Page 5422 – Christianity Today (2024)

The Supreme Court turns down the Lubbock case.

It had all the elements of a major test of freedom of religion, say the Christian Legal Society (CLS) lawyers who invested fatiguing hours to get their argument ready for the U.S. Supreme Court. The court thought otherwise and, without a comment, decided not to hear Lubbock Independent School District v. Lubbock Civil Liberties Union.

The issue was whether high school students could organize a Bible discussion group in the same way they might form a chess club or debating team. Public school officials in Lubbock, Texas, had said they certainly could, as long as the meetings were voluntary. Nobody’s particular set of beliefs was at stake. The issue was seen as freedom of speech, not religion. The ACLU challenged this as unconstitutional, and was upheld in the Fifth Circuit Federal Court. Similar free speech rights were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court last year for college age students in Widmar v. Vincent, but that decision has not been interpreted to apply to younger students.

Controversy about prayer in schools has been marked by continual misunderstandings of the Supreme Court’s 1962 and 1963 decisions on the issue. Some have alleged that the Court removed God from the classroom, exaggerating the Court’s intent by trying to snuff out all religious expression in schools.

CLS Washington office director Samuel E. Ericsson disputes those who say the Court banished prayer from schoolrooms. What the Court said, Ericsson explains, is that “the state had no business writing official prayers. Second, public school teachers should not be placed in the role of a priest or minister in the classroom.” But the Court did not prohibit student-initiated voluntary groups from organizing prayer groups or Bible study.

The Lubbock decision is an example of how those decisions are being twisted into a virtual ban on any school religious activity, and it may embolden civil liberties groups to challenge such meetings elsewhere around the country. Forest Montgomery, the legal counsel at the National Association of Evangelicals’ Washington office, speculated that “the ACLU may try to intimidate every other school district in the U.S.” The government’s official position toward religion is neutrality, balanced between free exercise and state establishment. Lawyers seeking to appeal the Lubbock case viewed it as replacing state neutrality with court-ordered discrimination against religion.

The Supreme Court kept to itself its reasons for not hearing the case, but a number of factors help explain why. Since two of the nation’s eleven circuit courts of appeals have reached similar conclusions on the issue, Ericsson said the Supreme Court “may want to see it percolate longer in the lower courts.” Usually, the Supreme Court views itself as a court of last resort to settle differences that persist among lower courts. For example, the Court did agree to rule on five abortion cases arising from conflicting decisions by courts in Ohio, Missouri, and Virginia.

The percolating process is happening around the country, with similar controversies heating up in Anderson, South Carolina; Williamsport, Pennsylvania; northern and southern California; Pittsburgh; and Seattle. If one of these is decided in favor of the students, a clear conflict with the Lubbock and New York cases would be likely to compel Supreme Court consideration.

In Williamsport, 40 students who wanted to form a Bible club to meet during a regular activity period at the beginning of the school day were refused permission, and they filed suit last June. Ericsson is optimistic that in one of these cases, the students will win out. “By no stretch of the imagination are we being thrown into the lion’s den” because of the Lubbock outcome.

The Supreme Court also may be biding its time and waiting for a legislated answer to emerge from Congress. Two bills that address the issue are on the runway, including a measure introduced by Sen. Mark O. Hatfield (R-Oreg.) last year. Patterned after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it would make it easier for students to bring suit. Right now, it is very difficult to argue a case for religious free speech in court because it must be derived from broader civil rights precedents. A lawyer in Hatfield’s office explained that a statute to protect religious free speech would give students a narrow “cause of action” to address their complaint. At the same time, the bill would preserve state neutrality by stating that no one in authority may try to influence the content of prayer or discussion.

Sen. Jeremiah Denton (R-Ala) is sponsoring a second “equal access” bill that goes a step further than Hatfield’s by protecting the rights of teachers and other nonstudents, such as off-campus parachurch group leaders. Denton’s bill “goes for the broad sweep,” according to an aide, by addressing the problem at all levels, not just at junior high and high school. Hatfield’s bill is designed to generate the broadest support possible, but Denton’s aide said a compromise will be attempted. “It takes more than a Hatfield and more than a Denton,” he said. “The synergism of the two together can create a stronger effect than either could alone.”

Denton and 22 other U.S. senators joined Hatfield in filing a friend-of-the-court brief in the Lubbock case—an unusual move that the Christian Legal Society thought would help persuade the court to consider the appeal.

Another reason for the Supreme Court’s reluctance to accept the Lubbock case to set precedent, according to Ericsson, could be a history of conflict over religion in Lubbock schools. During the 1970s, student volunteers read a prayer over the school’s public address system each morning. Evangelical speakers at all-school assemblies would sometimes give invitations to receive Christ. This led to charges by the ACLU that the activities amounted to state-sponsored revival meetings. Before the suit came to trial then, Lubbock schools substituted the current policy, confining religious activities on school grounds to voluntary student-led groups meeting before or after class. But civil liberties lawyers called this a facade behind which the previous activities might continue.

Even though their request for a Supreme Court hearing was denied, CLS lawyers succeeded in raising the conciousness of Christians about the need to protect religious free speech. They obtained friend-of-the-court briefs from the National Council of Churches, Pat Robertson’s Freedom Council, NAE, Christian Educators Association, and the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, as well as the 24 senators. They had retained the legal services of noted Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski, who died shortly after all the petitions in the case were filed.

For students who are still caught in the tangle of legal maneuvering, Ericsson’s advice is to keep meeting for informal, voluntary religious discussions. “I maintain that even the ACLU would come to the defense of students who sit together in a school cafeteria or on the lawn, study the gospel of Matthew, and are suspended for it,” he says.

Top High School Students Hold Religion Dear

Religion plays a prominent role in the lives of high school students who earn top grades and participate in extracurricular activities, a recent poll reports. The poll by Educational Communications, which compiles and publishes Who’s Who Among American High School Students, surveyed 55,000 juniors and seniors with better-than-average grades from 22,000 public, private, and parochial high schools across the nation. The survey provides an insight into factors that contribute to the development of high achievers.

Home environment emerges as possibly the most important factor. The survey shows that 85 percent of high achievers are reared in homes in which both natural parents live and formal religion is practiced. Nearly 45 percent live in rural communities. By an 84-percent margin, high achievers favor traditional marriages and reject the use of cigarettes and illegal drugs. Only 4 percent have used marijuana, and 89 percent have never smoked cigarettes. Another 7 percent have tried smoking and quit, leaving only 4 percent that smoke on a regular basis. Although they hold conservative political views, these students overwhelmingly reject racial segregation and discrimination of every kind and oppose the practice of banning “objectionable” books from school and public libraries.

The young people surveyed were among 363,000 listed in the latest edition of Who’s Who Among American High School Students, a directory of pupils with outstanding records in academics, community service, and extracurricular activities.

“This is not a poll of average high school students. These teenagers will be tomorrow’s leaders,” said Tari Marshall, project spokeswoman. She said the poll, which is the thirteenth conducted by Educational Communications, sought for the first time to elicit a profile of high achievers, their personal backgrounds, family lives, and attitudes on both moral and political issues. She said the results agree with the finding of a number of scientific studies conducted by sociologists and psychologists. Those studies also concluded that most Christian religions and Judaism foster positive attitudes towards life and responsibility and that a stable home provides children with the self-confidence needed for high achievement.

RELIGIOUS NEWS SERVICE

Christian Book Publisher Loses Tax Exemption

The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company (PRPC) has lost its tax-exempt status. In addition, it owes the Internal Revenue Service at least $75,000 in back taxes because of the federal tax court’s decision, according to Bryce Craig, general manager of the publishing company.

The battle took five-and-a-half years. Craig said no decision has been made on an appeal because that could take an additional two years, PRPC, which has headquarters in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, was founded in 1931 and sells 750,000 books per year. It sells mainly to seminary students and pastors in the Reformed tradition.

The IRS claimed that the publishing company “increasingly adopted a commercial method of operation” and was “engaged in business activity which is similar to a commercial enterprise.” The case started in 1977 when an IRS agent notified the PRPCthat it had too large a surplus.

Craig, who called the long legal fight “discouraging,” said the publishing company had argued that it used volunteer labor; that the nature of its books made it a distinct ministry, since it published books other publishing companies wouldn’t print; that many of its authors didn’t get a royalty; and that it sold books at discounts to students.

The bottom line is that “we feel we’re less commercial than most publishers.” Craig said. “My father worked for nothing from 1955 until his retirement in 1980. He donated his time and the use of his home, which was his office.” Craig said many religious publishers are tax exempt. “Most denominations have a publishing house; they’re a nonprofit ministry. We got singled out because we’re not under the umbrella of another ministry,” he said.

Should The Fcc Have Closed Its Books On The Ptl Case?

Christian television show host James Bakker and his associates at the PTL religious network were breathing easier in December when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) dropped its three-year-old investigation of money-raising practices. The FCC also permitted Bakker to turn his indebted Canton, Ohio, television station over to a new owner.

Now, however, the FCC’S action is being challenged by a national office of the United Church of Christ (UCC) and a minority rights group. Part of what troubles the UCC’S Office of Communications is that the new owner of the Canton station WJAN-TV has no base in Canton. The David Livingstone Missionary Foundation, which now has the station, was established in 1970 as the missionary arm of the anti-Communist preacher Billy James Hargis and his Church of the Christian Crusade. The Livingstone Foundation is based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Hargis has not been connected with it since 1980.

The national United Church of Christ and a UCC congregation in Canton have filed a petition with the FCC to get the case reopened. The National Black Media Coalition of Washington, D.C., has also filed a petition.

The FCC commissioners were sharply divided four to three when they voted to end their investigation of PTL and approve the Canton station transfer. The commissioners did, however, send their file on PTL to the Justice Department without saying why. It is not known what the Justice Department plans to do.

The United Church of Christ is not as upset about who the new owner of the Canton station is as it is that the FCC allowed the transfer to be made.

The commission’s action was called “a knee-jerk, rubber-stamp decision” by Donna Demac, staff attorney of the UCC Office of Communication. The FCC action “is illegal, it is irrational, and it cannot withstand judicial review,” contended David Honig, research director of the National Black Media Coalition. He said the commission had never before approved a license transfer from an owner that was being investigated.

Under the so-called distress-sale policy, Honig said, a licensee under investigation may sell its license to minority groups for no more than 75 percent of the fair market value, “PTL had indicated that if there were a hearing, it would go the distress-sale route,” but the FCC approval of the license transfer closed the door to that possibility, he said. Honig, who is a professor of communications policy at Howard University, said that “the only effect that this can have is to keep WJAN-TV from winding up in minority-owned hands.”

He said the coalition had “no grudge against PTL,” and that it viewed the Livingstone Foundation as “an innocent third party” in the dispute over the FCC action. According to Honig, the filing of the motion for stay meant that PTL continues to hold the station’s license because the two parties “did not effectuate the transaction.”

A spokesman for the FCC in Washington said that the agency was taking the charges against PTL seriously. “We felt the allegations were fairly serious,” said FCC spokesman Bill Russell. “Through the testimony and investigation, we felt they were serious enough to refer to the Justice Department. This is not an exoneration of anybody.”

When the FCC order was announced in December, commissioners Joseph R. Fogarty and Henry M. Rivera issued a stinging dissent. They charged that the commission’s action “does heavy violence to applicable law and precedent and is a rude and cynical insult to this commission’s jurisdiction and processes.” They declared that “the majority has short-circuited proper process with no explanation, thereby clearly signifying it lacks the courage of whatever convictions have led it to this malodorous result.” In a separate dissent, Commissioner Anne P. Jones asserted that “permitting this transfer to Livingstone establishes an entirely new policy that a licensee under a cloud can derail commission enforcement processes merely by transferring his license to any qualified successor.”

During the 1970s, Livingstone was the target of charges similar to those made about PTL—that it solicited funds for missionary work but used them for operating expenses. In 1974, Reader’s Digest cited the Livingstone Foundation as one of several charities using questionable procedures in an article entitled, “Charities: Which Ones Are Worth Giving to?”

RELIGIOUS NEWS SERVICE

World Scene

Pope John Paul II signed a new Code of Canon Law for the Roman Catholic church last month. The first revision of the church’s basic rules in 66 years—which will become effective on November 27, the first Sunday in Advent—formalizes change instituted by the Second Vatican Council. Some of the changes: reduction of the annual holy days of obligation from 10 to 2; reduction of the grounds for automatic ex-communication from 37 to 7 (abortion is still included); permission for Catholics to marry non-Catholics if local bishops approve; prohibition of priests and nuns holding public office and engaging in union and political activities; and termination of an experiment in the U.S. and Australia that reduced the average time required to obtain annulment of a marriage.

