Dayton, Tennessee, a small hill town thirty-four miles northeast of Chattanooga, was the scene of the famous Scopes trial, held July 10–21, 1925. The world’s most famous courtroom drama before Watergate was initiated by Dayton businessmen, who hoped to put their town on the map, and the American Civil Liberties Union, which wanted a test case of a new Tennessee anti-evolution law. But the original issue of academic freedom was lost (Scopes, a teacher charged with breaking the law, was never put on the stand) as evolutionist Darrow and creationist Bryan waged a bitter battle before the world. The following report was written from Dayton.

Attendance was good (forty-four present; only seven absent) at the Dayton Rotary Club meeting just before the fiftieth anniversary of the trial that made the town famous. When a visiting reporter mentioned that he had come to cover the celebration, Mayor Paul Levengood, an ordained Southern Presbyterian minister said, “We hardly ever mention the trial anymore unless someone like you comes around and asks. They made a circus out of Dayton.” Then the Rotarians heard a talk on credit unions.

City manager Clyde Roddy, 65, a deacon in the First Baptist Church (attendance about 250; largest of eight churches in Dayton, including a Catholic congregation), was an eyewitness. “It was strictly a publicity stunt,” he said. “Dayton just happened to get it before some other town did. It didn’t accomplish anything here. We’ve been embarrassed over things written then and since, outsiders calling us stupid hillbillies.”

(One of the few Scopes reporters still alive is Warner Ragsdale, Sr., retired political editor of U. S. News and World Report, who is a deacon in the First Baptist Church of Silver Spring, Maryland. “Many writers were from big cities in the North and knew nothing about Southern hill people,” he explained in an interview. “In the sense that they wrote from the perspective of their own prejudices, the people of Dayton did get a raw deal.”)

Behind his desk in Dayton’s modern municipal building, Roddy much prefers to talk about the new Dayton. “We don’t depend on monkey trials and strawberries anymore. (Dayton once thought of itself as the strawberry capital of the world; an annual parade is still held and a strawberry queen crowned.) We’ve got industry that makes everything from hairdryers to pantyhose, and more coming. Our tax rate is low. We have TV A electricity. A beautiful lake at our back door. Population growing. Why, I reckon there must be seven or eight thousand people now in greater Dayton.”

Over at the world’s most famous courthouse a judge was more history conscious. “I researched the trial when a student at Carson-Newman College (Southern Baptist) and came to regard Darrow as one of my heroes. Now I’m a Baptist deacon who believes in creation, but I think in a lot of respects Darrow acted more like a Christian than many others who professed the faith in that time. He was a champion of the little man and took the unpopular cases. And I think he acted in a more Christian way at the trial than Bryan did. He was more tolerant of other ideas, whereas Bryan, one of the greatest men who ever lived in this country, was dogmatic. Its unfortunate that Darrow has come to be a sort of villain to most Christians.”

The judge’s administrative assistant, Giles Ryan, 68, was one of John Scopes’s students. “It was all made up that he would teach that particular lesson, that particular day. The businessmen pushed John into it. John was soft-spoken and moderate. I think he was a Christian man and had no intention of harming the Bible.”

Dayton is the site now of Bryan College, an evangelical liberal arts college, a focal point for research into the Scopes trial.

TERROR IN RHODESIA

A violent climate greeted the return to Rhodesia recently of a United Methodist bishop who coordinates political strategy for the country’s vast but relatively powerless black majority.

While Bishop Abel T. Muzorewa was touring the United States, police fired on a mob gathered near the Rhodesian capital of Salisbury. Thirteen persons were reported killed and twenty-eight wounded. Muzorewa called it “coldblooded murder.”

A few days after his return, two hand grenades were thrown at his home, shattering windows. Police said the grenades were Soviet-made, but there was no immediate indication of who was responsible.

Christian Reformed Church: No Women

After eight hours of debate, the 148 male delegates to the 1975 Christian Reformed Synod voted to maintain a ban against women in ecclesiastical office. The vote was 84 to 62, with 2 abstentions. The issue is expected to surface again next year when the synod will study committee reports on the status of women at Calvin Seminary (four women were enrolled during the past academic year).

This year’s synod, held on the campus of Calvin College and Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan, also approved the appointment of Anthony J. Diekema to succeed the retiring president of the college, William Stoelhof. Diekema currently is associate chancellor of the University of Illinois at the Medical Center in Chicago.

Delegates voted to recognize the Presbyterian Church in America as a “church in ecclesiastical fellowship.” They refused, however, to make a judgment “as to the legitimacy of the action by which the PCA separated itself from the PCUS.”

The synod formalized the Christian Reformed Church’s membership in the North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council. The CRC, with its 300,000 members, is the largest body in that conservative council.

BRUCE BUURSMA

Canadian Anglicans Go Their Own Way

Three hundred delegates met at Laval University in Quebec City last month for a heated and historic twenty-seventh General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada.

Thirty-two years of church-union discussion with the United Church of Canada reached the crisis point when the General Synod passed a resolution describing the proposed plan of union as “not an acceptable basis of union,” for reasons of doctrine and differing views on the office of bishop. (The United Church of Canada has a presbyterian form of government.) A recent membership poll found a mixed to unfavorable attitude toward union, and last January the House of Bishops also voted against the document.

“We have been unduly obsessed with the United Church as an ecumenical love object,” observed Professor Eugene Fairweather of Toronto Trinity College. But delegates did reaffirm their commitment to seek union with the United Church and the Disciples of Christ and with “other Christian churches.” The church plans to use the union proposal as a study document.

Reacting to the Anglican rejection of the Plan of Union and its stated interest in further discussion, Ronald Ray, general secretary of the United Church of Canada, commented that his church was interested in union but not interested in playing word games about union and unity.

The General Synod approved the ordination of women to the priesthood “at the discretion of diocesan bishops … in consultation with the House of Bishops,” and became the first Anglican church in the West to do so (the Anglican Church of Hong Kong has two female priests). Two years ago the denomination approved ordination in principle only. This year the vote for action was decisive—85 per cent of the laity, 74 per cent of the clergy, and 78 per cent of the bishops. In deference to objecting bishops, delegates passed a clause that permits a bishop to refrain from ordaining women in his diocese for reasons of conscience.

The move caused a furor. Some clergy warned that schism was inevitable. Others retaliated by describing the threat as “blackmail.” Bishop David Somerville of British Columbia predicted that the first woman would be ordained to the priesthood by Easter, 1976.

Although each church in the Anglican communion is autonomous, observers say the move will affect the Episcopal Church in the United States, which has been plagued by lawsuits and trials over the ordination of women (see following story). The director of the American Church Union, Charles H. Osborn, who strongly opposes female priests, said the Anglican Church of Canada has “placed herself in schism” with other Anglican churches by this decision.

In other action, delegates came out squarely on the side of Canada’s native peoples (Indians and Eskimos) in their demands for negotiation with the government over land claims. The synod called on the government to come to negotiations without prior conditions. It further asked that no new policies and programs be initiated without full consultation with native people.

LESLIE K. TARR

Wendt: Appealing

Lawyers for William A. Wendt, Episcopal rector in Washington, D. C., have appealed the guilty verdict in Wendt’s recent ecclesiastical trial (see May 23 issue, page 55, and June 20 issue, page 33). The controversial rector was charged with disobeying his bishop, William F. Creighton, in allowing Alison Cheek, one of the eleven women irregularly ordained last summer, to celebrate communion as a priest.

Attorney Edward C. Bou cited “inadmissible legal errors” as the basis for appeal. For example, he said, the court allowed the question of the validity of Cheek’s ordination to be used as evidence for Wendt’s defense but in the decision said it was “a peripheral matter.”

Meanwhile, L. Peter Beebe of Christ Episcopal Church in Oberlin, Ohio, tried for disobeying his bishop, John H. Burt, was found guilty by a five to zero vote. The all-clergy court recommended that Beebe be admonished, and added that if he again allows any irregularly ordained women priests to celebrate communion he should be suspended. Only forty-eight hours after the decision was rendered Beebe permitted Mrs. Cheek and Carter Heyward again to function as priests in his church.

The vestry of Wendt’s church, fulfilling a pledge to have a continuing relationship with one or more of the female “priests,” has invited Mrs. Cheek to join the church “as a member and as a priest.” She has accepted the offer, though duties and salary have not yet been set. The move is unusual, since such a matter usually involves a priest’s or deacon’s own bishop. Mrs. Cheek, who is currently a member of the Virginia diocese, did not consult her bishop, Robert C. Hall, before accepting the new post. Creighton denied her request that she be transferred from Virginia to Washington as a priest or licensed to serve in his diocese as a priest while she was canonically affiliated with Virginia.

The two sentences of admonition have disturbed affiliates of the conservative American Church Union, which issued a statement claiming that admonition is canonically inadmissible. According to the organization’s legal committee, the church canons authorize only three sentences: suspension, removal, or deposition.

Reconciling The Races

Even though the “powerbrokers of evangelicalism,” according to black evangelist Tom Skinner, failed to show up at the first National Workshop on Race and Reconciliation, the group decided to act. On the final morning of the three-day conference, with only half of the 100 participants still there, the group pledged more than $2000 to establish a permanent center on race and reconciliation.

In the next twelve months, according to chairperson Ronald J. Sider, white dean of Messiah College’s Philadelphia campus, a planning committee (not immediately appointed) will solidify plans. Howard Jones, black associate evangelist with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, served as co-chairperson of the workshop.

The group, nearly half black, met at Atlanta’s Morris Brown College to discuss such matters as integration and cultural pluralism, which some people think is a new term for segregation. The idea of integration, at least for some blacks (Ozzie Edwards of the University of Michigan and Bill Bentley of the National Black Evangelical Association, for example), is no longer a primary goal. According to them, integration has meant a loss of cultural identity as blacks became part of white middle-class society.

Clarence Hilliard, a black clergyman from Circle Church, Chicago, believes the model of mutual cooperation and respect for both white and black modes of worship provides the key. That model was evident during the workshop; for example, hymns were sung in both white and black styles.

Resolving the conflicts between the various ways of viewing the race issue, and deciding the basic question of whether blacks and whites can in fact relate to each other, will be the business of the new center on race relations.

CHERYL FORBES

German ‘Church Day’: Something For Everyone

Some 50,000 people attended the closing open-air service of the sixteenth German Protestant “Kirchentag,” held last month in Frankfurt. Fifteen thousand were active throughout the six-day event, about two-thirds of them young people. That’s almost twice as many as at the Düsseldorf Kirchentag two years ago. Some felt the motto, “In fears (anxieties)—and behold we live,” derived from Second Corinthians 6, may have attracted many because it corresponded to their personal situation.

Observers generally agreed that this Kirchentag was “more religious” than any other since 1962. There was definitely more evangelical and evangelistic preaching, especially that by youth pastor Ulrich Parzany.

Evangelicals remained a minority, however. German United Methodist bishop Dr. C. Ernst Sommer and Warsaw Baptist pastor Zdzislaw Pawlik were also among the preachers of the opening services, held in fourteen Frankfurt churches. The “Confessing Communities,” representing the conservative wing of the established churches, had refused to participate. About two weeks before the Kirchentag they had staged their own “Gemeindetag unter dem Wort” (Church Day Under the Word) in Stuttgart. Some 40,000 attended and gave more than 400,000 Marks (about $173,000) for evangelical theological training at home and abroad. The Kirchentag has never been very popular among the free churches, probably because they do not consider it “their business.”

The theological highlight of this year’s gathering was an “ecumenical dialogue” on “What makes Christianity Christian?” between Dr. Heinz Zahrnt and Roman Catholic professor Hans Küng, both of whom have a rather liberal slant. Devotional sessions and Bible studies also were well attended.

Exhibition booths accommodated some 120 groups, from the evangelical anti-alcohol “Blue Cross” to radical left-wing groups like the “Peace Conference,” which presented some representatives of the new South Vietnamese government, hailing them as true liberators of their people. There were both “Christians for Socialism” and the more rightest Protestant Association of the Christian Democratic Party. Many groups were concerned with Third World problems. And one requested support of the United Farm Workers in the United States and denounced exploitation of Mexican farm hands by big firms in California like Del Monte (against which they asked a boycott). A large booth operated by the evangelical “Offensive junger Christen” (Young Christian Offensive) was one of the finest and was visited by many.

