Page 5722 – Christianity Today (2024)

Rudolf Bultmann, theological giant of the neo-orthodox era, died last month at his home in Marburg, Germany, where he had lived since he formally retired as a university professor in 1951. Had he lived until August 20, he would have been ninety-two.

Until very recently, Bultmann continued to exert a powerful personal influence over German theological scholarship. Associated with Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Paul Tillich, and lesser figures in the articulation of “dialectical theology” in the thirties and forties, he not only lived longer than they but his influence—for better or worse—was ultimately much greater in the world of academic theology.

Much that is positive could be said about his life and work, even by those who deplore the distinctives of his theological system (see editorial, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, August 16, 1974, p. 24). His scholarly labors, for example, were immense. Few biblical scholars of any theological persuasion have been his equals in either quality or quantity of work. And there is no question that his practice of developing warm, personal relationships with his students offers a model for all who teach theology. But there are also negative lessons to be learned.

As Barth observed on one occasion, no one ever talked more about understanding yet complained more that he was misunderstood than Bultmann. The irony of his program of “demythologization,” ostensibly an attempt to translate the Christian gospel into terms that “modern man” (whoever he/she is) could understand, was that nobody understood—at least not in the way that Bultmann intended (so he said). Many who heard his lectures or read his books concluded that he had given up the traditional heart of Christianity for secularism, and so they turned to secular humanism in its purer form. Others who maintained an orthodox faith concluded the same and denounced his teachings as heretical. A small but extremely influential group of disciples sought to interpret and to defend his thought to the world and thus were responsible for his continuing influence in the theological arena.

Bultmann admitted the impossibility of “presuppositionless exegesis” of the Bible. His presuppositions began with a conscious rejection of theological orthodoxy and did not allow for the presence of a personal, transcendent God who acts decisively and historically to redeem his people and who speaks in an intelligible manner to reveal himself and his ways to men and women. He excluded the supernatural by definition from his system, as also any real intervention of the living God into the affairs of the world; therefore, the concept of miracle was ruled out, including the greatest miracle of all, the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. Little wonder, then, that he evoked more controversy in the German Protestant church during the past four decades than any other theologian.

Wedding his theology to the existentialist philosophy of the early Martin Heidegger, Bultmann assumed the most radical tradition of biblical criticism. He denied the historicity of all but a few basics of the life of Jesus (the “thatness”) and essentially dismissed the Old Testament and all Jewish elements in the Bible as irrelevant for Christian theology.

Though the influence of Bultmann is still strong, there are evidences of its waning during the past few years. For one thing, most of his immediate students are now retired or about to retire from their academic posts, and new leaders who “knew not Joseph” are coming to prominence. For another, many church leaders have begun to listen to the cries of laypeople (and also to note their absence from the pews) who have long been aware that they have been given stones instead of bread.

In spite of the widespread influence of Bultmann, it seems unlikely that he will be remembered as a “father of the church” by subsequent generations of believers. Rather, his writings—brilliant though they may be—will probably be of interest primarily to future generations of scholars who specialize in the history of theology (as is true also of the work of Baur, Overbeck, Harnack, and Tillich). Bultmann, unlike Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin, will be remembered for his passing influence on Christian theology rather than for an enduring contribution to Christian faith and practice.

Abortion: No Adjustment

The U.S. Supreme Court had the chance this year to restore some legal standing to unborn children. So far it has chosen not to do so. The court issued decisions last month which showed that a majority of its members are no more respectful of the personhood of the fetus than they were three years ago when state laws prohibiting abortion-on-demand were ruled unconstitutional.

Three more abortion cases will be heard by the Supreme Court this fall, including one which asks for a determination as to whether public hospitals should be forced to perform abortions if their staffs object on religious grounds.

The July decisions struck down a Missouri law that required written consent of both the woman and her mate before an abortion could be performed, except that when the father withheld his approval an abortion could be performed if a licensed physician certified it necessary to preserve the life of the mother. Also ruled unconstitutional was a requirement that an unmarried woman under eighteen could not have an abortion unless at least one of her parents (or a person in loco parentis of the woman) gave written consent, again with the exception of maternal jeopardy. Even though the parents are legally responsible for an unmarried minor, the court’s argument was that “any independent interest the parent may have in the termination of the minor daughter’s pregnancy is no more weighty than the right of privacy of the competent minor mature enough to have become pregnant” (italics added).

When one considers that the court’s 1973 ruling insists that medical advice is appropriate and medical assistance should be required by the state, some arguments in the 1976 decision lose their force. If only the woman has veto power, then the state is in no position to make her go to a certified physician.

Part of the problem was that the Missouri law was somewhat inadequately drawn. Christians need to realize that a great deal of intensive work is necessary if legislative relief from the 1973 ruling is to be obtained. Polemics is not enough. We need to channel more energy into seeking better jurisprudence.

Scientific Evidence For Life After Death?

Our Victorian forebears were reluctant to talk openly about sex, but not about death. The age in which we live turned the tables. Talk about sex is frank and explicit, while death has until recently been an unmentionable.

The most forceful influence in the development of a new openness concerning death has been the work of Dr. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, who first began interviewing terminally ill patients in the hospital of the medical school of the University of Chicago a decade ago. Her book On Death and Dying (1969) brought the subject to public attention and launched her into a career as the foremost writer, lecturer, and leader of seminars on thanatology, the study of death and related subjects.

In her early work Kübler-Ross was agnostic—perhaps “uninterested” would be the better word—concerning the question of life after death. Recently she has joined a growing number of researchers impressed by the testimonies concerning out-of-body experience (OBE) by people who have been declared “clinically dead” (i.e., their hearts have stopped beating) but who have subsequently regained consciousness.

An article in Harper’s Weekly for July 12 (“Is There Life After Life?”) surveys some of the evidence for OBEs. A Virginia psychiatrist, Dr. Raymond A. Moody, in a recent book, Life After Life (Stackpole), details the stories of one hundred fifty patients who came close to death but lived to describe their sensations. And an August Reader’s Digest article tells of Kübler-Ross’s OBE investigations.

Before Christians run to jump on the bandwagon or add these data to their apologetic arsenal, they should be aware that no essential difference is reported between the OBEs of believers and unbelievers! All testify to a distinctively positive experience—a feeling of perfect peace, floating outside the body, restoration to wholeness (in the case of those who have lost limbs), hearing beautiful music, and the like. Christians testify to seeing Christ while Hindus say they come face to face with Krishna. Cultists tend to have their worldview validated, and some nominal Christians adopt heterodox opinions. A Scottish Presbyterian, for example, testified: “I know beyond a doubt that the Christ I saw will accept everyone, good or bad.”

Christians should encourage further serious research in the area while recognizing that faith cannot be “proved” by scientific research. The only certain evidence we have for the existence of life beyond the grave is the resurrection of Christ (1 Cor. 15:20–23; 2 Cor. 4:14) and the indwelling Holy Spirit, who has been given to believers as a pledge of the good things prepared for those who have put their faith in Jesus (2 Cor. 1:22; 5:5; Eph. 1:13–14).

‘If My People … Pray’

In the closing days of October, Christians will gather in Dallas, Texas, to claim the promises of Second Chronicles 7:14 for the United States and Canada. This gathering, a National Prayer Congress sponsored by “Here’s Life, America,” will take place just before America’s presidential election, and sponsors hope that some five to ten thousand Christians will come to pray at this crucial time.

We urge that churches in the United States and Canada keep their doors open during this period, October 26–29, and that they ask their members to make these days a time when they “humble themselves, and pray, and seek God’s face, and turn from their wicked ways,” and ask God to heal their land.

Anne Sexton’S Rowing Toward God

Since 1967, when she won the Pulitzer Prize, Anne Sexton has been recognized as a major American poet. She began to write almost by accident in her late twenties, after an early marriage, two children, and a psychotic break during which she tried to kill herself. Her short career has followed the pattern of a shooting star flashing against the backdrop of a dark universe. Her first volume, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), was followed by All My Pretty Ones (1962), Live or Die (1966), Love Poems (1969), Transformations (1971), The Book of Folly (1972), and The Death Notebooks (1974)—all published by Houghton Mifflin. Mercy Street, a play, was produced in New York in 1969.

At first, poetry was only therapy for Sexton as she attempted to relieve her psychic pain. In time she could claim that “poetic truth is not necessarily autobiographical. It is truth that goes beyond the immediate self.” She seemed to choose creation over destruction or poetry over suicide: “Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.” Poetry thus became a vehicle to find, to reclaim—to save the self. “When I’m writing,” she told an interviewer, “I know I’m doing the thing I was born to do.” (Prose quotes are from an interview published in the Paris Review, 1971.) “There is something there/ I’ve got to get and I dig/ down … / … and because/ of this I am a hoarder of words” (The Book of Folly, p. 34).

But in the end, even poetry could not rescue her from the death that beckoned her. “It is snowing and death bugs me/ as stubborn as insomnia./ … I hear the filaments/ of alabaster. I would lie down/ with them and lift my madness/ off like a wig. I would lie/ outside in a room of wool/ and let the snow cover me” (Folly, p. 7). Anne Sexton took her own life in 1974.

The publication in 1975, again by Houghton Mifflin, of another volume, The Awful Rowing Toward God, revealed Sexton as a profoundly religious poet. Many critics, interested in the poet’s primitive, confessional nature, had not paid attention to the theological thrust of her writing, but these poems simply bring to fruition themes that go back as far as 1960. “The Division of Parts,” written after her mother’s death, has a Good Friday setting, and Sexton’s persona declares: “The clutter of worship/ that you taught me, Mary Gray,/ is old, I imitate/ a memory of belief/ that I do not own” (To Bedlam and Part Way Back, p. 63).

Belief, however fragile, came to be hers. She commented: “There is a hard-core part of me that believes, and there’s this little critic in me that believes nothing. Some people think I’m a lapsed Catholic.” Although she was raised as a Protestant, her poems contain strong criticism of the mildness of the type of Christianity she first knew (e.g., “Protestant Easter”). When asked if the death of her mother had forced her to confront her own belief in God, she replied affirmatively. “The dying are slowly being rocked away from us and wrapped up into death, that eternal place. And one looks for answers and is faced with demons and visions. Then one comes up with God. I don’t mean the ritualized Protestant God, who is such a goody-goody … but the martyred saints, the crucified man.”

An attraction toward Catholicism and the suffering Christ is evident in several poems. A prayer addressed to Mary is entitled “For the Year of the Insane.” “The black rosary with its silver Christ/ lies unblessed in my hand/ for I am the unbeliever./ … O Mary, permit me this grace,/ this crossing over,/ although I am ugly,/ submerged in my own past/ and my own madness” (Live or Die, p. 44).

Critics have frequently coupled Anne Sexton with Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. Both women studied under John Holmes and Lowell; both deal with their split psyches, with a dark, ugly side often full of self-loathing, that contrasts with their public image as charming, middle-class young women. Sexton referred to much of her life during which she conformed to the image of the “woman of the American Dream” in the terms of “Those Times:” “At six/ I lived in a graveyard full of dolls,/ avoiding myself” (Live or Die, p. 29). Lowell, Plath, and Sexton have written uncompromisingly of madness, and Sexton sometimes linked her poetic gift to her dark visions, calling writing “The Black Art.” But she minimized the influence of Lowell and Plath upon her, emphasizing that poetry finds its roots in the subconscious.

Because of the frankness with which she deals with the body, feelings, and her personal past, some have criticized Sexton as self-indulgent, unable to create aesthetic distance in her poems. At the same time, the form of her work varies tremendously, ranging from carefully crafted poems using rhyme to open-ended transcripts of the metaphors of the psyche. But her best work is controlled and marked by penetrating images drawn from the New England landscape and middle-class American culture; it embodies the psychic malaise of our era and underscores the link between that malaise and spiritual hunger. “Small Wire” is constructed on the basic comparison between the poet’s faith and a weight suspended on a fragile wire. “God does not need/ too much wire to keep Him there,/ just a thin vein,/ with blood pushing back and forth in it, and some love./ … He will enter your hands/ as easily as ten cents used to/ bring forth a co*ke” (The Awful Rowing Toward God, p. 78).

