Presbyterians And The Mainline Decline

The Presbyterian Presence: The Twentieth-Century Experience,seven volumes, edited by Milton J. Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis B. Weeks (Westminster/John Knox Press). Reviewed by Mark Noll, McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College in Illinois.

This seven-volume series is the most comprehensive, the most honest, and the most illuminating study of an American denominational family ever published. The first six volumes present 60 essays by nearly 70 scholars, pastors, and denominational officials, which examine almost all imaginable aspects of the Presbyterian church in the twentieth century—from controversial decisions of general assemblies to the theological textbooks at seminaries; from lay attitudes toward Sunday to the participation of Hispanics, African Americans, Koreans, and native Americans in Presbyterian organizations.

The seventh volume, The Re-Forming Vision ($16.99), is a sustained argument from the three series editors, all of whom are associated with the Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Louisville. It attempts the daunting challenge of summarizing the findings of the previous six books, while also offering Presbyterians an agenda for the future.

The books treat most thoroughly the larger northern and southern Presbyterian churches, which in 1983 overcame regional differences dating back to the Civil War and united as the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) (PCUSA). Yet considerable coverage is also afforded the many smaller Presbyterian denominations, some of which have exerted an influence larger than their size.

More than just Presbyterian history, this series, appearing in the early 1990s, also addresses, by the nature of the case, the current predicament of the other mainline Protestant traditions.

Also reviewed in this section: Descending into Greatness, by Bill Hybels;The Women’s Bible Commentary, edited by Carol Newsom and Sharon Ringe;Dorothy Carey, by James Beck;The Son of Laughter, by Frederick Buechner.

What is Presbyterian?

The editors are frank about the crises that afflict their denomination. Presbyterians have experienced dismaying numerical fortunes. From 1965 to 1990, the PCUSA—with its two predecessor denominations—experienced a decline in members from 4.25 million to 2.85 million. If absolute decline continues on that scale, this denomination will be extinct by the middle of the next century. (While some smaller Presbyterian denominations have grown rapidly in recent decades, all of them combined enroll less than one-seventh the members of the PCUSA.)

The editors deserve credit for their realization that a decline in membership, taken by itself, can never be the final word for churches that remember the Scriptures’ words about Christ’s “little flock.” Quite properly, therefore, they consistently move the discussion beyond quantity to questions of quality.

On that level, the books document a recurring confusion over identity. Thus, J. W. Gregg Meister accounts for failure to mount a sustained effort in the modern mass media by noting, “[Presbyterians] seemed reluctant to frame a message that was distinctly and identifiably Presbyterian.”

The editors’ reflection on twentieth-century history leads to the same conclusion. After disruptive controversies over doctrine earlier in the century, the church avoided doctrinal questions. The editors argue that “the fundamentalist controversy prompted the [main Northern church] to strip the denomination of its ability to define its faith, by lodging theological authority in the presbyteries.” The loss of theological identity went hand in hand with meandering in Christian practice. In a moving article on the decline of Presbyterian Sabbath observance, the sociologist Benton Johnson concludes, “The erosion of Sabbath observance is not only a paradigm of the erosion of faith in general, it is also a paradigm of the loss of spiritual practice in the mainline churches.”

It is entirely appropriate that several of the contributors emphasize the battles over doctrine of the 1920s and 30s as a key to the identity crises that followed for all Presbyterians. In that strife, confessional conservatives, led by J. Gresham Machen, challenged the denomination to reassert its historic doctrinal standards. The main Presbyterian churches chose, by contrast, the path of moderate inclusivism. The resulting schism was small, with only a few thousand leaving the Northern church to found new denominations under Machen’s inspiration. But the psychic-theological legacy was great.

The great tragedy of these battles was to make it extraordinarily difficult for Presbyterians of all kinds to inhabit the “middle” from which their predecessors had spoken powerfully in American culture. The “confessionalists” who broke away from the main Presbyterian church in the 1930s (as well as breakaways who have followed at regular intervals since) betrayed an extreme fear of appropriating anything from the “moderates” for fear of being labeled “liberals.” The “inclusivists” who remained in the large denomination betrayed an equally extreme fear of appropriating anything from the “conservatives” for fear of being labeled “fundamentalists.”

For the main Presbyterian bodies, the consequence of this theological paralysis has been drift. Stultifying preoccupation with procedure advances alongside the mushrooming of professional bureaucracy. Massive quota-think has replaced creative interaction with the Presbyterians’ historic confessions. Without an energizing theology, Presbyterians have maintained a nearly fatal commitment to the bankrupt assumptions of nineteenth-century “Christian America”—that is, to the notion that the conventions of the prestigious universities and the central values of the nation’s cultural arbiters provided standards to which the churches should conform.

Diagnosis or autopsy?

Although the editors are magnanimous denominational loyalists, they are not hesitant about prescribing a foundational remedy for the Presbyterian malaise. The prescription they offer is presented with great respect for the labors of twentieth-century Presbyterians. But it is also a prescription emphasizing a historic, rather than a modern, antidote. The tone of their appeal is well-illustrated by their words on the key issues that have always defined Christian churches:

Repentance: “Repentance will mean confessing that we have distorted the meaning of the Christian faith and the church’s mission.”

Faith: “In recent American Presbyterian history there has been a confusion about the primacy of faith in the Christian life. Faith is not knowledge of either the Bible or Christian doctrine, although it obviously includes that. Faith is the experience of knowing God’s grace in Jesus Christ.”

God: “Any truly mainstream Christian community must have a plumbline. That center in the Reformed tradition is a radical devotion to a sovereign God.”

The jury is out on whether Presbyterians will be able to reverse their dramatic decline. But that is not the most important question raised in these books. The series is very good on some of the vital—but not ultimate—questions, like why churches grow and decline, or how Presbyterians interact with American culture. But especially in the editors’ own work, the most important question comes to the fore—Do the Presbyterians, speaking out of their experience of the gospel of Jesus Christ, have anything to say? How that final question is answered will determine whether this splendid series is an autopsy or a first sign of return to health.

Addendum: Robert W. Lynn, formerly senior vice-president for religion at the Lilly endowment, brokered the grant that made this project possible. It is the latest, and most impressive, evidence of how Lynn almost single-handedly rejuvenated engaged study of America’s historic Protestant denominations.

Dare To Descend

Descending into Greatness, by Bill Hybels and Rob Wilkins (Zondervan, 216 pp.; $17.99, hardcover). Reviewed by John A. Baird, Jr., adviser to the president, Eastern College, Saint Davids, Pennsylvania.

In this surprising book, Bill Hybels, senior pastor of the influential Willow Creek Community Church (with the assistance of journalist Rob Wilkins), presents the radical proposition that true greatness and joy come from embracing the twin paradoxes that the way up is actually down, and that greatness is not a measure of self-will, but rather self-abandonment to God’s will.

With the poetic Philippians 2 passage about Christ “emptying himself” as his springboard, Hybels sets off on a challenging and often poignant journey that brings us face to face with “servanthood,” “humility,” “obedience,” and a particularly profound glimpse of “joy.” The tough questions and hopeful answers which punctuate this journey emphasize Jesus’s “downward mobility” as a model for every Christian life.

Early in the book Hybels makes clear that God’s call to lose for his sake does not mean denial of legitimate human needs. But what are our legitimate needs? The conscientious believer, offers Hybels, must let God determine which needs are legitimate and which are peripheral to genuine discipleship.

Descending into Greatness is not all talk. Several real-life exampples of contemporahry individuals dramatize the scriptural teachings. We meet an 80-year-old woman who has spent most of her life serving on an Indian reservation, a successful businessman struggling with personal priorities in the high stakes world of finance, and a suburban doctor who journeys to a primitive hospital in Africa, among others. They show us both the ordeal and joy of the descent.

Overall, the book succeeds in making us examine ourselves. The enthusiastic Hybels does sometimes overuse the vernacular and is overly critical of the American Dream as the only cause of selfish living; but the perceptive Hybels understands that moving down is not easy nor reducible to a tidy formula.

Most interestingly, Hybels reveals the struggles in his own life, admitting the irony in the pastor of one of America’s most successful churches writing a book on downward mobility. But it is that very honesty and self-censure that makes Descending into Greatness all the more compelling.

The Gospel According To Feminists

The Women’s Bible Commentary,edited by Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (Westminster/John Knox, 396 pp.; $23, hardcover). Reviewed by Rebecca Merrill Groothuis, author of Women Caught in the Conflict (forthcoming from Baker).

In the words of the editors, “The Women’s Bible Commentary is the first comprehensive attempt to gather some of the fruits of feminist biblical scholarship … in order to share it with the larger community of women who read the Bible.” Actually, the WBC is in the tradition of The Woman’s Bible, which in the 1890s compiled comments from feminists on passages of the Bible which were of particular interest to women. The volumes share a number of interesting similarities.

In evaluating the WBC—and the genre of feminist biblical scholarship which it represents—several important questions arise: What motivates these scholars to study the Bible? What is their goal or objective in the interpretive process? What is their understanding of how gender influences biblical interpretation? Behind the answers to these questions lie basic assumptions about the nature of the Bible and of sexuality.

Inspired or sexist?

From Sarah Grimke in the 1830s to the early evangelical feminist biblical scholars in the first decades of the twentieth century, evangelical women leaders of early American feminism maintained that the Bible had been mistranslated and misinterpreted so as to appear to teach the subordination of women as a universal norm. This twisting of the true message of Scripture, they believed, occurred at the hands of men who approached Scripture from the premise that men are primary and women secondary. Male translators and interpreters with such a bias tended to find in Scripture what they expected to find. Nevertheless, evangelical feminists believed and taught that, despite its cultural context, the Bible does not teach male domination as a universal, God-ordained norm.

But beginning with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who edited and contributed to The Woman’s Bible (in two volumes, 1895 and 1898), a different stream of feminist biblical study developed. The hermeneutic behind this work maintains that the message of the Bible itself is tainted with the sexist views of the men who wrote it. The problem, therefore, is not merely one of male-centered translation and interpretation; rather, misogyny is inherent in the text. It follows that for the editors for both the old and new volumes, then, the Bible cannot be viewed as a wholly authoritative and infallible standard of truth. Rather, it contains some true and good insights, as well as some false and harmful ideas. It is up to the feminist critic to determine which is which.

