The N.I.C.E. was the first-fruits of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world. It was to be free from almost all the tiresome restraints … which have hitherto hampered research in this country.” These words from That Hideous Strength (Macmillan, 1946), C. S. Lewis’s “Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups,” describe the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments.

Mark Studdock, a young, upwardly mobile sociologist who is (for certain diabolical reasons unknown to him) being courted by the N.I.C.E., comes in the course of Lewis’s story to learn something about the program its leaders have in mind. They believe that man is ready to step out into the dizzying abyss of freedom and take control of his own destiny. And some of the leaders, at least, are clear about what this means. As one of them says to Mark, “Man has got to take charge of Man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest.”

As Mark learns from Filostrato, the mad clergyman, the N.I.C.E. program involves the destruction of all organic life. This will, Filostrato thinks, make life far more rational. He awaits the day when artificial metal trees will replace the real ones. Consider the advantages: “You get tired of him in one place: two workmen carry him somewhere else: wherever you please. It never dies. No leaves to fall, no twigs, no birds building nests, no muck and mess.” And artificial birds as well, “all singing when you press a switch inside the house.” Again, consider the advantages: “No feathers dropped about, no nests, no eggs, no dirt.”

Applied to man the theory is stark. “What are those things that most offend the dignity of man? Birth and breeding and death.” These will, therefore, be eliminated. Death will be conquered, and reproduction will no longer involve copulation. Everything specifically human will be sacrificed on the altar of mankind’s future. And behind this effort lies a profoundly religious impulse. “The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already … begun to be warped.… Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result.… Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God. The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling of all deep-set repugnances was the first essential for progress.”

Lewis’s vision may be fantastic, but fantasy has a way of illuminating reality. And if man is no more than his freedom, if there are no structures in human existence to be revered, then more of Lewis’s vision than we imagine may come true. There are among us at least two different—and, quite possibly, irreconcilable—understandings of rationality. The one is goal-oriented, trying to do something to the structures of life in order to achieve a better, more efficient, more pleasurable existence. The other tries to be compatible with these structures, respecting them as part of the mystery of what it means to be human. As Lewis says in a different work, The Abolition of Man: “For the wise men of old the cardinal problem has been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique …” (Macmillan, 1947).

We may tend to think that only the first view—trying to do something to the structures of life—is genuinely rational. Hence attempts to alter the basic character of birth and breeding are seen as the product of rational investigation; a claim that there may be knowledge of this sort that we do not want—though such a claim often strikes some deep chord within us—will seem to many an attack on reason. But we seldom see that if man is nothing more than his freedom to remake himself, if his nature is merely to be an isolated principle of will, then there can be no reason to remake himself after one pattern rather than another. The view we think rational turns out to be precisely the opposite.

An older view of reason recognizes that not all knowledge of our nature is to be gained by making man an object of research and experimentation. From this viewpoint one ought not to try to step out into that abyss of freedom—since that is seen as a step away from our humanity—but one can say, as the sage of Israel did, that some knowledge is “too wonderful,” “too high” for a man to attain. We know ourselves as human beings, and not just as isolated principles of will, only when we recognize in structures of life such as birth and breeding the very essence of our humanity. To try to do something to these structures is seen as fundamentally inhuman—and, therefore, irrational.

We should not forget what Mark Studdock learned: that when man takes charge of his destiny “some men have got to take charge of the rest.” And very often it will be the weak and the powerless, those in whose behalf no voice is raised, who will be used and misused in the name of progress for mankind. There are many dramatic—and frightening—examples of the way man is today seeking to take charge of his destiny. However, I want to point to one that we may view more calmly since it does not so obviously raise the specter of genetic engineering: research on fetal human subjects. Here is a classic case of attempting to co-opt the weak and powerless in the cause of someone else’s future (or, perhaps, no one else’s future, since “mankind” is not anyone).

After the Supreme Court decision on abortion in 1973, fetal research came into its own, since the class of potential research subjects was now greatly enlarged. Nevertheless, as Paul Ramsey has persuasively argued in The Ethics of Fetal Research, we should not make the mistake of running together the issues of abortion and fetal research. They are distinct questions—as one can see simply by reflecting on the fact that in abortion there is a (supposed) conflict between maternal and fetal interests, a conflict that does not exist when we consider the fetus alone as a possible research subject.

In November of 1973 a National Institute of Health study group proposed guidelines for fetal research. In August, 1974, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare published a revised (and somewhat more permissive) set of guidelines. In December, 1974, Caspar Weinberger, then secretary of HEW, appointed an eleven-member National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. The commission’s first task was to consider fetal research, and it was given four months in which to complete that aspect of its work (during which time all HEW-funded non-therapeutic research on fetal human subjects was halted). The commission has since made its report, which, together with Secretary Weinberger’s revisions, can be found in the Federal Register of August 8, 1975.

The report is too extensive and the issues too wide-ranging to be discussed in full. Here I concentrate on only a few of the most important details. It is, obviously, non-therapeutic research (i.e., research that can benefit only others and not the actual research subject) that is of special concern. The commission considers both (1) research carried out on the fetus-to-be-aborted while it is still in utero; and (2) research directed toward the fetus during the abortion procedure and toward the non-viable fetus ex utero. An example of the first would be giving experimental drugs to the mother while the fetus is still in the uterus in order to determine (after abortion) the effects of the drugs on the fetus. Thalidomide might (for example) have been tested only on fetuses-to-be-aborted and its harmful effects determined before it was administered at large. Examples of the second sort of research would be the injection of certain substances into the maternal bloodstream to see (by testing at intervals during the abortion procedure) whether they pass across the placenta into the fetal circulatory system; or, more spectacularly, prolonging the life of the living but pre-viable fetus in order to try to develop an artificial placenta (which, if developed, could save many future fetal human subjects).

Concerning the first category of research (which is, we should remember, non-therapeutic), the crucial recommendation of the commission is that such research should be permitted only if it entails “minimal or no risk [of harm] to the wellbeing of the fetus.” In its “Recommendations” the commission specifies that this criterion should apply to all fetuses, including those that are to be aborted. Thus, according to the commission’s “Recommendations,” the fact that a fetus is unwanted or undesirable (and hence destined for abortion) is no reason to deprive it of the protection from unwarranted experimentation that is extended to other fetal human subjects.

However, in the “Deliberations and Conclusions” that accompany its “Recommendations,” the commission—in a very sophisticated way—takes back much of that protection. Some members of the commission argued that “while a woman’s decision for abortion does not change the status of the fetus per se, it does make a significant difference in one respect—namely, in the risk of harm to the fetus.” That is, the commission (or some of its members) reasons as follows: Research on the fetus in utero is permitted only when it entails “minimal or no risk of harm”—and this applies to the fetus-to-be-aborted. However, for a fetus that is soon going to be aborted (and upon which the ultimate harm will be inflicted), the meaning of “risk of harm” changes. Many procedures that would be unacceptable if the fetus were being carried to term might, it is implied, be acceptable when abortion is in view.

The commission, whose members were unable to reach full agreement, suggests a national review board to decide hard cases. We should not underestimate the sophistication of the members of the commission. They have taken a well-known ethical principle—that cases dissimilar in important respects need not be treated similarly—and used it to suggest the almost unlimited availability of fetuses-to-be-aborted as research subjects. No doubt much beneficial knowledge can be gained from such research. The question, however, is whether “such knowledge is too high,” whether we want the sort of knowledge that requires that we co-opt the weak and helpless in a cause they have not chosen to make theirs. If progress of a certain sort requires that some human beings take charge of the destiny of the rest, we should not forget to ask: Do we want that sort of progress? Indeed, do we want to call it “progress”?

There are, after all, other questions than whether great or minimal risk of harm is involved. We need to consider that the fetal human subject may possibly be wronged without being (in the commission’s sense) harmed. By enlisting him in a cause he has not made his own and subjecting him to experiments of no relevance to his future we inflict upon him a very great wrong indeed—and, in the process, reveal something about ourselves and our vision of what is truly human and humane.

With regard to experimentation upon the fetus during the abortion procedure and upon the (living but non-viable) fetus ex utero, the commission believes the provision about “minimal risk of harm” to be irrelevant—and therefore drops it. This is because the fetus cannot at this point be harmed in either of the two ways the commission deems relevant: it cannot have its potential for future life diminished (since, the abortion procedure having begun, there is no such potential), and, as one of the commissioners explained in an accompanying statement, it cannot suffer pain (the commission adopted the view of some experts that the fetus cannot feel pain).

However, in its “Recommendations” the commission does place one significant limit on research at this point. It specifies that such research should involve “no intrusion into the fetus … which alters the duration of life.” There should therefore be no attempt to prolong the life of the fetus solely for the sake of research purposes. At issue here is, especially, research conducted in the hope of developing an artificial placenta. Such experiments can be—and are—conducted on fetuses ex utero that are known to be non-viable. In such circumstances, of course, the experiment cannot possibly benefit the actual research subject, the fetus. The thrust of the commission’s restriction is, therefore, the altogether healthful one that such experimentation could proceed only under more restricted circumstances—i.e., when the fetus was possibly viable and the research could genuinely be said to be therapeutic with respect to the fetus (an attempt to save its life and, incidentally, to gain useful knowledge). Regrettably, this excellent recommendation of the commission was overturned by Secretary Weinberger—essentially on utilitarian grounds. He specified that such research has “contributed substantially to the ability of physicians to bring to viability increasingly small fetuses” and should therefore continue unabated.

It is the old argument: there is so much to be gained; is it not irrational to refuse ourselves this knowledge (or, at least, refuse to acquire it quickly)? “Indeed,” many good people will say, “how can one refuse to do research that may help so many future infants? The fetus, after all, will die even if we do not experiment. Why not, then, save some of generations still to come?” And the only thing that can or should be said in response is that it matters not only whether man survives but how he survives. If in some hypothetical world of future possibilities we were confronted by one of those whom we might have saved had we done the research we refused to do, what could we say? Only that, in a way, we had refused even for his sake: in order that any world he might inhabit would be a humane one that did not survive by using those who were too weak to speak in their own behalf.

What we must recapture somehow is a sense of what it means to be a creature, one who, as the psalmist also writes, is “beset behind and before.” It is certain that the two brands of moral philosophy that still shape much of contemporary discussion, Kantian and utilitarian, will not help us recapture that sense. For who would ever imagine that a creature ought to legislate for mankind? Or be responsible for all the consequences of his action? To the degree we think either of these we have been seduced into imagining ourselves to be something other than creatures.

We have forgotten, perhaps, that this will not necessarily make us gods. There is, after all, another possibility. C. S. Lewis took his title, That Hideous Strength, from a line describing the tower of Babel in Sir David Lyndsay’s Ane Dialog: “The Shadow of that hyddeous strength / sax myle and more it is of length.” In refusing to be creatures we may lose our humanity and become barbaric or worse. That possibility always exists for those who cannot say of some knowledge that it is “too wonderful,” “too high” for a creature to strive after. Forgetting such restraint, we are not likely to remember that we too were once weak and vulnerable—and will be so again. But on finding ways to nourish that remembrance hangs much of our humanity. Speaking on behalf of fetuses that are made subjects of non-therapeutic research would not be a bad place to begin.

The wary, darting eyes of my friend Leslie had always betrayed the tension beneath her airy isn’t-it-grand approach to life. Serious, realistic conversations threatened her; Leslie refused to become involved. One evening, over coffee and a discussion of politics, it seemed that tension had disappeared. She made several pointed comments and, unusual for her, remained calm. Responding to a remark about her new serenity she excitedly told us she had learned how silly it was to become excited. She had discovered this at something called Erhard Seminars Training, a two-weekend therapy program that teaches people—for $250—how to become and stay serene. As of late last summer more than 80,000 people, some of them ministers, priests, and nuns, had already taken the training. And the organization expected to add 12,000 to its graduate list by the new year. Among its adherents is the singer John Denver, who calls Werner Erhard “a god.”

I became curious about Leslie’s change as more friends began talking of their great experience in the training sessions of what they called “est.” I saw one major change: my friends were not interested in anything that didn’t directly affect their comfort. Their bland smiles and uniform responses to controversial topics disturbed me. I called the est office to find out how Erhard training accomplishes these changes. After an impressively incoherent conversation I was invited to attend a guest seminar at a New York Hotel.

When I arrived at the hotel I immediately saw my first examples of the estian inner corps. They stood lined up from the entrance steps to the elevator, their stone faces occasionally lit by quick, mechanical smiles. They imposed an atmosphere of precision on the usually comfortable disorganization of a hotel lobby. Like sentinels on a precarious jungle trail, the people of est showed an uncanny ability to pick out their charges and impel them to the proper place.

