Fund Will Benefit Minority Workers in Parachurch Groups

A Washington, D.C., affiliate of Campus Crusade for Christ International has raised $100,000 to supplement the support payments of minority staff members.

Beginning this spring, four married Campus Crusade staff members will receive up to $2,000 per month from interest earned on the fund. Called the Special Ministries Assistance Fund, it is targeted to reach $1 million. Two unmarried staff workers will receive as much as $1,000 per month. The funding supplement will be based on the gap between support raised by the staff member and the money needed by the staff member each month.

Spencer Brand, Washington area director of Here’s Life, Campus Crusade’s ministry to adults, originated the Special Ministries Assistance Fund. He said minority people face “insurmountable financial barriers” when they begin to raise support money in their own communities.

“One black staff woman is 33 years old, has been raising support for 23 months, and has $300 a month to go,” he said. “There are very few white men and women who would have that kind of perseverance.” He said most middle-class whites who join the staff raise their support in about six months.

Recognizing a need for more minority workers in Christian ministry, Brand said Here’s Life intends to make grants available to people in other parachurch organizations such as Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship and the Navigators as well as to Campus Crusade staff members. He said fewer than 3 percent of the staff members of major U.S. parachurch groups are black.

Funds raised to date have come from two events, including a cruise on the Potomac River aboard a former presidential yacht. “One hundred percent of the money given goes into the fund,” Brand said. “There is no overhead.”

The six staff members selected as the fund’s first recipients include two blacks, two Hispanics, and two Southeast Asians. Austin and Shirley Smith, serving as associate lay ministers in Washington, D.C., hope to begin full-time ministry in Chicago’s inner city. Carol Smith will continue to work in Washington’s Here’s Life program with the boost she receives from the fund.

Melvin and Isabella Acevedo work in Los Angeles’s Hispanic community, along with another designated fund recipient, Mario Galeano. Hy Huy Do and his wife, Rose, help some of the 100,000 Vietnamese refugees in Southern California start churches and adjust to living in a new culture. Vek Huong and Samoeun Taing, of Long Beach, California, are involved with Cambodian refugee relief, leadership training, and discipleship.

Minority staff members involved in full-time ministry can apply for grant money by assenting to a statement of faith, demonstrating financial need, and providing three recommendation letters and a written narrative of plans and goals for one year. Other requirements and information for donors are available from Here’s Life Washington, 3030 N. Fairfax Drive, Suite 314, Arlington, Virginia 22201.

Church Leaders Challenge the Notion that America Is a Melting Pot

Randy Frame

In Houston, missions specialists discuss ways to evangelize without ‘Americanizing’ the nation’s many ethnic groups.

In Hollywood, California, a fast-food establishment run by Koreans sells Kosher tacos. Students in the Los Angeles Unified School District collectively speak more than 100 languages. Miami is the world’s second-largest Cuban city, and Chicago is the second-largest Polish city. Further, more blacks live in the United States than in any country except Nigeria.

With facts like these, missiologist C. Peter Wagner last month illustrated the ethnic diversity that pervades America, in his keynote address to Houston ’85, the National Convocation on Evangelizing Ethnic America. Sponsored by the North American Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization, it was the first major consultation of its kind to be held in the United States. More than 47 Protestant denominations and organizations were represented, with nearly 700 registrants representing 63 language/culture groups.

“The teeming multitudes of all colors, languages, smells, and cultures are not just a quaint sideline in our nation,” Wagner said. “They are America.” A professor of church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary, Wagner noted that “Anglos now comprise only about 30 percent of America’s population, even though most of the national cultural structures and forms remain Anglo.”

Wagner’s observations came as no surprise to representatives of churches and denominations that already have extensive programs to reach ethnics with the gospel. The leader in this field is the Southern Baptist Convention. Across the nation each Sunday, some 4,600 Southern Baptist ethnic congregations worship in a total of 87 languages.

The Southern Baptist Convention’s successful model was the main reason the Lausanne Committee chose Oscar Romo to serve as Houston ’85 conference chairman. Director of the language missions division of the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board, Romo directs the denomination’s ministry to non-Anglo populations in the United States.

“America is not a melting pot,” Romo said. “It never was.” He noted that his Hispanic ancestors lived in the southwestern United States long before the Pilgrims arrived in what is now Massachusetts.

Romo said the Southern Baptist Convention, the Assemblies of God, and other congregational-style denominations have been doing more to evangelize ethnics because they are not limited by hierarchical structures. “There is no need to have programs approved from the top,” he said. “The local church simply rises to meet the spiritual needs of the people.”

Romo and other conference organizers emphasized the importance of attaining unity in the body of Christ, but not at the expense of destroying ethnic diversity. “We’re seeking to evangelize,” Romo said, “not to Americanize.”

Thus, Houston’s South Main Baptist Church was an appropriate conference site. Some urban congregations, faced with an influx of ethnic groups, have opted to move to the suburbs. But some 20 years ago, South Main Baptist Church decided to stay. It initiated programs to help immigrants adjust to their new land. Today, three ethnic congregations—Korean, Hispanic, and Cambodian—operate under the umbrella of South Main Baptist Church, which also conducts a full program for its English-speaking congregation.

The use of South Main’s facilities and programs has eased the financial burden of these ethnic congregations and has allowed them to concentrate on evangelizing and nurturing within their own ethnic groups. Every three months South Main holds a combined celebration service that brings together the entire church family.

One goal of Houston ’85 was to supply resources and contacts for those interested in beginning or strengthening ministries to ethnics. Another was to educate participants about the peculiarities of particular ethnic groups in order to increase the effectiveness of evangelism.

In a major address, Toronto-based Indian evangelist Ravi Zacharias discussed the need for intellectual credibility to permeate evangelistic witness. “There are thousands and thousands of people,” he said, “who cannot be led to the Lord under a tree with a little booklet pointing to a diagram and asking them to identify their lives on that diagram.” He said such methods are “terribly simplistic” for the millions of people of the world “who have been raised with sophisticated philosophies.”

Zacharias observed that the Hindu mind does not ascribe to the principle that if something is true, its opposite must be false. He said scores of ethnics have responded to altar calls at evangelistic crusades only to “add what they’ve heard to what they already believe.” He said Christians should help Hindus realize that they “must learn to disbelieve something before they can take a true step toward Jesus Christ.”

Houston ’85 focused on Asians, Caribbeans, Europeans, Hispanics, international students and visitors, Middle Easterners, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, refugees, and deaf people. James Banks, who works with ministries to the deaf for the Assemblies of God Division of Home Missions, explained that deaf people identify with deaf culture more than they identify with any particular race.

The conference did not, however, include all of America’s ethnic groups, something that touched a tender nerve among blacks attending Houston ’85. “We felt deep in our hearts that there was a great opportunity missed that we [blacks] could have shared in,” said Michael Patterson, an ordained Assemblies of God clergyman. Patterson was born in South America, but he said he came to the United States in 1970 and made a conscious choice to identify with black America.

Twenty-seven black Americans attended a caucus meeting the night before the conference ended. With Fuller Seminary’s Wagner and North American Lausanne Committee chairman Robert Coleman sitting in, the blacks discussed some of the problems facing black America, including the dissolution of the family and a high rate of crime.

They lamented what they said was a lost opportunity at the conference to address these problems, and they asked for a formal apology. Patterson pointed out that he and others had voiced their concerns about the exclusion of blacks when the conference was still in the early planning stages.

In a statement released to the news media, conference officials explained that “[the] Central Planning Committee felt what the Lord wanted from Houston ’85 was a focus on the ethnic peoples ‘whose language and/or culure is other than English.’ ” The statement extended an invitation to those who felt excluded to participate “as evangelizers, not as evangelized.”

Robert Harrison, the first black pastor to be ordained by the Assemblies of God, said the exclusion of blacks at the conference was a symptom of the poor relationship between black and white Christians. “Historically, blacks have been invited to events that have already been organized and structured,” he said. “What we’d like is to be in on the ground level.”

At a news conference, Wagner said the Houston ’85 organizers “may well have made the wrong judgment. We knew that [our decision] would be somewhat controversial. I don’t think we realized it would be this controversial.”

Evangelist Leighton Ford expressed concern, during his closing address, that some feelings had been hurt, saying, “I am grieved and sorry for any misunderstanding.”

At the closing banquet, Patterson told the conferees, “We have had a problem here, and we must not deny it. We must not sweep it under the rug.” However, he said he wanted to stress possibilities, not missed opportunities. The black caucus selected Patterson to head up a task force aimed at assessing the state of black America, contexualizing the gospel for grassroots black America, and interfacing with the white church by providing input in the next major Lausanne Conference on World Evangelization, planned for 1989.

The Problems of Battered Pastors

Expectations of the minister’s role are increasingly demanding and unforgiving.

Having spent the past year researching the positive and negative dynamics at work within the church of Jesus Christ, author and editor Marshall Shelley offers some specifics to strengthen the relationships between pastor and parishioner.

While he knelt in prayer at his church in Onalaska, Wisconsin, 64-year-old parish priest John Rossiter was shot and killed by a 29-year-old man who objected to the priest’s decision to allow school-girls to read the Scripture at a children’s mass.

Granted, that episode last February is an extreme example of parishioner dissatisfaction. Many churches enjoy their pastors and find ways to show their appreciation. Assassination, thankfully, is still a rarity; unfortunately, reports of clergy casualties from emotional assaults are not.

“I’m the fifth pastor in eight years at this church,” wrote one Nazarene pastor to LEADERSHIP journal. “In the last two years I’ve found out why. But my congregation is not the only one. There seems to be a lot of hostility toward pastors in our town regardless of denomination. The constant struggle with personal attacks and putdowns has drained me of enthusiasm. I feel like I’m bleeding to death.”

Despite being a gathered community of saints, the church continues to be, as one observer puts it, “the one place where all are welcome … the difficult and the dear … the one public place in the world where one can vent one’s gall, relieve one’s frustrations, reveal one’s distortions, and still expect to be heard.” After spending the last year researching one thorn in the pastor’s flesh—difficult people—I’ve discovered angry individuals are only one of the threats to a pastor’s survival and effectiveness.

The problem of battered pastors is not always caused by specific individuals as much as by the changing expectations of the pastor’s role—expectations that in the last 15 years have become increasingly demanding and unforgiving.

The effect can be seen in the thousands of pastors desperate to leave unhappy situations. It is not uncommon for even small churches to advertise a pastoral opening and be flooded with resumes.

Many come from pastors already placed but eager to move somewhere—anywhere—to escape an unbearable situation. Others come from unemployed pastors.

Part of this is due to an oversupply of Protestant clergy. The Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches reports that of the approximately 410,000 Protestant clergy in the United States, 250,000 serve parishes. Many, of course, are in other professions. (The oversupply sharply contrasts with the number of Catholic priests, which U.S. News and World Report projects will decline by the year 2000 to half the present 58,000.) This oversupply not only makes placement more competitive, but it also has the effect of devaluing an individual pastor.