The “inner exodus” in the (Lutheran) Church of Sweden appears to be spreading to the Church of Norway. Those making plans to affiliate with a new, separate and conservative synod in Norway are those disturbed by the abortion issue, and are said to have links to both “the low church Association for Bible and Confession … and the high church Church Renewal” groups. In Sweden, meanwhile, a fourth diaconate has been formed, made up of members who object to the ordination of women, the inclusion of nonbaptized persons on church membership roles, and to powers the government holds over the church in some matters.

East Germany is bracing itself for a massive influx of foreign tourists to celebrate the five-hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s birth. The (Lutheran) Evangelical Federation has extended official invitations to 600 Western church officials, and the total number of North American visitors should surpass 300,000. Church-sponsored celebrations will commence officially at the Wartburg in Eisenach on May 4, concluding on November 13 in Leipzig. During the summer, seven regional church conferences (Kirchentage) will be held. The largest one, in Dresden during July, should attract 80,000 participants. The Wittenberg church conference in September will be devoted entirely to the study of Luther. The Marxist German Democratic Republic has also fielded a Luther committee, chaired by none other than Erich Honecker, head of both party and state. The main government-sponsered Luther commemoration is scheduled for November 9 in East Berlin.

Soviet believers in registered churches have opened 205 new churches over the past five years. The general secretary of the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists, Alexei Bychkov, made this report during a visit to Britain last month as part of a 12-man Christian delegation. This contrasts with the Russian Orthodox church, which has managed to open only a handful during the same time span. Bychkov attributed the difference to the more direct appeal of simple worship and clear preaching.

Soviet authorities are raising the student quotas at the Roman Catholic seminaries in Lithuania and Latvia for the first time since World War II. The Council of Religious Affairs has agreed to the admission of 32 new theology students for the winter semester in Lithuania, and of 19 in Latvia. The seminary at Kaunas, Lithuania, had 150 students in 1946, had been reduced to 62 students by 1979, and now has 97. The former Baltic States are the only part of the USSR that traditionally were predominantly Roman Catholic.

South African government defense and security officials have met with the leadership of the Dutch Reformed church and urged it to steer away from growing isolation to help counter an “onslaught” against the dominant Afrikaner state-and-church combination in South Africa. According to a report by Hennie Serfontein in the Cape Times, their secret advice included proposals that the denomination retain its membership in the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and that it join the South African Council of Churches.

The church in northern Mozambique isvigorous and growing in spite of having been cut off from direct missionary contact for 20 years, reports the Africa Evangelical Fellowship. The 450 congregations are short of Portuguese-language Bibles and hymnbooks, but they have some 44,000 members.

Kenya’s president has warned that his government may be forced to cancel the licenses of religious sects involved in leadership squabbles. Daniel arap Moi’s remarks followed an incident at the Nairobi church of the Gospel Furthering Fellowship in which an American missionary locked the church gates in order to preclude the holding of a service led by a rival Kenyan pastor. Local government officials intervened to order the gates opened.

Ethiopia’s usual winter rains did not materialize this year, leading to drought and famine. Ethiopian officials have appealed to governments and voluntary agencies for massive supplies of grain to stave off starvation for as many as 5 million Ethiopians, whose livelihood is based on an agricultural economy. Protestant missions and relief agencies are among those targeting aid to the country, which suffered a major famine in 1974 and 1975.

A “sensational” archaeological find has been made in a buried hillside cave opposite Mount Zion. Tel Aviv University archaeologist Gabriel Barkay leads a team that discovered nearly 1,000 artifacts in a tomb dating from the seventh century B.C. A cave-in of the tomb roof apparently protected the treasure trove from grave robbers. One notable find: an almost pure silver scroll inscribed with the classical Hebrew spelling of God’s name Yahweh (or Jehovah). Barkay said, “It’s the first time in 150 years of archaeological excavations in Jerusalem that the name of the Lord has been found.”

What is the refugee situation in Southeast Asia now? Although eight camps have been closed in Thailand, 169,000 refugees were still there in six remaining camps at the beginning of the year. That is down from 193,000 a year earlier. A recent census revealed that 10,000 new refugees had illicitly entered the largest camp, Khao I Dang. But 9,000 voluntarily returned to Kampuchea (Cambodia), 1,000 to Laos, and 33,000 were resettled overseas—19,000 of them in the U.S. and 2,000 in Canada.

7,000 European Youth Convene For Missions Conference

Asked to describe the church in Switzerland, an elderly Swiss pastor tipped his head to one side, rested it on his folded hands, and whimsically replied, “Sie shlaft” (She’s sleeping). But the activity just a few blocks from where the pastor stood was proof enough that the church in Europe is not dead. In fact, Mission ’83, a missions conference for European youths, had some overtones of revival.

During the 1982 Christmas holiday season, more than 7,000 young people from about 30 European nations met at the site of the landmark 1974 Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland. The conference was organized by TEMA (The European Missionary Association). The purpose was to think, learn, and pray about world missions.

Switzerland had the largest delegation, with 1,603 representatives. Germany was second with 1,069. Some were pleasantly surprised that Portugal (387), Italy (285), and Yugoslavia (131) had significant representation.

Mission ’83 has been described as “Europe’s Urbana” by those fond of likening it to Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship’s biggest missions conference. But conference organizers shun the comparison. “It is a youth conference rather than a student conference,” explains Luc Verlinden, assistant director of TEMA. “Also it must take into account the national preferences and differences of all the European nations represented.” Unlike Urbana, conference leaders did not ask for a public commitment and a head count of mission volunteers. Said Verlinden, “A difference between the U.S. and Europe is that we do not like numbers or statistics. Were we to announce those, many Europeans would be upset.”

Urbana director John Kyle, who attended Mission ’83 as an observer, agrees the conference was different. “It’s a more stupendous task than Urbana,” Kyle said. “I am impressed with the unity in bringing together so many nations and languages. It must surely impress not only the skeptical world looking on but the church in Western Europe.”

Efficient translators, polished organization, and thousands of headphone sets combined to unify what could have been another Tower of Babel at Mission ’83. As messages were delivered, they were translated into 12 languages—more than 3,000 headphones were distributed for each meeting.

Twenty-five national committees recruited young people in their own countries, and planned and promoted Mission ’83. More than 250 booths were manned by some 650 missionaries and representatives for European-based missions. All these groups faced the formidable task of translating their messages into at least seven languages. Those who gave slide/tape presentations provided individual earphones for each language group.

Although the European press tends to ignore evangelical functions, TEMA director Eric Gay, a Swiss pastor, was interviewed on a Lausanne news program. Local newspapers gave broad coverage, though sometimes with tongue in cheek. One headline read, “Mission ’83, Somewhere Between Show Business and Spirituality.”

The conference was the third of its kind. More than 2,500 attended Mission ’76, which spawned TEMA, and nearly 7,000 attended Mission ’80. Mainline reform churches declined active participation in Mission ’83, partly because, according to some, they fear TEMA will become another dead institution. To counteract this fear and to promote missions interest among local churches, Mission ’83 offered a concurrent pastors conference for the first time. More than 600 pastors and missionaries attended.

Asked if he thought Mission ’83 was a sign of awakening, Verlinden replied, “I can’t really say. But it is certainly evident that something is happening in some areas of Europe today. And it could be the beginning of a revival.” A TEMA spokesman commented, “There is no doubt that among European youths there is a new wave of interest in missionary work. They get up early and go to bed late. The days are spent in Bible study, prayer, singing, and getting to know what is going on in the world.”

Others have made similar observations, concerned that the church in Europe, as it is, could never support a massive missions movement among its youth.

LORRY LUTZ

Methodist Church Employees Vote To Unionize

In an unprecedented development, more than 200 general staff workers of the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries (BOGM) have voted to join the United Auto Workers. This marks the first time church workers have joined a major American labor union.

Union organizers and BOGM management agreed that the major issue was not money. La Verne Booker, a member of the union organizing committee, said the workers objected, among other things, to the merit system of promotion and salary increases, which, she said, is “based solely on evaluation by immediate supervisors.” A press representative said that workers believe the union “would give them a voice.”

District 65 organizer Karen Ackerman reasoned that since the BOGM has historically supported struggling workers, it should be more willing to hear the voices of its own people. Prior to the vote, the board’s general secretary, Randolph Nugent, sent a letter to staff members in which he stated that management “neither supports nor opposes a union.” He added, “We support your right to decide for yourselves.”

Nugent’s letter questioned required payment of union dues, the possibility that all employees must join the union, and its ability to pay strike benefits.

Ackerman said the letter was “skewed” and critical of unions. She claimed the letter “definitely discouraged workers and had all the elements of antiunion propaganda we see from hostile management, even though the language was more flowery.”

His son, who left Scientology and is now a Christian, wants to find out.

Where is Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard? Many would like an answer to that question, especially Ronald E. DeWolf, Hubbard’s son. DeWolf, who believes his father is either dead or totally disabled mentally, is seeking to have him declared legally missing so that his assets, estimated to be from $100 million to $1 billion, can be frozen. DeWolf, who says he has become a Christian, has petitioned a California court to appoint him receiver of those assets.

The March 1980 disappearance of the 71-year-old Hubbard came in the wake of the 1979 and 1981 convictions of 11 church officials for conspiracy, obstruction of justice, perjury, and theft of government property. This climaxed a prolonged cloak-and-dagger campaign of criminal activities by the church against a long hate-list of supposed enemies. Last month, Hubbard’s third wife was sentenced to four years in prison for her role in these operations.

DeWolf, who changed his name from L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., in 1972, maintains that a shakeup in Scientology’s leadership about a year ago—in which 150 staff members left the cult—brought to the front a cadre of “young Turks.” DeWolf contends the new leadership is pirating away millions of dollars in church funds and that if his father were alive and in his right mind, he would never permit such “wholesale thefts.” DeWolf has also speculated that his father might be held incommunicado by the new guard.

Not everyone agrees with DeWolfs speculation. Paulette Cooper, whose 1971 book, The Scandal of Scientology, led to vicious harassment and withdrawal of the volume from circulation, believes Hubbard is alive. She claims to have seen recent letters bearing the trademarks of his style and signature. But Boston attorney Michael Flynn, DeWolfs lawyer, disagrees. Although he possesses a recently autographed copy of one of Hubbard’s books, he says that one of his clients has revealed that she forged the signature while serving on Hubbard’s personal staff. Thus, he argues that this weakens the credibility of the church’s recent trump card—a dated (November 17, 1982), autographed copy of Hubbard’s latest book, Battlefield Earth. The church’s public affairs director, Kathy Heard, maintains that the book was written in the months immediately prior to its publication date, which was late last summer.

Heard was asked why the church doesn’t simply produce Hubbard, to prove he is alive and well and end the controversy. She replied, “Mr. Hubbard isn’t a commodity for us to produce at will. He’s a very private individual and prefers seclusion.” She added, laughing, “Besides, why should he show up and ruin all this good publicity?” (Despite negative reviews, the book, which sells for $24, is said to be doing well.)

A court will hear evidence in the case on April 18 in Riverside, California. Attorney Flynn is encouraged by the fact that on January 18 of this year, for the first time in the long history of the church of Scientology’s wrangling with the law, Hubbard defaulted by failing to appear in court.

DeWolf was born to Hubbard’s first wife and is the oldest of Hubbard’s seven children. He helped his father establish the Church of Scientology in 1952. The church began as a vehicle for applying principles contained in Hubbard’s 1950 book Dianetics. Scientology teaches that humans willed themselves into existence trillions of years ago and then proceeded to will the material universe into existence. Doing thus, they became trapped in physical bodies and must be “untrapped” in order to return to the original godlike state. This requires the services of Scientology “ministers,” (CT, Sept. 17, 1982, p. 32) who reportedly charge $300 an hour. The church’s religious services consist of lectures on Hubbard’s theories.

Although Hubbard has boasted that his teachings evolved through 30 years of research, his son avers that some were “written off the top of his head” while under the influence of drugs, while others were plagiarized from Aleister Crowley’s disputations on black magic and Satanism. According to DeWolf, not only was Hubbard addicted to cocaine, mescaline, and peyote, but he had a long history of venereal disease, sexual perversion, and mental illness. DeWolf also says his father was deeply involved in bizarre occult practices.

DeWolf left the cult in 1959. He says that in the decade prior to his defection, his father became “further and further removed from reality,” suffering from severe occurences of paranoia and delusion, continued physical deterioration from chronic diseases including arthritis, duodenal ulcers, chronic pneumonia, and skeletal weakness.” DeWolf says that in the 1950s, Hubbard plotted to take over the world and developed a strategy to penetrate every major governmental agency in the world to obtain sufficient intelligence data to accomplish that goal. His delusions further led him to believe that he was the Beast of Revelation and that he had the power to control all of mankind, according to DeWolf.