Anne Sexton confessed that she had religious visions. Although she refused to discuss them in detail, she implied that they were extensions of herself but also enveloped her in a reality larger than herself. “I have visions—sometimes ritualized visions—that come to me of God, or of Christ, or of the Saints, and I feel that I can touch them almost … that they are part of me.… I feel very much in touch with things after I’ve had a vision. It’s somewhat like the beginning of writing a poem; the whole world is very sharp and well-defined, and I’m intensely alive, like I’ve been shot full of electric volts.”

She thought that eventually people would be more shocked by her mystical poetry than by her so-called confessional poetry. Pieces such as “In the Deep Museum” (All My Pretty Ones) and those in the series called “The Jesus Papers” (The Book of Folly) portray a Jesus who is “postfigured”—humanized by the author’s twentieth-century imagination. If readers think them blasphemous, they must read the epigraph Sexton affixed to the poems. “‘And would you mock God?’ ‘God is not mocked except by believers.’”

The Awful Rowing Toward God is given a framework by the first and last poems, “Rowing” and “The Rowing Endeth.” The motif of the quest for God permeates the book and highlights, in turn, the poet’s moments of doubt, ignorance, despair, love, and joy. The poet’s persona is never irrevocably cut off from God, but separation from him equals homelessness, and ignorance of him, madness. “The place I live in/ is a kind of maze/ and I keep seeking/ the exit or the home” (“The Children,” p. 5). The poet speaks to a walking fish, telling him that she has a vague memory of a country she has lost. The fish replies: “You must be a poet,/ a lady of evil luck/ desiring to be what you are not,/ longing to be/ what you can only visit” (“The Fish That Walked,” p. 21). There is a sense of imprisonment in the false bourgeois world, in the body, in the self, in madness—and a longing to escape to permanent identity, to joy, to love, to God. “Take off your life like trousers,/ your shoes, your underwear,/ then take off your flesh,/ unpick the lock of your bones./ In other words/ take off the wall/ that separates you from God” (“The Wall,” p. 47).

God is transcendent, yet strangely present. Love between humans, joy among the objects of everyday life—these emotions give evidence of him. “I wouldn’t mind if God were wooden,/ I’d wear Him like a house,/ praise His knot holes,/ shine Him like a shoe” (“Is It True?,” p. 51). In contrast, the poet sees herself as having grown “like a pig in a trenchcoat” and as being devoured by a gnawing, pestilential rat, but “God will take it with his two hands/ and embrace it.” Like a fallen angel she is “both saved and lost,/ tumbling downward like Humpty Dumpty.”

Two moments of grace illuminate the book. In “The Sickness Unto Death,” Sexton depicts the nadir of her life, when God “went out” of her. “My body became a side of mutton/ and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.” She thus transforms a crisis of madness into a religious crisis when self-revulsion leads the way to the disappearance of self and renewal through the kiss of grace. “So I ate myself,/ bite by bite,/ and the tears washed me,/ wave after cowardly wave,/ swallowing canker after canker/ and Jesus stood over me looking down/ and He laughed to find me gone,/ and put His mouth to mine/ and gave me His air” (p. 40). The final poem depicts Anne Sexton’s joyful union with God. She docks her rowboat at the island of God and—“can it be true”—plays poker with him. “I win because I hold a royal straight flush./ He wins because He holds five aces./ A wild card had been announced/ but I had not heard it/ being in such a state of awe” (p. 85). The universe joins God in rollicking laughter over his win.

Readers can only leave to God’s infinite understanding the untimely end of Anne Sexton’s life when they hear the rhythms celebrating God’s gamble of love in the final stanza of The Awful Rowing Toward God. “Dearest dealer,/ I with my royal straight flush,/ love you so for your wild card,/ that untamable, eternal, gut-driven ha-ha/ and lucky love.”

PATRICIA WARD

Patricia Ward teaches French and comparative literature at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park.

Question. There are many reports of revival and awakening coming out of Asia. Have you seen this in your Asian travels in the last few months?

Answer. Burma is a good place to start. It has had no missionaries from the outside world for a long time. Yet the Burmese have taken on evangelism so intimately as part and parcel of their churches’ life that there has been great growth there. In the last decade the Baptist church has more than doubled, from 224,000 to 480,000. One Anglican diocese reported over 30,000 baptisms of new Christians during the last four years. The Burmese are finding new forms of evangelism, using indigenous types of communication. They have adapted drama, dance, and song for their witness. When I was there in 1975 I met more than 250 Christian Burmese clergymen in a conference, and the entire lot had completely given up Western dress. This is indicative of how their minds are ticking. In order to propagate the Gospel they believe they must contextualize it and live among the people.

Q. Have you been to Korea recently?

A. Yes, and that is a miracle of God. A minister goes into a police academy and finds 13,000 souls prepared to receive the Gospel. You find this kind of preparation wherever you go. The secret of Korea is that its Christians are biblically oriented and holiness oriented. This spirit of holiness is appealing to them more than any contextualization of the Gospel. Koreans are turning from their old faiths and their old thinking to Christ, and they are living holy, separated lives. The greatest penetration has been around Seoul, Pusan, and other large cities. There is still a tremendous amount of work to be done in rural areas; many villages have not been evangelized.

Q. What word do you have on North Korea?

A. We have no information, but I’m sure there is a church there, particularly in the mountains.

Q. What of the talk of eventual unification of North and South Korea?

A. It’s really very doubtful in my mind. I don’t believe that the North wants to unify the country if that means giving the South Koreans the right to decide how they will be governed. South Korea’s biggest danger, it seems to me, is not from any sudden military or diplomatic move from the North. Instead, sooner or later, the ways of the North will begin to seep in among the young people, the American troops will leave, some of the old regime will be out, and the Communists will begin to buy up the opportunity. The young people in the South are not learning what true Communism is. Christians, with their unique understanding of the world systems, are able to teach this and should do so while they have the freedom to do it.

Q. Haven’t some professing Christians been in trouble for speaking out about the government in the South?

A. Yes, and I have had to agonize about this quite a bit. The National Christian Council in Korea and some Roman Catholic liberals have been entangled with government, and some of the leaders were imprisoned. Yet the president of Korea openly says to young people that the way of life is the Christian way. At many times and in many ways he has encouraged the youth to turn to Christ. The government has given permission for 80,000 baptisms per year. The Church is growing four times faster than the general population of South Korea. So there has been freedom to evangelize, though other freedoms have been curtailed. Now, what does one do in that situation? We need to have independence for the Church and a guarantee of human rights.

Q. Bangladesh is a country about which Christians have been concerned lately. What is happening there?

A. So far this has been a sad state of affairs. Bangladesh has taken on the Indian view that missionaries from outside are to be restricted, although it seems to be somewhat open again. The World Council of Churches and evangelical groups have brought in a lot of money to help there. Personally, I have grave doubts that it has really helped the situation.

Q. Do you mean that money should not be sent to Bangladesh?

A. I mean that just pouring in money is not enough. I’m not against the idea of helping people. Our love must be shown so that people can see that we are concerned and love them. If the life of Christ is in me, then surely that love must be shown as Christ himself showed it. However, when it is shown without any verbalization of the Christian message, or when it is shown almost entirely as a foreigner’s love (and not that of the local Christians), then something is lacking.

Q. What about the preaching that has been done in Bangladesh?

A. In some areas the response has been good. The movement is not large, and some of the leading Christian workers are depressed. There is some reason for encouragement. Many of the Christians in one tribal group that was driven into India during the war are now coming back across the border. When people come back, they are always keener about their whole life.

Q. Is Malaysia open to the Gospel?

A. Yes. Now is the time to send missionaries to Malaysia. A real political tussle is going on. The British made a contract with the government pledging that they would not evangelize the Muslims, but more than half of the population is non-Muslim. I think the missionary movement should come from Indonesia.

Q. If half of the Malaysians are not Muslims, what are they?

A. Many are animists, but many of those with Chinese backgrounds are Buddhists.

Q. How strong is the Church there?

A. In the Chinese community it is quite strong. All missionary entry into the province of Sabah has been stopped, but 24 per cent of the population there is Christian. That is one of the highest percentages anywhere in Asia. (In South Korea the figure is 15 or 16 per cent.) This province—a part of what we used to call Borneo—has a population of about four million, and the Chinese there are the “moneybags,” very influential people.

Q. Is the Church as strong in that part of Malaysia which is on the Asian mainland?

A. Thailand is on that same peninsula, of course, and the danger is seeping down from there. Despite this difficulty, I think the churches in Southeast Asia are generally encouraged. The rate of church growth is perhaps greater in Southeast Asia than anywhere else in the world if you are speaking of evangelical churches. Remember that the fast growth reported from Africa includes all churches, not only those that would be considered evangelical.

Q. With all these Christians in Southeast Asia, why have they failed to have enough political influence to keep the Communists from taking over in some countries?

A. There was little evangelical or Protestant strength in Cambodia, Viet Nam, or Laos. The Roman Catholics had gotten so involved with certain elements of political life that they ended up with little influence. Remember that I mentioned in connection with Korea that I thought the young people should be taught about Communism. We are weak and afraid in this area, but we should not be. I have taught this subject in Thailand, and I will be teaching it in the Haggai Institutes in Singapore and India. We must teach the dangers in it, but we must also teach the positive side. I thank God for Communism, but not for Communism per se: I thank God for the true ideas in Communism that have made us rethink our social responsibility.

Q. Is there a large Christian community in Nepal?

A. The devil is very strong, but we are thankful that God’s power is stronger. I was there not long ago, leading a preaching mission for the pastors and evangelists. God has worked a miracle there. There are twenty-three organized congregations. Our mission was attended by twenty-seven ordained men. With the exception of the Japanese, foreign missionaries are not permitted to preach the Gospel at all. The Japanese have been welcome in the king’s palace as well as in village gatherings. There was a ban on baptizing Christians, punishable by imprisonment. The first converts were baptized when a man came over from India, and I was present at that service on the river that flows through Katmandu. Many of the converts there accepted the government’s penalty when they became Christians with the hope that they would be immune from subsequent prosecution (and persecution). There may now be as many as 900 believers.

Q. Do you think that Asian Christians are taking enough political initiatives?

A. I wouldn’t say they are, but a lot of background must be taken into account. Remember that they are the outgrowth of missions, and the missionaries coming from outside did not want to enter into politics. Also, most of these countries were colonies of the West, and our people were urged to shun politics. Only recently have we begun to feel our own identities and to take part in the processes of government. Often we were taught that politics was of the devil. Now we must correct this situation. It can’t be done overnight.

Q. Aren’t the Communists re-colonizing in Asia?

A. Communism is no more indigenous than Western forms of government, but the Communists have managed somehow to indigenize it. They never really colonized in the open style of the Spanish, or the Portuguese, or the British. Even the Americans had some of that type of colonization, the kind that takes control of the government. But the Chinese first infiltrate and take hold of seats of learning and other places of influence.

Q. But isn’t it the nationals in these countries who do that, and not the Russians or Chinese?

A. Yes, that’s the point. It is done by nationals who are committed to Communism and are following leadership from China.

Q. There was tremendous church growth in Cambodia starting in 1971, especially among the young people in the military and other government work. There have been reports that many of them were killed after the Communist takeover. Do you have any information about the Christians there and in Viet Nam?

A. In your country, nothing is a secret; it all comes out in the papers sooner or later. Information is more difficult to obtain in some other places. This question is difficult. I don’t know that the Communists picked out Christians as such, but there is no doubt that they have picked out those who were formerly linked with foreigners. We must ask, What are the lessons we can learn from this? How much do we need to keep “outside”? If Christianity in these countries began to contextualize more, then perhaps it would be so much within their own context that Christians would not be considered agents of foreign missionaries.

Q. Would you say that as a matter of missionary strategy it is important to keep government money out of the picture?

A. I would say as positively as possible that whenever a mission accepts money or favors from any government, it always works against the mission in the long run.

Q. Are you saying not to send “American” or “Christian” money? We’re always being told that we must help the Third World, the developing nations. Can this be done without money?

A. This is a big question, and answering it brought me to change over to my work with the Haggai Institute. Instead of bringing missionaries from abroad, the strategy is to train men to be missionaries among their own people. The money that comes from abroad to help with expenses is given for the sake of helping these men to be self-supporting. It is all right when it assists them in the development of self-propagating and self-governing churches. However, when it is given to carry out a particular program within the context of a certain denomination, then we must bear the label of American Baptists, or American Methodists, or American Episcopalians, and so on.

