Page 5766 – Christianity Today (2024)

Can a Christian salvage anything out of the rubble of the Viet Nam experience (an experience that was, we must always remind ourselves, enormously more devastating for the Vietnamese than it was for us)?

The answer is yes. Once Americans get over the trauma of having been on the losing side of a war for the first time, Viet Nam may not look like quite the debacle it is currently made out to be. After all, Britain, Germany, France, Japan, and Russia, as well as our own southern states, all lost wars and recovered. Granted, the price paid for the lessons learned is decidedly inflationary. But it could have been much higher. It could have been the price of nuclear warfare.

Americans should remember that the Viet Nam conflict brought the issue of war and peace to the fore as nothing else has in American history. Although the nation still has little agreement on what constitutes a just war and on when to intervene militarily in the affairs of other countries, vast numbers of people have become more sensitive to the immediate factors that bear on those great moral decisions. Wars for causes that do not involve any direct threat to important national interests will now be a lot harder to sell to the citizenry. The danger now is that politicians may be too cautious and fail to act even if national survival might be at stake.

Perhaps the biggest lesson is one of humility, and there should be plenty to go around. Even the most powerful nations cannot act as if their power were unlimited. Pride indeed goeth before a fall. Virtually all Americans must share blame for the Viet Nam war. Ulterior motives were to be found among both hawks and doves. In accord with President Ford’s appeal to avoid recriminations, no more specifics need be mentioned. Suffice it to say that the deception that drew America into the war got its come-uppance when shortly after noon on April 30 the flag of the Provisional Revolutionary Government was raised over the presidential palace in Saigon. And let those who saw the fall of Saigon as a “victory” be reminded that what was left of a free press there ceased that same day. There is no more dissent from left or right in Viet Nam.

To what extent should Americans feel guilty about having pulled out? Surely at least in a sense the nation went back on a promise. From another perspective, however, it is doubtful that any nation ever helped another to the extent that the United States aided South Viet Nam: more than 56,000 Americans killed and another 303,000 wounded, plus a financial investment of about $150 billion. No reasonable person really would define a political commitment in everlasting terms. America agreed to help those South Vietnamese who wished to resist the Communists, not to fight the whole war for them. America’s allies realize that, whether or not it is expedient now to say so publicly. In the end, it appears that South Viet Nam could have been “saved” only if the United States had acted as if it were defending Hawaii rather than a sovereign ally.

Christians are still left with some hard questions as to how Communism can be contained and whether the use of force is proper. Certainly justice must always be demanded, and one of the immediate imperatives is for the Church to call forcefully for the release of American missionaries imprisoned in Viet Nam. Also desperately needed is wider proclamation of the basic spiritual values that lie at the heart of the American republic but that get little foreign visibility in comparison to the materialism we export. If American Christians had invested in the evangelization of Viet Nam just 1 per cent of what the Pentagon spent in fighting the war there, the conflict might never have occurred. Fortunately, some significant missionary work did take place, and the hundreds of evangelical churches in Viet Nam deserve, now even more than before, the prayers of God’s people everywhere.

Again in the wake of Viet Nam, American Christians have the opportunity to seize the cultural initiative in a new way. They can begin by extending love to the comparatively few thousands of refugees, and then following through with a fresh implementation of biblical mandates. The Viet Nam experience, despite the adversities, provides an unparalleled spiritual opportunity. If American Christians avail themselves of this opportunity, the blood will not have been shed in vain.

Dollars For Disobedience

The American Lutheran Church has the dubious distinction, apparently, of being the first denomination officially to make a cash grant to a “gay” caucus within its ranks. Lutherans Concerned for Gay People, headquartered in Salt Lake City, proudly announced in its February–March newsletter that last December it had been approved for a grant of $2,000 by the board of the ALC’s Division for Service and Mission in America. The group, which includes both gay and non-gay members from the three largest Lutheran bodies, had its budget for 1975 increased by more than one-third by the grant. The money is to be used to expand distribution of the newsletter, to advertise in periodicals, and “to assist in providing a visible gay presence at major church conventions.” The media representative of the American Lutheran Church confirmed the essential accuracy of the newsletter’s report.

Other denominations, such as the United Methodist Church and the Unitarian Universalist Association, have previously given grants to gay organizations, but not to gay caucuses working within their own denominations.

Doubtless gay Lutherans will invoke Martin Luther’s stance for conscience and against Rome. A minority battling for public recognition in the face of strong and widespread opposition naturally tugs on the heartstrings of many Christians. However, Luther’s appeal was not to himself but to the authority of God as revealed through his Word. Because the Scriptures speak strongly and repeatedly against the practice of hom*osexuality, most Christians are nonplused by the presence of gay activism within the churches.

Lutherans and other Christians should indeed be concerned for gay people. Jesus Christ died for all persons regardless of their sexual orientation. The practice of hom*osexuality, like the practice of heterosexuality outside marriage, can indeed be forgiven by God, and therefore by his people. But forgiveness requires acknowledgment of wrongdoing. Undeniably the Church has been wrong to the extent that it has failed to distinguish between God’s love for hom*osexual persons and his condemnation of hom*osexual practices. But we cannot correct that wrong by contradicting God’s verdict on the practice.

Lutherans Concerned for Gay People recognizes that there are “gays who are celibate.” We submit, on the basis of Scripture, that this is the only morally defensible sexual pattern for gays who cannot or will not have a sexual relationship through marriage to someone of the other sex. It is, for that matter, the only scripturally sanctioned pattern for the millions of heterosexuals who are not married or whose spouses are ill, injured, or absent.

One wonders how long it will be before similarly outlandish church caucuses are formed to advocate public acceptance of promiscuity before marriage, adultery, incest, pederasty, and bestial*ty. We suppose a proviso would be that such behavior be voluntary on the part of those involved. Otherwise we cannot imagine how the gay Lutheran call for “a greater understanding of human sexuality in all its manifestations” can stop with the crusade “to remove discrimination against gay women and men wherever it exists.”

For a major board of one of the country’s major denominations to identify through its budget with an organization promoting blatant transgression of the revealed word of God is a sign of a sinking back to the level of official immorality that prevailed when Christianity emerged. Concerned members of the American Lutheran Church will know how to express their outrage at what their denominational officialdom has done without any prompting from us. Members of other denominations should beware of similar moves to gain official endorsem*nt of immorality.

Gifts For Graduates

From Muncie, Indiana, comes word that thanks to the initiative of local churches, every graduating senior at a local high school is being offered a gift of religious literature. The graduates get to choose from among six Bible and New Testament versions, or if they don’t want any of those they can pick a book appropriate to their own personal faith. It’s a beautiful idea!

Today two opposing viewpoints are battling for the minds of men. Both have to do with the concept of the “new man.” One is the Christian view, the other the Marxist, and Christians should understand the presuppositions underlying both.

In an interesting paper, Josif Ton, a Romanian Christian and a perceptive thinker, analyzes the Marxist conception. The Marxist “new man” has two major characteristics:

First, [he] should not be alienated from the means of production. All means of production will be the property of everyone. Therefore, man will yield all his energies, freely, to the process of producing material goods for society as a whole, and by this he will discover fulfillment in the creative process. Secondly, this man, freed from corruption by the strength of the socialist system, will handle the goods honestly and will distribute them freely, taking only as much as he needs so that enough will remain for all his kinsmen. He will be a man who will yield all his forces freely for others, a totally committed altruist.

The “old man,” according to Marxism, is the product of his environment, and the new man will be brought into being by a change in that environment. The “right” system will produce the right kind of man. By destroying capitalism (and the bourgeoisie) and bringing in socialism, the Marxist expects to produce the new man, who will, as Ton describes it, be a “totally committed altruist.”

Ton goes on to point out that “Marx, Engels and Lenin preached atheism merely to create despair in man and drive him to any lengths to obtain a larger share of the world’s goods.… But such a man was only necessary for a short period, that of the revolution.” It was thought that an “atheistic ideology would inevitably produce a desperate, unscrupulous man, capable of carrying through a bloody revolution”—and it did. But the kind of man required to destroy capitalism is not the kind needed for the socialist state. Once the revolution is over and socialism has been established, has it been true either in the short or in the long haul that the new man has been developed? No!

Socialism fails to develop the new man because it propagates a materialistic and atheistic conception of life. This approach necessarily produces unscrupulous and desperate men. Ton asked this question of a school teacher who was supposed to educate his pupils to produce the new man: “In a purely materialistic world where life is the product of a game of chance and where man’s single chance is here and now …, what motive can we offer to live lives of usefulness to others, or even self-sacrifice?” The teacher’s reply was: “I do not know why I should be good and honest. I know that if I don’t, pull strings, or stab someone in the back, I will not advance or succeed in life. And this is everything for me.” Given the presuppositions that underlie it who can fault this answer? According to this view, there is no hereafter, no judgment; get all you can in this life, for it is the only life you have.

To be sure, not all Marxists are like that school teacher; some indeed have sacrificed greatly in the hope that future generations will be able to enjoy what they themselves cannot. But the Marxist “new man” is mythical. He does not exist; he cannot exist. Materialistic atheism cannot produce him. We have to go elsewhere to find the new man.

The Christian faith starts with theism and spirit as the basic presuppositions. God exists, eternally, and man’s spirit is immortal. There is life beyond the grave, and there is a final judgment of all human beings. Man, though fundamentally sinful, can become a “new man” in Jesus Christ. And millions have. Alcoholics have been freed from their habit; adulterers have become faithful; liars now tell the truth; ruthless criminals have mended their ways; selfish people have become selfless; cheats now trade fairly. When men and women turn to Jesus Christ, they become new creatures.

To be sure, the Christian faith has often been perverted both by whole societies and by individual professing Christians, whether their profession be genuine or nominal. Many Marxist protests against the ways Christianity has expressed itself are valid. Indeed, there are several insights of value on particular points with Marxist roots even though the overall system is fallacious.

The central Marxist error is to assume the perfectibility of human beings and therefore of society without supplying the means of transforming the heart of man. Marxism promises what it can never deliver. Christianity, on the other hand, promises what is delivered in part in this life and will be perfectly fulfilled in the life to come. In the New Jerusalem, all the evils that both Marxism and Christianity wish to eliminate will be gone. Marxism is a dead-end street; Christianity is a doorway to life abundant, and life everlasting.

Learning Leadership

Nobody becomes a leader unless he has first learned to follow. For the art of leadership is acquired not by attending lectures, reading books, or earning degrees but by watching a leader in action, responding to the inspiration of his person, and copying his example. This is how even a so-called natural leader develops his leadership potential: he learns to lead by following a leader.

The Saviour’s challenging invitation still rings out in modern America as clearly as it did in ancient Palestine: “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.” As men and women heed that invitation and follow Jesus, they start to qualify for spiritual leadership.

Paul, that dynamic leader of the early Church, wrote to a group of his fellow believers, “I beseech you, be followers of me” (1 Cor. 6:16). To another he wrote, “Brethren, be followers together of me, and mark them which walk so as ye have us for an example.… Those things, which ye have both learned, and received, and heard, and seen in me, do: and the God of peace shall be with you” (Phil. 3:17; 4:9). To still another group of fellow believers he wrote, “For ye yourselves know how ye ought to follow us: for we behaved not ourselves disorderly among you; … not because we have not power, but to make ourselves an example unto you to follow us” (2 Thess. 3:7, 9).

But Paul never asked that he be uncritically followed, as though he were a flawless pattern. “Be followers of me,” he urges; then immediately he lays down an all-important limitation, “as I also am of Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1). Venturing to say, “Ye became followers of me,” he at once goes on to add these qualifying words, “and of the Lord” (1 Thess. 1:6). So with Paul discipleship was never merely a matter of following any man or group of men. It was always a matter of following men insofar as they were following Jesus Christ. Yes, follow men, he commands, provided they are following Jesus Christ, because Jesus Christ alone is the flawless Pattern.

Today, as in Paul’s day, when a disciple follows Jesus faithfully, he walks in the light (John 18:12); he is willing to forsake all (Matt. 4:19, 20); he takes up his cross daily (Luke 9:23); he never insists, “Me first” (Luke 9:16). When a disciple follows Jesus faithfully, he understands experientially the truth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s incisive comment, “When Jesus Christ calls a man to follow Him, He calls that man to die”—if not the death of martyrdom (John 21:18, 19), then death to personal ambition, self-centered living, and pride. When a disciple follows Jesus Christ faithfully, he grows by the Spirit’s nurture into one of those leaders whom the apostle commends: “Remember them which have the rule over you, who have spoken unto you the word of God: whose faith follow, considering the end of their conversation” (Heb. 13:7).

This is the kind of New Testament discipleship that qualifies one for leadership. Patrick Appleford’s prayer must therefore be the heart cry of any disciple who, love-motivated, aspires to serve by leading:

Jesus our Lord, and Shepherd of men,

Caring for human needs;

Feeding the hungry, healing the sick,

Showing your love in deeds;

Help us in your great work to share;

People in want still need your care.

