Thousands of despairing Christian believers in the Soviet Union see no future for themselves in their beloved homeland, and now they want out. The ranks of Christians seeking emigration visas are swelling weekly. At least 20,000 Pentecostals want to leave, according to the highly respected Keston College Center for the Study of Religion and Communism in suburban London, and the movement is spreading among congregations, both registered and unregistered. Also, an increasing number of Baptists want to emigrate. For the first time, reports Keston, the Council of Baptist Prisoners’ Relatives has come out in support of those who wish to emigrate on religious grounds. In one of its recent secretly published bulletins, the council published an open letter to Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev demanding freedom to emigrate for all those wishing to do so because of religious persecution.

Few are granted exit visas, however.

On June 27, seven members of two Pentecostal families from Chernogorsk in Siberia rushed past a police guard in Moscow and barricaded themselves inside the consular lobby of the U.S. embassy. An eighth person, the teen-age son of demonstrators Pyotr and Augusta Vashchenko, was seized by police. The Vashchenkos learned later that he had been permitted to return home.

The Pentecostals announced that they would not leave the embassy until the Soviet Union granted them emigration visas. Early this month they were still there. It was the longest sit-in in the Soviet capital in memory.

In addition to Pyotr Vashchenko. 57, and his wife were three of their thirteen children, Lidiya, 27, Lubov. 25, and Liliya, 21, along with a neighbor, Maria Chmykalova, 56, and her son Timofey, 16.

By day, reported Seth Mydans of the Associated Press, the seven sit on yellow leather armchairs in the consular lobby, quietly reading their Bibles. When the office has closed and everyone has left, they kneel and pray for exit visas so they can go to America to practice their faith. Then they stretch out for the night on sofas in the office. Someone has donated blankets for their use. Embassy staffers take up collections to feed them.

Embassy sources said the seven would not be ejected, despite the protests of Soviet authorities. Every day, though, the embassy asks them to leave, the Pentecostals told Mydans. An American official told them that it is not in their best interest to remain and that chances of gaining a Soviet guarantee of visas are slim. But that is as far as the embassy will go, he assured. “If it is necessary to keep them here forever, then we will,” he said.

The Vashchenkos, a mining family, were among thirty-two persons from their congregation who staged a similar demonstration at the American embassy in 1968. On that occasion, after Soviet officials gave assurances that there would be no retaliation, the embassy staff forced the Pentecostals to leave. The group had been there only four hours. Keston College says that documents from the group show that no reprisals were taken against participants. The Vashchenkos, however, informed reporter Mydans that they spent a term in a labor camp as a result of the action.

Mrs. Vashchenko charged that three of the couple’s children were taken away from them for six years because the government disapproved of the religious atmosphere of their home. (Under Soviet law, children may be taken from parents who are judged unfit to raise good citizens. A number of Pentecostal families throughout Siberia reportedly have suffered under the statute.)

If the Vashchenkos are permitted to leave the country, they may find American sponsors already prepared to take them in. Several years ago the Tolstoy Foundation of New York City lined up sponsors and began sending invitations to some 200 Pentecostals in the Soviet Union who wished to emigrate. The organization also petitioned the Soviet government. So far, only two families have arrived. Tolstoy executive Alla Ivask acknowledged that things “are moving very, very slowly.”

Among the Soviet believers who wish to emigrate is well-known religious dissident Georgi Vins, the leader of unregistered Baptists who is serving a sentence in Yakutia, a labor camp in Siberia. Earlier this year, according to information received by Keston College, he was visited by his son Peter, who brought word that the family had received invitations from relatives in Canada to emigrate to that country. The elder Vins reportedly informed his son in a written statement “certified” by the labor camp administration that he is ready to leave the Soviet Union and live with the Canadian relatives. Until recently, the Vinses and other Baptist leaders believed that the best policy was to stay as witnesses, despite the persecution. Peter Vins’s first arrest for his faith came less than a year ago. His father has spent most of his adult life in confinement or exile. Broken in health, the elder Vins may feel that a new beginning elsewhere is at last in order, say some observers.

One week after Peter Vins returned from the visit, says Keston. he was arrested a second time and sentenced to one year in a Ukranian labor camp for “parasitism,” a charge used often against church workers who have no secular job. Although he was allegedly beaten by a prison guard upon his arrival, the younger Vins is “in good spirits,” a family member reported.

Pastor Charles A. Trentham of First Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., recently traveled to the Soviet Union. While there he visited with dissident Baptists. He declined to comment, however, on what they talked about or on negotiations aimed at the release of Georgi Vins. Trentham, President Carter’s pastor, said the only message he carried from Carter was a greeting to his fellow believers throughout the Soviet Union.

While Pentecostals sat in at the American embassy in Moscow, a different kind of demonstration took place at the Soviet embassy in Washington. High-level representatives of the U.S. Catholic Conference, the Synagogue Council of America, and the National Council of Churches sent ajoint letter of protest to Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. The letter protested the recent widely publicized trials of four prominent Soviet dissidents, along with the heavy sentences that were meted out.

The delegation that carried the letter was unable to see Dobrynin, and a press attache refused to accept the letter. The group decided to mail it instead.

Graham: The News Can Be Misleading

Is evangelist Billy Graham a victim of irresponsible journalism, or is it all a case of faulty communication?

The question was raised afresh following the publication last month of a story by reporter Robert Hodierne in the Charlotte Observer. The story, which was widely reported elsewhere, recounts details of financial transactions connected with the 1973 acquisition of a choice 1,050-acre site east of Asheville, North Carolina, for a laymen’s Bible training center. Its cost was $2.75 million. (Additional acquisitions have increased the area involved to 1,374 acres at a total cost of more than $3 million.)

Funds for the purchase came from the World Evangelism and Christian Education Fund (WECEF), the Dallas-based Graham foundation that is also funding the Billy Graham graduate school and archives facility at Wheaton College. Construction of the North Carolina training center, which Graham describes as “the last goal I have before the Lord takes me to heaven,” is expected to begin next year.

Hodierne’s story suggests that it may have been improper for WECEF to purchase the mountain land next to Interstate 40 without an appraisal—a point disputed by some real estate people, including investor Melvin Graham, the evangelist’s brother. He said: “You pay what the man’s asking.… If he sets the price, you’re going to pay his price, or you don’t get the property.” Considering the property’s location and its adaptability to the intended use, the price was a fair one and maybe even a bargain, say some experts. Whatever, it is worth much more today, says an Asheville real estate broker who was involved in the transaction.

Apparently what aroused Hodierne’s curiosity most was the discovery that the $2.75 million price included $650,000 for an option held by two investors. The pair, William Pharr of Pharr Yarns and McLain Hall, a South Carolina real estate broker, had paid only $25,000 for the option just three months earlier, said the reporter. (The option gave its owners the right to buy the land for $2.1 million by mid-1974; no one else could buy it before then without also purchasing the option.)

Further, said Hodierne, some of Graham’s relatives and associates had business dealings in 1973 with the two men, especially with Hall. And it was Hall, he said, who had showed Melvin Graham—a WECEF board member with whom he was linked in several joint real estate ventures—the land that WECEF eventually bought.

Casual readers of the story could have mistakenly inferred that Graham’s relatives and associates somehow profited from the WECEF purchase. Indeed, using a hypothetical case of such self dealing, Hodierne explored the possibility of action by the Internal Revenue Service—thus increasing the likelihood of confusion among readers.

For the second time in a year, Graham took the unusual (for him) step of responding directly to a critical newspaper article. He had said last year that stories on WECEF by Hodierne were “grossly misleading” (see July 29, 1977, issue, page 36, and August 26, 1977, issue, page 18). The latest account, he declared, was “filled with unsupported and untrue innuendos and insinuations.” He added: “To my knowledge, no member of my family or organization has made a cent on the purchase.” An IRS audit of WECEF “took no exception” to the transaction, he said. (Graham declined to be interviewed until after the story was published. Hodierne spoke with several of Graham’s associates instead.)

In a follow-up report, the Observer insisted that its story “did not say Graham family members profited from the sale,” but it kept the pot boiling by implying that Graham was not telling everything he knew.

On the day that the disputed story was published in the Observer, an article on the proposed training center also appeared in the Asheville Citizen-Times, presenting an altogether different perspective. It was written by columnist Bob Terrell, who has often broken Graham announcements in exclusive stories. In it, Graham told of his plans for the center, where lay people “of all ages” can come for two weeks or for longer periods to study the Bible, speech, church history, and the like. A curriculum has been planned tentatively by Charles Riggs, veteran trainer of crusade counselors, who “will probably run the school.” It will “not be an academic institution,” and no credits will be offered, said Graham. Probably only one or two permanent faculty members will be named, he surmised, with others coming from around the world to teach for short periods. Initially, the center will be limited to a maximum of 500 students at a time.

Poetic Justice

Thomas E. F. McNamara, 42, a former educator in the field of fine arts, is considered an expert on the work of American poet Robert Frost. He is apparently less skilled in matters of handwriting, though. Last month he pleaded guilty in a federal court in New Hampshire to charges involving forgeries purported to be manuscripts of Frost and other major poets.

Among the poems McNamara was accused of forging is a two-liner by Frost:

“Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee,

“And I’ll forgive thy great big one on me.”

Graham, who lives a few miles away in Montreat, said that he intends to keep on preaching. The school “will have to be run by other people,” he acknowledged, “but I will keep my hand in it.” Meanwhile, he added, he will help raise money to build it.

Graham indicated to Terrell that he is not a stranger to criticism over land acquisition. He recalled that his organization in 1953 bought a Colorado property called Glen Eyrie for $300,000 from a Texas oilman who was chairman of the University of Notre Dame board. The idea was to build a Bible school there, said the evangelist, but the board chairman “was a Catholic, and Southern Baptists, who thought I was going to start a new denomination, raised so much fuss that we finally gave the property to the Navigators.”

Test-Tube Results

The birth of the first so-called test-tube baby in England was accompanied by an outpouring of published opinion. Much of the attention, it seemed, was prompted more by intense fascination than by philosophical anguish.

“Used responsibly,” said physician John Dawson, secretary of the British Medical Association’s ethics committee, the technique of laboratory fertilization of a human ovum and reimplantation in the uterus “offers no ethical difficulties for doctors.” He called it “a valuable addition to the treatment for infertile women.”

United States health officials are much more cautious, calling for more research in the laboratory and in animals. They said they will continue a three-year-old moratorium on funding of any studies involving even the first step of combining human ova and sperm until a new National Ethics Advisory Board gives its approval. Although suggested in 1975, the board was not formed until last fall when Secretary Joseph A. Califano, Jr., of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare began appointing its fourteen members (twelve have been named so far).

“This is the first project we’re going to undertake,” said one of the appointees, cleric Richard McCormick, professor of biological ethics at Georgetown University, a Catholic school. “I have real serious questions and problems that lead me to take a negative position” on the issue “at this time.” There may be doubts, he said, about whether that mere speck-sized clump of cells is or is not “fully a human being. And when there is a doubt, I want to go very slowly and cautiously.”

In any case, as Doctor Luigi Mastroianni, head of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, points out, the procedure pioneered in England relies on hormones to prepare the womb and help maintain the pregnancies. “Our Food and Drug Administration would never allow” use of these hormones, Mastroianni said, “because of the risk of producing congenital abnormalities” or problems in the test-tube children’s future offspring.

Responses of religious spokesmen to the event covered a wide spectrum.

Jewish rabbis were among the least bothered. Rabbi Wolfe Kelman, executive vice-president of the Rabbinical Council of America, the major Orthodox group, pointed out that the first of 613 commandments in the Torah is “be fruitful and multiply.” Therefore, he said, Judaism “is quite lenient in that area.”

Protestant spokesmen tended to take a more guarded stance.

Theologian William Lazareth of the Lutheran Church in America’s Department of Church and Society, commented: “Christian ethics cannot be determined by medical technology. Fallopian tubes, as the Sabbath, are here for the benefit of moral human beings created in God’s image. The basic issue is the validity of conception control, whether in aiding or in preventing such conception.”

According to Lazareth, “the ethical significance of the use of any medically sound method within a covenant of marital fidelity depends chiefly on the motivation of the users.” He pointed out that “human beings do not actually create life, whether inside or outside of test tubes. Ultimately, God remains the sole creator of the egg or the sperm, and the sovereign author of the miracle of life.”

Chairman Haddon W. Robinson of the Department of Pastoral Missions at Dallas Seminary saw “no theological problem” with the English baby, but he said that he was afraid laboratory-fertilized eggs could be placed in “surrogate mothers.” This would raise questions about “what it actually means to mother a child.”

Doctor C. Everett Koop, surgeon-inchief at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, who is a Presbyterian elder and an author on bioethics, praised the “remarkable scientific achievement.” But he added, “Since I believe that life begins at conception, I must ask what happens if somebody wants to cancel the experiment and he dumps it down the sink?”

Koop said that he was concerned about “the next step, when Mrs. Jones decides she wants a child from that tall blond gene pool down the block.” He also expressed concern that “some women’s liberation groups” might see it as an advance toward single parenthood, while he is inclined to view it as “just another threat to the family.” He also said that he fears genetic manipulation to produce a “super race.”

Catholics take the dimmest view of developments.