Q. What is distinctive about the approach of this institute?

A. Our teachers are outstanding Asian Christians, speaking out of their experience in Asia. Fifty students at a time come and live together under one roof in Singapore. Those who are invited are already men of some experience, with at least ten years of work behind them. Leaders teach them the “how” of evangelism, youth work, dealing with other religions, communications, and church growth.

Q. Do the graduates go back to work primarily as personal evangelists or as trainers of others?

A. Many of them have multiplied what they learned many times by training others. However, if a man is sitting at a desk all the time and is not personally involved in evangelizing, he is not going to teach anyone else how to evangelize. I feel that unless every one of us spends at least one day a month being evangelists in the highways and the byways, we are not going to be able to inspire others in their evangelism. When I was a bishop in Pakistan I reserved two or three hours at least three days a week to go into the market place to preach, sell gospel portions, and otherwise show myself keen for my faith.

Q. Are you teaching any distinctive methods?

A. Our main instruction is: use the mode that would be most meaningful among your own people. For instance, those working among Hindus are asked to relate to that point of view. They are asked, What are the concepts in the Hindu mind of the godhead?

Q. What about Islam?

A. We ask why Islam is always attacked as anti-Christian. Indeed, I thank God for Islam because it brings people to one God; it is an iconoclastic religion; it destroys all idolatry; its adherents have an idea of prayer and fasting. Why do we condemn them? Why do we never believe they can ever bring a man to salvation? Cannot Christ fulfill whatever preparation has been done to bring them to one God? It was the colonial way to condemn Islam.

Q. If Islam can function as pre-evangelism, why is it considered so resistant to the Gospel?

A. It is because we Christians put a thousand years of theology into our teaching instead of the method of the Holy Spirit.

Q. What do you mean?

A. The Holy Spirit had Matthew put first in the New Testament, and this gospel gives the genealogy of Jesus Christ as the son of Abraham and the son of David, not the son of God. Then immediately it goes on to the Virgin Birth, which Islam accepts, and therefore says Jesus was a holy man and God’s wonderful gift to the world. Then it brings in politics, with the account of Herod and the children’s deaths. Next comes the reinterpretation of the law in the Sermon on the Mount (and this is not difficult for the Muslim since Muhammad himself came as a reformer). Then the miracles of Jesus Christ show his power in the physical world and how much more he can do in the spiritual world. After that come the parables to make the message specific. Then only after all that do we see the transfiguration, and Jesus asks, “Who do men say that I am?” The disciples could not have been expected to answer “the son of the living God” any earlier, but we expect every Muslim to believe in the son of God from the word go.

Q. Then you are saying to approach the Muslim through the Gospel of Matthew and not John?

A. Yes; we cannot be wiser than the Holy Spirit. John was written much later. Now I believe every word of John, and I hold to the whole Scripture as the inspired Word of God. But I must ask, Why wasn’t John put first?

Q. Is there evidence of any significant move to Christ from Islam?

A. The best example is Indonesia. Many streets that were formerly populated completely by Muslims are now populated by Christians.

Q. Is Transcendental Meditation a “popular” variety of Hinduism for American consumption?

A. I think TM is a wonderful thing—if you focus your mind on Jesus and absorb him within yourself. TM is meditation on a particular character. If young people are going to focus on Krishna, I don’t always condemn this immediately. I say, “Hold it a moment. What is the picture or character of Krishna in your mind? Compare that to the picture and character of Jesus. Now whom would you rather concentrate on?” Sooner or later they find Jesus as superior. If you read the Epistle to the Hebrews, you find that is what it is all about, comparing all the Old Testament prophets and saying Jesus is greater. That is transcendental meditation to me.

Q. While some young people are turning to Eastern religions in North America, many are turning to Christ. What about Asian youth?

A. Come to the Anglican church in Singapore at 8 o’clock Sunday morning, and you will find that 70 per cent of the 800 to 1,000 persons there are under twenty-five. Go to a Brethren church with me in the afternoon, and there will be over 800 there, most of them under twenty-five. At the Billy Graham crusades in Hong Kong and Taipei last year, an overwhelming majority of those responding were young people—perhaps 90 per cent under twenty-five. Visit any congregation in Indonesia and you will find it full of youth.

Q. Are they being prepared for leadership?

A. They are asserting leadership, but the Asian churches need to learn from the West how you lost your young people so that we don’t lose them the same way!

Q. What are you doing now to try to forestall such a loss?

A. I am teaching that we should break up the church. By this I mean that we should encourage very small congregations, house churches, and so on, where people will spend time together opening the Word of God. Young people can enter into dialogue, show forth their love, and apply the Gospel in their daily lives with the encouragement of such small groups. They don’t get much of the Bible when they go to a big church, worship according to a ritual, and then hear a twenty-minute sermon on three or four texts. They need to do more exegetical thinking on the Word.

Q. This has implications for theological education, doesn’t it?

A. Yes. I’m not a great believer in the types of theological schools the Western world has built for us. Why should we always take this Oxford and Cambridge idea of learning when 80 per cent of Asia is still rural? Much of what is taught in the seminaries is applicable only in urban areas, in the big churches. I believe there should be a new pattern where we do six months of reading and thinking and then two or three months of practical work. Then the students would come back for a little more teaching. One mission decided to do this in Indonesia, but its board back in North America overruled the decision. Those people out there should be given more liberty to choose their own ways.

Q. Do you see any possibility that this will happen?

A. There have been several promising developments, including the founding of the Asian Missions Association and the Asian Theological Association. These associations are working to analyze the situation.

Q. With all the emphasis you put on indigenous training, are you suggesting that there is no room or no need for missionaries from outside the culture?

A. Far from it! So far Asia is only 2 per cent Christian. How dare we say we’ve done the job? We always need the fellowship and understanding. But CHRISTIANITY TODAY has reported repeatedly how the North American denominations have been declining in their support of missions. Surely something must be done to replace those workers who have been lost from the field. A missionary cannot separate himself from his culture, no matter how much he tries. This does not condemn him, but it must be recognized that an Indian can do a better job in India than a non-Indian. Still, Asia needs the help of Christians from overseas who will not come to plant their culture and who will try to understand ours. We especially need those who can train the nationals to work in their own countries.

What is truth in art? What does a symphony or novel, a painting or a play, have to do with truth? Aesthetics has few more difficult questions than this. Yet the difficulty gives no excuse for not thinking about it, for the arts in one form or another pervade our environment and influence us all.

Genius and talent come from God. He gives some men and women the ability to make or perform works of art. To think of literature, painting, music, and the other arts as merely peripheral to the main business of life does no honor to the Giver of every good and perfect gift. Man’s aesthetic faculty reflects the image of the God who created him. While only a minority write, compose, paint, or design, everyone has some capacity for responding to art. As Abraham Kuyper said, “As image-bearer of God, man possesses the possibility both to create something beautiful and to delight in it.”

All truth is of God. Every facet of it is related to the Father, who is the God of truth; the Son, who is the truth; and the Spirit, who is the Spirit of truth. Moreover, truth is related to Scripture, the written word of truth. All the arts must be judged by Christians in relation to truth. They are, as Calvin Seerveld has said, not to be “excluded from the test of truth as if [they] were simply a collected insight in a realm outside of verifiability.”

My purpose in this essay is to propose several marks of truth in art—not to attempt to give a complete answer to the question of truthfulness in art but simply to shed some light on it.

1. A good place to begin is with durability. Truth is not transient. It never wears out. If something is true, it keeps on being true. One of the early works in aesthetics, the Greek treatise Longinus on the Sublime, expresses this insight: “That is really great which bears a repeated examination, and which is difficult or rather impossible to withstand, and the memory of which is strong and hard to efface.… For when men of different pursuits, lives, ambitions, ages, languages, hold identical views on one and the same subject, then the verdict which results, so to speak, from a concert of discordant elements makes our faith in the object of admiration strong and unassailable.” So art that is deeply true stands up to the passage of the years.

We must distinguish between durability in artistic works and the unique changelessness of God. “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever”—that is eternally durable truth. So are the other great truths about God and man revealed in Scripture. These constitute Truth, as distinct from truth in art and other fields of human endeavor. In the latter, truth has durability but on the finite rather than eternal level.

But the principle of durability does not help us with what is newer in art. However much we love the great aesthetic achievements of the past, to confine our attention to them alone is parochial. Durability must not be pressed so far as to rule out contemporary art from any claim to lasting truth. Nor does the application of it always require many years: occasionally contemporary judgment quickly recognizes a masterpiece and is proved right by posterity. More commonly, however, great works do not come into their own till years after their creation. For example, Melville’s Moby Dick, now a secure masterpiece, was practically forgotten for decades. And Bach’s St. Matthew Passion lay dormant for nearly a hundred years till Mendelssohn’s revival of it revealed its towering greatness.

2. Consider next unity as a mark of truth in art. Truth has its own inner coherence. The criterion is very old. Biblically it is rooted in the oneness of the Triune God. Outside the Bible it found classic expression in Aristotle’s Poetics. It has been well said that form is the cup of art. When one finds that a book or symphony lacks unity, he does not have to know the Poetics to say, “It doesn’t hold together.”

The concept of order, which is related to that of unity, is implicit in the cultural mandate in Genesis. When God created man, he was placed in a garden and told to cultivate and keep it. Order is implicit in this idea of cultivating a garden. The creative process in man is not innately disorderly.

At its truest, art tends toward unity and order. The reason for this relates to the incarnational nature of art. As Goethe said, “The spirit tends to take to itself a body.” In the arts, the concept or idea is given definite form; it is “embodied” in sound, color, or words; in wood or stone; in action or movement, as in drama or ballet. But embodiment requires unity and order; a body cannot function effectively in a state of disorganization.

Certain aspects of contemporary art show a centrifugal and even schizophrenic trend. This stems from the sense of lostness and rebellion so prevalent today. Contemporary art does serve as a barometer of the times. But is this enough? Surely art that is ultimately true can do more than reflect what is. It can also have its prophetic function. The history of literature, music, and the other arts contains notable examples of genius that not only spoke to the present situation but went beyond it to break new trails for aesthetic advance.

3. Closely linked to unity as a mark of truth in art is integrity. Although both terms have to do with basic form or structure, integrity is more comprehensive, having to do with the matter of wholeness. A novel may be structurally unified, yet fall short of integrity if the characters or dialogue are unconvincing. Integrity refers to the overall truthfulness of a work of art. When we say that a person has integrity, we mean his entire personality is morally sound. So it is with integrity in art.

In the arts, integrity demands that anything contrived merely for the sake of effect and not organically related to the purpose of the work must be ruled out. Regrettably, there is much in evangelical literature, music, and art that lacks integrity. Sentimental pictures of Christ are widely promoted, records dress up hymn tunes in commonplace variations, and fiction written by evangelicals rarely rises even to the level of competent literary craftsmanship. It is evident that many Christians have much to learn about integrity in their use of the arts. In contrast, think of the art with which our Lord used words. He told the parables of the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, and the Pharisee and the Publican without moralizing and with an integrity that has never been surpassed. As St. Paul said of him, “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17).

The Christian writer has the advantage of being in a position to tell the whole story. Because he is a Christian he can present the full picture of not only man’s alienation and lostness but also the possibility of his redemption through Christ. This added dimension has characterized the work of great Christian writers from Dante through Milton and Bunyan to Dostoevsky, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, François Mauriac, and Flannery O’Connor. In a letter written about ten years after his conversion, C. S. Lewis said, “One of the minor rewards of conversion is to be able [at] last to see the real point of all the literature we were brought up to read with the point left out.”

4. Still another mark of truth in art is inevitability. Some works of art seem to be the final and inevitable expression of an aesthetic idea. Here a kind of paradox we may call “the familiarity of the unfamiliar” is involved. We may experience this when we hear an unfamiliar work by a composer like Beethoven, in which the inevitability of certain phrases or modulations gives the impression of something already known. In painting, one recognizes that a picture by a master like Raphael is completely right and could have been done in no other way. In great poetry we have the same sense of inevitability. In such cases we say, “This is right; this is the way it has to be.”

