A point of concern among many evangelicals today is the need for more and better leaders in our ranks. Many congregations and denominations find their progress retarded not because they are unwilling to move ahead but because they do not have enough qualified people to fill leadership positions. And outside the churches the problem is more acute; in various disciplines the voice of committed evangelicals is not heard at all. While we seek to preach the Gospel to the masses, we discover that agnostics, secularists, and skeptics still dominate the places where the minds of the masses are being shaped; it is they who are editing the newspapers and magazines, writing the plays, producing the films, and teaching in the schools.

There are factors in evangelical homes, schools, and churches that contribute to this leadership lack. I want to discuss three of them.

The first is over-protection. Whether physical, psychological, or spiritual, this stifling ghost haunts many Christians. We tend to confuse legitimate love and concern with a “mother hen” approach to the developmental process. A father who argues with the Little League umpire to “protect my kid,” a pastor who seeks to solve all the new convert’s problems for him “so he won’t get discouraged”—both are hindrances to the goal of developing leaders.

We find it difficult to give others—especially our children—the freedom God has given them, the freedom to succeed or fail on their own. Jay Kesler has put it well in his book Let’s Succeed With Our Teenagers. Doing bad, he says, is an option for every human being, “even … our child. This is hard to accept. We would like to influence him to choose only right and good. If we do this, however, we find ourselves doing the very thing that God Himself refuses to do.”

It is interesting to look at the development of some of the leaders in the Bible. Repeatedly one finds people who had confronted difficulties but had come through them and become leaders. David fought his bears, lions, and giants and became king. Joseph faced his angry brothers and an Egyptian prison and became a leader. Daniel was taken into captivity when he was young but rose to leadership. And Peter was tested, was allowed to fail (under the eye of Jesus himself, by the way), and emerged as the leader of the new church. One suspects that each of these men was a better leader because someone allowed him to face difficulty on his own and learn from it that freedom to choose must be included as a part of development.

Closely related to the problem of over-protection is the matter of encouraging docility. To be a leader demands what we often call “spunk.” A leader must be creative, and willing to go beyond some accepted ideas. Great leaders often do not fit into our cultural molds, but that is precisely why they are leaders.

If, on the other hand, our habit is to honor docility, it is little wonder that we are not developing leaders. As a boy, Joe Evangelical may have been taught by both parents and church that good boys never got into trouble or questioned authority. If he went to a Christian grade school he might have been taught that the good child, the one parents and teachers liked and rewarded, was the obedient child who accepted all he was told. When he went on to a Christian college he may have faced again the understanding that good students were those who followed all the rules without question. In fact, it may well have been suggested that such behavior was a sign of spiritual maturity. And so if Joe Evangelical, having learned his lessons about “fitting in,” were to become a leader, he would do so despite his background more than because of it.

Paul’s teaching about the necessity of variety in the church (First Corinthians 12) should help us. Instead of honoring the person who always fits in, we should perhaps do more to encourage the one who shows the courage and initiative to be creatively different.

A third way in which we can thwart leadership development is by promoting negative self-concepts. In Help! I’m a Parent Bruce Narramore discusses the relation between a child’s sense of autonomy and his self-image (principles that could also be true of the “babe in Christ”). He says, “By encouraging independent thoughts and actions, we promote a sense of confidence and strength. By over-protecting or squelching a child, we undermine his confidence. This makes it harder for him to cope with adult life.”

The negative self-image all too often found among evangelicals may be one of the serious results of over-protection and docility. It may have been formed under the guise of spirituality: are we not to “crucify self” if we are to grow spiritually?

This self-denying concept is often misused. Jesus was never at war with our humanity. The glory of the incarnation is that God came in the flesh! Furthermore, in stating the two greatest commands, Jesus made it clear that self-love is right and proper: we are to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

In our homes and pulpits we should be reminding others that being made in the image of God is good, not bad. Children and young people need to be encouraged by parents and other leaders to accept themselves for what they are—people made by God and worth the price of redemption. That can be an exciting climate for leadership development!

Arthur, I have been thinking all day long

Of you in Austria. Provincially

I conjure up absurd, distorted scenes.

I see you standing on an ancient bridge.

The night is cold, the river dark and flowing.

Traffic is light—a bicycle, a cart,

A taxi with a driver who has learned

Never to ask more than official questions.

You’re thinner now than when you left last year.

You pull your coat around you as you did

Many an evening here in Oregon

When, walking up the block for exercise,

We’d speak of Tillich, Rilke, Sartre and Paul,

And shivering like children in the rain,

We’d spend three hours in a dialogue,

Rhapsodic tongues above diluvian feet.

I know you must be occupied in studies—

Learning the language, going here and there,

Charming your hostess and her family,

Making your trips to minor villages,

Sailing the Danube, climbing in the Alps,

Doing things off the track and on the track.

Like every scholar from America,

You probably are seldom by yourself.

Yet in this vision that I cannot blur

None of that comes into consideration.

I see you rather in your solitude.

I see you when the social whirl is done,

The lessons over and the chatter gone.

I see you weary of the great illusion,

The thin pretenses of one’s seeking truth

While really clutching means to make his way

Into the idiocy of pride and status.

I see your spirit worn and desolate

Finding, in spite of all the gay clichés,

That Austrians like Oregonians

Bear out Thoreau: most men are desperate.

Trips over oceans are no remedy;

They sometimes make the heart more laden-down.

Seeing you on that bridge alone at night,

I do not fear some suicidal try,

Or anything external as a threat.

Rather I pray that as you watch the river,

The liquid black reflecting back the light

From two preposterous concrete-sculptured nymphs,

You won’t surrender to the lie, the tyranny,

The tyranny that man is always false,

Playing his roles with clever desperation,

That lie that death has the last word on life.

I pray that you’ll avoid the mental twist

That jumps to false conclusions on good grounds.

I pray you keep a radical innocence,

An innocence informed by worldly wisdom.

I pray that weariness will never settle in

And atrophy the wellsprings of your soul.

From cynicism, Lord, deliver him.

Shelter his eyes from nothing. Let him know

The present age’s order—stark, unvarnished.

Let him confront the enemies of Love.

Let him behold the emptiness of sin;

Let him draw back in agony, in horror.

But in the murky water, in the chill,

In the inexpressible sadness, in the light,

In his extremity, O mantle him

With grace, with resolution, and with peace.

Exchange for his illusions, God, Thyself.

Dr. Timothy L. Smith, professor of history at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, is a noted authority on religious movements in America. His book “Revivalism and Social Reform” was among a select group chosen for the White House Library some years ago. He holds a doctorate from Harvard and is an ordained elder in the Church of the Nazarene. He is currently overseeing a major research effort supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and dealing with “the mosaic of evangelical Protestantism in modern America,” which he believes will contribute to an emerging new model for American religious studies. Dr. Smith was interviewed in his Baltimore campus office by Senior Editor David Kucharsky.

Question. As one who is widely respected for insights into the life of the Christian community, would you say that we are in the midst of a religious revival at this time?

Answer. If by “at this time” you mean the period stretching back twenty or thirty years, I would say yes, very much so. There is an extensive surge toward faith in God.

Q. How can you tell?

A. Well, just look at the numerical and financial growth of evangelical churches and religious organizations. Those institutions based on biblical faith have experienced a decided upswing. I’m talking not only of evangelical congregations and denominations but of the seminaries and Christian colleges which share their commitment. Probably as many as fifty such colleges are flourishing despite all the talk of the financial crisis in higher education. And graduates of Gordon, Fuller, Trinity, and similar theological seminaries are beginning to fill the great pulpits of the old-line Protestant denominations. So what counts is not simply Billy Graham’s citywide crusades, which to the casual observer may seem to be only a flash in the pan, but what those crusades rest upon: the very solid growth of institutional affiliation, congregational commitment, and life styles in families and local communities which reflect biblical faith. These constitute the stunning religious development of the last thirty-five years.

Q. How do you view the religious elements of the presidential election campaign this fall, and what effect might the election of Ford or Carter have on the spiritual scene?

A. Jimmy Carter’s penchant for personal testimony seems to me an authentic expression of the piety and convictions of a mainstream Southern Baptist. And his combination of “conservative” theology with “liberal” politics fits not only much of my study of nineteenth-century evangelicals but my personal experience growing up in a politically liberal Southern family. But despite the efforts of reporters who have interviewed Mr. Carter in depth—including Norman Mailer and the managing editor of Playboy—to explain how authentic and consistent his religious testimony seems, the news editors have not been able to resist a caricature of his beliefs. They know that the public remembers all too well the paraded piety of a number of recent politicians. The effort by partisans of Governor Reagan, and subsequently of President Ford, to advertise the claim that these two are also born-again Christians caused religiously faithful Jews, Catholics, Orthodox, and old-line Protestants, as well as maybe thirty million others who don’t care that much about religion, to be suspicious of the whole matter. Thus whichever candidate we will have elected by the time these words are printed will find his actual freedom to function quietly as a Christian believer restricted by the necessity of persuading many of those who must help him govern, and a large segment of the public he must lead, that he is not from their point of view dangerously pious.