DeWolf defected in 1959 out of concern for his family. He claimed also that the cult “didn’t work.” It employed black magic, crime, and fraud. For several years, he experienced withdrawal trauma. Four years ago, he moved with his family to Carson City, Nevada, where he is employed as manager of an apartment complex. Today, DeWolf is eager to lecture before church, school, and civic groups concerning the evils of cults. But he opposes “deprogramming,” believing that religious reorientation should be personal and voluntary.

“In the process of trying to unravel Scientology out of my head,” DeWolf said, “I read the Bible, and in the course of time became a Christian.” Although he leans toward the Episcopal church, DeWolf shies away from church organizations and depends on Scripture reading, prayer, and the Holy Spirit for spiritual nourishment and growth. He says also that he benefits from small-group Bible studies.

North American Scene

At least 10 United Methodist congregations in Colorado and Wyoming are protesting the ordination of hom*osexuals by withholding some funds to their annual conferences. These churches are voicing their disapproval of United Methodist Bishop Melvin E. Wheatley, Jr.’s appointment of an avowed hom*osexual to a congregation. Last year, a church court unanimously decided not to bring heresy charges against the Denver bishop.

Zale Corporation of Dallas has been named p*rnographer of the Month for January by the National Federation for Decency. The “honor” is given monthly by the NFD to a company that regularly advertises in p*rnographic magazines. According to the NFD, more than 25 major advertisers have said they no longer plan to advertise in such magazines.

A suit against the Unification church and its leader, Sun Myung Moon, was summarily dismissed January 10 by a Massachusetts federal court. The plaintiff in the suit claimed breach of contract and brainwashing. According to a press release from the Unification church, the decision “clearly establishes that such claims are entirely frivolous and that the freedom of religious belief and teaching of basic tenets of faith must be allowed to continue in America unhampered.”

Holy Communion made history on Sunday, January 16, during a joint Lutheran-Episcopal service at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. The service was led by the presiding bishop of the Episcopal church and by leaders of three Lutheran denominations, following plans approved by the churches last fall. The presence of four bishops at the altar symbolized the achievement of enough doctrinal agreement to allow such a ceremony.

Evangelist James Robison and Fort Worth, Texas, millionaire industrialist Cullen Davis smashed more than $1 million worth of art objects in October because, they say, the objects represented false gods. Davis had donated the rare jade, ivory, and gold pieces to Robison’s ministry. The plan was to sell the pieces at a Dallas auction, but while on his way to see them, Robison became convinced, he says, “the Lord didn’t want me to receive them.” Robison and Davis, who became a Christian through Robison’s ministry, proceeded to smash the objects in a parking lot outside Davis’s mansion.

Leaders of 23 major communions belonging to the National Council of Churches and theNCC’s secretary general have protested an article published in the January issue of Reader’s Digest. The church leaders have written to the monthly publication’s editor-in-chief, claiming that the article is filled with distortions and misrepresentations about the council. They say the contention of the article that the NCC supports Marxist-Leninist movements in the Third World is untrue and have requested a more objective story about the NCC.

Ministers who buy their own houses will no longer be permitted the double benefit of a tax-exempt housing allowance plus tax deductions for mortgage interest and property taxes. A new Internal Revenue Service ruling, set to take effect June 30, disallows ministers a federal income tax deduction for any portion of mortgage interest and real estate taxes for which they have received a tax-exempt housing allowance. When the housing expenses are greater than the housing allowance, a portion of the interest and taxes will remain deductible.

The American Psychiatric Association has urged that some form of insanity defense be retained in criminal trials. But in its first comprehensive statement on the issue, the association also called for a “tightening up” of standards and procedures to protect the public against premature release of potentially dangerous individuals. The 27,000-member association cautioned the public and the courts not to expect too much of psychiatrists, stating that judgments concerning such things as the defendant’s knowing the difference between right and wrong involve moral, philosophical, and social judgments that are best left to juries and judges. The insanity defense was used successfully by the lawyers for John Hinckley, Jr., who shot President Reagan.

Private and parochial school pupils can expect increased aid under a new federal block-grant program to the states for elementary and secondary schools. Meanwhile the inconclusive debate over tuition tax credits drags into another session of Congress. New rules for allocation of the money mean that federal funds to some public school districts will decline, heating the debate over proposals for tax credits to parents of children attending private schools.

Nearly 100 officials of the Seventh-day Adventist Church will be disciplined by the denomination. The officials are in trouble because of their involvement with church loans to Donald J. Davenport, a surgeon, investor, and post office builder who filed for bankruptcy in Los Angeles in July of 1981. Davenport owes the Adventist church $18 million in loans and $3 million in accrued interest.

The Constitution’s ban on the government establishing religion applies to the federal government, but not to the states, according to a U.S. district judge in Alabama. In the highly unusual ruling, Judge Brevard Hand issued the statement in upholding Alabama’s school-prayer law, which was passed last July. Hand asserted that the establishment of religion was a power reserved to the states. He also criticized judges who have ruled against public school prayers, stating that the office of judge “gives us no power to fix the moral direction that this nation will take.” His decision is certain to be contested.

A lawsuit now in court could wreck a long-held tradition.

Before there was a First Amendment, there were chaplains in the U.S. Army, ministering by popular demand among militia from their own hometowns during the Revolution. They were paid $20 a month by the fledgling government, and their status went unchallenged even after the Constitution was amended to prohibit state establishment of religion.

Today, there are 3,347 ordained men and women in uniform, earning salaries equivalent to other officers. A case pending in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, however, could leave the chaplains wholly dependent on their churches for financial support and strip them of their officer rank.

The case is a taxpayer’s suit brought by Joel Katcoff and Allen M. Wieder, who began the project in 1979 as Harvard Law School students. They targeted the U.S. Army, the largest of the armed forces with 782,000 active-duty soldiers. They allege that the government “by design and appearance, lends its prestige, influence, and power to organized religion.”

At issue is a direct conflict between the Constitution’s guaranteed free exercise of religion and the prohibition against state support of religion. In the military, the absence of pastoral counseling, worship, fellowship, or Bible study—all functions of the chaplain corps—would deprive GIs of opportunities to practice religion. But Katcoff and Wieder counter that those needs should be met privately by churches or mission-sending groups, and that tax dollars should not line clerical pockets.

Churches clearly have the most at stake financially, because each chaplain is estimated to cost the government more than $100,000 per year for salary, programs, and administrative costs. The comparison is inadequate, though, because churches simply could not provide a similar ministry, especially at remote outposts, where security clearance is needed, or in combat.

Political scientist Paul J. Weber of the University of Louisville believes it is “almost certain that the chaplaincy will be found to be constitutional.” Even if it can be proven that government support for religion exists, the importance of free exercise would outweigh it in this case, Weber says. But he thinks the army may be vulnerable on other fine points of law itemized in the suit, including entanglement with religious groups and restrictions against some groups placing chaplains.

Even though the army is likely to win in a pretrial settlement, the suit is being taken seriously because it is the first to confront the chaplaincy head-on. Previous court challenges have been dismissed because the plaintiffs were found to lack standing as a properly aggrieved party. The army’s motion to dismiss on these grounds was denied when district court Judge Jacob Mishler found Katcoff and Wieder were legitimate taxpayers. He also said the suit contains charges, which, “if proven, might well establish that the chaplaincy program is so overly broad in scope as to constitute a governmentally sponsored program of religious proselytism.”

The suit comes in the midst of stepped-up efforts to attract new chaplains. The need for Roman Catholic priests is as acute in the military as in other areas of ministry. The navy is attempting to place 40 new chaplains each year because of legislation that will force many older chaplains to retire.

In each branch—army, navy (including marine corps), and air force—Protestant chaplains comprise more than 70 percent of the corps, with Roman Catholics at about 25 percent, Jewish rabbis at 1 percent, and a handful of Mormons, Eastern Orthodox, and others.

The attraction the corps holds for seminary students is a combination youth ministry and interfaith experience removed from many of the denominational tensions pastors face. Navy Commander George E. Dobes, a Catholic priest, served as chaplain aboard an aircraft carrier with 5,000 crew members. Working with 18-to 23-year-old sailors fresh from boot camp, Dobes discovered they “didn’t know why they were there or what they were doing. They didn’t particularly like the close quarters or being away from home, so they would come to us and say, ‘Get me out of the navy.’”

Along with motivational counseling, Dobes conducted liturgical and nonliturgical Protestant services as well as Catholic Mass daily and provided for the needs of Mormons and Jewish sailors through lay volunteers. Chaplains also take charge of emergency communications, run the library, and pay regular calls to sick bay and the correctional unit. They are considered staff assistants to the chief commanding officer, who frequently seeks advice about troop “morale and morals.” But Dobes said “the biggest thing we tried to have was a ministry of presence, just being there, making sure we were seen and involved on the ship.”

The chaplain corps is well suited for women. LuAnn Johnson, recently ordained by First Evangelical Free Church in Minneapolis, begins her stint as a chaplain at the naval hospital in Oakland, California. “I feel I’ve been called to serve in the professional ministry,” she says. “I have no option except this within my denomination.” The navy has 20 female chaplains, the army 13, and the air force 12.

Becoming a chaplain requires ordination in a recognized church and 90 semester hours of graduate theology training. Required also is official endorsem*nt by a faith group that has formal ecclesiastical authority, a verifiable number of adherents, a structured way of preparing and designating ministers, the ability to supervise chaplains, and will not proselytize through its chaplains.

These strict criteria prevent some groups from providing chaplains, and Katcoff and Wieder charge in their suit that this inhibits free exercise of religion. They also charge that army worship services tilt heavily in favor of nonliturgical Protestant modes of expression. Armed forces spokesmen counter by saying it is just a matter of supply and demand.

Ironically, if Katcoff and Wieder put a stop to salaried chaplains, more flagrant discrimination could result. Privately funded chaplains would overwhelmingly represent larger, wealthier church groups. The military’s restrictions on who can be a chaplain serve to keep cults out and mean more highly qualified chaplain candidates.

A chaplain lives with inevitable tension over where his ultimate allegiance lies: his church or his military superiors. Louisville professor Weber believes the armed forces are most vulnerable to constitutional challenges on this point.

Recent confrontations between the nation’s Catholic bishops and Reagan Administration military strategists over nuclear policy illustrate the problem. Several bishops believe their pastoral letter advocating nuclear disarmament must spell out more clearly what the church merely suggests and what it mandates for its followers, including chaplains.

Most military chaplains are Protestant, and the Protestant theology that predominates in the corps is getting more conservative. That makes the chaplaincy attractive for evangelicals, who populate the corps to a greater degree than ever, according to Floyd Robertson, executive secretary for the National Assocation of Evangelicals’ commission on chaplains, NAE endorses about 30 chaplains each year from member churches. For evangelicals in more liberal mainline churches, the chaplaincy is a natural choice, Robertson said, because “it is one place you can have a ministry consistent with what you feel the Lord wants you to do.”

Armed forces chaplains probably will never be free from court challenges and conflicts brought on by their dual performance for God and country, yet their retention rate is the highest among officers in the service, with more than 90 percent returning for multiple tours of duty. They do not view it as a compromise of either faith or patriotism, but an opportunity to integrate and interpret both aspects of life to people in uniform.

BETH SPRING

Frank Gaebelein Dies At 83

With the death of educator, author, and editor Frank Gaebelein, “a tall tower of evangelical talent has fallen,” according to theologian Carl F. H. Henry. Gaebelein, 83, a resident of Arlington, Virginia, died January 19 at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Doctors say he never fully recuperated from the double bypass surgery he had in November.

Gaebelein was a popular lecturer, a talented musician, an accomplished Bible expositor, and an avid mountaineer. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, for years a close friend of Gaebelein’s, described him as “a true Renaissance man.”

Gaebelein was known primarily as an educator. In 1921, at age 22, he became the founding headmaster at the Stony Brook School, a Christian college preparatory school in Long Island, which has become a prototype. He held the post for 41 years and considered his work there his most important accomplishment. According to Koop, Gaebelein “set a standard for Christian secondary education that led to a school that takes off its hat to no one.”

Gaebelein received a bachelor’s degree from New York University and a master’s from Harvard. He was ordained by the Reformed Episcopal Church. His most significant literary contribution was Christian Education in a Democracy (Oxford University Press, 1951). In this book, Gaebelein argued for the legitimacy of private education—especially Christian education—and he outlined a method. But those close to him say his favorite work was The Pattern of God’s Truth, a series of lectures published by Oxford University Press in 1954. In this work, Gaebelein sought to integrate faith and learning, and produced what is widely considered a seminal work in the philosophy of Christian education.

Gaebelein served as an editor of the Scofield Reference Bible, as style editor for the New International Version Bible, and as general editor of The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, a position he held at the time of his death. Says Carl Henry, “He was a gifted writer, a skillful craftsman and a highly competent editor whose literary gifts enriched the evangelical movement at many levels.”

In all, Gaebelein wrote 14 books, including a mystery novel. For a long time, his family, friends, and professional associates urged him to write a book on the Christian and aesthetics. Some considered it sadly ironic that he never wrote the book, because it was perhaps his favorite lecture topic.

