As evangelicals we maintain that the Bible is for us the only infallible rule of faith and practice. It is our final authority in all matters of doctrine (faith) and ethics (practice). Yet the Bible was not written to evangelicals living in the twentieth century. The science—or better, the art—of interpreting the biblical text so that the revelation of God written centuries ago is meaningful and correctly understood today is called “hermeneutics.” The basic principle of hermeneutics, to be somewhat simplistic, is that the question “What does it mean for us today?” must be preceded by the question “What did it mean for them yesterday?” If we do not seek first to understand what the text meant when it was written, it will be very difficult to interpret intelligently what it means and demands of us today.

My subject here is the use of the term “wine” in the New Testament. Some readers may already be thinking, “Is he going to try to tell us that wine in the Bible means grape juice? Is he going to try to say that the wine mentioned in the New Testament is any different from the wine bottled today by Christian Brothers or Chateau Lafite-Rothschild or Mogen David?” Well, my answers are no and yes. No, the wine of the Bible was not unfermented grape juice. Yes, it was different from the wine of today.

In ancient times wine was usually stored in large pointed jugs called amphorae. When wine was to be used it was poured from the amphorae into large bowls called kraters, where it was mixed with water. Last year I had the privilege of visiting the great archaeological museum in Athens, Greece, where I saw dozens of these large kraters. At the time it did not dawn on me what their use signified about the drinking of wine in biblical times. From these kraters, cups or kylix were then filled. What is important for us to note is that before wine was drunk it was mixed with water. The kylix were filled not from the amphorae but from the kraters.

The ratio of water to wine varied. Homer (Odyssey IX, 208f.) mentions a ratio of 20 to 1, twenty parts water to one part wine. Pliny (Natural History XIV, vi, 54) mentions a ratio of eight parts water to one part wine. In one ancient work, Athenaeus’s The Learned Banquet, written around A.D. 200, we find in Book Ten a collection of statements from earlier writers about drinking practices. A quotation from a play by Aristophanes reads: “ ‘Here, drink this also, mingled three and two.’ DEMUS.‘Zeus! But it’s sweet and bears the three parts well!’ ” The poet Euenos, who lived in the fifth century B.C., is also quoted:

The best measure of wine is neither much nor very little;

For ‘tis the cause of either grief or madness.

It pleases the wine to be the fourth, mixed with three nymphs.

Here the ratio of water to wine is 3 to 1. Others mentioned are:

3 to 1—Hesiod

4 to 1—Alexis

2 to 1—Diodes

3 to 1—Ion

5 to 2—Nichochares

2 to 1—Anacreon

Sometimes the ratio goes down to 1 to 1 (and even lower), but it should be noted that such a mixture is referred to as “strong wine.” Drinking wine unmixed, on the other hand, was looked upon as a “Scythian” or barbarian custom. Athenaeus in this work quotes Mnesitheus of Athens:

The gods has revealed wine to mortals, to be the greatest blessing for those who use it aright, but for those who use it without measure, the reverse. For it gives food to them that take it and strength in mind and body. In medicine it is most beneficial; it can be mixed with liquid and drugs and it brings aid to the wounded. In daily intercourse, to those who mix and drink it moderately, it gives good cheer; but if you overstep the bounds, it brings violence. Mix it half and half, and you get madness; unmixed, bodily collapse.

It is evident that wine was seen in ancient times as a medicine (and as a solvent for medicines) and of course as a beverage. Yet as a beverage it was always thought of as a mixed drink. Plutarch (Symposiacs III, ix), for instance, states. “We call a mixture ‘wine,’ although the larger of the component parts is water.” The ratio of water might vary, but only barbarians drank it unmixed, and a mixture of wine and water of equal parts was seen as “strong drink” and frowned upon. The term “wine” or oinos in the ancient world, then, did not mean wine as we understand it today but wine mixed with water. Usually a writer simply referred to the mixture of water and wine as “wine.” To indicate that the beverage was not a mixture of water and wine he would say “unmixed (akratesteron) wine.”

One might wonder whether the custom of mixing wine with water was limited to the ancient Greeks. The burden of proof would be upon anyone who argued that the pattern of drinking wine in Jewish society was substantially different from that of the examples already given. And we do have examples in both Jewish and Christian literature and perhaps in the Bible that wine was likewise understood as being a mixture of wine and water. In several instances in the Old Testament a distinction is made between “wine” and “strong drink.” In Leviticus 10:8, 9, we read, “And the LORD spoke to Aaron, saying, ‘Drink no wine nor strong drink, you nor your sons with you, when you go into the tent of meeting.… Concerning the Nazarite vow Numbers 6:3 states that the Nazarite “shall separate himself from wine and strong drink.” This distinction is found also in Deuteronomy 14:26; 29:6; Judges 13:4, 7, 14; First Samuel 1:15: Proverbs 20:1; 31:4, 6: Isaiah 5:11, 22; 28:7; 29:9; 56:12; and Micah 2:11.

The 1901 Jewish Encyclopedia (Vol. 12, p. 533) states that in the rabbinic period at least “ ‘yayin’ [or wine] is to be distinguished from ‘shekar’ [or strong drink]: the former is diluted with water (mazug’); the latter is undiluted (‘yayin hai’).” In the Talmud, which contains the oral traditions of Judaism from about 200 B.C. to A.D. 200, there are several tractates in which the mixture of water and wine is discussed. One tractate (Shabbath 77a) states that wine that does not carry three parts of water well is not wine. The normal mixture is said to consist of two parts water to one part wine. In a most important reference (Pesahim 108b) it is stated that the four cups every Jew was to drink during the Passover ritual were to be mixed in a ratio of three parts water to one part wine. From this we can conclude with a fair degree of certainty that the fruit of the vine used at the institution of the Lord’s Supper was a mixture of three parts water to one part wine. In another Jewish reference from around 60 B.C. we read, “It is harmful to drink wine alone, or again, to drink water alone, while wine mixed with water is sweet and delicious and enhances one’s enjoyment” (2 Maccabees 15:39).

In ancient times there were not many beverages that were safe to drink. The danger of drinking water alone raises another point. There were several ways in which the ancients could make water safe to drink. One method was boiling, but this was tedious and costly. Different methods of filtration were tried. The safest and easiest method of making the water safe to drink, however, was to mix it with wine. The drinking of wine (i.e., a mixture of water and wine) served therefore as a safety measure, since often the water available was not safe. (I remember drinking some water in Salonica, Greece, that would have been much better for me had it been mixed with wine or some other purifying agent.)

When we come to the New Testament the content of the wine is never discussed. The burden of proof, however, is surely upon anyone who would say that the “wine” of the New Testament is substantially different from the wine mentioned by the Greeks, the Jews during the intertestamental period, and the early church fathers. In the writings of the early church fathers it is clear that “wine” means wine mixed with water. Justin Martyr around A.D. 150 described the Lord’s Supper in this way: “Bread is brought, and wine and water, and the president sends up prayers and thanksgiving” (Apology I, 67, 5). Some sixty-five years later Hippolytus instructed the bishops that they shall “eucharistize [bless] first the bread into the representation of the Flesh of Christ; and the cup mixed with wine for the antitype of the Blood which was shed for all who have believed in Him” (Apostolic Tradition XXIII, 1). Cyprian around A.D. 250 stated in his refutation of certain heretical practices:

Nothing must be done by us but what the Lord first did on our behalf, as that the cup which is offered in remembrance of Him should be offered mingled with wine.…

Thus, therefore, in considering the cup of the Lord, water alone cannot be offered, even as wine alone cannot be offered. For if anyone offer wine only, the blood of Christ is dissociated from us: but if the water be alone, the people are dissociated from Christ.… Thus the cup of the Lord is not indeed water alone, nor wine alone, unless each be mingled with the other [Epistle LXII, 2, 11 and 13].

Unmixed wine and plain water at the Lord’s Supper were both found unacceptable. A mixture of wine and water was the norm. Earlier in the latter part of the second century Clement of Alexandria stated:

It is best for the wine to be mixed with as much water as possible.… For both are works of God, and the mixing of the two, both of water and wine produces health, because life is composed of a necessary element and a useful element. To the necessary element, the water, which is in the greatest quantity, there is to be mixed in some of the useful element [Instructor II, ii, 23.3–24.1].

To consume the amount of alcohol that is in two martinis by drinking wine containing three parts water to one part wine, one would have to drink over twenty-two glasses. In other words, it is possible to become intoxicated from wine mixed with three parts of water, but one’s drinking would probably affect the bladder long before it affected the mind.

In concluding this brief article I would like to emphasize two points. First, it is important to try to understand the biblical text in the context in which it was written. Before we ask “What does the biblical text mean for us today?” we must ask “What did it mean to them originally?” Second, there is a striking difference between the drinking of alcoholic beverages today and the drinking of wine in New Testament times. If the drinking of unmixed wine or even wine mixed in a ratio of one to one with water was frowned upon in ancient times, certainly the drinking of distilled spirits in which the alcoholic content is frequently three to ten times greater would be frowned upon a great deal more.

The scene: the little Lakeland town of Keswick, in the heart of the most beautiful mountain scenery in England. The time: the last week of June, 1875. From all over the United Kingdom a few hundred men and women converged for an informal convention of Bible readings, addresses, and prayer meetings designed to “promote practical holiness.”

They came because the vicar of Keswick, Canon Dundas Harford-Battersby, had issued a general invitation. He and the close friends at his elbow offered no elaborate plans; indeed, the intended principal speaker, Robert Pearsall Smith, had canceled his acceptance and was about to sail back to America after a nervous breakdown compounded by suspicion of infamous conduct. But Harford-Battersby refused to give up. A year previously his Christian life had been transformed by a discovery that he wanted to share. He would have been astonished and gratified had he known that what he began in 1875 would become an annual event, and celebrate its hundredth birthday, and turn a placename into a universal word.

The Keswick Convention arose in an England stirred by the evangelism of D. L. Moody, but the first steps owed nothing to him and everything to a Quaker glass manufacturer from Philadelphia, Robert Pearsall Smith, one of the oddest characters to blaze briefly across the religious scene. He arrived in London’s rich and cultured Mayfair in the spring of 1873 to create a quiet sensation with his message that a devout Christian need not lead an existence of gloom and defeat. Most of his early disciples were clergymen and upperclass laymen—the only people in that age with leisure to attend “conversational breakfasts,” where Pearsall Smith and his wife, Hannah Whitall Smith, expounded Scripture to prove the possibility of an unbroken walk with God. This, as the title of Hannah’s famous book put it, was The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life.

The following year a large number, including students, met at the Hampshire mansion of Broadlands, which had lately been the home of that jaunty pagan prime minister Lord Palmerston, and today is that of Earl Mountbatten. They met again at Oxford a few weeks later with many more. To that conference the shy, sensitive vicar of Keswick went with grave disquiet and doubts about this “higher Christian life.”

Harford-Battersby noticed at once a distinction from other conferences: “a definiteness of purpose and a direction of aim.” At first he dismissed the teaching as scripturally unsound, but while a London clergyman, Evan Hopkins, expounded a New Testament passage, Harford-Battersby wondered for the first time, “Has not my faith been a seeking faith when it ought to be a resting faith? And if so, why not exchange it for the latter? And I thought of the sufficiency of Jesus and said I will rest in Him—and I did rest in Him.” Despite a rooted distrust of emotion, he found next day an overwhelming sense of the presence of the Lord Jesus, a desire for full consecration, and afterwards a new effectiveness in daily living and parochial ministry. His had been a classic “Keswick” experience.

In 1875 a conference took place on an even larger scale at Brighton on the South Coast, where Pearsall Smith reached the pinnacle of his fame and toppled soon after into a sad anticlimax that does not invalidate his right to a niche in Christian history. Meanwhile smaller conventions, as they were beginning to be called to distinguish their specific purpose, sprang up in many parts of the country. That first Keswick of 1875 and the Keswick Conventions of the following years were not unique. But the beauty of their surroundings, the calibre of their speakers, and the wise leadership they had in face of misunderstanding and hostility from eminent evangelicals gradually gave them pre-eminence, until exposition of the “higher Christian life” or “the life of faith” became known as “Keswick teaching.”

It arose at a time when evangelicalism held apparent dominance in British religion. Yet joy too often gave way to anxious conformity; too many calling themselves evangelicals were like the clergyman Patrick Bronte, whose daughters, the novelists, had a grim childhood; or like the foster-mother whom the young Rudyard Kipling justly loathed.

Such a parody of the New Testament faith was well described by one of the early Keswick leaders, Hanmer Webb-Peploe:

Was not the old Evangelical teaching something like this: that I was perfectly justified in a moment and had then a standing before God; then at that moment sanctification commenced and I had to go on, struggle and strive and call in the aid of the Holy Ghost—which one too often forgot to do. I was continually expecting defeat and if I conquered, I thought it wonderful.

