The offence of Christ

I believe it to be a grave mistake to present Christianity as something charming and popular with no offence in it.… We cannot blink the fact that gentle Jesus meek and mild was so stiff in His opinions and so inflammatory in His language that He was thrown out of church, stoned, hunted from place to place, and finally gibbeted as a firebrand and a public danger. Whatever His peace was, it was not the peace of an amiable indifference.

—Dorothy L. Sayers in A Careless Rage for Life

Does prayer change things?

Prayer has its limits, some say. Speaking to God is all right; but letting God speak to us, well, that might be considered schizophrenia.

Yet Christ said whatsoever you ask the Father in my name will be given to you. Hmmm. Christ was fond of parables and speaking indirectly, but he is about as straightforward as possible about prayer. The question is, do we believe prayer changes things?

—Jay Copp in U.S. Catholic (July 1992)

Shall the next be first?

Perhaps the slack line of belief in eschatology, the theological concern for the last things, moves some to focus their fears on the next things instead.

—Eugene Kennedy in the Chicago Tribune (Jan. 11, 1993)

The wrong questions

A careful look at the gospels shows that Jesus seldom accepted the questions posed to him. He exposed them as coming from the house of fear.… To none of these questions did Jesus give a direct answer. He gently put them aside as questions emerging from false worries. They were raised out of concern for prestige, influence, power, and control.

They did not belong to the house of God. Therefore Jesus always transformed the question by his answer. He made the question new—and only then worthy of his response.

—Henri J. M. Nouwen in Lifesigns

Lessons from life

Perhaps God had chosen me in my time to detail what I learned from all the madness about.

I learned that often the false is made to look appealing.

I learned that witnesses today may be testifiers tomorrow.

I learned that one must be careful in helping others.

I learned that you do not proclaim another man’s evil.

I learned that mediocrity within yourself is unacceptable.

I learned that the more one says the less he is heard.

I learned that one does not argue with an arguer.

I learned that anonymity can be valuable.

I learned that there is safety in moving with the crowd.

I learned that not all praise is meant well.

I learned that secrets should neither be heard nor spoken.

I learned that you do not divulge what you cannot reverse.

I learned that all has its day.

—Baltasar Gracián in The Wisdom of Baltasar Gracián

The greatest victory

O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? This is so true that even Satan cannot deny it. Christ’s resurrection and victory over sin, death and hell is greater than all heaven and earth. You can never imagine his resurrection and victory so great but that in actuality it is far, far greater.

—Martin Luther, quoted in The Joy of the Saints

Freed from ego

A woman said to a guest at dinner, “We say grace at dinner each day to remind us around here that there is something bigger than our egos.” Prayer can free us from the gravitational pull of our egos and remind us of the goodness and might of God. Prayer can move us from self-centered preoccupation to wonder and awe.

—Maxie Dunnam in Living the Psalms

Desperately wicked

The human heart has so many crannies where vanity hides, so many holes where falsehood lurks, is so decked out with deceiving hypocrisy, that it often dupes itself.

—John Calvin in A Calvin Treasury

“A caricature of the ecumenical movement founded in 1948”—that is how February’s Reader’s Digest characterized the World Council of Churches. The A council has “drifted,” it said, “from its original goal of Christian unity into the choppy waters of secular ecumenism.’ ” Remarkably, and somewhat sensationally, the Digest now blames the drift on a secret KGB plot.

It was not the first time the “world’s most widely read magazine” took aim at the WCC. Indeed, many North Americans owe their most vivid impressions of the council to a major Digest article in 1982. “Which master is the World Council of Churches serving,” the article asked, “… Karl Marx or Jesus Christ?”

An organization that claims only to be a “fellowship” of churches finds itself again at the center of controversy. A group formed to confess “the Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour according to the Scriptures” makes many Christians chafe. Is the controversy simply a result of “bad press”?

When CT went looking for contributors to take readers beyond the Reader’s Digest, we were repeatedly pointed to the names in this CT Institute Special Report. We asked Tübingen scholar Peter Beyerhaus to survey turning points in the WCC. Senior editor J. I. Packer tells why he once was “in” but now stands apart. James Stamoolis of Wheaton College’s Graduate School explores ecumenical lessons from the Eastern Orthodox, while African church leader Tokunboh Adeyemo wonders what has happened to evangelism in the WCC. We also asked tough questions of evangelical Wes Granberg-Michaelson, a WCC staff member. Finally, senior editor Tom Oden considers new forms for evangelical ecumenism.

Defining Moments

Peter Beyerhaus*

The World Council of Churches traces its official beginnings to 1948, although ecumenical and cooperative missionary efforts stretch back well into the century before. That year delegates from 147 denominations, mostly from Europe and North America, met in Amsterdam to ratify the WCC’s founding constitution. To many Christians, the event came as a divine fulfillment of their sincerest spiritual aspirations and ardent prayers.

In the earliest days, the council drew its spiritual orientation from the so-called biblical-theology movement. This movement accented the Bible’s “salvation history,” its Christological center, and the oneness of the Testaments. The primacy given to Scripture made ecumenical Bible studies exciting and spurred new evangelistic enterprises.

Even so, some conservatives at Amsterdam had concerns. The council abstained from making any doctrinal document or historical creed binding for member churches or even its own teaching. The WCC wanted to invite into its fellowship all “churches who acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour,” as the constitution put it, leaving to individual denominations the interpretation of this formula.

The council emphasized three goals: world mission, organic church unity, and social service. To these ends, the WCC provided an informal platform for churches through commissions, consultations, study programs, conferences, literature, and a general secretariat in Geneva.

Everything could have turned out well if the WCC had safeguarded these goals with a healthy balance of involvements and solidly biblical interpretation of its own faith statement. In the early days, committees and commissions did indeed produce a number of impressive statements and reports that were gratefully accepted by member churches. But changes were in the offing.

Turning points

To grasp the significance of what happened next, one must understand that the WCC’s life rhythm is marked by its general assemblies, usually convened every seven years (the latest held in 1991 in Canberra, Australia). These draw representatives of member churches, theological advisers, observers, journalists, and “fraternal delegates” of other ecumenical bodies.

Two assemblies in particular set the course of the latter-day WCC: the third at New Delhi in 1961 and the fourth in Uppsala, Sweden, in 1968. Both were convened in a period of worldwide change, ideological upheaval, and social transformation. Both marked the end of the colonial epoch and opened the council’s eyes to the reality of the continents soon to be called the “Third World.”

Several events at New Delhi stand out. First, the WCC incorporated the International Missionary Council (founded in 1921) as its new Commission for World Mission and Evangelism. Second, the council admitted four major Orthodox churches from the Soviet hemisphere. The Orthodox churches tended to stablize conservative theological traditions in the council, but they also seemed compelled to champion the Soviet Union’s view on political matters. Finally, at New Delhi, the WCC widened its constitutional statement of faith to include references to Trinitarian faith and devotion to Scripture. From many observers’ perspective, however, this did little to slow the turn from an emphasis on the church’s unity and spiritual mission to an agenda of political liberation and unification of all humankind.

At Uppsala the WCC made this transition more explicit. The council largely reframed world mission as a struggle for humanization rather than as an offer of redemption. The effect was to polarize ecumenists and evangelicals, inducing the latter eventually to realign themselves in the Lausanne Movement for World Evangelization. The motto of the Uppsala assembly, “All things new,” was taken out of its prophetic context in Revelation 21:4, signaling a de-emphasis on Christ’s second coming—once the major incentive of the world missionary movement.

Theologies of revolution?

Regular conferences—on World Mission and Evangelism, on Faith and Order, and on Church and Society—have been no less significant than WCC assemblies. The conference on Church and Society in Geneva in 1966 sought a “theology of revolution,” for example. The Bangkok conference in 1973 asked for a moratorium in Western missions, and the Lima conference in 1978 finalized a consensus statement about views on baptism, Eucharist, and ministry (known as BEM).

In addition, “pilot consultations” have explored new fields without at first carrying the weight of the headquarters’ official endorsement. Such consultations have paved the way for two highly controversial innovations in 1970: the Program on Dialogue with Other Faiths and Ideologies, and the Program on Combating Racism.

From the sixties to the eighties, the WCC’s most urgent world concerns were social justice and international peace. The 1988 Vancouver assembly added the ecological crisis to this agenda. To mobilize churches to avert the threat to global survival, the WCC responded positively to the German proposal of working toward a coming Universal Council for world peace, which, in a second stage, would include representatives of other religions. Since the convening of such an “ecumenical council” met with objections from the Orthodox as members and Roman Catholics as observers, the new move was renamed Conciliar Process for Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation (JPIC). The last general assembly in 1991 endorsed JPIC, and the current, newly elected German general secretary Konrad Raiser has called it the WCC’s chief agenda in facing the third millennium.

At present, some of the strongest criticism of the WCC comes from within. Scandalized by syncretistic worship elements in the assembly’s program at Canberra, Eastern Orthodox delegations fired off a protest. They demanded that the WCC return to its doctrinal commitments and threatened otherwise to reconsider their membership. Since the Orthodox by now have grown to be the largest single confessional block within the WCC, it must be hoped they will thus influence the council for the good.

Why I Left

J. I. Packer

I tell this story because I was asked to do so. It is an account of how, standing firm convictionally, I saw the leading organization of the world Christian-unity movement slide away from me. My attitude to it had then to change, just because my view of God’s truth had not changed.

Once, perhaps pompously, I spoke of my relation to the World Council of Churches and local enterprises linked with it as one of qualified involvement. Now my understanding of biblical ecumenism requires me to stand outside those structures and speak of the need for repentance. I call my position, again perhaps pompously, one of prophetic detachment. My narrative is offered as a case study. It has three parts.

Doing the do-gooders good

Part one began in 1944, when I was converted to Christ in my first term at Oxford. Both the student evangelical movement to which, under God, I owed my soul and the evangelical Anglicans, with whom, as a cradle Anglican, I then formed links, nurtured me in an isolationist mindset. I was taught to view professed Christians who were not wholly with us on matters like biblical inspiration and authority or personal conversion as hardly Christian at all. Against this my judgment slowly rebelled.