So the effect on the religious scene will likely not be great. Unhappily, among the brotherhood of the born-again, the consequence may be to highlight longstanding political differences, especially notable between white and black evangelicals, and set off a decade of fruitless controversy over whether the Bible sustains Adam Smith or Karl Marx. Neither of these two gentlemen, I must say, really matters very much any more.

Q. Do you find much of a sense of oneness among evangelicals today? If someone were to come along and try to pull them together in some kind of unity, would he succeed?

A. My feeling is that we are a good distance away from major organizational revision. I think we may need another fifty years of loyalty to one another in seminaries, Bible-school programs, city-wide campaigns, prayer fellowships, and other symbols of the unity which CHRISTIANITY TODAY stands for before we should devote much energy to forging structural unity. I am very much more ambivalent about structural unity than I used to be, and I find confirmation of my ambivalence in Luther Gerbach’s studies of effective social movements.

Q. How does the report strike you that 34 per cent responding to a Gallup poll affirmed that they had been spiritually reborn …

A. Or that they had known such an experience as being born again?

Q. Yes.

A. I was both surprised and not surprised. Not surprised, because all branches of American Christianity rely on the appeal to conversion to secure adult commitments. In our society, religious affiliation is a matter of choice, so pastors and church organizations put emphasis upon some crisis of choice, whether they do so in biblical terms or not. Moreover, in teen-age years and in the early twenties developmental psychologists have observed a pattern of radical change in which a person does—if ever he does—break into an ethical perception of life’s meaning which is fundamentally different from the egocentric outlook of his childhood. These observations have created a body of psychological theory which appears to validate the notion of crucial turning points in religious perception and commitment. On these general grounds, then, I do not find the response to the poll startling. As I recall it, the question was not phrased in such a way as to point to a fully New Testament experience of the new birth. It was certainly close, however.

Q. But 34 per cent is a rather high figure, is it not, in a society that seems to opt so blatantly for secularity and irreligion?

A. Yes, but I have to look at the question also from my awareness that a very large proportion of the American population is affiliated with religious communities in which the biblical idea of a “new birth” as the beginning point of the life of faith is absolutely central. After all, there are some 12 million Southern Baptists in America, to say nothing of all the evangelicals of other persuasions, both white and black.

Q. And you feel this is a lot more than mere nominal affiliation?

A. In many denominations, yes. I recall Senator Sam Ervin’s influence over the minds of the American people in those wonderful Sunday-school talks on constitutional liberty during the Watergate hearings—the immense persuasiveness of his use of biblical language was a sign of how widespread are what some intellectuals call the simplistic ideas of evangelical Christianity. I don’t happen to think they are simplistic, of course. The conception of simple honesty has profound dimensions, and Senator Sam spelled them out.

Q. Do you feel that evangelical leaders, pastors, and others with influence are taking advantage of the current spiritual movement?

A. No, and for a strange reason. The early part of the twentieth century witnessed an immense fragmentation of religious association and resources. Those who in every Christian tradition were trying to keep alive a sense of New Testament faith faced experiences which prompted them to interpret their present and their future to be that of a beleaguered minority fighting with their backs to the wall, but holding out for a truth that was far more precious than either the wall or their backs! We kept that psychology. I have talked to people in many evangelical traditions over the past few months. They all lament how dark the day is and how hopeless the future. Yet, out of simple loyalty to the things they believe to be precious, they express a determination to hold out, faithful to what they suspect will be a bitter end. As a matter of fact, not only within their own communions but also in the others they believe to be truly biblical they witness this great growth, this flourishing of faith; but most are still under the illusion that the world outside is going in the opposite direction. Well, large chunks of “the world” are—certainly two parts of it that influence most the public image of our culture: the university community, and the media of mass entertainment and communication. These latter are not any longer the mainstream, however. The wave of the future is those young people deeply affected by religious need and evangelical commitment whom one finds thronging the campuses of earnestly Christian colleges. Yet the elders who have shared that commitment still cling to a fortress mentality, despite their testimony to faith in God’s promises to pour out his Spirit in the “last days” upon all flesh. I would not, however, substitute for the fortress mentality the old Christian triumphalism that assumes a steady march to the millennium. Biblical hope is not that simple, and the sources of despair in modern life are extensive.

Q. So what specifically do you think the local church should be doing to let the Spirit do his work through us in a time of religious prosperity?

A. It seems to me that we have applied production models to our view of church growth and church administration. Denominational leaders tend to think that the forward-looking pastor is the one who has a plan very much like a businessman’s plan for saturating a market. Accordingly, we have stressed image and public relations too much. But I think that the great need is to recover a sense of the complexity and profundity of biblical truth.

Q. What do you really mean by that? How does a pastor go about explaining that to lay people?

A. Laymen are not that naïve. They know that history is at least as complicated as their own lives, and that the Bible, both Hebrew and Christian, declares the situation of the people of God to be precarious. Social evil and personal sinfulness are omnipresent, the Book affirms; but those who keep the covenant of faith in righteousness are in step with eternity. Truth and justice may finally prevail on earth, but only if the believing remnant bear a cross for them. Biblical hope is rooted in faith and nurtured in love; love may go beyond, but it cannot go without, “simple justice.” Jesus made these teachings of the prophets the heart of his ethic. And he declared that living by that ethic, so long an impossible dream, was about to become the normal experience of persons reborn through the power of the Holy Spirit—persons who would know very well the manifold contradictions of a complex and often sinful social order. Those who believed him, and those who believe him now, soon learn, as the apostles did, that only through “much tribulation” can we enter into the Kingdom of God. But the apostles also learned that no test of their faith or fortitude can “separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus.” Thus what William Law in seventeenth-century England announced as a “serious call to a devout and holy life” is the plain, and plainly understandable, message of the New Testament. As long as Christians read the Bible, no amount of theological posturing can obscure that message. They do, and it hasn’t.

Q. What ethical and moral impact are the flourishing evangelicals having upon secular society?

A. A lot less than I would like to see. A characteristic of revivalism in the twentieth century, as distinct from that in the nineteenth, is that evangelists today are not as clearly insistent upon the ethical outcomes of religious commitment, especially in relationship to social evils.

Q. But the preaching of the Gospel today quite generally affirms that regeneration of individuals produces personal and social behavioral changes for the good.

A. That expectation comes through, yes, but in a way which makes radical renunciation of personal and social sin secondary to orthodox belief or psychic peace. Nineteenth-century evangelicals were committed to the conviction that the evidence of salvation by grace was a life of uncompromising righteousness. Accordingly, they went on to teach personal responsibility to act against social evil.

Q. But you do not deny, do you, that there has been a special kind of piety characteristic of evangelicals in the twentieth century?

A. Unfortunately, the ethical emphasis has been upon a traditional set of taboos. If someone asks me seriously why I do not drink, I welcome the chance to explain what I regard as the moral obligation to alcoholics I know as well as to the society I share which makes me say, “I’ll take diet Coke, or if you have none, buttermilk.” But it is possible for a non-drinking Christian simply to exemplify a kind of cultural hangover from the nineteenth century. Our evangelical ethical emphasis in other matters as well sometimes reflects merely an atrophied tradition rather than a vital commitment to making our new life in Christ the central principle governing ethical choices and ideological commitments.

Q. Does American pluralism have anything to do with this? Do you see any holding back because we are obliged to be tolerant of one another’s moral behavior?

A. It does have an effect. But remember, pluralism has characterized American religion from the beginning. New England was not pluralistic in colonial times, but the rest of the colonies were. And people living south and west of the Hudson cared about righteousness, too. Mennonites and Methodists were not Puritans, but they followed the way of holiness.

Q. How about dispensationalism? Do you agree with the criticism that it encourages a fatalism that bodes ill for our being the salt of the earth and the light of the world?

A. Numerous studies, including a couple by my own students, are now making plain what I did not realize when I wrote Revivalism and Social Reform: dispensational millenarians, or what I once called pessimistic premillennialists—men such as Arthur P. Pierson or A. B. Simpson, founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance—were as concerned to alleviate social evil as Wesleyan post-millennialists like the Salvation Army’s William and Catherine Booth. In a recent visit to the Philadelphia College of Bible, I found social work to be the most popular field of undergraduate specialization!

Biblical literalists, including dispensationalists, also feel bound to take literally the words of Jesus about compassion for the poor and the ill and justice to the imprisoned and the racially outcast. While rejecting the idealism which anticipates a brighter tomorrow, they often act in such ways as to help make a brighter day possible.

Q. Where is liberal theology in the seventies? What is its effect?

A. One of the things that’s happening is a return to the old modernism. Witness the new book by William R. Hutchison entitled The Modernist Impulse, which describes the author’s disenchantment with neo-orthodoxy and his new respect for the older liberalism. A good many examples of this return have cropped up in the liberal schools of theology. But I do not find it very significant. Modernism, of either the older or the newer variety, doesn’t have the morally transforming power or even the intellectual tools to cope with the despair about all order, all justice, all hope which dominates the modern intellectual community. The critical battle of the twentieth century is that between hope and despair. Human beings now experience staggering insecurity about all those structures of thought and value and community upon which we heretofore counted. Here and at every other major university there are scholars who are gearing their lives to what they see as a desperately honest explanation of the hopeless situation of mankind.

