If anyone wills to come after me,” said Jesus, “he must say ‘No’ to self. He must take up his cross day after day and follow me. For whoever wills to save his life will lose it; but he that wills to lose his life for my sake, this is the man who will save it” (Luke 9:23, 24).

Our generation just does not believe that. For us it is axiomatic that if we are to be successful in life we must press on with our own interests. If this cuts across the interests of other people, so much the worse for other people.

We defend ourselves by saying that there is nothing new in all this. Men and women have been living this way for centuries; probably they always have done so. Maybe there is a bit more of it in our day, but that means no more than that we are more open, less given to hypocrisy than were earlier generations. In fact, we find it quite possible to make a virtue out of our failings!

There is something in this. There is certainly no virtue in covering up and pretending to be better than we are. These days people have a certain impatience with sham, and for that we ought to be thankful. Furthermore, selfish conduct is not exactly new. “Realists” in every generation have been cynical about the virtues Christians advocate and have studiously avoided them when their own interests have been at stake. (They have, of course, advocated them when other people’s practice meant their own profit.)

But society at large has not condoned such practices. Society has held that people ought to be honest and reliable. Persons have been held to be responsible beings, expected to contribute in some way to the general welfare.

What is new is. that society at large seems to have abandoned the expectation that its members will behave with consideration for the rights and needs of others. People no longer trust one another to do what is right. The basic assumption is that everyone will be concerned in the first place with his own interests. No one is trusted to act with integrity. The expectation is that people will further their own ends and that the only sensible policy is to take steps to see that one’s own interests do not suffer.

This has far-reaching effects. People accept jobs and then don’t turn up for them. Employers promise conditions and then do not stand by their word. TV cameras are installed to watch for bank robbers but also to keep an eye on customers in stores. And on the staff. An article in a Melbourne newspaper (I live in Australia) recently pointed out that industry and commerce suffer far greater losses these days from staff than from all the shop-lifting customers plus burglars.

Where there is no written contract, or where the contract is loosely written, or where the contract can be broken without serious penalty, then it is common for the contract not to be honored. The fine print tends to get longer and fuller as people try to guard against this tendency, and, of course, more and more ingenuity is expended in getting round it. The assumption is widely accepted that it makes no sense, as W. C. Fields reportedly said, to give a sucker an even break.

This extends to national politics. It is rare these days to find leaders who can count on the loyalty of their colleagues and supporters through thick and thin. This means that a lot of time and energy must be spent in guarding against the stab in the back. And that in turn means that time and energy that ought to be spent in solving great national problems are spent instead on mere survival.

On the international level it is not much better. We have advanced here from “no trust” to total skepticism. Nobody seems to believe anybody anymore. Traditionally, people in Australia have been skeptical about statements made by totalitarian regimes, but they have felt that official statements made by responsible spokesmen in the democracies were different. While perhaps “open” government was too much to hope for, at least our elected governments would not lie. Not any longer. There have been too many instances in which lying has been elevated to the status of a policy.

Some have rebelled against the values commonly accepted throughout society. They have seen society as hopelessly materialistic and have rejected the whole set-up. But the hippie movement has been no more conspicuous for unselfishness than has society at large. It has had a different scale of values but an incurable determination to pursue its own way, no matter the cost to others.

There is a grim nemesis about all this. People have rejected the Christian way, denouncing it as hopelessly impractical. “It just won’t work.” In its place they have evolved a system that is its own condemnation. The ethic of selfishness, issuing in a “no trust” society as it has, can scarcely be said to have proved practical.

It is time for Christians to take a hard look at what they stand for. It is not easy to see what they are doing in a “no trust” society, for their whole system is built on trust. At the heart of their religion there is a cross, and the cross means that human beings are sinners and need a Saviour. The cross is God’s answer to the problem of man’s sin. It is God’s way of making it clear that sin is an evil thing (our modern selfishness as well as every other sin). And it is God’s way of saying that the final word is not with sin but with love.

Love is the greatest thing in the world, even in a stupid “no trust” world like ours. Love can take the sinner in all his sin and cleanse and free him. Love can produce the radical change that the Bible calls being born all over again. Love means a death to the whole way of selfishness. Love means a new start.

But unless a person is prepared to trust God, none of this happens. The Gospel is eloquent of God’s love. It opens up a new and power-filled way for a person to live. But the answer to the question “What must I do to be saved?” is still, “Believe.” Without trust in God we are back on our own efforts, and our own efforts have consistently let us down. But if we do trust in God, then his love takes over, and the miracle of rebirth takes place.

And when a person trusts God, one of the things that happens is that he becomes trustworthy. This is the thing that Christians must keep saying to a “no trust” society. Let us forget our petty defenses of our entrenched prejudices. That is not our task. Our task is rather so to trust that we can be trusted. Thus may we cast our vote for a “full trust” society.

A number of subscribers have asked us how they can tell from the mailing label on the magazine when their subscription expires. We’ll gladly break the code. The data line across the top of the label ends with the letters ITG and a number. If that number is, for example, 30, the subscription has thirty issues (or roughly fifteen months) to go. ITG means Issues To Go. Simple, isn’t it?

I want to commend John Chancellor of NBC for his gracious and fair retraction of his earlier statement that Billy Graham approved of the ordination of practicing homosexuals (for a report on what Graham really said, see our August 29 issue, page 47). Mr. Chancellor got caught in an unintentional misstatement. He has now set the record straight. May we all—CT included—be willing to admit our goofs.

Catholic Pentecostals in Ireland now outnumber Protestant Pentecostals, according to observers. Moreover, there has been significant cooperation between Catholics and Protestants involved in the so-called charismatic renewal movement—a development virtually unprecedented in Irish church history. The number of the movement’s conferences and centers, committees, charismatic prayer groups—and critics—has grown considerably in the last two years.

More than 1,200 people registered for the first National Conference on Charismatic Renewal in Ireland held in Dublin a year ago. Planners were expecting at least twice that number and possibly as many as 5,000 at this month’s annual conference. Major addresses were to be given by Cardinal Leon Joseph Suenens of Belgium and by Presbyterian minister Tom Smail, the newly appointed director of the Fountain Trust in Great Britain (see following story). A variety of workshops were to be led by teams of Catholics and Protestants.

Several Protestant and Catholic charismatic leaders combined forces and funds last year to establish a Christian Renewal Centre at Rostrevor in Northern Ireland. Rostrevor is a small village about halfway between Belfast and Dublin, the capitals of the “two Irelands,” north and south. The project is under the leadership of Anglican cleric Cecil Kerr of the Church of Ireland, a former chaplain at Queen’s University in Belfast.

Now, a year later, nine people from several different denominations live in community at the Rostrevor center. Each member of the group, including Kerr, receives about $8.80 a week for spending money; all else is communal. The center stresses faith living with no prescribed income or endowment. According to Kerr, the purpose of the center “is to provide a place of prayer, of renewal and reconciliation for people from all traditions in Ireland. We believe that Ireland’s problems can only be solved when we come together to receive the reconciliation which Christ has wrought for us on the cross.” He projects that the center eventually will house twelve residents with room for about twenty visitors.

To coordinate the national conferences, help to found other renewal centers in Ireland, and foster renewal in the country in general, a ten-person National Service Committee was set up earlier this year. Its seven Catholic and three Protestant members come from all parts of Ireland. The three Protestants are Kerr, Presbyterian deaconness Yvonne Cooke from Northern Ireland, and Joy Marston, an Anglican from the Republic. Among Catholics on the committee are Larry Kelly, a businessman from Newtownabbey in Northern Ireland and one of the first Catholics involved in the renewal in Ulster; Father Martin Tierney, chaplain at the Dublin airport and a leading figure in the charismatic movement in that city; and Dublin businessman Thomas Flynn, the author of a recent controversial volume entitled The Charismatic Renewal and the Irish Experience (Hodder and Stoughton, 1974). Overall, the committee lineup lists two clergymen, one nun, one monk, and six laypersons.

Extensive lay participation has been one of the marks of the renewal movement in both the Republic and Northern Ireland. In the south, leadership is about evenly divided between priests, nuns, monks, and the laity. Father Tierney says that more and more lay people are getting involved, many of them thinking and acting for themselves religiously for the first time. “That’s why many Irish Catholic bishops are skeptical of the movement,” he said in an interview.