Lord, we are called to follow you;

This we ask strength to do.

Building A Case Against College

With her latest book, popular lecturer and best-selling author Caroline Bird launches what may be the death blow to the fast-fading myth that college graduates automatically make more money, get more satisfying jobs, and lead richer lives than their non-graduate counterparts. The Case Against College (McKay, 308 pp., $9.95) will be quoted, defended, and denounced but not ignored.

Attempting to uncover the reasons for a prevailing sadness on campuses in the seventies, Bird interviewed hundreds of students, teachers, administrators, parents, and employers. Her obviously debatable conclusion is that students are sad because they are not needed, “not by their own parents, not by employers, not by society as a whole.” She goes on to say:

No one has anything in particular against them. But no one has anything in particular for them either and they don’t see any role for themselves in the future.… The neatest way to get rid of a superfluous eighteen-year-old is to amuse him all day long at a community college while his family feeds and houses him. This is not only cheaper than a residential college, but cheaper than supporting him on welfare, a make-work job, in prison, or in the armed forces.

The case that Bird painstakingly tries to build is that an endeavor as costly as a college education should lead to higher paying, satisfying, readily available jobs. But the evidence suggests that among the unemployed and “unfulfilled” there are at least as many college graduates as persons with a high school education or less. In fact, the author points to the analysis of Harvard professor Christopher Jencks, who concludes that in the United States financial success depends largely on luck and social class, not on number of years in school.

A particularly ruthless and unfair chapter called “The Liberal Arts Religion” compares the vague benefits of a liberal arts education to those of religion, where “no proof is required, only faith.” The abstractions used to justify a liberal arts training often crumble before the question of the bewildered graduating youth, “What are my marketable skills?” Of course, when the values of both true religion for all and liberal arts education for some are properly perceived, they do not crumble.

Although champions of learning for learning’s sake are sure to challenge this book, it is not an anti-intellectual assault on learning. It is a warning that we must take a harder look at the relation between education and jobs. Perhaps its most valuable message is that while college is good for some people, it is definitely not for everybody. Parents of teen-age children should reexamine the facts, including cost, their teen-agers’ abilities and interests, and the dwindling number of jobs.

Are there any alternatives? In an extensive resource section, Bird cites many successful experiences of young people who have traveled non-traditional routes before, during, and instead of college. She includes a nationwide list of names and addresses of persons and organizations that can help a young person find a fulfilling alternative.

Many Christian parents have automatically assumed that their children should go to college. But this assumption may not be in line with God’s will for a particular young person. Though written from a secular perspective, The Case Against College is a resource that, used cautiously, can help parents and children reach a decision.

Dear Brothers,

Pastoral associates are really hurting. Of course, there are many exceptions to this generalization—but are you sure your associates are among the exceptions?

Do you know them personally? Do you know them well enough to perceive where they are in their relationships to Christ, to their spouses, to their children? Is your relationship with them more than merely professional or administrative? Do you care whether or not they are hurting? Are you concerned for their spiritual maturation or their family situation?

Do you spend time with them? Do you see them more often than during worship or in a formal meeting? As a matter of fact, do you have staff meetings? And if so, is there time for ministering to personal needs, or is it just an impersonal business meeting? Do you know what they are thinking—their problems, their aspirations, their goals?

Do you know whether they are yearning for a deeper relationship with you?

Do you keep them boxed into their job descriptions, or are you interested in their ideas for the total work of the church? Do you listen to them and learn from them?

Would they be taking too great a risk to make constructive suggestions about your personal situation and ministry or the general situation in the church? Are they afraid to approach you with ideas that bum in their hearts? Do you intimidate them? Does your intimidation betray your own sense of being threatened by them?

These are not questions generated in a time of isolated reflection; they are expressions of very real concerns stated by members of church multiple staffs at a recent National Youth Workers Convention. An associate and I were asked to conduct two seminars on staff relationships that were attended by approximately 125 conferees. After brief introductory remarks, the seminar was opened for an hour of comments, questions, and discussion.

There were no senior pastors present. Eight or ten were alone in their pastorates. The great majority were associates, assistants, directors of Christian education or youth directors.

Tragically, few spoke of a satisfying relationship with the senior pastor. Most were very explicit in expressing disappointment and frustration. Some were deeply disillusioned. A few were angry. One young man never sees his pastor except on Sunday morning. In more than a year there has been no staff meeting. Two or three times he has had a momentary contact when they were coming or going during the week.

Several said they were not allowed to show real interest in or make suggestions about anything in the church except their own jobs. And even in that area, few senior pastors showed anything more than cursory interest in what the associate was thinking. Written reports were all that was required. One said the only way he could see his pastor was to watch his TV program.

In conversations after the seminars, several spoke of their respect and love for their pastors but said there was no way they could express this because of a wall that prohibited any personal relationship. I suggested (from experience) that the invisible wall might mean deep loneliness on the part of the pastor, and I urged them to attempt a breakthrough. Their reaction was that this would entail great personal risk.

Some were almost totally alienated from the senior pastor and felt helpless to make any overtures toward reconciliation. The experience strongly confirmed a quotation with which we had opened the seminars:

The multiple staff ministry—two or more ordained ministers in a particular congregation—is a fragile arrangement filled with dangerous pitfalls and laden with conflicting emotions, yet it offers rewarding opportunities. As many clergy have been involved in this kind of ministry, they should not be shocked by Kenneth Mitchell’s statement that “relationships within the multiple staff ministry seem to be relatively unstable: there is a rapid turnover in assistant ministers; there are constant reports of clashes between ministers; assistant pastors are reported to form into cliques wherever ministers gather” [from Psychological and Theological Relationships in the Multiple Staff Ministry, by Kenneth Mitchell, Westminster, 1966; quoted by Richard N. Dearing in “Toward Understanding Staff Ministries,” The Church Administrator, July, 1974].

In each of the seminars, the associates asked, “Are senior pastors aware of this problem? Do they talk about it? Does it make any difference to them?” Unable to speak for others, I was able only to repeat what my associates and I are committed to among ourselves, the others on the staff, the officers of the church and the people: we give priority to persons, not programs. We have an explicit commitment, first to Christ, then to spouse and family, then to one another, and to the officers and people of the church, in that order. We take our relationships seriously and practice fellowship on the basis of the formula found in Matthew 18:15–35. We treat alienation as intolerable, seek reconciliation as soon as possible when a breach occurs, and strive to maintain a loving, caring, affirming, supportive community.

Personal relations take precedence over the work in staff meetings as well as in official board meetings. We meet with the entire staff weekly, and always our primary concern is personal or family interests. When needs are expressed we unite in prayer and take any other action possible to respond to the need. The associates set aside one full day monthly to be together in worship, fellowship, sharing, and planning. Occasionally we take an overnight trip together, including our spouses.

We encourage and support one another in taking a day off weekly and in giving priority to spouse and family. We take every opportunity to be together in twos or more, such as at lunch, driving somewhere together, and dropping in on one another at the office. We are explicit in expressing our love for one another and doing whatever we can to demonstrate that love. We are free to criticize one another. Each takes a genuine interest in what the others are doing, and we all are involved in thinking and planning for the total life of the congregation.

We have learned to expect struggles in these relationships and have discovered that through these struggles love is matured and intimacies deepened. We are simply committed to dealing with alienation when it occurs rather than neglect it because we are too busy, thereby risking erosion and deterioration of the relationships.

“Why don’t you talk to senior pastors about this?” several associates urged in each seminar. This open letter is one response to that request.

Sincerely,

RICHARD C. HALVERSON

Minister

Fourth Presbyterian Church

Washington, D. C.

Fanning The Fame

“How,” asked St. Paul, “shall they hear without a preacher?” (Rom. 10:14). In Paul’s day, the visit of a half-way decent traveling preacher or teacher to a new community was always of sufficient interest that an audience would gather. Therefore it may never have occurred to Paul to ask, “How shall they hear if they won’t come and listen?” But it occurs to us. There are plenty of people who have a good message, but to whom few listen. And there are others who have the same message, and who do not appear to have one hundred or one thousand times the oratorical skill, but who attract one hundred or one thousand times more eager listeners. What is the difference?

Certainly one factor is fame, which in our day is tied up with the mass media. Fame gets attention: attention means that people will listen to you. Having people listen to you means that you have a greater opportunity to minister to them. Hence, what promotes one’s fame also promotes one’s ministry (and sometimes one’s income, which may be an indication of a growing ministry). If one is devoted to one’s ministry, it is prudent to protect one’s fame, which is after all a prerequisite to an ever-wider ministry. From this we derive what may be called Eutychus’s Second Law, the Law of Prudent Protection: if one has a successful ministry, it is not prudent to say or do anything that might antagonize those who might otherwise be one’s audience (or customers).

Eutychus’s Second Law, though newly formulated, is already being widely practiced by many religious leaders who recognize instinctively that their celebrity and the good will they enjoy are valuable assets. Some people have an instinct for this sort of thing. Let one example stand for many. A newly famous and successful evangelical was recently asked to make a statement about a vital moral issue on which that person was known to have strong convictions. But prudence prevailed. After all, one has to think of the work. Not passing the request to the celebrity, a spokesman fielded it like this: “We support you, but we cannot afford to have our name associated with anything controversial, as it might damage our ministry. People have written to us saying, ‘I used to support you, until I learned your views on———.’ Our books are best-sellers. The Lord has given us this ministry, and we cannot do anything to endanger it.” This is not exactly the same as what Pope Leo X is supposed to have said (“The Lord has given us the papacy; let us therefore enjoy it”), but somehow it isn’t much more satisfying.

The only trouble with Eutychus’s Second Law is that those who prudently follow it overlook one troublesome possibility: what if the Lord has allowed one to become famous not just to sell one’s evangelical product but so that one’s witness in some other area will be heard? If this should turn out to be the case, it can be added as a footnote to the Second Law. In the meantime, those evangelicals who follow the law in its original form can be assured of earning their places in the forthcoming Dow-Jones handbook of religious successes, Profiles in Prudence.

Fresh And Inviting

Congratulations on CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S facelift! It is most attractive and readable. The headlines are clear, sharp, and the whole book has a fresh, inviting look to it.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY is the one religious publication I feel I cannot be without—although, with many others, I cannot always agree with the posture on some of the issues.

Executive Vice President

World Vision International

Monrovia, Calif.

Another Maxim

My sincere thanks to Eutychus VI for his scintillating analysis of Bishop Creighton’s recent pronouncement about not ordaining any males until such time as the Episcopal Church permits the ordination of females to the sacred priesthood (“A Modest Proposal,” April 25). I do hope that the bishop reads CHRISTIANITY TODAY and comes to see the dishonesty of the position he has taken.

In the examination prior to his consecration as a bishop … he was asked: “Will you be faithful in ordaining, sending, or laying hands upon others?” His answer on May 1, 1959, was: “I will so be, by the help of God.” This was his pledge and promise to God on that day, but now, because he believes that God’s Holy Catholic Church is not obedient to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, he rejects and denies this promise to God. Let’s not mince words: he is being dishonest and should resign his see forthwith!… I loved Eutychus’s closing new maxim: “Eat your cake now and bake it later.” It quite properly leads into an even older maxim frequently heard on the streets: “Put up or shut up.”

St. John’s Episcopal Church

Kansas City, Mo.

Taking A Stand

The editorial on “Waste as a Wrong” (April 11) was rightly directed toward examples of resourcefulness in the Bible. Similarly, there are many proofs of God’s abundance toward men in this book. Remember the widow’s vessels which Elisha filled with oil, and the disciples’ nets which, when cast on the right side, were filled with fishes.

God is continually demonstrating his care for us in supplying our every need when we turn to him in prayer. It is our obligation to him to make the most of the moments, opportunities, and energy he abundantly gives to us. This is taking an active stand against waste.

Elsah, Ill.

Another Bird

In listing clerical birds of the mid-seventies (“New Clerical Types, April 11), I am surprised that Eutychus VI left out clericus daemonigpaegnans furiouso, characterized by seeing Satanic activity in every untoward happening, and exorcising everyone in sight, with a maximum of showmanship and a minimum of exposition of Scripture for the spiritual stability of the exorcised. Chicago, Ill.

Clarifying Facts

Thank you for publishing the news story, “Released Time” (April 11). However, I feel some clarification needs to be made. The Bonneville Bible Academy is not sponsored by the Conservative Baptist Association as reported, but by the Washington Heights Baptist Church of Ogden, Utah. However, the academy is under the direct control and guidance of an interdenominational board of directors, and classes are for students of all denominations. The largest single denomination represented in the Bonneville Academy is Mormon. The article stated that the Bonneville Academy is headed by clergyman Henry Green. The name is the Reverend George Green and he is the teacher of the classes, and is doing an excellent job.

The Bonneville board is developing another academy at a new Weber County High School. A building has been constructed, and the classes will begin next year. The Conservative Baptist Home Mission Society is planning to furnish a teacher for the Weber Academy, but it is operated as an interdenominational program.

