Page 5788 – Christianity Today (2024)

The Importance Of Sin For The Revolution (Tr)

Although “The Wages of Sin” by Professor v. Schlunk (issue of October 11) has merited attention in professional exegetical circles, it has been criticized by the widely growing community of revolutionary theologians, on the grounds that it reveals total bondage to a bourgeois mentality. One such theologian, Dr. Enrico Cabeza de Madera, has submitted a trenchant criticism in the form of a brief essay entitled “¿Revolutión sin pecado?” The manuscript, which arrived at our offices wrapped around a bomb, made such an impact that it seemed prudent to reproduce it in full here.

Prof. v. Schlunk has revealed his bondage to the oppressive class interests of the bourgeois milieu from which he springs in his essay “The Wages of Sin.” He writes as though sin were of significance only to the profit-oriented exploiter class. Actually it should be evident that St. Paul, although of middle-class origin, must have made a complete conversion to a revolutionary proletarian mentality, as did his noted successors in revolutionary thought who were also of bourgeois beginnings, K. Marx, V. I. Lenin, and Mao Tse-tung.

If Paul had been writing for a middle-class, exploiting audience, he surely would not have used the word “wages,” symbolic of the oppressed wage-slave struggling to retain a tiny portion of the surplus value of his labor confiscated by the oppressing classes. Instead, he would evidently have used “profits.” Hence it is clear that Paul addresses himself to the working class, or the proletariat, and seeks to promote the world revolution.

V. Schlunk is correct in observing that Paul wants to draw attention to the wages (not profits) of sin. However, he errs in eliminating the important third element, death, as mythological. Dialectical thought teaches us that a thesis (wages) and antithesis (sin) must be followed by a synthesis. To omit the synthesis death is to revert to a pre-scientific world view no longer possible for those familiar with Marxist-Leninist thought.

Paul, although writing obscurely in order to evade the censorship of the imperialistic Roman oppressors of his day, is evidently appealing to the wage-earner or proletarian to sin, as v. Schlunk has pointed out, mistaking it however for an appeal to the bourgeoisie. And the immediate results of this sin, as Paul states (not long-range, as v. Schlunk propagandistically claims), will be death. Insofar as death is a common result of violence, and violence is an inevitable prerequisite for true revolution, it is clear that the revolutionary doctrine taught by Paul envisages violence as a means of destroying the oppressor class and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat (and their intellectual leaders), which is doubtless what the Apostle had in mind in Galatians 5:1, “Do not submit again.…”

Of course, the Pauline emphasis on the wages of sin, so important in order to free sin from monopolization by the bourgeoisie, does not inevitably exclude the thought of profit, as evidenced by the lucrative sales of our revolutionary theological works precisely among the bourgeoisie. ¡Vica la revolución!

Now Convinced

As one who wrote to Dr. Lindsell expressing concern at the possible outcome and influence of Lausanne, let me now say that I’m convinced of its unique value to the evangelical cause throughout the world this century.

Goatbridge, England

On Sharing

The articles by Edith Schaeffer (A Layman and His Faith) have been encouraging and helpful. Not only does she display the commitment to Scripture sadly lacking in some quarters, but the application of those Scriptures is most helpful. We rejoice that the Lord has made available this kind of sharing in CHRISTIANITY TODAY and do want to support this writer and hope that she may continue to contribute.

We are thankful for your ministry in the magazine. It must be a monumental task to try and be fair and yet faithful. Thank you for your effort and thank the Lord for your success.

Greeley, Colo.

God And Banners

It was a surprise to me to read in your editorial that I had commented “favorably” on Salvador Allende’s attempt to introduce a peaceful Marxist revolution in Chile (“The Church and Political Ambiguity,” July 26). There is nothing in my article to indicate whether I would or would not include myself among the “many Latin Americans” for whom the former president of Chile was a symbol of hope! Ideological prejudice has prevented the author of your editorial from distinguishing between a statement of fact and a value judgment. The same applies to my affirmation that “according to a common opinion” the U. S. State Department played a part in Allende’s downfall. Representative Michael J. Harrington is in a better position than I to speak on the validity of that opinion, but it does seem to me that the Watergate case leaves no room for optimism with regard to the ways in which politicians often operate. That is beside the point, however: my article intended to be a statement of facts leading to a question that must be taken seriously: “Will Christians ever learn not to try to enlist God under the political banner of their preference?”

Associate General Secretary

International Fellowship of Evangelical Students

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Only One Side?

Having been an observer attending sessions of the International Congress on World Evangelization, to me it seems regrettable that the news report in CHRISTIANITY TODAY, “Sidelights at Lausanne” (Aug. 30), gives a one-sided report concerning Dr. Francis Schaeffer’s question regarding Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge. Those who truly know Dr. Schaeffer know his great faithfulness and courage in standing for the final authority of the Word of God and the importance of the true evangelical position in this day. They also know his unique consideration for the positions of every individual and the great Christian love in which he meets any opposing view.… It is possible that Dr. Schaeffer’s most earnest and powerful plea for evangelical seminaries to return to the position of faith in the inerrancy and historicity of the Bible, but in loving reverence of the personal worth and dignity of the individual who holds another view, may in the light of eternity have a greater impact for God than even Mr. Muggeridge’s brilliant, eloquent, and most thought-provoking address.

Oakland, Calif.

Wesleyan Women

This is in response to your September 13 editorial on the death of Methodist theologian Georgia Harkness (“Hearkening to Harkness”), in which you comment that “the evangelical camp has no prominent women theologians.” I’m not sure whose provincialism is showing or how stringent are your requirements of “prominence,” but may I remind you of Dr. Mildred Bangs Wynkoop. Mrs. Wynkoop, ordained in the Church of the Nazarene, has held several positions of importance and has authored several works of theology. After completing her doctorate at Northern Baptist, she served as chairperson of the department of theology at Western Evangelical Seminary and president of a seminary in Japan before accepting her current position as chairperson of her department in Trevecca Nazarene College in Nashville. Dr. Wynkoop also currently serves as president of the interdenominational Wesleyan Theological Society, a scholarly society of perhaps 600 members that is the Wesleyan counterpart to the Evangelical Theological Society. She has authored Foundations of Wesleyan-Arminian Theology and Love: The Dynamic of Wesleyanism, as well as other smaller books and articles.

Mrs. Wynkoop is one of the most important theologians in the Wesleyan wing of evangelicalism.… Methodism had her Georgia Harkness, but conservative Methodism has had her Mildred Bangs Wynkoop and a multitude of other women who have served as teachers, pastors, evangelists, and advocates of the cause of women.

Director, Mellander Library, and Assistant Professor of Theology

North Park Theological Seminary

Chicago, Ill.

• For a very favorable review, see February 1 issue, page 30.—ED.

Two Masters

For me CHRISTIANITY TODAY’s credibility is jeopardized by the “ifs” in the third paragraph of the editorial “Amnesty, Reconciliation, and Healing” (Sept. 13). By accepting the assumptions of the state instead of looking for Christian alternatives, you open yourselves to the charge that the government is ultimately Lord and not Jesus Christ. From at least the time of Moses, God’s people have been exhorted to “stand still and see the salvation of the Lord” (Exod. 14:13).… The power of the state is pervasive and its security seems obvious. But if we assume that the state has the authority to command Christians to do evil that good may prevail, we call into question our ultimate loyalty to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. As he observed, it is not possible to serve two masters.

Editor

Gospel Herald

Scottsdale, Pa.

Plugging Women

The article “Survey Results: Changing Church Roles For Women?” (Sept. 27) is the reason for my note to you.… For many months the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association has been thinking in terms of a … dedicated Christion woman for the board. This has already become a reality, I am happy to say. Also a terrific Christian [woman] board member has been added to World Wide Pictures. You will also be interested in knowing that the manager of the Christian radio station in Black Mountain, North Carolina (WFGW), is a lady, and the station is operating more efficiently than ever before. We have enjoyed having ladies on the committees of various Billy Graham crusades in different parts of the world.

Associate to Billy Graham

Montreat, N. C.

Physical Irony

Ironically enough, immediately following Richard Pierard’s statement on “sexist doctrines so latent in our faith as practiced today” (“Survey Results: Changing Church Roles For Women?,” Sept. 27), a news item by David Virtue begins: “She’s an attractive, six-foot German blonde, single, fluent in three languages.…” It is disappointing when Christians resort to characterizing women in phrases heavily loaded with physical attributes, while men are usually described in terms of intellectual or spiritual attainments. Happily, Miss Barend was cited because she is the first woman to hold a major post in the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Does it matter what she looks like?

Editor

Canon Press

Washington, D. C.

Free Pardon

I was shocked at the self-righteous reaction of some Christian leaders (Dr. Carl F. H. Henry and Dr. Hudson Armerding, particularly) to the pardoning of Richard Nixon (“Ford’s First Month: Christ and Conflict,” Sept. 27). Billy Graham’s comments seem to best reflect genuine Christian compassion. He has not forgotten that all true believers are sinners chosen without merit.… Does Dr. Henry desire that God had dealt with him with a pardon disciplined by justice or with a “free pardon” in Christ Jesus? It will not do to hide behind the truth that Christ met God’s demand for justice, for it is still true that Dr. Henry, Dr. Armerding, and all the rest of us hell-deserving sinners had our sin debt paid for by another and we got off scot-free!

Academic Dean

Southeastern Bible College

Birmingham, Ala.

ERRATUM

In “On Friendship and hom*osexuality” in the September 27 issue, the reference to Ecclesiastes should have said Ecclesiasticus.

In part one I dealt with poets who are well known to editors and anthologists and who thus stand a good chance of being read and commented upon in important places. There are other poets who may be familiar names in religious circles but are completely unknown to the poetic opinion-makers. They constitute a kind of poetic underground so far as recognition by the poetic establishment is concerned. These poets are often published by small presses whose output is rarely reviewed. A number of them merit discovery by the arbiters of poetic fashion.

The poets of the Christian underground are not equally successful. To make a point I cite the first eight lines of a sonnet, “Hill Difficulty,” by Lucile Brandt (The Flame Tree, Brethren Press, 1973):

Hard was the going, and the way was steep

Up the long hill o’er which the pathway led

And I, a pilgrim, weary, sore bestead,

Scarce in the rough and narrow path could keep

My feet, oft slipping.

What is going on in this poem? First of all, one notices the basic symbol, a journey, which was used successfully by T. S. Eliot in “Journey of the Magi,” has been used by countless other poets, and is still usable. So the poet has a natural symbol to express a spiritual journey. So far, so good. Then why is the poem not the equal of Eliot’s? Mainly, because it reads as though the poet were so intent on the message that the “poem” is rather mechanically superimposed. Note, for instance, the use of archaic words to fit the meter or give a rhyme: o’er, sore bestead, oft. The rhythm (iambic pentameter) becomes a mechanical tyrant, forcing the poet to pad out the lines or use awkward word order. Most of all, the poem lacks any fresh, vivid, specific imagery to make the journey alive in the reader’s imagination. To sum it up: the poet has a worthy theme and an interesting symbol for it, but is so preoccupied with “message” that she has not fallen in love with language and has not made it dance in an inseparable union of soul and body.

By contrast, take the beginning of “In Hunger’s Hunger” by Elva McAllaster, a poet who deserves and is beginning to get a wider public (the poem here is in the anthology Sightseers Into Pilgrims, edited by Luci Shaw, Tyndale, 1973):

Being famished for cathedrals, I went out

To look for crumbs.

This village has no board

Of fourteenth century glass, no Norman stone

When Chartres was building, bison pastured here,

And foxes barked.

Language becomes alive. It is not just a means to an end but a dancing radiance. And the mental pictures are sharply specific—“famished for cathedrals,” “to look for crumbs,” “bison pastured here, and foxes barked.” The theme is “incarnate” here—made flesh.

Another poet who, I am convinced, is destined to be known better is John Leax. Besides a sure skill in the craftsmanship of verse, he has an almost terrifying religious honesty, recording the despairs and dry times as well as the good moments. In “Letter to Ron” (published in Reaching Into Silence, Harold Shaw, 1974) he writes:

Remember the ease with which we spoke—

lyrical youths with faith

in art and Christ.

Mine broke first. I learned to doubt

in words.

What poems I commit

are wars with death;

my victories are pyrrhic.

The poem “After the Stroke” (about his wife) begins with the recognition of helplessness:

Beside your bed,

I cannot speak the prayer

that begs for your recovery.

The Groaning Spirit

who gives us leave to pray

withholds that comfort.

He has given me, instead,

sleeplessness,

open eyes to watch

the sweet liquid, fortified,

drip three days

into your needled arm.

My mouth stays shut.

The poem moves through one dark day after another until finally the poet’s wife is able to move her lips in speech and “one day, dominated, / they spoke as ordered / and blessed the name of God.”