Against this dreariness Keswick set the truth of Christ the Victor.

The difference He made soon caused Webb-Peploe’s parishioners to comment that the rector did not seem “as fidgety as he used to be.” It was even more noticeable in Henry Bowker, the elderly retired schoolmaster who became chairman of Keswick on Harford-Battersby’s death in 1882. Bowker was a layman, and had once been so cantankerous that later a friend visiting his home was astonished at the contrast between the face of his kindly host and the portrait hanging behind him, taken in pre-Keswick days.

The teaching was not new. In all ages men and women had discovered it, here and there, for themselves. Hudson Taylor had entered this “exchanged life,” as he termed it, in 1870 in China, and he later became Keswick’s warm supporter. Dwight L. Moody had learned it during his spiritual crisis in New York in 1871.

When the rediscovery caught on in London and Broadlands, rail travel allowed a sharing to thousands together for the first time in church history. Keswick teaching had a tenuous, barely recognized link with the American “camp meeting” and with Wesleyan perfectionism; yet the emphasis differed. Methodist holiness taught the believer to aim at the entire eradication of sin; Keswick taught him to rely on the counter-action of the indwelling Victorious Christ to defeat sin. Sin would not be destroyed in this mortal life, and so every Christian could, like Simon Peter, fall, however close he had walked with Christ. One of Keswick’s opponents who later became its foremost theological spokesman, Handley Moule, bishop of Durham, described this paradox succinctly. Looking back in old age he said: “God knows how imperfectly I have used my secret. I repent before Him in great humiliation. But I know the secret, His open secret of victory and rest. And I know how different life has been for that secret.”

Keswick quickly forged strong links between Christians of different denominations. The text “All one in Christ Jesus,” a sentiment much ignored in that day of warring sects, became the motto at the convention. Keswick saw itself as the servant of every Protestant church, not the hub of a new one. Moreover, Keswick attenders have not regarded themselves a conscious elite within the denominational framework, in the manner of the Oxford Group (Moral Rearmament.) Although Keswick speakers are asked to teach no opinions from the platform that are not held generally amongst them all, they do not subscribe to any code of doctrine or polity: in unity, not uniformity, lies strength.

Keswick also emerged, more slowly, as a strong force in overseas missions. The early leaders excluded missionary advocacy on the supposition that this would disrupt devotion, until in 1885, in the aftermath of the young Cambridge Seven, they were forced by popular demand to admit the Great Commission, rather gingerly and unofficially. Hudson Taylor of the China Inland Mission had long taught that the best way to evangelize the world was to deepen the consecration of those already evangelized. He would have been amused had he read a letter of 1888 from his friend the chairman of Keswick to the lay secretary in the Church Missionary Society: “A new thought has been given me: Consecration and the Evangelization of the world ought to go together.”

Thereafter the last full day of each convention saw one of Keswick’s most influential features: the Missionary Meeting. Its first organizer’s brilliant strategy is still followed while the hours flash by: no long addresses by missionary statesmen but a succession of briefly recounted personal experiences, and the pinpointing of needs known at first hand. Thus hundreds of listening young men and women over three generations have come to the moment of their response to God’s individual call to serve beyond their own shores. As the growth of overseas churches gradually changed the pattern of world evangelization and made Keswick an increasingly international gathering, the Missionary Meeting became a platform for presenting the claim of the Great Commission, whatever each speaker’s color or race or homeland.

Keswick further helped world evangelization by financing annual tours by Keswick missioners to carry the distinctive message to Australia, the United States, India, and many other parts. Thus the world became familiar with the idea of a “Keswick” for the deepening of spiritual life; for as someone wittily put it, “any conference has a subject but a convention has an object”—to bring every participant to learn for himself the “open secret.”

But Keswick stood aside from Pentecostal phenomena such as divine healing or speaking in tongues. The Welsh Revival of 1904 stemmed from “a Keswick in Wales”; yet when three hundred Welshmen came to the Keswick of 1905, and paroxysms were experienced in the Young Men’s meeting, and enthusiasts ran through the town throwing up windows of the lodging houses crying “All-night prayer meeting tonight!,” the leaders, ably helped by wise old A. J. Pierson from the United States, channeled the intensity into a sober, quiet consecration. Whether Keswick should have let the Welsh tide flow unchecked is one of the imponderables of history. Perhaps the Welsh revival would have become an all-British, or even world, revival.

Keswick shared the doldrums of the period between the First and Second World Wars, and at times it seemed that Keswick had added to its basic teaching a lesson that holiness involved conformity to the cultural habits of middle-class England. Yet the convention, and especially its attraction for students, undoubtedly helped keep alive throughout the world the claims of the Great Commission, the authority of Scripture, and a grasp of the larger possibilities of Christian consecration. Thus by the 1950s, when all Britain was stirred for Christ by the Billy Graham crusades, Keswick was well placed to fulfill an important role in nurturing converts, and in spreading and strengthening the spiritual forces released by Harringay and after. Keswick has traditionally invited at least one North American main speaker for each convention. It is fitting that Billy Graham, so often invited, will attend for the first time in 1975.

As it celebrates its hundredth birthday with the two consecutive conventions that large numbers have made necessary for some years now, Keswick may aptly express its role for the future with a comment from the past, by Handley Moule: “Keswick stands for … a message as old as the Apostles but too much forgotten: the open secret of inward victory for liberty in life and service through the trusted power of an indwelling Christ.”

Sonnet XVIII

Today is a day for praising the sun in the meadow,

And the high wind, the sky-wind that’s blown from snown peaks to our faces;

A day for the swift-gliding races of cloud-cast shadow,

For leaf-wing, bird, all things that move to be put through their paces.

A day for the laughter of maidens, the giving of graces;

A day for the splashing of singing-stream, rock-tumble water,

And the blooming of sweet mountain-laurel in seldem-seem places.

A day for hot sun in the desert to shine even hotter,

A day for clay cliffs to be shaped by the wind-handed potter.

Today, is a day for the thunder and lightning to battle.

And roar in high passes until the great stone-boulders totter,

And send down the swift-ending rain while the storm windows rattle.

It’s a day for singing, for telling the oft-told story,

For parising the ancient, twy-nature Enfleshment of Glory.

Biblical Teaching on Divorce, Part I

The most recent figures on marriage and divorce in the 1975 World Almanac show that for every two new marriages in the United States there is one divorce. It has been estimated that desertions—called “the poor man’s divorce”—equal the number of legal divorces, pushing the total of terminated marriages to almost two million a year. This means that divorces and desertions together almost equal the number of new marriages!

One of the familiar statements in the Bible on divorce is that of Jesus in Matthew 19:3–9. The Pharisees came to “tempt” Jesus. They wanted to find occasion to accurse or humiliate him. “Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause?” they asked. In Jesus’ day there were two schools of thought on divorce: the liberal school of Hillel, which permitted divorce for any cause, and the conservative school of Shammai, which permitted divorce only for infidelity. The Pharisees were asking Jesus, “Whose side are you on, Shammai’s or Hillel’s?”

Jesus answered in a way they did not expect:

Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and the twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.

Instead of appealing to the current views of divorce, Jesus went back to the original institution of marriage and showed that God never intended that there be divorce for any cause.

The Pharisees thought that they had Jesus on the spot, that he had not taken into consideration the Law of Moses. So they asked “Why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement, and to put her away?” Jesus’ answer was, “Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so.” Jesus made it clear that he intended to reestablish the original pattern of marriage that allowed no divorce.

Now this brings us to the famous “exception clause”: “And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery.” The usual interpretation of this clause is divorce on the ground of infidelity. It is suggested that the word “fornication” normally carries the idea of sexual impurity, and that its normal usage should be applied here.

Several considerations raise doubts about this interpretation, however. First, “adultery” would be the better word to describe the violation of the marriage vow; yet the word “fornication” is used. Second, Mark and Luke omit the exception clause; this suggests that Matthew, who wrote for Jewish readers, included something that was of particular interest to the Jewish reader. Third, the disciples’ reaction to Jesus’ words is one of amazement: “If the case of the man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry” (Matt. 19:10). Why this amazement? Divorce on the ground of infidelity was a view currently in vogue among even the Jews of the conservative school of Shammai. If Jesus were merely supporting the conservative view, the disciples’ amazement is hard to understand.

Another meaning of the word “fornication” seems to fit the context better. If we understand fornication as consanguineous marriage, marriage to a close blood relative, then the passage is more understandable. Such marriage was a special prohibition to the Jews (Leviticus 18), which would explain why only Matthew included the exception clause. Also, by advancing this narrow exception and by not going along with Shammai, Jesus would indeed provoke the reaction he did in the disciples.

This view has not gone unnoticed by expositors. For instance, Charles Ryrie makes a case for it in You Mean the Bible Teaches That … (Moody, pp. 47–51). J. Dwight Pentecost also supports this interpretation in his “Exposition of Matthew” (unpublished class notes, Dallas Theological Seminary). Although Roger Nicole takes the traditional view, he mentions the idea of consanguinity in his article “Divorce” in Baker’s Dictionary of Christian Ethics, edited by Carl F. H. Henry.

When Jesus says that the only ground for divorce is fornication, I think he means that those marrying within prohibited degrees can and should be divorced. He is not giving permission for divorce on the ground of marital infidelity.

This raises a curious problem, one that is seldom mentioned. If we say that divorce under any conditions other than the one Jesus mentioned is wrong, then it appears that the Mosaic Law is immoral, because the Law was quite liberal on this question. Some try to get around the problem by saying that the Mosaic Law and Jesus taught the same thing: divorce on the ground of marital infidelity. This, they say, takes care of the problem of remarriage, because the adulterer was stoned to death. This was not the case. Deuteronomy 24:1–4 gives three rules that cover divorce:

1. Divorce was permitted on the ground of “uncleanness.” Some have taught that “uncleanness” is marital infidelity and that Jesus and the Law agreed on the same ground for divorce. But the passage does not bear out this thesis. The Law provided that the adulterer be stoned (Deut. 22:22), but the woman in Deuteronomy 24 who is guilty of uncleanness is not stoned but is free to go her way and remarry. The Hebrew expression “uncleanness” means “improper behavior.” The Hebrew husband could accuse his wife of improper behavior for the slightest displeasure, and could divorce her for something as simple as burning his toast.

2. The woman who was divorced could remarry. This, incidentally, proves that divorce dissolves a marriage and that it is not merely separation.

3. The only remarriage banned was remarriage to a former husband, if the woman had remarried and divorced. The example given is the case where the woman divorces, remarries, and divorces again. When she is divorced by her second husband, she cannot go back to the first one, though the law allowed her to take a third husband.

We cannot say, then, that divorce in itself is immoral. The Law, which was holy, just, and good, allowed divorce and remarriage, and on the flimsiest grounds.

Then how do we reconcile these two teachings on divorce, both of which are morally acceptable to God? The answer seems to be that there are really two divorce laws in the Bible: one for Christians, who are able to conform to the original pattern of marriage, and one for unbelievers—those with hardened hearts who are not able to do so. In Matthew 19 Christ was not advancing a new law for unregenerate people or a law more moral than the law of Moses; God’s moral law is unchangeable, whether given by Moses or Christ. He was laying down a standard of conduct for Christians. Although the Mosaic Law had been done away with, the principle of divorce for the hardness of the heart remained. We cannot say that divorce for the hardness of the heart, which was once considered moral, is now immoral.

That this teaching of Christ was binding only on believers is supported by Paul, the interpreter of Christ. In his First Epistle to the Corinthians he wrote to a church that needed instruction in the problem of marriage and divorce, especially where a Christian was married to an unbeliever. He taught that if the unbeliever divorces the believer, the believer is free of that union. If Paul had understood Christ’s rule of no divorce to apply to unbelievers, he would not have allowed divorce under any circumstances. But Paul says, “If the unbelieving depart, let him depart. A brother or a sister is not under bondage in such cases: but God hath called us to peace” (1 Cor. 7:15). The word “depart” is the Greek word koridzo. The same word is used in First Corinthians 7:11, where Paul says, “If the wife depart, let her remain unmarried.” If “depart” did not mean divorce, then he would not have instructed her to remain unmarried. Paul says that if the unbeliever divorces, let him divorce. The believer is no longer bound by that marriage. Since Deuteronomy 24 teaches that divorce dissolves the marriage bond, permission to remarry is implicit in First Corinthians 7:15.

