I’ve been visited by the evangelical thought police.

I had always assumed that the hardline enforcers of religious trendiness were busy in the bureaucracies of mainline Protestantism—banning “Onward Christian Soldiers” for its militarism, axing “Jesus Loves the Little Children” because it excludes Hispanics, chopping “sexist” references to God with all the subtlety of a Moscow purge trial.

But evangelicals, I figured, were above all that.

Now, I’m not so sure.

Last year I received a letter from the organizer of an evangelical conference to which I had submitted a paper. He compared my views to racism and anti-Semitism, and called me an advocate of “Christian Archie Bunkerism.”

My crime? I had used the words “mankind” and “man” as inclusive of both men and women. This, I was told, “effaces the dignity of women.”

This concerned me, of course, but I dismissed the letter as the work of an overzealous evangelical faction determined to emulate its liberal role models and be fashionable at all costs.

Then it happened again. Days before I was scheduled to address another evangelical gathering, I received instructions that said using sexist words like “mankind” was not only equivalent to ethnic jokes or racist slang, but would violate “ethical/biblical guidelines.” I was also told that when reading Scripture aloud, I should change my translation to conform to their “gender inclusive” standard.

Does this mean I’m a bigot, that in my public addresses all these years I have routinely offended audiences with language that is the moral equivalent of “nigger” or “kike”?

This is the accusation—a serious one. But what are the facts?

There is very little etymological evidence that “man” or “mankind” are words that intrinsically denigrate women. Historian Jacques Barzun writes that the study of Middle English “leads us to the truth about man, a truth that the reformers do not know or wish to ignore, namely, that the word has two equal meanings, of which ‘male’ is only one. The other (and earlier) is ‘human being.’ ”

But even if these words are not historically sexist, have they become so today? After all, the accepted meaning of a word is influenced by common usage. That’s why dictionaries are constantly revised.

Every dictionary I have consulted, however, lists both generic and gender specific definitions for “man” and “mankind.” For most speakers and writers of English, these words are still used and understood to mean both men and women.

But despite their accepted usages, these words apparently still offend some people. So why not simply change the way we speak and avoid any offense? Why be a stickler?

This is a persuasive consideration, and I understand that many who use inclusive language do so purely out of the desire not to offend or exclude women. I respect this motivation; I’ve often chosen to use inclusive language myself for that very reason.

But choosing to do so is a different matter altogether from being called a bigot if I don’t do so—which for me raises two crucial considerations.

The first is that language is important. It forms the basis for moral discourse, and should not be changed lightly. People who don’t understand their own language need to be informed, not humored.

But the second reason goes much deeper. For while most well-meaning evangelicals see this merely as an issue of not offending others, I suspect that for some the primary concern is another agenda altogether. For them, nonsexist language is an ideological test to distinguish the “sensitive” sheep from the “reactionary” goats. The linguistic case matters little: the real object is to determine who will salute when the radical feminist flag is raised.

During sociologist Peter Berger’s childhood in Italy in the 1930s, Mussolini made a speech calling for reform of the Italian language. Italian had two forms of address, the formal lei and the familiar voi. Mussolini, without good linguistic reason, decided that lei was a sign of effeminacy while voi was a symbol of fascist virility. “From that point on,” writes Berger, “everyone who used lei or voi was conscious of being engaged in a political act … every time you said voi you were making the linguistic equivalent of the fascist salute.”

Berger sees parallels to the current debate over nonsexist language. “That is what inclusive language means … the artificial imposition of an ideological jargon whose purpose is to compel ideological allegiance in a symbolic fashion. It is not what people pretend it to be—namely, a rectification of past discrimination or exclusion. But it is precisely ideological-political jargon.”

This ideological-political agenda is the dark side of the sexist-language debate, and, if successful, it could well lead to two serious consequences.

First, it would threaten the division of roles essential to Christian conceptions of the family and the church. For believers there is no moral or spiritual superiority of one sex above another. But there is a biblical division of responsibilities in both the family and the church. To question these is not a revolt against unwarranted prejudice but a revolt against the order of the universe itself.

Second, blurring gender distinctions would not only disrupt order in church and family, but could eventually blur our understanding of who God is.

All language about God is symbolic. Though God is evoked by female images in Scripture, male images predominate. This does not mean God is masculine. But if we strip the masculine of its symbolic significance we strip our understanding of God as well.

Language, when it is loaded with an ideological agenda and made a test of ideological purity, is no longer a means of communication that brings people together, but a source of division that tears them apart. Line up with the feminists or the chauvinists—and don’t dare make any verbal slips. Every word can brand you. Every sentence can categorize.

And all this suspicion, all this judgment, all this condemnation, is advocated in the name of Christian sensitivity. Well, I have felt the sting of that sensitivity; I have known the scurrilous accusations of bigotry. I fear where it will lead. And I will not salute.

Can We Trust The Lewis Legacy?

The C. S. Lewis Hoax, by Kathryn Lindskoog, (Multnomah, 166 pp.; $11.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Nancy Lou Patterson, professor of fine arts at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and editor of Mythlore newsletter.