In Northern Ireland, most of the leaders are either laypeople (from various churches) or Protestant clergymen. Few Catholic priests have participated, and the Catholic hierarchy in the north is generally suspicious if not hostile.

In both north and south, the number of charismatic prayer groups is increasing steadily. The largest of many such groups in Ireland is the Eustace Street prayer meeting in Dublin. Beginning in January, 1972, with twelve people at a different location, a large throng now gathers every Friday evening at the Friends Meeting House on Eustace Street for a service of prayer, praise, hymn-singing, Bible-reading, testimonies, speaking in tongues, interpretation, and prophecy. At one recent meeting more than 700 attended, and some 150 were turned away for lack of space. Most of those who attend are Catholics. There is a sprinkling of Anglicans, Presbyterians, mainline Pentecostals, and Plymouth Brethren.

Charismatic prayer meetings in Northern Ireland are not as large as those in the south. Significantly, however, they are one of the few forums in strife-torn Ulster where Protestants and Catholics gather for extended periods of open communication. The meetings follow much the same pattern as charismatic prayer groups anywhere. The largest of them reportedly is the Antrim Road group in Belfast which attracts from sixty to a hundred people weekly. According to one northern leader, scores of similar but smaller weekly prayer groups meet all over Ulster, most of them numbering from twenty to forty in attendance.

The prayer groups in the north differ from those in the south in that they are predominantly Protestant. As in the south, the majority of charismatics are from the majority faith. However, Catholic participation in the north has grown dramatically since Catholics first became involved in the renewal there in 1971.

Director Smail of the Fountain Trust, a Presbyterian pastor in Ulster at the time, was one of the early leaders of the movement among Protestants in the north. Initially, Presbyterians took the lead in the spread of the renewal. However, Smail reports that today the charismatic movement is growing faster among Catholics than among any other group in Northern Ireland. Further, he indicated that it is growing faster among Methodists and Anglicans than among Presbyterians, who tend to be the most resistant to the movement among the mainline Protestant denominations (except perhaps for the Baptists, a much smaller group than the Presbyterians).

Smail stressed that in the charismatic movement in Northern Ireland “the situation is fluid and growing, and currently exists under a certain amount of threat.” Other charismatic leaders in Ulster agreed with his assessment. The Catholic hierarchy and denominational leaders are wary of the movement, and militants on both sides dislike the fraternizing between Catholics and Protestants.

But even under the “threat,” a number of significant breakthroughs have been reported in Protestant-Catholic relationships in charismatic meetings. For example, at one gathering in Belfast a young Catholic girl whose close relative had been murdered by Protestant militants embraced a Protestant girl whose brother had been killed by the Irish Republican Army. In another instance, a rough, hard-drinking, nominally Protestant shipyard worker was converted at a recent charismatic gathering in Rostrevor. After receiving the baptism of the Spirit he confessed his former hatred of “Taigs” (Catholics) and announced: “I think I used to be the most bigoted man in the Belfast shipyards, but the Holy Spirit seemed to come into my life and push the hate right out.”

But not all is sweetness and light. Critics of the movement have increased in recent months. Father Tierney in Dublin frankly admits that most of the Irish bishops “would like for it to go away.” Firebrand Ian R. K. Paisley, Ulster’s best-known preacher-politician and minister of the large and influential Martyr’s Memorial Free Presbyterian Church in Belfast, has spoken against the charismatics.

Herbert M. Carson, a leading Irish Baptist minister, questions the movement’s doctrinal base and expresses concern that Protestant charismatics are unwilling to come to grips with Catholic charismatics’ adherence to Rome’s teachings on the papacy and the Virgin Mary. Other Baptists and many Presbyterians criticize the movement for emphasizing experience and the subjective without a counterbalancing stress on doctrinal and scriptural objectivity.

In response, Father Tierney asserts that the movement is interested not in doctrinal wrangling but in “a real mingling of heart with heart, united in the heart of Christ,” and “in learning to live together and love together in a deeper way through the power of the Spirit.”

Other charismatic leaders frankly admit there are unresolved problems of Protestant-Catholic relationships and doctrine. But they emphasize that the renewal is thoroughly evangelical in that it stresses repentance and commitment to Christ as essentials of the Christian life. “The last thing we want and the last thing Ireland needs is a new denomination,” Kerr declared in an interview. He insisted that after the Holy Spirit breaks down the walls “the doctrine will follow.”

For the moment, Tom Flynn’s observation about the spiritual and social dynamics of the movement in Ireland appears to be largely true: “The most important universal feature of the charismatic renewal is that it is bringing Christians of all denominations together in a new and exciting way.” Still to be demonstrated, however, is the renewal’s power to sweep away the memory of the Irish past, silence the guns of the terrorists, and create the kind of trust necessary to solve the present conflict in Ireland.

PREPARED

Retired Foursquare pastor Melville S. Taylor had often said that when it came time for him to die he wanted the Lord to take him while he was preaching. Last month he was guest preacher at Baseview Assembly of God church in Emerado, North Dakota. He said when he started to preach that he hadn’t realized until then what the Lord wanted him to talk about, commented Steven Robbins, Baseview’s pastor. “Then he talked about eternal life. He stated in his message that he loved his family, but that if the Lord chose to take him home he was prepared to go right now.”

A moment later, said Robbins, the 71-year-old Taylor collapsed and fell from the podium, apparently having suffered a heart attack. Attempts to revive him failed.

Taylor’s long-standing wish had been honored.

Charismatic Concerns

A number of important meetings of charismatics were held last month.

In London, the Fountain Trust—Britain’s leading charismatic organization—brought together 1,800 persons for a five-day conference that stressed among other things charismatic involvement in social action. Among the speakers were Archbishop Bill Burnett of Cape Town, South Africa; Jesuit theologian Paul Lebeau, an aide to Belgium’s Cardinal Leon Josef Suenens; Bishop Chiu Ban It of Singapore; Dominican priest Francis MacNutt of St. Louis, one of the first Catholic Pentecostals to be involved in a healing ministry; and Anglican cleric Michael Harper, 44, founder of Fountain Trust.

Burnett, reports correspondent Michael Garde, disclosed that he had received the “baptism in the Spirit” when he became an archbishop and that the experience had turned him around theologically and socially. It had been easy to support the oppressed and to attack the government, but it was something else to love the oppressor, he said. Vast structural changes need to occur in South Africa if Christian justice is to be achieved, he told a press conference. But, he asserted, it is primarily people who must be changed by the Holy Spirit. Otherwise, “you change the furniture but don’t change what happens in the room.”

Lebeau told how he had moved from pacifism into Marxism but how the charismatic experience led him to seek ways to be truly Christian apart from any ideological movement. (Most discussion groups, while endorsing justice and liberation from oppressors, condemned the use of violence in obtaining social goals.)

On another topic, Harper acknowledged that division exists between Protestant and Catholic charismatics (Catholic participants had their own daily mass and did not participate in the communion service that concluded the conference) and between charismatic and non-charismatic evangelicals. He stressed the need for continuing communication and for grappling with the theological issues.

It was Harper’s last speech as director of Fountain Trust. He announced his retirement, saying he wants to devote more time to study and writing and perhaps take on pastoral responsibilities. An aide, Presbyterian clergyman Tom Smail of Northern Ireland, was named as his successor.

Conferences of Catholic charismatics attracted 450 to Manchester, England, 3,500 to San Diego, 6,000 to Detroit, and others were scheduled this month and next. Joyous occasions, they nevertheless were held against an ominous backdrop of increasingly vocal criticism of the movement. Critics in some Catholic circles think the church’s bishops ought to investigate the movement to determine how Catholic and how responsible it is.

In Minneapolis, an estimated 20,000 attended the fourth International Lutheran Conference on the Holy Spirit—the largest crowd yet. Catholics were the most numerous among the one-third non-Lutheran registrants. The sponsoring committee, made up of clergy and laypersons from the three main Lutheran bodies, is chaired by Larry Christenson, an American Lutheran Church pastor of San Pedro, California. Richard Denny, a St. Paul, Minnesota, businessman, was named to a full-time post as executive secretary.

A recurring theme emphasized by a number of the speakers: Stay in your church and be an instrument for new life and love. Also stressed was the need for charismatics to get involved in social action. Said Christenson: “When a concern for the needs of the world is matched with a concern to discern the will of the Lord as to how, when, and where to minister to that need, we [will] see a charismatic explosion in the social arena.”