While I saw myself as much closer, doctrinally and devotionally, to evangelicals of other church allegiances than to nonevangelicals in my own denomination, I could also see that many “catholic” and “liberal evangelical” Anglicans loved my Lord, even though some of their beliefs made me wince. I became an ecumenical evangelical with a bilateral stance, stretching out my right hand to fellowship with the world evangelical movement, whatever its church affiliation (or lack of it), and extending my left hand to associate with Anglicans as such. So a concern for Christian unity—perhaps I should say Christian Christian unity—was born in me fairly early on.

When I was ordained and began my ministry in a church in 1952, my theology had settled down as creedal and Reformed, with a directly biblical and pastoral thrust, and my hopes and prayers centered on the need for a new evangelical revival in the Church of England.

As for the World Council of Churches, formed in 1948, with the powerful biblical theologian W. A. Visser’t Hooft as general secretary, and the announced aim of advancing Christian unity and service to the world, I saw no reason not to wish it well. I knew about the Faith and Order and Life and Work movements (both launched in the 1920s) that were coming together in it. And while I regretted the Life and Work slogan “Doctrine divides; service unites,” I thought, no doubt naively, that being tied in with Faith and Order would do the do-gooders good, and complement their agenda.

Alarm bells ringing

Part two of the story opens in the late fifties. An Anglican bureaucrat came to Bristol, where I was teaching in a theological college, to persuade me to set aside time to contribute to the work of various church commissions that were exploring new proposals about faith, order, and church relations. I said I would, and over the next 20 years I was involved in Anglican-Presbyterian and Anglican-Methodist unity talks, in the Archbishops’ Doctrine Commission, and for more than a decade in the Faith and Order Advisory Group of the Church of England’s General Synod, a body which, among other things, prepared responses to questions and documents sent from the WCC headquarters in Geneva. This obliged me to look more intentionally at what the WCC was doing, and I was not too happy with what I saw.

In the fifties, I had believed that the theological tools being forged by the “biblical theology” movement would be put to use in the WCC for purging and synthesizing in a directly biblical mold the many denominational traditions being brought together. The informal slogan of “biblical theology” was “read the Bible from within, in terms of its writers’ own faith,” and I was all for that (and still am). In the sixties, however, it became clear to me that the WCC was working not with a reformational but with a relativist agenda, based on the idea that the church should let the secular world rather than the Bible tell it what to think and speak about. Politicization, in the sense of seeking political influence and adjusting testimony and policy as a means to a political end, had thus begun. I found that very worrying.

In the fifties, “one world—one church” was an oft-used slogan, and suspicious critics alleged that the WCC was out to create a single global super-church, including all Roman Catholics, and headed by the pope. I never considered the criticism realistic, for the WCC was in no position to bring this ecumaniac’s pipe dream to pass, and I thought the WCC’s supposed commitment to “biblical theology” was in any case safeguard enough against it. In the sixties, however, while super-church talk dried up, so did “biblical theology” (academics were by then reacting against it), and the WCC now appeared as sponsoring a consensus theology that celebrated the Bible without encountering its authority. This theology seemed bent on reducing Christian tradition to secular concepts of “humanization.” The cloven hoofs of North American liberal Protestantism and Latin American liberation theology were seen as the council began more explicitly to identify at official levels with socialist and revolutionary politics. In doing so, it acted as if it represented its member churches. It committed churches to these programs, or at the least promised to ensure that concern for peace and justice on earth would henceforth be the churches’ top priority in this fallen world. The alarm bells in my mind were now ringing loud and clear.

What was the church’s true priority? To evangelize the world, and thereby establish self-supporting, self-propagating churches everywhere. Where should “humanization” in the sense of philanthropy and social service come in? As supporting expressions of the neighbor-love of which evangelism is the primary expression. What was the WCC, which had absorbed the International Missionary Council in 1961, now saying about cross-cultural evangelism? That the church of the West should put into force a “moratorium” on it (that is, an indefinite suspension of the activity). Was the WCC assuming that universalism is true, so that all will be saved whether evangelized or not? Apparently so. Did the WCC then wish to redefine the Christian mission in a way that makes evangelism optional, or leaves it out of the picture altogether? Again, apparently so. Was not the WCC hereby disqualifying itself from the leadership it claimed in the ecumenical—that is, the world-Christian—sphere? I began to suspect so, and waited anxiously to see. So to part three of my story.

The point of no return

The cat finally came out of the bag at the Conference on World Mission held in Bangkok in 1973. I was not there, but the reports that reached me affected me like a kick in the stomach. Bangkok was deliberately structured as an experience of ideological group dynamics, orchestrated with the set purpose of browbeating participants into accepting a new account of the Christian world mission. This view equated present salvation with socio-politico-economic well-being. The sinner’s reconciliation to God, sanctification by grace, and hope of eternal glory were no longer viewed as central; indeed, for all practical purposes they were pushed right out of the picture. Syncretistic humanization became the name of the WCC’s game. The WCC leadership celebrated Bangkok as the close of the era of missions and the opening of the era of mission: truly a watershed event. For me, too, it was a watershed event, but one to be described in different terms.

Bangkok impressed me as a point of no return. It confirmed my worst fears about the way the WCC was going. Now the council had betrayed the true church by abandoning the true gospel and the true missionary task and, what was more, made it a virtue to have done so. I saw this as the nemesis of the WCC’s politicization: seeking significance in the global power play, it had given up its trusteeship of truth. Its euphoria about Bangkok seemed spiritually unreal, if not indeed demonic. With all the charity in the world, I could not but see the WCC, ideologically speaking, as a juggernaut that had run off the road and totaled itself, becoming irrelevant to and useless in the furthering of the church’s God-given role.

So since 1973 I have as a matter of conscience stood apart from the world of the WCC and done what I could for Christian unity and the Christian world mission under other auspices. I live in hope that the WCC might show some signs of going back on Bangkok, and I wish I could see some, but none has appeared as yet. Affirmations of evangelism have certainly been made since 1973, but they are clearly meant to be fitted into the Bangkok frame. Meanwhile, however, informal ecumenism flourishes among creedal Christians—Protestant, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic, all round the world. And in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, to look no further, church-planting evangelism prospers wonderfully. Christian unity and the Christian mission still go ahead, despite the debacle of the WCC, and in that I rejoice.

Whatever Happened To Evangelism?

In 1989 I attended a joint consultation on evangelism attended by 21 delegates of the World Council of Churches, the Lausanne Committee on World Evangelization (LCWE), and the World Evangelical Fellowship (WEF). We gathered in Stuttgart in an atmosphere of candidness, and I came away with two broad impressions.

First, speaking for WEF and LCWE, evangelicals found several areas of convergence with the WCC. All agreed that compassion and not law should be our motivation for world evangelization. We acknowledged that “entry points” will vary from one people group to another. No one doubted the need for depending upon the Holy Spirit in the task before us. It was equally agreed that the Great Commission (evangelism) and the Great Command to love (social responsibility) should not be set at variance with each other. Finally, we all saw the necessity of cooperation.

Where we disagree

Several points of divergence emerged:

• The nature and theology of evangelism. From the presentation made by then—WCC Secretary for Evangelism Raymond Fung, evangelism seems to encompass every effort to improve the human condition—whether made by Christians or non-Christians. He stated that Christians have no monopoly on this task. In contrast, evangelical representatives spoke of evangelism to be the proclamation of the good news of salvation in Christ for the express purpose of conversion. We believe that nothing but the church may or can do this. In the face of the WCC’s implicit universalism, we see evangelism as essential in reaching the lost.

• The practice of evangelism. Representatives from the WCC spoke of “solidarity” with the world in ways that implied little or no difference between the church and the world. Fung, for example, said, “We get involved not because we are different but because we are not.”

Rather than unqualified solidarity, the evangelicals emphasized “incarnation,” a word that suggests that while we are in the world, we are not of the world.

• Our view of the world. I concluded that the WCC views the world as friendly to the church and capable of being tamed by worship and prayer. In contrast, evangelicals tend toward a view of the world as fallen, antagonistic to the church, and one day doomed for judgment.

• The place of non-Christian religions. At the risk of oversimplifying, the WCC purports that the best of the non-Christian religions is as good as (if not better than) the best of Christianity. Consequently, dialogue and cross-fertilization become the goals. Evangelicals affirmed instead that all non-Christian religions are products of fallen human cultures. The Christian faith directly results from God’s intervention in Christ (the Incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection) and includes a personal relationship to God by faith through grace.

• Concepts of sin. Throughout his presentation, Fung used the categories of “sinners” and the “sinned against.” To him, the poor and the oppressed of every society are the sinned against to whom God offers salvation freely. The oppressors are the sinners who need to repent.

While we see a holy bias toward the poor in the Bible, the issue of sin is categorical: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” regardless of race, tribe, gender, and socio-economic class. Equally, salvation is God’s gift freely offered to all on the basis of the price paid by Jesus Christ.

Other issues came up in the discussion, including views of Scripture and Christ’s second coming. Differences persist. But the meeting was a step in the right direction, and meetings like it should be encouraged for the cause of Christ.

By Tokunboh Adeyemo, general secretary of the Association of Evangelicals of Africa and Madagascar.

Should Evangelicals Come On Board?

An Interview With The Wcc’S Wesley Granberg-Michaelson.

Not all evangelicals believe they should stand apart from the WCC. Some argue the time is ripe for dialogue or participation. Here an evangelical serving on the WCC’s Justice, Peace and Creation unit and staff task force on Relations with Evangelicals makes that case and fields CT’s questions.

You relate to evangelicals as part of your WCC staff responsibilities. How would you like to see evangelicals relate to the WCC?