At a recent business meeting in a Baptist church to discuss the budget, with the pastor and his family present, one man stood to say, “We don’t need to give the minister a raise. If this isn’t enough for the current pastor, we can always get another one for less.”

Is it any wonder then, as church consultant Lyle Schaller points out, “a substantial number of pastors find themselves very receptive to the idea of moving to another congregation approximately 35 to 45 months after arriving in that pastorate”? They find, however, the grass is rarely greener elsewhere.

What causes this desperation? According to the old adage, “It’s not the mountain ahead that wears you out; it’s the grain of sand in your shoe.” Most pastors can handle the mountains and survive the crises, but some aspects of the daily grind wear them out and bring an end to their ministry. From my contact with pastors, here are two of the most devastating grains of sand.

Everyone’s Expectations

Despite two decades of emphasis on lay ministry and the priesthood of all believers, people still have distinct ideas about what pastors are supposed to do and be.

“I always laugh when I think of the time we announced we would be adopting our first son,” says Bonnie Halcomb, a pastor’s wife in Milwaukee. “One dear old lady told my husband, ‘That’s how every pastor and his wife should have children.’ ”

If some people think pastors should be sexless, others think they should be sinless.

Researchers David and Vera Mace found that while only about 50 percent of pastors complained of such things as time pressure or lack of family privacy in the pastorate, a full 85 percent said they felt the congregation expected their marriage to be a model of perfection.

A study by the Association of Theological Schools on “Readiness for Ministry” reports that even fledgling clergy are expected to exhibit at least nine personal characteristics while performing their roles—ranging from “serving without concern for public recognition” to “ability to honor commitments … despite all pressures to compromise” to the ability to “handle stressful situations by remaining calm under pressure while continuing to affirm persons.”

The report, presumably issued in utter seriousness, somehow overlooked the item about walking on water. As G. K. Chesterton said, “People pay ministers to be good, to show the rest of us it doesn’t pay to be good.”

Yes, there are legitimate demands for church leaders to practice what they preach. Paul’s instructions to Timothy and Titus are clear. Yet some congregations come pretty close to expecting not maturity but divinity. (Do they take an M.Div. literally?)

These personal expectations are not new. Some 1,600 years ago John Chrysostom observed, “The minister’s shortcomings simply cannot be concealed.… However trifling their offences, these little things seem great to others, since everyone measures sin, not by the size of the offense, but by the standing of the sinner.”

What’s new are the functional expectations. Pastoral roles have multiplied in recent years.

“I find very few individuals with an unrealistic expectation of the pastor—it’s the composite image that gets to you,” said one Congregational pastor. “Each person expects something different. And rarely does anyone outside the pastoral family see the composite.”

  • The servant-shepherd, quietly meeting personal needs without regard for personal acclaim.
  • The prophet-politician, dominating local headlines while fighting for truth and justice.
  • The preacher-enthraller, attracting the unchurched with entertaining, uplifting sermons.
  • The teacher-theologian, challenging the most serious Bible student with verse-by-verse “meat” of the Word.
  • The evangelist-exhorter, winning converts through both private conversation and public crusade.
  • The organizer-promoter, administering an effective Christian education program, music ministry, and social activities for all ages.
  • The caller-comforter, visiting the sick, consoling the bereaved, playing checkers with the lonely.
  • The counselor-reconciler, offering guidance to the distressed, therapy for the disturbed, mediation for those in dispute, and restoration for the divorced.
  • The equipper-enabler, personally training motivated lay people to serve, prophesy, preach, teach, evangelize, organize, call, and counsel.

As Methodist minister Pierce Harris puts it, “The modern preacher has to make as many visits as a country doctor, shake as many hands as a politician, prepare as many briefs as a lawyer, and see as many people as a specialist. He has to be as good an executive as the president of a university, as good a financier as a bank president; and in the midst of it all, he has to be so good a diplomat that he could umpire a baseball game between the Knights of Columbus and the Ku Klux Klan.”

Not only are individual expectations different and sometimes mutually exclusive, but the basis for judging has changed in the last 15 years. Until the age of Christian mass media, pastors were compared, if at all, only with their predecessor or colleagues across town.

Today, however, standards have been elevated. Jerry Falwell has become the standard for measuring political involvement. Evangelistic effectiveness is judged against the most recent film series. Counseling techniques are compared with seminar leaders and authors of religious psychology. Preaching is stacked against Swindoll, Graham, or Schuller.

No longer are pastors allowed to be generalists, jacks of all trades; today is an age of specialization. It is not even enough to be a master of one area. Different church members expect pastors to be specialists in almost every area.

“I appreciate the Christian leaders who have become prominent in one field or another,” said one minister. “But some of their devoted followers in my congregation make life miserable by expecting me to duplicate the work of all the Christian achievers.”

One Colorado pastor has found that despite marching in several prolife rallies and emphasizing the sanctity of life regularly in sermons, some church members are not satisfied. “They tell me that abortion is the single most important issue of the day, and if I don’t condemn it at every opportunity, I’m selling out,” he said. “I support their cause, but I try to explain that God calls different people to different roles. As a pastor, I need to attend prolife rallies, but being prolife also means ministering to nursery workers, troubled junior highers, searching college students, harried young parents, and suffering older folks.

“Zealots can’t understand that … until their junior higher is the one with a problem.

“Too often they seem to think that because God called them to a specific task, he’s necessarily called me to it as well. Some friends of mine are called to be missionaries in the Philippines, and I support them; but that doesn’t mean I’m supposed to go there, too.”

In some ways, thanks to these expectations, the pastoral pedestal is higher and more precarious than ever.

Everyone’s Evaluations

In other ways, however, the pastoral pedestal has been removed. The office is no longer guaranteed respect. In a sense, pastors today must continually work against themselves: To the degree that they move laity toward more significant ministry, they remove some of the mystique of the pastoral profession and limit its power.

Today, few positions are so open to public evaluation as that of pastor. Like quarterbacks and presidents, pastors are fair game for second guessers. Often sermons are received not so much as a word from God to be obeyed but a suggestion from the pastor to be debated.

Everyone, regardless of training, has an opinion on what a church service should be. The dilemma for pastors is that they know these evaluations are often unfair, but they need feedback from the congregation. Even pastors who know faithfulness cannot be measured in quantifiable terms are desperate for encouragement.

“No matter how many times I tell myself not to, I always wind up asking my wife as we walk home from church, ‘Well, how was it?’ ” said one Presbyterian who has pastored his church 23 years. “I know I shouldn’t be so concerned what people think, but I can’t seem to help it. I have to know.”

Not only do pastors need the informal encouragement, but formal support as well. But sometimes, if poorly handled, feedback can actually hinder the ministry.

One pastor suddenly found his board wanting to operate in a more “businesslike” manner. For instance, they asked him to log his time so they could monitor his priorities. With detailed schedules in hand, they then began instructing him to “spend less time in sermon preparation and more in counseling.” They also wanted him to set “specific, measurable goals.”

“I don’t mind them being more organized,” the pastor said. “But if they’re going by business standards, I wish they had been consistent. Unlike a business, they offered no annual review, no pay raise, and no recognition of my ten-year anniversary with the church. Not wanting to seem petty, I didn’t bring these things up, but their new ‘efficiency’ has only made ministry a joyless and literally thankless task.”

How can pastors and churches develop expectations and evaluations helpful for both sides?

A Realistic Role

Obviously, a spirit of mutual appreciation and respect is the essential foundation. “With the right spirit, a clumsy church structure will work. Without the right spirit, an ideal structure won’t work,” says Malcolm Cronk, pastor of Camelback Bible Church in Paradise Valley, Arizona.

But in addition, three suggestions, while not providing the solution for every situation, may prove helpful in dealing with the realities of role confusion.

Look for gifts, not greatness. Congregations are rightfully concerned about the minister’s effectiveness. Unfortunately, their concern sometimes focuses solely on attendance or financial growth. A better test of a whether a pastor is effective is to look for signs of the pastoral gift.

Different churches have different emphases, but at bottom, they all need someone with a gift of pastoring. The signs of such a gift?

1. A mature understanding of God’s Word.

2. The ability to communicate that Word, whether through preaching or through interpersonal skills.

3. Growth in people’s lives. When a genuine gift is exercised, something happens; perhaps it is not seen in spectacular numbers, but the Word of God is having an effect.

If these are in evidence, the church probably does not need to be looking for someone “greater.”

This pastoral gift is different from other gifts—fund raising, for instance, or even evangelism.

Recently a Bible college that promoted itself as a training ground for pastors called as its president a well-known traveling evangelist. He has never pastored a congregation and as an evangelist has understandably focused on a successful but one-dimensional ministry. His priority for the school is to equip students to “win the 3 billion lost souls in the world.”

One of the school’s alumni, now a seminary professor, said, “I have no doubt [the new president] will succeed in his goal of equipping students to be evangelists. I also have no doubt that many congregations will suffer from the lack of priestly ministry necessary to sustain them in the celebrations and sorrows of life. There is a difference in the call of an evangelist from one who is a shepherd of souls.”

Some congregations thrive with a “pastor” who is an evangelist (or administrator or social activist or …), but they must recognize that the real pastoring will have to come from another source, either a lay person or pastoral staff member.

Let the pastor lead with personal strengths. The healthiest churches admit their pastors cannot be specialists in every area, so they let the pastor major on two or three areas of strength.

Building a Healthy Church

There are several keys to building a healthy church atmosphere, including:

A positive tone. This can be modeled personally:

  • By praising publicly the congregation’s strengths.
  • By enjoying and taking pride in the diversity among church members.
  • By thanking critics, at least initially, for their candor and concern.
  • By assuming anything uncomplimentary you say about anyone will be repeated—because it probably will be—and by trusting very few people with your private criticisms and suspicions.
  • By being slow to step into other people’s problems—balancing Paul’s instruction to carry, with some qualifications, each other’s burdens (Gal. 6:1–5) and Jesus’ refusal to intervene in the disputes of others (Luke 12:14).

One pastor who has seen his church transformed from a defeated, divided group to an enthusiastic, high-morale congregation says, “Obviously the Holy Spirit is responsible for this kind of change, but I think he honored some of our efforts in that direction, too. We began focusing on the joys of life rather than bemoaning our discouragements. You don’t cover up your disappointments, failed programs, and lost votes, but neither do you dwell on them or announce them from the pulpit.”

When the fruit of the Spirit becomes characteristic of the church’s daily life, it becomes painfully clear whenever someone violates that spirit (“That’s not the way we do things around here”), and the body itself will work to take care of the irritation.

Adapted from Well-Intentioned Dragons (LEADERSHIP/Word, 1985)

This means both the congregation and the pastor must admit something is being relinquished. Congregations must overcome their assumption that the pastor can do everything other pastors do. Pastors must overcome their desire to retain control over every area of church ministry. Relinquishing an area of personal weakness means entrusting it to someone else—not always an easy task.

But unless it is done, pastors find themselves increasingly ineffective, and both congregation and pastor grow increasingly dissatisfied.

