Page 5932 – Christianity Today (2024)

It was a favorite saying of a literary critic I once knew that Shelley and Milton, despite the vast differences between them as writers, shared equally an imaginative inability to think of anything interesting to do in heaven. The same deficiency has been pointed out about utopian novels, and is summed up in the sophisticated colloquialism that all the interesting people will be in hell.

Actually, with regard to Milton the critic’s assertion is a canard (or half of one), for no other writer has so overwhelmingly depicted the undesirability of hell as a place of residence. And he shows this not in Dante’s rather easy way of imagining endless physical torments but—more horrifyingly—by showing its unspeakable boredom. Whether he communicates equally well the joys of heaven is a question each reader must answer for himself, basing his judgment not mainly on Paradise Lost but on Paradise Regained, which few people read. As for Shelley, he made many things beautiful, but he had a hard time making anything interesting.

The opinion that the Christian heaven will be a pretty dull place is so widely diffused that one may pick almost at random for evidence. Item: “If an eternity of unrelieved cultural refinement [as envisioned in the Greek view of the Elysian fields] looks like a rather dreary prospect, it is probably less dreary than enjoying an eternal sabbath or singing endless hosannas” (Renaissance and Revolution, by Joseph A. Mazzeo). Clearly the New Yorker-ish picture of harp-strumming, bald-headed ex-businessmen with wings, sitting on clouds, has deeply permeated the folk-consciousness.

My chief purpose here, however, is not to deplore the imaginative anemia of famous writers who have tried futilely to animate paradise, nor to review the popular secular belief (whether sincere or wishful) that heaven would not be much fun anyway. Rather, it is twofold: to suggest a certain irrationality in the prevailing popular view; and to see whether Scripture, while silent on details, does not in fact provide at least a basis for determining what kind of activities will give dynamic joy in heaven. As to the details, we are, of course, told that they are both incommunicable and forbidden (1 Cor. 2:9 and 2 Cor. 12:4), so there is no use exercising our minds over them. We were not consulted when the delights of this earth, or when we, were created, and we were not called in to give advice on the “things which God hath prepared for them that love him.” (Past tense, note—he has already prepared them.)

As to the irrationality of the popular view of the dullness of heaven, it is instructive to ask what fruits of evil, as we see them displayed before us rather vividly every day, will be so missed in heaven as to generate there unassuageable nostalgia and unhappiness. Tending the sick, fighting wars, enduring mental confusion and physical pain, poverty and starvation, the ultimate hopelessness of death—are these and hundreds of other conditions produced by sin so dear to us that we cannot bear to think of living without them?

On the other hand, what kinds of activities that give true joy are incompatible with the Christian view of paradise? Surely not fellowship, unstinted intellectual activity, aesthetic creativity, sensuous beauty, exploration, literature, music, art, love—or anything else we truly cherish and enjoy. Someone has defined art as anything we would like to do if we did not have to do something else, like invent pesticides and dig graves. All man’s natural impulses, as they were implanted by God in our great progenitor, Adam, were good. Depravity has thwarted them, and mingled with them, as tares with the wheat, inclinations that promise good but, being tasted, bring ennui and death. “In the very temple of delight/Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine.” Even the deepest pleasures of this life are inescapably mingled with sadness, for we cannot, without sorrow, “love that well which we must leave ere long.” But even this sad pleasure will be impossible in a region where true love cannot enter, and where self-love, which fallen man in this life has perversely substituted for the only true object of love, God, will corrupt into self-loathing and produce unmitigated corporate and mutual hatred. Rationally considered, and on the basis of this one consideration alone (discounting, if one chooses, all other possibilities of discomfort and misery), the company of hell seems unlikely to be particularly scintillating, joyous, or endearing.

But let us leave Dante’s “natural dungeon where ill-footing was, and scant supply of light,” and fix our gaze, as blind Milton did in imagination, where “Now at last the sacred influence/Of light appears, and from the walls of Heav’n/Shoots far into the bosom of dim Night/A glimmering dawn.” A glimmer of dawn is all we can discern, for we have yet no daylight revelation of details. But we have knowledge, through promise, of certain basic conditions, principles, and qualities of that which God has prepared for those who love him. Among them: a purity of light; a restored and perfected environment; release, intensification, and refinement of intellectual activity and sensuous experience; restored balance between the body, soul, and spirit that make up our triune being; incalculably varied companionship; limitlessness of the horizons of personal fulfillment; a pervading knowledge of the perpetuity of bliss; the presence of God himself (beyond imagining)—the list tumbles out, and each reader of Scripture will conceive that the most important feature of all has been omitted from any list, save his own.

But is it possible to be any more specific, at least with regard to the kinds of activities that will animate heaven? I think it clearly is, even if, for present purposes, we limit ourselves to only one line of thought; namely, the fact that the best way to determine action (function) is to determine identity. It is a commonplace these days to point out that man does not know “what to do with himself” unless he knows who he is. To the existentialist, we must create our own identity. To most others, we must discover it. In either case, it is agreed that man, by nature, is dynamic. Being and doing are inseparable. If I know what and who I am, I know how to use me. And I must be used, I must act, in order fully to be. Even at the level of superficial sensuous (bodily) existence, experiments show that a person deprived for an extended period of time of the input of his senses (by being embedded in a state of senselessness, without motion, sight, sound, taste, or touch) quickly suffers serious psychological difficulties. Every capacity implanted in us contains its own imperative to be used. (Among its other undesirable features, hell may well be a condition of being without doing, of existence without function, of consciousness without meaning—and a pervading awareness of its perpetuity.)

Turning to Scripture for light, we find it permeated by the revelation that man has a threefold identity-function: as king, as priest, and as prophet. We see it first and dramatically revealed as Adam assumed sovereignty over his assigned realm, this earth; as he knew the words of God and the things pertaining to him (which is, of course, the central nature of “prophecy,” not chiefly to foretell the future); and as he directed for Eve and himself homage and worship toward their Creator, his priestly function. By treason he lost his great warrants, for himself and for his race; but they will be restored, marvelously transfigured and enlarged, under the Lordship of the Second Adam, who won them back both as Son of God and Son of Man, and who will invest his own with them. In its presentation of human history between the Fall and the Incarnation, how replete is Scripture with examples, plain teachings, pictures, symbols, and exhortations concerning man in his true identity—king, priest, and prophet. As embodied in even the greatest exemplars, however—in Moses, in David, in Elijah, in Aaron, and all the others—how marred is the original intention.

It is aslant to my chief purpose to say so, but I think that Scripture tells us that the truth underlying the triple role of man runs deeper in the universe than man and his nature. Consider what we are told about that terrible, ancient, and once-glorious being whose name we do not know but whom we call Satan, the Adversary. He was created to great glory, to the sound of music, perfect in his ways, and made king of a great empire, title to which (though perhaps in reduced dimensions) he still holds, for Jesus himself refers to him as Prince of This World. And an even greater realm is indicated in another title he still holds, Prince of the Powers of the Air, ruler of that wickedness in high places, those principalities and powers, against which, Paul tells us, is our spiritual warfare. That he was also prophet is indicated by the assertion that he was full of wisdom (Ezek. 28:12); and that he was priest, leading his empire in the worship and adoration of God, is implicit (if the term be well studied) in his mysterious identification as the “covering cherub.” Displaced, because of his rebellion, as prophet (for the father of lies will no longer speak truth about God) and as priest (for his worship, through pride, is of himself, not of God), he yet retains his fearful regal sway over the world system and over the “powers that are on high,” still enjoying access to the presence of God, where day and night he brings railing accusations against those who have dared cast off his rule and acknowledge another, even Jesus, as Lord and King. Already is this One, a greater than Moses, our prophet, for he alone perfectly revealed the will and the nature of his Father; and already our priest, ever our mediator and advocate before the Throne; and already our King, though his visible kingdom awaits his return in power and glory.

But back to my topic, which is the relevance of the revealed threefold identity-function of man as that revelation hints at certain kinds of activity in the kingdom of heaven. I pass over the kingship that is promised the redeemed, though there is much that could be said; and over the role of prophet, a function embracing the full dimension of intellectual activity (for to study anything is to study God); and comment briefly on only the priestly role, for that perhaps reveals less readily than the other two the joy implied in its exercise.

I suggest no less than that man’s total aesthetic, creative, artistic dimension may be intended to find its joyous release and practice within man’s role as priest, as he offers to God, in gratitude and love and worship, every shape and form of beauty he is capable of conceiving. No imaginable activity could be more wonderful, for even in this life the creation of beauty—whether it be of gardens, or music, or art, or literature, or whatever else gratifies and fulfills that mysterious sense called the aesthetic—gives man his deepest fulfillment and satisfaction. Beauty never sates. Its horizons are limitless. A fit inhabitant of eternity. During the history of man since the fall, on this sin-shrouded planet, consider how much of the world’s beauty has been called forth by man’s yearning to worship God by directing his creative genius to God in praise and thanksgiving. Among pagans, the religious instinct has been the chief instigator of aesthetic creativity, and some have even suggested (Robert Graves is one, in his quirky but brilliant book The White Goddess) that all poetry is, knowingly or unknowingly, a form of worship of the deity. Even at the purely human level, no impulse of artistic creativity has been more powerful or more pervasive than the artist’s desire to please, celebrate, and (if profanely) worship the object of his love with the works of his hands, shaped by beauty.

Multiply the worth of the person adored by infinity, as God is infinitely to be adored; release the aesthetic impulse from confusion, the clogs of dull senses, and the erosion of age and disease; place both in an environment of eternity—and one may perhaps capture some sense of what the priestly role will forever mean in the kingdom of heaven. (And in hell? No thing and no one to be loved, and hence no impulse or desire for aesthetic creativity; no knowledge of the meaning of the word beauty, or even if there be such a thing. And as for the singing of “endless hosannas” so feared by some, let there be no concern. The glorious priestly music of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Verdi, and others in their thousands will never once disrupt the gloomy silence, or the noisy din, of the dolorous regions, nor any melody of man or bird mar an eternity of self-loathing.)

In this life the priestly role necessarily and crucially worships God through tears, telling us of the alienation of sin, of repentance, and of sacrifice. But those shadows will vanish, leaving only the light of praise and adoration. “Ye are … a royal priesthood,” writes Peter. And to what end? “… that ye should show forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Pet. 2:9). God has provided that our highest duty and service should also be our greatest joy. “And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him: and they shall see his face … and they shall reign for ever and ever” (Rev. 22:3–5).

Calvin D. Linton is professor of English literature and dean of Columbian College, The George Washington University, Washington, D.C. He holds the A.B. from George Washington and the A.M. and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins.

As I write this, the candidates for public office are making their last frantic appeals to the public for votes. Like many others I am always dismayed by the quantity of rhetoric that flows from political lips, and even more so by its quality. Truth always seems to suffer at election time, and men who otherwise exhibit rationality and morality in good measure seem to lose substantial quantities of both until the election seizure is over. Yet somehow the nation manages to survive these biennial extravaganzas. Normality returns, and the party in control of the government turns out to be neither as good as it promised nor as bad as its opponents claimed it would be.

Calvin Linton returns to our pages with a delightful essay on the nature of work in heaven. Rolf Aaseng drives home the truth that neither sex is complete without the other; the two are complementary, not competitive. Donald Gill, speaking for one school of thought, tackles the problem of how churches that have lost their evangelical distinctives can be brought back to life and vitality. I commend to our readers also the essay by associate editor David E. Kucharsky, who has followed the National Council of Churches carefully and has attended most of its major meetings for a number of years. He knows whereof he speaks.