So if the Bible falls short by feminist standards, why exert so much effort dissecting and discussing it? According to the editors of the WBC, “The Bible has been one of the most important means by which woman’s place in society has been defined”; therefore, the meaning of biblical texts must be assessed “from a self-consciously feminist perspective.”

Although the Bible is a cultural and societal force, for evangelicals it is also God’s infallible and authoritative word—every believer’s source of life and truth. Respect for the veracity and authority of God’s word is foundational to evangelical feminism, and this is what primarily distinguishes it from the theologically “liberal” feminist approach to Scripture, which is exemplified in the WBC.

As Sharon H. Ringe explains in her chapter on feminist biblical interpretation, “There is no single ‘correct’ or ‘acceptable’ way to work, but what should be kept in mind is that the various approaches [to biblical interpretation] yield different results or conclusions.” The purpose of feminist biblical studies—such as those offered in the WBC—is to reach an interpretation that reflects “the voices of poor women and rich women, white women and women of color, single women and married women, women from one’s own country and from other parts of the world, lesbians and heterosexual women.” The goal is not to capture the objective sense of the text, but to attain a subjective sense that resonates with the views and experiences of its female readership.

A pink-lettered Bible

Integral to the subjective, person-relative approach to biblical interpretation is the belief that there is a thoroughgoing difference between women’s and men’s approaches to Scripture and to spirituality. If men’s understanding of spirituality is fundamentally different from women’s, then a book written entirely by men—such as the Bible—necessarily will present only a male version of spiritual reality. In order to be compatible with women’s spirituality, such a document must be revised and reconceptualized from a women’s point of view. Women, therefore, must be “self-conscious about reading [the Bible] as women.”

The idea that men and women understand Scripture and spirituality differently can be held in various degrees of extremity. In moderation this notion is harmless and can even be helpful. Certainly, women bring to their understanding of the Bible some life experiences that are quite different from men’s experiences, and this can create some variations in the ways men and women tend to approach biblical material. But these gender differences are not so radical as to render men’s ideas about spirituality irrelevant to women, or vice versa. The human commonality between women and men, especially in the spiritual dimension, is far greater and far more fundamental than their differences, and it is to this basic human spiritual dimension that the Bible speaks.

The WBC offers feminist perspectives on a wide range of biblical material. It does not purport to be a complete commentary on the Bible, but is intended as an introduction to feminist scholarship on those passages that are deemed pertinent to women. Despite the subjective, gender-relative hermeneutic that undermines its foundations, the WBC offers some useful information. Of particular value are two chapters on women’s cultural roles in Old and New Testament times. An interesting, though exasperating, chapter by co-editor Sharon H. Ringe lays bare the interpretive issues at stake in feminist theology.

The WBC revises the Bible’s “moral of the story” at times. Thus, Eve is viewed as having done well in “choosing knowledge. Together with the snake, she is a bringer of culture.” And the Song of Solomon is deemed a defense of illicit love, or, at any rate, a love relationship that is “in contradiction to prevailing norms.” Other aspects of the commentary offered in this volume are an evolutionary and syncretistic view of the Hebrew religion, a questioning of the historicity of the biblical stories of Genesis, much questioning of biblical authorship, a general attitude of detachment from the religious convictions of the believers depicted in the Bible, and a willingness to explain apparently contradictory passages as, simply, contradictory.

William Carey’S Burden

Dorothy Carey: The Tragic and Untold Story of Mrs. William Carey,by James R. Beck (Baker, 254 pages; $13.95, paper). Reviewed by Karen K. Hiner, a writer living in Boise, Idaho.

Oswald Chambers said, “If we obey God, it is going to cost other people more than it costs us.” In his new biography of Dorothy Carey, James Beck demonstrates just how much one person’s obedience can cost another.

In 1793, William Carey volunteered to go as a missionary to India, becoming the “father of modern missions.” Beck believes that Carey’s is “one of the greatest of all modern missionary stories,” but that it “includes one of the most tragic,” that of his wife, Dorothy.

In 1786, an impassioned William Carey questioned the antimissionary attitudes of his day and formulated a new concept of world evangelism. Five years earlier, however, when Dorothy Plackett agreed to marry William, a 19-year-old shoemaker, neither had any idea they would give their lives for missions—he willingly; she unwillingly.

During the next 12 years, Carey evolved from shoemaker to pastor to mission enthusiast to mission appointee. During that same period, Dorothy gave birth to five children (two of whom died), maintained a home on their limited income, and watched her husband develop an unquenchable vision for reaching the lost in a land she knew nothing about.

When the Careys arrived in India, they moved often, usually living in unsafe surroundings. Within two years, Dorothy contracted a chronic physical illness, buried her third son, who died of dysentery, gave birth to another son, and subsequently lost touch with reality. Never recovering her sanity, she died 12 years later—in India. Apparently William decided not to return to England to ease her distress.

In this well-researched book, Beck seeks to correct the negative impression some of William’s biographers have given of Dorothy. One wrote, “Never had minister, missionary, or scholar a less sympathetic mate” who remained “a peasant woman with a reproachful tongue.” Beck suggests that Dorothy was criticized because she did not conform to the image of the compliant, long-suffering wife. On the other hand, William’s biographers glossed over his shortcomings and tendency to give priority to his missionary work at the expense of his family.

Beck’s new angle on the William Carey saga does not discount the man’s immense contributions to the modern missionary movement. Rather, Beck is attempting to counter the serious neglect many church historians have shown toward the important and often sacrificial role women have played in the spreading of the gospel. Beck’s Dorothy Carey allows us to consider more clearly the historically misjudged life of a woman who played a key role in the birth of modern missions.

Colorizing Jacob

The Son of Laughter,by Frederick Buechner (HarperSanFrancisco, 274 pp.; $19.00, hardcover). Reviewed by Virginia Stem Owens, the author of the mystery novel Congregation (Baker).

For centuries Scripture’s treasure-trove of stories has lured writers looking for material. The Old Testament in particular, with its tales of espionage, murder, war, adultery, incest, and even cannibalism, is crammed with enough sex and violence to give even Hollywood a run for its money.

Frederick Buechner is the latest novelist to take the bait. In The Son of Laughter he has Jacob narrate the family saga, from grandfather Abraham—“a barrel-chested old man with a beard dyed crimson”—to son Joseph, the dreamer-made-good in the Black Land, the clan’s name for Egypt.

Throughout, Buechner sticks amazingly close to the biblical narrative and does a masterful job of untangling the various snarls of events, deleting none of the difficult material. Not only is Buechner’s thorough treatment true to the text, but he also brings us an ancient world credibly outfitted, compliments of modern archaeological spadework. Details of tents, clothing, food, and nomadic technology supply the novel with the verisimilitude of a period-piece movie.

The Bible by Homer

Why then does this book, like every other Bible-based novel I’ve read, leave me feeling vaguely dissatisfied?

Perhaps Erich Auerbach answered the question 50 years ago in his book Mimesis where he contrasted the sparse Hebrew narratives with their Greek counterpart, the Homeric epic.

Homer set the standard for entertaining stories with his rich description of settings and characters. Biblical tales, in contrast, contain hardly any details about surroundings or motivation. The gaping holes in biblical narrative, Auerbach says, are meant to invite, even demand, interpretation.

Buechner, like many a novelist before him, sets out to fill those holes with ample Homeric description, description that inevitably becomes interpretation. Buechner supplies a motivation for Isaac mistakenly blessing the younger twin: he had an eating disorder—as Jacob explains: “We had already eaten well that day but my father took a charred gobbet of the venison that Esau had brought him and placed the whole of it in his mouth. He licked the fat off his thumb and forefinger. His eyes glazed over as he chewed.”

Even minor characters are filled out. Bilhah, Rachel’s maid who supplied a surrogate womb for her barren mistress, is described in detail: “She had large hands and feet. She had eyes that swelled in their sockets beneath the sweeping brows of an owl.”

Descriptions of God are harder to supply, of course. Unlike Homer’s Athena or Zeus, the Hebrew God can only be described by implication. Buechner relies on his nomads’ name for their invisible deity—“the Fear.” And so a pensive Jacob declares: “a god named is a god summoned. The Fear comes when he comes. It is the Fear who summons.… Trust him though you cannot see him.… Trust him though you have no name to call him by, though out of the black night he leaps like a stranger to cripple and bless.”

Meaningful gaps

Inevitably, however, filling the gaps of the biblical account turns the interpreter into the interpreted. For it is only with himself that any novelist—or preacher or reader for that matter—can plug those holes. Hence, Buechner’s Jacob sometimes sounds more like an Ivy League introvert than a preliterate patriarch. (The obsessive recording of scatological phenomena, especially, seems the product of New England squeamishness. To Mesopotamian migrants, surely excretion would be ordinary, and hence unremarkable.)

The Son of Laughter definitely succeeds in terms of entertainment and passionate narrative. Yet, like other novels borrowing from biblical stories, it simply fills in too much, closing the gaps which, Auerbach says, are intended “to overcome our reality.” Any reality we add will always be exasperatingly partial. Instead of explaining the biblical world in our terms, we must “fit our own life into its world” and allow ourselves “to be elements in its structure of universal history.” The gaps are meant to swallow us.

My father insisted that faith meant loving others—even those who beat and bloodied him.

A black child growing up during the sixties, I was shaped by two powerful influences: first, two strong Christian parents who daily demonstrated their faith to me and everyone around them; second, the issue of race. Next to Christianity, issues of integration, voting, segregation, and “white folks” were the things most talked about in my house and my neighborhood.

This is the case for most black people of my generation. Racial consciousness has shaped who we are and is never absent from any situation. Yet it was precisely because of our strong Christian beliefs that my family took the point position in the battle for racial justice in our town.

As a child, I did not understand everything that was going on. Yet I was sure of one thing: I knew down to the core of my being that what we were doing was right in the sight of God.