When I arrived at the training room, I immediately received a highly legible name tag. Everyone was hailing everyone else with the air of people trying to overcome the differences that keep long-standing feuds alive. A voice called my name. But when I turned a stranger hurtled herself at me, arms spread wide. My reluctance to embrace her was only partly due to the fact she was a stranger; the deadness of her eyes belied her surface affection. No warmth, no life. The hallmark of est.

After the guest seminar I stayed for a meeting primarily for those who had already completed the training. The leader bounded onto the stage to welcome the guests to est. He mechanically announced that our friends in est loved us and welcomed the chance to assist us in creating our own experience of est.

His assistant then led the non-initiates to another room where she gave an enthusiastic sales pitch based on what est had done for her. But beneath her ready smile and wholesome appearance lurked an anger she betrayed when she faced a difficult, critical question. She could not conceal contempt for those who challenged Erhard.

She attributed superhuman qualities to Erhard. She stressed personal power over all events and laced her comments with derision for such things as guilt, unease, and ambivalence. These silly blocks to true experience would, of course, disappear once we had the training. The idea of salvation would become passé after we accepted the fact that we were already perfect.

Est has reluctantly made public the details of Erhard’s background. His mother was an Episcopalian, his father a Jewish convert to the Episcopal Church. Werner was baptized John Paul Rosenberg. New Times (March 19, 1976) points out that Erhard has always considered Nietzsche his intellectual mentor; the creation of a super-race is his highest ambition.

And thus—est. Werner received—not, he claims, conceived—the idea in a whooosh while driving his wife’s Mustang, somewhere in the vicinity of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. (The exact locale varies from telling to telling.) The force of the cosmos enlightened him by blinding his senses. This modern-day equivalent of Saint Paul’s Damascus-road experience is merely the beginning of contemptuous distortion of Scripture.

Erhard learned in his freeway conversion that “What is, is. What ain’t, ain’t.” He denies the past; its reminders encumber “the now.” And he thinks we should ignore the future consequences of our actions. Having removed moral and ethical considerations, Erhard decided he was “God in my universe.” According to est, each of us is God in his own universe.

In a radio interview printed in the New Age Journal (Sept. and Oct., 1975) Werner said, “I confronted myself as ultimately evil. What I saw in that car was that I was never going to make it; I had spent my whole life struggling to become spiritual, to become whatever that means. And I discovered in that car that I wasn’t going to make it; I was never going to be all right. You know, I was going to be no good forever.” He confronted original sin, but instead of seeking God’s redemptive grace, Werner determined to make himself his own redeemer. He justified his own sin. All men are liars, he admits, himself included: “I don’t mind being called a con man as long as when you’re calling me a con man you recognize you’re also a con man.”

Yet followers adore him, almost as a spirit. “When Werner wants to move from here to there, his body just moves him, like floating almost” says the devotee who gave the sales pitch at the seminar I attended. They emphasize the importance of love and claim Werner has what this follower called “this incredible sense of truth.” She buttressed her sales talk with references to est’s need to “give” the training to others in love. When I asked how she showed love to those who had had severe mental breakdowns after the training, she laughed contemptuously. Her reason—“Some people really want to freak out and make the training an excuse.” She and other esties deny that they have any responsibility for those in the training; est precludes compassion for others. But when Jesus saw the grief of Lazarus’s family he wept. When this woman was reminded that her master’s voice had contributed to other people’s anguish, she laughed with scorn. That kind of love has nothing to do with the love taught by Christ.

What is the training like? A trainee, confined to a hotel room with 249 other people for up to eighteen hours a day, undergoes four days of passivity exercises. He’s insulted—“You’re all a bunch of turkeys. Your lives don’t work and that’s why you’re here!” His beliefs are undermined—“Belief in God is the greatest single barrier to God in the universe.” Group pressure is a major psychological tool. Personal autonomy does not exist. The trainer attacks those who try to defend any beliefs. Verbal abuse and denial of physical comfort are punctuated by instruction in meditation technique. Of course, the trainer tells the students what to meditate about and for how long. Then he tells them how to use what they’ve been taught.

In his prophetic work, The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis underscores the vapidity of the argument that all one can ever express in language is personal feeling. He points out that when one is prompted by an event or circumstance to say, “This is sublime,” one cannot mean, “I have sublime feelings”; “the feelings which make a man call an object sublime are not sublime feelings but feelings of veneration.” “This is sublime” is properly translated “I have humble feelings.” The argument that all value judgments are merely subjective undermines any theological and philosophical discussion of ethics. It assumes that emotions are contrary to reason and in themselves contemptible. Calling something sublime, far from simply describing one’s feelings, also contains the implicit statement that what prompted the comment merited the emotion of humility. Those who deny this, which is in effect a denial of all objective reality, are forced to regard all sentiments as non-rational, as mist between us and reality. They must then decide to remove all emotions or to tolerate them regardless of whether they are “just” or not. Lewis points out that those who do this must create in others “by suggestion or incantation a mirage their own reason has successfully dissipated.”

Werner and est do just that. A former est assistant says she was encouraged to regard all emotions as “hindrances to real experience.” As Lewis makes clear, the truth is the exact opposite. Emotions are the result of one’s mind responding to one’s surroundings.

Est uses meditation to bypass emotion. For example, if you get angry about a situation, imagine yourself twenty feet away, twenty feet above the horizon, and looking angry. If you are displeased with that image, concentrate until the imaginary vision of yourself conforms to your desires. Est promises you will quickly match the image. Serenity is yours for the imagining.

The technique works because it removes you from direct sense stimulation. No emotional response will intrude on your fantasy, no logical argument will convince you that you are removed from reality. My friend Leslie used that to keep herself calm. She mentally moved into a fantasy world.

Est hammers away at previously held perceptions of reality, particularly a Christian world view. Eventually most trainees are convinced that they do indeed distort reality. Once they agree to that the trainer screams, “See, it was all illusion! There is no objective reality!” The group, tired and nervous, long to have their confused perceptions soothed, and est quickly supplies the longed for salvation. If everything is illusion, you are free to choose your illusion—you, therefore control your world. Freedom lies in choosing your illusion. Play it Erhard’s way and you, imitating him, are God in your universe.

In his classic explanation of the Christian faith, Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton reminds us that logic alone is not enough. “If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humor or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” Werner’s trainees do not lose the complements to reason; they willingly allow est to wrest them away. Knowing this, and knowing that the trainee will need a source of relief, est teaches them how to create the center of their lives.

Realizing that the world will infringe upon any carefully constructed fantasy, Erhard suggests that a person should drift into a meditative reverie called “your space.” Once there you construct a little mental room where you are safe to practice your perfection.

While mentally following the instructions of the trainer you physically act out the steps. You pretend you are hammering, sawing, moving things about, and putting up various pieces of paraphernalia. In your center, where Erhard assures you that you are free to experience your reality, you mentally place a chair, a desk, a telephone, a bookcase, a cassette file with tapes of all the things you know (according to one insider there should also be a few empty tapes), a television set, a large movie screen, a closet that contains the regalia for your favorite role (such as skier, spaceman, ballerina) and a few empty hangers (one should also have a shirt with epaulets—a pervading hint of est’s martial tendencies; the trainers wear such shirts), and a platform twenty feet away, twenty degrees above the horizon, where you can happily watch yourself practice your perfection.

All this is fantasy. Its purpose is to teach you to experience life. But the reality est proclaims is a retreat into illusion. As Lewis and Chesterton remind us, a Christian who tries to imitate Christ must face emotion and strive to make it one with reason—a move toward reality, not away from it.

Est’s theological pretensions have never been clearly stated, though Adelaide Bry’s authorized book, est, Sixty Hours That Transform Your Life, mentions them. She quotes Erhard: “The heart of est is spiritual people, really.… That’s all there is, there isn’t anything but spirituality, which is just another name for God, because God is everywhere.” The same book quotes a young man on his estian understanding of Jesus: “[Jesus] kept telling everyone over and over that everybody was like he was: perfect.” Werner’s “Bible” classes must leave out Judas Iscariot, the Pharisees, the people Jesus drove from the Temple, and Peter. Despite our imperfections, Christ forgives us when we repent, just as he forgave Peter for denying him. Jesus understands our weaknesses, our imperfections. He never claimed that we were, or could be, in this life, perfect.

On October 15, 1975, a letter mailed to est graduates quoted Erhard on religion: “One of the purposes of religion is to serve people by providing the space in which an experience can take place. And it is the responsibility of the clergy to communicate the experience—the aliveness—that is inherent in the world’s religions in a way that allows people to create that experience within themselves. It is est’s intention to support those people who have dedicated themselves to communicating the experience of religion.” But as we have seen, Erhard is adamantly opposed to Christianity—to the need for repentance, and forgiveness. Christians cannot serve Erhard and Christ.

Several weeks ago, on one of those turbulent days when Canadian air roars down the Hudson Valley driving out the pollution-laden smog of New York, Leslie met me for coffee again. Her air of calm was enthrallingly real, unlike that produced by est. She had been released from the inner qualms that had engulfed her; she was free from her former turmoil. Her eyes were now alive, and she laughed spontaneously. To help explain what had happened to her, she read from a book, The Four Loves by C. S. Lewis.

She told me she had always wanted to be loved but never felt worthy. Est, she explained, had for a while convinced her that the desire for other’s love was merely an illusion. She tried to imagine that other people did love her. That ended in disappointment. An alternative illusion, that she did not require love, proved equally painful. Her involvement with est caused a deep gap between her and her old friends. The people in est were no help. Whenever she tried to express her desires, they attacked her about why she couldn’t go along with the group.

A friend helped Leslie find what she was searching for. And C. S. Lewis helped her see the falseness of est: “We easily imagine conditions far higher than any we have really reached. If we describe what we have imagined we may make others, and make ourselves, believe that we have really been there. And if I have only imagined it, is it a further delusion that even the imagining has at some moments made all other objects of desire—yes, even peace, even to have no more fears—look like broken toys and faded flowers? Perhaps. Perhaps, for many of us, all experience merely defines, so to speak, the shape of that gap where our love of God ought to be. It is not enough. It is something.”

Christ that in the flower blooms

is manifested mild

and with more subtle power looms

than thunderheads wild.

Given the choice between the two

quiet grace or power

he may have chosen one to woo.

We watch to see the second flower.

What are you looking for in your Christian life? A remarkable experience of rescue that can be attributed to angelic or supernatural agency? A quick and final deliverance out of all your troubles? A miraculous healing? An amazing transformation by which you become a Christian with mighty power?

I remember vividly the first man who told me, “I must have power.” He went everywhere to have hands laid on him so that he might have power—English hands, Welsh hands, American hands. At last he was able to assure me that he had received power. I asked him what his wife thought about his new experience. He blushed. The relationship with her was not one tiny bit better.

What would you say to the following five propositions?

1. The Spirit-filled Christian often has remarkable deliverances from danger.

2. The Spirit-filled Christian can expect visions of God and of heaven and will often be in a state of ecstasy.

3. The Spirit-filled Christian is not often ill and if he is he can count on supernatural healing.

4. The Spirit-filled Christian, utterly yielded to Christ, is always a powerful personality, radiating health, energy, and vitality.

5. The Spirit-filled Christian never has a trace of fear or any visible signs of weakness.

Before you respond, let me ask another question: what are you going to be guided by? Your prejudices? Your preconceived ideas? Your wishful thinking? Images you have carved out from sermons or recent exciting paperbacks? Or the Scriptures, God’s holy, infallible Word? Evangelical Christians must bring every claim, every idea, every bit of teaching, however exciting it may sound, however popular it has become, under the authority of Holy Scripture. So let us turn to the Bible to see what God has to say about these things.

First hear what Paul says in Second Corinthians (11:30–12:10, NIV): “If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness. The God and Father of the Lord Jesus, who is to be praised forever, knows that I am not lying. In Damascus the governor under King Aretas had the city of the Damascenes guarded in order to arrest me. But I was lowered in a basket from a window in the wall and slipped through his hands.”

Then we come to Paul’s vision and his thorn: “I must go on boasting. Although there is nothing to be gained, I will go on to visions and revelations from the Lord. I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows. And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows—was caught up to Paradise. He heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell.… I will not boast about myself, except about my weaknesses. Even if I should choose to boast, I would not be a fool, because I would be speaking the truth. But I refrain, so that no one will think more of me than is warranted by what I do or say.

“To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

It is significant to note that the next sentence reads, “I have made a fool of myself but you drove me to it. I ought to have been commended by you, for I am not in the least inferior to the ‘super-apostles,’ even though I am nothing.” Instead of a supernatural deliverance story as in Acts 12, we read of a rather humiliating slither down the wall in a fish-basket that may have smelled bad. Paul paints himself as a comic rather than a heroic figure here.

For a vision and a revelation of heaven he has to go back fourteen years to somewhere around A.D. 42 or 43. The exciting details of that vision he refuses to disclose. Just think of the popular paperback he could have made of it today!

