Page 5866 – Christianity Today (2025)

While politicians and military men search for more than just a paper peace in South Viet Nam, many of the country’s beleaguered inhabitants are finding it—in God.

It’s been a year now since Le Van Thien, a 21-year old student at the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) Bible school in Nha Trang, sparked a revival that spread throughout the land (see May 26 issue, page 32). During the Christmas break, the 120 Bible school students fanned out to their home churches and towns, furthering the movement. In the ensuing months, nearly 100 churches reported widespread renewal among members, and there were thousands of conversions. (About 95 per cent of the Protestants in South Viet Nam belong to the 375 congregations of the Evangelical Church of Viet Nam, affiliated with the CMA. The CMA has worked in the region since 1911.)

Some missionaries say that a vast spiritual outpouring was already under way among the Stieng Montagnards in the hills above An Loc and among the Bru tribes in Quang Tri province to the north when the movement at Nha Trang began.

As the revival proceeded, there were numerous reports of miracles, especially healings. Some of these were confirmed by missionaries on the scene. (A CHRISTIANITY TODAY correspondent says that films and well-publicized reports of the Indonesian revival may have contributed to the emphasis on miracles.)

There were several accounts of persons being raised from the dead. In one, a fifteen-year-old Montagnard named Djhang of the village of Lac Thien died of heart disease in May. But he arose after pastor Y Tang and elders of the village church prayed over him. Afterward, he visited dozens of churches with the story of what he had heard and seen in heaven.

Conversion accounts abound. One of the best known is about a young man who passed a church on his way to carry out a robbery. He heard shouting and crying, went inside to investigate, and was converted.

“Thousands of tribal people are turning to Jesus,” reported visiting surgeon Raymond E. Benson of Billings, Montana.

Lowland Christians and highlanders confessed racist attitudes they held toward each other. “The spirit of brokenness and confession spread throughout the Montagnard believers,” said Overseas Crusade missionary John Newman.

Many church members confessed they had withheld tithes, a serious sin in Vietnamese minds, and made restitution. Regular giving picked up. In a not uncommon act, a disabled veteran gave his life savings to help rebuild a ruined church.

Multitudes of tribal people threw down their charms and repented from spiritism. President Doan Van Mieng of the Tin Lanh church says he was shocked to discover that a number of pastors’ sons had dabbled in spiritual magic.

With the spring invasion by North Vietnamese troops, bombings by the Americans, and counterattacks by government forces came death, deprivation, and dispersion. Many Christians, including pastors, were killed. In the village of Soc Be alone nearly 100 believers were killed, and several Christian young people were captured by the North Vietnamese. A number of churches were destroyed and several predominantly Christian villages were leveled.

Nevertheless, there were many stories of miraculous deliverance. Noted Stieng evangelist Dieu Huynh was severely wounded in the seventy-day siege of An Loc and narrowly escaped exploding shells in treatment centers. His fiancée and friends nursed him back to health, and on June 14 he stumbled into the office of CMA mission chairman Thomas H. Stebbins. “It was like seeing someone back from the dead,” exclaimed Stebbins.

An Loc was devastated, and Huynh and his church members lost everything. Today he is carrying on a ministry among 1,500 in Long Thanh, a resettlement area near An Loc, and hundreds are enrolled in his new believers’ classes.

Diana Read, a nurse from London serving with the United World Mission, tells of a North Vietnamese rocket that hit a Bato church filled with members praying for peace—and failed to explode. Another time, she says, moments after a pastor and some members fled from a bunker it was destroyed by a direct hit.

Despite the increased hazards, teams of young people went on with their evangelistic travels, braving bullets, bombs, and nighttime terrors of noman’s land, carrying the Gospel to village after village. Several insist that angels visibly walked with them.

The revival shows no signs of abating. Missionaries and church members are swamped with both relief and evangelism ministries. (More than 250,000 refugees came pouring into Da Nang in May alone.) In the last two months, say CMA officials, four new chapels were dedicated in Saigon, and two more are nearing completion. Three new chapels have been constructed in refugee centers, and new believers are meeting in temporary facilities in five other centers. All of the Bible schools have double the enrollment of last year—in spite of heavy draft calls.

At the turn of the year, 400 pastors and missionaries plan to gather in Dalat to reflect on the peace movement God has brought to their land.

Nagaland: Big Baptist Birthday

Until almost the last minute, it appeared that India would not permit evangelist Billy Graham to travel to Nagaland for a crusade scheduled as part of the centennial of Baptist work there. Guerrillas had attacked an army convoy days earlier, and Indian army officers disliked the prospects of huge crowds. When permission finally came, part of the Graham team was left stranded in Calcutta. Only Baptist Graham, associate evangelist-bodyguard T. W. Wilson, song leader Cliff Barrows, pianist Tedd Smith, black tenor Archie Dennis of Pittsburgh, and follow-up director Charles Riggs were allowed in. Associated Press reporter Myron L. Belkind accompanied them.

Kohima, the capital of Nagaland, normally has a population of 20,000. But 100,000 lined the streets to greet Graham’s motorcade. Many of them had hiked for days through dense forests. (About 350,000 of the state’s 520,000 inhabitants are Christians, mostly Baptists. Baptist missionary W. A. Clark of America, with the help of Christians from Assam, founded a church there in 1872. The Christian community experienced rapid growth. It is now totally under indigenous leadership.)

As many as 80,000 attended Bible studies conducted by Graham on two mornings, and more than 100,000 attended each of the three evening services, held on an athletic field. Nearly everybody stood up on the altar call the first night, a clear case of misunderstanding Graham’s invitation. But with more precise explanation the next two nights, the response was still huge.

Many of these people had arrived the preceding week to celebrate their one-hundredth birthday as Baptists. Baptist World Alliance president V. Carney Hargroves of Philadelphia was there. He said that more than 40,000 jammed into and around the huge thatched-roof structure that had been specially built for the occasion in the village of Impur. There were hours of singing and preaching.

A gap of several days occurred in the program when Graham’s associate evangelist, Akbar Abdul-Haqq, an Indian, canceled a scheduled preaching campaign, ostensibly because of the unpopularity of Indians in Nagaland.

Leaders of the underground movement that wants independence from India promised to observe a cease-fire during the celebration and crusade. But shots rang out in the distance as Graham prayed for the sick in a morning Bible study. Guerrillas had ambushed military forces three miles away. The evangelist appealed to the jittery crowd to remain calm, and only a few left.

Despite the heavy military presence and the occasional violence, Nagaland is known for its gentle, unselfish culture. “It’s beautiful to see,” says Tedd Smith. “Nobody has much, but everybody helps each other. It’s what Jesus was all about. I hope India keeps on keeping out the foreigners so it isn’t wrecked.”

A century ago, the fourteen tribes of Nagaland (it is situated in India’s northeast corner, along the borders of Burma and China) were animists, and some were even headhunters. But a Baptist missionary changed all that.

David Wilkerson: A Best-Seller in Brazil

Judging by the advance publicity, evangelist David Wilkerson’s sixteen-day crusade in Brazil was aimed at reaching the burgeoning drug population of the land. But most of the reported 250,000 who showed up to hear him in the seven cities visited were from the evangelical community, leading him to complain publicly about his lack of contact with non-Christians. Nevertheless, Wilkerson’s office later announced that 25,000 decisions had been recorded in the thirteen services where he spoke.

Several government officials, including the nation’s minister of education and the governors of the districts of São Paulo and Brasilia, met with Wilkerson to discuss the worsening drug problem among Brazil’s young people. The evangelist announced later that a Teen Challenge center will be established next year in Rio de Janeiro.

The crusade was billed as the first interdenominational youth campaign in Brazilian history. Representatives of most major denominations cooperated. Many Catholic priests urged their young people to attend the meetings, and the Catholic response was almost consistently favorable.

Seemingly, the least cooperation came from campaign organizers. There were delays, fouled communications, bad acoustics, and mixed-up schedules. And there was apparently little organized follow-up for those who signed decision cards. Some of the problems were probably traceable to a cultural gap between U. S. and Brazilian coordinators. Brazilians aren’t as organizationally oriented as Americans.

But despite the snags and confusion, the campaign over all was a big plus for the evangelical cause. Reporters swarmed Wilkerson in each of the cities and gave his meetings wide coverage. Manchete, the country’s leading magazine, interviewed him, and he appeared on the nation’s top-rated television show. (A Portuguese translation of Wilkerson’s book The Cross and the Switchblade is currently Brazil’s religious best-seller.) The evangelist pointed the newsmen to a spreading Jesus movement among Brazilian high schoolers and collegians.

A single service in Belem attracted more than 50,000, and in some meetings it was reported that as many as 15,000 were turned away. Assemblies of God missionary leader Reginald Hoover said that the crusade gave existing church youth groups new impetus. Some leaders even attributed an increase in confiscation of drugs and arrests of pushers to the conversion of many drug-users.

Those who attended the meeting in Campinas, an agricultural center near São Paulo, will long remember the altar call at that meeting. As is Wilkerson’s custom, he asked young people who walked forward on the invitation to throw their drugs, cigarettes, hypodermic needles, and the like on the platform. After an impressive shower and a prayer, he asked the group to smile forth their new joy in Christ.

Asked why he wasn’t smiling, a boy standing in the front said, “Because there’s not much in my life to smile about.” The boy had his head down, and Wilkerson instructed, “Look up.”

The youth lifted his head, then cried, “I can see! I can see! For the first time in my life I can see!”

But true to the campaign’s pattern, say American missionaries who were standing nearby, in the ensuing confusion no one knows quite what happened to the boy who was blind but now can see.

FAITH SAND PIDCOKE

On the Great Commission

As expected, Uruguayan Methodist Emilio E. Castro, 45, will succeed his old friend Philip A. Potter next month as director of the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism of the World Council of Churches. Earlier, Castro’s name had been in the hat along with Potter’s and two others for the job Potter eventually got, that of WCC general secretary.

Castro is president of the 2,000-member Evangelical Methodist Church of Uruguay, with headquarters in Montevideo. He also coordinates the Provisional Commission for Latin American Evangelical Unity (UNELAM). He previously headed the South American Association of Theological Schools and taught at the Mennonite Seminary in Montevideo. He has been an outspoken advocate of social reform and at times has tried to mediate between the government and Tupamaro guerillas. In 1970 he was arrested and detained briefly while the Tupamaros held U.S. advisor Claude L. Fly hostage.

With a world view akin to Potter’s, Castro will no doubt keep the WCC’s brand of evangelism tuned more to social activism than to theology or conversion of the individual. To him, liberation means more than salvation.

The NCC: Cary and Conflict

A forty-five-year-old official of the United Church of Christ, the Reverend W. Sterling Cary, was elected president this month of the National Council of Churches (NCC). He is the first black, the first representative of his denomination, and the youngest person ever to head the council.

Cary was chosen by the nominating committee of the ninth and last General Assembly of the NCC, which met in Dallas. He ran unopposed.

The opening of the five-day triennial assembly was marred by a dispute over one of the speakers, Imamu Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) of Newark, New Jersey. Fraternal delegates from the American Jewish Committee publicly challenged the propriety of Baraka’s place on the program. They charged that the noted black poet-playright “has become notorious for his anti-white racism and vicious anti-semitism.”

NCC executive R. H. Edwin Espy acknowledged the objections by saying that the topic of the assembly was conflict. “We built conflict into the agenda, and our purpose here is to learn to live with conflict as Christians.” He pointed to the meeting’s theme: “The demands of the Gospel in a world of conflict.”

NCC officials, prodded by religion columnist Lester Kinsolving, disclosed that Baraka was paid $1,500 plus expenses for his appearance.

Cary, who headed the planning committee for this month’s assembly, will preside over a restructure of the NCC during his three-year term. The new organization will combine the 275-member General Board and the much larger General Assembly into a single 347-member Governing Board that will meet twice a year.

Before signing on as associate minister of the Metropolitan and Suffolk Associations of the United Church of Christ in New York, Cary pastored churches in New York and Ohio. He is a graduate of Morehouse College and Union Seminary.

DAVID KUCHARSKY

CHRISTMAS IN ISRAEL

There will be no heavenly host to sound out the message of Christmas from Bethlehem this year, but there will be several orchestras and twenty choirs with about 1,500 singers on hand from the United States, Europe, and South Africa. As in previous years, a large contingent will attend a carol and Scripture service at the Shepherds’ Field on Christmas Eve, then move on to perform in Manger Square. The sights and sounds will be transmitted to the world by television.