Until my school years, most of us didn’t give much thought to hopes for racial justice. For years we had heard the grownups talking “hush talk” under their breath. We all cheered aloud as we listened to Martin Luther King, Jr., make his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, but his marches seemed far away. Though most people watching the evening news were shocked to see the Alabama police turn their dogs and water hoses on school-age children, we were not. We understood Southern justice. We had seen the news reports and could almost smell the smoke from Watts and Chicago. But we lived in Mississippi, “the Closed Society.” Things would never change here.

Still, something was in the air. All the teachers were talking about it, and I could see the fear and anger in their faces. Harper Vocational High School had an enrollment of 750 students in grades 1 through 12. It lay just across the railroad tracks in the “colored” section of Mendenhall, Mississippi. The entire student body and all of the faculty were black. This was small-town Mississippi in 1966.

“Who do they think wants to go to school with them ol’ peckerwoods anyway?” barked Mr. Jackson angrily, using one of our most derogatory terms for white folks. Some of the children in my seventh-grade homeroom cheered aloud as Mr. Jackson voiced the sentiments of the teachers, who found talk of school desegregation frightening. “I know I don’t want to have anything to do with them.” A couple of the more vocal kids added their “me neithers,” summing up the attitude of most black people in Mississippi’s school system.

For most of the kids, nodding in agreement with Mr. Jackson came easily. But not for me. I knew my father. He took his Christianity more seriously than most. He had left Mississippi in the late 1940s after his brother was killed by a white law-enforcement officer. But he had returned with his family 13 years later as a missionary, determined to make a difference in the lives of his people who, he said, “were trapped by sin, poverty, and racism.”

Instead of making him content, his Bible taught him (and he taught us) to be concerned not only about people’s souls but also about justice for them. He had already been kicked out of a local black church for trying to motivate the people to do something about their situation. Now he was the pastor of a small church that he had founded, and he and my mother worked tirelessly with the youth in the area through nightly Bible classes. They called it Voice of Calvary Bible Institute.

As I sat in Mr. Jackson’s classroom, I realized that if something radical was going to happen, my family would surely be squarely in the middle of it.

Until that point, the racial battle had consisted of talk of what was going on in other parts of the country. It had not really affected my life. But as I look back now and remember that day in Mr. Jackson’s room, I am aware that it was the beginning of a personal journey of trying to make sense out of the separation that existed between blacks and whites. For the next several years, I would try to reconcile this separation with what my parents had taught me about Christianity.

In the spring of 1966, Mississippi began to yield to the pressure to comply with the nation’s 12-year-old desegregation laws. But wholesale school integration would not come for another four years. Instead, Mississippi opted for an ingenious plan called Freedom of Choice, which made it legal for school-age children to enroll in the school of their choice in their town or city. We knew “Freedom of Choice” was an attempt, not to integrate the school, but to alleviate pressure from the outside world to do something about the state’s separate-and-unequal school systems.

As I said, I had given this racial mess little thought. I was content to live in the “colored quarters” and, like most of my 13-year-old peers, to attend an all-black school. Sure, I was aware of the separation of the races, but I thought that was the way it was supposed to be.

But now, with the civil-rights movement in full swing, I understood that we were actually second-class citizens and that God did not intend for it to be this way. And now—with my father’s bold response to Mississippi’s “Freedom of Choice”—I was going to be one of the people to do something about it. But why? Why did we five school-age Perkinses have to take the brunt of white anger and black resentment?

My father always summed it up in one word: leadership. My father’s response to “Freedom of Choice” was to send his children to Mendenhall’s all-white school. This decision resulted in a nightmare of physical and emotional cruelty, a nightmare that scarred my whole family and left some of us cold and unforgiving. Only after ten years did I talk about the experience with my closest friends.

I would love to say that all five of us were unafraid on the first day of the new school year of 1966. I would love to say that we were poised and ready for battle. The makeshift Freedom School we attended that summer had tried to equip us for what we were about to experience, but there was no way it could totally prepare us.

Given that bravery is not the absence of fear but acting in the face of fear, I will have to settle for saying that we were very brave soldiers. It was the most fearful first day of school I’ve ever had. And this fear was not a one-time thing. It went on for most of the first year and even into the second. This would be my first up-close-and-personal look at white people; and first impressions tend to stay with you.

Each day after school, I would compare the day’s experiences with my brothers and sisters. We concluded that the severity of the cruelty varied according to our age groups, but overall our experiences were very similar. On one level, we felt sorry for the white kids, because we were pretty sure they were all going to hell for the way they treated us. But on the other hand, we hated them and would probably have felt little remorse if the earth had opened up and swallowed them all.

I’m not saying that all the white kids participated in our constant harassment, but it might as well have been all of them. No one, not even the teachers, lifted a finger to make our existence at that school any easier.

One day while the teacher was out of the room, my desk once again become the target of innumerable wet paper bullets from rubber-band pistols. In my own opinion, I had become a model of Martin Luther King’s nonviolent restraint, never striking back even when the paper bullets found their mark and the entire class cheered with delight. I had learned to ignore or sometimes even make fun of such harassment: “Hope y’all are having fun.” Most of the time, though, I would keep a straight face and my mouth shut.

This day was different—not because the children did anything new, but because the teacher did not ignore their behavior. When he returned to the classroom, the evidence was irrefutable: dozens of paper bullets and rubber bands were strewn across the floor, all near my desk. For some reason, this time it made the teacher angry. He had me point out all the boys who were involved. This I did with the naive notion that finally justice would be forthcoming. For me, this was to be a major victory; finally my existence in this hellhole would be a little more bearable. My fellow students could no longer torture me without consequences.

Before we reached the principal’s office, I could see I was taking this a little more seriously than my seven tormentors were. The principal, who was also a pastor, was one of the few people in the school I had considered sympathetic to me. I could tell he wanted to correct the situation. His first question to the boys was, “Why?”

I will never forget the puzzled look on the boys’ faces as they marveled that he, a white man, had asked such a stupid question. One boy’s response to the principal’s question etched a wound in my soul that today, sometimes, still bleeds. His blue eyes twinkling with impatience, he pushed his blond hair out of his eyes and said in his immature Southern drawl, “He’s just a nigger!”

The principal was stunned. He didn’t know how to respond. I had lost another round.

Why did this cut me so deeply? I was used to being called “nigger” several dozen times every day. It was years before I understood what had happened to me that day. This was racism at its worst. For a 13-year-old black boy to realize that the highest authority in his daily world would not give him justice—even in the face of overwhelming evidence, including proud confessions from the perpetrators—was a devastating blow to his fragile sense of self-worth. The principal’s failure to convince the boys that they had committed any crime at all, along with his unwillingness to discipline them, painfully dashed my hopes of ever finding justice within a racist institution.

Although the civil-rights movement was under way in Mississippi, things were changing very slowly—at least from our perspective. A handful of blacks were now in the white schools and hating every minute of it, and blacks were being registered to vote all over the state.

Still, much was the same. The whites hated us, and we hated them. The police were just as mean as ever—and even more so to us because we were “stirring up trouble with all this civil-rights mess.” Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and the Kennedy brothers were all killed. Every time one of them died, the white kids at our school cheered.

On a chilly December night in 1969, the wind seemed to change direction, and the tiny spark of Mendenhall’s civil-rights movement started billowing up into flame. Garland Wilks, a neighbor, had been arrested. He was pretty juiced, and my father was taking him home when the police stopped them, pulled Garland out of the car, and took him to jail for drunkenness.

Our reason for concern was that we knew what had happened in a store 15 minutes earlier. It is said that often a person’s real feelings come out after a few drinks. Maybe this was the case with Garland. Sober, he was not one to step out of line. But this night, after having too much to drink, he had crossed the invisible line—he had talked smart to a white woman, and we knew that would not be tolerated.

A group of about 15 of us—children who had been practicing for a Christmas program along with three or four adults—made our way to the jailhouse to protest Garland’s arrest and to keep him from getting beaten. An hour later, all of us were peering out through those ice-cold steel bars.

This event captured the attention of the black community and tugged at its pride enough to catapult us into a battle of wills with the white community. They had now crossed our line. They had locked up children—girls as well as boys. And they would do that, of course, only to someone who could not or would not fight back.

That night my father gave his most unforgettable speech. “We ain’t asking for some kind of special treatment,” he said in a soft but determined voice. “We just want to be treated like every other American citizen. We want a fair share of the decent jobs so that we can afford decent homes for our families. We want paved streets in our neighborhoods, just like they already have in the white neighborhoods. We want good education for our children. We want police protection instead of the police brutality that we always get. But most of all, we want to be treated with respect.”

I’ll never know if it was what he said, how he said it, or the fact that he was saying it through the bars of a second-story window to a jailyard full of people. But I know I will never forget it. Even though I was shaking in my boots, I was proud to be standing there beside him in the jail. We had not bowed down but had stood up.

One of the statements my father made over and over during the course of this speech was, “If somebody’s got to die, then I’m ready.” This frightened me. I had heard how other people had been killed for standing up to white folks—one being my daddy’s brother, Clyde—but I had never entertained the thought of my father dying. The notion that my dad might not be there to stand between us and this cruel system prompted new fears in me—fears that, in the months that followed, I would learn to live with.

If the true test of a good speech is whether it stirs the listeners to action, then this was a great speech. The next morning when the stores opened on Main Street, several unwelcome visitors were patrolling the sidewalks, carrying signs made during the long night. The store owners, police, and authorities were caught totally by surprise. In response to my father’s passionate plea, a full-scale boycott, complete with demonstration marches and picketers, had begun in, of all places, Mendenhall, Mississippi.

During the previous night, the police realized it was a mistake to have children locked up in the city jail and invited us to leave. But we vowed not to leave unless everyone was released. Eventually the officers literally carried all the children out of the jail, beginning with the oldest male, me. They kept my father and his sidekick, a young, white hippie named Doug Huemer, locked up for several days.