Someone will say that this makes Jesus and Paul contradictory. No, it doesn’t. The divorce rule of Jesus applies to believers only. Paul is speaking of the union of a believer and an unbeliever, and in such a case only the unbeliever can initiate the divorce. There is no contradiction between the Law of Moses and the commandment of Christ if the following rules of divorce are observed:

1. A Christian husband and wife are not permitted divorce and remarriage because they have in Christ the means of fulfilling the ideal of marriage. Divorce without remarriage is permitted in First Corinthians 7:10, 11.

2. A Christian and an unbeliever may divorce if the unbeliever initiates the divorce. Divorce being a real dissolution of the marriage, the believer is free to remarry.

3. Two unbelievers are permitted to divorce for any cause, and divorce being a real dissolution of the marriage, they are permitted to remarry.

Such a permissive attitude toward divorce will shock many Christians. They will feel that divorce is rampant enough without Christians’ approving it under any circumstances. But this attitude overlooks an important feature of divorce for the hardness of the heart. Every time a marriage breaks up, the basic sinfulness of the husband and wife is revealed. Sit in a divorce court sometime and listen to the dirt dredged up by husbands and wives. Many divorced persons try to make a go at a second marriage, and many of these will end in divorce again. Why? The reason usually is that the same sinful drives that broke up the first marriage are carried over into the second. The Mosaic Law may approve unlimited divorces and remarriage, but the more a person divorces and remarries, the more he demonstrates his inability to make marriage work as God intended.

The answer to the divorce question is not to condemn what was and is permitted by God. It is to do something about the hardness of the heart. It is to point sinful husbands and wives to the Saviour, Jesus Christ, who is able to make them new creatures—people who can live together in harmony as God intended, and as Christ taught.

What is a pastor to do when a new Christian couple comes into his church and he discovers that they both divorced Christian spouses to marry each other? The divorce and remarriage contrary to Scripture are a fait accompli. Does he discriminate against them? Does he tell them to divorce each other and go back to their original spouses? That may well be impossible to do because the original spouses have remarried also. And divorcing the current spouse also raises the problem of sinning again by divorcing again. (Some might reply to this that the act of divorce is a single sin whereas living in an adulterous relationship involves repeated adulteries. Such logic would be saying that they should commit one sin to avoid committing many sins—a logic that does not befit Christian theology.)

A Christian pastor has a responsibility not to encourage the remarriage of a Christian divorced from a Christian, but discrimination against a Christian couple already divorced from Christian spouses seems to place them in the position of having committed an unforgivable sin. The biblical teachings on divorce and remarriage are designed to bring pressure to bear on couples to make their marriage work. It is hoped, however, that the Christian couple guilty of sinning against these teachings might be granted the same compassion Jesus showed to the woman caught in adultery: “Go and sin no more.”

It is extremely important that Christian leaders understand the spirit of biblical teaching on divorce and remarriage. The complexities and lack of uniformity of divorce laws among the states make it virtually impossible to come up with neat theological answers every time. For example, a couple living in the District of Columbia can have their marriage annulled on the ground of impotence, but in Maryland this is ground only for divorce, not for annulment. Shall a Christian couple forever bear the stigma of divorce simply because they live in the wrong state?

The Church is in danger of slipping into the errors of the Scribes and Pharisees of Jesus’ day on this question. Certainly it was this that Jesus had in mind when he told the Pharisees that they laid burdens on the people they themselves could not bear. Jesus’ yoke still is easy and his burden light.

NOTE:Part two of this article will appear in the July 18 issue. The Minister’s Workshop feature in this issue (June 20) discusses how ministers and congregations can help the divorced.—ED.

Pentecost Sunday, 1975, will live in church history as the day when the charismatic movement in the Catholic Church arrived in St. Peter’s with full force. During the pontifical mass presided over by Pope Paul VI on May 18, the sound of tongues and charismatic singing filled the massive nave of the ancient mother church of Roman Catholicism. Of the 25,000 who jammed the basilica, about 10,000 were participants in the third International Conference on the Charismatic Renewal (an estimated 4,000 were from North America and 1,000 from Latin America). In four remarkable days, these Pentecostal Catholics found that their movement had gained warm acceptance at the highest levels of the Roman church.

The conference, which in previous years had met at Notre Dame University, convened in Rome in conjunction with the Holy Year proclaimed by Pope Paul. The theme was the same as that for the Holy Year—”Renewal and Reconciliation.” Participants came from over sixty nations representing more than one million Catholic charismatics in several thousand prayer groups.* Several Protestant Pentecostal and charismatic leaders also attended as “official ecumenical observers.”

Conference sessions were held on the outskirts of Rome in a large tent over the catacombs of St. Callixtus, a meeting and burial place for early Christian martyrs. Many difficulties had to be overcome. Communist-run labor unions delayed construction of the five tents used for the conference. They also closed the airports and railway stations temporarily, stranding thousands of travelers in France.

The sights and sounds of the conference were similar to those of a back-woods Pentecostal camp meeting. Thousands stood and sat outside the tent because there was no room inside. The testimonies, sermons, and impassioned singing resulted in much rejoicing and “dancing in the Spirit.” The Daily American, an English-language newspaper, reported that “bishops, archbishops and cardinals, struggling to keep their hats in place, sang and danced in ecstasy, embracing one another and raising their arms to heaven.” Another Roman newspaper characterized the meeting as a “mass illusion.”

Although traditional Pentecostal manifestations claimed the headlines, the major work of the conference was devoted to workshops on healing, parish renewal, sacramental renewal, life in the Holy Spirit, and family life. The leading figure in the conference was Cardinal Josef Suenens, primate of Belgium, who welcomed the conferees and celebrated the final charismatic mass. Practical leadership was given by chairman Ralph Martin and the Word of God Community of Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Although no individual “messages” in other tongues were given, many “prophecies” were delivered. These were handed to the leaders in written form and communicated to the conference. Testimonies of the movement’s burgeoning growth around the world were greeted with enthusiastic applause.

On Pentecost Sunday, the conference moved to St. Peter’s for the mass celebrated by Pope Paul. Although the charismatics were a minority in the throngs who filled the church and the square outside, their presence was apparent as the mass progressed. Spontaneous singing of the charismatic anthem “Alleluia” competed with the pipe organ at the beginning and end of the service. At the consecration of the host, a soft murmur of “singing in the Spirit” (chanting in harmony in glossolalia) filled the cathedral. While the Pope continued the mass, hands were raised in praise, and at one point, a priest fell to his knees and asked to be baptized in the Holy Spirit. Several persons laid hands on him and prayed quietly.

At the end of the Pope’s sermon on Christian joy, which was delivered in five languages, he exclaimed, “Jesus is Lord,” evoking thunderous shouts from the charismatics. As the Pope was carried out on his throne, the chorus “Alleluia” was sung so lustily that the organist finally joined in and accompanied the singing.

On Sunday afternoon the conference returned to the tent to hear Cardinal John Willebrands, president of the Secretariat for Christian Unity in the Vatican. While praising the charismatics for their joy and use of the Spirit’s gifts, he counseled them to share their gifts with all mankind. He further admonished that holiness is the greatest object of Christian living.

The climax of the conference came at St. Peter’s on Monday, May 19, in a mass conducted by Cardinal Suenens, who was assisted by twelve bishops and more than 800 priests. This was the first specifically charismatic service ever held in St. Peter’s. Suenens delivered his sermon in typical Pentecostal style. The cathedral reverberated with the shouted responses to his “hallelujahs.” Such Pentecostal choruses as “Spirit of the Living God” and “Alleluia” were sung with hands upraised. Several times the well-filled basilica resounded with singing in the Spirit.

A striking moment in the service came when two young lay leaders, Ralph Martin and Bruce Young, prophesied from the high altar of the basilica. Their prophecies spoke of “days of darkness and tribulation” for the world and the faithful, but also a “time of evangelism, victory, and triumph” for those in Christ. Several similar prophecies were given over microphones in the choir area by members of the “word-gift unit.”

At the close of the mass, Pope Paul arrived to give special greetings to the conferees. As he entered, the congregation broke into cheers and applause. Most of his message was given in French, with short summaries in Spanish and English.

His message to the Catholic charismatics was one of encouragement and exhortation. Using the word “spiritual” instead of “charismatic” to describe the renewal, he called for “fidelity to the authentic doctrines of the faith,” for “all the spiritual gifts to be received with gratitude,” and for greater emphasis on love, because “the fruit of the Spirit is love.” Could not this spiritual renewal be a chance for the church and for the world? he asked, adding, “Why, in this case, do we not take every means to continue it?”

At the end of his prepared text, the Pope broke into impromptu remarks in his native Italian. Reflecting on his encyclical on joy that was proclaimed the day before, he exhorted the charismatics to share their joy with the world. The conference erupted in applause as the Pope ended with, “Glory to the Lord, hallelujah!” Before he exited, the Pope embraced and kissed Cardinal Suenens and greeted about twenty of the leading charismatics. Many wept openly.

At a closing theological conference and reception attended by more than sixty theologians and observers, attempts were made to explain the Pentecostal experience in terms acceptable to the Catholic Church. Leading professors from several theological faculties in Rome questioned members of a panel of charismatic theologians from Europe and the United States on the validity and evidences of tongues and miracles of healing.

Observers at the conference felt that the words and actions of Pope Paul amounted to tacit support for the charismatic movement. Even though the Pope’s remarks did not constitute “official” approval, they agreed, they indicated an acceptance that could spur even greater growth of the movement in the church.

According to Catholic theologian Kilian McDonnell of Minnesota, it was a “triumphant day,” while to Balthasar Fisher of Trier University, Germany, the meeting was “historical—of enormous importance.” To Protestant Pentecostal spokesman David du Plessis, it was “the greatest charismatic and ecumenical event in ecclesiastical history.”

Cardinal Suenens summed up the feelings—and hopes—of many when he declared that by his actions and warm words of approval, “the Pope opened his arms and heart to the charismatic renewal.”

Optimism In Canada

The eleven-year-old Evangelical Fellowship of Canada tried a new format for its annual meeting last month and got its biggest turnout ever.

Plans called for around 800 registrants at what was billed as a “Christian Leadership Seminar” May 13–16 at York University in Toronto. But more than 1,000 registered, and the main meetings had to be held in the university’s large ice arena. Ministers and lay leaders from all ten provinces and from nearly every Protestant denomination were there.

Business items, financial reports, election, and house matters were kept low key, being dispatched by the EFC’s dedicated core in the dead hours between supper and the evening session.

Attention was focused on the main ring at the arena and on the seminar room where Anglican rector John Stott of London, television minister Stephen Olford, and Fuller Seminary missions specialist Donald McGavran dealt with expository speaking, evangelism, and church growth. The three delivered daily addresses and conducted workshops.

The choice of the speakers and the theme of the gathering (“Let Canada hear his voice”) gave the impression of a mini-version of the recent Lausanne Congress. Some 1,300 people filled the arena each night to hear Olford.

McGavran sounded a ringing, optimistic note in his concluding address. “We live in the sunrise, not the sunset of the Christian enterprise,” he contended. Speaking during the days of the Cambodian seizure of the Mayaguez, he called on his hearers to shake loose from the “vast pessimism” that, he said, too often characterizes evangelicals.

He had earlier accused some conciliar churches of a “sour grapes” attitude in their rejection of evangelism and church growth. Their dependence upon “biological growth” could be their downfall, he warned, citing Canadian census statistics. “The dynamics of the pill may open the eyes of some major denominations to the necessity of vigorous evangelism,” he chided.

Resolutions, sounding a positive note, dealt with issues under debate throughout Canada. At a time when the government is conducting a cross-Canada immigration inquiry to sample public opinion, EFC delegates unequivocally called for immigration laws, policies, and regulations that “reflect the biblical principles of love, justice, liberty, and equality for all, without discrimination by reason of age, color, creed, nationality, race, or sex.”

An EFC resolution on overseas development aid called on Canadians to sacrifice to relieve suffering in other nations and asked provincial and federal governments to allocate at least 1 per cent of the gross national product to such international aid. Evangelicals particularly were asked to support Share, Canada!—the EFC’s own relief agency.

Other resolutions dealt with the status of women (they are divinely entitled to enjoy “the high calling of full personhood”) and education (provincial governments were asked to honor “the plurality of different educational convictions by equitably supporting all primary, secondary schools, colleges, and unversities” that provide quality education).

Elected EFC president for a two-year term was Charles Bidenstinner, president of Emmanuel Bible College (Missionary Church) in Kitchener, Ontario. He succeeds Toronto Presbyterian minister A. Donald MacLeod.

Since making provision in 1972 for denominational membership, the EFC has received ten denominations*, and two others have membership under active consideration. A large segment of support still comes from para-church agencies, mission boards, and individual members.