Was The Dark Tower, the posthumously published fantasy bearing C. S. Lewis’s byline, really written by Lewis? Were many of Lewis’s personal papers and unfinished manuscripts really burned by his brother after his death? Was Lewis’s secretary, Walter Hooper, really the confidant of the family that he claims to be?

Kathryn Lindskoog attacks these questions and others with her characteristic combination of meticulous research, witty style, deep compassion, and a profound concern for the truth. The answers she offers in The C. S. Lewis Hoax will shock some, confirm the suspicions of others, and, one hopes, finally bring forth genuine evidence to resolve the controversies the book describes.

First, the good news: Everything published by C. S. Lewis in his lifetime—the works that have moved and converted the hearts and minds of so many readers—remains intact and unmarred. And therefore, Lindskoog’s book plays no part in the ongoing theological or literary discussions by which Lewis will and should continue to be judged.

The Lewis Hoax, however, does raise serious questions about the works, whole or fragmentary, that have been published for the first time after Lewis’s death. Their veracity has already been questioned in print; in that respect, Lindskoog is not breaking new ground. But as those works have become more widely read, the questions Lindskoog raises cry more loudly for answers.

Why are these matters worth a book-length exploration? Because the authenticity of each fragment attributed to Lewis has bearing upon the others, and in the end, upon all his works. Indeed, these fragments have led to conclusions about his life, his writing methods, the order in which his works were written, and even about their meaning, which must now be reconsidered.

Oxfordian High Jinks?

Probably the most sensational of these debates concerns the posthumous fragments of The Dark Tower. Were they really written by Lewis himself, or were they merely works sent to Lewis by lesser writers and naïvely preserved with his papers? Or were they examples of Oxfordian high jinks written after Lewis died?

Lindskoog begins her argument by setting forth the context in which such fragments emerged: The enormous popularity of Lewis and the public’s eagerness for any scrap of new material from its idol was an environment, she says, in which exaggerations and even hoax could have been possible. She offers comparisons with other literary hoaxes, such as the publication as Arthur Conan Doyle’s own work of a short story written by someone else (documented in R. L. Green’s The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes).

She then argues from the text of The Dark Tower that it is, as a number of other commentators agree, an inferior and unpleasant work, uncharacteristic of Lewis’s writing style, and that it contains “a suspicious echo of the 1962 children’s classic A Wrinkle in Time.” Until an authenticated original manuscript is available, the question of The Dark Tower is unlikely to be resolved.

But, one must ask, would someone in charge of Lewis’s literary estate knowingly participate in a public hoax, prank, or practical joke? In answering this question, Lindskoog repeats the oft-told “bonfire story,” in which Hooper, the Anglican priest who became Lewis’s secretary in the author’s last year, rescues what is left of Lewis’s manuscripts from a three-day bonfire kindled at brother Warren Lewis’s behest.

Putting Out The Bonfire

Lindskoog first called this story into question, along with a long list of other charming stories about Hooper’s relationship with the Lewis brothers, almost ten years ago. Soon after, Christianity and Literature (Winter, 1979) published a letter from Anthony Marchington (a friend of Hooper’s who appears in the film series that Hooper wrote and narrated, Through Joy and Beyond) purporting to prove that a bonfire took place. This letter, Lindskoog says, was typed on Hooper’s own typewriter and is “a practical joke.” Lindskoog places this incident into a series of actions in the management of Lewis’s literary legacy, of which she questions the good taste and wisdom.

Lindskoog draws her most telling argument for hoax from Hooper’s published prefaces and recorded speeches, which, she says, tend toward richly embroidered and increasingly exaggerated accounts of his relationship with the Lewis brothers. According to Lindskoog, what began as the minor eccentricities of a young and eager disciple gradually became deeply ingrained habits.

Is the author successful in proving her thesis? As Prof. J. R. Christopher writes in his foreword to the book, “Can any of Lindskoog’s arguments be dismissed? Perhaps some can. But their power is in their accumulative weight. I do not think, overall, they can be dismissed.” The debate, no doubt, is not over. But Lindskoog has increased the body of evidence considerably. She has rendered commendable service to the ever-growing number of Lewis fans by helping purge the myth from the man and his work.

Spiritual Warfare, Supernatural Sales

This Present Darkness, by Frank E. Peretti (Crossway, 376 pp.; $8.95, paper). Reviewed by Steve Rabey, an editor with Compassion International.

Two-and-one-half years ago, when This Present Darkness was released, the spine-tingling novel sold 4,000 copies in its first six months—a respectable but uninspired reception, even for adult Christian fiction, a genre not known for blockbuster sales. But just as in the fictional town of Ashton described in the book, mysterious things began happening.

Frank Peretti’s tale of spiritual warfare in an otherwise peaceful small town sold 10,000 copies in its next six months, 20,000 copies the next six months, then 70,000 copies during the first half of 1988. By July of this year, it topped the Christian Booksellers Association paperback best-seller list.

Explanations for the book’s growing popularity focus on a story well told, and well promoted, in some very unexpected ways.