In his book Ordering Your Private World, Gordon MacDonald, until recently pastor of Grace Chapel in Lexington, Massachusetts, says, “Because I had not adequately defined my sense of mission … because I had not been ruthless enough with my weaknesses, I found that I normally invested inordinately large amounts of time doing things I was not good at, while the tasks I should have been able to do with excellence and effectiveness were preempted. I know many Christian leaders who candidly admit they spend up to 80 percent of their time doing things at which they are second-best.”

Unless the congregation allows the pastor to focus on areas of strength, his or her time will inevitably flow in the direction of relative weakness, depriving the church of the best the pastor can offer.

Let commitment mean something. Too seldom is the relationship between pastor and congregation a happy marriage; more often it is a temporary live-in arrangement based on “as long as we both shall love” instead of “as long as we both shall live.”

Commitment can mean something, even in the church. Some congregations condemn divorce but sever their relationship with a pastor as soon as he displeases them. Yes, there are times for ministers to move, but the call of a pastor, like any other commitment, is not negated just because of differences, even serious differences. Perseverance is the ultimate test of commitment—whether to God or another human being.

Sooner or later, we all must accept the fact that there is no such thing as a perfect marriage—neither between husband/wife nor pastor/people. And if there is, it will not stay that way long. No relationship is static. In fact, it is doubtful that any marriage can even be called good unless it is continually growing, admitting the growing pains, and reaffirming a commitment to work together in the new circumstances.

David Schuller, an ordained Lutheran and associate director of the Association of Theological Schools, points out that our responses to tension and ambiguity are the essence of maturity: “A sense of peace and stability may be a delusion and a false expectation. Some clergy talk longingly of becoming personally ‘freed up’ in order to be able to serve more fully. Only slowly is the truth learned: Ministry ‘happens’ most authentically in the midst of suffering and ambiguity. One’s own human predicament forms part of the response of ministry.”

While we continue to long for the glorious ideal, it is faithfulness in the less than ideal that brings glory to God.

Theology

Is Heaven Any Earthly Good?

Tim Stafford

Heaven is a disreputable topic today partly because it came to be understood as a repressive doctrine of the status quo: the “opiate” that kept the masses in their submissive place. It is “pie in the sky” that supposedly makes no difference in the world here and now.

Indeed, let us admit that the good news of heaven seems to make no difference to many. They say that they believe that the kingdom of heaven is coming, and yet go right on living just as they always have. They neither go up on a mountain to wait for Jesus, nor do they work especially hard in the valley to prepare for his coming. They just go about their business.

A friend, Jack Crabtree, has illuminated this question for me with an illustration. Suppose, Jack says, that you are a 16-year-old practicing basketball in your driveway when an angel appears to you and delivers a message about the future. “Good news! You are destined to be a great basketball player. You will one day be Rookie of the Year in the NBA. You will go on to be recognized as one of the very greatest players who ever lived.”

“So what’s the catch?” you ask.

“Nothing. This is free, a gift from God.”

Suppose that the angel managed, as angels do, to convince you that he was a real angel, and that the message was absolutely unconditional and supernatural. You believed it. Would it make you practice basketball more, or less?

That would depend on what your heart longed for. If the angel had merely happened to find you practicing basketball due to boredom, if you didn’t care much for basketball, his message would make little impact. In fact, it might make you care for basketball even less. “Hey, great. That will be fun. I’ll look forward to it.” You would go off and do the things you really wanted to do, without any increased sense of duty to practice a game that took so much hard work to be good at. You could forget about practicing basketball: you were going to be a success whether you practiced or not.

But suppose you lived and breathed and dreamed basketball. Suppose the greatest joy you had ever dared imagine was to be NBA Rookie of the Year. Then how would the message affect you? It would, I believe, release you to work harder at your game. You would lose that sense of discouraged uncertainty that afflicts people at every game: “What’s the use? I’m just kidding myself.” Instead, you would know that every moment you practiced was preparation for the very thing you longed for. When you made a basket, you would say, “I’m on the way!” When you missed one, you could shrug your shoulders and say, “Well, I still have a way to go, don’t I?” Because you knew that mistakes were merely transitional, you could forgive yourself for them.

Plenty of people are in just this situation. They have been told they can go to heaven to be with God forever. They are mildly interested, and glad to hear the news. Now they have good insurance coverage for the future, whatever it may hold. They can stop thinking about it, and go on with an easy conscience over whatever they really care about—making money, or becoming admired, or outdressing the neighbors, or hunting and fishing. They do not really long for Jesus, so the promise to meet him has only an incidental effect on their lives.

But the news should have far deeper effects on those who long for God. It should catch and hold their attention, forming a burning, joyful expectation that overshadows everything else. It should make Christians devote themselves to love because they believe that the kingdom of love is coming, and that what they do today will shine brilliantly tomorrow. They should love their neighbors because they know that love (and their neighbors) will endure beyond the turning.

Not only does this have very practical implications here and now, it helps us as we deal with this significant question: How do we reconcile our longing for God with the real and dull facts of where we are, poor, deadened, unspiritual creatures? Now we can see that we cannot reconcile it, and ought not to try. God will reconcile it in his own time, but here and now we do not have Jesus as we want to have him.

Nor should we. Our unfulfilled desire has a point: it will motivate us to care about living faithfully. For only those who ache to be great basketball players will practice more, not less, as they see their greatness on the horizon. Only those who ache to be with Jesus will do his will more, not less, as they expect his arrival.

Theology

The Age to Come

Tim Stafford

Heaven can’t be cut out of the garment of faith.

Heaven can’t be cut out of the garment of faith.

When I was a teenager, I would have been happy to do away with heaven. I felt that it was a disreputable concept.

I had a pragmatic mind, and the idea that Christianity’s value depended on something I could not see or know about, some place vaguely celebrated as having golden streets, disturbed me. I remember questioning a Sunday school teacher on the subject. “But even if there were not a place like heaven, even if life ended at death, don’t you think Christianity would be worthwhile?” I got a hesitant yes, and I felt better. I wanted a faith that was practical and valuable here and now. If I got a bonus after life, that would be fine, but it was not the reason I believed.

Why did I feel this way, which was at odds with the way so many Christians before me had felt? I think the period of my youth, in the 1960s, set many of us apart from the generations before. Through its events we lost any sense that we were part of history. The moon walk, the Kennedy and King assassinations, the Vietnam nightmare, the new math, marijuana and LSD, encounter groups—all these were, it seemed to my generation, a departure from everything that had ever happened. We had no certainty where they would lead us. To heaven on Earth? To hell on Earth? Both views had their partisans.

Once lost, a sense of history—the continuity with the importance of time out of reach, forward and backward—is very hard to regain. For my generation, Christianity focused around two poles. We wanted at one pole a practical Christianity that helped people form sound marriages, raise their children well, form positive friendships, help their community and their world, work hard, and live well. That was the outside of life. The other pole was on the inside: a faith that cured loneliness, took away anger, filled the God-shaped vacuum with a “sweet, sweet Spirit.” Our churches worked hard to help both poles of life. We held seminars on family life, “God’s will” (which means vocation and marriage plans), simple living. Those were for the outside. We also held seminars on “how to be filled with the Spirit,” “quiet time,” “spirituality.” These were for the inside. Both inside and outside were “practical,” making sense to us and even to our non-Christian neighbors.

But our generation’s Christianity had neither past nor future. It floated in an existential present. What happened in biblical times was relevant only as it helped me now. The future kingdom of Christ was a blurry theological detail (unless you could convince me that it would come within the next year or two).

Today my view is different. I realize now that you can’t cut heaven out of the garment of faith. Tear it out and you tear the garment at every point. Theologians and scholars know this very well. Heaven is a historic doctrine of Christianity. Jesus taught us to pray to our Father in heaven, that “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The Apostles’ Creed declares that from heaven Jesus “will come to judge the living and the dead,” and proclaims “the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.” There is no chaff in the creed, only the fundamentals that all Christians believe essential.

Unfortunately, I did not rediscover heaven as a result of reading the Bible, the historic creeds, or the great theologians. What led me to care about heaven was a personal exploration. I was preoccupied with the questions “Where is God?” “How do I know him personally?” I realized, when I asked those questions most frankly, that while God was with me, he was also absent. I lived in darkness as well as light. I could not see his face; I could not carry on a real conversation. This was more than a theological problem, it was a personal problem. I missed God.

Then I found that I was not the first person to feel that way. People in the Bible knew that the kingdom had still not come in its fullness. They felt pain and longing at its partialness and unfulfillment. They also felt expectancy and hope, for they believed that what they wanted was on its way.

Paul wrote in Romans 8:24–25, “Hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has?” (NIV) The full glory of following Christ was yet to be; when you signed up to be a Christian you joined those waiting at night, lamps ready, for the Bridegroom to come. Christian hope is the expectation that our current world situation is hopeless; it must all be burned up in preparation for something completely different. Jesus is coming. We long for him. This is what gives our faith meaning. This is what makes our “personal relationship” ultimately personal.

The Bible told me wonderful news: I would know God intimately, feel his love as the kindest and grandest of friends. But not in this age. I would know him that way in heaven, the age to come.

My grandparents were missionaries to India and Pakistan, and because they came home only every five to seven years, I did not see them often. Their picture was prominently displayed in our dining room, however, and I remember that picture as clearly as any of my childhod. Their faces looked softened and gentle to me, like old pieces of brass that have been polished so often that the sharp corners have rubbed down. In our family conversation, my grandparents were often spoken of, and their letters were read aloud. I felt personal with my grandparents even though I actually had no memory of seeing them. This would not have been possible, I imagine, if not for a fundamental certainty we all shared: “Grandpa and Grandma will be coming back.” We did not see them, but we knew that we would see them, that when they returned they would come straight to us.

As a matter of fact, when I finally saw them I got a jolt: they did not look just like the picture. They were not frozen still: they lived, they moved.

Yet what I had known was quite accurate. My faith in them had not been misplaced, for they were kind and generous to little boys. They were the same people whose picture I had grown up with, and whose letters I had read. I knew them, they knew me, and we belonged to the same family. Only I had a lot to learn. Their reality overwhelmed my mental image.

So it is with God. We know him, though in a limited way. More important, he knows us. And he is coming. When he comes, he will come straight to us. This hope lets us call him, with personal assurance, our Father, and say we have a personal relationship with him.

So far, our life here and now sounds grim. We live as aliens in “this wicked age,” and we wait to see Jesus in the age to come. Everyone must choose which to build his hopes on: the present kingdom of this world or the coming kingdom of Jesus. There is no in-between. It sounds as though our practical, sensible, helpful faith goes out the window. Only the future counts.

But the Bible also offers a subtler view. The age to come has already come, in seed form. The kingdom of God is already “in our midst” as well as “at hand,” and it has been ever since Jesus came. This is a most confusing situation. “Which is it?” someone may ask impatiently. “Is life in Christ joy or hope? Do you have Christ or do you expect him?”

