“To believe in the supernatural is not simply to believe that after living a successful, material, and fairly virtuous life here one will continue to exist in the best-possible substitute for this world, or that after living a starved and stunted life here one will be compensated with all the good things one has gone without: it is to believe that the supernatural is the greatest reality here and now.”

“I take for granted that Christian revelation is the only full revelation and that the fullness of Christian revelation resides in the essential fact of the Incarnation, in relation to which all Christian revelation is to be understood. The division between those who accept, and those who deny, Christian revelation I take to be the most profound division between human beings.”

Both of these quotations come from the writings of T. S. Eliot, born 100 years ago this month, a poet who garnered equal respect and near reverence from the world’s Christian and literary communities. Given his early reputation as a pioneer of the modernist movement and a voice of despair, Eliot surprised nearly everyone when he embraced Christianity. But a few years later, he came very close to abandoning his artistic calling in a quest for spiritual solutions to the world’s crises.

Eliot acknowledged that anxiety about the future was a central factor in his conversion. The global problems of his day make modern times seem calm by contrast: Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco were spreading terror throughout Western Europe, while Stalin ravaged half a continent to the east. Eliot concluded that only the Christian faith could bring order to that chaotic world.

Then, at the peak of his creative powers, Eliot apparently lost faith in the power of art. He said, “At the present time I am not very much interested in the only subject which I am supposed to be qualified to write about: that is, one kind of literary criticism. I am not very much interested in literature, except dramatic literature; and I am largely interested in subjects which I do not yet know very much about: theology, politics, economics, and education.” As he became convinced that Western civilization was in peril, his attention shifted from art to more pragmatic concerns.

Liberalism and humanism seemed to represent the greatest threats, and to combat them Eliot proposed a “Community of Christians” that would serve as a kind of elite “Moral Minority.” As he saw it, this gathering, comprising the most fertile minds from a variety of fields, would formulate Christian values for the society at large. Eliot himself participated in such a group: they backed an economic reform plan known as Social Credit and spawned a publication, Christian News-Letter, for which Eliot wrote a regular column.

The community, however, floundered. Members rarely could agree on practical programs, or even on the desirability of discussing practical programs. And their common Christian commitment did not guarantee a consensus on social issues. (To appreciate the problem, simply imagine Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore, Jr., Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago, and church historian Martin Marty discussing homosexual rights and abortion policies.)

Eliot’s reflections on society make a fascinating historical study, for many of the same issues are fiercely debated in the United States today. Do Christians have a right to impose their values on a pluralistic society? If not, who can suggest an alternative set of values?

Few students, however, are poring over Eliot’s commentary on society. His political and social theories now seem quaint and a bit fustian, and scholars treat them with mild bemusement. None of his many writings on politics and social theory remain in print. In fact, just to view them I had to visit the rare book room of a major university library. The irony struck me with great force: All over the world, students are poring over Eliot’s poetry, mining the allusions, exploring the images and symbols—many of them deeply Christian—embedded there.

The hundredth anniversary of T. S. Eliot marks a good time to reflect on his career, which offers a living parable of the enduring value of art. Visit a public library today and ask to see sample issues from 1960 of the following magazines: Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, New Yorker, Esquire. Count the proportion of articles that are “literary” in nature, compared with those oriented around politics or pragmatic issues. Then go to the racks containing current issues of the same magazines. You will find a much smaller proportion of literary articles in the current magazines. Or, pick up socially concerned Christian magazines such as The Other Side and Sojourners, or even CHRISTIANITY TODAY, and note how much space they devote to the arts, especially those works that have no overt spiritual or social message.

As a society, we keep turning from art toward more urgent, practical concerns. In a world facing economic and environmental crisis and the threat of global holocaust, who has time for poetry? Shouldn’t we be writing and reading about South Africa, Nicaragua, Chernobyl, and other “relevant” matters?