A big “liturgical night” attended by at least 7,000 young people turned out to be anything but liturgical—just a big, somewhat noisy party at which the young people sang, danced, talked, and ate bread and drank wine together. Another service was conducted by the two highest-ranking American chaplains stationed in Europe.

At the closing service, the highest ranking German Protestant clergyman, Bishop Helmut Class, chairman of the Council of the EKD (evangelische Kirche in Deutschland—an association of the established Lutheran, United, and Reformed Churches) preached on Romans 8:18–25, and WCC general secretary Phillip Potter sang the Lord’s Prayer. Many political and church leaders were present.

The Kirchenstag, meant to be a platform for discussion rather than an evangelistic enterprise, seems to mirror present-day pluralism within the German established Protestant churches.

WOLFGANG MULLER

DOUBLE KNIT

President E. Bolaji Idowu of the Methodist Church of Nigeria denounced as “denominational fornication” the growing practice among Nigerian Christians of enrolling as “full members” of two or more different churches. The practice, he said, is “inevitably disruptive of that single-mindedness which is vital to the health of the soul.”

Such divided loyalties have given rise to recent disputes over funeral services of persons enrolled as members of both the Methodist and Anglican churches.

A Catholic priest in eastern Nigeria meanwhile lashed out at Catholics who, he said, were deserting the church and joining up with the “mushroom-eating, hand-clapping, vision-seeing ‘churches’ that are springing up like fungus in all the nooks and corners of the country.”

Faith Healers: Will Government Pay?

The U. S. government is being called upon to give a measure of recognition to faith healing. Decisions on touchy church-state issues will have to be made in connection with national health insurance, some form of which seems likely to be legislated by Congress.

The church-state committee of the American Civil Liberties Union met recently to discuss the constitutional implications of reimbursing faith healers under a government health-care plan. Of special concern to the committee was the effort being made by Christian Science representatives to get recognition in proposed legislation. A lengthy legal study of the problem was presented to the group.

A comprehensive health-care system sponsored by the government is viewed by many observers as a fairly certain eventuality. The move toward enabling legislation has been temporarily delayed, probably because of the adverse state of the economy.

Christian Scientists spoke up in testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee last summer. “We neither support nor oppose any of the national health-insurance bills,” said H. Dickinson Rathbun, “but we do have some views we would like to contribute.” Rathbun argued that if a national health-insurance plan is enacted, it should include payment for Christian Science visiting-nurse services. Christian Scientists reject medical treatment, relying instead on the aid of Christian Science practitioners, nurses, and sanatoriums. Certain care services performed by Christian Scientists are already reimbursable under Medicare because the enabling legislation specifically provides for it.

“The feasibility of covering the charges of Christian Science practitioners may depend on the final shape of the program,” said Rathbun, manager of the Christian Science office in Washington. “If a national health-insurance program is administered by the government, with an insurance carrier playing only a minor role in its operation, we think that direct payments to Christian Science practitioners would not be desirable. However, if the plan merely allows employers to purchase insurance through private carriers for their employees, then inclusion of Christian Science practitioners’ services would seem to be right.”

Congress may also be asked to decide to what extent other types of faith-healing activities should be subsidized.

Religion In Transit

Of 403,000 patients in state and county mental hospitals, 26 per cent were there because of alcoholism or mental problems associated with alcohol abuse, according to a recent federal study.

In its ten-year history Christ Church of Oak Brook, Illinois, has grown from a few families to a membership of more than 2,400, with nearly that many attending Sunday-morning worship services each week. Arthur DeKruyter has been pastor of the independent evangelical congregation from its beginning.

While U. S. “super churches” studied by church-growth researchers have memberships of more than 5,000, Canada’s super churches have memberships of 500 to 1,000, says missiology professor Dennis Oliver of Canadian Theological College. He is also director of the Canadian Church Growth Centre, organized by CTC last fall to help Canadian churches grow.

Personalia

Mildred Jefferson, a Protestant and the first black woman graduate of Harvard Medical School, was elected president of the National Right to Life Committee.

United Methodist bishop Kenneth Goodson of Richmond, Virginia, has been elected president-designate of the denomination’s Council of Bishops. He will take office next April.

Peter Deyneka, Jr., was named to succeed his father as general director of the Slavic Gospel Association in Chicago. The elder Deyneka, a Russian-born evangelist who founded the SGA forty-one years ago, will assume emeritus status. The SGA will relocate soon in nearby Wheaton, where a Slavic missionary training institute will be established.

Canaan Banana, a Rhodesian pastor who recently returned to his native land after two years of study at Wesley Seminary in Washington, D. C., was sentenced to three months in jail for having left the country without a passport.

Ole Bertelsen, 50, became primate of the Church of Denmark (Lutheran). He has been a parish pastor and served as general secretary of the Danish Missionary Society and secretary general of the Danish YMCA.

New presidents: Superintendent John B. Davis, Jr., 53, of the Minneapolis public schools, called to 1,550-student Macalester College, a United Presbyterian-related school in Minneapolis; District Superintendent Don Irwin of the Church of the Nazarene to 875-student Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, Massachusetts; Pastor W. E. Thorn, 52, of the 2,300-member Metropolitan Baptist Church of Wichita, Kansas, called to the financially troubled 1,200-student Dallas Baptist College in Dallas, and Pastor Harold L. Fickett, Jr., 57, of the 11,205-member First Baptist Church of Van Nuys, California, to Barrington (Rhode Island) College.

Harold J. Ockenga will step down as president of Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, next spring. He will continue as chancellor of the college and president of Gordon-Conwell Seminary in nearby Hamilton.

World Scene

A team of evangelists from the Philippines, Singapore, and Indonesia led by missionary evangelist Greg Tingson found Muslims in southern Sumatra receptive to the Gospel (more than 150 of the 535 professing faith in Christ in one crusade were Muslims). A crusade among Bataks netted some 1,200 firsttime decisions, according to a mission report.

The Scottish Episcopal Church (Anglican), plagued by inflation and lagging giving, plans to reduce its 250 full-time stipendiary clergy by one-third within five years.

The United Methodist Church reported that an organized group of evangelicals has decided “to serve in a brokerage capacity” in the placement and support of missionaries. A leader of the group was said to have acknowledged that the action might be seen as the establishment of a rival mission agency.

Representatives from forty-two nations served by the Christian and Missionary Alliance met in Nyack, New York, to form a non-legislative organization. The new Alliance World Fellowship consists of national churches established through CMA missionary work. Quadrennial assemblies are planned.

Since 1973 the World Council of Churches has channeled some $20.4 million in aid to the drought-stricken Sahel countries of Africa, and it has now embarked on a $3.6 million rehabilitation program, according to WCC sources. Additionally, $1.5 million will be divided between four former Portuguese colonies in Africa and to liberation movements in Zimbabwe and Zambia. More than $1 million in aid has gone to Indochina since the fall of Cambodia and South Viet Nam to Communists.

Any interpretation that sees the state of Israel as the successor to the Old Testament people of God is a “misuse of the biblical message in order to justify Israel’s aggressive policies,” says the Prague-based Christian Peace Conference, a strong voice of the political left.

South Africa’s largest black Dutch Reformed denomination, the 500,000-member Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk, elected its first black moderator: B. T. S. Buti, 63, of Transvaal. Buti says his church will join the South African Council of Churches in defiance of its white NGK “mother church.” He intends for the black NGK to “remain evangelistic” and tell the government when it fails to “act in accordance with the Bible.”

A recent research project estimates that the Catholic Church is losing 250,000 members yearly in England, Wales, and Scotland. Some 2.7 million Catholics, 37 per cent, don’t turn to their church for baptism, marriage, and funerals.

Advance copies of the New Testament in the Dompago language of Dahomey are out, the first time Scripture has been available in the tongue. Sudan Interior Mission worker Roland Pickering completed the translation shortly before he died in a car accident last fall.

The executive committee of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan expressed “deep concern” over confiscation of Taiwanese-language Bibles and hymnals by the government. The committee asked for their early return. “Without the Bible and the hymnal in Taiwanese, it is impossible for our congregations to join in worship, to strengthen the faith of believers, and to deepen spiritual life,” said a committee statement.

DEATHS

IVESON B. NOLAND, 59, Episcopal Bishop of Louisiana; in a plane crash in New York.

LINDSAY GLEGG, 92, noted British evangelist; in Surrey, England.

JOHANNES CHRISTIAN HOEKENDIJK, 63, onetime secretary for evangelism of the World Council of Churches; professor of mission at Union Seminary since 1965; in New York, of a heart attack while swimming.

Despite a dwindling membership, a $2.2 million deficit, a proposed new confession, and the annual discussion on Presbyterian union, last month’s 115th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern), held in Charlotte, North Carolina, was characterized by long-time observers as a “caretaker” assembly.

The 411 commissioners (delegates) of the 900,000-member denomination heard progress reports about the proposed new confession. Because of a flood of suggestions from individuals and congregations the committee did not finish writing the confession in time for this year’s assembly. It will be ready this fall and should come up for a vote at next June’s General Assembly, scheduled to be held at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

The committee told delegates that some changes of wording were being made in an early draft. For example, the section dealing with the Virgin Birth, which some conservatives thought denied that doctrine, will include the traditional words “conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of Mary the Virgin.” But other language that disturbed conservatives—“He came as a child born of woman as is every child”—remains. Some also complained that Christ is nowhere spoken of as Saviour, and a statement describing him as the “Saviour who died in our place” will be inserted. However, the committee refused to change the assertion “His knowledge was limited by his time and place in history.” To deny that, the committee argued, is to deny Christ’s humanity.

Final decision on the proposed plan of union with the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. (UPCUSA) has been postponed until 1977. The PCUS first wants to decide the confessional issue. Resolutions to pull out of union discussions were soundly defeated, as were those to postpone union until an official membership poll could be taken on the issue. The question of union with other Presbyterian bodies caused more debate. Mention of the Presbyterian Church in America aroused special feeling. The PCA now includes about 370 congregations, many of which severed ties with the PCUS. Charges of conspiracy, proselytizing, and membership stealing flew across the floor as commissioners debated a resolution on the PCA that looked forward “to our walking together in mutual respect and love.” Later in a more conciliatory mood the commissioners said, “We look forward to our eventual union or reunion with all these now separated denominations, including the Presbyterian Church in America.”

Newly elected moderator Paul M. Edris, retired pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Daytona Beach, Florida, said before his election that he would vote for union with the UPCUSA, and that he would “welcome back” any PCA congregations, though he would not actively seek reunion with them. In a press conference he added that he had heard some congregations were making discreet inquiries about that possibility.

In a late-night session commissioners approved reports of the General Executive Board (GEB) that would tighten the lines of authority and change budgeting and management procedures. The GEB has been under heavy fire since last February, when a $2.2 million deficit was discovered. Last year’s proposed $9.4 million budget was cut to $7.6 by salary and personnel reductions and by a cutback in overseas missions giving. A last-minute effort to restore missions funds failed. The General Assembly, in a light wrist-slapping statement, expressed concern over “an apparent laxity of sound business management and finance principles that have resulted in deficit spending.…” A $7.4 million budget was approved for the coming year.

The liveliest debate of the week-long assembly occurred during a discussion on “The Problem of a Personal Devil and Demons,” a paper written by the theology and culture council in response to a resolution last year. Council member Harrison Taylor said that the film The Exorcist was the “straw that broke the camel’s back.” Many commissioners told of young people from their churches who were involved with the occult and Satan worship.