This year the program will be extended to include performances in Jerusalem, Nazareth, and various settlements in Galilee. Choirs from Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and Southwestern Seminary in Fort Worth will unite with the Israel Protestant Community Choir in a performance of Handel’s Messiah in Nazareth on Christmas Eve. Orchestras traveling with the U. S. groups will join with members from the local Israel Philharmonic Orchestra to supply accompaniment.

This 300-voice combined choir will perform five times in Israel during the season, with astronaut-turned-evangelist lames B. Irwin as MC. Irwin will also show a short film of his moon walk during the Apollo 15 flight.

The choir, minus the Israeli singers, was scheduled to travel to Jordan for a televised performance before King Hussein on December 20.

DWIGHT L. BAKER

No Decisions

Nearly 12,000 registrants attended last month’s national missionary convention of the Christian Churches and Churches of Christ (instrumental). The meeting was held in two sections, one in Norfolk, Virginia, and the other in Phoenix, Arizona. Preaching, music, and mission reports highlighted the convention. (Such conventions are non-delegate in nature. No decisions binding upon the fellowship of the various independent supporting churches and missionaries were passed—or even considered. As a fellowship, the Christian Churches support more than 1,500 home and foreign missionaries.)

There were standing ovations at both sectional meetings for a missionary family who commuted between the two cities: J. Russell Morse, his wife, and his son, Eugene. The family has served for more than fifty years in China, Burma, and Southeast Asia, and thousands have reportedly come to Christ through their efforts. For physical reasons, the Morses were unable to leave Burma when missionaries were ordered out in 1966. They were taken by the Lisu tribe to the hills and finally to India, but they were refused entrance. For several years they pioneered a work in a virgin valley among the Lisus.

WESLEY PADDOCK

HOME FOR CHRISTMAS

Thousands of Asian refugees from Uganda will be home for Christmas—but not in their native country. Many are being resettled in Europe and North America. The U. S. government has permitted 1,200 to enter.

Churches are leading the way with housing and help. Last month a 32-year-old former bicycle-shop owner and his children landed at Kennedy International Airport. A New Rochelle, New York, Methodist pastor met the family and took them to his home, where they were given temporary shelter. His congregation provided food and clothing.

Examples like this are multiplying across the country. United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) executive James J. Thomas said that “calls began coming in from all over the country” after UMCOR made its appeal. “More sponsors came forward at first than there were refugees; several churches and two seminaries are on a stand-by list to receive the next arrivals,” he said. Other denominations are working with Church World Service to house the refugees. Christians this Christmas are reaching out to those for whom there was no room in Uganda.

The Cross and the Flag, edited by Robert Clouse, Robert Linder, and Richard Pierard (Creation, 1972, 261 pp., $4.95, $2.95 pb), Back to Freedom and Dignity, by Francis Schaeffer (Inter-Varsity, 1972, 48 pp., $.95 pb), A Christian Political Option, by Bob Goudzwaard (Wedge [229 College St., Toronto 2b, Ontario], 1972, 66 pp., $2.75 pb) and Worship and Politics, by Albert Gedraitis (Wedge, 1972, 92 pp., $2.75 pb), are reviewed by Jon R. Kennedy, instructor in Christian communication, Center for Christian Studies, Stanford, California.

Biblical Christians show a growing awareness of the need for action on the political and social level that is scripturally based and faithful to the Law of God and the Spirit of Christ.

The fourteen essayists writing in these four volumes share a desire to see Christians occupy places of leadership in public life. All the authors agree that Christians have been too long identified with a middle-class status quo that is sometimes oppressive and indifferent to its neighbors wherever they are found in the world, and all believe that there is an imperative need for Christians to take action now to help relieve the world’s ills.

The eleven writers contributing to the Clouse-Linder-Pierard compendium speak out of a mainstream American evangelical tradition, drawing on church backgrounds that have emphasized the peace-making mission of Christians and the earlier social-work records of orthodox Protestantism. Francis Schaeffer’s critique of the trend toward doctrines of totalitarian biological control for the human race among humanistic scientists, and his call for Christian responses, flow out of his more conservative evangelical Presbyterian background and its political philosophy rooted in Calvinism and Samuel Rutherford’s concept of Law as King.

Both Goudzwaard, an economics professor at the Free University of Amsterdam and a former representative in the Dutch parliament, and Gedraitis, former research writer for Canada’s Christian Labour Association, speak from the perspective of the Dutch evangelical Christian political movement, which became the leading voice in Holland’s multi-party system at the turn of the century and has held a position of leadership ever since.

Writers in the Clouse-Linder-Pierard volume pay scant attention to the concept of an integrally Christian political philosophy based on the Gospel, however. Perhaps the major shortcoming of their work is a general ignorance of or indifference to what Christians of other nations and in other situations have worked out. Instead they offer the more limited role of “Christians in government” as the solution, the at least tacit suggestion being that individuals working within the system (Senator Mark Hatfield is frequently cited as the best example) can help keep the system honest and direct it away from serving its own needs selfishly and toward the needs of a larger neighborhood of humanity in accord with Christ’s teachings.

The book purports to expose the “all-too-frequent identification of evangelicalism with the interests, values and policies of [flagwaving] Americanism.” The impression is not hard to get, however, that the authors would be satisfied to identify evangelicalism with the equally-American-though-not-as-flagwaving tradition of political liberalism. Robert Linder, for example, in writing on “The Christian and Political Involvement in Today’s World,” names at least two professed Christians—conservatives Ronald Reagan and the late Mendel Rivers—on a list of persons of allegedly dubious character whom, he suggests, believers should work to replace with Christians! And Robert Clouse, in a valuable retracing of Christian historical positions on war and peace, mentions John R. Rice’s anti-Communist crusading as a position with which many evangelicals identify, and on the following page excommunicates them all by stating that the message of peace is “so consistently woven throughout [the New Testament] that a Christian ‘hawk’ is a contradiction in terms.”

The tone set by such examples of liberal chauvinism throughout the essays will do little to win over the evangelical conservatives whose position the writers seek to discredit. It also raises questions about the editors’ intentions. Are they willing to write off those fellow Christians with whom they differ as not worthy of engaging in the dialogue?, Do they have more in common with non-Christian liberals than with John R. Rice and the many fellow believers who occasionally, as Senator Hatfield writes in the preface, “rendered unto Caesar that which is God’s”? Are they willing to leave to Francis Schaeffer and Billy Graham the bridge-building between themselves and the fundamentalists they leave out by “advocating positions which fellow believers will call leftist” without attempting to first reconcile factions within their own household?

Graham is invoked eleven times throughout the volume, usually with quotations supporting calls for evangelical social involvement, though Lee Nash calls his social witness “inconsistent but growing.” Schaeffer is introduced as a “noted evangelical scholar” in Earl Reeves’s essay on “Evangelical Christianity and the Ecological Crisis.”

The book’s shortcomings are unfortunate because it deserves the hearing fundamentalists will deny it. The authors’ own lack of biblical authority for politics may be at fault; Thomas Howard suggests that because “all blueprints for society—feudal, communistic, republican, anarchic—invariably claim some ancient or divine warrant,” no political order is “derivable from Scripture.”

Strong chapters include Nancy Hardesty’s exegetical study of “Women and Evangelical Christianity,” an easy-reading argument for equality for women based on biblical texts. Paul Henry’s history of the New Left and call to repentant social action are dispassionate and of value to any study of the past decade in American politics. Lee Nash traces the history of social concern among evangelicals and attempts to identify their points of departure from combining faith with works. And the discussion of “Christian Attitudes Toward Israel” by George Giacumakis, Jr., works out some of the “extremely perplexing” aspects of a situation about which many Christians hold strong feelings.

Francis Schaeffer’s brief treatise on B. F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity and its scientism can be seen as a bridge leading to growing awareness among evangelicals. It speaks of an almost conspiratorial movement backed by prominent scientists throughout the world that would deprive individuals of all freedom, all choice, reaching eventually down to the “scientific selection” of their personality traits and IQs.

Although Schaeffer’s discussion is not intended as a political essay, the implications of what he says about totalitarianism and the biblical principles regarding choice of good and evil, right and wrong, and the outworking of God’s providence in history, are obvious. Schaeffer suggests no crusade against the Skinners, nor does he offer an alternative program in social psychology. He is satisfied with making Christians aware of the threat posed by chemical and environmental conditioning of the kind predicted in A Clockwork Orange. But his message has its power as political philosophy—its call of Christians “back to freedom and dignity” is what he is counting on to defuse what he calls “the biological bomb.”

As an American missionary to Europe, Schaeffer has developed an appreciation for the heritage of Dutch evangelical thought and action shared by few Americans. In a recent interview with New Reformation, he spoke of the Dutch Christian experience in politics. The formation of “the Christian political party under Abraham Kuyper in Holland was led of the Lord,” he said, “for a specific situation. But to say that the principles of an anti-revolutionary policy would indicate the formation of a Christian political party in every place in the world … [would] kill the work of the Holy Spirit.”

It is just this point that Bob Goudzwaard, one of the leading young representatives of the Anti-Revolutionary Party Kuyper led to prominence, addresses in A Christian Political Option.

In the first place, he points out, Christian politics is dependent not on “derived principles” of Scripture but on “the gospel’s own presence and living activity in the political sphere.… Evangelical politics does not rest on our active reaching out to God’s Word, but on the active reaching out of God’s Word to us and to the whole world.” In the second place, “whether or not a Christian political party is indeed the most effective instrument depends … on times and circumstances.”

Over against the hesitation of the authors in The Cross and the Flag to seek or claim biblical authority for political theory and social action, Goudzwaard declares:

While we may not superficially rid ourselves of the problems … posed, there is the undeniable fact that the gospel proclaims itself as a Word for the world; as a Word which affects and desires to redeem all our cultural activities. Therefore it is simply impossible to … deny the relevance of this Christianity to political life. To put it differently: even if we aren’t concerned with the gospel in politics the gospel is concerned about our political activities [p. 3].

Goudzwaard’s Christian Political Option is not a blueprint for reproducing the Dutch multi-party system in other countries. Rather, it is a careful discussion, with specific illustrations, of some of the problems that must be worked out before Christians can begin to function, as a unified community undivided by liberal-conservative factions, in or under any government in today’s world.

Albert Gedraitis’s Worship and Politics comes as a companion study to Goudzwaard’s Christian Political Option, being a studied exegesis of what the author calls the political teachings of Jesus and Paul. Specifically, Gedraitis gives political interpretations of Christ’s statement, “My kingdom is not of this world,” and the political implications he finds in the Lord’s Prayer and the “render unto Caesar” passages in the Synoptic Gospels.

“The Kingdom of Christ is indeed not of this world of brokenness, sin, and cursing,” Gedraitis writes:

The Kingdom of Christ is the world of love, peace, blessedness which is a totally creational possibility but must be struggled for in the power of His resurrection against the powers of darkness.… Among other things … God became man in order to re-establish the possibility of political work which would manifest now the full blessedness to come in the public-legal order when it is totally restored to its task before His Face [p. 21].

We cannot escape the political significance of the Lord’s Prayer in Jesus’ ministry. Even without the petition for the coming of the Kingdom, it cut into the established ways of government.… Jesus was teaching His disciples to change their political perceptions through prayer. And such a change of perceptions is always preliminary to any far-reaching political change.

Gedraitis finds the prayer speaking to the problem of poverty (“give us this day our daily bread”) and the illegitimate use of power (“deliver us from evil”).

“Give to Caesar what is his, and give to God what is His” can have no other meaning than that we are to give to God all our lives, our service, our communal impact on the course of history. We are to give God alone the governmental-political outcome of our earthly pilgrimage, pointing it, too, to the coming of His Kingdom [p. 19].

Unlike the other volumes discussed, Gedraitis’s is mainly a survey of texts throughout the whole New Testament for political doctrine. His treatment of

Romans 11–13 alone covers thirty-five pages. The work is not characterized by the presumptuousness of some of the writers mentioned above, but is a careful attempt to convince the skeptical that Christian political action is not only possible but mandatory, on no less authority than Scripture.

The work suffers mainly from the author’s use of philosophical and academic jargon. Many of his meanings will be obscure to those not steeped in the writings of others in Gedraitis’s Toronto-based Christian social movement. On the other hand, his strength is his flair for reducing extremely complex philosophical concepts to fairly simple substance.