Whenever I am tempted by such thoughts, I remember the continuing influence of such Christian authors as Eliot, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Donne, Swift, and Milton. (Donne similarly gave up writing poetry at the height of his career in order to devote himself to his sermons, which are seldom read today.) All of these wrote voluminously about the relevant issues of their time, and all those works have become mere curiosities, obscure footnotes to literary history. Meanwhile, their creations based on, in Faulkner’s words, “… the old universal truths lacking which any art is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice,” have not ceased to illuminate and inspire.

The Literary Guide to the Bible, edited by Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Belknap Press, 678 pp.; $29.95, cloth). Reviewed by D. Bruce Lockerbie, Staley Foundation scholar in residence, the Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York.

In an era of feel-good theology and relational homiletics, biblical exposition by textual analysis—the old-fashioned, verse-by-verse teaching once standard in evangelical churches—has become the pulpit’s dodo. Few preachers today know how to open a passage of Scripture and bring it to life.

Furthermore, in most Christian schools, colleges, and seminaries, Bible teaching generally means talking about the Bible rather than studying the text itself. As a teacher of English and Bible at the Stony Brook School, I’m often asked, “What textbook do you use?” Naïvely I reply, “The NIV.” The question, I know, refers not to the translation of the Bible but to whatever adjunct handbooks are supposed necessary to assist teenagers in reading the Scriptures.

We don’t need additional textbooks; we do need to learn how to read and comprehend, read and interpret, read and apply the language, poetry, narratives, and arguments of the Bible. Perhaps The Literary Guide to the Bible will help us reacquire these long-absent skills.

Thoughtful Readers

The book is a “literary guide”; its editors and 26 contributing essayists are literary critics—that is, thoughtful, careful, and critical readers of and commentators on the art of literature. Some of them also possess biblical credentials. For example, Robert Alter, one of the general editors, has written widely respected biblical studies.

However, as Wallace Alcorn pointed out in a letter to the New York Times Book Review in regard to its review of Literary Guide, none of the contributors is a recognized evangelical. And in some instances, the authors would hardly confess to being even traditionally orthodox.

Yet what each contributor brings to this compelling volume is a capacity to read the text as it stands: Not the form critic’s assumed “proto-text,” labeled with some arbitrary letter of the alphabet to give it added mystery, but the standard textus receptus for all English-speaking and literary-minded readers of the Bible, the King James Version.

Alter makes the point, reiterated by Kermode and others, that biblical scholarship has for too long ignored its own greatest asset, “the texts as they actually exist.” Forsaking the “largely disintegrative commentary” of biblical debunkers for a more sympathetic approach, these writers bring to the Bible the same integrity and intellectual rigor they have otherwise applied to the canon of Shakespeare, Dickens, James, or Eliot.

Peeling Away The Superficial

Even for evangelicals, whose view of Scripture is higher and more authoritative than these writers admit, the result is sometimes breathtaking exegesis, the kind of interpretation that peels away layers of superficial knowledge and unlocks a treasure chest beneath. In Alters “Introduction to the Old Testament,” his close reading of the Jephthah narrative may be worth the price of the entire book. Arguing against any presumed lack of literary sophistication among the ancient scribes, Alter uses the Jephthah tragedy to illustrate “the poised choreography of words” (what a phrase!) marking the great stories of the Old Testament. Mining the text for every nugget, Alter discovers the narrator’s “constant artful determinations” in telling his tale. The result is an exemplary disclosure of the text. J. P. Fokkelman’s unfolding of the Genesis narratives also stands out. The scintillating scholarly reasoning of the general essay by Sir Edmund Leach, “Finishing for Men on the Edge of the Wilderness,” cannot be questioned, even if one disagrees with its conclusions. Moshe Greenberg’s explication of Job sparkles in its clarity. John Drury’s revealing treatment of Luke achieves its climax as he shows the risen Christ opening up the Scriptures to the Emmaus-bound companions. “Good exegesis plucks from the mind a rooted sorrow and sets the heart aglow,” writes Drury. His essay is another model of the kind.

This book reminds me of a favorite moment in the history of biblical instruction, Ezra’s reading of the Law while the Levites interpreted it: “They read from the Book of the Law of God, making it clear and giving the meaning so that the people could understand what was being read” (Neh. 8:8, NIV).