One hopes that Leax’s recent book Reaching Into Silence will win him the critical attention he so richly merits. It is not hard to think of other fine Christian poets—Eugene Warren and Roderick Jellema, for instance—who merit a similar “discovery.” And then there are the somewhat better established Christian poets, such as Vassar Miller, who are often discussed by the critics in term of their doctrines, with little said about their poetic skill.

Perhaps I ought to conclude on a more personal note. I started writing poetry at about the age of ten but was a reasonably staunch agnostic into my late twenties. Sometimes I am asked, “What difference did your conversion make in your poetry?” My short answer is: “I live in a bigger house now, with more to write about. And there’s now less high seriousness in my poetry; I’m letting the words dance with more frivolous abandon.” That, as I said, is my short answer. I suppose I could put it in less metaphorical language and say that becoming a Christian has not kept me from writing what I would have in any case, but has given me new themes and insights that I would not otherwise have had. And if the surface of my poetry seems lighter, more playful than it did when I was an agnostic, perhaps the reason is that I no longer have to carry the universe on my shoulders. The affirmations of the Christian faith have more of the dance than the dirge about them.

Is there any way the poet, Christian or otherwise, and the Church can get together for their mutual benefit? I think so. Probably many poets would be intrigued and stimulated if asked to write words for new hymns and anthems, compose new responsive readings, even create a whole Communion service or devise mini poetic dramas as sermons. Occasional use of verse in these roles might bring alive experiences and truths that otherwise get embedded in the amber of time and custom.

If the Church is looking for a cooperative and experimental poet, it should not confine itself to official members. I have not looked into the Christian credentials of the British poet Philip Larkin, but I do know that he has a profound understanding of what a church is all about. His poem “Church Going” (in The Less Deceived, Marvell, 1955) could be a welcome substitute once in a while for the expected sermon. Here are a few lines:

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognized, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete.

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious.…

Perhaps Larkin speaks from experience, perhaps from sympathetic imagination; it doesn’t matter. The poem is what counts.

Speaking as a poet who is also a Christian, I would not want my relation with the Church (i.e., my relation as poet) to become too thick or sticky. Good fences, with frequent gates along the way, make good neighbors. I have no desire for my bishop to order or ask me to “write a Christian poem today.” I choose not to submit my poems to a panel of theologians for dissection and analysis as though they were Pauline epistles. (Not that anyone has proposed this!)

The greatest Christian poetry has not been commissioned but has simply come about. The Divine Comedy grew out of Dante’s whole life—his psychological compulsions as much as his study of St. Thomas; his encounters with a pretty girl as much as his encounters with God.

Most of the time when I sit down to write a poem I am thinking about such matters of craftsmanship as form and meter and the antics of words. If the poem emerges as one with an implicit or explicit religious dimension, O.K. If not, O.K. I suspect the distinction is a false one, anyway. In some ultimate way, maybe a nature poem or love poem or poem about Watergate glorifies God as profoundly as an ode celebrating the Conquest of Canaan or the Resurrection of Christ.

My first obligation is to take my craft seriously and to play the serious game with lightness of heart. W. H. Auden caught the right spirit in this well-known statement:

“Why do you want to write poetry?” If the young man answers, “I have important things I want to say,” then he is not a poet. If he answers, “I like hanging around words listening to what they say,” then maybe he is going to be a poet [Poets at Work, Harcourt, 1948].

CHAD WALSH¹Chad Walsh is professor of English and writer-in-residence at Beloit College, Beloit, Wisconsin.

The editors ofCHRISTIANITY TODAYrecently interviewed Dr. J. A. O. Preus, president of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, which has been in the throes of a major theological controversy. Besides giving his side of the dispute, he put in context some terms like “Seminex” and “moratorium,” now household words to those who have been following the struggle closely. Here is the edited distillation of the exclusive interview, which took place in the Washington offices ofCHRISTIANITY TODAY:

Question. What is the main theological issue in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod?

Answer. The authority of the Bible.

Q. Is there more to the difficulties than theology?

A. When people are involved in arguments on any subject, political issues and personality conflicts develop, but these are a result of the main problem. The moderates by their constant discussion of personalities, distortion of the facts, and emphasis on personalities and politics are obfuscating the doctrinal issue.

Q. Who are the “moderates”?

A. The moderates are made up largely of clergy, and primarily of younger graduates of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis who hold to, or are sympathetic or permissive toward, the use of the historical-critical method of biblical interpretation.

Q. If schism occurred, what portion of the local congregations do you think would remain within the denomination?

A. We have had three schisms in the last generation, and no more than thirty congregations left each time. I would be very surprised if more than twenty-five congregations would leave because of the present struggle. The synodical structure makes it very difficult for congregations to leave, and the people are loyal to the Missouri Synod because of its doctrinal commitment and its educational program. Our thorough confirmation instruction gives the average layman a strong foundation in Christian doctrine. Most—say 95 per cent—of the laity are satisfied.

Q. Does the Missouri Synod have a ministerial surplus as do its fellow Lutheran denominations?

A. We have fewer vacant parishes than we have had in about fifteen years—about 300 at the present time. Some congregations are calling graduates of the so-called Seminex but the calls and installations of these men are unconstitutional.

Q. What are the requirements for a Missouri Synod pastor?

A. A man must be a graduate of one of our schools under a recognized program established by our Board of Higher Education and must be certified. He is then placed by the district president.

Q. Can those who have left the denomination return?

A. Yes, if they abide by the constitution and bylaws of the Synod. The Board of Control of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis will have to decide about the reengagement of any professors who joined the moratorium and were subsequently dismissed from their positions.

Q. What has caused the slide from orthodoxy?

A. I think the basic cause of Missouri’s departure from its former position is ecumenicity. We moved from isolation to closer relationships with other church bodies. And our men picked up other ideas at non-Missouri graduate schools.

Q. How can this be prevented in other seminaries?

A. We need to establish a recognized orthodox graduate school of theology.

Q. How many students are left?

A. About 200 enrolled for the fall term at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis.

Q. How about professors?

A. At present the faculty is made up of eighteen men.

Q. Concordia Theological Seminary has had a good reputation, hasn’t it? Was it not the largest Lutheran seminary in the world as well?

A. Concordia Seminary in St. Louis has enjoyed a very good reputation, and I am sure that with the new faculty members they are getting they will have an even finer one. They continue to be accredited by the American Association of Theological Schools and, while they are no longer the largest Lutheran seminary in the world, I am confident that within four or five years they will be back to their former large position. At present our seminary at Springfield, Illinois, is the largest Lutheran seminary in the United States and probably in the world.

Q. What really happened last spring? Could you give us your own version of the big showdown?

A. The events of last winter and spring go back a long way in history. Both of my predecessors in office, Dr. Behnken and Dr. Harms, attempted over a very long period of time and with great efforts to try to stem the tide of liberalism which was arising at Concordia Seminary. They were not successful. I inaugurated the Fact Finding Committee as a way of trying to get a fair evaluation of what the situation actually was. The Synod convention in 1971 upheld my efforts and, when I gave a report to the church of what the situation was, I think the overwhelming majority of the church supported the doctrinal position of our Synod and took the position that they did not want theological liberalism and the use of the historical-critical method in the Synod. They spoke very loudly concerning this matter at the New Orleans convention. The liberal element of the Synod, under the leadership of the St. Louis faculty majority at that time, took very strong exception to the actions of New Orleans, with massive protests at the convention, protests following the convention, and the organization of ELIM (Evangelical Lutherans in Mission), which has been recently cautioned by the Board of Directors of the Synod as being a church within the church. All kinds of political actions also took place.

Then in January of 1974 the Board of Control, after very careful study of all aspects of the matter, suspended Dr. John Tietjen, the president of Concordia Seminary, on charges of false doctrine and malfeasance in office. This was followed the next day by a “moratorium” of the students and then the following day by a moratorium of the faculty. After many efforts by me, by the Board of Directors of the Synod, and by the Board of Control to bring about a resumption of normal academic activities on the campus, the Board of Control on February 17, after giving the faculty full information and warning of its intentions (to which there was no reply), dismissed the faculty on the grounds of breach of contract.

This resulted, shortly thereafter, in the creation of Seminex, the term being a shortened form of “seminary in exile.” Seminex made use of a consortium arrangement with Eden Seminary of the United Church of Christ and the St. Louis University Theological School, which is under the direction of the Jesuits. Thus accreditation of a kind and a place for meeting were assured.

The faculty were finally asked to vacate their homes because housing was a part of their salary and they were no longer in the employ of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. The students of Seminex were permitted to live in their synodically owned homes and also had the use of the gymnasium, dining room, and library of Concordia Seminary.

Finally, in June, Seminex was incorporated under the laws of the State of Missouri with seven professors serving as the members of the Board of Directors. It started as a closed corporation: no parish pastors, no lay people, and no students on the Board of Directors of the institution. About 385 students eventually joined Seminex.

In the meantime, the theological issues that brought about the whole matter are no closer to solution than they were before. In a letter of June 5, 1974, the faculty indicated that they stand exactly where they did doctrinally before the New Orleans convention. Efforts have been made by the Board of Control and others to bring about a rapprochement, but no meaningful theological dialogue has been held in order to try to resolve the doctrinal impasse. Several professors have indicated they do not even wish to return to Concordia Seminary.

Difficulties also came with the placement of the students for a year of pastoral internship, and a real constitutional impasse was reached when Seminex graduates who were not properly certified by an official of a recognized seminary of the Synod attempted to push their way into the ministry of the Synod in an unconstitutional way, often with the cooperation of certain district presidents. This has produced another serious and unnecessary crisis.

Q. Is it true that Seminex is not allowed to recruit seminarians from the Missouri Synod college in Fort Wayne, Indiana? Have these students caused trouble?

A. It is true that Seminex is not allowed to recruit on the campus of Concordia Senior College at Fort Wayne, but a great deal of unofficial and underhanded recruitment has gone on.

Q. What will happen to the seniors of Seminex? Will they be placed?

A. Yes, but only in accordance with the constitution.

Q. How is that?

A. The final arrangement was that each graduate of Seminex could be certified for the ministry if he would have a half-hour interview with the faculty of Concordia Seminary. Up to this point very few students have come over from Seminex to be properly certified. The issue is the recognition of the Seminex faculty. Seminex appears to be operating either on borrowed money or on a shoestring. It did receive a large amount of money from a donor in Indiana and also, of course, received in excess of $150,000 in tuitions for the spring quarter. Even in the Colorado district, which supposedly favors Seminex, only 100 out of 40,000 members donated anything.

Q. Has there been an infringement upon academic liberty at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis?

A. We don’t tell our professors whether to vote Republican or Democratic. We didn’t tell them how to stand on the Viet Nam war, and we don’t tell them how to stand on civil liberties or the Equal Rights Amendment, but when we get to things taught in the Bible, we are talking about something else. To demand adherence to Scripture in the context of a Bible seminary is not to defy academic freedom.

Q. How does this battle affect Canadian and European Lutherans? Will it cause problems for the mission department?

A. I have been in many of our foreign mission fields very recently. Efforts have been made to inject our American problems into some of our sister churches, and I think this is immoral. While the relation between the Mission Board and some of our missionaries is not cordial at the moment, partly because of the seminary matter, I do not believe that very much of a problem will be caused in our overseas sister churches, unless Americans do so deliberately.

Q. What is the constitutional situation with regard to elevating your doctrinal statement to the Book of Concord?

A. At the Milwaukee convention we passed resolution 524, stating that the Synod has a right to speak on doctrinal issues and pass resolutions that become the official positions of the church. Now the so-called Preus statement was not an attempt to say anything except what the Missouri Synod was teaching in all its congregations. I received 10,000 letters, 90 per cent favorable. Hundreds of congregations passed resolutions endorsing it. But the critics are noisy. The resolution says that any documents agreeing with Scripture could be accepted as statements of the church. The whole thing is political because my name is associated with it and because it represented the conservative victory in New Orleans.

Q. Who drafted the statement?

A. Dr. Ralph Bohlmann of our Commission on Theology, now the acting president of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, was very helpful in the production of it. The vice-presidents of the Synod also gave many helpful suggestions.

Q. Would you say that the statement was not in any disagreement with either of the Lutheran confessions?

A. It mentioned some things that the Lutheran confession doesn’t. For example, it had a great deal to say in a systematic way about the doctrine of Scripture, biblical authority, and inerrancy, things that weren’t issues at the time the confession was formulated.

Q. Isn’t it true that the LCMS has always believed in the infallibility of the Bible?

A. Definitely.

Q. If you had it to do all over again, what would you have done differently since 1969?

A. I think I probably would have talked less. Diplomatically, I should have kept a little lower profile. My reports to the church would have been the same, though.

Q. We hear two views of Missouri: Preus calls the shots, plans programs, and stuffs boards; or, the conservatives who were voted in at New Orleans perhaps are right of Preus and are going farther than he would have gone. Is either view right?

