New Wine in Old Wineskins: Evangelicals and Liberals in a Small-Town Church, by R. Stephen Warner (University of California Press, 355 pp.; $35.00, hardcover). Reviewed by Joel Carpenter, director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

Why do evangelical churches seem to be particularly strong in America? What gives American religion its distinctive shape and dynamism? Is the evangelical resurgence a threat to American freedom?

R. Stephen Warner takes on these questions in his book New Wine in Old Wineskins. But he answers them in a unique way—by telling the story of one congregation, the Presbyterian Church in Mendocino, California, from the 1950s to the 1980s. Warner, a sociologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, argues that even though this local Church’s history is unique, it typifies the American Protestant experience and so allows him to explore the changes in American religion and culture from the years of Eisenhower to those of Reagan.

Also reviewed in this section:

Twilight of a Great Civilization,by Carl F. H. Henry

Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim,by Malcolm Muggeridge

Purity Makes the Heart Grow Stronger,by Julia Duin

Book Briefs:

Heaven: A History,by Pauline McDannell and Bernhard Lang

The Hope of Heaven,by Helen Oppenheimer

Knowing the Truth About Heaven and Hell,by Harry Blamires

Harlots of the Desert,by Benedicta Ward

The Power of Ordinary Christians,by Margaret Wold

Everyday Discipleship for Ordinary People,by Stuart Briscoe

Ordinary Saints,by Robert Benne

You Are What You Say,by Karen Burton Mains

Animals and Christianity,edited by Andrew Linzey and Tom Regan

Unlike most sociological studies, this book contains a sparkling, richly detailed narrative. We meet beatnik artists, a Chinese-American social-activist pastor, and communal hippies. And the church’s story is certainly not dry or static. A “faith ministry” to evangelize the hippies develops, a revival breaks out, and a charismatic fellowship emerges to energize Mendocino Presbyterian Church. The congregation calls a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary, and in a decade its membership doubles.

Using this case study, Warner offers some insights about the recent evangelical resurgence. The strength of evangelical religion is partly a consequence of the voluntary, “free market” religious system in America, he asserts. The laity have had their way here, and they support churches that respond to their perceived needs and reflect their values. Evangelicalism gets the popular edge because its theology literally affirms the traditional beliefs and symbols of Christianity. Evangelicalism simply means what it says, and ordinary people can embrace, proclaim, and explain it with confidence.

Evangelicals’ intensely personal and parochial orientation, which liberals often disdain, also contributes to the movement’s strength. The Mendocino evangelicals made marriage and family the primary metaphors of their relationships: with Christ, the fellowship, and the community, as well as at home. Evangelicals’ embrace of marriage holds out a community ideal to our mobile and impersonal society, Warner explains, and is one reason for the group’s appeal.

Another community-building feature of evangelicalism is that it demands that people recognize their mutual dependence. This “culture of public humbling,” says Warner, opens the way for communal sharing and charity. Thus it is an open question, he argues, whether liberals’ focus on the “big issues” of public affairs promotes more human solidarity than evangelicals’ active caring for each other and their neighbors.

The author also doubts that evangelicals pose a threat to democratic institutions. While he grants that politicized fundamentalism has flexed some muscle and scared others with its theocratic rhetoric, he insists that evangelicals tend to make politics a low priority. More than anything else, Warner believes, evangelicals want respect. They have been angered and insulted by seeing the government lend support to beliefs and behavior of which they disapprove, but they want their values legitimated more than legislated. Evangelicals’ contribution to public discourse will most likely remain civil, since they have deep roots in American democratic traditions. Moreover, evangelicals want to live peaceably in the larger society; they want to please God and get along with their neighbors.

Finally, Warner argues that there are two sets of tensions at work in American Protestantism: the liberal-conservative division, and the conflicts between institutionalized, accommodating religion and innovative, “nascent” religion. The interaction of these two, he claims, provides a helpful grid for interpreting American Protestantism.

Though most people rarely, if ever, read sociological studies, here is one that a variety of readers should find useful. Besides sociology of religion courses, pastors and pastors-to-be of mainline congregations will find New Wine to be an extremely valuable case study of the promise and pitfalls of evangelical renewal. Pastors and lay leaders in evangelical denominations will find much to help them understand the larger religious scene. Liberal Protestants and secular academics will get a deeper understanding—and perhaps appreciation—of evangelicals. And evangelical laypeople will better understand the strengths and weaknesses of their own movement.

In sum, Warner’s book is a major achievement, and it deserves a wide readership.

A Prophetic Jeremiad

Twilight of a Great Civilization, by Carl F. H. Henry (Crossway, 192 pp.; $12.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Richard John Neuhaus, director of the Rockford Institute Center on Religion and Society, New York; his latest book is The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World (Harper & Row).

At what he describes as “the unmellowed age of thirty-four” Carl Henry wrote The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, and more than 40 years later the reverberations are still being felt. If by “mellowed” one means anything resembling complacency, a still unmellowed Carl Henry is at it again, as he has been indefatigably at it all these years. The “it” he is at is, first of all and last of all, the unembarrassed proclamation of God’s saving work in Christ. The acceptance of that gospel, however, must issue in myriad dimensions of discipleship. In the last of the 17 brief and spirited chapters of the present book, he looks back at Uneasy Conscience and allows that its focus on regeneration might have slighted the importance of government, law, and public reason in the responsible Christian life.

One of Henry’s favored words is cognitive, by which he means that the Christian must comprehend and contend for the truth claims of the faith. “Unless Christian scholars affirm the truth of Christianity in the context of public reason, rival religions will not respect its claim to universal truth or consider it worthy of a universal hearing,” he writes. In the light of that imperative, he is not much impressed by the vaunted achievements of “the evangelical renaissance.” In almost every chapter—whether the subject is evangelical colleges or the moral shoddiness of much money raising—Henry returns with unremitting urgency to the possibility that evangelicalism will miss, or has already missed, its historical moment of opportunity and obligation. There is naught here for the comfort of self-congratulatory Christians who regale one another with the success stories of evangelicalism’s having arrived.

“We need to do more than to sponsor a Christian sub-culture,” he declares. “We need a Christian counterculture that sets itself alongside the secular rivals and publishes openly the difference that belief in God and His Christ makes in the arena of thought and action.”

Even what he sees of the subculture is not all that inspiring. Far from it. Henry takes seriously the work of James Davison Hunter and others who have exposed troubling evidence that in the institutions of evangelicalism a veneer of Christian profession obscures a massive accommodation to a culture fundamentally at odds with biblical truth. At the same time, Henry will not ingratiate himself with sundry theocrats who propose that society be reconstructed on the basis of “Bible law.” With unyielding integrity, Carl Henry continues to insist that there is no substitute, either conceptually or in practice, for making the Christian case in a world that has not heard or does not understand or has knowingly turned against the truth. Were the term not so debased by overuse, one might say that Carl Henry is prophetic.

The jeremiad, or prolonged lamentation, is a vulnerable genre, though its power is demonstrated in more than one of these essays. It exacts a price, however, and at points Henry may paint with too broad a brush. He is too dismissive, for example, of Mark Ellingsen’s probings toward an evangelical-ecumenical rapprochement, and it is certainly not accurate to suggest that George Lindbeck’s proposal for theology in the “cultural-linguistic” mode is necessarily hostile to the question of objective truth. I would quibble, and at times more than quibble, over other arguments and asides. But in the space allotted the only honorable thing to do, the only honest thing to do, is to cheer the witness of a man who simply will not stop reminding us who we are called to be for a world that, beyond twilight, beyond midnight, is called to the risen Son.

Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim, by Malcolm Muggeridge (Harper & Row, 150 pp.; $14.95, hardcover). Reviewed by K. L. Billingsley, the author of a forthcoming book on the National Council of Churches (The Ethics and Public Policy Center/University Press of America).

When Malcolm Muggeridge set out to write this book at age 84, a friend doubted whether, as a “halfblind scribbler,” he would be able to pull it off. Muggeridge not only did so, but turned in his usual extraordinary performance.

In his Confessions, Muggeridge writes about himself in the third person during different stages of life: the child, the adolescent, the journalist, the soldier. He likens his pilgrimage to that of Bunyan in Pilgrim’s Progress, or of Blake unraveling the Golden String that ends at heaven’s gate.

From the beginning, Muggeridge felt himself a stranger in this world. Particularly touching are the passages about his Bible, which he reads secretly, through all stages of life, in Egypt, India, and the USSR. In the Gospels he “discovered a new world,” and a depth found nowhere else. Later in his life, he notes that the most marked-up passages concern the Passion, and bear “stains that might be from tears.”

Unfortunately, like many of his fellows, he gets detoured into the blind alleys of the senses, what he calls the “death camp of carnality.” The pretext is the pursuit of happiness, but happiness, he writes at one point in his diary, “is like a young deer, fleet and beautiful.” But after the kill it becomes “a piece of stinking flesh.”

Then there are jousts with the liberal mind, which he sees as “systematically dismantling our Western way of life … dethroning God, undermining all its certainties.” Rejecting God, the liberal mind venerates science and power. The journalist is an eyewitness to the adulation of Stalin—a “class war Napoleon”—by the brightest lights of the West, including clergy. It was at this point that he rejected “earthly solutions.”

And here Muggeridge confirms the key role that his Soviet experience played in his pilgrimage. The Russian Christians with whom he worshiped expected nothing from their leaders, much less from the West. To God, then, they turned, and “[took] the Journalist with them.” He considers it strange that “I should have found myself nearest to You, Jesus, in the land where for half a century past the practice of the Christian religion has been most ruthlessly suppressed.”