Jan Dennis, Crossway’s editor in chief, who has championed Christian fiction for eight years, describes Peretti’s book as “a good yarn.” “It’s a good detective/horror novel written from the Christian standpoint, where the supernatural good guys win,” Dennis says. “And it has a New Age connection, which makes it more interesting.”

The book has been boosted as well by a grassroots promotional bonanza about which publishers can only fantasize. Laypeople, pastors (some of whom have bought copies of the book for their entire congregations), and some of the biggest names in the Christian music industry have voiced their unsolicited endorsement of the book. Amy Grant and husband Gary Chapman read the book, which prompted them to seek spiritual renewal. Soon the book was required reading at the office of Grant’s management firm. Grant’s friend Michael W. Smith wrote the book into his new album, i 2 (EYE), in the form of a spooky instrumental number called “Ashton.”

Redeeming The Genre

Even though Christian writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and contemporary author Steven Lawhead have found popular reception for their fantasy fiction, the dark world of horror had been left to the likes of Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King. With This Present Darkness, a hair-raising account of demons and angels, Peretti staked a Christian claim to this powerful and popular genre.

The novel’s plot involves the struggle between Bible-believing Christians and New Age cultists vying for control of their once-calm town. Here the novel’s similarity to most other fiction ends, for much of the action and dialogue shift from the earthly plane of human affairs to the heavenlies, where well-armed principalities and powers battle with angels of light.

Henry Busche, pastor of the Ashton Community Church, and college psychology professor Juleen Langstrat, who serves as the cult’s guru, know the reality of spiritual warfare. Both are sold out to their respective gods in the unfolding power play. But the rest of the novel’s characters are only vaguely aware of the spiritual forces that surround and move them. Majestic angels move a hard-bitten, burned-out newspaper editor to seek “true” truth, while acid-breathing demons lead town officials to join forces with the cult to shore up their political power base. Filling out the action are sorceries and suicides, car chases and possessions.

Peretti’s portrayal of the machinations of these unseen forces is effective on two levels. As a literary device, it enhances the novel’s tension while it baptizes the reader’s imagination with a new perspective on the old detective question, “Who dunnit?” As an inspirational tool, the technique helps readers reflect upon the impact angels and demons have on their lives.

Some will rightly criticize the novel’s overly simplistic approach to good and evil, and its occasionally overdone descriptions of Ashton’s New Age bad guys and girls. But This Present Darkness remains a thrilling book that demonstrates the relevance of the faith to an important literary genre, while opening thousands of minds to the reality and techniques of spiritual warfare..

20/20 Foresight

Piety and Politics: Evangelicals and Fundamentalists Confront the World, edited by Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Cromartie (Ethics and Public Policy Center, 424 pp.; $12.95, paper). Reviewed by John H. DeDakis, former White House correspondent for CBN News, now a writer for CNN in Atlanta.

While Democrats raised the question “Where was George?” in their campaign for the White House, other political observers may have been asking a similar question about the election in general: “Where were the evangelicals?”

Once touted as the emerging political force of the eighties, complete with a presidential candidate of their own, Pat Robertson, evangelicals and fundamentalists seemed to drop from the political landscape, or at least the headlines, as the campaign drew to a close.

Answers to their absence can be found, surprisingly, in Piety and Politics, a book released more than a year ago, during the heyday of evangelicals’ perceived influence. Most of the essays were written between 1981 and 1986. None mention recent watersheds such as the PTL scandal. Even the piece on Pat Robertson was written more than a year before he made his tilt at the presidential windmill. Yet the book remains a valuable resource, displaying prescience of the past political season.

Among other things, the book helps explain Robertson’s poor showing among evangelicals in the primaries, and it discusses issues that continue to energize the Religious Right and Left. In addition, its constructive way of handling diverse viewpoints is a model for how the church should deal with political conflict.

Editors Neuhaus and Cromartie have chosen 26 essays “from all points of the political spectrum” to give the reader a basic overview of what it means, politically, to be an evangelical or a fundamentalist. The first section examines the historical development of the two traditions while comparing and contrasting them; the second section allows leaders of the various camps to articulate their positions; and in the closing section, the editors graciously give the final say to those outside the fold—commentators, such as George Will, who sometimes defend and sometimes criticize religious-political activism.

Premonitions About Pat

That Pat Robertson failed to capture the “evangelical bloc” during the primaries comes as no surprise to Stuart Rothenberg of the Free Congress Foundation. In a 1986 essay, Rothenberg wrote that political journalists have made a “serious error” because “they have failed to take note of the diversity within the Evangelical community,” adding that Robertson was never its number one choice.

In an interesting twist of history, conservatives are now resorting to civil disobedience. Again, Piety and Politics essayists saw it coming.

A. James Reichley of the Brookings Institution quotes from a 1982 interview with Cal Thomas (then a spokesman for the Moral Majority): “Those who regard abortion as infanticide have got to show … that they are prepared to suffer in order to stop the killing.” If not through “legal means,” Thomas said, then through “radical action.” Recently, hundreds of antiabortion activists have been arrested in mass demonstrations in Atlanta, an attempt, organizers say, to make that city the Selma of their movement.

