Open hands

All too often we regard stewardship simply as a matter of our giving to God, but this aspect is secondary. Before we can give, we must possess, and before we possess we must receive. Therefore, stewardship is, in the first place, receiving God’s good and bounteous gifts. And once received, those gifts are not to be used solely for our own good. They must also be used for the benefit of others, and ultimately for the glory of God the giver.

The steward needs an open hand to receive from God and then an active hand to give to God and to others.

—Murray J. Harris in Voices (Vol. XIII, No. 3, 1987)

Forgiveness humbles

Forgiven souls are humble. They cannot forget that they owe all they have and hope for to free grace, and this keeps them lowly. They are brands plucked from the fire—debtors who could not pay for themselves—captives who must have remained in prison for ever, but for undeserved mercy—wandering sheep who were ready to perish when the Shepherd found them; and what right then have they to be proud? I do not deny that there are proud saints. But this I do say—they are of all God’s creatures the most inconsistent, and of all God’s children the most likely to stumble and pierce themselves with many sorrows

—J. C. Ryle in Foundations of Faith

Of Giants And Infants

We have too many men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.… Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.

—Gen. Omar N. Bradley in a 1948 Armistice Day address

Asking and getting

When Jesus says that everyone who asks will receive, he is assuming that those who pray will be disciples who are right with God and not cherishing iniquity in their hearts.

—J. I. Packer in Father Loves You

Holy dependence

There is no security in things. In fact, things are deceptive: they appear to be satisfying and lasting when they are actually temporary and unable to satisfy the deepest needs of life.… Certainly, God wants us to enjoy the blessings of life. There is nothing spiritual about sitting morosely in a corner and saying, “These things will not last anyway! Why enjoy them?” God wants us to enjoy His good gifts, just as we want our children to enjoy what we give them. But He does not want us to depend on things—He wants us to depend on Him.

—Warren W. Wiersbe in Meet Yourself in the Parables

No slovenly work

We who say we love God: why are we not as anxious to be perfect in our art as we pretend we want to be in our service of God? If we do not try to be perfect in what we write, perhaps it is because we are not writing for God after all. In any case, it is depressing that those who serve God and love Him sometimes write so badly, when those who do not believe in Him take pains to write so well. I am not talking about grammar and syntax, but about having something to say and saying it in sentences that are not half dead.

—Thomas Merton, quoted in the Provident Book Finder (Jan.–Mar. 1988)

I was asked recently whether we really ought to snoop into the private lives of politicians. For all their private vices, my interrogator continued, haven’t many wicked emperors in the past been effective national leaders? Doesn’t the question of personal peccadilloes divert attention from a discussion of more legitimate political concerns?

Given the rash of media revelations about the lives of presidential candidates—dirty tricks, exaggerated résumés, plagiarism, premarital conception and extramarital liaison (and who knows what next)—it is natural to ask: Is it really all that important to focus on the personal morality of politicians?

Should evangelicals in particular concentrate on the importance of character and moral integrity in public life?

Yes and no.

Here are a few things to keep in mind.

1. Sin stains the story not only of some prominent politicians and candidates, but of all their media critics, and of evangelical leaders also. Even the so-called Moral Majority—from which liberal press and liberal politicos distanced themselves—must admit its own immoralities. The matter of choosing a president or governor or congressman is not a matter of immaculately conceived voters nominating sinless leaders. We live in a sinful society to which we are all contributing units.

2. Not even civil government requires inner purity. Government is concerned with justice, public conduct, and fair dealing. Legislation concerns what is lawful and unlawful. That does not mean that motivation is wholly irrelevant—the distinction between intentional murder and accidental manslaughter is important. But the courts do not decide whether defendants are moral or immoral; only whether they acted legally or illegally. A jury may now and then find a good person guilty and acquit a bad person. (Even the Christian doctrine of justification involves acquittal of a guilty sinner on the ground of Christ’s substitutionary bearing of the penalty and guilt of one’s sin.)

Yet respect for law is a prime requisite of an orderly society. No one given to injustice and illegality is worthy of office. Exposure of one’s legal record is relevant to eligibility for election.

3. Some matters of private conduct have no bearing on qualification for the presidency or any other public office. The contemporary cult of personality is so deeply entrenched that there is pervasive curiosity concerning the habits and flaws of anyone in the public spotlight. Because human beings have a variety of faults, foibles, and frailties, we must distinguish persistent and consequential moral failure from lesser transgressions, noting the stage of life at which they occurred and how the offender handled them. A deviant society could hardly have been astonished that, before he became a Christian, Pat Robertson fathered his first child out of wedlock. (Much more politically relevant, but overlooked by the press, was Robertson’s comment that he considered the later civil ceremony of little importance alongside the earlier covenant relationship with his sweetheart.)

Of course, politically marginal matters may be highly important in other contexts. Before God, one’s momentary lustful look, or coveting of a neighbor’s property, renders one guilty of sin irrespective of whether one actually commits adultery or theft. But if brainwashing of all such private thoughts is a prerequisite for political eligibility, a great many public offices will remain permanently unfilled.

4. Resentment of the media for its exposure of candidates’ logical and ethical inconsistencies is misdirected. The media may be double-standard prone, judging others at times by criteria reporters and editors refuse to apply to themselves. But that does not invalidate their criticisms of public officials. To be sure, the warning “judge not, lest you be judged” carries biblical legitimacy; not all the Washington womanizers and plagiarists are politicians, and not all the trivia unearthed by journalists (and eagerly repeated and sometimes exaggerated by them) are relevant or significant. Yet there may be good journalism by bad journalists who find the very conception of ethical absolutes exotic (but invoke them when they condemn others).

Nevertheless, the press is not running for public office, even if it is striving for public credibility. It has professional critics skilled in evaluating the integrity of aspirants whose main concern is not behavior but the invention of an image.

5. The religious facets of public policy issues are often deliberately highlighted by those who champion Judeo-Christian values vis-a-vis secular humanism. This invites closer appraisal of moral indiscretions in the lives of aspirants for office like Pat Robertson. Much of the secular public may view evangelical religion as a strange cult, but it nonetheless expects gospel truth and moral purity from those who champion those virtues. The same observation can be made about Jesse Jackson, who makes the churches his special podium. Yet in the final analysis, the same standards of character must be applied to all candidates. Incumbents who lie to the public, and candidates who lie to their potential constituencies, encourage the conviction that they are not trustworthy. Americans expect fidelity and truth from their leaders; they deplore deception.

6. The saddest aspect of the immorality controversy among politicians is the disposition of campaign spokesmen to regard the concentration on personal character as a sign of national unbalance and weakness. Some of Gary Hart’s supporters even championed an “unconventional candidate” as a sign of national maturity in a society in revolt against the nuclear family, and in which 40 percent of spouses are said to be unfaithful. But anyone who considers sexual infidelity an asset to political candidacy does not know the American mainstream.

7. Although the Constitution prohibits a religious test for office, the question of one’s religious views is relevant insofar as they bear upon political commitments. The public properly wished to know the implications of Richard Nixon’s Quaker roots for his stance on military preparedness. Today, some ask what the implications are for political action of Pat Robertson’s insistence that he stands in a direct revelatory relationship to God. No less relevant would be the stance of a candidate committed to secular humanism and its denial of changeless truth and moral principles. Almost all legislation has moral implications, and contemporary society is in ethical turmoil. The Judeo-Christian moral imperatives are not irrelevant to the politician qua politician. A candidate who lacks a value system in personal relationships may deplore the moral crisis in public speeches (often ghost-written). But he will be psychologically unable to resist the atrocities of others, let alone to model moral leadership for the nation. The political scene struggles in its foreign and domestic commitments for transcendent referents beyond utilitarianism and pragmatism. In their best moments, political leaders reach for a conscience superior to the press and to the state and even to the nation. They are increasingly wary of the ambition for power, of the autonomous products of liberal philosophy and religion, of a pseudo-intellectual elite uninterested in perennial truth and good. It does not speak well for American society that most of the best-educated in our nation seem to reject a religious basis for life and that, not surprisingly, they offer little in the way of moral leadership. Much as the Founding Fathers resisted any national church establishment, they would have insisted that the abolition of God means not the freedom of humanity but rather the nullification of humankind. For human rights are grounded in the Creator’s endowment; deny the divine Creator, and human rights lose their foundation.

8. What the political arena desperately needs is not merely better parties, platforms, and policies, but better persons. The hour has struck for moral courage; without it the cultural crisis must inevitably overtake all facets of contemporary society. It is high time to stop concentrating on political immorality and to start giving tribute to our moral heroes. Paul’s exhortation to the Philippians remains a comprehensive motto for those in public life: “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (4:8). No political agenda, however good, can be implemented effectively by candidates with tarnished reputations who have ceased to be symbols of hope.

9. In the last analysis, sound political judgment requires a verdict on policy no less than on character. That is not to say that more emphasis should be placed on concept than on candidate. But in an imperfect world the choices are more complex than whether to support a deceiver who champions flawed political policy or a saint committed to sound policy. Political and ethical realities often force us to choose the lesser of two evils. A candidate who has repented of his nonpayment of income taxes two decades ago and advocates a superior foreign policy should be preferred over a competitor who eaches Sunday school but holds a highly questionable view of foreign affairs. No doubt an ideal world will ultimately concentrate character and policy in the same person. But then, an ideal world presumably will dispense both with income taxes and with sinners, and thus exclude snoopers on political morality.