Despair is the pervasive reality, and any theology which does not have in it an immense amount of faith in the loving and empowering grace of God is not going to be able to cope with that reality.

So I tend not to take very seriously whatever fad may now be dominating liberal theology. The truth is that mankind has come to the brink. Our only hope is that view of God and of human destiny which it seems to me Jesus Christ made plain in his magnificent fulfillment of the insights and hopes of Israel’s prophets. He lights the way to justice, love, and liberty in human cultures. Evangelicals ought to be shouting from the housetops, not for partisan or sectarian advantage, but for the good news that love and grace in Christ are here to save us. Jesus and the apostles established the Church in a day equally dark, by a faith which seemed to broken Greek idealists equally ridiculous. We who today claim to be his followers, and who number not a handful but millions, ought therefore to be ashamed of any who profess that faith but live by cool accommodation to the despair of our age.

Mehitable was a small, plain, black-and-white-and-yellow calico cat who lived with me for fourteen years. She was born in a woodshed on the river, and she came from a long line of cats who had had to depend on their wits for their livelihood, being fed only in winter at a country house where they were kept as mousers, not pets. Although I provided plentifully for all Mehitable’s needs, her ancestry showed in the ways she adapted herself to life in the woods, and in her wisdom and independence.

Not a mouse was left alive on the whole of my promontory from the day she moved in, age six weeks. She was catching and eating chipmunks before she had lost her baby teeth. She hunted moles and bats, salamanders, skinks, small snakes, and voles, bringing them to me but not eating them. She loved to chew grasshoppers and moths. She tangled once, and once only, with a skunk. She sat patiently at the river’s edge, fishing, hooking her prey out of the water and tossing it well up onto dry land with one flash of an adroit paw. She slept curled up in the hollow of a rock or under a rhubarb leaf or a bit of bracken, perfectly camouflaged. And when she was thirsty she drank from the river, looking carefully up and down first to see that there were no power boats coming, and hence no waves in their wake. If a boat was in view, she would move back from the water’s edge until it had passed. And if its wake had filled some of the little hollows in the rock, which she diligently inspected after a boat had gone by, she would drink daintily from one of them rather than approach the water itself. Indeed, there is a cup-like hollow in a rock near the dock which is called Mehitable’s Hollow to this day.

Figaro, her handsome black successor, has spent all eleven of his summers at the same cottage, and he too loves life at the river. He will catch a bird on occasion, and each season he brings down one or two flying squirrels, which he seems to consider some sort of Batman game; but apart from this he does not hunt. And he does not drink from the river, no matter how thirsty he may be. Normally he gets enough liquid in his daily food. But sometimes, in very hot weather, he needs more. I tend to forget this, surrounded by water as we are, with all kinds of nice little cat-hollows filled with fresh water many times a day, just begging for a cat to drink of them. It is not until I notice that he seems off his food, has a warm nose, meows over-much, or swipes a drink from the bowl of water lilies on the table that I offer him some water. Then I am amazed at how thirstily and deeply he will drink.

To live on the edge of a great, flowing river, and to suffer thirst—how sad, even for a cat to whom water is not a natural element! What, then, of God’s children? We who know the Living Water, why do we not drink?—MARGARET CLARKSON, teacher and writer, Willowdale, Ontario.

American Christians seem to have rediscovered prayer. And even among the quasi-religions that so profitably proliferate today, prayer, as either meditation, recollection, chanting, or auto-suggestion, makes up a good deal of their appeal. The no-nonsense, square-jawed, steely-eyed social activist has turned into a mellower man, convinced, whether by the Bermuda triangle or by possibility thinking or by something else, of a spiritual realm wherein lie great and untapped reservoirs of power. And, as with the Alaskan pipeline or the North Sea discoveries, everyone wants to get in on it.

Many scoff at ignorant dupes who send their pension pittances to radio preachers for a special petition on their behalf; yet some of those same scoffers will part with a tidy sum themselves to receive a few secret syllables to repeat over and over in the search for peace. There are chain prayer letters warning of dire consequences if the magic spell is broken. Books of folksy monologues with God written in a somewhat choppy free-verse fashion twirl round on supermarket display racks. There are prayer breakfasts, prayer fellowships, prayer groups.

The problem, as it was in New Testament times, is not so much becoming willing to pray as learning how to pray, how to prevent the draining off of the true energy of communication with God into phony and ultimately dangerous short circuits.

Spiritual power exists. Even the feeblest and most misguided attempts at prayer yield some intimation of a lurking reality. And prayer is our link with that powerful reality. Unfortunately, we tend to transfer the ruling images of our culture uncritically into our life of faith. We hear ourselves spoken of as “consumers” so often that it is no wonder we slip into thinking of prayer in those terms (“I’ll trade you 317 mantras for twenty-four hours’ worth of serenity”). I have even heard from the pulpit the metaphor of prayer as a power source we “tap” as if it were a utility line. Notice, however, that the very image betrays our attitude toward this power: it is a great way off, as remote as the Arctic oilfields or ITT, and connected to us only tenuously. And of course the switch is always on our end. The great turbine of spiritual power sits there awaiting our summons.

If power is what we are seeking in prayer—power to change our lives in one way or another—then we must become aware of the nature of that power, which is fearsome to the last degree. It is not a power that can be harnessed. The images from the Bible shatter us with their uncontrollable force. A dove descends. Tongues of fire flame out. An angel appears. A bush burns. A mountain trembles. A whirlwind answers. God invades.

If we get so far as being ashamed of our overt consumerism in prayer (though who among us is really satisfied with asking only for his daily bread?), the next danger lying in wait for us is a sort of spiritual consumerism. As Jacques Ellul has put it in his book Prayer and Modern Man, “each one of us is so profoundly patterned in accordance with this necessity to consume that everything we lay hold of we value from that standpoint, even God.… We talk of having faith, of having the Holy Spirit, not of living in and by faith, of receiving and being sent forth by the Holy Spirit” (Seabury, 1973, pp. 144, 145).

Just how perverted this desire to consume God’s power can be—and how he can use even these misguided attempts of ours—can be illustrated with an example from my own life. Having read in perfectly reliable sources that prayer should not be simply a matter of speaking to God but that we should also listen to hear him speaking to us, I finally decided to put this theory to the test. I poured out every concern, every petition and intercession I could rake together and presented this knobby bundle to God. Then, exhausted by this mental and emotional effort, I felt it was time for a little feedback. So I waited, staring into the darkness, straining my ears—for what? I didn’t really expect to hear a voice, but I did want some response, an inner voice, an assurance, all those phenomena described by authors of true-life religious adventure books from Saint Augustine to Catherine Marshall. Nothing. My ears were ringing. Either God had nothing particular to say to me or I was not giving my imagination free enough rein. Worn out and dissatisfied, I drifted off to sleep.

Hours later but just before the winter sun climbed over the frozen ridge behind our house, I opened my eyes, instantly wide awake in the grey half-light. Already I was in tears. For suddenly, at the very moment of waking, there was in my mind the vivid memory of a situation in my adolescence. I had been promised a room of my own when we moved into a new house in my sophomore year in high school. As things turned out, however, it was my little brother who got the room while I had to share a room with a spinster aunt, a semi-invalid who had always made her home with us or other relatives.

For all the ensuing time in which I lived at home I had burned with the injustice of this reversal, convinced that my parents had decreed it just because I was a girl. I had made my feelings clear in devious and subtle ways, and I had carried this grudge with me for years.

But now in this early morning light, I was feeling for the first time the scalding shame this elderly crippled woman must have felt. Moving from house to house, never having one of her own. Totally dependent on the good graces of nieces and nephews for the very necessities of life. Never in all my years at home, or indeed till now, had I given a single thought to how she felt in the situation. But now I was getting a full dose of it—the pride that had to be swallowed daily in a galling gulp. It was more bitter than I could bear.

As far as I knew there was no apparent reason to have this experience. Although I think of my great aunt with affection often and although I continually spoke of the injustice of no room of my own when recounting the wrongs against myself as a female, this other perspective on the situation had never before entered my mind. And it was a whole, complete experience, simply there as soon as I opened my eyes on the morning, not something I had analytically thought out and become convinced of. The feeling simply engulfed me, and I concluded, as soon as I could get my head above water again, that this was the way God spoke to me, showing me a piece of reality to which I had been blind. Bitter and humiliating though it was, I was pleased.

When it happened again the next morning I was scared. The process was the same. As soon as I came awake, which was suddenly and out of a deep sleep, I was totally aware of another incident from my past life. This time it was my wedding, the day after Christmas during my first year in college. I had experienced the whole event totally from my own vantage point, indifferent to the heap of details that was smothering my mother. But this time I was seeing it all from her point of view. It had been a time of great anxiety for my mother, and indeed even her towering strength almost collapsed after the ordeal was over, but I had driven blithely away, proud of my new status of independence from my family and never once thinking of her pain.

I had often confessed in my prayers to being selfish. I knew I was at times. But this particular incident had never been revealed to me in those terms before. And it was revealed so totally, given all in one lump, so to speak, that the experience devastated me, and once more I began the day in penitential tears. The feeling of satisfaction at having evoked a response from God evaporated under the fear that I would have some horrid scene from my past to wake up to every morning for the rest of my life. He proved to be more merciful than that, however, although I was quite wary for a while about how I prayed.