Together the four volumes offer Christians concerned about working out their lives in political contexts great nurture and encouragement. All the authors can learn from one another. And the whole of Christ’s body, as it comes alive to the need for greater social works and witness, can contribute to that learning by getting involved with them as students of God’s Word, commited to Christ’s Lordship over all and in all. Yes, even politics.

Wit And Wisdom For Singles

Your Half of the Apple: God and the Single Girl, by Gini Andrews (Zondervan, 1972, 159 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Jeanne Willet, production coordinator, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Christian girls who tire of reading the usual religious fare on singleness will welcome Gini Andrews’s practical, perceptive advice. She keeps a jump ahead of the cynical reader by cleverly using a question-answer format and punctuating realistic, common-sense suggestions with a large measure of wit. Single for many years, she is now a widow and is associated with L’Abri Fellowship.

Mrs. Andrews recognizes “the struggle to find balance between God’s utter sufficiency in our lives and the need He has created in us for our own kind.” With only occasional sermonizing she emphasizes the necessity of a love relationship with God: “… no other relationship can ever completely fill all our needs all the time.” The Christian single should work within this framework and develop the whole person now to be prepared for a single or married life.

Readily acknowledging that “aloneness” brings its share of problems, the author affirms that this was the state Christ chose. And she reminds the reader of the loss of individuality and personal freedom that accompanies marriage.

In addition to examining attitudes, Mrs. Andrews looks at the practical aspects of a successful single life and makes positive suggestions both for those who will eventually marry and for those who won’t. She urges her readers to develop talents, exercise creative abilities, and work on appearance. Above all, she suggests, love others and be available with an open door and an open ear. This will leave little time for nurturing bitterness and self-pity.

An example of ideal womanhood is the woman of Proverbs 31. “Ruby” was tasteful, creative, and industrious. She helped the poor, was a skillful businesswoman, and a good craftsman. Although she was married and a mother, most of her virtues can be assimilated by contemporary singles.

Can a girl really find happiness and fulfillment without marrying? Gini Andrews’s accomplishments as a teacher, counselor, and concert pianist qualify her to answer with a hearty “yes!”

NEWLY PUBLISHED

The Great Reversal: Evangelism Versus Social Concern, by David O. Moberg (Holman, 194 pp., $5.95). Statements such as “Trophies for Christ are sought in somewhat the same way a big-game hunter in Africa stalks his exotic prey” will enrage many evangelicals. But Moberg brings balance and perspective to the evangelism-vs.-social-action debate and shows how evangelicals have changed since the days of Wilberforce and Shaftesbury. Every concerned evangelical ought to own, read, and lend this book.

River of Life, by James S. Stewart (Abingdon, 160 pp., $3.50). Luminous interpretive studies of single verses or groups of related verses. Good reading for meditation—and decision.

The City, by George Sweeting (Moody, 128 pp., $2.95). A collection of sermons by the president of Moody Bible Institute. Wide-ranging, with devotional rather than expository appeal.

Gleanings From Elisha, by Arthur Pink (Moody, 254 pp., $5.95). Chiefly a study of seventeen of the prophet’s miracles. The author, a widely traveled Britisher, died in 1952.

A New Breed of Clergy, by Charles Prestwood (Eerdmans, 108 pp., $1.95 pb). A somewhat prosaic apologia for the new style in (more or less liberal) clergy by a Methodist preacher turned professor of sociology. Incidentally but significantly portrays the development of the theologically emaciated, socially active “new breed” as the logical consequence of the take-over of most churches by optimistic, evolutionary humanism after the 1920s.

New Encyclopedia of Philosophy, by J. Grooten and G. Steenbergen (Philosophical Library, 468 pp., $20). Concise volume covering major terms, ideas, and thinkers in the history of philosophy. Translated from the Dutch. Handy but too brief.

Lamentations, by Delbert R. Hillers (Doubleday, 1972, 116 pp., $6). The latest in the “Anchor Bible” series of new translations with introduction and notes.

History of Israelite Religion, by Georg Fohrer (Abingdon, 1972, 416 pp., $10.95). An English translation of a German original from 1968. Fohrer has not only revised and updated Gustav Hoelscher’s important work on Israelite religion but has added a major contribution of his own.

Sealed Orders, by Agnes Sanford (Logos, 313 pp., $5.95). An often mystical autobiography telling of a healing ministry and life as a minister’s wife.

Toward a New Earth: Apocalypse in the American Novel, by John R. May (Notre Dame, 254 pp., $8.75). Presents a thoroughly supported case for the revelational in fiction, using such authors as Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, and Vonnegut. In tracing this dark vision in our novels, May also proves that fiction can and does present theological issues to the general public.

A Reader’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, by Sakae Kubo (Andrews University [Berrien Springs, Mich.], 284 pp., n.p.). Another time-saving device that will help the inexperienced student of New Testament Greek improve his reading skill. Arranges vocabulary in the order in which the words occur in the New Testament, according to chapter and verse.

How to Face Your Fears, by David Hubbard (Holman, 140 pp., $3.95). The president of Fuller Seminary draws on his counseling experience and biblical resources to help readers face the nagging fears they may suffer in daily life. Readable and incisive.

The Christian and Warfare, by Jacob J. Enz (Herald, 95 pp., $1.95 pb). A reexamination of the Old Testament’s teachings on war by a professor from the Mennonite pacifism tradition. Adds few new insights.

Essays on Nature and Grace, by Joseph Sittler (Fortress, 134 pp., $4.95). Subtle theological essays, rich in insights and allusions from a variety of sources, written against the backdrop of the modem interest in ecology, by a liberal Lutheran. More indebted to modern theology and literature than to biblical teaching.

Old Testament Theology: Basic Issues in the Current Debate, by Gerhard Hasel (Eerdmans, 1972, 103 pp., $1.95 pb). A comprehensive survey (with a European flavor) of current Old Testament theologies, and a proposal for a “new” approach (though it is difficult to see wherein it is new). Outlines questions evangelicals must begin asking.

The Forgotten Americans, by Frank Armbruster with Doris Yokelson (Arlington House, 454 pp., $9.95). Two staff members of the Hudson Institute have prepared a highly useful compendium and analysis of statistical studies and opinion polls in the United States over the last two decades. In view of the impact that a single poll or survey can have, even though alone it may give a very distorted view, this overview can be of great value to anyone wanting to see how beliefs and opinions are developing in the United States.

The Change Agent, by Lyle E. Schaller (Abingdon, 207 pp., $2.95 pb). Advocating a systematic and anticipatory approach to planned social change, this author discusses styles and tactics of innovative leadership. He does not discuss changing individuals or personal growth, a crucial omission to any comprehensive strategy for leadership.

Semantics in Biblical Research, by John F. A. Sawyer (S.C.M., 1972, 146 pp., £ 2.25). An attempt to isolate and solve the practical semantic problems that arise in biblical research, illustrated by special treatment of Hebrew words for “salvation.”

The Touch of God, by Charles R. Meyer (Alba House [Staten Island, N.Y. 10314], 156 pp., $4.50). An easy-to-understand examination of the widespread human phenomenon of religious experience as a lead-in to Christian faith; unfortunately the presentation of Christian doctrine is vague, amounting to little more than Otto’s sense of the holy with some Christian terminology thrown in.

An Index to the Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich Greek Lexicon, by John R. Alsop (Zondervan, 489 pp., $4.95 pb). The computer is used to help the student of the Greek New Testament use the standard lexicon. All the words discussed in Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich are listed in the order in which they appear in the New Testament, and references are given to the appropriate page and section. The result is a useful, time-saving tool.

The Calvinistic Concept of Culture, by Henry R. Van Til (Baker, reprint 1972, 245 pp., $3.45 pb). A significant statement of the Calvinistic position on what is still a hotly debated question, the relation between Christianity and culture.

See Also

1998 v44 No 2 SummerJournal articles: 'Economic aspects of Moving-picture theaters' – GrafiatiEvents | Museum of the Kansas National Guard3456 Crownworth Street, Corona, CA 92879 | Compass

Trousered Apes, by Duncan Williams (Arlington House, 169 pp., $6.95). An analysis of contemporary literature and art. The author concludes that in matters of taste as well as of ethics it is very hard to get along without faith in God.

Brief Introduction to the New Testament, by Andrew W. Miller (Warner, 143 pp., $.95 pb). A helpful introduction for the layman; recommended as a textbook for a youth or adult Bible class.

The Journalist’s Prayer Book, edited by Alfred P. Klausler and John DeMott (Augsburg, 112 pp., $2.50 pb). Creative insight into the problems and needs of those involved in one aspect of the art of writing. The prayers provide encouragement for journalists not yet seasoned in the career.

The Structure of Biblical Authority, by Meredith G. Kline (Eerdmans, 183 pp., 1972, $2.95 pb). In an important series of articles reprinted largely from the Westminster Theological Journal, Professor Kline applies his current covenant research (see earlier work on Deuteronomy) to the question of how the canon was formulated.

Christopher Marlowe’s Tragic Vision: A Study in Damnation, by Charles G. Masinton (Ohio University, 168 pp., $8). Approaches the study from both a theological and a literary perspective. Masinton gives finely perceived insights into Marlowe’s drama, as well as refreshing the reader’s understanding of evil and its inevitable end. A well written, well supported piece of literary criticism.

The Remnant: The History and Theology of the Remnant Idea From Genesis to Isaiah, by Gerhard F. Hasel (Andrews University [Berrien Springs, Mich.], 1972, 460 pp., $6.90, $4.90 pb). A Vanderbilt dissertation that presents, in an informed and conservative manner, vital studies of the remnant theme, particularly as found in the books of Genesis, First Kings, Amos, and Isaiah.

A Translator’s Handbook on the Gospel of Luke, by J. Reiling and J. L. Swellengrebel (American Bible Society, 798 pp., $4). Although prepared primarily for missionary translators, this will be of help to all serious students of the New Testament, and of immense value to those with only an elementary knowledge of Greek.

Twentieth Century Faith, by Margaret Mead (Harper & Row, 172 pp., $6.95). In this addition to a multi-author series on religious perspectives, Mead proposes a common planetary faith in which medicine, science, ethics, and religion are fused in a global life-support system. She argues that the religious impulse can best be implemented through the use of scientific and technological progress.

The Rabbinic Traditions About the Pharisees Before A.D. 70, by Jacob Neusner (E. J. Brill [Leiden, Netherlands], three volumes, 419 pp., 353 pp., 427 pp., 88 guilders each). An indispensable collection of materials for the study of the Jewish milieu of early Christianity. Should be in every seminary or Bible-school library.

The Natural Depth in Man, by Wilson Van Dusen (Harper & Row, 197 pp., $5.95). A clinical psychologist explores the fascinating inner world of man, drawing heavily on the life and work of eighteenth-century psychologist/mystic Emanuel Swedenborg.

Hospital Chaplain, by Kenneth R. Mitchell (Westminster, 128 pp., $4.95). A personal little book that explores and explains an important, often overlooked Christian service.

How Come, God?, by David M. Howard (Holman, 117 pp., $3.95). The missions director of Inter-Varsity reflects on the Book of Job from his own experience with suffering and death. He writes in clear, personal terms, but don’t expect extensive grappling with the issues.

Christian Revolution For Church Renewal, by Robert C. Linthicum (Westminster, 173 pp., $3.25 pb). A practical guide to reorganizing the local church for effectiveness in a changing urban situation. Realistic and useful about method, but does not deal with the distinctives of evangelical proclamation, belief, and life.

Christ, Faith, and History, edited by S. W. Sykes and J. P. Clayton (Cambridge, 303 pp., $14.95). A mixed collection of essays that, with honorable exceptions, are more noteworthy for know-it-all pomposity like that of J. A. T. Robinson than for unpretentious Christian scholarship like C. F. D. Moule’s.

Time of Need, by William Barrett (Harper & Row, 401 pp., $10). This compelling work takes an eclectic look at the twentieth century through the eyes of its artists and concludes that nihilism and humanism both fail as viable attitudes. Into the resulting vacuum, defined as “time of need,” steps technology. Will it succeed?

Liberation Ethics, by John M. Swomley (Macmillan, 243 pp., $6.95). A political scientist proposes to free men by changing societal systems. Displays a basic misunderstanding of man’s nature.

Walking Toward Your Fear, by H. C. Brown, Jr. (Broadman, 156 pp., $4.95). To surmount problems and crises, the author recommends God’s help and the will to face reality.

