What Is Evangelization?

Mission Trends No. 2, edited by Gerald H. Anderson and Thomas F. Stransky (Paulist or Eerdmans, 1975, 279 pp., $2.95 pb), is reviewed by Charles E. Hummel, director of faculty ministries, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship.

Evangelization is the keynote of this volume on contemporary mission trends. The first in the series featured the nature and goals of the Christian mission, while the next will deal with Third World theologies.

The volume is remarkable for its breadth of view and depth of perception. The authors of the twenty-two essays run the spectrum from evangelical Protestant and Pentecostal to Roman Catholic. Equally varied are the racial and cultural perspectives, from American and European to African, Latin American, and Asian. Most of the essays first appeared as addresses, magazine articles, or reports, rather than as theological treatises, and they are very readable. Their length ranges from one to twenty-five pages.

Amid this diversity runs a strong current of urgent concern to understand how the Gospel can be effectively proclaimed in every continent and culture. This collection of essays is not a puzzle whose pieces can be neatly fitted together to form a blueprint for action. It is more a gem with many facets, each reflecting an aspect of evangelization or its impact in a specific situation.

The writers do not focus on techniques but go to the heart of the theological and ethical issues in mission strategy. The first section, seven essays under the umbrella “Mandate and Meaning of Evangelization,” deals with evangelism, conversion, and church membership. John Stott sets the stage with a clear exposition of the biblical basis of evangelism. He shows that the Church’s mission is broader than evangelism; “mission” describes its total service, everything the Lord sent the Church into the world to do as the salt of the earth and the light of the world. Social and economic concerns are a part of this mission. A vital dimension of it is evangelism, spreading the Good News of Jesus Christ.

Paul Löffler’s exposition of conversion, the human response to evangelism, draws on Old and New Testament teaching. He affirms that this personal reorientation toward God has corporate as well as individual consequences: “There is absolutely no gap between turning to God and its realization in the personal and social spheres.”

Ecuadorian René Padilla takes American “culture-Christianity” to task for preaching man’s reconciliation with God while denying man’s reconciliation with man in certain areas of alienation. This “truncated Gospel” provides the basis for “religious clubs with a message that has no relevance to practical life in the social, the economic and the political spheres.” Padilla makes it clear that every culture tends to tame and shape the biblical message for its own comfort. But he focuses on the American version because its influence in world missions is so great. This hard-hitting essay tests the extent to which we are willing to hear such criticism and take corrective action.

The second section of nine essays is headed “Priorities and Strategies.” Especially stimulating are perspectives from India and South Africa. Samuel Rayan relates evangelism and development in the sense of liberation and humanization. “How does faith in the Crucified link up with social action, political conflict and economic development?” He shows the urgency of this question for the Church in India, where for centuries colonial missions were content “to tailor the Gospel to suit the economic and political interests of their sponsors.”

Manus Buthelezi writes from his experience of the black agony in South Africa. He believes that now is the time for the black to evangelize and humanize the white and to “discover a theological framework within which he can understand the will and love of God in Jesus Christ outside the limitations of white institutions.”

Ralph Winter’s article on crosscultural evangelism defines three kinds of evangelism in terms of cultural distance and difficulty. E-1 evangelism involves witness to a non-Christian within one’s own culture. E-2 reaches out to someone nearby with a different social status or dialect or tribal membership that constitutes a cultural barrier. E-3 evangelism involves a radically different culture with its own language and customs. E-2 and E-3 are “crosscultural” and therefore more difficult than E-1. Winter notes that four out of five non-Christians in the world today are beyond the reach of any E-1 evangelism.

The strategy for evangelism calls for special E-2 and E-3 efforts to cross cultural barriers and establish strong evangelizing churches and groups that then carry on effective evangelism at the E-1 level. This model is also valuable for evangelistic efforts in our own home communities, as we try to evangelize special groups out of our E-1 sphere. Winter’s is the most practical chapter, in itself well worth the price of the book.

A short third section deals with pluralism in the Church and the world. Emmett Carter considers problems of unity and diversity. A study document defines and relates concepts of Christian witness, common witness, religious freedom, and proselytism.

A final section of three essays gives new perspectives on other faiths and ideologies. Of special interest in view of recent developments in China is Donald MacInnis’s “A New Humanity in People’s China.” He describes the profound changes that have transformed the psychocultural identity of the Chinese people. While God is doubtless at work in the lives of individuals, “Christianity incognito will fail to reach others for conversion to Christ.… An identifiable community, the Church as the body of Christ, is needed within society at large.”

As valuable primary source material the appendix gives excerpts from documents produced by such gatherings as the WCC’s “Salvation Today” conference in Bangkok and the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization.

The editors did well in their selection of writings for this volume. And the introduction they provide for each essay whets the reader’s appetite for the stimulating pages to follow.

What’s Coming?

Images of the Future: The Twenty-first Century and Beyond, edited by Robert Bundy (Prometheus, 1976, 239 pp., $12.95), Religion 2101 A.D., by Hiley H. Ward (Doubleday, 1975, 247 pp., $7.95), and Understanding Tomorrow, by Lyle E. Schaller (Abingdon, 1976, 144 pp., $3.95 pb), are reviewed by Carl Townsend, director, Center for the Study of the Future, Portland, Oregon.

Each of us lives in the past, the present, and the future. Our past molds and shapes us, giving us a personal history. Our rituals and liturgies are a link to the past and what has gone before us. We also live in the present, sensing and experiencing the very reality of life. The future, however, gives us hope and vision. Our dreams and destiny lie in the future.

In earlier decades there was little fear or concern about the future. Change was slow and fairly predictable. It was easy to adapt to the changing world as one grew. This is no longer true. In the last few years we have experienced an increasing rebellion against any kind of authority; an increasingly sensate and pluralistic society; a growing suspicion of institutions; a depletion of many natural resources; the “liberation” of blacks, women, youth, and homosexuals; rapidly growing unemployment and (for some) increasing leisure; and the growing influence of the computer and other forms of technology in our life. During the last year, for example, our church in Portland has changed geographic location, changed facilities, changed its organizational structure, and changed its accounting procedure to enable better tracking of a budget that has doubled in size. We have also experienced a considerably change in the membership of the church.

This “Big Revolution,” as Schaller calls it in Understanding Tomorrow, is occurring at an ever increasing rate. “The person who can grasp the nature and direction of the Big Revolution will have an enormous advantage over those who do not comprehend this concept in both understanding and in responding to the changes that are a part of the second half of the twentieth century.”

For this reason the dreams and images we hold of the future are very important. The futurist does not predict the future; he creates images and visions of various alternative futures. From these we chose, creatively participating in making the future we desire come to pass. God’s Holy Spirit, working through us, becomes the actualizing force.

Polak, writing the opening essay in Images of the Future, says we must consciously work toward creating the future we desire or else the great decisions of the future (e.g., genetic manipulation, resource management, behavior modification) will be made by someone else. If we refuse to take responsibility for the future, others will make the future—both theirs and ours. “It is not a choice between having or not having any images of the future, but between good images—worth living and dying for—and bad images, which we cannot accept without betraying ourselves.”

The remaining six parts in this volume build on the thesis developed in the first part and take as subjects the futures movement and images of the possible, images of world trends and problems, images of human progress, non-male and non-white images of social reconstruction, religious imagination and the future, and images of education and learning.

The editor, Robert Bundy, writes in his own essay that most of us are now excluded from decisions about the future. The decisions are largely made by others and sold to us by way of Madison Avenue. Although as a society we are rich in information, in most areas of our lives we experience a poverty of information because we have shifted the decisions to the specialists. This leads to a narrow perspective and a poverty of imagination in forecasting and planning. There is a real need for “people centers” in our communities (both social and religious communities) to channel information and give a wider base for decision-making.

Lester Brown and Roy Fairchild, building on this, write that education is now recognized as the primary vehicle for social change. Few problems are as challenging as that of devising an educational system adequate for our needs in the late twentieth century. Education becomes the key in informing people of the need for change and motivating the acceptance of new ideas. Learning modes will soon consist more of networks than of buildings. With terminals and microcomputers in our homes, information will be mapped to each person profiled to his or her own needs. Televised courses and newspaper courses will grow a hundredfold, and information networks to provide legal, medical, and other professional help will be expanded. (At our Center for the Study of the Future, we are already using a microcomputer to match information to requests.)

A dozen new theologies carry us from our present age to the future. In the section on religious imaging, Elise Boulding groups these into four models: the existential, the radical Christian-secularist, the signals-of-transcendence model, and the sacration model. The author gives examples of each, adding that the “work of the Christian is to extend the concept of Koinonia into the secular world, helping to build new types of communities to cut across ethnic, national, class, and other boundaries.” We witness from community, yet this community is very difficult to achieve today because we have no common myths or stories.

One difficulty with this book is in assimilating the wide variety of views expressed by writers of many nationalities and religious persuasions. The cohesion is difficult, but Bundy does an excellent job of bringing them together. An epilogue weaves a fabric of ideas from this group of notable writers.

I recommend this book to the serious student as well as to those pastors and religious leaders involved in the process of change. In many churches change is happening fast. Our worship services need to help us more in bridging the past to the future. Our myths, liturgies, and symbols give us a link to the past. We also need a sense of calling, of our mission in the future. The whole congregation needs to be involved in this imaging process. In this sense the worship experience can become a “rite of passage,” carrying us into the future with a minimum of shock.

Hiley Ward’s Religion 2101 A.D., in contrast, is written in a style that is easy to read and digest. Ward, a religion writer for the Detroit Free Press, interviewed hundreds of notables in the futures field. His opening two chapters give a panorama of what can be expected in the future: high-strength structural materials, super-duty fabrics, seven-foot television screens, telepathic sermons, behavior control, special pills for special groups of people, increased I.Q., improved healing methods from mind control, people who look the way they want with no defects and with lifetime immunization from diseases, cloning, cyborgs (people with artificial parts), and genetic manipulation. Many of these technological developments are already a reality.

At the same time, says Ward, there are new religious experiments that are just as intriguing. Biersdorf, speaking at the 1973 “Insearch: The Future of Religion in America” conference, said in his keynote speech that here and there persons and communities are already creating new patterns for the future. “They are modeling the future now, so that surveys of 1980 will record their effectiveness in changing the shape of organized religion.” These groups can be effective in creating change, even though some of them may go out of existence or continue as minority forces.

Biersdorf put together a list of two hundred groups, of which fifty-six reported in detail to the Insearch conference. These included Pentecostals, house churches, communal groups, liturgical experiments, work communes, special agencies, meditative communities, and experimental congregations. In summary, Biersdorf noted that the groups had a common denominator in that whatever their intentional goals, they were preoccupied with the realization of an intimate community. In an earlier Insearch conference, Andrew Greeley said he believes the critical question is whether organized religion is ready to accept the authentic working of the Spirit in these underground communities. We are moving away from denominational polarities. The new polarity, says Bruce Larson, is the person versus the impersonal.

From this catalogue of contemporary experiments, Ward takes us on a space-age trip to the cities of tomorrow with their super-computer gods that automate the confession (this will free the priest for more critical theological activities).

Where is the institutional church in this? The cultural crisis of our age is leading to a new affirmation of the spiritual. The saints of tomorrow will be different and could be unheralded until we can change with them. The tide has come and gone, but we find ourselves on a different shore. Schillebeeckx believes the paths around the institution will determine the shape of the church of the future. Karl Rahner believes that a general church is not possible, and that the church will be characterized by a diversity of groups. The effective spiritual tension will continue to exist with a definite change in religious language by 1990 and 2000. Elmer Towns thinks most of the main Protestant denominations face a dim future. They lack identity and a dynamic theology. Martin Marty agrees with Towns in part, adding that most denominations are remote, impersonal, and bureaucratic. The religious giants have all departed.