People’s first assumption is that these are two different groups. It is much more complex than that. The first thing to say is that for the WCC to relate to evangelicals means in many cases relating to our own membership. Within member churches are millions of people who identify themselves as evangelicals—including specific member churches who would claim for themselves the evangelical or Pentecostal tradition.

The need for improved relations with evangelicals has appeared on the agenda of the WCC Central Committee several times over the past years. WCC observers have attended various national and international evangelical conferences. Likewise, evangelical participants have been visible—some in leadership positions—at most major WCC meetings. In recent years we have had meetings and exchanges with the World Evangelical Fellowship (WEF). Our new general secretary, Konrad Raiser, stated recently that he welcomes “a more open relationship” with WEF, and that “efforts to develop this further will continue with all my support.”

You have written that you believe we may be approaching a “kairos” moment for evangelical-ecumenical partnership. What did you mean?

From the WCC’s perspective, the time is ripe for fresh and open interchange.

At the WCC’s seventh assembly in Canberra, a hundred or so delegates, observers, and visitors with evangelical concerns met regularly. Near the assembly’s close, they released an open letter whose content and tone were largely positive. To be sure, it made several specific criticisms of the WCC and the assembly, but nearly every one of these was accompanied by a confession that the record of the evangelical community on that point is far from what it should be.

Many evangelicals balk because they perceive the WCC as soft on Christian conviction. The WCC asks member churches to agree to the constitution’s “Basis” (which confesses “Jesus Christ as God and Saviour according to the Scriptures”), but is that enough to constitute the WCC rightly as a council of churches?

The intent, as ecumenical pioneer Robert Gardiner said, was not to indicate “who is kept out” but “what holds together the churches.” I think history shows that the Basis does constitute a council of Christian churches. It reflects the formulations of the 1855 Paris Basis of the World Association of YMCAs and the Basis of the later Faith and Order movement. “Jesus Christ as God and Saviour” echoes Titus 2:13.

The Evanston assembly (1954) underlined that the WCC is not a church and does not perform ecclesiastical functions. It reaffirmed that the Basis indicates the nature of member churches’ fellowship—the belief that their unity is given in the person (“God”) and work (“Saviour”) of the Lord Jesus Christ. This allows for a wide range of fellowship, but it does not and should not be considered to offer a full statement of the Christian faith.

The council’s Faith and Order Commission has been involved for over a decade in studying how the WCC might move toward a common confession of apostolic faith using the Nicene Creed. General assemblies have affirmed that common witness to the one apostolic faith is an essential element of living in unity, but it is not clear whether adding the Nicene Creed to the WCC’s Basis would help or hinder that goal.

It is worth noting that objections to such a use of the Nicene Creed (or the Apostles’ Creed, for that matter) have come from the so-called noncreedal churches, many of which would clearly fall into the “conservative evangelical” camp.

Some argue that many leaders and spokespersons of member churches redefine the deity of Christ. In the light of this, can the council really be said to maintain a Christian commitment?

I would, of course, say that the WCC “really does maintain a Christian commitment.” Perhaps it would be more modest to say that it would be evident to anyone who attended a WCC assembly that the council strives to express and work out of a Christian commitment. And when I look at our 322 member churches worldwide, I have to contest the charge that “many leaders and spokespersons” redefine the deity of Christ. That’s nonsense. Can anyone cite specific examples of WCC member churches “redefining the deity of Christ”?

You can claim, of course, that within the millions of people in the member churches of the WCC you find individual speakers, writers, or seminary professors who explore all sorts of theological questions, including Christology. But the WCC does not, by common agreement of its churches, attempt to enforce, sanction, or discipline doctrine and teaching. Such matters quite properly are the responsibility of the churches themselves.

At its general assemblies, the council has sponsored speakers and worship services that in the eyes of many evangelicals are sub-Christian.While the council cannot be held responsible for what everyone in every constituent body says, certainly it must take responsibility for its own programs and its own leaders.

Speakers at WCC meetings reflect a wide diversity of opinion, and quite properly so. One function of the WCC is to bring widely divergent viewpoints into dialogue, interaction, and, we hope, mutual correction. Of course, evangelicals will hear opinions at WCC meetings with which they differ, as will all participants. But we act on the belief that the power of the Spirit is strongest when the varied gifts of all the body of Christ are fully represented.

If one wishes to judge the WCC’s positions and theology, the WCC can properly be held accountable to the official reports and statements of its governing bodies and assemblies. These are openly and carefully debated, adopted by vote, and form an extensive record. I think the National Association of Evangelicals or the WEF would make a similar request.

I am especially surprised by the assumption that some evangelicals regard worship at WCC meetings as “sub-Christian.” The “Letter of Those with Evangelical Concerns” from the WCC’s World Conference on Mission and Evangelism held at San Antonio specifically mentioned how signers were “enriched” by the worship and Bible study.

In the past, the WCC has financially supported left-wing political groups that have actively opposed evangelical and traditional Christianity. Is this still the case?

As one part of its program, the WCC has offered, and will continue to offer, support to churches and partners around the world in their work for justice and alleviating suffering. This is part of the call of Christ. In a few specific cases, such measures have been controversial. But I am not aware of how such actions can be said to be “actively opposed to evangelical and traditional Christianity.” Many evangelicals share these commitments.

Many wonder if the WCC sees leading non-Christians to Christian faith as a primary goal. Is the WCC committed to the Great Commission?

The first function of the WCC, as our constitution states, is “to call the churches to the goal of visible unity … and to advance towards that unity in order that the world may believe.” The second function is “to facilitate the common witness of the churches in each place and in all places.” The third is “to support the churches in their worldwide missionary and evangelistic task.” I have never heard any suggestion that these constitutional functions should be abrogated.

It is clear from these statements, however, that member churches, rather than the council, carry out the worldwide evangelistic task. The services of the WCC’s Secretary for Evangelism, our Schools of Evangelism, and efforts such as the Ecumenical Affirmations on Mission and Evangelism (adopted by the WCC’s Central Committee after thorough study and discussion) illustrate concrete steps undertaken by the WCC to this end.

Does the WCC do all this effectively enough? Probably not. Do all member churches consider conversion of persons from a non-Christian religion the primary indicator of whether they are being faithful to their calling? No. Several argue that faithfulness to Jesus Christ means witnessing, but leaving the question of conversion to God.

Unquestionably, tensions between evangelism, proselytism, and dialogue are matters of intense concern among churches today. I believe the WCC discusses the Christian challenge of relating to neighbors of other faiths more passionately, thoroughly, and realistically than any other Christian organization. And I don’t see that changing.

Five Reasons To Cooperate

CT asked several evangelical leaders known to support greater evangelical participation in the WCC to explain their position.

• We have some things to offer. Ron Sider, president of Evangelicals for Social Action, gives this example: “One of the WCC’s greatest weaknesses is lack of concern for evangelism. If evangelicals were more involved, we could insist on a more vigorous evangelistic emphasis.”

• We have some things to learn. “Though we question some of their bases,” says Sider, “the WCC has been a leader on crucial social-justice issues, such as the struggle against apartheid.”

• We have some things in common. Robert K. Johnston, provost of North Park Theological Seminary, notes, “It’s not that everyone in the WCC likes evangelicals. But there are large numbers of evangelicals within the council, particularly in Third World churches. And several influential leaders are evangelicals, or have views similar to those of evangelicals.”

William Pannell, professor of preaching and practical theology at Fuller Theological Seminary, notes, “I was at the WCC’s San Antonio conference on evangelism and mission and then at Lausanne II in Manila just weeks later; there is far less difference between the WCC and Lausanne than ever, owing largely to Third World peoples who have argued for a more holistic approach to mission.”

• We are being invited to. “The WCC,” says Johnston, “has sought in formal and informal ways to increase their relationship with evangelical churches.”

• We can strengthen our service to the needy. Says Gary Dennis, senior pastor of La Canada (Calif.) Presbyterian Church, “I worked with the WCC on an orphanage project in Romania. The needs were greater than our group working alone could have met.” Glandion Camey, associate director of InterVarsity Missions, believes evangelicals and those in the WCC could “accomplish much by sharing information with each other,” especially in relief and development work in areas like Bosnia or Somalia.

By Thomas Giles.

What Can We Learn From The Orthodox?

In spite of a history of involvement with the WCC, the Orthodox churches have not always approved of the implied or stated theological stance of the council. Their latest complaint was voiced during and after the seventh assembly at Canberra, Australia, in 1991. Signs of the Spirit, the official report of the seventh assembly, includes a document from Eastern Orthodox participants.

In that document, Orthodox concerns are clearly stated, and evangelicals should take note of them. The Orthodox are interested in the visible unity of the church but are not prepared to find unity apart from a biblically based Christianity. “We miss from many WCC documents,” their report read, “the affirmation that Jesus Christ is the world’s only Saviour.” They are concerned that openness to other religions not come at the cost of the uniqueness of the truth claims of Christianity.

What can we learn from the Orthodox experience in the WCC?

• Participation can provide a platform of influence. However frustrated the Orthodox may be in their involvement in the WCC, it at least remains true that the seventh assembly’s official report contains their testimony to the historic truth claims of Christianity. However much evangelicals would dispute the Orthodox Church’s claim to represent the earliest authentic tradition, from which the rest of Christendom has departed, we should admire a call back to a historic, creedal Christianity.

• Involvement need not mean losing identity. Orthodox churches have maintained their liturgical and theological position even while dialogue with other groups in the WCC goes on.

• Participation may bring unexpected opportunities for new interaction. The Orthodox experience in the WCC has helped bring them out of ethnic isolation. It has gotten representatives talking with other Christian groups. This has helped the Orthodox Church come to terms with today’s world instead of acting as if they still lived in Byzantium or czarist Russia.

Consultations, arranged by the Orthodox desk of the WCC, have been helpful in this regard. These meetings have reopened questions about reunion of the various Oriental churches that broke off communion with Orthodox churches centuries ago. There have also been interchurch dialogues exploring the theological differences between the Orthodox churches and Reformation churches.