As a trained concert pianist, Gaebelein often supplemented his lectures on aesthetics with piano performances of classical music. He passionately encouraged excellence in thinking and was a stalwart opponent of anti-intellectual leanings within Christianity. He argued for the legitimacy of artistic expression, and he found spiritual significance even in mountain climbing, one of his favorite pastimes. It was with Gaebelein that the phrase “all truth is God’s truth” originated. D. Bruce Lockerbie, who will write Gaebelein’s biography, calls him the “model of a modern Christian humanist,” a term Gaebelein championed in spite of widespread opposition to the concept.

Gaebelein’s son, Donn, who succeeded his father as headmaster at Stony Brook for 13 years, says, “There was a side to my father few people saw. That was his tremendous outreach to the have-nots of this world.” Gaebelein served on the board of Bread for the World and was one of the founding board members of Evangelicals for Social Action.

He was the target of criticism when in 1965, as coeditor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, he was sent to Selma, Alabama, to cover the civil rights march to Montgomery. Gaebelein left the area reserved for journalists and joined the marchers. In a 1979 CT interview commemorating his eightieth birthday, Gaebelein said, “I felt so keenly the rightness of the march.… This was simply an expression of personal feeling and I do not regret it.”

In addition to the many public hats he wore, Gaebelein was a private counselor. Several notables from Capitol Hill, including Sen. Mark Hatfield, often sought Gaebelein’s insight. According to CT advisory editor Kenneth Kantzer, Gaebelein had “a broad understanding of the religious picture and of evangelicalism in the United States. His breadth of understanding led people to trust his wisdom about many things.”

Gaebelein once was asked what counsel he wished to pass on to the next generation of Christians. He replied, “Maintain at all costs a daily time of Scripture reading and prayer. As I look back, I see that the most formative influence in my life and thought has been my daily contact with Scripture over 60 years.”

Oral Roberts Reports A 7-Hour Talk With Jesus, Asks For Money

Two years ago, well-known television evangelist and faith healer Oral Roberts claimed he saw a vision of a 900-foot-high Jesus standing over his City of Faith medical center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. An appeal letter based on this vision resulted in substantial donations to his 60-story diagnostic clinic and 30-story hospital, both completed in 1981. Also part of this City of Faith, which is associated with Oral Roberts University, was a 20-story research tower not yet in use.

In a recent fund-raising letter sent to thousands of his followers, Oral Roberts claims that God has chosen him to find a cure for cancer, using the research tower, which “lies gleaming on the outside but unfinished on the inside.” He further asks each recipient of the letter to send him $240.

The appeal letter runs a full 14 pages and is titled, “It’s Later than You Think” and “When Are You and Your Partners Going to Obey Me?” Roberts claims to have heard the Lord explicitly tell him this during a conversation with Jesus that he says lasted seven hours and which he describes as, “still continuing.” Jesus allegedly told Roberts, “I would not have had you and your partners build the 20-story research tower unless I was going to give you a plan that will attack cancer in both a physical and spiritual way that is different than other cancer research programs in the world today. I did not have you build this tower debt-free just to have it stand empty.”

Roberts writes that God told him in 1947 that he would feel divine presence in his “right hand,” and that he would be able “to pick up the presence of satanic power tormenting people.” The letter also says that God asked him, “Have you forgotten that I called you to be the John the Baptist of your time in the healing ministry?” Roberts states that he is “not a medical researcher,” but possesses “divine insight” as to the satanic nature of disease.

Cancer and other diseases are described by Roberts as a “satanic attack,” in which “Satan is trying to take control of the cells and cause them to multiply out of their divinely placed order.” He adds, “Cancer itself is the work of the devil, specifically Beelzebub, which means ‘god of the flies,’ or corruption.”

To bring about “the full forces of God’s gifts of the Holy Spirit alongside medical science,” Roberts quotes Jesus as giving him the following instructions “in that calm voice I have heard so many times before” during their conversation:

“Ask each friend and partner for $240 to be given now or to send $20 a month for the next 12 months. Do this until the full $240 is planted. Do as I tell you. Obey me.”

“Tell them that this is the Lord speaking through you, Oral Roberts, to them. When are you going to obey me? When?”

To those who respond and give $240, Roberts quotes the Lord as saying, “I will show them spectacular things of my miracle power.” Roberts then lists 14 “increases,” including improved health, peace, joy, energy, longer life, more money, and additional gifts of the Holy Spirit. At the bottom of this list, Roberts states, “I already know which five of these increases are for me and my family as we obey.”

In addition, Roberts will send donors a series of “at least” 48 tapes, containing his personal commentary on the entire New Testament. He has made further appeals concerning the research center on his regular television broadcasts.

Roberts and James Winslow, head of the medical complex, were unavailable for comment. City of Faith public relations staff declined to make any statements.

LLOYD BILLINGSLEY

Do we need Reminding that China today is really very different from the nation the early China Inland Mission pioneers entered 116 years ago? I am not referring particularly to China’s greatly increased population, its industrial development, or even its more significant role in world affairs.

Rather, I am thinking of the fact that in China today there is a large, strong, and growing church.

It is a different picture from what we were getting even a mere three years ago, when China was just reopening after the unprecedented trauma of the Cultural Revolution. Christian visitors reported finding “no trace of Christian survival.” The impression was that China was “a spiritual desert without any oasis.” If this were a true description of the facts—and we know now that it was not and is not—it would provide an explanation for the general Christian response to China. Obviously if there were no church to speak of in that great and populous land, then Christians in other lands would have no alternative but to approach China in much the same way those early CIM pioneers did 116 years ago.

If, on the other hand, the Word of the Lord has not returned to him void—and we know it has not; if Christ is building his church, which the gates of hell have not overcome; if through trial and tribulation a purified body of Christian brothers and sisters stand and serve in China today; then ought not our attitude and response clearly reflect the fact?

As Christians our response should express: consideration that seeks to grasp the complexity and sensitivity of the situation; confidence that sees our sovereign Lord working out his purposes; and concern that issues from love in prayer and prudent action.

Responding With Consideration

For us to respond with consideration will demand a deeper understanding of our brothers and sisters in China. This means not only hearing what they are saying, but understanding what they mean. A colleague who worked closely with my father for many years, for instance, recently asked a visiting professor to inform me that he had gratefully received the commentaries I had sent; he did not, however, wish to write at this time. I thought of the traditional value the Chinese people have always placed on interpersonal relationships and of how much my father’s colleague would normally have enjoyed reestablishing ties of friendship. Then it came to me: I suddenly realized that, like the apostle Paul, this dear friend was prepared to deny himself personal rights and joys in order that he should “cause no hindrance to the gospel” (1 Cor. 9:12).

Paul often expressed concern about how he and fellow Christians used their liberty. Many of us pride ourselves that we belong to a society that gives us a constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech. Yet, for the sake of the gospel, are we prepared to deny ourselves that liberty? Has the time not come for those in missions to articulate a biblical theology of publicity? It is significant that six times in Mark’s Gospel Jesus admonished people to say nothing about what he had just done or said. With modern society’s mania for a Madison Avenue approach to publicity, does the Christian not need to remember that “there is a time for every event under heaven … a time to be silent, and a time to speak”? With totalitarian states making increasing use of “clipping services,” information released in Christian papers and magazines is no longer limited to a concerned Christian readership. Names carelessly dropped may place Christian brothers and sisters in jeopardy or even instantly terminate a fruitful ministry (Mark 1:44–45).

Responding With Confidence

Our response to the church in China should be one of deep and genuine confidence—confidence in God’s sovereign rule in the realm of human history and in his unchanging faithfulness to his own. I well remember the pathetic hand wringing in the early fifties that characterized much of the evaluation (some called it the “post mortem”) of missions in China. To be sure, God’s judgment had fallen, and in the testing, wood, hay, and stubble were consumed. But in awesome process there also emerged, upon that sure foundation that was laid, a building of gold, silver, and precious stones.

God’s purposes in China did not depend on the continued presence of missionaries or on the large and small institutions they had established. For 150 years they had been servants and instruments to do his bidding. When God no longer needed them in China, missionaries were expelled and their institutions demolished. His church remained, and so did he.

Is it not humbling to see what God has been doing in China these 30 years without a single foreign missionary? Even by conservative estimates, his church has grown thirtyfold. Our brothers and sisters there have suffered for Christ as few of us have. They certainly know their own people and environment as none of us can.

Yet what an ironic spectacle to see so many foreign organizations jockeying for position and eager to go galloping in to tell mainland Christians how to do things! Christians in China won’t, of course, be up on the latest church-growth terminology or the “four spiritual laws.” But they do know the two spiritual laws: “not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit” and “unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.” And bearing fruit is something Christians are doing in China. Perhaps the Lord in his goodness will open the way for us to learn from them. What a privilege that would be!

Responding With Concern

Finally, our response must move from consideration and confidence to continuing concern. Surely this is best expressed through prayer. The struggle we are engaged in is not with earthly powers, but with the spiritual forces of darkness and wickedness in heavenly places. From personal experience Paul affirms that the Christian’s spiritual weapon is divinely powerful “to demolish strongholds … arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:4–5, NIV). How often members of our fellowship have found this to be true! Men are still moved through prayer alone, and the people of China are no exception.

This call to prayer, however, should never be construed to mean that those who pray are somehow high and mighty, while those prayed for are poor and to be pitied. That is a misunderstanding of the Christian fellowship of intercession. Listen to the apostle Paul: After admonishing the Christians in Ephesus to pray for all the saints, he then asks them to pray also for him. Earlier in the letter he had described how he did not stop giving thanks for the Ephesian Christians while making mention of them in his prayers. That is not condescending. It is at once both the beauty and strength of our fellowship as concerned believers.

Consideration, confidence, and concern—such should be our response to the Lord’s church in China.

“My son came home from the university,” our preacher friend told us one night at the dinner table, “and he said to me, ‘Dad, I’ve been studying and learning. And I’m just not sure I can follow your simple Christian faith any longer.’”

We could picture our friend as he skewered his son with his piercing black eyes and replied, “Son, that is your freedom—your terrible freedom.”

There may be parents reading this who have a child who has said the same thing or its equivalent. But God has ways.

Commenting on Proverbs 21:1, Matthew Henry says, “God can change men’s minds, can turn them from that which they seemed most intent upon, as the husbandman, by canals and gutters, turns the water through his grounds, which does not alter the nature of the water, nor put any force upon it, any more than God’s providence does upon the native freedom of man’s will, but directs the course of it to serve his own purpose.”

William Barclay writes that in prayer we must remember: (1) The love of God that wants what is best for us; (2) The wisdom of God that knows what is best for us; and (3) The power of God that can accomplish it. This applies also to those we love.

When I was in college, the Wheaton Men’s Glee Club had a special number they saved for an encore that went like this:

If a nest of wild hornets

Were left in this room

And the creatures allowed to go free;

They would not compel you to go ‘gainst your will,

They’d just make you willing to flee.

So look up! If you are God’s you have all of his promises on your side.

A nonsexist paraphrase of Bible passages, about to be issued by the National Council of Churches, is a trial balloon for a linguistically intolerant rendering of the whole Bible.

Languages are like we are: they have a past, present, and (we hope) a future. Because the future is as yet undecided from a human perspective, it offers the most possibilities for change. As Christians we should move into the future with the intent of shaping our language so as to include both sexes and as many colors and races of persons as possible.

We will need to remember, however, that language is a human vehicle and, consequently, as limited as our perspectives and only as rich and multifarious as our experiences. We may discover that we have to accustom ourselves to the limitations of our language as we do the limitations of our bodies—they are not cars, much less planes or rockets, and scarcely to be compared with the elaborate and instant world of imagination. But if we try, we usually find they get us from one place to another.

The National Council of Churches says that no issue in its history has raised such a storm of protest as the proposed language changes in Scripture. Little wonder, for our sexuality is intimately wrapped up with who we are as persons. Tampering with gender sends shock waves to our identity. When the challenge involves also our faith, we find ourselves picking our way through a minefield of emotions, beliefs, feelings, misunderstandings, and fears.

Part of the storm over the language changes has been generated because of a misrepresentation by the news media of the original proposal by the NCC. The overtures of the Division of Education and Ministry (DEM) of the NCC, which date back to June 1978, include the following:

1. The development of a nonsexist lectionary for public worship, to be adapted from the RSV;

2. An appeal to the rsv Bible Committee “to move more boldly” in employing inclusive language about persons by avoiding masculine-oriented language with reference to God (e.g., substituting “God” for the masculine pronoun), and by adding scholars with a feminist perspective as vacancies occur on the committee;

3. The development of alternative ways of dealing with racism, sexism, classism, scientism, and anti-Semitism in the Bible.