The peril of the possibility of becoming a braggart he admits twice. Note also the sickness that handicapped him. Three times he asked to be healed of it, and three times his request was turned down.

What was the matter with him? Nothing. This is New Testament Christianity. This is Spirit-filled living. This is the real image of the Spirit-filled man.

One of my friends, Richard Bell, was an IVCF staff worker in the West Indies for several years, greatly used by God. He got phlebitis and came home to England desperately needing rest. Then he was found to have cancer. Some of his friends prevailed on him to go to a certain place for the laying-on of hands. After twenty-four hours, he was assured in the group that he was healed. So he went to Cader Idris in West Wales and started to climb this favorite mountain of his. A hemorrhage quickly established that he was not healed. He went home to die, feeling himself an awful failure. If only he had enough faith, they had assured him, he would be healed. So he had two problems: his cancer and his guilty conscience.

After considering this passage in Second Corinthians, he ceased feeling guilty. The God who said no to Paul had said no to him. It was a case not of his lack of faith but of God’s sovereign wisdom: some he heals in answer to prayer, but to many others he gives patience so that they may endure their sickness to his glory. Many people were challenged through Richard’s Spirit-filled testimony from his death bed. And the testimony he recorded on tape in the face of death has been an enormous help to many people since his death.

A woman who was found to have a malignant melanoma in her leg ten years ago died quite recently at the age of forty-three. But she led her Jehovah’s Witness nurse to Christ in the last three months of her life. She suffered greatly but never faltered in her faith and never complained. This is the power of New Testament Christianity.

Another of my friends, knowing that he had not very long to live, said each morning, “This is another day, Lord. Take it and use it to your glory.” In his terminal illness, men and women were blessed through his prayers, through his witness, and through the courageous way in which he faced death. This is Spirit-filled living. “My grace is sufficient for you. My strength is made perfect in weakness.”

Bishop Taylor Smith, one of my heroes when I was a student, was asked to preach at a jubilee celebration in Chicago. While he was crossing the Atlantic, he walked round on the promenade deck in the open air each day and lost his voice. He arrived in Chicago and preached in a whisper, with none of the modern electronic gadgets available for amplification. At the end of his address, someone came to him and said, “You have persuaded me that I must become a Christian.” The bishop asked, “What exactly was it that I said that brought you to this point?” The man answered, “I couldn’t hear a word you said—it was just looking at you.” To put it another way, God’s strength was made perfect in the bishop’s weakness.

Why did Paul speak about spiritual power in this way in this passage in Second Corinthians? Paul was up against four opposing viewpoints in Corinth.

1. The ritualists, who had come rushing in from Jerusalem to confuse his converts, saying, “You must have this extra experience (circumcision) or you are not proper Christians.”

2. The antinomians, who said, “It doesn’t matter how you behave as long as you believe the right things.”

3. The super-supernaturalists, who claimed a hotline from heaven that put them ahead in teaching all that Paul had ever taught.

4. The wishful thinkers, who naturally preferred the exciting and extraordinary to the steady, ordinary daily discipline of Christian living.

In First Corinthians 1 and 2, Paul deals with Group 1. In First Corinthians 5 through 8, he deals with Group 2. In Second Corinthians 10 through 13, and especially the verses we have been looking at, he deals with Groups 3 and 4, the super-supernaturalists and the wishful thinkers. In each of us, there is a great yen to have this hotline from heaven and to be constantly seeing the exciting and extraordinary. But see what Paul says in First Corinthians 2:1–5. We don’t read, “I came to you with great excitement, in great power and tremendous confidence, radiating health with every step I took in Corinth.”

Holy Spirit power is not divine power that replaces the natural weakness of the human personality. Holy Spirit power was promised by the Risen Lord in Luke 24:49 and in Acts 1:8 for the specific purpose of bearing witness to the Risen Lord, not in order to give some Christians a “deeper experience” than others. And the promise Luke records is of power to cover as “clothing” the men whom Christ had called to his service, not of a completely new personality under the old skin, a personality that knows no frailty in a body that knows no weakness.

The promise of spiritual power is circumscribed, i.e., limited to certain situations, occasions, and purposes. It is not power promised for power’s sake, or power for our sake. It is not influence promised for the sake of influence. It is not power to bolster up our image or our ego. It is not power so that we can dominate other people’s lives or manipulate and control their thinking, their emotions, or their wills. It is not our power in place of our weakness. It is God’s power manifest in our weakness. It is God’s power using our human weakness as a platform on which it can be seen to be God’s power; God’s power using our frail storm lamps as a holder from which to shine into the hearts of men; God’s power as a tent surrounding us, supporting the framework of the weakness of our human nature. The weakness remains—the power transcends it.

Why do we need the Holy Spirit’s power? We need it because God’s power flows along God’s pylons. The power flows in the direction of the fulfillment of his purposes. The power of Christ is spiritual power, enabling strength given for his moment to his servant for his task; strength to bear witness to him effectively, to draw attention to someone other than ourselves. “Witnesses to me” means exactly what it says. (See Second Corinthians 4:6, 7; First Corinthians 2:1–5.) We need the Spirit’s power—

• to overthrow false ideas and ideologies or systems of thought by which men live (2 Cor. 10:3, 4);

• to face difficulties courageously (Phil. 4:13);

• to endure physical pain bravely (1 Pet. 4:12–14);

• to believe Christ is with us steadfastly when we don’t feel his presence with us at all (Heb. 13:5, 6);

• to fit in with other Christians humbly and helpfully, and support them in their hours of weakness and distress as well as in their daily routine (2 Cor. 1:4–7);

• to recognize temptations speedily and to resist them firmly (1 Cor. 10:13);

• to absorb solid teaching gratefully (Col. 2:6–9);

• to stand up for the truth uncompromisingly and with courtesy (Rom. 1:14–16; 16:25–27);

• to recognize continually that our natural resources, i.e., what we are by nature and past experience and what we have achieved by grace, are utterly inadequate to face today’s task, but that Christ’s grace is sufficient for us this very day (2 Cor. 3:16; 4:7);

• to have the ability to find some real delight in our weaknesses, for whenever we are weak, then, and then only, are we strong (2 Cor. 10:9–12).

How do we get the power of Christ’s Spirit? True spiritual power, like joy and fellowship, is not an end in itself but a by-product graciously thrown in as we seek to fulfill the Christian obligations for which the power is needed. As we lay hold of the promise God has given us, the power is turned on. “Seek the Lord and his strength,” says the Word of God. The Lord first; then his strength is found in his presence for the fulfillment of his will in our lives.

If we seek the Lord for the Lord’s sake, then spiritual strength is surely given us so that we may go on seeking him singleheartedly and go out to serve him faithfully. We may not be conscious of the power at the time, only of our own weakness. It may be only when we hear later of blessing coming to others through our words or deeds that we can be sure the power of God was truly released. The power of God is imparted in the process of witnessing and worshiping, not just for the purpose of witnessing and worshiping. I can do all things through the empowering Christ, who continually imparts power, rather than giving it as a reservoir for us to draw on at will.

If we take the time to abide in his presence—i.e., to live in constant conscious dependence on him, browsing daily in his inspired Word—we can be sure that the power of Christ’s Spirit will be released in us.

What Shall We Name This New Year?

Newsweek magazine labeled 1976 “the year of the evangelical.” Will 1977 be the year of the post-evangelical?

The Chinese have a nice way of describing their years: by beasts. Last year was the year of the dragon; 1975, the year of the leopard. This year goes to the serpent. Turtles, monkeys, pigs, and tigers have all had their time in the Chinese sun.

I wonder what we American Christians would call the years if we named them for animals instead of numbering them. What would this new year be?

Maybe the year of the rabbit, since the great emphasis among evangelicals seems to be on procreation and numerical growth.

Or the beaver. The year of the beaver: I like that. It creates visions of new—if not more stately—and larger church buildings. Enlarge the dammed-up pond and attract more beavers.

The anteater is another possibility. Let others take their aim at tigers and wolves; we’ll settle for ants.

How about the rhinoceros? Thick skin, horn upraised; nobody will get in his way. Relational theology? It’s for the birds, not us rhinos.

With one of us in the White House under Democratic party aegis, perhaps Christians should call this the year of the donkey. (A survey of many church boards might confirm the decision.)

I’ve racked my brain without being able to think of an animal that mauls and kills its own kind. So the current tendency toward internecine warfare among Christians is indescribable.

I wish this would turn out to be the year of the Lion. Don’t you?

EUTYCHUS VIII

Finding Evangelism

I have mixed reactions to the article by C. Peter Wagner, “How ‘Christian’ Is America?” (Dec. 3). While he has pointed out many glaring weaknesses of the Gallup report (the large proportion of the 71 per cent who are probably nominally Christian), I am somewhat disturbed by other comments.

He states, “Mainline denominations are beginning to recapture the evangelistic priority on high levels.” However, only two individuals were specifically named. Also, while these denominations may be rethinking their priorities in the area of evangelism, what do they offer as a definition of evangelism? I should think that this would have great bearing on whether or not they are truly involving themselves in biblical evangelism.

Dr. Wagner further finds great hope in “strong statements on biblical evangelism” which “are coming from Roman Catholic leaders.” I find this incredulous! While I would be the last to deny that there are Roman Catholics who are really born again, it is very difficult for me to imagine the basic tenets of the church having changed to include an “evangelism” apart from the sacraments which are the very foundation of Catholicism! Could Dr. Wagner do a follow-up on these changes in Roman Catholicism? Or could it be that he is now advocating a salvation different from Ephesians 2:8, 9?… While I agree with much of what Dr. Wagner has written, I cannot accept the sum total of the article. It would seem that he is so interested in finding a fountainhead of evangelistic orientation in America that whatever is called evangelism is accepted as biblical simply on that basis alone.

PHILIP A. JONES

First Baptist Church

Freeport, Ill.

C. Peter Wagner’s otherwise stimulating article seems misguided in one central premise. As a staff member of one of the organizations responsible for blocking any government religious census in this country, I would like to respond to his suggestion that it is only “undue nervousness over maintaining separation of church and state” that prevents the Census Bureau from collecting religious data.

It seems to us that there are a number of very sound reasons for opposing an official religious census conducted by the United States government. For one thing, such a census would imply an intensified role for government at a time in our history when many (most?) Americans are questioning the level of government involvement in their personal lives. Government has no legitimate concern with areas in which it cannot legislate, and it is forbidden to legislate in the area of religion. In a country which protects all religious expressions, it is illegitimate for government to even be concerned about the degree of religious belief, affiliation, or practice that such a census would inevitably involve.… Since churches and church research groups can do the job reasonably well, it is not appropriate for the government to gather data for the primary use of churches. Such an undertaking would surely violate the “principal or primary effect test,” upon which many church-state legal decisions are decided.

Finally, we question whether any census in any country could really uncover the number of individuals who “practice the Christian code in their daily lives.” This type of data would elude the most sophisticated government data-gathering agencies, or even public-opinion surveys. We believe the churches and synagogues of America are quite capable of gathering adequate statistical and quantitative information to help them in their work. Let’s not call upon the government for everything.

ALBERT J. MENENDEZ

Director of Research

Americans United for Separation of Church and State

Silver Spring, Md.

Who Pays For “No Need”?

I do not wish to detract from the very fine article by Leon Gerig, “Financing for the Future” (Nov. 5). On the other hand, I do feel that the article contains one inference which your readers should examine and consider very carefully. The list of possibilities offered to parents who wish to receive financial assistance for students planning to attend college is very inclusive and will be a great help to many people. Those people should consider, however, the moral implications of applying for or using “no need” scholarships. By asking for this sort of consideration, parents are indicating that they wish to be considered on a set of standards which differs from those used for the great majority of financial-aid applicants. They should bear in mind, also, that the cost of providing such scholarships must be borne by someone. The someone may be other students in the same college or, particularly in the case of Christian colleges, it may be an underpaid faculty. Within the financial-aid officer’s profession, there is probably not a clear consensus on the ethical nature of “no-need” scholarships. Many people will be inclined to accept such awards if they are extended. I would hope that your readers would be among the group who would consider saying no to such offers and pointing out to colleges why they cannot accept them.

JOHN H. LETARTE

Dean of Student Admissions and Records

The State University at Potsdam

Potsdam, N. Y.

Readers often ask, “What does ITG mean on my mailing label?” Or, “When does my subscription expire?” The answer is simple: ITG 15 means the subscription has fifteen Issues To Go before it expires. We publish twice a month, twenty-four times a year. To make it work out right we occasionally have a three-week, rather than a two-week, interval between issues. This usually happens in the summer and at the end of the year.