And yet, chary as we may be of this awesome power we confront in prayer, what other choices are really open to us? Can we simply hide our eyes and try to stay out of its unpredictable path? That is essentially to leave ourselves powerless in a world that swirls with spiritual battles all around us; it is like standing in the middle of a battlefield protected by nothing more than an insipid smile.

Christians have always interpreted the splitting of the temple veil during the crucifixion as symbolic of their liberation from the mediated presence of God. Henceforth they were “free” to approach him directly—which is almost like telling someone he is “free” to stick his head in the lion’s jaws. For once you start praying there is no guarantee that you won’t find yourself before Pharaoh, shipwrecked on a desert island, or in a lion’s den.

This is no cosmic teddy bear we are cuddling up to. As one of the children describes him in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, “he’s not a tame lion.” Ellul is convinced that prayer for persons living in the technological age must be combat, and not just combat with the Evil One, with one’s society, or even one’s divided self, though it is also all of these; it is combat with God. We too must struggle with him just as Jacob did at Peniel where he earned his name Israel—“he who strives with God.” We too must be prepared to say, “I will not let you go till you bless me.”

Consider Moses, again and again intervening between the Israelites and God’s wrath; Abraham praying for Sodom; the widow demanding justice of the unjust judge. But in this combat with God, Ellul cautions, we must be ready to bear the consequences: “Abraham had to submit to the sacrifice of his son as an answer to his prayer for Sodom. Jacob’s thigh was put out of joint, and he went away lame. However, the most usual experience will be God’s decision to put to work the person who cried out to him.… Whoever wrestles with God in prayer puts his whole life at stake” (pp. 161, 162).

Awful things happen to people who pray. Their plans are frequently disrupted. They end up in strange places. Abraham “went out, not knowing where he was to go”—hardly the picture of someone who has struck it rich on a brand new power source. After Mary’s magnificent prayer at the annunciation, she finds herself the pariah of Nazareth society. The well-worn phrase “Prayer changes things,” often meant to comfort, is as tricky as any Greek oracle.

In trying to compete in the religious marketplace today, we should, I think, be very careful about how we portray the power of prayer. All the other religious rivulets that trickle across this parched land seem to promise, through their diverse modes of prayer and meditation, inner peace, serenity, and security, all manner of well-being. How tempting to up the stakes, making prayer merely another consumer product. How embarrassing to have to admit not only that prayer may get you into a prison, as it did Jeremiah, but also that while you’re moldering away in a miry pit there, you may have a long list of lamentations and unanswered questions to present to your Lord. How are we going to tell them they may end up lame and vagrant if they grasp hold of this God? Anything else is false advertising.

Second of Two Parts

Clark Pinnock’s aim in this article, he says, is “to highlight a few of the basic themes important both to Pannenberg and to us evangelicals.” In Part One (November 5 issue) he discussed a theology of reason, revelation as history, and revelation as Scripture.

Jesus and the Kingdom

In his theology Pannenberg places tremendous stress on the future, seeing in the concept of the coming kingdom of God the most important truth about reality, a truth that overshadows all others. According to Jesus’ message, the future is not an enemy to be feared but the blessed goal toward which history is moving under the hand of God. For some time New Testament scholars have been aware of the apocalyptic element in the teaching of Jesus, but they have been uncertain what to do with it. The idea of an end event in which all the dead are raised and the glory of God is finally revealed for all to see seemed strange to modern thinking and a point of embarrassment to the exegetes.

True to his calling as the reverser of theological trends, Pannenberg has intervened in the discussion, arguing boldly that this very motif in the teaching of Jesus must be recovered as the key of the whole Christian message even for today. Jesus was open to the future God had promised, and calls all men to faith and hope. In a final event at the end of history, God will be vindicated as God of all peoples, and the hopeful longing of all the ages will finally be realized.

Pannenberg has managed to hoist apocalyptic out of oblivion and give it an honored place in a systematic theology of universal history. One might hope that the centers of interest in prophecy and apocalypticism in North American evangelicalism will take note of Pannenberg’s contribution in defense of their concerns, and allow him to teach them how to relate their insights to a broader theological context and in a more obviously intelligible and relevant way.

As to the person of Jesus, Pannenberg insists that we develop a “Christology from below.” This means simply that, instead of starting with preconceived notions derived from authoritative sources such as creeds or even epistles, we should begin with the man Jesus himself and strive to understand what he proclaimed about his own significance. Fortunately Pannenberg, unlike Bultmann, is quite optimistic about what we can discover about the life and ministry of Jesus. The knowledge gained in such an investigation is clear and definite enough, he thinks, to permit confident conclusions that can serve as an anchor for reasoning faith. As a result of his study, Pannenberg presents Jesus asserting a claim to divine authority in the context of preaching the kingdom of God, a claim that had to be either blasphemy or else the true fulfillment of the promises of God. But this claim to an authority belonging only to God was linked to Jesus’ expectation that God would vindicate him in the near future by the coming of the kingdom and the resurrection of the dead; it was not a bare authoritarian claim devoid of all truth conditions.

Pannenberg’s handling of the death of Jesus is much less satisfactory. Although I am grateful for his emphasis on vicarious substitution, I am troubled by his insistence that Jesus had no clear preconception of the significance of the death that lay before him, and was not an active agent in that death. The theology of atonement and sacrifice in the Gospels was read back into the life of Jesus by the post-Easter community, Pannenberg claims. This view exposes not only Pannenberg’s slight regard for apostolic Scripture but also the depth of his radical criticism, which can excise from the text of the Gospels as fundamental an element as the suffering-servant-of-God motif in the life of Jesus. Jesus’ final visit to Jerusalem apparently was not to offer himself as a sacrifice for sins; it was only to precipitate a decision regarding his claim about the nearness of the kingdom and about his own centrality in anticipation of it. The interpretation of his death in terms of atonement was arrived at later. Therefore, Pannenberg strives to expound the meaning of that death on the basis of severely edited Gospels and apart from the rich teaching about the cross in canonical Gospel and epistle. Given that limitation, I suppose we should admire the results all the more!

But this view leaves Jesus’ execution basically unforeseen, and therefore unclarified in its essential relation to what Jesus did proclaim and, strictly speaking, unnecessary to his mission. It cannot satisfy those who glory in Christ’s cross and treasure the teaching of the apostles and, we trust, of Christ himself on it. It does not seem reasonable to me, if I may appeal to Pannenberg’s norm, to divest Jesus of the awareness he so obviously possessed as the soon-to-be-offered sacrificial lamb of God.

On the Third Day …

On the subject of the bodily resurrection, Pannenberg’s optimism about the results of “life of Jesus’ research extends to unheard-of lengths, at least in the circles of academic theology. He boldly contends, to evangelical applause, that the resurrection of Jesus can be validated by historical research. In this he contradicts a virtual dogma held by liberal critics, dialectical theologians, and every shade of fideist. Before Pannenberg, the most a prominent theologian could be expected to say was that the resurrection was an event of history; that alone would win him a chorus of abuse from the Bultmann school and other skeptics in the church and outside it. But to go on and say that the resurrection can be proved to have occurred is breathtakingly bold: it refutes all positivists who see history as a closed system of natural causes and effects and at the same time rebukes a multitude of timid Christian thinkers who retreated decades ago into the safe haven of unverifiable “salvation history.” For this single achievement, Pannenberg deserves our undying praise and gratitude. Of course, some evangelical scholars have said as much before, but critical scholarship was affected by our weak initiatives about as much as a lion is terrified by a BB gun. At last a major, respected theologian has said it.

And Pannenberg, being the scholar that he is, does not leave it at the level of a bare assertion. He pursues the point at great depth, offering an extensive historical argument in defense of the resurrection and detailing an entire alternative historical methodology that makes room for such a case (Jesus—God and Man, Westminster, 1968, chapter three). While not suggesting that the issue is beyond controversy, Pannenberg believes that the historical evidence sustains the credibility of the Christian message beyond reasonable doubt. Furthermore, he rejects the cynical objection—by Schubert Ogden, for example—that the resurrection, even if it did happen, would mean nothing to modern man. Pannenberg argues strongly for its significance: it validates Jesus’ claim, signifies the inbreaking of the kingdom, and shows that the covenant with Israel is now open to all the nations. Above all, it signifies fulfillment to man, whose being is structured in such a way that he hopes for salvation beyond death.

Obviously, according to Pannenberg, Jesus is a unique person if he claimed divine authority, was raised bodily from the tomb, and is expected to reign in judgment in the coming kingdom of God. What then is Pannenberg’s understanding of the person of Jesus?

The title of his weighty book on Christology, Jesus—God and Man, shows quite clearly that he wishes to affirm the two natures of Christ in one person. However, his method of working from Jesus outward, rather than starting with creeds or even epistles, means that Pannenberg attempts to formulate his own statement in terms arising from the historical situation of Jesus’ mission. We cannot blame him for that; we wish him well. Pannenberg therefore emphasizes Jesus’ communion with God, expressed in his utter obedience to him; this relationship exhibits an identity with the eternal Son or Logos, who eternally stands in this position with the Father. In this way Pannenberg hopes to conceive of the deity of Christ without violating his true humanity.