In a letter to his publisher, Keats pointed to this quality in describing the kind of writing he hoped to achieve: “I think poetry should … strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts and appear almost a remembrance.” And one of Haydn’s contemporaries, the critic Ernst Ludwig Gerber, said of that great composer, “He possesses the great art of making his music oftentimes seem familiar.” To be sure, this recognition of inevitability of expression does not always come at once. It may be delayed till one knows the work more thoroughly, because art does not always wear its heart on its sleeve.

These four criteria—durability, unity, integrity, and inevitability—give us some insight into the nature of aesthetic truth. They are not the whole answer to the question “What is truth in art?,” but they are components of it. And they are closely interrelated principles; each contains something of the others.

To these four marks of truth in art let us add two examples from art that is Christian. For here the criterion is the reflection of the reality of God himself.

The musically sensitive Christian who listens to a performance of Bach’s B Minor Mass experiences a supreme example of truth-telling in sound. Truth may be defined as correspondence with reality. The ultimate reality is God, and the Christian knows this reality in Jesus Christ, God manifest in human form. Anything in art that sheds light on this reality has truth at the highest level.

So consider a Christian hearing the B Minor Mass. As he listens to the hushed sound of the “Crucifixus” with its mysterious downward progressions, he hears a tonal portrayal of the atonement that goes straight to the heart. Then, at the end of the “Crucifixus,” there is the sudden outburst of joy in the “Resurrexit,” as choir and orchestra acclaim the risen Lord Jesus Christ with a power few if any written commentaries ever attain. This presentation of the truth transcends barriers of language as it speaks to all Christian hearers. Aristotle spoke of art as mimesis or “imitation.” Here is mimesis in the highest sense, as Bach puts into music the profound truths of Christ’s passion and victory over death.

To turn to another field, consider Rembrandt’s great portrayal of the supper at Emmaus. Here is truth in form and color. Unlike Salvador Dali, who painted a blond Christ on a cross suspended between heaven and earth, Rembrandt portrayed Christ with integrity. His pictures show us our Lord as he was—Jewish, a real human being here on earth. Yet when this great artist paints the supper at Emmaus, he gives us the very moment of truth when the disciples’ eyes are opened and they see the risen Lord. The person they see is indeed human. We recognize him as the Christ, but Rembrandt shows us at the same time his glory. Here again we have truth in art, mimesis in its highest Christian sense.

But what about truth in lesser works of art and literature? Truth in art cannot be limited to the works of supreme genius. Wherever there is integrity, honest craftsmanship, and devoted cultivation of talent, there something of truth may break through. Literature has its minor classics and painting its primitives. Folk music can speak as authentically as a sonata. Honest craftsmanship, as in functionally beautiful furniture or pottery, enriches culture. And though these may not receive universal renown, they can attain a measure of truth.

No discussion of truth in art can be considered complete without some reference to the relation of beauty to truth. After contemplating an ancient vase, John Keats wrote his “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The final lines of the poem—“‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’”—seem to provide a definitive answer to the question.

Yet this identification of beauty with truth, so often taken for granted, needs scrutiny. Writers and other artists correctly reject the tendency to put moralizing into art. But do they have no moral responsibility whatever? Is art devoid of any ethical dimension?

The great biblical phrase “the beauty of holiness” answers with a qualified negative. Even if one were to grant autonomy to the beauty found in works of art, there still remains the artist himself. Like every human being, he stands under the ethical judgment of God. What he creates may be beautiful and aesthetically true. Yet it may tell a lie. The French writer Jean Genêt writes beautiful prose, but his work is decadent. Picasso’s erotic drawings are beautiful but corrupt. For the basic analogy, however, we need to go back to what Scripture says about Satan. There is a depth of meaning in Paul’s statement that Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Beauty itself can become the vehicle for a lie.

To this possibility two kinds of beauty stand as exceptions—the chaste intellectual beauty encountered in such things as pure mathematics or scientific equations, and that beauty which Ernest Lee Tuveson has called “the aesthetics of the infinite.” The latter is the beauty reflected in God’s work in creation. The Scottish mountaineer W. H. Murray tells of seeing the Buachaille Etive Mor, the great peak in Glencoe, in brilliant winter moonlight: “Let us speak of the unspeakable, for there is no speech so profitable. [Its] face was washed by intense light so searching that no shade was cast by ridge or buttress. All detail merged in the darkness of one arrowy wall, pale as shadowed milk, impregnably erect. At the remote apex, a white crest broke spume on the high seas of infinity.… To my unaccustomed eye the scene at first bore an appearance of unreality; yet the more I gazed, the more surely I knew that I saw not an illusion greater than is usual, but truth made manifest” (Mountaineering in Scotland, Denton. 1947, p. 222). This was one of what Murray called those “fleeting glimpses of that beauty which all men who have known it have been compelled to call truth.” Such beauty is incorruptible.

And what of the purely intellectual beauty of higher mathematics or scientific equations? The physicist Dirac maintained that the truth of an equation is evidenced by its beauty. So those who are trained to think in these realms recognize beauty in the balance and symmetry of conceptual thought and in the disciplined simplicity of symbolic logic. Just as a chessmaster speaks of a beautiful series of moves, so a mathematician sees beauty in numbers and symbols. On this level, beauty, while manifest through the mind of man, has a certain incorruptibility, even though it may be put to debased uses, just as the pristine beauty of nature may be despoiled by man.

But for most of the beauty man attains, Keats’s identification of it with truth must always be qualified by the Christian artist. Nor can he accept the finality of the poet’s conclusion, “—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

The Christian artist has to know more than this. He must know his responsibility to the God who gave him his talent, and he must also know the misuses to which beauty is prone. Beauty is not exempt from the consequences of the fall. Like money or power, art may become an idol. Apostasy may assume angelic forms. This is why the Christian artist stands so in need of humility. Like Bach, who appended to his compositions the words “Soli Deo Gloria,” he must never depart from the priority of seeking to glorify God in all he does.

To identify beauty with what is immediately pleasing or captivating is to have a superficial view of beauty. The difference between a Rembrandt portrayal of Christ and one by Sallman is the difference between depth and superficiality.

Moreover, to identify beauty exclusively with harmony and orderliness does scant justice to the power and truth the arts are capable of. Rouault’s paintings of Christ are not conventionally beautiful, but they have the inner beauty of truth. Merely to look at Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece with its agonizing crucifixion scene is to be confronted with the most terrible yet true picture ever painted of Christ’s suffering for the sin of the world. Dissonance in music, stark realism in literature, and the “ugly” in visual art all have an indispensable relation to beauty. The concept of beauty in art must be large enough to include the aesthetic astringencies. For beauty wears different faces. There is the unclouded serenity of Raphael in his Alba Madonna or the seraphic slow movement of Mozart’s last piano concerto. In contrast, we have the thorny beauty of Browning in The Ring and the Book or the rugged beauty of Bela Bartok’s music.

To turn again to “the aesthetics of the infinite.” the incorruptible beauty of God’s handiwork in nature has its terrible as well as its pleasing aspect. The bleak wastes of the Sahara are beautiful in a different way from the smiling loveliness of a Hawaiian landscape. Moreover, our apprehension of beauty changes as we develop our aesthetic faculties. Only comparatively recently have some of the greater aspects of natural beauty been appreciated. In the eighteenth century, majestic mountain scenery was often avoided rather than recognized as sublime evidence of God’s creative power. Fashions in art and literature change. But elusive and difficult to define though it is, true beauty continues. Just as God has yet more light to shine forth from his Word, he has greater dimensions of beauty for us to comprehend in his creation and in man’s making of art.

Therefore besides being aware of the perils of the misuse of beauty, we must recognize that beauty has profound theological implications. Among the great theologians and Christian philosophers, no one saw this more clearly than Jonathan Edwards. He spoke of God as “the foundation and fountain of all being and all beauty … of whom, and through whom, and to whom is all being and all perfection; and whose being and beauty are, as it were, the sum and comprehension of all existence and excellence.”

The relation of beauty to God, so profoundly developed by Edwards, means that we cannot downgrade the arts as side issues to the serious business of life and service, as some Christians do. When we make and enjoy the arts in faithful stewardship and integrity, they can reflect something of God’s own beauty and glory. Through them we can celebrate and glorify the God “in whom we live, and move, and have our being.”

Joy is about as rare as the bald eagle. That’s why Samuel Johnson once remarked that the human race is a vast assemblage of individuals who are counterfeiting happiness. That’s why, after Sigmund Freud had been successful in helping an emotionally disturbed woman, he commented that she had exchanged the exquisite misery of neurosis for the everyday unhappiness of normal human experience. And that’s why Joseph Folliet writes:

“I listen to you talk, my brothers of today; I lend an ear to your conversations, which are nothing but alternating soliloquies. You pour forth torrents of black bile in the form of criticism, complaints and accusations, forever deploring your bad luck and blaming some mysterious people called ‘they’ who never tire of playing dirty tricks on you. As it happens, ‘they’ is everything outside of you—tax collectors, neighbors, the government, perfect strangers. Nothing and nobody, from the weather to the people closest to you, can escape your censure. Why this perpetual fault-finding, which is sad*stic toward others and masoch*stic toward yourselves? Isn’t it possible that you see the dark side of everything because there’s so much darkness in your souls? Don’t you find the world sad and ugly because you view it with a joyless eye? The cold and gloom are in you first of all. Always unsatisfied, always discontented, you make more and more demands. Now, demands point to a lack. When the destitute clamor, we can see exactly what they need. But when the rich and the surfeited multiply their demands, what can they possibly be looking for? Perhaps one thing that wealth and prestige can’t give: joy” (Invitation to Joy, Newman, 1968, pp. 1–3).

In a world short on many things, that’s the saddest lack of all—joy. Nothing, therefore, makes the Gospel so magnetic as its promise of joy. All through the New Testament, jubilant music echoes and re-echoes, a symphony of joy. When Jesus is born, the angels carol “good tidings of great joy” (Luke 2:10). As he talks to his disciples even in the shadow of Calvary, the Saviour tells them not only about his own joy but also about a fullness of joy that nobody can take away from its glad possessors (John 15:11; 16:22, 24). The Book of Acts describes the triumphant joy of the early Church as its hymns of praise arise out of the crucible of persecution (Acts 2:46; 5:41). What a phenomenon—a group of ordinary people exhibiting an extraordinary hilarity in a situation of extraordinary hardship!

The Gospel is both a message of joy and an invitation to begin living a life of joy. Notice, then, some characteristics of this all too rare fruit, the experience of joy.

Consider first the source of genuine joy. God, Paul declares, is the blessed and only Potentate (1 Tim. 6:15). Since blessed means happy, Paul is here speaking of the happy God. If all truth and beauty and goodness are rooted in the very nature of our Creator, so too is all joy. God is not a grim and emotionless tyrant, the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle, a kind of cosmic icicle of eternally congealed solemnity. The Old Testament says this about him: “He will rejoice over thee with joy.… He will joy over thee with singing” (Zeph. 3:17). Our Lord Jesus reveals that “there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth” (Luke 15:10). God himself is the source of all genuine joy.

Notice, second, that genuine joy, reflecting the beatitude of God’s own Being, is not the same as pleasure. Pleasure is the feeling of delight we derive from the stimulation of our senses. It too is good, provided it is traced back to God, the Giver of all good gifts, and serves as a stimulus to gratitude. A misguided hyper-spirituality must not motivate us to belittle the pleasure that our God-given sensory equipment makes possible.

Yet pleasure, regrettably, is short-lived. And it can easily degenerate into self-centered indulgence, an all-absorbing sensual quest that overrides morality, reason, and love.

Joy, which differs from pleasure, differs also from happiness, that very positive state which comes through human relationships. Happiness, like joy, is one of God’s choicest blessings. Yet even the best of human beings are limited in their power to understand and meet our needs. And sooner or later they die. Happiness, the inner glow we experience in and through our human relationships, is changing and fleeting.

Different, then, from pleasure and happiness, joy is that abiding beatitude, that deep-down exuberance which comes from God through his Spirit by faith in his Son. Joy is thus supernatural in its source and essence, a foretaste of the face-to-face communion with God that will be rapture forever.

Notice, in the third place, that joy, according to the Apostle Paul, is a fruit of the Spirit. It is one of that gracious cluster of Christlike characteristics enumerated by the apostle: “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law” (Gal. 5:22, 23).

