An English missionary traveling in 1877 around the Ruvuma River, which flows between Lake Nyasa and the Indian Ocean, met an old man who preferred an ancient coat, partly disintegrated but of recognizably English cloth. This, he said, had been given him ten years earlier by “a white man who treated black men as brothers.… A short man with a bushy moustache and a keen piercing eye, whose words were always gentle and whose manners were always kind, whom as a leader it was a privilege to follow, and who knew the way to the heart of all men.” Uncannily accurate, the description readily identified David Livingstone, Scottish medical missionary and explorer, whose memory we salute on the centenary of his death (generally reckoned as May 1).
Born in 1813 at Blantyre, nine miles from Glasgow, David with the other children was later to erect a tombstone expressing thankfulness to God “for poor and pious parents” (he would not permit changing that “and” to “but”). At ten he went to work in the local cotton mill, but the omnivorous young reader culled a few words at a time from books propped up by his spinning jenny. Converted at twelve, he had a profound spiritual awakening at twenty, and resolved to be a medical missionary in China. Despite daunting obstacles, he determined to put “a stout heart to a stey brae [steep hill],” studied Greek and theology as well as medicine, returned to the mill during the six-month vacation to help pay his way, was provisionally accepted by the London Missionary Society, and after missionary training and qualifying in medicine, set out for Africa. China had been closed by the Opium War, and anyway David’s heart had been challenged by missionary Robert Moffat’s words about “the vast unoccupied district to the north, where on a clear morning I have seen the smoke of a thousand villages, and no missionary has ever been.”
Livingstone landed in South Africa one week before his twenty-eighth birthday. At Cape Town, before heading for his station at Kuruman, he preached against white exploitation of black, and was later to criticize the deployment of missionaries in the south while those innumerable villages in the north remained untouched. A burning conviction of his was that more use should be made of African workers—long since accepted missionary policy, but at that time alarming to many conservatives. He saw his task as opening up new ground, leaving native agents to work out details. He learned to speak Sechuana fluently during that first year, traveled widely, and treated even native medicine men courteously as having perhaps something to teach him. He got to know the native mind as few did. Writing home once, he mourned the death of a young attendant: “Poor Sehamy.… Where lodges thy soul tonight?… I told thee of a Saviour; didst thou think of him, and did he lead thee through the dark valley?… Help me, O Lord Jesus, to be faithful to every one.”
Robert Moffat’s daughter Mary, whom Livingstone married in 1845, knew three homes in three years as Livingstone moved further up country to Mabotsa, to Chonuane, to Kolobeng. He was doctor, teacher, builder, gardener, shoemaker, carpenter, and much more. All the time his eyes were on the “unknown north” beyond the fearsome Kalahari Desert, where he could establish work the Boers could not spoil. The Boers, who did not believe that natives had souls, were pushing up from the south, pressing the tribes back, commandeering their water-places, seizing their men for free labor—and once during Livingstone’s absence from Kolobeng looting his house and destroying precious papers.
In 1852 he sent his wife and children home before embarking on a four-year, 6,000-mile journey that took him west to the Atlantic at Loanda in Angola, and east to the Indian Ocean at Quelimane in Mozambique. During this and other long weary journeys, debilitating illnesses, danger from wild animals and hostile tribes, he never relaxed his self-imposed discipline but made observations, studied languages, prepared reports for scientific friends and for the Royal Geographical Society. Their acclaim did not change him. In his journal for May 22, 1853, he notes: “I will place no value on anything I have … except in relation to the Kingdom of Christ.”
In 1857 during his first furlough he gave an electrifying address at Cambridge University. “I direct your attention to Africa,” he said, with clipped compelling speech. “I know in a few years I shall be cut off in that country which is now open.… Do you carry out the work I have begun. I leave it with you!” One result was the formation of the Universities Mission to Central Africa. That same year, with mutual good will, Livingstone left the LMS on appointment by the government as head of an expedition to explore the Zambesi region. His British assistants found him tireless, exacting, and often uncommunicative about his plans, largely because of having worked so long alone. As missionary or explorer, however, he always had right priorities. Threatened once by a hostile crowd, he remembered God’s promise, “Lo, I am with you alway,” and commented: “It is the word of a gentleman of the most sacred and strictest honor.”