To all, a happy Thanksgiving.

The proliferation of groups devoted to sensitivity training is bringing the movement increasingly into the public eye. Some of the procedures involved are of such a nature as to call the entire bioenergetic method into question on ethical grounds, and we may expect an increasing amount of criticism of it. The Christian ought to familiarize himself with the issues involved, if only to understand the objections being raised.

The term sensitivity training covers a wide range of laboratory approaches to group therapy, some of them very far-out. The objective is to make people over on the basis of what is loosely called personal encounter. Involved are group dynamics, relations training, and various forms of experimental communication. Practitioners of sensitivity training accept many of the insights and procedures of more conventional group therapy, and add techniques of their own.

Much has been written in the sensational press concerning the way-out activities of such groups as the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, California, which not only has traveled across the land but is now operating abroad. The publicity has centered about the erotic forms that the sessions assume. This element may sometimes have been exaggerated, though such excesses are to be expected, given the background of some of those involved.

There is a place for evangelicals to take a look at sensitivity training and try to evaluate its fundamental techniques in terms of the Christian understanding of things. Something of the history of the movement may be helpful.

Twenty-three years ago Leland Bradford, Ronald Lippitt, and Kenneth Benne established the National Training Laboratories Institute for Applied Behavioral Science in Bethel, Maine. This institution, known as NTL, set the pattern for training groups (T-groups) that met under very informal conditions and for limited periods of time, guided by a trainer. The emphasis was upon emotional impact and exaggerated behavior, designed to assist participants in meeting the anxiety-arousing aspects of their environment.

Contemporary sensitivity training differs from the older T-group method in several respects. Its groups tend, ostensibly at least, to place less emphasis upon the role of the leader and more upon the encounter between or among participants. (The language, at least, is derived from the theory of Carl Rogers.) The newer forms emphasize “marathon laboratories” designed to break down inhibitions and reserve.

The training marathons use extreme informality and intensity of personal encounter in order to dissipate tensions and consequent aggression. There is a stress upon the non-uniqueness of personal problems—nothing is held to be private or idiosyncratic. The acceptance of any form of behavior, however erratic, is encouraged.

There is a great deal of stress upon emotional expression, particularly of aggression. Participants are encouraged to share their reactions to one another, however ruthless and negative they may be. The assumption is that expressing dislike, vindictiveness, or anger will serve to eliminate these feelings. One wonders what wounds may be inflicted in the process, and what latent feelings may surface later as a result of such therapy.

Large use is made of non-verbal techniques in the bioenergetic workshops. Forms of behavior that many regard as infantile are encouraged. Kicking and screaming, even tantrums, are considered therapeutic in that they help to give release to the authoritarian father figure that is held to create most of our hang-ups.

The rationale behind the non-verbal forms of therapy is that the body is the essential person. As one of the popularizes of the movement says, “You don’t have a body—you are a body.” This is strangely reminiscent of the materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach, and certainly embodies the romantic assumption that most of us are corrupted by our familial and societal environment.

In the bioenergetic workshops much emphasis is placed upon the group as constituting a miniature world. Now, since in real life aggressiveness, hostility, and neuroses are supposedly derived from groups, it is assumed that the therapeutic group will enable the participating person to get rid of these unlovely forms of mind and behavior. Aggressive behavior within the safety of the group, it is believed, will drain the poison from the neurotic mind.

It is assumed that the human person (i.e., the body) has an innate capability of shaping the personality into normal form. The problem is, it seems, to cause the body to stop saying, “No, No, No” as a result of its earlier repressions. It is at this point that the Esalen Institute has developed the motif of touching. Assuming that most adults grew up with too little of fondling (how have the neo-Freudians and Dr. Spock failed us here?) and too much of restraint, these practitioners feel that interpersonal physical intimacy, in varying degrees, will relax the body and release psychic anxieties.

Many have criticized the use of nudity-therapy in sensitivity training groups. This use is justified on several grounds: it is held that in nudity there is complete honesty; in nudity there is total acceptance; in nudity, artificialities are stripped away; and in nudity, status symbols are rejected. (One European critic has remarked, in response to the last claim, that wearing sweatshirts might serve the same purpose.)

It must be said that responsible therapists, especially those of NTL, feel that the technique of nudity has no value as a means to healing. Far from erasing the old life, it only serves to destroy the normal personal reserve that undergirds the individual’s self-respect.

Sensitivity training, as popularly practiced, is thus to be criticized on the following grounds: first, it is totally earth-bound and concerned exclusively with the here-and-now; second, it incorporates the worst features of romanticism, with its rejection of parental and societal values; and third, it incorporates the error that human nature can heal its own maladies. It assumes that all the disturbed need is an opening of the doors to the inner self. But what value can come from stripping bare an ego that is without dimensions if no new dimensions are added and no creative substitute is offered for the bleak wasteland that is the soulscape of men and women without God?

Evangelist Billy Graham fears that through its moral decadence the West is playing into Communist hands. He sees no let-up in the evil drift and feels it is being exploited by Communist leaders bent on world domination. Moreover, he thinks Communist ideology is becoming increasingly attractive to modern man as a way out of anarchy and poverty.

“We’ve lived too long in affluence,” Graham said in a long telephone interview with CHRISTIANITY TODAY on the eve of his fifty-second birthday this week. And we have used our affluence to turn away from God instead of turning toward him. We haven’t helped the poorer countries.”

He said he hopes to introduce a new urgency into his warnings of impending judgment, warnings that have characterized his world-renowned ministry for more than a generation but are conveniently overlooked by critics who have recently been labeling him an apostle of so-called civil religion.

“We can’t get away with the things we’ve being doing,” the evangelist declared from his home in Black Mountain, North Carolina. “Unless we have revival and repentance in North America and Western Europe, we will experience God’s wrath.”

The evangelist said he would come down hard on this theme in his remaining public appearances this year. After a five-day crusade¹The meetings will be videotaped and subsequently telecast all across North America, probably the first week in December. in the 70,000-seat Tiger Stadium of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Graham planned to fly to Portugal for his first preaching service ever in that country. He is scheduled to address a ministers’ meeting in Lisbon early in November.

In the interview, Graham suggested that clergymen running for political office are the ones who are promoting civil religion. Charges that the evangelist is an acceding chaplain to the establishment grow out of his long-time friendship with President Nixon. A short speech by Nixon at Graham’s crusade in Knoxville last spring and Graham’s participation in Honor America Day gave new impetus to the accusations.

A Newsweek cover story said of the July 4 event: “After 30 years of public preaching, Billy Graham had finally found his proper pulpit—and his proper theme.” The story said that Graham’s God resembles more and more the god of “civil religion—a deity which, in His American form, says sociologist Robert Bellah, is ‘much more related to order, law and right than to salvation and love.’” Bellah, taking his cue from Rousseau, wrote an article entitled “Civil Religion in America” that appeared in the Winter 1967 issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He began by attaching considerable import to the three references to God in President Kennedy’s inaugural address.

Perhaps the most serious indictment in the civil-religion theory is that chaplains to the establishment preach only those things that tend to support the status quo. White House services are often cited as examples. Graham counters: “If I told them in public what I tell them in private, they would never listen to me again—in public or in private.” He feels he has a continuing ministry with political leaders and the opportunity of exerting a moral influence upon them. The irony, says the evangelist, is that many who criticize his associations with political leaders also fault him for not getting involved enough politically.

While Graham is in Europe this month, he will participate in a special service at London’s Royal Albert Hall commemorating the 350th anniversary of the sailing of the Pilgrims and in a breakfast meeting with 300 members of Parliament. Among other dignitaries he is scheduled to see are Prince Rainier and Princess Grace, with whom he is to lunch in Monte Carlo.

After returning to the United States Graham will take part in a ceremony at Plymouth, Massachusetts, marking the 350th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims.

Graham said he feels there are basically only two great world views, the Christian and the Communist. Christians, he declared, have failed to live up to their ethic, with its demands and disciplines. “We have flooded our churches with unconverted people,” he asserted.

The Communists, on the other hand, have been more faithful to their ideals, he feels, and have maintained a small nucleus of avid devotees who exploit every opportunity. “Right now they are encouraging our moral corruption,” Graham said, citing Lenin’s prophecy that the Communists would not have to attack the United States but that “it will fall like an overripe fruit into our hands.”

Graham states, however, that he is optimistic and has great hopes for the coming generation (he is writing a book for young people, to be published by Zondervan, and an article on women’s liberation that will appear in the Ladies’ Home Journal). He also sees the Key 73 national evangelistic thrust as a “marvelous concept.” “I hope all of us can get together on it. Our own organization will do all it can.”

In another interview reported in Religious News Service last month, Graham said that if the U. S. Supreme Court rules federal aid to parochial schools constitutional, “I think the Southern Baptist Convention and other Protestant denominations should give serious consideration to setting up a massive school system like the Catholics and Lutherans have.”

He stressed that “aided” church-related schools should be fully integrated. At the same time he said he is opposed to crosstown “busing” and supports the neighborhood school concept.

Graham was critical of both the report of the Commission on Obscenity and p*rnography and the report of the Commission on Campus Unrest. The latter, he said, “fails to adequately distinguish between dissent and violence. I believe in dissent, but I don’t believe in violence.”

Breaking Ranks

The Salvation Army, which used to march through the streets of London “Bound for the Land of the Pure and the Holy,” may be headed for a crisis in its earthly homeland. Major Fred Brown, 47, officer in charge of prestigious Regent Hall, one of the army’s most active citadels, was suspended for refusing to submit his book, Secular Evangelism, for approval to H.Q. A major controversy ensued.

Brown, a lively, friendly man who was formerly a professional footballer and is highly regarded for his work among London’s hippies and drug-takers, confirms that there was nothing unacceptable in the book itself; he was objecting to what he regards as an outdated rule. Some of his fellow officers, one the son of a former general, have also defied the censorship procedure by writing letters to newspapers in Brown’s defense. A petition with thousands of names has been submitted to army authorities, but they are standing firm.

On suspension six months ago, Brown was removed to distant Cornwall on basic pay of about $130 a month, but with nothing to do. So he wrote another book, Faith Without Religion. Notice was then served on him and his wife to vacate their quarters last month, at which time he was officially dismissed. “There abideth faith, hope, and charity,” as he himself said on another occasion, “and the greatest of these is the status quo.”

J. D. DOUGLAS

Invasion Aftermath

Reports from Hungary say that two Western vice-presidents of the pro-Communist Christian Peace Conference have been dismissed as a result of disagreements in the organization over the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia.

The two ousted officers are Professor George Casalis of Paris and Dr. Heinz Kloppenburg of Bremen. They were replaced by the Reverend Heinrich Hellstern, a Swiss, and the Reverend Herbert Mochalski, a West German.

The dismissals were reported by the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Press Service in Geneva. EPS said that the action, taken during a meeting of the conference’s “working party” committee, signified a deadlock in the conference since the Czech invasion took place in August of 1968. In the aftermath of that event Dr. Josef Hromadka resigned as president of the Christian Peace Conference and Dr. Jaroslav Ondra was dismissed as general secretary. Hromádka strongly protested the invasion.