The Reverend ROBERT VANCE

Chairman

Board of Directors for Bonneville and Weber Academies

Ogden, Utah

The Old Straw Man

After reading Belden Menkus’s review of my book Hebrew Christianity: Its Theology, History, and Philosophy (Books in Review, March 28), I was left in a daze.…

One statement of his reads, “Fruchtenbaum concludes that a Jew who does not maintain his or her Jewish identity after becoming a Christian has not been truly redeemed.” Did I really say that in the book? As I looked through it again I found no such statement. On top of that I am a Calvinist who believes that redemption is solely based on one’s faith. I wish Belden Menkus had put in the page number where he arrived at that conclusion.… The reviewer totally confuses a distinction maintained by a separate Hebrew Christian church, with the maintaining of a Jewish culture within the local church. Is the Gentile Christian wedding ceremony any more “Christian” than a Jewish Christian ceremony? This is the real question that the reviewer has totally failed to wrestle with. When the Gospel is proclaimed to blacks, are the blacks required to give up their black culture and adopt the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture so prevalent in American Christianity? I assume that Belden Menkus would say that the answer is no, the black need not give up his black culture but simply conform his culture to the teachings of the New Testament, and certainly not everything in the WASP culture is Christian. Cannot Belden Menkus extend the same courtesy to Jewish culture? If maintaining black culture does not require a separate black church, why does the reviewer feel that maintaining a Jewish culture can only lead to a separate Jewish church?

Furthermore, he states that I conclude that “the Hebrew Christian is obligated to observe at least the six major annual festivals of Judaism.” Did I really say that? As I reread the book I wrote, especially pages 106 through 110, the point I made is that freedom from the Law meant the freedom not to observe anything demanded by the Law or the freedom to observe those parts of the Law that one may wish to observe on a voluntary basis. This hardly warrants Menkus’s strong word “obligated.” Would Belden Menkus say that since Christians are free to worship on Sunday or Wednesday they are therefore obligated to worship Sunday or Wednesday? When I said that the Hebrew Christians are free to observe and not to observe, that hardly means they are “obligated” to.

I do not demand that people agree with the things that I write. But I certainly demand that a reviewer know what I wrote and to portray what I wrote correctly. He is then free to criticize after presenting my correct views. This the reviewer failed to do, tragically. It is the old “straw man” technique. Apparently he simply states what he wished I believed and then proceeded to knock it down.

Editor and Director of Publications

American Board of Missions to the Jews

Englewood Cliffs, N. J.

To See It Work

As an evangelical who serves as a state senate chaplain, I concur with your March 14 editorial deploring California’s appointment of a chaplain outside the Judeo-Christian heritage (“When the Buddhist Prays”). However, I couldn’t let pass the innuendo of your suspicion that “the senate chambers, if they are like others, are pretty empty when the chaplain prays anyway.” Though I cannot answer for the other forty-nine states, here in Colorado better than 90 per cent of the senators are in their places when I pray. One day last week, when a significant minority were dawdling, the majority leader issued a quorum call prior to the invocation!

Incidentally, when I was first appointed, a cynical friend told me that “if you like baloney and love the law, you should never go see either one made.” To the contrary, I’ve spent enough time observing to be encouraged that integrity, hard work, and genuine public service still exist in these United States.

Chaplain, Senate of the State of Colorado

Lakewood, Colo.

Poetry And Contemplation: The Inner War Of Thomas Merton

Most modern Christian poets spend large portions of their creative lives engaged in an internal conflict that often rises to the level of civil war. That part of their personalities which seeks God often finds it difficult to lie down with that part which makes art. Probably no recent poet endured this conflict longer or suffered greater agonies from it than the Trappist monk Thomas Merton.

Something of a bohemian before, Merton after his conversion associated writing poems with the personal ambitions and worldliness from which he sought to be free. Consequently, when in December, 1941, he entered Our Lady of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery in Kentucky, he assumed that along with his name he would leave his poetry behind. For a time he did. But in 1943 Robert Lax, an old friend from his undergraduate days at Columbia, visited him. When he left he took with him the manuscript of Thirty Poems, which New Directions issued in late 1944.

Merton responded with indifference; as far as he was concerned more poems were out of the question. Lax returned for a Christmas visit, urging him to write. Merton records his reaction to Lax’s enthusiasm in The Seven Storey Mountain and links it to an incident shortly after:

I did not argue about it. But in my own heart I did not think it was God’s will. And Dom Vital, my confessor, did not think so either.

Then one day—the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul, 1945—I went to Father Abbot for direction, and without my ever thinking of the subject or mentioning it, he suddenly said to me:

“I want you to go on writing poems” [Harcourt, Brace, 1948, p. 402].

To adequately comprehend the force of this direction, which struck Merton almost like a blow, one must understand the import of the Cistercian life (the Trappists are a branch of the Cistercian order).

The Cistercians had their beginning in the eleventh century, in the monastic reforms that culminated in the founding of the abbey at Cîteaux in 1098. It remains a strict, contemplative order, one that allows an individual monk little interaction with the world. His day, beginning at 2 A.M., is spent in physical labor, meditation, and prayer. His goal is to lose his personal identity in the contemplation of God. His life is rooted in what the early church called the via negativa or the Way of Rejection. “It consists,” wrote Charles Williams in The Figure of Beatrice, “in the renunciation of all images except the final one of God himself.…”

Committed as he was, both by his personal inclination and by his vows, to the Way of Rejection, the order to continue writing poems meant to Merton the postponement of his deepest desire. In the essay “Poetry and Contemplation” he described that desire as “the voiding and emptying of the soul, cleansing it of all images, all likenesses of and attachments to created things so that it may be clean and pure to receive the obscure light of God’s own Presence.” Nevertheless Merton accepted the direction and continued to write poems. His vow of obedience left him no other choice. Unfortunately, while it ensured the production of poems, the vow could not resolve the tension Merton felt between his religious and poetic selves. He revealed the seriousness of the tension in The Seven Storey Mountain:

There was this shadow, this double, this writer who followed me into the cloister.

He is still on my track. He rides on my shoulders, sometimes like the old man of the sea. I cannot lose him. He still wears the name of Thomas Merton. Is it the name of an enemy?

He is supposed to be dead.

But he stands and meets me in the doorway of all my prayers, and follows me into church. He kneels with me behind the pillar, the Judas, and talks to me all the time in my ear.

And the worst of it is, he has my superiors on his side. They won’t kick him out. I can’t get rid of him.

Maybe in the end he will kill me, he will drink my blood.

Nobody seems to understand that one of us has to die [p. 400].

Merton’s conviction that writing would destroy his spiritual life, however, was a conviction that he eventually revised and then in practice rejected. How he came to recognize the opposition of the two as fundamentally false is directly related to his gradual grasp and appreciation of the via affirmativa or the Way of Affirmation.

The Way of Affirmation, like the Way of Negation, has as its end the loss of the believer in God. The means of achieving that end, however, involves looking closely at and then through the world, which, as the Psalms tell us, reveals the glory of God. While the methodology is essentially poetic, the Way is firmly established and made plain in the Incarnation. Writing of the Athanasian creed in Descent of the Dove, Charles Williams explains:

Thence it proceeds to the Incarnation: “it is necessary that he believe rightly.” It is in this connection that it produces a phrase which is the very maxim of the Affirmative Way: “Not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh but by taking of the manhood into God.” And not only of the particular religious Way, but of all progress of all affirmations: it is the actual manhood which is to be carried on and not the height which is to be brought down. All images are, in their degree, to be carried on; mind is never to put off matter; all experience is to be gathered in [Eerdmans, 1972, p. 59].

For most Christians the Way of Affirmation is the dominant Way. It is the way of marriage, the way of art, the way of politics, the way of economics. It is, in short, the way of doing all to the glory of God. It is also a dangerous way, for the things of this world can be interesting in themselves, and the wise Christian usually tempers his affirmation with selected rejections. The normal Christian way, then, can be viewed as a balancing of the two mystical ways.

But the life of Thomas Merton was not that of an ordinary Christian. Both his monastic vows and his priestly orders ruled out the simple balancing-act solution of the layman. And the common depreciation of the affirmative way delayed his recognition of the only possible resolution of his dilemma. Dorothy Sayers set forth the nature of this depreciation in her essay “The Beatrician Vision”:

From the fifteenth century on, Western mysticism has tended to conform itself to the Eastern pattern, which, rejecting all messages conveyed by the senses and all images derived from the outer world, contemplates in darkness, under the “cloud of unknowing,” the dweller in the innermost—the immanent God who is the ground of the soul. The other pattern, which affirms all the images and contemplates the immanence of God in the visible things of creation, is very generally assumed to be not mystical in any exact sense.… [The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement, Gollancz, 1963, p. 51].

Although this attitude contributed to Merton’s difficulty, he did not fully succumb to it. Speaking of the great contemplatives of the past in his early devotional work Seeds of Contemplation (1949), he wrote, “Do you think that their love of God was compatible with a hatred for things that reflected Him and spoke of Him on every side?… The saint knows that the world and everything made by God is good.…” We may conclude that intellectually Merton was not susceptible to this error. But where his emotions are concerned it is another matter.

The Seven Storey Mountain, as well as the numerous recollections published by his friends since his death, shows Merton to have been incapable of doing anything halfway. Edward Rice in The Man in the Sycamore Tree described him as “full of energy … unchanged from day to day, cracking jokes, denouncing the Fascists, squares, being violently active, writing, drawing, involved in everything.” Before his conversion this vigorous involvement included indulgence in many activities and substances not mentioned in the heavily censored autobiography. They were, however, sufficiently questionable to cause the Franciscans to turn down his application to enter a novitiate in 1940.

After his conversion, Merton channeled his enthusiasm in more profitable directions, but it remained a factor in everything he did and must be considered as an influence in his decision to enter a religious life. For at the same time he was considering joining the Trappists at Gethsemani, he was considering a position as a staff worker at Friendship House, a kind of mission in Harlem. His final reasoning, at least as it is recorded in the last entry of The Secular Journal of Thomas Merton, is curious and enlightening:

Going to live in Harlem does not seem to me to be anything special. It is a good and reasonable way to follow Christ. But going to the Trappists is exciting, it fills me with awe and desire. I return to the idea again and again: “give up everything, give up everythingl” [Dell, 1960, p. 222].

An appealing romanticism is involved. There was an excitement in going the whole route that his personality couldn’t resist. He saw the Way of Negation as a challenge worthy of his whole life.

But another factor entered his decision, one that is not nearly so attractive. In turning his back on his worldliness he contemptuously turned his back on the world. Even the Way of Negation does not allow this, for contempt, in the words of an ancient canon, “blasphemously inveighs against the creation.” The strongest expression of Merton’s contempt was the novel The Journal of My Escape From the Nazis, which, while written in 1940, was not published until after his death, when it appeared as My Argument With the Gestapo. His seclusion in the monastery apparently tempered his hatred, but it reappeared sporadically as late as 1948 in The Seven Storey Mountain and was the cause for his eventual repudiation of that work as unloving and narrow.

The romanticism and the improper rejection reached into nearly all of his early poetry, coloring not only what he wrote but also his attitude towards writing in general. To Figures For an Apocalypse, the collection of poetry written over the same time period as The Seven Storey Mountain, he appended the essay “Poetry and Contemplation.” In it he concluded:

That poetry can, indeed, help us rapidly through that part of the journey to contemplation that is called active: but when we are entering the realm of true contemplation, where eternal happiness begins, it may turn around and bar our way.

In such an event, there is only one course for the poet to take, for his own individual sanctification: the ruthless and complete sacrifice of his art [New Directions, 1948, p. 109].

Merton’s published journals covering these years (1946–52) are filled with references to giving up writing, and it is clear that, had his circ*mstances not been altered, Merton probably would have sacrificed his art. In 1948, however, Dom Frederic Dunne, his abbot, died, and Dom Gabriel Sortais, the Cistercian vicar general, traveled to Gethsemani for the funeral. He remained to oversee the election of a new abbot. During his stay, Merton was appointed to serve as his interpreter and secretary. Consequently, when Dom Gabriel was called to Louisville, Merton accompanied him, leaving the monastery for the first time in seven years. He recounts it in The Sign of Jonas:

We drove into town with Senator Dawson, a neighbor of the monastery, and all the while I wondered how I would react at meeting once again, face to face, the wicked world. I met the world and I found it no longer so wicked after all. Perhaps the things I had resented about the world when I left it were defects of my own that I had projected upon it. Now, on the contrary, I found that everything stirred me with a deep and mute sense of compassion. Perhaps some of the people we saw going about the streets were hard and tough … but I did not stop to observe it because I seemed to have lost an eye for the merely exterior detail and to have discovered, instead, a deep sense of respect and love and pity for the souls that such details never fully reveal. I went through the city, realizing for the first time in my life how good are all the people in the world and how much value they have in the sight of God [Harcourt, Brace, 1953, pp. 97, 98].

