The majority of evangelical Christians have been remarkably quiet about President Bill Clinton’s health-care reform plan, perhaps because they have yet to grasp how financially detrimental that plan would be for most Christians.

For example, the administration wants to implement what is known as “community rating,” a health-insurance pricing system wherein everyone pays basically the same price, regardless of an individual’s health status. By contrast, insurance historically has been priced based on risk. The higher the risk, the higher the price.

Health-insurance companies try to consider risk when pricing health insurance. A person living a healthy lifestyle is a much better risk—and therefore deserves lower health-insurance premiums—than a person who smokes, consumes alcohol or drugs, or engages in risky sexual practices.

Under traditional health-insurance pricing, the healthy-lifestyle person would pay less and the risky-lifestyle person would pay more.

The administration’s plan, however, would average out the prices, requiring the healthy-lifestyle person to pay more so that the risky-lifestyle person could pay less. Christians who treat their bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit would, in effect, be subsidizing the inevitable cost of that risky behavior. Such a pricing scheme insulates people from the true cost of their risky behavior.

There is, of course, widespread concern about how to provide coverage for the less than 1 percent of the population who have preexisting medical conditions—often through no fault of their own—that make them uninsurable, especially since their uninsurability can result in a person’s entire family being unable to get health insurance. One solution would be to create a national “high-risk” pool (27 states already have such pools), paid for by general tax revenues, that would cover those with preexisting conditions. People in high-risk pools usually pay a little more for their insurance, but it is expected they will get a whole lot more in return because of their conditions.

Besides this potential distortion of the insurance market, the administration’s plan would also force Christians to pay for benefits such as mental health care, counseling for drug and alcohol abuse, and abortion services. Even though Christians might reject abortion or turn to a minister rather than a mental-health professional for basic counseling, they would be paying premiums for these services so that others could use them.

There is a health-care proposal, however, that has some bipartisan support in Congress and that would reward Christians or anyone else who lives a healthy lifestyle and avoids practices that lead to higher insurance premiums. It is called Medical Savings Accounts (MSAS), sometimes referred to as Medical IRAS. Personal Medical Savings Accounts would permit people to put the same money they or their employer are now spending on health insurance into a tax-free account used for health care-related expenses. Out of the account people could purchase a low-deductible health-insurance policy or make payments to a health maintenance organization (HMO). But with MSAs, people would have a third option: buy a high-deductible health-insurance policy (with a deductible of, say, $2,500 to $3,000) to cover any major health-care expenses, and leave the premium savings in the account to pay for smaller health-care expenditures. With the special, tax-free treatment, the premium savings can just about equal the amount of the deductible.

As a result, individuals would have first dollar coverage, but (and this is the key to the plan) if they don’t spend the money, they, rather than an insurance company, get to keep it. The money can grow over a person’s working life and can be used for health care after retirement, rolled over into a pension fund, or become part of the estate at death.

MSAs give individuals a financial incentive to be prudent health-care shoppers. But they also promote healthy living by financially rewarding those who take care of themselves.

By Merrill Matthews, Jr., the health-policy director of the National Center for Policy Analysis, in Dallas, Texas.

Speaking Out does not necessarily reflect the views of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

No Good Argument

Thanks for an article that underscores our secure foundation in Christ and complete identity as women. I’ve long believed there is no “pro-choice” argument that can be successfully mounted on intellectual, scientific, emotional, psychological, or spiritual grounds when the debaters are women. Even the legality of abortion appears to rest on a subjective, unsubstantiated foundation. Consequently, “pro-choice” advocates work harder to convince a still-wary society that this overdeveloped sense of entitlement and self-absorption is not wretched, but honorable. The women Ellen Santilli Vaughn chose to showcase in her story “For Women, Against Abortion” [Mar. 7] provide a nearly complete picture of feminine debate.

Although one women does not a study make, I can say from anguished experience that university degrees, jetting around the country, the best hotels, a comfortable six-figure income, a generally high-flying 17-year career in a male-dominated industry, a stable marriage and happy children all still lead back to my home where a teenager is missing: a child aborted by its young mother, who, with her 15-year history of abuse and incest at the hands of “Christian” men, believed in confused immaturity that a baby would stand in the way of her “escape.” There appeared to be no alternative.

How I yet grieve over the life potential I chose to crush. If, as “pro-choice” (even Christian) feminists argue, women are society’s heart, then we must unite to end the promotion of death experiences, much less their practice. Abortion tops the list.

Please give readers details on how we might contact some of the organizations highlighted in Vaughn’s story.

Sheri Castleman

Littleton, Colo.

Americans United for Life: 343 S. Dearborn, Suite 1804, Chicago, Ill. 60604; National Women’s Coalition for Life: P.O. Box 1553, Oak Park, Ill. 60304; Nurturing Network: 910 Main Street, Suite 360, P.O. Box 2050, Boise, Idaho 83701.

—Eds.

Small groups disciple

There is a saying that all politics is local. In the same sense, all Christian growth is in and through small groups. Warren Bird worries that small groups will distract the church from evangelism [“The Great Small-Group Takeover,” Feb. 7]. We focus on evangelistic endeavors because they can be measured. It is easy to count, and ignore the statistics that predict 90 percent will fall away. The important task is contained in the oft-ignored part of the Great Commission that requires us to “teach them to observe all that I have commanded you.”

In practice, large groups divert individual Christians from the one-on-one interaction that produces disciplined, mature Christians. That is only found in the closeness and accountability of small groups and is never present in any effective way in the larger congregational group.

R. T. Carruthers

Hammond, Oreg.

I was a youth director who worked in a community with evangelicals who worked hard to ensure the young people we met had a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ” and continually told the students, “Jesus is your best friend.” But I couldn’t help feeling that in their choice of words, they were somehow diminishing God—bringing him down to our level, so to speak.