After discussing the literal and the symbolic interpretations of Satan and demons and what is meant by “personal,” the paper comes out for a symbolic interpretation of Satan as “the absence or negation of the good which God is.… It concludes: “In answer to the question whether we believe in a personal devil and demons, we can only answer with a flat, ‘Of course not!’ ”

One commissioner summed up the reaction against the paper by describing the statement as “a flimsy, hasty, inadequate, perhaps even flippant response to society on these matters.… We are left to imagine what the writers meant and are thus in a position of denying the existence of we know not what. This is indefensibly sloppy.…” If the paper had been adopted, as was recommended by the standing committee on Interpreting the Faith, the views expressed would have become an official PCUS position. By a vote of 207 to 167 the General Assembly decided to receive the paper as “information only.”

During debate of the standing committee, a member asked theologian Shirley Guthrie of Columbia Seminary, Decatur, Georgia, who wrote the original draft of the paper, if this was “the first demythologizing and symbolizing paper” to be presented to the laity, to which Guthrie replied, “Yes.” Taylor also conceded that “some people do not feel that this paper is in keeping with our doctrinal standards, as contained in the Westminster Confession of Faith, and that it’s not an adequate interpretation of Scripture.” As a follow-up to the demons paper, the commissioners asked the council on theology and culture to answer a question about the propriety of exorcism. Next year’s assembly will get the council’s reply.

In other action the General Assembly voted to study the necessity of synods in the new PCUS structure, decided to remain in the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, expressed concern over the suppression of freedom in South Korea, rejected unconditional amnesty, reaffirmed its opposition to gambling, and asked Congress to supply a minimum of seven million tons of food aid per year for the next five years. The assembly also called for members to voluntarily restrict meals three times a week and give the money saved to the Task Force on World Hunger.

‘A Call To Reformation’

Meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in mid-June, more than 150 United Presbyterians, disturbed over the outcome of the so-called Kenyon case (see June 6 issue, page 42, and March 28 issue, page 36) concerning the ordination of women, drafted “A Call to Reformation” to be distributed to the denomination at large. (Walter Wyn Kenyon was refused ordination because he said he could not participate in the ordination of women on biblical grounds.)

The group is called Concerned United Presbyterians, and James Montgomery Boice, pastor of Philadelphia’s Tenth Presbyterian Church, is the chairperson of a new fourteen-member ad hoc committee. Among other committee members are John Gerstner of Pittsburgh Seminary, R. C. Sproul of the Ligonier Valley Study Center outside Pittsburgh, and Frank Kik of Wichita, Kansas, vice-president of Presbyterians United for Biblical Concerns.

At the meeting a small but vocal minority favored immediate withdrawal from the denomination. Gerstner wrote I the first draft of the statement and included a twelve-month time limit for withdrawal, to which concerned clergy and congregations would pledge themselves. Others, more moderate, who felt that eventually they would have to leave the denomination or be forced out, hesitated to pledge themselves to leaving in a year, and the one-year pledge was eliminated. In the final vote on the statement, only five opposed it.

The statement says, in part, that “the Kenyon case is but a further aggravation seeming to deny us the privilege to differ on non-essential matters of polity even though we believe the Word of God requires us to do so.” Boice says the statement tries to shift the issue from the ordination of women to conscience. As he sees it, the church is trying to make the judicial courts rule conscience. Although some people who attended the Pittsburgh meeting have no problem with ordaining women, most, Boice says, think it’s unbiblical.

Despite the ruling of the church, the statement adds that “those of his [Kenyon’s] persuasion will continue in the church.” And the paper also calls for ministers and presbyteries to bring charges against any who depart from the church’s stated confessions, a fight-fire-with-fire strategy.

Kik, who remains on the committee and was one of four planners of the meeting, voted against the paper. He thought the method of drafting the statement “too hasty and casual.” “At no time did we have a copy of it. It was read to us twice,” he explained. He also thought the content too confrontational. “It was a shotgun approach when it ought to be a rifle shot,” he said.

Others, such as Frank Moser, another committee member, think the statement is not strong enough. “It wants us to do what we should have been doing all along,” Moser commented. “In the interest of the peace of the United Presbyterian church,” he says, he has resigned his pastorate. Moser, along with some twenty-five families from his former congregation, Bethel United Presbyterian Church in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, is forming a Presbyterian Church in America congregation. He will be one of six ministers in three congregations to be part of the first PCA presbytery in the greater Pittsburgh area (from Akron, Ohio, to Johnstown, Pennsylvania).

One observer thinks that there will be no mass exodus from the UPC but that congregations will quietly withdraw one at a time. For the present, the mood among most who attended the Pittsburgh conclave seems to be: wait and see what strategies the new committee develops for reforming the church.

CHERYL FORBES

ABOUT-FACE IN MOSCOW?

Scholars of the Soviet Academy of Sciences reportedly are undertaking a study of American religious life.

Leaders of the Academy’s Institute of U. S. A. and Canada Studies told an interreligious delegation visiting Moscow they had decided their neglect of religon was causing them to overlook an important factor in American life, Religious News Service said. Three scholars reportedly were assigned to the religious study.

News of the development was brought back to the United States by officials of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation, organized in 1965 to work on an interreligious basis for religious freedom.

My husband and I were recently eating in a restaurant by windows that looked out at the majestic Canadian Rockies. The sight was impressive in many ways—for the solidity of the rocks and firmly rooted trees, the ever increasing discoveries of depths and heights, shapes outlined in sunset colors or highlighted with white snow. Mountain deer ventured close to our windows, letting us realize something of the beauty of creature life in the natural, wild habitat as they gracefully loped across the open space and back into the woods.

How real are mountains! No need to dig and analyze and try to prove their reality. No need to race out with glue or cement and stick together the Canadian Rockies or the Swiss Alps or any other mountains to give them a greater appearance of unity.

But on the other side of the room an unwelcome sight met our eyes: imitation mountains! A plastic mass, shoulder height, running the length of the restaurant to divide one side from the other. Plastic flowers filled nooks and hollows in the plastic mountains, and gilt paint substituted for the sunshine or sunrise or sunset, never moving, never changing, never lighting the way to fresh discovery. Fragile, unconvincing copies glued together to stand in a place where even the mirrors were reflecting the glory of the real thing.

Ever since that time I have been seeing in my memory the Rockies on one side and the plastic mountains on the other. And over and over again I have thought of the frantic, wasted efforts of men and women as they try to glue together a miniature of the real magnificence that exists and is solid and everlasting: the fact of the oneness of God’s people. Consider God’s description of a future perfect unity:

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away.… And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes … [Rev. 21:1, 3, 4].

“And they shall be his people.” Here are people who are “one people with one God” and who need no long sessions of arguing fine points to see whether one or another belongs. The oneness of the entire grouping of people is magnificently solid and real. All of these in the new heavens and the new earth are tearless, joyful people with an everlasting oneness. Is there some special baptism that makes them one people after they get there? Do the resurrected and changed bodies create the oneness?

When did the oneness of God’s people become a factual happening in space and time? What is the real adhesive that bonds human beings into “the people of God” with the certainty of being together in the new heavens and the new earth? Those who came to God in his given way, bringing the lamb, looking forward to the coming Messiah, the Lamb of God, were his people right then, at whatever point in history their believing took place. It was the “circumcision of the heart” that counted, we are told. Those who truly believed did not have to wait to become God’s people until some far-off moment of history: they were his people then.

Thus saith the Lord GOD: repent, and turn yourselves from your idols; and turn away your faces from all your abominations … that the house of Israel may go no more astray from me, neither be polluted any more with all their transgressions; but that they may be my people, and I may be their God, saith the Lord GOD [Ezek. 14:6, 11].

“So we thy people and the sheep of thy pasture will give thee thanks forever; we will show forth thy praise to all generations.” People who believed could sing Psalm 79:3 with honesty; they could truly mean that it was possible to show forth praise as the people of God, as the sheep of the Shepherd, in such a way that the following generations would be affected and also be drawn to believe.

New Testament believers and you and I who believe in 1975 are called upon with just as specific a statement of fact that we are now the people of God. First Peter 1:18 and 19 speaks of our being redeemed with the precious blood of Christ. Then this statement:

Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, and a holy nation, a peculiar people, that we should show forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

Peter goes on to speak of a new factor, showing that the “people of God” now include those who were in heathen nations before, the Gentiles. Now there is a oneness. Right after he spoke of laying down his life for the sheep, Jesus said: “And other sheep I have which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold and one shepherd.”

We are called upon to show forth praise to God, and to have compassion enough to keep the commission given to us to make his truth known to “all the world.” At least some of “the great multitudes which no man could number, of all nations and kindreds, and people, and tongues” who will be standing together as one people before the Lamb are to be given the truth by you or by me. As God leads us day by day, he will show us which ones of the “great multitude” are to be our special responsibility.

What a feeble imitation it would be if people were to be brought together only by the weak glue of organizational strategies and committee deliberations. Often the long hours of attempting to glue together a unity ends up with each person’s sticking his own hands together, diverting energy and strength, time and compassion, appreciation and understanding away from the real and factual solidity of what God is doing, has done, and is going to do. We despair over splits and fresh splits, short-lived units resulting from hopeful new combinations. Is it wrong to band together in any kind of groupings as churches and missions in localities and areas? No, a thousand times no. But—and the “but” is very important—we need to take a long, satisfying look out the “windows” of present and past history and drink in the beauty of the solid, lasting magnificence of what God has put together.

The cementing of the people into truly “one people” is accomplished by the fact in history that the Holy Spirit indwells each believer, and that God will gather his people together when the great moment arrives. Then all history and space will no longer separate us in our finiteness but will melt away to enable us to be together with Abel and Abraham and Daniel.

“So we the people and the sheep of thy pasture will give thee thanks forever.”

Anything is possible as long as you don’t care who gets the credit. This is the philosophy of the pastoral team and members of Reedwood Friends Church in Portland, Oregon.

When after seventy-seven years the congregation moved into a new building on a three-acre site in June, 1970, the members decided to become more involved in the community. Prior to the move from cramped quarters, members had spent long hours praying and planning for the day when they would have enough space. They realized that one person cannot minister to 400-plus members without sacrificing some part of the church’s total program. A “team ministry,” it seemed to them was the ideal solution.

The leading of the Lord appeared evident in many ways as they strived to fill the needed positions. There are now ten persons on the pastoral team, with differing areas of competence such as psychology and music. Brainstorming sessions were instigated. Out of these emerged a confidence that something of spiritual worth could be happening in the church building seven days a week.

The church is directly across the street from the soccer field of one of America’s most liberal colleges. As the elders of the church met, they were concerned for the evangelization of those in the immediate neighborhood. One sentence of an elder’s prayer was, in essence, the prayer of all elders present: “Lord, make us shockproof.”

A lone student appeared at the church one Sunday morning. With bushy hair and faded blue jeans, he presented a sharp contrast to others in the sanctuary. This was the congregation’s first exercise in becoming “shock-proof.”

Members of the pastoral team as well as those in the congregation introduced themselves to the student and learned that he was a Christian on the Reed College campus. He appeared the following Sunday and told a Sunday-school class about the small nucleus of Christians at the college. Some cringed a little as he seated himself on the back of a pew, his moccasined feet on the lush new upholstery. But as they resisted the temptation to “bolt and run,” they discovered that beneath the thin veneer of a different life style lay a keen desire to unite with other Christians.

The following Sunday, more Christians from the college appeared in the sanctuary with their far-out clothing and hair styles. Instead of the aloofness they had previously experienced in formal church services, they found a genuine welcome awaiting them at the worship service and at the fellowship hour that followed.

An innovative idea was born when a member of the church’s pastoral team discovered that the college served no evening meal on Sunday. Some women of the church instigated a carry-in supper an hour before the evening worship service. This gave an added chance for fellowship between the students and church members. One astonished Reed student exclaimed “You people are human after all!”

More brainstorming sessions on the part of the members produced the idea for a nursery school where parents could leave their children each day of the work week. Within a short time, the “Little Friends Day Care School” was filled to its capacity of seventy-five preschoolers.

“Since our little girl has been coming here, we can’t begin a meal without saying grace first,” one mother reported. Another parent remarked, “You should hear the Scripture our toddler rattles off!”

At the other end of the age spectrum is the Young at Heart Club. A concerned member at Reedwood felt a need for closing the generation gap, and initiated the YAH Club for senior citizens. The program is enough to make even a “junior citizen” huff and puff to keep pace.