When Harry Whitley announced his retirement in 1972 from the High Kirk of Edinburgh (St. Giles’), his street-corner newsvendor complained it would be bad for business. “When I wanted to get to the pub before six o’clock,” he explained, “I only needed to shout ‘Whitley in trouble again!’ In no time my papers were snapped up.”

“What’s going to happen now?” the vendor demanded of the offending pastor. “Couldn’t they find you another job? I hear the Pope’s in poor health.”

Dr. Whitley’s appointment to St. Giles’ in 1954 had been unexpected. Brought up in the Catholic Apostolic Church, and a biographer of Edward Irving, he did pioneer youth work in Edinburgh’s slums, then entered the ministry after coming under the spell of Dr. George MacLeod. During his first two pastorates on Clydeside he scandalized the fashionable by dirtying his hands painting dreary tenements and consorting with the poor.

At St. Giles’ he encountered blighting opposition. For eight years his ministry was incredibly inhibited when his senior minister tried to resume the full control he had formally relinquished. From him Whitley two years later received the following letter: “I have never invited you to call me by my Christian name, and I would prefer that you would not do so. So perhaps you will do me the courtesy of continuing to address me in the future as you have done in the past.” Here is the unacceptable face of Presbyterianism wherein some ministers are more equal than others.

This letter is quoted in Harry Whitley’s newly published work Thorns and Thistles (Edina Press, £4), a sequel to his Laughter in Heaven (reviewed in this journal June 19, 1964, p. 25). To launch the book the publishers gave a small reception. Harry Whitley died last May, but his old friend Lord George MacLeod was there and led off with some inimitable comments. “The great thing about the church today,” he suggested, “is that it is not being persecuted, because there is nothing to persecute it about. Even where there is enthusiasm [here he cited some modern movements] it is sometimes more airborne than reborn.”

MacLeod added that it was extraordinary the lengths people will go in talking about ecumenicity—but few of them made the mistake of practicing it. Here he advocated a careful reading of the sixteen pages Whitley had devoted to what became known as “The Tirrell Affair.”

The Reverend John A. Tirrell, an Episcopalian from the diocese in California then presided over by the late Bishop James Pike, came to pursue postgraduate research in New College, Edinburgh. He needed a job to help pay his way, and none was forthcoming in his own denomination. He worshiped regularly at St. Giles’ and so commended himself that Whitley invited him to fill a vacant assistantship there. Bishop Pike, asked for permission, wired back, “O.K.—this is a great opportunity.” John Tirrell (to anticipate a little) made a big contribution to the St. Giles’ team. It was on Whitley’s part an imaginative gesture, an ecumenical action nevertheless doomed to failure because it had not originated in the official ecumenical stables where they know about such things.

Whitley found himself in the middle of what Ian Henderson once called “this ghastly internecine strife among Christians which the Ecumenical Movement has brought about.” From the Episcopal side the bishop of Edinburgh threatened sanctions upon the young Californian; in the Kirk’s general assembly an elder statesman said that brotherly love had nothing to do with the case—it was a question of right procedure.

By this time Tirrell was seeking to exercise “a full ministry,” and wanted permission to dispense the sacraments. Alas, upon that rock the project foundered.

The Tirrell Affair was referred from presbytery to general assembly and then back to presbytery, which finally decided that Tirrell could administer the sacraments in St. Giles’ if Bishops Pike and Carey (of Edinburgh) concurred. By this time it had become a cause célèbre. The Church of England assembly at West-minster heard a very slanted account (I was there) from a canon who turned out to be a friend of the bishop of Edinburgh. The archbishop of Canterbury (Dr. Ramsey, not Dr. Fisher as Harry Whitley says) wrote personally to the moderator, not realizing this was quite the wrong way to deal with a Presbyterian church. Bishop Pike, on a visit to England, was persuaded to change his mind.

Not only was the ecumenical battle lost, but the impression was given that a bishop of the tiny Episcopal Church in Scotland (with communicants making up less than 1 per cent of the population) could tell the national Church of Scotland who could administer the sacraments in the mother church of Presbyterianism.

An earlier controversy in which Whitley was involved arose from his dismay at finding John Knox’s burial place marked by a plaque in Parliament Square over which the lawyers of Edinburgh parked their cars. He determined to restore honor to his illustrious predecessor, who is now sadly ignored by Kirk and capital. His attempt to move a statue of Knox out of St. Giles’ and into the square outside met official obstruction, but he and his colleagues did it just the same—“early one morning.”

Altogether, Whitley’s book is a fascinating account of establishment pressures on a nonconformist who disliked “wafflers and God-botherers.” True to form, he took his farewell words to Edinburgh Presbytery from Edward Irving, himself deposed from the Kirk’s ministry in 1833 for alleged heresy but now partially rehabilitated. I quote in full:

“Be of no school; give heed to none of their rules or canons. Take thy liberty, be fettered by no times, accommodate no man’s conveniency, spare no man’s prejudice, yield to no man’s inclinations, though thou should scatter all thy friends, and rejoice all thine enemies. Preach the Gospel: not the gospel of the last age, or of this age, but the everlasting gospel; not Christ crucified merely, but Christ risen; not Christ risen merely, but Christ present in the Spirit, and Christ to be again present in person. Preach thy Lord in humiliation, and thy Lord in exaltation; and not Christ only, but the Father, and the will of the Father. Keep not thy people banqueting, but bring them out to do battle for the glory of God, and of his church; to which end thou shalt need to preach them the Holy Ghost, who is the strength of battle.”

Both Irving and Whitley remind me of an ancient writer who said (I quote from memory): “No man has attained to the degree of truth until a thousand righteous men bear witness that he is a heretic.” It must be disturbing to the establishment that God does not always choose to relay instructions through proper channels.

A recent announcement over government-owned Radio Zaire made it official: “The administration of public primary and secondary schools will be returned to the churches.”

Legal representatives of the Catholics, Protestants, and Kimbanguists (a semicultic independent church) have begun meeting with Department of Education officials in Kinshasa, the capital, to work out details of the decision, according to sources. That could take a long time. The transfer involves well over three million students, 80,000 teachers, and a budget that since 1965 has averaged about 20 per cent of the total national budget.

Since the first days of Belgian colonial rule, almost all education of the children was done in parochial schools. Even when the government nationalized the primary and secondary schools in 1974, fourteen years after independence, 80 per cent of the public schools were still administered by various church groups.

If the transfer of schools back to the religious sector is complicated for the government, it also causes complications for the churches. When the schools were taken over in 1974, some teachers threw off moral restraints and assumed a life-style impossible under a church-administered system, and in some areas persons antagonistic to the local churches were appointed school directors. The resulting question: What should the churches do with them?

While reaction among Zairian church leaders seems generally favorable to the transfer, some foresee a serious problem. The government take-over had resulted in some spiritual benefits that could be canceled out by the recent reversal of policy. An American Baptist Churches mission spokesman observed, “Overall, it was generally agreed that there were advantages in [the 1974 nationalization]. Church-appointed Zairian school directors and missionary educators remained at their posts, and it was a relief for them to be freed from the heavy burden of administrative responsibility for a school system which served hundreds of villages over a widespread geographical area. They felt a new sense of freedom and found that more of their time and energy could be devoted to programs of evangelism and Christian service. At the same time, opportunities for Christian witness in the classroom were as great as before nationalization, and in some cases, even greater.”

Resuming the responsibilities of school administration and its insatiable demands could drain from the churches that new sense of freedom and commitment to evangelism which has flourished since 1974, some leaders fear.

The recent decision clobbers the much-publicized goal of complete “Africanization” of the schools by 1980. Churches with mission ties will certainly appeal for expatriate help as they try to cope with administrative responsibilities for as many as 80,000 children in some jurisdictions.

The “Africanization” goal of the government had political as well as cultural implications. Some high officials claimed that as long as the children were educated in church-run schools, their loyalty would never belong totally to the state. The banning of religious instruction in the schools and the formation of all students into political cadres were part of the nationalization decree in 1974.

Where Two Or Three …

Zion United Methodist Church in Marissa, Illinois, may be the smallest church in America. With only three members, it has been kept open for fifty years by a brother and sister, Alex and Pearl Wildy, 83 and 87 respectively. It was their mother’s last wish that they maintain the church, founded in 1868. They place flowers on her grave before each service. Pastor R. David Reynolds, 28, is paid in cash each week by Alex Wildy, who also tends the church’s kerosene lamps and coal stove. Reynolds, who has been at Zion for four years, is also pastor of the nearby 148-member Marissa United Methodist Church.

This ban on religious instruction proved ineffectual, and it has been dropped. The commissioner of state for political affairs cautioned church leaders, however, that though the churches resumed administration of the schools, this did not necessarily mean that clergy and other religious personnel should take over the teaching posts.

Why did the government of President Mobutu Sese Seko turn the schools back to the churches? One missionary correspondent reported that there has been widespread moral regression under nationalization, and this has alarmed government leaders. But money may be the overriding factor. The government has learned that setting up an educational administration parallelling the already existing one of the churches is too costly and not nearly so effective. So, in this view, economic reality won over “Africanization.”

The transfer of schools is probably related to a larger austerity program forced upon the Zaire government by its creditors. The nation owes $2.9 billion in overseas debts and needs still more money. Manhattan’s Citibank and other creditor banks have agreed to a new $250 million loan, but first they imposed tough conditions that are pressuring the government to make humiliating about-faces, of which the school system is not the worst.

The government policy regarding foreign-owned companies, for example, has boomeranged to discredit the nation and hurt innocent Zairians. In 1973 Mobutu forced out many expatriate small businessmen and farmers and turned over their homes, assets, and businesses to selected Zairians. Now he is asking these expelled foreigners to return, while ordering the Zairians out of their houses and demanding full accountability of the “Africanized” properties.

In effect, the same sort of thing has happened in education.

Pneuma ’76: A Call For Unity

The sixth annual meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies convened in Atlanta last month to hear papers on “The Biblical Basis of the Pentecostal Faith.” This theme was chosen in part as a response to Nazarene Timothy Smith’s challenge in 1975 to deemphasize glossolalia in Pentecostal faith and practice. The papers presented by a dozen classical Pentecostal scholars did just the opposite, with John Swails III of Emmanuel College suggesting the occurrence of glossolalia in the Old Testament Jewish prophetic tradition. On the other hand, Professor Bill MacDonald of Gordon College questioned “messages in tongues” directed to congregations since glossolalia in his view is usually “God-directed” rather than “man-directed.”

Cecil B. Knight, General Overseer of the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), gave the opening address. While recognizing the value of cultural and organizational diversity among Pentecostals, he called for them—the new charisismatics and old-line Pentecostals alike—to come together” in mutually beneficial ways. For example, he suggested, a joint Pentecostal seminary could be established. Citing the costs of maintaining several small struggling institutions, Knight suggested that a jointly operated institution using the “cluster concept” of denominational components with a shared faculty and central facilities might be the answer for the classical Pentecostal groups.

Graduate theological training is a recent development among American Pentecostal denominations. At present there are three in operation: the Assemblies of God Graduate School in Springfield, Missouri (founded in 1973); the Church of God Graduate School in Cleveland, Tennessee (1975), and C. H. Mason Seminary in Atlanta (1970), operated by the largest black Pentecostal body, the Church of God in Christ. It is one of several seminaries connected with Atlanta’s Interdenominational Theological Center. Melodyland School of Theology in Anaheim, California, is interdenominationally charismatic, and Oral Roberts University in Tulsa is making another attempt to have a graduate seminary program.

Also surfacing at the conference was the fact that Pentecostals are entering older seminaries in increasing numbers on both the faculty and student levels. For example, Russell Spittler of the Assemblies of God was recently made assistant dean at Fuller Theological Seminary where as many as one-third of the students come from Pentecostal backgrounds. New York City’s venerable Union Seminary now includes two Pentecostals on the faculty: James A. Forbes, Jr., a dynamic young black scholar and preacher of the United Holy Church who holds the chair of homiletics once held by Harry Emerson Fosdick, and Old Testament professor Jerry Shepherd of the Assemblies of God.

In the restaurants and corridors between sessions, the inerrancy question raised by Harold Lindsell’s book The Battle for the Bible held the center of attention. Practically all Pentecostals would give assent to the inerrancy teaching (even though the word “inerrancy” does not appear in most Pentecostal denominational statements of faith), but concern was expressed over the prospects of “heresy trials” that might divert attention from the advance of the Pentecostal and charismatic renewals that are sweeping the world. Knight, however, underlined the doctrine in his address as the “platform [on which] we can stand together as Pentecostals and as Christians.”

In business sessions, the SPS reacted favorably to the overture of the World Pentecostal Conference which in September designated the Society as an officially recognized “research agency.” Program chairman Horace Ward, Jr., of West Coast Bible College (Church of God, Cleveland) was elevated to the presidency, while Anthony Palma, dean of the Assemblies of God Graduate School was placed in charge of next year’s program.