Carl F. H. Henry, who was editor of Christianity Today for its first 12 years, is author of Confessions of a Theologian (Word, 1986).

In a recent seminar paper, a Calvin Theological Seminary student observed that Herodotus (A History of the Persian Wars) amused himself in his Mediterranean travels with noting how much Persian gods looked like Persians. The tendency to make God in our image has had a long run. We still project both our best and our worst onto the object of worship.

One of my friends once preached a sermon in which he pointed out how twentieth-century American depictions of Jesus often seem remarkably familiar. Jesus Christ has been arranged, for instance, as an industrialist (did he not say, “I must be about my father’s business”?). But he can also be packaged as a labor unionist (remember, he was a carpenter). Indeed, Jesus was the first socialist (recall his warnings to the rich and his love for the poor). He can be set up as a revolutionary, a feminist, and as a pop psychologist and success preacher.

Publishers of children’s Vacation Bible School materials sometimes have portraits of a well-barbered, Hollywood-handsome Lord peering out at us from soulful blue eyes.

About a decade ago, a reviewer of Hans Küng’s best seller On Being a Christian noted the similarities between Küng’s Jesus and Küng himself. Writing from the heat of battle against the Vatican, Küng sketched Jesus as an uncompromising churchman, asserting God’s will “in face of the resistance of the powerful—persons, institutions, traditions, hierarchs.” Jesus, in Ralph McInerny’s immortal phrase, emerges as “The Man Who Would Be Küng.”

The human tendency to push ourselves forward into the target area for worship has by now become so usual—and so hazardous—that many Christians have learned caution where distinctive images of God are concerned. How much, for instance, is the God of process thought merely a product of modern evolutionary thinking? Suppose God is portrayed to look like Eisenhower rather than Gandhi: To what extent is the portrait more revealing about the artist than about God?

For that matter, how final for us are the biblical images of God as shepherd, or eagle, or lamb, or king? Must we struggle to generate cross-cultural relevance for these ancient pictures, or may we substitute more current ones? If we may, what are the rules and where are the hazards?

A Ménage À Trois?

One of the most striking developments in twentieth-century thought about God is the emergence of a social theory of the Trinity. For social theorists, God must be imagined not as a single or individual divine person. God is not a successful role player who can simultaneously manage the parts of creator, redeemer, and renewer, or Father, Son, and Spirit. Nor is the Trinity to be conceived along Augustinian lines. Augustine suggested that God is to Father, Son, and Spirit as a human person is to, say, his own memory, understanding, and will.

Augustine knew perfectly well that such analogies were inadequate and said so. Still, especially because of certain philosophical pressures, his Trinitarianism tended in a monist direction (perceiving ultimate reality as a unified whole), and his favorite analogies were all psychological.

Social theorists go another way. God must be thought of not as a single self, but rather as a society or community of three persons in the richest sense of “person.”

Each of Father, Son, and Spirit is a vibrant center of act, knowledge, and loving relation. Each is in fact so tightly and reciprocally attached to the others that the most proper referent of the word God is not the Father, or the divine essence, but the three-membered society itself—a society overflowing with a zestful life of light, joy, mutuality, and verve.

The social analogy of the Trinity has roots in the fourth-century Greek fathers (especially the Cappadocians), and can also claim an orthodox Latin adherent or two along succeeding centuries. For example, in the twelfth century, Richard of Saint Victor claimed that all real love requires both a giver and a receiver. Love is essentially other-directed. But, for God, creatures are insufficiently spacious receivers and depressingly low-wattage transmitters of love. Hence, said Richard, there must be at least two persons in God himself. Yet God is also perfectly good. A thoroughly good being would not jealously protect two-personed love, but would generously share such love with a third.

Thus, Richard’s remarkable conclusion: “In order for love to be true, it demands a plurality of persons; in order for love to be perfected, it requires a trinity of persons.”

Here one detects a certain ad hoc tendency in the argument. One also fears that some embarrassing recommendation of ménage à trois, rather than standard marriage, might be lurking in the wings. For whatever reasons, Richard’s theory has enjoyed only modest popularity in Western theology. The mainline has been occupied instead by more monist-tending theologians: Augustine, Aquinas, and in our own century, Karl Barth.

Augustine and Aquinas appear to have three full persons in God, but each theologian also states that since God is perfectly simple, each person is really identical with the divine essence. Readers are left with the impression that we have to think of Father, Son, and Spirit as distinct personal centers, but that as a matter of fact, there is actually just one thing in God: the divine essence. Everything else in the universe is a creature.

In the case of Karl Barth, the conclusion is inescapable. Barth thinks of three persons in God as tritheist, and opts for one person perpetually existent in three modes of his being. All the rich “connexion and fellowship” in God of which Barth speaks eloquently, all “loving coexistence and co-operation,” are assigned to a single divine “individual,” a sole subject, whose fellowship is only with himself: God is “I only in relation to Himself who is also Thou, and Thou only in relation to Himself who is also I.”

The social analogy offers a tempting alternative. First in British Anglicanism before World War I, and then, more recently, in a wave of love, suffering, and liberation theologies, one finds statements of Christian Trinitarianism that resist every attempt to reduce the personhood of Father, Son, and Spirit to roles or modes of one person. These theories contend that the divine threeness is at least as much a given of our Trinitarian confession as is the oneness of God; that the life of God is a continuous, reciprocal play of interpersonal harmony and fellowship; that “God” is better used as a communal than an individual name; and that the most apt analogies for God are social rather than psychological.

In the last two decades, certain Catholic and Protestant writers have presented such theories in the context of reflection on human suffering and human community in the face of it. By contrast with the earlier Anglicans, these “suffering and solidarity” theologians (e.g., Jan Lochman, Juan Luis Segundo, Geevarghese Mar Osthathios, and especially JÜrgen Moltmann) offer ethically and even politically ambitious Trinity statements. They tend, for instance, to associate monotheism with oppression and to find in the doctrine of the Trinity vast implications not only for life in community but also—and particularly—for socialism.

Moltmann is representative; the Holy Trinity (especially on the Easter weekend of God’s forsakenness, and then vindication by God) is a divine model of suffering love and of solidarity in the face of the evil that love must suffer. The Trinity is in fact a model of “social personalism” or “personal socialism” in human community. Here there is no dominating privilege for the strong, or hopeless subjugation of the weak, but only “the glorious liberty of the children of God.”

Theology By Smoke And Mirrors

What is a proper response to such ideas? It is hard to suppress the feeling that at least some social Trinitarians might be trying to validate favorite ideas by divinizing them. If a theologian is a socialist, for example, how fitting if God should be one, too. The theologian’s position can then claim “grounding” in the very nature of ultimate reality. One is reminded of the clever way the Austrian-American violinist Fritz Kreisler used to gain a hearing for his own compositions. In a sort of reverse plagiarism, Kreisler would write recital pieces and then claim to have discovered them in neglected manuscripts of baroque composers. Kreisler thus freed himself both to program and to praise these pieces.

Where the social analogy is concerned, an initial wariness seems appropriate. For one thing, like process theologians, social Trinitarians do not linger long over Scripture. Some scarcely mention it. For another, social Trinitarians who seek historical precedent for their theories sometimes find it in odd figures. Moltmann’s favorite pioneer, for instance, is a genuine eccentric—Joachim of Fiore, a twelfth-century prophet who expected the Age of the Spirit to begin promptly in 1260.

Finally, some social Trinitarians candidly reveal the real source of their theory. Human desire and experience—not revelation—generate portraits of God. The theologian’s task is therefore to match what we want in the way of deity with what we get from the theologian’s desk. Portraits of God are drawn to order. Consider what Joseph Bracken says: “… human beings are more aware than ever before of the need for community, of the fact of change or development, often accompanied by deep suffering, in human life, and finally of the distinctively bisexual character of all human relations. If the concept of God, specifically of God as triune, does not in some way reflect those all-pervasive human concerns, then it will cease to be truly relevant to present-day men and women.”

Bracken’s reference to the “distinctively bisexual character of all human relations” suggests still another feature of some social Trinitarianism. Following Gregory of Nazianzus, a fourth-century Cappadocian, certain theorists have lately begun to identify the Holy Spirit member of the suffering God as explicitly feminine. On their view, the right social analogy of the Trinity is a nuclear family—for example, Adam, Eve, and Seth of Genesis 5:2–3, where Eve represents the Holy Spirit.

In considering all this, orthodox believers may be properly uneasy. We seem to be back in the same department that retails a Silly-Putty Jesus, moldable for any market. So with the social analogy: It appears all too familiar a product of smoke and mirrors, the self-portrait of modernist theology.

A Scandal’s Ramifications

What is therefore remarkable is that the social Trinity, shorn of certain angularities and excesses, is probably the most biblically faithful and theologically redolent theory now available. You would not guess this by reading its most recent proponents, perhaps, but you might if you read some of the earlier Anglican writers such as Leonard Hodgson. When these theologians claimed that much Western Trinitarianism is biblically distorted and disappointingly reductionist (three persons in God reduced to roles or modes of one person), they were surely right.