Robert Wuthnow [“How Small Groups Are Transforming Our Lives,” Feb. 7] helped me better understand my intuition that we were somehow selling the kids short. I am frightened that we are portraying God as a friend (who is manageable and “user-friendly”) in an attempt to lure new people into the church. I fear for young people who may only view God as a handy, benevolent pal to call on when no one else will listen. God is omnipotent and holy. I can’t really relate to or understand a Being like that.

I hope our good intentions of reaching out to new people will not wane, but I pray that what we offer is not just a glimpse of the living God but the whole Truth. Because Jesus is not my friend. Jesus is Lord.

Karen J. Roles

St. Paul, Minn.

Death, the excruciating event

In the February 7 issue, I read Norwood Anderson’s compelling portrayal of death, “The Enemy,” and a notice reporting that my father [Paul F. Robinson] had died. Neither item was news to me. As we held Dad’s hand during the last week of his life, the words of Dylan Thomas haunted me: “Do not go gentle into that good night, … / Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”

I hated my father’s resignation. I hated my own acceptance of his death. But Dad’s passing was a chronicle of Dr. Anderson’s account. Dad never bought a saccharine view of death. He knew it was unnatural and that death broke God’s heart. But in his final days, it was clear to all of us that Dad knew the Victor awaited him. Thanks to Dr. Anderson for treating death with both realism and hope. I’m sure his article will rescue many Christians who feel guilty about finding death to be the excruciating event that it is.

William P. Robinson, President

Whitworth College

Spokane, Wash.

Did Lewis lose his faith?

My wife and I viewed Shadowlands, the movie about C. S. Lewis and his love affair with [Joy Davidman Gresham], who died of cancer. As portrayed in the movie, Lewis seemed to have been robbed of his faith by the harrowing experience [News, Feb. 7]. I’m sure this was not true, but I would like reassurance that my opinion is correct. Did Lewis write about suffering from a Christian perspective after this incident? If so, what?

Reo M. Christenson

West Carrollton, Ohio

See Lewis’s A Grief Observed, first published in 1961.

—Eds.

Truth needs to be demonstrated

The evangelical cause is ill served by the atavistic musings of Pope John Paul II and Richard John Neuhaus [“A Voice in the Relativistic Wilderness,” Feb. 7]. Truth is apprehended not by discussion but by demonstration. Christianity is not a philosophical idealism in the Greek mode but a theological pragmatism in the Hebrew mode.

David Hager

Warrenville, Ill.

Please let go of R. J. Neuhaus and his pope. The very word pope should be revolting to you. To a Protestant, it is clear that anyone who is Roman Catholic has misused Scripture. To say, at the head of the Neuhaus article, that you want help from such believers is pathetic. It is also useless.

Mrs. A. D. Fraser

Montreal, Que., Canada

Is it really in a good evangelical tradition to praise the man who calls himself the Vicar of Christ on earth without noting that it was papal claims like his that have contributed to the existence of the evangelical movement to which you and we belong?

Harold O. J. Brown

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Deerfield, Ill.

The “voice” that Neuhaus writes about definitely has a different agenda and should be viewed with much suspicion.

Charles H. Gillespie

Phoenix, Ariz.

The issue is “trash”

Aren’t we being more than a bit silly when we emote all over the place about sex and violence on TV [“Violence Foes Take Aim,” News, Feb. 7]? After all, the greatest books of our heritage—Iliad, Aeneid, the Books of Kings and Chronicles—recount little else. The Odyssey adds dirty jokes and a scam artist. There’s a trashy way to handle any subject matter and a good way. The issue is trash, not sex-and-violence per se!

A quick and dangerous thought: get rid of pro football (violence) and basketball (and the reputed sex exploits of its superstars), and you’ll purge half the sex and violence on TV.

Douglas J. Stewart

Newton Centre, Mass.

The church impotent

Philip Yancey in his “Breakfast at the White House” [Feb. 7] has provided us with a wonderful explanation of why the church is impotent in its influence on our culture in this post-Christian world. He agonizes over the “alienation that exists between evangelicals and the current administration” and states his purpose in attending this breakfast with the President was to “address our concerns.” He fears our access will be cut off “because of disagreements over these issues,” referring to abortion and homosexual rights, and states that the meeting convicted all present about the need to bring “civility to the dialogue.”

Can Yancey point to a single passage of Scripture in which there is “civil dialogue” between the church and a government ruler? Could he show me one passage concerning believers groveling before earthly magistrates so that our “concerns” would be addressed, then fearing our “access” would be cut off? I see only two forms of dialogue between men of God and government rulers. From the prophets of the Old Testament to John the Baptist to the apostle Paul, God’s ambassadors approach government officials with only two purposes: (1) to confront sin, both personal and national, or (2) to share with the individual the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ. In either circumstance, they were more likely to lose their heads, as did John the Baptist, than simply to lose access.

Until the church regains its prophetic voice, it will continue to be as influential as a child emptying the ocean with a spoon.

Pastor James M. Harrison

Red Mills Baptist Church

Mahopac Falls, N.Y.

It was heartwarming to see there are still some “Christlike” leaders who realize that civility and prayer for Presidents is the Christians’ calling—not political strong-arming!

Unless my memory fails me, the Roman government, as well as its leaders, was an immoral and anti-God government. Jesus did not cry out to the “Moral Majority,” or the “Christian Coalition,” or to any “Religious Right” action group. Needless to say, these politically astute groups hanged Jesus. His agenda was not in line with theirs.

I pray that God will guide Bill (the sinner) Clinton, his wife, Hillary, and those currently in power. Those loud voices from the mob, to the Left and to the Right, are not practicing what Jesus taught his disciples. Christians, beware of voices who have their own agenda!

Jerry W. Owens

Walton, Ky.