In February of this year Kloppenburg and Casalis were two of nine signatories to a letter saying they would not participate in the working party committee and the international secretariat “for the time being” because of the “externally forced resignation of the general secretary” and efforts to ignore the leadership crisis instead of clearing up the differences in fraternal discussion.

Voices From The Middle

An influential group of Southern Presbyterians issued a definitive ten-point “Statement of Position” this month. The document of the “Covenant Fellowship of Presbyterians” opposes inclusion of the denomination in COCU, but expresses readiness to consider mergers among Presbyterian and Reformed communions. Here is the complete text:

1. We reaffirm the validity of the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Catechisms as the doctrinal standards of the Presbyterian Church in the United States. We recognize the necessity for updating and modifying these standards that they may be more intelligible to the modern mind and more thoroughly consonant with the Word of God.

2. We stand for the principle of the parity of Ruling and Teaching Elders in all courts of the Church. We are for revisions in the Book of Church Order which seek to restore a proper balance.

3. We are for the retention of the present Book of Church Order provisions which place local church property control in the particular congregation.

4. We are for the unity of the Church, and strongly oppose any efforts or movements toward fragmentation within the Presbyterian Church in the United States.

5. We are convinced that while the present effort of the Church to serve people in need through the Black Presbyterian Leadership Caucus deserves our full support, it does not exhaust the costly involvement which is required of the Church to express adequately the fruit of the Gospel.

6. While recognizing the validity of the witness of other Christian communions, we believe there is a need for a distinctive Presbyterian-Reformed contribution to the life of the Body of Christ and to the world. We therefore are opposed to the inclusion of the Presbyterian Church in the United States in the proposed Church of Christ Uniting.

7. We stand ready to consider union with other Presbyterian and Reformed bodies, on the merits of the plan of union proposed, provided such a plan of union is founded on Reformed faith and order, and places congregational property under control of the particular congregation.

8. We believe that in the interest of good order and sound discipline, the boards and agencies of our General Assembly should not become involved in structural mergers with the boards and agencies of other denominations prior to union approved by our denomination as a whole.

9. We believe the present effort to restructure the boards and agencies of the General Assembly should be delayed until the matter of union with the United Presbyterian Church is settled.

10. We believe than any restructuring of the Synods by the General Assembly should be delayed until the matter of union with the United Presbyterian Church is settled.

Personalia

The Reverend Robert G. Stephanopoulos was appointed director of the Department of Interchurch Relations for the Greek Orthodox Church in North and South America. He succeeds Arthur Dore, who has served in the office since 1966 and is becoming executive assistant to Archbishop Jakovos.

Robert E. Frykenberg, chairman of the Indian studies department of the University of Wisconsin, was named president of the Conference on Faith and History.

The Reverend James R. Gailey has been elected general secretary of the United Presbyterian Board of Christian Education. Gailey, who has served on the board’s staff for more than two decades, will succeed the Reverend William A. Morrison, who resigned.

F. F. Bruce, noted evangelical scholar in Manchester, England, was guest of honor last month at a dinner on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. In the presence of distinguished scholars from Britain, Canada, and the United States, the Scots-born professor was presented with a festschrift to which an international team, including two Roman Catholics, had contributed.

Daniel Poysti of the Pocket Testament League has been holding evangelistic campaigns and distributing copies of the Gospel of John in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Copies of the Gospel also are said to be entering the Soviet Union through a “Love Letter” campaign sponsored by PTL.

A Muslim leader in Lebanon says he will run for the presidency of the republic, thus defying an accepted tradition that the president should be a Christian while the premier is a Muslim. The six-year term of President Charles Helou, a Maronite Christian, will end next September.

Religion In Transit

An official of the National Council of Churches voiced support of the report of the Commission on Obscenity and p*rnography. The endorsem*nt was reported in a news release distributed by the NCC Department of Information. It said that the Rev. William H. Genne, NCC director of family-life ministries, specifically underlined the call for more and better sex education.

Michigan may become the first state in the nation to certify teachers of academic courses about religion. The state education department has now established guidelines for certifying teachers with a minor in religion for secondary schools. Calvin College was the first to request approval of such a minor. It is now awaiting an examination to judge whether it measures up to the guidelines.

A “Cinema Institute” is being established in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, to enable Christians to broaden their understanding and sharpen their skills in films and television. Four-week courses will be offered, beginning in January and June of 1971.

A former disciple of Timothy Leary says that “the scene” is beginning to get “disenchanted” with drugs and that the “new scene is to be straight.”

Allen Y. Cohen told a Catholic student audience in Dubuque, Iowa, last month that ten years of research prove it is “impossible to misuse any drug and get away with it. There’s no way you can last—the drug abuser either quits, dies, or loses his mind.” But he added that the message is not getting through to junior-high-school students. “That’s the problem.”

Cohen is now an assistant professor of psychology and dean of men at the experimental John F. Kennedy University near Berkeley, California. In an address at Loras College he traced his life for four years as a “psychedelic utopian,” living with Leary first in Mexico and then on a large estate in New York.

He said “everybody figured that LSD was going to change the world,” but it didn’t. Nor did it provide a solution for those seeking higher forms of spiritual motivation, he said.

Cohen declared he had concluded that drugs are totally useless for spiritual advancement. He added that he believes there is the possibility of achieving real higher consciousness without chemicals. “There are ways to discover the fountain of inner happiness. But the use of drugs is not one of them.”

One of several incidents that fed Cohen’s doubts about drugs involved a friend who after “turning on” with pure LSD ended up in a mental hospital after trying to set fire to his wife and child.

“It just kind of struck me,” he said, “that if these guys were the saints of the Western world, we were in for big trouble.”

After “dropping” LSD about thirty times, he said, he realized that “no matter how good the experiences were, we always came down and nothing really changed inside. We thought they did, but people were acting pretty much the same way they always acted.”

Cohen attributed the “explosion” of experimental drug use by young people in the mid-sixties to a “powerful, brainwashing effect on our culture,” namely, “the use of chemicals for ‘instant relief of anything.”

But drugs are not the real problem, he contended. “Life is the problem. Drug use is just a symptom of what is going on in our time.” He warned adults to get to the heart of the issue.

“If you give young people something better than drugs, they’re going to stop drugs,” he stated. “Sooner or later every individual realizes that drugs are not good sense.”

Cohen added that the “challenge of the age” is to provide young people with alternative opportunities to develop themselves on the physical, sensory, emotional, intro-personal, creative, aesthetic, intellectual, social, political, and spiritual levels—by non-chemical means.

Logos Afloat

No one at Operation Mobilization is questioning the power of prayer to move a mountain. The evangelistic organization’s “mountain” is a Danish ship, Umanak, named for a mountain in Greenland. This month, the 2,390-ton ocean-going vessel will move to India; next May it will travel to Thailand for six more months.

Purchase of the ship fulfills long-time dreams and needs of OM. Previously, the vehicles essential to the group’s literature distribution and evangelistic crusades in India had to be driven overland from Europe, an expensive operation in time alone. Further, India’s six-month residency restriction for cars required the vehicles’ evacuation twice a year. Now they can be transported, repaired, and stored—nearly fifty at a time—on board the ship.

The 21-year-old ship cost OM $168,000—“no more than a good-sized church in the United States or Great Britain,” according to OM head George Verwer, Jr. A similar vessel, new, would cost about $5 million. Two other bids were higher than that of Operation Mobilization.

Before the ship, renamed Logos, can sail to India, however, it needs some repairs, and some Dutch Christians have provided a dry dock in Rotterdam where work is proceeding on the damaged propeller shaft and other problems. None of the 150 international crew members, including Norwegian Captain Bjorn Kristiansen, has a fixed salary. Each is considered a missionary, raising his own support.

In addition to garaging cars, Logos will store tracts and Scripture portions and even house a small printing press. But it will not neglect evangelism; sealed plastic bags containing tracts will be dropped along the mainland and on islands. The ship will also provide a place for housing missionaries, training new workers, and conducting Bible conferences for natives. In case of emergency, the ship could become a relief vessel, supplying food, medicine, clothing, and tents to disaster areas.

By broadening activities to include all areas of human need, Operation Mobilization leaders hope to convince unfriendly governments that Logos is more than a base from which to disseminate propaganda. “Some ships such as gambling ships give themselves 100 per cent to the works of darkness,” notes Verwer. “Why not a ship given 100 per cent to the works of righteousness?”

THOMAS COSMADES

A Damper On Violence

Events in Northern Ireland were quieter this past summer than was generally expected. A wet season may have helped to lower the political temperature. After heavy floods inundated houses in some of Belfast’s trouble spots, Catholic and Protestant neighbors found themselves helping one another clear up, with troops assisting. One thankful resident remarked, “It has taken an act of God to get us together again.”

An article in a religious journal drew attention to the disclosure in a Belfast paper in May, 1966, of the details of a plan by the outlawed, anti-Protestant Irish Republican Army to create extensive disorder in the north. These plans included: indoctrinating students and organizing them to act as pickets in strikes and demonstrations; organizing protests on housing and in other ways capitalizing upon grievances; promoting sectarianism and strife.

Military intelligence in Northern Ireland was reported to have knowledge of more than a hundred militant left-wingers from European countries who had visited that part of the Emerald Isle which still gives allegiance to the British crown. Many of these militants belonged to Maoist and anarchist underground movements, and some are known to have taken part in riots in European countries. A Catholic bishop some time ago warned his subjects against strangers who came to foment disorder.

S. W. MURRAY

NEWS

The Reverend Jerome F. Politzer, rector of St. John’s Episcopal Chapel, Del Monte, California, andCHRISTIANITY TODAYnews editor Russell Chandler attended the sixty-third General Convention of the Episcopal Church in Houston, October 11–22. Here is their report:

Episcopalians watched the erosion of their church.

Or they saw new relevance—daring concepts of stewardship, mission, and social justice for the oppressed and dispossessed in action.

Which happened depends on the interpretation of events at General Convention—and how the church responds. Some of the more important actions:

• Minority-group funding—The General Convention’s Special Program (GCSP), which gives church money without strings to empowerment organizations—many militant and a few violent—was continued and expanded with significant new guidelines on violence and veto power.

• Women—Women deputies were seated for the first time in the 181-year history of the 3.5-million-member church, but women were refused eligibility for ordination as priests or bishops by a narrow vote swayed by clerical deputies.

• Missions—Overseas missionaries were reported down 100 since 1966 to 164; further cutbacks in personnel and dollars are anticipated.

• Centralization—More power was concentrated in headquarters staff, standardization proposed for seminary exams and clergy deployment.

• Executive Council—A conservative drive eliminated a specific provision for women, youth, and racial minority persons on the denomination’s most important board. The council was reduced from fifty-one to forty-one members.

• Consultation on Church Union—Lethargic approval for a two-year study “without implying approval of the plan in its present form” rolled through both houses with minimal debate (none at all by the deputies), but it appeared Episcopalians are leaning Romewards rather than “homewards” toward COCU, the ambitious union plan for nine major American Protestant bodies.

• National Budget—Falling income since 1967 reached crisis proportions this year; diocesan pledges lagged $3.5 million behind the $14.7 million quota. Delegates struggled with a suggested $11.8 million basic budget as the convention reached its final hours.