It is a hard question to answer, for it is a question of timing. Time is slippery stuff, sometimes seeming to move very quickly, sometimes very slowly, sometimes inexplicably both at once. (It seems, for instance, only a short time since I moved into my house, yet I also seem to have been here forever.) Perspective—where in time we are looking from—makes a gigantic difference.

Perhaps we can make a little more sense out of the Christian dilemma if we consider the way we normally remember history—that is, how we look at events that have already blown past us. They look different from that angle than they did as they happened, for memory selects, from all the things that happened, only the few that prove of lasting importance.

The history of science may serve as a good nonreligious example. Most science textbooks chart its direction as a steady march upward. Looking backward, it seems to flow smoothly, almost inevitably forward. The timing may be delayed a few years or even decades, but sooner or later someone will make the next jump. Progress does not even ultimately depend on the rare genius of an Einstein. He speeds things up, but so long as there are real scientists practicing real science, man’s knowledge must expand, his mastery increase.

However, historians of science have shown that the scientific process is not nearly so neat to those living in the middle of the events. For every scientist who made a crucial discovery, ten made “discoveries” that turned out to be irrelevant or even false. Fairly often the ten were more renowned, in their time, than the one.

Only looking backward do we separate the wheat from the chaff. As a matter of fact, the chaff utterly vanishes from history, as though it had never existed. The unsuccessful scientists are nameless. Their insignificant or incorrect theories are unknown. Science looks very different from our perspective, looking back over it, than it did to those making it. It is the same with any series of events: a courtship, a career, a war. In the middle of life we see a confusion of grit; we are mainly aware of looking for diamonds in the dirt, not of finding them. But from the perspective of the end, all the dirt is vanished,like a shadowy memory. The enduring product—the gemlike scientific theory, the martial victory, the marriage, the polished diamond—seems to have been sitting fully formed, waiting to be found. Looking back, it seems to have been inevitable.

Now let us try to apply this to our Christian dilemma. According to the Bible, Christ lives in us, and at the same time, we wait for him to come. From which perspective is the Bible speaking, the middle or the end? Scripture, I believe, mainly presents us with a view of life from the end—“the eternal perspective,” we might call it. It is a voice telling us, “This is how it will seem when it is all over.” This view separates what is real from what is unreal. What is real is what will last. Everything else, no matter how real it seems to us, is treated as insubstantial, hardly worth a snort. That is why Scripture can seem at times so blithely and irritatingly out of touch with reality, brushing past huge philosophical problems and personal agony. That is just how life is, when you are looking from the end. Perspective changes everything.

Even pain and sorrow are transformed by the view from the end. If you walk through a hospital, you can encounter a practical example of this. There is one ward where moans are most likely to assault your ears. Young women writhe in severe pain, but the doctors resist giving them sedatives. The problem is obvious to the eye: these women are suffering from gigantic growths that have swelled their stomachs to the size of beach balls. Their taut skin glistens; as the hours pass, the women’s faces grow increasingly worn with pain. If they were there with any other diagnosis, say cancer, the scene would cut your heart.

Instead, you may feel great joy in a maternity ward. The view from the end is a baby. Because they know this, the women rarely despair in their pain. They may feel as much pain as a woman in the same hospital with stomach cancer. But they look confidently toward the end—a joyful end. Later, they will not be able even to remember how the process felt. A mother may say, “Isn’t it strange how you can’t remember how much it hurt?” The pain that seemed so terrible simply fades away, especially because it came to its proper end: she holds her baby.

We Christians carry the embryonic kingdom of God. Christ is being formed in us, and from the perspective of heaven he is King of Kings and Lord of Lords. There is no other realism; everything leading up to it leads up to it, and thus is part of the reality. Anything else is shadowy and insubstantial.

From the perspective of the end, our struggles, pain, and confusion, if they are worth remembering at all, add relish to the triumph. The scientist hardly remembers, except as a joyful joke on himself, how he set up the apparatus wrong three times. The diamond miner barely recalls, except as a nostalgic aside, standing knee deep in cold mud. The Bible is constantly trying to get us to see things this way, problems erased by a greater understanding, pain eclipsed by a greater result.

Psalm 73 presents a frightening view of the wicked: “They have no struggles; their bodies are healthy and strong. They are free from the burdens common to man.… They say, ‘How can God know? Does the Most High have knowledge?’ ” (NIV). Materialism throws up an impressive facade of success and permanence. The psalmist, seeing the view from the middle, ponders this with a bitter spirit. Then, in an insight, he realizes the eternal value of God: “God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” The wicked will vanish like shadows: “You destroy all who are unfaithful to you.” The frustrations of life are solved by a glimpse of the future. From that perspective the real may be separated from the arrogant shadows. His bitterness is not contradicted:it is evaporated.

A great deal of Jesus’ teaching emphasizes the view from the end. How do you tell a good tree from a bad tree? By the harvest, which is not continuous but comes at the end of the growing season. Jesus tells us to store up treasure in heaven—treasure that is indestructible, that has lasting value in the perspective of history. He tells us to build our foundations on rock, not sand. Only a house that endures the flood is a good house. What seems important and valuable to us must be tested by the view from the end of time.

So how do we answer the original question? Is Christ here, or yet to come? He is here, coming. Amid the mess of our lives, amid the broken experiments and the mistaken theories, the joy and the sorrow, is a vein of pure gold. Sometimes it surfaces. Other times it lies buried. But the whole mess will be purified with fire, and when that furious burning is over we will look at the shining gold that is left and say, “So you were there all the time!”

The seed will grow into a tree. The baby will be born. The harvest will vindicate the patient farmers.

Dying for a Drink

Anderson Spickard, Jr. and Barbara Thompson

Dispelling the myths about overcoming alcoholism.

Dispelling the myths about overcoming alcoholism.

Recent statistics indicate alcoholism directly affects the lives of one out of every five Americans—and many of the alcoholic or the hurt are in our churches. So understanding alcoholism and its treatment is important. To further that understanding, we have adapted the following article from the just-published book Dying for a Drink, coauthored by Anderson Spickard, Jr., and free-lance writer Barbara Thompson. Dr. Spickard is director of general internal medicine and professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and a frequent speaker on the subject of alcoholism.

When painful circumstances or an organized intervention compel an alcoholic to seek treatment for his addiction, he and his family members are confronted with important questions. Where does an alcoholic go to learn how to quit drinking? What kind of help does he need?

For many Christians, the answer seems obvious. They are skeptical of efforts to “treat” addiction and convinced that alcoholics find deliverance from alcohol only through repentance and personal conversion. As I travel among church groups, I frequently hear people say, “If only he were right with the Lord; then he wouldn’t need alcohol or drugs.” The implication is that addiction is strictly a spiritual problem, and that alcoholics and drug addicts who give themselves to God and faithfully attend church services and Bible studies will be cured of their problem.

I identify deeply with this point of view because it was once my own, and I know it often springs from a deep concern and compassion for addicted people. At the same time, I have learned from painful experience that the search for a “Christian” solution to the problem of addiction usually does more harm than good, and in a sad number of cases it prevents alcoholics from getting the help they need.

When I first began practicing medicine, I avoided alcoholic patients altogether. Hundreds of unpleasant encounters had taught me that addiction was a hopeless problem, and I preferred not to waste my time with “drunks.” Alcoholics I couldn’t avoid, those with acute physical symptoms, such as cirrhosis or bleeding ulcers, I rushed through the standard hospital treatment. They were detoxified with the use of drugs, treated for the most serious of their physical problems, and then discharged back into an alcohol-saturated world to await their next physical crisis.

My only “success” during this period was getting rid of an alcoholic patient who had irritated me for years. Henry was an old fraternity friend, and the more he drank, the more he presumed on our friendship. He constantly pressured me to give him pills for hangovers or to admit him to the hospital for imaginary illnesses. His phone calls came at any hour of the day, and he talked continuously of “unlucky breaks” and lost job opportunities. Finally I had had enough. When Henry called one afternoon threatening to jump off Nashville’s New Memorial Bridge unless I renewed his Valium prescription, I told him to go ahead. He was a pain in the neck, I added, and if he let me know the time of his departure, I would invite our mutual friends. I hung up on Henry without a trace of bad conscience. There were a lot of sick people in the world who wanted help: my time was too valuable to waste on patients, or even friends, who were trying to destroy themselves.

In the early 1970s I went through a revolution in my spiritual life that profoundly affected my attitude toward alcoholics. Like most Southerners from the upper-middle class, I had grown up in an achievement-oriented world of private schools, dance classes, and church services. Except for the months following the death of my father, who was struck by lightning when I was 18, I maintained a distant but cordial relationship with God. I called on him when I was in a tight spot, and otherwise I relied on my own abilities and professional accomplishments.

Over a period of several years, this optimistic self-reliance began to crumble. My responsibilities as a faculty member of Vanderbilt Medical School were increasing, my private practice was expanding rapidly, I saw a steady stream of patients whose illnesses did not respond to conventional medicines. These patients, many of whom had consulted numerous specialists, came to Vanderbilt Medical Center in a last effort to find effective treatment or an accurate diagnosis. Their needs were enormous, and far beyond the range of any doctor.

The stark realities of human desperation began to illuminate my own spiritual inadequacy. I needed something to give my patients, but I also needed something for myself. I began to pray for a deeper, more intimate relationship with God; over a period of several months, these prayers were answered. With help from a perceptive patient and lay renewal ministry within my church, I entered into a new and profoundly personal relationship with God. I surrendered my “M.D.-eity” ego to Jesus, and experienced the joy of having his Spirit fill my life.

After this profound conversion experience I was eager to help my alcoholic patients by leading them into a personal relationship with God. I felt a strong sense of identification with these people, whose lives were out of control, and I knew that if the Lord could rescue me from the bondage of pride and arrogance, he could also rescue others from the bondage of alcohol.

In order to help my addicted patients surrender their lives to God, I spent a great deal of time sharing my testimony with them and writing out prescriptions for selected passages from the Living Bible. I even handed out copies of Perry Como’s recording of “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

During this time I saw a string of patients (including three medical doctors) who were bright, gifted, and alcoholic. Despite my good intentions and genuine concern for these patients’ spiritual lives, I never cured, or even controlled, a single drinking problem. It was as if my simplistic remedies reduced alcoholism to a spectator sport. With a diagnosis in one hand and a Bible in the other, I could only stand and watch while my patients exhausted the last energies of their talented lives in pursuit of “just one more drink.”

The Impotence Of Will Power

One of these patients was a close friend. Jerry was the toughest, most strong-willed man I ever met, and our friendship went back many years. I knew that Jerry was a heavy drinker, but by the time his embarrassed family brought him to my office, I had trouble believing the results of my own examination. Jerry’s liver was barely functioning, his pancreas was acutely inflamed, and his blood pressure was dangerously high. Jerry spent a week in the detoxification ward, and then, in the presence of his wife and children, I warned him that he was going to die in a matter of months if he did not stop drinking. Jerry was visibly shaken by my diagnosis, and vowed never to take another drink. His family promised to do everything in their power to support his decision, and when they left my office I was convinced that Jerry was on the road to a new life.