The unmistakable impression given by the New Testament is that Jesus Christ is a fully divine person who is nonetheless distinct from the person he calls “Father.” Especially in the “high Christology” literature of the New Testament (Paul, Hebrews, and, most particularly, John), Jesus is not merely a man in whom God is specially present—though he is that. Nor is he only a deft and absorbent bearer of God the Father’s work, purpose, and love—though he is that, too. What is stunning about Jesus Christ, what scandalizes his skeptics and gradually dawns on his followers, is that this person is himself a divine being.

He—not just the Father in him—is worthy of divine titles (God, Lord, Son of God), and of sacramental devotion (Matt. 28:19; John 6:54), and of human doxology (2 Peter 3:18), and even prayer (Acts 7:59–60; 1 Cor. 16:22). In fact, Jesus Christ deserves worship (Heb. 1:6). Either distinctly or with God the Father, he requires the sort of reverence one reserves for God (John 14:1; Rev. 5:13, 7:10).

Moreover, as just suggested, New Testament writers distinguish Jesus Christ from God the Father at every stage of Jesus’ career—pre-existence (John 17:5) through incarnation to exaltation (1 Peter 3:22). There is one God, the Father; there is also one Lord, Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 8:6).

Add the (admittedly somewhat hazier) testimony to the personhood and divinity of the Holy Spirit (he is “another Counselor” in John 14:16; he does appear with God and Christ in such tripartite formulas as 2 Cor. 13:14) and a conclusion emerges: The precincts of heaven are occupied by more than one divine person. Christian monotheism must include more than one divine thinker, doer, actor, lover. For if God the Father and the Son of God are “one,” they are not one person. Their unity is more like a marriage in which two persons become one flesh, or like persons bound together in a single community.

In fact, insofar as the New Testament suggests any analogy for the Holy Trinity, it does so in John 17:21–23 where our Lord prays for the new community of believers. The offered analogy is social: Just as Father and Son, though distinct, are “in” each other and one with each other, so the new community must be unified both vertically and horizontally. Jesus’ last will and testament, presented to the Father, is that the new community may be “in us” and “that they may be one as we are one.”

Here is an undeniable source and model for social Trinitarianism. As Father, Son, and (by extension) Paraclete, though three persons, are yet communally one God, so the church, though many members, is still only one church. And just as Father, Son, and Spirit, though three, may be referred to with a singular pronoun such as “he,” so the church, though multimembered, may be referred to with a singular pronoun such as “she.” She is the new creation of Jesus Christ, her Lord.

Drawing Straight Lines

A theologian who draws straight lines out from biblical testimony to theory will thus draft a social statement. The Holy Trinity is a transcendent church family (whether or not the Spirit is feminine), supremely unified by common divine excellences—for example, perfect knowledge, love, holiness, power—and by shared redemptive purpose, revelation, and work.

Of course, it would be a mistake to picture the members of the Trinity as a set of three miscellaneous deities, each of whom discovered he was divine, and all of whom therefore resolved to get on together in combination. The divine church family is not congregationalist. Rather, each member of the divine society, though a person, is hardly an individual person.

For the Son is Son of the Father and the Father is Father of the Son. The Spirit is the Spirit of God or of Christ. The Son is not only equally divine with the Father; he is also, so to speak, “his Father all over again.” Father, Son, and Spirit are thus not just members of a generic class of divine persons. They are rather what we would call family members—perfect family members. For in the divine life we find no isolation, no insulation, no secretiveness, no fear of being transparent to another.

There may be inside knowledge, penetrating knowledge of the other as other, but as loved other, co-other, fellow, family member. Father, Son, and Spirit, the transcendent church family, are “members one of another” to a superlative and exemplary degree.

Critics have long charged (even carefully stated) social Trinitarianism with the heresy of tritheism. But the charge cannot stand. For, classically, tritheism is Arianism. It is the view that only the Father is fully divine, while Son and Spirit, though ontically inferior, are still worshiped. The polytheistic combination of worship with second-rate deity is what the orthodox church fathers objected to in Arianism. Responsible social Trinitarians join in this objection and also in the orthodox confession of one God.

Responsible theorists affirm just one divine essence (though they would insist that the persons have this essence instead of being identical with it). They further affirm exactly one Holy Trinity. Each of the persons of the Father, Son, and Spirit is essentially divine by the same pattern of excellences. But only God the Trinity—three persons in their mutual relations—is God peerlessly and alone.

With the smoke of criticism cleared away, Christian believers can see some of the striking implications of social Trinity theory. First, the confession that we are created in the image of God begins to resonate with new overtones. In our fellowship and koinonia, in such homely endeavors as telling one another the truth or in doing such honest work as will help those in need—above all in that love which “binds everything together in perfect harmony”—we show not only that we have become members one of another, but also that we as restored community, we-in-the-plural, have become a remarkable image of God. Race, class, sex, and other alienations get transformed into delightful complementarities, so that we may know, and respect the other as other, but as co-other, loved other fellow, family member. For those who reflect on the image of God, in short, the Holy Trinity becomes a model not of narcissism, but of overflowing, other-adoring, agapic love.

Second, baptism in the threefold name marks the adoption of human beings into the joy and warmth of the family of God. This is a family for whom our Lord prays in John 17, that it will one day enter the mysterious union of the Trinity itself. In the interim, as philosopher Richard Mouw once pointed out, we extend the arch of God’s benediction over each new person with whom we share the sacrament. Their concerns become our concerns, their joys our joys. This is a policy with family coverage. If some member should be abused or diminished by other Christians, we oppose this injustice not merely because it is unjust, but particularly because it is a desecration of the communal sacrament.

Third, our devotion to the triune God will include prayer to God the Father (Matt. 6:9), through Jesus Christ our Lord (Col. 3:17), and in the Spirit (Eph. 6:18), always aware that we are invoking not a solitary listener who studies us in splendid isolation, but rather the transcendent family of God. With proper humility and wonder, we seek entrance upon the awesome and resonant triune society that is itself alive with petition (Rom. 8:26, 34), and that pulsates with dynamic knowledge, action, and care. We worship no one person in isolation from the other two. For “the catholic faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in unity” (the Athanasian Creed).

Contemporary social Trinitarians may appear, at times, to be light on Scripture and tradition, politically tendentious, self-portraying. Oddly, the image of God they project is largely on target. Reality is at its core not only personal, but tri-personal and communal.

Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., is professor of systematic theology at Calvin Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is the author of three books, as well as the forthcoming article on “Trinity” in the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (Eerdmans).

The Rock of Our Salvation Evangelical Free Church and its pastor, the Reverend Raleigh Washington, are both firsts. Washington is the denomination’s first black pastor, and the Rock is its first black—or mostly black—church.

“We’re a black church in focus and outreach,” says Washington, 49, a 1983 Trinity Evangelical Divinity School graduate. “But 30 percent of our members are white. So we’re not exactly a traditional black or a traditional white church. We’re a hybrid.”

The Rock’s location in the 95 percent black neighborhood of Austin on the West Side of Chicago makes it an unlikely setting for a “hybrid” church. But on Sundays they gather—neighborhood families, inner-city teens, single moms, middle-class blacks who have chosen to stay in the neighborhood, suburban whites who live from 2 to 20 miles away and, seemingly, hundreds of children. Watching them belt out a chorus of “I’m a Soldier (In the Army of the Lord),” intercede for one another in a 40-minute open prayer time, and sing the benediction while holding hands at the end of the service, you can forget how impossible cross-cultural churches are supposed to be. So how did this one happen?

Building The Rock

For starters, Washington’s personal calling “to reach out and embrace whites, to be a bridge builder,” opened him up to the idea of a multiracial church early on. When the Rock held its first service in October 1983, the first attendees were Washington’s wife, Paulette, their five children, and six Trinity seminary students, two of whom were white. But Washington’s vision of a church that would bring blacks and whites together ignited when he met a white man who shared that vision.

Glen Kehrein, 39, is executive director of Circle Urban Ministries (CUM), a multifaceted ministry whose complex houses the Rock Church. Although the Rock is only one of five “affiliate churches” that contributes money and manpower to help keep Circle operating, it is the only one that meets on its premises—and the only one whose pastor is Kehrein’s boss. Several months after they met, Kehrein asked Washington to join CUM’s board of directors, and eventually recommended him for the position of president, which Washington now holds.

“All my adult life I had been searching for a black pastor who was committed to holistic ministry and who wasn’t threatened by associating with a white brother,” says Kehrein. “My experience told me that would never happen in my generation. Then I met Raleigh, a man who wanted to work in partnership with whites and blacks, to minister to the impoverished Austin community, and I thought, ‘This is too good to be true.’ ”

Circle Urban Ministries, which grew out of the then-multiracial Circle Evangelical Free Church in 1973, is a bustling complex housing a variety of programs: emergency care (food, clothing, and short-term housing), medical and legal aid, counseling, job-placement assistance, housing rehabilitation and management, a youth program, and others.

But the Rock’s and CUM’s partnership came only after much racial pain and struggle on both sides of the fence. Washington was a former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army and endured a racially motivated attack against him just before he went to Trinity divinity school. One white colonel told other officers that “if we don’t stop Raleigh Washington in his climb, he will become the first black general in the adjutant’s general corps,” and accused Washington of wrongdoing. The white investigators on the case shared that colonel’s sentiments, and Washington ultimately left the service under unjust circumstances.