• The Orthodax experience has to be viewed as a partial success. Orthodoxy has been forced into interaction with the wider world and into useful self-analysis. However, the Orthodox have not had an influence proportional to the numbers of their worldwide constituency. The Orthodox in the WCC are trying to maintain dialogue, while holding out for their theological and liturgical values. We should watch carefully whether the Orthodox can continue to do both.

By James Stamoolis, graduate dean at Wheaton College, and author of Eastern Orthodox Mission Theology Today.

How Should Evangelicals Be Ecumenical?

Thomas C. Oden

Senior editor Thomas Oden brings to this institute more than intellectual interest. “If anyone had told me in the early 1960s that I would come out of the ecumenical cauldron with sentiments similar to James Packer’s,” he notes, “I might have thrown up.” Raised in “the bosom of the the liberal ecumenical tradition,” Oden found himself “constantly on the left-leaning torque of every social concern that came by.” In liberal United Methodist and ecumencial circles, “we were strictly socialized to have no relations with evangelicals, and take pot shots at Baptists whenever possible.”

But in the midsixties, Oden began to suspect that the WCC was run by “radical political elites who cared less about the historic Christian faith than garish political posturing.” In the midseventies Oden began to read the church fathers—“the ancient ecumenical writers.” The more he did, the more he saw modern bureaucratic ecumenism as a “faded and feeble expression of the reality of the church.” And the more he found himself drawn to evangelicalism.

By the 1980s, through a series of what he terms “grace-enabled stages,” Oden found himself in the middle of a “flourishing evangelical ecumenism.” From that vantage point he now evaluates the WCC.

Something is happening in evangelical-ecumenical relations. The Holy Spirit is enabling a new form of dialogue, especially between Reformed and Wesleyan traditions of revivalism, and between these evangelicals and Eastern Orthodoxy. There is even some evangelical interaction with traditional Catholic moral teaching.

But that dialogue will not, I believe, be managed through an office in Geneva. It will take place instead on a more populist, local basis. It will center in the recovery by evangelicals of the ancient Christian ecumenical tradition.

What form will this emerging evangelical-ecumenical dialogue take? It will happen more through missional associations than formal, old-line religious bureaucracies. It is already happening in such unexpected places as evangelical publishing houses, evangelical seminaries, the academic arms of evangelicalism such as the Evangelical Theological Society and the Wesleyan Theological Society, and parachurch ministries that bring together Reformed, holiness, charismatic, and Pentecostal Christians.

I believe that evangelicals are called to dialogue with other Christians who, repenting, believe in Jesus Christ, and who by the power of the Holy Spirit seek to walk in holiness. But I distinguish between evangelical ecumenism and the mainstream of secularizing, syncretistic ecumenism as seen in the WCC.

The evangelical ecumenism I see tends to be a probing, open, personal dialogue between reborn Christians of differing histories and traditions. Generally it is low-key, arising from the grassroots, and spontaneous. And it is biblically grounded, committed to the sacred text at every point of interaction.

The ecumenical dialogue I experienced under WCC auspices tends to be a cautious interface between defensive institutions. It remains committed to a highly particular and dated political agenda that many evangelicals find objectionable.

The nonnegotiables

The problem evangelicals have is not so much with the WCC’s official basis of union, or formal definitions of mission, or with mere diversity, but rather with the long history of well-documented political escapades and pretenses, accompanied by theological indifference toward the basis of union. The problem is hardly reducible to a dilemma of public relations. As long as bureaucratic ecumenism fixates on radical feminist rhetoric, the romantic idealization of the secular, excessive accommodation to world religions, and fantasies of rational redistribution of wealth by political elites, I see little hope for dialogue.

Admittedly, some denominations represented in the WCC have many evangelical members, but evangelicals have been grossly underrepresented in the staff and leadership of the WCC.

Even so, evangelicals are now in a strong position to join with the Orthodox in calling bureaucratic ecumenism back to triune, historic, creedal Christianity and the authority of Scripture, WCC ecumenists, if interested in dialogue with evangelicals, must listen carefully when evangelicals say they perceive that the truth claims of Christianity are being ignored in favor of glib accommodation to modern culture and world religions.

Evangelicals are more ready for serious dialogue with Eastern Orthodoxy and with Roman ecumenical initiatives than with a Genevan pan-Protestant voice that only faintly echoes Reformation teaching on Scripture, sin, and grace. Evangelicals must remind both secular ecumenists and their own constituencies that Christ does not seek friendship with the world on its own terms, but on the basis of the costly, atoning love of God.

On these grounds, this CT Institute moves me to stake out a possible position of negotiation between evangelicals and the WCC. This position will center in repentance on the part of all parties, faith in Jesus Christ as the only Son of God, by whom alone we are reconciled to the Father, and mutual rediscovery of the history of biblical exegesis as the basis of dialogue.

Even if the areas of evangelical-WCC convergence are thin, this very thinness can be the realistic basis for continuing dialogue. It is time to mark a new position that welcomes dialogue, but only on grounds consonant with evangelical faith.

According to the farmer mayor of Philadelphia, nothing should stand in the way of helping the homeless, the hungry, and the struggling black male in America.

Elected as Philadelphia’s first African-American mayor in 1984, W. Wilson Goode served for two terms. Not all Philadelphians were initially aware of Goode’s fervent commitment to Christ, but Goode’s faith continued to influence his leadership throughout his tenure as mayor. That faith was formed while he was growing up as the son of an alcoholic sharecropper in North Carolina, the story of which he recounts in his recent autobiography, In Goode Faith (Judson).

The most troubling event of Goode’s first term as mayor was the MOVE tragedy involving a commune perceived as radical and disruptive by the broader community. A web of tangled circumstances, poor communication, and questionable judgments resulted in the police destroying several city blocks, thus killing a number of MOVE members, including some of their children. As Goode reveals below, a series of prayer vigils held in Philadelphia on his behalf helped him endure.

After his terms as mayor, Goode accepted a teaching position in political science at Eastern College where he also heads the Institute for the Advancement of the African-American Male.

You have described God as “the God who comes out of nowhere.”

I’ve learned that God responds to us when we least expect it and in ways that surprise us. When I was young, my mother’s God was all I understood of who God was and how God acted. I did not have a relationship with God. But I carefully watched my mother pray, sing, and meditate. Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, God would come. There would be food, peace in our home, clothing that we badly needed—sometimes even toys at Christmas.

At what point did you make your mother’s faith your own?

I was converted in a small country church when I was 12 years old. My mother had said to me, “It’s now time for you”—she emphasized the word you—“to make your decision for Christ.” I was confused. I needed to make a decision for Christ? As I sat on the mourner’s bench in church, I began seriously to consider my mother’s words. I had always feared God. I thought that if I failed to obey God, God would strike me dead. And yet as I sat on that mourner’s bench, I sensed I was coming closer and closer to Christ as he drew near to me.

It was as if Christ grabbed me and said, “Now you’re ready to serve me. Get up and take your minister’s hand and confess your sins before all these people.” I was being born again. I was a new creature. I literally changed my life from that point on. I was not as mean-spirited or mischievous as I had been before. I was more thoughtful about myself and others. I had no doubt that the Holy Spirit was moving in my life on that mourner’s bench and has been moving in my life since that time.

How has your relationship with Christ influenced your career choices?

At one time I decided to become a management trainee. My main goal was to make a lot of money. However, the job simply didn’t fit me. It was as though someone kept saying to me, “This is not where you belong.” Within 18 months I had returned to work in the city, even though this change meant I would be making less money. Basically, I ended up sitting in an office analyzing community organizations. The knowledge I gained would prove invaluable during my tenure as mayor.

I also sensed the Spirit’s guidance as I took the mayor’s office. As managing director for the city of Philadelphia, I had become something of a sensation for my ability to manage the budget and cut expenses. However, as I faced firsthand the problems of homelessness, AIDS, and child abuse, God hit me right between the eyes. The twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew kept coming back to me—that we were called to feed the hungry, house the homeless, and visit those in prison. I was driven, absolutely driven, to create one of the best programs in the country to protect homeless people. I had a responsibility beyond my oath of office. I had an obligation to God not to allow people to freeze to death and die of hunger.

The last time I strongly sensed the Spirit’s guidance was as I contemplated what to do after my time as mayor. A company in New York offered me an obscene amount of money to be its lobbyist on local governmental issues. I also talked to people at Princeton and Harvard about teaching positions. These were all prestigious positions, extremely lucrative and quite attractive. Instead, though, I decided to set up a nonprofit group to help African-American males. I started teaching at Eastern College. My wife said to me, “What is wrong with you?”

I said, “I don’t know what is wrong with me. All I know is that this is what I want to do with my life.” There is no logical way to explain these decisions apart from God’s movement in my life.

While you were mayor, how else was your faith strengthened or challenged?

My faith was both challenged and strengthened when I first ran for office in 1984. Early that year I had to decide whether to support Jesse Jackson or Walter Mondale for the presidency. The prevalent view was that I should support Jesse because he was black and I was black. I chose, though, to support Mondale because I thought this was the best decision for the city, rather than for me politically. I took a lot of heat from people for making this decision, but I felt it was the right decision, and I won the election.

Another key juncture occurred after the MOVE controversy. After this event, few people gave me any real chance for future political success. A local pastor, the Reverend Louise Williams, began to hold a series of prayer vigils throughout the city on my behalf. Nothing has ever strengthened and enhanced my life like those prayer vigils. Men and women, black and white, came together all over the city for four or five consecutive weeks to pray for my well-being, for the will of God to be fulfilled in my life, and for my spiritual health. I contend that because I was willing to accept these prayer vigils as God speaking to me that I went on to win a second term as mayor. I emerged from this time believing not only that I should run for a second term, but that I would win. It was one of the most spiritually fulfilling periods in my life.

How have you personally dealt with the MOVE tragedy?

