Will the 2.8-million-member Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS) be torn apart by schism?

Yes, say leaders of the so-called moderate side in the five-year-long battle in the LCMS over the doctrine of Scripture and how much doctrinal conformity the denomination can require of its churches and members. Actions taken at last month’s biennial convention in Anaheim, they claim, were a series of “eviction notices” that will force them out. These moves, they say, soon will lead to a direct confrontation between the conservative-led denomination and some of its districts and local churches. For the first time, they state, many members at the local level will become informed and take a stand. The result will be a new Lutheran denomination or transitional fellowship (pending merger with another Lutheran body) having an initial membership of 250,000 or so, says a moderate spokesman.

Conservative leaders, however, say they expect fewer than 100 congregations to bolt. And LCMS president Jacob “Jack” A. O. Preus implies he will do all he can to avert an explosive showdown with dissident district bodies.

The battle lines were drawn in 1969 when John H. Tietjen moved from a pan-Lutheran public relations job to the presidency of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, then the world’s largest Lutheran seminary, and when Preus moved from the presidency of Concordia Seminary in Springfield, Illinois, to the presidency of LCMS. Preus, riding the wave of conservative concern over creeping theological liberalism in the LCMS, pledged that no synodical school would be permitted to teach that the Bible contains errors.

In 1970 Preus appointed a fact-finding committee to investigate teaching at Concordia, St. Louis, an action protested by moderates. The haggling continued through 1971. Conservatives failed at that year’s convention to land a majority on Concordia’s board of control.

In 1972 Preus issued “A Statement of Scriptural and Confessional Principles,” a set of theological guidelines upholding the inerrancy of Scripture. The majority of Concordia’s forty-plus teachers rejected it as a standard for judging their theological stance. They were supported by the board of control. Things heated up when instructor Arlis Ehlen, under criticism for allegedly teaching that some Old Testament events were not factual, was dismissed by the LCMS board for higher education. The American Association of Theological Schools placed Concordia on academic probation, citing outside interference in the school’s internal affairs. Preus released a report critical of the school, a report labeled in a public rebuttal by Tietjen as “unfair, untrue, sub-biblical, and un-Lutheran.”

In 1973 Concordia’s faculty majority issued a 200-page statement, asserting their faithfulness to the Word of God and the church. The LCMS Commission on Theology and Church Relations, headed by Ralph Bohlmann, found the statement unsatisfactory and asked the teachers to reject the liberal-oriented historical-critical method of biblical interpretation.

At the 1973 convention in New Orleans, Preus was reelected. Conservatives swept into power on virtually all commissions and boards, including Concordia’s. They also passed a series of resolutions that gave official status to Preus’s confessional statement, declared false doctrine was being taught at Concordia, and referred charges against Tietjen to the board of control.

In reaction, a group of moderates formed Evangelical Lutherans in Mission (ELIM) to lobby for change and to support dissidents.

After months of haggling, Tietjen was suspended as Concordia’s president in January, 1974. Most of the seminary’s students, faculty, and staff declared a moratorium on classes to protest the suspension. When the faculty and staff majority refused to go back to work they were fired. The student majority joined them to organize Concordia Seminary in Exile, nicknamed Seminex. Backed by ELIM and headquartered in borrowed space at a Jesuit school, Seminex students continued their education under their old teachers.

That spring the 100-plus Seminex graduates began seeking ordination and placement, most of them shunning special denominational procedures aimed at granting them official endorsement. Sympathetic district presidents accommodated them—against the wishes of Preus.

Meanwhile, a row broke out in the LCMS foreign missions division, mostly over policies and personalities rather than theology. The dispute disrupted overseas work, which was already affected adversely by the doctrinal conflict. Several staffers resigned, including executive secretary William H. Kohn. Kohn became head of Partners in Mission, the de facto mission wing of ELIM.

The Concordia board finally fired Tietjen officially in October, 1974, charging him with false doctrine and administrative shortcomings, among other things. Formal doctrinal charges were lodged against him by two pastors. In January he was elected president of Seminex (Bohlmann was elected president of Concordia in May). A few days before the Anaheim convention convened, the charges of false doctrine against Tietjen were dismissed by Oscar A. Gerken, Missouri district vice-president, who had been assigned to investigate. The pastors say they will appeal, meaning that the case eventually may land on Preus’s desk for a decision. In Anaheim, Preus said he wanted time to study the Gerken decision before commenting on it. Bohlmann insisted that Tietjen is guilty.

Preus, five LCMS vice-presidents, and the presidents of thirty-eight North American LCMS districts (plus two in South America) meet periodically as the Council of Presidents. For the most part, the district presidents seem to be pastoral types who simply want the boat-rocking in the Missouri Synod to stop. But over the past year the council itself has been the scene of conflict, mostly over Seminex.

In May the council adopted a resolution that in effect asked the upcoming convention to settle the issue of how to certify Seminex graduates for the LCMS ministry. (Some presidents were ordaining them outright; others were requiring them to complete the special program set up by Concordia.) The resolution ended with a pledge:

We solemnly assure the church that we shall abide by the decisions of the convention on these matters and that we shall perform our duties in accordance with our oath of office.

Eight presidents, however, declined to sign. They argued that congregations, in an issue of conscience, have the constitutional right to ordain a pastor even if the church at large rejects him. Seminex is a valid LCMS school, they implied, and its graduates are fit ministerial candidates. In their statement of dissent they blamed the key New Orleans resolutions for “a major role in the Synod’s problems.”

The eight: Herman R. Frincke, Eastern District; Harold L. Hecht, English; Paul E. Jacobs, California-Nevada; Emil G. Jaech, Northwest; Waldemar E. Meyer, Colorado; Herman F. Neunaber, Southern Illinois; Rudolph P. F. Ressmeyer, Atlantic; and Robert J. Riedel, New England. They represent a total of nearly 600,000 baptized members in 1,300 congregations.

To Preus, the stand of the eight presidents amounted to anarchy—and the continuation of Seminex. In his keynote presidential address at Anaheim he emphasized that Seminex, ELIM, and dissenting district presidents had to be dealt with in a “fair and loving” but “firm” way. No church body, he stated, can long support two theologies which are in conflict nor long endure such divisiveness as that caused by ELIM. As for the district presidents, said he:

The convention must finally decide who understands the constitution correctly. It must finally insist that those who serve as officers of the Synod, whether at the synodical or district level, give assurance to the Synod that they will carry out their duties in keeping with the Synod’s understanding of its constitution and bylaws.

At the Anaheim Convention Center were 1,120 voting delegates (560 pastoral, 560 lay), 500 advisory delegates, and a visitors’ gallery of 1,500. On crucial votes, the conservatives registered roughly a 60–40 majority, enabling Preus to get the anti-Seminex package he wanted. Amid prolonged and emotional debate, the delegates:

• Called on those associated with Seminex to close it; if not, it will be regarded as any other non-LCMS theological school.

• Confirmed that Seminex graduates must be properly certified to be eligible for the LCMS ministry and urged them to take corrective steps.

• Authorized action to make Seminex stop using “Concordia Seminary” as part of its name.

• Stipulated that Seminex professors can be retained on the LCMS clergy roster only as candidates on a renewable annual basis.

• Labeled the 14,000-member ELIM as schismatic and set up procedures to discipline those in it if it continues its schismatic ways (“support of a competing seminary [and] a competing mission program, its encouraging congregations to withhold financial support from the Synod and to call uncertified men as pastors”).

• Decided to merge Concordia Senior College of Ft. Wayne, Indiana, the main LCMS pre-ministerial school, with the LCMS junior college at Ann Arbor, Michigan, making that school a four-year institution; and to move Concordia Seminary, Springfield, to the Fort Wayne campus (the Fort Wayne college was a major source of Seminex support).

• Decreed by a 626–466 vote that a district president must ordain or authorize the ordination of properly certified candidates only and asked that he resign if he cannot uphold this constitutional requirement (if he does not resign and if he persists, he can be subjected to discipline that can lead to his office being declared vacant).

The action concerning the district presidents was wrought with emotion. Each of the eight was given time to state his position during pre-vote debate. “We are not anarchists,” declared Frinke, “We are deeply committed to the Lord Jesus Christ as well as to the Synod.” Loyalty to Scripture and the Lutheran Confessions sometimes must have precedence over church laws, suggested Ressmeyer.

Preus, his deep feelings showing, offered to forget the past and to sponsor a last-minute move to withdraw the measure if the eight presidents would promise to abide by policy in the future. “Will you walk with us?” he cried. There were a few catcalls, but these were drowned out almost immediately in a standing ovation for Preus. The eight principals sat stone-faced among their colleagues nearby.

An Eastern district delegate told the assembly that 5,000 had signed a petition instructing Frincke to refuse suspension or dismissal from office by any body other than the district. The petition also served notice that any action taken against Frincke is “an action taken against each of us,” and it implied that the district would ignore any order vacating Frincke’s office.

As the delegates stood to have their votes counted, the eight studied the crowd. “This is terrible,” muttered Hecht. “Some of my key men, my close personal friends, broke with me.” After the vote was announced, family members exchanged embraces with the eight and wept. Preus, also in tears, left the platform.

In a joint response on behalf of the others, Jaech said they would not “throw in the towel and leave” but would “continue our practice as presidents of our districts, unless our districts replace us.” In a press conference afterward, Riedel said he had no intention of leading any churches out of the Synod “unless action is taken against me.”

Preus hopes to avoid getting involved in any such action, even though a number of “illegal” ordinations are scheduled over the next weeks. (Neunaber would have been the first to defy the Synod’s ruling with an ordination on July 20 at Trinity Lutheran Church in Ana, Illinois. A controversy developed in the church over the issue, however, and the congregation postponed the event indefinitely.) Seminex is at the heart of the LCMS troubles, says Preus. If it can be persuaded—or forced—to close, the problem involving district presidents will be resolved, thus keeping defections at a minimum.

ELIM is scheduled to meet in Chicago this month to plan its response and strategy.

Other actions at Anaheim:

• In a surprise vote, the delegates voted against dismantling the non-geographic English district (a bastion of ELIM backers).

• All but one of the 131 candidates endorsed by the conservative publication Affirm were elected, leading to protests by moderates. (The loser was conservative Waldo J. Werning, missions board chairman; many felt he was partly to blame for the overseas problems.)

Apologetics Made Appetizing

Christianity on Trial, by Colin Chapman (Tyndale, 1975, 594 pp., $7.95 pb), is reviewed by Clark Pinnock, associate professor of theology, Regent College, Vancouver, Canada.

Most Christian workers are convinced of the need for apologetics, for evangelism, and for nurture, and are on the lookout for a text to give disciples or interested persons, a book that clearly sets out the reasons for faith and provides a ready reference to the many subjects grouped around this theme. Colin Chapman’s handsomely prepared and printed book should meet this need for many.

This substantial volume is divided into three main parts: (1) “How can we know if Christianity is true?” (2) “Questions of God, Man, and the Universe.” (3) “Questions about Jesus Christ.” It is subdivided into seven basic questions, and the format is consistent in each subsection, eminently teachable. The author begins by giving the answer of biblical Christianity, then turns to the major alternatives to it, and finally returns to the biblical answer, clearing it of all objections that have arisen from the investigation. One particularly valuable feature of the volume is the paragraph-length citations culled from famous and influential writers of every opinion and fully documented at the back of the book. These are very apt and usable in connection with various apologetic issues.

The book starts out sharply and boldly. God has revealed truth about himself, and the truth is open to verification. Intellectual convictions about Christianity are of course inadequate in themselves, but they do supply a threshold for personal trust. In the first part, Chapman promises that Christian truth is verifiable factually, philosophically, and experimentally. After discussing options such as authoritarianism, agnosticism, and existentialism, he returns to his thesis and responds to the major questions that it raises. He does not advocate a cold rationalism, but believes that the Gospel has a broad appeal to the whole of man’s being, including his thinking. The first part prepares us for a rich feast of apologetic argument and evidence.