Worship in the future will be more of the experimental, with new rituals and liturgy. There will be new uses of music and dance. There will be new emphasis on worship in the home.

Ward includes an appendix of 134 groups that are dealing with the future (including UFO groups and those of the military-industrial establishment). Some of the addresses are dated, but the list is a good starting point for correspondence with leading futurists.

Schaller’s Understanding Tomorrow is primarily a collection of statistics and information showing current social trends and their relation to the church and the religious dimension. The primary difficulty is that Schaller’s projections are based on trend analysis, which is inadequate in itself as a method for grappling with the future.

An example of this is his third chapter, which forms the thesis of his book. Here he says that we are in a rapid revolution, moving from a survival-oriented culture to an identity-oriented society. We find more meaning and recognition as persons than as performers of a task.

I agree with Schaller that our society has, indeed, moved to an identity crisis, but this is no guarantee that we will continue to move in this direction. In fact, many futurists and economists believe we are on the threshold of moving back rapidly to a survival-oriented society, and they foresee an impending economic collapse. Trend projections, in this sense, become inaccurate, and can be dangerous, lulling us to a false sense of security. We need to envision more about where the Holy Spirit is calling us, and then work backward from the future, using trend projections only to show us how to actualize our calling.

Schaller is excellent, however, in his advice to churches that find themselves caught up in change. His writings are based on many years of consulting with churches, and here he has much to offer. His final chapter suggests that we can no longer work with simple answers. In our complex world the intuitive response is generally counter-productive. The person or community who can envision or image where it wants to go and how the vision can be brought to reality has an enormous advantage over the person or community that is without a clear sense of identity in the midst of today’s change.

Many of the trends and changes Schaller mentions are particularly important for the near future of the church. In addition, anyone who uses imaging methods (and Schaller does at times) needs to be aware of trends.

All three books have a deficiency that continues to concern me as I read the writings of most futurists. Few seem to give us much insight into the work of the Holy Spirit in the community of the future. The Holy Spirit, acting in history, is both the illuminator (giving us the vision and image) and the enabler (giving us the power to actualize the vision). Until we become more aware of this power, we can expect little redemptive change.

Briefly Noted

Two meritorious books of photographs of church buildings, suitable for Christmas giving, nicely complement each other. Holy Places of Christendom by Stewart Perowne (Oxford, 160 pp., $12.95) covers the whole of church history and focuses on the stately. There are some non-church scenes. Pioneer Churches, photographs by John deVisser, text by Harold Kalman (Norton, 192 pp., $27.50), is restricted to North America, with a different sort of stateliness. Probably most of the buildings are wooden, and the range of denominations represented is broad.

Everyone who has the four-volume Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible (published 1962) needs to acquire the Supplementary Volume edited by Keith Crim (Abingdon, 1,046 pp., $17.95). Preparing supplements every decade or so is an excellent idea that other reference-work publishers should consider. Of the more than 650 entries, 140 are completely new.

An expensive combination of “how to write” information (any help in this area is better than none) with data on presidents, states, countries, religions, art, and the like that are generally available in annual almanacs makes up the Quick Reference Encyclopedia (Nelson, 880 pp., $24.95).

The Catholic Encyclopedia by Robert Broderick (Nelson, 612 pp., $24.95) is a very curious offering. It comes from an evangelically controlled publisher, but there is no entry for “Evangelicalism” (nor for “Fundamentalism,” though there is one for “Jesus Movement”). There is an entry for “Franciscans” (the author studied at St. Francis Seminary) but none for “Dominicans” or “Trappists.” We are told that “current negotiations are under way for the Evangelical United Brethren to be merged with … the Methodist Church.” That merger was completed in 1968! No reference work is perfect, but …

Collegians In The Sixties

Radicals in the University, by Edward E. Ericson, Jr. (Hoover Institution Press, 1975, 281 pp., $11), is reviewed by William H. Young, professor of education, Barrington College, Barrington, Rhode Island.

This book offers a persuasive analysis of the rise and fall of the youth movement on college and university campuses in the 1960s. It traces the development of the ideology of the New Left movement from early pronouncements by the Students for Democratic Action to futile efforts to keep the radical impulse alive in the early 1970s. This study provides an intriguing insight into how this movement succeeded in capturing the imagination of so many university students and young faculty for a brief period in the last decade and why its revolutionary ideals so quickly lost their impact.

Ericson is a dean at Northwestern College, a Christian liberal arts college in Iowa. His central thesis is that contradictions inherent from the beginning in the goals of the New Left remained unresolved throughout the sixties and eventually led to its dissolution. He argues that the movement failed because its dual goals of personal and political liberation were defined in terms that produced unresolvable internal conflicts. Among the early radical leaders, a fervent desire for personal fulfillment and freedom inspired a quest for radical alternatives to existing social and political structures. Commitment to political revolution to achieve liberation for oneself and others eventually led to rigid Marxist forms of expression. Ultimately, however, radical politics proved an insufficient vehicle for integrating the hopes for personal and social freedom among young radicals. Disillusionment, bitter in-fighting, and factionalism were the inevitable outcome.

A case study of radicals in the fields of language and literature shows the two-headed character of this movement. Young teachers committed to its ideals could not reconcile their professional concerns and their political commitments. Teaching and writing about language and literature often seemed irrelevant and even inconsistent with their political radicalism. Their chief professional task involved the study and transmission of the great literary tradition of Western civilization, but their political theory led them to question this tradition and the place of the humanities in the university. In the end, these radicals chose politics over professionalism.

In a concluding essay Ericson carries his thesis one step further by viewing the radical movement as a quasi-religious phenomenon. The radicals frequently used religious metaphors to describe their experiences and motives. They sought to provide a unifying core of beliefs to govern all of life, and their quest for personal and social salvation had deep moral and spiritual dimensions. This study even shows that the radical movement took on characteristic features of sectarian religion, including heresy-hunting, proof-texting, and appeals to infallible authority. But revolutionary politics failed as a substitute religion for the same reason it failed as a movement for liberation: it could not satisfy the spiritual needs of the young radicals themselves.

The book, therefore, is of particular interest to evangelicals. They will find in it testimony to the inability of a quasi-religious political movement to satisfy the moral and spiritual impulses that originally brought it into being. The further this radicalism moved toward political activism and rigid ideology, the more alienated became its young adult adherents, whose idealism had profound spiritual roots. Ericson’s study helps the reader understand what shaped the radical movement and why its growth and demise cannot be understood in purely secular terms.

New Periodicals

The New Review of Books and Religion began in September as the successor to Review of Books and Religion and Seabury’s New Book Review. Librarians, professors, and others who are interested in serious (but not overly technical) religious books will want to see it regularly. The editor-in-chief is Iris Cully, who teaches at Lexington Seminary. Monthly, $10/year (815 Second Ave., New York. N.Y. 10017).

Theological Education Today is a quarterly replacement for Programming. First issue was in April. The scope is worldwide, and the name was changed to broaden the subject matter to include all educational methods. (It is not a news sheet.) Sponsor is the World Evangelical Fellowship, to which checks should be made; $3 airmail, $1.50 surface (address: J. E. Langlois, Les Emrais, Castel, Guernsey, U.K.).

Commenting on Ecclesiastes’ curtain speech about “pleasing words” and “words of truth,” G. S. Hedry says: “In the ancient world authorship was held of small account, so small indeed that the names of many authors of antiquity have been lost. The question men asked of a book was not ‘Who wrote it?’ but ‘What does it say?,’ and there was no need for an author to make a profession of modesty, since his work was not regarded as a personal achievement or a feat of virtuosity” (The New Bible Commentary Revised, D. Guthrie and J. A. Motyer, eds., 1970, p. 578). While that observation says less than some of us would say about the biblical writers, it nonetheless holds a powerful message for many of the rest of us.

For all that, I shall risk a few reminiscences and venture some comments on evangelical literary production.

Some thirty years ago, the only book this converted journalist had written was A Doorway to Heaven, a readable work on the Pacific Garden Mission now long out of print after some eleven editions. An evangelical publisher telephoned me from his Hawaii vacation spot to offer a $10,000 advance royalty if I would write a newspaperish biography of Jesus. The invitation rather stunned me. Who was I, I mused, to write a life of Jesus? Besides, the thought of thus turning Christian realities into a profit bothered me. My negative decision at that time helped to reinforce a growing determination to devote my writing energies to solid advancement of the cause of biblical truth.

When I wrote Remaking the Modern Mind I soon learned that many believers who have a lively evangelistic interest in Christianity do not at the same time have serious intellectual propensities. Even a fellow college alumnus wrote the alumni office that he had read Remaking twice but still couldn’t figure out what I was saying. By contrast, when in New Delhi I was covering the World Council of Churches assembly, a Christian leader sought me out for a word of personal thanks. “In my university studies my Christian faith was under heavy pressure,” he said, “and I want to thank you for the book that held me steady.”

In recent days a publisher has issued the first two of my four volumes on God, Revelation and Authority, themes of essential and even of supreme importance in theology today. If, God helping me, I complete the total effort by 1980, I will consider the four volumes to be my final contribution to the evangelical witness, unless I subsequently yield to pressures to write also a candid autobiography entitled Confessions of a Nonconformist.

Few readers, least of all those not at home in serious reflective thought, sense the toll in time and energy that serious writing takes—the long hours, the impact on family life, the self-restricted social opportunities, the pre-empted weekends and vacations, the ceaseless reading to stay abreast, the tedious editing and re-editing (in which I have providentially had the help of a gifted wife). My own library of about 10,000 volumes, now being dismantled and contributed piecemeal to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, has provided a costly but invaluable and indispensable insight into the best minds of the ages.

Ours is not a time when American Christianity has been intellectually strong. Neo-orthodox theology deliberately took an anti-conceptual stance and, along with existential theology, rejected cognitive knowledge of the invisible world. Even the older rationalistic modernist theology in time tilted more and more toward anti-intellectualism. Fundamentalism, to be sure, emphasized the indispensability of revealed doctrines, but it pursued theology mainly in an evangelistic context and largely ignored the task of earnest philosophical confrontation. Technically oriented scholars were the exception, and one can be grateful for Gordon H. Clark, Cornelius Van Til, Edward John Carnell, and others who in their evangelical concerns interacted with the contemporary theological revolt. None of the evangelical writers here at home gained the literary power, reading audience, and wide impact of C. S. Lewis, though D. Elton Trueblood, espousing a kind of evangelical rational theism, alternated serious and popular works with considerable literary flair. Among British evangelicals, relatively few engaged in serious philosophical-theological writing; most of them lent their energies instead to biblical studies.

Many American evangelicals tend to be suspicious of higher learning and measure Christian credibility only by the yardstick of conversion. Various disconcerting signals of evangelical weakness have been the forfeiture of Christian university possibilities; the move toward an evangelical doctorate only in the context of missionary concerns; the fact that most significant philosophical contributions now come mainly from evangelical scholars teaching on secular university faculties (Alvin Plantinga at Calvin is a noteworthy exception); the limited scholarship support for serious evangelical graduate study and research effort; and reader interest among evangelicals in primarily intellectually undemanding literature.