If only every professing Bible teacher in schools, colleges, and especially seminaries would heed those words! If every preacher, instead of looking for a catchy topic for this week’s sermon, would practice the art of literary explication, the gift of biblical exposition—then perhaps those of us who sit in the pew would not be so biblically illiterate.

The Poet As Prophet

T. S. Eliot: The Philosopher Poet, by Alzina Slone Dale (Harold. Shaw, 224 pp.; $17.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Pat Hargis, assistant professor of writing and literature, Judson College, Elgin, Illinois.

April is the crudest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

With these words, T. S. Eliot began The Waste Land, the poem that lamented the fragmentary and depressed condition of post-World War I Europe, revolutionized the writing of poetry in English, and expressed his own need for a sense of belonging and wholeness.

But during a spring more than 17 years later, Eliot published another poem, “East Coker,” which repeats the theme from an entirely different perspective:

The wounded surgeon plies the steel

That questions the distempered part;

Beneath the bleeding hands we feel

The sharp compassion of the healer’s art

Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Eliot still knows suffering, as he did throughout his life, but now it is the suffering, redeemed by “the wounded surgeon” with “the bleeding hands,” which must precede the hope of resurrection (Phil. 3:10–11).

September 26 of this year marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Eliot, the twentieth-century’s greatest English poet. Harold Shaw Publishers has joined the celebration by publishing T. S. Eliot: The Philosopher Poet, by Alzina Stone Dale. In this literary biography, which narrates the major events of Eliot’s life and discusses his major writings, Dale approaches Eliot, as her title suggests, as both poet and thinker. She gives equal weight to his poetry, his literary criticism, and his social criticism; and—in what is the strongest aspect of this book—she takes his Christianity seriously and understands what it means to his life and to his work.

Thin In The Middle

As biography, the book is particularly successful in its early and late chapters. Here the narrative is at its best, and the portrait of Eliot its clearest. Dale gives a strong sense of Eliot’s family and the cities of his youth—late nineteenth-century St. Louis and early twentieth-century Boston. The later chapters offer a well-paced telling of post-World War II events in Eliot’s life: the successful plays produced in London, the social criticism of the postwar world, the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize, and his happy marriage to Valerie Fletcher.

The middle portion of the book is not as satisfying, essentially because it covers too much ground in too little space. So many events have to be noted, so many significant people introduced that one never has time to settle into and assimilate any particular topic. (Dale’s style in this section exacerbates the problem; often the text reads like a series of note cards strung together without transitions.) Many things happen to and around Eliot, but a clear picture of him as poet, banker, and editor never develops. The significant people of the period between the wars—his wife, Vivien Haigh-Wood; Ezra Pound; Bertrand Russell; Virginia Woolf; and many others—never take on any depth, and remain only names.

Eliot’s books, however, are treated much better in this middle section, where they are given their proper contexts in Eliot’s life and thinking. Dale shows herself particularly perceptive in noting that, while Eliot’s poetry was being pushed by Pound in the late 1910s, it was the publication of Eliot’s first volume of literary criticism, The Sacred Wood (1920), that actually paved the way for the reception of The Waste Land (1922).

Dale also does a fine job with Eliot’s conversion and the events surrounding his entry into the Anglican church. But still, this middle section would have been much better had it been half again as long and developed in more detail.

Tenuous Connections

Incomplete development also hurts the author’s efforts to tie Eliot to other prominent literary Christians of his time, such as G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. Unfortunately, most of Dale’s comments are only surface allusions: Chesterton once did something similar; Sayers once said something like this. Perhaps her desire to make this a brief, introductory volume caused her to leave these connections underdeveloped.

Dale’s impulse is correct—the relationships between Eliot and his Christian contemporaries have not been explored fully. For decades he has been easily tied to Modernism and to the artistic/philosophical circle of the Bloomsbury Group; however, his more subtle ties to Fleet Street, St. Anne’s, Canterbury, and Oxford will require more than study of the letters and other biographical records. In fact, a thorough treatment of this question may well require a larger volume than this one. But Dale’s work along these lines makes some significant observations and does well to make students of Eliot consider these relationships.