I have asked God for forgiveness for my impatience, my lack of judgment in the appointment of the police commissioner, for the loss of life, and the role I played in this event. I believe a prayer for forgiveness asked in earnest is granted by God and that God has forgiven me. Peace with God, however, doesn’t guarantee peace with the broader community. I’ll be experiencing political punishment because of the MOVE incident for the rest of my life, but from a Christian perspective, I’ve been forgiven and have peace with God.

You are presently focusing your attention on the plight of the African-American male. Why?

In my eight years as mayor, the people I saw most at risk were African-American men. Seven out of ten African-American men between the ages of 17 and 44 are at risk—at risk of homelessness, AIDS, of dying violently in the street, of going to prison, of unemployment, of drugs, of illiteracy, of abuse in foster homes and in their own homes. One out of twenty black boys born in America today will be killed before he reaches his twenty-first birthday. If we’re going to change this statistic over the next ten years, we have to intervene now in the lives of young African-American boys in the inner city.

In 1940, 9 out of 10 black families had a black man as head of the household. In 1970, it was 6 out of 10. In 1992, it’s 3.5 out of 10. This should not surprise us if 7 out of 10 African-American males are at risk. So I want to work to bring back a complete black family. If we support family values, surely we’re talking about working to bring these families back together so they can have a wholesome life. This is the central project I’m working on.

How will this concern be expressed in your work with the Institute for the Advancement of the African-American Male at Eastern College?

No other university or college in the country is producing hard research on the plight of the African-American male. The institute at Eastern will provide the research foundation for future public-policy analysis of this grave problem. We will then be able to travel across the country disseminating this data and urging people to take action. We can think about this problem in emotional terms all we want, but until we get hard data and examine carefully reasons and causes, little will be accomplished.

What steps can the evangelical church take to overcome racism in our society?

All of us have been molded by our environment, culture, and background. We all create a “line of separation” from people who are different from us. This line of separation reinforces our ignorance of other groups and undercuts mutual understanding. This line can be cut if white Christians begin to fellowship with African-American Christians, Asian Christians, and Hispanic Christians.

During a recent Billy Graham crusade in Philadelphia, over 1,000 white men visited the Cornerstone Baptist Church in North Philadelphia to worship with the African-American community there. Although this was their first visit, 89 percent said they enjoyed the fellowship, worship, and music.

What are the needs of the inner city that the church is called to address?

All Christians need to examine carefully three central concerns: hunger, inadequate clothing, and homelessness. We can begin to alleviate these problems without getting the government involved. To fight a drug war, you have to involve the government. To rebuild major parts of our cities, you have to involve the government. But not to address the problem of hunger. Not to provide adequate shelter for homeless families. Shelter is available in churches, in properties owned by churches, in facilities churches can lease out. There is enough clothing in our closets to clothe all the people who don’t have adequate clothing—clothing we don’t need and will never wear again. But what do we do? We sell this clothing at garage sales.

We must rebuke our inherent selfishness by the power of the Holy Spirit. If Christian leaders in this country stood up and said in unison that we must wipe out hunger, hunger would be wiped out. Every religious leader should admit and proclaim that homelessness is a blight on the face of our country. How can Christians ignore the people who sleep in gutters and alleys downtown? How can we ignore them when we have cathedrals and churches that could house them for the night?

Many evangelicals feel alienated from the Democratic party because of its positions on abortion and homosexual rights. As a Democrat, do you feel this tension?

I feel a real tension. It is difficult from a Christian perspective to support the abortion-rights people. I believe that conception is a gift from God. As a Christian, I don’t believe anyone has the right to interfere with this process. On a public-policy level, however, does the government have the right to step in and tell individuals what they must do with their own bodies? I would state categorically that, as a Christian, I could not take a life, regardless of what point in the pregnancy the abortion takes place. I feel free to tell anyone my Christian views. But I have a difficulty saying that nonbelievers must agree with my perspective.

As for homosexuality, I reject the homosexual lifestyle while maintaining that homosexuals must still be treated as human beings. Homosexuals have the same fundamental human rights as any other human beings on the face of the earth. I will always defend their right to live where they want, to eat where they want, and to be fully accepted as human beings in our society.

What advice would you offer Christians considering political office?

I would tell them what I told my son. Public service is a noble profession that needs people of honesty, integrity, commitment, and vision. Know it will be hard, because you will be different. Fight for your position. Don’t give an inch. Don’t compromise your principles for the sake of political expediency. Even when an overwhelming number don’t believe in what you stand for, don’t give up. We need Christians in the public arena fighting for Christian principles, for right and wrong, for social issues, for honesty and integrity. This can only happen if we have politicians who are motivated, not by selfish interest, but by the larger interests of the community.

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.

Americans are talking about angels. More than ever, it seems, people entertain stories of the odd and remarkable:

• “The angels are opening to us as never before,” exult the authors of Ask Your Angels, a book published and promoted by Ballantine, one of New York’s biggest houses. “Something profound is on the move.” The authors present the channeled wisdom of Abigrael, a genderless being they claim was sent to instruct them. They also lead New Age-flavored workshops on getting in touch with “celestials” and aligning with “angelic energy fields.” Conversing with angels, they write, is another “divination tool.” Knowing that many readers face major decisions, the authors give instructions on making a deck of “Angel Oracle” cards.

• In the movie Grand Canyon, Kevin Kline plays a Los Angeles businessman on his way to a meeting on Wilshire Boulevard’s “Miracle Mile.” Worried, absorbed, he stepped off the curb when, he tells a friend, “a stranger grabbed me, yanked me back, just as a city bus went flying by my nose.” Turning around, he thanked the young woman who saved him from becoming “a wet bug stain on the front of the bus.” Then he noticed that she wore the cap of his favorite baseball team since childhood—the Pittsburgh Pirates. “Was that a real person,” Kline’s character muses, “or was that something else—you know, sent from somewhere else?”

• Angel artifacts have become big business with “heavenly profits,” asserts the Los Angeles Daily News. What with books, “angel catalogs, angel seminars, angel pins, angel newsletters and angel sightings, … it looks like the winged ones have left the cosmic back lot for the forefront of popular consciousness.”

A culture once prone to dismiss the supernatural as superstition is thinking twice. Erstwhile secularists make room for “spiritual forces.” Skeptics wonder if the cosmos is friendly after all. Across the spectrum, Americans wonder: Should we expect heavenly messengers and guardians to grace our daily lives?

The twentieth-century church may be caught off guard by the question. For all of our culture’s sometimes weird fascination with the topic, Christians have remained oddly silent. Angels may play well in venues of popular piety, but they do not inspire much serious theology. Few pastors preach on them. (In Angels, Billy Graham wrote that he had never heard a sermon on angels, despite having heard or read of “literally thousands” of personal accounts.) Millions do pick up Frank Peretti’s novels, where brawny angels slug it out with demons, but readers must sort out fact from fiction on their own. Indeed, fallen angels—Satan and his minions—excite more curiosity in the church than do those of the heavenly, wholesome variety. And while an occasional church member confides an angelic experience, it is usually done tentatively, in a quiet corner of the church.

A society bent on contact with the supernatural is threatening to outdo the church in asking and talking about angels. Who provides Christian guidance? To wrestle with angels raises three questions.

1. Why is our culture becoming fascinated with angels? Why all this “aerial commotion”?

Herbert Muschamp, writing on the “return flight” of angels in Vogue magazine, suggests that “maybe it’s an attempt to retain altitude at a time when culture is short on thrust.”

Maybe so. Jack Simms of Baby Boomers Consulting in California predicted a few years ago that the “quest for spiritual meaning” would be among boomers’ greatest concerns in the nineties. “They want to get in touch with the supernatural, and they will get in touch with it—somehow.”

Teenagers tell a similar story. Gallup polls reveal that teen belief in angels has increased steadily from 64 percent in 1978 to 76 percent in 1992. That three out of four young Americans now believe in angels says something about a coming generation and its search for something beyond self to believe in.

This helps explain why Sophy Burnham’s A Book of Angels, replete with story after story of angelic encounter, soared onto bestseller lists. Just as striking, hundreds of people, young and old, sat down to write Burnham of their own encounters. She gathered an assortment for her sequel, Angel Letters. Here stranded motorists tell of quiet figures appearing to help, only to vanish mysteriously. A woman writes of a prized, lost necklace reappearing under inexplicable circumstances. The accounts evidence a marked determination to believe. Letter writers are quick to credit not chance or good fortune, but, oddly, angels. They long for the assurance that the cosmos is inhabited by forces that provide “loving protection,” as Burnham says. They want to believe, in this lonely era, that beings exist who befriend and communicate.

Even among intellectuals, the notion of heavenly visitors strikes a responsive chord. Mortimer Adler, philosopher and editor of the Great Books series, tells how he gave a lecture under the auspices of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. His topic? Angels and angelology. “The announcement,” he wrote, “drew an audience larger than any I have ever enjoyed in the last thirty years.” The experience so moved him that he wrote a book on the philosophical significance of angels.

But this cultural fascination has a dark side. Books like Ask Your Angels, with its immersion in the occult and New Age, demonstrate that not all that purports to be angelic is necessarily Christian. Why else would we be warned that “Satan masquerades as an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14, NIV)? Why else would Paul caution the Galatian believers against “even an angel from heaven” coming to preach another gospel?

Angels too easily provide a temptation for those who want a “fix” of spirituality without bothering with God himself. Some prefer shuffling a deck of “Angel Oracle” cards over reading the Bible or listening to sermons. They prefer God in celestial soundbites.

And the pragmatist in us likes to harness mystery to personal ends. We want help from an angelic companion when pinned behind the wheel in an auto accident, perhaps, but get restive at the thought of opening up to the Sovereign who drew near in the Incarnation. Americans reach out to friendly spirits, not the Wholly (and Holy) Other. We want tamer divinities.

Yet our culture’s angelic fascination opens a window of opportunity for the church, which leads to a second question.

2. Just what are angels?

The Bible has much to say about angels, and, as significantly, not to say.