A. I would lean toward the second one. I don’t really call as many shots as some people think I should. In fact, a lot of things are done without my even knowing it. For example, when the Board for Higher Education came under some fire last spring I was not even informed or consulted about its resolutions not to allow dissent from the “Statement of Scriptural and Confessional Principles.”

When the faculty and the students left the seminary, the initial reaction was total shock. Our Board of Directors met the week following, and the only question was: “How do we get them back?” I was part of that. Well, as time went on a second question emerged: “Do we want them back?” But the Board of Control took close to two weeks to realize that the faculty actually was gone and that there was a simple way to solve the entire problem—by bringing in the Missouri corporate law, which says if you are not here you are no longer on the payroll. Nobody had really thought that through. Nobody had really asked what we would do if a walk-out occurred. The Board of Control only wondered how to cope with the doctrinal problem.

Q. Over and above passing strict resolutions, how is it possible to ensure that there will not be a gradual deterioration of theological faculties such as there has been in Germany?

A. As theological education goes, so goes the church. If the erosion was to be stopped we had to do it at the place where the pastors are educated.

Q. Isn’t it unethical to teach something other than what one professes to believe?

A. Yes, but not all would admit it.

Q. Can you offer any suggestions to other seminaries or church bodies that might be drifting from orthodoxy?

A. Our battle has been fought largely on the basis of the relation of the seminary to the church and to the bylaws of the constitution. Our seminary, for example, is owned by the church. Its Board of Control is elected by the church. In a certain sense, despite our difficulties, I think we’ve had it much easier than would a decentralized group like the Baptists. A church must devise ways to get control of the seminary. You need to know the individual structure of each church in order to answer that question.

Q. Has Tietjen’s popularity affected the problem?

A. Tremendously. There are students in Seminex calling themselves conservatives who probably would have no theological problem with the doctrinal position of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. But they feel sorry for Tietjen.

Q. If the liberals come to power, would you be part of a conservative walk-out?

A. If the liberals win, which they are seeking to do, I think there could be a major split the other way, much larger than any we’ve had. Four hundred delegations at the Denver convention in 1969 were ready to walk out because we went into fellowship with the ALC. I calmed them down. This could happen again. As far as I’m concerned I do not want to take part in any effort to split the church. I would not be party to any effort to split the Missouri Synod or lead any dissident group.

Q. What is your evaluation of the media’s role in the coverage of Missouri Synod problems?

A. I think the news coverage has extrapolated the problem, confused the lay people, and made a brotherly solution to the problem quite difficult. I would have said this is an issue we ought to settle in our own house. But the seminary used the secular press to promote its position. Naturally, conflict makes for interesting reading, and the media didn’t have to be begged to get with it.

Q. To what extent is the difference over Scripture a matter of semantics, hermeneutics, and even epistemology? Obviously, the professors who voice a confession, then teach what we regard as contradictory to that confession, do not consider themselves dishonest. How do they justify themselves?

A. Obviously the whole matter of the liberal understanding of Scripture began with the question of epistemology. I do not believe that the differences in the Missouri Synod are any longer matters of semantics. I think we understand one another very well. Our principles of hermeneutics are not really so very far apart, except for the fact that the use of the historical-critical method by a small number of our theologians has given them what they believe to be the right to declare as figurative portions of Scripture that on their face and in their context are obviously to be understood literally. The use of the historical-critical method, which they claim is a neutral tool, opens the door to this kind of problem.

I do believe that there must be some people who are having moral problems over the matter of whether they are being honest with the church. It is very evident that the various statements of the Seminex faculty are becoming more and more revealing and more and more honest as to where they actually stand. This is to their credit, but I think it also points out the fact that the church really is seriously divided theologically and that honesty and integrity would require that those who no longer agree with the officially enunciated position of their church, a position clearly drawn from the Scriptures and the Lutheran confessions, really ought not to continue to disturb a church that in extremely clear language has stated both what it believes and what it does not believe.

There may be efforts to overturn the decisions and actions of the convention at New Orleans, but I challenge these people to do so on a purely doctrinal basis. They can talk about personalities, power politics, and all kinds of matters that only obfuscate the issue, but I would challenge the dissident element in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod to engage in an honest, straightforward discussion of the doctrinal issues. This they still are unwilling to do.

First of Two Parts

Voltaire said, “If you wish to converse with me, define your terms.” This is no easy challenge in regard to either Christianity or psychiatry, with the one divided into as many variations in viewpoint as the other.

“Christianity” I define as that faith based on Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ and as God, as set forth in that remarkably short book the New Testament and, in even briefer fashion, in the ancient universal creeds. This orientation to Christianity I accept with all its supernatural implications centering in and deriving from the life, death, and bodily resurrection of Jesus. In short, it is the belief that God has broken into space and time, into history, and that he cares for us.

As a Christian I find in the Jesus of history the peace of knowing a still point in this rapidly turning world. I am also in agreement with Walter Barton when he says:

As a psychiatrist I don’t believe that scientific technology has replaced God’s truth. Nor do I believe that psychiatric jargon satisfies man’s search for meaning in his life. By the same reasoning I reject psychotherapy as a substitute for the confessional forgiveness and reconciliation. My belief doesn’t diminish the effectiveness of psychotherapy as a tool to heal the sick in mind [in Healer of the Mind, ed. by Paul Johnson, Abingdon, 1972, p. 12].

Leo Bartemeier also said something that I would like to have said first:

I am a child of God, a product of my ancestors, my family, my parish and a physician among other physicians. My concept of being a child of God is completely apart and unrelated to the psychological concept of immaturity. My spiritual relation with God supersedes all my human relations and is as eternal as my immortal soul. My soul is not the same as my psyche, my mind or my mental processes. But it is through these that I conceive of the existence of my soul and its relationship to God [“Presidential Address,” American Journal of Psychiatry, July, 1952].

The problem of the existence of God is not a problem in psychology but one in history and in metaphysics. Bartemeier makes an exquisite point in saying, “If there is no God, then indeed is religion an illusion.”

Interestingly, a satisfactory definition of “psychiatry” is not as easy to find as one for Christianity because psychiatry has not been as careful as the Church in defining its terms. For working purposes it can be regarded as both a medical specialty and a social science.

As medical specialists, we psychiatrists realize that while our responsibilities are heavy, our objectives are clear. We belong to a noble tradition based on the simple yet profound philosophy that a live person is better off than a dead one, and that a well person is better off than a sick one.

As physicians, with a clear mandate to treat our fellow citizens who suffer from mental diseases, we are charged with an awesome responsibility necessitating the strictest probity. As Francis Braceland expresses it, “the codes of behavior in the case of medicine must be stringent, for we deal with the lives of men.” The parameters of mental diseases are not always clear, the methods of therapy are often very personalistic, and the decisions we make as we deal with our patients can affect, for good or for ill, the most intimate aspects not only of their lives but of those of their loved ones as well.

The prime responsibility of the physician is to do the best for his patient, and he must take, and show that he takes, the patient’s side. Bartemeier states:

The whole tradition of medicine is based on healing and caring for the sick as persons through constant personal contact between the doctor and the patient … and within this tradition psychotherapy has always been the keystone of psychiatry which wished to bridge the chasm between so-called normality and mental alienation [“Presidential Address,” American Journal of Psychiatry, July, 1952],

Gregory Zilboorg adds a correct, winsome, and almost religious note when he says:

One cannot heal or cure anyone unless one can identify one’s self with the sick person in question, with the culprit in question, with the guilty one in question and thus becomes the psycho-therapeutic agent of the person and not of society [in Searchlights on Delinquency, ed. by K. R. Eissler, International Universities Press, 1949, p. 329].

This he sees as the “essence, and the inherent postulative psychology of our specialty”—and so it is.

Dr. R. O. Jones, my own esteemed mentor, while standing firmly within the legitimate domain of psychiatry, takes us very close to religious matters in his 1972 address to the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada when he says:

More difficult to deal with than these social factors in the prevention and treatment of disease are problems seemingly inherent in the human personality: our greeds, our lusts, our aggressions, present major difficulties for preventative and therapeutic medicine, and for society. These are the very problems that psychiatry has struggled with over the past forty years. We need to increase our effectiveness in dealing with the human personality. In the meanwhile we can do better than we are now doing by psychological support, by counseling and truly accepting the model that we care for people irrespective of their disease [“Psychiatry, Medicine and the 1970’s,” Annals of the Royal College, 1972, p. 114].

What is this but a modern expression of the Great Commandment?

Psychiatrists affirm and would practice this noble tradition of medicine, with its stern ethic based squarely on the presupposition of the inherent worth of man as an individual. For our patient we desire not only a sound body but also a sound, conflict-free mind. Our specialty would bring the full spectrum of the knowledge and methods of biology, psychology, and the other social sciences to the benefit of the patient. We stand ready to give of ourselves over many hours of mind-stretching, gut-grinding psychotherapy in intense one-to-one relationship with our patient, to bring this often unverbalized presupposition to fruition in his life. In this, our identity as physicians is secure.

However, our identity as social scientists does not rest upon such a secure presuppositional base. The body of knowledge and technique of modern dynamic psychiatry is irrevocably linked to the brilliant pioneering work of Sigmund Freud, that great Columbus of the unconscious. His achievements were monumental, and our debt to him is enormous.

Despite his greatness, Freud was a man of his age. In full accord with the scientific temper of his era, he saw everything in terms of mechanistic deterministic philosophy. In his student days Freud was exposed to the aggressive materialism of Ernst von Brücke for six years, and according to Ernest Jones (Sigmund Freud: Life and Work) was captivated by it. Brücke belonged to a club of nineteenth-century Viennese scientists who were pledged to destroy vitalism, and it was he who coined the canny statement: “Teleology is a lady without whom no biologist can live, yet he is ashamed to show himself in public with her.”

It is in response to this deterministic philosophical orientation, and not only in resistance to his brilliant discoveries, that the roots of the opposition that so quickly arose against Freud are found. In this opposition—fundamentally shaped by Adler and Jung—we also find a valuable part of our legacy in psychiatry.

Adler (whose orientation was always strongly toward the social side of man) in the maturity of his career increasingly identified “social interest,” with its corollary, “social consciousness,” as the legitimate goal of psychotherapy. He saw clearly that the runner runs not because he is kicked off the starting block but because of the prize at the other end; that “the most important question of the healthy and diseased mind is not whence, but whither?”; and again, that “the creative power of the individual is a third determining force superordinated to nature and nurture as dominant determiners.”

Jung discerned a being suffused and dominated by his purposive, inherent, collective unconscious with its many potent component archetypes. He said, “The unconscious is continually active, combining its material in ways which serve the future.” One of the enduring contributions was his recognition of the importance of religious outlook to mental health, particularly in the second half of life. Jung steadfastly insisted that psychotherapy could not be value-free, and that it was the responsibility of the therapist to know his own value system in order not to impose it on his patient—“the question of moral responsibility is inherent in analytic practice.”

And this reaction has continued: Rank with his “will therapy” and emphasis on “the recognition of the self in the other”; Meyer and his “commonsense” psychobiology; Sullivan with his stress on interpersonal relations; Horney with her “healthy striving toward self-realization”; Fromm with his “basic need for relatedness”; Erikson with his “nuclear conflicts,” ranging from basic trust versus mistrust, through identity versus role diffusion, to integrity versus disgust, despair; Franckl with his “will to meaning”; Tournier with his “therapy of the whole person”; and the so-called Third Force in psychology, Allport and Matson et al., with their constant emphasis on the importance of “the self.” Within orthodox psychoanalysis there has also been a move away from the strict psychogenetic determinism of Freud. This was initiated by Anna Freud in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, and brought to the forefront by the ego psychologists, led by Hartmann with his postulates of both a “primary autonomy” and a “secondary autonomy” of the ego. How to distinguish between an ego with this degree of “autonomy” and the ages-old concept of the soul I leave to others more artful than myself to discern.

This overview of the varied origins of our profession would be less than complete without mention of the continuing vigorous expression of mechanistic deterministic philosophy within scientific psychology. In his book Battle for the Mind, William Sargant raises an important warning regarding the dangers of the manipulation of man that are inherent in Pavlovian conditioning and other brainwashing techniques. As examples of these techniques Sargant cites abreaction and “certain forms of psychotherapy,” as well as the Wesleyan revival. But he seems to fall into the very trap he deplores when he sees man as so much like a dog, rather than from the perspective of Shakespeare’s “What a piece of work is man!… In action, how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.”