On November 27, 1982, Muggeridge was received into the Roman Catholic Church, but he does not identify this as the time of his conversion. Some have speculated that it was a final way of thumbing his nose at Stalin and his fellow-traveling socialists. But here he explains that “it was the Catholic Church’s firm stand against contraception and abortion” that most influenced his decision.

As for embracing Christianity, this is “a question of faith, not of rational proof, but at the same time a reasonable faith. Provided one accepts the initial jump of the Incarnation, everything else follows.” Indeed, the Incarnation is central to Muggeridge’s faith. He dwells on what John Stott calls “basic Christianity” from which it is all too easy to stray, under the guise of “growth.”

Although the book covers some of the same ground found in his autobiographical works, here it is cast in a different context and from a different point of view. “For every situation and eventuality,” Muggeridge writes, “there is a parable if you look carefully enough.” Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim is a parable for a confused and spiritually bankrupt age.

Purity Makes the Heart Grow Stronger: Sexuality and the Single Christian, by Julia Duin (Servant, 133 pp.; $6.95, paper). Reviewed by Janet Kobobel, book editor for Focus on the Family Publishing.

Society pressures singles to be sexually active. The church pretends sex doesn’t exist for singles. Single Christians are thus caught in the middle, not fitting comfortably in either world.

That is the thesis of Julia Duin’s book, Purity Makes the Heart Grow Stronger. A reporter for the Houston Chronicle and a single in her thirties, Duin argues that the church assumes abstinence is a condition of teens and college students to be cast aside when they marry. Unfortunately, a growing number of members in America’s congregations are in their twenties and thirties and so fall into the “abnormal” state of singleness. And most of them will remain unmarried, if not chaste, for their entire lives.

Purity is more than a diatribe against society and the church; it is a paean to the rewards of replacing sexual intimacy with intimacy with Christ. That song has been sung before in many books, but Duin brings to her work a refreshing insistence that singles are sexual beings even when they are celibate.

While Duin tells the reader that abstinence is not a vocation for the fainthearted, she advocates redirecting those energies rather than repressing them. “Unfulfilled sexual desires are such a source of pain that we often feel it is simpler to deny them altogether.… This can kill all tenderness in us. Instead of being submitted to Christ, who makes us face our pain, we choose the Law.”

She goes on to explain that a policy of refusing to touch others or to be open emotionally is a counterfeit way of handling sexual feelings. “Repressed people are lonely, driven, controlling, and [merely] functional,” Duin notes.

Throughout the book, she sprinkles tidbits of how she deals with her own sexual feelings, basically through diverting that energy into work, jogging, and church involvement. But she admits: “Then there are the times when all the hugs, activities, and cold showers can’t dispel our longings for sex. I take certain factors involved in sex, such as being vulnerable and surrendered, and express them in a nonsexual way.”

Duin suggests that the single who chooses chastity is like the woman who poured expensive perfume on Jesus’ feet—a lavish gift, a sacrificial gift, but an appropriate gift. It is an image that stirs and ennobles the heart of a single.

But then, Duin tells us, there are the shortsighted Esaus who sell their sexual birthright for a bowl of lentil stew. That is a poignant portrait no one wants to be identified with. But most singles know an Esau—and many have become Esaus.

Herein lies the book’s main problem. In the author’s rush to encourage the pouring out of the extravagant, fragrant oil, she fails to create an authentic picture of those who make other choices. She writes in blacks and whites. Sexual abstinence creates a satisfied celibate. Sexual expression results in promiscuity. One bite of this apple, and you’ll eat the whole orchard.

Such a limited and unrealistic depiction is especially disheartening when contrasted to Duin’s resonant call to face sexual feelings rather than repress them. At this point, she quickly slips from genuineness to a caricature of “fallen” celibates.

Neither does Duin deal adequately with older singles who date. She offers no clues as to how to develop an emotionally rich intimacy and yet maintain a physical relationship that is God-honoring. That is perhaps the hardest “vocation” of all.

Book Briefs

Mapping Heaven

Heaven is where everyone wants to end up, but few know what to expect once they get there. Several new books provide some helpful travel tips on that blessed place.

Heaven: A History, by Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, is, according to its publisher, the first such history ever written (Yale, $29.95). It covers almost 3,000 years of both philosophical and popular reflections on that place of final rest. The first Christians said that there was no marriage, that bodies would be spiritual, and that there would be a heavenly liturgy. The Fathers of the church developed the notion of a glorified material world. Medievals promised a heavenly city. The Renaissance pointed to the pleasures of a paradisaical garden. And our coevals offer, among other things, a heaven on earth. There are lots of illustrations, from a drawing representing the universe as seen by the ancient Semites to Charles Anderson’s 1974 painting entitled The Rapture.

The preceding book asks the questions, What will an eternity in heaven be like? and, Whom are we likely to meet there? but the next book, The Hope of Heaven (Cowley Publications, $7.95), asks the question, What happens when we die? According to the author, Anglican Helen Oppenheimer, heaven is full of antinomies: play and maturity, body and spirit, love and fulfillment. And “the best images of Heaven are images of hospitality.”

A third celestial volume is Knowing the Truth About Heaven and Hell: Our Choices and Where They Lead Us (Servant, $7.95), by Harry Blamires. A pupil of C. S. Lewis’s and later his friend, Blamires is happily known for both fiction and nonfiction with a Christian cast. Like Lewis, he too treats heaven and hell as destinations. “The kingdom of Heaven is to be the focus of the Christian hopes and strivings.” Blamires’s book is one of a handily written, handsomely packaged series under the general editorship of J. I. Packer and Peter Kreeft. With it were also published Knowing the Truth About God’s Love, by Peter Kreeft, and Knowing the Truth About the Resurrection, by William L. Craig.

From unwholeness to holiness

Many Christians are familiar with the early Fathers of the church; some have heard of a few mothers of the church; but there were also, almost completely unknown to us, such women as Pelagia, Maria, Thais, and Mary of Egypt, who traversed the sandy, windswept road from prostitution to sanctity.

They and some others have been memorialized in Harlots of the Desert (Cistercian Publications, $29.95, hardcover; $11.95, paperback). The subtitle tells all: “A study of repentance in early monastic sources.” The translator and author is Benedicta Ward, an Anglican sister of the Love of God; she is also a patristics scholar, educating American college students at Saint Michael’s Hall, Oxford.

She writes, “I first thought of translating these texts after meeting Maria, a very young girl living in London as a prostitute. One evening she approached me and asked me to help her get away from a life she hated. While we talked, a car drove up, and Maria was taken away by her protectors. I dedicate this book to her, asking that the mercy of God may come upon us all.”

From ordinariness to extraordinariness

There is hope for the ordinary bloke, if there is any truth in a trio of recently published books.

Margaret Wold, who teaches at California Lutheran University, writes in The Power of Ordinary Christians: Witnessing in Jesus’ Name (Augsburg, $6.95) that God is “calling us ordinary Christians to be his witnesses to a new age for the church and the world.”

Stuart Briscoe, who pastors in Waukesha, Wisconsin, develops this theme in Everyday Discipleship for Ordinary People: Giving the Routine of Life the Glow of Heaven (Victor, $10.95). He begins with a red-haired, blue-eyed young woman who identified herself as “a disciple of Jesus Christ very skillfully disguised as a machine operator.” Whenever he thinks of her, he is reminded that ordinary folks make wonderful disciples. The rest of the book is about the ordinariness and indeed wonderfulness of this discipleship.

Robert Benne of Roanoke College has written an introduction to Christian life entitled Ordinary Saints (Fortress, $13.95). He confesses, “Teaching religion and ethics to college students, like facing a firing squad, concentrates the mind wonderfully.” These same students wanted “a straightforward and comprehensive account of the Christian life,” and this book is the result. Using a Lutheran lens, the author focuses on how ordinary people can know that “the extraordinary grace of God in Christ … is freely offered to them.”

Ingenuous and ingenious

You Are What You Say (Zondervan, $7.95) sounds like the headline in a supermarket tabloid; instead, it is the title of a book by Karen Burton Mains that offers a “cure for the troublesome tongue.” Its style is ingenuous, and its remedies are ingenious. It contains the sort of spirituality one might expect to find in the writings of one of the early mothers of the church. Probably no one else in the long and often-tedious history of Christian writing has treated the subject at such length and with such brightness as Mains. “There is power in the tongue,” she concludes, “power of life or death.”

Animals in the afterlife

Is Fido wagging his tail in heaven tonight? That depends on how much immortality there is in your theological universe. Expanding this universe somewhat are the 55 readings contained in Animals and Christianity (Crossroad, $16.95), edited by Andrew Linzey and Tom Regan. As these men look at it, the problem is somewhat larger than Fido’s wagging a tail in the afterlife. Rather, it has to do with such things as animal experimentation in this life, fur trapping, hunting for sport, intensive farming, and killing for food. Among the authors quoted at length in the book are Bonaventure and Karl Barth, C. S. Lewis and E. F. Schumacher, Paul Tillich and Leo Tolstoy.

By William Griffin, religious books editor for Publishers’ Weekly and the author of the recently released novel The Fleetwood Correspondence (Doubleday).

RICHARD FOWLER¹Richard Fowler is director of the Minirth-Meier Clinic of Longview, Texas.

When I was in graduate school I had the opportunity to share my faith with a classmate. As I relayed to my friend his need for personally accepting Christ as Savior and Lord, he asked, “Am I supposed to feel any different if I trust Christ?”