The Only Freedom, by Barry Wood (Westminster, 188 pp., $5.95). It is curious to see the publishing arm of the United Presbyterian Church issuing an attractively written, somewhat superficial call to a Hindu-style pantheism. The reality of the individual and God is denied, and this denial is presented as “the only freedom.”

The Jesus Touch, by Richard Hogue (Broadman, 108 pp., $1.75 pb). A “successful” evangelist answers the question, “How do I win people to Christ?” Hogue’s answer: “The Holy Spirit plus the personal life style … plus methods equals total personal witness.”

The Rediscovery of Apocalyptic, by Klaus Koch (S.C.M., 1972, 157 pp., £2.25). Koch defines apocalyptic, discusses the recent writings on the subject from America, Britain, and Germany, and concludes that most work in the field suffers from an inadequate historical methodology. The challenge is particularly directed to followers of gospel critics Kasemann and Pannenberg.

Men Who Build Churches, by Harold Bosley (Abingdon, 158 pp., $2.95 pb). Using Paul as the standard for church building, this author lists the qualities needed for effective church leadership today. In enthusiastic terms, he calls for a contemporary response to the expectations of the early Church.

Prayers and Thoughts From World Religions, by Sid G. Hedges (John Knox, 18 1 pp., $4.95). The author, a proponent of universalism, collects “insights,” all (apparently) equally true and valid, from various religions. Southern Presbyterians once again have published a distinctively non-Christian book.

The Compelling Indwelling, by James H. Jauncey (Moody, 127 pp., $1.95 pb). A freshly written and helpful interpretation of John 15. Includes questions for study and discussion.

Witness to the Faith: Cardinal Newman on the Teaching Authority of the Church, by Gary Lease (Duquesne, 158 pp., n.p.). A good, well-researched survey that should provide a solid basis for any future study of New man’s theology.

Crisis of Moral Authority, by Don Cupitt (Westminster, 160 pp., $5.95). In his concern to purge the Christian tradition of its moral authority, this author leaves us with an essentially unorthodox theology.

True Resurrection, by H. A. Williams (Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 182 pp., $6.95). The author tells how he thinks resurrection pervades every aspect of his life. Draws highly on Eastern Orthodoxy.

The Groundwork of Christian Ethics, by N. H. G. Robinson (Eerdmans, 336 pp., $7.95). A comprehensive treatment of normative Christian ethics, using Kant as a starting point. Scholarly exposition of natural morality.

The Christian Church as Social Process, by Norman Pittenger (Westminster, 131 pp., $2.75 pb). This collection of observations on the current social and religious scene interspersed with insights and nostrums culled from various contemporary figures is presented as the application of process theology to ecclesiology.

‘I Think I Can, I Think …’

“To begin with, you’ve got to understand that a seagull is an unlimited idea of freedom, an image of the Great Gull, and your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip, is nothing more than your thought itself,” instructs Fletcher Gull, paraphrasing one of the great sons of the Great Gull, Jonathan L. Seagull. And that sentence summarizes the philosophy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Richard Bach’s allegory-parable combines Mary Baker Eddy’s philosophy (Bach is a member of the Church of Christ, Scientist) with Emersonian transcendentalism under the guise of a children’s story. But unlike the fine Christian storytellers such as George MacDonald or J. R. R. Tolkien, Bach fails to consider that to gain a great good—in this case perfect freedom through perfect flying—we often experience great loss. He perceives only one form of reality and ignores the complexity of life’s multiple realities. And he does not understand or acknowledge God’s absolutes.

Jonathan Seagull, Outcast, flies alone above the Far Cliffs, disgraced because of his desire to fly. But he is disgraced only in the eyes of the flock. Banishment proves good and easy for him; he learns quickly and soon flies to a higher world. There, relying on his own intellect and physical skill—with a few wise words from a guru-like gull—Jon progresses even more rapidly. Soon he flies back in time and space to his old flock to teach others the truths of flight and freedom.

Bach in interviews has said that Jon sacrifices in returning to teach, but in the book he explains that the superseagull is “born to teach.” There is no real sacrifice, for in Jonathan’s world all worlds and all times are equal.

The narrator tells us there are no limits; we build our own heavens. Chiang, the Elder, says, “No, Jonathan, there is no such place. Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time. Heaven is being perfect.” Even illness and death are mere illusions, products of the mind. When crippled Maynard Gull wants to fly, Jonathan says, “You have the freedom to be yourself, your true self, here and now, and nothing can stand in your way.” And Maynard flies. He uses the same reasoning when Fletcher smashes into a cliff: “What you did manage to do was to change your level of consciousness rather abruptly.” Fletcher reappears, alive.

Jon in returning as the glorified gull—and in being rejected as demonic by his native land—has obvious Christ-like overtones (but then, American authors from Melville to Faulkner have created such Christ-figures). The meaning of Bach’s allegory, however, is not found in such interpretations. Neither is Jonathan Livingston Seagull a commentary on the Gospel of John (see William L. Hendricks’s heavyhanded put-on, “‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’: Check Your Literary I.Q.,” The Christian Century, November 22 issue, page 1,186). Bach has written a multi-level, updated version of “The Little Engine That Could.” The story charms in places, but it lacks the intellectual, tragic vision of sin that leads men to question—and understand—their purpose and God’s.

Driving Christ Out Of Christmas

In Prince George’s County, Maryland, the board of education, at the request of persons offended by Christian festivals, issued directives forbidding songs or pageants with a religious or Christian content at Christmastime. After some controversy, the decision was reformulated so that carols and other music inspired by religious beliefs may still be presented. In Westfield, New Jersey, the American Civil Liberties Union, acting on behalf of the Committee Against Religious Encroachment in Schools (CARES), is attempting to ban the traditional high school Christmas pageant. Its argument is based on the First Amendment, of course, and holds that the language intended to prevent the federal government from establishing a state church means all material with any religious association whatsoever must be rigorously banned from public institutions and facilities.

We are not so naïve as to suppose that Christmas carols and pageants win people to the cause of Christ. Therefore we are not particularly determined to maintain them. But we detect a persecuting, almost malicious spirit in the zeal of the ACLU and other groups to purge our culture of all religious associations—which, our culture being what it is, means primarily Christian associations. It is in fact impossible to purge education, culture, or any other significant aspect of man’s mental and spiritual life of all religious associations.

The principle of tolerance for minority religious sentiment has long been established in the public schools, and rightly so. Is it too much to expect, from groups purportedly trying to protect minorities from the indoctrinating “pressure” of voluntary pageantry and festivities with religious overtones, some tolerance for the culture and traditions of the majority, even when, like all cultures and traditions, these have strong religious associations? Or will they not be satisfied until they have purged from public recognition every trace of our majority cultural heritage?

Intellectual and cultural tyranny exercised by a majority is unjust; exercised by a minority, it is absurd. The vestiges of Christian tradition may be distasteful to many, but what probably would rush in to fill a cultural vacuum could be more than merely distasteful. When Christian teaching became widely derided as “myth” in Germany, for example, “the Myth of the Twentieth Century” (Alfred Rosenberg’s term for the Nazi world view) swept in to take its place.

If the ACLU attempted to prevent a minority group, such as the blacks, the Jews, the Puerto Ricans, the Irish, or the Poles, from expressing any of its distinctive traditions in the public schools, it would be courting disaster. Cannot a certain tolerance be exhibited toward those few memories of Christian belief and life that are still cherished by the majority of our citizens?

For ourselves as Christians we can only say: If a festival must be purged of all Christian associations in order to be acceptable to certain people of tender spiritual sensitivities, then have no festival. Without the Christian associations, Christmas becomes meaningless, even insulting to us. If Christ is to be driven from Christmas, then let us abolish Christmas altogether (after all, “Christmas,” i.e., Christ-Mass, is an irredeemably religious term). Let us have no pageants, no ceremonies,—and no Christmas shopping. A commercialized Christmas season during which Christ is incidentally remembered in songs and pageants is shabby enough; with Christ banned, it becomes a feast of Mammon. After all, if sensitive souls who do not believe in Christ cannot tolerate public mention of his name in song or story, we who do believe in him must find what remains after the zealots’ purge revolting and obnoxious. If there is to be no mention of Christ, except in churches, then let there be no Christmas season anywhere else either.

Twisted Logic

On November 7 the voters of Michigan and North Dakota decisively rejected proposals to legalize abortion on demand. Little more than a week later, the Pennsylvania legislature passed a bill (subsequently vetoed by Governor Shapp) banning abortion except where necessary to save the life of the mother. It is clear that public and legislative opinion is running against acceptance of abortion as an admissible way of preventing the birth of an unwanted child. CHRISTIANITY TODAY had a staff member in Michigan during the last two days before the abortion referendum. In the prelude and aftermath of the vote, several things became clear.

Both pro- and anti-abortion forces in Michigan recognized that the drastic shift in voter opinion from 3:2 in favor of abortion on demand in September to 2:1 against it when the ballots were cast is explained by the fact that in September a large number of the voters really did not understand what was at stake in the referendum. The use of medical terminology, such as “fetuses,” “procedures,” and “embryos,” kept most of those polled from visualizing just what an abortion always involves: the violent destruction of what is admittedly human life, whether it weighs only an ounce or several pounds.

The pro-abortion forces were honest enough to concede that this is in fact what abortion does, but contended that other concerns could override the right of the developing human embryo to life, and that a woman and her physician should be able to decide on them. The majority of voters disagreed.

The tactics of the pro-abortionists were less honorable when they attempted to play on residual anti-Catholic and anti-clerical sentiment by evoking, in effect, the specter of a “papist plot.” Another distressing tactic of the pro forces was the constantly repeated charge that strict abortion laws represent the determination of men to prevent women from deciding responsibly about their own bodies. Generally overlooked was the fact that—except in cases of forcible rape—the problem would not arise if the women involved decided responsibly about their bodies before the unwanted child was conceived.

By contrast, an encouraging feature of the discussion in Michigan was the conviction expressed by anti-abortion spokesmen, both before and after their election victory, that they could not be satisfied with having closed the door to easy abortion but must now attempt to offer real, practical help in the social, educational, moral, and spiritual problems that lead to and result from unwanted pregnancies. If abortion on demand is a morally unacceptable way of preventing the birth of an unwanted child, it is also morally unacceptable to pretend that such a pregnancy cannot cause real hardship and unhappiness. Other countries have better laws than ours to protect the unwed mother and her child; many make the child’s father equally responsible with its mother for its care and upbringing, whether or not he is her husband. It is at this point that equality between the sexes should be assured, i.e., by extending full responsibility to both partners, not by permitting the mother to be just as irresponsible toward the conceived child as the father often is.

Among the astonishing aspects of the whole discussion is the fact that many church leaders, by supporting abortion on demand, are in effect trying to persuade the rank and file of church members to abandon historic Christian moral teaching. One of the things that distinguished Christian (and Jewish) practice from that of the pagans in the Graeco-Roman world was the refusal to commit infanticide and abortion. It seems that today the churches themselves, or at least many of them, are working to bring the laws of society back into conformity with pre-Christian paganism, against the wishes—now clear—of the majority of church members.

Even more astonishing than the fact that major church bodies support such a development is the reasoning sometimes used to justify it. The same arguments could be used to rationalize almost anything—cannibalism, for example. For instance, a Lutheran Church in America organ editorializes:

The church [LCA] did not say that the termination of pregnancy should be done on a wholesale basis, but carefully pointed out that the “fetus is the organic beginning of human life,” and “the termination of its development is always a serious matter”.… The law should permit us to exercise our beliefs without criminal penalties. Abortion—like religion—is a decision state law should leave to individuals [Michigan Synod News, September, 1972].

Try This Variation:

The church did not say that cannibalism should be done on a wholesale basis, but carefully pointed out that the “body is the organic vehicle of human life” and “cooking and eating it is always a serious matter.” … The law should permit us to exercise our beliefs without criminal penalties. Cannibalism—like abortion and religion—is a decision state laws should leave to individuals.

There are some things about which the Church must say more than merely that they are “serious matters” calling for “responsible decisions.” American Christians have often wondered how so many German churchmen, in the days of Hitler, could tolerate or even excuse his policy of wholesale slaughter. Apparently that kind of twisted ecclesiastical logic is not confined to Germany.

Shutting Satan Out

James says: “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (4:7). There is increased interest today in the devil, and it is a matter not of resisting but of consorting with and even worshiping this malign majesty.