VINSON SYNAN

The Pickpocket

Somewhere there’s a pickpocket who may be better for having committed one of his crimes—if he took what he stole to heart.

Southern Baptist mission pastor John Wallen was standing on a busy street corner in Neosho, Missouri, waiting for traffic to clear. Suddenly a stranger with a coat draped over his arm brushed by and disappeared. Wallen immediately checked his wallet. It was still there, but something else was missing from his coat pocket. The thief had stolen a packet of tracts on “How to Have a Full and Meaningful Life.”

Crucial Vote

Voting has begun in the sixty presbyteries (regional units) of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern) on the proposed change in its doctrinal stance. Included are new ordination vows, a book of confessions, and a new declaration of faith. Opponents of the package said in a full-page advertisement in the December Presbyterian Survey that the denomination is taking “the most crucial vote in decades.” Among the signers of the “Save Our Theology” appeal were former stated clerk James A. Millard, Jr., Mrs. Billy Graham, and former moderators C. Darby Fulton and J. McDowell Richards. Two other former moderators have also opposed an affirmative vote, but sixteen have said they favor the changes.

The first three presbyteries to vote on the package passed it with comfortable margins. Three-fourths of the regional units must approve if it is to go back to the General Assembly for a final constitutional vote. By the third week of next month three-fourths will have cast their ballots. If the contest is close, the outcome may not be known until the last of the presbyteries meet in April.

Absolution

Jackson, Tennessee, is not a place that generates much news of international interest. This overwhelmingly Protestant city of about 40,000 on the road from Memphis to Nashville is an especially unlikely site for important Roman Catholic developments.

But when Bishop Carroll Dozier came to Jackson from Memphis last month, so did reporters from the three major television networks, two wire services, and assorted other agencies. They dutifully recorded every detail of the second edition of a service he had conducted in Memphis a week earlier (most of them had missed it). Approximately 2,000 of the faithful attended the civic-center event in Jackson, while about six times that number had participated in the first edition at the Memphis Coliseum.

Why was all this newsworthy? Why did the Pope’s personal representative go to the trouble of issuing a statement saying he had not approved the program? Why did Catholic publications and prelates across the country “choose up sides” and commend or condemn the bishop of west Tennessee?

Dozier had touched a Catholic nerve by absolving divorced and remarried Catholics of their sins to the extent that they could partake of communion. To do this, he granted a “general absolution,” a rite usually reserved for soldiers going into battle or people in other emergency situations. The well-publicized services were attended by inactive Catholics from distant places as well as those from within the Memphis diocese.

The bishop instructed the communicants—many of whom had not been to mass for years—to go to confession within a year. This point, too, disturbed some of his colleagues. The president of the National Catholic Bishops’ Conference, Archbishop Joseph L. Bernardin of Cincinnati, issued a statement specifying that confessing sin to a priest before communion is still the norm.

The Non-Conformists

A new Gallup Poll shows that about 12 per cent of American adults are engaged in non-traditional religious movements. Transcendental Meditation (TM) was found to be the most popular, supported by 4 per cent of the 1,553 adults surveyed (or six million of the nation’s population). Yoga was listed by 3 per cent, the charismatic movement and mysticism by 2 per cent each (or an estimated three million people each), and eastern religions by 1 per cent.

The followers of TM and yoga tend to be young adults under age 25, said the Gallup report. It also stated that most of the new religions tend to place great value on the inner self and the attainment of mental, psychic, or spiritual states of peace.

No Resurrection

New York City police are investigating a bizarre case involving a group of cult members who were found in an apartment praying over the decomposed body of a man who had died of cancer in early October. Oric Bovar, 59, and five of his followers, were exhorting the deceased, a 29-year-old graduate student from Greece, to rise from the dead, the police said. The prayer vigil apparently had lasted two months.

Bovar has been described as a writer, opera coach, and astrologist. It was as an astrologist living in Italy but frequently visiting the United States that he built up a following of perhaps as many as 1,000, including many young entertainers and professionals in both New York and Los Angeles. A number defected when he returned nineteen months ago from Italy changed in appearance and philosophy. For one thing, he indicated that he was Jesus Christ incarnate, say defectors, and he laid down a lot of rules: no drinking, no drugs, no doctors or medicine, no premarital sex, no meat-eating, and no dealing with anybody else in the psychic business. Disobedience would bring dire results, he warned.

The police went to the apartment after receiving a call from a woman identifying herself as Mary Magdalene, who described the vigil. The body was covered with a shroud and lying on a bed surrounded by the six praying men. One of the men said the six were not part of a cult but simply members of a prayer group motivated by a deeply shared “faith in Jesus Christ.”

Religion in Transit

Among the sixty-one floats in the nationally televised Pageant of Roses Parade on New Year’s Day in Pasadena, California, were entries by the Garden Grove (California) Community Church, the Lutheran Laymen’s League, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon). The Garden Grove float was the sole entry sponsored by a single congregation in the by-invitation-only event. Television preacher Robert Schuller is pastor of the church. The grand marshalls of the event were Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, well-known in evangelical circles for their witness and Christian books.

For the fifth time a proposal to ordain women to the ministry failed to gain the necessary two-thirds vote by classes (districts) of the Reformed Church in America. The denomination’s General Synod last June recommended the classes to vote affirmatively in order to permit the synod to vote on the issue this year.

The Missouri branch of the Church of Scientology lost its $2.5 million libel suit against the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and two of its reporters, James Adams and Elaine Viets. The case involved five articles on the sect and its recruiting practices published in 1974. It was balanced reporting that did not constitute malicious defamation, the state supreme-court justices indicated in a unanimous decision. Observers say Scientologists have developed a reputation for media confrontations, compounding their image-polishing problems.

Here Comes Santa

In cities across America the Salvation Army bell-ringers manning the Christmas kettles and the Volunteers of America Santa Clauses got some unexpected—and unwanted—competition. Members of the Hare Krishna sect stopped their chanting, donned Santa Claus outfits, and hit the streets to pass out literature and candy canes or flowers and to hustle donations in exchange for the freebies.

VOA leaders complained that the super-salesmen Krishna Santas had given a bad image to street Santas in general and that contributions to the VOA were down drastically.

In some locations competing Santas almost came to blows, and police ticketed a number of Krishna Santas who failed to move on when told. Authorities warned the alien Santas against misrepresentation.

The Krishna people say they didn’t want to confuse anybody. “When people see Santa, the contemporary emblem of Christmas, we want them to think of God,” explained one leader.

The United Church of Canada is trying to stop the Reed paper company from cutting down more than 16 million acres of timber in northern Ontario. A church research report says that the result would be “an ecological catastrophe” affecting Canadian Indians who, contrary to promises, have not been consulted.

The Christian Broadcasting Network of Portsmouth, Virginia, has ordered a satellite earth station that will give it the capability to broadcast simultaneously across the United States and around the world. The unit is valued at $500,000.

Atheist activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair is still in the news. She announced the revival of the annual celebration of the Winter Solstice on December 21, which she claimed was stolen by Christians to celebrate the birth “of their mythical Christ.” She also declared Thursday to be the sabbath day of American atheists, and urged that employers arrange the work schedules of atheist employees accordingly. Meanwhile, her son William J. Murray, 30, has filed a $1 million suit against Gospel Tract Society of Independence, Missouri, for publishing a pamphlet allegedly describing him inaccurately as having forsaken his atheist convictions and become a Christian.

Dallas—Big D or Big Dud? A Bill Gaither “Praise Gathering” concert and a “World Thrust” conference sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ had to be cancelled recently due to lack of interest (from 5,000 to 10,000 registrants had been hoped for), and a national prayer congress expected to attract 10,000 drew fewer than 1,000. Nearly 100,000 thronged to the city less than five years ago for Campus Crusade’s Explo ’72. But Crusade’s “Here’s Life” effort, a roaring success in some cities, by comparison made only a dull thud in Big D last year.

Pastor Charles Blair of the bankrupt Calvary Temple church in Denver was sentenced last month to five years probation, fined $12, 750, and ordered to repay in full all victims of the financial collapse associated with Blair and the Temple. Blair was found guilty last August on seventeen counts of fraudulent sale of securities. He has vowed to repay “every cent” and is making progress toward that goal.

The National Council of Churches has raised about $70,000 since July for the legal defense of Leonard Crow Dog, 33, a Sioux medicine man serving prison sentences for convictions connected with the takeover of Wounded Knee by radicals in 1973. NCC direct-mail appeals portray him as “a victim of outrageous injustice.” The NCC contends that Crow Dog was performing religious and medical services and had nothing to do with the violence and theft for which he was jailed.

The National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., will provide an emergency backup loan program of up to $1 million for the ailing NAACP, says NBC president Joseph H. Jackson. A cash sum of $250,000 has been set aside for the purpose, the NBC will borrow a similar amount, and another $500,000 will be available from an unspecified source, according to Jackson.

The best tactic in combatting objectionable TV programming is to make it unprofitable for the sponsors. “Hit them in the billfold; you can’t get any closer to their hearts,” said Dallas advertising man William Hill in summing up the consensus of a Southern Baptist-sponsored hearing on television and morality.

Personalia

Evangelist Billy Graham made headlines in the National Enquirer with a statement expressing his belief that intelligent, ordinary-looking beings may exist in outer space and “have developed space vehicles capable of reaching Earth.” He said he believes they worship God, would visit Earth in peace if they came, and could hold the solution to many of Earth’s problems.

President David Allan Hubbard of Fuller Seminary was recently elected president of the Association of Theological Schools, an accrediting agency with nearly 200 Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish seminaries and theological schools as members.

Rebecca Ann Reid, 17, a member of Royal Haven Baptist Church in Dallas who was chosen Miss Teenage America of 1977 from among 20,000 entrants, says she intends to share her faith in Christ with as many as possible during her reign.

Graham Kerr, the former Galloping Gourmet of television, and his wife Treena are building a mountain retreat near Vail, Colorado, for couples with serious marital problems. “We are in a Christian war against divorce,” declares Kerr, whose own troubled marriage was rescued only after he and his wife professed Christ last year. They’ve named their ministry Rejoice Fellowship. Couples will be charged $24 per day for five days, including meals, but they will do their own cooking (from Kerr-packed kits and menus)—part of the Kerr therapy.

Methodist clergyman Richard Jones, 70, retired as president of the Canadian Council of Christians and Jews, which he organized in 1947. He initiated Brotherhood Week, an observance that has spread to every major city in Canada.

World Scene

A number of church relief agencies have sent clothing, tent, medicine, and other aid to help the survivors of the recent earthquake in northeastern Turkey that killed several thousand and left thousands of others homeless in sub-freezing weather. (The quake’s epicenter was underneath Mt. Ararat.) Of the nearly 40 million people in Turkey, fewer than three dozen are evangelical Christians, according to mission sources.

In a pre-Christmas attack on religion, the Communist Party in the Soviet Union urged the news media to save Soviet youth from “church traps” by a more forceful presentation of atheism. Pravda, the party’s paper, said letters from readers are complaining of a new “attitude of reconciliation toward religion” that is especially evident among the young.

Three Catholic missionaries from West Germany were slain last month by a terrorist in Rhodesia.

The Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland rejected the ordination of women, the third time advocates of it got a majority vote but not the required three-fourths majority. About 600 female theological graduates serve as unordained lectors, fulfilling many functions of pastors, but without approval to celebrate the eucharist.

The Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches (AELC) is probably America’s newest denomination. It was constituted officially last month in Chicago by break-away elements from the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS). The 172 delegates and some 200 observers represented about 150 congregations and 75,000 baptized members in five regional synods across the country. Predictions of 300 or more congregations by mid-year were common.

Pastor William Kohn of a Milwaukee church was elected to a two-year term as president, initially a part-time executive position. Kohn, a former LCMS district president, resigned in 1974 as the chief LCMS mission executive in protest against the Missouri Synod’s conservatism.

Pastor Will Herzfeld of Oakland, California, a prominent leader among black Lutherans, was elected vice-president.

A constitution and by-laws were adopted. The constitution contains a confessional statement similar to the Missouri Synod’s, and it provides for a biennial review of whether or not the AELC should continue in existence.

A five-part resolution declared “continuing fellowship” with the LCMS and indicated a desire for altar and pulpit fellowship with the American Lutheran Church, the Lutheran Church in America, and “other Lutheran church bodies in this continent and throughout the world.” The board of directors was instructed to apply for membership in cooperative Lutheran agencies, and to explore possible membership in both the National Council of Churches and World Council of Churches. A recommendation regarding NCC and WCC membership is to be presented at the 1978 convention.