I promptly read to him the section in Campus Crusade’s “Four Spiritual Laws” booklet entitled “Do Not Depend on Feelings.” It reads, “The promise of God’s Word, not our feelings, is our authority.… We, as Christians, do not depend on feelings or emotions, but we place our faith (trust) in the trustworthiness of God and the promises of His Word.”

The booklet goes on to describe the analogy of the engine, the coal car, and the caboose. The engine is the fact of God and his Word; the coal car is our faith or trust; whereas the caboose is our feelings or emotions. The section concludes by saying that “the train will run with or without the caboose” and that “it would be futile to attempt to pull the train by the caboose.” At the time, I thought it summed everything up rather nicely.

Several years ago, however, I was challenged by a Christian psychologist to rethink this analogy. He felt the popular Christian premise that we should not listen to our emotions when making decisions assumes that emotions are merely psychological “highs” or irrational states of elation that elicit “tingly” and “mushy” feelings inside. My friend believed that most evangelicals do not understand how emotions work and thus downplay their importance. He was convinced that emotions, in fact, play a crucial part in our finding God. I decided to take him up on his challenge.

The Marriage Of Left And Right

An important angle to this long-debated issue fell into place as I began to research the functions of the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Scientists have discovered that, generally speaking, the right side of the brain controls our emotions, our creativity, and our subjective thinking, while pattern and logical thinking are characteristic of the left side.

Since the right side of the brain controls intuition, artistic expression, and emotional reactions to situations, it also controls our sensitivity to people. Further, the right side of the brain seems to be very important in solidifying facts into our conscious memory. For example, I can recall exactly where I was and what I was doing when I first heard that President Kennedy was assassinated. The same is true for my memory of the space shuttle tragedy. However, there are many other important national and political events that cannot be so quickly and vividly drawn to mind. I remember every detail of the assassination and the crash because of the great emotional impact they carried for me. The right side of my brain functioned simultaneously with the left and indelibly etched all the data concerning these events.

It seems that the left and right sides of the brain, the cognitive and the emotional, work together to anchor an event securely in our minds.

Rediscovering Our Hearts

With scientific discovery in hand, I decided to look to the Scriptures to see what is said on the matter. I was surprised to find that my new insights were actually a few thousand years old. The idea that our will, intellect, and emotions do and should work together is embedded in the very common biblical concept of the heart.

The biblical words for heart connote “the thoughts or feelings of the mind.” Scripture sees the heart as what actually controls our will and intellect and integrates them with our emotions. In Jesus’ comments to the highly religious Pharisees, we see this usage borne out: “You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied against you: ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts [thoughts, actions, and emotions] are far from me’ ” (Matt. 15:7–8, NIV).

When you bake a cake, you first mix up all the ingredients. After the cake is cooled and ready to eat, there is no way to separate the ingredients again. The same is true with the heart: It brings together our will, intellect, and emotions; but once it uses these to bring about some action or decision, there is no way to go back and identify the separate ingredients. In a deep and mysterious way our heart represents our whole self. Solomon wrote, “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life” (Prov. 4:23, NIV).

We can also see the importance of the heart in a negative example from Exodus 10. We are told that Pharaoh had a “hardened heart.” Though he saw what was happening, and could say, “I repent” with his will and reason, and though he could hear the groanings of his people (the use of all his faculties), Scripture says his heart would not change.

The apostle Paul also saw a need for an intellectual as well as an emotional affirmation in order to solidify our salvation experience when he stated, “If you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved” (Rom. 10:9–10, NIV). In other words, our belief emerges from our hearts, where our intellect and our emotions work together.

The Heart Express

So how would I now answer my friend if he asked whether or not he should feel anything when he puts his trust in Christ? Piggybacking on the train illustration, I believe a more helpful picture can be drawn.

In our experience of faith, the engine could represent our will or intellect (instead of facts). The coal car can represent our emotions. Just as an engine does not move without fuel, so our intellect dries up and becomes lifeless without emotional support. And just as a coal car cannot pull a train by itself, likewise our emotions are directionless and lead us nowhere without the balance of our intellect. But when the heart brings these elements together, the wonder of combustion and movement occurs.

So what happened to the caboose? The caboose to this train is works (instead of emotions). We always want and expect to see the caboose on a train. It is a little disappointing to watch a train go by and not see the caboose. In the same way, we expect to see good works in the life of the believer. They belong there. While they can never pull us to heaven, their rightful place is following the engine and coal car.

So it is in our lives. When our will and intellect join hands with our emotions, the spark of faith is kindled and a glorious journey down the tracks of the Truth of God’s Word is begun. The unalterable destination is heaven.

W. WARD GASQUE AND LAUREL GASQUE¹W. Ward Gasque is the E. Marshall Sheppard Professor of Biblical Criticism at Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Laurel Gasque is a cultural historian and author.

Frederick Fyvie Bruce, 78, towers as a giant over the field of contemporary biblical scholarship. His commentary on the Greek text of the Acts of the Apostles (1951) is generally recognized as the first important work in what has since become a contemporary renaissance of evangelical theological research. He is the author of more than 40 books and nearly 2,000 articles and reviews. His main love has been the letters of the apostle Paul, writing a commentary for each epistle, two on the Acts of the Apostles, as well as a much-used textbook, Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free (Eerdmans).

From 1959 until his retirement in 1978, Bruce occupied the prestigious John Rylands Chair of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at Manchester University in England, where he supervised more Ph.D. students in biblical studies than any other professor in British history.

Although he has had to deal with a heart condition, Bruce’s health now seems to have stabilized. Yet even during two years of uncertain health, he managed to edit several commentaries, revise three of his own, and complete a new book, The Canon of Scripture (IVP).

Bruce has been a pioneer among evangelical biblical scholars, and like all pioneers, he is a man of both vision and strong opinion. Not all evangelicals will agree with the positions he takes, but all can appreciate his commitment to thorough and painstaking scholarship.

In one of your early writings you mention your father, who was an evangelist in Scotland, saying you had the sense of his looking over your shoulder as you wrote. Did he have an influence in your becoming a biblical scholar?

Yes, a very great influence—but in no sense was it an inhibiting influence. He always encouraged me to think for myself, and that’s one of the many debts I owe him.

Has your church tradition, the Plymouth Brethren, shaped your study and teaching of the Bible?

As far as my experience goes, it has been part of the tradition of the “Open Brethren” to encourage independent Bible study and independent thinking, without following one school of thought rigidly as sometimes happens in other ecclesiastical groups.

Your university education was in the Greek and Latin classics rather than in biblical studies. You subsequently started a Ph.D. but never finished. Why?

I had an offer to take a university lectureship in Edinburgh, Scotland, and I seized it. Wisely, I think.

I have often felt disposed to lecture some of my American colleagues and their students on what I call “the cult of the Ph.D.” The idea of the Ph.D. in itself sometimes seems to be more important than the actual work you do to get it!

When you were a university student, you were involved in Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. And you have continued a lifelong association with this evangelical student movement. What has been your involvement?

My involvement has taken two forms. As a university teacher, I have been available as a senior adviser to Christian student groups. If they have wanted to avail themselves of my advice, or use me as a speaker from time to time, I have helped them in that way.

My other major involvement, beginning in 1940, has been with what was originally the Biblical Research Committee, which was to become the Tyndale Fellowship for Biblical Research, an association of evangelical men and women who wish to engage in serious biblical research.

When you began your academic career, there were very few people in British universities who were committed to combining an evangelical faith with academic biblical studies. Things are quite different today, I believe.

Oh, completely different! For instance, in the first edition of The New Bible Commentary (IVP, 1953) there were very few contributors who were actually involved in university teaching. The people just were not around. Ten years later, when the revised edition was being worked on, the situation was completely changed: We had lots of younger scholars who were not only holding teaching posts in universities and colleges but capable of making much better contributions to a volume of that kind than had been possible ten years earlier.

What brought about the change?

This was very largely the result of the Tyndale Fellowship’s encouraging young men and women who had the necessary interest and aptitude to go in for this sort of thing.

It has been 45 years since you defended the essential truthworthiness of the New Testament in your little book The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? (IVP and Eerdmans). Do you still stand by what you wrote then?

I may differ in details, but I still maintain the same outlook that I argued for in that book.

How do you, as a Christian and as a scholar, approach the study of the Bible?

I would distinguish between academic study and more general study. At one level—and perhaps this is the most important level—I approach the Bible with a readiness and an expectation to hear the voice of God there. But there is no conflict between that more devotional use of the Bible and its academic study. Over the years I have played a pretty full part of Bible ministry in churches—preeminently, of course, in the local church that I happened to be associated with at any particular time. In this ministry I have tried to combine the two approaches.

I have sought to make available to my hearers, in a form they can assimilate, the results of my academic study, while at the same time trying to enable them, like myself, to recognize and apply the voice of God in Holy Scripture.

The term “biblical criticism” normally has a positive connotation in your writings, in spite of the negative connotation it has in some circles. Why is this?

Because biblical criticism is the study of the biblical text. It involves the establishing of a reliable text on the basis of manuscripts and other early witnesses; this is the work of “textual criticism.” And when that is done, it involves the interpretation of the text, what is technically called “exegesis.” This requires the study of such matters as the structure of individual books, a consideration of the dates at which they were written, how they fit into their contemporary setting, and the question of authorship.

It is in these three areas—structure, date, and authorship—that we have the group of studies that used to be summarized in the single term “higher criticism.” Thus biblical criticism is a very positive study. Its aim is to help people understand the Bible better.