The expression of this doctrine has not abated in the seventies. Kenneth Clark, in his 1971 presidential address to the American Psychological Association, advocated the use of drugs to contain human cruelty and destructiveness, and proposed that “a requirement imposed upon all power-controlling leaders and those who aspire to such leadership … would be that they accept and use the earliest perfected form of psychotechnological, biochemical intervention.” In the same year B. F. Skinner (Beyond Freedom and Dignity) decried the freedom, dignity, and individual worth of man and proposed the survival of the culture as the ultimate good. He cogently articulates the logically consistent development of the philosophy of determinism in the moral sphere. How quickly within this philosophical framework the study of man’s behavior turns toward making men behave! Science in the service of man can be turned against man. [To be continued]

Western nations are now suffering from greater instability than they have experienced for many years. Failing economies, roaring inflation, debilitated institutions, shaky political alignments, and talk about world depression have created vast, gnawing uncertainties for ordinary people. The “good old days” now seem better than ever. They did in the early sixteenth century, too. Europe was then in the throes of a profound social upheaval that in the end was to be yoked, perhaps surprisingly, to the cause of the Protestant Reformation. The plowing of the old ways did not lead to disaster, as it might have done, but to a renewal of Christian and national life, the effects of which have endured to this day. The celebration of these events on Reformation Sunday this year should be a reminder to us that our present turmoil, far from driving out biblical faith, may provide just the right soil for it.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century Europe was seething with discontent; it was ripe for revolution on religious, economic, and social grounds. The saying often quoted by Catholics at this time was entirely wrong:

Had Luther never penned a book

Germany’d have remained a peaceful nook.

On the contrary, society in most of its aspects was at the point of disintegration. Massive changes would have taken place had Luther never been born, but the changes would have produced a secular revolution; with Luther they produced a religious reformation. In the course of fifty years, from 1520 to 1570, what had been built up over a thousand years was completely reshaped and revitalized along Christian lines. James I. Packer stated the matter well when he wrote:

Without Luther, nationalistic revolts against the Papacy and Empire would still have taken place; absolutism and capitalism would still have reshaped community life; the principle that the civil power determines the form of religion in its own territory … would still have been established in Western Europe, the Renaissance would still have run its course, secularizing culture and challenging all forms of authoritarianism; but the gospel would not have been recovered, nor would Christian faith and life have been renewed, nor would there have been any evangelical leaven to work in the upsurging life of the new national states. There would have been no Bucer, Tyndale, Cranmer, or Calvin, for all these were Luther’s disciples [“Luther,” in the papers of the Puritan and Reformed Studies Conference, London, 1965].

That the Reformation was essentially religious in nature is now generally conceded. Great as its impact was on sixteenth-century culture, it nevertheless began with a lonely monk’s anguished search for forgiveness, and it never lost this basically religious aspect.

Despite earlier Catholic denigration of Luther as a syphilitic profligate, it is now commonly accepted that he really was a monk’s monk. Indeed, he was too conscientious. He tried to observe the rules, especially those relating to confession, with absolute faithfulness. The more sin he dredged up for confession, the more sin he found to confess; and the act of confessing rewarded him with neither comfort nor release. His wise guide and counselor, Staupitz, directed him to the study of Scripture, and here he found the gracious forgiveness that had formerly eluded him. The precise details are, however, obscure. Luther has left behind two accounts of this, but one was written many years after the event and with the passage of time may have lost some of its accuracy. At least it is clear that the new knowledge acted as a kind of leaven in his mind, traces of which are evident throughout his lectures on Psalms (1514), Romans (1515–16), and Galatians (1516–17). Long before his climactic posting of the ninety-five Theses, he had inwardly broken with the medieval theology in which he had been trained. October 31, 1517, saw the perfect coalition of thought and action, and this event, the posting of the theses, has been taken to mark the beginning of the Reformation.

John Calvin’s career as a Reformer began with a transforming encounter with Christ, too, as did Zwingli’s and for that matter Cranmer’s, but whereas the Reformation began in Germany with a symbolic act, in France it was marked by the appearance of Calvin’s Institutes in 1536 and in Switzerland by Zwingli’s preaching in the Zurich cathedral. Of Calvin’s conversion experience little is known. He was not inclined to bare his soul as was Luther. There was a touch of aristocratic blood in Calvin’s veins that was often misinterpreted as arrogant aloofness. In fact, his shyness obscured a warm and tender heart, as Stauffer showed in his study entitled The Humanness of John Calvin. Of his conversion he tells us only that at some time during his studies in France, “God, by a sudden conversion subdued and brought my mind to a teachable frame.” When persecution of the “Lutherans” broke out in France, Calvin fled to Basel, and here, in 1536, the first edition of the Institutes appeared. It was an ardent and eloquent defense of the Christian community addressed to the French king and subsequently categorized as a gem in the Church’s apologetic literature.

In England the Reformation did not become a movement of the people until after Henry VIII’s death. Initially it was an answer only to the needs of his shabby love life. The separation of the Church of England from Rome enabled him to dispense with his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and marry his second, Anne Boleyn. The so-called First Reformation Parliament (1529–36) did set itself the task of renovating the church but nevertheless denied any intention of varying from “the congregation of Christ’s Church in any things concerning the very articles of the Catholic faith of Christendom.” And it needs to be remembered that earlier Henry had defended the faith against Luther, arguing at one point that the “greedy wolf of hell” had devoured the German reformer and that it was from the belly of this wolf that he belched out “these foul inveighings” disdained and abhorred by the true flock. Luther replied that Henry was nothing but a crowned ass, which reveals the chasm that divided the English king from the Protestant faith. This chasm was never really bridged.

The Reformation on its theological and spiritual side, therefore, did not really begin as a popular movement until the reign of Henry VIII’s sickly son, Edward VI, and some have argued that it did not reach its peak until the reign of Cromwell, fully a century later. The English Reformation was far more complex and drawn out, but not less popularly based, than that in Europe.

Had the sixteenth-century Reformation followed the pattern of modern-day revivals, it would have remained an exclusively religious affair. As it was, the influence of reforming ideas began to percolate through all the layers of European society. This was perhaps not surprising inasmuch as no one then viewed religion as we do now. The Peace of Westphalia, which finally allowed each prince to choose for his subjects whether they would be Protestant or Catholic, perpetrated no injustice on common expectations. It was universally assumed that there would be an alliance between the faith chosen and the institutional and political environment in which it lived. Religious toleration was a much later development. The sixteenth century may seem brutally intolerant judged by contemporary standards. Men of this time would resort to persecution, however, because they were deeply concerned that the faith itself might be at risk. Judged by sixteenth-century standards, the present appears foolishly tolerant precisely because our age is no longer gripped by the ideas that reshaped Europe. Churches can rarely bring themselves to discipline even the most flagrant offenders. Today one’s religious experience is treated as if it were as private and personal as a toothache, and if our secular society should find some interest in it, it is the kind of interest that attaches to the aberrations of any eccentric.

Christian faith, the Reformers believed, was far broader than the simple experience of being saved; its teaching was to be implemented socially, culturally, and politically. In attempting to do this they exposed themselves to criticism both at the time and subsequently. Calvin was charged with being a petty demagogue who ruled Geneva with an iron fist against the will of its citizens. Luther was denounced as an untrustworthy agitator who first of all sympathized with the grievances of the peasants and then when they revolted in 1525 capitulated and urged the princes to crush them by force. Zwingli is faulted for precipitating a civil war in which he and thousands of other Protestants were slaughtered. Knox is remembered without affection by some romanticists for the way in which he publicly berated one queen and sounded forth against another in The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.

Undoubtedly the Reformers, like everyone else, made their mistakes. But the critics frequently overlook the fact that the Reformation was essentially a democratic movement. It was a people’s reform quite as much as a magistrate’s reform, and where the Reformers moved outside the jaws of popular consensus, they were repudiated. Calvin, for example, accepted the role of leadership in Geneva in 1536; two years later he was an exile in Strasbourg precisely because there was insufficient popular support in Geneva for his reforms. When this support grew, he returned to Geneva and built on it to implement his ideas. There was always opposition to what he carried out, but this is the genius and nature of every democracy; the minority must bow to the majority, but the common good is served not by its feeble acquiescence but by its unremitting complaints and criticism.

Likewise Luther took the utmost pains to see that practical reform never ran too far ahead of the common ability to accept it. While he was interned in Wartburg Castle, for example, his followers in Wittenberg almost fanatically began to dismantle Catholic religion. Luther was so disturbed that at great personal peril he reemerged and took charge of the situation. The Mass, he had said earlier, is an “evil,” but he now reminded some of the frenzied Wittenbergers that love is neither harsh nor coercive. Change can be no swifter than the common people can endure. What was needed was more education. To this end he himself wrote a treatise every two weeks for most of his life. The collected works of Luther, in the standard Weimar edition, fill ninety-four volumes and total approximately 70,000 pages.

Chief among the Reformers’ critics in the sixteenth century were the Anabaptists. The term “Anabaptist” covered a wide diversity of belief, ranging from hot-eyed millenarianists to sober pietists, from reckless revolutionaries to quiet pacifists. Yet they were agreed not only in their views on believer’s baptism but also in their repudiation of the Reformers’ use of the state to implement Christian ideas. By appealing to magistrates, they said, the Reformers had compromised their faith and perhaps even extended the reign of the Antichrist. The Anabaptists also had their dreams for a purified society, but these dreams did not include any reliance on the state for their implementation.

Undoubtedly the Anabaptists were placed in jeopardy by the kind of hand-in-glove relation that the Reformers formed with the state. While Anabaptists in certain areas had substantial local support, this was largely ephemeral, and they were never more than a small minority. Minorities always argue for freedom; this is the sine qua non of their existence. When the Reformers were but lonely dissidents in a Catholic world, they too pleaded for freedom from a “coercive” state in league with Rome. Had the Reformers continued in this peripheral position and the Anabaptists won popular support, there is little doubt that they too would have used the state and the Reformers would have been drowned instead.

The Anabaptist vision of a renewed society was so utopian that it could never have been anything but a dream. The choice in the sixteenth century was between those visionaries who lived on society’s periphery with no hope of translating their visions into practice and those who, like the Protestant Reformers, worked within the system for smaller and less spectacular gains, who sometimes made mistakes, but in the end saw the leaven of evangelical faith work throughout society.

Given the new power alignments in American religion today, the Reformation takes on an entirely new significance. It now seems indisputable that evangelicalism is beginning to assume a dominance on the American religious scene that it has not had previously in this century. It epitomizes, better than the other theological options, the deepest aspirations and the most enduring traditions that religious America feels. Now it must reckon with an acceptability that is quite new. This acceptability is at once disquieting and pregnant with opportunity. Evangelicals could find themselves drawn almost irresistibly into a shabby alliance with the status quo, at the most adding a touch of fervor to our widely practiced civil religion. On the other hand, the new opportunity we have for national, cultural, and social influence could open the way to the transformation of our nation. Like the Reformers, we have moved from the position of beleaguered dissidents in our society to something approaching the role of its religious representatives. What awaits to be seen is whether we, like them, utilize this rare moment, not to bask in the fading pleasures of acceptability, but to change what needs to be changed. To do this we will need all of Luther’s courage, all of Calvin’s insight, and all of Cranmer’s sophistication.

Yellowthroat

I was eighteen that summer, and working as companion-housekeeper to a retired schoolteacher at her cottage on an island six miles out from the shore of northern Georgian Bay. She was interested in nature and fairly well-versed in its lore. She had a habit, however, of referring to birds and other wild things as if I knew all about them. City bred, and never having had the privilege of wilderness vacations, although I was fascinated and thrilled by the beauty and wonder around me, I knew almost nothing about it.

The one thing that stands out in my mind from that long-ago golden summer is that I learned the call of the Maryland yellowthroat. “Witchety, witchety, witchety,” my companion would exult every so often, “there’s the Maryland yellowthroat!” It never seemed to occur to her, however, to take me to the thickets where the tiny, sprightly elves lived close to the water’s edge and to show me a yellowthroat, or to give me any concrete information about it. I had no idea of the origin of that witchety little song that rang out so often on that northern island, nor was I aware of the wonders of the yellowthroat’s nesting habits, or the migratory flights that carried it from its breeding grounds in northern Canada to its winter home in the Caribbean and back again every year. How easily my interest could have been aroused! But my mistress never thought of sharing with me her joy in birdlife.

Nearly thirty-five years were to pass before I caught my glimpse of that elfin warbler with his brilliant yellow throat and saucy black mask flitting busily and restlessly about in a low thicket at the edge of a stream; and then someone pointed him out to me. I was utterly captivated. From that moment I took up birdwatching, and life assumed a new and very meaningful dimension.

But oh, the wasted years! Life is too short to wait so long to discover the rich rewards that such a study can bring—joys that were all about me all those years but unrecognized, unheeded. Why didn’t someone introduce me to the warbler that long-ago summer instead of just referring casually to its song?

All too often, is not this how we Christians communicate Jesus Christ to our friends? We speak of him in passing, we acknowledge his presence, but do we actually introduce him to them? “Show us the Father,” said Philip, “and that will be enough for us.” Do our lives show Jesus Christ, in all his winsome beauty, to those around us?