Some members of the pastoral team became concerned for those who were confined to homes for the aged. Periodic nursing-home workshops have been held with gratifying results. With the increased amount of help that the workshops beget, the Reedwood members involved in this ministry are now able to project their services into twelve nursing homes in the metropolitan area. They conduct ten church services each month. Junior-high girls have been recruited to help nurses in the homes with menial tasks. Sometimes the best investment of their time is just a visit with a lonely resident.

The largest group to come to the church building during the week is the city-wide Women’s Bible Study Fellowship. On Wednesday mornings 450 women gather to study God’s Word.

The Sunday-evening service is structured for a dual purpose. The first half is a regular meeting for worship. The second half is a sharing time called “The Encouraging Fellowship.” Several worshipers tell of needs, their own or those of others. Other compassionate worshipers lift sentence prayers for these expressed needs. The following Sunday evening, reports of victory are shared.

In an intercessory prayer group that meets during the Sunday-school hour, a dozen or so members meet to pray for the nitty-gritty problems of everyday living. “Intercessory prayer is the hardest chore of the Christian,” one participant in the group admitted. “It is the most discouraging aspect of the prayer life. Yet it reaps the greatest rewards over the long haul.”

When a stranger comes to Reedwood Friends, he must make a concerted effort to remain anonymous. A rotating team of greeters has a warm welcome for all who attend. The visitor discovers two attributes when he attends a meeting for worship at Reedwood: love and prayer in bountiful measure.

Members of the pastoral team meet together weekly for planning, inspiration, and fellowship. During this time, they seek God’s direction toward fresh ways of spiritually strengthening the congregation and new avenues of service.

In various stages of development at Reedwood are a kind of day-care center for the elderly, a place where working adults can bring an aging parent during the week for companionship with a peer group; use of the building for worship on Saturday evenings by Spanish-speaking Christians; a baby clinic one day a month for welfare mothers; and office space in the church building for a Christian organization active on college campuses.

In view of the large number of youthful apartment-dwellers in the vicinity, a “late risers” worship service has been scheduled for 12:30, preceded by a continental breakfast at noon.

Reedwood Friends is also involved with its sister churches in cooperative ministries of half-way houses, drop-in centers, a counseling service, coffeehouses, and other projects to make a Christian presence felt in the community.—MELVIN KENWORTHY, elder, Reedwood Friends Church, Portland, Oregon.

Women Are Not Inferior

Man as Male and Female, by Paul K. Jewett (Eerdmans, 1975, 200 pp., $2.95 pb), is reviewed by Cheryl Forbes, editorial associate, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Women are by nature born to obey. Right? So said John Calvin. And for centuries the Church has assumed that the Bible said so as well, from Genesis (woman made from man) through the New Testament (Paul’s admonition that women keep silent in the Church). The reason for this subordination of women traditionally has been, whether we want to admit it or not, the assumption that the female sex is inferior to the male. Jewett, professor of systematic theology at Fuller Seminary, shows where that has been asserted by Christians from Augustine and Aquinas to Luther and Calvin. As Virginia Mollenkott says in the foreword, “he is the first evangelical theologian to face squarely the fact that if woman must of necessity be subordinate, she must of necessity be inferior.” For that admission alone Jewett deserves praise.

He also deserves praise for his thorough, painstaking, scholarly approach to the theological issues. As he says, we cannot solve the “woman question” (a condescending phrase that he merely quotes) by talking of women apart from men. God created male and female in his image, and Jewett’s emphasis on the mutuality of the sexes goes far to provide balance and wholeness on a divisive issue. In emphasizing Genesis 1:27 he combats the view that man alone was made in the image of God and that woman, because she was made from man, must therefore always have a male head.

This emphasis on both male and female as necessary to a unified theology of man may not please those women’s liberationists who prefer—wrongly, I believe—to discuss woman totally apart from man. Jewett’s rejection of the “androgynous idea” will be equally disturbing to them.

At the same time his rejection of the hierarchical view of the male-female relationship, in favor of the concept of partnership, will disturb conservatives who believe that Paul teaches the hierarchical structure. For those who think rejection of hierarchy within the sexes means rejection of all hierarchy Jewett states:

Even to suggest such a conclusion is unthinkable.… In fact, in the concrete structures of life, women ought to be subordinate to men as the occasion demands. By the same token men ought to be subordinate to women as the occasion demands. It is not the subordination of some women to some men, but the subordination of all women to all men, because they are women, that constitutes the indefensible thesis, indeed the unscriptural thesis [pp. 130, 131].

Finally, Jewett deserves praise for the amount of information he packs into 200 pages. He not only gives his own interpretation of the biblical view of women but also provides an ample and accurate summary of various theological options, of the New and Old Testament statements on women, and of the ideas of some of the Church’s greatest theologians. And along with all that he surveys misogyny in Western thought, discusses the ordination of women, and analyzes the idea of the Eternal Feminine. For any concerned person, Man as Male and Female is a must.

Radical Criticism

The New Testament, An Introduction: Proclamation and Parenesis, Myth and History, by Norman Perrin (Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1974, 385 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by David E. Aune, associate professor of religion, St. Xavier College, Chicago, Illinois.

During the past two or three years, more than half a dozen introductions to the New Testament have been marketed by some of America’s largest publishers of college texts. Perrin’s book, in preparation for several years, constitutes Harcourt’s bid for a piece of the action at secular colleges, and it is markedly different from its competitors.

First of all, the book is not really an introduction in the sense that it introduces the beginning student to the general results of the critical study of the New Testament. Several sections of the book, particularly that devoted to the Gospel of Mark, introduce the reader to the rather distinctive critical views of the author, who teaches at the University of Chicago Divinity School. In other sections the reader is introduced to the views of radical criticism emanating directly or indirectly from Rudolf Bultmann and his circle. Frequently hypotheses of varying degrees of probability are leveled in their presentation to the extent that they appear (erroneously) to be the communis opinio of contemporary New Testament scholarship.

Second, the book is perhaps more uneven in quality than any other introductory text with which I am acquainted. One is reminded of Longfellow’s line describing a certain little girl: “When she was good, she was very, very good, but when she was bad she was horrid.” Perrin is very, very good in his treatments of the Synoptic Gospels, the Fourth Gospel, and Acts. The weakest section of the book is that devoted to Paul, with the General Epistles running a close second. Here Perrin not infrequently makes unguarded or erroneous statements, such as, “His [Paul’s] letters show that he had a formal Greek education, for he writes Greek well and displays a knowledge of Greek rhetorical devices.” If Paul learned Greek formally anywhere, it was certainly within a Jewish context, and his rhetoric is manifestly not that of a Hellenistic school education (the diatribe style, so characteristic of Paul, was beneath the dignity of Hellenistic men of letters).

The text has two commendable formal features that can be extremely helpful to beginning students of the New Testament: (1) individual documents are set into the framework of a theological history of early Christianity (summarized in Chapter 3: “A Theological History of New Testament Christianity”), and (2) exegetical surveys are provided for individual writings. Most introductions fail to set the New Testament into some conceptual framework of early Christian thought and development; it is to Perrin’s credit that he has provided the student with such a structure. The framework he selected originated with Heitmüller and has been adopted and elaborated by such scholars as Rudolf Bultmann and Ferdinand Hahn.

The chief weakness of Perrin’s version is that it depends on two events or tendencies, the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 and the problem of the delay of the Parousia of Jesus. These two negative causes of early Christian theological development will hardly bear the weight assigned them by Perrin. As for the exegetical surveys, some are extremely helpful and informative; others hardly rise above the Sunday-school level. Perrin’s refreshing concern with literary structure is another strength of the volume, although apart from the Gospels and Acts what he says about this fails to rise above the elementary level.

In general, the uneven and unrepresentative features of Perrin’s text seem to make it an unsatisfactory introduction to critical New Testament scholarship for students in secular colleges and universities. Evangelicals will find it even less suitable. Perrin’s secular perspective makes one wonder why he limited this introduction to the canonical New Testament, particularly when several documents from among the Apostolic Fathers are earlier than Perrin judges the Pastorals and Second Peter to be. Undoubtedly the chief value of the book for evangelicals will lie in the fact that it is the best introduction to radical criticism’s contemporary views on the Gospels and Acts.

BRIEFLY NOTED

Holy Scripture, by G. C. Berkouwer (Eerdmans, 377 pp., $8.95). The thirteenth volume in the widely acclaimed Studies in Dogmatics series is especially important and will be of interest even to those who have not acquired the other volumes.

Is There a Place I Can Scream?, by Harold Myra (Doubleday, 103 pp., $4.95). Colloquial prayers by the longtime editor, then publisher, of Campus Life. It was released shortly before he accepted the invitation to become CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S publisher. (The staff has been assured that its offices are not seen as the answer to the title question.)

Ambassadors of Armstrongism, by Paul Benware (Presbyterian and Reformed, 178 pp., n.p., pb), Know the Marks of Cults, by Dave Breese (Victor, 128 pp., $1.50 pb), God and the Gurus, by R. D. Clements (InterVarsity, 64 pp., $1.25 pb), The Witnesses, by Chandler W. Sterling (Regnery, 198 pp., $8.95), and Scientology: A World Religion Emerges in the Space Age (Church of Scientology [5930 Franklin Ave., Hollywood, Cal. 90028], 64 pp., $10). Biblical Christianity is not the only religion aggressively seeking converts. Benware analyzes and criticizes the “Worldwide Church of God.” Breese discusses cults and their errors in a general sense. Three Western expressions of Hinduism are the subject of Clements’s informative pamphlet. Sterling, a retired Episcopal bishop, gives a survey of Jehovah’s Witnesses that is sympathetic, informative, and not critical. The Scientologists offer a brief, lavish presentation of their own beliefs and activities.

Epistles to the Apostle, by Colin Morris (Abingdon, 176 pp., $3.95 pb). Imaginary letters from a variety of his contemporaries to Paul. Liberties are taken, but some good insights are provided into circumstances surrounding the epistles. Informal.

The Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible, five volumes, edited by Merrill Tenney (Zondervan, 5,064 pp., $79.95 the set). Don’t be put off by the price: it works out to about a penny and a half a page, and most pages contain two columns of text. There are numerous illustrations, but “pictorial” in the title is misleading if it suggests coffee-table showpieces. This is a serious work of reference that every serious Bible student should welcome. Also, it should be recommended to every school and public library, as a counterpart by evangelical scholars to the similar-size Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible.

You Can Tell the World, by Sherwood Wirt (Augsburg, 127 pp., $3.50 pb). The editor of Decision gives good, practical advice for Christians who feel the itch to write.

The Naming of Persons, by Paul Tournier (Harper & Row, 118 pp., $5.95). Yet another worthwhile book by the Swiss physician. A biblically based exposition of the role of names in our lives. Good insights into family relations.

So That’s What Missions Is All About, by Wade Coggins (Moody, 127 pp., $1.95 pb). For those uninformed about missions, here is a simple explanation of missionary purpose and function for group study. In addition to the commonly known mission facts there are Scripture passages to study and questions to discuss.

Lost!, by Thomas Thompson (Atheneum, 249 pp., $8.95). The true story of three people lost at sea on a small boat. Discussion of their relationships to God make up a major portion of the book. Exciting and thought-provoking.

The Key, by Bob Forbes (Vantage, 182 pp., $5.95). The story of how a radio announcer discovered the meaning of life in God’s Word. Gives many practical hints about Scripture reading and memorization. Through the Bible With Those Who Were There, by Harold and Carole Staughn (Tyndale, 270 pp., $3.95). An introductory overview of the Scriptures that focuses on Abraham, Moses, David, Jeremiah, Jesus, Peter, and Paul. Numerous questions for personal reflection and discussion. Recommended.

Personal Bible Study, by William C. Lincoln (Bethany Fellowship, 153 pp., np). Outlines a six-step method of inductive Bible study based on the author’s years of teaching at Northeastern Bible College. Compares the student with a detective. Simple and helpful for beginners.

