Can Christianity survive a 19-inch (diagonal-measure) gospel?

“Worse theology may surface only with the help of better technology.” Thus Drew University theologian Thomas Oden recently addressed the influence of television on gospel communication. Oden considers television technology a “gift of God, but … subject to abuse.” It is morally neutral but seriously limited in its ability to communicate the gospel.

Others believe that television technology is inherently opposed to gospel communication.

And what of the problems that plague all forms of gospel communication, but are multiplied by the tremendous scale of broadcasting? Local churches and evangelistic organizations all struggle with fund-raising ethics, public relations problems, evangelistic follow-up and disciple-making, and the temptations of power and vanity. Does mass communication merely magnify these? Or does it create problems and temptations all its own?

The Christianity Today Institute decided to explore the problems of televangelism and the special responsibilities of religious broadcasters through the eyes of a communications expert, two theologians, a pastor, and a journalist:

• Quentin J. Schultze addresses the question of how television as a medium contributes to and exacerbates the problems of religious communication. Schultze is chair of the Department of Communications Arts and Sciences, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is the author of Television: Manna from Hollywood? (Zondervan).
• Thomas C. Oden provides a biblical study of the ethical issues facing anyone who has the opportunity to raise, and the responsibility to handle, large sums of money for the work of the ministry. Oden is Henry Anson Buttz Proffessor of Theology at Drew University, Madison, New Jersey. He is the author of Conscience and Dividends: Church and the Multinationals (Ethics and Public Policy), The Living God (Harper & Row), and the newly published Doctrinal Standards in the Wesleyan Tradition (Zondervan).
• Steve Wright records a parish minister’s reaction to the electronic church and the evangelistic harvest his church has reaped. Wright is senior pastor of Wesleyan Community Church, Oak Lawn, Illinois.
• CT news editor Lyn Cryderman visited the headquarters of Jerry Falwell, Robert Schuller, D. James Kennedy, and others in order to interview televangelists on their own turf.
• CT Institute dean Kenneth S. Kantzer concludes this report with insights for local pastors and church leaders. Kantzer is chancellor of Trinity College and professor emeritus of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.

Must TV distort the gospel?

Real generosity

Let us hide away our charity—yes, hide it even from ourselves. Give so often and so much as a matter of course, that you no more take note that you have helped the poor than that you have eaten your regular meals. Do your alms without even whispering to yourself, “How generous I am!” Do not thus attempt to reward yourself. Leave the matter with God, who never fails to see, to record, and to reward.… This is the bread, which eaten by stealth, is sweeter than the banquets of kings. How can I indulge myself today with this delightful luxury?

—C. H. Spurgeon in Faith’s Checkbook

All end in the cross

Suffering is the heritage of the bad, of the penitent, and of the Son of God. Each one ends in the cross. The bad thief is crucified, the penitent thief is crucified, and the Son of God is crucified. By these signs we know the widespread heritage of suffering.

—Oswald Chambers in Christian Discipline

Real Cross Bearing

To deny self does not mean to deny things. It means to give yourself wholly to Christ and share in His shame and death. To take up a cross does not mean to carry burdens or have problems. I once met a lady who told me her asthma was the cross she had to bear! To take up the cross means to identify with Christ in His rejection, shame, suffering, and death.

—Warren W. Wiersbe in A Time to Be Renewed

Hollywood’s influence, our responsibility

Even if we personally avoid the movie industry’s products, those products will have an ongoing impact on both the dreams and the fears of our culture. However uncomfortable we may be with what movies represent, we will be influenced by them because we are surrounded by their impact. If you doubt it, consider what you read on the backs of breakfast cereal boxes, the toys your grandchild wants for Christmas, the music taught in schools, and the televised versions of movies that fill some of your own evenings.… Is it not a Christian responsibility to study the cinema and to use it to advantage?

—John Stapert in The Church Herald (Sept. 18, 1987)

The ages of ministry

When I turned 30 I wanted to build a large church. At 40 I wanted to learn how to preach. But at 50 I want to know God deeply.

—Truman Dollar in Fundamentalist Journal (Nov. 1987)

No loose strings

We must face the fact that many today are notoriously careless in their living. This attitude finds its way into the church. We have liberty, we have money, we live in comparative luxury. As a result, discipline practically has disappeared.

What would a violin solo sound like if the strings on the musician’s instrument were all hanging loose, not stretched tight, not “disciplined”?

—A. W. Tozer in Men Who Met God

Loving people or targets?

You make us feel that you want to do good to us, but you don’t make us feel that you need us.

—an Indian Christian, quoted by Daniel Fleming in Whither Bound in Missions?

A holy truism

It is a common temptation of Satan to make us give up the reading of the Word and prayer when our enjoyment is gone; as if it were of no use to read the Scriptures when we do not enjoy them, and as if it were no use to pray when we have no spirit of prayer. The truth is that, in order to enjoy the Word, we ought to continue to read it, and the way to obtain a spirit of prayer is to continue praying. The less we read the Word of God, the less we desire to read it, and the less we pray, the less we desire to pray.

—George Müller in A Narrative of Some of the Lord’s Dealings with George Müller

Today’s world suffers from a lack of moral courage. By that I do not mean physical bravery or sacrificial heroism. Admirable as these kinds of behavior undoubtedly are, they must not be confused with moral courage. Rambo, for example, is an adventurer of cold-blooded fearlessness. But he is not a model of moral courage.

To understand what I have in mind, consider the confrontation recorded in 1 Kings 22. It is the only time the prophet Micaiah appears on the biblical stage.

King Ahab of Israel and King Jehoshaphat of Judah have agreed to a united attack on Ramoth-Gilead. Their plan has been enthusiastically endorsed by Ahab’s entire religious establishment—his hired sycophants who are supposedly God’s spokesmen. But Jehoshaphat is evidently suspicious of such uncritical unanimity. He asks if there is perhaps a dissident opinion. Reluctantly, therefore, Ahab summons God’s nonconformist servant, Micaiah. They stand face to face, King Ahab and prophet Micaiah.

Common sense, caution, and compromise would seem to be the policy for Micaiah to follow. Ahab, after all, is the king whom Elijah has denounced as the troubler of Israel because he has “deserted Jehovah and gone after the Baals.” Ahab is the king who coveted Naboth’s vineyard and tolerated murder in order to confiscate property to which he was not entitled. Ahab is the king who epitomizes evil. According to 1 Kings 21:25 there has never been a man so willing to sell himself and do what is wrong in the eyes of the Lord. Ahab had no scruples about liquidating people who dared to oppose him.

So, Micaiah, why risk martyrdom for the sake of refusing to endorse a military expedition on which this incarnation of wickedness has set his heart? Why arouse the wrath of a headstrong, ruthless tyrant who already hates you? Why play the role of a fearless fool who stands alone against all these others, maybe these hundreds of state-certified prophets? They are God’s official representatives, aren’t they, members of the ordained clergy? Why, then, venture to lift your solo voice against this unanimous chorus?

You do it for a single reason: You have been commissioned by God to speak his word. He has sovereignly told you his mind, his purpose, his truth. Thus faith, obedience, and loyalty suffuse your soul with moral courage and spiritual strength. You ignore the sudden trembling of your knees, the palpitation of your heart, the tremor of your voice. You deliver your unwelcome message and are hauled off to jail, there, unless God delivers you, to await a cruel execution.

Profiles In Moral Courage

What, then, is moral courage, a courage that will nerve you and me to be Micaiah-like disciples of Jesus Christ in our time? Suppose I define by example.

Example one: In 1966 Mark Hatfield (now U.S. senator) was governor of Oregon. He adamantly opposed the Vietnam War, and had from its inception. Despite the unpopularity and the hostility his convictions elicited, he refused to soft-pedal his criticism of our involvement in that tragic country. President Lyndon Johnson, himself under pressure, sought from every conceivable source the endorsement of our continued military involvement. So when all the American governors held a conference that July in Los Angeles, the president asked that they go on record publicly as approving his policy.