Angels poke their celestial heads repeatedly into the scenes of Bible stories. Scriptures for Advent and Easter are filled with their appearances. So are the stories of the Exodus (where God sent an angel to lead Israel out of Egypt) or the conquest of Canaan. Angels receive special attention in the books of the Bible that narrate the great acts of God (Genesis and Exodus in the Old Testament, for example, or the Gospels and Acts in the New). A majority of New Testament books mention them in some way, and the word angel or its derivatives appear in Scripture almost 300 times.

Historic Christianity continued the biblical tradition with a flourish. “Angels [became] a fundamental topic,” writes Mortimer Adler, for “such Christian theologians as Augustine, … Gregory the Great, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Pascal and Schleiermacher.”

Angelology also flowered among seventeenth-century English Christians, Anglican and Puritan. In the late 1600s, when Puritan preacher Richard Baxter detected growing skepticism about the existence of angels and demons, he wrote The Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits.

The church’s interest in angels informed much of the great poetry of the Judeo-Christian tradition—Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. And angels captured the eye of a host of medieval and Renaissance artists.

But while historic Christianity assumes that angels weave unmistakably in and out of the fabric of the world God has created, the Bible never aggrandizes them. The most common biblical terms used for angels in both Hebrew and Greek mean simply messenger. Angels are sent, and there is never any sense that the messenger is more significant than the Sender. Their task is to carry the message or do the will of the God who sent them. Twice the angel messenger made clear to John in Revelation, “Do not do it [worship me]! I am a fellow servant with you and with your brothers who hold to the testimony of Jesus. Worship God!” (Rev. 19:10; 22:9, NIV).

That angels appear more in the narrative books of the Bible, as opposed to the more didactic or pastoral, suggests that the Bible cares more about what angels say or do than what they are. Even in the case of the mysterious winged beings called seraphim and cherubim in Ezekiel and Isaiah, we learn more about their function (guarding God’s throne and communicating to mortals) than about their essence. Indeed, while the the intertestamental period saw an explosion of speculation about angels under Persian and Greek influences, the New Testament kept its reporting restrained, manifesting little interest in detailed hierarchies. Christ was always center stage; angels performed only supporting roles.

The Bible is notable in another way in its treatment of angels: Often they seem surprisingly everyday, especially in the Old Testament. With centuries of artistic and literary embellishment in the back of our minds, we may think of chubby-cheeked, ethereal, and haloed beings. But the Bible often depicts them in the guise of ordinary people. Consider the story of Abraham’s three angelic visitors in Genesis 18: Three “men” show up while he sits at the entrance to his tent. The distinction between God’s action and the angels is blurred to the point where they seem almost synonymous.

Early Christian artists took their cue from the Bible. In Christian art before the fifth century, angels look like everyday people. You know them as angels only by their role in the painting or icon. Here art imitates theology, for God never intended angels to be freelances, or anything but servants.

Angels may strike awe and fear, as they did in their appearance to shepherds at Jesus’ birth. And they speak with heavenly authority. But angels can never become a stand-in for God. Karl Barth once wrote that it is inappropriate for people to talk of angels independent of their experience of God in Christ. While God may send angels, gratitude must always be directed to God, the God we know in Christ.

The greatest danger of the new wave of angel interest rests here. The title of Ask Your Angels, for example, is no accident. “When you Ask Your Angels,” the authors write in obvious allusion to Jesus’ teaching about praying, “you can be sure that you will be answered.” Where is the Sovereign of the universe in such vague attribution? God becomes but a shadowy, sideline figure; the real action is angelic.

Thus Paul’s severe words to the Colossians apply: “Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of angels disqualify you for the prize.… Such a person goes into great detail about what he has seen.… He has lost connection with the Head” (Col. 2:18–19, NIV). Paul faces off here against an incipient heresy that would allow the majestic God to be worshiped only in the form of angels he had created. A full-blown version of this heresy, called Gnosticism, later developed a list of spirit beings through whom God had to be approached. Paul would have none of it.

When people suggest relating to angels instead of God, they repeat and yield to the medieval Catholic temptation to multiply mediators. “There’s Mary, the saints, now the angels,” explains theologian J. I. Packer. “In the end, the glory of Christ is diminished.”

3. Do angels still grace our daily lives? “Are there really forces,” as Sophy Burnham puts it, “that dive, invisible, into our petty affairs?”

Scripture clearly stands on the side of those who believe angels move among us. All the cultural fascination is not false. All our longing to see God enter our tragedies and flat stretches is not vain. Angels may deliver a message from the realms of glory. Or they may work, unsung, unseen, in ways we can only begin to think about. Why else would the writer to the Hebrews tell first-century Christians to welcome strangers, for by so doing, “some have entertained angels without knowing it” (13:2, NIV)? And, he earlier asked, “are not all angels ministering spirits sent to serve those who will inherit salvation?” (Heb. 1:14, NIV). We cherish the Pauline insistence that no mediator stands between us and God, save Jesus. But we need not thereby conclude that God cannot use angelic means to accomplish his will.

A friend of mine, a prominent publishing executive, believes this. Several months ago, his uncle’s wife of 50 years died. The family was worried about the elderly man’s possible depression, and my friend felt he had better make a visit.

When he arrived, he found his uncle in the best of spirits. Surprised, he coaxed out the explanation. “I was in a black hole of despair,” the uncle told him. “I couldn’t sleep nights, and one night I was startled to find my bedroom blazing with light, emanating from a human-sized being standing by the foot of my bed. The light radiated from its face, hands, and garments. And then I felt the angel communicating to me. It conveyed a message of personal peace. Calmness overwhelmed me. I fell asleep knowing it was going to be all right.” The uncle, a fervent evangelical believer, has been fine—and convinced about angels—ever since. So has my friend.

The editor of a leading magazine for church leaders, LEADERSHIP, tells how his young daughter lay comatose one night, on the edge of death. A hospital staff worker went by the room and saw angels “hovering” over the bed. The woman told the child’s nurse that she wanted to renew her commitment to God in response. By morning, the daughter revived. The editor—whom associates know as no sentimentalist—does not hesitate to believe that angels showed up.

Some will object, however, that most contemporary accounts contradict the biblical accent on angels as message bearers. These stories major on angels as guardians. Calvin Seminary New Testament professor Andrew Bandstra suggests a solution: The Spirit’s presence in Christians, along with the Bible, makes less necessary the need for angels as messengers. “That is why,” he argues, “most people now experience angels as ministers of God’s providential care.” Also, the stories of the prophet Elijah finding help from an angel as he fled Jezebel’s wrath or Peter’s angel-assisted prison break in Acts support the notion that angels do more than speak.

It will be argued by others that God usually employs “ordinary” means. Angelic visitation must be the exception. True enough. But if God has some cosmic “preferential option” for the unspectacular, he can still employ the extraordinary. Scripture is standing proof of that.

While we reject society’s faddish sentimentalism surrounding angels, we must acknowledge that God sometimes intervenes in ways that beggar the imagination. He can break through our routines in ways that leave us awestruck. That may be through a still, small voice, or it may happen more dramatically. “One part of the created reality is the hosts of God,” theologian Packer reminds us, “which include any number of angels.”

Their appearances may be rare, but angels are no endangered species. They move and work still. And they have not stopped guarding us, as the psalmist says, “in all [our] ways.”

A Job Description For Angels

One theologian has suggested that when we speak of angels we should do so only “softly and incidentally.” He meant that Christ, not angels, stands at the center of the biblical message.

I suggest, “softly and incidentally,” that the Bible describes the work of angels in five ways:

• Angels are God’s messengers. The original Hebrew and New Testament Greek words for angel simply mean “messenger.” The same words can designate human or divine messengers. We use the context to decide which is intended in a given passage.

Angels are God’s messengers. That is why, in the Bible, the usual human reaction to angels was to be terrified—as were the shepherds in Luke—or to fall to one’s face. Thus, the first words of the angel messenger were often, “Fear not.” Angels terrify because they bear God’s glory. Yet angels are not to be worshiped, a point made insistently in the Bible.

• Angels praise God. We often think of angels as singing praise to God. Yet the Bible never explicitly says that. The New International Version does translate Revelation 5:11 as “in a loud voice they [angels] sang.” But the Greek text literally says, “In a loud voice they said.”

I know of only two possible exceptions. One is Job 38:7, which says that “the morning stars sang together.” The verse may be using morning stars to refer to angels. The other exception may be Revelation 5:9, which says the 24 elders and the four living creatures “sang a new song.” Theologians allow for the possibility, but by no means agree, that the creatures and elders could be angelic beings.

• Angels exercise God’s providential care. Guardian angels protect us. Psalm 34:7 affirms God’s care through his angel, and Psalm 91:11 is familiar: “For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways” (NIV). This verse is familiar in part because the Devil quoted a portion of it in his temptation of Jesus (Matt. 4:6). But while he rejected how the Devil used the verse, Jesus did not reject the truth of Psalm 91. In his obedience, Jesus did experience God’s presence through the ministry of angels (Matt. 4:11).

Though they are our guardians, there is scant support in Scripture for the notion that each believer has her or his personal guardian angel. The two main texts, Matthew 18:10 and Acts 12:15, hardly warrant such a view. Yet it seems appropriate to think that God cares for us through angels. John Calvin maintained that God does so not because God needs angels but because we need them. We need them because they assure us that God exercises personal and powerful care over each one of us.

• Angels encourage Christian obedience. Hebrews 13:2; 1 Corinthians 11:10, and Matthew 6:10 all suggest in different ways that the presence of angels encourages Christians to obey God. Matthew 6:10 says, for example, “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” According to the Heidelberg Catechism (Lord’s Day 49), this request means, in part, “Help everyone carry out [his or her] work … as willingly and faithfully as the angels in heaven.” The willing, faithful service of the angels should inspire us as we seek to carry out our work for God.

• Angels cany out God’s justice. We sometimes think of angels as goody-goodies who are more interested in sentiment than justice. According to the Bible, that is not the case. Rather, angels carry out God’s judgment (Matt. 13:41; 25:31). Furthermore, the New Testament declares that angelic beings were the ones who “spoke,” “ordained” (RSV), and “put into effect” the law of God on Sinai (Heb. 2:2; Gal. 3:19; Acts 7:53).