As a long-time admirer of Yancey’s writing, I was stunned at his naïve and esoteric musings regarding Bill Clinton. First, no sane evangelical thinks President Clinton is the Antichrist or that his salvation lies in a political party or its leadership. Second, am I supposed to be impressed with “Clinton’s ability to articulate issues in spiritual terms, as well as his knowledge of the Bible”? What kind of litmus test is that? So can Satan.

Finally, who is Jack Hayford to deliver “an eloquent ‘apology’ for the un-Christlike way in which many Christians had treated the President”? Who is persecuting whom? Hayford does not speak for the millions of Christians who abhor the damage Bill Clinton is doing to their faith, freedom, and families. Speak the truth in love, but for heaven’s sake, take off your blinders and earmuffs and speak the truth.

Michael C. McHardy

St. Louis, Mo.

Over a year of the Clinton presidency has left many Christians wondering if all that “biblical knowledge” will ever have any impact on Clinton’s public policies that negatively impact unborn babies, public-school children, and the overtaxed American family—the future of our country.

Yancey asks, “Have we gotten to the place where it now takes courage to go to the White House and address our concerns?” What would have been really courageous is if Yancey and the rest of those evangelical breakfasters had firmly reminded the President he is supporting policies that are deeply repugnant to Christians all over America, and asked him—with civility, of course—what he intended to do about that.

Pastor John S. Sheldon

First Presbyterian Church

Ocean City, N.J.

Clinton has been judgmental of conservative thinking. He says, “A lot of changes we need in this country have to come from the inside out.” Does he mean that conservative Christian thinking has to change? Christian truth is reality and cannot be changed. To be anti-truth is to be anti-Christ.

Marvin Wahlert

Williams, Iowa

President Clinton has so far appointed 22 gays and lesbians to administration positions. Can you name one evangelical Christian who has been appointed? Since one out of four Americans call themselves “evangelical,” the promise that his cabinet would look like America sounded nice, but all it did was help him get elected so he could then break the promises.

Don Rosenow

Green, Kan.

I agree with Yancey and Hayford when they deplore the un-Christlike way some Christians have responded to Clinton. It also is easy to concur with Richard Mouw’s call for more civility in the dialogue between Christians and the President.

At the same time, one must ask where the civility was when, in his first week in office, Clinton took a direct slap at pro-lifers by announcing five steps that were good news for those favoring abortion and bad news for unborn children. One must ask why “the seasoned listener with an active, responsive mind” repeatedly responds to Christian concerns with appointments such as activist lesbian Roberta Achtenberg (HUD) and by seeking to legitimize the practice of homosexuality via such moves as forcing the military to accept gays. Perhaps such actions might help explain the alienation Yancey perceives between evangelicals and the Clinton administration.

We dare not become so engrossed in maintaining civility and “proper” dialogue that we lose sight of the gravity of the harm done by the Clinton administration’s promulgation of abortion and homosexuality.

Curtis Peck

St. Louis, Mo.

Grow up!

David Holmquist’s article proves once again that bad ideas can be wrapped in good English [“Will There Be Baseball in Heaven?” Jan. 10]. As a lively and engaging essay, it fails to support its claim that sports are beneficial. My research indicates otherwise. While play does promote many useful virtues, most educational literature tends to correctly differentiate between play and competitive sports (like baseball), although the article does not.

The article correctly observes that humans are “drawn to the magic of sports,” but erroneously attributes this to the Creator. Humans are also drawn to commit premarital sex, watch violent fistfights, and cuss out drivers who cut them off in traffic. We hardly want to attribute these passions to the Creator merely because they exist in the human. The article breaks an important rule of apologetics. Actions alone do not justify themselves. Just because something is hardly means that it should be.

Adults can get up every morning and go to work for 20 years, even when the roar of the crowd has long died out. Wow! We can work without all that praise, adrenaline, and coaching; that is growth. We’ve finally grown up!

Duane Covrig

Riverside, Calif.

How scandalous for CT to publish the wrong-headed musings of Dodger fan David Holmquist. As any native-born Californian of the right age can tell you, when the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958, God’s team also relocated in the West and became the San Francisco Giants. The forces of darkness and light have been thus arrayed ever since.

Rev. David J. Glass

Crossroads Baptist Church

Bellevue, Wash.

Brief letters are welcome; all are subject to editing. Write to Eutychus, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, 465 Gundersen Drive, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188; fax (708) 260-0114.

Until a few years ago, Carol Thiessen, who edits CT’S Letters column, would pray for mail. As each deadline approached, she wondered how she would fill the space.

But no longer. Our average mail response of 100+ letters to each issue gives her a different challenge: selecting and condensing letters to represent reader response proportionally.

Two topics are guaranteed to multiply our mail carrier’s load: gender roles and the politics of abortion. J. I. Packer’s 1991 essay on the ordination of women garnered a record 79 responses. But the flood of anti-abortion letters following a 1992 interview on the environment with Sen. Al Gore topped that. At this writing, Philip Yancey’s “Breakfast with the President” column is rivaling those records.

Many who protested the interview with Gore suggested that we give equal time to Dan Quayle. How had they missed the interview with Quayle published just three months earlier?

Our evenhandedness (on political, not moral, matters) has been noted by academicians. Scholars from the University of Houston analyzed the political content of four religious magazines over several decades. They contrasted the largely apolitical CT with the Christian Century—once so partisan it temporarily lost its tax-exemption.

In this issue, we continue our efforts at that historic balance: Philip Yancey reports on the puzzling relationship between Bill Clinton’s faith and his controversial policies (p. 24); while conservative columnist Cal Thomas speaks against trickle-down morality (p. 12) and policy analyst Merrill Matthews promotes an alternative to the Clinton health plan (p. 10).

Carol is awaiting your letters.