There is more than a slight letdown, however, in the second part. Although the basic question “Does God exist?” is raised in questions two and four, it is answered with the help of only the weakest kind of evidences. The reason is that Chapman, like so many others today, does not find the traditional arguments for God’s existence convincing. While they may carry some weight with those who are already Christians, he does not think they make any impression on the unbeliever. The result, however, is a large vacuum in the center of the handbook. There is no cosmological or teleological or moral argumentation, not even an appeal to religious experience to justify theistic belief. All we find is the sort of apologetic reasoning that tells us what it is like to view the world if you do believe. If the quite solid arguments of traditional apologetics have no effect on the unbeliever (an enormous generalization), one shudders to think what effect the absence of solid reasoning will have on them.

The strongest section in the book is perhaps question three, “What is man?” It is a statement of the experimental test for Christian truth. What good sense for the living of life does faith in Jesus make! In the section we are treated to some splendid quotations from Russell, Blackham, Huxley, and others that illustrate vividly the metaphysical darkness from which God has rescued us and cause us to be grateful to our Saviour for his goodness to us. But this substitution of an experimental, anthropological argument for the older theistic proofs, while it fits the spirit of our age and doubtless has a wide appeal, should, I suspect, be viewed rather as a complement to them than as a replacement. The practical evidence that proves Christianity relevant unfortunately does not prove it true, and the truth question about theism cannot be indefinitely shelved.

The third part is devoted to historical and theological apologetics concerning the person and work of Jesus, including his death and resurrection. The material here can only be called elementary. There is, for instance, no in-depth defense of the authenticity of the New Testament documents, and no detailed resurrection apologetic such as a toughminded person would require.

In conclusion, Christianity on Trial is a handbook of Christian apologetics suitable for the beginner or seeker in late high school or early college. It begins strongly, and raises expectations of a university-level treatise, but does not carry through with it. The book is excellent in format, and it could be used in the classroom together with supplementary readings.

The Gold Is There

Noah’s Three Sons: Human History in Three Dimensions, by Arthur Custance (Zondervan, 1975, 368 pp., $8.95), reviewed by Robert Brow, associate rector, Little Trinity Anglican Church, Toronto, Canada.

The “Doorway Papers” were written over many years, beginning in 1957 after Custance wrote a doctoral thesis in anthropology at Ottawa University in Canada. Here we have five of the sixty papers strung together in a spotty, repetitive fashion, but the gold is worth digging for.

Custance’s wide-ranging generalizations are admittedly too big and too skinny. Noah had three sons. From them came three races, the Semites, Hamites, and Japhethites. It is easy to identify the Japhethites as Indo-Europeans, and clearly Hindus, Greeks, and Europeans have been the world’s philosophers. The Semites contributed the great religions of the spirit: Judaism, Christian, and Islam. The Hamites, who include all the non-white races, were the originators of technology in the great civilizations of Sumer, Egypt, Babylonia, and Africa. Japhethite philosophy applied to Hamitic technology, and Semitic religion had a glorious flowering in our Western civilization. All three contributions are designed by God for the good of humanity, and we neglect one or the other at our peril.

What is important is Custance’s attempt to ground a truly biblical and interdisciplinary view of history in the Table of Nations. The Greek and Latin classicists and the Near Eastern archaeologists and linguists have sufficiently pursued their unrelated minutiae. Our author effectively argues for the very early date of Genesis 10 (confirmed from another point of view in R. K. Harrison’s Introduction to the Old Testament). Custance argues well that early races looked back to individuals as founding fathers, that these persons can be related genealogically, and that Genesis 10 gives us the correct framework.

The book is at its strongest in collecting references to the wide-ranging Japhethite Indo-European races. I was fascinated by the derivation of Saxons, German Sachsen, and Scandinavians from Ashkenaz, and the Gauls, Celts, and Galatians from Gomer.

Custance follows the assumption adopted by the first Semitic scholars that Abraham’s race and language were the same. The Table of Nations actually suggests that Abraham was Shemitic by race, but adopted the dominant Babylonian and Canaanite language (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY, October 26, 1973, “The Curse of Ham”). It is as if an African Muslim learned French at school and teaches philosophy at the Sorbonne: is his work Hamitic, Semitic, or Indo-European? Having taken it for granted that the Babylonians were Semites because they spoke a language similar to Hebrew, Custance is then in constant trouble. He admits the difficulty of finding Canaanites and Philistines Hamitic by genealogy and yet speakers of what scholars call a Semitic language. If we want to take the Table of Nations seriously, we have to call Babylonians, Canaanites, Egyptians, Minoans, and so on, Hamites. We then have to look for a race of true Shemites, who, like Abraham, originally spoke a completely different type of language.

Interestingly enough, Custance has dug up the information needed to link the Etruscans and Proto-Lydians with the agglutinative group of languages including Finnic, Altaic, Basque, and Sumerian. These are much more likely to be the representatives of the original Shemites, together with the Elamites. According to Genesis 10:21–23, the original language of the Assyrians and Arameans, before they were swamped by Akkadian language and culture, would also belong to this group.

Even if the author is wrong in the details I have suggested, much can still be retrieved from his work. He reminds us that pure science and philosophy have been produced by Japhethites. In a history of philosophy, what could one include apart from Hindu, Greek, Latin, German, French, English, and American contributions? (He disposes of the minor objection from China by arguing that Confucianism is not a philosophy.) Quoting Benjamin Whorf and other works in linguistic philosophy Custance offers the fascinating suggestion that perhaps philosophy, as we understand it, is possible only in the logic and thought forms of the Indo-European languages.

Much else in the book can whet the appetite, such as the chapter on “The Inventive Genius of Ham,” which apparently impressed the Canadian government in its immigration policy. There is an interesting section on racial migrations with the suggestion that degenerate forms such as Neanderthal man tend to be found at the margins of habitation, and yet can occur in otherwise healthy families. If you are looking for scholarly precision in a narrow field you will not survive the first few sections, but if you find imaginative synthesis worthwhile, this book will do much to stimulate your thinking. There is no index or bibliography but over 700 footnotes.

BRIEFLY NOTED

Christians interested in the arts should welcome the new thrust of the Fellowship of Christians in the Arts, Media, and Entertainment. To inquire about membership and the revived Newsletter write: Box 9323, Seattle, Washington 98109. Also, Genesis made its first appearance in April, with a sixty-four-page issue. It is the journal of the fine arts-oriented Society of Christians in the Arts. The journal should be in theological and art libraries and costs $5/three issues. For information on subscriptions and membership write: Box 1194, Greenwich, Connecticut 06830.

Providence Lost: A Critique of Darwinism, by Richard Spilsbury (Oxford, 133 pp., $11.25). A secular approach to the questions of man’s origins in a challenging, broadly philosophical manner. Criticizes reliance upon purely materialistic explanations.

Psalms For Worship Today, by Dwight Vogel (Concordia, 176 pp., $6 pb). A new arrangement and organization of the Psalms for use in the worship service. This spiral-bound kivar volume is more for antiphonal than responsive reading.

Church Planning and Management, by B. Otto Wheeley (Dorrance, 218 pp., $8.95). A guidebook, complete with examples of budgets, salaries, and pastor’s job descriptions.

There’s a Snake in My Garden, by Jill Briscoe (Zondervan, 143 pp., $4.95), It’s Good to Know, by Randy Bullock (Mott Media [Box 236, Milford, Mich. 48042], 233 pp., $5.95, $2.95 pb), Tell It to the Mafia, by Joe Donato (Logos, 154 pp., $2.95), The Dino Story, by Dino Kartsonakis (Revell, 128 pp., $4.95), Move Over Mountain, by Nancy Life (Bethany, 139 pp., $2.45 pb), and A Rebel From Riches, by Bebe Reynolds (Alba, 150 pp., $1.65 pb). The first five are autobiographical accounts of how five persons came to Christ: in the order listed, an evangelist’s wife, an actor, an ex-criminal, a pianist, and a formerly frustrated housewife. The sixth autobiography, reminding us of the variety of conversions, is by a self-made millionaire who became a Benedictine monk.

Jesus of Nazareth in New Testament Preaching, by G. N. Stanton (Cambridge, 207 pp., $16.50). A technical, important study of the life and character of Jesus in Luke-Acts by a younger British evangelical.

The Gospel According to the Wall Street Journal, by Carnegie Samuel Calian (John Knox, 120 pp., $3.95), Notes Toward a Christian Critique of Secular Economic Theory, by A. B. Cramp (Institute for Christian Studies [229 College St., Toronto, Canada M5T 1R4], 80 pp., $1.50 pb), and Illusions of Success, by John Raines (Judson, 128 pp., $5.95). Three critiques of modern Western economic value systems. Calian uses the Wall Street Journal to illuminate economic values, presenting his view of a Christian response throughout. Cramp’s more technical book examines theories of economics and presents his conservative Christian analysis. Raines’s treatment attempts to illumine the true, exploited condition of the American middle class. Some mention is made of religious influences in economic values.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia, by Robert Nozick (Basic Books, 367 pp., $12.95). An important addition to the field of political philosophy. Nozick seeks to show that anything more than a very limited government will violate individual rights and is not justified. The author is a full professor at Harvard, and the book won the latest annual National Book Award in philosophy and religion.

Which Way to Education?, by Philip May (Moody, 159 pp., $2.95 pb). Addressing Christian parents and teachers, the author, rather philosophically, points out their responsibilities in a child’s education. A rather abstract presentation of some biblical principles, but with a helpful perspective.

Man Without Tears, by Christopher Mooney (Harper & Row, 148 pp., $7.95), and The Mystery of Man, by Owen Sharkey (Franklin, 189 pp., $10.95). Mooney, follower of Teilhard de Chardin, calls his book “soundings for a Christian anthropology.” Sharkey’s study is also anthropological and is more clearly biblically based.

Lack of food is not a peculiarly modern problem; it was a fearsome prospect even in ancient times. There were acute and extended food shortages in the Old Testament era, including the patriarchal age, the epoch of the great King David, and the time of the prophets (Elisha and Elijah among them). Famine in the Bible is not simply a perturbing phenomenon of the past, however; Jesus speaks as well of great famines as a sign of the end time (Matt. 24:7; Mark 13:8; Luke 21:11).

One distinguishing factor of present-day famine is its colossal dimensions. At the very least, this year one million a month (some estimates run up to 25 million) will die of starvation.

There is an even greater difference than the burden of numbers, however, between famine in the past and in the present. While the Bible records such contributing causes as natural disasters, enemy invasions, and the ravages of war, never does it view famine as a mere happenstance. The Bible as a whole sets famine within the context of God’s creation and rule of all nature; famine is in the service of providential or judgmental divine purpose.

The psalmist knew that food is God’s gift: “Thou preparest a table before me.…” This by no means signifies that suffering is always an evidence of personal culpability or affluence a mark of righteousness. Scripture states, however, that in sending famine God may judgmentally warn against moral rebellion and spiritual decline, expressing anger over prolonged indifference (2 Kings 8:1, 2) and calling for renewed obedience. But that is not all. Through famine, God has often providentially shaped the larger fortunes of his followers: it pushed Abraham and Isaac into Egypt, lifted Joseph to prominence there, and eventually brought all the Israelites to the land of Goshen.

We must do everything possible to relieve famine. According to United Nations estimates, between 400 and 800 million people, 14 million of them refugees, are severely malnourished. Meanwhile, global population will soar by another 90 million this year. Some statisticians estimate that by the year 2000 the present four billion world population will be seven billion.

Last year the Nobel prize-winner George Wald electrified eminent scientists meeting in Tokyo with his verdict: “I do not see how we scientists can bring the human race much past the year 2000.” The 1980s are already being seen as “the decade of famine.” The book What Do You Say to a Hungry World (Word, 1975) by World Vision president W. Stanley Mooneyham comes at a desperate moment of global need when countless millions are asking, “Can I make it through another night?”

The United States controls 40 per cent of international food and non-food resources and 30 per cent of the world’s energy; these vast resources are at the disposal of 6 per cent of the global population. The food that feeds 210 million Americans would nourish 1.5 billion Africans or Asians.