“The episode points to a readiness to implement new technology before its moral implications have been thoroughly considered,” said Bishop Thomas C. Kelly, general secretary of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. “The consequences of this mentality—from the atomic bomb to uncontrolled use of carcinogenic pesticides—have become clear in recent years. We should proceed cautiously when the same mentality manifests itself in regard to so sensitive and sacred a matter as the transmission of human life.”

Theologian Charles Curran of Catholic University in Washington goes farther: “You have no right to use the process until you have the assurance that it is as safe as normal reproduction.”

“That argument,” counters cleric John Fletcher, a clinical assistant of bioethics at the National Institute of Health, “is an argument against doing anything for the first time.”

Director James McHugh of the Catholic bishops’ Pro-Life Committee maintained that priests should advise against anything that “would tend to mechanize the marriage act.” He added: “It is not necessary to have a child. People can have a certain confidence and reliance on God’s will. If God’s creative act doesn’t take place, it is not to be.”

The Pope had not yet spoken on the topic as of early this month but was expected to voice opposition to any artificial methods that do not aid the natural act. “In the case of the Brown couple,” wrote veteran Vatican journalist Benny Lai in the Florence daily La Nazione, “… sexual relations were missing, and thus the birth of Louise must be taken to be morally illicit.”

Some secular commentators ranged further afield. “Aren’t the more crucial problems of the world those of fertility, not infertility?” wondered Ellen Goodman in the Washington Post.

And syndicated columnist George Will reflected on what he described as a melancholy situation. Said he: “Dangerous and ethically dubious baby-making technologies” are being developed largely for the “compassionate purpose” of helping couples with problems to enjoy parenthood. Adoption, he suggested, would be a better option, but there are few children available for adoption. He concluded: “If there were fewer abortions there would be more adoptions and less pressure [to push] baby-making technologies beyond the range of ethical understanding.”

A Quiet Time For Lutherans

Lutheran church gatherings aren’t always noted for tranquility. But delegates to the Lutheran Church in America (LCA) convention last month in Chicago managed to remain unruffled in electing a new president and passing a variety of potentially controversial resolutions and social statements.

Outgoing president Robert J. Marshall described the ninth biennial meeting as the “easiest” of his ten-year tenure, mainly because of “an evident good feeling among the delegates” gathered at the Conrad Hilton Hotel. Marshall had announced in March that he would step down to become missions and development director of Lutheran World Ministries, a New York-based cooperative agency serving the LCA, the American Lutheran Church, and the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches.

Elected to a four-year term as LCA president—the 3.1-million-member denomination’s top executive post—was clergyman James R. Crumley, Jr., 53, who served as LCA secretary for the past four years. He is expected to follow Marshall’s path in emphasizing Lutheran unity and budgetary growth.

Crumley’s twenty years experience as a parish pastor was credited by many for tipping the election in his favor. He narrowly defeated William H. Lazareth, regarded as the LCA’s top theologian, on the sixth ballot. Despite the close vote, though, the election was peaceful.

Formed, in 1962 as a merger of four Lutheran bodies, the LCA is generally regarded as the most liberal of Lutheran groups—though the theological conservatism displayed at the convention might temper that assumption for some. The LCA is slightly larger than other members of Lutheranism’s Big Three: the more conservative 2.9-million-member Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS) and the 2.4-million-member American Lutheran Church (ALC), often described as the “moderate” group between the LCA on its left and the LCMS on its right.

Smaller Lutheran bodies include: the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches (AELC), a 112,000-member group that broke from the LCMS in 1976 following years of doctrinal controversy; the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), with about 400,000 members; and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Canada (ELCC), with 82,000 members.

Reaffirming their commitment to Lutheran ecumenism, the LCA delegates set the gears in motion for a joint consultation of ALC, AELC, and LCA representatives in the fall of 1979. Possible merger will be the main topic of discussion.

In brief fraternal greetings, presidents David W. Preus of the ALC and William Kohn of the AELC praised the signs of increasing cooperation. Following the remarks of Kohn, formerly a missions executive with the LCMS, Marshall told the assembly that overtures between the LCA and AELC are not designed to encourage schism or divisions. However, in an obvious slap at the LCMS, he said that a time may come “when the true confession becomes so obstructed that faithful people in good conscience feel that they must separate themselves from others.”

The LCMS participated in a Lutheran unity consultation from 1970 until 1975, at which time the presidents of the three big churches decided no further progress could be made, mostly because of doctrinal issues raised by the LCMS. It is unlikely that the LCMS will enter any new talks in the forseeable future.

LCMS president J. A. O. Preus did deliver fraternal remarks at the convention. He lauded the LCA for its consideration of “timely concerns,” and he commended Marshall’s work as a “church administrator … who does his homework.” In return, he was greeted with warm applause. Only two years earlier, Preus had jolted the LCA convention with a sharply worded defense against a 1974 LCA resolution that chided the LCMS for “fencing God’s word and fracturing God’s people.”

President S. T. Jacobsen of the ELCC said that the ELCC will pursue efforts to merge Canada’s 300,000 Lutherans within a single Lutheran denomination. About 70 per cent of Canada’s Lutherans belong to U.S.-based denominations, including the LCA and LCMS. An ELCC resolution calls for merger with the LCA-Canada section by 1980.

In other actions, the delegates:

• adopted a social statement on “Aging and the Older Adult” and one on human rights as foundations for action, along with a series of resolutions to implement them (a study of LCA retirement policies, an appeal for help for refugees, and the like);

• approved change of “president” to “bishop” in LCA titles, a switch that must also be endorsed at the 1980 convention in order for it to take effect;

• approved a revised communion practices statement drawn up jointly with the ALC (it precludes infants from receiving communion);

• elected Edgar R. Trexler, Jr., to succeed Albert P. Stauderman as editor of The Lutheran;

• Adopted budgets of $47.2 million and $50.3 million for 1979 and 1980;

• Referred resolutions on homosexuality to LCA units for further study;

• Reaffirmed the 1970 LCA position on abortion, specifying that abortion-on-demand is not endorsed;

• went on record opposing pending legislation in congress that would require certain disclosures by church and other lobby groups.

At the convention’s opening session, two delegates protested the church’s choice of Illinois as a convention site. The state, they pointed out, had not voted to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. One-fourth of the delegates submitted their signatures to indicate that they were seated under protest.

From then on, though, the mood was as placid as the warm Lake Michigan waters a short stroll away.

JOHN MAUST

Anglicans: Marriage Issues

Following nearly five hours of debate, the General Synod of the Church of England last month voted 367 to 92 to endorse a controversial ecumenical document known as the Ten Propositions. The paper, published in 1976 by a commission representing most of the nation’s denominations, asks those denominations to join in a covenant to seek visible unity and to press for action on intercommunion, agreement on baptism, and mutual recognition of ministries (see February 13, 1976, issue, page 74).

Archbishop of Canterbury Donald Coggan intervened during the debate to calm the strong Anglo-Catholic (or “high church”) faction, which feared a setback in relationships with the Roman Catholic Church. This faction hopes for eventual Anglican reunion with Rome. With Coggan’s assurances plus certain stipulated conditions, many of the Anglo-Catholics voted their approval. The conditions include the acceptance by the other churches of the historic episcopate at the inauguration of the covenant, and a narrowly passed amendment made clear that this must involve the consecration of bishops. Further, according to the conditions, the mutual recognition of ministers among the covenant groups must be effected “by the action of the whole episcopate of all the covenanting churches.” Other elements of Anglican tradition and practice were included in the clergy section of the conditions.

The action by the synod affected Britain’s Methodist Conference, which voted in June to endorse the propositions—on the condition that the Anglicans would do likewise. Earlier, the Moravian Church and the United Reformed Church approved, and endorsement by the Churches of Christ was expected this month. So far, the Catholic Church, the Congregational Federation, and the Baptists have decided against joining the covenant.

The next major step in the unity timetable will be the composition of a draft covenant by the unity commission. It is scheduled to be released for discussion among the approving denominations in 1980. The conditions that will be laid down in advance by the Anglican negotiators, however, may be a higher price for unity than the other churches are willing to pay. Marriage is still a long way off, say observers.

In addition to its action on unity, the synod voted 213 to 206 not to change long-standing rules that bar the remarriage in church of a divorced person while the other partner is still alive. Coggan made it clear that he was against relaxing the rules but said that he wished he could find some way out of the dilemma. (A study last year indicated that a large majority of Britain’s Anglican priests favor relaxation of the rule, a marriage-study commission of the church expressed a similar view, and an increasing number of remarriages are being conducted by parish priests in defiance of policy.)

“It’s a matter of some agony to me to have to register my own decision against this,” commented Coggan. “But I ask myself whether this is the moment for the church to take off the brake, perhaps the last brake, and rush down the divorce slope.”

Peaceful Prague

“… Christians for peace, justice, and liberation,” proclaimed the theme of the fifth assembly of the Christian Peace Conference (CPC), which met in Prague in June. In a sense, the CPC itself was enjoying a measure of liberation.

The CPC was founded twenty years ago by the late Czech Brethren leader Joseph L. Hromadka, mainly as a forum for churches in Soviet-bloc nations. It also attracted some participants from the West. But after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, a Soviet-dominated faction took over the Prague-based conference, and Hromadka resigned in protest. Consequently, at the last assembly—held in 1971—no Americans and few from the West attended.

This year was different. Twenty-four Americans attended, most of them from a National Council of Churches unit, and three were elected to important CPC offices.

Bishop Karoly Toth of the Reformed Church of Hungary was elected CPC president, succeeding Metropolitan Nikodim of the Russian Orthodox Church. Toth was elevated to the presidency from the general secretary slot.

Ludomir Mirejovsky was elected general secretary by the conference’s continuation committee from a field of six candidates—all of them Czech. The conference’s international secretariat excluded consideration of other nationalities. Mirejovsky, a clergyman of the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren who attended Union Seminary (Presbyterian) in Richmond, Virginia, had been ousted from the CPC’s international commissions following Hromadka’s resignation and was not permitted to participate in them until this assembly.

Hromadka was also rehabilitated in a sense. His widow was an honored guest and gave an address to the women of the assembly. A booklet about her husband was given to the delegates.

Soviet interest in the assembly was still very much in evidence, however. An estimated 300 delegates and their spouses (out of a total of more than 600 participants from eighty-four countries) came from the Third World, with the Russian Orthodox Church reportedly paying their airfare. They were flown to Moscow, and four chartered Aeroflot planes ferried them to Prague and back. (In the past, CPC statements consistently have reflected Soviet policy and often have been outwardly critical of the West.)

In a message to churches, the assembly declared that “solidarity in the work for peace means joining the fight for liberation.” It singled out racist oppression in southern Africa, military dictatorships in Latin America, and other “pockets of colonialism” in the non-Communist world. It appealed for support of detente and for achievement of general and complete disarmament by the year 2000.

Why Is There Evil?

God and Evil, by Michael Galligan (Paulist, 1976, 80 pp., $1.65 pb), God, Power, and Evil, by David R. Griffin (Westminster, 1976, 336 pp., $17.50), Evil, Suffering and Religion, by Brian Hebblethwaite (Hawthorn, 1976, 115 pp., $3.50 pb), and How God Deals With Evil, by W. Sibley Towner (Westminster, 1976, 185 pp., $4.95 pb), are reviewed by Steve Siebert, graduate student, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

One often hears these days that modern man is faced, as never before, with a series of objections to Christian belief known as the “problem of evil.” Although it is acknowledged that Augustine and others in the Christian tradition struggled with the presence of massive evil in a world alleged to have been created by a good God, it is claimed that the wars, concentration camps, and gas chambers of modern times have focused the contrast between God and evil even more sharply. Indeed, for many people it has become the apologetic problem of our time. With such considerations, in mind, these four books have been written.

The shortest and in many ways the wisest is Michael Galligan’s God and Evil. In the space of forty-five pages he examines two traditional and two contemporary justifications of God (“theodicies”) in the face of an evil world. Traditionally the most popular, the theodicy of free will (associated with Augustine, but it was the consensus of the Western church until after the reformation, and is still espoused in conservative circles) locates the source of moral evil in man’s free rejection of a perfect created state, and explains natural evils with reference to testing by God or punishment for sin, or else traces it to the malicious intent of a fallen devil in control of the world. In contrast, the theodicy of development (associated with the Eastern Orthodox tradition and with much of modern theology from Schleiermacher to the present) puts created perfection, not in the past, but in the future as the goal toward which human history will evolve. Evil, both moral and natural, serves as a necessary stage along the way in the development of such higher moral virtues as compassion. A more modern alternative is the process theodicy (based on the work of Whitehead), which argues that the only way to relieve God of responsibility for evil is to rethink the nature of his power. Finally, the last view discussed by Galligan is the type of theodicy that attempts to solve the problem by redefining the goodness of God (compare C. G. Jung and American personal idealism).

None of these four solutions is acceptable to Galligan. He claims that the free will defense is based on an inadequate characterization of the nature of human freedom, and founders, furthermore, on the theory of evolution. The developmental theodicy, on the other hand, is overly optimistic about the future and overlooks the ability of evil to produce bitter, broken people, as well as saints. Less confident, but therefore incapable of doing justice to the Christian hope, is the process theodicy, which is unable to guarantee that even in the end good will prevail over evil, and which (in its more consistent forms, Galligan argues) even denies personal immortality. Finally, theodicies that redefine the goodness of God so as to include a dark evil side in him can hardly be considered acceptable by Christians.