But that only fanned the fire. The Reverend Curry Brown, a friend of my father’s from California, and Mr. Ruben, an elderly black man who had already had a cross burned in his yard, joined my mother in leading the daily marches and directing the picketers. Curry was our courage, and my mother was our symbol. She was a hometown girl who knew everybody, and everybody knew her, and she was well respected for her work with children. When the people saw her standing on the corner and heard her passionate appeal, most of them heeded. “They got my husband locked up in that jailhouse for no reason,” she would yell. “Go spend your money somewhere else. We gon’ hit them where it hurts!” Even some of the people who had put Christmas items on layaway sacrificed them in order to make the boycott work.

My father was released from jail on Christmas Eve. There weren’t many gifts that Christmas, but if Christmas is the season of hope, there was plenty of that to go around. We had discovered that there was something we could do about the situation we lived under. We had stood up to “them,” and so far nobody had been hurt.

School resumed after Christmas vacation, and the daily marches became weekly but more intense. People were beginning to come from all over the state to help our cause. February 7 witnessed our biggest march ever, with more than 500 people. To us, it seemed like 5,000. We had grown used to the rumors of white retaliation and the daily telephone threats. But so far nothing had happened.

The Saturday after our triumphant march, Doug Huemer and Louise Fox, a white Brethren church volunteer, were driving two vans full of Tougaloo College students from Mendenhall to Jackson. Their caravan was pulled over by Mississippi state troopers for “reckless driving,” and everyone in Doug’s van was taken to the Rankin County Jail in Brandon. Suspiciously, the van driven by Louise was let go. Curry Brown, Joe Paul Buckley (my best friend’s dad), and my father rushed the 30 miles to the jail to make bail. It was an ambush. That night Curry and my father were beaten to within an inch of their lives in the Brandon jail (Joe Paul, who was older and suffered from heart trouble, was only roughed up a little).

By morning, our only clue to the events of the previous night had come over the phone in a question posed anonymously to my mother in the wee hours of the morning: “Have they hung ’em yet?” All we knew was that Daddy and the other men were somewhere between Mendenhall and Brandon, and we had to find them. So early that Sunday morning we set out for Brandon, not knowing what we would find.

There must have been at least 20 people in the nervous group that approached the jailhouse that morning. Before we could even reach the front door, we could hear Joe Paul shouting as he waved frantically through his cell bars, “Y’all go back, y’all go back!

“Don’t let them boys come up here,” he pleaded. “They’ll kill all y’all. Go back.” But my mother and I went in anyway. When we reached the front desk, the sheriff would allow only the immediate families into the jailhouse.

There was no visiting room, so we went up the stairs to the cell area. Every step of the way we were shadowed by a quiet police officer. He never spoke and neither did we. We could hear the women before we reached the room. (My father later explained that those Tougaloo women had cared for him during the night, keeping him alive.) They were trying to tell us what had happened the night before. But when we saw my father—well, nothing more needed to be said.

I can still picture what my father looked like in that jailhouse; I suppose a 16-year-old boy could never erase such a memory. His clothes were torn and bloody. His shirttail was half in, half out, as if he had tried to tuck it in when he heard we were coming. His eyes bulged as if they were going to pop out of his head. They were as big as silver dollars. He had a lump on his head about the size of a fist (a few days later, a doctor drained a cup of blood out of it). His face was full of fear—but there was more there. My sister Joanie figured it out as soon as she saw him. It was humiliation.

This is my toughest memory—the humiliation my father suffered. Although it was he who had been physically tortured, it might as well have been our whole family. We all felt the pain. An old biblical proverb sums up the situation well: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge” (Ezek. 18:2).

My mother tried to be brave. She held back her emotion until we were outside of the jail and out of sight of the policemen. Then she let it all out. “I didn’t want them to see me cry,” she sobbed. “I couldn’t let them think they were beating us.”

Sometimes I still resent what we had to go through just to get our “freedom.” I would have done anything to keep my mother from having to cry like that.

In the months after, I watched with interest as my father struggled through a crisis in his faith. Frankly, I hoped he would conclude that the gospel was for white folks. I hoped he would finally see the light and agree with Malcolm X that black people could not afford to be Christians because it cost them their dignity. I hoped he would decide that we should have nothing more to do with white people.

Over the next two years, I struggled with these issues. I went off to college with many questions unsettled. If Jesus says that the essence of Christianity is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind and to love your neighbor as yourself, then is it possible to love God without loving your neighbor? As far as we could tell, no one in the white community loved us, but most claimed to be Christians. Was it fair to say that they were not followers of Jesus? Did they read the same Bible as we did?

These were not hollow questions to me. If these people who had made our lives so miserable were included in the body of Christ, I needed to know so I could get out of it.

When I was younger, sometimes disputes would break out among the children in my parents’ Bible classes when they learned that we are to love everybody. “That don’t mean white folks,” one child would say. “Yes it do,” another would rebut. Periodically I had asked my parents if loving my neighbor meant loving white people, too. Their answer was always the same. Loving my neighbor meant especially loving white folks. But now that white people had nearly killed my father, would my parents answer differently?

I heard that my father was coming to California to speak at a black church pastored by a good friend, the Reverend George Moore. It was not too far from the private Christian college I was attending on a basketball scholarship. So I made it my business to go to hear Daddy. I had not heard him speak in over a year, and I was anxious to know whether he had settled any of the questions I knew he had struggled with after his jail experience.

As I sat in that church listening to him speak to an all-black audience, I felt disappointed. One side of me wanted some new insight that would justify my anger and bitterness. I got plenty of insight, but it was not what I wanted to hear. What I got was almost too simple. I listened as Daddy acknowledged that he had not been preaching the whole gospel, but that now he was determined more than ever to live the rest of his life preaching and living a gospel that would burn through all the racial, social, and economic walls erected to keep people separated—some even in the name of God. He went on to say that a gospel that reconciles people only to God and not to each other cannot be the true gospel of Jesus Christ.

“Before my Brandon jail experience,” he said, “I thought blacks were the only victims of racism. But when I saw the faces of those men in the jail, twisted by the hate of racism, I knew that they were victims, too—I just couldn’t hate back.”

I can’t possibly explain to you how much I hated to hear those words. After all we had suffered at the hands of white people, now we were supposed to forgive them? But I suppose it is what I knew I would hear. And deep down inside, I knew it was the truth.

It would be an understatement to say that the events of that night in Brandon had changed our lives. It was more than that. They had changed our Christianity. For my father, there would no longer be a salvation gospel and a social gospel. There would be one gospel—a gospel that reconciled people to God but at the same time reconciled people to each other. To separate the two could allow the state troopers to beat Daddy almost to death and still be Christians. A gospel that taught no responsibility for your neighbor could not be accepted as the true gospel.

As I sat in that church with tears in my eyes, unhappy that I had come, I knew what I had to do. If I intended to follow Jesus, I could not allow my anger and bitterness to defeat me. If I was to be a follower of Christ, I would have to try to be like him—to keep on forgiving. This was hard for me to swallow, but I knew it was right.

Loren Wilkinson is the writer/editor of Earthkeeping in the ’90s (Eerdmans) and the coauthor, with his wife, Mary Ruth Wilkinson, of Caring for Creation in Your Own Backyard (Servant). He teaches at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

It’s not the economy, stupid, says former drug czar William Bennett. It’s values.

William J. Bennett is not the only prominent Republican to set his sights on the White House. But while he has admitted to “thinking about” a presidential bid in 1996, Bennett insists his main concern is working to revamp a society that has lost its hold on cultural and moral values.

In that arena, Bennett finds plenty to keep him busy. With conservative stalwarts Jack Kemp and Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Bennett codirects Empower America, an organization dedicated to promoting conservative principles. He is also a Distinguished Fellow of Cultural Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., and a senior editor of National Review.

Bennett’s stints as education secretary and director of drug control policy under the Reagan and Bush administrations no doubt fueled his passion for a national recovery of moral values. In his latest book, The De-Valuing of America: The Fight for Our Culture and Our Children, Bennett further argues his case.

Bennett recently made headlines for spearheading a project he sees as even more significant: The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators. This booklet, says Bennett, provides “a statistical portrait … of the moral, social and behavioral conditions of modern American society.” The 19 cultural indicators show trends in such areas as crime, poverty, drug use, illegitimate births, and even average daily television viewing. The Index shows, says Bennett, that we are suffering from “cultural breakdown.”

A lifelong Catholic, Bennett here discusses what he learned from working on the Index, and what he believes Americans must do to reverse our cultural decline.

What prompted you to put together the Index?

My party likes to say, “It’s the pocketbook issues.” And the Democrats say, “It’s the economy, stupid.” But I believe the most important issues before us as a country are cultural issues. I put together the indicators to get at these other realities.

What did you find?

I found that in America things are not so good. Crime is way up. Child abuse is way up. Illegitimacy is way up. More than 65 percent of black children in this country are born out of wedlock. Family dissolution is up. Perhaps even more important, there are more and more children in this country who never live in a real family. They don’t know what a father is. This is probably the single most important number we looked at. It has a lot to do with generating some of the other numbers.

What we see is social breakdown, which is caused in part by moral breakdown. I identified the moral education of the young as the single most important task we have—in all generations, but emphatically now.

Is there a role for government in shaping cultural and moral values?

I believe in what’s been called “statecraft as soulcraft.” The government has a bully pulpit; the government can be a teacher in a vital national seminar. What it teaches it teaches by example: first through the words and actions of the President and others, and second through how it runs its programs. It teaches through the kinds of behavior it rewards and encourages the kinds of behavior it discourages.

Do politically and theologically conservative Christians, who are often labeled the Religious Right, have an important role to play in stemming this cultural decline?

I think they may have the most important role. They have kept in shape while the rest were losing their heads.

There’s a wonderful story about a Vermont farmer who’s out for a car ride with his wife; she’s sitting on the passenger side of the front seat. She says, “You know, Jed, when we were first married, you’d drive with one hand on the wheel and one arm around me. What’s happened?” And he looks up and says, “I ain’t moved.” A lot of conservative Christians haven’t moved; it’s the rest of us who moved. Do a portrait of the typical conservative Christian in America and this is what most Americans were like 30 to 40 years ago.