The United States has in fact given more than $5 billion in free food to more that 100 nations. But although many lives have been spared, there is little evidence of improved health and lessened malnutrition in these lands. Not every well-meaning proposal stands the test of time, and some statistics tell less than the whole story. What began as a program to dispose of excess farm commodities became a humanitarian program to aid friendly nations; critics now belabor the United States because its aid commitment is not entirely apolitical. Some church leaders say that an equitable division of all available food grown on the earth would make enough for all. But experts insist that the United States alone cannot cope with world malnutrition; social responsibility is a world responsibility that falls on Russians, Kuwaitians, and Israelis as well—on everyone who has famished neighbors.

Many discussions avoid the problem of productivity. America’s food needs are met by some 5 per cent of the population; production knowhow as well as climate is important. On the other hand, countries that have practiced redistribution and collectivization are not known for surplus production; while politicians can raise statistics on a bag of wind, farmers everywhere need an incentive to produce crops. For all that, food production has increased 70 per cent in the last two decades in both developed and less developed nations, while in the latter population growth has virtually offset the gain, narrowing it to about 0.5 per capita.

Gluttony is evil, and it would be virtuous for Americans, for example to cut back on food and energy consumption simply to conserve resources. But this would hardly help the hungry in lands where the birth rate multiplies as fast as the rate of food production. India preposterously deployed capital funds for nuclear bombs and ignores the rodents that ravage food supplies. If American farmers plowed with horses, how could that help the Sahel, where farmers plow by beast and farm by hand? And whose problem would it be if Americans too were reduced to 1,000 calories a day and threatened by malnutrition?

Compassion is nonetheless a Christian virtue, and it would be a sad day for America were the generosity of its citizens in responding to world need to dry up. Bob Pierce, founder of World Vision, often said: “If you can’t do everything, do something.” Methodists are providing subsidized fertilizer on a repayable basis to India. World Vision is at work in Bangladesh, written off by many as a hopeless area, and in about thirty other countries. Even as little as one missed meal or a dollar a week by each of us could add up to rescuing thousands of the hungry. In any event, many of the more affluent will need to simplify life styles, while impoverished masses must moderate expectations of plenty long associated with American full enterprise.

Yet the empty look on human faces today is due only in part to physical and material need; far more universal is mankind’s emptiness and nakedness of spirit. As the plentiful harvest depends upon rain, so spiritual growth depends on an outpouring of God’s nourishing Word. Amos spoke of famine in a figurative sense, warning that “there would be a famine … of the hearing of the words of the Lord” (Amos 8:11).

Jesus reminded his listeners that hearing is a divine gift that carries a responsibility: “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” Among his most solemn reminders is that “man does not live by bread alone … but by every word proceeding out of the mouth of the Lord” (Deut. 8:3; Matt. 4:4). We are to respond to the physically hungry in Christ’s name—as an expression of his love proffered in this age of grace to “whosoever will.” But Christians distort this ministry unless they also underscore that life is far more than food and drink (Matt. 6:25, 32). Our abiding meat, as Jesus exemplified, is to do the will of the Father (John 4:34).

As the car slowly turned to go up the hill, I craned my neck to get a better view of the building. Its columns soared skyward in dark brown beautiful symmetry. “The Steel Triangle. What a fantastic building, fitting into the three rivers, with the rest of the Pittsburgh skyline enhancing rather than dominating it,” I thought. “What a lovely brown that steel is—my favorite shade,” I remarked.

Our friend who knew a lot about this United States Steel building began to tell us some of what could not be seen. “See those columns? They rise to a height of 841 feet, and there are eighteen of them. Each column is made up of hollow sections and contains a total of about 400,000 gallons of water plus antifreeze.” He went on to say, “This water is to protect the building during any possible outbreak of fire. Without the water, the columns would lose their strength and collapse.” Poured-in protection! Beauty, strength, and purpose easily seen by one who looks at this especially fine modern building. But also a hidden protection, poured in to stay, ready for any sudden attack of fire.

What a good illustration of the marvel of the “water” with which God has promised to fill those who are a part of his building, his people! “Jesus answered and said unto her, “Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life” (John 4:13, 14). “In … that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, if any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly [his innermost being] shall flow rivers of living water. (But this he spake of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive; for the Holy Ghost was not yet given, because that Jesus was not yet glorified” (John 7:37–39).

Water! Life-protecting water will be poured into and will flow out of those who believe on Jesus. The Holy Spirit will be given to everyone who becomes a Christian. And in addition to refreshing us, the Holy Spirit is to be a protection to us in times of special “heat” or “fire.” Ephesians 6:16 speaks of our quenching the fiery darts of the evil one by using the shield of faith. But as I looked at those brown columns filled with water, I felt a special comfort in knowing that the Holy Spirit was filling each of us, too, as a protection against those fiery darts. Satan’s fiery darts come from unexpected angles, but the water of the Spirit is there. We have His cooling system as we feel the heat of the attack.

We’re also told in First Peter 4:12, “Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you.” Fiery trials—suffering, tribulations, disappointments—could cause us to buckle and collapse if we had no help. But we have been given help. “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?” (1 Cor. 3:16). Each one of us who is a Christian is a special building, a temple of God, filled with the water of the Spirit.

Like every other illustration, this one cannot be carried out to the nth degree. Unlike the U. S. Steel building, we who are temples of God can communicate with our architect, God the Father, who has sent his Son to enable us to become a temple and who has sent the Holy Spirit to be poured into us. We can communicate as individual persons with the Triune One and ask for special help in times of fire and heat.

The Steel Triangle stands unique in Pittsburgh as a building protected with water-filled columns. But each of us as a Christian “temple” or “building” has another kind of strength, the strength of being together with other buildings, forming a complex, not just in one city, not just in one country, not just in the whole world at any one given moment of history, but throughout all geographic space and all history. “For through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father. Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God: and are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone, in whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord: in whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit” (Eph. 2:18–22).

The whole company of believers, no longer strangers and foreigners, belonging to the same country and the same family, are also described as a building, with Jesus as the corner stone, a building where God dwells “through the Spirit.” The Holy Spirit indwells each believer, but there is also the special thing of his indwelling the whole building of all of us “framed together,” built together in a special structure. The Holy Spirit, whom Jesus called “rivers of living water” in John 7, is to fill the entire body of believers to protect them against fiery attacks.

Martyrs are not failures. Martyrs are not twisted, buckled pieces of steel, destroyed by the fire. Martyrs are those who have withstood the fiery darts, have stood firm because the water cooling system “worked.”

We may fail in our response at times. We may not ask for help when we should. We may disappoint our architect by not sending forth an alarm, or not using what he has given us for keeping communication open. But one thing is sure: the “living water” was poured into the column that is you or me, and it was poured into the “building framed together,” the entire combination of believers. “Fear not, O Jacob,” God says in Isaiah 44:2: “for I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground: I will pour my spirit upon thy seed, and my blessing upon thine offspring.”

After Jesus died as the atonement Lamb, the Temple was destroyed, but only the physical building. God’s spiritual building continues through the ages. All hell cannot prevail against it. There is a poured-in protection in the columns—living water. Thank God for the truth of his promises.

Physician, Heal Thyself

The Federal Trade Commission recently unlimbered some of its biggest guns for barrages against misleading advertising. It made an investigation to see whether, for example, various sports figures really drink the Miller’s “Lite” beer and other potions they advertise. And now deodorant manufacturers are being called on to justify the type of advertising that says their product encourages personal friendship. All this is very encouraging, especially to those of us who have always been inclined to take advertisements at face value. But now the time has gone for the FTC to turn its attention to what is, after all, the biggest advertiser in America—indeed, in the world: the government itself.

We could start with the names of government agencies and bodies. First of all, of course, the most prestigious government ministry ought to be called the Department of Travel. And wasn’t it better to call the Department of Defense the War Department? During the 158 years the United States had a War Department, the nation was involved in only fourteen years of war (not counting Indian wars, which came under the Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian “Affairs”)—less than one year in ten. Since it has been a Defense Department, twenty-seven years, there have been nine years of war, more or less—one in three. And of course it is misleading to call the Internal Revenue Service a service. Wouldn’t it be more honest to call it—as the French do—a Department of Fiscal Impositions? Supreme Court “justices” might have to call themselves “opinions” or even “self-righteousnesses.” The biggest department, Health, Education, and Welware, would be more honest if it called itself the Department of Treatment, Custody, and Waiting Lines.

Fortunately, the FTC is not allowed to interfere with religious claims, under the First Amendment. Otherwise popular “crusades” would have to be renamed something like “conventions” or else start wielding maces and broadswords in their efforts to “win the world.” Evangelistic literature would have to bear warnings such as: “Caution. The Inspector General Has Determined That Tithing Is Dangerous to Your Wealth.”

The task of achieving truth in packaging is immense; pessimists might consider it hopeless. But we have to give credit for its successes, too. At the center of it all there is a big building that is correctly and informatively called simply The White House.

Divorce: Refreshing View

You are to be commended for the two fine articles, “When Wedlock Becomes Deadlock” by Andre Bustanoby and “Ministering to the Divorced” by William L. Coleman (June 20).… It is truly refreshing to read something other than the static treatment so commonly and legalistically dispensed whenever the subject of divorce is discussed in the church-related life and program. Graceless legalism has had a heyday, and it goes without saying that the church of Jesus has lost many that could have been and should have been embraced, loved, nurtured, and utilized.… Thanks for the scriptural and gracious approach.

(The Rev.) JOHN W. STEINHAUSER

Superintendent

Union Rescue Mission, Inc.

Jamestown, N. Y.

Andre Bustanoby’s attempt to reconcile Old Testament provisions for divorce with Jesus’ prohibitions by claiming the former is for unbelievers and the latter for Christians seems highly unsatisfactory. In the first place, the Law was given to God’s people—believers, not unbelievers. In the second place, the author’s attempt to reconcile the Old and New Testament teachings is based on pushing too far the statement that the law is “holy, just, and good.” So he has to say that “divorce in itself is (not) immoral” because it is according to the Law. To be consistent with that position would require him also to say that slavery is not immoral and that even taking a man’s wife and children away from him for purposes of slavery is not immoral (see Exodus 21:1–4). Furthermore, Bustanoby’s establishment of a double standard of morality, one for Christians and another for unbelievers, denies any absolute morality. Wrong is wrong no matter who does it. Then the author inconsistently cites divorce of unbelievers as revealing “the basic sinfulness of the husband and wife.” How so, when he has just pronounced their divorce “not immoral”?

Editor

Victor Books

Wheaton, Ill.

Where Women Abound

I have always held Dr. Carl F. H. Henry in high respect for his intellectual insights, but in his article in the July 4 issue (Footnotes, “The Battle of the Sexes”) I wonder if he has missed the boat in several points. He tries to make the point that man is the head of the family since he was created before Eve. The logical conclusion would be that the baboon or the apple tree is head over Adam, having preceded him in the creation order. Scripture tells us that the opposite was God’s plan.

Further along in his article Dr. Henry says that none of the above conclusions justify discrimination against women in areas such as legal rights or work opportunities. If, as he pronounces, woman is to be subordinate to man, it would therefore be very difficult for her to work in any capacity where she had authority over any man. Incidentally, to confirm the widespread evangelical position on women’s subordination in almost every area of work, how many women professors of Bible or missions can one find in evangelical schools of higher education? And if such appear scarce, let’s try looking for women mission-board executives or even board members. The only place women abound in missions is out on the front lines while the men stay comfortably at home making the “important decisions.”

Albuquerque, N. Mex.

Negative Reek

Your usual responsible reporting was little evidenced in the article on the 187th General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church (June 6). It seemed Dr. James Boice was championing his own causes and biases. If he wants to editorialize, fine. Call it that, but do not put the article directly under the heading “News.” How can he call the assembly a “one-issue assembly” when only thirty minutes of the eight days were devoted to the so-called Kenyon Case? The article reeked of negativism.

Second Presbyterian Church

Chester, Pa.