DAVID NEFF, Executive Editor

Confessions Of A Christian Psychologist

Finding God,by Larry Crabb (Zondervan, 217 pp.; $12.99, hardcover). Reviewed by Kevin D. Miller, editorial resident of YOUR CHURCH magazine.

Reading the introduction to psychologist Larry Crabb’s latest book is like sneaking a peek into someone’s diary: “I have come to the place in my life where I need to know God better or I won’t make it. Life at times has a way of throwing me into such blinding confusion and severe pain that I lose all hope. Joy is gone. Nothing encourages me.”

A confession from one of Crabb’s counselees? Sort of. In Finding God, Crabb attempts to diagnose his own lack of passion for God in his life. In writing the book, he becomes something of his own counselee, while the text becomes the therapy transcript.

The ailment that Crabb diagnoses in Finding God is one more commonly associated with atheists than Christians: unbelief. Too many Christians have shifted their focus from finding God toward finding themselves, he warns. “Helping people to feel loved and worthwhile has become the central mission of the church. We are learning not to worship God in self-denial and costly service, but to embrace our inner child, heal our memories, overcome addictions, lift our depressions, improve our self-images.”

While not the first person to offer such criticism, Crabb’s “countless hours providing therapy for hundreds of people” makes his conclusion worth hearing: “A focus on increased knowledge of self rarely leads to richer knowledge of God.” The obsession of many Christians with counseling and self-help books, he believes, points to a refusal to embrace the more painful—but the only truly effective—remedy: repentance.

It is from this biblical concept that Crabb presents his most original contribution, a descriptive, psychological profile of sin. The apostle Paul’s law of sin is our “inclination to believe that God is not good, or at least not ‘good enough’ to be fully trusted.” This, says Crabb, forms the foundation for a structure of unbelief, which has five levels: first, we turn to others to gain from them what we couldn’t get from God; second, we hate others when they fail to meet our needs; third, we hate ourselves, the way others have hated us for hating them; fourth, we resolve to survive, even if alone; and fifth, we take any steps necessary to ensure our survival.

A myriad of examples is given to illustrate each of these levels, many of them being unflattering incidents from Crabb’s own experience. An especially poignant story goes back to 1991 when his brother died in a plane crash. While speaking at the memorial service, Crabb recalls, “I noticed that a phrase I had used was especially rich.… I paused to let that phrase sink in. During that three second pause, I heard these words run through my mind, ‘I’m doing a pretty good job. That was a good pause.’ ” His selfishness at his brother’s funeral would haunt him.

What purpose do these stories serve? Call it the psychology of confession. “Telling our stories requires us to face painful truths about ourselves,” says Crabb. And he is on track, for, as the prophet Isaiah or the apostle Peter would readily attest, our seeing the ugly truth about our sinful condition is inextricably tied to our seeing God for who he really is.

But Crabb does not leave it there. “Once we’ve faced those truths,” he writes, “we will again feel the noble passions to love, … passions planted in our hearts by God’s Spirit.” Hence, God is found and the joy returned.

Slave, Pastor, Missionary

From Slavery to Freedom: The Life of David George, Pioneer Black Baptist Minister,by Grant Gordon (Lancelot Press, P.O. Box 425, Hantsport, N.S., Canada B0P 1P0; 356 pp., $13, paper). Reviewed by Mark A. Noll, McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College in Illinois.

One of the most encouraging recent developments in religious history is the fresh attention being paid to African Americans. For too long the attitude prevailed that “Christian history” meant the story of Europeans and Americans (with perhaps a footnote or two for people of color). Grant Gordon’s thoroughly researched biography of David George (1743–1810) adds to the growing list of significant books demonstrating how vital the experience of African-American believers has always been to evangelicalism.

George was born a slave in Virginia, but as a young man he escaped and fled south. In the early 1770s, he was instrumental in establishing the colonies’ first independent Black Baptist church in Silver Bluff, South Carolina. Because he remained loyal to Britain during the War for Independence, George was resettled in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, where he established the first Black Baptist church in what would become Canada. George’s pioneering work was not yet finished, however.

In 1792 George emigrated to Sierra Leone, where he became the first Baptist pastor (White or Black) to head a church in Africa. George endured much for his faith from the hands of American slave owners and patriots; he was the object of racial prejudice in three widely scattered regions. But, throughout, he maintained a sturdy faith, which leaned toward Calvinism in doctrine and toward ecstatic experience in practice. Grant Gordon, who teaches at Ontario Theological Seminary, has included an illuminating selection of primary documents concerning David George in this most helpful book.

Downsizing Schindler’S List

Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory,by Deborah E. Lipstadt (The Free Press, 378 pp.; $22.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Richard V. Pierard, professor of history, Indiana State University, and coauthor of Two Kingdoms: The Church and Culture Through the Ages (Moody).

Four years ago a furor erupted in Hoosierland over a part-time history instructor at an Indianapolis campus who told his students that the Holocaust was a propaganda hoax designed to vilify the Germans and that he was presenting the “other side” of the matter since textbooks only gave the “orthodox view.” The school eventually dismissed him for teaching material that was irrelevant to the course and lacking in scholarly substance. However, because he had briefly taught at my university (he actually replaced me while I was on leave), various reporters contacted me. I told them in no uncertain terms that his assertions not only were a gross falsification of history but also were designed to arouse animosity against Jews.

Deborah Lipstadt’s recounting of this incident revived the memory of my first direct involvement in the struggle against “Holocaust revisionism,” and the book itself is a powerful indictment of the fastest-growing and most common form of anti-Judaism today. Moreover, David Duke’s use of such arguments in his presidential campaign in 1992 brought home to the evangelical community the seriousness of the problem. Even some of my fellow believers fell for Duke’s sweet-tasting conservatism that was laced with the deadly poison of anti-Semitism.