Long before delegates took their seats in the heavily guarded¹The security budget was boosted from $3,000 to $50,000 as the convention neared, an arrangements spokesman said privately. In part because of a threat on Presiding Bishop John E. Hines’s life (two months before), and fears of possible disruption by outside extremists and by militants close to Episcopal-funded groups, plainclothesmen augmented pistol-carrying police, and Hines was assigned a bodyguard. As the convention drew to a close, there had been no incidents. House of Bishops and the House of Deputies (the two units of the church’s bicameral governing body), but far the most pressing thing on their minds was the state of the highly controversial GCSP. Grants totaling nearly $5 millon have been given to poor and minority groups since the Seattle convention authorized the GCSP in 1967. The Episcopal Church has stepped ahead of all other denominations in risking this kind of project for minority groups.

A few grants have sparked fire for violence associated with the funded groups. Examples: $40,000 to the New Mexico-based Alianza (leader Reies Tijerina is doing time for assaulting two forest rangers); $25,000 awarded two days before the Houston Convention to the Black Awareness Coordinating Committee in Denmark, South Carolina (its leaders were convicted of entering Episcopal-related Voorhees College in the same town at gunpoint).

Houston was showdown time for the GCSP. Blacks rallying behind Negro Leon Modeste, $23,200-a-year head of GCSP, were determined to make sure of its expansion and a continuation of the “no strings” policy that can keep Episcopal brass from knowing even the names of the real leaders of a funded organization.

The Reverend Fred Williams, suave leader of the Union of Black Clergy and Laity (UBCL), spearheaded two brief walkouts during preliminary GCSP skirmishes, charging “bias” in a panel set up to discuss all sides of the GCSP. Not all black delegates went along with Williams. The UBCL said the panel was rigged and racist, but the real bone of contention was the scheduled appearance of an NAACP leader. Williams and others saw a plot to pit blacks against one another, since radical blacks consider the NAACP an “Uncle Tom outfit.”

Modeste, Williams, and company shouldn’t have feared NAACP deputy John Morsell, an Episcopal layman. He said a study of GCSP grants had surprised him; in most cases they were conventional.

But Morsell’s incisive speech contained a few zingers for those who cared to listen. There is no such thing as a church grant without strings, Morsell said, elaborating: “It’s the church’s money. The recipients will one day be back for more, and they will then be expected to demonstrate they should be given more.” He also said turning money over to minority groups without restraint was “a denial of black manhood.… Only children are dealt with on the theory that they are not responsible or accountable for their actions.”

A compromise resolution package put GCSP on the map for three more years. Local bishops won a veto power over grants in their diocese (it can be overruled by a majority of Executive Council members), but routine passage will be by a screening committee loaded with ethnic minority persons and some non-Episcopal non-Christians.

Bishops have thirty days to veto a local grant and now must see full reports beforehand.

Delegates disagreed about whether tricky new wording on violence will make it easier or harder for violent groups to get Episcopal money. Old language, which ruled out second-hand or “pipe-line” grants (see September 26, 1969 issue, page 42) has now been replaced with a guideline barring money to groups and their workers if either “advocate the use of physical violence as a means of carrying out the program of the organization.” And grants would be cut off if the group or its officers “shall be finally convicted of a crime which involves physical violence” while the organization’s work is being carried out.

The “joker in the deck,” according to one bishop, is the “final conviction” phrase, since most observers feel that means “after all legal appeals are exhausted”—often a matter of years. Also, it appears that groups such as the Black Economic Development Conference could now get funded, since—while advocating violence as an option to overthrow the government—the BEDC doesn’t use violence to conduct its programs or to print its materials calling for possible violence.

“We fund groups, not individuals, anyway,” commented Modeste, “and even though individuals in a group might be violent, we’ve always been able to prove that the group as a whole isn’t violent.”

The net effect is to make it easier to isolate and identify violators of the violence criteria, but to narrow the definition of who or what activities may be ruled violent. Presumably the Weathermen, whose violence is integral to their program, wouldn’t qualify for a GCSP grant. Whether a Black Panther breakfast program for children could is less clear.

Women were both talked about and—for the first time—talking and voting in the House of Deputies. Thirty women delegates were seated immediately as the conclusion of action started at Seattle. Special delegates—youth, blacks, and others—with voice but no vote were also allowed at non-legislative workshops, hearings, and assemblies. An expected hassle over seating them faded to a murmur. A handful of Submarine Church youth surfaced for a while but split with the convention early to “free Angela,” saying: “You are dancing death dances in clerical robes while we are at war.”

The sixty-third General Convention decided it wasn’t the time to ordain women as priests and bishops, but if the lay delegates had had their way, the resolution would have passed. The lay delegation voted in favor (49¼–41¾), but the clerical delegations voted against (38¼ to 52¾), thus killing the measure for three years. The proposal was to interpret he and man in pertinent church documents generically to mean both sexes, thus avoiding constitution changes.

Adverse effects the measure might cause among Orthodox and Roman Catholic communions helped torpedo it; doubtless it will rise again.

The Episcopal Church’s involvement in overseas missions can be described in one word: retrenchment. Besides the 100 overseas appointees recalled since 1966, headquarters office staff has been cut in half, according to a report given by Mrs. Harold C. Kelleran, chairman of the Overseas Review Committee.

Financial squeezes at home have sometimes accelerated the church’s efforts to develop independent indigenous churches on the mission field (four Japanese clergymen can be hired for the cost of one American priest), Mrs. Kelleran said. And she pointed to a concept of mission that may soon become standard for liberal churchwork overseas (as well as at home): social activism.

The House of Bishops’ decision to elect a bishop for Ecuador could be either a stray evangelistic opportunity or an importation of a North American cultural pattern having little present relevance.

Concern for evangelism was almost nonexistent at the Houston convention. The only official presentation was Project Test Pattern, the church’s multi-media experiment in parish renewal.

A few voices were heard crying in the wilderness of ethical humanism and political activism. The suffragan bishop of the Philippines told a meeting of the Eighth Province that greater evangelistic effort was needed to help people “climb the mountain of Calvary.” And a group of seminarians issued a statement claiming “the Gospel of Jesus Christ can never be subordinated to political and social activism.”

For those seeking involvement and relevance and the assuagement of guilt through good works, the sixty-third General Convention was an exercise in fulfillment. Bishop Hines—who himself proposed “a responsible review” of his performance as presiding bishop—has the good will and backing of the large majority of both lay and clerical members of his church.

The inclusion of minority members at all levels of decision-making and participation plus real compassion for the needs of the poor were the brightest spots on a gray horizon. But the glorious Gospel of Christ and his power are gradually fading into the background as the Episcopal Church, in the words of one of its clergyman at Houston, “talks right, and walks left.”

Methodists Aid Draft Opponent

The United Methodist Board of Christian Social Concerns voted last month to accept a theology student’s draft card. A spokesman said the board would forward it to the youth’s Selective Service board “as a symbol of his resistance to the draft.”

Following the vote, taken after an hour’s debate, Federal Circuit Judge Robert Mann of Tampa, Florida, announced he was resigning from the board because he “could not be associated with the violation of law” that he said the action would entail. Others said they did not think the law was being violated. Mann had been a member of the board for ten years.

The board, in its annual meeting held in Washington, D. C., acted to “receive and transmit to Selective Service boards, letters, with supportive data” from members of the denomination who want their individual protest to be accompanied by an “official statement such as support of conscientious objectors or of those who engage in non-violent resistance to the draft.”

The spokesman for the board said the vote was 25 to 9, with one abstaining. He added that the board had specified that its action would not commit it to endorse positions taken by those who oppose the draft, and stressed that it regarded itself as acting and speaking only on its own behalf and not for the denomination.

The card in question belongs to Horace R. (Jay) Jones II of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Jones, 24, is a candidate for a master of theology degree at the University of Chicago, but is not in school this semester. He is currently not subject to the draft because he has a theological student exemption.

Jones first attempted to get church action last April from the United Methodist General Conference, but a legislative committee succeeded in sidelining his request by a narrow vote. Then he took the card to the United Methodist Council on Youth Ministry, which urged the Board of Christian Social Concerns to accept this and the card of “any man who decides that he in good conscience cannot voluntarily relate in any way to the Selective Service system.”

Jones was quoted as saying that his decision was based largely on his church training.

Mcintire Shuns Prophecy

Claiming last month’s March for Victory a “glorious success,” an event “used of God far beyond our fondest dreams,” fundamentalist Carl McIntire is promising another on May 8. It will be the climax of a march-of-the-month plan that will include rallies in San Clemente on January 30, and Key Biscayne on February 27.

“We believe President Nixon is either walking down a blind alley or over a precipice,” said the indomitable Bible Presbyterian preacher. “Therefore, we are going to confront him with an increasing cry for victory every month of the year.”

In addition to the events at Nixon’s homes away from Washington, McIntire announced:

• National Victory Sunday on November 22. The thirty-fourth Bible Presbyterian General Synod that met following the October march suggested the project in an effort to put the word victory back in the vocabulary.

• A Christmas emphasis on peace by victory, presenting Christ as the Prince of Peace. Christmas cards showing George Washington crossing the Delaware have been designed.

• Simultaneous marches in the capitals of all fifty states on March 19.

The May 8 culmination march will be different from previous Washington rallies, McIntire declared. He refused this time to estimate the number of supporters who will march with him. Mrs. McIntire, he told newsmen, would be there, but he was not promising the presence of anyone else, so that the emphasis could be on victory.

Jews First American Settlers?

Columbus Day observances were scarcely over when Dr. Cyrus H. Gordon presented new evidence about who really discovered America. The Brandeis University professor of Mediterranean studies suggested last month that Jews reached America 1,000 years before Columbus.

The evidence for Gordon’s claim is an inscription found in a burial mound at Bat Creek, Tennessee, in 1885. It went untranslated for nearly a century because a photograph of the stone, published by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C., which sponsored the expedition and now houses the stone, was printed upside down.

Gordon’s study of the inscription convinced him that its five letters, translated “Belonging to Judah,” are the forms used on Hebrew coins about 100 A.D. “The inscription attests to a migration of Jews,” he told a meeting of the North Shore Archeological Society of Long Island, “probably to escape the long hand of Rome after the disastrous Jewish defeats in 70 and 135 A.D.”

The renowned archaeologist emphasized that the “circ*mstances of the discovery rule out any chance of fraud or forgery.” This stone, he declared, is the one thing in Hebrew characters found in America by bona fide archaeologists sponsored by a reputable organization.

It is not, however, the only Roman relic to appear in Tennessee: farmers have occasionally uncovered Roman coins dating from 132–135 A.D. And a group of people known as Melungeons, still living on Newman’s Ridge in eastern Tennessee, maintain a persistent tradition that their ancestors arrived on Phoenician ships centuries before Columbus. They are not Indians, Negroes, or Anglo-Saxons, Gordon notes; rather, they are Caucasians of Mediterranean descent.

JANET ROHLER GREISCH

Evangelicals And The American Revolution

In a stereotype-shattering discussion of evangelical participation in the American Revolution, Geneva College professor Howard Mattson-Bozé argued that evangelicals played a far more significant role than historical consensus recognizes. He told a meeting of the Conference on Faith and History in Dallas last month that evangelicals contributed to the American revolution a radical, democratic political and social ethic that was drawn from the Scriptures and the experiences of the Great Awakening.

“Their influence was more in giving strong emotional support than in providing an intellectual raison d’être.” Thus, by failing to “infuse society with their conception of the revolution, they left its interpretation to the secularists.”