Lausanne: Continuing The Action

Meeting for the first time since the Lausanne Continuation Committee’s first executive secretary assumed his post, the LCC’s executive committee instructed him to put a high priority on regional and local action. Gottfried Osei-Mensah, a Ghanaian who left the pastorate of the Nairobi First Baptist Church for the international post, was assigned itineration duties around the globe during the coming year.

First on his agenda will be a November meeting of the South American participants in last year’s evangelism congress in Lausanne. The Rio de Janeiro meeting will be convened by Nilson Fanini, a Brazilian Baptist pastor.

At the sessions, which took place in London, the executive committee heard reports from a national congress on evangelism held in Nigeria in August as a direct outcome of the Lausanne congress. It was attended by 1,000 participants from twenty-seven denominations. A number of topics were discussed, including “Christianity as an African religion,” and these discussions became the basis for a declaration of evangelical faith and action in Nigeria.

In another action, the panel directed that the committee’s information function be expanded to include, among other things, the publication of a bulletin to report on evangelistic work. An initial bulletin was published in April after the LCC’s first gathering in Mexico City. It went only to registered Lausanne participants. In London, the executive committee directed that circulation and coverage be enlarged.

The next meeting of the full LCC was planned for January 1976 in Atlanta.

Incarceration In Korea

Four prominent South Korean clergymen, including the general secretary of the Korean National Council of Churches (KNCC), received jail sentences of six to ten months for improper use of foreign relief funds.

The four are: KNCC head Kim Kwan Suk, a Presbyterian; Pastor Park Hyung Kyu of Seoul’s First Presbyterian Church, who is a leader of the Seoul Metropolitan Community Organization (SMCO); Kwon Ho Kyung, assistant pastor of Park’s church; and Cho Seung Hyok, a Methodist associated with the SMCO.

They were accused by the government of embezzling a slum-work grant of $47,000 from a West German organization, Bread for the World. The trial established that most of the money was used for community-organization projects among slum-dwellers instead of for food or other aid. Some of the money went to families of imprisoned opponents of the government, part of it for living expenses, part of it to hire lawyers. The prosecution insisted that the money has been misappropriated—even though a Bread for the World representative testified that the use of the funds fell within their intended purpose. The judge dismissed the embezzlement charges but found them guilty of misuse of the money.

The four have been in trouble with the government in the past over issues of repression and freedom; Park was sentenced to prison on two earlier occasions.

Nearly two dozen missionaries and about 300 others, among them a number of Christians, were in court this month when the sentences were announced. Afterward, some of them gathered outside and began singing “We shall overcome,” but police scuffled with them and dispersed them after only a few minutes.

Mozambique: Missionaries Jailed

Three American missionaries were still in prison in Mozambique at mid-month. They are: Armond Doll, 59, and Hugh Fryberg, 32, both with the Church of the Nazarene, and Donald Milam, a youth associated with Teen Challenge. Details were sketchy because of a lack of diplomatic relations between the United States and Mozambique. Milam was apparently jailed in July for handing out tracts, and the other two were arrested in August, reportedly for making religious broadcasts.

Mozambique gained its independence from Portugal in June. Almost immediately, FRELIMO—a black liberation movement that is now the ruling political party—began building a socialist state. Religion was declared to be a divisive force in the life of the nation, and a number of restrictive measures were laid down. Infant baptism was banned, apparently in retaliation against the Catholic Church for its strong ties to the former Portuguese colonial government. Mission schools, hospitals, and other property were nationalized, and funds were frozen.

Most missionaries had slipped out of the African nation by the end of last month. Some narrowly escaped arrest after selling their vehicles and other property that the government declared it now owned.

East Africa: Revival Revisited

After sweeping across tribal, national, linguistic, and denominational lines for more than four decades, the East African Revival movement still appears to be alive and very well.

Two conventions of the movement were held this August, one at Butere, Kenya, and another at Kabale, Uganda. Peak attendance at each of them was estimated to be over 25,000.

One of the speakers at Kabale was Joseph Church of London, a retired Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) worker who was one of two men generally credited with leading the original revival. Starting in Uganda in the 1930s, the spiritual fires spread into neighboring Ruanda, then back into parts of Uganda that had not been touched originally. Then it moved into Kenya, Tanzania, and other East African areas.

The conventions are held at ten-year intervals and in various locations. This year’s was the fourth. They have been characterized by exuberant singing, sacrificial giving in preparation by host groups, and hundreds of conversions of the curious who were attracted by the joy and excitement. Many people have traveled long distances on foot to attend.

This year’s meeting at Kabale was a combined jubilee celebration of the fiftieth year of gospel preaching in that section of western Uganda and the fortieth year of the revival’s influence. The convenor was Festo Kivengere, Anglican bishop of Kabale. “Christ’s Love Reconciles Us” was the theme, and observers say that a number of participants long at odds with each other were reconciled during the meeting.

General Secretary William Butler of the CMS Ruanda Mission gave the opening Bible messages each morning. The rest of the program was determined on a day-to-day basis by a team of 100 who met twice daily to seek the Holy Spirit’s guidance. While some overseas personnel were involved, most of the 100 were African. Clergymen, whose ranks included an archbishop and nine bishops, were outnumbered by laymen.

According to estimates, over half of those at the Kabale gathering were under twenty-five.

About 2,000 guests came from outside the immediate area. Part of their food came from crops planted by host churches many months ago specifically for the convention. Among the visitors were Christians from other areas of East Africa as well as people from seven nations on other continents.

Loose Ends

After six years of court battles, Kirby J. Hensley and his mail-order Universal Life Church were cleared of all charges in California. A San Jose municipal judge dismissed a $625 fine and a one-year suspended sentence against Hensley involving a 1969 conviction for selling courses from a non-accredited institution. The conviction was overturned by a federal appeals court in 1973, but the loose ends were not cleared up until last month.

Hensley, 63, a one-time Baptist preacher and self-designated “bishop” of the Universal Life Church, claims to have ordained more than two million people by mail and issued some 10,000 honorary doctor of divinity degrees at a charge of $20 each. Last year a court ruled that Hensley’s “church” is entitled to federal tax exemption.

Playing With Numbers

Father Joseph F. Lupo of the Most Holy Trinity Fathers in Garrison, Maryland, got a lot of press attention after he placed a $9,000 ad in the January, 1972, issue of Playboy. The ad was aimed at attracting recruits to the priesthood.

Playboy last month used the ad as the basis for full-page ads in several large dailies to promote the magazine. Downright irreverent, scolded Lupo. And also in error. The Playboy display boasted that Lupo’s ad had produced some 600 applicants within a few weeks time. While the ad generated a number of inquiries on a variety of topics, explained Lupo, the number of applicants within a year’s time was only thirty-five.

Religion In Transit

The National Courier, a 48-page biweekly Christian tabloid newspaper, will make its initial appearance with the October 7 edition. To be published in Plainfield, New Jersey, its first press run will be 500,000 copies, according to a Courier spokesman. The editor-in-chief is Robert Slosser, a former editor in the New York Times Washington bureau. Logos International, which publishes charismatic literature, is sponsoring the paper. But, says Logos head Dan Malachuk, the paper will be aimed at a broad audience.

Nearly 100 voluntary agencies, including eighteen religious ones, received a total of $688 million from private sources and $260 million from the U. S. government last year, according to a government report. The contributions were in the form of cash, food, supplies, and equipment. Catholic Relief Services, Church World Service, and CARE distributed the “overwhelming bulk of the amount of aid,” said a government source.

Thirty-three churches, all but three of them Baptist, reported average Sunday-school attendance of 2,000 or more in the annual Christian Life tabulation of the nation’s 100 largest Sunday schools. There were only twelve in the top bracket eight years ago, says Sunday-school editor Elmer Towns. In the first place is First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana, which reported an average attendance of 13,561.

Most of Hartford Seminary Foundation’s library was sold to the Candler School of Theology of Emory University, a United Methodist School in Atlanta. The $1.7 million transaction involved 215,000 volumes. Hartford kept 45,000 volumes (its archives, an Islamic studies collection, and books on clergy training and parish life). Hartford dropped its traditional seminary curriculum in 1973 in favor of a continuing education program for clergy.