Galligan’s book is lively, though not popular, and full of insight. Many readers, however, will find that his brief summaries of various positions, particularly process metaphysics, cannot be understood without having read some of the primary sources. Those people concerned with a more in-depth treatment of the two classical theodicies will need to turn to John Hick’s Evil and the God of Love, which develops the contrast between the two in its 400 pages. For the process theodicy, however, one need only turn to David Griffin’s God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy, the fullest treatment of the problem from that perspective. Griffin’s work is a moderately difficult attempt to engage the scholarly proponents of classical theism in a discussion of a whole range of problems (evil, providence, the nature of God) and cannot be ignored by anyone seriously interested in these issues. Indeed, I know of no better introduction to the contrast between traditional and process theism.

After spending fifty pages reviewing the biblical and Greek sources (the Bible, Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus), Griffin proceeds to discuss eleven different traditional theodicies, devoting fifteen to twenty-five pages each to Augustine, Aquinas, Spinoza, Luther, Calvin, Leibniz, Barth, John Hick, James Ross (a contemporary analytic philosopher), Emils Fackenheim (a contemporary Jewish theologian), Brunner, and personal idealism. All these theodicies (except personal idealism, which has other weaknesses), Griffin argues, ultimately compromise the goodness of God by presupposing that God either is, or could be if he so desired, the cause of everything that happens, good as well as evil. Traditional theism, of course, escapes the conclusion that God is therefore responsible for evil by distinguishing between God’s primary and human secondary causation, or between God’s willing and his permitting. All such attempts, however, Griffin charges, are inadequate, and, indeed, contradictory. Only a radically new conception—yet one suggested by many biblical passages—of the power of God, one which breaks with the classical Greek categories alleged to be used by traditional theism, will help us develop an adequate, noncontradictory, theodicy. Such a conception will recognize that everything that exists has some power, and therefore God cannot have it all, though he still has enough power (in fact, the greatest amount of power it is possible for a God to have) to make him worthy of worship. Thus construed, however, God is no longer responsible for evil, for much of what happens is outside his control, though this is not to say that God is unconcerned with luring as much good out of the world as possible.

Hebblethwaite’s Evil, Suffering, and Religion, as the title indicates, covers slightly different ground. Broadening the scope of his study beyond the Christian tradition, Hebblethwaite attempts a systematic discussion of the attitude of all major world religions towards the problem of evil. He does a surprisingly good job, given limitations of space, of presenting generally accurate and relatively detailed treatments of the different traditions, even making the necessary distinctions between various types of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. This feature alone would justify the enthusiastic endorsements on the back cover, but the reader will be just as stimulated and provoked by Hebblethwaite’s comprehensive (though, again, brief) treatments of all the relevant issues clustered around the problem of evil. He begins with a discussion of how people cope with evil, isolating five different, often related, responses: the ways of renunciation, mystical knowledge, devotion, works, and sacrifice. Theistic religions demand, in addition to ways of coping, ways of explaining the presence of evil in the world. Hebblethwaite again gives us brief surveys of the options: dualism (he isolates three types); blaming the devil; evil as due to divine punishment, testing, and discipline; and human freedom. His own solution employs a modified (non-Augustinian) free-will defense within a generally developmental theodicy. Man is created at a distance from God in an “ordered yet flexible physical environment,” which cannot preclude the possibility of natural tragedies, and into which God acts “without suspending the natural order” of events (93). This, Hebblethwaite believes, is an acceptable mean between the more traditional notions of providence (in which God acts directly) and existential versions of the doctrine (which reduce the notion of providence to subjective perceptions). At the consummation, however, God will actively intervene; the Christian “must suppose some future recreative divine act of transformation or resurrection.” Thus Hebblethwaite, like Hick (whom he seems to have followed in certain important respects), argues for a kind of eschatological verification of Christian belief about the goodness of God in the face of evil. This procedure is questioned by Galligan, who suggests that the sub specie aeternitatis viewpoint required by it is unavailable to us humans, and rejected by Griffin, who cannot guarantee either that good ultimately will prevail or that personal immortality awaits mankind—though he does not deny the possibility of either, and indeed hopes for both.

Despite their divergent outlooks, all three works share a conviction: the traditional Augustinian solution is no longer creditable. Not only is its view of God and/or providence self-contradictory, and its theory of the nature of human freedom inadequate, it also cannot maintain its idea of an original state of goodness against criticisms advanced by evolutionary theory. One can understand and even share the motivation behind this rejection of Augustine, and yet be wary of such wholescale rejection of time-honored solutions.

But the major weakness of these books is not their attitude toward tradition so much as their failure to do justice to important aspects of Scripture. Along with their repudiation of Augustine’s interpretation of Edenic existence goes the rejection, in one or more of these writers, of the idea of original sin, the personal being of the devil, the possibility of angelic existence, and the reality of hell. That these ideas are unpopular today may be granted, but that does not relieve the theologian or philosopher within the Christian tradition from making serious attempts to come to grips with some of these issues in a more positive manner than our authors do. Perhaps in the end one might feel compelled to deny certain traditional interpretations of Satan—but certainly one must find better grounds than those adduced by Hebblethwaite to the effect that modern psychology can now explain many phenomena once attributed to demon possession. Or perhaps one might quarrel with certain aspects of the notion of free rebellion in a state of paradise—but certainly on grounds stronger than Galligan’s. He himself seems to understand that, for his last pages are haunted by the symbol (at least) of some primal, cosmic rebellion.

These objections notwithstanding, Galligan’s and particularly Hebblethwaite’s books are rich in insight and understanding, and should prove of help to the Christian apologist, though perhaps not so much to the person caught up in the moment of personal grief or suffering.

Griffin’s book, on the other hand, must receive a more qualified endorsement. There is no question that he makes the most substantial scholarly contribution to the subject, but this in turn rightly exposes him to more criticism about inaccuracy in detail and interpretation. To take just one example, the careful reader will find that Aquinas does not mean, by the doctrine of divine simplicity, “that God’s knowledge, will, and causation are identical.” Not only does Aquinas not make this claim when he explicitly treats this doctrine in Summa Theologica I, 3, he also constantly distinguishes between situations in which God both knows and causes and those in which he simply knows. Such forcing of the texts is unfortunately quite frequent.

The cumulative effect of this is to render suspect Griffin’s major thesis about the self-contradictory nature of traditional theism. One cannot, of course, claim against him that to abandon this particular theological expression, with its use of Greek categories, is to give up biblical faith. Yet on the other hand it is unlikely that the weaknesses of the traditional account are as obvious as Griffin supposes. Indeed, most readers will find the process account of the nature of God’s power, goodness, and providence even more deficient.

The basic difficulty with Griffin’s argument, however, is his formula of the problem of evil as an eight-point logical problem leading from the dual premises of the orthodox definition of God and the reality of evil to the conclusion that that God cannot exist. This way of setting up the issues implies that there is “the problem of evil” and that one must find “the solution” to it. But this claim is extravagant and misleading. In the first place, it is unlikely that everybody could agree enough about the meaning of the terms involved to get the problem off the ground. Certainly this is the difficulty that plagues Griffin’s various definitions of genuine evil. More importantly, however, as Galligan’s valuable last chapter points out, people believe in God in the face of evil for a variety of highly complex and often personal reasons; the logic of belief is not the logic of deductive arguments. Thus any attempt to suggest that the problem of evil troubles everybody in the same way, if at all, is to distort the phenomena. That Griffin can claim that an elaborate, complex theology—let alone one that flies in the face of the whole tradition—alone solves the problem indicates that something serious has gone wrong.

The issue, indeed, is elsewhere for most people, and for many readers it will lie in the question, “What really does the Bible teach about God and evil?” To this question, W. Sibley Towner’s How God Deals With Evil is directed. Towner includes a critical examination of the treatment of divine retribution by some historic confessional statements along with two giant sweeps through Scripture. He wants to show, by examining representative texts, the diversity and openendedness of the biblical teaching about divine retribution, and to argue that one can justifiably subordinate these retributional passages to the kerygmatic core of Scripture, God’s universal redemptive purpose in Christ.

Towner confronts difficult texts head-on, and is to be commended for his desire to show—in a rare departure from most theodicies—that God is no mere “nice guy.” It must furthermore be conceded that many accounts, including evangelical ones, of the present and final states of rebelling creatures do not, as Towner points out, do justice to the full and rich variety of biblical teaching on the matter; that many Christians have treated apocalyptic literature inappropriately; and that some principle of selection and subordination is involved in all biblical theology. Towner’s book should set us all searching again to see what the Bible really says about God and evil.

Towner uses higher criticism to accomplish this task. Not only will the average Christian for whom the book seems to be written be overwhelmed by his approach, but on the basis of the often one-sided and incomplete evidence given, he will be unable to judge which critical theory to accept. Many of Towner’s opinions, such as his late date for the idea of covenant in Israel, will be hotly contested. That Towner chooses to follow these “assured scholarly results” is unfortunate, for a large number of his conclusions, such as his discovery of the relative unimportance of the lex talionis (an eye for an eye), could have been made without conjecture, simply by appealing to the total scriptural teaching on the subject.

Basically, however, most readers will find the book deeply disturbing, not so much because stereotyped and caricatured fundamentalists (such as an eschatologically minded anti-Communist) occasionally bear the brunt of the attack, but also because Towner, in his own way, often does violence to the text, and thus arrives at a view of the world as already and entirely redeemed, with Satan and hell as mere personifications. Towner’s conclusions to this effect are even more insidious than either Galligan’s or Hebblethwaite’s, for Towner wants to claim that this is what Scripture really teaches.

Ultimately, however, on key issues such as providence and divine action Towner comes to a position no different from that of the rest of our authors. When he says that we must “keep the secular sphere of cause-and-effect and the sphere of religious faith and perceptivity carefully separated,” he only states more openly a tendency implicit in both Hebblethwaite and Griffin. Such a view has characteristics of modernity. It is also expressed, Galligan points out, by the refusal of modern theologians to interpret the Holocaust in the light of God’s providential control of history (in contrast to their willingness to do just that as recently as the American civil war). Now orthodoxy need not shrink from this conclusion; any theodicy, after Auschwitz, and indeed after the first act of human rebellion, must take seriously the idea of a runaway world, which God has given up to its own devices. Of course, the historic Christian position has always expected a recreation at the eschaton, but neither would our authors, with the exception of Griffin, be willing to give up this hope either. The crucial questions arise, however, about the course of the world until then. Is God completely hidden and silent, as all but Galligan suggest? Does God not act into the world in this age? Can we count on nothing until the end? With these questions we move to issues far broader than theodicy.

BRIEFY NOTED

Judson Press has recently published four books on Christian education. Written primarily for church school teachers, Evangelism in Your Church School (63 pp., $2.50 pb) by Vincie Alessi discusses the basic concepts of salvation and some of the factors necessary for evangelism. She also includes advice on how to incorporate a new believer into the church as well as a discussion of the central elements of our faith. It is refreshing to see a book that goes beyond the mechanics of conversion. If growth is your concern, read A Growing Church School (64 pp., $2.50 pb) by Kenneth Blazier. Again, a refreshing broadmindedness is seen as Blazier defines growth in terms of both quantity and quality of faith. He discusses seven factors necessary for this type of growth and then provides checklists to help a church evaluate its program. Doing Christian Education in New Ways (112 pp., $3.95 pb) by Evelyn Huber discusses such innovative teaching models as contract learning and learning centers. The book provides a useful overview of many models and offers first-person success stories to illustrate them; however, a solid discussion of the methods and underlying principles are lacking. Huber does provide a bibliography to fill that gap. Family Cluster Programs (75 pp., $2.95 pb) by R. Ted Nutting deals with a way to keep the family together to learn with other families. For this book to be helpful one would have to be familiar with his idea, since little explanation of the method is provided; the bulk of the book is devoted to program material for six sessions studying Jesus’ parables.

STRESS. Everyone faces tension in some form at every stage of life. The accelerated pace of modern life often leaves Christians wondering why they don’t have their promised joy and peace. Of several recent books, Gary Collins’s You Can Profit From Stress (Vision House, 249 pp., $6.95) is the most comprehensive and realistic. Collins treats such sources of stress as one’s family, sexuality, occupation, and crises. He is practical in his prescriptions for coping with the problem. Questions for group discussion are included. A shorter, more colloquial book, The Stress Mess (Master’s Press, 48 pp., $1.50 pb) by Ron Susek is similarly designed to help one cope with stress. It is especially suited for those who take their reading in small doses. Robert Schuller’s Turning Your Stress Into Strength (Harvest House, 144 pp., $2.95 pb) is filled with illustrations from the lives of those he has interviewed during his “Hour of Power” telecast. Tom Watson, Jr., approaches stress and peace through a study guide to Philippians, How to Be Happy No Matter What (Regal, 160 pp., $1.50 pb). Wally Metts’s The Brighter Side: Practical Help for Facing Life’s Problems (Moody, 96 pp., $2.25 pb) offers fourteen meditations based on the author’s search of Scripture during a crisis. Each meditation begins with a question or insight, followed by Scripture, a reflection on the subject, and a prayer. It is a good gift for a suffering Christian friend. For those going through difficult times who might be turned off by constant Scripture references, two recent books to consider are Being Up in a Down World (Harvest House, 149 pp., $2.95 pb) by James Kilgore and To Bend Without Breaking (Abingdon, 127 pp., $3.95 pb) by Ella Stuart. The biblical insights are implicit, not explicit.