In the course of six hours, Merton’s life had been turned around. He had left the monastery committed to rejecting all images except the final one of God himself. He returned affirming, for the first time, the image called Man and seeing through that image the presence and grace of the Creator of all images. The possibility of a dual calling to poetry and to contemplation opened to him. He responded by going forward. A year later he wrote:

And yet it seems to me that writing, far from being an obstacle to spiritual perfection in my own life, has become one of the conditions on which my perfection will depend. If I am to be a saint—and there is nothing else that I can think of desiring to be—it seems that I must get there by writing books in a Trappist monastery. If I am to be a saint, I have not only to be a monk, which is what all monks must do to become saints, but I must also put down on paper what I have become. It may sound simple, but it is not an easy vocation [The Sign of Jonas, p. 228].

Merton’s evaluation of the difficulty of his vocation proved correct. He had, indeed, turned around, but the full acceptance of the new direction was not automatic. The conflict that had tormented him for seven years could not be laid to rest in one dramatic affirmation. His doubts recurred, but he continued to write, by choice. Finally he realized that his writing earned him what privacy and solitude he had.

He had other lessons to learn as well. Because of his increasing fame he was forced to answer voluminous piles of mail. And as he responded, sometimes with personal notes, sometimes with printed cards, he proved in his life that the purpose of solitude and contemplation was not a final withdrawal but an eventual return to the world, filled with the love and compassion of Christ. On March 3, 1953, he wrote in his journal:

Coming to the monastery has been for me exactly the right kind of withdrawal. It has given me perspective. It has taught me how to live. And now I owe everyone else in the world a share in that life. My first duty is to start, for the first time, to live as a member of a human race which is no more (and no less) ridiculous than I am myself. And my first human act is the recognition of how much I owe everybody else [The Sign of Jonas, p. 312].

For Thomas Merton, writing poems and writing books became a way of returning to the world he could not actually reenter. And as he gave up his largely selfish desire to be totally absorbed in the contemplation of God, as he willed instead God’s will, he found that the inner war of his religious and poetic vocations quieted. But he found that it was not because he had reconciled the two in theory. He found that just as God had willed them reconciled in practice for St. John of the Cross, God had willed them reconciled in practice for Thomas Merton.

John Leax is assistant professor of English at Houghton College, New York.

Almost every day newspapers tell of another war or revolution somewhere in the world. It is painfully clear that something is wrong with the human race. Why, with all our progress in education, science, technology, and philosophy, do violent conflicts remain? Why can’t we solve the human predicament?

We are living in what is called a new world—a world of revolutionary outlook and of dynamic change. But as the Bible puts it “there is no new thing under the sun” (Eccl. 1:9), and man can no more change his nature than the leopard can change his spots (Jer. 13:23).

The noted historian Arnold Toynbee once said that as long as original sin remains an element in human nature, Caesar will always have work to do. Toynbee believes there is no reason to expect any change in unredeemed human nature. There has been no perceptible variation in the average sample of human nature in the past, and so there is no ground, in the evidence of history, to expect any great variation in the future. All 6,000 years of recorded history, according to Toynbee’s study, reveal one truth: that man cannot save himself.

Pitirim A. Sorokin, a renowned sociologist and a former Russian revolutionary leader, searched exhaustively but found no cure for human ills in any human systems or schemes, whether political, economic, educational, or scientific. He said:

The shortest, the most efficient and the only practical way of really alleviating and shortening the crisis is by reintegrating its religious, moral, scientific, philosophical, and other values … primarily in the values of moral duty and the kingdom of God.… Without the Kingdom of God, we are doomed to a weary and torturing pilgrimage from calamity to calamity, from crisis to crisis, with only brief moments of transitory improvement for regaining our breath [see Sorokin’s The Reconstruction of Humanity, chaps. 1–3; Social and Cultural Dynamic; The Crisis of Our Age, chap. 9; Man and Society in Calamity, chap. 18].

Revolutionary Nature Of The Gospel

This biblical, historical, and sociological evidence offers good reason to rethink the revolutionary nature of the Gospel and to assume our solemn responsibility to preach the true Gospel. We need to give a reason for our hope to the people of the world who are being deceived by false doctrines and bewildered by false lights. First of all, we must tell the world that the Gospel is by its nature revolutionary. Christian world missions is a divine revolution. In the spiritual sense, Jesus Christ is the only true revolutionary leader. Christian revolution is timeless and spiritual, and the most powerful and dynamic in its implications for human lives. Compared with Jesus, all other revolutionary leaders are mere frauds; compared with Christianity, all other revolutionary doctrines are vain deceit. For only Jesus Christ can make a complete change in human nature and a fundamental transformation of the human value system.

Man spends too much time trying to change the world instead of trying to change the people who make the world what it is. World problems are an extension of individual problems. When man looks at the world, he sees himself, with all his fear, meaninglessness, hatred, and self-centeredness. The world cannot be changed so long as human nature remains unchanged.

Jesus Christ, the greatest revolutionary of all time, talked about change not in government but in the human heart. Most revolutions are accomplished by violence and by dramatic events, but not so with the spiritual revolution that Christ brings. If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature. This is the revolution we need, and this is the intrinsic nature of the Gospel.

Revolutionary Power Of The Gospel

But in this activist generation, the power of the Gospel has been greatly underestimated or has been restated in terms of “social action” (“social activism” is a more accurate term, for reasons that I will state later). While some activists are certainly sincere in their efforts, few if any fully understand the true nature of the revolutionary power of the Gospel. Lacking this understanding, they mistakenly regard evangelism and social action as mutually exclusive. But the regenerating result of the preaching of the Gospel is not merely a “religious” matter; it affects the whole of a person’s life. The Christian is to place all his activities under the Lordship of Christ.

History shows that the preaching of the Gospel has been not only a highly effective form of social action but also a mighty revolutionary power. The job of preaching is to inject a leaven into the social and political order and infuse a new spiritual life into secular culture and civilization. The early disciples did that, and that handful of unlearned and ignorant and despised people was enabled by the Holy Spirit to turn the world upside down (Acts 17:6).

In the early history of the Christian Church, the Christian revolution swept all the way from Jerusalem across Asia Minor, Greece, and Macedonia to the gates of Rome. This has been described by the church fathers. They did not seek to set up new social, economic, or political systems. Their prime objective was winning men and women to Jesus Christ. From this, they felt, all other good results would flow. Historian W. Stanford Reid has written:

The impact of Christianity on the society of the Roman Empire was powerful for the elevation of the status of women, the care of the poor, the abolition of slavery. The Reformation may be said to have had an even greater political, economic, and social influence. Many ideas that are being talked about today, such as the equality of all persons, the rights of the individual, and the responsibility of people to “do their own thing,” are secularized versions of the teaching of Luther, Calvin, and their followers. Many of the social and political reforms of the nineteenth century likewise sprang directly out of the Evangelical Revival, leading to social and political action to protect exploited workers, to free Negro slaves, and to help the poor and downtrodden [“Preaching Is Social Action,” CHRISTIANITY TODAY, June 4, 1971, page 11].

Even a secular historian, William E. H. Lecky, has recognized that the Evangelical Revival spared England from the throes and calamity of a revolution like the French.

These historical facts reveal the truth that Christianity is not a mere “religion” but an ever-renewing and revolutionary power. They encourage us to revitalize evangelistic efforts and to revive a revolutionary spirit to challenge the social activists.

Revolutionary Spirit Of The Gospel

Since the weapons of the Christian’s warfare are not carnal, his strategy of revolution cannot be in the form of frontal assault upon the world or its governments, nor can it employ violence, as the “new breed” clergymen advocate. Christian revolution should be primarily a revolution in the “inner man” (Eph. 3:15) “by the renewing of the mind” (Rom. 12:2). Real social uplift and enduring national renovation can be achieved only through the regeneration of individuals. The social radicals put the cart before the horse by stressing solely the salvation of social structures and by erroneously translating the biblical truths of “sin” as “exploitation” and “salvation” as “liberation” or “social revolution.” They are keenly interested in attacking the corruption of government, but they overlook the alarming corruption of man—such common matters as organized crime, adultery, fornication, murder, looting, kidnapping, p*rnographic literature, and unwholesome films and television programs.

Evangelicals must put on the whole armor of God, challenge the radical social activists, and pray that they may be rescued from the snare of the devil, who is trying to deceive the world, even God’s elect, with his new strategy—the new social gospel (social activism).

1. First of all, evangelicals must make it clear that while a Christian must never lose his deep sense of concern about the vital problems of mankind, nonetheless, as a true revolutionary, he must carefully discern the difference between what the late L. Nelson Bell called “‘involvement’ in the world for Christ’s sake” and “‘entanglement’ in the ways of the world by Satan’s power.” Moreover, in order to be involved he must first thoroughly study the problems and know how to be involved; otherwise, he is likely to get entangled in the horizontal perplexities and fall deeper and deeper into the snares of the devil.

2. Evangelicals must make clear the difference between “social activism” and “social action.” Social activism is “love in word and in speech, but not in deed and in truth” (1 John 3:18). The actions yielded by “social activism” are such things as wild street demonstrations and violent looting and burning, actions that are motivated not by love but by hate. Those who engage in social action go to war-torn and poverty-ridden countries with the Gospel, food, medicine, doctors and nurses, and relief funds, at the risk of their own safety and lives; the social activists stay behind, preaching in air-conditioned churches or shouting slogans on the street for “peace, peace when there is no peace.”

The social radicals are not aware of the tragic fact that under the Communist regime there is only a worse form of capitalism: its boss is the Party, which has no concern for the individual or social concern whatsoever. The Communists use “poverty” as a political weapon, but do not really care for the poor. The exploitation and oppression are more cruel under the “reign of terror” of Communist regimes than under any form of colonialism, feudalism, or despotism!

3. Evangelicals must make it clear that while the true revolutionaries maintain a sense of social concern, they never follow the god of the social radicals, who demands change in social structures, not in individuals.

4. Evangelicals must show that the true revolutionaries are different from the frauds who deal only with surface phenomena, who offer only aspirin to a society suffering from a tumor. What the world needs is not something that merely dulls the pain but something that cuts deep enough to change the basic unit of society: man. Social action without a vertical and transcendental relation with God only creates horizontal anxieties and perplexities!

Furthermore, social radicals are actually ignorant of the social issues; they are rarely experts in the social sciences. They demand immediate change or destruction of social structures, but provide no plan for a new society. They can be likened to the fool in a Chinese story who tried to help a plant grow faster by pulling it higher. Of course, his “action” only caused the plant to wither and die.

5. Evangelicals must challenge social radicals to distinguish between true repentance and “social repentance.” The Bible says, “For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret; but worldly grief produces death” (2 Cor. 7:10). This was the bitter experience of many former Russian Marxists, who after their conversion to Christ came to understand that they had only a sort of “social repentance”—a sense of guilt before the peasant and the proletariat but not before God. They confessed that, in the words of Nicolas Zernov, “a Russian [Marxist] intellectual as an individual is often a mild and loving creature, but his creed [Marxism] constrains him to hate.”

6. Lastly, above all, evangelicals must challenge social radicals to be aware of the danger of the new strategy of the old serpent. Satan is very subtle. He is familiar with the trends of theology and knows that evangelicals have refuted the old social gospel. Now he is preaching a new social gospel (social activism) in using “social concern” and “social justice” as pretenses and has raised a group within the New Left to be his preachers, penetrating to all walks of life, especially to the young intellectuals. On the other hand, the international Communists are using a more devilish form of brain washing to change the mentality of the free world. Among those who advance their cause are well-meaning but naïve theologians and preachers who “refused to love the truth,” and instead “believe a lie”!

Evangelical Christians have sometimes advocated the death penalty with an ardor approaching glee. Such enthusiasm is shameful. With our compassionate Father we should declare, “As I live, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live” (Ezek. 33:11; this and subsequent quotations are from the New American Standard Bible).

The death penalty is a horror. It is this not, as the humanists say, because it destroys the sanctity of human life, but because it testifies to the failure of human society to live up to the potential for justice and righteousness that comes from having been created in the image of God. The very existence of death is a perpetual penalty for mankind’s original sin. Death is our enemy. The command to “put away sin from among you” by the proper administration of the death penalty contains the promise of societal benefits; yet this same necessity to cast out evil required the death penalty for Jesus so that we could be freed from our own sentences of death. We all deserve the penalty of death.

To be Christian in personal behavior as well as social policy, advocates of the death penalty should present their case in a subdued manner. Exuberance for them is as inappropriate as the raucous clamor now heard on behalf of abortion.

Another factor ought to modify the advocacy of the death penalty: Old Testament judicial procedure. Though often presumed to be primitive, the legal processes in the Mosaic law are in many ways equivalent to those of the American system, and in some aspects superior. Evangelical Christians who favor the death penalty ought to be aware of the judicial safeguards God provided to prevent the miscarriage of justice and protect the rights of the accused.