“Behold the Lamb of God!” exclaimed John the Identifier, pointing out the Lord Jesus to two of his own followers. And the two disciples heard him, and followed Jesus. Are others compelled to look at Jesus Christ because of what they see of him in our lives?—E. Margaret Clarkson, teacher and author, Willowdale, Ontario.

Convinced that the only proper way to celebrate evangelism is to do more of the same, Billy Graham and his team came back preaching last month to the scene of their first big success.

The low-key silver-anniversary commemoration centered on a three-night crusade in the Hollywood Bowl sponsored by CHRISTIANITY TODAY and a special committee of Los Angeles area churchmen. On the closing evening Editor Harold Lindsell paid tribute to Graham as a “spokesman to the world” and presented him a bound volume of congratulatory letters, a number of them from important figures in American life who made decisions for Christ at Graham rallies.

All three services were videotaped to be telecast later around the world.¹People in non-English speaking countries are now seeing crusade telecasts with lip-synchronized translations.

Graham also was honored at a Variety Club banquet attended by dozens of Hollywood dignitaries. He was cited as “a man who has spoken face to face with more people than any person who has ever lived—carrying a message of hope to a generation of people groping for answers.” The 55-year-old evangelist was given a “gold card,” only a few of which have been presented previously, and all to heads of state.

Graham politely acknowledged all the accolades but repeatedly disowned the credit. He asked the crowds to talk about God rather than Graham. Programs for the anniversary celebration carried on the cover the opening stanza of “To God Be the Glory.” Offerings in excess of expenses were channeled into famine relief.

The mini-crusade in the 17,500-seat Hollywood Bowl drew crowds estimated at 12,000, 14,000, and 15,000, despite a transit strike. A school of evangelism, the largest ever conducted by the Graham team in the United States, attracted some 1,600 pastors and seminarians.

Twenty-five years earlier, Graham and his associates had come to the sprawling, smog-bound “City of the Angels” at the invitation of about a dozen Christian businessmen. The revival meetings, as they were then called, were held in a tent on an empty lot at the corner of Washington and Hills streets (see photo). The tent held 6,000 persons. Graham recalls it was about half filled for the first service on September 25, 1949. The crowds began to swell, however, and the meetings were extended. Media interest was built up following the conversion of several Hollywood celebrities. The revival lasted until November 25, by which time word had been flashed around the world of the responsive Los Angeles populace.

Graham’s star has continued to rise ever since. His ministry grew to embrace motion pictures, radio, television, and literature—including the monthly magazine Decision, the most widely distributed religious periodical in the world, which this year reached a circulation of five million.

Graham said he had a strong feeling of nostalgia in returning to Los Angeles, where in the intervening years he has drawn crowds of more than 134,000 at a single service in the Coliseum. So did team members who have stuck with him since those tent meetings: Cliff Barrows, Bev Shea, and Grady Wilson. Several people who served on the sponsoring committee for the 1949 revival were platform guests at the Bowl.

The world has changed a lot more than they have in the last quarter century, and Hollywood is not nearly the cultural pacesetter it once was. Politicians and idealistic prophets are displacing professional performers in the public mind.

For their part, Crusade workers today are much more reticent about releasing the names of notables who respond to Graham’s invitation to receive Christ. They are more interested in doing discipling follow-up among all comers, and improving efficiency at all levels. On the whole, however, the evangelistic methods used in the tent are much the same. And the Gospel that is preached is identical.

Helping, Guilty Or Not

Chicago’s near north side was called “Little Hell” when D. L. Moody ran a Sunday school of 1,500 there a century ago. Conditions haven’t improved much since. The biggest police scandal of Mayor Daley’s tenure erupted last year when scores of Chicago’s “finest” were found to be on the take from night-club operators and vice lords in the area.

Neighborhood black ghetto youths from the Cabrini-Green housing project (pop. 13,275; 70 per cent fatherless families) have little more than high-rise apartments of the Gold Coast super-rich to look up to. Many are bitter about the system. Five years ago one stood on a chair in a church coffeehouse and shouted at the staff, “Put your Jesus back in your bag and keep him there. I’ve lived in this neighborhood for ten years and haven’t seen you do anything to help us.”

Gang fights forced LaSalle Street Church, located two blocks north of Moody Bible Institute, to close the coffeehouse. But the small church (125 members) picked up the youth’s challenge and now sponsors a plethora of neighborhood ministries. These include a free legal-aid clinic, a counseling center (with graduated fees), skill-teaching youth programs, a bookstore and art gallery tailored to avant-garde young urbanites, nutritional meals and outings for senior citizens, and other means of “bringing relief to suffering and healing to hurt.”

LaSalle’s legal-aid clinic is believed to be the only one in the nation run by an evangelical church. It is headed by Chicago attorney Charles V. Hogren, a 38-year-old bachelor who is a graduate of Wheaton College and Northwestern University Law School. During 1973, its first year of operation, the clinic handled 233 cases. Of the eighty-nine criminal dispositions presented, fifty-four were either dismissed or given a verdict of not guilty.

The idea for the clinic grew from Hogren’s involvement in LaSalle Street’s tutoring program for illiterate neighborhood youths. “Word got around that I was a lawyer,” he recalls. “Parents began calling me to help get their kids out of jail. I was probably the only lawyer they knew.”

When Hogren’s after-hours case load reached twenty, he suggested to Pastor William Leslie that the church sponsor a legal-aid clinic, and Leslie concurred.

At first glance, Pastor Leslie’s enthusiasm for the project seems out of character with his background: he once served as student-body president at Bob Jones University, which has a policy of segregation. After his junior year, however, he dropped out. “I had a little falling out with the founder over blacks and some other issue” is all he will say. After graduating from Wheaton College’s graduate school, he became pastor of the largest Conservative Baptist church in Illinois, at Pekin, and then became Pastor Alan Redpath’s assistant at Moody Church in Chicago. While at Moody he became concerned about the struggling LaSalle Street Church a mile away, which was on the verge of being crushed by rapid population changes. Soon after moving to LaSalle in 1961, he concluded that to build a vital ministry required a transfusion of mature Christian leaders who could come as missionaries from stronger churches. One he recruited was Hogren, a layman at Moody Church.

Hogren offered to resign most of his private practice and head up the legal-aid clinic. He pointed out that a neighborhood black youth charged with a misdemeanor might receive little or no help at all from the city public defender’s office. Guilty or innocent, said Hogren, a ghetto youth often could not make bail and might be jailed with hardened criminals before his case came to court. On the other hand, a youth from a middle-class white family was usually released on recognizance.

The church agreed to sponsor the clinic if outside funding could be secured. An evangelical foundation pledged $15,000 for rental of two offices and the salaries of Hogren and a secretary. Nearby DePaul University Law School authorized up to six hours of credit for student interns to assist Hogren at the clinic. The dozen DePaul students now involved—all but two of them black—do research, reports, and interviews of clients and witnesses. Seniors handle some trials.

While the legal-aid ministry operates on a no-strings-attached basis, the evangelical cause has nevertheless benefited. One of the law-school interns, formerly bitter at what he considered was the church’s lack of involvement in human suffering, has become a Christian. Neighbors whose youngsters have been helped have begun showing up at church services. Others see the church in a new light and are less hostile.

The clinic has more work than it can handle. Another Christian attorney is ready to join the staff at a sharp cut in income. But, says Hogren, the clinic’s financial situation is desperate. The original foundation grant has run out, a loan of $7,000 from the church’s own limited funds has been depleted, and unless other support sources are found, the clinic will close this month.

Still, Leslie and Hogren are hopeful. “Christ identified with the repressed and exploited,” Leslie says. “We must be willing to take risks and do no less.”

JAMES C. HEFLEY

Cornelius: At Home In Rome

Not everyone appreciates the Cornelius Corps, of course. On a warm morning in the outskirts of Rome recently one woman, when offered a tract, turned away and said tartly: “I have my own religion; I have no use for that.”

Corps workers don’t knock Roman Catholicism, or any religion, for that matter; they just preach Christ and personal salvation through him. Those who show interest are invited to attend one of twenty home Bible studies conducted weekly by team members. And those who confess Christ are channeled to a central worship service held once a week in a leader’s apartment. These converts are the nucleus of a congregation that will remain after the team has gone.

Saturation-type evangelism overseas, by young people serving as short-term missionaries has been effective before, particularly by such groups as Youth With a Mission and Operation Mobilization. But Royal Peck, Greater Europe Mission’s man in Italy, thinks he has come up with a new twist that could have great potential for the church’s worldwide mission program.

Cornelius Corps is a pilot program in an urban area of northeast Rome and the realization of a dream Peck has had for more than fifteen years. The basic concept is that young workers are to give two years to the tasks usually associated with career missionaries: pioneer evangelism, church-planting, and discipling of new believers.

The first team of twenty-five men and women, ranging in age from 21 to 42, arrived in Florence a year ago for an intense three-month language program (Peck and other leaders are impressed by how quickly short-termers learn). The corps includes students, teachers, and several businessmen, from eleven U.S. states and four Canadian provinces. Last December they were transferred to apartments in Rome’s Val Melaina-Nuovo Salario, an upper-middle-class area of high-rise apartments. A target area of twenty-four square blocks with a population of about 150,000 had been selected. “As far as we knew,” says Peck, 48, an enthusiastic man who has lived in Rome for twenty years, “there wasn’t a single evangelical Christian living in the whole area.”

Each corps member raised his own support of $288 a month plus $2,000 cash from churches and friends before leaving North America. Since most of the workers are single, expenses are relatively low. And Peck cites another advantage also: many Christian young people who might hesitate to make long-range commitments are glad to give several years in overseas missionary service.

The corps started work in a thirteen-block primary area within the target community in a low-key ministry of presence. For a month and a half they walked around, getting to know people, pushing stalled cars, carrying groceries, doing free baby-sitting, teaching English. “Each day the twenty-five prayed that the Lord would allow them to help someone in a concrete way,” said Peck during an interview in a Rome sidewalk cafe. “We wanted to visibly demonstrate the love and concern of Christ.”

Last April 15 “operation friendship”—the first phase—was converted into the evangelistic “invasion” of the prime target.

Each day corps members converge on the community’s main open-air marketplace. They hand out tracts, tell Bible stories to youngsters, give testimonies, sing. All communication is in Italian. Cornelius Corps is there, and the Italian residents know it. They know also that the team will be around tomorrow, and next week, and next year.

Between April 15 and August 1, Peck said, there were more than eighty professions of faith, seventy of them by target-area residents. Half the confessions have been by adults, and Peck estimates that fifteen to twenty of these “are continuing in the Word.” He says that since April the team has conducted ninety open-air encounters, made door-to-door calls on 1,500 families, and distributed 5,000 tracts and 750 Bibles or Bible portions.

Although he stresses that the program is experimental, Peck is cautiously optimistic. During the previous twenty years of his work in Rome, he pointed out, he averaged about fifteen converts a year with half of them progressing in discipleship.

A difficult, hard-to-crack area and class of people were chosen, Peck continued, in order to estimate the chances of future success in other places. Cornelius Corps II is already forming; it is due to join Corps I in January. Greater Europe Mission leaders will take a hard look at the program after Corps II ends its two-year stint.

Peck and his co-worker wife, Elizabeth, hope it will serve as a pattern for local church-planting worldwide.

RUSSELL CHANDLER

Religion In Transit

As a result of the United Presbyterian Church’s budget crunch and depletion of unrestricted capital reserves, the jobs of two dozen denominational executives and a number of clerical employees have been terminated. Meanwhile, a theologically conservative group—concerned about both economic and theological issues—is studying way to guarantee support of evangelical overseas missionaries. The group has not ruled out the possibility of forming a new missions board.

Writing in the Asian Report, researcher Paul E. Kauffman says 300,000 on the Indonesian island of Kalimantan have been baptized in the last nine years.

Tennessee’s 1973 “Genesis Law” was ruled unconstitutional by a Nashville court. The law, scheduled to take effect next year, required public school biology texts to give equal space to biblical and evolutionary accounts of the origin of life, and to specify that evolution is only a theory. Americans United for Separation of Church and State was among the groups challenging the law.

A stay order issued by a U. S. District Court judge has enabled some 200 Bob Jones University students (including eighty new ones this year) to receive Veterans Administration benefits until at least January 1, pending the outcome of a higher-court appeal by BJU. The VA had announced it could not pay benefits (averaging about $220 a month) to future enrollees because of BJU’s admitted policy of racial discrimination in admissions.

The National Council of Churches’ special ministries unit will establish “information, counseling, and support services” in the United States and Canada for Viet Nam war resisters responding to President Ford’s clemency program. The plans include a counseling center for military deserters at Indianapolis.