One of my eminent Manchester predecessors in the Rvlands Chair, Arthur Samuel Peake, who was no mean practitioner in biblical criticism, has put it on record that “criticism for its own sake has never interested me. The important thing is to pierce to the core of the meaning.” And any technique that enables us to penetrate to the central meaning of Scripture is helpful.

Is there a uniquely “evangelical” view of biblical criticism that differs from other types of biblical criticism?

Not so far as I’m concerned.

In North America there has been a lot of debate concerning the “inerrancy” of the Bible, with “inerrancy” often being viewed as a touchstone of evangelical orthodoxy. What do you think about this concept?

Happily, from my point of view, that is a North American phenomenon which one does not find very much in Britain. The term that has been traditionally used to describe a high view of the authority of Scripture in this country is “infallibility.”

What is the difference between the two terms?

When one looks at the words themselves, there is no difference. Inerrancy means “not going wrong” and infallibility means “incapable of going wrong” or “incapable of leading astray.” But the infallibility of Scripture as traditionally defined relates to its function as “the rule of faith and practice.” Inerrancy seems to imply more than this.

What term would you prefer to use in describing the Bible?

Truth. What’s wrong with that word? The truth of Scripture is what we’re talking about. If one says that the Scripture is the Word of God, why bother about terms like infallibility or inerrancy?

Some years ago you objected to being labeled a “conservative evangelical.” You said you preferred to be known as an “unhyphenated evangelical.” What did you mean by that?

Conservatism is not the essence of my position. If many of my critical conclusions, for example, are described as being conservative, they are so not because they are conservative, nor because I am conservative, but because I believe them to be the conclusions to which the evidence points. If they are conservative, then none the worse for that.

Your work over the years might be described as a love affair with the writings of the apostle Paul, in that you have written commentaries on every one of his epistles, as well as on the Acts of the Apostles, which sets them in their historical setting. What do you think are Paul’s major legacies to the church?

Of course, anything I say about him would do him less than justice! But I believe his main legacy is his law-free gospel, his affirmation that the grace of God is available on equal terms and manifested in an equal degree among human beings of every kind. When Paul says that in Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free person, neither male nor female” (Gal. 3:28), he is saying that distinctions of those kinds are simply irrelevant where the gospel is concerned, and where Christian witness, life, and fellowship are concerned.

We have noticed that though many Christians adhere to Paul, they do not live lives characterized by Paul’s theology of freedom. How do you resolve this apparent contradiction?

If they are obviously not free, they don’t adhere to Paul! They may think they do, but they haven’t begun to learn what Paul means by “the liberty with which Christ has set his people free” (Gal. 5:1).

Many people, including many Christians, are afraid of liberty. They are afraid of having too much liberty themselves; and they’re certainly afraid of letting other people, especially younger people, have too much liberty. Think of the dangers that liberty might lead them into! It seems much better to move in predestinate grooves.

Who do you think have been the most accurate interpreters of Paul?

Certainly the great Reformers—Luther, for example. Or John and Charles Wesley in the eighteenth century. Paul played such a dominant part in their conversion experience that they could not help assimilating the very heart of Pauline teaching and communicating it to others.

Do you think the current theologies of liberation—for example, Latin American and feminist theologies—are correct in applying Paul’s theology of freedom to social and political issues?

Basically, yes. The liberation that is at the very heart of the Pauline gospel can’t be restricted in any way. It must have its social implications and applications.

I do not know too much about liberation theology, but it does sometimes seem to be linked to a Marxist interpretation of history, and of human life, which is quite different from the Pauline approach.

You seem to interpret Paul as a liberator, if not a revolutionary. But many others see him as a conservative—one who wanted to keep people in their places, who tells slaves to be satisfied with their position in society and who tells women to be silent. To these interpreters Paul is anything but a liberator.

Paul’s attitude to slavery must be seen in the context of the social condition of the time. There was no point in telling slaves to rebel against their condition of bondage. They were in no position to do anything about it. What he did was to show, as the Stoics of his day also did, in a way, that a slave can be a free person just as truly as a sociologically free person is very often a slave. Slavery and freedom are matters of the inner life, primarily, and a person’s economic or societal position is not of the first importance.

How would you apply this to the role of women?

Paul’s teaching is that so far as religious status and function are concerned, there is no difference between men and women.

What about in practice? Does he not limit women’s roles in leadership and teaching in the church, and in leadership in society?

No. If we have regard to the place that women have in Paul’s circle, he seems to make no distinction at all between men and women among his fellow workers. Men receive praise, and women receive praise for their collaboration with him in the gospel ministry, without any suggestion that there is a subtle distinction between the one and the other in respect of status or function. Anything in Paul’s writings that might seem to run contrary to this must be viewed in the light of the main thrust of his teaching and should be looked at with critical scrutiny.

Personally, I could not countenance a position which makes a distinction of principle in church service between men and women. My own understanding of Christian priesthood is quite different from the understanding that dominates so much of the current discussion of the subject. If, as evangelical Christians generally believe, Christian priesthood is a privilege in which all believers share, there can be no reason that a Christian woman should not exercise her priesthood on the same terms as a Christian man.

How do you interpret 1 Timothy 2:9–15, which suggests that women are not to teach?

It is merely a statement of practice at a particular time.

How do you answer people who say that you are picking and choosing among the various doctrines of the New Testament, using one strand of Paul’s teaching to set aside another strand of Pauline tradition?

If there is any substance in that criticism, then the strand that I am choosing is the strand that contains the foundation principles of Paul’s teaching in the light of which those other passages must be understood.

What about 1 Corinthians 14:34–35, where Paul suggests that women should be quiet in church?

In the same chapter, he indicates certain occasions when men should be quiet or silent in church also! My own view about 1 Corinthians 14 is very similar to the view expressed by Gordon Fee in his recent commentary (in the New International Commentary on the New Testament [Eerdmans, 1987]), namely, that the textual evidence throws doubt on the authenticity of the words “let your women keep silence in the churches.” But even if they are part of the original text of Paul’s letter, they have relevance only to the uttering of prophecies in church, where women are advised not to question publicly and vocally the interpretation of prophetic utterances.

In most of our churches today, we don’t have prophetic utterances of the kind envisaged in 1 Corinthians 14. Therefore, the application of that negative injunction does not apply.

In general, where there are divided opinions about the interpretation of a Pauline passage, that interpretation which runs along the line of liberty is much more likely to be true to Paul’s intention than one which smacks of bondage or legalism.

If someone wished to embark on a career of teaching the Bible as you have done, what word of advice would you give that person?

Go ahead and do it—if you have been given the necessary gifts and are willing to take time to develop the linguistic tools and do the historical study necessary to understand the Bible in its original setting as a basis for applying its lessons to our contemporary setting.

How important do you think it is to study Hebrew and Greek?

For the serious study of the Bible, it is indispensable.

Yet the trend in many theological schools is to deemphasize the biblical languages.

I know this is so, and it is a deplorable tendency. It is no use for someone who wishes to be regarded as a specialist in the Bible to be in a position that he or she must take translations on trust. That does not mean to say, of course, that everyone who studies the Bible in its original languages can hope to be an expert in either of those languages. But at least he or she will be in a position to assess the value of one translation against the other.

Do you think we are living in the last days?

I have no idea.

Our impression is that you have a great sense of confidence and an independence of spirit. If this is a valid observation, why do you think this is so?

Independence of spirit may largely be the result of my having always been in a position where my personal comfort, income, and the like were not affected by what I affirmed. A person who always has to be looking over his shoulder, lest someone who is in a position to harm him may be breathing down his neck, has to mind his step in a way that, as a university teacher, I have been a stranger to.

Has your father’s influence on your life been an influence in this?

In teaching me to think for myself, not to believe a thing just because some preacher says it is so, unless I see it clearly for myself—that was excellent advice.

What has been the greatest personal challenge to the development of your character?

I could say the great credibility gap, as it seems to me at times, between my Christian profession and my Christian practice, in terms of the ideal and the reality.

What word would you give to a young man or woman seeking to be faithful to Christ in today’s world?

Whatever your work in life is, do it in a spirit of obedience and service to Christ.

What do you think Christians can do to further the cause of peace in the world?

They can start by living peaceably one with another, showing themselves to be, in reality, as they are in the divine purpose, a fellowship of reconciliation, a community of those who, having experienced the reconciling power of God in their own lives, proclaim his message of reconciliation to others, in the widest conceivable sense.

Theologians are indeed an endangered species.

—Carl F. H. Henry

Twilight of a Great Civilization

It has been a while since a theologian was on the cover of Time. That thought crosses my mind as I sit in my office on a fall day flipping through the 304-page catalog for the 1988 meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). In Chicago on November 18–22 there will gather thousands of theologians, biblical scholars, professors of comparative religion, historians, and philosophers of religion—Christians, Jews, Muslims, agnostics, atheists, Buddhists, Hindus, and probably a few of the forgot-what-I-believed-some-where-along-the-way-but-had-already-spent-a-fortune-on-graduate-studies-in-religion variety. You just don’t know exactly. After all, one of the first persons to declare God dead back in the sixties, Thomas J.J. Altizer, was an English teacher who apparently decided grammar and Moby Dick were not big enough game any longer.