Five aspects of the judicial procedure under the Mosaic code bear significantly on the appropriate use of the death penalty:

1. The standard of proof required for conviction amounted to certainty. Unlike the American system, which requires proof “beyond reasonable doubt” in criminal cases, the Mosaic law provides that “you shall inquire thoroughly. And behold, if it is true and the thing certain that this detestable thing has been done in Israel,” then the judicial sanctions may be invoked, including the death penalty (Deut. 17:4).

2. Conviction required the testimony of more than one witness. Under the American system, circ*mstantial evidence alone or combined with the testimony of a single witness may be sufficient for a criminal conviction, but under the Mosaic law two or more witnesses are essential. “On the evidence of two or three witnesses a matter shall be confirmed” (Deut. 19:15; also Deut. 17:6, Num. 35:30). Circ*mstantial evidence apparently would never be enough.

The text, however, does not indicate precisely what these witnesses must testify to. That is, must they be eyewitnesses to the crime or merely corroborators of the physical evidence? The internal logic of the passages implies to me that eyewitnesses were intended. First, it is difficult to think that circ*mstantial evidence, even if fully corroborated, could often amount to certainty. Second, the administration of the death penalty by stoning was to be begun by having the witnesses cast the first stones (Deut. 17:7); this would be an excellent form of psychological testing to pressure a lying eyewitness to reveal himself at the last moment, before the irreparable act had been accomplished, but would seem unlikely to influence greatly the behavior of merely corroborative witnesses. Third, the definitions of some crimes require information that only an eyewitness could supply. For example, Numbers 35:16–24 makes a distinction between murder and manslaughter partially on the basis of whether the victim was killed by an object held in the suspect’s hand or by an object thrown or dropped. Other than an eyewitness, who could tell?

3. Under the Mosaic law the penalty for perjury in a capital case was execution. “If a malicious witness rises up against a man to accuse him of wrongdoing … then you shall do to him just as he had intended to do to his brother” (Deut. 19:16, 19). Such a system would effectively discourage “framing” someone for a crime, and would put even the most honest witnesses under compulsion to limit their testimony to actual observations and avoid inferences or assumptions (especially concerning the identification of suspects) lest their errors be mistaken for intentional perjury and put them in jeopardy of their lives.

4. In difficult cases the verdict was deferred to judicial experts. Deuteronomy 17:8, 9 directs:

If any case is too difficult for you to decide, between one kind of homicide or another, between one kind of lawsuit or another, and between one kind of assault or another, being cases of dispute in your courts, then you shall arise and go up to the place which the LORD your God chooses. So you shall come to the Levitical priest or the judge who is in office in those days, and you shall inquire of them, and they will declare to you the verdict in the case.

One of the weaknesses of the American jury system is that after making decisions concerning the facts, jurors sometimes do not understand the law well enough to apply the law to the facts at hand. Also, if a trial results in a hung jury, a completely new jury trial is necessitated, or else the charges are dropped. Under the Mosaic procedures, confusing or borderline cases were to be decided not by the local officials but by special priests or judges who were experts in the law and who fully understood, for example, the legal distinctions between the various kinds of homicide, assault, and lawsuits. Under the American system of judicial review the jury must reach a decision first, and even then the appellate courts can review only the judicial procedures employed in the trial. They do not ordinarily re-examine the evidence. Under the Mosaic code, on the other hand, the local “jury” was prohibited from attempting to decide cases beyond its capacities, and the “appellate” court was required to study and re-evaluate the evidence.

In addition, the Mosaic code provided that the presentation of the evidence before the judge or priest was to take place in a different location from the original trial. This provision, like our modern procedures for change of venue, no doubt reduced the effects of local prejudice for or against the defendant, a very significant safeguard against injustice.

5. Finally, once the verdict was returned, under the Mosaic system the death penalty was mandatory. The judge would have no discretion in sentencing. “No proscribed person who may have been set apart among men shall be ransomed; he shall surely be put to death” (Lev. 27:29; also Num. 35:31). One of the chief arguments against the death penalty when it was invalidated by the United States Supreme Court in 1972 was that it was “unusual” punishment, meaning that statistics proved it had been invoked discriminatorily. A far lower percentage of whites were being executed than minority-group convicts for equivalent crimes. Discrimination would not have been possible under the mandatory sentencing provisions of the Mosaic law.

We have seen that in the areas of evidence, judgment, and sentencing the Mosaic law code functions more restrictedly than the American judicial system. Fewer people would be convicted under the Mosaic code than under the penal codes of any of our fifty states. Those who are lobbying to restore the death penalty for biblical reasons ought also to consider lobbying for imposition of the procedural safeguards under which God directed that the death penalty be implemented.

There may be yet another reason why evangelicals should qualify or mitigate their enthusiastic endorsem*nt of the death penalty. Suggested new death-penalty statutes apply the sanction not only against various (though not all) kinds of murder but also against other acts, such as treason and lewd acts committed against children under age fourteen. Evangelical supporters need to determine for what crimes the death penalty should be considered appropriate according to the biblical norms.

The Mosaic code prescribes the death penalty for eighteen crimes: (1) Murders—Exod. 21:12–14, 20; 22:2, 3; Lev. 20:2; 24:17, 21; Num. 35:11–21, 30; Deut. 19:11–13. (2) Accidentally causing the death of a pregnant woman or her baby (?) if injured in the course of a fight—Exod. 21:22–25. (3) Killing of a person by a dangerous animal that had killed before, yet was not kept caged (both the animal and the owner to be killed)—Exod. 21:28–30. (4) Kidnapping—Exod. 21:16; Deut. 24:7. (5) Rape of a married woman (but not rape of a virgin)—Deut. 22:25–29. (6) Fornication—Deut. 22:13–21; Lev. 21:9; exception, Lev. 19:20–22. (7) Adultery—Lev. 20:10; Deut. 22:22–24; Num. 5:12–30. (8) Incest—Lev. 20:11–12, 14. (9) hom*osexuality—Lev. 20:13. (10) Sexual intercourse with an animal—Lev. 20:15, 16; Exod. 22:19. (11) Striking a parent—Exod. 21:15. (2) Cursing a parent—Exod. 21:17; Lev. 20:9. (13) Rebelling against parents—Deut. 21:18–21. (14) Sorcery, witchcraft—Exod. 22:18; Lev. 20:27. (15) Cursing God—Lev. 24:10–16. (16) Attempting to lead people to worship other gods—Deut. 13:1–16; 18:20; cf. Exod. 22:20. (17) Avenging a death despite acquittal by the law—Deut. 17:12. (18) Intentionally testifying falsely against someone in jeopardy of the death penalty—Deut. 19:16–19.

For which, if any, of these crimes should the United States or the fifty states re-establish the death penalty? If not for all of them, why not? Believers should be able to explain to unbelievers at least why they have selected certain crimes for the reinstatement of the death penalty, and they should be able to explain to other believers why their selection represents a consistent mode of biblical interpretation and demonstrates obedience to the sovereign authority of God.

One response could be that the Mosaic law code was intended only for Israel and no longer applies to us, especially in view of the teachings of Jesus. If that appraisal is accepted, the death penalty remains only for murder, because it alone pre-dates the legislation from Sinai. In Genesis 9:5, 6 God instructed Noah:

And surely I will require your lifeblood; from every beast I will require it. And from every man, from every man’s brother I will require the life of man.

Whoever sheds man’s blood,

By man his blood shall be shed,

For in the image of God

He made man.

What, then, about treason? Although not even explicitly on the Mosaic list, perhaps the death penalty for treason could be condoned by analogy. Since God was the head of the ancient government of Israel, to curse or defy God might be interpretable as analogous to treason against the supreme authority of the state. But even so, to accept that reasoning requires acceptance of the continuing validity of the Mosaic list. What then about blasphemy, sorcery, and witchcraft? What about private sexual acts between consenting adults?

If the notion of such broad application of the death penalty is distressing, notice at least that the crimes involved are all crimes against persons or against God. Property damage under the Mosaic law never brought the death penalty, though it did under the Code of Hammurabi and under the laws of European nations as recently as the eighteenth century. The Mosaic laws are carefully written to protect the recognizability of the image of God in men and women and to enforce basic human rights. The remaining laws defend the social structure itself by reinforcing the authority of the family unit and by accepting the sovereignty of God. The laws reflect rational principles and should not be dismissed as simply unreasonable or arbitrary.

The Mosaic law code cannot be treated as merely optional. Even though we believe that the enforcement of all of these penalties resides entirely with the government and not with the church, nevertheless to the extent that Christians attempt to influence the government they are not free to express personal preferences as though these fully disclosed the pronouncements of God. Perhaps we can say nothing to the government at all about crime and punishment, though to say nothing would be to leave the state to function on unbiblical, and therefore potentially inaccurate, ideas of good and evil. If we do choose to speak the truth, however, surely we must speak the whole truth.

The decision on whether to support the whole range of uses for the death penalty under the Mosaic law should not depend on their acceptability to our sensibilities. Properly considered, advocacy of the death penalty for all or none or just for murder should result from an independent decision about the applicability of the whole Old Testament revelation to New Testament Christianity. Such a decision should be a prerequisite to advocacy of the death penalty in any form.

Capital punishment is one of the life-and-death issues (along with war, abortion, and euthanasia) on which concerned Christians cannot divorce themselves from the actions of their government. When you speak out concerning the death penalty, however, speak soberly, for you are dealing with people’s lives and their final destiny; speak very precisely, for you are discussing a concept about which God has spoken precisely and in detail; and speak honestly and fully, for you are conveying a message for God, and his revelation should be forthrightly declared, no more and yet no less.

Many Christians take offense at any suggestion of dishonesty in Christian circles. They insist that Christians are above all honest. Is it true? In many ways, yes. We would, for instance, return the extra dollar in our change to the store clerk. But on the other hand we may give the impression that God’s presence keeps us always on “cloud nine,” when we know we also have times of depression. Our testimony may suggest that we live a victorious Christian life of exalted mood and no defeat, when we know very well that life is not always like that. We make it seem as if our “peak” experience is an ever-present reality. Isn’t this a form of dishonesty?

I lead what most people would consider an interesting and rewarding life. I teach stimulating university students about fascinating subjects, knowing that I am opening new doors for many. I direct a foundation aimed at helping missionaries and other Christian workers who have emotional problems; I work personally with those whose problems are severe enough to interfere with their ability to adjust, and can see the positive changes made in their lives as a result. I have opportunities to speak to receptive audiences in many places in the world. I have been personally involved in the lives of hundreds through their sharing and my helping in psychotherapy. I have stimulating business interests that add a wholly different dimension to my life. I get great satisfaction from using talents in writing, singing, painting, and construction.

Yet at times I am caught up in feelings of hopelessness, defeat, and horrible despair. Sometimes nothing goes right. Mistakes accumulate in rapid succession, and I feel ready to give up. Life seems not to be worth the herculean effort I am making to keep things going.

But in time there comes again the realization that “underneath are the everlasting arms.” This was the verse my father gave me as I left for a war that was to try my soul and body in new and devilish ways. Because God was faithful then, I have a glimmer of hope that he will be faithful now, and so I plod on, realizing that this too—this horrible mood—shall pass.

Sometimes help comes unexpectedly, as in an appreciative letter from a former client or student who, perhaps unknowingly, had been helped years ago. Then the thought comes that perhaps there is more going on right now than I realize. This spurs me to get out of my morbid preoccupation with failure, obstruction, or the seeming callousness of God’s people toward the needs of mankind.

If I made the mistake of comparing my state at these low points to the exaltation I hear described in testimonies as if it were the Christian’s continual state, I would be tempted all the more to give up on everything. But I know better than to make this error. I know that many of those people have had the same kinds of problems that I am experiencing, because I have helped them when they have honestly faced their low points in my office.

Most Christians, however, don’t have the opportunity I have to see both sides of the coin. The result is sometimes deep, lonely despair that may lead to neurosis, psychosis, or even suicide—and often it is related to other Christians’ emotional dishonesty.

James admonishes us to confess our faults to one another and pray for healing (5:2). Bearing one another’s burdens, as Paul instructed us in Galatians 6:2, is a significant step in bearing one’s own burden (Gal. 6:5), which we all eventually have to do. It helps the bearer as well as the sharer.

Each time we are emotionally dishonest and try to convey a false picture of a victorious Christian experience, we are depriving others of the opportunity to know us better and to grow spiritually and personally in the process. I am suggesting not that we continually cry on other persons’ shoulders but that we need to develop more honesty about the state we are in. Knowing that others have conflicts too and are coping with them gives hope to Christians who are in the midst of depression.

The bubbling fountain of life that we all want to experience all the time is in reality a waxing and waning of many experiences. The victorious life is one that rises above the failure and continues even though the emotional experience of that failure or loss seems to preclude any movement. And sometimes it is necessary to have someone work through those failures with us, until our perspective returns again. A trained counselor working in the church support center may be what is needed to help us learn the necessary truth about our inner life; or it may require the help of a dedicated professional, who can be the instrument of the Holy Spirit.