C. S. Lewis observed that there are two common errors to be avoided in demonology: one is to deny the existence of Satan and the other is to have an inordinate interest in him. A few years ago it was popular, and in some places it still is, to deny Satan’s existence; now it is popular to seek contact with Satan and build churches dedicated to him. Recently Pope Paul lashed out against this trend and affirmed what every Bible student knows, that Satan is the prince of this world, and that his major work is to defy Christ and to seek to undermine what he has done.

Scripture tells us that the role of the believer in relation to Satan is to resist him. He goes about as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. Therefore believers are not to be so curious about Satan that they become unwholesomely involved with him. It was Jeremy Taylor who said: “You may let the wolf into your house by opening the door to see if he is outside.” We are to resist Satan, but we should not open the door with curiosity just to see whether he is there. He will then enter the door we have opened and engage us in a struggle we need never face if only we keep the door shut tight.

From December 29 to January 9 the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism of the World Council of Churches will meet in Bangkok for an international study conference. The theme of this ecumenical gathering, “Salvation Today,” was decided upon after the WCC General Assembly in Uppsala four years ago. As Peter Beyerhaus pointed out in the October 27 Current Religious Thought column, this theme raises questions that cannot be answered within the context of the pluralism of the ecumenical movement.

One need not be endowed with the gift of prophecy to predict that whatever the Bangkok pronouncements on “salvation today” look like, they will little resemble the message that is the central concept of the two biblical Testaments, and that has been the basis for the Church’s ministry to the non-Christian world since the days of the apostles. As a Norwegian churchman, the Reverend Gunnar Staalsett, said in evaluating the preparatory volume for Bangkok, “Salvation Today and Contemporary Experience”: “Compared with the biblical message of salvation, the term loses its historic and ecumenical meaning, and salvation becomes exclusively situational. It becomes rather a quest for the solution of tomorrow than an offer of salvation today.”

The ecumenical predicament cannot leave us untouched, but let it not fill us with sinful gloating. It should rather induce us to examine once again our own understanding of this greatest gift of God to his fallen creation. As the message of salvation is the heart of the Gospel, the cry for salvation expresses the central need of fallen man. All religions and ideologies are human attempts to respond to this cry for salvation. And whoever undertakes to save his fellow men will naturally be inclined to heed both their empirical demands and the solutions others have offered.

But if Christians yield to this temptation, they will end up with another form of man’s self-salvation, which is not only futile but also specifically condemned by the biblical Gospel. Therefore the first requirement for becoming God’s ambassadors in the world is to understand the biblical concept of salvation. Each Christian ambassador urgently needs to ascertain from time to time whether his concept of salvation is still in all its aspects the biblical one. Otherwise his service will be useless or even harmful, though on the surface it may appear effective and make him popular in the eyes of the world.

There are seven basic truths about biblical salvation by which we need to measure our ideas and activities again and again. We have to be sure of the author, purpose, plan, diagnosis, basis, means, and conditions of salvation.

1. The Bible assures us in both Testaments that the author of salvation is no one else but God himself. In his need, man is inclined to seek help from any possible source. But by doing this he will not only miss his real salvation but will also risk enslavement to powers that try to establish their dominion by exploiting his helplessness. These enslaving powers are idols, ideologies, and dictators. In bringing the offer of salvation, the Church cannot cooperate with other forces. It must be at the sole disposal of God, the source of eternal life and all temporal blessings.

2. God’s purpose in salvation is to redeem and complete his original design of creation. A perfect world should manifest his eternal glory, and man as God’s image bearer should articulate this glory in an unbroken fellowship of love, thankfulness, and obedient cooperation. Salvation is the redemption of the world and man from the antagonistic forces that disturbed God’s original design. Only this theocentric context will prevent us from taking a humanistic shortcut.

3. God works out his redemptive purpose gradually according to a divine master plan. This plan was conceived even before the foundation of the world. It is revealed to man in a chain of revelatory acts, which are described and interpreted in the inspired documents of the two Testaments. Salvation can be understood only within this total plan, which embodies God’s definite steps toward the infallible achievement of his goal. Any attempt to achieve a full “salvation” in this world is condemned in advance by God’s revelation of what salvation really involves. At the end, salvation will be total. But it comes gradually, in steps and by degrees, and therefore our hope must be paired with endurance.

4. Salvation presupposes a need that is to be supplied in order to establish a new, satisfactory form of life, a new order. Therefore an accurate diagnosis is fundamental to a proper concept of salvation. One reason why salvation in the biblical sense can never be replaced by other human attempts at salvation is the Bible’s unique diagnosis of man’s real disaster. That disaster does not primarily consist in man’s becoming the victim of the attacks of inner-worldly forces; it lies in the fact that his original sin has made him the object of God’s wrath. Thus man is cut off from the fountain of life and enslaved by the destructive forces of the devil, sin, and death.

This original disaster has affected the total structure of the present world and all its creatures, but the seriousness of this fact is fatally ignored in most contemporary views of salvation. The ecumenical concept of “salvation today” shortsightedly concentrates on the social, political, medical, and psychological symptoms of man’s disaster rather than on its primary cause.

5. The basis of salvation, as the Bible sees it, must be adequate if new life is to arise in a blighted world. Since man’s disaster consists in his having made himself the object of God’s wrath, the only appropriate remedy is an act of God himself, in which his righteous wrath against man is removed. It is the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ, as a propitiation for man’s guilt, and his victory over the destructive forces by his glorious resurrection.

According to God’s plan of gradual salvation, the redemptive act of Christ is the beginning of a new world order. That order is not yet complete, but the problem of guilt as the cause of suffering has been resolved. The Church tackles the remaining problem of the influence of hostile forces by engaging in deeds of love and righteousness. But this problem will be resolved only at the final revelation of Christ’s victory, at his second coming.

6. Directly connected with this basis of salvation in the Christ event are the means by which salvation is applied to man and to the whole world. When Christ in his death and resurrection had accomplished reconciliation between God and man, he endowed his disciples with the gift of the Holy Spirit and entrusted them with the ministry of reconciliation. This ministry consists primarily in telling the good news, and it is accompanied by the visible demonstration of Christ’s love.

In the proclamation of the Gospel, Christ through his duly commissioned messengers invites fallen men to accept God’s offer of grace. If they do this and enter into life-giving fellowship with him in his Church, they will become a penetrating force of renewal in this present world. Christian mission in word and deed, therefore, is the way in which God’s saving act on the cross becomes an offer of “salvation today.”

7. God’s offer of salvation through Christ is a total one. It is sufficient to remove the misery of the whole world. But it becomes effective in individual man only on the condition of its acceptance by faith. Disbelief can lead to man’s eternal forfeiture of God’s offer of salvation. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

It is apparent that despite God’s saving intervention and its proclamation by the Church for twenty centuries, man’s oppression of man has not yet been ended. But this says nothing against the reality of salvation in Christ and the adequacy of the means designated by God. It must not induce us to resort to treating the symptoms by, for example, getting involved in revolution, as though we could thereby bring about “salvation today.”

The biblical answer to man’s quest for a real salvation in his needs today is: “Today, when you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts” (Heb. 3:7).

“When shall i start teaching my son about the Bible?” A Christian mother asked this question of her new pastor.

“How old is he?”

“Six,” she replied.

“Hurry home, woman, you have already lost five precious years,” the pastor exclaimed.

This is not a joke but a matter of the gravest importance. Too many parents assume that little children are not prepared to hear and understand spiritual truths, and in their ignorance they fritter away golden years of opportunity.

I am fully aware that some child psychologists, even leaders in Christian education, think that children should not be subjected to spiritual instruction before they are six. But I know from experience that little children are a fruitful field for just such teaching; they respond in a way that proves conclusively that these are indeed the golden years for Christian instruction.

The mind of a child does not operate in a vacuum. Even when he is only a few months old, impressions are being formed and character developed. What a tragedy to permit this formative period to pass without making an impact on him for God and his Word!

The hearts and minds of little children are amazingly receptive to outside impressions, for either good or evil. When our Lord affirmed, “Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein,” he was speaking of those characteristics of a child that are worth emulating by all.

Some people deplore telling children stories of violence found in the Bible. But these usually depict heroism, divine guidance, and divine intervention, and carry with them the concept of man’s dependence on God. They thrill young minds and bring blessing to them then and on through life.

When one considers the violence in very unfunny “funnies,” on TV, and in the daily press, one is inclined to cry out against any effort to deprive children of stories about David and Goliath, Daniel in the lion’s den, and his three companions in the fiery furnace, to mention but a few.

Even more deplorable is the concerted effort on the part of some to protect children from the “gory” details of our Lord’s death on Calvary. Some parents have reprimanded Sunday-school teachers for mentioning the “blood of Christ” to their children. And yet, when such children are subjected to impressions of violence all around, why should they be denied the story of the death of the Son of God, and the cleansing and redeeming blood that flowed from Calvary?

One of the outstanding characteristics of children is their simple faith. How wonderful, then, is the opportunity to instill in their minds the truths about Christ that will form the basis for their own faith in him!

Children’s lack of sophistication is a quality I am sure the Lord loves. The Christian world is beset by a desire to be sophisticated, so much so that the simplicity of the Gospel is often lost in a maze of worldly wisdom. Not so with little children. They have implicit faith in their parents, and are willing to take the Scriptures at face value. Their hearts are a fertile soil for spiritual truths, their simplicity an example and warning to us who may value worldly wisdom too highly.

This lack of sophistication carries with it a receptiveness to the Gospel that should thrill those who witness God’s grace working in the hearts of little ones. Innocence in itself carries a warning and a challenge: woe to any who either take advantage of innocence for evil ends or ignore its potential for good.

That millions of children are born into unprepared homes is a tragic fact in each generation. Certainly to the Christian, it would seem axiomatic that the Christian home alone has in it the potentials for proper training. But that so many Christian homes fail in this regard is cause for real heart-searching on the part of those involved. Christ is the center of the Christian home, and he must become the center of child training if it is to be effective.

Even very small children will sense things they have never been told. They know whether parents are sincere in their spiritual aspirations for them or not. It is little use to speak of prayer to a child if the parents are never seen praying. Little use to speak of the importance of Bible study if the parents are never seen reading the Word. Why tell of Christ’s love and transforming power if our children do not see the effect of his presence in our lives?

But all these things can take place, and there can be fulfilled before our eyes the promise, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.”

It should not be forgotten that this promise speaks of the way he should go and not the way he wants to go. The truth that “foolishness is bound in the heart of a child” is evident to all who try to guide wayward little feet.

Fortunately, Christian parents are not left to carry out their task alone, nor do they lack the tools.

First, they have the privilege of praying for their children, as well as with them. God knows our weakness and our inability to train others for him. To that end he will give wisdom and guidance and the necessary grace to carry out the task. The power of prayer will never be understood this side of eternity. God hears and answers prayer, and he reaches out often to bring help and blessing to our children. This should be an unending source of comfort.

Secondly, he has given parents his Word. That so many children now grow to adulthood with no knowledge of the Christian faith is one of the tragedies of our day. Even many coming from Christian homes know little about the Bible because they have neither learned it from their parents nor read it regularly themselves.

In a very real sense the Bible is the foundation of true education. Reverential trust in God is the beginning of wisdom. A child who goes out into the world with a knowledge of and love for the Holy Scriptures has the best preparation possible.

Young Timothy was raised amid surroundings we today would call utterly primitive. But he had the best training a parent can give: “From a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.”

The Christian parent has the same privilege to impart today.

On Recognizing The Enemy

In a recent Sunday-afternoon football game the halfback carrying the ball was tripped by a member of the opposing team. He jumped to his feet, slammed the ball on the ground, and headed for the offending tackle with blood in his eye. He was restrained by the referee. Later in the game he was tripped by a member of his own team. He rose and calmly, if glumly, walked back to the huddle.

General George Patton, if we are to believe the movie script writers, had such an intense feeling of rivalry for Britain’s Field Marshall Montgomery that he took unnecessary risks with his men to reach an objective before “Monty.”

Recently a fellow Christian made some uncomplimentary remarks to me about Pat Boone, apparently offended by his Mr. Clean image.

These items have led me to formulate the Beelzebub Principle: A person’s ability to recognize his enemy is in inverse proportion to the importance of that recognition.

It’s comparatively easy for a football player to recognize the enemy since football really isn’t important.

For a General Patton, it’s somewhat harder to recognize who the enemy is because war is important.

It’s virtually impossible for Christians to perceive their enemy because the matter is of supreme importance.

Sophisticated Christians, let me assure you that Pat Boone is not the enemy. Bob Jones, let me assure you that CHRISTIANITY TODAY is not the enemy. Evangelical friends, let me assure you that the Pope is not the enemy.