At any rate, the only guarantees about AAR/SBL are that a real array of religious thinkers will be on hand and that at least two tons of pipe tobacco will go up in smoke. Between puffs, these scholars will sample a smorgasbord of sessions, with special selections for liberation theologians, for evangelicals, for gay and lesbian theologians, for thinkers enamored of the theology of the nineteenth century, for disciples of Paul Tillich, for Wesleyans, and even—my catalog tells me—for students of Ugarit (who will be presenting papers on “RS 1929.1,” “Keret, Tablet 3, Column III,” and the creatively titled “Reading KTU 1.2 IV = CTA 2.4 = UT 68”).

It is said in Joshua 10:12–14 that the sun stood still “and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day.” I guess the presupposition for AAR/SBL’s November meeting is that for four days God will stand still and let a few thousand acute observers, hunkered down in a Chicago hotel, get a better look at him—or, depending on whom you ask, her/it/them.

My main objective is to watch and listen to both the theologians (knowers of God) and the theologian-logians (knowers of knowers of God), and scurry back with a report about the state of their art, or science, or whatever it is these days. Theology no longer holds the lofty position of “queen of the sciences” within the academy. I am wondering how comfortably it is now fitting within the ivory tower. What exactly are theologians up to? Are they saying anything that is relevant to the church, and if so, is the church listening?

So my pencil is poised, calendar at hand, to rough out a schedule for this four-day extravaganza. The catalog is not exactly a Christmas wish book, but it is revealing of some treasures. There are always several sessions going simultaneously, so some hard choices are unavoidable. Being a fan, I would like to hear “Love and Death in the Films of Woody Allen.” But how do I juggle that and “Are They Just Cows? Agricultural Biotechnology, Bovine Somatratopin, and the Common Good”?

I’m getting dizzy leafing through the catalog. My mind wanders, and I imagine what my church-going relatives from off the farm in downstate Illinois would think of this religious convention. What would they make of a room filled with men and women whose hands are powder white and callus free, expostulating that “fundamentalism is most broadly delineated as a universal urge to react, to protest, against the modernist hegemony” or that “four exegetical questions can be answered in a comprehensive way if 1 John 2:12–14 is understood as an example of the figures of thought called expositio and distributio used in combination with a variety of other stylistic figures”?

I can almost hear my outspoken cousin let off steam: “What has all this stuff got to do with anything? It has nothing to do with the real world. I can’t understand every other word they say. And they’re so highfalutin’. None of it’s any use to the church.”

Twisting slowly in and out of my reverie, the catalog heavy on my lap, calendar still gaping, open in anticipation, I can’t agree with my voluble, dreamy relative. Though we may not always understand the specialists’ lingo or concerns, I have the feeling that it translates into something that is actually quite essential. But I have to admit, it has been a while since a theologian appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

Unless you count Jim Bakker.

Entering The Ivory Hilton Towers

Now the weeks have passed and I really am at Chicago’s Hilton and Towers, paddling my way through the sea of tweed and clouds of pipe smoke. I have heard a sociologist of religion declare that Jim Bakker is our premier postmodernist theologian. The meaning was obscure, and I can’t fully elucidate it, but then you pick up a lot of murky references meandering through the hallways, in and out of sessions. The snatches, clinging like lint to the memory, include “messianic materialism,” “separate ontologies,” something about whether or not a particular Babylonian word should be translated “navel,” and a man calmly insisting we must get at the “compulsive and anal tendencies of the text.”

It can get exotic. And overwhelming. The hotel is packed: Convention organizers say a record 5,533 attendees have shown up. Scholars swarm up and down the Hilton’s ornate open staircases. Straggly lines of scholars maintain a vigil before the registration desk, kicking suitcases, shifting overcoats and caps from one arm to the other, shouting greetings across the lobby to suddenly sighted friends. Knots of scholars have mounted a relentless assault on the half-dozen elevators; every few minutes a bell sounds, doors open wearily, one knot surges off the elevator and another bobbles uncertainly on, losing a member here and there.

Going downstairs with the masses, you navigate between pockets of scholars who sit on the steps like boulders in a stream, trying to decipher schedules and maps. (No easy proposition, since meetings are situated over six floors of the labyrinthine hotel.) In the basement there is buried a massive exhibit hall with a bare concrete floor where nearly 70 publishers display their books and hundreds of scholars browse with all the relish of children in a toy store. (I’m feeling childish myself.) It is lunchtime, and the hotel’s restaurants are full, too. Even the snack bars bustle with men who now eat hot dogs, squeezing mustard into their beards, and in half an hour will argue about Whitehead’s epistemology.

Sleepwalking In An Exotic World

I need some air, and so I hit the street. It is a misty Saturday, the sidewalks are damp and Michigan Avenue buzzes with shoppers. I pass one, then two small restaurants, both crammed. Inside a third, I learn that no tables will be open for 30 minutes. So I veer off Michigan, make my way to State Street and turn north again. Eventually I land in Ronny’s Grill and find a spot for me and my cheeseburger. But Ronny’s is crowded too, and a long-haired stranger in a pullover sweater takes a seat across the table. I eat and thumb through a book I just bought. The stranger himself extracts a book from a sack, a Taoist volume on the strategy of war.

He is glancing furtively at the name tag pinned to my lapel, taking in the religious connotations. I sense he wants to talk, and soon he initiates a conversation. He says he is exploring all sorts of spiritualities and religions, “trying to discern where the world is going.” He works as a computer programmer “to make money.” But his heart is in the search. In fact, he has published in astrological magazines (“technical pieces—I’m no inspirational writer”). Standing beneath Ronny’s garish yellow sign after lunch, my companion eagerly unloads a few last words about his interpretation of the Hebrew word Elohim, being the first-person plural and feminine. The implication is clear: Just what does that say about God? We part, heading opposite directions in the grayness of the city and our theological notions.

On the route back to the hotel I pass the Fine Arts Theatre and stop to read the posters, idly wondering if a movie would be a good diversion that night. Ken Russell’s The Lair of the White Worm is showing. It is something about snake worshipers who inhabit a Victorian mansion and draw a young woman into their grasp for a night of fun. Roger Ebert, scaling the oxymoronic heights only movie critics can reach, deems it “delightfully kinky.”

A few moments later, sucked into the Hilton’s revolving doors, I am thinking that, yes, AAR/SBL gets exotic, but is it any more exotic than the world we all live in and so often sleepwalk through?

Polite Englobbing

Martin Marty is the 1988 president of the American Academy of Religion. He is a church historian at the University of Chicago and, since this year’s meeting is in Chicago, has had a lot to do with its organization. Marty is a diminutive, bald-headed man, but what he lacks in size and hair, he makes up for by being nearly omnipresent and omniscient. He is everywhere at the conference, speaking at this panel or that, listening earnestly to bright young stars such as Elaine Pagels, beaming and swaying in his seat while a black choir raucously sings the gospel.

When he does speak, it is always worth listening. At a session on “Religion and the Public Schools,” Marty stresses the difficulty of teaching religion in pluralistic America. “What is the consensus from which public school teachers should teach? Is it Judeo-Christianity? If so, do you emphasize the Judeo or the Christianity? If Christianity, do you emphasize Protestant or Catholic Christianity? If Protestant, which Protestant? If Baptist Protestantism, then whose interpretation—Jesse Jackson’s or Jesse Helms’s? Mark Hatfield’s or Jerry Falwell’s? Jimmy Carter’s or Pat Robertson’s?”

Despite all the pitfalls, Marty thinks religion should be taught. He concludes with a story, saying that when he was associate dean at the University of Chicago’s divinity school he was charged with raising funds and once asked how he could go around begging money for the study of religion in a world where children were starving. A colleague said religious education was like sex education—if you don’t teach it, the consequences are dangerous. The truth is, Marty says, if you get sex education or religious education right, it may make some other things come out right.

I go across the way to listen in on a famous German theologian. He is speaking in a cavernous exhibit hall, in a space cordoned off with blue curtains on aluminum poles. This session, like so many, is filled past capacity, and a couple dozen people are standing behind the chairs, 30 yards from the speaker. His accent is heavy and he is extremely soft-spoken, meaning I cannot make out much of what he says, but the gist is this: How do we talk about God and know God in our pluralistic world?

The next day I attend a session on “The Restructuring of American Religion Since World War II: Cultural Conflict, Denominational Decline, and the Future.” It is a discussion of sociologist Robert Wuthnow’s new book by that title. Martin Marty is here again. He and Wuthnow are joined by George Lindbeck, who teaches at Yale, and Stanley Hauerwas, a Yale alumnus now teaching at Duke.

Appropriately, Wuthnow begins. He exposits on the declining significance of denominationalism and the growth of special-purpose groups in religion. Then he talks about the resurgence of fundamentalism, noting the degrees of difference between fundamentalists. Some are white supremacists; others stoutly oppose racism. Some now major on prolife issues; others do not. He moves on to evangelicalism, cataloging differences among that clan, then to secular humanists, doing the same thing. Eventually he steps back to see the wider, national picture, observing that liberals take a strong stand on the Constitution’s clause forbidding the establishment of religion, while conservatives focus on the free exercise clause. Neither side speaks persuasively to the other, so we can expect continued conflict.

Marty responds first. He is glad Wuthnow is pressing the issue. It is important to recognize that religion is often used to legitimize an ideology, and we are certainly seeing plenty of this today. He agrees with Wuthnow that denominations are increasingly less significant. Now, instead of simply being split from other denominations, the denominations are splintering from within. So the issue “is in one sense about knowing what trench you’re in and who you’re going to shoot at.”

