Children Are an Endangered Species
This is not new. Children have always been objects of discrimination and abuse. But with the enactment of child-labor and universal education laws during the past hundred years, and with the recent development of “child rights,” we have come to believe that the situation has changed.
It has not, as various ugly developments show. Things like a 50 per cent increase in infanticide between 1957 and 1970, the alarming increase in cases of child abuse, a 150 per cent increase in suicide by ten to nineteen-year-olds. Movies with children as victims or objects of exploitation (“Taxi Driver,” “Bugsy Malone,” “Omen”) attract large audiences, while the growth of child pornography is—surprisingly—the one thing that is beyond even the ability of our permissive society to stomach.
Now comes a soon-to-be-released film, “Pretty Baby,” in which Brooke Shields—a twelve-year-old—plays prostitute and child bride, with nude scenes, according to New York magazine.
All this in the glorious age of the evangelicals.
Do we have anything to say, anything to do about our country’s degradation of children?
Probably not. We may not like to admil it, but the God of evangelicals in 1978 is a lot more like George Burns than the God of Sodom and Gomorrah, of millstones, or even of William Wilberforce and Elizabeth Fry.
EUTYCHUS VIII
A Christmas Pause
I stopped for a moment in the middle of a crowded pre-Christmas day to read Eutychus VIII’s “A Christmas Wish” (Dec. 9). I found that moment to be the most beautiful and important experience of the whole week. Thank you.
R. E. HOLLIS
Friendship United Methodist Church
Walker, La.
Editorial Myopia
I was drawn to your November 18 editorial “X-Rating Rock Radio” because I am a professional broadcaster. While I agree that some of today’s popular music lacks artistic value and taste, I vehemently disapprove of your line of thinking and of your proposed solution, not as a broadcaster but as a Christian.…
You are extremely myopic; you assumed that the sample lyrics which you offered taken from current popular songs were all addressed to illicit sexual partners and not spouses. Why? My wife is also my “lover.” What is wrong with “How could it be wrong when it feels so right”? According to Webster’s, “feel” means, among a dozen other things, “an emotional sensation or effect.” That’s emotional, not sexual. Further, what is wrong with the word “funky”?
If you insist on removing words and phrases from context and arbitrarily assigning perverted sexual connotations to them, surely you cringe when you read, “Open to me, my sister, my love.… I have taken off my tunic, am I to put it on again?” (Jerusalem Bible translation).… Using your yardstick, they describe incest, the last.… taboo.
DAVID S. OVERCASH
Teaneck, N. J.
The Time To Shed Skins
A hearty amen to Vernon C. Grounds’s article, “Faith to Face Failure, Or What’s So Great About Success?” (Dec. 9). It’s only a beginning of an analysis that’s long overdue, but it is a good beginning.
American churchgoers are so imbued with the spirit of business that they will have to crawl out of their own skins if they are to rediscover the mind of Jesus and the mystery of his kingdom. Ironically, the same issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY which advocates the faith to face failure also reports Bill Bright’s latest campaign to finish with a billion dollar push what the church and the Spirit have failed to accomplish.
ANDREW KUYVENHOVEN
Christian Reformed Church of Clarkson
Mississauga, Ontario
It’s about time!!!
TRACY L. SINGLETON
Sand Springs, Okla.
Small Bone-Picking
Thank you for some really excellent articles in recent issues; the interview with Ruth Carter Stapleton in the November 4 issue was particularly notable. I do have a small bone to pick with Robert C. Sproul, however (“You Can’t Tell a School by Its Name”): if the Christian college anonymously referred to did indeed change its “department of biblical and theological studies” to the less imposing but undoubtedly more accurate “religion department,” the reason may well have been that the department in question now offered courses outside of Bible and theology—e.g. in Asian religions. I personally am not so bothered as Sproul evidently is by the rise of the phenomenological approach to religious studies. In my introductory religious studies course I use Van der Leeuw’s classic work, Religion in Essence and Manifestation. Here the phenomenological method is brilliantly employed, yet even so the distinctiveness and compelling appeal of the Christian faith is clearly apparent.