The brighter side of the picture over the past generation is the appearance and growing demand for theological symposiums, Bible commentary series, modest encyclopedia efforts, theological and ethics dictionaries, and a few works in the area of biblical theology. The market for these works is largely among ministers and seminarians, however. Lay men and women have yet to share widely in an intellectual theological awakening; their usual concerns are stimulated mainly by polemical works, and some of their pastors set little example in reading and discussing serious religious literature. Among some Christian college students, however, we see a gratifying upturn of interest in intellectually rewarding evangelical books; this parallels what is happening in the religion departments of some secular universities. Serious evangelical students are realizing that neglect of the rational foundations of Christian theism and failure to confront the radically secular, positivist, and existential alternatives to biblical theology will only make less and less credible their own faith in the self-revealed God.

In a time of trouble the Apostle Paul solicited his “cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books, and above all the parchments” (2 Tim. 4:13). He did not, however, reserve his reading for the hours of critical need only. He was versed most deeply in Scripture, as we all need to be. But he was also a well and broadly read man, qualified to enter into dialogue with the unbelieving world of his day, to unmask its misconceptions, and to present a convincingly relevant alternative.

We have just been having a few days of rest beside the Mediterranean Sea. A raging three-day wind and rain storm made us conscious of the sound of the waters day and night, pounding against rocks, crashing against the shore. We stood fascinated but with a feeling of respect tinged with fear as we watched a point on the rocks one afternoon: the water whirled and was sucked out into the sea, making a shallow area that suddenly seemed attacked by mountains of waves, higher than any of the rest, that crashed and thundered in to refill the drained-out area. The sound of the pounding waves kept us awake between four and eight o’clock in the morning as the wind rose and water washed in gusts against our windows. The sound of many waters penetrated our consciousness with the realization of power, power that human beings can do nothing about. Here is the power that is connected with floods, tidal waves, and breaking dams, the power that gives sudden illustration of the frailness of human defenses. Water—the sound of power. Many waters—the sound of great power, which demands some kind of attention.

“Afterward he brought me to the gate, even the gate that looketh toward the east: and, behold, the glory of the God of Israel came from the way of the east: and his voice was like a noise of many waters: and the earth shined with his glory” (Ezek. 43:1, 2). In describing the appearance of the living creatures he saw, which are to be seen in the future by many others, Ezekiel says this: “And when they went, I heard the noise of their wings, like the noise of great waters, as the voice of the Almighty, the voice of speech, as the noise of an host …” (1:24). Again here the voice of God the Almighty is compared to the noise of waters. John in Revelation 1:15 describes the One who stood before him, saying in part, “And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters.” The voice John heard as Jesus spoke in all his glory was not to be compared with that of the meek and quiet Jesus whom John knew as a daily companion earlier in his life. John’s description of the voice of the glorified Lord in all his power is the same as Ezekiel’s: it was like the sound of powerful waters, the kind of sound that permeates the whole atmosphere, shuts out other things, penetrates and awakens.

Come now to David’s description of the voice of the Lord in Psalm 29:3–9. “The voice of the LORD is upon the waters: the God of glory thundereth: the LORD is upon many waters. The voice of the LORD is powerful; the voice of the LORD is full of majesty. The voice of the LORD breaketh the cedars; yea, the LORD breaketh the cedars of Lebanon.… The voice of the LORD divideth the flames of fire. The voice of the LORD shaketh the wilderness; the LORD shaketh the winderness of Kadesh. The voice of the LORD maketh the hinds to calve, and discovered the forests: and in his temple doth every one speak of his glory.” Not only is the sound a sound of power, as God speaks, but results take place that no man can accomplish with his finite voice.

The voice of God is unique in the universe. When Jesus spoke in his voice, which had not yet the sound John was later to hear, the winds and the waves obeyed him. The sea suddenly became calm, so that the disciples not only might be safe from the danger of drowning but might have demonstrated to them very vividly the powerful results of Jesus’ voice. The sounds of wind-blown rain, seas raging in storms, tidal waves sweeping houses into rubble, waters unleashed from too frail dams, remind us of the sound of God’s voice. And they remind us also that his voice can change things that man can do nothing about. The results of God’s voice speaking in authority are awesome.

Although both Ezekiel and John were overcome by the awesome sound of power when they heard the Lord’s voice, they were able to report what the Lord said. In Ezekiel 43 we are told in verse 6, “And I heard him speaking unto me …,” and in the next verse, “And he said unto me.…” The content is full of very clear warning and judgment of the sin of turning away from God, of commiting spiritual adultery by following false gods and false teaching. There is the warning followed by a promise: “Now let them put away their whoredom … and I will dwell in the midst of them forever.”

The powerful voice of God warns of judgment, and the same voice expresses his compassion for those who come back to him in his given way. We are to listen with the same intensity of awe we feel when we observe the power of water. His spoken truth is not for us to judge or edit; we are to listen, absorb, understand, and bow.

What is it John heard said by the voice that sounded to him as the sound of many waters? “Fear not: I am the first and the last: I am he that liveth, and was dead; and behold I am alive forevermore, Amen; and have the keys of death and hades.” That same voice speaks on in chapters that follow with strong messages to the seven churches, and to us. “He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God” (Rev. 2:7). “He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna …” (2:17). In chapter three the voice should penetrate any who have “an ear” with which to hear: “Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked; I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed.… Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me” (Rev. 3:17, 18, 20).

The voice of God speaks with power and with clarity. In Revelation 12:11 the “overcomers” throughout the centuries are described, those who have listened to the voice of God in his written and preserved word and have followed what God has said: “And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death.”

Sixteen years ago nineteen-year-old Robert Zimmerman moved from Minnesota to New York City. He left behind his past, his family, and his name. Ahead was his new life as Bob Dylan, influential singer-songwriter. Over the years countless artists have recorded Dylan’s songs, and he has toured the world. Dylan is one of the three major trendsetters in popular music, the other two being Elvis Presley and the Beatles. The press has hailed him as a prophet, a leader, a teacher, a messiah, a poet, the voice of young America, and the conscience of his generation. Dylan says he’s just a songwriter.

Throughout his career Dylan has reflected his religious upbringing. Raised in a strict Jewish home, he fills his songs with religious language, biblical references and characters, and theological questions. He views man in the light of the cosmic struggle between good and evil. Man must choose to follow God and truth or fall into death, decay, and ultimate judgment.

“Gates of Eden” (1965) says the world is evil but “there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden.” Dylan sees the world as “sick … hungry … tired … torn/It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born” (“Song to Woody,” 1962); as a “concrete world full of souls” (“The Man in Me,” 1970); and as a “world of steel-eyed death and men who are fighting to be free” (“Shelter From the Storm,” 1974). Technologically advanced America threatens human freedom, feels Dylan, who confesses that “the man in me will hide sometimes to keep from being seen/But that’s just because he doesn’t want to turn into some machine.” In “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” (1965), his sermon in song line by line decries the phoniness of society’s games. “Human gods” make “everything from toy guns that spark/ To flesh colored Christs that glow in the dark.” “Not much is really sacred,” Dylan concludes.

Early in his career Dylan wrote many finger-pointing songs about man’s inhumanity to man. He sang out against racial prejudice, hatred, and war. “Blowin’ in the Wind,” perhaps his most famous song, asks, “How many ears must one man have/Before he can hear people cry?”

Freedom and sin are major themes in a number of Dylan’s songs. “With God on Our Side” (1963) is a satirical justification of war. In “Masters of War” (1963) he lashes out at the war profiteers who make money from young men’s lives. He concludes that “Even Jesus would never/Forgive what you do.” This cool, calculated evil will be punished, for “All the money you made/Will never buy back your soul.” Dylan retells the story of Abraham and Isaac in “Highway 61 Revisited” (1965). Abraham questions God, who replies, “You can do what you want Abe, but/The next time you see me coming you’d better run.” Abraham complies, knowing that peace with God comes only through obedience to God’s directives. Ten years later Dylan reiterated that in “Oh Sister”: “Is not our purpose the same on this earth/ To love and follow His direction?”

Hard Rain, his most recent album, contains a live concert version of “Lay, Lady, Lay,” written in 1969. Dylan adds these lyrics: “You can have the truth/But you’ve got to choose it.” Is man ultimately responsible for sin? Is man really free? Yes, man is free to choose to obey or disobey divine directives, but he is responsible and will be judged (“I’d Hate to Be You on That Dreadful Day” and “Whatcha Gonna Do?,” 1962).

Dylan reads the Bible, and his favorite parts are the parables of Jesus. The album John Wesley Harding, recorded in 1968, two years after his nearly fatal motorcycle accident, contains a song patterned after those parables. “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest” tells of Frankie Lee’s thirst for wealth and his sensual lust, which ultimately bring his downfall and death. Frankie Lee denies that eternity exists. Dylan moralizes, “Don’t go mistaking Paradise for that home across the road.” So many people fail to think of anything besides their own quest for wealth; eternity means nothing to them. “Three Angels” (1970) play horns atop poles as people, oblivious, hurry by. “Does anyone hear the music they play?/Does anyone even try?”

Dylan views man spiritually. In “Dirge” (1973) he confesses, “I felt that place within/ That hollow place/ Where martyrs weep/ And angels play with sin.” In “Simple Twist of Fate” (1974) he writes of one who “Felt that emptiness inside/ To which he just could not relate.” Man’s spiritual cavity too often remains vacant.

Dylan has criticized the established religious institutions. “Got no religion. Tried a bunch of different religions. The churches are divided. Can’t make up their minds and neither can I,” he said early in his career. He hit at the attempts of churches and preachers to be relevant in “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again” (1966):

Now the preacher looked so baffled

When I asked him why he dressed

With twenty pounds of headlines

Stapled to his chest

But he cursed me when I proved it to him.

Then I whispered. “Not even you can hide.

You see, you’re just like me.

I hope you’re satisfied.”

Religious institutions are impotent: “The priest wore black on the seventh day/ And sat stone-faced while the building burned” (“Idiot Wind,” 1974).

Dylan views God pantheistically. “I can see God in a daisy,” he told an interviewer. “I can see God at night in the wind and rain. I see creation just about everywhere. The highest form of song is prayer. King David’s, Solomon’s, the wailing of a coyote, the rumble of the earth.” In his modern-day psalm “Father of Night” (1970), Dylan praises God as the creator of night and day, heat and cold, loneliness and pain. He is the Father of all “who dwells in our hearts and our memories,” the “Father of whom we most solemnly praise.” Dylan’s prayer for his generation and all succeeding people is outlined in “Forever Young” (1973): “May God bless and keep you always,” may you “know the truth,” be righteous, upright, and true and “stay forever young.” For as he wrote earlier, “He not busy being born/ Is busy dying.”

“Sign on the Cross” (1967), perhaps Dylan’s most enigmatic song, says that the sign on Jesus’ cross can never be forgotten—“And it’s still that sign on the cross/ That worries me.” Men cannot escape that symbol and what it means.

“Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (1972) deals with death. “I Threw It All Away” (1969) points to love as the ultimate force for good in the world. “Oh Sister” tells of dying, being reborn, and being “mysteriously saved.” “Shelter From the Storm” finds Dylan wearing a crown of thorns and bargaining for salvation. “Long Ago, Far Away” (1962) warns that those who promote brotherhood might end up hanging on a cross. “Isis” (1975) speaks of quick prayers that easily satisfy. Priests recite “prayers of old” as the face of God appears in the streets in “Romance in Durango” (1975). “Joey” (1975) pictures a God of retribution who will punish evil acts.

Bob Dylan pioneered the message song; he remains at its forefront. He asks metaphysical questions and tries to give some answers, which are less than Christian. But he has affected many young people and continues to do so. We need to understand what kind of spiritual guidance he gives.