Kehrein, a Wisconsin boy who never saw a black person until he came to Chicago, at 18, to study at Moody Bible Institute, was still suffering the shock and pain of Circle Church’s 1976 racial split when he met Washington.

“The Lord had to put Pastor [Washington] and me through certain experiences to understand the commitment it takes to be partners in cross-cultural ministry,” Kehrein reflects. “I think we at Circle Church failed at our agenda of racial reconciliation because we failed to understand the need for individuals to be reconciled to each other, one on one. So Pastor and I have worked on our relationship as a model—that blacks and whites can serve God together. Our personal commitment to each other is bedrock. If your commitment is to a philosophy, an idea, or a dream rather than a person, you won’t make it through the difficult times.”

And according to Washington, the potential for conflict and misunderstanding in a multiracial setting is high: “Any time there is a difference between a black and a white, no matter what that difference is, no matter what caused it, it ends up being a racial conflict.”

The Rock’s answer has been to build forums for frank communication right into the church calendar—“vanilla” and “chocolate” meetings in which whites and blacks can, with the pastor present, discuss what is bothering them in terms of the church’s racial dynamics. (In past meetings, whites have expressed concern that blacks seemed standoffish; blacks have voiced the opinion that whites seem to pry by asking too many personal questions.)

At the “fudge ripple” meeting, Washington helps each group understand the other’s feelings better over—what else?—fudge ripple ice cream.

“You’ve got to be preventive rather than prescriptive,” insists Washington. “Glen and I work together in this. There are whites at the Rock who feel more comfortable approaching Glen with negative feelings toward how things are being done, and there are blacks at Circle who feel more comfortable approaching me about the situation there. We can then deal with those problems lovingly and boldly. We’ve often marveled at how God has used one of us to resolve potentially divisive issues.”

Washington and Kehrein’s need for each other seems to reflect the Rock and CUM’s need for each other, “CUM does a lot of what the Rock isn’t equipped to do but needs to be involved in—such as health care and legal aid,” says Kehrein. “Likewise, CUM was spiritually orphaned when Circle Church split. We needed a pastor and a church who could provide spiritual nurturing to people who came to CUM.”

Is Heaven Homogeneous?

When Adele came to CUM last year, spiritual issues were not on her mind. She needed food for herself and her children. As several black CUM staff members began to develop relationships with Adele, painful details of gangs, alcoholism, and drug abuse began to unravel. She was bitter and angry, especially at whites. Eventually one woman invited her to a Rock-sponsored evangelistic luncheon, where she decided to follow Christ.

Says Kehrein: “This woman would never have come through the doors of a church—or reached out to me as a white person. But because of Circle’s partnership with the Rock, she experienced the gospel and became a Christian. Later she had the opportunity to develop a relationship with me, when I was an elder leading a Sunday school class for new believers. She has now accepted me as a friend and as a church leader.”

As Adele and others from the neighborhood find the Rock, so do a smaller but steady stream of whites drawn by the expressive worship and holistic focus. The percentage of whites seems to have stabilized at 30 percent for now. On some Sundays, with CUM volunteers on hand from as far away as Nebraska and Maryland, that percentage can climb to 50. Hundreds of volunteers, in fact, have passed through the Rock’s doors; many have been so affected and encouraged by the Rock’s multiracial unity that they have returned and brought others.

One white who had a deep-seated dislike of blacks, stemming from his time in Vietnam, reluctantly agreed to come with his church group. Experiencing unity between blacks and whites at the Rock and Circle moved him deeply. Back home, when he related how God was dealing with his prejudice, he broke down and cried.

“The reason the Rock makes such an impact on visitors such as that man is the power of reconciliation visibly at work in the church,” says Kehrein. Churches that are intentionally “racially pure hinder the power of the gospel, because at its core, the gospel is the message of reconciliation: us being reconciled to God and to each other. We don’t have vehicles within our society to act on that reconciliation. Even our present church-growth models stress homogeneity as the easy path to church growth—as if church growth were the goal of the kingdom of God. So we have Bible-believing evangelicals who at their core are very racist, yet they experience very little contradiction with that because they’re never challenged.”

Pastor Washington jumps in on the heels of Kehrein’s words: “I disagree with some of the writers who are saying that the homogeneous church is the way to go. Homogeneous churches may be easier, but I don’t think they’re God’s intent. The first New Testament church at Antioch had elders who were from different races and cultures. That’s our model church. I think what we give to whites—the freedom to say amen and hallelujah, to not let the clock rule the Sunday morning worship event—and the quiet, reverent worship and structure they give to us, is more blessed. When we get to heaven, it’s not going to be homogeneous. Where better for us to start than right here?”

“Thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven,” says elder Kehrein.

“Amen,” says Pastor Washington. “Amen.”

The minority members of the Rock of Our Salvation Free Church are not minorities—at least not in the wider society. They are white, and largely from white, middle-class church backgrounds. Yet these 51-some people have chosen to embrace and adapt to the Rock’s distinctly black character. Why?

Virtually all say they were first drawn by the church’s holistic emphasis. As a partner in ministry with Circle Urban Ministries, the Rock helps provide neighborhood residents with everything from emergency housing to family counseling. But what keeps white parishioners at the Rock goes deeper than wanting to get their hands dirty doing inner-city ministry. They are finding a dimension of their faith they say was missing before.

“These people don’t talk about faith. They experience it,” says Barb Schrag, a Californian who first came to the Rock a year-and-a-half ago. “Their depth of reliance on God, their way of talking to him as if he were standing right next to them, was new to me. I’ve learned about nuts-and-bolts faith—faith that God will provide basic needs.”

Steve Manock, a medical student who has been a member for two years, agrees: “It’s powerful to be part of a church community that’s constantly helping meet people’s very basic physical and spiritual needs. God seems bigger after you see so many lives changed. You realize in your heart, not only in your head, that God is not just a white, middle-class God, but that he’s working mightily in neighborhoods many whites would be afraid to venture into.”

For Steve, Barb, and others, a big part of experiencing God at the Rock happens at the church’s lively Sunday morning service. Although the Rock’s three hours of worship and teaching may have seemed like a spiritual marathon to them at first (many black church services, incidentally, last up to five or six hours), they now consider it vital.

“The music is victorious,” says Barb, who sings in the choir. “Being in this church choir has been an entirely different experience.” Watching her sway back and forth with the choir, eyes closed, belting out soulful gospel songs, you can begin to understand what she means. It is clear that she’s not performing: she’s worshiping.

“For me, the extended time we spend voicing prayer requests and praying during church has had a big impact,” reflects Heather Thompson, a nurse who lives and works in the neighborhood. “It’s different than the polite conversation and polite prayers I’ve heard in other churches. People are up front about their feelings. Hurts that would never be brought up in most white churches are put out in the open and dealt with.”

The black emphasis on community that fosters that kind of openness has also been a new experience for many of the Rock’s whites. Says Steve’s wife, Jennie, the Sunday school superintendent: “There’s a strong sense that if I hurt God, I’m hurting the other members of the congregation.” Like others, she was deeply moved when one Sunday a black member publicly acknowledged an adulterous relationship and asked the congregation to forgive him—which they immediately did by leaping to their feet and embracing him, one by one.

Of course, cross-cultural ministry is not always as easy as some of the white members of the Rock make it sound. “It takes extra effort to communicate,” says Barb. “I can’t always trust my instincts about what’s right or normal because of cultural and class differences. I have to go by other people’s perceptions, which is hard to get used to.” In addition, trying to meet the neighborhood’s overwhelming needs can easily spell burnout for white members, who are often called on to share skills and resources. “The needs overwhelm me until I remind myself how totally dependent I am on God,” Heather admits. “In fact, I find myself consciously relying on God for strength and wisdom more than ever before.”

Despite the obvious difficulties of cross-cultural ministry, new white faces continue to pop up at the Rock. And in the same way that Steve, Jennie, Barb, Heather, and others have turned for counsel to white elders Steve Henry and Glen Kehrein (who have been in the neighborhood more than ten years), prospective white members are now turning to them with questions.

“One white visitor recently asked me what was difficult or different about being in a black church,” says Steve Manock. “I realized that one-and-a-half years ago I could have given her a clearer answer. But you see, this isn’t just a black church we’re trying to minister to anymore. This is our church. When I talk about how the Rock does things, I’m talking about the way we do things. This is simply our church now.”

By Robert M. Kachur.

Robert M. Kachur is associate editor of U magazine.

Throughout the United States, a small but growing number of churches is attempting to bridge traditional racial and cultural barriers. Among these churches is the Atlanta Metropolitan Christian Center in Atlanta, Georgia, which began with the merger of two lower-middle-class congregations, one white and one black. Its pastor is 38-year-old Flynn Johnson, whose own introduction to cross-cultural ministry began with his conversion in 1971.

“While I was under the influence of the Black Panthers, a white man befriended me and shared the gospel,” Flynn recalls. “He was from Alabama and had the worst kind of accent. I was accustomed to intimidating people, but he refused to be put off. He talked to me like I was a brother and led me to Christ.”