Even those who seem to be working against God are not really the enemy. Scripture holds out the possibility that these folks may desert to Jesus’ side just as we did.

The enemy, dear friends, is the prince of darkness grim, the prince of this world, the first murderer, the father of lies, who masquerades as an angel of light. And his cleverest victory is the successful promulgation of the Beelzebub Principle.

Now try to keep that straight in the future, will you?

EUTYCHUS V

TO CLIP AND CONSIDER

Thanks for using Nancy G. Westerfield’s [poem] “Placed by the Gideons” in the November 24 issue. Interesting topic to write on; interesting images; a poem to clip out and think on further. Greenville College ELVA MCALLASTER Greenville, Ill.

Professor of English

I really enjoy reading those poetry selections that you choose for printing. Modern and moving. So good to see Christian poetry updated and with it.

Jermyn, Pa.

D. CARVALHO

BREAKING OUT LIKE MEASLES

I am writing to you today to tell you that the article “Whither Episcopalians?” (Nov. 10) is not only repugnant to me as an evangelical Episcopalian but also far from the truth.… Please be assured that there are a great many clergy and bishops who take seriously their ordination vow of teaching nothing as necessary to eternal salvation but that which can be reasoned and concluded from Holy Scripture. Indeed, all of us clergy of the Episcopal Church, in signing the Oath of Conformity, have stated flatly that we believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to BE the Word of God—period. It is quite true, of course, that there are many other clergy and bishops who are not loyal to the profession of their faith at the time of their ordination, and who do give the impression of providing a “dealer’s choice” in what is to be believed as necessary to salvation and what is to be regarded as man’s word. But I cannot see how you can, in any sense of Christian charity, let alone journalistic responsibility, condemn the whole before the gaze of the American evangelical reading public for a situation affecting only a part of the Episcopal Church (however large a part at that!). And I cannot see how you can fail to acknowledge that the religion of Jesus Christ, especially as he can be known through his holy Word, is breaking out like measles all over the Episcopal Church!

Certainly the recent Episcopal Conference on Evangelism in Louisville was … a resounding affirmation … that the evangelical way in the Episcopal Church is vital, that the Word of God, and the Gospel of Jesus Christ in particular, is being honored in our tradition together with the Holy, Gospel Sacraments, without fear of the “consequences.”

BRUCE E. LEBARRON

Christ Episcopal Church

Bethany, Conn.

Let me assure Mr. Wagner and others who share his concern, that John MacQuarrie is not authoritative or even representative in current Anglican thinking. The students at Virginia Seminary laugh at MacQuarrie’s ideas. Lest Mr. Wagner’s article convey a serious misconception, never has any one theologian spoken for the Anglican church, with the possible exceptions of Thomas Cranmer and Richard Hooker. I would encourage Mr. Wagner to ponder this when in his admiration for the Reformed tradition he shows a tendency to absolutize man’s theology. The Lord be praised for John Stott, and also for John Calvin, St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Augustine. However, only Scripture is infallible; no theologian or tradition can provide an inerrant key to the understanding of Scripture. Similarly, no one party within the church can claim to be the church. I would consider myself to be an evangelical, but I would certainly not want to equate that label with God’s elect. I encourage fellow evangelicals in the Episcopal church to be more sensitive to the working of the Holy Spirit in Christians who also wear a Catholic or Pentecostal label.

Alexandria, Va.

ERNEST CURTIN

APOLITICAL PRECAUTIONS

I was disappointed to read your news story “Backing Their Man” by Barrie Doyle (Oct. 27).… The story implies that the Wheaton College Student Government initially favored Senator McGovern and invited only him, but that the president of the college overruled this invitation until President Nixon was also invited.

This was not the case. In fact, both Student Government and President Armerding took every precaution to be apolitical. Invitations were sent to both major candidates on the same day, and when McGovern offered to speak during Spiritual Emphasis Week, the students suggested that he come on another day. You may also be interested to know that President Nixon did send a representative to our campus. He was the Honorable Frank Sanders, undersecretary of the Navy.

W. E. WHITTINGTON

Student Body President

Wheaton College

Wheaton, Ill.

LIVING WITH THE PROBLEMS

Professor Yamauchi (Eutychus and His Kin, Nov. 10) has correctly raised some serious difficulties in dating Genesis Man just after 4000 B.C. I am myself very puzzled by the cave paintings in Spain and France. In her Prehistory Jacquetta Hawkes calls them “the most improbable event in human history.”

I am not troubled by the development of agriculture and towns. The building of elaborate nests is instinctive to birds. Bees have complex cities. The female hunting wasp (Hymenoptera Pompilidae) makes a mud receptacle, fills it with live insects, which she anesthetizes, and then lays one egg in the opening so that her offspring will have fresh meat. The skills of dolphins and bats are in some respects far superior to ours. These instinctive skills are all printed into the genetic code of each species. My point is that according to the Bible the only instinctive skill that differentiates Genesis Man from all other animals is the ability to worship and converse with God. The fact that so-called Stone Age tribespeople have degenerated in their worship of God is irrelevant. Missionaries will soon show that they too can worship God as we do.

I admitted that the intermediate periods after the Old Kingdom of Egypt and Early Dynastic Sumerian do not at present yield evidence of a cataclysm, but on the other hand written sources for this period are to my mind incredibly scanty.

Professor Yamauchi’s solution involved ditching “the traditional doctrine that Adam was the physical progenitor of mankind” (his words). I prefer to live with the problems. Leakey’s recent discovery in Kenya of a normal shaped human skull believed to be 2.5 million years old shows how quickly the certainties of evolutionary theory can be shattered.

Millbrook, Ont.

ROBERT BROW

KEEPING ABREAST

Just a note as a member of the secular press to say how much I appreciate the news section of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. The issue of November 10 struck me as particularly interesting, and made me realize how helpful your efforts are to us in keeping abreast of developments among evangelical Christians. Keep up the good work.

The New York Times

EDWARD FISKE

New York, N. Y.

Religion Editor

STINGING HUMANS

I have appreciated the “What If …” cartoons, although perhaps sometimes the subtle points escape me. But the November 10 presentation of Aholiab is a real winner. So contemporary, so human, so stingingly human! Every issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY is an inspiration for me.

Ronan, Mont.

WALTER H. ARP

It’s a great Christian publication. But that cartoon: juvenile humor, unfunny, a mockery rather than fun, a burlesque, tasteless, irritating, pointless, misses the mark, puerile, unworthy of the tone you create in the rest of the magazine. Berkeley, Calif.

BENJAMIN HARRIS

BEST BOOKS

In “Palestine/Israel” (Nov. 10) Faith L. Winger has provided concerned Christians with the best practical list of books I’ve yet seen on the Middle East.… The only real problem … is inherent in the limitations of American publishing and bookselling on the subject. So many of the best books are from foreign presses and difficult to obtain in our country.… A partial remedy for this problem has been provided by Americans for Middle East Understanding (475 Riverside Drive, New York, N. Y. 10027), which has imported … foreign titles which, as a non-profit organization, it sells at cost. It also sells at wholesale price many of the U. S. publications suggested by Miss Winger and distributes, free, Bradley Watkins’s essay, “Is the Modern State, Israel, a Fulfillment of Prophecy?,” which she mentions.

THE REVEREND L. HUMPHREY WALZ

Synod of New York

United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A.

Syracuse, N. Y.

Having read extensively on the Middle East, both ancient and current history, I am delighted to have the bibliography presented by Miss Winger. I do think, however, that history from the Arab point of view is not as well represented in the bibliography as is that of the Israeli. May I suggest a few books that appear to me instructive additions to the list:

1. The Phoenix Land: The Civilization of Syria and Lebanon, by Robin Fedden, George Braziller, 1965.

2. The Arab Awakening, by George Antonius, Khayats, (Beirut, Lebanon).

3. What Price Israel, by Alfred Lilienthal, Regnery, 1953, and There Goes the Middle East, by Alfred Lilienthal, Devin-Adair, 1957.

4. Suez: The Twice Fought War, by Kennett Love, McGraw-Hill, 1969.

5. The Arabs, by Anthony Nutting, Potter, 1964, and The Other Side of the Coin, also by Nutting.

6. The Middle East in World Affairs, by George Lenczowski, Cornell, 1962. Sun City, Ariz. MCKINNIE L. PHELPS

AFTER FIVE YEARS

Concerning “Missouri Synod’s Troubled Campus” (Nov. 24): As a recent (six months ago) full-time student of five years at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, I feel that I need to disagree with President Tietjen’s statement that “it has not been their [students’] experience that the faculty is in basic conflict with Christian teaching. Quite the contrary. They’ve found a bold affirmation of the faith.” For five years I sat in classes at Concordia Seminary and listened to professor after professor allowing for beliefs that slowly but surely erode the Christian’s Church’s most precious gospel message. I am not speaking only of the biblical evidence concerning the six-day creation, the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, the historicity of Jonah, or the authenticity of the Red Sea crossing. What I am speaking of is the allowing of diverse and contradictory beliefs in the areas of the existence of angels and demons, the biological virgin birth of Christ, the miracles which the Bible clearly ascribes to the earthly Jesus, and the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. I am convinced that many students as well as many in the field do not realize that the historical-critical method as demanded at the seminary, even with so-called Lutheran presuppositions, allows for the denial of all of the above plus much more.… If LCMS members continue to support this new kind of neo-liberal Christian belief system and do not support what President Preus has initiated, then in a few years’ time the conservative voice will not only no longer be heard; it will not even be tolerated.

Trinity Lutheran Church

TOM BAKER

Sturgis, Mich.

ONLY TYPEWRITERS

An inaccuracy appeared in “Federal Aid to Religion” (Nov. 10). The Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada did not receive from CIDA $1,400,000, but rather $2,500. This was obtained under approval of the Kenya Educational Department for typewriters to enable us to initiate a typing course in one of our girls’ secondary schools. The only other dealing we have had with CIDA was to approve the seconding of one of our secondary-school teachers in Kenya to CIDA for a post which they wished to fill.

C. W. LYNN

Executive Director

Overseas Missions Department

The Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada Toronto, Ont.

• We erred. The figures CIDA gave us included funds from private sources as well as government grants.—ED.

The whole tone of the news story would make Christians feel that their governments were carrying a large share of the cost of Christian missions. In the case of Overseas Missionary Fellowship, the statement is not true. They did not receive any money from CIDA.

Barrie, Ont.

MRS. A. S. MORROW

SINGING IN CRUSADES

We greatly appreciated your news story, “Singing in Our Church” (Nov. 10), about the Ethel Waters dinner. One correction: While we did show a short film on the life of Ethel Waters, the title of that film was not Time to Run. Time to Run is the latest dramatic production of World Wide Pictures and will not be premiered until late January in Memphis. Following that, it will be shown in hundreds of commercial theaters across the nation.

Lest anyone think Billy Graham is now starting a church, it should be noted also that the inscription on the gift to Ethel Waters from the Billy Graham team recorded her fifteen years of singing in “our Crusades,” not (as the article said) “our church.”

World Wide Pictures

BILL BROWN

Burbank, Calif.

President

TO IGNORE OR TO TRADUCE

Your news story “Bishops Aye Women” (Nov. 24) is so slovenly that it is insulting to all members of the Episcopal Church.

The debate was not over women in the ministry; women are full ministers of the Episcopal Church, in the only order that the New Testament shows to have been open to women in apostolic days—the diaconate. The bishops were discussing the possibility of women being ordained to the episcopate and priesthood. The vote was 74 yea to 61 no, with 5 abstentions.

I speak as one of the bishops, and an enthusiastic supporter of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, when I tell you that it would be better to ignore us than to traduce us.

THE RIGHT REVEREND STANLEY ATKINS

The Diocese of Eau Claire

Eau Claire, Wisc.

SPAWNING GROUNDS

Those of us working with Clear Light Productions were very appreciative of the thoughtful, encouraging review of our multimedia show, CRY 3 (News, “CRY 3: Journey From Plastic City,” Nov. 24).

One correction worth mentioning, however, is that the missionary organization you print as Africa Evangelism is actually African Enterprise. This group of people operating out of South Africa and East Africa provided the spawning grounds for not only our production of CRY 3 but also another similar production, headed by Eric Miller (in conjunction with Inter-Varsity), called Twentyonehundred. Both CRY 3 and Twentyonehundred have seen tremendous impact among young people over the last two years. We have already received booking requests for CRY 3 as a result of your review—which proves your readership is definitely an involved one!