At that time some of the former opponents of the Vietnam expedition had become its supporters. Feeling in our divided country was at a fever pitch. So influential politicians urged Hatfield, “Don’t rat on America.” They argued that it was his patriotic duty to get lost for a few minutes when the hour for taking the poll of the governors arrived.

One by one, under the glare of television cameras, they voted. Yes, yes, yes: 49 yeses. When it came Hatfield’s turn, knowing that his public career was at stake, he quietly voted no. Whatever we may think about the rightness of his position, we must applaud his moral courage, a Micaiah-like courage that reflected ethical conviction rooted in deep faith.

Example two: Pastor Kaj Munk was the spiritual dynamo who generated resistance against the Nazis when, in the 1940s, Hitler annexed Denmark. A Micaiah-like hero, Munk spoke out fearlessly. He said to his fellow ministers in those turbulent days, “We stand as a temple of the holy God. All others have their obligations to this or that. We alone have our obligation to the truth.” He also said, “When justice or injustice is at stake, then we must never ask whether it is worth it. For then the devil always wins. On these issues it is always worthwhile to fight.” And finally, “What we as the church lack is most assuredly not psychology or literature; we lack a holy rage.”

I am afraid the church lacks holy rage still. There is too little blazing anger, ignited by the awareness of justice prostrate in the street and often prostituted in the courts. There is complacency about the blight of lying and deceit spread across the world, the ravaging and destroying of planet Earth, the senseless killing of God’s image bearers by fanatical terrorism and warring governments, and the starvation of little children while the tables of the rich groan with delicacies.

Moral courage! That, Munk boldly insisted, was what was lacking. And in January 1944, the Nazis dragged him out into a field and riddled his body with bullets. He possessed moral courage, the courage that will nerve you and me to be Micaiah-like disciples in our time.

The Steep Ascent

Some of us have no problem acquiring moral courage. We seem to possess it genetically, by God’s sovereign endowment. We come into the world with a propensity to be emotionally and volitionally strong. But others of us are wretched candidates for withstanding hostility, misunderstanding, and criticism, to say nothing of heroic martyrdom. What can we do, then?

We must not only work to develop unshakable convictions, but we must study the lives of biblical characters like Micaiah and those witnesses of the faith eulogized in Hebrews 11. We must keep company biographically with those confessors of the faith of whom we sing:

They climbed the steep ascent of heav’n

Through peril, toil, and pain;

O God, to us may grace be giv’n

To follow in their train!

We must, above all, be in continual fellowship with Jesus Christ, who steadfastly set his face to go up to Jerusalem and to Calvary, resolutely affirming in view of the Cross, “The cup my Father gives me to drink, shall I not drink it?”

Assume then, that, never perfectly fearless, we do acquire a measure of moral and spiritual courage. What will its exercise require? Bear in mind that irrational fanaticism can be mistaken for moral courage. So too can insensitive pugnacity, carnal stubbornness, and egocentric conceit. Thus for its exercise, Micaiah-like courage requires discernment. Not every doctrinal dispute is weighted with eternal consequences. Not every church issue is necessarily an issue that involves the glory of God. No servant of Jesus Christ should take Don Quixote as his model and gallantly do battle with windmills misperceived as wicked giants. Discernment is required.

Humility is also required. I may cast myself in the role of a prophet or a martyr, imagining that I am an Elijah standing alone against the priests of Baal, when in truth I am merely a misguided controversialist—for example, defending the King James Version as the only heaven-endorsed translation of God’s Word. Courtesy is likewise required, a refusal to engage in sarcastic name calling or contemptuous judging of one’s opponents and questioning their motives. We must never forget that our blessed Lord—as Peter reminds us—when reviled, reviled not again.

And prayer is always required, prayer that out of weakness we may be made strong, that the Holy Spirit may pour his power into our minds and hearts and wills in our times of testing and crisis. Discernment, humility, courtesy, and prayer—these are required for the exercise of godly, moral courage.

The simple words Sunday school children sing about another prophet sum up the awesome challenge of a Micaiah-like discipleship:

Dare to be a Daniel,

Dare to stand alone!

Dare to have a purpose firm!

Dare to make it known!

In daring to be like Daniel, dare to be like Micaiah.

Vernon Grounds is the former president of Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary. His books include The Reason for our Hope, Evangelicalism and Social Responsibility, and Emotional Problems and the Gospel.

Modern medical technology presents Christians with many questions. The fact that they are not only ethical, but profoundly personal and spiritual questions as well, came home to Robert Clouse three years ago when he elected to undergo a heart transplant. Clouse, professor of history at Indiana State University (Terre Haute, Ind.), is perhaps best known among evangelicals as editor of The Meaning of the Millennium (InterVarsity Press, 1977).

The following account was written with associate editor Rodney Clapp, who researched ethical concerns surrounding the transplant issue.

I wear a surgical mask in public. Some children, more candid than polite, stare at me. Once in a while one asks his embarrassed parent if I’m likely to hurt anybody. My wife, Bonnidell, joshes me: She says I must be careful not to wander into an unfamiliar bank with the mask on. But I feel a bit ornery now and then, so someday I may.

Other than the papery, yellow tissue across my mouth and nose, which I wear because of my increased susceptibility to infection, I don’t look so different. Due to the prescribed drugs I’m taking, my face is rounder than it once was. I’m a little hairier and no longer balding. But only my long-time friends would notice.

What is really different is underneath, unseen, quietly ticking. My heart is not the same one I was born with and that pumped blood through my body until I was a 53-year-old man. My new heart is two years old. Or should I say 32? The person who gave it to me was 30 when he died.

The History Of A Dream

Organ-transplant patients unsettle many people. A social-service worker at the hospital where I had my surgery tells me transplant patients have a hard time getting jobs, even job interviews. Potential employers fear these prospective employees may keel over upon hearing a difficult question. Or, as the social-service worker more colorfully puts it, “The interviewers can’t wait to get out of the room because they’re afraid the heart might fall out on their desk.”

I understand the uneasiness. I hardly thought twice about transplants until my life depended on one. Since then, of course, I’ve thought a good deal about them.

As a historian, I cannot avoid viewing the present from the perspective of the past. When I survey the parade of precedents to modern organ transplants, our contemporary uneasiness about transplants loses a little of its edge.

As early as 2000 B.C., surgeons attempted to graft skin from the neck or cheek to repair a mutilated nose, ear, or lip. In the third and fourth centuries A.D., there originated legends about the twin saints Cosmas and Damian. The pair was unusual in the annals of medical history, refusing to accept any fees (they were consequently beheaded). But even more unusual, and historically dubious, is the tradition that Cosmas and Damian amputated a cancerous leg and replaced it with the healthy limb of a person who had died earlier the same day.

The Middle Ages brought accounts, possibly with some basis in fact, of masters whose noses were replaced with those of their slaves. (Legend had it that the slave who sacrificed a nose must scrupulously be kept alive; if he was not, the transplanted nose would shrivel and drop off the master’s face.)

In the sixteenth century one Gasparo Tagliacozzi took nasal transplantation a step further. He reconstructed the nose with a flap of skin from the inner, upper arm of the patient. The arm was put in a cast and held to the face for two or three weeks, allowing the arm skin to affix itself to the face. Afterward Tagliacozzi would cut the skin away from the arm. Since all of this occurred without the benefit of anesthesia, it is little wonder that the procedure was basically unappreciated.

From the eighteenth century forward, medicine made rapid progress: methods of tying up weakened arteries were developed and perfected, along with aseptic (infection-free) surgery, anesthesia, blood and tissue-typing, and other medical advances essential to modern transplant technology.