More Members Than Communicants

Re the news story “Conservative Presbyterians: Unity, Yes; Union, No,” in the July 4 issue; I would like to correct an error regarding the membership of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. It is 15,098 and not 10,186, as you report. The latter figure is that of communicant members, which the note at the bottom of the page makes plain is not the statistic given.

The Orthodox Presbyterian Chapel

Glenwood, Wash.

Francois Mauriac: The Threshold Of The Soul

The soul, writes Francois Mauriac, “is the essence of reality,” and consequently his novels are marked by a special kind of psychological realism. They are explorations of the estranged soul, the soul that feeds upon itself, cut off from grace and from other human beings. One character can describe himself as malevolent and deformed while his family, in turn, also sees him as a monster, even in death—this is the ambiance of The Knot of Vipers. The unloveliness of Mauriac’s characters is essentially an illustration of the Pascalian misery of the soul without God.

Born in 1885 in Bordeaux, France, François Mauriac eventually transposed the provincial milieu of his childhood into his novels. His fictional world is narrow in scope—his characters represent the middle class of the Bordeaux region, and if they escape to Paris, they are lost and ill at ease. These people are tied to their families by bonds of mistrust and hatred and to their land and possessions by a deeper bond of greed and materialism.

The land itself is an extension of the spiritual state of these souls. Thérèse, the protagonist of Thérèse Desqueyroux, comes from Argelouse, literally, “ ‘a land’s end,’ a place beyond which it is impossible to go”—“a remote and arid corner.” Her personal aridity and isolation are echoed by the silence of the pine forests of this desolate countryside. The bond between Mauriac’s characters and their material world of money and the land also counters the metaphysical lack of their souls. Louis, the old narrator of The Knot of Vipers, describes himself with a money belt of gold coins that he had been hoarding around his neck: “I plunged my hand into all that gold which represented for me what I most valued in the world, and began to stuff the leather belt with money. When I got down from the stool, the swollen snake, gorged with metal, was hanging round my neck and weighing me down.”

Mauriac’s youth was also profoundly Catholic. He has commented: “I believe that the practice of religion from earliest childhood bred in me a taste for the dream which would turn out to be true, for an invisible reality. I knew that nature could be imbued with grace, for I had lived with that knowledge long before I had any idea of what ‘grace’ and nature ‘meant.’ ”

Although Mauriac’s ultimate vision is of nature transformed by grace, his novelistic temperament is pessimistic. By showing the weakness of the will and the strength of passion in characters left to their own devices, he seems close to such seventeenth-century writters as Racine and Pascal. Linked to the Jansenist movement (which was Calvinistic in theology, anti-Jesuit in tone, and later declared a heretical movement within Catholicism), these classical writers paint the psychology of the tormented, divided soul. As a young man Mauriac read them and discovered his affinity with them. In fact, his characters, in their narrow, prescribed world, seem to step, at times, from the stage of classical French theater. Their creator, an elegant, controlled stylist, reveals their inner torment as they brood over the “puzzle of their existence.” Few of Mauriac’s fictional people receive grace; rather, they are torn by the torture of their self-inflicted estrangements. Caught by profound loneliness, they desire to communicate with others, but they are dominated by hatred. They are also obsessed by sensual passions as though doomed to exist under the power of the flesh.

Mauriac was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1952; active also as a dramatist and journalist, he achieved his reputation through the novels that appeared from 1920 to the early 1940s, though his works were still being published in the late 1960s. For the English reader, two readily available anthologies exist, both translated by Gerard Hopkins and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. A Mauriac Reader includes A Kiss For the Leper (1922), Genetrix (1923), The Desert of Love (1925), The Knot of Vipers (1932), and Woman of the Pharisees (1941). Thérèse includes Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927) and three sequel stories.

Jean Péloueyre, the protagonist of A Kiss For the Leper, is tortured by his consciousness of his physical repulsiveness—and his isolation and passion in turn make his entire being repulsive. Félicité Cazenave, of Genetrix, is a tyrannical mother whose son finally rejects her. In The Desert of Love, Dr. Courrèges and his son Raymond are isolated from each other in a family devoid of love. They are brought together, though not to communication, in Raymond’s adulthood when they accidentally meet Maria Cross. Years earlier she had repulsed the advances of the doctor, who then avenged his wounded pride by a life of dissolution. The title character of Thérèse, who never totally explains her estrangement, tries to murder the husband whom she detests by slowly poisoning him. Louis, of The Knot of Vipers, lives almost his entire life in greed and in hatred of his devout wife Isa, who devotes all her attention to her children. And Brigitte Pion, the “woman of the Pharisees,” a self-appointed agent of righteousness, embodies hypocrisy and perfectionism as she destroys the people around her.

Of this group of characters, only the last two are touched by grace, but their illuminations come too late to change the general imprints left by their lives. Only Louis’s granddaughter can appreciate the old man’s change of heart and the hypocrisy of the Catholicism of his family. Although Brigitte’s stepson concludes that “she understood at last that it is not our deserts that matter but our love,” this moral statement seems the least satisfactory denouement of Mauriac’s major works, for Brigitte, also, remains isolated in her final years.

A sense of lost purity, of the vanished innocence of childhood, dominates Mauriac’s adult characters. They find human “love”a deception—a delusion that in the end separates and inflicts suffering. His adolescents also find an initial love experience deceiving, but their sensitivity and loneliness have not yet hardened into the cruelty of adulthood. The power of Mauriac’s stark, simple portrayal of the ugly reality of the human soul lies in his usually unexpressed suggestion that we all seek an experience of transcendent love and grace. The granddaughter says of Louis, in The Knot of Vipers, that “since he died I have seen much of people who, in spite of all their faults and weaknesses, live according to their faith and move about their daily tasks in the fullness of Grace. If Grand’pa had lived among them, mightn’t he have discovered years ago the harbour which he reached at last only on the very threshold of death?”

PATRICIA WARD¹Patricia Ward teaches French and comparative literature at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park.

‘Rollerball’: Who Will Follow?

Toccata and Fugue in D minor for organ by J. S. Bach dramatically opens the futuristic film Rollerball, released by United Artists, produced and directed by Norman Jewison (Jesus Christ Superstar). For here is another film about a saviour.

Jonathan E., played by James Caan, is the star of the Houston, Texas, rollerball team. The game is a vicious combination of roller derby, hockey, and muggings. Players include seven skaters and three motorcyclists. Since war no longer exists, rollerball provides a release for the hostility and violence of both players and spectators. The world is run by the corporations of Energy, Luxury, Transport, Food, Housing, and Communications.

Jonathan’s popularity, strength, and individuality—the latter something we are told rather than shown—have become a threat to the Energy corporation. (Everything in the year 2018 looks sterile and mass-produced. Even the women all look alike.) Therefore corporation executive Bartholomew, intently portrayed by John Houseman, tells him to retire. Bartholomew says, “It’s a significant game, but not a game a man is to grow strong in.”

Even though Jonathan has played the rugged game for a decade, he, too, is passive and flat. But like a struggling moth breaking loose from a cocoon he resists the corporation’s order, though admitting he doesn’t know why. His life, dedicated to making goals in the game, is without goals off the track.

Since the executives don’t dare to kill Jonathan, they try to eliminate him by changing the rules of the game, until no time limits, penalties, or substitutions are allowed. Of course he survives, the only one to do so during the world championship game. The film moves predictably to a non-ending—Jonathan triumphantly skating around and around and.…

Jonathan E. is trying to save the world from its mass-hypnotic state. He alone fights the corporation system. One reviewer said that he shakes society to its roots, but the film ends before we see that happen. Instead, Jonathan just continues his circular skate around the arena. He and we may see him as saviour, but saviour of what? Or for whom? Everyone loves him, but those who know he’s been asked to retire think he’s wrong to resist the rules. These people like their lives; they don’t want them changed. Society is lulled and coddled, divided into executives, rollerball players, and their women, who function only as sexual machines, and the mindless masses who rhythmically chant “Jon-a-than, Jon-a-than” at games.

Rollerball takes us one step farther than the anti-hero. It shows us a hero without a cause, a saviour without disciples willing to follow.

CHERYL FORBES

On August 16, 1875, Charles Grandison Finney died. Few if any memorial services will be held on the centennial of his death. No major institution, denomination, or movement would be fully comfortable in honoring him. Finney is too Arminian for Calvinists, too Calvinistic for Arminians; too rationalistic for mystics, too pietistic for rationalists; too perfectionistic for Presbyterians or Lutherans, too limited in his view of Christian perfection for many followers of Wesley; too conservative for radicals, too innovative for traditionalists; too concerned with individual salvation for those who subscribe to the social gospel, and too committed to the social implications of the Gospel for fundamentalists. It is fitting that a magazine such as CHRISTIANITY TODAY, representing the broad scope of evangelical conviction, should seek to honor this man of God on the one hundredth-anniversary of his death.

Finney’s spiritual experience has become for many an ideal of Christian aspiration. His dramatic conversion to Christ in 1821, when he was twenty-nine (“I will accept it [salvation] today, or I will die in the attempt”), his subsequent baptism of the Holy Spirit (“… like a wave of electricity, going through and through me … waves and waves of liquid love … like the very breath of God”), his call to preach (“Deacon B—, I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead his cause, and cannot plead yours”), his entrance into a deeper life of holiness in 1843 (“I was enabled … to fall back in a deeper sense than I had ever done before upon the infinitely blessed and perfect will of God.… Holiness to the Lord seemed to be inscribed on all the exercises of my mind.… It seemed as if my soul was wedded to Christ.… The language of the Song of Solomon was as natural to me as my breath”), and his ability to prevail with God in prayer and with men in the pulpit were extraordinary.

Under the impact of Finney’s ministry great segments of the adolescent nation experienced profound spiritual renewal. The Rochester revival of 1830 was called by Lyman Beecher “the greatest work of God and the greatest revival of religion that the world has ever seen in so short a time.” We are told that Rochester’s jail was empty for years afterwards. As a direct result of Finney’s intermittent preaching in New York City in the early 1830s four new churches were organized in four years. Steps were being taken to organize two more when he left for Oberlin in 1835.

Finney, Charles Grandison (1792–1875). Born in Connecticut, reared in upstate New York. Taught school, then practiced law until his conversion in 1821. Became an itinerant evangelist and continued to conduct campaigns after moving to Oberlin College in Ohio in 1835, where he was professor of theology until his death. President of the college 1851–66.

In 1858 a great revival swept the nation. Finney was preaching in Boston at the time. By summer of 1858, if not the devil, at least the extreme Unitarian Theodore Parker had been prayed out of Boston, and in innumerable small villages in the surrounding area not a single unconverted person could be found! In smaller towns, such as Utica, Rome, and Auburn in New York State, it was not unusual for the majority of the adult population to be “hopefully converted” under Finney’s preaching.

As a youth Finney loved sports. Standing six feet two and weighing one hundred eighty-five at the age of twenty, this child of the forest could out-run, -jump, -row, -throw, -swim, or -wrestle every rival. Throughout his life he had an infectious sense of humor. In his maturity he manifested an unaffected, childlike spirit, and he liked nothing so well as romping with his children on the living-room floor. Alfred Vance Churchill, who grew up in Oberlin, could recall his father and Finney frequently returning from church together “arm in arm, or swinging hands like children.”

When his first wife died, this spiritual giant experienced periods of sorrow that nearly overwhelmed him. He even felt for a time that he would lose his sanity over the bereavement unless he could find rest in God.

Although he often fasted and prayed, Finney was not an ascetic. He appreciated artistic expression, particularly good music. He sang solos, directed a choir, played the bass viol, and refused to teach at Oberlin if there would be no professor of music on the first faculty. According to Albert Vance Churchill, Finney was thereby responsible for introducing the study of music to American higher education (“Midwest: Early Oberlin Personalities,” Northwest Ohio Quarterly, 1951, p. 224).