Beginning in mid-September, the PBS television network will bring to American viewers “The Long Search,” a thirteen-week series on world religions. The series was coproduced by the BBC and Time-Life Films and has already been shown in Britain. It received a number of critical plaudits. A reviewer commented that “The BBC can safely regard it as a triumph and a breakthrough, the discovery of that rare thing, a new technique for making sense of an almost impossible subject.”

It’s hard to see what the shouting is all about. A basic interview technique is used in the series. Both religious professionals and laymen from each religious tradition are interviewed. Each group is shown at worship and work.

The reason the series seems so unusual probably lies in the fact that television has generally shown itself incapable of dealing with religious faith in any meaningful or realistic way. This self-imposed theological eunuchhood makes the series seem more virile than it really is.

Technically the films are well done. The photography is sensitive and effective. Producer Peter Montagnon has used natural settings with natural light. The occasional loss of photographic sharpness is more than offset by the sense of sharing in an intimate conversation with another about his religious faith. Ronald Eyre, British stage producer, who is the host-narrator, is a sensitive, polite, companionable guide.

My first concern in viewing a selection of eight of the thirteen episodes was: How is Christianity treated? I wondered if the Christian faith would come across in a fair and recognizable manner. I think it does.

The producers cannot be faulted for the answers given by the adherents of any religious faith. If Christians give inadequate answers, we can only blame the Christians. However, it is fair to ask. Did the interviewer ask the right questions and did he ask them of the right people? Generally the choices of questions and people seem reasonable. The questions are sufficiently straightforward and broad to enable everyone to state the case for his faith. In the case of Christianity it seems reasonable to cover the subject by looking at American Protestantism, European Catholicism, Romanian Orthodoxy, and independent Black African churches.

The hour spent on American Protestantism is probably the one of the greatest concern to most of us. The producers pegged Indianapolis as the typical American Protestant city. Its 1,100 churches represent the full spread of Protestantism. Host Eyre takes us to the Baptist Temple, a gargantuan church of incredible vigor and bustle. He innocently asks, “What is this vast organization all about?” Sonny Snell, one of the six full-time ministers at the church responds, “To get people saved.”

When Eyre attempts to find out what that means he finds himself the object of an on-camera personal evangelism effort. Apparently Snell hoped that Eyre might be asking out of need rather than curiosity. It was one of the few moments in the series that I found embarrassing. Snell’s pat and patronizing manner made me extremely uncomfortable. Yet his form of evangelism is no doubt greatly to be preferred to the nonverbal evangelism practiced by most Christians.

Scenes of the Baptist Temple’s worship service featured hilarious duets on evolution and the ecumenical movement by two young women. If they ever decide to enter show business, I hereby volunteer to be their agent. From his interviews with Greg Dixon, pastor of Baptist Temple, and others from the church, Eyre understandably but wrongly concludes that there is no room for doubt in fundamentalism.

The North Methodist Church of Indianapolis was chosen as the place to examine “mainline” Protestantism. Mainline Protestantism, according to adviser Martin Marty, is composed of those churches that are comfortable with their culture rather than trying to save people out of it. Dr. Richard Hamilton, the pastor, reveals his rejection of the task of saving people out of the world. As we listen to the pastor, sit in on a social action committee meeting, and visit a worship service, it would be easy to conclude that mainline Protestantism is spiritually bankrupt. Eyre perceptively notes that it was impossible for him to see where the North Methodist Church ends and society begins. “The edge was too blurred for me to see,” he concludes.

The third focus of the Protestant segment is the Mount Vernon Baptist Church of Indianapolis. Mount Vernon is a black Baptist church occupying a rickety, unpretentious building. Inside things are different. The building is not impressive but the Christian faith of the congregation is. The church, under the direction of Mozel Sanders, has an active life of worship and social help. Members of the church are shown preparing some of hundreds of Thanksgiving dinners distributed to those in need.

The scenes of its worship were moving. As a long-time aficionado of black Gospel music and an admirer of the late Mahalia Jackson, I was more comfortable with the worship at Mount Vernon than with either Baptist Temple or North Methodist. The proclamation/response style of preaching and the spirited singing of “You Must Be Born Again” and “I’ll Fly Away” seem to me to catch the emotional spontaneity that should characterize Christian worship.

For me the most engaging of the series was the segment on the Orthodox Church of Romania. Romanian Christianity is an anachronism—but a desirable anachronism. I had the feeling that there is a sort of medieval ethos to the Christian culture there. About 80 per cent of the population embraces the Orthodox faith. And it doesn’t seem to be a superficial profession with most of the people but a matter of personal commitment. Christianity has entered into the fabric of society and into the marrow of their bones. All of Romanian life—farming, cleaning, cooking—seems to have a sacramental flavor to it. That is remarkable in view of the fact that Romania is a Communist nation. The president of the building committee of one of the churches is a member of the Communist party. Of this seeming conflict he says simply, “No one says a Communist has to be an atheist.”

Eyre had one of his most unsettling experiences in Romania. In interviewing Bishop Justinian, Eyre thinks of himself as the post-Christian man who has gone beyond Christianity. He confesses his shock when Justinian treats him as a pre-Christian pagan. Justinian points out to him that a person can know about Jesus and not know him.

Eyre finds that Easter is fun in Romania. He has enough Puritan hangover to worry about that. He observes all the preparations for Easter, including the egg painting and spring cleaning that build a sense of excitement and anticipation. Bishop Justinian wisely remarks that every day is Easter if we could just understand it.

Eyre asks his Romanian guide-translator, Remas Rus, what Orthodox Christians believe. Rus corrects him, “You should ask rather: Whom do Orthodox Christians worship?”

The segment on Roman Catholicism focuses only on European Catholicism. The livelier North and South American scenes were ignored. I question that decision, which puts only the most traditional face of the Catholic church before the viewer and eliminates the ferment that has resulted from the charismatic renewal, marriage encounter, and the push for more lay control.

Those who were chosen as spokesmen for their church are intelligent and sensitive and generally acquit themselves well. Judith Dryhurst, a Catholic from Leeds, England, points out to Eyre that the church is simply “the people who follow Christ.” Rembert Weakland, Abbot Primate of the Benedictines, observes that Christianity says God has entered history. If that’s true, he concludes, God has made something available that wasn’t there before. Eyre notes that placed against the claims for Jesus the other claims of the Catholic church pale.

A great deal of time in this segment is spent with the Little Brothers of Jesus, a Spanish monastic order. It clearly shows the desire of these young monks to know God alone, but the non-Catholic viewer has to wonder how much of what it says about the essence of Catholicism is understood and practiced by most Catholics.

The hour spent on African religions was the most puzzling to me. The movements examined are not described as African Christianity but as “African response to the stimulus of Christianity.” That distinction seems to be accurate and important.

Black South Africans are apparently attempting to rediscover their lost religious heritage and, in some cases, to incorporate it with Christianity. It was somewhat disconcerting to hear Peter Mkize, a black Lutheran bank employee, comment that he communicates with his deceased mother. “She visits me,” he says, “in my visions and dreams about things I’m supposed to do but am resisting.”

Even Reverend Makhathini of Mapumulo Theological College, a Lutheran school, tells of a vision of his dead grandmother that resulted in his physical healing. “This has touched my mind to try to find out where the dead are,” he explains. “This is no problem to the Zulus but the Christians say, Don’t ask—just look to Jesus.”

It is relatively easy to see how the presuppositions of the African culture have pulled Christianity into an African shape. It is less easy for most of us to see how our Western civilization has pulled Christianity into its own shape.

The other episodes in the series left me ambivalent. It is easy enough to examine the doctrines of non-Christian religions and to condemn their distortions of God and his world. However, it is impossible to condemn the Muslim doctor who loves God as she understands him and spends her life trying to bring healing to sick children; or the Jewish student diligently studying the Torah in order to determine what God really demands of him.

The scenes of others seeking to find and serve God should remind us that in our evangelism we are merely beggars telling other beggars where to find food.

The episode on the meeting of Western and Eastern religions in California has a number of interesting moments. Eyre comments that he went to California wondering what the gods of the twenty-first century would be like and whether they had already appeared. That’s a heavy burden to give California.

Frankly, the appeal of the Eastern religions remains a mystery to me. In the minds of many they seem to offer an antidote to the mechanistic, fragmented view of the world in our own culture. In Eastern mystical religions man is not separate from the world and God but a part of some sort of great cosmic oneness.

People young and old seem prepared to lose themselves in some larger world soul. If I have to choose, I prefer fragmentation. After all, I am something different from the rest of creation and God is someone different from me. I can understand a Muslim seeking the will of Allah, the merciful and mighty. I find it difficult to understand the pantheist who wants to blur the distinction between himself and God.

The California interviews tend to shatter the liberal myth that Christianity must be demythologized in order to appeal to modern scientific man. We see the operator of sophisticated electronic biofeedback equipment using it in connection with Tibetan meditation. And we hear a scientist confess that scientists like to think they’re dealing with absolute truth—although they know they’re not.

The concluding episode, “Loose Ends,” is probably the most unsatisfactory for Christians. Eyre compares religion to a mountaineering kit. Different kits are needed for different mountains. Not all climbs are the same, we are told.

It would have been better to let each faith present its own claims and speak for itself and let the viewer make his own conclusion. This attempt to paper over differences and create some sort of validity for each religious expression is a disservice to them all.

The best part of this segment is Eyre’s dialogue with Dr. Jacob Needleman, professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University. Eyre asks Needleman how one starts with religious experience.

Needleman responds, “Are you speaking out of curiosity or need?”

Eyre reveals himself to be the typical modern man by answering with another question: “Is there something that can speak to us in the limbo between curiosity and need?”

He is a spiritual voyeur unwilling to say that his quest comes merely from curiosity and he is not ready to acknowledge his need of faith. He wants to ask ultimate questions; he’s not prepared to worship the Ultimate Answer. He reserves the right of refusal.

The answer to his question is no. There is nothing that can speak to us in the limbo between curiosity and need. I hope Ronald Eyre will take the step out of limbo into need. Only there does God ever reveal himself to man.

With all of its limitations, the series is nevertheless a good beginning. We can only hope that the Public Broadcasting Network will not regard this as the end of its task but a worthwhile beginning in the exploration of this important area of human experience that has too often been ignored by the electronic media. (A sixteen-page discussion guide has been prepared by Cultural Information Service, P.O. Box 92, New York, N.Y. 10016.)

John V. Lawing, Jr., is assistant professor of journalism at CBN University, Virginia Beach, Virginia.

A first-hand report.

‘We wanted to bring the Soviets into the dock of world opinion.’

In august, 1975, representatives of thirty-five nations including the Vatican signed the Helsinki Final Act, a document designed to bring greater security and cooperation to Europe. The Act, though not a binding treaty, has had extraordinary impact upon the signatory states and upon world public opinion. It legitimatized the post-1945 European borders and encouraged scientific and cultural exchange. The Act’s third section (“Basket Three”) contains some striking provisions that have caused observers to wonder why the Soviet Union agreed to such language.

“The participating states recognize and respect the liberty of the individual to profess and practice on his own, or in common with others the religion or creed, acting according to the dictates of his own conscience … will respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief, for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion … They will promote and encourage the effective exercise of civil, political, economic, social, cultural, and other rights and freedoms, all of which derive from the inherent dignity of the human person … will deal in a positive and humanitarian spirit with the application of persons who wish to be reunified with members of their family … as expeditiously as possible … facilitate wider travel by their citizens for personal or professional reasons … confirm that religious faiths, institutions, and organizations, practicing within the constitutional framework of the participating states … can have contacts and meetings among themselves and exchanges among young people by encouraging increased exchanges.”

The thirty-five nations also agreed to meet in Belgrade in October, 1977, for a “compliance meeting,” or as a veteran European diplomat put it, “A chance to give each other report cards, a kind of grading system to determine who were good boys and girls, and who were not.” After six months the meeting ended in a deadlock over the wording of a public statement of principles and recommendations. The United States wanted the human rights issue specifically mentioned in the concluding document; the Soviet Union did not. After weeks of bitter wrangling, a bland three-page final statement was hammered out with no reference to human rights. But, like so many diplomatic communiques, the true meaning is obscured from the casual reader, and only those who struggle know precisely what it means.

Several high U.S. government officials have told me they are pleased with the document. The thirty-five nations did resolve “to implement fully, unilaterally, bilaterally, and multilaterally all the provisions of the Final Act.” For the U.S. and its allies the key word is “unilaterally.” This is a commitment by the Soviet Union to carry out the human rights provisions within its own borders. The concluding document also states that the Belgrade Conference “in itself was a valuable contribution towards the achievement of the aims of the Helsinki Final Act.” And although “consensus was not reached on a number of proposals,” another compliance meeting will be held in Madrid in November, 1980 (not coincidently, a week after the American Presidential election). The National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry, founded six years ago by the American Jewish Committee and the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice, sent a seven-person delegation during the Belgrade Conference to press for full implementation of Basket Three. The group represented evangelicals, mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, and was made up of clergy and lay people, men and women, blacks and whites—a microcosm of America’s religious communities. From the moment the Interreligious Task Force arrived in the Yugoslavian capital, it was clear that Basket Three and the issue of human rights dominated the proceedings.

