In Defense of Paper Carnations
Singer John Charles Thomas, now sixty-six, wrote to syndicated columnist Abigail Van Buren a few months ago about an interesting project he undertook because he moves about a great deal: “I am presently completing the second year of a three-year survey on the hospitality or lack of it in churches. To date, of the 195 churches I have visited, I was spoken to in only one by someone other than an official greeter—and that was to ask me to move my feet.” Eutychus VIII replies:
DEAR MR. THOMAS:
Your idea is basically sound, and your letter deserves a reply from someone in the mainstream of Christianity today.
I don’t like to say this, but I think you need to learn a few things about churches and feet.
In the first place, you say that the “official greeter” in these churches did speak to you. If so, why do you complain because nobody else did? Don’t you know that churches today appoint surrogates for everything, including greeting? (Of course, the pastor is the big surrogate.) If you have young children, the church provides Sunday-morning surrogates to “bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” No longer do you have to be bothered at home with reading the Bible to your children and praying with them.
Or teen-agers. They need models, which they once found in mother and dad and grandparents. Now the church has surrogate models for them in the youth pastor and youth sponsors. Para-church agencies also provide surrogates in the leaders of Young Life clubs and staff members of Campus Life.
We once were burdened with old people. They were loved and cared for as an important part of our families. Now the church provides surrogates to do the job. These surrogates lead senior-citizen activities. They also visit nursing homes.
The church even provides us with surrogate neighbors. There was a time when Christians young and old felt a responsibility to witness to their Christian faith in their neighborhoods and places of employment. Now the church transports people to witness to surrogate neighbors at airports and shopping centers fifteen or twenty miles from home.
I hope you now see that the churches you visit are actually as friendly as the one you may have been in as a boy. It’s just that today’s church focuses its warmth and hospitality through a surrogate greeter, whose welcome is as real as his carnation or badge.
Now about feet.
Feet are important to the Christian person. The Old Testament says, “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings.” The trouble with your feet is that they were in disguise. Nobody recognized them. Had you come into the church service as John Charles Thomas, Singer, to bring good tidings from the platform through your beautiful voice, I guarantee that you could have put your feet anywhere you wanted to and nobody would have rebuked you. If you had been Miss America, half the congregation would gladly have washed your feet (an ancient rite celebrated by some churches today).
By the way, where did you put your feet?
EUTYCHUS VIII
Zeffirelli: Gratitude And Gripes
I appreciated very much your editorial (“ ‘Jesus’: Handled With Care,” April 15) on the film Jesus of Nazareth by the fine Italian director Zeffirelli. I and various members of my church enjoyed immensely viewing the film on NBC television. It was superb in every sense, and it would be interesting to know how the vast American TV audience reacted to it. I am very confident that God used it for the extension of his kingdom. I think the last sentence in your editorial, “It would certainly be the first film of Jesus that spurned grandiosity for quiet adherence to the word and the spirit of the New Testament,” is incorrect. The great Italian author and film producer Pier Paolo Pasolini, in his The Gospel According to Matthew, did even a superior job to Zeffirelli in his faithfulness to the text and to the spirit of the New Testament. It was considered the best artistic biblical film in Italy. Unfortunately, in the United States it was too serious a production to run in the major movie theaters, and evangelicals viewed it as a “Marxist production,” which is totally false.
W. HURVEY WOODSON
First Reformed Presbyterian Church
Bellingham, Wash.
Your editorial on the film was filled with as many inaccuracies as the film itself. NBC told me that it received the film in work print version only about ten days before it was aired on national television. At that time, a series of screenings for preachers was set up. Billy Graham saw it two days before I did. It was not in complete enough form to be available for viewing prior to that.
The protests that many Christian people made had everything to do with the final version that appeared on national television. The protest began prior to Christmas and left the filmmakers with adequate time to edit, re-film, and arrange a version that would be somewhat palatable to certain “Christian” leaders.
You label my attack upon the film without having viewed it as “inexcusable” and “unethical.” What could be more authoritative than a film director’s statements about his own film? Concerning his view of the miracle-working powers of our Lord, Mr. Zeffirelli said in an interview in the Christian Century in October of 1976, “When you look at miracles carefully, you’ll see that they are never impossible miracles. Most of the biblical miracles—and that’s why I believe in them, in the honesty of their recording—can be explained in psychological, psychosomatic traumas that healed.…”
I am not surprised that CHRISTIANITY TODAY, which characteristically lacks spiritual discernment and is usually on the wrong side of every scriptural issue, would find itself defending Jesus of Nazareth. If I had seen the film on television, having known nothing of it in advance, I would have protested its scriptural deficiencies and perversions. The subtlety of its misrepresentations of our Lord makes it more dangerous than had it been a frontal attack, as Mr. Zeffirelli said it would be. Among its major distortions were the following:
1. For the most part, the portrayal of Christ shows him as a weakling—terrified, uncertain, searching, meditative, mystical—a guru-type Jesus—definitely not the strong Christ of the Scriptures. Two of the few times he comes across with divine authority are in the cleansing of the Temple and the rebuking of the Pharisees.
2. The Passover meal, eaten by Jesus’ disciples, as shown in the film, is the Catholic ordinance of the Eucharist, which is a blatant offense to any Bible-believing person.
3. The supernatural is definitely underplayed, which is to be expected from a man who believes that anyone with psychic powers could have performed the miracles Jesus did. In the film, there is nothing to authenticate from heaven the incarnation or the announcement of the birth to the shepherds, etc.; to show the approval of the Father for the Son at the baptism; or to back up the announcement of the Resurrection.… After seeing the film, I felt that the picturing of Jesus with his disciples in one brief moment after the Resurrection was an afterthought. It had the quality of having been added at a later date, and I owe the proof of that to your article. I was confident that they had originally deliberately left in people’s minds the question of what happened to the body of Jesus.
BOB JONES, III
President
Bob Jones University
Greenville, S.C.