Daniel J. Evearitt is the assistant pastor of Tappan Alliance Church, Tappan, New York.

For Tolkien Fans

Late last summer at an informal gathering in Bethesda, Maryland, J. R. R. Tolkien’s daughter, Priscilla, announced that the long awaited The Silmarillion was finally at the publisher’s. And Tolkien devotees have more than that book to look for. Letters From Father Christmas, written for his children when they were young, and a new biography will soon be published.

Clyde Kilby’s delightful anecdotal book entitled Tolkien and The Silmarillion, published last spring (Harold Shaw), provides a good introduction to the Oxford don. C. S. Lewis’s comment that he served as Tolkien’s “midwife” becomes clearer after Kilby tells us of his disorganized, eccentric manner of work. And we also understand why it has taken Tolkien’s son Christopher so long to put The Silmarillion into publishable form.

In its Writers for the Seventies series Crowell has reprinted a 1972 Warner volume, J. R. R. Tolkien, by Robley Evans. Evans adds little to Tolkien criticism; both style and content are relatively undistinguished.

Those who enjoy Tolkien will want to read Patricia A. McKillip’s latest novel. The Riddle-Master of Hed (Atheneum, 228 pp., $7.95), the first volume of a trilogy, has several things in common with Tolkien’s work. It takes place in another world and tells of the end of an age. The plot turns on a quest, though of a different nature from Frodo’s. Some of McKillip’s names sound elvish, and language and names are central to her story.

By her clever creations McKillip saves her story from being merely derivative. She makes the vesta, an animal “broad as a farmhorse, with a deer’s delicate triangular face,” live. The ability of a man to change shape, to become a vesta, provides her with a striking image. Her description of what it’s like to be a strong, free animal, warm and white against the cold snow, has a dream-like quality. Protagonist Morgon’s Great Shout splits the High One’s house from top to bottom, and ends the first volume. That conclusion is a cliff-hanger; I hope the second volume will be published soon.

Another story for older children and adults (nine and up, says the book jacket) from Atheneum examines Margaret Redmon’s life after death. Song of the Pearl (158 pp., $6.50) by Ruth Nichols is a difficult book to follow. She mixes a little reincarnation with some apocryphal sayings of Jesus, a gnostic hymn (the title of the book is the hymn title), a little Indian superstition, and some other religious ideas. (Nichols is a Ph.D. candidate in religious studies at McMaster University.)

The story is interesting. But the religious implications are so intertwined with the plot that I doubt whether nine-year-olds would appreciate it at even the simplest level. Nichols’s talent is wasted in this religous story.

Ursula K. LeGuin, best known for her science-fiction stories, has written a lovely short tale, Very Far Away From Anywhere Else (Atheneum, 89 pp., $5.95), for older children and adults. This, too, can be called a religious book, but in contrast to Song of the Pearl it is simple, unaffected, moving. Why am I different? What do I want from life? How shall I live? What things are worth sacrifice? The narrator and his friend discover the answers to some of these questions as the story progresses. LeGuin uses the first-person style effectively, allowing it, as well as the plot, to show the protagonist’s maturation.

CHERYL FORBES

Low-Grade ‘Plot’

Gong! The scene changes. Another gong. Another scene changes. Gong.… And so on throughout the film. Those gongs are the most memorable part of a less-than-grade-B film—C-minus, perhaps.

The Passover Plot, released by Atlas Films, is a silly movie made from that bad book by Hugh Schonfield so much talked about a few years ago. The story, à la Romeo and Juliet: Jesus takes a drug to slow his heart to an imperceptible beat. He’s crucified but never dies. Thus a fake resurrection. The movie is fairly faithful to the book, and it’s obviously unbiblical. Add to the weak plot poor pacing, both under- and overacting, and a badly written and edited script.

Most of the actors are television rejects. The pauses Jesus makes between phrases slow the film to a crawl. His face is expressionless, his voice inflection free. His movements are rigid, studied, self-conscious. Another character (his name is unimportant; in fact, it’s difficult to tell who is who) shrieks all his lines in a hoarse, rasping voice—and he lisps. His facial muscles do double duty; he’s supposed to be a Zealot. John the Baptist is a little better, though he, too, is portrayed as wild-eyed.

Is the plodding “Passover Plot” a put-on?

Pilate is the only character worth watching, but unfortunately he is off camera most of the time. He looks and sounds natural, unlike the rest of the cast, who either scream or moon. The sympathies of the audience go to Pilate and not the oppressed Hebrews. Creaking Caiaphas calls Pilate “governor,” which jarringly comes out “guv’nuh.” He sounds as if he belongs in My Fair Lady.

The script-writers attempt to sound biblical and literary. But they undercut their efforts by throwing in such American slang as “lay low.” Perhaps the whole thing is a put-on.

Occasionally the cameramen give us some nice touches, and visually the film is not badly edited. A particularly effective shot comes when John the Baptist is arrested. He has just baptized a woman and stands in the water waiting for other converts to step forward. The crowd is afraid of the Roman soldiers on horseback watching nearby. As John turns in the water to see what has mesmerized the crowd, one of the Romans rides into the water, and the camera shows us the pounding horse’s hoofs flailing and churning the water.

The good camera work is too often undercut by the director’s bad blocking. At the end of a Jewish uprising the bodies of the victims are seen lying equidistant from one another in the sand. Most of the scenes have a rigid, tableau-like appearance. That lack of fluid movement, too, slows down the pace.

The producers of The Passover Plot are trying to cash in on the renewed religious mood in this country. We can count on not only reviews but also word of mouth to thwart them.

CHERYL FORBES

When Northern Ireland’s constitutional convention dissolved in disarray last spring, many observers predicted a new outbreak of killing, a stepped-up IRA offensive, even open civil war. That never happened, and now the Peace People have proved once again the folly of trying to prophesy events in that troubled country.

Recently, Protestant and Catholic women, fed up with eight years of violence and empty political rhetoric, joined in an unprecedented show of unity. Some 20,000 of them marched together in Belfast to demand peace. No one was more surprised than the beleaguered citizens themselves, and few expected anything to come of it. However, the movement has grown, and while both the IRA and Ian Paisley have denounced it, one Belfast paper editorialized, “the ordinary, decent Northern Irishwoman and man have found their voice, and they like the sound of it better than the voices that have been loudly raised in their name over the last eight years.”

More Americans confess to not understanding the Northern Ireland conflict than to not understanding the Middle East or the situation in Cyprus or Africa or other world hot spots. The most frequently asked question: “Is it a religious war?”

The ugly spectacle of two Christian bodies resolving their differences through violence makes most Christians shudder. Yet bloody battles in the name of Christianity are nothing new. Right after the Reformation, Catholic-Protestant wars raged in Europe, and churchmen all too often had a hand in assassinations, massacres, and political machinations.

Although the Ulster conflict has been complicated by religion, it is much more than a denominational war. Political power, civil rights, economic discrimination, deep-seated political differences, group identity and survival—all these factors enter into a fight in which the two sides are termed “Protestant” and “Catholic.”

No one is arguing doctrine. Although a few Protestant politicians express anti-Catholic sentiments, Protestant militants aren’t fighting to protest the papal claim to infallibility or belief in the presence of Christ’s body in the Lord’s Supper. IRA leaders generally lean so far to the political left that the church has excommunicated them, and many are atheists. The Queens University students who kicked off the present spate of troubles in 1968 were declared Marxists.

Is it a religious war? No one is arguing doctrine. But tribal instincts are strong, and both Catholics and Protestants fear that their way of life is in danger. Churches have not done all they might to cool the flames.

Tribal instincts are strong, and both Protestants and Catholics fear that their way of life is in danger. Religion, however, as a Time essay writer put it, “always a receptacle for ultimate aspirations, can enlist the best and the worst in its congregations. In conflict, religion can be used—or perverted—to call up supernatural justifications for killing.” A few Protestant extremists in Northern Ireland sound disturbingly like Luther, who wrote, “He who will not hear God’s Word when it is spoken with kindness must listen to the headsman when he comes with his ax.”

The Ulster struggle, however, is not a throwback to the sixteenth century, even though there is a case for handing the blame for the deep sectarian feeling back to England. Without question, over the years the Westminster government inflamed the animosities between the two groups as a means of controlling the country. For example, when Irish lands were confiscated, the justification offered was protection against the papacy. Actually, it was protection against Spain and France that England had in mind.

The Bill of Rights of 1689 and the Penal Laws of the early 1700s deprived Catholics of basic civil rights such as education, property ownership, and participation in public life. Lord Randolph Churchill, trying to oust the liberal Gladstone as prime minister in 1886, played what he called “the Orange Card.” He kindled the fears of Northern Protestants to believe that “home rule would mean Rome rule.”

H. M. Carson, a minister in Bangor, points a finger at history but aims it at the sixteenth-century reformers. He says they failed to deal with the Roman view of the state as sacred, and cites men such as John Calvin and John Knox, who thought in terms of national churches. When the seventeenth-century planters came to Ulster, they came not only as English and Scots but as Anglicans and Presbyterians. The cause of Ulster soon became the cause of Christ, and the conflict one between the people of God and the people not of God. Carson adds, parenthetically, that when one sees what the so-called Protestant population is like, one realizes how absurd that idea is.

“Under this kind of thinking,” Carson wrote, “the Protestant minister becomes an Elijah on Mt. Carmel facing the apostate ruler … and confronting the priests of Baal (for Baal read the Roman Catholic church).

“By New Testament standards, however, this is a false equation. No one nation today stands where Old Testament Israel stood. The Church of Christ is not the religious aspect of the nation but is the community of faith drawn out of the nation.”

Carson is one of many who bemoan the political involvement of ministers, especially as they commit churches to a political position. Although he doesn’t name the Reverend Ian Paisley in his writings, Carson is aware that Paisley is the chief exponent of this position. It is difficult to deny that it is a religious struggle when a man clearly states, as Paisley has, that he is fighting a religious battle. For him, no doubt, it is religious. The following passage from Paisley’s Protestant Telegraph is typical of his arguments:

“Ulster Protestants are passing through a time of tremendous testing. The Socialist government at Westminster is intent on their destruction. Harold Wilson, the puppet of Cardinal Heenan, and Mr. Callaghan, the puppet of Harold Wilson, are out for our destruction. Ulster is, in fact, to all intents and purposes under direct Westminster control, with a military dictatorship geared to placate the Roman Catholics and browbeat and ‘jackboot’ the Protestants.” (The Protestant siege mentality comes through here as strongly as the anti-Catholicism.)

Paisley’s anti-Catholic rhetoric has contributed immeasurably to the hardening of sectarian positions in the last six or seven years. How, for example, does someone on either side respond when he reads in the Protestant Telegraph, in an article about the sale of Hitler statuettes in Germany, the suggestion that they “make a statuette of the greatest war criminal that was never hanged, Pope Pius XII.” Paisley’s speeches are filled with more than bigotry and hatred. They are violent in nature and have contributed directly, as the Cameron Commission concluded, to riots and to bloodshed.

Just how influential is Ian Paisley and his Protestant Telegraph? No doubt he stepped into a leadership vacuum in the early seventies and struck a responsive chord with a majority of the Protestant working class. Then, as positions hardened, he swung many moderates behind him. And as Albert Menendez says in The Bitter Harvest, “it is doubtful that ultimate peace can come to Ulster unless the Protestants who subscribe to these views can be convinced that their fears are largely groundless.”