Jerry’s strong will to live, his determination to stop drinking, and the constant love and attention of his family combined to accomplish nothing. And despite my prayers, my Living Bible prescriptions, my threats and my pleadings, Jerry never could stop drinking. For over a year I watched in unbelieving sorrow as this remarkable man involuntarily drank himself to death. It was one of the most anguishing experiences of my medical career. Never again would I dismiss alcoholism as a disease of weak-willed persons.

In the midst of this perplexed helplessness, I attended a week-long workshop at an alcoholism rehabilitation unit in Minnesota. My initial skepticism—what was left to learn that I hadn’t already encountered in medical school?—slowly turned to amazement as I watched skilled counselors lead dozens of alcoholics into honest confrontation with their addiction. Many of these counselors were themselves “recovering” alcoholics who had been sober for 10, 20, or even 30 years. The key to their sobriety was a 12-step program that had been in existence since before World War II; now, in every major city and in most small towns, there were successful, well-run treatment centers or self-help groups for alcoholics.

It is difficult to communicate the astonishment and regret with which I digested this information. I was a professor of medicine at a major medical university teaching students the most up-to-date medical science, and reluctantly treating numerous alcoholics. All of these patients, as far as I could tell, were drinking themselves to death, and neither I nor my medical colleagues knew of any reliable or medically sound alternative to benign neglect. As a follower of Jesus Christ and a firm believer in the power of the Holy Spirit, I had tried to fill this vacuum by leading my alcoholic patients to conversion; but even the few who recognized their spiritual need were unable to give up drinking.

Now, after 20 years of medical practice, I was learning that alcoholism responded to a specific program of treatment, and that over a million men, women, and teenagers all over the world were recovering from addiction. I felt it was as if I had spent years unsuccessfully treating diabetic patients with prayer and psychotherapy only to discover that thousands of diabetics were doing quite well by controlling their sugar intake and using insulin. It was a rude awakening.

Before Choosing Treatment

Today, hundreds of alcoholic patients later, I am more convinced than ever that alcoholism is a treatable disorder. My professional involvement with alcoholics and their families has become one of the most hopeful and inspiring aspects of my medical practice, and while setbacks are unavoidable, the joy of participating in an alcoholic’s recovery far outweighs any disappointments I encounter.

Before alcoholics and their families choose among the available treatment options, there are several important points about the treatment process that need clarification. These include the following:

1. No alcoholic should be left alone during the period of physical withdrawal. Alcohol is a depressant drug, and its habitual use results in physical dependence. This dependence is a consequence of the perpetual depression of the central nervous system’s normal activity, and adjustments it makes to adapt to the constant presence of alcohol. When alcohol is suddenly withdrawn, the central nervous system “rebounds” into hyperactivity. The alcoholic experiences withdrawal symptoms ranging in severity from irritability and nervousness to seizures and delerium tremens (DTs). The most common withdrawal symptom is tremulousness, or “the shakes,” which includes an increase in blood pressure, profuse sweating, rapid heartbeat, and sleeplessness. Withdrawal symptoms normally last for two or three days, but they can persist for two or three weeks.

While some alcoholics have little or no difficulty during withdrawal, the majority of addicted drinkers have physical problems of one kind or another. The severity of their symptoms is usually related to how long the alcoholic has been drinking, and how much. Occasionally even short-term drinkers have serious or life-threatening complications. The death rate for unassisted alcohol withdrawal is higher than the rate for heroin withdrawal, and no alcoholic should be alone during this time. Hospitalization is required for most long-term alcoholics, and for any drinker who shows signs of delerium tremens. The DTs include some of the most acute mental and physical suffering known to man: the alcoholic’s escalating confusion, anxiety, and terrifying hallucinations result in a racing pulse, fever, high blood pressure, uncontrollable shaking, profuse sweating, and a high rate of respiratory and infection problems. Fifteen to 20 percent of alcoholics who have DTs die. There is no excuse for withholding medically supervised sedation from any alcoholic who is heading for trouble.

Members of Alcoholics Anonymous are often available to sit up with an alcoholic during withdrawal, and help can be obtained by calling a local AA chapter. Whether withdrawal takes place in a treatment center, a hospital, or, on a rare occasion, at home, the alcoholic needs constant reassurance and loving support to help reduce his anxiety and fear. A special effort should be made to explain to him the nature of his symptoms, and the purpose of any necessary medical procedures.

2. There is no known cure for alcohol addiction. Alcoholism, like diabetes, is a progressive chronic disorder that can be controlled or arrested, but is seldom cured. While a small percentage of alcoholics are thought to return to social drinking after developing an addiction, the vast majority of alcoholics will for the remainder of their lives only control their craving for alcohol by not drinking.

The incurability of alcohol addiction is a stumbling block for some Christians. “I move in Full Gospel circles, and I believe in healing because I’ve seen God heal,” says an alcoholic friend. “But whenever I tell my friends I’m a recovering alcoholic, they say that’s a ‘bad confession.’ They try to convince me that I’m not recovering, I’m healed. Sometimes I’m tempted to believe them and have a little glass of wine—after all, other Christians drink socially, why can’t I? Then I remember. I am an alcoholic. God has healed me from my burning compulsion for alcohol, but all my life I’m going to be just one drink away from a drunk. These friends mean well, but without knowing it they are one of the biggest threats to my sobriety.”

3. Instant healings are rare, and seldom complete. There is no question but that some people are miraculously and instantly delivered from their physical craving for alcohol. We wish this kind of experience happened frequently, but the truth is that instant healing from addiction is no more common than instant healing from cancer, heart disease, or diabetes. God can heal any of our diseases immediately, but such healings are his business; and as a doctor, I have learned that no one can predict if and when they will occur.

The very real possibility of direct divine intervention does not prevent a doctor from administering God’s grace to sick people through medicine and other forms of therapy. Nor does it excuse the patient from the responsibility of participating in his own health care. The diabetic waiting for healing is responsible to control his diet and, if necessary, use insulin. The alcoholic, his family members and friends, have a responsibility to use the tools and principles that are delivering thousands of alcoholics all over the world from the bondage of addiction. To encourage an alcoholic to search for an instant healing while a program of recovery is available is a dangerous form of “enabling,” and it frequently prevents alcoholics from getting the effective help they need.

In my experience, it is often the case that “instant healings” do well for a couple of weeks or months, and then the wheels start coming off. Even if the alcoholic’s physical craving never returns, both he and his family must contend with serious emotional, spiritual, and relational problems related to his addiction. None of these problems will disappear overnight, and we do the alcoholic and his family a grave disservice if we mislead them with a superficial understanding of the gospel. Without adequate information, they will be unprepared to assess their weaknesses realistically, and they will be caught off guard by persisting problems. At this point, even alcoholics who have been miraculously delivered from their physical craving often get discouraged and turn to a bottle for consolation.

Theology

“Be a Skeptic”

Flannery O'Connor

In the spring of 1962, Flannery O’Connor gave a talk to an English class at Emory University in Atlanta. One of her listeners was a young poet much taken by what she had to say. Too shy to go up after the address, Alfred Com wrote O’Connor, and received the following, edited reply.

I don’t know how the kind of faith required of a Christian living in the twentieth century can be if it is not grounded on this experience that you are having right now of unbelief. This may be the case always and not just in the twentieth century. Peter said, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.” It is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the Gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith.

As a freshman in college you are bombarded with new ideas, or rather pieces of ideas, new frames of reference, an activation of the intellectual life which is only beginning, but which is already running ahead of your lived experience. After a year of this, you think you cannot believe. You are just beginning to realize how difficult it is to have faith and the measure of a commitment to it, but you are too young to decide you don’t have faith just because you feel you can’t believe.…

The intellectual difficulties have to be met, however, and you will be meeting them for the rest of your life. When you get a reasonable hold on one, another will come to take its place. At one time, the clash of the different world religions was a difficulty for me. Where you have absolute solutions, however, you have no need of faith. Faith is what you have in the absence of knowledge. The reason this clash doesn’t bother me any longer is because I have got, over the years, a sense of the immense sweep … of creation … of how incomprehensible God must necessarily be to be the God of heaven and earth. You can’t fit the Almighty into your intellectual categories.… What kept me a skeptic in college was precisely my Christian faith. It always said: wait, don’t bite on this, get a wider picture, continue to read.

If you want your faith, you have to work for it. It is a gift, but for very few is it a gift given without any demand for equal time devoted to its cultivation. For every book you read that is anti-Christian, make it your business to read one that presents the other side of the picture; if one isn’t satisfactory read others. Don’t think that you have to abandon reason to be a Christian.… To find out about faith, you have to go to the people who have it and you have to go to the most intelligent ones if you are going to stand up intellectually to agnostics and the general run of pagans that you are going to find in the majority of people around you. Much of the criticism of belief that you find today comes from people who are judging it from the standpoint of another and narrower discipline.

Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It’s there, even when he can’t see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, I think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide upon in college. Learn what you can, but cultivate Christian skepticism. It will keep you free—not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects of those around you.

Excerpt reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Inc., from The Habit of Being, by Flannery O’Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald (© 1979 by Regina O’Connor).

Theology

Faith Is Not an Electric Blanket

Paul W. Nisly

Author Flannery O’Conner was anything but glib about orthodox Christianity.

Author Flannery O’Conner was anything but glib about orthodox Christianity.

Writer Flannery O’Connor was born in 1925 in Milledgeville, Georgia. After studying at a women’s college in her home town, she attended the University of Iowa’s School for Writers. In 1951 she was diagnosed with lupus erythematosus, an incurable and debilitating disease. She then returned to Milledgeville to live with her mother until her death 13 years later.

A devout and orthodox Roman Catholic, O’Connor often explored the meaning of faith through the fundamentalist characters in her fiction. She once commented that she wrote about such characters “because they express their belief in diverse kinds of dramatic actions which are obvious enough for me to catch.” O’Connor’s further thoughts about life and faith are most explicitly revealed in The Habit of Being, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979).

I have tried for a dozen years to “rescue” Flannery O’Connor from those inclined to read her stories as dramatized sermons for our times. “Although I am a Catholic writer,” she once said, “I don’t care to get labeled as such in the popular sense of it, as it is then assumed that you have some religious axe to grind” (The Habit of Being, p. 391). Despite her concern, however, her fiction has often been read in this limiting way, both by those who applauded her views and by those who deplored them.

Interpreting her stories as if they were “tricky tracts”—to use Marion Montgomery’s felicitous phrase—seems reductionistic to her fiction and unworthy of her artistic achievements. At the same time, having now the perspective of 20 years (the time since her death), it may be appropriate here to lay aside her fiction temporarily and reflect upon her letters in order to get an unassuming but accurate spiritual autobiography.

Flannery O’Connor herself, in her usual self-effacing manner, thought there would be no biography. “As for biographies,” she wrote, “there won’t be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.” However, if the stories and essays left any question, her reviews and letters make absolutely clear that her life was only apparently limited by the view from her back yard. Her inner life, despite its external constrictions, was impressively rich and varied.