Comparing the historical status of the evangelical to that of the Negro, Mattson-Bozé noted that “secular history, like white history, is the reflection of the dominant group and a distortion of the truth, and therefore is unsatisfactory.”

Another historical scholar, Congregationalist Cecil B. Currey, said that the Quakers tried to maintain their traditional pacifist stance during the American revolution but that in the process they lost both their evangelical theology and their political power.

“Other evangelicals,” Currey said, “saw their survival as a group in the aligning of their aims with those of the area in which they dwelt and were as a result able to enter wholeheartedly into the patriotic movement.” The Quakers would not do this, and “patriots mistook Quaker dedication to their ideals as antipathy to the American cause.”

The high point of the meeting of the evangelical historians was a spirited panel discussion on the revolutionary mood today. Reformed scholar C. T. McIntire, noting that many evangelicals associate the American way of life with Christianity while many in the ecumenical movement identify with the revolutionary left, called for a biblically oriented “third direction.” He said this “Christian way of life” would permit Christians to confront both the American civic, secular religion and the neo-Marxist cultural faith. McIntire, son of the controversial radio preacher, pointed to “Honor America Day” as the most recent instance of evangelical identification with the American civic religion.

Dr. W. Stanford Reid, noted Canadian scholar, cautioned the group that the solution to man’s problems is not revolution. “The stress in the New Testament is always on regeneration rather than revolution, and in a sense this is much more radical because regeneration means changing a man’s nature, not just his situation.”

Nevertheless, he urged evangelicals not to ignore social problems, and he criticized prevailing attitudes regarding involvement in the world. “I don’t believe the Christian should be or even think of himself as a conservative. He should welcome change as long as it is in the direction of equity and justice.”

Noting that more churches are controlled by forces opposed to change, Reid asserted: “Perhaps what you have to do is start a revolution in the Church itself. The reason for the development of the so-called underground churches today is that dyed-in-the-wool Tories are sitting on top of things in the individual congregations.”

“The desire of people to get out from underneath them is simply a repetition of what happened at the time of the Reformation.”

RICHARD V. PIERARD

Business Evangelism

Across the river, as one leader put it, are scores of “unconvinced” businessmen, and the Christian Businessmen’s Committee International, says publications director Phil Landrum, is determined to build a bridge to those “men on mahogany row.” At last month’s annual convention in St. Louis, CBMCI chairman Paul H. Johnson revealed a ten-year plan for spanning that river.

The doctrinal and social structure of CBMCI remains unchanged by the goals; “satisfied customers” will continue to testify about their Christian experiences at luncheon and dinner meetings. But Christians in local committees will be discouraged from attending without a non-Christian guest. Leaders expect this “Fifty-Fifty Plan” to contribute to another of the ten-year goals: a 10 per cent membership growth per year to a total in 1980 of 26,000.

The number of local committees will get a boost from two other plans: Project’70, which hopes by 1980 to see committees in all American cities with a population above 25,000, and PRICAP, which gives priority to establishing CBMC groups in the capitals of states, provinces, and foreign countries. Increased emphasis on the “I” in CBMCI was immediately apparent in the appointment of Englishman Ted Hubbard to the executive committee and the decision to hold the May, 1971, board meeting in London.

“These goals are to serve as guidelines for the organization,” Johnson told the 850 delegates at the thirty-third annual convention. They will be evaluated and perhaps modified every six months, Landrum added, emphasizing their elasticity. The ten-year plan, he said, was an example of how Christian businessmen can put their knowledge to use for evangelistic ends.

Turning Over Old Leaves

“In 1898, when I was ten years old, my parents subscribed for The Youth’s Instructor for me, and I read it clear down to its last issue—and wept at its funeral. Then I turned to greet with open arms and welcoming smiles its youthful successor. I truly love it.”—Letter to the editor, Insight, October 6, 1970.

Not all Seventh-day Adventists on the far side of thirty have responded so warmly to the denomination’s new youth weekly, Insight. Church officials at last month’s Autumn Council criticized the pocket-sized journal’s “way-out art”—presumably the combinations of camera and canvas that create the magazine’s effective but non-representational illustrations.

But young people apparently took to Insight immediately. Although its 118-year-old predecessor, The Youth’s Instructor, lay untouched in student lounges, college administrators report that copies of Insight vanish rapidly. Editor Don Yost, who is completing work for a doctorate in journalism from Syracuse University, and his under-thirty associates have succeeded with young people by filling Insight’s first six months with articles about ecology, peace, and the generation gap. The stamp of the denomination appears in concern for healthful living and the second coming of Christ as well as in news about SDA young people and a daily study guide for the week’s Sabbath-school lesson.

This fall there’s a new look to another magazine for young people. Most of the names are the same, but the slick paper and larger size are firsts with what the October editorial calls “The New Improved His.” For its thirtieth birthday, Inter-Varsity’s campus magazine got a new art editor, Mickey Moore, who contributed to its “bolder, more active, immediate, and flexible” image.

Other changes appear in the writing style, which is to be “less complicated and academic.… We’ve tried to eliminate the dullness that can easily intrude into a theologically-based magazine,” and in the promise of additional articles geared specifically for underclassmen and new Christians.

Some of His’s faithful readers may wonder if reaching thirty has been detrimental to the magazine, but editor Paul Fromer expresses only optimism for the new look.

Champion Convert

Brooks Robinson, highly revered third baseman of the world champion Baltimore Orioles, became a convert to Roman Catholicism shortly before this year’s World Series.

Robinson, who was voted the most valuable player in the series, had been a Lutheran.

His instruction in the Catholic faith was given by the Reverend Martin A. Schwalenberg of the St. Charles Borromeo parish in Baltimore. The priest is a longtime friend of the baseball player and his parents. Robinson is from Little Rock, Arkansas but now lives in Baltimore and is the darling of the city’s sports fans.

A totally new journalistic effort also appeared in October—an eight-page tabloid called American Report. Published by—though purportedly “not a house organ of”—the National Committtee of Clergy and Laymen Concerned, the weekly promises “to bring significant and frequently neglected news and viewpoints on social change, particularly as it affects the religious community of North America.” The first two issues include articles on racism in Mississippi, the presence of U.S. reconnaissance teams in China, and the GM strike, as well as the antiwar reports predictable from the successor of Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Viet Nam.

The paper incorporates “First Source,” a one-time publication of the National Council of Churches Communication Center. “Its aim,” declares the first supplement, “is to offer first-hand, first-person perspective … direct from those who battle the anti-personal in church and society.”

JANET ROHLER GREISCH

Strife In Catholic Education

The U. S. Catholic school system can be destroyed “from within” by the very persons who teach in and administer it, according to a veteran Catholic educator.

Monsignor George A. Kelly said the entire discussion on state aid to parochial schools may soon become irrelevant “if some priests, some brothers, and some sisters have their way” and continue to pull out of Catholic education. His address was given before a group of bankers in New York City.

Acknowledging that “religious communities are in turmoil,” the priest said that unless Catholic teaching orders “put their houses in order, it is possible … that the vast educational work of the Church will … disintegrate by attrition.”

Monsignor Kelly, former New York archdiocesan secretary of education who now holds a chair in contemporary Catholic problems at St. John’s University, Jamaica, New York, called on the Catholic laity to commit themselves to continuing Catholic education and encouraging the teaching nuns, priests, and brothers.

“In the long run,” he said, “doing this may be more important than fighting for state aid.…”

On Togetherness

A black Baptist pastor has called for a “ceasefire” between evangelicals and social activists in the church.

Speaking at the 163rd annual meeting of the New York Baptist Convention, the Reverend Granville A. Seward said: “Let us have a ceasefire between these two camps. Both are wrong. Both are inadequate. We need the wholeness of both working together.”

The Newark, New Jersey, minister said neither the approach of spreading the Gospel and saving souls nor the stressing of the social gospel was adequate by itself. Both approaches are needed, he insisted. “We must be both evangelists and social activists.”

Given the mind and heart, evangelical Christians could become the most dynamic and decisive minority movement in present American history. They could capture initiative in the social arena, command the attention of the mass media, and confront contemporary man with both a fresh option for personal meaning and worth and an arresting vision of public godliness.

That they are not doing so—except in scattershot fashion—has costly consequences for the secular scene no less than for the Christian churches. For one thing, this neglect condemns modern man to nonevangelical alternatives in the quest for answers and solutions. For another, it adds to the mushrooming mood that the Church has had its day and should be retired as a bit of Victoriana.

However dire may be the trouble of the institutional church, it in no degree matches that of the world. Even the film industry, notes Newsweek, is using apocalyptical themes to exploit the general awareness that things just cannot long continue as they are.

At a conference of executives, scholars, and journalists sponsored in Indianapolis last year by Liberty Fund, a whole afternoon’s discussion turned spontaneously to indications that contemporary man is now groping and fumbling in a civilizational twilight. Professor John Dietze of Johns Hopkins University interpreted the modern turning from a law-based to a positivist-based culture as the lengthened shadow of the French and Russian revolutions. Others saw in the moral pollution of the noble savage, the growing world-wide police power, and the debased currency, incisive reminders of the fall of ancient Rome. Still other warnings are the reaction against rationality and logic even on university campuses, distrust of foundational principles for democratic processes, and disengagement from Christian values not only in sexual life but also in attitudes toward human life itself.

No culture has long endured without a driving interest in such ultimate concerns as spirit, reason, and conscience; when earthlings become steeped in material concerns, they soon surrender transcendent objective values and respect for divine authority. Multitudes today live fast, furiously, and infamously, with no fixed goals or clear purpose. Fascination with man’s technological competence crowds out the idea of an afterlife. Man becomes secretly yet steadily intoxicated with his own supposed divinity and views himself as maker of his own destiny. Modern science, while it has given man a first opportunity to destroy the planet on which he lives, has now enabled him, on the other hand, to dabble in experimental creativity. Whether his byproduct will be a superior genetic type, a sporting variation of his present fallen self, or a generation of monsters, remains to be seen.

The need for not simply altered social patterns but a changed man is a basic biblical theme. Both prophets and apostles insist that man’s fall need not be an irrevocable calamity, because the Living God not only demands but also offers a new heart. Growing numbers of scholars on leading American campuses are convinced that unless we recover the truth and motivation of spiritual and moral vitalities, we will hurtle ever faster toward civilizational suicide. The masses who have fallen away from interest in supernatural realities and in moral rescue are already too much the servants of Antichrist to think intermediary options effective. On many campuses, the influence of positivism and humanism has so throttled the thinking of professors that they shrug off even the viability of the Christian tradition. Committed students are the ones who are tackling the world around them for Jesus Christ; their concern for truth and values is a refreshing hope and sobering indictment.

As the history of ancient Rome makes plain, nations seem to survive for a considerable time even after the core of moral health is gone; they move inexorably, however, from ailment to ailment toward yawning terminal illness.

In America the revolt against distinctively biblical values is now racing so fast and so far that evangelicals must face a determinative decision. Are we, perhaps, too often defending a way of life that conscience frequently indicts so that we ourselves cannot wholly believe in it? Should we instead be exposing the whole of our world to the searing scrutiny of the commandments of God and initiating healing measures for the sickness of our times? Young people are searching for something that’s missing in many churches, evangelical churches included; they crave, even demand, illuminating and authentic Christian proposals to once again motivate and dignify the world of labor and economics, of education, literature, and the arts, of sex and marriage. Too often the evangelical solution dead-ends in personal evangelism, and even here conservatives sometimes engage mostly in intramural conflict over isolationist versus cooperative strategy. To the world, this hassle presents a questionable testimonial, to say the least.