He was outraged by slave-trading, practiced for centuries by the Arabs and countenanced, if not actively abetted, by the Portuguese. His activities in freeing slaves from their chains (“the men … each had his neck in a fork of stout stick six or seven feet long and kept in by an iron rod which was riveted at both ends across the throat”) led to rumblings in Lisbon and London, and contributed to the recall of an expedition whose discoveries included the great falls Livingstone named Victoria after his queen.
In 1861 his wife died at forty-one, her sacrifices having been hardly less than his. He threw himself fiercely into his work, became more withdrawn, but never lost his indomitable will. It led him to refuse an invitation to go home from Henry Morton Stanley, sent to find him by the New York Herald. Stanley’s kindness greatly moved Livingstone, and probably saved his life for another eighteen months until at Ilala in what is now Zambia he was discovered dead, kneeling by the side of his bed.
His heart was removed and planted under a tree, then with incredible love and fortitude, and entirely on their own initiative, his native assistants bore his body to the coast 1,500 miles away. One of them was in the huge crowd at the funeral in Westminster Abbey on April 18, 1874. Part of the inscription on his tombstone reads: “For thirty years his life was spent in an unwearied effort to evangelize the native races, to explore the undiscovered secrets, to abolish the desolating slave trade of Central Africa.”
Were he still alive, David Livingstone would rejoice that the intervening century has seen Africa evangelized and explored, and that continent’s “open sore” of slavery healed.
The Leeks, The Onions, And The Garlic
On their pilgrimage through the desert to the Promised Land, the Hebrews remembered many of the things they had left behind them in Egypt, such as leeks, onions, and garlic (Num. 11:5). Americans are used to eating much and well—too much and too well, the health experts say, for a host of physical problems result from our over-refined, superabundant diet.
Americans spend a smaller percentage of family income on food than do the similarly well-stuffed inhabitants of Western Europe, and of course a much smaller percentage than people in the developing nations, who may spend almost everything they earn for what is little better than a starvation diet. But recently Americans have been spending more and enjoying it less. Wails of protest have gone up to anyone and everyone who might seem to have any power over the rising cost of satiety.
Land-locked, mountainous Switzerland imports most of its food. But between 1939 and 1945, when the war virtually cut off imports, the Swiss plowed up their lawns and public parks and grew almost everything they needed. Perhaps we need a new style of “victory garden” to win the fight against rising food prices. How are your leeks and onions doing this year?
From Good Friday To Easter
In the liturgical calendar, the forty-day season of Lent preceding Easter is considered a time for repentance, reflection, and self-discipline. The Lenten mood of fasting and meditation seems somewhat inconsistent with the promise of spring that is often in the air (indeed, the word Lent is from the Middle English lente, spring). It also seems somehow inconsistent with the turbulent period in the life of our Lord leading up to the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection. This was certainly a time of tension, a time of expectancy and excitement for the disciples and for Jesus’ other followers. Although the hallelujahs we commemorate on Palm Sunday may echo hollowly in our ears when we think of what came just afterward, at the moment they must have sounded genuine and exciting.
The catastrophe that followed must have been triply disillusioning for those who were sincerely drawn to Jesus but who lacked the fortitude and constancy to remain faithful to him through that dreadful week: first, because he appeared to disappoint their hopes for a messianic triumph; second, because of their own fickleness and cowardice in turning from him when he incurred the wrath of both synagogue and Roman state; and third, when they saw the Good Teacher, whom their acclamations had brought to the attention of a harsh ruler, dishonored, bruised, and broken on a criminal’s cross.
The season of Lent with its habitual disciplines is undoubtedly intended to help us to reflect on the Passion of Jesus. And yet the events of the Last Supper and Good Friday occupy only two days of a forty-day season. The terrible tension is quickly released by the message of Easter, “The strife is o’er, the battle done!” It is as though a longer confrontation with the terrible price of our redemption, and with the human realities of short-lived enthusiasm, facile betrayal, and callous bowing to expediency that made it necessary, is too much to bear. To set aside a much longer time than the forty or fifty hours between a Maundy Thursday service and Easter eve for reflecting on all those faults of an ancestral generation might make us too acutely aware of how similar they are to our own. And thus with great relief we pass from “O sacred head, now wounded” to “Welcome, happy morning.”
