Subtle Pressures Mounting on Cuban Churches

British Editorial Representative J. D. Douglas spent a week in Cuba during December getting a first-hand look at how churches fare under Castro. Here is his report:

Cuba marks the eighth anniversary of Fidel Castro’s revolution this week. So far is the regime from crumbling that to be anyone else’s man in Havana is to live dangerously indeed. Yet evidences of disillusion are there, too.

In the capital of the Communist island republic, the shops are brightly lit; but of the more essential goods, only sugar is on free sale. The showiest hotel in town cannot provide a cup of coffee some evenings. Strident music to encourage the workers blares from main-street loudspeakers. On December 7, however, it was replaced by quieter selections as Cuba remembered her national heroes, and all places of business and entertainment were closed.

Signs of the revolution are everywhere, from the placarded words of party sages to the gun-toting guards—some of them mere slips of girls—posted outside offices, apartment blocks, and public buildings and at strategic highway points. A Red Chinese exhibition seeks to attract the crowds. Tasteful art displays in the enormous foyer of the Havana Libre (nee Hilton) Hotel draw admiring throngs nightly.

The disillusion is reflected in the estimated 750,000 who have applied to leave the country despite certain forfeiture of nearly all their possessions. Long lines appear every day outside the immigration office.

More sinister signs of the revolution are seen in the regime’s attitude toward the Church. The harassment continues more subtly than in 1965, when fifty-three Baptists were arrested simultaneously. Thirty-four of them were brought to trial and sentenced for a variety of offenses, from espionage to “twisting biblical texts for the purpose of ideological diversionism.” To go about with Bible in hand is still an offense. Informers have infiltrated the churches—a fact not only admitted but boasted about by Dr. Falipe Carneado, director of the government’s department of religious matters. Churches cannot build. Theological students are whisked away to military service or to work camps. Unbelievers have been known to attend a church service, stand up at a given moment and sing the national anthem, then accuse those who do not join in of disrespect.

A common device is the street plan. Both ends of a street where a church is located are roped off; then, an hour before service time the street is designated a recreation area. Youths play ball or ride up and down on bicycles so that churchgoers are jostled and buffeted.

A few pastors have become firm Fidelistas trusted by the regime, and their sermons and other utterances are considered to be political propaganda rather than Christian messages. Visiting churchmen are usually taken in hand by such ministers, who give the visitors such a misleading impression that they go home honestly convinced there is no persecution of Christians in Cuba.

In the Americas access to Cuba is possible only from Mexico City. There, before flying out by Cubana, the traveler is photographed (“for the CIA files,” murmured a sardonic bystander), and as a symbol of Mexico’s disapproval a huge stamp is slammed on his passport: “Salió a Cuba.” This piece of democracy in reverse will make the holder persona non grata in any other Latin America country and stands in ironic contrast to Cuba’s deliberate failure to stamp one’s passport at all.

But behind the courtesy with which the tourist is met on arrival in Havana, the trappings of Communism are soon felt. The first is a compulsory change of all his money. For this purpose the peso is regarded as on a par with the U. S. dollar (the black-market rate is five to one). This rate operates also when the tourist leaves Cuba.

All in all, the picture is dark. One Cuban expressed it this way: “Our experiences are very sour. We breathe an atmosphere of insolence, tyranny, blasphemy, hypocrisy, lies, betrayal, and indignity. Our palm trees are so sad that they seem to be weeping, and our rivers are dry one moment and flooding at the other. This island is a huge prison with international jailers. We have returned to the time of the Vandals. The only thing we can do is raise our eyes to our blue skies, to the shining sun, to the twinkling stars, and to our God.”

At Havana Airport the departing traveler, to reach his plane, passes a big Pan American Airways section sign, its light lit, the counter beneath it swept and garnished. It is evidently a symbol open to different interpretations.

Cuban Church Conclave

Ecumenical Press Service of Geneva, the information arm of the World Council of Churches, reports that the Cuban Council of Evangelical Churches held its twenty-eighth General Assembly November 8–10. On hand were representatives of the twelve member denominations plus a few special guests. Addresses were given on the role of the laity by Mr. C. I. Itty, associate secretary of the WCC Department on the Laity, and on the witness of Christians in a socialist society by Professor Milan Opocensky of the Comenius theological faculty in Prague, Czechoslovakia. The Very Rev. Jose A. Gonzalez, dean of an Episcopal cathedral, was elected president of the council. Dr. Adolfo Ham was reelected to a two-year term as executive secretary.