And in the twentieth century, one step has rapidly followed another, like a toddler learning to walk who hurtles forward faster and faster to retain his balance:

• In 1913, Dr. Alexis Carrel transplanted a kidney from one cat to another; later he worked with Charles Lindbergh (following Lindbergh’s historic transatlantic flight) to develop a perfusion machine that drenched removed organs in blood and sustained their life.
• In 1954, Boston doctors successfully transplanted a kidney from one twin brother to another.
• In 1960, Sir Peter Brian Medawar won the Nobel Prize for his study of organ rejection, pinpointing parts of the immune system that attack transplanted tissue.
• In 1963, a Paris physician saved a man dying of leukemia with a total replacement of bone marrow; the year also marked the first successful liver transplant.
• In 1966, a Minnesota doctor successfully transplanted a kidney and pancreas into a 32-year-old woman.
• And in 1967, the South African surgeon Christian Barnard made history with the performance of the first human-to-human heart transplant (animal-to-human transplants were previously attempted).

Organ transplants are not yet commonplace. But in 1986 there were 8,800 kidney transplants (nearly twice the number in 1981), 1,300 heart transplants (three times the number in 1984), and 924 liver transplants (double the number in 1984). Survival rates have also briskly risen: 90 percent of kidney transplant patients now survive more than a year, as do 85 percent of heart-transplant patients and 65 percent of liver-transplant patients.

But these are just statistics. The fact is that each number represents a person: a man who has a family, a woman with friends and neighbors who call her by name, a child with a dog that greets her home from school. Each number represents a person who in an earlier time would certainly have died prematurely, but who today has a second chance. I am one of them. And I am grateful.

A Radical Step

In the 1983–84 school year I was visiting professor of evangelical Christianity at Juniata College, in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. When I went to Juniata, I had been teaching at Indiana State for 21 years, and Bonnidell had been teaching educational psychology there for 17 years. We were excited about a change of place and pace.

The Pennsylvania fall was everything we could have expected. Juniata’s campus stands on steep, tree-blanketed hills. Walking to classrooms, glancing out the window while I lectured, hiking with Bonnidell in the evenings, I saw the foliage exploding in reds, oranges, and yellows. I felt alert and peppy, with nature rioting around me and the brisk air stirring my lungs.

Of course, fall has another side. Those beautiful leaves are not releasing their grip and drifting to the ground simply so poets can rhapsodize. Fall is a season of death. I never thought about that at the time.

But gradually Bonnidell and I realized something was wrong. First I couldn’t climb the hills without losing my breath. Soon I had to sit down to reserve enough energy to teach an entire period. Often I could not summon the strength to carry groceries inside the house. Trying to sleep, I would wake up short of breath. When Bonnidell hugged me, she heard rasping and gurgling noises inside my chest.

Finally, I visited a doctor. He told me I probably had a heart problem. But I knew most heart problems were caused by arterial constriction, which meant accompanying chest pains. And I had no pains; I just couldn’t breathe. I dismissed the small-town doctor’s diagnosis, but took his advice to have it checked out back in Indiana.

Over the Thanksgiving holidays, I consulted with our family physician in Terre Haute. He heard a description of my symptoms, took x-rays, and sent me immediately to a specialist in Indianapolis. On Thanksgiving Day, sitting in a hospital, I learned I had congestive cardiomyopathy.

Cardiomyopathy often is caused by an enigmatic virus that settles in the left heart muscle and deteriorates it. No one knows where the virus comes from or who is likely to catch it. But as a result of it, my heart was enlarged to two-and-one-half times its normal size. The amount of blood pumped into the aorta was diminished; that explained why I was so weak. And the right ventricle continued to pump blood into the pulmonary circulation; that explained why I had so much trouble catching my breath.

Neither Bonnidell nor I had spent much time in hospitals. I hadn’t even had a physical for 20 years. On top of that, I’m basically an optimist. We were told cardiomyopathy could not be conclusively treated: About one-third of its victims get better, one-third stay the same, and one-third get worse. So we took the huge doses of medicine the specialist prescribed and headed home, certain I would recover.

During the next year and a half, I spent most of my days on the couch. I could no longer climb stairs or lift anything weightier than a couple of books. I lectured sitting down. The doctors juggled drugs, trying to steady the condition. But it was out of control, headed downhill and gaining speed.

On the weekend of Memorial Day, 1985, I gained 30 pounds with water retention. My ankles and legs were swollen, my abdomen bulged tight as a drumskin. By this time I was tired of the entire, drawn-out struggle. I felt near death. Bonnidell later told me the life had left my eyes.

Then my cardiologist, who had earlier suggested a heart transplant, began to urge it in earnest. It seemed such a radical step that Bonnidell and I had not pursued it before. Now I found myself alone during long nights in a hospital room, praying and thinking.

Lonely Nights, Anxious Thoughts

Before and since those lonely nights in the hospital, I have given much thought to the ethics of organ transplantation. Most of my friends have supported my decision to have the transplant, but some have challenged it. One acquaintance told me he could not believe that I, a devout Christian, did not choose simply to die.

The issue revolves around our understanding of the whole person. For Christians, a person is not merely a disembodied soul or a soulless body: a person is a unity of both—an ensouled body or an embodied soul, as it has often been put. Moreover, our bodies (through skin, eyes, ears, noses) allow us to perceive God’s creation, to express ourselves to God and to other persons. And our bodies will themselves be resurrected.

But what does it do to the person—an embodied soul—if some body parts are replaced with those of another person?

In one sense, we have long been interchanging bodily parts and using artificial parts—to the point that we now do so without a second thought. Many of us wear glasses or dentures, for example, and do not consider it a moral issue when an amputee straps on a prosthetic leg. We donate blood and, when necessary, gratefully receive transfusions.

In fact, this unity of body and soul—the person—constantly shifts and changes. I change internally by reading different books, making new friends, or visiting a strange culture. Yet I continue to think of myself as the same person I was before I read those books, made those friends, or visited that country.

Similarly, my body is forever changing. Every seven years its entire cellular structure is revolutionized. My fingernails and toenails replace themselves. I lose hairs and grow new ones. My blood sugar content fluctuates. My stomach and intestinal contents are different after each meal or even each aspirin.

With soul and body, there is both change and consistency. We are persons who develop, but we each develop along lines consistent with our former personhood. The outlines of the body and soul demonstrate a basic continuity between what they were yesterday and what they will be tomorrow. Even at a twenty-fifth high school reunion we see similarities in the inner lives of our former classmates and the persons they are today. “Ah,” we say, “the same old Jack: still a card.” And we recognize (at least after introductions) the bodies of these old friends.

So it is, I think, that if a child’s tonsils or appendix were removed, no one would regard her as a lesser person than she was before the surgery. Nor do we look on a pregnant woman as a new and odd creature, although she carries within her a second heart, a second pair of kidneys, and other organs—all with a genetic makeup dissimilar to her own. Even the transplant of a mundane organ such as the kidney does not give most people second thoughts. But somehow the heart is different.

I suspect this is the case because the heart is noticeable. The kidney, the liver, and other unsung organs are the coal miners of the body, working unseen and unheard, little respected, and likely to be neglected. Not so the heart. With attention, we can sense its presence. It pounds against our rib cage to protest overexertion or fright. If the liver begins to fail, we won’t know until related problems are apparent. But if the heart drops its tempo, we head for the clinic straightaway.

The heart is also one of the body’s most glamorous organs. It, not the bladder, is what we write songs about and draw on valentines. And in the Bible, the heart is the symbolic center of body and soul. When persons harden their hearts, they have rejected God. They accept God with pure hearts, and are called to love God with all their hearts.

The heart’s conspicuousness and symbolic significance make it the organ that has most profoundly caused people to stop and think about the rightness or wrongness of organ transplants. As Christian ethicist Paul Ramsey puts it, we find ourselves musing, “What is man now that his heart has been reduced to a replaceable muscle?”

Yet we have known for a long time that feelings and the will do not literally reside there. The heart symbolically stands for the whole person, and the whole person remains even if he or she has altered some convictions or even the physical organ we call “heart.”