“To Believe Nothing Is To See Nothing”

Central to O’Connor’s life and writing was her Christian faith. Although she never swerved from her orthodox beliefs, her faith—as revealed in her letters—was rigorous, intelligent, and unsentimental.

“I take the Dogmas of the Church literally,” she wrote in her first letter to Cecil Dawkins, a person with whom she would have a continuing correspondence. Dogma, O’Connor wrote in a later letter to Dawkins, “is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom” (p. 365).

O’Connor recognized that many, including some of her correspondents, viewed the Christian faith as being restrictive to her life as a writer. From her perspective, however, the faith was essential and liberating, freeing her to write. “For the fiction writer,” she argued, “to believe nothing is to see nothing. [However,] I don’t write to bring anybody a message as you yourself know this is not the purpose of the novelist” (p. 147).

Repeatedly, she asserted her complete acceptance of the central doctrines of the Incarnation and redemption, recognizing, of course, that many who considered themselves Christian held rather different views than she. In 1963, after she returned from a symposium on religion and art at Sweet Briar College, O’Connor wrote to her good friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, “Boy do I have a stomach full of liberal religion! The Devil had his day there” (p. 510).

While she deplored the liberalism that denied or downplayed the supernatural aspect of the faith, she also turned her sharp gaze on the anti-intellectualism of many within the church. In one of her most biting comments, she wrote her long-term friend, “A”: “I also told them that the average Catholic reader was a Militant Moron” (p. 179).

In her letters, then, Flannery O’Connor emerges as one who accepts church dogma wholeheartedly, but who also has no patience with intellectual laziness or thoughtless credulity. In fact, mindless believers, she wrote, brought disrepute to the church:

“I think that the reason such Catholics are so repulsive is that they don’t really have faith but a kind of false certainty. They operate by the slide rule and the Church for them is not the body of Christ but the poor man’s insurance system. It’s never hard for them to believe because actually they never think about it” (pp. 230–31).

Nor did the clergy escape her biting wit. On one occasion O’Connor quoted someone who had said he became interested in the church because “the sermons were so horrible [that] he knew there must be something else there to make the people come” (p. 348). Weak sermons did not invalidate the faith for her, of course, but neither was shabbiness excused as being inconsequential. To Fr. John McCown she wrote: “I wish we could hear more preaching about the harm we do from the things we do not face and from the questions we give Instant Answers to. None of these poor children want Instant Answers and they are right” (p. 309).

Always she mistrusted glibness in religion, whether in herself or others. To Maryat Lee, a friendly antagonist, she wrote (acknowledging her own “inadequate” discussion of religious mysteries): “I doubtless hate pious religious language worse than you [do] because I believe the realities it hides” (p. 227).

Religious clichés and instant answers, concocted from a broth of pious sentimentality, led, she believed, to “vapid Catholicism,” which had limited power to influence or change people, and which had better be discarded along with one’s baby teeth. O’Connor’s recently published book reviews make clear her own effort to have her mind challenged by a wide range of writers from Teilhard de Chardin to Karl Barth, from François Mauriac to Wyndham Lewis.

“My Christian Faith Kept Me A Skeptic”

Clearly, O’Connor was, as she wrote in her first letter to “A,” “a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness” (p. 90). And perhaps more consistently than any other sequence of letters, her thoughtful letters to “A” reflect a keen awareness of the problems of belief in a world that basically does not accept a Christocentric view of life.

At times in her letters on religious questions she was direct and combative; often she was quiet and probing. Always she respected the person to whom she was writing, though she might thoroughly disagree with his or her intellectual position.

Although her correspondence with him was limited, some of her most sensitive letters on matters of faith in the modern world are addressed to Alfred Corn, a young poet apparently too shy to speak to her after an English class she had addressed. In her first letter to him concerning his questions, she urges him to consider that God is larger than the intellectual categories that humans set up to try to contain him. At the same time, she writes, “Don’t think that you have to abandon reason to be a Christian” (p. 477).

In fact, she says, the Christian faith will give one a place from which to evaluate and critique the world views to which one is exposed in college. Don’t look for final answers, but for different questions. “What kept me a skeptic in college,” she writes, “was precisely my Christian faith. It always said: wait, don’t bite on this, get a wider picture, continue to read” (p. 477).

Although O’Connor never appeared to be preoccupied with doubts, she empathized deeply with those whose struggle between the demands of “modern consciousness” and the awful mystery of supernatural revelation were not resolved:

“I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what this torment is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened. A faith that just accepts is a child’s faith and all right for children, but eventually you have to grow religiously as every other way, though some never do” (pp. 353–54).

Some did come to the faith, and O’Connor was delighted when, after long consideration, her friend “A” entered the church. However, “A” later left the church and O’Connor was saddened, though never scornful, of her decision. “I don’t think any the less of you outside the Church than in it,” she wrote, “but what is painful is the realization that this means a narrowing of life for you and a lessening of the desire for life” (pp. 451–52).

In O’Connor’s view, “A” relied too heavily on her emotional reactions rather than her will and mind. In a letter to “A” written six years earlier—soon after the beginning of their correspondence—she had written, “Leaving the Incarnation aside, the very notion of God’s existence is not emotionally satisfactory for great numbers of people, which does not mean God ceases to exist.… The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally” (p. 100).

Flannery O’Connor could feel deeply—and did—but she believed that emotions had little to do with the foundations of faith. In a review of the Writings of Edith Stein, she commented, “The spiritual writings … are very impressive, being the type of spirituality that is based on thought rather than emotion.”

“Grace Changes Us And The Change Is Painful”

Although some of the fundamentalist Christians whom she depicted in her stories sought an emotion-charged salvation, O’Connor believed the act of grace to be quite distinct from emotion. To a Protestant friend, Dr. Ted Spivey, she wrote, “We [Catholics] don’t believe that grace is something you have to feel. The Catholic always mistrusts his emotional reaction to the sacraments” (p. 356). Grace is not emotion, nor is emotion even any particular evidence of God’s grace.

In both her fiction and her letters, grace is a major theme. O’Connor uses the term in at least two major senses: the one is grace as mediated through the church, specifically through the sacraments—a concept not familiar to many Protestants. Grace in this sense results from one’s regular, disciplined response to the requirements of the church.

On the other hand, grace may come through the sudden, even violent, incursion of the supernatural into the natural world. Grace in this sense may seem harsh and even overwhelming. To “A” O’Connor wrote, “This notion that grace is healing omits the fact that before it heals, it cuts with the sword Christ said he came to bring” (p. 411). Certainly in her stories grace often comes with violence: a charging bull in a pasture, a criminal threatening an old woman with a cocked pistol, harsh fingers of a mad girl on a woman’s soft neck.

Grace of this type is not sought; in fact, it is often resisted. “All human nature vigorously resists grace,” O’Connor wrote to Cecil Dawkins, “because grace changes us and the change is painful” (p. 307). Grace is mysterious, powerful, inexplicable. In a review of an autobiography by Elizabeth Vandon, O’Connor observed, “She [Vandon] fell into the church in one of those conversions for which there is no logical explanation except grace.” Grace changes people, though not in ways that can be predicted.

“What People Don’T Realize Is How Much Religion Costs”

One may wonder whether O’Connor viewed the lupus with which she had to cope through most of her writing career as being in some inscrutable way linked to God’s grace. She apparently saw the illness primarily in its human dimension—particularly the pain and physical limitations it brought. If she tried to sort out the reasons for her suffering, the letters do not give any clear indication of that introspection. O’Connor’s comments on her own illness were often humorous, sometimes merely descriptive, occasionally philosophical, almost never self-pitying.

She did on a few rare occasions reflect in her correspondence on her extended illness. Apparently, she had at one point received a letter from her devout Catholic friend Janet McKane about the value of suffering. Her response rather characteristically moves from the subjective, personal experience to the nature of the church. “I don’t much agree with you and your friend, the nun, about suffering teaching you much about the redemption. You learn about the redemption simply from listening to what the Church teaches about it and then following this to its logical conclusion” (p. 536). This observation was written less than a year before her death.

In a letter written to “A” in 1956 she became more personal: “I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it’s always a place where there’s no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don’t have it miss one of God’s mercies” (p. 163).

These meditative reflections on the meaning of her illness are rare. More characteristic is her lamenting that she has accepted another speaking engagement and now must transport herself on four legs—two of them aluminum—in an uncongenial, unfamiliar environment.

As O’Connor knew only too well, the medications she took only controlled (they did not cure) her lupus. She apparently accepted the incurable nature of the disease as inevitable, though naturally undesirable. A few people, particularly an aunt, wanted her to go to Lourdes to take the healing “bath,” a prospect that was frankly distasteful to her. Although she later reluctantly changed her mind, O’Connor wrote “A”: “About the Lourdes business. I am going as a pilgrim, not a patient.… I am one of those people who could die for his religion easier than take a bath for it” (p. 258).

She neither desired nor expected a miracle there. While O’Connor no doubt believed that God could perform a miracle on her behalf, she seemed somewhat embarrassed by the business and was obviously relieved when it was finished.

In a later letter to Elizabeth Bishop, however, O’Connor did admit that “Lourdes was not as bad as I expected it to be.… I saw nothing but peasants and was very conscious of the distinct odor of the crowd. The supernatural is a fact there but it displaces nothing natural; except maybe those germs” (p. 286). (The only answer to prayer, she was to say later, may have been renewed progress on her novel The Violent Bear It Away, a work that had been a source of repeated frustrations for her.)

Flannery O’Connor’s faith during her long illness and repeated hospitalizations was undramatic and unwavering. Never one to flaunt her problems—or success—she could write to a correspondent for months without that person’s awareness of her chronic illness. When she did mention the problem, she tended to dismiss it quickly. A few months before her death, though, in one of her most poignant lines, she wrote Louise Abbot, “Prayers requested. I’m sick of being sick” (p. 581). Her brief comment, written in a postscript, is characteristic of both her honesty and her piety, a piety expressed reservedly lest it degenerate into sentimental religious drivel.

In fact, one would have expected her to shun such sentimentality. But the reader of O’Connor’s letters may be surprised by the evidences of a personal humility not necessarily anticipated in the author of such hard-hitting fiction. To Janet McKane she wrote, “I do pray for you but in my fashion which is not a very good one. I am not a good prayer. I don’t have a gift for it. My type of spirituality is almost completely shut-mouth” (p. 572). And to “A,” who seemed to need an emotional religious experience, O’Connor admitted, “I have almost no capacity for worship. What I have is the knowledge that it is my duty to worship and worship only what I believe to be true” (p. 474).

O’Connor had an unusual capacity to join a strong intellectual grasp of the faith with a disarming personal modesty—a modesty that one perceives to be a genuine humility. “My mind is usually at ease,” she would write on another occasion, “but my sensibilities seldom so. Smugness is the Great Catholic Sin.” While believing with all her strength in the truth of the faith, she fought the temptation of becoming overly confident and self-satisfied. With remarkable insight she wrote to “A”: “I know well enough that it [her writing] is not a defense of the faith, which doesn’t need it, but a defense of myself who does” (p. 131).