EPS also reported that the governing board of the Cuban Council of Churches approved the opening of a study center with the Rev. Rafael Cepeda, a Presbyterian, as director. The center is to coordinate council research.

The Confined Baptists

Herbert Caudill, 63, Southern Baptist missionary released a few weeks ago from a Cuban prison, is in good spirits and enjoys good health except for an eye ailment. The malady had grown progressively worse, and Cuban authorities gave him liberty under certain restrictions so that he could obtain regular medical attention.

Though still under virtual house arrest, Caudill is permitted to have a few visitors. He is not allowed to preach or to give lectures at Havana Baptist Seminary, where he and his wife have an apartment.

Caudill’s son-in-law, David Fite, 33, is still in prison. The Swiss ambassador, guardian of American interests in Cuba, has been able to see Fite twice in nineteen months, and his family are allowed a monthly visit. Other foreign visitors would reportedly encounter “difficulties.” About thirty-five other Baptist pastors who are Cubans remain in prison also.

Soup With A Fork?

Due for publication early this year in Holland is a book of at least 200 pages on the authority of the Bible. It has the unanimous approval of the Synod of the Netherlands Reformed Church and is designed to be an aid to Bible reading and study. It marks the first time since the last world war that an old, established European church has come out strongly for the Bible as God’s Word.

The book says harsh things about the liberal biblical criticism of the nineteenth century and espouses in contrast a high esteem for the inherent authority of Scripture. But it bears down equally hard on the rationalism of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century orthodoxy. C. Frederikse, who wrote an original draft, claims that orthodoxy changed the great discovery of the Reformation. The book, revised by the synod prior to final approval, contends that Luther “again experienced the Bible as the book of the speaking God. In the days of the Reformation believers confessed their faith; later they believed their confessions.”

The title of the book translates as “Clear Wine.” It is taken from a Dutch expression that in this case suggests the idea of “honest to the Bible.”

The book’s flat assertion that the Bible is the Word of God takes issue with the well-known maxim of theologian Karl Barth that God’s Word is in the Bible. This is a significant development, for the national church of Holland was greatly influenced by Barth’s theology of neo-orthodoxy in the mid-thirties.

Bible criticism is not viewed as an unlawful form of Bible study, but serious dangers are acknowledged. The book claims there is “no reason to oppose the study of the Bible as a historic work or a literary document.” But Bible criticism is condemned where it mistakes personal views for scientific facts: “Often the Bible critics gave the impression they were eating soup with a fork.”

The book sees no hope in the prevalent word “existential.” It says, “This word may be a sign of good intentions, but there is the danger that the meeting in faith of Christ be diluted into some vague inner and religious experience.”

JAN J. VAN CAPELLEVEEN

Evangelical Editors Ex Animo

Magazine editors who want to belong to the Evangelical Press Association this year are required for the first time to sign a seven-point doctrinal statement with “ex animo acceptance,” that is, without mental reservations.

The statement is part of the association’s original charter, and EPA’s first president J. DeForest Murch recalls that the first members subscribed to it. But in the intervening years, as membership has tripled to more than 150 journals, the statement has been ignored.

The man who took it off the shelf was amiable Paul Fromer, editor of Inter-Varsity’s urbane campus monthly His, who is in line to be EPA’s next president. Young Fromer got EPA’s six-member board to require not only that new members sign, but also that old members sign it over again every year as a reminder of EPA standards.

Eternity’s Russell Hitt thinks the idea smacks of defensiveness. He doesn’t care if EPA “wants to check on my orthodoxy” but thinks the board was presumptuous in making the new requirement without discussing it at the annual convention.

M. A. Henderson of the Gideon scrawled “Amen!” below his signature, but half a dozen editors failed to return the signed statement, perhaps by mistake. (Fromer says they’ll have to sign to retain membership.) Fred Pearson of the Christian Medical Society Journal signed but made his own additions and corrections. He thinks the church, not EPA, should set doctrinal standards.