Informed denial

Lipstadt, a historian at Emory University, adopts a multipronged approach to the problem. She analyzes the various contentions of the Holocaust deniers and shows that virtually without exception they are founded on lies, half-truths, and conscious deceptions. In the process, she examines the historical origins of denial in the American and European extreme Right, dissects the writings of several high-profile deniers, discusses the movement’s use of the mass media as a tool for propagation, and assesses the matter’s role in German neo-Nazism.

Lipstadt denies the deniers even the least bit of respectability. She never calls them “revisionists” (a term professional historians use to refer to the reinterpretation of significant happenings through the discovery of new evidence and insights), since all they do is deny established facts.She insists that we must never debate or discuss with them in a public forum or the press, as that would imply there is an “other side” to this matter.

She also lays bare the anti-Semitism that undergirds their belief system. For instance, she quotes Robert Faurisson, a French professor of literature, who calls the “so-called gassings” of Jews a political swindle designed to benefit “the state of Israel and international Zionism,” and Arthur Butz, an engineering professor at Northwestern University, who declares the Holocaust “the hoax of the twentieth century,” invented to further “Zionist ends.”

Lipstadt argues eloquently that the First Amendment provision on free speech does not give the deniers the right to a public forum. There is a difference between the government forbidding them to speak (censorship) and requiring the mass media and schools to grant them opportunity to present their views. She argues that the deniers are contemptuous of the very tools that shape an honest debate—truth and reason—and they twist or create information to buttress their beliefs and reject any evidence that counters these. Their use of video lectures and footnote-laden essays even gives their work the appearance of scholarly objectivity; however, they employ the language of scientific inquiry for what is a purely ideological enterprise.

Relatively speaking

One of Lipstadt’s most telling points is that the modern-day attack on the Western rationalist tradition has fed Holocaust denial. The deconstructionists’ claim that literary texts have no fixed meaning and the reader’s interpretations, not the author’s intention, is what determines meanings, leads to the logical conclusion that all truths are relative and nothing is objective. Rejected is the notion that one version of the world is necessarily right while another is wrong. In this ambiguous world, all experience is relative and nothing is certain, history may be rewritten for political ends, and ideological conformity supplants scientific historiography.

The author’s conclusion, “If Holocaust denial has demonstrated anything, it is the fragility of memory, truth, reason, and history,” should make evangelicals stop and think. We have nothing to do with those who deny the objective reality of God, the authority of Scripture, and the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Should we, then, be any more charitable toward the convoluted relativism of the deniers who reshape history to fit their agenda?

Lipstadt’s work is a wake-up call that we need to hear. The fact that so many deniers call themselves “Christians” and “patriots” should alarm American evangelicals. Allowing them to gain a foothold in our ranks simply undermines the credibility of our witness.

Half-Full Ecumenism

Ecumenical Faith in Evangelical Perspective,by Gabriel Fackre (Eerdmans, 230 pp.; $17.99, paper). Reviewed by Harold O. J. Brown, professor of biblical and systematic theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn reported that doctrinal differences among Christians tended to lose all significance in the gulag. The modern secular world is not a “gulag” in Solzhenitsyn’s sense, but here, too, it makes sense for Christians of various colorations to overlook their differences and to stand together for their Lord. It is to this end that Gabriel Fackre, professor of theology at Andover Newton Theological School, has given us Ecumenical Faith in Evangelical Perspective.

Fackre presupposes and defines two distinct types of mostly Protestant Christians: evangelical ecumenicals—the group to which he claims allegiance—and ecumenical evangelicals, the group that he would like to attract. Fackre’s work is genial and generous. He offers a clear and fair typology of evangelicalism. This book will be especially useful in the current context where anyone who takes the Bible seriously, particularly biblical morality, is likely to be branded as part of the “detestable religious Right.” Here he offers valuable and sane correction.

Fackre identifies evangelicals primarily in terms of their approach to biblical authority and hermeneutics, rather than in terms of their doctrines of personal conversion and the new birth. Thus he tends to identify the difference between evangelicals and ecumenicals as being a question of emphasis or degree rather than of fundamentally diverse commitments. This may be a weakness, for evangelicals have difficulty accepting those who do not have a clear doctrine of repentance, conversion, and the New Birth as Christians, regardless of whether they may have a high view of the authority of Scripture. (After all, Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses also profess a very high view of Scripture.)

This points to a fundamental difficulty, specifically the one presented by the late J. Gresham Machen six decades ago in Christianity and Liberalism. The Russian Orthodox, Baptists, and Pentecostals who were thrown together in Russia’s gulags discovered that they shared much in common as Christians; the fifth-generation liberalism in many of the mainline denominational seminaries, however, is, as Machen said, another religion.

This criticism does not apply to Fackre, but it applies to much of the liberal camp where he finds his home. This may cast a shadow on his project, for he cannot truly reconcile the evangelical and ecumenical camps when the ecumenical camp, as evangelicals see it, is populated, and to some extent led, by individuals who affirm neither biblical authority nor personal conversion.

Fackre’s book is beautifully written, tactful, and very well done in many respects, and his generous spirit and sincere desire for Christian unity are to be admired. Nevertheless, his work fails to do justice to the substantial difference that divides evangelicals from so many ecumenicals once they leave the genteel terrain of academic scholarship and enter into the task of contending for the truths of the faith. The ecumenical group in which Fackre finds his home surely contains many Christians, but it also contains much that is in harsh conflict with biblical Christianity. Much has changed since Machen wrote Christianity and Liberalism, but the problem that he exposed remains: “different religions.”

When the long-awaited CBS television project Christy premieres on Easter Sunday, producer Ken Wales knows he will not yet be able to relax. After an 18-year struggle to bring Catherine Marshall’s novel before the cameras, Wales still must achieve a major ratings success to ensure its survival beyond the TV movie and six weekly episodes already filmed.