Historians dealing with Finney’s period commonly highlight the thought and activities of deists, Unitarians, and transcendentalists. However, the only genuinely popular religious movement in the years following the Revolution was orthodox Christianity in the form of a free-will, revivalistic, pietistic trinitarian evangelicalism. So predominant, in fact, did evangelical influence become that Brown University historian William McLoughlin has said:

The story of American Evangelicalism is the story of America itself in the years 1800 to 1900, for it was Evangelical religion which made Americans the most religious people in the world, molded them into a unified pietistic-perfectionist nation, and spurred them on to those heights of social reform, missionary endeavor, and imperialistic expansionism which constitute the moving forces of our history in that century [The American Evangelicals, 1800–1900, p. 1].

Nineteenth century evangelical Christianity was rooted in Scottish Common Sense philosophy and, in McLoughlin’s words, in “a new theological consensus on Arminian principles which prevailed between the Second Great Awakening and the rise of Modernism” (p. 1). A philosophy based upon the natural convictions of ordinary people was congenial to the mind of young America. It provided Christians with epistemological support for theistic metaphysics and was thus regarded as the handmaid of biblical revelation. But most important, it gave Arminian evangelicals from New Haven to Cane Ridge the conceptual tools for overthrowing Edwardsian determinism and establishing the freedom of the will.

The visible fruits of evangelical Christianity were phenomenal. The proportion of church members in America increased from one in fifteen in 1800 to one in seven in 1850. The college-founding movement, an almost exclusively evangelical enterprise, increased the number of permanent Christian liberal arts colleges from 25 in 1799 to 182 in 1861. Seventeen theological seminaries came into existence between 1807 and 1827. Voluntary associations were formed for all conceivable reform, benevolent, and evangelistic purposes. Abolitionism, women’s rights, coeducation of the sexes, health reform, peace movements, temperance, Sunday schools, and tract distribution all enjoyed the fervent sponsorship of evangelicals. Evangelical missionary endeavors helped to make the nineteenth century the age in which Christianity underwent its greatest geographical spread. And McLoughlin suggests that “both as motivation and as rationale evangelical religion lay behind the concept of rugged individualism in business enterprise, laissez faire in economic theory, constitutional democracy in political thought, the Protestant ethic in morality, and the millennial hope of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant America to lead the world to its latter-day glory (p. 1).

What was it that transformed a set of philosophical and theological ideas into religious, social, moral, and political dynamite? The answer is—revival! Not revivalism, but genuine spiritual revival. Revival was the mighty energizing genius at the heart of American evangelicalism. Though often treated as peripheral, revival was a crucial determinant of American character and identity. Harvard professor Perry Miller won the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1966 for a book in which he tells us that “for the mass of American democracy the decades after 1800 were a continuing, even though intermittent, revival,” that method in promoting revival was “the dominant theme in America from 1800–1860,” that revivals “gave a special tone to the epoch; through them the youthful society sought for solidarity, for a discovery of its meaning,” and that “one can almost say that … the Revival … was a central mode of this culture’s search for national identity” (The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War, pp. 7, 14, 5, 6).

Because revival was so important, Miller writes that “not Thomas Jefferson, or Madison, or Monroe led America out of the eighteenth century,” but Charles Grandison Finney, the man “who incarnated the aspiration and the philosophy of the revival” (pp. 24, 9). Finney’s Memoirs, says Miller, “is a central narrative for American history,” and his Lectures on Revivals of Religion stands “as the key exposition of the movement, and so a major work in the history of the mind in America. Its study is imperative if one wishes to pursue the mental adventure of the country” (pp. 24, 9, 25). In Finney the prevailing philosophical, theological, religious, and moral movements in America between the Revolution and the Civil War came to a focus. The central ideas of these movements were synthesized in the crucible of his great Spirit-anointed, Bible-revering mind and heart and then poured forth into the stream of the nation’s consciousness with unexampled clarity and moral urgency. The message was carried through his sermons, his books, and periodicals such as the New York Evangelist and the Oberlin Evangelist, as well as through his converts, his students, and multitudes of others whose lives he touched.

At the heart of Finney’s message was the belief that God has done and is doing all he wisely and benevolently can do for the redemption of every person. In love and grace God has taken the initiative by giving us his Word, his Son, and the Holy Spirit. The primary, indeed the only, obstacle to be overcome in salvation is the sinner’s free volitional determination to please himself rather than to please God. The sinner refuses to obey God because the “choosing” part of him is held captive, albeit willingly, by the emotional or the “feeling” part, which lusts only after its own gratification. The Holy Spirit in full sympathy with the saving purposes of the Father and the Son is striving to bring every sinner to repentance and faith in Christ. This the Spirit does by presenting to the “knowing” or the “rational” part of the sinner his moral obligation to keep God’s law, his exceeding wickedness and guiltiness for refusing to obey God, the grace and mercy extended to him in the Gospel, and the sweet reasonableness of coming to Christ.

It is the task of the Christian witness or preacher, Finney believed, to cooperate with the Holy Spirit by pressing these same biblical truths home to the mind and conscience of the sinner. When the “outer” revelation of the Word of God matches the “inner” revelation of the Spirit, the sinner is ripened for conversion. The saving moment comes, however, only when the sinner yields to the truth, embraces Christ by faith as his Saviour, and consecrates himself to live only for the glory of God and the highest well-being of the universe. Finney rarely concluded a sermon without spelling out some of the spiritual, moral, social, and political implications of this consecration.

Finney understood Christian experience to be a matter of the submission of the will to the intellect, or to truth as apprehended by the intellect, rather than to the feelings. His own experience is illustrative. After a winter of searching the Scriptures fully on the subject of personal holiness, he says, “one morning … the thought occurred to me, what if, after all this divine teaching, my will is not carried, and this teaching affects me only in my sensibility? May it not be that my sensibility is affected by these revelations from reading the Bible, and that my heart is not really subdued by them?” (Memoirs, p. 374). After a few moments of acute distress, he found relief as he was “enabled to fall back upon the perfect will of God.”

This interpretation of Christian experience naturally affected Finney’s understanding of genuine revival and determined the approach he used in preaching. He sought to reach the will through the mind. He believed that a commitment rooted primarily in emotional excitement was simply a confirmation in sin because it increased the will’s bondage to feeling.

Consequently, Finney followed the pattern of the Apostle Paul in the synagogues of Asia Minor and reasoned with people. He treated his congregations as juries and presented them with evidence. Using the universally acknowledged axioms of common-sense philosophy in conjunction with biblical revelation, he sought to convince his hearers of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment to come, and then he unfolded God’s gracious extension of mercy through Christ.

Early in his ministry Finney appealed more to the emotions in order to attract attention to the Gospel, but as he matured he came to have “much more confidence in apparent conversions that occur where there is greater calmness of mind.” He held that “no effort should be made to produce excitement beyond what a lucid and powerful exposition of truth will produce” (Revival Fire, p. 16). An interesting analysis of his preaching appeared in 1859 in the pages of the Christian News of Glasgow, Scotland. After acknowledging that Finney, like many other revivalists, was endued with the power of the Holy Spirit, the writer went on to say:

We must consider the real nature of Mr. Finney’s power in promoting true revival. This does not lie in any mere impulse of earnestness, or of eloquence. For a revivalist, he is singularly free from everything which could possibly move the mere involuntary or blind feelings of the people.… Unless we regard the most quiet and natural manner, and the most simple language, as constituting a power, there is nothing about this truly great preacher’s mode of address that could influence men at all. It is in what he says, and not in the way in which he says it, nor much in the feeling he manifests, that his resistless power lies.… He knows nothing of a mere galvanizing of souls.… He addresses the understanding—reasons with men, speaks to the conscience and heart in logical truth, which it is impossible to gainsay—comes up to the will, when he has made the path of duty plain, beyond the possibility of mistake, and demands surrender for Jesus Christ.

With preaching like this, no wonder a University of Rochester student returned home discouraged after Finney’s opening night there in 1855: “I failed to detect in his method anything that promised to command the public attention.” However, the same student soon learned the results of such preaching: “The interest was extraordinary.… The city was taken possession of” (Modern Masters of Pulpit Discourse, 1905, p. 289).

Finney’s revivals were marked by their effectiveness at points of strategic influence. All the major cities of the northeastern United States as well as of England and Scotland felt the direct impact. Although the common people and rude frontiersmen heard him gladly and felt that he successfully explained to them what other people preached, the better educated were most responsive.

A roster of major figures whose lives he decisively influenced through speaking and writing would include such names as these: Albert Barnes (Presbyterian minister whose Notes on the Old and New Testaments has sold over two million copies); Jonathan and Charles Albert Blanchard and V. Raymond Edman (presidents of Wheaton College); Catherine Booth (great preacher and intellectual leader in the early Salvation Army); Jacob Dolson Cox (governor of Ohio, U. S. secretary of the interior, convert and son-in-law of C. G. Finney); David Livingstone; James Morison (biblical scholar, founder of The Evangelical Union in Scotland); Elizabeth Cady Stanton (first president of National Woman’s Suffrage Association); A. H. Strong (Baptist theologian); Theodore Weld (abolitionist orator); Daniel Whedon (the determinative Methodist theologian of the nineteenth century); Francis E. Willard (early leader of the then powerful Woman’s Christian Temperance Union); and George Williams (founder of the YMCA).

Three further contributions of Finney and of evangelicalism to American life come to mind, one cultural and two political. First, Richard Weaver has written that the chief defining and integrating factor in any culture is the view which it has of human nature. “Not only the character but also the degree of a culture is responsive to the prevailing image of man” (Visions of Order, p. 134). If this is so and if Miller is correct in his observations about the relation between revival and cultural identity in nineteenth-century America, then the evangelical view of man as created in the image of God, as consequently endowed with moral freedom and rational dignity, and as redeemable though fallen is highly significant.

Second, it may be that revival, by bringing the masses under the sway of God and of right reason and moral principle, rendered unnecessary a proliferation of civil laws. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that “despotism may be able to do without faith, but freedom cannot. Religion is … needed … in democratic republics most of all. How could society escape destruction if, when political ties are relaxed, moral ties are not tightened?” (Democracy in America, 1966, p. 271). Through revival, widespread receptivity to the internal discipline of the Spirit tended to modify the need for imposed social control.

Third, one requisite of a non-totalitarian state is a pluralism of societal associations whose inner authority structures are at some points immune to federal interference. These act as a buffer zone between the individual and the authority of the state. Democracy seems to have an inherent tendency to erode such associations through ceaseless extension of the egalitarian principle, unless they are sustained by an inner vitality of their own. Evangelicalism spawned by a large number of these associations as well as greatly strengthening the inner life of such fundamental social units as family, school (especially Christian colleges), and church. The role played by Finney and the evangelicals in this nation’s heritage of freedom appears to be considerable.

I have said little of Oberlin, where Finney lived, preached, and taught theology for the greater part of forty years, or of his vast influence overseas, particularly in England and Scotland. I have also given little attention to the content and impact of his books, most of which are in print today. Perhaps enough has been said, though, for us to concur with the judgment of Columbia University’s Richard Hofstadter that “Finney … must be reckoned among our great men” (Anti-intellectualism in American Life, p. 92), and to echo the prayer inscribed on Finney’s gravestone in the Oberlin cemetery: “May the God of our fathers be with us as he was with them.”

The theology of liberation came into prominence with the World Conference on Salvation Today held by the World Council of Churches in Bangkok early in 1973. Its message is very simple: salvation is liberation. Liberation from what? From injustice, from every form of oppression and exploitation, from everything that prevents man from being “truly human.” Although the theologians of liberation acknowledge personal sin, they ascribe its existence to oppressive political and social structures; these alone produce and perpetuate it, they say. Guilt is fundamentally social; consequently no liberation from individual sin is possible except through the overthrow of these oppressive structures that make it inevitable.

Liberation theology began with the end of World War II. What Bangkok did, however, was to put the weight of the World Council of Churches behind it and thus confer upon it a measure of respectability. Its main impetus comes from the new churches in the Third World—in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—but it is spreading to the developed countries. It draws on the secular theologies of Americans like Harvey Cox, on Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers From Prison, on the death-of-God movement. It is the ultimate expression of social activism, reaching a point that few American social activists are as yet ready to embrace but that its proponents claim to be the future of the Church.