Is the Republican party going to be able to accommodate these people?

They’d better listen to them. Quite apart from what we have to learn from them, there are a lot of them. If the Republican party does not win the votes of conservative Christians, it will not win elections—nationally, in the states, or locally. The Republican party cannot put its fingers in the eyes of these people, both for reasons of prudence and also because they don’t deserve it.

What are the strengths and weaknesses of Christian conservatives?

Their values are basically very good. Their priorities are right. They care about their country, their children, the schools—the things I think are right to care about. They’re shooting at the right targets. There are still some who speak in a way that is not inviting, though they are getting much better about that. They make people who disagree with them feel that they are being condemned to eternal damnation. There is, in some, an unwitting moral arrogance, which is something Christians should never be guilty of.

What place do you think religious and moral values should have in public schools?

Values can and should be taught in schools without fear of violating the separation of church and state, without fear of accusations of proselytizing. Such teaching is not only appropriate, it is essential in our time.

This December my Book of Virtues will come out. It’s a 700-page volume designed especially for parents but also for public schools. It’s organized by virtues: honesty, self-discipline, work, and so on. I’m mining the depths of moral literacy in this and other cultures.

I believe the most important responsibility we have now is the moral education of our young. It is a time-honored belief from Thomas Jefferson to the present that schools should be places that teach kids how to read, write, count, think—and develop reliable standards and morals.

Have your leading cultural indicators affected your views about the propriety of schools working to form character?

The process only intensified my belief. I didn’t know the numbers were that bad. I had been on the education, drug control, and humanities beats nine years, and I knew some of the numbers from those jobs, but I didn’t really have a good grasp of the child-abuse numbers. I didn’t have a good grasp of the out-of-wedlock births.

What responses have your indicators generated?

No one has said the numbers were wrong. That’s very important. You can bet when someone with as high a conservative profile as I have gets out there talking about culture and morality, you would have known within 24 hours if the numbers were wrong. Whatever interpretations I or others may want to give, the numbers speak pretty eloquently to our problem.

So the debate will not be over whether the problem is really all that bad, but over the role government can play in creating solutions?

Yes, and I think that’s the next step. But there are a lot of next steps. One of the charts we could have put in the list concerns church attendance. That would have shown a dramatic increase. Now, if everybody’s going to church but society is in its current condition, what’s going on in church? Is church just being overwhelmed by the forces of popular culture? I think there’s a clear message here for the church.

And yes, the indicators suggest that we “reinvent” government, or at least take another look at government. People will defend things as they are by saying, “I concede that government may not help these problems. It may even make things worse. But at least it’s doing something. What’s your alternative?” Take welfare, for example. If I say, “The welfare state is a mess; let’s junk it,” people will say, “But what about the children?” And there has to be an answer to that. So that’s one of the things I’m working on.

What in your upbringing made you an ardent spokesman for values?

In speaking for the nuclear family, I should say I am not a veteran of one. My mom was divorced three or four times, so I speak not as Ricky or David Nelson, Ozzie and Harriet’s sons. My brother and I were raised by women—my mother and grandmother. But these were two very strong women with very clear ideas of right and wrong. They were very sure about the people my brother and I should associate with. People sacrificed to send us to Catholic school, and it meant an extra job for my mother. I had training in Jesuit and Benedictine high schools. And then I got a doctorate in philosophy, with an emphasis on ethics.

What ideas or issues or influences caused you, a former liberal Democrat, to become a neoconservative?

Well, I don’t think I changed. I think the Democratic party changed. In 1968 I was in Mississippi, and I said we should judge people as Martin Luther King, Jr., said—by the content of their character not the color of their skin. I was regarded as a liberal. I say that today—and I’m regarded as a conservative. It’s pretty much the same set of beliefs. If you believed what I believed in the early sixties, you would have been at home in the Democratic party. You wouldn’t be any more.

I was very interested in civil rights as an undergraduate. I’m still very interested. But my understanding of civil rights is much closer to what Martin Luther King, Jr., talked about than what Jesse Jackson talks about.

Over the years, some of your views have sparked controversy and criticism. How has that affected you?

Criticism doesn’t matter. It keeps you alert, it keeps you busy. But it doesn’t matter in the long run. As the Bible says, it’s like chaff before the wind.

My commitments, I hope, outrun this particular fight, or the next campaign cycle, or the next presidential election. I have some idea of what I care about and what I know.

I remember when I became secretary of education. I had 45 editorials saying I should leave—written during my first three weeks. I remember reading them at night and becoming depressed. I got up in the morning and checked all the limbs to see if I was still there. Then I went to work.

I have realized over the years that I have my commitments, my convictions, my beliefs, my family, and my friends. They sustain me, and I believe I’m doing something worthwhile.

Loren Wilkinson is the writer/editor of Earthkeeping in the ’90s (Eerdmans) and the coauthor, with his wife, Mary Ruth Wilkinson, of Caring for Creation in Your Own Backyard (Servant). He teaches at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Rabbinic scholar Jacob Neusner examines what was at stake in Jesus’ conflict with the Pharisees.

I have never before met a man who has written, translated, or edited more books than most people have read. Jacob Neusner, however, has nearly 500 to his name, as well as innumerable articles. He is a pre-eminent authority on Judaism in the first centuries of the Christian era when, after the fall of Jerusalem, the Jewish community gradually organized itself along the lines it exhibits to this day. He has translated into English virtually all the important works of rabbinic Judaism, including the entire texts of both the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds and many of the commentaries.

I do not know quite what to expect when I visit Neusner’s house to talk about his most recent book. I suppose I thought I would find a dusty residence filled with old Hebrew books and papers—something out of a Chaim Potok novel. Instead, Neusner lives in a two-story, wood-frame house on a quiet street overlooking Tampa Bay. A heavy-set but healthy man of 60 who swims every day, Neusner greets me with a big bouncing dog at his heels. “Germarnu,” he says firmly to the dog, which is Hebrew for “we’re finished.”

He shows me his upstairs office: a remarkably spare room with a computer, a few (mostly empty) bookcases with some Hebrew books, and not much else. He donated most of his library to a university, he explains, and points to some 3½-inch computer disks that contain his translations of early rabbinic texts. “That’s really all I need for the work I’m doing now,” he says simply.

The book he has just completed, now in bookstores, is A Rabbi Talks with Jesus (Doubleday). Neusner wrote it because he believes Christians and Jews rarely argue openly about the substantive issues dividing them—especially about Jesus. Interfaith dialogues are, for him, largely dishonest exercises in which both parties pretend to take the other side seriously but do not.

Both Judaism and Christianity, he says, are guilty of so misrepresenting the other’s religion that serious argument is impossible. Neusner wants to argue with Christians about the issues underlying Christianity because, at bottom, he likes and respects many Christians. In this, Neusner is thoroughly American, raised in a pre-World War II Reform Jewish household and among friendly and tolerant Protestant friends.

A little talk with Jesus

In A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, Neusner takes a look at the central teachings of Jesus reported in Matthew’s gospel—the “most Jewish” of the Gospels. He ignores all questions about Jesus’ miracles or resurrection and limits himself purely to an examination of what Jesus taught in light of the Torah (the Jewish Law): “I explain in a very straightforward and unapologetic way why, if I had been in the Land of Israel in the first century, I would not have joined the circle of Jesus’ disciples,” he writes in the preface. “I would have dissented, I hope courteously, I am sure with solid reason and argument and fact.” Christians will disagree at many such points in the book, of course, but listening in on the “conversation” can illuminate for us what was at stake in Jesus’ battles with the Jewish leaders of his day.

Neusner’s method is to imagine himself a faithful Jew, a proto-Pharisee living with his family in Galilee when Jesus began to preach and draw crowds. The first-century Neusner, like many others, is intrigued and impressed and goes to listen to what this obvious master of the Torah has to say. But he is troubled by the Master’s teaching. While in many ways it is a brilliant expansion and deepening of God’s revelation at Sinai—something Jewish sages have always attempted—it diverges on important points from what, in his opinion, the Torah clearly says.

Neusner then imagines himself holding a conversation with Jesus, putting to him questions and explaining why he cannot become a follower. Neusner draws heavily from the opinions and discussions of Jewish law found in early rabbinic writings, such as the Mishnah. Except for a few rhetorical devices to help Neusner’s monologues along (“Go on.… Tell me more”), Neusner does not try to make up answers from Jesus but simply uses Jesus’ words in Matthew.

While Jesus claimed he came “not to abolish the Torah and the prophets … but to fulfill them,” in fact, he did abolish them, says Neusner. Like many Jewish thinkers, he finds Jesus logically inconsistent. In Matthew 5:18–19, Jesus says, “For truly I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Whoever then relaxes the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven.” But then, only a few chapters later, Jesus apparently relaxes the commandment to keep holy the Sabbath by allowing his followers to glean grain on that day.

Far more than a prophet

Neusner’s book is valuable for Christians because, as an observant Jew, he is able to explain to Torah-illiterate Christians just what is at stake in seemingly inocuous statements of Jesus. He shows that based solely on what Jesus taught—leaving aside questions of miracles and the resurrection—Jesus is clearly announcing himself as far more than just another Jewish prophet. Neusner is unimpressed by the theological fashion of distinguishing between the “Jesus of history,” the real Jewish preacher behind the Gospels, and the “Christ of Faith,” allegedly made up by the Christian church after the fact. Neusner shows that even within Jesus’ own testimony are radical claims of divine or quasidivine status.

For instance, Neusner asserts that in the first half of Jesus’ famous statements “You have heard it was said … but I say to you …,” Jesus is referring to nothing less than the Torah, God himself speaking through his prophet Moses. Any observant Jew would immediately recognize that fact. Jesus is not simply being assertive, in our modern parlance; he is claiming for himself the right to adapt, or modify, Divine Law. This divine privilege is behind another saying of Jesus, which also greatly disturbs the first-century Neusner: “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”

Neusner wants to ask Jesus, “Who do you think you are—God?”