‘It’s a bit like Field of Dreams. If we produce it, they will come,” says Wales. “The question is, ‘Will they come?’ and I think the answer is yes.”

Christy, a faithful adaptation of the eight million-copy bestseller, stars Kellie Martin, the Emmy Award nominee who played Becca of Life Goes On, as a 19-year-old teacher at a Tennessee mountain mission. Wales is counting on support from Christians and other family-oriented viewers who have complained about the content of television programming.

Wales labored unsuccessfully for nearly two decades to find backers for a motion-picture version of Christy. Two years ago, he rejected CBS’s offer to do it as a series, still hoping for a film version. CBS produced Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman instead. When the network approached Wales again last year, he realized it was probably God offering a second chance.

Christy needs to draw a big audience from the beginning to convince CBS to make it a full-fledged series and for the network to pursue similar projects. Wales thinks his show is well-suited to religious audiences.

“The ideal thing,” says Wales, “would be for every pastor to say to the congregation [on Easter Sunday], ‘We’ve worshiped, now go home, and enjoy a lovely feast, and then gather with the family following 60 Minutes and enjoy a beautiful experience.’ ”

Good reviews

Christy is already earning critical support. Michael Medved, author of Hollywood vs. America, and Quentin Schultze, author of The Best Family Videos, praise the show and its treatment of faith.

Industry heavyweight TV Guide declared that Christy “is as close to that Little House on the Prairie feel as anything we’ve seen, with rugged, authentic locations and strong characters to care about.” USA Today called Christy “the best show of this new batch” of family-oriented series that have followed in the footsteps of CBS’s successful Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.

“The main thing is that this is the kind of program that will make big money and be around a while for CBS,” says Donald Wildmon, American Family Association (AFA) president. Wildmon, who failed in a belated afa writein campaign to resurrect NBC’s Against the Grain last fall, says he has been trying to spread the word about Christy. “But they’re going to have to give it time; they can’t run it four times and say it’s not going to work.”

Wales’s series has important advantages, including the investment by production company MTM ($4 million for the TV movie; $1.2 million for each hour-long episode), the popularity of four-time Cagney and Lacey Emmy winner Tyne Daly, and its prime-time Easter premiere following the highly rated 60 Minutes.CBS is also counting on the drawing power of Marshall’s book.

“After I got [the part], I read the book, and that made me even more excited, because the book is wonderful,” says Kellie Martin. “Whenever I had a question about a scene, I’d just go back to the book and see what happened before and what happened after.”

Martin says her grandmother is excited because Christy is her favorite book. “My friend, who is 18, watched the show and went, ‘Oh my gosh, Randall [Batinkoff, who plays minister David Grantland] is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’ You’ve got the 18-through 70-year-old viewers right there,” she says.

The show was to debut the first week in January but was delayed until April 3, to Wales’s relief. The delay avoided competition with college bowl games, and it allowed for testing preview audiences. CBS then heavily promoted Christy during the highest-rated Olympics in history. Beginning April 7, CBS will air six one-hour episodes on Thursdays at 8 P.M. (EST), the time slot once filled by The Waltons.

Viewers may be surprised with the level of faith reflected in the network program. Sin and the necessity of relying on God feature prominently in the movie. The opening scene of the first weekly episode features the main characters united in prayer and psalm-reading.

“We see several times when [Christy] comes close to quitting,” says Wales. “As that doubt deepens and gets serious, what does she do? She turns to God, not simply for the answer, but ‘God, help me to know, help me to choose. Use me, and if you want to use me, I’ll stay and keep my commitment and do this.’ ”

By John Zipperer.

MIDDLE EAST

Arab Christians See Post-Pact Tests

“We have just experienced a major paradigm shift,” Palestinian Christian Jonathan Kuttab told participants at a February “Celebration of Middle East Christianity” in Washington, D.C.

Kuttab, an attorney and human-rights activist in Jerusalem, said the sealed peace accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) have created a major new reality, noting that issues that many at the conference “had formerly struggled for are now being embraced by former antagonists,” causing “tremendous confusion.” The “new reality” will require Arab Christians to adjust their thinking so that they will no longer automatically defend the PLO and Yasser Arafat as the only legitimate voices of the Palestinian people, he said, but rather become willing to criticize them and hold them to high standards of conduct for their own good.

Several speakers expressed concern that, in the postcommunist era, American Christians would succumb to the temptation to demonize Islam as uniformly terrorist and “fundamentalist.” Sojourners editor Jim Wallis said, “America is going through withdrawal from the loss of its best enemy.” Brother Andrew, “God’s smuggler,” urged attendees not to make “the same mistake with Islam we made with communism” and create an “enemy image” that makes it difficult to share the love of God.

By David Neff in Washington, D.C.

CHINA

Religious Limits Are Codified

China has officially cracked down on religious activity in response to a new wave of growth in Christian conversions.

Prime Minister Li Peng signed new restrictions on February 6 prohibiting foreigners from making disciples, distributing religious literature, and establishing religious schools or organizations. Any religious activities that endanger “national unity or social stability” also are forbidden. House churches specifically are banned.

“Few, if any, of these regulations are new,” says OMF International’s Tony Lambert, author of The Resurrection of the Chinese Church. “What is new is that they have now been published as a code with the intention of enforcing them at the national level.” Violators will be “severely punished,” according to the new rules.

To underscore the absence of religious freedom, 14 Christians in Henan Province—including three Americans—were arrested at 3 A.M. five days after the laws became official for conducting “illegal religious activities.” After five days in custody, one American was deported and the other two freed in a remote field after their possessions had been confiscated.

China’s human-rights record is being watched closely by the U.S. government, which will review China’s Most Favored Nation trade status in June.