Concern for the poor is an ongoing theme tackled by the essayists. Ron Sider, author of the controversial Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, writes that evangelicals make the mistake of “allowing the values of affluent materialistic society … [to] shape their thinking about the poor. It is much easier in Evangelical circles … to insist on an orthodox Christology than to insist on the Biblical teaching that God is on the side of the poor.”

Again, the words are prophetic. Six years after Sider’s writing, the crass materialism of the PTL philosophy burst into the headlines. The man who would become the first PTL troubleshooter, Jerry Falwell, himself contributed an essay of the same vintage as Sider’s. “Our emphasis on belonging to the right group has caused us at times to overlook our own sins,” he wrote. “We cannot be blinded by our tendency to use our people to build our churches, instead of using our churches to build our people.”

Diverse, Not Derisive

Perhaps the greatest strength of Piety and Politics, however, is its ability to show an alternative to the current louder-than-thou trend. The book brings together diverse viewpoints, the articles are lively and learned, yet throughout the tone is constructive rather than derisive.

For instance, the editors offer back-to-back essays on the causes of poverty by Sojourners editor Jim Wallis and conservative author Lloyd Billingsley. Wallis: “The people of the nonindustrialized world are poor because we are rich.” Billingsley: “People can be poor because of their own lack of discipline and initiative.”

Writing in the preface of Piety and Politics, editors Neuhaus and Cromartie predict that “the new public assertiveness of conservative religion is likely to increase … in the years ahead.” And though evangelicals have not turned out en masse at the polls, the Religious Right has helped set the current political agenda. In the most recent past campaign, for example, Democrats and Republicans alike tried to out-family each other.

Within the past year, many Christians have acquired a taste for political wisdom. Piety and Politics, therefore, is a valuable primer for believer and skeptic alike. History has proved the foresight of many of its writers to be 20/20.

ARTBRIEFS

In 1970, Zondervan published Phillip Keller’s A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23. In 1988 they are offering A Musician Looks at the Psalms: A Journal of Daily Meditations. The musician who does the looking is arranger/composer Don Wyrtzen, who has produced more than 200 anthems and sacred songs.

A Musician Looks at the Psalms is a record of Wyrtzen’s personal encounter with the God of the poet-king. He characterizes almost every passage from the Psalms with musical language: Prelude, Paean, Polyphony, Dirge, Descant, Discord. Wyrtzen’s reactions to the Psalms are divided into 365 short sections for ease of devotional use. When read one page after another, the book feels choppy and underdeveloped. When read one page a day, it can be thought provoking.

Wyrtzen’s passion for alliteration can be overwhelming (“Opus of Oppression,” for example) and his inventiveness seems occasionally undisciplined (as when he calls his editor “a verbal virtuoso, a semantic Paganini” or refers to one passage as the “Drone-Pipe of Judgment”).

But if you are looking for a different sort of devotional aid, give this nicely illustrated volume an audition.

Capsized!

Cry from the Mountain, World Wide Pictures’ 1985 story of rescue from a white-water kayaking accident and a marriage bound for the divorce court, was released for home video purchase on December 1. The movie features a typical World Wide Pictures plot—a visit to a Billy Graham crusade (in this case, Anchorage, 1984) helps troubled family members become reconciled to God and with one another. The Alaskan scenic footage adorned by moose, bear, and pontoon plane is beautiful even on a nine-inch screen. And the reverent kerosene-lamp glow that lights a child’s visit to a ruined chapel is reminiscent of a painting by seventeenth-century French artist Georges de la Tour.

The video is in Christian bookstores.

The Smell Of The Greasepaint, The Amens Of The Crowd

With only 180 members, the Manhattan Lamb’s Church of the Nazarene is no megachurch. But its composition—actors, artists, architects, executives, professionals, as well as former pimps, pushers, and prostitutes—makes it remarkable. And its ministry is unique—a church, a health center and kitchen, and a theater (“offering alternative, value-oriented drama to the Broadway theatre-goer,” says a brochure). Located just one-half block off Times Square, the church began celebrating its fifteenth birthday this fall.

The theatrical aspect of Lamb’s ministry was founded in an east-side brown-stone in 1973 by Paul and Sharon Moore, beginning with some dinner theater presentations staged in a restaurant owned by a member of the congregation. The theatrical character of the congregation was further solidified with the 1975 purchase of the Lambs Club, a historic actors hangout. The Lamb’s Theatre began formally in 1979 when a production of Puff, the Magic Dragon was made possible by a grant from Noel Paul Stookey (of Peter, Paul, and Mary).

This month, the Lamb’s Theatre continues to entertain off-Broadway audiences with Godspell, the well-known musical romp through Matthew, and a musical adaptation of O. Henry’s The Gifts of the Magi.

PROFILE

There are three ways to look at humanity, says song-writer-physician-ethicist William Barton Hurlbut. One is the view from the top of the the World Trade Center. In this sociological view, one sees only large masses of swarming, faceless people. A second view, a human chromosome through an electron microscope, yields the biotechnological perspective. Only on the street level, meeting individuals face-to-face, do we see human beings as God made them.