Why the actual time between Jesus’ Crucifixion and his Resurrection was so brief lies in the sphere of God’s providential wisdom: he does not explain it. But when we realize how difficult it is for us as individuals or for the Church as a community to dwell for long on the events of Good Friday without taking refuge in those of Easter Sunday, we can sense what a tremendous benefit it was to the earliest believers to have to wait only “three days and three nights.” Good Friday without Easter is not good; it is the brutal and bloody extinction of all hope, and the realization that one has brought it on oneself. Therefore we rush on to Easter, and with God’s sanction, for evidently he did not want us to remain too long in the shadows of that blood-stained hill.
And yet we should never move so fast—either into the springtime with all its beauty or into the Christian Easter with its promise of a new and eternal springtide of soul and body—that we neglect to see Good Friday. For it is because he saw the sorrow and dereliction through to the end, to the “It is finished,” that our sorrows can be brief and our rejoicing without end.
Crime: The Broad View
Naturally we are glad to hear the recent reports that certain kinds of crimes are decreasing and other kinds are increasing at a slower rate. All men practice crimes, however, for which human courts will not judge us—pride, envy, sloth, anger, lovelessness, and the like—but which the Word of God views as serious offenses. Any professing Christian who looks at “criminals” as a different kind of person from himself had better examine his own relationship to God. Christians know that from the divine viewpoint all men are criminals and that we can be pardoned only because of the one who died the death of a criminal (in the eyes of the state) on our behalf.
The Bible teaches that in addition to crimes for which we will be held accountable by God, there are some crimes for which our fellow men must hold us accountable as well. The tendency of human nature is to be more concerned about the crimes of other people than about one’s own crimes, or those of one’s close associates. Christians must constantly be aware of this tendency and compensate for it. Are we, for example, more concerned about those robbed of money by someone on the street than about those robbed by hospital trustees who violate conflict-of-interest laws, or homebuyers robbed because of illegal “kickback”?
We should be concerned about rape and burglary, but we should also be concerned about unlawful discrimination in housing sales and rentals and in the employment of workers. It is a shame that we must spend so much money trying to make our homes, businesses, and cars secure. But it is also an indictment of our country that we have unilaterally violated many of our solemnly contracted treaties with Indian peoples. It is a crime to sneak into your neighbor’s house to go through his records, but it is also a crime to pay others to sneak into the headquarters of your rivals and then pretend that your hirelings were acting entirely on their own.
By all appropriate means we should try to reduce the amount of crime, to diminish whatever factors are found to foster crime, and to punish and also rehabilitate those who are guilty of crimes. But in doing this we must be careful to include all crimes against our fellow men in our purview, not just those practiced by the usually less affluent members of our society (who may well be encouraged in their lawlessness by evil at power level). And permeating all our concern for crimes with which the state deals should be the awareness that our crimes against God, our disobedience to his commandments, leave none of us righteous, no, not one.
Do Kouprey Matter?
The 1973 Britannica Book of the Year, just out, calls attention to a casualty of the war in Southeast Asia that few people know about: a rare wild cow known as the kouprey. According to an article by Jon Tinker, the kouprey wasn’t discovered until just before World War II. Tinker describes it as a large beast (the bull stands more than six feet tall at the shoulders), mostly blackish brown in color, with prominent white legs and a chestnut face pattern. “It was probably once distributed throughout Indochina, but by 1964 the total was down to 200, concentrated in three kouprey reserves specially established by Prince Norodom Sihanouk,” Tinker says. As a result of the war and poaching, there have been no confirmed sightings of the animal since 1968.
With all our problems today, we might be tempted to dismiss the apparent loss of the kouprey with scarcely more than a shrug. It is high time to realize, however, that God knew exactly what he was doing in creation and that everything had a purpose. Scientists point out that the extinction of any species involves an irreparable loss of genetic material. Some think that the kouprey could have been used to improve cattle strains and thus help to ease the world’s protein shortage.
The U. S. government had sent out a special expedition in 1968 to try to save the kouprey. It captured four of the wild cows in hopes of establishing a breeding herd in captivity, but all died.
We may have lost the kouprey forever. If so, perhaps the loss will at least serve as a dramatic illustration of the need to be more sensitive to the ever-more-serious environmental drain. As Tinker says in his powerfully illustrated article, “To most people, in comparison with the bloodshed and misery of the Vietnam war, the loss of the kouprey is totally insignificant. But by the year 2000 we may be regretting an easy dismissal.”