The third item is being held in abeyance by the DEM until a future date. With regard to item two, the RSV committee, which is editorially independent of the NCC, has indicated that it will use inclusive language only when such usage is consistent with the original texts of the Bible. The committee, which meets at regular intervals to consider improvements in the current translation of the RSV, has been attempting to eliminate masculine-oriented language where it can be accomplished without distorting the historicity of the original texts or resorting to contrived English expressions.

Examples of revisions to date include the elimination of “man” or “men” in Psalm 143:2; Mark 10:18; Luke 17:34; 18:1; Romans 2:6; and Revelation 3:20 where the Hebrew and Greek pronouns are indefinite; or the rendering of the Hebrew ’ish and Greek anthropos by inclusive phraseology (e.g., “those who,” “everyone,” etc.). The committee, however, has adopted the position that a translator of a historical document is obligated to provide as faithful and felicitous a rendering of that document in English as possible.

I think that those who are called to “rightly divide the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15) owe a debt of gratitude to the RSV committee for its present stand on this issue. Anyone who has mastered another language well enough to attempt translation work knows that the committee’s responsibility is not easily fulfilled. Such hybrids as “s/he” are unsuitable to the dynamic quality of biblical language. Nor is the matter so simple as substituting “God” for the masculine pronoun; in Romans 3:28–30, for example, this would result in 12 occurrences of “God” in three verses. Again, suggestions to change “Son of Man” to “Child of Humanity,” or “Father” to “Parent,” are not merely “a few nonsubstantive changes,” as one advocate of inclusive language contends. They involve a series of domino-like decisions that few of us, I suspect, will want to live with.

Take as an example the expression “son of God.” Assuming son of God were changed to a nonsexist substitute (e.g., child of God, offspring of God), we would experience the nullification of an important Christological title in the Bible. We all are aware that there is a difference in Scripture between the term “son” and “child.” Because of the right of primogeniture, son of God becomes in the history of Israel increasingly reserved for the one who will follow in the line of David as a Savior, whereas child of God remains a designation for any particular Jew. Son of God, because of its discriminate use in the biblical tradition, designates the unique individual upon whom God’s favor comes for salvific purposes. The term Child of God is simply a paraphrase for the term “Israel[ite].”

If we follow this hypothetical process a step further we discover that the problem begins to compound. In the Old Testament we encounter the term “man of God,” which designates an office above children of God, but below son of God. For example, Moses, Elijah, and Elisha are called “man of God,” but never “son of God,” whereas the king of Israel is called “son of God,” but never “man of God.” How shall these terms be distinguished, not only from themselves (i.e., child of God, man of God, son of God), but from “son of man”? Each of these expressions will need to be reduced to an amorphous equivalent of “person of God,” thus obliterating the unique role of each.

These terms also relate in various ways to a series of other terms—king, high priest, suffering servant, prophet, apostle, and so on, each of which is masculine in the Bible. Thus, the process of reductionism will necessarily lead further. This, of course, is but a brief experiment with one term. What kind of leveling will have to occur to reduce the hundreds of similar expressions in the Bible to a predetermined standard?

Bruce Metzger, who chairs the RSV Bible Committee, says that a literal translation (such as the RSV) intends to reproduce what a passage says, not necessarily what it means. Interpretive insights are the responsibility of commentators, pastors, and teachers. This has been the historic position of Protestantism. Interestingly enough, one of Protestantism’s long-standing criticisms of Catholicism is that the Roman church has presumed to decide what various passages of the Bible mean. How ironic it will be, as Harold Strandness has pointed out, if Protestantism, by producing a nonsexist paraphrase of the Bible, goes beyond the Roman Catholic church by changing what the Bible says.

We now Leave item two and turn to the first one in the NCC proposal. The DEM projects a three-year lectionary cycle (for use in Advent in 1983, 1984, and 1985), which, once the Scripture passages have been tested, could become the basis for a nonsexist rendering of the Old and New Testaments. This paraphrase, should it transpire, would be a separate edition from the RSV, on which the NCC holds the copyright. The lectionary can take the RSV as a point of departure, but the modified text could not legally be called the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. The guiding precept of this paraphrase would be that metaphorical language, especially as it relates to sex and gender (e.g., God as Father) is analogical rather than ontological, and ought not overshadow the theological truth it intends to convey.

This precept seems to me to require further consideration, especially in regard to the question of language and meaning in the Bible.

For example, the DEM desires to find language about Jesus Christ to “overcome the undesired suggestions that the incarnation makes Christ’s maleness crucial in such a way as to overshadow the primary import of the Word having become flesh, and the Divine having become human.”

This statement demands a closer look. In order to become human, God must enter into one of the two sexes of humanity. There seems to be no need nor reason to deny that God became a male in Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed, to do so would deny our own humanity and sexuality in some sense and would simply return us to a docetic view of Christ, namely, that Christ was not truly human. The question then remains whether Jesus’ maleness, or God’s male gender, is “crucial” to his nature. If God’s nature consists in the male gender in some way that it does not consist in the female, then a change in nomenclature is a theological offense. C. S. Lewis maintained, for example, that God is masculine and that the church, which includes both males and females, is feminine in relation to God.

Nevertheless, in the Bible God (e.g., Luke 15:8–10; Matt. 23:37) and the Holy Spirit (John 3:5–6) are sometimes described in feminine imagery. This would seem to deny that metaphor in the Bible is strictly ontological (though it does not prove it, for female metaphors are sometimes applied to males, obviously not thereby changing the male sex).

If, however, as it seems, biblical language about God is more analogical than ontological, one may question why the metaphor ought to be eliminated. Can we learn the unknown apart from associating it with the known? Are not analogies, in a sense, like matches with which we light candles in the dark? A match bums a short enough time as it is; if we quench it we may never have light.

A more promising route, it seems to me, is to educate ourselves that most speech about God is metaphorical, and much of it rooted in sex and gender, like we are. I am arguing here for the appreciation of analogy rather than the abolition of it, since it appears that in the Incarnation especially, God entered fully into our world.

It is Nevertheless Probable that a nonsexist paraphrase of Scripture will be attempted. What its reception will be among the churches is hard to say. Similar ventures have been attempted before. One could point to Origen’s practice of interpreting much of the Bible, and especially the Old Testament, allegorically, thus forsaking the obvious sense of God’s entering into our historical experience in favor of types of higher spirituality or deeper truth.

Let Truth Be Hard

I want to hear the truth,

and hear it hard.

I want to bow beneath the iron hand of right,

let false be jarred.

To walk for once with softened heart and strengthened sight,

let fall the guard.

And wake my mulish will unto its plight,

Let truth be hard.

But what is this I hear?

Is all truth gone?

You keep us babes. The mealy pap you feed,

makes truth a pawn.

You dribble drooling words that flaunt and please,

the right is wronged.

And selfish hearts wax cold with speech of ease;

Let truth be strong,

Let truth spread long,

Let truth be hard.

—Leslie Leyland Fields

But Origen’s endeavors related to interpretation rather than translation. For an example of the latter we could turn to Clarence Jordan, who in our own day has published his Cotton Patch Version of the New Testament in which he modifies the Pauline epistles to fit conditions in Atlanta or Birmingham during the racial movement of the 1960s. Thus, the idea behind a nonsexist paraphrase of Scripture in one sense is not new, and the result may be no more successful than its various predecessors were.

I began by saying that languages have a past, present, and future. The present, of course, is the moment of transition. Linguistically we live between what has been and what could be. It is tough to retain a sense of home when your furniture is in the moving van, and at present our language is in the van.

Here, it seems to me, lies an important challenge for the Christian. It would be very tempting, given our present pitch of awareness about language, to take a snobbish attitude toward the way our ancestors spoke and expressed themselves. An eminent theologian recently spoke at one of our seminaries, and in his lecture he employed masculine-oriented language. The reaction against his style was so fierce that it is doubtful whether students and faculty heard much of his content. Our linguistic intolerances are beginning to parallel our racial intolerances of the past. Instead of discounting persons because of their skin color, are we to discount them because of their use of pronouns? Racism, to be sure, is a strong judgment, but the discounting of persons is a serious offense.

As we move into the future, let us strive to shape our language, especially for the purposes of worship, to be as inclusive as possible. But let us do so without erecting a new wall of legalism: by requiring others to speak in a certain way before we will listen to them. And let us do so without ceasing to be informed by the past.

If Calvin and Jerome and Aquinas and Dostoevski and Tolkien use “men” when they could have used “people,” let us not discount them. We ought to be bigger persons than that. Otherwise we will have strained at gnats and swallowed camels. The goals of human rights will not be promoted by changing historical documents, nor by neglecting them.

A psychology professor at California State University, Herb Goldberg, tells the following story: “When I was 12 years old my father mocked me for crying one time. I consciously made a decision right then and there that I would never cry again. And I kept it, too, for years. When I finally realized crying is good, and that men need to cry too, I couldn’t do it anymore. Since then, I’ve been trying to learn to cry again, and it’s been very difficult. The same thing goes for other feelings. It’s very hard for me to let myself experience them most of the time” (The Other Side: “I Never Saw Clark Kent Cry”).

Unfortunately, our society has relegated characteristics such as sensitivity and gentleness to the feminine. Feminists have gone so far as to suggest that God is female because he demonstrates these qualities.

It has been stated that TV for the 1980s will promote women as dominant, aggressive, and successful. In contrast, picture the recent commercial for a bath product—an unattractive, pudgy man playing in the bathtub with his rubber duck.

Is it any wonder that boys grow up not knowing who they are, what they should be, and how they should act?

A Different Mold

There once lived a man who exuded confidence and authority. He knew why he was here and where he was going. His purpose kept him from being side-tracked by the errant philosophies of his day. He was not afraid of being thought weak when he cuddled children or treated women with respect. He showed affection to his close friends. Public opinion did not alter his behavior or pressure him into conforming to the status quo.

However, by today’s standards he was a failure, a drifter. During the critical years of his life he held no steady job. He never began a business or joined a progressive company. He bypassed political power and cared nothing for prestige. He never starred in the National Football League. Somewhat of a revolutionary, he ignored certain social customs. He wandered about, finding food where he could and sleeping from place to place. Yet he remains the one consistent role model for masculinity today. In fact, he personifies the perfect role model for both males and females, since he was the perfect human.

It is helpful to look at the male aspect of Jesus Christ in his humanity, for he portrayed a theology of maleness. He was a picture of masculinity, a role model for boys to follow as they grow up learning to be men. His relationship to his Father, his understanding of himself, and his involvement with others paint for us a picture worth our study.

His Relationship To His Father

Today many observe the male role model in fathers who are uncertain about how to handle their maleness, or in peers who have no better information than they do themselves. TV broadcasts have misconstrued information and distorted practice. The present generation has grown up on a diet of an exaggerated macho male image—the well-built, handsome athlete with a beer can in his hand and the latest model car in his driveway. He seeks recognition by his own effort.

What a contrast that is to the solitary man climbing a mountain to commune with his Father. He prayed all night before choosing his 12 disciples. His dependence on the Father forced him to be a man of prayer.

Luke says, “But he himself would often slip away to the wilderness and pray” (Luke 5:16). His habit of prayer led him to Gethsemane where he fell on his face under an old olive tree. His face contorted as he poured out his dread of the approaching cross. Blood and sweat drained down his face, soaked his beard, and stained his robe. Sobs convulsed his rugged frame as he struggled to learn obedience by the things he suffered.

His submission was demonstrated throughout his life as he lived by the principles of Scripture. “It is written, ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God’” (Matt. 4:4, NASB).

He refuted the critical Pharisees. “The Son can do nothing of himself, unless it is something he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in like manner” (John 5:19).

Paul says that Christ emptied himself, gave up his right to equality with God, and humbled himself to become a man, a servant of men. He voluntarily laid aside the independent exercise of his divine power, placing himself under the authority of his father and allowing the Holy Spirit to control him (Phil. 2:5–8; Luke 4:1).

Man was created to enjoy fellowship with God, achieved with the dependence upon God demonstrated by Jesus Christ.

His Self-Understanding

Jesus Christ stands in sharp contrast to a culture that judges manhood by appearance and status. Many in society applaud the macho, athletic body, but Isaiah prophesied concerning Jesus, “He has no stately form or majesty that we should look upon him, nor appearance that we should be attracted to him” (Isa. 53:2).

Society lauds the man with power, prestige, and wealth. Jesus said, “Whoever then humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:4).

Society says: Express yourself, demand your rights, get ahead in life. Jesus said, “If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life shall lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake, he is the one who will save it” (Luke 9:23–24).

Today we see severe pressure from the business and professional world to believe that real men make it to the top financially, politically, and socially, To do this, many men avoid family responsibility, leaving it to their wives. They may live out a passive example at home, or escape altogether. Others, to hide their weakness and inadequacy, become authoritarian Still others choose a deviated sexual identity, the ultimate role confusion.

