Would the National Council of Churches seat Governor George Wallace if the United Methodist Church sent him as one of its delegates to the governing board? Such a question preoccupied the board at its fall meeting in New York City while it was trying to pass a raft of pre-election political announcements.

The United Methodists have not chosen to name the controversial Alabama governor to the NCC board, but his name came up as an example while the policy-making body agonized over the problem of a member who has been accused of World War II crimes in Romania. Archbishop Valerian Trifa of the Orthodox Church in America, the accused, was not present at the meeting last month, but Jewish youths who charge him with “ritual slaughter” of Jews and Christians were there in force. They occupied the platform in the Roosevelt Hotel’s ballroom during a lunch break, and when members returned a shouting match ensued between NCC president William P. Thompson, various members of the board, visitors, and the young Jews. The afternoon business was delayed for more than an hour, but the protesters finally left after they were assured that the matter would be put on the board agenda.

The assignment of considering how inclusive—or exclusive—the NCC should be was given to the board’s credentials committee. Two days later, just before adjournment, it came back with a report that did not gain easy acceptance. The ensuing debate found Thompson taking the unusual step of leaving the chair and speaking from the floor. He defended the report, which stated that member communions alone can determine who represents them on the board. He added that, as a lawyer, he had to assume the Orthodox prelate was innocent until proven guilty. Further, he warned, any attempt to drop Trifa would be an “outright affront” to a member denomination.

“We challenge anything else,” replied board member Arie R. Brouwer of the Reformed Church in America. “Why not this?” The council’s moral authority is at stake, he declared, and he moved to send the whole report back to the committee.

Bringing the issue into sharp focus was clergyman William R. Johnson, Jr., of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. He said he “couldn’t sit here” if such arch-segregationists of the last decade as Lester Maddox and George Wallace were sent by member communions. Thompson replied that amendment of the constitution was the way to accomplish any further restriction of board membership (which already must meet quotas for laity as well as clergy, women, youth, and ethnic representation).

Most objectionable to some members of the board was a recommendation at the end of the credentials report. It stated that under the constitution the body had no “authority to judge the alleged activities of Archbishop Valerian nor to challenge the decision of our constituent communion to name him as a member of its delegation.” Instead of sending the whole report back to the committee, the board finally dropped the recommendation section and “received” the committee’s report of its findings. One attempt to suspend the Orthodox prelate pending an investigation was ruled out of order.

Thompson told reporters after the meeting that he had known of the charges against the archbishop for many years but that the allegations had not been discussed in any meeting of the NCC executive committee or board before this session. He suggested that the reason the NCC has not paid much attention to the charges is that Trifa’s denomination considers his record unblemished and that his Romanian archdiocese supports him.

The council president said that neither he nor anyone else in the NCC’s leadership knew of plans for the Jewish protest. He was informed of the platform takeover during the lunch break while he and General Secretary Claire Randall were discussing the afternoon agenda. A young rabbi who was the principal spokesman for the group conferred with Thompson during the recess and, according to the NCC president, agreed to withdraw the protesters if Thompson would permit him to speak to the board for five minutes. The agreement crumbled, however, when the demonstrators remained on the platform after Thompson’s return. He declared an extension of the noon recess, but most members stayed to hear the heated discussion.

Among the exchanges on the floor during the stormy session was one between the rabbi, Avraham Weiss, and black board members who had been in the forefront of demonstrations in the 1960s. The rabbi was asked if he had ever expressed his concern in writing to the NCC. He invoked the name of the late Martin Luther King, Jr., in response, noting that the famous black leader had had to “go beyond the agenda” sometimes to get timely action. Some of the blacks angrily rejected Weiss’s identification of his tactics with those of King. They urged the Jewish leader to work through the NCC channels.

A semblance of order was restored about forty-five minutes after the scheduled start of the afternoon session, and Thompson recognized Sterling Cary, his predecessor, to make a motion about the Trifa matter. During discussion of the Cary motion a former executive of the American Jewish Committee, writer Gerald Strober, sought permission to speak to the board. Thompson refused to recognize him and had his microphone disconnected when Strober continued to speak. Strober, as he was leaving the floor, said to Cary, “Let’s go back to the sixties.…”

The demonstrators finally left after the board voted to refer the matter to its credentials committee. Board members got back to their other business after they had stood for a prayer for the holocaust dead, led by the rabbi.

When the credentials report came back two days later, the current observer from the American Jewish Committee, Rabbi James Rudin, sought recognition. Thompson refused to give him the floor, but the board voted unanimously to allow him to speak. He called the report “morally flawed” and promised a campaign by his organization to “explain” the NCC action.

A formal statement issued later by the American Jewish Committee said Trifa’s continuing presence on the NCC roster “will seriously compromise the moral credibility of the National Council.” Rudin and Rabbi Marc Tannenbaum, the committee’s national interreligious-affairs director, said the least the board could have done would be to suspend the Orthodox prelate.

Many of the board members left New York with the conviction that the problem had not been solved. They were right. In the week following their meeting the Jewish youths appeared at the NCC general secretary’s office to demand more action. After an all-afternoon occupation of the Interchurch Center’s eighth floor, they left with a promise that more consideration would be given to the question at an upcoming meeting of the council’s senior staff.

Trifa, meanwhile, was at home in Michigan preparing his defense for a new set of hearings in federal court. The Justice Department has charged him with lying to immigration authorities about his relation to the anti-Semitic Iron Guard organization during the war. If it is proven that he was a commandant of the organization responsible for atrocities, as charged, he could lose his U. S. citizenship. Orthodox Church authorities contend that he has been cleared of the allegations by various responsible government agencies and that the current drive is a “trial by press” to discredit him.

The Romanian cleric, who became a bishop after coming to America, has attended only one meeting of the NCC board in the last three years. Some veteran board members remember his participation in earlier years, but many of the newer members have never met him.

The New York meeting, one of the liveliest in several years, was also the best attended in about three years. Some 190 (out of 250) board members attended or sent proxies.

With national elections less than a month away, the board concentrated on some of the campaign issues. It addressed a letter to the presidential candidates, calling for a commitment to a “just and sustainable global society.” The document reviews NCC positions on a variety of subjects, including unemployment, nuclear energy, and human rights abroad.

The board also received an “open letter to North American Christians” from a group of Latin Americans who wanted it publicized before the presidential elections. It covered a wide range of social and diplomatic issues. The NCC reply thanked the Latins for raising “the authentic and key issues impacting the relations between our nations and peoples.”

The NCC policy-makers passed one resolution supporting the “forces of liberation” in Southern Africa and warning against “diplomatic overtures of any non-African governments” to resolve the conflicts there. Another resolution asked the United States not to recognize the Transkei (first of the black “homelands” to be granted independence by South Africa) and to press for dismantling of all the Bantustans.

In other actions the board:

• Learned that the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO) had formally become a part of the NCC. IFCO was one of the groups founded in the late sixties to answer black demands for “reparations.”

• Asked for tighter government controls on nuclear materials at home and overseas.

• Addressed a letter of commendation to the “Peace People” of Northern Ireland and Ireland.

• Urged the United States to normalize diplomatic relations with Viet Nam.

• Called for a more active U. S. role in seeking a change in Korean government policies.

• Launched a new campaign against capital punishment.

• Warned against government efforts to define “church” and “religion” for tax purposes.

• Endorsed a California referendum proposition regarding farm labor.

Bingo, Scourge Of Texas Ecumenism

Close to $20 billion will be spent this year in legal gambling, according to researchers (up from the $17.3 billion a University of Michigan survey says was spent in 1974), with an estimated three out of five American adults—90 million people—plunking down money in pursuit of Lady Luck. (Another $5 billion or so will be spent in illegal gambling, the experts say.)

Of this amount, nearly $2 billion will be spent on bingo games. Although it is considered gambling and is therefore illegal in many states, bingo has flourished among Catholic churches, fraternal organizations, fire-house socials, and the like—and the authorities have chosen to look the other way.

Battle lines are being drawn in Texas, where a court recently ruled that bingo is illegal. Police in predominantly Catholic San Antonio say they will enforce the ruling, an announcement hailed by Baptist leaders. Inner-city Catholics, however, warned that the move will deprive their parishes of a chief source of support, and residents of senior citizens’ homes are protesting the elimination of what they call their “only source of recreation.” Several legislators say they may seek special legislation to exempt churches and charities from the law, a move certain to be opposed by the Baptists.

Baptists, who generally have an antigambling stance, and Catholics have clashed on the issue elsewhere in the state. Dallas police, urged on by the Baptists, began a crackdown in Feburary, prompting Catholic bishop Thomas Tschoepe to ask the faithful to comply with the law. (Bingo sponsorship is a felony under the lottery laws and carries a prison sentence of from two to ten years.)

Inducing Growth

The average-size Protestant congregation in America has fewer than 200 members, according to studies discussed at last month’s National Consultation on Evangelism and Church Growth in Kansas City, Missouri. These churches, the studies also show, are for the most part not growing.

More than 450 leaders and key clergy from a broad cross section of denominations and independent groups attended the by-invitation-only consultation to discuss how to get such churches moving—and growing. Many factors were considered in the three days of plenary and small-group sessions: the place of prayer, New Testament guidelines, the role of the Sunday school, statistical analysis, administrative leadership, the nature of ministering to people, family needs, and others.

“We’re interested in disciples, the ones that remain, not just decisions,” commented church-growth expert Vergil Gerber of Evangelical Missions Information Service. “Otherwise, the name of the game becomes numerology.”

“At the same time, we must not slide off on the other side,” cautioned Executive Director Paul Benjamin of the National Church Growth Research Center in Washington, D.C. “Every statistic stands for someone for whom Jesus died.”

Probably the most significant aspect of the consultation was the scheduling of regional workshop sessions in which church-growth conferences were planned for next year throughout the country. The idea is to get as many churches as possible represented at these meetings and to provide plenty of how-to and motivation for congregational involvement in evangelism and nurture that will result in growth. Existing regional resources will be noted in planning, say leaders.

The consultation was sponsored by the American committee of the Lausanne continuation movement (chaired by Southern Baptist pastor Kenneth Chafin), the Evangelization Forum (an informal group that had provided leadership in the Key ’73 nationwide evangelistic thrust, with Victor Nelson of the Billy Graham organization as convener), and other groups.

Invisible Tax

Public utilities in twenty-six states are permitted to make contributions to religious charitable and educational institutions and charge the donations to their ratepayers, according to Americans United for Separation of Church and State. AU brought suit in state courts earlier this year to challenge Pacific Northwest Bell Telephone Company for making substantial contributions to church colleges, with customers involuntarily paying the bill. AU spokesmen say they would have no problem if the donations were taken from stockholders’ profits, but they question whether it is constitutional for “government-regulated monopolies” to make their consumers pay.

“An invisible tax for religion is just as objectionable as a visible one,” says AU researcher Doug Lavine. States showing the highest amounts given to sectarian agencies, he adds, are Oregon, Ohio, New York, Texas, and Illinois.

Camp Crisis

The Texas Supreme Court ruled unanimously last month that an Episcopal Church camp in Hood County is not exempt from property taxes. Bishop A. Donald Davies had filed a suit to establish tax exemption for the camp. A district court ruled that only an open-air chapel and a minister’s residence at the camp were exempt. The remaining 153 acres were declared subject to taxation.

“Certainly, inspiration and a spirit of renewal may be captured by experiences with nature,” the Supreme Court commented, “but those experiences can also qualify as wholesome recreation which falls short of religious worship.”

The effect of the ruling on the tax status of the many other church-affiliated camps in Texas has not been determined.

A Methodist camp at Glen Rose is now in the courts. The Episcopalians sought exemption on grounds the camp was used for worship. The Methodists, however, are claiming their camp is exempt because it is an integral part of Christian education.

Train Up a Child …

Some people assume that academic and intellectual influences spoil the religious commitment of students. Such an assumption is wrong, according to a study of college teachers by researchers at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and Appalachian State University in North Carolina.

The main sources of religious commitment, or its absence, among college teachers are in early childhood experiences and family conditioning, and later academic training has little effect,” the study concludes.

The findings also show that scholars in the more developed natural sciences are more traditionally religious than are scholars in the humanities and social sciences.

Future in Focus

National conferences on key issues in the practice and theology of world evangelization, an enlarged program of communication to share news of evangelism, and a comprehensive survey of unreached peoples will be the focus of the Lausanne Committee on World Evangelization activities for the next two years. These directions were charted during the recent annual meeting of the LCWE executive committee in Berlin.

The committee took time out from deliberations to issue a statement of support for persecuted Christians in various lands.

General secretary Waldron Scott of the World Evangelical Fellowship was on hand to discuss views and plans of the WEF. The way was left open for joint WEF-LCWE sponsorship of some projects.

From the ten countries and five continents represented by the executive committee came reports of remarkable spiritual activity and growth despite political unrest.

Evangelist Leighton Ford is chairman of the Kenya-based LCWE, and African clergyman Gottfried Osei-Mensah is executive secretary.

Campus Outlook

Christian college campuses are full and overflowing this fall as record numbers of new and returning students boosted many schools past their projected enrollment figures, according to the news service of the twelve-member Christian College Consortium. They are also quiet.

In a survey of campus newspaper editors, the news service found that students at the theologically conservative colleges are expected to be more concerned this academic year with campus matters than with national issues. Getting “moderate interest” will be such issues as the presidential election, the feminist movement, charismatic renewal, world hunger, and recognition of black students’ rights. Most attention, however, will be on grading system revisions, academic calendar changes, and campus regulations, according to the survey.

There have been some changes on campus because of the “Title IX” federal regulations that prohibit sexual discrimination in education. For example, women athletes at George Fox College now enjoy pre-game steaks just like the men—instead of the brown bags they formerly got.

Help For the NAACP

Representatives of the U. S. Catholic Conference, the National Council of Churches, and the Synagogue Council of America have pledged their support of the NAACP in appealing a $1.2 million judgment that threatens its survival. White merchants in Port Gibson, Mississippi, won the judgment against the NAACP under a state law prohibiting conspiracies to injure a business. The case involved a boycott in the 1960s by the NAACP aimed at seeking employment for blacks.

An NAACP spokesman said the organization was already in financial trouble, with liabilities exceeding assets by $200,000.