FREDERICK R. STRUCKMEYER
Department of Philosophy
West Chester State College
West Chester, Pa.
In his article on the death of Christian colleges and universities Sproul outlined some possible factors for the decline. The whole article, however, revolved around an inherent contradiction, namely that the author’s own education is broader than the one he advocated for the Christian student. His discussion of the Kantian and phenomenological approaches to the theological education is a case in point as it shows an insight into the problems of modern society, which he would deny the Christian student.
The average reader might conclude that if Sproul could maintain a clarity of insight having been exposed to such controversial material, his fears are either unfounded or exaggerated. Surely the Apostle Paul had broad perspectives in wishing to be all things to all men and in calling upon numerous authors held in esteem by the society he was reaching. Is it not incumbent upon the Christian student today to acquaint himself with the problems of our world or endeavor to achieve similar abilities as reflected in Sproul’s own education?
On the surface it appears that the interests of the students would be safeguarded if the offending elements were removed from the curriculum; yet the result would undoubtedly be a limited academic program coupled with a parochial outlook. Obviously this would not serve the expanding needs of contemporary society. This leads us to the conclusion that the death of Christian colleges and universities is not due to any internal conflict between religious interests and secular concepts but rather to their inability to maintain an academic program of sufficient depth and breadth to enable them to serve the complex needs of contemporary society.
K. J. STAVRINIDES
Chairman, Department of
Classics and Philosophy
Ambassador College
Pasadena, Calif.
The Right Chord
I rarely respond to articles, but your article “The Mystery at Bethlehem” (Dec. 9) struck a responsive chord with me. Thank you for that masterpiece. I took the privilege of building my Christmas message from it. I appreciate your firm stand on the basics of our Christian faith.
MILTON BECKETT
Blenheim Assembly of God Church
Kansas City, Mo.
For Study Alone
As a conservative Disciple and one who was present at the General Assembly of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), about which you [wrote] (News, “Disciples Decide,” Nov. 18), I write this added word.
The heading of your story implies that the Disciples decided in favor of homosexuality. Your readers may be unfamiliar with Disciple procedure. The study document on homosexuality was not “adopted,” as if it were a resolution, but rather was received for study. That is, no position was taken about the contents of the document.
The document came from one of the divisions of the Disciples and went into the mill for treatment. It got treatment, all right, which let its authors know of much negative sentiment about its contents. (Including my own negative sentiment. I preferred to reject it even as a study document.)
The votes regarding the civil rights of homosexuals, homosexuality as a lifestyle, and ordination of homosexuals did indicate the sentiment of about 60 per cent of the voters.
In addition to the fact that acceptance of the study document (for study) does not put Disciples in favor of homosexuality, it might interest readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY that whatever this Assembly does, “does not speak for” Disciples, but rather “to them, to other Christians and to the world.”
W. L. THOMPSON
Executive Director
The European Evangelistic Society
Aurora, Ill.
Straining And Swallowing
In your editorial “Taking a Position by Avoiding the Issue” (Dec. 9) you condemn the morality of homosexual behavior.… What concerns me is that your magazine itself does not apply the plain teachings of Scripture to its moralizing. The Scripture quite clearly claims, for example, that we are to love our enemies, that we are to turn the other cheek when we are struck, that we are to return to no man evil for evil, that to live by the sword means we will die by the sword.
The early church from Jesus on through most of the first four centuries was always a pacifist church; soldiers who converted to Christ threw their arms away as part of their act of repentance. Yet when have I ever heard your magazine dare to even hint, never mind proclaim, that to be a soldier and a Christian might be incompatible? Can the military be an “alternative lifestyle for a Christian?” Are you as a magazine and the evangelical wing of Christianity as a movement really interested in the whole authority of Scripture? The only difference I perceive between most evangelicals and most liberals is simply that they choose different places to sell out the word of God to the world.
Alas your moralisms about homosexuality may be true, but such an easy foe. “Woe to you.… for you tithe mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice, mercy and faith.… straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!”
JÜRGEN W. LIIAS
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Malden, Mass.