On the whole, The Philosopher Poet is a solid introduction to Eliot’s life and work, written from a long-needed, distinctly Christian point of view. Though Eliot cannot be called an evangelical, we do well to explore the work of this profoundly Christian man who lived in a profoundly unchristian time. As Dale notes in her “Postscript”:

Eliot has become a prophet without honor in his own century, a major poet whose preaching is ignored. But seen as a philosopher poet, Eliot’s vision of a Christian life has something to say to our late twentieth-century world. Today theology has become so secular that the intersection of time and the timeless, of the everyday and the mysterious, has lost any sense of the holy. In this age of anxiety, Eliot speaks to that condition. He describes our modern alienation and despair, then offers us the hope of his own “turning.”

Executive Faithfulness

In Search of Faithfulness, by William E. Diehl (Fortress, 127 pp.; $5.95, paper). Reviewed by John A. Baird, Jr., vice-president, Eastern College, St. Davids, Pennsylvania.

When a retired Bethlehem Steel executive decided to search contemporary society for Christian faithfulness (“a characteristic that acknowledges God’s graceful relationship with us by striving to grow more charitable in our daily lives”), he began by looking where faithfulness appeared not to be—in the business community. What he found, surprisingly, said more about the church and its failure to nurture faith than about the world of business.

William Diehl’s quest took the form of a survey of corporate management, similar to that used by Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman in their bestselling book In Search of Excellence. In interviews and questionnaires, 244 Christian business executives were asked how they looked at their faith and what factors shaped their corporate decisions. They were queried about experiences that helped form their religious convictions, their degree of practice of religious disciplines, and to whom they would turn in time of trouble.

Faithful Christians, the author’s search revealed, enjoy a sense of identity with God; they strive to grow as believers. They pray and meditate on a regular basis, and they find satisfaction in religious-community participation. They give to others, possess a keen sense of justice, and “have no other gods.” In other words, they put God first in their lives. The author adds two disclaimers: Not all persons cited as models of faithfulness possessed all seven qualities, and possessing these qualities does not assure salvation, nor does lacking them confirm an unregenerate nature.

Diehl, however, does more than tabulate the answers to questions. He flavors In Search of Faithfulness with chatty, personal observations based on more than 30 years of experience as a corporate officer and Christian layman. He quotes Scripture, refers to contemporary theologians, and includes a few maxims of the American Management Association. Diehl also comes down hard on the church, an emphasis that provides the essential thrust of the book.

Is The Church To Blame?

The author examines deficiencies of the church in connection with each of the seven attributes of faithfulness. For example, in the chapter on a sense of identity, Diehl notes that more than 60 percent of the respondents confirmed their work as a kind of ministry. Many even felt called by God to their occupations. But he also notes clerical resistance to the concept. Many ordained ministers believe a call is limited to professional church occupations.

In another chapter, dealing with Christian growth, Diehl finds the church again at fault for offering educational programs that emphasize content but lack connections with the experience of belief. America is a pragmatic how-to nation, but most churches fail adequately to link biblical truth with the complexities of the work place. Most preachers cannot relate religious teaching to labor-and-management decisions.

Churches are also blamed for doing too little to encourage the personal prayer life of their members. Clerics, the author charges, see prayer exclusively as a church activity. Likewise, the sense of Christian community is sequestered in the church, although it needs to go beyond the parish or congregation.

Separating Faith From Workplace

Such shortcomings encourage Christians in business to separate their secular lives from their sacred commitments, instead of enjoying a unified life.

The writer completes his provocative mission with a chapter about the barriers to faithfulness. Both business and the church are to blame, he says. The former considers Jesus Christ a threat and therefore ignores him. The latter has pulled God’s people away from engagement in the world. The result has been that the church has become increasingly irrelevant in American life and culture.

Some readers may feel the author is overly critical of the local church and its ministers. Indeed, he makes sweeping charges. Many believers do find nurture and solace in their congregational and parish life. Had Diehl acknowledged that fact, he would have strengthened his book.