Said Reform rabbi Alexander M. Schindler: “If blacks can be thrown into bankruptcy for refusing to patronize merchants they regard as hostile to their interests, then Jews can be similarly victimized for withdrawing their patronage from concerns which discriminate against them or who cooperate with the Arab boycott.…”

Food Bank

The Mennonite Central Committee of Canada has set up a government-assisted food bank for world emergency relief. The initial program will run for five years with a maximum reserve at any one time of two million bushels of wheat. Up to $1 million for the first year has been allocated by the Canadian International Development Agency.

The Word in Japan

In commemoration of 100 years of Bible-translation work in Japan, the Japan Bible Society published a new translation of the Gospel of Luke a year ago—the vanguard volume of the Japanese Common Bible Translation. Begun seven years ago, the Bible project involves a committee of forty Protestant, Catholic, and Greek Orthodox scholars. The projected date for finishing the New Testament was 1976, but the work hit a snag, according to charismatic Catholic priest Bernardin Schneider and retired professor Masashi Takahashi, co-chairmen of the editorial committee. The new target date is the end of 1977, with the Old Testament to follow four years later and the Apocrypha sometime after that. Meanwhile the Gospel of Luke is open game and is receiving both compliments and criticism.

The new Common Bible is intended to make the Bible understandable to a non-Christian with a non-church vocabulary, to adhere to the original languages, and to have a non-foreign-sounding, true Japanese style. But in a long review, Tokyo’s popular Asahi newspaper said that the new Bible was too radical in its differences from other Bibles available in Japanese.

The major issue involves the transliteration of names and places into Japanese. For example, it is impossible to spell “David” in Japanese, so the earlier Bibles render him “Dabide” (da-bee-day); the new one changes it to “Dabido.” The committee compromised after a long battle over the name Jesus: Protestant “Iesu” plus Catholic “Iezusu” comes out “lesusu” in the Common Bible. Whether for sake of compromise or for a sound that is closer to the original Hebrew or Geeree shiago (Greek), the task has been tough: more than 500 Greek proper names and 2,600 Hebrew names in the Old Testament were tagged for study.

A second issue concerns the alleged use of “discriminatory” words. The mass media in Japan are being bombarded by a Communist-backed faction accusing the Bible translators of discrimination against the blind and other socially handicapped. The organization has picked out eleven words that they say are taboo and should be avoided in the Bible. Because mekura for “blind” is also used in reference to a blind animal, for instance, the word should be changed to a more polite mojin or me ga mienai hito to specify “a person whose eyes cannot see.” The same principle applies to “lame,” “deaf,” or “dumb.” “Leper” should be changed to “one with Hansen’s disease.”

Highly conscious of social status, the Japanese adjust their language to three distinct levels of social rank, depending on the one being spoken to. Hence the verb forms used when Jesus is speaking to his disciples are questioned. As their teacher, wasn’t he above them? Yet he washed their feet.

The new translation claims to be “more polite than the language of the Living Bible” and “more readable than the Kogotai” (a 1955 version similar to the King James that still has sales of 1.5 million a year).

For the most part, pastors do not seem to be using the new gospel of Rukas (Luke), and when asked about the “new Bible” they often reply, “You mean the Shinkaiyaku Seisho?” Published in 1970, by Japan Bible Publishers, that six-year-old colloquial version is still new to some. It has sold over a million copies and presently sells about 190,000 a year, according to a spokesman.

President Kenneth McVety of Word of Life Press in Tokyo reports that the Living Bible New Testament paraphrase, released in Japanese in October, 1975, is averaging 8,000 sales a month, with 180,000 in print as of September. The Old Testament is expected to be completed next year.

Although many Christians voice doubts about the need for another Bible translation, the Bible Society says it is not only possible but necessary to make the common version. The latest Catholic edition is a 1965 publication, though in the last four years large numbers of Catholics in Japan have been using the two latest Protestant versions (Kogotai and Shinkaiyaku Seisho).

The oldest Bible in Japan, the 1888-vintage Bungotai, is revered by the Baptist Bible Fellowship and other fundamentalist groups (some are working on their own private translations). The Bungotai was Japan’s first Bible, but in schools today the language it uses is considered classical and obsolete.

Early disciples of the mukyokai no-church church movement in Japan also translated portions of the Scriptures, but the movement in general uses the two post-war Protestant versions.

Also, there are a Mormon “Bible” and a Jehovah’s Witness “Bible” in Japanese.

In a 1975 survey that included reading matter of all kinds, 56.3 per cent of a cross section of Tokyo residents indicated they had read the Bible or parts of it, with 6 per cent saying they read it regularly. Another 8.5 per cent said they want to read it, while 35.2 per cent indicated no interest in reading it.

Judging by continuity of sales, the Bible is a best-seller in Japan. However, although bookstores are almost as plentiful as cold drinks, the average man on the street would have a hard time buying any version of the Scriptures except in a few Christian bookstores and in three or four major bookstores in the large cities. Book dealers avoid it because they favor faster-moving material on their crowded shelves—and because it might subject them to criticism by Shintoists and Buddhists.

NELL L. KENNEDY

The Pentecostal Tide Is Coming In

As English Labor government leaders struggled over the crises of the falling pound, Pentecostal leaders from more than eighty nations gathered in London in September for the eleventh triennial meeting of the World Pentecostal Conference. The 12,000 delegates represented more than 350 national Pentecostal denominations from around the world. Morning sessions were held in the Westminster Central Hall, the “cathedral” church for English Methodism, and the evening rallies were conducted in the 8,000-seat Royal Albert Hall. On the final night of the conference, both halls overflowed for the closing communion service.

The purposes of the conference, according to Chairman Thomas F. Zimmerman, top leader of the U. S. Assemblies of God, was to “recognize what God is doing in what may be the broadest based outpouring of the Spirit the Church has ever experienced,” and to “assess the unfinished task as God gives us to see it.” In his address, Zimmerman proclaimed that there are from 35 million to 50 million Pentecostals in the world and that “the end is not near.” The “Pentecostal tide is coming in,” he declared. He left little doubt that classical Pentecostals consider themselves to be first of all evangelicals. He declared that the Holy Spirit gave the Church “the inspired and inerrant Word of God,” which is “superior to any tongue or prophetic utterance.” He noted in conclusion that the “triumph of the Holy Spirit is worldwide evangelism.”

Although all twelve conference speeches dealt with some facet of the person and work of the Holy Spirit, the challenge of evangelism was a prominent note throughout the meetings. Featured speakers included pastors of some of the largest Pentecostal congregations in the world. Yongii Cho reported that his Full Gospel Assembly of God congregation in Seoul, Korea, numbers 40,000 members, an increase of more than 8,000 in the past year. Javier Vasquez, pastor of the Jotabeche Pentecostal Methodist Congregation (affiliated with the Pentecostal Holiness Church) in Santiago, Chile, reported 80,000 members. Also featured was K. E. Heinerborg, pastor of Stockholm’s 7,000-member Filadelphia Pentecostal Assembly. Practically all the representatives reported significant growth in their lands since the last conference three years ago.

In contrast to the neo-Pentecostal practice in large meetings of allowing charismatic gifts to be exercised only by a trusted “word gifts unit,” tongues and prophecies came forth from all over the Royal Albert Hall. In one instance a “message” was given in glossolalia, interpreted in German, and then interpreted in English.

A striking feature of the conference was the appearance of twenty delegates from Eastern European Communist countries. These included six pastors from the Soviet Union, representing the nation’s 600,000 Pentecostal believers. Others came from Bulgaria, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Romania. In welcoming the Iron Curtain delegates, Zimmerman declared that “the World Pentecostal Conference is not political.… We can enjoy fellowship of the brethren from any part of the world.… Ideological differences do not divide us.” Despite these statements, some delegates who have traveled in these nations contended privately that these men represented not the “true Pentecostal believers” but rather government-recognized churches that had compromised their testimony for government approval. The overwhelming spirit of the conference, however, was to give a warm hand of fellowship to the official delegates as true brothers in Christ.

The existence of the rapidly growing charismatic movements in the traditional churches was hardly noted during the conference. Instead of a triumphalism concerning the incursion of Pentecostalism into other traditions, a non-recognition policy seemed to exist. (Generally, classical Pentecostals feel that Christians who speak in tongues ought to join a Pentecostal denomination.) Yet in small ways the conference opened some windows toward the charismatics. David du Plessis, known as “Mr. Pentecost” to the charismatics but as a maverick to the Pentecostal power structure, was publicly recognized and applauded. Michael Harper of the Anglican Fountain Trust and Dan Malachuk of Logos International were also publicly received. In addition, the somewhat controversial Society for Pentecostal Studies, which was formed at the 1970 World Pentecostal Conference in Dallas, Texas, was recognized as an official research agency for the world Pentecostal movement.

In conference business, an expanded advisory committee of twenty-four persons representing the various continents of the world was approved, and Canada was chosen as the site of the 1979 conference.

VINSON SYNAN

East Germany: Taking a Stand

Four weeks after a clergyman set himself on fire outside his church in Zeitz, East Germany, to protest the oppression of Christian young people by the Communist government (see September 10 issue, page 81), pastors in 4,300 Evangelical (Lutheran) churches throughout the land read a sensitive sermon from their pulpits calling for increased religious freedom. The sermon was a pastoral letter drafted by the leadership conference of the Evangelical Church. The five regional newspapers of the church, with a combined circulation of 150,000, were forbidden by the government to print the statement.

The text of the sermon was “One member suffers, all the members suffer.” It said that pastor Oskar Bruesewitz’s self-immolation aroused deep concern over “the tensions that exist in our society, as well as the severe problems that many of us face.” Affirming that the pastor “wanted to be a witness of our Lord Jesus Christ” in what he did (government authorities claimed he was mentally ill), the statement said his action gave rise to serious questions, including “whether there is really sufficient freedom of belief and freedom of conscience [in East Germany], particularly for young people.”

Suppression of problems serves neither society nor the church, the sermon declared. “We must therefore take a stand to see to it that in our society respect for the convictions of others truly determines the coexistence and cooperation of people of diverse views.”

The sermon said it is “particularly urgent” that “an atmosphere of confidence be created in our socialist educational system, so that children and young people may live as Christians without being subjected to humiliations.…”

Christian children are under great pressure in schools not to practice their faith, according to church sources, and many Christian young people who do are barred from higher education.

The Christian And Self-Esteem

Positive Addiction, by William Glasser (Harper & Row, 1976, 152 pp., $6.95), Love Yourself, by Walter Trobisch (InterVarsity, 1976, 55 pp., $1.50 pb), The Sensation of Being Somebody, by Maurice E. Wagner (Zondervan, 251 pp., $6.95), If You Really Knew Me Would You Still Like Me?, by Eugene Kennedy (Argus, 1975, 118 pp., $1.95 pb), Hide and Seek, by James Dobson (Revell, 1974, 159 pp., $4.95), and Communication: Key to Your Marriage, by H. Norman Wright (Regal, 1974, 194 pp., $1.95 pb), are reviewed by Elizabeth Skoglund, counselor, Burbank, California.

In this post-Freudian era of psychotherapy, a large number of therapeutic approaches other than psychoanalysis have appeared on the scene. Psychotherapy is gradually becoming more acceptable within Christian thinking, partly since many of these more recent forms do not have the strong anti-God effect of the teachings of Freud. Also, some of these newer techniques work, while all too often psychoanalysis does not.

The importance of a good self-image is increasingly being stressed in psychological theory. This concept is becoming acceptable to Christians. Many formerly would have rejected the idea that one could or should love himself. But self-acceptance is clearly a Christian teaching: Christ himself commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves; and God is a God of truth, not wanting his followers to view themselves as either better or worse than they actually are.

One of the most effective bridges joining psychotherapy and the concept of self-worth to the Church has been the writing of psychiatrist William Glasser: Reality Therapy, Schools Without Failure, The Identity Society, and most recently Positive Addiction. In his practical approach to psychotherapy, Glasser connects self-acceptance with relationships and encourages responsible behavior as basic to a good self-image. This Christians can accept, and so he has made deep inroads among Christians.

In Positive Addiction Glasser again refuses the cop-out of some forms of psychotherapy that blame the past and emphasize insight. Instead Glasser uses words like “weak” and “strong” in describing people’s behavior, implying that they are not just victims of circumstances but human beings who can choose to change. He insists they are capable of becoming stronger, of developing a better self-image. The idea of becoming positively addicted to something is offered as one way to gain strength psychologically. A major portion of the book deals with various types of positive addiction and how this addiction can increase creative thinking and help us “develop the mental wherewithal to handle new, unexpected, and possibly overwhelming stresses and strains.” In general, Glasser’s books are very valuable reading for the Christian who wants to understand the concept of self-image.

From a totally Christian perspective, Walter Trobisch does a superb job of relating a good self-image to sound biblical theology in Love Yourself: Self Acceptance and Depression. Although I think he becomes a little simplistic in discussing abortion, Trobisch deals sensitively and directly with matters like acceptance of one’s physical body, self-acceptance versus self-centeredness, and Christianity as it relates to emotional problems. He encourages Christians to work toward feelings of self-worth and shows some practical steps to take.

His discussion of depression is particularly compassionate and uplifting. In contrast to a barrage of current writing that over-spiritualizes feelings of depression, Trobisch states: “We do not need to be ashamed of them. They are no flaws in our make-up or a discredit to the name ‘Christian.’ ”

Love Yourself is intellectually stimulating, psychologically sound, and spiritually uplifting. Reading it in conjunction with some of Glasser’s more lengthy discussions, most Christians could gain a good understanding of self-image and how to develop a good one.

Wagner’s The Sensation of Being Somebody is detailed and is written in a style that at times seems more cumbersome than profound. While the author draws upon his clinical experience as a counselor, his emphasis is on spiritual solutions for problems of self-esteem. His organized approach to the problem and his wealth of scriptural references have their value, and his book should be read by those wanting a more involved study of the Christian and self-esteem.

If You Really Knew Me Would You Still Like Me? by Eugene Kennedy is, in contrast to Wagner’s book, light and easy to read. However, if Wagner tends to over-spiritualize, Kennedy seems to ignore that dimension. His clear delineation of self-esteem problems and his encouragement of people to accept themselves are valuable. But he does not present solutions in much detail.