At the recent centennial meeting in Cleveland of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, WCTU president Mrs. Fred J. Tooze said U. S. alcoholic consumption increased by 115 million gallons between 1972 and 1973. Total consumption last year was 4.8 billion gallons, an annual per capita amount of “twenty-three gallons of booze” for every American, said Mrs. Tooze, citing a U. S. Treasury Department report.

Nearly 2,000 claims by persons over age 45 have been registered against the bankrupt Calvary Temple of Denver and related enterprises. Pastor Charles E. Blair, whose 2,000-family church is in receivership, has vowed that the investors will be repaid.

More than 100 members of the traveling “Christ Is the Answer” Jesus people’s group were jailed in Decatur, Illinois. Police say the youths failed to leave a K-Mart department store where they were leafleting shoppers.

Noted Minnesota surgeon William A. Nolen, who wrote the best-selling The Making of a Surgeon, says in a forthcoming book he couldn’t find a single cured patient among twenty-six persons who thought they had been healed in meetings conducted by evangelist Kathryn Kuhlman. Follow-up studies, he asserts, showed that two cancer patients were in much worse shape, some didn’t suffer from the disease reported, and one left a wheelchair she didn’t need. Denying he was out to put down the evangelist, he says his own religious background had convinced him that faith could play a role in healing.

“Praise ’74” a three-day Christian musical happening sponsored by Maranatha Village in Santa Ana, California, last month attracted more than 20,000 to the Orange County fairgrounds to hear Christian recording artists and to visit the booth displays of some 100 Christian agencies.

The United Church of Canada’s largest (3,200 members) and wealthiest (assets of more than $8 million) congregation—Timothy Eaton Memorial United Church in Toronto—invited an Anglican priest to become minister when Pastor C. Andrew Lawson retires next year. But Anglican bishop Lewis Garnsworthy of Toronto blocked the priest, Herbert O’Driscoll, dean of Vancouver, from accepting. The bishop cited “practical problems” of relating to both denominations.

Maharishi International University, a Transcendental Meditation institution, opened with several hundred students last month on the campus of defunct Parsons College (“Drop-out U.”) in Fairfield, Iowa. Townspeople say they like the new look around town (MIU’s unwritten dress code is not unlike that of a fundamentalist college). At current rates, a four-year education at MIU will cost more than $14,000. MIU bought Parsons for $2.5 million (Parsons’s debt was $16 million).

A. D., the joint magazine of the United Church of Christ and the United Presbyterian Church, gave its second annual Freedom of the Press Award to Thomas Oliphant, a Boston Globe reporter indicted by a federal grand jury on charges related to his coverage of the Wounded Knee occupation.

Some 400 persons participated in the second national meeting of the North American Congress of Chinese Evangelicals, held recently in Wheaton, Illinois. A continuing committee was appointed to draft plans for a national organization and for other cooperative endeavors.

More than 500 delegates and observers took part in the 800-congregation Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada’s twenty-ninth biennial general conference in Regina, Saskatchewan. Alberta district superintendent Charles Yates was elected general secretary.

Born: Evangelical Thrust, thirty-six-page monthly organ of the 1,000-plus-member Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches.

On what has become an annual pilgrimage to the Reformation sites of East Germany during the week after Christmas, my tour group and I revel in the heroic actions of Luther at the Erfurt monastery, the Wartburg fortress, and the Wittenberg castle church; and on New Year’s Eve we meet the shade of J. S. Bach as his chorales resound through St. Thomas Church, Leipzig, announcing another year of grace. But along the way we have contact with two places whose associations are very far from the Reformation era and the great period of Baroque orthodoxy.

These two historical sites are Weimar and Buchenwald, one the center of the eighteenth-century German “Enlightenment,” the other perhaps the most horrible of the death camps of World War II. Buchenwald is on a hill just above Weimar. Thus the epitome of man’s inhumanity to man was demonstrated just a few kilometers from the city that lauded man’s perfectibility. A chance irony? On one level, yes, but on another (the level where the Lord “laughs them to derision”?), a parable of the history of a fallen race.

Even today, in the suffocating embrace of the totalitarian-Marxist German Democratic Republic, Weimar is a perfect physical expression of the eighteenth-century “Age of Reason.” Its broad streets and rationally placed buildings impress the visitor with a sense of order and humanistic self-satisfaction. It is as if eighteenth-century Freemasonry’s Great Architect of the Universe had himself been hired to lay out the town. Here Goethe, Schiller, and Herder gave expression to the German Enlightenment and to its Classical-Romantic worship of Man.

As the greatest literary representative of the era, Goethe serves as our best introduction to its central beliefs—and myths. While a law student at Strasbourg, in contact with Herder, Goethe concentrated more on mystical flights of fancy (alchemy and occultism) than on the rigors of the Justinian Code, for he saw in the occult a possible means of romantic self-salvation. (During my doctoral time at Strasbourg, when I was preparing a theological dissertation involving the study of alchemical and Rosicrucian mysticism, I was amused by the non-romantic use the pigeons make of the statue of Goethe in front of the Palais Universitaire. Ironies of history abound everywhere!) In Goethe’s early Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”) period, human emotions were elevated to the status of means of grace. Subsequently, Goethe’s travels to Italy introduced him to the Classical ideal of eternal beauty and order and the Renaissance motif of the the universal man.

Goethe’s house in Weimar is the best possible illustration of the truth that architecture is physical liturgy. The house was built and furnished as an extension of the world-view of its famous occupant. Virtually every inch of wall space is covered with paintings, classical objets d’art, and evidences of man’s accomplishments—as if Goethe (a bit unsure of himself, like Faust?) had to remind himself continually that Man was indeed the apex of the universe. (In this respect, the contrast with Luther’s humble quarters at the Wartburg castle and at Wittenberg could not be more striking.) The height of the steps of the main stairway is abnormally low, even when the small stature of eighteenth-century people is taken into account; the psychological effect is to give one the feeling of a Gulliver striding into Lilliput. There is even a hallway, extending from one end of the house to the other, in which the door frames at intervals along it are so constructed that each is slightly larger than the one before it; as one walks along this hallway, he sees a full-length portrait of himself in the mirror at the end of the hall, framed in a series of enlarging frames: bigger and more important than life!

Theologically, Goethe embraced the eighteenth-century rejection of biblical revelation. He said of the crucifix that it was “the most repugnant thing under the sun,” and the idea of miracles was a “blasphemy against the great God and his revelation in nature.” But unlike the deists of his time, such as Thomas Paine, Goethe did not merely substitute “Nature” for “Scripture” as the source of truths about God; Goethe regarded Nature as God. One of his most famous aphorisms was: “When we study nature we are pantheists; in our poetry we are polytheists; in our morality, monotheists.”

Arnulf Zweig has summed up Goethe’s theology in terms that show its influence on and alignment with later evolutionism, Bergson’s élan vital, and contemporary process thinking:

Since every man is part of nature and, hence, of the divine, he shares the basic impulses of all natural things—specifically, the urge to develop upward and outward, the striving for an ideal.… Since there is no goal for man apart from his life, man struggles, like Faust, with the fear of life (Lebensangst) and is tempted by care (Sorge).

Thus the German Enlightenment rejected the Bible and the Cross, substituting for them Nature and Man. Man’s striving quickly became the only ultimate value, and he himself took on the functions of pantheistic Deity. His morals became the “monotheistic” reflection of himself as sole arbiter of value.

A hundred years after Goethe’s death (we are told that the clock in his house in Weimar stopped ticking when he died, and its hands still point to that moment), the inheritors of the German Enlightenment pushed tens of thousands of Jews, political opponents, and evangelical Christians through the iron gates of the concentration camp in the beech forest just above Weimar; most of them never came out again. On that iron gate, the camp motto remains: “Jedem das seine”—“To each his own,” i.e., “Each man gets what he deserves.” Note the logical (and inevitable) sequence: The Enlightenment makes man the measure of all things; modern man establishes the measure as he wills; and the strong, having devalued the weak, exterminate them. From Goethe to Nietzsche to Hitler is as short a step as from Weimar to Buchenwald.

The only counteractive to such a hideous sequence is a thoroughgoing rejection of the fundamental premise of the German Enlightenment. Man is not God; and fallen humanity is without hope apart from a clear scriptural word as to who God really is and as to the miraculous means he has provided for man’s salvation. “Fear of life” (Lebensangst) and the “temptation of care” (Sorge), when made ends in themselves, reduce to meaninglessness and the annihilation of human value. Only the Gospel—as the Reformers taught from the Angst of their experience in the light of Scripture—is capable of Seelsorge: the binding up of fractured souls.

I Love To Read Fast!

A noted publisher in Chicago reports there is a simple technique of rapid reading which should enable you to increase your reading speed and yet retain much more. Most people do not realize how much they could increase their pleasure, success and income by reading faster and more accurately.

According to this publisher, many people, regardless of their present reading skill, can use this simple technique to improve their reading ability to a remarkable degree. Whether reading stories, books, technical matter, it becomes possible to read sentences at a glance and entire pages in seconds with this method.

To acquaint the readers of this publication with the easy-to-follow rules for developing rapid reading skill, the company has printed full details of its interesting self-training method in a new booklet, “How to Read Faster and Retain More,” mailed free to anyone who requests it. No obligation. Send your name, address and zip code to: Reading, 555 E. Lange St., Dept. 690-09, Mundelein, Ill. 60060. A postcard will do.

Our report on Billy Graham’s three-night stand at the Hollywood Bowl, an event that celebrated his twenty-five years in mass evangelism, appears on page 52. Dr. Graham is a seasoned veteran who has learned a great deal since his first Los Angeles crusade a quarter of a century ago. But there are at least two things he has not changed. He still preaches the Gospel with particular emphasis on the cross of Christ. And he preaches understandably, so that young and old, educated and non-educated, rich and poor, all get the message.

I was very pleased to have the opportunity to pay a four-minute tribute to Billy Graham that will appear on nationwide television in December.

The First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, pastored by Lloyd Ogilvie, was the scene of the School of Evangelism, attended by more than 1,600 people. There I heard some outstanding speakers who are doing the work of evangelism. Dr. S. M. Lockridge, a black Baptist preacher from San Diego, was outstanding. He and three other black clergymen will appear in alternation on a weekly TV program about to be released by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

In a confrontation considered the crisis point in the fledgling denomination’s brief history, the newly rechristened Presbyterian Church in America (PCA; nee National Presbyterian Church last December) decided in its second General Assembly to consider itself as a city open to the world rather than a community needing the protection of massive walls labeled “Reformed.” At the same time it also, in effect, served notice that tongues-speaking charismatics would not be welcome in town.

It was a test of basic philosophies within the largely Southern-based church that everyone was expecting. Nobody, however, knew over which particular item on the agenda the battle would be fought. Ever since the organizing assembly in December in Birmingham (see January 4 issue, page 52), where the original lines had been drawn between hardline followers of latter-day Calvinists and those referred to by the hardliners as “evangelical,” the trenches had been dug and the guns loaded.

In Birmingham the church’s right wing, largely identified with some graduates of the new Reformed Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, had surfaced with such demands as that an absolutist stand be taken against so-called special gifts of the Holy Spirit, and against women’s work of any kind in the denomination.

Prior to the opening of last month’s four-day assembly, held in the First Presbyterian Church of Macon, Georgia (whose ante-bellum sanctuary has been placed in the National Register of Historic Places in America), observers agreed the denomination’s future would be decided over one of several subjects scheduled for consideration: charismatic experiences, inter-church relations, or overseas missions policy.

Setting the stage for debate, a large number of overtures (formal requests for action), chiefly from two of the church’s nineteen presbyteries, sought to guarantee not the slightest affiliation with any existing ecumenical or non-Reformed body, and to ensure that all extension work at home and overseas would be conducted either through established Presbyterian and Reformed churches or through new Presbyterian and Reformed work.

One overture to the some 600 commissioners (delegates) demanded that the PCA’s overseas missions agency “terminate its membership in the National Association of Evangelicals before the meeting of the [next] General Assembly.” (The PCA has thirteen missionary families serving in six countries.)

The battle was joined when a committee that had been working on the problem of overseas policy for nearly three days recommended missionary work in relationship “with other evangelical missionary agencies that welcome the services and teaching of missionaries holding the Reformed faith and polity.”

Four hours later, following debate that was spirited but never acrimonious, sometimes heated but always polite, and unblemished by unfair parliamentary maneuvering, the assembly set the pattern that will no doubt become a general operational philosophy in all areas: Presbyterian and Reformed, open to cooperation with evangelical bodies, searching the Scripture for further light.

The vote was nearly six to one. Nearly four dozen in the minority signed a protest, but as in the case of the wife who reported after fifty years that she had often thought of murder but never of divorce, no suggestion of division was heard—not even in the back rooms.

On the issue of spiritual gifts, the commissioners adopted a pastoral letter stating that “any view of tongues which sees this phenomenon as an essential sign of the Baptism of the Spirit is contradictory to Scripture.” It cautioned against “any practice of tongues which causes division within the church or diverts the church from its mission.”