God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons we could not learn in any other way. The way we learn those lessons is not to deny the feelings but to find the meaning underlying them. In this manner we grow to become more like the persons God wants us to be. The “refiner’s fire” may well be the mood problems we experience. If we deny that these feelings exist, we deny that God can use them to help us. We refuse to profit from them, to learn from them how to grow in our emotional and spiritual life. And our emotional dishonesty may be creating problems for others.

In the new “wave” of treatment of persons with severe emotional disturbances, many authorities suggest that tranquilizers or mood elevators not be used, so that the person who is undergoing the mood changes can discover the significance of the problem underlying the emotional upset. The implication is that chemically changing the mood deprives the person of the opportunity to find reasons why the upset occurred. An effect similar to the chemical mood change can be produced if one denies the reality of the mood itself, which is what some Christians are trying to do. One can fool himself by this sort of emotional dishonesty some of the time, and one can fool others much of the time by a vibrant testimony to what is a partial reality in his life. However, we eventually have to deal with this misrepresentation in other ways, such as, possibly, a conversion to a physical disorder that seems to appear mysteriously.

How can we learn the lessons we need to learn unless we face our problems and do something about them? Emotional honesty is necessary for one’s own spiritual and emotional growth, and it also helps others to get the right perspective on their own experience. This is what Paul speaks of in Galatians 6, the “bearing through sharing” that helps us to carry our own burden.

A PRINCE AT PENIEL

When No and No and No can in one day

become as life unborn, unthought of, a

refusal without form or reason, play

on weary words which falter in their way,

then what has seemed a fortress can dissolve

into a fragrant mist from heathered hills,

a home for one reborn to deep resolve,

to unsheathed heart, and tendered mind that wills

to walk with words that build not fortresses

of sculptured stone but altars simply set

to speak of one unalterable Yes

to living sacrifice lest we forget

and build again our fortresses to mar

our garden moor with fear of what we are.

CAROLE SANDERSON STREETER

Current discussions about the role of women in evangelical churches are often based on strange and historically untenable assumptions. It is usually taken for granted, for example, that the evangelical churches more than any others have resisted giving women a major role. Even Richard Quebedeaux, who advocates the ordination of women in his recent book The Young Evangelicals, asserts that “in almost all non-Pentecostal Evangelical or Fundamentalist denominations women are not ordained to the ministry.” This mistaken assumption then supports another: that to raise the question of ordaining women is to let the world—the secular movement for women’s liberation—set the agenda for the Church.

A better case could be made for the opposite assumption on each point. It is evangelical Christianity, especially in its more revivalistic forms, that after, perhaps, Quakerism and Unitarianism has given the greatest role to women. Denominations in the National Association of Evangelicals have by and large ordained women earlier, in larger numbers, and more consistently than those in the National Council of Churches. And the extent to which this practice has declined in recent years may be better attributed to a general accommodation to the dominant culture, seen also in the decline of other distinctive behavior patterns.

Robert Wearmouth, a close student of the social impact of the eighteenth-century “Evangelical Revival,” has even argued “that emancipation of womanhood began with John Wesley.” The same patterns that encouraged laymen and the poor to rise in church leadership opened the door for women. In a movement centered on the personal apprehension of divine grace, women could instruct as well as men, and as early as 1739 Wesley appointed women as “class leaders” in Bristol. The Evangelical Revival was willing to experiment with new forms of ministry and evangelism (such as “field preaching”) and let their validity be judged in part by their results. And since “God owns women in the conversion of sinners,” Wesley once said, “who am I that I should withstand God?”

The new role given to women in the Evangelical Revival was gradually expanded to include preaching. In 1787 Wesley wrote that “we give the right hand of fellowship to Sarah Mallet, and have no objection to her being a preacher in our connexion, so long as she preaches the Methodist doctrines and attends to our discipline.” Adam Clarke, the great commentator of the Evangelical Revival, insisted early in the nineteenth century that “under the blessed spirit of Christianity they [women] have equal rights, equal privileges, and equal blessings, and, let me add, they are equally useful.” These sentiments did not yet include the full ordination of women or the principles of modern feminism, but they were well on the way, especially when read in context.

The Great Awakenings in eighteenth-century America expressed many of the values of the British Evangelical Revival. Even before 1800 the Free Will Baptists permitted women to serve as preachers and itinerant evangelists. Among these women were Mary Savage, who began to preach in 1791 in New Hampshire, Sally Parsons, who worked later in that decade, and Clarissa Danforth, who flourished from 1810 to 1820. But it was in the wake of the Second Great Awakening, and especially the revivalism of evangelist Charles G. Finney, that such practices became widespread and developed into the full ordination of women and a form of feminism.

One of Finney’s controversial “new measures” was allowing women to pray and speak in “promiscuous” or mixed assemblies. Soon after his conversion in 1825, Theodore Weld, serving as Finney’s assistant, encouraged women to speak, and “seven females, a number of them the most influential female Christians in the city, confessed their sin in being restrained by their sex, and prayed publickly in succession.” Weld later married feminist Angelina Grimke and at that time insisted that he had since boyhood felt “that there is no reason why woman should not make laws, administer justice, sit in the chair of state, plead at the bar or in the pulpit, if she has the qualifications.” Weld suggested as well that women should feel free to initiate courtship and warned that “the devil of dominion over women will be one of the last that will be cast out” of men.

After several years of fulltime evangelism, Finney became professor of theology and later president of Oberlin College, a school founded largely to perpetuate his particular brand of revivalism and reform. Oberlin was the first coeducational college in the world. Later feminists found it still a little stodgy, but a very high percentage of the leaders of the women’s rights movement were graduates of Oberlin. Especially notorious was Lucy Stone, who preserved in marriage her family name and insisted on an “egalitarian marriage contract” repudiating the contemporary laws that made her essentially a property of her husband. Betsy Cowles, president of the second National Women’s Rights Convention, and Antoinette Brown, a Congregationalist who was the first woman to be ordained, were both Oberlin graduates.

There was during this period a close connection between the anti-slavery movement and the women’s rights movement—and both were firmly rooted in Finney’s revivalism. As in the 1960s “women’s liberation” was in part a product of the civil-rights movement, the abolitionist movement of the 1830s evolved into the women’s rights movement. Those who had attacked one social practice found it easier to question another. Many women found direct parallels between their state and that of the slave. Both were regarded at the time as “property” and merely a “means to promote the welfare of man.”

But more important were the parallel problems in the interpretation of the biblical texts. Abolitionists faced conservatives who built a “Bible defense of slavery” on biblical instances of slavery and the Pauline admonitions to slaves. Those who developed in opposition a “Bible argument against slavery” discovered that the same questions arose in relation to the “woman question.” Even the favorite text of Galatians 3:28 conjoined the issues in affirming that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” These facts called for a more sophisticated hermeneutic that appealed to an egalitarian “spirit” over against a repressive and subordinationist “letter” of the Scriptures. Along this line, the Reverend David Sherman argued in the preface to a biography of Mrs. Maggie Newton Van Cott, the first woman licensed to preach in the Methodist Episcopal Church (in 1869), that while “yielding for a time to the form of the institution, the apostles laid down principles which cut away the foundations of the system” of slavery—and that the “same method was adopted in the case of woman.”

Once this hermeneutical move was made, the way was opened for the full ordination of women and the emergence of feminism. Those traditions that most fully incarnated the revivalism and abolitionism of Finneyite evangelism also tended to ordain women and advocate women’s rights. The first woman to be ordained was Antoinette Brown, whose family in upstate New York had been profoundly influenced by Finney. She was a graduate of Oberlin College and had insisted on sitting through the theological course as well. In 1853, some three years after she left Oberlin, Antoinette Brown was ordained in the Congregational Church of South Butler, New York.

The preacher for this service was Luther Lee, a founder of the Wesleyan Methodist Church, which had broken with the Methodist Episcopal Church in an abolitionist protest against Methodist accommodation to the practice of slavery. Lee’s sermon, entitled “Woman’s Right to Preach the Gospel,” can still be read with profit. Though based on Galatians 3:28, it described “female prophets under the Old Dispensation” and “in the Primitive Church,” argued exegetically that the New Testament speaks of women as “ministers,” and insisted that the Pauline statements were either of local and limited application or binding only within the marriage relationship. (This and other sermons are reprinted in Five Sermons and a Tract by Luther Lee, edited by Donald W. Dayton, Holrad House [5104 N. Christiana Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60625], 1975, $3.)

The Wesleyan Methodists (the oldest branch of the current Wesleyan Church) had hosted earlier the first Women’s Rights Convention. That meeting was held in 1848 in the Wesleyan chapel in Seneca Falls, New York. The Wesleyans began to ordain women in the early 1860s (the mainline Methodist Church did not grant full ordination to women until 1956). The practice did not find complete acceptance immediately, however, and was debated for the rest of the century before becoming relatively common in the early decades of this century.

Presbyterian/Congregationalist Jonathan Blanchard, the founding president of Wheaton College, shared at least some of these convictions. Blanchard was an ardent abolitionist with close connections with both early Oberlin College and the Wesleyan Methodists. In his Debate on Slavery with N. L. Rice, Blanchard affirmed that “the first alteration which Christianity made in the polity of Judaism was to abrogate this oppressive distinction of sexes” in which “women had almost no rights; they were menials to their husbands and parents.”

Blanchard, like Luther Lee before him, preserved the teaching that “the husband is the head of the wife,” but B. T. Roberts, founder of the abolitionist Free Methodist Church, urged instead the image of the business partnership. Roberts insisted that “the greatest domestic happiness always exists where husband and wife live together on terms of equality.” He also argued for the ordination of women in a book called Ordaining Women (1891). But Roberts died before the issue was finally settled, and even though several other early Free Methodist bishops were distinctly feminist in conviction, their church allowed women to be ordained only as deacons until 1974, when this prohibition was discarded.

Another early evangelical leader holding to the same complex of convictions was A. J. Gordon, a Baptist who was the major figure behind present-day Gordon College and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Ernest Gordon, Gordon’s son and biographer, said his father was “bred in the strictest sect of the abolitionists” and “advocated their [women’s] complete enfranchisem*nt and their entrance into every political and social privilege enjoyed by men.” Gordon argued for the “Ministry of Women” in an 1894 article in the Missionary Review of the World.

Despite his abolitionist background, Gordon argued primarily not from a doctrine of human equality but on the basis of his doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Gordon insisted that in this “dispensation of the Spirit” inaugurated at Pentecost, the prophecy of Joel (quoted in Acts 2) that “your sons and your daughters shall prophesy” finds fulfillment. He then used this text as the hermeneutical key by which to interpret the rest of the New Testament. Gordon commented that when one starts from this point it is “both a relief and a surprise to discover how little authority there is in the Word for repressing the witness of women in the public assembly, or for forbidding her to herald the Gospel to the unsaved.”

But this argument had been developed thirty-five years earlier by Methodist lay evangelist Phoebe Palmer in a 421-page treatise on The Promise of the Spirit (1859), the whole of which was devoted to the explication of this “neglected specialty of the latter days.” Mrs. Palmer was the major force behind the nineteenth-century “holiness revival” that preserved a subtle synthesis of Wesleyanism and the revivalism of Finney. By the end of the century this movement had produced a large number of new denominations, most of which were ardently committed to the ordained ministry of women.

It was under the influence of Phoebe Palmer during an evangelistic crusade in England that Catherine Booth felt called to preach. She met resistance to this course with a number of articles and a booklet on Female Ministry. Catherine had earlier refused to marry William Booth until he capitulated to her egalitarian principles. Though the founding of the Salvation Army is usually attributed to William, Catherine was at least as important and was apparently the better preacher. Thousands attended her “revival services,” sometimes advertised by the slogan “Come and Hear a Woman Preach.” Catherine Booth carried her principles into the home and “tried to grind it into my boys that their sisters were just as intelligent and capable as themselves.” She insisted that “Jesus Christ’s principles were to put women on the same platform as men, although I am sorry to say that His apostles did not always act upon it.” Such egalitarian themes were built into the structure of the Salvation Army from the very beginning and are still largely operative today.

Another woman who felt the influence of Phoebe Palmer was Francis Willard, the founder and long-time president of the World’s Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Miss Willard felt she had a divine call into the suffrage struggle and served for a while as an assistant to evangelist D. L. Moody, speaking on temperance and suffrage in the Moody crusades. In 1888 she wrote Woman in the Pulpit, a sophisticated and exegetical defense of the ministry of women.