One discovers in O’Connor’s letters a woman who was orthodox in her belief, yet never glib in her proclamations of belief; a women whose faith was intellectually tough, yet one who respected others with differing views, even when she challenged them sharply. Her religious views are epitomized in a letter to Louise Abbot:

“What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course, it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe, you must at least do this: keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God” (p. 354).

So firm in her commitments, so unostentatious in her words and practice, Flannery O’Connor’s unplanned achievement in her letters is to make that invitation credible.

A Call to Rescue the Yuppies

Charles W. Colson

The church must awaken to the cold-hearted values of today’s young urban professiona ls.

The church must awaken to the new materialism of today’s young urban professionals.

It is a well-established ritual of American life: at year’s end, word-weary journalists compete to distill the past and future into a word or phrase. Last year was no exception; and I was fascinated by Newsweek’s offering, a cover story characterizing 1984 as “The Year of the Yuppie.”

As most people know by now, a yuppie is a young urban professional. He or she has been described as an aging hippie transformed by a $20 haircut and upper-middle-class values; a baby boomer in his or her thirties, a one-time rebel now domesticated. As one self-confessed yuppie put it, “We tried drugs and sex and all those things. Now we’re becoming the children our parents wanted us to be.”

As I read the Newsweek article I found myself again thinking like a politician; my electoral antennae tingled as I read about this fast-emerging power bloc. Yuppies, Newsweek said, control almost one-quarter of the national income. They are keenly interested in economic issues; they are clustering in certain cities.

I was tempted to pull out a map of the U.S. to chart where the electoral fault lines would move, the shifts in voter alignment that the yuppies portend. When I was in the White House, such analysis was reflex action. We took daily polls, always on the lookout for indications that voters’ preferences were moving one way or another. We would quickly seize on such movements to score political points. I often wrote speeches for the President based on narrow demographic data. Hamtramck, Michigan, for example, contained a preponderance of Polish-American voters who were sensitive to busing; hence, Nixon’s area advertisements would all talk about his antibusing positions.

We studied issues and voter data precinct by precinct. Simply put, those politicians who get re-elected are the ones who predict where the voter power base is moving. That was the secret of Nixon’s immensely successful silent majority strategy. And as I read Newsweek’s article, I realized the yuppies have probably as much potential for bringing about a realignment of American politics as Nixon’s silent majority had a dozen years ago.

Suddenly I shook myself out of my reverie. What in the world am I doing, I thought. I am out of politics. I then reread the article with the new eyes God has given me as a believer. That’s when the real shock set in.

Merger Marriages And The New Sex

According to Newsweek, the yuppies are apparently convinced that money is the root of all good. The managing editor of Money summed up his magazine’s study’s conclusion that money has become the number one obsession of Americans. “Money has become the new sex,” he enthused. Laurie Gilbert, one frank yuppie quoted in Newsweek, confessed to reporters that she would be “comfortable with $200,000 a year.”

In fact, yuppies have turned their devotion to getting rich into a fine art—so much so that Newsweek described them as having achieved a new plane of consciousness: Transcendental Acquisition. Listen to the testimony of a “converted” social worker: “I realized that I would have to make a commitment to being poor to be a social worker. Eventually, I was able to shed the notion that to prove to everybody I was a good person I had to parade around as a good person by being a social worker.”

Now, with her lawyer husband, she makes about $100,000 per year, without any apparent worries about her “goodness.”

Certainly this honesty would be refreshing were it not so appalling. Says the director of public service at an Atlanta TV station, “I’ve started to live the American dream. I want a business. I want to be rich. I want to have more money than I can spend. I want a Jaguar and maybe a quarter-of-a-million-dollar house.”

This money grabbing appears to be an all-out effort to increase possessions—particularly possessions conspicuous in their consumption. Restaurants specializing in exotic cuisine, $600-per-month health clubs, fine wines (“I guess this is a substitute for children,” coos one interviewee as she fondles a prize Perrier Jouet), all reflect the mentality of a generation that defines itself by what it owns.

I saw the ugliness of this mentality up close several months ago at a car-rental establishment. I was renting a compact for my visiting parents, and found myself in line behind a fellow who was loudly complaining to the clerk that he had not ordered a white Lincoln Continental, but a black one. The woman behind the desk explained she had no black Lincolns available, but gracefully complied with the man’s insistence that she check all other rental offices in the area.

After a lengthy search, the saleswoman’s efforts had turned up Lincolns of every other hue. The man shook his head. “I’m going someplace where everyone will be driving a black car,” he explained sulkily. (Since it was the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, I didn’t think he meant a funeral.) As he turned away in disgust, the man faced my direction for the first time. Emblazoned across his shirt was a motto that put the whole affair into perspective: “The one who dies with the most toys wins.”

Marital stability also appears to be easily sacrificed on the altar of Mammon. One young woman described how she had scheduled several job interviews during her honeymoon. At one she met a man she fancied more than her new husband; she returned home to divorce the latter to marry the former. “I know it sounds shocking,” she admits, “but there are times in your life when you just have to go after what you want.” Another yuppie summed up the point nicely: “Our marriages seem like mergers, our divorces like divestitures.”

The Politics Of Self

The yuppies make up an unusual amalgam in the voting booth: their political profile melds economic conservatism with social libertarianism. They appear to be distrustful of government and institutions—or perhaps anyone or anything that may exact a sense of community responsibility.

Thus Newsweek speaks of those who found in Gary Hart the embodiment of their “vehement impatience with the past—but happily enough, … the candidate of prosperity [Reagan] actually won the election.” One young urban professional put it this way: “I own a condo and for the first time I had to think about my pocketbook. [I liked Reagan] for financial reasons.” Nevertheless, this yuppie voted for Mondale because of her opposition to the Republican stand on abortion. But, she concluded, “I knew Reagan would win easily anyway. If I thought it was a close election, I might not have voted for Mondale. I had the best of both worlds. I could vote my conscience and still come out ahead financially.”

(And in a chilling comment for anyone who weeps for the clinical murder of the unborn, a young lawyer sums up the political concerns of the yuppies: “The social program Reagan is talking about a lot of them find really scary. Abortion is a part of their lives.”)

There is, on the other hand, apparently some concern for the war-and-peace issues that fired the radicalism of yuppie youth—though the slogans of the T-shirts of the ’80s show a slightly different twist: “Nuclear war? What about my career?”

What religious leaning the yuppies have may be that of the prosperity gospel. The Newsweek article features a picture of an attractive blond woman, Terry Cole-Whittaker, whose book, How to Have More in a Have Not World, is a yuppie favorite. Her radio messages are now broadcast in 19 cities in North America; her newsletter apparently reports testimonies of divine intervention in closing big business deals. It may not be too harsh to describe Ms. Cole-Whittaker as a tweedy, blond-haired version of Reverend Ike.

Of course, there is a debate going on in political circles and elsewhere whether yuppies are a passing fad or a genuine sociological tidal wave. One prominent commentator doubted that any of the people quoted in the Newsweek story actually existed, saying, “I won’t believe it until someone gives me proof. Their heads on a platter will do nicely.”

But there have always been those who refuse to see new trends until they are run over by them. Personally, I think Newsweek and other yuppie watchers are on to something. Marketing executives usually read the tea leaves of the times very well—and we can see the influence of their targeting in advertising. Look at the recent beer ad campaign featuring happy, successful yuppie types: “You can have it all,” the upbeat soundtrack assures its viewers—precisely the yuppie mentality described in Newsweek.

But what’s this got to do with Christianity? Simply this: As we examine the range of yuppie priorities, what clearly emerges is a people whose values are absolutely antithetical to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Pin-Striped Mission Field

Though biblically conservative Christians tend to be conservative on economic issues—and certainly the yuppies fit traditional definitions of economic conservatism—Christians have historically been, and should be today, sensitive to God’s demands for economic justice. The command to care for widows and orphans is a biblical imperative; and to “sell the poor for a pair of shoes” brings the judgment of God upon a people. So a Christian’s economic views must be tempered by God’s standards of fairness and compassion. There is none of the latter in the analyses of yuppie economics.

Their ultimate priority of money, coupled with rejection of absolute values and the cold-hearted focus on self-advancement, puts the yuppie generation on a collision course with Christian values. And that’s where we evangelicals need to be concerned. Our new-found social respect—coming in off the farm, as one evangelical leader put it—may be short-lived if we don’t begin to think about how we will reach this emerging power bloc.

Which brings me to my central point. Politicians and marketing experts are busily identifying the yuppies—where they live, what they eat, what kind of ads they respond to. But who in the church is doing this? All too often we tend to think in sermon-to-sermon strategy, rather than to look long-range at the ways we will reach those who need to hear the Good News.

I don’t have any easy answers. Neither am I suggesting we tailor our message to fit our audience, like politicians who shape their speeches according to the tastes of the voter bloc. But we can certainly identify yuppie issues needing to be addressed.

First, we need to help the yuppies discover they are on a blind path. We don’t have to club them over the head with our Bibles—but we can challenge them to recapture their lost social idealism by unmasking the emptiness of a life that depends on money, power, and prestige for its satisfaction.

Second, we can encourage spokespersons whom yuppies will respect. I was asked recently by a leading Christian publication to name the outstanding young evangelical leaders under 40; it was one of the shortest lists I’ve ever compiled. The evangelical caste system tends to stifle articulate young spokes-people. We must cultivate and encourage these—young preachers like a Rennie Scott, perhaps—solid in the Word, Ivy League educated, personalities with whom yuppies might identify.

Third, there are apparently some churches attracting young urban professionals, particularly in silicon valley and in sunbelt areas. We need to learn from these churches ways in which local assemblies might reach out, ways in which they can bring in and help meet the unspoken needs of the yuppies.

Fourth, since many yuppies appear to have little interest in the organized church, we need to reach them on their own turf. Home Bible studies, morning prayer breakfasts, and the powerful testimony of unadulterated friendship evangelism may well reach yuppies in the midst of their overscheduled lives. Several ministries to executives have pioneered dinner parties with a concise evangelistic message offered by a host after dessert. This is one way to catch yuppies relaxed in their natural habitat.

Fifth, the way in which our case is presented has a powerful effect. Yuppies may not be willing to listen to a thundering denunciation of the evils of alcohol and tobacco, or watch some arm-waving Bible pounder on television. But a reasoned argument by a Jim Boice, an R. C. Sproul, a Steve Brown, or a Stuart Briscoe on the evidence for the existence of God might quietly penetrate the yuppie armor.

A word of caution, however: We Christians are not immune to the seduction of money, success, power, and prominence. Far more often than we would care to remember, the church has girded itself for battle against the world—only to discover that the enemy is within. Evidence abounds today that this pattern is repeating itself, as the church dallies with the false values of an egocentric and materialistic culture.

So as we preach to the yuppies let us beware: cross-pollination will only produce our own crop of yuppies—young, urban, pew-sitting professionals whose faith is but a notation on their resumes and whose ornate churches are but a reflection of their social status.