A new “replaceable muscle” beats in my chest. But I believe I love God with the same heart—that is, my consistent but developing core self—I did when I confessed Jesus as Lord 39 years ago.

Three Theological Considerations

So, alone in my hospital room and since, I have not found good reason to oppose organ transplants in general, and a heart transplant in particular. But I not only thought in my hospital room; I prayed. I won’t pretend to have come up with a neat, systematic answer during those anxious nights in Indianapolis. But meditating on it since, I can see that I was moved in favor of organ donation and transplantation by three strong theological rationale.

First, the “cultural mandate” of Genesis 1:28: “God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it” (NIV). Many theologians have understood this command to mean that humanity should explore, cultivate, and develop the resources of the Earth. They extend the mandate to include human existence, one aspect of God’s creation. As Anthony Hoekema writes, “Man is called by God to develop all the potentialities found in nature and in humankind as a whole. He must seek to develop not only agriculture, horticulture, and animal husbandry, but also science, technology, and art.” If Hoekema interprets fairly, organ transplantation is a legitimate extension of humanity’s mandate, the exercise of God-given creativity in the cultivation of natural potentials. We should oppose it no more than some of our ancestors should have opposed anesthesiology, saying God flatly willed men and women to suffer in surgery.

Second, organ donation and transplantation is highly Christian because Christians regard death as an enemy. In Paul’s words, it is the “last enemy” (1 Cor. 15:26). Although life is not the ultimate good—not in itself “sacred”—the biblical bias is emphatically on the side of life. The Bible tells us to “choose life” (Deut. 30:19), and that Jesus came so we might have eternal life (John 3:16). It is a deeply Christian deed, then, to stand against death wherever and whenever we can. Of course, Jesus alone gained the final, conclusive victory over death. But our little victories imitate his great victory in a significant provisional sense.

And third, organ transplantation echoes the example of Jesus Christ and his victory on the cross in another sense. He saved us from sin and death, after all, by offering up his body. Celebrating the Last Supper, we remember that we live because he gave his body and his blood. The Cross is the symbol of his self-giving, and when we choose to follow him we are called to make his Cross our own. There are few more dramatic ways we can give to someone else, in the spirit of that Cross, than to share our body and our blood.

Waiting For The Real Thing

However ethical I may have thought organ transplants to be, it was not an easy decision to go ahead with the operation. I knew I might well not survive the surgery. The medication required to avoid organ rejection after the surgery would have dangerous side effects, such as an increased likelihood of cancer. And the entire procedure in 1985 was costly—around $100,000. We certainly did not have the funds for it. (Today, heart-transplant costs average about $50,000. Uncomplicated cases average $30,000, comparable to the cost of heart-bypass surgery.) I learned that insurance companies had been sporadic in helping to pay for transplants, and I did not want Bonnidell saddled with an impossible debt.

Which was exactly what I told Dr. Harold Halbrook, the chief transplant surgeon at Indianapolis’s Methodist Hospital. Looking back, I think it a wonder that Halbrook did not leave me to die. But Methodist Hospital is unusual in the amount of funds it expends on patients who cannot pay, and Halbrook said he would only expect me to make an earnest effort to get my insurance company to handle the bill. On that basis, I agreed to be a candidate for a transplant.

I say “candidate” because the simple need for an organ does not guarantee your name will go on the waiting lists. There are psychological tests to be considered, as well as the condition of the rest of your body. It must be determined that you have no additional organ-system failure, infection, or malignancy—any of these factors might prevent long-term survival. And psychological stability is essential for enduring the stress of waiting for a donor, as well as complying with the post-transplant routine of medicine, diet, and exercise.

Maybe since my wife is an educational psychologist, I take the psychological concerns seriously. There have been cases of men getting worried and depressed after they learned they were carrying a heart transplanted from a woman. Bigoted people have worried they might be receiving a heart from a person of another race. And doctors have reported some patients wondering if the donor “had Jesus in his heart.” Emotional problems, of course, hardly increase the chances of survival for the transplant patient.

After interviews and extensive physical evaluations, I was accepted into the program. Then I rented a beeper, to wear day and night. Because an extracted heart will remain viable for only four hours, I had to be at Methodist Hospital, 70 miles from Terre Haute, within 90 minutes of my summons. If I could not make it, I was to stop and telephone the hospital, at which point a helicopter would be sent to pick me up.

The whole affair, then, had an air of extreme drama about it. For six tense weeks in the spring and summer of 1985, Bonnidell and I waited. My friends were alarmed at how weak I was becoming. Medicines turned my skin gray. Doctors told me my heart was circulating only eight cubic centimeters of blood with each beat; 50 is normal. One physician said he had never seen a man on his feet with so little blood flowing.

I was cold—most of the blood in my body, circulating so feebly, left the extremities to gather around and sustain the vital organs. In addition, my digestive system and bowels stopped functioning almost entirely. Whether or not I would survive until a new heart was available was very much an open question.

The beeper sounded false alarms twice. Once it was merely signalling a dead battery. It went off a second time when I was getting ready for bed. Sitting on the edge of my bed, I nervously dialed the hospital, only to learn that someone had called a wrong number. Bonnidell and I tried to fall asleep peacefully, knowing we were facing at least another day of waiting.

At last, on July 8, the beep was the real thing. When I called the Methodist Hospital hotline, an encouraging voice asked, “Dr. Clouse, how would you like a new heart?”

A Bramble Patch Of Questions

I know little about the young man who gave me a new heart. I only know that, on a summer day in 1985, something happened in Buffalo, New York, and a man was killed. He had a strong heart. Its tissue type was close to mine. He had formerly agreed to donate his organs, or his family agreed on his behalf after his death. Telephone calls were made; computer banks were searched. My name came up. And while I was driving from Terre Haute to Indianapolis, my new heart was airborne, winging halfway across the country.

I can’t say that they were prominently on my mind at the time, but the entire process raises a bramble patch of very pointed questions.

The first is the question of the death of the donor. The determination of death is no longer so simple a matter as placing a mirror under a person’s nostrils. Machines can now keep a body breathing and blood circulating for days (though not indefinitely), even when the brain is irreparably damaged and the body will never again breathe and circulate blood on its own. Hence the introduction of the notion of “brain death.”

The fear, of course, is that an organ donor will be pronounced brain dead prematurely, for the sake of an organ recipient. Many people who consider signing an organ-donor card admit to wondering, “What if I have an accident and it gets touchy? Will the doctors give up earlier when they know I’m an organ donor? Will they declare me brain dead when I’m not really dead, and remove a vital organ for a transplant?”

That fear is allayed when we understand exactly what brain death is. It is not a “persistent vegetative state” where only part of the brain is destroyed, but the incapacitation of the entire brain. Catholic ethicist John Dedek puts it well: “A flat EEG is not in itself the decisive element. No one is to be declared dead who still has the potency of spontaneous respiration. But one who has no hope of ever recovering the power of spontaneous respiration because of irreversible destruction of the brain is no longer a living being, even though his heart and lung functions are being mechanically maintained.”

Brain death, then, is not a word play enabling venal physicians to remove organs prematurely. It is the result of the necessary recognition that medical machinery can now preserve, as Paul Ramsey remarks, “the vitality of specific organs of an unburied corpse.”

The physicians struggle as valiantly as ever against death, whether or not the patient is a prospective organ donor. I have seen and heard my doctors, who have performed dozens of transplants, curse motorcycles as “murder cycles” and stalk away from the emergency room in depressed resignation. (Significantly, hospitals guard against even a hint of deaths prematurely declared; for example, doctors attending a potential organ recipient are never the same ones attending a possible organ donor.)

There is a second, and related, question: the question of organ procurement. The current U.S. policy for procuring organs is “express consent”: No organs are taken for transplantation unless the donor (or the donor’s family) has expressly donated them. Some ethicists and physicians, bemoaning the severe shortage of organs available for transplant, have argued for a policy of “presumed consent.” Under such a policy, organs could be taken for transplantation automatically, unless the deceased or the deceased’s family expressly forbid it. (This policy is already in effect in Denmark, France, Israel, Italy, Spain, and other countries.)