Hide and Seek by James Dobson deals with self-esteem in children. The book is well written and attractive in style. Dobson is specific in his advice on how to generate a good self-image in a child, and he balances the spiritual and psychological sides of the problem. Hide and Seek can probably do more to help parents prevent their children from developing problems of self-esteem than to help cure them once they occur.

Finally, H. Norman Wright in Communication: Key to Your Marriage devotes one long chapter (“Communicate to Build Self Esteem”) to building self-worth in a marriage. He writes appealingly and gives numerous practical suggestions. The potential for each marital partner to contribute to the self-esteem of the other is brought out here. The self-image of the partners is very important in the marital relationship and is wisely included in this book on communication in marriage.

One hopes writers of books of popular psychology will increasingly seek to take into account spiritual, psychological, and physical needs. There is a danger in over-spiritualization, but Christian writers are equally remiss if they over-psychologize at the expense of the spiritual.

Biblical Norms And Ethical Behavior

Bible and Ethics in the Christian Life, by Bruce C. Birch and Larry L. Rasmussen (Augsburg, 1976, 221 pp., $8.95, $4.95 pb), is reviewed by Allen Verhey, assistant professor of religion, Hope College, Holland, Michigan.

Most Christians—surely all evangelical Christians—acknowledge the authority of Scripture for the Christian life. But that confession does not settle the perplexing problems of how it is authoritative, what this source may and should provide for the Christian community’s moral discernment, and the connections between Scripture and ethics. It is surprising that so little literature describes the functional relation between the Bible and ethics. This volume does exactly that—very well.

Earlier books jointly written by a biblical scholar and an ethicist have usually followed this pattern: the biblical scholar describes some important biblical theme or principle that the ethicist subsequently applies to a range of moral questions. The primary concern of the Birch and Rasmussen book is neither to describe the ethics of the Scriptures nor to offer normative replies to the moral questions raised by the Christian community today. The intention is rather one of describing, of judging, and of recommending certain connections between the Bible and ethics in the Christian life. The exegesis and ethical reflection along the way are basically illustrative and subordinated to the main intention; nevertheless, they are excellent. For example, the exegetical treatment of “you always have the poor with you” and the ethical analysis of world hunger not only help to illustrate possible connections between Scripture and ethics but are important and suggestive in their own right.

The introductory chapter describes the current relation between the Bible and ethics and challenges both biblical scholars and ethicists to do their work within a recognition of the Scriptures as canon and within the context of the Church. The rest of their book may be seen as the authors’ own attempt to meet this challenge. The challenge enlists not just scholars, however, but the whole Church; therefore, the churches are urged to recover their identity in the Bible and to acknowledge their corporate responsibility for discernment and action.

A second chapter skillfully surveys the literature directly concerned with the relation between Scripture and Christian ethics. This brief description of the work of others is used to raise and clarify the questions that must be answered, thereby setting the agenda for the rest of the book.

The first item on that agenda, the nature and scope of Christian ethics, is taken up in the third chapter. The authors quite rightly claim that a methodology for relating Scripture to ethics can be comprehensive only if the whole range of concerns of Christian ethics is understood. And they insist that character formation is just as important as decision-making, that the good person is as important a concern of ethics as right action. They contend that the Bible ought to have a major role in both, but they acknowledge that the two roles will be different. In the formation of character, of the faith, perception, disposition, and intentions that give identity, the whole Bible can and should have a primary role. The use of Scripture to form character must be guarded against “genre reductionism,” the selection of only certain kinds of biblical materials as relevant to ethics. The place to start is not with a selection of texts but rather “with the Bible in the life of the Church as a gathered community.”

The Bible has an important role in decision-making as well, and Birch and Rasmussen suggest several kinds of connections. Scripture is relevant to all the components of decision-making: to our perspective when we analyze situations, to the standards we use, even to the process of decision-making (without prescribing a certain procedure) and to moral imagination. But here—in contrast to character formation—the starting point is the moral issue, and particular texts that address the issue or illuminate the situation must be selected. But the canon and the Church continue to function as criteria. The full range of canonical materials, not just that selection which fits our pre-judgment, must be allowed to inform our decision-making, and other authorities must be given due consideration.

Birch and Rasmussen have insisted that the Church is the community for making the connections between Bible and ethics. In the fourth chapter they focus on the Church. They do not limit that focus to the Church’s moral pronouncements, a matter that has truncated many other moralists’ discussions of the Church. They are more concerned with the Church as “a shaper of moral identity,” “a bearer of moral tradition,” and “a community of moral deliberation.” These three functions and the place or role of Scripture in each are helpfully explicated.

In the fifth chapter the authors clarify the nature and extent of the authority of Scripture, especially in relation to other “authorities.” They reject any rigid formulation of biblical authority that would pretend that the Church can do ethics or live its life on the basis of Scripture alone. And they equally reject any relativizing of biblical authority that would pretend that Christian ethics could be done or that the Christian life could be lived without a primary and constant relation to Scripture. They suggest “a dialogue relationship of biblical material with non-biblical material in moral judgment” in which the Bible is the primary, constant, and necessary source, without depreciating other sources and without relieving us of the responsibility for decision. In character formation the authority of the Bible functions substantively on its own and transformationally vis à vis other sources of moral development. In decision-making the authority of the Bible is sometimes substantive, being the source of moral imperatives, but sometimes not, when either there is no single biblical position or the issue is not directly addressed in Scripture. Then biblical authority rests at another level, either in the range of biblical positions or in a more general principle or in the character formed by the Bible.

In chapter six Birch and Rasmussen suggest how Scripture can be made available again as an ethical resource. And just as they resist the churches’ forfeiting their responsibility for moral decision to their ethicists, so they oppose the churches’ forfeiting their responsibility to interpret Scripture to their biblical scholars. They contend not only that a mastery of basic exegetical skills is possible for any serious inquirer but also that such competence is necessary to preserve the Church’s Christian identity in the midst of the moral challenges of our time. Only with such exegesis (and they helpfully lay out the process of exegesis) can the biblical materials in their integrity and variety confront our moral concerns. The intention is not a mechanistic application of Scripture but “dialogue.” But without careful exegesis, appeal to Scripture can be purely rationalizing, in which one picks and chooses the texts that confirm one’s prejudices.

Careful exegesis within the context of the whole canon and within the Church provides the “control,” the assurance that the Bible is not being merely “used” but heard. Without denying that subjective judgments play a part in the selection and interpretation of Scripture—in fact, they affirm it with their “dialogic” understanding of the connection between Scripture and contemporary ethical concerns—Birch and Rasmussen have by “the canon criterion” placed an important limit on arbitrarily subjective or rationalizing appeals to Scripture. And, while recognizing and affirming the authority of Scripture, they have by the same criterion challenged the absolutizing of isolated texts.

The matter is critically important. So is the book, for it makes an important contribution to the churches’ ability to connect contemporary moral life with the rich fund of biblical resources. That is no small contribution to the greater goal of strengthening the churches’ life and witness.

How Is The Bible Actually Used?

The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology, by David Kelsey (Fortress, 1975, 216 pp., $11.95), is reviewed by Carl F. H. Henry, lecturer-at-large, World Vision, Monrovia, California.

Contemporary theologians appeal to the Bible in many ways to claim scriptural legitimacy for disparate views. For this reason Kelsey’s discussion of the authority and normativity of Scripture is both timely and significant. It has four-fold importance.

First, it reverses the approach of neo-Protestant theologians who repudiate scriptural authority while elaborating professedly Christian theology. Second, it exhibits the divergent uses made of Scripture by recent theologians who abandon the evangelical appeal to authoritative biblical texts and truths. Third, without immediately channeling the discussion concerning the relevance of the Bible into claims about inerrancy or even inspiration, it focuses on the issue of scriptural authority as a larger concern. Finally, it affirms scriptural authority only in a functional sense as an alternative to objective textual inspiration and in this way extends the revolt against the propositional trustworthiness of the Bible while professing to preserve biblical authority in the highest sense.

The first section of the book (half the volume) focuses on the views of seven twentieth-century theologians: B. B. Warfield, Hans-Werner Bartsch, G. E. Wright, Karl Barth, L. S. Thornton, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann, Four questions are asked of each: (1) What aspect of Scripture is authoritative? (2) What makes it authoritative? (3) What logical force has it? (4) How does it bear on theological affirmations so as to authorize them?

Warfield and Bartsch emphasize what Scripture teaches—the former the doctrinal content, the latter its concepts or main ideas. Wright and Barth stress rather what Scripture reports, whether its recital of God’s mighty historical acts (Wright), or its rendering of God’s personal presence (Barth). Thornton, Tillich, and Bultmann invoke images, symbols of myths that provide the occasion for a revelatory redemptive event. These are considered representative but not necessarily exhaustive of the ways theologians appeal to the Bible. All appeal to scriptural authority, but they differ in what they mean.

Looked at more closely, Warfield champions the classic Christian view that the content of the Bible—what it teaches—is authoritative. Bartsch too comes down on the side of authoritative biblical content but in a more limited way, regarding distinctive concepts as revelatory rather than affirming, with Warfield, plenary inspiration. Wright disavows doctrinal or propositional disclosure: Scripture is rather a record of God’s redemptive acts, from which knowledge about God is to be inferred.

For Barth, Scripture is a fallible witness through which God in Christ personally encounters the trusting reader or hearer. Scripture is authoritative not because it communicates divinely given information about God and his ways but because “it provides our normative link with God’s self-disclosure.” The Bible authorizes theological proposals only indirectly, as a pointer to the central revelational reality, Jesus Christ, who encounters us in Scripture. Barth is therefore a watershed for modern theology, since he understands scriptural authority in functional terms.

This functional use of Scripture as authority is further exemplified by scholars who professedly discern in the Bible some particular feature—images, symbols, or myth—held to be expressive of a revelatory event. The semantic signal that links the believing reader with an inner revelatory event where he becomes a new creature is found in the Bible’s literary symbolism rather than in a collection of revealed doctrines or a report of external happenings accessible to historians. Kelsey considers Thornton, Tillich, and Bultmann as illustrative of this approach.

Kelsey does not, however, end with merely an instructive survey of the different ways and purposes that mark these seven modern theologians’ appeals to the biblical text. Although he offers no programmatic essay concerning the correct approach to the Scriptures, his comments are laden with implications concerning the essence of Christianity, and what he writes about revelation and Scripture has the structure of an argument.

In “the unprecedented theological pluralism marking the neo-orthodox era” Kelsey refuses to see a sign of “breakdown in consensus about the nature and task of theology.” Although he concedes that the divergent ways in which contemporary theologians claim scriptural legitimacy for their theological proposals blur the conception of authority, he disagrees with those who contend that negative criticism of the canon and its content makes it “impossible to use the texts as authority in theology.” Loss of the Bible as a theologically unified, canonical authority, Kelsey insists, does not jeopardize scriptural authority.

How then is biblical authority to be conserved? The answer lies in redefining the terms “canon” and “authority.” The divergent views of modern theologians can all be squared with the authority of Scripture if we rid ourselves of the conception of biblical authority held by B. B. Warfield and other evangelical Protestants. To rescue biblical authority Kelsey ventures specific proposals that, in effect, erode the standard evangelical view of Scripture and advance an alternative.

The author denies that there is any truly normative meaning of biblical authority. He appeals to the diverse usage that modern theologians make of Scripture and insists that “there is no one ‘standard’ concept ‘scripture.’ ” “The suggestion that scripture might serve as a final court of appeals for theological disputes is misleading.” The logical consequence of this, one would think, would be an open and unapologetic repudiation of scriptural authority. But this is not the case.

For the traditional view of the Bible as a divinely inspired source of revealed truths Kelsey would substitute a functional view oriented to the life of the Church, correlating Scripture and its authority with the concerns of the believing community and individual. He writes: “The ‘authority of scripture’ has the status of a postulate assumed in the doing of theology in the context of the practice of the common life of a Christian community in which ‘church’ is understood in a certain way.” In his opinion, “Scripture” is not to be identified with the whole Bible, nor is any of the Bible to be considered “Scripture” or authoritative except in a functional sense.

Kelsey dismisses as meaningless any effort to establish “standards by which to decide when a ‘theological position’ really accords with Scripture.” His stance is basically existential, and his emphasis is on “an imaginative act in which a theologian tries to catch up in a single metaphorical judgment the full complexity of God’s presence in, through and over against the church’s common life and which both … provides the discrimen” whereby theology criticizes the Church’s current witness and “determines” the distinctive shape of theological proposals. This excludes in advance the understanding of Scripture on its own terms. It prevents the author’s taking seriously the view that the inspired Scriptures provide a body of divinely guaranteed truths to which all creative theology is answerable and that Scripture is the objective norm to which all the Church’s truth claims are to be conformed.

Kelsey repudiates the view that there is a “conceptual continuity, if not identity, between what scripture says and what theological proposals say.” Since he approves discontinuity between Scripture and theological proposals and admits scriptural authorization only by indirect appeals, “scriptural normativity” for him involves the dispensability of any and all logical continuity between Scripture and theology. Scripture is normative authority not because it preserves an unchanging content but because it serves as the starting point and model for theological elaboration. It is “relevant” to theological proposals but not “decisive” for them. Thus Kelsey approves of the reinterpretation of what the Bible says, as by Tillich and Bultmann, “in different concepts.” In short, he spurns the view that “meaning has only one meaning” and that the biblical texts have but one meaning that theological proposals are to reproduce in order to be scripturally authorized.

The epistemological relativity underlying this notion dissolves not only any fixed meaning for Kelsey’s own proposals concerning normativity, authority, and Scripture but also whatever fixed meaning he would attach to meaning itself under any circumstances. It therefore reduces theology to an intricate exercise in futility and nonsense.

The historic alternative to the functionalist notion of normativity does not at all, contrary to Kelsey, “beg the root questions” of “what ‘scripture’ and ‘authority’ are to mean.” Rather, it is Kelsey’s view of multiplied meanings that precludes attaching any definite sense to them. For all its usefulness, Kelsey’s volume does not help us much with the overarching concern of the transcendent truth of the Christian religion. And one may question whether Christian truth is served better by a redefinition than by a repudiation of its classic concepts if one no longer finds these palatable.