All the public fuss over yuppies will have served a useful purpose if it alerts the church to the challenge at hand. For the yuppies are now up for grabs. As resistant as they appear, their very defenses will serve as open doors for the gospel.

As Joanne Martin of the Stanford Business School predicts, “In the next few years we will see the biggest wave of midcareer crises this nation has ever seen.” Many of us know about the bankruptcy of transient power, money, and worldly goals; I surely do. Let us then be ready to give disillusioned yuppies the good news of the eternal Christ.

Our Lord commands us to go into all the world with the gospel; though we may little love the world of conspicuous consumption and greed, it is there that the need is greatest. Our work today, as it has been for Christians over the centuries, requires a form of translation in which we take the timeless message of the gospel and articulate it into the language of our own time and place. The question is how well we shall do it.

In the yuppie we are faced with a person who proudly values much of what the Scriptures call sin. How shall we communicate this shattering conflict of moral judgments? Merely to condemn from on high will do little but alienate an already antagonistic subculture. And yet, a word of judgment must come if such people are ever to see that, in fact, they are weak and heavy laden, needing to repent and believe in Jesus Christ.

This, I submit, is a great challenge of the work of evangelism in our nation: How to speak the uncompromising word of truth in love to a sector who glory in what the Scriptures call shame.

Ideas

Liberation Theologies: Looking at Poverty from the under Side

Is Tonto talking back?

The world map on my wall was prepared by an “Aussie.” It looks upside-down. The Australian continent is top center. To its left is South America, dropping like an hourglass into Central America and the United States. Below and slightly to the right are the vast masses of Asia and Europe, and at the far right, Africa.

This is how the world is viewed—from down under.

A comparable approach to social theology has emerged south of the border. It comes from the attempt by Latin American Christians to understand their history and experience in light of a rediscovered Bible.

More than 20 nations in Middle and South America have shared a common situation for four centuries. It includes the confusion of cross and sword, the political and cultural suppression of huge ethnic nations such as the Quechuas and Aztecs, economic exploitation of the masses by powerful oligarchies, and a blind, heartless official religion that has affirmed the rich but abandoned the poor.

The emerging “view from below” is frequently called the “Theology of Liberation.” It is really a family of theologies, ranging from conservative to heterodox.

Characteristics

The liberation theologies display at least three identifiable characteristics:

They share a prior commitment to the poor. Prior to what? To everything else. In liberation theologies, this priority means more than simply recognizing our “preferential option” to defend the poor and minister to them. It also acknowledges that in a particular way, God speaks through the poor. The gospel cannot be understood until it is seen from their perspective. “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Justo and Catherine Gonzalez have underlined this truth in Liberation Preaching (Abingdon, 1980). Using the illustration of the North American folk hero, the Lone Ranger, and his mute Indian helper, Tonto (in Spanish, “stupid”), they say, in effect, “What is currently happening is that Tonto has finally decided to speak up, and is making much more sense than the Lone Ranger ever did.…”

Their whimsical analogy continues, “The Lone Ranger, with his mask, his white horse, and his flashy gear, thought he knew all about doing justice. But Tonto is telling him that one can only know injustice when one suffers it.… The word of the gospel today, as in the times of Jesus—as ever—comes to us most clearly in the painful groans of the oppressed. We must listen to those groans. We must join the struggle to the point where we, too, must groan. Or we may choose the other alternative, which is not to hear the gospel at all.”

This position makes the almost “evangelical” assumption that “the powerless have readier access to an authentic understanding of the gospel than do the powerful.” This sounds very much like something Saint Paul might have written to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 1). It seems to ring true.

We must issue a warning, however. A new understanding of the importance of the poor in the plan of God should not be allowed to swing the pendulum too far the other way. It is not necessarily true that what is “good news” for the poor is consequently “bad news” for the rich. When we take into account the entire biblical context we see that we all stand equally naked before the holy God.

In the Bible, not only the poor deserve a preferential option. So do the children, and perhaps the “stranger that is within your gates,” and the widows. God’s concern must be understood to be universal and all-embracing.

Liberation theologies espouse a new exegesis or even a new hermeneutic. Bible scholars, such as José Míguez Bonino, have been trying to see the Bible anew from the “down-under” perspective of the poor and oppressed. This effort has opened up a vast and fruitful understanding of Hebrew roots and scriptural expressions that had perhaps been lost to many of us through inadequate translations or because of traditional misinterpretations.

Until recently, little exegetical analysis had been done of words relating to oppression, poverty, injustice. Yet at least 14 different Hebrew roots, I am told, signify some aspect of “oppression,” regardless of how those words may be translated in existing versions. Exploring these rich veins of meaning throws tremendous light on the nature of God’s concerns today.

Likewise, much of the significance of many Old Testament passages is lost to us by the careless rendition into English of certain Hebrew words. For example, the word “righteousness” is often used rather than “justice.” Many other such instances could be cited.

Some exponents of a liberation hermeneutic—most of them, as a matter of fact—go so far as to maintain that the reader of the Bible must deliberately choose his eyeglasses before he begins reading, and that the “preferential option for the poor” means just that—a deliberate bias or perspective. Without this, the true meaning cannot be known. We must discard our North Atlantic lenses, we are told, and put on Third World ones—we must lay aside the eyeglasses of the rich to use those of the poor. Some even say we must abandon our capitalistic spectacles in favor of Marxist ones. Otherwise, they affirm, we cannot truly discern what God is trying to say.

Yet how correct is this? Certainly it may have some positive value as an exegetical or devotional exercise, but its affirmation as a theological principle seems simply to reject one set of a priori factors for another, and it deprives God’s revelation of objective authority. Likewise, it appears to deny that the Holy Spirit can bring fresh conviction or understanding to the reader who has failed to put on his a priori spectacles.

Liberation theologians are “doing theology” in a sociological context. Fifty years ago, when I was in college, theology was thought of as a Christian philosophy. Consequently, to prepare for the ministry one studied philosophy, apologetics, logic—and perhaps some psychology (to understand the conversion experience and to apply Christian truth to personal needs). At that time the social sciences were in their infancy as academic disciplines.

Today, the situation has changed. The social sciences are demanding much more attention. And the theologians must be versed not only in anthropology, but also in sociology, political science, and economics as well. On balance, philosophy and apologetics receive less attention. Theology is to be done, not just learned.

The problem is that most university graduates in Latin America assume that the Marxist theory of social dynamics is the valid one. The struggle between the classes is said to be the motor of social progress. And, superficially, the social experience of the continent seems to support Marx’s theory. Many Latins see this in the history of Spanish colonization, the traditional conflict of liberals versus conservatives, the exploitation of indigenous tribes and imported slaves, the “patron-peon” dichotomy, the current economic oppression of the urban masses, and numerous other factors.

Thus, if they begin by analyzing the problem in Marxist terms, it is easy for Latin Americans to see the Christian solution in the same categories. Need caused by sin is equated with economic oppression, and salvation becomes social liberation. If the world view is one of social conflict, then liberation will be seen in the same terms.

However, the biblical world view is not one of dialectical materialism. The Bible sees humanity as existing in a crucible of cosmic conflict—caught in a struggle between the divine and the demonic. The war is not between capital and labor, or the bourgeois and the oppressed (although these conflicts may also exist), but it is between God and Satan, good and evil. If this is the case, we cannot be satisfied with Marxist analyses, despite any superficial light that they may shed.

Liberation theologies are almost irresistibly attractive to Latin Americans. They jibe with Latin social theory and promise immediate and political solutions to the excruciating problems presently endured. But they offer an ephemeral promise—one not rooted in basic, cosmic reality. Unless sin and salvation are understood in terms of deliverance from Satan’s power, they are not understood at all. Human solutions that are developed within the superficial parameters of dialectic materialism will never get to the root of the problem.

Concerns Over Liberation Theologies

We are left with a number of profound concerns as we work to understand the view from down under. The critical generalizations that follow may not be entirely accurate in all cases, but they show which way the wind is blowing.

1. Politicization. Liberation theologies affirm the social responsibility of Christians, but invariably they stumble over the rock of politicization. It is impossible to stay out of politics; it is the very nature of liberation theology to get involved in politics. Political solutions are, however, always human, always finite, always error-prone.

To think that the Exodus of God’s chosen people should be the paradigm for revolution in the Sierra Maestra or the Peruvian Andes is somehow to overlook some basic principles of Bible interpretation. Were Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries God’s chosen people? The Exodus should be seen as a paradigm not of a secular revolution but of the Christian church.

Eventually, political interests always succeed in snuffing out spiritual intentions, as a study of the Cuban, Chilean, Guatemalan, and other revolutionary situations will reveal. The Basic Church Communities movement in Brazil, for example, has demonstrated it. A politicized church is a church on the skids because it is a here-and-now church, without “eternity in its heart.”

2. Pelagianism. It is impossible to keep universalism and Pelagianism (earning salvation partly by acquired merit) out of liberation theologies. Salvation by works may not be openly espoused, but it is certainly implied in the concept of socio-politico-economic liberation from oppression. This is a part of the liberation theologies’ Roman Catholic baggage. And it is not easy for a liberation theologian to avoid the trap of universalism.

3. Atonement: moral influence only. Liberation theologies unconsciously revert to pre-Anselmic theories of the atonement of Jesus Christ. Anselm’s “satisfaction” theory, whereby the Mediator satisfies the demands of God’s righteousness while vicariously dying on the cross for sinful human beings, was the foundation on which the Reformation was built. But liberation theologies rest on an earlier theory of “moral influence.” Here again, the Catholic impact is evident.

4. Substitutes for spirituality. The liberation theology movement has spawned a multitude of substitutes for the real thing in the Christian life and experience. For example, evangelization frequently has become nothing more than an effort to create an awareness that will prepare people for political action.

5. Confused values. Even worse, the movement has often exhibited non-Christian values. An effort to raise a people’s political awareness, for example, can easily result in bitter hatred of landlords. Any modeling of class conflict itself becomes conflictive. And when working in horizontal, social contexts, it is easy for Christians to be trapped by materialism, humanism, and other such concepts.

6. Loss of the Holy Spirit in method. There seems to be a certain incongruity between the exercise of the gifts of the sovereign Holy Spirit and the almost exclusively man-centered methodology of much liberation thinking. Leaders of the movement have yet to define convincingly the Holy Spirit’s role in social revolution. Many observers would say it cannot be done. Pneumatology is conspicuously absent from liberation theologies.

7. Misunderstanding of Scripture. Instead of enhancing the work of Christ and understanding its spiritual power, liberation thelogies reread the Scripture to depict Jesus as a messiah of political involvement. This rereading often distorts the truth. It misses the paradoxes of faith, the spiritual measurements of personal commitment, the quality of love, the mystery of holiness, and the sinfulness of sin. In short, it diminishes the supernatural dimensions of a personal relationship with God the Father, Jesus Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit our Advocate.

In our search for a social theology to clarify the mission of the church, it is appropriate, as Samuel Escobar has pointed out, that we find in the theologies of liberation an important challenge and stimulus to our evangelical faith, but never a viable alternative to it.

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