Hurlbut believes advances in biotechnology have already distorted our understanding of the human race. Gene therapy and prenatal chromosomal analysis have their place, allowing for early detection and treatment of genetic disorders. But, says Hurlbut, they are just as likely to be used for selective abortion and the splicing in of “designer genes” to produce desired physical and mental characteristics. As we learn more of the mechanisms of life, says Hurlbut, we are in danger of regarding human beings as machines.

To encourage a different view, Hurlbut (under his nom de guerre William Barton) has issued Saints, an album of folk ballads about the lives and loving examples of well-known models of faith (Patrick, Francis) as well as lesser knowns (such as Martin de Porres).

“C. S. Lewis once commented that we should answer all problems with more love, not less love,” writes Hurlbut, who has learned much about love while caring for a daughter who suffered severe oxygen deprivation at birth. “To use this emerging technology with love, we will need a full vision of the sacred purpose of life. The stories of the Saints provide a stirring witness to God’s love working through the diverse personalities and varied circumstances of human existence.”

The 14 songs on Saints are stylistically varied and well programmed. Arrangements and orchestrations by Denny Bouchard, who has also worked with Noel Paul Stookey and John Michael Talbot, are sensitive and understated. Saints is available from Woodside Music, Woodside, California.

How does a German painter approach his nation’s past—particularly when it includes a subject as immense and awful as the Holocaust? For Anselm Kiefer, it has meant a continuing exploration of German history and mythology. Furthermore, it has meant coming to terms with the Third Reich and the Holocaust—willfully penetrating a subject most of his countrymen would rather avoid. It is no safe subject.

As a result of his work, some people in Germany have accused Kiefer of crypto-Nazi sentiments. But as Time magazine’s Robert Hughes noted in The Shock of the New, the visual arts have been largely ineffectual in confronting the Holocaust, because “reality had so far outstripped art that painting was speechless.”

Kiefer’s best means of confronting the complexities of the German experience have been through images of architecture and landscape. A painting from 1973, Germany’s Spiritual Heroes, for example, depicts a deep wooden interior, the archetypal Teutonic hall. Burning torches extend from the wall, with the names of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German cultural heroes painted underneath. Composer Richard Wagner’s torch is on the left, as well as one for Kiefer’s teacher, Joseph Bueys. But among the torches on the right is Hitler’s—and the potential combustion of Germany’s spiritual shelter feels imminent.

An exhibition of art by the 43-year-old Kiefer has been touring the U.S. since late 1987, and it has occasioned rare critical consensus. Since the show opened in Chicago, and in subsequent stops in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, critics have been positive, enthusiastic—and in some instances, downright effusive. There is no reason to expect the exhibit’s current (and last) stop at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (through Jan. 3, 1989) will reverse this critical trend.

Unlike some of his flamboyant contemporaries, however, neither critical nor financial success has noticeably affected Kiefer’s relationship to his work. One measure of his seriousness about his work is his continuing reclusive and guarded existence in Buchen, West Germany.

Lead Turned To Aesthetic Gold

There is much about Kiefer’s oversized canvases that excites attention—seen in the show’s attendance and its reviews. The paintings use unorthodox materials such as lead and straw—but this is hardly newsworthy in 1988. Their pummeled, clotted, and caressed surfaces have many antecedents, including Germany’s own expressionism, and the later American movement, abstract expressionism. So if Kiefer is not a novel painter, what is his attraction?

Kiefer might be compared to the artists he is most often grouped with—the neo-expressionists. A loosely affiliated group of artists from Europe and America that emerged in the 1970s, they were united by their reaction to the then-prevailing formal abstraction and their desire to return feeling, humanity, and great themes to art. However, the work of many of these artists is overshadowed by either their ambition or their press agents’ claims. The resultant art—aggressive, raw, and self-important—often seemed like sound and fury signifying confusion.

In Kiefer, on the other hand, we find an artist who has both the gift and the seriousness for neo-expressionism’s ambitions. This artist’s gift lies in his ability to poetically charge materials that quicken and coalesce with his imagery. His use of materials seems almost magical—or more properly, alchemical, since that is one of the subjects that fascinates him. In Kiefer’s hands, lead becomes aesthetic gold.

Personal Symbolism

Words such as mystical, spiritual, or religious are regularly invoked around Kiefer’s work. This is understandable given the artist’s abiding interest in Christian, Jewish, mythological, and hermetic traditions. Several of Kiefer’s paintings from the 1970s have Christian subjects or motifs, and he has recently employed Old Testament imagery.

His paintings are all charged with symbolism that looks and feels deeply religious. This is evident in Father, Son, Holy Spirit, for example, a two-tiered painting that depicts a forest beneath a crude wooden room. In the room three wooden chairs bum, but apparently are not consumed.

A more recent painting, simply titled The Book, shows an open leaden book centered over and in front of a vast seascape. In both paintings, the natural and the cultural coexist in an uneasy dialogue: culture, like morality, is fragile, while nature is primeval and a source of regeneration. The book in The Book has presence, but like Kiefer’s hermetic sources, does not reveal its wisdom to the uninitiated. The experience of seeing these works is gripping and strong. But the symbolism, for all of its allusions, is ultimately personal. One gropes to clarify what is so powerfully sensed.