His efforts in Christology, I think we should recognize, spring not from any impulse to deny the orthodox confession but, quite the opposite, from a strong desire to ground belief in the deity of Christ in original biblical categories rather than veiling it in more dubious Greek terminology. But this effort, coupled with his reluctance to make use of the rich materials on Christology found in the apostolic writings (a reluctance that springs from his inadequate doctrine of Scripture noted above), inevitably results in some hesitancy and unanswered questions. Yet there is no doubt in my mind that Pannenberg views Jesus’ relation to the Father as unique, and that he believes we gain a relationship with God only through communion with him and in hope of the resurrection.

What then is his view of other world religions? In a context of increasing pluralism, this is a question that anyone who, like Pannenberg, holds to the finality of Jesus must answer. Can the unevangelized, for example, share in the benefits of Christ’s reign, or are they automatically excluded from his kingdom?

Pannenberg develops two ideas bearing on the issue. First, he argues, in a long essay entitled “Toward a Theology of the History of Religions,” that we should regard other religions not as mere fabrications of man’s striving after God but as occasions of the appearance of the same God who revealed himself through Jesus, though they may present him in a fragmentary way, even at times resisting the infinity of the divine mystery (Basic Questions in Theology, II, 115f.). Second, looking to First Peter 3:19 and 4:6, he argues that salvation is made available in the realm of the dead to those who during their lifetimes never encountered Jesus or the gospel message. The meaning of Jesus’ descent into hell in the Apostles’ Creed according to Pannenberg is that the salvation he achieved applies also to the vast multitudes who never came into contact with his story. This viewpoint, I suspect, does not divide evangelicals from Pannenberg so much as it divides evangelicals among themselves. I myself find it basically acceptable.

The Doctrine of God

With Pannenberg there is no “death of God” nonsense. Everything hinges on the reality of the sovereign God who has raised Jesus and promised to bring in his kingdom. In another sharp contrast to Barth, Pannenberg also develops a kind of natural theology without calling it that, based not upon the classical “proofs” of God’s existence but on the nature of man as one open to the future and filled with hope for ultimate salvation. In this Pannenberg is endeavoring to establish a universal point of contact, a preliminary knowledge of God that the Gospel can presuppose. Anthropology is the sphere in which he thinks the question of God arises, and Pannenberg is optimistic that a point of contact can be established with all men in this way. We may expect greater development in this area of his thought.

In understanding God’s being, Pannenberg is boldly innovative in conceiving God as the “power of the future,” and at the same time soundly traditional in defending an essential trinity in the eternal being of God. If Jesus was raised from the dead, and is a revelation of the essence of the true God to be finally manifest at the end of history, it follows that the distinction experienced between Father and Son in Jesus’ earthly life belongs also to the inner life of God. His serious effort at constructing a viable trinitarian dogma for our time is welcome, and it reveals the essential orthodoxy of his theology. Here is no liberal theologian setting aside the Trinity, or treating it as a mere appendix to the system. Pannenberg can fairly be compared with Athanasius and Augustine, Calvin and Barth, for like them he strives to exalt the triune God and to preserve the divine origin of our divine salvation through Father, Son, and Spirit.

But in the same breath, and without withdrawing my respect, I must register a strong protest at some of the unwise modes of expression Pannenberg has used to draw attention to the importance of the future. I have reference to his striking notion of “the futurity of God,” in which he is determined to connect God’s deity with his rule. “The being of God is his lordship.” Therefore, until the rule of God is universally established, in a certain sense “God does not yet exist” (Theology and the Kingdom of God, Westminster, 1969, p. 56). Fortunately, Pannenberg later explains his meaning. The end of history will reveal God’s deity, which until then will remain wrapped in considerable mystery. The future will make evident what has been true all along. If that is his meaning, he would be wise to avoid expressions that obscure it, especially when process theology delights in seeing God as still developing.

There are rich benefits in store for those prepared to enter into dialogue with Pannenberg. A theological genius of his caliber, particularly one who expresses so strong a commitment to the basic biblical message and expects it to be vindicated in the face of all criticism, is a rare occurrence. Perhaps we ought to note, too, that his theology is not the labor of a solitary scholar working alone but has developed out of a team effort: he and other scholars from various disciplines met together, especially in the early years, to hammer out their positions. Likewise the evangelical theology we need, if it is to prove adequate for our day, will not be written by a “prima donna” but will arise out of a communal effort.

In essence, Pannenberg’s theology is a creative synthesis of the classical biblical themes and a modern critical posture. That accounts for both the delight and discomfort we feel in our interaction with him. But evangelical theology, represented by CHRISTIANITY TODAY, is not a monolithic and normative confessional position that can easily serve as a measuring rod for evaluating a theology like Pannenberg’s. Our roots are legion: Calvinist, Lutheran, anabaptist, Wesleyan, dispensational, pentecostal, and others linked together by a shared respect for the givenness of divine revelation and the finality of canonical biblical teaching and by our experience of the grace and command of the scriptural God. Because our precious unity masks so much important disunity, we cannot with a single voice reply to Pannenberg’s thought. His development of a theology of reason, for example, exposes a considerable rift among ourselves, delighting the wing of evangelical opinion that advocates a strengthening of our rational apologetic, and infuriating a fideistic wing that feels something vital is being lost.

The point most certain to gain widespread approval among evangelicals is one that charges Pannenberg with neglecting the inspiration and authority of the Bible, using it only as a historical source, and not submitting to its full cognitive authority. But in most of the other areas, we should think of Pannenberg not as a theologian to refute so much as a respected teacher in the Church who has a great deal to teach us, not least in the singlemindedness and love of the truth he displays in his pursuit of the theological task.

The Case of The Clammy Hand

The other night my children were yukking it up about the night of Dad’s hand under the bed. Although none of them was yet alive when it happened, the story has become a part of our family folklore.

It all began when one of my seminary professors asked my wife and me to occupy his house during his vacation. Our duty was largely just to watch the house, which was located on a remote road used mostly as the local lovers’ lane.

We knew of the reputation of the road but not what it would mean practically. The house was situated so that the lights of every car coming down the road flashed into the master bedroom.

I usually find it hard to sleep in a strange place, and my difficulty was increased by the continual flashing of auto headlights.

Finally, I put my arm over my eyes to block out the lights and dropped into an uneasy sleep. Unknowingly, I also cut off the circulation in that arm.

Since there was no night stand on my side of the bed, I had put my glasses on the floor just under the bed. In the wee hours of the morning some sound woke me. I sat up, causing my now feelingless arm to dangle over the edge of the bed, and as I groggily reached for my glasses I encountered my own now cold and clammy hand.

With a shudder of horror I jumped to a standing position in the middle of the bed and shouted, “There’s a hand under the bed!”

At that my wife bolted out of bed and began groping along the wall for the light switch. I joined her in the frantic search. Neither of us could remember where it was located.

Suddenly a thought came to me: “Why am I using only one hand?” Even before I found the light switch, the awful truth had dawned on me, and I knew of the years of total recall my wife would have of that night.

The moral of this story—all my stories have morals—is that when a member of the body loses contact with the head from whom the whole body is joined and knit together, no end of mischief can result.

EUTYCHUS V

From the February 16, 1973, issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Pleasing Participation

Several months ago you published an article by Rod Jellema titled “Poems Should Stay Across the Street From the Church” (June 4). I was delighted by the article.… Now I am even more delighted to see that you have taken Jellema’s article to your own hearts. The appearance of “A Missionary Dying on the Molopo” by George E. McDonough and “Making Prayer” by Eugene Warren in the magazine (Sept. 24) is most uplifting.

The Church is filled with men and women who enjoy the poem as dearly as do the men and women of the world. It is indeed a pleasure to see your fuller participation in Christian literature at this, the outset of your twenty-first year of publishing.

FREDRICK ZYDEK

Omaha, Neb.

Shelfworn Treasure

I was distressed to read that Ronald V. Jones, in his letter published in the September 24 issue, thought that Eutychus’s column on “Franchising the Church” (July 2) was “poison-pen sarcasm.” If he would reread it carefully, keeping in mind the task of the satirist, I think that he would see that Eutychus is saying nothing bad at all about the Scott Memorial Baptist Church (E and W). Instead, he is using the favorite satirist’s tactic of finding a legitimate need or event and then practicing a sort of reductio ad absurdum on it to show how it can be warped by evil or foolish men. Swift’s famous “Modest Proposal” is a good example of this: a real problem, and then an obviously tongue-in-cheek horrifying solution, showing how not to deal with the need.

Since the issue with his letter marked your twentieth anniversary, do you have any plans for publishing an anthology such as you published after your tenth year in 1966? A year ago I found a shelfworn paperback of the 1966 anthology and found it a great treasure trove—truly age does not mar the best Christian writing. Here’s a vote that you consider the idea again.

MARK EDWARD SOPER

Durand, Mich.