The crisis of the day is the collapsed middle. Marty says the majority of the population is fluid between extremes, gravitating toward a moderating position. But now, he laments, the center does not hold. He facetiously suggests that given our present, difficult situation, the most crucial difference is not between liberal and conservative religionists, but between the mean and the nonmean. The desperate question is, Who will fill the center? Fundamentalists, Catholics, evangelicals, liberals—Marty thinks no one group is going to run the country by itself, so how do we fill the center? At least if people were nicer we might move toward some healthy compromises.

Lindbeck, white haired and white bearded, next steps to the lectern. His candidate for the middle is what he calls Anselmian Scripturalism, a not easily explained position that looks to Scripture to provide a world view, without accepting its historicity on details. Lindbeck insists this perspective is acceptable to moderns and, if conveyed to the masses, would be congenial to their biblical piety. So Lindbeck disagrees with Marty’s prescription—a fluid public theology—but agrees with his and Wuthnow’s diagnosis that we are in dire straits.

Now it is Hauerwas’s turn. He alternately cups his beard and his own shiny pate; then, speaking in a robust Texas accent that belies his philosophical and theological sophistication, declares that Wuthnow, Marty, and Lindbeck are all wrong. Wuthnow comes to the crucial question: Given all this division, what do we do to recover a nation that is strong and free? Hauerwas thinks that is the wrong question for Christians; for them the right question is how to recover a church that is strong and free. As far as Hauerwas is concerned, American Christianity set out to be a religion that would sustain a liberal democracy, and now we’ve got the mess we wanted.

Hauerwas goes on to complain that theology has been rendered harmless by desiring to become just another academic discipline. “The Southern Baptists have this to say for them: their theologians still think their work should influence the church, and the church still cares what its theologians say.” Then he fires a broadside at Marty: “We don’t need more nice Christians—we’ve already got too many nice Christians.”

Marty and Hauerwas go to it. Marty, playing a different tune than he did the day before—or at least another verse—says there is much from which to build a vital center. The people of this country have common suffering, common stories, common propositions. He cites the national mourning, enabled by television, after the space shuttle Challenger blew up.

Hauerwas, a pacifist, replies that if anything drew the country together, it was World Wars I and II, “And for Christians, that’s just not right.”

Well, replies Marty in so many words, I agree with that, and Hauerwas shakes his head. “It’s so hard to disagree with Marty. He just keeps …” Hauerwas searches for a word adequate to his frustration “… englobbing you.”

This argument is solved like many in the academic setting: time runs out. Afterward the panelists shake hands and clap each other on the back. It is all quite civil but not, in my judgment, ultimately englobbing. I can’t shake off the sense that the differences expressed are not any smaller for the politeness of their expression. These men are not just politely agreeing to disagree, but politely agreeing to play in different ballparks, with unsettled rosters and under different rules. No wonder it’s hard to find an umpire.

Pluralism In The Elevators

The third day, Monday, will be my final day at the convention. I decide to go for maximum variety. I go to a liberation-theology session and hear, “Objectivity many times simply covers over the subjectivity of those who hold power.” I listen to a stimulating talk on Jacques Ellul. For lunch I eat chicken with two or three hundred Baptist professors of religion, in a sprawling ballroom with low-slung chandeliers and false balconies. (Later I find out, from convention organizers, that during AAR/SBL there were about 25 luncheons like the one I attended; 45 to 50 receptions, with hors d’oeuvres and drinks; 12 dinners; and 30 breakfasts. At least I could tell my cousin that theologians are useful for keeping cooks and waiters employed!)

After lunch I wend my way through the now-thinning masses, past the marble-veneered walls, the museum-sized paintings, to the elevators and up to the eighth floor. There awaits the epitome of diversity.

In one room, with participants crowded out the open door, evangelicals are discussing George Marsden’s history of Fuller Theological Seminary. Directly adjacent, the feminists are meeting, and on the other side of that “The Gay Men’s Issues in Religion Consultation.” I check out the gay men’s seminar first.

There are no chairs remaining, so I take a seat on the floor. The lecturer is saying that America is in decline, and that when proud nations lose their power internationally, they may seek new ways to exercise their power at home. Lesbians and gays have made gains in civil rights because of the nation’s largess; if things take a turn for the worse, there may be more harassment and even persecution. Considering the enduring historical popularity of scapegoats, this sounds like an all-too-plausible argument.

I skip over to the women’s group and stumble onto two provocative papers. One, called “Towards a Hermeneutic of Childbirth,” challenges the predominant associations of pregnancy and childbirth with sickness, fatness, and so forth. Then the radical feminist Naomi Goldenberg is introduced, with an air of eager anticipation. She is a small, enthusiastic woman, with large, horn-rimmed glasses and closely cropped black hair, and I soon understand why everyone seemed ardent to hear her.

She starts with a witty apocalyptic commentary on the tale of Chicken Little, then proceeds, for the next half-hour, to strew gleaming insights indiscriminately, like a gardener sowing cheap seed. There is one on the mechanization of relationships, the television and computers that push us toward “private cocoons in front of flickering screens”; an aside on the “prison architecture” of most universities; a quick exegesis of the B-movie classic The Blob; and more. I am enjoying all this tremendously, so Goldenberg’s conclusion is a real disappointment. She avers that we (women especially) must reject the distant, transcendent God of the biblical faiths just as Chicken Little should not have sought the advice of the king. (A move, you will remember, that resulted in the fox’s having Chicken Little for lunch.) In other words: Grow up, ladies, forget about God, and trust yourselves.

By the time Goldenberg is finished and I make it down the hall, the evangelicals are already dispersing. I stand briefly in their empty room, looking at the unoccupied and jostled chairs, the upended drinking glasses. Conferees from the women’s session and the gay session shuffle by behind me, and once more the jarring pluralism of the entire meeting hits home. While the homosexuals worried over potential persecution, people in the movement they probably consider their greatest threat were convening two rooms away. And as those would-be persecutors calmly discussed how well or poorly a seminary has served God and the kingdom, a brilliant woman next door pointed a finger at God and that kingdom as the central source of the Western world’s problems.

Down and around the hallway, evangelicals, gays, and feminists helped one another mount the elevators.

Who Would Miss Them?

There were gathered, in a single building, the best North American minds in religion. What if (for whatever reason) the earth opened up and swallowed the Hilton—the marble cracking, staircases corkscrewing, the walls heaving out and down like divers, room imploding on room imploding on room? Just like that, the brightest theologians on a continent, disappeared, gone. Would it make any difference? Would the church or the country suffer for it, after a few obligatory days of television-facilitated national mourning?

After all, as theologians will be the first to tell you, theology is in a predicament. On the one hand, it must convince the academy it is academically respectable—objective, disciplined, adding to that great store of knowledge that dyed-in-the-wool academics refer to with mystical awe. On the other hand, theology must convince the church it is faithful and serving the faith—committed, bold, vital to the discernment of the sovereign God’s will.

Add to this the dizzying array of convictions theologians present and promote. What theologian do you trust? What school of theologians do you trust? As Marty and Wuthnow observed, it is no longer a matter of simply disagreeing among denominations (though even that gives hundreds of options). Now there is profound disagreement within denominations. Methodists, Southern Baptists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans, even Roman Catholics—all have suffered from major intramural strains in recent decades, and all remain far from unity.

The litmus tests for true Christianity proliferate. And in many cases, the litmus test adopted by some who call themselves Christian is diametrically opposed by the litmus test of others equally certain they represent the genuine faith. Thus radical feminists say the true Christian works to eliminate patriarchalism, while some evangelicals virtually make the traditional, patriarchal family the sign of true faith. Liberation theologians say you are not loyal to the Bible unless you promote proletarian revolutions; establishment theologians say real Christians respect the rule of government. Gay theologians say those against the ordination of practicing homosexuals fail the spirit of Jesus; many other thinkers say they could not continue to worship within a communion ordaining practicing homosexuals. The list goes on. Some Christians use biblical inerrancy as the litmus test, others use nuclear pacifism, yet others an unqualified antiabortion stance, and still others faithful submission to the declarations of the pope. Things have come to a pretty impasse.

And you must add to the theologian’s burden my farm cousin’s complaint that theologians simply don’t talk the language of people in the pew, that they are stuck in their ivory towers.

All told, theologians may be among Earth’s most beleaguered creatures. They are members of the only endangered species that has one group (academics) trying to throw it out of its roost (in the ivory tower) while another group (laypersons) stands below and yells for it to jump.

Let’s start from the bottom and take the complaint that theologians are too esoteric and prideful. Theologians can be arrogant. In a technologically advanced society, knowledge is power, and theologians ply a certain kind of knowledge. They sometimes do act as if ordinary churchgoers are hopelessly naive and need nothing so much as to be disabused of their humble faith. But, on the other hand, there is no solvent as effective for cant and pomp as humor, and certainly there was an abundance of that at AAR/SBL. Theologians can mock themselves, and that alone bounds their pride. What is more, they are keenly sensitive to their cruel contemporary predicament. Many want desperately to be heard by the church, and yet at the same time they believe they can best serve the church by doing respectable work within the academy. Is the Christian faith true to life and the world or not? If Christians cannot make compelling arguments to that effect, then we are as much as admitting we cling to a delusion. Theology may no longer be at the heart of the academy, but all Christians have an interest in seeing that it is not dismissed as a mere vestigial organ.

What about technical language? Again, there are grounds for criticism, since theologians often use fancy words when plain ones would do. But that is not always the case. Technical terms focus inquiry, sharpen concepts, enable arguments. Without them each concept introduced into a discussion would have to be laboriously described, then described again each time it was reintroduced. We readily accept technical language from doctors, realizing no one needs a surgeon who would ask a nurse for that thingamajig so we can slice off this whatchamacallit. We also don’t berate mechanics for referring to fuel-injection or gear differentials, and it is shortsighted not to accept a similar precision in theology.