But it is not merely Jesus’ radical claim of divine authority that bothers Neusner, or his call to radical discipleship that seems to conflict with the responsibilities of hearth and home. No, something more troubles him. Jesus’ message does not appear to be directed primarily at the Jewish people as a whole, to Eternal Israel, which, for Neusner, is the core of rabbinic Judaism: the covenant between God and the Chosen People.

Jesus seems indifferent, even hostile, to the ritual customs of first-century Pharisaism, customs—such as the laws governing ritual purity—designed to keep Eternal Israel “holy” and set apart from the nations. While conceding that Jesus’ criticism of pious people in his time “could well be addressed to pious people I know in synagogues today,” nevertheless, “what bothers me in Jesus’ harsh judgments about the scribes and Pharisees is that I’m one of those people who do the things that the scribes and Pharisees observe.”

What counts for Jesus is moral righteousness, the Christian will argue, the goodness within the human heart. Jesus demands a righteousness “that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees,” a righteousness that not only avoids adultery but does not even fantasize about it, a righteousness that not only refrains from murder but does not reach that level of anger that could commit murder. Anything that gets in the way of this interior moral righteousness—laws that demand adulteresses to be stoned, for example, or which prohibit pious Jews from eating with prostitutes and tax-collectors—Jesus opposes.

Straining at a gnat?

For Neusner, however, as for other Jews, morality is not the only thing that counts. Holiness, being set apart as a chosen people among the nations, is also important, and the laws of ritual purity that Jesus ignores or deems less important are, he says, very important. The Jews are to be holy because God, in the Torah, commands them to be holy. To sanctify means to set apart, to separate.

For Neusner, it is not really a question of either/or: a good Jew should be both morally righteous and obey the minute ritualistic rules, the 613 mitzvot, of the Torah. And he concedes that, even from a strictly Torah-centered point of view, Jesus was technically correct: there is nothing in the Torah that commands ordinary Jews to keep ritual demands of purity for everyday food. Those rules are for the priests serving in the temple, and Jesus was within his rights to say his disciples need not wash their hands before eating. “When [Jesus] considers my interest in eating food by the rules of holiness, that is, in sustaining my life, meal by meal, with God’s will in mind, he thinks it absurd; straining out a gnat, swallowing a camel,” Neusner writes. “All I can say is, ‘Sir, does not God want us to be holy? And are these not the ways that holiness is defined? True, the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule take pride of place. But the Torah has more in it than those commandments, and you yourself say to keep them all.’ ”

In the end, Neusner parts company with the young rabbi and his ragtag band of followers. They leave for Jerusalem and the Cross; Neusner leaves and returns to his village, his family, and, he says, his dog.

But in making this fundamental choice, Neusner helps us, both Christians and Jews, make it as well. Neusner knows what is at stake in Jesus’ teaching, and that this teaching represents something fundamentally different from what would become normative Judaism. Both the primitive Christian church and the Jewish community recognized that very early on. The Jews expelled the Christians from their synagogues as heretics; the Christian community, while at first just a movement within Judaism, quickly welcomed Gentiles into its universal fellowship and abandoned many customs, including circumcision.

Christianity, while seeing itself as fulfillment of God’s plan of salvation in the Hebrew Scriptures, is a New Way—a covenant between God and a new, larger family. Neusner complains that Jesus does not discuss “Eternal Israel” or the covenant, but in fact he does: in Matthew 26:28, he gives his disciples the cup and says, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”

Christ is the new Moses with a New Law, and he becomes the Paschal Lamb sacrificed in a New Passover as part of the New Covenant. Neusner understands all this better than many Christians: he just does not believe it is true.

After his resurrection—which is outside of Neusner’s purview in the book—Jesus announces his ultimate intention for his disciples: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Matt. 28:18–20).

For Jesus and his followers, God’s plan of salvation extends beyond the people of Israel to “all nations.” All humanity is called to be adopted sons and daughters of the Most High. The justice of God expressed by the Jewish law, by the keeping of the 613 mitzvot of the Torah, comes now, through faith, to everyone—Jew and Gentile alike—who believes in Jesus Christ.

Many Jews, keeping the commandments of the Torah, have faith in God. It is an imperfect faith, lacking the full truth brought by Christ, but it is not a platitude to say that Christians can learn much from observant Jews—from the sages of the Mishnah up through Maimonides and the Ba’al Shem Tov, from Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel to Jacob Neusner.

Neusner strongly opposes a false ecumenism that downplays the real differences between religions. Instead, he wants to have an honest, no-holds-barred talk—polite and friendly, to be sure, but frank and to the point. That is the only way sincere, serious people can really learn anything about one another. Jacob Neusner says he has learned much from his encounter with Jesus and, yes, with Christians. Christians can, in turn, learn from Jews like Neusner what is at stake in following Jesus—away from the temple and toward the Cross.

Loren Wilkinson is the writer/editor of Earthkeeping in the ’90s (Eerdmans) and the coauthor, with his wife, Mary Ruth Wilkinson, of Caring for Creation in Your Own Backyard (Servant). He teaches at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Sitting in a plain folding chair in a plain 1,100-square-foot warehouse, Chris Haro shrugs. “How spectacular is a cold cup of water?” he asks.

The warehouse is home to Haro’s Missionary Book Society. “Warehouse” may be too strong a word to use to describe this space, actually the renovated 110-year-old attic of Haro’s insurance office in Auburn, in California’s Sierra Nevada foothills. Faded indoor-outdoor carpeting covers the floors, and a metal box bolted onto a wheelbarrow sits by the wall. Pallets of boxes crowd the main room.

As humble as a cup of water might be, though, “even a cup of cold water given in my name will be rewarded,” paraphrases Haro with a smile. Thus, Matthew 10:42 has become the statement of philosophy of the Missionary Book Society.

Booking the missionaries

I’ve really enjoyed the ones I’ve had time to read. Books have been a real encouragement to me—to relax and read something in English!

—Senegal

For 11 years, any overseas missionary who asks has received a four-pound box of mainstream evangelical Christian books, free of charge. Missionaries write from Bolivia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Uruguay, Indonesia, Yemen, and many other far away places.

“It’s not spectacular or romantic,” he says of his ministry. Indeed, at first glance, nothing about the enterprise cries out “Extraordinary!” No stranger would pick out the graying, bespectacled Haro, his belly straining against his shirt buttons, as a man with a mission. Just as unassuming are the streaked warehouse windows that look out over a narrow, gravel parking lot. Even the boxes of books Haro sends out yearly to 6,000 missionaries are just plain brown.

To most people in this gold-rush town, Haro is only a happily married businessman who carves stone for a hobby, the father of lour grown children. He keeps the Missionary Book Society under wraps. His reluctance to publicize his service stems from his discomfort at seeming immodest, or having his motives misread. He offers books to missionaries as a ministry, not for personal gain or celebrity. “I do this because I want to please my Father. It’s a form of worship.”

Grateful recipients

Thank you very, very much for this extra-special blessing! The books are all just wonderful—and I can never emphasize enough how great it is to receive spiritual reading material in English.

—Madagascar

When Haro discusses his ministry, his concern for missionaries far from home shines out clearly. “These missionaries are in a different environment,” he says. “They don’t have radios or TVs. They’re not superhuman beings. They just endeavor to do what God wants them to do. But just as God rested on the seventh day, they need a rest too. They need recreation and inspiration.”

The books he sends are remainders, seconds, or out-or-print books—materials he purchases at an 80-percent discount from Christian publishers. Missionaries are offered a choice: books for adults only, or a mixture of adult and children’s books. And Haro has recently expanded his service to include inspirational tape recordings as well.

“One woman wrote me who had been very depressed by two deaths in her family within six months. When she received her book pack, it included three books on death. She received a new peace of heart and strength to carry on.”

He also feels warmly toward an Anglican missionary who was about to quit his ministry. Then the books arrived. “He was inspired to renew his faith, and continue his work in Africa.”

Staying the course

There is virtually no Christian literature here—certainly not in English and a mere scant number of books in Romanian. The cry from the people is great, but red tape and [lack of] money prevent English books from being translated and published here.

—Romania

The Missionary Book Society grew out of Grace Crusaders Free Lending Library, a service Haro began 25 years ago, when Christian books were not available as widely as they are now. This “borrow by mail” ministry grew swiftly from a cubicle measuring 20 square feet to a space measuring 500 square feet.

Then, as now, no donations were accepted or asked for, says Haro. “As the need arose, the money was supplied.”

However, as the years passed, he saw a decreasing need for his library. Even supermarkets started to carry Christian books, and bookstores appeared selling Christian books exclusively. This came as a blessing as far as Haro was concerned.

For years he had questioned his motives for running the lending service. Was he doing it for God, or was he doing it because it made him feel good?

Eventually, Haro decided to provide books only to overseas missionaries. He obtained a handbook listing all the American missionary boards. He indicated that he’d send a free box of books on request, and asked the boards to advise their missionaries of this service.

It was his intention to cut down on the book business. But to his panic and amazement, book requests soon descended on him from all over the world. During this time, Haro received what he believes were signs that he was doing God’s will: a rental house he owned sold for a profit the day the down payment was due on his warehouse; and a publisher agreed to sell him $109,000 worth of books for $3,500. He smiles, remembering his amazement the day he received delivery on that shipment. “Can you imagine a 60-foot semi in my parking lot?”

Currently, about 1,200 boxes a year are sent to missionaries representing 600 missionary boards.

Haro says it’s important to him to send books to missionaries from many denominations because his own background is a blend of Catholic, Baptist, and Assemblies of God.

At 64, Haro no longer questions his motives, although he has entertained the possibility of retiring from this ministry. He knows he can’t keep going forever. He wants to keep the service going, though, and has hopes of someday finding someone willing to take over.

“You have to have a distinct burden for this type of ministry, definitely led of the Lord, and you have to have the finances.” His replacement would also have to share Haro’s eagerness to provide recreation, inspiration, and comfort to missionaries far from home.

“I’m not out to entertain the missionaries,” he says, “I’m out to help them.”

The book pack arrived a few months ago. It arrived in good condition and truly was “a cup of cold water” to refresh us.

—Papua New Guinea

Susan Rushton is a free-lance writer living in Auburn, California.