Murch said the statement was a word-for-word transcription of the doctrinal position of the National Association of Evangelicals. But a comparison with that document shows that somewhere along the line, the assertion of belief in Christ’s miracles and “vicarious and atoning death” has disappeared. “Completely inadvertent,” says current EPA President George Failing of The Wesleyan Methodist.

Other omissions shared by NAE and EPA are justification by faith alone, the sinfulness of all men, and God as the creator of the universe and of man. Pearson thinks modifiers are “mysterious” in the first point, on Scripture: “We believe the Bible to be the inspired, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God.”

Two Times At Once

After years without an interdenominational newsweekly, American Protestants now have two. Both come not from the big denominations or the National Council of Churches orbit but from evangelical independents.

The Sunday Times, which bowed December 3, is a successor to the venerable Sunday School Times. Its news is wrapped around the retained International Uniform Sunday School Lesson.

This week, the second one premieres—the Christian Times. Called a “Sunday School Paper for Adults,” it is a spinoff from Tyndale House of Wheaton, Illinois, publisher of Living Letters and other vernacular Bible translations and of the monthly Christian Reader.

Although the Christian Times uses a newsy front page to attract readers, little more than two of its eight, 8½-by-11-inch, slick pages are devoted to news. The rest goes to columns, interviews, sermonettes, and other relatively timeless features, plus one page apiece on daily devotions and Bible study. But the paper’s two-week gap from printer to consumer contrasts with the months-ahead timetable of its competitors.

Editor of the Christian Times, which has an initial print order of 28,000, is Don Crawford, 37, a University of Missouri journalism graduate who came to Tyndale from David C. Cook, a giant Sunday school house. The paper will be sold and mailed in bulk to individual churches. The first issue features a review of 1966 religious news and a timely column by Republican Congressman John B. Anderson of Illinois.

The Sunday Times is making an adventurous start toward something new in church journalism. With four times as much space as the other new weekly under its expanded tabloid size, it uses about five of its sixteen pulp pages for news and current features.

Editor of the Philadelphia-based newspaper is James Reapsome, 38, who is ordained by an independent congregation and was a reporter on two different dailies while working his way through college and seminary. He also served a stint as public relations director of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship.

Reapsome says the new format has doubled production costs, and Massachusetts industrialist John Bolten, Sr., who owns the paper, says 20,000 new subscribers are needed to “break even.” The paper’s current paid subscriptions total about 45,000. Bolten is well known as a generous benefactor of Christian organizations.

Despite Bolten’s conservative political views, Sunday Times commentators Donald Barnhouse (CBS-TV newsman in Philadelphia and son of the late Presbyterian preacher Donald Grey Barnhouse) and the anonymous “Urbanus” have already had some interesting, moderate things to say about U. S. policy on Red China and other current issues. Reapsome says that he has never discussed the paper’s politics with Bolten, and that the owner makes “no attempt to get any particular slant except the scriptural position.”

One hindrance for Reapsome and the other five full-time editors is a production schedule that blunts the element of timeliness—an essential for any newspaper. The last news material in an issue goes to the shop at 4:30 P.M. on Wednesdays, but the presses don’t roll until six days later.

Reapsome hopes to attract the “broadest interdenominational audience” he can, but the first issue’s editorial credo says the paper should be “a rallying point for evangelism, Bible conferences, and spiritual life teaching.” This emphasis on independent evangelical effort is reflected in news play.

Why haven’t big denominations or the NCC seized the newspaper idea? Reapsome thinks it’s because their publishers are “heavily academic, and not at the grass-roots level.” Also, he says, they are “wedded to the magazine concept,” while Roman Catholics and Jews have long capitalized on the natural appeal of a weekly newspaper.

Pastor Under Pressure

The Presbytery of Philadelphia held a special closed-door meeting in December to consider a dispute centered on the pastor of a prestigious congregation in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. The pastor, Dr. D. Evor Roberts, has been under pressure to resign.

Out of the meeting came a statement commending both Roberts and the session of the Swarthmore church. It left to the pastor and the session the decision whether to “accept or to reject the advice” of a presbytery counseling subcommittee that earlier had suggested Roberts’ resignation.