I personally favor express consent. Presumed consent smacks of statist coercion. It makes organ donation a matter of “societal taking” rather than “personal giving.” And in a way it weakens the case for organ transplants. It creates the impression that we cannot offer people persuasive reasons to donate their organs voluntarily.

The third question arising from the process that granted me a new heart is the question of allocation—how to determine who gets the scarce organs that are available. A fairly complicated set of criteria has developed. It includes the potential recipient’s age, emotional stability, physical condition, nearness to death, and tissue type. Most ethicists have argued, and rightly so, against making one’s estimated social worth a determining factor. We should also strictly prohibit any commercialization of the transplant process (though some have actually suggested organ donations might be used as partial payment of hospital bills or estate taxes).

As the system now stands, relatively wealthy people are more likely to receive transplants, since only they can afford them. (Although we can make allocation more just by altering insurance, Medicare, and other policies in a direction that would make transplants widely affordable.) However, laying aside the criteria determining the likelihood of survival, allocation should basically be a matter of first come, first served. In dealing with scarce resources, that is the way of a democracy. And as for the kingdom of God—there a poor man is no less valuable than a rich one.

Organ transplantation will increasingly confront us with these and other tough questions. For example, there is some pressure to introduce a new definition of death—“cognitive death”—for those in a persistent vegetative state. And some doctors favor exploiting the organs of anencephalic infants.

I cannot rest comfortably with such proposals. But as they are more intensely debated, it will be important to keep them separate from the legitimacy of organ transplants in general—just as we regard driving automobiles to be perfectly moral, even though they can be used to run down pedestrians or rob banks.

A Surgery Observed

Heart transplants, as I’ve said, are getting more and more common. But not too many people in Terre Haute, Indiana, have had them. So a local television station wanted to tape the surgery and televise parts of it. Since Bonnidell and I are educators, we agreed.

Only within the last year did I find it in myself to watch the videotape. On the tape I see myself reclining, in a blue gown, on a hospital bed. My thinning hair has fallen back off my forehead. Some of it rests across the white pillow. The camera does not capture my anxiety, really, or my weakness. But I do look tired. The reporter asks how I am feeling, then the top of a microphone appears in front of my face. With a wan, slightly raspy voice, I say that I am ready, that I am a little worried, but that “I have a lot of confidence in the surgeon.” I am a little self-conscious about this being on television, but I add, “And in God.”

Then follows several feet of tape depicting the preparation of the medical team. Eventually the camera catches me on a gurney, being wheeled through the halls. The gurney breaches and is engulfed by swinging doors. Bonnidell lingers behind, watching me disappear. She is not bent, but stands tall and confident. The reporter stops to offer a few encouraging words. Bonnidell smiles, but keeps glancing at the doors.

The scene changes, and we are in the middle of the operation. The camera gazes in wonder at all the equipment: tubes, pumps, panoplies of surgical instruments, monitors. My face, of course, is not visible. All that can be seen of me is a cavity in my chest, with several hands rummaging in it.

Soon the new heart is carried in, borne past the high-tech pumps and monitors in an ordinary picnic cooler. Watching now, I almost expect a surgeon to drop his instruments and exclaim, “Here’re the hot dogs!” Instead, someone removes the top and draws out the new organ, the one that today pounds inside my chest. It is in a plastic bag, dripping the cool solution that surrounded it. A nurse extracts the heart from the bag. It has a yellow cast in the lights.

The nurse holds the old heart, so large she must cradle it with both hands. The pitiful, faithful thing still quivers a little, reminding me of a marathon runner who has run past exhaustion and, lifted off the ground by those who assist him, uselessly churns his legs in the air.

Someone cups the new heart in the palm of one hand. It is membranous, slick, and, I imagine now with the pride of ownership, sleek. It is only 30 years old, and ready to take on a new challenge. It takes a stab at a few beats even as they sew it into my body.

Life After Transplant

It comes as a surprise to many people that, with most transplants, the surgery is far from the most tricky part. A heart transplant, for example, is technically a simpler operation than a heart bypass. In a transplant, the surgeon need only reconnect the large and manageable aortae; in a bypass the surgeon works with much smaller veins.

What has stymied and frustrated successful transplants is the body’s immune system, which attacks the alien tissue of the new organ. Dr. Frances Moore, a Harvard surgeon, compared the process to trying to make a ship without a bottom float with a cargo of cork. The ship will float if you can get the cargo in. The sensitive part is keeping it afloat until the cork is loaded.

Similarly, physicians caring for transplant patients must suppress the immune system enough that the new organ won’t be rejected, but not so much that the patient succumbs to a stray infection. The greatest advance in immunosuppression, so far, is the 1980 development of Cyclosporine.

Cyclosporine takes less of a scattergun approach than other immunosuppressive drugs, which basically depress the entire immune system. It targets T cells, the particular components of the immune system that attack alien tissue.

But Cyclosporine is only a piece of my daily regimen as an organ transplant recipient. Each day I take Tenormin and Apresoline to stabilize my blood pressure; Lasix, a diuretic; Persantine and Ascriptin, blood thinners thought to prevent or reduce chronic rejection as a result of coronary artery disease; Prednisone and Imuran (like Cyclosporine, immunosuppressants); and various ordinary medicines to settle a stomach that balks at being made into a portable pharmacy. My lifestyle must also include strict attention to health indicators. So every morning I weigh myself, take my pulse, temperature, and blood pressure. And three times a week I exercise by walking or bicycling.

My depressed immune system is why I wear a mask and frighten little kids. It is also why I got a terrible case of shingles, an ordeal more painful than the heart surgery and subsequent recovery; and why I have caught serious flu viruses—once a fever made my teeth chatter so severely that a filling cracked.

There are other prices an organ transplant recipient must pay. I have a strict diet to follow, and my life depends on it literally and immediately. Some of the drugs I take increase my chances of cancer or other health problems. And I may die at any time. My transplanted heart is not as predictable as a healthy, original organ.

But ask me if it was worth it and I don’t have to think about the answer. I preach every Sunday at the First (Grace) Brethren Church in nearby Clay City, Indiana. I’m finishing books and articles that otherwise would have remained unwritten. I’m still in the classroom—in fact, I was able not to miss a single semester—serving my life’s calling, with students I enjoy tremendously. (Shortly after the transplant, women students were showering me with sympathy kisses. “That’s all right,” Bonnidell said. “You look so beat up they know you’re harmless.”)

Another chance at work, though, isn’t the half of it. Getting out of bed in the morning is special. Every once in a while I pull off the shelf a book that’s been waiting a long time, crack it open, and realize: I almost didn’t get to read this one. I’m praying more intensely and learning about the spiritual qualities that truly matter—love, joy, patience, peace, and compassion. I’m more concerned with helping people out now, buying a gift for a friend or slipping money to someone in need. Out driving, I stop for a family on bicycles, mother and dad and little boys filing ragtag through the crosswalk. I revel in it.

The biomedical advances of the past two or three decades have given us all plenty of ethical headaches. But I’m here to tell you headaches are not the only things they bring.

Robert G. Clouse is editor, with his wife, Bonnidell, of the forthcoming Women in Christian Ministry: Four Views (InterVarsity).

Should the lives of anencephalic newborns be prolonged so their organs can be donated to other infants?

Late last year, a California couple learned that their unborn child was anencephalic—missing most of its brain. Hoping to bring good out of their personal tragedy, Brenda and Michael Winner found a hospital that, after delivery, would tend to their child in such a way that its organs could be donated to another infant.

Anencephalics, in the words of one ethicist, “represent the nadir of handicapped infants.” Many are stillborn, and most who are not die within a week.