Yet overall, In Search of Faithfulness represents an intelligent look at an elusive subject and contributes worthwhile discussion toward closing the false dichotomy of sacred and secular, church and business, faith and daily life.

PUBLIC POLICY

The shopping mall parking lots are empty every Sunday in Toronto, Canada, and the concept of a day of rest for clerks and salespeople remains largely intact.

But in Vancouver, British Columbia, 2,500 miles away on that nation’s west coast, Sunday has become almost like any other in the world of retail commerce. And experts say Toronto and other cities in Ontario may soon allow Sunday shopping. So far, Christians are giving little more than token support to preserve what is described in legalese as a “common pause day.”

The issue has warmed up in Ontario, particularly, because the provincial government has introduced “local option” legislation, which would shift decision making on Sunday opening from provincial to municipal jurisdiction. Passage of the legislation is awaiting public hearings.

Domino Effect?

The flaw in the legislation, according to Hudson Hilsden, one of the vice-presidents of the Coalition Against Open Sunday Shopping (CAOSS), is that municipalities would face unbearable economic pressures once neighboring communities opened stores on Sunday.

Hilsden, who is social concerns director for the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada (the Canadian equivalent to the Assemblies of God), says raising Christian support for the issue has not been easy “because there is a perception that Ontario Premier David Peterson will do whatever he wants” about Sunday opening. Peterson’s Liberal government was elected with a massive majority last fall and is currently enjoying unprecedented popularity.

Hilsden notes that CAOSS is fighting Sunday opening as a family issue. The biblical one-day-in-seven rest concept is meant to enhance not only worship but family togetherness, he maintains. CAOSS has printed two million bulletin inserts distributed to churches throughout Ontario. The insert calls for Sunday to be a family day and notes, “People are much more than economic entities.”

The Sunday-opening issue first emerged in the prairie province of Alberta in 1984, when a Calgary store was charged with violating the Lord’s Day Act, the legislation that governed Sunday opening at the time. The Supreme Court of Canada threw out the act, claiming it violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom by favoring a Christian-initiated pause day.

What followed were various forms of action in Canada’s ten provinces, all seeking to fill the vacuum left by the Lord’s Day Act’s demise. In Alberta, for example, the provincial government set up a system under which residents of a city could petition for a referendum to decide the issue locally. Cities in which petitions were not successfully advanced, including Calgary and Edmonton, were left with virtually wide-open Sundays.

Profiting From Service

British Columbia has also experienced a trend toward Sunday shopping, and some observers blame this on the Christian community. In fact, Jim Pattison, a household word in the retail service community there and an avowed evangelical, set the pace by opening his own chain’s megamarkets on Sunday.

To Pattison, the issue is corporate responsibility to provide service to the public. In one interview, he said the biblical concept of servanthood was a sound argument for opening on Sundays, in the evenings, or at any other time there is a public demand for service. Pattison allows, however, that Christians and others not wanting to work on Sunday, Saturday, or any other recognized rest day should be protected by law from discrimination.

And, indeed, Christians in different parts of Canada see it from different perspectives. In Toronto, for example, Christians who want a Sunday pause day have had to be careful that their viewpoint was not seen as anti-Semitic. Toronto has a Jewish population of close to 150,000, and many of the businesses wanting Sunday opening are run by Jewish people for whom Sunday work is not a matter of conviction.

For that reason, many who argue for Sunday closing propose that in areas where Jewish influences dominate, the day of closing should perhaps be Saturday.

The irony of that argument is that Ontario’s local-option proposal would permit such geographic logistics. And any Toronto Christians not bound by a conviction to refrain from Sunday shopping would only be a short driving distance from the places where they could exercise their freedom.

By Lloyd Mackey.

UPDATE

Efforts to secure a pardon for Oliver North give the Religious Right a lucrative cause.

With the Iran-contra trial on the horizon, Oliver North is getting a boost from some of his most loyal fans—conservative Christian activists.