For Less Fideism

I was encouraged and informed by Dr. LaSor’s comments about the new finds at Tell Mardikh and their bearing on the Old Testament (Sept. 24). However, I was shocked and apologetically embarrassed to read, “The only way to prove the Bible is to take it on faith and apply it in life.” The Mormons say the same thing about the Book of Mormon (Moroni 10:4). Jesus said, “If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?” (John 3:13). Surely, archaeological studies do bear on the truth of the Old Testament. Reckless fideism is harmful to the cause of Christ.

NORMAN L. GEISLER

Chairman

Philosophy of Religion Department Trinity Evangelical Divinity School Deerfield, Ill.

Birthday Greetings

Congratulations to the entire staff on your twentieth anniversary. I believe it is generally agreed that CHRISTIANITY TODAY has been the most significant Christian publication of its kind in our lifetime.

JOHN ERICKSON

President

Fellowship of Christian Athletes Kansas City, Mo.

Excellent On Art

Thank you for the excellent essay by Frank Gaebelein, “What Is Truth in Art?” (Aug. 27).… Again and again I have been impressed with how little has been written in the last few decades on the criteria of Christian art.… I hope many Christian artists are among your readers.

BURT MARTIN

Burt Martin Associates, Inc.

Burbank, Calif.

Distortion Vs. Deprogramming

I was not pleased to see Dean Kelley’s review of Let Our Children Go! (Books, Sept. 24). Kelley’s attitude seemed to be that “religion” is inherently more important than the shed blood of Jesus Christ, and that those who have been deceived in their search for truth and who are being demonized by these false religions should not be deprogrammed. One of my close associates in Divine Light Mission went berserk from the practice of incessant Hindu “meditation,” and had to be committed to prevent him from doing injury to people around him. Others committed suicide during the schism between Maharaj Ji and his mother in 1974–75. I might have done so as well, had I not been deprogrammed when I was.…

There are worse things in the world than deprogramming people without their prior consent, and after reading the September 24 issue, I, for one, think that writing this type of distorted book review is one of them.

WILLIAM O. WEST

Los Angeles, Calif.

Born Out of A Void

I was distressed to read the editorial “Democracies Take Note” (Sept. 24) in a Christian paper. Those of us who have spent years upon years in overseas countries conclude that editorials of this nature are born out of a void of knowledge of people other than North Americans. We were in Brazil when that country made an attempt toward what we would call a more North American style of democracy which led to chaos and near disaster for that country. The strong-handed leadership that was then introduced was the only salvation for that country. It may be the same for India. After all, order, stability, and food under a benevolent dictatorship are better than chaos, instability, and starvation under a democracy. I wish we could realize that there are patriots also among the strong-handed leaders of other countries, even though they may not operate according to our ideals.

H. C. BORN

Clearbrook, British Columbia

Bible-Smuggling: Help Or Hindrance?

Dr. Paul D. Steeves in “A Centennial Celebration Nine Hundred Years Late” (Oct. 8) gives an appreciable historical sketch of the Russian Bible Society and the profound effects of the Scriptures on the lives of the Russian people since the first printing of the Russian Bible in 1882. Dr. Steeves rightly points out the present scarcity of Scripture in the Soviet Union, but he states that the work of the UBS is hampered by the illegal activities of Bible smugglers and that “attempts to introduce Bibles into the Soviet Union by illegal means do not serve God’s work well.” There are numerous missions and individuals presently working to provide spiritual food for Russian believers through radio broadcasts beamed into their country, and to provide Bibles for their use. Because Russian believers are fined or imprisoned for listening to Christian radio broadcasts, should the missions stop beaming the message to Russia? Illegal means are used to see that the Russian believers receive Bibles and other help. Why? Because the official Communist government of Russia confiscates Bibles and burns them on the order of the courts.… Georgi Vins tells the story of arrests, persecution, suffering, confiscation of Bibles, and even death, in the book Georgi Vins: Testament From Prison. Christian services are violently dispersed, dogs are used to round up believers, families are left without breadwinners, heavy fines are legalized on Christians. Why does the official church leadership permit this? Because they are compromised with the atheistic government.… There is an apparent discrepancy between the situation described by Dr. Steeves and that which various mission organizations relate.

LILA WISTRAND ROBINSON

Topeka, Kans.

Fact And Flavor

As a working journalist (for Episcopalians United) who was there, let me commend you for your excellent coverage of the sixty-fifth convention of the Episcopal Church (“The Episcopal Church: Women Are Winners,” by Edward E. Plowman, Oct. 8). Both fact and flavor were handled in a way that is basically accurate and interesting—no mean feat.

As an Anglo-Catholic I must emphatically dispute the statement of Mr. Elmore Hudgens, executive secretary of the Brotherhood of St. Andrew, that the matter of “ordaining” women to the priesthood is a “little issue.” Indeed, it is the greatest departure from the doctrine of the Church Catholic since the Arians and their Montanist cousins—both condemned by the Council of Nicea (which also condemned female ordination as then practiced by the Montanist heretics)!

G. D. WIEBE

Trinity Episcopal Church

San Francisco, Calif.

Errata

There were two errors in the poem “A Missionary Dying on the Molopo” by George E. McDonough (Sept. 24). There should not have been a space between lines 5 and 6, and line 33 should have read, “With those whose eyes one understood at once.”

I have been musing over an indisputable fact: some Christians were praying for the election of Jimmy Carter and others were praying for the election of Gerald Ford. All had their prayers answered—God said no to some and yes to others. I discussed questions like this in a book I wrote some years ago, When You Pray.

The flood of pornographic materials that threatens to inundate our society is of great concern to those interested in the moral health of our civilization. It is a source of anguish to sensitive religious writers, particularly those concerned primarily with the freedom of the press. All religious journalism has a stake in the public reaction to an industry that apparently feels no social responsibility. The increase in the production and distribution of porno is compelling much soul-searching and much revision of attitudes.

Evangelical journalism has tended to take the middle ground in this respect. Its spokesmen have not been unaware of the problem of balancing freedom of the press against the possible impact upon our society of a flood of pornographic sludge. Most responsible evangelical journalists have refused to accept extreme positions, such as that which asserts an immediate cause-and-effect relation between pornographic literature and the growing rate of sexual crimes. The record here, in my opinion, has on the whole been creditable.

Liberal religious journalism has tended to pursue more closely the line dictated by general culture. Its guiding star has been the fear that any attempt to control the spread of pornography would lead to censorship. The tendency at this point has been to regard the First Amendment as absolute, permissive of no legal strictures at all. The fear has been that once any form of censorship is tolerated, very soon any unpopular point of view may be suppressed.

Liberal religious thinkers tend to believe that in the long run public taste and general good sense will prevail, and that only patience is required. Self-expression is regarded as a primary good, and therefore few if any forms of self-expression can be “without redeeming social value.” From a practical viewpoint, liberal religious journalists have been rather quick to hail reports of commissions that “discover” (shall we say, to the surprise of none?) that there is no relation between the spread of pornographic literature or literature depicting violence and the incidence of sexual or other violent forms of crime.

Illustrative of this was the eager acceptance of the findings of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography appointed by President Lyndon Johnson. When President Johnson’s successor declared his intention to ignore the majority report of this commission, his decision was met by loud liberal protests, and by demands for a continuance of the permissiveness that this report favored.

Today there are serious second thoughts upon the subject, reflected especially in a changed editorial thrust in liberal theological journals. As late as April 30, 1975, the Christian Century editorialized strongly against any attempt to curb the spread of blatantly obscene literature. The arguments were the usual ones: control implies some form of absolute judgment upon what is “truth” in publication; censorship deprives the public of dimensions of social understanding essential to society; pornography survives only as a result of the opposition to it.

The editor of that journal urged all who favor restrictions upon pornographic literature to cease their efforts and “let such material die of its own shallowness.” Fifteen months later the same editor admitted that porno has not died but has extended itself to a point at which some form of limitation is probably desirable (issue of July 7–14, 1976).

Commenting upon the U. S. Supreme Court’s decision in the case of an ordinance passed by the city of Detroit regulating the location of outlets of pornographic materials, Editor James M. Wall spoke with reserved favor upon the ruling. He admits that “after a little more than a decade of this kind of permissiveness, even many civil libertarians have grown wary of the explicit depiction of sexual activity on the screen and in books.”

While most of the shift in perspective within liberal circles is based upon pragmatic and cultural concerns, evangelicals will point out that moral and spiritual considerations form the basis for some kind of restriction upon the dissemination of literature designed to exploit sexual curiosity and to add fuel to the fires of a human capacity that always requires discipline.

Recognized also will be the shallowness of the arguments of those who excuse pornography. The most common of these are: pornography has a “cathartic effect” in that it drains off excessive sexual energy that might otherwise be expressed overtly; porno is little more than a natural extension of every person’s fantasies; and since there is no universally accepted definition of what constitutes pornography, it cannot logically be controlled by law.

Such arguments fail to take into account certain rather clear capacities of the human learning process. Seldom does the intensification of an educative stimulus weaken the impact of that stimulus. If that were true, corporations would cease to vie for advertising spots at high moments of TV programs. Again, pornography may initiate and stimulate fantasy, rather than merely reflecting it. Furthermore, the inability of commissions, courts, or boards to define pornography does not indicate that the salacious is without an objective existence. More likely it suggests that the human psyche is seriously confused—and often embarrassed—and therefore unable to deliver a clear moral judgment upon the nature of verbal or graphic filth.