While in Belgrade the Task Force met with the leaders of six delegations (the United States, Great Britain, Holland, Spain, the Vatican, and Hungary), as well as with Senator Robert Dole, Senator Claiborne Pell, and Representative Millicent Fenwick. Fenwick and Senator Clifford Case were the coauthors of the bill that established the official United States “watchdog” commission, an extremely valuable body that collects and publishes data, complaints, and testimony relating to the Final Act’s many provisions.

The Helsinki Final Act is best understood as a rough equation: Basket One (borders) plus Basket Two (technical and scientific exchange) equals Basket Three (human rights and religious liberty). Most Western and neutral countries agreed with the arithmetic, but the Soviet Union and many of the Eastern European nations did not, hence the great difficulty in agreeing on a statement of consensus in Belgrade.

Everywhere the American religious leaders went in Belgrade’s sleek new Sava Conference Center they heard the same question: “How serious is the United States’s commitment to human rights and how much is the Soviet Union willing to yield on this issue to gain the advantages of Baskets One and Two?” Our Western allies (the NATO and Common Market countries) were all more or less committed to Basket Three (who, after all, in the so-called Free World is opposed to human rights?). The real question was what price does a Western nation have to pay vis-à-vis the Soviet Union for its pro-Basket Three stance? Will it suffer economically? Will the Soviet Union threaten it militarily or diplomatically?

Just as the United States provides a “nuclear shield” for the West, so, too, at Belgrade our government supplied our allies with a “human rights shield.” Wielding that shield and leading the campaign against the Soviet Union was the head of the American delegation, Justice Arthur J. Goldberg, a personal appointment of President Carter. Goldberg was the only diplomat of international stature and reputation at the conference. The other thirty-four nations sent middle-level foreign service types to Belgrade, a clear reflection of their view of the conference.

Because of Justice Goldberg’s vigorous leadership and his long involvement in the struggle for human rights and religious liberty, there was a tendency at Belgrade to “let Arthur do it.” He was the one diplomat who publicly cited the names of Soviet Jews and Christians who are “Prisoners of Conscience,” he listed the dates of arrest, the jails where the prisoners are being held, and the alleged charges against them. Goldberg put the muscles, sinews, and flesh of specificity onto the skeleton of abstract commitment to human rights. Justice Goldberg clearly dominated the Sava Center as he attempted to rally the timid and diffident, the fence-sitters, and the human rights relativists. His acknowledged mediation skills were a great asset as he dealt with such disparate states as San Marino, the Soviet Union, Canada, Bulgaria, Malta, and the Vatican.

The Holy See pursued a delicate and highly nuanced policy at Belgrade. One of the Vatican officials in Belgrade stated it most clearly to the visiting Interreligious Task Force delegates: “We were aggressively against the Soviet Union after World War II … in Italy, in Hungary, Poland, many places. Now we have shifted to nonpublicized interventions in human rights. Of course, we are committed to religious liberty and Basket Three, but by quiet diplomacy, at the right time and the right place—efficacy, efficacy, that’s the important thing.”

Pope Paul’s public condemnation of the recent trials of Soviet dissidents was especially welcome since we were told in Belgrade not to expect any statements or public interventions from the Vatican that call attention to the many Christian and Jewish prisoners in the Soviet Union.

If Arthur Goldberg was the central personality present at Belgrade, there were two persons who hovered over the Sava Center like Banquo’s ghost in Macbeth. One was Anatoly Shcharansky, the imprisoned young Soviet Jewish engineer. His case was mentioned often, especially by the American delegation, at both the public and private conference sessions, as well as in the corridors. Shcharansky, charged with treason by the Soviet authorities, had been held in jail for over a year without a trial and without the right to select his own attorney. He has been called a “CIA agent,” a charge that President Carter has publicly denied. Shcharansky is a leader in the Soviet Jewish activist community and he is also a key member of the ad hoc Helsinki monitoring groups that have been set up inside the Soviet Union. Thus, Shcharansky represents both symbolically and actually two important forces in Soviet society today. His arrest, detention, trial, and lengthy sentence, was a calculated attempt to intimidate and stifle all human rights activities within the Soviet Union.

Pastor Georgi Vins, the Executive Secretary of the Churches of the Evangelical Christians and Baptists, is the other person whose case was vigorously pressed at Belgrade. As a leader of the free or underground Evangelical Church inside Russia, Vins is currently serving a five-year prison sentence with five additional years of exile after that. In 1975 he was found guilty of “unauthorized religious activities.” Soviet authorities are also harassing Pastor Vins’s nineteen-year-old son, Peter. This is part of the campaign to suppress the evangelical churches.

Shcharansky and Vins were the litmus paper tests of Belgrade. They were the linchpins of the Conference and because the Soviet Union is susceptible to public world opinion, and because it does react, sometimes in a Byzantine way, Belgrade was a highly important setting to bring the Soviets into the dock of world public opinion. And, indeed, one of the most hopeful signs emerging from the conference is that such compliance meetings will be held on a regular basis, the next scheduled for Madrid in two years.

Did the Belgrade Conference make a difference?

Yes, for several reasons. First, the Soviet Union was confronted with clearly documented cases of gross human rights violations, all in defiance of the Helsinki Final Act. The Press, especially in Western Europe, carried many articles on the continuing failure of the Soviets to implement Basket Three. Second, compliance meetings are now “regularized” (a bureaucratic term meaning the thirty-five nations will meet at set times to continue the process of reporting on compliance—the “report cards” will be issued again). Third, the argument that a nation’s “internal affairs” are not open to discussion or critique was shattered at Belgrade. After one of Ambassador Goldberg’s strong speeches about Soviet human rights violations, the Russians, in a mood of embarrassment and desperation sharply criticized alleged American human rights abuses (“the Wilmington N.C. Ten”). Goldberg welcomed discussion of American society and the Soviets by their anti-American statement tacitly confirmed the right of one nation to criticize another’s “internal affairs.”

Fourth, the governments and the peoples of Europe have now made heavy political, diplomatic, and emotional investments in the Helsinki Final Act. True cooperation and security now seems possible for all of Europe after centuries of strife and warfare. Human rights is part of that investment; it will be neither simple nor easy to remove it from the European scene. As if to confirm this view, the Soviet Union and the United States along with the other thirty-three nations have termed the Belgrade Conference a “success.” And the European peoples now have the reality and the hope of family reunification, student exchanges, human rights, and religious liberties. As religious men and women know so well, hope once experienced can never be taken away.

But the grave danger is that the specific human rights charges raised by Justice Goldberg at Belgrade will be viewed merely as an American concern. The Western nations and the Vatican must speak out clearly and often for all oppressed peoples in the Soviet Union. “Letting Arthur do it” may be a convenient and easy tactic for our allies, but it is ultimately self-defeating.

A Pilgrim’S “Cantabile” For Flight

With Pachebel’s D Major Canon still

At large in me, and all my heaven-bound

Enthusiasm straining hard to will

One will, I vowed to run but heard a sound

That beckoned me to walk a charted road,

Deciding that a hurried pace was not

The way He took.

What’s more, I dropped the load

I thought I’d always bear; and found a plot

So undeserved, so filled with ecstasy

I cried my little boyhood heart to sleep,

And rested in His love-then woke to see

That all my promises were His to keep.

Now when I hear that repetitious tune,

I’m like a butterfly without cocoon.

JAMES A. REIN HARD

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

Let’s face the hostility head on.

What advantage has the Jew?… Much, in every way! What if some of them were unfaithful?” Thus Saul of Tarsus, better known to history as Paul, who styled himself “a Hebrew of the Hebrews” (Phil. 3:5) expressed the attitude of one early Christian towards the Jews (Rom. 3:1–2). “I ask then, has God rejected his people? God forbid!” (Rom. 11:1).

Paul did not hesitate to criticize his ancestral people, even while attesting the zeal for God of unconverted Jews (Rom. 10:2). Paul’s prayer that Israel, which God had hardened against Jesus the Messiah, might yet be saved (Rom. 10:1) is cited by the contemporary German theologian, the late Paul Althaus, as an indication of the fact that “hardening” or “passing over” by God is not definitive, in the sense of double predestination. The relationship of believing Christians, Jews but especially Gentiles, to unbelieving Jews has always been a complex one. The special place of the Jewish people in God’s plan is acknowledged; God’s faithfulness to his covenant with them, despite their stubbornness, becomes a source of assurance to Gentile Christians as well, who also know themselves to be “chosen in him [Christ] before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4). The knowledge that God has a blessed future for the Jewish people despite their resistance to the claims of Christ encourages Gentiles to hope for their own unbelieving relatives, on the basis of the promise of Acts 16:31, even though they may see scant evidence of faith in members of their household. Yet, at the same time, as the Gentile disciple of Jesus acknowledges a certain primacy of God’s favor to the Jew, he frequently cannot avoid irritation and exasperation, or even anger, with the Jews who disdain the Messiah who came first for them, and only in the second place to the Gentile.

For this reason, it may well be true that it is precisely the Christians with the deepest sense of who Jesus Christ is and what he has done who can be most resentful, indifferent, or even contemptuous of Jewish attitudes towards Jesus. At the same time, it is also exactly those orthodox, fundamentalist, or evangelical Christians who do understand and acknowledge that the Jew had and still has a special place and dignity in God’s plan. The so-called liberal Christian may be a social anti-Semite, but is rarely a religious one, for he cannot blame the Jew for rejecting messianic claims he himself demythologizes. The conservative Christian may sense a terrible frustration, even anger, at the way in which the non-Messianic Jew rejects Jesus. Nevertheless, by the same biblical authority that tells him that Jesus is able to save him to the uttermost, the Gentile Christian also learns that the Jews retain a special place in God’s affection. Although Paul was the Apostle to the Gentiles, in many respects he is the most deeply Jewish of New Testament writers; he repeatedly attests his continued love and respect for his former coreligionists.

Nevertheless, Paul’s philosemitism, if we may call it such, does not stand alone in the New Testament. John the Evangelist, called “the divine” by early Christians, although racially as Jewish as Paul, has contributed to Christian hostility to Jews by his frequent use of the term, “the Jews” for those Jews who rejected and killed Jesus. The Jews who accepted Jesus, in John’s language, are no longer called Jews. John’s distinction between “Jews” (those Jews who rejected the Messiah) and disciples (those, in John’s day almost all Jews, who accepted him) was not recognized by pagan contemporaries: for them Jews and Christians, at least at the outset, were all alike, even though it was occasionally the non-Messianic Jews who provoked the public authorities against the Christians, also largely ethnic Jews (e.g. Acts 18:12–23).

At the outset, unbelieving Jews provoked governmental reprisals against Christians as disturbers of the peace. But soon the shoe was on the other foot. Of all the civil uprisings and rebellions that troubled the Pax Romana, none was fiercer than the Jewish War of A.D. 66–70, which ended in the reconquest and destruction of Jerusalem. Prompted by what they took to be God’s guidance, members of the Jerusalem church fled the city before its fall. For this reason, Christian Jews were regarded as traitors by the Jewish survivors of the war, and from A.D. 70 onward there was no longer a significant distinctively Jewish Christian community. Converted Jews began to assimilate and to lose their ethnic identity among Gentile Christians. Unconverted Jews often confounded Gentile Christians, who claimed to be the legitimate heirs of Old Testament traditions, with their superior knowledge of the Bible. A converted Gentile philosopher, Justin Martyr (first half of the second Christian century), intellectually the most distinguished scholar among early Gentile converts, has given us an extensive defense of Christianity against learned Jewish objections, his Dialogue with Trypho (circa 150). Justin’s Dialogue sets a high level for religious discussion. It ends with Trypho wishing Justin a good voyage to Rome (where Justin ultimately won the martyr’s crown) and Justin in turn praying that Trypho and his friends might come to acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah.

Nevertheless, such Christian cordiality towards Jews, although frequently voiced in the writings of other Church Fathers, became more and more mingled with expressions of hostility. The third-century African Christian Tertullian contrasted Gentile learning unfavorably with the wisdom of Solomon. But—especially as pagans utilized Jewish attitudes to embarrass Christians—Christian rejection of the Jews and things Jewish became more common. The anti-Christian Emperor Julian the Apostate (361–363) made an attempt to involve the Jews in his short-lived effort to discredit Christianity by an attempt to rebuild their Temple. The tendency of the church in the patristic era to an otherworldly asceticism, and—especially since Augustine—to amillennialism, was accompanied by a growing disdain for the Jews. Thus, centuries later, a Lutheran amillennialist, John T. Mueller, calls premillennialism not merely a “figment of the human mind,” but, citing the Augsburg Confession, a Jewish opinion (Christian Dogmatics, Concordia, 1955, p. 621; the relevant article of the Augsburg Confession, XVII, is interpreted differently by Lutheran premillennialists, who hold that it condemns as a Jewish opinion only the view that there will be a return of Christ, or the Messiah, before any resurrection of the saints). The important thing to note here is that Christians have tended to be more hostile to the unconverted Jews of their day as they tended to spiritualize the biblical doctrine of the millennium and advocate an otherworldly, ascetic approach to discipleship. But it is precisely the characteristic of so-called fundamentalists and evangelicals not to spiritualize the millennium nor to mistake the biblical call for a separated life for a command to asceticism. Thus, among the most conservative Protestants, an emotional hostility to unbelieving Jews because of their denial of Christ is frequently mingled with grudging or even romantic admiration of the Jews for God’s acknowledged faithfulness to them.