EVANGELISM

Recast Lausanne Has Global Look

The Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization (LCWE), which held global meetings in 1974 and 1989, voted at a February meeting in Stuttgart, Germany, to decentralize in order to be more responsive to national committees.

“Our mission and our commitment to the Lausanne Covenant is unchanged, but we’ve turned the structure upside down,” says 57-year-old National Bible Society of Scotland general secretary Fergus Macdonald, who becomes executive director of the Lausanne Committee in June. Under the revamping, the 80-member Lausanne Committee will be reduced to 30 members.

In an effort to broaden the funding base and decrease reliance on North America, the LCWE budget will come from contributions by national committees that benefit from Lausanne Committee services. A new communications center has been established in Oslo, and Lausanne’s fundraising office in Charlotte, North Carolina, will close. The organization has been emerging from a large debt since the Second World Congress on Evangelization in Manila in 1989.

PEOPLE AND EVENTS

In Brief

On February 23, one day after the last legal challenge to ordaining women as priests in the Church of England was rejected, more than 700 Anglicans, including bishops, priests, and deacons, announced in protest that they intended to convert to Roman Catholicism and accept the pope as the supreme head of the church. The general synod voted in November 1992 to ordain women; the Parliament and the High Court later approved the state church body’s action. The first 32 of an estimated 1,200 women priests expected to be ordained this year were ordained March 12 in Bristol.

• Despite a crackdown on religious freedom (CT, Feb. 7, 1994, p. 52), the Baptist church in Ulan Bator obtained legal recognition from the government in February, the first such action in the modern history of Mongolia. After protests from Christian groups, Parliament rescinded new laws that restricted missionary activity and required religious organizations to register with the government. A law prohibiting the use of public halls or schools for Christian meetings remains in effect.

• A dozen Americans affiliated with Operation Rescue National were denied access into Norway during the Winter Olympics because of concerns they would disrupt the games with illegal activities. Pastor Gordon Peterson of Minneapolis says the Americans had been invited by Norwegian pro-life pastors to speak in churches. But they were detained for 30 hours, including 8 hours of interrogation, then forced to leave. Peterson says Norwegian immigration officials said they had been warned by the FBI not to allow them into the country.

• John B. Aker resigned as president of the Loves Park, Illinois-based Slavic Gospel Association (SGA) to return to preaching. Aker guided the repositioning of SGA to reflect changes in the Commonwealth of Independent States, directing the establishment of six regional ministry centers where 55 Russian nationals are now employed.

The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), hoping to reinvent itself for the twenty-first century, will launch a top-to-bottom reorganization during the next 12 months.

In Dallas at NAE’s fifty-second annual meeting, the executive committee and the special committee on the future finalized a 24-page report, which was given to the NAE Board of Administration (BOA). The plan includes:

• Reducing the BOA to 100 members from 175, while making “reasonable” efforts toward “gender, minority, and age representation.”

• Discontinuing the executive committee and empowering NAE officers to handle executive and administrative matters between board meetings.

• Restructuring the Office for Public Affairs, renaming it the Office for Governmental Affairs, and placing it under the direction of an executive director and program board with the NAE president serving ex-officio.

The report comes at a time when the winds of change are blowing within NAE, which includes 50 member denominations. David Rambo, incoming NAE president and head of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, called the plan “massive and important,” as he outlined five objectives for the next two years: coming to terms with racism in the church, expanding the leadership role for women, making room for “boomers and busters,” finding ways for parachurch groups and local churches to work side by side, and reinvigorating local evangelism efforts.

Although the proposed changes are historic and sweeping, many delegates and attendees remained preoccupied at the March meeting with the provocative challenge laid down by theologian David Wells of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Wells, addressing about 750 leaders, said the evangelical movement was at risk of losing its “soul” as a result of being swept up into the “marketing ethos” of American culture.

The author of No Place for Truth, or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?, Wells said churches are inappropriately adapting their message to the felt needs of Americans, who respond to the church like consumers. He said, “Churches are doing what Pepsi has done, what Madonna has done.” He called for evangelicals to adopt a “vivid otherworldliness,” to recover “the lost Word of God” and the “holiness of God.” He concluded, “Despite our prosperity, we have less to offer. That is the irony of our success.”

Later, Knute Larson, pastor of The Chapel in Akron, Ohio, defended his megachurch, which uses modern methods and technology to evangelize, calling it “living” theology. He said using “carefully soft” methods of inviting unchurched seekers can be effective if biblical truth remains central and uncompromised.

Former NAE president B. Edgar Johnson told CHRISTIANITY TODAY that Wells has a “prophetic warning for the church today,” yet Larson’s response shows leaders how to address the modern problem of the church in a culture where religious faith is marginalized.

Outgoing president Donald Argue kept pace with Wells’s hard words, saying the culture had shifted and “new paradigms” were called for if the evangelical movement was to become “an architect of the future.”

In an unusual step toward that end, Argue announced that within the next year, discussions will be initiated with the National Black Evangelical Association (NBEA) on bringing the leadership of the two groups closer relationally.

Evangelicals and their connection to American power politics was another issue that commanded attention at the convention. The NAE had invited President Bill Clinton to address the body, but the invitation was not accepted.

NAE executive director Billy Melvin told the gathering, “All of us should be praying, writing letters, and voting.… Some of us should be serving on school boards, running for mayor, the state legislature, the Congress, or even the White House.” NAE recently launched the Christian Citizen Campaign to assist local churches in helping people to “pray for those in authority” and exercise their responsibility to vote.

Richard Land, executive director of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Christian Life Commission, spoke out against the “myth” that it is wrong to “legislate morality.” He pointed to the civil-rights legislation of the 1960s as an example of appropriate action.

By Timothy C. Morgan in Dallas.

Like two brothers in a divided family, Christians and Jews still have a strong family relationship, says professor Marvin Wilson. He believes they can patch up that relationship while still adhering to their religious distinctives.