Pornography is but an exaggerated form of the general moral rot that has permeated stage and screen in recent decades, so that “adult” and “mature” when applied to entertainment are euphemisms for “smutty.”

To the evangelical, the most definitive objection to the spread and reading of pornography is derived from the words of our Lord. After all, it was he who transferred the locus of fornication from the secretive “love nest” to the leering look. Reared within a faith that saw clearly that one is “as he thinks in his heart,” he knew only too well how vulnerable is the inner life of men, women, and children. Certainly his followers are duty-bound to find ways to protect that inner citadel.

For years, the 2.4-million-member American Lutheran Church (ALC) has been known as the quiet, mild-mannered partner in the Lutheran Big Three. It has served to some extent in a buffer and even mediative role between the 2.9-million-member Lutheran Church in America (LCA) on its left and the 2.7-million-member Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS) on its right. The nearly 5,000-congregation ALC maintains “pulpit and altar fellowship” with both groups; the LCMS and the LCA do not have such fellowship, mostly because LCMS leaders feel the LCA is too liberal theologically.

In recent years, because of the doctrinal controversy going on in the LCMS, tensions have built up between the Missouri Synod and the ALC. ALC people dislike the much-publicized disruption being caused by what they consider is narrowness on the part of the LCMS; Missouri Synod leaders question the theological integrity and ecumenical openness of the ALC. The LCMS has in recent years withdrawn support from a number of cooperative programs it engaged in as a joint member with the ALC and the LCA in the Lutheran Council in the U.S.A., and this has upset ALC leaders. Even though ALC president David W. Preus and LCMS president J. A. O. “Jack” Preus are cousins, each thinks the other is going down the wrong path.

Relations may have become more strained at the ALC’s biennial convention last month in Washington, D.C. Normally, the time set aside at such events for special visitors to bring fraternal greetings is a yawn period for delegates. But when Jack Preus’s turn came, he woke up everybody. He challenged the ALC to uphold its constitutional position on biblical inerrancy, the issue at the center of the LCMS controversy. In quoting the ALC’s constitution, he noted that the ALC is on record as accepting “all the canonical books of the Old and the New Testament as a whole and in all their parts as the divinely inspired, revealed, and inerrant Word of God, and [it] submits to this as the only infallible authority in all matters of faith and life.”

In an almost light aside he said he was “sorry to say that Missouri’s constitution is not as concise or as clear a statement on this important subject.”

He said he would like to believe that the ALC’s rank and file “believes with Missouri that God’s Book is inerrant.” But, said he, “I must be frank to tell you that certain statements and positions taken in recent years cause us to wonder whether there are those in the ALC who have departed from the position of their church.”

The issue of inerrancy is the main reason for the “great conflict” in the Missouri Synod, he stressed. Therefore, said he, LCMS people were “very distressed” when the ALC’s David Preus a few months ago described the adoption of a doctrinal statement on inerrancy by the LCMS as having “the effect of narrowing down the confessions of the Lutheran Church,” and of being “divisive and destructive … tearing down instead of building up fellowship.”

“While we gladly forgive this allegation, we also categorically reject it,” declared the LCMS president. The statement, he explained, was adopted “in order to help the teaching and worship life of our church, and in order to help us remain faithful to our confessional heritage and faithful in confessing the Gospel before the world.” He said an LCMS commission has called for a meeting with ALC representatives to discuss the ALC president’s statements.

Preus suggested that a number of ALC pastors might feel more at home in Missouri, and he invited them to get in touch. “We have a very large number of vacant congregations,” he said. At the same time, he added, an invitation by the ALC to the “casualties” leaving the LCMS could be “a very practical and loving action.” He seemed to indicate that David Preus had already given such an invitation. He warned, however, that not all LCMS dissidents are casualties. “There are some who have been the very cause of our problems,” he said, and he expressed hope that “the small minority which disagrees with our mutual doctrinal position would not be permitted to drive a wedge between our two church bodies.”

Explained Preus: “We are anxious to strengthen the bond of fellowship and to remove misunderstandings and differences. We do not wish to have our fellowship weakened through damaging stereotypes and false impressions.”

He told the ALC delegates that the Missouri Synod controversy is in its final stages, with “a few” seeking to set up a new church, the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches (AELC).

He pledged continued LCMS membership in the Lutheran Council, and he closed with an appeal that all “refrain from making irresponsible statements about one another.… Let us emphasize the positive aspects of our faith and our fellowship.…”

David Preus thanked his cousin for being “open, frank, and forthright.”

In the closing minutes of the convention, ALC vice-president Fred Meuser, president of Evangelical Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, Ohio, publicly took exception to Jack Preus’s remarks. Contrary to the apparent allegation made by Preus, Meuser said the ALC president never invited LCMS dissidents to join the ALC. The ALC in no way has encouraged schism, he asserted. There have been inquiries from congregations anticipating departure from the LCMS, he acknowledged, but ALC officials have replied “that we might receive such congregations as a non-geographic district for a limited number of years, not permanently.”

In his presidential report to the ALC, David Preus said the ALC will offer “appropriate assistance” to the new body emerging from the LCMS while continuing as “good partners” with the LCMS. The LCMS controversy, he pointed out, has been a source of concern and grief to the ALC. It is not clear how many congregations will join the AELC, he said, but the ALC has indicated its intention to maintain fellowship with both those who leave Missouri and those who stay. As for what he meant by “appropriate assistance,” he told a reporter later, “I intended only to say that the ALC expects to act as a good partner with the new church body just as we are with the LCMS and the LCA.”

In other convention action, the nearly 1,000 ALC delegates:

• Endorsed an emphasis on evangelistic outreach during 1977, in conjunction with a similar LCA effort.

• Adopted without debate a social-action-oriented “Manifesto for Our Nation’s Third Century” that calls for loyalty to Christ, repentance for national failings, ALC involvement in social systems and structures with an eye to changing them, and a redirection of “the American Dream.” (Republican congressman Albert H. Quie, an ALC member active in the Washington prayer movement, argued in a major address that socio-political involvement should be on an individual, not church, basis.)

• Rejected attempts to make the denomination’s 1974 middle-of-the-road position on abortion more limiting.

• Asked the President and Congress to grant “pardon” (rather than “immediate and unconditional amnesty” as recommended in the resolution’s initial draft) to non-violent “resisters” of the Viet Nam war.

• Encouraged the development of programs and encounters aimed at a better understanding of the charismatic movement.

• Cited a “serious and persistent threat” to large numbers of people posed by marginal religious movements or cults, and called for study of the cults, as well as for ministry to persons who have been involved in them.

• Approved a record budget for 1977 of $30 million, up from $28.2 million this year.

• Approved some changes to eliminate “sexist language” in church documents (for example, “a member of the clergy” instead of “clergyman”).

Meanwhile, the schism in the Missouri Synod is still in its formative stages. About fifty churches have applied for membership in the breakaway AELC so far, and leaders predict they will have 200 by the time the AELC’s constitutional convention is held in Chicago next month.

Among those in the forefront of the AELC are four men who resigned as LCMS district presidents over the past few months amid tumultuous circumstances: Harold Hecht, English District; Herman Neunaber, 57, Southern Illinois District; Rudolph P. F. Ressmeyer, 52, Atlantic District; and Robert J. Riedel, 58, New England District. All have urged restless LCMS congregations to join the AELC, and some are already performing leadership chores. A majority of delegates at the English District convention last spring voted to become the English Synod of the AELC, and Hecht has become the president of that unit. Ressmeyer may emerge from the AELC’s December meeting as the chief helmsman of the new denomination.

The LCMS Commission on Constitutional Matters has decreed that congregations, pastors, and teachers cannot be affiliated with the AELC without forfeiting their membership in the LCMS, but the ruling will not become effective until next September in order to work out pension matters and other problems of transition.

Not all of the dissidents in the Missouri Synod are ready to join the AELC. Most have been part of a protest movement within the LCMS known as ELIM (for Evangelical Lutherans in Mission). ELIM’s main projects were to support Seminex (the school set up in 1974 in opposition to Concordia Seminary in St. Louis), a mission program, and a 150,000-circulation biweekly, Missouri in Perspective. At the recent annual meeting of ELIM, its leaders recommended phasing out the group in favor of joining the AELC, a move rejected by the majority of the 1,100 delegates (there were 3,000 last year). They simply were not yet ready to throw in the towel—even though there is no reason to believe that conservatives in the LCMS can be ousted from power in the foreseeable future.

Only a six-month budget ($732,000) was approved for ELIM, however. From now on, backers are to send their donations directly to Seminex, to ELIM’s mission program, and to the newspaper. The move is seen as a way to ease transition of the programs from protest status within the LCMS to official functions of the new denomination—while leaving the door open to outside contributions.

Seminex in the meantime is trying to raise $1 million for its current academic year. Enrollment is 345, down 50 from last year (Concordia is back up to 354—about four times the number who remained on campus when the majority left).

The anguish and bloodletting in the LCMS is far from being over, but the worst of the upheaval is apparently past, and there are signs that the respective parties now are interested more in attending to the work to be done than in picking a fight.