The greatest of early Latin-speaking theologians, Augustine (354–435), frequently cited as one of the early representatives of Christian hostility to Jews, nevertheless places the ancient Jews head and shoulders above the pagans in his great theological study of history, The City of God (e.g. Book IV, chapter xxxiv). Augustine notes the grudging respect of the great pagan philosopher Seneca for the Jews, based on the fact that they alone among ancient peoples “know the cause of their rites.” He praises the superior spiritual discernment of Jews compared to Gentile peoples (On Christian Doctrine, Book III, chapter vi). Augustine’s older Greek-speaking contemporary, John Chrysostom, criticizes the Jews for rejecting Christ and gives evidence of some hostility, but claims, following Paul, to want to do away with “every suspicion of hatred.” Apparently Jews and Christians engaged in mutual conviviality, for the fourth-century Synod of Laodicaea prohibits feasting and sharing unleavened bread with Jews, classing them together with Christian heretics. The great fourth-century Cappadocian Father, Gregory of Nyssa, warned against fellowship with unbelieving Jews as a temptation to apostasy. Although these synodical and theological warnings clearly evince a certain hostility to the Jews, they also give evidence of the fact that fraternization was by no means unknown.

It was the early Middle Ages, when a renewed “Roman Empire”—actually the Germanic kingdom of the Franks—sought to protect Europe from Islam that religiously based anti-Semitism became apparent among Christians. For a time the Muslims appeared intellectually superior to European Christians, and their Jewish interpreters and popularizers formed convenient targets for Christian hostility. When Christian Europe went on the offensive against Islam in the Crusades, in many cases the “infidels” within Europe—the Jews—suffered first. The spread of a Yiddish-speaking Jewish diaspora in Eastern Europe, particularly Poland and Russia, resulted from the dispersion of medieval German-speaking Jews in a series of persecutions that attended the Crusades (Yiddish is essentially medieval German written in Hebrew script and with many Hebrew loan-words).

The fact that an outbreak of anti-Semitism among Christians has several times coincided with conflicts between Christian Europe and Islam (under Charlemagne, during the Crusades, and during the wars for the liberation of Spain in the fifteenth century) should not be overlooked today, when the largely Muslim oil-producing nations are squeezing “Christendom”—Europe and America—and placing us under pressure to abandon support for the state of Israel. Where “Christian” anti-Semitism has flourished, it has generally done so in the context of a “Christian state,” where the Jews appeared as a threat to political rather than religious unity. (This offers a precise parallel to the persecution of Christians in pagan Rome, which was largely for political, not religious, reasons.) It is precisely the most spiritual of Christians—Wesleyans and other evangelicals in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Britain, Pietists in nineteenth-century Germany—who have been most tolerant of Jews and Jewishness. It was the anti-Christian Hitler, who also fought against both Protestantism and Catholicism, who unleashed the incredible “Holocaust” against European Jews. Many Jews today, especially in the context of the recent NBC television series, “The Holocaust,” are interpreting Hitler’s atrocities as the expression of religious, i.e. Christian, anti-Semitism. This is a dangerous error, for—as Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt pointed out—it is precisely the suppression of Christianity that sets the stage for virulent persecution of the Jews. Conversely, anti-Semitism is a phenomenon that paves the way for totalitarianism and the persecution of Christianity. Thus Christians have every reason to fear a rise of anti-Semitism, for it is a prelude to anti-Christianity, while Jews are ill-advised to foster secularism to the detriment of popular Christianity, for that in turn is a prelude to persecution of the Jews.

It is generally acknowledged that the Calvinistic wing of the Reformation was the least inimical branch of Christianity with respect to the Jews. Indeed, Calvin himself as well as his most rigorous followers was accused of obscuring the difference between the New Testament and the Old and with seeking to set up a Christian theocracy patterned on Old Testament Israel. Yet, Paul’s acknowledgment that God has maintained his covenant love for Israel appears in a paraphrase by John Calvin: “Of old, certain peculiar prerogatives of the church [by this term, Calvin means God’s covenant people, the Jews in the centuries before Christ, and particularly the New Testament people after Christ] remain among the Jews. In like manner, today we do not deprive the papists of those traces of the church which the Lord willed should among them survive the destruction. God had once for all made his covenant with the Jews … their treachery could not obliterate his faithfulness.… Whence the Lord called the children born to them his children” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book IV, Chapter ii: 11). Unfortunately, Martin Luther’s record is less creditable. At the beginning of his career as a Reformer, Luther optimistically set out to evangelize the Jews who, he was convinced, resisted the Gospel only because it had been so distorted by the papacy. Indeed, the Reformation itself was marked, at the outset, by the defense by scholars of Jewish religious literature against efforts to destroy it—instigated, as it happened, by Johann Pfefferkom, a converted Jew. In 1523, Luther wrote a tract, That Jesus Was Born a Jew, a touching tribute to the Messiah’s national origin. Later in life, Luther turned vehemently against the Jews. Like Luther’s attack on the German peasants during the Peasants’ War, his anger at the Jews was incited by what he considered a threat to the most central Gospel doctrine, that of justification by faith. Many of the antitrinitarians of the Reformation era deliberately appealed to Judaism in support of their views, while the trinitarian Anabaptists appeared to Luther to be using Jewish models to defend a new legalism that, in his eyes, was as dangerous to the Gospel as the Galatian error had been in Paul’s day.

Some Noteworthy Titles

Here are some of the titles released in the last year or so that should be of particular interest to our readers who want to learn more about Jews and Judaism.

A basic reference work, one that should be in just about any library from high school on up, is the New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia, recently issued in its fifth edition, with major updating since it was first published in 1959. It is edited by Geoffrey Wigoder and published in America by Doubleday. The encyclopedia was prepared in Israel by some two hundred scholars and there are more than 2,000 double-column pages of entries on almost everything Jewish.

We Jews: Invitation to a Dialogue by Efraine Rosenzweig (Hawthorn) is by a rabbi with experience in trying to communicate something of the diversity of Jewishness to Christian audiences. Jewish Ideas and Concepts by Steven Katz (Schocken) attempts to give a systematic overview of Jewish religious thought. Rabbi: The American Experience by Murray Polner (Holt) is a popular account of what rabbis are like in a wide variety of settings. Christians need to recognize that much Jewishness does not express itself in religious categories, at least not the kind that Christians are used to. Ultraorthodox Jews make colorful copy on the press and TV documentaries but they are only one part of the Jewish people. For a good selection of writings by major, nontraditional thinkers, see Modern Jewish Thought edited by Nahum Glatzer (Schocken). An essentially secular position is frequently encountered among people of Jewish ancestry and is advocated in Humanistic Judaism by Sherwin Wine (Prometheus).

We need to read what Jews say of themselves as well as reading what Christians have to say. God Has Not Rejected His People by Richard De Ridder (Baker) is a brief book with useful suggestions for further reading. Most evangelical writing on Jews is from a dispensationalist stance, but De Ridder teaches at Calvin seminary, so his book is a welcome sign that other evangelicals can also be concerned about Jews. Contrary to what most Jews think a Jew can be a Christian. Judaism as a religion (to which non-Jews can convert) is distinguishable from ethnic Jewishness. Some recent Jewish Christian writings: Over the Stumbling Block: Inviting Jews to Jesus by Dan Wishnietsky (Broadman) is brief, with half of it relevant Scripture quotes; Chosen: Communicating With Jews of All Faiths by Lee Amber (Vision House) has a question-and-answer format and stresses diversity; Some of My Best Friends Are Christians by Zola Levitt (Regal) is a chatty, how-to-witness guide: Christ in the Passover by Ceil and Moishe Rosen (Moody), tells how Orthodox Judaism’s passover testifies to Messiah; The Underground Church of Jerusalem (Nelson) and the fictional An Israeli Love Story (Moody), both by Zola Levitt, give interesting but not definitive insights into Jewish Christianity in Israel. Jews and “Jewish Christianity” by David Berger and Michael Wyschogrod (Ktav) criticizes the kind of book mentioned above and is aimed in part at Jews who might convert.

Of special interest is Evangelicals and Jews in Conversation on Scripture, Theology, and History edited by Marc Tanenbaum, Marvin Wilson, and A. James Rudin (Baker). The book includes seventeen papers presented at a New York conference in 1975 between leading scholars and ministers from the evangelical and Jewish communities. Ecumenically oriented Christians are much more likely to have at least implicitly repudiated attempts to encourage Jews to accept Jesus as Messiah. For a collection of official statements by church groups see Stepping Stones to Further Jewish-Christian Relations compiled by Helga Croner (Anti-Defamation League). Samuel Sandmel’s When a Jew and Christian Marry (Fortress) is quite interesting. It is aimed at the couple who have already made the decision.

Honor the Promise: America’s Commitment to Israel by Robert Drinan (Doubleday) is a staunchly pro-Israel book by the Jesuit congressman from Massachusetts.

Finally, reading for a lifetime can be found in Bibliographical Essays in Medieval Jewish Studies, the second volume of a series launched in 1972 with The Study of Judaism: Bibliographical Essays and sponsored jointly by the Anti-Defamation League and Ktav Publishing House.

DONALD TINDER

Nevertheless, despite all the sympathy we can bring for Luther in his frustration at not being able to win the Jews to Christ and in his fear of a renewed legalism, it is impossible to excuse the attacks of his declining years, begun with a 1542 pamphlet, Against the Jews and Their Lies. On February 14, 1546, only a few days before his death, in what turned out to be his last sermon, Luther denounced the Jews and called on the civil authorities to deprive them of their citizenship and expel them from the land—measures later implemented, at the beginning of Jewish persecution, by none other than Adolf Hitler. It should be noted, however, that Luther’s anti-Jewish diatribes, far from being endorsed by Lutherans generally, caused great dismay among his friends and fellow-Reformers, notably Philip Melanchthon and Heinrich Bullinger. It would be as wrong to reject the Lutheran Reformation because of Luther’s anti-Jewish outbursts as it would be to reject Calvin’s achievements because of his persecution of the antitrinitarian Miguel Servetus. In the case of the Jews, Calvin’s record is far more acceptable than Luther’s. He did not, it is true, exonerate them of the charge of crucifying Christ, but he correctly points out that “they had the same defense as that in which we [Gentile Christians] confidently glory” (Commentary on Romans, at 10:2). In Calvin’s view, converted Jews will obtain the first place in honor, “being, as it were, the first-born in God’s family” (11:26). Ultimately it was Calvin’s veneration for the Jews, rather than Luther’s final hostility, that has come to characterize conservative Protestantism, marked as it is in this area more by Calvinistic than by Lutheran theology. Later theologians in the Calvinist tradition—for example, Rousas J. Rushdoony in his Institutes of Biblical Law—at times express an admiration for the Jews that verges on adulation. During the Six Days’ War and accompanying oil crisis, it was the Netherlands—the most Calvinistic of European nations—that resolutely refused to abandon Israel for the sake of oil concessions. And it is Europe’s foremost Calvinist political thinker, Jacques Ellul, who continues to appeal to the conscience of the Christian West—if it still has one—to stand by Israel in the face of the ever mounting pressures from its numerically vastly stronger Arab antagonists.

In short, the attitude of Christians towards Jews, while by no means uniformly honoring to our Founder and his Jewishness, is certainly not one of persistent hostility. It is precisely the spiritual leaders of Christianity, especially but not only those in the Reformed and more recently dispensational traditions, who have praised and supported the Jews and their new national state. Where Christians have engaged in persecution and violence towards Jews, far from being because of their religion, it is usually identifiably the result of the triumph of political and economic forces over spiritual ones. In a thoroughly Christian commonwealth, such as Calvin sought to establish in Geneva and the Puritans planned in New England, Jews would always be slightly ill at ease and out of place. But they would never be persecuted. In a secularized society in rebellion against God and Christ—such as Hitler established in Germany and towards which we are evolving in the United States—there can be no guarantee of the security of Jews. As the most distinctive and most vulnerable religious community, the Jews can expect persecution from a militantly secularistic state. No Jewish efforts to blend in and become assimilated, even by the repudiation of religion and the adoption of atheism, will protect them, for the Old Testament covenants, like New Testament baptism, leave an “indelible mark” on those who have shared in them. What Jews experience in a militantly secularistic society can only be, for Christians as well, an ominous portent of things to come. In each other’s eyes, Jews and Christians may be religious antagonists, but in the eyes of this-worldly secularism, they are remarkably alike. Let no believing Christian think that abuse of the Jews will leave him untouched—and let no Jew think that a society that mocks and scorns the religion Jesus founded will long be gracious to the race from which, according to the flesh, he came.

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

A question of culture.