The forces of the Religious Right have spent the summer garnering hundreds of thousands of names for a petition drive to win a presidential pardon for North. His trial—on charges related to the diversion of Iran arms’-sales profits to the Nicaraguan contras—is due to begin soon after the November elections.

Jerry Falwell, through his television and political ministries, has garnered approximately two million names, according to spokesman Mark DeMoss (CT, May 13, 1988, p. 40). Falwell plans to deliver five million names—gathered mostly by way of a toll-free telephone number—to the White House by the time the trial begins.

Also generating pro-North signatures has been the American Freedom Coalition (AFC). Led by Robert Grant of Christian Voice, the year-old group has been controversial because of its acknowledged ties to Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. Concerned Women for America, another conservative Christian group in Washington, has also spearheaded a campaign.

While enthusiastically behind him, the pro-North activists are not doing it simply for “Ollie,” as he is known by them. Leaders of the Religious Right have counted on the North cause to help put them back in the political spotlight and raise sorely needed funds.

“There haven’t been many issues on which to galvanize the Religious Right in the past year or so,” said Richard Viguerie, known as the direct-mail marketing whiz of the conservative movement. “Ollie is a certified five-star hero in a movement that is particularly short on heroes at this time.”

According to the AFC’s Grant, the exmarine has also been a big—and timely—fund-raising issue for the Religious Right. Like others in the movement, Grant declined to give a bottom-line figure. But he did say his group has sent out approximately eight to nine million pieces of direct mail emphasizing the plight of North, attracting 300,000 contributors. He added that the coalition has sold 100,000 copies of a videotape documentary on North, at $25 each.

More Than A Cause

But to activists like Grant, North is more than a way to raise money. He is a fellow born-again Christian.

Raised in a devout Roman Catholic family in upstate New York, North embraced Pentecostalism in the late 1970s while stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. Journalist Ben Bradlee writes about this in his recent biography, Guts and Glory: The Rise and Fall of Ollie North. Bradlee tells how North was led away from Catholicism by a commanding officer who—according to several fellow marines—helped cure him of a slight limp and back pain by way of faith healing.

North is now a member of the Church of the Apostles, a charismatic Episcopal parish in Fairfax, Virginia.

While some conservative Christians hope to secure a presidential pardon for North by the time Reagan leaves the White House, many Americans, including evangelicals, do not believe the lieutenant colonel did the right thing in his unauthorized campaign to aid the contras. There is one sign of an uphill battle: The National Association of Evangelicals is keeping a safe distance from the pro-North activities.

By William Bole.

MISSION

A blind person anywhere in the world faces physical and social barriers. But to be blind in Thailand is especially difficult.

Prayat Punongong lost his sight at the age of eight in 1961, the result of an automobile accident. And in this predominantly Buddhist nation, blindness and other disabilities are commonly interpreted as punishment for sin in a previous life.

Punongong believed otherwise, and with the aid of Christian missionaries fought to receive the education he wanted. He became a Christian in the process, and in 1978 started a school for the blind with $500 and 13 students.

A decade later some 80 blind people, mostly young children, study at the Khon Kaen Training Center, where Punongong serves as administrator. Today the school receives most of its financial support from the Christian Blind Mission International (CBMI), with international headquarters in West Germany.

Now, instead of being hidden from public view due to their parents’ shame, or confined to the streets as beggars, many blind youth in Thailand are learning to care for and support themselves. One major goal of the program is to prepare students for successful integration into government-operated schools.

“In my country,” says Punongong, “children are told that if they shake hands or stand too close to a blind person, they will get a disease or have bad luck.” Hundreds of graduates from the school Punongong founded now destroy this myth every day in government schools throughout Thailand.

Punongong’s efforts also provide a source for his Christian testimony. “In the Gospel of John,” he recalls, “the disciples asked Jesus if a man was born blind because he sinned or because his parents sinned. Jesus said it was neither.”

Time is set aside at the Khon Kaen center for prayer and for worship as part of the students’ two-year experience there. “We want the students to learn how to function in society,” said Punongong. “We also want them to see the light that is God.”