The theology of liberation is most articulate in Latin America. Unlike Asia and Africa, Latin America is a Christian continent, at least nominally. No Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Shintoists, or primitive animists muddy the religions waters there. On the other hand, conditions in Latin America make it a natural breeding ground for the theology of liberation. A small privileged class rules in every area of life and confronts the underprivileged masses. The masses are poor, hungry, largely illiterate, and without land or other property. They are also hopeless because there is very little social mobility in Latin America. Education has been one of the two ladders of upward mobility, but it has produced revolutionists because there were no jobs for its products. The other ladder has been the army, but those who have risen in it have joined the upper privileged class rather than struggle to raise the level of the masses from which they came.

The word commonly used to describe this situation is “colonialism.” By using that word, Latin Americans acknowledge their kinship with the peoples of Asia and Africa and point to the international dimension of their own position. To describe their own position they speak of “neo-colonialism.” In this way they assert that political independence is not enough. The Latin Americans have had political independence for two centuries, but it has not brought liberation from foreign and domestic oppression. The inequality among nations is as great as the inequality within the nations. Because underdevelopment is an international problem, the Latin American liberationists show great sympathy for the struggle of the masses in the developed countries, notably the emergence of black power in the United States. Liberation must be world-wide if it is to be complete, and worldwide liberation means world revolution.

The connection between the Latin American theology of liberation and Marxism is obvious. Everything is to be interpreted in terms of the class struggle; revolution is inevitable; Lenin’s theory of imperialism is accepted lock, stock, and barrel. However, the liberation theologians prefer the word “socialism” to “communism” because they look upon the Soviet Union as just another exploiting power. This nationalist orientation leads them to prefer Havana to Moscow.

The Latin American liberationists are very conscious of their minority status. Many and perhaps most revolutionists are not Christians at all. The Roman Catholic Church is recognized as one of the pillars of the existing social order and is therefore considered an enemy by most revolutionists. Nevertheless, almost all the Latin American theologians of liberation are Roman Catholics—indeed, Roman Catholic priests. A few, such as Alves and Fals-Borda, are Protestants. Like the Fascists before World War II, they look upon their movement as the wave of the future. Like the Marxists, they believe they are destined to win because of the “laws” of historical development. They will lose many battles, but they will win the war.

What the Latin American liberationists have done is to cast Marxism in Christian terms and to give their movement a foundation in Christian theology. The movement is widespread, taking in Uruguayans like Juan Luis Segundo, Peruvians like Gustavo Gutierrez, Colombians like Orlando Fals-Borda and Camilo Torres, Brazilians like Rubem Alves and Paulo Freire and Dom Helder Camara, and Mexicans like Jose Porfirio Miranda. While there are some differences among them, the resemblances are striking.

Liberty And Equality

What is the central thread of the Christian faith? The Latin American liberationists answer with one word: liberty. It is true that the concept of justice plays a very important role in their thinking. Miranda, for instance, says that God can be known only in a struggle for justice: “Yahweh is not among the entities nor the existings nor in univocal being nor in analogous being, but rather in the implacable moral imperative of justice” (José Porfirio Miranda, Marx and the Bible: A Critique of the Philosophy of Oppression, Orbis, 1974, p. 49). Again: “To know Yahweh is to achieve justice for the poor” (ibid., p. 44). But justice means liberation: “In the view of the Bible, Yahweh is the God who breaks into human history to liberate the oppressed” (ibid., p. 77). The great example always cited is the Exodus, in which the Jews were delivered from Egyptian slavery—in other words, set free. Commenting on this point, Gutierrez says: “The liberation of Israel is a political action” (Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation, Orbis, 1971, p. 155). “Let my people go” is the constant refrain. And, of course, there is a heavy emphasis on the Old Testament prophets.

Liberation is identified with conversion: “To be converted is to commit oneself to the process of the liberation of the poor and oppressed, to commit oneself lucidly, realistically, and concretely” (ibid., p. 205). Liberty is no secondary means to some other end or ends: “Instead liberty is a value in itself, and this more than compensates for the evil that may result from the act of choice” (Juan Luis Segundo, Grace and the Human Condition, Orbis, 1968, p. 44). Christians, observes Alves, are more and more committing themselves to liberty: “And when they do this they are simply recovering an element which is absolutely central, although many times forgotten, in the consciousness of the community of faith, namely, its vocation to freedom” (Rubem A. Alves, A Theology of Hope, Corpus, 1969, p. 76; italics supplied). Again: “For liberty is the gift of God himself, the presence of divine life within us” (ibid., p. 8).

Liberty, then, is the answer to oppression. What is wrong with oppression? One could say, of course, that oppression is a denial of liberty. But how do we know that liberty has been denied? By virtue of the fact that mankind suffers from inequality. The liberationists point to the poor—the wretched of the earth, diseased, landless, propertyless, illiterate, ignorant, starving, and hopeless. There is an enormous distance between rich and poor in Latin America, a distance that cannot be justified in the eyes of a God who loves all men. A similar inequality exists among the nations, e.g., between the United States and Bangladesh. This intra-national and inter-national inequality is not a fact of nature, something inevitable and immutable. The wretched of the earth were not intended by God to be that poor. “They were made poor” (Gutierrez, op. cit., p. 43).

Who made them poor? The social system. Among the social systems that exist and have existed, capitalism is the worst: “There never existed a socio-cultural system whose refined constrictive power was as capable of entrapping and hooking people on such deep psychic level as the capitalist system” (Miranda, op. cit., p. 22). Miranda calls it capitalism, Gutierrez calls it developmentalism, Segundo calls it history, and Alves calls it colonialism. The name does not matter. The point is that inequality is not the result of evil-designing men, though their evil designs are undeniable, because they too are prisoners of the system.

How far is the drive for equality supposed to go? The liberationists are fuzzy on this question. Obviously, it must go a long way, though most of them refrain from pushing for absolute equality. The most radical on this point is probably Miranda: “The fact that differentiating wealth is inacquirable without violence and spoliation is presupposed by the Bible in its pointed anathemas against the rich; therefore almsgiving is nothing more than restitution of what has been stolen, and thus the Bible calls it justice” (ibid., p. 19).

Poverty And Liberty

It should be noted that the rich are themselves the prisoners of the system from which they benefit but that this in no way excuses them. The liberationists’ animosity toward them is vocal: “Sooner or later,” says Dom Helder Camara, “money covers the eyes with dangerous scales and freezes the lips, the hands and the heart of the creature” (Dom Helder Camara, The Church and Colonialism: The Betrayal of the Third World, Dimension, 1969, p. 34). Another Brazilian says: “Love for the oppressed is wrath against the oppressors” (Alves, op. cit., p. 124). Miranda is of the same opinion: “But frankly I do not see how there can be an authentic compassion for the oppressed without there being at the same time indignation against the oppressor” (Miranda, op. cit., p. 47). Miranda goes on to say: “In fact, the absolute impossibility of salvation for the rich is something which no primitive Christian community … would have dared to assert if it were not basing its assertion on the authority of Christ himself” (ibid., p. 18). What Miranda has reference to is Christ’s statement concerning the rich young ruler: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25).

A few rich people feel considerable sympathy for the poor and are appalled at their status as oppressors, “but it does not necessarily lead to solidarity with the oppressed” (Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Herder and Herder, 1968, p. 34). For this to happen, there would have to be a genuine conversion experience: “Conversion to the people requires a profound rebirth. Those who undergo it must take on a new form of existence; they can no longer remain as they were. Only through comradeship with the oppressed can the converts understand their characteristic ways of living and behaving, which in diverse moments reflect the structure of domination” (ibid., p. 47). Therefore, if a rich man is to be helpful in the liberation process, he must become poor and identify himself with the oppressed so that he becomes one of them. He must become, says Paulo Freire, not an investigator but a co-investigator, not an actor but an actor in communication. Another word for it is “insertion,” which “means accepting the ordinary conditions of life endured by the populace being studied” (Denis Goulet, A New Moral Order: Studies in Development Ethics and Liberation Theology, Orbis, 1974, p. 58). Anything short of this conversion or insertion is reformism, which “by its very shallowness … perpetuates the existing system” (Gutierrez, op. cit., p. 48). Either that, or it is reconciliation, which is also unacceptable: “To preach reconciliation now, at a time when established structures support paternalism, privilege, and exploitation is not only to commit vicious hypocrisy; it is also to place the church in a nonhistorical posture which can only benefit the status quo” (Goulet, op. cit., p. 125). This conversion is extremely rare and not sufficient to bring a change in any case.

It follows that liberation can come only from the poor, i.e., the wretched of the earth, the exploited, the oppressed. “But in order for this liberation to be authentic and complete, it has to be undertaken by the oppressed people themselves and so must stem from the values proper to these people” (Gutierrez, op. cit., p. 91). The poor are God’s chosen people. “The human areas that are poorest in every way” says the Italian Enzo Gatti, “are the most qualified for receiving the saving Word. They are the ones that have the best right to that Word; they are the privileged recipients of the Gospel; they are the ones whom Christ and Paul would unhesitatingly seek out in proclaiming salvation” (Enzo Gatti, Rich Church—Poor Church? Some Biblical Perspectives, Orbis, 1973, p. 43). Liberationists, therefore, must “accept class struggle both as an undeniable fact and as a starting point for divising strategies of change” (Goulet, op. cit., p. 124).

Subversion And Revolution

However, the “privileged recipients of the Gospel” present some serious problems. They constitute a distinct social class, but they do not know it. They are hopeless and inert, accepting their status as though it were conferred upon them by nature. They have no class consciousness. This class consciousness must be aroused, and Freire calls it conscientization. It begins with the awareness of their class status and a realization that this status is not inevitable. At this point, a great temptation raises its head, namely, that of going up into the oppressor class. “It is a rare peasant” observes Freire, who, once ‘promoted’ to overseer, does not become more of a tyrant toward his former comrades than the owner himself” (Freire, op. cit., p. 30). It was the temptation of the blacks in the United States: “Since they could not become Whites they could at least behave as Whites do and gain their respect and confidence. This was the dream of integration. And that was all right with the Whites.… And suddenly they realized that in order to become whole, they had to abandon the white man’s game and create their own” (Rubem A. Alves, Tomorrow’s Child: Imagination, Creativity, and the Rebirth of Culture, Harper & Row, 1972, p. 68). It is a temptation that is being resisted internationally: “The poor nations of the world, with their banners of nationalism and self-determination—what are these if not rebellion on the part of the oppressed and their refusal to move ahead according to the logic of the oppressor?” (ibid., p. 69). For that reason, a total change is indispensable if the wretched of the earth are to attain liberation. “As long as they live in the duality in which to be is to be like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor, this contribution is impossible” (Freire, op. cit., p. 33).

The process of conscientization begins with subversion. “Subversion is thus defined as that condition reflecting the internal incongruities of the social order discovered by its members during a given historical period in the light of new, valued goals” (Orlando Fals-Borda, Subversion and Social Change in Colombia, Columbia University, 1969, p. 13). Subversion has its roots in the Bible: “The first rebel of this type was probably Moses, rallying his people against the tyranny of the Pharoahs” (ibid., p. 8). Christ is presented as the Liberator. “The Gospel was thus an ‘act’, a new insertion of freedom into history which opens new horizons for human liberation” (Alves, The Theology of Hope, p. 93). This emphasis on action leads to an interesting interpretation by Miranda of the commandment against making graven images:

Why is there a prohibition of images of God, even human images, if the Bible insists that man is the image of God? Evidently there is a great difference between a real man and an image, even if it has a human figure. The image does not speak; it enjoins no commandment, no imperative; it does not prohibit murder. The real man does; and the Bible does indeed consider the real man, the flesh-and-blood man, to be the true and legitimate image of God [Miranda, op. cit., p. 39].

The transcendence of God is knowable only in action: “Transcendence does not mean only an unimaginable and inconceivable God, but a God who is accessible only in the act of justice” (ibid., p. 48; italics supplied).