Peace—On Not Leaving It to the Pacifists, edited by Gerald Pedersen (Fortress, 88 pp., $2.95 pb). Eight Lutheran spokesmen call for an “aggressive” peace, action that takes the initiative in establishing peace whenever and wherever. Thought—provoking beginning on the topic.

The Abusers, by Gary Fisher (Mott Media, [Box 236, Milford, Mich. 48042], 213 pp., $2.95 pb). The results of child abuse are seen in this autobiographical account. He deals more with his responses than with the abuse or the abusers. Finally an evangelical is approaching the subject.

To Serve the Present Age, edited by Donald Dumbaugh (Brethren Press, 224 pp., $4.95 pb). From within the movement comes the story of the Church of the Brethren’s relief work following World War II as told by eighteen participants. Strong testimony to the unity of social consciousness with biblical Christianity.

Charity, Morality, Sex and Young People, by Robert Fox (Our Sunday Visitor, 173 pp., $1.95 pb). A Catholic priest tells what he thinks his church believes about sexual morality. Informally written for the Catholic teenager as an attempt to communicate a conservative perspective. Rather didactic in places.

Love/Hate And Theology

Between Belief and Unbelief, by Paul W. Pruyser (Harper & Row, 1974, 301 pp., $10), is reviewed by Lewis Rambo, graduate student, University of Chicago Divinity School, Chicago, Illinois.

With the publication in 1968 of A Dynamic Psychology of Religion and now with Between Belief and Unbelief, Paul Pruyser of the Menninger Foundation, has established himself as an innovative contributor to the psychology of religion. The first book shifted the focus of traditional psychology of religion from its previous preoccupation with conversion, mysticism, and other extraordinary religious experiences to the ambience of the ordinary believer. The book was also novel in that it used the categories of psychology as the organizing principles for the study of religious phenomena.

Between Belief and Unbelief is an exciting sequel to the earlier book. In it Pruyser explores the interface between religious affirmation and denial. It is his contention that every sensitive religious and nonreligious person in the contemporary world is plagued, either consciously or unconsciously, by pervasive tension, conflict, and doubt with regard to faith and nonfaith. In addition to the social milieu of both secularization and religious revival, there is the psychological environment of interpersonal (especially familial) ambivalence, ambiguity, affection, and animosity. Although aware of the importance of the sociological context, as a psychologist Pruyser focuses on the individual within the complex field of relationships.

Between Belief and Unbelief is based on two fundamental assumptions. First, the individual’s experience of and participation in the family drama play a major role in molding his religious or irreligious response. Second, specific beliefs are reflections of this process, and beliefs, like persons, give gratifications to their possessors. Pruyser’s position is, of course, a refinement of the Freudian theory of the importance of early experience in the family matrix. It should be quickly noted, however, that Pruyser does extend and qualify the psychoanalytic perspective and refuses to use psychoanalysis to reduce religion to nothing but the oedipus complex or some other monothematic interpretation. Indeed, in both books Pruyser avers that the psychology of religion is only one of many perspectives on religion and certainly not a total explanation of it. He acknowledges that religion is a complex phenomenon. He is also aware that religion has both its creative and its destructive manifestations.

Even though many religious people argue that theological positions are arrived at by a process of rational analysis (the atheist also so argues), Pruyser states that inevitably religious positions are most often the result of love/hate relationships with significant figures in a person’s life. A stark example would be the atheist who is an atheist in part because his father is a devout minister. In other words, the hate dimension of the atheist’s ambivalent feeling for his father is diverted into a rejection of what his father cherishes most. Such a clearly identifiable process rarely occurs, of course. Most people have far more subtle love/hate for their parents and their beliefs. A more common example would be the person who is an orthodox Christian in doctrinal affirmations but who lives in a vindictive and authoritarian manner. Whatever the case, there are psychological gratifications to be received by rejecting or accepting particular beliefs and specific styles of life associated with the beliefs.

The bulk of Between Belief and Unbelief is an extensive discussion not of traditional theological assertions but of ways of coping with the perennial conundrums of human existence: autonomy and dependence, mystery, providence, and fantasy and reality. These issues pervade the whole life cycle, and the beliefs and modes of life that are strategies of dealing with these problems are fraught with tensions and satisfactions. Except for rigid atheists and superorthodox people, everyone is continuously struggling, to a greater or lesser degree, between two poles of belief and disbelief, acceptance and rejection.

A crucial point made in Between Belief and Unbelief is that every belief requires both love and hate; that is to say, beliefs require affirmation and affection for a particular tenet and concurrently a denial and disdain for a contrary view. For example, one must love the good and hate evil (however they are defined). This duality of human response to a belief obviously entails the emotions in a way that is seldom explicitly recognized by those who emphasize the “rational” dimension of belief. Needless to say, Pruyser’s revised Freudianism asserts that the pattern of one’s love and hate emerges from the experience of nurture and/or rejection in the early family context. Although childhood experiences are not ironclad determinants of later life, they cannot be transcended unless a person is vividly aware of the origins of his loves and hates and their possible influence on his view of God, the world, and of human nature.

Pruyser shows a grasp of Sigmund Freud, William James, D. W. Winnicott, and many others and also of the experiential diversity and “thickness” (to use James’s term) of human life. His training as a clinical psychologist has prepared him well to discern the rich detail of ordinary life and the vicissitudes of religion within that life. His appreciation for the turbulence and perplexity of modern life provides him with the appropriate sensibilities to perceive accurately the nuances of faith and doubt among believers and nonbelievers (he notes that nonbelievers also doubt their nonbeliefs). Whatever one’s theological or psychological position may be, reading Pruyser’s Between Belief and Unbelief will be an enjoyable and enlightening process.

The Old Testament On Its Own

A Theology of the Old Testament, by John L. McKenzie (Doubleday, 1974, 336 pp., $7.95), is reviewed by Leslie C. Allen, lecturer in Old Testament, London Bible College, England.

Old Testament theology has been such a heated academic talking point in recent years that it is a brave man who ventures a further contribution. McKenzie, a notable Jesuit scholar, comes to the fray well prepared, having previously published a general volume, The Two-edged Sword: An Interpretation of the Old Testament, and an exegetical work, Second Isaiah in the Anchor Bible series. His book is not intended to rival the monumental epics of Eichrodt and von Rad, let alone older works of dogmatics. His useful introduction on “Principles, Methods and Structure” reflects a growing scholarly conviction that there just does not exist a single structural concept into whose confines the Old Testament evidence can somehow be squeezed. Accordingly the book is arranged under a series of topics. He does find a unifying feature in the Old Testament, neither more nor less than the “discovery” or “recognition” of Yahweh: “What emerges in the Old Testament is not a rational system, but a basic personal reality, Yahweh, who is consistent as a person is, not as a rational system.”

The “God-talk” of the Old Testament is placed against its ancient Near Eastern setting. Both contrasts and contacts with the religious thinking of neighboring peoples are brought out. The author writes from a moderate critical position akin to Eissfeldt’s, while in matters of history he stands closer to Noth than to Bright. His role as a modern observer sometimes beclouds his cultural empathy with ancient Israel, for instance, in his denial that the lot was oracular—its use merely indicated, he maintains, that the individual choice did not matter.

Different fields of Israel’s “experience of Yahweh” are discussed under six headings. Cult is happily rescued from the monopoly of Old Testament religion, as a major area of Israel’s contact with its God. Yahweh’s self-revelation is described, through his “authentic spokesmen,” lawgiver, prophet, and scribe; the messages of the prophets are considered individually. The topic of history presents the theological dimensions ascribed to Israel’s history from the patriarchal period to the post-exilic, as “the story of their encounter with Yahweh.” McKenzie is not perturbed that “the history of Israel, like the life of Jesus, does not yield to a quest for the historical Israel.” Like von Rad, he apparently regards theology as “a study of the beliefs of people, not of their history.”

Other topics are nature, political and social institutions (relevant because Israel was a theocracy), wisdom, and the future of Israel. This last topic the author presents as a miscellany of varied themes. The heterogeneous ideals of a prosperous Israel occupying Canaan, of a community centered in the temple, of one that lived by the law, and of one that mediated blessing to other nations jostle the themes of royal messianism, apocalyptic hopes, and moral regeneration.

Throughout this work McKenzie strongly insists that the Old Testament must be studied in its own right and not merely as a preface to the New. He aims to tell it like it was. He does not look back to Irsael with Christian hindsight but stands alongside, looking at their experience of Yahweh and onward to a hazy, jagged horizon of hope. The relation between the Old and New Testaments is, he considers, the task of the New Testament theologian. This may sound like passing the buck or the fault of academic specialization, and McKenzie anticipates the wrath of reviewers! But it is a tenable position. Unfortunately the author sometimes appears to go further and doubt the validity of fulfillment in any legitimate sense. If what he really intends is to jolt the superficial Christian reader of the Old Testament, by drawing attention to the high degree of metamorphosis to which Christ and the New Testament writers subjected Old Testament ideas, and to highlight the ruggedness and distinctiveness of Israel’s faith amidst a pagan environment, perhaps he may be forgiven for shrugging off a task that many other Old Testament theologians have considered vital. A Scripture index and a more theologically oriented subject index would have improved the value of the book as a reference work. Nevertheless I for one will be referring to it often.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Smell No Evil

Not everyone is wholly satisfied with the decisions rendered by the United States Supreme Court; among the malcontents are, for example, the more than two hundred prisoners waiting on “death row” for the Court to decide whether or not their pending execution is cruel, unusual, or otherwise unconstitutional, yet few will deny that the Court brings an innovative spirit to the interpretation of law. Recently Jacksonville, Florida, prohibited the display on vast outdoor screens of certain portions of the human anatomy, ostensibly in order to avoid traffic problems when such screens are visible from traveled roadways. But the Court, even more alert than its members usually look in photographs, quickly spotted in this local ordinance a thinly disguised attempt to abridge the freedom of the press.

Some may wonder whether the Court did well to devote itself to this relatively trivial matter, in view of the many more grievous problems facing it. They may think that instead of abiding by the old Roman maxim De minimis non curat lex (the law is not concerned with trifles), the Supreme Court appears more impressed by the slogan of a contemporary moving company: “No Job Too Small for Us.” But if we look beneath the surface, we see that the Court has broken new legal ground. The attention of most commentators was fixed on the fact that it will now be possible for drivers to witness diverting scenes on drive-in screens as they pass by. Only the more observant noted the promising future opened by Justice Powell’s interesting explanation that it is unreasonable to forbid the projection of such scenes, inasmuch as anyone who wishes to avoid seeing them can do so “simply by averting his eyes.”

This will no doubt put a spoke into the wheel of meddlesome consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who is constantly striving to interfere with freedom of industrial development under the guise of a war on pollution. Justice Powell has not yet said it, but it is now obvious that anyone who does not wish to be exposed to atmospheric pollution can avoid it, “simply by holding his nose.” This puts responsibility for maintaining clean air, like good morals, precisely where it belongs: in the hands of the individual citizens and taxpayers. In addition, instead of attempting to enforce outmoded laws against homicide, aggravated assault, and the like, the government can advise people of their right to run, dodge bullets, and adopt other readily available courses of escape when faced with behavior they consider objectionable.

If it is objected that some people may not be able to avert their gaze, hold their breath long enough, or dodge quickly enough, that is certainly not the responsibility of the Court. After all, as the old legal maxim has it, “Hard cases make bad law.”

More (Much More) On Women

I have read with interest the several articles in the June 6 issue relative to women in the church. I have appreciated the open and relatively balanced fashion in which you have been treating this and other controversial questions—although your articles do reflect a moderate to reactionary range, lacking an enthusiastic positive statement such as some of the young women seeking ordination might make.

It occurs to me, however, that Elisabeth Elliot (“Why I Oppose the Ordination of Women”) and Ruth Graham (Others Say …), like other women who so forcefully express opinions on the role of women in the church as only submissive, in effect contradict their own assertions. If Paul was right when he said women should remain silent and not be allowed to speak “in church,” then by what authority do they write?… To be silent in church would surely include not speaking out publicly in a church journal such as CHRISTIANITY TODAY!

Syracuse First Baptist Church

Syracuse, N.Y.