Pilgrimage To Paganism
Marlon Brando’s rejection of an Oscar gave a well-deserved jolt to the movie industry. It was his way of protesting the demeaning treatment of American Indians. He charged that film-makers have contributed to “degrading the Indian and making a mockery of his character, describing him as savage, hostile, and evil.” In the seemingly endless supply of Westerns produced by Hollywood there is more than ample evidence to support that accusation.
We applaud this awakened sensitivity to moral principals on the part of Mr. Brando, and we hope it may help to arouse the conscience of movie moguls generally. They have had a primary role in bringing about the permissiveness so evident in today’s society. Their exploitation of sex and violence and their appeal to man’s baser instincts in the interests of box-office return gives them a lot to answer for. Brando’s own latest film, Last Tango in Paris, should call forth a new outcry of indignation.
Dare we hope for a turn-around? The selection of Marjoe for an Academy Award as “best documentary” suggests that our glorification of evil has not yet run its course.
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso, the artist who died this month at the age of ninety-one, was both a person and an event. His influence over other artists and over twentieth-century culture is probably unparalleled. Elements of his technique have found their way into almost every phase of art from textile design to cartooning. His painting Guernica has been the subject of countless theological analyses. And Picasso himself has been the subject of numerous interviews, stories, and films.
The cubist movement in art is sometimes dated from his painting of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a work that looks like the results of some mad plastic surgeon’s running amuck in a bordello. The misplaced eyes of his heroines are vacant and expressionless. His subjects neither laugh nor frown. Several of the faces are distorted to resemble African masks, which intrigued Picasso.
The inside of his own head seems to have been Picasso’s primary concern. And a lot of what was in there seems to have been sex-related. The objects and persons he painted were less important to him than his own feelings about them.
Picasso was a man of his times in the truest sense. His canvases reflect the obsessions, self-preoccupation, confusion, and despair of twentieth-century man. The world of his paintings is an increasingly dehumanized world without meaning in which transcendence is dead. The reason for his great success is probably just that: he speaks what so many feel.
No doubt Picasso’s influence will continue for years to come. Part of that influence could be to show fallen humanity how serious is its fall and how great its need for redemption. As his work is viewed all around the world, it should remind Christians how very much we depend on the Holy Spirit for our very humanity.
Another Little Step
When the United States Supreme Court handed down its 7–2 decision nullifying state laws against abortion, we warned that the court’s reasoning could be used, with equal warrant, to justify much more—infanticide and euthanasia, for example. At that time, only three months ago, we were accused by a number of correspondents of clouding the issues and attempting to create a kind of hysteria.
It was made public this month that in 1971 a branch of the National Institutes of Health recommended the use of human fetuses in medical research, as is currently being done in Great Britain and perhaps—one infers from the somewhat evasive language used in the recommendation—in the United States also. Fetuses, though some are still alive after the abortion procedure, will die anyway, it is argued, and so the living ones may legitimately be used for research and other worthwhile purposes—provided, the British say, “that the required information cannot be obtained in any other way.” (Could not similar reasoning be used to justify interrogation by torture?)
“I don’t think it’s unethical,” explained Dr. Kurt Hirschhorn of New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital and Medical School. “It is not possible to make this fetus into a child; therefore we can consider it as nothing more than a piece of tissue.… How do we know what drugs do to the fetus unless we find out?”
Why is it not possible to make the fetus into a child? Because a doctor, bolstered by the Supreme Court decision that the fetus has no rights in the first six months of its existence, has removed it from the environment in which it would have developed into a child. First take away its chance of life, and then argue, in what Dr. Andre Hellegers of Georgetown called the Nazi approach, “If it is going to die, you might as well use it.” Thus Nazi scientists obtained “required information” in concentration-camp experiments.
In an earlier editorial (issue of February 16, 1973, pp. 32–33), we pointed out that the Supreme Court’s criterion, namely that life must be “meaningful” in order to warrant legal protection, is capable of much wider application than the Court saw fit to give it. Nazi Germany defined Jewish, gypsy, and certain other varieties of human life as not meaningful, with the consequences we all know.