By contrast, Jesus Christ, the perfect example of masculinity, walked through life with an air of confidence and courage. Accused by unbelieving religious leaders, he could retort, “You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father.… But because I speak the truth, you do not believe me” (John 8:44–45). His courage lashed whipping cords through the temple when it was desecrated by money changers and by bawling firstborn calves.

He knew he was the Christ, sent from the Father to accomplish salvation. His purpose sent him, face like a flint, to Jerusalem to die. Understanding his person and his destiny allowed him to speak with authority.

Yet with all his confidence he remained perfectly adjusted to his own person, in tune with his feelings. Our failure here has produced tragic results. Consider a mother’s letter recorded in A Reward from the Lord: “Just before Stuart entered fourth grade we moved to an industrial area where we lived throughout his high school years. Boys were tough and athletic in this community, and the school drop-out ratio was high. Stuart soon learned that it was not acceptable for a boy to be musical, artistic, or intelligent; he was all three.… Unfortunately, the church and Christian schools in the area reflected the values of the community. Consequently, Stuart spent his early teens denying what he was by nature.”

To escape his misery, Stuart, like thousands of other young boys, turned to drugs and wasted his life.

Like Stuart, Jesus was a sensitive person, but he did not hesitate to weep publicly at the death of his friend Lazarus. He cried with compassion over the rebellion of Jerusalem. The suffering of death produced in him an agony inappropriate to today’s male image.

He acknowledged his need for communion with his Father and fellowship with other men. He associated with 12 disciples, enjoyed an intimate relationship with Peter and James, and apparently had a special love for John. He seems to have been close to both men and women in his larger circle of disciples.

Accepting his humanity enabled him to express his feelings in any situation without embarrassment. The Pharisees’ rejection never intimidated him, nor did he respond defensively. His confidence lay cemented in the knowledge that his purpose was always to do the Father’s will.

Involvement With Others

Jesus hiked both difficult trails and pleasant hillsides, and also mingled in the marketplaces. Sweat matted his hair. He sometimes smelled of the sea, of fish drying under the sun. His eyes revealed the pain of loneliness, the flash of anger, the delight of a man who loves children. His identification with humanity demonstrated God’s design for masculinity.

His acceptance of himself freed him from self-preoccupation so he could minister to others. He displayed authority and leadership, clothed with gentleness. On one hand, he was not heavy-handedly authoritarian; on the other hand, he was not passive, shifting his responsibilities to the disciples or the women around him.

He came as a servant to give his life. He washed the disciples’ feet, the job for the lowliest slave in the household. His manliness wore the homespun garment of a servant as well as the robes of authority.

How different it is today. Boys are urged to “kill ‘em” on the football field, and they learn to avoid any expression of tender feeling. To assume responsibility or to care for someone weaker is in itself considered weakness. Society often abuses and disdains the “different” boy, the one who is timid or feeble. A man’s man is rough, tough, and strong. Rudeness is often tolerated as masculinity.

Yet Jesus expressed his feelings openly, not needing to be stoical or indifferent or brutal as little boys are often taught today. He wept with his friends who grieved over death. It is easy to picture him laughing with the children who danced around him, tugged at his robe, and pressed close to get a hug.

He was strikingly concerned for the needs of others—the poor, sick, elderly, oppressed. He was “moved with compassion” for the dirty leper and the hungry, wandering multitude.

Rather than being instruments of harshness, his hands soothed and healed the man born blind, Peter’s mother-in-law, the daughter of the synagogue official.

How different is this gentleness from much of what we see of distorted maleness today. My husband once greeted a massive seminarian who held the hand of his small son. Squatting to make eye contact with the boy, my husband said, “You’re quite a little man.”

“No, he’s not. He’s a sissy!” responded the father.

Will such a boy grow up to be the kind of man who can be sensitive and affectionate?

Jesus did not fear being thought a sissy for demonstrating his affection in public. Consider his use of touch. He allowed the beloved disciple John to lay his head on his breast. He accepted a demonstration of Mary’s deep devotion as she anointed his feet with precious ointment.

Jesus received people as they were, although he rejected their sin and tried to lift them to a higher plane of purity. Gini Andrews says of him, “He was mild with the strength it takes to be gentle when confronted with weakness or stupidity” (Sons of Freedom). Yet, when necessary, forcefulness pushed through his humility, as in his response to Herod: “Go tell that fox … or to the Pharisees, whom he called “white-washed tombs.”

Women today are often pictured as paper dolls, playthings for men who, James Bond style, use them as they wish. But Jesus, aware of the sensitivity of women, treated them with gentleness. Consider the immoral woman who washed his feet with her tears, Mary sitting at his feet, even Martha as he chided her for her inverted priorities. He responded to the widow of Nain and showed concern for those women who stood by watching him as he stumbled toward his death. Yet his sensitivity was not saccharine or cloying. He laid it on the line to the woman of Samaria, and to the Syrophoenician woman.

Jesus Christ remains the one perfect example of complete humanity. Following his masculine role model will not produce a stereotype, an assembly line production of maleness. Because of his infinity, his life develops in each man—and each woman—a unique representation of himself, with multitudinous shades of character, producing no two disciples alike.

We moderns are repelled by the thought of blood cleansing, but biologically and spiritually the precious liquid does exactly that.

Blood is life—spiritually and physically. Few persons are more appreciative of this truth than surgeon and devout Christian Paul Brand. In this and the following two issues, CT presents Brand’s striking insights, polished by writer Philip Yancey. Each essay may be understood exclusive of the others, but all explore the themes of blood and the Lord’s Supper.

I turn up the collar of my wool topcoat and bow my head against the penetrating, moisture-laden wind. Snowflakes are gradually transforming the tired modern city of London into a Dickensian Christmas card. On a deserted street I stop under an ancient street lamp and look up. Snow arcs around the lamp like an endless shower of electrical sparks, then floats down to cover pothole, gutter, car, and sidewalk alike with a uniform coat of softly glowing white.

From somewhere I hear music, muffled brass and what seems like human voices. On a night like this? I walk toward the sound and the music grows louder until I round a corner and see its source: a Salvation Army band. A man and a woman are playing a trombone and trumpet respectively, and I grimace as I imagine the effect of metal pressed against lips in the numbing wind. Three others, evidently new recruits, are lustily singing a hymn based on a poem by William Cowper.

Only two other people are listening: a drunken gentleman who is propping himself against the stone porch railing of a Georgian-style townhouse, and a businessman on the corner who keeps glancing at a pocket watch. The words are familiar to me:

There is a fountain filled with blood

Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins;

And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,

Lose all their guilty stains …

An unavoidable smile crosses my face as I hear those words. I have just come from hospital rounds, where I saw blood being drawn from some veins, transfused into others, and diligently scrubbed off surgical smocks and nurses’ uniforms. With my church background, I know the origin and meaning of that Christian hymn, but these other two bystanders, listening half-heartedly—what images fill their minds as they hear those words?

Would not such a phrase as “washed in the blood of the Lamb” seem to the modern Englishman as bizarre as a report of animal sacrifice being practiced in Indonesia?

We moderns have an initial resistance to the intrusion of blood into our religion. In this respect, we differ from all previous cultures. Virtually all “primitive” religions, including those of Rome and Greece, believed blood had sacramental power, and a bloodless religion would have seemed f*ckless to most ancients. To them, blood was an everyday substance. They killed their calves and chickens with knives before feasting, whereas we moderns select ours in shrink-wrapped packages, drained of blood and all reminder of slaughter.

Besides this unfamiliarity, an even greater barrier blocks off the meaning of the blood symbol from modern hearers. Consider the term “washed in the blood”: nothing in modern culture corresponds to the idea of blood as a cleansing agent. We use water, with soap or detergent, to clean. Blood is a soiling or staining agent, something we try to scrub off, not scrub with. What possible meaning could the hymn writer, and Bible writers before him, have intended?

The symbol of blood with its specific quality of cleansing appears throughout the Bible, from the earliest books to the latest. In Leviticus 14, for example, a priest sprinkles cleansing blood on the skin of a person with an infectious skin disease and on the mildewed walls of a plaster house. New Testament authors often refer to Jesus’ blood “cleansing” us (e.g., 1 John 1:7), and Revelation describes a multitude who “have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (Rev. 7:14).

Does this frequent reference to blood indicate primitive Christianity’s distance from modern culture? To the contrary, in the case of this one symbol, blood, and its specific application of cleansing, modern medical science has shown that the meaning derives precisely from the function of the actual substance. Presumably, biblical writers did not know the physiology behind their metaphor, but the Creator chose a theological symbol with an exact analog in the medical world. All that we have learned about physiology in recent years confirms the accuracy of the still-jarring juxtaposition of blood and cleansing. The theological image immortalized by William Cowper’s hymn makes for good biology as well.

I suggest a simple experiment if you truly wish to grasp the function of blood as a cleansing agent. Find a blood pressure test kit and wrap the cuff around your upper arm. When it is in position, have a friend pump it up to about 200 mm. of mercury, a sufficient pressure to stop the flow of blood in your arm. Initially your arm will feel an uncomfortable tightness beneath the cuff. Now comes the revealing part of the experiment: perform any easy task with your cuffed arm. Merely flex your fingers and make a fist about ten times in succession, or cut paper with scissors or drive a nail into wood with a hammer.

The first few movements will seem quite normal as the muscles obediently contract and relax. Then you will feel a slight weakness. Almost without warning a hot flash of pain will strike, after maybe ten movements. Your muscles will cramp. If you force yourself to continue the simple task, you will likely cry out in absolute agony. Finally, you cannot will yourself to continue; the pain overwhelms you.

When you release the tourniquet and air escapes from the cuff, blood will rush into your aching arm and a wonderful sense of relief will soothe your muscles. The pain is worth enduring just to experience that acute relief. Your muscles move freely, the pain vanishes, and life feels good again. Physiologically, you have just experienced the cleansing power of blood.

While the blood supply to your arm was shut off, you forced your muscles to keep working. As they converted oxygen into energy, they produced certain waste products (metabolites) that are normally flushed away instantly in the bloodstream. Due to the constricted blood flow, however, these metabolites accumulated in your cells. They were not “cleansed” by the swirling stream of blood, and therefore in a few minutes you felt the agony of retained toxins.

The body performs its janitorial processes with such speed and efficiency that I must pause for at least a summary of them. Hold the theological metaphor in abeyance while I indulge in a quick scan of the body’s cleansing processes.

No cell lies more than a hair’s breadth from a blood capillary, lest poisonous by-products pile up and cause the same ill effects felt in the blood pressure cuff experiment. Through a basic chemical process of gas diffusion and transfer, individual red blood cells, traveling slowly inside narrow capillaries, simultaneously release their cargoes of fresh oxygen and absorb waste products (carbon dioxide, urea, and uric acid). The red cells deliver these potentially hazardous chemicals to organs that can dump them outside the body.

In the lungs, carbon dioxide collects in small pockets and is exhaled with every breath. The body monitors how long this process takes and makes instantaneous adjustments. If too much carbon dioxide accumulates, as when I climb a flight of stairs and expend more energy, an involuntary switch increases my breathing to speed up the process. (Conversely, no one can commit suicide by not breathing—the involuntary trigger “forces” you to.)

Complex chemicals are filtered out by a more discriminating organ, the kidney. I must restrain myself from writing long, rhapsodic pages about the kidneys. Some observers judge them second only to the brain in complexity. The body obviously values them greatly, for one-fourth of the blood from each heartbeat courses down the renal artery to the paired kidneys. That artery divides and subdivides into a tracery of tubules so intricate as to bedazzle the finest Venetian glass blower.

Filtering is what the kidney is all about, but in very little space and time—a new heartbeat pumps another gallon of blood through the floodgates each second. The kidney manages speed by coiling the tubules into two million crystal loops, where cells can be picked over one by one.

Red cells being too bulky for those tiny passageways, the kidney extracts all the sugars, salts, and water from each cell and deals with them separately. This segregation process roughly compares to a master mechanic who has a garage the size of a woodshed. To tune a car engine, he hoists it out of the car, disassembles and scours each individual valve, piston, and ring, then reassembles the hundreds of parts minus the grime and corrosion.

The kidney removes the red cell’s entire payload to distill some 30 chemicals; then its enzymes promptly reinsert 99 percent of the volume into the bloodstream. The 1 percent remaining, mostly ammonia, is hustled away to the bladder to await expulsion. One second later, the thunder of the heart resounds throughout the body and a gallon of fresh blood rushes in to fill the tubules.

An elite coterie of people in the world view the kidney with an attitude approaching reverence. These are the few without kidneys, or with useless kidneys. Thirty years ago all of those people would have died. Now they have much time to contemplate the wonders of the kidney—too much time. Twice a week for six hours they lie or sit motionless while a tube drains all their blood into a noisy, clanging, washing machine the size of a large suitcase. The function of this technological monster, a kidney dialysis machine, crudely approximates the intricate work of the soft, bean-shaped human variety. Ours, however, weighs only one pound and works around the clock. Just to be sure, our body provides a spare—one kidney would do the job just fine.