I am a single, divorced man—“Stephen” in Craig Keener’s book And Marries Another. I abhor divorce. Having experienced its pain, I hate it more passionately than I did before. But I offer no apology for my state: unlike many American Christians, I have never fornicated. I was never unfaithful to my marriage. Nor did I want the divorce that was forced on me. I am divorce’s innocent victim.

Our churches tend to classify all divorced people in a single category, as if divorce’s sinfulness implies that all of us chose our condition. Let me tell you how this language feels to someone who was divorced against his will: it stings.

My unrepentance on this point is not a claim to sinlessness. Not only would that be bad theology, but it wouldn’t be true—in general, or in my marriage. Still, I cannot repent for a choice that was not mine to make. I daily affirmed and demonstrated my love to my wife.

My wife ran off with her best friend’s husband. I fought the divorce for two years—the legal limit in my state—hoping to get her back. I never stopped loving her, though some years ago I finally abandoned hope of her return.

Our main issues of contention before her affair—when both of us still seemed to love each other—were my refusals to participate in behavior that I believed would compromise my testimony as a Christian and as a minister. These are issues on which my wife and I had firmly agreed before our marriage.

Of course, I now recognize things I should have done better. But I also remain certain that I loved and served my wife faithfully.

Some insist that it “takes two to break up a marriage.” Although most Christians make exceptions for cases like mine, their language suggests that they do not think very hard about the exceptions. The Bible never condemns the spouse of the adulterer for the adulterer’s infidelity. In fact, certain biblical texts, such as 1 Corinthians 7:15, explicitly exonerate innocent parties from the guilt of divorce.

Who besides God has the right to say that I bear part of the blame for the breakup of my marriage? Does my wife’s choice to leave imply that I was a worse husband than a bad husband whose wife remains faithful to him? Or would things necessarily have been different had I been flawless? If so, then what does some people’s unfaithfulness or apostasy say about God?

Some people are divorced because they mistreated their spouses or gave up on a hard marriage. Others, though, are divorced because they were abused or abandoned. Is a trusting wife who is betrayed by her husband’s unfaithfulness less deserving of our support than the victim of another crime? Is a single mother abandoned by her husband less in need of consolation than a widow?

African-Americans have rightly pointed to the insensitivity of white America’s assumptions about African-Americans; women have similarly challenged men’s stereotypes that misrepresent them. I write this column hoping that readers will also learn to be more sensitive in how they speak of divorced people. Think twice before you condescend to us by saying, “Divorced people can be forgiven”—some of us had no choice in our new status, and we are the majority of divorced people in some of your churches.

Sins like fornication or divorce by mutual consent do not leave an innocent victim. But other sins, like rape, murder, robbery—or divorcing a faithful spouse—do involve innocent victims.

Innocence need not imply perfection in all areas of life. But it declares that blame for a broken marriage is not “equally shared.” And no physical, emotional, social, or even moral, flaw in the victim can be used to justify the act under discussion. To be sure, many failed marriages involve both parties in some degree of guilt. But one cannot assume the degree of a person’s commitment to his or her marriage based on the response of that person’s spouse.

I close by addressing the minority of Christians who would rather defend their insensitivity than correct it. My wife acted selfishly but not out of malice. You, however, kicked me when I was down and broke fellowship with me when I needed you most. Perhaps, like Job’s friends, you had to assign guilt to me to assure yourself that such tragedy could never overtake you. But you have acted unjustly. Because of you, I must end this column with the pseudonym Keener gave me in his book—“Stephen.”

Speaking Out does not necessarily reflect the views of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

There Is No Longer Gay or Straight?

The cover of the July 19, 1993, issue clearly identifies the gay-rights activists as the creators of a climate of hate. The testimony of a marine officer who is the father of a gay son indicated clearly that there was so much hatred of gays in the military that he feared for his son’s life if accepted in the military. The hatred is clearly on all sides.

Stanton L. Jones’s article, “The Loving Opposition,” is less biased than your cover, but does not define what “the high view of Scripture” is that he holds. Is human slavery justified in “the high view of Scripture”?

If slavery has been superseded by grace, cannot also rejection of homosexuality (which may be as much a matter of birth as the color of our skin)? Is it really impossible that Galatians 3:28 (“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female: for all of you are one in Christ Jesus”) could also refer to gays and lesbians?

B. David Hostetter

Wolcott, N.Y.

I have just finished reading the July 19, 1993, articles regarding homosexuality. As a former homosexual, it greatly distresses me that no one seems to be proclaiming the fundamental message of the gospel—freedom from sin! Christ died to set us free from the bondage of sin, so why are we arguing the interpretation of biblical passages pertaining to the wrongness of homosexuality when we should be focusing on the Scriptures in which God promises to set us free from sin, whatever form it may take?

My heart is heavily burdened for those still struggling with homosexuality, because I know they can be free from that bondage, and God knows they can be free.

Name withheld

Your articles and editorials about homosexuality were a wonderful combination of uncompromising biblical doctrine, sound ethics, factual information, and Christlike compassion. You have advocated compassion for individuals faced with agonizing temptations, yet you have rejected the selfish, destructive agenda of the militant and unrepentant self-appointed homosexual “leaders.” I only wish the leadership of my own denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA), would employ the clear-headed and Christ-centered thinking displayed in these articles.

My only complaint concerns your failure to examine the persecution of the churches in communities where militant gays have gained the upper hand. It would have been illuminating for you to have written a companion piece about Chuck and Donna McIlhenny’s church under siege in San Francisco.

Kent H. Karmeier

Kansas City, Mo.

Your very clear article on the homosexual issue let the main point slip by. The initial paragraph describing “Tom,” who had compulsive drives for anonymous sex and for seduction of teenagers, said it all. All of the other case histories warranted the “Loving Opposition” stance, but Tom’s problem is the reason strong public and legal opposition to the “gay lifestyle” is essential.

The main reason the gay community seeks public approbation rather than privacy is to facilitate promiscuity and recruitment. Masters and Johnson in Homosexuality in Perspective reported that every self-declared homosexual they interviewed in depth admitted to actively seeking to introduce others to the activity.

We should not hesitate to point out to those for whom the Bible is meaningless or modifiable that the “gay lifestyle” as it is currently practiced is a threat to individuals and society for simple sanitary reasons.

Telling the truth about the physical and emotional dangers of participation in the gay lifestyle is also a loving act, even if gays call it hate mongering.

P. M. Webster, M.D., F.R.C.P.C.

Toronto, Ont., Canada

Why the incredible moral outrage and spirited defense against this one particular sin? I think I can name two reasons (neither particularly attractive).

1. It is a sin most of us will never be tempted with.

2. Homosexuals are a minority, and disapproval is widespread—which makes them an easy target.

I believe in the words of the Bible and the power of Christ, who can change lives when they are voluntarily turned over to him. In the meantime, it is the church’s job to love people and do good to them whether or not they choose God’s gifts. So, come on, church! Get over your fear and get used to living in a secular world—with love.

Faith Totten

Spokane, Wash.

Stanton L. Jones claims that gay apologists must deny or grossly misinterpret the Bible to prove that homosexuality is acceptable.

Gay and lesbian Christians do neither when we believe exactly what John Calvin believed about the molesters in Sodom. When we believe what Martin Luther believed about 1 Corinthians 6:9, do we “mistinterpret the texts”? We even agree with Jerry Falwell regarding 1 Timothy 1:9–10 (Fundamentalist Journal, October, 1991).

Did Walter Martin get it wrong when he agrees with us about Moses’ moral laws in The Kingdom of the Cults?

The above “hostile witnesses,” like the rest of the church, have diverse reasons for condemning homosexuality. The Christian world has no consensus as to which verses do and which verses do not condemn us. Until God’s people develop a consensus regarding hermaphrodites, transexuals, divorce, and birth control, how will they ever come up with one answer concerning homosexuality?

Paul R. Johnson

Pomona, Calif.

Scripture Sip Language

A guest speaker at our church recently apologized for his tardiness by quipping, “My directions got a little turned around, and of course you know that only ‘an evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign.’ ”

His good-natured abuse of Matthew 12:39 sent my mind wondering if there weren’t other verses that could be good for an obviously out-of-context chuckle. Imagine posting small signs all over the church building with verses like these:

1 Chronicles 11:9 in the janitor’s closet: “So David waxed greater and greater; for the Lord was with him.”

Isaiah 55:2 in the kitchen or fellowship hall: “… eat ·ye that which is good and let your soul delight itself in fatness.”

1 Kings 18:27 on the pastor’s door when he’s out: “Cry aloud, … either he is talking or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awakened.”

1 Corinthians 15:51 on the door of the.church nursery: “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.”

And finally, 2 Chronicles 18:7, dare I say it, on the front of the pulpit? “There is yet one man, by whom we may inquire of the Lord: but I hate him; for he never prophesied good unto me, but always evil …”

I guess these “out-of-context signs” could start to get out of hand. Maybe that guest speaker was right about what kind of people seek after a sign.

Caesar’s coins

Contrary to Jerry Falwell’s charge (“Is Liberty Losing Freedom by Playing Virginia’s Tune?” News, July 19), Americans United holds no hostility toward evangelical Christians. We challenged state tax aid to Liberty University because it violated the constitutional principle of church-state separation. In the past year, we have also challenged government subsidies for schools affiliated with Roman Catholicism, Orthodox Judaism, and the Transcendental Meditation movement.

We did so not because we oppose religious education, but because such public assistance violates the right of taxpayers to support only the churches and church schools of their choice. Government aid, as the Liberty U. incident amply illustrates, also jeopardizes the integrity of the recipient institutions through government regulation.

Falwell clearly has compromised the Christian character of Liberty University in an effort to retain public funding. When state education officials questioned the religious content of an “Old Time Gospel Hour” advertisement for Liberty, the content of the ad was dramatically changed.

This episode illustrates the dangers inherent in any program of state aid to religious institutions. Once church schools become dependent on government largess, the temptation is great to surrender religious distinctives in order to keep Caesar’s coins flowing into their coffers.