The Best Artist For Our Time?

It does not seem appropriate to carp about personal symbolism; after all, most people assume that is what art and artists are about. The prevailing notion, based on an evident truth, is that we all find our own meaning in art. Art that is clear in its intentions runs the risk of reducing mystery and complexity. And it must be said that Kiefer’s work is not diminished because it is personal. All good art is personal.

But there is a problem. Kiefer wants art to be more than merely personal. He has a visionary yearning for art to address complex cultural, historical, and moral subjects. Kiefer stands alone in his ability to confront his country’s past in compelling, visual terms. But he also stands isolated within his personally constructed universe. Whether any artist can overcome this problem in our era is a burning question, and that’s why Kiefer may be the best artist for our time.

By Ted Prescott, associate professor of art at Messiah College.

CHURCH LIFE

As an institution, Sunday school is almost as old as the United States. And with old age have come some questions about the movement’s health.

Close to 96 percent of all local churches have some form of Sunday school. But according to the 1988 issue of the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, enrollment over the last decade and a half has plunged 34 percent, from 40.5 million in 1970 to 26.6 million in 1986. And Gallup polls reveal that the number of adults reporting no Sunday school training during their childhood rose from 10 percent in 1970 to 27 percent in 1986.

Figures from denominations yield more of a mixed picture. Some, such as the Nazarenes, Free Methodists, and the Mennonites, have experienced lapsed enrollment during the 1980s. But others, including the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church, Southern Baptists, the Evangelical Free Church, and the Assemblies of God, report increases.

Statistics compiled by David C. Cook Publishing Company, a leading publisher of Sunday school materials, put the current enrollment at 41 million, representing an increase of over 7 percent since 1980. Bruce Adair, vice-president of church marketing at Cook, said the statistics that are cited in the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches do not take into account major pockets of Christianity in America, most notably a host of independent churches.

Making It Work

Even in church groups where Sunday school is apparently in decline, W. Charles Arn, vice-president of the California-based Church Growth, Inc., says it need not be “written off as a lost cause.” Arn said, however, that denominations may need to reconsider priorities in Sunday school training, and perhaps ought to consider a name change. “Just the phrase ‘Sunday school’ in some circles has a lot of [negative] baggage connected with it,” Arn said.

Arn added that the “form of Sunday school may need to be changed” if it is to remain “vital and viable.” In this regard, Chicago Sun-Times religion writer Daniel Lehmann cites a new emphasis in some churches on “encounter” and “fellowship” groups and a plethora of other adult activities throughout the week that cater to needs once addressed on Sunday mornings.

Lehmann observed that the down side of all this attention to the “me generation” of adults is that people once counted on to run Sunday morning programs for youth are falling by the way-side. Lehmann believes this is “hindering the growth of the next generation of adult Christians: the children.”

By Joe Maxwell.

MISSIONS

Ed and Kathy Moroney were completing their first term as urban church planters in the densely populated island of Taiwan when they decided they needed counseling. With stresses from work and poor communication pulling them apart, Kathy put her foot down. “I told Ed we get counseling or else.”

Ed and Kathy are not alone. Because of a growing dropout rate among missionaries, counseling centers have become an integral part of missions.

“We are disturbed with the high dropout rate of missionaries and want to help minimize that rate as much as we can,” said Ken Royer, pastor to missionaries at Link Care in Fresno, California.

According to Jim Reapsome, director of the Evangelical Missions Information Service, that dropout rate can be devastating. “While it varies from board to board,” Reapsome says, “in some cases the dropout rate for missionaries is as high as 30 percent.”

Marriage And Missions

The need for ministries for troubled missionaries is great. Last year, Link Care counseled 116 missionaries from 29 mission boards, sending 70 percent back to the field. The organization’s counselors help missionaries with marital problems, cross-cultural stress, conflicts with mission boards, and an inability to work with nationals.

According to Royer, the most common struggle for missionaries is marriage, particularly a couple’s inability to communicate.

“With a lack in communication between the couple, things such as tropical weather, cross-cultural pressures, language barriers, and overwork or burnout intensify, making the relationship very stressful,” says Royer.

It was that kind of stress that sent the Moroneys to Link Care. They admit they “won’t go back perfect and all fixed up.” But they are going back.

Link Care, founded 25 years ago, is one of several centers ministering to the special needs of missionaries. Marble Retreat in Marble, Colorado, offers a two-week program for missionary couples. Louis McBurney and his wife, Melissa, lead therapy sessions for ministry leaders dealing with burnout.

“We offer a spiritual approach to psychology,” says McBurney. “We started this ministry at the suggestion of various mission boards who found their missionaries were needing help with relational problems and marital or family struggles.”

Mission boards are also addressing emotional needs of missionaries and the subsequent high dropout rate. Many have established counseling programs of their own.

Wycliffe Bible Translators and their Summer Institute of Linguistics, which oversees 6,000 missionary adults and 4,000 missionary children, currently has 20 members who are trained as counselors and therapists, seven of whom counsel full-time.