DON ANDRESON

Clear Light Productions, Inc.

President Newton, Mass.

• Sorry. (But a Clear Light Staffer gave us the wrong name!)—ED.

Every schoolboy knows how Galileo braved the Catholic Inquisition to put Copernicus on the map and the sun in the solar system. What they don’t always know is that scientists are capable of being just as prejudiced as are religionists.

A recent resolution of the National Academy of Sciences is a case in point. The academy strongly opposes the inclusion of the religious concept of the origin of life in California science textbooks—a course that has been urged on the State Board of Education, which was scheduled to … announce its verdict next month.

Many observers on the Western intellectual scene have been saying that we are coming out of the period of aggressive scientism that we have been in since the last century; but, if this resolution is any indication, scientism has just launched a counterattack.

It does no good to scream “monkey trial!” this late in the century. In the 1920s, bigoted religion was so strong that it could prevent science from teaching evolution. Now the shoe is on the other foot: bigoted science is trying to claim the field of origins for itself and to eliminate all other competitors.

The academy warns us that religion and science are “separate and mutually exclusive realms of human thought whose presentation in the same context leads to misunderstanding of both scientific theory and religious beliefs.” I’m a great believer in the interdisciplinary approach, and I frankly wonder if any two fields of thought are “mutually exclusive.”

But, no matter—anyone with a smattering of education knows that religion and science are different in many respects. Yet to assert so apodictically that “there is no question on which both science and religion can have something to say” is to say something that no one can really prove.

It is entirely possible that science and religion can work on the same question—in this case, the question of ultimate origins—and both contribute something valuable to the resolution of the problem. There is no sign on the door of religion reading, “No microscopes allowed.” Why should there be a sign on the door of science reading, “No faith allowed”?

Yet the National Academy of Sciences warns us that we must not introduce the concept of “the supernatural” into scientific studies because the concept is not subject to validation by scientists. This may be just its way of saying that the supernatural is not the natural, which you can see by the definition of the term.

If the academy is trying to tell us that science can’t deal with the nonempirical, or spiritual, that’s fine. But if it is suggesting that rational men, in their comprehensive efforts to understand the total universe, can’t postulate nonempirical explanations for things in their experience that can’t be accounted for on empirical grounds, then the academy is being unscientific itself.

It is true that science, as presently understood, can’t handle the concept of the supernatural. It is structured to study the empirical and repeatable, not the spiritual and the unique. But this proves nothing about the possible need to introduce the supernatural into a discussion of a special question, such as the problem of origins.

To study this problem might require, in addition to science, a discipline that handles the spiritual and unique. If science goes into origins, it ought to admit that the problem might transcend empirical categories and that such other disciplines as religion, theology, and philosophy could have something to say on the subject.

This is precisely what Dr. John Ford has been saying. He is a San Diego physician who, it so happens, is also vice-president of the State Board of Education. Ford has been joined by many religionists in his belief that it would be singularly unscientific for a scientist to affirm that “I can’t allow you to use other disciplines in handling this question of origins.”

I should think that a good educational system would allow many types of evidence and experiences to come into play as it deals with a question as complex as the problem of origins. To say that you can’t find God in a test tube or the soul under a microscope simply proves that you might be looking in the wrong place or with the wrong instrument. You can’t find fish in the desert or scorpions in the sea; you can’t pick up angstrom units on a Geiger counter or X-rays with a speedometer.

When we come to the real issue—the theory of evolution—anyone who meditates long on the problem will see clearly that this theory can’t establish itself beyond the possibility of replacement.

I personally feel that there is some cogent evidence for a simple theory of evolution—that is, for a basic hypothesis of change, progress, complexification of organic life on this planet. (There are also some knotty problems in the theory.) Exactly how this growth came about, whether by natural selection or by some other mechanism, is still hotly debated among scientists.

This simple theory of chance can be interpreted in a number of ways. For example: you can fit it rather easily into a world view of theism, and thus it would be illogical to rule out God just because you had evidence for a simple theory of growth.

A new theory could come along any day now and, using the same evidence, offer an intriguing possibility for rearrangement of the data or putting the same basic data into a new configuration—a simpler pattern that would make the old theory seem inadequate. This happens often in scientific thinking.

What I’m saying is that theories of origin always have a striking lack of finality about them. Plato called all of them “likely tales” (though he didn’t shrink from expounding his own tale in the Timaeus). Even those theories, like evolution, which have a certain power to explain the data, can’t establish themselves beyond doubt, because of the obvious problem of getting to the original facts. We would need to go back (in a time machine perhaps?) and directly observe the process of evolution going on before we could get dogmatic about the theory.

All theories of origin suffer from this same difficulty: they always keep us at a distance from what we need to see to be absolutely sure. This problem of distance makes it impossible to really experiment on the theory of evolution. We can only say that the hypothesis has some explanatory value for the facts that we do have, such as the fossil record and the structural similarity of man and animal.

Consequently, when Professor Melvin Calvin of UC Berkeley, speaking for the National Academy of Sciences, complained that the creation theory wasn’t subject to tests, he should have pointed out, in all fairness, that evolution has the same problem.

If science can’t establish one theory authoritatively, this means that other disciplines have the right to participate in the investigation of the question of origins. To prohibit this, as the academy wishes, could make science seem to assert, “Our discipline has already settled this question. We need no further discussion of it.”

Is this what the academy really means? Is there now no alternative to evolution?

Over 2,000 scientists now make up a body dedicated to the religious explanation of origins—the Creation Research Society, formed in 1968. When this many American scientists are committed to the creation view, I think we can safely say that creation is still a “live option” in the intellectual community, and it ought to be presented as such in any textbook that treats the problem of origins objectively.

If the National Academy of Sciences feels that the introduction of the creation alternatives in science textbooks would “affect the study of science for a generation,” I can only ask this question in response: “What will be the long-term effect of exposing students to only one hypothesis of origins, when the question of origins is still an open question?”

Or is it still an open question?—ARLIE J. HOOVER, professor of history and philosophy at the Malibu, California, campus of Pepperdine University. Reprinted from the Los Angeles Times, November 10, 1972.

One measure of the ethnocentrism of American evangelicals is the uncritical assumption that the evangelization of the world in this or any generation rests primarily on American, or at least Western, shoulders.

It is true that the churches of Europe and North America are responsible before God for the stewardship of their very considerable resources of men and materials. Since World War II some 60 per cent of world Protestant overseas missionary personnel and nearly 80 per cent of the finances have come from North American churches. Nevertheless, one must agree with Arthur Glasser’s words:

It is both physically impossible and demonstrably unscriptural that missionaries from the West are responsible to evangelize all the people of this generation throughout all the world.

The evangelization of the world is the task of the whole Church throughout the world. No Church attains fullness and maturity without participating to some degree in the missionary purpose of God (“February Theses,” East Asia Millions, May, 1961, p. 67).

Even if it were possible for the Christians of one country to evangelize the world, from a biblical perspective it would work an irreparable loss on believers in other lands, who are also under the mandate to “go disciple the nations.”

Today American evangelicals are becoming aware that in the twentieth century “the Church which is His Body” has at last become a worldwide reality. One of the important corollaries of this is that now the “home base” of missions is everywhere—wherever the Church is planted. This opens up the exciting possibility of church and mission cooperating in every nation to bring the whole Gospel to the whole world.

We are passing through an era in which many missions have pursued a pronounced objective of establishing “self-propagating, self-governing and self-supporting” churches. C. Peter Wagner in Frontiers in Missionary Strategy observes that the “three selfs” were useful and necessary concepts when mission societies were trying to shake off an inherited colonial and paternalistic mentality, but the terms have now become senile. We need to replace them with something more contemporary without losing what remains valid in the ideas they express.

Henry Lefever also cautions against the use of these terms, since “the New Testament speaks of ‘self’ only as something to be denied, or at least something to be discovered only through being set aside and forgotten” (with Peter Beyerhaus, The Responsible Church and the Foreign Missions, p. 16).

A church that is too self-conscious may also be self-centered and selfish, and not infrequently this has been a failing of so-called indigenous churches established as a result of this ideology. The Church was never intended to be self-centered; it is to be Christ-centered, with an outward, rather than inward, orientation to the world for which he died. In Archbishop Temple’s words, “The Church is the only society in the world which exists for the benefit of those who do not belong to it.”

The goal of mission is not simply establishing indigenous churches in the “third world” of Afericasia, but making disciples in the “fourth world,” which in the March, 1972, issue of Church Growth Bulletin Wagner defines as embracing “all those people who, regardless of where they may be located geographically, have yet to come to Christ. In that sense the fourth world is the top-priority objective of missions. This pushes the statement of the goal of missions one notch further than the indigenous church.”

Wagner pointedly asserts that “the proper goal of the Christian mission is not to establish an ‘indigenous church’.… The true goal of missions is making disciples” (Frontiers in Missionary Strategy, p. 168). Normally, indigenous national churches functioning on New Testament patterns should be the most effective instruments for implementing the Great Commission. But we all know of instances where local churches (in America as well as abroad) are not effective—and may actually be a hindrance—in discipling the fourth world. Where they can be helped to realize and pursue the Church’s primary objective—fine! But until they can be brought to do this, they may simply have to be bypassed in pursuit of the prime objective. The proper goal of missions is not simply planting indigenous churches in the third world; it is planting missionary churches that move out in responsibility to the fourth world of lost men.

A missionary from Cameroon reported that leaders of his mission were so committed to “indigenous principles” that when they heard of a new, responsive tribe they refused to evangelize it on the grounds that this was the responsibility of the younger churches. But the Cameroon church was not prepared, and the task was not carried out. Whenever so-called indigenous principles interfere with any church’s primary goal to disciple men and nations, they should be rethought or abandoned.

Simply establishing indigenous churches is no longer seen as an adequate goal of biblical missions unless such churches become “sending” churches in, and from, their own setting. The New Testament knows nothing of “receiving” churches that are not also in turn to be “sending” churches (1 Cor. 15:3; 2 Tim. 2:2). The early group of believers in Rome was a receiving church only until it could marshal its resources for sending the good news on to Spain and central Europe. We in the so-called sending churches of the West need to remember that we too were once on the receiving end of God’s message of reconciliation.

The truth remains that every church in every land ought to be and remain a sending church. Even in North America, the spiritual vitality of any fellowship of Christians should be measured not simply by the number of believers it attracts but by the number of disciples it sends out empowered for witness and service.

With respect to new churches Peter Beyerhaus advocates something similar when he says in the volume mentioned previously: “The ultimate aim of missions is no longer the organizational independence of the young Church; it is rather the building up of a Church which itself has a missionary outreach.” If we believe this to be the ultimate expression of the Great Commission, then we must regard the growing entrance into mission of churches on every continent as a cause for profound gratitude and continued encouragement in our day.

If Western nations and institutions are on the decline, God may well use the churches of Afericasia to bridge the gap as they increasingly are accepting the missionary responsibility that lies upon the Church in every place.

The emergence of foreign-mission societies in the third-world church is not altogether a new development. American evangelicals know the exploits of Livingstone and Moffett in opening large areas of Africa to the Gospel, but they have seldom heard of the unnamed or little-known local African missionaries who were responsible for much of the subsequent Christian advance in those areas.

One of the great accounts in missionary annals is the record of the evangelization of the Pacific Islands through the dedication of island inhabitants who went out under great risk and hardship in their small boats and canoes from Samoa, Fiji, and the Solomons to other island territories, until today three-fourths of the inhabitants of the South Pacific islands (apart from New Guinea) are reportedly members of Christian churches. Notable among these islander missionaries who crossed linguistic, cultural, and geographic boundaries with the Gospel are the more than a thousand members of the Melanesian Brotherhood who over the years worked so effectively for the Christianization of the islands, yet are all but unknown to most American mission enthusiasts.

Unfortunately, many indigenous national missionary organizations were more active around the turn of the century than they are today. To what extent does the responsibility for this lie with our generation of mission planners and activists?

What can we do to aid emerging churches overseas in developing a missions strategy and passion?

1. As American evangelicals and evangelical mission societies, we must clarify, sharpen, and update our own understanding of the biblical mandate for missions. The emphasis should be that the command to “preach the Gospel to every creature” and to “make disciples of all nations” must parallel and even supersede the intermediate goal of planting indigenous churches as a means of discipling the nations.