The anencephalic has no forehead. A mass of brain tissue, capped by a membrane, tops its shortened head. Its eyeballs usually bulge, and sometimes its ears touch the shoulders.

Both cerebral hemispheres are absent, meaning the child has no potential for conceptualization, memory, or communication with other human beings. It basically possesses only a brain stem, the “primitive” part of the brain accounting for reflexive actions such as breathing and the beating of the heart. At the same time, anencephalics who are born alive cry, swallow, and vomit like other infants. They grasp objects and react to pain.

In the end, the Winner baby was stillborn and the ethical questions surrounding their particular situation rendered moot. Yet the hard questions remain.

The church, like the rest of society, has to face the ethical dilemmas presented by anencephalics and transplantation, and it ought to consider them on its own terms. Christians are people who risk their lives on the truth of God’s kingdom, revealed in the life of Jesus Christ. So whatever the wider society’s decisions, the church needs to ask: How do we treat the anencephalic in such a way that our words and actions point to the kingdom?

On The Church’s Terms

The large majority of physicians and medical ethicists firmly—and rightly—oppose prematurely ending the anencephalic’s life in order to use its organs. But this issue has a twist. Given the ordinary “comfort care” treatment of nourishment and warmth until their death, anencephalics do not meet current brain death criteria until severe asphyxia has occurred. Organs cannot be taken until brain death criteria are met; but severe asphyxia damages the organs beyond usefulness. The only way to make use of the anencephalic’s organs, then, is to put it on a respirator, maintain its breathing until brain death is determined, and then donate its organs if a recipient is available.

Thus the dilemma. Should the anencephalic be kept alive merely to donate its organs? Or is this exploiting an unfortunate, helpless human being, making it the means to our own questionable ends?

Some would neatly avoid the moral quandaries by declaring that the anencephalic infant, since he or she has no potential for communicating or relating on a personal level, is not a person: It is only persons that we should treat as ends in themselves. Therefore, it is not wrong to prolong the anencephalic baby’s life in order to provide organs that will help another infant.

But the church can never be comfortable with so simple a dismissal of the anencephalic’s personhood. Christians insist that persons, whatever else they are, are a complement of soul and body, to be resurrected as a whole: “What is sown in the earth as a perishable thing is raised imperishable” (1 Cor. 15:42, NEB). Since the anencephalic indisputably possesses a human body, Christians will have due caution about declaring that it cannot be a person.

Are there, then, sufficient reasons to treat the anencephalic as a means to the end of better health for another infant? There are at least two reasons we should consider the matter further. First, God’s kingdom calls us to care for the weak and helpless. Concerns for the poor, the sick, the orphaned and widowed, run throughout the Old Testament. Jesus ministered primarily to the same group of people, and said, “How blest are you in need; the kingdom of God is yours” (Luke 6:20). Certainly the anencephalic is among the weakest of the weak, the most needful of the needy. But we must also consider infants in need of donated organs. They, too, are needy—if they were not, there would be no call for the use of the anencephalic’s organs.

Second, God’s kingdom calls us to promote life, not merely guard it. Christians are not concerned with mere survival, but with the good life formed in discipleship. “Choose life,” the Israelites are told (Deut. 30:15–16), and working actively for the wholeness of life may mean we cannot uncritically accept the flaws of life as we know it at the moment, but we must seriously consider the possible benefits each medical innovation presents. If some babies will live a richer, longer life after receiving organs from anencephalics, this in itself is an argument for thinking long and hard about prolonging the anencephalic’s life to do such transplants.

Precedents And Tragedy

There are precedents for using one person as a means to health for another. The bodies of brain-dead mothers, for instance, have been sustained until the fetus reached an age of viability. In such cases, the dignity of the person being “used as a means” is being respected. The mother would want her child to live: If she could consciously choose to stay on a respirator in order to give the baby life, she would surely do so. In expecting as much of the mother, we respect her capacity to give and to care for others.

Is it possible that parents of an anencephalic might expect (and respect) the same in their child? It may be, in fact, that this child, said to be incapable of relating to others, can enter into relationship in one poignant and significant way: by having its organs shared.

But such talk must be tentative. It is open to abuse and rationalization. There are many specific questions to be answered before the use of the anencephalic’s organs should be promoted. Does the anencephalic suffer significant pain during the artificial continuation of its life? How long can its life be decently prolonged? Does prolonging its life to transplant its organs help or hinder the parents in recovering from their grief? How long will infant organ recipients live, and how much are their lives enhanced? And can society be educated to understand the importance of such life-enhancing transplants? These and other concerns will further shape and sharpen the debate over the anencephalic and its organs.

There are no entirely comfortable answers and probably never will be. But that is part of another call of the people who seek to witness to God’s kingdom. To live after the pattern of a crucified Savior means confronting the agony of the world, never denying the continuing reality of tragedies such as anencephaly, and choices that can, at best, only slightly lessen the resulting pain.

By Rodney Clapp.

Robert Vernon, assistant chief of police of the Los Angeles Police Department, orders 6,000 police officers onto L.A. streets every day. He tells officers to mobilize battering rams during drug busts, to guard visiting dignitaries, including the Pope and the President, and “to protect and to serve” (the LAPD motto) the public. He relishes being on the scene, making crucial command decisions.

Such decisions can be risky, and although Vernon stands six feet, three inches tall and weighs 210 pounds, he realizes he is not in control of touchy situations. Speaking about his police work in general, he says, “Honesty and integrity are the only things I have going for me. If I can maintain my integrity, I can get by.” Vernon remembers one crisp winter afternoon when, in a football stadium, of all places, his integrity was put to a difficult test.

Chief Vernon should have known some of the football fans would be in a mood to party—and to fight—when the game ended. Vernon was among 88,000 fans who had cheered the Los Angeles Raiders to a 30–14 victory over the Seattle Seahawks in an American Football Conference title game. The Raiders were going to the Super Bowl! The contest had been intensely physical, with three scuffles in the first three minutes and a Raiders’ penalty for roughing the kicker. A couple of days earlier one Raider linebacker predicted the team would win using their three P’s strategy: “pointing, pushing, and punching.” He had been an accurate prophet.

As the game ended, thousands of delirious fans rushed the L.A. Coliseum field to tear down the goal posts. A private security force composed of burly ex-football players could not stop them. But they tried, pushing and throwing punches. Their actions only incited the crowd.

“That got the fans really mad,” Vernon recalls. “They not only got the goal posts, but they decided they were going to teach these guys a lesson. So they began putting the boots to the private security guys. We had to call out our troops to rescue them.”

Chief Vernon was off duty that day, enjoying the game with his 24-year-old son, Bob, Jr. He saw the fans pouring onto the field, but figured the ex-football guards would let the fans have the goal posts. Father and son walked to the car, unaware of the melee. Twenty minutes later the distress call crackled over Vernon’s radio outside the stadium: “Officer needs help.”

“Did you hear that, Dad? Let’s go help him.”

They ran back to the Coliseum, where the celebration had turned into a war. At the foot of the stands, Chief Vernon saw two officers pressed against a chain-link fence. More than 100 angry fans surrounded the two policemen.

The crowd had thrown beer on the officers and challenged the two to arrest them. The police had finally arrested two men, and the enraged crowd decided to rescue their handcuffed friends.

“The officers were trying to resist,” Vernon says. “Now there was a free-for-all, and those officers could have been killed. A mob can do weird things—things that no individual would ever think of doing.”

For a moment, Vernon thought strongly about leaving the scene. Thoughts of compromise gripped him: No one knows you’re a cop. No one even knows you’re here on the field. You are off duty. You’ve got a son with you. He’s not armed.

“All kinds of thoughts went through my mind,” Vernon says. “Rationalizing thoughts of keeping quiet. I’m ashamed to admit that [I had those thoughts] … but I was frightened.”

Instead of turning, though, Vernon stepped between the crowd and the besieged officers, as did his son. Vernon began talking as fast as he could. “Now you guys, you don’t want to go to jail. You don’t want a record, do you?” The assistant police chief began pointing at individuals, trying to break the mob psychology. “Sir, I know you don’t have a criminal record, and neither do you.”