We have said that the modern Church, however serious its problems, is for all that not in such dire straits as the world. At its Head and as its Heart, we must never forget, is the living Christ, and in him lie the possibilities of renewal.

The world’s heart is a dead heart needing not merely re-energizing but replacement. Only the Lord of the Church is able to meet this need. But how effectively do Christians introduce this Great Physician?

If our stock-in-trade continues to be limited to the usual Sunday “program,” we will never make the grade either personally or collectively in permeating the world for Jesus Christ. If we are convinced that evangelization of the earth is an indispensable task, but often neglected or mismanaged, we must also be convinced that continuing in the status quo can suck us and the Church only deeper into disrepute and to rejection of the Christ, the only Saviour of the world.

TOLL OF THE MOUNTAINS

A 48-year-old West German accountant got a nasty shock when he returned this year from his mountain-climbing vacation. The boss claimed that his subordinate was so tired after his outdoor exertions that he was unable to concentrate on his work, and the employee was ordered to give back his holiday pay. He appealed. The ministry of labor not only upheld the penalty but warned workers who go back to work tired from their holiday that they might even have to forgo another week’s pay. A ministry spokesman specifically cautioned that anyone who “acted the strong man” to impress others during his vacation and injured himself in so doing would also be in trouble. The official succinctly declared: “The holiday exists so that workers and employes can draw new strength for the job.”

I recommend this eminently sensible ruling to the religious denomination that has set up a committee to inquire into the alarming incidence of coronaries among its pastors. I hope the committee will call for evidence from the wives of those clergy who double as college teachers, and those seminary professors who take on summer pastorates and write books in their spare time. It’s not so much that many return tired from vacation, but that they don’t understand what a vacation means. The many wives who go holidaying with their husbands’ work can perhaps echo Cowper’s descent into doggerel:

John Gilpin’s spouse said to her dear—

Though wedded we have been

These twice ten tedious years, yet we

No holiday have seen.

It might give a new masculine dimension to that old sermon on Martha and Mary.

I’m talking just as much to myself here, for this year on vacation I took with me a particularly demanding work project. I fulfilled the minimum obligation to those around me, and actually found myself one Saturday afternoon murmuring agreement with Logan Pearsall Smith’s “Thank heavens! The sun has gone in, and I don’t have to go out and enjoy it.”

I was in no danger of having to give back my holiday pay; I earned every penny of it. And yet, and yet … That West German had breathed the mountain air, had seen great sights, and much more than I had given himself the chance to reassess life’s perspectives and perhaps discover that “the wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure.” It might incidentally be illuminating to inquire into the incidence of coronaries among mountaineers.

HOLDING POWER

I was seriously considering not to renew my subscription to CHRISTIANITY TODAY, first, because I am a layman and not always able to follow the theological discussion, and secondly, because I am busy. However, when I read “Not by White Might Nor by Black Power” (Oct. 9), I decided to renew.

The Philadelphia Tribune

Philadelphia, Pa.

SUPERIOR ANSWER?

I disliked the article “COCU: A Critique” (Oct. 9 and 23). I disliked the attitude of superiority. Having been in an “evangelical” church for fourteen years, I am well acquainted with the conservative-versus-liberal ax which is ground so much of the time. It is not that I don’t agree with the truth of the conservative position. I’m just tired of the argument. Could it be that “evangelicals” have many doubts about themselves as Christians and so find it necessary to be continually defending themselves? I myself am suffocating from this controversy and would welcome some fresh air in the Church. It is getting harder and harder to hear the voice of Christ today. COCU is a very tentative future plan with which I am not concerned.

Hightstown, N. J.

Thank you for your many insights into the issues of today from a Christian perspective. We must answer COCU.

Westfield, N. J.

The COCU arrangement is designed to give more power and glory to its leaders, and shove aside the personal relationships that Christ established. If those jokers honestly wanted to have one big church, they’d join the Roman Catholics and work within it for universal churchmanship. Since they don’t, their premises falter, and their intentions become evident.

Plantation, Fla.

NOT TRIUMPH BUT DESPAIR

It is very hard to accept David Kucharsky’s evidence (“Will Saints Go Marching Out?,” Sept. 25) that “though it had its shaky moments, the Ottawa congress emerged as a signal triumph for the biblical cause.” He even goes so far as to suggest that “it may have ushered in a new era of cooperation among Canadian evangelicals.” Events have already disproved this thesis. The fissure between the Ottawa position and the historic position adopted and tenaciously held by many evangelicals who could not go along with this congress runs very deep. First casualty may well be the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, which in recent years has been showing amazing strength. We must wait and see. But there is little of optimism around. The prevailing mood is one of silent despair.…

The usual, rather shoddy criticisms of churches as being “in-drags” rather than “places of outreach” captured (as they were no doubt intended to do) the attention of the secular press. But the diagnosis is false and the statement simply untrue in literally thousands of cases.…

We thank God for men like Dr. Henry, Leighton Ford, Ken Hamilton, Mariano DiGangi (whose herculean work behind the scenes and on the platform apparently did not merit Mr. Kucharsky’s notice) and others like them whose commitment to the true evangelical position is unquestioned. We regret that they found themselves placed in an equivocal position from which many who love them dearly had to dissociate themselves.

Knox Presbyterian Church

Toronto, Ont.

SLIGHTLY SALARIED

You may have a gremlin at work on your staff. If the salary of the president of the Methodist Publishing House were only $5,000 (Oct. 9, p. 52), I think he might be complaining, rather than being criticized, as reported.

Washington, D. C.

• That gremlin grabbed the lion’s share. The correct figure is $55,000.

—ED.

DISTURBING ANALYSIS

In spite of giving helpful insight into a number of pertinent questions, Mrs. Clouse’s article “Psychological Origins of Stability in the Christian Faith” (Sept. 25) is somewhat disturbing. It appears to treat faith in Christ as if it were in the same category as other human belief and thus capable of analysis by a psychologist, rather than the divine miracle of saving faith produced by the Holy Spirit in accordance with God’s grace.

Boulder, Colo.

Mrs. Clouse gives some very fine advice in training children to take the Christian stand for themselves. That is what all Christian parents want. But it should be more clearly stated that the parents take Jesus Christ as Lord in everything.

That will be shown most clearly by having a time for family prayers every day.

Springfield, Mo.

NO RESISTANCE

“Post- and Pre-Christianity,” “The Word and the Videotape” (Sept. 25)—how relevant can you get? And quotations from all our favorite writers: Lewis, Blamires, even the Book of Common Prayer (we are Anglicans). How can we resist? We capitulate, and our subscription is enclosed. You are not only brilliant and doctrinally faithful, but literate. What more encomiums do you need?

Sherwood, Ore.

ADVICE FOR EVANGELICALS

Addison Leitch’s … call (Current Religous Thought, Sept. 25) for evangelicals to produce “new and clear statements” on alternatives to the “new theologies” rather than indulge themselves in “carping criticism” is a praiseworthy suggestion that speaks for itself. Can we hope that the editors and contributors to CHRISTIANITY TODAY themselves will pay some attention to it?

Professor Leitch’s reading (?) of Karl Barth, on the other hand is misleading and open to criticism on two counts: (1) It fails to account for the fundamental distinction drawn in the Church Dogmatics between the hermeneutical categories of myth on the one hand and Saga and legend on the other. Barth saw no conflict between the categories of saga and legend and the revelation witnessed to in the Bible, but he emphatically rejected the notion of myth as a valid tool of biblical interpretation.… (2) The second criticism concerns Professor Leitch’s observation that “for Barth the Word of God has being and completion finally and only in the experience of the one at the receiving end,” and that in Barth, “the center of emphasis shifts from the Scriptures to the living experience of a believer”.… Indeed, for Barth the experience of the Word of God: “really involves collapse and death on man’s part” (CD, p. 254).… Finally, the charge that in Barth “the center of emphasis shifts from the Scripture to the living experience of the believer” can only be viewed in disbelief since the whole massive effort of the Church Dogmatics was undertaken in order to observe this very trend, epitomized in what Barth referred to as the Schleiermacher-Ritschl-Herrmann line of theology. If evangelicals believe that Barth failed in this effort then why not expose this failure by showing the inherent weaknesses of his thought and method rather than by rumor and innuendo, which itself is a form of “carping criticism”?

Union United Methodist Church

Trenton, N. J.

I agree with Dr. Leitch that we need more than “mere carping criticism,” but heaven spare us any more “statements by evangelicals”! What we need instead is a great deal more life style by evangelicals that is in accord with Christ’s statements. Could it be because there has been such a credibility gap between our statements as evangelicals and our actual behavior, such an unrighteous acceptance of the fact that our inner lives and attitudes are so contrary to what Jesus taught, that we now find ourselves in the position of having little left to say with any effectiveness or authority? It seems to me that is really the way it is.

Granada Hills, Calif.

EDITORIALS

The most destructive drug in general use today is the one whose massively harmful effects are least noticed.

“You can worry all you want about any future addiction to narcotics among our population,” says one survey, “yet it will never be more than a small fraction of the problem we already have with addiction to alcohol.”

Government officials call alcoholism the nation’s number-one health problem, and it is getting worse. Researchers at George Washington University say there now may be as many as nine million persons in America who are alcoholics (nearly one in twenty!), and many millions more on the verge of a serious drinking problem. The World Health Organization says the United States has the highest rate of alcoholism in the world. American industry alone loses an estimated $2 billion a year from the effects of alcohol; the cost of crime spawned by alcohol undoubtedly eclipses that figure.

The most appalling effect is the great loss of innocent life. Alcohol is a causal factor in some 25,000 traffic deaths and 200,000 injuries each year. Forty-four per cent of all drivers at fault in two-car accidents are legally drunk, says the Utica Mutual Insurance Company. One driver out of every fifty, according to a recent U. S. Department of Transportation study, is drunk.

The saddest part of the problem is that virtually nothing is being done about it. Hardly anyone seems to care. Why?

The notoriety of prohibition threw temperance forces into a tailspin, and they have been reeling ever since. After repeal, alcoholic beverages took on an attractively naughty kind of respectability. The industry spends nearly $200 million a year on advertising to add glamor to the image.

An increasing number of Christians, most of whom don’t bother to examine the sordid side, are yielding to the trend. Many simply assume that abstinence is an old cultural carryover and one that can be discarded without serious repercussions. Even Carl McIntire fails to say much about the evils of alcohol any more.

Some Christians, unfortunately, begin to imbibe out of social pressure or sheer pride or rebellion. There is a certain appeal in the cry to break the shackles of so-called legalism, and there is a desire not to be thought of as an obscurantist, which any association with the anti-liquor lobby is apt to bring about. More serious is the situation in which the Christian begins to drink to relieve tension, forget worries, or escape from reality. Those who drink to escape, say Washington researchers, are most likely to get into trouble.

Evangelicals in North America need to examine the alcohol problem anew. Intimidated by the fallout from prohibition, they have looked the other way too long. Meanwhile, thousands die and millions suffer.

Many Christians, for their own reasons, will argue against promotion of abstinence as an answer to the alcohol problem. Their opposition, however, tends to be along pragmatic lines. Most would agree that abstinence is in fact a good solution. The argument for abstinence, if considered dispassionately, can be persuasive.