How sad it is, if I understand Ruth Graham correctly, that all single women are living second-class lives because God has not provided them with a husband and family.

San Jose, Calif.

Your issue of June 6 was excellent. However, I would like to add a note concerning the listing of Letty Russell as a faculty member of the Manhattan College in the Bronx, in the review of books by feminist authors. She is also associate professor of theology at the Divinity School of Yale University.

Consultant in Women’s Ministries

Division of Homeland Ministries

Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)

Indianapolis, Ind.

Three cheers for Betty Elliot’s wonderfully lucid and delightful exposition. How naughty of C.T. to use a lady to express the conservative viewpoint! I don’t deduce the conclusion of the seminary professor’s piece (Paul King Jewett, “Why I Favor the Ordination of Women”) from the red herrings he throws out. He seems to set up an elaborate series of straw men and then knocks them down. Case not proven, professor, even if your exposition is profitable.

Tergiversation … what a wonderful new word to convey warping of the Scriptures.

Dr. Jewett should be required to join a church where the lady minister preaches only in asexual analogs and arid algorithms. On the other hand, it would be interesting to know if Betty Elliot kept things “in order” when engaged in missionary endeavor planting churches.

Beverly Hills, Calif.

A large percentage of the Christian women with whom I talk are searching to find their personhood apart from being simple reflections of husbands and children. These women know an intrinsic part of the Good News is that God sees each of us as a unique, precious person for whom Christ died.… In what sense does Scripture define the masculine and feminine? Rather, aren’t these terms culturally defined and therefore variables? To whom does the single woman “naturally” submit? Do not all submit directly to God? If women achieve excellence only as wives and mothers, what is the hope of achievement for the childless or single woman? How will the granddaughters of Elisabeth Elliot and Ruth Graham answer these questions?

Indiana, Pa.

I consider Ms. Elliot one of the finest ministers in the contemporary church. I find myself more in agreement with Jewett than with Elliot, however. Mr. Jewett’s analysis is, in fact, a fine example of Ms. Elliot’s principle that “we ought always to be testing our assumptions and priorities against the Word of God.” Elliot’s presentation was remarkably weak precisely at the point of biblical support. She unfortunately equates her own opinion that “woman was made from man” and “man was not made for woman” with revelation and therefore rules out “any attempt to evade or reinterpret” her own interpretation! This violates her own principle.

I wish that Jewett, however, had given more attention to the implications of his own stated belief that biblically there is “no essential difference between laity and clergy.” It seems to me this is of fundamental importance. The issue, therefore, is not of clerical ordination but rather the more basic question of ministry. The biblical view of ministry knows no distinction on the basis either of sex or of a clergy/laity dichotomy, but only on the basis of function.…

Contrary to Ms. Elliot, the biblical principle of man-woman relationships is not unilateral female submission but rather, “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Eph. 5:21). Here the analogy between marriage and the Christ-Church relationship must be qualified. The Church must be submissive to Christ in a way that the woman should never be subject to the man—for no man is Christ. And men certainly are not inherently more godly than women.

The biblical view is neither a static hierarchy nor a drab homogenization. Rather it is the beauty, harmony, and diversity of the body where each member is different, each is important, all are interdependent, and all are subject to Christ, the Head.

Executive Director

Light and Life Men, International

Winona Lake, Ind.

A Glaring Omission

As an Anglican clergyman working amongst Cree Indians in northern Quebec, I could not help but notice a glaring omission in David Kucharsky’s article, “Toward a Red Theology?” (News, May 9). There was no mention whatever of the extensive Anglican and Episcopal mission work in many parts of both Canada and the United States, much of which has flourished for well over a century. The Episcopal Church is particularly strong on a number of Indian reservations in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North and South Dakota.… Anglican work in the James Bay area of northern Ontario and Quebec dates from the arrival at Moose Factory in 1851 of the Rev. (later Bishop) John Horden. Thanks to the apostolic labours of Horden and his successors, the vast majority of Crees (and Eskimos) in these two provinces are devout and loyal Anglican Christians.

Kucharsky quotes “a prominent Indian mission director” to the effect that “there may now be considerable duplication of efforts … because of lack of awareness of what others are doing.” Much of this duplication is perpetrated by several independent groups similar to the North Canada Evangelical Mission, as well as by certain Pentecostals who come well-financed from the United States. Their raison d’être is not to convert the heathen to Christ, but to divert existing believers to their own particular brand of denominationalism.

Church of St. John the Evangelist

Baie du Poste, Quebec

Hiding In Harmony

Haarlem, Holland. Spring, 1940. A swastika printed on red cloth, the Nazi flag, flies over that country.

The ten Boom family listens to Queen Wilhelmina over the radio. What was once a free country, she explains, now is part of the Third Reich. Betsie, Corrie, Willem, their father, and Willem’s wife think “it can’t happen here”; the Germans will not exterminate Dutch Jews. But they soon learn how wrong they are.

The story of the ten Boom family is famous through Corrie’s book The Hiding Place. When World Wide Pictures decided to make the book into a film, some people wondered whether it would be artistically and realistically translated into celluloid. Executive producer William F. Brown, director James F. Collier, and the rest of the crew more than succeeded.

The cast is strong and effective. The sensitive actress Julie Harris stars as Betsie; Eileen Heckart is Katje, the prisoner who keeps other prisoners supplied, for a fee, with cigarettes and medicine; and Jeannette Clift is Corrie. Minor roles, too, such as the young German officer (Lex Van Delden), Eusie, the persnickety Jewish scholar (David De Keyser), and Snake, the camp matron (Carol Gillies), are well acted. Arthur O’Connell, who as Papa is the weakest member of the cast, still gives a believable, humorous performance. Technically, the film is superbly constructed; special credit goes to photography director Michael Reed and make-up artists Bunty Phillips and Phil Leakey.

Tedd Smith, who wrote the musical score, spent several months researching the story. His orchestration of the haunting melody that recurs throughout the film gives it a sense of inevitability. Only woodwinds and strings could play this refrain. Smith frequently shifts from cellos to bassoons for a seamless musical fabric. The music subtly supports the action rather than overpowering it. A restrained, sustained cello captures the mood at the train station as the Jews are sent from Holland. A light-hearted gavotte underscores the comic drama as Corrie helps an elderly male Jewish professor disguised as Betsie to escape, her first such experience. The rhythm of the bicycles blends with the song’s dancing rhythm.

The gavotte also symbolizes the frolicsome, yet fevered way the sisters approach the underground. Although they deny to Willem that the work is fun and exciting to them, both music and action deny this. Holding Gestapo drills and timing to the second how long it takes the family to get the Jews into the hiding place seems like a game to Betsie and Corrie. Not until they hear the Gestapo squeal to a stop before their house do their faces show any understanding that their adventure is with life and death. And the orchestration changes from a single instrument to a full, tormented sound.

At the conclusion of the film, when Corrie gets discharged from Ravensbruck concentration camp (according to the synopsis it happens because of a “clerical error,” but this is not evident from the film itself), the harmonic structure of the woodwinds creates a melancholy, bittersweet atmosphere, strikingly reminiscent both in sound and mood of the Jewish composer Gustav Mahler.

The music plays point-counterpoint with dialogue and action, as in the somber and witty conversation between Eusie and Corrie. Eusie, who obnoxiously refuses to carry his workload, tells Corrie of his wife and child, who he hopes escaped Holland. Cello and oboe (the English horn, I’m sure, represents Eusie, with its playfully snide sound) exchange notes as Corrie and Eusie exchange words. Eusie is more serious in this scene than in any other; his retort to Corrie’s “I’ll pray for your family,” though humorous, heightens the pathos: “Don’t think you’ll get me to peel potatoes.”

Even at the most serious moments of the story, humor smiles shyly through. God graciously provided the ten Boom family with a large amount of wit as well as a strong love of life and a deep faith. And Corrie and Betsie needed all these qualities to live at Ravensbruck. For example, Hut 28, to which the sisters were assigned, was overrun with lice. “Can you imagine what Mama would say?” asks Betsie and her sense of humor lightens the burden of lice.

The film, shot on location in Holland and England, realistically depicts both the agony of isolation and the psychological crippling of overcrowded barracks. Corrie, alone in a narrow cell, crouches in the corner. She moans, “Lord, I didn’t know I’d be all alone.” And when the camera focuses on her hands, folding and clenching, her dirty fingernails provide a striking contrast with the scrupulously clean house she kept before. Back at home, a shot of the steam kettle left boiling in Corrie’s room after the family’s arrest reinforces her isolation.

The producer and director did not shirk from showing the nearly stripped bodies of the women entering Ravensbruck, or their naked fight for clothes. Part of the torment of the concentration camp was the impersonality with which prisoners were treated. Physical stripping reflects the emotional and psychological stripping done by guards and wardens.

Academy Award-winning Eileen Heckart (Katje) portrays pain so realistically that the viewer’s body aches, too. Her hand, battered bloody by rifle butts, seems to throb visibly. Even the soft cotton the nurse puts in her palm causes Katje to cringe.

The small Bible that Katje smuggles to Corrie (who thanks God for it, though Katje wryly asks, “Don’t I get any credit?”) comforts the prisoners. Spiritual discussions arise naturally from the story and seem not superimposed on it but necessary to it. World Wide Pictures had offers from several major film distributors but decided to do its own distribution. The other companies wanted to cut some of the spiritual content, and World Wide couldn’t compromise on that matter, according to producer Bill Brown. If it had, both spiritual and artistic integrity would have suffered.

Betsie, played by Julie Harris, leads the group in spiritual discussions. Her unfaltering faith would have seemed unreal played by a lesser actress. And Katje’s conversion right before Corrie leaves the camp would have been too abrupt without the skillful character development accomplished by both actress and cameraman. Often during Betsie’s Bible studies the camera veers to Katje, silently, skeptically, yet hungeringly attuned to God’s words. It is Katje who forces Corrie to look at Betsie’s body, beautiful and serene in death.

One of the most powerful aspects of the film is the way in which it raises hard ethical questions. Corrie lies to the Gestapo and passes coded messages that may mean someone’s death. She asks if it’s right to lie and steal and kill for a good cause. No glib answers are given.

World Wide produced two endings for the film, one for general audiences and one for church audiences. The church-audience ending is a minute-long shot of Corrie speaking directly to the viewers about what they’ve seen. The general-audience version ends with Corrie, released from prison, walking alone through the snow. The action freezes and slowly changes into an oil painting. On the left appear the death dates of her family, father, brother, sister, with a phrase telling of Corrie’s thirty-year tramp for the Lord. On the right is the sentence “telling in the light what she learned in the darkness,” which stays on the screen a few seconds longer than the rest, white on black. This conclusion ties in well with the opening, in which the background for the credits shows faded photographs changing from the real family to the film family.

The film has not yet had its final editing and will not be released until September. World Wide plans to replace two scenes and cut part of the opening scene. The film, which runs nearly two-and-a-half hours, needs further editing. About twenty to thirty minutes should be cut, perhaps between the train scene and Betsie’s illness. But any such weaknesses are minor.

The Hiding Place shows Christian film-making come of age. It should get recognition not only from churches but from the secular film world and the academy as well.

CHERYL FORBES

Divorce is always a tragedy no matter how civilized the handling of it, always a confession of human failure, even when it is the sorry better of sorry alternatives.” Most of us will agree with this observation made in a Time magazine essay on divorce. But what shall we say about the unhappy marriage, sometimes called “holy deadlock”? Is it better than a happy divorce? Psychologists, marriage counselors, and judges are asking questions like this. Regrettably, the answers are not being supplied by articulate evangelicals. Most evangelicals say they oppose divorce under any circumstances. This is most unfortunate, because the Bible does not take an inflexible stance on the question.

Paul in his first Corinthian letter gives detailed instructions on how the problem should be handled in the church. In First Corinthians 7:10–16 Paul’s treatment of the divorce question depends upon who is involved. He discusses (1) the divorce of two believers (vv. 10, 11), (2) the divorce of a believer and an unbeliever where the unbeliever does not want a divorce (vv. 12–14), and (3) the divorce of a believer and an unbeliever where the unbeliever wants a divorce (v. 15). Paul does not deal with divorce involving unbelievers. God allows them divorce for the hardness of their hearts. But with Christians, the hardness of the heart has been remedied. What about them?