While for Paisley it is a religious battle fought on the political level, many of his followers no doubt are more interested in the political part of it. Close associates of Paisley formed the Ulster Protestant Volunteers, some of whom were no doubt instrumental in reorganizing the Ulster Volunteer Force. The original UVF was the illegal Protestant paramilitary group formed by Lord Edward Carson in 1912, and it forced the division of Northern and Southern Ireland. Since it was reorganized in the late sixties, the UVF has been responsible for dozens of bombings, shootings, and deaths. Most outside observers agree that Ian Paisley’s rhetoric gave birth to the new Protestant volunteer movement.

A second focal point for anti-Catholicism in Northern Ireland is the Orange Order. At the close of the eighteenth century, Protestants, again feeling the threat of the Catholic majority, began forming secret societies that coalesced into the Orange Order. Its main purpose has always been to maintain Protestant supremacy, and it is impossible today to measure the immense influence it has on the social and political life of the country.

The Orange Order is a major factor in keeping Protestants convinced that the real enemy is Rome, and many rank-and-file Orangemen (some 100,000 in Ulster) believe that the Vatican was behind the civil-rights protests as a ploy in its plan for world conquest.

On July 12 each year the Orange Order sponsors the marches that on dozens of occasions have led to violence. Thousands of orange-sashed marchers with bowler hats, beating large drums, parade through the streets. Their very presence provokes strong Catholic antagonism, and they often feed these feelings with anti-Catholic taunts and jeers. These bring stones, rocks, and bottles down on the marchers, and the battle is on.

This, by the way, is the organization that teaches its members to respond, when asked why they are Orangemen, “Because I desire to live to the Glory of God, and, resisting every superstition and idolatry, earnestly to contend for the faith once delivered to the saints.”

To what extent, then, are the churches to blame for the current situation? Could they, if they so willed, exert more influence for peace?

Certainly they have made the expected pronouncements. At regular intervals, or after some particularly bloody incident, leading churchmen deplore the violence and the current state of war. Bishop so and so “condemns the foul and callous bombing of the pub in the Falls Road.” Or the moderator of the such and such church says, “When will we come to our senses and sit down together to work out our differences?” Every major church group has made a dozen such statements, and hundreds of sermons have been preached on peace, brotherhood, non-violence, and the like.

But all too often the speeches of churchmen, while calling for an end to violence, also heap fuel on the fire by pinning blame on the other side. After the bitter battles of Belfast and Londonderry in August, 1969, Cardinal Conway called on his people to “remember that Protestants in general are good Christian people.” Yet at the same time he threw the blame at the feet of Protestant mobs. Immediately three leading Protestants attacked the cardinal’s statement.

Protestant and Catholic clergy have, of course, been conditioned by the same culture and history as their flocks. They also feel the weight of heavy community pressure. Any sign of reconciliation or offer of peace may be taken as weakness or straying from the faith and could bring on them the scorn of their own people.

Christians find it hard to admit that their faith can be a factor in a shameful scandal such as that in Northern Ireland. No doubt faith is not to blame. But that which has passed for religion in Ireland and in many parts of the world since the fall of man has certainly been a large part of the problem. On top of that, the churches and church leaders who bear the name of Christ have contributed significantly to the blot on his name.

Many thinking people in Northern Ireland have looked at churches’ involvement (or lack of it) and rejected the institution and its basic message. As one local editorial writer put it, “it is no wonder that so many honest men and women avoid the hypocrisy of such ‘Christianity’ and in the process opt for a fairly civilized life, based on roughly asserted secular values that at least have some aesthetic appeal.”

On the other hand, individual acts of Christian love abound, even though their effect on efforts for peace is negligible. There was, for example, the pastor who was sitting in his office before a Sunday-evening service when word came of trouble down the street. “My place is down there,” he said, and he ran from the church. At the riot scene he found two groups hurling rocks, bottles, and curses. He also found an Anglican rector, two curates, a parish priest, and a Methodist minister. The clergymen linked arms and formed a human barrier between the two mobs.

Then there is the Methodist minister who takes his people caroling each Christmas in a Catholic section; the mill worker who lost both legs in a bomb blast but feels no bitterness; the young man who once threw rocks at the soldiers but now plays gospel songs on his guitar in the army canteen. And there is the priest to whom the army turned for help to quell a riot; he walked up to a group of angry women and said, “Sure, and do you know what they tell me? That all the good-looking women are going home.” That brought a good laugh and broke up the crowd.

Another place where the sectarian wall has toppled and where bitterness and prejudice seem to have dissolved is within the charismatic movement. It has spawned a half dozen or more weekly meetings in which Presbyterians, Brethren, Methodists, and other Protestants pray, sing, study the Bible and worship with Catholics, an almost unheard of event before this. While the charismatic movement in Ireland is lay oriented, leading Catholic and Protestant clergymen are involved.

A few leading churchmen have also risen above sectarianism. Some Protestant clergymen dared to meet with IRA leaders to help bring about a temporary ceasefire one Christmas. Others on both sides have braved scorn and recriminations to make meaningful contact with their opposites. But they are a minority.

Writers and commentators in Ireland generally avoid any great show of optimism. When asked about the future, they often devise scenarios—if A were to happen, then B would follow.

Many Christians pray for revival and for peace, but the two are inseparably linked in their minds. There seems to be an assumption that if God is going to do anything, it must be to bring an end to the troubles. Peace is viewed more politically than spiritually. The most frequently quoted Scripture verse in the country may be Second Chronicles 7:14—“If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”

Of course, if Christ genuinely changes a life, it will show up in behavior. If love and patience and longsuffering and peace replace hatred and bigotry and fear and unrest in a large number of lives, why shouldn’t we expect it to touch all areas of life and bring peace to a weary land?

I have stunned the sheep:

slit his jugular

hung him from a rafter

and caught his blood

in a bucket

to paint my doorposts.

But now in the future:

there will be no stunning

no pain-killing hammers

only my arms hung at my sides.

The painting goes on

but there will be

no dying allowed.

One morning, near Bethlehem, after the Six Day I War, I watched tiny Arab children going to school. Like so many little black mice they scurried along the roadside. Israeli soldiers, without speaking a word, stopped them and pointed to their schoolbags. A week earlier a bomb had exploded in the Supersol (shopping center) in Jerusalem, and schoolchildren were suspected. So the soldiers were taking no chances. Silently the children opened their satchels. Inside each was a reading book in Arabic and a huge piece or two of bread for the midday meal. The soldiers looked, then waved the children on.

Little did I imagine that soon afterwards soldiers would be searching children’s schoolbags for bombs and bullets in my own city of Belfast. A death toll of more than 1,600 people in Northern Ireland may seem insignificant compared to those killed in Indonesia or Viet Nam. But the equivalent number in the population of the United States would be 220,000 people in six years of civil strife.

The world’s press speaks of “the children of hate.” This is no exaggeration. I have seen teen-age boys in militant Protestant areas of our city with tattoo marks on their arms and on their schoolbags the initials “K.A.I.”—“Kill All Irishmen” (meaning the republicans who wish for a united Ireland). I have seen children of different religions spit at each other on the street. They are let out of their schools at different times of day to prevent encounters, and they are taken home by buses. They are born apart, they live apart, they pray apart, they work apart.

Many children in our city are conditioned during their formative years to hate the other side. For the children of Ulster are gone into captivity—a terrible captivity that involves their hearts and minds.

This past summer a pregnant woman was wounded by a gunman’s bullet and rushed to a hospital. When the doctors delivered her child they found the baby girl had a bullet in her back. Even an unborn child cannot escape the violence of our society.

The Ulster community is a place in which two traditions meet—the Irish Catholic and the British Protestant. Labeling the two sides “Catholic” and “Protestant” is a convenience because the religious division parallels the political and ethnic division in the country. The religious traditions have also been synonymous with political views. In fact, there have been two nations, with two different cultures and two sets of values. Protestants and Catholics have been brought up to believe in different versions of a joint history, to admire different heroes, to sing different national songs, even to play different games.

So the one million Protestants have looked to Britain for their social and cultural links, while the half million Catholics have looked to Dublin and have had historic and cultural links with the Republic. Catholicism has remained identified with Irish nationalism, and Protestantism has remained the prisoner of unionism (union with Britain).

The history of Ireland has conspired to support a near identity of our political and religious communities. Indeed, many church leaders and members find it difficult to make a clean distinction between loyalty to their faith and loyalty to a particular political viewpoint. For all practical purposes the Roman Catholic Church is politically committed to a united Ireland, while the Protestant Church believes, in general, in the Protestant supremacy in Northern Ireland. In each case, divine approval is claimed for territorial and political aspirations.

A recent report shows that 1,500 Roman Catholics have been forced to leave one area alone, to the north of our city, because of intimidation. Homes in this district have been systematically raided; the windows of the local Roman Catholic school have been smashed and the school’s population reduced by a quarter.

This intimidation works both ways. Protestant families in predominantly Catholic areas have also had to pack their belongings and leave. A letter reached me from a family telling of the birth of their new baby. On the very day mother and baby arrived home, warning shots were fired as the father entered the house. The shots meant “get out.” That Wednesday the family with their week-old baby moved across the city to a safe area.

Today mixed neighborhoods, where both groups used to live together in reasonable harmony, have been split through intimidation—stones through windows, warnings through letterboxes. One by one, families have moved out. Both sides have retreated into defensive positions. This segregation in housing is building a barricade for the years ahead. It may prove to be a more formidable barricade than any barbed wire set up by British soldiers, and higher than any pile of hijacked trucks.

Another lamentable barrier is segregation in education. Many Protestant children have never come nearer than a stone’s throw to Roman Catholics. Protestant children are educated at the state schools. The Catholic Church chooses to keep its educational autonomy, and 98 per cent of Roman Catholic children attend their own schools. Protestant and Catholic young people get an opportunity to mix only at age eighteen, when some go to university. But this includes only a small proportion of them.

I am convinced that the integration of children from their early years would be the most important single factor in breaking down community barriers and in restoring peace. I feel that as long as school segregation continues, community strife will keep recurring. Ancient suspicions and prejudices persist unchecked among the children. A new generation is emerging to whom the abnormality of violence has become a normal way of life.

I believe that the first thing we have to do in Belfast is to treat each other on the basis of our common humanity, and never by reference to our inherited labels, whether religious or political.

Recently I was telling a Protestant group of a boy in our city, Paul McGeown, age two, who on summer days loved to go with his mother to the park to watch the birds. “Birdies! Birdies!” he would call out with glee. On his way to the park one day the blast of a terrorist bomb hurled Paul right across the road, inflicting severe head injuries. For sixteen days he lay unconscious in the Belfast Children’s Hospital. A brain surgeon operated, and when Paul recovered consciousness he could not see. Then a month later the miracle happened. The nurse was holding Paul at the window. Suddenly he pointed—“Birdies! Birdies!” Paul could see again.

What was the reaction from the people to whom I was telling this story? Nearly all felt happiness for the child whose sight had been restored, I’m sure. But one woman angrily asked: “But wasn’t he a Roman Catholic?”

Edwin Markham wrote,

He drew a circle that shut me out—

Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.

But Love and I had the wit to win:

We drew a circle that took him in.

Bricks can build a barricade or a bridge. The bridge between the segregated children of Belfast will have in its structure the bricks of compassion, understanding, and reconciliation. The bridge is love.

I believe that in moments of despair we must dare to hope. Violence in our city may have a long rope, but I know God holds the end of that rope. Christmas came to the world in the bleak midwinter. When the night was blackest, the light shone. So in our city of Belfast, with its many self-inflicted wounds, we will still dare to sing this Christmastide: “Love shall be our token/Love be yours and love be mine.” For if reconciliation is the very heart of the Christmas message, then this is a day of opportunity.