Abstinence commends itself primarily because, like preventive medicine, it allays a great many risks. In principle, the use of alcohol is not unlike Russian roulette: a substantial proportion of those who intend to confine themselves to occasional use of alcohol are automatically hooked into habitual use, with all the attendant evils. The only remedy is to try to get off the bottle altogether. Authorities agree that for such people, moderation is impossible.

But there is more than risk involved in the use of alcohol. There is inevitable harm, to oneself and to others. Recent research shows that brain cells die when alcohol is introduced into the bloodstream, and that the heart, liver, and kidneys also are affected. Tests made at medical schools show that even a small amount takes its toll. Colman McCarthy of the Washington Post, in an intensive analysis of the alcohol problem, declared: “Many social drinkers, particularly those with a sophisticated self-image, laugh off the effects of alcohol. Yet even one mild drink hampers both intelligence and efficiency.”

Reduced intellectual capacity entails a diminished moral capacity. The person who subjects himself to the influence of alcohol invites an assortment of new temptations unnecessarily. And from a biblical standpoint, that is a decidedly indefensible act.

The Christian who uses alcohol sets a poor example. Not only are “weaker brethren” caused to stumble, but money spent on alcohol amounts to poor stewardship. The alcoholic-beverage industry in the United States grosses $12 billion a year, which is nearly four times the current budget of the much-maligned NASA.

In the face of all this, are there good reasons to favor the use of alcohol? Christ’s turning water into wine is no argument at all, because in his day few nonalcoholic beverages were available, and wine was probably the safest thing to drink. In our day wine and particularly distilled beverages are typically much stronger, and their adverse social consequences are infinitely greater. Paul’s advice to use wine as a medical measure may suggest that even in the first century its use was not habitual. Today we have hundreds of better alternatives in beverages as well as in medicine. Abstinence cannot be defended as a direct biblical injunction, but as in the matters of slavery and polygamy, a good case can be built on a deductive basis from biblical principles. In our day abstinence is at least a sensible biblical option.

Beyond this, Christians should be involved in working for the enactment and enforcement of laws that curb the activities of those who drink. Alcoholics are unfit to drive cars, for example, and ought not to be allowed to retain licenses. Today’s manner of living is complicated enough without the added problem of irresponsible behavior on the part of those who have lost control of their faculties. Similar restrictions should hold true for those who use other drugs, whether they be opiates, stimulants, psychedelics, or depressants.

Not By (Episcopal) Bread Alone

Just before the sixty-third General Convention of the Episcopal Church in Houston, Texas, last month (see News, page 43), a small delegation of students from the University of Texas “disrupted” the church’s Executive Council meeting and rebuked its members for aiding student strikes across the nation. The council last May had recommended that offerings be taken to support student strikes.

The council later repealed the strike resolution, not in response to the University of Texas students but because church lawyers feared the council’s tax-exempt status might be endangered.

The uninvited students, led by Episcopalian Mike Wilson, also struck at the council’s policy of making grants to militant minority groups, saying that “lump sums” are the most depersonalizing form of assistance.

Wilson called “hogwash” the contentions of several Episcopal bishops that student agitators are calling for a return to Christian values. “It is our conviction that … the radical student leaders on the campuses are not representative of America’s young people, and you are hurting those who stand up against the violent disrupters by supporting the minority you do,” Wilson said.

Wilson then had the audacity to add that if the church wished to be relevant to students, it should take them the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Despite that, Wilson was wasting his breath; the council ignored his plea. It’s interesting to speculate what the council would have done had Wilson and company been radicals. Very likely, radicals would have gotten bread, whereas Wilson got a stone for his trouble.

The Episcopal Church has been making headlines lately for throwing open its doors to hear the discordant voices of youth, minorities, the deprived, and the dispossessed. Commendable concern. But we think it may be almost too late already for the church to heed other voices in time to save itself from being dismantled by agitators and wrecked by those whose real purpose is to seize control for political and economic power.

We urge the Episcopal Church to heed those voices—they may still be a majority—asking the church to provide the spiritual food that Jesus alone can bestow.

Radicals On The Rampage

Some political leaders such as Senator Fulbright apparently would have us believe that Communism presents no substantial threat to the world and that time has changed its revolutionary thrust to one of peaceful coexistence. Recently Senator McGovern (D.-S.D.) advocated admission of Red China to the United Nations as the first step in abandoning an “obsession with Communism.” China, he said, “is hardly a monolith ready to threaten the world.” The lion has become a lamb, according to this view; those who question it are accused of having a paranoid streak that compels them to look for a Communist under every bush.

But world events continue to refute the thesis that Communism is a peaceful political system, that it is not working for the death of democracy and the overthrow of non-Communist governments. Witness the terrorist activities of the Quebec Liberation Front (FLQ) in Canada, whose members kidnapped a British diplomat and the Quebec labor minister, used them as hostages for ransom and a one-way trip to Cuba, and then committed murder. Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, declaring that a state of insurrection existed, called out troops to protect the government and to arrest hundreds of the conspirators. According to the Christian Science Monitor, a highly respected newspaper not given to fanciful speculation, there is adequate evidence for the claim that leading members of the FLQ were trained in Cuba and Algeria, Soviet outposts of aggression. It is ironic that at the very time Canada recognized the Communist regime of Red China, it was faced with the problem of whether to break off diplomatic relations with another Communist state, Cuba, an obvious source of much of its present unrest and rebellion.

Meanwhile, in the United States a wave of bombings has shown all too clearly that the threat of left-wing radicals to bring down the government is not be taken lightly. The murder of a California judge in the attempted escape of the so-called Soledad Brothers, and the suspected involvement of Communist-party member Angela Davis, recently apprehended by the FBI, is a case in point.

It makes little difference whether bombings and insurrections bear a “made in Moscow” or a “made in Cuba”—or Algeria or China—label. It also makes little difference whether one can point to a planned conspiracy with juridical precision. The indisputable fact is that the Western democracies are under siege, and that the sources of much of the impetus for violence, insurrection, and revolution are plain.

Although there is no cause for panic, there are good reasons to be aware of the problem, concerned over its spread, and determined that the current rash of terrorism must be stopped. The proper response to the depredations of the left, however, is not to turn to the extreme right, which is no less totalitarian than Communism.

It’s high time for the democracies to set their houses in order and to use whatever force is necessary to quell these disturbances and put the revolutionaries behind bars, where they belong.

Which Way Chile?

Salvador Allende (Gossens) became Chile’s president—and the first freely elected Communist president in history—by a minuscule plurality. He polled 36 per cent of the vote against 35 per cent and 28 per cent for the other two candidates, and the Chilean congress had to decide whether he would receive the office.

That he was a minority choice clearly says that the Chileans are by no means committed to Communism. But the big question is whether the country can survive as a democracy. For a democracy to function, there must be at least two political parties, and free elections in which candidates represent at least two parties. But a Communist “people’s democracy” is a one-party affair; a second party is no longer necessary, Communists say, once the proletariat has secured control. Everyone who thinks right will belong to the one party. Anyone who thinks otherwise displays the bourgeois mentality and shows himself to be against the people’s democracy—and this cannot be permitted.

No Communist, be it Allende, Castro, Brezhnev, or Mao, can remain true to Communist tenets and yet allow for two parties and free elections. To do so would be an act of treason against traditional doctrine.

The future of democracy in Chile looks grim.

Fat Thoughts

If Julius Caesar were to appear in the twentieth century, he might fare best among evangelicals. “Let me have men about me that are fat,” Shakespeare had him say:

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;

He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.

Obesity is no gauge of orthodoxy, of course. But a glimpse from the rear of an evangelical gathering tends to nurture the notion that many who relish heavenly citizenship take exceeding great pleasure in a certain aspect of earthly existence—that, in other words, Christians who carefully abstain from six of the deadly sins may come within a gulp of committing gluttony.

Perhaps they consider eating a safe pastime. St. Jerome, for one, thought it an insubstantial one. “A fat paunch,” he said, “never breeds fine thoughts.” Those who crave the mind of Christ, who “hunger and thirst for righteousness,” need to feed on the fruit of the Spirit. If overfed Christians ate less, they could give more thought—and action—to fattening the Kingdom of God.

That Women’S Rights Amendment

The Congress of the United States has acted injudiciously—one is tempted to say stupidly—in its consideration of a constitutional amendment to assure women of equal rights with men before the law. Use of the archaic device of the filibuster and the senseless tacking on of unrelated amendments guaranteed that members of the Senate would not pass the bill before returning home to the political hustings. Few observers hold out any hope for the bill after the election when a lame-duck Congress convenes for a few short weeks.

But although the amendment itself may be dead, the issue is very much alive, as it should be. Some states have archaic laws limiting the rights of women: in California, for example, women must obtain a court order to start an independent business; in eight states, women cannot contract or sign leases until age twenty-one, whereas for men the age is eighteen. Everywhere women doing the same work as men are paid lower wages. This state of affairs should not be allowed to continue.

Some say that the road to equality for women lies in the judicial rather than the legislative processes, via the fourteenth amendment. But this might take a long, long time. The better and the quicker way seems to be a constitutional amendment. Simple justice calls for action. And the least the legislative branch can do is give the states the opportunity to decide whether the Constitution should be amended. When the new Congress convenes next January, the women’s rights amendment should be given high priority.

Radio’S Niche

Commercial radio broadcasting which began fifty years ago this month and underwent a transformation in format with the advent of TV, is today enjoying unparalleled prosperity. The Radio Advertising Bureau estimates there are now 58 per cent more radios than people in the United States!

Two facts about the radio audience should be of special interest to the Church. One is that more people listen between 7 and 9 A.M. than during any other two-hour period. This is also the most effective time to reach people, because the problems and other distractions of the day have not yet gotten to them. Christian programming should focus on these early hours.

Second, teen-agers listen to radio more than any other age group. For the Church this is the most crucial period, because the drop-out rate is highest during these years. Are we not overdue for development of Christian outreaches to teen-agers via radio?

Series Sequel?

Major-league baseball took a long time to accept black players. It took even longer to accept black umpires, and not until this year did one get the chance to work a World Series.

Like so many blacks in other professions, the talented Emmett Ashford had a wait problem while umpiring in the minors. He was not promoted to the majors until he was fifty, and now he is at the mandatory retirement age of fifty-five. Had the 1970 World Series gone six games, Ashford would have been behind the plate, but the Baltimore Orioles’ dismantlement of the “Big Red Machine” from Cincinnati precluded that possibility (the umpires themselves almost deprived Ashford of his big chance by staging a brief strike for more money).

Whites can never make up for what they have denied blacks in the past, but this seems to be one small area where a gesture of restitution would be appropriate. Baseball executives might well consider inviting Ashford to work another year and another World Series. The negative exceptions made against the blacks are a blot on the American conscience. Surely a positive exception would be in order.

Halfway Help

What happens to a prisoner after he has served his term and is released? Having “learned his lesson” and “paid his debt to society,” does he settle down and earn an honest living, pay taxes, and join the rest of us in complaining about war, inflation, and pollution? We all know that the answer is, unfortunately, no. The present penal system, suffering from inadequate funding and poorly qualified personnel, is simply not accomplishing the task we set for it. Instead of combining punishment with correction and rehabilitation, it tends to confirm a prisoner in his anti-social behavior.