Briefly Noted

Marriages face a barrage of advice from “experts” on all sides. The institution is being attacked as never before. The divorce rate is at an all-time high. Christians, even though they believe that only within marriage can an emotional, sexual, and spiritual relationship between a man and woman be properly developed, are not immune to the problems of the age. Topics such as submission, communication, and sex are discussed with different emphases in various recent books. Maximum Marriage by Tim Timmons (Revell, 126 pp., $4.95) discusses the overall biblical plan for an enriching marriage. If you have ever had a confrontation over a burnt roast, or a lively discussion on “What did you do all day?,” then Timmons’s down-to-earth anecdotes will speak to you where you are. Through these examples he discusses complex biblical concepts such as submission in a very practical way. Thoroughly Married by Dennis Guernsey (Word, 144 pp., $4.95) focuses on sexual intimacy in marriage. God’s plan for marriage provides for a healthy sex life within the bounds of a biblical union. Distortions in verbal communication are discussed in a technical rather than biblical sense in Do You Hear Me Honey? by John W. Drakeford (Harper & Row, 174 pp., $3.95 pb). Particularly helpful is the development of the “pendulum concept”: in the swing of conversation, one is forced to a more radical opinion in order to balance the criticism of a partner. The “Over to You” section at the end of each chapter allows the reader to integrate the material for personal effectiveness. Bernard Harnik is a Swiss physician and counselor who has worked closely with Paul Tournier in an intense commitment to minister to the whole person. Harnik’s book, Risk and Chance in Marriage (Word, 178 pp., $3.50 pb), is noteworthy for its clarity and for the depth of the author’s understanding of what motivates marital habits and patterns. Men and women are not simplified into characters who are easily molded into matrimonial bliss. Maturation in marriage comes through crisis. Harnik examines many complex problems in the form of stories or case studies from his counseling experience. He sees parenthood as increasing the chances of stability in the household. This is an important point in view of the growing number of couples choosing not to have children. Three to Get Ready by John Quesnell (Liturgical Press, 150 pp., $2.95 pb), is written for the engaged couple and takes a serious look at what a Christian marriage encompasses from the theological perspective of Catholicism. If you want some practical exercises rather than merely information about the ingredients of a successful marriage, try I Count, You Count by George Caldin (Argus, 200 pp., $3.95 pb). This is a self-help book in which the author intends to function as the reader’s counselor. The possible danger in all these books is that they provide insights into marriage that a person might use to judge his or her partner. The better way to use them is to begin by applying them to oneself rather than trying to force one’s spouse to change.

Francis Andersen’s commentary on Job (InterVarsity, 294 pp., $7.95) is the latest addition to the Tyndale Old Testament Commentary series. It is based on careful scholarship and certainly holds its own among the finest works on this powerful and enigmatic portion of Scripture.

The Christian Association for Psychological Studies is a growing group of evangelicals in psychology-related professions. A dozen of the papers presented at their Milwaukee convention are now available from them under the title Self Esteem edited by Craig Ellison (27000 Farmington Rd, Farmington Hills, Mich. 48024, 134 pp., $4.20 pb). Sample titles: “Self-Image and Self-Esteem,” “Some Social Aspects of the Self-Concept,” “Self-Esteem and the Classroom.” This volume is intended to launch a series, Christian Perspectives on Counseling and the Behavioral Sciences.

The field that scholars call “New Testament introduction” is misnamed. Rather than introduce the student to the New Testament, the subject offers an overview of what scholars have written about the New Testament. (Admittedly this is intended as an aid to serious study of the sources.) The subject is often deadly dull, and students who take such courses rarely find them of much value in later years. But “dull” is one adjective that could never be applied to the indefatigable Glasgow professor William Barclay. His two latest books, Introduction to the First Three Gospels and Introduction to John and the Acts (Westminster, 303 and 341 pp., $5.95 each pb), provide “introductions” to the first half of the New Testament in as interesting a fashion as possible. The first is an expanded revision of an earlier book, the second is entirely new. Barclay does not answer all the questions—not necessarily a fault—but he does present the most readable survey currently available. Both volumes are warmly commended to pastors who wish to review what they were taught in seminary while catching up on what scholars have been talking about lately, to laymen who want an introduction to scholarly research on the New Testament, and to college and seminary teachers who would like to liven up their lectures to their students.

Unbounded Love by Norman Pittenger (Seabury, 115 pp., $3.95 pb) dissolves historic Christian doctrines into vague sentimentalities under the guise of restating them in terms of “process philosophy.”

Various Kinds Of Congregations

The House Church, by Philip and Phoebe Anderson (Abingdon, 1975, 173 pp., $4.50 pb), The Small Church: Valid, Vital, Victorious, by Paul O. Madsen (Judson, 1975, 126 pp., $3.95 pb), and Hey, That’s Our Church!, by Lyle E. Schaller (Abingdon, 1975, 192 pp., $4.50 pb), are reviewed by Philip Siddons, pastor, Wright’s Corner United Presbyterian Church, Lockport, New York.

Not all successful churches are several-hundred-member suburban congregations. Three recent books focus on various other kinds.

The House Church deals exclusively with churches that meet informally in homes. The Andersons reflect that “only now and then does a person have an experience in the [conventional] church of unremitting, unconditional love.” And perhaps stronger: “The institutional form for the experience of love, which was authentic for previous generations, has become wooden and binding and inhibiting, even irrelevant to many Christians in the twentieth century.” The house church is proposed as the solution to the conventional church’s inability to provide loving and caring communities.

The particular house church described grew out of a weekend encounter group conducted by a trained Christian leader. The authors’ main premise is that “the experience of an individual is absolute.” Since “the ground of all theology is personal experience,” the emphasis is almost entirely on people “getting themselves together, both within themselves and in their relationships.” This apparent disdain for creeds and theology may run against the grain of those of Reformed orientation in theology. Central to orthodox Christianity is its emphasis on God as subject, addressing humanity as object. We as fallen creation find ourselves unable to find a way out of “the ugly ditch” through either our experience or our reason alone.

Undeniably, sharing to enable people to “let go” is greatly needed in churches today. The person in the pew needs honest dialogue and sharing. One’s faith is dead if it is not intimately coordinated with one’s experiences. But the balance of faith and work, of theology and experience, must be guarded.

The House Church could have been entitled “A Pocket Guide For Christian Encounter Groups.” It provides helpful suggestions and rules for running small groups. The hard question of what to do with the children might have been dealt with at greater length. Questions like “Whose turn is it to teach the children’s Sunday-school class?” and “Who is going to write the junior sermons for the children’s worship time?” must be answered eventually by all house churches.

The small church is usually considered to be something that is not yet (if it ever will be) a “success,” according to Paul Madsen. So in The Small Church he tries to establish an identifiable character for the typical small church (no more than two hundred members). Rightly he emphasizes that it is not numbers but spiritual growth that is important. Because at least 40 per cent of the churches fit into the “small” category, Madsen feels that they should be specially studied.

The Small Church has to do with advantages, problems, and solutions to the problems in a small church. The problems mentioned generally have to do with poor planning, poor programs, or poorly trained ministers. The author’s suggestions for improvements are salted with examples of specific churches that simply acquired better planning, better programs, and better ministers. If small churches were more open to new people and had a “try it” attitude, the author suggests, things would be better.

In short, The Small Church attempts to capture a seemingly universal character of the small church but ends only with scattered success stories of particular congregations. It offers little for church leaders to work with other than some general operating principles. Perhaps the best advice in the book is the suggestion that the small church set aside its feelings of autonomy and take advantage of its denomination’s resource people and facilities.

What is perhaps lacking in these two books is more than made up in Schaller’s Hey, That’s Our Church! Putting together a collection of articles he has written during the past few years, Schaller provides a perspective on most types of church structures functioning today. Schaller points out that those who analyze churches often make the mistake of characterizing a congregation merely by its size and geographical distribution. Instead, parish leaders should study their church in terms of the specific economic and sociological community in which its members exist.

The first six chapters describe six types of congregations. The last three chapters deal more with the vision and growth of churches in general, and suggest guidelines for planning goals.

The organized church at large has failed, says Schaller, because it has tried to be one thing to all people. A church in the seventies and eighties must concentrate on specialized ministries, tailored to the specific community it addresses.

A church must define its theological and sociological positions clearly. When it does that, it can move toward wholeness and greater relevance in its ministry. Hey, That’s Our Church! is a very useful tool for church leaders.

The Apostles’ Horoscopes

Yesterday, Today, and Forever, by Jeane Dixon (Morrow, 1976, 439 pp., $8.95), is reviewed by Nell L. Kennedy, missionary, Kanagawa Ken, Japan.

A new book by widely acclaimed “seer” Jeane Dixon has made its way to the shelves of various Christian bookstores. Subtitled “How Astrology Can Help You Find Your Place in God’s Plan,” the book attempts to explain away some of the godly characteristics of the twelve disciples of Jesus.

Although she does not claim to know the birthdate of each apostle, Dixon describes each of them in terms of a sign in the zodiac. “Each astrological sign has all the traits of a specific apostle,” she says. By learning the traits of your sign and knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your apostle, you supposedly can “gain revealing insights into your life, problems and plans for the future.”

For instance, those born under the sign Aries, between March 21 and April 19, have the same characteristics as the Apostle Peter, she says. “Peter was a diamond in the rough, headstrong, impulsive and aggressive,” a perfect reflection of his astrological sign of Aries the Ram. “Ariens learn quickly and are not too proud to admit their mistakes. Peter was once rebuked by Christ for his bluntness and Peter replied, ‘Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.’ ” Dixon thus dares to assert that Peter’s sin was merely the Arien trait of being overly eager to get things moving.

Following Aries in the zodiac calendar, the sign of Taurus is given to the Apostle Simon the Zealot, said to be patriotic and loyal. And so on, through the other ten.

Yesterday, Today, and Forever is a destructive book that is in direct disobedience of Jeremiah 10:2—“Thus saith the LORD, learn not the way of the heathen; and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them.”

New Periodical

Pastoral Renewal was launched in July by the Word of God Community in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a charismatically oriented fellowship of Catholics and Protestants. It is intended to provide help for pastoral leaders (whether clergy or laymen) in congregations and prayer groups. Monthly, no subscription price; donations welcome (Box 617, Ann Arbor, Mich. 48107).

American evangelicals are in danger of forfeiting their remarkable opportunity for theological breakthrough bestowed by the collapse of theological liberalism and the disintegration of neo-orthodoxy.

Evangelism remains the mainstay of evangelicalism. That is to the good, since a community that leaves no posterity is destined to extinction. Because of universalism, explicit or implicit, neither liberalism nor neo-orthodoxy stimulated evangelistic concern. The evangelistic crusades of Billy Graham and others provided a transcontinental witness to the ongoing power of the Gospel to transform warped and wanting lives. But American evangelism relied too much on sporadic crusades, failed to register a comprehensive mass-media impact, and ineffectively challenged national conscience and social trends.

Theological renewal, which evangelical administrators and evangelists and even educators have made a subsidiary concern, has stopped short of an influential tide of literature and learning. The shorthand “evangelistic theology” serviceable to cooperative community effort is now separating once again into Reformed, Arminian, charismatic, and other alternatives.

More than many would care to admit, evangelical theological initiative has leaned on the work of C. S. Lewis and more traditional British evangelicals, as well as upon the writings of continental theologians like G. C. Berkouwer and Helmut Thielicke, not to mention modified versions of the work of Karl Barth and Emil Brunner. On the American scene J. Oliver Buswell Jr.’s A Systematic Theology of the Christian Religion (two volumes, 1962, 1963) was the only comprehensive conservative effort to appear in recent decades. Major denominational publishing houses have produced little of durable theological significance from American evangelicals. Symposiums, Bible commentary series, encyclopedias, and dictionaries attest the existence of an international and interdenominational body of evangelical scholarship, and many writers have made commendable contributions on a smaller scale. But even the so-called evangelical thought magazines have tilted increasingly away from frontier theological impact to a passive lay readership, and some writing energies have been deployed to hasty and often lucrative productions rather than to technically demanding works.

Beyond doubt American evangelicals have pushed beyond major dependence upon reprints from past generations, but the task of producing a theological literature that invites reading on both sides of the Atlantic and comprehensively grapples with influential contemporary trends awaits fulfillment.

Something about the present evangelical state of mind is evidenced by the fact that a listening or reading audience of clergy and lay leaders is much more easily gathered for polemically oriented discussions of matters like the inerrancy controversy than for mapping a constructive agenda for overall evangelical advance. The battle over the Bible has become more central than the effective statement of the Bible’s claims upon man and society. The high task of forging a constructive theological program that bears on all the basic Christian beliefs is neglected.

Let me offer some proposals in which all evangelical scholars might share irrespective of the divisions that now tend to tear them apart. These proposals are less comprehensive than the program ventured by a number of evangelical leaders in England who have been meeting privately to ask both what factors today parallel those that in earlier generations facilitated the decline and decay of evangelical movements and what precautions are needed to avoid a repetition. Here I address only the Bible controversy.

1. List all evangelical academic resources for engaging in a five-to-ten-year program on the authority of Scripture: seminary, college, and Bible college faculties; evangelical professors teaching on non-evangelical campuses; graduate students writing dissertations or theses for advanced degrees; seminar courses conducive to the study of special problems.

2. Classify these international resources according to theological-philosophical, linguistic, historical-archaeological, and other specializations, and subdivide them into Old Testament and New Testament spheres.

3. Prepare a comprehensive record of the reversals of the biblical critics—positions now disowned by informed scholars but at one time ardently championed by prestigious academicians. This project will attest how extensively higher criticism turns not upon textual data and scientific-historical factors but upon the philosophical biases of the interpreters. Critics minimize their highly fallible track record by conforming critical works on the Bible to the latest theories and seldom mention the long succession of earlier “latest theories” now abandoned.

4. Chart the appeal made to snippets of Scripture by contemporary non-evangelical theologians who, though they disown the Bible’s objective authority, nonetheless appeal to it for an authority-aura where it coincides with their individual views. Then chart the specific rejection of these very passages by other influential scholars, and thus lay bare the process of cross-cancellation of biblical authority that pervades modern theological scholarship. This procedure will show that, once the Bible’s plenary authority is set aside, Scripture becomes a “wax nose” that neo-Protestant scholars twist and turn to support their prejudices.

5. Learn what specific problems are already being addressed by serious evangelical scholars.

6. Shape a comprehensive investigation of the remaining biblical problem areas by asking evangelical scholars who do not subscribe to inerrancy to help formulate issues to be researched.