Paul D. Steeves is assistant professor of history and director of Russian studies at Stetson University in Deland, Florida. He has the Ph.D. from the University of Kansas and specializes in modern Russian history.

Until recently, there seemed to be incontrovertible proof that Christ was born before March, 4 B.C. Josephus, a Jewish historian who lived in the first century A.D., recorded that Herod died shortly after an eclipse of the moon and before a Passover. Calculations have shown that a lunar eclipse occurred the night of March 12/13, 4 B.C. This was just before a Passover. Since the Bible makes it clear that Christ was born while Herod was still alive, this has appeared to many scholars as undeniable evidence that Christ was born before that eclipse in March, 4 B.C. And so the “Star of Bethlehem” has always been looked for prior to that date.

Some historical studies, however, have thrown doubt on the association of Herod’s death with that eclipse. In an essay in the October, 1966, Journal of Theological Studies, W. E. Filmer reviewed the historical data available from the period and suggested that Herod continued to live for some time after 4 B.C. Filmer also showed reasons for thinking that the eclipse to which Josephus referred was not the one in 4 B.C. but a later one on January 9, 1 B.C. AS early as the sixteenth century an eminent scholar, Scaliger, was decisive in stating that Herod’s death was connected with the 1 B.C. eclipse.

Virtually all early Christian historians and chronologers who lived from the second to the sixth centuries (and even later) put the birth of Christ after the eclipse of 4 B.C. Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Orosius, and Cassiodorus Senator said Christ’s birth was in a year we now recognize as 3 B.C. The early Christian chronologist Julius Africanus said it was in the year from 3 to 2 B.C. This same year was accepted by Hippolytus of Rome, Origen, the Chronicon Cyprianicum, Eusebius of Caesarea, John Chrysostom, Jerome, Hippolytus of Thebes, Photius Patriarch of Constantinople, the Greek historian Zonaras, and Bar Hebreaus, who quoted Syrian, Armenian, and Greek sources. Epiphanius and the early Syrian chronological work called the Chronicon Edessenum indicate it was 2 B.C. Almost all the early Christian Fathers of whom we have record said Christ’s birth was in either 3 or 2 B.C. These scholars were certainly acquainted with the writings of Josephus, and they must have been aware of his eclipse information. Yet they chose a date for Christ’s birth later than the one commonly used today.

No one should be dogmatically for or against the idea that the later eclipse is the one to which Josephus referred; there is still considerable doubt about the chronological information of the period. But the 3/2 B.C. date of the early Fathers is of real interest when astronomical data for that year are consulted. From August, 3 B.C. to December, 2 B.C., the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies caused a number of planetary and stellar relationships that could not fail to excite observers who saw significance in such things.

On August 1, 3 B.C. the planet Jupiter became visible above the eastern horizon as a morning star. It had just come out of the light of the Sun. Twelve days later, at about 5 A.M., a very close conjunction occurred between Jupiter and Venus (already a morning star for six months); the space between them at the morning observation was a mere .23 degree. Although the planets did not appear to touch each other (a rare phenomenon indeed), they showed an exceptional closeness.

Then some five days later the planet Mercury emerged from the Sun to become a morning star. While this was happening, Venus left its conjunction with Jupiter and headed toward Mercury. On the morning of September 1, Venus and Mercury came into conjunction, .36 degree apart. Their appearance would have been similar to that of Jupiter and Venus a few days before.

Such conjunctions of Jupiter/Venus and Venus/Mercury are not in themselves rare, but when connected with further astronomical occurrences in the year 3/2 B.C., they could be thought to have a great deal of significance.

After the September 1 meeting with Mercury, Venus journeyed back into the light of the Sun, emerging in the west as an evening star about December 20, 3 B.C. When Venus became an evening star, an observer just after sunset would find the planet moving progressively higher in the sky (going more easterly) each day. This movement placed Venus on a collision course with Jupiter, which was moving progressively westward each day. At the period when Venus reached the easternmost point from the Sun that it ever reaches, on June 17, 2 B.C. the two planets “collided.” This was a most uncommon occurrence. They were a mere .02 degree apart. To an observer on earth, the luminosity that each planet showed would have made the two planets together look almost like one gigantic star. What a dazzling sight—and it was in the light of the full summer moon! Immediately after this rendezvous, Jupiter advanced ahead of Venus as they both moved into the light of the Sun. (It must be understood that all these planetary motions and relationships are the apparent ones, as viewed by observers on Earth.)

This, however, is only half of the story. While Jupiter was on its westward journey to link up with Venus for this rare reunion on June 17, 2 B.C., Jupiter was engaging in some exhibitions of its own. Thirty-three days after the first Jupiter/Venus conjunction back in August of 3 B.C., an observer would have seen Jupiter come into conjunction with Regulus, a star of the first magnitude that is the chief star in the constellation Leo. The conjunction occurred on September 14. The stellar bodies, as viewed from earth, were only .63 degree apart. After that encounter, Jupiter then proceeded on its normal course through the heavens. Then on December 1, 3 B.C., the planet stopped its motion through the fixed stars and began its annual retrogression. But in doing so, it headed straight back toward the star Regulus. On February 17, 2 B.C., it was once again in conjunction with Regulus. This time they were 1.19 degree apart. Jupiter then continued its retrogression another forty days, finally returning to its normal motion through the fixed stars.

Then note what happened. On May 8, 2 B.C., Jupiter again was in conjunction with Regulus, 1.06 degree apart. (For Jupiter to unite with Regulus three times in one year is not common.) After this third conjunction with Regulus, Jupiter continued moving westward (in an apparent sense) for forty days more. (Jupiter actually moves eastward through the fixed stars, except in retrogression, but because the dome of the sky appears to move westward at a faster rate than Jupiter’s eastward motion, an observer on earth would see Jupiter more westerly on each succeeding day.) Jupiter, after its three conjunctions with Regulus, went on to reunite with Venus on June 17, 2 B.C., as mentioned earlier. This conjunction was the rarest for many decades, and it happened when Venus was at its easternmost point from the Sun.

But even this rare Jupiter/Venus conjunction was not all. On August 27, 2 B.C., Jupiter emerged once again as a morning star. Mars, which had played no active part in the past year’s conjunctions, overtook Jupiter and formed a very close conjunction with it; the two planets were only .14 degree apart. Such nearness is not an ordinary occurrence, and it must have been a wonderful sight. Since the planets were only eight degrees ahead of the Sun, the light for the predawn probably diminished the display for the observer on earth. Yet astronomers in that period could have calculated the time of the conjunction and may have been looking for it.

These astronomical indications show that seven major conjunctions took place in 3/2 B.C. That year must have been an unusual and interesting one to astronomers—and even more so to astrologers. And this is where the Wise Men of the New Testament come into the picture.

Since most people in the first century believed in astrology as a scientific indicator of important events, these displays of 3/2 B.C. must have produced a good deal of excitement. Even the writers of the New Testament may have shared in it. The New Testament says that wise men (Magi) came to Jerusalem looking for a newborn king. History shows that the Magi were astrologers, and the New Testament says that some of them journeyed to Jerusalem asking for the king of the Jews, whom they wished to worship (Matt. 2:2). Suetonius (Vespasian iv) and Tacitus (Histories v 13), two Roman historians who lived in the first century, said there had long been a belief throughout the East (Palestine, Syria, Babylon) that near the first century a king would be born of the Jews who was destined to rule the world. Virgil also told of the dawning of the golden age in that period (Eclogue iv). Since such a belief was widespread, there is little doubt that the astrologers looked for astronomical signs concerning the arrival of the prophesied king.

The Gospel of Matthew says the Magi saw a particular star that was the signal of the king’s coming. The Greek words used in relating the event were the ordinary ones used throughout Greek literature to describe the regular rising of the stars or planets (Kittel, Theological Dictionary, I, 352). In their normal predawn observations the Magi could very well have seen an ordinary star (or planet) ascending above the eastern horizon, which they interpreted as the sign that the prophesied Jewish king was to be born. They were certain enough of their interpretations to make a long, arduous journey with costly gifts to present to the new king. The Bible says that Herod and all Jerusalem also took the sign of the star seriously.

What star could this have been?

The ingenious German astronomer Kepler back in 1606 A.D. suggested that the star of the Magi was a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn appearing near some other star. In the last century, Ideler found that such a conjunction did occur in 7 B.C. But this year is very early for the birth of Christ, and later it was found that the planets Jupiter and Saturn were then at least two diameters of the moon away from each other. This was too far away for anyone to view them as a “star.” Some have suggested that the Bible is talking about a comet, but this is unlikely because comets were almost always interpreted as harbingers of evil. Perhaps it was an exploding star, a nova. Yet this suggestion is unprovable, and most scholars reject the idea. Some even feel it was an angel. Others say it was an outright miracle.

But let us recall a simple fact that the Gospel says happened: the Magi saw “his star” rising in the east. The text reads as if it were an ordinary morning star. Perhaps the star was a normal heavenly body that was in some kind of unusual configuration. Because 3/2 B.C. was an extraordinary year for visible astronomical occurrences, and since most early Christian writers say Christ was born in this year, perhaps we should focus our attention there.

Let us notice some astrological and biblical factors connected with the astronomical signs of 3/2 B.C. Since the New Testament shows that the “star” rose in the East, it would naturally be called a morning star. Christ said of himself, “I am the root and offspring of David, and the bright and morning star” (Rev. 22:16). We should recall that in 3 B.C. on the morning of August 12, eighty minutes before sunrise, Jupiter rose as a morning star in conjunction with Venus. How would astrologers (or Magi) interpret such a phenomenon? Astrological interpretation can vary widely, but let us notice some generally accepted beliefs.

Jupiter, known astrologically as the Father of the Gods, left the vicinity of the Sun and conjoined with Venus. This could be associated with a coming birth. In fact, “Jupiter was often associated with the birth of kings and therefore called the King-planet” (Hendriksen, Matthew, p. 153). Jupiter and Venus were also known as the Greater and Lesser Good Fortunes of the astrologers, and here they were in union. And note this: while this conjunction was occurring, the Sun (the Supreme Father), the Moon (considered a Mother), and Mercury (the Messenger of the Gods) were located in the single constellation of Leo—the Lion. The fact that these primary bodies were clustering in Leo may have had some biblical significance. The lion was the symbol of the tribe of Judah. Christ was called “the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David” (Rev. 5:5).

Then twenty days later another interesting thing occurred. Mercury (the Messenger of the Gods) left its position with the Sun (the Supreme Father) and moved into close conjunction with Venus. To the Chaldeans, Venus was Ishtar, the Virgin Mother—the goddess of fertility. However, the planet normally was thought to take on masculine qualities as a morning star. It was feminine in the evening. But notice what happened to the Sun when the Mercury/Venus conjunction took place. The Sun (the Father) had entered the constellation Virgo (the Virgin). This occurred when Mercury (the Messenger) and Venus were now conjoined in the constellation of Leo (the Lion) and Jupiter itself was just then entering Leo. All these astral signs have biblical themes associated with them. The Supreme Father in the Bible is God the Father. His Son was to be born of a virgin, according to prophecy. He was to be a descendant of Judah (Leo, the Lion), and he was to be introduced by a messenger (“Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee”—Mark 1:2).

Following these planetary conjunctions, Jupiter then moved on (as we have shown earlier) to unite with the star Regulus on September 14, 3 B.C. This could have been a very significant event—especially in relation to the other conjunctions of the year. Regulus is the chief star in the constellation of Leo, and Leo was connected with Judah in the Hebrew zodiac.