Consider next the bewildering variety of theologians and theologies. This feature of the theologian’s predicament may tempt us to gloat, to say it proves we do not need to listen to theologians since they are in such discord. But again there is no place for gloating: the theologian’s predicament is every Christian’s predicament. AAR/SBL, in its radical plurality, is only a microcosm of the world we all live in. At least in that respect theologians are very much engaged with the “real world,” a world bereft of common metaphysical presuppositions, with passengers who have had to abandon the great ship of shared meaning to the separate lifeboats of contested meanings.

All pursuit of meaning in this modern world (now postmodern, by virtue of this predicament) is fragmented and arguable. As demonstrated by the potentially shattering arguments over, say, abortion, the church and the nation need urgently to build a new ship of common meaning, or at least learn how to row our lifeboats in formation. In a world that has forgotten most of what it knew about shipbuilding, that can barely remember how to use oars for paddles rather than weapons, it makes little sense to kill off sailors. If there is any way through our predicament, surely theologians and philosophers are essential to finding it.

It was a long time ago, but I remember one contestant on television’s “What’s My Line” whose occupation completely stumped the panel. With a triumphant grin on his face, the guest finally identified himself as a “chicken sexer” employed in a hatchery to sort newborn chicks by sex.

Years later I toured a hatchery and observed a chicken sexer at work. At the rate of a thousand or more per hour, he grasped each fuzzy yellow chick and identified its gender instantly. Female chicks went to the hen houses to produce eggs. The roosters-to-be, on the other hand, started out on their inexorable journey toward the congenial colonel’s secret blend of 13 herbs and spices. Although I observed him for a long time, I never determined how the chicken sexer made his judgment so quickly and surely. Was it because he had only two choices open to him?

At about that same time, I toured a leather warehouse. Hides from all over the world were sorted and then distributed to artisans who would fashion thousands of different leather products. In the center of the frantic warehouse activity, amid piles and piles of hides, stood the “hide grader.” Constantly moving among the hundreds of bundles, the hide grader made a judgment about each hide. To me, they all looked the same. Yet the hide grader sorted them into 20 or more different categories. Without pausing in his sorting, he spoke of differences in color, smell, weight, pliability, and strength.

The key to the hide grader’s judgments was more than these characteristics, I learned. It was the grader’s ability to assess accurately for each hide how it could best be treated and “worked.” He envisioned what that hide could become. He discerned its potential for usefulness and beauty.

“Do you reject many hides?” I asked.

“Nope, not me,” he said. “Anybody can sort out the junk. I only work with the good stuff and make sure it ends up the very best it can be.”

The chicken sexer and the hide grader go about their work not too many miles apart. Both judge quickly and confidently. Yet their decision-making processes differ. The chicken sexer chooses between two clear alternatives. The hide grader’s options are complex, measured in nuances and degrees, laden with value and vision.

Life’s choices are like that. Some choices—actually only a few—have two straightforward options. I choose between true and false, right and wrong. It is a relatively easy matter, even though I sometimes choose wrongly.

Usually, however, choosing is difficult. Judgment, insight, and vision are necessary. I must practice discernment. And sometimes I can only hope to discern the least among several evils.

Choosing among a host of alternatives, each encrusted with emotions, habits, and entangling considerations, is painfully hard. Alternatives may be full of promise or full of threat. Seldom can I anticipate all the consequences. Sometimes I am not even aware of all the alternatives available. Time for reflection is always short. I must judge, decide, act. That is my predicament. Paul understood our great need for discernment. He prayed for the Philippian believers that they would have both the knowledge and the discernment necessary to minister in faithfulness to Christ. The thrust of Paul’s prayer on behalf of the Philippians was not only that they might have the discerning capacity to make the best choices, but also that they might become the best people, growing always more into the likeness of Christ. That is what I want for myself.

The older I get the more I realize that discernment comes as a gift from God. As discernment comes to characterize me more, I will choose those courses of action that will really matter. With God’s help I can decide with confidence the more excellent way. I even dare to hope that my family, colleagues, and casual acquaintances, including the chicken sexer and the hide grader, will recognize that God has increased my capacity for genuine discernment. Pray as Paul did that I may increasingly become a man who discerns the mind of Christ and acts upon it.

Are Our Lives “Mapped Out”?

I take exception to the wisdom offered by David Neff on understanding God’s will [“Have I Done Well?” Feb. 17]. He starts a good case for God having our lives “mapped out,” then totally changes course with his arbitrary statement, “But is that the necessary implication?” There is a treasure house of Scriptures that teach that, wonder of wonders, God does have an agenda for our lives mapped out in advance.

This presupposes our disposition to be submitted to the will of God in our lives. God does allow us to make other choices, if we choose. And he even uses our mistakes to his glory. God’s agenda for my existence is written in his book, and I choose to believe it!

Ray Lyon

Boca Raton, Fla.

Real Reel Life

You could head this letter “A Different View of the Home Video Screen,” as opposed to Mary Ellen Ashcroft’s “Is Reel Life Real?” [Feb. 17]. My maternal grandfather was a photographer in the glass-plate and flashpan era. His interest has been passed along to many of his descendants. I don’t look upon all the photographs we have as “materialistic,” although they are, in one sense. How else would I have a record of my wedding and my husband, now deceased? Of family vacations? Of my parents’ golden wedding anniversary in 1953? A record for my children of their great-great-great grandparents’ pictures? These photos show me and my children how these people who passed along our Christian heritage looked.

The God-inspired Scriptures in materialistic form are as image-making in my mind as if I had put them in a photo album. The “materialistic” videos contain a spiritually shared richness for my family whenever we view them, just as reading and sharing the Scriptures do.

Dorothy H. Prescott

College Park, Ga.

Greetings from the Trenches

We knew something big was afoot when the chairman of the outreach committee began describing his new system for greeting visitors by shouting, “Ten-hut!” While the rest of the committee hummed “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” he detailed his plan—an irresistible, recluse-proof cross between boot camp and fraternity rush.

From the pulpit, our pastor welcomes visitors and orders them to stand. Church enlistees seated next to the newcomers introduce themselves after the service, subtly taking hold of an elbow or shoulder. These pew-mate privates escort the visitors to the fellowship hall, positioning them in squadrons throughout the room.

The rest of the congregation falls out into orderly platoons of eager greeters. Remaining in formation in the fellowship hall, each platoon member is responsible for meeting one squadron of visitors.

Meanwhile, the Sunday school superintendent scouts the entire room like an AWACS reconnaissance plane, alert to potential new recruits to teach third and fourth grade.

Before deploying this glad-handing strike force, however, we dispatched three covert agents across enemy lines, to the church up the street. We had heard they’d captured—er, “enfolded”—dozens of newcomers, and we wanted to assess the combat-readiness of their program.

“They just give visitors a cup of coffee, a name tag, and invite them to Friday night fellowship,” our spies told us.

The chairman’s court martial was swift, his punishment sure. He makes the coffee for the next three months.

EUTYCHUS

Child Care At Home Or Away

I find it incongruous that boarding school for the children of missionaries has been, until recently, unquestioningly accepted [“Growing Up a World Away,” Feb. 17], while many Christians cannot tolerate the idea of anything but the “traditional” home, with mom there full-time with the kids. If it can be within God’s will, in some circumstances, for missionaries to place their children in the care of others for months between visits home, is it so hard to concede that it might be within God’s will for other families to entrust their children to others for part of a day?

Paula F. Cardoza

Indianapolis, Ind.

My parents were missionaries in Nigeria when I was a child, and I attended a boarding school. My experience was not the best. As I got older it was better, but at the ages of 5, 6, and 7 it was very painful. I was extremely homesick and would often become physically sick. I know it was hard for my parents, too. Some children do adjust, some don’t; but God gave children to the parents to raise, not to teachers or others. If children seem in the way of “God’s work,” then maybe the parents are not in “God’s will.”

Brenda Kelley

Junction City, Kan.

Fundamentalism And Alienation

I would like to comment on Philip Yancey’s column “Growing Up Fundamentalist” [Feb. 17]. Let us acknowledge that there are rare fundamentalist churches that retain the fundamentals of the faith in doctrine but do not add the ugly elements of legalism, extreme separation, and racial bigotry that are usually associated with the term fundamentalists.

Some alienation from unbelieving classmates in a public high school is inevitable if one loves Christ. A committed Christian in a public school is going to be different in speech and dress from his peers who do not trust in Christ. This is not the fault of fundamentalism, but it is part of our identifying with Christ when we choose to follow him.

Judy Anderson

Seattle, Wash.

My upbringing was similar to Yancey’s. Can I relate! Looking back, I am thankful for the “pietism” instilled in me, but I lament the discontinuity from the flow of the historical Christian church. Like Yancey, I am not vindictive about my upbringing in the fundamentalist church. Somehow, I think, I am the wiser for it.

Gary Ryan

University, Miss.

Boeke Not The First

Contrary to your recent editorial [“Interfaith Divorce,” Feb. 17], the Boekecase in Colorado is not the first instance of a civil court deciding which religion is preferable in a child-custody case, nor is it an issue that is likely to go away.