LESLIE K. TARR

X-RATED SERMON

In Richardson, Texas, they’re still talking about the worldly ways of First Unitarian Church. On a recent Sunday Pastor William Nichols invited Diana King, a Unitarian from Fort Worth, to take part in the service. She did, and when she was through, Miss King—an exotic dancer at a Dallas nightspot—was wearing only a G-string. The congregation of 200 adults and children watched in fascinated silence as she shed her clothes in time with recorded music.

Nichols said the dance fit “very well into our service” and nobody complained. He also said he didn’t think anyone was aroused, “but I don’t consider the erotic aspect of the dance wrong. After all, that’s the way we were conceived.”

Miss King said it was something she wanted to do for a long time, and she would like to conduct classes for women church members.

“I would like to do a sermon using the exotic dance, and members of the congregation could join me if they liked,” she commented.

Chad: After The Coup

The general who led the coup against Chad president Ngarta Tombalbaye is an evangelical believer, and the man who replaced Tombalbaye has strong Christian ties. Also, the persecution of Christians that marked the last months of Tombalbaye’s regime (see November 8, 1974, issue, page 40) has apparently ceased, according to a report by General Secretary Byang H. Kato of the Association of Evangelicals of Africa and Madagascar (AEAM). Kato visited the central African state last month. (Tombalbaye, who had personally enforced an edict requiring all Christians to undergo an idolatrous tribal initiation rite, was assassinated on April 13.)

General Noel Odingar, the officer who led the coup, told Kato that no one would be forced into any rite against his religious conviction. Although some members of the nine-man ruling Supreme Military Council have undergone the “Yondo” initiation rites required under Tombalbaye’s African “authenticity” program, the new government has passed a decree authorizing religious freedom and reopening closed Christian churches and Muslim temples. The military leaders invited Kato to return later on to discuss with the Supreme Council the relation between culture and the Church.

The country’s new leader, General Felix Maloum, was released from prison to become chairman of the Supreme Council. He is from a Christian family, and his wife is a member of the Evangelical Church of Chad.

Maloum told Ben Stroscheim of The Evangelical Alliance Mission that missionaries expelled under Tombalbaye are free to return. Among these are more than a dozen workers of Baptist Mid-Missions ousted allegedly for encouraging church members to resist participation in the initiation rites. (Tombalbaye was once a professing Baptist.)

“There’s great potential for the churches in Chad now, but presently they are faced with the problem of what to do with members who underwent initiation,” Kato reported. “In one church, all but the pastor and an elder succumbed to Tombalbaye’s threats; in other churches the pastors underwent initiation but many members resisted—some paying with their lives. One pastor told me how he had been severely beaten and forced to eat human excrement. Some Christian initiates have repented, but the process of healing in the churches will be a long one. Division over what to do is a threat to the churches.”

A “Committee of Initiates,” made up of church members who underwent initiation, is reportedly trying to take over leadership of the churches, and some mission sources fear schism will be the result.

Kato noted the lack of trained leaders among Chad’s 200,000 Protestants. Most pastors are untrained or have had only elementary vernacular training. There is no seminary in Chad, and only recently a few men have been sent to France for seminary training. Kato spoke to a crowd of 500 educated Chadians in a church in N’Djamena, the capital, but noted that it was without a pastor.

“Missionaries will still have a part to play taking the word of life to Chad,” Kato stated, “but they should stay in the background. The urgent need is for training of Chadian leadership.”

Kato, a Nigerian based at AEAM’s headquarters in Kenya, reported that more than one hundred refugee families are being cared for in northeast Nigeria by churches and missions there. He recommended that these groups temporarily help support Chadian evangelists as they return.

One hundred Chadian church leaders met with Kato to discuss formation of an evangelical association that could help Christians present a united front in the future. Kato observed that all Protestant work among the nation’s four million people has been sponsored by evangelical groups. These include separatist elements, however, that traditionally have clung to narrow-fellowship views.

Chad, a former French colony which became independent in 1960, has a population of about four million. Muslims make up 53 per cent of the population. Christians, about equally divided between Protestants (virtually all of them evangelicals) and Catholics make up 5 per cent. The remainder follows tribal religions (animism).

“Ask Christians to pray for us,” General Odinger told Kato. “We are professional soldiers and not professional politicians. We were not trained to run a country. We thank God that he has answered the prayers of Christians around the world. Only with God’s help were we able to succeed in rescuing our nation.”

W. HAROLD FULLER

Trouble On Taiwan

The World Council of Churches and other groups have appealed to the government of the Republic of China for the release of 1,600 copies of a new romanized Taiwanese translation of the New Testament and 60 Bibles seized by the government of the late Chiang Kai-shek in January. Church spokesmen charge that the Nationalist Chinese government is violating the religious freedom of Taiwanese Christians.

Bible study in Japanese and other languages has been banned in the government’s apparent plan to enforce Mandarin Chinese as the official language of Taiwan.

Many people on the island, however, are not Chinese and do not speak Mandarin. Both the Catholics, numbering about 350,000, and the Protestants, about 300,000 strong, include mountain tribes descended from Malay people. Of the Protestants, 175,000 are Presbyterians, and half of their denomination’s 880 congregations are in the mountains.

The confiscated New Testaments are in a romanized rendition of Amoy Chinese spoken by more than 80 per cent of the island’s population.

Church sources say authorities interrupted services at a Tayal (tribal) church in February and seized copies of a recently published phonetic New Testament. Police later raided the printing depository of the Tayal Scriptures.

Officials of the National Council of Churches say the government has “intruded” in plans for a Billy Graham crusade set for the capital city of Taipei in October. They accuse authorities of limiting Graham to a 3,000-seat auditorium in order to eliminate an outdoor rally that might demonstrate church strength.

DEATHS

WYCLIFFE BOOTH, 80, grandson of the founder of the Salvation Army and himself a top leader in the group for many years; in London.

C. Andrew Lawson, 65, under whose twenty-five-year ministry the Timothy Eaton Memorial United Church in Toronto became the largest congregation in the United Church of Canada; in Toronto.

Marking The ‘Meck Deck’

North Carolina has set a precedent for making the religious element very much a part of American Bicentennial celebrations. The nation’s first gigantic Bicentennial rally, held May 20 in a park in Charlotte, included a worship service with the state’s most illustrious citizen, evangelist Billy Graham. The event commemorated the two-hundredth anniversary of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, which some believe marked the initial severing of the colonies’ ties to the British crown. President Ford was the featured speaker.

Coincidentally, one of those who signed the declaration was named William Graham, which prompted the evangelist to say, “I feel a very real kinship with this man and with all the signers of the Mecklenburg Declaration.… Most of all, my affinity with these men stems from the fact that they were—almost without exception—deeply religious. It is significant, I think, that both the signers of the Mecklenburg Declaration and the signers of the U. S. Declaration boldly proclaimed their belief in—and their dependence upon—God.”

As Graham spoke, the crowd kept growing. Ford followed Graham, and by that time the crowd was estimated at more than 100,000.

The speeches were part of an all day event staged in Charlotte’s Freedom Park under a blistering sun. The turnout showed the community’s high degree of awareness of heritage that makes it in effect the Philadelphia of the South. One of the city’s main thoroughfares is named Independence Boulevard. “First in Freedom” is the slogan that appears on North Carolina license plates.

Many historians, however, dispute the authenticity of what is affectionately called the “Meck Deck.” Those who believe in the document and in the meeting at which it was drafted say the original records were destroyed in a fire. There is no dispute about a meeting on May 31, 1775, of a local patriot committee. Resolves adopted then, though more moderate than those attributed to the May 20 meeting, are nonetheless described in Encyclopedia Britannica as having “annulled the authority of Great Britain.”

Virtually all of the twenty-seven persons thought to have signed the Meck Deck were Presbyterians. Two were clergy and fourteen were leaders. The clerk of the session of the Hopewell Presbyterian Church was the secretary of the May 20 meeting, and it was his home that burned in 1800, presumably destroying the records.

“The Bible was their blueprint of freedom, their charter of liberty,” said Graham. “They were evangelicals. They had not heard of the radical theology that a hundred years later was to emanate from Germany. They believed in the Bible as the Word of God.” He called for rededication to the principles and faith of the early leaders of Mecklenburg County.

Later, as Ford spoke, a group of “Red Hornet” youths raised a banner with an obscene reference to the God-and-country theme of Graham and Ford. Only the week before, a longstanding $1.08 million suit that claimed the group was excluded from a 1971 Billy Graham Day rally was dismissed in court. The suit named H. R. Haldeman, assistant to then President Nixon, who spoke at the event.

Graham gave the benediction following Ford’s speech. In earlier remarks made during his acceptance of a local citizens’ award he said, “I’m delighted to be a member of the New South. Night before last we closed a crusade in Jackson, Mississippi, with 52,000 people present. A third of that audience was black. I have seen in the past twenty-five years tremendous changes taking place throughout the South, and I believe that the South is now leading the nation in many ways: economically, politically, and sociologically.”

A spokesman for the eight-day crusade in Jackson said Graham addressed a cumulative total of 281,100, of whom 7,335 made recorded decisions for Christ. Rain plagued four of the meetings, which were held in the Mississippi Memorial Stadium. A budget of $266,000 was covered by the fourth night (never before had crusade expenses been raised so quickly), and one of the subsequent offerings was earmarked for hunger relief.

DAVID KUCHARSKY

Religion In Transit

Americans gave a record $25.15 billion to charitable causes in 1974, including $10.85 billion for religion, according to the annual edition of Giving USA.

Long Island’s Newsday reports the Pentagon has authorized more than 5,000 abortions for women in the armed forces, as well as for wives and daughters of servicemen, during the last year despite a presidential order prohibiting abortions except where the physical or mental health of the woman is imperiled.

The Unification Church, headed by Sun Myung Moon, last month purchased the former Columbia University Club in New York City for $1.2 million. The group’s national headquarters will be moved there from Washington, D. C.

Transcendental meditation (TM) has been dropped from the 1975–76 public school program in Narragansett, Rhode Island. The controversial class had been taught under a federal grant by a pupil of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

In a referendum, classes (districts) of the Reformed Church in America voted 28 to 15 in favor of the ordination of women, but the measure to approve failed for lack of a two-thirds majority. Pastor Joyce Stedge of Accord, New York, the RCA’s only woman minister, was ordained two years ago, a move that led to the referendum. Her status is not affected by the vote.

Park Street Church in Boston received pledges of nearly $460,000 at its annual missions conference, a new high, according to Pastor Paul Toms.

Personalia

Rear Admiral John J. O’Connor, 55, a Catholic priest with an earned Ph.D., will succeed United Methodist clergyman Francis L. Garrett as Navy Chief of chaplains when Garrett retires next month.

C. Stephen Board, editor of His since 1971, has become executive editor of Eternity, succeeding William J. Petersen, who replaced the retired Russell T. Hitt as editor.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn spent Orthodox Holy Week recently in a spiritual retreat at an Orthodox Church in America cathedral in Montreal. It is reported that he intends to settle permanently in Canada.

World Scene

Some 175 delegates attended the formation meeting in London of the new World Association for Christian Communication, involving 241 organizations in sixty-one countries. Broadcasting executive Christopher O. Kolade of Nigeria was elected president for a four-year term. The WACC’s 1976 budget is $1.7 million.

Planners are expecting up to 10,000 young people for Eurofest ’75, a Christian training event and celebration July 24-August 2 in Brussels. Uganda bishop Festo Kivengere, Latin American evangelist Luis Palau, and Billy Graham are among the platform heavyweights. Group travel plans are available from North America (Box 419, Wheaton, Illinois 60187).

Andrei Tverdokhlebov, a founding member of the Moscow human rights committee and a member of the Orthodox Church, was reportedly arrested by Soviet authorities and religious literature confiscated from his apartment. He had been helping government-oppressed Baptists.

Ireland’s Catholic bishops sternly condemned all forms of violence in Northern Ireland. Since 1969, more than 1,200 persons have died in bombings and assassinations in Ulster.

Latin America evangelist Luis Palau recently completed a swing around South America, holding well-attended crusades described as successful in Buenos Aires and Rosario, Argentina, Paraguay, and Santiago, Chile. As in the past, he reached millions through television.

The first World Congress of Witchcraft will be held in Bogota, Colombia, in August. Some 3,000 witches, occultists, astrologists, parapsychologists, and others are expected to attend.

British Methodists have declined by nearly 100,000 since 1969.

Deaths: Godfrey Driver, 82, Old Testament scholar of Oxford prominently identified with the translation of the New English Bible; Hindu Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the former Indian president who received this year’s Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion; and Geoffrey Williams, 89, founder of the famed Evangelical Library in London.