A motion to endorse the United Methodist Church’s stance against homosexuality was defeated at a recent national seminar of the Women’s Division of the denomination’s Board of Global Ministries, attended by more than 300 persons. The denomination rejects homosexual practice as “incompatible with Christian teachings.” The women’s unit also announced it will monitor primetime TV to determine how it affects the “socialization of women.”

The Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, a gay-church denomination with nearly 100 congregations, is sponsoring a bicentennial program dubbed Affirmation ’76. The program will culminate in a Washington, D. C., meeting affirming the rights of homosexuals to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” say leaders. (More than 1,000 persons attended the group’s sixth annual conference last month in Dallas.)

As expected, Harvey Stegemoeller resigned as president of Concordia College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Teachers and students asked him to reconsider, but Stegemoeller—a critic of the conservative policies in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod—feels hemmed in by the mandates of his now conservative board.

Kimberly Ann Jensen, a high-school sophomore of Caldwell, Idaho, was crowned recently Miss National Teenager. A Mormon, she says hopes to use her extensive travel opportunities “to be a really good missionary [and] to talk about the gospel.”

In May, 1973, only 3 per cent of Soviet Jewish emigrants went to countries other than Israel, but that figure is now 45 per cent, and most of these are choosing the United States, say authorities. Reasons include the high cost of living in Israel, fear of war, and the good life in America.

Personalia

Denominational executive Norman D. Fintel, 50, of the American Lutheran Church was named to the presidency of 1,200-student Roanoke College, an ALC school in Salem, Virginia.

United Methodist evangelism executive Joe Hale, 40, was selected to succeed Lee F. Tuttle as general secretary of the World Methodist Council. Tuttle will retire next year. The council is composed of sixty-one Methodist/Wesleyan denominations in eighty-seven countries. Hale’s selection is subject to confirmation at a meeting of the council next summer in Dublin.

Dean Richard Gross of Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, will succeed Harold John Ockenga as president of the school next spring. Ockenga will become chancellor.

“WOUSA [Word Over the U. S. A.] by 1976.” The Word is the Bible as interpreted by Victor Paul Wierwille, 58, a former United Church of Christ minister and founder of The Way International, based in New Knoxville, Ohio, and the slogan heralds the goal of his zealous followers. If enthusiasm and rate of expansion are indicative, a lot of Americans are going to get the word about The Way in the coming months.

In 1957 Wierwille, a Princeton Seminary graduate, resigned his Van Wert, Ohio, pulpit to launch an independent ministry. Two years later the work was moved to the family farm near New Knoxville, and during the intervening sixteen years the movement gained an estimated 20,000 adherents, distributed among all fifty states and thirty-three foreign countries, say its leaders. (The Way has no official membership, and officials consider the estimate conservative.) Circulation of The Way magazine has increased fourfold, from 2,500 to 10,000 over the past 3½ years. Last year 1,033 “WOW [Word Over the World] Ambassadors” were dispatched to the midwest, south, and southwest sectors of the nation for a year of missionary service. More than twice that number—2,077—were commissioned in August for duty in eastern United States, Canada, and Germany, and 104 “Minute Men” (seasoned troops) received western U. S. assignments. Outside observers say Wierwille’s group did not begin to grow appreciably until he began foraging for leaders among Jesus-movement converts in the late 1960s.

Students for Wierwille’s video-taped PFAL (Power For Abundant Living) course reportedly are being recruited at the rate of 1,000 per month—at the going rate of $85 for the twelve three-hour sessions. This fall, The Way College of Emporia (Kansas) opened with more than 400 students. Administered by Wierwille’s son Donald, a former elementary school principal, the institution is offering a curriculum in biblical studies, without accreditation and without the authority to confer degrees. The Way failed in its effort to transfer the accredited status of the school when it was purchased from United Presbyterians last year (see December 20, 1974, issue, page 28). Leaders are negotiating with nearby schools in hopes of achieving accreditation through some sort of tandem arrangement. When renovation projects are completed in another year or two, The Way will have invested $2.5 million in the Emporia facility, say spokesmen.

The first “Rock of Ages Christian Music Festival,” a sort of national convention of the movement, was held at the New Knoxville farm in 1971 with an attendance of 1,000. In 1974, at a county fairgrounds, there were 5,500 full-time registrants plus several thousand part-timers who attended evening sessions. At last month’s four-day edition of “Rock of Ages,” held at a fairgrounds in nearby Lima, more than 8,300 attended (admission: $25). The faithful came in chartered buses and planes and in all varieties of motor vehicles from most of the fifty states and a dozen foreign countries. Area motels were jammed, and hundreds of truck campers and brightly colored tents accommodated the overflow. Although 80 per cent were young people, adult attendance was up significantly over previous years, according to publicity director David Craley.

Critics have accused The Way of fostering a permissive life-style. But although cigarette smoking was prevalent, alcohol, drugs, sexual permissiveness, and profanity were not in evidence. A mood of love and joy characterized the gathering, and “God bless you” or simply “Bless you” were standard greetings. Informal one-to-one sharing sessions and prayer huddles were frequent. Non-uniformed security guards were posted at strategic locations; they were particularly in evidence at the area circumscribed by The Way’s “company cars”: four mobile homes, a shiny new black Cadillac limousine, and the renowned Harley-Davidson motorcycle on which “Doctor,” as Wierwille is affectionately known, tools around the country. Bumper stickers and slogans adorned many vehicles; one truck was inscribed with the title of Wierwille’s most recent book, “Jesus Christ is NOT God.”

The freewheeling daytime schedule provided options for every age group: supervised activities at the children’s center, a coffeehouse for teens and young adults, and an adult pavilion for over-thirties. Two dramas played to packed houses each morning and afternoon. Exhibits, films, and a well-stocked bookstore attracted hundreds of browsers, and several bus tours departed daily for the New Knoxville headquarters.

Evening meetings featured the 500-voice Way Chorale Internationale, gospel-rock musicians, special dramatic and musical events, and a number of speakers (including Lima mayor Harry Moyer, Maine state senator Hayes Gahagan, and Wierwille—whose expected Sunday-night crowd of 10,000 was greatly reduced by heavy rain showers).

According to a publicity folder, The Way “is not a church, nor is it a denomination or a religious sect of any sort.” Yet the organization’s fifty ordained clergy (five of whom are women) are authorized to perform marriages. Way doctrines combine forms of biblical literalism (“The Word of God means what it says and says what it means”), evangelicalism (salvation is entirely by grace—through faith in the Virgin-born, crucified, resurrected, and ascended Son of God), Calvinism (once a person is saved he cannot become unsaved), dispensationalism (the Gospels belong in the Old Testament; only those New Testament epistles addressed to the Church apply to believers today—although the remainder of the Bible is “for our learning”), and Pentecostalism (the nine spiritual gifts of First Corinthians are operable today; tongues and healing are stressed).

Wierwille agrees with Jehovah’s Witnesses that the Trinity doctrine is contrary to Scripture (Jesus is the Son of God but not God; the Holy Spirit is a designation for God—and “holy spirit” is the power conferred at Pentecost). He teaches that human beings do not have immortal souls; they remain dead upon physical death until the final resurrections: the first is the resurrection of life, when Christ comes for his saints (only believers during the church age—after Pentecost—will be saved); the second is the resurrection of damnation, when Christ comes with his saints (after the millennium).

With Herbert W. Armstrong (who also denies the Trinity, the personality of the Holy Spirit, and the immortality of the soul), Wierwille teaches that Christ was crucified on Wednesday and raised on Saturday. He adds Matthew’s two robbers to Luke’s two malefactors and gets four crucifixions in addition to that of Jesus. He concurs with the Witnesses and with Armstrong in the teaching that the victims died upon stakes rather than crosses. The “new heaven and new earth” of Revelation 21 will occur when Paradise is restored upon the earth.

The Way International observes no special day of worship, although Wierwille holds forth at the headquarters chapel each Sunday night. Meetings are held in homes and borrowed halls. Water baptism is not practiced (unless requested), and is replaced by Holy Spirit baptism. The Lord’s Supper, however, is observed. Christmas and Easter are relegated to secondary status, while Pentecost is celebrated as the most important of the Christian festivals.