An orange tree cannot bear fruit in total independence. Sunshine, rain, and soil must play a part if oranges are to be brought forth. So it is with ourselves and joy. We may crave joy and fiercely will to be joyful. But as psychologist Abraham Maslow put it: “You cannot seek ecstatic moments directly; you must be surprised by joy.” And in saying that Maslow is endorsing Paul’s teaching that joy is a fruit. We cannot directly produce it.

We can, however, cooperate with the fruit-producing forces, and at the same time we can eliminate anything that might blight productivity. An orange-grower prunes his trees, fertilizes and waters them, fights insects by spraying, and sometimes, when frost threats, puts out smudge-pots. Having done his human best, he waits for forces outside himself to produce the desired fruit.

Does this help us better understand how we may foster the fruit of joy? What about pruning our lives by spiritual discipline? What about enriching them through the Word of God? What about combatting carnal blight by prayer? What about warding off chilling frost by the warmth of Christian fellowship? What about taking seriously the condition that our Saviour lays down before he makes the promise of joy to his disciples—“If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love. These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full” (John 15:10, 11)? What about adjusting our schedules in order to spend time with God, remembering that David bears witness, “In thy presence is fullness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Psalm 16:11)? What about asking specifically that a great prophetic declaration may come to pass in our own lives—“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath annointed me … to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness” (Isa. 61:1, 3)?

Let us pray that we may be joyful refutations of Nietzsche’s criticism, “I would believe in their salvation if they looked a little more like people who have been saved.”

Eleven years after his death in 1965, Paul Tillich continues to influence American Protestant theology. While Tillich’s theology was eclipsed in the late 1960s by the rise of the “death of God” theologies of Altizer and Hamilton, and by the rise of black theology, the theologies of revolution, and Moltmann’s theology of hope, Tillich continued to be studied in undergraduate courses on religion and in Protestant seminaries throughout America. His Systematic Theology, Dynamics of Faith, The Courage to Be, Love, Power and Justice, and other lesser-known writings continued to provide resource material for courses in theology, philosophy of religion, and Christianity and culture. The continuing interest in Tillich’s thought in American academic circles was recently underscored by the formation of the North American Paul Tillich Society, which meets in conjunction with the American Academy of Religion, a society composed of teachers of religion in colleges, universities, and seminaries.

In 1973, Rollo May’s Paulus (Harper and Row), subtitled “Reminiscences of a Friendship,” and Hannah Tillich’s autobiography From Time to Time (Stein and Day) created a stir with their revelations of Tillich’s philandering. May, a former student of Tillich’s at Union Theological Seminary, presented a rather sympathetic portrait of his former teacher. Tillich’s widow, however, reflected considerable bitterness and resentment in her book. Tillich’s theological foes were likely to see in these revelations a confirmation of their opinions about the unsoundness of his theology, while Tillich’s friends were likely to insist that these accounts—especially his widow’s—gave a distorted view of his life and work. Volume one of Wilhelm and Marion Pauck’s Paul Tillich: His Life and Thought (Harper and Row, 1976) presents a more balanced and comprehensive biography. In any case, these allegations severely blemish the reputation of the man who was the most prominent systematic theologian in America during the fifties and early sixties. My purpose in this article, however, is to focus on themes in Tillich’s work that have continuing significance for evangelical theology.

The German Years: Religious Socialism

From 1919 to 1933 Tillich was actively involved in a religious socialist movement in Germany. This period of Tillich’s career and the writings produced during it are not as well known in this country as his work of the fifties and sixties. As a member of the “Kairos Circle,” a group of German writers, intellectuals, and civil servants, Tillich was interested in building bridges between the Lutheran church, which had little contact with the working classes, and the Social Democrats, a socialist party that represented the majority of the workers. Anti-church sentiment was widespread among the workers. They perceived the Lutheran churches as unquestioned allies of the anti-labor forces in the government and the landed aristocracy.

Tillich attempted to find common ground between Christianity and socialism in many articles and essays written during this inter-war period, but chiefly in the 1933 work Die sozialistische Entscheidung (“The Socialist Decision”), as yet untranslated. A number of his essays on religious socialism have been translated and published in the volumes The Protestant Era (1948) and Political Expectation (1971). These religious socialist writings are of considerable interest; in many ways they anticipated both the Christian-Marxist dialogue that emerged during the 1960s and the appropriation of Marxist themes by liberation theologies in the 1970s.

Tillich found in Marxist theory valuable criticisms and insights for the Lutheran churches of Weimar Germany. Marxism appeared to be a secularized version of Jewish prophetism that promised to satisfy the longings of the German working class for a more just social order. The Lutheran churches were woefully lacking in sensitivity to the dismal living conditions of the lower classes created by severe unemployment and runaway inflation, and the socialist movement was quick to move into this social and spiritual vacuum. Tillich perceived in Marxism an urgent and providential reminder to the churches to recover their commitment to social justice, a commitment deeply rooted in the teachings of the Old Testament prophets and of Jesus but temporarily forgotten.

Tillich also found valuable correctives in the Marxist concept of ideology and the Marxist understanding of man. In Marxist theory, ideology is a technical term for a system of ideas that functions as an unconscious rationalization for the privileges of a particular social group. The Christian churches, Tillich argued, must continually engage in self-critical reflection in order to avoid giving unwitting support, by their teaching, to social conditions that need to be changed. Over the centuries the churches had often been guilty, said Tillich, of rationalizing the privileges of the more powerful classes, rather than functioning as the advocate of the weak and socially disadvantaged. Marxism also called attention to the material needs of man, needs that, in Tillich’s view, the Lutheran churches of Germany, with their predominantly other-worldly orientation and middle-class comforts, had tended to overlook.

Tillich’s attempts to build bridges between the churches and the workers’ movement yielded little visible fruit, being overwhelmed by the rise of the Nazis to power during the 1930s. In 1933 Tillich was forced to leave his native land. He had testified against a gang of storm troopers that had invaded the campus of the university in Frankfurt during the winter of 1931–32, and when Hitler came to power the next year the Nazis dismissed Tillich from his teaching post at the university. Even if Hitler’s forces had not come to power in Germany, there is considerable doubt as to whether Tillich’s religious socialist program would have had much success. The valuable insights that had come from Marxism were seriously weakened by a lack of concern for individual conversion as a prerequisite for lasting social renewal, and by a lack of grass-roots support among the Lutheran churches. Tillich’s ideas were largely confined to the intellectual circles in which he moved.

American Years: Systematic Theology

When Tillich left Germany in 1933 he accepted an invitation extended through Reinhold Niebuhr to join the faculty of Union Theological Seminary in New York. Niebuhr, himself an active proponent of socialist ideas during the 1930s, had been attracted by the religious socialist writings of the young German professor. Tillich was to have a twenty-two-year tenure at Union, followed by seven years (1955–1962) at Harvard, and finally by three years at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He died in 1965. During his years at Union, Tillich’s magnum opus, the Systematic Theology, was gradually taking shape. The first volume of this closely written and intellectually demanding system of some nine hundred pages appeared in 1951, followed by volumes two and three in 1957 and 1963. Of the many important points to be discussed about Tillich’s Systematic Theology, I will here consider only two essential ones: theological method and Christology. At these points the contrasts between Tillich’s theological system and historic orthodox theology come into sharp focus.

In considering Tillich’s method, I will concentrate on (1) his conception of systematic theology as “apologetic” theology, (2) his method of “correlation,” and (3) his view of Scripture as a source and norm of theology.

For Tillich, any contemporary theological system had to be an “apologetic” theology: it was obliged to give answers, from the standpoint of the Christian tradition, to the questions raised by the “modern mind.” Tillich argued that for the last two centuries the primary methodological question in Protestant theology had been whether or not the historic Christian faith could be successfully adapted to the modern mind without losing its essential substance. In the “modern mind” Tillich included the critical philosophical spirit of the Enlightenment, a scientific view of the physical universe, a comprehension of the results of the comparative study of world religions, and a view of human nature informed by modern psychology, sociology, and anthropology.

Tillich argued that a contemporary theological system had to avoid two dangers, that of merely preserving and repeating past formulations of the Christian tradition without seriously grappling with contemporary issues, and that of becoming so immersed in the contemporary context that essential Christian positions were compromised. The “kerygmatic” theology of Karl Barth, in Tillich’s estimation, was guilty of the first error, virtually throwing the Gospel at modern man like a stone, with little or no recognition of modern man’s situation or of any common ground between the Church and the world. Tillich’s “apologetic” theology, on the other hand, consciously took the risks of immersing itself in the situation of modern man and therefore virtually erased the distinctions between the Church and a modern humanistic culture.

Tillich attempted to build apologetic bridges between the Christian tradition and the modern mind with his method of “correlation.” By this method the questions posed by the modern mind were correlated with answers from the Christian tradition. The form of the questions and answers was determined by the language of modern philosophy, science, psychology, and art, while the substance of the answers was presumably drawn from the Christian tradition.

At the center of this Christian tradition was the Bible, which for Tillich was ostensibly the basic but not the sole source for systematic theology. Church history and the history of religions and culture also functioned as sources, in Tillich’s view. In practice this meant that Scripture no longer exercised the normative authority acknowledged by historic orthodoxy, but rather was adapted to the conscious and unconscious asumptions of the “modern mind.” The biblical message in Tillich’s system was filtered through the categories of the idealistic and existentialist philosophies of Schelling. Kierkegaard, and Heidegger before being addressed to the questions of the modern mind. In Tillich’s system, biblical realities such as heaven, hell, and judgment were to be understood symbolically; they pointed not to literal realities as traditionally understood but to states of man’s existential concern. As a result of Tillich’s philosophical a prioris, and of the pervasive antisupernatural bias of his thought, the Bible in Tillich’s system was hardly allowed to speak for itself; it spoke, rather, only through the categories judged to be credible to the “modern mind.”

While the idea of a method of correlation is valuable and even necessary, as Tillich developed it modern culture rather than the Christian tradition was really the controlling factor. As a result the modern mind was addressed but not confronted by a biblical message demanding a truly radical conversion of the heart and mind to the Living God.

Tillich’s Christology was plagued by these same problems, those of prior philosophical commitments to idealistic and existentialist categories and to antisupernaturalism. In his attempt to circumvent the skeptical results of radical biblical criticism. Tillich drove a dangerous wedge between the Christ of faith and the Jesus of history. He went so far as to suggest that were it to be proved that Jesus of Nazareth had not existed, this would not be a fatal blow to the Christian faith.

In any case, argued Tillich, the experience of the first disciples and of believers today establishes beyond doubt the real, historical manifestation of the “New Being” that overcomes man’s estrangement. Whether or not the particular individual in whom the “New Being” was manifested was Jesus of Nazareth was, in Tillich’s view, almost immaterial. This introduced a serious error in Tillich’s view of the Incarnation: the “Christ” could be separated from the specific human figure of Jesus attested by the Gospels. The concrete, historical person. Jesus of Nazareth, is virtually replaceable in the system by a construct of idealist and existentialist philosophy, a faceless bearer of the New Being. The fundamental roots of the Christian faith in a specific, historical person and specific, historical events have been greatly weakened.

In Tillich’s system, the Cross and Resurrection are understood as combinations of the elements of event and religious symbol. While the stories of the Cross are based on highly probable historical events, the stories of the Resurrection are the symbolic expressions of the mysterious religious experiences of the disciples. The resurrection stories symbolize the disciples’ conviction that the bearer of the New Being had not been vanquished by death. Tillich rejected a literal bodily resurrection and substituted for it the symbol of “resurrection” that the disciples, under the impact of their own experience of the New Being, applied to their recollected picture of the historical Jesus. Tillich’s doctrine of the Resurrection, which he termed the “restitution” theory, betrayed his antisupernatural bias, and could hardly be reconciled with the overwhelming historical evidence for the empty tomb.

Evangelicals can still learn from Tillich’s theological aims while repudiating many if not most of his specific results. Tillich set about to build a theological system that incorporated the best insights, as he understood them, of scientific biblical studies and of modern philosophy and psychology, all within the context of a realistic and critical awareness of the social environment that influences the Church’s thought. These aims evangelical theology can endorse, while repudiating the alien philosophical assumptions that influenced Tillich’s system and put the biblical message in an existentialist strait-jacket.