The commissioners also approved a replacement for a section of the PCA Book of Church Order, declaring that the “extraordinary officers … and gifts” of the church in New Testament times “have no successors since God completed His revelation at the conclusion of the Apostolic Age.”

A committee headed by Reformed Seminary teacher Jack B. Scott drafted the letter and replacement wording after last year’s assembly failed to agree on a position on the charismatic issue.

Pastor Erskine L. Jackson, 66, of Kosciusko, Mississippi, newly elected moderator of the 70,000-member PCA, commented: “If tongues are a true gift of the Spirit, it should produce unity. You wonder when it produces divisiveness if it as a true gift of God.”

In another major action, the denomination changed its name to avoid a contest with the National Presbyterian Church, a local congregation of the United Presbyterian Church located in Washington, D. C. Attorneys for the congregation had initiated steps to have the name registered with the U. S. Patent Office and were threatening to sue.

Debate in Macon centered not so much on the possible outcome of legal action as on “the Christian thing to do.” From a field of seventeen suggested names, the assembly first selected “National Reformed Presbyterian Church.” This too was opposed by the Washington church, but a spokesman said the congregation would not fight it in court. Overnight, sentiment developed for eliminating the word “National” altogether, “if we really mean to do the Christian thing.” In another extended session, nine proposed names were systematically eliminated before the commissioners overwhelmingly settled on the name finally chosen.

In other action, a working relationship with the Orthodox Presbyterian Church was approved, aimed at making the OPC’s publications unit the publishing arm for both denominations. The PCA has been using the OPC’s Sunday-school materials.

The PCA is the outgrowth of a split within the 113-year-old Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern) over what some conservatives felt was a drift away from theological orthodoxy and excessive involvement in controversial socio-political issues. Several exiting congregations lost their property in court battles; others are in litigation.

The PCA has grown by nearly 100 churches since it was organized with some 250 churches in December. It is served by about 260 ministers and is represented in more than twenty states, including some northern ones. The budget for the coming year is $1.8 million.Moon Eclipse

The Reverend Sun Myung Moon, 54, a self-proclaimed “prophet” from South Korea who is regarded by many of his followers as the Messiah (see March 1 issue, page 101), appeared before a capacity crowd at New York’s Madison Square Garden last month. But his impact was at least partially eclipsed by protests involving several hundred Christian demonstrators.

Moon’s Unification Church followers, including hundreds imported from Japan, Great Britain, and other foreign countries,¹Moon’s Unification Church is fight ing in court the possible deportation from the United States of 582 missionary trainees who allegedly violated their visitors’ vi sas by e ngaging in street vending on behalf of the church. plastered New York City with thousands of full-color posters and handbills that declared, “September 18th Could Be Your Re-birthday.” They also saturated local television and radio stations and newspapers in an advertising campaign that was estimated to have cost $350,000.

The main Christian opposition to the Moon effort came from a seventeen-church coalition called “Christians United For Jesus as Lord,” which was organized by Pastor Paul Moore of the Manhattan Church of the Nazarene. The main argument made by Moore’s group was that Moon improperly holds himself out as a Christian, even though he denies such basic Christian tenets as complete salvation for believers through Christ’s death on the cross. In addition, they charged that Moon encourages his followers to hail him, rather than Jesus, as the Lord of the Second Advent. A number of other Christian groups, including the forty-member Korean Ministers Association of Greater New York, also accused Moon of propagating false doctrines.

The Christians United campaign captured the fancy of the New York news media, and Moore frequently found himself on television and in the newspapers. “Christians follow Jesus Christ, but moonbeams follow Mr. Moon,” Moore told interviewers.

On the night of the Madison Square Garden rally, hundreds of political demonstrators gathered in their own picket lines and charged that Moon is a “fascist preacher” who supports the South Korean “dictatorship.”

Christians United, mobilizing about 400 supporters, carried placards that proclaimed such things as “Jesus Is Lord, Not Mr. Moon.” They also distributed 50,000 tracts and 20,000 copies of the Gospel of Luke supplied by the American Bible Society. One of the Christians’ pamphlets used Moon’s slogan, “September 18th Could Be Your Re-birthday,” but the inside pages revealed an anti-Moon message: “Accept Jesus Christ as Your Saviour.… Don’t Settle for Moonshine!” Seven vans with huge pro-Jesus signs cruised the streets, and Christian United supporters handed out 2,000 fortune cookies that contained slips saying, “Jesus is Lord.” Inside the Garden, an executive rented a private box where a group of Christians prayed during the rally.

An ingenious strategy was concocted by Moore and his colleagues on the day of the rally when they learned from police that Moon’s followers had handed out 380,000 free tickets for only 20,000 seats in the Garden. Because a turn-away crowd seemed inevitable, Moore set up an “overflow concert,” with gospel music and preaching, at the nearby Glad Tidings Tabernacle, and he printed 10,000 handbills to announce the event. As expected, a capacity crowd forced police to close the doors of the Garden, and thousands of people were left milling around outside. Christians United volunteers immediately started circulating their handbills, and the result was a turn-away crowd at the Tabernacle. More than 1,000 people heard at least part of the gospel program, and Moore said that two dozen made Christian commitments.

Meanwhile, a standing-room-only crowd at the Garden watched Moon’s colorful Korean Folk Ballet and heard his New Hope Singers. Then Moon himself spoke for two and a half hours. The crucifixion of Jesus was a “mistake,” he said, and a Second Coming is necessary to complete salvation. Drawing parallels between John the Baptist and Billy Graham, he said the world is entering a messianic era and must prepare to greet the “coming Messiah,” whom he did not identify. By the time Moon had finished his speech—which he punctuated with kicks, karate chops, tears, and even a song—only half of his audience remained. But he will have other opportunities to get his message across because New York was only the first stop on a planned evangelistic tour of eight major American cities. Already, the signs were out all over Washington, D. C.: “October 16 Could Be Your Re-birthday.”

WILLIAM PROCTOR

DEATHS

WILLIAM W. BRECKBILL, 67, organizer and pastor of the Evangelical Methodist Church denomination, and a leader in the American Council of Christian Churches and the International Council of Christian Churches; in Williamsburg, Pennsylvania, of a heart attack.

ERNEST C. COLWELL, 73, New Testament scholar, former president of the University of Chicago, and first president of the interdenominational Claremont School of Theology in California; in Deland, Florida.

JAMES H. STRAUGHN, 97, retired United Methodist bishop and an architect in the unification of American Methodism in the thirties; in Baltimore.

SADIE WILSON TILLMAN, 79, prominent Methodist churchwoman, former vice-president of the World Council of Churches and a member of the WCC’s Central Committee; in Nashville, Tennessee, of a heart attack.

HAROLD L. YOCHIM, 71, American Lutheran Church leader and for twenty-three years president of the church’s Capital University in Columbus, Ohio; in Columbus, of a heart attack.

PRESERVING THE WOOD IN WOODBURN

Many were the sermons at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Woodburn, Oregon, that were interrupted by woodpeckers pecking away at the church belfry. But things are quieter now. The congregation decided to give the birds the bird—literally. A large, stuffed owl presently stands guard outside the holey wooden tower, and those pesky peckers are keeping their distance.

Deprogrammer Patrick: Pressing His Case

Cult deprogrammer Ted Patrick, convicted in Denver, Colorado, recently of the false imprisonment of two Denver women (see July 26 issue, page 38), says he will appeal to the state supreme court. (He’d been given a $1,000 fine and a year in prison; except for seven days of the jail term, those were suspended.) In the meantime he will remain free. Although ordered not to engage in such practices, his name has nevertheless cropped up in newspaper stories around the country in connection with alleged deprogramming incidents.

Last month Patrick was indicted by a federal grand jury in Seattle on charges of kidnapping Kathy Crampton from the “Love Israel” sect and transporting her to San Diego for attempted deprogramming. The case was given wide publicity on a CBS television documentary (see August 31, 1973, issue, page 40).

Patrick’s legal problems in the Denver case continue. He and the parents of five Denver girls have been sued by the girls for $2.5 million in damages for alleged suffering incurred when two of the girls were kidnapped for deprogramming. The other three are roommates of the pair and all five claim damages for harassment by Patrick and the parents. (The parents who pleaded “no contest” to a misdemeanor on the false imprisonment charge earlier, are on probation with orders not to contact the girls.)

Meanwhile, a California legislative committee has begun a probe into the non-profit status of various religious sects. The first hearing in Los Angeles, under the chairmanship of state senator Mervyn Dymally, centered on deprogramming and the “dangers” of the sects. Among the featured witnesses were Patrick and numerous parents whose children have joined the sects. Charging that the sects exercise mind control over members, the parents said they wanted the state to intervene in some way.

Several dozen parents met recently in Denver and formed a new organization, Citizens Freedom Foundation (CFF), to muster support to restrict the influence of religious sects. Many of the parents in CFF have called on Patrick to help “deprogram” their children, but a spokesman says Patrick has no official connection with the organization.

Spreading The Word

Bibles—249 million in full or in portions—were distributed through the United Bible Societies in 1973, up more than 14 percent over 1972. And despite paper shortages, persecution, and inflation, said UBS general secretary Ulrich Fick, translation and production work shot up, too.

The UBS, with headquarters recently moved from London to Stuttgart, placed 40 per cent more full Bibles last year than in 1972, and 42 per cent more portions. Translators servicing the UBS’ fifty-six member societies in 1973 translated the Scriptures into twenty-six new tongues, bringing the language count to 1,526. The UBS annual report, released last month, also said translations were made last year in seven new Latin American Indian languages in Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, and Argentina.

The UBS, formed in 1948, raised its budget in 1973 to $9.4 million, up from 1972’s $8.7 million. New directions cited by Fick: Except for countries where Christian churches are a small minority, congregations rather than colporteurs must distribute Bibles, and Roman Catholic cooperation in translation and distribution projects is increasing. Hierarchies in Spain, Portugal, and Brazil now officially recommend that Catholics use Bible-society New Testaments, and the World Catholic Federation for the Biblical Apostolate has also moved to Stuttgart, making joint work easier.

RUSSELL CHANDLER

Parents, school officials, and church leaders across America are following with interest a textbook controversy that centers in Charleston, West Virginia. The uproar that erupted there last month may spread elsewhere; the basic classroom and supplemental textbooks involved (mainly literature anthologies) are used widely in schools throughout the nation, and parents from other states have been calling protest leaders to get more information.

The dispute has its roots in decisions last spring by Kanawha County school personnel and the five-member county school board, okaying use of certain texts¹The text s are anthology volumes in these series: “Communicating” (published by D. C. Heath); “Man” (McDouglass-Littell); Interaction” (Houghton-Miffiin); and “Man in Literature” and “Galaxy” (Scott Foresman). in the county’s schools. (Charleston, the state capital, is located in Kanawha County.)

School-board members did reject eight suggested volumes that they felt contained the most objectionable materials, including Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice and Freud’s Character and Anal Eroticism.

Later, after examining what had been approved, school-board member Mrs. Alice Moore—wife of a Church of Christ pastor in St. Albans and mother of four school children—mounted a campaign to rescind the decision and rid the schools of offending books. The books, declared Mrs. Moore, not only contain four-letter language but also teach questionable moral values, undermine religious faith, and subvert family relationships. Through pamphlets and press interviews Mrs. Moore publicized the content of the books, and a 13,000-name protest petition was presented to school officials.

When action was not forthcoming, angry parents launched a school boycott in early September—an action Mrs. Moore did not approve. Nearly 20 per cent of Kanawha County’s 44,000 students stayed out of school. Mrs. Moore’s children, ranging from grades two to eleven, did not participate in the boycott.

The boycott spread to neighboring counties where the textbooks were not used (one picket told reporters the action was intended as a warning to officials who might be thinking of using the texts).

Thousands of coal miners and other workers in three counties staged sympathy strikes. Mines were closed, work was halted on three express highways, Charleston’s transit system was shut down, and an electrical power station was picketed. Violence flared up: rock-throwing, slashed tires, broken windows. Two men were shot, one critically, and another was severely beaten. Government officials said the violence was related more to labor issues than to the textbook matter. They indicated that the miners were using the school issue as a ruse to deplete coal stockpiles and thus provide more leverage in pending contract negotiations. (A union report said the strike was causing a daily loss of 500,000 tons of coal and $200,000 in wages. By the end of last month, most of the strikers had returned to work.)

Kanawha County school superintendent Kenneth Underwood, a central figure in the dispute, closed the schools and worked out a compromise with the mainstream protesters led by Mrs. Moore. The agreement called for the books to be withdrawn for a thirty-day period, during which the boycott would be lifted and a fifteen-member citizens’ panel would review the contested books and others—400 in all—and make recommendations. Each board member was to select three persons for the panel. (Observers say the board is split two and two on the books, with one middle-of-the-roader still unsure this month which way he leans.)