Wierwille has defined an apostle as “one who brings new light to his generation.” Since he himself claims to have received audible communications from God, presumably he fulfills this role. He is apparently viewed as such by his followers. Paradoxically, at Lima he both encouraged and discouraged the apostolic image—the former, by riding to the opening session in a golf cart, which delivered him amid the tumultuous cheers of his disciples to the elevated box constructed for his family; the latter, by declaring to the audience (at an impromptu session in the grandstand when the open-air meeting was rained out on the second night), “I don’t want you to be ‘Wierwillites’—I want you to be God’s Lights!”

Elena Whiteside in The Way, a book published by the organization in 1972, quotes one convert as saying, “I see Dr. Wierwille as the next man of God to rise up after Paul’s death.” Another believer remarked, “Nowhere else can you get this knowledge of how to read and understand God’s Word.” Wierwille himself, she asserted, related the circumstances of his call in this fashion: “I was praying.… And that’s when he spoke to me audibly, just like I’m talking to you now. He said he would teach me the Word as it had not been known since the first century if I would teach it to others.”

Critics say they don’t know whose voice Wierwille heard, but they assert their certainty about something else: the word according to Wierwille was not known in the first century either.

RED LIGHT EXHIBIT

Evangelistic worker James Hayes didn’t stand on a box and preach hell-fire-and-damnation at the recent fair in Carroll County, Maryland, but he got the point across anyway—through modern technology. Hayes, who managed an evangelistic booth at the fair, administered an electronic test to the curious who visited the booth. The test consisted of five questions on the New Testament. If all were answered correctly, sky-blue lights came on spelling “Heaven.” If there was one wrong answer, fiery red lights flashed the word “Hell,” ending the test.

Only twenty out of 220 persons passed the test, Hayes told Washington Star reporter William F. Willoughby. That means a lot of people are going to hell, he commented.

Willoughby suggested that maybe God isn’t using the same computer.

PEDAL PUSHING

On October 13, 1974, four young men active in the American Lutheran Church departed Detroit on ten-speed bikes in a cross-country project aimed at supporting a special ALC mission offering. On August 5–297 days, 8,334 miles, and 120 flat tires later—they arrived in La Paz, Bolivia. They had to fly between Panama City and Cali, Colombia, because there are no roads, and they drove the last thirty miles by bus after a damaged wheel on one of the bikes collapsed. The youths, who handed out Spanish-language tracts as they traveled, said they better understood the church’s mission and themselves as a result of the trip. They also commented about the warmth and acceptance they received from people along the way.

The four are: John Cross, 24, and Jim Oines, 25, both seminarians at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota; Peter Crane, 21, of Ventura, California; and Jeff Stoopes, 22, a worker with Lutheran Youth Alive in Los Angeles.

(So far, about $36 million in gifts and pledges have been received in the special ALC offering, according to reports.)

Slandered

Evangelist Oliver B. (Jerry) Owen, 62, was awarded $35,000 in a $1.4 million slander suit against television station KCOP in Los Angeles. Owen, who has an Assemblies of God background, is known as “the Walking Bible” for his ability to quote verbatim the 31,173 verses of the King James version of the Bible.

KCOP executive John Hopkins was accused of making defamatory statements in 1969 as an explanation to viewers wanting to know why the evangelist’s program had been canceled. Hopkins claimed Owen was involved in the killing of Robert F. Kennedy and was a thief who burned down churches.

Owen had told police in 1968 that he’d picked up Sirhan B. Sirhan, Kennedy’s killer, as a hitchhiker two days before the slaying, but the police concluded that he had made up the story to seek publicity.

The trial judge said Hopkins was wrong in calling Owen a thief when Owen had been only “accused” of taking goods from a store. The judge also said the church-burning comment ignored the fact that Owen’s arson conviction in the early 1960s had been overturned on appeal.

Owen earlier won $55,000 in a 1972 suit against the northern California district of the Assemblies of God, which he said solicited false testimony to convict him of arson for burning down a Tucson, Arizona, church in 1963, the case he won on appeal. He has frequently been at odds with the Assemblies because of publicity over charges of adultery, shoplifting, and child abandonment.

Texas Roundup

About one hundred years after the first settlers moved into the area and took up cattle ranching, evangelist Billy Graham arrived in town to conduct a spiritual roundup.

In all, there were 7,000 decisions for Christ, half of them professions of faith, according to officials at the eight-day campaign in Lubbock, a city of 150,000 in the heart of west Texas. Crowds averaged better than 30,000 per meeting, and the 47,000-seat stadium on the campus of Texas Tech University was filled for the final Sunday-night rally.

“A great sense of ecumenicity,” observed one reporter in describing how churches of a variety of denominations pitched in to make the crusade an evangelistic success. Teams of speakers and musicians fanned out to jails, shopping malls, club meetings, and the like in a concentrated, cooperative outreach effort throughout the eight days. Pastors spoke of how the crusade had united them for the first time and how they planned to keep the fires of fellowship burning. Many of the 500-plus churches involved in the crusade reported there were new faces at worship services, requests for baptism and membership, and expressions of personal renewal because of the crusade. A large number of persons participated in the 3,000 pre-crusade prayer groups that met in some forty cities and towns across the west Texas plains.

A concurrent school of evangelism sponsored by the Graham organization brought together 1,100 pastors and seminarians and their wives from thirteen states and five foreign countries.

Even though Lubbock was not incorporated until the early 1900s, and despite the independent spirit for which Texans are noted, its citizens are engaged in a number of local projects to honor America’s bicentennial. At one of the Crusade rallies, John Warner, the head of the national bicentennial administration and a former secretary of the Navy, commented briefly on America’s spiritual heritage. Appropriately, said he, July 4, 1976, falls on a Sunday, and he implied that America’s Christians ought to make the most of it.

On August 29, two days before the Lubbock crusade began, assault charges against Graham’s wife were dismissed by a judge in Charlotte, North Carolina. The charges had been lodged by Daniel L. Pollock, 27, who alleged that Ruth Graham took from him a protest sign he was carrying during a May 20 speech by President Ford at a Charlotte park. Pollock, said the judge, failed to prove that Mrs. Graham had assaulted him. Graham said he was delighted by the verdict, and he told how his wife “day after day … earnestly prayed for the young man.”

As Pollock and Mrs. Graham left the courtroom she pulled a brown Bible from her pocketbook and offered it to him. Pollock smiled but declined to take it.

“I’ll be praying for you,” said Mrs. Graham.

Orphan Prevention

Snake-handling and the drinking of poison in connection with religious services were banned by the Tennessee Supreme Court. The five justices ruled unanimously that the state “has the right to guard against the unnecessary creation of widows and orphans.”

Liston Pack, a lay pastor of the Holiness Church of God in Jesus’ Name near Newport in eastern Tennessee, had been barred by a county court from handling or exhibiting poisonous snakes during services in his church. Several people had died as a result of such rites. The high court’s ruling upheld the injunction against Pack.

Satisfied

The stronger a woman’s religious convictions, the more likely she is to be highly satisfied with the sexual pleasures of marriage, a Redbook survey of 100,000 women shows. “The fundamental difference that distinguishes the non-religious from the strongly religious woman is that the non-religious woman is far more likely to be dissatisfied with every aspect of life,” conclude researchers.

That’s a sharp suit,” my hostess said as I entered her house.

“This suit?” I replied. “I got it a year ago, half-price at a discount store.”

I spoke the truth, but my unconscious motive had been to reject the compliment. I tend to ward off compliments, gifts, helping hands.

I am a minister of the Gospel, and I like to give. It may be inconvenient or exhausting, but I know how to give of myself. My difficulty comes at the other end. To receive graciously another’s help or love or friendship or kindness is hard for me to do.

Ever since a frightening incident a year ago, I’ve been struggling with this matter of giving and receiving. My wife and I had been out for the evening, and on our way home our car was hit from the rear by another car at a stop sign. Shirley had been resting her head on the headrest, and the impact jarred her forward and jerked her head back. She passed out.

Agonizing moments passed while someone called an ambulance. Shirley would come to, then pass out again. The ambulance came, and ten minutes later we were at the hospital. Several other emergency calls had come in just before us, including six victims of a violent car accident, all in critical condition, lying on stretchers. Shirley, seemingly not so seriously hurt, lay on the white-covered stretcher and waited.

Across the hall was a telephone. I hurried over and dialed a number. “Norval,” I blurted out, “Shirley’s been hurt. I don’t know how serious it is. I’m in the emergency room at DeKalb Hospital, waiting for them to examine her. Please pray!”