The “homogeneous unit principle,” offered by Fuller Seminary’s School of World Mission, has become a controversial subject. It stresses that churches grow most quickly along their own cultural lines—thus, for instance, you can expect a church that tries to combine black and white American cultures to grow very slowly, if at all. As an introduction for CHRISTIANITY TODAY readers, we asked Tim Stafford, west coast editor of Campus Life magazine, to get together C. Peter Wagner of Fuller Seminary and Ray Stedman, a pastor at Peninsula Bible Church, for a discussion of the principles.

Stafford: The New Testament upholds the unity of the Church of Jesus Christ, which overcomes cultural distinctions like Jew, Greek, slave, free. Dr. Wagner, why do you think we should maintain cultural homogeneity in the church?

Wagner: We need to ask the sociological question, “How do churches empirically grow?” When churches don’t grow, and the Great Commission is not being fulfilled because somehow the church is irrelevant to the community, what are the reasons for this? One of them, we’ve found, is a failure to discern the principle of homogeneity.

I think the sociological level is a starting point. The second level is biblical/theological/ethical. Even if the homogeneous unit principle does help reach the lost sheep and bring them into the fold, that is not a sufficient reason for a Christian to hold it. But we start by asking, “Do churches grow better?” We find that they do.

Stedman: I question the validity of making numerical growth a kind of supreme measure of whether a church is succeeding or not. We need to produce the kind of a church the Lord wants—one that mixes all castes, clans, creeds, and races. That’s what demonstrates the quality of reconciliation.

I would agree that numbers is a sign of health in a church, just as you can detect health in a child by the fact that he is growing. But culturally you should see gradual change. The world is always divided into classes, castes, racial and vocational divisions, and that’s where you need to start. But you mustn’t stay there.

For one thing, you lose the value of various backgrounds and the flavor of diversity. Second, you don’t demonstrate to the world the reconciling character of the Gospel. I don’t think people are impressed when they come into a church of, for example, Republicans at prayer. They don’t come out of a church like that and say, “My, what tremendous power is evident here.” What it appears to be is often what it really is: a social club made up of people who like the same life style. A church can grow like that, but it does not fulfill the mind of the Lord for the church.

It impresses people to see Republicans and Democrats living and loving and working together; likewise with hippies and businessmen, blacks and Chinese and whites.

Wagner: Empirical studies don’t bear this out. Churches where outsiders see their kind of people grow faster. Do you have any evidence that the other is really attractive?

Stedman: I can’t compare figures with you, but I can use our own church as an example of this. I think that we have some very distinct life styles mingling and comingling. Yet it’s a growing church. The walls keep bulging out; we have to keep getting new people; we have to start new services. All the marks of growth are there.

We have, for instance, a group of single adults that meets in a restaurant on Sunday mornings. It’s growing fast, now about 550 strong. It grew from about forty within five years time. It’s had three divisions and each one is growing just as rapidly as the original. But even within that group, there are all kinds of people.

Wagner: Suppose I were called to be pastor of your church, Ray. You left and I went in, and I said, “You know, one of the first things we ought to do here is, we ought to stop those singles from meeting alone in that restaurant. We ought to bring them into our married couples’ classes.” Would you agree with that procedure?

Stedman: No. As I say, I think there’s a basis for starting works on a homogeneous basis of appeal. Marital status is one.

Wagner: By describing a singles ministry where the singles meet by themselves, you’re describing the homogeneous unit principle.

Stedman: But it’s still a unit within the whole body of the church. We’re talking about the church itself as a unit. There may have been those kinds of divisions in the church at Jerusalem, but the whole of the church brings together those various groups.

Wagner: As the church growth movement has analyzed it, the larger the church gets in membership, the more it can absorb fellowships of different homogeneous units.

In our church, Lake Avenue Congregational, we detected a couple of years ago that one of our problems of growth was in the adult Sunday school. We knew that our Sunday school classes were getting too big. Since then our classes have been dividing and growing.

The Pathfinders were what you could classify as young parents. They were all white, similar educationally, from the same area, and so forth. But there were members from South Pasadena, Arcadia, and San Marino, who were upper socioeconomic. There was also a group of people who lived in Pasadena, Altadena, and San Gabriel, who were a slightly lower socioeconomic group. So they said, “Definitely we don’t want to split along these lines.” They divided the class on a completely random selection.

But for a period of time, two to three months, if anybody was dissatisfied with his or her group, he could change. And lo and behold, all the people from South Pasadena, San Marino, and Arcadia were voluntarily in one class, and all the Pasadena and Altadena people were in another class.

We tried to bypass the homogeneous unit principle, or to prove that it didn’t necessarily hold. Predictably, it didn’t work. This is just part of the innocent human nature that God has made in us.

Stedman: But what you’re calling a homogeneous principle is really a characteristic of the flesh. It’s a reflection of the innate selfishness of human beings, who want to be with our own people in our own group where we feel comfortable. The Spirit of God has come to counteract the flesh. It’s a process, and it takes time. In no one period of time or in one church are you going to see the process totally completed. But that to me would really mark growth in a church—I mean growth in a biblical dimension. People should grow in their ability to reach out across gaps and chasms to other people of different backgrounds and cultures, to show love and understanding.

Wagner: We divide the classes to win unbelievers to Jesus Christ. If we’re going to do that we need to offer them a starting point, namely, groups of their own homogeneous unit. When unbelievers come in, they will feel welcomed and folded in a group of their own kind of people. Christians can form conglomerate fellowship groups, and perhaps in some cases it’s the will of the Holy Spirit. My argument is that insisting on this across the board reduces the chance of embracing unbelievers. They are in the flesh.

Stedman: Maybe we agree more than we think we do. When you evangelize you almost always will do it on a homogeneous principle. But its purpose is to introduce new Christians to a larger group with a much more diverse background. When you look at the church you should see what the world is unable to create.

Wagner: In my book Your Church Can Grow, and in a new book, Our Kind of People, to be published by John Knox Press and is on the ethical implications of the homogeneous unit principle, I give an example of what I am saying: Temple Church in Pershing Square in Los Angeles. It’s a Baptist church right in a mosaic of inner city ethnic groups. In one church they have an Anglo congregation, a Spanish congregation, a Chinese congregation, and a Korean congregation. And they’re aiming for two more, at least. They all participate in the government of the church. Everyone is a member of Temple Church.

Stedman: Do they then intermix in worship services?

Wagner: I was coming to that. They have to worship in four different languages. But the first Sunday of every quarter they all get together in the “Sounds of Heaven” celebration. No sermon, since they couldn’t understand it. But they minister to each other in music, in testimony, in baptisms. The pastor’s vision is to build a new sanctuary with a round cylinder in the middle and five partitions going out with soundproof walls. That way every congregation worships in its own language and style, except at a predetermined time each Sunday morning, when the walls all go up. One of the congregations in the center ministers to all the congregations for a period of time, and then they go back to their own service. To me this is a beautiful illustration. When Koreans go to that church, they’re with their own people. They can be won to Christ. They say, “Yeah, I understand the Gospel.” For one thing, it’s in their language. Each congregation maintains cultural integrity. Yet there’s a sense of interdependence and love among all the four congregations.

We have in our unified school district, 43 per cent blacks, 38 per cent whites, and the others are other ethnic groups. We bus our children to schools. I live in an integrated neighborhood. Our children go to integrated schools. Blacks need Christ. Whites need Christ. But there’s no way one church can meet the needs of both of those communities. If we began having a service with soul music that ran two-and-a-half hours, with the kind of black preaching that appeals to our black community, we would be considered ridiculous by everybody. We would stop winning people to Christ. But why should we do this, when New Revelation Baptist Church is winning numbers of unbelievers who are black, and we’re winning numbers of unbelievers who are white? Neither one is racist.

Stedman: That troubles me. You’re denying the reconciling power of the Gospel. I think there has to be a time when you get them together. You’re only saying you couldn’t do it because it would be difficult. But I think it could be done. The church can be flexible and have services of different styles, with all the people joining and belonging to the same church.

Wagner: That can happen. I’ve been to churches that had two different services, and actually had two homogeneous units. One homogeneous unit goes to one service, and the other goes to another, which isn’t much different from going to one church on this corner and one church on that corner.

Generally speaking, churches that have tried bicultural models, with certain exceptions, have been unsuccessful.

Stedman: But the Great Commission is still incomplete until they have become disciples. It’s not just, go and win people to Christ, but to make disciples of all men. Disciples are those who have learned to love and live together despite differences. Diversity in unity is the great hallmark of the church as distinct from the world.

Wagner: But to deny people the privilege of worshiping God in their culture doesn’t seem to me to be a Christian virtue.

Stedman: I don’t think you deny it to them. You adjust to it. You have varying styles available in different times and places within the church. But the important thing is that people sense that they belong to a larger body that includes all these groups.

We’ve experimented in this way. There’s a black church in East Palo Alto that we’ve exchanged pastors with. We’ve taken our congregation over there and met with them; they’ve come over and met with us; we’ve exchanged choirs and choral groups. We’ve had close ties with this church. But to try to merge the two churches and have joint services together at this stage would be difficult, unwelcome to both groups.

Wagner: You’re one step ahead of us, and I envy you for it.

Stafford: We’ve been talking as though cultural distinctives are neutral ethically. But some people would say that the reason black people are uncomfortable with whites and white people are uncomfortable with blacks is that whites are racist. In erecting an all-white church there’s an inescapable aura of offense to blacks, which is an extension of our whole culture. Given the fact that the separation of blacks and whites in America is central to our economic problems, central to our social problems, and central to our educational problems, shouldn’t the church be doing more than just exchanging pastors or having an occasional choir cross town? Shouldn’t the church embody the answer to our racial situation?

Wagner: My position is that culture is not sinful. There are always demonic elements in every culture, but it’s not sinful to worship God in your language or in your style.

I think that one of the major manifestations of this today is the evangelism of the Jews. In the New Testament the Judaizers were insisting that Gentiles, in order to be true followers of Jehovah, needed to be circumcised and keep the law and the Sabbath. But the Jews through the centuries have had the tables turned on them. In the last hundred years or so it’s been fairly well agreed that much of the so-called mission work to the Jews was largely Gentilizing, rather than Judaizing. Mission agencies insisted, in an implicit form, that Jews, in order to become true followers of Jesus needed to join Gentile churches and that Jewish men needed to marry Gentile women.

Much more recently the messianic synagogue movement has arisen. Members say that it’s possible for a Jew to follow Jesus Christ, to bar mitzvah his children, to keep a kosher kitchen, to attend messianic synagogue on Friday night, to wear yarmulkes in a service, to grow beards, to marry Jewish women, and to still be Jews and be followers of “Yeshua Hamashiac,” Jesus the Messiah. The multiplication of these synagogues is a testimony to the vitality of the homogeneous unit principle.

Now the question is, does this increase or decrease hostility between Jews and Gentiles? Most Jews who have been won to Christ in messianic synagogues love Gentiles more than they ever have before. Since I learned more about the messianic synagogue movement, I have felt much closer and more appreciative of Jews. It has helped break down barriers; they’re now following Jesus the Messiah and we’re following the same Jesus. They’re doing it their way and we’re doing it our way, but we’re all brothers and sisters in Christ and we rejoice together and love each other much more than we did before.

Stedman: Long-range, you may have a breakdown of cultures, as you visit each other’s services. It may become possible to mingle some of these congregations and see people move from one to another.

Now to come back to your original question, Tim, I think there are some dangerous elements in the idea of having homogeneous groups that make no attempts to break down these barriers. Take the whole question of black-white relationships in the South. I strongly believe that had white Christians who won their slaves to Christ really treated them as Christian brothers and sisters the whole race issue might never have sprung up in the South. In the early church there was a cultural breakdown going on in the intermingling of slaves and masters in the same congregation.

Wagner: I don’t think so. There was probably a slave church in Rome that met by itself.

Stedman: Well, why, then, in the letters to the Ephesians and to the Colossians and so on do we have the words addressed to both groups right in the same letter? “To the church at Colossae. To the church at Ephesus. Masters, treat your slaves rightly. Slaves, be faithful to your masters.” These were read to the congregation. They were evidently all sitting there together.

Wagner: Let’s go to the New Testament now, because this is very important. If this homogeneous unit principle is not the way New Testament churches developed, that’s sufficient evidence to scrap it.

Jesus was born into a culture. He was not a Gentile. He was not a Samaritan. He was a Jew. Not only was he a Jew, but he was a very special kind of Jew. Among Jews, there were many different homogeneous units. There were priestly and secular classes. He was not a priest, but a layman. There were also socioeconomic classes. He was of the working class. There was a much more important division between Hellenists and Hebrews. He was not a Hellenist, he was a Hebrew. There was another important difference among Hebrews, and that was between Galileans and Judaeans. He was a Galilean. He was an Aramaic-speaking Galilean Jew, a specific homogeneous unit in the sociocultural makeup of the first century.

Since Jesus grew up in that culture—and if he was truly human, he was thoroughly a part of that culture; that’s a theological deduction—it would be natural for him to form his own inner circle from those of his own homogeneous unit. Eleven of the twelve disciples were Aramaic-speaking Galilean Jews, with one exception, Judas Iscariot. Ish-Kerioth means man of Kerioth, which was a Judaean village. There were two candidates to replace Judas—Joseph Barsabbas, who was probably a Cyprian, and Matthias, who was an Aramaic-speaking Galilean Jew. Matthias was chosen.