God promised to send an angel before the Israelites to lead them out of Egypt, and then he warned them thus: “Pay attention to him and listen to what he says. Do not rebel against him; he will not forgive your rebellion, since my Name is in him” (Exod. 23:21, NIV). Here the angel clearly represents not so much God’s mercy as God’s law, order, and justice.

By Andrew J. Bandstra, professor emeritus of New Testament at Calvin Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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.

Fourth Presbyterian Church of Bethesda, Maryland, recently sponsored a celebration for the eightieth birthday of Carl F. H. Henry. It was a joyful occasion on which I and many other friends could thank God for Carl’s life and witness.

Chuck Colson, who gave the opening address, reminded us that within Richard Nixon’s inner circle he had come to know many brilliant minds. Yet, he said, he never met one who was Carl Henry’s equal.

But the supreme compliment was voiced by many in different words: “Here is a man of God through whose transparent love for God shines a light from Christ that illumines and brightens the lives of all who know him.”

Carl Henry is reckoned the evangelical theologian par excellence of the second half of this century. But Carl almost missed his calling. Like many gifted people, he had to make hard choices.

Carl could have been an entertainer. In college, partly for enjoyment and partly to support himself, he pulled bunnies out of a hat and sawed pretty ladies in two. Even today, if you invite him to your home, he may entertain your children by making coins disappear and then reappear in astonishing places. But, thank God, Carl chose not to be an entertainer.

Carl could have been a journalist. He has written over three-dozen books and too many articles to count. As the first functioning editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, he made it a banner under which evangelicals of all sorts could take their stand without shame or compromise. But thank God, Carl did not become a journalist—at least not the ordinary kind.

Carl could have become a politician—his son did, a good one. Carl used his political and journalistic skills to pull fundamentalists and evangelicals back from their half-century of isolationism to enter boldly into the public forum. His early volume, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, and his writings since have steadfastly pointed the way for all evangelicals. But, thank God, Carl did not decide to become a politician—at least not the ordinary kind.

Carl did decide to be an educator. I believe he will be remembered best for that. I first met Carl in the early forties. We were part of a group of budding scholars working on our Ph.D.’s. Later we shared an office at Wheaton College. For many years he taught at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in Chicago. Then he went west to be part of the founding faculty of Fuller Theological Seminary. Since then, he has taught short terms at many seminaries—especially Eastern Baptist and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School—and has lectured at numerous colleges and prestigious universities. In Carl’s mind, editing, lecturing, and preaching were all a part of his calling to education.

Utopia U.

Education played a role in Carl’s greatest failure and his greatest success.

From his student days, Carl dreamed of a great Christian university modeled after sixteenth-century Wittenberg or Geneva. He dreamed of drawing the best and brightest young minds, preparing them, and sending them out to win the minds and hearts of men and women to the gospel and an unequivocal evangelical faith.

Great ideas die hard, but it was not to be. Perhaps the idea was ill-advised. Augustine taught us a millennium-and-a-half ago that Christianity is best understood not high in an ivory tower, but in the roaring thoroughfares of real life. In the radical pluralism of the modern world, a thousand rays of light may penetrate better than a single beam from a lighthouse.

Carl’s greatest success was in his lifelong battle to demonstrate the inner unity of a coherent world-and-life view to living meaningfully in a world falling apart. He taught, in fact, with great power that the only world-and-life view that can ultimately satisfy the human mind and heart is compatible with, and finds its only rationale in, biblical theism and evangelical Christianity.

I believe that 50 to 100 years from now, if our Lord has not yet returned to usher in his kingdom of righteousness and peace, Carl will be remembered as one person who, in a confusing age, held forth the solid middle of a faith that fortifies the whole human person against the fraying ends of irrationalism and superstition.

Once again, heartfelt thanks to God for his servant Carl Henry.

KENNETH S. KANTZER

Just before last year’s presidential election, my church bought full-page ads in USA Today and the Washington Times. In them we warned Christians of what we thought were the dangers of voting for a presidential candidate who supports homosexual rights, lifting regulations on abortion, and distributing condoms in public schools.

Not long afterward, we heard from the Internal Revenue Service. These matters are political, the IRS explained, and the church must be silent on them. Speaking out on them violates IRS code on tax-exempt organizations.

The IRS proceeded to ask us for a mountain of information, including the names and addresses of financial supporters, so it could determine if a “church inquiry” was called for. While in good conscience we could not respond to all of their requests, we did supply several pages of Bible-based explanations of the church’s identity and role. At press time, our response was still under review.

When CHRISTIANITY TODAY covered the incident (Dec. 14, 1992, p. 64) it used the headline “Church Tests Political Limits.” The magazine should have called the story “Government Tests Limits of the Church.”

Has tax exemption become a means for government to control the church? Evidently the government thinks so. And by their meticulous compliance, many pastors, church boards, and Christian leaders seem to support that position.

Some of God’s watchmen bear powerful oracles of warning that should be delivered clearly and unapologetically. Yet, just as Judah relied on the “broken reed” of Egypt’s protection (Isa. 36:6), those watchmen hold back for fear of losing tax-exempt status.

Too often, reproving the works of darkness or warning the saints is no longer a matter of “What saith the Scriptures,” but “What saith the IRS.” Too many churches view tax exemption as a tenuously held privilege—a monthly lease paid for by surrendering the right to speak on the issues of the day.

This has not always been the case. Our Founders understood the church to be separate from government jurisdiction—not tax exempt, but tax immune. To tax was to exercise civil control in church affairs.

But lately, government has been acting as though it has a right to tax the church—and is doing the church a favor by leaving tax dollars in the church larder. This, in their view, amounts to subsidizing the church.

In return for this generous subsidy, the church and its watchmen are expected to bow obsequiously before government censors.

But this must not continue. We churches that hold to moral absolutes will find ourselves more and more out of step with the culture around us. We exist on the foundation of eternal, immutable rules. And one facet of our calling is to try all things by God’s Word and expose the works of darkness.

We cannot allow tax exemption to become the bit by which government controls the church’s mouth in that prophetic role.

We must begin by refusing to act upon a nonexistent agreement. No church that cares for the lordship of Christ ever understood or agreed that tax exemption means being government registered and controlled.

We do not need permission to speak on moral matters or to publish ads that warn other Christians about what we believe are the works of darkness. We may do this freely, on local or national levels, and we may do it without fear of the government. Also, if they so choose, people may freely give of their finances to support the church in this task.

But suppose the worst. Suppose we are forced to surrender our tax-exempt status. The loss could become a gain. We could, as it were, cast down the broken reed that splinters in our hand and embrace anew the lordship of Christ and his Word. And his words, Isaiah reminds us, put teeth into the mouth of worms—teeth that even worms can use to crush mountains and make hills into chaff.

Daniel L. Little is pastor of the Church at Pierce Creek in Binghamton, New York, and has written for The Pentecostal Evangel, Guideposts, and other publications.

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

Unfair Comparisons

Much of what William Willimon says is excellent [“I Was Wrong About Christian Schools,” Feb. 8], and it is encouraging to see Christian initiatives in delivering excellent educational services. However, he ignores some signficant factors in reporting the differences between public and Christian schools in terms of both costs and results.

Private schools in general are short on delivering educational services to the physically, emotionally, and academically disabled. Public schools are mandated by law to provide all such special services. These are expensive, and their costs are a part of the public-school bill.

Private schools also may choose their clientele. Students with behavioral problems or who do not measure up to academic standards are either not admitted or returned to public schools. Their academic records become part of the public school’s performance reports against which private schools, operating without such handicaps, measure themselves.

Christian schools can be a great asset, but when comparisons are made, they should be done fairly.

Arthur L. Moser

Peoria, Ill.

The church at worship

The point of the [Speaking Out] article [“Let’s Stop Childless Abuse” Feb. 8] is well made. Why does the church pander to every commercial and civic holiday? I once attended an unfamiliar church on Pentecost, hoping for the best. Pentecost was never mentioned; it was Children’s Day, complete with balloons and all the hilarity of a penny social.

This is the church at worship?

G. Oosterman

Greeley, Pa.

Open Bible’s investments

[Re: “Open Bible Churches Lose Funds in Alleged Scam,” News, Feb. 8], let me set the record straight.

First, the Department of International Ministries has not and will not lose any money as regards these investments. To the contrary, they have received more cash returns than they invested. The jury is still out on some of the other investors.

Second, we were never promised exorbitant interest rates.

Regarding our feeling of responsibility to notify our people, I told [the article’s author], “We are monitoring the situation very carefully and are prepared to take whatever action we feel is appropriate.” Apparently, that is not the slant he wanted to communicate.

Ray Smith, President

Open Bible Standard Churches

Des Moines, Iowa

Editorial honesty

Bravo! and kudos to the author of “Homosexuals in Uniform?” [Editorial, Feb. 8]. One doesn’t often encounter such honesty! It takes real courage to call homosexuality “unnatural, unhealthy, and ungodly.” Not to mention “indecent”!

R. B. Johnston

Fort Wayne, Ind.

I share Chaplain Webster’s disdain for homosexuality. However, we live in a pluralistic society—not a theocracy. The matter of allowing gays into the military must be resolved on a constitutional basis, not a religious one.

As to his concern for preserving the “moral and spiritual health of both the armed forces and the American commonwealth,” I would point out that in the same context that God’s Word condemns homosexuality it also condems other sinful practices that are commonly practiced within the armed forces as well as society at large. By what measure does there presently exist in either one a “moral and spiritual health”?

Ronald E. Frye, President

Christian Respondent, Inc.

Aitkin, Minn.

We Have Finished The Race

Some of us from the Thursday-morning Bible study decided to combine our zeal for evangelism with our love of competition: We embarked on a race to see who would be the first to lead Dan Rastler to the Lord.