“Would you like me to come over?”

It was nearly 12:30. “No, it’s too late. Just pray.”

As soon as I hung up, I called Mary and Al Jepson. Mary was a member of our Christian writers’ group. “Mary, please pray with us. And would you call the other members of the group and ask them to pray, too?”

She too offered to come over, but I said, “It’s not necessary. The Lord can hear your prayers at home.”

Then the real waiting started. I found a chair, pulled it up next to the stretcher, and sat down. Another half hour passed. A nurse came by. “I’m sorry, Mr. Murphey, that you’ve had to wait so long. We’re almost through with the other emergencies. It shouldn’t be more than ten minutes more.”

I thanked her and tried to keep praying, to block the horrible thoughts that tried to intrude. Partial paralysis … some kind of permanent damage … unable to walk …

“Cec, there you are!”

I looked around.

“Norval! I told you not to—”

“I heard you. But I wanted to be here.”

“Norval, it’s so late. You’ve already spoiled your night’s sleep and—”

“And I’m here with two people I love,” he said simply. He took my hand and almost crushed my fingers.

Momentarily I turned away because I didn’t know how to respond. I was touched, but an appropriate expression of thanks refused to come out.

As I turned away, I saw someone else coming down the corridor. “Al Jepson!”

He smiled and said, “Got here as soon as I could. Mary’s called everybody in the group.”

“Al, you shouldn’t have—”

“I wanted to be with you, Cec. I know how lonely it can be in the hospital—especially when you don’t know how serious an injury is.”

I had been with many families in waiting rooms or standing in hallways outside intensive-care units. Many times a wife would grab me and hug me and the tears would flow. Or a husband would grip my hands and say over and over, “You don’t know what it means to have you here.” Now I knew. It had happened to me.

Shirley had twisted three vertebrae. She was allowed to go home but was not to leave her bed for thirty-six hours. As I helped her into our car, I tried to say thanks to my friends, but there were no adequate words. I finally mumbled something like, “I appreciate your coming.”

Al replied, “That’s what friends are for.”

That experience made me do a lot of thinking and heart-searching. My philosophy had been that there are basically two kinds of people in the world: the givers and the takers. I counted myself as a giver.

Then, a verse began troubling me. Jesus himself said, “Freely ye have received, freely give” (Matt. 10:8). In that section Jesus also told his disciples to go from place to place and preach the Gospel and to heal the sick. They were to take no money or extra provisions. The people ministered to would minister to their needs.

I ran across another significant passage also. “How grateful I am and how I praise the Lord that you are helping me again,” the Apostle Paul writes. “I know you have always been anxious to send what you could, but for a while you didn’t have the chance” (Phil. 4:10, The Living Bible).

These two passages have continued to work on me. I can no longer say, “Well, I’m a giver” and forget it. I have a responsibility to receive as well. I’ve also been asking why people like me find it hard to take, and I’ve sorted out a few answers.

First, we Christians are continually admonished to give, give, give. Perhaps we are made to feel guilty for not giving more.

Second, being on the receiving end makes me feel obligated. I used to reciprocate quickly when I was given a Christmas card, a meal, a gift, and that freed me from obligation.

Third, receiving humbles me. Our American culture has stressed rugged individualism and self-sufficiency. Those of us who pride ourselves on being strong and self-reliant find it hard to admit our need of help.

But Jesus Christ didn’t call me to be an all-sufficient person who comforts everyone else and then sits alone with his own crises. Givers should also be takers.

Last night Bob offered me a gift. I had admired a sports jacket of his a few days earlier. He went out and bought one for me. It was a sacrifice for him, and I didn’t want to take it.

“Bob, I appreciate it, but you can’t afford it and …”

The words buzzed in my brain again: “Freely ye have received, freely give.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I realize the sacrifice you’ve made in buying this. That makes the gift all the more meaningful.”

He smiled. “I’ve been a Christian fifteen years. And you know what? This is the first time I’ve been able to afford a gift for my pastor.”

After he left I prayed. “Father, help me to accept graciously. I want to give of myself and to be your servant in every possible way. Help me also to be a receiving servant.”—CECIL B. MURPHEY, pastor, Riverdale Presbyterian Church, Riverdale, Georgia.

Mindszenty: Casualty Of Detente

Memoirs, by Józef Cardinal Mindszenty (Macmillan, 1974, 341 pp., $10), is reviewed by Blahoslav S. Hruby, editor, “Religion in Communist Dominated Areas.”

Cardinal Mindszenty’s Memoirs is a most timely reminder to the free world that Communism (of all types and shades), despite present propaganda about detente and peaceful coexistence, remains the most serious danger for a free society. It threatens religious and all other basic freedoms and human rights.

Mindszenty was a courageous man who always stood up for the freedom and rights of his church. Policies of accommodation and collaboration either with the Nazis or with the Communists were alien to him. The Communist authorities of Hungary finally arrested him early in 1949 on charges of treason, espionage, and black-marketeering. He was accused of trying to restore the Habsburg monarchy, of requesting the Western powers to interfere in international affairs of Hungary, of spying for the United States, of engaging in illegal currency transactions, and of other crimes against the state.

“Again and again I forcefully refused when they tried to persuade me to sign their prepared confession,” says Cardinal Mindszenty in describing the five weeks of his ordeal preceding the trial:

Again and again the major took over, dragged me back to the cell where I was stripped, thrown down, and beaten. Just as regularly the guard afterwards tried to intensify the effect of this torture by preventing me from sinking into a sleep of exhaustion.…

The tormentor … held the truncheon in one hand, a long sharp knife in the other. And then he drove me like a horse in training, forcing me to trot and gallop. The truncheon lashed down on my back repeatedly—for some time without a pause. Then we stood still and he brutally threatened: “I’ll kill you; by morning I’ll tear you to pieces and throw the remains of your corpse to the dogs or into canal. We are the masters here now.” Then he forced me to begin running again. Although I was gasping for breath and the splinters of the wooden floor stabbed painfully into my bare feet, I ran as fast as I could to escape his blows [pp. 110, 112].

When the trial of Cardinal Mindszenty and his codefendants began on February 3, 1949, a broken man faced the court. The Communist judges, practicing “social justice” and using the tortures learned from their Soviet and Nazi teachers, extracted a confession in the form they wanted. Mindszenty was condemned to life imprisonment, although the government asked for the death penalty.

During the short-lived Hungarian uprising in the fall of 1956, the cardinal returned from prison in a triumphant procession; but after Soviet tanks crushed the revolution (there was no help from the West!) he found a refuge in the U. S. Embassy in Budapest.

From the Memoirs we learn an interesting detail about the policy of detente as practiced by Nixon and Kissinger. It was not only the Vatican that pressed Cardinal Mindszenty to leave the American Embassy in Budapest for Rome so that the Vatican could arrive easier at some modus vivendi with the Communist government of Hungary. The White House too asked the cardinal to leave the embassy. Nixon and Kissinger apparently believed that the presence there of a refugee of high ecclesiastical status who was involved in the 1956 Hungarian uprising was a stumbling bloc in détente negotiations with the Hungarian and other Communist governments.

The chapter on the Vatican’s negotiations with the cardinal on his leaving the U. S. Embassy is of particular interest and poignancy. Pope Paul VI seemed to be very close to Cardinal Mindszenty and assured him on several occasions that he “will always remain Archbishop of Esztergom and primate of Hungary.” However, personal feelings and the Pope’s promises had to make room for the new Vatican’s Ostpolitik and its policy of détente with Communist governments. On February 5, 1974 (the twenty-fifth anniversary of the cardinal’s show trial!), the Vatican announced the cardinal’s removal from the see of Esztergom. The cardinal authorized his office to issue the following statement: “Cardinal Mindszenty has not abdicated his office as archbishop nor his dignity as primate of Hungary. The decision was taken by the Holy See alone.”

The concluding sentence of the Memoirs reveals the depth of Cardinal Mindszenty’s disillusionment after many years of struggle and suffering: “This is the path I traveled to the end, and this is how I arrived at complete and total exile.” It also underlines the extreme difficulty if not impossibility of finding a proper answer to the questions raised by those who went through the darkness of persecution and long experience of Communist attempts to infiltrate and manipulate the churches. They have, understandably, serious doubts about all attempts to accommodate the Communist regimes through détente and peaceful coexistence.