7. Ask non-inerrantist evangelicals to show their basic evangelical intention by indicating what specific problems they propose to address in the context of a biblically affirmative view.

8. Complete a comprehensive program of assignments that involves all these problems by enlisting all available evangelical energies, including national and regional meetings of the Evangelical Theological Society and other academic associations interested in biblical truth.

9. After one year probe the possibility of a summer task force to review and correlate these efforts, the cost of each scholar’s participation to be underwritten by his own institution or some cooperative agency.

10. After several years consider the possibility of publishing periodic paperbacks and/or a final volume.

Such a program, if it is to succeed, must represent the work of serious scholars and concentrate on issues rather than on personalities and institutional rivalries.

We had a day of fasting and prayer today at L’Abri. For two hours we prepared together from the Word of God, and looked back with thanksgiving over things God has done in our midst. Then for five or six hours each of us went off into woods or fields, by streams or on rocks, in a sheltered place by a fire or wrapped in a blanket on a balcony, to be alone for communication with God.

As people returned from various parts of the hillside and village to gather in the chalet chapel, an overheard remark expressed what the world would think of such a procedure: “It blows my mind the way you people think that praying all day is going to cause something to happen that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.” “He that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him” (Heb. 11:6). Who is this God, the true and living God of the Bible? Who is he to whom we pray?

“For thus saith the LORD, that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I am the LORD; and there is none else. I have not spoken in secret, in a dark place of the earth: I said not unto the seed of Jacob, Seek ye me in vain: I the LORD speak righteousness, I declare things that are right” (Isa. 45:18, 19). The living God to whom we come created the universe, created the earth to be inhabited, created the people to inhabit it. “I have made the earth, and created man upon it: I, even my hands, have stretched out the heavens, and all their host have I commanded” (Isa. 45:12). “Thus saith God the LORD, he that created the heavens, and stretched them out; he that spread forth the earth, and that which cometh out of it; he that giveth breath unto the people upon it, and spirit to them that walk therein …” (Isa. 42:5).

We come to the Creator of all things when we pray, and to the Saviour. How is the Saviour defined? “His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace” (Isa. 9:6). “And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger: and he that believeth on me shall never thirst” (John 6:35). We come to the bread of life, the living water, the light of the world, the shepherd who died for his sheep, the door by which we can enter in. We come to the Lamb without blemish, told about in First Peter 1:19, and to the “chief cornerstone, elect, precious: and he that believeth on him shall not be confounded” (1 Pet. 2:6). We come to the “High Priest of our profession, Christ Jesus; who is faithful to him that appointed him” (Heb. 3:1, 2). We come to the Head of the church (Eph. 5:23) and to the advocate, our lawyer, who pleads our cause: “And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. And he is the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 2:1, 2). He not only pleads for us but presents himself as our substitute.

Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians and how I bare you on eagles’ wings, and brought you unto myself” (Exod. 19:4) “He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust” (Ps. 91:4). We can know his gentle desire toward us as we picture wind whistling by our faces, blowing our hair, as we are borne softly along on a feathery back. And we can know the tenderness of his protection as we picture ourselves covered by the soft warmth of feathers in the midst of life’s freezing storms.

“I will say of the LORD, he is my refuge, and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust” (Ps. 91:2). “I will love thee, O LORD, my strength. The LORD is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation and my high tower” (Ps. 18:2). “In my distress I called upon the LORD, and cried unto my God: he heard my voice out of his temple, and my cry came before him, even into his ears” (Ps. 18:2, 6). This One is a protection in so many ways to his people, and he is a hearing God, with ears open to our cries. He is reachable. He can be communicated with, and he communicates.

He himself can be our dwelling place, our home in the midst of an alien world. “Because thou hast made the LORD, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation.…” He promises, “He shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him, and honour him” (Ps. 91:15). “Call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me” (Ps. 50:15).

He is our guide, those of us who are his people. “For this God is our God forever and ever: he will be our guide even unto death” (Ps. 48:14). “Nevertheless I am continually with thee: thou hast holden me by my right hand. Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel, and afterward receive me to glory” (Ps. 73:23, 24). How can we but fall on our faces as we pray to this One, and call out in the words of the next portion of this same Psalm, “Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee. My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion forever” (Ps. 73:25).

John describes Jesus in his glory in Revelation 1:13–17: his eyes are as a flame of fire, and his voice as the sound of many waters. Power. This One to whom we come is a God of power, wisdom, might, holiness, and judgment, as well as love. John fell at his feet as dead. We too would faint were we to come face to face with him in all his power. But at that moment the Second Person of the Trinity, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, said to John: “Fear not: I am the first and the last: I am the living one who was dead; and behold I am alive for evermore.…” Although we come to the Alpha and Omega, the everlasting God who is perfect in his holiness, wisdom and might, he also is the One who says, “Fear not.” “For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities: but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb. 4:15, 16). We pray to One who is on a throne, a king, a high priest, but who understands us. He is God, but Satan attempted to make him fall into temptation in all points. He understands our struggles. He understands our feelings. We pray to our Father, in the name of Jesus our Saviour, through the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit, on the basis of the fact that entrance has been opened to us through the blood of Christ.

Dwelling on this One to whom we pray makes trust grow in us, so that our requests are offered in the atmosphere of faith, with thanksgiving for his existence.

What do we know about the imagination? Why do we have it? And do we need it? Shelley and Chesterton considered imagination the moral organ of man. Lewis said imagination was the organ of meaning. Tolkien described it as the part of man that causes him to “sub-create” (only God can create, said Tolkien). For each of these men, imagination resulted in literature—poetry, fantasy, fairy tales. And for most of us a definition of imagination is dependent upon our observation of its products. The product most easily recognizable as imaginative is the fairy tale.

The essays on imagination by Lewis and Tolkien, which I have reread annually for much of my adult life, leave me both satiated and tantalized. Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories,” though thorough, stops short of telling me why he and other Christians are so interested in imagination. Explaining imagination is no easy task.

Help has come from an unexpected source: a child psychologist. In a compelling and brilliant book entitled The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (Knopf, 1976), Bruno Bettelheim proposes that for a child to develop an integrated personality he needs fairy tales, he needs imagination. “Like all great art, fairy tales both delight and instruct; their special genius is that they do so in terms which speak directly to children” (p. 53). This book should become the basis for future studies of fairy tales.

In his introduction Bettelheim tells us what he won’t do in his book: he won’t concentrate on how fairy tales reflect our cultural heritage, our moral values, or our religious nature, though throughout his study he cites several fairy tales that function in each of these ways. As he explains, those are book topics in themselves. Rather, he looks at fairy tale as an art form that helps children (and adults) answer such questions as: “What is the world really like? How am I to live my life in it? How can I truly be myself?” And these are metaphysical questions.

Fairy tales suggest—they do not dictate answers. Therefore, different fairy tales may answer those questions for different children at different stages of development. And the same fairy tale may provide answers to different problems for one child as he grows.

Bettelheim wrote this book to help adults, particularly those with children, recognize the importance of fairy tales. He urges parents to overcome their fear that fairy tales will frighten children—a twentieth-century phenomenon, as Lewis and others have pointed out. Fairy tales never pretend to describe external reality, and no child confuses dragons or unicorns with cattle. The once-upon-a-time setting gives a child all he needs to understand what the tale is about. “The ‘truth’ of fairy stories is the truth of our imagination.… Before a child can come to grips with reality, he must have some frame of reference to evaluate it. When he asks whether a story is true, he wants to know whether the story contributes something of importance to his understanding” (p. 117).

The Uses of Enchantment also explains how fairy stories help a child sort out his universe. The Bible explains that “God divided the light from darkness.” Bettelheim sees fairy tales helping children do the same: “As he listens to the fairy tale, the child gets ideas about how he may create order out of the chaos which is his inner life. The fairy tale suggests not only isolating and separating the disparate and confusing aspects of the child’s experience into opposites, but projecting these onto different figures” (p. 75), such as the wolf and the father in “Little Red Riding Hood.”

Now, all this might sound as if it destroys the appealing magical quality of a fairy tale. But Bettelheim avoids that by insisting that the art form is as important as the psychological meaning of fairy tales to children. If the story doesn’t entertain, it won’t educate either.

Bettelheim dislikes the modern fairy tale, which violates what is most enduring about the traditional tales. A good fairy story, he says quoting Tolkien, needs fantasy, recovery, escape, and consolation—the latter most of all. Each of us needs hope; modern tales often end with despair. How can a child feel that he can work out his problems if all he hears are sad endings?

“Hears” is a key word. Even if a child is old enough to read, the art form of the fairy tale demands to be spoken. “To attain to the full its consoling propensities, its symbolic meanings, and most of all its interpersonal meanings, a fairy tale should be told rather than read” (p. 150). A child needs the emotional and physical involvement of the teller. Also, the ancient tales—and just how ancient we learn in part two, “In Fairy Land”—were “shaped and reshaped by being told millions of times, by different adults to all kinds of other adults and children.” Bettelheim urges his readers to reread the fairy tales as they read his book.

Part two explores the meanings and history of some well-known fairy tales—“Little Red Riding Hood,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and, of course, “Cinderella,” the oldest and best-known fairy tale (when first written down in China in A. D. 9, it already had a history, says Bettelheim).

Some readers may reject Bettelheim’s interpretations as being too psychological, though I think he’s on the right track in most cases. But as he explains in his introduction, his interpretations are “illustrative and suggestive.” “Jack and the Beanstalk” may have phallic significance, Sleeping Beauty’s bleeding finger may symbolize the onset of puberty, and Goldilocks might deal with sibling rivalry. Whatever the interpretation—and as art fairy tales have many—parents should never explain them to children. Imagination works subconsciously for children. Bettelheim wants parents to understand this, and he hopes his book will help them be sensitive about which tales help a child and why.

Although Bettelheim does not write from a specifically Christian perspective, what he says about fairy tales touches Christianity. Fairy tales are about justice, mercy, original sin, love, and peace. Through imagination they help a child recognize love and sacrifice, first in his parents, and then in others. And unless a child understands that, he will find it difficult to understand what Christians claim is the ultimate source of sacrificial love.

Film: Fragments of Reality

The darkened room is hushed with expectancy. All eyes strain ahead as heavy curtains glide apart and a narrow cylinder of light pierces the gloom. Suddenly color and light fill the front of the room while discordant electronic notes shatter the stillness. The film begins.

Every year millions of people enter a theater, willing if not eager to surrender themselves to the film experience. Any intrusion of reality, such as light from an opening door or audience whispers, distracts and irritates. The enthusiastic viewer wants to lose himself in the film world.

The modern scientist defines reality as a construct of mathematical symbols based on the junction of time and space, mass and energy, matter and field. So it is not possible for the modern artist, working from this definition, to create art that is an imitation of reality; his reality is not apprehensible through his senses. Thus begins a subversion of conventional reality that results in the fragmentation, dissolution, and destruction of the most fundamental beliefs and precepts.

In his book Film as a Subversive Art (Random House, 1974) Amos Vogel clearly outlines the techniques used in avant-garde films to accomplish this subversion. Time and space are telescoped or dismissed altogether. Memory, reality, and illusion fuse until the viewer realizes with a sickening flash that the discontinuity only reflects the modern world view. Camera movements are frequent, editing is unpredictable. Narrative structures and clearly defined characters give way to uneasy improvisation and poetic complexity.

Vogel provides numerous examples of these techniques. Among them is an ominous scene from the movie Even Dwarfs Started Small by Werner Herzog, 1970. Two eerily stunted beings with caps, oversized goggles, and long white clubs appear to be examining a dead pig. The Kafkaesque image is infused with metaphysical dread.

How successful are avant-garde films in subverting viewers? Research indicates that the average person seeks out those films that support his point of view and avoids those that do not. If forced to view a film that assaults established opinions or convictions, the average person tends to react in anger by distorting the film’s content to reaffirm and justify his own convictions. Finally, the average person will remember only those things in a film that he values according to his age, sex, intelligence, level of formal education, socioeconomic values, needs, and desires.

Unfortunately, increasing numbers of viewers bring no well-thought-out world view to the film experience. Established convictions and beliefs, if any, are minimal, and these are ripe for subversion. The unwary are easily robbed of their sense of meaning and purpose.

Artistically sensitive Christians need to respond forcefully to the nihilistic anarchism filling theater screens. Verbal and written criticism would shield the vulnerable person who wanders out of a Fellini movie feeling dirty and depressed but not knowing why.

CAROL PRESTER MCFADDEN

Carol Prester McFadden is a free-lance writer and editor in Arlington, Virginia.

Financing a college education is a problem I identify with this fall: my eighteen-year-old son is now a freshman in college, and his brother is two years behind him. Hundreds of parents who are facing college costs for the first time are in a state of near shock.

I used to be a high school counselor and am now a college dean of admissions, and I have discussed the opportunities of the college experience with many students and parents. When they hear that it will cost $4,568 per year (1976–77 mean for private four-year colleges) for a student to attend X college or $2,790 per year (1976–77 mean for public four-year colleges) for a student to attend Y university, many automatically turn off the possibility of X or Y right on the spot. But let’s explore the alternatives of financing a college education.

I believe that a student should be able to attend the college that will best serve and develop his or her abilities regardless of costs. The basic responsibility for paying the cost of education rests with the student and his family. Financial aid from various sources is supplementary to the family’s efforts. For the best chances of receiving aid, a student must plan ahead. Among the many possible sources of aid are colleges and universities, federally supported programs, state scholarships and loan programs, commercial banks, and insurance companies.

As I walk across our campus, I often see a student whose family simply cannot afford to send him to our college. But here he is with a pile of books under his arm. How do they do it? Tremendous sacrifice by the parents, to be sure. Plus the son’s willingness to work part-time as a janitor in a downtown Seattle office and hold a summer job as a deckhand in the salmon fleet. But there is more. He has a financial-aid package that includes a federal grant, a college scholarship, and a loan. This story of the janitor-fisherman-student is repeated thousands of times across our nation’s campuses.

Financial-aid packages are usually awarded to students who have a demonstrated financial need. To determine a student’s need, colleges use the services of either the College Scholarship Service (its forms are called “Financial Aid Form” and “Parents’ Confidential Statement”) or the American College Testing Student Need Analysis Service (“Family Financial Statement”). These organizations review the information supplied by the student and his parents and estimate a reasonable family contribution to one year’s education.