Wilson is professor of biblical studies at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, and a veteran of Jewish/Christian dialogue. He made his plea for reconciliation at a February conference in Jerusalem that featured top Christian and Jewish leaders from around the world. He was the only American evangelical among the plenary speakers.

“We who are Christians have a Jerusalem connection at the very heart of our faith,” Wilson says. “When the church makes the entire Bible rather than church history its starting point, it will be driven to recognize on the deepest level that Christianity is Jewish.… We are Abraham’s spiritual children, grafted into Israel, not Israel into us.”

Wilson does not believe the church has permanently displaced Israel. Instead, he believes “the church in these latter days will … grow into a deeper appreciation of its own Hebraic heritage and foundation.”

Some in the church still blame the Holocaust on the Jews’ refusal to recognize the lordship of Jesus, Wilson says. He instead believes the “dejudaization of the church … fostered through a neglect of the Hebrew Bible” was one of its main contributing factors.

Limits of evangelism

Despite Christianity’s debt to Judaism, Wilson is not urging Christians to pretend to be Jewish, or pretend not to be Christian. In remarks later in the conference, George Carey, archbishop of Canterbury, said Christians in interfaith dialogue do not have to repudiate evangelism. However, they have to recognize there are limits to evangelizing.

“Jews have often been the victims of intolerant and insensitive Christian evangelizing,” Carey said. “We have been guilty of treating people as objects which need a religious formula instead of people greatly loved by God.”

Linda Compton, an evangelical Presbyterian minister who directs the Marin Interfaith Council in San Rafael, California, endorsed Wilson’s ideas.

“Since my conversion, I’ve always felt that we can’t understand our Christianness if we don’t understand Jesus Jewishness,” Compton said.

Wayne Hilsden, senior pastor of King of Kings Assembly, an evangelical church in Jerusalem, also agrees with Wilson’s message. “It’s going to take a miracle for Jews to trust Christians again,” Hilsden says. “But I believe that miracle is possible.”

Hilsden sees the return of the Jews to their Promised Land as evidence that God is at work. “I believe that Jews will open their eyes to the truth of Jesus and his messiahship,” he says. “That will be a revelation of God that will come supernaturally. That will outdo any human efforts to convince Jewish people of our sincerity.”

Common ground

“I think that Orthodox Judaism and evangelical, charismatic Christianity have a lot in common,” said Rabbi Yitzhack Rubin, who attended the conference; that includes “a belief in God, a belief in a God who is concerned, a belief in God who gave us a blueprint for life, which we find in the Scriptures.”

Rabbi Irving Greenberg, professor at the Center for Jewish Learning and Leadership, went one step further. Speaking after Wilson, Greenberg commended the Christian post-Holocaust self-critique and lamented “unrevised negative stereotypes and contemptuous judgments” within Judaism.

“This is why I as a Jew have come to affirm that it was in the fullness of time that Christianity was born,” he said. “This represented not a replacement or a repudiation but an offshoot, a reaching out to the rest of humanity.”

Wilson says one good way to change attitudes toward Jews is for Christians to visit Israel. “The land has its own built-in power. It can change lives.”

The conference, Religious Leadership in Secular Society, drew 450 leaders from almost 100 countries. It was sponsored by the Bamot Center for Cultural and Social Studies and the Tantur Ecumenical Institute.

Conspicuous by their absence were local Christian Arabs, although the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Michel Sabbah, spoke on the final morning. Some ultra-orthodox rabbis protested the conference.

By Gordon Govier in Jerusalem.

Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary president Russell H. Dilday appeared before the school’s board of trustees March 8 for what appeared to be a scheduled performance review.

The next day, however, trustees for Southwestern, operated by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), went into executive session for about an hour. Word spread quickly across the Fort Worth campus, and students and faculty gathered outside the door to sing and pray. Dilday emerged and informed onlookers that the largest seminary in the world no longer had a president.

Soon after, newly elected trustee chair Ralph W. Pulley, Jr., made it official: Dilday had been fired from the post he held for 16 years.

According to Baptist Press, trustees said Southwestern “needed a new direction for the twenty-first century.” At a news conference, Pulley declined to reveal the vote of the 40-member board. Nor did he comment on whether he regarded Dilday as the latest victim in the long-standing power struggle between conservatives and moderates within the SBC.

“This happened so suddenly and unexpectedly that we’re still trying to assess what the damage will be,” says Leon McBeth, a church historian wbo has taught at Southwestern for 34 years. According to McBeth, trustees had been trying to oust Dilday for a long time but “didn’t have the votes.” That changed, he says, as Dilday’s supporters rotated off the board and opponents were elected.

Rather than a liberal-conservative rift, McBeth says “it is a struggle between two kinds of conservatives.” The more conservative generally holds a strict view of scriptural inerrancy.

“If any event is going to create a schism in the Southern Baptist Convention, this is it,” says Bill Leonard, religion chair at Samford University in Birmingham. He cites Dilday’s “impeccable” credentials as a traditionalist. “There’s no way this can be seen as a theological purge. It’s a political purge.”

Dilday’s access to seminary offices has been restricted. He and his wife were ordered to vacate their campus house by June 7, though Dilday, 63, has received a severance package. Until a new president is hired, William B. Tolar, the school’s provost and vice president for academic affairs, will chair a team of vice presidents who will hire an interim president.

McBeth says he is trying to talk students and faculty into riding out the storm, although several have told him they are considering leaving the school. “Russell Dilday is a man of high personal integrity and the greatest motivator I have ever worked with,” McBeth says. “We’re in grief here. We regret what happened and how it was done. But we’ve still got a job to do.”

In a word to supporters, Dilday likewise urged students, staff, and faculty to carry on, even though it would be “awkward and difficult.”