Today, Johnson leads a growing church program (approximately 300 members) that combines biblical preaching and teaching with extensive social outreach, including literacy programs, food, clothing, and shelter assistance, a Christian school, and television and radio programming. White members remain a distinct minority, but the church is located in a racially mixed neighborhood and maintains a strong commitment to cross-cultural ministry.

In the following interview, Johnson reflects on the history and philosophy of Atlanta Metropolitan Christian Center and addresses some of the issues facing biracial churches.

What steps did you take to prepare your congregation for its merger with a white church?

Looking back, it seems our preparation wasn’t so much leading us to undertake a merger as it was leading us to do the will of God. For two years we had been meeting in schools, moving three different times. Consequently, our concept of the church gradually was divorced from pews and stained glass windows. We began to see the church as the family of God whose members were related deeply enough that they could minister to one another and the outside community.

During this time, we felt we were being called to be pioneers, to go where others could not go or had refused to go. We agreed to relinquish our own traditions, if necessary, so that we could be the kind of community our neighborhood needed.

How did the merger actually come about?

A casual acquaintance from an interdenominational pastors’ fellowship called one day to say he had to see me right away. We met, and he told me God had made it clear to him that our two churches were to merge. I was moved to hear this proposal from a white pastor, but I wasn’t interested. Our church was growing rapidly, and we were about to make a major property purchase. I told the pastor I would pray about it, but was all the time thinking, “God might have spoken to you, but he hasn’t said a word to me!”

The Sunday before we were to sign on our new property a woman in our congregation came to me and said she’d had a dream of merging with a white congregation. I hadn’t said a word to anyone, so this got my attention; I began to do some serious praying. It became clear to me that our churches were supposed to merge. Both congregations were open to the idea, and after bringing together the leadership and working out the technicalities of administration, it became a reality.

How do whites and blacks in your church understand the gospel differently since they have come together?

The statement “We are one in Christ Jesus” always was defined in the context of our own homogeneous cultures. Now we’ve had to broaden our understanding of the kingdom of God to include each other. And not just each other, but whoever comes through the doors of our church. We see our separation along racial lines as Satan’s number-one tool to destroy the unity of the body of Christ, and we want to be instruments here on Earth to bring about the unity of God’s people.

We’ve also seen firsthand that the gospel really does have the power to transcend cultural barriers. You can preach and worship in your own culture for so long that you begin to wonder if the gospel has validity anywhere else. But when you see the Word of God take root in other cultures, you appreciate in a new way that Jesus is the Lord of all humanity, that the power of God unto salvation reaches all people and races.

What steps, if any, have you taken to protect the cultural integrity of subgroups within your church?

We try to distinguish between kingdom culture and “natural” culture, and we listen carefully to what one has to say to the other. There is a lot in our natural culture that isn’t an issue of sin; it’s just the way we live. But where any aspect of our culture contradicts the Word of God, we need to make changes.

We’re not interested in making everyone black or everyone white. It disturbs me when blacks who leave the black church to find more biblical content in a white church feel they must deny their own culture and become like whites. It’s equally disturbing when whites come into a black congregation and think the way to relate to people is to slap their hand and say, “What’s happenin’, man?” Our acceptance of each other can’t be based on our ability to change dialects.

For the sake of unity, we need to be willing to give up our sacred cows, even while maintaining our individuality.

Can you give an example?

The black church is in touch with its emotions. Historically, it is evangelistic, socially responsible, and entrepreneurial. The white evangelical church is sophisticated theologically and administratively. Together we could demonstrate the power of God to a secular society. As it is, the secular society is laughing at the church and dictating to us what our norms will be.

There is a substantial and influential segment of the church-growth movement that believes homogeneous churches grow best, that the mix of cultures is a stumbling block to evangelism.

I respect the work that men like Ralph Winter and Peter Wagner have done, but on this point we differ. Maybe I’m not in a position to argue as strongly as I might be if I had 7,000 members and 40 percent of them were white. But there is a growing move of God across the country which is bringing together different cultures within the church context. This is particularly true for those of us located in culturally mixed communities: If we accept responsibility for evangelizing our local communities, it’s only natural that our congregations will be culturally diverse.

I believe culturally mixed congregations make a stronger statement to the world about the power of the gospel. And we have found that if the power of God is present, and people get their needs met, then they don’t really care if the context is black, white, or whatever.

There is an enormous amount of Christian preaching in the United States, yet the church remains one of the most highly segregated institutions of society. How do you account for this?

Paul says we become false prophets and false people of God when we preach the truth but don’t do the truth. In the case of racial reconciliation, I don’t believe the gospel has been preached in this country. And in most cases, it certainly hasn’t been practiced.

The body of Christ is being shaken today to the place where we can no longer stand up and proclaim what we’re not willing to practice. Lately I have witnessed tears, meaningful tears, from evangelical leaders who have wept over the problem of racial division. Whether they will act on this recognition remains to be seen; I’m choosing to believe they will.

There are black evangelicals today who say that true integration is not possible within the church, because white evangelicals will never give up their power.

That’s a powerful statement, but it’s a secular statement. If you approach the gospel believing that it doesn’t have the power to change people’s lives, the power to make new persons, then you are speaking from a secular point of view.

These people are speaking out of their experience in the evangelical community.

Then they need another experience. And that’s what we are hoping to provide here. I think it’s true that many white evangelicals are afraid of losing control. But because I’m goal oriented and mission oriented, I choose to believe it will not always be that way.

From my understanding of Scripture, reconciliation is a command from God. We can’t call ourselves the people of God and reject another part of the body of Christ. So if I’m a black evangelical saying I’m not going to reach out to whites because they will never relinquish control, it is sin. And if I’m a white evangelical saying let the black church take care of itself, let them handle the inner city, then this also is sin.

Jesus died for the world, but he prayed for the church. And what he prayed was that we would be one, so that the world would know God had sent him. In my estimation, the world is not going to know who Christ is until his church is reconciled.

In your experience, is there a price to pay for racial reconciliation? If so, who pays what price?

There is a price, and it will be paid by all of us in the church who determine to come together and say, “We are related.” Part of the price for both blacks and whites may be rejection by their own religious culture.

In our own church, it is whites who have had the more radical choice to make. Some of them left after the merger, in part because of g pressure from relatives. Those who remained had to answer the question, “Who is my family?” A few of the whites had to choose between their biological families and the family of God.

In general, I think it is white Christians who pay the biggest price for racial reconciliation. This is particularly true if they accept responsibility for repentance—and restitution.

In what areas do you see a need for repentance?

For starters, there is the sin of slavery, which would not have happened in this country if the white evangelical community had said no. Instead, they not only allowed it, but they supported it by twisting and misinterpreting Scripture.

We also need to repent because we’ve spent millions of dollars and trained thousands of people for overseas missions (including Africa) while neglecting the black church here at home. One of the great miracles in the history of this country is that there even is a black church, because evangelicals have not evangelized the black community.

Jesus says if we’ve offended someone or are ourselves offended, we need to get things straight. In this case, there has been much “going to your brother” by the black community. Perhaps not as much recently. But the civil rights movement was in part an effort by the black church to say to the white church, “We’re offended.” Unfortunately, the evangelical church never got the message.

Jesus says there are heavy penalties for not dealing with our offenses. He doesn’t say there is no excuse for them to come up, but he does say there is no excuse for them to remain. And I think both the black church and the white evangelical church are reaping curses because we’ve allowed our offenses to hang on so long.

Can you give an example?

In the black community, we have become bigoted ourselves. The very thing that offended us has become our offense: we have taken on the racism of the white evangelical community. The tough part is that white evangelicals are reaching out their hands, and blacks are saying, “I don’t believe you.” We’ve cut ourselves off from the help God gives, because we don’t believe God is big enough to touch the hearts of white people.

It challenges me to the core of my being that Christ said I must forgive my brother if I want God’s forgiveness. He doesn’t give us an option. He said if we don’t forgive our brother from our heart, he will turn us over to the tormenters until we’ve paid the full price. That’s a very heavy statement.

What specific steps of restitution do you think are necessary for there to be genuine reconciliation between white evangelicals and the black community?

We need to make it possible for blacks to attend evangelical seminaries in larger numbers. Blacks were received with open arms in liberal seminaries, but they were essentially shut out of evangelical schools. This is one reason the black church hasn’t fared better in the United States.

There also has to be a willingness on the part of white evangelicals to recognize and follow black Christian leadership. I’m not talking about reversing the tables, but we have to raise the visibility of black leaders among the white community.

Money is another issue. I don’t mean doling out guilt offerings to pay for sins, but we need to recognize bona fide ministries that are meeting the needs of the black community as best they can. The question of long-term resources is very important, because disenfranchisement is a terrible thing, and we are not going to change the minds of people overnight.

Restitution also needs to be made to the black family. One of the things taken from black people during slavery was the family structure, which was systematically broken down while immorality was imposed as a way of life. It never fully recovered. We need to support programs that help rebuild and restructure the black family from a biblical standpoint.

Many, if not most, biracial and multiracial churches in this country are associated with the charismatic movement. Do you see any intrinsic connection between the two?

When people try to relate on the basis of doctrine or culture they are usually in deep trouble, because they can always find differences. The “charismatic experience” gives people a shared history, a point of reference that enables them to recognize each other as brothers and sisters in Christ.