The brightest star in the constellation of Leo is Regulus, known as “the Heart of the Lion.” The Babylonians referred to Regulus as “the King,” and the Romans called it Rex, “King.” In Arabia, Regulus was known as “the Kingly One.” The Greeks called it “Basiliscos Aster,” which means “King Star.” Of all the stars in the heavens, Regulus was the one universally connected by ancient astrologers with greatness and power. And it was clearly connected with the conception or birth of kings.

Here was the King planet Jupiter, which had recently united with Venus, now associating itself with the King star in the constellation of Leo (the tribe of Judah). At the time of this conjunction, the Sun (the Supreme Father) was positioned in the constellation of Virgo (the Virgin). All these features are very reminiscent of biblical themes associated with Christ.

But these are not all the signs of 3/2 B.C. After Jupiter’s three conjunctions with Regulus (the King star), Jupiter continued its westward journey, and on June 17, 2 B.C., it had its rare reunion with Venus. The planet Venus (now called the Mother, an evening star) was extending as far east as possible to meet her consort, Jupiter, the King planet. What occurrred was a splendid planetary conjunction visible to all on earth that, let us note again, occurred in the constellation Leo—the sign of Judah. The conjunction also happened at the exact time of the full moon. The two planets would have appeared almost as one gigantic star. Could it be that these same planets that had introduced the prophesied king when they were both morning stars some nine and two-thirds months ago were now finalizing that introduction of the newborn king with an impressive evening-star union?

This, however, was not the end. On August 27, 2 B.C. (seventy-two days later), observers would have seen the extremely close conjunction of Jupiter with Mars (the planet of War). This occurred just before sunrise, close to the Sun. If the planets had not been close together, they would ordinarily not have been seen from earth. But they were then in very close conjunction, and because of that their light could have shone through the predawn.

As a matter of fact, there were actually four planets near the same longitude in the heavens when Jupiter and Mars had their conjunction: Jupiter at 142.6 degrees; Mars, 142.56; Venus, 141.51; and Mercury, 144.28. For these four planets to be so close was an unusual occurrence. And remarkably, those planets clustering around one another were all located in the constellation of Leo the Lion while the Sun at that very time was entering the sign of Virgo the Virgin! These factors too could emphasize biblical events.

What could be the interpretation here? Since Jupiter and Mars had just become new morning stars, it could well signify that war would break out on the earth just before that prophesied messianic day could commence. At least the Bible predicts that this will happen—and astrologers may have interpreted the sign similarly.

One thing is certain: the year 3/2 B.C. was remarkable for its visible astronomical occurrences. And since Genesis 1:14 says that the heavenly bodies were given for signs, perhaps these unusual conjunctions were intended to signal the advent of the Christ Child into the world. The stellar body that played the most prominent role in this extraordinary year was Jupiter. It could well be that Jupiter was “his star” that the Magi followed to Jerusalem, and finally to Bethlehem.

Let us now look at some interesting biblical features that could be said to support this interpretation. It should be recognized that the Magi arrived in Jerusalem sometime after Christ was born (Matt. 2:2). He had been circumcised (Luke 2:21) and presented at the Temple (Luke 2:22–24). The parents of Christ were living in a house, not a manger (Matt. 2:11), and Christ was then called a paidon (child), not a brephos (infant). After the Magi presented their gifts, they returned home by a different route. In response to this subterfuge, Herod slew the infants around Bethlehem who were two years of age and younger (Matt. 2:16). Since it was often difficult to interpret whether heavenly signs were indicating conception or birth, Herod probably took both possibilities into account: he killed the children up to two years so as to include both the time of conception and the time of birth. All these indications show that the Magi must have arrived in Bethlehem several months after Christ’s birth.

This leads us to the final indication that the planet Jupiter may be the “Star of Bethlehem.” Recall that the Magi saw the star rise above the eastern horizon. And in August, 3 B.C., Jupiter did in fact rise as a morning star that soon came into conjunction with Venus. That started a series of six conjunctions with other planets and the star Regulus. The last planetary conjunction was the one with Mars in August, 2 B.C., but then something else happened with Jupiter: Jupiter left its conjunction with Mars and proceeded in its apparent motion westward. The Bible says the star “went ahead of them” (Matt. 2:9). Could it be that the Magi (who came from the East) simply followed the normal movements of Jupiter as it progressed westward each day? The text could be interpreted this way.

Then note what occurred. When they reached Jerusalem, the Magi were told to look toward Bethlehem for the newborn king. This happened at a time when the New Testament says the star came to a definite halt in the heavens—it “stood over where the young child was” (Matt. 2:9). And indeed, the planet Jupiter does become stationary in its motion through the fixed stars. This happens at its times of retrogression and progression. It could well be that Matthew was referring to such a thing.

Jupiter had come to the point of retrogression; it became stationary among the stars. It was now about to display its seventh and final sign of that extraordinary year. The precise time for the retrogression of Jupiter was December 25, 2 B.C.! On that day Jupiter became stationary in the heavens.

But how was it possible for Jupiter to be stationary over the village of Bethlehem at that time? Very simple. The Bible says the Magi saw the star while they were still in Jerusalem (Matt. 2:8, 9). Bethlehem is located five miles south of Jerusalem. And on December 25, 2 B.C., at the ordinary time of the Magi’s predawn observations, Jupiter would have been seen in meridian position (directly over Bethlehem) sixty-five degrees above the southern horizon. This position would have shown the planet shining right down on Bethlehem! Furthermore, it was the period of the winter solstice, and so not only Jupiter but also the Sun was “standing still” in the heavens. (The word solstice comes from Latin words meaning “Sun stands still.”) This occurrence could well have appeared significant to astrologers. “General observance required that on the 25th of December the birth of the ‘new Sun’ should be celebrated, when after the winter solstice the days began to lengthen and the ‘invincible star triumphed again over darkness’ ” (Cumont, Astrology and Religion Among the Greeks and Romans, p. 89). And now, both Jupiter and the Sun were “standing still,” and Jupiter was then situated in the constellation of Virgo the Virgin.

Would not astrologers have been impressed with these interesting heavenly relationships? The Magi could have interpreted them as the destined time for giving their gifts to the “newborn Sun”—this time the “Sun of righteousness” (Mal. 4:2), born of the Virgin Mary.

The astrological interpretations I have suggested in this article may or may not be correct, but the occurrence of these astronomical phenomena in 3/2 B.C. is certain. Those exhibitions no doubt caused a great deal of excitement and wonder. They may well indicate that the early Christian historians were correct when they said Christ was born sometime in the period 3/2 B.C.

Is the United States the most religious nation in the world?

Pollster George Gallup, who may know as much about religious trends in the United States as anyone, said earlier this year that perhaps it was. Contrary to the gloomy pronouncements of some, Gallup sees little erosion of religious beliefs in our society. “Americans have in fact held firmly to basic religious beliefs over the last quarter century,” he says, “while a dramatic change has come about in certain European nations during this time.”

On a deeper level, however, it is difficult to claim the title “most religious” for the United States, or for any other nation, for that matter. In the biblical sense of “the nations” (ta ethne), some entire nations are highly religious in their way. The Sawi of Peace Child fame, for example, believed in a multiplicity of evil spirits dwelling in stones, trees, wind, and lightning. There were no exceptions, so it could be said that the Sawi are a totally religious “nation.” And even if we restrict “religious” to Christian, we find peoples in the world more religious than the United States. No area of the world is more thoroughly Christian than northeast India, where large tribes of headhunters have become followers of Jesus Christ during the last seventy-five years. Approximately three-fourths of the people in those tribes are Christian now. The Mizo “nation” leads with some 98 per cent of its population Christian.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the people of the United States are very religious. One recent Gallup survey found that 71 per cent of adults (eighteen or older) were members of a church or synagogue. This is quite remarkable, given the fact that the government officially neither requires nor encourages any particular religious belief. Religion is a matter of free choice in America, and most Americans choose to be religious at least to the point of associating themselves with a religious group.

At first glance the United States might also seem to be a highly sports-minded nation. Many people, and I am one of them, are keenly interested in sports. I live in the Los Angeles area and I cheer when the Dodgers, the Lakers, or the Rams win. In the Los Angeles Times I find multi-page sports sections seven days a week. And religion? Well, one has to wait until Saturday to find two pages buried in the interior of the paper, with half the space taken up by mediocre religious advertising.

But one day I became curious about what the situation really was. I went to the Statistical Abstract of the U. S. for sports data and to the Gallup poll for religious data, and found to my surprise that more American people attend church in an average week than attend all professional baseball, basketball, and football games combined in the average year! All athletic events of all kinds, professional and amateur, draw about 5.5 million spectators per week, while churches draw 85 million worshipers in the same week.

This ought to be encouraging to Christians. Shocking data can be compiled about drug addiction, prostitution, gambling, alcoholism, crime, pornography, and other prominent activities of the devil. But behind it all, Christians ought to remember that Jesus said, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). By nature, Christians should come down on the side of the optimists. Read the list of the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5 to confirm this. The vocabulary there is anything but pessimistic.

America as a Mission Field

Was America always as religious as it is now? Of course not. Because we send a great many missionaries out from America and receive few from other countries today, we forget that America was once a mission field. As W. Richey Hogg of Perkins School of Theology observes, “During the past two centuries, the greatest missionary effort in history among a single people was concentrated within the United States” (“The Role of American Protestantism in World Mission: A Bicentennial Perspective,” page 3; I derived a good bit of the information in this section from Hogg’s excellent study, presented to the American Society of Missiology at its annual meeting in June, 1976). And this effort met with good success. The result is that America has the largest group of professing Christians to be found in any one country in the world.

American mythology makes us think that all our forefathers were deeply Christian people. Such things as the language of the Mayflower Compact, the tradition of Thanksgiving Day, the Scarlet Letter, and Washington’s prayer at Valley Forge nourish the impression that in the colonial period the person who didn’t attend the Sunday-morning worship service, who hoed corn on Sunday afternoon, or who coveted his neighbor’s ox or ass was the exception to the rule.

Not so. British colonists in America were no different from British colonists in any other part of the world. America was a land of new opportunity for a free-wheeling life-style and substantial material gain. Religious freedom was an added attraction, but in more cases than not it was used as freedom to reject Jesus Christ rather than to serve the living and true God.

Colonial America was definitely a mission field. Some British Christians tried to meet the challenge through the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. But for the first hundred years their missionaries made little impression. Most colonists could hardly have cared less about Jesus Christ and the Church. And the colonial churches themselves were at a fairly low ebb until the Great Awakening swept the colonies about a half century before independence.

The bitter struggle for independence, which was a twenty-year process, tore many of the churches apart. The Anglicans found themselves in disarray, since most of their leaders were loyal to the British. Strong religious leaders like John Wesley were developing biblical arguments why the American revolution was wrong. And as a result, in 1776 when the Declaration of Independence was signed, only about 7 per cent of the citizens of the new United States of America were church members.

At this point American Christians became those most directly responsible for the evangelization of their own people. The British could no longer do it. The task was enormous, and the story is thrilling. By 1850 American church membership was up to 20 per cent; by 1900 it had reached 36 per cent; and so far during our century it has risen to at least 60 per cent. Adding the synagogues and other religious organizations, we approach the 71 per cent registered by the Gallup poll.