A decision on the ordination of women to the ministry was left to the discretion of the five regional synods, which were formed in the weeks prior to the Chicago meeting. The delegates agreed to “commend to the other synods … the action of the Pacific Regional Synod in approving the ordination of women” and to urge them to take action. The 2.7-million-member LCMS does not ordain women, but the Pacific Synod’s action is in line with the practice of the other two major Lutheran denominations, which do. At least one woman, Janith Otte of Oakland, is qualified for the ministry and is seeking a pastorate in the AELC. Several other women are at the seminary level.

Seminex (Concordia Seminary-in-Exile) and Partners in Mission, a support operation for domestic and overseas ministries, were recognized as part of the AELC. Each is responsible for its own funding, however.

A 1977 budget of $140,000 was adopted, and AELC members were challenged to study various social and ecclesiastical issues.

The AELC board selected Elwyn Ewald of St. Louis as the denomination’s executive secretary for the next two years. He has been the chief executive of Evangelical Lutherans in Mission (ELIM), the dissident body in the Missouri Synod out of which most of the AELC’s leaders came. (ELIM is continuing its work on a reduced scale for the immediate future despite pressure against it by Missouri Synod loyalists, say sources.) St. Louis will serve as AELC headquarters city for the time being, according to Ewald.

In a convention sermon, Seminex president John Tietjen urged the AELC to institute safeguards against organizations and regulations that overshadow a concern for people and result in a “new legalism,” a slap at the Missouri Synod. “The Gospel alone is the criterion for our fellowship,” he declared.

Kohn got applause when he said during the keynote address: “It is our intention as a church body to give the people of the AELC the opportunity to be involved in the study of theological issues so that consensus on understanding the Scriptures, rather than voting power, shall be the deciding factor.” It was another obvious reference to the doctrinal turmoil that has beset the LCMS in recent years.

New York pastor C. Thomas Spitz, the AELC’s ecumenical officer, conceded that the nation doesn’t need another Lutheran church but that AELC members need each other. The AELC does not intend to continue a separate existence over a prolonged period of time, he said.

“We believe that Lutheran consolidation will occur,” he asserted, “and we want to be a part of it.” (AELC leaders predict a six-to ten-year lifespan for their church.)

In corridor talk, reporters noted that it is usually conservative groups that break away from liberal-controlled bodies to form new organizations. A reversal of that trend occurred in 1962 when the Progressive National Baptist Convention was formed by churches that left the more conservative National Baptist Convention, U.S.A. The AELC is the most prominent illustration of such a reversal so far in this decade.

There was little overt bitterness or high emotion evident in the AELC proceedings. But there are many troubles at the local level. A hint of them was contained in a report of the LCMS board of directors, whose meetings overlapped with the AELC convention. In a resolution on property rights, the board reminded member congregations that in the event of division or threatened division within a congregation, all parties are encouraged to deal with each other and with the issue in Christian love and concern. The board also said that it is not automatic that a minority in a congregation has no rights regarding the congregation’s property when the majority votes to terminate membership in the LCMS. Nor is it true that courts are prohibited from deciding a church property dispute just because a doctrinal controversy exists, the report says.

A statement outlining “theological, legal, and practical ramifications of schism within congregations” was to be mailed to all LCMS congregations this month.

A Rewarding Study

A knowledge of the Bible can be rewarding, as any Bible college professor can attest. Especially Richard McNeely of Biola College in suburban Los Angeles. Somehow he got picked as a contestant on the television game show “50 Grand Slam.” The show is based on the contestants’ knowledge on the given topic of the day. On McNeely’s day, the topic was the Bible. When it was over he had won the top prize of $50,000.

Our Man At the U.N.

President-elect Jimmy Carter’s nominee for the chief U.S. diplomatic post at the United Nations, Congressman Andrew Jackson Young, Jr., 44, is an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ. He travels in ecumenical circles (for years he’s held office in the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches) and prays in evangelical ones (he is part of the prayer-group movement in Congress, meeting weekly with a few Republican and Democratic “moderates” for discussion and prayer). He describes himself as a liberal socially and politically but a “fairly orthodox” believer theologically. He commutes to Georgia most weekends and frequently preaches twice on Sunday; the churches he visits vary widely.

The son of a dentist, Young grew up in a middle-class black family in a New Orleans neighborhood that was nearly all white. The family attended Central Congregational Church. Young was educated in black public and private schools, Dillard University, and Howard University in Washington, D.C., from which he graduated at age 19. On his way home from Howard he met a white fresh out of Yale Divinity School who was on his way to Africa as a missionary. “He was the first young Christian I had ever really gotten to know,” Young recalled in an interview with correspondent James C. Hefley. The friend invited Young to a summer youth conference in Texas sponsored by the NCC.

“That was the first time that I sat down and really studied the New Testament,” he said. It was a spiritual turning point. Young decided to enter full-time Christian work, intending to enroll in seminary and then go to Africa as a missionary, a decision that at first upset his family (his father wanted him to be a dentist).

At Hartford Seminary he studied Gandhi and became convinced that the country’s social ills could be changed without violence.

He worked in various youth projects and among a number of local congregations. While running a Bible school at the First Congregational Church in Marion, Alabama, he met Jean Childs, a Bible teacher who had attended Manchester College in Indiana. She later became his wife (they have four children).

Their applications for missionary work somehow went astray in the denominational bureaucracy, and by the time it was all straightened out the Youngs were settled in the pastorate of a small church in Thomasville, Georgia (Young was ordained in 1955 into the ministry of the former Congregational Christian Church).

Two years later Young joined the NCC staff as a youth-work executive, then went to work for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1961. He became executive director of the civil rights organization in 1964 and executive vice-president in 1967. In 1968 he was named chairman of the NCC’s Delta Ministry program (he retained his SCLC post). Throughout the civil-rights marches and demonstrations of the early and middle 1960s he was frequently out front with Martin Luther King, Jr., and other leaders.

In 1970 the firm-willed but soft-spoken Young won the Democratic nomination for Congress from Georgia’s fifth district but lost the election. In 1972 he ran again and became Georgia’s first black congressman since 1870. During these forays he often bumped into a rising Georgia politician named Jimmy Carter (he ran for governor in 1970). “I found out he was sensitive to people,” says Young, “and that impressed me.” They became friends. During the recent presidential campaign, Young was one of Carter’s closest advisors, and he helped to deliver the black vote.

Young is on the international committee that oversees the WCC’s controversial Program to Combat Racism. He says he is committed to the concept of majority rule in southern Africa. Therefore, he had no problems of conscience as a committee member in approving grants to “liberation” movements. “The money was to be used for humanitarian purposes—food, clothing, medical care,” he says. “We made no judgment on the way in which the people struggled against oppression.”

The Youngs envision themselves someday going back to a little country church “to work with ordinary people and their problems.” But for now it’s a big building in New York and some very big problems as America’s ambassador to the United Nations.

“I hope that I will always be open enough for God to lead me, no matter where it is that he wants me to go,” affirms the minister.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Amy’s New Teacher

The wife of a United Methodist pastor will be Amy Carter’s new teacher when the daughter of the President-elect moves to Washington.

“We have a lot in common, being from the South and, most important of all, Christian,” said Mrs. Verona Meeder, fourth- and fifth-grade teacher at Thaddeus Stevens School, located about five blocks from the White House.

Mrs. Meeder, a black, is a native of North Carolina. Her husband was the pastor of a United Methodist church near the school until last June. Since then, Andrew Meeder has been the pastor of Lanham Methodist Church in suburban Maryland. He is a graduate of Garrett Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois. The couple met while both were students at East Carolina University.

The Thaddeus Stevens School is located just off K Street Northwest, a key thoroughfare along which a number of the capital’s modern commercial office buildings are situated. The 108-year-old school was originally built for black children and was segregated during its first eighty-six years.

Nine-year-old Amy, whose mother was reared a Methodist, will be the first child of an American president to attend public school in Washington since Theodore Roosevelt’s son Quentin. The three-story school has 215 pupils from pre-kindergarten through the sixth grade. About 60 per cent are black American (more than 90 per cent of Washington’s public-school population is black), 10 per cent are white American, and the remaining 30 per cent are foreign-born from some two dozen countries, most of them from the diplomatic community.

Mrs. Meeder has taught at the school for ten years. Some of her pupils are Hindu and Muslim. They are excused from classes on their religious holidays.

John Novotney, Religious News Service correspondent, quoted the teacher as saying: “I consider it quite a responsibility. I feel a sense of mission to be given the challenge to teach her, and I’m very serious about how to deal with it.” She added that she hoped that as a result the image of urban schools will be given a lift.

As a pastor’s wife, Mrs. Meeder has taught Sunday school and worked with church women’s groups over the years. The Meeders have three children, a 21-year-old girl who is finishing college and two teen-age boys.

Amy’s new school, named after a Republican abolitionist congressman of the Civil War era, has reportedly been besieged with requests from parents in the suburbs offering to pay high tuition rates to be able to transfer their children there.

Secret Service spokesmen will not say how they intend to handle Amy’s security while she is at school, but if it becomes difficult she may be transferred to a more secluded private institution.

War in Toronto

In a move that made front-page news in the city’s papers and dominated newscasts early last month, Roman Catholic archbishop Philip Pocock of Toronto launched a full-scale attack on pornography. The spiritual head of Canada’s largest English-speaking archdiocese called on the 900,000 faithful to boycott all publications, theaters, and businesses that “encourage the pornographic.”

He issued his call to arms in advertisements in all three Toronto dailies. They were paid for by the Knights of Columbus. In the ads, Pocock said the prime motivation for the current “amazing proliferation” of pornographic material is financial profit, but the ultimate result is “the destruction of the moral fibre and virtue of our people, especially the young.”

Priests in the 200 congregations of the archdiocese were ordered to read the letter at masses and to preach against pornography. Parents were urged to protest the sale of smut at neighborhood stores and to ask that “adult” publications, if they must be carried, be kept out of sight.

In an unprecedented display of unanimity, major Protestant leaders voiced their support and urged their church members to support the anti-obscenity drive.

LESLIE K. TARR

Saints in Memphis

Bishop J. O. Patterson, Sr., 64, was elected to a third four-year term as international presiding bishop of the three-million-member Church of God in Christ. The action was taken at the recent annual Holy Convocation of the black Pentecostal denomination in Memphis. Plans were also approved to build a $20 million national headquarters to be known as “Saints Center” in downtown Memphis. The complex will contain a 15,000-seat-dome-shaped auditorium, a 2.000-car garage, and other church facilities.

An estimated 45,000 delegates attended one or more sessions of the convention, which combined around-the-clock revival services and business meetings.

Serving Under Fire

The tightrope that relief administrators must walk to serve war victims was spotlighted by the National Catholic Reporter last month. The independent, lay-edited Catholic weekly, in a major feature article, warmed over allegations that it began making about ten years ago. It charged that officials of Catholic Relief Services (CRS) in Viet Nam were too cozy with government people. In particular, said the paper, the CRS director from 1967, Robert L. Charlebois, was too close to the Central Intelligence Agency and American Army personnel.

Charlebois, now working in CRS headquarters, was quick to deny that he had worked hand-in-glove with the U.S. military. His job, he said, was to “feed the poor.” The new CRS executive director, Bishop Edwin Broderick, said CRS’s goal for twenty-one years in Southeast Asia was “to help as many of God’s poor as possible.” In order to accomplish this, he explained, “it was necessary for CRS to work cooperatively with whatever governments were involved. Without their logistical support, it would be utterly impossible for CRS to carry on any kind of effective relief program.” Broderick stressed, however, that “at no time did CRS knowingly act on behalf of any military intelligence agencies, and if CRS reports and correspondence were used to supply any organization with ‘intelligence’ information, then CRS was never aware of such procedures.”

The Reporter feature, written by the weekly’s Washington correspondent, Richard Rashke, included some previously unpublished allegations by former CRS workers. It was entitled, “Christ’s Work—or the CIA’s.” While some of the material vital to the article’s overall charges is not attributed to any source, most of the new material is linked to Jacqui Chagnon, a former CRS staffer in Vietnam now working in Washington for Clergy and Laity Concerned, an anti-war group. Also quoted is Heinz Kotte, an expriest now working in Germany with Action for a World in Solidarity. Both claimed that goods were provided directly to the military or to families of soldiers. In response, CRS officials said the quickest and fastest way to get commodities to the needy was through the military.

Rashke’s article charged that U.S. personnel in charge of the war effort used a “carrot and stick” technique to get CRS workers to cooperate. Those who provided intelligence information and who were otherwise cooperative got such help as postal and post-exchange privileges, priority travel on CIA and military flights, and free housing, the article said. Charlebois responded that instead of being given such privileges, he often fought for them.