“Are you a cop?” someone asked. “Yes sir, I am, and I’ve got a gun right here, too.” The mob mood cooled temporarily, but later rekindled. One fan shouted from the pack: “Come on, let’s get them! They can’t possibly take us all on.”

“For a few minutes we went round and round,” Vernon says. “I could see the temperature rise and fall. Fortunately, God was with us. Something caused them to settle down. And they turned around. They not only left, but they let us take the prisoners that the officers had arrested.”

The temptation to flee the scene taught Vernon an important lesson about standing for one’s convictions, a lesson he often tells Christian audiences. “[Christians need to] take a public stand with God, no matter what the cost. We [also] need to take a stand for our faith and have the courage to say, ‘I’m a Christian.’ If we are to have revival in this nation, that’s what Christians will have to do.”

Vernon, 53, keeps in shape for his duties as operations director by running three-and-one-half miles most days and lifting weights at the Police Academy gym. His sandy blond hair has thinned little during 34 years of police work. Though Vernon usually works just with his deputy chiefs and commanders, once a month he sits in on detective meetings or rides in a police squad car with a beat officer, to “be at the scene of the action.”

As director of operations, he processes paperwork and speaks to business groups and city councilmen about police policies. But the officers and the public are his main concern and ministry.

Vernon is one of six police chaplains in the LAPD. When he finishes work at 5 P.M., officers can find Vernon waiting in his office to offer spiritual counsel. During his weekends he is a teaching elder at large at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, speaking at youth conferences and churches nationwide.

For Vernon, integrity is crucial in all aspects of police work, whether in the field, behind a desk, or speaking to the city council. He refuses to misrepresent the truth before the city council, “even if it hurts my interests. Several members have told me, ‘We don’t always agree with you, but at least we know we can trust what you say.’ ”

So the same words apply again: “Honesty and integrity are the only things I have going for me.” For this Christian and police officer, that seems to be plenty.

By James Vincent, assistant professor of communications at Moody Bible Institute.

It’s finally happened: I’ve been bitten by the “roots” bug! It all started when my historian brother (the really serious genealogist in the family) heard we would be spending this year in Manitoba. He asked me to help him trace the descendants of a great-great-aunt and uncle who moved from Ontario to the prairies at the turn of the century. Since my brother is the kind of fellow who doesn’t get visibly excited about much, I readily agreed—even though I’d never personally been turned on by this sort of thing. Little did I realize how absorbing it would become.

Armed with bits of information, including the fact that the ancestors in question had been staunch Anglicans, I was pleased to discover that the relevant old registers of baptisms, marriages, and deaths were lodged in the Anglican district office not half a mile from our temporary home in the city of Brandon.

I soon found that you can experience strange and powerful feelings immersing yourself in those leather-bound, yellowed, hand-inscribed volumes. Turning over page after page, you suddenly come face to face with your own past: “Robert Tweedy, farmer; husband of Mary Stewart [she was the great-great-aunt mentioned earlier]; born, Templetown, Ireland, 1819; died, Boissevain, Manitoba, March 23, 1903. Cause of death: senile weakness.”

Or: “Hubert Fenwick Morris, born December 6, 1896; baptized May 9, 1899; son of William Morris, carriage builder, and Deborah Tweedy.” (Deborah was a daughter of Robert and Mary, and thus my cousin a few times removed.)

What is the source of these strong feelings that keep amateur genealogists compulsively combing through records and tramping around rural church cemeteries? Part of it is just the excitement of sleuthing; it is the same compulsion that keeps scientists tracking an elusive virus, mystery readers vicariously solving cases with Lord Peter Wimsey, and crossword puzzle fans sitting up past midnight to fill in every last square.

But genealogical sleuthing may also mask a subtle arrogance. As biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling writes, genes have enormous appeal, because “although my body will someday pass from this earth, part of me will remain, passing itself on to generations yet unborn. And should my children turn out to be brilliant or successful, so much the better. I can claim half the credit, since half their genes came from me.”

Is it possible for ancestor hunting to turn into ancestor worship? For us to start seeing our immortality in our genes rather than in the confidence we have in Christ is certainly one real danger. And to start seeing blood ties as more primary than the ties that bind us as Christians—whether we are “Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female” (Gal. 3:28)—is certainly another.

Still, the family is one of God’s creational structures, and the fifth commandment enjoins us to honor our father and mother. Rooting among one’s roots can become idolatrous, but it can also be a legitimate way to preserve community and continuity in an increasingly mobile and mechanized society. It can be quite moving to see elderly people, long neglected or lost track of by younger relatives, come alive with enthusiasm when shown an old photo, or asked what it was like to grow up next door to eccentric cousin so-and-so.

Fortunately, my brother is a careful enough historian to have catalogued our ancestors, “warts and all.” This prevents me from losing a realistic sense of human depravity. Genes can work both ways: If I am going to see them as bearers of my own virtues, I also have to admit that they can be mirrors of my own sin, actual or potential. When I read my brother’s extensive notes, I find stories of courageous immigrants clearing land and parenting large families in rural Canada; but I also find accounts of drifters, drunkards, and sharp-tongued shrews. Like all of us, my Scots-Irish ancestors were made in the image of God; like all of us, they showed the effects of the Fall even when they were redeemed in Christ. And I see myself in not a few of their foibles.

MARY STEWART VAN LEEUWEN

Spiritual Gifts in the Eighties

Concerning the three Dallas Theological Seminary professors resigning because of their charismatic leanings, [News, Feb. 5], the apostle Paul declares that he would not have us ignorant about spiritual gifts (1 Cor. 12:1), which Dallas Seminary appears to be. Paul also declares that we are to desire spiritual gifts (1 Cor. 14:1), which Dallas Seminary doesn’t; and we are not to quench the Spirit (1 Thess. 5:10), which Dallas Theological Seminary has.

MICKEY KERN

Sunray, Tex.

Linguistic gnats

In his percipient essay, “How to Avoid Offensive Language While Saying Absolutely Nothing” [Jan. 15], Prof. David Wells has much to say about current language patterns. But I fancy he hints at conspiracy where none exists. If we parrot the mass-media lingo, it’s unfortunate for society as a whole. Both print and electronic media are hardly known for grammatical precision or sophisticated diction. Still, society ought to think and speak much better.

I agree that “our culture is having to evolve language that can do service in two directions … [and] able to describe the new arrangement in which the utility of sex has displaced any consideration of its mystery and propriety.” However, the expression “alternative lifestyle” can mean anything from life in an artists’ colony to joining a religious community. The “alternative” maybe any of numerous nonconformist ways of living, including, but not limited to, homosexual and communal modes.

Let’s not strain at linguistic gnats. Language is being softened to absorb the impact of rapid societal change. Some euphemistic juggling is inoffensive and innocuous.

WILLIAM DAUENHAUER

Wickliffe, Ohio

As I’m sure many readers noticed, Wells’s article was really about sex. Nine-tenths of it dealt with various sexual illustrations. And what forcefully comes through his pen is not so much that we have used “linguistic sleights of hand” in our sexual terminology, but rather that sexual promiscuity has become all-pervasive, and we evangelicals are in danger of getting caught up in all the fun! How can Wells be so sure? Certainly being gay is not an “option,” but neither is being straight! I’ve never met a homosexual who made a well-thought-out decision to have sexual urges for someone of the same sex. And I have yet to meet a heterosexual who made a similar decision for someone of the opposite sex. Is being gay a sin? The Scriptures have little light to shed in response to that question.

REV. GARY MCCARY

Point Loma Seventh-day

Adventist Church

San Diego, Calif.

No impossibilities with God

In James Reapsome’s article, “Great Commission Deadline” [Jan. 15], there are those who answer the initial question, “Can the world be reached by the year 2000?” by saying no! There are always those who say “impossible” to any dream or vision or attempt.