A minority group, however, led by four pastors, rejected the compromise. Demanding permanent withdrawal of the books, they held demonstrations in front of the state capitol and school-board offices in violation of a court order. Three of the ministers were arrested, fined from $250 to $650, and sentenced to thirty days in jail. They are: Pastor Ezra Graley of the Summit Ridge Church of God in Lincoln County, Pastor Charles Quigley of Charleston’s independent Cathedral of Prayer (which operates a Christian day school), and Pastor Avis Hill of the independent Freedom Gospel Mission in St. Albans. They were released on $2,500 bond.

Earlier, the fourth minister, Pastor Marvin Horan of the Leewood Freewill Baptist Church, dropped out of active leadership of the protest, citing exhaustion. At one point he fired a rally audience, declaring, “We could use a big book-burning right here.” Later he admitted to reporters he had not read the texts himself but had nevertheless demanded their removal because of what he’d heard about them. In a rally late last month, Horan and Hill conceded that court action against the board would be more effective than protest demonstrations. Said Hill: “I went to jail and the books are still in, so I don’t think we’re going to achieve anything this way.”

Meanwhile, students at Charleston’s George Washington high school staged a walkout in support of the textbooks.

Another snag developed when Mrs. Moore declined to name her three selections to the review panel. She said it would only be a waste of their time because the work of the review committee would have no effect on the board’s eventual decision on whether to remove the books permanently.

The controversy has divided church members throughout the area. The Charleston Ministerial Association called for “reasonable” discussion of the disputed reading selections but did not take a stand on either side. But the West Virginia Council of Churches issued a statement interpreted as support of the administration. It warned that imposition of a particular ideology or religious idea on public institutions is “antithetical to the very concept of religious freedom.” West Virginia Episcopal bishop Wilburn C. Campbell and other Episcopal leaders voiced support for the right of the school board to approve texts for its schools. Rector John Lewis of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Charleston lashed out at the demonstrators in a Sunday sermon. He chided “Bible-carrying” demonstrators who in the name of protection of their children from “godless anarchy” were themselves in the streets “breaking the very laws they pretend to uphold.”

(Lewis and Pastor Ronald English of Charleston’s First Baptist Church are steering-committee members of the newly formed pro-textbook Citizens Concerned for Quality Education.)

Nazarene and United Pentecostal ministers in paid newspaper advertisem*nts criticized the “violent insurrection” and “mud-slinging campaign” but also voiced objection to the disputed books, calling for a “proper investigation” to remove “unworthy materials” from the schools.

Some citizens allege that the controversial textbook selections reflect Communist influence aimed at demoralizing pro-American attitudes; they believe some of the racial-oriented materials are designed to spread the unrest in northern cities to the small working-class communities of America’s hinterland.

One demonstrator told a Washington Post reporter: “I think there is something here to try to stir up racial troubles. The relations between black and white in this country improved for a time, but now they’re going down. They’re trying to say all white people are your enemy.”

Among the demands of some protestors was one asking for Superintendent Underwood’s dismissal. A United Methodist layman who came to West Virginia from North Dakota, Underwood at first vowed angrily that he would remove no books. He likened the situation to the book-burning days in Nazi Germany.

Mrs. Moore believes parents should take a more active role in the education of their children instead of leaving full control in the hands of professional educators. She feels her cause is just, and she hopes the excesses and extremist viewpoints of some of her backers do not cloud the existence of a serious issue that demands a responsible response. She points, for example, to a series of elementary school books that “undermine parental authority and tear children away from their dependence and reliance on their parents.” One assignment in a book entitled Write On!, she says, asks children to tell classmates how their parents interfered in their private lives. “It puts the kids in the position of being critical of their parents,” she explains.

A third-grade text, she adds, asks children to determine when it is right to steal and cheat—“probably the first time he’s thought of stealing as being right.” In a second-grade teacher’s manual, even the perennially favorite fairy tale “Jack and the Beanstalk” is subtly shown to approve stealing, Mrs. Moore charges. “This sort of thing has no place in the school. It has no right to indoctrinate my children that way.”

Others object to alleged anti-Christ poetry. Included is a poem by black poet Gwendolyn Brooks:

I think it must be lonely to be God.

Nobody loves a master.…

But who walks with Him?—dares to take His arm

To slap Him on the shoulder, tweak His ear

Buy Him a Coca-Cola or a beer

Pooh-pooh his politics, call him a fool.…

Parental ire was also raised over Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Christ Climbed Down”:

Christ climbed down

from His bare tree

this year

and softly stole away into

some anonymous Mary’s womb again

where in the darkest night

of everybody’s anonymous soul

He awaits again

an unimaginable and impossibly

Immaculate Reconception

The very craziest of Second Comings.

The textbook publishers say they are surprised by all the fuss. A D. C. Heath spokesman said the company’s books are being used without incident by school boards across the nation, and he estimates that more than 500,000 children are using the books. A Scott Foresman spokesman said it is difficult to collect anthologies that meet with everyone’s approval. Both the firm’s “Galaxy” and its “Man in Literature” series have been sold “in the hundreds of thousands,” he said.

Whatever the outcome of the citizens’ review of textbooks in Kanawha County, one thing is certain: not everyone is going to be pleased. And given the nation-wide publicity of the dispute, the unrest is likely to spread.

Unaccredited

A county judge in Greenville, Ohio, fined six couples $20 each for sending their children to an unaccredited school opened a year ago by God’s Tabernacle Church in nearby Bradford. The children may remain there pending appeal. One of the parents is Levi W. Whisner, pastor of God’s Tabernacle and principal of the school, which meets in the church basem*nt (a new building is under construction). Whisner says the parents feel their children should have a Bible-oriented education.

In Good Hands

“My surgical skills are a gift from God. Thank him for them.”

That’s how Chief Surgeon C. Everett Koop of Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia often responds to grateful parents whose little ones he has helped. Koop, 57, world renowned for his surgical techniques on infants born with congenital defects in their gastro-intestinal tracts, is an elder at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, a leader in the Christian Medical Society, and board vice-chairman of Medical Assistance Programs (MAP), an evangelical relief agency based in Illinois.

Last month his skills were applied in one of the most dramatic medical events of the year: separation of thirteen-month-old Siamese twin girls Clara and Altagracia Rodriguez of the Dominican Republic. Koop led a team of eighteen doctors and five nurses in the day-long series of complex procedures (Dr. Louise Schnauffer, Koop’s first assistant surgeon on the team, and Dr. Gene Betz, head anesthetist, also attend Tenth Presbyterian). The hospital and the medical team donated their services.

The girls were born connected at the waist and abdomen. Without surgery they would have survived, says Koop, but they would never have been able to walk or sit independently. They had two hearts, four kidneys which had been linked to each other’s bladders, and a shared intestinal tract. Koop’s team gave the existing tract to Alta and constructed an artificial waste system for Clara. Only three of six known previous attempts to separate similarly joined Siamese twins have been successful, and these have had colostomies. If Clara’s operation withstands the test of time, she will be the first such patient to have a “normal” elimination system. Both girls should also be able to bear children, says Koop.

Through a relative’s maid in Puerto Rico, Mrs. Diana Zimnoch of Warrington, a town north of Philadelphia, heard of the Rodriguez children. She learned that their parents were poor Catholic peasants who lived in the Dominican Republic, working a one-acre farm without electricity or plumbing. Mrs. Zimnoch telephoned Children’s Hospital and asked if anything could be done, a contact that eventually led to Koop. Meanwhile, the thirteen-family “Community of Christ”—an evangelical Catholic fellowship to which Mrs. Zimnoch belongs—chipped in enough money to fly the girls and their mother to Philadelphia.

Other churches (including Tenth Presbyterian) and groups also lent a hand. A Catholic church held a special mass attended by 2,000 to raise funds for the girls’ future education.

Koop says he believes “in the sovereignty of God over all circ*mstances and events.” He acknowledges candidly that he “doesn’t know why children are taken from the world or why they suffer.” Yet, he believes, “God never makes a mistake.”

God works through natural laws established in the development of a baby before its birth, says Koop. “Other laws, however, may upset the orderly consummation of the development of a child,” he adds. ‘This is no more difficult to believe,” he says, “than seeing a man fall on the sidewalk and fracture his wrist. I would no more berate God for a child born with a congenital defect than to rail at God for a crack in the sidewalk.”

Koop offers parents spiritual counsel when the opportunity arises, and he makes a special effort to speak with parents whose child has died. Many of them express their gratefulness in Christmas greetings year after year.

Whether he applies scalpel or spiritual salve, say Koop’s friends, his patients are in good hands.

JAMES C. HEFLEY and EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

THE PLIGHT OF PASTORAL PAY

Many ministers are hurting financially as inflation spirals upward faster than increases in traditionally low salaries. In a recent study that confirms those low salary levels, the National Council of Churches found pastors are getting along on an average of $7,700, with other income sources such as housing and utilities allowances bringing the median equivalent to about $10,350—about half of what a comparably educated attorney, accountant, or personnel director earns.

Of those pastors in nineteen Protestant denominations who were surveyed, 14 per cent reported over-all salaries of less than $6,000, while 11 per cent reported pay in excess of $15,000, including benefits.

The study, financed by a grant from Ministers’ Life and Casualty Union of Minneapolis, shows many lack fringe benefits common in other vocations: only 67 percent of the ministers have any kind of pension plan, only 55 per cent are covered by health insurance, and only 15 per cent are compensated for Social Security payments (ministers, as self-employed persons, must pay the entire employment tax—which has been increasing yearly—out of their own pockets). Fully 65 per cent of the 4,635 pastors polled said their income was not adequate for family and personal needs.

A Winner

“Gift of Tears,” an episode in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod’s “This Is the Life” television drama series, won the only 1974 Emmy Award for religious programming given by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Questioning The Validity

Since the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church in mid-August ruled that the ordination of eleven women to the priesthood was invalid (see September 13 issue, page 68), several proponents of female priesthood have questioned the validity of the bishops’ ruling. John Lathrop, rector of St. George’s Church in La Canada, California, thinks the ruling violated the canons (laws), a reason given by the bishops for declaring the renegade ordination invalid. The bishops, he maintains, can only declare an ordination “invalid” after a local-diocesan-level, canonical trial has taken place.

Meanwhile the eight-member standing committee of the Washington, D. C., diocese has asked its bishops to work for a special convention in 1975 to decide the issue of women’s ordination. (Bishop William F. Creighton voted for the bishops’ ruling, while Suffragan Bishop John T. Walker abstained.) With a vote of 7 to 0 and one abstention the committee (which is the highest elected body of lay and clergy in the diocese, without whose consent the bishop cannot ordain) requested “positive action” to ordain “qualified women to the priesthood and episcopate at the earliest possible moment.”

Lonesome For Love

Lonesome Stone. A symbol. A person. A rock musical. And this fall it’s rolling through some small American cities in the Midwest, declaring that “Jesus is just all right with me.”

Lonesome Stone had its American première with a four-night stand in Toledo, Ohio, last month (it was also scheduled for Duluth, Minnesota; Kansas City, Missouri; and Sioux City, North Dakota). Most of the some 1,200 in the opening-night audience at Masonic Auditorium were under twenty and, according to producer Jim Palossari, non-Christians.

Palosarri, once a bartender in San Francisco, was an early Jesus-movement convert. He headed a 600-member Christian youth group and commune in Milwaukee until two years ago, when he moved to the London area and organized a ministry called “The Jesus Family.” The musical was an outgrowth of this work. It played for weeks at a London theater, then went on the road last year to other United Kingdom cities and to cities on the Continent. Just before its American debut the show played at two U. S. military bases in Germany in connection with drug-rehabilitation programs run by chaplains.

Many in the international thirty-six-member cast plus crew were formerly dope users or pushers; they come from America, France, Sweden, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The production is sponsored by the Gloria Deo trust, founded by London-area real estate man Kenneth P. Frampton, a member of a Plymouth Brethren chapel.

The musical’s story—based on actual experiences of the cast—is framed against the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in 1967, the place and year of the start of the Jesus movement. A drug user and dealer known as “The Bear” gets arrested and sent to jail, where he becomes a Christian. He returns to his friends with the Gospel. They are looking for love, but only a handful turn to Jesus.

If the audience is receptive—as it was in Toledo (the crowd was still shouting “more, more” when the house lights were turned on)—the cast and the band, “The Sheep,” give a brief Christian rock concert at the end of the musical. The audience is invited backstage to talk with the cast or to ask questions about the show’s theme. While no formal “altar call” is given, Palossari says his intention in conceiving the show was to build a good “mouse trap,” not necessarily to create “Christian art” (he thinks the term is a misnomer, anyway). Judging by the response in Toledo, he has succeeded.

CHERYL FORBES