I don’t mean that this experience brings some mystical cloud on people that solves all the problems of cross-cultural relationships. We have to work out our relationship with God, and we surely have to work it out with each other. But at the same time, the charismatic experience does open the door for dialogue. People begin thinking about new truths to which they were previously closed, and they may become more willing to go through the process of reconciliation.

What do you see as the future of cross-cultural churches?

They have a fantastic future. Secular society is already becoming culturally and racially mixed, and if we are going to reach people with the gospel, we need to catch up in this area.

Unfortunately, the present generation is far ahead of the church when it comes to crossing cultural barriers. Take television—or the movies. Once you had to look long and hard to find some black folks on the screen, and when you found them they were bowing and scraping. This is no longer the case.

I predict the time will come when secular society will look for cross-cultural churches and will even wonder what’s wrong with churches that are homogeneous. But we need to be willing to give up our old wineskins. Our current systems are stretched beyond their limit, and they’re too raggedy to hold the new wine of the Spirit. It’s time to let go of the past and embrace the new. There are risks involved, but not near the risks of doing nothing. And the rewards are greater than we can comprehend.

Barbara Thompson lives and writes in Atlanta. Her latest book, written with Anderson Spickard, Jr., is Dying for a Drink (Word).

Twenty years ago the highly regarded Kerner Commission report appeared, summarizing months of research with an ominous prediction: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” Today, partly because of the commission’s report, that prediction remains largely unfulfilled. Yet racial relations are still touchy at many points. How satisfactory are they? How much injustice remains? And what should the church do about it? To get some idea of how evangelical Christians might answer these questions, CHRISTIANITY TODAY decided to survey its readership.

Of 505 surveys mailed, about 13 percent were returned. Reflecting the magazine’s readership, most of the respondents (94 percent) were white. Though the response of 13 percent is not high enough to allow absolute statements about the beliefs and practices of the CT readership as a whole, it is high enough to allow the tentative generalizations that follow. Four Christian leaders close to the issue of race relations reviewed and analyzed the statistical data. Their comments appear throughout.

Thinking about the issue of race relations, especially between blacks and whites in North America, brings images not of a fresh wound but of an old scab—one that keeps getting bumped and refuses to heal.

Many citizens, Christians not least, are frustrated. They sense that they have yet to outlive the injustices dealt to minorities. Yet they feel at a loss when it comes to speaking to the issue in 1988. What can they do or say that has not already been done or said?

A few respondents to the CT survey thought the answer to racial conflict was clear. As one put it, the races must “share bed and board”; integration is “one meaning of ‘Choose Life.’ ”

But is this “solution” tenable? Says black Presbyterian Church in America pastor Carl Ellis, “If we were to homogenize all the races today, we’d come up with some other way to discriminate against people: Some have tan wax in their ears, others have dark wax. There’s no way around the sinfulness of the human being.”

Besides, Ellis adds, “I don’t want integration to mean I have to obliterate my [black] culture, completely throw it away. That’s a price I’m not going to pay.” So much for simple answers. There are none. That’s why the scab persists.

What CT Readers Think

There was only one expression of overt racial hostility against blacks in the CT survey. A few additional white respondents either stated or implied their objections to interracial (black-white) marriage.

However, most respondents said they would like to see more integration:

• Sixty-nine percent would like to see more integration in the workplace;
• Seventy percent would like to see more residential and social integration;
• Eighty-eight percent would like to see more integration in churches.

But CT readers do not regard improving race relations as a top priority. Asked to reveal which issues they regard as “very important,” they responded as follows:

• Seventy-three percent, dissolution of the family;
• Sixty-four percent, sexual behavior and sexual ethics;
• Sixty-one percent, abortion on demand;
• Fifty-two percent, pornography and its availability;
• Forty-six percent, poverty in America;
• Twenty-eight percent, race relations and racial reconciliation;
• Twenty percent, nuclear arms proliferation.

Matthew Parker, associate vice-president of urban academic affairs at William Tyndale College and a CT consulting editor, said that while he is not surprised by the apparent apathy, he is disturbed. Parker regards race relations as the key question this country must address if it is to play a prophetic role in world affairs. “The majority of the world’s four billion people,” Parker explains, “are nonwhite. These people interpret how they will be treated by Americans by looking at how people of color are treated in America.”

Youth minister Buster Soaries stressed the things white people stand to lose by not prioritizing race relations. “When we talk about segregation in this country, we usually think of the social gains that are due blacks. Most white people have totally overlooked the level of intellectual loss they suffer from segregation. I talk to white kids, for example, from a perspective no white man can share. When I talk about self-esteem, I talk from the perspective of a kid who grew up knowing he could never be President.”

A Closer Look

Several respondents expressed the view that class barriers are more difficult to overcome than barriers of race. Wrote one, “I’ve seen a black man in a white pulpit, and I’ve seen a white man in a black pulpit. The congregations have stayed the same. The real barrier would be to have a poor man in a rich man’s pulpit and a rich man choose a poor man’s pulpit.”

William Leslie, pastor of Chicago’s LaSalle Street Church, located in a racially mixed community, agreed, observing that class barriers present a greater problem because “class buys experience.” He said, “The poor, more so than minority groups, have few people to represent them in places where decisions are made.”

Almost unanimously, respondents who brought up the issue of affirmative action in answer to one of the survey’s questions opposed it. One representative response read, “I’d like to see everyone earn their place by effort and ability, not government regulation.”

Thirty-eight percent of the respondents strongly agreed that the civil rights movement was a net gain for the country, while 15 percent strongly disagreed. Ellis observed that had this statement been put before blacks, “Ninety-nine percent would say it was a gain, because the civil rights movement was directly related to our survival as a people.”

Ellis adds that “not everything that goes on in the name of affirmative action is right. It can be a ceiling instead of a floor. And it can foster mediocrity. But by and large, whites have not realized that they continue to benefit from what I call the ‘old affirmative action.’ By that I mean the legacy that has come to them by way of racism. The old affirmative action also fostered mediocrity by excluding black resources. In this country, we have been terrible stewards of the human mind.”

Though he is disturbed by some of the attitudes expressed in the survey, Ellis does not characterize the response as racist. “It’s a problem of cultural dynamics, of majority versus minority culture. If black Americans were the dominant culture, we’d be the ones everybody would complain about.” But he adds, “Just because the problems are explainable does not mean they are excusable.”

Is Integration The Answer?

Fifty percent of the survey respondents strongly agreed that race relations should be improved. But only 20 percent said they were dissatisfied with their degree of contact with other races. And only 10 percent strongly agreed that racial integration should be a top national priority. Thus it is uncertain how respondents believe improvement in race relations should be accomplished, although a commonly expressed view was that, in the words of one respondent, “Integration is best accomplished by individuals rather than forced by law.”

Said Leslie, “When people of different races find out who each other are, and that we have the same hopes and desires for ourselves and our children, that’s when real harmony will come. This is happening now, and will continue to happen whether we want it to happen or not.”

Of course, some of the concern about racial integration comes not from whites, but from the black community. Many black social workers, for example, oppose the adoption of black children by white families. Said Parker, “The problem is that when people talk of interracial adoption, very seldom do you hear of nonwhite families adopting white children. This subtly communicates that blacks are not good enough to bring up white children.”

Ellis discourages marriage between blacks and whites because of his concerns for the preservation of black culture. “Because of the current state of the black family,” he explains, “we are desperately in need of black Christian family models.” However, once an interracial couple is married, Ellis says, “I become a champion for just treatment. Today, interracial couples are the new niggers.”

CT readers think the church is primarily responsible for integration. However, 32 percent said it would not be “very advantageous” for a pastor to be of a different race than the congregation, while 6 percent said it would be “very advantageous.”

One black respondent asserted that the church is the one place where there should be less integration. He suggested the black church might not flourish independently of the culture that has nourished it. As another respondent put it: “Dutch Calvinists will never acquire the class requisite for the ‘soul’ of a black worship service; blacks (unless they shed their black identity) will not become ‘soulless’ Presbyterians.”

Directions For The Moment

Analysts of the survey responded in virtual unison to the question of what must be done in order for race relations to be improved: “Let’s get to know each other.”

Said Soaries, “You still have a legacy of fear, of superstition and rumor. It works both ways. Blacks have historically based their own self-esteem on the contributions of other black people. Because every President has been white, the average black kid does not know how it can be that white people have self-esteem problems.”

Parker said when he encounters a white person who wants to do something about racial tension, his first response is, “Let’s get together.” He adds, “Some people don’t think they have racist attitudes. They’re willing maybe to go into the city and help a black family remodel a house. Yet these same people might be uncomfortable submitting to black leadership or taking orders from someone at work who is not white. So I don’t encourage people to do something. I try to encourage white people to become friends with a black couple or a black individual.”

“The goal,” said Leslie, “is to be able to move in and out of black and white communities without batting an eye, without thinking race. The only way to pick that up is to live in an integrated environment, where life experiences are shared among the races. Where there is not shared experience, it must be created.”

As one respondent put it, “It’s one thing to live next door, go to work, or go to church with blacks. It’s another thing to really allow another person to enter your ‘space,’ your life.”