Laura May Gardner, international coordinator of counseling ministries at Wycliffe, says marital stress, isolation, fatigue, and language or cultural barriers sometimes develop to the point where a missionary’s career is in jeopardy. When that happens, Gardner generally recommends counseling at one of Wycliffe’s regional centers.

Wycliffe’s counseling program was created when field administrators requested counselors with mission-field experience. “Although nonfield-experienced counselors can be of significant help, it was felt that those who had experienced field stress would be in a better position to understand the field-related problems of their colleagues,” said Gardner.

Merv Heebner, personnel director of OMS International, said his organization plans to add two full-time counselors to minister to the 527 missionaries on Asian fields. Said Heebner, “The needs are definitely there, and we want to be sensitive to them.”

Meanwhile, the Christian and Missionary Alliance’s assistant vice-president of overseas ministries, Arnie Shareski, said his denomination handles missionary burnout in two ways. The board may send a stateside pastor to the field to offer counseling and resources to help the family. If warranted, the pastor may also encourage the missionary to take an early furlough and get longer-term, professional counseling at a place such as Link Care.

Concerning Link Care’s popularity with several mission boards, Royer added, “The reason a lot of mission boards use Link Care is because we are independent, and missionaries have a feeling of anonymity. They can be very honest and not jeopardize their standing with a mission board.”

By Jeff Williams.

UPDATE

Former PTL owners Jim and Tammy Bakker got a dose of Scripture with their bankruptcy verdict last month. According to an Associated Press report, Federal Bankruptcy Judge Rufus Reynolds quoted 1 Timothy 6:10 to help explain why he ordered the Bakkers and a former top aide to repay $7.7 million to PTL.

“James Bakker either overlooked or ignored parts of the Bible, including 1 Timothy 6:10,” the judge said, going on to quote the passage: “For the love of money is the root of all evil; which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”

Reynolds’s judgment, filed November 10 in the Federal Bankruptcy Court in Columbia, South Carolina, marks the first time any court has ruled that Bakker or other PTL leaders used PTL donors’ money improperly.

PTL sued the Bakkers and its former vice-president, David Taggart, for $52 million in February, alleging they mismanaged the ministry by taking large sums of donated money for personal use from 1984 to 1987 while PTL could not pay its bills. In the suit’s trial in September and October, PTL dropped its claim to all but $7.7 million.

According to the order, Bakker must pay PTL $4.9 million, his wife must repay $677,397, and Taggart must put slightly more than $1 million back into the ministry.

Reynolds said expenditures under the Bakker administration were “unbelievable” and a waste of PTL money. He also accused the administrators of “gross mismanagement” and “total disregard for reality.” He said Bakker and Taggart “approached the management of the corporation with reckless indifference to the financial consequences of their acts.”

Attorney Ryan Hovis, representing the Bakkers, said Bakker was “obviously disappointed,” and would appeal the ruling.

PTL is under the administration of the bankruptcy court. Earlier this fall, Canadian financier David Mernick successfully submitted a bid to purchase the ministry (CT, Nov. 18, 1988, p. 60). Completion of the sale of PTL to Mernick is expected by the end of this month. His plans for PTL will be announced at that time.

DRUGS

The French government’s approval of the RU 486 abortion pill has reignited intense debate in the United States over abortion-inducing drugs. Most agree it will be years before RU 486 wins approval in the United States, if it ever does. But other abortion drugs are closer to reality, and many prolifers fear France’s acceptance of RU 486 could have wide-ranging implications for the use of abortion-inducing drugs in the U.S. and around the world.

Ingested in pill form during the early weeks of pregnancy, RU 486 deprives the developing fetus of the vital nutritional hormone progesterone, resulting in a spontaneous abortion. According to Roussel Uclaf, the French company marketing the drug, RU 486 induces abortion 80 percent of the time when taken alone, and it is 95 percent efficient when taken with another prostaglandin drug.

The drug is now available in France and China, and the World Health Organization is testing it in several other countries, including Sweden, Hungary, Great Britain, Italy, Cuba, Singapore, and India. While family-planning groups and abortion advocates consider the marketing of RU 486 a key victory, prolife groups such as the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) say the battle is not over yet.

So far, international prolife groups have not announced formal plans to protest the marketing of the drug, but they are forming a strategy. NRLC president John Willke said an international boycott is one of the options being discussed. “If we do anything, it will not be impulsive,” he said. “And if we do pull a boycott, it will be a doozy.”

Willke said there has been inadequate testing of the drug and its possible medical implications for women. He said he is particularly concerned about the drug’s use in Third World countries in areas where there is limited access to direct physician supervision.

Coming To The U.S.?

Opposition from the prolife movement has limited the progress of RU 486 in this country. So far, there have been no applications to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for licensing of the drug. But advocates of RU 486 hope its increased international marketing will boost its prospects in the U.S. Willke said drug could also enter the country through “bootlegging.”

Meanwhile, other drugs with potential abortion implications are being pushed forward. An FDA advisory committee has given tentative approval to Cytotec, a drug designed to prevent ulcers and stomach problems in arthritis patients. A product of G. D. Searle & Co., Cytotec has not been developed as an abortion drug, but is known to have abortion-inducing effects.