Doug was first off the block by coming up with two first-baseline tickets to the Cubs’ home opener. Doug and Dan had a great time, but Doug froze up on the way home. “I had the perfect opening when Dan started talking about his marriage, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask him where he would go if he died,” Doug recalls.

Jim came closer: “I took Dan fishing, and conditions were perfect. I mean, you’re in a boat for five hours, no one’s around to distract you—and you’re fishing! The perfect chance to talk about another Fisherman. But the weather was so nice, we were catching fish, and Dan was enjoying himself so much. It didn’t seem right to get religious on him.”

Not to stretch the fishing analogy, but I almost hooked Dan myself. I knew he loves old cars, so I invited him over to help me replace the generator on my ’57 DeSoto. Things were looking up as he stroked those big fins and then leaned over the fender to hold the new generator in place as I tightened the bolts. Then came the moment I had rehearsed for all week. As I reattached the battery cable, I looked up and said, “You know, Dan, that’s just like it is in real life. We all need to be hooked up to a Higher Source of Power.”

He said he’d been thinking of trying transcendental meditation himself.

The following Thursday we felt pretty depressed. And more than a little ashamed. We vowed never again to turn evangelism into a game but to keep being friends to Dan and let God do the rest.

But all was not lost. Dan unexpectedly walked into the restaurant where we meet and sat down with us. After a little small talk, he said, “You know, the Good Lord’s been so nice to give me friends like you, I just might get saved one of these days.”

John Stott and the charismatics

I have been a fan of John Stott for over 25 years; all his efforts are to be commended, especially in his concern for reconciliation between charismatics and noncharismatics. However, his reference to the “signs and wonders movement”—a common code name for John Wimber and the Vineyard Christian Fellowship—is somewhat misleading [“John Stott Speaks Out,” Feb. 8]. The Vineyard movement espouses the “now and not yet” kingdom theology of George Eldon Ladd.

We do not make “miracles the norm of the Christian life” or say “every disease can be miraculously healed.” But we do believe in praying for the physically sick and emotionally wounded and believe that God often allows us to experience the “now” of the kingdom.

Pastor George Mallone

Grace Vineyard Christian Fellowship

Arlington, Tex.

The New Testament silence

Thank you for publishing the excellent article by Michael J. Gorman entitled “Why Is the New Testament Silent About Abortion?” [Jan. 11]. I particularly appreciated the evidence he presented of a consensus against abortion that existed in both Jewish and Christian thought when the New Testament books were being written.

When a sinful action is clearly identified and condemned in the Old Testament (as is abortion), why must that condemnation be repeated in the New Testament in order for it to be valid today? Did God change his mind about what was sinful during the time between the two Testaments? And what about other sins that are not mentioned in the New Testament? Shall we declare that Christians have freedom of choice regarding bestiality and sadomasochism simply because these aberrant sexual practices are not mentioned in the New Testament?

Dr. David Reagan

McKinney, Tex.

Silence is silent! We cannot properly argue this either way. To dredge up contemporary literature is interesting and may be informative, but to equate these with canonical material undermines the very reason for a canon. If, as we claim, the Holy Spirit inspired Scripture and the selection of the canon, we should not try to change it when it does not say what we want it to say.

Robert G. Tallent

Marlton, NJ.

It seems the article has accepted too much of the common conclusion that only the New Testament really counts today.

Pastor C. Bruce Anderson

Calvary Baptist Church

Yankton, S.Dak.

A needed framework

I appreciated your coverage of the Earth Summit, and the article by Loren Wilkinson [“How Christian Is the Green Agenda?” Jan. 11]. His outline of theological issues that need to be addressed should be a framework for a major effort by evangelical theologians and scientists.

Our responses to many environmental issues are directly related to our environmental ethic; this is precisely the area where evangelicals can provide needed guidance. As Wilkinson’s article showed, environmental issues are relevant to many areas evangelicals have always considered of major importance, including missions, stewardship of monetary and other resources, and human health and social problems.

My hope is that we will seize the grand opportunity to provide a “team effort” of leadership in this important area of debate. If we do not, there are many other groups that will, and in the process some might establish an environmental ethic that may not at all be acceptable.

Raymond E. Grizzle

Campbell University

Buies Creek, N.C.

I wonder why there seems to be interest in rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. God has sworn to destroy this material earth. The use of New Age terms and thinking should alert any Bible-believing Christian to this apostasy. The Bible does not teach shalom or true peace, as Wilkinson suggests. Rather, it is presented as peace with God the Father through the Son at the cross, through his blood. He is in the people-saving business and has charged us with the responsibility of getting out this message.

John Schaefer

Herndon, Va.

Poet T. S. Eliot spoke well and truly: “A wrong attitude toward nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude toward God, and the consequence is an inevitable doom.”

Historian Lynn White, who tried to lay the blame for what he chose to label our “ecologic crisis” on the author of Genesis, and thus on Christianity, apparently overlooked the pervasive nature and influence of sin, especially greed, in all of man’s relationships—not least those involving the Earth and other forms of life that depend on it for their material sustenance.

However, many critics can be useful teachers. A credible case can be made that the members of the visible body of Christ on Earth have been lax in teaching each other and the rest of humanity that Earth and all it contains should be objects of love and respectful treatment precisely because they are God’s creation, and he has charged us to have responsible dominion over them, husbanding them unto fruitfulness.

Leonard Johnson

Troy, Idaho

If having large families causes criticism of Christianity among environmentalists, so be it [“Are 10 Billion People a Blessing?” sidebar, Jan. 11].

By using the cultural mandate (”to replenish the earth, subdue it and have dominion over it”) as a call for Christians to be “green,” one must also take seriously the cultural mandate’s instructions to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28). There is no reason why Christians can’t do both.

Michelle Bruinsma Roberts

Abbeville, S.C.

Scripture out of context

Tod Connor’s article on Gaia, “Is the Earth Alive,” was interesting and informative [Jan. 11]. Unfortunately, the two Scripture quotes were taken out of context and given meanings that appear to be foreign to their authors.

Apparently Connor wants to say that “if you defile the land it will vomit you out” means the Israelites were not to harm the environment (Lev. 18:28). Even a cursory reading of Leviticus 18 will show the author intended to say that incestuous sexual relations, homosexuality, child sacrifice, and bestiality would defile the land and result in the Israelites being “vomited out.” Similarly, he quotes 2 Chronicles 7:14 in an attempt to reconcile the statements of Mother Teresa and Mr. Lovelock.

Clearly, God has said he will control the environment as a means to wake people up when they begin to sin. And we will not change the environmental conditions if God intends to judge the sins of the people, for we will be fighting against him.

Bruce J. Taylor

Jupiter, Fla.

After reading the article by Tod Connor, I was tempted to go out and stomp on the grass, cut down a tree, and kill an animal for supper, just the way God intended when he said we are to subdue the earth.

Richard A. Bennett

Pulaski, N.Y.

Disappointing selectivity

As a pastor, author, and executive in the United Pentecostal Church International (UPCI), and a longtime CT subscriber, I am disappointed by your selectivity in reporting on our movement of 1.5 million constituents. You have consistently chosen not to discuss UPCI or its newsworthy events, yet you recently ran an item, evidently prompted by an ex-member, that erroneously anticipates a major schism [News, Jan. 11].

Of the five sources CT named, two left the UPCI years ago, and two apparently plan to leave soon. Consequently, the article is one-sided and misleading. In 1992 our general conference passed, by an overwhelming majority, a resolution calling for each minister to sign an annual reaffirmation of our identifying beliefs. It appears that, as usual, we will enjoy net growth in the coming year. Perhaps CT should cover our general conference in 1993 and publish a follow-up article on the accuracy of its predictions.

David K. Bernard

Austin, Tex.

As this issue was going to press, over 400 current or former UPCI ministers had just concluded a meeting in Spring, Texas, to discuss the future of the denomination.

—Eds.

A Calvinist review title?

Only a Calvinist could have titled a book review “If the Rapture Occurs, This Magazine Will Be Blank” [Books, Jan. 11]. (Perseverance of the saints, and all that.) An Arminian, however, would have titled it, “If the Rapture Occurs, We Dearly Hope This Magazine Will Be Blank (though we suspect there are a couple of guys in the sales department who are going to be left behind and will use this opportunity to promote themselves to editor, in which case you’ll probably want to ignore everything you read in this magazine, anyway).”

Greg Brothers

Boise, Idaho

Hillary Clinton: Angels Are Guiding My Lite!” proclaimed the cover of the National Examiner. But it was a typical tabloid bait-and-switch tactic.

They offered the testimony of an unnamed source that Ms. Rodham Clinton believes angels will “guide and protect her, Bill and Chelsea throughout the next four years.” And they had a photo of an angel lapel pin she wears. But the best proof they could offer was a brief prayer in which the First Lady didn’t mention angels at all. Nevertheless, the tabloid’s source was quick to say, “I’m certain that this was really a plea to her angels.”

At last angels have joined the ranks of the late Elvis, the polyandrous Liz, and the racially ambivalent Michael as cultural icons for America’s Slim-Fast-swilling, soap opera-watching millions.

But the angels of popular culture are more like celestial versions of the fairy godmother from Disney’s Cinderella than they are like the mighty archangel Michael who successfully drove the Devil and his evil angels from heaven and exiled them to earth.

The angels of the tabloids are cosmic mascots who use magical powers to make our lives just a little sweeter than they might have been. Perhaps that is why the Examiner juxtaposed its Hillary Clinton headline next to one about the healing power of crystals.

Want to tell angel facts from current fads? Look to Timothy Jones’s article beginning on page 18.

Cover artist Michael Annino himself has a special interest in angels. He was not named for an Uncle Mike or even the Mikey from the Life cereal box. He was named for that warrior archangel. When he was a boy, artist Michael’s mother gave him a medal portraying Saint Michael, which he wore faithfully for many years. He has long enjoyed reading about angels, but our cover was his first professional opportunity to paint one.

DAVID NEFF, Managing