The ecological debate has taken a distinct turn during the last two years. The ecological campaign began as a radical offshoot from the older nature conservation movement and has never been able to quite rid itself of the suspicion that it was more interested in the survival of some subspecies of fox than in the survival of starving millions of human beings. Other symptoms of the tendency in question were the resentment several of its authors held against the mere concept of “environment” as being typically man-centered, and their obvious resolve not only to halt the much advertised “population explosion” but to reduce the earth’s population considerably (in the case of Britain by one-third) in order to allow the rest to return to a life of immediate correspondence with and enjoyment of nature.

Extremes like these set apart, the ecological uproar of recent years has rightly met with the applause and support of a vast number of people who feel that man is not meant to become a natural invalid and who certainly sympathize with the slogan coined in over-populated Europe: man has an inborn need for a quiet house and fishing water.

In 1972 Dennis Meadows’s book The Limits of Growth somewhat marked the apex of this environment-oriented phase of debate. His passionate call for overall zero growth, though, particularly challenged the sociologists who with fierce resentment pointed out that this would mean the stabilization of present prerogatives: affluence for the rich, and poverty for the poor forever.

The second report to the Club of Rome—that high-powered body of top scientists and big-business strategists—written by Mesarovic and Pestel for its Berlin session in October last year not only dropped the idea of zero growth but also flatly stated that there were two cleavages to bridge, one between man and nature, the other between rich and poor. Moreover, instead of a global analysis they offered a regionalized study of the world’s problems and pleaded for cooperation between world regions of different character. The problem of man’s handling of nature is thus linked to the seemingly imminent problem that the world food and energy crisis presents: the problem of distribution.

The same turn of topic may now also be observed in Christian publications on the subject. The first phase of the ecological debate—on the relation of man and nature—brought forward that magnificent though short statement by Francis Schaeffer, Pollution and the Death of Man: The Christian View of Ecology (1970). This book will be of lasting importance, just as much of the environment problem remains after the coming of socio-political emphases.

Representative of Christian participation in the present phase of debate is Thomas Sieger Derr’s Ecology and Human Liberation: A Theological Critique of the Use and Abuse of Our Birthright, jointly produced by the WCC’s Department of Church and Society and the World Student Christian Federation (1973). This is quite a remarkable book, written with systematic vigor and clear thinking.

The American author Derr anticipates the conviction of Mesarovic and Pestel, i.e., that “we have to satisfy two needs, justice and the protection of the biosphere.” Note the sequence. Derr believes that man’s bond to his fellow human beings is stronger than his bond to the rest of nature. So he seeks to find a theology of nature that is socially responsible. His concept is demonstrated from the biblical sources and with constant powerful argument against the attacks leveled at Christianity on ecological grounds, and against the different philosophies, such as romanticism and pantheism, offered as substitutes.

Man, states Derr, controls nature but as a “caretaker.” There is no such thing in Genesis as a command from God to treat the earth irresponsibly. On the contrary, the biblical idea of property right from the beginning, and as opposed to its counterpart in Roman law, carries the notion of responsibility.

Coming to the problem of distribution of resources, Derr therefore finds that compared with other suggested systems of thought the traditional Christian emphasis on supporting the weak, feeding the hungry, and clothing the naked is most helpful for tackling today’s crisis. Except for a certain leaning to Teilhardian tendencies and a grossly irrational attitude pro abortion, Derr’s main argument is clear, sound, and useful.

Christians should certainly attempt to keep abreast of these recent developments in the ecology/distribution debate and continually think through the application of the Christian message to this subject. These are central problems for humanity, even if the fashion of the day turns away from them. It is here that the doctrine of God’s sustenance of creation comes into force in Christian ethics. Here is a field that calls for the Christian message of creation and redemption to be put into practice, and here is a ready ground to show the superiority of this message.

Christianity can never be satisfied with replacing destruction of nature by mere non-destruction. It does not stop at an ethics of avoidance. God orders Adam not to destroy but to guard and develop the garden that He created. In the same way He asks man to take on the sustenance of his fellow man (Lev. 25:35).

There are two ways of life that Christ says human beings adopt in the open space of time before his Second Coming: man will be either a destroyer or a provider (Matt. 24:45–51). These two types come up dramatically side by side in real life in Matthew 14. There we see King Herod “eating and drinking,” and not only beating but killing his fellow servant, John the Baptist, for the sake of a party whim. Next there is Christ, feeling mercy for the hungry masses and feeding them, Christ himself the “faithful and wise servant.” His words in Matthew 24:45 quote that well-known verse, Psalm 104:27: “These wait all upon thee that thou mayest give them their food in due season.” This very work of God Christ now entrusts to his servants: to sustain, to give good to their fellow men, to maintain them, body and spirit.

Let Christians therefore be reminded of his word, “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35), and of St. Paul’s realistic application of it in Ephesians 4:28—“Let him that stole steal no more, but rather let him labor … that he may have to give to him that needeth.”

Some disgruntled letter-writers have made it quite clear that they do not think a column written by a woman should be called “A Layman and His Faith.” The name was selected by the originator of the column, the late L. Nelson Bell, and we have not been in a hurry to change it. But now we invite readers to help us make a change. We have already turned down “A Laywoman and Her Faith”; we would like a name suitable for either a male or a female writer. I’ll announce with gratitude the name of anyone who sends us a winning idea—and extend his or her subscription for a year with our compliments.

The umbrella of the “Umbrella Church” did not exactly snap shut at last month’s 187th General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. But it closed enough to leave many conservative ministers within that denomination standing in the rain. At convention’s end whether they would move back under the umbrella or seek shelter elsewhere remained an open question.

Unlike many former General Assemblies, this year’s gathering in Cincinnati, Ohio, of the highest ruling body of the 2.7-million-member denomination was a one-issue assembly. The issue was the “Kenyon Case,” a landmark decision by the denomination’s Permanent Judicial Commission (the UPC’s supreme court) that barred ordination to twenty-seven-year-old seminarian Walter Wynn Kenyon on grounds that he said he could not endorse for biblical reasons the denomination’s position in regard to the ordination of women ministers and elders (see March 28 issue, page 36).

Conservatives had hoped for a shift in policy in order to permit those who felt as Kenyon did to remain within the denomination. Instead, the assembly moved to bar the legitimacy of any mediating position. It also implied that not only new and aspiring ministers like Kenyon but also ministers, elders, and deacons of long standing who think like him are unwelcome.

The focus of debate fell on seven overtures (proposals) from a wide variety of presbyteries, all of which sought to provide some breathing space for dissenters from the official denominational position. But on recommendation from the Bills and Overtures Committee, commissioners voted either no action or non-concurrence on each one. There was not even significant debate. The only real discussion was on a substitute motion by clergyman Wayne Buchtel of the Santa Fe Presbytery that would have allowed ministers, ruling elders, and deacons already ordained to continue in their current roles with “equal rights” and move to other churches and presbyteries “without prejudice.” But this was soundly rejected. No more than twenty-five of the nearly 700 commissioners voted support.

The whole discussion took only thirty minutes, during which time Kenyon and other affected seminarians watched from the sidelines. Kenyon did not appear to be surprised. “It seemed inevitable,” he told a reporter. “I had hoped we would be able to get the constitution changed, but I really didn’t have any great hopes.” He added that he was disappointed that so momentous an issue was not more fully debated and that the final vote in support of change was so low.

Others were disappointed also, but for different reasons. In an interview shortly after the vote, Robert C. Lamar, the immediate past moderator of the assembly, supported the viewpoint of the Permanent Judicial Commission but said he wished the matter had not gone the judicial route. He said that the effect of the assembly action was to “strengthen and broaden” that decision, a course that he termed “unfortunate.” The new moderator, William F. Keesecker of Wichita, Kansas, said at a news conference before the debate that any move to make the Kenyon decision “retroactive for those who are already pastors would be going too far.”

Reacting to the assembly’s action, many predicted that the matter will go much farther than Keesecker or other denominational officials have anticipated.

The immediate fall-out may be the splitting or secession of a sizable number of churches and the peaceful withdrawal of even more pastors and seminarians. According to Pastor Frank Moser of the Bethel United Presbyterian Church of Monroeville, Pennsylvania, at least ten churches in the Pittsburgh area alone may either split or be refounded by their departing pastors. Another informed observer predicted the same would be true of the Baltimore and Albany areas and perhaps many more.

By the assembly’s end, several pastors had determined to call a church-wide meeting to discuss the options, including the possibility of simultaneous withdrawal. The meeting is currently scheduled for June 16 and 17 in the Pittsburgh area, where the Kenyon matter originated.

It is not known how many ministers or churches might attend the Pittsburgh meeting, but 1,700 of the 8,700 churches in the denomination do not have women elders.

On a broader front the assembly’s decision may also affect the proposed union between the UPC and the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern), which is now in the study stage. Contacted within hours after the debate, Chairman Andrew Jumper of the board of the Covenant Fellowship of Presbyterians, a powerful group of conservative Presbyterians within the southern church, said he intended to have his group write an open letter to the southern churches in which they would discuss the bearing of the Cincinnati decision upon the proposed merger. He said the decision was an offense to decency and might kill the union plan.

The irony of the decision, conservatives point out, is that it is now possible to remain in the northern church while denying the virgin birth, bodily resurrection, vicarious atonement, and personal return of Jesus Christ, and many other cardinal doctrines, but not if one believes that the Bible requires that women may not be ordained to the office of ruling or teaching elder.

Does that mean that the position of the church regarding women is more important than these other doctrines? Apparently, and some are not afraid to say so. Clergyman Jack Maxwell, who brought the case against Kenyon, said that a minister who does not believe in the virgin birth of Christ is not hurting anyone. But a minister who denies women the right to be ordained “would hurt and dispossess a lot of people.”

Kenyon had not denied the right of the church to ordain women nor their right to be ordained within it. He had only denied that this was right according to the Bible, and said that he would himself refuse to take part in such a ceremony.

It was ironic that it was at an earlier meeting of the General Assembly in Cincinnati, forty-five years ago, that the ordination of women as ruling elders became a part of the denomination’s constitution. At the last meeting in Cincinnati, thirty years ago, the assembly voted to oust New Jersey minister Carl McIntire and two other men from its ministry.

If the Kenyon matter was clear cut, as the brief debate and the vote against all mollifying overtures would indicate, the place of homosexual ministers within the church apparently was not. A proposal to recognize a gay caucus was debated at length, received strong platform support, and was voted down by a narrower margin than the Kenyon issue.

Under the leadership of clergyman David B. Sindt, a confessed homosexual, the Presbyterian Gay Caucus had sought recognition as an unofficial organization of Presbyterians related to the church through special provisions in Chapter 28 of the church’s constitution.* (The conservative Presbyterian Lay Committee and Presbyterians United for Biblical Concerns are Chapter 28 organizations.) The assembly engaged in two hours of intense, spirited debate before it voted against receiving the gay report, which would have had the effect of granting recognition.

The report of the Committee on Minutes and Reports, upon which the assembly acted, affirmed that “there is no condemnation for anyone in Christ Jesus,” but added that in its view “the Scripture as understood in our Reformed tradition does not condone their sexual orientation and life style.” Former moderator Lamar surprised many by arguing forcefully on behalf of the Gay Caucus. He argued that “we must continue to run the necessary risks of inclusiveness within our church family.”

Even though the commissioners declined to follow his advice, many conservatives felt that recognition of the Gay Caucus will be granted eventually, along with the right of homosexuals to be ordained within the denomination. Those who felt most strongly about the Kenyon matter noted with dismay that no one seemed concerned about the sexual orientation of Sindt and other confessed homosexuals, although their life style is clearly in opposition to biblical norms while Kenyon’s is not.

Overall, it was a bad week for conservatives. In other action the assembly affirmed the action of its General Assembly Mission Council in rejecting both the theology and recommendations of “A Declaration and Call,” the mission document drafted and signed by most of those who participated in a mission consultation called by Presbyterians United for Biblical Concerns last October. The document had articulated a conservative theology of mission and had called upon the mission council to “establish the overseas mission enterprise of the church as a separate agency,” responsible to the mission council in carrying out “the work of world evangelization.”

The assembly also called for “a vehicle through which the Presbyterian Lay Committee is obliged to dialogue with … persons or groups” it criticizes, and it instructed the mission council or a committee appointed by it to “counsel with” the lay groups about “the manner in which its publications and spokespersons deal with persons, organizations, and policies with which it disapproves.” The lay organization had come under unprecedented attack for recent articles criticizing denominational policy, particularly in fiscal matters. Its monthly, The Presbyterian Layman, has a circulation of 300,000.