Proponents of the drug testified at the FDA hearing that Cytotec should be clearly labeled as dangerous to pregnant women, and that physicians would have to be educated about its abortion-inducing properties. The NRLC and other prolife groups oppose the drug. “Once it is known that [Cytotec] aborts babies,” said Willke, “there will be people using it, wanting it, and prescribing it.”

Prolife groups are also keeping an eye on Epostane, a drug that at one time was being developed by Kodak-owned Sterling Drugs. Like RU 486, Epostane targets the hormone progesterone. Sterling has announced it is no longer researching the drug and thus has no intentions of marketing it. Willke said the NRLC wants to make sure that doesn’t change.

By Kim A. Lawton.

World Scene

CUBA

Restricted, But Growing

Despite pressure characterized more as annoyance than persecution, Christians in Cuba continue to report progress.

For example, Ecuadorian missionary Rodrigo Zapata spent 11 days in Cuba last summer conducting Bible studies and workshops for more than 60 pastors. He says there is no “organized persecution” of the evangelical church, but “for an active Christian, it is difficult to obtain a job.” Zapata, whose trip was sponsored by HCJB World Radio, estimates 5 there are 30,000 evangelical Christians (.3 percent of the population) in Cuba.

This fall John Huffman, Jr., pastor of Saint Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, California, preached at a weekend series of meetings in a local church in the interior of Cuba. Huffman’s father, John, Sr., had pioneered a radio ministry in Cuba in the 1940s. Both Huffmans were invited back to Cuba by B. G. Lavastida, who had helped with the radio ministry. “I preached … to people eager to hear the Word of God declared by a brother from another culture, but one who was trusted by a fellow believer in Jesus Christ,” Huffman told his congregation.

JAPAN

Where Abortion Is Routine

A very small prolife movement in Japan is trying to counter the almost universal acceptance of abortion in that nation. According to Pro-Life Japan (PLJ), for every live birth in Japan there are three abortions, totaling more than five million per year.

In a report published in Japan Update, PLJ attributes the high abortion rate to several factors: scarcity of birth-control pills, the high cost of raising children, and the Buddhist practice of offering memorial rituals for parents of aborted fetuses.

Japanese law allows abortion through the twenty-third week of pregnancy. Also, a woman’s official family registration must record any children to whom she has given birth, even if those children are given up for adoption. Since such a record could mar the reputation of single women, abortion becomes an easier option.

Recently, a Christian physician was barred from medical practice for six months because he assisted a patient in putting her baby up for adoption, rather than perform an abortion. The case went to the Japanese supreme court, which ruled his behavior “violated medical ethics.”

COLOMBIA

Missing Missionary

Veteran missionary and Bible translator Bruce Olson was apparently kidnapped late in October by leftist guerrillas in Colombia. According to a report by International Media Service (IMS), the independent missionary and five Indian companions were ambushed in the “drug trafficking corridor” of Northern Colombia. It is unclear what prompted the incident.

In a prayer letter sent to the U.S. in late August, Olson said the Colombian army had warned him that he might be the target for some type of violence. “… I am in danger due to the imposing presence of guerrilla forces in … areas that I must pass through …,” he wrote.

The U.S. State Department is monitoring the situation, but is limited because the American-born missionary renounced his citizenship earlier this year. Olson’s situation is further complicated because he was not sent out by any particular denomination or mission group.

Olson has been working in Colombia since 1961, and has written a book, Bruchko, about his experiences. According to IMS, he has translated all of the New Testament and part of the Old Testament into the Motilone language, set up educational and medical facilities, and has spread the gospel to many unreached regions.

CHINA

Hudson Taylor’S Grave Found

For several years, the family of J. Hudson Taylor, pioneer missionary to China, has tried to find his place of burial. This past August, a Chinese pastor escorted Taylor’s greatgrandson, James H. Taylor III, to a former Protestant cemetery in Zhenjiang where the graves of Hudson Taylor, his first wife, and four of their children are intact.

The cemetery caretakers still live nearby. They told Taylor, currently general director of Overseas Missionary Fellowship, that in 1957 the gravestones were removed. Later in their visit, Taylor and his wife, Leone, discovered dismantled sections of Hudson Taylor’s monument behind the Zhenjiang Museum. Museum staff gave the Taylors rubbings of the engraved sections of the monument.

Authorities have asked the Taylors for a formal proposal to re-erect the monument.

PEOPLE AND EVENTS

Briefly Noted

Honored: For his 28 years of medical missionary service in Africa, Robert L. Foster. World Vision presented Foster, international director of the Africa Evangelical Fellowship, with the Robert W. Pierce Award for Outstanding Christian Service.

Announced: By population experts, that Asia may have just crossed the three billion population mark. China marked the occasion with speeches urging citizens to practice birth control.

By England’s oldest Anglican home missionary society, the Church Pastoral Aid Society, that retiring general secretary David Bubbers will be replaced by John Moore.

By archeologist James H. Charlesworth, “sensational, breathtaking” discoveries in Israel of the apostle Peter’s house in Capernaum where Jesus stayed.