Divorce of two believers. Paul speaks first of divorce involving two believers: “And unto the married I command, yet not I, but the Lord, Let not the wife depart from her husband” (1 Cor. 7:10). Paul mentions the command of the Lord, recalling for us what Jesus taught in the Gospels. Jesus was unalterably opposed to divorce for Christians.

Paul was aware, however, that a Christian husband or wife out of fellowship with Jesus Christ can make marriage intolerable for the other partner. I know of an evangelical minister who had an outwardly successful ministry, a talented and devoted wife, and grown children, and who was discovered to be a homosexual. Even after he was discovered, he persisted in his perversion. His wife was opposed to divorce, but she could not live with him.

Undoubtedly Paul had run into similar situations in Corinth. He advises the wife that “if she depart, let her remain unmarried, or be reconciled to her husband: and let not the husband put away his wife” (1 Cor. 7:11). The divorce law in Paul’s day did not provide for legal separation in which a woman could live apart from her husband and not be divorced from him. Fortunately the law today does provide for legal separation. The Christian who needs the protection of the law may take this route as an alternative to divorce. Legal separation provides protection but leaves the door open for reconciliation. The door to reconciliation must always be left open because Christians have in Christ the means of solving their problem.

Since there was no legal separation in Paul’s day, Paul had to advise a specialized use of divorce. In fact, he does not use the same word for divorce that Jesus used (apoluo), undoubtedly to guard against contradicting what Christ taught about divorce. Paul says that the Christian wife may “depart” (koridzo) from her Christian husband, but she must remain unmarried. “Depart” means divorce, else why would Paul say “let her remain unmarried”? Divorce with this condition is really the same as our law of legal separation. By attaching this condition to divorce, Paul keeps the spirit of Christ’s commandment and at the same time provides protection for the believing wife until a reconciliation can be effected with her husband.

If a believer’s professing spouse divorces and remarries, what then? Reconciliation is impossible. In such a case I believe that the abandoned believer is free of the burden to remain unmarried because the purpose of remaining unmarried, the hope of reconciliation, has been eliminated. He has fulfilled the spirit of the command.

I use the word “professing” with design. It seems to me that a Christian sometimes places himself under the rules pertaining to the marriage of two believers when the behavior of the spouse raises serious questions about his professed Christianity. The Apostle James must be taken seriously here. A true faith is demonstrated in a changed life.

Divorce of a believer and an unbeliever where the unbeliever does not want a divorce. Regarding this second situation Paul says: “But to the rest speak I, not the Lord: If any brother hath a wife that believeth not, and she be pleased to dwell with him, let him not put her away. And the woman which hath an husband that believeth not, and if he be pleased to dwell with her, let her not leave him” (1 Cor. 7:12, 13).

Since the Lord had not given instruction in the case of marriage between believers and unbelievers, Paul, under the inspiration of the Spirit, does. The language is clear: If the unbeliever does not want a divorce, the believer is not to sue for divorce. It may be asked, then, what the believing wife should do if the unbelieving husband mistreats her. The principle of verses 10 and 11 may be applied in such a case. The woman may secure a legal separation for her own protection, but the door to reconciliation must be left open so long as the unbeliever wants reconciliation.

This may seem an excessive burden to place on a Christian—to require him to remain with an unbelieving spouse. Paul states why he must: “For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband: else were your children unclean; but now they are holy” (1 Cor. 7:14). Whatever is involved in the “sanctifying” role of the believer, this much is clear: the believer exposes the unbeliever to a Christian influence that is bound to have an effect on the unbeliever and may ultimately result in his salvation. Paul says in verse 16, “For what knowest thou, O wife, whether thou shalt save thy husband? or how knowest thou, O man, whether thou shalt save thy wife?”

I often think of this verse in church prayer meetings where women with unbelieving husbands faithfully come to pray with the church for the salvation of their husbands. Nowhere have I seen such a concern for the lost. Indeed, the unbelieving husband is placed in a unique position by the believing wife.

Divorce of a believer and an unbeliever where the unbeliever wants a divorce. Paul’s instruction here is: “But if the unbelieving depart, let him depart. A brother or a sister is not under bondage in such cases: but God hath called us to peace” (1 Cor. 7:15).

A great deal of argument has centered on the word “depart.” What does it mean, divorce or separation? “Depart” is the Greek word koridzo, the same word used in verse 11. In verse 11 the word clearly means divorce, else Paul would not have made the condition of no remarriage. Paul uses the word “depart” to mean divorce with or without condition. In verse 11 he speaks of divorce with the condition of no remarriage. In verse 15 he speaks of divorce with no condition attached. This is the clear meaning of “a brother or sister is not under bondage in such cases.” In the case described in verses 10 and 11, the brother or sister is under bondage: no remarriage. In verse 15, the brother is not under bondage: remarriage is allowed.

Paul does not elucidate the circumstances of verse 15. He does not say whether it applies only to a person saved after marriage or also to a believer who unwisely marries an unbeliever. Paul’s teaching applies to the situation as it stands at the moment of divorce: an unbeliever wants to divorce the believer. It matters not how it came to be that the believer is married to the unbeliever. If the unbeliever wants a divorce, the believer is free.

One further word should be said about this. Paul’s instructions in this passage must be considered in light of the variety of divorce laws in the United States today. Many times the unbeliever may desire to depart but find himself unable to secure a divorce under his state law. He may ask the believer to sue for divorce in such a case. Would such a divorce be scriptural?

The answer is found in the spirit of what Paul is saying. Does the unbeliever want freedom? If he does, the believer may grant that freedom. The only reason to maintain the marriage bond is to bear witness to the unbeliever (1 Cor. 7:13, 14). If the unbeliever does not want to remain in the presence of the believer, there is no reason to maintain the bond.

It may be, therefore, that by legal technicality the believer must file for divorce to grant the unbeliever the freedom he desires. In such a case the believer would be fulfilling the spirit of First Corinthians 7:15.

Objections to this stand on divorce will certainly be raised. A frequent objection is, “What about the children of divorce? They will be hurt.” Unfortunately, marriages that are kept together “for the sake of the children” rarely benefit the children. In his book Children of Divorce, Dr. J. L. Despert says that it is not legal divorce that damages the children but emotional divorce. The marriage is held together for the sake of the child, but the child is made to live in an atmosphere charged with tension. Dr. Despert says, “As long as the child knows that his parents love him and will continue to take care of him, he can accept the fact that they both no longer live with him” (p. 77).

Psychologists at the University of Washington have found that divorce is not as damaging to the children of divorce as is commonly supposed. Their study shows that as a group, adolescents in broken homes show less psychosomatic illness, less delinquent behavior, and better adjustment to the parents than do children in unhappy, unbroken homes (New York Times Magazine, Feb. 14, 1965). Of course, the ideal is a happy, unbroken home, but that ideal is not always possible.

The child may feel guilty about the breakup, but the parents can minimize the child’s feeling of guilt and assure him that he will not be abandoned. The parents should calmly explain the situation to the child and not let him find out from quarrels between them or from the neighbors. The child must be told that the divorce means the end of stress, not the end of contact with him.

The mother may say simply, “Your father and I can no longer live together happily, but that doesn’t change the feelings we have for you. Even though your father won’t live with us, he will continue to love you and will never stop being your father.”

The father may explain, “What has happened was between your mother and me and had nothing to do with you. You had no part in our unhappiness or our decision to divorce.”

The whole matter may be summed up in this way: though the Church may permit the legal separation of believers with the hope of reconciliation, it can never encourage the divorce and remarriage of believers. They have the means in Christ of fulfilling the original pattern of marriage: the two shall be one flesh.

In the case of marriage between a believer and unbeliever, the Church may permit divorce and remarriage. Paul says that God has called us to peace (literally, “in peace”). When a person accepts Jesus Christ as his Saviour, he has peace with God, and peace ought to mark all his earthly conduct. Insisting on the continuation of a marriage when the unbeliever does not want it contradicts this spirit of peace.

Divorce is a tragedy, but there are times when it is preferable to an unhappy marriage.

Fifty years ago this month the biggest news story since World War I broke across the front pages in this country and abroad: the Scopes “monkey” trial of July 9–21, 1925. And only a few days after the trial ended, its most famous participant, William Jennings Bryan, lay dead.

Today historians are beginning to see the Scopes trial and William Jennings Bryan in a different way than most Americans saw them in 1925. By the end of the trial, Bryan was the most vilified man in America, at least in most of the nation’s leading newspapers. He died shortly afterward with a dark cloud hanging over his reputation.

But from the perspective of half a century, Bryan’s place of leadership in both the Progressive movement and evangelical Christianity is being reassessed. The experiences of fifty years have forced historians to take a second look at the harsh criticisms leveled at him in the mid-1920s. Bryan’s personal and political reputation is being restored, and evangelicals are rediscovering a respected “hero of the faith.”

The 1920s were a time of intellectual, social, and economic upheaval in the United States. They were also a time of bitter trial for American Christianity. As the noted historian Sydney E. Ahlstrom said: “Furious controversies, great debates, and wild fulminations were the order of the day. And nearly all of this conflict is part of the nation’s religious history, either because the churches were active participants or because events impinged on their life” (A Religious History of the American People, p. 896).

Perhaps most important for evangelical Christianity was the spectacular development of science and technology in the period. Some Protestant leaders tried to accommodate traditional doctrines to modern scientific thought, and theological liberalism became popular in some circles. Other Protestants, mostly evangelicals, refused to alter their beliefs to suit the theories of science, especially in the realms of biology and anthropology. Although the lines of battle had been drawn before 1920, warfare erupted between two major Protestant groups after that date.

Evolution became the focal point for this fundamentalist-modernist confrontation. On one side stood those who rejected any possibility of the evolutionary development of man. On the other stood those who accepted the basic ideas of Charles Darwin concerning the “descent of man.” The public schools and state legislatures of the nation were the battleground.

Evolution became the focal point of the fundamentalist counterattack on modernism because it provided a concrete target. The variety and fluidity of theological liberalism made it an elusive enemy. However, Darwinian evolution was an unmistakable and highly visible part of the modernists’ ideological superstructure, and therefore an obvious area for fundamentalists’ attention. Moreover, its growing identification with atheism, sexual immorality, secularism, and Communism in this period made it eminently attackable.

In this way the Scopes trial became central to the fortunes of fundamentalism in the twenties. This case gave the fundamentalists worldwide notoriety and brought the issue of evolution to Main Street America. In addition, the trial in Dayton, Tennessee, dramatized the nature of the conflict between the two religious movements fighting for the soul of America. Finally, it brought Bryan to the forefront in his last great role in American history: defender of the fundamentalist faith.

The Shining Knight

Bryan had long been known as an outspoken champion of the Christian faith. A testifying Presbyterian, he was unabashed in his stand for evangelical Christianity and the application of Christian principles to politics. Bryan, the Great Commoner and three-time Democratic presidential nominee, was something of an American folk hero, especially in rural America. As a man of impeccable morality and Christian idealism, he was the “shining knight” of the Progressive Era of American history.

However, after 1920 the Commoner turned his main attention to what he perceived as the threat to Christian orthodoxy presented by evolution. His patience with evolutionary theory gradually wore thin. Finally, Bryan consented when prominent fundamentalists urged him to assume the leadership of a great anti-evolution crusade. Although more accurately described as an “evangelical” and not as a sociological fundamentalist, Bryan certainly embraced the “fundamentals of the faith” that marked theological fundamentalism, and after 1920 he became the most distinguished spokesman for the fundamentalist cause.

The general outline of the story of the famous Dayton trial in 1925 is well known. The bizarre affair centered on the trial of a young local high school teacher, John T. Scopes, who was accused of violating a new Tennessee law that forbade the teaching of the theory of evolution in the public schools. Scopes freely admitted that he had taught the questionable doctrine, but, through his lawyers, he challenged the constitutionality of the law. Bryan was invited to join the prosecution.