Subversion must lead to revolution. By revolution the liberationists do not mean a mere change at the top, the substitution of one government for another. What they have in mind goes much deeper: “The goal is not only better living conditions, a radical change of structures, a social revolution; it is much more: the continuous creation, never ending, of a new way to be a man, a permanent cultural revolution” (Gutierrez, op. cit., p. 32). It is too easy to “forget that rebellion is the presupposition of any creative act” (Alves, Tomorrow’s Child, p. 127). Creation begins with negation, negation of the state and of the law: “Completely opposite to the defense of the status quo, the realization of justice not only subverts it, it also demands that we abolish the State and the law” (Miranda, op. cit., p. 38). Speaking of the Apostle Paul, Miranda says: “The law, the generative segment of civilization, is now by its acquired and inextirpable essence the instrument of sin …” (ibid., p. 190). He labels law observance as “a carnal attitude” and asserts that “Paul rejects the law—every written or formulated law. If the term refers to the law of God, much more does it refer to the law of men” (ibid., p. 257).

Violence

The concept of violence plays an important role in the theology of liberation. We usually distinguish between law enforcement and violence. One is legal, the other illegal. This distinction does not hold for the liberationists. Some of them distinguish between violence by public authority and counter-violence by private persons, but most of them do not bother. In any case, the liberationists hold that violence is necessary. Many Latin American governments are dictatorships whose regime cannot be justified on the basis of either constitutional legitimacy or popular election; hence no peaceful alternative for change is present. But this does not make any difference because the liberationists hold that constitutional regimes based on universal suffrage are just as oppressive. The oppression is only disguised somewhat. Says Freire: “Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons—not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized” (Freire, op. cit., p. 41).

It is therefore necessary, argues Fals-Borda, to respond in kind:

It is under this light that painful acts like the kidnapping of foreign ambassadors and national personalities by truly revolutionary groups should be understood. Counter-violence of this type depends on the violence executed previously by reactionary groups in power.… The strategy of subversive war therefore requires to respond in kind to the onslaughts of those who oppose radical progress because this social change would end their selfish vested interests [Fals-Borda, as quoted in Goulet, op. cit., p. 72].

No sense of wrongdoing is associated with subversive violence: “A supreme sense of moral worth pervades the subversive enterprise in Latin America” (Goulet, op. cit., p. 63). Alves adds his words of commendation: “Man is absolved from inhumanity and brutality in the present, as the time of transition, the time which does not count” (Alves, A Theology of Hope, p. 155).

The effect of these liberationist attitudes is to escalate violence. Violence breeds counter-violence. As the Brazilian archbishop of Recife, Dom Helder Camara—who does not believe in violence—says: “It is true that violence belongs to all ages, but today it is perhaps more topical than ever; it is omnipresent, in every conceivable form: brutal, overt, subtle, insidious, underhand, blind, rational, scientific, solidly entrenched, anonymous, abstract, irresponsible” (Dom Helder Camara, op. cit., p. 101). This escalation of violence cannot be limited to dictatorships or other regimes customarily described as oppressive. It applies to all regimes and therefore must be world-wide in scope. “The insurrection of authentic Christianity against all law and all civilization which has ever existed in history is a subversion which knows no limits …” (Miranda, op. cit., p. 189).

It follows from the position taken by the liberationists that salvation is by and through politics. Alves, for instance, speaks of “the ongoing politics of God” and “the politics of the Messiah.” Segundo adds his word: “In the domain of time, then, salvation is a ‘political’ maturity. It is the maturity of ‘political being’ that every human being is” (Segundo, Our Idea of God, p. 39). Alves explains that “the creative event cuts its way through the social inertia by creating a counter-culture. In the. Old Testament, the community of Israel was a counterculture.… The early Christian community was a counter-culture. Or more precisely, an underground counter-culture” (Alves, Tomorrow’s Child, p. 202). The counter-culture creates a new man: “This is why the new consciousness believes that the new man and the new tomorrow are to be created in and through an activity which is political in character” (Alves, A Theology of Hope, p. 16).

Secularization

The effect of this exclusive concentration on politics is to rule out all religion in the traditional sense. Citing the prophets, especially Isaiah, Miranda rejects cultus as something which causes man to deviate from the pursuit of justice. “See how people close their eyes,” remarks Alves, “when they pray. They do not know why. It has become an automatic reflex. But the reason is that they believe God begins where the body ends. The act of closing one’s eyes is an act of refusal of the body and of rejection of the world” (Alves, Tomorrow’s Child, p. 159). The liberationists endorse radical secularization or desacralization: “The language of theology and of the Church, the language of many hymns, liturgies, and sermons sounds to the secular man like the voice of an alien and remote sphere. This is one of the reasons why a growing number of people are leaving the churches and opting for a totally secular humanism” (Alves, A Theology of Hope, p. 29). Alves does not hesitate to go all the way with secularization:

God, thus, is not freedom for man. He is the domestication of man, the end of the “homo creator.” When the death of God is proclaimed, obviously man is made free again for his world, for history, for creation. The world is desacralized. Its frozen values thaw. Nothing is final. The horizons become permission and invitation. Man is free for experimentation.… Religion, therefore, is to be destroyed for the sake of the earth, for the sake of man’s freedom to criticize his world in order to transform it [ibid., p. 33].

The same thought is echoed by Gutierrez: “Secularization poses a serious challenge to the Christian community. In the future it will have to live and celebrate its faith in a nonreligious world, which the faith itself has helped to create” (Gutierrez, op. cit., p. 68).

Secularization, i.e., a completely desacralized world, is the wave of the future. It is the sign of the times, what God is doing in the world: “The Church has the duty of scrutinizing the signs of the times in order to ‘be able’ to reply in a suitable way …” (Segundo, op. cit., p. 126). God had been eliminated from the world and man is in full control: “Secularization is a central postulate of the Christian message.… Now everything is under man’s dominion” (ibid., p. 39).

Interpreting secularization in this manner as the sign of the times, the liberationists profess great hope for the future. “Political humanism is a language of hope” (Alves, A Theology of Hope, p. 27). There is no basis for accepting the status quo “which many Christians, it would appear, find so normal” (Miranda, op. cit., p. 168). Such acceptance is but a vestige of colonialism, which has “defuturized and defuturizes the nations under its power” (Alves, A Theology of Hope, p. 112). More and more, Christians are coming to their senses:

The commitment of militant Christians to liberation is not confined to rhetorical professions of principle or to new conceptual models for the conduct of theology. It finds its expression in everyday life: Dominican priests in Brazil offer sanctuary to urban guerrillas; Protestant missionaries in Uruguay actively support the Tupamaros; United States churches contribute funds to liberation groups in South Africa and Mozambique; priests issue public ultimatums to their religious superiors urging them to return church-owned lands to Bolivian peasants or to reject government subsidies for their school. Such activists openly accept all political risks: suppression, jail, torture, exile, even assassination [Goulet, op. cit., p. 84].

Evaluation

The first fallacy of the theology of liberation is its emphasis on liberty. Liberty is not the central theme of the Christian faith. Taking the favorite theme of the liberationists, namely that of Exodus, let us note what the Lord told Moses to say to Pharoah: “Let my people go, that they might serve me” (Exod. 8:1, italics supplied). Service to God, to glorify God, and not some abstract idea of liberty, is the reason for liberation. The people of Israel were shifted from servitude to Pharoah to servitude to God, and, instead of leaving them to their own devices, God gave them the moral law and detailed forms of worship—yes, cultus! Contrary to what Miranda has said, God also gave them government. In all this the concept of liberty is secondary.

A second defect in the theology of liberation is its concept of equality. Let us note in passing that there is an inescapable contradiction between liberty and equality. If men are absolutely free, inequality must result because the ablest—whether by nature, training, or circumstance—will come out on top. If, on the other hand, men are absolutely equal, the liberty of the ablest will necessarily have to be so severely curtailed as to be non-existent. More serious is the idea that inequality is wrong in itself. It may be justly argued that the distance between the rich and the poor within a country and the rich nations and the poor nations is excessive and cannot be justified in terms of God’s love for all people. In that sense, the cry of the wretched of the earth does reach into the heavens as it did in Israel of old, and Christians should do what they can to mitigate it. But let us not forget that inequality of some kind is an inescapable fact of life. God did not endow us equally. There will never be complete equality on this earth and perhaps not in heaven either.

To cite only one of the sayings of Jesus; the parable of the talents illustrates the justice of inequality. Jesus did not say that all should have received the same talents but only that more would be expected of those who were more richly endowed. The favorite reference to the least of Christ’s brethren means that Christians should minister to the needy but not that the distinction between rich and poor should be abolished. The poor, said Jesus, are always with us.

To say with Enzo Gatti that the poor are “the privileged recipients of the Gospel” is a violation of repeated biblical declarations that God is no respecter of persons. Lowly shepherds celebrated Christ’s birth, but so did the wise men, whose presents indicated that they were wealthy as well as wise. Peter was a lowly and uneducated fisherman, but Paul was a highly educated Pharisee and a member of the establishment. Luke was a Greek physician and therefore a professional man. Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea who buried Jesus were rich and were members of the establishment. Jesus did say, “Blessed are ye poor,” but they were not the only blessed ones. The truth is that Jesus never judged people according to their social status.

The advocacy of subversion and revolution runs counter to Romans 13, which instructs us to obey the powers that be. Jesus specifically rejected the concept of the “ongoing politics of God” (Alves’s term) when he was tempted in the desert and steadily refused the pressure to make him an earthly king. In the Sermon on the Mount he told us not to resist evil but to seek righteousness and be perfect as is our heavenly Father, who sends his rain on the just and the unjust. He well understood the fallacy of negativism in that those who indulge in it become like those whom they resist.

It is significant that the doctrine of original sin plays no part in the thinking of the liberationists. That is why they do not recognize the ambivalence of resolution, which always engenders its Napoleons. The end result is always to substitute one inequality for another—e.g., that of the political party elite for the rich capitalists in the Soviet Union—and the second is often worse than the first.

One of the fundamental messages of the Christian faith is instruction in how to live under adversity. The Apostle Paul repeatedly prayed that he would be delivered from his thorn in the flesh, but he was not. Instead, he learned how to live victoriously with his affliction. The early Church lived and thrived under slavery, and countless slaves found salvation without legal emancipation. The Church lives and thrives today under the Hammer and Sickle. Man has to realize that he is not God and must learn to put up with some poverty, injustice, and oppression. Improve on these evil conditions, he may; remove them, he may not.

As for the liberationists’ espousal of secularization, it is enough to say that no doctrine that reads God out of life can rightfully be called Christian. It cannot even be called religious! The task of the Christian is to sanctify the secular, not secularize the sacred. The idea that man is in full control and needs no supernatural help flouts reality and is a twentieth-century reappearance of the first temptation to which Adam and Eve succumbed.

Why should we Americans and citizens of other developed countries pay attention to the theology of liberation in the underdeveloped countries? Because the theology of liberation is the logic of social activism. As long as we are fed with the vague generalities of Harvey Cox and Richard Shaull, some of us may not get very excited. What the Latin American theologians of liberation have done is to spell out in concrete detail exactly where these vague generalities lead us when we take them seriously and put them into practice. By their fruits ye shall know them.

Believers in God’s creation of mankind have developed a wondrous variety of interpretations through the years. For brevity we can divide them into two major positions: (1) those who hold that God created mankind comparatively recently, say, a few thousands of years ago, and (2) those who find acceptable an earlier date for Adam’s creation, say, hundreds of thousands of years ago.

The first group, those who maintain that Adam must have been created within, say, the last ten thousand years, may themselves be divided into two main branches according to how they interpret the geology and the fossil remains: (a) those who accept the geological antiquity of the earth and who therefore interpret the ancient fossil types as pre-Adamic forms: (b) those who do not accept the geological antiquity of the earth and who therefore interpret the fossil types as the descendants of a recent Adam.