Lutheran Concerns

“Evangelical outreach … is currently a high-level concern” among the 6,100 congregations of the Lutheran Church in America, according to a study by the LCA’s parish-services unit. Apathy, poor morale, and diminishing membership ranked at the top of complaints by clergy and laity alike in recent surveys. Of the 3,400 congregations reporting goals last year, more than half specified evangelism goals—higher than any other area of interest listed.

A related trend, the study points out, is “growing concern on how to help inactive members become involved in congregational life.” Last year more than 101,000 LCA members were taken off the rolls because of inactivity.

There is also a “long-standing concern about involving young people in the life of the congregation.” Sunday-school enrollment has declined by more than one-third in the last decade.

This year the LCA is promoting an outreach program that emphasizes both evangelistic witness and congregational nurture.

Religion in Transit

A guide to “non-sexist interpretation of the Bible,” believed to be the first of its kind, has been published by Westminster Press for the National Council of Churches. The ninety-six page, $3.95 volume of essays and suggested guidelines was written by women scholars and theologians for use in planning worship services, church-school classes, group Bible studies, and seminary work. The idea is to study and explain the Bible without “sexist bias.”

A glossary substituting “non-sexist language” for masculine terms used in the prayerbooks and liturgy of Reform Jewish congregations has been proposed by a women’s-equality task force of the 102-member New York Federation of Reform Synagogues. Examples: “Lord” would become “God” or “Almighty” or something similar; “fathers” would become “ancestors”; “he” referring to God would be changed to second-person “you, God”; “Shield of Abraham” would become “Shield of our ancestors.” Rabbi Chaim Stern of Chappaqua, New York, a Reform prayerbook editor, says: “I am now persuaded that it is illegitimate to use masculine language about God.”

Congress passed a measure that removes the threat of a cut-off of federal revenue-sharing funds for certain day-care centers, hospitals, and other charitable organizations that are operated by religious groups. The legislation makes applicable not only the same prohibitions against discrimination on the basis of religion that are contained in the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 but also the same exemptions.

At least four more states must ratify the Equal Rights Amendment before it becomes part of the U. S. Constitution, and a campaign to help get them to do so has been launched by the Religious Committee for the ERA. Target states: Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, North Carolina, and Florida. Committee members represent thirty-one religious agencies. They include General Secretary Claire Randall of the National Council of Churches and President Margaret Sonnenday of Church Women United.

The Good News Bible (the Bible in Today’s English Version) will be released December 1. Its New Testament segment was published in 1966; more than 50 million copies are in print.

Thirty-eight Christian liberal arts colleges from across the country have joined together to form the Christian College Coalition. The coalition’s purpose is to provide united positions on issues affecting Christian colleges and to conduct legal research into matters affecting educational freedom. It will cooperate closely with the Washington, D.C.-based Christian College Consortium, whose fourteen members are also coalition members.

Grace Wallace, director of the Nurses Christian Fellowship in the United States, was elected president of Nurses Christian Fellowship International, which has twenty national organizations of nurses and nursing students. More than 200 persons from twenty-five countries met in Ghana for the NCFI quadrennial conference. The U.S. fellowship, based in Madison, Wisconsin, is a division of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. It has seventeen staffers and is represented at some 150 schools and hospitals.

A study by two Loyola University psychologists in Chicago concludes that Catholic bishops are “more satisfied” and happier being bishops than priests are being priests. The study is based on returns from 161 of the nation’s 300-plus bishops. The bishops are seen as goal-oriented workaholics though somewhat colorless. They like their independence and have difficulty in identifying with the problems of their priests. Mass is central in their religious life, but they have difficulty with private prayer. An earlier study found that priests tend to have strong personal faith but have problems of adjustment and achievement.

Leaders don’t go to church as much as the rest of the people, according to a survey by the Washington Post and a Harvard research unit. While 42 per cent of the 1,521-person survey reported attending religious services once a week or more, and 22 per cent reported attending never or almost never, only 29 per cent of leadership groups reported attending weekly or more, and 36 per cent reported never or almost never. Among leaders, farm groups and blacks ranked highest in attendance; university students and feminist leaders ranked lowest.

Minnesota governor Marvin Anderson estimates that $10 million in state aid will go to private and parochial educational institutions this year. At an outdoor mass recently he pledged to continue efforts to help parochial schools. He cited tax deductions, shared-time support, special-education programs, and other forms of “sharing.”

More than one million teen-agers—10 per cent of all girls 15 to 19 in the United States—become pregnant each year according to a study published by Family Planning Perspectives magazine. More than one-third of the births are to unmarried mothers, the report says, and nearly one-third of the pregnancies end in abortion. Meanwhile, Playboy notes in a survey of students at twenty colleges that virginity is claimed by only 26 per cent of the women students this year (compared to 49 per cent in 1970) and by 26 per cent of the males (up from 18 per cent).

Note to Sunday-school planners; the national school population kindergarten through twelfth grade will drop to 41.3 million by 1980 (it was 45 million in 1974), according to official estimates.

In an attempt to avoid schism in the 800-member Guess Road Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina, church officers have asked members who speak in tongues not to accept any teaching assignments. Sterner measures may be taken if the request is unheeded or if charismatic members try to promote glossolalia in other ways, warned pastor Ernest Holt.

The Evangelical School of Theology, Myerstown, Pennsylvania, almost doubled its enrollment over last fall, jumping from 44 to 79. It has more than doubled its library with the acquisition of 30,000 volumes from the former Evangelical Seminary, Naperville, Illinois, which merged with another liberal United Methodist seminary to form Garrett-Evangelical seminary in Evanston, Illinois. The Myerstown school is sponsored by the 30,000-member Evangelical Congregational Church, a theologically conservative German-American body that was once part of the same group as the founders of the Naperville school.

Three-year-old Douglas Owens, whose infant sister died of pneumonia, was made a ward of the court in Oklahoma City because his parents’ religious beliefs would forbid medical aid if he became ill. The boy will remain with his parents, members of the Church of the First Born, but under welfare-department supervision.

An evangelical non-profit group has begun plans to launch a full-time Christian television station in the nation’s capital. So far, there are sixteen Christian TV stations on the air in twelve states.

The French Baptist Hour, sponsored by Southern Baptists in Louisiana, is now heard on thirteen radio stations by an estimated 200,000 of the 900,000 French-speaking citizens in eighteen Louisiana counties, according to a spokesman.

Last spring, the board of Allen University, an African Methodist Episcopal school in Columbia, South Carolina, voted 18 to 7 to oust president Benjamin J. Glover on charges he made unauthorized payments of $27,000 to himself and took other actions without board approval. Glover insisted the money was for job-related expenses. When board member James Holmes virtually accused Glover of embezzlement in an AME newspaper article, Glover sued for libel and won. He was awarded $1,600. Holmes said he will appeal, and he ordered an audit of university funds.

That 1972 ad in Playboy for recruits for the Trinitarian religious order didn’t pay off after all. Initially, there were many inquiries, and a couple of men came to the forty-member Catholic order but were later dismissed when they failed to measure up, according to Trinitarian officials. They say they regret the ad—and all the criticism it brought.

Pity the poor church secretaries trying to keep the membership directories up to date. A government study shows that between 1970 and 1974 (4.5 years) nearly one-half of the 71 million American households moved to a new address. More than one-fourth of these movers represented new households (newlyweds, young singles establishing their first independent residences, changes caused by divorce and death).

An appeal to raise $6.25 million in Britain to rescue the Canterbury Cathedral from 900 years of decay is still $2.5 million short. A fund-raising drive has begun in America, headed by George W. Ball, former undersecretary of state.

Personalia

Adolph Coors IV walked out of his family’s Colorado brewery nearly a year ago looking for a new life—and found it in Christ. Coors, 33, tells church audiences that he was beset by business problems, a failing marriage, and despair. His wife became a Christian after heavy discussions with friends at the brewery. Following an auto accident in which he was seriously injured, Coors too accepted Christ. He keeps busy with a weekly TV Bible-study program but is willing to return to the brewery “if the Lord leads” (he sees no conflict with his faith, and he describes his relatives running the business as “good Christians”).

World Scene

A group of ninety-seven Soviet Pentecostals appealed recently to the World Council of Churches to intercede with the Soviet government about their wish to emigrate, according to documents received by the Keston College research center in England. They speak of constant persecution of Pentecostals over the years. Earlier, the center received emigration appeals from several hundred other Pentecostals.

Thaw in the Soviet Union? About twenty Pentecostal congregations have been permitted to register as autonomous bodies over the past two or three years in the Soviet Union, mostly in Ukraine, according to researchers at Keston College in England. Prior to that time, Pentecostal congregations could register (and therefore function legally) only if they became part of the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists.

Weekly mass attendance in Ireland is 91 per cent of the population, the highest of any predominantly Catholic country, according to a church survey.

Jesuit priest Joao Bosco Penido Burhier and Spanish-born bishop Pedor Casaldaliga went to the police barracks in Ribeirao Bonito in western Brazil to protest the alleged torture of two women being held for questioning by the police. A military policeman shot and killed the priest, and the bishop was threatened, according to Vatican Radio.

The government of Laos has outlawed birth control. War and the flight of many into neighboring countries has decimated the population; hence the ban on contraceptives.