Phoebe Palmer’s basic argument was also taken in a distinctly feminist direction by many of her followers. Mrs. Willing Fowler, a Methodist, wrote a series of articles just before the turn of the century in The Guide to Holiness (which Phoebe Palmer had edited for years) arguing that “Pentecost laid the axe at the root of the tree of social injustice. The text of Peter’s sermon that marvelous day was the keynote of woman’s enfranchisem*nt.” Or again, “when the Pentecostal light shines most brightly … [women] are principals, professors, college presidents, and are admitted to all the learned professions.… They have equal rights with men by whose side they labor for God’s glory.”

W. B. Godbey, a scholarly Methodist evangelist associated closely with the early years of Asbury College, wrote in 1891 a pamphlet called Woman Preacher, arguing that “it is a God-given, blood-bought privilege, and bounden duty of the women as well as the men, to preach the gospel.” Godbey insisted that the Pauline prohibitions about women’s speaking in the church were given to maintain order and not to keep women from speaking, and affirmed that “I don’t know a Scripture in all the Bible by whose perversion the devil has dragged more souls into hell than this.”

Many of the evangelical churches founded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries explicitly endorsed and practiced the ordination of women. The Church of God (Anderson, Indiana), founded in 1881, had many women among its early leaders and preachers, perhaps as many as 20–25 per cent. The denomination’s historian reports that “no other movement, either religious or secular, in this period of American history except perhaps the suffrage movement itself, had such a high percentage of women leaders whose contribution was so outstanding.” The Church of the Nazarene, founded in 1894, wrote into its original constitution a guarantee of the right of women to preach. This practice was later defended in Women Preachers (1905), in which a dozen women reported their testimonies and calls to the ministry. In early years as many as one-fifth of the ministers in the Church of the Nazarene were women.

One of the founders of the Pilgrim Holiness Church was Seth Cook Rees, the father of Paul Rees, an important leader in early years of the National Association of Evangelicals. Rees co-pastored with his wives and argued that one of the marks of the ideal church is that it “is without distinction as to sex.” He said:

Nothing but jealousy, prejudice, bigotry, and a stingy love for bossing in men have prevented woman’s public recognition by the church. No church that is acquainted with the Holy Ghost will object to the public ministry of women. We know scores of women who can preach the Gospel with a clearness, a power, and an efficiency seldom equalled by men.

We could go on and trace these themes along a number of routes. It is largely recognized that Pentecostalism continued the focus on Pentecost and the doctrine of the Holy Spirit that supported a role for women in the ministry in some contexts. Pentecostalism has preserved this practice from early evangelist Mary Woodworth-Etter through Aimee Semple McPherson, founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, to Kathryn Kuhlman of today. Similar statements about the ministry of women were left by both Mr. and Mrs. Reader Harris, spiritual leaders in England at the turn of the century. Revell published in 1926 a detailed treatise on the Bible Status of Women by Lee Anna Starr, for years pastor of the college church (Methodist Protestant) in Adrian, Michigan. Jessie Penn-Lewis of England wrote in 1919 a book on The “Magna Charta” of Women According to the Scriptures. This was in turn based on God’s Word to Women by the American Katherine Bushnell.

There is more, but this is enough to indicate the extent and variety of the evangelical precedents for supporting the right of women to preach and to be ordained. During the last couple of centuries evangelicals led the way in granting a major role to women in the churches.

It is true, however, that the practice of these principles has declined in recent years, especially since World War II. (In the Church of the Nazarene, for example, where in 1908 20 per cent of the ministers were women, the figure was only 6 per cent in 1973. A study of the American Baptists revealed that even from 1965 to 1971 the number of women in administrative positions decreased more than 50 per cent). No doubt there are many reasons for this. One is the increasing “professionalization” of the ministry. With the growth of evangelical theological seminaries and increasingly sophisticated requirements for the ministry, women in general and lay people in general have both found their roles in the churches reduced. These trends have coincided with the breakdown of distinctive cultural and behavioral patterns that helped sustain separate subcultures in which patterns such as the ministry of women were preserved against a hostile culture. Successive generations, embarrassed by such “strange” and “unnatural” practices, have gradually accommodated to the dominant culture, becoming in some ways the sort of churches against which their forefathers and foremothers protested.

Amid reports that more and more of Southeast Asia was falling into Communist hands and missionaries were being evacuated, delegates to the thirty-third annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Los Angeles last month pondered the imperative, “Let the Earth Hear His Voice.”

The theme of the three-day meeting, attended by 1,050, was a continuation of the theme of the International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne last summer. It was reflected not only by the strong position paper on the nature of evangelism adopted by the body and ten resolutions approved on a variety of social issues but also by the delegates’ expressed concern for the fate of Third World Christians.

One resolution urged Christians to pray regularly for “suffering humanity and evangelical believers in Southeast Asia” and noted that “the agony of Southeast Asia stirs the heart of compassion of a watching world. Christians everywhere are deeply concerned for fellow believers caught in the webs of the sweeping movement of anti-God and anti-Christ forces. The rolls of the martyrs continue to grow at a frightening rate.” Indeed, the delegates were told in a situation report on Southeast Asia that several Vietnamese pastors had been martyred (see following story). Louis L. King, field director for the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) in Southeast Asia, gave a moving account of “dismantling” CMA mission forces there.

The resolutions were non-controversial and passed unanimously, virtually without discussion. Some observers saw them as echoing the action-consciousness of Lausanne.

Included was a call to pray for and assist “the persecuted church” in Communist-dominated countries and elsewhere. Without Christian protest, the resolution said, “oppressive treatment may increase.” A series of resolutions protested “lowered moral standards relating to sex, vulgarity, blasphemy, and violence” in the motion picture, broadcasting, and television industries. Another objected to “widespread … advertising which portrays social drinking as attractive, healthy, and normal behavior …” Still another urged public officials to “put the welfare of those they serve above personal and partisan interests.”

NAE executive director Billy Melvin, in a keynote speech, stressed “growing recognition of the importance of united evangelical witness and cooperative action across denominational lines” and pointed to the convention’s thirty-three workshop sessions as “practical help” in bringing this about.

A workshop for evaluating short-term missionary service was led by Dr. Vernon Wiebe, general secretary of the Mennonite Brethren Board of Missions Services. It collated experiences of different missions groups. One point made was that lack of continuity, especially in countries like Japan, where mission efforts take much time, is a weakness of the short-term approach. In Zaire, some nationals complained that short-term medical doctors were “learning” or “practicing” on them; hence the need to involve nationals more thoroughly from the beginning in short-term efforts.

Although a few students came back from the field “disillusioned” with the “humanness” of career missionaries, most groups reported that a significant number of short-termers signed up for further service. Language difficulties and the need for trained nationals rather than outsiders were also discussed, but the conclusion was that short-term service was “more good news than bad.” Still, Wiebe cautioned, “the short-termer will always be ancilliary; the bones and muscle will always be the career missionary.”

A workshop on China concerns emphasized opportunities and problems of Chinese evangelicals in America rather than in Asia. Pastor Eddie Lo of First Evangelical Church in Los Angeles cited statistics showing that the number and size of Chinese churches in this country had grown “phenomenally” during the past ten years. American-born Chinese are largely unreached, however, Lo added, and though 90 percent of Chinese congregations are evangelical, the prevailing attitude toward theology “is apathetic.”

Lo pointed to two North American congresses of Chinese evangelicals, one in 1972 and the other last August, as signs of unity. A “Love China” conference will be held in the Philippines this September, and the International Congress of Chinese Evangelicals is scheduled next year in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, thirty applicants are already awaiting the opening of the China Graduate School of Theology in Hong Kong this fall. Most encouraging of all, Lo said, is the commitment of 100 American Chinese evangelicals who are preparing to enter careers in mainland China “witnessing for Christ.”

Philosopher-author Elton Trueblood drew a standing ovation for his profound but lucid commentary on the future of Christian higher education during a luncheon sponsored by the NAE’s Higher Education Commission. Church-related colleges that have blunted their evangelical witness generally are in financial straits today, the Earlham College educator declared. On the other hand, “Christian colleges that resist pressure toward pagan conformity on the whole are doing better financially.” Praising NAE educators “refusing to be conformed to the new paganism,” Trueblood said he saw little hope for Western civilization “unless we can build up a great community of Christian intellectuals.” And he observed that evangelical schools, “little institutions without prestige, may be the very means by which [spiritual] renewal is achieved.”

A somber note was sounded by Pastor W. A. Criswell of the 18,000-member First Baptist Church of Dallas. “Unless there is intervention from heaven,” he said, “by the year 2000 only 2 percent of the world’s population will be evangelical.”

Over all, the NAE this year appears robust, though hardly the avant-garde of evangelicalism. Good administration and financing, under the leadership of Melvin and NAE president Paul Toms of Boston’s Park Street Church, plus the infusion of some younger persons and a thrust toward taking social action more seriously, were generally credited by observers as the reasons for NAE health.

There are various membership levels in the NAE; individuals, churches, religious agencies, and denominations can all join. Some 30,000 churches are represented by NAE members, according to official estimates. Twenty-three denominations belong to the NAE’s military chaplaincy-endorsem*nt commission. The NAE estimates it serves a constituency of 3.5 million persons.

For some, the big disappointment of the convention was a poorly attended fasting and prayer “non-dinner” intended to dramatize world hunger. Sponsored by the World Relief Commission, the event attracted only 138 persons, who were handed five-ounce packets of millet (used as bird feed in the U.S.) instead of usual dinner fare. The packets represent the average daily food allotment of millions in starvation areas. An hour later, however, more than 1,000 persons jammed the International Hotel Ballroom for a musical program and a message by Leighton Ford.

Toms and his first and second vice-presidents—CMA president Nathan Bailey and President Carl Lundquist of Bethel College and Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota—were reelected for a second two-year term. Lester C. Gerig, president of a Fort Wayne life insurance company and member of the Evangelical Mennonite Church of North America, was named NAE Layman of the Year.

New officers are D. Howard Elliot of Topeka, secretary, to replace Cordas C. Burnett, who for health reasons did not seek to retain the post he had for nineteen years; and the Reverend Arthur Gay, Jr., pastor of South Park Church, Park Ridge, Illinois, treasurer. Although there are only two women on the NAE Board of Administration this year, that’s twice as many as a year ago, “and there are plans to systematically increase this,” said the Reverend Robert P. Dugan of Lakewood, Colorado, an Executive Committee member.

Dugan, representing younger blood and leaning toward politics instead of an ecclesiastical career, was elected program chairman for the 1976 Convention. That convention will be held February 23–26 in Washington, D. C., jointly with the annual meeting of the NAE affiliate, National Religious Broadcasters.

NO MORE MOURNING MAÑANA

Thousands of mourners, most of them Cubans who fled their homeland after Fidel Castro came to power, crowded into and around the Church of the Soldiers of the Cross of Christ in Union City, New Jersey, one day last month. At the front of the church were the twin white coffins of 11-year-old Esli Hall and her brother Robert, age 6. They had been kidnapped and murdered by a man yet unknown.

A family friend sang a song the children’s father, once a teacher in Cuba but now a maintenance worker in Newark, had composed. It was a song of Jonathan and David and love. Then the diminutive, black-shawled mother, Elsa Hall, stepped to the pulpit. Reporter Peter Kihss summarized part of what she said:

“Leave the things of life,” she implored. “This is not life. Life is Christ. Life is salvation, where there is no more grief, no more tears. May all of you here make a promise from today on. Look for God. Prepare your life. Accept Christ.”

As for herself, she added, “I have faith and hope. Soon I will see my children.”

Out of the church and through the streets walked the mourners, escorting the slow-moving hearse and funeral cars. They stopped at a stadium for a community-wide memorial service. Again Mrs. Hall pointed to Christ and urged her hearers to turn to him and away from corruption and sin.

The procession moved on to the cemetery, more than a mile away. Amid the tears and sobbing Pastor Roland Stone, who was Orlando Pena in Cuba, pledged:

“Esli and little Robert, en la mañana veremos [we shall see you in the morning].”

Left Behind In South Viet Nam

The following update on South Viet Nam, written by News Editor Edward E. Plowman, is based in part on his interviews with government officials, mission leaders, and missionaries recently returned from Southeast Asia. It is also based on news-service reports and on accounts filed by correspondents Tom Steers in the Philippines and G. Edward Roffe in Laos.

Reliable sources confirmed last month that the seven American missionaries¹The seven are Mr. and Mrs. Norman Johnson of Hamilton, Ontario (Christian and Missionary Alliance); Mr. and Mrs. Richard Phillips of Bloomington, Minnesota (CMA); Mrs. Archie Mitchell of Ely, Oregon (CMA); and Mr. and Mrs. John Miller of Allentown, Pennsylvania (Wycliffe Bible Translators). With the Millers is their pre-school daughter. missing after the fall of Ban Me Thuot in South Viet Nam (see April 11 issue, page 31) are alive. They and the five-year-old daughter of one of the couples were seen in a group of seventeen Caucasians in a stockade in Pleiku province. They were being detained with hundreds of South Vietnamese.