Dr. Charles U. Lowe, scientific director of the NIH’s National Institute of Child Health and Development, is not yet sure we can go along with such proposals, “using federal dollars.” Does he have ethical scruples? No, political ones: “First, we have an articulate Catholic minority which disagrees. Second, we have a substantial and articulate black minority sensitive on issues of human life.” Soon, however—the hope was not formulated explicitly, but it seems to underlie the approach of the government scientists—these politically difficult minorities will be reduced, like the white Protestants and the Jews, to a docile and inarticulate insensitivity, which will enable official agencies to proceed as they choose to obtain all “required information.”
Blend Is Beautiful
For years, ecclesiastical engineers have been trying to get Christians to merge their organizations. This, they argue, would more fully manifest the unity that Christ taught, and would serve a witnessing function; it would encourage the outsider to believe. The Consultation on Church Union, which has sought to evolve into the Church of Christ Uniting, is the most daring of the ecumenical efforts.
But is Christ’s prayer “that they all may be one” really suggesting this kind of sameness? The context indicates otherwise. God in the wonder of creation has made us all different (even the Godhead is composed of three distinct persons), and we are inclined to worship and witness in varying ways. Unbelievers recognize this; they do not expect Christians to show the same face. What they rightly expect, and do not get, is an essential unity in doctrine. The ecumenical movement long ago gave up trying to achieve a meaningful theological consensus. Within the main Protestant framework, the only wide area of theological agreement to be found is that of the evangelical community (and yet conciliar leaders persist in labeling evangelicals “separatists” and “independents”).
Let us grant that wasteful overlap and competitiveness create some discord in the work of the Church today. But the remedy is not to insist that all voices from the coloratura to the basso profundo sing in unison. It is to teach them all to sing their parts in better harmony.
The Dh Factor
The number of places where a person can get away from it all and relax and yet not be bored stiff is dwindling. One holdout is the baseball park. Appropriately for warmer weather, baseball proceeds at a much more leisurely pace than football, basketball, and hockey. It does provide its share of exciting moments, but on the whole baseball soothes more than it stimulates. And considering the hectic pace of society today, we surely need such a tranquilizer.
Under pressure to get more action into the game, the American League introduced a provision this year whereby the pitcher, traditionally the weakest hitter on the team, does not have to bat. His turn can be taken by a non-fielding designated hitter. The rules change is the most significant in major-league baseball since 1903, and its effect on the game will be widely discussed this year. First indications are that this effect will be something less than startling. In the opening three days of the new season the “designated hitters” got 23 hits in 104 times at bat for a .220 average. Good. We occasionally need to be where the action isn’t.
On Sitting This One Out
CHRISTIANITY TODAY has been intimately involved in Key 73 and its burden of “calling our continent to Christ.” Since the nation-wide project was conceived a number of years ago, it has found energetic support even in circles where enthusiasm for proclaiming the biblical Gospel of salvation through a personal faith in Jesus Christ was, to say the least, faint. This has led some of our readers to suggest that the message proclaimed may be compromised or diluted, and a number of evangelistically minded congregations and groups have refused to take part.
At the same time, the No Other Gospel Movement in Germany has declined to participate in the German Protestant Kirchentag (see News, page 42) on the grounds that it is basically pluralistic. We approve this stand by the German evangelicals, and yet we regret some American Christians’ reluctance to cooperate in Key 73. What is the difference? It seems to us that Professor Walter Künneth of Erlangen put his finger on it when he stated that the problem with the Kirchentag is not that the Gospel will not be represented there but that it will be presented only as an “option,” one among many, including liberalism, modernism, the social gospel, and several others. Every different group will be testifying to its own particular interpretation—or misinterpretation—of the biblical message. In this babble, Künneth knows, it will be next to impossible to discern the gospel call.
If the disparate groups cooperating in Key 73 were examined as to their underlying presuppositions and the details of their understanding, significant areas of controversy would certainly arise. But Key 73 is not presenting the areas of conflict and urging that the Christian message lies somewhere in a pluralistic confusion. The participating groups have all agreed to silence whatever babble of disagreement might normally exist among them and sound the Gospel clearly. We think that in Key 73, it will be possible for multitudes to discern the gospel call. And we pray that many will hear and accept it, for it is indeed, in Paul’s words, the power of God unto salvation.