For years the UPC has endorsed the concept of “mutuality” in mission but has been ignoring it in grants to a controversial organization known as ROSCA in Colombia, South America. Mutuality refers to an agreement not to intrude into the affairs of another country’s churches against the wishes of those churches. In two previous years the denomination’s Committee for the Empowerment of Minorities granted $75,000 to the non-church-related, Marxist-oriented ROSCA organization. This year the committee was proposing to give $90,000, in spite of the vigorous protests of the Presbyterian Church in Colombia. But the protests seemed to have gotten through to the commissioners, though not to many members of the committee; the commissioners voted to adopt a minority report which struck down the proposed grant.

On the same morning, worship had begun by the singing of the words, “We will work with each other, we will work side by side.… And they’ll know we are Christians by our love.” But as the assembly ended many pastors and elders returned home feeling unloved and unwanted. They face agonizing decisions of compromise, withdrawal, or defiance. Others, less affected, spoke openly of the “death wish” of the northern church, which, in spite of its severe budget cutbacks and divisions, persists in racing like a herd of lemmings into the sea.

EASY, RIDERS

“We’re simply moving with the times,” explained Bishop Maurice Wood of Norwich, England, as he sent forth thirty-six vicars on Hondas to spread the Word of God.

With only 500 clergy to cover 760 parishes in Norfolk County, Wood decided it was time to switch from horses and gaiters to Hondas and crash helmets.

The parsons are not “a rodeo of reverend gentlemen,” commented Wood. “They are seriously out to reach the people.”

Clergyman Geoffrey Burton, 55, stood on the seat of his bike as he roared off with the others. He had, he said, ridden a motorcycle before.

TAKE KERR

There’s been a change of menu for TV chef Graham Kerr, known to millions as “The Galloping Gourmet.” Kerr, 42, recently told a History of Eating class at Cornell Hotel School in Ithaca, New York, how his tastes have changed since he became a follower of Christ. He says his “Galloping Gourmet” series, taped several years ago and being shown currently as reruns, wrongly emphasized indulgence, imbibing, and off-color humor. He wants to get the reruns off TV.

Kerr and his wife Treena, who produced the show, were injured in a serious auto accident in California in 1971. In the aftermath, they dropped production of the show, and their family life deteriorated. To try to mend things they bought a yacht, bundled their three children aboard, and sailed the world for two years in a vain search for happiness. In March, 1974, the family settled in Easton, Maryland. Financial disasters wiped out almost everything they had, and there were more fights.

But suddenly, Treena changed. No more arguments. And she was noticeably happy and at peace within. Only later did Kerr discover that Ruth Turner, the family’s 34-year-old black domestic worker, a happy-eyed Pentecostal, had been counseling Treena and had quietly led her to Christ. She was secretly baptized in December.

Meanwhile, Kerr’s secretary, Michelle Dubois—a self-described “backslidden Christian”—had been led back to the faith by Patricia Rich, a temporary food assistant Kerr had hired from California.

Not knowing that everybody around him was praying for him, Kerr grew increasingly restless and turned to prayer himself as a way out. Finally, in a hotel room in Canada on March 13, he accepted Christ as Saviour.

Things are better now, says Kerr, who was baptized on April 13. He and his family are members of a Church of the Brethren congregation in Easton whose pastor is into the charismatic movement (Kerr says he received the gift of tongues on Easter Sunday). His new, lower-keyed TV series—“Take Kerr”—is doing well, and he has plans for a cookbook in which he will include some food for thought about faith in Christ.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Books, Yes; Remedial Reading, No

The U. S. Supreme Court upheld a Pennsylvania law providing the loan of textbooks to students in parochial and other private schools, but it struck down as unconstitutional the lending of instructional materials and equipment. The court also banned the provision of such auxiliary services by the state to private school children as counseling, testing, and remedial classes.

In another action, the high court decided not to hear after all a Tennessee case involving public tuition grants to students enrolled in the state’s colleges and universities, including church-related ones. The case was returned to a lower federal court for reconsideration because an amendment was added to the grant plan specifying that the schools must use such funds “solely for secular purposes.”

Printed Matter

Annual awards were handed out at the annual meetings of the three major religious press associations last month.

Campus Life, a 160,000-circulation monthly published by Youth for Christ International, was named grand prize winner in the “Awards of Excellence” competition at the twenty-seventh annual convention of the Evangelical Press Association in suburban Chicago. CHRISTIANITY TODAY was a close second, placing just ahead of 30,000-circulation His, the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship monthly.

Divisional winners included Success (Baptist Publications), The Standard (Baptist General Conference), CHRISTIANITY TODAY,Cable (Overseas Crusades), Good News (independent United Methodist), Campus Life, and Youth Illustrated (Scripture Press).

At the Associated Church Press meeting in New York, the top divisional awards went to A.D. (United Church of Christ and United Presbyterian Church), Mennonite Reporter, The Virginia Churchman (Episcopal), World Encounter (Lutheran Church in America), Journal of Current Social Issues (United Church of Christ), and Youth (United Church of Christ).

The Catholic Press Association, also meeting in New York, gave its top newspaper award to the National Catholic Reporter, an independent weekly published in Kansas City, Missouri. St. Anthony Messenger and U.S. Catholic won the most first-place awards among magazines.

Dozens of other winners in various categories were announced at the three meetings.

Sneak Preview

More than 100,000 advance tickets—believed to be a record for any movie—were sold for sneak previews of The Hiding Place in the Minneapolis area last month. Unlike other films released by the Billy Graham organization, no counseling was to be done in theaters following performances. Follow-up was to be done through literature and reply cards.

RELOCATING THE REFUGEES

Among the Vietnamese who fled their country just prior to the Communist takeover were hundreds of evangelical Christians. They left behind some 400 churches in South Viet Nam and some 120,000 other believers.

Spokesmen for the Christian and Missionary Alliance, which has taken on the responsibility of sponsoring the Christian refugees, say they may number as many as 1,000.

The CMA was until recent years the only American mission board with workers in Viet Nam. Its missionary efforts resulted in the establishment of the Evangelical Church of Viet Nam.

CMA president Nathan Bailey told a press conference held in connection with his denomination’s annual General Council in Cleveland that a drive has begun to raise $500,000 to assist in the resettlement of the refugees and in the relocation of more than 100 of its missionaries who had been serving in Viet Nam. Churches and individual members are being asked to locate homes for the refugees and help them find jobs and learn English. A number of other church bodies and para-church groups are also offering extensive aid to refugees.

Among the first CMA churches to offer to accommodate the Vietnamese was the Cathedral at the Crossroads in Castro Valley, California. The church has long been known for its ministry to servicemen. Its extensive facilities include quarters that will be used to care for refugees for three or four weeks until homes can be found for them.

The CMA refugees were being processed at the centers set up in California, Florida, and Arkansas. Some were expected to proceed to the center established last month near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the state in which CMA churches are most numerous.

One of the dozen or so Vietnamese pastors who fled was the Protestant patriarch, 81-year-old Le Van Thai, president emeritus of the Evangelical Church. His successor, Doan Van Mieng, chose to stay in Viet Nam.

The only one of the refugees who was able to attend the council meeting in Cleveland was Le Hoang Phu, who was the dean of an evangelical Bible school in Nha Trang. Phu speaks English well, having been educated in the United States. He attended Nyack and Wheaton Colleges and earned a doctorate from New York University.

Phu said that his fellow Vietnamese Christians in the refugee camps were engaged in evangelistic work, and that a number of conversions were being reported.

Most of the refugees are said to be people who were originally from the north. They were fleeing Communism for the second time. Very few of the tribespeople sought evacuation.

Tom Stebbins, the last CMA missionary to leave Saigon, said he tried to get helicopters to go to the CMA-operated International Protestant Church there, inasmuch as some 200 persons had assembled in the building in hopes of being picked up. Stebbins was unsuccessful, and was himself forced to climb a wall to reach a helicopter.

The CMA has also had missionary work in Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. Its missionary force in Laos, which had numbered more than a dozen, was ordered to leave in mid-May.

DAVID KUCHARSKY

Mixed Usefulness

Finding the Old Testament in the New, by Henry M. Shires (Westminster, 1974, 251 pp., $7.50), is reviewed by John Goldingay, lecturer in Old Testament, St. John’s Theological College, Bramcote, England.

Henry M. Shires, who is professor of New Testament at Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, has written a wide ranging survey of how the New Testament uses the Old. He begins by noting that the New Testament regards the Old as the inspired word of God, “authoritative for belief and practice”:

It was the recognition that the Holy Spirit was active in the writing of the Old Testament which enabled Christians to accept its authority over them as over the Jews. Moses, David, Isaiah, Hosea, and other authors are looked upon as God’s chosen instruments for the writing down of his words [p. 27].

Later Shires affirms that Jesus too took this attitude to the Old Testament. But, he adds, it is true that in Jesus and the giving of the Spirit something new has come, with an authority equal to that of the Old Testament. Thus the New Testament quotes and treats the Old Testament with a sovereign freedom. Indeed, paradoxically, Jesus abrogated the Old Testament as well as accepting it, says Shires. His evidence for this conclusion is that Jesus taught that the Old Testament did not go far enough, that he treated some parts of it as on a higher level than others, and that he assumed the authority to give his own interpretation of it; one may grant the truth of these three points without regarding them as a demonstration that Jesus abrogated the Old Testament. Elsewhere Shires infers that the New Testament’s failure to quote from some of the psalms signifies that it rejected them, and he indicates that he himself wishes to apply a principle of selectivity to the Old Testament; I suspect that he is trying to find such a principle in the New Testament itself, when it does not in fact have one. Embarrassingly, the kind of psalm Shires disapproves of is in fact quoted in the New Testament.

Against the background of his examination of the Old Testament’s authority in the New, and of a sketching of contemporary Jewish methods of interpretation, Shires surveys the New Testament’s methods of actually using the Old under familiar headings—historical understanding, prediction, typology, literary influence—and looks at the way quotations were introduced, the areas of the Old Testament they come from, their implications for the history of the canon, and their use of the Septuagint. I found the most interesting material in the final chapters. One, “Christian Doctrine and the Old Testament,” surveys the use of Old Testament quotations in the New Testament in connection with each of the elements of the “apostolic kerygma” as these were isolated by C. H. Dodd. Then the last and longest chapter looks at “The Book of Psalms in the New Testament”—illuminating the use of the psalms in the teaching of Jesus and in the Gospels, and showing how they are used to illustrate or prove Christian doctrine in the New Testament.

Shires’s aim has been to write a resource work that will be useful to the minister, layman, or student in his own study of the New Testament’s use of the Old, and he provides various tables of further parallels between the testaments with which one can carry on the work of which he provides some samples. The scholar will not find anything very new in this book; it is a less technical and specialized work than such recent scholarly studies in this area as Michael Goulder’s Midrash and Lection in Matthew or Anthony Hanson’s Studies in Paul’s Technique and Theology, or even than the slightly older works by conservatives such as Earle Ellis’s Paul’s Use of the Old Testament or Richard France’s Jesus Christ and the Old Testament. Its virtue is as a survey of the actual New Testament data on the subject, the product of Shires’s own independent work.

But the person who wants to go on to work out how we may use the Old Testament may need to move on to the more technical studies, to get deeper into the rationale of the New Testament’s practice. He will also need to consider studies of Old Testament hermeneutics such as the works of Brevard Childs and James Barr and the volumes of essays edited by Claus Westermann (Essays on Old Testament Hermeneutics/Interpretation) and Bernhard Anderson (The Old Testament and Christian Faith).

Religion And Literature Are Yoked

Religion and Modern Literature: Essays in Theory and Criticism, edited by G. B. Tennyson and Edward E. Ericson, Jr. (Eerdmans, 424 pp., $8.95, $5.95 pb), is reviewed by Cheryl Forbes, editorial associate, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Tennyson and Ericson picked some of the best literary critics of this century to anthologize: C. S. Lewis, Nathan A. Scott, Jr., Edwin Fuller, Austin Warren, and Cleanth Brooks, for example. The essays provide a thorough survey of the relation between literature and religion, in some cases specifically theology.

The contrast between T. S. Eliot’s opening essay “Religion and Literature” and J. Hillis Miller’s “Literature and Religion” will serve as an excellent discussion-provoker. Eliot emphatically states that as critics and readers of literature (the two ought to be one since all readers should be critics), we cannot divorce our theological views from our literary ones. Miller, on the other hand, thinks “literary study is objective and public” while “a man’s religious views are his private business and need have nothing to do with his public life as a scholar.” The two essays give the book a strong opening.

Although such conflicting opinions are evident in some of the essays chosen, the basic thrust of the book is to show the inseparability of literature and religion. Flannery O’Connor’s essay “Novelist and Believer” is perhaps the best exploration of that theme and is one of the best written essays in the collection.