In every generation the abiding truths of the Christian faith need to be correlated with the contemporary situation, but in such a way that the Bible and not the “modern mind” supplies the controlling assumptions. A living orthodoxy has the responsibility of giving honest answers to honest questions. And yet, orthodox theology has a more crucial responsibility. It is to show modern man that his questions are ultimately not the right questions—that God’s questioning of man, and God’s command that man repent and become a disciple of Jesus Christ, are the abiding priorities on the Christian agenda.

Some cities that would otherwise have remained unknown are universally remembered as a result of important events that occurred there. And some individuals or groups have sought to immortalize their cause by identifying it with some already famous city. An example of the first would be Nicea, and of the latter, perhaps the Club of Rome. Within the past twenty months, two cities in the eastern United States have lent their names to theological conferences whose fame (or notoriety) may be with us for some time.

During January 24–26, 1975, eighteen thinkers with theological concerns met at Hartford, Connecticut, and drafted a surprising document known as “An Appeal for Theological Affirmation,” or more simply “The Hartford Appeal.” Surprising, I say, particularly in format, which is essentially a modern Syllabus of Errors that raises the charge of heresy (one might have thought this word was dead!) against the liberal theological establishment. Such a document could not fail to call forth efforts at reply. One came earlier this year from a panel of twenty-one members of the Boston Industrial Mission Task Force, who acted in consultation with some two hundred church leaders.

Both gatherings were widely interdenominational and thoroughly ecumenical. The Hartford consultation was spearheaded by Peter L. Berger, an eminent sociologist at Rutgers University, and Richard John Neuhaus, a Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor in Brooklyn. The Boston Affirmations issued also from a diverse interdisciplinary and interfaith group. Its authors had the advantage of having a statement to which to react, plus a year’s time in which to think about it. The caliber of participants on both sides guaranteed that the documents would be carefully structured.

The Hartford Appeal reminds one in its format of a scholastic document: affirmative propositions are negated, being declared “pervasive, false and debilitating” in their theological effect. It is no small thing to denote a group of theses long held dear by liberal and ecumenical churchmen as “superficially attractive” but profoundly misleading for today’s theological scene.

The Appeal decries the views that Jesus cannot be said to be more than contemporary models of humanity suggest, and that the emphasis upon God’s transcendence is at best a hindrance to, and at worst incompatible with, Christian concern. This strikes at the root of the group of secular theologies that emerged during the period of the Theology-of-the-Month Club.

Equally devastating to conventional secular theologies is the condemnation of Theme 5. This proposition, declared to be “false and debilitating,” reads as follows: “All religions are equally valid; the choice among them is not a matter of conviction about truth, but only of personal preference or life-style.” The reply is that such a position not only “obscures the meaning of Christian faith, but also fails to respect the integrity of other faiths.” The Hartford Eighteen believe that “truth matters; therefore differences among religions are deeply significant.”

The opposition to Theme 10 strikes a very telling blow at the currently chic liberation theology. Against the view that “the world must set the agenda for the Church,” the Appeal declares that while the mission of the Church may at times coincide with programs within the political spectrum, “the norms for the Church’s activity derive from its own perception of God’s will for the world.”

It was this opposition to Theme 10 that drew the loudest protest from the Boston Affirmers. It does, of course, strike at the heart of current forms of secular theology, and particularly at liberation theology. It would, if taken seriously, cut the ground from beneath the popularizers of “religion” who identify the Christian task as that of endorsing most of the left-of-center movements of our time.

The Boston Affirmations, while not formally labeled as a reply to the Hartford Appeal, clearly reflect painful responses to the Hartford challenge. Although the Boston authors professed to act upon their own initiative, their pronouncement shows by its format that it is scarcely an “independent affirmation,” as Harvey Cox described it to the media in his statement of December 22, 1975.

In reality, the Boston authors undertook a task that placed them at a distinct disadvantage, in that while Hartford does not pretend to outline the Christian faith in a substantive way, the Boston Affirmations deal with what their authors feel to be a kind of ecumenical creed. Among the themes are some that appear in every classical formulation, such as Creation, Fall, Covenant, and Prophecy.

Conspicuously lacking, however, are such themes as Revelation and Authority, Atonement, Resurrection, Life Beyond Death, and Final Judgment, to name a few. Jesus Christ is mentioned once, almost incidentally; the best the Affirmations seem able to put in his place is a vague reference to “suffering love.”

At one point, however, the Boston Affirmations are not vague. Under the rubric of “Present Witness” the statement identifies with full confidence the points at which “the transforming reality of God’s reign is found today.” The work of the Church in fulfilling the Great Commission is, it seems, not worthy of mention, since nothing is said concerning discipling the nations.

While no one who takes the Christian message seriously will deny that God is at work in his world, many are far less certain that they can read off the fulfillment of God’s purposes with such accuracy as the Boston Affirmations seem to suggest. It is not that the secular forms of the Church’s concerns mentioned by the Affirmers are in themselves wrong concerns. What may be questioned is whether the Affirmers’ division of the world into “good guys and bad guys” is not too simplistic. Some of the Hartford Eighteen have felt that the Boston Affirmations tend to lock their adherents into leftist views and leftist social and economic programs.

How shall evangelicals evaluate this tale of two cities? First and foremost, it needs to be recognized that neither statement comes to grips with such basic matters as Revelation, Authority, Christology, and Eternal Life. The Hartford Appeal does designate as wrongheaded the secular theologians’ view that hope for life beyond death is irrelevant to the Christian assertion. Hartford can thus be credited with a valuable plus for theology.

While neither the Hartford nor the Boston pronouncement is theologically adequate, yet the Hartford Eighteen are to be applauded for doing well the task that they undertook, namely, to challenge the current forms of secular theology. It can scarcely be said that the writers of the Boston Affirmations did equally well in fulfilling their chosen task.

HAROLD B. KUHN

The Danish Embassy is still receiving a flood of mail about the projected p*rno film on the life of Christ. In our April 23 issue we reported that no government funding, direct or indirect, would be supplied by Denmark. No more letters are needed: mission accomplished!

This issue is dated August 6, three—rather than the usual two—weeks after the previous one. We do this twice during the summer to allow for staff vacations. The next issue will be dated August 27.

If your copies of CT arrive tattered and torn, fill out a Consumer Service Card (PS Form 4314) at your post office. It gets results.

Churches and church-related groups across America celebrated the nation’s two-hundredth birthday in many ways. There were worship services in 1776 style, preachers and parishioners dressed in colonial costumes, birthday cakes, bell-ringing, interfaith services, community dinners and picnics, patriotic concerts, special prayers for the nation and a variety of other observances (see July 2 issue, page 36). In some smaller communities the church was at the center of the Bicentennial celebration.

Thousands of young Christians took advantage of the Bicentennial spirit and crowds to proclaim the Gospel through literature distribution, street witnessing, special rallies, and other projects—including a coast-to-coast Christian Bicentennial wagon train.

There were special masses and church services in New York, Boston, and Newport, Rhode Island in connection with the Bicentennial visits of the Tall Ships. A Declaration of Dependence on God was proclaimed at Seattle’s First Presbyterian Church on July 4. Interfaith services highlighted observances in a number of cities, although in Miami and perhaps elsewhere there were ruffled feelings because the Sunday morning meetings overlapped with normal Sunday-school and church hours.

Most attention was focused on the two main Bicentennial cities, Philadelphia and Washington.

July 4 dawned bright and warm in Philadelphia, where official observances began with an interfaith service conducted under a canopy on Independence Mall. Taking part were Greek Orthodox archbishop Iakovos, Cardinal John Kroll, and other church leaders. An audience of some 2,000 heard main speakers Cynthia Wedel, an Episcopalian who is a president of the World Council of Churches, and Jesse L. Jackson of Operation PUSH, a self-help organization, preach on the need to continue the revolution begun 200 years ago, to extend social justice to all.

President Ford arrived by helicopter a short time later, following a stop at Valley Forge, and delivered a televised address to the nation from the steps of Independence Hall before a crowd of tens of thousands. The speech underscored the nation’s spiritual heritage. “The American adventure began here ‘with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence,’” declared Ford. “It continues in a common conviction that the source of our blessings is a loving God in whom we trust.” In closing, he asked everyone to join him “in a moment of silent prayer in gratitude for all we have received and for continued happiness in the United States of America.”

At 2 P.M. as a parade passed, the Liberty Bell was tolled, signaling the simultaneous ringing of bells across the land.

Before, during, and after the President’s visit teams of young people leafleted the crowd. Most visible were members of Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, whose literature many declined, and the Jews for Jesus, whose tracts generally were read and kept.

Queen Elizabeth arrived two days later to dedicate a Bicentennial bell given as a birthday gift to America from Britain, and again there were large crowds. Among those waiting for her were separatist leader Carl McIntire and some of his followers from the Bible Presbyterian Church across the Delaware River in Collingswood, New Jersey. As the queen’s yacht prepared to dock at Penn’s Landing, McIntire and his friends downstream tossed a plaster of paris replica of the bell into the river. They waved signs saying, “Send the bell back.” Overhead, a plane had spelled out the message, “Britain Bans Bible Verse From Bell.”

McIntire had urged President Ford to reject the bell because it omitted the Scripture verse Leviticus 25:10 that is inscribed on the Liberty Bell. He refused to accept the official explanation that the bell, which bears the inscription “Let Freedom Ring,” was not intended to replace or duplicate the Liberty Bell. McIntire and his wife followed the queen to Independence Hall, where he badgered her from across the street with a portable loudspeaker to “put the Bible back on the bell.”

Another separatist, evangelist Jack Van Impe, held a week of meetings in Philadelphia’s Convention Hall. Top attendance was estimated at between 6,500 and 8,500.

On his brief visit to Valley Forge, Ford greeted the hundreds of people who had come there by wagon trains from all over the country. Aboard one of the six Bicentennial wagon trains was Dorothy Shuman, 62, of La Verne, Oklahoma, wife of the wagon master of the official Oklahoma wagon. With the wagons assembled in a circle, Mrs. Shuman led the group in prayer before each day’s journey. A Methodist preacher from Arkansas rode with them part of the way. He and pastors along the route conducted services for the travelers (a Methodist minister led an Easter sunrise service for them outside of Nashville). There were no serious accidents or injuries en route. Says Mrs. Shuman: “The Lord was with us.”

Some “independent” wagon trains also made the trek. One of them was associated with Youth With a Mission’s “Spirit in ’76” cross-country evangelistic project. Headed by Earl Woodward, 32, the eight-wagon caravan and scores of riders left San Diego on January 4. Two days later his wife went into labor and was rushed to a Seventh-day Adventist hospital where a girl, their first child, was born. They named her Liberty. Mrs. Woodward rejoined the wagon train a few days later. The wagons arrived at Spirit’s church-site encampment outside Burlington, New Jersey, at the end of June.

Also arriving on time as part of the Youth With a Mission (YWAM) effort were more than 50 transcontinental bicyclists (they averaged 50 miles a day), hikers, and a hot-air balloon team headed by pilot Craig Hill, 22, of Denver. The red balloon, nearly sixty feet tall and kept aloft by spurts of propane-fed flames, began its trip from near Gettysburg, tethered most of the time to a van. Attached was a huge banner proclaiming, “Jesus Christ is King of Kings.”

All of the YWAM teams engaged in outreach as they made their way across the country. A week of Christian training and rallies took place at the New Jersey site, featuring well-known speakers and musicians. Busloads of YWAMers were ferried daily to Philadelphia to engage in street ministry among the crowds there. The nearly 1,000 participants were joined by thousands of area residents for evening meetings. A spate of thunderstorms (including one that almost rained out Jimmy Owens and his “If My People” concert with 300 singers) and sparse local publicity contributed to unexpectedly low attendance.

YWAM was founded in the early sixties by Loren Cunningham, a former Assemblies of God worker, as a means of harnessing the abilities and potential of young people for Christian service. It is now one of the world’s largest mission groups.

In Washington, Bicentennial observances included an “Honor America” program at Kennedy Center on July 3, which featured Art Linkletter, Bob Hope, evangelist Billy Graham (he gave the invocation), the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and others. President Ford followed Graham to the podium and expressed thanks for the opportunity to join in “making a joyful noise unto the Lord.”

Two interfaith services were conducted early Sunday morning. One was sponsored at the Lincoln Memorial by Washington church leaders. The other was held at the Jefferson Memorial by the social activists of the People’s Bicentennial Commission. Crowd estimates varied widely, ranging up to 3,000.