World Scene

EASTERN EUROPE

Camp Meeting In Poland

Evangelistic meetings held in Poland this summer were eagerly attended, according to a report from Campus Crusade for Christ’s European office. Nearly 6,000 attended the largest of the week-long series of meetings, with 200 accepting Christ.

Observers report no interference from the Polish government. The meetings were held in a large tent in the village of Cieszyn, and Polish television produced a program about the event—a first, according to observers. Organizers of the event videotaped the proceedings and will distribute the tapes to organizers of home Bible studies this winter. Protestants in Poland number 120,000, compared to the nation’s 35 million Catholics.

TRENDS

Islam Goes To College

Over the past ten years, several British universities have established departments of Islamic or Middle Eastern studies that are heavily financed by Islamic nations or individuals. According to a report from People International, an outreach ministry to Muslims, the university centers “promote Islam” while giving it “academic credibility.”

Contributions from Persian Gulf states to Oxford University’s Center for Islamic Studies have been estimated at close to $10 million. Other British universities receiving similar aid are Exeter and Newcastle.

A spokesperson for People International says that Islamic clergy see England as a potential source of converts.

UPDATE

China Seeks Church Help

Faced with corruption in government and moral decay in society, Chinese Communist leaders may be turning to the church for help, says a report from the Hong Kong-based Chinese Church Research Centre. The report referred to conversations between premier Li Peng and American evangelist Billy Graham, where Ping suggested Christianity could play a role in China’s efforts to fight moral and social problems.

In June, the government allowed the official Protestant church to consecrate its first bishops in more than 30 years. The government also allowed a Catholic bishop who had been imprisoned for 30 years to visit the United States. The report says such activity may be the result of Chinese Christians’ reputation for being good citizens.

PACIFISTS

Baptists Study Peace Roots

Last month a group of Baptists met in Sweden for the first International Baptist Peace Conference. There were nearly 200 Baptists from 27 countries in attendance.

“We are discovering the presence of a worldwide community of Baptists who share our convictions, along with an almost-forgotten history of Baptist peacemakers,” noted Ken Sehested, the executive director of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America, which helped sponsor the event.

The conference focused heavily on Baptist history. Twice each day Paul Dekar, a Baptist church historian from Canada, told brief stories of Baptists who struggled to abolish slavery, oppose war, and reform prisons. But Australian history professor Heather Vose noted that the majority opinion among Baptists since the seventeenth century has been to support the use of violence in resolving conflict.

The five-day event included participants from the Soviet Union and East Germany. One specific result of the historic conference—a “Baptist Pen Pals for Peace” network—was initiated by 12-year-old Courtney Walsh of Memphis, Tennessee.

MIDDLE EAST

Plea For Jailed Christian

Christians in Egypt have begun a campaign to free a fellow believer who has been in jail for his faith for nearly two years. Abdul-Rahman Mohammed Abdul-Ghaffar was arrested on October 21, 1986, without explanation and has never been given a legal hearing.

No official charges have been brought against Abdul-Rahman, but informed sources say he will be accused of “exploiting religion to promote extremist ideas and divide national unity and social peace.” This was the same charge used against ten other Christian converts from Islam detained in 1986. They were released after widespread Western media attention.

Prompted by what he had read of Christ in the Qur’an, Abdul-Rahman, a medical doctor, began a study of the Bible in 1981, which ultimately led to his Christian conversion.

ELECTRONIC EVANGELISM

Bible Beamed To North Korea

South Korea’s Christian Broadcasting System (CBS) recently began airing a daily program of Bible reading at dictation speeds for listeners in North Korea.

“We do not know if anyone in North Korea is listening,” said the program’s sponsor,” Peter Lee. Radio ownership is carefully controlled by the North Korean government. The few that are available have no tuning dial, just an on/off switch preset to the official government channel.

According to a report from News Network International, this is believed to be the first time the Bible has been read across the airwaves to people in North Korea. However, a CBS spokesman said that “hard evidence of a Christian audience in North Korea is not available.” Most Christians fled the northern section of the Korean peninsula during the Korean War.