Other reports, unconfirmed, were less cheerful. Sources say Communists executed a South Vietnamese army chaplain along with other military officers in Da Nang. He was a minister in the Christian and Missionary Alliance-related Evangelical Church, the predominant Protestant body in South Viet Nam. The sources also tell of the slaying of a Protestant pastor, of several Catholic priests, and of scores of believers involved in education, business, and government leadership. Rumors were circulating at mid-month of the deaths of two Catholic bishops in the central highlands.

Observers say, however, that it may be a long time before the reports are verified or proven wrong. These observers point out that the Communists executed between 2,000 and 3,000 leaders who stayed behind in North Viet Nam after the mass exodus south in 1954. The observers predict the bloodbath in the south will be many times worse.

By April 24 all missionary personnel had been evacuated from South Viet Nam except for a handful of doctors, nurses, relief workers, and administrators. Christian and Missionary Alliance administrator Jack Revelle was having little success in arranging for the evacuation of key CMA nationals and those associated with several other missions.

Many nationals face an uncertain economic future. As they curtailed or shut down operations, some mission agencies gave generous severance allowances to their national employees (six months’ pay for them in at least one case). What value, if any, the currency might have under a Communist regime is not clear yet.

In an apparent first among the main denominations, a Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) unit sent a telegram urging North Viet Nam not to inflict terror and violence against South Vietnamese refugees.

Relief efforts aimed at helping the hundreds of thousands of refugees were continued last month by ecumenical, denominational, and independent agencies. Millions of dollars in cash, goods, and medicines poured into both government-and Viet Cong-held areas. How much actually reaches the refugees may be something else. A former medical missionary who served at Da Nang said the aid is often intercepted by the military, the rich, and others with connections. It is then hoarded or resold at inflationary rates—out of the reach of the refugees.

Church leaders in both South Viet Nam and the West debated the airlifting of thousands of orphans. The Vatican expressed displeasure, but leading Catholic Relief Services officials—who arranged some of the airlifts—endorsed the concept. The executive committee of the World Council of Churches took a dim view, condemning any use of the orphan issue for political or propaganda purposes. The committee also noted that a Geneva Convention guideline calls for orphans and lost children to be entrusted to persons of the same cultural tradition. A leading Buddhist in South Viet Nam demanded that all the children be returned.

The adoptive process had already started months earlier for many of the children; the airlift simply hurried things along. There were questions about some of the others.

“As we were leaving Da Nang,” said Judith Long, wife of an American medical missionary, “a number of parents wanted to give their children to us. This was an act of deepest love on their part. They knew there would be no future for their children under Communism.” Also, she pointed out, government officials said they could not care for all the orphans without the help of the volunteer relief agencies, and Christian orphanages would not be permitted to function under Communist rule. (World Vision alone was sponsoring about 15,000 children.)

Stories of the exodus from threatened areas are still filtering in. Southern Baptist missionaries Robert C. Davis, Jr., and Gene V. Tunell managed to escape Da Nang along with 6,500 refugees aboard an American freighter just hours before Communist troops entered the city.

A leader of the Hope Baptist Church in Da Nang saw his family off to Saigon but stayed behind to help evacuate the remaining believers. He and most of the congregation were unable to leave when hysteria and confusion gripped the city. The associate pastor of Hope pled for immediate assistance. Mission leaders chartered a small Vietnamese freighter to evacuate the Christians from Da Nang, but it arrived too late. Instructed to proceed to Cam Ranh to pick up Baptist refugees, the ship was diverted instead to Nha Trang where local authorities commandeered it. The Baptists at Cam Ranh, like those at Da Nang, were left stranded.

One youth from Hope Baptist made it to Saigon after five days of jungle and sea travel. He fled Da Nang, he said, because he was on the Communist death list. He had committed several “crimes” that landed him on the list: he had worked for the American Government, he was an officer in the Vietnamese air force, he had studied in America, and he was a student preparing for the Baptist ministry.

One pastor shepherded twenty-five orphans from Kontum in the central highlands. They were among thousands of soldiers and other refugees who were fleeing. Halfway to the coast they were forced into the jungle. On Palm Sunday the pastor and his orphans and other Christians paused for a worship service. After ten days they could go no further. Then a helicopter arrived. Aboard was a general, an old friend of the pastor. He shuttled the group to their destination.

The missionaries, many minus their personal belongings, have left behind houses, schools, hospitals, offices, and a lot of equipment, virtually all of it deeded to the nationals. They have also left behind a strong, though now disorganized, church. Its roots are deep, and it has been growing rapidly. For instance, says veteran CMA missionary evangelist Tom Stebbins, 3,000 tribes-people around Ban Me Thuot turned to Christ during outdoor meetings held by a Vietnamese pastor one month before the city fell.

Wycliffe Bible Translators has left behind eighteen years of translation and literacy work among tribespeople. On the day Ban Me Thuot was attacked, missionaries and nationals were making a final check of a translation of the New Testament in the Bru language.

CMA missionaries Charles E. Long and Truong-van-Sang (a national assigned to tribal work) recently completed translating the New Testament into the Jarai tongue. Believers among the Jarai hill people have grown from a struggling handful fifteen years ago to more than 5,000 today.

The missionaries are being reassigned elsewhere in Asia. Some will still work among Vietnamese. Cambodia, now closed to missionary work, has 200,000 Vietnamese. But, says national worker Doan-trung-Tin, there are 80,000 Vietnamese in Thailand (they have strong pro-North Viet Nam feelings), 42,000 in Laos, 100,000 in France, and 10,000 in the United States (before the current influx).

Open And Shut Cases

In rulings by two federal courts last month, racial discrimination was outlawed in admission policies of private schools, including church-related ones, and the biblical account of creation was shut out as required content in Tennessee textbooks.

A court in Richmond, Virginia, in ruling that blacks cannot be barred from private schools because of race, upheld a lower-court ruling based on the 1866 Civil Rights Act. The act prohibits refusing to enter into a contract with blacks because of their race. If upheld by the Supreme Court, the decision will affect the hundreds of segregated schools that were organized to skirt the high court’s 1954 public-schools desegregation ruling. Many of the schools are run by churches.

Relatedly, private schools would be required to submit annual proof of racial non-discrimination in order to qualify for income-tax exemption under an Internal Revenue Service proposal.

Meanwhile, an appeals court in Cincinnati declared unconstitutional a 1973 Tennessee law requiring public-school texts to give equal time to creationist views. The law stated that evolutionary content had to be labeled theory and could not be “represented to be scientific fact.” It also required that biology texts include the Genesis account. The court, agreeing with the National Association of Biology Teachers, said the law established illegally a preference for the biblical viewpoint—just as did the law that led to the famous Scopes Monkey Trial fifty years ago in Tennessee.

Psychological Studies: From Gothard To Gay

At last month’s twenty-second annual convention of the Christian Association for Psychological Studies in Oklahoma City, some 200 participants—mostly of Dutch Reformed background—delved into a diverse array of topics catching the interest of church members today.

Bill Gothard’s theory of spiritual gifts, taught in his well-attended “seminars on basic youth conflicts,” came under psychometric scrutiny by Dr. John E. Carter and Dr. J. Roland Fleck of the Rosemead Graduate School of Psychology in California. Gothard teaches that persons endowed with certain gifts of the Spirit as set forth in Romans 12 exhibit discernible character traits. These traits differ according to the gift as shown on lists Gothard has drawn up. Assuming that all of this is psychometrically verifiable, Carter and Fleck tested a large number of Christian-college freshmen, subjecting their findings to the sophisticated statistical analysis now prevalent in such research. Their results, though inconclusive, generally showed that gifts and traits do not line up the way Gothard says they do. The only gift in Gothard’s schema that correlated significantly with their testing procedures was “mercy.”

Many, including the researchers, agreed that the sample was deficient in its omission of believers in older age groups. Moreover, a non-Christian control sample would have added to the validity of their study, according to reactors in the audience. Nevertheless, the research into Gothard’s categories exemplified the possibility of empirical verification of the behavioral realities in Christian experience.

Three of the panelists in a symposium on the demonic expressed belief in the present reality of the biblical dimension of demonic activity. A strong dissent was voiced, however, by Dr. J. Harold Ellens, an articulate clinician and pastor of a Christian Reformed congregation in Farmington, Michigan, who averred that Scripture must be taken as conditioned by its historical and cultural context. Ellens expressed his doubts about the uncritical acceptance of a literal and unseen demonic realm, suggesting that the psychological scientists must bind themselves to empirical investigation and findings rather than to the assumptions concerning demons that were current in Bible times.

A symposium on hom*osexuality, Christianity, and the mental-health professions resulted in a second look at the standard evangelical view that hom*osexual behavior (as distinguished from hom*osexual orientation) is sinful. Taking their cue from a new study conducted by a Methodist, Dr. Thomas R. Clark, a practitioner in clinical psychology in Detroit, the majority of panel members agreed that hom*osexuals are no more predisposed toward neuroses or psychoses than are heterosexuals, that hom*osexuality is not a mental illness, and that the only real distinction is that of a non-voluntary sexual orientation toward the same sex resulting from a complex set of learning factors.

The possibility of a lasting cure was largely discounted.

Clark’s study of a rather sizable group of non-patient hom*osexual males in various occupations and professions, including professional sports, showed that these persons were functioning as normally and healthily as heterosexual males. Previous theories as to the psychogenesis of hom*osexual orientation were said to be inaccurate and no longer acceptable. Clark’s findings have attracted wide attention among American psychiatrists and clinical psychologists since they indicate that the vast majority of males, at least in their feelings, fall somewhere on a graded scale between hom*osexual and heterosexual, and are therefore ambisexual in varying degrees of intensity. In a majority of males, however, the heterosexual orientation predominates, and whatever hom*osexual feelings they may have are resolved in favor of a heterosexual lifestyle. However, when the hom*osexual orientation is strongly predominant, the ambivalence is resolved the other way, and the probability of any lasting reversal or permanent change is very unlikely, perhaps impossible, according to Clark and his colleagues.

In addressing themselves to the biblical-exegetical question of the sinfulness of hom*osexual behavior, the majority of panelists rejected the standard evangelical view that all hom*osexual behavior is sinful. They offered an alternative exegesis of the biblical passages relating to the subject: that God condemns promiscuity, fornication, adultery, and sexual permissiveness, whether heterosexual or hom*osexual, but that Scripture does not condemn hom*osexual behavior between committed Christians in a covenant relationship of love and loyalty. God’s “perfect” will is for the monogamous heterosexual family. However, according to the majority view, Christians burdened with an involuntary hom*osexual orientation could choose a committed hom*osexual relationship as within God’s “permissive” will rather than an unwanted celibacy.

Dr. Phyllis Peters Hart, a clinical psychologist from Chicago, declared that she had long held to the standard exegesis on the subject, but that the realities of her clinical practice led her to take a second look at the exegetical question. The upshot was that a strong case was made for thinking through again the meaning of the scriptural texts without compromise and without the imposition of exegetical or emotional preconceptions.

The symposium included a candid “testimony” by a minister of the Metropolitan Community Churches, a gay-church movement. He said he was both hom*osexual and a follower of Christ.

With the hom*osexual issue growing in intensity in the denominations, there seemed to be a deep sense of a need for further exegetical study to evaluate what the majority of the panelists, themselves professedly Bible-believing Christians, have come to think is the healing answer within the churches. No strenuous objections to the apparent pro-gay view were issued from the floor; audience reaction tended to be of the scholarly mull-it-over sort.

JOHN E. WAGNER

DIAL AN ATHEIST

Los Angeles Times religion reporter John Dart reports that when the American Atheists organization held its first convention in Austin, Texas, five years ago, only a dozen persons attended—and two of them dove under a table when the press was admitted and stayed there until the reporters left.

More atheists are coming out of hiding these days, observes Madalyn Murray O’Hair. About 160 registered for last month’s annual convention in Los Angeles, which was organized and conducted by Mrs. O’Hair. She says her organization, the Society of Separationists, has a mailing list of 60,000. Her ailing husband is president.

Helping to man the book table was her son Bill, 29, the central figure in the 1963 Supreme Court decision banning prayers in schools, a case initiated by the then Mrs. Murray.

The convention’s “atheist of the year” award went to Lloyd Thoren of Petersburg, Indiana, the owner of a small telephone company who ran a dial-an-atheist line in 1973 and 1974.

Convicted Watergate conspirator Charles W. Colson was voted “Religious Hypocrite of the Year” for “seeing the light” when faced with a prison term. (In reality, Colson’s conversion occurred months before Watergate began unraveling. He served a light jail term recently and is now teamed in Christian ministry with former Iowa senator Harold Hughes. They are based in Washington, D. C.)

On another front, Pastor Robert Bruce Pierce of the Chicago Temple-First United Methodist Church refuted Mrs. O’Hair’s claim on a Chicago radio station that the church pays no taxes on the twenty-two story building in which it is housed. The building, he said, is owned by a Methodist agency which paid $254,000 in real estate taxes last year. However, he pointed out, the one-fourth of the facility used for church purposes is exempt.