Other organs enter into the scavenging process also. A durable red cell can only sustain this rough sequence of freight loading and unloading for a quarter-million circuits or so and then, battered and leaky as a worn-out river barge, it is nudged to the liver and spleen for one last unloading. This time, the red cell itself is picked clean, broken down into amino acids and bile pigments for recycling. The tiny heart of iron, “magnet” for the crucial hemoglobin molecule, limps back to the bone marrow for reincarnation in another red cell. Four million red cells a second retire to the junkyard in my body; four million more leap from the marshes of bone marrow to begin their circuit of fueling and cleansing.

All this inquiry into the process of cleansing leads back to the meaning of the metaphor. Blood sustains life by carrying away the chemical by-products that would interfere with it. This, then, is the medical explanation of blood’s cleansing property. As I reflect on the body of Christ, the blood metaphor offers a fresh and enlightening perspective on a perpetual problem in that body: sin.

The word sin is dusty, timeworn, and freighted with unfortunate connotations. And the metaphors commonly used to describe God’s relationship with sinful creatures are equally onerous. God is the judge, we the accused—but although biblically accurate, that metaphor has lost much of its force as the modern legal system has grown less trustworthy and more capricious. Justice has become a formal code to be scrutinized and applied without compassion. Metaphors age over time; sometimes they crack, and the concepts inside them begin to spill out.

Yet in blood we have the perfect analog to reveal the process of sin and forgiveness with startling clarity. Forgiveness cleanses the wasteful products, sins, that impede true health, just as blood cleanses harmful metabolites.

Too often we tend to view sin as a private list of grievances that happen to irk God the Father. Laws were given for his sake, and in the Old Testament he seems easily irritated. But even a casual reading of the Old Testament shows that sin is a blockage, a paralyzing toxin that restricts our realization of full humanity. God gave laws for our sake, not for his own.

To realize the full meaning of romantic love, we must recognize the natural laws that govern an exclusive relationship. In a complete, fulfilling relationship with God and our neighbors, equally binding principles apply. When pride, egoism, lust, and covetousness take over, they poison us, interfering with those relationships. They must be purged out before we can become fully human. “Truly it is evil to be full of faults,” said Pascal, “but it is a still greater evil to be full of them, and to be unwilling to recognize them.”

Separation is at the root of sin: separation from God, other people, and our true selves. The more we cling to our private desires, our thirsts for success, our own satisfactions at the expense of others, the farther we will withdraw from God and others. The Old Testament Israelites had a vivid pictorial representaton of this state of separation: God’s Presence rested in a Most Holy Place, approachable only once a year (the Day of Atonement) by one man, the high priest, who had purified himself through an elaborate series of blood sacrifices. Jesus Christ made that ceremony obsolete by a historical once-for-all sacrifice. “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 26:28, NIV), he said as he instituted the Last Supper. Later the author of Hebrews constrasted Christ’s complete, once-for-all sacrifice to the partial, annual rituals enacted by the high priest (Heb. 9:23–28). Christ became sacrificial victim as well as priest, conquering evil by forgiving it with his own blood.

The Lord’s Supper as celebrated today contrasts sharply with the Old Testament ceremony. Then, each worshiper had to go to a fixed geographical point to receive forgiveness at the hands of a designated priest. The stench of death, the sight of blood splattering an altar, the odor of burning flesh, a Holy of Holies off limits to everyone, an offering brought by each worshiper—these elements characterized that worship scene. Now, the Lord’s Supper expresses that Christ’s sacrifice was made continuous and ongoing. It is taken personally, into the interior of every member of his body. In other words, the same living blood that bathes every cell with the nutrients of life also carries away all the accumulated waste and refuse. By his blood we are forgiven, made clean.

No longer must we approach God through a purified priest, no longer await the Day of Atonement to enter the Holy of Holies. On the day Christ died, the thick temple veil separating God from man split from top to bottom. Now we, all of us, can enter into direct communion with him: “We have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body” (Heb. 10:19, NIV). Or, again, “Now in Christ Jesus you who were once far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ” (Eph. 2:13).

The word Repentance describes the process of each cell undergoing that cleansing action. C. S. Lewis reminds us that repentance “is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose; it is simply a description of what going back is like.” In the terms of our analogy, in repentance each cell willingly cooperates with the available cleansing process of blood. It is for our sakes, not so much to punish us as to free us from the harmful effects of accumlating sins.

In addition to removing sin, Christ’s blood replaces it with his own righteousness. He manages a stuff exchange wholly to our benefit. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us,” Paul said, “so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). “This is his body, broken for you”—for your gossiping, your lust, your pride, your insensitivity; broken to remove all those and replace them with his perfect obedience.

We humans do not take easily to forgiveness. The concept flies against reason. We are prepared for anything but this: a God who strikes hard bargains, yes, but not One who lets us off scot-free. Missionaries to remote peoples report that mercy is the most difficult concept of Christianity for them to grasp. We expect pain in approaching God, and fear; but unqualified, as-if-it-never-happened forgiveness stops us short. Perhaps for this reason the church has tempered forgiveness over the centuries, often seeming to prefer the morals business, distributing guilt, to the business of forgiveness, dispensing grace.

A fear lurks in each of us. Perhaps when God discovers the real truth, perhaps then he will stop loving us. We forget that, even among human relationships, when you love someone, his or her weaknesses and defects become part of the bond that pulls you closer. Not until that person lets you see true humanity do you feel you really know him or her. In an incomprehensible way this is how the Creator loves the creature, and is why Jesus lingered so often among adulterers, tax collectors, and Samaritans. It is why he favored the sinner over the Pharisee: the sinner was closer to God, not in similarity but in approach. Aware of the awful burden of his sins, he gladly released them to God’s forgiveness. The Pharisee, inhibited by pride, clung to his sins.

Why do any of us go to church and sit on rather uncomfortable furniture, in stiff clothes, lined up in rows as in a high school classroom, singing songs unlike any we have heard all week? Is it not because in each of us a spark of hope has been lit—a hope to be known, to be forgiven, to be healed, to be loved? Something like this yearning lies at the heart of the Lord’s Supper.

All symbols are weaker than the reality behind them, and we poorly perceive the reality behind the form. But Christ has given us the wine and the bread as proof that we are forgiven, healed, and loved. The symbol works its way inside us, becoming material as well as spiritual nourishment, carrying its message to individual cells throughout each body.

“What does my blood do all day?” a five-year-old child asked, while peering dubiously at his scraped knee. Whereas the ancients would have answered elegantly with references to ethers and humours carried by that “pure clear lovely and amiable juyce,” perhaps a technological metaphor would serve best today.

Imagine a plastic pneumatic tube snaking southward from Canada through Orinoco jungles, plunging into oceans only to surface at every inhabited island, shooting out eastward through every jungle, plain and desert in Africa, forking near Egypt to join all of Europe and Russia as well as the entire Middle East and Asia—a pipeline so global and all-pervading that it links every one of the four billion people worldwide. Inside that tube an endless plentitude of treasures floats along: 49 brands of cereals; mangoes, Kiwi fruit, asparagus, and other produce from every continent; watches, calculators, and cameras; genes and minerals; all styles and sizes of clothing; the contents of entire shopping centers. All four billion people have access: at a moment of need or want, you simply reach into the tube and seize whatever product suits your taste. Somewhere far down the pipeline a replacement is manufactured and inserted.

Such a pipeline exists inside each one of us, servicing not four billion but one hundred trillion cells in every person’s body. A stockpile of oxygen, amino acids, nitrogen, sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, sugars, lipids, cholesterols, and hormones surges past our cells on rafts of blood cells. Each cell has special withdrawal privileges and uses the resources to fuel a tiny engine, which carries out complex chemical reactions.

In addition, that same pipeline ferries away refuse, exhaust gases, and worn-out chemicals. In the interest of economical transport, the body dissolves its vital substances into a liquid, much as coal is shipped most efficiently through a slurry pipeline rather than by truck or train. Five or six quarts of this all-purpose fluid suffice for all hundred trillion cells.

In the Eucharist, we are reminded of the overarching forgiveness accomplished in Christ’s bloody sacrifice that made obsolete the whole Jewish sacrificial system. And we also experience the particular, cell-by-cell cleansing of toxins that have accumulated and will not easily release their grip. “For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!” (Rom. 5:10, NIV). If sin is the great separator, Christ is the great reconciler. He dissolves the membrane of separation that grows up every day between ourselves and others, ourselves and God. “Now in Christ Jesus,” said Paul elsewhere, “you who were once far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ. He himself is our peace.”

Near the end of his life, François Mauriac, the French Catholic novelist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature, reflected on his own love-hate history with the church. He detailed the ways in which the church had not kept its promise: the petty rifts and compromises that have characterized it throughout history. The church, he said, had strayed far from the precepts and example of its founder. And yet, added Mauriac, despite all its failings the church had at least remembered two words of Christ: “Your sins are forgiven you,” and “This is my body broken for you.” The Lord’s Supper brings together those two words in a quiet ceremony of healing, cleansing individual cells in his Body of all impurities.

Why is the one-time winner now a loser?

Traditionally, the church in America has been overwhelmingly evangelical. As the dominant religion, evangelicalism gave structure to this nation’s world view and to its ethics (honored in theory if not in practice).

But beginning about 1880, liberalism began to move into the American church in serious fashion. By the end of the First World War, religious liberalism had become dominant in many of the older, so-called mainline denominations, and it continued to reign supreme over the leadership of the churches between the two world wars. From Riverside Drive in New York, the old Federal (now National) Council of Churches was its official voice and spoke for American Christendom in the halls of Congress and to the public media. The liberal Christian Century became its literary flagship. Liberalism controlled the resources, agencies, religious colleges and universities, the most influential seminaries, prestigious foundations, and the religious book publishers. But how and why did this all come about?

The Wave Of Scientific Secularism

In some ways, liberalism was merely an eddy of a far broader stream sweeping through history. Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, in his classic work The Crisis of Our Age, traces the movement from a society whose values are based on God and religion to one whose values are drawn from the world of the five senses. While one need not buy every aspect of Sorokin’s rather too-neat evolution of Western thought, still all must agree that Western civilization has gone through a massive change in the last 300 years. For most Western Europeans as well as for most Americans, God and the church are no longer dominant factors. Western Christendom has become secularized. Its center of interest is man and this world. It settles for a sort of practical materialism.

This context explains the essential nature of liberalism, which evangelicalism has generally misunderstood. It has considered liberalism as an attack focused against orthodox Christianity out of hatred for biblical revelation and supernatural Christianity. Not so. It is safe to say that no liberal ever reckons himself as an enemy of traditional Christianity, but as a preserver. Harvard dean Willard Sperry characterized it as the “Yes, But” religion in a volume by that title: Yes, I believe in the deity of Christ, but the language of Chalcedon has become meaningless. We must redefine the doctrine so as to make it intelligible to us who live in the twentieth century. Yes, I believe in the Virgin Birth of Christ, but the important thing is not any biological fact but the value of Jesus for us. Liberalism always wanted to be Christian, but it always wanted to be “with it,” too. For three centuries the world has moved at an accelerated pace away from traditional religious and Christian values. In its essence, religious liberalism was an attempt to meet this challenge by updating an old and beloved religion so it could survive in the modern world. Liberalism succeeded so well because it rode the crest of what during the first third of the century seemed to be the wave of the future.

A Weakened Evangelicalism

But another factor helps explain the swift triumph of religious liberalism. Evangelicalism never was so widespread in America as many thought.

But this earlier evangelical influence on America gradually waned as, oddly enough, church membership skyrocketed. During the last century the American nation began more and more to identify with the church. To be a good American, one must belong to a church. As a result, the churches of America experienced a “Constantinian” effect like the Roman church at the beginning of the fourth century. Everyone moved into the church, and the church became filled with half-converted and unconverted members. Their meager Christian knowledge made them easy prey for a liberal gospel that would allow them to secure the comforting assurances of traditional religion while yet holding on to all the new values of a modern secular and scientific world view.

Ignorance Of The Bible

Finally, among other factors, the increasing pluralism of American society helped render the church susceptible to a liberal takeover. Beginning early in the nineteenth century, Roman Catholic infiltration into the port city of New York posed a problem for the public schools, then dominated by evangelical Protestantism and supported by the state. Roman Catholics demanded tax money for their schools also, so that they could rear their children in the Catholic faith. They appealed to the antiestablishment clause in the Constitution. But Protestants were unwilling to pay Roman Catholics to educate Catholic children. They preferred to exclude all sectarian religions from the public schools.