Among the major liturgical events of July 4 was a rite of “dedication of service to the nation” at the Washington National Cathedral (Episcopal), led by presiding bishop John M. Allin of the Episcopal Church. Queen Elizabeth attended another of the cathedral’s dedication services later in the week.

As in Philadelphia, organized evangelical groups handed out tracts and witnessed to passersby.

The Navigators sponsored an evangelistic rally near the Lincoln Memorial that attracted an audience of 2,500 and netted more than 200 inquirers. A week-long evangelistic training conference sponsored by some Washington evangelicals had more than 1,000 registrants.

Grocer Joel Ahlstrom, 30, of Minneapolis, and his brother Tony, 27, a Chicago minister, jogged up to the White House just before the holiday weekend after running 2,957 miles. Their well-publicized witness run began on April 26 in San Francisco. They ran six days a week and preached on Sundays, meeting with state and local government officials en route. President Ford invited them in for a brief chat, and they gave him a Bible.

A group of pastors and leaders representing the nine denominations in the National Presbyterian and Reformed Fellowship delivered a “Bicentennial Testimony” to the President. It stressed the role of faith in molding the nation and its institutions, expressed concern about America’s spiritual and moral condition, and called on Ford to help promote “interest in and regard for the principles of sound religion.”

Instead of singing “Happy Birthday” on July 4, many Americans seemed more inclined to sing “God Bless America.”

ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS and EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

If A Hymn Offends …

A multi-faith hymnal published in 1974 for America’s military forces has been under fire in recent months. At issue especially is number 286, “It Was on a Friday Morning.” Its words are expressed from the viewpoint of a dying thief who bitterly harangues Christ during the Crucifixion. “It’s God I accuse.… To hell with Jehovah.… It’s God they ought to crucify instead of you and me,” declares the folk-style hymn.

Church people have showered Congress and the Pentagon with protests. Among the leaders of the protest movement is Mrs. Frank Horton, wife of the New York congressman, and Mrs. Melvin Price, wife of the chairman of the House Armed Forces Committee. Mrs. Horton was dissatisfied by the four-page response to a letter she had sent to the Armed Forces Chaplains Board, which supervised production of the hymnal. And Mrs. Price has been distributing hundreds of copies of the hymn ever since Mrs. Horton called her attention to it.

On July 9, Chief of Chaplains James Rogers of the Veterans Administration ordered the hymn to be “removed” from the VA’s 15,000 copies of the hymnal within twenty-four hours. Chaplains at seventy-one VA hospitals were affected by the order. Rogers, a United Methodist, said he issued the directive because the hymn is sacrilegious and is out of place in a hospital. Rogers’s action upset some VA and Pentagon officials, and a study was under way last month to determine if Rogers had the right to issue such an order.

Meanwhile, a spot check indicated that VA chaplains were searching for adhesive opaque paper to cover the offending hymn instead of cutting it out. Outright removal would affect four other hymns, including “There Is a Green Hill Far Away” and “O Perfect Love.”

More than half a million copies of the 815-page hymnal were printed, at a cost of $1.87 per copy.

Fundamentalists On Record

The following story is based in part on a report filed by J.D. Douglas in Scotland.

Billed as “the first meeting of its kind to cross denominational lines,” the eight-day World Congress of Fundamentalists convened in 2,500-seat Usher Hall in Edinburgh, Scotland, under the joint chairmanship of chancellor Bob Jones, Jr., of Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, and Ulster preacher-politician Ian Paisley. Their aim was to promote unity among badly fractured fundamentalist forces, to rekindle the fires of fundamentalist-styled evangelism, and to specify and speak out against the evils of the day.

More than 2,000 persons attended the congress, with the United States having the largest representation. Americans also dominated the thirty-three-man sponsoring committee (ten came from other countries, none were from Scotland, England, or Wales) and the roster of sixty-nine speakers.

A notable absentee was Bible Presbyterian founder Carl McIntire, who heads the fundamentalist International Council of Christian Churches. He had declined an invitation to participate, objecting to what he saw as the formation of another movement that constituted a challenge to the ICCC. He accused Jones of spawning a “neo-fundamentalist” movement representing “a new inclusivism based upon an undefined fundamentalism.” Congress organizers wrote off McIntire’s objections as a case of sour grapes because the congress was not held under ICCC auspices. In one of the unanimously passed resolutions, congress participants defined what it means to be a fundamentalist. The statement concluded with a repudiation of the term “neo-fundamentalist” as “an invention of one who would discredit a movement he cannot dominate.” Bob Jones III and Paisley—whom McIntire had sided with for years—were among the five who drafted the statement.

Present as a protester instead of a participant was Baptist pastor Jack Glass, editor of The Scottish Protestant View. He accused Jones of holding Arminian doctrinal views and expressed surprise that Presbyterian Paisley “should be party to such deception.” He seemed to take special delight in picketing one of the world’s arch-demonstrators.

The statement defining a fundamentalist listed seven criteria, among them “an immovable allegiance to the inerrant, infallible, and verbally inspired Bible,” a belief in the foundational truths of the historic Christian faith, a commitment to evangelism and to contending for the faith, and a determination to expose and separate from “all ecclesiastical denial of that faith, compromise with error, and apostasy from the truth.” Fundamentalists use the separation criterion to distinguish themselves from evangelicals.

In other resolutions, the congress:

• repudiated women’s liberation and opposed the ordination of women as unscriptural;

• called for more responsible reporting by the news media;

• condemned the charismatic movement as “a Satanic counterfeit”;

• denounced as Satanic and unbiblical Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church and Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God;

• deplored “the cheap and worldly approach” of such organizations as Youth for Christ, Young Life, and Campus Crusade for Christ, alleging they are destroying fundamental churches “with their ‘easy believism’ and ungodly philosophies” while “emasculating the ministry of those who support and cooperate with them”;

• upheld capital punishment;

• opposed contemporary trends in Christian music;

• warned about the “devilish origin and deception” of many new Bible versions and translations, including Today’s English Version (“Good News for Modern Man”), The Living Bible, the Revised Standard Version Bible, and the New English Bible, and called upon Christians to withdraw financial support from Bible societies that distribute them;

• condemned the “unbiblical evangelism and missions” conducted by “Romanists,” ecumenical leaders, and “the new evangelicals through the cultural mandate and Billy Graham type of compromising ministries,” and called upon “all born-again Christians to separate from such associations”; and

• supported the stand taken by fundamentalists in Northern Ireland on the Ulster issue.

The Law Arrived Before The Lord

For nearly ten months a group of believers related by blood or marriage waited in a house in Grannis, Arkansas, for the second coming of Christ. Many sold their property, took their children out of school, stopped paying bills, and left their goods behind in response to a revelation that Viola Walker, 67, the clan’s matriarch, said she had received. Gene Nance, owner of the $15,000 house, stopped making mortgage payments, believing the house would be empty by the time an eviction notice was served. Twenty-one gathered to wait; others came and went. Finally, after months of hassles with creditors and authorities, federal marshalls arrived—ahead of the Lord.

Despite the eviction, the vigil will continue but probably “only in our hearts,” said Elizabeth Bard, one of the thirty-one in the house at the end. “We don’t know what we will do, but our faith is certainly not shaken.” Nance agreed. “The Lord,” he said, “doesn’t desert anyone.”

Church Business

Many denominations hold their main business conventions and assemblies in the spring and early summer. Here are highlights from some of them:

Evangelical Free Church of America. Pastor Thomas A. McDill of Crystal Evangelical Free Church in suburban Minneapolis was elected president of the 646-church, 80,000-member denomination. McDill, 49, succeeds the retiring Arnold T. Olson, 66, the EFCA’s first and only president since the 1950 merger of two Scandinavian-background bodies that brought it into existence (with 18,000 members in 318 congregations). Olson, a leader in evangelical circles, has long been a vocal advocate of biblical inerrancy, and he attributes much of the EFCA’s growth to emphasis of this belief.

About 1,700 persons attended the week-long Free Church conference in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The 900 voting delegates among them adopted with little discussion resolutions calling for family life to be strengthened, for parents to set an anti-drug example by being “totally free from any chemical dependency” themselves, and for Christians to become aware and active politically. Unnamed leaders in Congress were commended for alerting citizens to “the inherent dangers” in the Child and Family Services Act and in the Youth Camp Safety Act; and for expressing concern over the National Science Foundation’s development of controversial curricula materials such as MACOS (“Man, A Course of Study”). The conference expressed reservations about the Equal Rights Amendment, and took a stand against allowing Transcendental Meditation and occult courses in public schools.

Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod. The biggest issue at the 154th RPCES general synod in Colorado Springs was left unresolved. Commissioners (delegates) after more than a day of debate voted 79 to 76 to refer to an enlarged study committee the question of ordaining women as deacons. The original study committee said in a majority report that the Bible opens the door to women deacons. In separate action the synod affirmed that God has not called women to the authoritative teaching and ruling office of elder. And a motion to allow women to serve on boards and agencies of the denomination lost by a close vote.

A proposed union of the 18,000 communicant RPCES with the Orthodox Presbyterian Church—voted down last year (while the OPC approved it)—was left in limbo. The next vote cannot be taken before 1978.

International Church of the Nazarene. A record 35,000 attended the six-day nineteenth quadrennial general assembly of the ICN in Dallas. Housekeeping matters, including a reorganization plan, were the main items on the business agenda for the 729 voting delegates. Among other things they voted to establish a department of communication, an area where the denomination has had problems in recent years.

In a state-of-the-church address, Chairman Eugene Stowe of the Board of General Superintendents—the ICN’s chief executive officer—announced the addition of 196 churches during the past quadrennium and an increase in membership to 586,532 in sixty-one countries (about 450,000 in the United States). Overseas, the membership growth rate has been 33.8 per cent, he said.

Reemphasizing the group’s anti-charismatic stance, he warned: “Any practice and/or propagation of speaking in tongues either as the evidence of baptism of the Holy Spirit or as a neo-Pentecostal ecstatic prayer language shall be interpreted as inveighing against the doctrines and usages of the Church of the Nazarene.”

Missionary Hugh Friberg, jailed by the new Marxist government in Mozambique last fall, made his first public appearance since his release in April. He was given a standing ovation. In a brief talk he thanked the church people for their help in gaining his freedom, and he said he had not been mistreated in jail. Fellow Nazarene missionary Armand Doll, 60, is still in prison. For a while, said Friberg, he and Doll were able “to have a ministry of sorts,” including a Sunday-morning church service with some 300 other prisoners, mostly Catholic. Stowe told the assembly that on June 11 the U. S. Senate agreed on an amendment prohibiting any consideration of funding to Mozambique until Doll is released.

A commemorative service was held at Pilot Point, Texas, where the church was founded in 1908.

Christian Reformed Church. The synod of the 163,000-communicant CRC, meeting in Grand Rapids, Michigan, established “official fellowship” with the Reformed Church in America. This status provides for intercommunion, pulpit and fraternal delegate exchanges, and joint efforts to promote Christian unity. (The CRC withdrew from the RCA more than a century ago.)

On matters of doctrine, the synod adopted guidelines regarding what is meant when one subscribes to the confessions, the major creeds of the church. Subscription is “without reservation to all the doctrines contained in the standards of the church as being doctrines which are taught in the Word of God,” say the guidelines. But that does not mean that the subscriber believes the confessions contain every doctrine or warning of heresy, the statement goes on, and the subscriber is not bound to the material “incidental to the formulation of these doctrines nor to the theological deductions which some may draw from the doctrines set forth in the confessions.”

The synod upheld the ordination of Allen Verhey, a teacher on loan to Hope College, a Reformed Church in America school. A church in the Grand Rapids area alleged that Verhey does not accept some scriptural accounts as literal (a talking serpent in the Garden of Eden, the earthquake in the Resurrection account). The ordination was procedurally correct, said the synod; any further action must be according to procedures governing ministerial relationships.

Reformed Church in America. The 170th general synod of the 215,000-communicant RCA, meeting in Madison, New Jersey, elected as president for a one-year term Louis H. Benes, retired editor of the Church Herald, the denomination’s official magazine. Amid lively debate, the synod voted to return the issue of women’s ordination to its regional governing units (known as classes) with a recommendation that they approve it. Four times in recent years the classes have turned it down, this year by a narrow margin. The synod cannot act upon it until it is approved by the classes. Women may be ordained as elders and deacons in the RCA but not as preaching ministers.