One of the most exciting chapters in this story of the spread of the Gospel in America is the evangelization of the Africans who were forced to migrate to America as slaves. Although many of the facts about the evangelization of American blacks are just now emerging, it seems clear that blacks were largely evangelized by blacks. This is not to deny that some white churches made sincere efforts to evangelize the blacks. But black religion in America was mostly self-propagated. In fact, Kenneth Scott Latourette says that “all the extensive Protestant missionary effort of Europeans and Americans in Asia and Africa in the century between 1815 and 1914 had resulted in no greater numerical gains than had been achieved among the Negroes of the United States in the same period” (A History of the Expansion of Christianity, IV, 327).

Missionaries feel their work has been successful not just when a national church has been planted but when the church gets busy sending out its own missionaries. The first United States mission, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, was organized in Bradford, Massachusetts, in 1810. Its first five missionaries set sail for India in 1812. By the end of the century, 4,891 American missionaries were serving overseas, constituting roughly a fourth of the total world Protestant missionary force. Today the number has risen to over 35,000, about 64 per cent of the world’s missionaries. Voluntary giving to the world missionary enterprise has kept pace. American Christians currently contribute over $400 million annually to world missions.

How Well Is America Evangelized?

With a 71 per cent membership in religious organizations, it might seem that America is now virtually evangelized.

No one I know of, however, believes that this is so. There remains a tremendous evangelistic concern not only for the 29 per cent who do not belong to a church but also for many of the 71 per cent who belong to a church in some vague sense but who are not personally committed to Jesus as Lord. They are Christians only nominally. There is a wide gap between what they profess to believe when a polltaker questions them at their front doors and what they practice when the doors are closed.

Finding out how many Americans still need to be evangelized is not easy. Regrettably, through what I consider undue nervousness over maintaining the separation of church and state, our Census Bureau has not collected religious data for quite some time. We know exactly how many Americans attend horse races, how many fly on airplanes, how much Americans spend on shoes, and how many toilets there are in the houses in a given census tract. But the Census Bureau does not find out how many belong to churches, attend worship, go to Sunday school, or practice the Christian code in their daily lives. I think that data on church attendance is at least as valuable for an understanding of our society as data on theater attendance or purchase of toasters, but until some courageous legislators agree and are willing to work to bring about changes, we will be without our potentially most accurate data.

What the Census Bureau does give us, however, is the important figure of how many people there are in the country as a whole. I think that in evaluating past evangelistic efforts or in planning future strategy, it is helpful to deal not with the total population but with the number of adults. It is not that children are unimportant as people. God loves them and wants them to be saved. But for a measurement of the effects of evangelism on a broad scale, children are not nearly so significant as their parents. The figure I like to work with, then, is 143.8 million, the number of adults the Census Bureau says we have in the United States. It is most helpful to define adults as those eighteen or over because the Gallup poll, a most important source of religious data, also works with Americans eighteen and over.

How many of these 143.8 million adults have been evangelized? How many attend church?

The Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches is only partially helpful in answering these questions. The Yearbook publishes official denominational membership reports for about 330,000 U.S. churches. But no attendance reports are given. Furthermore, even the method used to report membership is not as helpful as it could be; a disclaimer that “church statistics are not always comparable” is placed in a prominent place in each edition of the survey. It is true that the established categories for reporting statistics differ from group to group. On that basis the official figures of one denomination cannot always be compared with those of another. But it seems reasonable to suppose that a Yearbook editor could develop formulas for refining the statistics in such a way that apples could be compared to apples across the board.

A relatively simple questionnaire or some type of marketing survey could reduce the official statistics to adults eighteen and over. Then we would know how many Jewish adults are affiliated with synagogues and how many Catholic adults belong to churches, whereas now Jews simply estimate the number of Jewish people in the community as a whole and Catholics count all baptized persons. Some Protestants do the same thing. To mention another problem: of the some 12 million Southern Baptists, 4 million do not reside in the localities of the churches where their names are on the rolls. That membership figure needs to be refined to compare with that of, for example, the Christian and Missionary Alliance, which underplays formal membership but has many loyal non-members who tithe and are active in church life.

Some church-growth experts recently got together in Pasadena, California, to attempt to draw up guidelines for compiling religious data helpful for planning evangelistic strategy for the United States. One of the results of that meeting was what is called the “church involvement axis.” Nine categories of people were described, beginning with those closest to the church and ending with those furthest away. It loooks like this:

1. Active church members who are strong.

2. Active church members who are weak.

3. Active members who are not born again or personally committed to Jesus Christ.

4. Resident members who are inactive.

5. Non-resident members (their names are on the roll in another town or city from where they live).

6. Adherents who attend church but whose names are not on the roll. Some of these people might be faithful believers but for reasons of their own have not taken membership in the church they attend.

7. Non-members who have a church background but who have become indifferent.

8. Non-members who have a church background but who have turned against the church and become hostile.

9. Non-members who have no church background; they constitute the “pagan pool.”

Obviously, the 71 per cent discovered by the Gallup poll to be members would span categories 1 through 5. But many of those people need to be evangelized even though their names might be on the membership roll of some church. They are what I would call “functionally unchurched.” The best approximation I can make is that 106.4 million American adults fall into the “functionally unchurched” category. This is 74 per cent. In other words, three out of every four American adults are lost and need to be evangelized. Most of the 69.2 million children need to be evangelized also.

This, then, is a tremendous challenge. Bible-believing evangelicals have no time to be complacent about the religiosity of the American people when more than 100 million adults still need to be touched personally with the Gospel of Christ. God certainly is not willing that they should perish. And the Scripture reminds us that they will not be able to hear of God’s provision unless there is a preacher to tell them (Rom. 10:14).

Evangelism Is In

Fortunately, things never looked so hopeful for finding lost people in America and bringing them into the Christian fold. The icy cynicism about the church common in the 1960s has now melted. Priorities are being straightened out. Instead of advocating the death of the institutional church, people are praying and working for its renewal and growth. It seems to me that functionally unchurched Americans have never been more ready to hear and accept the Good News. I see eight signs that suggest to me that we have entered a time of ingathering into the Christian Church in America:

1. The steadily increasing strength of the evangelical movement is furnishing a solid base for biblical evangelism. Evangelicals have consistently preached a biblically rooted message of personal repentance, faith, and regeneration. Some fix the number of U.S. evangelicals at 40 million, although the figure is a soft one. People from all socioeconomic strata, and every area of the country, and virtually every denomination count themselves as evangelicals. Participants in the exciting Messianic Jewish movement might well be called evangelicals. The National Association of Evangelicals has never been stronger. Evangelicals do not need to be persuaded that evangelism is God’s will. They know what their task is, and more of them are devoting time, energy, and money to getting it done.

2. Mainline denominations are beginning to recapture the evangelistic priority on high levels. One indication of this was the grass-roots demand for evangelism at the Fifth Assembly of the World Council of Churches (Nairobi, 1975). Both Bishop Mortimer Arias of Bolivia and John Stott of England spoke strongly for evangelism in the plenary sessions. The “Spirit of Lausanne,” a reference to the Congress on World Evangelization held in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1974, clearly made its influence felt in the World Council. An example of how it is also penetrating American churches was seen in the United Methodist Quadrennial Conference held earlier this year in Portland, Oregon. Overwhelmingly, the delegates there voted to place evangelism among the three highest-priority items for the next four years. Less official overtures are being heard from leaders in several other mainline denominations that have begun the process of reinstating evangelism as a matter of importance in their church life.

3. Strong statements on biblical evangelism are coming from Roman Catholic leaders. Reeling from the effects of a startling decline in attendance at mass from 71 per cent in 1963 to 50 per cent in 1974, many Roman Catholic leaders are searching for something that will reverse the trend. In October of 1974 the Synod of Bishops met in Rome under the theme “Evangelization of the Modern World.” One of the outcomes was an exhortation by Pope Paul VI, “On Evangelization in the Modern World,” in which he declared, “We wish to confirm once more that the task of evangelizing all people constitutes the essential mission of the church.” Paragraph after paragraph in the document sounds as if it could have been written at Moody Bible Institute. This, combined with the rapidly growing Catholic charismatic movement, may well signal a new day for Catholics.

4. The rapid growth of independent churches is almost hidden from the public in general. However, in many cities and towns one can find new churches called “Calvary Chapel” or “Bible Church” or “Evangelistic Center” or “Baptist Church.” These churches do not affiliate with any national denomination. They often are highly visible in their communities, but they lack combined national strength. I suspect that the fastest-growing religious movement in America is the Baptist Bible Fellowship movement. The superchurch First Baptist of Hammond, Indiana, is one of them. Although they do not figure in the statistics of the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, they are extremely important. One indication of strength is that Pastor Jack Hyles’s seminar at Hammond draws more than 5,000 per session, most of them Baptist Bible or other independent pastors. These independent churches are typically superaggressive in evangelism. As a result, a great many of them are growing well.

5. The church-growth movement, which traces its origins to Donald McGavran of the Fuller Seminary School of World Mission, is gaining wide acceptance. Just two or three years ago, those of us who are advocates of church growth had to devote much of our energy to defending the insights, methodologies, and research findings of the movement. No longer. Now the demand for church-growth teaching from those who are already strongly motivated far exceeds the supply of teaching time. Several Doctor of Ministry programs now have church-growth components for ministers who had no opportunity to study this area when they were in seminary. All this is building a strong theoretical base for highly effective evangelism in the near future.

6. During the last couple of years I have seen what I consider a significant breakthrough in the evangelization of two of our nation’s traditionally resistant peoples, the Jews and the Navajos. The Messianic Jewish movement, which encourages Jews to be born again, to follow Jesus (called “Yeshua”), and yet to remain Jews, is proving to be a powerful evangelistic force. A recent survey by the Jews for Jesus organization indicates that since 1976 somewhere between 14,000 and 35,000 Jews have become followers of Yeshua.

A week on the Navajo reservation recently has led me to believe that Navajo evangelism has turned an important corner. Navajos constitute about one-fourth of American Indians, and the tribe is increasing rapidly. The vigorous growth of some independent Pentecostal-type churches on the reservation is very encouraging. A change in missionary attitude and approach to culture also promises more effective evangelism. Missionaries are now recognizing that the old-school approach has not always been an effective evangelistic tool. They are beginning to use indigenous church-planting principles. A number of missionaries are now studying the Navajo language for the first time. To date, only a couple of missionaries are fluent enough to preach in Navajo, but this will change. Some of us may see the day when half of the Navajos are Christian.

7. Some parachurch organizations are beginning to relate to local churches much more creatively than they have in the past. The Evangelism Explosion program, one of the strongest new forces for evangelism training, originated in Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. This evangelism is designed to produce church growth. The Fuller Evangelistic Association, founded by the late Charles E. Fuller, began a Department of Church Growth last year. It offers consultation services to churches and denominations that want professional help in developing evangelistic processes that will help their churches grow. Campus Crusade’s new “Here’s Life, America” program is working directly with local churches and is using a system specifically designed to incorporate converts into local churches. If other parachurch organizations take steps to gear their evangelistic efforts to church growth, tremendous spiritual power will be harnessed for God’s glory.

8. A new national mood of receptivity to spiritual truth is prevalent. The religion issue in the 1976 presidential campaign probably stirred as much interest in the claims of Christ as any hundred evangelistic crusades could have done; Jimmy Carter was not afraid to let the voting public know that he is “born again.” The dramatic conversion of former Nixon aide Charles Colson, told in his own words in the book Born Again, has made a strong impression on many readers. All this serves to create receptivity, especially among what I am calling America’s “functionally unchurched.”

There is much to be thankful for, and there is much to be done. New and growing forces for evangelism plus unprecedented openness to the message bid fair to make this last quarter of the century a very exciting time to be an evangelical and evangelistic Christian.