The article noted the resignation of a number of staffers who were disgusted with the relations between CRS and government officials. Charlebois said his people “were told before they came to Viet Nam that we were apolitical.… There were times when people got so emotionally involved that they couldn’t perform, at which time they had to be relieved from the staff.… I can honestly say I never, ever, removed a staff person at a request or suggestion of U.S. or Vietnamese officials.”

CRS is the largest relief agency in the world. The outlay in the past year, according to Associated Press figures, was $257 million, and in the past thirty-three years it has amounted to $3.7 billion.

High Tension In Latin America

Tension continues between the government of Ecuador and the Roman Catholic Church following the arrest of thirty-one people in a church-owned retreat house north of Quito in late November. The group was described by the minister of government, Colonel Bolivar Jarrin, as subversive and “ready to begin guerrilla activity.” Jarrin charged there were direct links between the group and the bishops’ meeting in the city of Riobamba in August that was broken up by police and resulted in the expulsion of a number of foreign clergy from the country (see September 10, 1976, issue, page 68).

A Spanish priest and two Ecuadorian ex-priests were among those detained, along with officials of the Catholic University, according to reports. The Spaniard was later expelled.

Among other accusations, the government claimed the group planned to incite the peasants. A number of farms in the province of Chimborazo have been occupied in recent weeks by peasants demanding land. They have the backing of Bishop Leonidas Proana of Riobamba, capital of the province, who organized the August bishops’ meeting.

The military government said that it is determined to continue with its plan for a return to democracy, with elections scheduled this year, but that it can do so only “in a climate of order and peace.”

According to a document found by police, the group arrested was allegedly planning to found a clandestine political movement, the “National Democratic Union,” which was to be formed by “the democratic elements of the people, the armed forces, and the new church.”

Meanwhile, in Colombia, the Catholic hierarchy there warned in a document released November 30 that Marxism is penetrating the church. The document, signed by sixty-five leaders from all over the country, criticized in harsh terms various dissident movements of priests and liberationist thinking, which “puts the temporal above the spiritual and tends to negate the transcendence of Christ’s redemptive action.”

The declaration was released three weeks after the military arrested three priests and a nun in Cartagena and confiscated arms, military uniforms, medicines, and cash that were hidden in a church and in the priests’ homes, apparently destined for the Communist guerrilla “National Liberation Army” (ELN). The four were accused of serving as a link with the guerrillas.

The bishops’ declaration characterized the Marxist influence as “not simply a compromising action in the light of the requirements of social justice” but “an attack against the pillars of the Catholic faith itself.”

STEPHEN R. SYWULKA

No Obituary Yet For Church Colleges

Church-related colleges, especially those with strong evangelical commitments, are not necessarily an endangered species. This finding, contrary to widely held opinion, was reported at year-end by the University of Arizona higher-education center after a study of ten-year enrollment trends. Principal authors of the report were Earl J. McGrath and Richard C. Neese. McGrath, executive director of the center’s program in liberal studies, is also senior adviser for education to the Lilly Endowment and former U.S. commissioner of education.

“Those institutions in which religion is a genuine force are faring better than those which have succumbed to the secularization widespread in our culture and in the enterprise of higher education at large,” McGrath and Reese concluded. They back up their statement with figures from 88 per cent of the self-declared church-related colleges and universities with full-time enrollments of 250 to 2,900 students. Over the 1965–75 decade, 327 institutions had an aggregate growth of 13 per cent. The total enrollment grew from 287,052 to 324,124.

The higher-education experts found the greatest growth in colleges related to groups with strong evangelical positions, such as the Assemblies of God and the Southern Baptist Convention. The thirty Southern Baptist institutions reporting in the survey experienced a ten-year growth of 31 per cent. At the other end of the scale, the American Baptist Churches was among the four denominations whose colleges showed a decrease during the decade. The five ABC schools lost 6 per cent. Also dropping in enrollment were colleges of the United Church of Christ (3 per cent), United Presbyterian Church (7 per cent), and Church of the Nazarene (10 per cent). However, the authors of the report explained that the Nazarene figure does not include two institutions organized since 1965. Had they been counted in the denominational total, the Nazarene category would have registered a 9 per cent increase.

McGrath and Neese noted that enrollments in many of the nation’s public colleges dropped sharply from 1975 to 1976 (even though they showed large gains from 1965 to 1975), but that church-related schools registered a gain. The writers also made special mention of the fact that some schools with strong evangelical positions, such as non-denominational Wheaton, were not covered in their survey. Many of these independent institutions are attracting record enrollments of highly qualified students, they said.

Enrollment is not all that counts, the experts cautioned. While students keep coming, the funds to educate them are harder to get. Said the Arizona report: “One of the principal purposes of this analysis is to refute the notion among potential donors that financial aid to the church-related college is a poor investment because it is in danger of closing for want of students. The fact is that with larger resources in the form of gifts—and particularly scholarship assistance—these institutions could easily draw a larger percentage of the college-going population.”

One of the denominational studies mentioned in the McGrath-Neese report is that of the National Commission on United Methodist Higher Education. At a November meeting this commission called for more “constitutionally permissible” state and federal funding for church-related colleges. At a meeting this spring it will decide on an official definition for “church-related.”

The ‘Threat’ To Religious Broadcasting: Somebody Is Lying

“Keep those cards and letters coming in” is the familiar appeal of American religious broadcasters.

There is one kind of card and letter they wish they could stop, though—the letter to the Federal Communications Commission about a long settled petition. Messages by the thousands continue to pour into the FCC (and into other federal offices) asking for a denial of a mythical petition from Madalyn Murray O’Hair that would “eliminate the proclamation of the Gospel via the airwaves in America.” If there were such a request to the FCC the broadcasters would welcome the mail, but there is none.

The petition number cited in most of the notices that encourages the letters is RM 2493. That is the number assigned to the Milam-Lansman petition, which the FCC denied in August, 1975. While Mrs. O’Hair, self-proclaimed atheist leader, might have been sympathetic to that request, she was not a party to it. The persons who filed it are communications consultants, and they were asking the FCC to rule in a rather narrowly-defined area of station licensing.

Mrs. O’Hair gained her fame in cases related to school devotions and astronaut Bible readings, but so far she has no pending business at the FCC. Yet notices crop up in church bulletins and newsletters stating (without authority) that the FCC has granted her a hearing.

Those notices prompt all sorts of appeals to the FCC, and the mail is an embarrassment to religious broadcasters. At last count last month, nearly four million pieces referring to RM 2493 had been received since it was denied in 1975.

The notices urging mail have shown up in every state, and the appeals are identical, said Ben Armstrong, executive secretary of National Religious Broadcasters. His organization has been trying for over a year to get Christians to turn off the correspondence. He said responsible broadcasters have made many appeals to their constituencies to ignore the anonymous suggestions to write. He is now convinced that someone with ulterior motives is behind the drive, trying either to embarrass the FCC or to ridicule religious broadcasting.

Armstrong has decided to get help in trying to track down the source of the appeals for letters. He has asked the FCC to bring the Justice Department into the investigation. Government sleuths may be able to turn up the culprit NRB has been unable to turn off.

Up, Up And Away!

Church Growth: Everybody’s Business, by E. LeRoy Lawson and Tesunao Yamamori (Standard, 1976, 152 pp., n.p., pb), Introducing Church Growth, by Tesunao Yamamori and LeRoy Lawson (Standard, 1975, 256 pp., n.p.), Your Church Can Grow, by C. Peter Wagner (Regal, 1976, 176 pp., $3.50 pb), and Your Church Has Real Possibilities, by Robert H. Schuller (Regal, 180 pp., $2.95 pb), are reviewed by Richard Allen Bodey, pastor, First Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, Gastonia, North Carolina.

A fantastic future for the institutional church in the United States of America”! This confident forecast by Robert H. Schuller, the pastor of California’s mushrooming Garden Grove Community Church, is welcome news indeed, especially at a time when, according to the many recent prophets of doom, the Church is nearly ready for last rites.

This new optimism about the institutional church is one of the tastier fruits of the church-growth movement, a “scientific approach” to understanding the principles and dynamics of church growth. Critics trace the movement to the American penchant for bigness as a sign of success. Proponents, however, claim biblical inspiration for it, arguing that the book of Acts sets forth a pattern of church growth that is meant to be normative, and is as feasible today as it was in the first century. Why, then, is it so largely frustrated? For an objective answer to that question, church-growth researchers draw heavily on the social sciences—cultural anthropology, psychology, sociology, and linguistics—as well as on biblical and historical studies.

In their neat, handy overview, Church Growth: Everybody’s Business, Lawson and Yamamori locate the genius of the movement in its insistence that the following emphases are essential to the missionary thrust of the Church: the authority of the Bible, the distinctiveness and priority of evangelism, a realistic evaluation of receptivity to the Gospel, scientific objectivity, and shared research. Of particular value to pastors and lay leaders alike are the chapters “How Do Churches Grow?” (twelve conditions), “Why Don’t All Churches Grow?” (ten obstacles), “How Can I Make My Church Grow?” (eight steps), and “Where Should the Missionary Dollar Go?”

Introducing Church Growth, a more formal textbook by the same team of writers, presents the major concepts of the church-growth school, identifies the most important publications in the field, and includes a generous selection of excerpts from the writings of authorities. The final chapters deal with the controversial issues of the relation of Christianity to non-Christian religions and the Church’s role in revolution. Church-growth leaders, while favoring a sympathetic understanding of other religions and acknowledging the validity of certain of their insights, are nevertheless committed to the uniqueness of Christ and the necessity of Christian conversion. Similarly, the movement recognizes the need to transform the social order but finds the key to social change, not in confrontation with established structures, but in individual conversion.

Discussion questions are appended to each chapter. Many of them, though stimulating and relevant, are too advanced for beginners and cannot be answered satisfactorily from a reading of this text alone. The book also has an excessive number of blank, or nearly blank, pages.

Turning from Lawson and Yamamori to Wagner is like exchanging a cuddly kitten for a belligerent porcupine. Your Church Can Grow is a disturbing book—disturbing for its truth, no less disturbing for its fallacies.

One can scarcely dispute Wagner’s thesis that God wants churches to grow. And many of us in static or dying congregations are guilty, as he charges, of taking refuge in “remnant theology.” But his idealization of the super-church lacks both scriptural sanction and empirical validity. A five-thousand-member congregation may feed a pastor’s ego and project an image of success, but comparative studies—based on criteria such as attendance, per-capita giving, member involvement, and corporate fellowship—suggest that ten congregations of five hundred members each are apt to generate greater spiritual growth among the members.

Admittedly, the big church can offer a wider variety of specialized ministries. But this advantage hardly compensates for the weaknesses that inevitably accompany bigness. Preaching, for example, has its best effect when the preacher maintains close pastoral contact with his hearers. But no one person can be a pastor to several thousand people. Nor is the quality of Christian worship, as Wagner mistakenly argues, necessarily influenced by the size of the worshiping body. Who doubts that the institution of the Eucharist in the Upper Room was one of the most moving worship experiences of all time? Yet only a dozen or so were present.

Many will find Wagner’s patronizing attitude toward pastors of “unexpansive personality” highly offensive. His allowance for various equally acceptable philosophies of ministry is debatable. And his hunch that many “dead wood” church members are really good Christians suffering from pastoral neglect or lacking the opportunity to exercise their spiritual gifts leads one to question his familiarity with the problem.

Faults and fallacies notwithstanding, the book sounds a challenge that should be taken seriously by all church leaders. Those who study its seven vital signs of a healthy church and take appropriate action in their own congregations should find the future brighter than the past.

“Grow or perish,” warns Schuller, whose formula for success combines adventuresome faith with professional salesmanship—and more than a pinch of showmanship—in ministering to clearly identified human needs and hurts. Your Church Has Possibilities expounds the techniques he has used to produce one of the greatest success stories in modern American church history, and he “absolutely guarantees” that these techniques will enable almost any church to grow.

For Schuller, the ultimate test of methods and programs seems to be their popular appeal. For the Lord of the Church, the decisive test was the glory of God. Between the two, as Christ’s wilderness temptation makes abundantly plain, an irreconcilable conflict often exists.

The books reviewed here provide a good sampling of church-growth theory. For a sympathetic, yet biblically and theologically sensitive assessment of the movement, I recommend Harvie M. Conn’s Theological Perspectives on Church Growth (1976, Presbyterian and Reformed) and J. Robertson McQuilkin’s Measuring the Church Growth Movement (1974, Moody), both of which have helpful bibliographies.

Less Is More

Church Growth Is Not the Point, by Robert K. Hudnut (Harper & Row, 1975, 143 pp., $7.95), is reviewed by Howard A. Snyder, executive director, Light and Life Men, Winona Lake, Indiana.

This book is not a criticism of the church-growth movement, at least not directly. Its thesis is that the point of being a Christian is suffering, passivity, discipleship. “Church growth is not the point, faithfulness to the Gospel is.”