Many parents hesitate to supply the confidential information necessary for this evaluation. They should understand that the financial statement is considered strictly confidential. Many years of experience have gone into developing these need-analysis guidelines that are used nationwide by colleges and scholarship programs. The method that has evolved is, in my opinion, just. The same procedure is used for all students, but the expected contribution varies according to such factors as income, assets, size of family, and expenses. (For more information on the complex process of evaluating the family need, send for the very helpful brochure entitled “Meeting College Costs—A Guide For Parents and Students.” See the bibliographical list at the end of this article.)

After the amount of need—the difference between the educational costs and the amount that the student’s family can provide—is determined, a financial-aid package is awarded. The package may not, however, supply the total amount of the demonstrated need. The award extends over one year, and the student must reapply for subsequent years.

The estimated costs for a year of college are shown in the following tables, published by the College Entrance Examination Board in an excellent manual entitled Student Expenses at Post-Secondary Institutions 1976–77.

Costs can differ greatly from one institution to another, so a student should make an estimate for each college he is considering. The costs also can differ considerably from one family to another, depending upon the circumstances and life style of the student.

The following questions on financing a college education are those most often asked by parents and students:

Question. What level of family income will exclude the possibility of financial aid?

Answer. So many variables are involved that it is impossible to set an income ceiling, though a truly wealthy family should not apply. Generally, the higher the educational costs of the college, the higher the income level at which the student could still qualify for assistance.

Q. What if the parents will not pay the expected family contribution?

A. That is a matter that has to be resolved within the family. Under certain rigid conditions the student can be declared independent and can be considered for a financial-aid package on the basis of a Student Financial Statement.

Q. What if the parents will not complete the financial statement?

A. This document is essential. Without it, federal aid cannot be administered. The document is strictly confidential.

Q. Which form does the family fill out, the Financial Aid Form, the Parents’ Confidential Statement, or the Family Financial Statement?

A. Check to see which scholarship service the chosen college prefers. The forms can be secured in a high school counselor’s office.

Q. When does the student apply for aid?

A. Most colleges ask that the prospective student have all admissions and financial-aid credentials completed by some date between February and April. Check the deadline of the chosen college, and allow three to four weeks of lead time for the family’s financial statement to be analyzed by the evaluation service and returned to the college.

Q. When are financial-aid packages announced?

A. Normally, for the fall term, between March and May, although late packages may be awarded through the summer. Most colleges also offer aid packages to students starting at other times during the year.

Q. How does the student apply for the federally administered Basic Educational Opportunity Grant Program?

A. Apply at any time; applications are available from U.S. post offices, high schools, and colleges. Submit the form to the federal government, not the college.

Q. What financial aid is available to the adult student?

A. If he has a documented need, he is eligible for all federal programs and some additional programs if he has not previously earned a bachelor’s degree. A few colleges offer free tuition to senior citizens.

Q. How can a student finance a college education if his family does not have a documented need or simply cannot meet the expected family contribution?

A. There are a number of possibilities:

1. Attend a local community college for one or two years and then transfer to a four-year college.

2. Attend a community college or vocational school to develop a salable skill, then use that vocational skill to finance college.

3. Attend a local four-year public or private college as a commuter.

4. Choose a college in an urban area where part-time jobs and summer work are more readily available.

5. Choose a college that has “no-need” scholarships. These scholarships are based on past academic achievement, regardless of need. The “need” and “no-need” scholarship issue is hotly debated in the nation’s academic community at the present time.

6. Take the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. It is a very competitive program, but many attractive “no-need” scholarships are available.

7. Many colleges have “no-need” athletic scholarships for both men and women.

8. Some colleges have “no-need” talent scholarships (e.g., music, drama, debate).

9. Try night school.

10. Use the “stop out” method. Work for a year or two before going to college. Take a year of college, work a year. Take two quarters of college, work a quarter. Attend summer school and then take advantage of the good jobs during the fall and winter. It will take five or six years to graduate, but the college degree is likely to be more valuable to the student who has obtained it this way.

11. Find a “live in” situation with an elderly couple or in a wealthy home or with a relative.

12. Join the military and continue getting an education there or use the GI Bill benefits after the term of enlistment is finished. This option is open to both men and women.

13. Apply for an ROTC, Air ROTC, or NROTC unit at the college. This option is open to both men and women.

14. Apply for a military academy appointment. This option is open to both men and women.

15. Take the College-Level Examination Program (CLEP) prepared by the College Entrance Examination Board (CEEB). This program is a national system of receiving college credit—up to one year—for what the student knows no matter where he learned it. It is available for persons of all ages and educational background.

16. Take the Advanced Placement Test, also prepared by the CEEB. This program tests what the student has learned in advanced high school courses. A student who scores well can accelerate his college program.

17. Do your homework. Research local, state, and national scholarships available from private and public sources. Use the high school counselor’s library to discover little-known scholarships. Use the public library also. Write the college Financial Aid Office for specific programs. Plan ahead!

Further information is available in these publications:

• Student Expenses at Post-Secondary Institutions 1976–77, College Scholarship Service of the College Entrance Examination Board (Box 2815, Princeton, New Jersey 08540), $2.50.

• Making It: A Guide to Student Finances, Harvard Student Agencies, Inc. (Cambridge, Massachusetts), 1973, $4.95.

• Need a Lift? Educational Opportunities, The American Legion (P.O. Box 1055, Indianapolis, Indiana 46206), $.50.

• College Placement and Credit by Examination, 1975, College Entrance Examination Board (Box 2815, Princeton, New Jersey 08540), $3.50.

• The Official College Entrance Examination Board Guide to Financial Aid for Students and Parents, Simon and Schuster, 1975, $4.95.

• Meeting College Costs—A Guide For Parents and Students, College Scholarship Service of the College Entrance Examination Board (Box 2815, Princeton, New Jersey 08540), free.

Humanistic education has been judged by a troubled world to be no better than the world. Riddled with chaos, inhumanity, moral impotence, and intellectual charlatanism, higher education has increasingly been subjected to adverse and even abusive criticism. And evasive as he might wish to be, or as loyal to flags, the Christian scholar and educator in the 1970s cannot escape as a context for his own enterprise the difficulties—and the apparent impotence—of secular humanism.

The first line of evidence marshalled against humanistic education has simply been the desperate persistence of a will to do evil, to destroy others and to destroy oneself. The anguished uncertainty of the Rhodes-scholar officer in Viet Nam (or of the whole American people) and the rationalized ambivalence of the beautifully educated Watergate convicts reflect a rationalization and loss of meaning that George Steiner, in the T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures for 1970, finds most extravagantly exemplified in the holocaust of World War II. The terrible separation of idea from action, art from life, that allowed German soliders, fresh from their Brahms and Mahler, to force men, women, and children into the gas chambers signifies a moral disease that still grows like a choking vine around the frail bloom of educational endeavor.

As Steiner rightly pointed out, this humanistic disorder has roots that extend deep into our cultural memory. However, they go back not merely to the romantic formulations of such eighteenth-century idealists as Fichte and Schiller, as Steiner suggested, but much earlier.

In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan couches his temptation of Eve in the most seductive intellectual terms. The preface to this tempting, however, is offered as a lecture to his fellow angels, while they float on their backs in the burning stink of the hellish lake. In his lecture, Satan discourses as the virtues of an autonomous mind. His thesis is this:

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n [I, 254–5].

All the self-deception and interpersonal deception that characterize the world of human enquiry and of human society would seem to have matriculated at this floating academy. Yet the perpetual lesson, after what happens in Eden, is that the mind cannot be “its own place” and retain its character as mind. (Witness Samuel Beckett’s eloquent yet inadvertent commentary, for example, in Endgame.)

Satan’s is the characteristic egocentric view. But it has also been the dominant view of post-medieval liberal humanism. The simple basis of Satan’s attractiveness to Eve is the attractiveness of the subtle ego-personalism of any age that confuses thinking with the self, in that at first it appears to offer a legitimate self-fulfillment. “The mind is its own place”—identity, autonomy, “integrity,” proprietorship, originality, “personal authenticity,” fulfillment. What deceit. But the litany of deceptions begun in Eden has become, for much of modern education, a kind of vicious and all-encompassing solipsism (the view that the self is the only reality) in which too few dare to loose their hold on the serpent’s tail.

John Milton’s version of this human problem (1663) has a particular piquancy for the modern history of humanism and a particular insight for the Christian interested in education today. Acutely conscious that humanistic endeavor had come to a great crisis of understanding, Milton put before his contemporaries the problem of the self in learning. Renaissance humanism had evaded its relational content. It had shifted the perspective of enquiry from a system of reference to God to a system that reformulated the old Protagorean adage, “Man is the measure of all things.” Perhaps the most popular philosophical statement of this shift was that of Milton’s near contemporary, Descartes (1596–1650), in whose formula Cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) contemporary humanism has (rightly or wrongly) often seen its parentage.

Descartes’s “Cogito” (or Kant’s, or Whitehead’s) represents what John MacMurray calls “a challenge to authority and a declaration of independence.” Intellectual historians and educators have found it a very healthful declaration. For Descartes, as for the subsequent history of humanism, the “I think, therefore I am” presupposition may be paraphrased as follows: “I am a thinking being; to think is my essential nature. I have therefore both the right and the duty to think for myself, and to refuse to accept any authority other than my own reason as a guarantor of truth.” This attitude is, in my opinion, basic to the present malaise in higher learning in this country and everywhere else in Western culture. And it is the basic challenge facing Christians in education.

The problem with taking “I think” as the starting point of one’s system of thought is, in the words of John MacMurray, that it “institutes a formal dualism of theory and practice; and that this dualism makes it formally impossible to … conceive the possibility of persons in relation, whether the relation be theoretical, as knowledge, or practical, as cooperation. For thought is essentially private” (The Self as Agent, Humanities Press, 1969, p. 73).

First among the facts of failure that challenge the Christian in education today is an evident contradiction both in theory and in practice: while humanism claims to stand for personal freedom, its rampant ego-centrism, its love of the private mythology, of the mind as its own authority, make it too easily a shield for either exploitation or indifference. Not only does this contradiction help to justify the Marxist’s clamor against what he sees as self-contradictions in the liberal ideal; it also lies behind the suspicion of many within the secular humanities that the humanist enterprise is irredeemable.

At every level we live in transgression of the very “human” values we claim to uphold. The sickness that affects North American graduate schools, for example, is a spiritual cancer born of sheer moral irresponsibility, an attitude in which one views the lives of others as subservient to one’s blindly rationalized self-interest. It persists, even though it has been overwhelmingly discovered by students and by their professors for what it is. One result of student disenchantment is that enrollments in the humanities are dropping, as students turn away from the pursuit of ideas seemingly unrelated to personal reality toward a self-interested professionalism of their own. Perhaps Life saw it all coming as early as 1967. Writing of a midwestern American university, Life headlined the turn away from the optimistic activism of the 1960s with this harbinger: “The New Student Sensibility—Looking Out for No. 1.”

Educators should be aware that what gets communicated in the classroom far more effectively than content is a personal style—an approach to learning. And it is in this respect that the evasion of moral and personal responsibility has come back to haunt us. As Frank Kermode has recently put it: “We have allowed knowledge to become unfashionable, yielded to the cult of the gut-reaction, created a situation in which professors who profess nothing teach students who study nothing” (Times Literary Supplement, June 13, 1975).

Life magazine in 1967 saw a return among students to the old self-centeredness, expressed in this headline: ‘The New Student Sensibility—Looking Out for No. 1.’ We need to confront this egocentrism.

The harvest is a series of student generations raised under a subliminal but very real curse. They come to the university in a state of anarchistic half-engagement, deprived not only of the grounds of personal motivation but increasingly of the very skills with which they might try to understand and express any alternative and sharable experience. One of the basic challenges confronting the Christian in education today is that of motivating the educational community—a community that is proving to be no community at all, indifferent to or even incapable of asking those basic questions to the pursuit of whose answers the Christian scholar may think he has devoted his life. Like it or not, the Christian student (or even senior scholar) may find himself, like the disciples of Isaiah, compromised, if not victimized, by a generation of Pharisaical and false prophets, “shepherds who know nothing; they all go their own way, each after his own interest” (Isa. 56:11).

This, then, is a brief catalogue of embarrassments for the secular humanist, and at least an index to the problems he helps to create. Now what about ourselves?

Despite all this “secular” malaise, can the Christian in education afford the luxury of his own despair, or of a kind of holier-than-thou withdrawal—which is to say, the false peace of his own impotence? Hardly. Like the disciples of Isaiah, we must now pass beyond the challenge presented by the failure of a poorly realized, misunderstood vocation; we must see our task in its historical and transpersonal perspective. The challenges that confront the Christian in education are no new thing, and they are far from untouched by the problems of the secular humanist. We might as well get out there and face the weather.

The oldest lament of the scholar, and one of the oldest surviving inscriptions in the world, is found on a piece of clay now in the museum of Constantinople that was excavated from the lowest layer of Babylon. It should strike us as a kind of consolation: “Things are not what they used to be. Everything is in decay, and everybody wants to write a book.” (Let me say in passing that I think one of the major challenges facing the Christian scholar today is to write better books. What we owe the tradition of Lewis, Williams, Barfield, and Tolkien—or Butterfield, Latourette, and F. F. Bruce—is not so much hero worship as a commitment that their enterprise shall not perish from the earth.)

We really need to ask ourselves, What can we do? Where can we go from here? I am not a prophet. But it seems to me that the answers are at least as old as the problems, and that genuine prophets have seen them truly. In the perspective of Paradise Lost, as of Isaiah and his followers, we too need to move first to a carefully studied, sharp critique of our contemporary culture. And this will involve us in an unmasking of ignoble fictions. One of the most notorious of these is the myth of the isolated and purely individual self; we should recognize it as a subtle but malicious perversion of the truth we seek. But its opposite, the notion that a collective community in conformity constitutes one selfhood, is no less perverse.

We must make an effective and practical critique of the cult of personality, of ego-centrism in leadership. We must challenge simplistic evocations of the idea of progress, just as we rigorously scrutinize the many subtle felonies of cogito ergo sum. And in all this we must oppose and avoid the sort of pseudo-intellectual enterprise that is little more than specious generalization or enervating gossip. Christians in education must insist on dealing with real problems in constructive ways—must act in secular as well as Christian educational arenas.