The only issue made public in the dispute has been the pastor’s past involvement in civil-rights activities. But the presbytery noted that “there are long-standing and deep-seated issues involved in this situation which are broader than civil rights.”

The counseling subcommittee had been appointed by the chairman of the presbytery’s ministerial relations committee at the request of the session and the pastor. It held fifty-one meetings over a period of nine months before issuing a report. The report was said to have commended Roberts “in large measure” but to have advised that he seek another position.

Turks Jail Preaching Trio

Three Americans landed in a Turkish prison for distributing Christian literature and gospel records. The U. S. State Department identified them as George G. Jacquith of Nampa, Idaho, Gordon K. Magney of Arlington, Virginia, and Geoffery W. Cobb, of Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania.

United States government representatives said the trio admitted that they had engaged in proselytizing activities, in violation of Turkish law. The three were also described as having refused to accept professional legal counsel. All serve under a small American mission board.

Magney was said to have been previously arrested on similar charges.

Abbreviated Defection

Harold M. Koch, 35, a former Chicago Roman Catholic priest who defected to the Soviet Union in September to protest U.S. Viet Nam policy, announced he was returning to America. In Sweden, he said the Reds finally “let me go” because he wants to see his father, who is seriously ill.

Pearl Harbor Revisited

Mitsuo Fuchida led the air armada that attacked Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941. He fired the signal flare unleashing the armed might of the Japanese against the American military base in Hawaii. The raid killed 2,409 Americans and smashed eighteen warships and 300 aircraft.

Twenty-five years later, Fuchida was back in Hawaii—as a Christian evangelist. At a prayer breakfast in Honolulu sponsored by International Christian Leadership, he said:

“When I came to Hawaii twenty-five years ago, I was your enemy. Now I am your brother in Christ.”

Fuchida, now 64, told of his conversion as a result of reading the Scriptures and said he believes God spared his life so he could “witness to the Lord’s grace and forgiveness.”

In 1941 he was a commander in the Japanese navy and was in charge of the training for the Pearl Harbor operation. He piloted the lead plane that gave the signals for the attack.

After Pearl Harbor, Fuchida is said to have faced almost certain death in combat at least six times. Of the seventy officers who led the Pearl Harbor bombing, he is the only one still alive, according to a report by Baptist Press.

Fuchida appeared at the breakfast with evangelist Billy Graham, who was en route to Viet Nam to spend Christmas with troops.

On The Road To Saigon

Three top leaders of American Christendom, one from each branch, arranged their year’s-end schedules to make trips to visit soldiers in South Viet Nam.

It was the sixteenth consecutive Christmas with U. S. troops for Francis Cardinal Spellman, 77, who is the Military Vicar of Roman Catholics.

The most prominent Protestant traveler was evangelist Billy Graham, who planned to eat his Christmas dinner in the field. Before he left, Mennonites at the Goshen, Indiana, seminary urged him to “express the divine judgment upon all use of violence” and call soldiers “from the sin of killing,” lest his trip be interpreted as church endorsement of the U. S. war effort there.

But endorsement had already come, in mid-December, from the third traveler, Archbishop Iakovos, primate of Greek Orthodoxy: “In my opinion the United States is the only major power which still upholds and believes in the moral obligations which emanated from [the] international agreements on Viet Nam. This is why it is incomprehensible to call our involvement in the Viet Nam ‘civil war’ as lacking moral foundation. This is a civil war between Communism and democracy. This is the real issue of the fighting in Viet Nam.”

The bearded Iakovos’ reactions to a week in Viet Nam were particularly significant because he is one of the six presidents of the World Council of Churches, which has been skeptical of U. S. policy there. Another of the presidents, Germany’s Martin Niemöller, was to set out last week for Communist North Viet Nam to investigate relief needs.

Iakovos supported the National Council of Churches and Pope Paul in calling for an extended truce, rather than the brief holiday cease-fires both sides had agreed upon.

To the archbishop, Viet Nam is “entirely the same” as postwar Greece, where the United States helped fight off Communist infiltration.

In a Saigon press conference during his visit, Iakovos sounded a similar note, saying that his church basically opposes war but that this one is moral and necessary. He had high praise for U. S. servicemen and armed forces chaplains (only two of whom are Greek Orthodox).

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