This fatal decision set American Protestantism on a course of religious illiteracy. It is no wonder that Protestant churches offered little effective opposition to liberal leadership. During the last two decades, Catholics have reluctantly abandoned their parochial schools and the opportunity to give their children solid instruction in their faith. Thus, the Roman Catholic church, like the Protestant church before it, is rapidly becoming an illiterate body. Protestant illiteracy was a major contributing cause to the breakdown of Protestant orthodoxy and the sweep of religious liberalism through the church leadership. It is no accident that the breakdown of the Catholic school system accompanied this disintegration of the traditional American Catholic church in the middle of the twentieth century.

A House Of Cards

Liberalism swept over the American churches, but if its rise was amazingly swift, its fall was even more so. Like a house of cards, it fell with unbelievable rapidity—first in Europe after World War I, and then in the United States after the Great Depression of the thirties and World War II.

I wish I could say that the decline and fall of religious liberalism was due to the overwhelming challenge offered it by a vigorous evangelical apologetic. The fact is, evangelicalism was never weaker than in the thirties. Liberalism was not challenged from without, but decayed from within:

1. Liberalism lost its faith in the liberal gods. It could no longer believe in the goodness of man or in the sweet reasonableness of the world, or in automatic progress, or in science’s ability to solve all the problems of humanity. Evolution had not really placed humans on an escalator that inevitably took them up and out of all the ills of the world.

2. Liberalism lacked a doctrine of salvation. It sought to build the superstructure of a beautiful Christian ethic without providing an adequate foundation in redemptive supernatural Christianity. It could tell man how to live, but when tragedy struck and sin corrupted, it faltered, for it had no solution to the problem of sin. It was a case of seeking beautiful fruit from a tree with no roots to nourish it.

3. Liberals could not defend the basis of their beliefs. Liberal apologetics scintillated with devastating attacks upon outworn dogmas. But when it came to a positive construction of new faith, it fragmented into personal feuds. Liberalism had a method, but no theology that could win any consensus.

In a way, Karl Barth illustrates all three of these liberal tensions. As a minister of a small church on the Swiss border during the First World War, he found his liberal optimism destroyed by the distant booming of the guns of Verdun. His confidence in his liberal teachers faded as he saw them lining up in solid support of a war that seemed to deny all of the fundamental tenets of their own liberal faith. Then, on Sunday when he mounted the sacred pulpit to deliver his morning message, the table of the law would slip from his fingers, He found himself offering worthless advice (that even he only half believed) to a people waiting in deepest personal need. Karl Barth, the liberal, found that his liberalism simply did not fit the real world he saw opening up before him.

Beyond the three liberal flaws mentioned so far, there were two others that Barth did not recognize until later.

4. At its center, liberalism harbored a contradictory Christology. The liberal Christ was a good man who taught his fellow humans a simple gospel of the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the ministry of the kingdom; and he set before them a good example to follow. But more and more it became apparent that the real Jesus was not at all what liberals conceived him to be. Surely, at the end of his life he claimed to be Messiah and identified himself in a unique way with God. He provided no example for sinners who stood in dire need of forgiveness from a holy God. Worst of all, he was through and through a supernaturalist who accepted the complete divine authority of holy Scripture, believed in demons and exorcism, held to a God who numbered the very hairs of our head; his intimate piety and blatant supernaturalism were the antithesis of liberal faith. Albert Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus summarized the unsolvable contradiction in the liberal understanding of Christ.

5. Finally, liberalism never penetrated to the masses. It always remained a theology of the university professor of philosophy or the seminary professor of theology. It lacked religious power at the grassroots level, and this was its fatal flaw.

Be that as it may, in Europe by the 1930s the old liberalism had been destroyed. And American liberalism followed suit almost immediately after World War II.

New Liberalisms

Occasionally, we hear rumors of liberalism’s revival in our day. Now and then, liberal ideas float momentarily across the theological scene. But the older liberalism is dead. Its new forms present a radically different structure of Christian faith and usually are unwilling even to claim the name. The old religious liberalism that dominated our churches through the first third of this century will not soon rise again.

But if religious liberalism is understood in terms of a restructured Christianity, we shall probably always have it with us. In this sense, religious liberalism is a by-product of evangelical Christianity. In a free society, there will always be a pluralism of faith. Revisionist Christianities, and there are many of them, represent halfway houses from faith to unfaith, from Christianity to secularism. The old liberalism we have known is dead, but new liberalisms—new compromises with secularism—have risen and will continue to rise so long as man is free.

KENNETH S. KANTZER

By Their Reviews You Will Know Them

While browsing among the used books in a local bookstore, I discovered an early edition of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. In the back were pasted some of the reviews published in various religious periodicals. I quote here just a selection.

The Fundamentalist Journal: Without agreeing with everything the author writes, we feel the book has a message. Had Goldilocks remained separated, she would not have endangered her life. Her going to sleep instead of fleeing is a warning to our youth who are constantly being lulled to sleep by intellectualism, neoevangelicalism, and other false teachings.

Bibliotheca Sacra: An exciting tale built around the number three (i.e., three bears, three chairs, three bowls of soup, three beds). The bears are a definite allusion to Daniel 7 and Revelation 13. The presence of lukewarm soup indicates that the events take place during the Laodicean age. The fact that the author has Goldilocks escape danger indicates his or her belief in the pretribulation rapture of the church. We suggest that in the next edition the author include a chart of the forest and the floor plan of the house.

Sojourners: This apparently innocent story is obviously a cover-up for an insidious “tract for the times” that promotes disrespect for other people’s property. How a well-to-do girl could take food away from poor creatures, and then (feeling no guilt whatsoever) go to sleep, is beyond us. Such is the social conscience of the church today!

Moody Monthly: A clever presentation of hospitality, good manners, and family oneness, depicted by three lovable bears. We have arranged for Dr. John MacArthur to bring out an annotated version as well as a series of seven films. Puppets will also be available. Highly recommended for Sunday school, VBS, and Awana Clubs.

… and they lived happily ever after.

EUTYCHUS

Alarming News

Your news article on the dialogue between evangelicals and Jews [Dec. 17] is alarming. Evangelical leaders seem willing to seek common ground apart from Jesus Christ. The apostles struggled to prove to the Jews that “this Jesus is the Christ” (Acts 9:22). They were willing to suffer persecution for this essential truth. Further, the epitome of God’s love is in giving his Son (John 3:16). Now we see eminent leaders of the evangelical community finding satisfaction in common ground apart from Jesus Christ. Were the apostles just too narrow? Is there a better love to display than the love of God which finds its expression in Christ? What objective could possibly be so desirable as to warrant keeping the Lord Jesus Christ in the closet?

One of the evangelical participants returned to our area and boldly asserted that it is possible to be saved apart from a New Testament knowledge of Jesus Christ. Our mandate is to set forth Christ in word and deed, but never to deny Christ even as a temporary measure to gain some perceived “greater good.”

JOHN M. CUSTIS

Gresham, Oreg.

What Does It Mean?

Now that we have a “surprising agreement” by the Council on Biblical Inerrancy on hermeneutics [“What the Bible Means,” Dec. 17], we must ask what it means, especially when it sidesteps crucial issues.

One wonders whether consistency wasn’t sacrificed to some shibboleths. How can one affirm that “each biblical text is single, definite, and fixed” in its meaning, that this meaning is to be found according to its literal sense (“the grammatical-historical sense, that is, the meaning the writer expressed”), and that “the single meaning of a prophet’s words includes, but is not restricted to, the understanding of those words by the prophet”? Once one says the meaning is more than what the author or writer of the text understood, have we not broken through the chrysalis of the grammatical-historical sense and moved toward at least a limited “fusion” of horizons?

REV. DAVID A. FRASER

Hermitage Presbyterian Church

Hermitage, Tenn.

Future “Classics”

Seldom do I note the author’s name, but I diligently read the contents of the articles. However, this past year three features so moved me that I had to be cognizant of the author. Surprise! They all were by Walter Wangerin, Jr. This brother knows how to weave a plot and tell the story masterfully, while drawing the reader’s response both emotionally and spiritually. I think, also, that his writings will have a certain significance many years from now, should the Lord tarry. They have the potential of becoming “classics.”

STEVEN R. MADSEN

Sibley, Iowa

Walter Wangerin’s poetic prose (or prosaic poetry?) is a refreshing oasis among the more academic articles and a most effective conductor for the insightful and sensitive thinking he generates. It distinguishes him, not just as a skilled craftsman of words, but as a remarkable man of God.

RUSS SPRADLIN

Buena Park, Calif.

How Could That Be?

On the first Christmas the angels proclaimed: “… on earth peace, good will toward men” (Luke 2:14). In his article, “Peace: At Times a Sword and Fire” [Dec. 17], Billy Graham mistakenly suggests that Matthew 10:34 (“I did not come to bring peace, but a sword”) contradicts the angels’ announcement. The Matthew passage uses the word “sword” as a synonym for “divide.” In fact, the corresponding passage in Luke 12:51 actually uses the word “division.” If we say that Matthew 10:34 justifies Christian participation in military service and interpret that verse in the context in which it is written, then we will have to conclude that in this passage the Bible is telling us to declare war against the members of our own family!

LEONARD NOLT

Boise, Idaho

One Way To Righteousness

I was deeply dismayed by the editorial “It’s Too Soon to Quit!” [Dec. 17]. The Carl F. H. Henry quote used and the tenor of the entire editorial are so ladened with enlightenment thinking that I wonder why those battling “secular humanism” have not turned their wrath on them. Where in the Scriptures does it say, “evangelicals, and especially fundamentalists, were (are) going to ‘make America once more a righteous nation’”? I have always understood that the only way to true righteousness and justification is through the blood of Jesus Christ, not the efforts of men.

Once we accept that God’s grace is the only way to righteousness, then we as Christians can be free to participate in matters of social justice, not as acts of redemption, but, as Barth called them, “parabolic” actions that give witness to the glory of God. I would hope these efforts toward social justice would not be seen as an end in themselves but as a reflection of God’s mercy and justice toward us.

ERIC L. OLSON

Ashland, Oreg.

I think after reading the sixth chapter of Matthew that the School Prayer Amendment would more likely allow our children to pray as the hypocrites do. I am convinced after reading this chapter in Matthew that our communication with God cannot be interrupted by any person or court of law.

WILBERT HILL

Downey, Calif.

The impetus for writing this letter was the statement, “The unemployment rate, the President’s economic program, and defense spending all but eclipsed the social issues on election day.” If these are not social issues, I do not know what are.

Since CT has a long tradition as defender of biblical authority, I urge you to look to the Bible. I ask you to show me where prayer in public schools is a social issue in the Bible. When I read of social issues being raised and/or challenged in the Scriptures, I read of such issues as poverty and the misuse of wealth, oppression, or dependence on military might instead of on God. The Old Testament prophets spoke out on these issues and many proclaimed that these are preferred over all the sacrifices or religious practices the people could muster. Even such an important issue as abortion does not receive the attention that these issues receive.

REV. JIM GOODE

Saint Peter’s United Church

Osgood, Ind.

If evangelicals were really concerned for the unborn they would be throwing their political weight behind the freeze campaign, for unless the arms race ends soon, with its diversion of funds from social programs to nuclear weapons, there will be no more children, born or unborn, to worry about.

So, yes, let us as evangelicals get more involved politically. But in doing so let us concentrate our efforts where they are needed most.

REV. JOHN HUBERS

Hawthorne Reformed Church

Hawthorne, N.Y.

Temper! Temper!

Once I got so mad at CT that I thought of taking the time to count the number of times the word “evangelical” appeared in the issue, and then suggest that you rename the magazine “Evangelicals Today.” You seem to use that word more than Christian.

BOB BEVERLEY

Pawling, N.Y.

Mortality Rate

As an actuary I could not believe that Handel was at age 56 “two decades beyond the normal life expectancy of his day” [“Messiah: Behind the Scenes of Handel’s Masterpiece,” Dec. 17].

Using an appropriate mortality table, I found that the expectation of life at birth was about 39 years. Infant mortality in the eighteenth century was very high. But expectation of life at birth is not a true picture of how long people lived in Handel’s era.

For example, if one lived through childhood to age 5, the expected remaining lifetime was about 51 years. If one lived to adulthood (say 16), the expected remaining lifetime was about 44 years. Having lived to age 56 the expected remaining lifetime was about 17 years.

My conclusion: Handel’s longevity was not as unusual for his era as Dinwiddie would lead me to believe. Among the adult population, a person aged 56 or older was not that uncommon.

JAMES MILES

Indianapolis, Ind.

Subscription Cost Justified

Thank you for Walter Elwell’s essay “We Act—Therefore We Believe?” [Nov. 26]. This one column has justified my cost of receiving the magazine for perhaps five years.

If you ever reprint the article—and that isn’t a bad idea—perhaps you will be willing to consider dropping the question mark. When we flee, we become frightened; when we hit, we become angry; when we act loving, we love; when we act out our faith, we believe.

ASHLEY HALE

Lake San Marcos, Calif.