We must recognize that cultural criticism, for the Christian, begins—and concludes—in self-criticism. If the generalizations we reach are to be significant rather than specious, they must be founded on at least a tentative mastery of concrete particulars. What we want is books whose chief merit is not that they are easy but that they are the product of clear thinking and a mature digestion of careful research. Both as continuing students and as educators we must also recognize that effective cultural criticism begins in an apprenticeship, and rises ultimately toward some sort of true penetration of the culture.

We ourselves have lived in our own versions of “cogito” centeredness. As an evangelical raised to believe that history after St. Paul began with Calvin and the Pilgrim Fathers (if not with Descartes), I am often chastened by an illuminating sequence of three resolutions from a New England assembly in 1640:

1. The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. Voted.

2. The Lord may give the earth or any part of it to his chosen people. Voted.

3. We are his chosen people. Voted.

There was an administrator of some genuine worldly promise in that assembly, I can tell you. But in his illogical and perverse way of treating Scripture he showed that his education as a Christian was incomplete. And his error is often repeated in the Christian community today; calamity often arises from a confusion between divine will and self-will.

We should be candid with one another about what is probably the most persistent lesson in the Bible: the way one can tell who God’s chosen people are is that they are always the first ones called to do penance. And the repentance to which we are called is, certainly, a turning away from the self-centeredness and autonomous double-speak that are evident in the idolatry around us. But it is much more than that. Here is the instruction of Yahweh, as it came to the disciples of Isaiah:

Hanging your head like a reed,

lying down on sackcloth and ashes?

Is that what you call fasting,

a day acceptable to Yahweh?

Is not this the sort of fast that pleases me

—it is the Lord Yahweh who speaks—

to break unjust fetters

and undo the thongs of the yoke,

to let the oppressed go free?…

If you do away with the yoke,

the clenched fist, the wicked word,

if you give your bread to the hungry,

and relief to the oppressed,

your light will rise in the darkness,

and your shadows become like noon.…

You will rebuild the ancient ruins,

build up on the old foundations

[Isaiah 58:5b–12, Jerusalem Bible].

The true repentance is active charity, rebuilding with that integrity on the “ancient ruins,” yes, but also upon the “old foundations.” Against the impotence that threatens, repentance is an act of discovering, as William of St. Thierry puts it, that “the will is set free when it becomes charity.” As through understanding we come to pursue a genuine learning, true repentance is coming to know in no simplistic way that amor ipse intellectus est, that love itself is understanding. Against the false opposites of ego-centrism and collective conformity, true repentance is active participation as many (wonderfully diverse) members of One Body, teaching to our time the perpetual Body of Christ. Christians in education still have far to go in discovering their wider community in Christ.

But what Satan proposes is loneliness. At his entry, into the Garden of Eden to seduce Eve and Adam to the curse of his own loneliness, Milton has Satan stop to survey the territory from a most arresting perspective:

… on the Tree of Life

The middle tree and highest then that grew,

Sat like a cormorant; yet not true life

Thereby regained … [IV, 195–7].

Like a cormorant Satan perched on the Tree of Life, surveying the yet unfallen Garden. Milton’s point is that even the Tree of Life, so perverted, cannot serve to counter Death. Seeing it from there is not enough. There is a lesson for us in that, too.

The business of the Christian in education is, like Milton’s, twofold. First, to recognize and describe the problem: to understand the meaning of Paradise Lost. Second, to learn, to act, to live, and to love toward a Paradise Regained far beyond any vision of our own, but made known to us in part already through God’s revelation. The challenge facing us is to do a thorough job of the first as we dedicate ourselves to the second, learning a lesson from Isaiah’s disciples. We find, therefore, our ultimate challenge in the words of our Lord: “If you dwell within the revelation I have brought, you are indeed my disciples; you shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31, 32, NEB).

Christians who are concerned about education need to be clear about what sort of thinking is the enemy and what sort is consistent with Christian life. There are many contemporary versions of intellectual egocentrism and many characterizations of the mind as, in Satan’s words in Paradise Lost, “its own place.” However disguised, all these are antipathetic to a biblical understanding of genuine learning. True education for the Christian is preceded by a submission. It proceeds in an apprenticeship to Creation in which one acknowledges with Paul that “in him all the treasures of wisdom lie hidden” (Col. 1:17). It succeeds when it is characterized by the growth of personal discipleship.

Intellectual freedom is not to be found in the mythology of intellectual autonomy, the mind as its own place. But a genuine integrity, a release to enquiry, and an optimism about learning can spring from relationship to a truth the self could not provide. Christians need, now more than ever, to be willing to claim the commencement Christ promised when he said to his disciples, “You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Against so many tacit or explicit proclamations that “man is the measure of all things” we need to exercise our gifts toward a better prospect: “till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13, KJV).

Until then, Christians interested in education must unapologetically seek to express their interest—but must speak out of the humility and wisdom that characterize minds in which the spirit of Christ dwells richly. As this happens, we can speak effectively about the educational crises of our time and, at least in part, relieve them with a more healthful understanding of the mind’s most apt and noble place.

First of Two Parts

Evangelicals need to hone their theological skills by sparring with such brilliant men as Pannenberg.

To dismiss Wolfhart Pannenberg as just another German theologian seeking fame through ingenuity and novelty would be a grave mistake. Pannenberg is a Lutheran theologian of rare brilliance, remarkably capable in philosophy, biblical studies, and theology. He has come out in strong defense of several major themes of classical theology, including the deity, vicarious death, and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. He is projecting the most rigorous and ambitious program of academically oriented theology since Barth, and like Barth (of whom he is sharply critical) is likely to be remembered as a towering giant in twentieth-century Christian thought.

Whether we like it or not, German theologians have played a leading role in the creative theology of modern times and will go on doing so, at least until others of us challenge their leadership with work of equal quality and power. Meanwhile, the best thing evangelicals can do, if we hope to mature in thought and reflection, is to engage theologians of Pannenberg’s stature in dialogue so as to sharpen our own tools and commitments. Pannenberg welcomes this interaction. He maintains an admirably open spirit toward criticism of his thought and an evident willingness to change in the interests of the truth.

Although he writes with clarity and force, Pannenberg is a formidable thinker for the average person to grasp. He often expresses his thought in long essays devoted to a single aspect of a question, subtle in argument and richly documented. Therefore we are deeply indebted to E. Frank Tupper, a professor at Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, for giving us a serious, readable, systematic report on the full range of Pannenberg’s ideas in The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg (Westminster, 1973). The book enjoys Pannenberg’s own seal of approval. The simplest way for the initiate to get a direct introduction to the texture of Pannenberg’s thought would be to read his book entitled The Apostles’ Creed in the Light of Today’s Questions (Westminster, 1972), the title of which points to his central concern: to submit historic Christian commitments to the test of critical thought. All that I can hope to accomplish in this short article is to highlight a few of the basic themes important both to Pannenberg and to us evangelicals.

A Theology of Reason

Pannenberg’s advocacy of a theology solidly based on reason is an identifying feature of his position. (His major study entitled Theology and the Philosphy of Science is, regrettably, not yet available as I write.) This emphasis is attributable in part to the fact that he underwent a rigorously intellectual conversion from atheism in his university days. Like C. S. Lewis and Malcolm Muggeridge, he traveled a path to Christ that entailed more rational reflection than Christian nurture or emotional crisis. Certainly, his concern from the first has been to oppose all forms of authoritarian theology and to espouse what we might call a “university theology,” open to criticism and intellectually aggressive. To use his own words, he wishes to demonstrate the powers of Christian truth “to encompass all reality” and “gather together everything experienced as real” (Basic Questions in Theology, II, 1f.). He is deeply hostile to the revolt against reason that has for decades characterized theology and made it a matter of interest only to a ghetto of initiated believers. His basic concern was expressed in another generation and context by L. Harold DeWolf in The Religious Revolt Against Reason (Harper, 1949).

Although he studied with Barth, Pannenberg reacted against him sharply on this question. Theology, Pannenberg insists, must subject its truth claims to the canons of rationality operative in the larger human community. It must be able to point to evidences supporting faith instead of only a bare, subjective decision. He is convinced that authoritarian claims are not acceptable in either political or intellectual life. Such claims in theology, he says, clothe human ideas in the splendor of divine majesty and place them beyond the reach of critical examination. The result is that the content of theology becomes arbitrary and subjective. We must not, he insists, make the knowledge of God’s truth dependent on a private revelation, available only to the members of an esoteric society with its own in-group linguistic symbols. To do this does not exalt the sovereignty of the self-revealing God, as is supposed; it simply directs attention away from God’s objective truth to man’s own subjective understanding. Pannenberg’s critique crashes down on all versions of dialectical theology; however, it is equally hard on evangelical theology, insofar as it too is often presented in the guise of an authoritarian claim.

Debate has been swirling around this matter of the relation between faith and reason for centuries. Pannenberg has simply emerged on one side of the discussion with a forceful and subtle proposal, attempting to reverse the irrationalist trend from Schleiermacher to Barth that derives revelation from the experience of faith rather than from reason’s knowledge of history. If faith is placed in faith, and not in truth, how is faith to be distinguished from superstition or illusion? For Pannenberg, faith and reason are co-essential dimensions of the act of a total person. A split between them, or even a ranking of one over the other, is intolerable. He does not leave us under the tyranny of the expert, or with the arbitrary situation of faith projecting its own basis; he wants only to assert the legitimacy of reason’s role in the decision of faith.

Pannenberg insists that the Hebrew concept of truth not be suppressed by the Greek view. He does not contrast Hebrew thought with Greek in a simplistic manner but rather calls our attention to the fact that truth for the Hebrews is something that happens and is not merely thought out. God’s truth is proved to be true to the extent that his promises are realized. Truth thus shows itself in history, and is historic in a manner foreign to the Greek conception. Although the Israelite did not search for truth as a timeless reality behind appearances, he expected it to be proven reliable by the outcome of the future. In the light of this, it would be more accurate to say that Pannenberg has developed a theology of historical reason rather than reason per se, a point that becomes obvious in his view of revelation as history.

Before moving on to that point, we should note that, paradoxical though it may seem, even Pannenberg’s stalwart defense of the bodily resurrection of Jesus derives not from his orthodoxy but from his rationality! He is not motivated at all, as evangelicals often are, by a reverence for classical beliefs just because they are biblical and traditional. He defends Christ’s resurrection solely because it seems more reasonable to defend it than to deny it. The demands of the same reason that place him in opposition to a host of other critical scholars also lead him to reject the virgin birth of Christ, to consider many of the Christological titles in the Gospels as post-Easter intrusions, and to be skeptical about various and sundry details in the resurrection narratives.

Just because he insists so strongly that faith must rest on rationally tested foundations, Pannenberg must devote time to the doctrine of the Spirit, which many of his opponents in both dialectical and evangelical circles have used to support the notion of certainty that is inwardly experienced but not externally verified. He is convinced that the doctrine of the Spirit has been misused as “a fig leaf to protect the nakedness of the Christian tradition from the questionings of modern critical thinking” (Apostles’ Creed, p. 131). He thinks that scholars have appealed to the Spirit in order to immunize traditional positions against having to face up to critical objections, and to offer believers a cheap certainty indistinguishable from fanaticism.

It is clear that Pannenberg does not wish to deny that faith is the gift of God. What he is concerned to say is that faith cannot be indifferent about its basis, and should not be perverted into blind belief in some authority claim. By recognizing the objective truth content of faith, we rescue faith from the danger of perversion and acknowledge it to be a decision on the sound basis of reliable knowledge. The Spirit is not to be thought of as authenticating an otherwise unconvincing message, or adding to it the plus of personal inspiration. The Spirit of illumination does not create new truth but rather leads us to the truth that already exists in the proclamation of Jesus.

Revelation as History

A second major defining characteristic in Pannenberg’s theology is the important shift from the self-authenticating word in dialectical theology to verifiable history as the key to the nature of revelation. Besides being directed against Barth’s central emphasis on the word of God, this move is a rejection of both the liberal mysticism of religious experience and the orthodox idea that revelation consists chiefly of infallible doctrinal propositions.

In the seminal book that he edited entitled Revelation as History, originally published in 1961, Pannenberg expounded his concept of the indirect revelation of God through history, final and complete only at the end, but indicated in advance by Jesus and the vindication of his claim by the resurrection. He sets forth his highly original yet deeply convincing notion of revelation as history, open to all, located at the end, but realized in advance in what happened to Jesus. God does not unveil his essence to man directly but demonstrates his deity in historical events so that he may be recognized and trusted. In Pannenberg’s words, “In the destiny of Jesus the End of all history has happened in advance, as prolepsis.”

Lest we suppose that he fails to answer the inevitable criticisms raised against such a view, let us look deeper. What about the interpretations placed upon historical events? Do they not amount to a set of doctrines existentially derived?

Not according to Pannenberg, who rejects the sharp distinction between event and interpretation. For him the meaning of events inheres in them. Facts are always experienced in a context in which they have a made-to-order significance, which we discover by casting about in the context of the events themselves. For example, we discover the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus, not by producing an authoritarian interpretation, but by asking what resurrection signified in the Hebrew tradition and to Jesus. Of course, the same event may mean different things to different people, but the process is still not merely a subjective one, because there are objective methods by which to determine and settle the various interpretations offered.

Pannenberg’s aim in this is not to deny the importance of word alongside event but to dispute the commonly held idea that the word has a nonhistorical and basically experiential origin. In this, he is lining up with the theology of Gerhard Von Rad, who also advocates seeing the acts of God in the context of the history of Israelite traditions. Pannenberg wishes to refute the idea that the revelatory meaning of the activity of God in history is available only to faith and not inherent in the activity itself, which would make it autonomous and finally ahistorical. Rather than conceiving revelation as the union of event with a supplementary illumination by the Spirit, he sees it as Spirit-directed events, already defined in their original context and continually explicated in the history of the transmission of traditions. Pannenberg does not reject the category “word of God” except in its isolated use, outside the unity of event and word. To split up the detection of facts and the evaluation of them is intolerable to him: it makes the Christian message ultimately a human subjective interpretation, and it is the result of a poor historical method.