Legal niceties aside, the real opponents in the trial were the older Protestant America and the newer, increasingly secular America. The Dayton trial provided a forum for a great debate between leading spokesmen for the two sides: William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow.

But the Scopes trial turned out to be a nightmare for Bryan and the fundamentalists. It also proved to be a watershed in American religious history. This trial did more than any other single event of the decade to discredit evangelical Christianity in the United States. Bryan and the fundamentalists movement came away battered and scarred, in the areas of both public perception of the Christian stand on evolution and of evangelical morale. After July, 1925, the term “fundamentalist” became synonymous with bigotry and ignorance in the minds of millions of Americans. How and why did this happen?

The Tarnished Armor

By 1925, fundamentalism represented evangelical Christianity to the popular mind, and Bryan was its most prestigious leader. Unfortunately, the Bryan of 1925 was not the vigorous, dynamic Bryan of an earlier era. By 1925, he was sixty-five and in failing health, both physically and politically. The opposition at Dayton took advantage of Bryan’s growing weakness, and to some extent he laid himself open to the kind of treatment he received. His defense of the faith he loved so dearly was neither sophisticated nor particularly relevant. On the other hand, Darrow was ruthless in dealing with Bryan and left no avenue unexplored that might make the aging Commoner look like a religious crank. In effect, Darrow put Bryan on trial at Dayton and focused attention on him rather than Scopes.

But Bryan’s mistakes and the advantage Darrow took of them to discredit his opponent and his opponent’s faith do not explain fully the widespread negative impression of Christianity left in the minds of many Americans after the trial. Darrow was abetted in his efforts by a press hostile to Bryan and his cause. Many Americans assume that slanted journalism is a recent invention. As a matter of fact, it has a considerable history in this country. But even at that, the historian is struck by the vigorous antagonism toward Bryan displayed by American newspapers in July, 1925.

Research indicates that the majority of those who reported the Scopes trial went out of their way to cast Bryan in the role of an ignorant fanatic and bigot. It is not clear why the contemporary press was so hostile to Bryan and fundamentalism; more study needs to be done to clarify this. Whatever the case, Bryan was misquoted, jeered, and vilified in many of the nation’s leading newspapers and magazines.

A study of the New York Times’s coverage of the event reveals how far this animosity toward Bryan extended. The Scopes trial dominated page one of the Times from July 9 to July 22, 1925. On the opening day the champion of fundamentalism was strategically misquoted by a Time reporter to the effect that if he lost in Dayton he would lead a campaign to put the Bible in the Constitution and push for an amendment to prohibit the teaching of evolution. What Bryan really said was that if he lost the Scopes case he would carry the fight to the people. A correction, published at Bryan’s insistence, appeared days later on page two. In the interim, Bryan became the object of a spate of editorials and cartoons in national newspapers denouncing him for his alleged efforts to impose his kind of religion on others by law.

During the trial the Times ran several editorials severely criticizing Bryan and referring to him as “prodigiously ignorant” and a man with “a poorly furnished brain-room.” An unflattering large picture of Bryan appeared on the front page on July 13. When Bryan supposedly stated at the trial that “these men [the evolutionists] would destroy the Bible on evidence that would not convict a habitual criminal of a misdemeanor,” the Times requested that Professor H. F. Osborn, president of the New York Museum of Natural History, reply. It gave him a “special features” section in the July 12 issue of the paper to do so. Even when Bryan died shortly after the trial, the Times editors could find little good to say about him except for a few backhanded compliments.

Other major nationally recognized papers joined in the attack. On July 10, the Atlanta Constitution carried a lead story by Raymond Clapper, who claimed that the antagonists in Tennessee were ready for “the greatest battle of the mind since Galileo was imprisoned by the inquisition for teaching the earth is round.” It goes without saying who at Dayton represented Galileo and who the Inquisition. In a similar vein, several bitter editorials in the Cleveland Press attacked the Commoner and his fundamentalist followers; one suggested that the reporters at Dayton might be better off if they simply packed up and “took a train for the United States.”

Perhaps the harshest and most relentless assaults on Bryan came from the Chicago Tribune, which also had its radio affiliate WGN broadcasting directly from the site of the trial. Half a dozen editorials during the three-week period characterized Bryan as a bigot and an enemy of American liberty. On July 22, the Tribune’s lead editorial commented on the results of the trial: “In each state of the Union he wants a law which will bring the aid of the legislature, the law, the courts and the police to the upholding of his way of reading the King James version of the Bible.” A series of Tribune cartoons during the course of the trial mercilessly lampooned Bryan as an ignorant hayseed.

The best example of non-objective reporting was that done by H. L. Mencken, who covered the trial for the Baltimore Evening Sun. Mencken, sharp-tongued critic of Americana and iconoclast par excellence, and a number of other reporters acted unofficially on behalf of the defense. Mencken’s attitude to Bryan is summed up by his reaction to the news of Bryan’s death a few days after the trial: “We killed the son-of-a-bitch!”

The negative impression of Bryan purveyed by the American press in July, 1925, was enhanced decades later by a broadway play (1950) made into a movie (1960) entitled Inherit the Wind. The movie more than the play assailed Bryan and fundamentalism and badly hurt their image. Although real names were not used, Inherit the Wind is about the Scopes trial. The movie is a classic case of historical distortion and the manipulation of ideas and characters. Bryan is portrayed as an ignorant fanatic, the fundamentalists are caricatured as vicious and narrow-minded hypocrites, and Darrow is the idealized showcase liberal. And this is the stuff of which stereotypes are made!

After 1925 the notion that Bryan and Fundamentalism stood for bigotry and ignorance grew until it became the accepted view. Bryan, the shining knight of Progressivism, now wore badly tarnished armor. Over the years novels, essays, and poems, and Inherit the Wind helped sustain the myth. Fundamentalists themselves contributed to it after 1925 by emphasizing the “withdrawn life” and by becoming more negative in their world view.

The Vanquished Vindicated

But this reactionary stereotype is grossly unfair to Bryan and to evangelical Christianity. Bryan’s post-1920 faults and later fundamentalist negativism must be admitted; yet the whole of a man’s career must be assessed before judgment is passed. More recent students of Bryan’s life and work (such as historians Paul W. Glad and Paolo Coletta) are inclined to see the Great Commoner’s positive achievements as far outweighing the negative image stemming from the Scopes trial. With the passage of years, scholars see more clearly the Bryan who was a great Christian statesman and a leading Progressive reformer. Moreover, the course of recent history has forced many scholars to re-evaluate their judgment of the Dayton trial itself, especially in the light of the principle of Bryan’s position there.

As Professor Coletta has pointed out concerning Bryan: “His uniqueness lay in his double dedication, first to his God, second to the ideal of imbuing America’s domestic and foreign relations with Christian ethics and morality. In each case he was a humanitarian.” As a Christian statesman, he consistently defended personal rather than property rights and championed democracy as the best of all possible forms of government. As a Christian statesman, he opposed war and worked tirelessly for peaceful solutions to world problems. As secretary of state (1913–1915), Bryan negotiated arbitration treaties with thirty nations. He resigned this position in June, 1915 when he could no longer support President Woodrow Wilson’s increasingly belligerent policy toward Germany.

Further, Bryan was a progressive reformer and a humanitarian because he was an evangelical Christian. To the end of his life, his sense of Christian ethics remained supreme. He believed that the message of Christ was both individual and corporate. He stood for the cross of Christ and against imperialism, alcohol, greed, and godlessness. He believed in both political and economic democracy. He was in the vanguard of the drive for women’s suffrage because he believed it was where a Christian belonged. He worked vigorously for change and progress in the political and economic realms, but at the same time he wanted America to remain unchanged morally and theologically.

Moreover, the basic concern of Bryan and the fundamentalists at Dayton has proved to be a reality. Some have seen the Scopes trial turning on the issue of academic freedom versus the rights of taxpayers. Others feel it was a showdown between the new urbanism and the old agrarianism, while still others regard the focal point as the modernist-fundamentalist controversy.

Bryan thought differently. In his last printed speech, published posthumously, he declared that although it is desirable to know science, it is imperative to know how to live. He went on to say that evolution was deadening the spiritual lives of millions of students by making the redemption of the individual impossible and by substituting the law of the jungle for the love true Christians have for all people. Bryan was rightly concerned about a cult of science that stripped away basic beliefs, provided no adequate system of ethics, offered little sustenance in times of grief, and robbed society of an integrative principle with which to explain humanity and the universe. Fifty years later, more and more people are aligning themselves with Bryan in this concern.

Insights For Evangelicals

The anti-evolution crusade that fizzled in Tennessee in 1925 represented the last gasp of Bryan-style Progressivism. Bryan was the last of the major evangelical leaders of the early twentieth century to blend populist democracy with the historic Christian faith until the recent resurgence of evangelical social concern in the 1960s. Even though Bryan won the battle at Dayton, he and the fundamentalists lost the campaign for the hearts and minds of the American people during the next generation. As a result of the largely negative reactions to evangelical efforts to meet the threat of evolution through political and social action, the fundamentalist wing of evangelical Christianity increasingly withdrew from the mainstream of American life and turned its attention more and more narrowly to a Gospel shorn of its social dimension.

The confrontation at Dayton offers a number of insights for evangelicals, especially from the perspective of fifty years. First, evangelical Christians need to pay more attention to the press. Something happened in the years prior to 1925 to create a body of reporters and correspondents basically hostile to the evangelical community and its leadership. Probably a number of factors entered into this antagonism between Bryan and his followers and the press corps at Dayton. But whatever the reasons, the situation makes it clear that in a mass society evangelicals cannot afford to ignore the role of mass communications. In 1925, it was newspapers and radio, then just a fledgling industry. Today it is both of those plus TV. More evangelicals need to consider media journalism as a calling of God. More evangelicals need to concentrate on good relations with the press in order to aid the work of God at many levels.

BY YOUR FLIGHT, O DOVE

By your flight, O dove,

we know you;

by your access,

regal, sure—

by your rapt delineation

of your message,

by your power.

You have circled over

the Savior,

spread your wings

above his Word.

Irresistible your

signals,

we have kneeled

before your Lord.

BETH MERIZON

Second, evangelicals need to remember their heritage of political and social activism so abundantly illustrated by the career of William Jennings Bryan. For more than forty years, Bryan enriched American life with his dedication to democratic and humanitarian reform. At all times he tested all questions, whether of law, politics, or economics, by the light of the Bible and/or democratic principle. His political involvement was based, as he himself said, on “faith in God, belief in Christ, and confidence in the people.” A man with admitted human faults, he was a warm, honest, wholesome human being who spent his entire life translating Christian ethical principles into political action. A growing number of evangelicals feel that he is the prototype of national leader desperately needed today. The Bryan heritage of evangelical social and political concern needs to be redeemed.

Finally, evangelicals can learn from the Scopes trial the advantages of the positive approach and the pitfalls of excessive negativism. Bryan and his followers allowed themselves to be trapped at Dayton. They were maneuvered into the role of villain and bigot, a very uncomfortable one for an old reformer like Bryan. Nevertheless, it happened, and evangelicals emerged from the incident tarred with the brush of reaction, anti-intellectualism, and authoritarianism. After 1925, the fundamentalist movement soured and became more and more defensive. The initiative in the struggle for the soul of the nation passed to the modernists, who held it for a generation. Now, in the new era of evangelical resurgence, the evangelical community has an opportunity to see that such a debacle does not occur again.

Bryan believed that God stands in judgment of all political, economic, and social systems—and so should all Christians today. Bryan believed that every follower of Christ has stake in his government and his society—and so should all Christians today. Bryan believed that the Gospel of Christ entailed not only individual but also social righteousness—and so should all Christians today. In this respect, the Great Commoner’s eloquent words, carved on his statue in Lincoln, Nebraska, are a fitting tribute to the man and the heritage he has left for evangelicals today: “The humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error.” This, and not the negative image created by the Scopes trial, is the heritage of William Jennings Bryan. Will evangelicals in this generation reclaim it before it is too late?