But we are not bound by the impossible, for we have a God to whom the word “impossible” is a glorious challenge. We look to him, not to the churches, not to the mission agencies that are fearful, not to religious and political oppositions, and certainly not to the cost. If this goal to reach all nations by 2000 is of man, it will fail; but if it is of God, it cannot fail.

MARTIE BUSS

Corona, Calif.

Respecting “Fighting Bob”

In reading the article “The Wireless Gospel: Evangelical Radio Puts Televangelism into Perspective” [Jan. 15], I became increasingly concerned about how “Fighting Bob” Shuler, my grandfather, was portrayed. Schultze presents a man who is supposedly a rabble rouser, manipulator, and money grabber. In truth, “Fighting Bob” was a highly respected proclaimer of the gospel who believed that the convictions of his heart could not be separated from the words he spoke or the deeds he performed. Jesus was seen by some as an embarrassment when he chased the money changers from the temple. However, we know he not only held purity of devotion to God as a conviction, he practiced the same, holding a standard before us all. “Fighting Bob” Shuler held forth the same standard in his day.

Bob Shuler was undoubtedy feared and certainly controversial for going against the grain of a city heavily steeped in corruption, but he was not a manipulator. It is a shame that the years that remove his day from ours allow for superficial consideration of his impact and ministry.

BILL SHULER

Calif.

In your otherwise interesting article “The Wireless Gospel,” there was a glaring omission. Billy Graham has had a great, if not a greater, impact in his use of radio and television than any of the others you mentioned. Surely you have not forgotten Graham or the contributions he has made through broadcasting for nearly 40 years.

CAL THOMAS

Manassas, Va.

I felt your writer slighted the person and work of Aimee Semple McPherson. She put a gospel radio station on the air in February of 1924, just one month after she dedicated her world-renowned Angelus Temple. I sense that she was without doubt the most authentic pioneer in radio evangelism. Also, Paul Rader led Charles E. Fuller to the foot of the Cross in a gospel evangelistic service in 1917 at the Church of the Open Door in Los Angeles.

JOHN W. LITTLEFIELD

Church of Christianity

Hollywood, Calif.

Pause for reflection

“Last Thoughts by the Tombstone Pizzas,” by Mary Ellen Ashcroft [Jan. 15], gives us pause to reflect upon the rendezvous we all will someday have with death. The reader is simultaneously swept into a readily identifiable activity, then shocked into the realization that brand names, social status, and material possessions are merely evasions, just as a face lift is not a restoration of youth.

Recently I counseled survivors of a drug-related massacre. The most remarkable attitude some of them had was that the “innocent” victims (some of whom were involved in narcoticstraffic) were unlucky in their fate—not that they were reaping the foreseeable results of a sinful lifestyle. Having read this article only the day before, I mused upon the false gods and feeble goals that most of us set for ourselves and live by. Mary Ellen Ashcroft has depicted well the alienation of modern Western society. The article will haunt me for a long, long time.

REV. VICTOR E. BUKSBAZEN

The Christian Jew Foundation

Hyattsville, Md.

A better scriptural perspective?

Thank you for Philip Yancey’s insightful column on the Gay/Lesbian March on Washington [Jan. 15]. I suspect that by even seeming open to gay and lesbian people, you have attracted a large amount of flak from the “righteous.” I was at the march, too, and considerably put off by the unmitigated hate the counter-protesters were shouting. I shudder to think what the majority of people marching, mostly non-Christians, now have reinforced in their minds about what Christ is all about. But John 8 is not the best scriptural model for assessing the confrontation. A better perspective is found in Paul’s epistles, as in the issue of a believer purchasing meat offered to an idol—which bitterly divided believers.

When I read Yancey’s column to our local Evangelicals Concerned chapter, several mentioned his phrase “homosexual promiscuity” in the sin list at the end of the article. The question raised was whether Yancey considers all homosexual practice promiscuous (a strictly passé view, even among non-Christian gay people, in this age of AIDS), or whether he considers that nonpromiscuous homosexuality might not necessarily be sinful. We wondered.

MARK B. LEE

Denver, Colo.

Actually, Philip Yancey wrote “homosexual proclivity.” Somewhere in the production process, proclivity was accidentally changed to promiscuity.—Eds.

I waited to hear Yancey say that homosexual promiscuity is to be forsaken, along with murder and adultery. Yes, his list of sins can be forgiven, along with self-righteousness and scorn; but Christ would say, “Go and sin no more.” We readers have been impressed with the thought that there are only two options available to us in our attitude toward homosexuals: forgive or scorn. There is also the message of “repent and forsake” that I would like to give to my homosexual friends.

WARD FRENCH

Flagstaff, Ariz.

Yancey says he “stood on the sidelines” and “watched a startling confrontation take place,” and rebukes those who scorned the 300,000 “gay folks” who marched on D.C. And he watched a Christian coterie inveigh against the sodomites, screaming, “Faggots go home.” No doubt these Christians hate sin (a disaffection rarified amidst today’s peaceful, dialoguing Christendom). Perhaps the passive pious can forgive these activists their rambunctiousness. Better yet, rather than standing on the sidelines, let Yancey show us that more excellent way—or at least point to someone who is prophesying more politely.

MICHAEL BRAY

Ray Brook, N.Y.

Letters are welcome. Brevity is preferred, and all are subject to condensation. Write to Eutychus, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, 465 Gundersen Drive, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188.

First Church Of The Fish Stick

Cathedrals and parish churches used to dominate town squares and cityscapes. But churches have fallen on hard times, architecturally speaking, as the skyline shadows of corporate towers fall long and deep across our houses of worship.

Churches don’t need to engage in tower building (who could hope to dwarf the World Trade Center?). But perhaps they should architecturally express themselves in more pictorial (and peculiar) ways, much like those roadside restaurants shaped like giant hot dogs, teepees, bowler hats, and so on.

Innovative churches could look like boats, for instance. Combining Jesus’ promise to make us fishers of men with the symbolism of Noah’s ark could produce a church that was downright shipshape. And taking the Twenty-third Psalm literally could produce a church that was sheep-shape.

A traditionalist Catholic parish could advertise its Friday fasts with a building shaped like a fish—or perhaps a fishstick. (A congregation into simple living, on the other hand, might erect a giant lentil.)

An evangelist who preaches that God rewards faith with material goods could design an auditorium shaped like a BMW—complete with leather-covered bucket seats. And Unitarian Universalist faith could be visually summed up in a shapeless mass.

Right now, our own congregation is planning a new building just across the street from a shopping mall. Do you think a giant piggy bank would attract any visitors?

EUTYCHUS

Bob Clouse had a new heart. But it was his mask that took associate editor Rodney Clapp aback.

“I was very conscious of the fact that the fellow I was going out to lunch with was wearing a mask,” Rodney said after his first encounter with a heart-transplant recipient. So is everyone else who meets this 56-year-old professor with a 35-year-old heart. “Someday when I’m feeling particularly frisky,” said a bemused Clouse, “I’m going to wear this going into a bank.”

Rodney later spent two-and-a-half days with Bob and his wife, Bonnidell, in their hometown of Terre Haute, Indiana, to hear firsthand the events surrounding Bob’s transplant, to discuss the medical and theological questions needing to be answered—and to watch on videotape the surgery itself. Rod also accompanied Bob to an Indianapolis hospital, where the latter underwent tests monitoring his new heart’s progress.

“Bob spent much of that morning just lying still on a bed,” recalls Rodney, who was able to talk with a number of doctors and nurses about Clouse’s surgery. “Fortunately for me, he kept right on answering my questions.”

Such inactivity is not typical, however, for the man who teaches a full load of classes at Indiana State University.

“You only have to be with Bob a little while to see how alive he is,” says Rodney. “Consequently, it really doesn’t take long to forget about the mask.”

HAROLD B. SMITH, Managing Editor