Cardinal Mindszenty’s Memoirs should be read by every person concerned about churches’ and peoples’ struggle for freedom in Communist countries. It is particularly imperative during the present political and moral climate in this country. President Ford and Secretary Kissinger are making important decisions that remind us of the Munich appeasement. President Ford’s initial refusal to invite Solzhenitsyn to visit him, done at the advice of Kissinger because it would irritate Brezhnev and weaken detente, is an outstanding example of this dangerous policy. Another is President Ford’s participation in the Helsinki Conference.

Pentecostalism, Satanism, Scientology, Etc.

Religious Movements in Contemporary America, edited by Irving I. Zaretsky and Mark P. Leone (Princeton, 1974, 837 pp., $25), is reviewed by Lewis Rambo, assistant professor of psychology, Trinity College, Deerfield, Illinois.

The recent explosion of popular piety in the United States has drawn varied responses. For religious people, the religious revival has pointed to deficiencies within traditional institutions. It has also confirmed their belief that even modern man is in need of spiritual guidance. For many social scientists, the resurgence of religiosity has generated some creative confusion, for it has required them to reexamine their rather rigidly held views on the evolution of society. Orthodox theory in the fields of anthropology, psychology, and sociology held that man was becoming more and more secular in his mode of life and thought; therefore the inevitable demise of religion was confidently predicted. Furthermore, the researcher generally viewed religion as the reflection or residue of the larger processes of culture, society, and personality.

Religious Movements in Contemporary America consists of twenty-seven essays that seek to sketch the contours of the current religious renaissance and to reformulate a theory of religion. The book is a major achievement on both counts. First, it gives extensive reports on field research conducted among such groups as the Hare Krishna movement, Scientology, Satanists, Pentecostals, Mormons, and many others. As participant observers, the authors offer us detailed, and empathetic accounts.

Theoretically, too, the book is important, for it levels major criticisms against the dominant views of religion: that it is (a) a reaction to some form of deprivation (whether social, psychological, or economic) or (b) a response to the general disorganization of the larger society in which it lives. In my opinion, the book’s only fault is that there are only tentative attempts to construct a new, more comprehensive theory of religion. Nevertheless, the criticism of the reigning theories and the explorations into new territory are extremely valuable.

Generally, one who reviews so large a book written by so many different people feels constrained to report that the contents vary greatly in quality. That statement is not necessary for this book. The reader’s own evaluation of each essay will be determined more by his interests—whether they lie in theory or data, the occult or the more traditional—than by the quality of writing (which is unusually high) or by the author’s theoretical bias. The only problem confronting the reviewer is selection. One cannot comment on all the articles. My choice of several reflects my psychological orientation, my concern for the integrative and innovative dimensions of religious experience, and my liking for theoretical questions.

“Ideological support for the Marginal Middle Class: Faith Healing and Glossolalia” by E. Mansell Pattison skillfully portrays the personality style of the ardent fundamentalist. Pattison says that fundamentalists tend to be riddled with conflicts—covertly hostile and overtly passive, acutely aware of their worthlessness and stubbornly arrogant—and oriented to the future. Pattison also clearly lays down a theory for the relation between personality characteristics and the cultural milieus that foster certain styles.

Virginia H. Hine in “The Deprivation and Disorganization Theories of Social Movements” astutely analyzes contemporary theories of religion. Her essay explicitly states what is implicit throughout the book, that current theories cannot provide a coherent understanding of religious phenomenon. E. Fuller Torrey’s “Spiritualists and Shamans as Psychotherapists” is a direct attack on the condescending attitude of many American social scientists toward the healers of different societies; they assume, by definition, that psychiatry and clinical psychology is superior because it is more “scientific.” Healing, according to Torrey, is a process that combines art and science, even for the successful therapist in the United States. Torrey’s colleagues who react only with dismay to what he says will probably miss some valuable insights.

One of the most surprising essays is Edward J. Moody’s “Magical Therapy: An Anthropological Investigation of Contemporary Satanism.” The article is rich in details of the inner workings of a California Satanist group. It is startling to discover that (at least in Moody’s perception of the situation) Satanism’s bizarre rituals and its violently anti-Christian stance do, in fact, “socialize” its adherents and make them more “normal.” Those drawn to Satanism are deficient in the skills necessary to lead successful lives in society. Their failure breeds anger toward society. However, through their association with Satanist groups, these people are taught to perceive social expectations more correctly. This helps them achieve personal success in business, family, and other areas. The carefully controlled (and secret) rituals of Satanism are useful to diffuse hostility and create an environment in which personal relations are structured and gradually transformed. Moody’s study is arresting and useful in that he disabuses us of stereotypes of Satanism; however, his analysis of the movement tends toward advocacy at times. Satanism is “therapeutic” for some; yet most people would probably feel that the cure is worse than the disease.

The editors of the book are to be praised for their excellent organization. Diverse subjects are given compelling coherence. The editor’s extensive introductions give invaluable orientation to the essays, and they point to salient issues and problems raised in various sections of the book. The fascinating details, the openness to the novel qualities of these groups, and the willingness to attempt new theoretical formulations make this book a refreshing harbinger of a new approach to religion among social scientists.

BRIEFLY NOTED

Keeping Your Cool in a World of Tension, by Richard LeTourneau (Zondervan, 142 pp., $4.95), Life Is So Great, I Really Don’t Want to Get Off, by Milo Arnold (Zondervan, 200 pp., $5.95), Living With Depression and Winning, by Sarah Fraser (Tyndale, 110 pp., $1.45 pb), Survival Kit For the Stranded, by William Self (Broadman, 142 pp., $4.95), and That Elusive Thing Called Joy, by Calvin Miller (Zondervan, 144 pp., $4.95). Five books by evangelicals that seek to help Christians deal with the tensions and problems of modern living. LeTourneau in outline format uses the concepts of dynamics and diligence to discuss the Christian life in general. Arnold’s theme is fulfillment. He uses a kind of Christian “positive thinking” approach. Fraser writes perceptively of her struggle with suicidal depression. Self’s book encompasses many mental-spiritual crises such as mental illness, grief, guilt, fear, despair, loneliness, and illness. Well written. Miller structures his book around a pattern he calls a “happiness construct.” This formula approach to life could be very dry, but Miller’s good ideas about human relationships add spice to the recipe.

God’s Party, by David Randolph (Abingdon, 144 pp., $3.50 pb), and A New Look For Sunday Morning, by William Abernathy (Abingdon, 176 pp., $4.50 pb). Two volumes that focus on changes from the more traditional forms of worship. Randolph explains why change is sometimes needed and offers some suggestions for innovative worship. Abernathy records the experiences of his Congregational church in Connecticut. Neither author is so extreme that evangelicals cannot benefit from what he relates.

A Father … A Son … And a Three-Mile Run, by Keith Leenhouts (Zondervan, 140 pp., $4.95). A poignant story of a special father-son relationship. The father/author brings his insights as a Christian and a judge to his observations of fatherhood.

Property and Riches in the Early Church, by Martin Hengel (Fortress, 96 pp., $2.95 pb). Examines the attitudes toward owning things expressed in the Old Testament, in the New Testament by Jesus and Paul, and in the early centuries of the Church. Not definitive, but a well researched, thoughtful exposition.

Jesus in Genesis, by Michael Esses (Logos, 270 pp., $2.95 pb), Judges and a Permissive Society, by John Hunter (Zondervan, 128 pp., n.p., pb), and Hosea and His Message, by Roy L. Honeycutt (Broadman, 96 pp., $1.50 pb). Somewhat unusual approaches to three Old Testament books. Esses attempts to relate Genesis directly to the teachings of Jesus; he writes in a light style that some will find hollow. Hunter studies Judges through the characters in the book. A help, especially for a beginning student of the Old Testament. Honeycutt expounds on a somewhat unfamiliar book chapter by chapter in a simple, readable style. He draws some good parallels with modern times.

The Transfiguration of Politics, by Paul Lehmann (Harper & Row, 366 pp., $12.95). A ponderous, self-assured tome by a leading ethicist. Advanced students of the relations between Christ and government and political change cannot ignore this book, though many will argue with it.