The failure to observe at all—not to mention to analyze and explain—the rise of evangelical Christianity in the U.S. (or around the world, for that matter) over two decades must constitute one of the great modern blind spots of the American journalistic mind. It is a failure sadly paralleled by the inability of Western reporters during the same period to grasp the scope of the Khomeiniist Islamic revival, or the dangerous reverberations of a renascent Islam even among Muslim communities not belonging to the minority Shi’ite sect dominant in Iran.

In a vague effort to push the concept of a large, grassroots American evangelical community out of sight and mind, much of the news media have resorted to the safe old standby term for people of religious conviction: “fundamentalists.” The word, with its connotation of fanaticism, has the useful effort of consigning evangelicals to the category of the unreportable.

Kept In The Dark

This media blindness to religious faith at home and abroad has had all sorts of unpleasant consequences, and not just among American evangelical Christians who have had to endure the many prejudices—born of ignorance—that swoop around the public marketplace. Americans as a whole have been shortchanged by those whose job it is to report and analyze events around the world. They have been kept in the dark about one of the great stories of the century: the emergence of a growing, perhaps mortal, competition among the world’s great religions (secular and otherwise) for the ultimate loyalties of mankind.

Why has the U.S. press failed so conspicuously to do justice to this phenomenon? An ordinary explanation would be ignorance. But that ignorance is at least partly willful. Surveys of the U.S. public media have confirmed one astounding fact: reporters tend to be overwhelmingly secular in their world view, they tend not to respect religious faith in general, and, for the most part, they espouse a system of values inherently hostile to the traditional Western values handed down in the Bible.

In a well-known survey of 216 leading U.S. journalists, conducted in 1981 by sociologists S. Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman, 54 percent of the respondents thought adultery was not wrong, 75 percent considered homosexuality an acceptable lifestyle, 86 percent seldom or never went to church or synagogue, and 90 percent thought abortion was an inherent right of women. If those figures are frightening for Christians, they are likely to be even more skewed away from traditional values today than they were six years ago.

Open Hostility?

Of course, the recent string of scandals and internecine squabbles within the evangelical community has not made the task of reporting sympathetically (or even fairly) about it any easier. In fact, U.S. news organizations have at times displayed open hostility toward any Christian organization with a high profile and explicit evangelical position. Apparently lacking any degree of discernment—a requisite skill for journalists—they regularly tar much of Christendom with the opprobrium earned by only a small part of it.

In so doing, some journalists have departed from a principle of their professional code of ethics: keeping personal likes and dislikes out of the business of reporting. Moreover, they have departed from a more important principle as well: curiosity about life, with enough open-mindedness to ask a lot of questions. In theory, that is what journalists are supposed to do.

Redeeming The Media

Is there a Christian solution to this? Yes, there is. But if it is simple, it is not easy. For years, Christians have been content to drift along with the changing fashions of the general public’s trendy whims. They have been confident there is not too much difference between Christian and non-Christian standards and behavior in private life and society.

That confidence is utterly misplaced in today’s climate. If God’s people are not to be completely swamped by the evolution of much of modern culture into barbarism and neopaganism, then they must fashion the instruments of their own cultural expression, including their news media, for themselves. Otherwise, they will be unable to discern the sign of the times.

This refashioning includes reinventing journalism, and applying to it the biblical standards evangelical Christians demand of their own and other Christians’ private lives. Little by little, in such outstanding places as CBN University’s journalism program, or in the communications program of Youth With a Mission, this is being done.

But until journalism as a whole has been significantly redeemed from its present worldiness, one of the great stories of the millennium—how more people than ever are finding Christ—is going to be lost to the world.

By David Aikman, a correspondent for Time magazine, currently covering the U.S. State Department.

SPEAKING OUT offers responsible Christians a forum. It does not necessarily reflect the views of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Most school people seem to think faculty meetings are a bore. I don’t. I’ve always considered attendance to be a pleasant duty. In fact, I have probably built up some sort of attendance record over my 48 years as a teacher.

At one of our better meetings here at Trinity recently, Prof. Gordon Palmer gave a review of the much talked-about book by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

Like a host of other writers during the last decade, Hirsch decries the steady downward trend of grade school and high school achievement scores in spite of the fact that tests themselves have been revised to make them easier for our increasingly illiterate youngsters. Even more devastating is the fact that the very best students of today are scoring dramatically lower than their counterparts a decade ago.

As bad as this is, however, it gets worse. Hirsch’s deepest concern is what he calls cultural illiteracy: a lack of the “basic information needed to thrive in the modern world.” He writes, “Only by piling up specific, communally shared information can children learn to participate in complex cooperative activities with other members of their community.”

And effective communication, as Hirsch demonstrates over and over again, requires not just an ability to read and understand words, but a body of information that serves as a hermeneutical context for words. We not only need to know, but we need to know what others know. Shared information is the key. And this is just what our youngsters are not getting in school.

Hirsch insists we must begin early in the educational process. By the fourth grade, it is already far too late: We have lost the advantage of younger children’s ability to memorize data.

Several things occurred to me as I read and reflected upon Hirsch’s work. Professor Palmer himself pointed out the first: We need a Christian list comparable to Hirsch’s American cultural list. (In the appendix, Hirsch lists approximately 5,000 terms—names, events, dates—that he believes should serve as a guide for refilling the information vacuum created by our schools.)

Every church statistician or Christian educator I know laments the fact that knowledge about religion, the Bible, and Christianity has fallen off. This is certainly true for the general public, but unfortunately it is true for evangelical Christians as well.

In a recent Gallup poll, the vast majority of Americans indicated their belief that the Ten Commandments are valid today and that someday every human will have to answer to God for his or her obedience or disobedience to these commandments. Yet hardly anyone knew what these commandments are. Most could not name even five.

What do we need on a Christian list that provides our young people with sufficient information so they can understand the Bible and what Christianity is all about? Just for starters: the Ten Commandments, a half-dozen favorite psalms, the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer, John 3:1–18, the Love Chapter (1 Cor. 13), a hundred or so select verses on Christian doctrine and ethics, and the Westminster Catechism thrown in for good measure. And for dates: 1400 B.C., 1000 B.C., 722 B.C., 586 B.C., 400 B.C.; A.D. 30, 70, 1054, and 1517. (I’ll leave it up to you to figure out their significance.)

But then a dreadful thought grabbed me: Hirsch’s exhaustive list is what people don’t know. How impoverished we are in seeking to communicate our biblical faith to the world. Every time I hear a radio or television sermon, I find myself wondering how much of this non-Christians understand. What does a reference to “the blood” communicate to them? What meaning do they have for law, sin, grace, regeneration, righteousness, and the basic vocabulary of Christian faith?

Francis Schaeffer used to speak of “pre-evangelism.” Maybe this is what he meant. We can’t wait to preach the gospel until the educational level of our society is raised to Hirsch’s standards. But neither can we ignore it.

KENNETH S. KANTZER

It’s Balance That Is Needed

What Philip Yancey saw in that October gay-rights march [“We Have No Right to Scorn,” Jan. 15] was the two extremes we evangelicals should seek to avoid: morality without sensitivity and sensitivity without morality. Jesus’ response to the woman caught in the act of adultery shows the right balance—“Neither do I condemn you” and “Go now and leave your life of sin.” Let’s just be sure we’re not “turned off” to morality because it’s voiced harshly by self-righteous people, or “turned on” to the compromising positions of others because they exhibit sensitivity. It is the proper wedding of morality and sensitivity that makes us respond in a manner that is truly Christian.

REV. BOB PARKS

Mission Hills Baptist Church

Littleton, Colo.

Having read over and over the story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery as an example of how we (Christians and/or straights) should approach the gay community, let me make these points: (1) I would not have been among those “Christian protesters” nor do I condone their behavior; (2) I do not want gays persecuted, prosecuted, or discriminated against for conduct between consenting adults; (3) I want government and health organizations to push for medical research and do all possible to help those suffering from AIDS; (4) I will gladly stand before God’s altar in any church alongside any gay and ask God’s forgiveness for the sins we each have committed.

But after making those points clear, I want to point out that I cannot say to a gay that I forgive him/her, because first, the sin is not against me but against God and his/her partners. Second, to be forgiven by God we must acknowledge our sin and ask forgiveness; these people will not do that because they will not accept the fact that they are committing a sin. You who quote that story never comment on the last phrase, “… leave your life of sin.” None of the gay marchers accept that teaching.

SHIRLEY FLEENER

Manhattan, Kans.

The issue is not so much whether Christian mission mandates the offer of saving grace to the morally deviant AIDS victim. That is readily acknowledged, of course. What is deficient in Yancey’s article is the seeming lack of awareness as to the ever-present endeavor of moral and spiritual deviance to confuse. The singing of “Jesus Loves You …” does not represent a valid expression of gospel proclamation or intent any more than the Philippian psychic’s pronouncements (Acts 16:17) represented a call to truth.

The infusion of truth and elevated rhetoric into the promotion of evil is one of the oldest ploys for the obscuring of the divine mandates of righteousness and biblical compliance.