Those of category 1a, who accept geological antiquity but insist upon a comparatively recent Adam, have developed quite a wide variety of interpretations. Let us begin with the most unorthodox. J. M. Clark claims that “when Adam was created and placed in Eden, the human race was already long established.… (“Genesis and Its Underlying Realities,” Faith and Thought, Vol. 93, No. 3, p. 146). To arrive at this position Clark distinguishes between the creation of the first men (Gen. 1:26) and the creation of Adam (Gen. 5:2). His entire thesis rests essentially on this distinction. He examines all the Genesis references to Adam and concludes that separate meanings are necessary, “Adam” as “mankind” and “Adam” as the man put into Eden. Both of these he finds in Genesis 5:1, 2, holding that since God called the name of the first created men “Adam” they shared the nature of the later “Adam” of Eden. Clark concludes: “We may therefore take Gen. 5:1 and following, as applying to the couple in Eden without in any way committing ourselves to the view that they were the first human beings on earth, from whom all others are descended” (p. 152). As for the first or original man, for Clark, “the expression ‘called their name Adam’ indicates that the original man, like ourselves, was reckoned to share in the nature of Adam, and therefore to share in his sin and in his condemnation to spiritual and physical death” (p. 153). Clark must assume, however, that “the results of Adam’s sin may operate backwards in time as well as forwards, in the same way as the saving work of Christ. Thus men who lived long before Adam would be under the same dominion of sin and death as those who have lived since” (p. 154). After examining the New Testament references to Adam, Clark concludes that “we cannot anywhere find a clear and definite statement to indicate conclusively that Adam was the first man on earth, nor can we find a clear and definite statement that all men now living are descended from him” (p. 151).

Another example is the explanation offered by J. Stafford Wright, writing in Faith and Thought (Vol. 90, No. 1): because he cannot see any evidence of religion in the prehistoric fossil sites, he questions the “spiritual capacities” of “man-like creatures” before about 6000 B.C. and calls all fossil men before Neolithic times “pre-Adamic” creatures that “do not have the status of men in the Biblical sense.”

A third example is the view of T. C. Mitchell (Faith and Thought, Vol. 91, No. 1), who tentatively holds that “only the fossil remains which have been unequivocally described as Homo sapiens [modern men], men of the upper Palaeolithic period,” are “to be called ‘man’ in the Biblical sense.” Non-sapiens fossil forms “would not be pre-Adamite men, for they would not be men.” A very similar position is espoused by Gleason Archer, professor of Old Testament studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, who cannot accept the extension of the genealogical records of Genesis 5 and 11 over any longer period of time (A Survey of Old Testament Introduction). James Murk also takes essentially this position, basing it upon a thesis held by some anthropologists that previous forms did not have true language and therefore were not truly human (Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, Vol. 17, No. 2).

Summing up these positions, we find that all but Clark hold that Adam must be considered the first human being for theological reasons. All, however, put Adam at such a position in time that the pre-Adamic forms must be at least accounted for because of Adam’s relation to all mankind in the Fall. Clark does this by assuming their humanity by an exegetical and theological device; Wright demotes them from humanity by discounting their religious capacity, Murk by discounting their linguistic capacity, and Mitchell and Archer by simply being forced to assign them a non-human status by reason of their assumed pre-Adamic existence. Here, too, we could insert the extreme position of Robert Brow, author of an article in CHRISTIANITY TODAY entitled “The Late-Date Genesis Man,” who holds that Adam’s creation was about “3900 B.C.” and who demotes all previous beings to animal status (Sept. 15, 1972, issue).

Now those in category 1b, who do not accept the geological antiquity of earth or mankind, also hold firmly to the orthodox position that Adam was the first man. However, in assigning not only Adam but all of Creation otherwise a very recent date, they must treat the fossil remains of ancient man either (a) as non-human animals, (b) as largely fraudulent or fictitious, or (c) as appearing morphologically very very modern and entirely within the scope of the present human races.

Perhaps the best-known representatives of this position are Arthur Custance, a Canadian who is the author of the series called “The Doorway Papers”; members of the British Evolution Protest Movement; and members of the American-based Bible-Science Association, Creation Research Society, and Institute for Creation Research. John C. Whitcomb and Henry Morris have stated the position most plainly:

We say, on the basis of overwhelming Biblical evidence, that every fossil man that has ever been discovered, or ever will be discovered, is a descendant of the supernaturally created Adam and Eve. This is absolutely essential to the entire edifice of Christian theology, and there can simply be no true Christianity without it [The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications, Presbyterian and Reformed, 1961, p. 457].

But Morris insists that “the Biblical record indicates creation to have taken place only a few thousand years ago.” He admits a “possible range of uncertainty” of “about 15,000 years ago,” but considers “a more likely limit to be “not more than 10,000 years ago.” In fact, he concludes, “there is nothing really impossible or unreasonable about the traditional date of 4004 B.C.”(Evolution and the Modern Christian).

Turning now to position two, the acceptance of a geologically ancient creation of man, we may first point out, as William Kornfield did in his CHRISTIANITY TODAY article “The Early-Date Genesis Man” (June 8, 1973), that those who are familiar with the abundant data, both anatomical and cultural, strenuously resist the idea of assigning these types to a pre-Adamic position. They object to this on the grounds of the very evident humanity of these remains, as inferred by modern primitive parallels. Kornfield says, “The concept of a pre-Adamic creature looking like man but not being man appears to be a way of avoiding the implications of all the fossil and cultural evidence for the existence of man early in time.”

Those who hold this position—and I am among them—therefore insist that Adam must have been created before the earliest of those forms that, by both anatomical and cultural evidence, may be interpreted unequivocally as human and as geologically ancient, according to the findings of human paleontology. With very few exceptions, anthropologists who are creationists hold this position. And although the American Scientific Affiliation does not have an official position on human antiquity, nor can it be said that there is a consensus on the matter among its members, it appears that a great many of them are in substantial agreement with this position.

There are many cultural and anatomical remains that are both clearly ancient and clearly human, with continuous-occupation sites well back beyond ten thousand years in both hemispheres. The question may be asked, why are these remains objected to? Why do those of the late-date Adam position feel it is necessary to compress them, debunk them, or omit them from the ranks of progeny? So many of the doctrinal fundamentals of the Christian faith are held in common by those of both these creationist positions that many find it perplexing that the issue of the antiquity of the creation of mankind should so divide the testimony before the Christian and scientific worlds.

Let us briefly review the beliefs we hold in common. First, parties on both sides of this great debate believe that God created the first man as an individual human being by supernatural means. The historicity of an individual Adam is a fundamental doctrine of each position. This, in turn, is directly tied to the second fundamental belief held in common, that man was created as a creature unique from all other creatures not only in his discontinuity from them genetically but also in his distinction from them spiritually and culturally after the image of God. Paul A. Zimmerman in his chapter in the Baker Symposium on Creation and John C. Whitcomb in his book The Early Earth describe most effectively and fully the arguments for the distinctiveness and historicity of Adam, with excellent presentations of the biblical data that undermine the position of theistic evolution. And R. J. Rushdoony in The Mythology of Science points out correctly that “when the historicity of the first Adam is undercut, then the historicity of Christ—and the validity of all history—is also destroyed.”

These three authors hold the position of a recent or late-date Adam. The essential nature of the historicity of Adam is also subscribed to wholeheartedly by those of us whose interpretations of Scripture allow for a much earlier date for Adam’s creation. Among these are Cora Reno, S. Maxwell Coder, George F. Howe, Donald England, and Francis Schaeffer.

These doctrinal base lines are tied also to the third doctrine held in common, the doctrine of the Fall, and in turn to the New Testament passages in First Corinthians 1 and Romans 5 that make the supernatural creation of a perfect man and his subsequent fall a necessary condition for the role of Christ in redemption.

Here the early-Adam creationist would insist as strenuously as his late-Adam counterpart that, in the words of Emil Brunner,

The surrender of the idea of the Fall … would mean nothing less than the shattering of the foundations of the whole Biblical doctrine of man, and indeed, the whole Biblical doctrine of revelation and salvation.… Apart from the doctrine of the Fall it is impossible to understand Sin as the presupposition of the New Testament message of Redemption. Only a fallen humanity needs a Redeemer [Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption, Westminster, 1952, pp. 50, 90].

Since these crucial doctrinal issues are agreed to, we return to the question, Why is there such decided rejection of an early or ancient date for the creation of Adam, which seems to fit the scientific date with the fewest problems? The answer lies in the interpretation of one set of biblical data, the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11. This is virtually the sole unresolved scriptural issue over which the remaining confrontation exists.

The late or recent-date Adam creationists insist (a) that the great age of the earth understood by conventional geology constitutes an “evolutionary chronology” and therefore invalidates any attempt to articulate a creationist position within its scope; and (b) that it partakes of extra-biblical perspectives and data not provided for within the text, and that the text of Scripture should be the only source for our interpretation of human origin. Henry Morris is most explicit on this: He writes, “In the Bible which is the word of God, He has told us everything we need to know about the Creation and earth’s primeval history” (Evolution and the Modern Christian, Baker, 1967, p. 54). He further claims that “within the framework of … three great events of history—Creation, the Fall, and the Flood—can be explained all the data of true science and history” (p. 66). And, with specific reference to the genealogies, he says:

The general method of Ussher—that of relying on the Biblical data alone—is the only proper approach to determining the date of creation. The genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11 provide the most strategic data in this connection. If these are taken at face value, they indicate that Ussher must have been correct at least in order of magnitude [p. 63].

The early-date Adam creationists, on the other hand, claim to stand with some of the classic stalwarts of the faith—William Henry Green, B. B. Warfield, and others—whose contributions on the inspiration of Scripture constitute some of the most revered and scholarly documents of fundamentalism, but who at the same time argued just as cogently that the genealogies were not intended to be considered as chronological devices for counting the years between Adam and Noah and between Noah and the time of Abraham, and that the matter of how long ago Adam was created is theologically irrelevant. Furthermore, Green points out in his “Primeval Chronology” that when the Bible is silent on a matter one should search for extra-biblical evidence for enlightenment. Cora Reno has put this into perspective for the modern creationist position:

Since the Bible is not specific about a date for Adam, most scholars are willing to look to science for help in determining man’s antiquity. In no way is science being set above the Bible for we know that harmony exists between God’s created world and His written word. It was God who set into operation the various laws that govern the dating methods [Evolution on Trial, Moody, 1970, p. 127].

S. Maxwell Coder and George F. Howe also point out that “in Genesis God does not reveal the date of creation” and that “there is nothing incongruous in the biblical account of creation when we consider the existence of fossils in various strata of the earth’s crust, apparently of great antiquity” (The Bible, Science, and Creation).

Kenneth Taylor, the paraphraser of The Living Bible, writes:

From the Creationist viewpoint at this time, the picture is this: All fossil men and women are descendants of Adam and Eve, who were created directly by God, so Adam and Eve are older than the earliest human fossils. The Bible gives no evidence upon which we can draw to determine the time of Adam’s creation [Kenneth Taylor, ed., Evolution and the High School Student, Tyndale, 1974, p. 37].

Francis Schaeffer, after a detailed consideration of the arguments, concludes that “prior to the time of Abraham, there is no possible way to date the history of what we find in scripture” (Genesis in Space and Time).

Finally, Donald England points out:

To get a value of 6,000 years for the age of the earth one would have to assume an error of 99.9998 percent for each of the major radioactive methods. Inasmuch as the different methods employ different techniques, and … different assumptions, an error of such magnitude as this is quite incredible. [A Christian View of Origins, Baker, 1972, p. 105].

We find then, a continuing and, in the opinion of many, unnecessary breach between those holding the two major creationist positions. Their doctrinal orthodoxy is sound and largely shared, their activities in evangelism and Christian education and scholarship are fruitful and effective, their personal testimony and devotion to Christ are unquestioned, but they oppose each other. The early-origin creationists consider their opponents to be far too conservative and unrealistically defensive; the late or recent-date creationists see their opponents’ position only through their own premises, which cancel out any appreciation of their opponents’ claims to Christian orthodoxy.

May we creationists in each position work and pray for increased empathy and communication as we are led by the Holy Spirit, to the strengthening of our testimony for the faith we hold in common.