Since many people from poor backgrounds do not enter into a life of crime, those who do cannot shift all the blame to their circ*mstances. However, it should not surprise us when an ex-convict who has had little or no help in acquiring a useful trade and in adjusting to society in a non-criminal way finds himself once again engaging in the pattern of life to which he formerly was accustomed. The parole system is supposed to ease the transition. But excessive case loads and poor funding make its effectiveness minimal.

What is needed are more “halfway houses” where a released prisoner, living in the company of others who want to break out of criminal patterns, can avoid the companionship of those who will cajole him once more into wrongdoing. Ideally, the halfway house would provide psychological counseling, both individual and group, to help him gain insight into what has motivated his behavior and how to alter it. It would also assist him in finding and holding a suitable job.

Over the centuries, Christians have pioneered in founding institutions, such as schools, hospitals, and orphanages, that society as a whole has come to value and to provide. The halfway house for released prisoners is the kind of institution that needs pioneering in our time. The costs would be high, but not nearly so high as the cost of crime—including apprehending, prosecuting, and imprisoning the criminal.

Moreover, Christian-sponsored halfway houses, like Christian rescue missions, afford an excellent opportunity to proclaim the good news of divine forgiveness for even the worst of crimes. Those who know they are pardoned sinners in the sight of God should be in the forefront of attempts to reclaim others from a life of crime.

Delicious Morsels, Deadly Poison

Two verses in the Book of Proverbs are exactly alike: “The words of a whisperer are like delicious morsels; they go down into the inner parts of the body” (18:8, 26:22). A “whisperer” is, of course, a talebearer, a gossip, one who passes along to others what he should keep to himself.

It is always wrong to gossip about things we know to be untrue. This is lying. It is equally wrong to gossip about things of which we are not certain. This is pawning the truth. And it is also wrong to spread damaging information that we know to be true, unless there are compelling reasons for doing so. Once such information is circulated, the damage is irrevocably done.

The story is told of a peasant who slandered a friend. Upon discovering that what he had said was untrue, he went to the village monk for help. The monk told him to take a bag of feathers and to place one feather on each doorstep of his community. This he did, and then he returned to the monk, announcing that he had completed the penance for his sin. But the monk sternly ordered him to take his bag and pick up each feather he had dropped. When the man replied that by this time the wind had blown the feathers away and they were irrecoverable, the monk reminded him that words are like feathers: once they are dropped, and that easily, it is impossible to get them back.

Talebearing is a sin belonging to the tongue, which James describes as an unruly member that stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. It is, he says, “a restless evil, full of deadly poison.” Taming the tongue is a most difficult undertaking—but a necessary one. One who cannot control his tongue is liable to wound others deeply, perhaps leaving lasting scars. A good day’s-end question for each of us is: Have I hurt anyone today by saying something untrue, unkind, or unnecessary?

Diabolical Didactics

Satan looked through lazy smoke-ribbons at his subordinate, Fireball, and said, “You bring a report from earth?”

“Affirmative, Majesty,” said Fireball. “Things are going great for us. Business is booming. Crime in America alone has zoomed 99 per cent since 1960. Drug addiction is growing like wild. The city streets are dangerous. I walk about my assigned territory, the United States, and say with one of their own, ‘How sweet it is!’”

“Is the Enemy making any successful resistance?”

Fireball chuckled: “I have observed nothing to get us uptight. Lots of talk—committee meetings, dialogues, resolutions, that sort of thing. Now and then, of course, someone manages to toss in a Molotov co*cktail. I mean, there’s always someone around who doesn’t like sin. But all in all, things are going nicely.

Satan frowned. “It might be well to stir up a few more to preach against sin.”

“I beg your pardon, Majesty?”

“Against overt sin, that is. Rape, robbery, murder, even the Mafia. This will help detract them from their real problem.”

“Will you elaborate, sir?”

Satan grinned a crooked grin. “You’ve been with me all this time and still don’t understand? Man’s real problems are not war, theft, and things like that. Take war, for instance. Man has always had it—and always he has talked about peace. But the more he talks, the further he seems to get from realizing peace.”

“I see. What’s important is what causes wars and other things.”

“Correct. We must remember why man is bedeviled by so many things.”

Fireball chortled. “You put it admirably, sir—‘bedeviled!’”

“Man must be prevented from really examining his disease,” said the devil. “We have to keep him from making a proper diagnosis—keep him forever looking at symptoms.”

“Even if man is offered a remedy for his condition,” said Fireball brightly, “without a proper diagnosis he will not so much as try the remedy!”

“Right,” Satan growled. “He’ll keep on trying one futile corrective after another. He will preach mightily, teach brilliantly, engage in powerful action, stir up revolutions, change systems, claim victories—but he will never really win. His very struggle to be free will contribute to our cause.”

“Fabulous!” breathed Fireball.

Smoke drifted across Satan’s sudden frown. “But we’ve got to keep an eye on those who do know the right diagnosis. Remember that there are more of them around than just Billy Graham! They know what man’s trouble really is—‘sin in the heart’ they call it. We have to watch them closely.”

“Our chief task, then, is to keep men away from themselves—right, Majesty?”

“Well said. They must keep trying to save others while they themselves are not saved.”

“Keep the blind leading the blind—that’s our thing, isn’t it?” asked Fireball.

Satan grimaced. “Much as I dislike your earth jargon, yes. For millennia we have worked this thing. You would have thought they’d have caught on by now. But they haven’t. Their disease is curable, but not without the true diagnosis. Note how the Enemy when he was on earth did not preach much on what man now emphasizes. Oh, he knew! He knew the only way to end war and racial strife and bad politics. The heart, he told them. That’s where it all begins. Just make mankind blind to that one thing and we are ahead of the game.”

“Why has it been so easy for us to keep men away from themselves?” asked the underling.

“Little brother, long ago we made the human heart a rebel against the Creator. We have kept man a rebel. We see that he does not face the fact of the Enemy’s sovereignty. We see that he hangs on to his pride.”

“You mean we make him like us?” asked Fireball.

Satan glowered. “Just remember: Attract man by any kind of goings-on outside himself. Let him be moral, pious, Bible-minded, even theologically conservative. But never let him see his real need. Don’t let that Spirit get in him who marched those first believers across the world! Never let men understand that happening! Give them a Pentecost Sunday, allow them to preach on the theme—but never let them have such an experience!”

“Never!” exclaimed Fireball.

“Steer man from grace by making him self-sufficient. A thousand things ought to make him humble—his inability to set his world in order, his repetition of stupid operations, the way he clutters up his earthly spaceship with ridiculous trash, the manner in which he drives himself toward the gulf of despair. But we must keep him proud. Keep him on his feet and off his knees! Make him feel like a god—even when global ruin stares him in the face because of his failures. To repeat: Keep him away from himself!”

“I dig you!” cried Fireball enthusiastically.

The devil snorted. “You and your twentieth-century slang! Return to your post and remember: The battle is ours as long as we can keep man from taking that long hard look at his own inner being. Without that look he will keep thinking he can survive without help from another World—and so he will never come to the end of his tunnel.”

“How sweet it is!” exulted Fireball.—LON WOODRUM, author and evangelist, Hastings, Michigan.

To live in harmony with the world order instead of in harmony with the Creator is an evidence of man’s inherent folly. For man does not have to exist in the desolate darkness of this world; he may choose the light of God and his eternity.

The world order is without hope, because true hope rests solely in the finished work of Christ, of which the world knows nothing. The Apostle Paul reminded the Corinthian Christians, “Remember that you were at that time [before conversion] separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12).

The unregenerate world is spiritually blind and without wisdom. Oh yes, it may be filled with knowledge and with scientific achievement, but it lacks the wisdom that comes from God whereby knowledge is controlled and implemented for the glory of God.

The world system can provide for man’s physical life and surroundings but not for his death. Possessions may be acquired, material progress made, scientific know-how harnessed for comfortable living. Insurance may be taken out for accidents, hospitalization, fire, liability, and life—but not for anything beyond the grave.

The world system, being blind, stumbles over it knows not what. The only guidance it has is that which comes from the human mind and experience—good in its way but totally inadequate for the ultimate needs of mankind. What is necessary is guidance by the One who sees all the past, present, and future at once, the One who has promised to give direction to those who truly seek him.

Into this hopeless situation came God’s Son to bring the things man so desperately needs. The world system rejected him and continues to suffer as a result. But there were those who received him then, as there are those who do so today.

The Gospel is the good news that God has done through his Son the things that can lift us to a spiritual plane, unknown and unattainable to those who reject him. What are some of these things?

First of all, man is restored to a right relationship with God through God’s loving forgiveness of our sins for Christ’s sake. That which we could not do, Jesus did for us, so that God no longer sees our sins but sees the righteousness of his Son.

And with forgiveness there also comes cleansing. Sin is dirty, contaminating; it makes a stain on our lives that no detergent of human devising can take away. God speaks to us as he did to the people of Judah, “Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool” (Isa. 1:18). Centuries later, John, also speaking through the Spirit, wrote, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). Two verses earlier he names the divine detergent: “The blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.”

Not only are we forgiven and cleansed but the filth and worthlessness of our lives is replaced by his presence. Jesus promises, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you” (John 14:15–17). The truth of God’s indwelling presence is one we Christians often stumble over, but it is a glorious reality to be appropriated and enjoyed.

Prevalent in the world system is the idea of self-improvement and self-reformation. Many of the activities of individuals as well as those of our lawmakers center in man’s attempt to change himself for the better. Our Lord told of an unclean spirit that left a man, only to return bringing with him “seven other spirits more evil than himself; … and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first” (Luke 11:24–26).

Man cannot change himself into a new creature. This accounts for our miserable failures, and also brings into clear focus the fact that it is through Christ that we are born again. This is a work of the same Holy Spirit who continues to live in those who believe.

But that is not all. Not only do we receive forgiveness, cleansing, and infilling, but because of our faith in him we receive strength for the daily grind. No matter how good our intentions, we need constant help. To his sleepy disciples Jesus said, “Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matt. 26:41). The power God offers rests in the person and presence of the One he has sent. “But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you” (Acts 1:8)—a promise not only for those disciples who were to go out into a hostile world but also for you and me, who live in a world order just as hostile because it is still dominated by Satan.

The world order is confused, with no recourse to spiritual guidance. Certainly this explains, in part, the predicament of men and nations. But the Christian has ever at his command divine guidance, not only in the emergencies of life but also in the more mundane things—the “little” everyday problems.

Because of what God has done for us and his promised help in every area of life, the Christian should so live that he demonstrates to all around him the difference between a God-centered and a world-centered life.

The believer waits for the Lord and renews his strength in him while the unbeliever rushes hither and yon in the futility of human endeavor.

The believer takes courage from God’s promise, “Fear not, for I am with you, be not dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my victorious right hand” (Isa. 41:10). The man without faith, however, is filled with the forebodings that stem from loneliness and helplessness.

For the Christian there is the blessed release of casting his anxieties on the One who cares for him (1 Peter 5:7), the assurance of every need supplied (Phil. 4:19), of a peace the world cannot give and cannot take away (John 14:27).

Living in this chaotic, turbulent world order, the Christian stands as living evidence of the saving and keeping power of the sovereign God.

The Apostle Paul has the word: “… be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast the word of life” (Phil. 2:15, 16).

What a challenge, and what a privilege!