REV. BURL RATZSCH

First Baptist Church

Akron, Iowa

I would suggest that not only is there “no right to scorn,” there is every reason for repentance. While the general evangelical community may not be yelling slogans at gay civil rights protests, they continue to dismiss alternative positions on homosexuality and the Bible as mere liberal relativism. Whether yelling slogans at a parade or from the more dignified platform of the pulpit, evangelicals’ preoccupation with moral decency and antigay rhetoric may well have jeopardized an evangelical witness to the gospel itself.

TIM PHILLIPS

Evangelicals Concerned

Chicago Region

Western Springs, Ill.

Electronic witness

I enjoyed “The Wireless Gospel” [Jan. 15]. Radio and television are good ways to spread the gospel; many will listen to television preachers who would never go to church. I was “born again” by reading my Bible and listening to TV preachers. The problem is that the authentic and the counterfeit preach side by side.

ELSIE GRAHAM

Olmito, Tex.

Surely your picture of Paul Rader in action on the cover was more fascinating to me than to most of your readers. It brought back memories of the late Ivan Panin’s stories about Rader and his brother Lyell, a noted chemist. Mr. Panin could have said about Paul Rader as he did once after a stay with brother Lyell in New York: “He’s a steam engine in breeches.” Thank you for your story about “The Wireless Gospel.”

J. S. BENTLEY

Bible Numerics

Niagara Falls, Ont., Canada

Test Your Eq

I always thought the people in my church were evangelicals. After all, we believe in the traditional doctrines. But then I asked some church friends if they’d caught Dobson’s show on Thursday. “Who’s Dobson?” they asked, with all seriousness When some others thought “Joni and Friends” was a puppet show, I knew our church’s evangelical standing was in grave danger.

So I devised a test that accurately determines a person’s EQ (Evangelical Quotient). Just five questions will reveal if you and your friends are truly evangelical.

1. Which of the following is not an evangelical institution? (YFC/BGEA/IVCF/ACLU). Chuck Swindoll’s “Insight for Living.”

2. Which of these colors cannot be found in the Wordless Book? (red/gold/blue/black).

3. The correct zip code for Wheaton, Illinois, is: (21795/45450/60187/92013).

4. Aslan is: (an Old Testament patriarch/an Asian missions agency/a figure in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles/an early New Testament manuscript).

5. In the song, “The B-I-B-L-E,” the second line is: (“It helps me, Lord, to see”/“Its truth will set me free”/“Yes, that’s the Book for me”).

If you missed three or more, it’s not too late. Pray, fast, and listen daily to Chuck Swindoll’s “Insight for Living.”

Eutychus

Bring on Pentecost!

Re: “Great Commission Deadline” (Jan. 15): Lack of data is a problem in thinking about the Great Commission, but there is an even greater problem with our North American skepticism about available data. Our cynical, secular culture has trained us to disbelieve that God is doing great things in faraway places. Evidence the statement in your article that “we could have a Pentecost every day with 3,000 saved in China,” and “it would take 900 years before all of China would be saved.” There is ample evidence that church growth in China far surpasses a Pentecost every day. In fact, there may be a Pentecost every three hours now taking place in China—and without the planning or foresight of Western mission agencies. What might God do if we really put our resources to the task? The problem is, if God did it, would anyone believe it?

REV. DENNIS M. MULDER

World Home Bible League

South Holland, Ill.

Real ecumenicity?

Terry Muck’s assessment of the Moral Majority as “a model of ecumenicity of the best sort” [“Home to Lynchburg,” Jan. 15] mistakes the working of a political pressure group using religious vocabulary for a true joining of believers in a common cause for faith. By this standard it could be said that the great ecumenical event of history was the one that brought together such diverse groups as Pharisees, Sadducees, and Romans for the common cause of dealing with the national threat of Jesus of Nazareth. Each could claim a motivation of patriotism and piety while, ironically, ignoring and abusing the real issue of faith in their midst.

REV. JAMES N. FOSTER

The Reformed Churches of Currytown and Sprakers

Sprakers, N.Y.

Lewis: Appreciation or depreciation?

J. I. Packer’s column “What Lewis Was and Wasn’t [Jan. 15] is a skillful endeavor to discredit Lewis without accountability. While his final sentence serves as a disclaimer, Packer manages within ten concise paragraphs to raise the just-right bothersome questions to a highly refined evangelical conscience concerning Lewis’s skill as a debater and author, the vitality of his conversion, his theology, the motive for his orthodoxy, and his choices in lifestyle and intimates.

Having read a considerable amount of Lewis’s writings, I recognize the validity of some of Packer’s statements. I am left to question, however, Packer’s motives. Is it to warn a vulnerable readership of the dangers of a mortal Lewis? Or is it to discredit a strong man whose “catholic” (non-Roman!) views might undermine certain of the author’s cherished positions? I wonder.

Granting Lewis his fair share of flaws and inconsistencies, Packer’s column seems more a depreciation than an appreciation of the man who elicited from him the conclusion: “Thank you, Mr. Lewis, for being you. I wouldn’t have missed you for the world.”

MIRIAM HUFFMAN ROCKNESS

Lake Wales, Fla.

Doctrinal parameters

James Hitchcock is to be commended for his article “Boundary Markers for Belief” (Jan. 15), but his discussion of John Henry Newman’s doctrine of development is misleading. While the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine was completed (just barely) before Newman’s formal conversion to Rome, it can be argued that he converted to Rome—that is, he mentally assented to the claims of that church—well before the work was even completed. Indeed, it was probably the act of writing the book that led to his formal conversion.

Hitchcock rightly summarizes two of Newman’s conclusions: that every doctrinal development must be contained “at least in embryo” in Scripture, and that no such development may “negate authentic earlier doctrine.” But these two conclusions forced Newman to still another conclusion that Hitchcock overlooks: If certain well-developed doctrines are outgrowths of ideas that are contained in Scripture in embryonic form only, then someone must determine which fully developed doctrines are proper products of the embryo and which are mutants. Newman concluded that the Church, and ultimately the Pope, must be the final judge of doctrinal issues. This belief left him little option but to convert formally, and it later led him to acquiese to Pius IV’s claim of papal infallibility.

Whatever the mechanics of doctrinal development, evangelicals must reaffirm that Scripture alone is the final arbiter of doctrine. Our reasonings about doctrine must be continually measured against, and supported by, the Word of God.

DAVID W. CARMICHAEL

White Plains, N.Y.

I would like to take issue with one point of Professor Hitchcock’s otherwise fine article. He asks for a balance between personal experience and a faith based upon doctrinal orthodoxy that can be dead and barren. While there can be no argument that dead and barren lives can be found associated with any doctrinal stance, however rigorous, I fear he was implying that the more theological we become, the more “nitpicking” we become and the less we resort to a simple biblical faith.

I hope Hitchcock is not saying this. It would be like saying we have to balance out our commitment to God with commitment to the world. If we are mandated to teach the teachings of Jesus to the world and to obey them ourselves, then we are also mandated to meditate upon them that we might know them, thus being good theologians.

DANIEL MANN

Brooklyn, N.Y.

Precise language

I appreciated David Wells’s essay on euphemistic language [“How to Avoid Offensive Language While Saying Absolutely Nothing,” Jan. 15], but his opening salvo, specifically regarding “drug abuse,” is off target. “Abuse implies that there is a proper use,” he says, and there is obviously no “proper use of pot, crack, angel dust, and heroin.” True enough; but what about tranquilizers, pain medication, and other prescription drugs (to say nothing of over-the-counter drugs)? They have their proper and even essential uses, but the abuse of such drugs is a major part of the overall drug problem.

Even with regard to “recreational drugs,” however—and there is a target!—dropping the word “abuse” would leave us worse off, not better. Grammatically, “drug abuse” means abusing drugs, but in practice it also reminds us what those substances do to our bodies. Let’s not give up that impact for mere precision of language.

REV. JOHN M. SALMON

Westminster Church

Piqua, Ohio

Wells’s point that we often use words to obfuscate, rather than communicate, is well taken, but I would like to take issue with his statement “Secularism assumes there is no moral or transcendent order related to what we do and before which we are accountable.” Many ethical secularists do recognize an impersonal “natural order” and unreservedly acknowledge a “reap what you sow,” cause-and-effect moral order. Catholicism and liberal Protestantism are better prepared to defend a moral social order without appealing to distinctively Christian theological beliefs in a pluralistic society than Orthodox Protestantism, since they recognize the valid, though less explicit, revelation of divine order inherent in natural theology and law spoken of by some psalmists and by Paul in Romans 1.

True, the self-interested moralism this conviction engenders falls far short of our gospel ethic of self-sacrificial love; but it can certainly provide the basis for a healthy, well-ordered society and, in fact, did so in our own culture until an excessively subjective individualism, not secularism, produced a widespread denial of normative ethics.

CAROL A. DWORKOWSKI

Annapolis, Md.

I thought Wells was fighting straw enemies. We talk about “drug and alcohol abuse” because it’s an accurate way to discuss the issue. We talk about fetuses because that’s what they are. The use of the word “lifestyle” reflects our pluralistic culture. And should we always call sexual sin by name? Did Jesus say to the woman caught in adultery, “You are an adulterer”? (Granted, he didn’t talk about her “lifestyle” either!) I believe some of the motive behind the “sexual preference” language is grace. That grace might really be motivated by the compassion of Jesus.

LYNNE M. BAAB

Seattle, Wash.