To paraphrase Matthew 16:26: For what has a church school profited if it gain the whole world and lose its own soul?

The Rev. Barry W. Lynn

Americans United for Separation of Church and State Silver Spring, Md.

Modernity close to home

I appreciate the soul-searching of thoughtful conservative authors like David Wells in Roger Olson’s book review entitled “The End of Theology?” [July 19].

Regardless of whether evangelical theology has succumbed to modernity or postmodernity in the erosion of “absolute, objective truth,” it still remains popular to blame mainline churches and theology for the Christian woes of American society. I find it refreshing to read that authors in CT and reviewers like Roger Olson are admitting that modernity and postmodernity are trends that impact all theologies—including conservative evangelical theology.

Rev. David Coffin

Trinity Lutheran Church (ELCA)

Malinta, Ohio

Roger Olson’s review of No Place for Truth distracts readers from Wells’s thesis by focusing on intramural hair-splitting (is the enemy modernity or postmodernity?) and by dubiously claiming that Wells must only be interested in “Puritan, Calvinist” theology since he ignores recently published evangelical books on theology.

But Olson misses the point. Wells does note these new works, but the problem is that they, along with traditional works, are being ignored by pastors and laypersons alike because of the contemporary focus on feelings, success, and church growth.

The Rev. Scott Hoezee

Second Christian Reformed Church

Fremont, Mich.

Chill!

I would like to commend Charles Colson [“Sweet Reason and Holy Outrage,” July 19] for urging evangelical Christians to “cool the incendiary rhetoric” in discussions of social and political issues. I have been dismayed at the caricatures some Christians have employed in debates with those who disagree with them.

We all need to practice, to borrow Richard Mouw’s phrase, “convicted civility,” with each other. Only then will the kingdom be advanced.

Kathryn A. Lee

Eastern College

St. Davids, Pa.

Still going!

The book review “Half-full Christianity” [June 21] was half-full regarding Norman Vincent Peale. The last paragraph not only tries to say too much, it is inaccurate.

Dr. Peale preached at Marble Collegiate Church until he was 84. He did not “devote most of his time [after age 84!] to motivational speaking.”

My wife and I recently returned from a four-day conference of 420 ministers and spouses (evangelicals, mostly) in a School of Practical Christianity, which emphasizes preaching, working with volunteers, etc. Several thousand ministers have attended these seminars, which are deeply spiritual and inspirational. This is what Dr. Peale, now into his 90s, has been doing in retirement.

Tyler Johnson,

pastor First Presbyterian Church

Newport, R.I.

Devastating conclusions

As a survivor of satanic ritual abuse (SRA), I’m glad you labeled your conclusions “provisional” [“Memories of Satanic Ritual Abuse,” June 21]. Your conclusions were disappointing, to say the least—devastating would probably be more accurate.

You give very little attention to the most convincing argument in favor of the truth of SRA: the corroboration of the stories of many people, unknown to one another, from many different locations and backgrounds. You dismiss it as the result of invention by experts who share the same educational networks and the same stories. But what about the survivors? How many survivors are party to that network?

I can only speak for myself, but I was not particularly familiar with the topic of SRA when my memories began to return. I have purposely done very little reading about SRA so as not to plant any false memories. My therapist, like any good therapist, avoids leading questions and is very careful not to give me information that I don’t already have. When I come up with a memory, he goes to great (and sometimes frustrating) lengths not to mold or interpret the memory in any way. One day, when he asked me a key question that helped a memory to unfold, I asked him how he knew to ask that particular question. His profound reply was, “Evil is not very creative.”

You concluded that “satanic panic can harm marriages and churches.” True. So can Satanism. So can ignoring Satanism when it is present. Anything that is a lie will bring harm. But there doesn’t have to be panic; there can be a compassionate response and a joining in the quest for truth.

My husband is joining me in that quest, and my marriage is better than ever as the truth of my growing-up years is coming to light.

Please urge your readers to join the survivors of SRA in their quest for truth, without a preconceived notion of what that truth is.

Name withheld

This article grossly underestimates the cunning and pervasive influence of Satan “in his world.” While I do not wish panic to prevail, there is an abundance of evidence that something of this nature is occurring in this country and throughout the world.

Just as the Christian communitity for years kept its head buried in the sand concerning sexual abuse in its own ranks, so it seems there are those bent on repeating this pattern of response when it comes to recognizing and dealing with the reality of satanic ritual abuse.

Having been involved in group therapy with other victims of this type of abuse, I have seen the devastation that satanic and ritual abuse has had on their lives. To discount its pervasiveness seems to be a gross disservice to the Christian community. Evil is evil and stems from Satan through the hands of man.

Tom C. Szuszitsky, pastor

Fence Lake Community

Christian Church

Fence Lake, N. Mex.

I was saddened by the article on SRA because it is another “win” for the Satanists and their god. We know from a police investigator that the FBI does have evidence of SRA. We have seen some of his videos and photos that give evidence.

I want to share what we have personally witnessed: In 1989 God brought into our home a 27-year-old SRA survivor with multiple personality disorder (MPD). My husband and I had never heard of MPD or SRA, but we were willing to reach out to this troubled person, and we have now adopted her as our daughter. In the last three-and-one-half years, we have heard the memories of family and ritual abuse and have watched her relive the memories. None of us who hung in with her put any suggestions in her mind; we didn’t even know anything to suggest! The memories came as the Holy Spirit directed the healing process.

As she turned from Satan to the Lord Jesus Christ, the pieces of her life came together. And the more she talked, the more the satanists threatened her. There have been and continue to be phone calls, personal abuse, and attempts on her life. We have witnessed many miracles of God’s protection.

The opinions of the experts do not shake us. We know what we have seen and experienced. Unfortunately, there are people in high places who cover up the evidence. It is truly a battle not against “flesh and blood,” but against “principalities and powers.” I hope the church of Jesus Christ wakes up and helps these victims who have nowhere to go for true help except to the church.

Susan Weber

Irwin, Ohio

I knew it would be hard to leave the satanic cult I was abused and raised in, but I didn’t know it would be as hard as it has been. Perhaps even more painful than the demonic affliction and the efforts of Satanists to destroy me has been the unbelief of Christians. I thought when I came to the church that I would find a place of healing and safety. The church nearly destroyed me.

If it had not been for my new family and a few people in the church, I would not be alive today. I know two former cult members who were killed because they left Satanism and became Christians. Their church did not believe the threats on their lives. I am glad that the support from my church is growing through the months. Those of us who come out from Satanism risk our lives. Your article will make it even harder for us to get help.

Zy Weber

Irwin, Ohio

Your recent article on satanic ritual abuse did very little either to prepare the church for properly responding to the needs of SRA victims or to encourage those victims to come out and get help from the body of Christ.

It offends me that the church asks people to prove they were abused. Does the church or even the state require emotionally, physically, or sexually abused children to “prove” they were molested before intervening?

The only proof that the church will get (or should need) is the dysfunction and damage evident in the lives of people who are suffering from posttraumatic stress—depression, addictions, flashbacks, and multiple personalities.

No psychotherapist has the responsibility to provide forensic proof. As badly as some victims and therapists may want validation of their memories, a search for details and “facts” surrounding past abuse is secondary to therapeutically working through the effects of the trauma. So also for the church; redemptively loving the victim back to spiritual and mental health takes priority over scouring the distant past for “proof.”

Kim Campbell

Tulsa, Okla.

It takes surprisingly little for vulnerable, hurting persons to be led into the belief that they were abused in a concrete way at some time in their past. A catch-all statement from a therapist (e.g., “You have all the symptoms of an early sexual trauma”) can lead to the development of “memories” and accusations of general abuses, sexual abuse, and SRA. A wounded person is then victimized by this “therapy.”

Deception never heals. It destroys the victims of this kind of misleading therapy, as well as the victims of the false accusations. When family members are among the falsely accused, “therapeutic truth” also destroys the family support system needed for complete healing. I have witnessed the destruction of a family based solely on this brand of “truth.”

Michele Johnson

Eagle River, Wisc.

Can somebody say Amen?

Re: “The City that Wouldn’t Say ‘Amen’ ” (July 19). If Christians would transfer the time they spend trying to inject prayer into government events to prayer for their public officials, we might get more of the just and honorable government we say we desire.

Donald P. Shoemaker

Fellowship of Grace Brethren Churches

Seal Beach, Calif.

Clarification

The June 21 news article “Overseas Ministries Step Up Fight Against U.S. Ills” reported that World Relief has nearly doubled the percentage of its total budget devoted to U.S. programs from 23 percent in 1987 to 46 percent last year. Those figures mostly represent refugee-resettlement rather than aid to indigenous poor. World Relief aid to nonrefugees in the U.S. remains less than 1 percent of its budget. CT regrets any misunderstanding.

Letters are welcome. If intended for publication, they must include a signature and address. Letters may be edited for space and clarity. Write to Eutychus, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, 465 Gundersen Drive, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188.

In the fall of 1992, N. T. Wright was the talk of the joint annual conventions of the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature. We didn’t hear his presentation, but we heard all about it.

The Oxford scholar was part of a panel responding to John Dominic Crossan’s methodology employed in his controversial book The Historical Jesus. The first speaker, a Crossan fan, offered some standard words of appreciation. Then several hundred curious scholars perked up as Wright proceeded to tell a story, a sort of postmodern critique of Crossan’s very postmodern book. Wright spun his yarn about a book named “Michelle,” who couldn’t figure out who she was even though she was using Crossan’s methodology of historical reconstruction. She even read the promotional copy on her dust jacket. Alas, her identity crisis was still intact! Poor “Michelle.”

The normally decorous scholars chuckled and laughed aloud all through the presentation.

When Wright sat down (to much applause), it was Crossan’s turn. The Chicago scholar corrected one minor misapprehension on Wright’s part. Then he shrugged and said, “Well, I don’t know quite what to say …”

In his essay beginning on page 22 of this issue, Tom Wright examines several of the recent attempts to reconstruct who Jesus was. No funny stories here, just sober reflection on “The New, Unimproved Jesus.”

DAVID NEFF,Executive Editor