The editors not only arranged the essays in an interesting and provocative order but also successfully blended theoretical essays with those considering specific authors. Both O’Connor and Eliot appear as writers in part one and as subjects in part three. Comparisons between what the authors say and what is said about them would also provide the basis for several good class discussions.

Most of the ideas of twentieth-century scholars and critics on literature and religion are represented here. The book will serve as an invaluable resource and text book. Anyone interested in the subject ought to own this volume.

Mutual Submission

Sexist Religion and Women in the Church: No More Silence!, edited by Alice L. Hageman (Association, 1974, 221 pp., $5.95 pb), and Human Liberation in a Feminist Perspective, by Letty M. Russell (Westminster, 1974, 212 pp., $3.95 pb), are reviewed by Nancy A. Hardesty, doctoral student, University of Chicago Divinity School, Chicago, Illinois.

To dismiss either of these books as “liberal,” even “radical,” will be easy for evangelicals who do not wish to think about the theological issues raised by the women’s movement.

The Hageman book consists of the 1972–73 Lentz lecture series at Harvard Divinity School and contains an essay by Mary Daly provocatively entitled “Theology After the Demise of God the Father: A Call for the Castration of Sexist Religion.” The author of the second book, Letty Russell, an assistant professor of religious studies at Manhattan College in the Bronx, is a devotee of the currently fashionable Third World liberation theologies. None of the authors comes across as a subscriber to the doctrinal statement of the Evangelical Theological Society. But both books raise a myriad of serious issues that all Christians are going to have to face if we wish to preach Good News to all people. On some fronts we have already begun.

Both Russell and Hageman in her own essay on “Women and Missions” complain that American Christianity has too often become entangled in politics at home and served as a tool of oppression and imperialism abroad. Similar criticisms were voiced by Third World delegates to last year’s Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne. Many mission organizations are aware of this problem and are trying to overcome it.

Nelle Morton, associate professor emeritus of Drew University, in her Harvard lecture on “Preaching the Word” justly criticizes Key ’73 spokesmen who continually spoke of “calling men to repentance and renewal” and of Jesus Christ as “the Word for modern man,” as “for all men,” as “good news to men.” I personally received a plea for funds from a usually progressive evangelical group whose return envelope read, “That Every Man May Hear.…” But members of the Thanksgiving Workshop of Evangelicals for Social Concern pledged to become more conscious of their use of masculine language and to seek to use more inclusive terms in all their communication. As Paul said, “Let no man put a stumbling-block or an occasion to fall in his sister’s way!”

Both books offer helpful insights and information for self-education in this direction. Hageman’s essay is particularly good in outlining the contributions women have made to the missionary cause (between one-half and two-thirds of all missionaries have been women). United Methodist executive Theressa Hoover outlines the “triple jeopardy” under which black women function in the church. Harvard theologian Krister Stendahl offers some male observations on how difficult it is to make practical adjustments in one’s thinking and acting in regard to women. Gail Shulman, a Harvard student, gives insights into Judaism’s treatment of women. Russell’s discussion of the nature of the ministry raises such pertinent questions, “Do we really believe in the priesthood of all believers and the minister as servant?

Beyond areas of agreement and the helpful new material in these books, however, lies a basic question. Particularly Daly and Russell are asking: What would be the shape of a theology that took seriously the declaration that in Christ there is neither male nor female? While I do not agree with the answer given by either, I do think they are asking many of the right questions, questions that we as evangelicals must answer if we hope to put forth a viable, biblical alternative.

Of the two, I find Russell less helpful, perhaps because I am immediately offended by her excessive use of contemporary jargon. For example, she speaks of conversion as “conscientization,” which (if you can say it) is defined as “the process by which men and women are awakened to their socio-cultural reality, move beyond the alienations and constraints to which they are subjected, and affirm themselves as the conscious subjects and creators of their own historical future.” That statement, like many others in the book, is linguistic and theological nonsense. She also has a penchant for throwing in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew words in a way that will frustrate those who do not know the languages and infuriate those who do.

But Human Liberation in a Feminist Perspective does represent a serious attempt to write a theology that is relevant to more people than just a few Western males. While this is a noble endeavor, the result reveals the difficulty of basing theology on the vagaries of experience and current philosophical fads. Evangelicals will find her manipulation of and even disregard for Scripture disconcerting.

Daly’s conclusions that we must dump both a male saviour and all concepts of original sin are equally unacceptable, but I find the issues she raises in Sexist Religion both lucid and challenging. Unlike Russell, Daly is certainly in dialogue with the history of the Church and its interpretations of Scripture, wrong as some of them may have been. She declares that “women are at war with sexist religion as sexist” and that “women whose consciousness has been raised are spiritual exiles.” In this she speaks as well for many women reared in evangelical circles.

I do not agree with Daly’s method of “liberation,” or her assertion that “to exist humanly is to name the self, the world, and God.” I believe that naming has already been done by God’s revelation in Scripture. But I would sympathize with her methodological goal of “cutting away the phallus-centered value system imposed by patriarchy.” In speaking of God as a “dynamic verb” and the “Verb of Verbs” rather than as a “static noun,” I think she is coming closer to an articulation of the meaning of God’s revelation as “I Am” to Moses at the burning bush than do most theologians who concentrate on such masculine images as “Father” and “King.” Her attempt is at least a reminder that all language about God is symbolic and limited, that all images represent only one facet, and that we are to make no graven images of God.

Daly concludes by declaring that “women are perceiving that patriarchal religion is indeed patriarchal and are choosing to give priority to what we find valid in our own experience without needing to look to the past for legitimization of this.… There are no adequate models in the past to guide us.” Yet she does not reject the notion of a God actively involved in our lives nor the possibility of meaning for life within a religious context.

If we as evangelicals are going to have something to say to women who are also listening to Daly, we must recognize the patriarchalism in Christianity, stop defending it, and start building a theology around those elements that transcend sexual dichotomies. For example, we must begin to emphasize that both men and women are made in God’s image and that therefore God is neither male nor female. We must stop emphasizing Jesus’ maleness and start remembering his humanity. We must stop preaching submission only for wives and justice only for a few and start exhibiting agape-love and equal respect.

BRIEFLY NOTED

Adjustment to Widowhood and Some Related Problems, by Cecile Strugnell (Health Sciences, 201 pp., $6.50 pb). For pastoral counselors and their teachers, an annotated bibliography that encompasses the spectrum of problems related to bereavement and resulting loneliness. Though not specifically Christian, this is a valuable resource.

1975 Directory of Religious Stations and Programs in the United States, edited by Ben Armstrong et al. (National Religious Broadcasters [Box 2254 R, Morristown, N. J. 07960], 88 pp., $10 pb). A listing by state of hundreds of stations, plus an alphabetical listing of scores of broadcasts. Useful reference.

The Prayers of the New Testament, by Donald Coggan (Harper & Row, 190 pp., $6.95), Sense and Nonsense About Prayer, by Lehman Strauss (Moody, 123 pp., $3.95), Hungry For God: Practical Help in Personal Prayer, by Ralph Martin (Doubleday, 168 pp., $5.95), The Workbook of Living Prayer, by Maxie Dunnam (The Upper Room, 138 pp., $2 pb), Healing of Memories: Prayer and Confession—Steps to Inner Healing, by Dennis Linn and Matthew Linn (Paulist, 101 pp., $1.45 pb), and Inner Healing: Ministering to the Human Spirit Through the Power of Prayer, by Michael Scanlan (Paulist, 85 pp., $2.25 pb). Many aspects of prayer are explored here. Coggan is now the archbishop of Canterbury; a reprint is offered of his 1967 study of all the recorded prayers in the New Testament. Strauss examines the follies most of us practice in prayer and provides practical helps. Martin, a Catholic charismatic leader, shares his thoughts. Dunnam offers the ultimate in “how-to’s” in a genuine workbook designed to teach new awareness and sensitivity in prayer in six weeks. Some of the exercises could be helpful, but many seem contrived. The Linns and Scanlan, Catholic priests, stress prayer as a means of inner healing. Scanlan spans the range of interpersonal relationships. The Linns treat individual confession about past attitudes that may be blocking present relationships.

An Annotated Bibliography of Bible Study, by Jerome Walker and David MacLeod (Western Bible Institute [Box 9332, Denver, Colo. 80209], 41 pp., 75¢ pb). A very good, classified aid to building up a library of commentaries and other biblical reference books. Aimed at the serious Bible student rather than the advanced scholar.

The Human Life Review, edited by J. P. McFadden, is a new quarterly journal devoted to certain crucial ethical issues. The first two issues include articles on abortion, the relevant Supreme Court decision, and the fetus as a person. Former CHRISTIANITY TODAY associate editor Harold O. J. Brown now has the same title with this journal. Available for $2.50/issue (about 110 pp. each) from 150 East 35 St., New York, N. Y. 10016.

The Works of Jonathan Edwards, two volumes (Banner of Truth, 1,894 pp., $19.95/set). Kudos to the publisher for reprinting an 1834 edition that includes a lengthy biography by Sereno Dwight plus the complete journal of David Brainerd. It would take twenty or more volumes in conventional format to equal what is in this small-print, two-column edition. Edwards is widely recognized as being probably the greatest American theologian. His writings, though sometimes difficult, are often inspiring. Full doctrinal agreement is not a prerequisite to profiting from this great man of God.

Current Christian Books, two volumes (Christian Booksellers Association [2031 West Cheyenne Road, Colorado Springs, Colo. 80906], 448 pp., $29.95/set). A Christian version of the comprehensive guide called Books in Print. Alphabetically lists (one volume by author and the other by title) the books currently available from almost all the larger and many of the smaller publishers of religious books from a Protestant perspective. (Only a couple of Catholic houses are included, and, curiously, Logos is omitted.) Valuable reference tool for librarians as well as booksellers, and one that all students of religion will want to know about.

God, Man, and Archie Bunker, by Spencer Marsh (Harper & Row, 104 pp., $5.95, $2.95 pb). A Presbyterian minister evaluates, in the light of biblical teaching, the personality traits of America’s favorite television bigot and the “God” he has imagined. Some stimulating observations, though rather preachy in spots. Fans of “All in the Family” may have different conclusions as to what the producers intended by some of the examples Marsh refers to.

Introducing Church Growth, by Tetsunao Yamamori and E. LeRoy Lawson (Standard, 256 pp., n.p.), Your Church Has Real Possibilities, by Robert Schuller (Regal, 179 pp., $2.95 pb), The Church That Dared to Change, by Michael Tucker (Tyndale, 129 pp., $2.95 pb), Hey, That’s Our Church!, by Lyle Schaller (Abingdon, 192 pp., $4.50 pb). Survival and Mission For the City Church, by Gaylord Noyce (Westminster, 162 pp., $3.95 pb), and Church Growth Is Not the Point, by Robert Hudnut (Harper & Row, 143 pp., $7.95). Varied approaches and opinions regarding “church growth.” Yamamori and Lawson provide a comprehensive introductory text that combines analysis of various growth theories with some of their applications. Schuller bases his comments on the success of the well-known southern California church that he started from scratch twenty years ago. (The same principles have been taught in his numerous Institutes for Successful Church Leadership.) Tucker’s church was twenty years old when he became the pastor but was on the verge of disbanding. He tells how dying bones can be made vibrant. Schaller, drawing on visits to 3,000 congregations in the last fifteen years, delineates several “types” and their growth patterns. One of these “types,” now struggling but formerly prestigious, is the inner-city church, Noyce’s subject. He stresses the positive potential and suggests five varied “images” and the need for each city church to decide which to aim for. A needed counterbalance to advocates of bigness is offered by Hudnut, who reminds us “that church growth is not the point; faithfulness to the Gospel is.”

Jesus According to a Woman, by Rachel Wahlberg (Paulist, 106 pp., $1.45 pb), Christian Freedom For Women, edited by Harry Hollis (Broadman, 192 pp., n.p.), The Fulfilled Woman, by Lou Beardsley and Toni Spry (Harvest House, 172 pp., $2.95), and Love, Honor and Be Free, by Maxine Hancock (Moody, 191 pp., $5.95). Christians offer varied responses to the questions raised by the Women’s Liberation movement. Wahlberg maintains that we have been wrong in our interpretation of some of Jesus’ teaching. She offers a “liberated” look at nine of Jesus’ encounters with women. Hollis and three other sociologically oriented Christians present thirteen essays on a variety of pertinent topics. Beardsley and Spry, both women, address themselves to married women and do not consider fulfillment apart from conventional housewifery. Hancock, a housewife and freelance writer, is a welcome contrast to them as she discusses a Christian woman’s role in marriage.

