it is healthy, in several meanings of that word, to try to do so. Why not try to make your own bread and rolls once in a while—even once a week? It is possible to have a greater variety if you become proficient in bread making: variety of the basic dough from week to week (adding toasted wheat germ, oatmeal, soya flour, honey, brown sugar, more or less eggs, etc.).…

Perhaps part of the reason why some people dislike cooking, or find meal preparation a bore, is that they get into a rut where menus are concerned. Variety makes food more interesting to cook, as well as to serve and eat. I have cooked for an increasing number of people for an increasing number of years, and I must say that it is not necessary to put aside variety because there are too many people. Indeed it is the other way around. It would become unbearable to cook for so many for so long if there were not the challenge of variety and the interest of making sudden last-minute changes as the mood strikes, or if circ*mstances, such as an influx of guests, make it necessary. Chicken for six people can become enough for twelve if you cut it off the bones and make it into a Chinese meal by adding onions, peppers, almonds, and pineapple wedges. Or it can just be cut into large pieces and put into the gravy to serve over hot biscuits—which themselves can be made when the influx of people is discovered to be coming in the front door.

Making food “stretch” can be a challenge, as well as a necessity. It is not necessary to have a large food budget to make meals interesting. In fact it is often the other way around. The need to “stretch” the money often gives birth to ideas in cooking and serving.

It seems to me that in a world of starvation Christians should recognize their responsibility to share in a practical way with those who go short. So it is important for everyone, no matter how well off they may be, to be careful not to waste food. There are two ways to avoid waste: first, one plans meals which balance the more extravagant ones with inexpensive ones; and secondly, one uses leftovers—even the tiniest bit of leftover. Bones can be boiled to make broth, bits of vegetable can be used in soups or casseroles. Meat can be used for Chinese fried rice, soup, scalloped potatoes with ham or corned beef, in macaroni dishes, curry, and so forth. To toss out food and buy new is akin to tossing out good furniture or fabric to buy new. This too is a practical side of ecology.

I know one cannot directly help the starving Third World by using the leftover stewed tomato in tomorrow’s meat loaf, but it is really true that one saves money by cooking this way, and the saved money can be given to some project in either doing something personally for someone or in giving it to an organization. As children of God who will someday stand before him to be shown the “treasure in heaven” or the absolute zero in the heavenly bank account, the waste will be realized—it seems to me—by remembering, or being shown, what could have been done with what was wasted, as well as what should have been done with that which was spent with personal extravagance.…

There is no occasion when meals should become totally unimportant. Meals can be very small indeed, very inexpensive, short times taken in the midst of a big push of work, but they should be always more than just food. Relaxation, communication, and a measure of beauty and pleasure should be part of even the shortest of meal breaks. Of course you celebrate special occasions—successes of various members of the family, birthdays, good news, answered prayer, happy moments—with special attention to meal preparation and serving. But we should be just as careful to make the meal interesting and appealing when the day is grey and the news is disappointing.

Children feel the difference in the home that takes this attitude. Father comes home tired and discouraged after some sort of failure or disappointment to find, not food he dislikes, nor burned soup and sloppy serving, but a beautifully set table, with his favorite food served artistically, and a hot drink and some tiny cookies or nuts served afterwards with all the air of a special occasion. The roommate receives a letter which is the dreaded reality of a fear long worried about, but comes back to the flat to find a meal prepared in anticipation, and the comfort of hot broth and melba toast, omelette and muffins, and chocolate scalding hot, topped off by a marshmallow or whipped cream.

Food cannot take care of spiritual, psychological, and emotional problems, but the feeling of being loved and cared for, the actual comfort of the beauty and flavor of food, the increase of blood sugar and physical well-being, help one to go on during the next hours better equipped to meet the problems.

This article is abridged from chapter eight of Mrs. Schaeffer’s book “Hidden Art,” published in 1971 by Tyndale House (copyright ©1971 by Edith Schaeffer).