God and the Future, by Henry McKeating (Judson, 94 pp., $3.50), Jesus the King Is Coming, edited by Charles Feinberg (Moody, 200 pp., $4.95), The Approaching Advent of Christ, by Alexander Reese (Grand Rapids International [P.O. Box 2607, Grand Rapids, Mich. 49501], 328 pp., $5.95), What, Where, and When Is the Millennium?, by R. Bradley Jones (Baker, 144 pp., $2.95 pb), and The Dawn of the Apocalyptic, by Paul Hanson (Fortress, 428 pp., $14.95). Eschatology is the area of doctrine with the most books. McKeating writes on the whole biblical approach to the future, not just the end. Feinberg’s contributors include such notables as Hal Lindsey and John Walvoord. A good introduction to one widespread view. Price concentrates on prophetic fulfillment relating to restoration of Israel and Jewish expectations of the Messiah, especially as they affect the Christian. Reese’s volume, a reprint, is a polemical, often quoted defense of a post-tribulational view of the Second Coming. Jones contends that the millennium is now; his views will interest the prophecy buff. Hanson gives a scholarly treatment of the origins of apocalyptic writings, for the advanced student.

Believe!, by Richard DeVos (Revell, 128 pp., $4.95), and Success, Motivation and the Scriptures, by William Cook (Broadman, 172 pp., $3.95). What is the relation between “success” and the Christian faith? DeVos, president of Amway, seems to be saying that belief in God, America, and free enterprise is the key to a successful life. Some may question his thesis. Cook attempts to apply biblical principles to the subject and brings more depth to the understanding of motivation.

Scripture And Sciences: Concord, Not Conflict

The Clock Work Image, by Donald MacKay (InterVarsity, 1974, 112 pp., $2.25 pb), is reviewed by Michael Macdonald, associate professor of German and philosophy, Seattle Pacific College, Seattle, Washington.

Donald MacKay, a professor of communications and a specialist in brain physiology, is the author of Room For Freedom and Action in a Mechanistic Universe. He has debated B. F. Skinner on William Buckley’s TV show, “Firing Line.” As a scientist and a Christian, MacKay here examines the Christian view of the universe and its relation to scientific thought.

His theme is the essential, non-accidental harmony between biblical Christian faith and mechanistic science. MacKay emphasizes a philosophy of wholeness: the harmony and complementarity between Christian thought on the one hand and the spirit and practice of natural science on the other. God’s story is revealed in both Scripture and science, and MacKay thinks that the greatest educational need of our time is to restore wholeness to our view of life.

We tend to try to understand each situation by analogy with a machine. Much can be described and analyzed as a mechanism, but this does not mean that the only “real,” objective, worthwhile explanations are the explanations we get from machine analogies. We can know some aspects of reality only by becoming involved with them. MacKay argues that if you transfer scientific criteria, which are expressly developed for observing physical objects, into the sphere of religion, which deals with the personal knowledge of God, “you do not discover a conflict, you create one.” He maintains “that the religious and the scientific approaches are not rivals but are complementary, each appropriate to an aspect of experience largely ignored by the other.”

The scientist has no reason to deny that there is much knowledge of a different kind to be gained by personal involvement. In many situations one should become a participant and accept personal responsibility. The move is one from detachment to involvement. This extremely important distinction is reminiscent of Bergson, Buber, and more recently Tournier. Each in his own way stresses that there are two profoundly different ways of knowing—one by moving around the object, which depends on point of view, and another by entering into a personal relationship with it.

Provocative and sensitive, this book is written both for Christians who want to evaluate science in the light of their faith and for non-Christians who wish to discover what commitment to Christ would do to their intellectual integrity in this age of mechanistic science. The book is based largely on talks given over the past twenty years; some presupposed no religious commitment, while others were given at conferences of Christians. The slight unevenness in style is understandable and not bothersome.

But if from thence thou shalt seek the LORD thy God, thou shalt find him, if thou seek him with all thy heart and with all thy soul” (Deut. 4:29).

“Then shall ye call upon me, and ye shall go and pray unto me, and I will hearken unto you. And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart. And I will be found of you, saith the LORD; and I will turn away your captivity, and I will gather you from all the nations.…” (Jer. 29:12–14).

“Blessed is the man that heareth me, watching daily at my gates, waiting at the posts of my doors. For whoso findeth me findeth life, and shall obtain favour of the LORD” (Prov. 8:34, 35).

“Seek ye the LORD while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near” (Isa. 55:6).

Generation after generation, century after century, there have been people who sought the Lord with sincere, honest seeking, and who found him—without ever seeing him face to face in the land of the living. These people found that he was near them, that he never left them nor forsook them, that he listened to them when they called upon him. They came one by one, through the Lamb, his appointed way—and they came with the motive of wanting to follow him as soon as they could find him. Honest seeking turns into honest following when he is found. The “following” is not just a nebulous religious act, a mystical ceremony; it is an open, frank, honest belief that there is a Person to follow, and that the Person is God, a personal God who responds.

This kind of specific, assured following brings with it a spontaneous telling of others. “One of the two which heard John speak, and followed him, was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He first findeth his own brother Simon, and saith unto him, We have found the Messiah, which is being interpreted, the Christ. And he brought him to Jesus” (John 1:40–42). Remember old Anna, who had waited and watched for the Messiah for many years, praying daily in the Temple; she recognized the One for whom she was watching, even though he was a tiny baby. “And she coming in that instant gave thanks likewise unto the Lord, and spake of him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem” (Luke 2:38).

Those who are convinced that the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son of God, the long awaited Messiah, has indeed come, need no urging to tell others of this fact, so exciting and at the same time so deeply comforting. If people care about other people, the finding of that which has been sought, the “seeing” of what has been watched for, brings a burst of response, and then a rush of communication.

Come to the opposite of positive, sincere, honest seeking. “And they watched him, whether he would heal on the sabbath day, that they might accuse him” (Mark 3:2). The motive of these Pharisees, who were religious men, well trained and proud, was to find a flaw, so that they could “accuse him.” Verse six of this chapter shows how these men pounced on the “evidence” they felt they had found by their negative watching. “And the Pharisees went forth, and straightway took counsel with the Herodians against him, how they might destroy him.” “Now we have him” was their feverish reaction to the healing of the man with the withered hand.

Face to face with the Son of God, the Messiah, these men heard his voice in their ears, looked into his eyes, watched him gently restore a man’s withered hand, but they did not find him. One can be close enough to the living God, as they were, to feel his breath upon one’s face, to have one’s ears ring with his voice—and yet not find him. The finding is something that, God tells us, depends upon a deep sincerity, described as “seeking with all thine heart.”

What a frightening picture of “hard hearts” and their effect on the senses! How ineffectual is clear proof to those who are watching with only a desire to disprove. And how staggering a picture we are given when we realize that the Pharisees, the religious rulers, are not confined to one moment of history. Other religious men, too, have watched him, looking for new and brilliant ways of accusing him of not being who he says he is so they might destroy him.

We are told to be aware of the rapid passing of time, and of the increasing “signs of his coming,” and we are to watch with assurance that he will keep his promises to come back again and restore that which has been spoiled. We are to watch with loving faith, not suspicion. We are to watch with awe and admiration, not scorn and superiority. “Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.… Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh” (Matt. 24:42–44).

“Blessed are those servants, whom the Lord when he cometh shall find watching: verily I say unto you, that he shall gird himself, and make them to sit down to meat, and will come forth and serve them” (Luke 12:37). If we read the previous verses we will see that those who do this kind of watching are “seeking first the kingdom of God.” They have provided themselves “with bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth” (v. 33). There is a key given to how to watch with the right motives: “for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (v. 34).

Jesus spoke sharply to the disciples about watching with him in the garden of Gethsemane. “What, could ye not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matt. 26:40, 41). Added to the “key” of putting our treasure in heaven is the command to pray with our watching, in order to ward off temptations. “Watch and pray”: Jesus gives us this combination command to follow actively, not simply to read as devotional words. Watch for his coming, but watch also that Satan’s subtle temptations don’t twist and turn us aside. And the watching must be accompanied by close communication with our Heavenly Father.

If the disciples needed to watch and pray at that time, how much more do we need to watch and pray day by day now. Not only is there danger of temptations that we recognize as “evil,” but Pharisees with other names can also tempt us. Satan uses whatever would be most likely to succeed.

Let us then “be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain” (Rev. 3:2).