The Foreign Missions Department of the Assemblies of God recently restated its mission objectives to include an emphasis upon the Church’s continuing responsibility:

IN FOUR CELLS

(About Christians under attack: A parable)

Four girls sat in four little cells.

Gray soundproof walls were ink-smeared,

Scratched with graffiti.

When the spokesmen came to Cell 1

(Came shuffling, oozing;

Came like greasy smoke,

Like undulating snake backs)

They slithered whispers at her:

“Lonely, aren’t you?

Only … lonely …”

When she cried

Morosely enough

They let the cell walls disappear,

But she sees the same graffiti

On all other walls, everywhere,

Now.

Sees, sobbing; whining.

The girl in Cell 2

Was passive when they whispered,

But when they ran technicolored travelogues

Against a little fog screen

She smiled

And stepped over into

The next lurid journey.

“Lonely? Only …”

The spokesman whisper-snarled

For weeks on end

Inside Cell 3.

Weeks? Years.

She always nodded.

“Oh, yes.

But that’s quite irrelevant.

Of course, of course.

It matters, and doesn’t matter

Because He matters

So utterly.

You see?

Irrelevant.

Irrelevant.”

Their film screen wouldn’t coagulate

And finally they themselves couldn’t coagulate, either.

They flaked off into puddles of dust

And she swept them out

When she chopped the cell walls

Into kindling

For the big stone fireplace

In her oak-paneled living room.

(“And the street of the city

Was pure gold,

As it were transparent glass.”

Her city.)

Cell 4:

When she nodded agreement

At their very first whisper

They signaled to Neanderthal’s cousin

Who was waiting just outside.

They handcuffed her to Neanderthal’s cousin;

They fastened other chains to ankle, neck, and knee.

They flung a gummy plastic serape

Over her, over him,

Making them into another kind of Siamese twins.

And the spokesmen laughed at her

For the rest of her life,

Laughed like demons.

Well, of course.

Like what they were.

ELVA McALLASTER

The Foreign Missions Department is dedicated primarily to the fulfillment of the Great Commission—“Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15). Its basic policy is to evangelize the world, establish churches after the New Testament pattern, and to train national believers to preach the Gospel both to their own people and in a continuing mission to other nations.

This statement of objectives, after affirming the importance of establishing indigenous churches as an instrument of fulfilling the Christian mission to the world, goes on to stress the need for missionary-national “cooperation and unity in the mutual God-given responsibility for complete world evangelization”:

In so doing, the missionary must not abdicate his responsibility to world evangelism and church planting, either by perpetuating the mission’s authority over the national church or by succumbing to nationalistic interests that would prevent him from fulfilling the Great Commission.

2. It is imperative that we communicate the missionary mandate by precept and example from the inception of all evangelistic and church-planting ministries.

A Chinese youth leader at the Singapore Congress on Evangelism commented that while he knows his missionary friends preach the missionary imperative on furlough in their homelands, he had never heard one preach a sermon on missions to the new churches they had helped bring into being in Asia. He went on to observe the same failure in most seminaries and Bible schools of his acquaintance: they had no courses on missions in their curriculum, he said. It is little wonder if pastors trained there have no informed and compelling sense of missionary outreach to communicate to their congregations.

Missionaries responsible for pastoral and lay training must be prepared to imbue new leaders with the principles and practice of multiplying disciples and churches, both in their immediate environment and across adjacent cultural and geographical boundaries.

3. Let new Christians everywhere prepare for immediate involvement in the evangelism of their own cultural “Jerusalem” (sometimes called M1), with the needs of their respective “Judea and Samaria” (i.e., communication at a slight cultural or geographical distance, M2) regularly set before them, so that some of those proved and approved of God through faithfulness in nearby witness may in time be entrusted with even more difficult missions to totally different peoples (the M3 dimension at “the ends of the earth”) as men and means become available.

4. Rather than simply internationalize existing mission organizations, let us encourage new church fellowships to develop their own patterns and forms of missionary expression.

We should be ready to share with them the best of what we have learned in a century and a half of the modern missionary movement, but then give these maturing churches full liberty under the Holy Spirit to determine what they will adopt as applicable to their situation and what they will modify or leave behind as relics of another day.

5. Finally, while seeking to manifest the unity of the Spirit through fellowship among like-minded participants in a world mission that transcends all boundaries of color and culture, let us not involve others in over-organization, nor embarrass them by insisting on ties that might compromise their effectiveness.

Above all, within the missionary movement of third-world churches we must respect the same principles of spiritual voluntarism that brought most of our missionary societies into being. Spontaneous response to the Spirit’s leading and voluntary participation by believers passionately devoted to making Christ known may well produce a greater tide of missionary advance in the third world than history has seen to date.

George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”

This well-known sentence appeared in the late, great New York Sun as an editorial response to a letter from an eight-year-old girl asking whether there really was a Santa Claus. Since its publication in 1897 the editorial has become a classic year-end repeat along with other sub-Christian Christmas paraphernalia. Religiously, however, the writer was years ahead of himself. Consider this excerpt:

Not believe in Santa Claus? You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on that lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders that are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You tear apart the baby’s rattle to see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest men, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance can push aside the curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God, he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the hearts of children.

With slight adaptation this “Christmas” story could approximate much of the New Testament theology prominent in seminaries of the major denominations under the influence of Rudolph Bultmann and his fellow-traveling existentialists. Let’s “Christianize” some of the above sentences to prove the point.

On Easter Sunday you could have hired all the television cameramen and the news reporters to watch the tomb where the dead body of Jesus lay; but even if they did not see Jesus come out or even if his body was there, what would that prove? Nobody sees the Risen Christ but that is no sign that there is no Risen Christ. Only faith can push aside the curtain and view and picture that supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, dear Christians, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Risen Christ! Thank God, he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the hearts of Christians with good news.

The editor of the Sun and the existentially oriented exegetical scholars operate from the same philosophical base: they divide their area of concern—Santa Claus or religion—from history. Like Spinoza several centuries before, these scholars give science undisputed reign over fact and religion undisputed reign over piety. By comparison the old liberal theology, à la Adolf von Harnack and Harry Emerson Fosdick, was quite conservative. Its picture of Jesus might have been warped—the tolerant rabbi from Nazareth who taught brotherhood and whose religious moralisms resemble politicians’ speeches at prayer breakfasts—but the old liberalism did not contest the historical existence of Jesus or doubt that his message (though distorted by Paul and others) could be known. But beginning with Barth and going right down through Bultmann, Fuchs, Ebeling, Bornkamm, Käsemann, Marxsen, and their offspring in both Europe and America, theology and history have been practiced in two different and opposing fields.

For an analogy, let’s go back to Virginia and Santa Claus. Barth would say:

Yes, there is a Santa Claus, but I will not guard the chimney. In fact, I will ignore entirely the question of whether or not there is a chimney. Let’s get on with the story.

Bultmann would say:

Yes, there is a Santa Claus, and I will guard the chimney all night. My research—and you can be assured it was “objective and scholarly”—has convinced me that Santa Claus has never come down the chimney and never could. And not only that, the scientific mind set of the twentieth century has ruled out the possibilities of fat men coming down the small exhaust gas pipes on most homes. Most homes with advanced construction are capable of supporting a sleigh and eight reindeer (tiny variety), but aeronautical science finds “flying sleighs” impossible. Let’s forget about the empirical evidence. “No Santa Claus! Thank God, he lives, and he lives forever.”

Marxsen would say:

Nothing would be more destructive of Santa Claus than if we really discovered that there really was one. A real Santa Claus would destroy the dynamic quality of faith. The more our historical research rules out the possibility of Santa Claus, the more our faith will grow. Nobody sees (or can see) Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. Our growing ignorance of Santa Claus will only strengthen our faith in him.

Both Bultmann and Marxsen could say with the Sun editor: “Only faith … can push aside the curtain.”

What the editor and the scholars do is not necessarily deny history but ignore it. The stories of Santa Claus and Jesus Christ are told completely but without concern for the questions of what really happened and if it happened.

The existential theologians are not the first to flee from history into the realm of “faith”; the disease appeared in a benign form in the old “warm faith” of Pietism, in which the response to embarrassing historical questions was, “What does it matter? Only believe!” In fact, whenever history has become difficult because of the intellectual laziness of the Church or the offense of the cross, the Church has fled from history into faith. But whoever flees history flees from the virgin birth of Jesus, the incarnation, the atonement, the resurrection, and the ascension. To forsake history, even in the name of faith, is to flee Jesus.

Faith is not the most important element in the Christian religion. History—here defined as what really happened—is more important than faith. The Christian message starts in history and is participating in history till that history comes to an end. The story of Jesus begins with these familiar words: “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled. This was the first enrollment when Quirinius was governor of Syria.” Those words anchor Jesus Christ in history, making him as much a part of that history as Caesar Augustus, Quirinius, or the other persons mentioned in Luke 3—Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate, Herod the Tetrarch, Philip the Tetrarch, Lysanias the Tetrarch, Annas and Caiaphas, the high priests. Christmas for a Christian means that at one particular time and no other, God appeared as a Man, Jesus Christ. God was Jewish! This appearance was unique, incapable of repetition. Even the indwelling of God, Christ, or the Spirit in the believer hardly comes close to being analogous to the incarnation. The very scandal or offense of the cross is that God was acting in ordinary history. Not even faith can erase the fact that God’s mighty acts are not timeless in the sense that they can take place at any time under a variety of circumstances but can be dated sometime between 6 B.C. and A.D. 27–29.

What happened in Palestine in the first half of the first century in our calendar time (Jesus’ life, death, resurrection) gave birth to the Word. This Word (the news about what happened) gives birth to individual Faith (one’s awareness of what happened in History and understanding of how this History benefits him eternally). History, Word, Faith is the correct order.

For the existentially oriented theologians the only components of Christianity are Word and Faith. The Faith of the first-century Christian community, say these New Testament scholars, gave us Jesus, Bible, apostles, sacraments, and even God (along with hope, love, joy, and peace). That Faith produced the Word (some message that just sits in the Bible without any explanation of how it got there) that in turn produces Faith (one becomes aware of this Word’s meaning in a particular situation without knowing what really happened or caring if anything happened in history at all). But Faith, despite all the glories attached to it, cannot live without the historical Jesus. Just as Virginia must one day have grown up and found out that while there might be peace, joy, and happiness in the world, there was really no Santa Claus, so also the Christian whose faith has depended on a Jesus amputated from history will discover that his “Jesus” really does not exist and never did.

For the Church to live by faith alone, without confronting hard historical and scientific questions, might be comfortable and undemanding if it were possible. This type of religion may be called “Christianity,” but it isn’t that. When religious truth (I don’t know how to express this better) supersedes historical truth, “God talk” becomes only a symbol for greater religious realities, and such basic Christian mysteries as incarnation, angels, miracles, and resurrection become realities that exist in the human mind without ties to specific happenings and people. In short, Christianity becomes dependent on such traits as joy, faith, hope, love, and beauty, and Jesus begins to look like Virginia’s Santa Claus:

Your mother, father, grandparents are all “Santa Claus.” He can be found where people are moved by the Christmas spirit to help their fellow men. The countless charities cause Santa Claus to become “incarnate” in the hearts of people all over the world.

At that point, the Church might as well switch religious symbols. After all, the story of Santa presents fewer difficulties than the one about Jesus. For one thing, we are only one century removed from the latest manuscript on the life of Santa Claus and nineteen centuries from ones about Jesus. For another, Santa’s sphere is global—he comes down from the North Pole and flies through the earth’s atmosphere—while Christ’s is universal—he comes down to earth from heaven. In the story of Santa Claus there is no mention of sin, wrath, persecution, or death. Santa Claus is good to all people and gives gifts to all people. (Universalism at its finest!) He makes no hard demands on anyone: a little goodness in December will be richly rewarded.

The story of Jesus, on the other hand, mentions human sin and God’s judgment of it and includes a horrible death scene. The miracle in Santa’s story—flying reindeer—could probably be reproduced today by making a sled airborne, one way or another. And reindeer on roofs and a man sliding down chimneys are less difficult to demonstrate. Not so with Jesus’ story. Modern science has yet to demonstrate how a virgin can have a child, how angels can talk and sing (and even what they are), and how God could become a man.

With Santa’s story established as a convenient and acceptable vehicle for religious truth, the New York Sun editorial would become important source material for the Christmas Eve sermon. For the sake of traditionalists in his congregation, the minister might want to substitute the words “Jesus Christ” for “Santa Claus.” Same number of syllables. No great problem.

George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”