In a number of divorce cases judges seem to have allowed their preference for “mainstream” faiths to dictate a choice of parental custody. Just last year Rita Mendez, a Florida Jehovah’s Witness, fought all the way to the supreme court in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to regain custody of her daughter. A family court granted her Roman Catholic ex-husband custody largely on the grounds that psychologists and other “experts” think Jehovah’s Witnesses are a despised minority in the United States, and a child would be better off growing up in an “accepted” faith. The court decree forbids Mendez to say anything to her daughter that might undermine the child’s Catholic training—even forbidding the mother to mention her religious beliefs.

Since our Constitution gives the government no authority to favor one religion over another, these cases raise troubling questions. After all, in this religiously pluralistic nation each of us would be considered a “despised minority” somewhere.

Rev. Robert L. Maddox

Americans United for Separation of Church and State

Silver Spring, Md.

SPEAKING OUT

The Hymnal Is Not Enough

New things often threaten tradition. It should not surprise us if that even applies to new church music, especially the use of praise songs in worship. But many of us desperately need new worship. But many of us desperately need new worship music to rejuvenate our spiritual lives and revitalize our worship. And if we hope to meet the needs of our young people—and attract the unchurched—the music that will get Christian content across to contemporary people is contemporary music.

Because of the place of hymnals in our evangelical traditions, we may be unable to imagine worship without them. But it is tradition, not Scripture, that makes it seem heretical to suggest that there are other ways to sing together, that what we do in church might even be counterproductive to worship.

While I have always enjoyed singing in the church, it wasn’t until I freed myself from exclusive use of the hymnal that I experienced what praise and worship can be. And it is the new music, sung with eyes closed for 10, 15, or 20 minutes at a time, that makes that experience possible. These short, repetitious songs with memorable choruses help me focus on God; I don’t even need to look at the music. The pleasant result is that now I am learning to worship and praise through hymns, as well as through worship and praise songs.

Unfortunately, many of us have grown up with very little understanding of worship. Our worship services revolve around an informational sermon preceded by a token number of informational hymns. Today, our hymns are little more than transitional devices between other parts of the service.

Besides spending too little time singing, we sing hymns so chock-full of rational content and information that they are unmemorizable. In addition, the hymns are usually written in archaic language and thought forms geared to other times, places, and interests. To sing them, we glue our eyes to the hymnal and sing to the floor.

True worship involves something quite different. It usually takes a lot of singing to create an atmosphere of praise and worship. Singing cannot serve this purpose if it is crammed between the offering, Scripture reading, and sermon. If any music is to foster worship, it should come from the heart and be sung to the Lord, not to the floor.

We also need to realize that styles that are meaningful for one generation or one group of people are often not very meaningful for another. To live out our commission to love and serve people means to love and serve them in their great diversity. Even when it comes to music.

Is the main audience made up of younger people? Contemporary music should predominate. Is it a largely older congregation, one that would be disturbed if anyone tampered with the music? Even for such a group, the worshipfulness of their experience could be enhanced by spending more time in singing (especially singing to God). And if we’re discussing a ministry that, like most, serves a mixture of these two groups (and others), we need to open our services to all kinds of music.

Remember, however, that people need to understand what is happening. We should accompany our changes with instruction that helps people understand the meaning of worship, and we should strive always to keep our focus in worship on God. And those who prefer one form of music need to learn to empathize with those who prefer something quite different.

Whatever the situation, let’s stop being enslaved to the present rationalistic, intellect-centered approach to church that characterizes much of evangelicalism. Worship takes time. It is expressive, not passive. It is, after all, the outpouring of a relationship. Let’s not just sing; let’s praise, and make worship the focal point of our services.

Charles H. Kraft is professor of anthropology and intercultural communication at Fuller Theological Seminary.

Speaking Out offers responsible Christians a forum for their views on contemporary issues. It does not necessarily reflect the opinions of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Actions Over Rhetoric

I want to express frustration with your News article [“White House Religion,” Feb. 17]. When Ronald Reagan did not attend church, had a-hundred-and-some of his chosen aides, advisers, and officials indicted for breaking laws and unethical standards, proclaimed self-admitted liar Oliver North as a hero, and had his appointment schedule arranged by an astrologer, his “faith” was never questioned. My frustration comes with questioning one man’s actions while another man’s very words are believed. I’m not saying Bush’s motives are not political, but I do appreciate his activity more than the rhetoric proclaimed by the last administration.

Rev. Ted Weidman

Ford Parkway Baptist Church

St. Paul, Minn.

It is good to hear our Presidents pray and invoke God’s blessing upon America. That’s the way it should be; but it’s hollow, invalid, and hypocritical when the lifestyle is inconsistent with the words.

I heard the President’s prayer in his inaugural address and the statement “God bless America” in his budget message. During the campaign he came out with the term “damn” in a sentence one day, to which I objected in a letter to him. Nearly all the Presidents, in my memory, have used bad language and had behavioral failures beyond what would justifiably be expected of those who profess faith in God and invoke his favor. Anyone who knows much of the Bible knows what it says about our speech, all the way from taking God’s name in vain to every idle word. There are no exceptions made for Presidents or any other people.

Rev. Lowell E. McCoy

Southside Christian Church

Sapulpa, Okla.

Language Not The Problem

I was struck by Robert Bellah’s comments about moral language [“Habits of the Hearth,” Feb. 3]. He observes that even when people do something loving and caring, they describe it in selfish language, in terms of “what it does for me.” His observation is astute, but he mistakes the symptom for the underlying problem.

When people talk this way, they are expressing their lack of any other reason for loving actions. Something in them wants to relate to others and to care about them, but modern secular man has lost hold of any solid credible reasons to reach beyond himself. Because mankind is fallen, our character also includes selfishness. What the self-oriented language reflects is that the selfishness is gradually winning. Bellah is quite right that our moral practices are being undercut, but it’s not by the language. It will do no good to change the way people talk if their internal reality is not changed.

Wayne Shockley

Brooklyn, Wis.

A Sixth Course For Mcgavran

I would strongly urge a sixth course for Donald McGavran’s church-growth students [“Beyond the Maintenance Mentality,” Feb. 3]: How to make church attendance half as pleasant as dozens of other Sunday morning choices, by preaching not everything you want to say on a subject (for 30 minutes), but everything your audience must hear (for 8 minutes). Any seminary that fails to come grips with the fact that church is usually boring, and preachers are usually the most boring part of it, is doing a disservice to the whole concept of evangelism. Many people stay away from church because there’s no good reason for them to go.

As a writer who must daily find ways to keep the message precise and short enough to survive the editor’s scalpel, I often wish preachers had editors, too. In fact they do: they’re the people who edit out the whole message (by staying away) because the main point is obscured by obligatory doctrinal assertions, monotonous rhetorical flourishes, extra verbiage, and irrelevant meanderings.

Paul De Groot

Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

More Details Needed

Thanks for the generous expressions of CHRISTIANITY TODAY’s support of the Lausanne movement as we approach the second Lausanne Congress in Manila, July 11–20. I was troubled, however, by the statement made in Art Toalston’s article [News, Feb. 3] regarding the ongoing work and effectiveness of the Lausanne Committee. Particularly troubling were the partial quotes by an unidentified source, calling the Lausanne movement in effect anti-Catholic and anticharismatic. As far as I know, with the exception of one country, the charismatic issue in Lausanne is a nonissue; the staff has a large number of charismatics on it. The Roman Catholic issue is more complex.

I speak for many in the movement who are rejoicing at what God is doing within the Roman Catholic Church. Two emphases stand out—the renewed interest in evangelism, and increasing commitment to Bible translation and distribution. The honorary chairman of the Congress Advisory Council in the Philippines, and Ambassador to the U.S., the Honorable Emmanuel Pelaez, is a Roman Catholic. And there will be Roman Catholics as full participants at the Congress. The position taken by the committee was that Catholics from countries where evangelicals feel free to invite Roman Catholics active in evangelism will be welcome as full participants. We do not compel brethren from countries where they do not feel free to invite them to do so.

Paul McKaughan

Lausanne II in Manila

Pasadena, Calif.

Conflict Mediation Or Arbitration

Your article on the suit filed against James Dobson and his organization by the Alexander-Moegerles [News, Feb. 3] demonstrates the conflict inherent in the Christian Legal Society’s offer of either mediation or arbitration. Mediation must bring people closer and requires openness. If an arbitration is to follow, parties protect their position and there is no openness. In my mediation practice we will not arbitrate, and we are fully committed to a mutual resolution of the conflict. Our mediation agreement prevents the use of information gained through the mediation in any later arbitration or litigation.

Duane Ruth-Heffelbower

Fresno, Calif.

One of the last assignments our former managing editor Harold Smith worked with was this issue’s cover story (p. 16). He sent former associate editor Rodney Clapp to downtown Chicago to sniff around the edges of the world’s largest assembly of theologians and scholars of religion, the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature (AAR/SBL). Harold wanted Rodney to write an impressionistic account of what this endangered species looks like in one of its natural habitats, the professional meeting.

At the meeting, Rodney met with and listened to theologians of all kinds: literalists and deconstructionists, conservatives and liberals, local and foreign. He came back with reams of notes and ideas, and together with Harold picked the ones they thought could best convey the atmosphere of such a meeting.

Both editor Smith and writer Clapp have done themselves proud. The “you were there” format allows the article to tell far more than a straight news report could. And Rodney makes it clear that theologians are very important people—but when you get 5,000 of them together, some strange things can happen.

Actually, the article makes all of us on the staff realize how gifted our two colleagues are, and how much we will miss them as Harold takes up expanded editorial duties here at CTi and Rodney returns to school for more theological training. We are grateful for the time they spent with us.

TERRY C. MUCK, Executive Editor