Hudnut makes a number of arresting statements. God’s work “is the one enterprise which we don’t run.” “Grace is what is happening to us that we didn’t plan.” On peace and reconciliation, the author speaks cogently of the priority of “peace between” over “peace within”: “We have everyone pursuing ‘peace of mind’ when we should have everyone pursuing the peace of the world, from which pursuit you may or may not get peace of mind.… The cross is the Christian symbol, not the cross-legged contemplative.”

Hudnut is good when he speaks of the Church’s inability to do anything except by God’s grace. He is best when he speaks of discipleship. Leadership is the greatest lack in the American church today, he says, and the reason is the shallowness of our discipleship. Church leaders do their best: the problem is that “others who should be leading are not.” In the early Church, discipleship meant leadership. “Normally we focus on the charisma of Jesus. It is time to remember also the charisma of the disciples.” Following Jesus absorbed the first believers totally—and “the one who is possessed is the one who leads. The problem is that we do not have enough church people who are possessed.” Hudnut would put the emphasis here, rather than on “possibility thinking.”

Hudnut’s point about leadership is worth considering. From the world we get the picture that the key to “sucess” is a strong, individualistic leader who inspires others to work together and follow him. It is relatively unimportant what happens to these followers as persons. But the Gospel seeks to develop the Body of Christ, and in this Body each person contributes as he is renewed according to the image of Christ. Some lead more overtly and obviously, according to their gifts. But every disciple makes his unique contribution as a person. So discipleship becomes leadership.

But what about Hudnut’s thesis that church growth is not the point, that “decreasing numbers” means “increasing power”? Noting that membership and attendance are down in many churches, the author claims that “loss of growth in statistics has often meant increase in growth in the Gospel.” That may or may not be true in a given case, however. Hudnut gives no evidence—either empirical or biblical—that it is necessarily so, or that it is so today in American Protestantism.

The fact is that some churches are growing while others are declining. Hudnut seems to write exclusively from within the perspective of those that are declining. He equates decreasing numbers with increasing faithfulness, which is just as erroneous as saying statistical growth is the proof of faithfulness. Neither church growth nor church decline is the point; faithfulness to the Gospel is.

Hudnut writes for the church member who wants to be faithful but finds himself in a declining church with little evidence of spiritual vitality. He does a good job of pointing that church member to some of the basics of Christian discipleship. The title and style chosen for the book deliberately put the case in a stark either/or form. That is all right for the sake of making a point. In the final analysis, however, we may well come back and affirm a positive relationship, in most cases, between Christian faithfulness and church growth.

Transactional Analysis And Christianity

When God Says You’re OK, by Jon Tal Murphree (InterVarsity, 1976, 130 pp., $2.95 pb), is reviewed by Charles Dickson, assistant professor of psychology, Lenoir Rhyne College, Hickory, North Carolina.

This brief paperback should be of interest to anyone who is concerned about one of the newer phenomena in psychology, Transactional Analysis, and its relation to the Christian faith.

Transactional Analysis (TA) is being taught and used in hundreds of centers throughout the country and also in many seminaries. It uses individual responses called “transactions” as its units of analysis. People respond to one another in any of three ways, corresponding to the ego-states that exist in all people: as a Parent, an Adult, a Child (P-A-C). The Parent represents attitudes received as a child, primarily of a controlling, manipulative nature. The Adult ego-state is a mature, responsible response pattern concerned with decision-making and value judgments. The Child ego-state is a dependent, immature, self-seeking response, reflecting basic drives and instincts. The goal of TA is to make people aware of which ego-state they are expressing and the position into which it puts others. By moving from disruptive into complementary transactions, a person can develop more satisfying relations with others.

When God Says You’re OK is not a polemic against the proponents of TA but an attempt to set TA within the context of a Christian view of man. The author does not disagree with the basic categories of P-A-C, but he thinks they are inadequate to explain the totality of man’s spiritual nature. They must be expanded to include the divinely created capacity for God. We could then find in those categories the tools for understanding something of man’s sense of isolation without God as well as something of his capacity to interact with the God-personality.

For Murphree this task is not a mere adjunct to the process, a kind of theological frosting on a psychological cake, but rather a fundamental ingredient. He cleverly interweaves such diverse creatures as Charlie Brown, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Soviet scientist Dotsenko with Judy and John next door in illustrating his points.

This provides evangelical Christians with a working basis for understanding Transactional Analysis as a tool for helping oneself and others, while also underlining the necessity of a proper relationship with God if one is to maintain a balanced and integrated personality.

The OKness based on acceptance of others will dispel human loneliness, but it will never drive away existential loneliness. For this we need a relationship with a loving God who, through Jesus Christ, is the Great OKer.

Equality Or Complementarity?

Let Me Be a Woman, by Elisabeth Elliot (Tyndale, 1976, 190 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by C. E. Cerling, Jr., minister of education, Hopevale Memorial Baptist Church, Saginaw, Michigan.

What was the most significant evangelical book of 1975? Eternity suggested Scanzoni and Hardesty’s All We’re Meant to Be. Elisabeth Elliot answers this title by saying, please, Let Me Be A Woman. Her definition of what a woman is, however, is vastly different from Scanzoni and Hardesty’s.

This book takes the form of correspondence between Mrs. Elliot and her recently engaged daughter, Valerie, about her impending marriage. As a result, it is really two books; one about women’s lib, the other about marriage. The book about marriage is far and away the better one.

Four themes recur throughout the book. First, everything has its place in God’s creation. “The special gift and ability of each creature defines its special limitations. And as the bird easily comes to terms with the necessity of bearing wings when it finds that it is, in fact, the wings that bear the bird—up, away from the world, into the sky, into freedom—so the woman who accepts the limitations of womanhood finds in those very limitations her gifts, her special calling—wings, in fact, which bear her up into perfect freedom, into the will of God.” In God’s will from creation, “it is the nature of the woman to submit.” For by submitting a woman finds perfect freedom because freedom means “doing the thing we were meant for.” This is a theme evangelical feminism must face: did God create the two sexes for a reason? Is there some essential, non-anatomical difference between the sexes? If not, then why did God create two sexes instead of just one? If so, then in what do the differences consist?

Second, hierarchy is necessary for order. There is no society where order comes apart from hierarchy. The same is true of the miniature society, the family. Hierarchy, however, need not be onerous. To illustrate this Elliot uses a personal reference: she can remember only one time in her married life when her husband had to command her to do something. In marriage, an institution created by God, God gives authority to the husband. A wife’s submission to this authority then brings her true freedom because it is really submission to God. As in society in general freedom cannot be found apart from submission to God’s authority, so in marriage freedom is impossible for a woman apart from submission to her husband’s authority. No woman can be truly free attempting to be a man. “It is a naïve sort of feminism that insists that women prove their ability to do all the things that men do.… Men have never sought to prove that they can do all the things women do. Why subject women to purely masculine criteria?” By rejecting male authority in marriage, Elliot thinks, this is what women do.

Third, hierarchy is essential because equality in marriage is impossible. Complementary differences are what God planned. “Who is in a position to apportion everything according to preference or competence?… It is a naïve view of human nature to assume that two equals can take turns leading and following, and can, because they are ‘mature’ do without rank.” What in fact is happening is that “ ‘equal opportunity’ nearly always implies that women want to do what men do, not that men want to do what women do, which indicates that prestige is attached to men’s work but not to women’s.” Therefore Elliot argues the need for differences. Equality is a beautiful ideal, but women’s lib must face the question, Is it a sociological possibility or merely an ideal?

A fourth theme finds less emphasis, although it is clearly important. Marriage reflects the relation of God to Israel and of Christ to his Church. “Tremendous heavenly truths are set forth in a wife’s subjection to her husband, and the use of this metaphor in the Bible cannot be accidental.” But women’s libbers say submission is cultural, not essential. If they are right, marriage does not illustrate any longer the relation of Christ to his Church.

This book, however, is more than a book about women’s liberation. It is also a book about marriage. Elisabeth Elliot reveals great insight into the marriage relationship. For example, she warns her daughter that she will be marrying a sinner, a man, and a husband. As a sinner he will have faults. She must learn to love him for what is good and live with the faults. She will also be marrying a man; she will find that being around a man is quite different from being around a woman. Finally, she will be marrying a husband, not a father or a brother. Her husband will be able to do some things her other males could not; he will also not be able to do some things they could. This must be accepted.

Apart from the ideas about marriage, the strength of this book is its criticism of evangelical women’s liberation. The statement of the traditional women’s role is adequate but rather limited by the form chosen.

Briefly Noted

Many pamphlets have appeared on the Unification Church and its prophet (of which InterVarsity’s forty-four-page The Moon Doctrine by J. Isamu Yamamoto is probably the best), and it’s time to expect books. One of the first is The Spirit of Sun Myung Moon by evangelical author Zola Levitt (Harvest House, 127 pp., $1.75 pb).

Have you ever been exasperated by Robert’s Rules of Order and wondered if there were some alternative other than chaos or an informal consensus that might owe more to personality strengths than the merits of the issue? If so, try Deschler’s Rules of Order by the late Lewis Deschler (Prentice-Hall, 228 pp., $10), who served as parliamentarian of Congress 1928–74. He does not simply give Congress’s rules, but simplifies and generalizes them so that any organization that has members, especially if it is incorporated, can have up-to-date, fair guidelines for getting started and then doing things “decently and in order.” Obviously many religious organizations can find this helpful.

PSALMS Three mid-nineteenth-century commentaries on all 150 psalms are now reprinted in comparatively convenient one-volume editions: Perowne (Zondervan, 1,099 pp., $19.95), Plumer (Banner of Truth, 1,211 pp., $18.95), and Spurgeon, abridged from seven volumes by David Otis Fuller (Kregel, 703 pp., $14.95).

Yet another religiously oriented paperback line has begun to send forth titles, the Fountain Books imprint of Collins + World. Among its initial offerings is well-known writer William Barclay’s translation of The New Testament (576 pp., $2.95 pb). It was first issued in a two-volume hardback nearly a decade ago and would be a worthwhile addition to the shelf of translations in many an English-speaking Christian’s home.

Stephen Neill presents the seminary student or educated layman with a lucid, comprehensive introduction to New Testament theology from a moderately critical point of view in Jesus Through Many Eyes (Fortress, 214 pp., $4.50 pb). He assumes no knowledge of Greek or previous theological study on the part of the reader and leads him through all the books of the New Testament, grouping them by genre and date. A selected, annotated bibliography, which includes many conservative works, guides the student into further study.

Books giving principles of biblical interpretation (“hermeneutics”) abound. One of the most helpful is Understand by Walter Henricksen (Navpress [Box 1659, Colorado Springs, Colo. 80901], 107 pp., $1.95 pb), a leader in The Navigators. He describes and illustrates twenty-four “rules” of interpretation such as, “Biblical examples are authoritative only when supported by a command,” and, “Interpret words in harmony with their meaning in the times of the author.”

EVANGELISM Along with the more technique-oriented manuals, it is helpful to read biblical and theological reflections on evangelism. Of course, very practical ideas are also imbedded throughout the following recent releases: Dynamics of Evangelism by Gerald Borchert, New Testament professor at North American Baptist Seminary (Word, 146 pp., $5.95); Evangelism in Perspective by Robert Coleman, evangelism professor at Asbury Seminary (Christian Publications, 109 pp., $3.95, $1.75 pb); Word in Deed: Theological Themes in Evangelism by Gabriel Fackre, United Church of Christ minister and theology professor at Andover Newton (Eerdmans, 109 pp., $1.95 pb); Evangelization and Catechesis by Johannes Hofinger, a Jesuit (Paulist, 153 pp., $4.95 pb); Love Leaves No Choice: Life-Style Evangelism by C. B. Hogue, evangelism director for the Southern Baptist Convention (Word, 160 pp., $5.95); Bringing God’s News to Neighbors by Carl Kromminga, practical-theology professor at Calvin Seminary (Presbyterian and Reformed, 162 pp., $4.50 pb); Going Public With One’s Faith edited by R. James Ogden, focusing on biblical models (Judson, 128 pp., $2.50 pb); Contemporary Problems of Evangelism by Wendell Price, pastor of North Seattle Alliance Church (Christian Publications, 111 pp., $3.95, $2 pb); and Christian Mission in the Modern World by renowned Anglican Bible teacher John Stott (Inter-Varsity, 128 pp., $2.95 pb). None of these books is overly technical. Although the range of the authors’ denominations is wide, there are many common concerns.

The enigmatic figure of Melchizedek has been interpreted in a variety of ways since the Reformation. Bruce Demarest of Conservative Baptist Seminary catalogues these by period, school, and exegete in readable, exhaustive detail in A History of Interpretation of Hebrews 7:1–10 from the Reformation to the Present (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 146 pp., 32 marks, pb).