Gay Liberation, by Roberta (PTL Publications [Box 1277, Tustin, Calif. 92680], 131 pp., $1.49 pb). Autobiographical account of struggles and failures on the way to liberation from the practice of homosexuality. Doctrinal and practical explanation of why God calls for abstinence.

How I Write, by Robert Hastings (Broadman, 145 pp., $3.95 pb). Some very basic (and well written!) suggestions for aspiring writers interested in being published for the Christian community. Doubtless most editors wish they could require all would-be writers to read such a book before mailing in manuscripts.

Who Walk Alone, by Margaret Evening (InterVarsity, 222 pp., $3.95 pb). One of the most honest examinations of all aspects and struggles of the single life. A practical, Bible-inspired approach toward relationships with married couples, roommates, and children, constructive use of time, importance of accepting oneself as a whole person. Goes far beyond the usual tripe to scratch at the truth. Highly recommended.

Recently I have been thinking more about women and reflecting on the drubbing some of them are giving the Apostle Paul for certain of his supposedly infelicitous comments. One would think the great apostle was a male chauvinist who consigned women to the kitchen when they were not barricaded in the bedroom.

For the moment I mention only First Timothy 2:9–15, which recently erupted in family devotions and then in our neighborhood Bible-study group. The Interpreter’s Bible (Abingdon, 1955) tells us that “few passages in the Bible … have aroused more heated discussion than these verses” (II, 404).

If some feminists see here an opportunity to scorch Paul, they will not lack for ammunition from religious commentators. The Interpreter’s Bible itself suggests “solutions” that bankrupt the evangelical heritage. The Apostle, we learn, is not to be taken literally; his argument is based on cultural conditions (the apostle “fastened divine authority upon particular mores”); Paul presumably clung to objectionable rabbinical interpretation; his reference to Adam and Eve “seems far fetched and unconvincing”; and the supposed anti-feminist passages are in any case not really Pauline in origin.

The expositor finally appeals to “Jesus’ attitude” and “the spirit of Christ” to outweigh the epistle’s teaching. This same device is now widely used to provide leverage on many moral issues. Jesus exalted love, and therefore (for example) divorce is justifiable if marriage turns sour. Indeed, much that the New Testament explicitly condemns is currently approved as expressing “Christian love” or “the spirit of Christ.”

Not that Paul’s precise intention in First Timothy is easy to determine. Even Kittel’s monumental Theological Dictionary of the New Testament helps little with the verb authenteoo, found in the Bible only in 2:12: “I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” Translations other than the King James render the verb in a noteworthy variety of ways: “have authority,” “put in positions of authority over,” “contradict,” “interrupt,” “dictate to,” “lord over.”

To be sure, Paul does not have in view an end to the Christian woman’s public witness. Women, he emphasizes, are to bear public witness silently by seemly dress and deportment and by good works (2:9 f.; cf. 1 Pet. 3:1–6). And what Paul teaches and approves elsewhere in his other letters should clarify his overall intentions. He commends many women active in church life and work, among them Dorcas, Euodia, Julia, Lydia, Persis, Priscilla, Syntyche, Tryphena, and Tryphosa, and to the Christian hospitality of numbers of women he acknowledges a personal debt (Rom. 16:1–15). In Second Timothy 1:5 he commends Timothy’s mother Eunice and grandmother Lois for transmitting a scriptural heritage to Timothy.

Not only so, but in Galatians 3:29 he affirms that in Christ there is neither “male nor female,” a reminder that Christian realities turn not on gender but on the divine image. Hence his position can hardly be that the male is superior to the female of the species. Not an iota in Paul’s writings suggests any sympathy for the prevalent ancient view that women and slaves are inferior creatures.

What then of the emphasis of First Timothy 2:11–15? Had Paul perhaps changed his mind about women, since he here says that they “should listen and learn quietly and humbly. I never let women teach men or lord it over them. Let them be silent in your church meetings” (Living Bible)? Did he who declared that Christ had done away with the condemning power of the Law (Rom. 10:4) and who waged war on the Judaizers who retained Hebrew rites and practices here unjustifiably bind women converts with rabbinical interpretations of the status of women, when he reminded them that the Law declares that women are not to speak but to be subordinate (1 Cor. 14:34)? Does he return to bondage Christian women who thought they had been freed from pagan inhibitions and Judaistic restrictions and liberated to a new order of life?

It helps little to refer the Pastoral Letters to another author than Paul, since the same teaching appears in First Corinthians 14:34 and 35: “As in all the congregations of the saints, women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church” (NIV).

What is noteworthy is that the passage in First Corinthians appears in a context in which Paul does not object to women’s freely praying or prophesying; what he criticizes rather are women who do so with shorn hair or uncovered head. Some have suggested that these gatherings were in homes where women took part informally, whereas First Corinthians 14 may have in view an official role in established churches. First Timothy concerns public prayer and worship in a context in which the attitude of some Christians toward the established government was suspect; Paul urges prayer for rulers as well as all men, and urges certain public conduct by women. Could it be that certain women had turned their new-found freedom into a disruptive participation in the larger services? Or is the “spirit” of First Corinthians 11 to be adduced in judgment on the teaching of First Corinthians 14? Is the contemporary movement of women’s ordination therefore to be hailed as a victory for this “spirit” and hence over Paul’s own subsequent hesitancy and supposed inconsistency?

Even so the indicated restrictions about covered head and shorn hair seem strange to us today. Greco-Roman social customs may have been somewhat in view when Paul required women to veil their heads in public worship (1 Cor. 11:5 f.), since only prostitutes were unveiled outside their homes. Social propriety meant that women kept their heads covered in the streets but removed head coverings when entering a home. The early churches met in private homes. In some pagan Greek cults both sexes bared their heads during worship.

But Paul in no way grounds his argument in a protest against established social custom. Rather he appeals for subordination of women in Christian public worship on the basis of a divinely established order, the violation of which he considers reprehensible (cf. Col. 3:18). Indeed, he identifies his teaching on the point in terms of divine commandment incumbent even upon those who may claim private revelation (1 Cor. 14:36, 37). He appeals both to Scripture and to nature (1 Cor. 11:8, 14) as well as to his own authority, and presumes to give a guiding principle of universal and permanent importance

Charity Begins At Home

There’s never a cloud without a silver lining. If the Viet Nam war divided America, then the Vietnamese refugee problem seems to be uniting us again. In the halls of Congress, in the public media, and even in our local church, we have heard all kinds of arguments. The wonderful thing is how thoughtful people, starting from different presuppositions and pursuing different routes, seem to be able to arrive at the same position, which can be roughly summed up as “Charity begins at home,” sometimes paraphrased as, “What, me pay?”

Senator P. Crassus Malgubernans, famous for his promises of federal generosity in election years, pointed out tactfully that most of the refugees would probably really be happier back in Viet Nam, once they had overcome their initial adjustment difficulties. Congressman L. Avidus Crispus, from a Western state, said that it would be immoral to help foreigners while we have so many dissatisfied people here at home. A leading spokesman for economy in the Senate, M. Tullius Avis, stated that personally he had the greatest sympathy for refugees from tyranny anywhere, but that this is a bad year for the U. S. economy and the price of oil is continuing to rise. One noted ecclesiastic, himself a spokesman for an easily identifiable minority group, stated that Vietnamese refugees are all right but that something must be done for our own people first.

Retired general L. Severus Vindex, who directed the famous “seek and demolish” campaign during the years 1966–68, stated that personally he has nothing against Vietnamese but that we don’t need anything to remind us of our past failures. Noted conservative spokesman M. Pecunius Lupus warned that, deserving though the Vietnamese may be, support for them will be paid for by further government indebtedness and hence by an unacceptable rate of inflation. Anti-Communist publicist I. Rufus Bombastus stated frankly, “The Reds are responsible. Let them pay.” Some conservative Protestants observed that most of the refugees are probably Catholics and hence should be paid for by the Pope, while at least one Catholic thought that they were chiefly Buddhists and hence indifferent to suffering as a matter of principle.

The wonderful thing about all of this is that despite the differences of detail, so many voices are evidently united in one and the same opinion: “We’re sorry, but this really isn’t a very convenient time for accepting refugees. Ask again after some other war.”

There was one dissident voice, hard to catch among the unanimous babble of disapproval, and we could catch only phrases. It went something like this: “Depart from me … for I was hungry and you gave me no food … a stranger and you did not welcome me.” Probably whoever it was doesn’t understand our current economic situation or the realities of political life in America.

Since When?

I was very impressed with the editorial in the April 11 issue, “Waste as a Wrong,” but it struck me as the grossest inconsistency to have an advertisement on the back cover which features the headline, “If you are like I used to be, maybe you can’t see yourself as being a well-paid Christian businessman.” All I can ask it, what’s gone wrong when you allow advertisements such as this to appear in CHRISTIANITY TODAY? Since when has God ever promised business success manifested in the form of a fancy home and a Mercedes Benz? I find this to be particularly disturbing, especially in view of the widespread acceptance of the Lausanne Covenant, where thousands of Christian leaders pledged to adopt a more simple lifestyle to advance the cause of the Gospel worldwide.

Professor

Wheaton College Graduate School

Wheaton, Ill.

A Perfect Fit

I want to congratulate you for your selection of Edith Schaeffer to write articles for “A Layman and His Faith.” When Dr. Bell was writing these articles, they always thrilled and inspired me, and I wondered at his death who could fill his shoes. Mrs. Schaeffer manages to do so beautifully each issue, and every article has been superb.

First Baptist Church

Littlefield, Tex.

A Vote Of No

As a member of the curriculum committee of the Board of Christian Education of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, I would like to clarify a statement in the article “Updating the Sunday School” (April 25). We have not participated in the Joint Educational Development curriculum development. Our Board of Christian Education did send representatives to the early planning sessions, with the purpose of studying JED. Finally, in January, 1974, our Board of Christian Education voted not to become a member.

Independent Presbyterian Church

Brandon, Fla.

From Milk To Meat

Joann and Belden Menkus have diagnosed the adult Sunday-school situation correctly (“Adult Sunday School Needs to Grow Up,” April 25).… The editorial, “Do Something For Your Sunday School,” suggests successive steps for revitalizing the Sunday school. High on this list, I feel, is “train teachers” (making certain the trainer is qualified to train). Many adults of my acquaintance do not attend Sunday school because they are starving for meat and only little drivels of milk are being offered. It’s staggering, the number of adult teachers who are still on milk.

Austin, Tex.

Back To The Books

I very much appreciated both the tone and emphasis of your brief editorial “Debatable Behavior” (April 25).… We desperately need people who will “do their homework” regarding the role of women in the church and in the home.

Edmonton, Alberta

Not A Fine Point

You have rendered your readers a good service in presenting Dr. Carl Henry’s perceptive focus (Footnotes, May 9) on a most dangerous influence which stems from Watchman Nee’s otherwise helpful writings: the disparagement of truth, which devalues “the historical and factual aspects of the Christian faith.” As theological liberalism has demonstrated, acceptance of an agnostic view of truth deductively leads to theological agnosticism. However, I felt that Dr. Henry’s final sentence tended to undermine his own position: “While they [Christian martyrs in Communist work camps] may flub in the fine points of technical theology, they may also teach us a great deal about practical discipleship.” As Dr. Henry says, “… contemporary Christianity needs to become deeply rooted in the biblical view of … reality.” This view is propositional truth. And the issue is not a fine point of technical theology but the very foundation of Christianity.

Fairfax, Va.

Indicative Or Imperative

James Davey’s article, “How to Discover Your Spiritual Gift” (May 9), was a real disappointment to me. It is evident he has not handled the passages in Romans 12; First Corinthians 12, and Ephesians 4 in the Greek. I am sorry he cannot decide whether we receive our spiritual gift(s) when we become a part of the body of Christ or later. His handling of Paul’s injunction to “earnestly desire spiritual gifts” indicates he takes zeloute (12:31; 14:1) as a present active imperative (command) rather than a present active indicative (action going on). To do this is to cause the Scripture to contradict itself, in fact, within the context of First Corinthians itself.

North Valley Baptist Church

Red Bluff, Calif.

To Keep Abreast

I note with much interest the news story, “The Trial of Georgi Vins” (April 25).… It is absolutely essential that Christians be aware of the plight of their brothers and sisters in Christ behind the Iron Curtain and in different parts of the world.… If we neglect to intercede for them and do whatever we possibly can on their behalf, surely God will be displeased, and a similar or worse fate could easily befall us.

We have looked to CHRISTIANITY TODAY for many years for sound evangelical leadership. In today’s world, with the recent rapid devastating changes in Viet Nam and elsewhere, it is so important that we have reliable Christian sources of information to keep abreast of the news.

Montgomery, N. Y.