In other action, the synod took a firm stand against state lotteries, and tabled a recommendation calling for full civil and human rights for all—including hom*osexuals.

Religion In Transit

Delegates to the biennial convention of the 82,000-member Evangelical Lutheran Church of Canada voted to permit women to be ordained to the pastoral ministry.

A federal panel ruled that all non-public schools in Pennsylvania must either buy or return some $19 million worth of educational materials and equipment provided by the state under a law invalidated by the U. S. Supreme Court last year.

Prospective counselors for the Billy Graham crusade in Detroit in October will be offered training on television twice a week for four weeks beginning August 9. The TV training, a first, will be conducted by crusade director John Corts on UHF Channel 62, thanks to free time donated by commercially sponsored talk-show host Jack Reyhberg. A final session must be attended in person. In San Diego, where a Graham crusade will be held this month, a school of evangelism will be held for young people between 15 and 25.

Fire destroyed the well-known Scofield Memorial Church in Dallas.

In two years, more than a dozen children of the 400 members of the Church of the First Born, a religious community at Cortez, Colorado, have contracted diphtheria, and two have died. The group refuses inoculations on religious grounds. State officials are looking for legal ways to force immunization before a worse outbreak of the disease occurs.

World Scene

Three Catholic nuns, three priests, and two seminarians were assassinated in two Buenos Aires churches last month, apparently by right-wing terrorists. Some church officials theorize their deaths, along with those of fifteen other persons a day earlier, were in retaliation for leftist bombing of a police headquarters dining room in which eighteen were killed and sixty-six injured. More than 600 have been killed in political violence in and around Argentina’s capital since January 1.

Swedish authorities say no public money will be used for the filming of a proposed p*rno movie on Christ. But, they add, they cannot stop the film from being made if Danish producer Jens Jorgen Thoresen proceeds with production. To do so, they explain, “would interfere with the basic principles of Swedish cultural policy and freedom of expression.”

Orthodox rabbis in Israel continue to crack down on Christians who “convert” to Judaism without giving up their belief in Jesus. Pressure has resulted in the nullifying of a number of conversions by American rabbis. Some of the converts had engaged or intended to engage in missionary work in Israel.

Twenty-six Catholic missionaries of various nationalities were expelled from South Viet Nam with no explanation.

DEATH

CHARLES F. PFEIFFER, 57, noted evangelical Old Testament scholar and writer on biblical history and archaeology; in Pentwater, Michigan, of a heart attack.

On the Sunday after he was formally chosen to be the Democratic party’s candidate for President, Jimmy Carter was back in Plains, Georgia, where he taught an adult Sunday-school class at First Baptist Church. About half of his some eighty listeners were reporters and Secret Service agents. The lesson was on the need for love, justice, and humility.

“We ought to make our own societal structure a better demonstration of what Christ is,” commented Carter—the first Deep South presidential nominee since 1848.

If that can be done from the top down, Southern Baptist Carter may get a chance to wield his influence come November. Some early polls show him beating both President Ford and Ronald Reagan.

Retired Atlanta pastor Martin Luther King, Sr., 76, a Georgia delegate who delivered the benediction at the final Democratic convention session, implied as much in impromptu comments before he prayed. “Surely the Lord is in this place,” declared “Daddy” King. “Surely the Lord has sent Jimmy Carter to come out and bring America back to where it belongs.” Carter, 51, and his wife were at King’s side when he asserted that God was in Madison Square Garden, and both said “Amen.”

The black preacher sounded almost a revival note in helping to bring the convention to an end. He exhorted the Democrats to make real the surface unity evident throughout the proceedings. “If you have an unforgiving heart, get on your knees,” he said.

Misgivings in the liberal wing of the party were partly overcome with Carter’s selection of Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota as his running mate. Mondale, 48, is the son of a Methodist minister, and he and his family are members of Chevy Chase Presbyterian Church in Washington. The church is affiliated with both the United Presbyterian Church and the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern). Mondale has attended regularly since joining in 1964 but does not hold office, say church sources.

Mondale’s sponsorship of controversial child-care legislation and his support of camp regulation by the federal government have drawn fire from many conservative church people.

While Mondale’s stands on issues are fairly clear, Carter’s positions appear ambiguous to some evangelical critics. His views on abortion have evoked the most vocal controversy to date. Contrary to many accusations, Carter says he had no input at all on the Democratic platform plank on abortion. That plank opposes a constitutional amendment to limit abortion. Carter says his position is similar, “but I would have worded it differently.” He also states that he personally opposes abortion and “will do everything possible to minimize its need” if he is elected President.

In a speech for anti-abortion candidate Ellen McCormack, convention delegate James Killilea cited opposition to Carter on the abortion issue by a Catholic writer and by Harold O. J. Brown, a teacher at Trinity seminary in suburban Chicago and a leader in the anti-abortion Christian Action Council. In describing Brown as “an evangelical like [Carter],” he quoted the theologian as saying: “For someone to say that he is morally opposed to abortion and then that he is against doing anything to stop the present flood of abortions is rather like Pontius Pilate’s action in washing his hands at the trial of Jesus.”

One pro-life picket outside the hall carried a sign saying, “Carter is nothing but a 621-month-old fetus.”

Whether Carter will win the support of the many Catholics and a growing number of Protestants who are unhappy with his abortion views remains to be seen. Some 10,000 pro-life people rallied in Central Park on the eve of the convention to register their opposition to the plank on abortion, and a new movement, Democrats for Life, reportedly was organized during the convention. Its members include Governor Richard Kneip of South Dakota.

One of the eight clergymen recruited to pronounce invocations and benedictions at the convention was Robert N. Denting, a Catholic priest from Kansas City slated to give the benediction on nominating night. Only hours before he was to lead in prayer he backed out “as a matter of conscience and principle” because of the abortion position. A local priest, Leo J. Daly, was quietly enlisted to take his place.

There were a number of religion-related sidelights both inside and outside the convention hall.

One of Carter’s seconding speeches was by Atlanta congressman Andrew Young, 44, a United Church of Christ clergyman and former aide to Martin Luther King, Jr. The soft-spoken Young, highly respected in congressional circles, in 1972 became the first Southern black elected to congress in almost a century. His voting record is liberal, and he has been a member of the World Council of Churches Program to Combat Racism. He is known as a devout man of faith, and he identifies personally with evangelical Christianity—enhancing his compatibility with Carter. He has become one of Carter’s closest friends during the campaign, and the former Georgia governor singles him out for more credit than anyone else in his campaign success. If Carter wins the upcoming election, Young will no doubt play a key role in his Administration.

There were several clergymen and nuns among the delegates, including priest William Graham of Pittsburgh, affectionally referred to by his fellow Democrats as “Father Billy Graham.” None of the clergy delegates, including editor James Wall of Christian Century, felt Carter’s “born-again” faith will be a controversial issue in the campaign; some said it will gain him votes in certain areas. “Jimmy Carter is not a fundamentalist, as some liberals seem to think,” said United Methodist minister Donald Messer, president of Dakotas Wesleyan University, in an interview with correspondent Elliott Wright for Religious News Service. “Jimmy Carter is a social-gospel evangelical, and I expect he will give leadership to the churches on how to relate the Gospel to the world.” (There have been a number of post-convention appeals, including one by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, asking voters, candidates, and the press to refrain from making religion an issue.)

Outside, unseen and unheard by most delegates, assorted groups of demonstrators and evangelists tried to get their messages across with loudspeakers and leaflets. They ranged from gay-liberation advocates, pot endorsers, and promoters of women’s rights to “Moonies” of the Unification Church, Jews wanting a platform plank on behalf of Soviet Jewry, Jews for Jesus, and a loosely knit team of Southern Baptist ministers and lay evangelists who worked the 1972 political conventions and the Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

The 150-member Lamb’s Manhattan Church of the Nazarene sponsored a 100-hour round-the-clock prayer vigil for the nation from a street-corner booth a block from the Garden. A two-hour “Jesus Joy” rally was held on the street corner one night, and hundreds stopped by to listen to music by Children of the Day, a group from Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa, California. Songs were interspersed with testimonies by young people and mini-sermons by the church’s pastor, Paul Moore, who sported a red vest and clergy collar for the occasion. The entire sidewalk crowd—even the dozen police officers standing watch nearby—joined in singing “The Hallelujah Chorus” at the close of the meeting. (Moore’s church recently purchased the famed Lamb’s Club in Times Square and sponsors a variety of outreach ministries in it, including theater presentations and what amounts to a Christian supper club.)

Among the sidewalk witnesses, the Jews for Jesus contingent of about sixty seemed to prompt the most—and sometimes sharpest—response. Eight Jewish youths identified as members of the Anti-Missionary Institute—tried to break up a pre-convention meeting being conducted at Calvary Baptist Church by Jews for Jesus members.

Jews for Jesus leader Moishe Rosen reported that his group was distributing more than 50,000 tracts daily. Among them were two titles that were bound to catch the eye during a political week: “Promises, Promises,” and “Why Things Aren’t Working Out.”

On the Sunday morning before the convention opened, Carter worshipped at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church and heard two guest preachers describe the city’s economic and social ills. A reporter stated that pastor Kenneth L. Folkes of Mount Carmel Baptist Church looked right at Carter as he said, “You must change the picture.”

That same hour, Canon Walter D. Dennis told worshipers at nearby Cathedral of St. John the Divine (Episcopal) they should consider Carter’s religious convictions in determining whether to support him politically. A President’s decisions, he said, “ought to be informed by his religious, ethical presuppositions.”

CATCHING ON

Some people are wondering if Jimmy Carter’s reputed qualities of faith and honesty might be having an effect on others. Paper strips were placed over the undraped anatomies on the covers of sex magazines at the main newsstand of New York’s Americana Hotel during Carter’s convention stay there. And on the day after the Democratic convention, two CHRISTIANITY TODAY editors were approached by a panhandler on a Washington street. “Can you spare some change,” he asked, “to help me buy a drink?”

Business Is Good

There is still no sign of any let-up in the evangelical book-buying boom that began a few years ago. Perhaps that explains best the spirit of optimism, even euphoria, that prevailed among the 5,317 delegates, exhibitors, and visitors attending the twenty-seventh annual convention of the Christian Booksellers Association in Atlantic City last month. The 2,100 CBA bookstores are expected to gross more than $350 million this year.

Bibles continue to sell briskly—more than 35 million were sold in North America alone during 1975—and evangelicals continue to land on best-seller lists. Billy Graham’s Angels: God’s Secret Agents (Doubleday), which topped the non-fiction best-seller list last year, is still a leader, with more than 3,000 hard-cover sales each week. According to Doubleday, Pocket Books is anxious to get the book out in paperback but will not be able to do so “until the weekly sales fall below the thousand mark—probably not before next February.” Hard-cover sales stand at 1.4 million copies to date.

Among the authors on hand to help promote their latest works were Hal Lindsey (The Terminal Generation, Revell), Norman Vincent Peale (The Positive Principle Today, Prentice-Hall), and Marabel Morgan (Total Joy, Revell). Lindsey’s books have sold more than 15 million since 1970.

Logos International handed out more than a thousand free copies of its whirlwind best-seller, The Miracle of Jimmy Carter, by journalists Howard Norton and Bob Slosser. More than one million copies were in print by July 31, with sales at 600,000. The volume was released six weeks earlier. Also handed out were hundreds of copies of a book by Carter’s sister, Ruth Carter Stapleton, The Gift of Inner Healing (Word Books). It too is moving briskly.

Perhaps the most significant trend in Christian publishing observable at this year’s CBA convention was a renewed interest in distinctively evangelical books by major secular publishers who a few years ago almost gave up their religion departments. Harper & Row, for example, was there not only selling its wares but actively seeking evangelical books and authors. Another sign of a change of mood among the secular houses: asterisks next to numerous titles in the latest Doubleday catalogue, indicating they are “suitable for evangelicals.”

According to John T. Bass, executive vice-president of CBA, the owners and managers of the more than a thousand bookstores represented among the delegates to the convention tended to be younger, broader, and more tolerant than a decade ago. Not only widely assorted traditional evangelical types but also both Catholic and mainstream Protestant charismatics were present, and without any open ideological conflict.

Whatever the reasons for all the changes, publishers and book-sellers are beaming—all the way to the bank.

W. WARD GASQUE