The startling result of Pannenberg’s argument is to make an ally rather than an enemy out of critical history, a tour de force by any standard. He intends to rest faith firmly upon historical knowledge rather than upon private revelations or authority claims that have no solid basis. He is well aware that the results achieved by the use of historical evidence are only probable at best, but he holds probable knowledge to be the basis of all human decisions and compatible with the trustful certainty of faith. In any case he cannot see how religious experience or authority can come up with anything more certain or more probable than this. As for the standard skeptical argument that miracles do not occur and that no amount of evidence could convince the person who is skeptical of the resurrection of Jesus, Pannenberg simply unfolds a carefully wrought historical methodology of his own in which he shows the a priori and therefore unacceptable character of such a historical dogma. Again, he defends the possibility of miracle, not in the name of orthodoxy, but with the tools of a properly conceived rationality.

Revelation as Scripture

Although the evangelical reader appreciates Pannenberg’s integrating of word and event into the unity of divine revelation, he is forced to ask further about the locus and authority of the word-component. He does this not just because it is the conservative’s reflex to do so, but because he sees a weak concept of Scripture leading into the very subjectivity that Pannenberg abhors.

Pannenberg repudiates biblical infallibility on two grounds. The first is that he interprets it in terms of an authoritarian commitment to the sacrosanct truth of the Bible, independent of rational checks. He opposes, not verbal revelation per se, but verbal revelation vouchsafed to a select community that alone recognizes it as such on the basis of an inward experience. Were he to confront Warfield’s position that, just as Jesus’ claim to authority was confirmed by his resurrection, so also was his claim for the divine authority of the Old Testament Scriptures—an extension of Pannenberg’s own historical apologetic—I cannot believe his position on infallibility would be so decisive.

Nevertheless, we cannot overlook his second reason for rejecting it: that critical difficulties in the text also preclude understanding the Bible as the infallible Word of God (Basic Questions in Theology, I, 1–14). The only way to dispel his fears on this point is to show by means of patient biblical scholarship that the difficulties that arise in connection with the text do not refute biblical infallibility, which is itself soundly based on the testimony of accredited biblical spokesmen, including Jesus himself (cf. J. W. Wenham, Christ and the Bible, Inter-Varsity, 1972).

A lingering doubt in the evangelical’s mind over the theology of Pannenberg relates to a certain depreciation of the category “word of God.” It is not that he eliminates it from his thought; in fact, he includes it together with event in an integral way that may improve our own understanding. The problem is that, because of his unnecessary equation of verbal revelation with authoritarianism, he has difficulty giving full weight to the concept of revelation as word, which is nonetheless as prominent in Scripture as revelation in history is. It is simply impossible to subsume under his category “revelation as history” substantial portions of the Bible such as the wisdom literature, or to incorporate in it so central an experience as God’s speaking to Moses before, during, and after the historic deliverance called the Exodus.

My reservations about the “revelation as history” formula are intended not to invalidate it but to call attention to event and word, which are both genuinely God’s acts, the twin focus of his redemptive dealings with mankind. Event and word are to be kept inseparably together and each given full weight and value. The fully biblical concept of revelation includes the mighty acts of God in history, transmitted through a uniquely inspired medium of interpretation by accredited prophets and apostles. Not to do justice to this full biblical pattern will lead, almost inevitably, to an undercutting of dogmatic theology through a dissolution of the Canon that gives it its norms.

Pannenberg is right to insist, as Warfield also allowed, that even without inspired Scripture a true knowledge of the divine purpose would still exist as a result of the impact of the divine actions that have irrevocably taken place already in world history. But he is wrong to imply that divine revelation in fact exists without such an inscripturation when the promise and reality of this divine gift, too, is abundantly plain. Because of his refusal thus far to acknowledge the normativity of the Scriptures over human thought, Pannenberg is forced to make his own reconstruction of the event and meaning of revelation canonical, with all the uncertainty and subjectivity that implies, at least for us.

We evangelicals do not ask that Pannenberg forsake his stance of critical honesty, which we ourselves strive for. We ask simply that due respect be granted to the gift God has so evidently given: inspired written Scriptures, the capstone of that anticipatory revelation which has come to light through Jesus.

A revolution has taken place in American life and thought. Few have taken note of it, and even those who have seem unaware how radical the change has been and how important the long-range implications are for us all. The revolution is in the relation of the government to higher education.

One great strength of the American way has been its careful separation of powers. We have just gone through a traumatic reaffirmation of the integrity of the legislative and judicial branches in the face of pressure from the executive branch. In another balance of power we have historically declared that the family, the church, the school, and the press are to be free from governmental control. Recent Supreme Court decisions have reaffirmed the separation of church and state and the freedom of the press, but a vast change has occurred in relation to the school.

As late as the 1930s the federal government had little or no control over higher education. Laws such as those providing for social security, workmen’s compensation, and unemployment insurance, binding upon almost every other sector of society, specifically exempted educational institutions.

Just a little over two decades ago the Commission on Financing Higher Education declared that the strength of higher education was in its freedom and that this freedom “must be protected at all costs.” It predicted that federal financing would bring federal controls that would be destructive to originality and diversity and would finally produce uniformity, mediocrity, and compliance. But in 1952 this was only a prediction.

Independence characterized American higher education from its start. When Harvard College was founded in 1636, the question was raised as to whether it could grant a degree. In England at that time, Oxford and Cambridge had royal charters to grant degrees and thus had a monopoly on higher education. With their religious tests for admission they gave to the Anglican church a favored position that guaranteed both a political and a religious elite. In 1642 when President Henry Dunster and his colleagues assumed for Harvard the right to grant degrees, they assumed a right reserved in England only for those institutions with special royal favor. Less than a century later Yale College followed suit. The result was that when the Revolutionary War broke out, nine institutions in the young republic were granting degrees that only Oxford and Cambridge could give in England. The groundwork was laid for equal educational opportunity for all, and that without governmental involvement. The result has been an educational system unique among the nations of the world.

Despite the urging of many, the U.S. government has never established a national university. It has entered the higher educational domain only with its service academies like West Point and Annapolis, though even here the accreditation of the academic programs has never been done by the government. The value and acceptability of the work in these national academies is determined by regional accrediting agencies in the private sector.

We have benefited from this “arm’s length” relationship. President Derek Bok of Harvard in his most recent presidential report was able to say without fear of contradiction:

“In an era of universal dissatisfaction, it is well to begin by pointing out that our system of higher education, for all its faults, has emerged as the best in the world in the eyes of almost every qualified observer. In terms of the quality of our research, the eminence of our leading universities, the degree of access afforded to all groups and income strata, and the responsiveness of the system to widely varying student needs, higher education in this country has no equal. Preeminence of this kind is a precious asset. It is a status that cannot be claimed for the quality of our government service, the achievements of primary and secondary education, the performance of our labor unions or the record of many of our older institutions” (The President’s Report, Harvard University, 1974–75, p. 5).

The values of this independent educational system to our country have been incalculable. Persons educated in institutions not controlled by the government were able to develop their minds and critical faculties freely and bring them to bear fearlessly upon our national problems. What a resource!

Unquestionably the freedom of Americans to organize religious colleges that grant accredited degrees (a privilege almost unknown outside the United States) has been a major factor in the strength of the religious element of American life. No religious group was by governmental decree kept on the margin of American life. The center was open to all.

But the careful respect by the government for the independence of the educational world is long gone. Non-involvement has changed to intrusion, respect to financial and regulatory control. The extent is frightening.

President Bok reports that compliance with federal regulations in 1974–75 at Harvard consumed over 60,000 hours of faculty time. President Willis Weatherford of Berea College says that one-fourth of his time this past year has been spent on governmental matters. Bok estimates that the cost to Harvard in the same year was between $4.6 million and $8.3 million. The American Council on Education reported in 1975 that the equivalent of 5 to 18 per cent of tuition revenues was spent on the implementation of federally required social programs. Change magazine estimates that the cost of such programs to higher educational institutions last year equaled the total of all voluntary giving to such institutions, just over $2 billion. So we run our development programs, not to sustain or strengthen our educational program, but to appease the government so that we can stay in business.

Nor is the cost in dollars and time alone. In most meetings of educational organizations today, any creative discussion of education is at a disadvantage in competing for a place on the agenda with the problems of governmental regulations. Energies that should go into education are spent elsewhere. The 1952 warning of the Commission on Financing Higher Education that heavy federal involvement would produce mediocrity and uniformity will soon be fulfilled simply by preemption. Time, energies, and resources necessary for first-rate education will have been spent on compliance.

The problem now is more than one of intrusion. It is rapidly becoming one of control. Federal regulations now determine decisions in areas once considered vital to academic integrity. Decisions on admission, selection of faculty, curriculum, and expenditure of institutional funds that could once be made with eyes wholly on the quality of the educational process must now be made with one eye on a multitude of federal regulations. Many decisions once made by school administrators are now being made by the decrees of bureaucrats in Washington.

Someone may say that the schools deserve their fate because they were foolish enough to accept federal funds. A number of administrators felt that with federal money would come controls, and so they courageously resisted the urge to enjoy the benefits of government aid. It is instructive to see how they have fared. One regulation from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare on July 21, 1975, simply redefined the term “recipient” of federal financial assistance. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 declared any institution to which “federal financial assistance was extended directly or through another recipient” (italics mine) to be officially and legally a recipient of federal aid and thus bound by all the governmental regulations that control such recipients. To have one veteran attending on the G.I. bill puts the institution in the “recipient” category. No institution is now exempt. President Kingman Brewster of Yale suggested that the government’s philosophy is, “Now that I have bought the button, I have a right to design the coat.”

How did this involvement become so deep so fast? It was not done without reasons, even good reasons. The Second World War, Sputnik, and the post-war social problems made all America aware that scientific discovery and new knowledge were essential to national security and well-being. The best place to get these things was in the colleges and universities. Their resources were not substantial, and so the government offered assistance. With assistance, though, goes accountability, and with accountability, controls. Then came the quickened social conscience of the fifties and sixties. The government assumed responsibility for guaranteeing social justice, equal opportunity, and consumer protection. When the passage of laws did not seem to be enough, other means were sought. “Reception” of federal monies became the key. Executive orders and bureaucratic regulations followed that produced the maze in which we are now trapped.

All this happened in a period of great difficulty for the colleges and universities. They were all struggling with inflation, recession, and declining enrollments. Private colleges were unsure they could survive, and many pled for help from Washington. When survival and integrity are the options, integrity finds itself upstaged.

In a society where great social programs like those adopted within the last forty years involve the great majority of our citizens, the federal dollar is almost omnipresent. The young share in educational-assistance programs and the old in social security. Every tax-exempt organization stands in a federally protected position. Reception of benefits from a federal program became the key to getting near universal compliance with the federal strategies for achieving social justice, equal opportunity, and consumer protection. Executive orders and bureaucratic regulations followed that now are covering us all.

But the cause is good. To object is to fight virtues more noble than motherhood and love of country. Should we not comply joyously?

Some observations are in order here. First, there is a difference between law and regulations. Congress passed a law against discrimination on the basis of sex. Thirty-seven words of law were turned by HEW into eighteen triple-column pages of fine print. When legislators who passed the law learned of the contents of the regulation, many of them insisted that they had not intended this when they passed the law. The regulation carries the same weight as law. Yet none of these rules and regulations has ever been voted upon directly by the people who represent the electorate. And some suggest that it would be an intrusion of the legislative into the executive domain for Congress to get very concerned about this. Anonymous writers of regulations beyond the reach of the people, what some call “the fourth branch of government,” are now determining the character of much of American life.

Second, our government is now becoming the judge of matters of deep religious import. Some areas intended by the writers of the Constitution to be kept inviolate from governmental intrusion are now under federal regulation. Consider four areas of concern under Title IX:

Marital status. In the Christian religion, marriage is held to be an enduring, God-ordained relationship. Every Christian institution wants to put examples of marital success and stability before its young. Yet today a Christian college “shall not make pre-employment inquiry as to the marital status of an application for employment.” Thus reads Section 86.60(a) of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

Pregnancy. In the Christian perspective, the conception of a child within a proper marriage is a reason for joy; outside marriage it is tragic and wrong. Yet according to current federal regulations, pregnancy outside marriage is to be considered a “temporary disability.” A Christian college is now precluded from dismissing or disciplining a teacher or administrator for an extramarital pregnancy, and from refusing to hire an applicant on these grounds. The regulation, Title IX, Section 86.57(b), holds that we “shall not discriminate against or exclude from employment any employee or applicant for employment on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth, false pregnancy, termination of pregnancy, or recovery therefrom.”

Abortion. To the Christian, the sacredness of human life has the binding effect of law. The termination by one person of another’s life is a religious question. Yet we are not to discriminate against an employee or applicant for “termination of pregnancy.” It is now wrong to treat a person, single or married, who has an abortion differently from one who develops the flu.

Human sexuality. The Scripture says that in the beginning God made human beings male and female. In other words, one’s sexuality or gender is not an accident of nature but an essential part of one’s personhood. It is not like race or national origin. There is a profound difference between a male and a female, a divinely wrought difference. One’s fulfillment individually should be sought in terms of one’s divinely wrought personhood. Therefore a truly Christian educational program must on occasion recognize the gender difference and treat people for what they are, male or female, in order not to discriminate against them. But that is now counter to federal regulations.

Academic freedom and religious liberty have been vital parts of the atmosphere that has enabled American democracy to flourish. Both are fragile and need some protection. It is an illusion to think that political liberty will long survive if these freedoms go. Today the balance that has made possible American academic freedom and American religious liberty, to the envy of much of the world, is threatened. How tragic if in the fight for social reform, very valid in its own right, we should destroy the integrity of the institutions essential for achieving social justice and equal opportunity.

Few people are aware of the unique role that evangelical colleges have played in the development of America and in producing Christian leadership for the world. A look at Christian leaders around the world will show that a handful of small schools have had a disproportionate influence. These are a priceless resource that we can ill afford to lose now. Some semblance of autonomy, both financial and philosophical, is essential if they are to survive. They never have flourished elsewhere. If the trend of the last decade cannot be reversed, they will not survive here.

If they go, it will not be the Christian world alone that suffers. The conditions under which they flourish are the same as those required for a truly free university. If a government can impose its secular moral philosophy upon all our institutions today, it can impose its political philosophy tomorrow. The pattern and the machinery will already be in place. More than academic or religious freedom is at stake.