The basic ministry of these twelve people was not conglomerate or crosscultural. When Jesus sent them out he said, “Go not into the way of the Gentiles; into the city of the Samaritans enter not; but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” They were going to their own people. When the Syrophoenician woman came along, Jesus used language that could be considered racist. At first he gave her the silent treatment. He finally healed her daughter, because of her faith. Compassion always crosses culture. But Jesus initially wanted nothing to do with her, if we can take the text at face value. And there are other examples, as when the Holy Spirit sent Paul and Barnabas to the Gentiles. Paul’s churches were mostly started as splinter synagogues. The people in them were mostly God-fearers, not Jews or proselytes, although there were some of them; those God-fearers began winning the Gentiles. So the churches that Paul left behind were Gentile churches.

Stedman: That’s a beautiful example, Pete, of approaching the Scriptures with a conclusion already in mind. You can interpret various passages so that they seem to support one conviction, but when you approach it from another point of view you find something entirely different.

Wagner: I grant you that. But it’s a reasonable way to read the Scriptures.

A Balanced Stride

Readers should not side exclusively with the ideas of just one of these men. The emphasis of both is important.

If C. Peter Wagner thought or taught that the “homogeneous unit” was the governing principle of church life I would be concerned. But he seems aware that homogeneity, if twisted, can be a convenient excuse for bigotry. Obviously, specialization has to stop somewhere, or churches would be tailored just for men, or women, or the elderly, or children.

On the other hand, you cannot have a congregation where year after year everyone who attends will not only be welcomed but also feel at home. Given the differences in people, at some point some people will feel out of place, whether because of language, culture, age, style, or emphasis. Wouldn’t Ray Stedman agree that Christ’s church should be composed of congregations with varying personalities? Certainly assimilation is not the ultimate answer.

The question, then, is not who is right, but which emphasis is best for me? I would have been wise several years ago to have heeded Wagner. He warned me not to try to reach too many different people in one church. Sure enough, the congregation eventually split in our attempt to extend our imperfect love too far and too fast. We were young and obsessed with solving in a few years problems that had been centuries in the making.

This does not mean, however, that Christians are not to consistently work toward reconciliation in all areas of life. I thank God for other congregations that continue to work to remove the walls that keep us from loving each other. Even the most painful lessons I learned from black believers made me a more healthy person spiritually. The world needs to see the reconciling love of the Gospel in our local churches. “Balance” is the appropriate word. The two positions are not that much in conflict. But were I forced to choose between growth versus reconciliation, I would choose the latter.

DAVID R. MAINS

David R. Mains was formerly copastor of Circle Church in Chicago, an experimental black-white congregation. He now serves as director of Chapel of the Air in Carol Stream, Illinois.

Stedman: I don’t think that’s an argument in your favor. I preached through the Gospel of Mark not long ago and I saw that Jesus spent at least half of his ministry traveling among Gentiles. He didn’t preach only among the Jews. If you trace his work with the disciples, in Mark’s Gospel, particularly, you see that he is trying to break down the cultural barriers of the Jews, so they could see the whole of the world.

Wagner: But no matter how many months Jesus spent in Gentile territory, it doesn’t change the fact that when he left there, he left Galileans behind. They weren’t even Hellenists, to say nothing of Gentiles. Jesus started no Gentile church. When Peter later went to the house of Cornelius, that breakthrough blew everybody’s mind. The way I see it, all those acts of Jesus—the parable of the good Samaritan, the healing of the centurion’s servant, and the potential contacts that he did have with Gentiles—were all serving to prepare the way.

Stedman: They were deliberate teaching methods of his to break down the limited cultural background of the disciples.

Wagner: Those are your words, not mine. My words are that he was preparing the way for his final command, which they had not heard before, “Make disciples of all nations.” They needed to have that preparation in order to go out. Jesus was a good teacher, but even when he left, none of the twelve fully understood that.

Stedman: But that was because they were lacking the Holy Spirit. Jesus said, “Wait in Jerusalem until the Spirit comes. Don’t try to evangelize, yet.” The Holy Spirit came at Pentecost, and now all of us have him. We should start immediately to break down these cultural barriers as soon as people come to Christ.

Stafford: Peter, you said earlier that all culture is neutral. Are there times when, because of a political or racial situation, the atmosphere is inflamed and the church needs to violate the homogeneous unit principle?

Wagner: Yes. I call them “social disaster areas.” South Africa may be one of those social disaster areas today. I believe that the churches in South Africa may have to violate the homogeneous unit principle. They may have to sacrifice growth temporarily in order to combat the racism of that country.

Stedman: What would you say about Japan? I have thought for a long time that Japan’s culture deliberately encourages deception: putting on a face, being polite to people you are ready to murder, hiding every real feeling. I think that the Gospel in Japan must confront that.

Wagner: I don’t have an opinion on Japan, but I will always contend that every culture has a demonic element, and that the entrance of the Gospel into any culture has to change part of that culture.

Stafford: But how do you tell? You talked about blacks and whites in America. Some see that as a sign of the demonic in our culture. We could even talk about the white suburban culture that makes up our home churches. A good many Christians are saying it represents a wealthy, ingrown, proud, and secure mentality that needs to be confronted. It produces an atmosphere of comfortable religion that is antagonistic to the Gospel. I assume that you don’t agree with that. But how do we make the distinction? The South African Christians don’t agree that their country is a social disaster area either. Some would, but the vast majority of white South Africans wouldn’t.

Wagner: That’s a very hard decision for someone to make, and I can’t really decide about someone else’s culture.

Stafford: How about America?

Wagner: America has gone through an interesting change. I think the sixties will go down as the most important decade of the century, socially. We have made a subtle sociopsychological change in America, which I think is positive. For the first time in our history, our academic and legal systems are recognizing the valid existence of disparate groups in America. The idea before the sixties was that everybody melts together in a “melting pot.” Now the idea is that America is a society in which people can affect each other like ingredients in a stewpot, so that they all come out of the pot differently from the way they went in, but they all maintain their identity.

Few are talking any more about an integration of black and white churches, diluting the minority culture, but rather about a mature recognition of each cultural expression. If the Spanish prefer to worship in Spanish rather than in English, then I don’t think they should be denied their privilege to do that.

Stafford: I don’t think the issue is denying a minority the right to maintain its own culture. The issue is the right of the majority culture to be isolated from the minority culture. If it’s true that every culture has within it a demonic element, that element needs to be confronted. Any majority culture has the ability to ignore other cultures. A black in America can’t ignore whites. A white can almost completely ignore blacks in most parts of America. Doesn’t the Holy Spirit confront the arrogance of people in a majority culture by forcing them to confront others, by forcing them out into the highways and biways of other cultures? Isn’t it a high responsibility for pastors to work in that?

Wagner: I agree. Not only a responsibility of pastors, but the responsibility of prophets. We need to listen to the Sojourners, The Other Side, people like Ron Sider. I agree that this is the way the body of Christ works.

Stafford: Doesn’t the homogeneous unit principle, in application, contradict that a good percentage of the time? If our churches are geared toward a white suburban culture, if our jobs and our homes and the places we eat are solidly in the majority, when are we contradicted by other cultures?

Wagner: We’re not, unfortunately. The homogeneous unit principle is a starting point. If it’s an ending point, it’s sub-Christian. If we don’t form these relationships where we’re judged, and flavored, and blessed by Christians of other cultures, we are missing out on God’s best. How to do it is hard to say.

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

‘I Was Sick … I Was in Prison’

Karl Barth and Cornelius Van Til. The names represent two widely divergent theological/philosophical outlooks. Both men exerted strong influence on more than a generation through their teaching and writing.

And each had a pastor’s heart. (Dr. Van Til is alive and still has it.)

Every Sunday morning Professor Barth went to the Basel, Switzerland, jail to visit the prisoners and preach to them. He went from cell to cell.

Every Sunday afternoon Professor Van Til went to the Chestnut Hill. Pennsylvania, hospital to visit the sick and share the Gospel with them. He went from bed to bed.

Granted that this similarity does not erase the differences—many of them at the heart of Christian belief—between Van Til and Barth, I still find their shared sense of personal mission and responsibility an exciting thing.

I think it was Bishop Stephen Neill who suggested that the church’s theologians should be its evangelists, and its evangelists the church’s theologians.

It’s beautiful when the two are combined in one person.

EUTYCHUS VIII

Pilgrims of Stewardship

As usual I am way behind in reading your wonderful publication. I wanted to comment, however, on the excellent article “On Wealth and Stewardship” by Klaus Bockmühl (Current Religious Thought, June 23). God is teaching us concerning many areas that need correction and the subject dealt with in this article is probably one of the most needed. And the most difficult for us to bow to. If we could only live more like the pilgrims God says we are.

GERARD COUENHOVEN

Minneapolis, Minn.

I read Klaus Bockmühl’s article several times. This is indeed an area in need of more attention and action. Unfortunately, however, Bockmühl has been lured away from the realities of life and made captive of clockwork theory. One reality that shatters the comfort of such theory is that there never is any “going back to the biblical tradition”—whatever the biblical tradition is. Even in the Bible there is no magic formula which we need only to plug in and watch work. In addition to this, though we need to have a more narrow concept of relieving the burden of the needy, Bockmühl’s concept is unhealthily narrow.

STANLEY J. RODES

Kansas City. Mo.

The Taste Of Sawdust

By and large I greatly appreciate what the editors are doing to enrich the Christian community with CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Having just read the two lead articles on the family (“Parents and Prodigals” by Virginia Stem Owens and “The Yoke of Fatherhood” by Thomas Howard, June 23), I find myself left with a taste somewhat akin to sawdust in my mouth. Howard’s piece, although well-written and constructed, seemed so abstract, pseudointellectual, almost rambling in its approach. My goodness, I agree with his thesis, but is such a stream-of-consciousness approach the best way to go with your lead? Then Owen’s depressing article. I guess that Howard’s approach wouldn’t have bothered me so much had it not been followed by such a negative viewpoint. Is [being a mother] as frustrating as she presents it? Are children such monsters, so difficult to raise and so unpredictable in their outcome? Does the Bible really offer so little to help the perplexed parent? Where’s the balance we readers so need, the encouragement, the models of true parental success? I’m not calling for Christian success stories, but I would have appreciated at least some encouragement in this particular issue with this particular topic.

JAMES M. KUTNOW

Dallas, Tex.

Kudos for beautiful cover picture. Do it again.

RALPH R. BELL

Escondido, Calif.

Alone Is Beautiful

I wish to thank you for your recent article in Minister’s Workshop, “A Need to Be Alone” (June 23). This piece should be must reading for all pastors who strive to minister to God’s people. The realization that we, as pastors, need to be replenished as our cups are emptied is evident, not only in Victor Pentz’s article, but should be realized through common sense that you can’t run on an empty tank. Thanks once again, and keep up the good work.

(THE REV.) DOUGLAS E. ADAMS

Elmwood-Carthage Presbyterian Church

Cincinnati, Ohio

Language Sins

Talk about mixed emotions. In the June 2 issue you published a very thought-provoking article by my favorite writer, Ron Durham (“Evil and God: Has Process Made Good Its Promise?”) and then commit the type of sin against our language one might expect from The Enquirer or its ilk. I refer to the supposed news article “Sears, Roebuck: Accounts Closed,” wherein twice your reporter used the phrase “explicit sex” to describe the content of “Charlie’s Angels” and “Three’s Company.” Your description of these two shows might well have included adjectives such as “tasteless, banal, repetitious in theme, lacking in entertainment value,” and so forth, but explicit sex! Precision in language would require us to reserve such phrases for the content of adult book store fare, where it would properly apply.… My major disappointment is that your calibre of journal would use the same exaggeration and editorializing in reporting as all the other periodicals. Shame.

CLYDE N. GORDON

Atlanta, Ga.

Thank you for Durham’s article on process theology. I hope that the article marks the beginning of a long dialogue between process and more conservative theologians.… That dialogue may bring us a fuller understanding of God, and help us to realize that any one group’s claim to completely understand God must be relegated to the category of intellectual idolatry. Unfortunately, that dialogue which offers so much promise, has begun on a less than ideal footing with Durham’s article. As often seems to be the case, process theology seems to be criticized here by one who either does not understand the system, or who wishes to destroy it and will use any means, including half-truths.

DANIEL J. G. G. BLOCK

Golden Valley, Minn.

Unto the Inner City

I appreciated the message of your article on urban seminary training (“Urban Perspective on Pastoral Education,” June 2). I’m happy to know that some conservatives are willing to accept the challenge of a most necessary ministry to the losers who must live in the run-down neighborhoods in our large cities.… If we Christians cannot make the Christian faith meaningful and useful to the people of the inner city, the people who cannot help themselves or who have not learned how. then our Christian faith is irrelevant.

(THE REV.) CHARLES H. KAMP

Park Memorial and First Avenue Presbyterian Churches

Evansville, Ind.

The controversy between Newsweek senior editor Kenneth Woodward and Ruth Stapleton, evangelist sister of President Carter, warms up. CHRISTIANITY TODAY reports the fracas on page 8. Without taking sides, CHRISTIANITY TODAY makes the point that although consistency is a noble virtue anyone has the right to set the record straight regarding his personal religious convictions.